# The Boston Symphony Orchestra-1905

The Boston Symphony Orchestra
And Its Founder Henry Lee Higginson
By Richard Aldrich
he Boston Symphony Orchestra is Mr. Henry L. Higginson’s yacht, his racing-stable, his library and his art gallery, or it takes the place of what these things are to other men of wealth with other tastes. It is a remark that he himself once made in disavowing any philanthropic ends when he set up in the city of Boston a musical organization that has few peers in the world of music anywhere. And though few will be persuaded to accept his disavowal as a complete expression of the case, it is true that Mr. Higginson has found in the establishment, the upbuilding, and the maintenance of a consummate artistic institution the keen personal delight that other men take in perfecting a collection or pursuing supremacy in a sport. If horse-racing is the sport of kings, there is also something regal, even imperial, in the possession of an orchestra. Kings had their court bands for their courtly pleasure a century and two centuries ago—bands which, in continental Europe, have evolved into royally endowed artistic establishments for the benefit of the people; and even into the nineteenth century the splendid Austrian princes, upon whom a fine old crust of feudalism lingered later than upon any others of the anointed, maintained for their own delectation, in their own palaces, great orchestras and great composers, whereof Joseph Haydn, serving the house of Esterházy as a liveried menial, is the classical exemplar. Mr. Higginson’s orchestra, whatever he may declare as to his own motives, has been for twenty-three years as much for the benefit of his townsmen as for himself; and, in a way by no means indirect, for the benefit of his countrymen.
Henry L. Higginson, born in New York, but brought up in Boston as a scion of a Boston family socially and intellectually most distinguished, passed in his youth through the days of the Germania Orchestra and the Harvard Musical Association and the other local institutions that decorated the town with the epithet of “musical,” and that contributed in large measure to that connotation of “culture” still inseparable from its name. The young Higginson, no doubt, like the good Bostonian he has always been, thought these things were all they should be or could be, till he was sent to Vienna to complete his education.
There he saw a great light. He associated much with musicians and musical amateurs, and heard what orchestral playing might be at the hands of accomplished musicians constantly in training under great conductors. Then and there he formed the resolution that when his time came he would give to Boston an orchestra on a higher plane than all its culture had ever known; an orchestra the members of which should not be summoned to its service upon occasion from other pursuits, but whose business should be its business; an orchestra that should not be dependent upon the caprice of the public, or limited in its scope by the conservatism of a clique.
His time came in the midst of a successful business career, when, moreover, Boston was ripe for the experiment he intended to try. The old Harvard Musical ​Association had shriveled up to nothing. To take its place, there was a newly formed Philharmonic Society supporting an orchestra upon the casual basis that was the only possible one under existing conditions. Its purposes were sincere, but it was glad to retire from the field when, in February, 1881, Mr. Higginson made public his intention of establishing a new orchestra in a new way. There was in Boston at the time a clever young baritone singer, musical through and through, a man of uncommon intelligence and force, and in certain ways of rare accomplishment. To Georg Henschel, though he was without experience as an orchestral conductor, was intrusted the organization of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He proved, not unnaturally, to be far from an ideal conductor, since the art of conducting is not inborn, but is acquired by great toil and long experience; but he did well the pioneering work for the new orchestra.
As he organized it, it numbered seventy performers. There were twelve first and eleven second violins, eight violas, nine cellos, nine double-basses, and the number of wood- and brass-wind players usual in a small orchestra.
