The New York Metropolitan Opera announced this Wednesday, September 23, 2020 “with pain” the cancellation of all your 2020-21 season due to the pandemic of covid-19, a major blow to the city’s arts and culture industry.
The announcement is a dire signal for the institutions that present live entertainment in New York, which at the Met will not resume before at least September 2021.
The Governor of the State of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has not yet authorized the resumption of the shows in closed spaces.
After consulting with public health officials, the Opera decided that “it is not safe (…) to resume operations” until a vaccine against him coronavirus has been administered to the population.
Something that, according to the authorities, will take “at least five or six months” after the vaccine is available to everyone, according to a statement on Wednesday.
The Met is one of the first cultural institutions foreground of New York to announce the annulment of all his season.
The famous theatrical circuit of Broadway, paralyzed since mid-March and in an extremely delicate situation, is still betting on reopening in early 2021.
Peter Yellow, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, told AFP that the institution is going through “the difficult moment” in its 137-year history.
The Opera It will stop earning at least some USD 154 million for the cancellation of eight weeks of the 2019-2020 season and the entire 2020-2021 season, he indicated.
“I think some people think of the Met as some kind of historic and invulnerable institution,” continued the official, who took office 14 years ago. “Clearly, no institution has immunity from financial failure”.
For survive“It will be necessary to reduce costs globally,” he added.
About 1,000 employees full time of the New York Opera are in unemployment insurance since April.
Gelb said he aspires to negotiate with unions a new collective agreement that foresees a drop in wages.
“I am optimistic, if we are able to convince our workforce to collectively take responsibility for the recovery,” he said.
“The Met seems determined to take advantage of this situation to destroy our employment contracts and those of other unionized employees, ”the American Guild of Musical Arts (AGMA), one of the main unions that represents the workers of the institution.
“The individual and family situation of our members will be financially unbearable” in the event that the cuts salaries, said the union in a statement transmitted to AFP.
Donation “flow”
The cancellation from season represents a new hit for an institution that for several years has tried to attract a younger audience in order to fill its room, one of the largest in the world, with 3,800 seats.
The Met has a budget considerable that in 2018-19 reached USD 312 million. But the income from ticket office they only represented 85 million in that period.
The institution’s largest source of money comes from patronage.
Peter Gelb noted that from the beginning of the pandemic the institution had received a “flow” of donations from 30,000 new patrons.
To project itself into the future, the Opera presented the calendar of the 2021-22 season, which will open with ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’, by the jazz musician Terence Blanchard, hired at the Saint-Louis Opera House, where it was already presented.
Plan to include three contemporary works in its programming, for the first time since the 1928-29 season.
“The inability to produce weighs heavily on our organization,” Gelb also said.
As announced in June, the institution is betting on advancing the start time of several of its functions and reduce his duration, “To respond to the expectations of a public that will be, the least initially, more prudent” than usual due to the covid-19 pandemic.
– .
