James Levine was not a great man with a single tragic flaw.
He was an almost completely horrible person, with a single, tragic talent.
Ever since I heard the news, I’ve had a voice on one shoulder screaming “don’t write about James Levine.” And on the other shoulder, another voice is saying “write about James Levine.”
First, I don’t want to hurt or offend the many dear friends and colleagues close to me who admired him. Cincinnati, which is like a musical second home to me, was Levine’s home town. His mentor was the first violinist in the LaSalle Quartet, Walter Levin – I studied with the quartet’s second violinist and cellist. Many people I love and admire loved and respected Levine. I am sorry if this post causes them hurt or offence.
But, here I am, writing about James Levine.
Part One – “Stories about James Levine”
Everyone in the classical music business over the last forty years has heard the phrase “the stories about James Levine.”
Here are two stories which might not be quite what you think of when you hear that phrase.
A friend of mine was, for a time, producer and engineer of the radio broadcasts of the orchestra at Verbier when Levine was conducting regularly there. As is the case with the broadcasts of most festivals and orchestras, where there is more than one performance, either the producer or a member of the musical staff (at the Cincinnati Symphony it was usually one of us on the junior conducting staff who had been in the audience for all the performances) will select what they think are the best options and run those by the maestro before the ‘broadcast performance’ is edited together.
The situation my friend found himself working with Levine in was truly bizarre. At the end of each run of performances he would go to the maestro’s office. There he would see Levine and his brother Tom. My friend was not allowed to speak to Levine directly, but would say to Tom something like “I thought the first movement was the best on Sunday and the other three better on Saturday.” Then Tom would turn to James Levine and say “_________ says “the first movement was the best on Sunday and the other three better on Saturday.””
Bear in mind, my friend is in the room.
Jimmy would then say to Tom “Tell ______ that I would like to use the first and last movements from Sunday and the two middle movements from Saturday.” After which, Tom would turn to my friend and say “Maestro Levine says to use the first and last movements from Sunday and the two middle movements from Saturday.” My friend would confirm to Tom that, of course, that was a far better selection. Those would, indeed, be the movements he would use. Tom would relay that to Levine, who would nod silently. After which, my friend would be dismissed. And this is how he treated one of the top Tonmeisters in Europe, not some piddling assistant conductor. Even a Russian Czar would have been impressed.
Here’s another story.
A different friend worked in the classical department at a Tower Records in a major American city. One morning, he and his colleague arrived at work to a large box and a message saying “Levine’s Mahler 3 is out today. Put up this cardboard display for the LPs and the life-sized cutout of Levine at the top of the escalator before opening.” Many of you may still remember the halcyon days of record stores, where the classical managers presided over their departments with equal parts commanding knowledge and total authority. So it was in this Tower. These guys were used to deciding which Mahler 3’s were worthy of pushing based on their knowledge of 100 other versions. Their view was that Levine was not a good Mahler conductor, that his 3rd probably sucked, and they were not, in any case, going to race to put up all that tacky display stuff until they’d at least listened to it. Well, the shop opened at 10, and at 10:15, James Levine came scooting up the escalator looking for the life-sized cardboard cut-out of himself. He got to the top, stopped and stood there, his eyes narrowed, looking in vain for the missing shrine to his genius. He then turned around and left.
Minutes later, my friend got a phone call from Tower’s corporate office. Levine had called his manager, the manager had called the record company, and the record company had called Tower. This is how fast things can move when a ‘great man’s’ ego doesn’t get the feeding he thinks it deserves. The air was blue as the national head of the classical division explained in no uncertain terms that this was a world-class screw up, and that they had exactly 45 minutes to get the display up. They, of course agreed.
They then took the LP bin, the cardboard cut-out and all the Mahler 3 LPs out to the dumpster and threw them all away. Sure enough, a little while later, Jimmy came up the escalator, looked around briefly with an even darker expression, then turned and left.
I tell these stories not to be glib, but to make a point. The reason I decided to listen to the “write about James Levine” voice was that I couldn’t stand the “great musician, great guy, pity about the scandals,” fake dualism anymore. James Levine wasn’t a great figure with a single tragic flaw. You can’t be a lifelong sexual predator, grooming, coercing, blackmailing, bribing and manipulating children into being repeatedly raped and humiliated if you have just one tragic flaw. He could also be arrogant and petty enough to refuse to speak to his own producer, and insecure enough to involve his own manager and the president of a record company in a dispute over a life-size card-board cutout of him not being displayed in a record store.
Part Two – Boston
I’ve seen people do a lot of stupid and reckless stuff in my life.
But I’ve never, ever seen anything as stupid, reckless and irresponsible as the decision to turn over the keys to the Boston Symphony to James Levine. And yet, in obituary after obituary, I see respected critics talking about how Levine revived a moribund orchestra or raised the standards of their playing to electrifying heights. By my reckoning, I heard the BSO play live four or five times in the mid-late 90s, including two performances with Ozawa, one by Andrew Davis and one with Bernard Haitink. I gotta say, the orchestra sounded pretty damn good in all of those. Maestro Ozawa deserves a lot more credit and respect than he gets for his work in Boston.
