It’s fun reading Norman Lebrecht. He’s inaccurate and irresponsible, but classical music suffers from too much responsibility. So in a way Lebrecht is a good corrective — tabloid journalism, of a pretty extreme sort, right in the middle of the classical music world.
But his column on Peter Gelb, linked in ArtsJournal, is a good example of why we can’t take anything he says very seriously. He thinks Peter is a bad choice to run the Met, and of course he’s got the right to think that. But when you examine what he says, it’s a tissue of illogic and mistakes.
For instance, right at the start, he writes:
As the sole gateway to US fame, the Met has a monopoly on singing talent. Renee Fleming, Magdalena Kozena, Anne-Sofie von Otter — divas beyond the reach of Covent Garden — appear several times each season at the Met. Everything the Met does is massive. With 3,800 seats to sell, programmes are familiar and stagings spectacular. The archtepyal Met show involves a gold curtain, several zoo animals and Franco Zeffirelli. When the Met sneezes, the rest of the opera world catches pneumonia.
So when the Met replaces its manager, the implications are felt sooner or later by everyone who sings, plays or attends opera in any setting larger than a church hall.
As far as I can see, the European opera world has no close connection with the Met. In recent past decades, in fact, the Met had trouble attracting European singers. Its fees weren’t high enough; income tax made the precise amount any artist would take home difficult to calculate in advance. And if you sang in Europe, you were within each reach of other European opera houses. If you were rehearsing Salome in Munich, and somebody got sick in Paris, you could fly there and do a performance or two, to fill in. You can’t do that if you’re singing at the Met.
It’s news to me that the singers Lebrecht names sing “several times” each season at the Met. Whether the Met has, on the whole, a more starry lineup than big European opera houses I don’t know. But if it does, and Peter Gelb ruins it for serious opera — which is what Lebrecht thinks will happen — then won’t Fleming, von Otter, Kozena, and many others be more available to European houses? So won’t the European opera world be better off, not worse?
There’s much more to be said on this, but I want to move on. Lebrecht goes on to say this:
And when the new boss is picked in a backroom deal, beyond artistic or public scrutiny, that’s cause for alarm.
He then sets forth a scenario he finds shocking, no doubt leaked to him from backstage sources. The Met was considering candidates for the top job. Deborah Borda, former executive director of the New York Philharmonic, who now runs the LA Phil, was the leading candidate. But not everybody liked her. She didn’t know opera; she was a woman. Enter Peter Gelb, not up to then a candidate, but mentioned privately to Beverly Sills, the chair of the Met’s board of directors, by Ronald Wilford, president of CAMI, the huge (but, by all reports, slipping) management agency. At Wilford’s request, says Lebrech, Beverly meets with Peter. Now suddenly he’s the leading candidate! It’s a “fix,” screams Lebrecht. Peter was chosen — let me quote this again — “in a backroom deal, beyond artistic or public scrutiny.”
But since when were CEO’s of American arts organizations chosen by any kind of public process? Since when weren’t they chosen by boards of directors, meeting secretly — and in fact, more realistically, by the executive committees of boards, with the other members simply giving their consent? Music directors of orchestras are chosen the same way. Was Zarin Mehta picked to run the New York Philharmonic after open public discussion? Is that how Robert Harth, and now Clive Gillinson were picked to run Carnegie Hall? Very often, people up for these positions won’t even tell their friends that they’re serious candidates. One good friend of mine, who now runs a major arts organization, wouldn’t even tell me she’d been chosen, until the public announcement was made. There are all sorts of reasons for this, starting with the fact that candidates for these positions already have other jobs, and might not want to rock the boats they’re already in until they’ve been chosen.
And isn’t there a far less contentious explanation of how the Met made its choice? Like Lebrecht, I’d heard that Peter was a relatively late addition to the list of candidates. But in the version I heard, the Met wasn’t happy with any of its choices. That’s why it was open to another name. So when Peter came along, there wasn’t any fix. Instead, the Met was happy to have someone new to look at. And why, by the way, did the board pick Peter, if he’s as bad as Lebrecht thinks he is? What would their reasons be for their choice? Lebrecht never mentions that, and may not have even tried to ask anybody at the Met — characteristic signs, by the way, of amateur journalism. For what it’s worth, one person I know on the Met staff is thrilled with the choice, and this isn’t someone who even shares Peter’s populist views of art.
