Peter Gelb’s Contract Is Extended at the Metropolitan Opera
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/arts/music/peter-gelb-met-opera.html
The company’s general manager since 2006 will continue in his position through at least 2027.
The show will go on: Peter Gelb’s contract as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera has been extended through at least 2027, the company announced on Monday.
The five-year extension, which was approved on Thursday by the Met’s board of directors, will give Mr. Gelb at least a 21-year reign at the opera house, the largest performing arts organization in the United States. The only Met general managers with longer tenures than that have been Giulio Gatti-Casazza (who held the post for 27 years beginning in 1908) and Rudolf Bing (1950-72).
Mr. Gelb — who earned $2.1 million in pay and benefits, including for his pension and deferred compensation, in the fiscal year ending in July 2018 — said in a telephone interview that he looked forward to having more time to put into effect the ideas he is forming with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s new music director.
“In opera we plan four to five years ahead of time, so there are some exciting artistic plans that Yannick and I are working on,” he said, “the fruits of which won’t be harvested for years.”
The Gelb era has been transformative, but also tumultuous. A record executive before joining the Met in 2006, he began the company’s successful program of cinema simulcasts, which now shows operas on 2,200 screens in more than 70 countries across six continents. He appointed Mr. Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s first new music director in over four decades. And he has worked to modernize the company by bringing in new stage directors and 81 new productions. There have been 23 Met premieres during his tenure, of both neglected older works and newer ones by composers including John Adams, Philip Glass, Kaija Saariaho and Nico Muhly.
But amid industrywide struggles, Mr. Gelb has also faced fiscal pressures and weak box office revenues, which prompted him to curb expenses, causing occasional labor strife. He had to navigate the case of James Levine, the company’s former music director, who was fired in 2018 after an inquiry the Met commissioned in response to news reports found evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied. Mr. Levine’s subsequent lawsuit against the Met, and the Met’s countersuit, were quietly settled in August.
When Plácido Domingo, long one of the Met’s biggest stars, was accused in news reports this summer of sexually harassing multiple women, Mr. Gelb initially said he would await the results of an inquiry into the matter before taking action. But after some members of the Met’s company expressed concerns about that approach, the Met asked Mr. Domingo to withdraw from its fall production of “Macbeth” — which he did, adding that he did not expect to ever return.
The financial challenges facing the Met were underscored last week when the news that it had run modest deficits for the past two years — including a $1.1 million deficit on a budget of $312 million in the 2019 fiscal year — prompted S & P Global Ratings to announce that it was keeping the company’s “A” credit rating but revising its outlook
to negative, from stable.
“There is still a lot of work to be done in terms of finding the formula for economic stability and sustainability,” Mr. Gelb said.
He and Mr. Nézet-Séguin are planning to bring new works to the Met, collaborate with other New York institutions, and sometimes perform works outside of the opera house.
“It’s very exciting for me to actually be working with somebody who is so creatively engaged in the artistic process, and to have a true artistic partner,” Mr. Gelb said. “It’s something that I wasn’t used to.”
He has also begun to change the Met’s performance schedule to make opera-going more convenient for modern audiences — adding Sunday matinees this season and, in the coming years, taking a break in the depths of winter and adding more performances in the spring. Mr. Gelb said he still hoped to expand the theater’s lobby, which is thronged before performances.
“We are winning new audiences,” he said, noting that this fall’s new productions of the Gershwins’s “Porgy and Bess” and Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” both sold out. “But we need to win a lot more.”
Peter Gelb
https://www.metopera.org/about/who-we-are/peter-gelb-general-manager/
General Manager Peter Gelb’s career has followed a singular arc that began with his teenage years as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera and led to his appointment, in August 2006, as the storied company’s 16th general manager.
Under Mr. Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera has once again taken a leadership role among opera houses and other arts organizations, not only in the U.S. but around the world, providing a model for other groups with its groundbreaking artistic and public initiatives. Mr. Gelb today shares his message regularly through keynote addresses and discussions at conferences in the U.S. and abroad, including at Harvard University, Yale University, MIT, New York University, the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Showa University in Japan, the European Opera Conference in Paris, the Chautauqua Institution, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the American Academy in Berlin, and the MIDEM conference in Cannes. He has received honorary doctorates from Hamilton College and from the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.
