The Year the Metropolitan Opera Declared War on the Critics

Can the art of opera ever escape the suffocating grip of its magnificent past? Judging from the striking array of contemporary works that reached American stages in the past year, we might be closer to that goal than at any time in recent decades. The Met, which in the mid-twentieth century routinely presented entire seasons devoid of living composers, featured no fewer than five modern scores in 2024: John Adams’s “El Niño,” Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded,” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar.” My operagoing year also included Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko’s “Chornobyldorf,” at the Prototype Festival; Oliver Leith’s “Last Days,” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Damian Geter’s “American Apollo,” at Des Moines Metro Opera; and Missy Mazzoli’s “The Listeners,” at Opera Philadelphia.

For those who think of opera as an antique genre preoccupied with musty subject matter, the above-named works might prompt a reconsideration. They address, variously, the birth of Christ, the suicide of Virginia Woolf, drone warfare, the murder of Federico García Lorca, the apocalyptic recent history of Ukraine, a Kurt Cobain-like rock star, the homoerotic art of John Singer Sargent, and a cult society built around ambient sound. Their musical languages are no less diverse. If Puts’s pastiches of late-Romantic and early-modern styles put you off, you can try the roiling electronic drones of “Chornobyldorf” or the fractured, glitchy textures of “Last Days.” R. & B. and gospel course through “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”; “Ainadamar” is inflamed by flamenco. “The Listeners”—to my ears the most formidable achievement in this crop—balances fragmentary lyricism against drone and glissando, to darkly hypnotic effect.

Needless to say, none of these works is destined for universal appeal. We lack a lingua franca that would make such a breakthrough possible, and given the range of voices that beg for representation, that’s all to the good. It’s dismaying, then, to find an operatic leader claiming that there is only one viable path forward—namely, “operas with rich melodic scores,” in the vein of Puccini. That figure is Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. In an opinion essay published in the Times in November, Gelb argues that opera had “turned inward” in the second half of the twentieth century, gravitating toward “experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that didn’t appeal to large audiences.” He chides unnamed critics for pushing this unappetizing diet and for bad-mouthing the ostensibly more digestible fare that he has lately been offering at the Met.

At least one of these journalistic enemies of the people is readily identified. In October, the New York Post reported that Gelb had been publicly grumbling about Zachary Woolfe’s pan of “Grounded” in the Times. At a fund-raising event on the Upper East Side, Gelb said, “There’s a great deal of resentment on the part of some critics . . . about the idea that music should be approachable by a large audience.” Such putative naysayers champion “the operas of Elliott Carter or pieces that I don’t believe would have popular success.” In fact, Carter, an obdurate modernist who tended to receive reviews of the grudgingly respectful type, wrote only one opera, the forty-seven-minute-long “What Next?” As far as I know, neither Woolfe nor anyone else has ever demanded that it be performed at the Met.

In the Times piece, Gelb returned to the theme of audience-alienating avant-gardists, singling out a new target:

György Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” an operatic farce about the end of the world that premiered in 1978, was described by the composer as an “anti-anti opera.” It featured 12 automobile horns and an absurdist plot that explores arachnophobia, among other unusual themes. I met Ligeti in the 1990s when I was the head of a record label and visited his Hamburg apartment. He ordered me to quickly shut the door before any spiders sneaked in.

This sneering put-down is even more bizarre than the swipe at Carter’s phantom operatic output. Gelb reduces Ligeti, a canonical twentieth-century figure, to a marginal weirdo who wrote esoteric gibberish. He has apparently forgotten that Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” and Requiem reached an audience of untold millions by way of Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and that virtuosos like Yuja Wang regularly include the composer’s Études on their programs. The late Kaija Saariaho, whose opera “L’Amour du Loin” had a successful run at the Met in 2016 (and whose final masterpiece, “Innocence,” is destined for a future Met season), acknowledged Ligeti’s impact on her dense, smoldering textures. As for “Le Grand Macabre,” it’s a staple of European houses—this fall, it appeared at the Prague National Opera, the Bavarian State Opera, and the Teatro Massimo, in Palermo—and it sold out three performances at the New York Philharmonic in 2010. It deserves to be seen at the Met, though it will evidently have to wait until Gelb moves on.

Who, really, are these “experimental, sometimes atonal” composers who tyrannized opera in the latter part of the twentieth century? If you look at playbills for American opera houses between 1950 and 1990, you see dozens of non-radical, even hummable scores by the likes of Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, William Grant Still, Jack Beeson, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Ward, Douglas Moore, Dominick Argento, and William Bolcom. A few of these showed up at the Met; a great many more found a home at New York City Opera. Gelb’s notion of a decades-long melodic drought ending with Philip Glass and John Adams shows a basic indifference to opera history.

