City Hall’s progressive accessibility initiative could help to diversify the Metropolitan Opera’s crowd and improve dwindling audience numbers.
Back in 2019, Pete Buttigieg, then a Democratic presidential candidate and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, released a list of his 10 favourite books. It was a predictable yet refreshingly honest selection that included both canonical works of Western literature, such as Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and obscurer, more contemporary works like Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted, a history of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Alongside these sat Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which served as the moment’s obligatory commute read.
The list was refreshing because it was manifestly a reflection of Buttigieg’s personal interests and preoccupations, rather than a cringe-making attempt at political positioning. Compare it to, say, the then UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s 2013 Desert Island Discs picks, which included Robbie Williams’s “Angels”, Neil Diamond’s perennial sing-along “Sweet Caroline”, and the Hubert Parry anthem “Jerusalem” — a cynically focus-grouped man-of-the-people playlist if ever there was one.
Yet Buttigieg’s apparent honesty was rewarded less with praise than with accusations of anti-intellectual posturing masquerading as egalitarianism, much of it originating from the online left. He was “Pete Bottygeek,” wrote one Twitter user — out of touch, pompous, and elitist.
All of this came to mind when, at the end of last week, New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced the city’s new partnership with the Metropolitan Opera. Under the initiative, 70,000 free tickets for performances will be handed out to residents over the next seven months. The initiative makes a lot of practical sense: the Met has long struggled to fill its seats, and doing so in this manner costs the institution almost nothing, while potentially creating a new generation of paying opera lovers. This comes at a time when, in the United States, the theatrical art form receives little ongoing state or national support in comparison to other global traditions, such as Noh in Japan, which enjoys protected status as an Important Intangible Cultural Property.
Naturally, alongside the excitement over the plan came predictable sniping. On Elon Musk’s X, reactionary bots spread misinformation about how much taxpayer dollars the plan would cost, when in reality the expenditure amounts to very little beyond administrative costs. Meanwhile, cultural snobs worried aloud about whether those in possession of a free ticket would know how to dress appropriately, and those for whom doing a good deed for its own sake is utterly unfathomable declared the initiative nothing more than empty virtue signaling.
Considered a mainstream entertainment form from the 17th to the 19th centuries, opera has unfortunately become the preserve of the wealthy for decades. This shift is driven partly by the sheer expense of staging lavish productions involving dozens of musicians, choristers, and principal performers. The resulting high ticket prices have turned the art form into a niche, luxury interest—despite what Nicholas Cage’s wild-haired, one-handed, Met-loving baker in Norman Jewison’s 1987 Cher vehicle Moonstruck might suggest.
Cultural appetites have also evolved significantly over the years. There is fierce competition from cinema, television, video games, and social media, much of it specifically designed to capture and hold modern attention spans. Contemporary audiences might simply feel more excited to see Tom Cruise in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new movie, Digger, or watch MrBeast on YouTube, which is entirely fair. Richard Wagner might have considered opera to be the complete art form, but it is clear that it is simply not for everyone.
This reality is precisely why Mamdani’s initiative feels so remarkably bold. Much like Buttigieg with his literary reading list, the mayor has declared his public support for an art form that many among his progressive-leaning base might instinctively dismiss as posh and pretentious.
Since debates about the authority of literary and artistic canons came to a head in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a conspicuous turn against Reithian notions of institutions’ responsibility to disseminate the best of human thought and creativity to as wide a public as possible. Of course, it remains crucial to interrogate what a canon includes and rejects, as well as the underlying power structures that shape this process. But such a nuanced discussion is possible only when we can all freely access and assess what the powerful deem worthy of immortalisation.
This principle is precisely why trade unions historically maintained libraries of key works for members to learn from, and why Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, launched affordable paperbacks in 1935, pricing them at the exact cost of a packet of cigarettes. A genuine man of the people does not condescend and presume that blue-collar workers have no interest in classic works, or that all they are capable of enjoying are mixed martial arts fights and fireworks displays.
The opera ticket giveaway is just one of many similar initiatives that Mamdani has launched, and it probably will not significantly change popular attitudes toward high culture by itself. Some critics, with much justification, will continue to view these elite cultural spaces with suspicion. But there is hope that the effort will spark a more open, inclusive discussion about the place of historically important works and the fundamental right of those of limited means—including tortured neighborhood bakers—to enjoy them.
