Entertainment

Mr. Met hopes for a winning opera season

Peter Gelb doesn’t like playing cheerleader.

Invited to get Post readers fired up about “From the House of the Dead,” opening tonight, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager shrugs.

“Opera doesn’t appeal to everybody,” he says.

“Dead” is an even harder opera to sell than most. Janacek’s episodic tale, set in a Siberian prison camp, lacks even a single takeaway aria like “Nessun dorma” — and it’s sung in Czech, to boot.

But Gelb, 56, is quietly optimistic.

For six weeks, director Patrice Chéreau has rehearsed the company’s singers and a company of actors — 75 performers in all — to produce what Gelb grandly predicts will be “an incredible theatrical effort, maybe one of the greatest events ever to take place in New York.”

It’s also key, he believes, to extending the Met’s appeal beyond its (moneyed and graying) audience.

It’s not the first time he’s taken risks. “Tosca” — performed on opening night of the first season over which Gelb has complete creative control — dissolved into boos and “a perfect storm of hostility,” much of it from fans of the previous Franco Zeffirelli production.

On the other hand, Gelb says, plenty of people liked it, including many of the estimated 200,000 who saw it in high-def transmission in movie theaters.

That HD series is considered the one grand slam of his four-year tenure, expected to reach about 2 million viewers this season, tripling the company’s audience. Though the program barely breaks even, it’s enticed such in-demand stars as Anna Netrebko and Juan Diego Flórez to spend more time at the Met.

For every success, there’s another problem waiting to be solved. Nothing — not even the length of intermissions — is too small a detail for his consideration, even in a season that boasts eight new productions.

Then again, the former music manager is used to details. For more than a decade, the onetime Met usher headed Sony Classical. A colleague from that time describes Gelb’s style as that of “a 1940s Hollywood mogul” — demanding and abrasive.

These days, he has even more people to please: the Met’s board of directors, musicians, critics, and that most exacting boss of all, the audience.

“Opera fans are incredibly opinionated, and they have every right to be,” Gelb says. “But even if they don’t like ‘Tosca’ or ‘House of the Dead,’ they shouldn’t think the world is coming to an end.

“I hope they will evaluate the Met in the context of a whole season. And if they still hate what we’re doing, I’m going to be trying my hardest to continue to do what I am doing, because I believe it’s the only way to go.”

Enough talk: “Now I get to go down to the HD trucks and work on lighting levels.”