The Metropolitan Opera in New York announced Sunday that it was suspending its relationship with James Levine, its music director emeritus and a monumental figure in the world of classical music, because of multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

The New York Times reported Sunday that three more men said they had been sexually abused by Levine in a time period that encompassed the 1960s through the 1980s. "While we await the results of the investigation, based on these new news reports, the Met has made the decision to act now," Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, said in a statement.

The decision to suspend followed an announcement Saturday that the Met would start an investigation into allegations, which came in the wake of an article detailing sexual abuse allegations made by a man, now 48, to the police department in Lake Forest, Illinois - allegations that the Met had known about for at least a year.

"This first came to the Met's attention when the Illinois police investigation was opened in October, 2016," Gelb said in a statement. "At the time, Mr. Levine said that the charges were completely false, and we relied upon the further investigation of the police."

Gelb could not be reached for comment on why the Met deemed the charges worthy of investigation at this time, but not a year ago.

Levine, 74, was the music director of the Metropolitan Opera for 40 years before stepping down in 2016. He is also the former music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic and the Ravinia Festival, which is held near Chicago and is billed as the oldest outdoor music festival in the country. Levine was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient in 2003.

Levine is a beloved figure in the industry but has faced rumors of these sorts in the past - so much so that he addressed them in a 1987 interview. "I don't have the faintest idea where those rumors came from or what purpose they served," Levine told the New York Times' John Rockwell.

The alleged victim in the Illinois investigation, whose name has been withheld because The Washington Post does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse, has approached reporters from multiple publications over the years and, more recently, posted publicly on Facebook. But the New York Post was the first to report his allegations, followed shortly by the New York Times and other publications over the weekend.

In his account to the Lake Forest Police Department, the accuser made explicit charges against Levine. The abuse, he told police, began in 1985, when he was 16. Levine, he said, used to arrange to meet him for dinner, but would instead take him to his hotel room near Ravinia, where Levine was music director from 1973 to 1993. There, according to the accuser, Levine would ask him to remove his clothes, fondle his penis and masturbate in front of him.

The man told police that this behavior continued for years. Levine, he said, also gave him financial gifts amounting to about $50,000.

The encounters left him confused and unhappy, he said, and almost drove him to suicide.

Levine has suffered from ill health for years. He was diagnosed as having Parkinson's disease in 2006, but that was publicly revealed only a decade later. Today, he is largely in a wheelchair, but he has stepped up his activity at the Met in his current role of music director emeritus, after a period of not conducting very often. The New York Post story was published shortly after he finished conducting the last of four performances of Verdi's "Requiem."

Levine's management did not respond to requests for comment.