Anniversary Orchestras: New York, Vienna, Leipzig

By John Rockwell

Anniversaries are arbitrary; other than Kurt Masur’s co-tenancy in New York and Leipzig, there is nothing special to link the orchestras of those two cities, or them to the Vienna Philharmonic. Yet the simultaneous 150th-anniversary seasons of the New York Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, and the 250th anniversary of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, prompt an attempt to see all three ensembles as part of a larger picture.

The thing that leaps out right off is the New York Philharmonic’s place in this venerable list. America is supposed to be the New World, while Vienna and Leipzig symbolize the old order, the European font from which American classical music flowed.

The explanation for New York’s early start, or perhaps better the European orchestras’ late start, has to do with the accidents of history and with sociology and politics, as well. There was sophisticated classical music for largescale forces in most major European cities long before New York, and at the time of the New York Philharmonic’s founding, Boston was the cultural capital of this country.

Europe waited until the 19th century (Leipzig got a head start) to found big, plush, Romantic symphony orchestras because they weren’t needed until 19th-century composers began writing big, plush, Romantic symphonies. Orchestras are largely bourgeois phenomena, created by an ascendant merchant class to be enjoyed by a large modern public, compared to the generally smaller forces employed at a church or a royal court.

Leipzig was a merchant city in a monarchy, Saxony, whose royal seat was Dresden. The Gewandhaus orchestra owes its name to its original concert site, a merchants’ exchange hall, and the colorful name stuck even when the orchestra moved into a series of proper concert halls. The latest, on the south side of Augustus Platz (formerly Karl Marx Platz, formerly Augustus Platz), was opened in 1981 and is a rather flashy modern building with soft, warm acoustics of which Masur is particularly proud.

Vienna’s Philharmonic was founded by the conductor Franz Lachner and a group of enlightened musical amateurs—bourgeois culture in German-speaking lands was the golden age of the amateur, the kind of music lover who would hear a concert and then repair with friends to play a Schubert quintet. Some of the founding circle were aristocrats, but the majority were middle class, and all were educated urban intellectuals. The orchestra’s musicians were professionals who derived their primary income from playing in the Royal Opera, as the Vienna State Opera was known in monarchical times.

In America, the typical pattern was for some wealthy industrialist to found an orchestra so that he and his friends and their wives could ape their European betters by sitting in their finery to hear European classical music (not too much has changed).

But New York’s Philharmonic Society came together under the impetus of a group of musicians who wished to perform the emerging masterworks of the 19th-century German school; as with the young Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestra can almost be said to have been founded to play Beethoven. New York could also boast large immigrant communities—Germans for symphonic music, Italians and Germans for opera—to provide the backbone of the subscription lists.

The ongoing histories of these three disparate ensembles are beyond the scope of this article, but their present-day profiles reflect their origins. The Vienna Philharmonic boasts the most distinguished history: With their dual allegiance to operatic and concert repertory, the Viennese musicians helped shape the performance history of most of the great masterpieces of Western music of the last 150 years.

The orchestra is still the antithesis of the big international ensemble; its players come largely from Vienna, where they grow up knowing one another and their teachers (who played in the orchestra before them), as well as the city’s arts administrators and music critics. They play many of the instruments of their teachers, or copies, and those instruments still, because of design and playing technique, sound inescapably Viennese, the horns above all.

Today, the very sound we hear in our innermost ear of Brahms and Bruckner, Wagner and Richard Strauss—and even backward to before the orchestra’s founding, to Mozart and Beethoven—has been formed by these men (and all men they still are). The Vienna Philharmonic’s ensemble personality is so dominant that it transcends any mere conduct tor, even though nearly all the great ones have conducted it.

Leipzig’s Gewandhaus is even more closely tied to the local conservatory, a sense of isolation that was reinforced by East Germany’s political defensiveness and soft currency. Today, some 85 percent of the players still come from that one conservatory, where the leading Gewandhaus musicians teach, and have thus studied with their predecessors. As in Vienna, the Gewandhaus musicians, all 200 of them, also play at the Leipzig Opera and at the St. Thomas Church, where Bach was organist and choirmaster. But unlike most German-speaking cities, in Leipzig orchestral music comes first.

Dominant individuals have played a stronger role in Leipzig than in Vienna. Schumann and Brahms were closely tied to the Gewandhaus, offering many premieres there, and the orchestra’s music directors have included Mendelssohn, Nikisch, Furtwängler, and Walter. Under Masur, the orchestra has regained much of the luster it lost in the darker days of the East Germany regime.

Just how close the New York Philharmonic will eventually approach the Gewandhaus in sound and style under Masur will be fascinating to hear. Already, Masur has softened the traditionally hard-edged, aggressive New York sound, and the tinkerings that he instigated in Avery Fisher Hall’s acoustics may further that process.

But the New York Philharmonic remains a fractious band with a personality all its own. Unlike Vienna and Leipzig, New York draws its musicians from all over the world, often refined at the Juilliard School but still reflecting a heady international diversity. That means less single-minded authority in any one corner of the repertory, like the Germanic classics—a lack that New York, as well as Philadelphia, Cleveland, and several other North American cities, seems trying to overcome by engaging German conductors. But the heterogeneity of its members does let the Philharmonic adapt with rare alacrity to different kinds of conductors (it would be difficult to imagine a more diverse assortment than Toscanini, Walter, Bernstein, Boulez, Mehta, and Masur).

And it positions the New Yorkers to respond with quickness and imagination to the unprecedented challenges facing the orchestras of the future. For all their fitful attention to the 20th century, the orchestras of Leipzig and Vienna remain primarily museums, and museums threatened in their curatorial approach by the firebrands of the early-music movement. The New York Philharmonic can play Cage and Carter and Adams, Gershwin and Bernstein and Sondheim, Ravel and Chavez and Shostakovich, as well as Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms.

One should rightly cherish the idiomatic authority of the great central European orchestras. But the future of orchestral performance, for better and for worse, is likely to lie in New York, with its equally venerable tradition of adaptability and change.

John Rockwell, for 19 years a music critic at the New York Times, is now that newspaper’s European cultural correspondent, based in Paris, as well as its principal reviewer of classical recordings. He was raised in San Francisco and attended Harvard College, the University of Munich, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in German cultural history. He is the author of All American Music: Composition in the Late 20th Century and Sinatra: An American Classic.