Through the Opera Glass

The opera conjures a vivid collection of types: the diva with the glass-shattering high notes, the divo with the bowel-shattering vibrato, the conductor with fierce gestures and fiercer curls, the bejeweled patron equipped with tiny binoculars and pearly champagne. Less known is the impresario—the businessman behind it all. In earlier centuries, he was generally depicted as fat, mustachioed, and conniving, a personification of the grubbiness that ensues whenever art is forced into a dalliance with commerce.

Our dystopia is boring, so the contemporary impresarios who run the world’s opera houses are pale, middle-aged men (truly almost always men). They favor blazers, turtlenecks, and dated business-world buzzwords, and go by a variety of vaguely corporate titles: managing director, chief executive, artistic director, general manager. In the twenty-first century, they have two tasks. One is to make sure their opera houses survive. The other is to decide what operas are performed, which means practically deciding what contemporary opera is.

In my lifetime, no one has failed as much at both tasks as Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, which is the largest performing arts organization in the United States and has the highest seating capacity of any opera house in the world. It has a yearly operating budget of over $300 million and a long, illustrious history dating back to 1883. It hosted the legendary conductors Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini—twice, in the same season—as well as the U.S. premieres of most of Richard Wagner’s good operas. Its plush red seats are almost as familiar a reference point in the annals of American homosexuality as the beaches of P-Town. Susan Sontag loitered in the lobby. Maria Callas had legendary fights with its leadership. Jessye Norman sang eighty performances there.

The Met should be a lodestar for opera worldwide. Instead, under Gelb’s leadership, it has found itself lost at sea. Various scandals and increasing financial instability paint a concerning picture. But its biggest failure is as a place for powerful aesthetic experiences, which is ostensibly why the city demolished the neighborhood of San Juan Hill—displacing nearly seventeen thousand of its mostly black and Latino residents—to build Lincoln Center in the first place. In recent years, the Met, in an attempt to return the form to its long-lost place as art for the masses, has become the purveyor of a series of fundamentally unserious works I’ll call second-screen operas. Like Emily in Paris and paint-by-numbers content-trash of its ilk, the Met’s lineup of new operas privileges predictable plots, leaden dialogue, obvious foreshadowing, and didactic scene-setting—plus music whose only purpose is to underscore the story yet again. In Gelb’s vision, opera is an art during which you can get stuck on Instagram for several minutes watching a capybara riding a crocodile, then return to the piece without having missed a thing. In his race to the bottom, Gelb is robbing opera of its ambiguity and challenge: the two characteristics that make the art form sing. 

Early in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, the title character’s servant, Leporello, sings a catchy piece that quickly brings the audience up to speed on the backstory—in this case, his master’s sexual conquests. It’s an effective device, so I’ve tweaked it to summarize some of Gelb’s recent ineptitudes. To the tune of the “Catalogue Aria”:

Here’s a list I would show you,
Of the failures of Gelb’s years at the helm;
Here you’ll find them all duly assorted,
In my writing, will’t please you to look.
Ticket sales are at just seventy percent;
The endowment is down forty million,
And in Covid he furloughed the orch’stra, but;
Mark the climax,
That year he got over a million!
A cool million, a cool million! Etc.

Gelb has long approached classical music as a made-for-TV commodity. He began his career as an apprentice to the impresario Sol Hurok, making a splash when he managed the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 1979 tour to China on the heels of the Cultural Revolution. In 1982, he headed a video division at Columbia Artists Management; when he took over Sony Classical in 1995, he led the company to growth by releasing film scores like James Horner’s Titanic. Immediately after becoming general manager of the Met in 2006, he launched The Met: Live in HD, which brought broadcasts from the house to movie theaters around the world, allowing listeners to chomp popcorn while enjoying operatic music.

Despite these innovations, the Met has often seemed to be playing catch-up. It was not until 2015, for instance, that Gelb “came to the conclusion that it would make sense” not to use blackface in the Met productions of Verdi’s opera Otello. (By 2020, the house was mourning George Floyd on Instagram.) It was not until 2017, when the New York Post broke a story about James Levine, the Met’s music director for over forty years, allegedly sexual abusing a pubescent boy, that the institution addressed rumors about Levine that were by that time so prevalent that I—an utterly unconnected, pimply orchestra kid barely out of the age bracket Levine supposedly preferred—was well aware of them. (In an interview for VAN, a classical music magazine where I’m an editor, I once asked Gelb how I could have known of the stories while he apparently didn’t. He declined to answer.)

