For all its novelty, the Met still cannot find an audience
OperaAt yesterday’s season launch , Peter Gelb was made to admit that attendances at the Metropolitan Opera have barely improved since the Covid turbulence.
Gelb conceded that the current season’s average attendance is 63%, barely above the unsustainable 60% of the pre-Covid season.
There will be only 18 operas on show next season, the smallest repertoire in more than 40 years.
Rolando Villazón’s production of La Sonnambula has been indefinitely postponed.
Michael Mayer’s long-delayed Aida has been pushed back to 2024-25.
The new season poster does not exactly betoken joy.
Villazón’s Sonnambula was shown in Paris and is awful. So Gelb got that one right at least.
Gelb is hoping to put more bums on seats by having a whole bunch of new works pandering to the woke community akin to the rest of Broadway. I wish him the best of luck as audience figures have not increased in Broadway. With a reduced budget, I think he should concentrate on fewer works but with better casts and and productions. It is time to move towards a newer generation of better singers who can sing as well as act instead of having stately galleons inch their way across the stage with loud and ugly voices. I wonder if he has already missed the boat as usual. The static productions are boring and it is time that he looks outside the Met to see that inventive directors elsewhere have shown that much can be done with little to bring thought provoking and stimulating productions on stage. It is challenging to revive new works and the Met will run out of new works to commission at the rate it is going. The Met needs to seriously rethink its strategy if it hopes to survive.
Have you been to the Met recently? Stand and sing singers have bee”style” of acting at The Met than there is anywhere else. And just what young voices are the Met not employing? The Met roster is jammed with young singers…many would say at the expense of more established singers with experience who help to bring wisdom an gravitas to performances. There needs to be a bridge between generations…not a wiping out of one in the hopes of a younger generation just taking over. Both generations need to be present and enjoyed…not condemned.
Those simpletons not showing up, don’t deserve the MET opera anyway. They’re probably the type of plebeians that clap between movements. Pure art doesn’t need an audience in order to bestow artistic merit.
Sounds like you need to hold on to your LPs.
LPs are the domain of juvenile hooligans. I only listen by way of Edison wax cylinders – the only original recording medium.
Alas, poor Curvy, another victim of Poe’s law. (Rest assured, some of us got the joke.)
Sure, because the MET doesn’t need people to buy tickets! Surely it can survive without people paying to see it.
Again, they’re probably not the only ones. American orchestra attendance is also lagging – Baltimore is playing to sparse houses (and no, it’s not the “woke” programming).
If I’m not mistaken, the newer operas are actually doing pretty well – interesting that they’re doing more Blanchard and Heggie, and postponing Aida and La Sonnambula.
It is actually “woke” programming in Baltimore that made me renounce my longtime subscription. In fact, what is offered in Baltimore is the definition of woke.
However, with a more “traditional” programming, the last few concerts of the NSO that I attended (with Noseda and Gaffigan at the helm) were well attended.
Please explain what you find “woke” in Baltimore. Or what the term means to you generally.
This year I’ve heard a good bit of Strauss, Bruckner, Mahler, Prokofiev, etc. And a compelling presentation of “L’Histoire du Soldat,” though that one had the effrontery of presenting it as the experience of a (horrors!) BLACK soldier in the Vietnam era.
You’re missing a great orchestra in action; maybe you should trust them to provide a compelling experience. Your loss.
The LA Phil and Disney Concert Hall are killing it. Audience attendance is strong. Los Angeles is where it’s at, and with Salonen taking the helm in San Francisco the West Coast is where classical music is thriving!
The Met is in NYC. Question solved…
Dead Man Walking is the only English-language opera in my list of favorites, but at this point I have no interest in seeing what the Met does with it or the Ring or anything else. The Met has made it very clear most Americans are not welcome.
Do we know of any audiencve statistics? What attracts bigger audiences? New or old (naturalistic) productions? New works or classics?
It’s contemporary operas.
Say what you will about Gelb, but he follows the data.
Whenever the Met (or BAM) does a Philip Glass opera, for example, it sells out. They revived their new production of Akhnaten sooner than expected because sales were so strong.
This season, the contemporary operas are again selling well while old war horses like Don Carlo struggle to fill just half the house.
Audited numbers, please, not hearsay. (Good luck)
I’ve seen the numbers (I’m not allowed to share them) and Thornhill is right. You can think Gelb is an idiot for a million reasons, but if there’s one thing he is definitely trying to get right, it’s programming things that sell tickets. And he is data-driven (again, for better and for worse, but that’s a fact — even if Tiredofitall knows better).
That is most likely to be the case because the MET production of Don Carlos is so awful – and everyone knows this.
Maybe the rep has something to do with it! And prices!
