FOUNDING OF THE SYMPHONY AND ORATORIO
SOCIETIES OF NEW YORK
In 1873 Anton Rubinstein, greatest of Russian pianists, accompanied by
the violinist Wieniawski, came to America by invitation of Steinway and
Sons. He dined at our house and expressed wonder that my father had not
yet been able to achieve a position in New York commensurate with his
reputation and capacity. My father explained to him how difficult the
situation was and that the entire orchestral field was monopolized by
Theodore Thomas. He told Rubinstein that when he had first arrived in
New York he had met Thomas at the music store of Edward Schubert in
Union Square and that after the introduction Thomas had said to him:
“I hear, Doctor Damrosch, that you are a very fine musician, but I want
to tell you one thing: whoever crosses my path I crush.”
Thomas at that time really believed that America was not large enough to
contain more than one orchestra, but he lived long enough to see my
father surpass him at the head of a symphony orchestra, as founder of
the first great music festival in New York and, above all, of opera in
German at the Metropolitan.
In 1881 the first symphony orchestra on a permanent basis had been
founded in Boston by Major Higginson, and before Thomas’s death there
were half a dozen great subsidized orchestras actively operating in the
United States, a number which has since then increased to twelve.
Rubinstein said to my father: “Why don’t you begin by founding an
oratorio society, and that will lead to other things?”
My father consulted a few devoted friends, and the Oratorio Society of
New York was accordingly founded in 1873 and began rehearsals in the
Trinity Chapel with a chorus of about eighteen singers, my mother’s
glorious voice leading the sopranos and my very humble and little self
among the altos. The first performance took place in the warerooms of
the Knabe Piano Company the following winter, at which time the chorus
had increased to sixty singers. The programme was a remarkable one for
that period, containing a capella chorus and accompanied choruses by
Bach, Mozart, Handel, Palestrina, and Mendelssohn.
From this small beginning the society developed until it became the
foremost representative of choral music in New York, performing, with a
chorus of three hundred and fifty voices, under my father’s direction,
the older oratorios of Handel, Haydn, and Mendelssohn, and such
novelties as the first part of “Christus” by Liszt, the Berlioz
“Requiem” and “Damnation of Faust,” the Brahms “Requiem,” Cowen’s “St.
Ursula,” the choral finale from the first act of “Parsifal,” and the
third act of “Meistersinger.”
Indirectly, but logically, the founding of the Oratorio Society led to
the founding of the Symphony Society of New York in 1877, which at last
gave my father an orchestra with which he could demonstrate his
abilities as a symphonic conductor.
The differences between him and Thomas were very marked. Thomas, who had
educated himself entirely in America, had always striven for great
cleanliness of execution, a metronomical accuracy and rigidity of tempo,
and a strict and literal (and therefore rather mechanical) observance of
the signs put down by the composers. America owed him a great debt of
gratitude for the high quality of his programmes. My father had been
educated in a more modern school of interpretation, and his readings
were emotionally more intense. He was the first conductor in this
country to make those fine and delicate gradations in tempo according to
the inner demands of the music, gradations which are too subtle to be
indicated by the composer’s signs, as that would lead to exaggerations,
but which are now generally considered as necessary in order to bring
out the _melos_ of a work.
Both conductors had their violent partisans, and, as they were at that
time literally the only orchestral conductors in America, feeling ran
very high. My father was the last comer, and Thomas was well fortified
in the field, with a group of wealthy men to support him. The first
years for my father were very hard and a portion of the New York papers
assailed him bitterly, continuously, and with vindictive enmity. Again
and again dreams of murder would fill my boyish heart when I would read
one of these attacks in the morning paper.
It was hard work to keep the two societies going and to enable them to
meet the bills for hall rent, soloists, and orchestra. There was as yet
but a small public for the higher forms of music, and again and again it
looked as if further efforts would have to be abandoned. But my father
persevered and struggled on, making a living for his family by teaching
violin, composition, and singing, and occasionally getting a fee of “a
hundred dollars in gold” as violin soloist or in a chamber-music
concert, officiating as musical director in a church and as conductor of
the German male choral society, the Arion.
The first production of Symphony No. 1, in C minor, by Brahms became a
subject of intense rivalry between the two conductors. Brahms had waited
until his fortieth year before writing a symphony, and the work was
eagerly awaited in New York, as the reports from Germany proved that it
had made a sensation.
My father went to see old Gustav Schirmer at his store on Broadway and
asked him whether the orchestral score of this work had yet arrived.
Schirmer told him that it had, but that he was in honor bound to give it
to Theodore Thomas as he had promised it to him. My father was very much
chagrined to think that this prize should thus have escaped him, and he
spoke of this very regretfully to a pupil of his in composition, Mrs.
James Neilson, member of an aristocratic old family in New Brunswick,
New Jersey, and a woman of great beauty and distinction. Mrs. Neilson
said nothing to my father but quietly went down to Schirmer’s and
inquired of the clerk whether the orchestral score of the Brahms
symphony had arrived, and when he answered in the affirmative, she asked
whether it was for sale. “Certainly,” answered the clerk.
She thereupon purchased a copy of the score and sent it up to my father
with her compliments. His astonishment was intense, but she did not tell
him until weeks afterward how she had obtained it.
He received the score on a Thursday and the first rehearsal for the next
concert was to take place on the following Monday. This left but little
time to obtain the necessary orchestral parts and Schirmer naturally
would not sell him any. He therefore cut the score into three parts and
divided them among three copyists, who worked day and night and managed
to have the parts ready in time for the rehearsal. Great was the triumph
in the Damrosch camp at this victory over the Thomas forces.
Some years later I gave the first performances in New York of the Third
and Fourth Brahms Symphonies, but I had no need to resort to strategem
to obtain the scores and orchestral parts.
Orchestral conditions were bad compared with to-day. There was no such
thing as a “permanent orchestra.” The musicians of the Symphony Society,
for instance, played in six symphony concerts during the winter, each
preceded by a public rehearsal. They also officiated at four concerts of
the Oratorio Society, and this was almost the extent of their efforts in
that direction. The rest of the time they made their living by teaching,
playing in theatres, at dances, and some of them even at political or
military processions and mass meetings. If a better “job” came along
than the symphony concert they would simply send my father a substitute.
Small wonder that occasionally their lips gave out and the first horn or
trumpet would break on an important note during a symphony concert. And
yet, in spite of this disheartening condition, my father succeeded in
infusing the orchestral players with such emotional intensity, and in
imparting so lofty an interpretation to them, that the audiences of that
day were often roused to the greatest enthusiasm; and I would tuck my
arm very proudly into his as we marched home from a concert, even though
we knew that the subscription to the concert was not more than eight
hundred dollars and the single sale at the box-office had not reached
the hundred dollar mark.
But all this was changed like a flash in the year 1879 when my father
decided to perform “The Damnation of Faust,” by Berlioz, until then
unknown in America. This concert, which was held at Steinway Hall, in
East 14th Street, necessitated the services of solo singers, the New
York Symphony Orchestra, the chorus of the New York Oratorio Society and
the male chorus of the Arion Society.
The work and the performance made a sensation. All New York buzzed with
it, and during that winter, 1879, it was given five times in succession
to crowded houses, creating an excitement such as New York had never
before seen in the concert field.
I played in all these performances at the last stand of the second
violins, as my father considered it of the utmost value to me as a
future conductor to be able to follow the conductor’s beat as one of the
orchestra.