Metropolitan Opera: The Math Behind the Collapse

The Financial Statements: $47 Million Annual Deficit

The Met's IRS Form 990 — the tax filing every nonprofit must make public — reveals the scale of the problem. In fiscal year 2024, the Met spent $331 million while earning only $284 million. The gap: $47 million. This is not a one-time event. The organization has been running structural deficits for years, plugging the gap with endowment withdrawals and one-time gifts.

More than half of the Met's revenue comes from donations, not tickets. The Met earns only $105 million from actually selling opera — roughly 37 cents of every dollar it spends. The remaining 63 cents must come from philanthropic generosity. When a major donor turns out to be fraudulent — as happened in 2025 — the math doesn't bend. It breaks.

The Endowment: Eating the Seed Corn

An endowment is supposed to be an institution's financial foundation — the permanent capital that generates annual income to support operations while preserving the principal for future generations. It is, by design, the one thing you don't spend.

The Metropolitan Opera has spent it.

Since fiscal 2023, the Met has withdrawn $120 million from its endowment to cover operating deficits. That represents roughly one-third of the endowment's total value, consumed in approximately three years. In December 2022, the endowment stood at $306 million. By January 2024, Gelb withdrew another $40 million. In July 2024, the Board approved borrowing up to $50 million more. After the Pietras fraud was exposed in June 2025, another $5 million was drawn.

This is not a reserve draw during an emergency. This is an institution eating its own seed corn to keep the lights on, season after season, while its general manager assures the public that a turnaround is coming.

The Attendance Crisis and the Season Cuts

Even with conservative programming, the Met cannot fill its house. Paid attendance reached only 72% of capacity in the 2024–25 season — down from 75% pre-pandemic — and has stalled there. Factoring in ticket discounts, the Met realized only 60% of potential ticket income. That means the opera house is collecting barely more than half of what its seats are theoretically worth.

The 2026–27 season tells the story of an institution in contraction: 17 productions — the fewest in more than sixty years. Only 5 new stagings. 71 of 187 total performances devoted to just three crowd-favorite operas: Puccini's Tosca, Puccini's La Bohème, and Verdi's Aida. 22 administrative layoffs. Executive salary cuts of 4–15%. Postponement of McBurney's staging of Khovanshchina.

Gelb's response to the attendance problem has been to commission new contemporary operas. The results have been sobering: contemporary operas averaged just 65% attendance in the 2023–24 season, consistently underperforming the traditional repertoire. When his commissioned opera Grounded received negative reviews, Gelb suggested that critics had an “agenda” and were responsible for the production's poor reception. He subsequently wrote a New York Times op-ed taking another shot at critics. The pattern is consistent: when the strategy fails, Gelb blames the critics.

Subscriptions have collapsed from 45% to 15% over two decades — a 67% decline. The average Met subscriber is 70 years old. This is a customer base that is, in actuarial terms, disappearing.

How He Treated the Musicians: $41 Million Saved on Their Backs

In spring 2020, as COVID-19 devastated New York City, Peter Gelb suspended all paychecks for the Met's orchestra musicians, chorus, and stagehands effective April 1.

The Met was an outlier in the industry. As NPR reported, every other major American orchestra continued compensating its musicians during the pandemic. The Met did not. While health insurance contributions continued, all wages stopped.

The financial benefit to management: according to the Met's own financial disclosures, the organization saved $41 million in wages during just four and a half months of withheld pay.

The human cost: one-third of the Met's unsalaried orchestra musicians left New York City — some exhausting their savings, some taking early retirement, some moving back in with their parents. These are among the most accomplished instrumentalists in the world. Conductor Riccardo Muti publicly expressed his “disbelief that the Met Opera Orchestra is in danger of disappearing.”

The Met subsequently locked out IATSE Local One stagehands after the union refused a 30% pay cut. The Met Orchestra's union, AFM Local 802, issued a statement of solidarity: “Met management is exploiting this temporary situation to permanently gut contracts.”

Meanwhile, Peter Gelb continued earning approximately $1.5 million annually throughout this period.

The $16 Million Machine That Didn't Work

In 2010, Gelb championed a new production of Wagner's Ring cycle directed by Robert Lepage. The centerpiece was “The Machine” — a 45-ton, $16 million computerized set consisting of 24 aluminum planks that rotated, tilted, and transformed with video projections. It was the most expensive production in Met history. It was also, by critical consensus, a failure. The Washington Post's headline: “The Met's 'Ring' succeeds thanks to singers, despite multimillion dollar production.” The Machine was notoriously prone to glitches, and its mechanical noise was audible to audiences during performances. $16 million on a set that critics described as a noisy distraction from the music.

The Saudi Gamble

Facing financial collapse, Gelb negotiated a deal with the Saudi Music Commission and the Royal Diriyah Opera House worth more than $200 million over eight years. The Met would become the resident winter company of Saudi Arabia's new opera house, traveling to Riyadh each winter.

