Our conversation was briefly interrupted when a Met staffer opened the boardroom door, saw us, and swiftly closed it as Nézet-Séguin whipped around to investigate the breach. “Oh, that was Timothée Chalamet,” I wisecracked. “He was just coming in to say he’s sorry about everything.”
“Oh my God, what a fantasy,” Nézet-Séguin said of the opera-eulogizing star with a laugh, before he debunked Chalamet’s claim that “no one cares about [opera] anymore.” The situation is the opposite, he said, with an audience that’s growing and diversifying, not shrinking.
“I see a different kind of audience, an audience that, of course, is different through the way they look, but also the way they dress and the way they come…There’s something incredible that now the average age is in the 40s of the operagoer, as it was in the 60s not so long ago.”
The Met Opera’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, said the audience is “growing and diversifying, not shrinking.”
Marty Sohl/Met Opera
His words might as well apply to conductors—at least, a conductor like him. Nézet-Séguin, a Rolex Testimonee, intentionally matched his nails to his watch, a gold tiger iron model from 2025. “I’m obsessed with it, and of course it’s yellow gold,” he said.
“It’s much more than just making sure that I start on time and finish on time,” he said of his partnership with the brand. “Rolex is so present in the classical-music field and behind many institutions that I was connected with, especially The Metropolitan Opera, but also the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Paris Opera, and the Salzburg Festival, and all places I was going to,” he said.
Nézet-Séguin meant “going to” quite literally. Following that day’s matinee, he was scheduled to be at a Rolex-sponsored dinner attended by other partners of the brand, members of the media, and luminaries like Frank and Met general manager Peter Gelb. But as we took our seats, still moved by the two-hour spectacle of art, life, love, and death we’d just witnessed, Nézet-Séguin—back in his short set—informed those assembled at the Lincoln Ristorante dinner that he couldn’t stay.
