100 years: Seattle Symphony survives, thrives as city booms and busts

The year was 1903, and that tough old Rough Rider, Teddy Roosevelt, was president. And way out west, a bunch of equally tough Seattle roughnecks were inventing a cultural identity for a town where saloons and minstrel shows were the favored form of entertainment.

The Seattle Symphony that debuted in 1903 — only a little more than a decade after Washington became a state — was far from today's idea of an orchestra. It was a tiny group of 24 players, brought together for two afternoon inaugural concerts in a hall that seated only 300. The concerts weren't a roaring success; there were many empty seats, even in a hall less than one-eighth the size of the orchestra's current home. As the season progressed, turnover among players was constant enough to be remarked upon by reviewers.

The symphony's path to the next century was full of stops, restarts, hazards, disasters and a handful of international scandals (see sidebar story). At times, the orchestra seemed on the verge of extinction, and at other times, there were two rival orchestras alongside each other — both of which collapsed and finally re-emerged as the Seattle Symphony. As the city's fortunes rose and ebbed, the orchestra flourished and withered, a parallel process that continues to this day (the orchestra struggles with deficits while the economy founders).

"The past century has been a lot about survival," says the orchestra's music director, Gerard Schwarz, who first arrived here in 1983 as music adviser. "There were some rough years, not only early on, but in the middle 1980s, when it wasn't so clear how the orchestra was going to go forward."

Early cultural movement

When you think about it, it seems extraordinary that the city fathers decided we needed a symphony at all, back in 1903. Yet the drive toward culture seems to be a strong force in this city's history. Though Seattle's population in 1860 was only 250, pioneer Henry Yesler was already constructing a modest performance hall a year later, and the city's first opera house was opened in 1879.

A symphony orchestra wasn't a pro-forma commodity in every town of civic ambition, back in those days. Cleveland, an older city than Seattle and the proud possessor now of a Big Five orchestra, didn't found its orchestra until 1918. Somehow, in the Seattle mix of loggers and gold miners and eager observers of early rough-and-ready touring variety shows like the "Frisco Lillies" (a rather dubious girlie show), the desire for something finer, some way to partake of past greatness, emerged.

At first, few Seattleites even realized they had an orchestra in their midst. A review of the second concert offering Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, about a month after the debut program, noted the small audience and observed that "Seattle is yet hardly awake to the fact that it has a symphony orchestra."

During the next several decades, it wasn't entirely clear that the orchestra was going to stick around, either. Like an overtaxed balloon, the orchestra inflated and deflated, as personnel and backers and philanthropists came and went. Occasionally there were noteworthy conductors, like composer Henry Hadley (1909-11), and later the famous Sir Thomas Beecham (1941-44); they didn't stay for long, driven away by financial crises or mismanagement, or just by personal ambition.

The big watershed, and the dawn of the modern era at the symphony, was the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

World's Fair made impact

When scoffers and worriers were pointing skeptical fingers at the Space Needle, predicting its early demise, few could have guessed that the Century 21 World's Fair would be the catalyst for Seattle's own cultural revolution. Flush with the success of the ambitious international fair, newly the center of nationwide cynosure, Seattle gained the confidence — and the incoming talent — to create an astonishing succession of new companies that gradually flourished: Seattle Opera, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Pacific Northwest Ballet, ACT Theatre, Intiman Theatre, Northwest Chamber Orchestra and a multitude of smaller companies. These, in turn, undergirded a richer grass-roots development of community/volunteer arts groups, many of which gradually metamorphosed into professional organizations as they grew.

It was the Seattle Symphony that allowed much of the arts scene to flourish: playing for the new Seattle Opera and then the Pacific Northwest Ballet, providing a vital corps of great teachers, substitute work for fine free-lance musicians, and an impetus to excellence generally in the region.

As the clock ticked into the 1970s, it became clear that some of these fledgling arts organizations had tough times ahead. Boeing — which became the region's biggest corporate contributor to the arts — underwent such massive layoffs that a famous 1971 billboard requested, "Will the last person leaving Seattle, turn out the lights." Corporations, not yet realizing that the arts were great marketing opportunities, chipped in minor contributions from their philanthropy budgets.

