He excelled in the opera pit and on the symphonic podium.
Baroque, Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Debussy-whatever it was, he excelled in it. It’s just that he is out of conducting, for reasons written about extensively.) He was a compleat conductor. (It’s odd to write of him in the past tense, by the way, as though he weren’t living and breathing. Yet I could not help thinking of Levine last night, because Wozzeck was one of “his” operas. Nézet-Séguin does not need that ghost over his shoulder. (James Levine was music director of the Met for forty years: from 1976 to 2016.) You must leave Levine out of your criticism. When he took over a few years ago, I set a rule: No fair comparing him with Levine.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, was in the pit. In any case, manning up, I went to the Metropolitan Opera House last night for Wozzeck.
He had mentioned Berg and this led to Wozzeck-and the idea of “unwatchable operas.” Of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Maazel said this: “When I conduct that opera, I can’t look at the stage for the last five minutes-when she gets ready to disembowel herself. I brought this up with Lorin Maazel, the late conductor, in a 2009 interview. But the story is cruel, unbearably cruel, for some of us with maybe weak constitutions. At the top of it is Wozzeck, the opera by Alban Berg, which premiered in 1925. I myself have a do-not-watch list, concerning opera.
