“I didn’t understand fully how difficult it was going to be,” he added. “I don’t go into a season hoping that just some things will work. Everything has to work. The stakes are very high. The Met is at a moment when either it will continue to be the leading opera house or it won’t. There’s no middle ground.”

Image The Mets current production of Tosca, directed by Luc Bondy and designed by Richard Peduzzi, contrasts with Franco Zeffirellis version, which was staged for 25 years. Credit... Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

To that end he has commissioned new productions, some of works seldom seen in New York; signed up new singers, who don’t just “park and bark,” as he puts it, but actually act; and recruited directors from Broadway, like Bartlett Sher, and the movies, like Anthony Minghella, who died last year. Mr. Bondy is a Swiss director of opera and theater, and though Mr. Zeffirelli recently called him “third rate,” his productions have a reputation for braininess and for stripping away clutter. James Levine, the music director of the Met, likened his new “Tosca” to a Hitchcock movie.

Mr. Gelb’s program was initially greeted with skepticism, if not hostility, by many opera buffs. In his last job, as president of Sony’s classical record division, where he recorded an album of arias by the soft-rocker Michael Bolton and where his greatest hit was the soundtrack for “Titanic,” purists saw him as a shameless panderer. Mr. Gelb, who likes to point out that classical music used to be pop music, is unrepentant. “I haven’t really changed,” he said. “The only thing that changed was the world I was working in. I’ve always tried to popularize classical music, and I’m still doing it, only I don’t work for a classical record company anymore.”

And whatever his record at Sony, Mr. Gelb’s Met career has by most reckonings been an almost immediate success. The audience has both grown and become more youthful. He has reached out to contemporary visual artists and begun a promising collaboration with André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, to develop new work. His program of showing selected operas on live high-definition television broadcasts has been tremendously popular, filling movie theaters both here and abroad.

There have been artistic misfires, like Mary Zimmerman’s production last year of “La Sonnambula,” which set the opera as a play-within-a-play and was also hooted at on opening night. But for the most part the Gelb vision has so won over the opera world that it’s hard now to find anyone with something critical to say  at least on the record. Most of the grumbling one hears these days is not about the merits of the new Met productions but about how expensive they are. Since Mr. Gelb took over, the Met budget has increased by about $60 million. The box office is up, but meanwhile personal and corporate donations, which the Met depends on to balance its budget, are down, thanks to the economy, and so is the value of its endowment. The Met’s projected deficit for next year is about $4 million.