NEW YORK — The new Metropolitan Opera House opened in a blaze of glory Friday night, [Sept. 18] settling a dispute with its orchestra and thrilling one of its most glittering audiences ever gathered in New York. Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson headed personalities at the Lincoln Center first night — which had threatened to be the last for some time. But as the curtain was about to rise for the last act of “Antony and Cleopatra,” Met general manager Rudolf Bing took the stage of the $47 million Opera House to announce that a strike by the musicians was over.
The Met’s 100 musicians called the strike last Tuesday but agreed to carry on with the big performance “as a gift to the world of music.”
The New York Times
The Tragedy of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’
When Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” inaugurated the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966, it promptly entered theatrical lore as one of the great operatic disasters of all time.
Mr. Bing did not announce the terms, but under the settlement the Met’s next two performances — Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” and Verdi’s “La Traviata” which had been postponed — will go on as scheduled tomorrow and Thursday.
The gala audience of 3,800 which paid an average of more than $100 for tickets priced at up to $250, gave almost as big an ovation to the settlement news as to the opera itself — written by U.S. composer Samuel Barber and ambitiously directed by Italy’s Franco Zeffirelli. Leontyne Price sang the role of Cleopatra and Puerto Rican Justino Diaz was a robust Antony.— New York Herald Tribune, European Edition, Sept. 19, 1966