For many years I accepted long summer engagements with two concerts every day, first at Willow Grove near Philadelphia, and then at Ravinia Park, on the North Shore near Chicago. The former became a great educational factor, as Philadelphia at that time had no orchestra of its own. Willow Grove Park is situated seventeen miles from that city and was built by the Rapid Transit Company in order to stimulate travel on their trolley lines. The first season, for which a military band had been engaged, had not proven a success, and I was invited the following year in the hope that a symphonic organization might do better. I began by giving them popular programmes of good music with a regular symphony night every Monday and a Wagner programme every Friday evening, with excellent results. Our audiences usually numbered from fifteen to twenty thousand. The Rapid Transit Company, realizing the importance of the concerts, promptly built a huge open-air auditorium after my own design, consisting of only a roof on pillars connecting with the shell in which the orchestra was placed. The acoustics proved exceedingly good and the out-of-doors atmosphere was preserved.
I continued these concerts for seven seasons, thereby developing an audience for symphonic music which eventually and inevitably demanded a resident orchestra of its own. To-day the Philadelphia orchestra, under the leadership of Leopold Stokowski, ranks as one of the foremost of our country. Its concerts are crowded to the doors and I like to think that our seven years of pioneer work in Willow Grove have helped to lay its foundations.
I also conducted a series of concerts at Ravinia Park, organized by the Chicago and Milwaukee Electric Railway to serve a similar commercial purpose. Chicago had, of course, enjoyed for years the splendid winter concerts of the Chicago Orchestra, first under Theodore Thomas and then under his successor, Frederick Stock, but this was the first time that symphonic concerts were given during the summer amid such charming surroundings on the borders of Lake Michigan. These concerts proved exceedingly popular, the audiences consisting not only of the North Shore residents but of thousands who came out from Chicago on trains and trolleys.
After several years of this work, however, the incessant daily concerts, coming after an arduous winter season, began to pall on my musical nerves. I ran a real danger, if I continued, of becoming nothing but a musical routinier, with an inevitable loss of the enthusiasm and freshness which is an absolute necessity for the interpreter. I therefore gave up all conducting during the summer months.
I founded the Damrosch Opera Company in 1895, and the harassing question of how to maintain my orchestra seemed solved, for, during the first year, my opera season lasted thirteen weeks and during the following three years, from twenty to thirty weeks each. This not only enabled me to maintain a beautifully trained orchestra for the Wagner operas, but also gave to my symphony performances a greater finish. The orchestra was now under my exclusive control and could rehearse as often as the endowed orchestra of Major Higginson. But as it was the opera that enabled me to give my men such a long engagement, its needs had to control all other arrangements, and gradually the regular sequence of my winter concerts in New York began to suffer. I could not keep my opera company in New York except for a limited period each year, and therefore had to fill in much of my time in Philadelphia, Boston, and the larger cities of the South and Middle West. In 1899 I was therefore finally compelled to give up the regular subscription series of our New York concerts and the New York Symphony Orchestra became a part of my travelling operatic organization.
I made this sacrifice with a heavy heart, but at that time it was the only solution. An orchestra devoted only to concerts could not be maintained without an endowment, and that I did not have at the time, while the length of my Wagner opera season enabled me not only to give my men a good engagement but to have the pick of the best musicians in New York.
From then on until 1903 most of our playing of symphonic music was only on our spring concert tours and at irregular intervals in New York.
In 1900 Maurice Grau asked me to conduct the Wagner operas at the Metropolitan, and in the spring of 1902, at the close of my second season with him, I received an invitation from the New York Philharmonic Society to become its conductor. This invitation was a great surprise to me, as the Philharmonic had been, ever since my father’s day, the rival orchestra. In many ways it seemed a flattering proposition, as it was the oldest organization of its kind in America and had had an honorable history. Under the leadership of Theodore Thomas and later on of Anton Seidl, the audiences had been large and its affairs had prospered. It had always been a co-operative association, composed of the members of the orchestra, who had complete control of its affairs, receiving no salaries, but dividing the profits equally among themselves at the end of each season. I accepted the conductorship, but found very soon that my acceptance was a blunder. The society had come upon evil days, and under its last conductor attendance had dwindled to less than one-half. Of the membership of the orchestra only the skeleton remained, and I found to my amazement that of the hundred players at the concerts, less than fifty were actual members of the organization, the rest being engaged from outside, and often changed from one concert to another. Some of the members were old men who should no longer have played in the orchestra at all; but they were devoted to the concerts of the society, and as the orchestra was regulated by their votes, they naturally would not vote themselves out of it. Many of them had been excellent musicians and were personally upright men, but age, alas, is no respecter of technic, and the fingers of the left hand and the muscles of the bow arm gradually stiffen with advancing years. Most of the wind instruments were outsiders and therefore could not be properly controlled regarding their attendance at rehearsals and concerts, while, on the contrary, nearly all of the first violins were old members, several of whom were no longer fit to play first violin.
The fact was that Major Higginson, of Boston, with his permanent orchestra composed of young men, many of them the best of their kind, with their daily rehearsals and at least seventy-five symphony concerts a season, had set a new standard of orchestral technic which the old Philharmonic, under its archaic conditions, could not hope to equal.
The only solution seemed to me to lie in gathering together a fund large enough to produce the same conditions and results as Higginson had achieved in the Boston Orchestra, and, above all, to put the management of the Philharmonic into the hands of a committee which should not be composed of members of the orchestra, but of music lovers and guarantors of the fund.