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.