Peter Gelb's Paycheck and the Risk That Runs Downstage

Two Marc Chagall murals hang in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House, where they have hung since the building went up in 1966. You can see them from the plaza through the tall patchwork windows, lit up after dark, which is more or less the point of them. Sotheby's has valued the pair at about $55 million. The Met has engaged the auction house to find a buyer, on terms under which the buyer would agree to leave the paintings exactly where they are during the opera season.^[1]

Sell the art off the walls, and ask the new owner to let it stay on the walls, so that from the plaza nothing looks any different.

That is roughly the position the Met is in. In the fiscal year that ended in July 2025 it spent about $325 million against $304 million in revenue, and closed the year with $168 million in net assets, down from $232 million three years earlier.^[2] Eight months later a ratings agency cut its debt deeper into junk.^[3] In April a $200 million foreign partnership evaporated.^[4] The company laid off staff, cut executive salaries, put the naming rights to its own theater on the table, and trimmed next season to 17 productions, the fewest in at least sixty years.^[5][6]

Across the same fiscal year, the total compensation of the man who runs the place moved by four tenths of one percent.^[2]

Peter Gelb was paid $2,227,876. The year before, $2,237,377. In between, everything above happened.

This is not an argument that Gelb's pay caused any of it. It didn't, and the arithmetic later in this piece will show why that charge doesn't even work. It is an argument about where risk lands inside an institution under strain. At the Met the answer is legible, and it has three tiers. The top is cushioned. The middle was bargained into safety a long time ago. And the bottom, which is not the bottom of the art form but its public face, is the artist hired one production at a time.

What the pay buys at the top

Gelb's $2,227,876 breaks into $1,446,282 in reported compensation and $781,594 in other compensation, the category that holds deferred amounts and benefits.^[2] In the prior year the same two lines came to $1,395,216 and $842,161. The difference between the two totals is $9,501.

The music director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, is close behind at $2,056,750, and by reported compensation alone he is ahead: $2,035,560 against Gelb's $1,446,282.^[2] Two people at one company, each above $2 million, in two consecutive years that cost the company $68 million and knocked $51 million off its net assets.

Opera finances are not simple and nobody should pretend otherwise. Endowment returns, donor mood, ticket sales, production costs, the long tail of the pandemic: all of it moves the number, and no single line drives the result. The Met's own account of the crisis points elsewhere, at a collapsed partnership and a soft box office.^[4] Fine. The narrow observation still stands. Across two years of deepening trouble, the compensation at the top was, in dollars, the same.

How the Met's pay compares

The figures below come from each company's Form 990, for the fiscal years ending in 2025 and 2024, with the general manager or chief executive as the point of comparison rather than the music director. Each is total compensation, reportable plus other, from Part VII.

Fiscal years ending in 2025:

• Metropolitan Opera (Peter Gelb, general manager): $2,227,876. Revenue $304.1M; expenses $325.3M; margin -7.0%.^[2]
• Lyric Opera of Chicago (Anthony Freud, general director, through August 2024): $1,197,245. Revenue $80.8M; expenses $76.8M; margin +5.0%.^[7]
• Los Angeles Opera (Christopher Koelsch, president and CEO): $1,001,078. Revenue $50.3M; expenses $46.8M; margin +6.9%.^[8]
• San Francisco Opera (Matthew Shilvock, general director): $774,969. Revenue $82.8M; expenses $89.1M; margin -7.6%.^[9]
• Santa Fe Opera: no FY2025 return was public at the time of writing.^[10]

Fiscal years ending in 2024:

• Metropolitan Opera (Gelb): $2,237,377. Revenue $284.0M; expenses $331.0M; margin -16.5%.^[2]
• Los Angeles Opera (Koelsch): $1,239,626. Revenue $46.6M; expenses $51.1M; margin -9.7%.^[8]
• Lyric Opera of Chicago (Freud): $809,203. Revenue $57.1M; expenses $77.3M; margin -35.3%.^[7]
• San Francisco Opera (Shilvock): $759,840. Revenue $103.9M; expenses $93.4M; margin +10.1%.^[9]
• Santa Fe Opera (Robert Meya, general director): $592,486. Revenue $35.1M; expenses $31.8M; margin +9.5%.^[10]

Two things hold across both years. Gelb is the highest-paid general manager in the group, by a lot. And the Met carries the largest dollar deficit in it, $47.0 million in FY2024 and $21.2 million in FY2025, against worst-case peer figures of $20.2 million and $6.3 million.

