The Union, ICSOM, and Family Strife by Thomas Wolf

In a past blog post, I talked about how the emergence of a strong union movement in the classical music world caused strife between generations of my family.  My brother and I were all for the efforts of the American Federation of Musicians to enhance the working lives of members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.  My grandmother, Lea Luboshutz, and others of the older generation thought us naïve, disrespectful, anti-musical, and ignorant of the realities of the music business. The union, they claimed, would simply empower the mediocre and put at risk the very organizations that were providing musicians’ livelihoods.

There was another family in which the struggle was even more divisive – the Gomberg/Zazofsky family.  Our family could observe their struggles first-hand because two of the Gombergs, Celia and Robert, had been my grandmother Lea Luboshutz’s pupils at the Curtis Institute of Music. 

In many ways, the Gomberg family saga had been similar to that of the Luboshutz clan (my grandmother’s relatives).  In their story, the part of my great grandmother Gitel (the force of nature who ran the family with an iron fist) was played by Mary Gomberg.  Both women were married to rather passive husbands.  And both believed their children could triumph as musicians if they were determined enough to make it happen.  In the case of Mary, once in the United States, she decided that every one of her seven children would become successful.  The oldest, Rachel, was not musically talented but she fulfilled her mother’s dream by becoming one of the few female pharmacists in the Philadelphia area, marrying a fellow pharmacist and operating a successful business.  For all the other children, Mary gambled on music. 

In 1928, Mary heard about an exceptional music school in Philadelphia with free tuition – the Curtis Institute of Music.  She immediately moved her family from Boston to Philadelphia, hoping to get her children into the conservatory. Just as my great grandmother had achieved a miracle by securing places for all three of her children in the incredibly competitive Moscow Conservatory, so Mary achieved something even more miraculous.  She managed admittance for five of her six remaining children at Curtis.

Robert, the oldest, was a violinist who studied with my grandmother and upon graduating from Curtis in the early 1930s was immediately hired by the Philadelphia Orchestra and became the breadwinner for the family. Celia, another violinist who also studied with Lea, took a different course.  Upon graduation, she got married and never touched the violin again.  Nevertheless, her mother was completely satisfied because her husband, Ruby Newman, was rich.  He led Boston’s favorite society band beginning in the 1930s where he enjoyed a long run at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The band had no trumpet section and much to Celia’s delight, it substituted strings for brass instruments, with Ruby frequently featuring himself in violin solos. My own recollection of Ruby and Celia was of her fur coats and his chauffeur-driven Cadillacs.

Mary’s other sons, Harold and Ralph, both oboists, would achieve the remarkable feat of simultaneously occupying two of the five most prestigious principal oboe chairs in United States orchestras (those of the Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic) while their Curtis teacher, Marcel Tabuteau, occupied a third in Philadelphia.  The youngest son, Leo, graduated from Curtis and joined the Radio City Music Hall orchestra as a trumpeter.

The only child not deemed talented enough to make it into Curtis was Edyth, who studied privately with a Curtis teacher but could not keep up with her siblings.  So she did the next best thing – she married a poor Jewish violinist, Abraham Zazofsky, and determined that he would go to Curtis in her stead and become a player in a major orchestra.  Unfortunately, as he pointed out to her, he was too old.  He had started the violin late (at age 12) and had passed the Curtis age limit for entering students, which was 21 at the time.[1]  Edyth was not deterred.  “Borrow your younger brother George’s birth certificate,” she insisted.  Thus, Abraham Zazofsky became George Zazofsky, and was accepted at Curtis.  Upon graduation, he realized the family’s dream by joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

But even among poor Jewish musicians, there are hierarchies.  Although George now played in a major orchestra, he was initially only a section player, not the leader of his instrumental section, and he was not as revered as his first-chair brothers-in-law in the Gomberg clan.  Nor was he rich like the husbands of his two Gomberg sisters-in-law. Worst of all, he had become a union man, agitating for a new group within the American Federation of Musicians that would represent the interests of players in major symphony orchestras. 

