In 1900 Maurice Grau asked me to conduct the Wagner operas at the Metropolitan, and in the spring of 1902, at the close of my second season with him, I received an invitation from the New York Philharmonic Society to become its conductor. This invitation was a great surprise to me, as the Philharmonic had been, ever since my father’s day, the rival orchestra. In many ways it seemed a flattering proposition, as it was the oldest organization of its kind in America and had had an honorable history. Under the leadership of Theodore Thomas and later on of Anton Seidl, the audiences had been large and its affairs had prospered. It had always been a co-operative association, composed of the members of the orchestra, who had complete control of its affairs, receiving no salaries, but dividing the profits equally among themselves at the end of each season. I accepted the conductorship, but found very soon that my acceptance was a blunder. The society had come upon evil days, and under its last conductor attendance had dwindled to less than one-half. Of the membership of the orchestra only the skeleton remained, and I found to my amazement that of the hundred players at the concerts, less than fifty were actual members of the organization, the rest being engaged from outside, and often changed from one concert to another. Some of the members were old men who should no longer have played in the orchestra at all; but they were devoted to the concerts of the society, and as the orchestra was regulated by their votes, they naturally would not vote themselves out of it. Many of them had been excellent musicians and were personally upright men, but age, alas, is no respecter of technic, and the fingers of the left hand and the muscles of the bow arm gradually stiffen with advancing years. Most of the wind instruments were outsiders and therefore could not be properly controlled regarding their attendance at rehearsals and concerts, while, on the contrary, nearly all of the first violins were old members, several of whom were no longer fit to play first violin. The fact was that Major Higginson, of Boston, with his permanent orchestra composed of young men, many of them the best of their kind, with their daily rehearsals and at least seventy-five symphony concerts a season, had set a new standard of orchestral technic which the old Philharmonic, under its archaic conditions, could not hope to equal. The only solution seemed to me to lie in gathering together a fund large enough to produce the same conditions and results as Higginson had achieved in the Boston Orchestra, and, above all, to put the management of the Philharmonic into the hands of a committee which should not be composed of members of the orchestra, but of music lovers and guarantors of the fund.