Maestro of the Met

By Michael Walsh

James Levine is the most powerful opera conductor in America

Oh! to be a conductor, to weld a hundred men into one singing giant, to build up the most gorgeous arabesques of sound, to wave a hand and make the clamoring strings sink to a mutter, to wave again, and hear the brass crashing out in triumph, to throw up a finger, then another and another, and to know that with every one the orchestra would bound forward into a still more ecstatic surge and sweep, to fling oneself forward, and for a moment or so keep everything still, frozen, in the hollow of one's hand, and then to set them all singing and soaring in one final sweep, with the cymbals clashing at every flicker of one's eyelid, to sound the grand Amen.

--J.B. Priestley

The burly figure standing calmly on the podium of a darkened opera house pit bears little resemblance to the conventionally glamorous image of a famous conductor. At 205 Ibs. and standing less than 5 ft. 10 in., he is built more like a stagehand than an aristocratic maestro, and his round face, capped by a corona of curly hair, is a world away from the suave image of a Leonard Bernstein. Yet as his baton comes slashing down with swift, chopping strokes, he is abruptly transformed into a figure of grace. Cuing the orchestra, effortlessly guiding singers through an opera's trickiest passages, joyfully but inaudibly singing along, he has become Priestley's ideal personified. And why not? James Levine, 39, is doing what he was born to do.

Not since Bernstein has an American-born, American-trained conductor had such an astonishing career. As music director and principal conductor of New York City's Metropolitan Opera, one of the world's top opera companies, Levine wields an international influence. During the summers, when he is not working at the Met, he leads the Chicago Symphony as music director of the Ravinia Festival. He is in demand as a guest conductor, and such is his reputation that whenever a major vacancy in the conductorial ranks occurs, Levine's name (it rhymes with divine) is invariably mentioned as a possible successor. A talented pianist, he often finds time to squeeze a chamber concert or two between conducting appearances.

Nor is his activity limited to America. Since 1975, Levine has appeared regularly at the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria, leading widely acclaimed productions of Mozart's The Magic Flute and La Clemenza di Tito in the composer's home town. When Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of Richard, was seeking a conductor for last summer's centennial production of Parsifal at Bayreuth, Levine was his choice. "Jimmy's star is going up," says a member of the Chicago Symphony. "I don't think anything will interrupt the rise." Levine talks about his ascent to prominence with a characteristic mixture of pride and hyperbole. "Every year my life gets better," he says. "It's all sort of like a dream. It's so nice."

The dream, however, is no fantasy. Observes Soprano Renata Scotto, who frequently works with Levine at the Met: "The rapport he establishes is so wonderful, it is really a joy to make music with him." When Bernstein heard Levine lead his first Parsifal at the Met, in 1979, he broke into tears. "It was the best Parsifal I ever heard," he recalls.

Tales of Levine's musicianship and memory have become part of the classical repertory. One of Levine's first big breaks came in 1971, at the Ravinia music festival, when he was asked to lead a performance of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony on a week's notice. Edward Gordon, the festival's executive director, telephoned Levine to inquire how well he knew the music. "Will it make you feel any better," Levine responded, "if I say I will do both the rehearsals and the performance without a score?"

Tenor Luciano Pavarotti remembers the first La Boheme he and Levine performed together at the Met, in 1976: "He came out at the last minute, without time even for a rehearsal. It was wonderful, the most wonderful Boheme I ever did." When Marilyn Horne and Levine recorded Mahler's sprawling Symphony No. 3 in 1975, the mezzo turned to the maestro at one point and asked him how he had found time to learn the difficult piece in the midst of his busy schedule. Recalls Horne: "He very seriously told me he had learned it when he was twelve years old."

That is not hard to believe, for significant musical talent usually is revealed early. Success can quickly follow: Herbert von Karajan led his first opera at 20, and Bernstein's brilliant career was launched at 25. "As long as I can remember," says Levine, "I have had a relationship to music that was so spontaneous, so natural and so all encompassing that I can't remember life without it." Even when he is not actually conducting, rehearsing or playing the piano, Levine remains obsessed with music. Says he: "If I am walking in the woods, I am hearing music in my head; if I am in a boat, I may be going over scores in my mind. For me, music is like eating, breathing or sleeping."