George Zazofaky’s pioneering work on behalf of the union was so successful that in the orchestra industry, his name will be remembered at least as long as any of the Gombergs.  A founder of the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM), which after much pressure, became a part of the parent American Federation of Musicians in 1969, his efforts led to what many consider the full professionalization of the classical music industry where players are now well paid and well treated.  Yet his activism led to great strife in the family and for many years some Gombergs would not speak to him.  His brothers-in-law opposed many of the things he fought for, but in time, he and his wife Edyth would have the last laugh.  Not only would his activism lead to major changes in the way orchestras operated but their son, Peter, turned out to be the only member of the next generation of the family to be accepted at the Curtis Institute and would have a successful musical career.  (There is a wonderful photo of father and son playing together that I reproduce here in the blog with thanks to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) Over the years, my brother Andy, another Curtis graduate, and I would perform often with Peter and we would laugh as we compared notes on the ways our families had split over the union.

At the time my uncle Boris Goldovsky started his touring opera company, however, George Zazofsky’s success with the union was no laughing matter.  Because the economics of such a company depended on keeping costs down and having flexible work rules, George Zazofsky was not a popular name in the Goldovsky household.  The union imposed new requirements on Boris’s company including not only higher salaries and per diems but paid days off and overtime pay for long travel days.  Cities in the western United States and Canada were far apart and bus trips could be very long between performance cities.  Yet the union demanded overtime pay for travel that lasted more than six hours on a performance day with rest stops every two hours when the company traveled in a chartered bus.  The costs of transporting the company escalated quickly. 

Then there was the issue of “doubling.”  If a an orchestra member played a second instrument during even one performance, he or she had to be paid 25% in addition to the base salary for the full week.  If he or she played a third instrument, the addition amounted to 50%.  Boris was particularly incensed when I reminded him of this during a tour of Benjamin Britten’s opera, “Albert Herring.” He would have to pay me – a member of the American Federation of Musicians – 50% more on top of my regular salary for being asked to play not only my flute but also an alto flute and a piccolo. I was silently thanking George Zazofsky.

Dealing with the musicians’ union was only the tip of the iceberg for Boris.  There was a union for singers, and another for stagehands.  There were unions for company managers (which every tour was required to have) and another for truck drivers.  In many union theatres, “house” musicians had to be paid even though they did not play (Boris toured with his own orchestra).  So-called “loaders” in union houses, members of the Teamsters Union, were the only ones allowed to unload scenery from the company’s truck and they often had minimum “calls” – that is, a minimum number of hours for which they had to be paid that usually went well beyond the time they actually worked.

At the height of union activism, eleven separate unions had contracts determining work rules and pay.  Boris’ touring operation was almost doomed before it began and negotiations were often difficult and acrimonious.  Boris had the somewhat archaic notion that people should be paid for the value they produced and he was especially incensed that the musicians in the pit should be paid more than singers on stage simply because they had a stronger union.  Of course, he could have paid the singers more, but it would have bankrupted the company.  So he paid the minimum “scale” and fumed that a percussion player who sat around doing nothing for much of the opera should receive more than his lead singers.

In a 1985 interview, as he was wrapping up his touring operation, he claimed that the musicians’ union was putting touring opera companies out of business and thereby eliminating their own jobs. “Musicians in the pit are paid as much as those in symphony orchestras,” he was quoted as saying, “and that is indefensible. Symphony orchestra [musicians] represent close to 100% of what it’s all about, while in opera, the orchestra represents about 25% of what it’s all about.  When I went on tour, I had special arrangements [of the music] to use only 23 [pit musicians]. And even then in my budget, the orchestra was paid more than anyone else. More than half the cost was the orchestra, and that is wrong because the orchestra doesn’t produce that much value.”[2]

To his credit, when he had to be, Boris became an effective negotiator and was able to design a business model that allowed the company to thrive for forty years.  It wasn’t easy and ironically, it helped that so many other touring troupes floundered during that period and went out of business.  For a time, Goldovsky Opera Theatre was the only opera company dedicated full time to touring in the United States and at least some of the unions did not want to kill the goose that was laying the few golden eggs.  Despite the challenges, under Boris’ leadership, Goldovsky Opera Theatre continued to operate until he decided to call it quits at age 76 in 1984.  And our family eventually made peace with George Zazofsky’s.

[1] Curtis no longer has an age limit for applicants.

[2] Interview with Bruce Duffie on WNIB Radio in 1993 and published as “Conversation Piece: Producer Boris Goldovsky,” in The Opera Journal, June 1993.