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“While in Europe [during the summer of 1883] Theodore Thomas had, as usual, been on the lookout for musical novelties for coming programs. He had met, in Munich, a young and almost unknown composer, one Richard Strauss, who had recently finished writing a symphony,” wrote Rose Fay Thomas in her husband’s Memoirs. “Thomas secured the first movement of the work, and was so much impressed with it that he requested the young Strauss to let him have the other three movements, promising to bring out the whole work in a concert with the [New York] Philharmonic.”
However, in a letter to Thomas from Strauss dated a few months later on September 20, 1883, it appears that Thomas only met with Franz Strauss, Richard’s father and a noted horn player, composer and teacher. Nineteen-year-old Richard wrote: “As I was unfortunately unable to welcome you here this summer . . . I must not neglect to express to you in writing my heartiest and warmest thanks for your kind intention to give my second symphony the great honor of a New York performance.” Thomas kept his word and led the world premiere of Strauss’ Symphony no. 2 in F minor on December 12 and 13, 1884, thus introducing Strauss to America.
Their friendship blossomed, and as a result, Thomas later introduced several of Strauss’s tone poems to Chicago audiences, including the U.S. premiere of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks during the Chicago Orchestra’s fifth season on November 15, 1895.
“In this work of the gifted young composer, we have a curious extravaganza, in which the entire resources of the modern orchestra are employed as a sort of summary of all conceivable pranks and freaks of elfins, fairies and gnomes, together with a thread of intelligible melody,” according to W. S. B. Mathews in the program book. “At times the cacophony reaches a point where it seems as if we were listening to the preliminary overture of tuning and passage work, which everybody knows who has heard an orchestra tune up and warm up its instruments.”
The critical response was unanimous:
- “The Strauss rondo is probably the most fantastic piece of musical horse play that ever found place on a Chicago Orchestra program. It is eccentricity run mad, bedlam expressed in musical numbers.” — Chicago Times-Herald
- “It is, we can well believe, a marvelous piece of orchestration. More curious and inharmonious noises are woven together in it and the semblance of coherency maintained despite all the absurdities that we ever heard before in a sane composition.” — Chicago Chronicle
- “His absolute mastery of the resources of the modern orchestra may now find odd method of expression, but with years and their calming influence and with a firmer command of an imagination now fantastic to the verge of riot, to limit prediction of his possibilities would be something more than rash. Berlioz did not have his orchestra more completely in hand than Richard Strauss.” — Chicago Tribune
- “Strauss’s rondo is a tour de force, astonishing at every measure, irresistibly droll, full of quaint medieval quips and cranks, teeming with clever mimicry and brilliant instrumental pantomime, and, above all, a masterpiece of orchestral art. The intricacy of the score is extraordinary, the ingenious devices resorted to for effect amazing, and the humor and wholesome buffoonery of the piece unique. Nothing could have been chosen better to illustrate the immense resources of the young composer and the fertility of his genius. What is more, the piece gave the Orchestra an opportunity to display its consummate training, and it may be said that music never was played in Chicago with finer technical nicety or with more of the spirit of a composer.” — Chicago Record
Thomas repeated Till Eulenspiegel twice during that same season in early 1896—on January 24 and 25 for a “Request Program” and again on February 28 and 29 for a “Requested repetition of the Request Program”—and programmed it five more times over the next eight years. The composer himself led his tone poem when he first guest conducted the Orchestra in April 1904.
According to Phillip Huscher, the CSO’s program annotator and scholar-in-residence, Strauss begins his tale of the German peasant folk hero “by beckoning us to gather round, setting a warm ‘once-upon-a-time’ mood into which the horn jumps with one of the most famous themes in all music—the daring, teasing, cartwheeling tune that characterizes this roguish hero better than any well-chosen words ever could.”
Principal horn during the 1895–96 season, Ernst Ketz (ca. 1853–ca. 1901) was likely sitting in the first chair for the U.S. premiere of Till Eulenspiegel on November 15, 1895, to play that theme, just ten days after the world premiere in Cologne, given by the Gürzenich Orchestra under the baton of Franz Wüllner.
A charter member of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1882, Ketz also performed regularly at the Bayreuth Festival from 1886 until 1894 and with the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne. In April 1893, he first traveled to the U.S. as a member of the Garde du Corps Cavalry Band, one of two military bands representing Germany at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the fair, Ketz’s name also appeared on the roster of the Exposition Orchestra, which was the Chicago Orchestra expanded to 114 players, led by Theodore Thomas.
