“For the performing arts, the idea of a V-shaped recovery is not possible,” the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, says. “It’s going to be slow.'
Photo: Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images I last went to the Metropolitan Opera on March 6, and the anxious sensation that viral clouds might be pulsing through the hall, borne on waves of Wagner, convinced me it was past time for the city’s cultural life to go dormant. A couple of days later, it did. Now, as New York reawakens, the performing-arts world is desperate for clues to its future.
The Met’s Gelb ticks off the obligations that don’t go away just because the music stops: pension payments, scenery and costume storage, repairs to the building’s crumbling travertine exterior, health insurance for furloughed orchestra and chorus members, and so on — well over $100 million a year. Revenue can’t just be switched back on either, especially since so much of it comes from donors whose portfolios are experiencing cyclone-level turbulence.
That last suggestion seems like an odd one for a soprano whose voice lifts easily over a 100-piece orchestra to fill every nook of the Met’s 4,000-seat house, but Goerke can accept new limitations. “I don’t always have to dial it up to 11,” she says. “I do have a setting at five.” The internet can’t do much to bring orchestras, string quartets, or dance companies together, but some soloists have found high-tech ways to rediscover a simpler life in music. “Planning years ahead is one of my least favorite things about the industry,” says pianist Inon Barnatan. “I enjoy this ‘What are you doing next Tuesday?’ approach to putting on a concert.
There are signs of an expansive future. The Los Angeles Opera canceled its two-night run of Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Angel’s Bone and streamed it instead, drawing an audience big enough to fill Madison Square Garden. “We’ve been able to democratize the art form in an essential way,” Morrison says. “My hope is that will continue when this is over.”
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