When the pandemic hit, Gelb suspended paychecks indefinitely for the Met chorus, orchestra, and stagehands, forcing some of the older musicians into early retirement and some of the younger ones to move back in with their parents. (Other American orchestras—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra—cut pay too but managed to keep at least some money flowing to their musicians.) When the Met hosted an online gala that brought in about $3 million in April 2020, the performers didn’t see a cent. And when Gelb decided the house couldn’t reopen that fall, some musicians found out about the decision from the New York Times.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Met rebranded as a staunchly pro-Ukrainian institution. That year, Gelb ousted the singer Anna Netrebko over her refusal to denounce Vladimir Putin. (In 2012, she’d commented that she’d have liked to become Putin’s lover because of his “strong, male energy,” two years before Russia’s first incursion into Ukraine.) Shortly after the invasion, Gelb told me that the Met was at war with Russia; his wife, the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, likes to describe her baton as her weapon. But actual Ukrainians in classical music, for whom the war is not just a cause célèbre but a lived reality, can contain their enthusiasm about Gelb and Wilson’s belated conversion to their side. I know two volunteer music critics—a profession Gelb famously detests—in Ukraine. One is deployed to the front. The other recently came to a writer’s conference in Berlin bearing a piece of a Russian drone as a gift for the organizers. They’ve managed to fight their war while running a magazine that advocates for high aesthetic standards. Gelb made “Cancel Putin, Not Pushkin” refrigerator magnets.

In an op-ed for the New York Times last fall, Gelb explained the rationale behind the Met’s recent pivot to second-screen operas like Grounded and Champion. The pandemic left the company on the ropes financially: in 2023, it withdrew $30 million from its endowment, followed by another $40 million last year. For Gelb, that financial hole posed an aesthetic problem. “After Puccini, opera started slipping from its creative peak,” he wrote. “Geniuses like Strauss and Janáček followed in the early decades of the 20th century, but with a few exceptions, the second half of the 20th century produced little truly popular opera; composers turned inward, with experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that didn’t appeal to large audiences.” That made opera houses rely on the traditional repertoire from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he argued, which was more popular but failed to attract new, younger audiences. His solution? Narratives ripped from the headlines, set to musical mush.

Popular or not—I saw people begging for tickets outside a sold-out performance of Luigi Nono’s avant-garde political masterpiece Intolleranza 1960 a few years ago in Berlin—the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first have produced numerous masterpieces of “experimental, sometimes atonal” opera, from Morton Feldman’s Neither to Claude Vivier’s Kopernikus to Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway to Salvatore Sciarrino’s Lohengrin, and, despite Gelb’s snide derision toward it in the op-ed, György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, which is by turns hilarious and disturbing. Imagine if the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art took to the New York Times to chide artists that they should be making work more like Renoir, and that nobody likes Brâncuși because his pieces don’t look enough like people, and you get a sense of the scale of Gelb’s self-righteous, pseudo-populist philistinism.

What does he mean by opera that does appeal to large audiences? Having sat through a solid ten hours of contemporary works at the Met, here’s my best guess: Opera that “resonates” for Gelb must center on an attractive, heroic underdog from a background that has faced historical discrimination. This hero must be haunted by the demons of their past; these demons are society’s fault, not their own, and eventually result in their undoing. The opera must tell us that something obviously bad—misogyny, homophobia, the use of killer drones to slaughter innocent civilians, heterosexual marriage—is bad. It must be written in faux-slangy English even if that sounds dumb when sung. It must have laugh lines involving the words fuck or shit because apparently the Met’s ideal audience has the sensibility of an immature fourth grader. A flashback to a traumatic childhood, it probably goes without saying, is de rigueur.

Of course, plenty of great historical operas have stupid plots; what matters is the music. As compositions, Gelb’s stable of new works are utterly pabulum. Closer to musicals and corny television scores, these pieces are ignorant of the harmonies in Wagner, let alone Wozzeck, which premiered a century ago. Gelb’s new operas are works in which the music is at best a backing track. Two characters fall in love? Swooshing harp. Something bad about to happen? High, dissonant strings. A party? A drum set and jazz that doesn’t swing.

