OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN OPERA: James Levine wiped off Sirius-XM’s Met Opera Radio channel. 

This means the 40 years of broadcasts while Levine was music director has been silenced.

The Levine operas have been replaced with full-length broadcast recordings from the 1930s, 1940s, and especially 1950s with often dubious technical quality despite great singers.

Now everyone knows that Levine and the Met are only speaking through lawyers these day, but this vindictive editing of institutional history is reminiscent of Stalin at his worst, when Trotsky and other undesirables were whited out of party pictures.

The Met fired Levine last month, the L.A. Times reported, “after finding ‘credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct.’”

By that standard, a whole lot of Hollywood’s back catalog of both movies and TV shows will soon be tossed down the Memory Hole, no matter how big the resulting bonfire’s carbon footprint will be.

(Via Terry Teachout.)