When the Devil Drives
The Faustian fallouts of Leon Botstein and Peter Gelb
Last September, the Metropolitan Opera and Saudi Music Commission signed a memorandum of understanding towards a potential partnership. Under the terms, the Met would become the company-in-residence at Riyadh’s Royal Diriyah Opera House for three weeks each winter, a move that would add the company’s imprimatur to Saudi’s growing fund of cultural capital—and about $200 million into the Met’s coffers over eight years.
If there were any doubts as to the real motivations behind this deal, one need only look as far as the Met’s press release for this MoU, in which Saudi Music Commission CEO Paul Pacifico said:
“Music is a universal language that transcends borders, uniting people through creativity. At the Saudi Music Commission, we are committed to empowering talents, providing them with the skills, platforms, and global exposure they need to flourish. This collaboration is more than a cultural exchange; it is an opportunity to forge new connections, share our stories through music, and contribute to a vibrant global arts community.”
Anytime someone tells you that “music is a universal language,” it’s worth finding out what language the check is written in—and how many zeroes it takes to make everyone suddenly fluent.
Last month, however, the Met announced that Saudi Arabia had withdrawn from their agreement, citing the growing cost of regional instability—much of it shaped by the same military alliances Riyadh continues to quietly support. While this fallout leaves the Met in continually dire financial straits and facing an uncertain future, there is a silver lining: If I were in Peter Gelb’s shoes, I’d rather lose sleep over my company’s finances than over using that same company to launder the image of a regime stained by human rights abuses.
While last week began with the tail-end of the Met/Saudi fallout, it ended with similar news from the department of dirty money: Following the conclusion of an independent investigation into his ties with Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Botstein announced that he will step down as President of Bard College next month. My husband, an alum of Bard himself, received an email sent to alumni of the college (though not, it would appear, to alumni of Bard’s high-school program at Simon’s Rock).
A link to law firm WilmerHale’s evaluation was shared in that email, which made no other mention of the conclusions. Reading the summary, it’s clear why they chose to ignore the lede: “Nothing that President Botstein did in connection with his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was illegal, but President Botstein made decisions in the course of that relationship that reflect on his leadership of Bard,” reads a memorandum attributed to WilmerHale partner Jamie Gorelick (who served as Deputy Attorney General under President Clinton). Gorelick adds a few paragraphs later:
“Against the background of Epstein’s conviction, President Botstein’s contacts with Epstein, over the period 2012 to 2019, could have alerted President Botstein to the possibility that he and Bard would be facilitating Epstein’s continued abuse of women, legitimizing Epstein, or exposing Bard students to a person like Epstein.”
Botstein’s insistence that his relationship with Epstein was purely business and his proclaimed disdain for the financier-slash-sex-offender reads as even more hollow now than it did when news of their relationship first broke in 2023. While he reportedly told WilmerHale, “I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God’s work,” he doesn’t mention what he would do if Satan tried to use him as his own reputation-launderer in order to groom a young Juilliard violinist.
“When you meet people like this, you think, Who am I to question [Jeffrey Epstein] and his behavior when people at that level shake his hand?” Svetlana Pozhidaeva, a former Russian model and “staffer” for Epstein, told The Guardian in March, referring directly to Botstein. Pozhidaeva also told The Guardian that she believed Botstein’s “reputation as a ‘sophisticated intellectual’ helped ‘legitimize’ Epstein.” Her parents even met Botstein after a concert he gave in Moscow, which she said “created more trust” in Epstein’s legitimacy. Botstein, she added, “made a really good impression.”
Botstein can claim ignorance, but for a conductor who has led performances of nearly every Faust work in the canon—including Liszt’s Faust Symphony in 2006, Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust in 2010, and Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust in 2024—those claims invite skepticism.
On the other hand, it may be a question of what version of Faust Botstein finds most useful: One of the courses offered at Bard at the time that my husband attended was titled: “Goethe’s Faust: Sympathy for the Devil?”. The class examined “the dynamics of Faust’s striving for knowledge of the world and experience of life, and Mephistopheles’ [sic] advancement and subversion of this striving… [as] the basis for analysis of the play’s central themes of individuality, knowledge, and transcendence.”
