The Metropolitan Opera Guild Annual Report.

At the end of the millennium, the Metropolitan Opera Guild reached its sixty-fifth anniversary. With new leadership in place both at the Guild and at the Metropolitan Opera Association, we felt it was a good time to take stock of our past accomplishments and to chart our goals for the future. To help us create a strategic plan, we worked with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. The Guild has begun to invest in its renewed mission to build a wider audience for the Metropolitan and for opera in general.

From its beginnings, the MOG was conceived as a national organization whose mission included developing and cultivating public interest in the lyric art. Today, we are exploring as many new resources as we can in furthering this mission. Chief among them is the internet. The Guild's new, enhanced website, launched at the end of April 2001, serves as an umbrella for four sites. At www.met guild.org, you will find a history of the MOG, with general information about each of our departments. Two exciting new features are a Guild-wide calendar of events, so that all our activities can be viewed in one place, and an E-mail Club, where we look forward to hearing from you, our members, about your specific interest in our programs.

The complete Metropolitan Opera Shop, now online at www.metopera shop.org, is fully searchable. A visitor can now look for a particular book, recording or video by title, artist or composer, while other products are searchable under the category of "gifts."

All Education at the Met programs are at www.operaed.org, searchable under the broad categories of Adults, Schools, Teachers and Families. The Creating Original Opera section, one of our most popular programs, contains a map of the U.S. that can be clicked on to show a state-by-state list of schools participating in the COO program. Also connected to the Education at the Met site is the Texaco Learning Center, which features study guides in French, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as English, for thirty-seven operas in the Met's repertoire. These translations are particularly important, as 15 percent of Learning Center users are from abroad.

OPERA NEWS Online, www.operanews.com, with its searchable archive of information and articles for the past ten years, is slated for upgrading during the coming year.

In another effort to expand our outreach, we have created an External Relations Department, under the direction of Jane L. Poole. When the Guild was founded in 1935, there were three major opera companies in the U.S.; today, there are more than 100 member regional companies, suggesting that opera is one of the fastest-growing art forms in the country. We are exploring how the Guild's resources might be used to create partner relationships that will benefit both the local company and the Met. We are making available to interested regional opera companies the educational resources of the Guild, archival materials from OPERA NEWS and assistance in product development.

Meanwhile, many of our regular core activities have enjoyed enormous success during the past year. The Guild's Sixty-sixth Annual Membership Luncheon, in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, proved to be a winner in every respect. In tribute to Verdi, we assembled thirty-eight great Met Verdi singers. Joseph Volpe delivered a spoken tribute to Verdi, and Aprile Millo and Francisco Casanova performed. The April event was attended by record numbers, including seven tables hosted by our corporate sponsor, the Bank of New York. We are especially grateful for their support, and to our Luncheon co-chairmen, Katharine Bidwell, Corbin Miller and Sandra Joys. Each year, we work closely with the Met's Special Events staff to make arrangements for this event, and we are indebted to Wendy Westwood and her staff for all their help, with special thanks to Mary Gene Sondericker, who once again took on the difficult task of seating the Luncheon. Most of all, thanks to our executive director of program development, Paul Gruber, who managed to keep the Guild's Merchandising Department running smoothly while supervising every ...