"For decades, the Met was essentially the Levine Company. Its identity was intertwined with his. His taste in composers..."

"... his relationships with singers, his hires, orchestra, conducting style... Audiences burst into applause as soon as his corona of springy curls bobbed into the spotlight... His cheery, seemingly eternal presence thrilled the board and helped keep the spigot of donations open. I’m not sure the Met can survive Levine’s disgrace. The company is an outgrowth from, and a uniquely regressive example of, the 19th-century commercial opera houses that flourished through specialization, activity, and growth. August companies erected massive buildings, mounted expensive shows, packed in audiences, and concentrated prestige in the hands of very few gatekeepers, all of them men. That power structure produced a century and a half of lavishly misogynistic operas in which women are constantly going mad, turning into prostitutes, dying, or all three...."

Writes Justin Davidson in "The Met May Not Survive the James Levine Disgrace" (at NY Magazine).

How can an organization that big become so dependent on one individual? Quite aside from the potential for a scandal that would require him to be banished from society, he, like everyone else, could die or become mentally or physically incapacitated. What an absurd risk to take, to go on so long and build so much, all intertwined with one man! And it looks as though the Metropolitan Opera has had reason to know for a long time that James Levine was susceptible to a colossal scandal.

Did the people who were so dependent on him believe that his magic extended to silencing the boys upon whom he (allegedly) transgressed? What arrogance, and yet perhaps the entire enterprise of the Metropolitan Opera is arrogance upon arrogance, an overweening — operatic — conglomeration of arrogance.

Or was it that the Met had gone so far in the direction of Levine's "uniquely regressive" idea of opera that only Levine could maintain the crazy, outdated vision it has for itself. Davidson seems like he knows what he's talking about. I don't know what it takes to maintain a gigantic opera enterprise in our day. There is something magnificently archaic about it, making it a shared delusion that perhaps requires a charismatic cult leader. And when that's who you've got running a grandiose game, the transgressions may seem like part of the necessary craziness, and you may get to thinking that special rules apply to your leader.

And when the great man of opera falls, the fall should be operatic. He must take the whole overblown set crashing down in the final scene.