Part 15

On our tours, Miss Steers usually attended to the local needs of the cities we visited—the music committees, the hall managers, and the newspapers—while Miss Coman travelled with us as general railroad manager, baggage despatcher, and “committee of one,” to smooth out all difficulties, adjust any disputes and, in general, to “oil the wheels.” As soon as we came into their territory everything moved like clockwork. I remember one agonizing day, however, when we had to make Salt Lake City from the West and terrible floods had disarranged all railroad schedules. The final jolt came when, at some station on the way, John Drew’s two cars containing his dramatic company and scenery were added to our already over-heavy train because the floods had compelled him also to change his route. All hope of reaching Salt Lake City in time for our concert seemed gone. Miss Coman hopped onto the engine and sat down next to the engineer and stoker. I did not know whether she used a woman’s wiles or brute force or a combination of both, but we arrived in Salt Lake City at nine P. M. on a lovely summer evening. An audience of two thousand had been notified that we would be late and were calmly promenading up and down in front of the theatre. Trucks were in waiting at the station to rush our baggage to the auditorium, our men had put on their evening dress in the baggage-car, and I began the opening overture with all the instruments properly tuned at ten minutes before ten. Symphony concerts were so few and far between in Salt Lake City that the audience did not mind this long wait one little bit.

Of course all these difficulties could not have been so happily solved had I not always had devoted and efficient heads of the different departments of our organization. George Engles is the most careful of business managers; Rissland, the orchestra manager, has always been tireless in his efforts to keep the men in good discipline and spirits and to look after their welfare; and Hans Goettich, who has been my baggage-master and librarian for over twenty-five years, is a perfect marvel. I remember seeing him flag an entire train because he had suddenly noticed that our baggage-car, containing all our music and musical instruments, had been hooked on to it by mistake. As this train was going to New Orleans, while we were headed for Chicago, we would have had to stop giving concerts for several days until that baggage-car had been traced and sent back to us! On Goettich devolves the entire responsibility for the library, which is packed in dozens of boxes and kept according to a system of his own. On these long tours our programmes are changed more or less every day, partly to avoid the monotony of repetition for us and partly because each community has its own needs according to its stage of musical development, which I try to gauge very thoroughly when making up my programmes. This means incessant work for the librarian and mistakes might easily occur, but during all these years I cannot recall a single concert when, through fault of Goettich’s, an orchestral part has been lost or misplaced. This is a remarkable record.

I remember giving a symphony concert in William J. Bryan’s town of Lincoln, Nebraska. I found a typical Middle Western community, living in nice houses with green lawns, with neatly bricked streets and concrete sidewalks, and roomy large-windowed schools. The theatre in which we played was thoroughly modern, clean, and well lighted, and the audience well dressed and appreciative. One of my double-bass players told me that he had played there thirty years before with Theodore Thomas. In those days Lincoln was but a frontier town and the theatre and the public who had come to hear the Thomas Orchestra were of a more or less primitive character. My double-bass player told me that with a colleague, whose head was devoid of hair, he had stood directly below a proscenium box in which a group of cowboys were seated. While the orchestra was playing Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” one of these cowboys, who was chewing tobacco violently, amused himself by spitting frequently and always aiming for the bald head of the bass player, who had to keep one agitated eye on the conductor and the other on this horribly resourceful listener, in order to avoid his only too-well-directed shots.

Our orchestra always enjoyed the long spring tours, although now and then uncomfortable happenings would mar their pleasure. Nothing makes a musician so ill-natured as to be deprived of a good square meal, and sometimes our dining-car would not connect properly or we would be so delayed as to arrive in a town only just in time to rush to the theatre and give our concert. Then I would have to exert all my powers as an orator to induce them to go directly to the theatre instead of “loitering by the wayside,” and I would quickly order large quantities of ham and swiss-cheese sandwiches to be distributed behind the scenes just before the concert.

At present our players while on tour receive so much per day above their salaries for meals and beds, but in the early days I used to pay their hotel expenses, my manager engaging rooms and arranging the rates “on the American plan” before we arrived in the city in which we were to play. This system, however, never worked well because there was always intense jealousy among the musicians as to the quality or conveniences of their respective rooms; and if the first oboe found that his room did not front on as agreeable a locality as that of the first horn, he would perhaps sulk and consider that he had been unfairly treated. The newer arrangement proved much better, as it enabled some to save from the money allowed them and permitted others to “splurge” by spending more.

