Dramatic Results

Making opera (yes, opera) seem young and hip.

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There are few institutions as staid as the opera. So it's more than a little surprising that New York's Metropolitan Opera has emerged as one of the most media-savvy organizations, cultural or otherwise, around. Over the past 12 months, the Met--the nation's oldest opera company--has unleashed a remarkable multipronged media strategy, using everything from skillfully produced events to streaming audio to simulcasts on satellite radio and in movie theaters, all to communicate the unlikely message that opera (that's right, opera) is hip.

The effort has been spearheaded by the opera's new general manager, Peter Gelb, a former head of Sony Classical. When Gelb took the job last year, the situation was fairly dire: Revenue at the Met had been flat for six straight years, more tickets were being sold at discount to fill the house, and the average age of the audience had jumped to 65. Gelb wasted no time, doubling the marketing budget and making some daring moves, such as enlisting filmmaker Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) to stage Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

The risks paid off. Revenue jumped more than $8 million last season, and the overall audience expanded 15 percent. Advance sales for the 2007-2008 season are up 10 percent. Getting all of this done so quickly, especially at a 124-year-old institution with 900 employees and a $220 million budget, was no small feat. Senior writer Stephanie Clifford recently asked Gelb about how he pulled it off.

When you took this job, how did you plan to make this old-school institution relevant to a new crowd?
When I was being interviewed, I explained to the board that if I was to take this position, we'd all have to recognize what was wrong with the Met. There was a reason the audience was declining. And it had to do not just with the marketing of the Met, but with the core artistic essence of the Met. It needed to go through a quiet revolution that would be exciting enough to engage a new audience. I wasn't looking to suddenly turn the Met into an audience of 20-year-olds, but to draw upon the broader cultural audience of New York City.

How do you get something like that past a board that might not be so eager to change?
By explaining to them that it was necessary. And telling them I had a plan of how I was going to do it. I was very careful. I did it almost like a political platform. I laid out planks, specific initiatives that were going to be undertaken. And I kept repeating them in stump speeches. I held a press conference on the state of the Met. And luckily--and when you're producing something, luck always is a factor--my first few new productions, starting with Madama Butterfly, were successful. They not only were looked on benignly by the core audience, but also attracted a new audience.

How did you position Butterfly, a 103-year-old opera, as a must-see new event?
The Met previously did not run advertising beyond basic listings ads, so all of the advertising last season was meant to engage the public in new ways. We spent half a million dollars on a public outreach campaign in which we established the new Met with a very striking image of a performer from Butterfly. That became an iconic image and we put it everywhere: on the sides of buses, on entries into subways, on lampposts, in newspaper ads. We also did radio.

Then we staged a number of events to let people know that the Met, without dumbing itself down artistically, was going to be more accessible to a broader audience. So I said the final dress rehearsal of Butterfly would be the first rehearsal in the history of the Met that was open to the public. When we made tickets available for free, 4,000 people lined up and all the TV crews came. That in itself became an amazing event. We created a documentary about the rehearsal, and I'm bringing in filmmakers to work on intermission features for the simulcasts.

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