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      Met Opera Announces Its First Live Concerts Since Shutdown

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      Despite ongoing labor tensions, members of the company’s orchestra and chorus will perform with soloists and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.The Metropolitan Opera will perform again for a live audience, 430 days after the coronavirus shut down its theater.Members of the company’s orchestra and chorus, joined by prominent soloists and led by its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will give two concerts at the Knockdown Center in Queens on Sunday, the Met announced on Wednesday. The concerts will go on despite continuing labor tensions at the Met, which have threatened the intended reopening of its Lincoln Center home in September.Scheduled for 6 and 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the program, called “A Concert for New York,” includes selections by Mozart, Verdi and Terence Blanchard, whose “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” is planned to reopen the Met on Sept. 27 and will be the company’s first opera by a Black composer. The soloists for the Queens performances will be Angel Blue, Stephen Costello, Justin Austin and Eric Owens; 12 Met choristers and 20 orchestra musicians will take part.Whether the Met will be able to reopen in September is not yet clear. While New York officials have announced plans to loosen pandemic restrictions around the performing arts — prompting major sectors, like Broadway, to lay out their plans for a fall return — the Met, which says that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues since it was forced to close, has been seeking pay cuts from its workers, like other arts organizations. Many of its unions are resisting, and the company has locked out Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents its stagehands.The union representing the Met’s chorus members, soloists and some other workers recently struck a deal on a new contract, though the details will not be made public until the union members vote on ratifying it later this month. The orchestra players’ union, Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, is still in negotiations with management over how deep and lasting pay cuts will be.In March, after nearly a year of unpaid furlough, the musicians and chorus members agreed to begin receiving up to $1,543 per week in exchange for returning to the table to negotiate longer-term contracts. For the concerts on Sunday, each union performer will be paid an additional $1,000.Since last summer, the Met has livestreamed pay-per-view recitals featuring soloists and musicians from outside its orchestra, drawing criticism from furloughed orchestra members. The orchestra began staging its own virtual concerts and collecting donations to distribute to musicians in need. The concerts on Sunday will be the first in-person performances under the Met’s brand since March 11, 2020.“As the city’s largest performing arts company, we are determined to participate in New York’s reopening,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement, “even though there is much still to be settled with our unions and in preparing the opera house for next season.”In keeping with the state’s current rules, Sunday’s 45-minute concerts will each have an audience of 150 people, who must provide proof of vaccination, a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the show or a negative antigen test within six hours of the start time. Tickets will be distributed by a lottery system, including a portion set aside for emergency medical workers with Mount Sinai’s hospital in Queens.Because the concerts are taking place in Queens, Local One does not have jurisdiction over the stagehand work. That work instead goes to Local Four of the union, though Local One has agreed to make a limited number of its workers available to load large instruments, music stands and chairs at the Met.While the concerts promise a display of unity amid labor tensions, union members are planning a rally on Thursday in front of Lincoln Center, where they are expected to voice opposition to the Local One lockout and the Met’s proposed pay cuts, which the company says are necessary for it to survive the pandemic and beyond. More

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      Metropolitan Opera Reaches Deal With Union Representing Chorus

