The Copland is one of Mr. Drucker’s benchmark works, a jazzy and lighthearted piece that fits his loose, jaunty style of playing and sunny personality. He has made it his own, performing it 60 times with the Philharmonic as of Friday. Only one other clarinetist has ever played the concerto with the orchestra: the man who commissioned it (and who inspired Mr. Drucker’s parents to buy their 10-year-old Stanley a clarinet), Benny Goodman.  At a rehearsal on Wednesday, orchestra members gave their colleague several rounds of foot-tapping applause. He played with abandon, swaying from side to side, tilting his clarinet upward, bouncing his eyebrows in time with the notes. Other players smiled with pleasure.  The departure of someone like Mr. Drucker is not only a sea change for the orchestra and its collective memory but also an occasion to use phrases like “end of an era.” He was part of a generation of remarkable woodwind principal players who came to their jobs in the decades after World War II, when American orchestras became the skilled, hearty musical machines that were the prides of their cities.  He has outlasted, and outlived, almost all of them.  “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” he said in an interview at his home in Massapequa, N.Y., where his beloved 30-foot cabin cruiser, the Noni, is tied up by the deck. It is waiting to take Mr. Drucker and his wife, Naomi, a professional clarinetist with her own career, on their annual summer cruise up the Atlantic Coast. (Noni is Mrs. Drucker’s childhood nickname.)  “It’s just the way life works,” he said. “You have your time, your era. Mine has been a very long time and era. I’ve been very lucky.”  Mr. Drucker said his musical faculties were undiminished, but 80 was a good moment to bid farewell. “I always wanted to retire with everything intact,” he added.  In his time he has seen the orchestra turn from a smoke-filled, poker-playing boys’ club to an assembly half populated by women; progress from a part-time job to a year-round occupation; move from Carnegie Hall to Lincoln Center. He lived through its heyday as a recording machine and watched its output dry up to nothing but a dribble of online issues.  He has played for most of the great conductors of his time: George Szell (“not a pleasant guy”), Dimitri Mitropoulos (“a saint”), Leopold Stokowski (“called everybody ‘You, sir’ ”), Leonard Bernstein (“Whatever he touched seemed to work”).  The Philharmonic has yet to find a successor. Auditions this season were inconclusive. The orchestra will hold another search next season.  Mr. Drucker’s retirement has unleashed an orgy of numbers from the Philharmonic: 10 music directors during his tenure, 60 countries visited on tour, 191 solo appearances and 10,200 concerts with the orchestra — two-thirds of the total since it was founded in 1842.  The numbers are on display at an exhibition in a corridor at Avery Fisher Hall that traces his career and provides clips of interviews and performances. It was organized by Amy Shapiro, a former student who is writing a doctoral dissertation about the Philharmonic through his experiences. At a private preview last week, a subdued Mr. Drucker seemed moved. “It’s overwhelming,” he said softly.  Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that Mr. Drucker is only the third principal clarinetist of the Philharmonic in almost 90 years. Imagine three chief justices of the United States since 1920, or three popes, or three Yankees managers.  Mr. Drucker has left his imprint on millions of listeners, night after night. It was his version of the solos in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, or in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, or in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” or in countless other pieces that audiences heard night after night. Mr. Drucker’s clarinet also soared in the opening of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” heard in Woody Allen’s movie “Manhattan.”  Mr. Drucker, a briskly cheerful man given to quips and fast walking, is not much for deep introspection, at least publicly. He emanates ease, in his playing and manner.  “He comes in every day like a 17-year-old, and he’s playing something for the first time,” said Carl Schiebler, the orchestra’s longtime personnel manager. “It’s a great gift, and also for the people around him, to see the enthusiasm.”  Mr. Drucker plans to keep performing. In August he will make two appearances with the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society in Massachusetts, during a stop on his cruise. He will teach a master class in October at Michigan State University in East Lansing.  The secret to playing all these years, Mr. Drucker said, was keeping things fresh.  “You have to be driven,” he said. “You want it to have meaning. You just don’t rest on your laurels. You try to be new and edge-of-chair.” That involves reaching into the “memory bank” of past performances and always trying to improve.  Despite Mr. Drucker’s seemingly charmed career, he views himself as having had to swim against the current. “I came from a humble background,” he said. “I didn’t have a famous teacher. I didn’t have what I would say was a well-rounded educational background.”  His parents were Ukrainian immigrants. Mr. Drucker grew up in Brooklyn and studied for five years with Leon Russianoff, who later became a noted pedagogue. At 15, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and by the end of his first year, he had his first job, with the Indianapolis Symphony. After two more quick orchestra stops, Mr. Drucker landed at the New York Philharmonic as assistant principal and E flat clarinetist.  He essentially learned on the job. “It was a master class every day,” he said. By 1960, he was principal clarinetist, appointed by Bernstein.  Mr. Drucker performed his first solo with the orchestra in 1961 under Bernstein and was the last soloist to play under him. “Lenny was the most unique of them all,” Mr. Drucker said. “Everything became an event, the tours, the type of pieces that he promoted, the countless recordings.”  Bernstein declined to write a concerto for Mr. Drucker, citing time constraints, but recommended the composer John Corigliano and insisted on conducting the premiere of Mr. Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto. A recording with the conductor Zubin Mehta won Mr. Drucker a Grammy nomination in 1982. Another came for the Copland Concerto with Bernstein in 1992. In 1998 he was Musical America’s instrumentalist of the year.  The Druckers live in a red-brick and brown-shingle home, surrounded by a lush garden, in a cul-de-sac. They share a 12-by-12-foot studio, one of four bedrooms. A slab of glass sits on a nondescript black desk, used to work on reeds. Boxes of them fill a wicker basket.  In a drawer a cardboard box contains a jumble of barrels — the barrel being the short section of the clarinet below the mouthpiece — and many mouthpieces. Mr. Drucker is always looking for a backup, he said, but nothing will improve on the mouthpiece he bought from Russianoff in 1948 for $6. He still plays it.  “It shows you I can stick to things,” he said. “It must have been a good deal.”  Pictures cover every inch of the studio’s walls, a visual biography and a monument to Mr. Drucker’s longevity and prominence: Mr. Drucker with Paul Hindemith (inscribed “Don’t forget this old composer”), Copland, Goodman, Morton Gould, Pablo Casals, Bernstein, Mr. Mehta, Kurt Masur.  There is Mr. Drucker on tour in front of the Teatro Alla Scala, next to the Berlin Wall, in North Korea last year.  Record company ad copy calls him: “Not just the first clarinet of the first orchestra. Very possibly the first clarinetist of the world.” Also on the wall is an enlarged Rolling Stone cover featuring the Stray Cats, which includes his son, the bassist who goes by the name Lee Rocker. The Druckers’ daughter, Rosanne Drucker, is a country music singer and songwriter.  A portrait of Leon Russianoff, after whom the Druckers named their son, is naturally there. It is inscribed, “To the greatest of them all.”  Stanley Drucker’s clarinet can be heard in countless New York Philharmonic recordings, but he also made many solo and chamber music discs. Two — containing the Corigliano and Copland concertos — were nominated for Grammys. Here is a sampling.  STANLEY DRUCKER PLAYS BRAHMS, Elysium Records (2001, two discs, $38.98). SCHUMANN: THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR WINDS AND PIANO, Alan Stepansky, cellist; Gerald Appleman, cellist; Mr. Drucker, clarinetist; Elysium (1996, $72.84, import).  MOZART: THE ELYSIUM STRING QUARTET & FRIENDS, with Mr. Drucker, clarinetist; Allen Spanjer and L. William Kuyper, horn players; Joseph Robinson, oboist; Elysium (1999, $18.98).COPLAND: EL SALÓN MÉXICO/CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND STRING ORCHESTRA/MUSIC FOR THE THEATER/CONNOTATIONS FOR ORCHESTRAS, Mr. Drucker and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein; Deutsche Grammophon (1991, $16.98).  JOHN CORIGLIANO, CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND ORCHESTRA/SAMUEL BARBER, THIRD ESSAY FOR ORCHESTRA, Mr. Drucker and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta; New World Records (1992, $17.99). CONTRASTS FOR VIOLIN, CLARINET AND PIANO, by Bela Bartok, with Robert Mann, violinist; Mr. Drucker, clarinetist; and Leonid Hambro, pianist; Bartok Records ($15, available from bartokrecords.com).
Stanley Drucker, 80, the principal clarinetist for the New York Philharmonic, is retiring after the longest tenure of any player in the orchestra’s existence.