James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director reportedly earned $2.1 million in 2010, which is more than Peter Gelb, the general manager of the opera house, who only made $1.4 million, the Huffington Post reports. While the news might surprise some, even in light of all the controversy that has arisen over Mr. Gelb’s management philosophy, the Met says you can’t compare Mr. Levine’s apples to Mr. Gelb’s oranges. Read More
This year was supposed to be James Levine’s victory lap.
On June 5, Mr. Levine celebrates the 40th anniversary of his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, where he has conducted nearly 2,500 performances and been music director since 1976. He began the season conducting a new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which opened as the Read More
These days, when James Levine conducts, it makes a statement. And in the midst of a series of health-related cancellations over the past month, he left three opera performances conspicuously untouched. They weren’t the performances with the biggest stars, or even those with the most immediate implications for his career. In fact, they weren’t even Read More
Wagner conceived Lohengrin in a bath—while he was taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845. He was immersed, too, in the murky historical and mythological texts that never failed to fire his imagination. He envisioned the opera’s hero, a chivalrous Knight of the Holy Grail, appearing out of nowhere on a boat drawn by a Read More
The origins of “event culture” may reside not in the grandiose scheming of some Hollywood pitchman, but in the ingenuity of one Emil Gutman, a German concert agent who filled a gigantic exhibition hall in Munich on Sept. 12, 1910, for what was billed as the world premiere of the “Symphony of a Thousand” by Read More
The other day, when I asked a young friend of mine if he was interested in joining me for a Saturday matinee performance of Siegfried at the Met, he reacted as though I’d suggested a weekend in Falluja. He’d never been to a Wagner opera and couldn’t imagine spending a fine spring afternoon listening to Read More
In 1821, in Vienna, a friend of Franz Schubert wrote to his fiancée about a singular event he’d just attended: “Last Friday I was excellently entertained … [Franz von] Schober [another friend of the composer] invited Schubert and 14 of his close acquaintances for the evening. Schubert sang and played a lot of his songs Read More
On a recent evening, while the rest of the world was glued to the spectacle of bombs raining down on Baghdad, I found myself enthralled by the spectacle of a young man seated at a piano in the elegant paneled library of the Lotos Club. The occasion was a fund-raising gala for the Music Festival Read More
On a recent evening, while the rest of the world was glued to the spectacle of bombs raining down on Baghdad, I found myself enthralled by the spectacle of a young man seated at a piano in the elegant paneled library of the Lotos Club. The occasion was a fund-raising gala for the Music Festival Read More
Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera , by Johanna Fiedler. Nan A. Talese-Doubleday, 393 pages, $30.
The Metropolitan Opera is a lot like the Yankees: An exalted fixture in the city’s life for as long as anyone can remember; it thinks of itself as above any competition and inspires Read More
