Time for Joe to go?

Has anyone read the Financial Times interview with Joseph Volpe, the man who runs the Metropolitan Opera? Extraordinary document. You could, if you wanted, make a case after reading it that Volpe should be fired right now. The Met, it’s widely known, is having trouble — not selling enough tickets, accumulating a deficit. And Volpe, if this interview is accurate, has no plan to deal with that. Nor does the interviewer ask him what his plan might be, in this almost-a-crisis situation. I kept thinking of Casey Stengel’s famous line, when he managed the hapless New York Mets — “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Here are the particulars. Volpe is more than happy to describe the Met’s problems. After 9-11, people stopped coming to New York, and ticket sales fell. As the economy got bad, donors stopped giving money. In other bad news, Chevron-Texaco announced plans to stop broadcasting Met performances. And the fabled Lincoln Center reconstruction seems, Volpe thinks, to be stalled.

So what’s he going to do about all that? Nothing, apparently. “He says the financial situation has stabilized, to the point that the Met is expecting to break even this year,” says the story. “But there have been two years of losses, leaving it with a $9 million deficit.” Have the donors come back? Volpe doesn’t say they have. Nor the audience — “the one thing I don’t see any improvement in is tourists coming to the city. They tell me that they are, but they are not coming to the Met.” (Odd phrasing, since, again, Volpe doesn’t specifically say there’s been any improvement anywhere else.)

What does he offer instead of plans? Jokes. He makes fun of Luciano Pavarotti’s name. He slams Chevron-Texaco. “[O]ne of the reasons they gave me for not continuing was that they were not a global company. My response was — ‘Now I know why.’ Heh, heh, heh. I said, ‘Your chances of becoming global aren’t great.’” He slams some of his biggest donors. “There are some big donors feeling the pinch,” he’s quoted as saying, “but if you’ve got $4 billion and you lose $1 billion, I can’t be very sympathetic.”

He slams The New York Times for stressing popular culture; he slams Frank Gehry for wanting to build a dome over Lincoln Center. Everybody, it seems, is full of spit except him, and all he’s going to do, if I read between the lines, is just run the Met the way he’s always run it — as if he believed (even though he doesn’t seem to have any new marketing plan, or any new artistic vision) that the audience and donors will somehow return. “I don’t think opera is under threat at all,” he says, “unlike symphonic music which is having an extremely difficult time all over the world.”

Tell that to other opera companies; tell it to the San Francisco Opera, or the Chicago Lyric, both of which are having problems (and the Lyric used to sell far more tickets, as a percentage of seats available, than the Met ever did). Volpe sounds just blind. If Coke lost 10% of its market share, and its CEO gave an interview in which all he did was make fun of Pepsi, shareholders would be screaming for his blood. If the New York Philharmonic announced a substantial deficit, coupled with declining ticket sales, and Zarin Mehta, its executive director, gave an interview like Volpe’s, the music world would be abuzz.

And yet Volpe gets away with it. Maybe, of course, he’s like Dwight Eisenhower, who, when he was president, made sure he looked dumb in public, to keep the press off his back. But I doubt it. I think Volpe profits here from his reputation for being outrageous. People eat up the quotes — “Can you believe he said that?” – and don’t notice that the interview offers no solutions. I think, further, that the Met profits from its grandiose reputation, which I’d guess is also turning Volpe’s own head. The Met — famously aloof from other Lincoln Center constituents, and from the American opera world — pretends that classical music’s famous problems don’t affect it, even when they clearly do.

Does the Met have a marketing plan? I don’t see one. They do have a billboard in Times Square, aimed at tourists — which, if the tourists aren’t coming to New York in the first place, won’t do them much good. A marketing consultant I know says, “The Met does sales; it doesn’t do marketing.” It knows, in other words, how to sell tickets the way it always has, to the people who’ve always bought them; it doesn’t know how to reach out to anyone new.

Does the Met have artistic vision? Not a chance. They put on opera. They hope people come. Why should people come? Because the Met puts on opera, presumably on a scale grand enough to be dazzling. It seems, though, that this isn’t working the way it used to. So what can the Met offer in its place? How can it generate some electricity? How (as I asked some time ago in this blog) can it make us feel that something exciting is going on, and that the excitement might strike any night we show up there?