Trinity Church Fires Julian Wachner

Monument in the Trinity Church graveyard

Well, that didn't take long. On February 28, Trinity Church learned of a sexual assault allegation against its choir director Julian Wachner, who runs their very well-funded music programs. (Trinity owns real estate in NYC and has an investment portfolio worth $6 billion, which is not a typo. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have held on to real property since the 18th c.) He was put on leave within the last couple of days, as Javier C. Hernández reported yesterday. Today, Trinity fired him, issuing a statement indicating that it "concluded based on recent information that Julian has otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position."

I saw some comments on Facebook indicating that Wachner has a reputation for bullying people he works with in various capacities, which would be sufficient reason, in my opinion, to fire someone. Trinity's statement says that the investigation into him is ongoing.

Compare and contrast Trinity's actions with those of, say, the Metropolitan Opera, which heard those rumors about James Levine for decades before finally being forced to conduct an investigation that found credible evidence of his misbehavior.

 

Levine Coverage

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The coverage of James Levine's demise is....interesting. There are a few people trying to be "fair", meaning they are trying to be "balanced" despite Levine's alleged crimes (and everything noncriminal involved with brushing his health problems under the nearest rug). 

I realize that an obituary written by a journalist as news, running in a newspaper, is supposed to assess the whole of its subject's life, but there is such a thing as soft-pedaling and there is definitely quite a bit of that around. There is lots of room for arts-related opinion pieces that really dissect Levine's career and that work to understand how he managed to stay in one of the most powerful positions in the U.S. classical music world for decades despite the rumors that swirled around him. (And why the BSO hired him to be their music director despite the rumors and his health problems.) That's the kind of thing I'd like to see more of. 

I want to note a couple of factual items that came out after the announcement of his death:

1. Levine died of natural causes. The exact cause hasn't been released, but in addition to wondering whether he'd died as the result of injuries suffered in a fall, I also wondered whether suicide was the cause.

2. In December, 2019, he married his friend? companion? life partner? Suzanne Thompson, the oboist, with whom he lived for many years. The question marks should be read in the context of his alleged fondness for underage males.

Here's a round-of of coverage of Levine's death. Note that I have not yet read all of this, so there isn't commentary on every link yet. There will be, but not until this weekend.

• Composer, teacher, and performer Elaine Fine discusses the evolution of her thinking about musicians, in a compassionate and thoughtful way. 
• Conductor and cellist Kenneth Woods has a scorching blog post  that tells you a lot about what kind of a person that Levine was. Unusually, I suggest reading the comments, which are informative and include an extensive comment by a long-time Met orchestra member. I have elsewhere read a report to the effect that Levine would talk to singers through an intermediary, which is weird for someone whose job it is to work with singers.
• Joshua Kosman (SF Chron) tells you about what the reactions to Levine's death tell you about the people making the pronouncements.
• AZ Madonna (Boston Globe) calls for the end of genius-worship. Here is Madonna's earlier call for Peter Gelb's resignation. 
• Jeremy Eichler, Globe, obituary 
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times: obituary
• Anthony Tommasini, NY Times: appraisal
• NY Times: timeline of Levine's career
• Boston Symphony, notice of Levine's passing. It is very short, and finishes with two sentences that tell the heart of the story: "The last period of his tenure as BSO music director was plagued by ill health, which resulted in his resignation in 2011. Subsequently, there emerged allegations of sexual improprieties which virtually ended his career as many musical institutions severed ties with him, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra."
• William R. Braun, Opera News, obituary
• Justin Davidson, vulture.com, obituary
• Tim Page, Washington Post, obituary
• Michael Andor Brodeur, Washington Post, appraisal
• Guardian, obituary
• Tom Jacobs, SFCV, appraisal, worse than soft-pedaling. He seems to be trying to excuse Levine somehow. Note the outraged comment from composer and violist Kurt Rohde.

You Don't Say.

Received from the Google Search Console; formerly Webmaster Tools:

Here is how some of your top queries performed in the week of Mar 15, 2021 to Mar 21, 2021:

• Query: james levine metropolitan opera
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 Not only is this unsurprising for a classical music blog in the week that James Levine's death was announced, Blogger helpfully includes a panel that's basically Google Analytics Lite, with inflated statistics because it doesn't even try to screen out likely spam, as Analytics does. I happened to check that panel last week.

Levine's Reputation

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

The various obituaries for the late James Levine are heaping praise on him, and honestly, you should be asking yourself how much of this is even deserved.

The over-inflation of James Levine's reputation comes from various sources. Back when he stepped down as Music Director, Anthony Tommasini praised his interest in modern music and expansion of the repertory, citing Pelleas et Melisande (1902) and Berg's operas (1922; 1937) as evidence. Come ON.

The Met continues this on their home page, where they state the following:

Celebrated for shaping the Met Orchestra and Chorus into the finest in the world, he was also responsible for considerably expanding the Met repertoire. Levine conducted the first-ever Met performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani, I Lombardi and Stiffelio, Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Moses und Aron, Berg’s Lulu, Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, as well as the world premieres of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles and John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby.

There's plenty of bullshit in that quotation. The Met Orchestra is a terrific group, for sure, the equal of the best American and European orchestras. Saying it's the "first in the world" seems to me to be stretching things, owing to the many, many superb ensembles performing today.

