The paper presents to an international audience the research on the programmes of Dimitri Mitropoulos with the New York Philharmonic, based on the orchestra’s archive on the Internet, with an emphasis on the make-up of his repertoire. In the programmes of Arturo Toscanini, Beethoven and Wagner account for one third of the performances, and twelve composers for two thirds; in those of Mitropoulos, the same share is spread over twice as many composers, with more opportunities for composers of the 20th century. After him, and especially in the 1970s, the programmes turned to avant-garde music: under Pierre Boulez Beethoven fell to 11th place (3.5%), while the programmes of Lorin Maazel brought back the music of the Romantic era. The frequency with which programmes were repeated increases from the 1957–1958 season, when Mitropoulos’s tenure ends, a phenomenon the paper calls an “industrialisation of production”. In Mahler’s works, Mitropoulos (1.52%) lags behind Bruno Walter (4.45%); the strong impression that his Mahler performances made on the public and the critics must therefore be sought elsewhere and not in the number of performances. The works he conducted most often were Manuel de Falla’s “El sombrero de tres picos”, the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. 81.5% of his programmes include at least one symphony, and each programme usually three to five works.
Presentation. The paper was given in English at the symposium “Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896–1960) / 50+1 Jahre danach” of the Institute of Musicology of the University of Vienna (21–22 October 2011).