Metropolitan Operas PeterGelb blames Trump for sales slump but needs tolook in the mirror

Blaming the president is a popular pastime these days, but one of America’s cultural leaders has come up with something really novel in the genre.“Metropolitan Opera season attendance dropped slightly following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that coincided with a decrease in tourists to New York.”Who knew rounding up hardened illegal-immigrant criminals would hit the hallowed halls of the country’s most prestigious opera house hard?That line is the first sentence of a June 13 Associated Press news report that takes as fact Metropolitan Opera general director Peter Gelb’s explanation for a slump in sales.With the Met’s season over, Gelb has been making the rounds, pushing this narrative repeatedly in interviews and podcasts.

He even ripped the American president last week from a Kyiv stage, telling Ukrainians his government “no longer stands for some of democracy’s most basic principles.”The Met matched its 2023-24 sales, at 72% of capacity — but had projected 75%.“We were on track to continue to improve,” Gelb said.

“I attribute the fact that we didn’t achieve our sales goals to a significant drop in tourism.”That’s “a direct consequence” of Trump policy, Gelb told German outlet BackstageClassical.He said New York saw 17% fewer tourists after President Trump took office, sighing to AP about “the times in which we live.”Gelb’s international Blame Trump tour might make him more popular at Upper West Side cocktail parties (which he’s been attending for life: His father was New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb).

But he should look closer to home to understand why he’s not seeing success at the storied institution he’s run for 18 years.The impresario can’t help putting the political into his productions, even though audiences are anything but enamored of these new, woke operas.And he needlessly canceled the company’s biggest star, Anna Netrebko — to make a political point he still crow...