The Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, is scheduled to open its 131st season this September with a new production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. But the noise emanating from its house at Lincoln Center in New York is more akin to requiem than comedy.
The Met’s contracts with 15 of its unions – whose members include singers, musicians, stagehands, costumers, front-of-house staff, security staff and besides – expire on Thursday, and neither side expects a deal on new agreements before then. Management is demanding cuts to overtime pay, pensions and benefits amounting to a 16% total reduction, though unions say the figure is higher. The unions want spending cuts from the artistic side and have attacked management for the Met’s poor performance at the box office.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has affirmed that the company will lock out union members on Friday if no agreement is reached. It will be the Met’s first lockout in 34 years, and the latest setback for an opera company – and an art form – at a dangerous junction.
While the Met’s budget has grown to $325m under Gelb, revenue has stagnated and ticket sales are off their peaks. An analysis by the Wall Street Journal showed that in the 2012-2013 season (the last for which figures are available), the house grossed just 69% of its total possible take in ticket sales. Attendance in the 2013 fiscal year stood at 79%. The Met is relying more and more on its richest donors, and it’s also spending its endowment at a worrying rate: it’s down to just $253m, less than a single year’s operating costs.
So Gelb is playing hardball. Last month he told the Guardian that the Met could “face a bankruptcy situation” by 2017 if costs aren’t brought under control – and labor accounts for about two thirds of the company’s operating budget. He also sounded an apocalyptic note about the future of opera more generally, insisting that “there aren’t enough new audience members replacing the older ones who are dying off.”
Yet the main opera houses of London, Milan, Munich, Vienna and Stockholm were all packed to 95% capacity or greater in the past season. Elsewhere in the United States, whose opera companies receive nothing like the same government support as their European counterparts, the art form has had a notable upswing in places.
“I’ve been hearing that the opera audience was dying out for decades now,” says Perryn Leech, managing director of Houston Grand Opera, which launched its first Ring cycle earlier this year and has just completed a New York tour. Houston’s ambitious company mixes core productions of Otello and Così fan tutte with new works (one recent new opera featured a mariachi band), chamber opera and even a musical or two – and posted record attendance this year. “We believe we can best serve our audience by broadening our scope of activity to engage as many communities and demographics as possible,” Leech adds. “It is about accessibility and relevance. People came to Houston from all fifty states and twenty-seven different countries to see our performances this season. There is certainly a healthy appetite and demand for quality opera.”
Gelb’s proclamations that opera is on its deathbed have to be understood in context – as a negotiating tactic. The Met’s troubles are specific to the Met rather than a universal predicament.
Its ticket prices are punishingly high: nearly $500 for box seats in that 2012-2013 season, though down since then. The house, with 3,800 seats, is unworkably large: it desperately needs to rent a second smaller stage, ideally in New York’s largest borough, Brooklyn, where it could mount its more experimental fare and hook younger and more diverse audiences. Marketing is not the house’s strong suit: its slogan “You never forget your first time” sounds more like a birth-control advertisement than an exhortation to high art. The sense of occasion that should come with a night at the opera is absent: the lobby is crowded, and the food is unspeakable. Music director James Levine, off the podium for two years due to illness, has refused to make way for a younger replacement. And some of the unions’ privileges, notably when it comes to overtime pay, could indeed be trimmed – as the unions have conceded.
Then there is the matter of the Met’s high-definition simulcasts in movie theaters, the major innovation of Gelb’s tenure. Originally pitched as a way to entice new, young opera-goers, they have, in Gelb’s words, cannibalized the audience for live performances. More than three quarters of the HD audience is over 65. But that’s not the case at the thriving Dallas Opera, where about 80% of the HD audience is below 65.
“They’ve been hugely helpful for visibility and attracting new people,” explains Keith Cerny, the Dallas Opera’s general director and CEO. “This whole notion of reorienting opera around community outreach and community service has been essential. The simulcasts are perfect for the Bohèmes and Turandots and Magic Flutes. But we can balance conventional and more exotic programming” – this season Dallas mounted a project with MIT Media Lab – “and robust commissions. In 2015 we will present three world premieres. I’m very optimistic about the future of opera in America.”
Programming, ultimately, is where an opera company soars or sinks. Gelb, quite rightly, vowed when he took over in 2006 to junk the Met’s overstuffed spectacles and produce powerful, director-led theater. You could have believed him in 2006, when he opened his first season with a sharp new production of Madama Butterfly directed by Anthony Minghella, a filmmaker best known for The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley.
It’s a very fine production, and it’s still in the repertory. That Butterfly was not exactly a Met creation, however: it was first produced at the English National Opera in London, and came to New York as part of a co-production. Almost all of the best operas of Gelb’s tenure have followed the same pattern. The Met’s bracingly spare La Traviata, its climate-change-parable Parsifal, and its essential production of Philip Glass’s politically engaged Satyagraha during Occupy Wall Street: each of these got their start out of town.
His touch at home has been far shakier, where he has programmed inert new versions of Tosca, The Barber of Seville and L’Elisir d’Amore, plus a Don Giovanni that New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe rightly condemned as “disastrously dreary … a show that the Met should be ashamed of.” It has not mounted a world premiere in eight years. Saddest of all was the Met’s cataclysmic Ring cycle – which Alex Ross of the New Yorker branded as “the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history,” and which officially cost $16m but surely racked up millions more in overtime costs to fix its malfunctioning disaster of a set.
Result: a program that pleases neither traditionalists nor more adventurous audiences, with little to offer newcomers. If the Met’s audience is dying, that is the effect, not the cause, of its woes. There is nothing better in prospect: the 2014-15 season is stuffed with 16 endless nights of Carmen and 10 of that appalling Don Giovanni. Many New Yorkers might not even notice the company’s absence if the lockout lasts through the winter.
The unions contend that the Met needs to produce fewer new operas, and more cheaply. But new productions, almost invariably, are paid for by wealthy donors, and the Met has some of the wealthiest: the last time they faced such dire straits, Mercedes Bass, the New York socialite and philanthropist, cut them a no-strings-attached check for $25m. The much bigger problem is that the productions have no staying power, and that the Met is lacking the artistic vision and the daring required to get anyone’s attention and win new devotees.
“Contrary to what used to pass for conventional wisdom, the companies that are thriving are doing so because they are concentrating on new work that is as vital theatrically as it is musically,” says composer Mark Adamo, whose The Gospel of Mary Magdalene had a successful premiere at the San Francisco Opera last year. “It’s much harder for a company like the Metropolitan, which produces 24 pieces a year in an enormous and expensive hall really appropriately scaled only for Wagner. But the companies that model themselves less on the museum than on the theater – companies for whom new work is the norm, and the draw, rather than a duty – have never been more lively.”
For Adamo, “the sung story will last as long as humans do. Whether our current opera house model will survive will depend, I believe, on how successfully opera houses attract new artists to create work that speaks as eloquently to the traditions as to present-day audiences.” It’s an open question, however, whether the Met can do so. It certainly cannot while the stage door is padlocked.
