And so, the Minnesota Orchestra lockout has finally come to an end. I’m just as surprised as everyone else is: with George Mitchell, the distinguished negotiator, and Osmo Vänskä, the orchestra’s renowned music director, having left town, and with the orchestra musicians progressing with their own concert series, it seemed that the board and the musicians were taking separate paths into the sunset. Now, there’s a settlement. Perhaps the possibility that the city of Minneapolis would take back the free lease on Orchestra Hall that it gives to the Minnesota Orchestral Association might have sped things up a bit. (The vigilant Doug Grow, of MinnPost, saw a few green shoots sprout up in recent days.) No word yet on whether Vänskä, or the respected director of the composer’s institute, Aaron Jay Kernis, will be coming back.

For each side in this war, there are lessons. The administration and board’s vision of a Right to Work Philharmonic—an ecstatic future in which the power of musicians’ unions is finally brought to heel—has been exposed as morally bankrupt and artistically obtuse. (One of the few events that has taken place in Orchestra Hall since it reopened, last fall, was a meeting on right-to-work laws and streamlining state government given by the Center of [sic] the American Experiment, a conservative Minnesota think tank.) The musicians of the orchestra should be grateful for the tens of millions of dollars that board members give to support their salaries. But the board has to realize that maintaining a world-class symphony orchestra is as much a public trust as a personal investment. Classical music is a key part of the Western civilization that conservatives so ardently claim to believe in; in its thousand-year history, it has never paid its own way. The amount of funding that the good and the great—the church, the aristocracy, government, corporations, and private donors—have given to the art form’s economy has fluctuated over the centuries, and in different societies, and it will continue to do so in modern, capitalist America. But for some of the richest Minnesotans, who are reaping the benefits of a rebounding Twin Cities economy, the prospect of balancing the orchestra’s deficit on the backs of the players was never justified. (Sadly, the concept that the best way to support arts organizations is to give them less money than before seems to be spreading to Los Angeles.)

The musicians, to their credit, have won an assurance that classical music will remain the primary focus of the orchestra’s programming—a serious issue for an ensemble that had found itself facing an ever-increasing schedule of pops concerts and “film nights.” Now, it is their job to make sure that the local audience wants to come: even in its most recent, Grammy-nominated form, under the widely praised Vänskä, the Minnesota Orchestra was hardly selling out Orchestra Hall. (The demise of New York City Opera has proven that savvy marketing alone cannot lure an audience that is voting with its feet.) So, the musicians must join this struggle with all their might—and, by performing their series of independent concerts, they seem to have strengthened their attachment to a community that clearly wants them back.

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Above: Osmo Vänskä leads practice at Orchestra Hall, in Minneapolis, in September of 2012. Photograph courtesy AP Photo/The Star Tribune, Brian Peterson.