The Boston Music Hall

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Title:     The Boston Music Hall
Author: George William Curtis [More Titles by Curtis]

It is not, of course, possible that New York feels any chagrin that Boston has given the most colossal concert ever known upon the continent; but it is observable that, as wind and fire finally levelled the last timbers of the Boston Coliseum in the dust, the first step taken was taken towards the Beethoven Centennial Celebration, in New York. The project is not yet matured; but a vision of something very large indeed, something "metropolitan," begins to allure expectation; and Boston, having scored handsomely in the game, sits upon the ruins of her Coliseum and the profits of her Jubilee to see what New York will do.

If New York will build a proper hall for music and other public purposes, she will do well, and the Beethoven Centennial will not be in vain. The Cooper Institute hall is large enough for political meetings, and Steinway Hall is good for many purposes; but it is not a beautiful nor imposing room, as a great hall should be. The most impressive hall in the country is still the Boston Music Hall, where the great height and the two galleries, one above the other, with the organ and imposing statue of Beethoven, give a feeling of dignity. But the Music Hall lacks one of the chief characteristics of a noble room for the purposes to which it is devoted, and that is brilliancy. It is too dark. There is no smiling splendor of effect, which is always so enlivening. The darkness of the hall may be agreeable to weak eyes, it may even be described as "very much better than a glare of light," but brilliancy remains an indispensable quality of a great hall devoted to popular enjoyment.

Yet, whether dark or light, how much has been enjoyed in that stately room! What memorable figures have passed across that platform! What exquisite strains of music, sung, played, or spoken, have died along those walls! No one who is familiar with our history for the last twenty years will sit in the hall for any purpose but suddenly he sees it crowded with a silent and attentive throng; sees a reading-desk with vases of flowers, and a man[A] of sturdy figure standing behind it, whose voice is deep and penetrating and sincere; whose words are things; who has a certain rustic shyness of movement; but whose sentences roll and flash like volleys of trained soldiery, and who stands in the warmth of his own emotion and the sympathy of his audience, an indomitable gladiator, compelling the admiration even of his enemies as he fights with the Ephesian beasts. Against him, as he stands there every Sunday preaching to that vast multitude what seems to him the truth, and breaking to them what he believes to be the very bread of life, other men are preaching and praying, and the excommunications of the Vatican against Luther, shorn of their thunder and lightning, are hurled. Who is he that judges motives and sincerity? We do not know in this world what is believed, but only what is said and done.

[A] Theodore Parker.

This man, with bald head set low upon high square shoulders, who looks firmly at the great audience through spectacles, and speaks in a low half-nasal tone, visits the widows and fatherless, and keeps himself unspotted from the world. What he believes, others may question. What he is, every aspiring soul must admire. Although almost every one of them would have theologically cast him out and have recoiled from him with dismay, yet he preserves more than any other the traditional power and individualism of the old New England clergy. He applies the eternal truth and the moral law as he feels it to the life and times around him. They are heated white, and his words are blows of a sledge-hammer to mould them into noble form. That dauntless mien is the true symbol of his mental aspect as he confronts the menacing principalities and powers, and the man whose voice has so often charmed the crowded hall is one of the few who distinctly see and foretell the terrible war.

Long since his tongue is silent. He who came of the toughest stock and might have looked to live almost a century, died when it was half spent. It may have seemed to the great throng easy to climb that platform and preach a sermon every Sunday morning; but to study early and late as if he would master all knowledge; to write books, lectures, and speeches; to travel hard by night and day, losing his sleep and his food, and by the dim light in the car still pushing out the frontiers of his learning; to deny himself exercise and needful rest while the mental tension was so constant and the moral warfare so intense--this was not easy; this was to violate all the laws of life, which none knew better; and suddenly the stretched harp-string snapped, and there was no more music!

Not every one who knew his power knew into what sweetness and tenderness it could be softened, nor suspected that in the gladiator there was the loving and simple heart of the boy. Here, as the Easy Chair sits listening to the orchestra, it recalls the preacher when he was the minister of a rural parish, and used to come strolling through the fields and patches of wood to measure his wit with the friendly scholar who was the chief at Brook Farm, or to sit docile at his feet of counsel and sympathy. Or, again, it sees him in his country pulpit, the same sturdy, heroic athlete, trying and tempering the weapons with which he was to fight upon this larger scene. It was a noble character; a devoted, generous, inspiring life, a memory always hallowed in this hall. The conductor waves his baton! The symphony thunders from a hundred instruments, but through them all breathes the low tone of the remembered voice.

"Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?"

