‘Hi Leah. It’s Peter Gelb’
OperaIn a chronicle that is currently being read by practically every opera singer on the planet, soprano Leah Partridge describes how she was hired as a cover by the Met and then unceremoniously dumped.
Among her conclusions:
If I could go back and do it all over, I would never have taken any cover contracts. I’d like for singers to understand that without clarity in your contract, you should know you will most likely be the absolute last choice, and if given enough time, they will try to get a star or someone ‘up and coming’ to fill your place. The idea of going on for someone and launching your career into stardom like Scotto going on for Callas is gone. At places like the MET, when you step into their roster as a cover, you no longer have the status of a singer they will promote or even care about….
Read here.
photo: Stacey Bode
I spoke to an old friend, a Juilliard graduate, who after further training in the US and Europe was given a contract in a major German opera house. Going through school, her entire dream, was singing one specific role at the MET. She now sings leading roles throughout Europe and with other major US opera houses other than the MET. By the way, she has major management both sides of the Atlantic. So I asked her recently if she still wants to sing at the MET. She then told me they came knocking and she turned them down cold. Leah’s experience with Gelb is one of many stories about him that leads one to understand, where there is smoke, there is fire. The financial problems at the MET can be surmounted with an effective leader. The moral of Leah’s store when it comes to Gelb is when you run a business, you can run a tight ship and still not be an ***-hole.
So, first flowers, then fired…
At least there is some professionalism left at the Met:
“I ran into a stagehand while trying to make it out of the MET without seeing anyone. He stopped me.
He said, “I want you to know we are all very sorry about how you were treated. It’s going around about what happened, and we don’t like it. You’ve always been great and fun backstage. We love working with you and are sorry you’ve been treated this way.”
By the way, how well is Peter Gelb doing HIS job?
Wait a minute. People who pay up to $250-$300 per ticket to hear the world’s leading singers want to hear the world’s leading singers. If the Met can pull a high-profile substitute out of a hat rather than put on an unknown cover, I’m not sure it deserves to be slammed for doing so.
Then they shoudn’t hire one, and the singer shouldn’t accept a cover, unless it is made clear it is only for rehearsals before a star turns up, or as an absolute last ditch replacement when n other star can jump in.
Fine, but in that case, it’s downright evil to dangle the carrot of the last two performances in front of her, only to pull it away after she’d done everything asked of her.
And if that is the case, the career advice (don’t accept cover work if you’re still trying to establish a career) is definitely sound.
When is the last time you e been to the Met? You can get tickets for $35 because nobody is going. And many of these “leading singers” are well past their primes with many up and coming voices singing circles around them. I’d rather see a good performance at the Met, for a change, rather than a “star.”
When will people realize that at the Met, covers are for emergencies? If there’s good notice, they will replace the singer who is contracted and not promote the cover. The cover is there in case the person who is supposed to sing is sick at 7:26 pm.
Pre-Gelb, covers frequently went on, often to great acclaim. Gelb apparently has plenty of gelt to throw around.
The Metropolitan Opera has a history of steady covers singing leading roles for their entire history. For instance, tenor Thomas Hayward from Kansas won the MET auditions with Robert Merrill and was Jussi Bjorling’s cover for years. Listen to Tom’s records and you wonder why he was not a household name in the opera world. American singers in opersa have generally held second fiddle to their European counterparts. Sure a few like Sam Ramey, Marilyn Horne, Leonard Warren etc. etc. rise to superstardom, but it is rare. They generally have to be heads and tails above the Europeans to get the same recognition here. Also, a number of singers made breakthroughs stepping in as covers.
People who pay up to $250-$300 per ticket do not want to hear the staff are mistreated and mislead.
When it comes to leading singers, they are dead. As is the Met.
Peter Gelb is merely the undertaker.
Many of the contributors on this site complain about casting. Tell me, why wouldn’t the Met look for the best alternative rather than use a cover. There has never been any guarantee a cover would automatically go ‘on’ in the event of a cancellation. It is a judgement call of the Met to put the best person on stage, and if an alternative to a cover can be found isn’t that the Mets obligation to their audience ?
