On May 26, 2007, at 1:33 PM, Mariposa Symphony Orchestra (Les Marsden) wrote:
In the mid-to-late 1800s American symphony orchestras and opera companies were sprouting everywhere;
There *were* no American symphony orchestras in the mid-late 19th c. except for the NY Phil and Theodore Thomas's touring outfit.
every last small town had its Opera House which was routinely sold out when a Jenny Lind or Louis Moreau Gottschalk came through.
"Opera house" meant simply a theater equally adapted to drama and music. The most typical thing you'd hear there would be a minstrel show. As for Gottschalk, his diary of his experiences on tour will put paid immediately to any notion that audiences outside a handful of major cities were even remotely sophisticated.
Whether the cheering mining-camp reactions to touring Shakespeareans
drama, be it said, is not music.
or Tchaikovsky's (1891) writings which document his astonishment while touring the US East Coast at the fact that he was far-better known, comprehended and more widely celebrated in America than in his own land,
Things had improved somewhat by the 1890s--a part of the continuing, long-term improvement that I mentioned in my previous posting. Note, however the key phrase "East Coast" in the quote above. I suspect that even that would better read "Northeast Coast." Did Tchaikovsky go to Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta?
or the plethora of competing music critics in US cities major and minor,
This went hand in hand with a plethora of newspapers. The closest equivalent nowadays would be the blogosphere--where there are indeed numerous competing music critics, major and minor.
Dvorak was celebrated - and extremely well-known in this country when Jeanette Thurber managed the coup of bringing him here to head the National Conservatory of Music,
Again, this was at the very end of the 19th c., just before the foundation of orchestras in Philadelphia, Cleveland, etc.
in 1851 Anthony Philip Heinrich, America's most important composer before the civil war, took an extended vacation in the Catskills. He had thought of himself as a famous man, for every musically-educated person in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia knew his name and affectionately referred to him as "Father Heinrich." A decade earlier he had chaired the founding meeting of the New York Philharmonic Society. In the Catskill towns, however, he found he was totally unknown--which sent him into a deep depression lasting a month or more, after which he started styling himself "The Unknown Man."
Nearly every parlor in nearly every American home had a piano which served as training ground for yet another Fur Elise rendering;
But mostly to accompany popular songs. A home piano nowadays signifies some degree of musical sophistication, but that was certainly not true in the 19th c.
Caruso's 78s were the greatest-selling recordings by far
OK, now we're into the 20th c. And the statistic you give is a slippery one: thousands of musical acts were recorded, most of them utterly meritricious-- and Caruso could easily have outsold all the others without commanding more than a tiny percentage of the total. I don't know for a fact that this is the case, but I suspect it is.
the age of radio and later TV produced far more wide-flung, non-specific broadcast dissemination of classical music than we have today - think only of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts,
--which still continue, uninterrupted--except that nowadays, at least where I live, you can now hear two different opera broadcasts each week instead of just one. As for the rest, it is simply untrue. Ballet only came to TV in the 1960s, and operas in that medium were rare "specials" before then.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://www.kallistimusic.com/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