What does not hold is any rule that pay tracks distress. In FY2024 Lyric Opera of Chicago ran a far worse percentage deficit than the Met and paid its general director about a third as much. A year later Lyric and Los Angeles were both in surplus, San Francisco had fallen into deficit, and none of it corresponded to what those companies paid their leaders. Boards set this number, one house at a time, and they are not consulting each other.

What the comparison does not show

There is an obvious answer to all of that, and it should be made here rather than left for the Met to make later.

Divide each general manager's compensation by the total expenses of the company that person actually runs:

• Metropolitan Opera: 0.68% of total expenses in FY2025, 0.68% in FY2024.
• San Francisco Opera: 0.87% and 0.81%.
• Lyric Opera of Chicago: 1.56% and 1.05%, the later figure inflated by a leadership transition.
• Santa Fe Opera: 1.87% in FY2024.
• Los Angeles Opera: 2.14% and 2.42%.

By that measure Peter Gelb is the cheapest chief executive in this group, in both years, and it isn't close. The Met spends about a third as much of its budget on its general manager as Los Angeles Opera spends on its president. The Met is roughly seven times the size of Los Angeles Opera and ten times the size of Santa Fe. Scale is a real argument, and this is it.

So the pay ratio will not carry an argument on its own, and nothing here rests on it. What survives is narrower and harder to wave off. Scale explains the level of Gelb's compensation. It does not explain how still it sat. Between the two years the Met's revenue rose and its expenses fell and it lost money anyway, and its net assets went from $219 million at the close of FY2023 to $168 million at the close of FY2025.^[2] The number at the top moved by less than half a percent. Whatever the institution gave up in those years, it did not give it up there.

What the bond market says

On March 18, 2026, Moody's cut the Metropolitan Opera Association to Caa1 from B3, negative outlook, on $178 million of debt.^[3] Caa1 is not a warning shot. It describes an obligation of very high credit risk.

Moody's is worth quoting because it has no stake whatsoever in the labor argument. It cited a "pronounced structural deficit." Three years of extraordinary endowment draws, $120 million in all, eroding the company's cash. Poor liquidity. Total reliance on a bank line that runs out in February 2027. And then the sentence that reads differently now than it did in March: "absent a material cash infusion, the Met is likely to confront a substantial budgetary shortfall in fiscal 2026, potentially requiring further unsustainable endowment draws." The negative outlook, the agency added, reflected the risk that one-time sources of cash might be delayed or fail to materialize.^[3]

Five weeks later the largest of those one-time sources failed to materialize.

A house in crisis

The Met had spent years building a partnership with Saudi Arabia worth as much as $200 million over eight, under which the company would have performed three weeks each February at the Royal Diriyah Opera House outside Riyadh. Nothing was ever signed. It was a memorandum of understanding, and in April 2026 the Saudis walked, citing economic damage from the war in Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Gelb said he was told the government was "only doing the projects that are essential."^[4][1] He did not hide what it cost him. "This is something we had been working on for several years," he said. "It's a very significant disappointment."^[4]

That left roughly $30 million to find by July 31, with a $62 million credit line coming due in February 2027 and a bequest of more than $100 million at least a year out.^[4]

The company had already started cutting. In January 2026 it laid off more than twenty of its roughly 284 administrative employees and pushed the pay reduction on executives earning above $150,000 from four percent to fifteen.^[5] Then the naming rights. Then the Chagalls. Then a season of 17 productions.^[6]

Gelb's salary sits well above that $150,000 line, so his pay is among the figures being cut, and that is the fair way to read the $2.23 million: it is the last full year on the record, and it predates all of this. Even so. Cut by fifteen percent, it would still lead the peer group, at a house now trying to work out what its own name is worth.

