James Levine, 2007. (Courtesy PatrickMcMullan.com)

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.

From the piece:

The two numbers can't actually be compared. The figure given for Gelb's pay refers to his salary, while Levine's refers to his entire compensation. "It is not unusual for the music director’s compensation to be higher than that of the general manager, since James Levine’s pay includes conducting fees and media payments that are not strictly salary," wrote Met Press Director Peter Clarke in an email.

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 Met released a box set of 32 CDs and 21 DVDs--22 complete operas in all--in honor of the anniversary.

His storied range was on display in the operas he was slotted to conduct. In addition to the Rheingold and a new production of Wagner's Die Walküre, he was to lead revivals of Donizetti's Don Pasquale, Verdi's Il Trovatore and Simon Boccanegra and Berg's Wozzeck. The season was to end with the company's tour of Japan and a performance of Verdi's Don Carlo on the actual date of the anniversary. Oh, and all this was to occur simultaneously with his full season as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

It didn't work out that way. After years of periodic cancellations due to a series of health problems, in March he resigned his position in Boston and, at the Met, canceled an additional two performances of Das Rheingold and the run of Il Trovatore. When he has conducted, the results have been uneven: Wozzeck was deep and vibrantly beautiful, but Walküre was disappointing and lethargic. Mr. Levine's range of motion has looked expansive, but he has otherwise seemed physically weak, either not leaving the podium for his bow or hobbling gingerly to the stage.

This hasn't quite been the year he might have hoped for, and it's the depressing context in which the Met has published James Levine: 40 Years at the Metropolitan Opera. With Mr. Levine's career ebbing, and Fabio Luisi being groomed to replace him at the Met, the book feels more like an elegy than a celebration.

It has the generous dimensions and full-color photo spreads of a coffee-table tome, but not the cover (which is soft) or the price (which is just $32). Unsurprisingly, the prevailing formal mode is the encomium. Yet even given the quality of coffee-table-book writing in general, and considering the range of Mr. Levine's accomplishments, the prose here is thin, with the word "wonderful" repeated so often that you enter a kind of fugue state of approbation.

"She knew it was wonderful," he writes of Leontyne Price's relationship to her voice. On the next page, of Tatiana Troyanos: "God, what a wonderful artist." Ileana Cotrubas? "Wonderful girl, wonderful artist." Working with Cecilia Bartoli? "It was a completely happy, wonderful thing."

At times, the praise grows disconcertingly cursory, as though the editors didn't bother to massage Mr. Levine's notes into actual sentences. "This was the first time I worked with Leonie," he writes of the soprano Leonie Rysanek. "Heaven. Wonderful, passionate, funny, very hard-working."

There is literally a single moment in the book in which opera comes alive. It's when Mr. Levine talks about his work with the great tenor Jon Vickers on a single line in Verdi's Otello. In a few sentences you get a sense of Vickers, of Mr. Levine, of Verdi, of the difficult close work that goes into every note of a great operatic performance, of the compromises inherent in producing theatrical art. It is the only time in which the relentless narrowness of the book's tributes widens enough to let in a glimpse of something like reality.

Reality certainly doesn't intrude on Mr. Levine's perfunctory account of the Met's devastating 1980 strike. "Terribly depressing," he describes it. "It was the singular low point of my entire artistic life. As Music Director, I don't have a function if we are not performing." It's a sentiment that shows a troubling disregard for the reasons behind the strike and the real lives--not just "artistic" lives--that were affected by it.

But perhaps we should not be surprised by this lack of compassion, of a certain human feeling. In 1974, Mr. Levine told Stephen Rubin, "I have good friends who feel that their wives and children are the most important things in their lives. I find it difficult to achieve real empathy with that, though I understand it. My ability to function in involvements with other individuals has always been contingent on my feeling properly involved with music."

For those of us who have wondered about who Mr. Levine "really" is, we may yet be satisfied: Knopf recently announced that it will, at some future date, publish his autobiography. But even that might not be worth holding one's breath for. While Mr. Levine is undoubtedly an important musician, the new book's bland generalities, its tone of perpetual air-kiss, establishes his voice as detached and self-satisfied, and simply uninteresting. He is a person whose performances you may well want to hear, but not someone whose memoirs you'd ever want to read.

editorial@observer.com

So it was perhaps surprising to some that Mr. Levine didn't skip the run of Bedrich Smetana's The Bartered Bride at the Juilliard School from Feb. 15 to Feb. 20. But this was not just another conservatory production. It was, in a sense, Mr. Levine's baby: the inaugural offering of a new partnership between Juilliard and the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, a partnership that has the potential to transform the way young singers rise at the Met.

The new partnership, marked by a shiny "Met+Juilliard" logo, was announced in February 2008 but had been a priority of Mr. Levine's for years, even decades, before that. He founded the Met's young artist program in 1980 and has long advocated for a closer relationship with Juilliard, the kind of institutional partnership--bridging closely held fiefdoms--that can be excruciatingly difficult to make happen. That it happened at all is amazing, and it is a tribute to the size of the victory that Mr. Levine made a point of being on the podium.

When the partnership was first announced, Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times that it was "essentially an expansion of the Met's young artist program," which was renamed after a $10 million gift from George and Frayda Lindemann in 1998. The three-year program provides a stipend, coaching and some performance opportunities at the Met, usually in smaller roles.

The Lindemann program is a prestigious thing to have on one's résumé, but as the pace of the opera world quickens, the Met seems to want to give its most promising singers earlier experiences playing major roles in high-profile productions. As Met general manager Peter Gelb told The Times, "One of the shortcomings of our young artist program in the past has been that when our young singers do get onstage, it's typically in a smaller role. Getting a major role is rare. This will help give them that experience."

