The AFM Weighs In

The musicians' union, Local 802, AFM, has a statement:

December 3, 2017– The Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802 AFM has released a statement on the allegations of sexual abuse on the part of Music Director Emeritus James Levine:

“We are horrified and sickened by the recently reported allegations of sexual abuse by Mr. Levine. The Metropolitan Opera has an obligation to all employees to provide a safe workplace free of sexual harassment and discrimination. Throughout history, artists have stood for our society’s values and priorities. As musicians of the MET Orchestra, Local 802 and members of labor unions, we have the power to bring about positive change. It is incumbent upon our community to decisively and immediately denounce actions of abuse, assault and sexual harassment.” — Tino Gagliardi, President, Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802, AFM

I'm really pretty sure that there were members of the union who'd heard about this.

Statement from the Metropolitan Opera Regarding James Levine (and an Update)

Received about 20 minutes while I was putting up a pot roast to braise:

The Metropolitan Opera announced today that it is suspending its relationship with James Levine, pending an investigation, following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct committed by Mr. Levine that took place from the 60's to the 80's, including the earlier part of his conducting career at the Met. 

Mr. Levine will not be involved in any Met activities, including conducting scheduled
performances at the Met this season. The Met has appointed Robert J. Cleary, former United States attorney and currently head of the investigations practice at Proskauer Rose, to lead a full and complete investigation into the relevant facts. 

“Based on these new reports, the Met has made the decision to act now, while we await the results of the investigation,” said Peter Gelb, Met General Manager, whose actions are fully supported by the leadership of the Met Board and its Executive Committee. “This is a tragedy for anyone whose life has been affected.” 

There will be no further comments or statement regarding this issue from the Met at this time.

Multiple allegations from the 60s to the 80s? New reports? I must have missed something.

Here's the update, in a Times story from Michael Cooper:  three two more men, with their names in the paper, have gone to the Met to say "this happened." The third is the man who filed the police report.

Shocked, Shocked

Last week, it transpired that the Metropolitan Opera won't be performing a new opera by Osvaldo Golijov after all. Neither party is saying much about what happened or why the project is being canceled. From Michael Cooper's article:

The opera house and the composer were circumspect about why the project, which was more than a decade in the making, had been called off. The Met said in a statement this week that it had parted ways with Mr. Golijov because of “conflicting schedules” but would not elaborate. Mr. Golijov declined a request for an interview; his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, cited an unspecified “difference in artistic vision” for the demise of the project.

Let me hazard a guess that Golijov's ongoing creative block is what's responsible; he has been having problems following through on commissions for years now.

However, "more than a decade in the making" does not reflect well on the Met: other composers are able to deliver commissions within a few years, and the company must have given Golijov an unusual degree of latitude to let the project drag on for so long. Consider, for example, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec: he has deliver The Letter (2008), Danse Russe (2011), and The Shining (2016) in less than the time it has taken Golijov to not deliver a score to the Met.

In response to this news, Anne Midgette took a long, hard, look at the Met's commissioning program and concluded that it is boneheaded. Okay, that is not what she says, well, not directly, but she is completely right about how misguided it is. The big problem is that the program doesn't commit the Met to actually staging anything that they commission; they can run workshops until the cows come home, but composers are not guaranteed a performance, although they do get paid for their work.

This seems very unfortunately to be typical of the Met. Over a long period - their whole damn history, in fact - there's been a very slight degree of commitment to commissioning and performing new music. Here is a list of Met world premieres:

1. La Fanciulla del West
2. Koningskinder
3. Monda (Parker)
4. Cyrano (Damrosch)
5. Madeleine
6. Madame Sens-Gen
7. Goyescas
8. The Canterbury Pilgrims
9. The Robin Woman: Shanewis
10. The Dance in Place Congo (ballet)
11. Il Trittico (Il Tabarro, Suoer Angelica, Gianni Schicchi)
12. The Temple Dancer
13. The Blue Bird
14. Cleopatra's Night
15. Skyscrapers
16. The King's Henchman
17. Peter Ibbetson
18. The Emperor Jones
19. Merry Mount (world stage premiere)
20. In the Pasha's Garden
21. The Man Without a Country
22. The Island God
23. The Warrior
24. Vanessa
25. Antony & Cleopatra
26. Mourning Becomes Electra
27. The Ghosts of Versailles
28. The Voyage
29. Babbitt Piano Concerto (Met Orch at Carnegie Hall)
30. The Great Gatsby
31. An American Tragedy
32. The First Emperor
33. The Enchanted Island (pastiche)

Many of these works have sunk without a trace, although there are a few very bright lights in there....most of them written by Puccini. It's true that the Met has also performed a bunch of recent work not commissioned by the Met, including three operas by John Adams, Thomas Adès's The Tempest, and Nico Muhly's Two Boys. 