The middle tier, protected

Now go down a floor.

A Met regular chorister works a 52-week salaried contract with ten weeks of paid time off. The company's own audition materials put the starting weekly base at $1,716.82, rising to $2,146.04 by the fourth season, with rehearsals above base paid at $91.82 an hour, and state that "with overtime and additional benefits, a starting Regular Chorister can earn an estimated $150,000-$175,000 a year." The same page notes that the 2026-27 rates are "contingent upon the outcome of upcoming contract negotiations."^[11] Health and dental. A pension. And a sentence at the foot of the same page that decides a great deal: "All Chorus positions are hired as W2 employees."^[11] If the season is short or the house is empty, that is the institution's problem, not the chorister's.

What that kind of job buys is not only money. Writing in AGMA's own pages this summer, the chorister Tanisha Anderson described what it means to be accommodated at work: "I'm appreciative of people who acknowledge and understand my disability and make provisions where a music stand, despite optics, can assist me to perform at the same level and comfort as others." Her hope, she said, was that future performers "can be in spaces where they can soar, without having to hurdle roadblocks that stifle them."^[12]

A music stand is a small thing to ask for. You ask for it more easily when you are staff, when there is a contract behind you and a next season already on the calendar. That security took decades to bargain. It is exactly what the artist one floor down does not have.

The exposed tier

Andrew Stenson is a tenor from Rochester, Minnesota. He joined AGMA in 2009; his first union job came through the Santa Fe Opera apprentice program. In 2024 he was elected the union's soloists' vice president, and when the union asked him what he meant to do with the job, he answered with the plainest possible description of how his half of the membership lives.

"My top priority is advocating for financial guarantees for independent contractors," he said. "This mostly affects soloists, who typically aren't paid until performances."^[13]

Read that twice. It comes from the elected officer representing soloists, published by his own union. Soloists typically aren't paid until performances. Not on signing, not during the weeks of rehearsal, not while they are paying rent in two cities at once. Stenson had watched what that meant when the work stopped: during the pandemic, he said, "we saw countless people left high and dry, left to foot the bill for temporary housing, role preparation, and countless other expenses."^[13]

These are the singers on the poster. They are engaged production by production, each booking its own negotiation, the money arriving in lumps with no guarantee of another and no employer health plan standing behind it.

Which brings us to one sentence in the 2021 Metropolitan Opera agreement. Its binding language 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."^[14]

Not "the employer will contribute." The soloist may divert. That is the right to redirect a slice of your own fee to buy your own insurance, and only if the engagement runs four weeks or longer. Below four weeks, under the cited provisions, a soloist appears to get neither a Met contribution nor the diversion option for that job.

The fees had been cut too. Under the same agreement, per-performance soloist fees came down on a sliding scale, six percent on fees under $6,000 rising to 12.65 percent on fees of $14,000 or more.^[14] The cuts were temporary and sunset on July 31, 2025.^[14] While they ran, a singer in the top bracket lost about $1,770 on a $14,000 engagement, and was then invited to fund health coverage out of what was left.

There is a further layer that rarely gets said out loud, and it lands entirely on this tier. Some of the obvious costs are covered: the Met books a soloist's travel or reimburses it on receipts, and under the 2021 agreement weekly and per-performance soloists receive their weekly rehearsal pay on arrival rather than at curtain.^[14] That is what bargaining bought, and it is worth saying.

What bargaining has not covered is the cost of being ready to sing the role. Classical artist managers take a standard commission of twenty percent of the fee, against ten to fifteen percent in most other genres, and the artist is separately billed for a share of the management company's advertising and promotional materials and the manager's travel to booking conferences.^[15] On a $14,000 engagement the commission alone is $2,800. The coach and the accompanist who prepared the role months earlier are paid by the singer; the 2021 Met agreement resolves nothing there, providing only that "AGMA may refer issues of coaching for soloists to the Artistic Advisory Committee for further consideration."^[14]

