How ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 Finale Pulled Off Its Massive Metropolitan Opera House Reveal

The Gilded Age Season 2 ends in triumph for Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) as she sees her new Metropolitan Opera House crush the old guard’s beloved Academy of Music on Opening Night. Bertha gets her center opera box, Caroline “Lina” Astor (Donna Murphy) sees her power over society dwindle yet more, and we get to see the end of the so-called “Opera Wars.” As it happens, though, bringing the original Met Opera House to life was a struggle offscreen for the HBO hit, as well. Because both the original Metropolitan Opera House and Academy of Music were demolished to make way for the modern day Met in Lincoln Center, finding a place to shoot those pivotal final scenes in The Gilded Age Season 2 finale was quite a task.

“The biggest design challenge for us this year was to make an opera house from bits and pieces because the auditorium was in one place and backstage was in another place and the front lobby was in another place,” The Gilded Age‘s production designer Bob Shaw shared during a virtual press conference Decider sat in on in the weeks ahead of the second season premiere. “You know, trying to stitch them all together.”

In addition to being an Oscar-winning production designer, Shaw is also a hardcore opera fanatic. So much so, he revealed that when he was interviewing for The Gilded Age gig, he literally quizzed creator Julian Fellowes on whether or not the Opera Wars — the upper crust squabble that led to new money socialites like Bertha Russell-template Alva Vanderbilt to build the Metropolitan Opera House — would factor into Season 2.

“I think that may have been part of what indicated that I might have been the person for the job,” he quipped.

Because he knew so much about the Opera Wars of 1883, Shaw said that he literally made a point to save the Philadelphia Academy of Music as a filming location for Season 2 — even though series director Michael Angler was eyeing the 19th century theater for Season 1 scenes set at the New York Academy of Music.

“I had to say, ‘Now a warning, if we get into the Opera Wars, this is the only European-style opera house from the 1800s in the country. So we have to save this for Season 2,'” Shaw recalled during the press conference.

However, when Shaw and company returned to the Philadelphia Academy of Music for their original Metropolitan Opera House in Season 2, there was a tiny problem. There were no opera boxes.

“The whole story is about the right to have an opera box. That’s why they had to start their own opera house, specifically to have boxes,” Shaw said. “And then we look and go, ‘Oh right. We forgot that there weren’t any boxes.’”

“So many of the opera houses destroyed the boxes and they tore out these tiers of boxes to replace them with, you know, two boxes here and two here, but the rest are straight balcony,” Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes said during the press conference, noting you have to go to Europe to find any 19th century opera houses with their boxes intact. “It saddens me actually, that New York pulled down the Old Met. I think it’s rather a pity that they did.”

So what was Shaw to do? “We had to build the boxes separately, on stage, many feet in the air, and then we basically slid them between the first and second balcony rails of the Academy of Music as if it was a giant cassette.”

If that sounds sort of insane and maybe unsafe, don’t worry. Decider followed up with Shaw on this after the press conference.

“Our set was perfectly safe. It was basically flat, but it was twenty feet in the air,” Shaw said. “It’s one of those things where I suggested the plan that I thought would work and then I worked with Douglas Purver, our visual effects supervisor.”

“The biggest discussion in the beginning was are we building a box or are we building two boxes? Eventually we decided we needed to build five in order to have enough of a curve, you know, to give us the whole opera house.” Thank goodness they did. Otherwise, how would we have enjoyed the spectacle of Mrs. Winterton (Kelley Curran) fuming at the Russells over the center box?

“That was something that I hadn’t done before and it felt like it would work but, you know, it was a dicey thing to try,” Shaw told Decider. “Because everything needed to line up.”

The good news is it did work out and so both Bertha Russell and The Gilded Age‘s audience got the opera house of their 1883 dreams.