The moral stench seeps through Peter Gelb‘s decision to partner with the Saudi government, but what new sources of funding for the Met don’t have red flags?
Richard Lynn bravely asks what we’re hoping to get out of the continued Peter Gelb-bashing — and whether our expectations of him have ever been fair
The catch: Employees would have to agree to a 30 percent cut in pay, half of which would be restored once the Met’s box office returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“Gelb said the Ring probably will return in five or six years…”
La Cieca just received a package of pdf files the sender says is a copy of James Levine‘s lawsuit against the Met.
Tristan has been the season-launching opera three times before now, but good luck finding someone to provide a firsthand account of the last time.
The Met’s 2016-2017 season opens on September 26 with a new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
It’s up to you, cher public, to try to decide for yourself what, if anything, this bizarre story in the New York Times means.
“In a fiscal year that challenged the nation’s largest performing arts organization to find a more sustainable financial model for the future, the Metropolitan Opera incurred an estimated $22 million budget shortfall for the 2013-14 season.”
You figured it out a fortnight ago, cher public.
La Cieca has come into possession of an interesting presentation, with fonts and everything, from Local 802, American Federation of Musicians, and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, outlining their solution for the current financial crisis at the Metropolitan Opera.
Your conduit to the spirit world, La Cieca, isn’t feeling quite as clairvoyante as usual today, cher public, so she’s going to ask your help in predicting what will happen in the course of the Met’s current labor negotiations.
Alan Gordon, embedded journalist, reports from inside the first AGMA/Met negotiation session.
Peter Gelb sent out an email to the “Public Bulletin Board” earlier today, noting that “inaccurate rumors [are] flying around” and attempting to clarify the Met’s position on upcoming union negotiations.
Coming as Peter Gelb did from the music industry, opera lovers hoped that he would display a more distinctive knack for casting and an improved talent pipeline than Joe Volpe offered during the waning years of his tenure.
Alan Gordon has mass emailed AGAM again, and La Cieca’s got a copy of the missive.
Short answer: yes. But let’s begin by dismissing the a blatant canard. One thing that the Metropolitan Opera does not need to do is to scale back the number of performances in a season.
The Met’s financial challenges are not meteorological, demographic, or cyclical; they are structural.
“When you read, and credit, the more feverish musings of the internet chatterati, there is some kind of British invasion storming the bastions of American opera.”
Opera Teen (pictured, second from left) is not kidding us: he had an interview with Peter Gelb.
La Cieca has reviewed the parterre circulation numbers and she is delighted and not a little perplexed to note that the day of the Great Opera News Kerfuffle provided our site with the highest number of pageviews in history.
The repertory for the upcoming season of the English National Opera (also known as “Peter Gelb‘s shopping list”) boasts the world premiere of a new opera by Philip Glass, The Perfect American, which imagines the last days of Walt Disney.
“After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary tale about the…
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
