He had another operation that September after falling and damaging a vertebra, an injury that sidelined him until May 2013, when he returned and conducted from a motorized wheelchair that he would use for the remainder of his career. He then suffered spinal stenosis, leading to surgeries in May and July 2011. He had an operation in 2008 to remove a kidney and another in 2009 to repair a herniated disk in his back. His health worsened in 2006, when he tripped and fell on the stage of Boston’s Symphony Hall during ovations that followed a performance and he tore a rotator cuff, which required shoulder surgery.
Levine started conducting from a chair in late 2001, and when tremors in his left arm and leg became noticeable in 2004, he said they began a decade earlier. While he upgraded the quality of the orchestra to the highest level since the company began in 1883, his health became an issue for more than a decade. Levine was regarded as the top American conductor following the death of Leonard Bernstein in 1990. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights.” “No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Gelb said in a statement. He had been scheduled to make a comeback performances of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem this January in Florence, Italy, but the concert were canceled due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
He was fired the following March and never conducted again. Levine became music director emeritus and remained head of its young artists program but was suspended on 3 December 2017, the day after conducting a Verdi Requiem in what turned out to be his final performance, after accounts in the New York Post and the New York Times of sexual misconduct dating to the 1960s.
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