Metropolitan Opera Seeks Pay Concessions in Labor Negotiations

New York’s Metropolitan Opera wants to curb costs by reducing musicians’ retirement and health-care benefits and altering work rules, The New York Times reports, citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the proposal.

Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is for the first time personally leading talks with the opera house’s 16 unions, whose current contracts expire at the end of July. The organization ran a $2.8-million deficit on a $327-million budget last season and has tapped its endowment in recent years as box-office revenue declined.

Tino Gagliardi, president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, declined to discuss details of the union’s talks this week with Mr. Gelb but said that “we’ve never received a set of proposals from the Met that represented such a devastating reduction in pay.”