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      Music’s Most Treacherous Assignment: Finishing Mozart

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      A scholar dared to complete violin sonata fragments left by the great composer. They’re featured on a new album.For a musician, there could hardly be a more perilous task than completing works left unfinished by Mozart.“It was bloody cheek of me to even try,” Timothy Jones said in a recent interview.What began as a musicological lark for Jones, a Mozart expert who teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London, has now been captured on disc. His completions of several fragments for violin and keyboard were released on Friday on the Channel Classics label, played by the violinist Rachel Podger and, on fortepiano, Christopher Glynn.Posthumous completions are not unheard-of in the classical world. Mozart’s Requiem as it’s generally presented contains much material by Franz Xaver Süssmayr. Deryck Cooke’s realizations of Mahler’s 10th Symphony — of which only a single movement was substantially finished at its composer’s death — are widely performed, if still controversial in certain circles. Opera houses usually put on the standard completions of Puccini’s “Turandot” and Berg’s “Lulu.”The new Mozart-Jones recording is unusual, though, in its choose-your-own-adventure approach. Jones, testing different aspects of Mozartian style, made multiple completions of each fragment, and the album includes some of that variety, giving a heady sense of how open-ended creative production is — how differently symphonies (or paintings or novels) we know and love might have ended up.“The one big thing that came out of it for me,” Jones said, “is that it sort of dramatizes the openness of even the finished scores.”The new album features Christopher Glynn, left, on fortepiano and the violinist Rachel Podger.Andrew WilkinsonJones got into the completions game while researching a book about Mozart’s late career. Looking into the master’s sketches — over 100 instrumental fragments survive from his final decade — and how they fit in with the canonical works, Jones became fascinated. But he wanted to deal with them in what was, for a musicologist at least, an unconventional way.“There were things I wanted to say about these fragments which might be more easily said by dots on the page rather than prose,” he said.He experimented with completing some chamber pieces, then a violin concerto from 1788. “It took on a life of its own,” he said, “and it’s preoccupied me for the best part of seven years now.”The fragments were not new discoveries; they have been known since the 19th century. But more recent research, including by the scholars Alan Tyson and Ulrich Konrad, helped date them more precisely, allowing Jones to be focused in exploring the circumstances in which Mozart created them.Jones, a Mozart expert at the Royal Academy of Music in London, has spent years working on completions of fragments.PIAS“Having a precise sense of the context for these fragments is what let me ask detailed hypothetical questions about what his compositional strategy might have been,” Jones said. “What was he working on, listening to, his compositional interests? That was key, because his style is still evolving really quite fast up until he died, in 1791.”Tyson’s research, which involved close study of the manuscript paper Mozart used, suggested that one of the fragments, 34 dusky bars in the key of A, was from 1784. But the composer also used that type of paper in 1787. So Jones offers completions that might have emerged from either option, including one (more extroverted) in the style of other pieces Mozart wrote in 1784, and another (more intimate) à la 1787.What is believed to be the latest of the violin-keyboard sonata fragments — 31 exuberant yet aching bars of an Allegro, in G — was dated by Tyson to Mozart’s final two years, well after his last completed violin sonata. One of Jones’s completions is intended to be reminiscent of the relatively straightforward lyricism of that finished sonata (K. 547, in the standard chronological catalog). Another completion, though, sees the fragment as part of a new beginning circa 1790, with more complex harmonies borrowed from the K. 590 String Quartet and the K. 595 Piano Concerto.“Which of those paths does one bend this movement toward?” Jones said. To my taste, while the harmonically thornier, more overtly dramatic option is intriguing, the plainer pleasures of the other completion feel more properly, well, Mozartian.But it really — obviously — could go either way, particularly since Podger and Glynn play both alternatives with a relish that draws on broad experience in this repertory. The new recording is an appendix of sorts to Podger’s eight-disc cycle of Mozart’s violin sonatas, a collaboration with the keyboardist Gary Cooper that was completed in 2009.“When Chris and I played them through before lockdown,” she said of Jones’s pieces, “I remember thinking, Gosh, do I believe this, do I believe that? I was constantly questioning myself, because Tim hadn’t written in where the fragment finished and where the new invention began. And we did stop at one stage, and one of us said, ‘Surely that must be Tim,’ and we checked, and it was Mozart.”In scholarly circles, the response to Jones’s work has been positive — more or less. “Some think these are useless parlor games; some are a bit more used to them,” he said. “Some people are so polite they won’t tell you to your face. There are Mozart scholars who know what I’ve been up to, and on the whole they’ve been interested. Yes, there are anxieties about doing counterfactual history. But I think of these as just pieces of criticism; they’re no different than improvising a cadenza.”Emphasizing that he never set out to be a completions completist, Jones said he was almost done with his project posing as Mozart’s co-composer. “There are a few still interesting to me I haven’t tackled,” he said. “But I want to move on and finish the book I interrupted to do all this.”“Putting the hubris aside,” he added, “I’d much rather Mozart had finished these pieces than I.” More

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      10 Classical Concerts to Stream in April

