Leave it to Julian Fellowes, the man who made his career mining the aristocracy, to eke a season’s worth of narrative tension out of dueling opera houses. That’s what the creator did during the second run of his HBO series, which chronicled a heavily fictionalized war of the old-money-backed Academy of Music and the new-money alternative, the Metropolitan Opera. (Name recognition alone should give you a hint how that turned out.
) But, for the Emmy-winning writer of , the debate about opera allegiances is ultimately symbolic. “These new people, they were juggernauts,” he says. “They knocked down everything in their path.
In many ways, it was the preamble to the 21st century, the American Century.” I’m always in the market for real things, whatever period, to give you an idea of what the characters would be talking about at breakfast. Someone said to me, “Oh, you do know all about the opera wars?” It seemed so incredible that the old guard, having the Academy of Music, would try to keep these people out — these Vanderbilts and Rockefellers — when they could have easily built new boxes for them.
I love the hopeless confidence that they could defend the past from the future. Period drama is always expensive, but I make it my business to keep out of the bits I don’t regulate. ( ) I don’t really spend much time on budgets.
I write it, and if they come back and say, “We can’t afford the ball,” then I think of another way of doing it. Suddenly, we’re.