RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/

Ill Met: opera house at war over money
A bitter dispute has sprung up between managers and workers at New York’s Metropolitan Opera as financial crisis
looms

PETER GELB, the formidable general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, turned up at the opening gala for a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin a few months ago wearing a pair of rainbow braces — a small but colourful gesture of solidarity with gay and lesbian Russians then being threatened by Vladimir Putin.

Gelb could have used some braces last w

• The Met’s spending has included £100,000 on silk flowers (Kathy Willens)

eek after a bitter dispute with powerful backstage unions caught him with his trousers down.

A discordant clash between managers and workers at the Lincoln Centre opera house, which regards itself as the biggest, richest and most admired in the world, has divided the aesthetes of New York and raised alarming questions about the future of opera in America.

The launch this month of a new round of contract negotiations with 15 unions representing singers, musicians, stagehands and support staff has turned into a public slanging match over everything from Gelb’s salary to allegations of bedbugs in the men’s chorus changing rooms.

At stake in an increasingly toxic confrontation is not just the Met’s $311m (£180m) annual budget (against £112m at Covent Garden), or the daunting costs of staging opera with unionised workers who demand £400 for moving a single cello onstage. The real concern is the future of opera in the internet world, and how an art form whose patrons are mostly ageing white people can be adapted to a younger, multicultural audience.

Both sides describe the crisis in near-apocalyptic terms, not least because the Met’s former neighbour at the Lincoln Centre — the New York City Opera — went bankrupt last year.

Gelb, who was forced to cancel a live broadcast of John Adams’s controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer last week, recently spoke of “the edge of the precipice… this battle is an existential one that has to be won”.

Without radical change, the 60-year-old warned, bankruptcy would also loom for the Met “in the next two or three years”.

The unions are equally gloomy. “An epic tragedy is unfolding,” they collectively announced on a new website called Save the Met. But of course it is not the workers’ fault: “While the leadership of the Met wants to build the Rolls-Royce of Opera, it can only really afford a Cadillac.”

To smooth the path for a proposed package of 16% cuts, Gelb recently announced that he had taken a 10% reduction in his £1m annual salary.

To his embarrassment, the unions then discovered from tax declarations that when his contract was renewed in 2012, Gelb had received a 26% pay increase. “Nobody is fooled when management gives themselves a 26% raise and then takes a 10% pay cut right before negotiations,” noted Joe Hartnett, an official of the stagehands’ union IATSE.

Gelb is widely credited for his introduction of digital technology enabling live transmissions of operas to cinemas around the world. More than 80 British cinemas have shown Met productions.

Yet in New York he is under fire for reckless expenditure on avant-garde productions that fail to attract a large audience; and, perhaps more damaging, for turning the opera-going experience from magic to money-grubbing.

“Somewhere along the way, the opera house at Lincoln Centre went from being a temple of art to becoming a facility,” complained Fred Plotkin, a former Met manager and opera consultant.

What used to be a modern architectural marvel, decorated with Viennese chandeliers and magnificent paintings by Marc Chagall, is now filled with “gauzy promotional banners” and “revenue generation or marketing opportunities”.

Union leaders have also complained that Gelb is more willing to cut employees’ benefits than to curb artistic directors who insist on ruinously extravagantly decor for their sets — most notably a £10m production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, complete with a 45-ton scenery-shifting machine that prompted the New Yorker magazine’s critic to complain of “the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history”.

There were further complaints earlier this year when the Met spent £100,000 on handmade silk flowers used to depict a small field of poppies in a production of Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor. Union leaders argued that mass-produced plastic flowers would have worked just as well, but “pretty much whatever Peter Gelb wants, it’s done”, added a member of a singers’ union.

Others have accused the Met of having an inflated sense of its own importance, and of refusing to trim its grandiose ambitions despite its supposed financial straits.

Its current production of Puccini’s La Bohème is hugely popular with audiences but, according to The New York Times, it requires seven principal singers, 80 chorus members, 35 children, 72 musicians in the orchestra pit, 12 more musicians on stage, 106 non-singing performers, one horse and one donkey. The show requires 94 stagehands to change its sets, and in the third act they make it snow.

The same tax documents that disclosed Gelb’s income also showed that several senior stagehands earned more than £250,000 a year.

On Friday the Met’s executive committee, composed mainly of millionaire patrons, hit back at criticisms in an “open letter to opera lovers” in The New York Times.

“We don’t intend to demean the Met’s chorus and orchestra, but some of these practices, established many years ago, are financially unsustainable,” it warned.

Yet the letter did little to calm suspicion backstage that Gelb is launching a union-busting drive.

“Rumours are abounding that the Met’s rich donors are funding a war chest so that Gelb can bust the unions,” said Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times’s opera correspondent, who follows the Met closely.

Fred Cohn, a contributor to Opera News — a bible for New York opera-lovers — suggested that “leaner, meaner… more affordable” opera might prove the best way forward.

In place of rainbow braces, Gelb may need a tighter belt.