People sometimes politely nudge me over my self-imposed limit of one contemporary piece per annum from the Met’s offerings. Couldn’t we use some good new operas? Shouldn’t we eagerly welcome (or at least keep an open mind toward) our artform’s efforts to confront the here and now? The answers are, in theory, “yes.” But theory soon encounters experience, and there’s a history. My own engagement with the history begins in the immediate aftermath of WW2, so—with a quick salute to the Met’s prewar efforts to establish an American component for the repertory, most effectively championed as singer and spokesman by Lawrence Tibbett—I’ll pick it up from those years forward. In my first two decades of operagoing, including my early years of work as a critic, the New York City Opera was the epicenter of activity on behalf of American and contemporary European opera, not only for New York, but for the country as a whole. That was true from early in the company’s life, when the spirit of Opera for the People was still alive, and at its original home, the City Center, where production costs were relatively low and audience expectations with respect to visual astonishments were modest—as were, for that matter, the audiences themselves, which almost invariably fell well below the attendance for meat-and-potatoes repertory operas. ^(I)Still, several of the sturdier American operas maintained a hold in the NYCO repertory through the 1960s, along with several more 20th-Century European works, and the company’s first season in its new home at Lincoln Center (Spring, 1966) consisted wholly of post-WW1 operas, though just three of the eleven were American. The pattern did not hold, of course. As promptly as the next season (Fall, ’66), there was only a single American opera, a revival of Menotti’s The Consul, in the NYCO repertory. That was also the sole post-WW2 work presented. In the new house, with expectations and expenses sharply higher and the Ford initiative ended, the company’s energies were perforce directed to what might sell tickets and attract the attention of other funding sources. Over the next fifteen years, only the occasional return of one of the American operas from the early years (by Menotti, Weill, Floyd, Moore, Blitzstein, or Ward) and the very occasional new piece could be found in the mix of standard repertory works, revivals left unexplored by the Met (the Donizetti Queen trilogy, Mefistofele, Die Tote Stadt, et al.), and operettas. ^(II)