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      Bach two ways, the composer Tania León and a Philip Glass adaptation of Kafka are among the highlights.With a widespread return to indoor, in-person performances still a ways off, here are 10 highlights from the flood of online music content coming in April. (Times listed are Eastern.)‘St. John Passion’April 2 at 9 a.m.; dg-premium.com; available through April 4.This concert sells itself: John Eliot Gardiner, one of the finest Bach interpreters in the world, leading his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the “St. John Passion” — on Good Friday, no less. Not always as popular, and always more controversial, than its sibling “St. Matthew Passion,” the “St. John” is nonetheless a work that Gardiner feels passionately about. As he wrote in his book “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” it is “as bold and complex an amalgam of storytelling and meditation, religion and politics, music and theology, as there has ever been.” JOSHUA BARONEAttacca QuartetApril 6 at 7 p.m.; millertheatre.com; available indefinitely.The Attacca players seem incapable of putting on a dull concert; one of the final live performances I heard before last year’s lockdown featured them in joyous mastery of Caroline Shaw’s string quartets. That was at the Miller Theater, which is hosting this livestream of selections from John Adams’s “John’s Book of Alleged Dances”; Gabriella Smith’s rhapsodic jam session “Carrot Revolution”; and “Benkei’s Standing Death,” a 2020 work by Paul Wiancko, whose “Lift” teems with understanding of and affection for the string-quartet tradition. JOSHUA BARONE‘Pelléas et Mélisande’April 9 at 1 p.m.; operavision.eu; available through Oct. 9.We usually associate the phrase “period instruments” with the Baroque era. But changes in musical technology have been continuous and profound through the ages, such that there can be revelatory performances of “period Beethoven” or “period Wagner” — or period Debussy! François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, have long tailored their interpretations — and the instruments they use — to different works they play. They have recorded Debussy as he might have sounded at the turn of the 20th century, and now take on his epochal 1902 “Pelléas” for Opéra de Lille, directed (and with starkly elegant sets designed) by Daniel Jeanneteau. ZACHARY WOOLFETania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, is among the works that The Orchestra Now will play in a streamed concert on April 10.Miranda Barnes for The New York TimesThe Orchestra NowApril 10 at 8 p.m.; theorchestranow.org; available on demand from April 15 through May 30.This impressive ensemble of graduate students at Bard College presents a characteristically adventurous program, conducted by Leon Botstein. It opens with Tania León’s glittering “Ácana,” from 2008, followed by Bernstein’s “Serenade”: a rumination on Plato’s “Symposium” that takes the form of an intense, episodic violin concerto, with Zongheng Zhang as soloist. The brilliant pianist Blair McMillen appears in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, a terrific but seldom performed piece. The program ends with Mendelssohn’s spirited “Scottish” Symphony. ANTHONY TOMMASINIBenjamin ApplApril 12 at 8 a.m.; wigmore-hall.org.uk; available through May 12.When this German baritone sang Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” cycle at the Park Avenue Armory two years ago, Joshua Barone wrote in The New York Times that he “had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice.” If you, like me, missed that performance, another opportunity beckons with this livestream from Wigmore Hall in London. Appl will have, in the pianist James Baillieu, the same partner as at the Armory, so we’ll see if he can cast the same spell over the screen. ZACHARY WOOLFE‘In the Penal Colony’April 15 at 12:01 a.m.; philipglasscenterpresents.org; available indefinitely.In the past, I’ve found the recording of this Philip Glass “pocket opera,” adapted from Kafka’s short story, to be a bit of a slog. But a staging can make all the difference, particularly when dealing (as here) with a talky libretto. This 2018 production by Opera Parallèle — presented as part of this year’s digital edition of Glass’s Days and Nights Festival — has turned me around on the work. Thanks to a strong pair of lead performances and a simple yet effective black-box set, Kafka’s bureaucratized dystopia shines through with a fresh lacquer of bleak humor. SETH COLTER WALLSSan Francisco SymphonyApril 15 at 1 p.m.; sfsymphonyplus.org; available indefinitely.The pandemic waylaid this orchestra’s splashy plans to welcome Esa-Pekka Salonen as its new music director. But with its own streaming service now up and running, San Francisco is giving Salonen a chance — however curtailed — to start defining his tenure. For this SoundBox program, he is focusing on ideas of musical patterning. While the program includes some well-worn Minimalist favorites by Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the most intriguing item is a premiere from Salonen himself: “Saltat sobrius,” a fantasy on Pérotin’s medieval “Sederunt Principes.” SETH COLTER WALLSJeremy Denk’s Bach concert, presented by Cal Performances, will be available starting April 15.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesJeremy DenkApril 15 at 10 p.m.; calperformances.org; available through July 14.The first book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” was to have dominated this pianist’s 2020 performance schedule. That, of course, was not to be, but last spring, he nevertheless produced a series of streams related to the capacious work. He returns to it in its totality for this concert, presented by Cal Performances. ZACHARY WOOLFEHallé OrchestraApril 29 at 7 a.m.; thehalle.vhx.tv; available through July 29.All three of the Hallé’s streams this month will be worth watching, including the premiere of Huw Watkins’s Symphony No. 2, available from April 15. But this last program of the season is the most ambitious: an account of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” filmed on location across the orchestra’s hometown, Manchester, England. Composed amid the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Stravinsky asks for small forces: just seven instrumentalists backing three actors and a dancer. Mark Elder conducts, and Annabel Arden and Femi Elufowoju Jr. direct. DAVID ALLENChamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterApril 29 at 7:30 p.m.; chambermusicsociety.org; available through May 6.This program is billed as “Monumental Trios,” and that’s no exaggeration. Beethoven’s Trio in E-flat (Op. 70, No. 2) is a majestic, searching and, at times, alluringly quizzical work. The superb pianist Juho Pohjonen joins the violinist Paul Huang and the cellist Jakob Koranyi in a performance taped in 2015. Brahms’s Trio No. 1 in B, composed in 1854 and revised in 1889, offers music by this composer in his brash early days — then modulated some 35 years later, once he was a probing, mature master. The performance by the pianist Orion Weiss, the violinist Ani Kavafian and cellist Carter Brey is from 2017. ANTHONY TOMMASINI More

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      Kurt Weill’s Path From Europe to Broadway Was a Straight Line

