James Levine was not a great man with a single tragic flaw.<\/p>\n
He was an almost completely horrible person, with a single, tragic talent.<\/p>\n
Ever since I heard the news, I\u2019ve had a voice on one shoulder screaming \u201cdon\u2019t write about James Levine.\u201d And on the other shoulder, another voice is saying \u201cwrite about James Levine.\u201d<\/p>\n
First, I don\u2019t 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\u2019s home town. His mentor was the first violinist in the LaSalle Quartet, Walter Levin \u2013 I studied with the quartet\u2019s second violinist and cellist.\u00a0 Many people I love and admire loved and respected Levine. I am sorry if this post causes them hurt or offence.<\/p>\n
But, here I am, writing about James Levine.<\/p>\n
Everyone<\/em> in the classical music business over the last forty years has heard the phrase \u201cthe stories about James Levine.\u201d<\/p>\n Here are two stories which might not be quite what you think of when you hear that phrase.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018broadcast performance\u2019 is edited together.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cI thought the first movement was the best on Sunday and the other three better on Saturday.\u201d Then Tom would turn to James Levine and say \u201c_________ says \u201cthe first movement was the best on Sunday and the other three better on Saturday.\u201d\u201d<\/p>\n Bear in mind, my friend is in the room<\/em>.<\/p>\n Jimmy would then say to Tom \u201cTell ______ that I would like to use the first and last movements from Sunday and the two middle movements from Saturday.\u201d After which, Tom would turn to my friend and say \u201cMaestro Levine says to use the first and last movements from Sunday and the two middle movements from Saturday.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cLevine\u2019s 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.\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/sup> probably sucked, and they were not, in any case, going to race to put up all that tacky display stuff until they\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n Minutes later, my friend got a phone call from Tower\u2019s 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 \u2018great man\u2019s\u2019 ego doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I tell these stories not to be glib, but to make a point. The reason I decided to listen to the \u201cwrite about James Levine\u201d voice was that I couldn\u2019t stand the \u201cgreat musician, great guy, pity about the scandals,\u201d fake dualism anymore. James Levine wasn\u2019t a great figure with a single tragic flaw. You can\u2019t be a lifelong sexual predator, grooming, coercing, blackmailing, bribing and manipulating children<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve seen people do a lot of stupid and reckless stuff in my life.<\/p>\n But I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n By the time Levine got that job, \u201cstories about James Levine\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t know or understand what he was. By the time the BSO appointed Levine, everyone<\/em> in classical music knew what he was. I remember telling a colleague at the time \u201cwhen this comes out, the BSO may well go out of business.\u201d I literally couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Why??????<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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\u2019t Berlin take him when Karajan died? Why didn\u2019t Chicago choose him when Solti left? And on, and on\u2026. In fact, other than Munich (who have long a soft spot for darkly crazy maesetri), no other orchestra<\/em> that could afford him had ever wanted him as a music director.<\/p>\n The amazing thing under the circumstances was that Levine\u2019s tenure in Boston was worse<\/em> 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 \u201cJimmy is a genius\u201d fund to pay for his \u2018ambitious projects\u2019 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?<\/p>\n Levine\u2019s much vaunted \u2018commitment to new music\u2019 at the BSO only really comprised two composers \u2013 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\u00a0 (Word on the street was that he turned two pages in a very difficult passage. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a long and necessary book to be written about Levine\u2019s 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\u2019t give? For seasons he wasn\u2019t 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<\/em> that forty million spent? What legacy did it create?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019m 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\u2019s sense of duty and charity during Covid? Or in the preceding decades?<\/p>\n James Levine was not a great man with a single tragic flaw. He was an almost completely horrible person, with a single tragic talent.<\/p>\n Was he the greatest American conductor of his generation?<\/p>\n 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<\/em> musicians compose, explore and arrange. They research, they challenge assumptions, they create and they re-invent. He didn\u2019t create, he didn\u2019t compose, he didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s something I can\u2019t 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\u2019t think of any opera in which his recording would be my first choice, and there are many where I feel that once you\u2019ve heard the real thing, his interpretations seem pretty pale \u2013 particularly in Wagner. Without the world\u2019s greatest singers at his side, I can\u2019t 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\u2019s Mahler 3 into the official version of \u2018his\u2019 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.<\/p>\n It astonishes me that some on the internet have chosen to defend Levine on the basis that he was a victim of \u2018cancel culture.\u2019 And that it\u2019s not fair to disregard a life of \u2018great\u2019 music making because of a single character flaw or error of judgement. But let\u2019s 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\u2019s had a life, and her suffering was brief. Levine\u2019s victims had their childhoods and their futures stolen from them, and they\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what cancel culture is.<\/p>\n Cancel culture is that the voice on my shoulder saying \u201cdon\u2019t write about James Levine\u201d is saying things like \u201cbecause you\u2019ll never work at the BSO or the Met.\u201d Well, they haven\u2019t exactly been booking me every week, so that\u2019s fine. That voice is saying \u201cdon\u2019t question his musical genius, because the leading critics in America have spent the last 30 years telling everyone he\u2019s the greatest conductor since Bernstein, and critics have long memories.\u201d That voice is saying \u201cdon\u2019t 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.\u201d That voice is saying \u201cdon\u2019t speak ill of the dead, it\u2019s wrong.\u201d Well, if someone is \u2018ill\u2019 and you can\u2019t speak of them when they\u2019re alive, and you can\u2019t speak of them when they\u2019re dead, then I guess you can\u2019t 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\u2019ve lived, I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n UPDATE<\/p>\n Thanks to everyone for your words of support.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\nPart Two – Boston<\/h2>\n
Part Three – The Artistic Legacy<\/h2>\n
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