$7 million per year. That’s what it costs to put the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the air each Saturday afternoon. With the Met scrambling for new sponsors, there are rumblings in the opera world that the price tag is just too high, and that the broadcasts aren’t worth saving. Nonsense, says William Littler. There are other great opera companies, but none that consistently match the Met’s high level of performance. “I’ve visited them all, and I’ve never encountered in any of them the sustained quality I experienced last weekend during four performances at the big house at Lincoln Centre. As Harold C. Schonberg, late music critic of The New York Times, once observed, The Met sometimes fails, but when it does, it does so on a level of its own.”