Among those who sensed the momentous nature of the orchestra’s tentative steps outside the faubourg Poissonière was the impresario Gabriel Astruc, who foresaw capital opportunity in it. (He was not the only one: in 1907 the piano manufacturer Étienne Gaveau had tried to interest the society in moving to his new hall in the rue La Boétie, but they were yet not prepared to think carefully about renting a facility, and simply thanked him for the evidence of his esteem.) Astruc was perhaps the most prominent of the new wave of concert organizer/managers, agents on whose services the society would rely increasingly as the century progressed. He had, among other accomplishments, produced the first Salomé. His negotiating tactics, not always subtle, had cleared the way for the recurring Lyon concerts. Sometime after the Brussels journey Astruc approached the Société des Concerts with a project for an impresario-produced concert of 500 at the Salle des Fêtes of the Trocadéro, with its 4,500-seat capacity and pipe organ by Cavaillé-Coll. Their own forces would be augmented by a large chorus from the École de Chant Choral, led by the orpheonist and writer Henri Radiguer. Astruc argued that the society had “a duty to broaden its sphere of influence and occasionally to escape from its historic room, part temple, part prison.” The performing force would be large enough to overcome the acoustic of the cavernous space, and, he asserted, the central heating would function admirably. This last was an ongoing problem at both the Trocadéro and its successor the Palais de Chaillot; Astruc’s subsequent publicity took care to observe that those who had been to the first rehearsal could testify to the perfect atmospheric conditions.
     In part because it was now urgent to find some alternative to the Salle des Concerts, in part out of Messager’s obsession with raising the orchestra’s profile, the committee was at length convinced by the project. A séance extraordinaire was billed for Sunday, 11 February 1912, with Beethoven’s Ninth, the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, and a French version of Richard Strauss’s Taillefer, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra (1903). The press release trumpeted “this little revolution in our austere habits.”
     This new working arrangement brought with it inevitable problems, of which the most difficult was the scheduling of rehearsals. The choral society, consisting of volunteers with day work, was only available nights and Sunday mornings, precisely the time the professional singers among the sociétaires were engaged by their opera choruses and church choirs. There was of course no ready venue at the Conservatoire where hundreds of singers might rehearse. These questions were long negotiated and finally settled with a compromise plan that reserved the Trocadéro for a series of Thursday-night rehearsals.
     The Conservatoire, meanwhile, refused to authorize its box office to sell tickets for an impresario concert. As of the committee meeting on the Tuesday before the concert, gross proceeds amounted to only 5,349 francs. In the end, there was a reasonable sale and decent attendance, but then a round of disagreements with Astruc as to how to reckon the accounts for printing and advertising compromised whatever good feelings had so far been achieved. It is to Astruc’s credit that he understood how these first-ever encounters of the society with the outside world would need patient and flexible administration if they were to survive at all. Tensions were gradually lowered in every case, with the books made to balance when Astruc reduced his own fee. With all accounts reconciled, the Société des Concerts took away 7,820.65 francs from the Trocadéro, something less than the 9,000 they usually got and the 10,000 they expected, but in view of the risks scarcely a poor result.

