The Master Builder

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A conductor's job is to make harmony. He plays the most complicated musical instrument conceivable--a symphony orchestra. When he plays well, he has only to raise his hand, or nod his head, and strings bow in unison, brasses, flutes and kettledrums come in on cue.

That is the harmony the public hears. But there are other, behind-the-scene noises that go to make up that harmony. They are the clashes of musical temperament, the clanging demands of the cash register, the murmurings of directors and managers. A successful conductor has to make a harmony out of them too.

Last week a pent-up man eased his big frame into a desk chair in a plainly furnished 16th-floor ofnce in Manhattan's Steinway Building. The man was Dr. Artur Rodzinski, conductor of New York's renowned Philharmonic-Symphony. His small eyes, almost concealed behind thick glasses, took in his audience: seven tense members of the Philharmonic's executive committee.

They had offered to renew Rodzinski's contract for three years. There were a few strings attached, of course, but--. Well, what did he say? Grey-maned Artur Rodzinski had a lot to say. Speaking above the muted horns of the 57th Street traffic below, he said it for an hour and 20 minutes. A lot of it was on the state of the orchestra whose greatness he had restored. Improved, rather. But a lot more was about a man named Arthur Judson. His speech rose to a bitter, excited tirade that accused Arthur Judson, the handsome, leonine manager of the Philharmonic, of trying to run the orchestra and hamstringing the conductor. Mr. Judson, who was present, listened with interest.

When Rodzinski stopped, flushed and spent, there was half a minute of pregnant, almost audibly gestating silence. When the Philharmonic's board chairman finally spoke, it was as if a thin sheet of ice had been carefully cracked. And what, said he, had Mr. Rodzinski decided? "Give me 24 hours to think it over," said Rodzinski, and left for home.

There he discussed matters with Halina, his attractive wife--and with his conscience. (Conductor Rodzinski is a Buch-manite, and believes that he gets "guidance" in all his decisions.) Two hours later, he sent a telegram to the board chairman--and tipped off the press too. He had quit.

Babushka, We Go! Next morning, the story was on Manhattan front pages. (Not the tabloids, of course: there was no sex angle.) Waves of friends and reporters eddied through the Rodzinskis' Park Avenue apartment. They found the household as gaily confused as a Polish wedding party: the telephone and doorbell jingled merrily, Artur poured wine, vivacious Halina sliced Polish pastries.

From here & there over the country telegrams cried bravo. In the midst of all these exclamation points came a lone period: a terse message from the Philharmonic board, releasing Rodzinski not at the end of the season, as he had asked, but at once. His spirits only soared higher. Elatedly, he jounced his two-year-old son's big clown doll on his knee and told it the news; he grabbed his 75-year-old mother around the waist, waltzed her around the room and cried exultantly: "Babushka, now we are going to Chicago!"

What was he so happy about? Artur Rodzinski had cut himself off from the biggest job in U.S. music. Most conductors would give either arm to get his place --and he was quitting, to take over the run-down Chicago Symphony. The prestige-incrusted Philharmonic is the oldest (104 years) orchestra in the U.S., and, next to London's and Vienna's, the oldest in the world. It is also the most widely heard (13 million people listen to its Sunday CBS broadcasts).

Mission Accomplished. Under Toscanini the Philharmonic made musical history. But between his departure (1936) and Rodzinski's arrival from Cleveland (1943), the Philharmonic began to droop; neither Toscanini's hapless successor, John Barbirolli, nor a long parade of guest conductors could get it marching.

Today it is the most improved orchestra in the land. An arguable case can now be made (as it could not when Rodzinski took over) that the Philharmonic is the best orchestra in the U.S. The New York Herald Tribune's able Critic Virgil Thomson considers it "possibly the finest in the world."

The man who brought it to that pitch is a great orchestra builder. Rodzinski tore into the Philharmonic as a contractor would attack a run-down mansion. He ripped out the human deadwood, restored the shaky foundations of the strings, the brass. He drove his workmen furiously, taught them precision and sonority.

When he came, they were torn by hatred and jealousy. The new conductor invited his men to his home. Then Halina asked the wives over. One by one, Rodzinski had his men in for heart-to-heart chats, talked over their domestic harmony as well as their musical problems.

