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
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
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
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
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?