Peter Gelb. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

By the third week in May, the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season had been over for a week or so. Not that an opera company’s summer is really a break. Most of July is spent planning, and by August preparations are underway in earnest for the start of the season in September. The final week or so of May, however, is a reliable respite. The phones slow down; staff members usually get away for a few days.

But the tiny, gossipy opera world started from its slumber on May 21, when Daniel J. Wakin reported on The New York Times’ website that Opera News, the magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild (the nonprofit foundation that promotes opera and gives grants to the Met), would no longer be publishing reviews of Met productions. The decision had been made by Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, who had been upset by two recent articles in the glossy: a scathing review of the new production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and an essay by one of the magazine’s editors that criticized the Met’s artistic direction more broadly.

In journalism, three’s a trend, and this was the third instance of Mr. Gelb’s high-handed efforts to suppress critical outlets. Last August, the Met asked a blogger to stop publishing his listing of future Met seasons—he did—and last month Mr. Gelb personally asked the radio station WQXR to remove a blog post that ragged on him. The station complied.

So Mr. Wakin’s web post was more than just a news article; it was a genuine trend piece, and since The Times covers high culture and culture in New York aggressively, it ended up on the front page of the paper the following day. This found it a far wider readership than the usual opera story; friends of mine who couldn’t care less about opera were suddenly asking me about Opera News. The response was an immediate onslaught. Alex Ross, on The New Yorker’s blog, wrote that “the episode only intensified questions about Gelb’s fitness to lead the institution.” On the Washington Post’s blog, Anne Midgette was more blunt: “the takeaway now seems to me to be that Gelb is losing his mind.”

Even if he isn’t mentally ill, it seems that Mr. Gelb, like the rest of his staff, could use a vacation. It was a dispiriting season for New York’s opera critics, and doubtless a draining one for him. Lacking any justification at all to call Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Ring cycle a success, the Met is currently trying to manufacture an aura of “controversy” around it, but that’s a little like saying that there’s “controversy” among scientists about climate change.

What has been lost in the shuffle of the Met’s recent P.R. debacle is the fate of its music director, James Levine, whose persistent ailments have caused him to cancel all his performances next season. The word is that he intends eventually to return, but who knows?

I have been thinking a lot about Mr. Levine lately, and not just because the increasingly rudderless Met is in need of someone to handle its artistic direction. I’ve been thinking more about his style. Even if Mr. Levine’s musical-historical eminence is taken for granted in New York more than it should be, his conducting was always acknowledged as having weight. It had grandeur and size. (The downside of this is that it was sometimes, particularly in Wagner, eye-rollingly slow.)

The trend lately has been for something quite different. Few had kind words for the Ring production, but many critics did praise the conducting of Fabio Luisi, the Met’s principal conductor and, some say, music director in waiting. In many cases this functioned as a rhetorical strategy—a way of conspicuously not disliking everything, thereby making the most pungent criticisms count—but some writers did seem to respond to Mr. Luisi, who is also the conductor of the Vienna Symphony.

In Wagner, Mr. Luisi has said that he is all about transparency, lightness, subtlety: a corrective to sludgy Ring performances. But that sludginess is a straw man, and conductors have been advocating for “lighter,” more detailed versions of the Ring for decades now. When it comes to Mr. Luisi, you’re usually more aware of what’s missing than what’s been put in its place. The conductor’s touch often felt less light than affectless; maybe it was transparent, but the result was that you saw, and heard, very little. The Ring cycle closes with an apocalypse, the collapse of the gods’ regime, and Wagner’s arching theme of redemption through love. In Mr. Luisi’s rendition, the music might have been depicting a pleasant day in the park. Heaviness is not always the enemy when it’s profundity you’re going for.

This heaviness-versus-lightness debate flared up again on May 24 at a concert performance of Strauss’s Salome at Carnegie Hall featuring the mighty Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of its mercurial music director, Franz Welser-Möst. (Mr. Welser-Möst, like Mr. Luisi, also has an Austrian appointment; he leads the Vienna State Opera.)

His conception of Salome—which is often rendered as a bludgeon of sound—was streamlined, lyrical, sometimes oddly aloof. There were advantages to this approach: The early scenes were eerily offhand, making the eventual catastrophe even more powerful. The “Dance of the Seven Veils” began liltingly. Yet unlike Mr. Luisi’s Ring, Mr. Welser-Möst’s Salome rose to its climaxes. The unleashing of the seventh veil had a seventh-seal fury, and Mr. Welser-Möst had the great dramatic soprano Nina Stemme on his side for the final scene.

Appearing in evening wear, her Salome was vaguer than it might be in a staged production, and she made no effort, either in voice or interpretation, toward demonstrating that the character is a teenager. This was a pure-sound kind of evening, and Ms. Stemme obliged with volume and warmth. In the final scene, she astonished a New York audience who has this spring been given Natalie Dessay, Deborah Voigt (Mr. Luisi’s Brunnhilde) and Karita Mattila—redoubtable divas all, but none currently capable of anything approaching Ms. Stemme’s rich flood of tone.

Some critics found Mr. Welser-Möst’s conducting overly slight. Unlike Mr. Luisi’s Ring, though, its lightness revealed an erotic Orientalist fantasia—not the scherzo Strauss said he wanted, but a legitimate alternative, as self-conscious and detached as Salome herself.

Perhaps I had been readied for a lighter Salome by seeing Werner Schroeter’s strange, mesmerizing 1971 film version of the Oscar Wilde play upon which the opera is based at the Museum of Modern Art the day before. Set on a ruin in Lebanon, Schroeter’s film is more a whisper than a scream. The action takes on a queasy aspect when the main characters are actually adolescents: Salome’s petulance and Jokanaan’s self-righteousness finally seem crushingly equivalent.