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      Labor troubles have cast the company’s planned reopening in September in doubt; two other major unions have yet to reach deals.The Metropolitan Opera, whose efforts to cut the pay of its workers to help it survive the pandemic had left it locked in a bitter dispute with its unions, threatening to derail its planned September reopening, announced Tuesday that it had reached a deal with the union representing its chorus and other workers.The union, the American Guild of Musical Artists — which also represents soloists, dancers, actors and stage managers — is the first of the three largest Met unions to reach such a deal after months of sometimes-bitter division between labor and management over how deep and lasting the pandemic pay cuts should be. The Met had been seeking to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, which it said would cut the take-home pay of those workers by around 20 percent.The terms of the deal — the culmination of 14 weeks of negotiations — were not immediately disclosed; the company said they would remain confidential until the union held a vote to ratify the agreement on May 24.In recent weeks, New York officials have taken steps to loosen the restrictions around live performance, and in recent days several major Broadway shows have announced their intention to resume performances in September and October. But whether the Met can reopen in September, after the pandemic forced the opera house to remain closed for more than a year, depends on how quickly it can resolve its remaining labor problems.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement that he was grateful to the guild for “recognizing the extraordinary economic challenges the Met faces in the coming seasons.”Leonard Egert, the executive director of the guild, said in a statement that the new contract would “ensure the Met becomes a more equitable and better workplace.”“We are pleased to arrive at a new deal during the most trying time in performing arts’ history,” he said.The Met’s deal with the guild is just one step toward reopening. The union that represents its stagehands, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, has been locked out since December, after the two sides failed to reach an agreement on pay cuts. Without its union stagehands, starting performances will likely be impossible. And the union representing the Met’s orchestra is still negotiating its contract.The opera company, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, says that it has lost $150 million in earned revenues — including ticket sales to the opera house and to its cinema simulcasts, as well as its shop and dining revenues — since the coronavirus pandemic forced it to close its doors more than a year ago. If the Met reopens in September, it will have gone 18 months without live performances in its opera house.The Met’s management has argued that such a long period of closure — and the uncertainty over the return of its audiences in an era where it could take years for New York City tourism to rebound to prepandemic levels — requires it to seek financial sacrifices from its employees. It has said that half of its proposed pay cuts would be restored once ticket revenues and core donations returned to prepandemic levels. A number of major American orchestras and opera companies have already negotiated pay cuts with their workers to help them survive the pandemic.After the opera house was closed, the members of its orchestra and chorus went unpaid for nearly a year. Then the company brought them to the bargaining table with the offer of up to $1,543 a week, less than half of what they are typically paid.On Thursday, union members are planning to rally in front of Lincoln Center as a display of solidarity during tense negotiations with management. Union leaders have accused the Met’s management of using the pandemic as a reason to force concessions from labor.If approved, the agreement with the guild will take effect on Aug. 1; for now, unions members will continue to receive partial payments. More

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      A Jaw-Dropping Philip Glass Opera Is Finally on Video

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      “Satyagraha,” one of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest stagings of the 21st century, has been released on DVD and CD.For decades, Philip Glass fans have internalized a lesson: If you want to see his operas, plan to buy tickets and attend in person. Don’t expect the stagings to show up on DVD in a year or two, as most prominent productions do these days.Glass has long carefully husbanded the rights to his work. And since founding his own record label, Orange Mountain Music, in 2001, he has been selective regarding releases of some of his operas.This has been particularly glaring when it comes to his trilogy of what became known as “portrait” operas, the stage works of the 1970s and ’80s which made his reputation in the genre. Each is focused on the life of a consequential man of history: “Einstein on the Beach” is an abstract account of that scientist and the development of nuclear technology; “Satyagraha” dramatizes Gandhi’s early activism in South Africa; “Akhnaten” contemplates the Egyptian pharaoh who pioneered monotheism.Glass in 1984, the year “Akhnaten,” the follow-up to “Satyagraha” in his trilogy of “portrait” operas, premiered in Germany.Beatriz Schiller/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesA globe-trotting revival of Robert Wilson’s definitive original production of “Einstein” was released on video in 2016, a full 40 years after the work’s premiere. But while “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten” have received acclaimed recent productions at the Metropolitan Opera, and have been transmitted to movie theaters worldwide through the Met’s Live in HD series, they have been missing on DVD.That is now changing, thanks to a deal struck between the Met, Orange Mountain Music and Dunvagen, Glass’s publishing company. Late in April, the Met released, for the first time, its 2011 “Satyagraha” staging, directed by Phelim McDermott, designed by Julian Crouch, first seen in New York in 2008 and quickly assessed to be one of the Met’s triumphs of the past 25 years.Scenes from the Metropolitan Opera’s production, which is newly available on video.