Sleazy tales from the classical pit

A young musician, quickly rising to fame in the late ‘70s, seemed to have it all. She was beautiful. She was an extraordinary player. She was muse to at least one great composer. She was highly ambitious. Some significant music exists because of her. But in the early ‘80s, she suddenly vanished from the scene.

Several years later at a concert in New York, I ran into a friend who had known her. Normally unflappable, he looked shaken. He had just stumbled over her. Literally. She was on the street in the Bowery, homeless. She told him her story.

She had fallen on a slippery floor and broken her wrist. The fracture was complex, and when it healed she had lost a bit of mobility. She had also lost her edge on the competition and simply given up. She looked terrible but refused help.

My reaction to this tragedy was that music and musicians had let her down. Couldn’t someone along the way have helped her realize her worth, shown her that there is more to life than a self-centered soloist’s career?

The music business, however, is a sea full of sharks. In a well-publicized new memoir, “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music,” Blair Tindall uses a more earthy metaphor. Reading her expose will definitely not increase your respect for the classical music establishment and how it treats many of its underlings. This is a troubling report from the front lines by a freelance oboist turned journalist.

Yet “Mozart in the Jungle” ended up making me sympathize less, not more, with victimized musicians. It’s far too easy to blame the music business for all that is wrong with classical musicians. Such censure is very old news.

Bach grumbled about his bosses, be they prelate or prince. Mozart parodied his patrons. Beethoven felt downright oppressed by publishers, concert promoters and the fickle public. Mahler tore his hair out over such things. Schoenberg was treated badly. Leonard Bernstein played the game better than others but was angst-ridden all the same. John Cage kept his sense of humor but still had plenty to complain about and advocated anarchy.

Tindall’s is a tawdry tale. But what is scandalous in it may not be what she intends. I know the sharks’ motives, and I don’t expect them to be on the side of music. But I do expect musicians to be on the side of music. One of the best things about music is that its most devoted practitioners have, throughout history, found ways to keep their art alive and thriving whatever the obstacles. Indeed, it’s the fate of those like the homeless musician in the Bowery who help us appreciate the success of the winners.

A veteran freelance musician in New York, Tindall tells of a rat race. She lived in the Allendale, a cockroach-infested building on the Upper West Side favored by musicians. She went from gig to gig to gig. She substituted in the New York Philharmonic, played in opera and ballet pit bands, in various chamber orchestras. The pay for such gigs is not good, but a really busy freelancer can make $1,000 a day by playing, say, a morning orchestra rehearsal in Brooklyn, a Broadway matinee, a late-afternoon session for a jingle recording and an evening concert with the Hudson Valley Symphony in Poughkeepsie.

The problem is that there are few really busy freelancers and that a schedule like that will kill the spark of almost any musician. So Tindall describes a life of desperation. She slept with first-chair oboists who would then hire her for the second chair. She, of course, would lose the chair when the affair ended.

Like a lot of her colleagues, she went to performances drunk or stoned. Playing for such Broadway shows as “Les Miserables” proved so mindlessly repetitive that she read books and magazines not only during her rests but even while performing. Musical revelations were few and far between. The norm was a round of lecherous teachers and conductors, petty treatment from colleagues and general sleaze.

This was hardly the life Tindall imagined when she started on a career in music. And she believes she was duped by the system. Classical music doesn’t mean much to the average American’s life, and she condemns the major orchestras, opera companies and performing arts centers for acting as if it does. They can’t sustain their high budgets, and they get by, in part, by taking advantage of the little guy, the musician. She should have been warned. She should have been trained by her exclusive, high-tuition conservatory to know something of the world, not just of the oboe.

“Music,” she learned the hard way, “had not become the glamorous and elite profession of Cold War fantasy but an overpopulated, stagnant and low-paying business.” Conductors make 10 times, 20 times what musicians in the orchestra make. Nonprofit arts administrators get paid huge salaries. For what?

It was enough to drive Tindall to the brink of suicide, although a hunk she met on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas managed to lift her depression for a while, showing her a glimpse of a world outside music.

Tindall admits that she never really had the fire for a career. She had found she was good at playing the oboe and liked the attention it brought, and she just kind of went along with the flow. In her book, she demonstrates little knowledge of, or even interest in, music.

The most worldly of her circle of desperate drudges was the late pianist Samuel Sanders, best known as violinist Itzhak Perlman’s accompanist. She admired Sanders for his intellectual sophistication. But her touchingly sympathetic portrait hardly touches on intellectual sophistication. Instead, she tells us that “Prizzi’s Honor” was one of his favorite movies, that he collected toy soldiers, that he and Perlman exchanged baseball scores and made merciless fun of each other’s infirmities (Perlman crippled by polio, Sanders with a bad heart).

At the end of the book, Tindall does offer a ray of hope for the corrupt world of classical music by mentioning Michael Tilson Thomas’ championing of new music with the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s bringing musical relevance to Walt Disney Concert Hall. But she seems to miss the point. They and most of the conductors and performers who matter today do so because they are deeply engaged with art, music and the issues of their times.

It was not out of character for conductor Simon Rattle to once take a year’s sabbatical to study literature. It is no coincidence that a refined classicist such as the pianist Alfred Brendel is a quirky surrealist poet or that the versatile Russian violinist Gidon Kremer has written several books. Has anyone noticed that a new, powerful urgency in Daniel Barenboim’s conducting coincided with his political activism?

Perhaps for a hard-working, underpaid freelancer, taking a year off to read English literature at Oxford or Cambridge, having the time to write a book about music or finding six weeks to spend coaching young Arab and Israeli musicians, in an effort to promote peace in the Middle East, is as much an unobtainable luxury as living in the Dakota, the New York building favored by such musicians as Bernstein and John Lennon.

Then again, maybe it isn’t. Tindall, using savings from playing on Broadway, attended journalism school at Stanford and has written a book. She claims that journalism gives her a satisfaction she did not get from her career as a freelance musician, and she now sees herself as a kind of savior, spilling the beans about classical corruption.

The beans are worth spilling. There are serious inequities in the system and a lot of jerks who manipulate musicians and the public for their own profit. But there are musicians who engage in the world in a meaningful way -- and not just the Rattles, Tilson Thomases and Salonens -- who get out and make music that matters, who change lives.

That level of engagement, though, seems never even to have been an option for Tindall, whose focus was on her career. Now, no longer a victim, she’s found her own way to exploit the system. “Mozart in the Jungle” is part of the problem, not a solution.