By the time Levine got that job, “stories about James Levine” had been universally known about in the music business for more than 20 years. There were entire countries where he was reportedly not allowed to travel, and others where he could not be in a room with minors under any circumstances (including a children’s choir in a concert hall). That the BSO appointed Levine under the circumstances has to have been the most astonishing failure of either judgement or due diligence in the history of the performing arts. I have very little sympathy for the Met in this story, but they can at least plead that, when they hired the 27-year-old Levine, they didn’t know or understand what he was. By the time the BSO appointed Levine, everyone in classical music knew what he was. I remember telling a colleague at the time “when this comes out, the BSO may well go out of business.” I literally couldn’t imagine how such a colossal failure of judgement, which had to be facilitated by dozens of senior management members and the board of directors, could not bring the whole thing down once the truth was known outside the industry.
Why??????
Why risk the entire organisation, your professional reputation and the livelihood of all your musicians and team members for James Levine? The decision to appoint Levine had the potential to cost every member of that orchestra their job, their house, their health insurance, their retirement. And the people making that decision knew the risk they were taking. Is it even a risk, when your entire strategy boils down to the blind hope that American newspapers will continue not to report the worst kept secret in the music industry for the rest of eternity? That’s not a risk, that’s a death wish. And I just don’t think that Levine was a good enough symphonic conductor to merit such a risk. If he was really such a great conductor, why didn’t Berlin take him when Karajan died? Why didn’t Chicago choose him when Solti left? And on, and on…. In fact, other than Munich (who have long a soft spot for darkly crazy maesetri), no other orchestra that could afford him had ever wanted him as a music director.
The amazing thing under the circumstances was that Levine’s tenure in Boston was worse than I thought it would be, in ways I had never imagined. It was such a disaster that his criminality almost became a background issue. He demanded a FORTY MILLION DOLLAR “Jimmy is a genius” fund to pay for his ‘ambitious projects’ and required the players to agree to extra rehearsal time, but even in his first season, musicians began complaining that the maestro was spending those very expensive EXTRA rehearsals with his head buried in the score, sight-reading the music. Forty million dollars! Think how many commissions that could fund? How many scholarships? How many instruments for poor kids? That forty million could fund a world- class British professional chamber orchestra completely for anywhere from 10 to 90 years. Every musician, every staff member, every venue, every music hire. Has there ever been a year in classical music history when the total value of all the commissions paid to all the classical composers in the world combined added up to forty million dollars? Instead, they spent $40 million dollars so Levine could sight read in front of the BSO?
Levine’s much vaunted ‘commitment to new music’ at the BSO only really comprised two composers – Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen (with the notable exception of John Harbison’s Sixth Symphony). It is hard to imagine more forbidding repertoire for a symphonic audience, and listeners started staying home in droves. In one Carter performance, Levine reportedly got lost (Word on the street was that he turned two pages in a very difficult passage. It’s happened to me, and it happens to most conductors at some point.), and musicians describe Levine being unprepared and unaware of when they were faking.
There’s a long and necessary book to be written about Levine’s years in Boston. There are serious questions that need answering. How much money did he receive from the orchestra during his tenure and under what conditions? Was he paid for concerts he didn’t give? For seasons he wasn’t involved in? When he was injured and unable to conduct, did he help plan concerts? Raise money? Recruit board members? Teach? It is reported that in 2005, this great orchestra builder only attended 2 out of 16 auditions. How many did he attend in other years, if any? How was that forty million spent? What legacy did it create?
The wasted money, the repeated no-shows, the lack of interest the welfare of the institution… it beggars belief. His tenure apparently ended when he was so loopy on painkillers in a rehearsal that the musicians put their foot down in 2011 and said that had to be the last rehearsal. That decision probably saved the BSO, because it meant he was a fading memory by the time the US press finally broke their wall of silence on his criminal behavior in 2017. It also means that nobody involved in hiring Levine has faced any consequences for their decisions that I am aware of.
I’m not the only one to point out that the Met paid Levine $3.5 million in 2019, and the all the musicians in the orchestra not a penny since Covid. What is also worth pointing out is that Jimmy seemed just fine with that. What kind of “great colleague” sits on $3.5 million in blood money paid for with the innocence of children when his supposedly beloved orchestral colleagues are losing their homes right, left and centre? At the end of his life, the famously tough Lorin Maazel put much of his substantial wealth into supporting young musicians through his festival and his competition. Where was James Levine’s sense of duty and charity during Covid? Or in the preceding decades?
James Levine was not a great man with a single tragic flaw. He was an almost completely horrible person, with a single tragic talent.
Part Three – The Artistic Legacy
Was he the greatest American conductor of his generation?
He was very possibly the most gifted American performer of his generation. His ear, his memory, his knowledge of languages, his encyclopaedic knowledge of opera style and performance tradition are all legendary. He was a phenomenal pianist. But, for me, great musicians compose, explore and arrange. They research, they challenge assumptions, they create and they re-invent. He didn’t create, he didn’t compose, he didn’t expand the repertoire in a meaningful way through either the exploration of lost and unknown work, or through commissioning. He was, instead, the ultimate embodiment of the musical status quo, as was his overall leadership of the Met, which during his time was known for bland, middle of the road stagings.
I watched pretty much every Met broadcast he did on TV, and listened to hundreds of others on the radio. Looking back, everything he did was well-played and well-sung, and that’s something I can’t say about my own performing life, though I wish I could. The playing of the Met Orchestra (unpaid for a year at the time of his death) could be a thing of wonder. He had some fantastic collaborations with singers, no doubt about it. And some performances, like his Otello with Domingo, really thrilled me. But I can’t think of any opera in which his recording would be my first choice, and there are many where I feel that once you’ve heard the real thing, his interpretations seem pretty pale – particularly in Wagner. Without the world’s greatest singers at his side, I can’t think of a single symphonic recording of his that is of the first rank. I completely understand why my friend would not be bullied into making Levine’s Mahler 3 into the official version of ‘his’ classical department. I once listed to an entire CD of Schumann 3 on the radio because it was so leaden, dull and awful that I had to find out who it was. No prize for guessing who was conducting.
