Metropolitan Opera

Peter Gelb. Peter Gelb’s career has followed a singular arc that began with his teenage years as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera and led to his appointment, in August 2006, as the storied company’s 16th general manager. After taking the helm at the Met, Mr. Gelb began to launch initiatives aimed at revitalizing opera and connecting it to a wider audience.… See full bio.

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Story: The Metropolitan Opera has been around since 1883! Learn more about the Met: The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883. The first Metropolitan Opera House was built on Broadway and 39th Street by a group of wealthy businessmen who wanted their own opera house. In the company’s early years, the management changed course several times, first performing everything in Italian (even Carmen and Lohengrin), then everything in German (even Aida and Faust), before finally settling into a policy of performing most works in their original language, with some notable exceptions. Hansel und Gretel was the first complete opera broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera on Christmas Day 1931. Regular Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts from December to April quickly made the Metropolitan Opera a permanent presence in communities throughout the United States and Canada. In 1977, the Metropolitan began a regular series of televised productions with a performance of La Bohème viewed by more than four million people on public television. “The Metropolitan Opera Presents” has made seventy-eight complete Met performances available to a huge audience around the world. Many of these performances have been issued on videotape, laserdisc, and DVD. In 1995, the Metropolitan introduced “Met Titles,” a unique system of simultaneous translation. “Met Titles” appear on individual computerized screens mounted in specially built railings at the back of each row of seats, for those members of the audience who wish to utilize them, but with minimum distraction for those who do not. “Met Titles” are provided for all Metropolitan Opera performances, and have recently expanded to include Spanish and German for all operas. Each season the Metropolitan stages more than two hundred opera performances in New York. More than 800,000 people attend the performances in the opera house during the season, and millions more experience the Met through advanced new media distribution initiatives and state-of-the-art technology. (Learn more at: http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/about/ourstory.aspx)

Evidence of Impact Summary:

The Metropolitan Opera Association is described as the most renowned opera association globally. More specifically, nearly every expert cited their HD opera broadcasts as offering a distinct contribution to opera by giving quality access to viewers nationwide.
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Organization Strengths Summary:

Multiple experts consider this organizations leadership as a strength. Others note national reach as a meaningful asset. One expert called out the organizations program design and their marketing as distinct strengths.
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Areas for Improvement Summary:

