Banal New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini sniffed that he would no longer keep Levine-led recordings in his living room, where Manhattan’s moral guardians might disapprovingly glimpse them at some insipid cocktail party. Levine’s publisher withdrew a lucrative book contract. Much of the media all but declared his guilt, smugly citing Gelb’s statement along with other gossip that led one to wonder how the pundits would have reacted if mere innuendo had superseded the laws and contracts governing their employment. The size of the settlement strongly suggests that the Met’s ‘credible evidence’ was probably far less than ‘credible’Īll US arts institutions with ties to Levine categorically severed relations with him, with Puritanical Boston’s symphony, which he led from 2004 to 2011, declaring that Levine will never again work with them. Levine, who debuted at the Met in 1971 and went on to revolutionise the company’s performance standards was suspended without pay in December 2017 amid revelations of decades-old sexual harassment claims and then, in March 2018, fired him from his post as music director emeritus and all other responsibilities.Īlmost immediately following Levine’s suspension, but months before the Met’s internal investigation reached any conclusions, the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb publicly stated that “this is a tragedy for anyone whose life had been affected,” as though the allegations were already proven. How sad, then, that just before this fiscal tsunami arrived the already struggling opera company had to reach a legal settlement with arguably the single most important performer in its history: former music director and celebrated conductor James Levine. The Metropolitan Opera, the city’s premiere performing company, lost an estimated $60 million from the cancellation of its remaining 2019-2020 season and faces as much as another $200 million in losses in the current season, which is now cancelled in its entirety. The pandemic has been a financial disaster for arts institutions worldwide, but nowhere more than in New York, where early local government mismanagement resulted in a disproportionately high number of cases and deaths.
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