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The Night Philadelphia Met Mahler

The Academy of Music, 1892. Completed as an opera house in 1857 and designed by Napoleon LeBrun and Gustavus Runge.

When the wild-haired Leopold Stokowski took command of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1912, his theatricality was greatly at odds with his proper Philadelphia patrons.  Tall, dapper, charming with the ladies, and more than a little vain, he was the epitome of European cosmopolitanism.  The London-born son of a Polish father and an Irish mother, Stokowski received his education at Britain’s Royal College of Music and Queen’s College, Oxford, where he had the good fortune to study under Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, respectively.  Spurning the traditional baton, Stokowski used his hands alone to lead the orchestra.  He also used them to grab Philadelphia by the scruff of its neck and drag its musical taste into the twentieth century.

Architectural cross-section of the Academy of Music.

Since its founding in 1900, the Philadelphia’s Orchestra specialized in the classicism of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Beethoven, with occasional forays into the chromaticism of Wagner.  The Quaker City’s elite dutifully listened from their plush seats.  Or at least some did.  Many prattled or even knitted.  Fritz Scheel, the Orchestra’s first conductor, went apoplectic when one patron suggested that he should add a Strauss waltz to sweeten his solemn, Teutonic programs.  Scheel eventually suffered a nervous breakdown and died in a sanitarium.  His successor, Karl Pohlig, lasted only a year before resigning under the cloud of a sex scandal.

Stokowski was not only a superb musician, but also fearless confronting this lack of respect from the audience, especially from those who left early. During Friday matinees, some left their seats in middle of the concert to catch the 4:00pm train back to the Main Line.   One Friday, Stokowski was fed up.  Just before conducting the opening bars “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, he heard the typical chatter and the rustling of shopping bags.

Stokowski turned around, faced the audience, and intoned:

Try as hard as we can, we cannot make a divine music amid so much untranquility. There is constant walking in and out. You know you cannot live the material life alone. You must have something else. All the rest of the week you are immersed in your worldly affairs. On Friday you come here. Will you not say to yourselves: ‘I will give to the other side of life the two hours or less that the music requires?’ You will gain enormously, and so shall we.

Some welcomed Stokowski’s standing up to his own audience. Others thought him extremely impertinent and disrespectful. Yet Stokowski was not intimidated.  He had the support of many members of the Orchestra’s board, including the powerful and very wealthy Alexander van Rensselaer. A frequent traveler, Stokowski was entranced by the revolutionary music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, and Claude Debussy.  He also created his own  lush, unashamedly Romantic orchestrations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works.

Only three years into his tenure, Stokowski decided to really shock his audience by introducing one of Europe’s most progressive composers to the American stage.   He asked the Orchestra board to front $140,000 for the production of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony #8, popularly known as the “Symphony of a Thousand.”  An Austrian Jew who had converted to Catholicism, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) had been famous as the conductor of the Vienna Opera, but his compositions languished in relative obscurity.  Stokowski, who had heard the Eighth Symphony’s premiere in Munich, proclaimed it was “one of the greatest compositions of the twentieth century.”  He also assured the skittish board that Philadelphians would passionately embrace Mahler’s music if they gave it a chance.

On March 2 , 1916, over 2,000 people packed the sold-out Academy of Music, anxiously awaiting what promised to be the greatest musical event in the city’s history.  Among the luminaries in the audience were pianist Josef Hoffmann. According to The Public Ledger: “The scenes at the Academy set the nerves tingling…The curtains rose and the audience gasped. The 958 singers filled the great stage from footlights to roof and the orchestra was upon the an apron which had been built into the house. The first twelve rows of singers were women, dressed in white. Above them were twelves rows of men, with a gardenia-like spot of girls, members of the children’s chorus, pinned, it seemed in their midst.”

Stokowski stepped onto the stage, bowed, and flung his arms. The string basses growled, a mighty organ chord sounded, followed by the chorus singing “Veni, Creator Spiritus!” fortissimo, and then a mighty blast of the brass section.

For the next hour, Stokowski bathed his audience in waves of sound they had never heard before: gripping, transcendent, awe-inspiring, tender enough to draw tears from even the most hardened listener.  Nearly a century later after that memorable night, Joseph Horowitz of The New York Times compared the orchestra under Stokowski to a great pipe organ: “its soft-edged attacks and majestic swells and recessions, its smooth textures and lavish colors were all derivative of the Romantic organ of Stokowski’s youth. Its ‘rolled’ chords (at different speeds!) even fabricated a reverberant cathedral acoustic.”

There was no talking, knitting, or rushing out to catch the next Paoli local. So transfixed was the audience by Mahler’s music.

When the last chords died away in the Academy of Music that evening, a new age for the Philadelphia Orchestra had dawned.

