The announcement that Yannick Nézet-Séguin would replace James Levine as music director of the Metropolitan Opera was no surprise. The timing was rather quick in that Levine announced on April 14 that he would become music director emeritus at the end of the 2015–16 season. Such a quick transition suggests that Met general manager Peter Gelb and the board had been planning it for a while, as one would expect given that Levine has been dealing with arduous health problems for several years.
When the announcement came on June 2 at 10 A.M. New York time, it was streamed live, with the conductor in Japan and Gelb and other key Met figures in New York. In it, Nézet-Séguin referred to James Levine as “my hero and my inspiration.”
If there was more than one conductor in the running for the job, it would only be because Nézet-Séguin is a very busy man. But he clearly was the favorite, and as Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter remarked about the National Symphony Orchestra’s pursuit of Gianandrea Noseda as its music director, “I told the search committee, because he has so many virtues, ‘If you fall in love, why are you still dating?’”
Much is being made of Nézet-Séguin’s relative youth at the age of 41. This should be put in perspective. James Levine conducted his first performance at the Met 17 days before his 28th birthday. He became music director at the age of 33 after having led at least 15 different operas there with top stars. Nézet-Séguin made his Met debut at the age of 34 and has conducted six operas there (Carmen, Don Carlo, Faust, La Traviata, Rusalka and Otello). He will become music director at the age of 45.
Beginning in the 2017–2018 season, Nézet-Séguin will hold the title of music director designate and will lead two operas per season. Only in 2020–2021 will he gain the full title of music director, and from that point forward, he will conduct five operas each season. According to the Met’s press release announcing the appointment, he won’t become music director until 2020 because it is “the first season in which he is available to take over the full responsibilities of the position. However, he will immediately become involved in the company’s artistic planning, which happens many years in advance.”
Yannick Nézet-Séguin will have to find a way, even when he is not physically at the Met, to make his presence and influence felt. That will not be easy even if he develops a fluid and congenial relationship with Peter Gelb and with the music staff. He has responsibilities and commitments elsewhere and no amount of conference calls and sessions on Skype can make up for working at a desk inside the Metropolitan Opera house.
Since 2012, Nézet-Séguin has been the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which he is now on tour in Japan. Concurrent with the Met’s announcement, the orchestra extended the conductor’s contract through the 2025–2026 season. He has relationships with other companies, including the Rotterdam Philharmonic (where his tenure will conclude in 2018) and in his native Montreal, where he will maintain a somewhat reduced connection with the Orchestre Métropolitain until his contract is up in the 2020–2021 season. Although he plans to conduct at a couple of major European orchestras in Berlin and Vienna, he will eventually become the Amtrak Maestro, commuting between New York and Philadelphia to lead opera in one and symphonic music in the other. It remains to be seen whether he can create synergy and programming involving the two institutions.
Nézet-Séguin is expected to be involved in long-term planning long before he becomes music director in 2020. My first piece of advice for him is to immediately take in hand the Met’s current labor agreements with the orchestra, chorus, solo artists and stage crews and memorize every detail. Only this way can he effectively work with Gelb to plan future seasons. One of the reasons the Met has struggled financially is that programming in recent years has often created situations in which long operas with big choruses have been presented on holidays or in weeks when other long works are in rehearsal or performance. This leads to having to pay overtime to many employees and with that, increased costs that can be avoided.
The Met tends to plan years ahead, with many commitments of repertory and leading performers either locked into place or sketched in as part of a larger picture. In some cases a conductor might not have been secured, especially toward the end of this decade.
Because Nézet-Séguin will not be a regular presence at the Met until 2020, I think it would be wise to bring in as many great conductors as possible so that the orchestra, the company as a whole and, especially, audiences will have the benefit of superb musical leadership. This, more than anything else in the next few years, will make attending a live performance at the Metropolitan Opera house with its wonderful acoustics worth the time spent and the price of a ticket.
In terms of who should be asked to conduct, I will divide my suggestions into three categories. First, James Levine should be made welcome to conduct at the Met for as long as he is able. In the 2016–2017 season he will lead Idomeneo, L’Italiana in Algeri and Nabucco. He still has so much to contribute, and the status of “emeritus” should not be merely an empty honorific.
Second, have conductors who already collaborate well with the Met orchestra or have done outstanding work be regular visitors in coming seasons. These include Marco Armiliato, Paolo Carignani, James Conlon, Valery Gergiev, Alan Gilbert, Gianandrea Noseda, Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Emmanuel Villaume. Met principal conductor Fabio Luisi has done superb work at the company this year — on Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Manon Lescaut and Le Nozze di Figaro — although he will put the Met behind him for at least two seasons after he leads Don Giovanni and Guillaume Tell this fall. The Met should make it a priority to get him back as soon as possible.
