The Metropolitan Opera has been making headlines lately — for all the wrong reasons.
It’s not that the country’s oldest continuously operating opera company is seeing revived relevance and eager engagement. Quite the contrary.
The storied institution announced in the fall a deal with Saudi Arabia, said to be worth $200 million, to perform three weeks a year as the winter resident company at a $1.4 billion opera house opening in 2028.
It was a much-needed lifeline given that the Met has withdrawn $120 million from its endowment — more than a third of the fund — to cover costs since the COVID pandemic, but it also produced a brutal backlash in the cultural community, given the kingdom’s human-rights issues.
Then, as if to prove why the company’s having trouble raising money at home, audiences savaged its just-ended run of the Bizet classic “Carmen.”
The ripped-from-the-headlines production, brought back from the 2023-2024 season, moves the action from 1820 Seville, Spain, to modern-day America.
Instead of sumptuous costumes and striking sets, star mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina traipsed across the stage in denim cutoffs and cowboy boots, while bass-baritone Christian Van Horn’s Escamillo crooned his “Toreador Song” dressed as a rodeo rider.
Carmen works not in a cigarette factory but for an arms builder, and the troops were transformed, as many saw it, into ICE agents.
It wasn’t money, though, that led superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann to declare at year’s end he’d no longer appear at the Met.
The big box-office draw — one of the greatest singers of his generation — heavily hinted that Met leadership was behind his decision.
“I felt very bad about how they treated the chorus and orchestra in the pandemic. They didn’t get paid at all. Musicians had to move out of New York or move in with their parents. I did a live-streamed concert and asked listeners to donate. That didn’t go down well,” Kaufmann told BBC Radio’s Norman Lebrecht.
(Carnegie Hall announced last week Gustavo Dudamel’s first appearance there as New York Philharmonic leader, this fall, will be an opera in concert starring Kaufmann.)
Then a real bombshell dropped a week and a half ago: Peter Gelb, Met general manager, said the company is laying off about 10% of its 200+ administrators, chopping a new production from the next season and temporarily cutting the salaries of the 35 executives who make more than $150,000 annually, including Gelb’s $1.4 million and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s estimated $2 million.
The Met might sell its theater’s naming rights.
It’s already looking for someone to buy its two Marc Chagall murals, valued at $55 million, made specifically for the space — though on the condition the murals stay put, with the new owner’s name displayed on a nearby plaque.
The news shook the arts world but “is not surprising to anyone in the building,” a Met employee told The Post.
The Saudi agreement remains unsigned, he alleged, adding that “there’s a bit of mystery surrounding that deal.”
Gelb cited a delay in explaining his cuts.
“I understand the Saudis have had to recalibrate their budgets because of their own economic concerns,” he told The New York Times. “I’ve been assured that it’s going to go forward. But we have been waiting for some time.”
It’s not the only issue, an insider told The Post: “There is a lot of friction from Met chorus members and orchestra and staff members who are gay and/or Jewish in particular [and] are concerned about safety.”
The employee agreed — but explained the Met’s situation is desperate.
“How money comes in and out of that building is an incredibly complex thing,” he said. “They need that Saudi money now, and the Saudi money isn’t coming yet, and so they have to figure out other ways to continue to operate.”
How did America’s greatest operatic institution get to the point of needing Saudi money to cover its $330 million annual operating budget?
Ticket sales account for less than a third of that.
“Nine [wealthy] families keep the Met alive in New York City,” the employee bluntly said. “Maybe 30 years ago in New York City, there were a lot of people that had that kind of capacity. And the Met was an institution they wanted to give their money to, and it meant something. It had social capital. Those people are dying off.”
Their children are less interested in continuing contributions. And the new tech titans aren’t proving to be big arts fans.
“The one counterexample,” the employee said, is Nvidia’s recent $5-million-a-year pledge to the San Francisco Opera, “a major get. Seattle Opera was never able to get Microsoft to donate.”
Gelb also canceled one of his biggest moneymakers, declaring Russian star soprano Anna Netrebko would no longer grace the Met’s stage after Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Netrebko spoke out against the war but wouldn’t sufficiently criticize Vladimir Putin to Gelb’s liking — though he’s allowed plenty of other Russians who’ve sung at Russian state-sponsored events to stay.
He called her antiwar statements “disingenuous,” claiming “she condemned the war purely out of expediency.”
The employee said it was “very unfair” for Gelb to use Netrebko so he could make a show of “taking a big stand”: “It all felt very cruel.”
