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      Met Opera Players to Meet an Old Friend for a Gig, and Aid

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      The musicians, who went unpaid for nearly a year, have been invited to join Fabio Luisi, their former principal conductor, and his Dallas Symphony for two benefit concerts.The musicians of the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra, who went unpaid for nearly a year, are getting a hand from one of their old maestros, Fabio Luisi.Luisi — who was the Met’s principal conductor for more than five years, and was seen as a candidate to succeed James Levine as its music director before the post went to Yannick Nézet-Séguin — has invited the musicians to Texas at the end of the month to join the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which he now leads, for two benefit concerts.The Dallas Symphony announced on Monday that the Met musicians would join its players for performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 on April 30 and May 1. The orchestra noted in a news release that the concerts would present the first opportunity in over a year for many of the Met’s musicians — who recently began receiving partial pay as they negotiate a new contract — to perform together for a live audience.A spokesman for the Dallas Symphony said that roughly 40 to 50 Met musicians were expected to travel to Dallas for the concerts, and added that they would be paid for the performances. The joint concerts will act as fund-raisers for the Met Orchestra Musicians’ Fund and the Dallas players’ union’s DFW Musicians Covid-19 Relief Fund; a filmed recording will be released.“As one of the few orchestras fortunate to be able to perform all season to live audiences, we are painfully aware that many of our colleagues around the country were not able to play concerts due to restrictions in their cities or the financial situation of their organization,” Kim Noltemy, the president and chief executive of the Dallas Symphony, said in a statement.Luisi said in a statement that he sought to “gather musicians together to make music” as a “symbol of solidarity.”“During my time with the Met,” he added, “I became close to many of the members of the orchestra. It is devastating that these incredible musicians have not had an opportunity to perform together in over a year.”Brad Gemeinhardt, a Met Orchestra hornist who is the chair of the committee which represents the musicians in negotiations with management, offered thanks to the Dallas orchestra. “We cannot overstate the impact this unprecedented collaboration will have on our members, both financially and artistically, after this long year of cultural famine,” Gemeinhardt said in a statement.After going without paychecks for nearly a year, members of the Met Orchestra voted last month to return to the bargaining table in exchange for temporary pay of up to $1,543 a week. The Met, which has said that the pandemic has cost $150 million in lost revenue, and its general director, Peter Gelb, are insisting on long-term pay cuts to offset those losses — cuts a number of other leading orchestras have agreed to.In January, Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, agreed to give up to $50,000 in matching donations to the orchestra and chorus. After the musicians and the company reached their deal on temporary pay, he sent a letter to the Met’s leaders urging them to “find a solution to compensate our artists appropriately.”“I am finding it increasingly hard to justify what has happened,” he wrote.The Met said at the time that it shared his frustration and that all parties had been “working together for new agreements that will ensure the sustainability of the Met into the future.” On Monday afternoon, the company added in a statement that it hoped the musicians would “have an increasing number of performance opportunities between now and the fall, when we will once again be able to come together at the Met.” More

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      When Boston Ruled the Music World

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      Three recent recordings conjure the mid-20th-century moment when the city was a center of innovative composition.When I moved to Massachusetts in the mid-1970s to start a doctorate at Boston University, there was a specific professor I wanted to study with: the formidable pianist Leonard Shure.But Shure was hardly the only renowned pedagogue in Boston. The city had at that point long been a hub of academic music, with distinguished programs at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston universities, the New England Conservatory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Until I arrived, though, I didn’t realize what a center the Boston area was for contemporary music; from afar, the city had seemed to me too staid and traditional for that. But in its own buttoned-up New England way, it was a modernist hotbed. Each of those institutions was like a little fief, with eminent composers on the faculty. Each maintained active student ensembles, including many devoted exclusively to new music.If you wanted to be on the front lines of the battle between severe “uptown” music and rebellious “downtown” postmodernism, you headed to New York. If you were drawn to mavericks and intrigued by non-Western cultures, especially Asian music, you probably found your way to Los Angeles or San Francisco.But if you wanted a classic education, studying with a true master composer — and at that time, almost all the major university composers were white men — you went to Boston. But the music that emerged there in those decades has faded in favor of work from other American cities.Not entirely, however. Keeping that legacy