San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Symphony’s shocking demise felt inevitable
How can an occurrence feel inevitable and shocking at the same time?
That’s what I’ve been asking myself since the news broke on Thursday night that the board of directors for the Symphony Society of San Antonio had voted to dissolve the symphony by filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
In the blink of an eye, a storied 83-year history came to an end. That’s the shocking part.
It’s a history shaped by Max Reiter, a refugee from Nazi oppression, who landed in New York with $40 and a few letters of recommendation from European conductors. He moved to San Antonio in 1939 on the advice of New York friends who told him that pianos were selling like crazy in Texas.
Over the first 37 years of the symphony’s history, it was a model of organizational stability. It had only two conductors during that period: Reiter and his hand-picked successor, Victor Alessandro.
After that, things got thornier.
The San Antonio Symphony — like so many other orchestras across the country — was hurt by changing musical tastes and the ever-expanding glut of customized entertainment options competing for dollars and attention.
Over the past 40 years, symphonies in Houston, Nashville, Baltimore, Honolulu, Long Beach, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, San Diego, Colorado Springs and Savannah have endured some combination of canceled seasons, bankruptcy, deep payroll cuts and bitter contract disputes with musicians.
In San Antonio, the pattern became familiar: a symphony periodically teetering on the edge of extinction and then getting rescued by a renewed community commitment to keep it alive.
In December 1986, the Symphony Society demanded that the musicians accept a 30 percent payroll cut or face the cancellation of the 1987-88 season.
A stalemate ensued and a group of symphony players formed their own collective, the Orchestra of San Antonio, which performed a series of concerts in the fall of 1987. Ultimately, then-Mayor Henry Cisneros brokered a deal and the symphony reemerged, with seven fewer members.
In 2002, symphony musicians accepted a 20 percent pay cut. A few months later, when it became obvious that the symphony didn’t have enough money to pay its musicians, the players performed a concert without pay, hoping to spur community support for the symphony.
It wasn’t enough, however, to prevent the Symphony Society from filing for bankruptcy protection and canceling the 2003-04 season.
The symphony returned in 2004 with a new operating plan calling for a shorter concert season and reduced pay for the musicians.
In January 2018, the members of the Symphony Society board voted to cancel the remainder of the concert season. Two days later, with new donations coming in, the board reversed itself and committed to an abbreviated season.
We became so accustomed to this pattern of crisis followed by short-term reprieve, we thought it would happen forever. This time, however, was different.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the symphony’s chronic financial problems. At the end of fiscal 2019, the symphony reported a net worth of $505,268. By the end of fiscal 2020, they were in the red — to the tune of $977,827.
During that year, the symphony’s program service revenue dropped by nearly 45 percent.
Last September, the Symphony Society tried to alter labor terms with the musicians for the 2021-22 concert season.
The austerity plan called for reducing the orchestra’s personnel from 72 to 68. It also would have split the symphony into two groups: 42 full-time players, whose pay would drop from $36,000 to $24,000, and 26 part-timers who would get only $11,250 and no benefits.
The musicians went on strike. The Symphony Society eventually came back with better terms, but the atmosphere had been poisoned by then.
We can’t blame this situation on concert venues.
It was widely believed that moving into a refurbished Majestic Theatre in 1989 would be a game-changer for the orchestra. Likewise, the 2014 opening of the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts looked like an opportunity to ignite community interest.
Neither did the trick. We certainly can’t blame this situation on the musicians, who are brilliant virtuosos with great passion for their work.
One encouraging development in recent months was the way the symphony musicians banded together and independently put on a series of concerts. All signs are that those performances will continue.
Maybe it’s time for a new organizational model for classical music in San Antonio — just as Reiter created a new one 83 years ago.