Then the tax code takes its turn, and it has no good answer for either half of the profession. The Met does not carry its per-performance soloists on payroll. They are engaged on Individual Artist Agreements and paid as independent contractors, on a 1099, which is why the health diversion is offered "on a pre-tax basis (if permissible)," a hedge that would be unnecessary for an ordinary employee.^[14] The company says of the chorus, in writing, that every position is a W2 job.^[11] It says nothing of the kind about the soloists. One of these people is an employee of the Metropolitan Opera. The other is a small business standing on the same stage. Their costs do become deductible, which is a real advantage, but they carry self-employment tax of generally 15.3 percent, both halves of Social Security and Medicare, where a salaried colleague pays one half and the house pays the other.^[16] Nobody withholds it, nobody contributes to a retirement plan, and nobody contributes anything toward health coverage, which is precisely why the contract offers only the right to divert one's own fee.

Salaried performers have the mirror problem. Employees lost the deduction for unreimbursed business expenses when the 2017 tax law suspended it, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made that permanent in 2025.^[17] The Code's one carve-out for performers lets a "qualified performing artist" deduct above the line, but only with adjusted gross income of $16,000 or less, a ceiling set in 1986 and never indexed against a 2026 federal poverty guideline of $15,960.^[18][19] A bipartisan bill to raise it has sat in committee since 2025.^[20] Stage Door Society traced a single engagement all the way down, and what the tax code does to the remainder, in The Only Union in the Room.

When that contract went to AGMA's Met members it passed, 334 to 124. The union published the tally by work group, and it shows one category standing alone: the chorus, dancers, staff performers, stage directors and stage managers ratified it by 245 votes to 11 between them. The soloists voted 89 to 113 against.^[21] The one group whose fees the contract cut hardest was the one group that rejected it, and it was outvoted.

What the contracts show across the field

None of this is peculiar to the Met. Under Washington National Opera's 2022-2025 agreement a leading soloist earned $1,627.40 per performance and a Group I chorister $304.85, and Washington was the generous case: it still funded an employer health contribution for both.^[22] Under Detroit Opera's 2022-2025 agreement a leading soloist earned $849.43 per performance and an "A" chorister $190, choristers were excluded by name from the health article, and soloists got a cash "Production Bonus" of $83.55 a performance instead of a health-fund contribution.^[23]

There is a reason that substitution exists. AGMA's second health benefit, Plan B, has been closed to new members since January 2018, and the fund's own materials now call it a "Reimbursement Plan" rather than insurance.^[24] Money that used to be built around Plan B has gone elsewhere. Detroit turned it into a per-performance bonus.^[23] Wolf Trap Opera's contract says the old Plan B contribution now goes to the AGMA Retirement Fund because "the ACA no longer makes the Health Plan B a viable...option."^[25] The dollars still move through a bargained structure. For a younger artist they no longer buy a doctor.

One union, limited exit

There is also nowhere else to go. AGMA represents singers, dancers, choristers and staging staff at nearly every major American opera house, and bargains dozens of agreements across opera, ballet and concert dance. Article XX of the AFL-CIO Constitution holds that position in place: "each affiliate shall respect the established collective bargaining relationship of every other affiliate," and "no affiliate shall organize or attempt to represent employees as to whom an established collective bargaining relationship exists with any other affiliate."^[26]

For a singer at an established AGMA house that means no rival union inside the federation is available to be chosen instead. The formal exits are legal and hard: decertify the union at an entire company, work non-union and give up scale, or, only in a right-to-work state such as Texas, decline membership and take the contract's terms anyway. In New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and Washington State, where the biggest engagements are, even that last one is gone.

The counterpoint

AGMA wins for its members, and this is where that gets said properly.

Take Dallas Black Dance Theatre. Its dancers voted unanimously to unionize in May 2024 and were fired en masse that August, three of them on eleven-month contracts paying $25,300, $30,800 and $33,000 before taxes.^[27] AGMA went after it, winning a roughly $565,000 NLRB settlement in December 2024 for thirteen dancers.^[28] Then, on August 10, 2026, as the company entered its fiftieth season, the union's Board of Governors ratified the company's first contract: three years, at least twelve dancers guaranteed, at least 41 weeks of pay, a 20 percent cumulative raise, and 90 percent of health premiums paid by the company.^[29] That fight is told in full in The Only Union in the Room. Twenty-five thousand three hundred dollars for eleven months of work, and then a contract that guarantees forty-one weeks of pay and nine-tenths of the health premium. That is what a union is for, and AGMA did it.

