For readers who are not on the New York scene, or perhaps are but aren’t tracking things all that closely, I can’t overemphasize how unusual this journalistic sequence was. The NYT handles the Met with kid gloves. Its article assignments dutifully follow the company’s emphases, as expressed in its advertising and promotional efforts. There are grumblings in individual reviews, of course, but usually they are mildly voiced complaints over the unworkability of production concepts (never angry denunciations of the basic sellout to the notion of director as auteur that underlies the pileup of wreckage), or timidly expressed concessions of vocal failings that never place them in the context of the  general enfeeblement of operatic singing or the striking of critical flags that has accompanied it. For the NYT to devote even these moderate allotments of space and position (all these pieces ran on inside pages of the daily paper’s arts section, little salients in its “Classical” ghetto) to first questioning the company’s repertory policy, then to a pointed comparison with a prominent European company, and finally to a less than ringing endorsement of its Music Director and his orchestra (the latter “indistinct,” “inconsistent,” and “difficult to assess” under N-S), is altogether extraordinary. Around the same time, we had those rumblings (hearsay, but some of it emanating from within the Staatsoper) that Roščic might be headed to New York, which would presumably mean to the Met. It seemed as if the Times must have hold of something, though without enough reliable sourcing to release it. But then came the announcement of the renewal of Nézet-Séguin’s contract for an extended period, without any disclosed proviso regarding more dedicated time and attention, and the little dust flurry settled.

On to the current season, which began with Grounded, an opera by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, based on the latter’s play. Woolfe’s review of the premiere ran on September 24. On October 9, the Met hit the tabs—the New York Post‘s celeb gossip-oriented Page Six, to be exact, whereon Oli Coleman reported on an unhinged outburst from Peter Gelb at a Musician’s Foundation gathering. This bore all the earmarks of a man under extreme pressure whose “swerve” was running off the road and into a ditch. He lashed out at Woolfe, accusing “some critics” of harboring an elitist agenda. As if, he complained, “Anything they think smacks of accessibility, there is something inherently wrong with.” He asserted that Grounded is deeply moving, and, in a detour that attracted widespread and merited derision, claimed that “some critics” wanted the Met to program operas by the likes of Elliott Carter.

Well, I’m easy with cutting Gelb a little slack. In the course of coming unglued at an event he probably did not foresee turning up in the press, let alone Page Six of the NYP, a man not on intimate terms with the “difficult” side of the modern repertory came up with an especially inappropriate name. Embarrassingly revelatory, but borderline understandable. Speaking of agendas, however, Gelb v. Woolfe, and Gelb v. criticism in general, goes back to what, in view of intervening events, seems a remote time—2012, when Woolfe was writing for the selectively lamented The New York Observer.^(I) In February of that year, Woolfe joined in the general disapprobation of the Le Page Ring (“If you haven’t created a convincing world, who cares how it ends?”, he concluded), and in passing casually dismissed several of Gelb’s rationales for it. Then, in June, he addressed Gelb’s clumsy, autocratic stab at suppression of reviews and critical articles in Opera News, and was impolite enough to note that it was the third such intercession with normal press prerogatives within a year and that one prominent critic, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, had questioned Gelb’s fitness for his job while another, Anne Midgette of The Washington Post, had wondered about his sanity.