I WILL ADMIT, in answer to the question, that I was a bit of a sucker for the James Levine legend, though I could hear with my own ears that under his direction the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra played at an incredibly high level. Maybe I wouldn't have if I didn't hear that. Over the seven years of him being musical director of the Boston Symphony it was good to hear some modern repertoire, something that the previous music director had not been very interested in. I will admit that as his tenure continued the bloom was off the rose, some of those performances were nothing like as good as those I heard on the Met broadcasts and there were constant rumblings of frustration with Levine coming out of those who would have the most credibility to judge his work with them, the musicians. His demands on them were ridiculous and the frustration of him wasting the extremely expensive and demanding extra rehearsals he made a condition of them hiring him AS HE SIGHT READ AND GOT LOST IN SCORES HE HAD NOT STUDIED SUFFICIENTLY BEFORE WASTING TIME SIGHT-READING THEM IN FRONT OF SOME OF THE BEST MUSICIANS IN THE WORLD didn't make it down to me.
When his health problems that would have led a responsible conductor to retire forced the musicians to call it quits - reportedly after a rehearsal where he was so ga-ga on pain killers that it was a total disaster - I'd figured he was ready for retirement.
And that was before any of the scandal of his serial rape, torture (literally), humiliation, degradation, blackmailing and grooming of young men, but also some young women AND CHILDREN WELL UNDER THE AGE OF CONSENT, some as young as 12 years old THAT WE KNOW OF had made it to my ears. I'm kind of shocked that none of the musicians I knew of, including a member of the Met chorus didn't tell me about that, some of it going back more than fifty years, I'd never have gotten suckered by the legend.
I don't care who it is who performs or composes at the top level, there are some things you never overlook. If such stuff were proven about my favorite composer, I'd never touch or listen to his music again, I wouldn't teach it. Ironically in terms of last weekend's little brawl here, there were a number of years when I gave up Stravinsky because in 1930 he made statements in favor of Mussolini who was all the rage in modernist circles in the arts and lit, and disparaging of democracy. I don't think I've listened to or looked at the score for the Symphony of Psalms since I read those remarks (other than that I've never been a fan of his neo-classical period stuff, neo-classicism often being a symptom of fascism). He did change his mind quite a bit with the start of WWII and the revelations of the crimes of the fascists and, especially the Nazis. America had a generally positive influence on him. For me, his personal recovery of some of his status was due to Susanna Heschel pointing out that someone who joined the Nazi Party in 1930 may well have not understood what they were joining up to - especially if they left it later - but that someone who joined it in 1937 doesn't have that excuse. Someone who acts the way a fascist would act starting in the late 1960s doesn't get any slack with me. Especially if they rape children and otherwise use them like Levine did.
One of the articles linked to pointed out the enormous risk that the management and board of the Boston Symphony took in hiring him when they would certainly have known the rumors and maybe even the covered-up arrests of James Levine, the article pointed out what could have happened if he were still working as music director there when the inevitable scandal broke. He was, in fact, banned from entire countries, cities, etc. due to his criminal behavior. It pointed out that the luck they had in having let him go a few years before the scandal broke may have meant that the august BSO didn't get shut down but it also meant the irresponsible jerks who took that risk never had to answer for their irresponsibility. I haven't gone into the $40 million dollar slush fund Levine demanded and got - something I hadn't seen reported but would have thought was outrageous in itself. What they were thinking of I can't imagine though I might wonder if kickbacks didn't figure into it. There would have had to be some inducement either in graft or in star-struck idiocy to make them do something that incredibly irresponsible and stupid.
Needless to say, I don't play my relatively few recordings he conducted anymore. I might eventually throw them out to make room for something else. I never did much buy opera on disc, listening to it on the radio, instead.
The high end of the classical music world is far more corrupt than I used to think it was, I think that's almost inevitable with the salaries and money involved in it. I am thankful that I never worked at that level, I'd rather work down where I have where there is less incentive to cover up wrongdoing and far less of a motive for victims of it to keep silent. Levine, like stage directors and producers got away with a lot because of their power to make or break careers their victims aspired to have. No one in the arts should have that kind of power, certainly not without a far higher level of scrutiny that would prevent that kind of abuse of power and manipulation of those with less power. It makes me sick to think of what he got away with, what others, no doubt, still get away with. He belonged in prison, not waving a baton in front of an orchestra.
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