Peter Gelb vs. the operas of Elliott Carter

The New York Post's Page Six section, a space that infrequently turns its attention to classical music, reports on a bizarre attack that Peter Gelb recently unleashed on Zachary Woolfe, the classical critic of the New York Times. At a donor event on the Upper East Side, Gelb apparently said: “There’s a great deal of resentment on the part of some critics — not all critics, some critics — about the idea that music should be approachable by a large audience and should be available to more people and some critics might [prefer to] keep it sacred, in some ways, for themselves." He went on to claim that "some critics" were promoting “the operas of Elliot [sic] Carter or pieces that I don’t believe would have popular success." This is nonsense, on several levels. First, Elliott Carter wrote only one opera, the forty-seven-minute-long What Next?, and no one I know is campaigning for it to be performed at the Met. The remark exhibits Gelb's basic indifference to contemporary music. Second, Woolfe is hardly an inflexible advocate of modernist complexity; Gelb seems to have confused him with the late Charles Wuorinen. Third, the Met is lavishly covered in the pages of the Times, and it's rather ungrateful for the company's leader to attack it on that score. Fourth, when only a handful of papers in America still have classical critics on staff, "some critics" is a strange locution. Finally, after nearly two decades at the Met, Gelb ought to have developed thicker skin when it comes to bad press. (Recall his 2012 attempt to shut down adverse coverage of Met productions in Opera News.) Instead of becoming fixated on imaginary media conspiracies, Gelb should be concentrating on more substantial challenges.