The Metropolitan Opera is Dying Because It Wants to Die
The pinnacle of the Performing Arts in America is collapsing not from the weight of its chandelier, but from the brittleness of its imagination. The Metropolitan Opera has chosen extinction over evolution, and the evidence is no longer circumstantial.
In January 2026, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, announced layoffs of 22 administrative employees, graduated salary cuts for 35 executives earning over $150,000, a reduction of the 2026-27 season to just 17 productions (the Met regularly staged 25 or more before the pandemic), and the postponement of a planned new staging of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. These are not cost-saving measures. They are the vital signs of an institution in cardiac arrest. The Met has drained approximately $120 million from its endowment since 2022, consuming more than a third of its total reserves. Moody’s downgraded the Met’s credit rating twice in 2025, most recently to B3 with a negative outlook. And now, in a gesture that should alarm anyone who cares about American culture, the Met is considering selling Marc Chagall’s two monumental murals, The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music, appraised by Sotheby’s at $55 million, under the stipulation that the buyer leave them hanging in the Grand Tier. It is the aesthetic equivalent of pawning your wedding ring but asking the buyer to let you keep wearing it.
The numbers that precede this moment are equally grim. Subscription sales, once the backbone of opera house revenue, have collapsed to just 7 percent of ticket sales as of the 2024-25 season, down from what the Met has reported was around 45 percent two decades ago. The average subscriber is now 70 years old. In 2023, the independent Metropolitan Opera Guild scaled back operations after decades of supporting the institution, and Opera News, the most significant American publication on the art form, printed its final issue as a standalone magazine. Ticket sales for the 2023-24 season reached 72 percent capacity, but when adjusted for steep discounting (tickets as low as $25), the effective revenue hit only about 64 percent of full-price potential. Opera ticket sales across major American companies fell 21 percent between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 seasons, per OPERA America. Revenue fell 22 percent over the same period. The 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons featured the fewest productions since 1980-81, when a labor crisis nearly shuttered the house.
The Met’s response to this emergency has been to seek salvation not from innovation or audience expansion but from foreign capital and fraudulent philanthropy. In September 2025, Gelb announced a deal with Saudi Arabia worth up to $200 million over eight years, under which the Met would perform three weeks each winter at the Royal Diriyah Opera House near Riyadh. The ethical compromises of this arrangement are self-evident: Saudi Arabia’s human rights record includes the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the persecution of the LGBTQ+ community, and systemic repression of women and dissidents. Gelb’s defense was breathtaking in its candor: “I have to put the survival of the institution of the Met first. I don’t operate the Met according to my personal feelings on every issue.” This from the same general manager who cut ties with the world-renowned soprano Anna Netrebko because she declined to repudiate her public support for Vladimir Putin. Morality, it seems, is negotiable when the check is large enough.
That Saudi check, however, has not cleared. By January 2026, the deal remains in limbo as Saudi Arabia recalibrates its own budgets. Gelb told the New York Times he has been “assured that it’s going to go forward,” but acknowledged “we have been waiting for some time.” In the meantime, the Met has hired CAA Sports to sell naming rights to its opera house and continues to bleed.
Then there is the Matthew Pietras affair, which reads like a libretto from an opera about institutional vanity. Pietras, a 40-year-old who claimed to manage the finances of Gregory Soros, son of the billionaire George Soros, rose through the Met’s donor ranks over several years, graduating from modest gifts to gala co-chair status and the title of Managing Director on the board. In March 2025, he pledged $15 million to the Met. When he attempted to transfer the first $10 million in late May 2025, the bank flagged it as fraudulent. It was. Pietras had allegedly embezzled the funds from his employers. A representative of the Soros family contacted the Met to explain the money was stolen. Two days later, Pietras was found dead in his apartment. His death was ruled a suicide. The Met had counted on that money for operating expenses. It had to withdraw another $5 million from its already ravaged endowment, while board members scrambled to pledge emergency funds. The parallels to the Alberto Vilar Ponzi scheme that struck the Met in the early 2000s are unavoidable. The institution seems magnetically attracted to phantom benefactors.
All of this is tragic, and none of it is surprising, because the Metropolitan Opera has been systematically refusing to adapt for decades. The institution does not fail because it lacks resources. It fails because it lacks the willingness to rethink who opera is for.
We Tried to Help. They Didn’t Want It.
In the summer of 2023, Janna and I brought a proposal to the Metropolitan Opera. Our ASL Opera Project was designed to address something that should have embarrassed every major opera company in the country: the near-total exclusion of the Deaf from live operatic performance. Broadway shows have offered ASL-interpreted performances since 1980. Opera, which fancies itself the apex of all performing arts, has done essentially nothing.
Our proposal was simple and three-pronged. First, provide live ASL-interpreted performances at the Met using what we call “High Art” interpretation, matching the elevated performance quality of the opera itself. The Deaf have the right to experience the fullness of a Met performance in the same room, at the same time, and with the same access as a Hearing person. Second, create an outreach and educational program that would help prepare new Deaf audiences for their first operatic experience. Third, establish a High Art Opera interpreter training program at the Met, bringing interpreters from across the country to learn how to interpret live opera, working alongside performers and culminating in a signed performance on the main stage.