So while the content of the young artist program will remain largely similar--participants will now be able to attend some classes at Juilliard--the significance is in giving added prominence to both the program and the school, which, while only a few hundred yards from the Met, has sometimes seemed much further away in terms of getting its students onstage. It is another way of making the Lindemann program even more attractive to young talent. "We have global talent scouts looking for artists who should be on our stage," Mr. Gelb said, "and I think they should be looking for young singers who should be in this program as well."

The centerpiece of the new partnership will be an annual production, either fully staged or in a concert version, co-presented by the Met and Juilliard and conceived, at least some of the time, as a trial run for a later, larger-scale production at the Met itself. That is the plan for this year's Bartered Bride, a classic tale of a bumpy road to love in the Czech countryside and one of the most beloved of operatic comedies. Mr. Levine conducted a famous John Dexter production of the work at the Met in 1978, which he brought back to the company in 1996.

This "Met+Juilliard" production is by Stephen Wadsworth, who took over this season's new production of Boris Godunov when Peter Stein dropped out late in the process. As in Boris, there was a great deal going on in Bartered Bride, but little seemed to happen. Every person onstage, down to the last chorister, seemed to have been given a backstory, an action to perform, a person to converse with, but the result felt artificial. The production, updated from the 1860s to the 1930s (because of budget reasons, Mr. Wadsworth wrote in a program note), resembled several of the Juilliard productions I've attended in the past few years: well prepared but a little staid, nicely sung and attractively designed but somehow unexciting. Mr. Levine's conducting, similarly, was lacking not in polish but in fire.

The opera was performed in an English translation by the poet J.D. McClatchy, whose Magic Flute translation is sometimes performed by the Met and who recently published his versions of seven Mozart librettos. His work here, as in Mozart, tended toward the cutely, tediously self-regarding. And the bland choreography of Benjamin Millepied exemplified the Met's recent taste for boldface names over effective artistry (remember the Herzog/de Meuron/Prada Attila?).

But the reason for the Met/Juilliard partnership is the singers, and they were uniformly charming. The stars, soprano Layla Clair and tenor Paul Appleby, sang well, and Mr. Appleby got many opportunities to act barely contained excitement, which he clearly enjoys. (Both he and Ms. Clair did their bits of dancing with more character, style and flair than the too-smooth Juilliard dancers in the company.)

But the production's opening night was one of those cultural events whose significance goes far beyond what happens onstage. Who knows what the full artistic implications of the Met's partnership with Juilliard will be over the coming decades, but it's an institutional streamlining of a kind that happens only rarely at this level. And that is why Mr. Levine, even though he didn't feel hardy enough to make it to the stage for his bow, made very sure he was there.

editorial@observer.com

This, I imagine, was how the avant-garde director Robert Wilson must have felt after the Met’s recent revival of his Lohengrin was greeted with the loudest cheers I’ve heard all season. At its opening night in the spring of 1998, this same production was booed as though somebody had set off a stink bomb in the gilded red barn. Though admiring of the musical performance, most critics found Mr. Wilson’s minimalist light show and super-stylized stage direction pretentious and soporific.

But that was eight years ago. The other night, I—along with everyone else—found the whole thing riveting.

It’s not simply that time has been kind to Robert Wilson’s radically stripped-down vision. Over the years, this Lohengrin has grown kinder to the performers. For the production’s first revival, Mr. Wilson was persuaded to edit out some of the most punishing frozen Kabuki poses, to the point where the singers were able to behave as though rigor mortis hadn’t quite set in. Now, whether because of the director’s benevolence or the performers’ greater ease with Wilsonian body language, the opera’s characters—as opposed to their caricatures—have been allowed in. This Lohengrin can finally be appreciated as what I sensed it might be all along—as fully illuminating a Wagner production as any opera house has had in years.

The Met’s music director, James Levine, once said of the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle that “he was the only director I worked with who … knew the music, knew the text, and understood the technical as well as the subliminal relationship between the two.” The same might be said of Mr. Wilson’s understanding of Wagner’s most popular masterpiece, whose meanings operate more subliminally than they do in perhaps any other opera.

For all of Lohengrin’s celebrated tunes and blazing orchestral colors, it’s essentially a drama of unknowingness in which the characters act not out of free will, but according to predetermined forces set loose before the opera begins by some cosmic puppeteer who might resemble, say, Robert Wilson. Scholars have described the story as, variously, a metaphysical clash between implacable paganism and redemptive Christianity and the tortured working-out of Wagner’s own Hamlet-like feelings toward a mother who “abandoned” him for a usurping stepfather. In any case, Lohengrin must be the haziest opera ever written.

Scenically, Mr. Wilson’s Lohengrin is nothing but haze—there isn’t a river, a rampart or a bridal room in sight. It’s an ethereal, weirdly mechanistic setting that Dan Flavin or Donald Judd might have conjured up: subtly shifting atmospheres of color intersected by the mysterious appearance of brilliantly indifferent bars of light. The choral forces—Saxons, Thuringians, Brabantians, pages and attendants—are more silhouettes than 10th-century Germans. The principals are defined primarily by unchanging, one-color costumes—deep maroon for Ortrud, virginal blue for Elsa, black for Lohengrin, Telramund and King Heinrich.

Rather than probe for any psychological friction, Wilson has directed them to glide—or just stand interminably—like sonambulists wrapped in a private opium dream such as the French arch-Wagnerian Baudelaire might have been recalling when he wrote, after hearing the opera’s opening prelude, that he felt “released from the bonds of gravity.” As in most dreams, Mr. Wilson’s Lohengrin permits of no physical interaction—not even during the famous bridal music. Still, the hall was alive with operatic contact. Rarely have I felt so keenly the spell of a Met performance (which in this case lasted well over four hours).

