Wealth & Money Quote by Eugene Ormandy

Ormandy’s line lands like a well-timed cymbal crash: bright, a little shameless, and impossible to ignore. Coming from a conductor who spent decades at the helm of the Philadelphia Orchestra, it reads less like a confession than a wink from inside the machinery of high culture. “Principles” evokes the lofty language institutions love to advertise - artistic integrity, tradition, excellence - while “money” yanks the conversation back to the unromantic truth that orchestras run on budgets, donors, touring fees, union contracts, and board politics. The punch is in the pivot: principles are fine as long as they’re cheap.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how art gets made. Ormandy isn’t praising greed; he’s naming a structural reality that turns ideals into negotiable terms. “Flexible” is doing double duty: it’s the virtue we’re taught to admire in professionals, and the polite euphemism for compromise. He’s also protecting himself with humor. As a musician, saying this outright could sound cynical or ungrateful; as a deadpan quip, it becomes an insider’s realism, the kind that lets everyone laugh while recognizing themselves in the mirror.

Context matters: Ormandy’s era was the golden age of American orchestral prestige, built on patronage and institutional branding. The quote punctures that grandeur. It suggests the real conducting isn’t only with a baton; it’s negotiating the terms under which “principles” are allowed to survive.