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The Entrepreneur-conductors and their Orchestras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2011

John Spitzer
John Spitzer
Affiliation:
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
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Extract

The story of the orchestra in the nineteenth century usually focuses on two types of orchestras: theatre orchestras – such as La Scala, the Queen's Theatre (London), and the Paris Opéra – and concert societies – such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris), and the New York Philharmonic. It concentrates on the conductors who led these orchestras, many of whom were also famous composers, such as Weber, Spontini, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Wagner, whose works form a large part of today's ‘classical’ music repertory. This story is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Type
Articles
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , June 2008 , pp. 3 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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2 Christoph-Helmut Mahling refers to enterprise orchestras as ‘private orchestras’. See ‘Berlin: ’Music in the Air”’, in The Early Romantic Era, ed. Ringer, A. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1991): 109–39, here 132 ffGoogle Scholar.

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12 Elwart acknowledges that the Musard and Valentino orchestras, unlike the theatre orchestras, do not pay musicians a pension after they retire. The musicians in the enterprise orchestras, however, according to Elwart, make enough money to be able to save for the future.

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16 I am grateful to Dr Jochen-Georg Güntzel and to Brett Benner for help with this and other illustrations.

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24 Quoted in Davison, J.W., From Mendelssohn to Wagner, Being the Memoirs of J.W. Davison (London: W. Reeves, 1912): 199.Google Scholar Members of the Philharmonic Society bought tickets by subscribing to the entire series at half a guinea per concert. Extra tickets were available to subscribers at 1 guinea per concert. See Cyril Ehrlich, The First Philharmonic, 54. For more information, see Appendix B of this article.

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29 Reports of disruptions at the Proms turn up first in The Times in 1845 and can be found almost every year thereafter through 1857. See: Davison, , From Mendelssohn to Wagner, 201–2; andGoogle ScholarCarse, , Life of Jullien, 119–20.Google Scholar Semi-organized disturbances in public places and harassment of the police were common in the London of the 1840s and 50s. They can be considered a sort of ritualized class warfare. See Pearson, Geoffrey, Hooligan – A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983): 156 ffGoogle Scholar.

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35 New York Times (17 May 1869): 5; (24 Sep. 1873): 4; (23 Jul. 1875): 4. Also: Schabas, Ezra, Theodore Thomas – America's Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835–1905 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989): 38 ffGoogle Scholar.

36 Wiener allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 146–7 (5–8 Dec. 1846): 594.

37 Musical World 33/2 (13 Jan. 1855): 25.

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45 The American tour of the Steyermark Company is discussed in Lawrence, Vera Brodsky, Strong on Music, Vol. 1: Resonances, 1836–1849 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988): 544–8.Google Scholar On the Germania Orchestra see Newman, Good Music for a Free People.

46 Beck, Roger L. and Hansen, Richard K., ‘Josef Gungl and his Celebrated American Tour: November 1848 to May 1849’, Studia musicologica (Budapest) 36 (1995): 53–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gungl seems to have been somewhat disappointed with his American tour, and he published a letter in the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung in which he criticized American musical taste: ‘Americans have far surpassed most European nations as business men, but they remain far behind in the realm of the fine arts, especially music … Only what we call profane music suits the tastes of the American public: waltzes, galops, quadrilles and above all, polkas’ (Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, 28 Feb. 1849: 70). Gungl's letter was translated and published in Dwight's Journal, where it aroused a storm of protest (18 Dec. 1852: 83–4).

47 ‘The Orchestra: Jullien’, Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art 2 (1853): 423–33, here 425, 432. Of Jullien's 102-man orchestra, only 27 had made the trip with him from England. The rest were American musicians recruited in New York City. See Carse, , Life of Jullien, 75–8Google Scholar.

48 Carse, , Life of Jullien, 83.Google Scholar

49 Quoted in Miller, , Johann Strauss Vater, 166.Google Scholar

50 See Mailer, , ed., Johann Strauss (Sohn), Leben und Werk I, 113 ff., II, 112. Grotjahn, ‘Entdeckung der Terra Incognita’, 10.Google Scholar

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56 Friedrich Wagner, who brought his band from Dresden to Philadelphia to play a summer season at Ridgeway Park, withheld $80 from each of his musicians as a security deposit. The Wagner Kapelle contract is printed in the American Music Journal 20 (Mar. 1886): p. 3Google Scholar.

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66 As a young man, Benjamin Bilse played in the Strauss Sr orchestra (Grotjahn, ‘Entdeckung der Terra incognita’, 4). The 18-year-old Theodore Thomas was one of the New York musicians that Jullien hired for his American tour of 1853 (Schabas, Theodore Thomas, 9). Jean-Baptiste Arban was the trumpet soloist in Jullien's orchestra before going on to form his own orchestra.

67 See Waltz, Heinrich, Die Lage der Orchestermusiker in Deutschland (Karlsruhe: Druck der G. Braunschen Hofbuchdruckerei, 1906): 25–53.Google ScholarAlso Newhouse, Martin Jacob, Artists, Artisans, or Workers? Orchestral Musicians in the German Empire (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1979): 26–39Google Scholar.

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69 L’Art musicale (21 Dec. 1873): 49–50.Google Scholar The women in Amann-Weinlich's orchestra played mainly stringed instruments. Wind instruments (except for flutes) were played by boys. See Revue et Gazette musicale (7 Dec. 1873): 390Google Scholar.

70 Levine, Lawrence W., Highbrow / Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

71 Dwight's Journal (29 May 1852): 60.Google Scholar

72 Alfred Musard, son of Philippe, revived the Musard orchestra, with some success, between 1857 and 1869.

73 Kemp, , The Strauss Family, 156.Google Scholar

74 See Loft, Abram, Musicians’ Guild and Union (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1950): 272–94.Google Scholar

75 Reprinted in Österreichisch-Ungarische Musiker-Zeitung 19/22 (3 Jun. 1911): 177–8.Google Scholar

76 The American big bands of the twentieth century were in some respects the heirs of the enterprise orchestras of the nineteenth century – in their entrepreneurial organization, their origin as dance bands, their dependence on touring, and the role of their leaders as front men and stars.

77 Orchestra active between indicated dates, based in indicated city.