The Chorus is an excellent group, though maybe not as great as, say, the amazing Bayreuth Festival chorus, not to mention this key point: the Met's chorus masters train the chorus, not the music director. The current chorus master is Donald Palumbo; his immediate predecessor was Raymond Hughes; before that was the legendary David Stivender. My recollection is that Stivender should get a lot of credit for the group's excellence and I know that Palumbo is considered to be a terrific musician and chorus master.

If those are all the Met premieres that Levine conducted, I would call that pathetic for his 45-year tenure. I count fifteen (15) operas. They weren't the only Met / world premieres between 1972 and 2017 by any means, and presumably Levine gets some credit for changes to the rep. With a schedule of 20-25 operas annually, though, a conductor who was truly dedicated to expanding the repertory would have found more works new to the Met to lead. 

It's also important to remember that Levine stated publicly and has been widely quoted as saying that there just weren't enough new operas that were good enough for the Met. This is also total bullshit, to which the only proper response was "maybe you should get out a little more, Jimmy." Under Levine, the Met managed to perform its second opera composed by a woman, more than a century since the first, and managed to not perform any operas composed by Black people, although the company did manage to commission and perform Tan Dun's The First Emperor.

But the Met was late to an awful lot: the company commissioned Philip Glass's The Voyage, then waited until 2008 for Satyagraha (premiered in 1979) and 2019 for Akhnaten (premiered in 1984). They were decades behind other groups, both production originated at the ENO, and both have been extremely popular. John Adams's Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghofer had long waits, though Doctor Atomic made it to the Met stage only three years after its first performances in San Francisco.

Their Janacek record is also terrible! Except for the two 1925 performances of Jenufa, San Francisco was ahead of the Met in performing The Makropulos Case, Kat'a Kabanova, and modern performances of Jenufa. We've had The Cunning Little Vixen, but (alas) not From the House of the Dead, where the Met did perform it in 2009.

We need also to take a look at Levine's record as music director of the Boston Symphony. I did, the other day, and while his record of performing new music there was better than I thought, it was also narrowly focused. He performed works by Bolcolm, Carter, Ligeti, Wuorinen, Sessions, Harbison, Lutoslawski, Messiaen, Babbitt, Perle, Schuller, Foss, Lieberson, Dawe, Duttileux, Barber, Poulenc, Milhaud among post-war and living composers, plus a fair bit of Berg and Schoenberg.

I would have gone to most of the concerts featuring those composers, but he missed an awful lot of good composers. (You can check this yourself at the BSO's performance archive.)

Lastly, here's Peter Gelb:

“No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.”

It's difficult to compare the impact and influence of artists working in very different periods, and clearly Gelb means "on the Met", but I must note that the Met's chief conductors included Arturo Toscanini, who had a profound impact on orchestral quality and was a champion of new music in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however seemingly conservative he became as he aged. And you can currently find plenty of criticism of Levine's actual conducting, from interpretive blandness to technical deterioration starting in the 1990s, to the point that for at least part of this century, the orchestra was following the concertmaster rather than Levine. Why would a big institution like the Met keep a music director who was losing the ability to conduct? (Toscanini retired from the NBC Symphony after one memory lapse that we know of.) Well, that's an interesting question, now, isn't it.

Secrets, Lies, and Levine

James Levine, serial child rapist and longtime conductor / music director / artistic director at the Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony Orchestra, died on March 9, 2021, in Palm Springs, CA, at 77. The cause of death has not (yet) been announced. It could have been Parkinson's Disease, which Levine had for an unknown number of years, or it could have been from complications of a fall (he was injured at least twice in bad falls), or it could have been some completely unrelated issue, such as a stroke or heart attack or cancer.

You can read obituaries in the NY Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere about Levine's musical career, or you can peruse the Met annals or read reviews. I have a few, mostly non-musical, things to say.

1. He lied to the public over a very long time about his health.

2. He might have lied to the Metropolitan Opera about his health.

3. If the Met knew about his health problems, they covered for him.

4. He lied to the public about his long history of sexual abuse.

5. He presumably lied to the Met about the abuse.

6. The Met covered for him.

7. He bamboozled a lot of people, including reasonably smart journalists, into thinking that he had  been a major expander of the Met's repertory. He was not. Check the label Levine on this blog; there's a  post where I debunked this ludicrous claim. 

See the pattern? A powerful man who was financially important to a cultural institution,  and an institution ready to lie to protect him.*

If you think that the Met didn't know about the abuse, or at the very least the forty-plus years of rumors of abuse, there is a bridge I would like to sell you, and I will give you your choice of bridges, even. 

I knew about the rumors as a grad student at Stony Brook. Terry Teachout, who then lived in his home state of Missouri, knew the rumors in the 1970s. A fellow posting on Twitter a few years back said "I was a 17-year-old in LA and I knew the rumors." The parents of children in the kids' chorus at the BSO (or maybe it was Tanglewood) told their kids not to ever be alone with him. The late composer Matt Marks noted that "I knew when I was 15, and if I knew, the Met knew."

The Met knew; they covered for his health problems and they covered for the abuse. There's a lot of criminal behavior to around. With Levine gone, maybe more of the facts around Levine and the cover-ups will come out.

