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 "I think there were a lot of people who expected us to fall
on our face with this program," Gelb told Reuters.
Seven years later, and with an anticipated 3 million viewers
seeing about a dozen Met opera broadcasts this year in cinemas
in 64 countries, Gelb says he has proved the doubters wrong.
The Met's broadcasts have created a new market for live cinema
broadcasts of dance, opera, plays and orchestral performances by
a raft of arts institutions, from the Royal Opera to the Bolshoi
to the Berlin Philharmonic which is airing its New Year's Eve
concert this year featuring Chinese piano soloist Lang Lang.
Gelb thinks a large part of the broadcasts' allure is the fact
they are live, that anything can happen and, at least in opera,
it underscores the "gladiatorial" aspect of these highly trained
singers giving their all on stage, now to audiences far beyond
the boundaries of the opera house.
Here is what else he had to say about how the live broadcasts
have helped the Met's finances, are a plus when trying to engage
the top singers and may even be helping to bring down the
average age of the opera audience:
Q: There are a lot of costs associated with these
broadcasts, which cost about $1 million each, so how does it
work out financially?
A: The business plan I had for it is that it would make a
modest profit so from a financial point of view it has exceeded
those expectations significantly. But, at the same time, we were
very fortunate that it did because if it hadn't we would be in
trouble right now, and in fact we're always in trouble
financially because the cost structure of opera is ridiculously
challenging and so the fact that we have quadrupled our paying
audience with all the attendees around the world who are seeing
the Met in movie theatres has been a huge help
Q: What do the singers make of them?
A: It makes our casting easier because we are competing with the
other top opera houses for top stars and opera stars know if
they come and sing at the Met it's kind of one stop shopping
because they can perform on the stage of the Met and be seen by
an audience of 300,000 to 350,000 people ... There are
subscriptions being sold in the Arctic Circle in Tromso, Norway,
to see the Met and the same is true in Buenos Aires or Mexico
City or St. Petersburg.
[to top of second column] |
 Q: It is different watching the live
broadcast in a cinema, rather than the opera house, isn't it?
A: I certainly don't want to replace the
experience of going to the Met and seeing it in the opera house but
what the cameras can offer, particularly in a comedy like (Verdi's)
"Falstaff" which is a brilliant production ... and relies on a lot
of cameras that when seen in close up really works ... I realized in
the briefcase that Ford, disguised as Fontana, brings in to give to
Falstaff they were bundles of dollar bills which I noticed at the
last second so we changed them to $100 bills - that's the kind of
detail you have to look out for in High Definition (HD).
Q: You've been quoted as saying the Met lost some 25,000
subscribers, mostly from the New York City suburban area, who
apparently are going to their local cinemas instead of the opera
house. Do the broadcasts risk causing trouble from their success?
A: If you look deeper into those numbers a
lot of those are really the older audience and we're really
providing a service to those who may not have the physical means to
get to get to New York anymore - we're extending the lifespan of
opera lovers in a way.
Q: And are you reaching younger people too?
A: When I took over the Met, the average age of our audience was
65-years-old and a market survey showed them ageing at the rate of
one year per year so it was heading toward extinction. We managed to
reverse that trend. The average is a few years younger, I think it
is 59 or 61, but it has gotten slightly younger and certainly HD is
part of that. In some places the audience in the movie theatres is
older than the audience opera house now but in other places it is
younger. I know in Paris our French distributor Gaumont Pathe says
that the audiences in Paris are very young. I think there and in
Germany the audiences are quite young. Overall ... we've stopped the
ageing of the audience. Obviously we can't stop people from getting
old but we've stopped the increasingly elderly attendance.
(Editing by Alison Williams)
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