Mel Broiles: Gunga Din

On a Saturday evening in 1995,  I received a call from the orchestra manager telling me that Mel was sick and that I had to come in to play the Saturday night performance. I thought he was kidding. Mel had never called in sick in 37 years!  But the call was not a prank; Mel had suffered a stroke during that afternoon’s performance of Der Rosencavalier. Jim Pandolfi, who played third trumpet that afternoon told me that during the third act, Mel was getting wobbly. He was listing in his chair. By the final trio, Mel was unable to sit upright in his chair and Pete Bond, the second trumpet player, had to hold onto Mel to keep him from falling on the ground. Mel was having a stroke. But like the character,  Gunga Din, from the famous Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name, who after being mortally wounded, still picked up his bugle to warn the British regiment, Mel was unbowed by a little annoyance like a stroke.  Just as the famous presentation of the rose moment came, Mel picked up his trumpet and played this difficult solo, powerfully and clearly up  to the high concert D flat! After that, Mel’s head was nodding onto his chest and he was clearly in serious distress. Pete Bond continued to hold onto Mel.  At the end of the piece, there is a short trumpet fanfare. Mel, still undeterred, tried to play this fanfare! Immediately after the final note of Rosencavalier,  the paramedics came into the pit, strapped Mel to a gurney and took him to the hospital.  “Men die in battle to the sound of the trumpet” Indeed! Two months later, Mel was back at the MET. Though not quite as strong as before, he still managed to keep to his usual very full schedule. 

The audition process in 2011 is unlikely to produce a Mel Broiles. Winning an orchestral job in 2011 is like winning an Olympic gymnastics competition. It requires technical and rhythmic perfection - every note in place, in tune, not too loud, not too soft, not too anything. Homogenized. The down side of this is that the subsequent aesthetic of orchestral music making (post-audition) is also deeply affected by its audition process. Orchestras are almost indistinguishable from one another. Homogenized. Mel Broiles was the opposite of homogenized. Mel was operatic, excessive, intense, dramatic, melodramatic. Mel was exciting. People go to concerts to hear exciting. Orchestras need less perfect, more exciting. I know I sound like an old geezer dreaming nostalgically for the good old days but the older I get the more I am convinced that the orchestra world desperately needs as many Mel Broiles as they can find.  Maybe having Mel Broileses populating the orchestra world this wouldn’t save the orchestras from fading out of the culture from lack of interest, but it wouldn’t hurt.