Meeting of the Minds

David Rockwell in conversation with Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera.

Rockwell and Gelb photo by Jeffrey Mosler
DR: I wanted to talk about transformation, which, in the world of
architecture and restaurants and hotels, is more of a subtext, but my
contention is equally relevant. I thought focusing on transformation was
interesting-particularly in a world where software matters more and
things change quickly. My earliest memories of New York were theater and
restaurants, places that create a deep experience.
PG: You certainly have been responsible for transforming the restaurant experience in a huge way.

DR: I think architects place such a premium on permanence, but in
fact, nothing is really permanent. In hospitality, there’s an overlap.
I’m wondering, as someone who is acknowledged for bringing
transformation to the Met, do you think that’s critical to keeping the
Met relevant?
PG: Well, any business, and any art form that’s been around a
long time, has to go through an ever-changing process. It has to be
constantly transforming itself if it wants to survive. And even
businesses that think that everything is okay, find out in a very
unexpected and unpleasant way, that it’s not. So, coasting doesn’t work
in any form of life. Unless it’s downhill skiing. I was appointed to run
the Met partly because I had not run another opera house, and because
the members of the board who chose me realized a change was absolutely
necessary. They didn’t quite understand what kind of transformation it
would be, but they knew they were losing their audience.

DR: As long as you don’t change what people don’t want changed.
PG: People don’t always know what they want or don’t want
changed. There’s a kind of knee-jerk [reaction] amongst an older
audience that change is something to be very afraid of. But, numbers
don’t lie, and the Met is losing its audience. It’s getting older and
smaller. The question is whether it would be a change that would be
successful or not. And part of the problem in that phase is that,
because it had been successfully coasting, at least theatrically, for so
many years, change then seems more dramatic and potentially more
damaging to those who don’t want change.

DR: I hadn’t really thought of this before, but I know a little
bit about how far ahead it takes to put on a production. So, change or
transformation at the Met has to, by definition, happen over a very
extended period of time, just because of the time it takes to get things
into production.
PG: Absolutely. I knew that I couldn’t wait three or four years.
Operas, as you point out, are planned so far ahead, I did not have the
luxury to wait until the cycle that had been planned to play out. So I
immediately jumpstarted a number of productions, in a way that typically
is not done in the opera world. My first opening night as general
manager was [film director] Anthony Minghella’s Madame Butterfly. And that sent a signal that the Met was looking at things differently, aesthetically.

DR: And it happened to be a huge win.
PG: It was a huge win, and as a producer, you know and I know,
things can always look great on paper. But you never know until the
curtain goes up and then comes down at the end of an evening whether you
really have a success or not. So, we were very fortunate in that most
of the new productions that were put on the stage in the first couple of
years of my tenure were successful, and did make an impression on the
public in a positive way. At the same time, we were changing things by
inviting top stage directors who had never worked here before because
opera is one of the most complicated, if not the most complicated,
performing art forms. It’s not just a huge theater and a stage that has
to be filled with scenery. It has to work with an orchestra and a cast
of very fragile opera singers.

DR: Many of whom, I assume, resist any kind of transformation.
PG: What’s fortunate is that there’s a whole new generation of
opera singers who believe that acting is important and that full
representation of your characters, through the singing and the acting of
a role, is what makes the performance. They are also very fragile. They
have to get on the stage in front of 4,000 people and not crack their
high notes.

DR: So it’s artist and athlete.
PG: It’s the most athletic and exciting and thrilling of the
performing arts for that reason. Because the public comes to hear these
singers. Not just for the interpretation, but also to see if they’ve
made it.

DR: Someone else who’s contributing to this issue is Richard
Wurman, who founded the TED conference. The first time I was invited to
speak at TED, Richard made it clear that he wanted people who were
talking about things they were amateurs at, in the best sense-things you
were passionate about. Do you feel like part of the benefit you’ve had
in creating a transformation at the Met is coming to it with an
outsider’s eye?
PG: Yes and no. I think I have an outsider’s eye in the sense
that I’m not an East Side opera nut. A lot of the people who end up in
administrative positions in opera houses are former musicians or
singers. And, very often they are so fanatical themselves that they
don’t have a proper sense of perspective. On the other hand, I’ve worked
with opera singers, and even though I haven’t run an opera house, I’ve
worked as a producer, worked with talent in this field, and loved opera
all my life. I’m coming to it with a healthy sense of perspective, I
think, but certainly, a very developed sense of what to do as a
producer. Because of my background in the media, I have been able to
emphasize the theatrical side of opera, which is essential for it to
continue, but also the ability to bring opera to a larger public and to
strip away all the layers of dust.