* See also, Domingo, Placido

Annals of Music Journalism

The NY Times, caught flat-footed without a pre-written obituary and somehow omitting Parkinson's disease, from which Levine suffered:

Here's the Washington Post, with an obit on file, publishing just a little too hastily:

DATETK = DATE TO COME

PLACETK = PLACE TO COME

XXX = person who made public the death

A friend points out privately that there are discrepancies between these two obits as to various date-related factors, including his age at his Met debut. Presumably these will be corrected at some point.

Monday Miscellany

Various odd ends I've had floating around.

• Philip de Oliveira, writing in Scene, tells it like it is with the Cleveland Orchestra (and oh so many others): After 100 Years, the Cleveland Orchestra Continues to Ignore Women, Minorities, and Living Composers. The comments...well, mostly, don't read them.
• Jill Radsken discusses composer Shirley Graham's Tom-Tom: In 1932, this opera was hit. Why has no one seen it since? The answer to that question is pretty easy!
• The Beeb tells you about some women who've been erased from music history.
• Dennis Polkow bemoans the sacrifice of a broad operatic repertory in favor of musicals at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
• Justin Davidson on the Met Semiramide, which I liked a whole lot. 
• Jenna Ross at the Star Tribune: Minnesota music scene finally amplifying women composers.
• Aubrey Bergauer of the California Symphony: A Public Commitment to Diversity. "Because we have to start somewhere and be willing to be held accountable." Yep, yep, yep. And every orchestra should be doing this.
• Malcolm Guy, Boston Globe: Area musicians call on BSO to diversity programming. (The BSO's recently-announced 2018-19 season is markedly better than previous seasons.)
• Oldie but goodie: In the wake of the Levine allegations, the BSO planned to review its sexual harassment policies. Considering that their way of dealing with Dutoit was to warn women not to be alone with him....

Popcorn and Lawn Chair Time

Lincoln Center Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

February 28, 2018

Let me all encourage you to read Kalimac's excellent posting about James Levine, which he published earlier today. He took Johanna Fiedler's Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera out of the library and reports on what she had to say about Levine back in 2001. I will say no more; just read his post.

You might have thought that the Met's firing of Levine on Monday was the end of the story. Terry Teachout disagrees with this, as his column in the WSJ said. (I am not a subscriber and haven't read it yet.)

And today, well: James Levine is suing the Met, and that's the reason for my post title. The link is to Michael Cooper's article on the lawsuit.

First off, the lawsuit is for breach of contract and defamation. Items of note: As music director emeritus, Levine was to be paid $400,000/year for ten years, plus $27,000 for every performance he conducts. Usually, you can only get this sort of thing from an institution's 990 form, an IRS form filed by nonprofits that is available to the public. 

Second, the lawsuit states that Levine's contract contains no provision for the Met to fire or suspend him. Well, I'd love to see that contract! It's common for contracts of this type to contain morals clauses, which lay out behaviors for which one party can be fired. If I were the Met, and I had a good lawyer (and you bet they do), and I had heard the rumors about Levine, well, any contracts I had with him would contain such a clause.

Third, of course Levine is denying everything, as he has from the start. 

Fourth, there's this:

The lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, states that Mr. Levine “has clearly and unequivocally denied any wrongdoing in connection with those allegations,” and paints his firing as a result of an effort by the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, “to oust Levine from the Met and completely erase his legacy from the organization.”

Let's stipulate that it just isn't possible to erase Levine's legacy from the organization. What could the Met do? Delete 2500 performances from the archive database? Round up every copy of every recording and video Levine made with the company and toss them in the Hudson?  Demand that the Times get rid of every review ever published of his performances?

UPDATE: A friend advises that the Met appears to have updated their website to remove Levine's name from the company history page and administration page. Okay, so he's no longer an administrator, but removing hims from the history page? However much they'd like to wash their hands of him, there he was, for 40+ years.[end update]

Seriously, they can remove his name from plaques and take down any portraits of him, but that's about it. The man's influence on the institution, for better and for worse, cannot be denied or erased.

As far as efforts to oust Levine from the Met: wow, that's going to be a tough one. I mean, it's entirely possible that Gelb wanted to remove Levine long ago. Levine's health problems would have been sufficient reason to move him out of the music directorship, and they have been evident for many years. The truth is that the Met kept him around long past the point when he should have been removed (or gently eased out....although my guess is that Levine fought, or would have fought, any attempts to ease him out).

Really, I hope this goes to trial. I can only imagine what will be turned up in discovery. Because Levine's suit discusses details of his contract with the Met, we might actually get to see the whole thing, and these contracts are super hush-hush. And one can imagine who might be deposed: Levine's victims? His long-time housemate / best friend Suzanne Thompson, a former oboist? 

Lastly, I'm waiting to see Levine file a defamation suit against the Boston Globe, over their story the other week. It sure looked well-sourced and well-reported to me, not like "vague and unsubstantiated accusations in the press."

Met Fires Levine

Michael Cooper has the story: James Levine's Final Act at the Met Ends in Disgrace.

What a surprise!