It astonishes me that some on the internet have chosen to defend Levine on the basis that he was a victim of ‘cancel culture.’ And that it’s not fair to disregard a life of ‘great’ music making because of a single character flaw or error of judgement. But let’s be real for a moment. We call misconduct misconduct because it is, by definition, improper. Sexual misconduct is particularly insidious, and always a serious matter, but on the scale of seriousness, spending fifty-plus years serial raping children is about as bad as it gets. Really, what could be worse? Chopping up grandma with an axe? At least she’s had a life, and her suffering was brief. Levine’s victims had their childhoods and their futures stolen from them, and they’ve had to live with the trauma of his acts for their entire lives. They will take the memory of the true face of James Levine to their graves. The dark face that many in the American musical firmament knew existed, but chose to conceal for decades.
Here’s what cancel culture is.
Cancel culture is that the voice on my shoulder saying “don’t write about James Levine” is saying things like “because you’ll never work at the BSO or the Met.” Well, they haven’t exactly been booking me every week, so that’s fine. That voice is saying “don’t question his musical genius, because the leading critics in America have spent the last 30 years telling everyone he’s the greatest conductor since Bernstein, and critics have long memories.” That voice is saying “don’t call out the complicity of the rich and powerful, because in addition to sitting on boards of directors that facilitated his criminality and covered up his crimes, they sit on boards of trusts and foundations that you need to support your work.” That voice is saying “don’t speak ill of the dead, it’s wrong.” Well, if someone is ‘ill’ and you can’t speak of them when they’re alive, and you can’t speak of them when they’re dead, then I guess you can’t speak ill of them at all. That voice is talking to me and MANY others like me this week. The fear in our industry is real. People don’t want a ‘reputation’. They don’t want to burn bridges. But, like Granny under the axe, I’ve lived, I’ve got a job (for now), and so here I am. Having seen a few of my friends and colleagues with more to lose than me speak the truth on this topic today, I want to stand with them.
UPDATE
Thanks to everyone for your words of support.
There are many interesting comments below, including ones from members of the BSO, the Met, the Chicago Symphony and many other orchestras. For some reason, my website is clipping it down to just the most recent ones. It’s worth the effort to click on ‘older posts’ and see what others have said.
Thank you for writing, Maestro.
Thank you for this. Thank you.
Thank you for this!
Ken, thank you for speaking up and out. There are more of his ilk running around. Hopefully, these revelations will clip some other wings. And prod some people in positions of power to choose more carefully. Susan Spector‘s comments resonate deeply with me. And as a retired orchestral musician, I find the fact that the MET orchestra has been dispatched without pay for so long unbelievable and totally deplorable.
Andrew Joy (former principal horn of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne)
Thank you, Andrew
It seems pretty clear that Levine was a bad man who did bad things, and should have been fired and/or incarcerated far earlier than his eventual reputational depantsing. He was also a talented conductor whose bad behavior was coddled and minimized by the people who bankrolled the BSO, in the service of financial gain for all concerned.
I personally only own one Levine recording (which I do enjoy) that was given to me by a friend. I don’t have much of a dog in the fight.
To me what this all points to is the danger of celebrity.
For thousands of years, humans who could create beauty through performance or artistic production have been celebrated and valued. It’s really pretty odd when you think about it. There isn’t much survival value in it for early humans, and creative types have long tended to be, shall we say… less competitive for reproductive resources… yet the impulse seems to have been selected for (I say this as someone who always felt less physically attractive than his peers and cultivated drawing and writing abilities, probably mostly unconsciously, as a strategy to attract mates). When you graft onto that our current culture of glorification and massively outsized financial compensation for celebrity creators, you have a recipe for disaster, really.
Beethoven, a famously socially maladroit ugmoe, couldn’t land a date back in 1800. But if he were alive and producing today? Yikes. Who knows what shenanigans he would have gotten into.
Levine was probably near the very far end of the bell curve in terms of bad acts. But If you took one hundred creative weirdos and effectively lavished them with worship, impunity, and gobs of money, I imagine a pretty disgusting bell curve of behavior would form.
I’m just musing, I guess. I don’t know what the solution is. We should certainly worship celebrity less, and punish bad acts more swiftly. If creative people were suitably rewarded for their creativity but not given that extra psychically poisonous remuneration, and there was a strong culture of rebuke for bad acts, we would all be better off, I think.
I wish to point out a mistake in my previous comment: the former colleague mentioned in my comment retired from the MET Orchestra in 2003, NOT 2007 as previously stated.
I’ll echo what everyone else has already said: Bravo to you for taking the difficult stand and for writing (so eloquently) what needed to be said this week. It is too important to be ignored. Thank you.
Great writing, clearly articulated and forcefully put. The best analysis I’ve read of the Levine situation. Sadly, he wasn’t (isn’t) the only paedophile maestro out there. One hears whispers and talk about other, far less known, older men who are also troubled, shall we say? Some boards have been aware of the situation and fortunately moved those conductors on before their, uh, “batons” got them in trouble. On a brighter side, hope to see you in Boulder someday soon!
