The Metropolitan Opera has announced that it will start an investigation into allegations that James Levine, its music director emeritus and a monumental figure in the world of classical music, had sexually abused a teenager more than three decades ago.
The Saturday announcement came in the wake of an article detailing sexual abuse allegations made by a man, now 48, to the police department in Lake Forest, Ill. — allegations that the Met had known about for at least a year.
"This first came to the Met's attention when the Illinois police investigation was opened in October, 2016," Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, said in a statement. "At the time, Mr. Levine said that the charges were completely false, and we relied upon the further investigation of the police. We need to determine if these charges are true and, if they are, take appropriate action. We'll now be conducting our own investigation with outside resources."
Gelb could not be reached for comment on why the Met deemed the charges worthy of investigation at this time, but not a year ago.
Levine, 74, was the music director of the Metropolitan Opera for 40 years before stepping down in 2016. He is also the former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Ravinia Festival. He was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2003.
Levine is a beloved figure in the industry but has faced rumors of these sorts in the past, so much so that he even addressed them in a 1987 interview. "I don't have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served," Levine told the New York Times' John Rockwell.
The alleged victim in the Illinois investigation, whose name has been withheld because The Washington Post does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse, has approached reporters from multiple publications over the years and, more recently, posted publicly on Facebook. But the New York Post report was the first to publish his account, followed shortly by the New York Times and other publications over the weekend.
In his account to the Lake Forest Police Department, the accuser made explicit charges against Levine. The abuse, he told police, began in 1985, when he was 16. Levine, he said, used to arrange to meet him for dinner, but would instead take him to his hotel room near Ravinia, where Levine was music director from 1973 to 1993. There, according to the accuser, Levine would ask him to remove his clothes, fondle his penis and masturbate in front of him.
The man told police that this behavior continued for years, even after he had turned 18. Levine, he said, also gave him financial gifts amounting to about $50,000. But the encounters also left him confused and unhappy, he said, and almost drove him to suicide.
Levine has suffered from ill health for a number of years, surrounding a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease made in 2006 but publicly revealed only a decade later. Today, he is largely in a wheelchair, but he has stepped up his activity at the Met, in his current role of music director emeritus, after a period of not conducting very much. The New York Post story was posted shortly after he finished conducting the last of four performances of the Verdi "Requiem"; and he is scheduled to conduct the company's new "Tosca," which opens on New Year's Eve and runs through May.
Levine's management did not respond to requests for comment.