In front of an orchestra, Levine assumes a commanding, but still affable mien. His standard rehearsal mufti is blue polo shirt, dark polyester slacks and tan desert boots. A large bath towel is inevitably draped over his left shoulder almost everywhere he goes, to wipe away sometimes profuse perspiration. Levine steps briskly upon the podium, throws open a score and sets to work. He is not an acrobat like Bernstein, or a near telepathist like Karajan; his movements are semaphoric but controlled. Whoosh! Both arms suddenly fly up, and the orchestra visibly tenses, anticipating the downbeat. Slash! The baton in his right hand cuts the air, hissing as it slices down. Crash! As one, the musicians enter with the opening chord. There is no flailing or thrashing, no wasted motion. "Jimmy is a real classical conductor," notes Raymond Gniewek, the Met's concertmaster, who has played violin in the orchestra for 26 seasons. "Only the necessary movements are made, unlike the choreographers and the karate choppers."

When Levine stops, it is generally to correct errors, polish details or discuss fine points of interpretation. There is little philosophizing about music, something musicians hate. "You can make even a bigger deal out of that," he will say to a reticent oboist, encouraging him to play a phrase more grandly. "Bass drum, diminuendo, a little less all the way through," he will call out to an enthusiastic percussionist. Levine rarely raises his voice, preferring to maintain a relaxed but efficient atmosphere. "He's cool," says Trumpeter Melvyn Broiles. "I've never seen him flip out. He doesn't blow his top." Even at pressure-filled moments, such as the dress rehearsal of the Met's new production of Verdi's Macbeth recently, Levine maintains his equanimity. When backstage noise threatened to drown out the singers, he only briefly raised his voice: "Come on, people, we're trying to have a dress rehearsal here!" he shouted, continuing to conduct. The talking ceased.

When things go well, Levine signals his pleasure with a warm, broad smile; indeed, when conducting he communicates almost as much by facial expressions and eye contact as he does with his baton. He wants the musicians to watch him carefully, and he rarely lets them out of his sight. "He will often say to us, 'Give me some eyes, give me some eyes,' " says Gniewek. Singers get the same treatment. Says Baritone Sherrill Milnes: "If you are singing of love, you look down and his face is reading love." Yet Levine tries not to get so caught up in the music that he loses perspective. "Take the last page of Boheme," he says. "Many people cry. They are moved over and over again. As a conductor, I want to make sure that reaction happens. My tears only hurt my ability to make the audience cry."

A relaxed, reassuring attitude persists when Levine puts down his baton and attends to the details of running the Met in association with General Manager Anthony A. Bliss. This season, the Met will offer 210 performances of 23 operas during its 30-week season at New York City's Lincoln Center, as well as the 56 performances it presents while on tour in the spring. Notes Kurt Herbert Adler, who was general director of the San Francisco Opera for 28 years until his retirement a year ago: "There are two jobs in this country that are impossible to fill. One is President of the U.S., and the other is director of the Metropolitan Opera."

Impossible the job may be; it is unquestionably important. Says retired Diva Beverly Sills, now director of the New York City Opera: "The Met has the funding, wonderful facilities, glamour, international stars. It is the most prestigious opera house in the world." As such, the Met must act as an aural museum, preserving and displaying the standard repertory: works such as La Traviata, Tosca and Die Meistersinger. But an opera house must also be active in reviving worthy pieces and commissioning new ones. Under Levine's artistic administration, the Met has successfully explored new territory in such operas as Poulenc's fervid Dialogues of the Carmelites, Berg's thorny Lulu, Kurt Weill's sardonic Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and the ebullient French triple bill Parade. In standard works, such as Verdi's Don Carlo and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, the company has used the latest scholarship to offer versions that are as musicologically accurate as possible. In honor of its centennial next season, the Met has commissioned new operas from Composers Jacob Druckman (on the Medea legend) and John Corigliano (based on the third of Beaumarchais's Figaro plays).

