The shop around the corner
La Cieca’s lovely and talented colleague Olivia Giovetti takes on the Met’s gift shop in the latest installment of her WQX-Aria blog. La Cieca herself is of at the very least two minds about the changes to the gift shop, but she’ll invite you, the cher public, to chew on this issue before starts gnawing on the bone.
What I remember (1994) were all these old photos, fake-signed, or very carelessly signed with a thick felt-pen. An enormous supply of Lisa della Casa, which I thought was odd, and a few more oldies that had spent a long time on the shelves.
My favorite record store was Rose Records, on Wabash -- I think I bought more than half of my collection there.
All those wonderful stores are somewhere with les neiges d’antan. Money talks and the Met isn’t about to stock what doesn’t sell. Cincinnati Opera opened its season last night and had a local bookstore handle the shop sales. There were few cds but at least the book selection was reasonable. Perhaps the Met should do what our local public library does: sell mp3 players for downloads.
BTW, I fondly remember Rose Records on Wabash. Wasn’t that part of DePaul University’s music center? That was amazing: a store for stringed instruments, one for percussion, another for reeds and woodwinds--and they all sold music.
Funny or sad that I was reading this thread and my daughter called and said her youngest (2 yrs old) broke the The Ring Cycle snow globe that I bought at the old Met Opera Gift Shop. She was crying, the 2 year old was crying and I cried. My 2 granddaughters would listen to the RIde of the Valkyries, naming the characters and talk about the parts of the story they fixated on. The youngest on the part when Wotan strikes down Hunding and the older (6 years old) on the Ride.
I know it is a chotzche (sp) but what a prod to excite interest.
There were also plenty of other items designed to spark children’s interest in opera. Books and CDs developed by the Guild which has a fabulous Education Department.
The new shop is cold, cold, cold.
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As a couple of reponses here have already indicated, the reason the Met gift shop doesn’t stock shelf upon shelf of bizarre operatic ephemera on CD is that the stuff doesn’t sell, or at any rate doesn’t sell anywhere near enough to justify devoting precious retail space to it. There was a time around 20 years ago and another 40 years ago or more when there was a very big market opera on recorded media (CD and LP, respectively) and at that time the Met gift shop was on the bandwagon along with Tower a few blocks uptown and (from the early ’90s, the HMV store that essentially duplicated Tower’s offerings.)
But that most recent wave of demand for opera on disc fell off fairly quickly during the late ’90s as fans bought up both standard reissues and rarities, and the casual listener made his choice among the 25 different Tosca recordings and went home. Soon after home burning of CDs, online file-sharing, iTunes-style media downloading and convenient Amazon-style online shopping all took off, and the bottom fell out of the brick-and-mortar physical media store.
After around 2000 or so that “opera room” at Tower, and in fact most of the classical department there, was empty most of the time, and when there did happen to be people hanging around there, they were mostly doing just that, hanging, and not buying stuff. The same was pretty much true of the Met gift shop’s extensive CD racks: a great place to hang out and chat, but a lousy profit center for the Met. All those racks of Lebendige Vergangenheit and such were pretty to look at, fascinating to discuss, but they didn’t sell.
So, here’s the question: is the point of an opera house’s gift shop to make money for the company, or is it supposed to be a free social club for opera queens? Obviously Peter Gelb decided the former, and apparently the shop is now making money, which it wasn’t doing in the old days. (If the scarves and costume jewelry and t-shirts weren’t making money, you can bet that Gelb would brutally revise its merchandise policy once again, or else shut the shop completely and substitute some other franchise in its place.)
If there were money to be made in stocking vast shelves with rare opera CDs, someone in New York would be doing it. The fact that nobody is doing it in the Lincoln Center area means that there is no money to be made, at least in the Lincoln Center area. So why should the Met gift shop be forced to operate at a loss just so a few queens can have a place for their coffee klatsches?
I miss the learned games of one-upmanship by the racks as much as anyone, but I can’t pretend that the Met has either a financial interest or a moral obligation in devoting precious retail space to my social life.