Two years later, Ketz returned to the U.S.—at Thomas’ invitation—to be a member of the Chicago Orchestra, serving as principal horn. He stayed for only one season, after which he returned to Cologne. Ketz was back in the Gürzenich Orchestra for the world premiere of Strauss’s Don Quixote on March 8, 1898, again with Wüllner on the podium. Thomas led the U.S. premiere in Chicago on January 6, 1899.
This article also appears here, and portions previously appeared here.
Wishing a very happy birth anniversary to our founder and first music director, Theodore Thomas, on the occasion of his 190th birthday!
According to Andrea Friederici Ross—in her new book Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy and Rose Fay—Rose wrote a poem in memory of Theodore shortly after his death in early 1905, “titled To Theodore Thomas, My Morning Star, [expressing] her grief and the depth of her love for her departed husband:
“The morning star in glorious splendor ‘rose
Upon my life when all the sky was bright
With dawning day—my happy day of love,
Through love’s long day, of fourteen winged years
He shone with steadfast, tender beaming light
My guide and beacon towards the better life.
And when at length the evening hour drew nigh,
He sank to rest in sunset’s radiant glow,
Leaving me shrouded in eternal night
Save for the rainbow orbit which he traced
In transit o’er my life. This shineth still
Above the mist of melancholy tears—
A bow of promise, love and energy,
The arch on which my hope of heaven rests.”
—excerpt from Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy and Rose Fay
by Andrea Friederici Ross, 2025
This article also appears here.
Throughout his career, Theodore Thomas introduced hundreds of works to the American public as a conductor and music director of his own Theodore Thomas Orchestra, the New York and Brooklyn philharmonics, and ultimately the Chicago Orchestra, which he founded in 1891. In fact, the first orchestral concert under his own direction—given on May 13, 1862, in New York’s Irving Hall—opened with the United States premiere of Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman.
Barely a year later on May 9, 1863, Thomas—then only twenty-seven years old—was back in Irving Hall, making his second “annual appeal to the good taste and intelligence of the community,” according to the New York Times. “The interest of the occasion was centered of course on the Harold symphony, played for the first time in America [and he] engaged an orchestra of eighty players for the just interpretation of the symphony.”
“It is not easy to express a liking for Berlioz’s muse—so strangely does it oscillate between the extremes of raving eccentricity and of colossal, but entirely inconsequential magnificence,” continued the reviewer in the Times. “Berlioz has supplied the school of the ‘future’ with the few ideas of which it can boast, and this work of ‘Harold’ contains the materials for a dozen Liszts and Wagners. . . . Mr. Thomas conducted the orchestra with consummate ability, and Mr. Edward Mollenhauer* played the viola with marked effect. . . . We are only sorry that the Harold Symphony cannot be repeated.”
In the spring of 1867, Thomas took “a short vacation for the first time in his life, [spending] about two months in Europe, hearing everything he could in that brief time and impressing the highest standards of orchestral, quartette, and solo violin performances on his mind, in order that he might hereby improve his work at home,” according to his widow Rose Fay in the Memoirs of Theodore Thomas. During his two-month sojourn, he kept a diary describing the performances he heard and the people he met. “May 8, Paris. . . . Spent a delightful hour with Berlioz, in which we talked over all his larger compositions. It seems he had heard already that I played his music, and, as I was leaving, he asked me if there was anything of his that I would like which I didn’t already have in my library. I told him yes, there was one thing that I wanted very much, and that was his great Requiem Mass. Hearing this, Berlioz went to the music case, took down his own copy of the score and inscribed it . . . and presented it to me.”
Following Thomas’ death in 1905, Rose Fay donated a number of his presentation scores—including the copy of Berlioz’s Requiem—to the Newberry Library. To the right, the title page shows the composer’s inscription: “á Monsieur Thomas, en souvenir de l’auteur reconnaissant, H. Berlioz” (to Mr. Thomas in remembrance of the grateful author, H. Berlioz). At the bottom, Rose added, “This copy is Berlioz’s own copy of this work, which he took from the shelf in his study in Paris and presented to Theodore Thomas in 1867. Autographed. R.F.T.”
