Movie Quote of the Day (‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,’ on a Source of Opera Funding)

[Longfellow Deeds, suddenly inheriting $20 million from his uncle, finds himself besieged by the opera board of directors.]

Longfellow Deeds [played by Gary Cooper]: “Gee, I'm busy. Do the opera people always come here for their meetings?”

Cornelius Cobb [played by Lionel Stander]: “Uu-hum.”

Deeds: “That's funny. Why is that?”

Cobb: “Why do mice go where there's cheese?”—Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), screenplay by Robert Riskin and Clarence Budington Kelland, directed by Frank Capra

In the last few weeks, at least as far as the Metropolitan Opera is concerned, the cheese moved. The agreement that the Met announced last fall for the Saudi Arabian government to provide more than $800 million over eight years came unraveled, just one more casualty of the Iranian War and the resulting Strait of Hormuz standoff.

What will the Met do now? Even looking to a misogynistic, authoritarian Mideast regime to keep it afloat was…a stretch. Now, the longtime cultural institution might be hearing more variants on this sharp rejoinder from Mr. Deeds: “I personally wouldn't care to be the head of a business that kept losing money! That wouldn't be common sense.”

The Met’s James Levine Problem: From an Individual’s ‘Open Secret’ to Institutional Crisis

“[T]his is no ordinary scandal: It is an existential crisis, one that threatens the survival of a financially beleaguered organization that had already spent years struggling with the problem of Mr. Levine’s declining health….If the number of accusers continues to grow, it will appear increasingly likely that others, at the Met and elsewhere, knew more about Mr. Levine’s alleged behavior than has previously been acknowledged. Should this prove to be the case, then the poison will have spread beyond a single individual to the institution as a whole.”— Terry Teachout, “The Levine Cataclysm,’ The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2017

As far back as freshman year in college in the late 1970s, a classmate nicknamed “Opera Man” passed along to me a bit of gossip about James Levine, then only a few years into his lengthy tenure as principal conductor -music director of the Metropolitan Opera.

“He likes boys,” my classmate said, leaving little doubt, with his lifted eyebrow, exactly what he meant.

This conversation took place in New York. But as far away as Kansas City, around the same time, the same tidbit made its way to Terry Teachout, the playwright, blogger and longtime Wall Street Journal cultural critic related in a recent column.

Just these two people—one, geographically distant from the events (Levine), the other, not a part of the maestro’s musical milieu (me)—are enough to demonstrate that this particular rumor about Levine was, in the phrase so commonly used now as to become a cliché, an “open secret.”

Over the years, I’d catch sight of Levine—profiled on American Masters as “America’s Maestro,” showered with Opera News, George Peabody, and Grammy Awards, honored by the Kennedy Center, for God’s sake—and wonder how so many people who must have heard the same thing I did managed to close their ears and shut their eyes. 

And I wondered, after the bonfire of sexual abuse allegations engulfing and terribly damaging the Roman Catholic Church in 2002: “When will it be Levine’s turn?”

Well, at long last, it may be now. Reports in The New York Post and The New York Times that Levine has been accused of sexual misconduct with four youths dating back decades show that the “Me, Too” phenomenon unleashed in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal has taken on a whole different dimension. 

Some wags have employed the term “maestrobation” to describe one of the particular activities supposedly engaged in by Levine. The surprise of the new word might be funny, except that what is being described is sexual assault that leaves long-lasting psychological damage. And the financial cost to ameliorate such damage, as the Roman Catholic Church has discovered, ends up being borne not just by perpetrators but by the organizations that abetted the abuse.

As Teachout points out in the characteristically trenchant column I cited above, the Met itself stands in mortal danger if the investigation by the outside law firm Proskauer Rose turns up evidence that the institution either covered up or turned a blind eye to Levine’s alleged crimes.

I’m not just talking about other musical festivals and organizations that the globetrotting maestro visited, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the Munich Philharmonic and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. 

(When he was 12, according to Ben Miller in an article for VAN Magazine, his father--a BSO cellist--and mother told him about the "serious rumors" whirling around Levine already, and warned him "never to be alone in a room" with the conductor and even to "walk the other way if I saw him coming." As for Ravinia, it was, in effect, ground zero for the charges: abuse of a 16-year-old that allegedly took place in 1986— an accusation reported last year. For once, someone—in this case, the Lake Forest Police Department in Illinois—actually pressed hard to investigate Levine. That department has now announced that it will not pursue charges because the teen involved was of the age of consent at the time.)