Of late, the company has been making a virtue of belated debuts—first, that of the virtually unknown 40-year-old Swedish soprano Erika Sunnegårdh as Leonore in Fidelio a few weeks ago; now, that of the American soprano Luana DeVol, a veteran of European opera houses, who has finally made it to the Met in the pivotal role of Ortrud at the age of 63. A tall woman with an imposing stage presence, Ms. DeVol’s wicked witch projected charismatic malevolence to spare, if not always the steadiest of tones. The American baritone Richard Paul Fink mustered considerable dignity as her hapless, henpecked husband, Telramund. The British bass Andrew Greenan, replacing an ailing Stephen West, made King Heinrich a figure of elegant perplexity. (Local Wagnerians are salivating over the prospect of his successor in the role—the towering German bass René Pape).

But the singers who sealed this performance as an unforgettable night at the Met were Karita Mattila as Elsa and Ben Heppner as Lohengrin. I’ve long ago run out of superlatives about the Finnish soprano, who brings such radiant conviction to every role she touches, from deranged Salome to noble Leonore. Suffice it to say that I’ve never heard the usually holier-than-thou Elsa enacted and sung with such complex purity. There have been reports that Mr. Heppner’s dress rehearsal was a vocally troubled affair, but he calmed all fears in the punishing third act with the unflagging power and plangent lyricism that he commands when he’s at the top of his game.

In the pit, the young French conductor Philippe Auguin, replacing an injured James Levine, showed all of the older maestro’s instinctive feeling for pace and sensitivity to the dramatic inflections of the individual singers. Hard as it is on the principals, Lohengrin is perhaps hardest of all on the chorus, particularly in this staging, which requires the members to stand and deliver without shifting a foot or moving a muscle for what to them must seem like hours. I’m told that the Met’s choristers jokingly refer to Mr. Wilson’s Lohengrin as “Long and Grim,” but if that’s what they were thinking on this occasion, they sure didn’t show it.

The performance was an overwhelming success-as triumphant as the last century's other epochal musical premiere was scandalous (Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring caused a riot in Paris three years later). Among the luminaries allegedly in attendance at the Munich extravaganza were King Albert I of Belgium and the Prince Regent of Bavaria; the statesman Clemenceau; the composers Webern and Korngold; the conductors Klemperer and Stokowski; the writers Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig; the director Max Reinhardt; and Henry Ford. The evening ended with a coup de théâtre . According to Mahler's assistant, the conductor Bruno Walter, "When the last note … had died away and the frenzy of enthusiasm made its way to him, Mahler climbed up the steps of the raised platform to where the children's chorus had been positioned, who met him with elation, and pressed all the hands stretched out to him as he strode past their ranks."

Since then, the logistical challenges have made Mahler's Eighth Symphony the least performed of his major works, but it has lost none of its drawing power. When James Levine chose it to inaugurate his tenure as the new music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra a few days ago, the demand for tickets was as intense as it had been for the redemptive Red Sox World Series. Three nights later, Mr. Levine and his players brought it to Carnegie Hall, creating a box-office stampede the likes of which I haven't seen on West 57th Street in years. As I made my way through the scalpers, I didn't spot any royals, Nobel Prize–winning authors or automotive industrialists; nor, when it was all over, did Mr. Levine-who's less agile than the Alpine-fit composer was-mount the platform to clasp hands with the members of the American Boychoir. But an event it was-though it was not, to my ears, an altogether happy one.

The Mahler Eighth is a great symphony, but its greatness is sui generis -there's simply no other symphony like it. Mahler seems to have composed its roughly 90 minutes of incredibly dense, compulsively vivid music in a white-heat state that lasted eight weeks. The "whole thing," he later told his biographer, Richard Specht, had appeared to him as in a "lightning-like vision … and I merely needed to write it down, as if it had been dictated to me." No one had ever attempted anything like this before. It's the first sung symphony, using the human voice (or a great many voices) as both instrumental amplification of the symphonic form and as the medium for two radically different texts-the medieval Latin hymn ("Veni, creator spiritus") and the final scene of Goethe's Faust , the Holy Grail of German literature, in which the weary hero, now over 100 years old and indifferent to the riotous vanity of his past, achieves a Buddhist-like salvation.

Mahler wanted Part I, the medieval hymn to creation, to be performed with tremendous energy ( Allegro impetuoso ), in keeping with the score's feverishly compressed writing. Mr. Levine, who'd whittled the original forces down to a mere 327, more than obliged, not so much with speed as with a savage drive and an unrelieved loudness that turned this urgent plea for God's grace into something more resembling a Deus irae . In recent years, his pared-down podium style-the result perhaps of a tremor in his left hand-has occasionally made for a metronomic rigidity that sweeps aside nuance and color and, in this case, any sense of what all those voices were singing about. When the march theme was passed among the horns and the woodwinds, I heard no wonderfully alert give-and-take, but only a generalized traffic roar. What saves this "Veni, creator" from sounding theologically archaic is the illumination of musical sensuality-sheer sonic beauty. As sharpened by Carnegie Hall's close acoustical brilliance, the entreaty became a bludgeon, and I wanted to shout, "Turn down the volume! Enjoy!"

An unnecessary intermission robbed us of the beatific contrast that makes such an impact when Part II unfolds immediately after Part I. Harsh woodwinds and unfeeling horns-which recurred throughout the performance-marred the delicately weird nature painting of the hermits' mountain gorges. But after that, there was much-intermittently-to enjoy. The Eighth is a feast for concertmasters, and the B.S.O. leader, Malcolm Lowe, was eloquent.

