Americans by adoption

by Joseph Husband

For half a century, from the glorious day when the United States cast off the yoke of a European monarchy and became a republic, there was small time in the lives of Americans for music, art, and all the other finer elements of civilization. It was necessary that men should explore and open up the vast rich country in which they lived. They must build cities and plant fields with grain; they must dig deep mines and find coal and metals, and they must cut timber from the forests for the needs of the nation. Also, they found it necessary to develop the government of their new nation, and form from the wilderness, where once only the Indians dwelt, new states to increase the union of the great Republic.

But through all these years of labor there remained in the minds of men an appreciation of those other more beautiful factors of civilization; memories of an inheritance that were like dreams from which these pioneers waited to be awakened by someone who, at the right time, would come to them and, understandingly, would point out the way. The love of music was in their hearts.

Meanwhile, in the town of Essen, in Germany, by the North Sea, was born, on the eleventh of October, 1835, a boy, Theodore Thomas, who in a few short years was destined to bring to the great United States that appreciation of music of which it was now so thoroughly unconscious.

The boy’s father was the Stadtpfeifer, or town musician, of Essen. It was a position of honor, for the Stadtpfeifer played on all important occasions, and many great musicians have held this title.

From infancy the boy showed an aptitude for music. At the age of five he played the violin in public, and he spent as much of his play-time as he could with his father’s orchestra, playing his violin and reading all the new music he could find.

When he was ten years old, the family emigrated to America. It was the land of promise, and a bigger and brighter future seemed to await them in the vast free United States than in the sleepy German village where for generations their ancestors had been born and lived and died.

This was before the days of fast steamships; then the passage of the Atlantic was made in sailing vessels, and often the voyage lasted as many weeks as now it is measured by days. The Thomas family found passage on an American vessel; and it was six long weeks after their departure that they landed, on a hot July morning in the year 1845, in the city of New York.

There was little or no real music in the United States. A few people played the piano or cornet, there were a number of brass bands, and some of the theatres boasted of a few musicians, but orchestras and good music were unknown.

The Thomas family was a large one, and the father worked far into the night, playing in theatre orchestras, to provide for his wife and children. It was only natural that young Theodore, with his musical talent, should be called upon to help; and so almost from the beginning the boy labored with the father, playing his violin in various theatres, at a dancing-school, and wherever he could earn an honest dollar.

Three years later the father enlisted in a navy band, and the boy followed him, playing second horn to the father’s first. But a year later, both father and son left the navy; and as the former was now able alone to provide for the family, young Theodore found himself free to carry out his own plans and lay the foundations for his future.