Solomon's Wives

Said Shakespeare: "Will my daughter prove a good musician? I think she'll sooner prove a good soldier." But women have never believed him. In 1888 a Boston woman named Caroline Nichols formed the first all-woman symphony orchestra in the U. S. Her "Fadette Women's Orchestra" (named after the heroine of George Sand's novel La Petite Fadette) barnstormed up & down the U. S. on Lyceum courses and vaudeville circuits, grossed more than half a million dollars before disbanding in 1920. Since Maestra Nichols first started swinging her mutton-chop sleeves many a woman's orchestra has been heard in the land. Since few U. S. symphony orchestras hire women players, female fiddlers and cellists who are not good enough to be soloists have no other place to play.

Today there are at least twelve women's symphony orchestras* in the U. S. Oldest: the Los Angeles Women's Symphony which has been flouncing its fiddle-bows for more than 40 years. Finest: the Chicago Woman's Symphony, which last week got to the start of its 15th season.

Ten years ago the Chicago Woman's Symphony got itself a permanent woman conductor, a husky, blonde Swedish-American from Lindsborg, Kans., named Ebba Sundstrom, and went to work in earnest. But while its concerts swept by with an air of drawing-room dignity, its private meetings and rehearsals seethed with back-bitings, hair pullings. Socialite sponsors quarreled with each other; the women musicians quarreled with Conductress Sundstrom. Several times it looked as if the show could not go on. In 1937, with a deficit of $3,500 on their hands, the orchestra's board of directors elected socialite Mrs. Royden J. Keith president. Mrs. Keith forthwith fired Conductress Sundstrom.

Since then the Chicago Woman's Symphony has had one guest conductor after another, with results that critics found scarcely an improvement on the Sundstrom era. But last week it sported a brand-new conductor, hoped this one was for keeps. This time the conductor was a man: pint-sized, cadaverous Izler Solomon (TIME, March 27). Mr. Solomon started by firing six women, cowed five more into resigning, added 15 new players. Chicago wits nicknamed the orchestra "Solomon and his Wives," "87 Girls and a Man." But when Solomon led his black-dressed musical harem through Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, Chicago critics agreed that a man was just what the Woman's Symphony had needed all along.

In the audience, among the mink-coated sponsors, there were still some stormy echoes. President Mrs. Royden Keith, who had got Solomon his job, had resigned ("like a bolt from the blue," cooed her co-directors. "Perhaps she felt that the Board was not in sympathy with her policies"). So ex-President Keith had to sit downstairs in an ordinary orchestra seat, while platinum-blonde Acting-President Mrs. James George Shakman (whose Pabst Brewery money helps feed the orchestra's kitty) basked in a box. Beamed she: "We are all working in perfect harmony. . . . The girls are such fine musicians, they should be supported. Why, think of all the money that is spent in night clubs! . . ."

* Chamber orchestras, like Frederique Petrides' Orchestrette Classique, consist of few players, play no big symphonies. Ensembles like Phil Spitalny's all-girl orchestra play only light music.

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