The wave of sexual assault allegations sweeping through society has rocked Toronto’s usually serene classical music community.

On Wednesday morning, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir announced that two upcoming concerts have been cancelled and that longtime artistic director and conductor Noel Edison has taken a leave of absence. Within a few hours, news surfaced that this arose from allegations of misconduct, still unproven.

The boards of the Mendelssohn Choir and the Elora Festival Singers, which Edison co-founded, have launched an independent third-party investigation and said there will be no comment until the results are in.

The #metoo storm surge began crashing over old bastions of male privilege only last October. In less than six months, the flotsam has included the careers of great classical artists, including Metropolitan Opera Company conductor James Levine and former Montreal Symphony Orchestra music director Charles Dutoit.

Both conductors, considered among the finest in the world, were accused of harassment and assault. The Metropolitan Opera immediately suspended Levine and moved up the arrival of his replacement, Canada’s Yannick Nézét-Séguin. Charles Dutoit’s main employers, including the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra in North America, immediately severed their ties.

It’s no surprise that the seemingly genteel world of classical music and opera is facing the same reckoning as the rest of the entertainment industry. The power dynamics we find in the wider world are often even more unbalanced on and off the stage. The big orchestra conductors are stars who command annual salaries that reach the mid-six figures. They get the best suites in hotels and have large private studios in many concert venues. Their say-so can make or break the career of a promising young orchestra musician or soloist.

The regular musician is often precariously employed in a world where 200 or more candidates sign up to audition for a single job in an orchestra.

Add in the fact that the overwhelming majority of orchestra and choral conductors are male, and the stage is set, so to speak, for an unhealthy mix of sexual and power politics. And it’s not just older conductors who carry around dubious attitudes. A bit less than five years ago, the principal conductor of Britain’s Royal Liverpool Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko, told a Norwegian interviewer that orchestras play better when “they have a man in front of them.” He added, “a cute girl on the podium means that musicians think about other things.” Petrenko was 37 at the time.

Bad behaviour is hardly a new phenomenon. Far from it. Yet up until recently, Western society has been forgiving or, more commonly, turned a blind eye to repugnant men who made great art.

The classical music and opera worlds decades ago came to terms with the awfulness of Richard Wagner. Musicians and audiences alike keep concluding that Wagner’s creative achievements are worth more than his virulent antisemitism, lying, cheating and multiple adulteries (including the wife of his most ardent patron).

Wagner is not alone as a symbol of art trumping morality. The list of the world’s great masters of music is dotted with men who took advantage of their position and of other people.

Claude Debussy, Gesualdo, Henry Purcell, Franz Schubert, Gabriel Fauré, Thomas Weelkes (who urinated on a priest in a fit of drunken rage) are among the many transgressors. Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini were notorious tyrants as conductors. But we would never think of depriving ourselves of their musical legacy.

The current awakening to the need for basic respect of people, not to mention the need for better gender balance in every workplace, may end up making art more responsible to morality. But it will take time, and more revelations.

In Britain, the Incorporated Society of Musicians launched a voluntary survey on workplace discrimination after the #metoo movement took off last November. In the first month of the survey, 65 per cent of the respondents had identified sexual harassment as the basis of discrimination in their musical workplace. The preliminary report indicated that 77 per cent of respondents did not report their incidents for fear of losing work.

There is no reason to believe the situation is any different in Canada. In chats over coffee or beer over the last few months, people in Toronto’s music community have been speaking more openly to each other about all of the misbehaving men in our midst.

There was (and continues to be) a secret grapevine of information about which men to never follow into a room alone, who is likely to try to humiliate you publicly and who will try to proposition you as his hand gently brushes your shoulder/forearm/thigh.

People know and, unfortunately, have accepted this as the way things are in the arts. If you complain, you will be considered a troublemaker and not get hired again. This needs to change immediately.

Whether or not the accusations leveled against Noel Edison are true, he remains an artist of incredible achievements. We need more people like Edison – yet we also need them to respect human dignity.

Given the power and whims of artistic impulse, creative types cannot magically be remade into models of moral rectitude. But we can help create an atmosphere where people who have been placed into uncomfortable situations are not intimidated into silence.

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Every school, conservatory and arts organization that hasn’t already done so should convene open forums and pledge to create means where everyone can speak freely without fear of repercussions.

We need wildly imaginative, impulsive and envelope-pushing artists. But we also deserve to not worry about how that envelope is being pushed.

Classical music writer John Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.