So far this season there have been two new productions: a grandly ceremonial staging of Mozart's Idomeneo by Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and a controversial setting of Macbeth by Sir Peter Hall. The Met cast Idomeneo as few houses can, with Pavarotti, Mezzo Frederica von Stade and Sopranos Hildegarde Behrens and lleana Cotrubas. All had voices big, agile and beautiful enough to handle the opera's extraordinary demands, and the result was a triumph.

Macbeth, however, had problems. The production was vehemently booed on its opening night in November by a segment of the audience that found the sight of witches flying through the air on broomsticks risible, the presence of a nude dancer inappropriate and the arrival of white-clad ballerinas during Macbeth's dream sequence comical. Some prominent critics were outraged: Donal Henahan, in the New York Times, said Macbeth "may just be the worst new production ... in modern [Met] history." Hall's attempt to place the opera in a mid-19th century theatrical context was daring, but sometimes miscalculated.

Inevitably, Levine comes in for his share of criticism; on its basest level, he is booed with surprising frequency by a vocal minority at the Met when he takes his post-performance bows. Levine's tempos can be brisk to the point of hastiness, and in his enthusiasm for the music he often lets the sound of the orchestra overwhelm the singers, swamping them amid Wagnerian brass fortissimos or with the urgent sweep of passionate Verdian strings. Even the Met orchestra musicians, who are generally enthusiastic about their conductor, complain. Sometimes after a performance they leave informal, anonymous critiques: "Too loud, Maestro." "Much too slow." "Much too fast."

Levine is also accused of conducting too many performances, freezing out eminent guest conductors. "The weakness of the conducting staff is a manifestation of his own ego," says one disgruntled Met musician. "Where are the likes of Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Sir Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel and Sir Colin Davis?" With Levine leading 78 performances this season, there is always the possibility that the orchestra will grow stale. Says Met Conductor Jeffrey Tate: "All orchestras like guests. They see Jimmy all the time, and there is a great danger for both of them in this. They must loathe him sometimes, as in any close relationship, like a marriage."

Another charge is that Levine plays favorites with singers, overusing some voices while ignoring others. "Levine's love affairs with certain voices are total," complains a Met singer. "When he finds a voice he likes, he uses it over and over." Like any other conductor, Levine has a roster of singers he finds congenial, among them Soprano Teresa Stratas, Tenor Placido Domingo and Baritone Milnes. Sometimes, as with veteran Diva Scotto, their voices are long faded but still histrionically effective. Sometimes they are not up to major-house standards, as with Tenor Philip Creech, whom Levine has pushed beyond the limit of his modest gifts. But his commitment to certain singers has paid off in the development of several young Americans who are potential stars, among them Sopranos Leona Mitchell and Kathleen Battle. And his tireless work with the Met orchestra has greatly raised the level of its playing: short of the Vienna State Opera orchestra's class, but at least on a par with the excellent Royal Opera House orchestra in London.

Still, the criticism rankles. "I'm doing my damnedest 24 hours a day to make the Met as good as I can," says Levine with unaccustomed asperity. "Every decision I make is to try to do that, and I can't help it if sometimes I'm wrong or sometimes I'm no good. That's just the way it is." Levine insists he has no desire to hog the Met's podium. The great opera conductors, he says, are routinely invited, but their crowded schedules usually do not permit them to give a four-to six-week block of time to New York. Moreover, he adds, "every time we put the repertory together, we put it out to bid to them all. If Karajan or Solti or Lenny wants a piece that is slotted in for me, I'll give it to them in a minute." At a time when major conductors regularly jet around the world, Levine is a throwback to the orchestra-building maestros of yore. "I don't spend my time on planes," he says. "I'm proud of that."