Still, there were some silver linings: PONCHO (the acronym for that cumbersome phrase, "Patrons of Northwest Cultural, Civic and Charitable Organizations"), which arose in order to help the symphony pay off its debt from a World's Fair production of "Aida," has stayed on to become a major force in Seattle arts funding over the years.

Eternally underfunded, the symphony struggled with deficits and shortfalls until the mid-'80s, when a new byword surfaced: stabilization.

Influencing factors

A number of factors aligned propitiously for the orchestra. Among them were new board leadership (from Samuel N. Stroum and Richard Cooley, who made good on their vow to wipe out the deficits), civic leadership (mayoral panels were appointed to study the finances of both the symphony and the general arts scene), and the subsequent arrival in Seattle of the National Arts Stabilization Fund.

This entity, an offshoot of the Ford Foundation, laid down draconian and generally effective requirements for receiving "stabilization" cash, including balanced budgets and the creation of a cash reserve for the participating arts groups.

Stabilization didn't fix everything. It's hard to stabilize an organization in which many millions of new contributed dollars must be squeezed out of corporations, individuals, foundations and government entities every season. The nation's orchestras are still dependent on the financial health of their communities, and the continued good will of same, for their prosperity; when either of those commodities declines, so does the orchestra.

The 1990s boom years that followed the stabilization drive masked the vulnerability of arts organizations, and optimism held sway. This climate allowed for the building of Benaroya Hall, as well as a gratifying flow of black ink in the budget registers.

But we don't need to tell you what came next. The bursting of the dot-com bubble, the collapse of the stock market, the continued effects of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, have all helped create an economy that is not conducive to big arts donations.

More donors despite economy

Yet even in these difficult times, the symphony's donor base continues to grow; there are more individual donors every year. The catch is that they aren't giving as much as donors gave in the past.

The even bigger catch is that corporate support is much harder to get. The region's barometer of local corporate contributions, ArtsFund (formerly the Corporate Council for the Arts), is officially holding steady at last year's rates. But as the orchestra's budget steadily rises, in response to costs and players' salaries, a "holding steady" rate of corporate support amounts to a decline.

Even after cutting costs, the symphony showed a $719,000 shortfall last season, and is forecasting another $400,000-$500,000 in red ink this year.

"This is horrible, and we feel terrible about it," says Schwarz, "but we are one of the success stories. We're a lot better off than just about everyone else. We've been very conservative; we haven't overspent."

The difficult economy is particularly worrying because Schwarz is determined to take the orchestra to the next level — not only in the upcoming proving ground of an East Coast tour and a Carnegie Hall concert (both of which are funded from outside sources), but also here at home.

"There are artistic initiatives we must assume; things we need to accomplish that can only be done with extra money. We need to make a few changes in personnel, and also to add extra players in all the woodwinds so we have two solo players of equal caliber. We need to be able to buy fine instruments for our players to play. We need to travel every year, not just every five years, and to be on TV, and to get more involved with high schools in our community."

Financial shortfalls have artistic costs. Schwarz says a "wonderful festival" had been planned for this season, then scrapped because it would cost too much.

Plans to do Mahler's huge-scale Symphony No. 8, which requires about $60,000 worth of extra players, fell through because of the price tag.

The orchestra's reputation, meanwhile, has risen since the opening of Benaroya Hall in 1998 (and also because of the symphony's much-lauded performances in the orchestra pit for Seattle Opera).

In it for the long run

Schwarz says, "We still have a lot to do," and he thinks the key to progress is his continuation in Seattle: "It's a complicated question, how long to stay (in this city). I think it's unquestionably true that orchestras with long-term resident music directors are better off. I'm a great believer that only through longevity can you make artistic strides.

"Nearly every great orchestra has had a long-term music director to help it along the way — conductors who have stayed for more than 25 years. (Serge) Koussevitsky in Boston, (George) Szell in Cleveland, (Eugene) Ormandy in Philadelphia, (Herbert von) Karajan in Berlin, (James) Levine at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

"Is change healthy? Yes, of course. But the most successful marriages are the ones that are long. If you're happily married for 20 years you don't say, 'Well, let's change.' "

In spite of everything, Schwarz says he feels optimistic about the orchestra, its centennial season and its future.

"I've signed a new five-year contract," he says.

"I have to see how things go. I need to be able to continually lead and inspire the musicians and the community and the management team. I have to be strong enough artistically to lead that growth — and I feel very confident that I can."

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com