The mood has the precision and wrongness of a dream; music from the opera plays at incorrect moments. There is a sense throughout of something very strange and tense, which should be the fundamental quality of Salome and was present throughout the Cleveland ensemble’s idiosyncratic, riveting performance.

editorial@observer.com

Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried in Wagner's “Götterdämmerung.” Photo by Ken Howard. Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

I hope it will spoil no one’s six-hour evening to learn that Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, ends the way Mr. Lepage’s cycle began.

Although it was only September, 2010, it seems a long time ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season opened with Das Rheingold, the first Ring installment. Bathed in blue light, the monumental set of 20 enormous planks levitated in silence, like something out of Kubrick. The music began: that long, low E-flat that in Wagner’s ears was the sound of the birth of the world. Then, like the music, the machine began undulating—first slowly, then faster. My mouth fell open; I was looking at the river Rhine.

For a minute or two, it was magic: everything felt possible. In the 15 hours of the Ring that Mr. Lepage has given us since then, there have been other heart-catching moments in which the visual spectacle and Wagner’s stirring, searching music alchemically combined. There’s even one in Götterdämmerung, right at the start of the score, when deep chords sound and the machine swoops upward, like a charmed snake.

It is no surprise that the most memorable sequences of this Ring have come at the beginnings of the operas, since the defining problem of Mr. Lepage’s cycle is his inability to sustain visual or dramatic interest for more than a few moments. In an epic, complex work that requires that sustained intensity, Mr. Lepage has been plainly at sea, nowhere more so than in Götterdämmerung, his most timid, dully conventional installment yet.

As he did in the other three operas, in Götterdämmerung Mr. Lepage shows greater interest in the workings of his set than in his characters. In the first scene of the first act, a large central panel majestically swings around for no apparent reason; no one has used the doorway that the slow rotation replaces with a wall. But while we are puzzling over the pointless mechanics, we have lost a crucial opportunity to pay attention to and learn about Gutrune, the complicated, conflicted character standing in front of us.

Immense effort seems to have gone into how to transition the elaborate video projections from a rocky beach back to the Gibichungs’ hall. Comparatively little attention has been given to what, exactly, the mood is inside that hall. Wagner tells us plainly that the Gibichung siblings are melancholy, lovelorn, childless, and vaguely incestuous, but all that is unreadable here. What does Gunther think about Gutrune? Gutrune about Gunther? Hagen about either of them? If Mr. Lepage has any idea, he doesn’t reveal it to us. By the time the director makes what seems like a conscious, even interesting choice—to focus on the sorrowful Gunther during Siegfried’s funeral march—we don’t know or care enough about Gunther for it to register.

Over the course of the cycle we’ve grown used to Mr. Lepage’s much-heralded projections picking up some of the slack of characters that never quite come alive. Yet the visuals are more halfhearted in Götterdämmerung than in the previous operas. One of the selling points of the projections was their remarkable, seductive interactivity. When Alberich waded in the Rhine in Das Rheingold, his every step dislodged some loose pebbles; little circles of fire flared up around Loge when he walked.

Whether it’s due to limitations of time, money, or inclination, that’s all gone: when Hagen and Gunther walk into the Rhine in Götterdämmerung, they are simply walking on a projection of water. It doesn’t matter, of course, except that we’ve been sold on the idea that this is what is important in Mr. Lepage’s Ring, that this is the cycle’s point.

There certainly isn’t a point about the work’s ideas to be found here. “Götterdämmerung is the only opera in the Ring that has a chorus,” Mr. Lepage says in an interview in the program. I’m glad he noticed. But you get the sense that he hasn’t thought much about why the chorus, made up of the Gibichungs’ subservient vassals, has been added here. Certainly, in Mr. Lepage’s blandly benign vision of pagan feudalism, there is nothing of Wagner’s own hatred of social hierarchies, his conviction that money and power corrupt everything, everywhere.

That would have been a story well worth telling, particularly in New York, particularly at the Met, in a time of gross social inequality and Occupy Wall Street. But relevance to our own time—indeed, to any time—may have conflicted with what Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, generously refers to in a program note as the production’s “literal but imaginative approach.”

The production is in actuality about as imaginative as Fabio Luisi’s well paced and well-balanced, but less than poetic, rather faceless conducting. The orchestral performance is in keeping with the general spirit of this Ring, which at its most competent achieves a smooth corporate sheen.

Hulking and calm, with a rich voice of utter steadiness, the bass Hans-Peter König delivers the finest vocal performance of the cycle as Hagen, but why is he playing this malevolent character so kindly? If this is his and Mr. Lepage’s choice, it introduces a level of subtlety that this simple-minded production can’t encompass.

By the third act Stephen Gould showed some signs of strain as Siegfried, but he sang throughout with sensitivity and a big, rounded tenor more appealing than the bright edge of Jay Hunter Morris, with whom he is alternating in the role. The soprano Deborah Voigt closed her first-ever Ring cycle sounding as she has in the other operas: brave, underpowered, and shrill. Other Brünnhildes have been memorable despite similar vocal shortcomings, but Ms. Voigt is too busy keeping afloat to point the text. The broad emotions are there—anger, love, stony resignation—but they are as generic as the silent-film gestures she keeps resorting to. Her estimable reserves of energy don’t have focused direction.

Ms. Voigt did some of her most exciting singing in the scene with her sister, Waltraute, sung by the brilliant, urgent, wildly committed mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier. Passages of purely lovely singing alternated with rougher patches, but Ms. Meier’s cameo was the first and only time in the entire cycle that we experienced a character who actually seemed invested in her own story, that we got a sense of the scope and urgent stakes of Wagner’s work. There was finally something to care about.