Several major singers, among them Mirella Freni, Joan Sutherland, Von Stade and Alfredo Kraus, are too rarely heard at the Met, although all four are appearing this season. And British Soprano Margaret Price, who sings in the major international houses, has never sung there. Somewhat ingenuously, Levine blames their absence partly on the Met's distance from Europe. Even in the Concorde age, he contends, they prefer to work closer to home, no more than a couple of hours' flight from Covent Garden, the Paris Opera or Milan's La Scala, rather than take up extended residence in New York. Further, Levine says, the heavily subsidized European houses can afford to pay as much as 50% more than the Met's top fee of about $8,000 a performance. Domingo concurs with Levine's assessment. "I could go where they would pay me four or five times what I get at the Met," says Domingo.

On the wall of Levine's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is a framed quotation from Thomas Mann's novella The Tables of the Law, given to the conductor by his longtime live-in companion, Sue Thomson. It reads, in part: "Mighty and long labor lay ahead, labor which would have to be achieved through anger and patience before the uncouth hordes could be formed into a people who would be more than the usual community to whom the ordinary was comfortable ..." Too often, there is an air of comfortable ordinariness about the Met, such as casting a popular opera like Il Trovatore with a soprano past her prime and a tenor who never had one, or substituting a less-than-star-quality singer like Herman Malamood for Pavarotti in Idomeneo. Still, on a day-to-day basis, the Met's productions are the equal of any, the result of Levine's mighty and long labor.

In his performances, Levine strives to banish interpretive routine to get at the heart of the composer's message. "My function," he says, "is to be a necessary middleman, not a willful, distorting, idiosyncratic, egocentric middleman." His high performance standards are derived from three major influences: Toscanini, Soprano Maria Callas and Director Wieland Wagner. From the incandescent Toscanini, Levine learned the value of a taut, singing musical line. Callas, the indomitable spirit who assaulted her audiences with intense, molten performances, taught Levine that opera must always be convincing as drama, not simply a collection of voices gift wrapped in period costumes. Wagner, who restored Bayreuth to glory after World War II, showed him that opera productions had to involve the imagination of the listeners, making them part of the drama instead of passive observers of props and painted backdrops.

But while Levine has learned his lessons well, he is aware of human limitations, as Callas, with her temperamental voice, always was and as Toscanini, with his fiery temper, usually was not. Levine's musical ethos, demanding though it is, is still far from that of old-fashioned tyrants like his mentor, George Szell, or Fritz Reiner. "Perfectionist is one of the stupidest words in the English language," says Levine. "Take any performance. I promise you that there will be a pizzicato chord that's not together; somewhere or other a horn will crack. If there are a number of magical and successful moments that really capture what they should, then a technical imperfection here or there will pass. The question is whether you are counting successes or counting mistakes."

Most of Levine's life has been spent counting successes. Born in Cincinnati, a city with a rich musical heritage, young Jimmy Levine could pull himself up to the family Chickering piano and pick out tunes before he was two years old. When little more than an infant, he once astonished his father, a former bandleader, by spotting the rhythm of Mary Had a Little Lamb when it was idly drummed on a tabletop. Piano lessons came at four, recitals at six. In 1953, age ten, he made his debut with the Cincinnati Symphony, performing Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 2.

But his parents did not want the sideshow life of a prodigy for the eldest of their three children. When the television show The $64,000 Question called, trying to book Jimmy for an appearance, they declined. When Comedian Sam Levenson wanted to cast him as a musical genius in a TV show, they turned him down. When the legendary piano teacher Rosina Lhevinne of the Juilliard School first heard Jimmy play and said, "I must have this child," they told her to wait until he was older. Says Levine: "My parents handled all the critical decisions of my early life sensationally well."

Jimmy's love for the piano was intense, but he soon discovered an even greater love: opera. Jimmy would listen to recordings, singing the parts and conducting from the score. His mother, who had been a Broadway actress, bought him a miniature stage, where he put on his own productions using toy tables and chairs as props. During the summers, he attended the performances of the Cincinnati Opera, held then on the grounds of the local zoo, clutching his grandmother's long knitting needle as a make-believe baton.