All of that is true and all of it belongs here. None of it settles the structural question, which was never whether AGMA delivers. It is where the risk goes when one union represents both salaried ensembles and artists hired one show at a time, and their interests come apart at the table. At the Met you can find the answer without going anywhere near the executive suite. It is in the sentence about who may divert a portion of their own fee.

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 documents and AGMA's ratification tally, AGMA's contract summaries and member profiles, 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. Stage Door Society did not seek comment from the Metropolitan Opera or AGMA before publishing this article. Both are invited to respond, and this article will be updated with any response.

Executive-compensation and company-finance figures come from each organization's IRS Form 990, retrieved from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer. Compensation figures are GM/CEO total compensation, reportable plus other compensation from Form 990 Part VII, not base salary, with music and artistic directors treated as a separate category. Revenue, expense and net-asset figures are as filed. Operating margin is (revenue minus expenses) divided by revenue.

The normalized comparison divides each executive's total compensation by that organization's total functional expenses for the same fiscal year, as filed. It measures what an organization spends on its chief executive relative to what it spends in total. It does not adjust for tenure, contract terms, deferred-compensation timing or local labor markets, and it is not a measure of whether any individual is worth the money.

Three caveats apply to the FY2025 comparison. Lyric Opera of Chicago's figure covers Anthony Freud, who left the general director role in August 2024, and therefore reflects a partial year plus transition payments rather than a full year of a sitting chief executive; his successor, John Mangum, began in fall 2024. The Santa Fe Opera had not filed a return for a fiscal year ending in 2025 at the time of writing, so it appears only in the FY2024 comparison. And at Lyric Opera of Chicago in FY2024 the single highest-paid individual in the filing is a deputy general director at $823,012 in total compensation; the general-director figure is used here for a like-for-like comparison.

"Other compensation" on Form 990 Part VII aggregates deferred amounts, retirement contributions and nontaxable benefits, and in some years includes the payout of amounts deferred and reported in earlier years. This analysis reports the line as filed and does not attempt to allocate it across the years in which it was earned.

The Met's 2026 measures are documented in contemporaneous reporting: The Bond Buyer for the March 18, 2026 Moody's downgrade and the agency's stated rationale; OperaWire and Artforum for the collapse of the Saudi partnership, the credit line, the Sotheby's engagement and the naming-rights discussion; The Guardian for the January 2026 layoffs and executive salary cuts; and the Associated Press for the size of the 2026-27 season. Labor terms come from the cited agreements themselves. The Washington National Opera and Detroit Opera rates are from 2022-2025 agreements and are used as historical comparators; successor agreements have since been ratified at several of these companies, and this article does not treat the older rates as current minimums. The Met chorus figures are the company's own published audition materials for the 2026-27 season. The Dallas Black Dance Theatre dancer salary figures are as reported by KERA News. Quotations from Andrew Stenson and Tanisha Anderson are from AGMA's own published member profiles and are quoted verbatim; neither was interviewed for this article. Compensation figures reflect what organizations reported to the IRS; Stage Door Society has not independently audited them.

The tax discussion describes general federal rules in force at the time of writing and is not tax advice. The Metropolitan Opera's collective bargaining agreement does not address tax classification and neither the Met nor AGMA publishes it. The statement that the Met engages its per-performance soloists as independent contractors, paid on Form 1099, rests on Stage Door Society's reporting rather than on a published document; it is corroborated by the structure of the Individual Artist Agreement, by the contract's "(if permissible)" hedge on pre-tax diversion, and by AGMA's elected soloists' vice president describing the artists he represents as independent contractors. Neither the Met nor AGMA was asked to confirm it. Classification is determined by the facts of each engagement and by applicable law, it varies by company and by category, and an individual singer's year may contain both employment and contracting. The manager's commission figure is the standard classical rate reported by the career authority Angela Myles Beeching, not a rate drawn from any individual artist's contract; commissions are privately negotiated and no house or union publishes them. Travel, per diem and housing provisions are quoted from the agreements themselves, and this article does not claim that soloists pay their own airfare: at the companies examined, transportation is provided or reimbursed by the employer. The out-of-pocket costs discussed are those no agreement reimburses, principally the manager's commission and billed management expenses, and the coaching and accompanying that prepare a role. Statutory requirements for the qualified performing artist deduction are quoted from 26 U.S.C. 62(b); the poverty guideline is the figure published by the Department of Health and Human Services for 2026.

