♪ 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, mozart's cozy cosi fan tutti. here is a look. ♪ [applause] [applause] has been a major force of the met for more than 40 years, conducting some 2000 500 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 ojzieck. you wh 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. , mozart.ct in genius >> yes. i would say it doesn't 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. 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 felt. when i fell, i didn't disturb the surgery but i wound up with a major spinal cord injury, which meant that i really couldn't move some things. i couldn't move my legs. , through really caring treatment and therapy and rehab and all this, it gradually comes back. i am able to work again. and i canues tell me 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 wasn't in any pain. no doubt about it. i just don't have pain. i get a twinge here or there and it is gone, but i don't have anything like a chronic pain anywhere. >> did you doubt that you might ever stand there again? >> when you're 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 withoute to conduct 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. , the return started to come and the surgery held and nerves began to come back. nerves to 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 , carefully.a walker recently, i started to climb which was unthinkable when i was lying there and couldn't move. >> did you learn something from this experience? >> well, you learn millions of things area 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. suppose as i found that my body began to respond and i was encouraged to work harder , thearder at the rehab 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 don't even know. 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 people's lives, but you don't 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 you're young, but even a better place. >> it was better because i had all that experience and i've 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. 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 wasn't 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. way. back into it that i really still feel like i'm 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. --hink it has to do with apparently, the way most work, there is a lot of body exercise. that is very good for you. it makes you tired, so you sleep . diednk most conductors who 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. the first concert? >> yes. >> it was unbelievable. it was like you dream something positive and then it happens even more in reality than you could have dreamed. charlie, i don't go through life sentiments 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 had 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. enormously, because now we have to put a lot of things to stopether that had 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 on your? >> 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 i apparently could remember the tunes and carry them, i'm told, long before i could speak currently, which some people would say i still can't speak rarely. at least it got better. itit was, i thought, perhaps that you had a speech impediment. >> i did have. i was interesting because the 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 there's nothing wrong with that baby, he is just a little and i don't 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 didn't matter. people did not know that then. this dr. was very perceptive. , i used to walk by the panel 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 can lessons. so they started me with panel lessons and my speech impediment when away. >> it is stunning. you're on stage when your tan, what your? >> yes, i made my debut as a pianist with my hometown symphony, the cincinnati symphony, when i was 10. i had artie 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. >> i'm just one of these people 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 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? want toay my god, i 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, styles of repertoire and things of the company needs, things i need, which are usually , and just keeping us stimulated along the tracks we were on before i fell. isis tricky because planning done several years in advance. me how ieople asked chose these three opportunities and it was really like that. it was one by one, the ones i was supposed to conduct i didn't because i wasn't 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 we're doing it. >> are they among your favorite? >> oh, always. i never agree to conduct something that i'm not so close to that i can say with my favor while it was going on. there is so much great music, there's no need to conduct something you don't feel the deepest affinity for. >> to find new things? >> always. >> really? you, aret might be for you finding new composers? 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 ahead of athey are 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 i'm 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 don't 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. there's nothing you have wanted to do and you didn't, you set yourself i'm 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 mym -- i told you, one of great teachers fell in my lap from the heaven -- from heaven like magic. , you shouldto me piece, a certain mozart g minor symphony. he said you won't do it well until you're 40 but do it now. i understood what he meant. he said don't 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 don't 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, i'm into all the things that it takes to try to get as close to what the composer would today.re he alive >> 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 one-man 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. tremble cheeks start to -- he was something else. >> what he meant to you, woody gave to you. -- 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 40's. he was also conducting at the met third he conducted several seasons at the met. in cleveland, he had the opportunity to build a europen-style, classical an orchestra in america with americans. wewas, when i was a student, 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. juilliard,shed with 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. l 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 didn't know anything about. with at know how to deal single symphony orchestra as an entity. the way i really did more know about operatic structure. i went there. 1964 untilhim from he died in 1971. i think it was 1971, it may have even been 1970. i lose it now. time, i during that 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. noteneral music teacher, 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. there about much 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 and oratorio and operatic repertoire. there was only one person there who was a coach/conductor to tutte. theysi fan asked me if i could put the pianists together and make a backstage course. and i did. there was an anybody there to do it. i got bitten by the opera conducting bug. ♪ >> we thought that this year -- how would you describe what you're going to do this year? >> were going to do a new production which we haven't 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 and donalier , and you meistersinger take all the human comedies, with or above the best of them is falstaff. falstaff is a miracle of libretto and storyline, of , of masteryiration 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 don't need them to be perfect. i love a lot of pieces that are theperfect and those are 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 and through aer lot of circumstances which they play seriously but we find very funny. >> who else has been instrumental in terms of helping , the music anda 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 whohers, like george szell was my mentor, wolfganag vacano starting in 1962. from the time i was 10 or 11, i had walter levine with all the everything, for theory, for harmony for style. 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 but sheon technique, took me, knowing full well that i was trying to use the piano as a tool for conducting mostly. i didn't 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. willing to start with me when i was 14, the year -- in aspen,ith he broughtud, contemporary composers within every summer. one had a chance to talk with them and hear their music and work on the music. 