If ever you need to know what's wrong with the Metropolitan Opera and its press puppet, the New York Times, look no further than the opening paragraph of last weekend's puff piece for tonight's production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead. Here goes:

Just as a diva regards her Metropolitan Opera debut as proof that she has arrived, a Met premiere confers on a work a lasting seal of approval. On Thursday, that honor will fall to Leos Janacek's From the House of the Dead...

Read that and weep. Which part of that sentence and a half might not have been written by a publicity agent? And which other city newspaper would so pump up its opera house to state that until a work has been staged there it simply doesn't exist? Why, the late Mr Janacek must be jumping out of his grave with joy at the news that his last work is finally getting the seal of approval after 80 years of neglect.

Never mind that House of the Dead has been staged by every major European house and festival over the past four decades, or that Janacek is a box-office cert in most opera cities, a trailblazer for social realism on the opera stage. He became a fixture in London in the 1950s through the advocacy of Rafael Kubelik and Charles Mackerras, in Paris and Berlin soon after and in Milan during the Abbado years. Operagoers in Europe regard Janacek as staple rep. 

New York, though, takes no risks. It was 1991 before the Met got around to staging Katya Kabanova, the composer's most powerful work after Jenufa, and its public still regards the Czech as as esoteric innovation. Looking at the Met website, there are swathes of vacant seats for the new production.

Despite lagging behind the rest of the world on this and many other creative fronts, the Met and the Times manage to pretend that they are the umbilicus mundi of opera, the seal of approval without which the art form would wither and die. It's a tragic case of self-delusion and one that inflicts sustained damage on the advancement of opera in the United States.

The Met is, beyond contention, one of the world's important opera houses. But while its present chief Peter Gelb deserves credit for dragging it halfway into the 20th century (forget the 21st), its inflated self-image has, with the Times's help, stultified the art and New York's expectations. The Met is a monolith, a near-monopoly with a tame newspaper in tow. The only seal ever bestowed by the Met is that of certified safety.  

Apart from a newsbreak by an alert Tim Smith in her native Baltimore and a low-cal obit in the New York Times, America allowed the passing of its first operatic heroine to pass unnoticed.

Anne Brown created the role of Bess in George Gershwin's opera not just by singing the opening night in 1935 but by sitting on the composer's piano stool, prodding him to give her more to sing. Porgy and Bess is, by general consent, the first American opera. Anne Brown was the definitive Bess.

She continued to sing the role with the original cast until 1948, touring many parts of the US and appearing in a Gershwin biopic before the onslaught of racial prejudice led her to seek a better life in Norway. Stanley Henig reminds me that an original-cast recording of Porgy was taken on Decca and is still around on CD. Anne Brown is dead: you don't have to believe that if you don't want to.

She helped form what we think of as American heritage. Yet no part of US culture has stopped to pay her homage. No opera curtain has been held so that Peter Gelb or somesuch could share an Anne Brown moment with the audience. No music director - even in Baltimore - has revised a concert program to include a Bess tribute. And no-one in the White House has  doffed his hat to a woman who showed the world how Black Americans lived. Has nobody told the President? 

Coming up on Monday night on BBC Radio 3:

A statement by Peter Gelb to the Economist has set alarm bells ringing.

At his former job, as head of Sony Classical, Gelb used to deliver hour-long harangues about how his genius would rescue the label and the recording industry as a whole. By the time he quit, Sony was a shambles and the industry near-dead. For the detail, see here.

Now read Gelb in The Economist: 'When I took over, the Met was on a declining slope toward extermination...' He does not finish the sentence, but the implication is that golden man has once more revived a dying goose.

This is pure fantasy. The Met, with an endowment running into hundreds of millions of dollars, was never at death's door, let alone an emotive threat of 'extermination'. It just needed a blast of fresh air after a decade of stagnation.

What Gelb has done - introducing new repertoire, new directors, opera at the movies and in the open air - has been highly effective and long overdue, but no more than the start of what needs to be a coherent strategy to make opera meaningful to a wider American public. Let's hope the strategy is in place, because without it Gelb's reforms will soon go stale and in a couple of years the Met will be right back in the state he found it.

I, for one, very much hope that there is depth and breadth to the Gelb plan because I like to see success in the arts more than I enjoy criticising failure. But this latest boast, echoing the hollow claims of his Sony years, has me worried. 

Hubris is a sign that a leader has peaked. What follows is nemesis. Peter Gelb needs to take care that he does not let himself believe a myth of his own making.