James Levine first saw the New York Met at the age of eight. Now, in his 30th year as its conductor, he regularly clocks up two performances in a single day - with just a sandwich and a quick nap to keep him going. In a rare interview, the world's most successful opera conductor tells Martin Kettle what Britain can expect from his baton
The day before I interview James Levine in New York, he had done something that tells you a lot about why he is what he is: the world's most successful opera conductor. At one o'clock in the afternoon, Levine conducted Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera with the kind of cast you only normally hear on recordings: Bryn Terfel, Renée Fleming, Ferrucio Furlanetto. Then, at 8.30 the same evening, Levine was back in the pit at the Met again, this time conducting Fidelio, with another starry cast: Karita Mattila, Ben Heppner, René Pape. It was nearly midnight when he left the theatre. And now, on a Sunday, here he is again, back at the opera house for an interview.
"These Saturday doubles happen once or twice a season," explains Levine, who is conducting the Munich Philharmonic at the Barbican at the end of this month. "I do the same routine every time. I eat very little after the first one. Yesterday, I just had a sandwich. Then I go home. It's just 15 minutes to my apartment and I like the walk. But the important thing is to lie down and fall asleep. That little nap means you wake up fresh again and can continue. Of course it's tiring. But, to tell the truth, I also find it very interesting and very stimulating. I've had some curious combinations over the years. I once did La Bohème and Lulu in the same day. And one year I got a pairing I had always wanted: Otello and Falstaff, in that order of course."
Two operas in a day. Eleven different operas at the Met this season, including three new productions. More than 70 performances in all. And it's much the same schedule every year. The man is simply wedded to the job. He even speaks the way he conducts, in long, flawlessly constructed paragraphs. He pays attention to verbal detail, too, rather as he might with some orchestral point in rehearsal, pausing to find just the right word or phrase to express what he wants to communicate. And then there is also, unmistakably, a certain personal reserve, a distancing that is sometimes a feature of his performances, a sense of his own importance that is conveyed by a reluctance to talk in depth about anything except conducting.
But then, you think to yourself, why not? This is, after all, a rather special conductor. For the past quarter of a century, Levine has been the central figure in the emergence of New York's Met as the most complete opera house in the world today. In a world which yearns for certainty amid change, Levine has fulfilled both a civic and an artistic ideal. Any opera house in the world would give anything to equal his achievement. In modern times, none has even come close. "This is my 30th year of working here," he says. "It wasn't that I ever knew I'd be at the Met for 20 years, or 30 years, or 40 years, or anything like that. It was just that we had this phenomenal honeymoon relationship that just kept on going."
When you look back at Levine's personal history, though, there is a certain inevitability about it. He was eight when he first heard the Met on tour in Indiana in 1951, performing Die Fledermaus and Don Carlo. Levine first went to the Met - the "old" Met on Broadway and 39th Street - in 1953, when he was 10. His parents had brought the child prodigy pianist from their home in Cincinnati to play for professors at the Juilliard school. One evening, they went to the opera, where Levine heard Gounod's Faust, conducted by Pierre Monteux.
Levine first conducted an opera, The Pearl Fishers, when he was 18. After an orchestral apprenticeship under George Szell in Cleveland, he conducted his first performance - at the age of 27 - at the Met, which was by now the "new" Met at the Lincoln Centre. The work was Tosca, and the cast included Grace Bumbry and Franco Corelli. "That was the most exciting performance I have played since Karajan conducted us," the orchestra's leader Raymond Gniewek told Levine afterwards.
Three years later, when Rafael Kubelik resigned, Levine was the Met's de facto music director, conducting 38 performances in the 1974 season. In 1976, the Met made it official. Levine has been there ever since. "I suppose it was always part of my nature that I preferred working in a way in which there was great depth and continuity, where I could work with the same people in an orchestra or an operatic ensemble so that the nature of the work would resemble the way that a singer might prepare the lieder repertoire.
"Whether it was 23 years in the Chicago Symphony summer season, or 17 years in Salzburg, or 15 in Bayreuth, or nearly 30 here, I've always been the opposite of the school of come in and do a programme and then go away. That kind of performance gives me almost no pleasure at all, especially nowadays. I feel that it is so far from the composer's intention. It's oil and water for me. I tell you. I set out to do one thing which turned out to also produce another. When I started out, I had a very strong belief in a certain kind of performance. I like to hear performances which are, as much as possible, carefully worked out, and then - " he pauses to find the right word, or perhaps merely for effect, " - and then released. And so, little by little, I gradually divested myself of pretty nearly all of the guest conducting I used to do, because I was at the same time working in the places like the Met, where I could work in this sort of depth."