Still, you could wish that the country's most prestigious opera company would taking some kind of lead in recruiting composers to compose operas, matching them with good librettists, and then following through by staging the resulting operas. They are certainly hamstrug by factors somewhat beyond their control: the enormous cost of staging opera in NYC, their gigantic theater, and the lack of a smaller, perhaps nonunion, venue - say a thousand seats? - where they could stage new opera at a lower cost and with much less risk, perhaps drawing on their young singers' program.

You should definitely read Anne's article, which goes into a lot of detail about issues with the Met program; also take a look at Justin Davidson's article about new opera at the Met. He's absolutely right that composers rarely get it right with their first opera (or operas); the exceptions include Mozart, Berg, and Britten, so you see.

Thursday Miscellaney

Too many things make a post, or, why do I have 34 open tabs in my phone's browser? No, I am not putting 34 items in this blog post.

• Gilbert Kaplan died in January at 74; he was a Wall Street millionaire who got rich by starting a magazine, Institutional Investor. He had an obsession: Mahler's Second Symphony. The headlines when he died called him a conductor, but, well, that was all he conducted.  Margalit Fox's NY Times obituary for him is here; The Telegraph has an obit here.
• Also deceased, the great choral conductor Sir David Willcocks, last September at 95 (yeah, I'm behind a little!). Guardian obit here; Times here, also by Margalit Fox.
• "The Broken Musican," about injury and disability among musicians. Note especially the remarks about James Levine.
• Ivan Hewett reviews a new biography of Bela Bartok, by David Cooper, published by Yale University Press.
• "Margin Notes," a very amusing blog post at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra about what you find in musicians' orchestral parts.
• Scott Chamberlain at Mask of the Flower Prince goes into great and gory detail about the myriad problems with Terry Teachout's article several months ago claiming that the cost disease was what's killing the Met. Let's just say that he is a lot more thorough than I was.
• Composer Kevin Volans gave a speech so muddled that I can't quite figure out what he is talking about. (I do agree with him that grants and awards shouldn't all be tied to the age of the composer because composers improve over time.) Joshua Kosman helpfully explains while taking the opportunity to wallop Volans and critic Philip Clark, who had published an equally muddled lament over the lack of great composers these days.
• Anne Midgette thoughtfully discusses HD broadcasts, and her conclusions all make sense to me. Speight Jenkins, former general director of Seattle, a post he held for decades, says some very silly things, like HD broadcasts aren't opera. Um. I wish Anne had asked him how he feels about recordings and DVDs. I also wish she had not used the word "purist." More to the point, opera administrators should think about Peter Gelb's admission that the HD broadcasts are, or might be, cannibalizing the live audience. I'll hazard a guess about why: cheap tickets, parking close by, comfortable seats, popcorn, camaraderie. (Think about where your local opera company stands on those issues. I am aware of no company that allows popcorn except for the SFO ballpark broadcast) I do find it interesting that David Gockley says there's no money in HD when the Met is making about $18 million/year. He means, for US companies other than the Met.
• Changing the Narrative: Why "Getting New Audiences" Isn't the Answer The California Symphony goes into quite a bit of detail about how they approached the question of audience growth. Their strategy involved identifying and, well, befriending single ticket buyers, many of whom started buying more tickets or subscribing. They rewarded ticket purchases, personalized offerings, etc. This worked brilliantly. They're a small organization that puts on a small number of concerts; I don't know how this would scale for an organization such as SFS or SFO that has a lot more performances and tickets to sell, but it made an awful lot of sense to me.
• David Allen writes about new works that are responses to older masterpieces. I wish he'd squeezed in something about John (Coolidge) Adams's "Absolute Jest;" he did not, he tells me, because it wasn't commissioned specifically to be a response. So? The work does feel like part of the trend, and the revised version is a damn good piece.

