Academy of Music

This guide to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia begins with its opening night, January 26, 1857, a lavish ball with no opera at all, until Verdi's Il Trovatore finally opened the stage a month later. Architects Napoleon LeBrun and Gustavus Runge modeled the hall on Milan's La Scala, spending where the crowd would feel it, not see it: three feet of brick behind the seats, and a five-thousand-pound crystal chandelier once lit by hand on two hundred forty gas jets. That opening night's ritual has repeated every year since 1957.