Homer F. Emens

The Metropolitan has not of recent years retained the distinction, which it once possessed among the world’s great opera houses, for quality of its singers. Older New Yorkers who occasionally attend its performances are very apt to run their imagination back to days when, for half the present prices, the music-lover could listen on almost any opera night to the de Reszkes. Lilli Lehmann, Plançon, Eames, Maurel or Calvé. It is perhaps the single mitigating circumstance that no such scenic background was provided for those celebrated artists, or is provided in any other opera house today, as the present settings of the Metropolitan.

One of the men who guided the earlier stages of this achievement was Homer Farnham Emens. Like his own old friend and our own old fellow-Centurion, Lippincott, he was a painter whose natural ambitions were pitched higher, and who probably sometimes chafed at the turn of fortune which had directed his brush to what seemed these unrealities of art. But he spent eight busy and successful years at the Metropolitan in the period of Maurice Grau, revised and renewed the scenery for all its operas, and personally prepared the stage picture for the first production of Parsifal in this country.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook