Alfred Hubay at work in the 1960s. His long career as an usher, house manager and box office chief gave him the ability to predict houses with uncanny precision. Credit Louis Melancon/The Metropolitan Opera
Mr. Hubay locking the old Metropolitan Opera, at Broadway and 39th Street, after a farewell gala in 1966. The company moved north to Lincoln Center, and its previous home was torn down.
Credit via The Metropolitan Opera
Alfred F. Hubay passed away on October 3, 2018, 75 years to the day after he began working at the Metropolitan Opera. As evidenced by his ORAL HISTORY of a part of his time at the Met, his memory never waned. He will be sorely missed by his friends, his fans, and all lovers of opera and the arts.
Click here to read the New York Times Obituary.
…His job titles belie his importance at the company; Mr. Hubay did far more than oversee ticket sales. He became something of an expert on opera and opera singers, so much so that he would be asked to judge singing and scholarship competitions. He also served on the boards of numerous musical organizations, including the Glimmerglass Opera, the Oratorio Society of New York and the Marilyn Horne Foundation.
Moreover, Mr. Hubay was a sort of institutional memory for the company, where he worked his entire adult life, including for years as a consultant after his formal retirement. It is a measure of his wide-ranging role there that last year, when the Met made a documentary, “The Opera House,” about the company and the move to Lincoln Center, he is the second person heard on it, after Leontyne Price…
–Excerpted from “Alfred Hubay, Met Opera’s Box Office Prognosticator, Dies at 93”, The New York Times, October 16, 2018
Opera News
ALFRED HUBAY
NEW YORK, NY, JUNE 13, 1925 —OCTOBER 3, 2018
HUBAY BEGAN his long career at the Metropolitan Opera as an usher in 1943 and was formally associated with the House for sixty-two years. He was promoted to chief usher in 1956 and was appointed house manager in 1960. In 1962, Hubay was named box-office manager and remained in charge of those operations until his retirement, in 1987. He remained a consultant to the Met until 2005. Hubay was a founding member of the George London Foundation and the Martina Arroyo Foundation, a Life Trustee of Glimmerglass Opera and vice-president of the Bagby Foundation for Musical Arts. Hubay’s voice was well-known to radio listeners from his thirty-eight consecutive years as an Opera Quiz panelist during the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon broadcasts.
Other Press
“The Graduate,” Opera News, Robert Jacobson.
“Meet the Met’s Mr. Hubay,” New York Magazine, Robert V. Winstein