Paul du Quenoy The Met’s “Big Bet” on Contemporary Opera Looks Like a Loser General manager Peter Gelb’s gamble on new works has failed to fill seats—or steady the company’s shaky finances.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/metropolitan-opera-ticket-sales-operating-costs-performances
“Hopefully we see the Met thriving artistically, and that we will have created a new artistic foundation that will help it continue to grow,” Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb told the New York Times in 2023, referring to his “big bet”: programming “new works” by living composers. That includes brand-new pieces premiering at the Met, very recent ones that premiered elsewhere, and contemporary works that have been around but are coming to New York only on Gelb’s initiative.
Just how well has this programming done? Sales for the recently completed 2023–2024 season are up slightly: 72 percent capacity versus 66 percent for 2022–2023. However, adjusted for steeply discounted tickets—as little as $25, including taxes and fees—the 2023–2024 season’s box office revenues reach only about 64 percent of their full-price potential. It’s hard to say that the “big bet” is paying off.
Part of Gelb’s approach is to stage one “new work” as each season’s opening-night gala performance. The Met kicked off this trend in 2022 with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, a tedious adaptation of journalist Charles Blow’s oversharing childhood memoir. The Met, having just returned to live performance after the Covid-19 pandemic, touted Blanchard’s opera as its first by a black composer. Racial tokenism notwithstanding, Gelb congratulated himself in a Times op-ed last November for having “seized the moment for some wholesale change.”
Gelb has claimed that “new works” outperform traditional favorites. But this appears to have happened only once last season, with Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcom X, which sold 78 percent of seats. House premieres of Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas, the Met’s first staged production of a Spanish opera in the original language, reached only 68 percent of seats sold. The respected composer John Adams’s new opera El Niño, a Latin-themed meditation on the birth of Christ, returned just 58 percent. The 2023–2024 season’s much-hyped opening-night new work, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking—a preachy indictment of the death penalty—sold only 62 percent.
Revivals of recently introduced new works were also disappointing. Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Kevin Puts’s The Hours both did well when they initially premiered in 2022–2023. But they sold at below-average rates when they returned—65 percent and 61 percent, respectively. That’s despite the second featuring the famous soprano Renée Fleming.
Compare these disappointments with the 2023–2024 season’s lightly advertised revival of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, a highly traditional production dating back to 1977. That sold 64 percent in the cold, dark days of December.
Despite these unpleasant accounting facts, last June, Gelb proclaimed, “We believe we’re on the right path artistically.” He does not appear to have changed his opinion. This season opened with Jeanine Tesori’s Grounded, a Met-commissioned opera about a female Air Force pilot who gets pregnant and gets transferred to ground duty remotely managing combat drones, causing her to develop psychological problems. After a dismally received world premiere at Washington National Opera last season—and despite a thorough revision—the opera’s Met run reportedly sold only 50 percent of seats. That makes it the worst performer of the ten operas presented in this season’s first part. A photograph of the sparse audience at one performance showed what one Redditor called a “ghost town.”
The Met’s next new work was Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar, a meditation on the death of the leftist Spanish poet Federico García Lorca during his country’s civil war. It sold just 61 percent of seats. Financials for last month’s Moby–Dick, also by Jake Heggie, have not yet been released. But its critical reception was poor, with the Times calling it “dully one-note, shallow as a tide pool.”
Against these poor results compare the Met’s production of Verdi’s Aida, a popular work in a more or less traditional staging. Sales for the initial performances reached 79 percent. Overall, the Met has sold just 70 percent of seats in the first half of the current season.
Signs of financial catastrophe are on the horizon. Gelb has twice dug into the Met’s anemic endowment, withdrawing up to $70 million out of a total of $340 million to meet operating costs, while slashing the number of performances. Subscription sales, which allow spectators to purchase tickets to several performances upfront, fell from 45 percent in 2000 to just 15 percent last season. The average subscriber is now 70—far older than the Met’s more casual audience. In 2023, the Met eliminated its Opera Guild, which had financially supported the house since the 1930s, and ceased publication of Opera News, America’s most important publication on the art form. The ongoing 2024–2025 season and recently announced 2025–2026 season feature just 18 productions each. That’s the lowest since the 1980–1981 season, when the Met faced a major financial crisis amid labor unrest that caused the cancellation of several weeks of performances. Moody’s has consistently downgraded the Met’s credit rating. Its iconic murals by Marc Chagall, offered as collateral to secure a line of credit in 2009, remain unredeemed.
Gelb recently called in the Boston Consulting Group to try to right the ship. BCG’s recommendations, which will be put into effect next season, include increasing already-mammoth runs of traditional audience favorites. Accordingly, Verdi’s La Traviata will be presented 21 times. That work, along with three overscheduled Puccini operas, will make up nearly 40 percent of all performances.
But next season’s three “new works” are operas about comic book illustrators, the Mexican Communist artist couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and a school shooting in Finland. Pardon me if I stay home, along with a lot of the Met’s audience.
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