From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Use a Baton, Go to Jail
In France, they're arresting conductors--literally.
David Miller and the Bulgarian orchestra he was conducting on a tour through France were backstage after a performance of "Don Giovanni" on the night of Feb. 11 when they received an unexpected backstage visit. "The performance was over and we were changing into our civvies," Mr. Miller recounted, when suddenly "the place was full of police. No one was allowed to leave until they were cleared by the police."
Truth be told, the visit wasn't entirely unexpected; the ensemble had already been visited twice by the authorities in the course of their 15 previous performances of "Don Giovanni" in small towns around France. Both previous times, the police had checked the papers of the musicians and left, apparently satisfied.
This time would be different. The tour organizer, an Italian, was taken to prison for two days and is now on trial in France on charges of illegally importing workers to the country. Three other members of the ensemble were taken to headquarters and questioned by the police for several hours before being released without charges. In the end, the musicians were told that their tour was over; the remaining performances were canceled and the orchestra boarded the bus for Bulgaria.
Two weeks later, in Strasbourg, it happened again. A German conductor, Volker Hartung, whose Cologne New Philharmonic was also employing some East European musicians, was arrested as he came out for an encore following a performance of Ravel's "Bolero" and Bizet's "Carmen." After also being held for two days, Mr. Hartung was released with a warning but, according to the Guardian newspaper, has been banned from performing in France "until further notice." This was, according to Gerald Mertens, director of Deutsche Orchestervereinigung, or the German orchestra union, the second time Mr. Hartung was arrested in France for underpaying his musicians and not obtaining proper authorization for them to perform in France.
Mr. Miller's "Don Giovanni" tour had played to sell-out crowds across the country in towns too small to have an opera company of their own. "Usually," he said, "we're the only live opera of the season. They're thrilled to have us come." Typically, the organizer of these sorts of tours is paid by the local concert hall, which recoups its money through ticket sales for the show. "It's always full. It's always hard to get tickets," said Mr. Miller, who has lived in Belgium for 26 years and has dual Belgian and American nationality. In the past, he's conducted similar tours, once with a Ukrainian orchestra and once with a (different) Bulgarian ensemble.
The reason for importing musicians from the east to play in countries like France is simple: money. "The tour would've been too expensive with French musicians, so there wouldn't have been a tour at all," Mr. Miller argues. While a company like the one conducted by Mr. Miller might charge about €15,000 ($20,055) for a show, a French orchestra would probably cost three times that amount, Mr. Miller reckons--pricing them out of the 300- to 800-seat venues they were playing, typically in towns of less than 100,000 people. "I don't feel at all that I'm taking work away from a French musician," Mr. Miller told me. Musicians like the Bulgarians he was conducting, meanwhile, "need the work, they don't hold out for very high fees and they play well." "Artistically," he added, "the tour was a great success."
But that's not the way the musicians' unions in Germany and France see it. Mr. Mertens, of the German union, says people like Mr. Hartung are engaging in "unfair competition" that "jeopardizes European jobs." According to this view, orchestra directors bringing in low-wage East European musicians to play to West European crowds are exploitative profiteers who are mistreating their workers and harming their West European counterparts at the same time. According to Mr. Mertens's view, in other words, putting on a tour in small towns that can't afford a French opera company and giving work to eager musicians from the east in the process is a lose-lose proposition.
Of all the unsavory aspects of French police going around the country busting orchestras and locking up their conductors or managers, it is the notion that it's being done to protect these innocent violin-playing lambs from Sofia that drips heaviest with irony. In common with price-fixing cartels the world 'round, France and Germany's high-priced musicians have only one interest in this affair, and that is keeping low-priced competition off the market. That this means smallish French towns get no opera, or get it only when heavy public subsidies are made available for it, concerns them not at all.
What's more, it's reasonable to assume, as Mr. Miller does, that productions such as the "Don Giovanni" he was conducting "make the French economy turn a little faster than it would otherwise." The musicians stay in hotels and spend money; stage crews are put to work on the shows, and others may find incremental work on the peripheries of tours such as these. But all that is as nothing, it seems, compared to the need to protect the privileged position of France's domestic musicians.
Whether it is the unions themselves that are responsible for the crackdown, as Messrs. Miller and Hartung suspect, or the impetus comes from elsewhere inside France's lumbering bureaucracy, the story is a microcosm of economic and cultural protectionism that is looking increasingly tenuous in an expanding Europe and globalizing world. When it comes to its language, its cinema, and now its music, France has long stood athwart history crying "Stop!" In two months' time, Mr. Miller is returning to France with a production of "La Traviata." Will the French police let the fat lady sing?
Mr. Carney is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