Early on, Levine displayed an amazing and often galling confidence, the lot of the gifted youth who feels unchallenged by and superior to his environment. He flunked a grade-school music class because he refused to take the course seriously. His mother once picked him up after school and found her son's jacket bulging with the concealed score of a Verdi opera. "I learned two acts during math class," Jimmy calmly informed her.

At the recommendation of the dean of the Juilliard School in New York, where they had taken their ten-year-old son for an evaluation, the Levines in 1953 asked Walter Levin, principal violinist of the LaSalle Quartet, to supervise their son's musical education in Cincinnati.

After some hesitation, Levin agreed. "What I found," he recalls, "was a natively talented, undisciplined, slightly overbearing kid who was in serious need of a teacher who could teach him what music was all about." Levin, born and raised in Berlin, devised a European-style education for Jimmy, an interdisciplinary approach to music that placed it in a cultural, historical and philosophical context.

For the first time, the boy was forced to confront the drudgery that is a necessary part of musical understanding. One afternoon, when he came unprepared to a lesson, Levin threw him out, forcing him to wait in front of his house for two hours until Jimmy's mother came for him. "I realized at that point," says Levine, "that you had to work your way through the frustrating, boring phases of music, and that unless you got on with it, you didn't get to the treasure at the end."

In the summer of 1956, Levine set out on his musical travels. First came the Marlboro festival in Vermont, where he got a taste of opera conducting (the brief choruses in Cos`i fan tutte), and then at the Aspen festival in Colorado, where he spent 13 summers. He realized that the solitary life of a piano virtuoso held no appeal. "I had never been attracted to the big solo pieces," says Levine, "and I just didn't want to spend my life playing the Tchaikovsky concerto. I was perfectly aware that the amount of technical work I would have to do to play that piece would be better spent on different repertory."

In 1961, Levine went to Juilliard; although only 18, he was put into the postgraduate curriculum as soon as he had taken a semester of pre-Bach music history. In his third year, he was selected for the American Conductors Project in Baltimore, established by the Ford Foundation to develop fledgling maestros. There he met Szell, the irascible Hungarian-born autocrat who had built the Cleveland Orchestra into one of the country's finest symphonic ensembles. Szell offered the unproven Levine the post of apprentice conductor in Cleveland. When Levine protested that he hadn't finished his formal course of study at Juilliard, Szell, who had made his conducting debut at 16 with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, dismissed the objection. "You're a very good conductor," he told him. "Maybe we can make you a great one." Levine dropped out of Juilliard and spent six years as Szell's assistant.

He impressed many people in Cleveland with his natural talent and brimming energy. "Structurally, he could organize music almost as soon as he got his fingers around it," remembers Atlanta Symphony Conductor Robert Shaw, then an associate conductor with the Cleveland. "He also had a facility of stick technique. Even Mr. Szell wasn't as graceful as Jimmy." In 1966, Levine founded the University Circle Orchestra, a student ensemble from the Cleveland Institute of Music; he soon had them performing formidable works like Mahler's Sixth Symphony.

Szell died in 1970, and Levine's apprenticeship came to an end. What he required now was a break, and luck was obliging. The San Francisco Opera needed a conductor for the last few Toscas of the season and hired Levine. By chance, a Met administrator heard him, and was impressed. Levine made his Met debut the next year, also with Tosca. His career began a rapid ascent, aided by Levine's manager, Ronald Wilford of Columbia Artists Management Inc. Wilford oversees the livelihoods of many major conductors, including Mstislav Rostropovich of the National Symphony and Seiji Ozawa of the Boston Symphony. "From that first day I watched Jimmy work," says Wilford, "I knew he would have a major career. All it needed was guidance."