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      Weill’s early, Weimar-era works reveal the qualities that found a natural home in his golden age American musicals.Kurt Weill is often described as if he were two composers. One spun quintessential sounds of Weimar-era Berlin in works like “The Threepenny Opera,” and the other wrote innovative earworms for Broadway’s golden age. His career was bifurcated, so the story goes — split not only by a shift in style, but also by the Atlantic Ocean, when he fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in the United States.Yet it’s possible to trace an unbroken line from Weill’s earliest works, as a teenager, to his final projects for the American stage, before his death in 1950. This path is evident in a recent wave of streamed performances — from his hometown, Dessau, as well as from Berlin, Milan and elsewhere — that together form a rough survey of his European output and reveal a spongy mind, a desire for novelty and a steady progression toward simplicity that found a natural home in his pathbreaking Broadway musicals.The oldest piece on offer came, appropriately, from Dessau, where Weill was born in 1900. Today it’s a dreary town in the former East Germany, but it has a rich cultural heritage: The Kurt Weill Center is inside one of the Masters’ Houses of the Bauhaus school, which is a local landmark and a venue for the annual Kurt Weill Festival. That celebration went online this year, with events including a spirited recital by the young pianist Frank Dupree.Between duets with the trumpeter Simon Höfele, Dupree played “Intermezzo,” a short piano solo from 1917, before Weill had studied with the likes of Engelbert Humperdinck and Ferruccio Busoni or worked under the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch. You can already hear, in this tender work, a gift for melody, as well as the textural sophistication of Brahms.Music history looms over Weill’s early efforts. The First Symphony (1921) — recently streamed by the Berlin Philharmonic under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko — reflects the energetic enthusiasm of a student absorbing works of the post-Wagnerian generation, with an expressionistic nod to Schoenberg and a debt to Mahler. But it has more than a classroom sense of craft; Petrenko made a persuasive case for how tautly constructed and delicately balanced the symphony is within its uninterrupted, chaotic 25 minutes.Kirill Petrenko conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a recent livestream of Weill’s First Symphony.Monika Rittershaus, via Berliner PhilharmonikerAt the same time, Weill was also showing an interest in popular styles, such as in “Langsamer Fox und Algi-Song” — a textbook cabaret number that was charmingly arranged by Dupree for piano and trumpet in his Dessau program. It foreshadows Weill’s embrace of the lowbrow, which he bent to ironic and politically charged effect in “The Threepenny Opera.” But that was still some years off, and until then, his music carried traces of fashionable atonality, with a teeming urge for originality that came out in works like the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, written in 1924 and featured in a stream by the Berlin Philharmonic’s Karajan Academy.Despite the title, the concerto is also written for percussion and double basses; nonetheless, it’s a gambit of orchestration, pitting a string soloist against an ensemble of much louder instruments. The Karajan musicians and the conductor Marie Jacquot — joined by the coolly able violinist Kolja Blacher — may have played with a timidity that paled some of the piece’s wit. But overall, they validated the claim of the musicologist Kim Kowalke, the president of the Kurt Weill Foundation and author of the landmark study “Kurt Weill in Europe,” that “nowhere is the acuity of the ear more apparent than in the orchestration of the concerto.”Elsewhere — such as in “Der Neue Orpheus,” a cantata for soprano and violin soloists — Weill proved a master of balancing disparate voices, with a keen ear for precise orchestration. It’s why his works from the 1920s rarely call for a large ensemble — and perhaps why so many of them, normally neglected for their modest scale, have been programmed during the pandemic.One that remains overlooked is the short comic opera “Der Zar Lässt Sich Photographieren” (“The Czar Has His Photograph Taken”), written in 1927 and the embodiment of the mocking question Busoni is said to have asked Weill: “What do you want to become, a Verdi of the poor?” (To which Weill responded, “Is that so bad?”) It’s easy entertainment but also revolutionary, not least for its use of a prerecorded tango played onstage from a gramophone.The dramatic works that have recently been staged, however, are significant as well. In Milan, the Teatro alla Scala paired “The Seven Deadly Sins” with “Mahagonny Songspiel,” Weill’s first collaboration with Bertolt Brecht (and the raw ingredients for their full-length opera “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”). Weill’s music was already moving away from its flirtation with atonality, toward deceptive simplicity and a wholesale adoption of dance and jazz idioms; his goal was nothing less than the reformation of music theater.From left, Elliott Carlton Hines, Michael Smallwood, Kate Lindsey, Andrew Harris, Matthäus Schmidlechner and Lauren Michelle in the Teatro alla Scala’s double bill of “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “Mahagonny Songspiel.”via Teatro alla ScalaWeill sought out partnerships with the playwrights and poets he considered the best of their time. He had admired Brecht’s collection “Die Hauspostille,” as well as a radio broadcast of “Mann Ist Mann.” Though they had different temperaments, and were ultimately incompatible, the pair created some of the definitive artworks of Weimar-era Berlin, in which Weill’s music reached its most potent, most subversive political power.Irina Brook’s staging of “Mahagonny Songspiel” for La Scala — conducted clearly if slowly by Riccardo Chailly and featuring the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and the soprano Lauren Michelle — was an imaginatively scrappy reflection of the New York Times critic Olin Downes’s report from the 1927 premiere, which he described as “a clever and savage skit on the degeneration of society, the triumph of sensualism, the decay of art.”Chailly’s foot-dragging interpretation, which didn’t put enough trust in the music’s dancing rhythms and tempos, is a common problem among Weill performances today. Members of the Berlin Philharmonic came close, but ultimately fell short, in playing the jubilant fox trot “Berlin im Licht” (1928) and the “Threepenny” suite “Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” (1929) in one concert, and Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg’s suite from the “Mahagonny” opera, imprecisely conducted by Thomas Sondergard, in another. Contrast these performances with Dupree’s rollicking arrangement of “Berlin im Licht,” whose smiling spirit wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1920s nightclub.“Kleine Dreigroschenmusik” in particular reveals how the liveliness of dance is essential to a Weill performance. The music has to be enjoyable, even while sticking its tongue out at you; that’s the sly magic of its politics, the triumph of Weill and Brecht’s partnership, admired to this day by composers like David Lang. Otherwise, the piece risks being weighty and ponderous — in other words, no fun.An energetic interpretation can lift even the less successful of Weill and Brecht’s projects. Take “Happy End” (1929) — loved by neither man, but nevertheless packed with hits including “Bilbao-Song” and “Surabaya-Johnny.” For the Brecht Festival, in Augsburg, Germany, the actress Winnie Böwe, joined by Felix Kroll on accordion, salvaged the show by presenting “Happy End für Eilige,” a breathless abridgment that cleverly repurposed the script’s bite in touches like singing the mocking hymn “Hosiannah Rockefeller” from inside an apse.Weill and Brecht parted ways while preparing a revised “Mahagonny” for its Berlin run in 1931. But they were reunited in their exile following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Weill had fled to Paris not long after “Der Silbersee,” which features one of his finest European scores, became a target of Nazi demonstrations and was banned. In his new city, he quickly received a commission from George Balanchine’s Les Ballets 1933.It became “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a “ballet chanté” that tells the story of two sisters — one singing, one dancing — who set out from Louisiana hoping to make enough money in the big city to build their family a little home on the Mississippi River. It’s a bitter tale, prone to aggressive interpretations. But at La Scala, Lindsey struck a balance of ironic beauty and grittier outbursts held in reserve for maximal effect. In Amsterdam, the Dutch National Opera presented its own virtual “Sins,” starring Eva-Maria Westbroek, who approached the role with a sort of generic elegance fascinatingly at odds with unhinged acting, intensified by the multicamera production’s kinetic close-ups and harsh lighting.Eva-Maria Westbroek in the Dutch National Opera’s multicamera production of “The Seven Deadly Sins.”Sanne PeperThere is some of the “Sins” score in Weill’s Second Symphony, which was written at the same time and premiered in 1934. Performed by the Karajan Academy alongside the violin concerto, this symphony is more focused than its 1921 predecessor in the genre, but is also composed with a straightforward language better suited to dramatic than concert works. It’s likable, but to what end?That’s a question you could ask of much of Weill’s music from this interlude between Berlin and Broadway. His inclination to novelty is reflected more in chameleonic adaptation than in innovation. Members of the Berlin Philharmonic recently played “Suite Panaméenne,” which is adapted from “Marie Galante” (1934), a show whose music is clearly eager to be loved — and was, especially the tango “Youkali” and the chanson “J’Attends un Navire,” which became something of an anthem for the French Resistance. There is a confidence and an unpretentious ease in these songs, but they behave like the work of a tunesmith. “J’Attends un Navire” doesn’t sound ironically French, the way schmaltz is skewered in “Mahagonny” as “eternal art”; it just sounds authentically French.But the hallmarks of this period in Weill’s life — high standards for collaborative partners, a knack for internalizing diverse styles, an ear for unforgettable melodies — would soon serve him well in the United States. Some of his best work was still to come: setting Ira Gershwin’s lyrics in “Lady in the Dark”; blending opera and Broadway with Langston Hughes in “Street Scene”; pioneering the concept musical with Alan Jay Lerner in “Love Life.”He just had to get there first. That opportunity would come a year after “Marie Galante,” when Weill left for New York and a project with a fitting provisional title: “The Road of Promise.” More

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      A Malcolm X Opera Will Get a Rare Revival in Detroit

