Peter Gelb: An opera lover is someone who comes twice a year
NewsThe Met’s general manager believes the subscription model is on its last legs and the notion of an opera lover needs redefining.
‘When we survey our audiences, we learn that a self-described opera lover today is someone who comes to the opera a couple of times a year. A self-described opera lover 20 years ago was someone who came to the Met 20 times a year.’
Really?
From a typically unchallenginng New York Times interview.
So what does this site define an opera lover as? Must you attend live opera many times a year to be an opera lover?
Or is this just more nit picking because, you know, you can.
The subscription “model” is at least 300 years old and is going nowhere.
The Metropolitan Opera would have its 3,800 seats filled or nearly filled every night if its Board had the right team and related properly to the 20,140,470 people who live in the New York metropolitan area.
Hint: in the performing arts only two of the 4 Ps of Marketing can be shaped. Work on them.
Bravo. And Mr. Gelb should be focused on raising money from the Elon Musks and Warren Buffetts and their ilk, he doesn’t need to play “talent spotter”. He’s not Beverley Sills.
Miss Sills could do both. In high heels. In retirement.
Miss Beverly Sills. What a lady
And George Soros – if he even knows what opera is, apart from some Soviet agitprop.
“The Metropolitan Opera would have its 3,800 seats filled or nearly filled every night if its Board had the right team and related properly to the 20,140,470 people who live in the New York metropolitan area.”
Oh really? Who would be on “the right team” and please provide an example or two of “relating properly” to the people who live in NYC. I’m all ears.
But you have no other deformities, right?
Theatre, not Opera, but Bristol Old Vic this morning announced the plums of its September to March season, and I notice that it’s promoting a Subscription deal with discounts, increasing as more shows are booked and significantly greater for Members.
Having just been to a livestream of the Met’s Der Rosenkavalier where of the people near me:
– one couple moaned they didn’t like Strauss and it wasn’t Mozart (they had a subscription so came to everything regardless of whether they liked it)
– one couple had a criticism for everything, eg their take on Lise Davidsen, one of the foremost sopranos of our time, was ‘she was good but the wrong size’
– one person chose the middle of *that* final trio (which is stunning but hardly long!) to loudly leave to go to the toilet
Perhaps it is best if ‘opera lovers’ go only a few times a year to the operas they really want to hear, instead of blanket going to everything and noticeably not enjoying it.
Lovely, but that isn’t a functional business model. Unfortunately, there are currently too few singers that make people want to leave the comfort of their homes, pay for an opera ticket and all the other expenses involved for a ‘memorable’ evening at the MET. If you must make do with the ‘barely audible’ singers in house, they are better over Sirius or HD, the out of tune singers or singers no longer able to successfully sing their roles are better left unhired. Everything can be ‘tolerable’ when you are NOT paying and that includes in house professional critics, but not tolerable if you must pay to be underwhelmed by a performance. The casting at the MET this past season for core opera repertoire has not been good at all.
Things are not going well at the Met then? I know people, myself included, who have gone to almost every opera La Monnaie has put on since pandemic restrictions were lifted. However children in Mainland Europe are often brought up with opera and classical music from a very early age. I doubt this happens much in the US. Opera is after all a European art form that originated in Italy in the 16th century and drew its inspiration from ancient Greek drama.
I can attest to that with children in Vienna, not so much opera but classical music. It always heartened me to see them sitting quietly and enjoying the music, having been disciplined to sit still – just as they once did at Mass on Sundays. (Throw out religion, by all means, but do understand that it taught children to sit quietly for an hour at least once a week. All weathers.)
The notion of discipline has been hauled across the coals in recent decades with no noticeable improvement in society to show for it.
This is not a brilliant insight but, realistically, live performances are expensive, particularly at the Met. With HD performances and so much online/home-based content, we opera lovers may “watch” 20 live events while being thrilled to “attend” two Met performances in person.
Isn’t it funny to read about ‘progressives’ resenting change??!!! Caught the irony of that?
For once Gelb is probably correct. After all, the heyday of subscription was in Danny Newman’s time 50 or so years ago. The range of leisure activities available to everyone nowadays is vastly in excess of what it was half a century ago. Finding patrons prepared to commit to a subscription on a certain evening every few weeks (or even with the ‘pick and choose’ subscriptions generally available now) must be extremely difficult and will no doubt be limited to the older generation. The young and the middle class today have so much else to occupy their leisure time, certainly in most cities in the west. If I happened to be running an opera company I would definitely focus the marketing away from subscription and on to specific features of the specific operas. Much more time consuming and no doubt more expensive, but an opera company has to get an audience or it will slowly die. Changes in protential audience habits inevitably leave opera companies no choice. Perhaps given his track record to date, we should not be surprised that Gelb has only just realised this!
