Sad Song

The start of any new musical season usually raises the old question of whether the audience will show up. This year the question seems to be whether the orchestra will show up. A month ago, a capacity-plus crowd of 2,900 city and suburban dwellers arrived for a Saturday matinee at the New York City Opera only to find the house shut down.

The orchestra had gone on a surprise strike.

Last week that dispute was finally settled, with the musicians getting a $40 raise (from a $300-a-week base) over the next three years. No sooner was that accomplished than the members of the New York Philharmonic walked out.

They earn a basic $330 a week and are seeking a reported $70 raise. They have been offered $35 but have been asked in return to play four extra concerts a season. Meanwhile, the Chicago Symphony called off the opening of its 83rd season, rejecting an offer by its musicians to continue playing while a new contract is being negotiated. Again, wages were the key issue, although neither side would divulge details. In declining to open without a contract, the Chicago officials seemed fearful that the orchestra would go on playing only until the arrival of Sir Georg Solti (TIME Cover, May 7) in mid-October, then strike dramatically, with lucrative recording dates and a fall tour hanging in the balance.

Money Pie. One could throw up one's hands at all this were not so many lives and careers being disrupted. To the layman, the performing arts constitute an often incomprehensible world, but never so much as when management and labor gather to divvy up the shrinking money pie. As much as anything else, the problem stems from a scale of values and priorities that the cultural community has allowed to go haywire.

Buildings outrank people, creature comfort comes before the cultivation of creativity, and everybody owes the arts a living. Or so the song goes.

Money remains easy to come by--to put buildings up, but not to run them.

A refreshing exception was the $8,000,000 to $10 million gift two weeks ago from Avery Fisher, founder of Fisher Radio, mostly for the maintenance of New York City's Philharmonic Hall (now renamed for Fisher). Yet the bequest was announced at the most critical stage of the New York Philharmonic's labor talks, and since none of the money was for wages, it must have struck many a fiddler or trumpeter as a colossal case of bad timing.

One of the key issues in the New York City Opera strike was management's proposal to eliminate eleven extra weeks of employment previously guaranteed to the musicians. As it happens, the money in question (about $100,000) could have been met by the sums earmarked for three new upcoming productions.

New repertory feeds the vitality of any opera company, of course, but new mountings of familiar works can be a misappropriation of dwindling resources. Probably the New York City Opera owes its loyal fans the right to see Beverly Sills in her latest Donizetti revival, Anna Bolena (not given a major stage production in New York since 1850). But would those fans really desert if deprived of yet another new production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos? Not likely.

What does alienate customers is allowing them to become aware that they can do without an art form, as the Metropolitan Opera has unhappily learned. During the half-season that the Met was closed by a labor dispute in 1969-70, thousands of its patrons simply walked away for good. That is one reason the Met now finds itself $5.5 million in debt and mired in its worst financial crisis since 1932.

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