II
Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century Boston lagged considerably behind New York in the matter of orchestral music. After the demise of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in 1824 the city was without any permanent symphonic organization until 1840, when the Academy of Music established an orchestra. During its existence of seven years the Academy orchestra varied in size from twenty-five to forty performers, many of whom were amateurs. It introduced to Boston most of the standard symphonies and some other works of importance, but its ambition seems to have been greater than its ability. It was succeeded in 1847 by the Musical Fund Society, founded in imitation of the Philadelphia society of that name, by Thomas Comer. Comer leaned emphatically to the popular in music and there was little value to the performances of the Musical Fund until George J. Webb took over the leadership during the last few years of the society's life, which ended in 1855. In the meantime Boston had been enjoying good music through the agency of the Germania Orchestra, a body of young German musicians who had come to America during the revolutionary troubles of 1848. The Germania was a travelling orchestra, but it gave a large proportion of its concerts in Boston. Its conductors were successively Carl Lenschow and Carl Bergmann and there seems to be little doubt that it was by far the best orchestra America had yet heard.
In 1855 Carl Zerrahn, flute player of the Germania, founded an orchestra which became known as the Philharmonic and which gave regular concerts in Boston until 1863. He was invited, in 1866, to the conductorship of the orchestra newly formed by the Harvard Musical Association. This was really the first permanent orchestra of value that greater Boston possessed, and during the twenty years of its existence it clung with remarkable consistency to the highest musical ideals. Included in the works performed by it were the nine Beethoven symphonies; twelve Haydn and six Mozart symphonies, Spohr's Die Weihe der Töne; Schubert's B minor (unfinished) and C major; Mendelssohn's 'Italian,' 'Scotch,' and 'Reformation'; the four symphonies of Schumann; Gade's First, Second, Third, and Fourth; two of Raff and two of Brahms; Rubinstein's 'Ocean'; Berlioz's Fantastique; the Second of Saint-Saëns; two of Paine; one of Ritter; Liszt's symphonic poems, Tasso and Les Préludes; Lachner's first suite and Raff's suite in C; Spohr's Irdisches und Göttliches for double orchestra; and overtures by Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Cherubini, Schubert, Weber, Schumann, Gade, Bennett, Bargiel, Buck, Goldmark, Paine, Chadwick, Parker, Henschel, Rietz, and others. Nevertheless the Harvard Orchestra did not receive very warm support from the people of Boston. Among musicians, too, there grew up gradually a certain impatience at its undoubted conservatism and finally a rival was started which was organized as the Philharmonic Society in 1880.
There was not room enough in Boston for two orchestras, but there was room and need for one good orchestra which would cater fully to the city's musical tastes. Such an orchestra needs a sponsor in the shape of heavy financial backing and the deus ex machina in this case was Henry L. Higginson, the banker, who founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra at his own risk and guaranteed its permanency. Under the leadership of George Henschel the orchestra opened its first season in 1881 with Beethoven's 'Dedication of the House.' It gave twenty concerts that season and twenty-six in the third season. Since then the regular number has been twenty-four, in addition to public rehearsals. Regular visits are made to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Providence, and other large cities, bringing the total number of concerts each season to the neighborhood of one hundred.
George Henschel returned to Europe in 1884 and Wilhelm Gericke came over from Vienna as conductor. To Gericke must be awarded the chief credit for making the Boston Symphony Orchestra what it is to-day—the finest in America and one of the most perfectly balanced and finished symphonic ensembles in the world. Gericke was a disciplinarian of the most rigid type and under his iron rule practically all the technical weaknesses of the orchestra were eliminated. Musically, like Theodore Thomas, he was an ardent devotee of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and he was more concerned with strictly traditional interpretations of the classics than with incursions into new and untried fields. Just as Thomas in New York had an ideally suitable successor in Anton Seidl, so Gericke had an ideally suitable successor in that remarkable orchestral virtuoso, Arthur Nikisch. Perhaps musical America has never known anything like the four seasons during which the temperamental and fiery Nikisch performed on the perfect instrument which Gericke had left to his hand. He was succeeded by Emil Paur, a decided modernist in his tendencies, who made Boston familiar with Tschaikowsky, Richard Strauss, and lesser post-Wagnerians. Gericke returned in 1898 and in the following year Symphony Hall was built. Max Fiedler was the next conductor, and after him came the present incumbent of the post—the scholarly and immaculate Dr. Karl Muck.