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Several major singers, among them Mirella Freni, Joan Sutherland, Von Stade and Alfredo Kraus, are too rarely heard at the Met, although all four are appearing this season. And British Soprano Margaret Price, who sings in the major international houses, has never sung there. Somewhat ingenuously, Levine blames their absence partly on the Met's distance from Europe. Even in the Concorde age, he contends, they prefer to work closer to home, no more than a couple of hours' flight from Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra or Milan's La Scala, rather than take up extended residence in New York. Further, Levine says, the heavily subsidized European houses can afford to pay as much as 50% more than the Met's top fee of about $8,000 a performance. Domingo concurs with Levine's assessment. "I could go where they would pay me four or five times what I get at the Met," says Domingo.
On the wall of Levine's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is a framed quotation from Thomas Mann's novella The Tables of the Law, given to the conductor by his longtime live-in companion, Sue Thomson. It reads, in part: "Mighty and long labor lay ahead, labor which would have to be achieved through anger and patience before the uncouth hordes could be formed into a people who would be more than the usual community to whom the ordinary was comfortable ..." Too often, there is an air of comfortable ordinariness about the Met, such as casting a popular opera like Il Trovatore with a soprano past her prime and a tenor who never had one, or substituting a less-than-star-quality singer like Herman Malamood for Pavarotti in Idomeneo. Still, on a day-to-day basis, the Met's productions are the equal of any, the result of Levine's mighty and long labor.
In his performances, Levine strives to banish interpretive routine to get at the heart of the composer's message. "My function," he says, "is to be a necessary middleman, not a willful, distorting, idiosyncratic, egocentric middleman." His high performance standards are derived from three major influences: Toscanini, Soprano Maria Callas and Director Wieland Wagner. From the incandescent Toscanini, Levine learned the value of a taut, singing musical line. Callas, the indomitable spirit who assaulted her audiences with intense, molten performances, taught Levine that opera must always be convincing as drama, not simply a collection of voices gift wrapped in period costumes. Wagner, who restored Bayreuth to glory after World War II, showed him that opera productions had to involve the imagination of the listeners, making them part of the drama instead of passive observers of props and painted backdrops.