Time magazine named Mr. Gelb a 2008 honoree of the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people. In 2010, France honored him as an Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2012, he received the Diplomacy Award of the Foreign Policy Association. In 2013, he received the Sanford Prize from the Yale School of Music and was named Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the French President.
Mr. Gelb is the son of the late Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of the New York Times, and the late writer Barbara Gelb. He is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and has two sons.
5 Essential Lessons Peter Gelb Has Learned From The Met Opera
‘Opera is an old art form. We’re trying to teach it new tricks’ — Five key takeaways from Peter Gelb’s 14 years as General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera.
https://www.ludwig-van.com/toronto/2020/02/27/lizsts-5-essential-lessons-peter-gelb-has-learned-from-the-met-opera/
Five essential Gelb lessons (so far) go this way:
Follow the money
“This year we had Sunday matinee performances because we have new audiences for the Met,” he says. “We’re changing to conform to the new audience. Next season there’ll be no performances in February but more in the Spring itself.”
Re-think what opera asks and can deliver
“We are developing shorter operas for family,” says Gelb. How about 90-minute works?
Broaden the repertory.
“Whether it’s a new production of an older work, or a new work,” says Gelb. “Part of my vision is to introduce at least one work that’s new to the repertory.” He cites jazz trumpeter Terrance Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones opera scheduled for the 2021-’22 season. The Blanchard will be the Met’s first opera from an Afro-American composer.
Gelb: “Philip Glass’ Akhanten is not a work I planned for the Met. I resisted it initially until I saw it at the Los Angeles Opera (it opened in 2016). And I fell in love with it. I can’t claim to have taken part in the creative aspect other than being smart enough to bring it to New York.”
Don’t go pop.
“All of this doesn’t mean we’re going to produce opera as a pop experience. We have a symphony orchestra. We have a chorus. We are an opera house.”
Think long-term.
“Always find a path to financial stability; always find ways to manage costs to further amplify earning potential.”
The Metropolitan Opera on Television
https://www.metopera.org/discover/archives/notes-from-the-archives/the-metropolitan-opera-on-television/
Although the Metropolitan Opera experimented with television broadcasting from the early days of the technology, it was not until 1977 that the company established a regularly televised program of performances.
In 1940, the Met collaborated with the National Broadcasting Company, its regular radio broadcaster since 1931, to transmit a program of operatic excerpts to the some two thousand sets then capable of receiving the NBC television signal. Met General Manager Edward Johnson served as the MC for a bill that included four arias, the Rigoletto quartet, and excerpts from Act I of Pagliacci (pictured above). Frank St. Leger of the Met’s music staff conducted a group of 32 members of the NBC Orchestra, and the singers included Licia Albanese, Bruna Castagna, Frederick Jagel, and Leonard Warren. The endeavor doubled as a fundraising appeal for the Met, then seeking contributions for a major campaign to buy the opera house from its boxholder owners.
Finally, in 1977, the Met found the formula for success on television when it began a series that continues to this day on the non-profit Public Broadcasting System. Initially entitled Live from the Met, the series has been renamed to reflect changes in its programming modes, first to The Metropolitan Opera Presents, and more recently to Great Performances at the Met.
The 1977 series inauguration presented Puccini’s La Bohème with Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti (pictured above) as the ill-fated romantic duo, conducted by James Levine. The lead couple exemplified Italian style, balancing passion and intense musicality, and together with their colleagues and the Met’s superlative orchestra and chorus, they delivered a captivating performance. The telecast was an astounding success, drawing millions of viewers and proving that there was indeed a substantial audience for opera on TV. The Met and PBS teamed up for three more telecasts that season, and the partnership has continued unabated, presenting multiple Met performances (224 total as of this writing) on TV each season for 43 years.
Since 2006, the Met on PBS series has expanded due to the success of The Met: Live in HD transmissions into movie theaters. Those live transmissions, approximately ten per season, provide a large trove of taped performances that are later broadcast on PBS.
Treasures of New York: Lincoln Center with Patti LuPone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRpLGifRHnI
Tony winner Patti LuPone, a Juilliard graduate, hosts and narrates this documentary exploring the ambitious renovation and fascinating history of Lincoln Center.