THE FIDDLERS FROM VIENNA

It's good to see The New York Times taking constructive note of the Vienna Philharmonic's discrimination against women, which I harped on earlier this month. In a report on Sunday about Seiji Ozawa's role in Vienna's musical world, "He Got His Opera, Vienna Got Its Maestro," Alan Riding noted:

[Ozawa] hopes to exercise influence in one area that has brought the Vienna Philharmonic reams of negative publicity: its longstanding resistance to admitting women into its ranks. True, in 1997 it voted to admit women through the existing audition process. But even today, it has just 3 among its 148 members: a harpist, a violist and a cellist. Other women occasionally play with the orchestra as substitutes.

The Times' acknowledgment of this issue is vitally important because it's the sole newspaper in the United States that the Vienna Philharmonic cares about, mainly due to the fact that its reporting can affect opinions among the New York audience for its annual tours to Carnegie Hall -- the orchestra plays there Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week -- and among the American audience-at-large that buys its recordings.

Just getting to this point, after many years of protest initiated by composer-musicologist William Osborne and a small but organized group of U.S. women activists, has taken too long. The Times music critic Bernard Holland and the classical music editor James Oestreich tended to pooh-pooh the issue, and for years they were seen by feminists as, in effect, apologists for the orchestra. It wasn't until another Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, made the issue a central point of a critique of the Vienna Philharmonic's Carnegie Hall performance in 2000 that the issue began to gain traction at the paper.

In "Glorious, Yes, But Resisting Today's World; The Vienna Philharmonic Returns, Virtually a Male Bastion," Tommasini faulted the orchestra's musical and cultural "unanimity of purpose" as a defense for its exclusion of women. He echoed points that Osborne had made in emails and articles on the Web and in scholarly magazines such as M.I.T,'s Leonardo Music Journal and the Journal of the International Alliance of Women in Music. Tommasini wrote:

Obviously, the unanimity of purpose that the Vienna Philharmonic has achieved is a precious thing and you can understand their fear of diluting it. But what accounts for this quality? The maleness of the players? Maybe that was so in a time when women were routinely oppressed, but it makes no sense any longer. More likely the special cohesiveness comes from a shared commitment to a revered heritage. Why should fine female musicians not be able to embrace this heritage and work ethic as well as men? Over the decades many sons have followed their fathers into this orchestra. Cannot daughters do the same?

Interestingly the orchestra has always sought young players. At auditions no one over 35 is selected. Looking at all the youthful faces, I kept wondering what these men must think about the orchestra's history of prejudice against women. Do they approve? Are they go-along, get-along chauvinists or closet feminists waiting for the old guard to pass away?

If more women join its ranks, the orchestra will certainly change. But why should that not be an enriching change? The players already have a weighty tradition to uphold. It must be tiring to also cart around all that manhood.

Tommasini's mention of auditions brought up another question, also raised by Riding's article, in which Ozawa is quoted as saying: "It's true that since I came here, more women have come for auditions, because the record says that some 60 percent of the musicians I chose for the Boston Symphony were women. But I have to say, the auditions I have seen have been fair."

At the time that Tommasini's critique appeared, Osborne hailed it as a mainstream breakthrough. But he was well aware that it fell short of telling the whole story. Auditions then and even now, despite Ozawa's claim, are stacked against women.

In "Blind Auditions and Moral Myopia," Osborne has explained the orchestra's procedure: "The Philharmonic's auditions are held in three rounds. In the first two the musician plays behind a screen, but in the third it is removed. This allows the physiognomy of the applicant to be evaluated to make sure it matches the orchestra's ideology that gender and ethnic uniformity give it aesthetic superiority."

Osborne notes that after World War II, the Philharmonic did institute true blind auditions, "but they were soon eliminated" because, as he quotes from the memoirs of Otto Strasser, a former Chairman of the Philharmonic, they caused a problem. Strasser wrote:

I hold it for incorrect that today the applicants play behind a screen; an arrangement that was brought in after the Second World War in order to assure objective judgments. I continuously fought against it, especially after I became Chairman of the Philharmonic, because I am convinced that to the artist also belongs the person, that one must not only hear, but also see, in order to judge him in his entire personality. ... Even a grotesque situation that played itself out after my retirement, was not able to change the situation. An applicant qualified himself as the best, and as the screen was raised, there stood a Japanese before the stunned jury. He was, however, not engaged, because his face did not fit with the "Pizzicato-Polka" of the New Year's Concert.

Well, Strasser can rest easy. Despite the orchestra's recent hiring of its first person of color, a Japanese tuba player who will not be too visible, the situation has certainly been rectified by the current practice of taking away the screen for the third and final round of so-called blind auditions.

I asked Osborne by email for his reaction to Riding's article. He replied: "I am happy that The New York Times has kept the VPo theme alive -- even if brief and sotto voce. Progress for women in any area of music helps women in all of the other areas."

But given the orchestra's male to female ratio of 50 to 1, he asks: "What are we to assume, that Austrian men are genetically superior to Austrian women? That something is wrong with the Austrian educational system? Or that something is fishy with the auditions in an orchestra that has a tradition of entirely excluding women and was forced to change against its will and that removes the screen for the last round?"

At any rate, Osborne finds it ironic that Ozawa, who is of Japanese descent, has come to the defense of an "orchestra, which until last year forbade membership to people of color." He adds: "As usual, the article doesn't mention the orchestra's racial ideology (which is directed particularly toward Asian musicians) -- though it seems to vaguely allude to it and its correlations with the orchestra's sexism."

The Vienna Philharmonic will doubtless fall back on the assertion that change can only come gradually: It can't be expected to alter the male-to-female ratio overnight. So let's look at the employment numbers for six years from 1997, when the orchestra proclaimed a new, enlightened policy of hiring women, until 2003. It's men, 21; women, 3. How's that for even-handed progress?