From our studios in new york city, this is new york turley rose. Charlie rose. You dare yourself to play the first three notes in the speed and drive and force and power and excitement that you really think they should have. The maestros back. Music director of the metropolitan opera after missing two seasons due to a spinal cord injury he returns to the met last month to conduct one of his favorite operas, mozarts cozy cosi fan tutti. Here is a look. [applause] [applause] james levine has been a major force of the met for more than 40 years, conducting some 2500 performances and shaping the way opera sounds. The New York Times calls him one of the greatest living conductors. This season he will conduct an new performance of falstaff and a revival of wojzieck. You look great. We will talk about what you have been through and what you have learned. Is that the happiest time for you . You are in that orchestra. And conducting genius, mozart. Yes. I would say it doesnt get happier than that. To be doing what you are cut out to do, what you have the talent for, the drive for, the wish for, and especially under miraculous circumstances, it was an amazing feeling. It must be especially amazing if you did not know whether you would ever be able to do that. I fell. I had terrible trouble with my back. I was in tremendous pain. Nothing seemed to cure it. I had to have surgery. Once the surgery was finished and i was out of pain, i fell. When i fell, i didnt disturb the surgery but i wound up with a major spinal cord injury, which meant that i really couldnt move some things. I couldnt move my legs. Gradually, through really caring treatment and therapy and rehab and all this, it gradually comes back. I am able to work again. My colleagues tell me and i can hear from the audience that they are not relating it to the way i was before i had to stop because of the fall, but two years before when i really have the vitality and i wasnt in any pain. There is no doubt about it. I just dont have pain. I get a twinge here or there and it is gone, but i dont have anything like a chronic pain anywhere. Did you doubt that you might ever stand there again . When youre lying in a hospital bed and you look down at your legs and you can move them, you think to yourself, yeah, i could conduct with my upper body, but i would not have been able to conduct without feeling some kind of flow through the whole thing, because you conduct with your body on some level or other, even though it is possible to conduct just fine sitting down, many people do. But luckily, the return started to come and the surgery held and nerves began to come back. Nerves do it on their own time. I worked hard on the muscles so that i would have a possibility for the nerves to hook up again. The therapists have gotten me walking, in a walker, carefully. Recently, i started to climb up stairs, which was unthinkable when i was lying there and couldnt move. Did you learn something from this experience . Well, you learn millions of things. First of all, i did not know that i could work again and i thought to myself, i always thought i was the luckiest guy in the world and i had 40 years at the met and 50 years of musical professionals experience activity. I thought well, if i am supposed to stop now, i will. What can you do . I would have pursued other aspects of music. There are many things that interest me, of course. But, i suppose as i found that my body began to respond and i was encouraged to work harder and harder at the rehab, the feeling that i would not be able to do it just disappeared. It is a triumph of the human spirit, no doubt about it. There is one other thing that is really important in this case. For the entire time, i got messages and letters and phone calls and vibrations, not just from my loved ones and friends and from the company, but from the public, from people i dont even know. I would go in the park and hide in my wheelchair and people would go by on their bikes and say words of encouragement. I felt more a part of the Community Even than i ever had before, though i have lived here all my adult life. You realize that you touched peoples lives, but you dont really know. You know the music and the audience in the hall, and you know the critics who say good things, but you realize when you are in a place where you are, that what you do connects to their life. It brings something special. I never realized it to that extent. I was moved so much by their present, that they also the same thing. Comeback, we need you, whatever it takes. You have said that you found yourself psychologically in a state that was even better than before you were injured. Not at your best when youre young, but even a better place. It was better because i had all that experience and ive been through all that and i had this experience which stopped me cold. Two years of not conducting when i have conducted all my life. So, it is a misfortune to have a spinal cord injury, but i learned so much from the doctors and therapists and the whole teams of people who are working with spinal cord patients, a world might never have known at all. When i went back to working, i started off in the second year of my rehab, i wasnt ready to conduct yet, but i went back working with the Young Artists in our Young Artists program. This was so thrilling, i think as i get older i feel it is a more important, more important part of our work to pass on our experience to the next generation. I got back into it that way. I really still feel like im living in a dream and that i got out of that nightmare i was in. 70 is not old for a conductor. Is that because music makes you young . Largely. I