The Metropolitan Opera last named a new music director in May of 1975. Gerald Ford had been President for less than a year; Saigon had fallen a few weeks earlier; Barack Obama was thirteen. "His name is James Levine," Donal Henahan wrote in the Times. "There were no gasps of surprise when the Met made the announcement the other day." Levine, then thirty-one years old, had been serving as the company's principal condu…
SOURCE: The New Yorker at 05:42PM on June 2, 2016