Yes, after 40 years of rumors, the Met was able to determine, in just three and a half months, that there's credible evidence that Levine abused young musicians over whom he had authority. They found evidence that this happened both before and during his employment at the Met. "During" is especially interesting, because the published reports are mostly from the late 60s and early 70s, before he joined the Met.

The Met is not releasing any details beyond saying that their investigation included interviews with more than 70 people. This part of the Times article is....interesting:

But some questions arose early on about how the company had handled the case, including the fact that it began its investigation more than a year after Peter Gelb, its general manager, was first told that the police in Illinois were investigating an accusation that Mr. Levine had sexually abused a teenage boy there in the 1980s.

Mr. Gelb has said he briefed the leadership of the Met’s board about the police investigation and spoke with Mr. Levine, who denied the accusations. But Mr. Gelb said that the company took no further action, waiting to see what the police found.

The Met said that its investigation, which was led by Robert J. Cleary, a partner at the Proskauer Rose law firm who was previously a United States attorney in New Jersey and Illinois, had determined that “any claims or rumors that members of the Met’s management or its board of directors engaged in a cover-up of information relating to these issues are completely unsubstantiated.”

Well, Anthony Bliss knew about the rumors, because of an anonymous letter, and he has to have passed the information along to his immediate successors (Bruce Crawford and Hugh Southern, then Joe Volpe). It's certainly curious that the Met was able to obtain enough information now to declare the accusations credible, but could not back in the day.

The Levine Cult

Here's a stunning report from the Boston Globe about the cult that James Levine ran in Cleveland. It is creepy as hell, because of the way he manipulated the cult members into various sexual encounters and used various mind control techniques.

An enterprising reporter is eventually going to find someone who got paid off to keep quiet about Levine. You know such people are out there, right?

Process

I've been posted here and there on the internet about the Levine and Dutoit sexual abuse cases. I've gotten some comments about process and the swift ending of careers in the cases of both the conductors. Herein some thoughts on process.

There was an article in the Washington Post a couple of weeks back about a sexual harassment case in a completely different part of the public world, but it's awfully similar in some ways to what happened with Dutoit, different in other ways that bear on Dutoit.

The case in question is that of Judge Alex Kozinski. Some features of the situation:

• Kozinski has a long history of questionable behavior.
• Multiple women attesting to this.
• Incidents took place over decades.
• There's a whisper network of women warning each other about him.
• These women generally told friends and family what had happened contemporaneously with the harassment.
• Non-denial denials: "In an initial statement to The Post, Kozinski said he would 'never intentionally do anything to offend anyone and it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done.'"
• The federal judiciary has a procedure for dealing with this stuff, and a judge asked Chief Justice Roberts to appoint a an investigator. Kozinsky resigned (retired) a few days later.

Kozinski was not reported earlier in part because clerking is a big stepping stone in a lawyer's career and women he'd behaved inappropriately with were concerned about the effects of complaining on their careers. That's also a feature of the Dutoit case, where the conductor could hire or not hire soloists, and it's a feature of other music business harassment cases, I expect - nobody knows how many unreported harassers there are.

Also regarding Dutoit, with several of these orchestras, he resigned ahead of being fired. What I understand is that music director contracts almost always have "morals clauses," which govern how the MD is to behave, including not making the orchestra look bad. Guest conductor contracts can contain clauses setting forth circumstances under which an orchestra can fire the conductor. I would expect that some of these do cover the conductor's behavior. So that is part of the process: Dutoit signed contracts knowing what they contained and what the expectations are.

It is difficult to set a procedure for how to handle incidents that are far in the past. There's the question of whether behavior is unacceptable or illegal. There are statutes of limitations that come into play, but an organization that has someone under contract is also not obliged to ignore reports of past bad behavior, especially when there are reports from unrelated people and the incidents took place over decades. The fact that Dutoit withdrew from some engagements is telling, also: if these incidents never happened, he is free to hire a lawyer and take action against the accusers. He is apparently not doing this and his denials are of the sort "something happened and they're interpreting it differently from me."

Earlier this week, another six women came forward about their past experiences with Dutoit. He is alleged to have raped one of these women. Several of the women went on the record, though not the rape victim. Anne Sophie Schmidt, a now-retired opera singer, says that Dutoit never hired her again after she refused him.

Dutoit's behavior hasn't been a secret. Back in 1995, journalist Natasha Gauthier reported on this; nobody denied it and no orchestras did anything about it. The Philadelphia Orchestra passed over him twice as a potential music director because of his reputation for "extreme flirtatiousness" (and what a euphemism / lie that is).

The problem isn't that abusers such as Levine and Dutoit are losing their careers because of a lack of process. The problem is that musical organizations didn't have processes in place to protect musicians and other members of their organizations.

Here's an example: Fiona Allan, who says that Dutoit assaulted her at Tanglewood, was told the following by the BSO's manager:  "Before you see maestro, I need to tell you something,” she recalled the manager saying. “Look, we advise, we’ve had some complaints, and I wouldn’t go in there alone." That was the BSO's process! What bullshit! This was in 1997, 20 years ago, when Allan was an intern at Tanglewood. So if you see the BSO claiming that they never knew about Dutoit, well, they are lying. And if the BSO knew, other orchestras knew also.

