New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic is an American symphony orchestra based in New York City. Known officially as the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, Inc., and globally known as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra or the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, it is one of the leading American orchestras popularly called the "Big Five". The Philharmonic's home is David Geffen Hall, at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Founded in 1842, the orchestra is one of the oldest musical institutions in the United States and the oldest of the "Big Five" orchestras. Its 14,000th concert was given in December 2004.
History
Founding and first concert, 1842
The New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842 by the American conductor Ureli Corelli Hill, with the aid of the Irish composer William Vincent Wallace. The orchestra was then called the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was the third Philharmonic on American soil since 1799, and had as its intended purpose, "the advancement of instrumental music." The first concert of the Philharmonic Society took place on December 7, 1842, in the Apollo Rooms on lower Broadway before an audience of 600. The concert opened with Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, led by Hill himself. Two other conductors, German-born Henry Christian Timm and French-born Denis Etienne, led parts of the eclectic, three-hour program, which included chamber music and several operatic selections with a leading singer of the day, as was the custom. The musicians operated as a cooperative society, deciding by a majority vote such issues as who would become a member, which music would be performed and who among them would conduct. At the end of the season, the players would divide any proceeds among themselves.Beethoven's Ninth and a new home, 1846
After only a dozen public performances and barely four years old, the Philharmonic organized a concert to raise funds to build a new music hall. The centerpiece was the American premiere of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, to take place at Castle Garden on the southern tip of Manhattan. About 400 instrumental and vocal performers gathered for this premiere, which was conducted by George Loder. The chorals were translated into what would be the first English performance anywhere in the world. However, with the expensive US$2.00 ticket price and a war rally uptown, the hoped-for audience was kept away and the new hall would have to wait. Although judged by some as an odd work with all those singers kept at bay until the end, the Ninth soon became the work performed most often when a grand gesture was required.During the Philharmonic's first seven seasons, seven musicians alternated the conducting duties. In addition to Hill, Timm and Étienne, these were William Alpers, George Loder, Louis Wiegers and Alfred Boucher. This changed in 1849 when Theodore Eisfeld was installed as sole conductor for the season. Eisfeld, later along with Carl Bergmann, would be the conductor until 1865. That year, Eisfeld conducted the orchestra's memorial concert for the recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln, but in a peculiar turn of events which were criticized in the New York press, the Philharmonic omitted the last movement, "Ode to Joy", as being inappropriate for the occasion. That year Eisfeld returned to Europe, and Bergmann continued to conduct the Society until his death in 1876.
Competition, 1878
, Franz Liszt's former concertmaster at Weimar, served as conductor of the Philharmonic for the 1876/77 season. But failing to win support from the Philharmonic's public, he left to create the rival Symphony Society of New York in 1878. Upon his death in 1885, his 23-year-old son Walter took over and continued the competition with the old Philharmonic. It was Walter who would convince Andrew Carnegie that New York needed a first-class concert hall and on May 5, 1891, both Walter and Russian composer Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducted at the inaugural concert of the city's new Music Hall, which in a few years would be renamed for its primary benefactor, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie Hall would remain the orchestra's home until 1962.Theodore Thomas
The Philharmonic in 1877 was in desperate financial condition, caused by the paltry income from five concerts in the 1876/77 season that brought in an average of only $168 per concert. Representatives of the Philharmonic wished to attract the German-born, American-trained conductor Theodore Thomas, whose own Theodore Thomas Orchestra had competed directly with the Philharmonic for over a decade and which had brought him fame and great success. At first the Philharmonic's suggestion offended Thomas because he was unwilling to disband his own orchestra. Because of the desperate financial circumstances, the Philharmonic offered Theodore Thomas the conductorship without conditions, and he began conducting the orchestra in the autumn of 1877. With the exception of the 1878/79 season—when he was in Cincinnati and Adolph Neuendorff led the group—Thomas conducted every season for 14 years, vastly improving the orchestra's financial health while creating a polished and virtuosic ensemble. He left in 1891 to found the Chicago Symphony, taking 13 Philharmonic musicians with him.Another celebrated conductor, Anton Seidl, followed Thomas on the Philharmonic podium, serving until 1898. Seidl, who had served as Wagner's assistant, was a renowned conductor of the composer's works; Seidl's romantic interpretations inspired both adulation and controversy. During his tenure, the Philharmonic enjoyed a period of unprecedented success and prosperity and performed its first world premiere written by a world-renowned composer in the United States—Antonín Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, "From the New World". Seidl's sudden death in 1898 from food poisoning at age 47 was widely mourned. Twelve thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral at the Metropolitan Opera House and the streets were jammed for blocks with a "surging mass" of his admirers.
