Miracle at the Met

On Monday, I ventured across the Charles River to hear Peter Gelb speak at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Gelb was tapped in 2003 as the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and in the last season and a half he has proven to be the savior of that institution. The business of music is utterly fascinating to me and I took four pages of notes from his presentation, but here I'll just list the most interesting facts that help paint a picture of what he's been able to accomplish.

* In 2003, the average age of the Met patron was 65. Five years earlier, the average age had been 60. Hmm. Clearly, the audience was literally dying out.

* Box office sales were at 76% when Gelb took over in the 2005-2006 season. Today they are at 88%. Just as significant, patron donations have risen 40% from their 2005 levels.

*Gelb has doubled the number of new productions the Met offers each year. In choosing to open his first season with a new production of Madame Butterfly, directed by acclaimed film director Anthony Minghella (English Patient, Cold Mountain), Gelb offered the Met's first new production on an opening night in twenty years.

*New ticket programs have been initiated (100 tickets are available at $20 the night of the performance), rehearsals have been opened to the public, and performances have been broadcast into Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza.

*An annual family production has been introduced. (Last year it was an abridged Magic Flute directed by Julie Taymor, this year it's been a production of Hansel & Gretel.)

*John Adams, the most respected contemporary opera composer in the U.S., has never had an opera produced at the Met. His Doctor Atomic is coming next season.

*In the spirit of Chagall and Hockney who had deep relationships with the Met in their eras, Gelb is reaching out to contemporary artists to create banners for publicity and to hang in front of the house. The gallery art space in the lobby of the house also features works inspired by the operas.

Gelb's most publicized change, of course, has been the introduction of live HD transmissions into movie theaters. This year, the transmissions are going out to 650 theaters in 14 countries, estimated to reach over 110,000 people. Fifty percent of box office revenues are currently coming from HD tickets! In a feat of arts management, each broadcast is easily covering the incremental $1 M it takes to distribute the film-- and generating profits!

The ingenuity of what Gelb is doing rests in the fact that he believes intensely in opera's role as "high art". He is trying to make opera connect with contemporary society, but he is not doing it at the expense of dumbing down -- or making "accessible"--the productions, the singers, or the overall quality. Instead, he is focusing on the distribution of the art form, and in this he is revolutionary.

At the end of the presentation, I had the opportunity to ask Gelb personally about the future of the HD broadcasts. After seeing Hansel & Gretel in January in the same week I saw Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, it occurred to me that it would be a nature next step for the Met to separate its production capabilities from the realm of the live performance and perhaps break off a separate film production arm. "The Metropolitan Opera Company presents... Electra, directed by Tim Burton." If Gelb is giving film directors the chance to direct live opera, why not meet them on their own playing field and have them direct opera for film? Few attempts have been made at this, most notably Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute, but with the global brand and excellence of the Met, it could become standard practice. Alas, Gelb agreed it was a good idea, but claimed he had no idea where the money would come from to pour into a production arm. Well, maybe in 10 years he'll hire me to be heading up that initiative....