DR: To see [movie] marquees that feature operas in the Met is just thrilling.
PG: Yes. We just added Russia, China, and Israel. We have 50
countries that are taking our live, high-definition transmissions into
movie theaters; 1,600 movie theaters on six continents. And that has
created a whole new surge of interest in the opera experience. What’s
remarkable is the Met is one of the biggest opera audiences in the house
itself-about 850,000 people a year. That only represents 20 percent of
our paying audience. Eighty percent of our audience is seeing the Met in
arts centers and theaters in other countries.

DR: Same with the NFL. That’s something like 93 percent.
PG: This process began sort of using sports as a model. Because I
wanted to kind of strengthen the bond between the opera fanatics and
the opera house, by making the content available all the time, in every
possible platform. We started a Sirius/XM radio station. We have our own
channel, where we have live audio feeds three or four times a week,
plus we archive operas the rest of the time; we have them streaming on
our website. We have every live show we do at the movie theaters, that
has a secondary life in television, and, on a subscription opera channel
service, we have a pay service. It’s transformed the relationship
between our company and our public. It also changed the relationship
between the performers and the public. And it helped in our casting,
because I’m able to get all the top stars who want to sing here more
often than ever before, because of the visibility. Anna Netrebko, the
reigning Russian soprano star who opens our season in Anna Bolena,
knows that two weeks later, she’s going to be in a matinee and open our
high-definition season. And she’ll be seen by a quarter of a million
people, everywhere from Moscow to Morocco to Miami, in a giant movie
screen, live.

DR: You mentioned that you’ve always loved the performing arts.
When you were young, were there experiences you had that fostered your
interest?
PG: Sure. I had great experiences because my parents were very
swept up in the cultural scene in New York. My father, at the time I was
a little boy, was the No. 2 drama critic at the [New York]
Times. He went on to become the managing editor. He and my mother used
to take me to the theater all the time. I remember seeing Hamlet when I was five years old. And when I was a teenager, I actually worked here as an usher.

DR: Do you remember who played Hamlet?
PG: Donald Madden, who died a couple of years ago. That’s a
performance I remember, as well as some performances I’ve seen just a
few months ago. My father was very good friends with [Public Theater
Founder] Joe Papp, and I remember being taken to the early versions of
Shakespeare in the Park, even before they built the Delacorte Theater.
So I have great memories of the theater.

DR: There’s a lot of interesting work done in technology and
architecture. And you’ve really embraced technology. Are there pros and
cons?
PG: Any artist [knows that] technology is only as good as the
service in which you place it. And there are some directors and
designers now who have figured out how to use modern technology in their
visual vocabulary and in the service of their storytelling. A perfect
example of that is Robert Lepage [director and designer of the Met’s
current Ring Cycle], who thinks in terms of visual effects going
back to the 16th century, as well as the most modern ones. So he’s
interested in the whole range of everything that’s ever been
accomplished technologically, from the earliest days of theater and
pre-theater, to what has not yet been seen. For example, in the next
installment of the Ring, “Siegfried,” that opens in October, there is a
technology that actually simulates a real 3-D experience. Those planks
[the basis of LePage’s set], when they’re in the right position, with
the right projection on them, are meant to represent the underbelly of
the forest where Siegfried grew up, which is the opening image of the
opera. It’s going to blow the audience away, because you actually see
the snakes slithering and branches moving, and it looks like you’re in a
very real theatrical place that is unlike any place anybody in this
opera has ever seen before.

DR: I’m struck by the mammoth size of your productions and the
fact that there’s a different one every day. Any thoughts about how you
create a system that embraces transformation?
PG: The system that we’ve tried to set up is one in which we have
multiple goals. So, theatrically, it’s a question of breaking new
ground in the service of storytelling. For me, the best told story is
one that works on multiple levels, so that the older opera audience who
knows, say Don Giovanni well, will appreciate a new telling of it.

DR: With very little technology in that case, right?
PG: In the case of our new one, it’s fairly straightforward, but
with a very modern aesthetic sensibility. The way we’re achieving
transformation is through a combination of theatrical innovation, which
embraces technology, and opening the art form up to the widest possible
public. Everything that we do sort of tries to address those goals.

DR: You make all your sets yourselves, right?
PG: Not always. Sometimes they’re made elsewhere. But the Met is a
remarkable center of artisans. You know, we have some of the greatest
scenic painters in the world working here.

