Philharmonic’s Pride Comes Into Play

“America is a pluralistic society,” says conductor Daniel Barenboim. “The Vienna Philharmonic is exactly the opposite.”

Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony and guest conductor of the philharmonic’s concerts in Costa Mesa and New York this week, was commenting Monday on the controversy about the Vienna musicians’ refusing until last week to admit women into its ranks as full-fledged members.

“Americans are proud of the pluralistic society they live in, and justly so,” said Barenboim, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 and now holds Israeli citizenship.

During an interview at his hotel, he continued: “When you have not only blacks and whites, you have Hispanics and Asians, you have to integrate them, and it is a wonderful pride that I feel in America about this.”

During his own career as a conductor, Barenboim said, “I have engaged I don’t know how many women in Paris and in Chicago and other orchestras I have been involved with in the last 25 years, and the level of the orchestras would have been considerably less good if we had not taken women.”

In the United States, Barenboim finds “a respect for everything that is different, a mutual respect from one individual to another, which is so important and absolutely necessary, and that also goes therefore to the mentalities of the orchestras. The orchestra is very much a society in microcosm.

“The Vienna Philharmonic is exactly the opposite. There’s no pluralism. It is [maybe] the only orchestra where the new members are very often pupils of present members. And it goes from one generation to another, and it is precisely--as is the pride in a pluralistic America--the pride of it going from generation to generation that is so important to them.

“I don’t justify it. It’s not for me either to endorse or to criticize. But it is part of the story which people outside aren’t knowledgeable enough or sensitive enough about. These issues are usually more complex than they appear. It’s very easy to take something out of context and make headlines.”

The Viennese, he said, feel “a sense of duty to transmit their way of playing and their way of producing sound from generation to generation. That should not change. Whether women sit in it or whether foreigners, whatever it is, this should not change. The criterion has to be that to be eligible for the Vienna Philharmonic, a player has to fit in the sound world that they have.

“Yes, that sound is unique. There are very few orchestras that have a sound world of their own. The Vienna Philharmonic is one of them, and this is treasurable. Otherwise, all the orchestras will sound the same in the world, and they shouldn’t.

“In some music, their sound is absolutely unique,” Barenboim continued. “The way they play Mozart symphonies, there’s no orchestra in the world that [can duplicate it]. I’m not saying, of course, that other orchestras can’t play Mozart symphonies on a very high level. But this level of homogeneity comes to them naturally, not from discipline from either the conductor or the concertmaster, but because that’s the way they play.

“They all come from the same school. They all hold the violin in the same way. They hold the bow the same way, and they produce a very homogeneous sound, but of course a good and lively sound, no question.”

Still, he said, “Where do you draw the line? This is the whole problem of Germany before the Nazis and during the Nazis. The fact that they had a culture of their own and that they took it so seriously and that they thought they were the only ones that had the key to depths of knowledge and depths of feeling, I can live with all of that. It’s arrogant, but I can live with that.

“Where I stop, because it becomes fascistic, is when they say only Germans are able to do that, and this is where, of course, it is wrong. But this is the difference, and it’s very difficult to separate the things, but in fact they must be separated. Otherwise you become a fascistic society.”

(In fact there are two Americans in the orchestra: trombonist William McElheney and tuba player Ronald Pisarkiewicz.)

“The question of women in the orchestra is a subject that has occupied the Vienna Philharmonic members for many years. It is a very complex subject.

“The social benefits in Austria are totally different than in America. As a pregnant woman, you have so many rights, which you don’t have in America, and these rights go in many ways against the basic rules of this orchestra.”

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Until Austrian labor laws were amended recently to be more equal, he noted, a woman could take upward of two years’ maternity leave and be guaranteed her job would be secure. A man who had been sick and hadn’t played for a year had to either leave the orchestra or audition again.

“I’m sure there are people who would rather not have women in the orchestra, but I’m sure that happens in the States too; only the climate is different. And don’t forget the physiognomy of American orchestras is changing constantly.”

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Where female players in the top U.S. orchestras are still in the minority, Barenboim said, “I think in 20 years from now the great majority of the members of many American orchestras will be female, and probably of Asian extraction.”

Barenboim said he has “no reservations about working with the orchestra. No. No. No. I’ve worked in Germany so long. No, absolutely not.

“So there’s no question for me about it. That is part of the whole process of development, which will come, and obviously they have accepted that.”

As far as ethnic and racial minorities also being excluded from the orchestra, Barenboim said, “If that is so, I haven’t been aware of it.”

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Similarly, he said he hasn’t noticed any musical fallout from the recent controversy.

“I must say I have found them always extremely open and attentive. Of course, it helps very much that we speak the same musical language. In other words, I have a great admiration for their tradition and their way of playing, and they know that and feel that. I don’t know how they would react with somebody else who had a totally different aesthetic.

“There are certain things that are very important to them, which is not just sound. It’s a sense of phrasing, a sense of musical structure. If a conductor takes them in directions which go against the structure of the music to do exaggerations, or whatever it might be, there is something inside them which would rebel.

“It is my duty as a conductor to try first of all to understand what comes out of the [score]. It is my duty as a conductor to have as much knowledge as I can acquire about sound and putting together sound, and it is my duty as a conductor to make a difference between playing notes and making music. And making music means when all those different sounds are in constant relationship to each other and help bring about an organic whole.”

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You don’t, he said, “open a drawer and the sound is there. The sound of a Bruckner symphony or any other piece does not really live in our physical world. The Bruckner Ninth existed in Bruckner’s brain when he imagined it and was subject only to whatever physical or metaphysical laws that he imagined since it was in his own brain.

“And then what happened? Then there was a system of notation invented with black spots on white paper, and this is what we call the ‘Bruckner Ninth.’ But this is not the Bruckner Ninth. This is a notation system that gives us an idea of what he might have wanted.

“Every time an orchestra somewhere around the world plays the Bruckner Ninth, conducted by whoever is conducting, the sounds of the Bruckner Ninth are literally brought into our physical world. . . . When you have an orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic, whose language is that music, that gives you a very wonderful ground to start from.

“But I don’t think one can really, musically speaking, say is it my Bruckner or somebody else’s. If I go against the indications of the printed page in a haphazard or in a capricious way, then obviously it will be my Bruckner Ninth--but it can only be in a derogative sense.”

* Daniel Barenboim will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in music by Beethoven and Strauss tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. The concert, sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, is sold out. (714) 553-2422.