James Levine, a Fractured Partnership and a Met Opera Lawsuit

NEW YORK — Seven years ago, when the conductor James Levine marked his 40th anniversary with the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, went all out to celebrate him.

The company issued two lavish boxed sets surveying the career of Levine, who defined the Met for decades. Gelb produced a PBS documentary about him and wrote, in a coffee-table book, that he was “one of the most beloved and legendary conductors of all time.” After Levine’s poor health forced him to step down that year, 2011, as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a subsequent injury left him unable to conduct at the Met for two seasons, Gelb kept him on as the Met’s music director.

But behind the scenes, their relationship was apparently frostier. Levine, 74, who was fired by the Met this week after a company investigation found what it called “credible and corroborated evidence of sexual misconduct during his time at the Met, as well as earlier,” is now suing the company, and Gelb, for breach of contract and defamation. The lawsuit claims that Gelb, 64, “brazenly seized” on allegations of misconduct “as a pretext to end a long-standing personal campaign to force Levine out,” a campaign that the suit claims he undertook “to advance his own career and step out of the long shadow cast by Levine’s incredible talent.”

The lawsuit draws back the curtain on the relationship between two of the most powerful men in opera, at least as Levine sees it. It shows Levine’s losing battles to hold on to his job — first amid a series of health problems, and later after he was accused of sexual misconduct. (The lawsuit states that he “categorically denied having ever been engaged in an abusive sexual relationship.”)

How much Levine’s accusations reflect a rare window into a powerful relationship that had privately soured, and how much a tactic designed to deflect from the troubling accounts that have surfaced about him, will now be decided in court.

Gelb and the Met declined to comment beyond a statement it released Thursday. “It is shocking that Mr. Levine has refused to accept responsibility for his actions,” the statement said in part, “and has today instead decided to lash out at the Met with a suit riddled with untruths.”

The suit accuses Gelb, who has been deferential to Levine in public, of engaging in “demeaning name-calling more usually associated with a childhood bully than a professional music administrator,” saying that Gelb had used the phrase the “2,000-pound elephant in the room,” which the suit interprets as a “blatant reference to Levine’s physical appearance.” It also claims that Gelb told Levine at least twice that he feared Levine was “going to have a heart attack” and die while conducting.

“There was probably a natural conflict there,” David Gockley, who led the San Francisco Opera and Houston Grand Opera, said in a telephone interview, “because Peter inherited a music director god in his last years of real productive work because of all those illnesses that he had. And I’m sure that was frustrating, to have to continue to make a place for James Levine in the structure.”

Levine’s lawsuit complains at length about the Met’s decision to have him step down as music director in 2016. The path to do so was cleared by a 2015 agreement (included as an exhibit in the suit) in which Levine extended his contract as music director through the summer of 2019. As music director he was paid $700,000 a year, plus $50,000 for travel and expenses, and $27,000 per performance — more than the $17,000 that the Met usually describes as its top fee. (Levine’s contract prohibited the Met from paying anyone more than him for performances, unless he agreed.)

The 2015 agreement, which came after years of health problems and cancellations, allowed the Met to make him music director emeritus should he be unable to perform his duties. During that season, 2015-16, Levine grew erratic at the podium, where the Met had previously built an elevator to accommodate his wheelchair. Musicians and singers said in interviews at the time that he had become hard to follow.

But when Gelb spoke to Levine about transitioning to emeritus status, he resisted.

“Astoundingly,” the lawsuit states, Gelb invited a reporter for The New York Times to attend a meeting with Levine and his neurologist, Dr. Stanley Fahn, that winter. The doctor said at the meeting that Levine’s most serious problems could probably be solved by adjusting the medication he was taking for his Parkinson’s disease.

But in April 2016, the lawsuit says, Gelb “unilaterally forced Levine to step down as music director.” The lawsuit accuses the Met of issuing a public statement in Levine’s name that “suggested that Levine agreed with the decision to stop serving as music director, even though Levine emphatically disagreed.” As Levine’s health showed signs of improvement, he continued to conduct, and was given high-profile assignments by Gelb.

Last December, after the Met suspended Levine and launched an investigation into accusations of sexual abuse that had appeared in articles in The Times and The New York Post, Levine’s lawyers sent a letter to Ann Ziff, the chairman of the Met’s board. The suit says the letter denied the allegations and demanded that the Met lift his suspension and allow him to conduct the remaining performances he had been scheduled to lead this season. Levine claims he did not get a response. The relationship that is now shattered began decades ago. Gelb, who was an usher at the Met when he was a teenager, worked with Levine as a producer of the Met’s telecasts in the 1980s. Both men were greatly influenced by Ronald A. Wilford, who was Levine’s powerful manager as well as a mentor and former employer of Gelb’s. (He died in June 2015 at 87.)

Gelb became the Met’s general manager in 2006, and arrived as a change agent at the company Levine had guided for decades. He began staging works by composers Levine had previously shown little interest in; championing new and sometimes controversial production styles; and launching the Met’s “Live in HD” simulcasts to cinemas.

The suit charges that Gelb was trying to “create a Met in his own image, even though he had no artistic qualifications to do so,” and that Gelb had long wanted to “replace Levine with a younger conductor.” (Yannick Nézet-Séguin, 43, will become music director next season.)

The suit claims the Met had no right to terminate Levine “based on allegations of misconduct or wrongdoing by him, least of all for conduct that predates the agreements.” His contract did not contain a so-called “morals clause,” though Gockley, the impresario, said that such clauses are “totally standard” at many performing arts organizations.

Now the issue of whether Levine could be fired for what the Met called “sexually abusive and harassing conduct toward vulnerable artists in the early stages of their careers, over whom Levine had authority,” is headed for court.