If you work at a big company, and you find evidence that an accountant - or the CFO - has embezzled a couple of million dollars, you fire that person right away, before the charges are filed or the trial is held. You can't keep someone like that around. And nobody would complain about "lack of process."

This is no different. Don't tell me all about how Dutoit and Levine's careers were destroyed because of lack of process. Their own actions destroyed their careers. It's too bad that didn't happen decades ago, before they had the chance to damage their victims' lives and careers.

The Year in Review

This was one very weird year, in so many ways. Personally, it was pretty good! My job went reasonably well, and I have the best colleagues possible in Cloud Networking Docs and generally in Cloud Docs. The only task left with my mother's estate is filing one final tax return. I did not travel as much as I would have liked to, although....Los Angeles for opera; Seattle twice for work within a one month period; NY twice, once for my mom's unveiling, my aunt Ida's unveiling, and my uncle Irving's 99th birthday party, and, ten weeks later, Irv's funeral (sigh, but he had a good long run...); once to Hawaii (not the best vacation ever for various reasons); and once to Santa Fe for opera.

Musically, I will forever remember 2017 as the year Mason Bates wrote a better opera than John Adams. At no point before the dress rehearsal of Girls of the Golden West would I have expected this, and in fact, I would have laughed at the notion.

Boy, was I wrong. While my review of GGW was not as vitriolic as Joshua Kosman's, he and I and nearly everyone else are in agreement about the weaknesses of the opera; in fact, I'm willing to bet that even reviewers who on balance liked it agree about what the weaknesses are. And everybody loved the performers, too.

That said, while Bates's The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs has obvious weaknesses (see my review for details), the music is inventive, energetic, and consistently engaging. I'm looking forward to seeing it again in SF! And wondering about the casting, since Seattle announced an almost completely new cast for their bring-up. My bet: Brian Mulligan or maybe Quinn Kelsey as Steve.

Some of the big musical highlights of 2017:

• Nixon in China at the LA Phil. Conducted by John Adams himself, gorgeously directed by Elkhana Pulitzer, and with a terrific cast, Nixon remains one of the great 20th c. additions to the operatic repertory.
• Salome at the LA Opera. A revival of an old and well-traveled Peter Hall staging and somewhat looking its age, but also with some wonderful touches. An excellent cast, led by the surprisingly convincing, and very brave, Patricia Racette. You wouldn't have thought this was her role, but her combination of musicality and total dramatic commitment makes up for the fact that her voice isn't exactly the right type or size. Beautiful and supportive conducting from James Conlon helped a lot, I am sure. The supporting cast was very fine, with Isaacha Savage a magnificent Narraboth and Alan Glassman a lyrical and convincing Herod. Savage is the real dramatic tenor deal and I look forward to seeing him in leading roles. This performance also made me a fan of the opera after decades of casually loathing it, which is why I now have five recordings of it floating around. Read Alex Ross's wonderful Gramophone roundup for recommendations.
• Das Rheingold at the NY Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert's last subscription appearance as music director of the orchestra. An excellent cast, although....I found Eric Owens a little recessed for Wotan. Jamie Barton as Fricka, Russell Thomas a real WOW as a lyrical and straightforward Loge, and Christopher Purves as the best Alberich I have seen (and I include a great performance by Richard Paul Fink at Seattle in 2001). I note that with Morris Robinson's Fasolt, this was the first non-Porgy opera I've seen with more than one African American singer! And how on earth did they get the great Stephen Milling as Fafner? Gilbert was excellent, and, by the way, there were six harps on stage, although That Hall being what it was, they weren't very audible in the upper reaches.
• Das Lied von der Erde with the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Stuart Skelton, and Karen Cargill delivering greatness all around.
• Alcina and The Golden Cockerell at Santa Fe, in addition to Steve Jobs. I hope to write up both productions in greater detail.
• Elektra at San Francisco was in the HOLY MOTHER OF GOD category, with Christine Goerke's haunted and fabulous Elektra leading the way in an absorbing, if slightly wayward, Keith Warner production set in a museum. Adrianne Pieczonka, Michaela Martens, and Alfred Walker rounded out a tremendous cast; Henrik Nanasi conducted; all my friends saw this multiple times and I only wish I'd gone to the Wednesday performance I missed.
• Manon at SFO. Okay, I'll never be a huge fan of the piece, but the sparkling production and excellent singing by Ellie Dehn and Michael Fabiano made this the second-biggest pleasant surprise of the year for me, after Steve Jobs.
• Turandot at SFO, Nina Stemme, Brian Jagde, Leah Crocetto, debuting conductor Christopher Franklin gave the best performance of this I've seen. I've got a detailed review about half done.
• Claire Chase's amazing four-hour flute recital, the first fruits of her 23 year commissioning project, Density 2036. Greatest recital I've ever seen? The review was not easy to write because you run out of superlatives pretty fast.
• Merola triple bill of La Serva Padrona, Savitri, and The Bear. Peter Kazaras's direction left a good deal to be desired, but the singing and execution did not.
• Krzysztof Urbańsk's two programs at San Francisco Symphony were simply astonishing.

And some lowlights:

• Girls of the Golden West. I've already said plenty about this.
• Berlioz Requiem at SFS, with Charles Dutoit giving an uncharacteristically weak performance.
• Frankenstein at West Edge Opera. A well-performed train wreck of an opera.