I was willing to give James Levine a pass until I heard that he had disrespected one of the top Tonmeisters in Europe. Unacceptable.
Thanks for shining a spotlight on a man who’s bad behavior was an open secret and who’s sexual abuse was whispered about for decades.
Thank you very much, Kenneth Woods, for having the courage to lay it out as it was and is. I know someone who played in the Met orchestra in 1978. He told me that the players in the orchestra were talking about his extra-curricular activities (to put it way too diplomatically) even then. Shame on the Met for actively covering for him all those decades. I always considered him to be a mediocre conductor, but I’ve spent my nearly 7-decade life collecting recordings of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, with Furtwangler and Toscanini at the top of my long list (I do not play the sophomoric WF vs AT games). Levine wasn’t fit to shine their shoes. Thank you, again, Mr. Woods.
Bravo Ken.
Finalmente THE TRUTH!!! Thank God and thank YOU… We’ve been hearing these stories from credible sources for over 40 years… YOU ROCK!!!
I was a conducting student of Walter Susskind from 1970-72 with the St. Louis Symphony and a Tanglewood Conducting Fellow in 1972. Even as early as my St Louis yrs the rumors were going around. I stayed clear of the guy.I always go to BSO rehearsals when I return to the US. Levine‘s I couldn‘t take any more. He talked and talked and talked. The orch was going nuts. He did not improve the orch, they were great when he came to Boston. As a symphonic conductor I found him rather uninteresting. Opera was something else. I really thought he would get the job here in Berlin. As one manager said, „what Jimmy wants, Jimmy gets.“I would love to know who was protecting him all those.
Thank you for a candid, poignant and very important glimpse into the actions of a mind that was very brilliant and very sick at the same time. This further illuminates the ever-growing question of: should the art of monsters he appreciated? Do we stop reading Wilde, listening to Wagner, watching films of Polanski and Allen, and now, enjoying the productions and performances of Levine because of their egregious crimes and (in the case of Wagner) Anti-semitism? Not an easy call by any means. The real tragedy here, (whichever outcome we arrive at) is not the stain left on the art Levine created, but the devastating harm inflicted on his countless young victims.
Thanks so much for this very important article. It reinforces by determination to never again listen to any any recordings that this individual had anything to do with.
Just as with those cardboard cutouts of him at the Tower
Records store, they’ve gone to the dumpster where they belong.
What a refreshing commentary to find. Thank you for taking the time to write and share it. Hopefully more like you will continue to come out of the woodwork.
Some of what you say may have been done on advice from his agent who played, or insisted that Levine play, real hard ball on negotiating terms.
As far as Tom is concerned, Joe Volpe, for around 20 years the director of the Met, in his memoirs gently implied that when it came to practical matters even as the musical director, Levine was an absent minded professor type who could not focus on practical matters. He gave the example that in the days before cell phones Levine once forgot to leave a phone number when he was out of town and that Volpe went crazy trying to contact him about an important artistic matter a production was in rehearsal. He depended on Tom to deal with anything with a non artistic component, like a radio production or when there might have been the potential to argue with somebody.
He spoke through Tom probably out of fear, not snobbery.
Most of the accusations of sexual exploitation come from 30, 40 and 50 years ago and I have never heard Levine credibly accused, with a victim actually coming forward, of physical rape or even a credible charge of statutory rape.
I am not condoning it; according to interviews those students who had sex with him felt that it was necessary for their careers or because Levine promised them the moon in terms of career advancement (and then did not deliver). He had a talent of sniffing out the most vulnerable which at one time before and immediately after he joined the Met, he kept in a quasi cult, with him as the undisputed leader, and marginalized those who crossed him.
However, those were different times and unequal power in sexual relationships was considered more acceptable both in straight and in underground gay sexual activity. In addition, Levine was a child of the sixties when it was considered healthy or even necessary to “get in touch with one’s sexuality” to become a better artist. According to newspaper reports apparently Levine even said something like that to one of the young men he was trying to seduce.
His hubris was probably largely caused by those who adulated him; when heard often enough it was easy to believe the his own hype. I doubt that he could forsee the hurt and anger he would cause among those acolytes who went to bed with him and later felt betrayed.
To echo some of Mr. Woods’ comments about Levine’s conducting, as well as similar comments made by people in the discussion thread, I’d like to say that I usually found Levine’s orchestral conducting to be pale and dull. (Just one example: Given my enthusiasm for Arcadi Volodos’ pianism, I eagerly sought out his recording of the Rach 3, only to wish that I could divorce the piano playing from the accompaniment and Levine’s conducting. I just can’t listen to it anymore.) Point being: some kind of ephemeral, divine gift for leading an orchestra would never excuse or mitigate Levine’s crimes, nor justify his hiring and all the institutional silence. But then, he wasn’t even a superlative conductor. Based on Mr. Woods’ blog post here (thank you for writing it), and other accounts I’ve read in recent years, it seems that his single lasting legacy is trauma for his victims.
I met James Levine when I was 19.
Not a boy, yet utterly unformed.
That was 45 years ago.
This article is true.
The articles in the New York Times are true.
Levine’s life was arranged so that he never had to personally deal with anything he didn’t want to deal with.
This is unreality.
This was also the Petri dish that created abuse, damage, and heartache.