Mr. Levine, who is beloved by so many of the Metropolitan Opera's best singers, assembled an impressive array of soloists: the sopranos Jane Eaglen and Hei-Kyung Hong, the mezzos Stephanie Blythe and Yvonne Naef, the baritone Eike Wilm Schulte, the bass John Relyea and the tenor Vinson Cole, who was a last-minute replacement for an ailing Ben Heppner. They had the misfortune to be virtually invisible, sandwiched as they were between the orchestra and the choirs, and for all one could make of their German, they might have been singing in Urdu. On this occasion, Goethe's immortal poetry did not crackle or caress. But these were voices of commanding power-especially those of Ms. Hong, who sang with a reedy warmth that was superbly Mahlerian; Ms. Blythe, a rock of ages; and young Mr. Relyea, whose Pater profundus carried an Old Testament authority.

But for Mahler's Eighth to sweep us away, the performers must be swept away-must seem to be not mere performers, but messengers of the composer's mystic vision. Only near the end, when the soprano Heidi Grant Murphy stood up in one of the balconies as the Mater gloriosa and angelically sang "Come! Lift you unto loftier spheres," did the evening become truly magical. From then on, everything under Mr. Levine's now beautifully pacified baton came together as one-and the symphony's "thousand" forces disappeared in a musical enactment of bliss.

And yet, with trepidation, my friend accepted the invitation. Before the performance, I filled him in on the events that had preceded this, the third installment in the four-opera Ring cycle: The evil dwarf Alberich's theft of the Rhinemaidens' gold, out of which he forges the omnipotent, accursed ring; the bad deal that Wotan, king of the gods, makes with the giants who have built his outlandish dream palace, Valhalla; Wotan's wrath at his favorite Valkyrie daughter, Brünnhilde, for disobeying his orders not to protect his son Siegmund, who has fallen incestuously in love with his twin sister, Sieglinde-a union that will produce the boy wonder, Siegfried.

After the snarling orchestral prelude to Act I gave way to Mime's marvelously dyspeptic declaration of his plan to trick Siegfried, his wild foster-child, into slaying the current keeper of the ring, Fafner the dragon; and after the breathless arrival of Siegfried himself, with bear in tow, I glanced over at my friend. He was riveted-and he stayed that way for the next five and a half hours to the very end, when the young hero subdues Wotan and rushes through the circle of fire to discover sleeping Brünnhilde and the radiance of love.

Once again, the most astonishing theater piece ever written had worked its magic. George Bernard Shaw, a famous Wagner buff, was right when he urged "modest citizens" not to disqualify themselves "from enjoying The Ring by their technical ignorance of music." Shaw added, "There is not a single bar of 'classical music' in The Ring -not a note in it that has any other point than the single direct point of giving musical expression to the drama."

That insight goes to the heart of The Ring 's magnetism, which has made it the Met's most cough-proof draw for more than a century. The four Saturday afternoon performances that I attended, each of which was broadcast throughout North America, were sold out. The current staging, by the German director Otto Schenk, dates from the late 1980's, and it's been perhaps the most popular Ring in the Met's history.

It's also been the most reviled of recent Ring s, especially among Wagnerites who feel that the cycle's immense complexity needs to be inflected with a little attitude in order to reach today's dumbed-down philistines. The Ring far surpasses all other operatic works as an invitation to interpretation, thanks to its paradoxical combination of mythological rituals and melodramatic plot twists. Its myriad themes touch on more human frailties than came out of Pandora's box. An epic of turbulence, it ends on an admonitory note that has assumed ever more urgency in the last terrible century and in the terrible first decade of the new one: The gods are finished, they're history, and only we are responsible for what happens to us.

Like Shakespeare, The Ring has the power to transfix you with magnificent language-in this case, the all-enveloping splendor of the music-while making you squirm with self-recognition. In recent years, the most "advanced" productions have concentrated on the squirm factor, the idea being to reduce Wagner's vast vision to a scold about the evils of materialism, the evils of sexism, the evils of fundamentalism-what have you.

The Schenk staging sticks resolutely to an older tradition: Let the magnificence flow and meaning will take care of itself. It's a retrogressive approach that I've applauded for years (though, having just completed my fourth go-round of this production, my enjoyment may have finally run its course). What Mr. Schenk and the set and projection designer, Günther Schneider-Siemssen, the costume designer Rolf Langenfass and the lighting designer Gil Wechsler realized is that somewhere in this cornucopia of timely concerns is a fairy tale trying to get out. Replete with sets and costumes out of the Brothers Grimm and special effects out of George Lucas, the Met's Ring puts into the mix the one member of the human family Wagner never showed much interest in-the child in all of us.

In keeping with a house whose Ring s have featured virtually every great Wagner singer of the past 100 years (Lilli Lehmann, Albert Niemann, Olive Fremstad, Frida Leider, Friedrich Schorr, Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Hans Hotter, Wolfgang Windgassen, Astrid Varnay, Birgit Nilsson and Hildegard Behrens, among others), the current Ring has availed itself of most of the world's top Wagnerians. The challenge brought out their best, and even when the voices faltered-which they seldom did-there was the Met's mighty orchestra, under James Levine, to fill the ears with wave after wave of sumptuous, expertly delivered sound.

I don't think I've ever heard a more strongly cast, more seamlessly paced Das Rheingold . Richard Paul Fink, a young American baritone of keen dramatic and vocal agility, showed that Alberich will retain all his desperate menace during the next generation. Another newcomer to the production, the Austrian mezzo-soprano Yvonne Naef, was a refreshingly warm and unshrewish Fricka. And there, once again, as her impossibly errant husband, Wotan, was James Morris, still holding his own and minus the vocal wobble he's had of late-but looking rather like the old coach who's been through too many playoffs.