During the Chicago Orchestra’s first season, Thomas programmed Harold in Italy for the fourteenth subscription week on March 11 and 12, 1892. August Junker, the Orchestra’s charter principal viola, was soloist. Since then, the work has been performed by CSO principal violas Franz Esser and Clarence Evans, along with guest soloists Nobuko Imai, Kim Kashkashian, Michael Ouzounian, Lawrence Power, and Pinchas Zukerman. Harold in Italy also was a signature piece of Milton Preves, who performed it with the Orchestra on dozens of occasions during his nearly six-decade tenure, most of those years as principal viola.
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*German American violinist and composer Edward Mollenhauer (1827–1914) was a student of Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst and Ludwig Spohr. Following a short concert career in Germany, he moved to London to join his older brother Friedrich in Louis-Antoine Jullien’s orchestra. After that ensemble toured the United States in 1853, Edward and Friedrich remained in New York to perform and teach, and both later frequently performed as soloists with the New York Philharmonic. Also a composer, Edward composed operas, symphonies, numerous solo works for the violin, and songs.
Special thanks to Alison Hinderliter, Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts and Archives at the Newberry Library
This article also appears here.
Ben Poirot moved to Chicago in the fall of 2021 to begin graduate studies in tuba performance at Northwestern University. The following spring, he won a position in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and in the fall of 2022, he began his first season on the ensemble’s roster.
A few months later, Ben received a message from one of his mother’s cousins, who had been working on a family genealogical project. “She knew I was in Chicago doing something relating to music,” he said, “and she forwarded some information about my maternal great-great-great-grandmother Katherine Maria Fay (1846–1928). She was the sister of Rose Fay (1852–1929), the wife of Theodore Thomas (1835–1905), who was ’instrumental’ (her exact words) in the creation of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.” That makes Ben the great-great-great-grandnephew of Theodore and Rose Fay Thomas!
Rose was the eighth of nine children of Reverend Charles A. Hopkins Fay and Charlotte Emily Hopkins. Born in Saint Albans, Vermont, she moved to Chicago as a young woman and lived with her brother Charles Norman Fay (1848–1944) until she married Thomas in 1890, following the death of his first wife Minna in 1889. Rose later founded the National Federation of Music Clubs and the Anti-Cruelty Society, also serving as the first president of both. After Thomas died in 1905, she edited his Memoirs and facilitated the donation of his extensive music collection to the Orchestral Association (formally establishing the Orchestra’s music library) and the Newberry Library. After retiring to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she became active in the Army and Navy Club of Boston, later renamed the Soldiers and Sailors Club. Because of her dedication to this organization during and after the First World War, when she died in 1928, she was honored with a full military funeral.
Rose’s sister Melusina Fay Peirce (1836–1923) was a gender equality activist who advocated for women’s economic independence and organized the “cooperative housekeeping” movement. Sister Amelia “Amy” Muller Fay (1844–1928) was a concert pianist who studied with John Knowles Paine and Franz Liszt and managed the New York Women’s Philharmonic Society. And Rose’s brother Charles—who directed several Chicago utilities and the Remington-Sholes typewriter company—is credited with inviting Thomas to Chicago to start an orchestra here.
A native of Simsbury, Connecticut, Ben Poirot began his musical studies on the trumpet, switching to the tuba at age fifteen. After high school, he began a degree in audio/music production at Western Connecticut State University, but at the end of his first year, he realized how much he enjoyed performing and switched his concentration to performance. During his undergraduate years, he performed and toured with the New York Youth Symphony for three seasons. Following a lengthy application process in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben decided on Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music for graduate studies, despite not having visited the school or the city of Chicago. “I felt confident about the decision to move there and begin the next stage of my life.”
Six months after moving to Chicago and starting his master’s degree, he won a chair in the Civic Orchestra. “The legacy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra runs deep, especially regarding the history of the low brass section. I had heard recordings before and was well aware of the caliber of musicians that made up the Orchestra, and I wanted to learn from the best. This was easily the biggest achievement of my life up to that point, and I was absolutely ecstatic to be joining the Civic, an organization that has its own legacy, as well as being so closely tied to one of the world’s great orchestras. For my first concert in Orchestra Hall — the Alpine Symphony of Richard Strauss — I will never forget the feeling of sitting down on that stage for the first time and having the opportunity to perform in the same space as my greatest idols.”
