Peter Gelb says he will stay as Met Opera faces financial strain

Peter Gelb is staying put at the Metropolitan Opera, at least for now, even as the company’s finances look increasingly fragile and the institution confronts a broader reckoning over how elite arts groups survive in a shifting cultural market.

Gelb, who became the Met’s 16th general manager in August 2006 after starting there as a teenage usher, has led the company through a stretch of shrinking margins, rising labor costs and donor uncertainty. The Met is in its 142nd season and remains the largest performing arts organization in the United States, but its fiscal 2024 filing showed a revenue gap that underscored the strain: $283,987,551 in revenue against $330,977,035 in expenses, producing a net loss of $46,989,484. The same filing listed $467 million in assets and $286 million in liabilities.

The company has continued to present itself as a global institution with a deep bench of repertory and new work. In February 2025, it announced a 2025-26 season with 197 performances, six new productions and 12 revivals, including multiple Met premieres and a new production of Mason Bates’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. But the scale of the programming has come against a tighter operational backdrop. The 2024-25 season had 18 productions, the fewest since the strike-shortened 1980-81 season.

By early 2024, the Met had already withdrawn $40 million from its endowment, reducing it to about $255 million. More recent reporting in 2026 said the endowment had been depleted by roughly a third and that short-term debt was coming due, while Moody’s pushed the company deeper into junk territory in March 2026. The Met’s own annual reports page now lists FY25 financial statements, a sign the company is still trying to show public accountability even as the balance sheet tightens.

That pressure has driven hard choices. In January 2026, the Met laid off 22 administrative employees, cut pay for 35 executives earning more than $150,000, and reduced compensation for Gelb and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The company also postponed a planned 2026-27 production. It has considered selling theater naming rights and even the two Chagall murals in the hall, which Sotheby’s valued at a combined $55 million, though the paintings would remain in place under the proposed terms.

The Met’s most controversial move has been its Saudi partnership. On September 3, 2025, the company said it had signed an agreement with the Saudi Music Commission and the Royal Diriyah Opera House that would make it the resident winter company there once the house is completed. Gelb has defended the arrangement as a survival strategy, while critics have pointed to human-rights concerns in Saudi Arabia and to the Met’s own financial vulnerability. Gelb, whose contract runs through July 31, 2030, has said he does not want to retire if he is healthy and the board wants him to stay. For the Met, the question is bigger than one executive: whether a legacy arts institution can adapt quickly enough to survive the next decade.