1. [1]Artforum, “How Much Is That Chagall in the Window: Metropolitan Opera Faces Funding Crisis After Saudi Deal Collapse”↗
2. [2]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, “Metropolitan Opera Association (EIN 13-1624087), Forms 990 for fiscal years ending July 2024 and July 2025”↗
3. [3]The Bond Buyer, “Moody's downgrades the Met and The New School”↗
4. [4]OperaWire, “Peter Gelb's Saudi Deal Falls Apart Amidst Metropolitan Opera Financial Turmoil”↗
5. [5]The Guardian, “New York's Met Opera announces 'necessary' layoffs and pay cuts”↗
6. [6]Associated Press, “Met Opera's 2026-27 season has 17 productions, its fewest in at least 60 years”↗
7. [7]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, “Lyric Opera of Chicago (EIN 36-6008929), Forms 990 for fiscal years ending June 2024 and June 2025”↗
8. [8]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, “Los Angeles Opera Company (EIN 95-2096402), Forms 990 for fiscal years ending June 2024 and June 2025”↗
9. [9]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, “San Francisco Opera Association (EIN 94-0836240), Forms 990 for fiscal years ending July 2024 and July 2025”↗
10. [10]ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, “The Santa Fe Opera (EIN 85-0131810), Form 990 for fiscal year ending September 2024”↗
11. [11]Metropolitan Opera, “Chorus Auditions”↗
12. [12]AGMA, “Disability Pride Month Spotlight: AGMA Chorister Says Every Artist Belongs”↗
13. [13]AGMA, “Get to Know AGMA's New Soloists Vice President Andrew Stenson”↗
14. [14]Metropolitan Opera-AGMA Agreement Documents (Board-Approved) 2021-2025 (per-performance soloist health-diversion language; fee-reduction schedule in Met Principal Solo Artist Proposal 35)↗
15. [15]Angela Myles Beeching, “5 Artist Management Myths”↗
16. [16]Internal Revenue Service, “Self-Employment Tax (Social Security and Medicare Taxes)”↗
17. [17]Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation, “One Big Beautiful Bill Act Implements Significant Tax Package”↗
18. [18]26 U.S.C. 62(a)(2)(B) and 62(b), “Qualified performing artist”↗
19. [19]U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “HHS Poverty Guidelines for 2026”↗
20. [20]Congress.gov, “H.R.721 - Performing Artist Tax Parity Act of 2025”↗
21. [21]American Guild of Musical Artists, “AGMA Ratifies Contract with the Metropolitan Opera”↗
22. [22]Washington National Opera-AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2022-2025 (Article XXVIII Principal Artist compensation; employer health contributions)↗
23. [23]Detroit Opera-AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2022-2025 (Schedule C rate classifications; health article excludes choristers from "Artists Covered"; per-performance "Production Bonus"), “Artists Covered”↗
24. [24]AGMA Retirement & Health Fund, “Reimbursement Plan (formerly Plan B)”↗
25. [25]Wolf Trap Opera-AGMA Collective Bargaining Agreement 2023-2026↗
26. [26]AFL-CIO Constitution, “Article XX, Settlement of Internal Disputes, Sections 2 and 20”↗
27. [27]KERA News, “How Dallas Black Dance Theatre fired dancers in the clash of old and new school”↗
28. [28]NLRB Region 16 (Fort Worth), “Region 16 Fort Worth secures settlement requiring Dallas Black Dance Theatre to pay dancers”↗
29. [29]AGMA, “Highlights from AGMA's First Contract with Dallas Black Dance Theatre”↗