James Levine, revered conductor at the New York Met whose career ended in disgrace – obituary

James Levine, who has died aged 77, was probably the most successful opera conductor of the modern age before persistent rumours of sexual misconduct against teenage boys burst into the public domain, bringing down the curtain on his 42-year career at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

He was a one-man powerhouse, taking the Met to musical heights rarely seen in its 138-year history; at the same time he skilfully navigated the political minefield of superstar singers, demanding funders and general managers. Where Arturo Toscanini had been tyrannical and Leonard Bernstein flamboyant, Levine was quiet, studious, hard-working and ever-present. He was so synonymous with the Met, spending seven months a year in the house, that his other appointments – Boston Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Salzburg Festival – seem relatively insignificant.

Mozart was his speciality, but his willingness and ability to conduct anything from Beethoven (Fidelio) to Berg (Lulu) made him all but indispensable. His conducting style was minimalist. There was none of the arm-waving, dramatic gestures or bouncing around the podium associated with modern maestros. Even his wild hair acquiesced to stay calm in performance. Instead, the tiniest of pulses would emanate from his baton, while his eyes darted around the orchestral musicians. The work, he explained, had largely been done in rehearsal.

As he once told Martin Kettle of The Guardian: “It isn’t that I want to stand impassively while the music has an orgasm around me. It’s just that, when the orchestra look at me, I want them to see a completely involved person who reflects what we rehearsed, and whose function is to make it possible for them to do it.”

Levine conducted more than 2,500 performances of almost 90 different operas at the Met, sometimes with two full-length shows a day. The list of singers he worked with was packed with legends: Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, Mirella Freni, Kiri Te Kanawa, Renée Fleming, Teresa Stratas, Pilar Lorengar, Teresa Zylis-Gara, Katia Ricciarelli, Margaret Price and Gilda Cruz-Romo were just his Desdemonas in Otello. He earnt admiration from his orchestral players, not least for their substantial salary increases, and gratitude from his singers, many of whom he also accompanied at the piano with sublime sensitivity.

Critics argued that Levine’s presence excluded others. Indeed, the Met struggled to attract world-class singers and conductors for non-Levine nights because they were typically shunned by critics and audiences. But his hard work and artistic results ensured that dissenting voices rarely gathered momentum. As a result, he was able to demand the singers and repertoire of his choice. The general rule, according to The New York Times, was “What Jimmy wants, Jimmy gets”.

That, it transpired, extended to his carnal desires, which included “loyalty tests” and group sex. He was suspended by the Met in 2017 after three men came forward alleging that he had abused them many years earlier. Others followed, and he was fired. He brought a defamation suit, while the Met filed a countersuit claiming “credible evidence that Mr Levine had engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct”. Although the litigation was settled in August 2019, with the Met paying him $3.5 million, the disgraced Levine never worked again.

James Levine was born in Cincinnati on June 23 1943, the grandson of a synagogue cantor. His father, Lawrence, was a clothing manufacturer and amateur violinist, while his mother Helen (née Goldstein) had been a small-time Broadway actress. The young Jimmy had a speech impediment, but showed extraordinary promise at the piano. At the age of 10 he performed Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He was also a talented violinist and nurtured ambitions of being a singer.

He was eight when he first heard the Met, which was touring with Die Fledermaus in Indiana. Two years later, when his parents brought their prodigious son to play for potential piano teachers at the Juilliard School, he saw Gounod’s Faust conducted by Pierre Monteux at the Met’s old home on Broadway and 39th Street.

After winning the Ford Foundation competition for conductors in Baltimore in 1964, he was offered an apprenticeship in Cleveland by George Szell and in 1970 made his debut with the San Francisco Opera in Tosca – as well as a little-noticed British debut with Welsh National Opera conducting Aïda. His first appearance at the Met, the following June, was also in Tosca with a cast that included Grace Bumbry, Peter Glossop and Franco Corelli, an occasion described by the orchestra as “the most exciting since Karajan conducted us”.

Soon the Met was in turmoil: Rudolf Bing retired as general manager in April 1972 and three months later his Swedish successor, Gören Gentele, was killed in a car accident. Rafael Kubelík, who had been Gentele’s chosen musical director, resigned suddenly the following year, propelling the 30-year-old Levine into the limelight. In 1976 he was appointed music director, becoming artistic director a decade later.

Critics complained that Levine’s musical policy was too conservative, “a mausoleum of well-worn hits by Mozart, Verdi and Puccini”, as Norman Lebrecht wrote, noting that Levine had been in post for 18 years before commissioning his first American opera, John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles. In his defence, however, Levine did have 3,800 seats a night to fill, with no European-style state subsidy.

Beyond his operatic hinterland Levine’s orchestral positions alone would have made an impressive CV: Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1973-93), Bayreuth (1982-98) and Munich Philharmonic (1999-2004). Some tipped him for the Berlin Philharmonic when Herbert von Karajan died in 1989, but the German players voted for Claudio Abbado.

During the 1970s Levine made annual visits to London concert halls, occasionally at the keyboard instead of the podium, and in later years brought the Vienna or Munich orchestras to Britain. When he conducted the LSO in 1973 one critic noted how “incisively Mr Levine can already convey his wishes to his players and immediately make them sit up”. The following year he cancelled a debut at the Royal Opera and was never invited back. There were rumours that he was arrested in London for “cottaging”, but no charges were brought.

In a 1977 British newspaper interview he declared that his energies were concentrated on New York. His philosophy, he said, was taken from a bygone age when success “was achieved by those who were not always on the move, by those who ate and worked together and were a little calmer than most of us are today”.

In later decades he was largely known to British opera-goers from the Met’s “Live in HD” cinema screenings. In 1994 he conducted the Philharmonia in what was possibly a vain attempt to lure him to a London position, while his Proms debut came as late as 2002 with the Munich Philharmonic and Alfred Brendel, but received mixed reviews.

Levine, known as Big Jim on account of his boyish, chubby features, often had a towel over his shoulder to wipe away the gallons of sweat he produced while conducting. He was notoriously shy of the media and rarely gave interviews. When he did, he was careful and measured, constructing every response as if it was a musical phrase.

In 2004 he nominally scaled back his responsibilities at the Met to those of music director, allowing him to replace Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But the Massachusetts marriage was not the happiest of nuptials: few at the Met noticed any difference, while concertgoers, critics and musicians in Boston felt short-changed. They parted company in 2011.

On the rare occasions that Levine had a free evening he was an avid theatregoer, tending to fixate on one show: in London he once saw Noël Coward’s Suite in Three Keys seven times in a week.

Throughout his career he suffered from ill health. In March 2006 he fell on his baton at the end of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, forcing him to cancel the rest of his season at the Met. He acknowledged sciatica, which he dealt with by conducting perched on a stool with his right leg dangling, but vehemently denied that the visible tremors in his hands were from Parkinson’s or any other disease. In 2011 he had spinal-cord surgery.

Levine was carefully protected throughout his illnesses, as in his unorthodox personal life, by a compliant New York media, although many years ago Time magazine did suggest that the latter involved “liaisons with people of every age and hue”.

From 1967 until his fall from grace he shared a home on the Upper West Side with his best friend Sue Thompson, an oboist (though they were not lovers), and a large collection of dinosaur bones, which he had collected since his teens. He often travelled with his brother Tom, a sculptor who died in April 2020, or with his sister Janet, a marriage counsellor.

James Levine, who was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1997, was unmarried.

James Levine, born June 23 1943, died March 9 2021