Thank you. Your voice is important in this dialog. I have gone through many phases since the Me Too issues began to surface. At first I was forgiving – we should not judge behavior in earlier eras by current standards; we can separate the art from the artist – that sort of thing. I have of late come to quite a different place. Abusive and abhorrent behavior was never ok, should never be glossed over and yes, we need to re-examine our history and call it what it was. Sex with children or under age teens is never ok, is always an abuse of power, and never, never serves the child. These are not “stories” or rumors, they are accounts of abuse. There is no grey area for me anymore. Times have changed only in that we are willing to call it out now. Thank you for your frank voice and your clear eyed analysis.
A creep is a creep, talented or not.
Sharon, your statement that “most of the accusations have come from 30, 40, 50 years ago” is simply not factual. And speculations that the subject’s criminal activity had largely abated in recent years (and even if that WAS true, does that change the story?) is a myth. I personally know of at least one such unwelcome advance perpetrated upon a student at the Verbier Festival. And even more recently, many in the company were aware of crediblereports of a motorized wheelchair-bound maestro making unwanted overtures toward a makeup artist in the Solo Artist area just offstage—resulting in the poor man being pinned up against a wall by the chair. This was around the time of the subject’s final performance which was, appropriately enough, the Verdi Requiem. The young man didn’t want to come forward. Considering the defense of the predator I’ve read in comments in forums other than this post, who could blame him?
And, I’m sorry—“Hubris largely caused by those who adulated him?!”
Your insinuating that his close confidants were to blame and that he merely began to believe their inflated hagiographic reassurances is patently false (although that may have magnified the malignant narcissism he already possessed.)
As a person who worked directly with him for years, I can assure you that he came by his unseemly self-adulation and -deification all on his own. I lost track of the times in rehearsals when we in the orchestra were a captive audience to his self-congratulatory accolades and his demeaning and dismissive comments about other conductors living and dead.
When I first experienced the latter and voiced to a colleague my shock at his unprofessionalism and pettiness—not to mention the wasted rehearsal time (also mentioned in this blog post as an issue in Boston)—especially since his leadership at the MET was secure and never in question—the seasoned veteran turned to me, smiling, and said, “Well, you see—music isn’t being MADE unless Jimmy is involved.”
I meant to mention this in my comment directly above:
Another indication that the serial predator preyed undeterred late into his career is the fact that a person in his inner circle was at some point expressly forbidden from entering the Tanglewood campus because of his ongoing efforts to “procure” TMC students for the subject.
Susan Spector
Oboist, MET Orchestra
Adults with absolute power and access to children should NEVER be trusted or left alone.
Add ego or perceived virtue and it’s the perfect hunting ground for predators like Levine, and countless Pastors, Scoutmasters, teachers, and volunteers.
BSO, The Met and others who sacrificed the well-being of children on Levine’s altar need to be sued into oblivion. Including board members.
There is no art that should withstand this.
Ms. Spector, thank you for your informed comments on this subject. The behavior that ultimately ended Levine’s Met career (at least a decade too late) certainly was NOT all 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Even if we limit our scope to what Proskauer Rose’s 2017-18 investigation put on the record, the accusers included a member of the Lindemann program whose story covered a period as late as 1999.
Thank you for your essay. Thank you for addressing the myths and reality of J Levine. And, thank you for thoroughly describing the dense self-serving web of people who enabled Levine’s megalomaniacal behavior and predatory sexual entitlement, and for calling out the gross unethical use of resources.
I have not been the victim of sexual assault. I have been the victim of abusive narcissism and artist-“hero” worship by those who held the power of employing me. My 30-years’ proven experience (in admin and arts leadership) wasn’t enough credibility to withstand the worshippers’ gaze: in one case the narcissist’s self regard; in another case a board’s misplaced awe of an artist. I appreciate your accounting of this wrong-headed dynamic.
I am not and never was “famous,” and never had the dubious honor of working with, meeting, or even attending a live concert of JL. But I will say this:
After the semi-retirement of Leonard Bernstein, and with JL being the pre-eminent “face” of classical music in America…Image-wise and socially, we male music majors and collegiates of a certain age – straight, gay, bi, ANYWHERE on the sexual map – all carried water, paid a price for JL’s pre-eminence. Needless to say, in & of itself, his orientation was NOT the problem, because there are gay people I would trust with my life…It’s that JL was the very incarnation of every homophobe’s worst nightmare : an enflamed, leering child molester…I won’t go into details, but during my college years (late 1970s-almost mid 80s), it was already challenge enough to be a not-yet healed, male abuse survivor, without having to carry water for JL.
Of course, this is only the resurfacing of an old grudge. And perhaps it does nothing to heal myself or those even more wounded than I was. The challenge for any abuse survivor is balancing the need to call evil Evil, with the need to avoid fruitless, corrosive hatred and resentment. Anyone who thinks this is easy, probably hasn’t grappled with it, themselves (“Job’s Comforters”). In my case, it was tougher, because in some ways I paid for it more than those around me…But it has to be done, and with JL’s influence gone, it’ll easier for me, now, to let it drop. Let God sort him out. (Knappertsbusch’s 1962 PARSIFAL will help me do just that. Tonight.)
I must be one of the few remaining U.K. musicians who worked with him. It was for an Otello recording with Domingo at Walthamstow Town Hall. His perverse nature was well known throughout the profession, rumours were flying about that The Met had paid out a million dollars on his behalf to buy a famille’s silence. None of the main orchestras would employ him so the orchestra for this recording, The National Philharmonic, was a freelance orchestra made up of session musicians.
