In 1883, war was waged between two opera houses in New York Society. Why were the theatres pitted against one another, and what did the battle mean for the upper echelons of the East Coast? <\/p>
The War of the Operas of 1883 is a society battle dramatised in series two of Julian Fellowes\u2019 historical drama, The Gilded Age.<\/p>\n
The action sees the fictional Bertha Russell, a newly-wealthy wife of railroad and steel tycoon George Russell, take on established society figures including Mrs Astor<\/a> (a real historical figure) and other \u2018old money\u2019 rivals.<\/p>\n In season one of The Gilded Age<\/em><\/a>, the Russells struggled for acceptance in this world of rigid social hierarchy, connections, and ritual \u2013 as was the case in reality for many nouveau riche families.<\/p>\n Many of the Knickerbockers of New York \u2013 descendants of the Anglo-Dutch families who had settled in what was then New Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th centuries \u2013 were determined that these interlopers were not to make it into \u2018real society\u2019.<\/p>\n Newly-minted families included the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, many of them businessmen who were labelled \u2018robber barons<\/a>\u2019 \u2013 shorthand for the handful of men who dominated industry in late 19th century America.<\/p>\n \u201cThey forged their path in the business world at a time when new technologies \u2013 steel, oil refining, railroads and steam-powered factory technology \u2013 were remaking the material basis of the western world,\u201d writes Adam IP Smith. \u201cThey were the exploiters, not the inventors: men who took small-scale operations and scaled them up, and then up again.\u201d<\/p>\n Though the families of these tycoons bought up or built grand houses on New York\u2019s prestigious Fifth Avenue, summered and played lawn tennis in the fashionable coastal town of Newport, and employed etiquette guides to help them navigate the vagaries of polite society, they struggled to break into the city\u2019s most elite circles.<\/p>\n