Peter Gelb's Paycheck and the Risk That Runs Downstage

The Metropolitan Opera is the largest opera company in the United States, and in the year ending July 2024 it reported the largest dollar deficit among the peer companies reviewed — spending roughly $331 million against $284 million in revenue, a gap of about $47 million.^[2] Where that risk falls inside the institution is not evenly distributed. It is cushioned at the top, bargained down in the middle, and pushed onto the artists with the least structural protection — the ones whose names sell the productions.

Start at the top. The Met paid its general manager, Peter Gelb, just over $2.2 million in total compensation that year, and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, more than $2 million.^[2] A starting member of the Met chorus earns a base near $89,000 — or, by the company's own account, $150,000 to $175,000 a year once overtime and benefits are counted.^[3] Gelb's package is more than twenty-five times the one figure and more than a dozen times the other.

That ratio is the headline that surfaces every time the Met and its unions negotiate. It is also the least interesting part of the story. The chorister is not the most exposed party here. The chorister is salaried, insured, and pensioned — the protected middle of a three-tier structure. The exposed party is the artist between the chorister and the general manager: the per-performance soloist, hired one production at a time, marketed as the face of the art form, and left, on short engagements, to arrange health coverage out of the fee itself.

What the pay buys at the top

Gelb's $2,237,377 consists of $1,395,216 in reported compensation from the organization and $842,161 in other compensation — deferred amounts and benefits — as reported on the Met's Form 990.^[2] Nézet-Séguin's total, $2,072,060, is close behind; measured by reported compensation alone, the music director's $2,045,038 actually exceeds the general manager's.^[2] Two individuals at one company, each compensated above $2 million, in a year the company lost $47 million.

None of this proves that executive pay caused the Met's deficit. Opera finances turn on endowment returns, donor behavior, ticket sales, production costs, and post-pandemic attendance, and no single line drives the result. The narrower, and still striking, fact is this: the Met's board awarded the highest general-manager compensation among the peer houses reviewed at the same institution that posted the largest dollar deficit among them.

How the Met's pay compares

To compare like with like, the figures below are each company's Form 990 for the fiscal year ending in 2024 — the latest fiscal year for which filings were available across the entire peer group at the time of writing — with the general manager or chief executive, not the music director, as the point of comparison. (The Met's FY2025 return was not yet public; some peers, including Los Angeles Opera, have since filed FY2025 returns showing different figures.)

• Metropolitan Opera — Peter Gelb, general manager: $2,237,377. Revenue $284.0M; expenses $331.0M; operating margin −16.5%.
• Los Angeles Opera — Christopher Koelsch, president and CEO: $1,239,626. Revenue $46.6M; expenses $51.1M; margin −9.7%.
• Lyric Opera of Chicago — Anthony Freud, general director: $809,203. Revenue $57.1M; expenses $77.3M; margin −35.3%.
• San Francisco Opera — Matthew Shilvock, general director: $759,840. Revenue $103.9M; expenses $93.4M; margin +10.1%.
• Santa Fe Opera — Robert Meya, general director: $592,486. Revenue $35.1M; expenses $31.8M; margin +9.5%.

Two things follow, and only two. Gelb is the highest-paid general manager in this group, by a wide margin. And the Met carries the largest dollar deficit in it. What does not follow is a clean rule that pay tracks distress: Lyric Opera of Chicago ran a worse percentage deficit than the Met while paying its general director roughly a third as much, and the two companies that finished the year in the black — San Francisco and Santa Fe — pay their leaders the least. Across the group, executive compensation maps neatly onto neither scale nor annual performance. It is set by boards, one institution at a time.

