Meanwhile, New York Magazine‘s music critic, Justin Davidson, has voiced fears about the very survival of the Met in the wake of the scandal. These would seem overblown were it not for two factors: 1) Should Levine really press his suit, which in my more twisted moments I hope he does, ^(I) and should a trial establish that the decades-old stories of Levine’s predilections—never proven, but of a critical mass and persistence that put them in a category beyond that of common malicious gossip—are true, and that the “credible evidence” had been known at the upper administrative and/or board level prior to the Met’s recent and inescapable acknowledgement of complaints, that could result in an organizational upheaval, with concomitant plunge in contributions, from which the organization could not recover. And 2) The company seems in edge-of-the-cliff condition anyway, and contract negotiations are not far off.

The articles by Wolfe and Davidson do open the door a crack on the real question, which is what sort of opera company the Met can be now, not only in terms of its institutional survival, but in those of the cultural position it should occupy. Wolfe’s piece, concerned with the role of the musical director, is thoughtful. But except for Levine himself, its examples are all drawn from the world of the symphony orchestra. That’s functionally not only quite different from the opera-house situation as it presently exists, but even more from what it might be in another organizational model. We might recall that just as Levine was coming on the scene, the Met was embarking on a quite radical re-structuring. In the position of artistic director-designate was not a conductor or impresario, but a theatre man—Goeran Gentele, an imaginative director who had been running the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm to some acclaim.

The notion of a person from the dramatic side as overall artistic director or (as with Max Reinhardt at Salzburg) co-equal with a musical eminence, had some precedent in 20th-Century Northern Europe, most notably with the Wagner brothers at Bayreuth and Walter Felsenstein at East Berlin’s Komische Oper. Those, however, were much smaller, more narrowly defined situations, at once blessed by the European tradition of high culture as a public good, but  answerable in the defeated, divided Germany of the time to the political causes that came attached—Felsenstein’s to “Socialist Realism,” the Wagners’ to the cleansing of their cultural legacy. Here at the Met, it was decided that the age of one-man rule was over, and that while Gentele would be the ultimate artistic authority, he would work with a conductor of stature who would preside over the musical sphere, and an experienced business person who would oversee development and set the financial parameters. This was the “troika” model of governance. It never really got a chance. Gentele lost his life in an auto accident just as he was assuming active leadership. The chosen musical director, Rafael Kubelik, didn’t work out, not because he wasn’t a fine conductor or operatically experienced (he was both), but because he saw his job as a prominent Central European conductor of the time was bound to see it, as arbiter of all things musical, and much of the time at a distance, at that. So after some uncomfortable shifting about, James Levine, without the period of in-house learning and growth he would have gained as Kubelik’s adjutant, became the musical corner of the eventual troika, with John Dexter in the theatrical corner and Anthony Bliss in the administrative.