Ruinously Expensive

The Metropolitan Opera, now the largest performing arts institution in the United States, was founded by unpleasant people at a Wall Street steakhouse. Its first subscribers, robber barons mad to be excluded from the high society that gathered in the august boxes of the Academy of Music, sought a social scene where they could be treated like European aristocrats. Opera was, for this class, not a passion but, as Edith Wharton writes in the first paragraphs of The Age of Innocence, an ‘amusement’. Her hero Newland Archer arrives at the Academy after the beginning of the third of five acts of Gounaud’s Faust, and his response to the soprano’s performance is mostly couched in terms of a patronising apprehension of his bride-to-be in the opposite box. That soprano, Christina Nilsson, sang the same role to open the Met’s first season in 1883. The Academy abandoned its opera programme three years later.

The Met’s founding and sustaining donors drilled for oil, ran banks, formed monopolies, busted unions and sought spiritual solace in patronising the arts. Grand opera has always required subsidy. What makes it so exciting – hundreds of highly skilled, specialised, trained artists on and off stage applying themselves to a collective expressive impulse – also makes it ruinously expensive. Mid-century social democracies made it a public good. The Met, in contrast, has always been funded entirely by private money. Texaco sponsored it from 1940 to 2003. Its current board of directors must have a collective net worth in the tens of billions. The most recent annual report lists mere $10,000 donors in the kind of font that graphic designers call ‘ant type’.

Over the decades, the ultrarich may have filled the boxes and bank accounts, but the middle and working classes filled the theatre. Immigrants and their children, mostly from Italy or the Pale of Settlement, crowded its standing room sections and high balconies, and contributed to the high ratings of its national radio broadcasts. Gays fucked under coats during Wagner preludes. A broader public came to think of the Met as theirs. In 1989, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote: ‘I think that Anna/Moffo sings,/to this day, in a second,/parallel Met, a hologram of the original/projected in air,/where failing voices continue/to thrive amidst a system of strange geysers/and girders, cables/linking the golden prompter’s box/to a sky that burns directly on the stage.’ This second Met belonged to the people.

In the absence of state support, only great wealth has been able to keep the Met open. For the Met being open, I am grateful. I remember Karita Mattila bringing psychological complexity and depth to Wagner’s Eva; Waltraud Meier as Klytämnestra singing ‘what truth is, no man can tell,’ floating the ‘tell’ with absolute musical and emotional truth; Bryn Terfel’s blustering, brilliant Falstaff; Kathryn Lewek not just hitting but parking on the Queen of the Night’s first-act high F, the kind of note that sets your entire body vibrating; Renée Fleming, as Thäis, burdened with ridiculous hair extensions and draped in gold lamé, running up an entire flight of stairs to let off a single, exquisite high C.

The past decade has been difficult for the Met. The old working-class audience base is aging, and their children have less disposable income as well less interest in the art form. The old donor base is also aging, and the new robber barons would rather buy a social media soapbox than a box at the opera. The Met’s current general manager, Peter Gelb, an expert at creating media spectacle in the crossover-driven 1990s, began his tenure nearly twenty years ago vowing to bring down the average audience age and return the house to the centre of the cultural conversation. These were, and are, worthy goals. He introduced live streams to movie theatres, outdoor opening nights and festival productions from Europe, and revitalised the Met’s theatre programme.

When some high-profile new productions flopped, however, Gelb shifted towards the conservative. More and more, it seems he understands his mission as managing decline. His first new production of Verdi’s La Traviata, in 2010, was an import from the Salzburg festival that set the story in front of a single, curved wall: a hit with both critics and audiences. His second Traviata, in 2018, set in a Barbie’s Dream House 19th century overflowing with eye-searing chemical dyes and polyester crêpe, was a significant step backwards.

