No one who follows classical music can have been remotely surprised by the announcement that came in from the Metropolitan Opera earlier today: James Levine, who has been the dominant artistic presence at the company for forty years, will retire as music director at the end of the current season. Levine’s health problems—Parkinson’s Disease and an array of other ailments—have hampered his work for years, not only at the Met but in his earlier position at the Boston Symphony. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, seemed on the point of announcing Levine’s departure earlier in the year, although he was persuaded to hold off while the conductor’s doctors adjusted his medications. Alas, these treatments seem not to have sufficed. Anyone who has seen the progress of Parkinson’s at close quarters knows that it is often relentless in its advance.
All the same, the news comes as a conceptual shock, because no one under the age of fifty—myself included—can remember a time when Levine wasn’t the frizzy-haired man on the Met podium. He was always there, eyes alight, sweat on his brow, hands caressing the air. He has led more than two thousand and five hundred performances of more than eighty-five different operas; his brisk, effusive technique has been adequate to them all, and superior in many cases. He is an outwardly voluble man who has kept his personal life hidden, and few people, even those who have worked with him for decades, can say that they know him well. But as a musical personality he has exuded warmth and inspired trust.
Levine’s greatest achievement was to raise the Met orchestra to a technical and interpretive level that rivals that of any leading European ensemble. The concert series that he inaugurated at Carnegie Hall, in the nineteen-nineties, felt almost like a taunt directed at other orchestras who came through New York on tour. On relatively short notice, the Met players could put together a performance of, say, Strauss’s “Don Quixote” that lost nothing in comparison with what the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonic had recently offered in the same space. (That the Berliners had declined to hire Levine as a replacement for Herbert von Karajan may have added to the sense of rivalry.) To have an orchestra of that caliber playing opera on a nightly basis was an immense luxury. It was a sound of burnished strength, seldom forced, never ugly. When it came time for, say, a quartet of cellos to play the letter-writing music in Act III of “Tosca,” in the buildup to “E lucevan le stelle,” the immaculate beauty of the tone could make you feel a little dizzy.
Levine’s tenure has hardly been immune to criticism. Peter G. Davis, the former classical-music critic of New York, once remarked that at a typical Levine performance all the notes glowed in place, like “shiny new pennies,” but that a sense of drama and mystery had gone missing. Plenty of performances I heard contradicted that generalization—in Wagner, Strauss, and Berg, especially, Levine could summon an atmosphere of brooding power—yet the accusation is not unjust. He is more a pure musician than a man of the theatre; he has fostered strong relationships with several generations of singers, but has never seemed in his element collaborating with directors and with singing actors. And his possessive hold over the orchestra has sometimes made it difficult for fellow conductors to find their way to the Met.
The chief failing of the Levine era at the Met was the company’s sparse, spotty record with contemporary opera. Not until 1991 did Levine get around to presenting a world première, in the form of John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles.” That piece has found a footing in the American repertory, but its successors at the Met—Philip Glass’s “The Voyage,” John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby,” Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,” and Tan Dun’s “The First Emperor”—are a rather miscellaneous group. Levine’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for such major opera composers as John Adams, Thomas Adès, and Kaija Saariaho seemed to delay their progress toward the Met. Latter-day masterpieces like Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten,” Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre,” and Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise” have gone unheard there.
Let’s hope that whoever takes over the music-director post will bring more urgency to the cultivation of new work and to the interaction of music and theatre. The leading candidate is said to be Yannick Nézet-Séguin, presently the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a short Amtrak ride away. Nézet-Séguin has the musical chops, and as a personality he is considerably more extroverted and approachable than Levine. Whether we will often feel again the Levinian sense of wonder, the sensuous maxing-out of orchestral and vocal sound, remains to be seen. If Levine is able to maintain a presence on the podium in future seasons—he has been named music director emeritus—that sound will probably materialize from nowhere, merely with the addition of his presence. Meanwhile, endless ovations are certain to greet his final performances of the season, in May, and they will be deserved. The story of Levine at the Met is one of inexhaustible devotion.