Kenneth, thanks for a marvellous essay. And my thanks also to the many people who wrote comments, which on the whole are thoughtful and add an important dimension to the James Levine discussion.
I’d like to add comments about the James Levine era at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I’m a long-term BSO subscriber (30+ years), and come at this from two very different perspectives.
First, EVERYONE KNEW in Boston exactly who James Levine was when he was hired. From the music critics to informed members of the public, no one was in the dark that James Levine was a serial pedophile. For two seasons there was a couple who had seats next to ours, and the husband was a partner at one of the top Boston law firms. He told me that a friend of his was on the Board of Trustees at the BSO, and the BSO was well aware of Levine’s pedophilia when he was hired. There’s no reason to not believe him. Like us, he thought very little of Levine’s work in Boston, and they told us they were so disheartened by Levine’s tenure that they were giving up their BSO subscription. We never saw them again.
Second, James Levine was a HORRIBLE conductor during his BSO tenure. I heard exactly two good Levine concerts over 7 seasons: Wagner’s Flying Dutchman in a concert performance, and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Levine’s performances of the core symphonic repertoire were reliably awful. Let me get specific: A terrible Beethoven 7, which shocked me because I thought it was impossible for there to be a bad performance of that joyful, life-affirming symphony. A soulless performance of Dvorak 8 which did not uplift, did not affirm, and couldn’t end soon enough. Awful Brahms 1, 2, and 4. The worst Schubert 9 I have ever heard–“heavenly lengths” of torture. Terrible Schumann 2. Really, I could go on and on with the list, but you get the point. So let me explain why these performances were terrible.
When Levine came to Boston, I was completely neutral and had no opinion on him. I had never heard a single concert of his before anywhere, I owned exactly 1 James Levine CD in my VAST collection (“Ma Vlast” with the VPO), and had never seen or heard a Levine opera performance (admittedly I’m not a big opera person, although I’ve since come to really enjoy many Wagner operas and some selected operas from other composers). All I knew was that James Levine was considered a giant of a talent and everyone was telling me Boston was lucky to have him. So I was excited. (I on the other hand had hoped Bernard Haitink would be the next music director of the BSO.)
To his credit, Levine definitely improved the day-in, day-out playing of the BSO. They were not at their best at the end of the Ozawa era, although Ozawa’s last 3-4 years saw a very different Seiji Ozawa on the podium with some astonishing, jaw-dropping performances that were nowhere to be found during most of his tenure, and on occasion they played like the great orchestra they can be. In those last 3-4 seasons, it was as if Seiji decided he was actually going to do the work and put in the effort, and at the end of his tenure, it really showed and I was blown away by a lot of what I heard from him – an ASTONISHING Bruckner 9 (the best live performance I’ve heard from anyone, and coming from the most unlikely of sources), incredible Shostakovich 5, Turangalila, Mahler 3, etc. Man those were good years. But the orchestra was typically underperforming. Levine changed that, and to my ears, that is his sole achievement in Boston. And it’s not insignificant.
As for his symphonic work, what went wrong? Well, as I came to learn, a Levine performance of any of the warhorses simply went nowhere. They lived in the moment but never jelled into a coherent narrative. It was as if he was incapable of defining a long line in the music, or having the music tell a story. Everything was in the here and now, with no past and no future. Everything lived in the moment but went nowhere. It was bizarre. I joked to friends and gave Levine a nickname: “King of the Phrase.” James Levine earned that nickname. He could do phrases like no other: soft, loud, loud to soft, soft to loud, change in tempo, etc. What he was utterly UNABLE to do was to link all those phrases together into a coherent interpretation. But more than that, I found his interpretations to be soulless, utterly devoid of emotion in any real sense. Yes, you could hear “tender” and “heart-felt” and whatever was required sonically, but it was superficial, and whatever underlying it that drove those sonic effects was completely missing. It’s hard to explain, but it was consistently this way. The best analogy I can use is Stanley Kubrick. Many people talk about his movies as being ice-cold at their center, with no warmth, no humanity, just a void. That was the emotional content of a James Levine symphonic performance. There was nothing at its core, it was just an exercise in a series of sonic effects and ultimately pointless. I still can’t believe that awful performance of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. How is it possible for there to be a bad performance of that masterpiece, which I had always considered conducted itself and didn’t need anyone on the podium? Well, Levine proved otherwise. It was lacking in genuine, heartfelt emotion, although it was as loud or soft as it needed to be at the time, but there was no “there” there. It was only a series of sonic effects. Nothing connected, and nothing felt emotionally engaging or lived-in. Utterly soulless, and at the end of the day it was an empty exercise in nothingness.
I think the most insightful comments I’ve ever heard or read about James Levine have come from my husband, who is a doctor, not a musician, but has fanastic ears. After the awful performance of Dvorak’s 8th symphony, he said to me, “Levine’s performances come across as if he’s on SSRI’s.” His comment shocked me, and almost immediately, I realized he was not only right but completely nailed the essence of James Levine. SSRI’s are the standard of care anti-depressant drugs, the Prozacs, Zolofts, etc. of the world. SSRI’s just level you out – they get rid of the highs and the lows of emotions. When they are working in a patient, they just even the patient’s emotional being out into a steady neutrality. And he nailed it – that’s EXACTLY what Levine’s symphonic performances were. They existed. They came. They went. And nothing stuck. There was no emotional engagement. And when a Levine symphonic performance was over, it was if it never existed except for the time that had passed.