think it has to do with apparently, the way most conductors work, there is a lot of body exercise. That is very good for you. It makes you tired, so you sleep. I think most conductors who died before a ripe old age, either had some congenital ailment or they smoked continuously. So they got smoke related things. When you went to Carnegie Hall in may 2013, tell me about that. You mean the first concert . Yes. This was unbelievable. It was like you dream something positive and then it happens even more in reality than you could have dreamed. Charlie, i dont go through life sentimental all the time, but there was no way i could be in that experience and not feel touched and moved. It was right where i live. That was, my met orchestra which i hadnt worked within two years. There it was, music we never played before but music i had done often and wanted to play with them. There was that audience there, giving us every bit of concentration and support and love and excitement. It helps enormously, because now we have to put a lot of things back together that had to stop or diffuse over the two years. We had plenty of things that were moving forward at the time when i had to suddenly stop. You found music when you were very young, or music found you . Music found me. I apparently could sing before i could talk properly. Tell me that story, its amazing. My dad used to sing songs to me and i apparently could remember the tunes and carry them, im told, long before i could speak currently, which some people would say i still cant speak rarely. At least it got better. It was, i thought, perhaps it that you had a speech impediment. I did have. I was interesting because the doctor, when my parents called a remarkable pediatrician who had been my dr. When i was born. I was born prematurely at my parents were very worried. The doctor said theres nothing wrong with that baby, he is just little and i dont want to hear one word from you until he is three years old about how he is not keeping pace with the other kids. Of course, we saw what happened. It didnt matter. People did not know that then. This dr. Was very perceptive. When i was three, i used to walk by the piano and reach up and bang on it. When my mother complained to the doctor about my speech impediment the doctor said what is he interested in . Mother said he bangs on the piano. He said lessons. So they started me with panel lessons and my speech impediment when away. It is stunning. It is stunning. Youre on stage when you were ten, what your . Yes, i made my debut as a pianist with my hometown symphony, the cincinnati symphony, when i was 10. I had played piano recitals in the studio of my teacher before that. It is true, music found you. This thing that would shape your life and bring you so much joy. Im just one of these people who was able to do exactly what i was best cut out to do and who had the chance to do it. I was lucky in every way, charlie. The teachers were were there the right time and the opportunities. I could not have had more good fortune. As a result i worked very hard, because i felt i had to come up to the gift. I think the spinal cord injury was as close as i ever felt to a real problem that has to be solved, and now two years later we are looking like the doctors and therapists think i can improve quite a bit week is apparently the nerve regeneration is very slow. It is clearly happening. How do you approach a year now . We just began a new season. Have you approach it . Do you say my god, i want to choose those things that i am so passionate about, that is so much want to do, that is so much want to share . It would be nice if you could do that, and you do that to some degree, but i think basically what i have to do is move slowly and steadily, increasing, balancing styles of repertoire and things of the company needs, things i need, which are usually the same, and just keeping us stimulated along the tracks we were on before i fell. It is tricky because planning is done several years in advance. So many people asked me how i chose these three opportunities and it was really like that. It was one by one, the ones i was supposed to conduct i didnt because i wasnt ready for conducting yet. When we projected that we thought it would work, then the best choice in the best layout for me were these three pieces. That is rather how were doing it. Are they among your favorite . Oh, always. I never agree to conduct something that im not so close to that i can say with my favor while it was going on. There is so much great music, theres no need to conduct something you dont feel the deepest affinity for. To find new things . Always. Really . Whoever it might be for you, are you finding new composers . From new and i do one thing which is a little different from some of my colleagues. A lot of my colleagues are in situations where the quantity of new music they can do is greater because if they are ahead of a Symphony Orchestra, the turnover is one new Program Every week. Whereas at the met, i do three programs with my orchestra in a season because of all the operas and rehearsals. That makes sense to me, that is good. It has always been a kind of there was always much more great music than that i felt close to then there would have been time with three lifetimes to do. So im interested in doing things i have not done before and i am interested in repeating things i have done before that i need to do better. There begins to be a small group of things that i think maybe i will leave alone because i dont think i can do them better or they are not a high enough priority. There is nothing, i can imagine this but i will ask anyway. Theres