Open aria theater

HOW’S this for coming strong out of the gate -- the Metropolitan Opera season had not yet officially begun, the gala opening night still days off, and yet the guy in the suit, who doesn’t sing a note, was getting an ovation, cheers, “Bravos!” from a packed house, all 3,800 seats filled.

And it wasn’t only veteran opera-goers who had scooped up those free tickets for the final dress rehearsal of “Madama Butterfly.” Delsin Sefman, 5, was clutching a miniature Power Rangers robot while trying to make sense of the tear-jerker about the Japanese woman who falls for an American sailor. “I didn’t like what the girl did to the boy,” Delsin told his mom, Tousette, a New York corrections officer, a corrections officer.

Of course there’s no rule saying someone from the prison world can’t be at the opera, and she had been before (“I used to date a guy who had orchestra seats”), but that’s hardly the traditional image of the opera crowd exemplified by an old Weegee photograph showing a society woman in a fur coat passing common folk on the street who glare at her while dripping with hatred, just as she drips with jewels.

Then again, the Met filled 93% of its seats not long ago. Last season the figure was 77%.

During an intermission in the open rehearsal of “Madama Butterfly,” the corrections officer mom led her son outside, where workmen were erecting a platform for opening night, when the gala performance of the Puccini opera would be projected on screens in Lincoln Center Plaza and Times Square -- to be followed by offering other Met productions on satellite radio. “I found out that you can get some tickets for $15 too,” said the tot-toting mom.

To be sure, not everyone was sold on what’s going on at the nation’s leading opera house. George Bash, 80, originally from Transylvania, was wary of importing directors from the movies or Broadway to give its operas a new look. Bash once saw a “Magic Flute” with “exaggerated” staging that “distracted from the singing,” he said. “I hope they will not neglect the singers.”

Then the crowd headed inside for the final act of the “Butterfly” directed by just such an outsider, Anthony Minghella, who won an Academy Award for “The English Patient.” With “Butterfly,” he told the performers not to sing at their first run-through, to merely speak their lines. He used a Japanese Bunraku puppet instead of a young actor to play the love child of Cio-Cio-San and the American, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. And when the heroine realizes that she has lost her beau, and the child, and does what an opera heroine does -- kills herself -- dancers dressed in black appear to pull lush red fabric from her throat. Yards of fabric keep coming out, as when a magician pulls scarves from his sleeve, until they stretch into enormous diagonals across the stage. Both beautiful and horrifying, the image of spreading blood unfolds above them as well, for the ceiling over the stage is mirrored and tilted toward the audience.

Finally Pinkerton cries “Butterfly!,” the curtain falls and the people rise again to treat the singers, orchestra and conductor James Levine as if they were rock stars, bookending the reception given before the show to the man in the suit, Peter Gelb, who has emerged, almost overnight, as the great hope of, if not an entire aging art form, at least the 123-year-old Met.

“I’ve never been cheered by 4,000 people,” the Met’s new general manager said later. “Who wouldn’t be excited?”

Yet, given how he’d been in the post a matter of weeks -- since Aug. 1 -- Gelb knew it would be wise not to let the cheers go to his head before anyone sees if his bid to lift “this veil of formality” from the opera house will work.

“I’m also realistic enough to know this was an audience that got 4,000 free tickets,” he said. “Why wouldn’t they cheer?”

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Unconventional resume

GELB jokes that when he was born, 52 years ago, his great-uncle Jascha Heifetz, the violinist, came to the hospital and put a tuning fork to his ear “to check for signs of innate virtuosity.” The punch line: “My mother informs me that I failed the test.”

While that giant of 20th century music was in his maternal bloodlines, his father, Arthur Gelb, was no slouch either, having risen from copy boy to become managing editor of the New York Times, serving as a drama critic in the process.

The first time Gelb went to the opera, at 13, he saw “Carmen” from the box of a Met general manager, Rudolph Bing, who served from 1950 to 1972. His most vivid memory of the night was Bing’s jumping from the box and “jousting with a spectator who was yelling ‘phooey!’ at the end of one of the arias.”