 

Stokowski on the stage of the Academy of Music with the ensemble of over one thousand instrumentalists and singers needed for the premiere of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.” Library of the University of Pennsylvania.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSulGXYkn08?rel=0&w=480&h=360]
An historic recording of Leopold Stokowski conducting the first movement of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.”

The applause after the performance of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” was so great that it could be heard in the foyer of the Hotel Walton across Broad Street.

Sources:

Marc Geelhoed, “A Thoroughly Modern Orchestra,” Great Performances: Carnegie Hall Opening Night, 2004. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/shows/carnegie04/essay1.html

Marjorie Hassen, “American Premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (‘Symphony of a Thousand’) Leopold Stokowski Conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, Academy of Music, Philadelphia 2 March 1916.” Leopold Stokowski: Making Music Matter. Otto E. Albrecht Music Library, University of Pennsylvania. http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/stokowski/mahler.html

Joseph Horowitz, “Spring Music/Orchestras: A Window on Stokowski’s Greatness,” The New York Times, March 5, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/05/arts/spring-music-orchestras-a-window-on-stokowski-s-greatness.html?ref=leopoldstokowski

Joseph Kupferberg, Those Fabulous Philadelphians: The Life and Times of a Great Orchestra. (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969). pp. 20, 31, 25 ,42-44, 54.

 

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What Deserves Preservation Awards? [Hint: It’s not about buildings; it’s about community.]

Detail: Southwest corner, 15th and South Streets, December 27, 1937. Wenzel J. Hess, photographer. (PhillyHistory)

It’s more than fair to say that, once again, the Royal Theater is not in line for a Preservation Achievement Award. (Nominations for 2013 are due this week to the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.) At this stage of the game, after languishing for 43 years, pretty much only wreckage remains behind the façade of the South Street institution that opened in 1920 and closed in 1970.

The entire South Street corridor had fallen victim to the proposed Crosstown Expressway. That ill-conceived and controversial project would eventually be removed from the city plan. But while blocks of South Street nearest the neighborhoods of Society Hill and Washington Square benefited from their proximity to revival and investment, those nearer to Broad Street would continue to decline. For the Royal Theater, high hopes wouldn’t be enough to overcome decade after decade of false starts, neglect and vandalism.

Royal Theater. Detail of “15th and South Streets, December 27, 1937,” by Wenzel J. Hess, photographer. (PhillyHistory)

Today, what remains of the Royal Theater’s exterior is a handsome façade that’s little more than a canvas for murals echoing fifty years of faded memory. From the 1920s through the 40s, the Royal called itself “America’s Finest Colored Photoplay House” and hosted live performances with Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey and Count Basie. That was then. What remains inside now is damaged almost beyond recognition, a hardhat site for even the most hopeful displays of hipster creative culture.

15th and South Streets, December 27, 1937. Wenzel J. Hess, photographer. (See details enlarged above, left and below.)

Decades of optimism, good will, vision and nostalgia have kept a dream alive, though they haven’t added up to enough to wake the Royal Theater from its longtime coma. Money might have made a difference. And great sums were lined up to arrive for the Royal revival at the end of Rendell’s second term as Governor. Just a few years ago, this project promised a haul of $31 million from Harrisburg for music producer-turned developer Kenny Gamble to create the “Royal Theater and Universal Commercial Complex.”

Funding can do a lot, but in the end, money is not fungible with well-earned, authentic preservation success. We sometimes convince ourselves to the contrary, but money is no substitute for community.

Community is what made the Royal an original and enviable success. Three-quarters of a century ago, when photographer Wenzel J. Hess visited 15th and South Streets, the Royal Theater stood at the heart of a vibrant, thriving community. The glue that worked for the Royal Theater was the same glue that held together all of the other enterprises on that stretch of South Street: drug stores, hardware stores, pawnshops, diners and Chop Suey joints, dentists, tailors, barbers, bicycle shops and bars. It was about life—the lives of the folks who made  this community and the places they lived them. People and community made South Street. And when  community declined, so did the possibility of preservation success for the Royal Theater.

The inevitable has been coming, if in slow motion. Twenty-one years ago (1992) The Philadelphia Inquirer reports the Royal’s owner is seeking a demolition permit. Five years later (1997) the city Law Department sets out to sue that same owner for code violations that allowed the building to deteriorate. The following year (1998) the Preservation Alliance acquires the building to buy more time but sells the building two years later with no preservation guarantees. And two years ago, the Alliance puts the Royal Theater on its “Endangered Properties List” as the owner considers demolition and then, last year, possible sale.

How long are the statutes of limitations for wishful thinking? If this slow-motion slipping into oblivion continues for another seven years, the Royal Theater will have been empty and abandoned as long as it was open and thriving. Maybe that’s long enough to find a new reality.

