except that upon one of them is annually bestowed the brief glory of conducting. But even when these eight weeks are ended, the lesser players of the orchestra find that they still have a famine period to reckon with before the rehearsals are taken up again in the autumn. There remains for them the “summer snap,” the orchestra of the summer hotel, in which four or five players whom the proprietor proudly advertises as “from the Boston Symphony Orchestra”’ provide agreeable diversion for the guests. The matter is harmless and unimportant, except for the specter of the Musical Union that it has evoked, and that has in recent years increasingly troubled the serenity of the orchestral brotherhood, touching chiefly the interests of the lesser men. Mr. Higginson’s position as to the union is very positive. He thinks that unions are an excellent thing; he believes in them—but not in the “closed shop.” He is willing that his men should belong to the union, but not that they should compel the unwilling to do so. He has told the players frankly—and they all know that he means it—that if the union undertakes to dictate in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or to interfere in any way with its management or the freedom of its members, he will pay off all hands and disband the organization on the spot. Recent events, resulting in the resignation from the Union of all of the Symphony men who belonged to it, seem to have relieved this situation.
Within a couple of years the members of the orchestra have had still another resource to look forward to. in time of need, in the shape of a pension fund established in imitation of the general practice in Germany. Such a fund in such an organization has certain features of doubtful expediency, into which it is not necessary here to inquire too closely; but it has also its obviously advantageous ones. And as it has also the sanction and support of the founder, there is good reason to hope for its increase in usefulness.
It might be supposed that, after twenty-three years, everybody who knows the orchestra knows that back of it stands Henry L. Higginson. Yet it was only a few months ago that its manager, Mr. Charles A. Ellis, who with his assistant, Mr. F. R. Comee, has guided its fortunes skilfully and in the spirit of Mr. Higginson’s purpose from the very beginning, received a note from an unknown but ardent admirer of the orchestra, who thought that it was such a very good thing, such a great public benefit, that some rich man like Mr. Carnegie ought to back it up and support it.
Mr. Higginson knew, when he embarked upon the scheme of his orchestra, that it would cost him heavily; and it has. He recalls with a certain grim amusement a conversation with a local musical entrepreneur who anxiously tried to dissuade him from it as from a mad folly. “Why, Mr. Higginson, you will never be able to make it pay,” was the final argument. And it never has “paid.” He estimated that it would burden him, on the average, $20,000 a year, which it has—and more. Mr. Higginson has never taken the public into his confidence as to the orchestra’s finances, but it may be said on the highest authority that it has cost him as much as $52,000 in a year; that in one season it paid its expenses, and only one, though in another it lacked only $2000 of doing so; and that last season, after several more prosperous ones, the deficit mounted up again to $40,000. It may also be said, on the highest authority, that Mr. Higginson has made provision for the continuation of the orchestra on the same lines after his death. Mr. Higginson is not a wealthy man in the modern acceptation of that term, and what the orchestra costs him in money comes out of his annual earnings. What it has cost him in time and trouble, in annoyances great and small, in perplexities, in demands upon his patience, wisdom, and sense of justice, no man may know. He is always accessible to his players, in his busy hours and out of them, and they seldom have shown any hesitation in coming to him as to an unfailing friend, counselor, and guide, or as to a tribune of last resort.
According to the founder, however, the establishment of a Boston Symphony Orchestra is a perfectly simple thing. “All you have to do is to set the game going and back it up. It does n’t require anything more than that.” It is not necessary to talk about it; and as for New York’s annual chatter about a “permanent orchestra,” so long destitute of results, he says there are plenty of men in New York who could start and maintain such an orchestra as his as well as he could, if they wanted to. The essential, besides wisdom,