The growth of the orchestra is shown by a comparison of these figures with those of its present constitution. There are now, when all the players are in requisition,—which, of course, they are only in the most modern compositions,—about ninety men; namely, sixteen first and fourteen second violins, ten violas, ten cellos, eight double-basses, four flutes, three oboes, one English horn, three clarinets, one bass clarinet, three bassoons, one contra-bassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, and one player each of the harp, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, and tambour. It gave its first concert on October 22, 1881. The purpose was at first to make it minister specially to listeners of limited purse. The best places cost fifty cents; at the so-called public rehearsals, on the afternoons of the day preceding the concerts,—really exact duplicates of the concerts themselves,—there were seats for twenty-five cents, But the concerts speedily became not only popular but fashionable. There was great competition for tickets among those of unlimited as well as of limited purse, and advantage was soon taken of this eagerness by the institution of an auction sale at the beginning season for the choice of places. Some have said that this has tended to restrict the popular privileges upon which emphasis was laid at first, and to increase the reliance put upon the support of wealth and fashion. Some have affirmed, too, that attendance upon these concerts is for many in Boston only a compliance with fashionable necessity. Yet for twenty-three years, week after week, the hall has been filled, often to the very limit of its capacity. Now, Boston is doubtless not to be judged as other towns; but it is hard to believe that, even in Boston, the necessity of being fashionable after the Boston manner can continue to constrain hundreds to weekly boredom unremittingly for twenty-three years, with few signs of relief yet in sight. It is almost easier to believe that love of music has really permeated the several strata of Boston society, and that the audience goes to the concerts because it wishes to hear them.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra was not founded to provide an instrument for any particular conductor, but its conductors have been summoned to fill the need it created—a fact that should be taken into consideration by zealous but not always wisely prompted orchestral founders elsewhere. It has had four different men at its head in the course of its existence, each a man of special qualification in certain directions, who has not escaped fiery. ordeals of criticism for one reason or: another, especially at home. It has been observed that the angel Gabriel would be disparaged by the American public if he came in contact with it long enough; and in Boston the critical faculty has always been highly developed.
At least Mr. Henschel’s standard of was high and his temperament stood often in good stead where skill and routine failed him. What he accomplished was worth the doing. He returned to Europe in 1884, to be succeeded by a man as different in type, in ideals, and in method as could well be imagined.
Mr. Higginson had seen and heard [[Wilhelm Gericke|]] in Vienna as Hans Richter’s colleague at the Imperial Opera, and as conductor, also, of the Society of Friends of Music. Keen, alert, of imperious and overmastering will, with all the technic and routine of the difficult art of conducting ​
From the painting by John S. Sargent, owned by the Harvard Union. Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
Henry Lee Higginson
Drawn by S. Ivanowski
The Kettledrums
There were many veterans and some incompetents of the earlier dispensation in the orchestra when he came to it, who had found in it a “pleasant refuge” for declining years. Many new men came from Europe at his summons,—young men of eager blood, like the “young lions” of the Conservatory orchestra that were the delight of Berlioz in Paris,—for whom the orchestra was not a refuge, but a field for ambitious and energetic labor.
It was a fortunate chance that brought Mr. Kneisel, Mr. Loeffler, Mr. Svecenski, Mr. Roth, Mr. Giese, the Adamowski brothers, Mr. Schuecker, and still others in the earlier years, and that has since ​added such men as the ill-fated Pourtau, Drawn by S. Ivanowski An Oboe and Mr. Longy, to name only a few of many accomplished players who have helped make the Boston Symphony Orchestra admired as “a band of virtuosi.” Their coming caused wailing and gnashing of teeth in certain quarters. It is not a pleasant task to dismiss veterans who have deserved well; but it sometimes must be done, and the need for it must never be lost sight of, as New York has found to its cost. The violinist’s arm gets unsteady, his fingers uncertain; the oboist’s throat and tongue muscles, continuously strained in forming the tone of his capricious and difficult instrument, become relaxed and inefficient; the clarinetist loses his front teeth and is as one bereft of hope; the trumpeter’s and the hornist’s lips forget their cunning, and as musicians they must all give way long before, as men, they are used up.
Strange though it may seem, it is a difficult undertaking to secure the best men from abroad as orchestral players in the Drawn by S. Ivanowski The Leader American Promised Land. There is a stronger force than the Musical Union to keep them out. Seasons are short, engagements are limited, opportunities for players of other than the stringed instruments, in case they should lose their positions, are few. Nor is it possible to pick out good men abroadvwith certainty. Not all the undertakings of the Boston Symphony conductors in this direction have been fortunate. It stands upon the records that, having heard many aspirants during a certain summer in Europe, one of Mr. Higginson’s conductors personally chose and brought over sixteen new men. Every one of them proved quite incompetent and had speedily to be sent back. On another occasion it was desired to obtain a new clarinetist to take the place of one of the veterans just mentioned. The old one was dismissed with an indemnity for the breaking of his contract. The new one was sent, at the conductor's request, from Vienna by a celebrated conductor, who certified to his competency, truly believing him, no doubt, to be “good enough for America.” Before he had gotten half through his first rehearsal with the orchestra it was clear that the new man would not do at all. He was ​not even allowed to play at the ensuing concert, but was sent away with a blessing and the year’s salary he had contracted for—shipped to a distant city where he could play in a theater and be as little as possible a thorn in the flesh of Boston. The veteran was hastily recalled and reëngaged, naturally at an advance in salary sufficient to assuage his wounded feelings.
