Peter Gelb – The Divo

All of Peter Gelb’s big problems running the Metropolitan Opera only got bigger during the pandemic.

- By Shawn McCreesh. Photographs by 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.

During the months of the pandemic inside the darkened opera house, pieces of the dormant machinery that powers the mammoth sets began to rust, break, and fall apart. The Met furloughed 1,000 people; the orchestra and chorus went unpaid. Gelb waived his own salary for nine months. That time in which the hall sat empty, its innards decaying, cost the Met $150 million in revenue and threw its problems into relief. The audience? Old. The big donors? Older and fewer. The financial picture? Bleak. The art form? Intimidating. In its 138-year history, the institution had never been so imperiled. After all, the 70-year-old New York City Opera, with which it shared Lincoln Center, ran aground in 2013. Could it happen to the Met, too?