According to Joseph Horowitz, Seidl's death was followed by "five unsuccessful seasons" under Emil Paur, music director from 1898 to 1902, and Walter Damrosch, who served for only one season, 1902/03. After that, he says, for several seasons the orchestra employed guest conductors, including Victor Herbert, Édouard Colonne, Willem Mengelberg, Fritz Steinbach, Richard Strauss, Felix Weingartner, and Henry Wood.
New management, 1909
In 1909, to ensure the Philharmonic's financial stability, a group of wealthy New Yorkers led by two women, Mary Seney Sheldon and Minnie Untermyer, formed the Guarantors Committee and changed the orchestra's organization from a musician-operated cooperative to a corporate management structure. The Guarantors were responsible for bringing Gustav Mahler to the Philharmonic as principal conductor and expanding the season from 18 concerts to 54, which included a tour of New England. The Philharmonic was the only symphonic orchestra where Mahler worked as music director without any opera responsibilities, freeing him to explore the symphonic literature more deeply. In New York, he conducted several works for the first time in his career and introduced audiences to his compositions. Under Mahler, a controversial figure both as a composer and conductor, the season expanded, musicians' salaries were guaranteed, the scope of operations broadened, and the 20th-century orchestra was created.In 1911, Mahler died unexpectedly, and the Philharmonic appointed Josef Stránský as his replacement. Many commentators were surprised by the choice of Stránský, whom they did not see as a worthy successor to Mahler. Stránský led all the orchestra's concerts until 1920, and also made the first recordings with the orchestra in 1917.
Mergers and outreach, 1921
In 1921 the Philharmonic merged with New York's National Symphony Orchestra. With this merger it also acquired the imposing Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg. For the 1922/23 season Stránský and Mengelberg shared the conducting duties, but Stránský left after that season. For nine years Mengelberg dominated the scene, although other conductors, among them Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Igor Stravinsky, and Arturo Toscanini, led about half of each season's concerts. During this period, the Philharmonic became one of the first American orchestras with an outdoor symphony series when it began playing low-priced summer concerts at Lewisohn Stadium in upper Manhattan. In 1920 the orchestra hired Henry Hadley as "associate conductor" given specific responsibility for the "Americanization" of the orchestra: each of Hadley's concerts featured at least one work by an American-born composer. In 1922, harpist Stephanie Goldner became the orchestra's first female member.In 1924, the Young People's Concerts were expanded into a substantial series of children's concerts under the direction of American pianist-composer-conductor Ernest Schelling. This series became the prototype for concerts of its kind around the country and grew by popular demand to 15 concerts per season by the end of the decade.
Mengelberg and Toscanini both led the Philharmonic in recording sessions for the Victor Talking Machine Company and Brunswick Records, initially in a recording studio and eventually in Carnegie Hall as electrical recording was developed. All of the early electrical recordings for Victor were made with a single microphone, usually placed near or above the conductor, a process Victor called "Orthophonic"; the Brunswick electricals used the company's proprietary non-microphone "Light-Ray" selenium-cell system, which was much more prone to sonic distortion than Victor's. Mengelberg's first records for Victor were acousticals made in 1922; Toscanini's recordings with the Philharmonic actually began with a single disc for Brunswick in 1926, recorded in a rehearsal hall at Carnegie Hall. Mengelberg's most successful recording with the Philharmonic was a 1927 performance in Carnegie Hall of Richard Strauss' Ein Heldenleben. Additional Toscanini recordings with the Philharmonic, all for Victor, took place on Carnegie Hall's stage in 1929 and 1936. By the 1936 sessions Victor, now owned by RCA, began to experiment with multiple microphones to achieve more comprehensive reproductions of the orchestra.
1928 marked the Philharmonic's last and most important merger, with the New York Symphony Society. The Symphony had been quite innovative in its 50 years before the merger. It made its first domestic tour in 1882, introduced educational concerts for young people in 1891, and premiered works such as Gershwin's Concerto in F and Holst's Egdon Heath. The two institutions' merger consolidated extraordinary financial and musical resources. Of the new Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York, Clarence Hungerford Mackay, chairman of the Philharmonic Society, was chairman. President Harry H. Flagler of the Symphony Society was president of the merger. At the first joint board meeting in 1928, the Mackay said that "with the forces of the two Societies now united... the Philharmonic-Symphony Society could build up the greatest orchestra in this country if not in the world."