So, as we say, there’s a history here, which from Gelb’s p.o.v. cannot have been enhanced by Woolfe’s assessment of the 2022-23 season, in which he noted the company’s drawdown on its endowment, its reduction in productions and performances, and its “swerve” toward the contemporary in programming (all straightforward reportage), coupled with unenthusiastic evaluations of two of the recent operas and speculation on whether or not attendance for them would hold up in a second season (it did not). For “Woolfe” we can read “NYT,” insofar as the paper’s critical posture toward the Met is concerned. Gelb seems to view criticism’s function as an extension of the Met’s propaganda ministry, and while many opera administrators surely share that view at least part of the time, most of them display more deftness in tucking it in, and in recognizing that other uses of criticism might in the long run be of greater value to the artform and therefore to the lives of their institutions. On his New Yorker blog, Ross responded in real time (Oct. 9) to Gelb’s rant and its Page Six exposure. Everything in his sharp, concise piece is, I think, well taken, except perhaps for his characterization of the Times’ coverage of the company as “lavish.” For example: on October 2, Woolfe published another “Critic’s Notebook” article. Over a half-page this time, devoted to remarks on the first three weeks of the opera season. Generous! But in fact, more than half the column inches of the piece (on p. 5 of the daily arts section) are given over to photos and blank space for a floating caption. The text touches briefly again on Grounded, but is otherwise devoted to the three canonical operas that had so far re-entered the repertory: Rigoletto, Tosca, and Les contes d’Hoffmann. The reason these revivals are glanced at in a “notebook,” where they average about 300 words apiece, is that they have not been granted reviews of their own. This mirrors the Met’s advertising investment in the NYT (full-page, full-color ads for Grounded, with little blurbs for the rep operas below), and continues the paper’s current policy in apportioning space and positioning to the coverage of Met offerings (though when Il Trovatore entered the lists a little later, it did receive a free-standing, and very melancholy, review). Woolfe’s tactic for escaping this encirclement is to first preserve some critical dignity by noting that “not one of the four is a must-see,” that “none of the revivals represent the Met at its most theatrically vibrant,” and then to peck and scratch through the lineups to locate a few recommendable individual performances, or, even, a single memorable moment in a performance. “Lavish?” It’s not criticism at all, in any meaningful sense.                      

Since I did not see Grounded, I have no basis for agreement or disagreement with Woolfe’s opinion of it, save for my reading of the tea leaves that argued against any investment of time and money in the first place. But there was nothing out of line about his review; he simply didn’t like it. Like so many NYT reviews of similar events, it strains to find a few good things to say. It notes that after a half-hour of cuts since the work’s poorly received Washington premiere, the first act was now “zippier,” and acknowledges the composer’s “stylistic agility” and a “tunefulness” heard in her Broadway successes. But then it’s constrained to observe that the tunefulness is not present in the opera, that the score is “faceless and bland,” “lacking in musical depth and intensity,” and that the second act remains diffuse and peters out at the end. A negative evaluation, certainly, but I do not detect anything prejudicial in it, or any hankering after Elliott Carter.