James Levine, Former Met Opera Maestro, Is Dead at 77
In 1966, while still working under Szell in Cleveland, Mr. Levine founded the University Circle Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians particularly interested in contemporary music. The next year he conducted the premiere of Milton Babbitt’s “Correspondences,” a formidably difficult 12-tone work, with the orchestra, and won its composer’s lasting admiration.
In March 2018 the Boston Globe published a long expose of Mr. Levine’s years with this student ensemble in Cleveland, drawing upon some two dozen interviews with former students and musicians, who described a cultlike atmosphere that developed around Mr. Levine, even though he was not much older. The participants, who became known as “Levinites,” recalled belittlement from their mentor, loyalty tests and even group sex.
Just 15 years after his Met debut, Mr. Levine’s leadership role there was formalized in 1986 when he became the house’s artistic director, a title that was scaled back to music director in 2004 when he began his tenure with the Boston Symphony.
He had other important associations as well. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1976 conducting Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” in a landmark Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production. In 1982 he made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, conducting the centennial production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” At the time Bayreuth was still tainted by the anti-Semitism of Wagner and certain of Wagner’s descendants, who ran the festival during the rise of the Nazis and hobnobbed with Hitler. The festival directors purposefully entrusted this milestone production to Mr. Levine, who was Jewish. “Parsifal,” a work he conducted with spacious, luminous eloquence, became a Levine specialty.
Though he made 20th-century operas like Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” Berg’s “Lulu” and Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” central to the Met’s identity, Mr. Levine could not turn the company into a house that nurtured new opera. For such a prestigious international institution, the Met’s list of premieres during the Levine era, including works by John Corigliano, John Harbison, Philip Glass, Tobias Picker and Tan Dun, was not long.
In interviews over the years Mr. Levine asserted that he tried to commission new works, but that the Met was a monumental, slow-moving institution. He once also lamented the dearth of good-enough new operas.
In the 1990s Mr. Levine’s relationship with Joseph Volpe, the Met’s effective, pugnacious general manager, was sometimes fraught. Mr. Volpe respected Mr. Levine and gave him most of what he wanted, but put the brakes to financially risky projects (like a concert performance of Mahler’s daunting “Symphony of a Thousand”) and several commissioning ideas.
