So pity the poor opera house manager, trying to deal with an essentially insoluble situation: choose your donors, choose your poison. And pity especially Peter Gelb, who has been running the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the world\u2019s biggest opera house, for the past two decades. Gelb faces in extremis the same hard economic truth that all opera houses, classical music institutions and performing groups face. Unlike so many parts of the economy, the services they provide have not become \u2013 and cannot become \u2013 more efficient. It\u2019s what is known as Baumol\u2019s cost disease<\/a>, a term coined by the economist William J Baumol in the 1960s. One of the examples he used to illustrate the \u201cdisease\u201d was a string quartet. It took four players in 1800 \u2013 and still, today, takes four musicians. How stupidly inefficient! It\u2019s the same story, only exponentially less efficient and more expensive, for putting on an opera. Wagner\u2019s Tristan und Isolde, one of the Met\u2019s recent blockbuster productions, still needs an army of stage managers as well as orchestral musicians, it still requires gigantic sets and a stellar cast just as it did in 1865, all to fill the Met\u2019s 4,000-seat auditorium.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/da1ec98533ba9919ebbe6f6d9285fce8b42454be\/509_0_3559_2847\/master\/3559.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=342300f4710ad48fbbbc44f1a656654e\" "\\"Giving")
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