Norman Lebrecht’s book Who Killed Classical Music was published in 1996, and contained an infamous anecdote about a conductor, named under a pseudonym, abusing children. The culprit was widely rumored to be James Levine. (In a recent groundbreaking investigation, Malcolm Gay and Kay Lazar of the Boston Globe confirmed a similar incident to the one in the book.) According to a contemporaneous report in FOCUS, a German magazine, it was through Lebrecht’s book that rumors about Levine’s alleged criminal past entered the political sphere and attached themselves to his name for the first time in the public record. It would be another 20 years before his victims finally came forward.

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… has been an editor at VAN since 2015. He’s the author of The Life and Music of Gérard Grisey: Delirium and Form (Boydell & Brewer), and his journalism has appeared in The Baffler, the New York...

… is an Austrian concert pianist, musicologist, and feminist scholar. She holds a DPhil in Historical Musicology from the University of Oxford, where she was a Stone-Mallabar Music Scholar at Christ...