Die Walkürie reunited the ageless Plácido Domingo, who brought to Siegmund the sort of Italianate lyricism that Wagner wanted in his singers (but has seldom got), and Deborah Voigt, who forged her own incomparable ring of vocal gold as Sieglinde. And, yes, we were treated yet again to the Met's Brünnhilde of choice, Jane Eaglen. To my ears, this enormous artist offers a very mixed treat: a clarion top register that becomes a wan, unmusical shadow of itself in the middle and lower registers and delivers no hint of the character's vulnerability. Two operas later, in Die Götterdämmerung , she managed to bring down the house (and, figuratively, the Hall of the Gibichungs) with those steely high notes, but by this time her ability to penetrate the unforgiving sound-mass of Mr. Levine and his troops seemed like a stunt. Brünnhilde is by far the most complex of Wagner's oh-so-pure heroines, but the only real complex character onstage was the Hagen of the venerable Finnish bass Matti Salminen, who gave this deeply unlikable villain a Shakespearean grandeur I hadn't seen before. (Earlier, he made a wonderfully chilly, cavernous Fafner.) I eagerly await Ms. Voigt's ascendancy to the Valkyrie goddess, which I suspect will occur any day now.

Siegfried , to everyone's delight, finally landed a real Siegfried in the person of Jon Frederic West. His triumph in the most punishing of heldentenor roles was a surprise. I'd heard this veteran American tenor give fine but not especially memorable performances at the Met as Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos and Eric in The Flying Dutchman , but neither role demands what this one so inhumanely calls for: four hours of all-out singing, much of it above a dense, high-decibel orchestra, climaxing with 20 minutes of impassioned vocal ecstasy. Short and stout, Mr. West is scarcely the picture of impetuous adolescence. His vocal timbre lacks distinctive beauty. Nonetheless, he sang all the notes and all the words with thrust and sense. He brought out the cruel callowness of the young man toward his greedy guardian Mime (powerfully sung by Gerhard Siegel) and brandished his magical sword Notung with a good stab at panache. Best of all, he was indefatigable. If he lacked the ringing splendor of the most celebrated Siegfried of the last century, Lauritz Melchior, he seemed the incarnation of our present government's heedless approach to the world's shadowy evils-a Siegfried for our time, a Siegfried without fear.

Thus was launched the most celebrated series of informal gatherings in the history of music. These jolly affairs, which came to be known as Schubertiads, gave the composer an audience for an outpouring of works that, at the time, could not find a public hearing, but are now acknowledged as the greatest contribution to Western song-608 lieder, Shakespearean in their range, which Schubert wrote in astonishingly productive spurts throughout his brief, tragic life. (He died in 1828, at the age of 31.) Over the years, concert presenters, as well as people who give private musicales in their home, have seized upon the model of the Schubertiad in the hope that an evening devoted to the composer's bittersweet spirit will provide gemütlich relief from the slickness of so many public performances.

The grandest Schubertiad I've ever attended was at Carnegie Hall the other evening-the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street was as clamorous with ticket seekers and scalpers as if the attraction had been the White Stripes. In classical-music terms, the performers were about as hot as they come: the soprano Renée Fleming, the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, the tenor Matthew Polenzani and the bass René Pape, with the Met's maestro, James Levine, at the piano. To establish a feeling of intimacy, the hall was dimmed to an approximation of Biedermeier candlelight; the stage was softened by kilim rugs; and the Steinway was flanked by four velvet club chairs in which one might have happily lounged until 3 in the morning.

It soon became clear, however, that this Schubertiad would be anything but a roaring good time. When the stage door opened, the participants filed out in a somber procession, wearing formal evening dress suitable for presentation to the Hapsburg court (Ms. Fleming's emerald-green extravaganza came with a train). Mr. Levine, whose bespectacled, curly-haired corpulence gives him a more-than-passing resemblance to the Schubert in Wilhelm August Rieder's famous watercolor portrait of 1825, sat down at the keyboard; the others each took a chair; and the first singer-René Pape-rose to kick things off with the archetypal Romantic lied, "Der Wanderer" (1816), in which an unhappy "stranger" roams the earth in search of an unattainable home.

It was hard to imagine Mr. Pape, with his strapping frame and imposing self-assurance, as anything but supremely well-rooted, and though he sounded magnificent, he managed to convey none of the wanderer's questing angst. Rather than spending a congenial evening among musical friends, he appeared intent on knocking the socks off the back row. He seemed more comfortable in "Der Einsame" ("The Hermit"), an ode to fireside contentment from 1825, but his huge, nerve-tingling instrument failed to suggest the pain and the longing that invariably lurk behind the geniality of a composer who once said that, for him, there was no really happy music. Mr. Levine seemed lost in a trance of his own. Immobile as a stone, he held the tempo to a tight steadiness that conjured up none of the bass line's suggestion of fire tongs poking at embers and, toward the end, made little of the cricket's chirping. The other singers sat and gazed impassively, like people in a waiting room. Why, I wondered, hadn't someone thought to have them standing casually around the piano, enjoying each other's company and holding glasses of simulated schnappes ?

The word "Schubertian" describes a temperament rather than a style. The next two singers brought us closer to Schubert, the most irrepressible of composers. In the famous "Frühlingsglaube" ("Spring Faith," 1820), Ms. Von Otter, an elegant Swedish drink of water, teased out all the colors of this radiant song of hope with a seemingly artless subtlety that recalled an aperçu of Schubert's beloved poet, Goethe: "Nature and Art seem to shun one another, but before one realizes it, they have found each other again." In the gently rocking "Am See" ("By the Lake," 1823), which compares the soul to the glittering surface of the water, she made a heart-stopping effect in the closing line " Sterne, ach, gar viele, viele " ("Stars, ah, so many"), evoking celestial infinity by dropping her voice on the last word to an echo-like hush.