Okay, enough for now. I'm down to 20 open tabs.

It's Déjà Vu All Over Again: Cost Disease, Round le 47th, or, A Tale of Two Opera Houses

This time it is the normally sensible Terry Teachout running aground in the Wall Street Journal on the shoals of the so-called cost disease and its effect on musical organizations. "Cost disease" is a term that some economists apply to a situation where costs go up, but for various reasons, productivity can't go up, leading to a spiral of increased costs.

I've heard the term applied to classical music off and on for the last ten or so years. The argument runs something like this: it takes four musicians to perform a string quartet, and that's the same number it took in [some year in the past], but they are getting paid more and they can't increase their productivity.

Well, it depends on how you define productivity. Every time this argument comes up, I point out that, in fact, there has been an immense increase in productivity in classical music. Musicians these days have incredible chops, vastly more technical ability than even 50 years ago. Listen to recordings of Le sacre du printemps from the late 20s - there are three - or even from the 50s, then compare to the quality of what you get now, when college and even good high school orchestras can play the piece more competently than professional orchestras from the 1920s.

If you can learn music faster, and play it better, you have an increase in productivity. That 18th c. string quartet may have taken the same four players for a Haydn quartet that the Takacs takes today, but could they play the Bartok quartets?

Beyond this, Terry has chosen to address the problems of the Metropolitan Opera through the lens of the cost disease. The Met has major financial issues, but I just don't see them as having a damn thing to do with the cost disease.

Here are the critical numbers:

Metropolitan Opera expenses, FYE July 2003: $201,000,000
Metropolitan Opera expenses, FYE July 2013: $311,900,000
(Sources are the 990 forms right here.)

Percentage of tickets sold, 1995-96: 90%
Percentage of tickets sold, 2015-16: 66%
(Source: Terry's WSJ article)

Who needs the cost disease to explain this? Expenses went up 50% -by a cool $100 million - during a period when ticket sales were falling. A 50% cost increase is nearly impossible for an arts organization to absorb; if your tickets sales are falling on top of that, your fund-raising requirements go up and up and up.

I'm going to further note that all the smaller-scale productions in the world will not reduce overall costs at the Met because of the union contracts.

And the cost disease, which should apply across the board to all opera companies, does not explain why a company such as San Francisco Opera should manage to approximately break even annually and avoid that 50% cost increase that the Met has incurred. It's not SFO has gotten a whole lot more efficient than the Met.

In this case, I'll just go ahead and state what should be obvious: SFO has far better management than the Met! We have had a decade of labor peace; the size of our endowment has tripled under David Gockley; he has held costs under very tight control; and he has introduced some operational efficiencies by consolidating certain operations across the courtyard from the opera house; he has built a new, 299-seat theater and an archive, and turned all of this into a great fund-raising opportunity.

Stop Holding Your Breath.

Everybody wants him.

Between the announcement of Alan Gilbert's departure from the NYPO and the somewhat surprising appointment of Jaap van Zweden as his successor, the favorite candidate of almost everyone in NY was Esa-Pekka Salonen, the orchestra's composer in residence. And you can can hardly blame them for it, given that Salonen is a great conductor and composer, charismatic, and photogenic, with a long and hugely successful tenure at the LAPO behind him.

Now there's a new leadership opportunity in NY, and once again Anthony Tommasini, in his review of the Chereau Elektra, floats Salonen as a successor to James Levine.

Tony, give up. Salonen has made it perfectly clear that he is not interested in this kind of position. He has already been through building a concert hall, with Ernest Fleischmann as the executive; the Met is going to need major renovations in the next few years, and Peter Gelb is no Fleischmann. The Met has enormous financial problems, and Salonen does not want to be a US-style music director who gives a huge amount of time to glad-handing, fund-raising, and administration.

Peter Gelb should certainly go out of his way to engage Salonen on a regular basis as a guest conductor; in fact, he should commission an opera from Salonen.

And while I'm giving advice to the Met, while I think there is no way he would be offered the top job, there's another available conductor I can think of who is a top-notch champion of new and recent music and who should be engaged immediately for future appearances: Alan Gilbert.

