The singers were in place for a “La Bohème” rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera last week when an unexpected guest walked onstage: Zohran Mamdani. For the next hour, Mr. Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York, used the Met’s grand stage as his backdrop for a video promoting opera — opera! — and announcing a new Met-City Hall program to distribute 70,000 free tickets a year to New Yorkers.
A few days earlier, Gustavo Dudamel, the new music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, was heading to the podium to conduct his first concert at David Geffen Hall when he got a call from Mr. Mamdani to welcome him to New York. It was the first time they had talked. “He was wonderful — it was very nice,” Mr. Dudamel said. They spoke about education, he said, and the mayor told him he would try to attend a New York Phil performance.
For Mr. Mamdani, a mayor who has promoted free child care, free buses and a lottery to give 2,100 free Broadway tickets to high school students, the idea of distributing opera tickets, some worth as much as $400, was in keeping with the populist themes he has embraced during his first 10 months in City Hall. So was the fast-paced video he put out to promote it.
But for classical music leaders in New York, the appearance of Mr. Mamdani at the Lincoln Center campus, and his advocacy for the city’s two premier music organizations, was cause for celebration and relief. The financially struggling Metropolitan Opera seized on the mayor’s new enthusiasm as it started a $1.5 billion fund-raising campaign along with the ticket program.
“The mayor stands for everything that is the opposite of elite,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “Having the mayor, who is one of the most popular individuals on the planet right now, actively engaged with the Met can only be beneficial.”
Since the days of Fiorello La Guardia, who helped found the New York City Opera, high-profile political leaders in New York have been known to take an interest in classical music. For some, that reflected their personal tastes; Rudolph W. Giuliani was a big fan of Italian opera and held a campaign fund-raiser featuring opera performances. But it was also a way of promoting the city as an arts capital — and crossing paths with wealthy donors.
There are exceptions. The last two mayors, Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio, were rarely spotted at Lincoln Center. And over his years in public life, Mr. Mamdani has shown little interest in what takes place at the opera house or at Geffen Hall. Mr. Mamdani, 34, has displayed a liking for other performing arts, appearing as a rapper under the name Mr. Cardamom, for example. (He did not respond to requests for an interview to discuss his views on the arts.)
Darren Walker, a former member of the Lincoln Center board of directors and former head of the Ford Foundation, said in an interview that classical music labored under the weight of being viewed as elitist, reflecting its audience and the cost of tickets, which he said posed obvious complications “for a populist mayor.”
“But a great mayor loves all art forms and understands that for New York to remain the cultural capital of the world, we must have a healthy ecosystem that supports all of the arts,” Mr. Walker said. “This isn’t optional for Mayor Mamdani. Engagement in my view is essential to furthering the success of this city.”
The ticket program will give away 70,000 Met seats this season and continue indefinitely, Mr. Mamdani says in the video. The tickets will be drawn from the Met’s pool of unsold seats; it sells about 75 percent of its seats a year. The tickets will be distributed by lottery on the Met app, and promoted with various city agencies, including the Housing Authority, the New York Public Library and New York City Public Schools.
The program will be limited: New Yorkers who purchased tickets for the 2018-2019 season or later will not be eligible for free tickets this season.There will be no income requirements. Mr. Gelb said he hoped the costs of giving away the tickets would be defrayed by expanding the audience.
The $1.5 billion fund-raising campaign being announced along with the ticket program comes as the Met, which has a $340 million annual budget and 3,000 employees, has drawn down a third of its endowment to pay operating costs. It faces an annual shortfall of $83 million.
Mr. Gelb said he intended to use $790 million of the $1.5 billion to increase the endowment, which is now $237 million, to $1 billion. Mr. Gelb said that he had commitments for $407 million of the $1.5 billion and that the fund-raising campaign was intended to raise the rest. That effort, he added, would be greatly boosted by the mayoral video.
“Opera is one of the greatest art forms we have,” Mr. Mamdani says on the video. “And there’s no better place to see it than here: at the iconic Metropolitan Opera House.”
The taping at the Met turned into a bit of a celebration for the mayor. Mr. Mamdani, whose office did not permit reporters to cover it, was greeted enthusiastically by Met workers. “Everyone was thrilled to see him,” said Nishana Dobbeck, a librarian for the Met orchestra. “The applause was thunderous. We are used to hearing thunderous applause. But to see the mayor on that stage was something else.”
At the end of the taping, the mayor took the conductor’s place on the podium as Met photographers captured his image with nearly 1,000 Met employees, including the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Mr. Gelb and cast members from “Lincoln in the Bardo,” the Missy Mazzoli opera that will have its world premiere on the Met stage in October.
“I thought it was really important for the Met to establish a connection with the mayor,” Mr. Gelb said. “He said to me he intends to come back for a performance next month. I invited him to come back and see ‘Lincoln in the Bardo.’”
The post A New Advocate for Opera Takes the Met Stage: Mayor Mamdani appeared first on New York Times.