After a particularly awful performance of Schubert’s 9th Symphony (I think in Levine’s 3rd or 4th season at the BSO), at the end of the performance my husband turned to me and said, “I’m done with Levine. Either you trade out of his concerts in the future, or find someone else to go with.” We traded out of all Levine programs from that point forward except for 1 concert each season, because I wanted to see if anything might change for the better (it couldn’t be worse). Well, it never did, and then Levine was gone.
So let’s talk Complicity, Part 2. Everyone in Boston was complicit. Levine got nothing but rave reviews, and even amongst the public all the talk I heard was about how amazing he was. Except for us, and some people we knew who also had good ears and knew the music and would think for themselves rather than in terms of what the sycophantic Boston Globe published (yes Jeremy Eichler, I’m talking about you), and were equally aghast at what they were hearing. I find it incredibly ironic now that critical consensus was that Levine is not that great a symphonic conductor and his stay in Boston was unsuccessful. Yes, that was obvious at the time to those of us who were genuinely listening and horrified by what they heard, but that was definitely NOT what was being publicly said. So either one of two things is happening: people have changed their narrative of late to match the seamy facts of Levine’s existence now that they’ve have been publicly exposed, or they weren’t being honest at the time when Levine was being praised to the moon. I don’t know which is worse. All I can say is, I went in with open ears, and after 3 seasons, we couldn’t take no mo’. As a conductor of the symphonic repertoire, Levine was an abysmal failure in Boston. It wasn’t even a close call. And I won’t even bother to talk about all the horrific atonal music he shoved down our throats. I hope to never hear another note of Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Wuorinen, etc. All of them belong in the trash heap of history, they have nothing to offer and they’re little more than a pointless joke that outlived its usefulness 100 years ago.
Levine was a sick man, and his sickness absolutely came across in his performances although it seems most did not realize this in realtime in Boston. To be a narcissistic serial pedophile as he was, he had to have a lack of human empathy, a lack of emotional connectedness, and an inability to connect the dots of life. That came across loud and clear in his soulless, terrible performances of the great symphonic warhorses in Boston.
As best I can tell, this is the darkest point in the BSO’s storied history. May it never happen again.
Thanks again, Kenneth and everyone else here, for the truth-telling.
And one final comment: Levine never conducted Bruckner–and thanks be to the high heavens for that! It’s been reported that he told people he just didn’t understand Bruckner’s music. That really says it all as far as I’m concerned, because Bruckner’s music is about everything James Levine is not: emotional engagement, connectedness with God/the universe, and a belief that as we strive and encounter many obstacles along the way of our journeys in life, it will all end well if we persevere and endure even under the most difficult of circumstances. All of which are concepts completely foreign to Levine’s existence.
Kenneth, let me answer your question why the BSO hired James Levine knowing full well he was a sexual predator and pedophile. The answer actually comes from several people I talked to, so I want to be clear that I’m not relying on one source.
Levine was hired because his presence made fundraising easy in Boston’s Jewish community. Ozawa stayed on as long as he did at the BSO because he tapped huge amounts of Japanese corporate money, and the BSO did not want that revenue stream to end. The BSO understood that when Ozawa left, the money was likely to follow with him, as it did. That was why the Vienna State Opera hired him – because they knew he came with a dowry, and sure enough, Ozawa delivered the Japanese corporate donors to Vienna as well. So the BSO had a void to fill, and hiring James Levine played extremely well in the Jewish community. Plus, James Levine was a brand name and a big one, and it fit the BSO’s overall narrative even if the musical results delivered were awful. But hey, no one needs to know that given that most people in the hall will give a standing ovation to everything. And hey, the BSO was assured fawning reviews from The Boston Globe, which told the public how awesome James Levine was and how lucky Boston was to have him. I’m sure Jeremy Eichler is very proud of his work during this era as a subcontractor to the BSO’s marketing department.
Thank you for this.
Adding for further reference the link to the March 2, 2018 Boston Globe article that went into details of past evidence of Levine’s propensity for narcissistic abuse of those around him.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/03/02/cleveland/cn2Sathz0EMJcdpYouoPjM/story.html
Thank you for being brave enough to speak the truth.
I very recently watched Das Rheingold from the Met on BluRay. The Robert LePage production.
It struck me that Levine had the biggest cheers of all at the curtain call. He was deified by the Met audience. I wonder how they felt when the scandals broke.
A horrible egotistical vastly overrated paedophile deserves to have his halo tarnished.
A brilliant article Ken. I hope that you are well. It seems an age since we met at St David’s Hall!
I’m so glad people are telling the truth. Thank you for this eye-opening article.
There are too many in the arts that look the other way to keep their positions. I received angry responses when I posted comments about Domingo’s accusers coming forward. Apparently, his lifelong fans care more about celebrity status than someone being harrassed and violated.
So, it is a must that we as artists dismantle this sick and twisted American pedestal. No one, and I mean absolutely no one is so talented that criminal behavior should be excused. It’s tantamount to Barbara Walters telling Corey Feldman that he’s trying to destroy an entire industry by speaking out.
If you don’t report criminal activity then you can and should be held as an accomplice. And the Met has plenty of accomplices all for the sake of “image”.
I am the founder and director of Empire Opera in NYC. I am also a volunteer for O.U.R. (Operation Underground Railroad) working to end child sex trafficking.