"Every violinist," he explains, "is a

Misha or Sasha who has been built up by his parents to be a Heifetz and sweep the world. In the second fiddle section he has to play tremolo--ta-ta-ta. A soloist never plays tremolo. How do I make them like the ta-ta-ta? By building their self-respect, by calling them to my room, by endless talks."

He had noticed that whenever a solo violinist played before the intermission, the violins played beautifully afterward. "It brings back their childhood memories of how they planned to be soloists. Orchestral work," he says gravely, "is maybe 75 percent psychology."

But when he had got his 100 men playing together, Artur Rodzinski could go no further. For he is not a great conductor. The incandescent genius of a Toscanini or a Koussevitsky--or even of a Stokowski, when Stokowski is on his best behavior--is simply not in Rodzinski. He has no gift for fanning fire and excitement into his players; he can get 100 men playing in harmony, but not over their heads. The guest conductors always got the best notices. On the podium, where he works without a baton but with "my ten batons," Rodzinski himself knows his place: "I never for a second am conscious of Mr. Rodzinski conducting the work. I like to think that the music goes from the orchestra to the audience without going through myself."

God Knows Why. What made him throw over the biggest job in his life? Rodzinski's answer was that God had told him to: "God leads me. I don't know how He does. Through so many little coincidences I know the Big Boss is working through me. He tells me so clearly, like a bell--this time it rang like Big Ben. Gosh, He is smart!"

The command had certainly not come from Mammon. From at least $85,000 a year in New York ($60,000 salary, the rest from records and radio), Rodzinski would be getting less than $50,000 in Chicago.

Wherever the command had come from, Rodzinski was also moved by a strong negative reason. New York is a big place, in a sense, but it cramped Rodzinski's style; the town was not big enough to hold both him and Arthur Judson. "You cannot play music with one ear on the box office," says Rodzinski. And the box office means Judson. He is not only the man behind the Philharmonic, but the man who conies nearest to controlling classical music in the U.S. The 30-man Philharmonic board, a collection of socialites, Wall Streeters, amateurs of the arts and a few musicians, stand greatly in awe of Judson. They respect his judgments; and they have bought and paid for them. And Arthur Judson would not let Rodzinski run the Philharmonic the way he wanted it run.

King Arthur. Music is not only one of the highest arts, it is also a pretty tough business. In the music business, austere, unapproachable Arthur Judson has the making or breaking of scores of careers. James Caesar Petrillo sets the minimum wages for U.S. musicians; it is Judson who often gets the maximum for the best ones. Judson was once a professional violinist, but he learned early that there is more money in managing artists than in being one. The money he gets from the Philharmonic is peanuts to him ($15,000 a year) but the prestige and power count. Today his Columbia Concerts Inc. grosses $5 million a year, keeps Lily Pons, Jascha Heifetz and $250-a-concert unknowns circulating through 540 cities & towns.* Judson, remote from lesser musicians, has close friends among his top clients, looks like a Lord Calvert whiskey Man of Distinction (and in fact is one).

All but a stubborn handful of U.S. conductors (some exceptions: Toscanini, Koussevitsky, and for the past year Rodzinski) are under contract to Judson. Conductors are glad to pay his stiff commissions (up to 20%) simply as unemployment insurance; if they need a new job they will need his help. There are only 24 major symphonies in the U.S., and Judson alone has some 50 conductors on his rolls.

The Philharmonic's board of busy New Yorkers looks to Judson and his assistant, Bruno Zirato (once secretary to Enrico Caruso), to handle such things as conductors' contracts. Judson & Zirato have done so much handling, say their critics, that in 20 years the Philharmonic has had 20 conductors--while in the same period Boston has had one, and Philadelphia two. This winter Rodzinski demanded a three-year agreement, and no strings.

"When I got it," he said, "it had no strings--but chains!" The contract gave him first choice of what pieces would be played during the season, but no control over what guest conductors played, no say in the choice of his guests and soloists unless the board and Judson chose to consult him. Rodzinski was fuming over these terms when Edward L. Ryerson, board chairman of Inland Steel Co. and head of the Chicago Symphony, called on him in Manhattan during the holidays.

