Peter Gelb

Peter Gelb has been General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera since 2005. He has especially in recent years been the target of criticism in the press, on line and in social media. Seldom is a good word said about this gentleman who inhabits a job most opera lovers think they can do better. Maybe they can. I admire a manager who brought the  Met to the world live in HD. I love the crowds in Times square and in front of Lincoln Center watching performances together. A community of people who don't go to the Met focused on opera. The message is one the Met neglected for years: "This is for you, too." (The New York City Opera did this message masterfully. Don't get me started.)



Opera is an emotional art.
At its best it calls up a visceral reaction from the audience. It is difficult to view a beloved work with objectivity and an ear toward the box office. The General Manager of the  Metropolitan Opera is not hired to love opera. not on company time. Save that for his I-pod on the elliptical in the gym. He's hired to put butts in seats, to maintain a healthy box office and a balanced budget. If he shows a profit at the end of the season, he'll be canonized by whatever God(s) a board of directors can invoke. AS with the U.S. presidency, I can't image who would want this job.

I'm sure it helps if the GM loves opera. The criticism on line comes from persons emotionally in vested in the art form. It comes from people who weep at the end of La boheme and who stay awake through the Ring cycle. There are people who believe opera performance stopped with the retirement of Maria Callas, the death of Luciano Pavarotti or when Placido Domingo decided to become a Verdi baritone.

I have never met Peter Gelb. My name means nothing to him. I have no knowledge of the day to day operations of the Metropolitan Opera. Once I lived in standing room. At this writing I have not been inside the  Met in nearly ten years. What performances I've seen since then have been in movie theaters. I don't need to be told that seeing the Met in the opera house is different from HD or any other D in a movie house, popcorn or not. Back in the day we snuck popcorn, beer, and worse into the Met for the standing room munchies. My point being that as of today I write from several degrees of separation.

I still love opera. I love the stage craft and dramaturgy. I love imagining what Parsifal's relationship was with Herzeleide. Did he bounce baby Lohengrin on his knee? I love wondering if Norma's 'Sediziose voci' is delivered in defiance or fear. I don't need a tree to be a tree. I need singers who can communicate the text. Stage craft that makes sense. I want to be moved, uplifted and changed in a positive way. It don't have to be happy and giddy leaving the opera house. But I do want to know that I have experienced something special.

Gelb is charged with providing the visceral thrills. There's a core repertoire Mozart-Verdi-Wagner-Puccni that must be maintained. I'm the first to admit that the Luc Bondy Tosca helped nobody. But the Luc Bondy Tosca was part of the point.



Gelb's passion seems to be re- energizing the audience. Forget the core audience. I'm not getting any younger. If I'm the target market then money's being wasted. I'm the choir. Don't preach to me. I'm not the young choir. I think Gelb's mandate is bring "downtown" opera. He wants to rough it up. That's not bad. It's an honest attempt to bring in audiences  who thought Lincoln Center was a president of the United States. A dead president. The person who successfully reinvigorates the opera audience is smarter than I'll ever be. So far, it seemed that juicy productions have been the rule. I liked the Vegas Rigoletto. The person responsible for the recent Parsifal has my devotion forever. I love  having From the House of the Dead and Doctor Atomic available.




The Ring. Ah, the Ring. That would have been any GM's largest gamble. Do we all remember when people came from all over the world any Ring cycle? The four music dramas were ......(fill it in)--proof. Not anymore. The Robert Lapage Ring was relentlessly promoted. Millions spent to reinforce the Met stage were widely resented in days of post crash austerity. Enfin, the Lapage staging gave some visual thrills. Th Ring became about The Machine. The Machine malfunctioned. People laughed at the Machine. The Machine became the show at Wagner's expense. Who could imagine such a thing happen? The problem with many of these new stagings is that they do not wear well. Once seen, okay. Even I'm not sure I want to live with a Vegas Rigoletto.  The Lepage Ring began as an attempt to rethink  opera's most iconic work. Opera's most iconic work didn't need Robert Lepage. It needs the magnificent Met orchestra, which must have felt dissed by the expense over runs, and great singing actors.



Which goes to the point of the Met orchestra, chorus and everybody backstage. Where are their betters? Thy don't have any. I'm not here to say anyone's salary is inappropriate. I'm not paid what I'm worth. Are you?  But you neglect one group at the expense of another, then you got a problem. Orchestra, chorus and backstage are fixed asserts. Opera productions need to be built around them, not vice versa. Front of house spectacle doesn't work without reinforcements.

I would ease up the relentless pre-promotion. You are setting up a disaster if your product doesn't live up to the hype/ I would realize that your new target audience may have the money but wold rather spend it elsewhere. Lights cameras and machines will not bring in the crowds. The Met management and boardrooms are still tone-deaf (!) as to the paying customers. Yeah I know you are dealing with an expensive art form and that ticket sales don't cover costs. Opera began as a popular art but soon needed to be supported by the nobility. I'm sure there are noble hedge fund managers in the 21st century. Gelb, who comes from the New York  intelligentsia lacks an approachable touch in public. Who didn't love Mr. Volpe's capo di tutti capi persona? My way or the highway. Volpe made that fearful and fun. Gelb can't bring that off. He comes across as cold.

One thing opera never is is cold. It's not cynical either. Hard to put a price tag on love but that's what opera comes from. Go ahead, laugh. Opera is about that, too.