The American life, and his strenuous part in it, caused Mr. Gericke, after the season of 1888-89, From a photograph Franz Kneisel to return to the quieter atmosphere of Vienna; and to succeed him Arthur Nikisch was summoned from his post of conductor at the Neues Theater—the municipal opera-house—of Leipsic. He was just then emerging into that fame that has since made him one of the most distinguished, and, it may also be added, one of the most highly paid conductors in the world; but he had not quite arrived at it then, and the series of concerts that he had conducted the previous winter in Berlin had been a disastrous financial failure.
In Boston he did much in the next three years to bring himself into prominence as one of the most original, daring, and intensely subjective of the modern school of conductors—a man who, with certain exaggerations and affectations, is illuminated by the living flame of genius. As about his predecessor, so even more about him, was Boston rent into contending factions. So it was also about his successor, Emil Paur, who, having stepped into Nikisch’s position at the Leipsic opera, stepped into it again in Boston as one who came to tide over an emergency. For after Mr. Nikisch’s contract had been canceled in 1893, under circumstances of some stress and strain, Mr. Higginson fully expected to secure for his orchestra Dr. Hans Richter. It is not perhaps generally known by how narrow a margin the great Viennese conductor, then as now recognized as one of the most gifted and authoritative in the world, failed to come to this country. He had just had trouble in the intriguing court circles of the Austrian capital, where the strings that direct the management of the Imperial Opera are pulled. He was disgusted and ready to leave Vienna. He had actually signed a contract with Mr. Higginson and was expected in Boston. Then came salve to his wounded feelings, auf hohen Befehl, in the shape of a decoration and an appointment to the post of of Hofhapellmeister at the opera on the death of Hellmesberger. So he calmly ignored his American contract and stayed. Mr. Paur exercised a rude but vigorous sway for five years, when he was succeeded, in 1898, by Mr. Gericke, who returned to a place that had been kept warm in the hearts of his admirers during the nine years of his absence.
It would be wrong to neglect the part that was played in the upbuilding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra by Franz Kneisel, whom Mr. Gericke took as a lad of twenty from the post of concert-master of Bilse’s orchestra in Berlin, and put in the corresponding post in Boston in the autumn of 1885. To the eye of the audi- ence the concert-master—so we somewhat unintelligibly translate the German word Konsertmeister, ignoring the more descriptive French name of chef d’attague—is the ​
The Conductors of the Boston Symphony Society
do no wrong. If all goes well in the orchestra, it is the conductor’s achievement; if anything goes amiss, it is very likely to Drawn by S. Ivanowski A Soloistbe the concert-master’s fault. He must always see that all the instruments are in tune with one another before rehearsals and concerts begin. In most cases he sees that the violin parts are properly marked for bowing and phrasing, which he determines himself, in order that all shall play alike—though not always is uniformity of bowing considered indispensable. If there is a misunderstanding between the conductor and a player, the concert-master’s good offices are invaluable in setting it right. He advises the conductor as to the deficiencies or excellences of individual players, and may often be called upon to assist in engaging new men. If the conductor makes a mistake,—and even the greatest conductor does,—the concert-master is there to see that the force of it is broken in some way. Few conductors are thoroughly familiar with the details of the technic and the limitations of all the orchestral instruments, their possibilities in the way of phrasing and the production of special effects; for, though most conductors have begun their careers as performers upon some instrument, their playing days are past and they have other things to think of. So, if the conductor gives a direction as to phrasing or accentuation that is im-​practicable, or if he demands something that cannot be done, the concert-master must be ready, after the rehearsal, to explain to the bewildered or derisive player that he is not to understand thus and so exactly as he thought, but rather this and that, which was what the conductor really meant; and likewise adroitly to intimate to the mistaken autocrat that some slight modification of his desires would be advisable. In case of direst need, should conductor and