The Overture

"Sawallisch accepted today," they told him.

Muti assured them that he was thrilled things had worked out so well. But he did not appear all that animated. In fact, his mood turned bittersweet, as the reality of his departure seemed to hit home.

PHILADELPHIA WILL MISS RICCARDO MUTI when he’s gone. Let’s face it: He’s sexy. When he walks into Il Gallo Nero for lunch, women practically leap out of their seats to get a better look at him. When he came here, he brought a bit of badly needed glamour to Philadelphia, and it was immediately appropriated by the city’s image-makers. Millions of people who’ve never seen him perform nonetheless know him from that split second in the opening montage of Action News.

Riccardo Muti and Wolfgang Sawallisch seem as different as an aria and an oompah band. People say Sawallisch looks like an engineering professor. To all outward appearances he’s reserved, formal, serious — what the Germans call distanziert. He would never, ever show up for rehearsals in a turtleneck.

This contrast was always in the back of the minds of the search committee members. Style can’t be dismissed — it has a very real way of translating into money and money is the lifeblood of any American orchestra, a 19th-century invention that, in Philadelphia’s case, gets only 56 percent of its revenues from taking tickets at the door. Furthermore, the selection a new conductor comes at a crucial time in the Orchestra’s existence, perhaps the most crucial of the century. It is trying to raise $85 million to build a new concert hall at Broad and Spruce, and the donations, which total $21 million to date are shall we say, behind schedule.

But in the end, those concerns did have an impact on the search. "I think it’s great that it was a musical decision, not a public relations decision," says search committee member David Cramer. “We went for substance over style. Sawallisch is a man of such substance that that gives him all the style he needs."

WHEN A SEARCH COMMITTEE OF A DOZEN people knows something, it’s incredibly hard to keep it a secret. Nevertheless, for the next month, not a word got out about the agreement.

Then all hell broke loose.

On August 28th, deep inside the pages of The New York Times, the newspaper’s music critic, John Rockwell, announced, "It seems likely that shortly after
Labor Day, Wolfgang Sawa1lisch will be named to succeed Riccardo Muti as the orchestra’s music director." The piece ran under the headline “The Future of the Philadelphia and Germanism on he Rise.”