In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the Metropolitan Opera’s current travails at the box office, and speculate on whether they’re soluble. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Metropolitan Opera, America’s biggest opera company, sold a lot of tickets last season—660,500, to be exact. But, then, it had no alternative, for it had a lot of tickets to sell. The Metropolitan Opera House is a 3,800-seat monster of an auditorium, vastly bigger than it needs to be. Bayreuth, by contrast, seats 1,925, La Scala 2,030 and the Vienna State Opera 2,200. To keep its doors open, the Met must fill those extra seats, and it’s no longer doing so. Two decades ago, the company earned 90% of its potential box-office revenue. That figure has been declining steadily in recent years and dropped to 66% last season, an all-time low that’s been the talk of the opera world ever since it was disclosed in May. As a result, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has been forced to hike ticket prices to an average of $158.50 per head. On Broadway, the average price is $103.86.
So what’s wrong at the Met? Mr. Gelb argued in 2014 that “the question is not whether I think I’m doing a good job or not in trying to keep the [Metropolitan Opera] alive. It’s whether I’m doing a good job or not in the face of a cultural and social rejection of opera as an art form.” He has a point: The National Endowment for the Arts reports that the percentage of U.S. adults who attend at least one operatic performance each year declined to 2.1% in 2012 from 3.2% in 2002. Yet many observers fiercely argue back that the real trouble with the Met is not the culture but Mr. Gelb himself….
You can wrangle on and on about what the Met should do to cut costs and sell more tickets, but you may be wasting your time and breath. For if you know anything at all about economics, you’ve probably already got a pretty good idea of what’s happening there. It sounds like a raging case of cost disease—one that could be fatal.
Cost disease is the term used by economists to describe the condition of a business in which wages go up without a corresponding increase in productivity, not because the workers are lazy but because the business itself is constituted in such a way as to preclude greater productivity….
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Read the whole thing here.
IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASS.:
It’s already been a wildly busy year, and I just covered a back-to-back pair of out-of-town shows at Chicago’s 
Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, written in 1897, is an Oscar Wilde-like fable whose protagonist, Lord George Hell, is a “greedy, destructive, and disobedient” Regency rake whose face bears the marks of his dissolution. Then he falls in love with a sweet, innocent young girl named Jenny Mere. In order to court her, he dons a mask that makes him look like a saint, and endeavors thereafter to live in a manner worthy of his “new” face. Lord George and Jenny marry and live happily together—until one of his former mistresses shows up and, enraged, tears off the mask. But to Lord George’s astonishment, he discovers that the face beneath it is no longer that of a debauched rake:
I’m not a rake, of course, but I do suffer grievously from the sin of impatience, not with myself but with other people, as well as with such inanimate objects as elevators, stoplights, and toasters. This chronic impatience (to whose existence, I deeply regret to say, Mrs. T can testify) is by far my worst character flaw, a canker of the soul that has been with me for as long as I can remember. When I first read The Man Who Came to Dinner in my far-off youth, I unhesitatingly identified with Sheridan Whiteside’s oft-quoted lament: “Is there a man in the world who suffers as I do from the gross inadequacies of the human race?” Believe it or not, it didn’t hit me until I acted in the play in college that Whiteside is himself the most grossly inadequate of men, precisely because he believes in all sincerity that the rest of the world should cater to his every whim, and thus refuses to make allowances for the all-too-human weaknesses from which he suffers in even greater profusion.
The point, I suppose, is that even if you can’t make yourself over into a better person, it’s no bad thing to at least be able to fool the rest of the world into thinking that you’re the person you wish you were. But long, hard experience has led me to believe that the incomparable Max was kidding himself about the transformative power of a mask of virtue. We are what we are, not what we seem to be—or, alas, what we do.