I remember that once in those early days we had to fill in a date in a small New York State town on our way to Canada. The principal hotel had room for only about twenty, and the other members of the orchestra were quartered in four other hotels. Naturally the unfortunate five who were put into the last of these had a terrible story to tell of their sufferings when we met the following morning at the station. To be sure, the manager of the hotel had charged only a dollar for each person, and this included his supper, bed, and breakfast, but their rooms had been dismal and the beds hard. The climax was reached in the morning, when, as a frowsy waitress began to serve them their breakfast in the fly-specked dining-room on a table covered with the inevitable dirty red and white checked cloth, the manager, putting his head in at the door, shouted: “Lizzie, no eggs for the band!” This phrase became a catchword in the orchestra, and whenever my manager or I refused anything to our men, the cry immediately resounded: “Of course, no eggs for the band!”

Orchestra players through experience become remarkably routined travellers. They know the good hotels and restaurants in every city of the Union, and during the long railroad jumps, especially west of the Mississippi, where distances between important cities become greater and greater, they know how to amuse themselves, each one according to his fashion. There are, of course, a few groups who play poker violently from morning till night. Others are equally constant to pinochle or bridge, while a few are perfect sharks at chess. The Frenchmen, as well as the Russian Jews, are great readers of serious literature, and books on history, philosophy, and music are in great demand among them. Whenever the train stops, even for a few minutes, a dozen jump off to play ball. As a rule, during the day we have two cars, one of which is given up to the smokers, where indeed the air becomes so thick that one could cut it with a knife. At night three or four sleepers are necessary to take care of us comfortably. The old days, when I travelled with fifty men, have gone long ago, and now we should not think of touring with an orchestra of less than eighty-five.

The time for spring tours seems to be passing, however, as the Western cities are beginning to minister to the needs of their respective communities with their own excellent orchestras.

For many years I accepted long summer engagements with two concerts every day, first at Willow Grove near Philadelphia, and then at Ravinia Park, on the North Shore near Chicago. The former became a great educational factor, as Philadelphia at that time had no orchestra of its own. Willow Grove Park is situated seventeen miles from that city and was built by the Rapid Transit Company in order to stimulate travel on their trolley lines. The first season, for which a military band had been engaged, had not proven a success, and I was invited the following year in the hope that a symphonic organization might do better. I began by giving them popular programmes of good music with a regular symphony night every Monday and a Wagner programme every Friday evening, with excellent results. Our audiences usually numbered from fifteen to twenty thousand. The Rapid Transit Company, realizing the importance of the concerts, promptly built a huge open-air auditorium after my own design, consisting of only a roof on pillars connecting with the shell in which the orchestra was placed. The acoustics proved exceedingly good and the out-of-doors atmosphere was preserved.

I continued these concerts for seven seasons, thereby developing an audience for symphonic music which eventually and inevitably demanded a resident orchestra of its own. To-day the Philadelphia orchestra, under the leadership of Leopold Stokowski, ranks as one of the foremost of our country. Its concerts are crowded to the doors and I like to think that our seven years of pioneer work in Willow Grove have helped to lay its foundations.

I also conducted a series of concerts at Ravinia Park, organized by the Chicago and Milwaukee Electric Railway to serve a similar commercial purpose. Chicago had, of course, enjoyed for years the splendid winter concerts of the Chicago Orchestra, first under Theodore Thomas and then under his successor, Frederick Stock, but this was the first time that symphonic concerts were given during the summer amid such charming surroundings on the borders of Lake Michigan. These concerts proved exceedingly popular, the audiences consisting not only of the North Shore residents but of thousands who came out from Chicago on trains and trolleys.

After several years of this work, however, the incessant daily concerts, coming after an arduous winter season, began to pall on my musical nerves. I ran a real danger, if I continued, of becoming nothing but a musical routinier, with an inevitable loss of the enthusiasm and freshness which is an absolute necessity for the interpreter. I therefore gave up all conducting during the summer months.

I founded the Damrosch Opera Company in 1895, and the harassing question of how to maintain my orchestra seemed solved, for, during the first year, my opera season lasted thirteen weeks and during the following three years, from twenty to thirty weeks each. This not only enabled me to maintain a beautifully trained orchestra for the Wagner operas, but also gave to my symphony performances a greater finish. The orchestra was now under my exclusive control and could rehearse as often as the endowed orchestra of Major Higginson. But as it was the opera that enabled me to give my men such a long engagement, its needs had to control all other arrangements, and gradually the regular sequence of my winter concerts in New York began to suffer. I could not keep my opera company in New York except for a limited period each year, and therefore had to fill in much of my time in Philadelphia, Boston, and the larger cities of the South and Middle West. In 1899 I was therefore finally compelled to give up the regular subscription series of our New York concerts and the New York Symphony Orchestra became a part of my travelling operatic organization.