Gelb suggests he was almost a normal kid, collecting boxes of baseball cards. But the radio under his covers at night was tuned to WQXR-FM, a classical station.

He spent only a short time at Yale but got an education as an “assistant mailroom boy” for Sol Hurok, the Russian-born impresario who represented Marian Anderson, brought the Bolshoi Ballet to America and once said, “When people don’t want to come, nothing will stop them.”

At 19, Gelb became a publicist at a level, as he describes it, not unlike Woody Allen’s fictional agent in “Broadway Danny Rose,” who represents an act that twists balloons into puppy dogs. In his real-life case, the clients were “aging cabaret singers, anxious tenors and the occasional circus performer,” Gelb recalled in a speech last year.

He joined the Boston Symphony in 1978 as promotion director, then became assistant manager and arranged its visit to China near the end of the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese insisted on profit sharing, so they wrote out a contract on “tissue-paper-thin hotel stationery” providing for “50% sharing of profits or losses.”

In 1982, he joined Columbia Artists, for which he represented performers and produced films and TV shows, including the Met’s broadcasts. That’s when he saw how its then general manager, Joseph Volpe, handled a temperamental soprano who didn’t like the color of her wig. “The wig is going on,” Volpe said, “with or without you.”

Gelb says he developed his own skills in dealing with “divas” as the manager of Vladimir Horowitz, who insisted on a stage temperature of 72 degrees. “I can assure you that on concert days I carried a thermometer,” said Gelb, who arranged the piano legend’s televised return to Russia in 1986.

Gelb exercised a different diplomacy with Luciano Pavarotti, who in talks about a Three Tenors concert in 2000 was convinced that Italian tax authorities were eavesdropping on him, so they negotiated “by silently tracing contractual figures with our fingers on his kitchen table.”

By then, Gelb was president of the Sony Classical recording label during a time when classical music was hardly flying off the shelves. His biggest success was with the “Titanic” soundtrack, and he served up a famous, or infamous, quote while discussing commercial realities with a British magazine. “I know what good music is,” he said. “I just don’t want to record it.”

Gelb waited nearly a year for a feeler when the Met began its search for a replacement for Volpe. When he did get his chance, he was to the point. “I explained to them that I believed the Metropolitan Opera was an isolated artistic island and that the only way to move forward would be to build bridges to a broader public,” he said. Within 48 hours the great-nephew of Jascha Heifetz had the job of managing 1,500 employees and a $220-million budget in “either the most coveted job in the performing arts or the one most likely to lead to a nervous breakdown.”

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Staunching the flow

THE empty seats were hard to miss at all sorts of performing halls after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Met saw occupancy drop 10 percentage points, while across Lincoln Center, the City Opera had its occupancy go from “into the 80s” to less than 75%, according to Jane M. Gullong, its executive director. “It marked a turning point,” she said.

There was a psychological impact too, not unlike the “broken windows” view of crime-ridden neighborhoods, which sees unfixed vandalism having an escalating effect. At the Met, one incentive for people to become donors had long been gaining access to tickets. How could they feel so lucky anymore if they saw empty rows behind them?

It was evident after a few years that larger cultural forces were at work too. With opera, the advancing age of patrons and cost of tickets -- up to $375 at the Met -- were frequently cited, along with the staleness of the programming. At a recent symposium at the French-American Foundation in New York, the former executive vice president of the Paris Opera and a French economist outlined a study that found how dependent the major houses remain on “warhorse” operas of the 19th century. From 1999 to 2004, they calculated, two-thirds of the Met’s productions were from that century, and seven works accounted for 30% of all performances: “La Boheme,” “Carmen,” “Turandot,” “Tosca,” “Aida,” “Butterfly” and “La Traviata.” Six works generated 30% of the box office in Paris.

