Orchestras: Revival at the Museum

New York was hardly a musical wasteland in 1842, when the city's Philharmonic Society gave its first public concert on Dec. 7. A large middle-class German population had brought cultivated tastes from abroad; the concert rooms and theaters were filled with touring opera companies on long visits, and there was an impressive roster of homegrown organizations. Indeed, two other Philharmonic societies had already come and gone. The first, founded in 1799, took part in George Washington's memorial services; it lasted until 1816; the second, put together in 1824, succumbed three years later, largely because a craze for masquerade balls had tied up most of the available halls.

Philharmonic No. 3 felt free to mark its debut with a novelty-packed program: the Beethoven Fifth (which New York had heard only once before), arias from Weber and Rossini operas, and assorted works by composers who ranked among the innovators of the time, including Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Johann Wenzeslaus Kalliwoda. Founded by the eccentric but talented violinist-conductor Ureli Corelli Hill, the orchestra gave only three concerts its first year. It charged the astronomical price of $1.11 a ticket (the going price for 20 Ibs. of beef). Unlike the Vienna Philharmonic, though, which was founded the same year and forced to suspend operations several times in the 1850s, the New York Philharmonic stayed solvent.

Dazzle & Boom. Last week Conductor Leonard Bernstein led the orchestra in a birthday celebration that was an almost exact copy of the first-night program. But little else was the same. At the birthday concert, the distinguished musicians in the black-tie audience far outnumbered those on the stage (among them: Composer Aaron Copland, Conductor Leopold Stokowski, Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Violinist Isaac Stern and retired Tenor Lauritz Melchior). Ticket prices were set as high as $35 (regular concerts currently bring an $8.50 top). The orchestra, which merged in 1928 with the rival New York Symphony and became the Philharmonic-Symphony Society, has doubled from the original 53 players, to 106. What was once a daring program, with its mixture of orchestral works, chamber music and arias, now seemed merely quaint. The razzle-dazzle of Kalliwoda's Overture in D Minor sounded tame to ears familiar with Wagner, Mahler and The Rite of Spring.

Yet there was also much that had not changed. In the 1850s, American composers filled the press with complaints that the Philharmonic was bypassing native creativity in favor of established European classics. The composers are still complaining. And last week Bernstein explained why. The "natural growth and decline" of symphonic literature, he said, "has left us with a great repertory of masterpieces from the 18th and 19th centuries, but only a few from the 20th. The orchestra today is booming as never before, but as a museum. The conductor today is a kind of curator."