Met Governance, Again (and Again and Again)

Via Parterre  Box, a story in the Times by the estimable Michael Cooper raises the curtain on what's been going on at the Met recently. La Cieca calls it bizarre, and indeed some of the phrasing is very, very careful. But you don't need to read between the lines all that carefully to figure out the real story: James Levine was going to retire, and apparently Cooper was doing research on that, when a visit by Gelb, Levine, and Cooper to Levine's neurologist yielded a medication adjustment that will enable Levine to keep his gig for a while longer.

And that became the story, rather than an announcement of Levine's departure (or semi-retirement) at season end or when the 2016-17 season is announced.

Here's my honking big problem with it all:

And it surprised Mr. Gelb, who said in an interview that he had been in talk with Mr. Levine about announcing the conductor’s retirement after this season and making him the Met’s music director emeritus. But Mr. Gelb said he felt obligated, both morally and artistically, to see if changing Mr. Levine’s dosage would improve his upper body movement and help him get back to normal.

“He has supported this company, he has given everything to this company, and I feel the Met’s responsibility is to support him as long as we can,” Mr. Gelb, who briefed the Met’s board members on the situation on Monday, said in an interview. “If in fact it’s possible that by regulating his medication he will be able to conduct like the James Levine of before, that would be a miraculous turn of events that everyone here would embrace and cheer for.”

It's going on five years since Levine resigned from the BSO, and during those five years, he had two years of not conducting at all and an extremely limited schedule since 2013. Here's what I said in 2012 about the situation at the Met:

It's the Board's responsibility, first and foremost, to take care of the institution, but it looks as though their primary concern right now is taking care of James Levine. I understand their desire to have him as active as possible in an organization he has helped shape for so long. But their evident reluctance to contemplate life without Levine is a serious concern. It is not good for the Met to be so dependent on one individual.

It looks exactly the same right now. Peter, you're doing it wrong. You need to protect the Metropolitan Opera and provide for its future, but you're protecting Levine instead.

Gelb at the Met, Redux

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a long article, around 9,000 words, about Peter Gelb, the Met's finances, and last year's labor-relations drama. James B. Stewart, a business reporter at the NY Times, is the author. You may be wondering why this didn't run in the Times itself, especially considering Anthony Tommasini's statement in his Rubin Institute address about wishing that the business section would cover the Met's finances and labor relations.* My best guess about this is simply the length of Stewart's piece: it's way over the length of articles that run in Arts & Leisure or the business section, and it's perhaps too specialist for the Magazine.

The ever-alert Drew McManus solicited opinions, and after I read it, I posted a few. Here's an expanded version of what I wrote in comments at Adaptistration.

Stewart goes into quite a bit of detail about the structure and membership of the Met Board of Directors. There are two tiers of members, with different rights and responsibilities. This material dismayed me. Many board members are deeply engaged, but others pay essentially no attention to the company's finances. And that is a bad thing, because fiduciary responsibility to the institution comes with board membership.

Some of the board members are also so artistically conservative that I question whether they belong on the board at all. Okay, some of them have donated millions to the company. Still, some of what Stewart says makes it clear that Gelb has not succeeded in persuading the entire board to support his artistic vision, which includes moving away from overstuffed traditionalist productions.

For example, one older, and extremely wealthy, board member asked him whether she would see the Zefirelli Tosca, retired and in storage in favor of Luc Bondy's more modernist take on the opera, during her lifetime. Gelb was forthright in replying that the Zef production is not the Met's artistic direction, and I admire him for that. But a more canny response might have been "For you, dear lady, next season" (or 2017 or whatever), simply to court a donation from the board member.**

In my opinion, the article provides good reasons to get smart people who are knowledgable but not rich onto arts organization boards. Boards don’t exist just to raise money and rubber-stamp or oppose what management says.

Stewart's article also discusses the role of Eugene Keilin and his findings in the eventual settlement of the labor dispute that Gelb started with his threats to lock out the union workers. I wish there were even more details about this, especially about the findings.

I wanted to take a nice red pencil to some of the article, though:

1. Stewart uses the terms “average salary” and “base salary” without bothering to define either. I know what those things mean and people who follow the arts business know what they mean, but most NYer readers do not.

"Average salary" is what it sounds like: you take everyone's salaries, add them up, divide by the number of salaries. But "base salary" is the amount a musician gets paid as a new orchestra or chorus member who isn't a soloist. In the Met orchestra, this would mean, for example, a newly-appointed section violinist. The base doesn't apply to the concertmaster's salary (separately negotiated), to members who've gotten annual increases as a result of their tenure, and soloists, who get paid more than section players (for example, the principal horn). Base salary doesn't include overtime either.

