Ben Miller

The Metropolitan Opera’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.

‘I thought,’ White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony (1997), ‘that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle, oppressed in the Fifties, freed in the Sixties, exalted in the Seventies, and wiped out in the Eighties.’ He was describing, as he always did, the generation of gay men of which he was a part. 

When diva worship turns an artist into an icon, everyone loses.