nothing you have wanted to do and you didnt, you set yourself im not quite ready for that. It is funny, because i did some big projects when i was young, but they were things i thought i learned something from i told you, one of my Great Teachers fell in my lap from the heaven from heaven like magic. George said to me, you should conduct a certain piece, a mozart g minor symphony. He said you wont do it well until youre 40 but do it now. I understood what he meant. He said dont try to crack it for yourself new later on down the road. I was that way with some pieces and i was always a person, charlie, who said i know what i know, but what i dont know is a closed book to me. I was never happy with superficial knowledge. I could never just go and hear a performance and feel i was close to the peace at all without really looking at the score, really hearing the performance and really living with it a while. And to do that, are you deep into interpretation in terms of where the composer was at that moment at that time and what was in his head . Yes, im into all the things that it takes to try to get as close to what the composer would want were he alive today. This is a pbs documentary in which the young levine is being instructed by his mentor george zell. Every piece should start inside the player before he plays the first note. He is a oneman orchestra which makes things a little less complicated. Out of long experience, i tell you, the shorter your down the will be, the more precise your up the can be a little bigger than the downbeat if you do. This, about an inch. You got more handsome with age, mr. Levine. If my cheeks start to tremble he was something else. What he meant to you, woody gave to you. He was what he gave to you. He was the epitome of a classic repertoire. He built, he became music director of the Cleveland Orchestra in the middle 40s. He was also conducting at the met third he conducted several seasons at the met. In cleveland, he had the opportunity to build a europeanstyle, classical european orchestra in america with americans. He was, when i was a student, we used to go near all the visiting orchestras that came to Carnegie Hall, but one orchestra, my friends and i always had to go to all three of their concerts was cleveland, because it was always interpretive repenting and more and more marvelously played. When i finished with juilliard, i was taken in a competition to go to baltimore for some weeks to do it repertory project with the baltimore symphony with visiting conductors leaving us, helping us. There were four of us. Szell came to the audition and liked what he saw well enough to tell me he had a position open on the conducting staff in cleveland and he would love to audition me thoroughly and take me for it if it worked the way you thought it would. For me, this was exactly what i needed, as i say, always the right thing at the right moment. It was just what i didnt know anything about. I didnt know how to deal with a single Symphony Orchestra as an entity. The way i really did more know about operatic structure. I went there. I was with him from 1964 until he died in 1971. I think it was 1971, it may have even been 1970. I lose it now. I think, during that time, i observed him and asked to many questions. We spent many sessions together going over music that was related to music that he was doing, but not always the same music. He recommended me for some of the first professional work that i got. In fact, i date my professional conducting to 50 years next year, in 2014. It was 1964 when i started in cleveland. And you know when you wanted to conduct . Oes. It was in 1956, i spent a summer at the marlborough festival. My general music teacher, not piano teacher but music theory repertoire style, Walter Levine, who was the first file invest with the lasalle string quartet. He took me. Even though i was only 13. In marlborough, there is not yet the concert hall there will is now. We used have concerts in the dining hall. It was converted into a concert hall after lunch. I learned so much there about ensemble at making music with other people that from then on, the idea of just developing as a solo pianist went away for me and i had to make music with other people, all kinds, chamber pieces, songs, and little by little, i got the bug about doing symphonic and oratorio and operatic repertoire. There was only one person there who was a coach conductor to assist on cosi fan tutte. They asked me if i could put the pianists together and make a backstage course. And i did. There wasnt anybody there to do it. I got bitten by the opera conducting bug. We thought that this year how would you describe what youre going to do this year . Were going to do a new production which we havent done in many years. 50 years. I have done a good number of the revivals. The only one of my time. You have described it as the creme de la creme. What is it about that . If you take all of the great operatic comedies, the really great ones. If you take figaro and rosenkavalier and don pasquale, meistersinger, and you take all the human comedies, with or above the best of them is falstaff. Falstaff is a miracle of libretto and storyline, of musical inspiration, of mastery of every detail of composition. It is in a class with figaro and meistersinger, which are perhaps the other two that are most perfect. I dont need them to be perfect. I love a lot of pieces that are not perfect and those are the creme de la creme of operatic comedy, which is striking because 80 of operatic repertoire is grandiose, tragic, melodramatic, somebody dies. In these pieces, the human beings get wiser and through a lot of circumstances