alive is part of the mission of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and its record label BMOP/sound. The ensemble champions modern and new music from all over. But according to its founder and artistic director, Gil Rose, 40 or 45 percent of its recordings have been of works by Boston-area composers.Schuller in the late 1970s. His overlooked operatic collaboration with John Updike, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” has been recorded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.Fletcher DrakeSeveral recent releases have brought me back to my first years in the city, when composers at those various academic institutions loomed large. Three recordings are especially exciting: Gunther Schuller’s overlooked opera “The Fisherman and His Wife” and albums of orchestral works by Leon Kirchner and Harold Shapero.Schuller, who died in 2015 at 89, once described himself as a “high school dropout without a single earned degree.” Technically that was true. But he was a protean musician who in his late teens won the principal horn position at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and then, two years later, moved on to the Metropolitan Opera, where he held the same post until 1959. Yet, he also played and recorded in jazz groups with the likes of Miles Davis.When I moved to Boston, Schuller was in the final years of his transformative tenure as president of the New England Conservatory. There he had established the first degree-granting jazz program at a major American conservatory — bringing in the pianist Ran Blake to chair it as well as hiring giants to teach, including Jaki Byard and George Russell.Anticipating by decades creative practices that are commonplace today, he had coined the term “third wave” to describe music that drew from both classical and jazz genres. Schuller, who as a composer was drawn to 12-tone idioms, though not in the strictest sense, also appointed the brilliant modernist Donald Martino to lead the composition faculty. He had all the bases covered. Schuller also taught for two decades at the Tanglewood Music Center, serving as artistic director for 15 of those years, until 1984.For all his formidable skills and vision as a composer, Schuller may have been more consequential as a teacher, mentor, conductor and a tireless (sometimes shrill) agitator on behalf of contemporary music and living composers than as a writer of music himself. That perception has long seemed unfair, but it persists. Though fine pieces from his large catalog have been gaining attention, “The Fisherman and His Wife” has languished.It was commissioned as a children’s opera by the Junior League of Boston, and first performed in 1970 by Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston — though Caldwell had another composer in mind for the project when she found herself working with the imposing Schuller.The 65-minute opera, based on a familiar story by the Grimm brothers, boasts a libretto by none other than John Updike. As the story unfolds, a lowly fisherman makes repeated trips back to the restless sea to summon a magical fish he has caught and released — the fish is actually an enchanted prince — and to ask for the granting of yet another of his wife’s increasingly grandiose wishes. Schuller inventively, yet subtly, organized the score like a theme and variations. Most boldly, he wrote whole stretches of the score in his trademark modernist language — steeped in, but not beholden to, the 12-tone approach, with some jazz chords folded in.A 12-tone opera for children?Yet Schuller was on to something. The story is full of darkness, strangeness, magic, evocations of a threatening sea and cloudy skies, bitter confrontations between the wife and husband. Why not convey it through flinty, atonal music? The voice lines are written with skill to make the words come through clearly. Updike introduced the character of a cat that both meowed and talked, a charming role that Schuller assigned to a high soprano. The orchestration, for a smaller ensemble, is alive with myriad sonorities and captivating colors.Though released last year, the BMOP/sound recording was made in 2015 in collaboration with Odyssey Opera, founded by Rose, following a semi-staged concert performance. The commanding mezzo-soprano Sondra Kelly as the wife, the plaintive tenor Steven Goldstein as the fisherman and the sturdy baritone David Kravitz as the magic fish are excellent — and Rose draws glittering, swirling, mysterious playing from the orchestra. I could be wrong, but with a vivid staging, I think an audience of children would respond well to it.Schuller, an accomplished, exacting conductor, wrote a comprehensive book about conducting. Across the river in Cambridge, the respected composer and Harvard professor Leon Kirchner also had a following as a conductor back then, though he was not the most efficient technician. He was, however, a skilled pianist and a probing musician who understood how pieces were supposed to go.Leon Kirchner, a composer and conductor based at Harvard, in 1982.John GoodmanIn 1978, with the support of a dean at Harvard, Kirchner founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, a professional ensemble of freelance players organized purely so that Kirchner could conduct free, routinely packed concerts. With those dedicated players, he led scores like Debussy’s “La Mer” and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony as if he had written them. A remarkable 1984 account of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Peter Serkin as soloist, was issued recently on a Verdant World Records release, and it’s just as exhilarating and profound as I remembered.As a composer, Kirchner was powerfully influenced by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Like Schuller and others of their generation, Kirchner adopted the aesthetic and approach of 12-tone music but with freedom and flair, unbound by strict rules. I do remember him being narrow-minded about composers who stuck essentially to tonal harmonic languages — let alone to Minimalism, which he could not abide.But I’ve always admired the depth, imagination and engrossing complexity of his music. Those qualities abound in five orchestral pieces on a riveting BMOC/sound recording from 2018 — particularly the 11-minute “Music for Orchestra,” from 1969. It’s a transfixing score that feels subdued in a lying-in-wait way, as if at any moment pensive stretches of lyricism could break out. And sometimes do, through cascades of skittish riffs and teeming bursts.