PETER GELB'S BIGGEST MISTAKE

posted by James Reel

Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera's powerful autocrat who sometimes actually has some great ideas, did something less than honorable a few days ago. According to a New York Times article, he pressured a leading New York City radio station, WQXR, into removing a blog post that was highly critical of Gelb and his very expensive, widely reviled new production of Wagner's Ring.

I didn't see the blog post, so I can't comment on it, but from the Times summary it seems rather innocuous, mainly summarizing a recent newspaper interview with Gelb. Surely the blog couldn't have drawn as much blood as Alex Ross's oft-quoted line from his New Yorker review of the production: “Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.”

Look, many bloggers and newspaper critics are idiots, but a lot of arts administrators are idiots, too. Public figures, especially very ambitions figures like Gelb, are subject to close scrutiny, and when they whine about being abused in what is really a minor blog post, they look petty, insecure, and overweening. And most of all, when an arts organization strong-arms its critics, things always come out worse for the organization than for the critic. The Cleveland Orchestra pressured the Cleveland Plain Dealer to pull Don Rosenberg from the orchestra beat because of his long-term criticism of music director Franz Welser-Möst--a conductor whom London musicians had long before dubbed Frankly Worse Than Most. The episode made the newspaper editors look like cowards, and it transformed what had been a purely local nuisance for the orchestra into a national scandal.

Unless a critic is truly incompetent, getting basic facts wrong, the best thing an arts organization or administrator can do is simply shrug off the criticism--or, heaven forbid, learn from it--and produce the best work possible as consistently as possible. Audiences are not such dullards that they can't evaluate the work on their own. In fact, they're sharp enough to be put off by any abuse of power--as Peter Gelb is likely to learn in the next few days.

Postscript: I've just stumbled across a cached pdf of the offending blog post. Read it, and decide for yourself if it should have been pulled.