the individuals. The terms under which the Boston Symphony players are engaged are very various. The rank and file are for the most part under annual contracts for a season of twenty-nine weeks (of which twenty-four are devoted to the Boston concerts, and five to traveling), at a salary of from thirty or thirty-five dollars a week upward. The chief players—the first violin, or concert-master, and some of the other best violinists, the first cellist, the first performers on the other instruments—receive more, up to an annual salary of five thousand dollars, with engagements of several years. Some receive weekly salaries of various amounts guaranteed for various periods of time beyond the regular season, sometimes as long as forty-five weeks in the year. The conductors have received salaries of about eight or ten thousand dollars.
The contract that each member has to sign requires that he shall have “a good and suitable instrument and keep it, at his own expense, constantly in the best condition”; that he shall “support to the best of his ability all rehearsals and performances,” and “play to the best of his ability as a musician.” He shall comply with the instructions of the conductor as to music, deportment, and order; shall play at no balls and at no other orchestral concerts or rehearsals in Boston or elsewhere without permission. One proviso that seems a little curious at first is that “the conductor shall have full power to regulate the pitch of the orchestra,” until it is remembered that in case of some of the wood and brass instruments a change of the standard of pitch would mean the procurement of new instruments. There are fines imposed for lateness at rehearsals: five dollars for a period not exceeding fifteen minutes, ten dollars for a longer one, and ten dollars for absence, unless there is sufficient excuse. There are certain penalties and indemnities which Mr. Higginson is entitled to claim on the non-fulfilment of contract stipulations. It may be remarked, however, that the contract is much more severe than Mr. Higginson is; and the pound of flesh is rarely exacted, and then only for the sake of discipline.
Such a thing could never happen, for instance, as happened to Dr. Richard Strauss in New York last spring, when he was rehearsing his enormously difficult “Symphonia Domestica” for the eighth or ninth time with an orchestra supposed to have some claims to at least a season’s permanency. An unlucky horn-player made a mistake that the composer had repeatedly corrected at previous meetings, and when Dr. Strauss angrily threw down his baton and reproached the musician for inattention and neglect of his directions, the culprit replied: “But, Herr Doctor, I have n’t been here before—I ’m a substitute!’ Playing in the theater orchestras is forbidden; but if, in a few occasional instances, it 1s tolerated, it is because a special necessity is recognized. Many of the players teach; but few beyond the violinists and cellists have that resource open to them. The purpose is—and it is effectively realized—to make the orchestra, during the season, a united body of men with but one main object in view and free to devote themselves to it—following a single director’s counsels of perfection, with as little as possible to weary them or to distract them from it. How high an ideal that is, and how few of the great orchestras of the world make any pretense of reaching it, is perhaps not often realized. Mr. Thomas’s Chicago orchestra is one of them. The orchestra of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is one. Are there many others? The Gewandhaus players in Leipsic, those of the Vienna Philharmonic, and those of the great Paris orchestras have their operatic and other duties; the members of the Berlin Philharmonic are subject to the wear and tear of almost daily popular concerts. Mr. Henry J. Wood has just fought his way through almost bloody strife to the point of forbidding the men of his Queen’s Hall orchestra in London to rehearse through substitutes. The orchestras that are so entirely devoted to the sole object of their orchestral concerts are indeed rare.
But twenty-nine weeks’ salary is not enough to support the rank and file of Mr. Higginson’s men throughout the year. Hence arose the “Pops” of the early Boston summer-time. Not chiefly to supply his fellow-citizens with fantasies on “Carmen,” Strauss waltzes, and sarsaparilla, but to lengthen the period of his men’s earnings, Mr. Higginson, twenty years ago, began to give a series of concerts of light music in the Music Hall, lasting for eight weeks after the close of the regular season. The leading players take no part in these,
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