It wasn’t love at first sight when Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the new music director of the Metropolitan Opera, and his partner, Pierre Tourville, met as students at the Montreal Conservatory almost 25 years ago.
“I felt I needed to emancipate, to get out of my parents’ place, as one does at 20,” Mr. Nézet-Séguin said recently at Julius’, the West Village gay bar. “And so we were just roommates.”
“You and your best friend,” he said, turning to Mr. Tourville, “she and you were looking, and I said, ‘I’m going to be your roommate.’”
Mr. Tourville, a violist, was dating, he admitted with a laugh, “many people at the same time.” Mr. Nézet-Séguin was in a four-year relationship — with a woman.
But did Mr. Tourville seriously think Mr. Nézet-Séguin was straight?
“Not for very long,” Mr. Tourville deadpanned. “It became pretty clear. Quickly.”
It’s not unusual to share meet-cute stories over cheap cocktails at Julius’, one of the oldest and coziest gay bars in the city. But it was an extraordinary conversation to be having with the music director of the nation’s largest performing arts institution.
While culture — particularly high culture — is indelibly associated with gay tastemakers, audiences and creators, it’s a sign of how outmoded our conception of authority is that remarkably few major performing arts leaders have been openly gay. In classical music and opera, even New York, the city that gave rise to the modern gay rights movement with the Stonewall riots 50 years ago this June, has been dominated since then by two conductors: Leonard Bernstein and James Levine, who both kept sexual relationships with men hidden.
So chatting casually about coming out, bullying and Celine Dion with Mr. Nézet-Séguin and Mr. Tourville was a sign that a new generation is coming to power, one for which sexual orientation is far less fraught. And it adds to the sense that Mr. Nézet-Séguin, 43, who is conducting Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” at the Met through Jan. 31, represents a milestone, and not just for opera.
Despite gay pioneers like Michael Tilson Thomas (at the San Francisco Symphony) and Marin Alsop (in Baltimore), conducting remains an overwhelmingly straight (and male, and white) profession. As throughout society — business, politics, sports — music has struggled to produce and promote leaders outside of the traditional mold. It doesn’t help that the field is by its nature past-loving and has major centers in countries like Italy and Russia, where reactionary values still reign.
“Orchestras and opera companies are microcosms of our society and our world, and this is a representation of it,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, and the partner of Coralie Toevs, the Met’s development chief. “If you think about Western society, the epitome of leadership — and people go around teaching courses on this — is a conductor. And the model is Toscanini: a man who stands on the podium, has total authority and simply tells people what to do. He is grand, and white, and fully patriarchal.”
Mr. Levine, Mr. Nézet-Séguin’s predecessor at the Met, was fired last year after a company investigation found evidence of sexual misconduct. He has denied the accusations, but no one disputes that he has always been fiercely guarded about his personal life. The contrast with Mr. Nézet-Séguin — who has been openly gay for his entire professional career and nonchalant enough about it to post a smiling partners’ beach selfie on Instagram — is impossible to miss.
“The fact that he’s so comfortable with who he is is part of what makes him a powerful, effective artistic leader,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in an interview. “Because he is proud of who he is, and that’s very important.”
While he hasn’t wanted to make what he called “a big fuss” about his relationship, Mr. Nézet-Séguin sees himself and Mr. Tourville as symbolic of a widening conception of what a conductor can be.
rest at link