Man Behind the Curtain.(Peter Gelb; 'Lucia di Lammermoor')

Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, slipped into his theatre's darkened auditorium just as Natalie Dessay, the French soprano, was losing her mind. It was a Friday afternoon in early September, with less than three weeks to go before opening night, and the company was rehearsing Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor." The day's business was the so-called "mad scene," a milestone in the careers of divas from Maria Callas to Joan Sutherland, in which the heroine, having just stabbed to death the bridegroom to whom she has unwillingly been married, performs a demanding eighteen-minute aria. The title role in the new "Lucia," directed by Mary Zimmerman, was taken by Dessay, whose gaunt, wild-eyed visage had for the previous few days graced the sides of buses all over town, accompanied by the tagline "You'd be mad to miss it." Dessay whirled about the stage in a leotard and a long flounced skirt--a bloodied wedding gown was being readied for her in the costume shop--shying violently away from a massing horde of choristers and flinging herself against the bannister of a sweeping staircase, all the while delivering a frenzy of coloratura trills.

Gelb took the seat behind mine, and whispered, "Mary says that all Natalie's instincts are absolutely right. She's just a great actress." Director and singer were trying to decide how Lucia--who, in Zimmerman's production, receives a shot in the arm from a doctor halfway through the scene, and dissolves at high pitch into an opiate haze--should sing her final notes. They were experimenting with having her pass out as the scene ended, so that Dessay, who is as slight as a ballerina, would conclude the aria while being lifted in the arms of a chorus member. "It's a good thing Natalie's so light," Gelb said, as Dessay hit her concluding high E-flat while being borne aloft, her head thrown back and her arms and legs dangling. "It's a good thing it's not Joan Sutherland up there."

Gelb excused himself and went to the back of the house, to greet another star who had just made an appearance: Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis player, who, the previous evening, had triumphed in the men's semifinals at the U.S. Open. Dessay had been in the stands, and when she and Djokovic were introduced, after the match, he sang her the opening of "Don Giovanni." The Met's press office had arranged for Djokovic to attend the rehearsal, and when Dessay stopped singing Gelb led Djokovic onto the stage. Dessay shook his hand warmly, encouraged him to experiment with the acoustics of the house by delivering a few whoops, and prodded him to sing a few bars of Mozart, which he did enthusiastically and tunelessly. Over the next few days, photographs of Dessay and Djokovic appeared in all kinds of outlets that do not target the natural constituency of the Met, from the Los Angeles Times' sports pages to ESPN.com. By the eve of the opening night of "Lucia," a YouTube video of the encounter had been viewed more than thirty-five hundred times--almost enough to fill the opera house's thirty-eight hundred red velvet seats.

Gelb, who assumed the post of general manager in August, 2006, has sought to define his stewardship of the Met with two words: theatricality and openness. In his view, the Met, while still an institution of great glory, had in recent years become culturally irrelevant. His goal is to maintain its superlative musical values--he has told James Levine, the Met's musical director, that he would like him to remain in his post for the rest of his life--while reinvigorating its theatrical values, thereby building a broader audience.

Gelb's emphasis upon opera as theatre rather than as recital was immediately apparent. His first season opened with a stark, stylized "Madama Butterfly," directed by Anthony Minghella, in which Cio-Cio-San's son--typically played by a towheaded child--was instead incarnated by a Bunraku puppet. There was also a much praised "Il Barbiere di Siviglia," directed by Bartlett Sher, in which Count Almaviva made his first entrance from among the audience, as if he were a season-ticket holder struck with sudden inspiration, before strutting on a walkway built around the orchestra pit--a sundering of the fourth wall that amounts to daring innovation at the Met.

Meanwhile, Gelb has made extensive efforts at operatic outreach: inviting the public to "open house" dress rehearsals, complete with box lunches; broadcasting opening night onto the plaza at Lincoln Center and into Times Square; beaming several performances by satellite into movie theatres throughout the country, as well as to theatres in Canada, Europe, and Japan. He has established a rushtickets program, with two hundred heavily discounted seats available at every weekday performance. In an attempt to forge links with the world of contemporary art, Gelb has opened a small gallery in a corner of the opera house's lobby, in which opera-related works, by artists including Chuck Close and Guillermo Kuitca, have been displayed. Gelb's innovations are not exactly transforming the core audience of the Met: this season, a quarter of the rush tickets have been set aside for senior citizens, since last year's marketing research indicated that many of those standing in line were retirees who used to pay full price at the Met but could no longer afford it. Nevertheless, his efforts are paying off at the box office, where revenue is up by seven per cent, after six years of decline. Through a combination of carefully cultivated artistic relations, and with a thoroughgoing comprehension of public relations, Gelb has achieved what two years ago seemed unimaginable: the Met--recently described by the Times as "perhaps the most exciting cultural institution in New York"--is hot. Gelb has been embraced as opera's most energetic champion and modernizer, a populist with class. "I've never seen anything like what he's done--to take something this large and rethink the institution," says Sher, who usually works in theatre (he directed "The Light in the Piazza"), and made his Met debut with "Il Barbiere di Siviglia." "Peter has the rebel in him. He gets inside the clockwork enough, and is visionary enough, that he overthrows the Bastille in a quiet, effective way."

Gelb is, of necessity, more Mirabeau than Robespierre. The Met, which was founded in 1883 by aspiring social grandees for whom there was no room at the Academy of Music--Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Roosevelts--is an inherently aristocratic domain. Like all institutions of high culture in America, the Met depends upon the patronage of donors and private endowments for its survival: box-office receipts count for about half of its annual budget, which last year was two hundred and fifty million dollars. Two years ago, Sid Bass, the Texas billionaire industrialist, and his wife, Mercedes, gave the Met twenty-five million dollars; Mercedes Bass, for whom the opera house's Grand Tier was renamed, has since begun a five-year quest to raise a hundred and forty-five million dollars from her peers. Gelb's success has depended not only on persuading the social elite who support the Met to permit the opening of their hitherto well-guarded preserve but also on persuading them to enjoy it. Among the less obvious accomplishments of Gelb's first year as general manager has been his ability to balance his much heralded innovations with a less often acknowledged conservatism. In this, he may be the perfect impresario for this modern gilded age: He has convinced partygoers that they are attending a revolution, and has invited would-be revolutionaries to attend a party.