Peter Gelb for a Day

  
I've never met Peter Gelb. My name will mean nothing to him.
Peter Gelb is the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera.
He's responsible for a half billion dollar company which for many reasons must maintain its status as the world's finest.

His job is to put together a top quality product for about 250 performances a year.
His bigger job is to put fannies in seats.
I'm being polite here.
The Met board is lacking in the old money because the old money is either dead or gone the way of Bernie Madoff.  I daresay most of the board members to whom Gelb must answer are or were financial mavens oriented to the bottom line. The old question, "Why do you need all those violins anyway?" is not a total joke. So it is that in this lousy economy, the sight of empty seats must mean trouble in the upstairs boardrooms.



Look folks, Gelb is having to balance musical and dramatic sophistication with an audience that wants to be entertained. Or a company controlled by those who want to be entertained. Few of this potential audience-the mass audience, reads Opera-L or patretrre box und so weiter. They pays their money and they don't want to take no chances.So Gelb has to come up with, if not sure fire winners, then flops that can be re- imagined for good copy.

I don't imagine the to-do over the Robert Lepage Ring staging is causing sleepless nights. This kind of argument is good publicity. What is not good publicity is looking like an idiot by silencing a magazine or a blog. Discussed elsewhere. 'Nuf said..

Could you do Peter Gelb's job for one week? Be the target boy for people who express genuine critical concerns over the product, or for those who bitch and don't attend, and for people who have more than a few screws loose, and for those in the middle, who enjoy finding things and people to hate. Then there are the parties to be satisfied and kept happy: Singers, chorus to Renee Fleming, orchestra, wardrobe, stage hands, lights, camera you name it. Any one group can shut down the show. Then there' s the board, needing to be stroked and petted for that extra five hundred thou Bernie didn't get. 

Never mind when Karita or Juan Diego or Riccardo decide not to show up, and Jimmy is sick and some idiot is moaning on line that the soprano in The Enchanted Isle (A Gelb hit in my opinion) smiled too much.You think its all limos, luxury apartments, gourmet on the grand tier and the directors box for Les troyens? For all the time a person has you might as well live across the street at the West Side YMCA and chew on a tuna fish sandwich. Hookers and blow would be nice if they were offered (I'm not saying they are) but not much fun if you're too aggravated or too fucking exhausted.



Gelb is probably not helping himself much with his cold demeanor. He comes across as forbidding and awkward. We don't need a teddy bear in this job, but a little of Rudolf Bing's timing and punchy humor would go a long way.



I have to love an impresario who gives us From the House of the Dead and The Nose; who engages a producer who understands that The Barber of Seville is meant to be funny. The HD presentations make the Met an international brand in the way radio broadcasts used to. We who don't in New York (and I grew up in upstairs standing room but saw my last Met performance in 2005) find ourselves invested in the Met and its repertoire, if not always its people, in our local movie theatres.

Peter Gelb. Want his job? I dare you.

Failures? Who liked the Tosca? I suspect we've seen the last of The First  Emperor. The Ring is the one-or four-productions the public loves to hate. It had a lot to do with machinery and very little with characterization. Peter Grimes, if they had opened one more freakin' window...But Gatti-Casazza had his failures too. Joseph Breil's The Legend was assigned to the young Rosa Ponselle. Sixty years later she told her biographer, "The girl had a feather sticking out of her somewhere" and reported she had burned the score. Who remembers Cleopatra's Night or La campagna sommersa-the latter a flop by Respighi which Elisabeth Rethberg and Martinelli couldn't save. And if you know who the hell is Gatti-Casazza, you need to get out more.

Wagner's Dream

 
Here's what I liked most about Wagner's Dream: we got to see some vulnerability from Peter Gelb. He seemed human and reachable. His public facade up until now had been aloof and reptilian. He was channelling Rudolf Bing, who it was said had a very dry and active wit. Gelb looked worried and looked tense. It made me like him.





The 2 hr film was more the story of Robert Lepage and his ExMachina Company in Quebec. The building and assembly of the controversial machine-the set for the new Ring Cycle at the Met-is certainly a story, but this film was more Robert's Dream than anyone else's. It's a PR tool for the Metropolitan. No harm there but how much blocking and staging was actually done. Why so little discussion of the characters? It was all mechanics and very little character.




That said, I know James Levine withdrew because if illness early on, but still. Where the hell was he? A few rehearsals shots were not enough. He is the artistic conscience of the company and has been for forty years. He deserves respect. If he was unavailable for an extensive interview he could have been acknowledged more. James Levine conducting the Met orchestra in Wagner is was one of the best experiences of my life.




The story of Jay Hunter Morris pinch hitting and making good is worth a separate film. A big, good looking bruiser from Paris Texas who can actually sing (yes, sing) Siegfried. What's not to love? He gave a brief interview during the HD Walkure a few months ago. The audience where I was fell in love with him.






We had a lot of Debbie Voigt-no bad thing. I would have liked more Bryn Terfel and Stephanie Blythe. Who wouldn't? And one thing was clear. Like it or not, I doubt anyone can work on the Lepage Ring without an engineering degree. I fear for all the expense and all the trouble, the 'mystery will be gone' and theRing in New York will no longer be a great event. It was that as recently as the mid nineties, in the Otto Schenk production that had held forth for years. And they didn't have the two big boys: Bryn 'n' Jay.