Mr. Gelb has his own explanation for the opposition to Mr. Lepage, who was loudly booed on this production’s opening night. He writes in his program note, “Of course, because our Ring is revolutionary, not everyone supports it.”

But Ms. Meier’s success in the midst of so much failure was a reminder that Mr. Lepage’s production is, at heart, less a forward-thinking one than it is a throwback to the hyperrealistic Franco Zeffirelli spectacles that have long clogged the Met’s repertory. As anyone who’s seen enough Zeffirelli knows, the productions are utterly mutable. Like Mr. Lepage’s Ring, they are grand spaces in which stick figures are moved around. They ignite when you have compelling performers and sink when you don’t.

That has been the traditional character of the Met: dependence on charismatic singers for its artistic and financial lifeblood, with desultory attention paid to theatrical values and intellectual point of view. I understand why Mr. Gelb is eager to mark his tenure as a “revolutionary” shift from that ethos, but saying it doesn’t make it so. His Met is functioning in the same way that this great, flawed company has always functioned, with a couple more Tony Awards in the directorial credits.

Mr. Lepage’s Ring began with jaw-dropping clarity; its great disappointment has been its subsequent confusion. After tens of millions of dollars and six or seven years of development, there is no evidence that Mr. Lepage, an artist renowned for his visual and conceptual imagination, has a coherent, consistent sense of his production: the level of stylization versus naturalism, what the projections signify, how the stage space is organized, the difference between the narrow strip of stage near the orchestra pit and the “trench” behind it, how the characters interact with the projections and each other, how the aesthetic values—costumes, projections—changes over the course of the cycle.

The anticlimactic apocalypse of Mr. Lepage’s finale—capped, I kid you not, by little explosions that burst open the heads of white statues representing the gods—elicited more chuckles and eye rolls than shock and awe. And the return to the undulating Rhine in the final bars left me unmoved, a reprise that emphasized how empty the intervening 15 hours had felt.

If you haven’t created a convincing world, who cares how it ends?

After bad press and bad feelings surrounding Mr. Levine's injury-related cancellations last season, the box set feels redemptive, a reminder of his prominence and influence, the precision and passion of his conducting and the ways he's grown the Met's repertory--Berlioz, Berg, Schoenberg, world premieres. That said, it's still uncertain whether Mr. Levine will be able to fulfill this season's commitments. The box set is most of all a reminder that the Met needs as its music director not just an excellent conductor but a vibrant, committed, present musician who can truly lead the company's artistic direction.

The cancellations, the uncertainty: All is forgiven. But on the occasion of this extraordinary anniversary, Mr. Levine and Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, must think hard about what will best serve the Met and its audience.

It is not only Mr. Levine whose recent struggles are highlighted by the quality of the box set. One of his favorite singers, the soprano Deborah Voigt, stars in four operas in the set--more than any other singer. But those memorable performances are reminders of how disappointing she's been in recent seasons. When she appeared last year in one of her signature roles, Chrysothemis in Strauss' Elektra, her voice was thin and squally, a pale echo of her Chrysothemis in a 1994 video recording included in the box set. She hasn't sounded as radiant in five years, at least.

The coming season poses major challenges for Ms. Voigt. In December, she takes on the role of Minnie in performances of Puccini's La fanciulla del West, in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the opera's world premiere at the Met. It's a sympathetic part well suited to Ms. Voigt's temperament, but it requires a warmth of tone she hasn't shown in a while. Her more highly anticipated test will come in April, when she sings the first Brunnhilde of her career, in Die Walküre. Given the reduced size and power of her voice, the success of the run will say a lot about the future course of her career.

As that run of Walküre goes on, a less public but no less important performance will be taking place: negotiations for a new contract between the Met and its labor unions. Mr. Gelb chose Joseph Volpe, his predecessor, to lead the Met's negotiating team because of Mr. Volpe's success with the company's labor relations. But it is unclear whether even Mr. Volpe will be able to secure much-needed savings for the company.

"The Met is going to present a spectacular array of operatic music next season," said Alan Gordon, executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), which represents the Met's principal singers, choristers, directors and production personnel. "But it also has a continuing obligation to ensure that it treats the singers, dancers and production staff that create its music in a fair and reasonable manner."

Any union concessions will likely involve the schedule of wage increases over the coming years. The structure of the Met's health benefits and pension plans is not likely to change. (The Met would like to begin shifting pensions from a defined benefit plan, in which employees receive a certain amount regardless of economic conditions, to a defined contribution plan, like a 401(k), in which payouts are invested and therefore contingent on the economy.)

"There's no room for negotiation" regarding the pension and health plans, Mr. Gordon said in a phone interview.

The timing of the negotiations--scheduled just before next summer's tour of Japan--puts added pressure on the Met: A strike would not just be bad public relations; it would force the tour's cancellation.

Mr. Volpe's presence, though, is generally acknowledged to make a strike less likely. "With Volpe," Mr. Gordon said, "you have a reasonable expectation it's going to come out O.K." Whether for the good of the Met, or to show up his successor, or both, Mr. Volpe seems inclined to make a deal work, even if it will largely preserve the Met's difficult budget situation.

While financial matters may prove intractable, Mr. Gordon said AGMA will also seek to address one of Peter Gelb's signature initiatives, bringing "name" directors to the Met. Now that audiences might seek out "Mary Zimmerman's Lucia" rather than just "Lucia," there will be a renewed effort to protect directors' work.

"Let's say Bart Sher directs something," Mr. Gordon said. "He has very limited rights if the Met redoes it. We want to improve the rights of directors and their compensation when things they direct are restaged by the Met."

