Peter Gelb
General Manager
Peter Gelb’s career has followed a singular arc that began with his teenage years as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera and led to his appointment as General Manager of the 124-year-old company. In August 2006, the producer and former recording company executive succeeded Joseph Volpe, who retired after 16 years in the Met’s top post.
Mr. Gelb is strongly committed to revitalizing the Met theatrically while preserving its musical values. He is engaging many of today’s greatest directors to stage the Met’s new productions, including Luc Bondy, Matthew Bourne, Patrice Chéreau, Willy Decker, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner, Robert Lepage, Anthony Minghella, Bartlett Sher, Peter Stein, and Mary Zimmerman. Under his leadership, the number of new productions is increasing dramatically, from its recent average of four, to seven during the 2007-08 season – the most the Met has had in a single season since it moved to Lincoln Center more than 40 years ago.
After taking the helm at the Met, Mr. Gelb immediately began to launch initiatives aimed at connecting opera with a wider audience. One of the most groundbreaking and successful is “Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD,” a series of live performance transmissions shown in high definition in movie theaters across North America, Europe, and Japan. In its first year, the series was seen by a paying audience of more than 300,000 and has received significant international media coverage. The live movie theater transmissions have been widely credited for raising the global profile of opera, successfully advancing the art form by merging opera and digital technology. The first HD transmission occurred in December 2006—a special holiday presentation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, staged by Julie Taymor. Since then, the Met had transmitted five additional operas to sold-out movie theaters around the world, and next season the series will expand to eight operas, showing in hundreds of more theaters.
Mr. Gelb has taken advantage of other modern technologies to reach millions of opera fans around the world. Last September, Sirius Satellite Radio launched “Metropolitan Opera Radio,” an around-the-clock channel broadcasting four live performances a week as well as historical performances from the Met’s vast radio archive. The Met has also started presenting free, live streaming of performances from its website once a week with support from RealNetworks.
Other audience-building initiatives launched by Mr. Gelb include a free open house for the final dress rehearsal of the new production of Madama Butterfly that opened the 2006-07 season; a free live transmission of the opening-night performance onto giant screens at Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza; the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Ticket program, which offers select orchestra seats for weekday performances at the dramatically reduced price of $20; the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, a new contemporary art exhibit space in the Met lobby; and a free open house for public school children during a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. These initiatives will be expanded in coming seasons.
Revitalizing the company’s repertory with new works is also among Mr. Gelb’s priorities for the Met. In 2006, in partnership with Lincoln Center Theater, he announced a commissioning program to provide composers and playwrights with the resources to create and develop new works that will be presented at either the Met or the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Other contemporary operas planned include Philip Glass’s Satyagraha in the 2007-08 season, John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in the 2008-09 season, and a newly commissioned opera from composer Osvaldo Golijov in the 2011-12 season.
About Peter Gelb
Mr. Gelb’s extensive and varied experience in the field of classical music has prepared him for the considerable challenge of overseeing both the artistic and the administrative aspects of one of the largest performing arts institutions in the world. An award-winning producer of films, recordings, radio broadcasts, telecasts, concert events, operas, and festivals, he has collaborated with the world's leading artists, many of whom will be featured at the Met during his tenure, including John Corigliano, Plácido Domingo, Tan Dun, Renée Fleming, Osvaldo Golijov, Wynton Marsalis, Anthony Minghella, Rachel Portman, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Julie Taymor.
His close association with the Met’s music director, James Levine, extends back two decades and spans recordings and film (Fantasia 2000).
In 1992, Mr. Gelb produced both the stage and film versions of Ms. Taymor’s first opera production, Oedipus Rex, for Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival. In 1994—also for the Saito Kinen Festival—he commissioned an early opera staging by Robert Lepage, La Damnation de Faust, which will be presented at the Met in 2008-09.
As president of CAMI Video, a division of Columbia Artists Management that Mr. Gelb founded in 1982, he served as executive producer of the Met’s television series, “The Metropolitan Opera Presents” for six years. In all, he produced 25 televised productions for the Met, including the 1990 telecast of Richard Wagner’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by Levine. The 17-hour program was broadcast over four consecutive nights on PBS (and subsequently released on DVD), making history for monolithic programming of opera on television. While at CAMI, he produced and occasionally directed over 50 programs featuring such artists as Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Claudio Abbado. His television productions earned 13 Primetime Emmy Awards.
Among Mr. Gelb’s Emmy Award-winning films are Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia and Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic, both with Maysles Films. Mr. Gelb received a Peabody Award for his four-part television series Marsalis on Music (1995), in which jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis introduces young audiences to the full experience of classical music and jazz. In 2001, he co-directed and produced a 90-minute documentary entitled Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks, about the making of the hit Broadway show’s cast album. The film was awarded a Grammy in 2002.
Since 1995 and until joining the Met, Mr. Gelb was president of Sony Classical, one of the largest international classical record labels. He led the company through a period of notable growth and creativity, expanding the focus of recording projects to include best-selling film scores, including the Academy Award-winning scores for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Tan Dun, The Red Violin by John Corigliano, and Titanic by James Horner, while preserving the label’s tradition of recording Broadway musicals and maintaining an extensive catalogue of classical works by many of the best known artists in the world. He also initiated Sony Classical’s broad program of commissioning new music, something no other classical label had attempted in recent years.
Mr. Gelb’s career in classical music began at the age of 17 when he went to work as an office boy for Sol Hurok. Training from an early age under the legendary impresario may have instilled in him a kind of entrepreneurship and creative acumen that has since distinguished his work, from managing the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s historic 1979 tour to China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which made headlines around the world; to reviving Vladimir Horowitz’s concert career in 1980 and producing the famed pianist’s historic return to Russia in 1986; to the Tan Dun premiere, Symphony 1997, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, which Mr. Gelb commissioned in partnership with the Chinese government to be performed at the handover of Hong Kong to China.
The announcement of Mr. Gelb’s appointment to the Met was made in October 2004. He joined the Met in January 2005 and worked closely with Mr. Volpe and Maestro Levine, as well as with the board of directors, staff, and administration, to plan for the Met’s future, before taking over as General Manager in August 2006.
Mr. Gelb, who is 53, is the son of Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of The New York Times, and writer Barbara Gelb. He is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and has two sons.