Wealth & Money Quote by Rudolf Bing

Opera is the rare art form that dares you to treat it like a public good rather than a product, and Rudolf Bing leans into that dare with managerial deadpan. As the long-serving general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, he knew the spreadsheets better than anyone. So when he shrugs that opera "always loses money", it lands less as romantic fatalism than as a defense strategy: don’t judge this thing by the logic that governs shoes, streaming subscriptions, or box-office franchises. If it breaks even, it’s probably been tamed.

The subtext is a rebuke to the idea that cultural value should be proven by profitability. Opera is expensive because it’s stubbornly, extravagantly human: dozens (sometimes hundreds) of specialized workers in a room, performing an unrepeatable event. You can’t optimize your way out of live orchestra rehearsals, chorus calls, sets, costumes, and singers whose instrument is their own body. Bing’s line reads like a preemptive strike against donors, politicians, and critics who treat deficits as moral failure rather than structural reality.

There’s also a quieter provocation: money can corrupt the repertoire. If opera had to “make money,” programming would drift toward the safest hits, flattening risk, new work, and the very excess that makes the form worth saving. Bing isn’t celebrating waste; he’s insisting that opera’s purpose is not to scale but to endure - as a civic luxury that measures a society’s patience for beauty that won’t justify itself in quarterly returns.