No, smaller institutions may also be gulping and sweating now. Each summer, classical music, theater, and dance companies around the country train in their craft thousands of talented youngsters. The incentives to these companies are obvious: creating a talent pipeline for tomorrow’s artists, gaining a source of cheap, short-term labor, and attracting funding from foundations that will pay for this educational outreach. The advantage to teens is even stronger:  a much-needed experience that can help them better themselves and develop a support network.

But such summer internships could also prove a nightmare for parents who leave their talented children, craving affirmation, in places where they can get it, all right—at the hands of cunning sexual users who can appear as mentors even as they camouflage their true intentions. 

These young people are in their way every bit as vulnerable as the children of at-risk families who seemed to be the special targets of many pedophile priests. Yes, their talents make them special, but also isolate them from peers. 

In commitment to craft and willingness to abide significant aches and pains, a ballet dancer, for instance, can be just as athletic as a football player, but unlikely to receive the adulation accorded to gridiron stars. She is all too open to someone who can give that attention.

All of this can happen in environments where alcohol can soften defenses and where family and friends are hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.

The opportunities for exploitation are considerable, and Levine is not the only charismatic adult in the cultural world who may have done so. Last week, The New York Times also reported that Israel Horovitz, the playwright and longtime artistic director of the Gloucester Stage Company, has been accused by nine women of sexual assault and misconduct. 

If the allegations are true, Levine and Horovitz went beyond the deference often granted artists to something more akin to droit du seigneur, the customary right of a feudal lord to have his way with a vassal's bride on her wedding night—in modern terms, taking advantage of their positions to sexually surprise confused teens.

They share something else in common, too, if their accusers are to be believed: an icy coldness when the fun and games are over. When Chris Brown, who said he surrendered to Levine's advances as a 17-year-old at Michigan’s Meadow Brook School of Music in 1968, told the up-and-coming maestro that he would not repeat the experience, Levine ignored this former favorite for the rest of the summer. Similarly, when an aspiring actress protested after Horovitz put his tongue in her mouth during rehearsals, the director would put in an understudy and replace her with another cast member.

The Met has already been skating on thin financial ice for a while, forcing general manager Peter Gelb into a nasty labor dispute with its orchestra and chorus two years ago. (See James B. Stewart’s article in The New Yorker about this troubled time.) 

An adverse report from Proskauer Rose about the organization's dealings with Levine may not only trigger costly lawsuits but an exodus of faithful members and donors. A smaller institution may have even fewer means of survival--particularly if it has to answer questions, as The Met surely will now, about why they didn't do the necessary due diligence and investigate a star administrator or performer before offering him a generous contract. 

The 74-year-old Levine, who has already suffered from health problems for the last several years, may now, as a result of the scandal, have conducted his last performance at The Met and the other institutions where he worked, as virtually all have either suspended or completely cut ties with him. 

But even as his presence fades, the questions posed by his case and other errant artistic leaders across the country will persist. Administrators of the arts and their trustees will have to honestly and painfully review their past actions to see what went wrong--and implement new procedures to ensure past mistakes aren't repeated.

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity," George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Doctor's Dilemma. Acolytes of the arts have, unknown to much of the public, been experiencing their own loss of faith because of the profession's "priesthood." For that reason, the American arts community, already facing adverse forces in the Trump administration, may now have to weather a storm whose ominous clouds they had ignored for far too long.

(The accompanying Flickr photo of James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera House was taken Dec. 21, 2013, by Ralph Daily.)

Photo of the Day: Richard Tucker Bust, Lincoln Center Neighborhood, NYC

For nearly 40 years, this bronze portrait bust has been, like the Brooklyn-born tenor it honors, a mainstay of the Lincoln Center neighborhood. It is, in fact, the main element of Richard Tucker Square, a small triangular park at the intersection of Broadway and West 66^th Street. I took this photo three weeks ago, while in the area.

A former cantor, Richard Tucker (1913–1975) made his debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1945, and went on to a 30-year career with that institution. The bust, created by Milton Hebald and unveiled in 1979, sits on a granite pedestal.

The titles of 31 productions in which Tucker appeared, leaning heavily toward his specialty in Italian opera, are inscribed on the pedestal, including Rigoletto, Tosca, Turandot, The Magic Flute, Manon Lescaut, and Samson et Dalila.

