Peter Gelb blames critic for Met flop
NewsPage 6 in the NY Post – not the first place you’d turn to for opera reviews – has a speech made by Peter Gelb at a private fundraiser, lambasting Zachary Woolfe of the NY Times for poor sales of the season-opening opera, Grounded.
He called the opera ‘a brilliant work that has a brilliant story, and it has great emotional impact…
I’ve been around long enough to know that critics write — and they should write — what they feel. But sometimes you get the sense that there’s an agenda.’
‘There’s a great deal of resentment on the part of some critics — not all critics, some critics — about the idea that music should be approachable by a large audience and should be available to more people and some critics might [prefer to] keep it sacred, in some ways, for themselves.’
Woolfe had written in the Times that Grounded ‘doesn’t risk much, politically or musically.’ What is lacks ‘is musical depth and intensity….
‘Tesori’s gift for tunefulness, so charmingly evident in her musical theater work, has unfortunately been sidelined, as if it’s too lowbrow for the likes of opera. And there’s not enough that’s interesting or idiosyncratic in her score — its orchestration, structure, vocal lines — to compensate.
‘The result is often faceless and bland.’
Tickets are, as you’d expect, still available.
They should have named it “Dead on Arrival”. At least folks would have known long in advance.
It may be that some critics still think that ugly, modernist sounds in opera reaffirm the work’s precise location in the ‘now’, in the time of glorious ‘modernity’. It’s a matter of aging, that even critics cannot escape.
But with this opera, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with the music, which is very much of ‘now’ – but whether that is a good thing is quite another matter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqKt4-IORDk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cnKr2Ejw1U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVFbk4z4nBI
Subject matter seems the usual American silliness, though, on the assumption that involving planes and war makes it nicely contemporary.
The more an opera is anchored in the reality of the surrounding world, the less chances it will survive – unless the music transcends the topical and becomes universal, so that the work becomes accessible to very different places and times.
Who is Jeanine Tesori? A tatoo’d female composer with a broadway background – of course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojDjOyovS4Q
The Met tried to present contemporary work that is accessible to a general opera audience and they could only find the usual average thin fashionable stuff. The dichotomy between modernist ear grinder and cheap poppy confection is an artificial one. For instance there is Guillaume Connesson who wrote an accessible light opera with so much more musical content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw0rBvptoJw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fWCTlQ9yYc
What does tatoo’d have to do with anything?
They’re like nose rings.
It is a tangible marker either of anti-social or anti-self. Either way a problem. It’s nonsense that someone needs to obliterate their body to express themselves. Simply put, there is trouble inside. And it doesn’t take long to find. In this case, this opera.
Let’s look at some tatoo statistics. Below are the estimated percentages of people who have at least one tatoo, by generation:
Boomers: 13%
X: 32%
Millenial: 41%
Z: 23%
Tatoos are not my cup of tea, maybe partly because I am a baby boomer. But between my personal observation of perfectly normal people having tatoos and the above statistics, I would seriously question your negative associations.
Zachary Woolfe has been hammering his local NYC organizations recently. Just this week he also laid into Manfred Honeck and the NY Phil.
Gelb calls operas “shows.”
Enough said!
It’s because PG treats opera as a “product”. (I’ve heard him reference it as such.). As a revenue-producing activity, it can be argued, but from the leader representing an arts organization, PR-wise it is disheartening.
Peter Gelb IS the problem.He has no idea about opera as a form, nor any understanding that opera survives because the music is emotionally powerful on its own. Having suffered through the musical ennui and uninspiring fabric of Tesori’s Grounded, the critics are right.
Why does no one focus on Gelb’s dubious list of career “achievements”? At Sony he eliminated the classical division, lumping it in with jazz. He went millions over budget for the ill-conceived, overbuilt and mechanically problematic Ring production, he dips into the endowment to shore up his mismanagement shortfall, did his best to undermine and abandon the orchestra during Covid, and knows little to nothing about suitable vocal casting for repertory operas. Gelb truly believes the audience prefers watching opera at home on the couch. It is time for the board to find someone competent to replace the source of the problems at the Met.
Gelb must have a dossier on each of the board members, lol.
“opera survives because the music is emotionally powerful on its own.”
An important point that many journalists and commenters miss. Try marketing an “opera” DVD without the music, on the basis of the drama alone.
The irony… A project designed specifically to attract a broader range of people to the opera has trouble attracting any people at all. Just admit it was a bad idea and move on!
So much for “The buck stops here”.
Neither Peter Gelb, nor Zachary Woolfe have a single clue what opera or operatic singing is.
Alex Ross didn’t like the opera either (“It all rings false”), though he praised Emily D’Angelo.
Ross hasn’t liked Gelb either, and in his blog he’s joined the bruhaha over Gelb’s recent comments.
As if you didn’t hate the woke Gelb enough….this happens.
1) “sometimes you get the sense that there’s an agenda.”
An “agenda” is anytime someone disagrees with you.
Poor Gelob, Met patrons have an “agenda”, an agenda for good opera!
2) “the NY Post – not the first place you’d turn to for opera reviews”
The story goes, in the 1980s, the publisher of the NY Post was at a cocktail party with the CEO of Bloomingdale’s (department store), the publisher asks, “how come you don’t advertise in our paper?”, the CEO of Bloomingdale’s answers, “because your readers are my shoplifters”
No, I don’t imagine the readers of the Post go to the opera or know who Gelb is, but they might hang around Lincoln Center to mug operagoers leaving the opera at night
This strikes me as positively Stalinistic; Telling critics that they should write what Gelb would like them to think, not what they actually think.
Gelb is such a baby! I have not read ONE single glowingly positive review of this dumb opera. In fact, it’s even worse than being simply a mediocre opera. I have met more than one person who has told me they were going to the opera “for the first time” to see Grounded, who came away from it thinking it was dumb. Even a complete neophyte can tell when a show has a hackneyed plot or uninteresting music. Productions like this most definitely contribute to a growing disinterest in opera by the general public.
And let’s be honest, Woolfe’s review isn’t even close to being a slam on the level of some others I’ve read about this drivel.
Gelb: “There’s a great deal of resentment on the part of some critics — not all critics, some critics — about the idea that music should be approachable by a large audience…”
——–
Huh? Both the music and subject of “Grounded” don’t look too approachable.
Gelb would be on stronger ground if Jeanine Tesori were into John-Williams-type melodies and “Grounded” was a theme about, say, Snow White being saved by the prince.
However, Gelb is correct in describing some critics as being too much into the esoteric and inscrutable. But “Grounded”? That appears to be both visually esoteric and aurally inscrutable. Or aurally esoteric and visually inscrutable.
Better luck next time, Pete.
Can’t find find a legitimate opera composer from Italy instead of a Broadway composer moonlighting as an opera composer? So many of opera productions today are being hijacked by Hollyweird and musical theater people who know nothing about opera’s Grand Tradition.
Hmm, as I recall it, the first critics were quite dismissive of Les Mis…