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After some hesitation, Levin agreed. "What I found," he recalls, "was a natively talented, undisciplined, slightly overbearing kid who was in serious need of a teacher who could teach him what music was all about." Levin, born and raised in Berlin, devised a European-style education for Jimmy, an interdisciplinary approach to music that placed it in a cultural, historical and philosophical context.
For the first time, the boy was forced to confront the drudgery that is a necessary part of musical understanding. One afternoon, when he came unprepared to a lesson, Levin threw him out, forcing him to wait in front of his house for two hours until Jimmy's mother came for him. "I realized at that point," says Levine, "that you had to work your way through the frustrating, boring phases of music, and that unless you got on with it, you didn't get to the treasure at the end."
In the summer of 1956, Levine set out on his musical travels. First came the Marlboro festival in Vermont, where he got a taste of opera conducting (the brief choruses in Così fan tutte), and then at the Aspen festival in Colorado, where he spent 13 summers. He realized that the solitary life of a piano virtuoso held no appeal. "I had never been attracted to the big solo pieces," says Levine, "and I just didn't want to spend my life playing the Tchaikovsky concerto. I was perfectly aware that the amount of technical work I would have to do to play that piece would be better spent on different repertory."
In 1961, Levine went to Juilliard; although only 18, he was put into the postgraduate curriculum as soon as he had taken a semester of pre-Bach music history. In his third year, he was selected for the American Conductors Project in Baltimore, established by the Ford Foundation to develop fledgling maestros. There he met Szell, the irascible Hungarian-born autocrat who had built the Cleveland Orchestra into one of the country's finest symphonic ensembles. Szell offered the unproven Levine the post of apprentice conductor in Cleveland. When Levine protested that he hadn't finished his formal course of study at Juilliard, Szell, who had made his conducting debut at 16 with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, dismissed the objection. "You're a very good conductor," he told him. "Maybe we can make you a great one." Levine dropped out of Juilliard and spent six years as Szell's assistant.
He impressed many people in Cleveland with his natural talent and brimming energy. "Structurally, he could organize music almost as soon as he got his fingers around it," remembers Atlanta Symphony Conductor Robert Shaw, then an associate conductor with the Cleveland. "He also had a facility of stick technique. Even Mr. Szell wasn't as graceful as Jimmy." In 1966, Levine founded the University Circle Orchestra, a student ensemble from the Cleveland Institute of Music; he soon had them performing formidable works like Mahler's Sixth Symphony.