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The philanthropist Ann Ziff has given $30 million to the Metropolitan Opera, the largest single gift from an individual in its history.
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and Ann Ziff.
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“It came at a time when the Met is sorely in need of cash,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview at his office on Friday. “We really need it, and we need a lot more than that. We have been in a position of significant financial challenge.”
The Met is projecting a deficit of as much as $4 million for the current fiscal year.
“It’s not enough to save us,” Mr. Gelb said, but “it’s a very timely and important gift from a longtime supporter of the Met.”
Ms. Ziff, the secretary of the Met’s board, will become co-chairwoman of the board in May, taking over the role of chairwoman next year.
Donors typically earmark their big gifts for building projects that will ultimately bear their names. But Ms. Ziff’s gift, made in behalf of her family, is unrestricted, which means it can be used to help cover the Met’s $300 million annual operating expenses.
“Whenever I give a gift like this — especially at this time — it needs to be unrestricted,” she said. “I’m glad I can help the Met.”
In Mr. Gelb’s first three years the operating budget increased by $60 million, largely because of ambitious new productions and media efforts like the Met’s high-definition transmissions of live performances into movie theaters. At the same time, these new activities have resulted in “significant returns,” Mr. Gelb said, explaining that revenue has increased at a greater rate than expenses.
At the box office the Met is just 3 percent behind last year’s ticket sales, Mr. Gelb said, and attendance last season was at 88 percent of paid capacity, compared with about 77 percent when he took over in 2006. The HD transmissions have tripled the company’s paying audience; so far this year, the Met has sold more than 2 million tickets. The eighth presentation, Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet,” is to be shown on Saturday on 1,100 screens in about 40 countries.
“Part of what I have to demonstrate to donors is that I’m pursuing a fiscally responsible path, and the increase in expenses has to be explained,” Mr. Gelb said. “Sales were in a downward spiral until I instituted these programs that reversed that trend. It’s not spending money to make money, but creating stimulating programming and accessibility to gain greater audiences.”
“At the moment, the Met is the toast of the opera world because of new initiatives and the success of new productions,” he added. “Opera has a higher profile today, in part because of the Met.”
Ms. Ziff, 63, said she was fully behind Mr. Gelb’s efforts.
“If the great arts organizations of the world — and I think perhaps the Met is the greatest — start cutting back, we’re cutting back on cultural heritage in this country,” she said. “It’s a good time to keep up our standards, keep pushing for the best.”
That is not to say Ms. Ziff is always a fan of what the Met presents these days. “Whether I like a new production or not, I don’t feel is important,” she said. “To get these new audiences, we need to try new things.”
Ms. Ziff was married to William B. Ziff Jr., the publishing executive behind publications like Car and Driver and PC Magazine, who died in 2006. Her mother, Harriet Henders, was a soprano who performed with conductors like Arturo Toscanini and George Szell. “Opera has been in my blood since I was little,” she said in an interview at the Met on Friday.
She is also a vice chairwoman at Lincoln Center and recently joined the Carnegie Hall board.
Ms. Ziff, who has served on the Met’s board since 1994, also provided funding for Robert Lepage’s new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, a 17-hour series of four operas — featuring a complex set — the first of which opens in September. The Met declined to disclose the amount of that support, but Met productions typically cost $2 million to $4 million each.
The Met in part is seeking to build its endowment, which declined to about $200 million from more than $300 million in the last fiscal year because of the economic downturn. The Met has also seen its pension funds lose $50 million to $60 million over that period, Mr. Gelb said.
Ms. Ziff’s gift represents the start of a $300 million fund-raising drive over the next five years and has prompted several other board members to donate a total of about $30 million, Mr. Gelb said. This new campaign is starting even though the Met just completed a $170 million drive, but Mr. Gelb said there would continually be new fund-raising goals to meet.
“I think part of being successful in running this institution is never to feel too good or too secure because it’s a difficult balance financially,” he said. “Certainly all the new productions keep us on our toes, and we need them to be hits.”
“So I feel good when the curtain comes down,” he added. “But it doesn’t last for long.”
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