Peter and the Woolfe
The arts journalist La Cieca would like be when she grows up, Zachary Woolfe, continues his analysis of Peter Gelb‘s Met tenure — now all the more interesting since Joe Volpe has returned to the fold. [Observer]
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Bravo!
oh snap
I have one question: does Mr. Woolfe receive regular press passes at the Met? If he does, they are now in danger.
Woolfe: “Mr. Gelb’s move looks like a cry for help, an admission that he can’t do something that his predecessor could.”
Au Diable tout ce bavardage!
More importantly – HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEUTSCHE GRAMOPHONE
Well let’s just wait to see the final spin of this. The p.r. juggernaut that is currently the Met is not to be underestimated. Mr. Gelb from the beginning always reminded me of every MBA manager, director, v.p. or whatever I have come into contact with in my many careers. Those savvy marketing types have an uncanny way of making sure that their s–t doesn’t end up stinking. If the negotiations go wrong…who’s fault is it? Volpe, not Gelb. He truly is a fucking genius whether it was his idea or the board’s to hire Volpe.
I’m not so sure about the genius part, but if nothing elese,
he’s really a phuquer!
I pretty much agree with you NYCOQ. Gelb has found a way to remain above the fray and keep his hands soft and lily white while hiring someone who is feared in negotiation and carries a large stick and a lot of baggage at that company.
Politically, I think it’s a pretty brilliant move, unless of course it gets really ugly and he has to get down in the dirt with the rest of them. But for now, he’ll have the best of both worlds by maintaining his distance and keeping his image while still having oversight of the full situation. Whether or not that will backfire is yet to be seen.
In other news, the Observer is still publishing? Hasn’t that crook’s kid married to the robber baron’s daughter run out of stolen money yet?
If you want to be technical about it, Cassandra, all money is stolen at one point or another. (Take a glance sometime at the backgrounds of the men who founded the Met.) What matters in the long view is how the money is put to use, and there are certainly worse ways to spend money than to invest it in journalism. (Particularly when the paper in question provides about the only thoughtful analysis of the business of opera production in New York.)
It’s a very well argued piece.
Just like the ones we read here.
re: #6.1.1, I totally agree with what La C. says about the Observer. Woolfe’s article about the Met B.S. HOFFMANN was particularly apt and important to have.
I know, I was being facetious. New York’s culture (or New York itself) wouldn’t exist without robber barons.
Cassie: DOES Volpe carry a big stick?
It depends on whether he reports to Volpe
or to the Board.
Do you know?
I have a hard time taking Mr. Woolfe seriously when it comes to Gelb. He is NOT an arts “journalist”, he is a critic. He reviews performances and expresses his opinions freely. He is a very conservative (though young) soul who resists any attempt at anything new. He’s still bemoaning the fact that Aprile Millo is not still singing at the MET for god’s sake, though no one else will hire her either.
He has an obvious agenda. His personal distaste for Gelb, in my opinion, colors everything he writes about the MET. He couldn’t bring himself to write a good review for even FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, which was a huge critical success. He says that all the new productions have been critical disasters. That, again, is not true. Certainly the TOSCA was but, to be fair, the HOFFMAN response was mixed and the CARMEN reviews were generally positive. He does not mention the fact that all the performances of those three productions have been completely sold out and popularly succesful. He never seems to mention the success of the HD transmissions but I notice he made a big deal out of the fact that Edo De Wart was flown on a private jet to and from his MET performances. Even though de Waart was a last-minute replacement for Levine and he obviously had commitments elsewhere!!! And if Gelb had just allowed the cover conductor to take over the ROSEKAVALIER run, Woolfe would have been bitching about a routinier conducting performances while MET patrons are paying top price.
An article he wrote in the Fall was entitled “MET’s messy season limps into third week of boos”…and included the statement that these days at the MET “there’s booing right and left”. Again, a huge exaggeration. There was booing on opening night of TOSCA and some idiots booed Gatti at the first performance of AIDA….hardly an “epidemic” of booing. But when you have an agenda……
Considering the sloppy blowjobs that most published entities like the Times are constantly giving the Met, I hardly think it’s outside the realm of reason that there remain one barely critical outlet.
so sterling, you work in the box office, universal love for Gelb, eh?
