A Quick Report from Opening Night ...

... at the Metropolitan Opera

From The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera)

Last night, the Metropolitan Opera, at Lincoln Center in New York, opened its 2025–26 season. There was a red carpet, as there has long been on Opening Night. The great and the good walked on it. So did the young and the beautiful—models and such. I did not recognize any of them.

I used to be better at recognizing celebrities. Jude Law and Sienna Miller graced the red carpet on Opening Night, many years ago. Them, I knew! These days ...

I certainly knew John Corigliano, who entered the house the same time I did. This American composer was born in 1938. In recent days, the New York Philharmonic has been playing his Symphony No. 1, elsewhere on the Lincoln Center campus. I congratulated Corigliano on this symphony (penned in the late 1980s).

I further said something like this: “Look, I don’t care how young you were when you wrote the violin sonata. It’s great and always will be.”

He smiled.

(Corigliano wrote this piece—his sonata for violin and piano—in 1963, when he was in his mid-twenties. His father, also John Corigliano, was the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic.)

Music at the Met last night began with the national anthem—as it always does on Opening Night. We all rose to sing it. On my right was a famous soprano. Once the anthem was finished, I remarked to her companion, “Now I can put on my résumé that I sang with her.”

I thought of a couple of instances past. Years ago, on an opening night of the New York Philharmonic, I sat, and stood, behind Beverly Sills. We rose for the national anthem. She did not sing a note. I did not expect her to.

Maybe I could quote from my appreciation of her, published in 2007, shortly after she died:

[Sills] retired in 1980, at fifty-one. Years of singing and struggle had taken their toll, and Sills was ready. Her final event was a gala at City Opera ... After the gala, she never sang another note: not in the shower, not walking down the street, under her breath, not ever. There was only one exception to this, she
would tell me and others: President Reagan made a special request, on a certain occasion. Otherwise: silence. Sills wanted to sing her way—the right way—or not at all.

(As I remember, Reagan had asked her to sing “Happy Birthday.”)

Maybe I could do a little more quoting—from a column I wrote last February, when Paul Plishka, the basso, died:

Some years ago, I covered a New Year’s Eve concert by the New York Philharmonic. The printed program was over. I made for the exits. But there would be an encore—“Auld Lang Syne.” The audience was invited to sing. I stood at the back, next to Paul Plishka (who had apparently made to leave as well). Neither one of us sang a note.

When it was over, I turned to him and said, “I didn’t dare sing with you standing there.” He pinched my cheeks and said, “Awww.”

All right, enough Memory Lane—back to last night at the Met.

After the anthem, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the company, took the stage. There were cheers and jeers. There was applause and booing. That’s life in the big city.

He welcomed the audience to the Met, and the new season. He also made a statement—something along the lines of, “We at the Met stand for freedom of artistic expression.” The audience exploded in applause. Indeed, it gave the statement a standing ovation—a long one.

Someone near me said, “Oh, yeah? What about Saudi Arabia?”

In case you have not heard the news, this was the headline in the New York Times a few weeks ago: “The Met Opera Turns to Saudi Arabia to Help Solve Its Financial Woes.” The subheading reads, “The Met, which has withdrawn $120 million from its endowment since the pandemic, reached a lucrative deal to perform in Saudi Arabia for three weeks each winter.”

To read the article, go here.

What do I think of this Saudi deal? (Thanks for asking.) I have nothing to add to a piece I wrote for The Dispatch three years ago, about the Saudi golf league, then new: here.

In due course, Peter Gelb introduced another speaker, Senator Chuck Schumer, whom he described, if I recall correctly, as a “champion of democracy.” Once more, there were cheers and jeers. “That is the sound of democracy,” I thought.

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.” (I did not come up with those words myself.)

Around me, people cried, “Endorse!” It took me a second to figure out what they meant. They must have meant: “Endorse Zohran Mamdani,” one of the candidates for the New York mayoralty this year. Schumer has dragged his feet (a dragging I admire).

A practiced pol, Schumer was unfazed by the cheering and jeering. He has been “in the arena” for eons. Politician-style, he talked about the public money he had brought to Lincoln Center during the pandemic. The arts, he said, are under worse attack now than by COVID. Like Gelb, he plugged freedom of artistic expression, and freedom of speech generally.

He closed by citing the words of the national anthem, which we had just sung: “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

For ten, fifteen minutes, there had been a fair amount of excitement. The house had been raucous—positively raucous. I turned to the critic sitting next to me and said, “Is there going to be an opera tonight?” There was: a new one, by the American composer Mason Bates. This was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, based on Michael Chabon’s novel of 2000.

I will review it, for The New Criterion, soon. But I wanted to file this lil’ report ...