Geraldine Farrar Collection. Opera advertisement

The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883, with its first opera house built on Broadway and 39th Street by a group of wealthy businessmen who wanted their own theater. In the company’s early years, the management changed course several times, first performing everything in Italian (even Carmen and Lohengrin), then everything in German (even Aida and Faust), before finally settling into a policy of performing most works in their original language, with some notable exceptions. The Metropolitan Opera has always engaged many of the world’s most important artists: Christine Nilsson, Marcella Sembrich, Lilli Lehmann, Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, De Reszke brothers, Jean and Edouard, Emma Eames, Lillian Nordica, Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Rosa Ponselle, Lawrence Tibbett and more. Some of the great conductors have helped shape the Met: Anton Seidl, Arturo Toscanini, Gustav Mahler, Artur Bodanzky, Bruno Walter, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, and Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Cia Fornaroli,1888—1954, was an Italian dancer who studied at the La Scala Ballet School. She was prima ballerina at New York's Metropolitan Opera Ballet in 1910–1914. She was married to Dr. Walter Toscanini, 1898 - 1971, who was an Italian-American historian and ballet choreographer and a son of Arturo Toscanini, an Italian conductor and one of the most acclaimed musicians of the early 20th century. Arturo Toscanini was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan, the New York Philharmonic and the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. After Cia Fornaroli death, her husband Walter Toscanini handed over their collection of dance memorabilia to the New York Public Library. NYPL Cia Fornaroli Collection represents Italian dance from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. The collection includes the finest renaissance dance manuals, scores of books, letters, programs, hundreds of designs, photographs, lithographs, and ephemera.

Geraldine Farrar (1882—1967) was an American soprano, known for her beauty and dramatic talent and the intimate timbre of her voice. Farrar displayed musical talent from early childhood, and although she eventually abandoned the piano she continued her voice lessons. In 1900 she traveled to Berlin, where in 1901 she made a sensational debut at the Royal Opera House in Charles Gounod’s Faust. After three years with the Royal Opera, Farrar spent three years (1904–07) with the Monte Carlo Opera, making her debut there opposite Enrico Caruso in La Bohème.

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