As the Metropolitan Opera’s new HD cinema season is about to open in Australia, General Manager Peter Gelb explains what makes a good program and discusses some of the highlights in the year ahead. In an honest and open chat, he talks to Clive Paget about the post-pandemic problem with returning audiences, how new voices have saved the art form from late 20th-century killjoy composers, and the hurdles facing Russian singers with respect to the Anna Netrebko problem.
How do you go about building a cinema season? How many operas in cinemas are enough, or how many would be too many?
The pandemic has made making these decisions harder than ever, because our audience has not fully returned, by any means, to pre-pandemic levels. We had reached what we thought was just the right balance and we had a more than healthy, I guess an unprecedented average of about 250,000 people attending. Depending upon the popularity of the piece and the casting, it would vary between a difficult new work or perhaps a Wagner work of 125,000 or 150,000, to a piece like Carmen, which could have as many as 400,000.
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