Library Revolution

I heard such a great story on NPR this evening as I raced to pick my son up at daycare. It seems that the long-standing rule against encores at the Metropolitan Opera was broken Monday night when the Met general manager, Peter Gelb, responded to the audience’s reaction to Juan Diego Florez’s incredible performance of the aria “Ah, Mes Amis” by greenlighting the first encore in 14 years.

For years, the practice of performing an encore at the Met has been forbidden. As Gelb said in the interview I heard today,

“In the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there was wording in the program books admonishing the audience with words saying ‘positively no encores allowed,’ kind of like no-smoking signs.”

But the audience went wild on Monday night after Florez’s rendition of the aria, and Gelb wanted to give them what they wanted- even if in doing so he had to break the rules.

“For me, and for the audience at the Met,” Gelb says, “it’s very important that opera be a theatrically satisfying and thrilling experience, and if the audience has a great time with a singer singing an aria like this, with an incredible run of nine high C’s, and they want to hear more of it, why not?”

Way to listen to customer feedback and act on it! Way to break down a barrier to customer satisfaction!

I think we should think of this in our libraries… what are our audiences clamoring for? What rules could we re-examine, re-write, or downright break in order to give our customers what they want?

Oh, and be sure to take a few minutes to listen to the encore - I can totally see why the crowd went wild!

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