Dieter Flury is a Swiss flutist who was the principal flute of the

Vienna Philharmonic The Vienna Philharmonic (VPO; german: Wiener Philharmoniker, links=no) is an orchestra that was founded in 1842 and is considered to be one of the finest in the world. The Vienna Philharmonic is based at the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria. It ...

from 1981 to 2017. He also served as the orchestra's managing director from 2005 to 2014.

Early life

Flury studied with Hans Meyer and

André Jaunet André Jaunet (May 17, 1911 – December 13, 1988) was a flutist in the same genre as Marcel Moyse. In later years he worked as a teacher in Zurich, Switzerland, where he taught flautists Peter-Lukas Graf and Aurèle Nicolet, Conrad Klemm amon ...

at the Zurich University of Music, where he graduated in 1976. He also completed a mathematics degree at the same time at ETH Zurich.

Career

Flury joined the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in September 1977 and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1981 as the principal flute. He was succeeded by Silvia Careddu in 2017. He has been a full-time professor at the University of Fine Arts in Graz,

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

since 1996.

Controversy

Flury has sparked controversy over comments that accepting

women A woman is an adult female human. Prior to adulthood, a female human is referred to as a girl (a female child or adolescent). The plural ''women'' is sometimes used in certain phrases such as "women's rights" to denote female humans regardl ...

and/or people of color into the Vienna Philharmonic takes away from the musical tradition of the

orchestra An orchestra (; ) is a large instrumental ensemble typical of classical music, which combines instruments from different families. There are typically four main sections of instruments: * bowed string instruments, such as the violin, viola, c ...

and that musicians outside of Europe do not have the same standards. In 1996, he commented: He also told

Westdeutscher Rundfunk Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (''West German Broadcasting Cologne''; WDR, ) is a German public-broadcasting institution based in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia with its main office in Cologne. WDR is a constituent member of the conso ...

that accepting women would be "gambling with the emotional unity that this organism currently has".Westdeutscher Rundfunk Radio 5, "Musikalische Misogynie", 13 February 1996
transcribed by Regina Himmelbauer
/ref>

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Flury, Dieter Living people 1952 births Players of the Vienna Philharmonic Swiss classical flautists