Indeed, the season will begin with one of Mr. Gelb's favored directors, Robert Lepage. Rheingold, along with Walküre in the spring, are the first two installments of Mr. Lepage's elaborate, technologically advanced version of Wagner's Ring cycle. There will be acrobats and stunt doubles, interactive video projections and Bryn Terfel. It will, in other words, be pretty cool. Whether it will balance the small and large moments--the characters in Berlioz's Damnation de Faust kept getting lost in Mr. Lepage's Met production--is another question.

Nicholas Hytner's production of Verdi's Don Carlo opens in November; John Adams' Nixon in China finally arrives at the Met in February, in Peter Sellars' vintage production. Both are must-sees, as are the Met debuts of two great conductors: William Christie leading Mozart's Così fan tutte in November, and Simon Rattle with Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande in December.

Valery Gergiev, at one time a plausible successor to James Levine, will conduct a new production of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov in October, directed by Stephen Wadsworth, rather than the German director Peter Stein, as originally planned. It turns out that Mr. Stein's cranky demands for hand-holding through the visa process were met with an ultimatum from Mr. Gelb.

It is not the first time a Met general manager has been forced to resort to deal sternly with divas. Rudolf Bing canceled Maria Callas' contract; Joseph Volpe fired Katherine Battle, and famously told another soprano that her wig was going onstage, with or without her. The publicly restrained Mr. Gelb, who styles himself a very different kind of impresario, has now joined this grand tradition.

Another Met tradition seems to be starting: With every New Years' Eve, another Zeffirelli production is retired. Last year was Carmen; this year, La Traviata. Mr. Zeffirelli's grandiose production is not universally beloved, but the spare Willy Decker production that will replace it is perhaps the furthest the Met has yet strayed from a traditional aesthetic in the standard repertory. It will be interesting to see how the audience responds, particularly since the production lacks any of the company's established stars. The Violetta, 32-year-old Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya, is having her Met coming-out this fall: La Traviata opens on the heels of the new Don Carlo, in which she will also star. For her, the story is just beginning.

zwoolfe@observer.com

According to today's Times, the Met has installed three 65-foot girders underneath the stage to support the 45-ton set for Wagner's four epic operas. The paper says the structure is "the most extensive work yet to prepare for a new production there."

Much has been made of the upcoming cycle, which comes to the Met during a time of economic difficulties, and promises to be some of the most ambitious work to come out of an already ambitious new direction. "Das Rheingold," the shortest of the "Ring" operas, is two and a half hours long, and without intermission.

And what does the weighty set for the weighty production look like? To envision it the Times prompts you to "imagine a series of see-saws placed side by side, that can move independently and collectively levitate."

Levitating see-saws? Sign us up!

But Mr. Galifinakis’ presence at the gala was representative of a mood there that celebrated the younger elements in both the audience and the company. Caroline Kennedy, whose late mother was a board member, praised the ABT’s efforts to engage a wider audience through touring. Then, accepting an award marking his 25-year trusteeship, billionaire David Koch spoke reverently of the “beautiful young bodies” that would soon grace the stage.

The whirlwind performance was a preview of 13 shows forthcoming this season, the company’s 70th. Dancers were whisked on and off the stage, leaping from Vivaldi to Tchaikovsky to a heady piece involving the music of Robert Fripp, strobe lights and levitation.

After the show, guests dined in a massive tent in Lincoln Center, where Bebe Neuwirth called the evening “thrill after thrill after thrill.” She’d handed out scholarships for the ABT during the meal and afterward spoke eagerly with all dancers who approached. “I entered ballet class at age 5 and in some ways I never left,” she told us.

Actress Isabella Rossellini said that she particularly favored a hot-and-heavy sampling from a ballet based on the Dumas novel Lady of Camellias (opening May 25). She was seated next to the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb.

“I think it’s great for ballet and opera to bring new audiences in. That’s what the art form’s all about,” he said.

Can we count on him continuing to shake things up with that goal in mind?

“I’m staying on the course that I began.”

He’s not the kind of guy, in other words, who would give The New York Times interviews detailing his insecurities about his working-class background. He’s not the kind of guy who would also tell The Times that to get things done in an opera house, you sometimes have to act operatically. Both of those insights came from his predecessor, Joseph Volpe, who started at the Met as a carpenter, rose over the course of three decades to the house’s leadership and left in 2006; and whom Mr. Gelb hired last week to lead upcoming contract negotiations with the company’s three major unions. The hire, an uncharacteristic and surprising move, reveals more about Mr. Gelb, and about the state of his company, than any other moment since he came to the Met.

It seems to be the very opposite of what Peter Gelb would do. He may be quiet and unprepossessing, but he clearly revels in exercising his power, and he has an inflexible, almost messianic sense of his mission, telling the New York Post last November, regarding opera fans displeased with the Met’s offerings, “If they still hate what we’re doing, I’m going to be trying my hardest to continue to do what I am doing, because I believe it’s the only way to go.”

Power-sharing wouldn’t seem to come easily to him, particularly not when Mr. Volpe is involved. The transition from one administration to the other, in 2005 and 2006, was a rocky one. Mr. Volpe bristled when Mr. Gelb described the Met he was inheriting as “coasting,” and Mr. Gelb, then and since, has seemed uninterested in reaching out to Mr. Volpe for advice.

Until, well, now. In going with a “team of rivals” approach to what could be very messy negotiations, Mr. Gelb has shown that he is, above all things, pragmatic, that he is willing to undergo some embarrassment—there’s been an unpleasant aura surrounding the hire, one of running back to Daddy when things get tough—in order to achieve his goals. But unlike, say, Barack Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton, Mr. Gelb’s move looks like a cry for help, an admission that he can’t do something that his predecessor could.

