Opera house as wealthy patrons and it continues to have a large number of working opera houses such as Teatro Massimo in Palermo (the biggest in Italy), Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (the world's oldest working opera house) and Teatro La Scala in Milan. In contrast, there was no opera house in London when Henry Purcell was composing and the first opera house in Germany was built in Hamburg in 1678. In the 17th and 18th centuries, opera houses were often financed by rulers, nobles, and wealthy people who used patronage of the arts to endorse their political ambition and social
Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center) the summer months. Planning for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera began as early as the mid-1920s, when the backstage facilities of the former house were becoming vastly inadequate for growing repertory and advancing stagecraft. The development that what would become today's Rockefeller Center was to have a new 4,000-seat opera house at its center, but financial problems and the following stock market crash of 1929 postponed the relocation of the Metropolitan Opera, and the complex became more commercial-based. With the development moving forward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. replaced the opera house with a 70-story skyscraper, opened as the