The Overture

How the Philadelphia Orchestra wooed and won its new music director.

Kluger got busy faxing a message to Sawallisch, who was off in Tokyo, to set up a visit to Munich. Meanwhile, the answer to item number one came within a few weeks. The 104 members of the Orchestra were asked to rate 27 guest conductors on an excellent/good/fair/poor scale. Of the 90-odd replies, Wolfgang Sawallisch received 69 excellents.

The next highest contender got 34.

ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 4TH, KLUGER, Christy and Burtis grabbed the red-eye to London. They were to interview three of the five men on the short list: Bernard Haitink, Simon Rattle and finally Sawallisch. They landed in London at 7 a.m. and by 10 they were having coffee with Haitink. They already knew he wasn’t interested in the job, but they used the occasion to invite him to be a guest conductor sometime in the future. It was left at sometime.

At 12:30 they met Rattle at the Covent Garden opera hall. They caught him coming out of a rehearsal, and they sat down together in the barren conductor’s room for half an hour. It was an amiable chat, Rattle telling them he thought Philadelphia was one of the three or four great orchestras that he hoped to lead someday, but meanwhile he was busy building a fine orchestra in Binningham and thought he wasn’t ready. After all, he was only 35. He did agree, however, to consider a guest conducting stint in 1993-94, perhaps due to the prodding of Christy, who told him the world’s great orchestras don’t like to hire people who haven’t been coming to visit.

As they got up to leave, Rattle excused himself for a moment and went into his office with his manager, Martin Campbell-White. After a few minutes behind closed doors, Campbell-White reappeared. Having no idea who was on the short list, or where they were headed the next day, he said: "I don’t know if I should tell you this or not, but what he told me in there is he thinks the person the Philadelphia Orchestra should hire is Wolfgang Sawallisch. He suspects you’re going to see him, and good luck."

The next day, the 6th, was a lovely late spring day in Munich. Kluger, Christy and Burtis sat down for lunch with Sawallisch at the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, right next to the opera house where Sawallisch has been conductor for 20 years. The three Philadelphians told the conductor that they wanted him. Burtis himself made the formal job offer. Sawallisch received their compliments in silence. He seemed surprised that an offer was so soon in coming — bitte, even before the soup! Then he said he’d been a music director of either an orchestra or an opera for more than four decades, and that his wife and he had been looking forward to a much less demanding schedule. Philadelphia was a wonderful opportunity, but it was in conflict with their plans to slow down.