which they play seriously but we find very funny. Who else has been instrumental in terms of helping you appreciate a, the music and become up being a mentor to you . Who have been the men who have helped you understand the limitless potential of music . Is a long list, charlie. It is a long list of official teachers, like george szell who was my mentor, wolfganag vacano starting in 1962. From the time i was 10 or 11, i had Walter Levine with all the musical for everything, for theory, for harmony for style. He even coached me on the instrument, playing Chamber Music with his students. It was an unbelievable education of the kinds that one goes to college for, but i was 11 when i started. Then, i went, for example to marlborough. There was claude frank and Able Community of brilliant teaching musicians. Then i went to aspen to study with Rosina Levine because she was the most dynamic teacher of the instrument at the time. She was very well known for working on technique, but she took me, knowing full well that i was trying to use the piano as a tool for conducting mostly. I didnt know how much i wanted to perform on the piano. It turned out i did want to and did do quite a lot more than i pictured when i started. She was very willing to start with me when i was 14, the year after i was with in aspen, darius milhaud, he brought contemporary composers within every summer. One had a chance to talk with them and hear their music and work on the music. For example, i conducted Albert Herring in front of its composer Benjamin Britten when i was there. I think of that now because we are doing a beautiful revival of midsummer nights dream at the met at the moment and it is britains hundredth year. Whenever i conduct a french piece, behind me are jean morel, jennie turrell, regine crespin, pierre boulez, who started conducting in cleveland and work with me on a lot of his music and the school music that i need to learn. Manual rosenthal came to the met and conducted our french triple bill and was literally connected, he was a ravel protege. All of this blowthrough which i tried very hard to get, because i just felt we were getting further and further away from the composers and when the pieces were written, and i didnt want that to happen to me. When you stand there or sit there, you sit or stand on the shoulders of giants. That is absolutely true. This is what makes it so critical for me to try to help the next people. You can give them everything that is been given to you. As much as possible. Do you see extraordinary talent out there . Oh yes. Without any doubt. Individually, i see plenty of talent. The phases change and the priorities change and there are institutional and structural crises, but the talent keeps coming, thank out. Do you worry about orchestra and do you worry about opera and its future . Sure, but my worry is what can i say, we always worried. But other times more challenging today . Absolutely, they are. Why is that . Oh, lordy, why is that . Good question, charlie. It depends on which part of it we are to examine. Perhaps the most, the easiest way to start examining it is to say, imagine that you were a singer or a conductor or an instrumentalist who was 30 or 40 or 20 or 50 years old when the premiere of the last verdi operas came, and he died in 1901. Now, there were people who heard him people who studied with them, people who studied with the generation of the people who saw the premiers. Little by little, there were two world wars, there was the jet plane flying people around where their brains could go, but the bodies couldnt go that fast and there was some problem with that. Gradually, the teachers thinned out. It was bound, generationally, to become diffused. At the moment, if you go to the opera, the best performances you hear are likely to be of relatively contemporary operas or newish operas or relatively old ones, baroque ones, mozart and that sort of thing. That is because the old ones have gotten old enough that we can reinvent the way that we do them without it worrying people. The new ones because we are close enough to the substance of them. That large output of 19th century that kept the big opera houses hot when i was growing up and before, we cant do anything like that density of that repertoire nowadays just because of the quantity of the kind of singer it needs. The come along, that they dont have the same it is wanting to come along and be able to hear it on the radio and in your opera house left and right of you, it is another thing when there is only one or two others of that quality spread around the whole world. It is hard for them to last as long because some of them do remarkably with all that responsibility. There are times we worry about that. I assume you do it exactly the way you did it. I dont suppose i would be able to change it much, but lets just say if i had it to do over again, i might change a detail that i know now more about than i did then, but the basic guts of it i would not change at all. I think we did as good a job and had as good judgment as it was possible to have. Would you have composed more . No. I was not a talented composer. I was a dutiful composer. I wanted to learn about it. I was a weak creative musician, not a creative one. Fortunately i was a recreative musician, not a creative one. I wanted to make sure musicians do not get delusions of grandeur about who wrote the piece. If i look at you and they look at so many of the great conductors, whether symphony or opera or other things, would there be a common link among the great ones . The great ones are functioning in a certain realm. They are functioning with great understanding