Levine is a perfectionist. One singer to whom I spoke about working with him said he was "always perfecting, always refining". It's as if every performance is another attempt to get the piece just right, the singer said. While other conductors might be risk-takers, Levine "always works towards the centre". Levine's goals are "the beautiful, the noble and the powerful".
At the heart of Levine's achievement at the Met is his orchestra, which he has raised to very great heights over a long period of continuing progress. "I just love this orchestra," Levine says. "I grew up in an era where an orchestra was like a treasure chest. And I still work with orchestras in the way I worked with them when I was young." Asked to define the Levine sound and the Levine orchestra, he says: "It has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is - like Verdi said - working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra's collective qualities emerge. It's a very subtle process. Everything interacts with everything else. You try on purpose to get players with different qualities which will rub off on one another.
"I think this orchestra's strengths involve drama and voice. They are encouraged always in vocal virtues and dramatic virtues. It's the opposite of treating the works as if they were abstractions. I try to work with them to produce vocal virtues, dramatic and lyric characteristics, but always specifically applied to whatever we have in front of us."
I ask Levine to imagine that he is placed in front of an orchestra blindfolded. Would he know which orchestra he was conducting? "An orchestra that I know well? Absolutely. I couldn't possibly get it wrong, just like you wouldn't ever get the singer wrong. Each has its personal characteristics. But you work very hard for that. It doesn't happen by itself. It's very, very hard work."
He talks, fascinatingly, about the most mysterious aspect of his calling, the ability to communicate his intentions to players, a gift that lies at the heart of the conductor's art. "When people see me with the orchestra in the concerts we do in Carnegie Hall, they often say, 'But you do so little.' And I say, 'I have a big problem with conductors who gesture a lot.' There is no relationship between the gestures and what an orchestra will do. In a concert, my function can be as non-visual as possible. This means a great deal to me."
Go to a Levine performance at the Met and the contrast between what the eyes see and the ears hear is sometimes dramatic. What you will mostly see is a conductor who sometimes barely moves, whose baton seems merely to set a pulse which can be rock-solid. What you will hear is a rich, dramatic and variegated sound. Mostly there is no waving of the arms, let alone the crouching, leaping and big gestures which other conductors enjoy. This is exactly as Levine wants it.
"Where my tastes in music are concerned, I'm a real maximalist," Levine says. "But where my attitude about the function of the conductor in a performance is concerned, I'm a real minimalist. It isn't that I want to stand impassively while the music has an orgasm around me. It's just that, when the orchestra look at me, I want them to see a completely involved person who reflects what we rehearsed, and whose function is to make it possible for them to do it.
"Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out. It's tricky, because impassive is impossible. That would make a kind of distancing. But I'm afraid a lot of people - I'm sorry for them - listen with their eyes."
Levine loves to talk about other conductors. His knowledge is formidable, and his tastes tend to those who, like Evgeny Mravinksy, Fritz Reiner, George Szell or Bruno Walter, were minimalists too. "Mravinsky was a very brilliant music director who understood that in the end the musicians are playing this performance and not the gesture. It's a little bit like a thing we try to teach singers. Their work shouldn't be done while they're performing in front of the public. When they are performing in front of the public, they ought to have a sensation that's relatively easy, if the technical and the interpretive work was done before."
There is talk in New York that Levine is considering stepping down from the Met, maybe as soon as next year, in favour of Valery Gergiev. Levine, the rumour mill says, is being courted by all the big east coast orchestras, hoping that he can be persuaded to do for one of them what he has already done for the opera and its orchestra. Levine denies it all, just as he denies that he was ever interested in succeeding Karajan in Berlin a decade ago. "I never agreed even to be thought of. That never had the slightest validity," he claims. Yes, he says, he is talking to American orchestras, but he talks to them all the time, and the rumours are exaggerated. His future, like his past, is committed to the Met, he says. He says he does not have a "career path" that would take him anywhere. For Levine, even after 30 years, there's no place like home.
"I don't have any plan to leave in the foreseeable future. We have arrived at a certain quality and I want to take that as far as possible. Any moment now, that orchestra will be without weaknesses anywhere, and then we shall play even better. I can imagine wanting to work with this ensemble and this company always. It has become like my own voice."