If Gelb understood that classics versus modern opera is not the issue: boring productions for grandparents only are the problem. His audience is dying and it won’t be Bart Sher or Michael Meyer who excites new audiences to opera. Gelb has no personal taste: he hires whoever the other elders (enter bully grandpa Pierre Audi) tell him are safe commercial bets: enter cliche master Simon Stone, enter sterile Ivo van Hove, or these musical theatre white men destroying yet another opera: as if musical theatre and opera are the same art forms. Gelb will sink the boat as the Met board have no vision or courage. NYC doesn’t care about opera anymore: they care about musicals and Beyonce.
Everybody cares about Beyonce. She’ll sell out Wembley, Allianz Arena, Stadio Olimpico in Rome, the Maracana, and any other venue across the world, including in all those cities where you may think people prefer opera.
Is novelty and commissioned opera what your average audience member wants and needs to fill the barn at Lincoln Center?
Name a single stage director, who directed any production that Caruso and Ponselle sang in at the Met!
Name an opera that you saw and heard Caruso and Ponselle sing live in at The Met?
Wasn’t even born!
Well, it’s a meaningless comment, since the whole opera world has changed, but David Belasco directed Caruso in LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST at the Met.
You are not comparing like with like. Like it or not opera production has shifted to the age of the stage director. In the age of Caruso and Ponselle the singers ruled – hence they are remembered. Can you remember offhand any other than a handful of Opera conductors from those days, I wonder?
What I don’t understand is the long tenure of Peter Gelb who has presided over this decline. The Met is a business after all; any business whose CEO is leading his shop into decline should be fired by the Board. All you have to do is look across the Plaza to find out how things can be done. Deborah Borda took the NY Phil, a great orchestra in a horrible hall, raised $550 million and then got a charismatic conductor to finish her tenure in glory. Most of the concerts I have gone to are almost sold out (I know that the Geffen hall seats half of the number as the Met). Their endowment keeps going up and up.
Hey Met Board ! Wake up!!
Borda is more interested in the institution than the art form. We’ll see how well the Philharmonic does when the novelty of the ‘new’ hall, only a modest improvement over the old one, wears off. She’s left us with a starry music director who doesn’t have much in the way of intellectual substance, and a hall that works better for the kind of woke events Lincoln Center wants to present these days, than for standard orchestral fare.
NY Phil is decent…but hardly “great”…
The Met Board has been asleep at the wheel for well over a decade. Ms. Borda has been a highly experienced CEO of several orchestras and achieved a great deal of success. Gelb had been CEO at not even one small Opera company before he was plucked from irrelevance to run the Met when there must have been an opera house full of far more competent administrators around the world. One gets the impression that the Board long ago realized it’s massive error in appointing him and became equally long ago terrified of losing him! And as others have pointed out in another forum, the problem with Boards is that few if any of the members have any real idea what they are talking about. They are hugely dependent on their appointed administrative and artistic heads. Appoint a novice – and you end up with the disastrous policies as shown by the Met and the ENO!
Stick to the classics of Puccini and Verdi; class and wonderful music NEVER goes out of style.
If I’m not mistaken there are 4 Puccini and 3 Verdi (plus the Requiem). 7 out of 18 is a lot.
Some of us are sick to death of yet another Boheme or Traviata reincarnated, and rolled out as predictable museum pieces.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the “novelty” for novelty’s sake programming, together with an offensively woke slant, that contribute to the problem. There is a reason that classics are classics. They can, and do, speak to every generation. Novelty wears off quickly. Classics endure.
The problem with putting so much money into contemporary Opera is that you rarely want to go see them again after you’ve seen them once. The bottom line, there are no star singers who draw people because of the magnificence of their voice anymore.. I think Star Singers died when they stopped making Studio recordings. Live recordings are nice, but there was nothing more exciting than to get a new studio recording by Leontyne Price or Joan Sutherland. People learned operas from those recordings and were educated when they got to the house. I don’t think it’s just the Metropolitan Opera, but Opera around the world is pretty boring these days in general.
“NYC doesn’t care about opera anymore: they care about musicals and Beyonce.”
In general, the entire culture-entertainment industry is following the same playbook. Although such trends may be worse in places like NYC, they can be also found in both small and large cultural organizations throughout the US and Europe.
Moreover, some of these same trends are increasingly also found in the world of professional sports too.
These are very woke times and everyone had better buckle up.
Get Woke go broke!
I am really disappointed (but not surprised) by the raging negatively here. Why not celebrate that we have a glorious opera house in our country ! How are these new operas “woke”? Woke, by definition is “being aware of or well informed in a political or cultural sense”- who WOULDN’T want that? If what folks are complaining about is that the main characters are not white but brown and black skinned folks, then say that. The stories in these operas are stories like Verdi, Puccini or Mozart about people and situations.
I for one look forward to learning new operas, hearing old chestnuts and celebrating the fact that truly great music an performances are only a car ride away. Who wouldn’t want that?
My suggestion is if you hate opera in its current state then bow out gracefully and find another avenue to nourish your soul and use comment sections to celebrate that new found passion.
