IN DECEMBER 1997, CBS NEWS CAMERAS showed up to our rehearsals of The Messiah at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The occasion was a puff piece on David Daniels for their Sunday morning show. A gifted singer, Daniels was then beginning his rise in the world of classical music, and CBS wanted some footage with the Choral Union’s chorus and orchestra. In the late nineties, the ascent of an opera star, no matter how talented, would have been insufficient reason for a network to send a crew to middle America. What made Daniels such a sensation was that he was singing not the bass or tenor solos in Handel’s oratorio but the alto part.
The classical music world knew exactly what kind of beast a countertenor was, but before Daniels, they had been relegated to the fringes: Renaissance lute song, art-house productions, obscure baroque operas. Their small voices and prim repertoire kept them out of the public eye. Although pop singers like Frankie Valli and Brian Wilson arguably sang in a countertenor range, they did not bill themselves as such. Even within the opera world, the idea of a hooting countertenor like Russell Oberlin approaching anything like fame would have been unthinkable before Daniels appeared.
In that first rehearsal, Daniels’s voice broke my heart open. It had a rich, velvety sound, with exquisite phrasing and a pulsating, if restrained, affect. The long, tedious aria “He was despised,” which normally makes Messiah-goers squirm in their seats, became a revelation of pathos. On break, Daniels was snarky and funny, signaling his queerness in that era just before Will and Grace, when dissident sexualities were tolerated rather than celebrated in the classical music biz. With his scruffy beard and cherubic face, Daniels gave off the charismatic charge of the newly famous. Connoisseurs loved his voice, but the wider public’s curiosity was not about his artistry or even his unusual vocal fach. It had more to do with the cognitive dissonance his appearance created: a creamy, feminine voice pouring out of the body of a shot-putter. That week I bought his debut CD, and for years afterward, every new album as it came out. His 2000 album Serenade has long been one of my ten desert-island discs.
I still listen to his recordings, even though Daniels has turned out to be a predatory creep. The University of Michigan’s student newspaper broke the news in 2018: a sordid tangle of abusive behavior, boundary violations, and sexual harassment—a pileup that eventually got Daniels fired from the voice faculty. A report filed in federal court confirms the nauseating patterns of abuse, attested to by dozens of witnesses. When the story broke, twenty years after I first met Daniels, the news did not surprise me. Backstage rumors had been circulating for a long time. The final nail was pounded in recently: In August 2023, he and his husband, Scott Walters, entered a guilty plea to the drugging and sexual assault of a young singer.
Or perhaps not the final nail. Weeks after pleading guilty, Daniels bragged on social media about two offers to engage him in Europe. He may be able to outrun the puritanical streak of American social media, but he can’t escape the consequences of hard living. The last time I heard him sing, in 2015, his voice had lost its bloom and he was struggling to stay in tune. His early decline was likely the reason he took a faculty position in the first place.
When I teach courses on literary modernism, I always address the ethical problems of authors’ biases, attitudes, and behavior, but I try to keep the focus on what is valuable in their work. Recently, however, there has been a change in the atmosphere. After George Floyd, the Me Too movement, DEI efforts, and decolonizing the curriculum, there is more energy behind ethical responsibilities in the arts. The humanities classroom has become a more contested space, with some decrying a censorious wokery and condemning the stifling of speech. But the renewed attention to ethics can also be invigorating: After decades of teaching literature, I sense a new frisson, a belief that there is something at stake in literary questions, even for the bored non-majors in my introductory courses.