This is a traditional, but in my view superficial read of Faust, one that Goethe himself subverts in his introduction of Mephistopheles as “part of that force who always wills evil and always brings about good.” Likewise, as Marshall Berman argues in All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Faust is no victim. He accepts that his goals require a destructive power such that Mephistopheles can offer. “Only if Faust works with and through these destructive powers will he be able to create anything in the world,” Berman writes. “In fact, it is only by working with the devil, and willing ‘nothing but evil’ that he can end up on God’s side and ‘create the good.’”
While not taught by Botstein (at least not when my husband took it in 2002), the Bard course’s framing of Faust suggests that Goethe’s antihero is able to achieve what he achieves in spite of Mephistopheles’s subversion, that Faust is merely a victim of his own ambition. How apt, then, that this would be the same cover Botstein later sought in his own defense for taking money from Satan in order to do God’s work. Gelb gave a similar defense of his willingness to do business with the Saudi Government last September, telling the New York Times, “It’s the right thing to do, because it will make the Met stronger as an institution, both financially and artistically,” adding that he believed the Met could help promote “human understanding and compassionate thinking” in the country.1
It’s fair to say that Botstein’s relationship with Epstein went far beyond even what the most dedicated fundraiser would consider proprietary, especially given that all that Bard ever got from the affair was $75,000 and 66 laptops. (Botstein said he donated the $150,000 he received from Epstein’s charity foundation to the college, although WilmerHale said it “cannot confirm…the contribution of those fees to Bard.”)
It’s also fair to say that Botstein is getting off relatively lightly for his conduct: As of this writing, he remains the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, a position he has held since 1992. He will continue to live on campus, remain on the faculty, and continue his work with the Bard Music Festival, SummerScape, and the Conservatory. He was also allowed to rewrite the narrative of his “retirement,” noting in the email sent to Bard alumni on Friday:
“I previously informed the Board of Trustees that in view of the completion of the endowment campaign, my 51 years of service as president, and my upcoming eightieth birthday, it has been my intention to retire from the presidency and focus my energy as faculty member, teacher, and musician.” This is a sharp U-turn from just a few months ago, when Botstein refused to resign. This is a page directly out of Berman’s read of Faust:
“Mephisto’s message is not to blame oneself for the casualties of creation, for that is just the way life is. Accept destructiveness as part of your share of divine creativity, and you can throw off your guilt and act freely. No longer should you be inhibited by the moral question, ‘Should I do it?’ Out in the open road to self-development, the only vital question is ‘How to do it?’”
You can’t make an omelet without a bone saw and a private island.
For Berman, Faust is a “tragedy of development,” and an indictment of the modernity that was beginning to take shape at the end of Goethe’s life (around the time he finished this lifelong work). But in this read, Berman assumes that the bargains pay off, at least temporarily, for the would-be developers. The end may be tragic, but the deal still pans out. Even if his relationship to Epstein is the lede in his obituary, Botstein has, for the time being, emerged from the last few years of scrutiny relatively unscathed, materially speaking. He maintains his cultural fiefdom in the Hudson Valley, with a concert hall designed by no less than Frank Gehry. The paltry funds that Epstein donated were a drop in the bucket compared to the $1 billion endowment that had been Botstein’s goal for the college; he could likely have met $1 billion without ever having met Epstein.
Gelb’s legacy is still in question, and the Met is in a much different financial situation. The company has borrowed more than $120 million from its endowment since the 2020 lockdowns. Last year, it was also one of several institutions in the city that were promised significant donations from a fake millionaire donor that never materialized. The company has now reportedly begun to look for a buyer for its two Marc Chagall murals and is also considering naming rights for the opera house itself.
The Met has never existed without dirty money. At a certain scale, you could argue that no opera house or private university could. Needs must. But Berman’s tragedy of development was never about purity. It was about what it costs to build anything at all; the compromises, entanglements, and collateral damage that underpin even the most elevated cultural projects. What these two institutional crises suggest in complementary ways, however, is a shift within Berman’s tragedy: This means of development is no longer reliably effective. The Faustian bargains are ceasing to live up to their terms. The devil still collects, he just doesn’t deliver.
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“I don’t operate the Met according to my personal feelings on every issue,” Gelb added when pressed about the broader ethical implications of such a deal. In a later New York Times article, he also disclosed that he had pitched Elon Musk for funding, offering—only half-jokingly—to produce an opera on Mars.