The Professors' Birthday

The audience sat in wooden pews. The orchestra, 63 "professors of music," of whom only a lordly few wore evening dress, played standing up (except for the cellists). The most presentable of the professors acted as ushers, wore white gloves, carried long white wands. The main piece on the program was the "Grand Symphony in C Minor"--the Fifth by Herr van Beethoven, who had been dead for 15 years. That was in 1842, in the Apollo Rooms, on lower Broadway.

Last week the audience, biggest and flashiest in a decade, sat in the middling comfortable seats of flag-draped Carnegie Hall. The 104 orchestra men sat also. The main piece was Beethoven's "Grand Symphony"--whose fateful dot-dot-dot-dash opening now means "V for Victory." A new, concealed spotlight picked out the pale, rhetorical hands of the conductor, emotional Leopold Stokowski. There was applause, and Times Critic Olin Downes took to his typewriter to complain of the orchestra's playing and the symphonic ways of "this curious man" Stokowski. This was the New York Philharmonic-Symphony's opening of its 100th birthday season.

Before the Philharmonic, the U.S. had no professional orchestras. And in Europe, only London and Vienna possessed orchestras which were to survive the century.*

Founder, first president and first conductor of the Philharmonic was Ureli Corelli Hill, a Connecticut Yankee given to rash business ventures (once the orchestra had to lend him nearly all its sinking fund). Hill ended as an extra at Wallack's Theater, killed himself (with morphine) at 73, writing: "Ha, ha! The sooner I go the better."

The Philharmonic began as a cooperative in which each member invested $25; first season's take was $15 apiece. The bylaws forbade "indecorum," wearing caps or hats at meetings, smoking and "violent language." In 1865 the orchestra raised some eyebrows by hiring a conductor, Karl Bergmann, at the whopping salary of $1,000 a year. When Edwin Booth declaimed with the Philharmonic (in Schumann's Manfred), the musicians gave him a silver vase; the actor countered by presenting Conductor Bergmann with an aluminum baton (then more costly than silver) from Tiffany's.

Once the Philharmonic had to keep careful count of expenditures such as 19-c- for wine for a lady soloist, but today it operates on a $1,000,000 budget. Since its merger in 1928 with the New York Symphony, it has a virtual monopoly of Manhattan's symphony concerts. But its audiences have fallen off since Maestro Arturo Toscanini left the orchestra in 1936. "The Old Man" well earned his $50,000 a year by his hard riding of the Philharmonic, which was then as fast and tautnerved as a fine race horse. Regular conductor now is a lightweight, Anglo-Italian John Barbirolli. For the birthday year, he is being spelled by eight guest conductors.* But eight jockeys are no good for one horse. Once again last week critics marked the orchestra's sloppy form.

* London's Philharmonic (founded in 1813) is now heard only sporadically, and Vienna's (eleven days older than the Manhattan orchestra) has been musically wrecked by the Nazis.

* The guests: Stokowski, Bruno Walter, Artur Rodzinski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Sergei Koussevitzky, Walter Damrosch, Fritz Busch, Eugene Goossens.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.