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation, which included his friend Leonard Bernstein. As a student at Tanglewood, Shapero deeply impressed Aaron Copland. He earned the attention of his idol, Stravinsky, when that composer came as a guest to Harvard, where Shapero was a student.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation.Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesShapero set about adapting Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical style, giving it a jolt of American spunk and unfettered intricacy. From 1940 to 1950, he produced a breakthrough series of ambitious works, including his daunting 45-minute Symphony for Classical Orchestra, composed in 1947. Bernstein adored the piece and led the premiere in 1948 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He recorded it in 1953 on a single hectic day with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Then the work disappeared until André Previn discovered it and led a triumphant performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1986, and later recorded it. You could make a case for the piece as one of the great American symphonies.The BMOC/sound album includes Shapero’s Serenade for String Orchestra from 1945, a 35-minute, five-movement score that vividly demonstrates how Shapero, while writing in a Neo-Classical idiom, was attempting to make essentially tonal music modern and challenging. The first movement is an engrossing jangle of counterpoint, yet somehow transparent. The Menuetto is like a diatonic retort to Schoenberg’s 12-tone minuets. The slow movement is weighty and searching, yet harmonically tart and suffused with tension. The finale is frenetic, pointillist and wonderfully jumpy.In 1950, Shapero helped start the music program of the newly founded Brandeis. That department soon became the unofficial headquarters of the “Boston School” of composers, as it was called, which included Irving Fine (who died in 1962, at 47) and Arthur Berger. All three began as Stravinsky-influenced Neo-Classicists. But over time, Fine and Berger slowly adopted their own brands of the 12-tone writing that was taking hold in universities, for better or worse, as the de facto language of modernism. Shapero, who died in 2013, explored the technique but never went along. He composed less and less, until he had a renewed burst of creativity running Brandeis’s electronic music studio.But he was a great mentor to countless student composers. And his life offered a lesson, a kind of warning: Stick to your guns; don’t be intimidated; write the music you want to write. They were lessons eagerly learned in the explosion of creativity happening in Boston. More

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      Lois Kirschenbaum, the Ultimate Opera Superfan, Dies at 88

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      In New York opera circles, an autograph request from her, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said, was considered “a special type of approval.”For more than a half-century, nearly every prominent singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera could expect to be approached backstage afterward by a wispy woman in thick glasses, who held piles of memorabilia to be autographed while she praised the performance in a raspy Brooklyn accent.This was Lois Kirschenbaum, one of New York’s biggest and longest-standing opera buffs and a nightly staple at the opera since the late 1950s, before Lincoln Center was built, when the Met was located in Midtown.Few operatic performances took place at the Met without being observed through Ms. Kirschenbaum’s large binoculars (she was legally blind from birth), usually from a seat in the uppermost balcony secured for little or no money by canvassing operagoers at the entrance just before the opening curtain.And few prominent singers went home without signing numerous items for Ms. Kirschenbaum, whose constant desire to get backstage helped her befriend some of the world’s most famous opera singers, from Beverly Sills to Plácido Domingo.Ms. Kirschenbaum died on March 27 at a hospital in Manhattan after suffering from pneumonia and renal failure, her longtime friend Sally Jo Sandelin said. She was 88.Such was Ms. Kirschenbaum’s reputation at the Met, as well as at New York City Opera, that singers half-joked that they had truly arrived on the New York opera scene only after being approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum after a performance.“It was like getting a special type of approval,” the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade said. “I never met anyone who didn’t welcome her backstage and want to hang out with her.”She added, “We’d always look out for her and bring her in early if we could, because everyone loved her, and she’d have a hundred things to sign.”The bass singer Samuel Ramey said he was first approached by Ms. Kirschenbaum in his dressing room immediately after his first major role, as Don Basilio in “The Barber of Seville” with City Opera in late 1973.