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      Michigan Opera Theater announced the return of indoor performances and named an associate artistic director: the star soprano Christine Goerke.When Anthony Davis’s sprawling, genre-blending biographical opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera, it drew a notably diverse audience and was considered a commercial success. Yet it has rarely been revived.A new production is coming, though, as part of Michigan Opera Theater’s 2021-22 season — the first under its new artistic director, Yuval Sharon. Opening in May 2022, “X” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”) and star the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who will also be the season’s artist in residence.“My first interview for this job was shortly after the murder of George Floyd,” Sharon, who is also an innovative stage director, said in an interview. “I thought: This is a moment for change. Casting singers of color is really easy, but my focus has been on composers, librettists, conductors. I’m thinking about this season as a statement of principles, and that’s what I hope for going forward.”As part of the season announcement, on Tuesday, Michigan Opera Theater also said that Christine Goerke, a reigning Wagnerian soprano who sang the role of Brünnhilde last fall in “Twilight: Gods” — Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage — would join next season as associate artistic director.In an interview, Goerke said that her family would be moving from New Jersey to Detroit, where she has relatives. But, aware that the news of her appointment might surprise fans of her performances, she clarified that she didn’t plan to reduce her performance schedule any time soon.“I’m not stepping away from singing,” she said. “I’m stepping toward what’s going to come eventually.”“I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” she added. “We’re always thinking about what’s next. And I want to be on the other side of the desk. My relationship to opera is not going to end when I’m done singing.”The soprano Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde in “Twilight: Gods” last fall at Michigan Opera Theater, which has named her its associate artistic director.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesAll of the productions next season come with backup plans, as the course of the coronavirus pandemic appears hopeful yet is still uncertain. But what Michigan Opera Theater unveiled on Tuesday puts off a return to live indoor performances at the Detroit Opera House until at least April 2022.Until then, productions will be staged outdoors, or at unconventional venues. The season will open on May 15 with a concert performance of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” with Goerke making her role debut as Santuzza. It will be presented at the Meadow Brook Amphitheater in Rochester Hills, Mich., and conducted by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Jader Bignamini.In September, Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s opera “Blue,” about a family in Harlem navigating the American Black experience, will receive a new production, by Kaneza Schaal, following its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019; Daniela Candillari will conduct. The location and timing have not yet been determined, but the following production, staged by Sharon, will be “Bliss,” Ragnar Kjartansson’s marathon performance piece that loops the same three minutes from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” for 12 hours.Michigan Opera Theater will return indoors on Feb. 26 for Robert Xavier Rodríguez and Migdalia Cruz’s “Frida,” conducted by Suzanne Mallare Acton, the company’s assistant music director. It will be a revival of Jose Maria Condemi’s 2015 staging, performed at Music Hall in downtown Detroit.Then the company will return to its theater, the Detroit Opera House, on April 2, for Sharon’s production of “La Bohème,” conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni. The concept is something Sharon has discussed in interviews before: He will present the four acts of Puccini’s opera in reverse.“The reverse order means that we’re starting with death, and ending with love and hope,” he said. “We’ll all be coming from a place of death — at least I hope that this will be post-Covid. And I love that this thing everyone is hearing, the first thing in the theater in two years, is something they’ve never heard.”“X,” in a newly revised score by Davis, will bring the season to a close in May, conducted by Kazem Abdullah. Writing for The New Yorker after Davis won the Pulitzer Prize for Music last year, the musicologist Ryan Ebright noted that the opera had received only one full revival, at Oakland Opera Theater, in 2006. San Francisco Opera once suggested that “X” be staged as part of its inner-city parks performances, and Davis countered by asking whether they would put on Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” in a park.“I tried to make them realize,” Davis told Ebright, “that it’s about time that America got over thinking of Black art as being what’s done in the playground, or what’s basically the social-service part of culture.” More

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      For Eddie Izzard, a ‘99’ Ice Cream and a Waterloo Sunset Are Wondrous Things

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      The star of “Six Minutes to Midnight,” opening Friday, tells why Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, “Great Expectations,” David Bowie and London landmarks hold meaning for her.Eddie Izzard, the British comedian-actor-writer-activist-endurance runner, tends to push herself to the limit. And then some.“I do find — because I had my sort of 10 wilderness years before things took off — that I’ve tried very hard to stay four steps ahead of where I need to be,” Izzard, who is transgender, said in a video interview from London.She performs stand-up in English, French, German and Spanish. She channels 21 characters in a one-person show of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” She runs multiple marathons for charity — clocking 32 in 31 days in January, each followed by a comedy routine, for her Make Humanity Great Again campaign, which supports global unity and tolerance.And still, Izzard found time to co-write, executive produce and star in “Six Minutes to Midnight,” set in 1939, about a teacher at a finishing school in the south of England whose students include the daughters of high-ranking Nazis. The film, out Friday, based on a true story she learned about from a museum curator in Bexhill-on-Sea, where her family is from, was a 10-year process: five to develop the characters and five to get her acting to a level where she could play a lead, alongside stars like Judi Dench.Catch her while you can: Izzard hopes to go into politics in the near future as a member of Parliament for the Labour party, during which she’ll take a hiatus from performing.With her career in high gear, the timing may not be perfect, but she’s not worried. “There’s the critical momentum you need when you’re going in,” she said, “but that will stick around for when you come out.”Izzard channeled her trademark whimsy into her list of 10 cultural essentials — from the fantasy world of the Narnia books to the simple delights of an ice cream cone — which she wrote herself. KATHRYN SHATTUCK1. Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations My mum used to love to listen to classical music. My mum and dad were married in ‘Adan (Aden) in Yemen and Dad talked of her liking to go up onto the roof of a local hotel and play classical music from a gramophone record as the sun set. I think that, amongst others records, she would have played Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations, as it was one of the classical albums that was often played in the house. My mum died when I was only 6 years old, but I do remember hearing different albums played at home in the years she was alive, and this one stuck with me from an early age. The fact that he was called Edward, and so was I, didn’t hurt.2. “30 Rock” “30 Rock” is just gold dust. If you have a brain and a sense of humor, just buy the first episode. If it grabs you then just do what I did and download the whole box set. The height of great comedy is to be as intelligent as it is bonkers, and this is it. It’s the kind of sitcom that probably only could exist in a post-“Seinfeld” America, and it probably had to fight just as hard as “Seinfeld” did for its own existence over its first few seasons.3. “David Bowie: Finding Fame” The key thing in this documentary to take home to your brain is that it shows the 10 wilderness years before Bowie took off with Ziggy Stardust in 1972. One needs to know that he was in his first band in 1962, when the Beatles were just taking off. So the stamina that 10 years adrift taught him, and also the few times when it looked like things were taking off but then didn’t, must have informed the rest of his career. I didn’t realize until I watched this that he was at times, in the early days, way off course but he kept regrouping and coming back.4. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” by C.S. Lewis It is a great mystical adventure story to feed the imagination of kids. You have to understand that I’m dyslexic and so read very few books, but I read all of the seven Narnia ones when I was young. I later found out that Lewis was lacing in religion to the series, and this made every feel a little hoodwinked about the whole thing. But later, I realized you could just ignore the symbolism if you wanted to.5. “The Great Escape” A classic war film and one I’ve watched many times. The fact it is based in truth, when a lot of war films in those days were not, makes it even better. I like the film so much, I’ve even watched it in German. As I do my stand-up in German, I was playing Berlin, and I bought the DVD of the film there. If you switch on the German audio track and just have English subtitles, it is a different film. Suddenly they’re all talking German, and so it just becomes a battle between an extreme right regime and people fighting for a return to humanity.6. “Waterloo Sunset” Written by Ray Davies of the Kinks and performed by them. It’s a song that I’ve always thought was accidentally perfect for me as I knew exactly where to see a Waterloo sunset. Waterloo Bridge is my favorite London bridge (we have many). When I was a street performer at Covent Garden, I used to walk across the bridge to perform in front of the Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. And at some point soon after Covid, I will perform inside the Festival Hall. And then I’ll watch another sunset and I will play “Waterloo Sunset” again.7. “Pogles’ Wood” If you search for “Pogles’ Wood: Honey Bees” on YouTube, you can see an episode of this early animated TV series that I was mesmerized by when I was about 5 years old. Normally if you watch back at TV shows that you found entertaining at that age, you will find them tired and old-fashioned in modern times. But “Pogles’ Wood” still holds up with its mixture of animated characters, weirdly beguiling music and short pieces of live-action documentary that showed and taught you things from the real world.8. The “99” Ice Cream What did people do before ice cream? Nobody knows. But the “99” is a staple of the British ice cream world. It is just a basic wafer cone with soft white vanilla ice cream swirled on top of it, but the crowning difference that makes it a thing of genius is a chocolate Flake stuck diagonally (always diagonally) into the side of the vanilla ice cream.Once you buy your “99,” experienced users will have their own eating ritual to perform. Mine is always to push the chocolate Flake with one finger so that you push it down into the center of the cone. Then you close the hole in the ice cream over with your tongue and carry on eating the cone as if it never had a chocolate Flake. Then, when you are down to the final handle part of the cone, you have a heady mixture of wafer, vanilla ice cream and flaky chocolate to feast upon.9. “Great Expectations” Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, and slightly bizarrely, I was born on Feb. 7, 1962, 150 years later. Having never read a great work of literature, I thought I should start with a work of Dickens due to the weird link. I chose “Great Expectations” to firstly read and record it to become an audiobook (which I have now done), and then I thought I should turn it into a solo show. So I commissioned my older brother, Mark, to adapt it down from over 20 hours of book into a 90-minute solo performance.Apart from it being one of Dickens’ more mature books and a great story of Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Estella, “Great X” is also interesting for me as it starts off down to the South East of London, along the river Thames towards the mouth of the river. This is the Chatham, Kent area of England and was where Dickens grew up, and the book starts here in about the 1820s, which is when he was there as a child. So you hear about “the marshes” direct from his childhood, a place that was barren in the winter and glorious in the summer.10. The Parks of London I do find them a joy. Are they culture? I think so, for they can inspire. Two of our biggest are slap bang in the center of London. They are Hyde Park and Kensington Park. They are essentially one large park, but they have West Carriage Drive running between that separates them. The ancient Serpentine River runs through them, which was long ago turned into a boating lake. Speakers’ Corner, where anyone can pull up and hold forth on any subject, is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park — which is right by the beginning of the old Roman road of Watling Street. I encourage anyone to take a walk from the bottom corner of one park to the top corner of the other park on a warm and sunny day, and it will feel like a walk in the countryside. More