“Everybody at the Met has a personal relationship with Anna,” the employee added, calling her cancellation “grotesque.”
And one can’t entirely blame an aging donor base. Opera isn’t loved just by the elderly, after all: The median age of a Met ticket buyer was once 60 and now 40.
Gelb has cited post-pandemic challenges, but he never seems to take responsibility for his failures — he blamed President Trump’s immigration crackdown for last season’s slump in sales.
The employee said the pandemic was simply an “accelerator” of already-existing problems.
As Joe Pearce, the Vocal Record Collectors Society’s president, told The Post, “It constantly amazes me that a city of more than 8 million people cannot find 3,500 or so to fill an opera house every night, especially when some much less populated cities in Europe have two and three opera houses for a population of maybe 1 or 2 million folks. Gelb is, before all else, a hype kind of guy, and he convinces himself that new operas will turn the trick and bring in younger audiences, and he then goes out and we find the first black composers commissioned to write operas or people with very rockish backgrounds . . . often with more attention being paid to the libretto and the social or racial meaning of the story than to the music.”
Take last season. Besides its 3,000 employees, the Met now pays influencers to help sell seats.
It used internet celebrities to promote its opening-night production, “Grounded,” a new “antiwar opera,” as Gelb called it — but that didn’t work.
The opera, about a military pilot who gets pregnant, was the season’s worst attended, selling only 50% of capacity.
Other contemporary, woke operas fared similarly, while great works continued to be the big draws.
As Brooklynite Pearce said, “Mimi’s death brings tears to my eyes today just as it did when I was 13.”
The Met employee isn’t a fan of the “relevancy grabbing” influencer operation. “There’s a very awkward quality to it all,” he said.
Nor does he think the other attempts at relevance work — like politically themed productions put on by Broadway creators with no opera experience at all.
Directors will declare, “’I’m gonna make the new feminist blah blah blah,’” the employee said. “And then you go see it, and none of that is there. All you get is this mostly inarticulate mess of political cliché.”
The insider scoffed, “The creator of the new ‘Carmen’ production was actually unaware as to how the opera ended, reaffirming that the Met continues to prioritize spectacle over substance in hiring decisions.”
It came out after the cuts were announced that director Carrie Cracknell, who works in British theater, and five others who worked on “Carmen” demanded the Met remove their names from the credits of the recent revival.
Their original had bullfighter Escamillo enter the scene in a red Jaguar convertible, with his posse in three pickup trucks.
Getting those vehicles on stage was expensive, so Gelb cut them to save $300,000. This time, Escamillo and his gang walked on stage pushing a motorcycle.
Cracknell was outraged that her vision was destroyed.
Opera insiders would only speak to The Post on condition of anonymity. They’re “terrified” to lose their jobs.
At least one recently fired administrator is suing over the dismissal, an insider said.
There are fewer productions to work on — the company’s gone from putting on between 24 and 26 pre-pandemic to just 17 next season.
How far will the Met finally fall after Gelb’s nearly 20 years at the helm?
“Peter has done a lot of good and meaningfully changed the opera industry,” the employee said. The HD cinema broadcasting Gelb pioneered in the aughts, “whatever the actual effect of that is, for better or worse, changed my life” — exposing him to opera when he had no place to see it in person.
But he’s also “a very flawed leader because he is stuck constantly between trying to make people happy and also steer the ship in a certain way, and he gets paralyzed,” the employee said, calling Gelb a “micromanager” who’s “not focused enough on big picture.”
“His problem can be summed up to: He makes a bet on a creative team, realizes that this creative team, for whatever reason, can’t quite deliver on the grand production that will save opera, but he can’t say no to them. He wants to be seen as a person that supports directors, and so he lets these productions sprawl out and get oversized, and then when they turn out to be a disaster, it’s like he wasn’t at all in control of it, he just throws up in his hands. ‘What can you do?’” the employee said.
“Well, you can find better artists, and you can manage them better, and hopefully then you have a better artistic product to put on stage.”
It wasn’t just audiences that cringed at “Carmen” — the staff did too.
That one dud is indicative of the larger problems at the crucial cultural institution.
“There’s a lot that one could say about the political posturing,” the employee concluded.
“The problem is, people want good work. It’s not about new or old. Make something good.”
It may not solve “the problem of replacing your donor case at the $200 million level. But at least people can’t look at a production like that ‘Carmen’ and extrapolate all this other s–t from it.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
