NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
March 13, 2018
By Zachary Woolf
It was about 9:30 on Monday evening at the Metropolitan Opera, just a few hours after the Met had fired the conductor James Levine, its musical lodestar since the early 1970s, for what the company found was sexual abuse and harassment, including of young artists under the Met’s guidance.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the 43-year-old the company has hired as its next music director, was taking his bow after Strauss’s “Elektra,” an opera about killing your parents that Mr. Levine led three dozen times with the Met. The audience roared its approval as Mr. Nézet-Séguin grinned. It felt like an anointing.
But is an anointing what the Met should want? The fate of Mr. Levine, 74, who has not commented publicly since denying any misconduct in December, after The New York Times reported a series of accusations, may be an opportunity to think about what it means to be a maestro, to consider the vast power we grant to conductors and whether that power has outlived its usefulness.
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