The ethical concerns were immediate. Saudi Arabia's human rights record — including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the imprisonment of women's rights activists, and the war in Yemen — made the partnership deeply controversial. NBC News, the Middle East Institute, and numerous cultural commentators raised alarm.

The hypocrisy was difficult to ignore. In 2022, Gelb had been vocal about cutting ties with Putin-aligned artists and institutions, canceling appearances and severing the Met's relationship with the Bolshoi Theatre. When asked about Saudi Arabia, Gelb offered: “All the democratic governments that I know of are engaged in business with Saudi Arabia.” The moral framework, apparently, depends on which autocracy is writing the check.

But here is the truly devastating part: the Saudi money hasn't arrived. As of early 2026, Gelb acknowledged that the Saudi contribution had been delayed. The consequence: 22 layoffs, the smallest season in 60 years, and executive salary cuts. The Met bet its entire financial future on a single deal with an authoritarian government. That deal has not yet delivered.

The Fire Sale: Chagalls and Naming Rights

In January 2026, it was reported that the Met is considering selling its two iconic Marc Chagall murals — the monumental paintings commissioned in the 1960s for the Grand Tier lobby. Sotheby's valuation: $55 million combined. If sold, the condition would be that the buyer leave them in place.

The Met is also exploring selling naming rights to its theater — the possibility that the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center could bear a corporate name. When you sell the art on your walls and the name on your building, you are not managing a cash flow challenge. You are liquidating.

To put these numbers in perspective:

The Fraud: A Donor Who Didn't Exist

In March 2025, Peter Gelb proudly announced a $15 million gift from Matthew Christopher Pietras, a 40-year-old man who claimed to manage the finances of Gregory Soros, son of billionaire George Soros.

Pietras had risen through the Met's donor ranks over several years. His name first appeared in the Met's annual report in the 2018–19 season, under gifts between $5,500 and $6,499. By 2020–21, he was giving between $50,000 and $99,999. He graduated to gala co-chair status and was given the title of Managing Director on the board.

None of it was real.

On May 28, 2025, when the Met attempted to transfer $10 million from an LLC connected to a property attributed to Gregory Soros, the bank flagged the transaction as fraudulent. Two days later, on May 30, a housekeeper found Pietras dead in his apartment. His death was ruled a suicide.

The Met's leadership had spent years cultivating a fraudulent donor, elevating him to board leadership, and counting his phantom millions in their financial projections. After the fraud was exposed, the Met was forced to return previously accepted funds and dip further into its dwindling endowment. What due diligence was performed on a donor who rose from $5,500 to a board seat in six years?

The Censorship Record

2012, WQXR: Radio station pulled a blog post by critic Olivia Giovetti after Gelb personally called the station's CEO to complain, calling the piece “awful and nasty.” WQXR had a sponsorship arrangement with the Met that made the station financially dependent on the institution its critic was evaluating.

2012, Opera News: The magazine — produced by the Met Opera Guild — announced it would no longer review Metropolitan Opera productions after critical coverage of Gelb's Ring cycle. Gelb said the decision was made “in collaboration with the guild.” The public outcry was immediate and fierce — noted critics across the country condemned the move, and the decision was reversed. But the message had been sent.

The pattern: when coverage is negative, Gelb intervenes. When critics are harsh, they have an “agenda.” The general manager of America's largest opera company has repeatedly used institutional power to suppress critical journalism.

The Levine Settlement: $3.5 Million

In 2018, Gelb fired James Levine — the Met's music director for 46 years — over sexual harassment allegations. Levine sued for breach of contract and defamation. Levine won. The settlement: $3.5 million — $900,000 covered by insurance, the Met responsible for roughly $2.6 million out of pocket. Whatever the merits of the underlying allegations, the financial outcome was clear: the Met's handling cost millions during a period of severe financial stress.

The full picture:

What the Met's Musicians Deserve

The Metropolitan Opera employs some of the finest instrumentalists, singers, choral artists, and stagehands in the world. They have dedicated their careers to an institution that, under Peter Gelb's leadership, has:

• Run a $47 million annual operating deficit
• Burned $120 million of its endowment in three years
• Been defrauded by a fake donor elevated to the board without apparent due diligence
• Bet its future on Saudi money that hasn't materialized
• Spent $16 million on a set that didn't work
• Stopped paying its musicians while every other orchestra did
• Saved $41 million on their unpaid labor
• Censored critics who questioned leadership
• Paid its manager $1.4 million annually through all of it
• Announced the smallest season in 60 years
• Been downgraded to Caa1 junk by Moody's
• Put its Chagall murals and building name up for sale

These musicians do not deserve four more years of this leadership. The Met's board — which has approved every endowment draw, every cost cut, and every desperate financial maneuver — owes the people who actually make the music a better answer than “we'll retire him in 2030.”