By Brian Bell

In April of 1918, the 83-year-old Henry Lee Higginson’s failing health and finances forced him to resign the stewardship of the Boston Symphony at probably the most critical moment of the orchestra’s history. With the conductor Karl Muck arrested, and a large portion of the musicians German or from the Austro-Hungarian empire, guidance after the turmoil of the First World War had to come from somewhere else.

In May of 1918, the Boston Symphony was incorporated, a board created from some of Boston’s most prominent families, with Frederick P. Cabot as President and Frederick Lowell as Treasurer. The search for a new conductor went about as poorly as can be imagined. Overtures to candidates were telegraphed to the press as the candidates themselves were reached.

A conductor was secured just six weeks before the season was to begin, a relative unknown, Henri Rabaud. The only problem was that Rabaud was in France, and with the war still raging, getting on a transatlantic ship was not in the cards. It fell to Pierre Monteux (under contract for French repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera) to audition players for the many openings created by departing German speaking players that autumn, and with no Rabaud, Monteux opened the season after a flu epidemic had closed the city for a month. Rabaud finally showed up in mid-November, and promptly departed at the end of March, leaving the newly installed board the task of finding another conductor in as many seasons. Fortunately Monteux was able to wrest himself from the Metropolitan Opera, but an even more serious issue came to the fore. Since Higginson’s resignation, the musician’s compensation did not begin to cover what was offered in earlier years, and the board’s ham-handedness in dealing with the players resulted in a strike before a Saturday night concert in March of 1920. Nearly half of the orchestra was fired on the spot. Monteux had to reorganize the orchestra for a second time. Thus concluded the second season without the sure and steady hand of Henry Lee Higginson.

Without Higginson to pay the bills, a board of trustees was regarded as the only realistic means of keeping an orchestra financially viable. This was how the Chicago Symphony was organized in 1891, and after more than 67 years as a self-governed cooperative (from 1842 to 1909), the musicians of the New York Philharmonic established a board of trustees. But this arrangement is far from ideal when it comes to artistic integrity. This past century is chock full of instances where musically clueless board members made decisions that are complete head scratchers, even without the benefit of hindsight. My personal favorite is the dismissal by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Leopold Stokowski after a quarter of a century of playing too much contemporary music. They haven’t had it so good since. The BSO board cannot claim complete credit for several steps forward in the past century. The Berkshire Music Festival was in its third season before the Boston Symphony was contacted, and only with Serge Koussevitzky’s insistence did the orchestra journey forth. The board had nothing to do with the creation of the Shed, as this was the purview of the Berkshire Symphonic Festival and Miss Gertrude Robinson Smith. Only in 1946 did the festival and the Shed become part of the Boston Symphony, when Smith and the Berkshire Festival generously donated the Shed and ceased existence. Then there is the matter of union representation. Higginson did not deal with the union during his lifetime because of the union’s insistence that the membership be drawn from their local, in other words, from Boston rather from anywhere in the world. Higginson made up for this lack of representation by compensating them far better than they would find elsewhere. Getting the Boston Symphony into the musician’s union was not an action by the trustees, indeed it was the death of BSO trustee Ernest Dane in April 1942 that allowed Serge Koussevitzky to spring into action. It paved the way for Koussevitzky’s personal negotiations with Union president Joseph Petrillo, and Petrillo’s altering of the union bylaws to allow for orchestras to hire from outside their locals, that got the BSO to sign on the dotted line.