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      Kenneth Cooper, Harpsichordist With Improviser’s Gift, Dies at 79

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      He excelled in the Baroque repertoire, but this interests were eclectic. He was also an accomplished musicologist.Kenneth Cooper, a harpsichordist, pianist and musicologist who was acclaimed for performances of Baroque music that balanced historical insights with engaging spontaneity, whose nearly 100 recordings included forays into contemporary works and ragtime, and whose collaborators included Yo-Yo Ma, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 79.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his family, who said he had suffered a stroke a few days earlier at his Manhattan apartment.Mr. Cooper had a flair for improvisation and ornamentation based on his scholarly studies of early music practices. “Oh, I enjoy improvising a lot,” he said in a 1977 interview with The New York Times. “I always enjoy making trouble.”He added: “I know there are harpsichordists who are more well behaved than I am. But I’m not trying to be outrageous. I’m trying to give the music the same vividness and impulse that I think Bach or Handel might have given it.”That interview appeared the day before Mr. Cooper presented a recital at Alice Tully Hall, a typically adventurous program that included compositions by Bartok and Ligeti and showcased a recent discovery: works from a frayed early-18th-century volume that Mr. Cooper had chanced upon while rummaging through a junk shop in Oxford, England, and that contained harpsichord transcriptions of orchestra overtures to 65 of Handel’s operas and oratorios.Some harpsichordists might have dismissed these works as not “authentic” Handel, Mr. Cooper said, though he surmised that the arrangements could have been prepared by Handel’s students. But he embraced them for their vitality and grandeur, as well as for the opportunity they offered for creativity. Though Handel’s melodies, bass lines and rhythms were intact, inner voices were omitted; performers were clearly expected to fill in these parts extemporaneously.In a review of Mr. Cooper’s recording of those Handel transcriptions in 1978, the Washington Post critic Joseph McLellan praised the album for presenting familiar music “in a striking new perspective.”Mr. Cooper’s 1978 recording of Handel transcriptions was praised for presenting familiar music “in a striking new perspective.”VanguardMr. Cooper’s adventurousness went hand in hand with scrupulous musicianship and articulate technique. He was a sensitive partner in chamber works, as in his recording, with Mr. Ma, of Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba (played on the cello) and harpsichord.In 1993, Mr. Cooper’s interest in Baroque works for larger forces led him to found the Berkshire Bach Ensemble, an extension of the Berkshire Bach Society in Great Barrington, Mass., then in its third year. The ensemble, which he directed for 23 years, presented chamber and orchestra programs in various locations. The concerts included an annual New Year’s Eve program, often featuring Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos.This offering grew so popular that in time it spread over several days at several sites, most notably the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. A Berkshire Eagle article in conjunction with Mr. Cooper’s final New Year’s program, in 2016, estimated that he had presided over some 200 Brandenburg Concerto performances for the society.“I’ve enjoyed every single one of them,” the article quoted him as saying. “I’ve had the most amazing group of players.”Kenneth Cooper was born in New York City on May 31, 1941, and grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. His father, Rudolf, a British immigrant, taught English at the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). His mother, Florence (Buxbaum) Cooper, after raising Mr. Cooper and his sister, Constance, worked at the Museum of Modern Art and became active in the League of Women Voters. Both parents were painters and art collectors.Mr. Cooper began studying piano at a young age. A brief residency at his high school by the harpsichordist Fernando Valenti fired his enthusiasm for that instrument, leading to his studies at the Mannes College of Music with the eminent harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe. He then attended Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s and, in 1971, a doctorate in musicology.While leading a student ensemble at Columbia, Mr. Cooper auditioned a soprano from Barnard College for a staged production of Handel’s “Acis and Galatea.” That singer, Josephine Mongiardo, won the role of Galatea, and she and Mr. Cooper married in 1969.The couple performed together for decades, including at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1979 in a program of works by Bach and Handel, a rarity by the 19th-century composer Franz Lachner and a premiere by Seymour Barab, with Mr. Cooper playing harpsichord and piano.Ms. Mongiardo-Cooper, a voice teacher at Barnard and elsewhere, survives Mr. Cooper, along with their son, Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, an actor and singer, and his sister, Constance Cooper.A pivotal early solo recital for Mr. Cooper, at Alice Tully Hall in 1973, earned a glowing review in The Times from the critic Allen Hughes, who described the young artist as a “virtuoso of apparently unfaltering precision, rhythmic security and tone color sensitivity.”Mr. Cooper performed works by Clementi on the pianoforte at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Elebash Recital Hall in Manhattan in 2003.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAs his career thrived, Mr. Cooper performed regularly at festivals in Santa Fe, N.M.; Lucerne, Switzerland; and Salzburg, Austria. He also appeared with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His recordings include well-received albums of Scarlatti sonatas and of Bach’s violin sonatas, with Mr. Cooper accompanying the violinist Ani Kavafian on fortepiano, as well as “Silks and Rags,” featuring his versions of ragtime pieces and other American fare. He taught at Barnard, Columbia, Mannes and elsewhere.In an appearance on the radio program “WNCN Live” in the early 1980s, Mr. Cooper explained what it was like to lose himself in performance.He was about to play Bach’s dark, teeming and intense Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Every time he played it, “something new comes out of it,” he said.“It’s almost now an adventure to see what new is waiting,” he added.However, he said, he had to be careful. “If it’s too different, I can get very distracted and forget what I’m doing.” More