Important news:

• MTT to retire as music director of SFS in three years. Wow. I mean, I have had a lot of complaints about the degree of dead-white-guy programming, but the orchestra is in great shape and it's been a wonderful partnership. Enormous shoes to fill, etc. 
• James Levine, finally, after forty years of rumors.
• Charles Dutoit, and since his behavior was in the newspapers 22 years ago, it's not even rumors.
• Waiting for about 30 other shoes to drop.

More on Dutoit and Levine

It's been a couple of weeks since the allegations about Charles Dutoit came out.  Here are some follow-up articles about him and about James Levine.

Dutoit Denies Accusations (AP) Dutoit's comments; apparently he thinks that whatever happened was "informal physical contact." We'll see whether he actually takes legal action to defend himself.

"The allegations made against me are as shocking to me as they are to my friends and colleagues. I do not recognize the man or the actions being described in the media," Dutoit said in a brief statement emailed to the Associated Press.

"Whilst informal physical contact is commonplace in the arts world as a mutual gesture of friendship, the serious accusations made involving coercion and forced physical contact have absolutely no basis in truth. I am taking legal advice and plan to meaningfully defend myself and I believe within this current climate, media accusations on serious physical abuse do not help society tackle these issues properly if the claims are in fact not true."

By the time this article was published on December 23, Dutoit had withdrawn from or been relieved of engagements with eight (8) orchestras in the US, Europe, and Australia.

Montreal Symphony Orchestra Launches Probe (AP) This probe, at an orchestra where Dutoit was music director for 25, involves a fifth woman, in addition to the four who had previously come forward. These days, Dutoit is a guest conductor there only.

Dutoit Out at Eight Orchestras (AP) "The four women who spoke to AP said Dutoit attacked them on the sidelines of rehearsals and performances with orchestras in five cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Saratoga Springs, New York. All four told the AP they never filed formal complaints because they were young and Dutoit was the maestro; they figured they would lose their jobs, not him."

Mark Swed says some dumb things about James Levine: Among other comments: "The age-old discussion of whether you can separate art from the artist has once more been ignited." No, Mark, he's not dead and buried, like Wagner, where that is the issue. The problem with Levine is whether someone who committed unethical acts should be hired to conduct, especially given his enormous stature and influence. This is someone who could and possibly still can make or break careers. How much power do you want to give him? Do you want to let him anywhere near, say, 16-year-old, male, aspiring singers?

More stupidity: "But before everyone starts throwing stones, let me point out that we make peace with politicians, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We convince ourselves that this is the way things must be because it is the culture, until we get a Weinsteinian shock." Speak for yourself, Mark. Women have been trying to get this crap changed for, you know, decades. (Centuries?) You're old enough to remember Anita Hill, right?

And more: "It would not be unreasonable to assume that the young Levine lacked emotional maturity. The most successful musicians spend much of their lives alone practicing. They bask in praise. They attend conservatories, institutional hothouses where they hone their aggressively competitive skills to make it to the big time. They are pawns of the Wilfords, who look after careers, not lives." Oh, come on! It is amazing how many men manage not to be sexual abusers.

And more: "Levine also brought the Met into the 20th century, greatly expanding the repertory." Mark, take a look in the goddamn Met archives. This just isn't very true.

And more: "Not coincidentally, opera is an art form that abounds in the value of forgiveness and the potential for redemption." SO? Real life doesn't work that way. This is a terrible, terrible argument. Is it...a call for the men abused by Levine to forgive him? Did you read about how the abuse eroded their confidence and affected them for years and decades?

Nobody is disputing the greatness of Levine's musicianship. That's not the question and it's not central to whether he should continue to work and in what position. The question is the extent of his past acts of abuse - do you really believe they stopped in the 1970s? - and whether or not he should continue to work. (His health problems also bear on whether he should continue to conduct.)

UPDATE, re Swed: He's making lots of attempts to explain and excuse Levine, and none to hold him responsible. That's the problem.

More on James Levine

So the Met has canceled all of James Levine's performances this season, while it investigates; Ravinia has "cut ties" with him; the BSO has issued a statement about its due diligence before they hired him as music director (but now it turns out - surprise! - they'd heard the rumors but "saw no cause for concern"); Levine himself has issues a statement.

Let's take a look at some of this. Here's the BSO statement, which they put on Twitter (click to enlarge):

"We followed our standard procedures and decided to hire him. Nobody complained!" Well, sure. He wasn't going to approach adult women, girls, or adult men, and he wasn't going to assault minors at Symphony Hall. And apparently the vetting process, at least as described here, didn't include asking a few grad students or opera fans about Levine. We would have clued them in.

Seriously, it is not credible that the Met and BSO didn't know about the rumors. I heard them around 1980-82 when I was a musicology grad student at Stony Brook, from housemates who hung around Lincoln Center. Terry Teachout heard the rumors in the 1970s when he was living in Kansas City, a good 1200 miles from Lincoln Center, according to his WSJ article. And a fellow on Twitter mentions hearing the rumors in 1995, when he lived in Los Angeles and was 15 years old.

