Peter Gelb

General Manager

Peter Gelb’s career has followed a singular arc that began with his teenage years as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera and led to his appointment, in August 2006, as General Manager of the storied company, which this season celebrated its 125th anniversary.

After taking the helm at the Met, Mr. Gelb right away began to launch initiatives aimed at revitalizing opera and connecting it to a wider audience. A fundamental goal is to recruit increased numbers of the world’s great theater directors to enhance the theatricality of the Met’s productions and complement the extraordinary musical standards established by Music Director James Levine. Mr. Gelb is also committed to securing more engagements each season from the world’s top singers. One of the most groundbreaking and successful of his new initiatives is The Met: Live in HD, a Peabody Award-winning series of live performance transmissions shown in high definition in movie theaters across North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan, which has so far played to a paying audience of more than 1.5 million in the 2008–09 season. In September 2006, Sirius Satellite Radio launched Metropolitan Opera Radio, an around-the-clock channel broadcasting four live performances a week as well as historic performances from the Met’s vast radio archive, now heard on Sirius XM.  The newly launched Met Player makes HD, standard-definition, and audio performances available online on a subscription basis. The Met also now presents free, live streaming of performances from its website once a week with support from RealNetworks. Other audience-building initiatives launched by Mr. Gelb include free open houses for the public; a free live transmission of the opening-night performance onto giant screens at Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza; the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rush Ticket program, which offers select orchestra seats for weekday performances at the dramatically reduced price of $20; and the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, a contemporary art exhibition space in the Met lobby.

Mr. Gelb’s extensive and varied experience in the field of classical music has prepared him for the considerable challenge of overseeing both the artistic and the administrative aspects of one of the largest performing arts institutions in the world. An award-winning producer of films, recordings, radio broadcasts, telecasts, concert events, operas, and festivals, he has collaborated with the world’s leading artists, many of whom will be featured at the Met during his tenure, including John Corigliano, Plácido Domingo, Tan Dun, Renée Fleming, Osvaldo Golijov, Wynton Marsalis, Rachel Portman, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Julie Taymor.

His close association with Maestro Levine extends back two decades and spans recordings and film (Fantasia 2000).

In 1992, Mr. Gelb produced both the stage and film versions of Ms. Taymor’s first opera production, Oedipus Rex, for Seiji Ozawa’s Saito Kinen Festival. In 1994—also for the Saito Kinen Festival—he commissioned an early opera staging by Robert Lepage, La Damnation de Faust, a reconceived version of which was presented at the Met in 2008-09.

As president of CAMI Video, a division of Columbia Artists Management that Mr. Gelb founded in 1982, he served as executive producer of the Met’s television series “The Metropolitan Opera Presents” for six years. In all, he produced 25 televised productions for the Met, including the landmark 1990 telecast of Richard Wagner’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by Levine. The 17-hour program was broadcast over four consecutive nights on PBS (and subsequently released on DVD), making history for monolithic programming of opera on television. While at CAMI, he produced and occasionally directed more than 50 programs featuring such artists as Herbert von Karajan, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Claudio Abbado. His television productions have earned 13 Primetime Emmy Awards, including six for Mr. Gelb as a producer and director.

Among Mr. Gelb’s Emmy Award-winning films are Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia and Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic, both with Maysles Films. Mr. Gelb received a Peabody Award for his four-part television series Marsalis on Music (1995), in which jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis introduces young audiences to the full experience of classical music and jazz. In 2001, he co-directed and produced a 90-minute documentary entitled Recording The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks, about the making of the hit Broadway show’s cast album. The film was awarded a Grammy in 2002.

Since 1995 and until joining the Met, Mr. Gelb was president of Sony Classical, one of the largest international classical record labels. He led the company through a period of notable growth and creativity, expanding the focus of recording projects to include best-selling film scores, including the Academy Award-winning scores for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Tan Dun, The Red Violin by John Corigliano, and Titanic by James Horner, while preserving the label’s tradition of recording Broadway musicals and maintaining an extensive catalogue of classical works by many of the best known artists in the world. He also initiated Sony Classical’s broad program of commissioning new music, something no other classical label had attempted in recent years.

Mr. Gelb’s career in classical music began at the age of 17 when he went to work as an office boy for Sol Hurok. Training from an early age under the legendary impresario may have instilled in him a kind of entrepreneurship and creative acumen that has since distinguished his work, from managing the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s historic 1979 tour to China at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which made headlines around the world; to reviving Vladimir Horowitz’s concert career in 1980 and producing the famed pianist’s historic return to Russia in 1986; to the Tan Dun premiere, Symphony 1997, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, which Mr. Gelb commissioned in partnership with the Chinese government to be performed at the handover of Hong Kong to China.

The announcement of Mr. Gelb’s appointment to the Met was made in October 2004. He joined the Met in January 2005 and worked closely with Maestro Levine, as well as with the board of directors, staff, and administration, to plan for the Met’s future, before taking over as General Manager in August 2006.

Under Mr. Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera has once again taken a leadership role among opera houses and other arts organizations, not only in the U.S. but around the world, providing a model for other groups with its creative and groundbreaking public outreach initiatives. Mr. Gelb today shares his message regularly through keynote and featured addresses at conferences here and abroad, including at Harvard University, Showa University in Japan, the European Opera Conference in Paris, the Chautauqua Institution, and the American Symphony Orchestra League. In June 2008 he received an honorary doctorate from the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.

Time magazine named Mr. Gelb a 2008 honoree of the Time 100 list of the world’s most influential people. He was recently featured in NYC & Co’s “Just Ask the Locals” tourism campaign.

Mr. Gelb, who is 55, is the son of Arthur Gelb, former managing editor of The New York Times, and writer Barbara Gelb. He is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson and has two sons.

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