For reasons only Gelb can understand, the director of that Traviata, Michael Mayer, was brought back in to restage another Verdi opera, Aida. This production, which I saw in its opening run at the Met in January of 2025, stages the opera in Egypt by way of the Luxor Casino, with egyptologists drawing hieroglyphs that appeared to come to life, mapped projections in Vegas hues, hoochie-coochie choreography and intellectually insulting, paper-thin references to colonisation. Angel Blue valiantly attempted to bring dignity to the proceedings in the title role; as Amneris, the mezzo-soprano Judit Kutasi campily swished her kaftan but sang with such slovenly intonation that pitches were, in some crucial places, not distinguishable from one another.

Covid made everything worse. Ticket sales have slumped to just above 60 per cent of box office capacity; costs continue to rise. One last ditch attempt to save things has been a sudden interest in new opera, following decades of active indifference. After the success of Kevin Puts’s adaptation of The Hours, Gelb announced a renewed focus on new work, including multiple commissions, as a way to attract new audiences. Most of the Met’s commissions, however, are stinkers. Garth Greenwell described The Hours as ‘middle-of-the-road … suburban … cynical’; Jeff Brown diagnosed Gelb’s new operas with ‘literalness, signposting, pat plotlines, an impatience with the slightest ambiguity’. The first run of The Hours did well because it combined three bankable stars (Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara) with a known cultural property. Its hastily scheduled revival sold below average.

Other new operas have not fared well at the box office, the nadir being a highly promoted work called Grounded, about the struggles of a drone pilot in suburbia attempting to find work-life balance between massacring Afghan children and raising her own. In its original run at the Washington National Opera, Grounded was sponsored by General Dynamics, a defence contractor. It reportedly sold only 50 per cent of available tickets for its run at the Met. Since Covid, the Met has withdrawn a third of its endowment fund to pay operating costs, the arts management equivalent of selling the copper wires out of your house to pay the electricity bill.

The solution, trumpeted in a press release earlier this month full of warm words about international cultural exchange, is a new ‘collaboration’ with Saudi Arabia. While the financial details of the deal are secret, the New York Times reports that the Met is expected to see more than $100 million in exchange for eight annual three-week performance seasons in a new opera house outside Riyadh. A company that has refused to engage the star soprano Anna Netrebko because of her failure to denounce Putin’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine will now perform in an opera house built by a regime whose marquis projects have been ‘built on widespread labour abuses’, according to Human Rights Watch, in front of a royal family that ‘uses the death penalty to crush dissent’. Jonathan Dove has been brought in to write a new opera set in ancient Saudi Arabia. Performances in Riyadh are scheduled to begin in 2028. In the meantime, New York audiences can look forward to such ‘artistic possibilities’ as ‘a Saudi pop artist’ singing the role of Papageno in The Magic Flute. How thrilling.

Opera needn’t be a dying art form. In Berlin, where I live, three repertory opera companies regularly sell 90 per cent of their tickets. When our right-wing mayor, attempting to justify sweeping cuts to culture, asked whether supermarket cashiers should be asked to fund opera with their taxes, the newspaper Taz interviewed several cashiers on duty and quoted one, an opera fan, as saying, ‘the ticket prices shouldn’t be increased because culture should be there for everyone.’ The most expensive opera ticket in Berlin is cheaper than two-thirds of the seats at the Met. The city’s companies, offering sold-out runs of the kind of challenging repertoire that Gelb describes as having killed opera, still feel as if they belong to the people who live here, because they do.

Art belongs to everyone, but in the absence of collective support, it has always needed patrons. The question is what the money allows an institution to do, and for whom; and what the patrons are buying themselves with their money. Like many people, I find the idea of an institutional collaboration with the Saudi regime beyond the pale: but to be shocked by bloody oil money funding the Met is about as plausible as Captain Renault being shocked to find gambling at Rick’s. The Saudis join a host of donors whose interests, both political and artistic, are diametrically opposed to those of the audiences the Met needs to survive. In 2018, La Scala turned back from plans to sell a seat on its board to the Saudis for approximately $15 million. The Met has, at least, negotiated a better deal. Like an ageing footballer whose game is starting to go, this declining institution will retire in the Gulf.