Most enlightening, not least the commentary…….Yours truly, a Wagnerphile,found his circa 1990 Ring utterly pedestrian, although to be fair his most recent reading sounded matured; much preferred was Gergiev ca. 2001
Thanks Korbin Mulder for sharing this . Well written article.
As long Boards of Directors and Managing Directors tolerate sexual abuse and predators because the talent is a cash cow, nothing changes. Boston sounds better without him. FYI: I have sat on Boards for performing arts groups since I was 24 , so there are 30+ years in my opinion. As long as as anyone in a Arts Org is protected from reality it goes on. We don’t teach our students to report abuses.
Thank you for writing this, Mr. Woods. Levine’s horrible actions existed on the periphery of the music world for so long, known to many but never directly addressed, that I believe now we owe it to the ages to question the post-mortem burnishing of his legacy as loudly as possible. Your piece of writing shows what a horrible, small man he was.
I must admit I’m astonished to see so many obituaries rush to discuss his alleged brilliance as a symphonic conductor. I was shocked when Tony Tommasini, who came up in Boston during the Ozawa years, trotted out the received wisdom that Levine somehow “revitalized” the BSO. (Then again, not unlike Levine, a brilliant pianist but passable conductor, Tony is a very good pianist and a passable critic.) All one needs to do is look at the BSO under Nelsons these last few years to see how inferior Levine’s work with that ensemble was. I do hope the day will come when Levine, always a showman, never an artist, and always a monster, is assigned his rightful place in the ash heap of history.
I am a volunteer with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Shortly after James Levine was appointed, one of my fellow volunteers asked, if we ran into him in the Hall, could we say Hi? The answer — “Absolutely not!” Now I know why…
For better or for worse, Levine was a major figure in the musical world. And as such, needs to be appropriately judged only through the passage of time, when passions have subsided, and facts gathered.
Thank you for writing this—it clarifies so much. Has anybody seen a description of the mechanisms that kept Mr. Levine’s reputation intact and burnished despite less-than-thrilling performances and loathsome behavior? It would be helpful to understand what made this happen so that we can begin to dismantle it.
Kenneth Woods, would you consider submitting this piece as an Op Ed to The Boston Globe, NYTimes, Washington Post, SFChronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cleveland Plain Dealer, LATimes—to journals in all cities with major orchestras?
Hi Mary
Thanks for your comment. I certainly would, but not really sure how one would go about it. But if there were interest in publishing it, I would be happy for it to have a wider reach. Thanks for reading and for reaching out.
Ken
When Karen and I were publishing On The Air Magazine, a classical radio magazine from 1989-1997, one of our NY writers secured an interview with Maestro Levine, which would have been a huge coup for our little publication. But I knew of his many issues with sexually inappropriate behavior as far back as 1986 or so, and I told her I didn’t want to publish it. It was a very tough decision at the time. But I also always had admiration for his artistry at the Met.
Toscanini once accidentally poked out the eye of a musician when he threw his baton in a fit of anger . He had to pay the musician money for this act of uncontrolled rage . Fritz Reiner was a sadistic bully who made the musicians of the Chicago symphony live in terror of being summarily fired , and many were fired . A joke about him predicted he would fire the pallbearers at his funeral .
Josef Krips was such a bully to the musicians of the San Francisco symphony when was music director as to cause one of them to commit suicide . And there are countless other examples of conductor cruelty to musicians I could cite .
Fortunately, musicians unions have prohibited music directors from summarily firing musicians since the heyday of these and other legendary conductors active in the US in the past .
James Levine was a sick man mentally who had an uncontrollable urge to to terrible things . And struck by serious physical illnesses in his later years , which explains the erratic performances of his later years .
But I am convinced he was a very great musician and conductor . Yes, not every liked his conducting but this has always been true of every great conductor . But I must admit to being absolutely thrilled by many of the performances I experienced by him live and recorded over the years .
Toscanini was generally idolized in his day and long after his death . Yet I have always found his NBC recordings to be coarse ( appalling crude , blaring sounding trumpets for example), choppy, hectic, punchy, nervous, rushed , unbelievably rigid and metronomic, mechanical, joyless and stiffly regimented . I can hear the fear of”the maestro ” in the playing of the NBS symphony . The woodwinds in particular play with an extremely nervous fluttery rapid vibrato . You never hear this fear in the performances of Walter, Mitropoulos, Karajan, Furtangler and other legendary contemporaries of Artie . I’ve certainly never heard it in any of Levine’s performances .
I’ve always liked Toscanini’s recordings with the NY Phil, the Philadelphia and other orchestras more .
But let’s face it – Levine would never have become a famous conductor without his enormous talent . As appalled as I am by his behavior in private life, I can’t stop admiring his conducting .
Thank you for this difficult, necessary and painful corrective.
The stories about JL were already rampant when I was growing up in Cincinnati and he was at the Cleveland Orchestra. Your account of JL and his brother Tom is spot on; it seems as though JL even on the podium, couldn’t communicate in any other way except from a position of power, (although he could be an excellent communicator to audiences–when he wanted to be).
Again, bravo, maestro. Your second home town would love to see you again.
Thanks, Kenneth, for writing this piece. I’ve been thinking since JL’s death about the urgent need to stop excusing abusive behavior by lionizing its perpetrators. Your article is an account of a life and career as it should be told.
Thank you so much, Anne. Nothing would make me happier than a return visit to Cincinnati. We’re learned to make our own Skyline here in Wales, but it’s still not quite the same.
Superb and courageous article. Thank you!