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      Met Opera’s Music Director Decries Musicians’ Unpaid Furlough

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      Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s letter to the company’s leaders urges them to “find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately.”Urging the Metropolitan Opera to compensate its artists “appropriately,” the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, sent a letter to leaders at the Met on Thursday saying that the many months its orchestra and chorus had gone without pay during the pandemic had become “increasingly unacceptable.”He sent the letter as the Met’s musicians were scheduled to receive their first partial paychecks since they were furloughed in April. Before this week, they had been the last major ensemble in the country without a deal for at least some pay during the pandemic. In addressing the players’ nearly yearlong furlough — and hinting at the tough negotiations ahead, in which the Met is seeking long-term pay cuts from its unionized employees — Nézet-Séguin was doing something rare for a music director: weighing in on labor matters.“Of course, I understand this is a complex situation,” Nézet-Séguin wrote, “but as the public face of the Met on a musical level, I am finding it increasingly hard to justify what has happened.”The letter was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by its recipients, which included Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager; the leaders of the negotiating committees representing the chorus and orchestra; and members of the opera’s board of directors.“We risk losing talent permanently,” Nézet-Séguin warned in the letter. “The orchestra and chorus are our crown jewels, and they must be protected. Their talent is the Met. The artists of the Met are the institution.”The orchestra committee has said that 10 out of 97 members have retired during the pandemic as the ensemble has gone unpaid, a stark increase from the two to three who retire in an average year.“Protecting the long-term future of the Met is inextricably linked with retaining these musicians, and with respecting their livelihoods, their income and their well-being,” Nézet-Séguin wrote.The Met said in a statement that “we share Yannick’s frustration over the lengthy closure and the impact it has had on our employees,” and added that the company was pleased that its orchestra and chorus and others were now receiving bridge pay. The Met said all involved were “working together for new agreements that will ensure the sustainability of the Met into the future.”The Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, has said that since the pandemic forced it to shut its doors it has lost an estimated $150 million in earned revenue, and that it was seeking pay cuts from its workers, as many arts institutions have. The Met has been trying to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent — the change in take-home pay would be more like 20 percent, it has said — and has offered to restore half the cuts when ticket revenue and core donations return to prepandemic levels.Months into the furlough, the Met offered partial paychecks to its workers if they agreed to those cuts, but the unions resisted. At the end of the year, the Met offered partial paychecks on a temporary basis for simply returning to the bargaining table. Members of the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents chorus members, dancers and others, accepted at the end of January and have been receiving paychecks for more than a month. The orchestra musicians voted to accept the offer this week. (The Met has locked out its stagehands, whose contract expired last year.)Nézet-Séguin wrote in his letter that he was relieved that both the musicians and the chorus members are now being paid, but added that “this is just a start.” The deal allows for temporary payments of up to $1,543 a week, less than half of what the musicians are typically paid.Nézet-Séguin was named the Met’s music director in 2016, when he was tapped to succeed James Levine, who led the company for four decades (Mr. Levine, who stepped down to an emeritus position because of health problems and was then fired two years later after an investigation into sexual abuse allegations, died earlier this month.)“I implore the fiduciaries of this incredible house to urgently help to find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately,” Nézet-Séguin wrote. “We all realize the challenges, economic and otherwise, that the Met is facing, and therefore I ask for empathy, honesty and open communication throughout this process.” More

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      James Levine, Former Met Opera Maestro, Is Dead at 77