Mr. Polenzani, whose refined, silky musicality I've not heard in a tenor since the heyday of Cesare Valletti, 50 years ago, reminded me of another Schubertian quality: No other composer's music so exactly expresses what he thinks and feels. The young American tenor brought a welcome, light-hearted note to the prevailing gloominess with "Fischerweise" ("Fisherman's Song," 1826), whose goofy innocence was curbed only by Mr. Levine's strangely somnambulistic playing of the flowing accompaniment. Mr. Polenzani's full-throated rendition of "Du Liebst Mich Nicht" ("You Do Not Love Me," 1822) was fearless of the song's dynamic contrasts-straight from the heart in its Italianate ardor.

Ms. Fleming has a beautiful album of Schubert to her credit (with the pianist Christoph Eschenbach), which generously demonstrates her sumptuous tone and command of musical nuance. All that was on ample display in her "Gretchen am Spinnrade" ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel," 1814), Schubert's first setting of Goethe and his first unbridled masterpiece. Ms. Fleming made almost too much of the operatic G of the kiss (" Und ach, sein Küss "), and her masterfully executed fade on the last line, " Vergehen sollt !" ("I should expire!"), had more experienced diva in it than inexperienced girl. More troubling was the softness of her German diction, which made nothing of the song's whispery consonants and diminished the poem's urgency, which can be so telling against the monotony of the "spinning" piano, to a Sarah Vaughan–like mush. For Suleika's "Song I" (1821), Ms. Fleming evoked Suleika's rapture with Wagnerian opulence.

So much beautiful singing, I thought, but why did this celebration seem so stiff ?

Things loosened up, sort of, after the intermission. Mr. Levine, though he remained resolutely self-effacing, grew more alive to the fluctuations of the songs' sometimes wayward heartbeat. Mr. Pape found an unforced, visionary stride in a song from Schubert's valedictory cycle of 1827, Wintereisse -"Der Wegweiser" ("The Signpost"). Ms. Von Otter was wonderfully intimate in "Der Wanderer an den Mond" ("The Wanderer speaks to the Moon," 1826), with its haunting shifts between the major and the minor-the tension between the masculine and the feminine that animates so much of Schubert. Mr. Polenzani brought unsentimental tears to my eyes with his "Die Allmacht" ("Omnipotence," 1825), in which Schubert expresses, with shattering concentration, his conviction that God is everywhere present in Nature.

For some, the high point of this long evening, with its embarrassment of vocal riches, may have been Ms. Fleming's rapturous "Du Bist die Ruh" ("You Are Repose," 1823). Ms. Fleming is one of the rare singers who can do anything she wants with her bounteous instrument, and I was dismayed when she chose to sing the repetition of the high G during the ecstatic climax with a crescendo rather than with the diminuendo that more exquisitely evokes the image of eyes "illumined" by a lover's radiance. In Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's indispensable study, Schubert's Songs (1977), the greatest lieder singer of our time distills his wisdom about all things Schubertian when he writes that the diminuendo is "often overlooked, because of the general difficulties of execution. However, Schubert is not singing to an audience out over the prompter's box, he is singing rather to the inner soul." More than a very good and plentiful supply of punch, what was missing from this ambitious Schubertiad was the ebullient spirit of composer himself, a man who was keenly attuned not only to his own soul, but to the souls of his good friends-who were having a hell of a good time.

Sharing great music may be the best way to cope with these bewildering, benumbing times. A few days after the Lotos Club event, I heard Mr. Gortler again, in a midday recital at Rockefeller University, next-door to New York Hospital. This time, many of the listeners were dressed in clinical white coats or surgical scrubs, but for the moment, they had left behind their labs and their operating rooms for the alternative realities of Beethoven (the Op. 110 Sonata), Mendelssohn (eight "Songs Without Words") and Brahms (the Variations on a Theme by Handel). Mr. Gortler, a slim, buzz-cut man in his mid-30's who lives in Tel Aviv and is hoping to make New York his home, brought these 19th-century masterworks to vibrant life, revealing qualities that are rare in today's world of young, breakneck virtuosos. His thoughtful grasp of the works' architecture reminded me of the late Claudio Arrau, and his ear for the noble, singing line reminded me of Arthur Rubinstein. As he traversed the peaks and plains of the Handel Variations, a journey requiring prodigious reserves of nimbleness and stamina, he demonstrated the power of a musical adventure to make the world's great misadventures seem puny by comparison.

That evening, I attended the first night of the Met's revival of Parsifal , which is more shattering of the here-and-now than any opera ever written. For as long as I can remember, Wagner's sublimely garrulous Easter idyll has been James Levine's most indulgently enjoyed whirlpool bath. I've grown impatient with Mr. Levine's love of snail-like tempos, which seem calculated to give proof of his sovereign control over the magnificent orchestra he has built-and to show his uncanny ability to keep a musical behemoth afloat like a hovercraft whose engine is always on the verge of giving out. (His pulseless pacing of the duet that closes Ariadne auf Naxos , a few weeks ago, had me screaming silently for release, despite the valiant vocal splendor of Deborah Voigt's Ariadne and Richard Margison's Bacchus.) But this season, the figure on Parsifal 's podium was Valery Gergiev, who is mercury to Mr. Levine's granite.