Another plus that these cultural changes have wrought is that moral judgment of literature inevitably involves biographical criticism—one of my areas of interest, and one that has long been suspect in English departments. (Years ago in a T.S. Eliot seminar, a graduate student expressed consternation that I had assigned a biography.) Reading works of literature through their authors’ lives is commonly dismissed as the “biographical fallacy.” But this tired assumption never made sense to me. As a matter of course, works of art will reflect their creators’ lives. What the biographical fallacy should mean is: the mistaken belief that there is a one-to-one correspondence between biographical persons and fictional characters, between the ideas held by a character or work and the beliefs of the author. Biography, like any form of criticism, can be reductive and crude. But that doesn’t mean that an author’s experiences, prejudices, and passions can be exiled tout court from the task of interpretation. Tellingly, there is no such concept as the “historical fallacy”—a mistaken belief that works of art reflect their historical eras. It is not a fallacy, because it is true. And if it is true for history, then it is true for biography, which is history writ small. Fortunately, the consensus against biography is crumbling. A general curiosity about the private lives of artists and the ease of discovering dirty secrets on the internet have both abetted the re-theorization of biography, memoir, and autofiction in literary studies.
When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, in the waning days of high theory, the political critiques of feminism, Foucault, and Marxism were the preferred grounds where aesthetics grappled with ethics. Powerful as those systems are, their grand narratives of patriarchy, repressive control, and economic determinism require the acceptance of their assumptions before one can advance to critique. By contrast, my encounter with Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep offered the first systematic account of the relation of art to moral judgment that didn’t require me to first adopt someone else’s assumptions about the world. Booth’s system allowed for competing moral systems to enter into dialogue, and it set no requirements about where you started from. In the close atmosphere of deconstruction and poststructuralism I was inhaling, Booth was a breath of common sense and moral balance. To me, his method looked a lot like the kind of dialogue about ethics and art that went on in movie reviews and dinner-table conversations.
The overlap of ethics and aesthetics is not merely the purview of academic philosophy. Anyone who takes art even semi-seriously eventually has to think through this problem: To what extent do an artist’s prejudices, opinions, or behavior stain the art? It is the regular fodder of newspapers and social media: Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Jimmy Savile, Gérard Depardieu, Roman Polanski, Louis C.K., Junot Díaz, and now—agonizingly—Alice Munro. The list is endless of villains whose art we wish we knew how to quit.
When I teach about the clash between ethics and aesthetics, I lean heavily on the metaphor of the stain, because it is flexible: a stain on a page can be light, easily ignored, or dark as ink, totally blotting out the text. For me, Virginia Woolf’s anti-Semitism is a coffee-mug ring—noticeable, but it does not obscure the text. Ezra Pound’s vitriolic prejudice is an ink stain, a spilled bottle blackening the page.
Even though I primarily teach literature, I began this essay with an anecdote about a singer because for me, negotiating this issue with musical artists is more complicated than with authors. I’m an Eliot scholar, so I’m well apprised of the man’s ugly side, his anti-Semitism and misogyny. I’m also well informed of his admirable qualities, his generosity to colleagues and young artists, including Jewish ones. When I read or teach “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” his anti-Semitism does not intrude. When I teach The Waste Land, I have a series of pedagogical moves for getting students to query the ways in which the poem constructs women, the working class, and modernity. Which is to say, I don’t bracket these problems but teach through them. They are part of what makes the poem vexed and interesting.
It is different with music. Knowledge of David Daniels’s behavior creates static when I listen, and though I am troubled, I can’t turn away. When I am in the now of listening, there are no intellectual moves I can make to quiet my conscience, to redirect the channel of my thought. Hearing a recording of the voice, such a seductively beautiful one, is a different experience from reading Pound’s praise of Mussolini in The Cantos or contending with Woolf’s disability prejudices. In the realm of literature, I feel that I have more distance, more control over the problem. In his novels, Charles Dickens’s gender politics are offensive, all the more so once you discover what he did to his wife. Nevertheless, I can weigh in complicated assessment all his sentimental depictions of femininity, because there is so much wheat among the chaff: the sly narration, the inventiveness of his characterizations, the ebullient energy. Also, literature is not beholden to time the way a recording is. With a novel or poem, I can pause whenever I like. I can look up from the page, reorient myself and dip back in, or back up a few lines, resetting the pattern of my thinking. But clicking my earbuds off creates a greater disruption. An aural text is more slippery than a visible one.