Discovering this deep personal connection only intensified Ben’s experience. “Playing on the Orchestra Hall stage always feels surreal, and I am incredibly lucky to have this opportunity. But now knowing the connection to Theodore and Rose Fay Thomas, it makes me feel even more a part of the stage and the music we make there.”
Ben has plenty to do during this, his third and final season as a member of the Civic. He is next on the roster for Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in December, the brass and percussion concert in March, and the season finale featuring Respighi’s Fountains of Rome and Sibelius’ Second Symphony. After that, what’s next? “I plan to stay in Chicago and take as many auditions as I can, in hopes of achieving my dream of playing great music at the highest level with great colleagues. I basically want to achieve my fullest potential and make it into a Big Five orchestra, and, of course, the CSO would be the all-time dream job!”
This article also appears here.
Theodore Thomas, the Orchestra’s founder and first music director, introduced the music of Richard Strauss in this country. According to his Memoirs (edited by his widow, Rose Fay Thomas), “While in Europe [during the summer of 1882] Thomas had, as usual, been on the lookout for musical novelties for coming programs. He had met, in Munich, a young and almost unknown composer, one Richard Strauss, who had recently finished writing a symphony. Thomas secured the first movement of the work, and was so much impressed with it that he requested the young Strauss to let him have the other three movements, promising to bring out the whole work in a concert with the [New York] Philharmonic.” Thomas kept his word and gave the premiere of Strauss’ Symphony no. 2 in F minor in New York on December 13, 1884.
Thomas’s friendship with Strauss blossomed, and he later introduced several of the composer’s tone poems in the United States. With his eponymous ensemble—the Theodore Thomas Orchestra—he led Aus Italien in Philadelphia in March 1888. After founding the Chicago Orchestra in 1891, Thomas conducted the U.S. premieres of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks in November 1895, Also sprach Zarathustra in February 1897, Don Quixote in January 1899 and Ein Heldenleben in March 1900.
For the first concerts of the new year in 1899, the first work heard after intermission was Strauss’ “Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character.” “At first thought it would seem that any attempt to narrate musically the droll incidents of the masterpiece of Spanish fiction could result only in commonplaceness and failure,” wrote Hubbard William Harris in the program book. “But Strauss has scored a genius-stroke at the outset by the choice of the ‘variation’ form and by assigning personal themes to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.”
Following the first performance on January 6, the reviewer in the Chicago Tribune agreed. The work “exhibits the composer so strongly as a master of orchestral construction, the contrapuntal skill brought into play throughout the ten variations is so extraordinary. . . . The ’cello obligato which indicates Don Quixote was finely played by Mr. [Bruno] Steindel,* who entered into the humorous yet pathetic feeling of the character, and the prominence gave to the viola [played by Franz Esser**] in denoting Sancho Panza was a welcome recognition of a much neglected instrument.”
Strauss’ tone poem has remained a staple of the Orchestra’s repertoire, often featuring not only guest cellists—Pierre Fournier, Lynn Harrell, Antonio Janigro, Yo-Yo Ma, and Gregor Piatigorsky—but also CSO principals—Edmund Kurtz, Robert LaMarchina, Frank Miller, Daniel Saidenberg, John Sharp, János Starker, and Alfred Wallenstein—in the iconic role of Cervantes’s chivalrous knight-errant.
*Former principal cello of the Berlin Philharmonic, Bruno Steindel (1866–1949) had played under Brahms, Dvořák, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and Tchaikovsky when he was chosen by Theodore Thomas as the Chicago Orchestra’s founding principal cello in 1891. One of a handful of musicians in the Orchestra who continued to express pro-German sentiments following U.S. involvement in World War I, Steindel and three other players were expelled from the Chicago Federation of Musicians in October 1918. He tendered his resignation effective at the beginning of the 1918–19 season. Steindel continued to perform in Chicago, as principal cello of the Chicago Civic Opera and giving concerts for the benefit of German war orphans, despite protests by American Legion posts. Steindel’s wife Mathilde, a pianist who frequently performed with the Steindel Trio (along with CSO violin Fritz Itte), had become depressed over the countless accusations her husband had received in the press. On the evening of March 5, 1921, she committed suicide by drowning herself in Lake Michigan. The next morning at the foot of Farwell Avenue, the police found her automobile (according to the Chicago Tribune), its lights “still ablaze. Her expensive fur coat, which she had cast off before jumping into the lake, lay on the pier.”