The most egregious example of the Met’s second-screen opera is Grounded, which came to the Met in 2024. Composed by Jeanine Tesori—behind such groundbreaking works as Shrek: The Musical—it follows an American fighter pilot during the war on terror who gets pregnant by a charming rancher and is shunted into drone duty. She misses real flying but cooperates up until she is ordered to murder innocent people, at which point she is put in a military prison. It is a clusterfuck of musical clichés. Tesori uses snare drums to represent army officers and oboe and/or English Horn to represent the Middle East, which is about as inspired as filming a scene in the region in sepia. When the pilot was at the mall with her kid and I heard the ominous interval of a minor second, I knew—probably half-eyeing my phone—that a traumatic flashback was imminent. The piece’s insight into the nature of war goes about as far as killing people from a Vegas trailer can be bad for your work-life balance.

The Hours, a vehicle for the divas Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara, and Joyce DiDonato by the composer Kevin Puts that premiered in 2022, is a darkly churn—no, stop, “darkly churning” is too nice of a way of putting what I mean, which is that the show is a constant, deadening barrage of sixteenth notes. It is a weepy, maudlin, and bathetic work. Like Grounded, the score is relentlessly literal, with bells for the text “church bells clanged” and a choir singing to “Maybe I should join a choir.” An adaptation of the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film of the same name, it tries for melodic sweep but fails to produce a single memorable melody. In Tosca, when the heroine jumps from the parapet, it’s a shocking moment. When Richard, a hero of The Hours, falls from his window, it comes as a great relief: he’s finally stopped whining.

Terence Blanchard’s 2023 Champion, meanwhile, opens with the main character bemoaning a single missing shoe. Let me take a wild guess: Is this character—a gay boxer who put another boxer in a coma during a match, but it wasn’t really his fault—conflicted? The piece should have been a musical because it is very awkward when opera singers use their traditional technique over the jazzy music. When the boxer, exiting a gay bar, is beat up by dancers playing street toughs for a prototypical hate crime scene, it’s inappropriately silly, recalling the bit in Arrested Development where the queeny Hot Cops strippers pretend to be thugs. Champion’s trauma plot is introduced with all the subtlety of a cinder block. (Literally: the boxer was tortured as a child when he was made to hold a cinder block over his head the entire night.) That explains everything; everything is explained.

Such insistent shallowness goes hand-in-hand with Gelb’s populist worldview. If a critic has the temerity to lament the Met’s new vibe, Gelb, despite his self-described “thick skin,” may well lash out. The most recent incident took place last year, when he used an upscale fundraising event to attack Zachary Woolfe, the chief classical music for the New York Times, for (rightly) panning Grounded. Like a Reddit commentator, Gelb accused critics of not being able to let people simply enjoy things. As Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker last December, Gelb’s aesthetic shift is based on incomplete and ahistorical assumptions. Gelb’s attacks on critics show that every such populist pivot needs an enemy.

The qualities of the Met’s new pieces—literalness, signposting, pat plotlines, an impatience with the slightest ambiguity—are key tenets of second-screen television. They are also irreconcilable with good opera, in which text and music subvert one another and pieces permit manifold interpretations. In Don Giovanni, for example, Mozart quite intentionally gives his corniest, most banal music to the title character to sing. The character thinks he’s a romantic lead; Mozart shows us that he’s just a rapist who has money, ransacking for their bodies people with genuine inner lives.

My most treasured memories of the opera often include heated discussions afterward about what the librettist, the composer, the singers, and the director meant. If art is going to be any solace, it must be layered enough to demand our full attention. Gelb’s new operas permit no second readings. Because of that, they are forgotten by the time the cursory ovations end. In part, that’s just because the man has no taste. I think it’s also related to the people Gelb is beholden to. It’s not his fault that the United States resolutely declines to fund the arts, but the people who finance the Met probably have different priorities than me and my opera-loving friends, chasing as we do the marrow-deep exhaustion that accompanies a moving time at the opera. People with a lot of money go to the opera to see and be seen; to cement their legacies with cement terraces; to whitewash their grubby fortunes; to wear their pearls and sip their Louis Roederer Brut. Gelb’s operas are a pleasing set for that. They are not the kind of art that puts a finger in your wound.