“Satyagraha” is available on DVD and is also downloadable on Apple TV. The audio is available on CD, as well as through streaming services and digital-purchase storefronts. The Met and Dunvagen confirmed in emails that the deal also includes the release of “Akhnaten” across a similar range of formats next month.“Satyagraha,” which premiered in 1980 and was the middle child of Glass’s portrait trilogy, is where the composer began to write for more traditional operatic orchestral forces, and for unamplified voices. He left behind the fully non-narrative approach of “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), while maintaining that work’s stylized pageantry.The scenes of “Satyagraha” depict recognizable events in Gandhi’s life, but instead of a biopic-style libretto, the Sanskrit text is made up of selections from the Bhagavad Gita, which Glass said he imagined Gandhi pondering during his time in South Africa. In the first scene, for example, the text’s discourse on the morality of conflict is reflected, dreamscape-like, in the opera’s action, as Gandhi confronts his fears regarding direct political action. The use of the Bhagavad Gita throughout keeps the opera enigmatic and poetic, endowing Gandhi’s evolution from lawyer to activist with epic grandeur.“Satyagraha,” which premiered in 1980, is where its composer began to write for more traditional operatic orchestral forces, and for unamplified voices.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met’s “Satyagraha” realizes the work in a way that Achim Freyer’s 1981 staging in Stuttgart, Germany — long out of print on DVD — never really did. (Among other things, Freyer’s punk couture designs were never quite right for this opera, and have aged poorly.)In McDermott’s production for the Met, the images are dazzling throughout, with surreal, giant figures conjured out of newsprint in a gesture at Indian Opinion, the newspaper Gandhi founded. At the opera’s climax, the influence of Gandhi’s nonviolent protest on the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is rendered explicit with slow-motion, hushed profundity.Given the work’s stylization and the many repetitions of the text, the Sanskrit doesn’t need to be followed word by word to understand its implications. McDermott’s production selectively projected English translations onto the set, and the new DVD captures those projections well enough to do without full subtitling.Until now, the only available audio release of “Satyagraha” was a CBS Masterworks recording from 1985, which features synthesizers very prominently in the mix alongside the New York City Opera’s orchestra and chorus.That energetic recording and others from Glass’s CBS years did a lot to popularize his music. But is the nervy, aggressive, computer-age precision of the synthesizer on the CBS recording the best way to evoke Gandhi’s gradual organization of mass protests at the end of the second act? If you’re playing the music as background, perhaps it doesn’t matter. But if you’re tuned into the drama, the autopilot momentum of synths seems out of place in a story about such concerted effort and up-and-down struggle. The conductor Dante Anzolini, along with the Met’s orchestra and chorus and the tenor Richard Croft as Gandhi, create a more affecting groundswell (including a subtler use of synthesizer) over the same minutes.Through his career, Glass has emphasized adaptation — and the validity of multiple perspectives on his catalog. Creating a one-and-only approach has rarely been the goal. In his 2015 memoir, “Words Without Music,” he wrote, “This is what I know about new operas: The only safeguard for the composer is to have several productions.”If a work can survive its first decade, he adds, “we might begin to form an idea of the quality and stature of the work in its third or fourth production.” This was and remains a sadly rare phenomenon. The opera world loves its premieres; less so, its third or fourth productions of a contemporary piece.But Glass’s fame, and the quality of both “Satyagraha” and “Akhnaten,” have allowed them to be explored again and again over the past four decades. This means that there will, inevitably, be interpretations that are stronger than others. This newly released “Satyagraha” is not just one of the best Met productions of the 21st century. It also immediately takes its place among the essential releases in the storied career of an instantly recognizable voice in contemporary music. More

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      Christa Ludwig, Mezzo-Soprano of Velvety Hues, Is Dead at 93