But wait - the BSO had heard the rumors! Not only that, but this extremely moving and intense piece by Ben Miller makes it perfectly clear that the rumors reached far enough that members of the BSO itself warned their children against being alone with Levine because they knew he was a pederast.

It's just amazing what institutions can manage to ignore or forget when an important person is involved.

As to Levine's statement, shudder. (Link is to Michael Cooper's NY Times article.) It is the very essence of a non-denial denial, the statement of a person who doesn't see how wrong his actions were. This is what Cooper's article quotes:

“As understandably troubling as the accusations noted in recent press accounts are, they are unfounded,” he said in a written statement. “As anyone who truly knows me will attest, I have not lived my life as an oppressor or an aggressor.”

“I have devoted my energies to the development, growth, and nurturing of music and musicians all over the world — particularly with the Metropolitan Opera where my work has been the lifeblood and passion of my artistic imagination,” he said in the statement. “My fervent hope is that in time people will come to understand the truth, and I will be able to continue my work with full concentration and inspiration.”

The second paragraph is mostly filler: I have lived a life of artistic good, including my work with musicians! I couldn't have done anything wrong! That stuff about his hope that "people will come to understand the truth" is nauseating and goes with "the [accusations] are unfounded" in the first paragraph. This all boils down to: "Sure, there was sex, but it wasn't the way my victims say! I didn't harass them and moreover the truth is that they were into it."

Well, no, they weren't. Read their accounts of how it felt to them at the time and what the long-term psychological effects of the abuse were.

Here's what you need to keep in mind: the four men's accounts are very similar. It's also apparent that there was some kind of cult around young James Levine; he had a coterie of followers. And the four men's accounts close resemble accounts by people who've been sexually victimized by authority figures such as priests and music teachers. (See reporting on the Royal Northern College of Music and Chetham's scandals, for example, and everything about sexual abuse by priests.)

I doubt that Levine will work again. The police report and publicity have made him completely radioactive. But, you know, this should have happened long ago. He has conducted plenty of performances with young choristers; he has taught here and there; he's had plenty of opportunities.

What I expect to happen: Peter Gelb will be fired for having sat on the Lake Forest police report for a year with no attempt at independent verification or investigation because "Jim denied it all." (OF COURSE HE DID. WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?) Perhaps the Met board will lose a few members. More recent police reports or victim accounts will surface. Maybe there were payoffs. Perhaps we'll find out whether Diva X really did get an opening night in exchange for getting him out of jail. And possibly one of the reports will be about actions that still fall under the statute of limitations, and there will be a trial.

Further to Previous: Levine Replacements

The Met has announced who will conduct upcoming runs of Il Trovatore and Luisa Miller, replacing James Levine. Marco Armiliato gets Il Trovatore and Bertrand de Billy gets Luisa Miller.

Sir David McVicar’s production of Il Trovatore will feature Maria Agresta as Leonora, Yonghoon Lee as Manrico, and Anita Rachvelishvili as Azucena. Quinn Kelsey and Luca Salsi will share the role of Count di Luna, with Štefan Kocán and Kwangchul Youn both singing the role of Ferrando.

Performances of Il Trovatore are on January 22, 26, 30, Feb 3 (matinee), 6, 9, 12 and 15, 2018.

Elijah Moshinsky’s production of Luisa Miller features Sonya Yoncheva in the title role, with Plácido Domingo as her father. Piotr Beczała sings Rodolfo, with Olesya Petrova as Federica, Alexander Vinogradov as Count Walter, and Dmitry Belosselskiy as Wurm.

Performances of Luisa Miller are on March 29, Apr 2, 6, 9, 14 (matinee), 18 and 21 (matinee), 2018. The April 14 matinee will be transmitted live as part of the Met’s Live in HD series, which reaches more than 2,000 movie theaters in 73 countries around the world.

Va, Tosca!

The Met announces most of the conductors who will take over the new Tosca from James Levine, who has been relieved of his duties following this weekend's news:

Emmanuel Villaume will conduct the Met’s new production of Puccini’s Tosca, on December 31, 2017, and January 3, 6, 9, 12, 23, and 27, 2018, replacing James Levine.

Maestro Villaume, who recently conducted Massenet’s Thaïs at the Met, is Music Director of the Dallas Opera and Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Prague Philharmonia. He made his Met debut in 2004 conducting Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and his subsequent performances with the company have included Saint-Saëns’sSamson et Dalila, Bizet’s Carmen, Massenet’s Manon and Gounod’s  Roméo et Juliette.

Sir David McVicar’s new staging of Tosca opens on December 31, with Sonya Yoncheva as Tosca, Vittorio Grigolo as Cavaradossi, and Bryn Terfel as Scarpia. The January 27 matinee will be transmitted live as part of the Met’s Live in HD series, which reaches more than 2,000 movie theaters in 73 countries around the world.

Later performances on April 21, 26 and 30, and May 4, 8 and 12, 2018, will star Anna Netrebko in the title role opposite Marcelo Álvarez as Cavaradossi and Michael Volle and Željko Lučić sharing the role of Scarpia. The April and May performances will be conducted by Bertrand de Billy.

Gareth Morrell will conduct the performance on January 18, 2018. The conductor for the January 15 performance will be announced at a later date.

