NEW YORK — Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb confirmed Tuesday that despite the unrelenting, soul-crushing agony of overseeing a massively funded arts institution, he will heroically remain at his post to endure the suffering.
The plight of the modern arts administrator; a tragedy of endurance not witnessed since the mythic sufferings of Prometheus, or perhaps more aptly, the lingering, damp mid-career malaise of Arthur Schopenhauer; has finally found its definitive martyr in the velvet-lined halls of Lincoln Center. Peter Gelb, currently navigating the twilight of his second decade as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, confirmed this week that he will not flee the crushing, omnipresent agony of his post. To abandon the institution now, he suggested, would be a dereliction of his duty to bear the sins of a shifting cultural landscape upon his own bespoke-tailored shoulders.
The sheer, unadulterated brutality of Gelb's daily existence cannot be overstated. His ongoing crucible, which frequently involves the agonizing calculation of how many consecutive performances of Carmen the upper-middle class will tolerate before open revolt, elevates him to a pantheon of suffering previously occupied only by the ascetics. One is immediately reminded of the visceral torment etched into the margins of Dante's Inferno, the weeping, fractured dissonance of a late Shostakovich string quartet, and the inescapable existential dread permeating the entirety of the 1993 Pauly Shore vehicle Son in Law; each an inadequate, fumbling prelude to the horrors of a modest two percent dip in single-ticket sales.
We have watched him stare directly into the abyss of the upcoming spring gala seating chart, and the abyss, recognizing a peer in sheer, unadulterated suffering, simply blinked first.
To navigate the treacherous, darkening shoals of contemporary operatic irrelevance requires a fortitude historically reserved for the trench-bound infantryman or the doomed arctic explorer; yet Gelb remains, a solitary titan holding aloft the crumbling pillars of an entirely self-inflicted structural deficit. He endures the slings and arrows of union negotiations, the paralyzing terror of modernizing a staging of The Magic Flute, and the unbearable weight of a donor base aging into dust, all while refusing the sweet, dignified release of a lucrative consultancy.
Society must now reckon with the uncomfortable reality of his sacrifice. As we go about our trivial, unburdened lives, blissfully ignorant of the sheer terror required to cast a reliable mezzo-soprano, Gelb stands vigil. He is the tragic hero of our degraded age, bound forever to the rock of the Upper West Side, stoically awaiting the daily arrival of the board of directors to peck at his liver.