I heartily agree with your comments Mr. Marino. Let us minimize the negativity and vitriol of our comments. It is counter productive. It is not only the Met that suffers from lower audience and finance problems. It is world wide. The Met is doing what it can under the circumstances. New modern productions are welcome for me plus old traditional ones. The Met will survive. As a subscriber for more than three decades I am patient and give my thumbs up for the MET.
But the problem with new operas is as earlier pointed out they almost always end up with a very short shelf life. How many end up being revived? Unless you can budget for at least 2 or 3 revivals, all the monies spent on planning, scenery, costumes, rehearsal time, creative team, orchestra rehearsal time and artists/chorus fees go down the drain. I’m not suggesting this is a reason NOT to commission new works, but it is a commercial fact of life.
Back in the 1970s the then excellent Scottish Opera commissioned 4 new operas over 4 consecutive years. I considered Thea Musgrave’s Mary Queen of Scots an excellent work. It received one revival and was produced at Thea’s Festival in America. It has rarely seen the light of day since as far as I am aware. And I consider that a great pity.
Scottish Opera gave one revival of Iain Hamilton’s The Caroline Conspiracy and that was it, despite the work being much admired by critics. The other two by Thomas Wilson and Robin Orr received less enthusiastic reviews and quickly died. How much cash went down the drain as a result I have no idea, but even for Scottish Opera in its heyday it must have been significant.
Even the often disliked Jeremy Isaacs stated in his autobiography that plentiful revivals had to be the staple when financing any opera company. A recent book mentioned that in a recent season the Met had 5 new productions and 20 revivals. Mounting any production – standard repertoire or new – without considering revivals has surely to be a recipe for future disasters in future years.
If a city of over eight million people, within close proximity of a range of other major cities, with three international airports serving it, and it being in many ways the most important and famous in the world, cannot do better in attendance at a giant opera house, the problem is not limited to Gelb’s ignorance and egomania: something ELSE is deeply wrong. Who will or can figure this out? Not his sycophantic board who rubbed-stamps him on everything… and do we truly believe a season of so many ‘modern’ works will sell? Let’s hope it does. In the meantime we will be subjected to the Met’s desire to turn above-average artists into the superstars they aren’t while a music director practices and learns the repertoire on our time and expense. Challenging times indeed. Thank god Major League Baseball starts up soon.
Neither has Opera North. Whole galleries closed the other night for Ariadne auf Naxos and great reviews from our national papers and Elizabeth Llewlyn and some other fine singers. I usually sit in the Upper Balcony but since September been given seats in the stalls in the Grand Theatre that is half the size of the Met I suppose. It’s not all like London where you get Channel-hopping tourists to go to ROH!!!
There is nothing we will spend our money on next season. Disappointing, but we won’t experiment at the prices the Met charges, thank you.
There is a Russian singer in Europe whose performances always sell-out, including almost 14,000 at the Verona Arena last summer. Three performances went on sale last week but were sold out almost immediately, including her role debut as Abigaille in “Nabucco.” Next week she and her husband begin a tour of Asia (Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tokyo). Europe and Asia have accepted her multiple condemnations of the war in Ukraine. She has not returned to Russia since the war began. Unfortunately, Peter Gelb is still virtue signaling.
“She has not returned to Russia since the war began” – not sure that is true? She did and was despatched to far-flung corners of the Russian ’empire’ before decamping back to Austria (she holds Austrian citizenship).
My favorite new hypocrisy of Gelb’s Met is his delusion of Diversity: how many new “woke operas” can he hand to elderly white men, even when their subject matter is all black, all female, etc: James Robinson, Robert O’hara, Phelim McDermott. And we call this woke anything? . A humiliation for what was once the greatest house of music and opera production on earth. Now a scrambling mess of white male ineptitude. Next up: Alexander Neef chewing the furniture in the wings. Oh boy. Another power hungry white man with more ambition than artistic anything.
Robert O’Hara is Black.
Look north, to Harlem, there is your audiance.
Los Angeles Opera performances of Le Nozze di Figaro have been selling out. They also just announced a truly fantastic 2023-24 season. There is good news out there!
https://www.laopera.org/performances/202324-season/
If you hate German opera, it’s a great season.
Big deal, keep confitscate russian artist, and lousy american operas, and ego maniac G.D. good for you.
This isn’t really about Gelb. His dilemma is just a particularly acute example of the dilemma everywhere.
It isn’t conservatism that makes Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, Puccini (et al.) essential to an opera season. It’s the intrinsic properties of their music-dramas that make people need them repeatedly over the course of a lifetime. Our “standard repertory” operas were created mostly in a period of about 150 years in which their idiom was ALSO the popular idiom of the day. So theaters could produce many, many “also-ran” works that would keep the public happy while searching for the smaller number that would become repeatable classics.
It’s questionable whether such a large-scale, labor-intensive, high-cost art-form can sustain itself without being either “the popular idiom of the day” or reliably producing some of those peak-experience works that people will need over and over. How realistic is it to hope for that?
Well stated.