So Barbara Leder did not close her eyes after all.  A couple of days before she went to watch “Rigoletto” at the Metropolitan Opera — the “Rat Pack” version set in 1960 by the director Michael Mayer, with a Dean Martin-esque Duke in a dinner jacket — she said it was wrong to reimagine “Rigoletto” in Las Vegas, with the neon frenzy of a casino in the opening scene. The third time she brought it up, her daughter, Marilyn Ruby, said: “Mom, you can always just close your eyes. The music’s the same.”  But by skipping the see-no-evil approach, she could say this when the curtain calls were over:  “I didn’t especially like the pole dancer. A pole dancer does not belong in ‘Rigoletto.’ ”  At least Ms. Leder, an 82-year-old opera lover from Minneapolis, could check off one important item on her wish list: going to the Metropolitan Opera.  The tourism industry generates facts and figures about who comes to New York — 56.5 million are expected in 2015, according to the city’s convention and visitors bureau — but no one knows how many visit for the first time. The city does not even try to guess. Ms. Leder was a first-timer only if you disregarded a couple of brief stopovers decades ago, when she saw no operas, went to no museums, saw no sights.  She became a regular at Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, the Met’s broadcasts shown in movie theaters, when they began in 2006. The camera work gave her a sense of the Met’s large but finite space. When the singers strolled along a runway called a passerelle around the orchestra pit in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” Ms. Leder blanched back home in Minnesota. “I kept thinking they’re going to fall off,” she said.  She longed to see the Met’s home for herself, to hear the singing without the intermediaries of broadcasting — the voices that introduced the voices, the cameras that focused on what the director decided to focus on. It was a longing that had begun when she was a girl.  “We had radio,” she said by way of explanation. “There was no Internet, no TV. I remember I would lie on the floor in the kitchen and listen to classical music. I always wanted to sing, but I couldn’t hold a note.”  She married at 17, had five children, became a grandmother at 44 and, more recently, acquired a new hip and two new shoulders. And now she was on a tour of the Met, looking at the chandeliers above the grand tier. And the acres of red carpet. And the cantilevered stairway.  “I’ve been wanting to come here for years,” she said on the tour this month, after saying things like “amazing” and “it’s lovely.”  Sam Neuman, the press director who led the tour, said the Met moved to Lincoln Center in 1966, opening with “Antony and Cleopatra” by Samuel Barber. That opening night is remembered as a fiasco, and while the critic Peter G. Davis wrote in The Times in 2009 that he did not remember it that way, there were apparently some close calls backstage — “Look out for the sphinx!” Later in the performance, the star, the soprano Leontyne Price, was trapped inside a pyramid.  Mr. Neuman started down the aisle toward the stage. Ms. Leder looked over the rail into the orchestra pit, and her daughter said, “There’s James Levine’s chair, right there.” Curtain time was a couple of hours away.  The tour wound through corridors backstage that Ms. Leder had not imagined — unglamorous passages where the red carpet and chandeliers gave way to nondescript tile and everyday fluorescent ceiling fixtures. On one bright white cinder block wall was a photograph of the Met’s old house in Midtown Manhattan, on the edge of the garment and the theater districts. Mr. Neuman said it was so short on space that the sets had to be stored in the street.  They trudged down another corridor and made a couple of turns. “Where are we?” Ms. Leder asked.  Mr. Neuman pointed to a door painted with yellow and black stripes. He said it was the entrance for “high-security V.I.P.s or stage animals.”  “We call it the horse door,” he added.  In operas like “Aida,” the walk-ons include a horse that is brought in from a stable. Beyond the door is a long tunnel to Amsterdam Avenue where the trailer from a stable waits.  There was more walking, then another door painted yellow and black, the stage door.  Mr. Neuman pushed it open. Ms. Leder stepped through and stood where generations of singers had stood, awaiting their cues. From this back corner, there was no view of the 3,800 seats out front. Scenery was stacked high: orange trees for “The Barber of Seville” alongside the coach from “La Bohème.”  Mr. Neuman pointed to an elevator he said had as much hauling capacity as an elevator on an aircraft carrier. The Met uses it to load and unload scenery from a basement storage area three levels down. The tour group ended up there after passing the costume department’s washing machines and clambering into a small passenger elevator. The scenery they saw when they stepped out was familiar.  “That’s from ‘La Bohème,’” Ms. Ruby said. “I recognize the fence.”  Ms. Leder’s four nights in New York included two performances at the Met, and she was awed by the singing. Besides “Rigoletto,” she saw Rossini’s Scottish-themed opera “La Donna del Lago.” And because a friend of a friend knew someone who knew someone, she was taken backstage after “Rigoletto.”  She got a hug from a burly guy in a Ralph Lauren shirt — Zeljko Lucic, the baritone who had sung Rigoletto — before the bass Dimitry Ivashchenko emerged from his dressing room. “Oh, the murderer,” Ms. Leder said of Mr. Ivaschenko. “Really deep voice. A little scary.”  The tenor Piotr Beczala was no less personable in person than he had been as the casino-owning Duke. “It’s your first time here,” he said, “and it’s my last performance.” Someone pulled out a phone for a photo. Mr. Beczala smiled as the phone made noise like a camera, then chuckled and pointed to a sign on the wall: “Photography prohibited.”  Ms. Leder told him how much she had enjoyed his vivid, lucid singing. She did not tell him what she had said a few minutes earlier, on the subject of relocating “Rigoletto” to Las Vegas.  “It got better when they got rid of most of the bling,” Ms. Leder said. That happened in Act II, when the scene shifted from the casino to the Duke’s penthouse.  Someone who had been listening to her asked if she had anything good to say about Las Vegas, a place she visited twice in the 1960s, the same time frame as the Rat Pack “Rigoletto.”  “I don’t care for Las Vegas, let’s put it that way,” she said before rethinking the “what happens here, stays here” slogan: “Keep Las Vegas in Las Vegas.”
Barbara Leder, 82, of Minneapolis, had always dreamed of visiting the Metropolitan Opera. She saw two productions and took part in a backstage tour.