Will the Metropolitan Opera have to Return Any Previous Donations from Matthew Christopher Pietras?
By Francisco Salazar(Credit: Jonathan Tichler / Met Opera)
Will the Metropolitan Opera have to return donations from Matthew Christopher Pietras?
The question was asked in a New York Times article, which recently published another in-depth article about Pietras. In the article, the Times noted that the arts institutions such as the Met and the Frick Collection, which Pietras famously donated money to, “are bracing for the possibility that they may have to contend with formal requests to return past donations made by Mr. Pietras.”
Additionally, it said, “A person familiar with the families’ outreach to the institutions said the families expect that any stolen funds would be returned to their rightful owners.”
The Frick said in a statement that it “had no reason to believe that any of the contributions were made with misappropriated funds… This issue will not cause any significant financial disruption to the Frick.”
The news comes after the New York Magazine wrote an exposé about Pietras, a fraudulent millionaire who became well known in the arts communities as a young arts patron. In the New York Magazine report, Pietras was documented for donating for many years to the Met Opera. His name appears in the Met Opera’s annual report for the first time in 2018-19, under gifts between $5,500 and $6,499. The following season, he gave between $50,000 and $99,999 and repeated it in 2020-21. He was also elected “Young Associate Director” by the board. The magazine also reported that in September 2022, Pietras paid for 20 friends to go to the opera’s opening night, as one of the gala “benefactors,” and also did the same in 2023.
The magazine also revealed that Pietras attempted to donate $15 million to the Met, but after the opera company attempted to transfer $10 million, the bank flagged the transfer as fraudulent, leaving the Met $10 million short and having to dip into its endowment.
In the new NY Times piece, the newspaper detailed how much money the Met took from the endowment. After the $10 million allegedly donated by Pietras was returned, “the Met got permission from the executive committee of its board in June to draw another $5 million from its endowment to help make up the missing funds, according to the Met official. Several committee members offered to make up the remaining $5 million that the company had been counting on.”
The new article also noted that Pietras had risen to the position of managing director on the board at the Met and served as a co-chair of a Met Opera gala in April for the opening of its new production of Strauss’s “Salome.” He also chaired a gala that celebrated Elizabeth Eveillard, a Met executive committee member, and her husband, Jean-Marie Eveillard, a French investor.
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