2. He never provides hard numbers about what the orchestra and chorus cost beyond the disagreements about the chorister salaries.

3. There’s a paragraph where you might think that Gelb designed the Ring set, not Robert Lepage. That’s terrible editing, not worthy of the NYer, and something that ought to have been caught.

4. The references to Wendy White are out of place in a discussion of the artistic direction of the Met. The mezzo, a long-time soloist, was badly injured when a set collapsed under her. She has not sung since.

The article and people quoted seem to blame the production itself for what happened to her, but that kind of incident is better viewed as an occupational health and safety issue. Somebody didn't properly secure the set, and if the design made this more likely, that problem should have been caught at the initial construction of the set or when the Met performed a safety inspection.

I wish the article, overall, had been even longer and deeper than it was; I'm extremely curious about what might have been left out or cut to avoid legal issues or endangering inside sources.

In any event, this week's NYer has responses from the Board and from Alan Gordon of AGMA, and they are entirely predictable:

• Kevin Kenndy, Ann Ziff, William Morris, and Judith-Anne Corrente are "disheartened" and defend the Met with all the best buzzwords without addressing any substantive points made by Stewart. Please tell us, in detail, about the Met's finances and how you're going to work with Gelb to get the company back on a decent financial footing, instead of spouting the kind of garbage any PR person, and I include amateurs such as myself, can put together.
• Alan Gordon is "disappointed" and rails against the board and Gelb's "out of control" spending.

The third letter, from an audience member, is on the money in expressing his dismay about the Met's finances, although I think that his comments about "controversial" productions is a vast oversimplification about what's been going on at the Met.


* A total aside: I asked both Tommasini and the Rubin Institute for a copy of this speech, and neither provided it to me. I was not there and I hesitate to say too much about a speech I have not heard or read.

** David Gockley, for example, is a proven master at working with wealthy donors, which has resulted in a much larger SFO endowment and funding for a long string of new works. SFO has also had labor peace during his tenure. Operatic general directors everywhere could learn a lot from him.

Oy Vey

Peter Gelb, June 2014, in a Met press release:

“I’m convinced that the opera is not anti-Semitic,” said the Met’s General Manager, Peter Gelb. “But I’ve also become convinced that there is genuine concern in the international Jewish community that the live transmission of The Death of Klinghoffer would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.” 

He doesn't say "we think showing Klinghoffer will increase anti-Semitism," but the statement is phrased to imply that he is saying that. Instead, he is agreeing with nameless others that there's concern that it's inapporpriate to show Klinghoffer. I thought this was a dumb stance to take in June, and I still think it is a dumb stance.

Peter Gelb, September 2014, according to Commentary:

“He took the outrageous position that challenging this opera would increase anti-Semitism because it would appear that Jews were controlling the arts,” the rabbi recalled. “We said this opera is an affront not only to Jews but also to all decent people, especially those victimized by terrorists. Many 9/11 families have spoken against it. Given this mentality what’s next, an ISIS love story?”

This is the worst possible argument to make: it is outrageous because it is wrong and stupid. All he needs do is to keep repeating "We believe in this opera, we are going to stage it, you cannot make us cancel the production. Thank you for your comments." And needless to say, anyone who wants to challenge or protest or picket the opera itself should do so; free speech and all that.

Stagehands Union and Met Reach Settlement

IATSE Local One, representing the stagehands, and the Met have reached a settlement. Several unions still do not have new contracts, but evidently the Met won't lock them out. From different locations in the press release:

Final negotiations will take place tomorrow with eight smaller unions representing behind-the-scenes Met personnel. All are expected to reach agreements, preventing a potential labor crisis at the nation’s largest performing arts organization.

....

The remaining unions with unsettled contracts include six unions represented by IATSE: Local 751 (box office treasurers), Local 764 (costume and wardrobe), Local 794 (camera operators), Local 798 (wigs, hair, and make-up), Local USA 829 (scenic artists and designers), and Local 829EE (bill poster); Local Four (parks crew); and Local 1456 (painter).  

Concessions on Both Sides

According to Michael Cooper's report, both management and labor made some concessions in the Met's negotiations. What I find most interesting is that the apparent actual wage cuts for labor were much lower than either the labor allegation that the Met wanted 25% or the Met statement that the Met wanted 17%.

