Ralph Daily · CC BY 2.0

Music director of the Metropolitan Opera for forty years, conducting 2,577 performances there and building the Lindemann Young Artists program that trained a generation of singers and conductors. He began as a piano soloist with the Cincinnati Symphony at age ten and studied under Rudolf Serkin and George Szell. In 2018 the Met fired him after finding credible decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against young musicians, which he denied; the allegations became public only in his final years.