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 britain's hundred dear. year.tton's hundredth whenever a player french peace, jennieme are jean morel, crespin, pierre 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. 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 didn't 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 and ask people. >> you can give them everything that is been given to you. >> as much as possible. >> juicy 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? -- what but my worry is 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. which part of it we are to examine. perhaps the most, the easiest way to start examining it is to were aagine that you 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 couldn't go that fast and there was some problem with that. gradually, the teachers thinned out. generationally, to become diffused. at the moment, if you go to the opera, the best performances you ofr are likely to be relatively contemporary operas relativelyperas or 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 .hem without it worrying people the new ones because we are close enough to the substance of them. that large output of 19th century that cap the big opera houses hot when i was growing up , we can't 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 don't 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 don't suppose i would be but to change it much, let's 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. as good a job and had as good judgment as it was possible to have. >> would you have composed more? >> no. 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 recr eative 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 , wouldr other things there be a common link among the ? eat ones ech >> a great ones are functioning in a certain realm. they are functioning with great understanding of the music is put together. in a highunctioning energy and high desire to communicate what they find in these masterpieces to an audience of listeners. skillfulperceptive and 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 ,s 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. andhere is a violence excitement, a togetherness, a focus that is absolutely not beat me in any other piece written before or after. burn the ee flat as best you can. harder, harder. >> is a perfect storm, for peace and orchestra and you. feelit somehow -- do you like i realize i am in his own. i realize something is happening this evening? >> a very good question. i will tell you what happens. form thatot an art deals really with the concept of perfection. have hundreds of people in an opera performance singing and playing for hours. somebody's lips slips or somebody's fingers, an accident happens. that is not of any consequence. .ou can feel it unmistakably if you have a large group or small, if the pieces 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 doesn't mean you think the performance can't be made better, it is just that you know you are in the realm where the composer would say, good job, that's my piece. >> he just explained to me something i didn't 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 her 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 a country and of a mets season, for the last three weeks or so, i can feel the audience is applauding not just for the at, butnce they are they are saying thanks for all the high points in this terrific season. they are saying, you're 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. thisublic understood continuously, and the interaction with them is so beautiful. 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, i'm sorry to interrupt, there is another example that comes to me. what to look for in a singer, people say to me. best in look for the that singer, that individual singer. but when singers audition, i begged them, if they're going to audition, come out on stage, do your thing, and don't 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. get out there and audition for human being every time you have to audition for a job. >> you can't get their expectations. >> is an example of what you're saying, that there is a kind of ultimate of what one wants to hear, is a singer clearly functioning with what they have got. is somebody't want trying to make up for something that isn't 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 monday 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 corker's. 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 to uset to be able 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 kid, it when i was a literally didn't matter at all whether a singer looked plausible in a role at all if that singer could sing the spots off it. i'm 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. tragedy thatis a you don't. that people who are nell putive, julius per his life into it and he outlives it? that is unthinkable, insane. gelben you look at peter and you, is there in some way, can you argue that this is a perfect match because of differences, they complement each other? peter? what hear pete need be between them to create great art? >> charlie, all i can say to you with peter, when it works it really works, between us. now that i track important, was so 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 would've said, well, we don't 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. day after dayou that wasn't so easy to do. the company had to absorb a lot but ick and he had to, 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 we are getting along marvelously. -- i worked with an awful lot of general managers, all defense styles at different times, and opera always has variousties of 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 -- and god knows, for the metropolitan opera i will always give anything i can, that is just where i made a life commitment. that because of something external, it just is, it is like, i guess it is like marriage. -- n your legacy >> it is hard to think of performances in terms of legacy because performances are evanescent. over that.s to look i've been there up to now, we brought a lot of operas into the repertoire that -- great operas it hadn't 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. of ourght the quality night to night performance at level.t up to a higher i think we have initiatives now which will perhaps yields us , but if you ask newdo i think we do enough works? no, i don't. but, i don't agree with the do by who measure what we 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. that very important to me this business of working new pieces doesn't 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 carter's very nations written 1954-55. 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. i'm not very interested in the quantity, i'm interested in equality 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, two. oo. >> i'll been told him met to do new opera every year. my responses, 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. i'm not. it is that for something to succeed at the met, it has to be studied and rehearsed and cast and digested. liken't just be crammed people do for an exam and then they don't remember anything about it again. bad, indrome is really think. i don't think it is helping any, whereas if you look over the last years, what we have done that hadn't been played at the someefore, you will see brand-new works and you will see some recent works, but you will also see rossini's greatest comedy show run below which had never been played before. greatest comedy ch erundolo. a lot of verity that wasn't there before -- a lot of verdi that wasn't there before. there is striven to the and -- tenre is stravinsky and brit 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 harm.lace and do no second, you leave it better than you found it. >> yes, absolutely. >> it is the idea, i have talked to people who have done this ,eam to 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 you're 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. ♪ >> this is "taking stock" for thursday, august 21. i am pimm fox. today's theme is transformation. jordan belfort's story of milk and claims of the billions of dollars was made into the movie "the wolf of wall street." it has been working to transform himself into a motivational speaker, but does he grapple with regret?