Detail: Northwest corner, 15th and South Streets, December 27, 1937. Wenzel J. Hess, photographer. (PhillyHistory)

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The Rise of Balloon Photography in Philadelphia

“Balloon View of Philadelphia from about one mile high, July 4th, 1893.” By William Nicholson Jennings. (PhillyHistory)

Jean-Pierre Blanchard wanted to make a splash, figuratively, not literally. He arrived  from France, 220 years ago, planning a display of showmanship that would, if successful, be the first balloon ascension in Americaand his 45th.

On January 9, 1793, the French aeronaut and inventor readied his balloon in the prison yard at 6th and Walnut Streets, accepted best wishes from President George Washington and other luminaries, and floated skyward. Blanchard metaphorically lived his motto: Sic itur ad astra—to the stars. More precisely, he went to Deptford, New Jersey.

If not made useful, such feats of technology, skill, daring and luck were of little value. Blanchard made use of his time aloft conducting a variety of measurements and experiments, the results of which were recorded in a small book published in Philadelphia with a pleasant illustration of his balloon. Engravings were all they had in Blanchard’s time; it would be nearly half a century before photography allowed aeronauts to dream of returning to earth with “you-are-there” documentation.

The first successful aerial photographs in America,” taken above Boston in 1860, were made from Samuel A. King’s balloon, the “Queen of the Air.” And President Lincoln’s war machine soon put aerial photography to work against Confederate troops. But King didn’t much care for sharing his basket with photographers. Another three decades passed before he went aloft with Philadelphia photographer William Nicholson Jennings.

In the early 1890s, King, brought the “Eagle Eyrie” up from his home in Tinicum to Fairmount Park for annual July 4th ascensions. In 1934, Jennings reminisced about their partnership in “Snapshots from Cloudland,” published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute.

William Nicholson Jennings’ view to the east: Girard College, Eastern State and North Philadelphia. July 4, 1893. (PhillyHistory)

As King prepped, Jennings found a moment to approach “the genial aeronaut to make a bid for a place in the basket for the purpose of making aerial snapshots.” King stared back “with an eye blue as the sky he loved to sail in; stroked his long beard, fleecy as any cloud he had passed through, and remarked: ‘My charge for a passenger is fifty dollars; but if you expect to make good photographs on your first balloon trip … you will be wasting your time and money.’” A first-time passenger would succumb to nerves and produce double exposures, blurred images, use erroneous settings, and on top of all of that, the summer’s “blue haze between balloon and landscape” would result in “thin,” “washy” negatives. Plus, King added, “escaping coal gas from the balloon would create a chemical fog.”

Undeterred, Jennings conducted experiments from the top of the Washington, Monument and devised a combination of orthochromatic plates and a light yellow lens filters and got him “bright, snappy” negatives. He made a “gas-tight” camera, and showed both to King.

Re-enactment of the Nation’s First Air Voyage, in “La Coquette.” January 9, 1968. (PhillyHistory)

On the Fourth of July, 1893, as “the Municipal Band struck up ‘My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,’ all Jennings had to do was to “forget nerves, wait until the desired section of landscape came into view” hold his breath and press the button.” He “made several exposures while passing over Philadelphia at the height of about a mile…securing sharp, crisp, clear-cut negatives, from which I afterward made a number of 40” x 50” enlargements for exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London.”

King and Jennings would continue to collaborate, but their demise (King in 1914; Jennings in 1946) would hardly mark the end of the Philadelphia balloon story.

In 1956, when Hollywood adapted Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, producer Mike Todd lined up an all-star cast including David Niven and the young Shirley McLaine. The film, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture, also featured appearances by Noel Coward, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra. For the all-important role of the balloon, Todd turned to his friend; the self-described Philadelphia “balloonatic” Constance Wolf, who lent  her beloved “La Coquette.” The first woman to cross the Alps in a balloon, Wolf would promote the film by piloting “La Coquette” over London and Paris after its release. No surprise that, in 1959, she would replicate Blanchard’s first American ascension, and would inflate “La Coquette” again for another re-enactment, seen here, in January 1968.

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Before the Academy: Classical Music in the Quaker City

338 Spruce Street in 1961, home of Francis Hopkinson, the composer of “The President’s March,” otherwise known as “Hail, Columbia!”

During the late eighteenth century, Philadelphia’s Quaker elite had a dim view of the performing arts.  For a sect that prized plainness, industry, and silence, European high culture represented frivolity and unnecessary “fanciness.”  Having a harpsichord or fortepiano in one’s house could mean being “read out” of meeting, and Friends schools forbade keyboard instruments until the 1900s. As theater was banned in the city proper,  the town of Southwark (today’s Queen Village) became the de facto entertainment district for colonial America’s most populous city.