In the months leading up to the Trocadéro concert Astruc met regularly with the committee and in the end they had reached a congenial working relationship and mutual respect. At nearly every meeting he would have heard discussion of the crisis of venue that had dominated their concerns since the announcement in 1908 that the Conservatoire would definitively relocate to the rue de Madrid, leaving them the sole occupants of a dying property slated for demolition. (The move took place in the fall of 1911.) During the course of the Assemblée Générale of 1909, Théodore Heymann as secretary delivered an oration, “Notes sur les origines de la Société,” that documented the struggle for the hall by citing the decrees of 1828, 1832–33, 1850, and 1897–98. Then he unveiled—begging that the musicians keep it in their confidence—the committee’s project for a new auditorium on the plot in the rue de Madrid, with construction costs reckoned at 250–300,000 francs. This would be reserved for the Société des Concerts. Prosperity would surely follow, and Messager would become the new Habeneck. The proposal, he said, had been quietly circulated and had met with no objections.
     In fact it had been met with little reaction at all. It was in this context that Astruc unveiled in turn his own project for a complex of fabulous new halls in the avenue Montigny: the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. He and his associate Gabriel Thomas had already constituted a société immobilière that would fund the building and guarantee the partners a 20-year lease. For purposes of discussion, he proposed to undertake the administrative direction of the Société des Concerts, gradually capitalizing the enterprise. It would be the principal occupant of the new building. Whether or not the society was in fact especially interested in Astruc’s vision is a matter for conjecture: I suspect they were not. But it had the effect of recognizing the possibility that the orchestra might flourish in an open market, divorced from the Conservatoire. A copy of Astruc’s proposal was thus sent to Fauré, along with a request from Messager for a meeting to discuss a strategy for delivering the society from its “menacing danger.”
     At the Conservatoire, Gabriel Fauré was “quite vividly contrary” to learn that the Société des Concerts was even considering a separation from the Conservatoire. While admitting that he had failed to take an active part in the society’s work, he also went on to maintain that everything that touched his institution interested him in the highest degree. He had properly pled the case, with the undersecretary for Fine Arts, for a hall “in greater rapport with the requirements of performing modern work and also greater correspondence with the comforts that today’s public can find in others theaters and halls.” But he was adamantly opposed to divorce: they could keep their name, he threatened, only if they remained a branch of the Conservatoire. Then he argued rather feebly that the solution to their problems was to hew faithfully to their traditions: with impeccable performances of the grands classiques—he listed Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven—in a fabled place. The public existed and would continue to exist; and if the society were to refuse its responsibility, someone else would come along to gather up the heritage they had abandoned. This was, of course, the old Louvre-of-music argument.
     In early February 1912 Messager and the secretary carefully drafted a letter summarizing the situation. As it was a critical manifesto, in fact a turning point, the text was reviewed and approved by each member of the committee before being submitted to Fauré:

M. Gabriel Fauré, member of the Institute
President of the Société des Concerts

Monsieur le Président:

In response to the request you honored me by tendering, I hasten to furnish you with the details of the crisis now facing the Société des Concerts. The Société des Concerts, originally established to enrich the public exercises of the Conservatoire’s students, was never and has never become a commercial enterprise in the strictest sense. The profits realized were, and still are, considered as an honorarium reimbursing the sociétaires for the time they devote to the rehearsals and performances.
     Last year each sociétaire earned, after the 20% deducted for the Caisse de Prévoyance, the sum of 633 francs. (The Société gives 20 concerts which require 40 rehearsals.) By contrast the other main Paris orchestras enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their work well compensated.
     For those honored to be members of this most elite of ensembles, the Société des Concerts is thus not about money. The interest of artists wishing to be part of the society lies in the very recognition of having been appointed by the administrative committee.
     I just noted, Mr. President, the financial results of last year. Those were less than in 1910, which in turn were less than the profit realized in 1909.
     We are thus led to a painful conclusion: the public, our subscribers, are leaving us.
     To what may we attribute their dissatisfaction? Certainly not to our performances: like our predecessors, we maintain the same care for perfection in our performances that earned the Société its worldwide reputation. And be assured, Mr. President, that all our efforts have but a single goal: to keep intact, and to transmit to our successors, the beautiful traditions and artistic probity that were left us by our predecessors.
     Thus we have to look elsewhere for the causes of the precarious state in which the Société des Concerts finds itself. In my opinion these are:
     1. The tiny hall in the faubourg Poissonnière. The limited dimensions of this room prevent us from allowing into the repertoire the majority of contemporary works, despite their having been proven by their character and the standing of their composers; in a room built for the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart they explode with noise.
     2. The high ticket prices we are obliged to charge in view of the small number of seats: only 800. This tends to chase away a numerous, interested public.
     3. The transfer of the Conservatoire to the rue de Madrid, which has dealt a near-fatal blow to the Société des Concerts. It is now isolated in a quartier which has definitively lost the musical excitement that the Conservatoire lent it.
     Led to believe that this situation would not last forever, the society bravely undertook to endure these vicissitudes. But last year the powers that be did nothing at all about building a concert hall in the rue de Madrid. That is why I need to tell you, Mr. President, of the substantial unrest and great malaise that reigns in our group—discouragement, even, which has come to afflict even our most devoted sociétaires. I need scarcely add that our recruitment grows ever more difficult. The young artists of today—and, alas, can we hold it against them?—no longer separate questions of material satisfaction from purely artistic considerations.
     Moreover the nature of the frenzy into which we have been plunged is far from unknown to others: we have received offers to give our concerts in another hall.
     It is to be feared that the Assemblée Générale of our members will vote to oblige us to accept this proposition, too advantageous to be ignored in this crisis.
     If the State were to agree to a temporary subvention of 30,000 francs per year, to last until we can occupy the rue de Madrid, this measure—thus restoring our receipts to the level of two or three years ago—would settle the sociétaires’ concern over the future that awaits the Société des Concerts.
     This arrangement, which I take the liberty to submit to you, would I think allow the Société to wait for the building of the hall in the rue de Madrid and our consequent reintegration with the school—soon enough, we hope, since we know how much you want it.
     Finally, if this were to happen, we would continue to be what we have never ceased being: completely absorbed in the musical instruction given by the Conservatoire. For the Société des Concerts is the only orchestra in France where, in order to belong, you have to be French and to be part, or have been part of the Conservatoire, as professor or student.
     The Société des Concerts thus well merits the title often bestowed on it: affiliate of the Conservatoire.
     Agréez, je vous prie, M. le Président, l’assurance de mes sentiments les plus respectueusement dévoués.

