The Lost Accord
Colorful, glamorous Leopold Stokowski, who came to conduct the orchestra in 1912, probably was more of a force than any other in stealing Philadelphia audiences away from opera. After he opened here in 1916 and then went on to take New York by storm with a premiere of Mahler’s 8th Symphony, which requires an expanded orchestra and a cast of a thousand singers, he could do no wrong — until the unfortunate outside financial deals with recording and movie companies that finally led to his break with Philadelphia in 1936. He could scold audiences, stalk off the stage, replay offensive passages in contemporary music when the ladies at the Friday afternoon concerts complained, and they ate it up.
But things were different in those clays. Men with personal fortunes would dole out magnificent sums of money for culture, even if they didn’t care to consume the product themselves. Income taxes have reduced private wealth of that magnitude and Philadelphia, unlike Chicago, for instance, where the meat packing industry has taken up where the McCormick and Swift families themselves left off, has never been able to interest corporate business in footing the bill for music.
MEN AT WORK. Labor relations have changed too. Musicians who worked with Stokowski remember his capricious brand of discipline, "If you looked at him funny at a rehearsal, you could look for another job the next year," one man remembers. Stoki was supposed to have dismissed 35 men at one crack (some were later reinstated) for having attended a union meeting where pensions were being discussed. A retired violinist, Henry Schmidt, who played under Stokowski, says, "This heritage of abuse and Jack of security, as well as unreasonable pressures from management led to increasingly more demands from musicians and increasingly more voluminous contracts to cope with a1l the details."
This fall anyone who tried to keep up with the intricacies of the orchestra’s labor dispute had a hard time. What they’ve seen and heard bas been a cacophony of contradictions and counter-accusations. For a long time, the parties involved couldn’t even agree on what to disagree about. The union and orchestra men themselves would pour out a recital of grievances that could last for hours. Wanton Balis, speaking for the Association in typical no-nonsense fashion said, "It’s very simple, the issue is money." Fred Batchelder, a bass player with the orchestra for 15 years, speaking for the men in typical .impassioned Jashion said, "The main issue was not and never has been money. It’s work load."
These were the two major themes introduced and repeated with variations over the next months: Pay and work load. But you also had to listen for minor themes like exclusivity and favoritism. Even more important, you had to pick up the accompanying chords of mutual distrust, antagonism and disappointment. These were never stated clearly, but they underlie and color every issue.