**Franz Esser (ca. 1868–1950) joined the violin section at the beginning of the second season in 1892, later serving as principal viola from 1898 until 1926 and principal second violin from 1926 until 1939. After more than fifty years of service, he retired in 1945.
This article also appears in this week’s program book and here.
Theodore and Rose Fay Thomas in 1903
Wishing our friends at The Anti-Cruelty Society a very happy 125th anniversary! And a tip of the hat to the society’s first president, Rose Fay Thomas, wife of Theodore Thomas, founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra!
During Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, nearly twenty-eight million people visited our fair city, to “marvel at man’s progress and visions for the future,” according to the society. “Yet the utopian ephemeral White City was a sharp contrast to the poorer neighborhoods that lay a short distance from the fairgrounds. The United States was in the midst of an economic depression. Hoards of immigrants, spurred by the industrial revolution, flocked to Chicago and other urban centers in search of work only to find themselves poor, starving, and huddled in crowded tenements. Raw sewage ran through the streets and epidemics of typhoid and other diseases often ravaged the city. The social unrest that would lead to the deadly Pullman Strike in 1894 was on the rise.
“As the century drew to a close, this grim climate and a deepening fear of these growing urban masses lead to the rise of progressive social reforms in Chicago and other urban centers. The middle and upper class women of the day were the driving force of this movement. Since the rise of the Suffrage movement in the 1850s, many women had become increasingly dissatisfied with their designated place in society and wished to play a more active role in bringing about needed change. In Chicago, many such women took the lead in establishing ground breaking social institutions and reforms. Jane Addams opened Hull House in 1889 to provide social services to immigrants and the working poor. Chicago’s women’s clubs formed charitable organizations and reform committees in response to the needs of the city’s poor, neglected and abused. In 1899 a small group of Chicago women turned their attention to a forgotten group of suffering creatures—the city’s animal population.
Rose Fay and Dickey, the Thomas family’s Springer Spaniel, in the late 1890s (George Glessner photo, courtesy of Glessner House collections)
“These humanitarians faced an uphill struggle to overcome the hardship, neglect, and cruelty all around them. A large percentage of the city’s estimated 50,000 workhorses were old, sick, and ill cared for. Many dropped under heavy burdens, only to be savagely beaten by insensitive drivers. The burgeoning Union Stock Yards and the slaughterhouses demonstrated little concern for the livestock they handled and incidents of inhumane butchery practices were common. Homeless dogs and cats wove their way through crowds of people in the streets in search of morsels of food and temporary shelter.
“A deep concern for the welfare of these helpless creatures led five Chicagoans to the home of Mrs. Theodore Thomas, wife of the city’s symphony conductor, on the evening of January 19, 1899. A second larger meeting at the residence of Mrs. Joseph Winterbothom on March 7, 1899, led to the formation of The Anti-Cruelty Society. This meeting saw the adoption of by-laws and election of Mrs. Thomas as the group’s first president. As the president of The Anti-Cruelty Society, Mrs. Thomas became one of the first women to head a humane society.
Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1904
“This small band of dedicated volunteers set high goals: to suppress cruelty to animals, to educate the public on humane treatment, and to create a refuge for strays. The Anti-Cruelty Society opened its first small animal shelter in 1904 at 1898 North Clark Street. By 1905, it had placed watering troughs throughout Chicago for thirsty workhorses. On December 6, 1906, The Anti-Cruelty Society received a charter from the State of Illinois to conduct protective work with animals and children. In addition to its work with animals, the Society was directly involved in the handling of child welfare cases for the next decade. The Society also instituted a humane education campaign organizing children’s chapters, distributing humane literature, and providing lectures.”
The Anti-Cruelty Society—one of Chicago’s oldest animal welfare organizations—continues its mission today, “building a community of caring by helping pets and educating people.”
Happy, happy anniversary!
This article also appears here.
Six degrees of separation is the theory that all people are no more than six social connections away from each other. It is usually used to connect living individuals, but we also can stretch it back to link people through history.
Throughout his career, Riccardo Muti has been connected to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. During his tenure as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s tenth music director, he has conducted all of the composer’s major orchestral works—including the nine symphonies—and he will conclude his tenure with the monumental Missa solemnis. So, how might Maestro Muti be connected to Beethoven? Let’s find out, perhaps through the historic roster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra . . .
Beginning with his debut in 1973 and continuing through his tenure as music director, Muti has collaborated with two musicians who hold the record as the longest-serving members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Lynne Turner, second harp, and Jay Friedman, principal trombone. Both were hired by sixth music director Fritz Reiner in October 1962, and in June 2023 both will complete their sixty-first seasons as members of the Orchestra. (The record previously was held by Adolph “Bud” Herseth, who served for fifty-six seasons, fifty-four as principal trumpet.) Turner, who first performed with the CSO as a soloist on youth concerts at the age of fourteen, joined the Orchestra shortly after becoming the first American to win top prize in the International Harp Contest in Israel. Friedman, after four years as a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and two with the Florida Symphony, was hired as assistant principal trombone, and in 1965, he was promoted to principal by seventh music director Jean Martinon.
Turner and Friedman performed for several years alongside colleagues Milton Preves and Frank Crisafulli, each of whom served in the Orchestra for over fifty years and both were hired by second music director Frederick Stock. Preves joined the Orchestra’s viola section in 1934, became assistant principal in 1936 and principal in 1939, remaining in that post for forty-seven years until his retirement in 1986. Crisafulli began his tenure in the trombone section in 1938, serving as principal from 1939 until 1945 and again from 1946 until 1955. He retired in 1989.
Preves and Crisafulli certainly would have known Franz Esser and Hjalmar Rabe, also members of the Orchestra for more than fifty years. Esser joined the violin section at the beginning of the second season in 1892, later serving as principal viola from 1898 until 1926 and principal second violin from 1926 until 1939; he retired in 1945. Rabe joined the violin section in 1895 but also played the bassoon; he was principal of that section for one season, 1918–19, and also principal contrabassoon in his final season, 1944–45.
Of course, both Rabe and Esser were hired by the Chicago Orchestra’s founder and first music director Theodore Thomas.
That brings us up to four degrees: Muti to Turner and Friedman to Preves and Crisafulli to Esser and Rabe to Thomas.
In early 1850, fourteen-year-old Theodore Thomas was performing in New York as a violinist in pit orchestras. He caught the attention of Karl Eckert, who hired him into the Italian Opera Company as leader of the second violins. Eckert was succeeded the following year by composer, violinist, and conductor Luigi Arditi, who promoted Thomas to the role of concertmaster as well as contractor to engage the members of the orchestra. As a member of the Italian company, Thomas had a front-row seat to hear and collaborate with two of the most important musicians of the day: Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (also known as the “Swedish Nightingale” whose American tours were organized and promoted by none other than P.T. Barnum) and German soprano Henriette Sontag.
In 1823, Carl Maria von Weber heard Sontag—then only seventeen—in Vienna, in Rossini’s La donna del lago and offered her the title role in his new opera, Euryanthe, which premiered to great success later that year. Her career continued to flourish as she performed throughout Europe. Her single tour to the United States was in 1852 and included several performances with the Italian Opera Company in New York, with then sixteen-year-old Thomas in the pit.
Thomas expressed in his autobiography: “I do not remember another singer in whom art and experience were combined with such freshness and quality of voice. . . . neither of these exceptional women conquered the world with voice and execution alone. It was the perfection and blending of these qualities, together with the single aim—that of truthful expression, which gave greatness to whatever they rendered. I have never heard their equals.” And according to Thomas’s widow Rose Fay in the Memoirs, “nothing was more helpful to young Thomas [and] at this time the greatest singers the world has ever heard were singing in New York. . . . [Lind and Sontag] possessed the true secret of tone quality, and it occurred to him that the same kind of tone which they produced with the voice could also be created on the violin . . . as he listened to these great artists . . . he endeavored to reproduce their singing, tone for tone, on his beloved instrument.”
Nearly thirty years before her United States tour, eighteen-year-old Henriette Sontag sealed her place in music history. On May 7, 1824, in Vienna, she was the soprano soloist in three sections—Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei—of the Missa solemnis and the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, conducted by the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.
That’s six degrees of separation, mostly through the Chicago Symphony Orchestra family: Riccardo Muti to Lynne Turner and Jay Friedman to Milton Preves and Frank Crisafulli to Franz Esser and Hjalmar Rabe to Theodore Thomas to Henriette Sontag to Ludwig van Beethoven.
This article also appears here.