DR: I’m impressed by the fact that one day you’ll see this
amazingly crafted, big physical presence, and the next a very sleek
thing.
PG: When the Met was built in 1966, it was the most modern and
technically advanced opera house. Now, 40 years later, it’s in need of
major upgrades. And so we’ve been doing it in a patchwork fashion. In
the period when the Met was built, the acoustical science of building
concert halls and opera houses was not very advanced. And the attempt to
create great acoustical halls, to match the great acoustics of the
halls of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when building materials
were different, resulted in some of the worst acoustically efficient
concert halls and opera houses. The Met, miraculously, somehow escaped
this problem. The difference between an opera house and a concert hall,
of course, is that there’s a fourth acoustical wall, which is the
scenery. So, the scenery has to be built properly in order to complete
the acoustics of an opera house.

DR: Do you have any ability to computer model that for scenic designers?
PG: No. But we just give intuitive advice. We know that scenery
is built out of hard substances, and that singers who are placed in
front of the scenery that fill up a large part of the stage, and who are
in the right position downstage usually sound pretty good. And we know
that not to have wide, open spaces into the wings and upstage.
Avoiding those kinds of things results in better acoustics. This set of
the Ring is acoustically superior. I mean, Jimmy Levine, our music
director, when he first heard the singers on this set, was ecstatic.
Because it’s what every conductor dreams of- having a set which is going
to propel the sound out into the audience.

DR: Any thoughts about transformation at the performer level? I
think it’s fascinating to think about knowing the singers, and then
seeing them take on the role in the physical environment, where the
transformation’s happening from their point of view.
PG: It’s really hard to underestimate how difficult it is for a
singer on the stage of a huge opera house like the Met, where they have
to have a voice that’s big enough to command the space. And the biggest
challenge from a theatrical point of view is to give a dramatic
performance that makes the audience believe the singer is not simply
worrying about their vocal production. So, it’s very rare that you can
find [that kind of] a singer-although, increasingly less so, because of
what singers understand today, and the directors with whom they’re
working. I remember when Minghella worked with the cast of Madame Butterfly
on his first day of rehearsal. He wouldn’t let them sing, which was
unheard of. He had them read the libretto because he wanted them to do
something that singers very rarely do, which is to listen to each other.
The best singers are learning that they have to be able to give a
complete theatrical performance. Deborah Voigt took on the role of
Brünnhilde here in our Ring Cycle. If you were sitting here in the front rows of the audience, or in the back of the house, you had the sense of, here is somebody. She was Brünnhilde.

DR: Do you have a desk in the orchestra?
PG: Because I spend a lot of time there, making sure that the
directors I’ve hired feel good about working here, I’ve sort of moved my
headquarters. It’s not really a desk. The way the Met is set up in
rehearsal modes, we have lots of tech desks. They’re sort of tabletops
that are laid on top of chairs. And we have benches that we put on top
of the arms of chairs so we can raise up. And I have a laptop, a phone,
and I do my business there. At the same time, I can keep an eye on
what’s going on on the stage, and put my two cents in if necessary.

DR: It’s an interesting analogy, though, to other worlds of
technology where there’s a strong curator at the center of the
experience. And being right there allows artists to feel like they can
collaborate in perhaps a different way, and that they’re supported. What
are the parts of the transformation of the Met that haven’t happened
yet that you look forward to, if those exist?
PG: I think there are some parts of the transformation that will
never happen. It will never be possible to replace a large part of the
older musical repertoire with new pieces.

DR: Because of volume or because of love for the old productions?
PG: Because of love and because of the talent. I think that the great, timeless pieces have not been surpassed.

DR: Didn’t you refer to opera as the pop music of its day?
PG: It wasn’t exactly the pop music of its day. But it was much
more popular, that’s for sure. And it certainly had the support of the
entire intellectual creative community in any one country.

DR: Although, who knows? I would imagine, as we look 20, 30 years
out, some of the things you’re doing here will create momentum for new
works.
PG: We’re pushing for new works all the time.

DR: And is the dining experience ever going to mirror what’s happening with the opera?
PG: Well, most interesting restaurants vary their repertoire all the time, don’t they?

DR: Do you feel like the transformation of Lincoln Center has given new energy to the Met?
PG: I’m actually a believer that the energy at Lincoln Center
comes from within the buildings, not the exterior. What gives a theater
or a cultural center like Lincoln Center, or a city like New York, its
sense of dynamism is the individual efforts that go on within the
confines of each institution. It’s like every great restaurant in New
York.

DR: Nothing makes a restaurant design look better than a great chef.
PG: Right.

DR: Well, here’s looking forward to my opportunity to work on this incredible stage.
PG: I look forward to that.