of the music is put together. They are functioning in a high energy and high desire to communicate what they find in these masterpieces to an audience of listeners. They are perceptive and skillful on various levels in communicating with an orchestra and getting the orchestra, who after all a playing the instruments, the conductors just waving his stick, to get them to be as committed as they can and as they would be on their own, and get all of this communicated to the public. This, all great conductors have in common, i think. Many other things are a matter of degree. There is a violence and excitement, a togetherness, a focus that is absolutely not beaten in any other piece written before or after. Burn the ee flat as best you can. Harder, harder. When it is a perfect storm, for peace and orchestra and you. Does it somehow do you feel like i realize i am in a zone . I realize something is happening this evening . A very good question. I will tell you what happens. Music is not an art form that deals really with the concept of perfection. You have hundreds of people in an opera performance singing and playing for hours. Somebodys lip slips or somebodys fingers, an accident happens. That is not of any consequence. You can feel it unmistakably. If you have a large group or small, if the piece is small, group of highly talented and really dedicated artists who have really worked on the piece and who understand the technique of reversing and then releasing, you can feel in that zone more frequently than i ever thought possible. It doesnt mean you think the performance cant be made better, it is just that you know you are in the realm where the composer would say, good job, thats my piece. You just explained to me something i didnt understand about music heard what could happen and what could go wrong . I understand that more about sports than i do about music heard i can understand how you might throw the ball a lot further than you wanted to and therefore it is an interception rather than a completed pass. I understand golf in which your hand still come down just right. It is just the same thing at par with music. I will tell you something that always strikes me. When i come to the end of a mets season, for the last three weeks or so, i can feel the audience is applauding not just for the performance they are at, but they are saying thanks for all the high points in this terrific season. They are saying, youre batting average was high. That for music director and for a conductor i had to be so exposed in this city in order to make use of the situation we had to keep making our results better. The public understood this continuously, and the interaction with them is so beautiful. I think it is it is not possible in art for everybody to like everything, but it is possible for them to understand what it takes to do it and if it were so easy, any idiot could do it lying down. You expect a level of high performance. Charlie, im sorry to interrupt, there is another example that comes to me. What to look for in a singer, people say to me. I say, i look for the best in that singer, that individual singer. But when singers audition, i beg them, if theyre going to audition, come out on stage, do your thing, and dont spend a moment on whether or not you get this job or not. You have no idea what the people who are listening are looking for, you have no idea what their criteria are and what their conception of the part may be, and you may sing marvelously and they give the part to somebody who is a different element or a different who knows. You may not have a good day and be exactly what they were looking for. You cant get out there and audition for human being every time you have to audition for a job. You cant get their expectations. It is an example of what youre saying, that there is a kind of ultimate of what one wants to hear, is a singer clearly functioning with what they have got. What you dont want is somebody trying to make up for something that isnt there. I always begged young singers not to audition too soon, not to audition when they may have something that within a year or two could be so easily remedied and then when they addition known would be able to tell what they have had forever and what they have only learned in the last two years. You understand it more than anybody, give us the sense of what you have learned about singing and what you have learned about singers. Lordy. You ask good corkers. That is always like walking on shifting ground. It is a science only to a certain point and then it is an art. But at least we do know enough about it to be able to use people who do it well as models and demonstrators for people who need to learn to do well. There are still some really good coaches and teachers, not perhaps as numerous as we were at one time, but they come along because the kind of singer who is in demand also changes with the time. Now, for example, well, just consider when i was a kid, it literally didnt matter at all whether a singer looked plausible in a role at all if that singer could sing the spots off it. Im not sure that an audience today has that same conditioning. Does a city like new york has more than one Opera Company . Terrible. The saddest. Desperate. It really is a tragedy that you dont. A company that people who are still alive, Julius Pernell put his life into it and he outlives it . That is unthinkable, insane. When you look at peter gelb and you, is there in some way, can you argue that this is a Perfect Match because of differences, they complement each other . Here you and here peter . What need be between them to create great art . Charlie, all i can say