orchestra lose touch with each other in a public performance, the concert-master must divine the cause of the trouble, and, through his intimacy with the men and his knowledge of the conductor’s wishes as well as of the score, bring them together again with the sound of his instrument, at a critical moment more potent than the conductor's stick. Or, should a soloist miss a cue or make a false entrance, he must, if possible, give such a hint or catch up such a missing strand as shall set the unlucky one right. In short, his office is of an importance to the prosperity of the orchestra only less than that of the conductor himself. It may easily be seen how valuable a man of force and tact, of accomplished musicianship and fertile resource, may be in such a place, or how futile one must be who has not these qualities. It is only needful to say that Mr. Kneisel, during the eighteen years he was concert-master, was the very ideal of what a concert-master should be; and that, without services such as his, the Boston Symphony Orchestra could scarcely have attained the perfection it has. The orchestra has at present, in Professor Willy Hess, a player of style, authority, and technical accomplishment, and a man of the vigorous and commanding personality needed for its concert-master—one who is carrying on the best traditions of his office in the economy of the orchestra.
Drawn by S. Ivanowski
The Box-circle
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is the creature of Mr. Higginson’s will, and never has been anything else; and if he should choose to-morrow to disband it, it would cease to exist. He has made it what he ​desired; but he has never interfered with the absolute authority of his conductors, and he has always upheld their hands and met their wishes in a way that has often entailed great and sometimes extravagant expense. Indeed, the price of the Boston Symphony Orchestra has never been measured by the guarantee of salaries and rentals. There was once one of Mr. Higginson’s conductors who thought that the tone of the violins—the greatest glory and strength of the organization—would be improved if all the players had instruments of the same make and quality, instead of such as each individual had chosen or been able to possess himself of. Nothing would do, therefore, but that he should send to Germany and import for the score or more of his violinists a set of violins by one maker. The experiment was tried for a time, but the results were not what were expected, and most of the instruments are now packed away in the store-room, gathering dust. Again, that the orchestra should have the assurance of a home from season to season and from week to week, it was necessary to secure control of the old Music Hall, and Mr. Higginson found himself a real-estate owner by virtue of possessing an orchestra. But even ownership did not bring peace and quiet. The Boston elevated railroad was projected, and one of its surveys took its line directly through the sacred statue of Beethoven, threatening the demolition of the ancient, barn-like, and drafty, but acoustically excellent, auditorium. An immediate movement toward the erection of a new hall was necessary; and though the proposed line was changed and the hall was left untouched, the movement, after some years, resulted in the erection of the new hall in another quarter of the city—a hall erected, to be sure, by a company, but one whose financing approached in one way or another close to Mr. Higginson’s pocket.
Drawn by S. Ivanowski
The Orchestra, Mr. Gericke Leading
An orchestra is a kind of microcosm, a miniature of the outside world, in which there are the leaders, the aristocrats, and the followers, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, though a spirit of civic unity must inform them all. And, as in the outside world, the material rewards vary with the powers and the position of ​the individuals. The terms under which the Boston Symphony players are engaged are very various. The rank and file are for the most part under annual contracts for a season of twenty-nine weeks (of which twenty-four are devoted to the Boston concerts, and five to traveling), at a salary of from thirty or thirty-five dollars a week upward. The chief players—the first violin, or concert-master, and some of the other best violinists, the first cellist, the first performers on the other instruments—receive more, up to an annual salary of five thousand dollars, with engagements of several years. Some receive weekly salaries of various amounts guaranteed for various periods of time beyond the regular season, sometimes as long as forty-five weeks in the year. The conductors have received salaries of about eight or ten thousand dollars.