The AFM Weighs In

The musicians' union, Local 802, AFM, has a statement:

December 3, 2017– The Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802 AFM has released a statement on the allegations of sexual abuse on the part of Music Director Emeritus James Levine:

“We are horrified and sickened by the recently reported allegations of sexual abuse by Mr. Levine. The Metropolitan Opera has an obligation to all employees to provide a safe workplace free of sexual harassment and discrimination. Throughout history, artists have stood for our society’s values and priorities. As musicians of the MET Orchestra, Local 802 and members of labor unions, we have the power to bring about positive change. It is incumbent upon our community to decisively and immediately denounce actions of abuse, assault and sexual harassment.” — Tino Gagliardi, President, Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802, AFM

I'm really pretty sure that there were members of the union who'd heard about this.

Statement from the Metropolitan Opera Regarding James Levine (and an Update)

Received about 20 minutes while I was putting up a pot roast to braise:

The Metropolitan Opera announced today that it is suspending its relationship with James Levine, pending an investigation, following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct committed by Mr. Levine that took place from the 60's to the 80's, including the earlier part of his conducting career at the Met. 

Mr. Levine will not be involved in any Met activities, including conducting scheduled
performances at the Met this season. The Met has appointed Robert J. Cleary, former United States attorney and currently head of the investigations practice at Proskauer Rose, to lead a full and complete investigation into the relevant facts. 

“Based on these new reports, the Met has made the decision to act now, while we await the results of the investigation,” said Peter Gelb, Met General Manager, whose actions are fully supported by the leadership of the Met Board and its Executive Committee. “This is a tragedy for anyone whose life has been affected.” 

There will be no further comments or statement regarding this issue from the Met at this time.

Multiple allegations from the 60s to the 80s? New reports? I must have missed something.

Here's the update, in a Times story from Michael Cooper:  three two more men, with their names in the paper, have gone to the Met to say "this happened." The third is the man who filed the police report.

Not the First Public Classical Music Abuse Story in the US

Updated & more strongly worded 12/3/2017

So no, this isn't the first, as I was saying yesterday. There's the Johannes Somary case, which came out a few years ago, after his death. There've been stories about other figures in classical music for decades, including at least one prominent composer, now deceased. And there were the Chetham's and RNMC scandals in Great Britain a few years back.

But the NY Post story on James Levine is likely a surprise to very few: there've been rumors about him at least since I first heard them as a grad student back in 1980-81. And it will be no surprise that neither the Met nor Peter Gelb has responded to the report's questions about the story. (Here is Michael Cooper's NY Times story, released a few hours after that of the Post. It includes a brief statement from the Met, which is opening an investigation.)

By the way, if you have a story about someone, and you are unable to discuss it publicly, the Times has a tip hotline. Read information on how it works here. It is almost always possible to make an anonymous tip or talk to a reporter on deep background.

New:

And now the Met and the BSO are telling us that they're shocked, shocked to hear about this. C'mon, people, this is total bullshit. If I heard about Levine in 1980-82, and a guy on Twitter heard it in Los Angeles in 1995 when he was 15 years old, there is no way that nobody on the Met Board of Directors or in management hadn't heard the stories. I mean, really: he wouldn't be abusing kids in the Met's orchestra pit, right?? Note the careful grooming of the man discussed in the Post story, whom Levine met for the first time when he was a boy of four (4) years.

The man at the center of the Post and Times reports isn't likely to be the only victim. And Levine isn't the only famous person you'll be hearing about in the next six months.

As I said to someone, or intended to say, a few weeks ago, if I were a journalist on this story, I'd be talking to the parents of Met Children's Chorus members right now. And I imagine there is enormous panic at Lincoln Center just now: how many donors, big or small, will keep giving to an institution that may have protected a child sex abuser for decades? If this is what happened, and if the company collapses, the Met will have sacrificed their entire staff for one person.

Return of the King

Received from the Met; notes in square brackets by me:

James Levine will conduct the Met’s new production of Puccini’s Tosca next season, replacing Andris Nelsons, who has withdrawn. [Possibly predictable after Kristine Opalais, his wife, left the production.]

Mr. Levine, who now holds the title of Music Director Emeritus, has a long history of conducting Tosca at the Met, including his very first Met performance in June 1971, when he led a cast of Grace Bumbry as Tosca and Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi. He conducted performances of Tosca with Bumbry, Plácido Domingo, and Tito Gobbi in the Met’s 1971-72 season, and more recently, Levine conducted the premiere of Luc Bondy's staging of the opera in September 2009, which the new production will replace.

In addition to leading the new David McVicar production of Tosca, Levine will conduct performances of Die Zauberflöte, Il Trovatore, Luisa Miller, and Verdi’s Requiem during the upcoming 2017-18 Met season.

The new staging of Tosca opens on December 31, starring Sonya Yoncheva as Tosca, Vittorio Grigolo as Cavaradossi, and Bryn Terfel as Scarpia. TheJanuary 27 matinee will be transmitted live as part of the Met’s Live in HD series, which reaches more than 2,000 movie theaters in 73 countries around the world. For further information, including casting by date, please visit www.metopera.org. [Sir Bryn is the only original major-cast member left: Jonas Kaufmann was replaced because he couldn't commit to the rehearsal period and full run; Opalais...withdrew....Nelsons withdrew.]