Really the Mets obligation is a fiduciary one to the board. Covers get paid whether they perform or not and bringing in a star last minute comes at a premium. They are often flown in last minute, first or business class, paid a premium for a one-off performance, and housed for free. All this while the cover is still paid $3,500-5,000 for the performance for which they did not cover. These last minute substitutions are not covered by a boost in ticket sales.
The bigger issue with this kind of treatment is that a lot of performers who cover at the Met earlier in their career go on to build substantial careers in Europe. After being disrespected by the Met and Gelb specifically they often do not come back and the Met misses out on the new crop of up-and-comers and star performers.
I guess my point is that the Met is run more like a personal fiefdom for the sake of an individuals vanity rather than an actual business. That is why it suffers both financially and from a quality perspective.
A cover artist at the MET is paid $5k per show which they do not sing? Be interested to have this fee level confirmed. Or indeed exploded.
It’s absolute nonsense.
It’s not $5K. It’s been $3K for decades.
Poster throw around number pullout of thin air…or other places. Unless you can verify a fact, don’t state it.
Not even remotely accurate.
Except for the fact that in this case the singer they hired for the last two shows was in no way better known than the cover, and arguably less known at the Met.
I was present at the infamous 3-Tristan Tristan at the Met in 1960
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,894646,00.html
Rudolf Bing used 3 different tenors to sing Tristan in 1 night, 1 act each. A great quiz question would be “Who were the 3 tenors and which 1 sung each act?”
It also reminds me of the very sad story of Brian Sullivan. Sullivan was a lead tenor at the Met and sang almost every Lohengrin over a several-year period. He went to Zurich thinking that he was set to sing Siegfried there. He found out that he was only the cover and drowned himself at age 49. 1 of the saddest of all opera stories. Steve
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,894646,00.html
Leah, your wonderful account – thank you! – brought back buried memories of the only cover I ever accepted; and it was for Simon Keenlyside! It was at ENO, in War and Peace, that famously short little piece! I had sat through rehearsals and watched Simon in imperious form. I never expected to go on, and don’t think I had even had a chance to sing it all off-copy with a pianist, let alone the orchestra. We covers got to rehearse a few scenes in a studio, but mainly those with massive waltz choreographies. The weekend leading up to the open dress – I think, I can’t quite remember – I went out on a bit of a bender with friends. I was young and stupid. I was returning from said 2-day bender on the Monday around midday when, slouched and half-asleep on a commuter train, my old Nokia phone rang. ENO! “You will be required to sing the role of Prince Andrei tonight…” Panic! Instant panic! Guinness fumes were still evaporating from my pores! What?! It was one of those moments where you shake your head and hope you’re dreaming. Nope. Nightmare! I didn’t even have my score on me, and there wasn’t time to go back to my digs in South London to get it, because I had to go straight to the theatre to meet the conductor and director. I didn’t even know if I could sing it right through when in good form – as opposed to hungover – and with the score! But when I got to the opera house I realised I would be on stage, in costume, not singing from the side. Simon was at home! I would run the whole opera, from memory! My adrenal glands must have gone into Serengeti mode, because – after soaking in a hot shower for about an hour – I went out there and seem to remember having one of the best nights of my singing life. I got the million compliments, but I never got invited back there. Turns out the only man who really mattered, Mr. Berry, was the only member of staff not there that night. Ah, well. And Simon never missed a night. A hell of a lot of work for not much more than a Mars bar and a packet of crisps. I never covered again. But at least I got to duet with Willard White as General Kutuzov, while pooping my britches…
Get over it, snowflake. The Met is a business like any other business. Gelb has the right to use whoever he thinks will sell tickets. Workers in all kinds of fields are unceremoniously replaced every day, and most of them don’t have the luxury of blogging their complaints.
Everyone has the right to blog their complaints, you just did it above! The issue is that Gelb does not run the Met like a business. He runs it like his own vanity project surrounding himself with “stars” rather than focusing on quality. The Met used to be the gold standard for opera and it has become an industry joke in the last two decades. It would be one thing if it was making money, but Gelb is burning through that endowment quickly because he keeps doubling down on his bad decision
Look at how successful Gelb has been. He had to rob the pension fund a few years back, which he’s never repaid and now took 1/3 of the companies endowment to pay off his bills. It is laughable to support Gelb for his business acumen in singing, or in running a big opera company. His decision making has been from hunger and he still remains unpopular in the house by people who have been there for years and seen other management.
