Joseph Volpe caps 16 years running the metropolitan Opera. “Through various crises—a singer dying onstage, a bloated supersta cancelling, attendance figures falling in the wake of September 11th, Cuban billionaire patron turning out to be neither a billionaire nor Cuban—Volpe kept the great old house trundling along. Was he visionary? No. Did rival American companies—particularly the Sa Francisco Opera, with its history-making productions of Messiaen’s “Saint Francis” and John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—challenge th Met’s preëminence? Yes. But the chaos that has surrounded many bi houses elsewhere has been absent from the Met, and in this busines the absence of chaos is a considerable achievement.”