The Met May Not Survive the James Levine Disgrace
By Justin Davidson*, vulture.com, December 3, 2017
... For decades, the Met was essentially the Levine Company. Its identity was intertwined with his. His taste in composers, his relationships with singers, his hires, orchestra, conducting style, and even, for a while, his eye for productions all shaped what happened onstage in seven performances a week. Divas remained loyal to the Met because they felt safe onstage so long as he was in the pit. Audiences burst into applause as soon as his corona of springy curls bobbed into the spotlight. Critics — and I include myself — lauded his leadership as well as his musicality. His cheery, seemingly eternal presence thrilled the board and helped keep the spigot of donations open.
I’m not sure the Met can survive Levine’s disgrace. The company is an outgrowth from, and a uniquely regressive example of, the 19th-century commercial opera houses that flourished through specialization, activity, and growth. August companies erected massive buildings, mounted expensive shows, packed in audiences, and concentrated prestige in the hands of very few gatekeepers, all of them men. That power structure produced a century and a half of lavishly misogynistic operas in which women are constantly going mad, turning into prostitutes, dying, or all three. Many companies in Europe and around the U.S. have somehow managed to find their way to the 21st century. But the Met, the world’s largest and busiest opera house, is also among the most cumbersome and conservative. In the past 40 years, it has hired just four female conductors and performed exactly one opera by a woman composer. With a crushing overhead and too many seats to sell every night, the company survives on a diminishing diet of goodwill.
In his heyday, Levine was the antidote to decline — the star-maker, prestige keeper, and donation magnet who could keep an antiquated system from showing its age. Over the last 15 years, his health and the Met’s fortunes have dimmed in sync. Soon it will all be gone: Levine; those who protected him; Peter Gelb, the general manager who quietly cooperated with last year’s Lake Forest police report and launched an investigation only after the news came out; the donors who ignored the possibility that their hero might be a pedophile. Will the Met be able to build back from that catastrophe? I hope so, but the company was already having a tough time surviving well before Mephistopheles finally showed up to collect on that decades-old deal.
* Justin Davidson is a classical music critic who, in 2002, won the Pulitzer Prize for his work.
James Levine puts the existence of the Met Opera at risk
SALON, December 4, 2017
... Full reporting and the victim's claims suggest that the Opera knew of the allegations some time ago. That, coupled with other accusations and the Met's already declining fortunes may mean this particular set of accusations — so similar to the many we have heard over the last few months since the exposés detailing Harvey Weinstein's purported history of sexual abuse — constitutes an existential threat to one of America's more well-regarded cultural institutions.
The Times reports that Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, confirmed to the paper that other allegations concerning Levine's behavior "had reached the Met administration’s upper levels twice before, to his knowledge." One was the case above, and the second, first brought to the Met's attention in 1979, came in from the Met's former Executive Director Andrew Bliss, who "wrote a letter to a board member about unspecified accusations about Mr. Levine that had been made in an unsigned letter."
Even at this early stage of the Met's self investigation, there are two incidents of the institution not quickly and comprehensively responding to allegations tied to Levine. That in and of itself opens the opera up to possible liability from any of his past victims. Given that the Times has found two other men willing to accuse Levine of misconduct and, as it writes, "speculation surrounding Mr. Levine’s private life has swirled in classical music circles for decades," it is possible to imagine that there will be more victims coming forward, more tales of institutional malfeasance and more potential for more lawsuits on the way.
None of this is anything the Met can afford right now. While sales this year have slightly improved, the opera is still generally in the midst of a long decline at the box office. The Met has depended more on philanthropic giving than show receipts for years. Giving and income are still generally strong; however, that has come at the price of concessions from unions, wage decreases and cost cutting across the board. Simply put, less money is going into what you see during a night at the opera, and not enough people are paying enough for it.
But all of that is a symptom of a deeper problem. A box at the Met no longer carries the same sort of cultural cachet it once did. When the Met actively targets millennials with discounts and marketing campaigns, it's because the elite whales are either aging out or visiting less. Currently, Gelb isn't just trying to carry the company from season to season — he's trying to establish a future for opera in New York City, one that isn't secured.
Fighting for continued relevance and working hard to fill up seats is hard enough when you're not handling the same sort of scandal that has, elsewhere, destroyed once-esteemed studios. Where the Met was once flirting with a manageable disaster, Levine may have pushed it to the precipice.