Mr. Gergiev's cavalier disregard for punctuality, not to mention his idiosyncratic way of indicating a beat ("like a quivering stalactite," a friend of mine describes it), reportedly drives the orchestra members nuts. (During a ragged Otello earlier this season, they seemed on the point of mutiny.) I'm told that Mr. Gergiev showed up late for the dress rehearsal of Parsifal , which began without him, under an assistant conductor. When he finally arrived, he glowered from a seat in the auditorium, then rose imperiously to relieve the pinch-hitter of his baton. On opening night, I sensed a certain tug-of-war in the pit-at the expense of the all-enveloping musical atmosphere which Wagner so ingeniously contrived. The silences during the Prologue were not pregnant ones, but pockets of dead air. Act I, which is devoted almost entirely to exposition, is difficult to keep taut under the surest of hands; as conducted by Mr. Gergiev, it proceeded moment to moment, without any sense of a grand unfolding.

Still, there were some marvelous stretches, notably during a beautifully rapt Act II in the Grail temple, and the cast was superb. In the title role, Plácido Domingo continues to astonish with the untarnished gleam of his heldentenor; and, as always, his dramatic conviction is unfaltering. At 62, though, he appears to be anything but an innocent young swan-killer-a creaky miscasting that only added to the grim datedness of Otto Schenck's 12-year-old production, which is conceived not as a mystery play, but as a sequel to The Magic Flute . Violeta Urmana's Kundry was piercing and true; Falk Struckmann brought a neurotic intensity to anguished Amfortas. But the show belonged to Gurnemanz: As the Brotherhood of the Grail's resident sage, René Pape towered over the events with a bass voice of immense power, German diction that gave eloquent clarity to every gnomic utterance, and a force of personality so compelling that, for once, I allowed myself to ignore the anti-Semitic underpinnings of Wagner's most "Christian" opera and toy earn whole- heartedly for the redemption of these Aryan knights. Once again, music-in this case, the distillation of Wagner's supremegifts_as_a composer- trumped ugliness.

As it did, on a more gossamer level, at New York City Opera's pretty new production of Handel's Flavio . This seldom-heard work of 1723 offers a preview of Mozartean humanism in its tale of the triumph of love over squabbling fathers, aristocratic sexual exploitation and death by swordplay. City Opera mounted it like a candy box done up in 18th-century pinks and greens that would have looked right at home at a Palm Beach lawn party. I wasn't consistently enchanted by the work of the young director, Chas Rader-Shieber, which ranged from aimless to delicious (notably, in the arrival of more tulips than I've ever seen onstage). Nor was I always delighted by the cast, which was led by two countertenors, David Walker's sweetly ineffectual Flavio and Bejun Mehta's effortful Guido, who offered passages of great beauty when he wasn't veering wildly off-pitch. The brightly monochromatic Emilia of Jennifer Aylmer had similar problems. But the conductor, George Manahan, and the City Opera orchestra attacked one of Handel's most felicitous scores with a buoyant gusto that was irresistible. At some point in the second act, I said to myself: "To hell with being a music critic-relax and enjoy it while you can."

Sharing great music may be the best way to cope with these bewildering, benumbing times. A few days after the Lotos Club event, I heard Mr. Gortler again, in a midday recital at Rockefeller University, next-door to New York Hospital. This time, many of the listeners were dressed in clinical white coats or surgical scrubs, but for the moment, they had left behind their labs and their operating rooms for the alternative realities of Beethoven (the Op. 110 Sonata), Mendelssohn (eight "Songs Without Words") and Brahms (the Variations on a Theme by Handel). Mr. Gortler, a slim, buzz-cut man in his mid-30's who lives in Tel Aviv and is hoping to make New York his home, brought these 19th-century masterworks to vibrant life, revealing qualities that are rare in today's world of young, breakneck virtuosos. His thoughtful grasp of the works' architecture reminded me of the late Claudio Arrau, and his ear for the noble, singing line reminded me of Arthur Rubinstein. As he traversed the peaks and plains of the Handel Variations, a journey requiring prodigious reserves of nimbleness and stamina, he demonstrated the power of a musical adventure to make the world's great misadventures seem puny by comparison.

That evening, I attended the first night of the Met's revival of Parsifal , which is more shattering of the here-and-now than any opera ever written. For as long as I can remember, Wagner's sublimely garrulous Easter idyll has been James Levine's most indulgently enjoyed whirlpool bath. I've grown impatient with Mr. Levine's love of snail-like tempos, which seem calculated to give proof of his sovereign control over the magnificent orchestra he has built-and to show his uncanny ability to keep a musical behemoth afloat like a hovercraft whose engine is always on the verge of giving out. (His pulseless pacing of the duet that closes Ariadne auf Naxos , a few weeks ago, had me screaming silently for release, despite the valiant vocal splendor of Deborah Voigt's Ariadne and Richard Margison's Bacchus.) But this season, the figure on Parsifal 's podium was Valery Gergiev, who is mercury to Mr. Levine's granite.

Mr. Gergiev's cavalier disregard for punctuality, not to mention his idiosyncratic way of indicating a beat ("like a quivering stalactite," a friend of mine describes it), reportedly drives the orchestra members nuts. (During a ragged Otello earlier this season, they seemed on the point of mutiny.) I'm told that Mr. Gergiev showed up late for the dress rehearsal of Parsifal , which began without him, under an assistant conductor. When he finally arrived, he glowered from a seat in the auditorium, then rose imperiously to relieve the pinch-hitter of his baton. On opening night, I sensed a certain tug-of-war in the pit-at the expense of the all-enveloping musical atmosphere which Wagner so ingeniously contrived. The silences during the Prologue were not pregnant ones, but pockets of dead air. Act I, which is devoted almost entirely to exposition, is difficult to keep taut under the surest of hands; as conducted by Mr. Gergiev, it proceeded moment to moment, without any sense of a grand unfolding.

