At the age of ten, he gave his first concert as a pianist, studied at the Juilliard School in New York, and debuted as a conductor at 18. In 1973, James Levine was appointed Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera New York, a position he held for more than four decades, conducting over 2,500 performances of 85 different operas there. He made the Metropolitan Opera one of the most renowned opera houses in the world – also through the television broadcasts “Live from the Met”.
At the Bayreuth Festival, he performed almost every year from 1982 to 1998 and conducted highly acclaimed performances of Wagner’s “Parsifal”. His interpretation of the four-part opera cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen” was so extraordinary that the production entered the festival’s history at the time as the “Levine-Ring”. Levine’s musical concept had an almost narcotic effect, wrote the German weekly magazine “Die Zeit” at the time. He was also a regular guest with the Vienna Philharmonic and at the Salzburg Festival.