“I was told, ‘You’ve made it now — Lois has asked you for your autograph,’” he recalled, adding that Ms. Kirschenbaum became a constant presence backstage after his performances and that the two became good friends.“She was something else — she always got on the backstage list,” he said.Ms. Kirschenbaum, a wisecracking native of Flatbush, defied the stereotype of a highfalutin opera aficionado. She worked as a switchboard operator for the International Rescue Committee, the humanitarian aid organization, until retiring in 2004. She lived nearly her entire adult life in a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, from which she would travel by subway and city bus to Lincoln Center while lugging a huge handbag full of photos, programs and recordings to be signed.Ms. Kirschenbaum with the soprano Renata Tebaldi in the late 1960s. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s love of opera began when she heard a recording by Ms. Tebaldi being played in a record shop.via Ken BensonIf she was unable to score a free or cheap ticket just before the performance, she would often slip in with the help of a friendly staffer.“Everyone knew her, from the workers who cleaned the bathrooms, to ticket takers, to the administration and of course the singers,” said another longtime friend, Carl Halperin. “All you had to say was ‘Lois’ and everybody knew who you meant.”Ms. Kirschenbaum was the grande dame of a group of hard-core fans who would flock to the backstage door for autographs and chats.With the help of her formidable handbag, she would quickly find her way to the front of the line and approach singers with complimentary and detailed critiques of their performances — from that night or from years earlier.“She could tell you anything going on in your performances on any given night — this or that particular phrase and what it meant,” the soprano Aprile Millo recalled. “For a singer, it gave you the feeling that you were being heard.”“She was so much part of the opera lore of New York, like the aficionados at La Scala,” the opera house in Milan, Ms. Millo said. Working the switchboard allowed Ms. Kirschenbaum to call singers and opera insiders for updates on news like cast changes or show cancellations, information she would then relay to fellow opera buffs.“For opera, she really was the internet before there was the internet,” said Ken Benson, a manager of opera singers and another longtime friend.And before the Met began putting out detailed schedules months in advance, Ms. Kirschenbaum became known for the homemade lists she compiled of upcoming performances and featured singers.She would distribute copies to fellow buffs during intermission, while enjoying the coffee and sandwiches she routinely smuggled in to avoid the expense of buying food at Met prices.“People would say that Lois’s list was more precise than what you’d get from the press,” Ms. Millo said.Ms. Kirschenbaum “was so much part of the opera lore of New York,” the soprano Aprile Millo said. Ms. Kirschenbaum’s request for an autograph, Ms. Millo added, meant “you got the blessing.”Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesMs. Kirschenbaum gleaned much of her information while soliciting singers’ autographs.“She’d ask them, ‘When are you coming back and what are singing next year?’” Mr. Halperin recalled. “And while Luciano Pavarotti was signing something for her, he’d say he’d be singing ‘La Bohème’ and ‘Tosca’ next season. And she’d collect all this.”Ms. Millo said Ms. Kirschenbaum might have her sign up to 20 pieces of memorabilia at a time. “It was a way to keep you engaged — it was clever of her,” she said.Lois Kirschenbaum was born in New York City on Nov. 21, 1932, to Abraham and Gertrude Kirschenbaum. Her father was an optometrist.An only child, she grew up in Flatbush and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. Ms. Kirschenbaum was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but when the Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles in 1957, her obsession shifted to opera after she heard a recording by the soprano Renata Tebaldi being played in a record shop.In her later years, Ms. Kirschenbaum alternated between haunting the margins of the Met for tickets and autographs and being honored as a special guest at fancy galas held by opera organizations.For her 75th birthday, in 2007, she was feted at a party by singers like Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming, as well as the Met’s musical director, James Levine — “Jimmy” to Ms. Kirschenbaum — who gave her a ring and an autographed operatic score of “La Bohème.”In 1980, she won a raffle to see Beverly Sills’s farewell performance gala at City Opera, after having seen every role Ms. Sills sang in New York, except one, for 25 years.“Beverly saw me after that and said, ‘Lois, it was fixed,’” Ms. Kirschenbaum laughingly told The New York Times in 2012.In recent years, Ms. Kirschenbaum had begun using a wheelchair and went to the Met only sporadically. She continued to listen to opera (and to Yankees games) on the radio.Friends said she never married and never spoke of any surviving family members.It was unclear what would become of the trove of autographs, programs and photographs left behind in Ms. Kirschenbaum’s apartment.“There was no one more devoted to opera and the artists she loved than Lois,” Ms. Fleming said. “She was a beloved member of the Metropolitan Opera family, like a favorite aunt. I will miss knowing she is watching from the balcony and seeing her afterward at the stage door.” 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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      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