The Met and the press

I said I’d write something about the press reaction to Peter

Gelb’s announcements, which amount to the most promising first steps toward a

turnaround that I’ve ever seen a classical music organization take. Some of the

stories, like two in The New York Times,

noted or even stressed skepticism about Peter’s plans. People were quoted

saying things like, “What will he [Peter Gelb] do with the core audience while

he’s courting this new audience?”

Well, he’ll have star conductors, new productions, and also

very likely more star singers, since yet another criticism of the past Met

administration has been that they haven’t jumped on rising European singing

stars fast enough. The normal excuse goes something like this: “Well, he just

got famous, but you know we plan many years in advance.” With no thought

(apparently) given at all to tearing up your plans,

and spending enough money to get the singers to alter theirs. Peter seems

willing to do this.

And beyond that, everyone who worries about the core

audience (which very likely includes the worriers themselves) should repeat

after me: The core audience isn’t buying

enough tickets! The Met can’t survive if it caters only to them. Not, by

the way, that this is a new story. Classical music institutions everywhere have

to do two dances at once, one for their traditional audience, and another for

newcomers. Why should the Met be any different, and why does everyone seem so

surprised—and concerned—when Peter points the house in that direction?

But there’s more. At the press concert where these

initiatives were announced, one press guy got up and asked why the Met had

given the story to The

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New York Times ahead of everybody else,

making everybody else third-class citizens. He got a ripple of applause from

his colleagues. One of these colleagues, whom I sat next to, murmured something

to me about a news conference without any news. Everybody was angry, in other

words, because they’d been scooped, and for them, evidently, this insult

scooped anything else that could happen. The guy who asked the question

actually wrote a story (for Bloomberg News) in which the main event, as he saw

it, was the dis to him and the rest of the non-

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Times press. Forget the opera house, and

its new hopes for survival. Who cares about that, when you think you’ve been

insulted.

Now, the Times really

did get the story first. Or, rather, second. The

Associated Press somehow got hold of the substance of Peter Gelb’s announcement

in advance, and distributed a story. This got the Times aroused, and the Met may have felt the worst possible thing

it could do was get the Times not

just aroused, but annoyed. (There was near-war, some years ago, between the

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Times and the New York Philharmonic,

over a not too different issue.) So the Met gave the Times an exclusive interview.

Whether this was right or wrong I can’t say, but it

certainly got the rest of the press mad. But now I have to ask: Does that make

it right for the press to ignore the real news from the Met, and in effect make

itself the news? And I have to dissent from what my colleague murmured to me.

There really was news at the news conference, as follows:

• Joseph

  Volpe wasn’t there. Well, OK, maybe that’s gossip, not news. But it

  certainly shows something about how the power transition is working out.

  Normally the old guy would go to the new guy’s press conference, or at

  least issue a statement full of hope for the future. The old guy then

  would get duly thanked by the new guy, for all he’d done while he held

  power. So here we have a situation where the old and new guys are both in

  class=GramE>residence, and the old guy stays away. Talk about a

  class=SpellE>dis — that looks like a major one. And from that

  moment on, Volpe was obliterated, or so it seems to me. He’s now clearly

  the past. Peter Gelb is the future — and Volpe wasn’t even present when

  the future began.

• James

  Levine (who spoke at the press conference) talked about the

  class=SpellE>Met’s “major financial problems” (his words) as

  casually as he might talk about the weather. That the Met has these

  problems is well known to people in the business, but very little reported

  in the press (and even what little reporting there’s been came long after

  the problems were common knowledge). But if these problems were supposed

  to be some kind of dark secret, nobody told Levine. He didn’t hesitate to

  mention them.

• Levine

  also slipped in something that I, at least, had never heard about — that

  the Met orchestra needs rebuilding once again. Not because it’s

  deteriorated, but because it now has many young players who need to learn

  what the older ones learned the first time through. This happens, as time

  passes, and orchestras change personnel. But you rarely hear it talked

  about.

• The

  longest part of the press conference was a presentation by the six stage

  directors of next season’s six new productions, talking (some live, some

  on video) about what, exactly, they were going to do. Some of them went

  into quite a bit of detail. So the press conference talked more about art

  than it talked about anything else! This was quite wonderful to see, and

  it also registered as a smart political move. Peter has been damned by

  many critics as the shallow king of crossover,

  all because he made a speech when he took over Sony Classical in which he

  was honest about what classical record companies had to do. Critics then

  assumed that Peter had no taste at all. By letting more of his press

  conference be about art than about anything else,

  he gave a quiet signal that art is something he cares about. Very savvy, I

  thought. (And when he announced that one of his own new productions, in a

  future season, is going to be Janacek’s

  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>From the House of the Dead, conducted

  by Salonen and directed by Patrice

  class=SpellE>Chereau, who directed the famous Ring at Bayreuth

  that Boulez conducted…that was yet another quiet sign that Peter knows

  what art is.) One curiosity, though. All the art talk was about theater.

  Maybe sometime we’ll have some talk at a press conference about music.

  class=GramE>Which won’t be easy. Not because music is technical

  (though talk about it can be), but because normally the technical side of

  music is all that gets talked about. The stage directors all talked about

  the artistic meaning of what they wanted to do. I’d love to see a musician

  get up and talk about music just that way.

On another note, I got a long e-mail from someone prominent

in the classical music business, discussing many fascinating money issues

involved in Peter’s announcement. Certainly Peter

plans to spend a lot of money. I can only assume that either he thinks he can

get it, or understands that he can’t transform the house without spending

money, whether he knows where it’s coming from or not. Or,

most likely, a combination of both these things. I’ll ponder these

things, see if there’s anything in the e-mail that can be shared, and maybe

post more about this in the future.