Moving on, Lebrecht says this about Peter:
At Sony Classical he stripped out classical music, announcing “I know what good music is, I just don’t want to record it.” Another catchphrase of his was: “I’d rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on a small shit,” — meaning a mainstream classical CD.
This is the basis for Lebrecht’s overall take on Peter, which is that he’s “done more than anyone in the past decade to remove classical music and opera from public consumption.”
Well, first Lebrecht distorts Peter’s position, which Peter has very clearly stated on the record (in a well-known speech he gave at a record industry gathering in 1997) and off (to me, and of course many others, in private conversations). He’s not completely free to choose what to record. Classical recordings don’t sell. If they cost a lot to make, they may never be profitable. If they involve large orchestras, major conductors, and major soloists, then of course they cost a lot to make. Major classical labels, like Peter’s label, Sony Classical, have traditionally been in the business of recording standard repertoire with major artists. So in the present climate, their entire business has become unprofitable — which means, since they’re commercial companies, their business is completely untenable.
That’s what Peter responded to. Beyond this, we might want to look at the demands of the conglomerates that own the major classical labels. Universal, from what I’ve been able to pick up, has operated and still apparently operates in a more benign corporate climate than Sony Classical. BMG and Warner were the worst corporations for classical music — they basically gutted their classical labels. At Sony, I’ve gotten the impression that the corporate owners demanded heavy profits from their classical label, thereby putting Peter in a difficult position. It’s true, of course, that some people therefore wouldn’t have wanted his job, but at least we should understand the pressure he was under.
As for Peter’s alleged “catchphrase,” “”I’d rather lose a million on a movie score than make $10,000 on a small shit,” well, I never heard him say anything remotely like that. I wonder what Lebrecht’s source was here. What I always heard him say was that he couldn’t make $10,000 on (relatively) small classical releases. He was much more likely to lose a quarter of a million. And how could anyone in his position talk about losing a million dollars on a movie score? What would his bosses have thought of that? If he kept doing it, he’d have been canned. His movie scores were expected to make money.
Then, talking about what Peter actually did at Sony Classical, Lebrecht warbles this offkey tune:
Gelb set about buying film soundtracks and mining the mongrel seams of crossover. He had the classical cellist Yo Yo Ma play country music and the pop star Billy Joel perform piano suites. The gimmicks worked — Titanic sold 11 million CDs in the US — but the novelty soon wore off. Gelb’s job was now on the line. He was 51 and, as they say, ready for a new challenge.
Nobody, it’s safe to say, can “have” Yo-Yo Ma play country music. Yo-Yo Ma — one of the few classical stars recognizable to a wider audience, and one of the few who actually does sell CDs (a modest number, maybe, by pop standards, but still they sell) — does what he wants. And the crossover Lebrecht’s talking about here wasn’t country music. It was Appalachia Waltz, a wonderfully artistic project (at least in my judgment) that Ma recorded with Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor. Meyer was the artistic leader of the project. As a bass player, he in fact has played some Nashville sessions, but in the country world he’s known as someone from the artistic — and definitely not mass-market — wing of bluegrass. Mainstream country music fans would never listen to him. And Ma, of course, played this because he wanted to, not because Peter Gelb could force him.
As for the Billy Joal CD, it wasn’t piano suites. It was piano music Joel composed — a small detail, but telling, because once again it shows how careless Lebrecht can be with facts. But what’s most important is that this CD wasn’t even Peter’s project. I’ve said this here a couple of times before, because some people in classical music are so ready to hate Peter that they don’t stop to find out what he actually does. Billy Joel has for years had a recording contract with Columbia, Sony’s largest pop label. Years before his classical CD came out, he announced that he wasn’t going to write pop music any more. He was going to do classical. Eventually he made good on that declaration, and, when it was time to give Columbia his latest music, gave them his classical CD, instead of a collection of pop songs.
They freaked. This wasn’t what they wanted. But on the other hand, they couldn’t do anything about it. Billy Joel is one of their biggest stars, and they didn’t want to lose him. So they had to release his classical CD — and naturally turned to Peter, their classical colleague within the Sony Music company, to help them sell it. (My source for this information, by the way, is Joel himself.) What Peter might have thought of Joel’s work has nothing to do with any of this. The project wasn’t his idea, and he had no choice about working on it.
Finally, it’s not completely accurate to say that Peter’s “gimmicks” worked. Universal sold far more crossover CDs than he did, thanks to the great success of Andrea Bocelli and Andr