Official Suggests Disbanding Vienna Philharmonic

The Vienna Philharmonic should disband rather than bow to pressure to admit women, the orchestra’s president said Thursday.

“This is a private club, and we won’t have our arms twisted,” Werner Resel is quoted by Reuters as saying on Austrian state radio.

But his suggestion “is absolutely ridiculous,” Austria’s leading feminist music sociologist told The Times from Vienna. Elena Ostleitner, a professor at the School of Music in Vienna, where 20 philharmonic members teach, dismissed Resel’s comments as childish.

“They are only threatening themselves,” she added. “They won’t have all their money if they disband.”

The philharmonic generates about $15 million a year in profits, which provides each of its members about $180,000 in annual earnings in addition to the civil-servant salaries they receive as members of the Vienna State Opera orchestra, according to a report in the Salzberger Nachricthen, a Salzburg newspaper.

The Vienna Philharmonic, considered one of the world’s finest, is scheduled to play U.S. concerts in March in Costa Mesa, under sponsorship of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, and in New York, where it will be sponsored by Carnegie Hall. Women’s groups have vowed to mount peaceful demonstrations at both venues in protest of the orchestra’s 155-year all-male tradition.

The Vienna Philharmonic, which operates as a private society, draws its 134 to 136 members exclusively from the 149-member State Opera Orchestra, and also has excluded members of racial and ethnic minorities.

“Resel is just saber rattling,” William Osborne, an American composer who is writing a book about the orchestra, told The Times. “The threat to dissolve the orchestra is aimed at the Austrian politicians, warning them to stay out of philharmonic affairs. But I don’t think any politician in Austria is going to take the threat seriously.”

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Resel’s comments came in response to a demand from the director of the Vienna State Opera that the opera orchestra begin admitting women.

“I decided in mid-January to [propose] admitting women immediately,” Ioan Holender said.

Pressure ratcheted up this week when Holender addressed a meeting of the opera orchestra members and emphasized the government’s expectation to have more women in the State Opera Orchestra besides its two longtime harpists.

Gottfried Martin, chairman of the State Opera orchestra’s employee committee, said Thursday that “Holender can’t enforce” the government’s demand “because he is only one vote in the audition jury and the jury has 25 members.”

Martin, a violist who has been in the opera orchestra since 1964 and in the philharmonic since 1974, maintained that orchestra membership “is not about women or men. It’s about the best musicians.

“Maybe there will be women members in the State Opera orchestra in a year,” he said. “Why not? The best players must get the jobs. How good the women will be, we don’t know until auditions.”

Asked how seriously he takes Resel’s remarks, Martin said: “I am not allowed to speak about that. You will have to ask him. My own opinion is that [dissolution of the philharmonic] is possible, absolutely possible.”

Resel could not be reached for comment.

Osborne, speaking from his home in Germany, discounted Resel’s warning as “crazy” and too draconian to believe.

“The philharmonic is literally a cultic fraternity, and when outsiders threaten to break their code of exclusivity and secrecy, that causes deep psychological stress to the men in this group,” Osborne said. “They start making these crazy statements.”

A story in the Austrian weekly magazine Profil, about Tuesday’s heated meeting of the State Opera orchestra reported “there was one genuine case of foaming at the mouth” during the debate on women’s admission.

Meanwhile, Ostleitner notes that all arguments against taking women into the State Opera orchestra “are anachronistic and anti-democratic.” The Austrian constitution “requires all public jobs must be independent of race, religion and gender,” she said.

Ostleitner said that in all Austrian orchestras, women constitute 16% of the membership. They make up 33% of the graduates of the University of Music, Vienna’s most prestigious music school, and more than 50% of the school’s student violin, viola and cello players.

She said the lack of women in the State Opera orchestra and the philharmonic “raises the question” of whether the faculty members at the university, who are drawn from the two orchestras, are giving equal treatment to their students.

“They teach the men and the women and say the women are not as good,” Ostleitner said. “How is that? Do they give the men better instruction?”

She said a study of orchestras worldwide shows that “the more prestigious the orchestra and the higher paid it is, the lower the percentage of women on average. This is true not just in Austria.”

The New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra, coincidentally, each have 33 women among 106 contract musicians.

The International Alliance for Women in Music is planning protests of the Vienna Philharmonic with the National Organization for Women when the orchestra plays the Orange County Performing Arts Center March 4-5 and at Carnegie Hall March 7-9.

In Washington, where the Alliance is based, board member Catherine Pickar said the current dust-up among the musicians is not surprising. “It’s clear that admitting women is not an easy decision for the philharmonic to make.”

Pickar said the orchestra has a long history of “stalling tactics.” She noted that as long ago as 1981, discussions about women’s admission had made headlines. One, on Feb. 21, 1981, in Die Presse, an Austrian daily, said: “Women and Music; the Door Is Open: A Bastion of Male Rule Is About to Fall.”

“Now 16 years later, we’re still waiting,” Pickar said. “The philharmonic has quite a history of skirting the issue, no pun intended.”