Is it a zombie? Animate but lifeless? It’s probably too soon to tell, but it’s well on its way to the six-foot trench. Is the terminal event linked to the Met alone or to the art form in general? A caveat, I’m not as good at predicting the future as was Yogi Berra, so you might be better off turning on a recording of La Traviata and ignoring what follows. But if you’re not detetered by warnings, read on.
The Met’s first problem is poor leadership. General Manager Peter Gelb has one positive accomplishment in nearly two decades on the job – the HD telecasts of live Met productions. Outside of this important achievement, his tenure has been drab. He has needlessly involved the company in international politics, as if opera house politics were not deadly enough.
He has dismissed some of the company’s brightest stars for behavior that the Met has known about for many years. Anna Netrebko was let go for being Russian, only to have Gelb engage a succession of lesser Russian singers. Jame Levine and Placido Domingo were sent packing without a goodbye. Gelb has the loyalty of a clam. Levine and Domingo didn’t even get a gold watch. Then he hires a bunch of Russian singers without making them denounce Vladimir Putin. He also hires his wife to lead the band.
If previous GMs were as sensitive to sexual peccadillos, Caruso would have been fired after the Monkey House incident in Central Park in 1906. Ezio Pinza was said to be a fanny pincher, Beniamino Gigli has several families and scattered bastards around he world. Toscanini slept with most of his leading sopranos. None was disciplined by the Met. So by previous standards, Gelb is at least a prude. But if he were any good at the core of his job this bourgeois failing could be overlooked.
Gelb’s biggest blemish is his financial mismanagement. He repeatedly schedules expensive productions that fail at the box office or require rapid replacement, such as his La Sonnambula debacle. Two productions of this infrequently performed opera in 15 years is a sign that the GM doesn’t know what he’s doing. Tosca and Traviata both had to have premature replacement productions because of inferior new productions that should have lasted for decades. A wonderful Aida was replaced with a piece of treacle. Consider Zefferelli’s Bohème, which is still wowing the audience long after its producer has departed the proscenium.
The company’s endowment is only about $255 million, down about $100 million from the previous year. They had to use the endowment to cover operating expenses which reflects poor fiscal management. The endowment is very small considering the size and importance of the Met in the opera world.
Gelb’s programming continually force-feeds the Met’s audience inferior new works that are enormously expensive to mount and which fail to attract a sufficient audience. The company’s record of success with new productions is virtually nonexistent. Of all their premiere’s only two have been of works that endured, both by Puccini.
Behind the glitter of the Lincoln Center palace lies an infrastructure that’s crumbling (as are the exterior walls of the center’s buildings) due to inadequate care and attention. Not all of the decay is the fault of management. Tastes and skill sets vary with time. Opera, as a popular diversion, has receded into the shadows as movies and their congeners have claimed both creative talent and the public’s attention. It may be that there is no longer room for the art form to thrive, save as a memory.
Verdi is at the core of the operatic repertory, yet the company has no Verdi singers of genius. They can do Puccini, but Verdi is currently a big problem. They’ve tried Germanic singers in key Verdi roles without a felicitous result. It’s not an accident that there’s no Verdi opera on the company’s HD list for this season.
Regardless of externals and immutables, the company could be run with more regard for efficiency and the tastes of its audience. At more than $300 a ticket, said audience is apt to be as scarce as it is gray. Of course, efficiency, the need to fill an auditorium with 4,000 seats, and the presence of no one knows how many unions make for an immovable sludge. The Met’s palace cum theater does the company more harm than good. It would be far better off to present opera using its up-and-coming talent at a smaller venue where it could offer a different bill of fare. But that’s like asking the New York Yankees to play at Marine Park. And the ball club has a much larger and devoted audience.
The Met is a prisoner of its past and present. The former glorious, the latter mired in fly paper. I doubt if the company could be saved even if it were managed by someone who knew what he was doing. Short of Elon Musk coming to the rescue as he did for Twitter, I see nothing but dark days ahead. And Musk has shown no indication that he has any inclination for music, much less the kind that emanates from an opera house.
The Met may endure, but if it does, it will be a sideshow. And as if things weren’t bad enough, it’s in New York.
