Dear Mr. Gelb:

Lincoln Center Plaza Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Dear Mr. Gelb:

I received the following appeal from the Met today:

Support the Met Now and Protect Its Future

Dear Ms. Hirsch,

As you know, we recently had no choice but to cancel performances in order to protect our audiences, artists, and staff from the spread of the coronavirus. As devastating as it is to have to close the Met, this was the rare instance where the show simply couldn’t go on. 

But we are determined to weather this storm and are looking ahead to the 2020–21 season, opening in September, since it is now clear that we will not be able to resume operations before the scheduled end of our current season in May. The financial threat to the Met is immense, and we cannot ensure the future of Met performances or seasons without your help. I am writing today to ask you to consider making an urgent gift to the company to help us address the overwhelming economic implications of the pandemic.
In these extraordinarily challenging times, opera and the arts offer solace to a frightened nation and our fellow citizens around the world. That’s the reason why last week we began streaming a different encore performance from our Live in HDseries each night, for free. It’s a reminder that the arts are part of the soul of a civilized society, and without cultural institutions like the Met, our lives would be diminished. 

While we are cutting expenses in every way possible in the coming months, including my own decision to take no salary, we need your help now. The stock market is down, but it will rebound. The Met will recover too, but only with the assistance of our most loyal fans and donors.  

I am forever impressed and grateful for your passion and support. We need it now, more than ever before. Thank you. 

With great appreciation for your help,

And my answer is that you can fuck right off. Because the right way to do this would have been to tell your audience members that you want to continue paying the orchestra, chorus, and union crew members, so please send money to help. Instead, you laid them all off, effective the end of March, and then you sent out an appeal for $60 million to tide you over.

As I'm sure you're aware, the Met's Board of Directors (or Trustees, or whatever the title is) is packed with wealthy people, worth millions to billions. They're the ones who should be coughing up the money. I mean, to a billionaire, $60 million is fairly small change. Former Mayor Bloomberg just dropped at least $500 million on a presidential campaign that was likely intended just to keep Sanders and Warren out of the White House.

He's an opera fan, which I know because I passed him in the halls at the Met a couple of times on my last visit. Suggest you have a chat with him, stat, instead of me, well-off wage earner who lives 2500 miles away.

Yours truly,

Lisa Hirsch