Agenda? Gelb’a agenda…
the “chairman mao” principle of making everything that came before “the big bad wrong and useless and horrible and only thru chairman mao’s gracious help can we save the +world+ (company)…this is an old time trick gelb plays. opera is dull, a museum piece, a ludicrus world of fat people, and bad theater. centuries it survives and now HE is the saviour. Hardly. The pendelum might just catch him in the arse, but hey, for you Gelb supporters, he has a little time left. Pop star meets Opera star comes to the Met, already has in a way.
For New York there was an epidemic of booing,starting with the “silly little opera by bellini” the Tosca, and the much deserved Gatti booing was a lot for New York. they don’t boo here. haven’t in a long while. he wasn’t the only one screaming, the post, the new yorker, THE TIMES, the New York Magazine, Opera London, Opera Now, try every paper in the world discussed it.Do they all have an agenda? No, they are reproting what went on as opposed to what Gelb wants us to see.
He isn’t really questioned as much as he should be.
Wow…now Gelb is Chairman Mao…yup I can see you’re open to a reasonable discussion about this. God forbid anyone should dare suggest that opera should be good theater. Bring back the Golden Age of Volpe!!
There are worse people to be compared to than Chairman Mao, I assure you, but I’m pretty sure that post was not meant as a compliment. Be that as it may, your reaction brings up a core issue — the casual acceptance of the attitude that not only was there no adequate opera-as-good-theatre during the Volpe era, (watch my hands carefully, folks, see how they never leave my arms) there never had been.
So you’re saying that becomes the TIMES has a pro-Gelb agenda then it’s ok for someone else to be so anti-Gelb that it colors everything they write.
How about someone being FAIR & BALANCED around here??
There is a difference between an opinion and a bias. And, though you didn’t ask, La Cieca thinks that one of the most important functions of the media in a free society is the questioning of powerful institutions. The Met is indeed a powerful institution, and somebody needs to ask, “Are they using this power wisely and well?”
That is absolutely not something the Times is ever going to do, no matter if the company were taken over by a triumvirate of Gerard Mortier, Lady Gaga and Glenn Beck. The Times is about preserving the status quo in artistic organizations (at least so far as opera companies are concerned) especially if the artistic organization can hew to the paper’s “art is good for you, make sure you eat up all your art so you’ll grow up big and strong” ethos.
Sounds like a crossover episode of Big Love and Lost.
I agree with you about the TIMES (though Lorin Maazel and the NY Philharmonic might disagree with your statement that the TIMES is about preserving the status quo….they couldn’t buy a good review during Maazel’s tenure and the TIMES did everything it could to speed up his exit). No one is saying the questions should not be asked…but they should be asked by honest, impartial journalists who deal with FACTS rather than someone who from day one has had nothing good to say about GELB. To me any criticism from a tainted source can be too easily discounted and so it serves no purpose whatsoever.
I don’t agree that questions can be asked impartially, unless you’re talking about, “What was the date of your Bayreuth debut?” All questions come with some built-in assumption about what the answer is going to be. A good journalist, of course, like a good critic, should always be ready and eager to be surprised.
It would be different if Mr. Woolfe’s lesbian life partner had been snubbed by the Met board and he took his revenge by assigning interchangeable proxies to grind his axes for him. But, thank goodness, that’s not the case at the Observer.
Is Alan Gilbert getting good reviews in the NYT? His London concerts with the NYPO got a bix of shrugs and thumbs-down in the press here.
Cara Regina, does anybody on this board apart from you, me, armerjaquino and CerquettiFarrell care what people think on this side of the Atlantic?
Well, Our Vicar does!
As for Gilbert, Tony T and some other peddlers of Youth = Hip = The Future keep trying to make him cool– multicultural background, “young” (hardly by conductor standards), open to contemporary rep.
In truth he’s a clear improvement on the dreadful glitzy Maazel but a bit of a Kapellmeister yawn.
Cieca, all you say is true and wise — but there is ONE MORE very very important element lying behind the Times position you did not mention, and maybe it is the predominant one: ‘ We want everyone to know how really wonderful the Met is, the NY Phil, Carnegie Hall – and all the rest – so you will come from Dubuque to NYC and go shopping while you are here. Our advertisers deserve your patronage, dear public, and the Met Opera is a huge magnet to draw you here – come to the wonderful Met!
Why, Mr Tommassini will tell you how wonderful again and again and over and over. Read, believe, come, buy – and go home and tell everybody about it.’