During the struggle for power at the Met that followed Sir Rudolf Bing's retirement as general manager and the death in 1972 of Goeran Gentele, his successor, in an automobile crash, two men emerged triumphant. Bliss, whose father had been the Met's chairman of the board, became executive director and, later, general manager. Levine became music director. His boyish grin remained undimmed, even during the bitter labor dispute that postponed the opening of the 1980 season; it was, says Sue Thomson, "the closest I've ever seen him to being depressed."

Even in a profession marked by dedication, Levine's obsession with music is pronounced. "His life consists only of conducting," says one assistant conductor at the Met. "He is a conductor, and that is what he is." He is not interested in sports, and he is unconcerned with religion. Although born into a family of Reform Jews, he was never confirmed, and he accepted Bayreuth's invitation to lead Wagner's Christian allegory, Parsifal, in an opera house that, during the Hitler years, was a citadel of Nazism. "I wanted to go to Bayreuth," he explains, "because the only way I know to solve the enigma of Wagner's being a genius and an anti-Semite is to get as close to it as possible."

When discussing his favorite subject, Levine shies away from controversy. He will not, as many musicians gleefully do, talk about his colleagues' performances. He refuses to be pinned down about his favorite pieces of music. Says Levine: "There is a general tendency in the world to be preoccupied with evaluating things, and this is a trap. If you agree that Verdi's masterpieces are Otello and Falstaff, then what about Ernani and Macbeth? In finding a level on a kind of musical Richter scale, it implies that you should not be altogether involved with works that get only a 3 or a 5." Yet, with the fervor of the true specialist, he will happily expatiate on Beethoven's metronome markings or Debussy's revisions in Pelleas et Melisande.

In private life, Levine keeps a low profile. As with many prominent unmarried musicians, Levine gathers rumors the way his formal attire gathers lint. He is whispered to have had liaisons with people of every age and hue, with both sopranos and tenors. But it is his longtime companion, Thomson, a pale, pretty brunet, who lives with him in his unprepossessing apartment and at their 41-acre farm in upstate New York, managing the household. He unwinds with his fruit juice, diet soda and candy bars, and can get by on as little as four hours' sleep, content, as always, to study another score.

The money he earns, estimated to be in the high six figures annually, is spent on creature comforts, such as good meals and his blue Cadillac Seville, which he joyfully pilots around Manhattan's pot-holed streets with the aplomb of a captain at the helm of a swift cutter. But he is also generous with his Met colleagues, sending them champagne on festive occasions and often giving a party at the Renaissance Center in Detroit to celebrate the company's yearly U.S. spring tour.

Levine spends little on clothes or on polishing his public image. When his father once advised him to lose weight, get a haircut and trade in his glasses for contact lenses, Levine balked: "I said I will make myself so much the opposite of the great profile that I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I'm engaged because I'm a musician, and not because the ladies are swooning in the first balcony."

How long Levine will remain at the Met is moot. While he never criticizes Bliss, it is clear that he wants more control. In renegotiating his contract, which expires in 1986, Levine is demanding complete artistic authority over the Met, including a lump-sum budget to spend as he sees fit. "For me," says Levine, "it would mean that any mistake that happens then would happen because I had lousy judgment, instead of a mistake happening because we couldn't time the moves right." Other organizations, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Opera House, approach him with offers. But for now the Met comes first.

No one should be surprised, however, if Levine's career eventually becomes fully international, with major positions on both sides of the Atlantic. As he took his curtain calls after his final Bayreuth performance last summer, that highly critical, frequently rather parochial audience gave him a loud, long ovation. His face flushed with excitement, his eyes gleaming, Levine came onstage slowly, basking in the bravos. Shyly bowing from the waist, his hands resting on his thighs, his head bobbing up and down in mute response, he seemed more the precocious pupil being celebrated by his schoolmates than the architect of an international musical triumph.

Afterward the orchestra musicians presented him with an ornate scroll with all their signatures as a gesture of respect and affection. "Heavenly thanks for the good musical collaboration," it reads. "So nice," said the kid from Cincinnati who had grown up to sound the grand Amen. "That's marvelous. Fantastic. Wonderful."

--By Michael Walsh. Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/New York

With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.