The Overture

At the Inquirer, the outrage was palpable. The hometown paper had been scooped on one of the biggest cultural stories in a decade. Maybe, they reasoned, Rockwell found out from sources in Munich. Maybe he went with hearsay. It didn’t matter. The Inquirer editors were furious. After all, they had been promised by the Orchestra’s management that they would be the ones to break the story. Inquirer music critic Lesley Valdes was told to start squeezing her sources on the Orchestra board until she found someone to confirm the Times story. The next day, August 29, the Inquirer ran her story announcing that Sawallisch had indeed been offered the post. (And incorrectly stating in the lead that Sawallisch was the director of two opera companies, the State Opera and the Munich Opera. There is no Munich State Opera; Who’s Who in the World seems to have mistranslated the fact that at the Bavarian State Opera he holds both musical and administrative posts — the equivalent of being Riccardo Muti and Joseph Kluger.)

The premature announcement could have brought disaster to the Orchestra. As of yet, Sawallisch had signed nothing. If the deal had fallen through, it would have been embarrassing to go out and woo another conductor — he might well have felt like a second fiddle. Luckily, by this point only a few details remained to be nailed down. They were ironing out scheduling conflicts, for example.

And they were still talking money. The Orchestra won’t disclose Sawallisch’s salary, but in classical music circles it’s widely known that the music directors of the major American orchestras earn more than $500,000 a year. As for Sawallisch in particular, Baltimore Sun music critic Stephen Wigler says sources tell him $35,000 is "a good, safe figure" for Sawallisch’s weekly guest conducting fee. Multiply that by his 15-week contract, and the result – $525,000 — would be the bare minimum needed to get him here.

Internally, the announcement caused an even larger problem. The other members of the Orchestra board had no idea that Sawallisch was even being wooed, much less won. Although the search committee was entrusted with all responsibility, board members had expected the courtesy of voting on the final decision before it was announced to the public. Or at least hearing about it from Kluger before they read about it over coffee one morning. And the Orchestra’s musicians were also put off to find out this way. They, too, felt shut out.

But they also were thrilled with the news and to have played a part in it. The experiment in musical democracy had gone well, so that by the end the board members and the musicians on the search committee heaped praise on each other.

And the search had taken only five months. That was but a brief interlude compared to the year and a half it took the New York Philharmonic to find Kurt Masur, or the two years it took the Cleveland Orchestra to get Christoph von Dohnanyi. Notably, both those conductors are German. Although musicians themselves never talk this way, it has been said that German conductors are "hot" these days. At least it’s fair to say that, after a generation in which virtually no Germans rose to the podiums of America’s orchestras, suddenly they are much more visible.