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      She was a beloved interpreter of Strauss, Mozart and Wagner roles, but equally admired for her rendition of art songs.Christa Ludwig, who poured a lustrous voice into dramatically taut performances of opera roles — especially those of Mozart, Strauss and Wagner — and intimately rendered art songs as one of the premier mezzo-sopranos of the second half of the 20th century, died on Saturday at her home in Klosterneuburg, Austria. She was 93.Her death was confirmed by her son, Wolfgang Berry.Ms. Ludwig commanded a broad range of the great mezzo-soprano parts, including Dorabella in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte,” Cherubino in his “Le Nozze di Figaro,” Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” Bizet’s Carmen and numerous Wagner roles. Often, critics were reduced to calling her the greatest mezzo-soprano of her time.But like many mezzos, Ms. Ludwig strove to lay claim to higher-voiced — and higher-profile — soprano roles. So she took on, most successfully in that category, characters including the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Dyer’s Wife in “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” and Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.”She was an equal master of the intimate song — especially the works of Brahms, Mahler and Schubert. Her artistry put her in the pantheon of postwar lieder singers that included Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elly Ameling and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.Ms. Ludwig made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Cherubino (a trouser role, a type she said was not her favorite) in 1959, took on Octavian and Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the house that year as well and sang regularly at the Met until the end of her career.Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, left, and Ms.  Ludwig in a recording studio in 1962. Both were renowned lieder singers.Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive/Getty Images,She was associated for decades with the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, and worked especially closely with the conductors Karl Böhm, Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.Ms. Ludwig rose from straitened origins in a shattered wartime Germany to the height of the singing world, aided by a sense of discipline instilled by her strong-willed mother — her only real teacher and a constant presence throughout her career.She also displayed traits of the pampered diva, with a preference for elegant gowns and opulent hotel suites (partly inspired by the hardships of her youth), fanatical attention to any hint of illness and the state of her vocal cords, and reverential fans who followed her from house to house. On performance days, she would communicate with whistles or by writing on a pad.But onstage, Ms. Ludwig brought a striking combination of acting ability, charisma and vocal beauty. Her voice had range and power, a security through all the registers and a broad array of colors.“Her unmistakable, deep-purple timbre envelops the listener in a velvet cloak,” Roger Pines wrote in Opera News in 2018, reviewing her collected recordings. “She excelled equally in intimate, legato-oriented lieder and the largest-scale operatic repertoire, where her sound expanded with glorious brilliance.”Critics often took note of her wit and comic deftness, and a personality that could fill a hall even when she sang softly. “Her presence on the Met stage was a synthesis of the dramatic arts all by itself — her voice, her wonderfully natural diction and her shadings of facial expression and gesture all conspiring to express with great emotional breadth the singular message of this singular music,” The New York Times critic Bernard Holland wrote of a “Winterreise” performance in 1983. Ms. Ludwig sang that searing Schubert song cycle some 72 times, even though it was composed for a male voice.Ms. Ludwig in 1963. She favored elegant gowns and opulent hotel suites and paid fanatical attention to the state of her vocal cords.Harry Croner/ullstein bild via Getty ImagesMs. Ludwig was born on March 16, 1928, in Berlin. Her parents lived in Aachen in western Germany, but her mother, Eugenie Besalla-Ludwig, wanted the child to be born in her family home in the capital.In Aachen, Christa’s Viennese father, Anton Ludwig, a former tenor who had sung with Enrico Caruso at the old Met, was the opera house stage director and manager; her mother sang in the company, and performed several roles under an up-and-coming conductor named Herbert von Karajan. Christa saw those performances and many others. “I practically lived in the theater,” she said in her 1993 memoir, later published in English under the title “In My Own Words.”Her mother gave her singing lessons as a girl and remained her lifelong coach, going to her rehearsals and performances and living most of her life with Ms. Ludwig. “I really owe everything to her,” she said. But Ms. Ludwig also described her mother as an inflexible and sometimes suffocating presence who dominated her life before she felt able