How Should a Critic Be?

Peter Gelb (still) really doesn't like critics.

There was a moment from my interview with conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson earlier this summer in Lviv that has stuck with me. As we were wrapping up, Wilson (who had been impressed that someone without any familial connections to Ukraine would willingly travel to the country during wartime, as I have done a few times now), told me, warmly: “The world needs more of you.” 

What immediately flashed into my head at that moment was Wilson’s husband, Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb, calling me (or at least my writing) “awful and nasty” in the New York Times about a dozen years ago. What a difference a decade makes. With this in mind, I jokingly responded, “I don’t think the world wants more of me.” 

I thought of this exchange again while reading Gelb’s guest essay, “How to Save Opera? Make it New Again,” published on Sunday (also in the Times). “Many…