levinity

This is a week old, but it's not out of date. I want to say a little more about the death of James Levine, in the light of Lisa Irontongue's round-up of the coverage.

The main-market obituaries tended to take the "say no ill of the deceased" attitude of describing Levine as a great conductor, and brushing the sexual abuse aside as a minor peccadillo. So glaring was this that it generated counter-obituaries, which not only focused on the abuse but for a topping insisted that Levine was actually a terrible conductor!

Both of these attitudes employ common fallacies. The first is that greatness excuses any flaws. The second is that fundamentally bad people cannot have any admirable qualities.

It's the second of these I want to focus on here. It's one we have no excuse for falling into in classical music. That Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven were, in their somewhat different ways, appalling human beings who wrote great and beautiful music is a contradiction we've long lived with.

And I think it's important to grasp because my analysis is that the success, critical esteem, and general popularity of Levine's conducting is what made it possible for so long for his abuses to be ignored and denied. He was too valuable artistically and too beloved professionally for the institutions to risk losing him, so they had to brush off the charges. The same was true for his equally vehemently denied health problems, until they grew so severe they could be denied no more.

This has been the case for other abusers. Harvey Weinstein was an enormously successful movie producer. Bill Cosby was a beloved comedian and actor. It took a lot of effort to expose their crimes.

This is not to minimize those crimes. It is to offer a warning in future cases. That a person is renowned or esteemed doesn't mean charges against them are true; there have been a number of false bandwagon accusations (see Operation Midland). But it also doesn't mean they are false, and investigations are needed.