to cut ties only at age 60.During the war, a half brother was killed on the Eastern front. Food was rationed and Christa was sent to work on a farm. The family’s home and belongings in Giessen, where Mr. Ludwig had become director of the municipal theater, were destroyed in an Allied bombing raid, leaving them homeless. With the arrival of American troops, Ms. Ludwig recounted in her memoir, she and her parents were assigned an abandoned apartment with a piano that had been used as a toilet.Christa’s mother gave voice lessons. “Studying singing was a wonderful way to forget the wretched way we lived, the ruins, the still-smoldering coal cellars, and the stink of ashes,” Ms. Ludwig wrote.The young singer soon found work singing popular tunes at the American officers club, wearing a dress she had made from a Nazi flag. She was paid in cigarettes and stole whatever food she could. Once her father, who had been a member of the Nazi party, was denazified, he was given back his job and organized variety shows around town in which his daughter was featured.Ms. Ludwig received her first major contract in 1946, at the Frankfurt Opera, and made her stage debut as Prince Orlofsky in “Die Fledermaus.” Her mother, recently divorced from her father, moved in with her in the city in an unheated room, and they began daily lessons.Along with her opera work, she sang many concerts of contemporary music amid a wave of creative freedom unleashed by the fall of the Reich. “I was cheap,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I learned things easily and I had a good voice.” It was a shrewd move: Critics got to know her before she became famous.Ms. Ludwig as Fidelio (Leonore) in the first act of the Beethoven opera “Fidelio” at the Salzburg Festival in August 1968.Gerhard Rauchwetter/picture alliance via Getty ImagesStints in the opera houses of Darmstadt and Hanover followed, until she was summoned to audition for Mr. Böhm, the director of the Vienna State Opera. He took her on in 1955, and she quickly became a mainstay. Engagements at the world’s major opera houses followed. She met the bass-baritone Walter Berry at the Vienna opera in 1957 when they were cast in “Le Nozze di Figaro.” They married three months later and had a son, Wolfgang, who survives her, along with a grandson and a stepson, Philippe Deiber. The couple frequently appeared together in operas and joint recitals. In interviews, Ms. Ludwig said they felt occasional rivalry and were at odds in preparing for performances (she needed quiet, he less so; he liked small hotel rooms and she liked large suites).The couple divorced in 1970, though they continued to perform together. (Mr. Berry died in 2000.)Soon after her divorce, Ms. Ludwig met the actor and stage director Paul-Emile Deiber while he was preparing a production of Massenet’s “Werther” at the Met, and they married in 1972. He died in 2011.Ms. Ludwig came of age at the dawn of the postwar golden era of recordings, and her LP legacy is vast, from a 1961 “Norma” with Maria Callas to a 1962 “St. Matthew Passion” conducted by Otto Klemperer, to two complete and classic Wagner “Ring” cycles. She appears on five “Rosenkavalier” recordings, including a beloved rendition with Ms. Schwarzkopf, conducted by Mr. von Karajan.In the realm of song, critics took note of her sensitivity, smooth lines, intimacy, control and mastery of the text. “She is perhaps the reigning feminine expert at making us feel good about lonely teardrops and thwarted bliss,” The Times critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1979.Despite the care that she took with her voice, Ms. Ludwig suffered damage to her vocal cords in the early 1970s that forced her to cancel numerous performances, and even parts of whole seasons. She recovered but cut back on opera appearances. She gave a series of farewell performances in the 1993-1994 season before retiring.A few years after her vocal crisis, Ms. Ludwig made clear the pragmatic view she had about a singer’s voice.“It’s like a raw egg,” she once said. “Once it’s kaputt, it’s kaputt.” More

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      Met Opera Players to Meet an Old Friend for a Gig, and Aid

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      The musicians, who went unpaid for nearly a year, have been invited to join Fabio Luisi, their former principal conductor, and his Dallas Symphony for two benefit concerts.The musicians of the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra, who went unpaid for nearly a year, are getting a hand from one of their old maestros, Fabio Luisi.Luisi — who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years, and was seen as a candidate to succeed James Levine as its music director before the post went to Yannick Nézet-Séguin — has invited the musicians to Texas at the end of the month to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which he now leads, for two benefit concerts.The Dallas Symphony announced on Monday that the Met musicians would join its players for performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 on April 30 and May 1. The orchestra noted in a news release that the concerts would present the first opportunity in over a year for many of the Met’s musicians — who recently began receiving partial pay as they negotiate a new contract — to perform together for a live audience.A spokesman for the Dallas Symphony said that roughly 40 to 50 Met musicians were expected to travel to Dallas for the concerts, and added that they would be paid for the performances. The joint concerts will act as fund-raisers for the Met Orchestra Musicians’ Fund and the Dallas players’ union’s DFW Musicians Covid-19 Relief Fund; a filmed recording will be released.