Gelb is just as hazy when he looks to the deeper past. “History has proved time and time again that the status quo on artistic works is often wrong,” he writes. “When Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’ had its premiere at La Scala in 1904, it was a critical flop.” Indeed, it was. But it also flopped with the public, as Gelb would have realized if he had consulted an informative page on his company’s Web site: “There were animal and bird calls from the audience during the dawn scene, laughter when Butterfly presented her child to Sharpless, and shouts of ‘She is pregnant!’ when a draft caught and billowed the lead singer’s costume—all in addition to the typical whistles, hisses, and boos.” Gelb’s populist tactic of pitting nice audiences against nasty critics belies the complex reality of how the repertory comes into being.

The Met’s chieftain has had prior issues with free expression in the cultural press. In 2012, he tried to stop Opera News—then owned by the Metropolitan Opera Guild—from publishing mildly critical reviews of Met performances. This fixation is a pity, since opera, like any art form, thrives on debate, disagreement, the back-and-forth of the public sphere. The fact that the Met is staging so many new works is fundamentally praiseworthy. That some of them will go over better than others—with audiences as well as with critics—is not only inevitable but healthy. New opera is an inherently flop-prone enterprise, as Joshua Kosman points out in an online response to Gelb’s rant: “It takes ten new operas to produce one good one. If you whine to (or in) the press the other nine times, you’re not really in it for the long haul.”

Believing that you possess a perfect understanding of what the people want is a poor way to run an opera company—or any organization, up to and including a nation. What we call the “audience” is an ever-shifting assemblage of tastes, expectations, experiences, levels of knowledge, degrees of passion. The global musical landscape has undergone so many tectonic changes in the past century and a half that no one can claim to see it whole. The idea of emulating Puccini is as undesirable as it is impossible. The man himself would have disdained such a move. In 1920, Puccini attended a performance of Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder,” hoping for a blast of radical energy from the progenitor of atonality. Instead, as he told Alma Mahler-Werfel, he heard a mere rehash of Wagner—“Gurrelieder” being one of Schoenberg’s pre-atonal creations. Puccini didn’t feel surprised or challenged. He left at intermission.

Fifteen Notable Recordings from 2024

• Bára Gísladóttir, “VAPE,” “Hringla,” “COR”; Bára Gísladóttir, Eva Ollikainen conducting the Iceland Symphony (Dacapo)

• Louise Bertin, “Fausto”; Karine Deshayes, Karina Gauvin, Ante Jerkunica, Nico Darmanin, Marie Gautrot, Diana Axentii, Thibault de Damas, Christophe Rousset conducting Les Talens Lyriques and the Flemish Radio Choir (Bru Zane)

• Kali Malone, “All Life Long”; Macadam Ensemble, Anima Brass, Malone, Stephen O’Malley (Ideologic Organ)

• Ives, Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-4, Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Stefan Jackiw, Jeremy Denk (Nonesuch)

• Bruckner, Symphony No. 7, Mason Bates, “Resurrexit”; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

• Weill, Symphonies No. 1 and 2, “The Seven Deadly Sins”; Joana Mallwitz conducting the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra, with Katharine Mehrling, Michael Porter, Simon Bode, Michael Nagl, Oliver Zwarg (DG)

• Saariaho, “Adriana Mater”; Fleur Barron, Axelle Fanyo, Nicholas Phan, Christopher Purves, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Symphony Chorus (DG)

• Corelli, Violin Sonatas, Op. 5; Rachel Barton Pine, David Schrader, John Mark Rozendaal, Brandon Acker (Cedille)

• Obrecht, Missa Scaramella (reconstructed by Fabrice Fitch) and other works; Andrew Kirkman leading the Binchois Consort (Hyperion)

• “Music in Time of War”: music of Debussy and Komitas; Kirill Gerstein, Ruzan Mantashyan, Katia Skanavi, Thomas Adès (myrios)

• Fauré, Complete Works; various artists (Erato)

• Louis Beydts, Melodies and Songs; Cyrille Dubois, Tristan Raës (Aparté)

• Sarah Hennies, “Zeitgebers,” “Clock Dies,” “Motor Tapes”; Ensemble 0, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Dedalus (New World)

• Chopin, Études; Yunchan Lim (Decca)

• Jürg Frey, String Quartet No. 4; Quatuor Bozzini (QB) ♦