The Metropolitan Opera is Dying Because It Wants to Die

The pinnacle of the Performing Arts in America is collapsing not from the weight of its chandelier, but from the brittleness of its imagination. The Metropolitan Opera has chosen extinction over evolution, and the evidence is no longer circumstantial.

In January 2026, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, announced layoffs of 22 administrative employees, graduated salary cuts for 35 executives earning over $150,000, a reduction of the 2026-27 season to just 17 productions (the Met regularly staged 25 or more before the pandemic), and the postponement of a planned new staging of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. These are not cost-saving measures. They are the vital signs of an institution in cardiac arrest. The Met has drained approximately $120 million from its endowment since 2022, consuming more than a third of its total reserves. Moody’s downgraded the Met’s credit rating twice in 2025, most recently to B3 with a negative outlook. And now, in a gesture that should alarm anyone who cares about American culture, the Met is considering selling Marc Chagall’s two monumental murals, The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music, appraised by Sotheby’s at $55 million, under the stipulation that the buyer leave them hanging in the Grand Tier. It is the aesthetic equivalent of pawning your wedding ring but asking the buyer to let you keep wearing it.

The numbers that precede this moment are equally grim. Subscription sales, once the backbone of opera house revenue, have collapsed to just 7 percent of ticket sales as of the 2024-25 season, down from what the Met has reported was around 45 percent two decades ago. The average subscriber is now 70 years old. In 2023, the independent Metropolitan Opera Guild scaled back operations after decades of supporting the institution, and Opera News, the most significant American publication on the art form, printed its final issue as a standalone magazine. Ticket sales for the 2023-24 season reached 72 percent capacity, but when adjusted for steep discounting (tickets as low as $25), the effective revenue hit only about 64 percent of full-price potential. Opera ticket sales across major American companies fell 21 percent between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 seasons, per OPERA America. Revenue fell 22 percent over the same period. The 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons featured the fewest productions since 1980-81, when a labor crisis nearly shuttered the house.

The Met’s response to this emergency has been to seek salvation not from innovation or audience expansion but from foreign capital and fraudulent philanthropy. In September 2025, Gelb announced a deal with Saudi Arabia worth up to $200 million over eight years, under which the Met would perform three weeks each winter at the Royal Diriyah Opera House near Riyadh. The ethical compromises of this arrangement are self-evident: Saudi Arabia’s human rights record includes the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the persecution of the LGBTQ+ community, and systemic repression of women and dissidents. Gelb’s defense was breathtaking in its candor: “I have to put the survival of the institution of the Met first. I don’t operate the Met according to my personal feelings on every issue.” This from the same general manager who cut ties with the world-renowned soprano Anna Netrebko because she declined to repudiate her public support for Vladimir Putin. Morality, it seems, is negotiable when the check is large enough.

That Saudi check, however, has not cleared. By January 2026, the deal remains in limbo as Saudi Arabia recalibrates its own budgets. Gelb told the New York Times he has been “assured that it’s going to go forward,” but acknowledged “we have been waiting for some time.” In the meantime, the Met has hired CAA Sports to sell naming rights to its opera house and continues to bleed.

Then there is the Matthew Pietras affair, which reads like a libretto from an opera about institutional vanity. Pietras, a 40-year-old who claimed to manage the finances of Gregory Soros, son of the billionaire George Soros, rose through the Met’s donor ranks over several years, graduating from modest gifts to gala co-chair status and the title of Managing Director on the board. In March 2025, he pledged $15 million to the Met. When he attempted to transfer the first $10 million in late May 2025, the bank flagged it as fraudulent. It was. Pietras had allegedly embezzled the funds from his employers. A representative of the Soros family contacted the Met to explain the money was stolen. Two days later, Pietras was found dead in his apartment. His death was ruled a suicide. The Met had counted on that money for operating expenses. It had to withdraw another $5 million from its already ravaged endowment, while board members scrambled to pledge emergency funds. The parallels to the Alberto Vilar Ponzi scheme that struck the Met in the early 2000s are unavoidable. The institution seems magnetically attracted to phantom benefactors.

All of this is tragic, and none of it is surprising, because the Metropolitan Opera has been systematically refusing to adapt for decades. The institution does not fail because it lacks resources. It fails because it lacks the willingness to rethink who opera is for.

We Tried to Help. They Didn’t Want It.