“As one of the few orchestras fortunate to be able to perform all season to live audiences, we are painfully aware that many of our colleagues around the country were not able to play concerts due to restrictions in their cities or the financial situation of their organization,” Kim Noltemy, the president and chief executive of the Dallas Symphony, said in a statement.Luisi said in a statement that he sought to “gather musicians together to make music” as a “symbol of solidarity.”“During my time with the Met,” he added, “I became close to many of the members of the orchestra. It is devastating that these incredible musicians have not had an opportunity to perform together in over a year.”Brad Gemeinhardt, a Met Orchestra hornist who is the chair of the committee which represents the musicians in negotiations with management, offered thanks to the Dallas orchestra. “We cannot overstate the impact this unprecedented collaboration will have on our members, both financially and artistically, after this long year of cultural famine,” Gemeinhardt said in a statement.After going without paychecks for nearly a year, members of the Met Orchestra voted last month to return to the bargaining table in exchange for temporary pay of up to $1,543 a week. The Met, which has said that the pandemic has cost $150 million in lost revenue, and its general director, Peter Gelb, are insisting on long-term pay cuts to offset those losses — cuts a number of other leading orchestras have agreed to.In January, Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, agreed to give up to $50,000 in matching donations to the orchestra and chorus. After the musicians and the company reached their deal on temporary pay, he sent a letter to the Met’s leaders urging them to “find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately.”“I am finding it increasingly hard to justify what has happened,” he wrote.The Met said at the time that it shared his frustration and that all parties had been “working together for new agreements that will ensure the sustainability of the Met into the future.” On Monday afternoon, the company added in a statement that it hoped the musicians would “have an increasing number of performance opportunities between now and the fall, when we will once again be able to come together at the Met.” More

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, the Ultimate Opera Superfan, Dies at 88

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      In New York opera circles, an autograph request from her, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said, was considered “a special type of approval.”For more than a half-century, nearly every prominent singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera could expect to be approached backstage afterward by a wispy woman in thick glasses, who held piles of memorabilia to be autographed while she praised the performance in a raspy Brooklyn accent.This was Lois Kirschenbaum, one of New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buffs and a nightly staple at the opera since the late 1950s, before Lincoln Center was built, when the Met was located in Midtown.Few operatic performances took place at the Met without being observed through Ms. Kirschenbaum’s large binoculars (she was legally blind from birth), usually from a seat in the uppermost balcony secured for little or no money by canvassing operagoers at the entrance just before the opening curtain.And few prominent singers went home without signing numerous items for Ms. Kirschenbaum, whose constant desire to get backstage helped her befriend some of the world’s most famous opera singers, from Beverly Sills to Plácido Domingo.Ms. Kirschenbaum died on March 27 at a hospital in Manhattan after suffering from pneumonia and renal failure, her longtime friend Sally Jo Sandelin said. She was 88.Such was Ms. Kirschenbaum’s reputation at the Met, as well as at New York City Opera, that singers half-joked that they had truly arrived on the New York opera scene only after being approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum after a performance.“It was like getting a special type of approval,” the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said. “I never met anyone who didn’t welcome her backstage and want to hang out with her.”She added, “We’d always look out for her and bring her in early if we could, because everyone loved her, and she’d have a hundred things to sign.”The bass singer Samuel Ramey said he was first approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum in his dressing room immediately after his first major role, as Don Basilio in “The Barber of Seville” with City Opera in late 1973.