New York Metropolitan Opera cancels its 2020-21 season – Culture

The New York Metropolitan Opera announced this Wednesday “with pain” the cancellation of its entire 2020-21 season due to the covid-19 pandemic, a major blow to the city’s arts and culture industry.

The announcement is a dire signal for institutions that host live shows in New York, which at the Met will not resume before at least September 2021.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo has not yet authorized the resumption of indoor shows.

After consulting with public health officials, the Opera decided that it is “not safe (…) to resume operations” until a coronavirus vaccine has been administered to the population.

Something that, according to the authorities, will take “at least five or six months” after the vaccine is available to everyone, according to a statement on Wednesday.

The Met is one of the first major New York cultural institutions to announce the cancellation of its entire season.

The famous Broadway theater circuit, paralyzed since mid-March and in an extremely delicate situation, is still betting to reopen in early 2021.

Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, told AFP that the institution is going through “the difficult moment” in its 137-year history.

The Opera will stop earning at least $ 154 million for the eight-week cancellation of the 2019-2020 season and the entirety of the 2020-2021 season, he said.

“I think some people think of the Met as some kind of historic and invulnerable institution,” continued the official, who took office 14 years ago. “Clearly, no institution has immunity from financial failure.”

To survive, “costs will need to be cut globally,” he added.

About 1,000 full-time employees of the New York Opera have been on unemployment insurance since April.

Gelb said Wednesday that he hopes to negotiate with the unions a new collective agreement that provides for lower wages.

“I am optimistic, if we can convince our workforce to collectively take responsibility for the recovery,” he said.

“The Met seems determined to take advantage of this situation to destroy our employment contracts and those of other unionized employees,” reacted the American Guild of Musical Arts (AGMA), one of the main unions that represents the workers of the institution.

“The individual and family situation of our members will be financially unbearable” in the event that the salary cuts are made, the union said in a statement transmitted to AFP.

– Donation “flow” –

The cancellation of the season represents a new blow for an institution that for several years has tried to attract a younger audience in order to fill its room, one of the largest in the world, with 3,800 seats.

The Met has a considerable budget that in 2018-19 reached 312 million dollars. But box office revenue only accounted for $ 85 million in that period.

The largest source of money for the institution comes from patronage.

Peter Gelb noted that since the beginning of the pandemic the institution had received a “flow” of donations from 30,000 new patrons.

To project itself into the future, the Opera presented this Wednesday the calendar for the 2021-22 season, which will open with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”, by the jazz musician Terence Blanchard, hired at the Saint-Louis Opera House, where it already was introduced.

It plans to include three contemporary works in its programming, for the first time since the 1928-29 season.

“The inability to produce weighs heavily on our organization,” Gelb also said.

As it already announced in June, the institution is committed to advancing the start time of several of its functions and reducing their duration, “to respond to the expectations of an audience that will be, at least initially, more prudent” than usual due to the covid-19 pandemic.

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