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Sympathetic Barbers. In its growth, the symphony orchestra is now a voice that is more distinctively American than any other in serious music. Its repertory is top-heavy with German works (Beethoven is played nearly twice as much as Tchaikovsky, the most popular non-Germanic composer), and it has no hampering patriotic duties to the national culture: it plays very little music writ ten in its own land. But its hybrid birth and its international spirit spare it the national mannerisms that mark most European orchestras, and it plays with a freshness and flexibility that make each orchestra unique.
World War II doubly decimated European orchestras. Battles and the bombing of cities savagely diminished a whole generation of musicians, and in places under Axis control, Jewish musicians disappeared into exile or concentration camps.
Of those who survived, many got to the U.S. — a whole new wave of emigre musicians who enriched American musical life.
While many of their colleagues at home grew flaccid in chairs guaranteed them by state contracts, in the U.S. they found a spirited and highly competitive atmosphere. They also found a rising climate of orchestral prestige.
The American conductor — a temperamental twin to the operatic tenor — has shared the orchestra's celebrated status; some, indeed, have defined it. In Europe, many a conductor has become a stoop-shouldered civil servant or a traveling virtuosity show. But in the U.S., a first-rank conductor can settle down comfortably, find a sympathetic barber to whom it seems reasonable that he must look even better from the back than he does from the front, and seize the authority to make music in his own style.
If all goes well, several years in the same town give him a closeness to his orchestra that he develops into musical accomplishment — as Paul Paray did in ten years with Detroit, and as Robert Whitney is doing in Louisville, Izler Solomon in Indianapolis and Hans Schwieger in Kansas City. Occasionally, as with Szell in Cleveland, the orchestra's sponsors share the maestro's boundless aspirations, and stand back while he takes the orchestra as far from home as its excellence makes it welcome.
He can count on a high place in local society, and, unless he is careful, cuddling up with the dragons and dragon ladies who run so many orchestras can easily do in his music while it velvets his life. In Seattle, Conductor Milton Katims has gently urged his salary up to $37,500 a year, about as much as the mayor and the school superintendent earn together, and nearly 20 times the pay of the men who fill the back chairs of his orchestra. In San Francisco, conductors come and go at the whim of J. D. Zellerbach and his fearful board, and in Los Angeles, a conductor who does not take tea with "Buffie" Chandler is likely to find himself conducting in Weehawken.