According to my Op-Ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Metropolitan Opera House — physically and metaphorically — signifies a notion of “grand opera” that is increasingly unsustainable.
To read the rest: http://online.wsj.com/articles/joseph-horowitz-union-trouble-isnt-the-mets-only-problem-1407537082?mod=rss_opinion_main
The article is behind a pay wall, but can be reached by googling:
Union Trouble Isn’t the Met’s Only Problem
Over the last month I’ve posted several times on Slipped Disk about the problematic size of the Met.
this is a really important idea – early in the sturm-und-drang about all this I posted a comment on Parterre suggesting that the Met either move to a different house or push in the back wall to get rid of about a thousand seats .. you mention other American houses .. there is no European opera house that I know of that has more than about 2,800 seats … a thousand less than the Met. And as you surely know, Wagner wrote his Ring for a theatre of only 1,925 seats .. pretty small – imagine the new Met Ring there. This article should start a new line of conversation.
Gentlemen, what in the world does the size of the hall matter in this crisis? The elephant in the room is how much the non-performing unions are demanding for relatively unskilled labor. That’s where the unsustainable costs are. The rest is just trimming. NYC has always had plenty of money to support the best opera house in the world, but the MET has to put their house in order.