In the summer of 2023, Janna and I brought a proposal to the Metropolitan Opera. Our ASL Opera Project was designed to address something that should have embarrassed every major opera company in the country: the near-total exclusion of the Deaf from live operatic performance. Broadway shows have offered ASL-interpreted performances since 1980. Opera, which fancies itself the apex of all performing arts, has done essentially nothing.

Our proposal was simple and three-pronged. First, provide live ASL-interpreted performances at the Met using what we call “High Art” interpretation, matching the elevated performance quality of the opera itself. The Deaf have the right to experience the fullness of a Met performance in the same room, at the same time, and with the same access as a Hearing person. Second, create an outreach and educational program that would help prepare new Deaf audiences for their first operatic experience. Third, establish a High Art Opera interpreter training program at the Met, bringing interpreters from across the country to learn how to interpret live opera, working alongside performers and culminating in a signed performance on the main stage.

We were not asking the Met for money. We were offering them something they desperately needed: a new audience. An untapped community of people who had been locked out of opera for its entire history. We came with expertise, having co-founded the CUNY-SPS ASL Program and co-authored ASL textbooks. Janna, who is Deaf, had been a Broadway musical Juilliard advisor and interpreted performance artist. She grew up singing gospel hymns in ASL. She had already performed ASL interpretations of arias by Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Elina Garanca, and Diana Damrau. We had a website, proof-of-concept videos, and an interview with Opera Wire. We had everything except the one thing we could not manufacture: institutional courage.

Our meeting on July 11, 2023 was polite, forward-looking, and, in retrospect, a performance of interest without any underlying intention. The Met’s concerns were telling. They worried interpreters would be “distracting” to performers and audience. They questioned why ASL would be necessary when operas are captioned in English, revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of ASL (which is a distinct natural language with its own grammar, not a manual rendering of English, and many Deaf people, particularly foreign-born Deaf, are not literate in English). They asked how two interpreters could represent fifty singers on stage, and Janna explained Role Shifting, a foundational technique in ASL communication, where a single interpreter can voice a thousand characters by establishing them spatially.

The Met listened. They nodded. They told us they would look into it. Then they shuffled us into the DEI department, which is where institutions send ideas they intend to bury under bureaucratic politeness. The meeting with the board never came. The follow-up never happened. The idea was received, acknowledged, and abandoned. They did not even have the professional courtesy to say no. They simply let the silence do it for them.

The irony should not be lost on anyone watching the Met sell its Chagall murals and fire its staff while begging for Saudi money. Here was an opportunity to expand their audience to include a community that has never been welcomed into the opera house. It would have cost them almost nothing compared to what they spend on a single production. It would have generated press, goodwill, educational partnerships, and, yes, ticket revenue. It would have demonstrated that the Met understood accessibility not as a compliance checkbox but as a moral imperative. Instead, they chose to do nothing, and now they are choosing to do less than nothing: cutting, shrinking, selling, and crawling toward an authoritarian regime for a bailout that may never arrive.

Why Opera Is Dying in America

The answer is not that Americans have lost their taste for great art. The answer is that opera institutions have refused to meet Americans where they are. Opera in Germany continues to thrive, supported by robust government funding and a culture that treats the performing arts as a public good rather than a luxury for the wealthy. In the United States, opera companies receive more than twice as much funding from philanthropy as from government sources, and that philanthropic base is eroding. New billionaires, many of whom made their fortunes in technology, prefer to direct their giving toward education, disease eradication, or global development. The old money that built opera houses is aging out, and no one is replacing them.

Opera companies have nearly doubled their administrative costs as a share of their budgets since the mid-2000s, while spending on artistic programming has remained flat. They have not embraced the audience data analysis, digital content experimentation, or online engagement strategies that every other sector of the entertainment industry uses as standard practice. Management practices, metrics, and audience development tactics have barely changed since the pre-internet era. The number of students graduating with degrees in vocal performance dropped 35 percent between 2011 and 2021. The pipeline is drying up because young performers can see that the industry offers them a middle-class income at best, in exchange for a doctoral-level education and a life lived on the road.

Opera Philadelphia put its annual festival on hiatus in 2024. The Detroit Opera, once celebrated by the New York Times as “the Future of American Opera,” canceled its 2025-26 season opener after losing over $3 million the year before. The Baltimore Opera Company and Pacific Opera in Orange County have closed permanently. The New York City Opera, which once performed daily at Lincoln Center, filed for bankruptcy in 2013 and now stages approximately one show per year.