I’m sorry, but I worked there for 32 years. What the Met needs is truly great performances of truly great music, which used to “happen” on a regular basis. It doesn’t need a single pee of marketing. Ass backwards mentality.
Whenever I look at the upcoming opera programs – no matter where – I see the usual fare, with an over-representation of Verdi and Wagner. Staleness is a major part of the problem.
There should be many more baroque works; Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lully, Rameau et al.
My impression is that the baroque works get better performances.
Yes easier to cast with smaller voices. But dull as dishwater in most cases and certainly not as fit for a huge house like the Met.
Gotta love that idiotic photo of Gelb in a suit and Yannick in his trademark hoodie with his sneakers on the velvet seats. He looks like his late for a dance battle.
You’re either cool or not. Wearing a hoodie and dying your hair at his age is more than a little pathetic.
He’s responding to the ‘anything goes’ culture in which he lives. What is confusing about that?
I hope maestro is relayed my message: Hon, get your sneakers off my seat .I touch those surfaces with my hands. Didn’t your mother teach you manners ?
As an European I was completely shocked to see it.
Would he dare to do the same at La Scala or Vienna/
Zurich Opera House?
They usually dare to much worse in the stagings, especially in Zurich.
It’s yet another example of Peter’s non-plan of how to run an opera house: always look for an excuse and others to blame. The audience he “surveyed” is the audience he has created (or not) over the past fifteen years.
Solutions have never been part of his management style. His “my way or the highway” mentality has resulted in a reduced 2023-24 season of works that fewer and fewer opera lovers want to see.
Good luck with that.
If the seats didn’t cost $300 more people would come more often.
Expense doesn’t seem to stop people in Europe and I have attended performances in many European houses. The Met has lost the plot.
Plenty of seats in every price range. Trust me.
Cheapest seats are 25$, but I get the point. How an opera house is supposed to function putting on the most expensive shows in the world, with the biggest stars in the world, while charging low prices and not receiving any public funding, though, is a bit more complicated than ‘PUH Gelb is such an idiot’.
Seriously? The budget for the Met is higher thant that of any state subsidiezed opera house. These European houses keep their expenses low by paying less their orchestra musicians and the stage crew (whether those wages at the Met are sustainable, that’s anoter part of the discussion. And, of course, NY is one of the most expensive cities).
The best example is the Vienna Philharmonic, whose musicians earn more in the Salzburg summer than in the whole rest of the year when playing in the Staatsoper pit.
They don’t. You can in for $30 or stand for less. Even the top prices are less than $300 in the Grand Tier depending on the evening you choose. Covent Garden is more, I just bought tickets there for an upcoming trip to London.
I’m not surprised.
There is too much else to do, most opera fans live beyond an easy trip to the opera hall, if you go you are going to either hear something you have heard before or hear a new work that wasn’t worth the trip to hear.
Oh you’re right, I see it too. If you ignore “self-described” in the quote, it’s possible to completely miss his point! Thanks for pointing that out.
I live in NV and I go to most all Met in HD performances at my local movie theater. Local for me is a 40 min. drive.
I’m an opera lover and I’ve been to the Met in NY once. It was one of the highlights of my opera loving life!
In Vienna during summer many of their operas are projected on a screen outside the House; Live am Platz. I don’t know if they do this anymore. It was good, but there was a lot of ambient noise and those ubiquitous hawkers for ‘Mozart concerts’ spoiling one’s enjoyment.
Yes. Those who do not have immediate access to live performances are those who appreciate them most.
For the last 10 years, organizations like the National Endowment of the Arts and the League of American of American Orchestras have been releasing studies showing a steady decline in subscription sales since the late 1990s. The San Francisco Opera, for example, went from selling 75 percent of its tickets through subscriptions to less than half by 2018. I’m sure it’s even worse today. During the same period, the Lyric Opera had a 58 percent decline in subscription sales.
All of the data shows that Gelb is right.
Only comes twice in a year? He/she should take things inn and….
er, things in hand I meant to type
When the tickets are affordable and the singers are not the likes of Eyvazov, people will return. I certainly will. I stopped going, subscriptions have nothing to do with it.
CHAMPION is not selling well…the Met has reduced ticket prices for some of the performances. Yet “new” operas are supposedly going to save the Met.
They will if they’re good. Champion would be completely sold out if the reviews were good, but they weren’t. I’ve read at least eight different reviews, and all of them were ambivalent — and I agree with them.
Champion was a chance worth taking, but sometimes these things just don’t work out.
