All of Peter Gelb’s big problems running the Metropolitan Opera only got bigger during the pandemic. ShawnMcCreesh reports
Photo: Landon Nordeman Dressed head to toe in black Armani, Peter Gelb is white-knuckling the railing on the sixth floor of the Metropolitan Opera House. “I haven’t been up here in 16 months,” he says dazedly. It’s opening night at the Met, one of the most sacred evenings in the cultural and civic life of the city. This hasn’t happened since 2019. He’s looking down on something thrilling, if slightly terrifying.
“Pretty amazing,” observes Gelb, who turns 68 this month. Ordinarily, he’s dry, a little sardonic, but tonight he’s practically vibrating with nervous energy. In his 16 years as the Met’s general manager, he has always opened the season with a new opera, but they don’t always go over so well. Fire Shut Up in My Bones was a risk. Critics can be brutal. And opera may be the last critic-dependent art form in America.
We’re backstage. There are dials and gadgets and screens all over the place. Gelb, a self-confessed “control freak,” leans over and starts saying things like “Three minutes, tops.” A stagehand claps him on the back and says, “Into the mouth of the wolf, Peter.” That’s apparently operaspeak for “Break a leg.”
The party afterward in Damrosch Park is glittery and diverse. The mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves glints in a kelly-green gown and a bejeweled mask. “Tonight was historic,” Spike Lee, whose Louis Vuitton tux sports orange buttons, tells me, “and I found out Peter’s a Yankee fan tonight. He talked about us kicking Boston in the arse.” Lee takes Walter Russell III, the 13-year-old who plays a young Charles, aside, telling him, “Don’t get souped up by tonight; still keep your Jordans on the ground.
Not every board member has been so supportive. When Gelb came in, the Met’s budget was far smaller, but with an aging and shrinking audience, some worried the organization was just managing its decline. But Gelb, who spent his early professional life as a publicist, took that as a challenge: The Met must expand its reach.
But Gelb survived, and the Met survived, and today the organization is very much his creation and he its master. In 2019, his contract was extended through at least the summer of 2027. When asked about grooming a successor, he says he doesn’t yet have anyone in mind. Nobody seems to. Gelb’s Hits: Akhnaten and Fire Shut Up in My Bones . Photo: Karen Almond/Met Opera ; Ken Howard/Met Opera . Gelb’s Hits: Akhnaten and Fire Shut Up in My Bones . Photo: Karen Almond/Met Opera ; Ken Howard/Met Opera and Fire Shut Up in My Bones . Photo: Karen Almond/Met Opera ; Ken Howard/Met Opera . Gelb’s Fails: Tosca and Götterdämmerung . Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times ; Sarah Krulwich/The New York Times . Gelb’s Fails: Tosca and Götterdämmerung .
“I was somewhat of a teenage juvenile delinquent,” says Gelb with a grin. “I used to love going up to the roof and smoking pot.” Later, he dropped out of Yale to work full time as a music publicist. He says he has “a very strong sense of right and wrong, I believe, which I think I got from my parents, particularly my father.”
One recent night, I attended the opening of Turandot. This is Franco Zeffirelli’s production of the Puccini opera, which is to say it’s as warhorsey as they come. Campy as hell and financed by a geyser of Texas oil money, it has been in the rotation since 1987 and is like crack for old-school Met heads. It’s an eye-popping spectacle, if, by contemporary appropriationist readings, a bit problematic to watch Ping, Pang, and Pong twirling around the stage.
“Well,” says Gelb, laughing after I tell him this, that Tosca “was a mistake.” Still, he says, “it’s riskier not to take risks.” He says when he arrived at the Met, “a number of leading directors” wouldn’t even consider mounting a production there because “they felt the Met was an operatic factory that was so conservative that they wouldn’t be able to be creative.
One suspects that Gelb feels a little controversy isn’t a bad thing for something with such an aloof reputation as the opera. And while many credit his spine of steel, others say his management style is more like being rubbed with steel wool. His recurring battles with the unions have left scar tissue. One musician tells me 80 percent of his orchestra dislikes Gelb.
Gelb insists he has only done what’s necessary to keep the place alive. “I took such strong actions,” he says, “to make sure it wasn’t the end. But they were very controversial among the company and the members who were furloughed, because they were naturally very unhappy about that, understandably.”
A labor protest on Lincoln Center Plaza in May. Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images One thing everyone agrees on is that Gelb’s job is harder than ever. “I couldn’t do that job in my wildest dreams,” says Eugene Keilin, the respected financial analyst who was brought to the Met in 2014 to review its finances and act as an independent go-between for Gelb and the unions.
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