Coming from someone with surpassing confidence in his own abilities, it is a deeply unexpected decision, and that Mr. Gelb even considered it shows how profound the company’s financial worries must be. Since the beginning of Mr. Gelb’s administration, the Met budget has increased by about $60 million. Last year’s million-dollar deficit will increase to about $4 million this year, with spending continuing to increase and hundreds of seats going unsold at some performances.

Since Mr. Gelb has stated that he thinks that substantial cuts in productions and marketing—the stuff people see—are a mistake, those deficits will continue, and likely worsen, in the next few seasons, barring another major gifts campaign or a revival in the economy that invigorates donations. Meanwhile, employee compensation—including both union and nonunion workers—is by far the Met’s largest expense, accounting for more than two-thirds of its budget.

Mr. Gelb, who told The Times that he is still planning on “directing the strategy” for the union negotiations, could certainly have consulted Mr. Volpe privately if he was uncertain about the talks, or asked him to act as a more subtle go-between between the Met’s management and the unions, where Mr. Volpe has maintained contacts. But with mounting deficits putting pressure on Mr. Gelb to achieve substantial concessions, he clearly believed that he needed a much grander gesture of goodwill toward the unions. And while the Met was not free from deficits under Mr. Volpe, his relations with the unions were consistently excellent. “Coasting,” as Mr. Gelb is discovering, is not always a bad thing.

It likely contributed to his decision that Mr. Gelb’s interactions with the unions over the past year have been as inauspicious as his predecessor’s were amiable. The stagehands’ union last spring refused his proposal of a 10 percent pay cut; they accepted the deferral of a promised increase in exchange for an yearlong extension of the current contract. Translation: status quo. The other two unions roundly refused to renegotiate unless they were permitted an audit of the Met’s finances. The audit never happened, nor did any change in the contracts. Status quo again.

In October, the stagehands’ union publicly balked at the possibility of using nonunion workers as part of the construction team for Robert Lepage’s new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, slated for next season. And Mr. Gelb no doubt uneasily watched the Cleveland Orchestra’s brief strike last month, which raised the specter of more walkouts in the classical music world; the singers’ union executive director, Alan S. Gordon, told The Observer last week that the Met’s orchestra is considered the most likely of the company’s three major unions to strike.

Such a walkout would be devastating to the carefully constructed public image of the Met, highlighting the company’s financial troubles, agitating the board and affecting ticket sales and donations. The hiring of Mr. Volpe indicates that Mr. Gelb considers a strike a very real possibility, and is determined to do most anything to prevent it.

Anything, that is, except admit that these issues are within his purview. As The Times reported on Saturday, “Mr. Gelb said the job of running the Met had grown so complex that he did not have time to handle the negotiations personally.” “I can’t do everything,” he complained to The Wall Street Journal. But the union contracts account for a huge percentage of the Met’s budget. Surely Mr. Gelb must have known that this would be a just-as-huge percentage of his job.

Mr. Gelb goes to great lengths to display his interest in the nitty-gritty aspects of opera production. Profiles this past fall in both The Times and the Post, for example, included remarkably similar accounts of him tinkering with stage lighting levels. But for all his tireless emphasis on theatricality, Mr. Gelb is not really a man of the theater, which may also explain why all three of the big new productions this fall—Tosca, Hoffmann and Carmen—were widely considered drab and dull. From securing union contracts to actually having a taste for what plays onstage, when it comes to the meat-and-potatoes, nuts-and-bolts aspects of actually putting on a compelling show, he loses interest, thinks it’s not his job. After all, “I can’t do everything.”

Only time will tell if Mr. Gelb’s move is the bold decision of a mature leader or the chink in the armor of an anxious one. It certainly proves the truth of something he told The Times in September about his tenure thus far, one of the only confessions you’ll ever hear from Peter Gelb: “I didn’t understand fully how difficult it was going to be.”

Zwoolfe@observer.com

The unions were informed of Mr. Volpe's hiring on Tuesday, Alan S. Gordon told the Observer in a phone interview. Mr. Gordon is executive director of the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA), which represents the Met's principal singers, choristers, directors and production personnel. "Volpe has a lifetime commitment to the Metropolitan Opera and cares about it," Mr. Gordon said. "Gelb recognizes that and understands that Volpe, however tough a negotiator he might be, will be deal-oriented." Mr. Volpe referred inquiries to the Met, which did not respond to requests for comment.

According to Mr. Gordon, Mr. Volpe's hire was a response to a growing sense within the Met that negotiations with the unions, particularly the orchestra's, could end in a strike. "There seemed to have been a climate of fear developing among the orchestra members," Mr. Gordon said, "that the negotiations were going to be so difficult that they woud end up in a lockout or strike. Gelb's hiring Volpe clearly sends a signal that his goal is to make a deal, not to have a lockout or strike."

Mr. Gelb's relations with the unions have not always been been peaceful. Last spring, Mr. Gelb asked the unions to accept a 10 percent pay cut as part of a company-wide response to the recession. Instead, the stagehands' union would only agree to postpone a promised salary increase in exchange for an extra year on their current contract. Both AGMA and the orchestra's union declined to negotiate unless the Met allowed them to confidentially audit the company's finances. And in October, there was a dispute between the Met and the stagehands' union over the division of labor in constructing the sets for the Met's upcoming new Ring cycle.