The contract that each member has to sign requires that he shall have “a good and suitable instrument and keep it, at his own expense, constantly in the best condition”; that he shall “support to the best of his ability all rehearsals and performances,” and “play to the best of his ability as a musician.” He shall comply with the instructions of the conductor as to music, deportment, and order; shall play at no balls and at no other orchestral concerts or rehearsals in Boston or elsewhere without permission. One proviso that seems a little curious at first is that “the conductor shall have full power to regulate the pitch of the orchestra,” until it is remembered that in case of some of the wood and brass instruments a change of the standard of pitch would mean the procurement of new instruments. There are fines imposed for lateness at rehearsals: five dollars for a period not exceeding fifteen minutes, ten dollars for a longer one, and ten dollars for absence, unless there is sufficient excuse. There are certain penalties and indemnities which Mr. Higginson is entitled to claim on the non-fulfilment of contract stipulations. It may be remarked, however, that the contract is much more severe than Mr. Higginson is; and the pound of flesh is rarely exacted, and then only for the sake of discipline.
Such a thing could never happen, for instance, as happened to Dr. Richard Strauss in New York last spring, when he was rehearsing his enormously difficult “Symphonia Domestica” for the eighth or ninth time with an orchestra supposed to have some claims to at least a season’s permanency. An unlucky horn-player made a mistake that the composer had repeatedly corrected at previous meetings, and when Dr. Strauss angrily threw down his baton and reproached the musician for inattention and neglect of his directions, the culprit replied: “But, Herr Doctor, I have n’t been here before—I ’m a substitute!’ Playing in the theater orchestras is forbidden; but if, in a few occasional instances, it 1s tolerated, it is because a special necessity is recognized. Many of the players teach; but few beyond the violinists and cellists have that resource open to them. The purpose is—and it is effectively realized—to make the orchestra, during the season, a united body of men with but one main object in view and free to devote themselves to it—following a single director’s counsels of perfection, with as little as possible to weary them or to distract them from it. How high an ideal that is, and how few of the great orchestras of the world make any pretense of reaching it, is perhaps not often realized. Mr. Thomas’s Chicago orchestra is one of them. The orchestra of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is one. Are there many others? The Gewandhaus players in Leipsic, those of the Vienna Philharmonic, and those of the great Paris orchestras have their operatic and other duties; the members of the Berlin Philharmonic are subject to the wear and tear of almost daily popular concerts. Mr. Henry J. Wood has just fought his way through almost bloody strife to the point of forbidding the men of his Queen’s Hall orchestra in London to rehearse through substitutes. The orchestras that are so entirely devoted to the sole object of their orchestral concerts are indeed rare.
But twenty-nine weeks’ salary is not enough to support the rank and file of Mr. Higginson’s men throughout the year. Hence arose the “Pops” of the early Boston summer-time. Not chiefly to supply his fellow-citizens with fantasies on “Carmen,” Strauss waltzes, and sarsaparilla, but to lengthen the period of his men’s earnings, Mr. Higginson, twenty years ago, began to give a series of concerts of light music in the Music Hall, lasting for eight weeks after the close of the regular season. The leading players take no part in these, ​except that upon one of them is annually bestowed the brief glory of conducting. But even when these eight weeks are ended, the lesser players of the orchestra find that they still have a famine period to reckon with before the rehearsals are taken up again in the autumn. There remains for them the “summer snap,” the orchestra of the summer hotel, in which four or five players whom the proprietor proudly advertises as “from the Boston Symphony Orchestra”’ provide agreeable diversion for the guests. The matter is harmless and unimportant, except for the specter of the Musical Union that it has evoked, and that has in recent years increasingly troubled the serenity of the orchestral brotherhood, touching chiefly the interests of the lesser men. Mr. Higginson’s position as to the union is very positive. He thinks that unions are an excellent thing; he believes in them—but not in the “closed shop.” He is willing that his men should belong to the union, but not that they should compel the unwilling to do so. He has told the players frankly—and they all know that he means it—that if the union undertakes to dictate in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or to interfere in any way with its management or the freedom of its members, he will pay off all hands and disband the organization on the spot. Recent events, resulting in the resignation from the Union of all of the Symphony men who belonged to it, seem to have relieved this situation.