And as the concert proceeds--one of the series of the Harvard Musical Association, whose concerts are the musical pride of Boston, at which the performance is all of the purest classical music, so pure and so severe that the profane sometimes secretly ask whether melody in music is the unpardonable sin, and are peremptorily answered by the elect: "No, but rub-a-dub-dub and tumti-id-dity are not music"--and as the concert proceeds it is surely a striking spectacle. The great hall, rather dimmer than ever because of the consciousness of daylight outside, is full of people, gathered in the afternoon not only from the city, but from all the environs within twenty miles, and they sit as attentive and absorbed as a class of students at an interesting lecture. If, in such a concert, melody is not the unpardonable sin, whispering is. Woe betide the whisperer at a Harvard Musical. It were better for him, or even her, that the money for the ticket had been expended at the minstrels or the museum. You might as well be a forger, a swindler, a perjurer, or a burglar in ordinary life as to be a whisperer at a Harvard Musical. Yes, you might as well "speak right out in meetin'" itself as whisper here.

Such a disciplined audience, so quiet, so attentive, so susceptible to the slightest sigh of the oboe or wail of the violin, is a marvellous spectacle. They are hearing the finest and much of the freshest music in the world. They are not exactly sympathetic; perhaps the character of the music does not permit it. They applaud calmly--as it were, with reservations. It really seems sometimes as though they approve the music rather than enjoy it. But the Easy Chair reflects with pride that the organizer of these concerts, if such a word may be used, and certainly with no exclusion of the co-operation which alone makes such concerts possible, is a Brook-Farmer; and it complacently smiles upon the great multitude as unconscious pupils of that Arcadian influence.

And, indeed, in other days in this same city of Boston, in the halcyon days of the "Academy" concerts at the old Odeon, or still more ancient Boston Theatre, many of the Brook-Farmers were present in the flesh. Those were the days--or, rather, the nights--when Beethoven was truly introduced to America. Preluded with the pretty "Zannetta" overture by Auber, or with the "Serment" or the "Domino Noir," or with Herold's shrill "Zanetta," or some strain which would not now be tolerated in the Harvard concerts, the Fifth Symphony was played until it became familiar. And the long, willowy Schmidt stood at the head directing, proud as a general commanding his column. In the audience, earnest, interested, attentive, sparkling with humor, was Margaret Fuller, not hesitating, when the thoughtless girls whispered and tittered and giggled in the most solemn adagio strains, to lean over when the movement ended and to say to the offenders: "But let us have our turn, too; some of us came to hear the music."

There, also, was the delegation from Brook Farm, in whose appearance it was plain to see that in Arcadia the hair was worn long, that the stiff collar and cravat were repudiated, and that woollen blouses were a mute protest against the body coats of a selfish and competitive civilization. Those young fellows walked in from Brook Farm and out again. They made nothing of ten miles or so each way under the winter stars. And with them and of them, already accomplished in the beautiful science, already familiar with the great works of the great composers, was the present tutelary genius of the Harvard concerts, whose life, consecrated as critic and lover to this art, has been a true service to his city, and, reflectively, to the country.

But even Boston does not deny the charm of Theodore Thomas's orchestra and the delight of the New York Philharmonic music. Indeed, there was no audience which, for its training, was more authorized to judge the great excellence of the Thomas orchestra than that of the Harvard concerts. But when he went to Boston it was not as a doubting Thomas. He did not play Bach and Beethoven only, but he tickled the amazed multitude with positive tunes. He raised his baton, and his varied orchestra, a single instrument in his magic grasp, consented to waltzes; or, like a cathedral choir becoming suddenly a lark, trilled airy roundelays, at which the delighted (but not all assured of the propriety of delight) audience smiled and shook, and the youngest catechumens even tapped time faintly with their feet!--a sound which, could it be conceived audible in the midst of one of the Harvards, would probably cause such a shudder of horror that the hall itself would fall as by an earthquake.

Thus the Music Hall itself is a kind of symphony of memories. It is full of delightful ghosts. Among the visible figures there are a host of the unseen, and every singer, player, speaker, as he stands for an hour upon the platform, is measured by the masters of his art. But in the famous Peace Jubilee it had no part. Indeed, the musical taste of which it is peculiarly the temple resisted the colossal and continuous concert with bells, anvils, and cannon as something monstrous, and as repulsive to true art as a huge and clumsy Eastern idol. But not even the finest taste of the Music Hall denied the impressiveness and grandeur of the result. New York, in the Beethoven Centennial, will have immense advantages. The musical resources of the city are truly "metropolitan," and such should the festival be.

[The end]
George William Curtis's essay: Boston Music Hall

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