Michiel Commandeur, a Dutch violinist, sounded surprisingly upbeat when he said his income had fallen to zero since the coronavirus pandemic began.

He wasn’t earning anything from concerts, he explained in a telephone interview from his home in Amsterdam, and, because of a loophole, he didn’t qualify for support for lost income in the Netherlands, either.

“I’m counting the number of cigarettes I have,” he said.

But, Mr. Commandeur said, he was in good spirits because he was lucky compared with others. He lived in a house owned by his mother, so he didn’t have to pay rent, and while his bank balance was “going flatter and flatter,” things were OK for now.

“Call me back in about two months and see if I’m still that optimistic about life,” he said.

Mr. Commandeur, 50, is a member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a group that has plenty of acclaim, but no home concert hall or rehearsal space. Though it has an office in Berlin, the musicians only meet to go on tour, usually rehearsing when they arrive in the first city of each trip. “We’re people from about 20 different countries,” Mr. Commandeur said. “We have to travel from all of them to play concerts.”