Last Sunday, after he had overcome a long bout of serious illness that idled him for a year and he had just led a brilliant performance of the Verdi Requiem for its Saturday afternoon worldwide radio and cinema audience, the Metropolitan Opera suspended 74-year-old principal conductor and former musical director James Levine, cancelling all his scheduled performances including his much-anticipated new production of Puccini’s Tosca on New Year’s Eve. Maestro Levine has conducted almost 2,500 operas for the MET over 4 decades. Several men had come forward with allegations of sexual abuse by him, some occurring more than fifty years ago. Why these assaults that supposedly traumatized these men for life were not reported at the time they occurred was not made clear, as is usual in such cases these days, when the truth seems to be that there is a stampede of these sheep bleating out their identical grievances encouraged by faddishness, a media feeding frenzy, greed for blood money.and a mean-spirited hatred of excellence and success.
The contrast is so jarring. The transcendent finale of Wagner’s Parsifal, music soaring towards a climax not of volume but of intensity, divine light radiating from the newly-uncovered Holy Grail, pure voices of boys from the gallery high above the stage singing of redemption, the knight Parsifal healing the sick old King by touching him with the spear that pierced Christ’s heart and thereby restoring fertility to the Wasteland – all this happening in the Metropolitian Opera House in New York City under the baton of Maestro Levine, the greatest opera conductor in the world.. Set over against it think of his accusers, conjuring up with revolting vividness even after fifty years the hard, sticky, smelly reality of male-on-male sex. It is a moment that reveals the sickening truth about our age. The vicious hatred of losers for greatness, beauty, truth and genius. Lying and disloyalty in all the high places (even the Pope seems a heretic) seeking to destroy culture, religion, family and traditional civilization, especially the humanities. It was only a matter of time before they attacked the world-famous Metropolitan Opera with their tiresome, repetitive screeds about sexual misconduct, lack of diversity and multiculturalism, predominance of dead white men, Eurocentrism, elitism, you know how it goes on, day after day, hour after hour.
But in this case it’s all so far off the mark. The Met is one of the very few American institutions that is deservedly world famous, a high-achieving cultural enterprise rare in this philistine wasteland of mediocre art, poorly-educated plodders and narcissistic hedonists wallowing in pornography, graphic violence, ugly pseudo-music like hip-hop and trashy entertainment that Orwell called “prolefeed” in 1984. Cultured people in Europe and Asia laugh at the vulgarity of Americans and their silly fantasy that theirs is the greatest and freest country on earth. A country just over 200 years old that is declining so fast into paralyzing ignorance and civil war that it may never see its 300th birthday. Many predict that with only 12% student enrolment (and sinking) the humanities will soon be extinct. With dropping enrolment and increasing tuition costs it is regularly predicted that more than 50% of US colleges and universities will be bankrupt within a decade. Several have already closed their doors. But the elites don’t get it. Academics and ruling suggestion-givers deny the popularity and relevance of the MET, ignoring the fact that the live Saturday broadcast is North America’s oldest regular radio program. Perhaps the world’s oldest. Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould grew up listening and spoke of the profound influence on them of these Saturday afternoons. They introduced Enrico Caruso, Lily Pons. Kirsten Flagstad.and Arturo Toscanini to worldwide audiences. Operas performed come in multiple languages from all musically literate countries, performers and musicians from all races and identity groups., beloved characters from ordinary people – the seamstress Mimi, the clown Canio, the African and Chinese slave girls Aida and Liu, the barber of Seville and fisherman Peter Grimes. Compared to such overpriced monocultures as the NFL, the MET is truly multicultural, diverse, and neither elitist nor expensive. The spectrum of opera-lovers extends across a huge socioeconomic base and a seat at the MET will cost you less than a ticket to a football, baseball or hockey game.
James Levine has not been destroyed. The greatness of his talent and achievement will be validated in the hearts of those who saw and heard his performances, available in so many media. Beyond the reach of gossip and scandal, and mean-spirited, cowering, ungrateful bureaucrats, he will live as long as opera will. Forever. Bravo Maestro! Bravissimo!
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the true nature of this nihilistic, unconsciously self-loathing, sick and rotten phase of our society that is now accelerating towards collapse:
Where does one not encounter that veiled glance which burdens one with a profound sadness, that inward-turned glance of the born failure which betrays how such a man speaks to himself – that glance which is a sigh! ‘If only I were someone else,’ sighs this glance: ‘But there is no hope of that. I am who I am; how could I ever get free of myself? And yet – I am sick of myself’.
It is on such soil, on swampy ground, that every weed, every poisonous plant grows, always so small, so hidden, so false, so saccharine, Here the worms of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; here the web of the most malicious of all conspiracies is being spun constantly – the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-constituted and victorious, here the aspect of the victorious is hated. And what mendaciousness is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand words and postures, what an art of ‘honest’ calumny! These failures: what noble eloquence flows from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble submissiveness swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At least to represent justice, love, wisdom, superiority – that is the ambition of the lowest, the sick. And how skilful such an ambition makes them! Admire above all the forger’s skill with which the stamp of virtue, even the ring, the golden-sounding ring of virtue, is here counterfeited. They monopolize virtue, these weak, hopelessly sick people, there is no doubt of it: ‘we alone are the good and just, we alone.’ They walk among us as embodied reproaches, as warnings to us – as if health, well-constitutedness, strength, pride and sense of power were in themselves necessarily vicious things for which one must pay someday, and pay bitterly: how ready they themselves are at bottom to make one pay; how they crave to be hangmen.”
— from The Genealogy of Morals