Another reason listening is an altogether messier experience has to do with the reality of the voice. I’ve written a book on voice and audience in Eliot’s early poetry, but there I meant voice as a rhetorical construct of the writer, not his vibrating vocal cords. Even in an audiobook of a Dickens novel, I am not hearing Dickens’s own breath. But the living breath is inescapable when I listen to David Daniels.
I would like to resolve the experience by imagining that Daniels, at the moment of singing, had nothing but angelic intention, and that I am listening to his best self, the demons flooding back in only when he walked out of the recording studio. It’s never this simple, of course, but neither is essentializing a human person to the worst deeds of their life. Where that leaves me, the morally compromised listener, I couldn’t say.
James Levine, the longtime music director of the Metropolitan Opera, is another troubling musician whose reputation disrupts my listening with no resolution on the horizon. Levine was arguably worse than Daniels, since he preyed on minors. In retrospect, I am unsettled by how much I loved singing under Levine, the clarity of his gesturing, the sure sense of phrasing—though I acknowledge that singers and instrumentalists often have very different reactions to his directing. Even in his declining years, when I sang with the Boston Symphony, where he was music director, he was a magical presence on the podium, with a knack for unlocking the sound of a chorus. So when the aging Levine rolled up for rehearsal in his motorized wheelchair with a laughably gorgeous assistant in tow, we just elbowed each other and rolled our eyes as usual: Putting up with Levine’s quirks was part of the fetid atmosphere that surrounded him.
For decades, I had known of rumors about his pedophilia—including the claim that a famous soprano had landed an audition at the Met by procuring a boy for Levine. By the time I sang with him, such rumors seemed so over the top, so wildly unthinkable, that I unconsciously disbelieved them, or dismissed them as homophobic conflations of pederasty with queerness—it was convenient to think that boy was queer slang for young man. (I should clarify that I never witnessed anything troubling. I saw him only on the podium or fleetingly back stage. That we called him “Jimmy” belied his remoteness.) The luridness of the tales seemed to place them in the realm of jealousy or revenge rather than warning or morality tale. No Me Too movement had yet made room for his victims’ voices to be heard in credible venues.
I’m not sure what it would have meant for me to have taken those rumors more seriously. Where could I have turned to know more? I was a singer and a scholar, not a detective. At the time the issue did not seem pressing for me, a small cog in a choral-orchestral ensemble. What I realized only in retrospect was that these were not so much rumors as open secrets. That nothing was done about it until 2017 suggests not apathy and inattention but a long and concerted conspiracy.
In July 1987, contentious changes in the managerial structure at the Met provoked an article in the New York Times that also addressed unspecified “rumors” surrounding Levine’s “private life.” It is chilling to read Levine’s answer:
This is nothing new for me.… Ten years ago, [executive director] Tony Bliss called me about reports of a morals charge in Pittsburgh or Hawaii or Dallas. Both my friends and my enemies checked it out and to this day, I don’t have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served. Ron Wilford [Levine’s manager] says it’s because people can’t believe the real story, that I’m too good to be true.
A number of details leap out here: Even in the 1980s, known allegations stretched back at least another ten years. Levine names random cities he was not associated with instead of Cleveland, where he had a history of allegations. And his sleight-of-hand downgrades rape and pedophilia to a “morals charge,” suggesting that the hayseeds in Dallas have no category for consensual gay sex. Set these beside the hubris of Levine’s belief, demurely attributed to his manager, that he is “too good to be true.”
It is troubling to consider how many powerful people must have gone into overdrive to silence the victims, what money must have changed hands, how many journalists feared a libel charge enough to throw this story back into the rumor mill. I hope someone as fearless as Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, or Ronan Farrow is writing a book about Levine and the people and structures that let him hide in plain sight for forty years at one of the world’s most revered institutions.