We were not asking the Met for money. We were offering them something they desperately needed: a new audience. An untapped community of people who had been locked out of opera for its entire history. We came with expertise, having co-founded the CUNY-SPS ASL Program and co-authored ASL textbooks. Janna, who is Deaf, had been a Broadway musical Juilliard advisor and interpreted performance artist. She grew up singing gospel hymns in ASL. She had already performed ASL interpretations of arias by Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Elina Garanca, and Diana Damrau. We had a website, proof-of-concept videos, and an interview with Opera Wire. We had everything except the one thing we could not manufacture: institutional courage.
Our meeting on July 11, 2023 was polite, forward-looking, and, in retrospect, a performance of interest without any underlying intention. The Met’s concerns were telling. They worried interpreters would be “distracting” to performers and audience. They questioned why ASL would be necessary when operas are captioned in English, revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of ASL (which is a distinct natural language with its own grammar, not a manual rendering of English, and many Deaf people, particularly foreign-born Deaf, are not literate in English). They asked how two interpreters could represent fifty singers on stage, and Janna explained Role Shifting, a foundational technique in ASL communication, where a single interpreter can voice a thousand characters by establishing them spatially.
The Met listened. They nodded. They told us they would look into it. Then they shuffled us into the DEI department, which is where institutions send ideas they intend to bury under bureaucratic politeness. The meeting with the board never came. The follow-up never happened. The idea was received, acknowledged, and abandoned. They did not even have the professional courtesy to say no. They simply let the silence do it for them.
The irony should not be lost on anyone watching the Met sell its Chagall murals and fire its staff while begging for Saudi money. Here was an opportunity to expand their audience to include a community that has never been welcomed into the opera house. It would have cost them almost nothing compared to what they spend on a single production. It would have generated press, goodwill, educational partnerships, and, yes, ticket revenue. It would have demonstrated that the Met understood accessibility not as a compliance checkbox but as a moral imperative. Instead, they chose to do nothing, and now they are choosing to do less than nothing: cutting, shrinking, selling, and crawling toward an authoritarian regime for a bailout that may never arrive.
Why Opera Is Dying in America
The answer is not that Americans have lost their taste for great art. The answer is that opera institutions have refused to meet Americans where they are. Opera in Germany continues to thrive, supported by robust government funding and a culture that treats the performing arts as a public good rather than a luxury for the wealthy. In the United States, opera companies receive more than twice as much funding from philanthropy as from government sources, and that philanthropic base is eroding. New billionaires, many of whom made their fortunes in technology, prefer to direct their giving toward education, disease eradication, or global development. The old money that built opera houses is aging out, and no one is replacing them.
Opera companies have nearly doubled their administrative costs as a share of their budgets since the mid-2000s, while spending on artistic programming has remained flat. They have not embraced the audience data analysis, digital content experimentation, or online engagement strategies that every other sector of the entertainment industry uses as standard practice. Management practices, metrics, and audience development tactics have barely changed since the pre-internet era. The number of students graduating with degrees in vocal performance dropped 35 percent between 2011 and 2021. The pipeline is drying up because young performers can see that the industry offers them a middle-class income at best, in exchange for a doctoral-level education and a life lived on the road.
Opera Philadelphia put its annual festival on hiatus in 2024. The Detroit Opera, once celebrated by the New York Times as “the Future of American Opera,” canceled its 2025-26 season opener after losing over $3 million the year before. The Baltimore Opera Company and Pacific Opera in Orange County have closed permanently. The New York City Opera, which once performed daily at Lincoln Center, filed for bankruptcy in 2013 and now stages approximately one show per year.
And across all of this wreckage, the consistent thread is institutional rigidity. Every company that has failed, or is failing, made the same fundamental error: they assumed that upholding tradition requires refusing to change. They treated their audience as a fixed demographic rather than a community to be built. They programmed for subscribers who were already dying rather than for the public that was being born. They chose aesthetic purity over human inclusion.
The Diagnosis is Confirmed
The Metropolitan Opera is not failing because opera is irrelevant. Opera is the most complete art form ever devised. It combines music, drama, visual art, poetry, architecture, and the full range of human vocal expression into a single, unified experience. There is nothing else like it. The problem is that the institution charged with presenting this art form in the United States has become a monument to its own inertia.
When Janna and I walked out of that Met meeting in 2023, we were hopeful. We had been heard, or so we thought. What we learned, over the months of silence that followed, was something more instructive. The Met did not reject our proposal because it was impractical or too expensive. They rejected it because it required them to change. It required them to acknowledge that their audience could, and should, include people they had never served. It required them to accept that accessibility is not a side project but a central artistic and ethical obligation. And it required them to admit that they needed help.
The Met could not do any of those things. It still cannot. Instead, it has chosen to sell its art, fire its people, beg from autocrats, and hope that a fraudulent donor class will replace the philanthropic base it has failed to cultivate. This is not a survival strategy. It is a hospice plan with better lighting.
Peter Gelb told the New York Times in 2022 that “the only path forward is reinvention.” He was right about the word. He was wrong about his willingness to pursue it. Reinvention requires guts. It requires the humility to listen to people who offer new ideas, even when those ideas come from outside the velvet rope. It requires looking at the Deaf community, at disabled audiences, at young people who have never set foot in an opera house, and saying: you belong here, and we will make room for you.
The Met chose not to make room. The Deaf are still locked out. The Chagall murals may find a new owner. And the greatest opera house in the Western Hemisphere is sinking, not because the music stopped, but because the people running it refused to learn a new song.
The ASL Opera Project remains active. If you are interested in bringing ASL interpretation to opera performances, contact us.
Previously: Will The Metropolitan Opera Allow the Deaf to Sing? and Yes, the Deaf Just May Sing at the Metropolitan Opera!
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