Bring back the venerable Nello Santi, still active in Europe and one of the grand old masters of Italian repertory. He led some 400 performances at the Met between 1962 and 2000. He will conduct La Traviata (with Anna Netrebko) and Nabucco at La Scala in the 2016–2017 season.
Third, until Nézet-Séguin becomes music director full time in 2020, the Met should make a point of having as many outstanding conductors who do great work elsewhere come for important debuts or major returns. This would be nourishing for the orchestra and chorus and catnip for audiences who hunger to hear the leading maestros of our time. The bait to get them is that the Met probably has the best opera orchestra in the world.
When possible, it would be wise to pair these conductors either with an opera that they specialize in or a work that is overdue for presentation on the Met stage. Among the maestros I would like to see are Daniel Barenboim, Riccardo Chailly, Myung-Whun Chung, Gustavo Dudamel, Ivan Fischer, Daniel Harding, René Jacobs, Mariss Jansons, Philippe Jordan (who, I gather, is due back), Zubin Mehta, Andris Nelsons, Antonio Pappano, Kirill Petrenko, Christian Thielemann and Franz Welser-Möst. Not all of these maestros will win a popularity contest because some have rather forceful personalities (to put it kindly), but all are front-rank and have a lot to say as artists. They will stimulate artistic ideas and sell tickets.
The Met has had very few women conductors in its long history, and there are several excellent ones at work. I am glad that it will have Finnish conductor Susanna Mälkki next season to lead the premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin. It is important to have other female conductors on a regular basis. Among the ones to consider are Marin Alsop, Sian Edwards, Alice Farnham, Jessica Gethin, Jane Glover, Emmanuelle Haïm, Nicole Paiment and Xian Zhang.
Of course, Nézet-Séguin should make it a priority to have the world’s greatest opera conductors in the pit every night even after he is fully in charge. This has not always been the case at the Met, although things have improved somewhat in recent seasons.
I think it is fundamental that every conductor who comes to the Met in the intervening years and, above all, Nézet-Séguin himself, be required to do coaching of singers they will work with or perhaps even of artists they are not scheduled to conduct. Once upon a time, when maestros did not hop on planes and trains with alacrity, they were constant presences who made coaching part of their jobs. These included Georg Solti, Karl Böhm and James Levine. This will enhance the quality of singing one can hear at the Met.
A major challenge any music director — at the Met or elsewhere — faces nowadays is the perceived dearth of excellent opera singers. When Levine became music director, he had so many fantastic singers available that, looking back, it seems like a golden age even if it was not considered such at the time. I would argue that there are many remarkable singers today — I hear them all the time — but they don’t enjoy the status or attention that came to their forebears 40 years ago. Back then, audiences had a means of discovering singers and following the arc of their careers. There were numerous recordings issued each year. A young artist such as Aprile Millo could record a solo album of arias. There were more classical music radio stations. Opera stars regularly appeared on television, whether on talk shows, variety shows or in Live from the Met presentations.
Nowadays, apart from a few superstars, most singers are not as widely known even to opera fans. There is just not a way to find them as used to be the case. As famous as Anna Netrebko is on Planet Opera, few people who are not lovers of the art form would recognize her name and face.
One of Nézet-Séguin’s most important responsibilities will be to constantly listen to singers of all ages and sizes, and envision them in roles that they would shine in at the Met. If he cedes this responsibility to staff, he will not be able to shape the sound and style of his Met. He will need to find a way, in his travels and in his carefully-budgeted time, to hear as many new and established singers as possible.
I would further propose that as long as James Levine is able, he should have an active role in developing singers in the Lindemann Young Artists Program, which he will lead in his emeritus role. He is a superb teacher and counselor whose gifts would prove valuable as a steward of burgeoning talent. These young artists will be a part of the legacy of the James Levine era (begun in 1971).
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, when he is fully ensconced in his role as music director, will offer exciting prospects for the future. To achieve that he will require full support of the Met’s board and of its general manager, and the goodwill of the orchestra, chorus, all company employees and its audiences. Many things will be beyond his control and yet he will be blamed when things do not go right. He is a very talented musician who has the ability to motivate and communicate as a modern maestro needs to do. Let us hope the board uses it leadership to get the institution on firmer financial footing so that the new music director can do his job.