Last of the Old-School Maestros

Eugene Ormandy ends a great one-man epoch in Philadelphia

This coming Saturday will be like any other day for Eugene Ormandy. He will study scores, do some arm exercises, take a nap. After dinner he will walk the few blocks from his elegant Barclay Hotel apartment to Philadelphia's venerable Academy of Music. There he will conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in a typical Ormandy program, the First Symphonies of Shostakovich and Mahler. No matter what tributes or ceremonies may be offered, he will try to step down from the podium as usual with a minimum of sentiment and fuss.

So will end one of the longest and most distinguished one-man epochs in U.S. orchestral history. At 80, Ormandy will have conducted his last regular-season concert as music director of the ensemble he has led so successfully for 44 years. "The time has come," he says.

But if Ormandy is relinquishing a post, he is scarcely retiring. "I never fished in my life," he says. "And I hate golf--hit little balls and run after them. No, not for me." Instead, he will continue to do what he has done for nearly 60 years: conduct. Some observers of late have sensed a faltering of Ormandy's command on the podium, perhaps a dimming of his legendary memory for scores. But he insists that he feels young and fit; and, indeed, his gaze remains keen, his step springy and his stocky (5 ft. 5 in.) frame as muscular as ever. This summer he plans to lead the Philadelphians in their usual three-week residence at the Saratoga festival. Next season, as Conductor Laureate, he will merely cut back to 50 concerts (compared with 100 this season and as many as 180 in the past) and fill in his schedule with extensive guest conducting.

Ormandy's hand-picked successor as music director will have an equally short season. Riccardo Muti, 38, will divide his time between Philadelphia and other posts in London and Florence, a trend among the newer generation of conductors that Ormandy laments. "These jet-set conductors, they jump from one place to another," he says. "At the end, they don't have their own children, their musical children. I belong to the school where you are married to only one orchestra and you live with it 24 hours a day."

Ormandy is the last of that school, at least in the U.S. Hard working and efficient, attentive to his board of directors, suave but wary with the press, he has been called a "gray-flannel-suit conductor." Yet his devotion to the orchestra's excellence is unquestioned. In his programming he has been criticized for catering, as one critic put it privately, to "the dowager taste, to the Main Line bluebloods who put up the dough." He himself concedes: "I should have done more new works--the late Stravinsky, Copland, the whole contemporary group." His predecessor, the flamboyant Leopold Stokowski, made a specialty of such works. But, says Ormandy, he got away with it because "the women were crazy about him. I am not so handsome as he was."

Ormandy's strength has always been in the late 19th and early 20th century repertory, in the music of such composers as Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Sibelius, Ravel and Debussy. Here he conducts with color and sweep, with glowing sonorities and vivid details. If he has seemed short on profound emotion or penetrating insight, notably into classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven, his musicianship--his pitch, timing and ear for balances and shadings--has always been impeccable. Having inherited a great ensemble from Stokowski, he made it greater. He has hired virtually all of the orchestra's 106 members and molded them into a unit renowned for its tonal sheen and bravura. As he has said: "The Philadelphia sound--it's me."

It is the kind of warm, richly singing sound that is characteristic of a violin. Which makes sense, since Ormandy was trained as a violinist. His father, a music-loving dentist in Budapest, wanted him to be a famous virtuoso like the Hungarian Jenoe Hubay. Little Eugene obliged by making his debut at seven and touring Europe in his teens. But at 21, he was lured to the U.S. and then stranded by bungling promoters. Alone in New York, he was literally down to his last nickel when he landed a job in the orchestra that played between movies at the Capitol Theater. One day when the conductor failed to show, Ormandy led a section of a Tchaikovsky symphony on 15 minutes' notice. A new career beckoned.

In 1931 the Philadelphia offered him the unenviable task of filling in for an ailing Arturo Toscanini. He jumped at it. Although it would be five more years before the orchestra would summon him from the podium of the Minneapolis Symphony to take over in Philadelphia, Ormandy remembers that first time he stepped onstage at the Academy of Music as his greatest thrill. After all these triumphant years, after all the honors and premieres and tours (including the first by a U.S. orchestra to Communist China), after making the Philadelphia probably the most recorded orchestra in history (many hundreds of LPs, three of which have topped sales of $1 million), he still looks back to that first encounter as "the most important moment in my life."

For most of his life since then, he has given everything to the orchestra. Several years ago, he even gave it his two violins ("not great ones like Isaac Stern's, but good ones"). It was a fitting gesture. Ormandy is a virtuoso, all right; but his father's hopes notwithstanding, it is the orchestra that has turned out to be his true instrument.

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