You’re a garbage person.
Norman, I thought you were going to delete personal attacks?
Sorry but this is not news. Anyone who goes far enough in the business knows a MET cover contract is death as that is the only thing they will ever see you as, if you take it, and they will do everything they can to hire a star to replace a role before they ever let the cover go on. A rare exception does get made (Rachel Gilmore) but it is *RARE*
Obviously there is not much to say about the appalling way that Leah was treated, not just by the management, but also by conductor Louis Langrée, whose musicmaking I have previously enjoyed. Let me also say that I also enjoyed Leah’s artistry as well.
But besides causing trauma, the whole story opens another window on the mismanagement that the Met has suffered in the recent era. While hiring a “name singer” like Marlis Petersen (a good artist, let’s be clear) “may” be justified by the fact this was the premiere of a work that was not seen at the Met in over a century, not giving Leah the final performances and bringing a soprano who at that time was not better known (arguably less known at the Met because by that time Leah has already appeared in Peter Grimes, Thais and La Fille) can only be interpreted as a huge waste of money. How many other such wasteful decisions were made by Yellow Pete? No doubt they have contributed to the crisis that the house finds itself in.
(That other soprano, in case you wonder, is Jane Archibald, whose career highlight was being a member of the ensemble of the Vienna State Opera.)
Yellow Pete must go.
Peter Gelb is the symbol of our completely finished classical music business.
He is cruel, with no empathy and in a fantastic way without success.
Wonderfully and succinctly stated!
This became clear when Gelb had Kristine Opolais, running on zero hours of sleep, fill in for Anita Hartig on the 2014 La Bohème HD instead of the actual cover singer.
She took on that assignment because she was very reluctant to say no to Gelb. And listen to the state of her voice now…
There are covers at the Met who have a performance-usually on a night around a holiday that the star would like off-written into their contract. One is better than. none on a resumé.
Pfff what a job, what a demented world is the classical music bizz
I’m not convinced she should’ve been given the other two performances, based on her account. Sometimes, you’re just not good enough!
One would think that covering great singers would be an excellent apprenticeship. It probably is, but then you don’t perform there and you don’t even get hired at other houses… From a training point of view, it’s awesome to learn from the greats, something is off if that’s the “kiss of death?”
The only issue with all these complaints is that every US opera company seeks more bankable singers before they put on a cover. This is not a MET-specific problem — hell it’s not even an opera-specific problem, as the same can be said about the decline in assistant and cover conductors going on in the symphonic sphere. At the end of the day, if artistic departments can get a genuinely comparable replacement in time, they will.
Artistic departments that actually know little or anything about singing or how to perform. They sure aren’g doing a good job of getting rear ends into seats.
The saddest thing about this story is that when she was invited back to put herself in the same situation, she agreed – thus doing her part to guarantee that the cycle continues. The Met treats singers this way because the singers allow it. Leah thinks we’re supposed to feel sorry for her when she is the one responsible.
It is fascinating to read the misconceptions that covers aren’t world class performers of their own right. Many have performed at some of the greatest houses in the world other than the Met. These covers aren’t people brand new to the business, many are featured in the magazines read regularly about opera.
The role of the cover is beyond challenging and to step in at the last second or even with some notice is a very special, courageous skill. The difference now is the emphasis on “media branded star power” being more important than getting an exquisite evening of gorgeous, acoustic, transformative music and storytelling- with the original cast or the opportunity for someone to jump in for an indisposed colleague.
Please consider that everyone in ANY opera house is working their tails off to give the audience an evening that will thrill them to their core.
I won’t attend the Met until Gelb and this Board are gone. Doubt I’m the only one.
Is this what happens when you care more about your virtue-signaling credentials at cocktail parties than the quality and marketability of the product you’re offering?
Wutevs.
Been sad watching the collapse but at least it won’t be in person.