Big names make a big difference at the Metropolitan Opera’s struggling box office, where star singers can drive up attendance by 10 to 20 percentage points. This season, at a time when opera superstars are in short supply, the Met is promoting its most important artists, including Nina Stemme, Anna Netrebko, Renée Fleming and Plácido Domingo, with an advertising campaign proclaiming “The Voice Must Be Heard.”

The dusky-voiced German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, 47, has long been in their Olympian company. A box-office draw with a major recording career and few peers in a wide range of repertoire, he is the rare opera singer with the Byronic looks to inspire women to toss their lingerie at him, as they did at one concert in London.

He has also become one of today’s most elusive artists.

In 2015, he canceled a pair of sold-out performances of “Carmen” at the Metropolitan Opera, to which scalpers were selling tickets for nearly $1,000 apiece. Last season, he withdrew from a new Met production of “Manon Lescaut” mounted with him in mind, telling his fans on Facebook that “only illness would prevent me from coming to you.” This season, he canceled a series of high-profile appearances across Europe, citing a burst blood vessel on a vocal cord.

And on March 3, not long after his return to the stage, he stunned the opera world by announcing that he would not appear in the Met’s highly anticipated new production of “Tosca” next season, just weeks after the company had announced it.