Maestro Zinger

By Thomas A. Sancton/Paris

Eventually, the whole thing deteriorated to the point that the antagonists were calling each other names -- actual proper names. "I don't want to live under another Kim Il Sung," said Myung-Whun Chung, referring to Hugues Gall, the official who last week forced Chung out of his job as musical director of the Paris Opera. For his part, Gall said of Chung, "He's a good conductor, but he's no Seiji Ozawa or Daniel Barenboim." And "Mr. Chung is neither Mother Teresa nor Florence Nightingale."

What do the late North Korean autocrat and the founder of modern nursing have to do with an opera house? The French take their civilization very, very seriously, so Parisian cultural conflicts tend to become impassioned and bizarre. In America it's the fight between baseball players and owners that fills the front pages; in France it's the death struggle between a conductor and his boss.

No artistic battlefield has seen more bloodshed over the past few years than the Paris Opera. An earlier victim, in fact, was Barenboim himself. In 1986 the celebrated pianist and conductor was appointed by the then Cultural Minister to be the opera's musical director, two years before the company would move into its lavish, modernistic new quarters at the Place de la Bastille. But French President Francois Mitterrand had asked his friend Pierre Berge, who runs the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, to be the head of the opera, and Berge thought Barenboim's reported $1.1 million-a-year salary was too rich. Amid great turmoil and acrimony, Berge fired Barenboim in 1989. Then Berge hired Chung, a little-known 36-year-old from South Korea by way of Juilliard.

In the time since, Chung has proved to be both a gifted conductor and a skillful politician. Despite his unfamiliarity with much of the standard opera repertoire, he managed to pull together a fractious band of musicians and, even by Gall's reckoning, bring it into the "first rank" of lyric orchestras. "Our five years under Chung put us at a world-recognized level," says violinist John Cohen. "He's a magnificent leader."

The reasons why this "magnificent leader" is now out of work are the usual ones: money and ego. Berge renegotiated Chung's contract last year and gave the maestro a pay package that started at $660,000 a year and would have risen to $1.5 million by the year 2000 -- breathtaking sums for an organization that was losing more than $9 million a year. When he made the agreement, Berge knew that a new government would be coming in and that he himself would most likely lose his job; cynics believe his generosity to Chung was a way of handing the new administrators a problem.

Right on cue, Berge was let go, and Gall, who had run Geneva's Grand Theatre for 14 years, was appointed to take his place starting in August 1995. Gall didn't wait, however, before getting involved. He labeled the compensation for Chung "extravagant, out of all proportion to his value on the world market." Moreover -- and this is where the ego part comes in -- Gall said he wanted control over all artistic decisions. "I can't cohabit with someone else who has the power," he says. "We need a director at the center with full authority."

After months of negotiations, Gall in late June offered Chung a take-it-or- leave-it arrangement that would have frozen his pay and taken away his power of veto over choices of repertoire, performers, directors and so forth. Chung rejected it. On Aug. 12, the opera abrogated his contract and engaged Australian conductor Simone Young to lead the fall premiere of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Chung went to court, and a judge ordered the opera to restore him to his post pending a decision about his contract -- or face a $10,000-a-day fine. The option taken by the opera company was illustrated in the most forceful way: when Chung showed up for rehearsals the day after the decision, acting executive director Jean-Paul Cluzel physically barred him from entering the rehearsal room. Cluzel had the locks changed on Chung's office for good measure.

Finally, last week, Chung forced a resolution with a dramatic gesture of his own. He announced that he was willing to forgo his entire salary if he could remain as musical director until 2000. "I was sick and tired of them claiming this was all about money," he says. "I told them they can keep their dirty money. I just wanted a minimum of respect." The opera declined this offer, but the next day a deal was made. Chung would conduct the season premiere and then leave his position. He would be paid the full indemnities stipulated by his contract -- estimated at $1.3 million.

Gall says he intends to retire the title of musical director and replace Chung with a "permanent conductor." But who will believe that under Gall, permanent means permanent?