Meanwhile, there’s the less pressing question of what I should listen to. Of the multiple excerpts of Die Walküre that I love, nothing comes close to Jessye Norman’s ecstatic “O hehrstes wunder!” Levine doesn’t just happen to be the conductor on this recording: He’s the animating force that enables Norman to hurl this sound into the gallery. To compare how other sopranos deliver this moment is to be disappointed, and to admire Levine’s hair-raising ritardando on Norman’s behalf. (Some critics have disliked his fiddling with tempi: so attentive to singers’ needs, and so blithe of musical architecture.) To cancel Levine is to cancel the hundreds of artists who thrived under his baton.
Claire Dederer’s morally nuanced essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” makes me wonder whether her test cases—filmmakers—might help me to sort out my literature/music quandary, since film, like music, is a timebound art. Dederer admits to having to rewatch Woody Allen’s Manhattan in short spurts in order to manage her qualms. She also nicely captures the psychological impetus that drives our moralizing: It is “this sneaking suspicion of our own badness,” Dederer writes, that
lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things. Something in us—in me—chimes to that awfulness, recognizes it in myself, is horrified by that recognition, and then thrills to the drama of loudly denouncing the monster in question.
Her point is well taken, though I do not relate to her “sneaking suspicion.” For a cradle Catholic, original sin has nowhere to sneak to. My own monstrousness is part of my quotidian reality, not something I need to scrounge for in the depths of my unconscious. Years of Catholic grade school taught me not whether sin existed but how far the stain had crept into my soul. Venial sins were coffee stains. Mortal ones were inkblots.
My concern is less with how I eventually came to change my view of Daniels, Levine, Charles Dutoit, and other troublesome artists I worked with than how that view now affects the way I listen to their recordings and recall their influence. Because of their superior artistry and objectively horrible behavior, Daniels and Levine sit in an uncomfortable middle for me. Test cases on either end anchor the continuum of what I can or cannot bracket.
The soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sits on the positive end of that continuum. She lied about her affiliation with the Nazi Party, which she joined seemingly for professional advancement. There does not seem to have been any affinity for Nazism, only a grim complicity with the machinery grinding on around her. After her death, when these issues were hashed out in public, there was some silly commentary that tried to link her singing—its dark, tonal quality, its perfection and control—to fascist affect. But imagining that political ideology can be heard in someone’s vocal technique is akin to claiming that writing sonnets will make you vote for the Tories. An artist of the highest caliber, Schwarzkopf might be personally compromised, but I can listen to her recordings without qualms.
At the negative end of the continuum sits American opera singer Kathleen Battle. In 1994, Battle was fired from the Metropolitan Opera for her increasingly erratic and petty behavior. Among her idiosyncrasies, she had demanded, like a Tudor queen, that underlings not look at her. Anecdotes of her rages and vindictiveness piled up. As the goddess was cast from her pedestal, so public was the uproar that by the next year, Sarah Bryan Miller could declare confidently:
Kathleen Battle is the most universally despised individual in the world of classical music, transcending all lines of gender, ethnicity, and nationality. To know her is to loathe her, and virtually everyone whose professional life has intersected with hers, from the humblest dresser and elevator operator to the loftiest of opera stars and impresarios, has a horror story to tell.
While I never had to perform with Battle, a friend served as her personal assistant for a week at a music festival. My friend is the kindest of souls, and so I asked her whether the tales about Battle were true. “Oh, no,” she said, “she’s much worse than anyone knows.” Battle’s behavior was extreme, but I now reconsider how the vitriol directed against her was racialized. I also wonder what kind of professional support was offered her as a young African American in a high-profile job. Negotiating the tremendous pressures of fame was not on her conservatory curriculum. Battle was further burdened by the curse of a middle age in which the smallness of her voice and limitations of her artistry boxed her into an ever more constricted career path—likely the source of her increasing insecurities. Monsters with backstories seem not so monstrous.
