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But while Levine has learned his lessons well, he is aware of human limitations, as Callas, with her temperamental voice, always was and as Toscanini, with his fiery temper, usually was not. Levine's musical ethos, demanding though it is, is still far from that of old-fashioned tyrants like his mentor, George Szell, or Fritz Reiner. "Perfectionist is one of the stupidest words in the English language," says Levine. "Take any performance. I promise you that there will be a pizzicato chord that's not together; somewhere or other a horn will crack. If there are a number of magical and successful moments that really capture what they should, then a technical imperfection here or there will pass. The question is whether you are counting successes or counting mistakes."
Most of Levine's life has been spent counting successes. Born in Cincinnati, a city with a rich musical heritage, young Jimmy Levine could pull himself up to the family Chickering piano and pick out tunes before he was two years old. When little more than an infant, he once astonished his father, a former bandleader, by spotting the rhythm of Mary Had a Little Lamb when it was idly drummed on a tabletop. Piano lessons came at four, recitals at six. In 1953, age ten, he made his debut with the Cincinnati Symphony, performing Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 2.
But his parents did not want the sideshow life of a prodigy for the eldest of their three children. When the television show The $64,000 Question called, trying to book Jimmy for an appearance, they declined. When Comedian Sam Levenson wanted to cast him as a musical genius in a TV show, they turned him down. When the legendary piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne of the Juilliard School first heard Jimmy play and said, "I must have this child," they told her to wait until he was older. Says Levine: "My parents handled all the critical decisions of my early life sensationally well."
Jimmy's love for the piano was intense, but he soon discovered an even greater love: opera. Jimmy would listen to recordings, singing the parts and conducting from the score. His mother, who had been a Broadway actress, bought him a miniature stage, where he put on his own productions using toy tables and chairs as props. During the summers, he attended the performances of the Cincinnati Opera, held then on the grounds of the local zoo, clutching his grandmother's long knitting needle as a make-believe baton.
Early on, Levine displayed an amazing and often galling confidence, the lot of the gifted youth who feels unchallenged by and superior to his environment. He flunked a grade-school music class because he refused to take the course seriously. His mother once picked him up after school and found her son's jacket bulging with the concealed score of a Verdi opera. "I learned two acts during math class," Jimmy calmly informed her.
At the recommendation of the dean of the Juilliard School in New York, where they had taken their ten-year-old son for an evaluation, the Levines in 1953 asked Walter Levin, principal violinist of the LaSalle Quartet, to supervise their son's musical education in Cincinnati.