“I was told, ‘You’ve made it now — Lois has asked you for your autograph,’” he recalled, adding that Ms. Kirschenbaum became a constant presence backstage after his performances and that the two became good friends.“She was something else — she always got on the backstage list,” he said.Ms. Kirschenbaum, a wisecracking native of Flatbush, defied the stereotype of a highfalutin opera aficionado. She worked as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, the humanitarian aid organization, until retiring in 2004. She lived nearly her entire adult life in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, from which she would travel by subway and city bus to Lincoln Center while lugging a huge handbag full of photos, programs and recordings to be signed.Ms. Kirschenbaum with the soprano Renata Tebaldi in the late 1960s. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s love of opera began when she heard a recording by Ms. Tebaldi being played in a record shop.via Ken BensonIf she was unable to score a free or cheap ticket just before the performance, she would often slip in with the help of a friendly staffer.“Everyone knew her, from the workers who cleaned the bathrooms, to ticket takers, to the administration and of course the singers,” said another longtime friend, Carl Halperin. “All you had to say was ‘Lois’ and everybody knew who you meant.”Ms. Kirschenbaum was the grande dame of a group of hard-core fans who would flock to the backstage door for autographs and chats.With the help of her formidable handbag, she would quickly find her way to the front of the line and approach singers with complimentary and detailed critiques of their performances — from that night or from years earlier.“She could tell you anything going on in your performances on any given night — this or that particular phrase and what it meant,” the soprano Aprile Millo recalled. “For a singer, it gave you the feeling that you were being heard.”“She was so much part of the opera lore of New York, like the aficionados at La Scala,” the opera house in Milan, Ms. Millo said. Working the switchboard allowed Ms. Kirschenbaum to call singers and opera insiders for updates on news like cast changes or show cancellations, information she would then relay to fellow opera buffs.“For opera, she really was the internet before there was the internet,” said Ken Benson, a manager of opera singers and another longtime friend.And before the Met began putting out detailed schedules months in advance, Ms. Kirschenbaum became known for the homemade lists she compiled of upcoming performances and featured singers.She would distribute copies to fellow buffs during intermission, while enjoying the coffee and sandwiches she routinely smuggled in to avoid the expense of buying food at Met prices.“People would say that Lois’s list was more precise than what you’d get from the press,” Ms. Millo said.Ms. Kirschenbaum “was so much part of the opera lore of New York,” the soprano Aprile Millo said. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s request for an autograph, Ms. Millo added, meant “you got the blessing.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesMs. Kirschenbaum gleaned much of her information while soliciting singers’ autographs.“She’d ask them, ‘When are you coming back and what are singing next year?’” Mr. Halperin recalled. “And while Luciano Pavarotti was signing something for her, he’d say he’d be singing ‘La Bohème’ and ‘Tosca’ next season. And she’d collect all this.”Ms. Millo said Ms. Kirschenbaum might have her sign up to 20 pieces of memorabilia at a time. “It was a way to keep you engaged — it was clever of her,” she said.Lois Kirschenbaum was born in New York City on Nov. 21, 1932, to Abraham and Gertrude Kirschenbaum. Her father was an optometrist.An only child, she grew up in Flatbush and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. Ms. Kirschenbaum was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but when the Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles in 1957, her obsession shifted to opera after she heard a recording by the soprano Renata Tebaldi being played in a record shop.In her later years, Ms. Kirschenbaum alternated between haunting the margins of the Met for tickets and autographs and being honored as a special guest at fancy galas held by opera organizations.For her 75th birthday, in 2007, she was feted at a party by singers like Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming, as well as the Met’s musical director, James Levine — “Jimmy” to Ms. Kirschenbaum — who gave her a ring and an autographed operatic score of “La Bohème.”In 1980, she won a raffle to see Beverly Sills’s farewell performance gala at City Opera, after having seen every role Ms. Sills sang in New York, except one, for 25 years.“Beverly saw me after that and said, ‘Lois, it was fixed,’” Ms. Kirschenbaum laughingly told The New York Times in 2012.In recent years, Ms. Kirschenbaum had begun using a wheelchair and went to the Met only sporadically. She continued to listen to opera (and to Yankees games) on the radio.Friends said she never married and never spoke of any surviving family members.It was unclear what would become of the trove of autographs, programs and photographs left behind in Ms. Kirschenbaum’s apartment.“There was no one more devoted to opera and the artists she loved than Lois,” Ms. Fleming said. “She was a beloved member of the Metropolitan Opera family, like a favorite aunt. I will miss knowing she is watching from the balcony and seeing her afterward at the stage door.” More