to you is with peter, when it works it really works, between us. We are on a track now that i think it was so important, what peter thought of this is crystal clear. If he had been a different kind of general manager or a different type kind of man, he wouldve said, well, we dont know when jim will be back or if he will be back heard i have to move on. What he found a way to keep the company protected enough and to keep the option open that if i came back, let alone came back in really good form, that i could continue. I can assure you day after day that wasnt so easy to do. The company had to absorb a lot of shock and he had to, but i can only say, if we are dealing with a man made of that, who then, when i come back, he is just delighted that it is more than he ever thought it could possibly be after an injury like that, and we are getting along marvelously. I think i worked with an awful lot of general managers, all different styles at different times, and opera always has difficulties of various seriousness. But i think peter is so determined to solve the crises that occur in his time, and he is so intelligent about it that i and god knows, for the metropolitan opera i will always give anything i can, that is just where i made a life commitment. You dont do that because of something external, it just is, it is like, i guess it is like marriage. In the end your legacy it is hard to think of performances in terms of legacy because performances are evanescent. If one wants to look over that. Ive been there up to now, we brought a lot of operas into the repertoire that great operas it hadnt been there before. We launched and worked successfully a Young Artist Development program which now has People Holding up their artform all around the world. We nurtured a lot of our own artists as well as continuing always to try to bring the best from other places. We brought the quality of our night to Night Performance at its best up to a higher level. I think we have initiatives now which will perhaps yield us more new works, but if you ask me, do i think we do enough new works . No, i dont. But, i dont agree with the people who measure what we do by that, because was there for years and he did new operas one after the other, american operas, he was determined. He did them and they were gone. It is very important to me that this business of working new pieces doesnt become like hit and run. I feel very uncomfortable when i spend a lot of time studying and nursing apiece and i really see what it has and then it is gone. For example, at our concert on sunday, we played elliott carters variations written 195455. He just passed away a year ago. I have played that peace with our orchestra, the met orchestra, an orchestra that plays opera all the time, we have played that three times in our concert series, which means that anyone who does not want to hear it does not have to go, but people who do want to hear it can count on there being a way to hear it again. That is desperately important to me. Im not very interested in the quantity, im interested in quality and the memory and the depth of the experience. Sometimes people will say, everything you did was great, but did he do enough of this . You know that criticism. That is a response, too. Ive been told the met should do new opera every year. My response was, i wish there was an new opera good enough for them at every year. That makes it sound as though i am putting composers down. Im not. It is that for something to succeed at the met, it has to be studied and rehearsed and cast and digested. It cant just be crammed like people do for an exam and then they dont remember anything about it again. That syndrome is really bad, i think. I dont think it is helping any, whereas if you look over the last years, what we have done that hadnt been played at the met before, you will see some brandnew works and you will see some recent works, but you will also see rossinis greatest comedy cherundolo. A lot of verdi that wasnt there before. There is stravinsky and britten and some which i hope in some cases will stick around and be revived. The question of legacy from one who knows little about music but understands a few things, it seems to me the legacy is people say first, do no harm and come to a place and do no harm. Second, you leave it better than you found it. Yes, absolutely. It is the idea, i have talked to people who have done this steve jobs, it is a culture, it is a company, it is a place where they were, in a sense, true to the idea. I think it is just what youre saying, that it has to do with all of the things we did that raises our night tonight standard and the variety of our repertoire and the opportunities for operatic artists across the board. I often say to people, if you give me a list of works you would like to have seen us do in the last 40 years, remember, for each when you give me, you will have to strike off one that we did. So many people are happy to see you back. I can feel that. It makes it possible to do it. Thank you for coming. Thank you, charlie. A pleasure. Thank you for joining us, see you next time. Live from pier three in san francisco, welcome to bloomberg west. We cover innovation, technology and the future of business. Im emily chang. Are acquisition starting to pay off or salesforce. The giant reports rising revenue and more money from business customers. The Company Posts another loss as it continues to spend on acquisitions. With the protests in ferguson, missouri, there is been a new focus on whether Police Forces should invest in Better Technology that includes wearing cameras that stream directly to a smart phone. We will gea