“Bizet, Puccini and Mozart reign in Paris,” the pair concluded. “Puccini, Bizet and Verdi are the masters in New York.”

While City Opera scheduled more modern operas and Houston’s Grand Opera gained a reputation for staging new ones, the risk is enormous in the Met’s high-overhead house, where they calculated that each performance costs $631,000 -- and it doesn’t have the lavish government subsidies that help the Paris Opera meet its budget. When the Met tried showcasing new operas based on the literary classics “The Great Gatsby” and “An American Tragedy,” they got lukewarm receptions.

Another participant in the symposium, Mark A. Scorca, head of the nonprofit Opera America, took the analysis of the challenges even further, depicting a tension between opera’s highly hierarchical institutions, which in a midsized city may offer only a couple of dozen performances a year -- in a place and time they specify -- and the “increasingly consumer-driven world” in which you can order a book or movie at home, online, at midnight if you want.

Scorca is an optimist nonetheless, touting opera as a multimedia art form before its time. “It took the rest of the world 400 years to catch up,” he quips.

The multimedia potential is what Gelb is trying to tap in asking outsiders to spruce up the visual drama in Met operas, as with an upcoming “The Barber of Seville,” which will be directed by Bartlett Sher of Broadway’s “The Light in the Piazza.” Julie Taymor of “The Lion King” fame is creating an abridged version of her “The Magic Flute” in English to attract families during the holidays.

Given how Met schedules are set years in advance, most of Gelb’s recruits will not have their operas staged until several seasons from now, when they could wind up in Lincoln Center’s smaller Vivian Beaumont Theater, depending how they work out. Just don’t let Gelb catch you assuming that a Wynton Marsalis opera would land there and not in the cavernous Met. “Why not? He thinks big,” Gelb said of the trumpeter-composer.

Gelb was speaking three days after the open rehearsal of “Butterfly” and just hours before the gala opening. His e-mail gave him updates on which celebrities would be walking the red carpet. “Well, Russell Crowe was supposed to be coming, but I don’t think he is,” he reported.

The fact is, much of what he’s doing has been attempted before. Bing imported Broadway talent back in the ‘50s. The City Opera has nights when all tickets are $25. London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden experimented with piping operas into movie theaters.

“It’s the launch of all this, all at once, by the nation’s largest performing arts institution,” said Opera America’s Scorca. “To adopt these ... practices makes everybody sit up.”

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Seeing what sticks

AS red-carpet time neared on Sept. 25, Gelb got a call from his son David, asking whether to wear suspenders with his tux. “I’m wearing them,” his dad told him.

David, 22, just graduated from USC’s film school and a younger son also wants to get into the movie biz, where a lot of ideas sound great at pitch meetings but no one knows which will go over with the audience.

“Some will work, some won’t,” says Leon Botstein, the Renaissance man conductor and Bard College president, offering his take on Gelb’s initiatives at the Met. Botstein applauds the use of modern technology, “the transmission of these great spectacles or events on a streaming basis so you can download them, both sound and audio.

“That’s the long-term future,” he says, comparing it to how people take in baseball and football games -- some want the live experience in a packed stadium, but far more tune in from afar.

Botstein does worry about the huge performing halls built in the ‘60s and ‘70s, like the Met -- he suspects the future is in more intimate spaces. But he is all for Gelb’s going after the snobbery that unnecessarily distances people from opera, which “talks about the most important things in our life. You know, betrayal, love and death. Everybody knows what that’s about.”

Some critics no doubt will be waiting for the Met’s new GM to cross the line between selling that art form and selling it out. Gelb addressed that recently when he recalled seeing one of those “Euro-trash” productions that try anything to connect. It was a “Rigoletto” conceived by a German film director as “Rigoletto Meets the Planet of the Apes.” Set amid the shattered remains of the world’s opera houses, it had the singers dressed, yes, as apes.

“There will be no ape suits,” Gelb declared, “in our new productions.”

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paul.lieberman@latimes.com