The Berlin Philharmonic's First Woman, and the Clarinetist Who Came Next
Berliner Philharmoniker
On September 1, 1982, the Berlin Philharmonic seated a woman for the first time in its hundred-year history. Madeleine Carruzzo had beaten twelve male rivals at a June 23 audition to win a place in the first violins, a section that had never included a woman since the orchestra's founding in 1882.
The Swiss violinist, born in Sion in 1956, had not set out for Berlin. She trained under Tibor Varga at the Hochschule fur Musik Detmold and had applied for the concertmaster post at the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, in her own country, only to be turned down explicitly because a woman was not wanted in the chair. Berlin, of all places, took her.
Karajan's orchestra was not finished making history that year. Weeks after Carruzzo's audition, the conductor personally pushed to bring in a second woman: the clarinetist Sabine Meyer, whom he wanted as principal. Where Carruzzo had won her seat through the orchestra's normal audition process, Meyer's appointment came from Karajan overriding it, and the players never forgave the method. The German press called the resulting feud the Klarinettenkrieg.
After Meyer's probationary period ended, the orchestra's musicians voted 73 to 4 that she should leave, citing a tone that did not blend with the section, though Karajan and much of the press suspected the real objection was simply that she was a woman following Carruzzo into the ensemble. Meyer departed nine months later and rebuilt her career as a soloist, a path that made her far more famous than she would likely have become as a rank-and-file member.
Carruzzo, by contrast, stayed. She built a decades-long career in the first violins, quietly, without the controversy that trailed Meyer out the door. It took the orchestra another forty years to hand a woman its most visible chair: in 2023, the Latvian violinist Vineta Sareika-Volkner became the Berlin Philharmonic's first female concertmaster in its 141-year history, a title Carruzzo's 1982 audition made thinkable in the first place.