I used to find Battle’s tone pleasing and her legato admirable, but my enthusiasm waned the more I heard her in concert—her mannerisms were distracting, her voice monochromatic. Even though she is nowhere near as monstrous as Levine, I rarely listen to her anymore. Her musical faults seem more glaring in light of her personal failings, and my mind drifts to what I know of her. I cannot pay attention to the voice alone.
As a biographical critic, my thinking about art always implies an offstage life that surrounds and contextualizes the appearances on stage. In another essay about opera I once wrote: “The genius of a diva resides in what she does on stage, not in her entourage, jewelry, or stories about her cats. I don’t want to make small talk with a diva. All I want is her public self: that she stand on stage and pour herself out.” I still think this is true: I don’t need gossip about singers to interest me in their work. But when I discover that Leontyne Price grew up in the Jim Crow South, that Kirsten Flagstad sang unhappily in New York while her family endured the Nazi occupation of her homeland, these biographical facts do more than lodge in my memory. They vivify my sense of the person who is singing.
To return to the stain: the continuum I’m describing weighs artistic genius against inhumanity. Battle and Schwarzkopf fit easily at either end, but my continued enthrallment to Daniels and Levine doesn’t seem to fit in the middle after all. My judgment is complicated by my professional relationship to the artists, admittedly a distant one. And then, while imperious rudeness and sending monthly dues to the Nazi Party fall heavily on the scale of general inhumanity, rape and pedophilia don’t so much weigh more heavily as set fire to the scale.
Daniels and Levine exist somewhere outside that scale, because the moral-artistic accounting doesn’t seem sufficient to the task. My moral calculus ends up elsewhere, and I hit the play button again. This is not something I can entirely explain. There is no resolution, and at the same time there is no turning away. I can only think of T.S. Eliot’s lines about unresolved memory:
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
My own history explains why the clash between aesthetics and ethics is harder to process for musicians than for authors. As a musician, I have a personal connection to these artists, one not analogous to my professorial relationship to W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes, or Gertrude Stein. I can listen without trouble to the music of Carlo Gesualdo, a sixteenth-century composer, even though I know he murdered his wife and her lover and that a second wife accused him of abuse. The historical distance makes the story seem quaint, a gory yarn with Neapolitan color. But I have no such distance from Levine, Daniels, Dutoit, and other artists felled deservedly by Me Too with whom I once happily made music. I didn’t willingly enable their behavior, but I was part of the grim machinery.
Although I love both music and poetry, I have always felt music as the stronger pull on my consciousness. There is never a moment, not even in sleep, when a melody is absent from my head. Sounds inhabit me more fully than words or ideas. In my life I have spent roughly equal amounts of time reading literature and performing or listening to music. The difference is this: Lines of poetry will strike me when I am reading, then haunt me for days or years after. With music, the effect is more immediate and visceral. Poetry is sonic and thus carnal, its rhythms a substantive part of its meaning. But a favorite poem, voiced by the best reader, doesn’t affect me in the same way as a well-sung aria. Whitman’s “Beat! Beat! Drums!”—even if shouted through a microphone—couldn’t come close to the body-jarring accents of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. And the sweetest love poem, spoken by the most seductive actor, cannot compete with the orgasmic ocean-swells that drown Tristan and Isolde in Wagner’s love duet.
It is generally agreed that most opera plots are ridiculous, and that this silliness doesn’t much matter, because who cares how dumb the plot is when the music is so glorious? Of the hundreds of risible or creaky plots I’ve gladly tolerated, only that of Bellini’s La Sonnambula is so farcically stupid that it distracts me from enjoying the music. I’ve always been appalled by the emotional manipulations and patent falsity of Puccini’s operas, which is why I prefer to hear his music on audio recordings. My grasp of Italian is shaky enough that the ideas don’t get in the way of the melodies. But I’ll still attend a Puccini opera, if one is handily nearby. I can stomach his characters and plots because a good spinto soprano, arching her lines into the stratosphere and buoyed by a surging orchestra, has the same endorphin effect that a winning goal has for sports fans.
