Dear Ms. Scott,

We are reaching out to you on behalf of our beleaguered opera community, which faces yet another serious threat in the form of the dire financial straits of the Metropolitan Opera of New York (Met Opera) as reported in the New York Times recently.

According to the relevant article, the Met Opera once again has had to draw on a substantial portion of its endowment fund to tide itself through its present crisis. Drastic measures such as the trimming of its opera season to the shortest it has ever been as well as a round of layoffs have not alleviated its predicament to the extent necessary.

It might appear that all is well with the Met Opera, judging by another recent New York Times article about the extra performance it had to stage for its sold-out run of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. However, this is a mere façade as behind the scenes, the Met Opera has been desperate enough in its quest for funds to keep the curtains up, in turning to Elon Musk. Its reported deal with the Saudis, understandably, did not bear fruit.

Ms. Scott, with your sincere desire to give back to society and your zeal for helping organizations laboring to make a positive difference in the lives of others, can we interest you and your team in considering if the Met Opera merits your charity?

Opera, from its beginnings in the late 16th century, has always been an extravagant art-form. Contrary to long-outdated stereotypes unthinkingly perpetuated in popular media for generations, the art-form has long ceased to be a playing field for the wealthy. Otherwise, the Met Opera, with its origins as a clubhouse for a newly made class of Gilded Age socialites, will not be experiencing its present woes. The extravagance of the art-form actually arises from the sheer costs of mobilizing the forces it requires in achieving its symbiosis of other art forms, chiefly music, drama and dance. It is true that there already are musicals which serve that function. Nevertheless, opera, with an ability to evoke and inspire a gauntlet of emotional depths honed over the centuries and a profundity developed by a who’s who of masters in classical music, is and has been able to go much further than the musical in this regard. If not, how would opera have left its European home to win different generations of devotees all over the world, even as surrounding fashions come and go? Its history is much deeper than the musical.

The Met Opera, as an institution dedicated to the art-form not only in the United States but also globally, thus has a cause for its rescue. What also lies at stake with the Met Opera’s current plight is the diversity of its opera season and its accompanying Live in HD broadcasts, one of the few types screened in movie theaters. An opera season has more than one kind of opera, each of which needs a cast of specialists. With a slash in the number of kinds of opera available in the art-form’s firmament as represented by the Met, a ripple effect will result when soloists in the affected specialties will have to fight for jobs in performing venues at the level below and so on. Furthermore, a gaping hole is made in the international circuit when there is one less organization with the requisite size and resources for producing certain large-scale works. Switching to doing more popular works is an option for the Met Opera that can only go so far because there is a limit in the number of tickets it can sell. Unlike Broadway, opera’s nature is such that the Met Opera cannot do a series of shows for a period long enough to recoup its expenses. Hence, it has to rely on patrons and donors for its financing. Unfortunately, as its existing pool of financiers inevitably shrinks with the passing of a generation that still had an appreciation for high culture, we hope that you, who are also a writer who well knows the importance of the arts, could entertain the idea of filling in its ranks.

We hereby earnestly put our case before you and your team to judge if the Met Opera and our dearly beloved genre it epitomizes shall be a worthy recipient of your attention.  

Thank you.