The NSO: 75 and Counting Its Blessings

"The long months without a paycheck were somehow gotten through," Schwartz recalled. "Some of the musicians had to drive cabs or become salesmen. Occasional engagements like weddings or at the Washington Cathedral were like drops of water on the desert. An occasional quartet concert or solo engagement in wealthy patronesses' homes helped a little, but it was tough sledding."

Moreover, by all reports, Kindler was a deeply difficult man. "He'd find your vulnerabilities and embarrass you in front of the whole orchestra," Schwartz recalled. "Kindler would make nasty, hurtful comments. I think this was to cover up his considerable inadequacies as a conductor. There were different concertmasters and assistants every season because they couldn't stand Kindler or Kindler was dissatisfied with them."

Howard Mitchell, the orchestra's second music director, was a very different character.

As Ted Libbey observed in "The National Symphony Orchestra," his lively and authoritative history, Mitchell "personified the optimism that permeated Washington and America after World War II; he socialized, schmoozed and charmed the ladies of high Washington society, fitting right in, playing the role of music director as he played the cello. He saw the symphony as a necessary component of the city's social and cultural life, an institution to be supported by the enlightened few and used to educate and enrich the many."

Still, despite the new conductor's many attractive qualities, Libbey is hardly alone in considering the Mitchell years "the artistic nadir of the National Symphony." Mitchell's conducting was generally judged awkward and prosaic, and the orchestra itself was still only a part-time operation. As the NSO's longtime principal cellist John Martin recalled to Libbey, "there were so many years I didn't know whether I'd have a job when I came back in the fall. I would borrow money, live on it through the summer, and pay it back during the season from my salary." Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that the orchestra's personnel changed from year to year. "If you were good, you left," Martin said, overstating the case only slightly.

Yet it was under Mitchell that the orchestra made its first overseas tour, and a spectacular one at that. The NSO spent the entire summer of 1959 in Latin America, playing 68 concerts in 19 countries, with at least one American composition on every program. An initial European tour followed in 1967. But by the time Mitchell stepped down as music director at the end of the 1968-69 season, relations between players and management were at an all-time low. A bitter strike was the result: Libbey quotes a "well placed observer" who believes the work stoppage and its aftermath left "a discredited, disoriented, discouraged bunch of performers, a less than competent board, a justly hostile press and a distrustful public."

Antal Dorati to the rescue. Finally, Washington had the wherewithal to seek out and engage a master conductor. He had studied with the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, served as music director of the leading orchestras in both Dallas and Minneapolis, and made an enormous number of recordings. (He would eventually record all 104 of Haydn's symphonies.) Dorati arrived in 1970 and set about promptly to remake the National Symphony Orchestra, instilling firm discipline and new pride.

The late Elizabeth Mensh, a charter subscriber to the NSO who attended every concert she could for almost 70 years, credited Dorati with "changing the orchestra forever. A huge change -- just night and day," she told me in 1996. "He was attractive, dignified, professional, a complete musician." In 1971, Dorati oversaw the NSO's move from dowdy and acoustically challenged Constitution Hall into the brand-new Kennedy Center, which he later called "the greatest success of its kind I have ever encountered. From the day of its opening, it has upgraded the cultural appetite and taste of the city."

But Dorati did not like the NSO board -- "Little did I know what a hornets' nest I was stepping into," he later recalled -- and the feeling was mutual. Dorati had intended to stay in Washington for a decade; instead, the board let him go after seven years, informing him of its decision only a few minutes before he was due to lead the orchestra in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." There was a new prospect on the horizon: Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich, who was widely considered the greatest cellist in the world and who had just made his American conducting debut with the NSO.

The Rostropovich era, which lasted 17 years, is still controversial. Nobody denied his mastery of the cello, or his charisma, or the welling love for music that informed everything he did. And yet his tenure, while bringing the NSO unprecedented international attention, was marked by a curious inertia.

He led some music magnificently -- especially the Russian repertory, which he loved and understood as have few others -- but, as a conductor, it would not be entirely unfair to describe Rostropovich as a brilliant, fitfully inspired amateur. Under his direction, the orchestra lurched along -- some splendid Shostakovich or Tchaikovsky one week would be followed by what seemed impulsive and unbalanced renditions of the core repertory. A listener often had the sense that Rostropovich was operating on pure feeling and, while emotional commitment is obviously an important part of making music, it could not quite compensate for a lack of technical control.

Some of the problems facing the NSO during this time were inherent in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, which had proven to have acoustical shortcomings not much less debilitating than the ones that had plagued Constitution Hall.