This Day in Classical Music History (Shelved “Gatsby” Music Revived)

September 11, 1986—Jay Gatsby was not easily dissuaded from his great, shimmering dream, and neither was John Harbison (left). After the composer saw his request to create an operatic adaptation The Great Gatsby ignored by the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he pulled together some stray ideas into the short orchestral piece, “Remembering Gatsby,” which was performed publicly for the first time on this date by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Shaw. Thirteen years later, when Fitzgerald’s classic novel finally premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Harbison’s “orchestra foxtrot” comprised the overture.

In choosing a topic for today, I felt strongly tempted to write about 9/11, or even about one of the objects of that day’s heinous attacks, the Pentagon, which began construction on this date exactly 70 years ago. But ultimately, this particular topic won me over, and not simply because it represents another oblique way to write about my favorite novel. (Even the title of this blog, of course, takes its inspiration from Fitzgerald’s rhapsodic ending to that book.)

Any foreigner who wants to divine the heart and soul of America can start with Fitzgerald’s perfectly crafted tale of his country at the height of the Jazz Age. There are things in it that al Qaeda—or, indeed, anyone of a fundamentalist faith—would find antithetical to their beliefs, notably adultery, heavy drinking, disdain for the past, the characters' overwhelming materialism and the absence of any real god (the famous “eyes of God” are depicted in a billboard ad observing “the valley of ashes”).

Of course there are so many things in the novel that abide, however, among them the belief that one can reinvent one’s self and the endless straining for grace. It depicts a secular society in a desert of spiritual values, but finds a kind of saving grace in the purity of purpose at odds with the violent trade of bootlegging at the heart of Gatsby’s quest (note that phrase about the “orgiastic green light”).

Adaptations of Gatsby have tended overwhelmingly toward stage, film and television, hinting at the deep respect for theater present in Fitzgerald even as a boy staging amateur plays. But I think he’d be equally delighted that the world of music—especially the world of classical music—has finally sat down and paid him attention.

A book of his short stories, titled Tales of the Jazz Age, has understandably led readers over the years to associate Fitzgerald with the new musical form taking his country by storm in the Roaring Twenties. But Robert Westbook, the son of the novelist’s later mistress, Sheilah Graham, reported in his book about their relationship, Intimate Lies, that it was classical music, not jazz, that really claimed his devotion. In fact, Fitzgerald was spending a quiet afternoon listening to Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony when he was struck down by his fatal heart attack in December 1940.

Now, let’s turn back to Harbison and his own indomitable attempt to capture the essence of Fitzgerald’s vision in music.

I haven’t been able to find any information about why the Fitzgerald estate turned a deaf ear to the composer’s wish to adapt Gatsby into an opera. It was just the kind of classy project that Fitzgerald’s surviving daughter Scottie always tried to encourage to preserve the memory of her parents.

But the request by Hardison--who, like many Princeton grads, was fascinated by the life and work of fellow alum Fitzgerald--went nowhere for a long while. (The subject matter held additional interest for Hardison because the time evoked, the Roaring Twenties, was when his father, an historian of the Reformation, held out youthful hope that he could carve out a living as a show-tune composer, “and this piece may also have been a chance to see him in his tuxedo again,” he recalled.)

In 1985, Harbison was prompted to revisit his aborted project when Robert Shaw, artistic director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, commissioned him to create a new work. Harbison scanned notes from his Gatsby opera and fashioned his “Remembering Gatsby (Foxtrot for Orchestra).”

I’ve heard neither this eight-minute creation nor the full-length opera that the Met eventually staged, but the most likely source for “Remembering Gatsby” would seem to be Chapter 3 of the book. Like all admirers of the novel, I’ve always retained a vivid mental picture of the summer parties at Gatsby’s mansion, and even recalled the marvelous phrase “yellow cocktail music” used to evoke the atmosphere. But it wasn’t until I re-read the chapter, in preparing this post, that I appreciated how subtly Fitzgerald worked his magic.

The chapter begins with a rather prosaic sentence: “There was music from my neighbors’ house through the summer nights.” The second sentence hints at the marvelous interplay between the actual event of the parties, how Fitzgerald employed this as a metaphor, and his further evocation of sound in non-music-related images: “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

A couple of paragraphs later we’re introduced to the orchestra, whose size is fully of a piece with the immensity of Gatsby’s ambitions: ““By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums.”