When Rodzinski faced the Philharmonic executive committee last week, he knew he could have the Chicago job with the crook of a finger. So did the committee. He blew off at Arthur Judson, but if anyone thought Rodzinski was a white knight out to unseat music's Mr. Big, he was mistaken. "I don't hate Judson," Rodzinski said. "I've learned to eliminate hatred."

Holy Terror. Artur Rodzinski is a professional, in the strongest sense of the word: he is a professed musician. He regards music as his calling, and himself as consecrated to it. His devotion to his calling is selfless--though his selflessness is sometimes as hard to take as another man's selfishness.

He was born 53 years ago in the Dalmatian town of Spalato (now the Yugoslav town of Split) but spent his childhood in Lvov. His father was a Polish surgeon in the Austrian Army.

Artur was put at the piano at 6, became a page-turner at Lvov concerts at 15 and practiced furiously five and six hours a day. Once when his big brother Richard, trying to study medicine, shouted that he couldn't stand the noise, Artur slashed Richard's hand with a saber. "Our house," as he looks back on it, "was a madhouse." He became infatuated with the opera, joined the claque to get in free.

Rodzinski played the piano in a cabaret to support his first wife and their small son. It was a big break when the local opera director let him conduct Verdi's Ernani: "The smell of the scenery, the makeup, the wigs . . . you can't get it out of your system. Ask any opera man." In 1924 Leopold Stokowski, visiting Warsaw, met Rodzinski, later hired him as assistant conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. When Rodzinski reached the U.S., the first thing "Stokie" did was to run his fingers through Rodzinski's slick and parted hair, "to give me a conductor's look." He did much more in the next four years, and Rodzinski is "incredibly grateful." But their temperaments did not mix well. Stokowski and Arthur Judson helped line up the run-down Los Angeles Symphony for Rodzinski. No admirer of Stokowski's lushed-up style, he says that Stokowski "plays music sexually."

After four years in Los Angeles, Rodzinski quarreled with the manager and headed for Cleveland. Toscanini heard one of his Cleveland broadcasts, and recommended him for the 1937 Salzburg Festival. And when Toscanini agreed to head the projected NBC Symphony, he insisted that Rodzinski should recruit the players.

The Cleveland musicians came to respect but never to love their abusive foreman. There was no big farewell party when he left in 1943, and his welcome to

New York was open warfare: even before he hit town he had fired 14 players, including Concertmaster Mishel Piastre.

Change of Life. Not all the 100 men got to like their new master. But some did. When Halina came home from the hospital with a baby two years ago, a delegation from the Philharmonic serenaded her with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll* and reduced the Rodzinskis to tears. Some of the boys, trying to oblige the boss, for a while drank goat's milk that Rodzinski sent in from his farm at Stockbridge, Mass.

The New York musicians found him less of a ring-tailed Tartar than he had been in Cleveland. In the meantime, he had found Buchmanism. He went to see a doctor in Boston about a sore back, and was told that his trouble was spiritual. He never joined in the public confessions of his fellow evangels in Moral Re-Armament, but liked the way the Buch-manites had become "such happy people."

Shake on It. Last week happy Artur Rodzinski was a man without a contract. In New York the Philharmonic scurried around for a successor to him (a possible candidate: Minneapolis' dramatic Dimitri Mitropoulos). In Chicago, all Rodzinski had was a "handshake agreement." A handshake, however, was all that Chicago's late, beloved Dr. Frederick Stock needed for 38 years. And (until now) it had been enough for the outgoing conductor, earnest, uninspired Desire Defauw.

"Since 21 years," Rodzinski exulted last week, "Chicago is my goal. It is a healthy city, like a young colt, full of concentrated power. . . . New York will go down."

* Judson's firm and its big rival, National Concerts and Artists Corp. (which handles few conductors), do about 90% of the concert bookings for all U.S. singers, dancers and instrumentalists. Impresario Sol Hurok, better known because he is not so self-effacing as Judson, shares an office with N.C.A.C., works through it. * Which Wagner wrote as a surprise for wife Cosima on her 33rd birthday (Christmas Day, 1870). Wagner hired a group of musicians, led them as they played on the stairs for his bride of four months, their children (including 1 1/2-year-old Siegfried, for whom it was named) and Nietzsche, their house guest.

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