With James Levine Fired, Should We Rethink Maestro Worship?
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Version 0 of 1. Zachary Woolfe is the classical music editor of The New York Times. It was about 9:30 on Monday evening at the Metropolitan Opera, just a few hours after the Met had fired the conductor James Levine, its musical lodestar since the early 1970s, for what the company found was sexual abuse and harassment, including of young artists under the Met’s guidance. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the 43-year-old the company has hired as its next music director, was taking his bow after Strauss’s “Elektra,” an opera about killing your parents that Mr. Levine led three dozen times with the Met. The audience roared its approval as Mr. Nézet-Séguin grinned. It felt like an anointing. But is an anointing what the Met should want? The fate of Mr. Levine, 74, who has not commented publicly since denying any misconduct in December, after The New York Times reported a series of accusations, may be an opportunity to think about what it means to be a maestro, to consider the vast power we grant to conductors and whether that power has outlived its usefulness. “This is a critical moment in terms of analyzing that position,” said JoAnn Falletta, the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic since 1999, when she became the first female conductor to lead a major American ensemble. “The responsibility of a conductor is always going to be there: the decision-making responsibility, the creation of a positive environment, to get 100 individual artists to coalesce. That’s not going to change. But the style, the unlimited power? That should change.” A conductor’s position has always been strange and amorphous, even mystical. He — batons are still almost exclusively wielded by men — is a kind of medium between composers, usually from the distant past, and players who actually make the sounds. He is chief rehearser, sure, but his duties and the faith that is put in him have tended to establish him as more of a semi-spiritual conduit than a mere time-beater. Along with — and because of — this mysterious role has come enviable power and influence. Money, too: Often far more, as a percentage of an orchestra or opera company’s budget, than Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Cecile Richards at Planned Parenthood. According to the Met’s most recent tax filing, Mr. Levine was paid $1.8 million for the 2015-16 season, when he conducted four operas; the company has not revealed Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s compensation. Music directors might spend less than a third of the year with an ensemble but are the center of its marketing campaigns. The San Francisco Symphony is struggling to choose just the right successor to Michael Tilson Thomas, who will retire in 2020, after 25 years; that orchestra’s very existence without him feels, at the least, delicate. The centrality afforded to conductors makes them appear indispensable. It inclines institutions to look past obvious problems and try their best to make their relationships with their maestros work, at most any financial or moral cost. (The critic Justin Davidson, writing on the Vulture website, has pointed out a slew of questions regarding the Met’s involvement in Mr. Levine’s case that are left unanswered by the company’s curt statement firing him.) The way some conductors have abused their power — Charles Dutoit, like Mr. Levine, has recently been felled amid numerous accusations of sexual misconduct — is a function of being granted so much power in the first place. Activists in any number of fields have lately renewed their calls to topple the patriarchy, but classical music is one of the few remaining areas of human endeavor in which leaders are still encouraged to think of themselves as daddies. When Jaap van Zweden, the incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, visited The New York Times recently to speak with writers and editors, he referred without apparent irony to his role as “father” of that orchestra. Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s Twitter biography likewise describes him, abbreviating some of the ensembles he directs, as “Father of Rotterdam Phil, Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain Mtl” — and “Future father of the Met.” Mr. van Zweden and Mr. Nézet-Séguin doubtlessly believe they’re being sweet; they aren’t not. Mr. Nézet-Séguin told The Times a few weeks ago that he is “consciously breaking” what he called “this culture of ‘You can’t say anything to the maestro.’ ” Their paternal self-conception leaves them well short of Mr. Levine’s or Mr. Dutoit’s trespasses; most fathers, of course, aren’t abusers or even unfair leaders. But in these cases, the two modes — parent figure and accused abuser — are sides of the same coin: a male-centered, star-driven structure that saps coffers, repels gender equity and leaves ensembles at a loss when a charmed leader disappears, unexpectedly or not. The end of this story may well be happier. As classical music and opera slowly, steadily drift from mainstream culture, ticket sales that were once driven purely by the names of beloved music directors have dried up; audiences want experiences, not artists they more likely than not haven’t heard of. The record companies that spent millions on advertising plumping up the celebrity-conductor complex are shadows of their former selves. While orchestras and opera companies hold tight, for the time being, to the fading magic of the maestro, beloved of aging donors and subscribers, audiences as a whole believe the illusion less and less each year. This demystification will eventually result in a more diverse, more modest pool of leaders. There are already examples worth following. The Cleveland Orchestra, perhaps the finest in America, has had its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, for nearly 20 years now. He’s plainly guided its style and artistic choices, and yet it has stubbornly, inspiringly declined to be defined by him. This orchestra and conductor seem truly like colleagues. And I’ve been thinking a lot, over the past few months, about Alan Gilbert, Mr. van Zweden’s predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, whose up-and-down eight-year tenure ended in June, earlier than he probably would have liked. It causes me some shame, now, to look back on those years; I think I resisted Mr. Gilbert’s performances, his presence — genial, bookish and curious, and utterly without glamour — because they didn’t meet my sense of what a conductor was supposed to be. He acted like the Philharmonic’s peer, not its papa. He was more of a model than I recognized. The Met shouldn’t want a savior to follow Mr. Levine. It should want a musician. |