I make no normative claims here. Emily Dickinson would certainly disagree with me. For her, it was poetry, not music, that knocked her socks off:
If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
Because the top of my head mostly stays on when I read poetry, I gravitated to literature rather than music as a profession. Starting in graduate school, my first experiences teaching literature were in state schools, where I learned to teach poetry to skeptical business majors and engineers. After thirty years of teaching, I still love the challenge of their blank stares: Their demand for evidence and facts strikes me as honest enough. But I could not fathom teaching music to apathetic students, to people who were not as overwhelmed by music as I was. How I experience poetry is in some sense teachable. How I experience music is not.
So is it the seductiveness of sounds that weakens our moral resolve? That seems to be what Plato thought, and why he banned most types of music from his ideal republic. Only martial music, instilling valor and strength in its citizens, would do; love songs would make them too lethargic to defend the republic. Or is it rather something else altogether—not that music weakens moral resolve, but that the very ideas conveyed by music are not susceptible of logical parsing? As a musicologist said to me once: A B-flat refers to nothing in the world. By contrast, Dickens’s female characters most definitely refer to things in the world, and even science-fiction monsters and horror-story ghosts do as well, if only by analogy. And yet, musicologists can show us how even instrumental music, or “absolute music” (to use the endearingly pompous terminology of German idealism), has a politics. But how the average modern listener experiences the politics of a Beethoven sonata, a Brahms symphony, or a Chopin nocturne is not at all obvious. Nor are those politics, once illuminated, easily translatable into categories that have a moral purchase on the listener. The ethical ideas or moral quality of music itself is a different matter from my primary concern here: the moral character of the composers and performers who create it. But the two questions are adjacent.
When I first sang in the chorus behind David Daniels in 1997, I was in my late twenties, the unhappiest I have ever been, experiencing a number of personal crises: of faith, sexuality, vocation, professional identity. I didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. Hearing Daniels sing was a balm for my soul. And because he seemed to know who he was and what he wanted, watching the machinery of fame gear up to launch him was a vicarious thrill to the confused young man I was.
Six years later, living in Paris for a summer, I met Daniels again after a concert at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Countless concerts are given in the churches of Paris during the summer, most of them terrible, so I was glad to be assured of serious artistry in a work that I loved, J.S. Bach’s Ich habe genug. By then I had figured out who I was and wanted to be. In fact I was deeply happy, a few weeks away from entering the Jesuit novitiate. The idea of hearing Daniels again appealed to me as a bookend to my years of searching. After the concert, I congratulated him on his performance. I was tempted to explain how much his artistry had meant to me at a difficult time, but I couldn’t find words that wouldn’t have seemed clichéd or fawning. He was kind and gracious, and we joked about rural Texas, a place I had recently left.
One other detail about that day swims into memory: Sitting at a café near the basilica before the concert, I saw Daniels walk across the plaza carrying the trappings of success—large bags from fashionable shops. Good for him, I thought, that his wealth affords him the luxuries of capitalism. The shopping bags also provoked me to measure the distance between my own desire for power, security, and success and my other desire: for humility in the form of poverty, chastity, and obedience. How I would experience my imminent vows as a countercultural sign, as guiding stars for my imperfect life, was unclear to me. Nor could I have known that lovely summer, watching Daniels stroll across the hot pavement, anything about the mix of intentions at work inside him. A few hours later, he stepped onto the altar of a Catholic basilica to sing the words of a stern Lutheran:
I have enough.
My comfort is this alone,
That Jesus might be mine and I his own.
I have long believed what Saint Augustine allegedly said: “To sing is to pray twice.” But that’s wrong. Or, rather, the idea is probably right, but it turns out that Augustine never said it.
Jayme Stayer is a Jesuit priest and professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. His most recent book is Becoming T.S. Eliot (Johns Hopkins). He is a past president of the International T.S. Eliot Society.
Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash
