USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 42
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A series of concerts is given on Sunday afternoons, throughout the winter, at Symphony Hall, for which the most eminent pianists, violinists and singers are engaged. Some are given at popular prices, and most of them are well attended.
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EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
Boston, with Harvard University and Medical School, the Institute of Technology, Boston University and numerous private schools, has always been pre-eminent as an educational center. Especially have music students been attracted here on account of its musical advantages. The New England Conservatory of Music, one of the largest institutions for musical education in the United States, was founded by Dr. Eben Tourjee in 1869. It has a faculty of about a hundred members and an average registration at present of about 3,000 students. It is equipped with commodious buildings, two concert halls, one of which contains a large concert organ, thirteen pipe organs for practice, and many classrooms. Its orchestra of eighty-five members, organized and for many years conducted by the director, George W. Chadwick, gives six or eight concerts per year. The programs cover a wide range of classical and modern music, including the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms and Tschai- kowsky. Choral works are occasionally given and the standard of performance is very high. The orchestra is now conducted by Mr. Wallace Goodrich, who in the fall of 1930 succeeded Mr. Chadwick as director of the Conservatory. Degrees of Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of School Music are given in the collegiate department. Although the Conservatory has no endowment, many scholarships are awarded to talented students from bequests given by generous benefactors. Foriner students include Mme. Lillian Nordica, Mme. Louise Homer, Lee Pattison, Guy Maier and Jesús María Sanromá. Many graduates of the orchestra are now members of symphony orchestras throughout the United States.
To the musical scholar the libraries of Boston offer great advantages. The Boston Public Library has a good collection of music, which is available to readers. It also houses the Allen A. Brown Library, a very complete col- lection of operas, orchestral scores and choral works. These are rendered peculiarly valuable by the details and criticisms of the original performances which the donor carefully collected for many years. The Library of the Harvard Musical Association contains many of the classics and much valuable musical literature. In this library is also the Julia M. Marsh Room, with two grand pianos and a very complete collection of music for four and eight hands on two pianos. This is available without cost to any music student who is properly introduced. The Widener Library at Harvard University contains many modern scores (as well as classics) and most of the standard theoretical and historical literature. Although primarily for the use of Harvard students, all interested persons are welcomed. This is also true of the library of the New England Conservatory of Music, which is rich in theoretical and historical inaterial, especially in reference to early American music. Complete editions of Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc., of the Allgemeine Musik Zeitung and of Dwight's Journal may here be found. Some special treasures, like the original sketch of Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande" the original receipt for four hundred florins given to Count Oppersdorf for Beethoven's "Fourth Symphony," the first edition of Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum". and several other interesting items, also a choice collection of autograph letters by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz,
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Wagner and others, are here to be found. The orchestral library contains scores and orchestral parts of 1,000 works, which may be consulted by students when not in use by the orchestra.
One of the most significant factors in the growth of music in the United States is the increasing enthusiasm for music in the public schools. Choral singing is brought to a high degree of excellence, even in the lower grades. Students of both sexes are encouraged to learn stringed and wind instruments, and credit is given them for their work outside the school. In some cities money is appropriated to furnish instruments and instruction. Orchestras and bands are formed which often attain a high degree of excellence. Some of the young players reach a high standard of virtuosity and are taken into the great symphony orchestras. This work is in charge of supervisors who undergo a long and arduous training, but are well paid if they are efficient in their positions. In Boston annual concerts of the school children are given in Symphony Hall under the direction of Professor John A. O'Shea. The students sing in groups and, from the highest grades to the lowest, the per- formances are startling. It is not easy to listen to this music unmoved.
In 1930 a concert of the New England High School Orchestras, a total of two hundred and fifty players, was given in Symphony Hall under the direc- tion of Francis M. Findlay. In intonation, precision and euphony the playing was most creditable, and in most of the pieces left little to be desired. This movement, looking to the musical training of young people in the schools, is widespread in the United States. Eventually it will create an intelligent musical public by bringing music into the home. And in time it may develop a class of orchestral players which will make it no longer necessary to import them from Europe.
Mention should be made of the growing interest in male chorus singing by the Intercollegiate Glee Club. Following the example of Doctor Davison and the Harvard Glee Club, the College Glee Clubs have attained a high stand- ard of singing. Their programs present the best examples of classic and modern composition, from Palestrina to the present time. Yearly contests are held which are occasions of great enthusiasm.
In this brief sketch it has been necessary to omit references to many interesting events of the past and present in the musical life of Boston. The rapid growth of the great western cities, the increase in wealth, the great prog- ress in means of communication, and above all the invasion of the radio and the phonograph have made it necessary for Boston to divide some of her laurels as a musical town with the other great centers of musical activity. But for those who love good music for its own sake, and want to hear and study it, Boston has not yet been superseded as a musical Mecca.
EDITORIAL NOTE.
Mr. Chadwick's modesty, no doubt, has prevented him from enlarging upon the group of composers, resident or native, who for fifty years or more have conferred upon this city a distinction in the art of music quite comparable with that which it has earned for its Symphony Orchestra and its choral societics. Besides those already mentioned - John K. Paine, Arthur Foote, Edward Burlingame Hill, Frederick S. Converse, J. C. D. Parker, Daniel G. Mason,
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Carl Mckinley, Philip G. Clapp and (assuredly not least among them) Mr. Chadwick him- self - the list includes such eminent names as Horatio W. Parker, Henry F. B. Gilbert and Henry K. Hadley, all three natives of Greater Boston, Charles M. Loeffler, who, though born in Alsace, came liere at the age of twenty, and Gustav Strube, who lived among us nearly a quarter of a century. Among our women composers Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, Margaret R. Lang and Mabel W. Daniels are conspicuous. Fred Field Bullard wrote spirited songs and Julius Eichberg, besides his light operas, composed a stirring and favorite national anthem, "To Thee, O Country Great and Free." Works of Arthur Bird and Clayton Johns have been performed in Europe as well as America. Arthur Whiting is prominent among the older group; Nicholas Slonimsky among the younger. On the whole it is doubtful whether any other city in the United States, except New York, could equal this score or more of com- posers in variety and distinction. For a review of their achievements the reader may con- sult the chapter entitled "The Boston Group" in John Tasker Howard's "American Music." Paul Rosenfeld offers estimates of Horatio Parker, Loeffler and Chadwick in his recent "An Hour with American Music."
The music critics of Boston - William F. Apthorp, Louis C. Elson, Philip Hale, Henry T. Parker, Olin Downes (since removed to New York) and others - have done much to create and sustain an interest in good music. Their scholarly and brilliant work deserves more than the passing mention which is all that it can receive within the limits of this article. Music publishing houses and instrument makers of high reputation also testify to the many- sided activity of Boston as a musical center. A development of recent years is the growth of national singing societies,- German, Swedish, French, Polish, Lithuanian, Italian and others, -- which compete for prizes annually on Washington's Birthday in Symphony Hall. Their spontaneous efforts, while not too pretentious, are yet of good augury for the musical future of Boston.
GENERAL PROGRESS IN THE FINE ARTS
By WILLIAM HOWE DOWNES
The conventional use of the term "fine arts" restricts it to architecture, . painting, sculpture and the minor crafts. In a great cathedral these may all be seen together, blended in a harmonious whole. The sculptured figures of the portal, the painted altar-piece, the glittering windows, the carved pulpit and railings, the vessels of wrought gold, the bronze lamps and candlesticks, the embossed missal, the embroidered vestments and hangings, reinforce the unity of the broad design, while enriching it with decorative detail. Boston of today is not altogether lacking in examples of this happy combination of the arts, though perhaps its greatest achievement in the last fifty years is in a field which is not usually grouped with the others, that of landscape architecture. Many good judges agree that the chain of urban and suburban parks, ponds and water courses, beach reservations and connecting parkways, created by the genius of Frederick Law Olmsted and his disciple, Charles Eliot, is not surpassed by any similar creation elsewhere and is truly a great artistic master- piece, though the materials of which it is formed are not dead but living, not fabricated but rather selected and arranged, being for the most part natural opportunities seized, natural gifts adapted and transformed.
Next to landscape design, architecture is the second of the arts in ampli- tude. In this field, too, Boston of today is not without glory, if distinguished names and fine buildings can confer it upon her. Among her leading architects she has had such men as H. H. Richardson, master of the Romanesque style, Bertram Goodhue of the Gothic, Guy Lowell of the Renaissance, Louis Sullivan (a native, if not a worker here) of what may be called the modern American, and others not less eminent. In painting, Winslow Homer, John S. Sargent and the unique, if eccentric, Maurice Prendergast, in sculpture, Bela Pratt and the remarkable wood-carver, John Kirchmayer, may be named as repre- senting her standards. And all these masters have worthy successors, women as well as men, who are practising their several arts in the city today and whose work will be described in the following chapters. Mr. Cram, Mr. Maginnis, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Hale and Mr. Code have, on the whole, no story of decadence to tell but one of life and vigor.
It may be that literature, if we except history and biography, can show fewer shining names than in the golden age of New England letters, when Boston was the literary capital of America; but one has only to look back to the period of the Civil War and the decades following to realize that in the arts of design there has been as great an advance as there has been admittedly in music. It was just before the opening of the present half-century that the city reached the stage of ripe culture and financial ease at which these arts generally flourish. It is not surprising, then, that in this propitious atmosphere there should have been a new quickening of creative energy and a new spread of general interest and appreciation.
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THE ART MUSEUM
In no respect has this spread of appreciation been more remarkable than in the erection of fine public buildings and the growth of great art collections. The Museum of Fine Arts, for example, at the beginning of the period under review was still in its infancy. This Museum, which is open to the public free, is supported entirely by private subscriptions. Before the elose of the nineteenth century it had become evident that its first location on Copley square was inadequate to meet the increasing need of space. Land on the Fenway was accordingly bought in 1899; the property on Copley square was sold and the new building was opened in 1909. About six years later the Robert Dawson Evans memorial galleries for paintings were added, together with a central structure at right angles connecting the galleries with the Huntington avenue building and containing the lecture hall and the stately tapestry gallery. The architect of the group was Guy Lowell.
In 1917 the Quincy Adams Shaw collection of paintings, pastels and etch- ings by Jean François Millet came as a gift to the Museum and was installed in two special galleries. This gift consists of the most important group of Millet's works in the world, and it is most appropriate that it should belong to Boston, where the recognition of Millet's genius antedated that of the rest of the world. To Edward S. Morse the Museum owes its great collection of Japanese pottery, unexcelled outside of Tokyo; to Denman W. Ross its unique Cambodian sculptures and almost innumerable rare specimens of Oriental art. By the will of Mrs. F. T. Bradbury $1,000,000 has just been added to the endowment. But to name the benefactors of the Museum and its many treasures - Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Modern European, Colonial American and what not - would require more space than is available here. Special mention, however, may be made of the most recent addition, which represents a conspicuous broadening of the original plans. .
In 1928 occurred the opening of a new wing for the collections of the decora- tive arts, with many period rooms from England, Scotland, France and America, and rooms devoted to ship models and silver and porcelain. This wing, adding nearly fifty rooms to the Museum, is built on three sides of a beautiful courtyard. Outstanding among the period rooms are those from the Château de la Muette, Passy, the Tudor room from a house in Somersetshire, the morning room from Hamilton Palace, and the Chippendale room from Woodcote Park, Surrey. The decorative arts wing has given rise to a remarkable degree of popular interest.
FENWAY COURT
Fenway Court, the Italianate palace of Mrs. John L. Gardner, with its attractive patio, cloisters, flower garden and fountains, is another product of the past half-century. It was built mainly to house the collection of works of art - pictures, sculpture, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, pottery, curios and articles of virtu - which this rich and discriminating amateur of art had assembled over a long period of years. A few years before her death Mrs. Gardner threw open her mansion to the public for a short time twice each year, limiting the number of visitors; and she made arrangements for incor-
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porating the court and its treasures under the name of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which, by the terms of her will, was to be, after her demise, in the charge of trustees and kept open as a publie art museum for the people, all its contents remaining undisturbed as she had left them. She died in 1924. The collection is one of the most valuable and famous in America, and is espe- cially strong in paintings of the old Italian schools. To mention only a few of the greater names, there are examples of the work of Raphael, Giotto, Titian, Botticelli, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, Tiepolo, Mantegna, Fra Angelico, Crivelli, Filippo Lippi, Correggio, Moroni, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and Guardi. From the other European schools there are examples of Rembrandt, Ter Borch and Vermeer of Delft, of Rubens, Van Dyck and Antonio Moro, of Dürer and Holbein, of Velasquez, of Clouet. The modern painters comprise Degas, Manet, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Zorn, Whistler, Sargent, LaFarge, Mancini, Besnard. There are rare sculptures by Benvenuto Cellini, Verrocchio, Mino da Fiesole, Benedetto da Majano, Andrea and Giovanni della Robbia. The arrangement is quite unlike that of a museum. In all the rooms the personal touch of the amateur of art is manifest; the atmosphere is that of a palatial residence, reminiscent of Venice, whence most of the materials for the edifice were brought.
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
A third product of the period, the Boston Public Library, completed in 1895, is one of the small number of publie buildings in the country which may be called a first-rate monument of architecture. It is the masterpiece of Charles F. MeKim. The façade is frankly an echo of the Library of Ste. Geneviève in Paris, and the courtyard is an equally eandid adaptation of the court of the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, which is to say that the entire com- position is in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Salient features of the interior are the noble main stairway and the imposing main reading-room, Bates Hall, but the building is probably more famous for the mural paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, John S. Sargent and Edwin A. Abbey than for any of its structural features. As the Trinity Church mural decorations were the first important works of this kind in the United States, so the Public Library's mural paintings are the most renowned. Those of Puvis, the only examples outside of Franee, are worthy of the international celebrity that is theirs and of the unique genius of the author, undisputed modern master of this art.
THE STATE HOUSE
Bulfineh's State House, though dating from a mueh earlier period, has been greatly enlarged by reeent additions to the north, east and west. The east and west wings, which are the newest portions, are built of a light gray marble. The original front of briek was covered by gray paint, but this has been removed, leaving an agreeable rose-color surface, which harmonizes not badly with the marble walls at either side. Honesty, after all, is the best architectural policy. When illuminated at night, the Bulfinch front is a spec- taele of genuine beauty. In the interior of the Capitol a number of mural
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decorations depicting pivotal events in the history of Massachusetts have been installed. These works are by Robert Reid, Henry O. Walker and Edward Simmons. All three of these men were natives of Massachusetts. Mr. Reid's subjects are: "James Otis Making his Plea Against the Writs of Assistance," "The Boston Tea Party," and "Paul Revere's Ride." Mr. Walker's subjects are: "The Pilgrims on the Mayflower," and "John Eliot Preaching to the Indians." Mr. Simmons' subjects are: "The Battle of Concord" and "The Return of the Colors to the Custody of the Commonwealth." While the decorative function of these panels may be subsidiary to their historical interest, they are not without merit in both respects.
MEMORIAL SCULPTURE
Since 1880 Boston has erected about a score of new statues and monu- ments. Of these the only one which is an unquestionable masterpiece of sculp- ture is Saint Gaudens' Shaw monument, on Beacon Hill. Yet several of the others have considerable artistic worth,- notably the William Lloyd Garrison, a seated figure, by Olin Warner; the Sir Henry Vane, a picturesque and spirited figure, by MacMonnies; the General Warren by Paul W. Bartlett, and the equestrian statue of General Hooker by French and Potter, which, in spite of the rigidity of the figure of the rider, is a sterling work. Several insignificant statues have been moved; others removed and replaced by better works, and one or two have been ruthlessly scrapped. For this excellent work the com- munity is indebted to the City Art Commission, which is also to be credited with the honor of having courageously rejected certain proposed monuments. The record on the whole is not bad. One masterpiece out of twenty works is all that can reasonably be expected.
