“Every night, we have to fill thirty-eight hundred seats,” Gelb says. “We’re doing everything we can, but it’s tough.” Photograph by Richard Burbridge

On February 26, 2014, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, entered the Met’s boardroom to address a group that included a nine-member committee of the Met orchestra, whose contracts were due to expire on July 31st. There was much to say. Seven and a half years into his tenure at the world’s largest and most complex arts organization, Gelb could point to an impressive record of achievement: High-definition theatrical broadcasts of Met productions in cities around the world had brought grand opera to an audience of millions and opened a new revenue stream—$32.1 million in the most recent fiscal year. To attract new audiences, he’d brought a roster of acclaimed directors to the Met stage and introduced fifty-four new productions, averaging seven per year—a Met record.

Yet the Met’s expenses had soared. In the most recent fiscal year, 2013, they were three hundred and twenty-seven million dollars—forty-seven per cent higher than when Gelb took over. Because the box-office accounted for less than a third of revenue, the Met depended heavily on charitable contributions. Though revenue had grown by nearly fifty per cent, to three hundred and twenty-four million dollars, the company had run an operating deficit of $2.8 million.

Despite a multiyear bull market in stocks, the Met’s endowment had withered to two hundred and fifty-three million dollars, from a peak of three hundred and forty-five million in October, 2007, owing in part to annual withdrawals to fund operations. In fiscal 2013, the Met drew twenty-one million dollars from the endowment, an alarming spending rate of 8.3 per cent. In 2012, the Met had tapped the bond market to borrow a hundred million dollars. Meanwhile, attendance had fallen from ninety-two per cent of capacity, in 2007-08, to seventy-nine per cent, in the 2012-13 season.

As Gelb faced the orchestra committee, he pulled up a PowerPoint presentation and enumerated the dismal statistics. In two to three years, he said, if nothing was done the Met could face bankruptcy. To avoid the fate of New York City Opera, which was forced to close down in 2013, he wanted sixteen-per-cent labor-cost cuts from the orchestra union and from many of the Met’s fifteen other unions, the three largest of which represented the orchestra, the chorus, and the stagehands.

Jessica Phillips, a clarinetist who, at thirty-seven, had just been elected chairman of the orchestra committee—and who would play a major role in the orchestra’s upcoming contract negotiations—was shocked at the mention of bankruptcy. The Met was among the world’s foremost cultural institutions, backed by wealthy board members. It had survived other crises, including the Great Depression. Even if Gelb’s numbers were accurate, did they justify cuts in salaries and benefits for the orchestra and other union members?

After the meeting, Phillips and the other committee members speculated about whether the problem was Gelb’s management. They had heard rumors of misallocated expenses and exorbitant cost overruns, which they vowed to look into. Gelb’s pay-cut demands all but insured an ugly contract dispute. “This is going to be bad,” Phillips told the orchestra. “Like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I met with Peter Gelb several times last fall in his office on the ground floor of the opera house. It is spacious but sparely furnished, with few mementos of his career in classical music and opera and no photos of celebrity singers, conductors, or directors. We also spoke by phone on several occasions. We’d met in passing before. (I’m a subscriber and have been a patron of the Met, on a modest scale.) Gelb was approaching his ninth season as the Met’s general manager. Still youthful at sixty-one—an avid tennis player despite two hip replacements—he exudes enthusiasm for his job.

“The challenges are huge,” he said. “I’ve always been aware that classical music and opera face an uphill struggle.” The core repertoire hasn’t changed much in generations, many operas last for hours, and they’re mostly sung in foreign languages. Even in English, audiences need supertitles to understand the words. Top ticket prices at the Met can run four hundred and seventy-five dollars. “The audience is much smaller than it was twenty or even ten years ago,” Gelb said. “We are attracting a younger audience, but they don’t buy subscriptions. I have to keep us economically sound. Every night, we have to fill thirty-eight hundred seats. We’re doing everything we can, but it’s tough.”

Gelb had never run an opera company or a nonprofit cultural institution, let alone one as large and complex as the Met. But he had deep cultural roots in New York. His father, Arthur Gelb, oversaw cultural coverage and was a renowned managing editor at the Times; his mother, Barbara, was the niece of the violinist Jascha Heifetz. His first job as a teen-ager had been as a part-time usher at the Met, and he worked for the classical-music impresario Sol Hurok. After dropping out of Yale, he worked in music publicity and, later, at the classical-music talent agency Columbia Artists, where he produced numerous broadcasts for “The Metropolitan Opera Presents” series on public television.

More important, he’d shown a flair for widening the audience for classical music. He took the Boston Symphony to China after the Cultural Revolution, arranged Vladimir Horowitz’s widely publicized return to the former Soviet Union, and, as president of Sony Classical, produced a series of film soundtracks and crossover hits. “We wanted energy,” William C. Morris, the chairman of the Met’s executive committee, told me. “He was the strongest candidate. His mandate was to be more aggressive in promotion and marketing, bring in more producers and directors, and attract bigger and younger audiences.”

“Mom! Jonah’s engaging in nation-building again!” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Gelb is conversant in the intricate finances of the Met’s operations and knowledgeable about the repertoire, but he comes most to life when talking about directors and their stage concepts. Because much of the material that the Met has to work with is from the nineteenth century—every note is circumscribed by a dead composer’s intentions and, in most cases, more than a century of performance tradition—a general manager can make his mark only in creative new stagings. Were Gelb little more than a museum curator, one gets the impression that he wouldn’t find the job much fun. “The one thing I know is you can’t be complacent,” he told me. “Just going along with things may be a way to be popular, but I’ve had to come at this with a missionary zeal.” He has dedicated himself to bringing novel ideas to the Met’s stage. “The thrill for me is seeing new productions, new singers, and how they can excite an audience,” he told me. “That hasn’t diminished one bit.”

Gelb is not alone among opera chiefs in his approach, although the increasingly dominant role of the director in reinterpreting familiar story lines has been widely contested. The pianist András Schiff has written: