“I’ve been hearing that the opera audience was dying out for decades now,” says Perryn Leech, managing director of Houston Grand Opera, which launched its first Ring cycle earlier this year and has just completed a New York tour. Elsewhere in the United States, whose opera companies receive nothing like the same government support as their European counterparts, the art form has had a notable upswing in places. Yet the main opera houses of London, Milan, Munich, Vienna and Stockholm were all packed to 95% capacity or greater in the past season. Photograph: Kathy Willens /AP Photograph: Kathy Willens/AP The house, with 3,800 seats, is unworkably large it desperately needs to rent a second smaller stage. He also sounded an apocalyptic note about the future of opera more generally, insisting that “there aren’t enough new audience members replacing the older ones who are dying off.”
Last month he told the Guardian that the Met could “ face a bankruptcy situation” by 2017 if costs aren’t brought under control – and labor accounts for about two thirds of the company’s operating budget. The Met is relying more and more on its richest donors, and it’s also spending its endowment at a worrying rate: it’s down to just $253m, less than a single year’s operating costs. Attendance in the 2013 fiscal year stood at 79%. An analysis by the Wall Street Journal showed that in the 2012-2013 season (the last for which figures are available), the house grossed just 69% of its total possible take in ticket sales. While the Met’s budget has grown to $325m under Gelb, revenue has stagnated and ticket sales are off their peaks. It will be the Met’s first lockout in 34 years, and the latest setback for an opera company – and an art form – at a dangerous junction. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, has affirmed that the company will lock out union members on Friday if no agreement is reached.
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