A house in crisis

The Met's losses are not an abstraction, and the months since have made the strain concrete. The company had pursued a partnership with Saudi Arabia reportedly worth up to $200 million, tied to annual winter residencies connected to the planned Royal Diriyah Opera House. In the spring of 2026 the deal collapsed, leaving the Met to close a roughly $30 million shortfall by the end of July.^[4]

By then it had already moved. In January 2026 the company laid off more than twenty of its roughly 284 administrative employees and deepened the salary reductions it had imposed on executives earning more than $150,000 — from four percent to fifteen.^[4] It has explored selling the naming rights to the opera house. It is weighing the sale of the two Marc Chagall murals in its lobby, valued together at about $55 million.^[4]

Gelb's compensation, well above the $150,000 threshold, is among the figures being cut — the fair frame for the $2.2 million, which is the most recent full year on record and predates these measures. The cuts do not change the comparison. Even reduced by fifteen percent, Gelb's pay would still lead the peer group, at a company now weighing extraordinary measures, including monetizing its Chagall murals, to make its budget.

The middle tier, protected

The chorister sits in the part of the structure that union bargaining has most thoroughly secured. A Met regular chorister works a 52-week salaried contract; the Met's own audition materials put a starting chorister's base at about $1,717 a week, and state that "with overtime and additional benefits, a starting Regular Chorister can earn an estimated $150,000–$175,000 a year."^[3] Behind that sit employer-funded health coverage and a pension. For a permanent ensemble member, the institution carries the risk.

That security is the product of a long-bargained relationship — and it is exactly what the artist one tier down does not have.

The exposed tier

Per-performance soloists are not on staff. They are artists engaged production by production, each booking its own negotiation, the fees arriving in lumps with no guarantee of a next one and no employer health plan behind them. They are the singers the Met features in its marketing. They are also the ones the contract leaves to insure themselves.

The binding language of the 2021 Metropolitan Opera agreement provides that "per performance soloists working for the Met for a period encompassing four weeks or more shall be entitled to elect to divert a portion of their total compensation, on a pre-tax basis (if permissible), to cover the cost of AGMA Plan A for an individual."^[5] Not, on its face, an employer contribution — the right to redirect one's own fee. And only past four weeks at the house. Under the cited Met/AGMA provisions, a soloist below the four-week threshold appears to receive neither a Met-funded contribution nor the diversion option for that engagement.

Those fees had themselves been cut. Under the 2021 agreement, per-performance soloist fees were reduced on a sliding scale — six percent on fees under $6,000, rising to 12.65 percent on fees of $14,000 or more.^[5] The reductions were temporary; under the June 3 update to the 2021 tentative agreement, they did not apply to per-performance contracts for work after the 2024–25 season.^[5]

When the 2021 agreement went to AGMA's Met members, it passed 334 to 124. Of the 124 votes against, 113 came from the soloists' branch — a majority of the soloists voting no.^[6] The contract passed because the chorus, the dancers, the staff performers, the stage managers and directors, treated differently under their own terms, voted yes in numbers the soloists could not overcome. It is the clearest illustration of where the votes — and the protections — sit.

What the contracts show across the field

The pattern is not the Met's alone. Under Washington National Opera's 2022–2025 agreement, a leading soloist earned $1,627.40 per performance in the first year and a Group I chorister $304.85 — and Washington was the relatively generous case, still funding an employer health contribution for both categories.^[7] Under Detroit Opera's 2022–2025 agreement, a leading soloist earned $849.43 per performance and an "A" chorister $190; choristers are excluded by name from the agreement's health article, while soloists receive a cash "Production Bonus" of $83.55 per performance in place of a health-fund contribution.^[8]

That conversion has a cause. AGMA's second health benefit, Plan B, has not been open to new members since January 2018; the fund's own materials now describe it as a "Reimbursement Plan," not insurance.^[9] At several companies the employer money once designated for it has been redirected into the AGMA Retirement Plan by side letter — at Wolf Trap Opera, the contract states that "because the ACA no longer makes the Health Plan B a viable…option, these contributions are now being made to the AGMA Retirement Fund."^[10] The contribution may still move through a bargained structure. For newer artists it no longer operates as employer-provided health insurance.