The hire is a tacit admission from Mr. Gelb, whose background is in marketing and who had never run an organization before coming to the Met, that he is still a relative newcomer to the machinery of managing one of the world's largest arts institutions. Mr. Volpe, by contrast, started his Met career in 1964 as a carpenter, rose through the ranks, and was widely praised during his tenure for maintaining amicable labor relations, including the negotiation of the current contract, which expires in July 2011. As Mr. Gordon said, "Gelb's expertise is in media and not necessarily in labor relations. ... Volpe has a much longer knowledge base about the Met and how the various unions interact with each other."

zwoolfe@observer.com

That white-on-blue image will be instantly familiar to anyone who saw Robert Wilson's minimalist Met Lohengrin a decade ago. During the Hoffmann, though, the visual echo served only as a reminder of the Wilson production's focus and coherence, which Mr. Sher's work sorely lacks. His Hoffmann is muddled and meandering, a jumble of half-baked ideas that feature prominently in his program note but are strangely absent onstage.

Mr. Sher's production started with Offenbach's biography. The composer's father was a cantor; Offenbach himself converted to Catholicism in 1844, a decade after moving from his native Germany to Paris, where he became the fantastically popular creator of almost 100 operettas, the comic musicals that were the hit of France during the Second Empire. Les Contes d'Hoffmann, which inserts the real-life German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann into Hoffmann's own stories of ill-fated love, was his final work, and his first to aspire to serious "grand opera" status.

Mr. Sher views the composer as an archetypal outsider: a Jew who wanted to be accepted as a Gentile, and a composer of light, frothy operettas who wanted to be a accepted as a "serious" artist. Hoffmann the character, unsatisfied by love, is for Mr. Sher a reflection of Offenbach, who was unsatisfied in religion and art. There could be quibbles about the judgment that Offenbach thought of himself as a religious outsider—he was the object of some venomous press after the 1871 Paris Commune, but this seems due more to anti-German than anti-Jew sentiment—but his sense of himself as having been successful only in a "lesser" genre like operetta feels right.

But other things feel wrong. According to Mr. Sher's program note, "for both men"—Hoffmann and Offenbach—"questions of identity, sexual obsession, and longing for acceptance all swirl within the dreamlike landscape of these fantastic stories." Wait a second: What are Hoffmann's "questions of identity"? What is Offenbach's "sexual obsession"? (He was happily married.) This total conflation of composer and subject is misleading, and it's at the heart of the production.

And the director doesn't stop with the ties between Offenbach and Hoffman. He connects the thematic dots, as if it were logically inevitable, to Kafka, who—wait for it—was also a Jew! This is indeed true, but Mr. Sher could just have easily have chosen Norman Podhoretz. Kafka, according to Mr. Sher, is a better fit, because he was not only a Jew, but was also "at the forefront of an explosion of writers, painters, and composers seeking to reinvent how we think of narrative or of a canvas, or even the way we hear music." It's unclear to what and whom he's referring, but apparently part of that explosion was Fellini, who was not only interested in "non-linear" art but was—like Hoffmann and, apparently, Offenbach—"obsessed with women." (There's no mention here of Kafka, who was by far the most sexually obsessive of all these men.)

This tenuous web of connections wouldn't seem so ridiculous if Mr. Sher's production had a fraction of the originality of a Kafka novel or the exuberant weirdness of a Fellini film. But, indeed, none of Mr. Sher's intellectual framework finds its way into the finished product. Hoffmann—the so-called "outsider"—may be a touch grumpy, but he gets along well with most everyone onstage. He's popular in Luther's tavern, where the prologue and epilogue are set and where his fellow drinkers wonder where he is and ask him to sing for them. And there's little sense in the production that Hoffmann is much miffed by the disastrous endings of all three of his love plots, perhaps because Joseph Calleja, though a fine singer, is an entirely unevocative actor.

Executing a production that really dealt with the relationship between Hoffmann and the crowd would have also involved actually directing the chorus, rather than uselessly clumping them upstage. And if Mr. Sher had wanted to present a work about nagging self-hatreds and deep disappointments, he might have worked with his singers on psychological nuance, which is almost entirely absent unless you count a seizuring Anna Netrebko stuffing paper in her face.

Are the men in bowler hats supposed to evoke Kafka's Prague? Are the umbrellas emblazoned with huge eyes Felliniesque? If so, they're half-hearted gestures at best. The production isn't set recognizably in Offenbach's time, nor Kafka's, nor Fellini's. It takes place in the nonspecific nowhere that characterizes post-Zeffirelli productions at the Met, consciously avoiding both detailed realism and Robert Wilson-style abstraction. Mr. Sher promised a "dreamlike" production, and once in a while, generically "surreal" things happen. Three or four actors dressed like Hoffmann march onstage; a few sheets of paper periodically drift down from the flies; when Hoffmann's friend Nicklausse sings an aria about a violin, a violin magically and cheesily appears behind a scrim.

There are some beautiful moments—arresting backdrops of a grand opera house interior, the Venice of the third act imagined as a sweep of lanterns. Mr. Sher and designer Michael Yeargan should have left the lanterns alone. But they are joined onstage by the silhouette of a Venetian building and a huge swath of silvery fabric, and the overall effect isn't worthy of the Met: it's provincial schlock, and all the references to Kafka and Fellini can't change that.

But this is Peter Gelb's Met, in which no marketing blurb can pass without a tendentious connection drawn between opera and the more popular arts of literature and film. Hitchcock's name kept popping up in the P.R. for Luc Bondy's season-opening Tosca, though it is unclear what, if anything, was the great director's relevance, besides telegraphing to film buffs that they should give opera a try. There's nothing wrong with that, except for the problems inherent in suggesting, both in the press materials and in the focus on the HD broadcasts, that film provides the best point of comparison for opera—even that film is somehow superior, that opera at its best should aspire to the status of a good movie. Mr. Gelb is the real Offenbach here, as desperate to demonstrate the Met's coolness as the composer was to prove that he could write a serious opera.