Messager

The authorities read the essay not as a compelling case for a new building of semi-permanent subvention but as evidence of a passing fiscal embarrassment. In mid March the undersecretary of Fine Arts responded with a grant of 1,000 francs, “most exceptionally, in encouragement.” The formulation was as offensive as the money was trivial: it was the language of royal tipping now eight decades past—and half the sum. Fauré used a delaying tactic to dissuade the angry committee members from going to call on the government, promising to support the idea of a new hall at the new Conservatoire when it came before his conseil supérieur in a year’s time; Messager should then, he said, take care to attend. By late April it was clear that the government had no intention of attaching the necessary appropriation to the annual budget submitted to the Chamber of Deputies. The Minister of Finance was heard to say “If the Conservatoire wants a hall that badly, why don’t they go to a loan company?”
     Meanwhile Astruc’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was nearing completion, and it did not escape attention that “private initiative had resolved, with rare success, a problem that the State itself so conspicuously failed to resolve.” The promotional materials boasted of an architectural union of “French taste with Anglo-Saxon technique"—elevators, hidden wiring, a designer salon-boudoir at the disposition of the spectatrices during the intervals, wide aisles, and comfortably large seats all with full visibility—in the quartier now recognized as the center of elegant Paris. In stark contrast to the Salle des Concerts (and the Trocadéro) the new theater would be “healthy”; modern heating with forced-air ventilation promised “absolute hygiene.” The souvenir program for the gala opening in April 1913 listed patrons including eight royal highnesses and among the Americans J. Pierpont Morgan, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and Mr. and Mrs. Otto Kahn. (Kahn is shortly to play a role of immense importance in the society’s fortunes.) The inaugural season at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées saw the premières of Le Sacre du printemps and Jeux and reprises of Daphnis et Chloé and L’Après-midi d’un faune; operas from Khovantchina and Boris to Rosenkavalier and Elektra; orchestras under Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Weingartner, Mengelberg, and Toscanini; Beethoven’s Ninth and the Verdi Requiem. There was no participation by the Société des Concerts. Instead Astruc’s season was their principal competition.
     But by October Astruc was bankrupt. Within a few weeks a businessman named de Mortier, representing a new Société des Amis de la Musique, again approached the Société des Concert to occupy the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. They proposed a rent of 1,500 francs per concert (modified in the written proposal to 2,000 francs), inclusive of heat, electricity, and staff—noting that the large auditorium seated 2,000 and was equipped with a pipe organ. Messager and the committee were now prepared to take the proposal a good deal more seriously than they had greeted Astruc’s first initiatives, and indicated their readiness to occupy the house for the 1913–14 season scheduled to open on 30 November. But the musicians, when consulted, thought otherwise. The rent was considerably too high, they thought, and the new corporation had presented no proof of actually having the lease. Moreover Fauré sent word of his “strongest reservations,” again reminding them that the cherished words du Conservatoire were at risk. It was agreed to postpone the decision until there was more time to think about it; the secretary left to tell Mortier immediately and would break the news to Messager that night at the Opéra. Before the matter could be taken up again, war intervened.
     The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées did, in fact, become the home of the Société des Concerts, but not until many years later. They played there for the first time during World War II, and adopted the theater it as their permanent venue as of the Liberation.