Yet things changed when President George Washington took up residence on Market Street in 1790.  Washington could not play an instrument or carry a tune.  The extremely image-conscious Washington loved the theater.  His favorite play was Joseph Addison’s play about the Roman Republican hero Cato.  He loved dancing even more. During the 1790s, when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, a coterie of musicians organized performances of orchestral music by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and other European masters. They also sprinkled their own compositions into the programs.  These American pieces were written in the  classical style but frequently quoted patriotic songs such as “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail, Columbia,” as well as Irish and Scottish folk songs.  And then there was Benjamin Franklin, who loved music so much that he invented a new instrument that became all the rage in Europe and America: the haunting, ethereal “glass harmonica.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNRpf1aVAyI&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
Mozart: Adagio & Rondo for Glass Harmonica & Quartet – Adagio

This stylistic pastiche shamelessly played on the cultural insecurity of Philadelphia’s literati, who yearned for sophistication but did not want to be seen as un-Republican British imitators.  During the French Revolution, composers would also insert bars of controversial, anti-aristocratic songs such “La Marseillaise” and “Ca Ira” into their works, provoking either wild applause or hissing from the audience.  Although Americans had recently ridden themselves of a king, not everyone was sure that the violent overthrow of Louis XVI was such a good idea.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGyBfeYoOD8&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
“A Toast” by Francis Hopkinson, starting at 2:00.

One American in this coterie was Declaration of Independence signer Francis Hopkinson, a renaissance man of means who dabbled in writing plays and political satire, as well as playing the harpsichord and organ. He even composed a short revolutionary propaganda opera, entitled American Independent or The Temple of Minerva. Shortly before his untimely death in 1791, Hopkinson published “Seven Songs for Harpsichord or Piano Forte,” dedicated to George Washington.  Hopkinson seems to have thought rather highly of himself,  declaring in the dedication: “I cannot, I believe, be refused the Credit of being the first Native of the United States who has produced a Musical Composition.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw7Qwj9v05s&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
“The Federal Overture” by Benjamin Carr, c.1795. The French Republican sympathies of Carr’s Philadelphia audience are pretty obvious in this piece.  Note also the inclusion of the famous Irish gig “Mother Hen” and Francis Hopkinson’s “The President’s March” (aka “Hail, Columbia!”).

The most famous of President Washington’s “court composers” was Alexander Robert Reinagle.  The son of a Hungarian father and a Scottish mother, he immigrated to America from Edinburgh in 1786.  By the 1790s, Reinangle was writing concert music for professionals and amateur ensembles, holding concerts at the City Tavern’s Assembly Room and the Chestnut Theatre.  Compared to British and Viennese ensembles, Reinangle’s players were doubtless rather rough-and-ready.  Reinagle’s compositional style had its roots in the classicism of Haydn and C.P.E. Bach, which perfectly matched the simple, well-proportioned “Federal” style of architecture.

The Chestnut Theater itself, opened in 1794, was the work of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the mastermind of the Fairmount Waterworks.  Able to seat around 1,100 people on four levels, its stage was crowned by a sculpture of a soaring eagle in the clouds. George Washington was a frequent, enthusiastic attendee of Reinagle’s concerts; he even entrusted the composer with the musical education of his stepdaughter Nellie Custis.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdQyNOQ9ne8&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
Benjamin Carr: Rondo on “Yankee Doodle” (1804)

Another Philadelphia composer was London-born Benjamin Carr, who arrived in the city in 1793 as a voice and keyboard teacher.  In addition to teaching and composing, he served as organist and choirmaster at St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church and then St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Carr’s most famous work is the “Federal Overture,” written for full orchestra in 1794.

The Musical Fund Hall, 1959, after being sold to a labor organization. The Victorian facade was added in the late 19th century.

Yet Carr’s most important contribution to the musical life of the city was co-founding along with artist Thomas Sully of the Musical Fund Society in 1820. Its charitable board sponsored the city’s first symphony orchestra. Headquartered in a magnificent auditorium designed by William Strickland, the Musical Fund Society was the forerunner of The Philadelphia Orchestra. The Society’s purpose was “first, to cultivate and diffuse musical taste, and secondly, to afford relief to its necessitous professional members and their families.” Designed by William Strickland, the Musical Fund Hall was a Greek Revival structure with an auditorium on the second floor.  Playing host to such distinguished guests as singer Jenny Lind and author William Thackeray, it was the city’s grandest concert hall until the Academy of Music opened on South Broad Street in 1857.

Sources:

E. Digby Balzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1979), p.319.

Irvin R. Glazer, Philadelphia Theatres A-Z (New York, NY: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp.84, 172.

Philadelphia Scrapple: Whimsical Bits Anent Eccentrics & the City’s Oddities (Richmond, VA: The Dietz Press, 1956), p.141.

Philadelphia Composers: Alexander Reinagle (1756-1809), http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/keffer/reinagle.html

Francis Hopkinson, 1737-1791. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200035713/default.html