In fact, the cuts, which have some unusual features, are so low that one wanders whether all the sabre-rattling and threats were necessary.

No Lockout, Tentative Agreements Reached at Met

A brief message from the Met says that the company has reached agreements with AGMA and AFM. Email from the AFM confirms this.

From the Met:

Please be aware that the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) will be issuing a statement momentarily announcing that the Met has reached agreements with two of its largest unions, AGMA and Local 802.

In addition, the Met announced that the contract deadline has been extended through midnight on Tuesday, August 19, to allow Local One and the other remaining unions with unsettled contracts more time to secure new deals with the institution.

From the AFM:

Statement from Met Opera Musicians and Local 802, AFM, Regarding Tentative Negotiation Agreement

New York, New York—Monday, August 18, 2014—The musicians of the Met Orchestra and their union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, announced that they have reached a tentative agreement with the Metropolitan Opera.

Said Tino Gagliardi, president of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802, AFM, which represents the MET Orchestra musicians, "After many hours of deliberation, today we have reached a tentative agreement which is subject to the approval of Local 802's executive board and ratification by the MET Orchestra Musicians."

NY Times article, Michael Cooper

Met Contract Talk Links

I'll put links worth reading here on a rolling basis. Thanks to everyone who boosted my stats by reading The Met as a Risk-Taker this week.

• Mezzo-soprano Suzanne Mentzer tells you what the stage crew, dressers, hairdressers, and makeup artists do, and why they are so important and well-paid.
• Michael Cooper (Times) writes about some of the issues
• Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera tells you about what opera singers make and why.
• Met Prepares to Lock Out Workers, Michael Cooper
• Met Proposes Federal Mediators, Michael Cooper
• Labor Struggles at the Met Have a Past, Michael Cooper 
• Clocked In....or Locked Out at the Metropolitan Opera, Mark MacNamara, SFCV. Be sure to read the comments!
• The Case for Peter Gelb: The Met's Maligned Manager Isn't as Bad as You Think. James Jorden, NY Observer. A ringing endorsement!
• Met's Labor Woes Divide Opera Fans as Well as Participants, Michael Cooper. Opera Teen is quoted!
• Lois Gray, Drew McManus, and James Jorden talk about the Met's labor problems on WQXR
• Metropolitan Opera and Two Unions Reach a Tentative Deal

Blog postings here and elsewhere:

• I'm Thrilled, Thrilled, I Tell You
• Peter Gelb Wants to Lose His Job
• Peter Gelb and the Met Contract Talks
• Ron Spigelman has a few things to say
• Drew McManus at Adaptistration (link is to his Met tag, so you'll see all articles so tagged)
• The Met as a Risk-Taker, with comments from La Cieca.

Extension 2

Received from the Met:

The Met Announces One-Week Extension of Contracts

To Allow For Independent Financial Review

New York, NY (August 2, 2014) – The Metropolitan Opera, AGMA, and Local 802 announced today in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service that they have agreed to allow an independent financial analyst, Eugene Keilin, to conduct a confidential and independent study of the Met’s finances in an effort to help all parties reach new contractual agreements.

The study commenced today and as a consequence, there will be a further extension of union contracts for approximately one week. Discussions with other unions, including Local One, Local 4, Local 751, Local 764, Local 794, Local 798, Local 829, Local 829BP, Local 1456, and Directors Guild of America, are temporarily on hold.

Earlier this week, the Met announced that it had reached new contract agreements with three unions: Local 32BJ, Local 210, and Local 30.

Extension

A Metropolitan Opera press release says:

• There's a 72-hour extension of the talks, with no lockout yet.
• The Federal Mediation and Reconciliation requested the extension.
• The Met has reached agreements with Local 32BJ, which represents ushers, ticket takers, cleaning staff, porters, security guards, and office service workers; Local 210, which represents the call center; and Local 30, which represents building engineers. 
• The 12 unions whose contracts are not settled are AGMA, Local 802, Local One, Local Four (parks crew); Local 751 (box office treasurers); Local 764 (costume and wardrobe); Local 794 (camera operators); Local 798 (wigs, hair, and make-up); Local 829 (scenic artists and designers); Local 829BP (bill poster); Local 1456 (painter); and Directors Guild of America (directors and stage managers).