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      Met Opera’s Music Director Decries Musicians’ Unpaid Furlough

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s letter to the company’s leaders urges them to “find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately.”Urging the Metropolitan Opera to compensate its artists “appropriately,” the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sent a letter to leaders at the Met on Thursday saying that the many months its orchestra and chorus had gone without pay during the pandemic had become “increasingly unacceptable.”He sent the letter as the Met’s musicians were scheduled to receive their first partial paychecks since they were furloughed in April. Before this week, they had been the last major ensemble in the country without a deal for at least some pay during the pandemic. In addressing the players’ nearly yearlong furlough — and hinting at the tough negotiations ahead, in which the Met is seeking long-term pay cuts from its unionized employees — Nézet-Séguin was doing something rare for a music director: weighing in on labor matters.“Of course, I understand this is a complex situation,” Nézet-Séguin wrote, “but as the public face of the Met on a musical level, I am finding it increasingly hard to justify what has happened.”The letter was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by its recipients, which included Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager; the leaders of the negotiating committees representing the chorus and orchestra; and members of the opera’s board of directors.“We risk losing talent permanently,” Nézet-Séguin warned in the letter. “The orchestra and chorus are our crown jewels, and they must be protected. Their talent is the Met. The artists of the Met are the institution.”The orchestra committee has said that 10 out of 97 members have retired during the pandemic as the ensemble has gone unpaid, a stark increase from the two to three who retire in an average year.“Protecting the long-term future of the Met is inextricably linked with retaining these musicians, and with respecting their livelihoods, their income and their well-being,” Nézet-Séguin wrote.The Met said in a statement that “we share Yannick’s frustration over the lengthy closure and the impact it has had on our employees,” and added that the company was pleased that its orchestra and chorus and others were now receiving bridge pay. The Met said all involved were “working together for new agreements that will ensure the sustainability of the Met into the future.”The Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, has said that since the pandemic forced it to shut its doors it has lost an estimated $150 million in earned revenue, and that it was seeking pay cuts from its workers, as many arts institutions have. The Met has been trying to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent — the change in take-home pay would be more like 20 percent, it has said — and has offered to restore half the cuts when ticket revenue and core donations return to prepandemic levels.Months into the furlough, the Met offered partial paychecks to its workers if they agreed to those cuts, but the unions resisted. At the end of the year, the Met offered partial paychecks on a temporary basis for simply returning to the bargaining table. Members of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents chorus members, dancers and others, accepted at the end of January and have been receiving paychecks for more than a month. The orchestra musicians voted to accept the offer this week. (The Met has locked out its stagehands, whose contract expired last year.)Nézet-Séguin wrote in his letter that he was relieved that both the musicians and the chorus members are now being paid, but added that “this is just a start.” The deal allows for temporary payments of up to $1,543 a week, less than half of what the musicians are typically paid.Nézet-Séguin was named the Met’s music director in 2016, when he was tapped to succeed James Levine, who led the company for four decades (Mr. Levine, who stepped down to an emeritus position because of health problems and was then fired two years later after an investigation into sexual abuse allegations, died earlier this month.)“I implore the fiduciaries of this incredible house to urgently help to find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately,” Nézet-Séguin wrote. “We all realize the challenges, economic and otherwise, that the Met is facing, and therefore I ask for empathy, honesty and open communication throughout this process.” More