Manager Peter Gelb is leading the way in attracting a new, younger audience to New York's Metropolitan Opera, but at what cost?
In Peter Gelb's office at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, there's a screen that's flush with the wall so it resembles a window. It captures whatever is happening on the Met's stage ? so its general manager's eye can be trained on rehearsals and performances all day long. When I visit, the set of Philip Glass's Satyagraha is being taken down, to be replaced, a little later, by that of Don Giovanni (both productions have British directors, to whom we will return).
It is appropriate that Gelb's eye on his operatic kingdom is via a screen, for cinema has become the company's boom area. Gelb claims it will reap $10m?$12m (�6.4m?�7.7m) net profit from this, its sixth season of live HD transmissions into cinemas. Donizetti's Anna Bolena ? directed by Briton David McVicar ? grossed $2m at the box office when it was shown in cinemas this autumn, with 200,000 watching in the US, Europe, the Middle East and Russia. It is a tiny number by Hollywood standards, but not bad when your opera house seats only 4,000.
And it's a fascinating development. The Met's presence in 80 British cinemas means the company has traction in British cultural life as never before (though its broadcasts on Radio 3 are a long tradition). This season, you can watch nearly all the Met's shows in the cinema; Marina Poplavskaya in Gounod's Faust screens tomorrow.
Gelb ? dome-headed, tall, given to talking in careful sentences ? says he began the screenings as a break-even proposition that would work as a marketing device, driving audiences into the opera house itself. But now it contributes to his budget, which is, annually, about �208.5m, compared with the Royal Opera's �106m annual turnover, which includes the Royal Ballet.
The Met has ruffled some feathers, though. It prefers to strike exclusive deals with cinemas, preventing other opera companies from relaying their work on the same screens ? hardly a collegiate move. Gelb's counterargument is hard-headed: "There is competition everywhere ? including in the world of opera. We compete for singers, we compete for directors, why not compete for cinemas, too? We wouldn't were it not for the fact that the operatic repertoire is so limited. A perfect example is Gounod's Faust. The Royal Opera just had a Faust that was transmitted in cinemas, and we have one in December. If they are going out in exactly the same movie theatres then one of them is going to suffer as a result. We don't force movie theatres to take our movies; we don't hold a gun to their heads. They could take the Royal Opera instead if they wanted to."
Gelb became general manager of the Met in 2006 after a stint as the head of Sony's classical recordings arm. When he arrived, he was presented with a study that "showed the average age of the audience was 65 and was ageing at the rate of a year every year". As he says: "This was an indication that the audience would soon all be dead." The HD transmissions are part of a wider plan to open up the Met to a broader, younger audience, a strategy that also includes free opera screenings in New York's Lincoln Plaza and Times Square, and initiatives such as a forthcoming iPad app called Met Opera on Demand, which will allow subscribers to access more than 100 operas from its film and TV archives and thousands of radio shows, according to Gelb.
But the most significant part of his strategy has been to update the style of work seen on stage. Old productions have been thrown out, new directors hired. It also co-produces more operas with English National Opera than any other company ? ENO being another organisation that sometimes courts controversy on its mission to raise the theatrical ambitions of opera. The current production of Satyagraha is a co-production with ENO, staged by the British duo Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch of Improbable Theatre. And Nico Muhly's opera Two Boys, which premiered at ENO in June, will be seen at the Met in the 2013-14 season. (In another interview, Gelb referred to the utility of premiering Two Boys "out of town", as if London was a provincial city fit for a preview run.) A number of the newer faces directing at the Met are British, such as McVicar and, most recently, Michael Grandage, whose Don Giovanni was only his second opera production. "I think it's really important," explains Gelb, "that opera has a strong theatrical pulse to it. I get attacked for having said that, as if I am being so presumptuous to imagine myself the first to think that. Absolutely not. Over the rich history of the Met there are many directors who have been leading theatrical directors. The difference between today and recent decades is that it's more consistent. We are doing more new productions in an effort to really revive the repertoire."
The strategy has had a mixed reception. According to Gelb, the average audience age has now dropped to 62 or 63, so the ageing trend has been reversed, if slowly. The house averages 80% paid attendance ? again, not a spectacular success story. Gelb believes there may be a "slight cannibalisation" of box office by cinema screenings, but he says that's not a worry while the cinema audience is rising. Meanwhile, not everyone has enjoyed the banishing of their old favourite productions to be replaced with work from new directors. The reaction to Grandage's Don Giovanni was revealing. For the critics, it seemed to fall between two stools: the show had been marketed as a theatrical event from a director who has won plaudits on Broadway; but what they got was something that looked, on the surface at least, rather old-fashioned. Reviews ranged from lukewarm (the New York Times complained of "timidity") to furious (the New York Observer called it "disastrously dull"). Gelb allows himself a hint of exasperation as we discuss them. "Don't get me started on that," he says. "I feel damned if I do, damned if I don't."
He has pressing short-term problems to deal with, too: not least, the serious health problems of his music director, James Levine, who has cancelled all his engagements this winter after a back injury. Meanwhile, Fabio Luisi has been elevated from principal guest conductor to principal conductor to cover the gap. The party line is that Levine will return. Though, as Gelb points out: "It's a very delicate situation for him and the opera house. He has every intention of returning, but I'm not a doctor, so I can't tell you when that will be."
Even so, the company recently announced record-breaking donations ? $281m garnered over the last financial year. "We are managing to make ends meet," says Gelb, and if that sounds gloomy given those apparent riches, bear in mind that the company is trailing a $40m accumulated deficit.
As Gelb politely sees me out of the front-of-house, I get a sudden sense of how lonely it must be, pursuing a risky and sometimes unpopular strategy in the hope of a renewed future for opera, uninsulated by public subsidy and in the bleakest of economic climates. As he deftly opens, then fastens behind him the beautiful metallic gate that indicates the theatre is shut for the day, it is hard not to think of gilded cages.
Faust screens at cinemas nationwide on 10 December, The Enchanted Island on 21 January, and G�tterd�mmerung on 11 February. Details: metopera.org/uk
?�This article was amended on 9 December. The original stated that Angela Gheorghiu sings in the Faust screening tomorrow. This has been corrected.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/dec/08/opera-big-screen-peter-gelb
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