And across all of this wreckage, the consistent thread is institutional rigidity. Every company that has failed, or is failing, made the same fundamental error: they assumed that upholding tradition requires refusing to change. They treated their audience as a fixed demographic rather than a community to be built. They programmed for subscribers who were already dying rather than for the public that was being born. They chose aesthetic purity over human inclusion.

The Diagnosis is Confirmed

The Metropolitan Opera is not failing because opera is irrelevant. Opera is the most complete art form ever devised. It combines music, drama, visual art, poetry, architecture, and the full range of human vocal expression into a single, unified experience. There is nothing else like it. The problem is that the institution charged with presenting this art form in the United States has become a monument to its own inertia.

When Janna and I walked out of that Met meeting in 2023, we were hopeful. We had been heard, or so we thought. What we learned, over the months of silence that followed, was something more instructive. The Met did not reject our proposal because it was impractical or too expensive. They rejected it because it required them to change. It required them to acknowledge that their audience could, and should, include people they had never served. It required them to accept that accessibility is not a side project but a central artistic and ethical obligation. And it required them to admit that they needed help.

The Met could not do any of those things. It still cannot. Instead, it has chosen to sell its art, fire its people, beg from autocrats, and hope that a fraudulent donor class will replace the philanthropic base it has failed to cultivate. This is not a survival strategy. It is a hospice plan with better lighting.

Peter Gelb told the New York Times in 2022 that “the only path forward is reinvention.” He was right about the word. He was wrong about his willingness to pursue it. Reinvention requires guts. It requires the humility to listen to people who offer new ideas, even when those ideas come from outside the velvet rope. It requires looking at the Deaf community, at disabled audiences, at young people who have never set foot in an opera house, and saying: you belong here, and we will make room for you.

The Met chose not to make room. The Deaf are still locked out. The Chagall murals may find a new owner. And the greatest opera house in the Western Hemisphere is sinking, not because the music stopped, but because the people running it refused to learn a new song.

The ASL Opera Project remains active. If you are interested in bringing ASL interpretation to opera performances, contact us.

Previously: Will The Metropolitan Opera Allow the Deaf to Sing? and Yes, the Deaf Just May Sing at the Metropolitan Opera!

Brookfield CT Theater present's Sondheim's ASSASSINS

Weekend shows Feb. 13 - March 7

Shows with ASL interpretation on Sunday 2/22 & Friday 2/27.

Tickets $35, $30 seniors, $20 students: https://www.brookfieldtheatre.org/

#theater #connecticut #ASL #theatre #musicals #signlanguage

It’s a really common question, and the short answer is: not all deaf people find captions (subtitles) easy or natural to follow, especially if their first language is sign language like BSL (British Sign Language) rather than English.

Sandy uses her amazing #ASL ability to sign what #Reggae means to her. #shorts #music #diyband #zhzpodcast #musicpodcast #videopodcast #SatWhatWithSandy #signlanguage

Check out the FULL INTERVIEW in PART ONE of this killer episode! ➡️ https://youtu.be/O23j3xT-xo4?si=I3567Y-t3lAOeydJ

Protestujący w Hong Kongu używali znaków migowych tego kraju aby na bieżąco informować się o zapotrzebowaniu na kaski/parasole/wodę/maski itp. na lini zderzenia z ochroną rządową

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/HONGKONG-EXTRADITIONS-TACTICS/0100B0790FL/

#signlanguage #migowy

Memory in the Meme

We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.

The meme is often dismissed by the serious-minded as the detritus of a distracted generation. It is seen as a low-resolution joke, a lazy way to communicate a thought that should have been an essay. But as someone who has spent a lifetime studying the intersection of the “Human Meme” and the hard realities of communication, from the stageboards of Broadway to the silent, proximal grammar of American Sign Language, I tell you that the meme is something far more curious. It is a vessel of containment. It is the modern amber in which we trap the mosquito of our collective emotion, preserving the DNA of a specific moment in time that would otherwise evaporate into the ether of the forgotten.