EXHIBITIONS
This chronicle would be incomplete without a mention of the activities of the various art institutions, more especially in the line of exhibitions. The Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Copley Society, the Guild of Boston Artists, the Boston Art Club and the St. Botolph Club have held exhibitions of great interest, some of them important enough to be regarded as historic events. These include the Whistler, Sargent and Monet loan exhibi- tions, sponsored by the Copley Society, and the Art Museum's exhibitions of Winslow Homer's and John Sargent's works; the sculptures of George Grey Barnard, of Bela Pratt, of Paul Manship and others, assembled in represen- tative numbers and variety; rare illuminated manuscripts from the collections of connoisseurs like J. P. Morgan; the great Frick collection of masterpieces, which included original Vermeers; works of the classic Spanish painters, as well as of Goya, Sorolla and Zuloaga; British portraits of war leaders; examples of the mediaval Russians, the Cubists, the post-Impressionists, the modern Mexican painters, and many more.
The picture dealers of Boston also show contemporary works, foreign and American, and in the art clubs the productions of local artists are almost con-
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tinuously displayed. In fact, the art-lover living in Boston, if he has but used his opportunities, will have had the materials for a liberal education placed within his reach at a trifling cost or, oftener than not, no cost at all. In this way, it is believed by our many public benefactors, appreciation for the best in art is widely diffused and the foundations of true progress are laid, since it is only in an atinosphere saturated with the love of great art that the seeds of hidden talent will expand and bear fruit in original creations.
Art criticism has flourished in Boston but this field has been covered by Professor Rogers in his article on Literaturc. The mediating function of the critic, between the creative artist on the one hand and the public on the other, is hard to define, but his continued existence, in Boston as in other centers of production, offers at least prima facie evidence that he exerts a stimulating influence in both directions.
ARCHITECTURE
By RALPH ADAMS CRAM
The year 1880 is a very significant date for the inception of this review of architecture in Boston during the generation now coming to its close, for it definitely marks the end of one era, the opening of another. For exactly fifty years this great art had languished in a condition where oblivion would have been a crowning mercy. Indeed, it is not too much to say that architecture in America from the election of Andrew Jackson to that of Garfield maintained itself at a lower level than had ever been known before in the two Americas - perhaps even in the history of human civilization. During the Colonial period and that of the aristocratic republic of the Virginia and Massachusetts Presi- dents, the architecture that had been remembered or imported by the colonists took on a very individual and significant quality, rational, restrained, delicate in detail, even original, and in many respects better than the Georgian of its parentage. Boston could match Virginia in its admirable monuments, but here as there the greater part has perished, partly through natural decay or conflagration, more through a growing ignorance and indifference on the part of the publie and the stupidity of legislative bodies. Boston still has its kernel of Bulfinch State House in its husk of magniloquence or impropriety, its Old State House redeemed from the creeping paralysis of commercialism, King's Chapel, Faneuil Hall and a few of the once stately mansions of Beacon Hill. The Province House, "palace" of the Royal Governors, is gone, and the Hancock House, finest of all courtly houses, sacrificed to the meanness and myopia of a stupid legislature, together with nearly all the other examples of the work of the excellent architects and master builders of the eighteenth century. Many of the surrounding cities and towns, essentially a part of Boston, contribute their valuable quota, particularly Cambridge and Medford, but their number is as small as their influence on the succeeding work of the nineteenth century.
It may be a debatable question as to just why, after nearly two centuries of at least respectable architecture, the collapse should have been so exactly synchronous with the revolutionary political change in the year 1830, but there is no question as to the facts. For fifty years these most abnormal and unprecedented "dark ages" continued, with only here and there a sporadic instance of decent but precarious survival and, towards the end of this deplor- able era, equally sporadic examples of an attempt to do better along the some- what alien lines of "Victorian Gothic." In the general humiliation Boston suffered less than some cities, - Philadelphia, for example, - while it still can boast some of the best demonstrations of the Victorian and Ruskinian episodes, such as the Central Church, the "New Old South" and the First Church. The old Art Museum, devotedly Ruskinian in its general character, is gone, with some of the other pseudo-Gothic structures. Simultaneously with the English
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