Not often that we highlight stories from the Metropolitan Opera, but this one is worth it.
....one of America’s cultural leaders has come up with something really novel in the genre.
“Metropolitan Opera season attendance dropped slightly following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that coincided with a decrease in tourists to New York.”--[Peter Gelb, GM/Metropolitan Opera]
Who knew rounding up hardened illegal-immigrant criminals would hit the hallowed halls of the country’s most prestigious opera house hard?
Gelb's problem is that he is a horse's ass.
...“Mediocre or even bad.” “Flop after flop of terrible productions.” “Just bad.”
Those are some of the judgments I can print in a family newspaper about Gelb’s recent runs from Reddit’s opera lovers.
“Gelb has had contempt for opera and his own artform since he started,” one declared in a thread with almost nothing positive to say about the manager....
Hmmm.
...“Grounded” opened this past Met season after a heavy revision from its 2023 Washington, DC, premiere.
The “antiwar opera,” as Gelb calls it, centers on an F-16 pilot grounded after she unexpectedly gets pregnant; on her return to the military, she’s still on the ground — going after human targets by manning drones....
...Even with a September opening-night red-carpet gala — which the company trumpeted as “the first opera by a female composer ever to open a Met season” — ticket sales were sluggish: It was the worst-attended opera this season, selling just 50% of capacity.
Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar,” which Gelb described as “about the murder of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca by the fascist forces of Franco, eerily mirroring the troubled world in which we live today,” sold just 61% of tickets....
IOW, two POS anti-USA screeds-in-music flopped. This is Disney-level floppage.
...What did sell?
A new production of Verdi’s “Aida” (82%), “Moby Dick” (81%) and Puccini’s “Tosca” (78%). Even Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades)” — not one of the American stage’s most popular operas — sold 77%.
Those numbers — low for contemporary woke operas, high for great works — can be seen in every recent season....
We hear that Disney will be looking for another House of Mouse idiot, Mr. Gelb. Maybe you should consider that old suggestion "Go West."
Peter Gelb is the son of Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of The New York Times, and writer Barbara Gelb.
ReplyDeleteGelb is married to conductor Keri Lynn Wilson. He has two children from a previous marriage. His elder son, David Gelb, is a director and cinematographer, most known for his documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. His younger son, Matthew Gelb, is a film editor based in New York City.
Arthur Gelb( Peters Father) was born to two Jewish immigrants from what was then Czechoslovakia and now Ukraine, in the back of his parents dress shop in East Harlem.
Interesting how many of the comments these days are about tracking Jewish heritage even to the grandparents. That has a familiar ring to it.
ReplyDeleteAt least the opera-goers seem to have good taste. That sort of thing will eventually tell.