Still, there were some marvelous stretches, notably during a beautifully rapt Act II in the Grail temple, and the cast was superb. In the title role, Plácido Domingo continues to astonish with the untarnished gleam of his heldentenor; and, as always, his dramatic conviction is unfaltering. At 62, though, he appears to be anything but an innocent young swan-killer-a creaky miscasting that only added to the grim datedness of Otto Schenck's 12-year-old production, which is conceived not as a mystery play, but as a sequel to The Magic Flute . Violeta Urmana's Kundry was piercing and true; Falk Struckmann brought a neurotic intensity to anguished Amfortas. But the show belonged to Gurnemanz: As the Brotherhood of the Grail's resident sage, René Pape towered over the events with a bass voice of immense power, German diction that gave eloquent clarity to every gnomic utterance, and a force of personality so compelling that, for once, I allowed myself to ignore the anti-Semitic underpinnings of Wagner's most "Christian" opera and to yearn wholeheartedly for the redemption of these Aryan knights. Once again, music-in this case, the distillation of Wagner's supreme gifts as a composer-trumped ugliness.

As it did, on a more gossamer level, at New York City Opera's pretty new production of Handel's Flavio . This seldom-heard work of 1723 offers a preview of Mozartean humanism in its tale of the triumph of love over squabbling fathers, aristocratic sexual exploitation and death by swordplay. City Opera mounted it like a candy box done up in 18th-century pinks and greens that would have looked right at home at a Palm Beach lawn party. I wasn't consistently enchanted by the work of the young director, Chas Rader-Shieber, which ranged from aimless to delicious (notably, in the arrival of more tulips than I've ever seen onstage). Nor was I always delighted by the cast, which was led by two countertenors, David Walker's sweetly ineffectual Flavio and Bejun Mehta's effortful Guido, who offered passages of great beauty when he wasn't veering wildly off-pitch. The brightly monochromatic Emilia of Jennifer Aylmer had similar problems. But the conductor, George Manahan, and the City Opera orchestra attacked one of Handel's most felicitous scores with a buoyant gusto that was irresistible. At some point in the second act, I said to myself: "To hell with being a music critic-relax and enjoy it while you can."

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 insatiable curiosity about its inner workings. But according to this account of backstage life at the world's biggest opera house, the Met, during much of its history, has been surprisingly fragile. "Mayhem" doesn't quite describe all the ego clashes, diva flare-ups, backstage politicking, labor disputes and extramarital romances–not to mention several onstage deaths and one grisly murder. Nonetheless, Ms. Fiedler, who toiled in the Met's press office for 15 years, has written the juicy survival saga of a leaky vessel that has managed to stay afloat despite constant threats of disaster and a passenger list out of Ship of Fools .

The tale begins in 1883, when the Met was founded in a fit of pique by members of New York's nouveau riche who were denied the social badge of a box at the Academy of Music. In the company's first three decades, it survived a fire that gutted the auditorium, an earthquake in San Francisco, and the philistinism of boxholders who didn't hesitate to yelp when their moral sensibilities were offended (by Strauss' Salome ) or their prejudices aroused (by the prospect of a Jewish artistic director, Gustav Mahler).

The company enjoyed its first extended period of stability thanks to the partnership of a wily Italian artistic director, Giulio Gatti-Cassaza, whose inability to speak English proved useful during confrontations, and a passionately generous financier, Otto Kahn. After things went slack during the amiable tenure of Edward Johnson, a retired tenor, Rudolf Bing, an Austrian-Jewish impresario with the manner of a British grandee, was brought in.

It was Bing–along with a more genuinely aristocratic board member, Anthony Bliss–who set the Met on its present course. He made attention-grabbing new productions the lifeblood of the house and solicited wealthy patrons to foot the bill–a strategy that has paid off handsomely but sometimes dubiously (witness the Met's reliance on such taste-challenged benefactors as Sybil Harrington and Alberto Vilar). Bing vanquished egos as big as his own, even firing Maria Callas after she dithered over signing a contract. And he was so territorial about the Met that he bitterly opposed the New York City Opera's move to Lincoln Center–a hostility that has flared again in the redevelopment talks, thanks to the operatic truculence of the current general manager, Joe Volpe, who has modeled his autocratic style on Bing's, while maintaining the manners of the scenic carpenter he once was.

Ms. Fiedler is tight-lipped about her own experiences at the Met, but fearless on the failings of her famous colleagues. The mauling she gives Plácido Domingo for his womanizing and jealousy over press coverage smacks of score-settling. (In one of her not entirely convincing summings-up, she writes, "His thirst for attention and reassurance has somehow compromised his copious gifts.") More entertainingly, she trots out all the horror stories about Kathleen Battle, culminating in a line that I'd never heard before. After the Battle-scarred soprano Carol Vaness called her co-star in Le Nozze di Figaro "the most horrible colleague I've encountered in my whole life," the crazily difficult diva is reported to have cried to her mentor, James Levine: "What did I do? I've never done anything to her!"

Ms. Fiedler reserves her most complicated scrutiny for Mr. Levine. Praised for his heroic work with the orchestra and his unflappable temperament, the Met's longtime artistic director also comes across as a master Machiavellian, hogging the best conducting assignments and maintaining control with a fuzzy benevolence that conceals an iron will. That an institution like the Met can be a rough place for even the most powerful talents is illustrated in a chapter about John Dexter, the British director who was responsible for a series of brilliant stagings in the late 70's that have not been equaled since. By 1982, when his role had been shrunk to "production advisor," he was writing in his diary, "I could not work with JL in any creative way, and I do not enjoy the political atmosphere he creates and the relentless pursuit of popularity in which he drowns himself like a child with a sweets' trolley." Eight years later, Dexter died bitterly at the age of 64. The Met–with tenacious Maestro Levine at the artistic helm–sails on.

Charles Michener, a senior editor at The New Yorker, writes a classical music column for The Observer.