I'm Thrilled, Thrilled, I Tell You.

The Met sends me a begging letter the week that they're going to lock out the unionized employees:

No donations this week, thank you. And conductor Ron Spigelman has a few words to say about the Met's leadership.

Peter Gelb Wants to Lose His Job

He's threatening to lock out the Met's unionized workers on August 1:

In letters to the company’s unionized workers, Mr. Gelb, who is seeking to cut pay and benefits, wrote that “if we are not able to reach agreements by July 31 that would enable the Met to operate on an economically sound basis, please plan for the likelihood of a work stoppage beginning Aug. 1.” He added, “I sincerely hope to avoid such an unfortunate event.” 

Mr. Gelb said in an interview, “If we haven’t reached agreements, the Met really has no option in my opinion but to impose a lockout.”

C'mon: this tactic worked out so well in Minnesota. Apparently Gelb and the Met's board aren't aware of the enmity stirred up against the board and management by the 16-month musician lockout, or of the eventual resignation of the executive director and a good chunk of the board. And it's not as though those events are a secret.

Here's Alan Gordon of AGMA, who has not always been sensible in his own pronouncements:

“He has no intention of actually reaching an agreement by Aug. 1 unless it’s his agreement,” Mr. Gordon said of Mr. Gelb. He also said: “Once he locks out employees, his relationship with the performers at the Met is over. They will never respect him again. He’ll be the captain of a ship where the crew is just waiting for a chance to mutiny.”

For once, he is right on.

Peter Gelb, you have a choice: it's called play and talk. I suggest that you keep talking.

Peter Gelb and the Metropolitan Opera Contract Talks

Months ago, I'd opined that Peter Gelb would not destroy the Met with a lockout. The contract negotiations have now been in full swing for months, and you could say that I am no longer sure of this. The public war of words has gotten to the point where it's a little tough to tell the rhetoric from the reality.

Both sides are guilty. Alan Gordon of AGMA started with the inflammatory public statements back in February. He has continued with them ever since, to the point that his union members might consider taking him aside and suggesting he back off.

The Metropolitan Opera's musicians, whose union is the AFM, hired a publicity firm, Geto & de Milly, that has been sending me sundry press releases and reports. Here's a link to their report on "Peter Gelb Mismanagement," which they delivered to the Met Board of Directors.

On the other side, Peter Gelb has made his share of stupid remarks to the press. Here's a paragraph from a New Yorker article by Alex Ross (make sure you read the whole eloquent thing):

Especially disheartening is the fatalistic tone that Gelb has struck in discussing the Met’s biggest crisis, “Klinghoffer” notwithstanding: the ongoing negotiations with the sixteen unions that represent the Met’s great beehive of performers and workers. Gelb has said that expenses have become ruinous and that employees must accept cuts. The unions have responded by blaming Gelb for rising expenses and diminishing receipts. The underlying financial situation is difficult for an outsider to assess, and Gelb may have valid points to make. But he loses credibility when he blames wider cultural trends for the Met’s particular problems: “There aren’t enough new audience members replacing the older ones who are dying off. It’s no secret that the frequency of operagoing in the U.S. is decreasing.” Such actuarial language is unworthy of the leader of one of the world’s largest arts institutions. Incidentally, Gelb has revealed that seventy-five per cent of the Live in HD audience is sixty-five or older. “Those are people who are so old that they can’t go the Met, to the theatre, anymore,” he has said. This, apparently, is the same audience that would have become bloodthirsty after a viewing of “The Death of Klinghoffer.”

I'm going to be a little less polite that Alex is in the above: Insulting your audience members is a really, really bad thing to do. The HD broadcasts are known to be a profit center for the Met, so it is especially bad to insult them. Also, you know, with 1,500 theaters showing Live in HD, most of the audience members live too far away to attend the Met on a regular basis.

As Alex recounts, this isn't the first of Gelb's PR blunders. He's still defending the Lepage Ring. He tried to ban Opera News reviewers from reviewing the Met.

The Met has a communications department, and I'm willing to bet that the folks there are competent, and that they'd be happy to help keep Peter Gelb's foot out of his mouth. I have to conclude that he is either not consulting them or not listening to them.

