Conduct unbecoming: clockwise from top left, Leonard Bernstein, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Charles Dutoit and James Levine
I once knew a great conductor who claimed that he never boarded a plane to a new orchestra without a tube of lube in his pocket. Just in case he got lucky (which he often did).
Conductors are migratory birds who fly where their agents point them, hopping from one hotel bed to the next. There is no shortage of bright young things on an orchestra’s staff and besotted fans backstage who are open to a wink and the whisper of a room number. A maestro is never alone for very long.
Sex is one of the perks of conducting. Mostly, it’s consensual. My middle-aged maestro would sit up half the night reading poetry to a young woman before he made anything so crass as a lunge. Down the years, there have been few complaints about maestro sex. Seduction techniques vary. An opera conductor I know makes eye contact at the first rehearsal with younger members of the chorus, one by one, until someone stares right back.
Inevitably, in so gregarious an activity as opera, everyone knows. They have always known. They knew that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s secretary would bring a woman to his dressing room before a concert. They knew that Georg Solti was a Lothario at Covent Garden (he told me so himself). They knew that certain Italian maestros were too free with their hands, that Leonard Bernstein preferred young males, that an early music master was a philanderer.
They also knew that there were certain conductors with whom you did not go alone into a room. Interns were warned about them. Not always in time.
All this has tended to be seen in the musical world as a joke. And this has, on many occasions, given cover to greater abuses, which are only now coming to light.
The most serious case I know of is the soloist in her late teens who was summoned to the conductor’s room in one of Europe’s most famous halls an hour or so before a concert to discuss a few points in the score. She emerged a while later, sobbing uncontrollably. She had been raped, and she still had to go on stage, perform a concerto, and take a bow with her rapist. I have tried to persuade her to speak out, but she — understandably — wants to get on with her life and is probably still more than a little afraid that the man who raped her can, after all these years, still damage her career. Several music insiders saw her come out of that green room. Nobody confronted the aggressor.
Because sex is taken for granted as a conductor’s prerogative. Never an act of love, it is a raw and explicit expression of power. The deal is: sleep with the maestro, or you’ll never work again.
And the threat is very real. A French soprano, Anne-Sophie Schmidt, has recently disclosed that, after she refused the persistent advances of Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit in the mid-1990s, work in her diary dried up for the next year. She is convinced that the conductor blacklisted her.
Dutoit, 81, was suspended from conducting last month after multiple allegations of sexual harassment dating from the 1980s to the past decade. The incidents, which his accusers allege took place in all sorts of places including Dutoit’s dressing room, a hotel elevator, a car, involve several cases of the conductor forcing himself on musicians. In one case, he ‘shoved’ his tongue down a singer’s throat. In another rape is alleged. He has denied the reports, consulted his lawyers and vowed to clear his name. His former orchestras have promised independent investigations. Whatever the outcome of these inquiries, no one doubts that a conductor of Dutoit’s rank — former music director in Montreal, Philadelphia and London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — has executive power. To give one inoffensive example: in 1990, Dutoit installed his girlfriend Chantal Juillet — later his fourth wife — as concertmaster of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal. Such promotions are in the music director’s gift.
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