And, thank you New York Times.
And how would that explain the constant critical drubbing Maazel and the NY Philharmonic took from Tony and the Times for five years??
Or the constant NY Times criticism Peter Martins has gotten at NY CITY BALLET??
I don’t think the bias has to be of a personal nature. It’s clear Mr. Woolfe’s bias is based on the fact that he sees opera very differently than Gelb does. The most telling article Woolfe has written about the MET was a piece before this season started, in which he basically said it’s too early to tell what kind of General Manager Peter Gelb will be and then proceeded to attack everything he’d done until now…including the HD broadcasts…which, horror of horrors, Woolfe believes encourages “realistic acting” in opera and he thinks that’s a bad thing.
Since this dialogue began, I’ve been trying to think of one journalistic voice in ANY field at ANY time that was not “tainted.” The best were not overtly adversarial but not one could be judged free of bias. Would you care to make a nomination, SK?
Woolfe criticizes Gelb for not being a “man of the theater;” would he say the same about Bondy, Sher, and Eyre, the actual directors of the productions he so dislikes?
I thought that Sher and Eyre were “men of the theater,” just not men of opera.
Oh, I see your point.
I think you and Wolfe and messa all have a point here. Opera has theatrical elements, and Gelb wants to pay more attention to them, but directing opera is not the same as directing theater. Sher, Eyre, Doyle, and Zimmerman are all directors who work primarily in theater with limited prior experience in opera, and I think their lack of knowledge of opera was very apparent in their productions. But Gelb, not being a “man of the theater” (in the broad sense) isn’t sensitive to this.
Sorry, I mean “Woolfe.”
Gelb is “a man of the theater” ……..perhaps you should ask Maestro Muti that.
Binging theatre directors to work in the opera world can be a good thing if done right. Rather than contracting a director to direct opera X, of which he may know nothing, I would go to the director and say: we like what you do in the theatre; is there an opera that you’ve thought about directing, an opera you’ve seen and thought you could make more effective, an opera with a plot or music that inspires you?
I believe Bondy has been quoted as saying that he had never even heard Tosca before he took the Met assignment. Crazy. He should have been asked to do some homework; find an opera that attracted him for whatever reason; develop a concept for this work; and then, and only then, given the job.
“Binging theatre directors to work in the opera world can be a good thing”
Doesn’t it depend on the nature (and duration) of the binge?
The Hell with “Opera as Good Theatre.” I want “Opera as Good Opera.”
Unfortunately there aren’t enough of you….and there are fewer every year….
there are plenty that aren’t dead but who choose not to go and see opera light. this is change for change sake. why dump a fabulous boheme for a new one? why?
there isn’t that much money to burn.
EXACTLY, #10.
Opera is not theater, it’s OPERA.
Opera, but not concert either. If all you are interested in is the “voice” buy a CD and stay home.
I keep hearing this used to bash every attempt to bring theater directors into opera, and I wonder–what’s the difference between theater and opera? And are there any directors who understand that difference, apart from I suppose the inevitable Zeffirelli? (I’m not so sure about him, even, but that remains to be discussed.)
Spoken theater works very differently from opera. A score dictates mood and timing in a very different way from a spoken text. There are no equivalents to arias, recits, ensembles, and such–opera direction requires an ear for music that spoken theater does not. Spoken theater rarely involves large groups of people (choruses). The Met is MUCH bigger than most theaters, and directors seem to have trouble knowing what to do with all that space.
Some theater directors are also successful opera directors. But being good in one genre is no guarantee of competence in the other.
Surely, at its best, it’s both. They’re certainly not mutually exclusive.
One would think, AJ; one would hope, but after this little excursion, and the discovery that Mrmyster and I are at wide variance, I’m not at all sure of myself. The Aristotelian definition of drama used to be enough for me. The constituent elements were plot, passsion, and spectacle. Fear and pity led to catharsis. But now we have non-linear theatre — there goes plot. Passion is out of date in this ironic age of the ultra-cool. (Keanu Reeves as Parsifal? I’m not ready for it.) Spectacle has given way to meaningless extravaganza. Then to add that it must be “good” theatre which by the very use of the terms whips the whole pudding into the subjective realm. At least we can agree that opera must include all of the above with the added element that music — the organization of time into sonic elements — must propel the lot. Weh ist mir ! I think I’d be better off watching porn; at least I can understand that.