Brother, Can You Spare $200 Million?

Why the Metropolitan Opera needed a Saudi lifeline.

- Rachel Corbett

Peter Gelb (standing) at a gala honoring Daisy Soros, seated with her son Jeffrey.

“IT WAS NOT A difficult decision,” Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb says of accepting up to $200 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He has dealt with mounting debt, declining sales, and an aging patron class during his nearly 20 years on the job, and the pandemic gutted more than $150 million in revenue from the Met. In 2023, when Gelb was invited to meet in Paris with culture minister Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, who a few years earlier had bought the Leonardo da Vinci painting Salvator Mundi for $450 million, he didn't hesitate. “In spite of repressive aspects of the Saudi regime,” he says, the board's leadership supported the deal he brought back with “unanimity.” The plan—to spend the Met's normally dark Februarys on the outskirts of Riyadh—would have covered a majority of the opera house's financial needs through at least 2032.

Then, in April, Saudi Arabia called it off, blaming the war in Iran, and left Gelb scrambling for a way out of a fresh crisis. Facing a liquidity crunch and regional conflict, the Saudis are turning off the cash spigot across the board, shutting down funding for LIV Golf and scaling back plans for the estimated $500 billion megacity project Neom. The reneged opera deal, which had been announced when it was still in a “memorandum of understanding” phase, is a major setback for the nation’s largest performing-arts institution.