Contracts between the Metropolitan Opera, its orchestra (AFM Local 802) and stagehands (IATSE Local 1) expire at midnight tonight. Insiders tells us talks have been bogged down on general manager Peter Gelb’s insistence that there’s no new money coming in.
A hair-raising story in New York magazine about a dead donor suggests that panic has set in.
Two brief extracts:
On Wednesday, May 28, a $10 million transfer was routed to the Met from an LLC associated with a property Greg owned. But it was flagged as fraudulent and didn’t go through. That night, back in New York, Pietras attended the American Ballet Theatre’s spring gala at Cipriani, where he wore a cold expression for photographers on the step-and-repeat. He looked pale and jet-lagged. Meanwhile, Met employees waited to hear from him — surely the whole thing was just a mistake. Before they could figure it out, on Friday, May 30, a housekeeper found Pietras dead in his apartment. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Stefanie. “The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense. It was all just too weird. I was like, Something isn’t adding up here. But nothing ever did with Matthew, and no one could say what the hell happened.”…
*
At an emergency meeting after Pietras’s death, Gelb and the Met’s top board members discussed what had become suddenly, alarmingly clear: Not only was the promised gift not coming but they had accepted millions in fraudulent funds. The Met scrambled to develop a communications strategy, a plan of action for when reporters inevitably called. But the problem went beyond bad press. Even as audiences have trickled back after the pandemic, the opera — like most every cultural institution across the city — has bled cash. Gelb has tried to plug the holes with contemporary stagings and celebrity-driven marketing, but his efforts have been mostly futile.
Critics say he let costs run wild while doing a poor job of fundraising, forcing him to look further afield for new donors. Now, to make matters worse, he’d counted on one of those new donors for a massive pledge that wouldn’t be arriving. Over the past two years, the board had allowed Gelb to dip into its endowment multiple times to cover basic costs like payroll. After Pietras’s death, he once again got the board’s permission to reach into the endowment.
Lately, in interviews, Gelb has teased a “transformative” gift some say is almost certainly a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia…
Elsewhere, the New York Times, a newspaper that lives off Met handouts, runs a feature today on how its chandeliers are being cleaned. Not a word about the contracts deadlock or the fraudulent gifts.
The post Big money goes missing as Met’s contract talks hit deadline appeared first on Slippedisc.
