Chip Brown, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of this week's cover story about Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Brown last wrote for the magazine about the oil boom in North Dakota.
Are you an opera nut of the type you describe in your story?
Good God, no! I am trying to cut back on my personality disorders. However, I was exposed as a kid to the extreme emotions opera can elicit, thanks to my mother, who for many years informed her children that when she died we were to scatter her ashes at the Met — where, exactly, it was never clear, maybe that little glade between the Met and the Henry Moore sculpture. Every Saturday afternoon she would get into her wedding dress and spend three hours cathartically weeping over the live Texaco broadcasts from the Met of operas like "La Bohème" and "Rosenkavalier." I realize now that as she sat by the small white radio in the study, it probably wasn't her wedding dress she was wearing, though for many years I was sure it was. And it probably wasn't the tragic course of life that was making her weep, because there was nothing particularly exceptional about a young mother who gives up a career in N.Y.C. in the 1950s, moves to the suburbs, has a bunch of kids and can no longer fit into her wedding dress. I'm still of two minds about those Saturday-afternoon appointments she kept with her radio. On one hand, it does seem that the nature and genius of opera is to make our circumstances seem larger and more significant, more beautiful, more tragic than they really are. On the other hand, maybe I got it all wrong, and that what those broadcasts were doing in essence was the religious act of calling the divine out of the clouds and shunting it onto the radio.
The story captures the excitement of being backstage. If Gelb isn't an opera nut, is that why he is in it, for the adrenaline?
While not an opera nut, in the conventional sense of the word, he does love the art of staging operas, which includes everything from getting the best singers and musicians to making sure there is a future for the art form. Running the Met, he has said many times, was his "dream job." Grand opera is an art and a business, and it takes a certain virtuosity to succeed in both domains. The Met is like a giant Rubik's Cube, and if he's not in it for the adrenaline per se, I think he is in it for the adventure of getting all the parts lined up perfectly, of pulling off the formidable challenge of getting an opera going six nights a week, of guiding this enormous and influential performing arts organization into the future.
There must be some very interesting people around Gelb. Did you interview any or get a sense of anyone else particularly memorable at the Met?
I did get a chance to talk to Gelb's mentor, Ronald Wilford, the principal figure at Columbia Artists Management, who hired Gelb away from the Boston Symphony. In a book, Wilford was famously called "the man who killed classical music." I was wondering how I might bring up the charge, and before I got a word out, he said: "I was once called the man who killed classical music. You can't kill classical music — I tried!" His point was that there were thousands of people in China streaming into villages and cities eager to become classical pianists. Wilford apparently doesn't give a lot of interviews, and I was excited when he said to come over to his office on Broadway, but the experience of interviewing him seemed to me the equivalent of trying to catch a great knuckleball pitcher with an opera glove.
You compare Gelb's job to that of a Yankees manager, but could anyone really manage to make the Met as central to the city as the Yankees?
I think the Met job is comparable to managing the Yankees only in the sense that these are iconic positions with storied histories — exalted jobs in an exalted city. Obviously the manager of each institution uses a completely different method of evaluating the success of the performers in their charge. Opera singers don't have on-base percentages or earned-run averages. Opera companies don't have quantifiable win-loss records. Wins and losses are based on a complex amalgamation of factors from critical opinion to ticket sales. I can't imagine why any opera impresarios wouldn't want to make the Met as central to the life of the city as the Yankees are, but by the same measure that seems an awfully tall order when you consider the cultural barriers to classical music in America. Millions of dollars are poured into sports programs while music and arts education has been virtually been eliminated from most public-school curriculums. Kids are exposed to sports in a way they are not to music and art.
What was it like to profile someone who once worked very successfully in public relations?
Peter Gelb has spent many hours "getting press" for his clients. He knows how journalists work, or thinks he does. It's a fallacy that journalists all work in the same way. Like figure skaters, there are certain compulsory routines they have to complete, but after that, the program is wide open and if you want to mix a harmonica solo in with the triple axels it's up to you and the structure of the story. At one point Gelb suggested that I was employing the "Columbo technique," which he said his father, a former New York Times managing editor, Arthur Gelb, had told him about. The Columbo technique, in case you aren't familiar with it, is based on the old Peter Falk detective show "Columbo." It entails showing up at an interview in a general state of dishevelment, and asking dumb, obvious questions that give the person you are interviewing the impression that you haven't prepared for the interview and are a crazy clod who doesn't know anything about the case in question. Of course, the payoff is that Columbo was crazy like a fox. But if you are practicing the Columbo, technique you are obliged to insist that you are not doing anything of the sort and that you truly don't know anything about the subject. In my case since the subject was opera, it was easy to swear to the authenticity of my ignorance.
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