The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most renowned performing arts companies, is turning to Saudi Arabia to help it solve some of the most severe financial problems in its 142-year history.
The company has reached a lucrative agreement with the kingdom that calls for it to perform there for three weeks each winter. While neither the Met nor the Saudis disclosed financial terms when they announced a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday, the deal is expected to bring the Met more than $100 million.
The Met hopes the agreement will help it emerge from a period of acute financial woes. Since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has withdrawn more than a third of the money in its endowment fund to help it cover operating costs — about $120 million overall, including $50 million to help pay for the season that ended in June. The withdrawals have raised questions about the viability of staging live opera on a grand scale in the 21st century.
Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview that the Saudi deal would cover a “substantial portion” of the Met’s financial needs through at least 2032 and that the company would no longer be forced to tap its endowment for emergency funds.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Gelb said of the agreement, “because it will make the Met stronger as an institution, both financially and artistically.”
Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, restrictions on free speech and its role in the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, has led some in the West to call for shunning the kingdom. But in recent years both the Biden and the Trump administrations have sought closer relations with Saudi Arabia. And the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has relaxed some rules in the kingdom, tried to diversify its domestic economy beyond oil and worked to reshape its global image through large investments in business, sports, tourism and culture.
Under Mr. Gelb, the Met has been a vocal champion of political freedom and human rights in supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, cutting ties with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and with artists who had supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including the star soprano Anna Netrebko.
Mr. Gelb said his support for cultural exchange with Saudi Arabia was different. He called the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, which American intelligence officials said had been approved by Prince Mohammed, “a horrendous event.” But he said he had been encouraged by the new social freedoms given to Saudi women, saying that the country was “trying to improve itself in the eyes of its own population and in the eyes of the world.”
“All the democratic governments that I know of are engaged in business with Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Gelb said, adding that he believed that the deal would give the Met the opportunity to help promote “human understanding and compassionate thinking” there.
“I have to put the survival of the institution of the Met first,” he said. “I don’t operate the Met according to my personal feelings on every issue.”
Under the agreement, the Met will become the winter resident company at the Royal Diriyah Opera House, a $1.4 billion complex spanning some 11 acres on the outskirts of Riyadh that is set to open in 2028. The Met will stage operas like Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Puccini’s “La Bohème” for three weeks each February, during its winter break in New York. The Met will also provide training to Saudi singers, musicians, composers, directors, set designers and technicians in New York. And the company will commission an opera set in the ancient city of Al-Ula by the British composer Jonathan Dove.
Paul Pacifico, a cultural official for the Saudi government who helped negotiate the deal with the Met, said it would greatly accelerate the country’s efforts to build a comprehensive music education system and become a major force in classical music.
“Think of all the lessons the Met has learned, and how they got so good at what they do,” said Mr. Pacifico, who leads the Saudi Music Commission, a quasi-governmental organization that is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture. “Having a partnership with them enables us to benefit from those learnings from Day 1.”
The deal could help shore up the finances of the Met, which have weakened considerably over the past couple of decades as the costs of staging grand opera have grown while box-office demand has weakened.
Then the pandemic hit, forcing the Met to close its doors for more than a year and a half and disrupting audience attendance patterns.
In 2022, the Met, facing a cash shortfall and lackluster sales, began dipping into its endowment for emergency funds. That is typically done only as a last resort, since endowments are meant to grow over time while producing a steady source of investment income. The Met’s endowment is now valued at $232 million, down from $306 million in 2022, which was already considered small for an institution of its size. The Met’s annual budget is about $334 million, making it the largest performing arts organization in the United States.
Those withdrawals have raised alarms among financial watchdogs. Moody’s has downgraded the Met’s credit twice this year, and it recently lowered its outlook to “negative” from “stable.”
Paid attendance is still below prepandemic levels: It was 72 percent of capacity in the 2024-25 season, compared with 75 percent before the pandemic. Since some tickets are discounted, the company took in only 60 percent of its potential box-office capacity last season. But with ticket sales covering only a portion of the Met’s budget, the company relies primarily on philanthropic donations for support. Moody’s called the Met’s “very strong donor support” a strength, noting that it raised an average of $174 million a year over the past three years.
