Round and Round They Go

By Michael Walsh

Too few top conductors fill too many jobs, again and again

After such a long and bitter dispute, the climax was no surprise. American Conductor Lorin Maazel abruptly abrogated his contract as director of the Vienna State Opera and resigned effective Sept. 1. Said Austrian Minister of Education and Art Helmut Zilk, who oversees the opera company and had clashed repeatedly with Maazel during the conductor's 1 1/2-year tenure: "I don't want to say anything bad about him, but he has no manners and is a megalomaniac." Observed Maazel: "Every three weeks we have another unprofessional statement from a minister who only goes to football games. I told him to take the bloody job."

With his announcement last month, Maazel, 54, became the latest in a long line of conductorial fugitives from Vienna's legendary operatic snake pit. Among the others: Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Herbert von Karajan, all of whom found the Viennese insatiable thirst for intrigue intolerable. But Maazel's departure also marks a new round in a process that seems to have become habitual among international maestros today: they trade top jobs and collect new ones like baseball cards.

Originally, Maazel had declared that he would not return to Vienna after his contract expired in 1986. With what appeared to be almost gleeful haste, the opera company signed his replacement, precipitating his departure rapido: Italian Claudio Abbado, 50, who finished as music director at Milan's La Scala opera house last month. (Maazel's purely administrative duties have fallen to new General Director Claus Helmut Drese.) To fill Abbado's prized post, La Scala tapped another Italian, Philadelphia Orchestra Conductor Riccardo Muti, 42. In 1982 Muti rejected a similar offer from London's Royal Opera House to follow Sir Colin Davis there in 1986. Apparently La Scala's was an offer he could not refuse, although he will continue to lead the Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Maazel last week was named music consultant to the Pittsburgh Symphony. But wait. Hasn't Andre Previn been music director there for the past eight years? Yes, but three weeks ago, Previn, 55, accepted an offer from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to succeed Carlo Maria Giulini as its music director beginning in January 1986. Previn's departure from Pittsburgh was sealed when he lost an ugly power struggle with Managing Director Marshall Turkin over the orchestra's artistic direction, a rupture that Previn declines to confirm. "To lose a job is one thing, but to keep your manners has to be done at the same time," says the Berlin-born, California-bred Previn, who previously led the London Symphony for eleven years. He was promptly snapped up by Ernest Fleischmann, the executive director in Los Angeles, who when manager of the London Symphony first brought Previn there as a guest conductor. Deadpans Fleischmann of his happy timing: "It was great luck."

Maazel says he is not a candidate to replace Previn permanently, but will merely advise the Pittsburgh orchestra on programming and hiring conductors and soloists. "This is just to tide them over," says the conductor, who grew up in Pittsburgh and played violin in the orchestra for two seasons. He says he wants to concentrate on composing and guest conducting. "I have been in music administration for 20 years in Berlin, Cleveland and Vienna. This is the first time in two decades when I can just make music." In case he changes his mind, Maazel has commitments to lead several Pittsburgh Symphony concerts over the next two years, including highly visible engagements at New York City's Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

What all these changes add up to is a game of musical chairs, but with a reverse twist: there are too many chairs and not enough players. At any given moment, the number of major conductors in the world is insufficient to accommodate the opera companies and orchestras that are clamoring for their services. The top maestros jump from podium to podium to fill the gaps and often hold more than one job at a time; Abbado, for example, also conducts the London Symphony, and next year Previn will add London's Royal Philharmonic to his duties.

In the past two years, the orchestras of Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, Houston, San Francisco and Utah have filled conductorial vacancies, and at least seven other U.S. ensembles are searching. Cleveland, Detroit and San Francisco were forced to reach outside the narrow circle of superstars for Christoph von Dohnanyi, Gunther Herbig and Herbert Blomstedt, Europeans relatively obscure to U.S. audiences. Others have breached the prejudice against Americans, as Baltimore did in hiring David Zinman.

Most administrators agree that the current crop of leading conductors is too small and the temptations of jet travel too great for the widespread return of the old-fashioned music director like George Szell in Cleveland or Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia. Says Gideon Toeplitz, executive director of the Houston Symphony: "If Ormandy were young today, nobody would expect him to stay 40 years with his orchestra." The globetrotting, if-this-is-Tuesday types are not about to be tied down. "It's easy to stand up and beat time and have fancy choreography and a good tailor, but that does not make a good conductor," observes Fleischmann. "What we need is magicians capable of performing mysterious acts with an orchestra." Alas, the favored trick today seems to be the vanishing act.

--By Michael Walsh.

Reported by Gertraud Lessing/Vienna, with other bureaus

With reporting by Gertraud Lessing