And now, the famous “yellow cocktail music” passage begins:

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

“Suddenly one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the FOLLIES. The party has begun.”

This is such a bravura piece of writing that analyzing it is a bit like revealing the secrets behind a magic act. It ends with “the party has begun,” but already we have, in a sense, watched the entire movement of this event. The third sentence sounds like the swelling and diminution of instruments in an orchestra. It’s all so giddy, the way listeners can get caught up in intoxicating music, and yet there are already hints of excess, like an orchestra without a conductor (as, in a sense, Gatsby is, since he’s present but unknown by the great mass of party crashers here).

The laughter, for instance, is “spilled” and “tipped out,” like the illegal liquor everyone’s consuming. The party seems to stop on “the erroneous news” that the gypsy is an understudy from FOLLIES—an echo not only of the false rumors about to be spread about Gatsby even before Nick Carraway meets him, but also of the ludicrous falsehoods Gatsby has created in fashioning a backstory for himself. And there’s that especially piquant phrase, “yellow cocktail music.” It not only marries an aural and visual image (something that only Fitzgerald, I think, would ever have the brass and technical skill to pull off), but also further develops an association that “yellow” will have by the end of the novel with corruption.

The foxtrot is hardly the first musical type that one might associate with classical music, but ever since George Gershwin had daringly mixed jazz with classical music in Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, virtually nothing could be ruled out of bounds for the American composer’s aural palette. (More recently, another piece I saw performed at the Chautauqua Institution had used the foxtrot in a classical work: “The Chairman Dances,” an outtake “Foxtrot” from John Adams’ Nixon in China.)

The eight-minute piece begins with the novel’s ending, the green light that Gatsby sees, evoked here by a cantabile passage for full orchestra. “Then the foxtrot begins,” Harbison later summarized the piece, “first with a kind of call to order, then a twenties tune I had written for one of the party scenes, played by a concertino led by soprano saxophone. The tune is then varied and broken into its components, leading to an altered reprise of the call to order, and an intensification of the original cantabile. A brief coda combines some of the motives and refers fleetingly to the telephone bell and the automobile horns, instruments of Gatsby’s fate.”

So often, opera has taken the kind of low passions associated with tabloid crimes and wedded them to a grandiosity that spills out of the confines of its vast concert halls. Such is the case with The Great Gatsby, a work that practically screams with Jerry Springer material (“crooked millionaires and their mistresses!!!”) but endows it with so much more.

This Day in New York History (Metropolitan Opera Opens)

October 22, 1883—New York's Metropolitan Opera opened with a performance of Gounod’s Faust, starting as a meeting place for Gotham’s new-money class but swiftly becoming an established symbol of culture in its own right.

The nouveau riche of the Gilded Age were like today’s starlets with implants—they’d paid a lot for what they had and, by George, they were going to display every bit of it. One of my earlier posts discussed one occasion for this—the ultra-extravagant Vanderbilt fancy-dress ball, also in 1883.

Another such event was the founding of the Met. It all came about because New York’s millionaires (back when the term meant something) found themselves frozen out of New York’s Academy of Music, located near Union Square. The Academy’s old-line Knickerbocker elite were in no mood to accommodate the rich new upstarts, who regarded their offer of 26 additional boxes to be too little, too late. So the nouveau riche built their own property.

The first Metropolitan Opera House—one where it stood until it moved into its present quarters at Lincoln Center in 1966—was located at Broadway and 39th Street. Fashions could and did change over the years in terms of the repertoire (sometimes in Italian, sometimes in German, but a couple of things remained constant: 1) the constellation of talent that came to the house, and 2) the inadequacy of that venue as an institution for musical theater. (In the latter case, the acoustics were fine—it was limited rehearsal and storage space, not to mention cramped dressing rooms, that represented the problem.)

The latter problem was alleviated by the move to the organization's current home, in Lincoln Center, in 1966. But, whether on 39th Street or further uptown, the talent has remained constant, with the stage serving as home over the years to the likes of Enrico Caruso, Lawrence Tibbett, Maria Callas, Marian Anderson, Joan Sutherland, Renee Fleming, and "The Three Tenors"—Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Contreras. Plus, of course, my favorite—the late great baritone Robert Merrill, who for more than three decades thrilled Yankee fans such as myself with his thrilling renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on opening day at the stadium.