I made this sacrifice with a heavy heart, but at that time it was the only solution. An orchestra devoted only to concerts could not be maintained without an endowment, and that I did not have at the time, while the length of my Wagner opera season enabled me not only to give my men a good engagement but to have the pick of the best musicians in New York.

From then on until 1903 most of our playing of symphonic music was only on our spring concert tours and at irregular intervals in New York.

In 1900 Maurice Grau asked me to conduct the Wagner operas at the Metropolitan, and in the spring of 1902, at the close of my second season with him, I received an invitation from the New York Philharmonic Society to become its conductor. This invitation was a great surprise to me, as the Philharmonic had been, ever since my father’s day, the rival orchestra. In many ways it seemed a flattering proposition, as it was the oldest organization of its kind in America and had had an honorable history. Under the leadership of Theodore Thomas and later on of Anton Seidl, the audiences had been large and its affairs had prospered. It had always been a co-operative association, composed of the members of the orchestra, who had complete control of its affairs, receiving no salaries, but dividing the profits equally among themselves at the end of each season. I accepted the conductorship, but found very soon that my acceptance was a blunder. The society had come upon evil days, and under its last conductor attendance had dwindled to less than one-half. Of the membership of the orchestra only the skeleton remained, and I found to my amazement that of the hundred players at the concerts, less than fifty were actual members of the organization, the rest being engaged from outside, and often changed from one concert to another. Some of the members were old men who should no longer have played in the orchestra at all; but they were devoted to the concerts of the society, and as the orchestra was regulated by their votes, they naturally would not vote themselves out of it. Many of them had been excellent musicians and were personally upright men, but age, alas, is no respecter of technic, and the fingers of the left hand and the muscles of the bow arm gradually stiffen with advancing years. Most of the wind instruments were outsiders and therefore could not be properly controlled regarding their attendance at rehearsals and concerts, while, on the contrary, nearly all of the first violins were old members, several of whom were no longer fit to play first violin.

The fact was that Major Higginson, of Boston, with his permanent orchestra composed of young men, many of them the best of their kind, with their daily rehearsals and at least seventy-five symphony concerts a season, had set a new standard of orchestral technic which the old Philharmonic, under its archaic conditions, could not hope to equal.

The only solution seemed to me to lie in gathering together a fund large enough to produce the same conditions and results as Higginson had achieved in the Boston Orchestra, and, above all, to put the management of the Philharmonic into the hands of a committee which should not be composed of members of the orchestra, but of music lovers and guarantors of the fund.

I discussed this idea with several of my friends and some old subscribers and friends of the Philharmonic at a meeting held on January 5, 1903, and it was resolved to obtain a fund of fifty thousand dollars a year for four years, to be administered for the benefit of the Philharmonic Society as a permanent orchestra fund by a board of fifteen or more trustees, but it was not to be subject to the control of the Philharmonic Society. This fund was to be the beginning of an endowment for a permanent orchestra, of which the Philharmonic Society was to be the nucleus. The terms of the deed of trust under which the fund was to be held were to be determined by a committee of three, consisting of Mr. Samuel Untermyer, Mr. John Notman, and Mr. E. Francis Hyde.

The members of the Philharmonic Orchestra were not unfavorably disposed toward our scheme. The idea of being guaranteed a yearly salary instead of sharing problematic yearly profits, naturally appealed to them; but when our committee explained to them that, under the terms of such an endowment, several of the playing members would have to resign their places because in the opinion of the committee they had passed the age of usefulness, they rebelled. Nor did they feel inclined to give up the absolute management of their concerts.

Among the most respected members of the Philharmonic Orchestra were two old violinists. The one, Richard Arnold, vice-president of the society, had been concert master under my father twenty-five years before and still officiated in that position in the Philharmonic. The other, August Roebbelin, who had played as first violinist in the orchestra for nearly forty years, had also acted as manager of the society and unselfishly given his best energies to its affairs. As a violinist, however, he had passed his time of usefulness. Our committee, perhaps rather bluntly, informed the Philharmonic committee that under the reorganization the selection of the orchestra must be left in the hands of the conductor and that Mr. Arnold would have to content himself with a second position at the first stand, so that a younger artist could become concert master, and that several of the first violinists, among them Mr. Roebbelin, would have to be retired altogether.