Faced with a gloomy financial outlook, Mr. Gelb has spent the past few years looking beyond traditional fund-raising channels. He said he was approached by an associate of the Saudi government in 2023 about a possible collaboration, and he met in Paris with Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, the cultural minister. (Prince Bader is also known as the mystery buyer of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “Salvator Mundi,” which fetched a record $450.3 million in 2017.)
When Mr. Gelb arrived in Riyadh in the summer of 2023 to meet with Saudi officials, he was struck by the government’s investments in the performing arts.
The Met hosted the American debut of the Saudi National Orchestra and Choir that fall, a three-hour concert of traditional Saudi music as well as jazz called “Marvels of Saudi Orchestra.” At the concert, Mr. Gelb said from the stage that “cultural exchange has the power to enhance understanding and to transcend our differences.”
As talks of a deal grew more serious, Mr. Gelb consulted a variety of experts, including Condoleezza Rice, who was secretary of state under former President George W. Bush. She supported the idea.
Under Prince Mohammed’s ambitious Vision 2030 plan, which aims to broaden the domestic economy into areas like tech, tourism and sports, Saudi Arabia has worked to greatly expand its cultural offerings, including by collaborating with western groups. The country has established partnerships in recent years with the Paris Opera, the Recording Academy, the Smithsonian, the Pompidou Center and others.
But the kingdom’s efforts to build soft power through culture have occasionally drawn scrutiny.
In 2019, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan was caught in a scandal involving fund-raising efforts with the Saudi government. After an uproar, the company returned more than three million euros in funding to Saudi Arabia.
More recently some human rights activists have accused western groups and performers that work with Saudi Arabia of helping “art-wash” the nation’s image. Some raised concerns about the participation of European and Australian artists last year in the premiere of what Saudi cultural officials described as the world’s first grand opera in Arabic, “Zarqa Al Yamama,” a pre-Islamic story about a tribal matriarch with the power to predict the future. The opera was written by the Australian composer Lee Bradshaw and featured the British mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly as well as Saudi artists. Mr. Gelb attended the premiere.
Mr. Pacifico, the cultural official, defended such collaborations. “The awareness and stories and perceptions of Saudi don’t always keep peace with the rate of change,” he said.
Mr. Gelb said the Met never required its artists to take part in foreign tours, so performers could choose whether they wanted to participate in the partnership with Saudi Arabia.
The deal has the support of one of the largest unions at the Met: the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents chorus members, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others.
The union’s president, Ned Hanlon, said in a statement that the agreement “represents an important step toward the kind of financial stability for the Metropolitan Opera that will enable artists and the art form to thrive for the next generation.”
Mr. Gelb said that the Met’s survival did not depend on the Saudi deal, but that it was necessary at a time when cultural institutions were having difficulty securing donations from a new generation of philanthropists.
“The triple-digit billionaires do not give money to the arts,” he said. “I’d be very happy if Elon Musk wanted to write a check for $2 billion, which would be a rounding error for him, but I don’t think he’s going to do it.”
The executive committee of the Met’s board unanimously supported the agreement with Saudi Arabia, Mr. Gelb said. The board recently extended the contract of Mr. Gelb, whose tenure began in 2006, through 2030.
Next year, Saudi Arabia will begin sending young theater professionals, musicians and others to the Met for training. The Met is considering sending singers in its Lindemann Young Artist Development Program to Saudi Arabia and arranging concerts there by renowned opera stars.
While the Met will not start performing in Saudi Arabia until 2028, Mr. Gelb said the two sides were already thinking about artistic possibilities, including by finding ways to feature Saudi performers. In “The Magic Flute,” for example, the Met is considering engaging a Saudi pop artist to sing the role of Papageno, the zany bird catcher.
Javier C. Hernández is a Times reporter who covers classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond.
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