The Met need to offer more free tickets to schools and students.
Find more ways to reach the public.
Offer shorter versions of a few operas a year.
Use their PR machine not just to sell new productions of American operas. They don’t sell the great operas because they don’t reach the public and sell themselves.
The answer is not to stop playing great music
I happened to be in Helsinki this past Winter for a week, just a random week without any pre-planning. During that week in the capital, there was a children-friendly performance of Magic Flute, bog standard “grand opera” staging of Turandot, an hands-on interactive orchestra demonstration, and a contemporary music festival which included a double trombone concerto of all things.
A quick note that Helsinki’s population is under 750,000 and the entire country has fewer than six million inhabitants.
The point is not to extol FInland (which I am however happy to do at a moment’s notice and at great length) but to point out that there ARE ways for a society even in these latter times to broaden appeal and garner a demographically diverse audience who will attend “Western art music” concerts.
New York is dangerous now so you have to park at the MET garage, $50.00 per performance with now discount for subscribers. Maybe lower parking cost for subscribers would encourage people to subscribe?
Or they can take mass transit there like the rest of us do.
The vast majority of Manhattan is quite safe especially the Lincoln Center area. Insane to drive there if public transit exists anywhere near your home.
It must be possible to fill one single large opera house each night in a metropolitan area housing 20 million people with high average income per capita, and tens of thousands of tourists each night?
I never read about the demograohics of the American opera audiences. How is it? Old and white?
Pretty much. For the Blanchard operas you see more diversity.
Gelb was great at LPs and CDs but as a defender of opera faith he truly is abysmally bad. With opera managers like him who needs enemies?
The Metropolitan may as well hang the “ for sale “ sign out. A repertoire of modern and commissioned works for people who storm the box office twice a year to fill the 4000-seat barn?
Where is the fight? Where the belief? What board of idiots keep this guy employed??
Don’t have data on this, only guessing, but I would venture that the Met ALREADY fills more seats per year than all other NYC orchestral performances COMBINED.
What magic could they come up with that Carnegie Hall, which has fewer and fewer orchestral performances per year, hasn’t figured out?
Or which Gefen Hall hasn’t figured out, with its barely having orchestral performances any night of the year (and that’s MOST nights of the year) when the NYPHIL is not there?
Carnegie has just as many performances as it has done for the past 30 years. The last five times I went this season it was pretty much full. Likewise the NYPO at Geffen
Yes, Carnegie Stern Auditorium has events most nights.
But fewer and fewer are classical.
And fewer and fewer are orchestral.
(Perhaps 45, between now and the end of the 2023-2024 season, if we only count classical music and major orchestras with tickets priced accordingly.)
And Carnegie has fewer seats than the Met.
Gefen Hall, aside from having fewer seats than the Met, has orchestral concerts from full-size orchestras perhaps 100 nights per year.
Compare that to any major European city, even those 1/10 the size of NY.
This just shows a failure of the MET’s marketing and sales functions…
They’ve let their own repeat patrons go from attending 20x per year down to 2x.
Shameful. And Gelb has been GM for 17 of those 20 years.
The answer is simple— understand what is needed for great performances: a voice of EXCEPTIONAL quality and timbre, singing the appropriate repertoire for the natural build of the instrument so that it is exciting when accompanied by the orchestra. Most importantly, the artist must have the ability to move the listener to an emotional response. The only cast I have any desire to see next season is the Romeo and Juliette, and I will be going to hear Ben Bernheim. It is absurd that Sondra Radvanovsky is not cast in the Forza, which was to be mounted for her. Obviously Mr. Gelb does not know what he is doing, and has pedestrian taste in general, as he believes opera lovers want to watch a live performance form on screen instead of in the opera house. It is time for the Board to replace Mr. Gelb, who BTW successfully destroyed the classical division of Sony during his tenure there.
It’s possible that opera lovers might struggle to find more than two nights when they’re free to go and the Met is offering something they want to hear with a cast they want to hear in it.
I’m an opera lover. But in San Diego, uh, uh, ummmmm: I listen to great 12 inch lp vinyl. Pons. Ponselle. Tebaldi. Callas. I Inessa Galante (CD only). Del Monaco. Wunderlich. And my favorite, Richard Brooklyn Tucker. I would attend Don Giovanni 3 or 4 times a year if it were performed here.
The Met structure itself was all the glam in the 60’s without the substance. The acoustic is horrible and it’s a vocal killer. Prestigious,yes.
But many artists will tell you,they’d rather sing elsewhere. New York is in desperate need of a modern facility.
Opera is a lot more expensive today and for Americans outside NYC, to see a Met performance costs as much as traveling to Vienna to see one.