At a time when tense contract negotiations are going on, he really ought to consult them and listen to them. (And Alan Gordon should get some help too, before the chorus smothers him under their costumes o keep him from making things worse.)

Lastly, there are a couple of things that I hope everyone will keep in mind as the contract negotiations continue:

• The Met's annual budget has gone up by approximately 50% since Peter Gelb took over from Joe Volpe.
• Somebody signed those contracts that Peter Gelb now says are killing the Met.
• That person's name is Peter Gelb.

He should be taking some responsibility for the current situation, in other words.

I said a while back that the Met board couldn't really replace Gelb, given that people who can run a gigantic arts organization aren't exactly thick on the ground. Present circumstances suggests that the Met might, in fact, be better off without him.

And I had a thought the other day: David Gockley retires from San Francisco Opera in two more seasons. He has done a sterling job of controlling costs, working well with the unions, planning for the future, increasing the company's endowment, and hauling in big contributions. If anyone can get the Met under control for the long term, he's the one.

Defending the Indefensible

The Times has a puff piece on the dismantling of The Machine, that nasty unit set used for the Met's current Ring production, which is going into storage for the nonce. Ho hum, except for the quotations from Peter Gelb, who inserts his foot farther into his digestive system with every comment:

Mr. Gelb suggested that the machine had become a scapegoat. “One of the reasons the ‘Ring’ has been criticized so much is people disagree with his approach, not the machine,” he said, referring to Mr. Lepage. “The machine is a victim, not entirely innocent because of its creakiness, but, you know, every production at the Met makes some noise.” 

He said he had not lost his enthusiasm for the machine. “It worked far more times than it didn’t work, and when it didn’t work sometimes, the machine was blamed when it wasn’t its fault.” He mentioned a moment in “Das Rheingold” last month when a jam on a separate “track-and-trolley” device prevented acrobats from zooming over the stage. Still, that problem forced the crew to stop the machine. 

He added that while it had delayed that 2011 “Die Walküre,” it had never interrupted a performance. “I’ve been to Broadway shows where the performance was stopped and the audience sat with the house lights on because things weren’t working,” he said. “That never happened to us.”

Yeah, that 45-minute delay to reboot the thing for Die Walkuere, who cares?

Nobody believes a word Peter Gelb says about the production at this point; actually, people disagree with the approach (brainless) and The Machine (worthless, dull). I'd suggest that he cut his losses by keeping his mouth shut.

Now We Know

A press release from the Met announces some upcoming conducting engagements for Music Director James Levine, starting next spring. The details make it rather clear why the Met has been so closed-mouthed about Levine's health. That fall in August, 2011? It left him partially paralyzed.

He's scheduled to conduct:

• A Met Orchestra concert on May 19, 2013, at Carnegie
• Falstaff new production in 2013-14
• Cosi fan tutte revival in 2013-14
• Wozzeck revival in 2013-14

 Despite his condition, his doctors "expressed uniform optimism about his ability to resume conducting," but:

While his upper body strength has returned and he is progressing with his rehabilitation, the injuries have left him temporarily unable to walk. For the time being, he will conduct from a motorized wheelchair, which he also uses to move about. In anticipation of his return, the Met’s technical department is designing customized, elevating podiums that will be utilized on the Carnegie Hall stage and in the Met’s orchestra pit.

I saw a rumor at Parterre Box that Levine was seen in a wheelchair there recently. If he was there, well, yep.

Then there's this:

Dr. Stanley Fahn, the H. Houston Merritt Professor of Neurology at Columbia University, has been treating Levine for the disease in recent years. He said, “Since 1994, Maestro Levine has shown symptoms of Parkinson disease. They mainly affected his legs and also caused a mild tremor in his left hand. Fortunately, the symptoms have changed little over the years and have been suppressed with medication. This lack of progression indicates a benign form of Parkinson’s, rather than the more typical form, in which symptoms steadily worsen. In the past, Maestro Levine’s symptoms were aggravated by the stress of severe back pain. Now that he is pain-free, his mild Parkinsonism should have little impact on his quality of life and his return to conducting. His upper body strength and dexterity are quite remarkable.”

Hoo boy. I will admit to some skepticism about the extent of his involvement in the Met going forward. I suspect there's a photo of Otto Klemperer on his desk these days.

Dan Wakin interviewed Levine yesterday and has a story on the Times front page right now.

Full press release after the cut.