Speaking of “social” space at the Met, am I dreaming, or was the Opera Shop once a small cafe of some sort, possibly open through the opera’s last intermission? I’m talking when the house first opened. I vaguely remember it, and think it may have closed around the same time as the Top of the Met restaurant. (I know, this is ancient history…)
I don’t think this is really about “bizarre operatic ephemera” or even Lebendige Vergangenheit, but about being able to find a recording of Maria Stuarda for example (I was told they could order it -- but I could do that myself), or CDs by singers who had appeared within recent memory at the Met itself.
I hadn’t realized, or had forgotten, that the shop was formerly run by the Guild. How did Gelb manage to wrest it from the Guild, and what will he annex next -- Opera News?
Mirto:
If so--I have the same dream….lol!--
I actually can not recall ever using the cafe…but DO recall IT BEING THERE…
We could really use a place to get a decent --REASONABLY-PRICED cuppa coffee and a snack , at the MET…
Yes, there was previously a (rather gay, as I recall) cafe and/or bar in that space.
Of course there was also another, “Lincoln Center” gift shop, downstairs in the concourse area, duplicating the operatic contents and tsotschkes to some degree but also including non-opera stuff, with lots of books, good for long intermissions. This disappeared in the renovations several years ago and hasn’t been replaced.
Circa 1975 Lincoln Center still had a large, popularly-priced public cafeteria, open pre-performance, somewhere more or less underneath where the Lincoln restaurant is now.
I feel sorry for budding queens that the brick and mortar stores are no more. I picked up a lot of recordings because I accidentally stumbled across them at Tower and learned a lot about singers by such experimentation. Had I only Amazon as a resource, where one finds recordings only when one specifically seeks them, I would not have learned as much.
On the other hand, I didn’t have YouTube as a resource in my youth, and one can learn a lot there by seeing what comes up in the related column and clicking through videos. So keep posting there so the next generation will learn our history!
A topic near and dear to my heart. Compared to other commentors here, I’m somewhere in the middle recording-collecting wise in terms of when I started seriously buying CDs [early 1990s]. Thankfully, I began when there were still shops where you could find these ancient relics. Remember fondly the Tower/Virgin megastores in London where you could find so much. I still buy CDs for all the reasons mentioned here: I like the booklets and have probably learned more from reading their short essays than from anywhere else. And, I like to hear my music not through a set of headphones, but from good speakers in a room -- there’s no one who can say it compares in any way to what you get out of tiny earbuds. I’ve tried buying some stuff on itunes -- but what do you get…no background (especially if its repertoire that is unfamiliar to you), and the quality to me really is subpar (i.e. if I hook my itouch to my stereo I notice a difference from commercial CDs). Also, I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has this problem…most of the time when I transfer a CD I have in my collection via itunes in order to put it on my itouch…the order of the tracks comes out random, so for example, complete operas get re-arranged, put into different album files, and it’s a crazy amount of work to try and get them back in the right order. I suspect this is because itunes just hasn’t got their act together for classical music, in realising that these tracks need to be listened in order (as opposed to most pop/rock albums). Anyway, I see the wave of the future, and don’t discount it entirely but am not sold on downloading music just quite yet…
Also, I have much more to say on this as I’m the main buyer for the gift shop of another major opera company. I see certain trends (customers are more interested in buying recordings of the opera they just heard vs. a selection from our very good general library of operas on CD and DVD) but for the moment, we’re still aiming to offer a wide, varied selection of CDs and DVDs as increasingly, we’re just about the only place in town where you can physcially come and buy this sort of thing!
Duca,
I go back farther than you, and miss many CD emporia. When in the UK, I used to love Covent Garden Records especially. While J&R is still quite passable for new releases, I grieve over the loss of Tower and its import section.
There are times when downloading an opera “new” to one’s collection is cheaper than the physical version. I could have picked up the then-new Adventures of Mr. Broucek for a song on some website--but what good would that be to me? It’s not as if it’s just another boheme or Tristan to round out the collection. I’ve also found that downloaded music has a variable sound quality and I just don’t like it. I do it only when there’s no other alternative. I’ll probably be the last to convert to e-books as well.
Thanks Tubs! Nice to see someone mention what has become one of my favorite Janá?ek operas- Výlety pán? Brou?kovy (Excursions of Mr. Brou?ek), which I only heard a few years ago for the first time on a BBC broadcast with B?lohlávek conducting.
-- I had a homemade recording of it I took off the internet, but when DGG issued the performance on CD, I was overjoyed. I think it is one of the best CD recordings I’ve ever bought.