As far as good movies go, the punch line is that the Met will be, well, tastefully editing the HD broadcast of Hoffmann on Dec. 19. The company made the rather stern announcement on its Web site that the broadcast "will not include the partial nudity seen in the stage production." These HD broadcasts are ostensibly bringing in new, younger audiences, but some pastie-covered breasts—used in the production to telegraph "edgy" "sensuality"—are apparently beyond the pale. Censoring non-nudity? Yeah, the Met sure is hip.

zwoolfe@observer.com

“What would I like to do besides singing?” she asked herself aloud when reached on the telephone by The Observer. “I can tell you honestly, I’m not that passionate anymore about singing and all this stuff, you know? Once I have a family and a kid, I’m so happy to have a family, and I’m not that enthusiastic anymore.”

It might cause some concern among critics, audiences and opera company administrators—who have embraced Ms. Netrebko as one of the great artists of her generation—that her passion and enthusiasm for performing might be waning after her marriage to baritone Erwin Schrott and the birth of their son, Tiago, a year ago.

She’s not only one of opera’s biggest stars, but one of Playboy’s “sexiest babes of classical music.” She sells out theaters; she’s been profiled on 60 Minutes and Good Morning America. Even better, she has the talent—a big, flexible, dark-toned soprano—to back up her renowned looks and charisma. All in all, if you had to choose a poster girl for our HD Opera Era, it would be Ms. Netrebko. But she may no longer want it as badly.

“There is a lot, lot of singers,” she said, “who don’t have anything else but the theater. I have to say, I used to be like that. I was really—the theater was everything for me—the theater, partying, because I didn’t have anything else, you know? You come back home and there is nobody. It’s fine when you’re young, but when you’re a little bit older, you want something else.”

Ms. Netrebko’s career has certainly not come to a halt since motherhood. Indeed, in 2009, being a mom is part of the marketing strategy. “Ask Anna” videos on Ms. Netrebko’s Web site feature her holding up the grinning Tiago while she answers questions about lullabies and the baby’s favorite ice cream flavor.

And her engagements proliferate: She sings Antonia in the Met’s new production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, which opens on Thursday, and then returns as Mimi in La Bohème in February and March. Through April and May, she is appearing in—gulp—four back-to-back roles at the Vienna State Opera, culminating in Massenet’s Manon, which she will bring to Covent Garden in June and July.

It is telling that Ms. Netrebko is spending so much time in the cities she calls home. Since 2006, the Russian-born singer has had Austrian citizenship and lived in Vienna, and she has recently added an apartment in New York. She is trying to be both a star and a mom, a jet-setter and a homebody. She is also trying, ever so slightly, to cut back.

“It’s difficult, but yeah,” she sighed, “I’m trying to slow down a little bit. Definitely now there will be less than it was last year. It was very crazy; I didn’t think too much.”

It’s hard to say whether these efforts to slow down are related to her decision to perform just Antonia in the Met Hoffmann, rather than the full trilogy of female leads, as she originally planned. Or her decision to pull out of next season’s planned version of the Willy Decker production of La Traviata, in which Ms. Netrebko caused a sensation at the Salzburg Festival. 

“I don’t like to repeat myself,” she said. “That production was pretty big a few years ago, and I don’t think it’s going to be the same after four or five years. I did it once, and I don’t want to go back to that, because it was very specific production, very specific time, and specific partners. I don’t think it’s going to be the same. I think better somebody else can do it if they can.”

Though Ms. Netrebko says she would still like to do the opera at the Met, it’s unclear whether Peter Gelb will choose to put her or the Decker production onstage. Mr. Gelb remains squarely in her corner, however. She will be opening the 2011-2012 Met season as Donizetti’s Anna Bolena.

“The other [Donizetti] queens, I don’t think I’m really interested for now,” she said. “With one [Maria Stuarda], it’s too late for me, and Roberto Devereaux, it’s too early. But Anna Bolena, it should be fine.”

The following season brings a new production of Eugene Onegin. “And probably I’m going to sing Trovatore, which I’m now learning,” she said. “That I haven’t signed yet, but it’s in the plans. I’m going to study now and see if I can sing it or not.”

She’s come a long way from her early servitude. Well, not really: Her Cinderella Story has been incorporated into her biography, but while she did, in fact, mop floors at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, she did it to watch rehearsals and make ends meet while she studied singing; she was hardly a janitor. And conductor Valery Gergiev didn’t come upon her singing while she worked. She got discovered the old-fashioned way, winning a competition and then auditioning.

Her international breakthrough came in 2002, when she appeared as Donna Anna in Don Giovanni in Salzburg and, for her Met debut, as Natasha in Prokofiev’s War and Peace. In 2003, she had her first performances alongside Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón. Opera companies and record labels looking for a winning narrative marketed them as a dream team, a Sutherland and Pavarotti for the new millennium. But the plan took an unanticipated turn when Mr. Villazón announced in 2007 that, due to vocal problems, he would be taking time off. He has since sung only a few performances, tying Ms. Netrebko’s image to a partner whose future remains very much in doubt. But she is taking a “stand by your man” attitude toward the situation.

“This kind of thing can happen to all of us,” she said. “Sooner or later … we are all coming to this kind of problem. … But I think he’s going to be fine, and he’s going to be back and with even better glory in the voice. I wait for him.”

In fact, she doesn’t even have to really wait for him for their collaboration to recommence: Their film version of La Bohème, set to a recording of the opera made just before Mr. Villazón’s hiatus, comes out on Dec. 15. There are some overwrought Moulin Rouge–ish directorial touches, but Ms. Netrebko is quite affecting onscreen, and she does some of her best acting work—simple and true—in smaller moments, often while listening to others sing.

Watching her in La Bohème, or the Met’s new DVD of Lucia di Lammermoor, or any of dozens of YouTube clips, it’s hard to imagine her doing anything but singing onstage. And there’s a big part of her that loves it.