Consider the “visual vernacular” of the internet. In American Sign Language, we talk about the power of the classifier—a handshape that represents a class of objects, moving through space to tell a story that words cannot capture. The meme operates on this same frequency. It is a classifier for the soul. When you share an image of a skeleton sitting on a park bench waiting for a reply, you are not just making a joke about patience. You are transmitting a complex, heavy emotional state—the specific, crushing weight of being ignored—without uttering a syllable. You are using a shared visual language to contain a feeling that is too large and too messy to be constrained by the rigid geometry of the English alphabet.

There is a “braided prairie” quality to this phenomenon. Growing up in Nebraska, I learned that the land remembers everything. The wind that cuts through the tall grass carries the same dust that settled on the pioneers. The meme is our digital prairie. It is a vast, open space where millions of individual blades of grass, our individual anxieties, our triumphs, our absurdities, weave together to form a cohesive landscape. When a meme goes viral, it is not because it is clever. It is because it has tapped into the groundwater of that prairie. It has found a common root. It allows us to stand in the middle of the digital nowhere and say, “I am not alone in this feeling. You are here, too.”

This is the function of memory in the meme: it fights the “cultural instinct to forget.” The machine wants us to forget. The algorithm prioritizes the new, the fresh, the “trending.” It wants us to be in a constant state of forward motion because a person who stops to remember is a person who stops clicking ads. But the meme acts as a brake. It is an anchor. It drags the past, a screenshot from a 1999 cartoon, a blurry photo from a 2012 news broadcast, into the present and forces us to reckon with it. It creates a loop of “static time,” freezing a reaction in perpetuity.

I have written before about the tragedy of the “Original Cast Recording”—how it captures a living, breathing theatrical performance and freezes it into a definitive, unchangeable document. The meme does something similar, but with a crucial difference. The cast recording demands you listen to it as it was; the meme invites you to remix it as you are. It is a living archive. It allows us to take the memory of the past and overlay it with the context of the present. It is a collaboration between the dead (the original context) and the living (the current caption).

However, we must be wary of the container itself. We are building our “palace of memory” on rented land. We entrust our cultural heritage to platforms that view our memories as data points to be mined, not treasures to be kept. We are facing a crisis of digital preservation. The “Link Rot” of the web is real. The servers will eventually be wiped. The Technocrats will pull the plug when the storage costs outweigh the ad revenue. And when that happens, what becomes of the memory?

This is why the act of sharing a meme is, in itself, an act of defiance. It is a way of keeping the signal alive. We are the “Human Meme.” We are the biological substrate that keeps these ideas breathing. When you save a meme to your phone, you are acting as an archivist. You are curating the museum of your own existence. You are saying that this specific collision of image and text, this specific containment of irony and truth, matters enough to be saved from the flow.

We must not mistake the trivial for the temporary. A joke can last a thousand years if it touches a truth that the history books are too polite to record. The meme is the folklore of the future. It is the cave painting of the twenty-first century, scratched not into stone, but into the liquid light of the screen. It proves we were here. It proves we saw the absurdity of the world, the horror and the beauty of it, and instead of screaming into the void, we chose to contain it. We chose to frame it. And we chose to share it.

So, the next time you hesitate to post that silly image, remember the weight of what you are doing. You are not just adding noise to the signal. You are preserving the hum of the human condition. You are ensuring that the memory survives the moment. You are telling the future that we were complex, and we were funny, and we were here.

#MusicChallenge
#20FaveVideos
To post your favourite videos, 1 per day in January.

I love that the story told in this video is based on an IRL story AND that the female actor in the video ended up marrying one of the group 😍

1/20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlYtC1mMHsg

#Jpop #SignLanguage

Agency is wildly powerful!

This morning at a community gathering I saw a hearing person politely ask a deaf person if the seat beside them was available. A nearby hearing person who also signed waited to see if they would resolve the matter themselves, but then seeing a need and could have answered the question instead signed the question for the deaf individual and relayed the response.

As a parent and as a spouse I can follow this example. I can’t count the number of times I’ve answered on behalf of my child or partner because I knew the answer. It’s a terrible habit that removes agency of the others around me; a habit I will break.

#Deaf #Agency #NotAResolution #DoBetter #Now #ASL #SignLanguage

Someone just sent me that, looks cool!

DicAutiSignes Project: A video sign dictionary designed for autistic people who want to learn French Sign Language (LSF). http://www.dicautisignes.org/Signaire/

#lsf #french #signlanguage