San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joshua Kosman: James Levine’s silent and shameful career end.
The conductor and sexual predator James Levine died on March 9 amid an alltoofitting miasma of skulking secrecy and shame. For reasons no one has yet explained, the news stayed under wraps for more than a week before slipping into public view.
It’s as if everyone around him understood all too clearly what the reaction was going to be.
They were right, of course. Levine spent decades as one of the world’s leading operatic and orchestral conductors, chiefly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He performed and recorded tirelessly, leading performances of music by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi and others that were almost unanimously hailed for their fluidity and expressive depth.
But in the end, Levine was remembered above all as a serial sex offender. Journalistic reports began to surface in 2017, after many years of widespread but never substantiated rumors, alleging that Levine sexually abused young men and boys over a period going back to the 1960s.
It’s the kind of behavior that no operatic performance can possibly atone for.
The moral arithmetic there would seem to be pretty incontrovertible. Yet in the wake of Levine’s death we’ve heard, once again, some of the same arguments that are trotted out in connection with such artists as Michael Jackson or Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, or in the classical arena, sexual harassers like Plácido Domingo and Charles Dutoit.
Devotees of these men’s work are quick to dispute the allegations, then to downplay their gravity, then to insist that too much attention is being paid to them. It’s as though sexual victimization is just the regrettable price that has to be paid for artistic achievement.
It’s always worth asking, though, who pays that price — because it’s never the abusers’ defenders. They get to reap the benefits of the abuser’s work, while his victims are, for the most part, conveniently silenced.
That’s why reactions to Levine’s death — or for that matter, reactions to any charges of harassment or assault — can serve as a reliable litmus test. They let you know who instinctively sides with power and who with the powerless; they alert you to where empathy resides and where it’s lacking.
When a composer pleads for a more sympathetic view of Levine because of his advocacy for new music, or when an opera buff clings to Levine’s recordings of the standard repertoire, that’s a tell. It says that wrongs inflicted on others don’t merit a full moral standing, at least not when weighed against the benefits to oneself.
And if that sort of reckoning is helpful for assessing the priorities of individuals, it’s even more critical in judging the institutions that make artistic careers possible — or refuse to do so.
The Metropolitan Opera did fire Levine months after the story of his misdeeds broke, after conducting its own investigation. But it takes a certain amount of naivete to believe that the organization was completely blindsided by the revelations. The fact that his career flourished so long there, whether through duplicity or willed ignorance on the part of the leadership, remains a stain on the company’s reputation that will be difficult to wash away.
If nothing else, we can hope that this will be a cautionary tale for other organizations in a similar situation. The world of classical music, like any professional setting in which power is unequally distributed, continues to be a presumptive breeding ground for wrongful behavior of all sorts.
The fact that you and I may not know who the abusers are doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, or that the institutions employing them don’t have at least a glimmering of what they’re up to. “We had no idea” is not an excuse that passes the smell test any more.
That message seems to be slow to sink in at the Met, but it may be gaining traction elsewhere. When the allegations against Domingo and Dutoit came to light, for example, many musical organizations, including the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony, swiftly cut ties with them; in future, those efforts to marginalize abusers may come even sooner.
As for Levine, the silence surrounding his death seems an apt epitaph.