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Szell died in 1970, and Levine's apprenticeship came to an end. What he required now was a break, and luck was obliging. The San Francisco Opera needed a conductor for the last few Toscas of the season and hired Levine. By chance, a Met administrator heard him, and was impressed. Levine made his Met debut the next year, also with Tosca. His career began a rapid ascent, aided by Levine's manager, Ronald Wilford of Columbia Artists Management Inc. Wilford oversees the livelihoods of many major conductors, including Mstislav Rostropovich of the National Symphony and Seiji Ozawa of the Boston Symphony. "From that first day I watched Jimmy work," says Wilford, "I knew he would have a major career. All it needed was guidance."
During the struggle for power at the Met that followed Sir Rudolf Bing's retirement as general manager and the death in 1972 of Göran Gentele, his successor, in an automobile crash, two men emerged triumphant. Bliss, whose father had been the Met's chairman of the board, became executive director and, later, general manager. Levine became music director. His boyish grin remained undimmed, even during the bitter labor dispute that postponed the opening of the 1980 season; it was, says Sue Thomson, "the closest I've ever seen him to being depressed."
Even in a profession marked by dedication, Levine's obsession with music is pronounced. "His life consists only of conducting," says one assistant conductor at the Met. "He is a conductor, and that is what he is." He is not interested in sports, and he is unconcerned with religion. Although born into a family of Reform Jews, he was never confirmed, and he accepted Bayreuth's invitation to lead Wagner's Christian allegory, Parsifal, in an opera house that, during the Hitler years, was a citadel of Nazism. "I wanted to go to Bayreuth," he explains, "because the only way I know to solve the enigma of Wagner's being a genius and an anti-Semite is to get as close to it as possible."
When discussing his favorite subject, Levine shies away from controversy. He will not, as many musicians gleefully do, talk about his colleagues' performances. He refuses to be pinned down about his favorite pieces of music. Says Levine: "There is a general tendency in the world to be preoccupied with evaluating things, and this is a trap. If you agree that Verdi's masterpieces are Otello and Falstaff, then what about Ernani and Macbeth? In finding a level on a kind of musical Richter scale, it implies that you should not be altogether involved with works that get only a 3 or a 5." Yet, with the fervor of the true specialist, he will happily expatiate on Beethoven's metronome markings or Debussy's revisions in Pelléas et Mélisande.