"Thanks, Fritz"

The normally staid members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra laid a dress suit on the floor of their dressing room and pinned a label to it reading: "Farewell, European Tour--Thanks, Fritz." Then several players trampled across the suit. Reason for the musicians' fury: an announcement made to the orchestra a few minutes earlier by Conductor Fritz Reiner. "For your own good," Reiner told them, he had canceled the "awful tour" planned for the orchestra this summer by ANTA and the State Department. The players responded with hisses and boos.

The scheduled tour would have taken ten to twelve weeks, would have included a two-week stand in Moscow, plus such stops as Milan, Athens, Berlin, Brussels and Paris, and probably Cairo, Baalbek, Santander and Warsaw. It was not only the longest European tour ever scheduled for a U.S. orchestra, but also would have been the Chicago Symphony's first overseas tour in its 68-year history. The only trouble with it, argued 7O-year-old Conductor Reiner, was that it would leave the orchestra "miserably worn out" for its regular Chicago season. The explanation did not satisfy the musicians, each of whom will lose, beyond a fine junket, an average $2,000 in extra salary. "It's easy for him to talk," said one orchestra member. "He makes $70,000 a year."

Reiner supporters pointed out that the real reason for the cancellation might be the conductor's health: there have been persistent rumors of heart trouble. Despite Reiner's assurance that he would try to set up a six-week European tour in the spring of 1960, Chicago papers set up a clamor: "For the first time," wrote Critic Roger Dettmer in the American, "Chicago might have gained a reputation for something else than Prohibition Era hoodlums, gang wars and civic graft. Fritz Reiner owes Chicago an explanation."

Next day another announcement merely served to twist the knife in Chicago's wounded pride: the canceled tour, said ANTA, would be taken over by the New York Philharmonic, under the leadership of Conductor Leonard Bernstein.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.