Leasing a box at the opera was an essential part of social life for the city aristocracy and bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Boxes are self contained enclosures in the side walls of theatre auditoria, in which the rich can eat their own sandwiches, or quietly fall asleep during your most magnificent legato aria. Boxes rarely afford the best sight-line to the stage, nor the best acoustics, but they provide a useful vantage point from which to view the rest of the audience, and from which to be viewed while doing so.
