PART ONE: 2021-2022 IN RETROSPECT.

This has been a disheartening season. It has happened under trying conditions, most of them arising from our re-emergence from a still-active pandemic during a period of intense social disturbance. Since they have exerted downward pressure on both the conduct of the season and our reception of it, their most detectable effects should be acknowledged before proceeding to critical observations. ^(I)

1. The casting of a few principal roles was affected. Some were re-arranged and announced well in advance; others came on short notice in the form of Covid-related cancelations and substitutions. Based on familiarity with the singers involved, it’s fair to conclude that the effect was generally negative, in a couple of cases markedly so, and at least somewhat more disruptive than what we’d expect in a “normal” season. But I must also emphasize that most of the casting was as originally announced. Toward the end of the season, we  had the impact of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, though it seems to have resulted in only one important cast change. Rehearsal, technical preparation, and administrative progress were also certainly interrupted or slowed due to Covid illness absences, exacerbating the stress attendant on those functions.
2. Somewhere up to one-third of the orchestra’s personnel departed, with no little rancor, over the Metropolitan’s shut-down salary policies. (This is an upper-limit educated guess. The company acknowledges the loss of eleven players, but I haven’t found anyone with close knowledge of the situation who does not estimate a much higher number, and according to the best available information, only a handful have returned.) While there is no shortage of highly skilled instrumentalists to replace them, some of whom may have worked at the Met as alternates or acquired other operatic pit experience, the loss of such a contingent of players familiar with the company’s repertory, conductors, and routines cannot have been helpful. Perhaps the figure of eleven represents the net loss, after the new hires have been counted. There has been some reduction in the chorus as well, through departures and company-terminated contracts.
3.  For those of us out front, there has been the deflating impression created by the sparsest houses within even the longest of memories, and by the unmistakeable presence among those who did show up of an increasing proportion of the unpromising uninitiated, of butts in seats for a one-night stand. (I am referring here to standard repertory audiences, and not to the ethnographics of the one for Fire, which was the closest to a full house of any I saw.) And finally, the season has gone forward in a reduced city, an increasingly disorderly one deprived of some of its services and amenities, coming out from its long partial closure with an attitude and energy that are an uneasy mix of the timorous and the frenetic. So the atmospherics have not been good.

We abide in hope that those conditions will ease, but they are not guaranteed to quickly pass. And I do not believe that in terms of artistic results, anything fundamental would have been more than marginally different in their absence. The MetropoIitan Opera has been on a downward trajectory for fifty years. For the first thirty or so of those, the descent was gradual, uneven, and in most respects reflective of the encroaching decadence of the artform in general, though not relinquishing the company’s position on the trailing edge with regard to ideation and “concept” in production. For the last twenty, the rate of decline has accelerated, and in the last few has gone into a new, higher gear. It is easy to see the synchronicity between this acceleration and the duration of Peter Gelb’s directorship, and its recent gear shift with the accession of Yannick Nézet-Séguin as Musical Director. While association and causation are not the same, and other synchronicities could also be cited, these are real, and surely causative in regard to important aspects of our local situation. The fact remains, though, that while changes in these crucial positions are desirable and would buck us all up (at least until their successors are announced), even the most deeply informed and artistically ambitious leaders would still be confronted with the deepset predicaments of our artform.