I had made it particularly clear that my selection as conductor for the following year was not in any way a necessary part of the reorganization scheme, as it seemed to me that the only way to achieve a real permanent orchestra for New York was to unite the conflicting factions and to let the choice of conductor be made after the organization had been properly placed upon a sound and comprehensive basis.

After lengthy negotiations the Philharmonic, in a letter of February 28, 1903, definitely refused the offer of the reorganization committee because, as their secretary expressed it, the amendments required by our committee “would so change the nature of the society as to seriously interfere with the control of its affairs by its members, which has always been its vital principle, and that the future prosperity of the society would thereby be impaired.”

As I had no desire to continue another year with the orchestra on the basis of existing conditions, I wrote to Mr. Arnold and requested that my name be not proposed as a candidate for the following year. I had been in a very delicate position during all this time, as I had grown quite fond personally of some of the very men whom, for artistic reasons, it was necessary to retire. It was not in human nature that they should have seen themselves as others saw them, or heard themselves as others heard them, and at our rehearsals and concerts they all certainly gave the best that was in them. The changes which I had proposed were necessary, however, if the society expected to continue its existence as an orchestral body.

For a few years they staved off the inevitable by engaging for each season a number of European guest conductors. This served as a stop-gap, as it diverted the attention of the audience from the deficiencies in the orchestra to the different and interesting personalities and musical specialties of the conductors. But then a reorganization plan, exactly on the lines originally proposed by me, completely eliminating the power of the orchestral players to manage the concerts or to select the players in the orchestra, was accepted by them, and to-day the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society is organized and successfully working on exactly the same basis as the New York Symphony Society and the Boston Orchestra.

For me the rejection of our reorganization plan was at the time naturally a great disappointment, but not for long, as my efforts had made new friends for me and in a new direction, which eventually proved a turning-point in my life.

On March 19, 1903, I received a letter which read as follows:

I have been instructed by the members of the Permanent Orchestra Fund Committee to express to you their appreciation of the spirit of unselfishness and of loyalty to the highest artistic interests which has characterized your attitude during the negotiations which have been in progress between our Committee and the Philharmonic Society. We regret that a consolidation of our interests has proved impossible, but we relinquish the plan we had in view with the greatest respect and admiration for your broad attitude of mind in regard to the undertaking, for your musicianship, and for your devotion to the cause of music in which we are all working.

HARRY HARKNESS FLAGLER, _Secretary Permanent Orchestra Fund_.

Years before I had met Mr. Flagler through his friend, Max Alvary, when the latter was a member of the Damrosch Opera Company, but the meeting was quite casual and I had not seen him again until the meetings of the Philharmonic Orchestra Fund Committee, of which he had become a member. I had been singularly attracted by him and his gentle and quiet, almost diffident manner. He had been a great lover of music all his life and had found in his wife Anne an enthusiastic companion in his love for the art. As the reorganization scheme of the Philharmonic Orchestra gradually unfolded itself, he became more and more interested in it as the right solution of the problem of developing a symphony orchestra in New York which should be the equal of the Boston Symphony or the Chicago Orchestra, and he was ready to help such a scheme to the fulness of his financial ability. Very quickly after the failure of this project, many of the forces concerned recruited themselves anew, and a large proportion of the would-be guarantors turned to me with the suggestion to reorganize the New York Symphony Orchestra, and by subsidizing all the first players and thereby binding them to the orchestra, make a new beginning in the right direction. During the interregnum of three years the orchestra had maintained itself fairly well through the earnings of our long spring tours and summer engagements, but I joyfully hailed this opportunity to renew the New York winter concerts. A reorganization of the Symphony Society of New York was quickly effected by the re-election of most of the old directors and of many new ones. My old and loyal friend, Daniel Frohman, at whose theatre I had given many a Wagner lecture in the years past, accepted the presidency pro tem and was of great assistance in procuring outside work for the members of the orchestra. He was succeeded by Mr. Samuel Sanford, a man of real musical ability, who had founded the musical department at Yale University and had contributed liberally to many musical enterprises. He immediately became one of the largest guarantors of our orchestra fund.