Multiple experts believe that the Metropolitan Opera Association could expand programming and achieve greater impact. Others note opportunities to expand outreach efforts.
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Peter Gelb’s career has followed a singular arc that began with his teenage years as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera and led to his appointment, in August 2006, as the storied company’s 16th general manager. After taking the helm at the Met, Mr. Gelb began to launch initiatives aimed at revitalizing opera and connecting it to a wider audience. One of his fundamental goals is to recruit the world’s great theater directors to enhance the theatricality of the Met’s productions and complement the extraordinary musical standards established by Music Director James Levine. Mr. Gelb is also committed to securing more engagements each season from the world’s top singers. One of the most successful and groundbreaking of his new initiatives is The Met: Live in HD, a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning series of live performance transmissions shown in high definition in movie theaters across six continents, which has sold nearly five million tickets since its inception in December 2006. Mr. Gelb has also made a priority of revitalizing the repertory with new productions of both classic operas and modern masterpieces. Since he took over with the 2006–07 season, the Met has presented 27 new stagings by some of the world’s greatest theater, film, and opera directors, including Patrice Chéreau, Richard Eyre, William Kentridge, Robert Lepage, the late Anthony Minghella, Mark Morris, Jack O’Brien, Bartlett Sher, Zhang Yimou, and Mary Zimmerman, among others. He has also capitalized on new media technology to share Met performances with a wider global audience than ever before. In September 2006, Sirius Satellite Radio (now Sirius XM) launched Metropolitan Opera Radio, an around-the-clock channel broadcasting live performances each week as well as historic performances from the Met’s vast radio archive. The recently launched Met Player service makes HD, standard-definition, and audio performances available online on a subscription basis. The Met also now presents free, live streaming of performances from its website once a week with support from RealNetworks. Other audience-building initiatives launched by Mr. Gelb include free open houses for the public; a free live transmission of the opening-night performance onto giant screens at Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza; the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Ticket program, which offers select orchestra seats for weekday performances at the dramatically reduced price of $20; and the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, a contemporary art exhibition space in the Met lobby that presents new work connected to Met productions by such artists as John Currin, William Kentridge, Julian Schnabel, and others. Mr. Gelb’s extensive and varied experience in the field of classical music has prepared him for the considerable challenge of overseeing both the artistic and the administrative aspects of one of the largest performing arts institutions in the world. As an award-winning producer of films, recordings, radio broadcasts, telecasts, concert events, operas, and festivals, he worked with many of the world’s leading artists prior to becoming general manager, including Vladimir Horowitz, Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Luciano Pavarotti, and Plácido Domingo. His close association with Maestro Levine extends back two decades and spans recordings and film (Fantasia 2000). In 1992, Mr. Gelb produced both the stage and film versions of Julie Taymor’s first opera production, Oedipus Rex, for Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival. Also for that Japanese festival, in 1994 he commissioned an early opera staging by Robert Lepage, La Damnation de Faust, a reconceived version of which was presented at the Met in 2008-09. As president of CAMI Video, a division of Columbia Artists Management that Mr. Gelb founded in 1982, he served as executive producer of the Met’s television series “The Metropolitan Opera Presents” for six years. He produced 25 televised productions for the Met, including the landmark 1990 telecast of Richard Wagner’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by Levine. The 17-hour program was broadcast over four consecutive nights on PBS (and subsequently released on DVD), making history for monolithic programming of opera on television. While at CAMI, he produced and occasionally directed more than 50 programs for television featuring such artists as Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Claudio Abbado. His television productions have earned 13 primetime Emmy Awards, including six for Mr. Gelb as a producer and director. Among Mr. Gelb’s Emmy Award-winning films are Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia and Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic, both with Maysles Films. Mr. Gelb received a Peabody Award for his four-part television series Marsalis on Music (1995), in which jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis introduces young audiences to the full experience of classical music and jazz. He has also won Peabody Awards for the 1986 concert film Horowitz in Moscow and for the Met’s Live in HD series. In 2001, he co-directed and produced a 90-minute documentary entitled Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks, about the making of the hit Broadway show’s cast album. The film was awarded a Grammy in 2002. From 1995 until joining the Met, Mr. Gelb was president of Sony Classical, one of the largest international classical record labels. He led the company through a period of notable growth and creativity, expanding the focus of recording projects to include best-selling film scores, including the Academy Award-winning scores for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Tan Dun, The Red Violin by John Corigliano, and Titanic by James Horner, while preserving the label’s tradition of recording Broadway musicals and maintaining an extensive catalogue of classical works by many of the best known artists in the world. He also initiated Sony Classical’s program of commissioning new music, something no other classical label had attempted in recent years. Mr. Gelb’s career in classical music began at the age of 17 when he went to work as an office boy for Sol Hurok. Training from an early age under the legendary impresario instilled in him the kind of entrepreneurship and creative acumen that has since distinguished his work, from managing the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s historic 1979 tour to China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which made headlines around the world; to reviving Vladimir Horowitz’s concert career in 1980 and producing the famed pianist’s historic return to Russia in 1986; to the Tan Dun premiere Symphony 1997, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, which Mr. Gelb commissioned in partnership with the Chinese government to be performed at the handover of Hong Kong to China. Under Mr. Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera has once again taken a leadership role among opera houses and other arts organizations, not only in the U.S. but around the world, providing a model for other groups with its groundbreaking artistic and public initiatives. Mr. Gelb today shares his message regularly through keynote and featured addresses at conferences here and abroad, including at Harvard University, Yale University, New York University, the Miller Theater at Columbia University, Showa University in Japan, the European Opera Conference in Paris, the Chautauqua Institution, the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the American Academy in Berlin, and the MIDEM conference. In June 2008 he received an honorary doctorate from the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. Time magazine named Mr. Gelb a 2008 honoree of the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people. In January 2010 he was named an Officer dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Cultural Minister of France. Mr. Gelb, who is 56, is the son of Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of The New York Times, and writer Barbara Gelb. He is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and has two sons.

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