In that regard, the Met will sell you just about anything, and stick your name on it. The big item on offer just now is the Chagall murals that preside over the frontage, installed for the opening of the house in 1966, when the painter was also designing Günther Rennert’s production of Die Zauberflöte that served the company for many seasons. If you “buy” them, you must leave them in place on permanent loan, but presumably in exchange for a lobby plaque and other perks. We’ve long had new productions underwritten by benefactors whose names are then attached to the production throughout its life. The Traviata production, for instance, lists on the first program page a gift from one private foundation, additional funding from some other folks and a watch company, gifts toward the revival of the production from another foundation and another company and, on a less grandiose plane, salaries of the evening’s performances of the roles of Violetta and Alfredo by a Great Singers Fund established by a generous patron couple. And of course the positions of General Manager and Music Director are named for individuals who agreed to underwrite them. The Onegin program also carries such acknowledgements, though not as extensively, and apparently that performance boasted of no great singers worth their salaries. These thank-yous are over and above the fourteen small-print pages that list contributors at levels down to $5,500, or the five more devoted to support for particular projects or estate gifts.

You may be surprised to find that it hasn’t always been so. A random check (top of one pile) of a Met program from the season of 1958-59 reveals one page devoted to a listing of the officers, board of directors, and members of the Association; three half-pages naming season box-holders and their subscription series (“Even Mondays,” “Odd Thursdays,” etc.); and a half-page to the officers of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, then a major source of support of what we might call the proto-crowdfunding sort. Money was assuredly being given in large amounts, but disclosure of a dollar figure and of individual contributions would have been considered crass, and the thought of naming a tier of the auditorium or an artistic position after a donor ridiculous, simply a way to buy oneself in. This transformation of attitude is of course a byproduct of the expansion and (so it seemed, at least) democratization of opera that began in the post-WW2 years, boomed on for a quarter-century or so, hung in suspension for a time, then turned into a retreat that has become a rout. These efforts to reposition our artform in American society, marked by then-new theories of audience development and marketing, scored large successes so long as they had political support, which in a democracy comes back to a majority of the citizenry minus billions in PAC money and a few gerrymandering capers. Now, we are more beholden than ever to private, often individual, wealth, and watch from the sidelines as opera companies around the country cut back on productions and seasons or go out of business altogether, while our loss-leader company here in New York tips the hat over and over to the successful bidders for bits and pieces of itself, in the hope that the new audience it is trying to build won’t notice. A disheartening spectacle, and easily mocked, but the plight is real.