“I wish to have a little more free time, that’s all,” she said. “I would like to spend more time with the family and enjoy my life more. You know, even to go to dinner with my husband, to buy food and cook, put on nice music, watch a nice movie, walk in the park, do the things together. … I’m definitely not that singer who is like, ‘Ahh’”—drawing out the syllable—“‘my life is singing and nothing else.’ Definitely not. I have so many other wonderful things in my life.”

zwoolfe@observer.com

At this point, Peter Gelb would probably gladly settle for just one day. Instead, his problems, which began opening night, are stretching into the third week of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2009-10 season, the first to be planned entirely by him. There’s booing left and right, the press is biting at his heels, his marquee music director is going under the knife again, he has to fly a replacement conductor around in private jets, and even his singers (when they’re not dropping out) are doubtful about the controversial new Luc Bondy Tosca, which replaced Franco Zeffirelli’s beloved production.

“When I signed my contract, I thought it would be for the Zeffirelli production,” soprano Violeta Urmana told the Observer. Ms. Urmana, currently in town for Aida, will sing Tosca in the Bondy production’s first revival next season. Though she dislikes sitting in the Met’s heavy air-conditioning, she plans to see the production before leaving New York. “I just saw some stage sets,” she said, “and it wasn’t somehow so revolutionary. Of course, it was not so beautiful like the Zeffirelli production, which was wonderful.”

Marcelo Alvarez, Tosca’s tenor lead, did Ms. Urmana one better, comparing the production to a car wreck in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s like there’s an accident in the middle of street,” he said. “People say, ‘Ah, I don’t want to go.’ But they want to see the blood.”

They may see blood, but not James Levine. Mr. Levine, the Met’s music director, led opening night but is missing his other four Tosca performances because of back surgery. He will also be out for three Met Rosenkavaliers as well as concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of which he is also music director.

His Rosenkavalier replacement is Edo de Waart, who just started as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. De Waart will be traveling back and forth several times between New York and Wisconsin for rehearsals and performances, including on Oct. 16, when he is conducting an 11:15 a.m. concert in Milwaukee and a 7:30 p.m. opera at the Met. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last week that “the Met will arrange [de Waart’s] flights, which may include private jets,” an extravagant choice in the midst of a multimillion-dollar budget deficit and after sweeping staff pay cuts. The Met did not return phone calls before deadline.

Not everything has been bad news. The revival of Le Nozze di Figaro is youthful and exciting, and the debuts of Emma Bell in Figaro and Georg Zeppenfeld in Die Zauberflöte were notable. But it’s hard to argue that the season has started off on the right foot.

The gala premiere of Tosca was widely covered by the press (yay!), but not for the best of reasons (“boo!”). Any publicity is good publicity, but the reviews were scathing. “How did this dopey show get on stage?” asked Bloomberg News. The Wall Street Journal called it “minimally provocative” and “tepid.” “Heavy-handed,” said the Times. The Associated Press screamed that it was “one of the company’s biggest failures in decades.” The review in The New Yorker was titled, simply, “Fiasco.”

In that review, Alex Ross charitably floated the possibility that “once Bondy is safely on the plane back home it should be relatively easy to devise new stage business to replace his lamer notions.” But it’s been hard for the cast and conductor to make adjustments because of a series of cancellations and indispositions. The production’s original Scarpia, star baritone Bryn Terfel, long ago dropped out of the first performances (he’s singing four in April), and his replacement withdrew only a week before opening night on Sept. 21. George Gagnidze ended up with the role, then promptly got sick. At the second performance, in an unusual arrangement, Gagnidze acted Scarpia while it was sung from the side of the stage by Carlo Guelfi, who hadn’t had time to rehearse the blocking. By Sept. 28, Guelfi had learned the staging just in time to cede the role back to Gagnidze for the Oct. 3 matinee.

Much more serious is Mr. Levine’s medical leave, his third in recent years, which is reviving discussion about his ability to maintain his taxing schedule, rumblings that will no doubt intensify as the 2011 due date of his Met contract draws nearer. As the Times’ Anthony Tommasini wrote on Saturday, “The Boston Symphony and the Met have to be worried about the implications of Mr. Levine’s recurring ailments.” Mr. Gelb has said that Mr. Levine has the Met position for as long as he wants it, but pressure is mounting on both men and the Met’s board to address the situation.

It may not be solely a matter of health. Jeremy Eichler, the classical music critic of the Boston Globe, told the Observer that many of Mr. Levine’s medical problems wouldn’t have been prevented by a lighter conducting load. “The health issue can be a red herring here,” said Mr. Eichler, who has been critical of what he has perceived as Mr. Levine’s recent turn towards more conservative programming in Boston. “The real question is what he’s bringing artistically to both organizations and whether he’s realizing his full potential at either one.”

Mr. Levine is not the only Met conductor with problems. At the first performance of Aida on Friday, Daniele Gatti was booed, a rarity for singers and conductors in the house. The Times reported that Mr. Gatti had also been booed while conducting Aida this past spring in Munich. Peter Gelb’s goal for his company—director-driven, highly theatrical opera—is strikingly European, but if European-style perpetual booing comes with it, he may end up regretting what he wished for.

These messy opening weeks ensure that even more attention will be paid to the New Year’s Eve premiere of the season’s other new take on a repertory staple, Richard Eyre’s Carmen, which has had its own casting dramas. If Carmen is a success, the season’s tumultuous start may be forgotten. If it’s another fiasco, though, there will be serious talk about Peter Gelb’s artistic leadership. At Saturday’s premiere of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, when Dr. Bartolo sang, “A man’s not safe even in his own house,” it was hard not to think of Mr. Gelb.

zwoolfe@observer.com