In the meantime, there were signs that a new order of things at the Metropolitan was much desired of a large section of the New York music-loving public. The Metropolitan had practically a monopoly of opera in the city and a few serious attempts had recently been made to break that monopoly. Oscar Hammerstein and Rudolph Aronson had rushed to the front with immature performances of _Cavalleria rusticana_ in 1891. The former, apparently, had already been inoculated with the managerial virus and in 1893 he opened his Manhattan Opera House on Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street. Moszkowski's _Boabdil_ and Beethoven's _Fidelio_ were the features of a season of two weeks which saw the beginning and end of that particular enterprise. Some performances in English were given at the Grand Opera House, beginning in May, 1893, and in the same year the Duff Opera Company presented an English version of Gounod's _Philémon et Baucis_. There was, however, a demand of which these flimsy ventures took no account, and the credit for realizing it sufficiently to take chances on it goes to Walter Damrosch and Anton Seidl. The former took advantage of the presence in New York of Amalia Materna, Anton Schott, Emil Fischer, and Conrad Behrens to give representations of _Die Walküre_ and _Götterdämmerung_ at the Carnegie Music Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, respectively. Further evidence of the strong Wagnerian tendency in New York was the success of an improvised performance of _Tannhäuser_ by the German Press Club. The next symptom of the movement was the organization of a Wagner Society to support a season of Wagner operas at the Metropolitan. Unfortunately Seidl and Damrosch were rivals and could not agree on a plan by which they might give German opera together. Damrosch was able to secure subscriptions enough to insure him against loss, and, after the close of the Metropolitan season of 1894-95, he gave seventeen performances of opera with a middling company which included Johanna Gadski, then a novice, Marie Brema, Max Alvary, and Emil Fischer. The enterprise was devoted altogether to Wagner and was an immense success. Denied the use of the Metropolitan for another season, in 1896 Damrosch established himself at the Academy of Music with a strong company which numbered among its members Milka Ternina, Katherina Klafsky, Johanna Gadski, Max Alvary, and Emil Fischer. Besides the Wagner repertory he presented _Fidelio_, _Der Freischütz_, and his own opera, 'The Scarlet Letter,' based on Hawthorne's romance of that name. The second Damrosch season was a failure.