One union, limited exit

There is also no easy way out. AGMA represents many of the country's professional opera singers, dancers, choristers, and staging staff, and bargains dozens of agreements across opera, ballet, and concert dance. Its position is reinforced by Article XX of the AFL-CIO Constitution, which bars any affiliate from organizing or representing workers where another affiliate already holds an established bargaining relationship.^[11]

For a singer at an established AGMA house, that means no easy rival-union path inside the AFL-CIO structure. The formal exits are legal but difficult: petition to decertify the union at an entire company, work non-union and forfeit minimum-scale protection, or — only in a right-to-work state such as Texas — decline membership while still taking the contract's terms. In New York, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Washington State, where the largest engagements are, even that last option is gone.

The counterpoint

AGMA wins for its members, and the record shows it. In December 2024 the National Labor Relations Board's Fort Worth region announced a settlement of roughly $565,000 against Dallas Black Dance Theatre, covering thirteen dancers who had been fired or had offers rescinded.^[12] It is a real result — and an unfinished one: a year later the dancers and AGMA still had no collective bargaining agreement and were reported to be in talks.^[13] The 2025 Met agreement, for its part, closed a gap the 2021 deal had left open, guaranteeing a per-performance cover full fee if bypassed at the last minute for an outside principal.^[14] And Andrew Stenson, the elected AGMA soloists' vice president, credits the union plainly: "AGMA came through for us during the pandemic."^[15]

These are true, and they belong in the account. They do not settle the structural question, which is not whether AGMA ever delivers but where the risk lands when a single union represents both salaried ensembles and one-production-at-a-time soloists and their interests split at the table. At the Met, the answer is visible not in the corner office but in the contract language governing the artists hired one show at a time.

What the institutions say

The Metropolitan Opera and AGMA speak here through their own records — the Met's IRS filings and published audition materials, the executed 2021 agreement and AGMA's ratification materials, AGMA's contract summaries, and the on-the-record statements of its elected soloists' vice president. AGMA's defense of its record appears above, in "The counterpoint." Every figure and quotation in this analysis is drawn from those public documents.

How this was reported

Executive-compensation and company-finance figures come from each organization's IRS Form 990, retrieved from public filings; all five peer figures reflect the fiscal year ending in 2024 and are GM/CEO total compensation, not base salary, with music and artistic directors treated as a separate category. (At Lyric Opera of Chicago the single highest-paid individual in the filing is a deputy general director, Elizabeth Hurley — a name coincidence with the actress — at $823,012; the general-director figure is used here for a like-for-like comparison.) The Met's 2026 measures — the collapsed Saudi partnership, the roughly $30 million shortfall, the layoffs and deepened executive pay cuts, and the proposed Chagall sale — are documented in contemporaneous news coverage. Labor terms come from the agreements themselves; the regional rates cited are from the 2022–2025 contracts, several of which have since been succeeded, and the structural features described persist in the newer agreements reviewed. The Met chorus figures are the company's own published audition materials. Compensation figures reflect what organizations reported to the IRS; Stage Door Society has not independently audited them.

1. [2]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer↗
2. [3]Metropolitan Opera, “Chorus Auditions”↗
3. [4]CBS New York, “Metropolitan Opera's funding agreement with Saudi Arabia falls through, Met officials say”↗
4. [5]Metropolitan Opera–AGMA Agreement 2021–2025 (Health Care §17; per-performance soloist fee-reduction schedule
5. [6]OperaWire, “AGMA Ratifies New Collective Bargaining Contract With Metropolitan Opera Despite Major Soloist Dissent”↗
6. [7]Washington National Opera–AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2022–2025 (rates and health contributions)↗
7. [8]Detroit Opera–AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2022–2025 (Art. 16 Health Coverage; Art. 29 Choristers; soloist rate schedule)↗
8. [9]AGMA Retirement & Health Fund, “Reimbursement Plan (formerly Plan B)”↗
9. [10]Wolf Trap Opera–AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2023–2026↗
10. [11]AFL-CIO Constitution↗
11. [12]NLRB Region 16 (Fort Worth)↗
12. [13]KERA News, “5 Things to Know About the Labor Disputes at Dallas Black Dance Theatre”↗
13. [14]AGMA, “Highlights from AGMA's New One-Year Agreement with the Met”↗
14. [15]AGMA, “Get to Know AGMA's New Soloists Vice President Andrew Stenson”↗