Peter Gelb repeats a lie on TV

Interviewed this week on NYC-Arts, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera made the following statement (at 05:55 on the video):

The box-office sales are down because box-office sales in every city in this country are down for classical music and opera. This is an endemic problem that America faces and that is faced in Europe as well.

This is untrue, and Peter knows it is untrue.

The Lyric has just reported record results. So have Vienna, Amsterdam, Dresden and more. We’ve reported these results on slippedisc.com over the past couple of weeks.

Peter Gelb is out there telling the world that opera is doomed when others are getting off their butts and making it bigger and better.

If everyone else thinks opera is growing and Peter Gelb alone insists it is doomed, what we have here is not an artistic crisis but a clinical dysfunction at the top of the Met.

At the start of the interview, Gelb is asked what responsibility he bears for the Met’s bad figures these past seven years. He refuses to answer the question, three times.

Watch below.