Within a couple of years the members of the orchestra have had still another resource to look forward to. in time of need, in the shape of a pension fund established in imitation of the general practice in Germany. Such a fund in such an organization has certain features of doubtful expediency, into which it is not necessary here to inquire too closely; but it has also its obviously advantageous ones. And as it has also the sanction and support of the founder, there is good reason to hope for its increase in usefulness.
It might be supposed that, after twenty-three years, everybody who knows the orchestra knows that back of it stands Henry L. Higginson. Yet it was only a few months ago that its manager, Mr. Charles A. Ellis, who with his assistant, Mr. F. R. Comee, has guided its fortunes skilfully and in the spirit of Mr. Higginson’s purpose from the very beginning, received a note from an unknown but ardent admirer of the orchestra, who thought that it was such a very good thing, such a great public benefit, that some rich man like Mr. Carnegie ought to back it up and support it.
Mr. Higginson knew, when he embarked upon the scheme of his orchestra, that it would cost him heavily; and it has. He recalls with a certain grim amusement a conversation with a local musical entrepreneur who anxiously tried to dissuade him from it as from a mad folly. “Why, Mr. Higginson, you will never be able to make it pay,” was the final argument. And it never has “paid.” He estimated that it would burden him, on the average, $20,000 a year, which it has—and more. Mr. Higginson has never taken the public into his confidence as to the orchestra’s finances, but it may be said on the highest authority that it has cost him as much as $52,000 in a year; that in one season it paid its expenses, and only one, though in another it lacked only $2000 of doing so; and that last season, after several more prosperous ones, the deficit mounted up again to $40,000. It may also be said, on the highest authority, that Mr. Higginson has made provision for the continuation of the orchestra on the same lines after his death. Mr. Higginson is not a wealthy man in the modern acceptation of that term, and what the orchestra costs him in money comes out of his annual earnings. What it has cost him in time and trouble, in annoyances great and small, in perplexities, in demands upon his patience, wisdom, and sense of justice, no man may know. He is always accessible to his players, in his busy hours and out of them, and they seldom have shown any hesitation in coming to him as to an unfailing friend, counselor, and guide, or as to a tribune of last resort.
According to the founder, however, the establishment of a Boston Symphony Orchestra is a perfectly simple thing. “All you have to do is to set the game going and back it up. It does n’t require anything more than that.” It is not necessary to talk about it; and as for New York’s annual chatter about a “permanent orchestra,” so long destitute of results, he says there are plenty of men in New York who could start and maintain such an orchestra as his as well as he could, if they wanted to. The essential, besides wisdom, ​is liberality. When a well-known wealthy amateur of London, desirous of carrying out a similar plan, consulted Mr. Higginson about some of the details of his expenses, he was told not to worry too much about the bills. “You don’t worry about your wine bills nor about your cigar bills, nor about your wife’s dressmaking bills,”—Mr. Higginson was addressing a millionaire,—“and you must treat your orchestra’s bills in the same way.”
What a permanent orchestra may involve in expenditure above what its public pays to hear it may be judged from the reports of similar organizations that do reveal the facts. In one recent year the Philadelphia Orchestra acknowledged a deficit of nearly $80,000. The comparatively modest Pittsburg Orchestra, a year ago, called upon its guarantors to make up a loss of about $40,000. In the first ten years of its existence the Chicago Orchestra sank about $300,000. In the beginning Mr. Higginson was heavily burdened; and especially a source of great expense was the visits to distant cities which the orchestra began to make in 1887. But since it first presented itself in New York in that year it has built up a very large and substantial body of admirers here—as large as the hall can accommodate; and in the other cities included in its five monthly pilgrimages—Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—it has met with similar success. It gives many concerts in all the large cities of New England that can be reached from Boston overnight, and it could play still more frequently to the advantage of its treasury did the conductor feel equal to standing the strain of more traveling.
It is in ways such as this that Mr. Higginson’s achievements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra have spread their benefits far outside of Boston. He has raised the standard of orchestral playing in this country immeasurably, and has created a taste and a demand for what was unknown before he began his work. He has set Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Cincinnati to an emulation of Boston; and has made many good people in New York very uneasy in their desire to do so. He has caused American music to be spoken of with respect and admiration by every European musician. And all the lovers of music in his own country ought to rise up and call him blessed.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
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