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      Mr. Levine was the longtime musical leader of the Met and orchestras in Boston and Munich. But his career ended in a scandal over allegations of sexual improprieties.James Levine, the guiding maestro of the Metropolitan Opera for more than 40 years and one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors until allegations of sexual abuse and harassment ended his career, died on March 9 in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 77.His death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by Dr. Len Horovitz, his physician. He did not specify the cause, and it was unclear why the death had not been announced earlier. Mr. Levine had been living in Palm Springs.After investigating accounts of sexual improprieties by Mr. Levine with younger men stretching over decades, the Met first suspended and then fired him in 2018, a precipitous fall from grace at the age of 74. He fought back with a defamation lawsuit.Before the scandal emerged, Mr. Levine was a widely beloved maestro who for decades helped define the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, expanding its repertory and burnishing its world-class orchestra. And his work extended well beyond that company. For seven years, starting in 2004, he was the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, earning high praise during his initial seasons for revitalizing that esteemed ensemble, championing contemporary music and commissioning major works by living composers.After investigating accounts of sexual improprieties by Mr. Levine with younger men stretching over decades, the Met first suspended and then fired him in 2018.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMr. Levine also served as music director of the Munich Philharmonic for five years (1999-2004). He had long associations with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as music director of its Ravinia Festival for more than 20 years.His final years as a maestro were dogged by health crises, including a cancerous growth on his kidney and surgery to repair a rotator cuff after he tripped on the stage at Symphony Hall in Boston in 2006. The problems forced Mr. Levine to miss weeks, even months, of performances. In March 2011, facing reality, he resigned the Boston post.Despite the stark break with the Met Opera, it is at that institution where Mr. Levine’s musical legacy will be mainly defined. He had a 47-year association with the house and served in various positions of artistic leadership there. “No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.”Most conductors of Mr. Levine’s generation maintained international careers, jetting from one appearance to another and not getting tied down for too long at any one post. Mr. Levine’s commitment to the Met was a throwback to the era of conductors like his mentor George Szell, who was the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra for 24 years.From the beginning, his association with the Met seemed an ideal match of musician, art form and institution. A few weeks before turning 29, he made his debut in Puccini’s “Tosca” on June 5, 1971, a matinee for which he had had no stage rehearsals with the starry cast, headed by Grace Bumbry as Tosca and Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi. Reviewing the performance, Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Levine “may be one of the Metropolitan’s best podium acquisitions in some time.” Mr. Levine was named the company’s principal conductor, the first person to hold that post, for the 1973-74 season. The next year, with the departure of Rafael Kubelik, who had a brief and uneasy tenure as music director, Mr. Levine took over that title, beginning with the 1976-77 season, and settled in for what turned out to be 2,552 performances — far more than any other conductor in its history — as well as the creation of an extensive catalog of recordings and videos, including some landmark Met productions. He confidently led both early Mozart and thorny Schoenberg, and he brought works like Berg’s “Wozzeck” from the outskirts to the center of the company’s repertory.At 5 feet 10 inches, with a round face, unkempt curly mane and portly build, Mr. Levine did not cut the figure of a charismatic maestro. His father used to nudge him to lose weight, cut his hair and get contact lenses, but Mr. Levine balked.“I said that I would 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,” he said in a 1983 Time magazine cover article. Indeed, Mr. Levine expanded the public’s perception of what a conductor should be and, through dozens of “Live From the Met” broadcasts on public television, became one of the most recognized classical musicians of his time, even sharing the screen with Mickey Mouse in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.”He was neither a podium acrobat like Leonard Bernstein nor a grim-faced technician like Szell. His movements were nimble but never attention-grabbing. He encouraged orchestra players to watch his face, which beamed with pleasure when things were going right and signaled an alert when called for. “Give me some eyes” was his frequent request.A Sense of Musical DramaSome critics said Mr. Levine’s work lacked an identifiable character. Though his interpretive approach, even in matters as basic as tempos, fluctuated markedly throughout his career, certain qualities were consistent. His performances were clearheaded, rhythmically incisive without being hard-driven, and cogently structured, while still allowing melodic lines ample room to breathe. Not surprisingly given his immersion in opera, he had a keen sense of drama that carried into his accounts of symphonic literature. Above all, Mr. Levine valued naturalness, with nothing sounding forced, whether a stormy outburst in a Wagner opera or a ruminative passage of a Mahler symphony.By the late 1980s, the Met Orchestra was considered among the top opera house ensembles in the world. That was not enough for Mr. Levine. He instituted a regular series of orchestra concerts at Carnegie Hall and transformed what had been periodic chamber music programs with Met musicians into the popular Met Chamber Ensemble.A proficient and elegant pianist, he forged close musical ties with the Met players by performing chamber works with them. In time, many critics came to consider the Met Orchestra on a par with the leading symphonic ensembles of the world.Mr. Levine began his career in opera at a time when the genre was perceived to be in decline. “The farther we get from the living tradition of opera, the more difficult it is to come up with the voices and personalities to perform it convincingly,” he said in a 1985 article in The New York Times Magazine.Mr. Levine in about 1971. He had a 47-year association with the Metropolitan Opera and long ones as well with orchestras in Boston, Vienna, Munich and elsewhere.Hastings-Willinger & Associates/Met Opera ArchivesTo contend with this situation, he argued, it was essential for the Met to place artistic matters under the guidance of a maestro steeped in the tradition — namely himself. Soon he was conducting as much as one-third of the Met’s performances each season, claiming for himself most of the major works, the new productions and the biggest stars. His quick rise at the Met was viewed by many as a power grab. There were frequent complaints that giants of opera like Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Georg Solti and Riccardo Muti had little presence or were absent from the conducting ranks.In its defense the Met explained that given the company’s repertory system, with multiple works in performance simultaneously during a week, conducting an opera involved a commitment that many leading maestros were unwilling to make. Besides, it was hard to argue with success. Perhaps Mr. Levine was hogging the podium and keeping rivals at bay, but audiences and critics were excited by the artistic results.Rumors of Mr. Levine’s alleged sexual misconduct with younger men had trailed him for decades. Though periodically news organizations had looked into the story, nothing concrete turned up until December 2017. Amid the tide of allegations against powerful men in what came to be called the #MeToo movement, four men went public with accusations that Mr. Levine had sexually abused them. The acts were alleged to have taken place as far back as 1968 and began, the accusers each maintained, when they were teenagers.After their accusations were reported in The New York Post and The Times, the Met hired an outside law firm to investigate and suspended Mr. Levine pending the results. In March 2018, after the investigation found what the Met called credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in “sexually abusive and harassing conduct,” the company fired him.Days later Mr. Levine sued the Met for breach of contract and defamation. The suit claimed that Peter Gelb, who had been general manager since 2006 and in public had been a steadfast supporter of Mr. Levine, had “brazenly seized” on allegations of misconduct as “a pretext to end a longstanding personal campaign to force Levine out.” The company responded in May of that year with a countersuit, releasing evidence that, according to a company statement, Mr. Levine had “used his reputation and position of power to prey upon and abuse artists,” citing examples of misconduct that it said had occurred from the 1970s through 1999.Mr. Levine’s suit sought at least $5.8 million. The Met sought roughly the same amount. The two sides settled in the summer of 2019, agreeing that the Met and its insurer would pay Mr. Levine $3.5 million.In July 2020, the Maggio Musicale festival in Florence, Italy, announced his return to the podium the following January, but those performances were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.A Young TalentJames Lawrence Levine was born on June 23, 1943, in Cincinnati. Though his heritage was German, Latvian and Hungarian, all of his grandparents were born in the United States. His father, Lawrence Levine, under the name Larry Lee, was a bandleader and pop crooner in Los Angeles during the 1930s; he later returned to Cincinnati, his hometown, to work in his father’s clothing business. Mr. Levine’s mother, the former Helen Goldstein, had been an actress in New York under the name Helen Golden and had a leading role opposite John Garfield on Broadway in “Having Wonderful Time” in 1937.By the age of 2 Mr. Levine was picking out tunes on the family’s Chickering piano. Formal lessons with Gertrude Englander began when he was not quite 5. Thor Johnson, the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, took an interest in young Jimmy, who advanced quickly and made his debut with the orchestra at 10, playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1.His teacher persuaded his parents to take him to New York for an evaluation at the Juilliard School. The renowned piano pedagogue Rosina Lhevinne heard him play and urged the dean of the school to offer him a scholarship.Mr. Levine in 1962. At Juilliard he studied with the conductor Jean Morel.Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesBut Mr. Levine’s parents did not want to disrupt his childhood in Cincinnati. There were more things in the world than music, his mother said. Jimmy needed to learn how to be a full person and to live with his two younger siblings: Thomas, an artist, who in later life became an assistant to his brother; and Janet, who became a clinical psychologist.He is survived by his sister; his brother died in April.Instead of setting their son up in New York, the Levines arranged for him to take regular trips to the city, usually every other week. He would fly to New York on Friday night, have lessons with Ms. Lhevinne on Saturday morning, take in the Met matinee or an evening orchestra concert, have another lesson on Sunday, then return home that afternoon.In 1956, Mr. Levine went to the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where he worked with the pianist Rudolf Serkin and was the chorus master for a performance of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” put on by the resident musicians and singers. The next year he spent the first of 14 summers at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where he committed himself to a conducting career.Mr. Levine was a powerful force at the Met Opera over five decades.Calle Hesslefors/Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1961, after graduating from high school, he moved to New York and enrolled in Juilliard’s college division, where he studied with the conductor Jean Morel. At a summer program in Baltimore in 1964, the American Conductors Project, he was heard by Szell, who invited him to come to Cleveland to be his assistant. Mr. Levine left Juilliard without completing a degree and spent the next six years working closely with Szell.Mr. Levine’s debut with the Cleveland Orchestra came in 1967, conducting Strauss’s tone poem “Don Juan.” While there he met Suzanne Thomson, a young oboist from Detroit, who put aside her own career to become his personal assistant and living companion, sharing his Upper West Side apartment from the early 1970s.Mr. Levine was circumspect about his private life, refusing to discuss his sexual orientation or romantic relationships. In a 1998 interview with The Times, he explained why he had refused to comment on rumors and “such nonsense” over the years. “I’ve never been able to speak in public generalities about my private life,” he said. “Day by day, my world is filled with real music, real people, real interactions.” He added almost plaintively: “How much do you have to give? How good do you have to be?”In 1966, while still working under Szell in Cleveland, Mr. Levine founded the University Circle Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians interested in contemporary music. The next year he conducted the orchestra in the premiere of Milton Babbitt’s “Correspondences,” a formidably difficult 12-tone work, winning its composer’s lasting admiration. Opening night at the Met Opera for the 1997-98 season, when Mr. Levine was at the height of his powers.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesIn March 2018 The Boston Globe published a long exposé of Mr. Levine’s years with this student ensemble in Cleveland, drawing on some two dozen interviews with former students and musicians, who described a cultlike atmosphere around Mr. Levine, even though he was not much older than they. The participants, who became known as “Levinites,” recalled belittlement by their mentor, loyalty tests and even group sex.Just 15 years after his Met debut, Mr. Levine’s leadership role there was formalized in 1986, when he became the house’s artistic director, a title that was scaled back to music director in 2004, when he began his tenure with the Boston Symphony.He had other important associations as well. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 1976 conducting Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” in a landmark Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production. In 1982 he made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, conducting the centennial production of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” At the time, Bayreuth was still tainted by the anti-Semitism of Wagner and certain of Wagner’s descendants, who ran the festival during the rise of the Nazis and hobnobbed with Hitler. The festival directors purposefully entrusted this milestone production to Mr. Levine, who was Jewish. “Parsifal,” a work he conducted with spacious, luminous eloquence, became a Levine specialty.Though he made 20th-century operas like Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” Berg’s “Lulu” and Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” central to the Met’s identity, Mr. Levine could not turn the company into a house that nurtured new opera. For such a prestigious international institution, the Met’s list of premieres during the Levine era, including works by John Corigliano, John Harbison, Philip Glass, Tobias Picker and Tan Dun, was not long.In interviews over the years Mr. Levine asserted that he tried to commission new works but that the Met was a monumental, slow-moving institution. He once also lamented the dearth of good-enough new operas.In the 1990s, Mr. Levine’s relationship with Joseph Volpe, the Met’s effective, pugnacious general manager, was sometimes fraught. Mr. Volpe respected Mr. Levine and gave him most of what he wanted, but put the brakes to financially risky projects (like a concert performance of Mahler’s daunting “Symphony of a Thousand”) and several commissioning ideas.As supertitles became popular at other opera companies, including the New York City Opera next door to the Met in Lincoln Center, Mr. Levine argued that his house’s informed patrons would find them distracting. Supertitles would come to the Met “over my dead body,” he said in a 1985 interview, a comment he came to regret.Mr. Volpe, who disagreed, prevailed, and in 1995 the house introduced its innovative technology, Met Titles, which employed individual screens mounted on the back of the seat in front of each audience member. The titles could be individually turned on or off, a feature that Mr. Levine said had ameliorated his objection.Podiums in Munich and BostonMr. Levine was eager to leave his mark on the legacy of symphonic music and to cultivate a major orchestra. This led to what many saw as a curious career move: becoming principal conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.His selection was hotly debated in the German press, in part because of his salary ($1.2 million), at a time when cultural institutions in Germany were being forced to accept smaller government subsidies. Though the orchestra made strides under Mr. Levine’s leadership, the relationship proved disappointing. He was unwilling to cut back his Met schedule to spend more time in Munich. When the Boston Symphony came calling, he was receptive.Mr. Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he commissioned important works.Michael Lutch/Boston Symphony OrchestraMr. Levine began his Boston tenure in the fall of 2004 with a commanding performance of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” the piece he had longed to perform with the Met’s orchestra and chorus. Initially, Mr. Levine was able to maintain full involvement and high standards at the Met while thriving in Boston, where he could finally commission significant works from major composers, especially Elliott Carter and Charles Wuorinen, and build a legacy. But concerns about his health soon surfaced.Starting in the 1990s, Mr. Levine had been afflicted with tremors in his left hand and left leg. To compensate, he developed a technique with minimal hand motions and eventually conducted while sitting in a tall, swiveling chair. In 1996, for the 25th anniversary of his Met debut, he conducted the Met orchestra and chorus in a gala concert that lasted eight hours and involved some 60 acclaimed singers performing 42 selections. As the author Johanna Fiedler recounted in “Molto Agitato,” a history of the Met, Mr. Levine’s detractors considered the gala an unseemly act of self-celebration. Others felt inspired to see Mr. Levine marking the occasion by working so hard.Still, overweight and overworked, he often moved with hesitancy. In an article in The New York Times in the spring of 2004, several members of the Met orchestra complained anonymously that Mr. Levine’s baton cues were getting hard to read and that his attention sometimes flagged during long performances.In 2008 Mr. Levine had surgery to remove a cancerous cyst from a kidney, causing him to withdraw from most of that season at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony’s summer home. By the time he resigned, the symphony calculated that he had missed one-fifth of his scheduled performances.At the Met, with Mr. Gelb’s encouragement, Mr. Levine limited his schedule to the projects he most cared about and ceded some major productions and important revivals to guests, including Mr. Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Simon Rattle, who made long-awaited Met debuts.By the time he resigned, the Boston Symphony calculated that he had missed one-fifth of his scheduled performances because of health issues.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Gelb kept Mr. Levine on as music director even during a two-year period when health problems prevented him from performing. When, in May 2013, he conducted a Met Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, a triumphant return, Mr. Levine used a motorized wheelchair, which he continued to employ at the house. In April 2016, Mr. Gelb eased him into a new position as music director emeritus.Mr. Levine’s final appearance at the Met, on Dec. 2, 2017, was a Saturday matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem with the orchestra, chorus and four vocal soloists. He looked fatigued that day, and the performance was somewhat lackluster. That evening, the news of the allegations against him broke.Michael Cooper contributed reporting. More