More than twenty years before founding the Chicago Orchestra in 1891, Theodore Thomas and his eponymous ensemble—the Theodore Thomas Orchestra—were enjoying a wave of success. Thomas founded the orchestra in 1864 and after performing to great acclaim primarily in New York, he soon decided that traveling the country was next step in their continued success. The first tour began in the fall of 1869 and included a November residency in Chicago for three concerts in Farwell Hall.
“The first concert by Theodore Thomas’s unrivalled orchestra on Saturday evening was, without exception, the finest musical event Chicago has ever known,” reported the Chicago Tribune on November 29. “The light and shade of this orchestra are something marvelous [and] it plays with delicious expression . . . magical.”
Thomas and his orchestra returned to Chicago twice over the next year and a half, in November 1870 and April 1871. The anticipation for their returns grew and reception continued to be enthusiastic. “I think we cannot, any of us, be too grateful for such music as this,” wrote Peregrine Pickle (perhaps a nom de plume) in a letter to the editor of the Tribune on April 22, 1871. “It makes better men and women of us all [and] lifts us to a higher plane of enjoyment.”
The Theodore Thomas Orchestra’s fantastic receptions during those first three residencies encouraged Uranus H. Crosby to invite Thomas to be the centerpiece for the grand re-opening of his opera house in October 1871.
Originally inaugurated on April 20, 1865 (delayed by three days due to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln), Crosby’s Opera House was located on the north side of Washington Street between State and Dearborn. The Italianate five-story palace featured allegorical statues overlooking patrons as they passed through a grand entry arch, and residents included music publishers, William Wallace Kimball‘s piano store, business offices, and art studios and galleries. The 3,000-seat auditorium featured a dome encircled by likenesses of composers surrounded by frescoes painted by the firm of Jevne & Almini, and above the orchestra was a forty-foot painting based on Guido Reni’s Aurora. The reported cost to build was well over $600,000.
Soon after the house’s initial success, Crosby ran into severe financial difficulties, and the theater sat mostly dark until undergoing a major renovation during the summer of 1871. On September 14, the Chicago Tribune announced: “The opening of Crosby’s Opera House, after the splendid refitment which it has been undergoing for several weeks, will be fitly celebrated by a season of Theodore Thomas’s symphony and popular concerts, ten of which will be given, beginning Monday evening, October 9, and ending on Wednesday evening, the 18th.”
On October 8, the “brilliantly decorated and renovated” theater was “lit up for the first time . . . for the pleasure of friends of the managers,” according to George P. Upton. A few short hours later, tragedy struck and the city was in flames, as the Great Chicago Fire rapidly spread from the southwest side to the center of downtown. Early in the morning on October 9, Thomas and the members of his orchestra “reached the Twenty-second Street station of the Lake Shore Railroad while the fire was at its height and left the burning city at once . . .”
According to Memoirs of Theodore Thomas, completed in 1911 by his widow Rose Fay: “Thomas was paralyzed by the announcement that Chicago was burning, and [Crosby’s] Opera House already in ashes! In short, they had arrived just in time to witness the terrible conflagration which so nearly wiped Chicago off the map altogether, and, of course, the concerts which Thomas had expected to give there for two years to come, were canceled. . . . he and the orchestra stayed [in Joliet] until it was time for the next engagement in Saint Louis.”
Over 2,000 acres of land were destroyed, including nearly 18,000 buildings and well over $200 million in property. More than 100,000 Chicagoans—roughly one-third of the city’s population—were rendered homeless, and it is estimated that more than 300 lost their lives.
“We got away from the burning city as best we could, and spent the time intervening before our next engagement . . . in rehearsals,” wrote Thomas in his autobiography. “We began by studying the finale of [Wagner’s] Tristan and Isolde, and I played it in connection with the Vorspiel (which I had brought out in 1865), for the first time in America [in] Boston, the following December.”
In Saint Louis, Thomas was invited to add concerts at Benedict DeBar’s Opera House, including a “grand extra concert” on Monday, October 23, “for the benefit of the Chicago sufferers, for which occasion all the members of Mr. Thomas’ troupe have volunteered their services.”
Despite initial financial setbacks due to the lost concerts in Chicago, the Theodore Thomas Orchestra would continue to mostly thrive until it was disbanded in 1888. Of course, this led the way for Thomas to establish the Chicago Orchestra in 1891 and serve as music director for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, proving to the world that Chicago had indeed risen from the ashes.
This article also appears here and portions previously appeared here.
In May 1904, Chicago Orchestra founder and first music director Theodore Thomas led his final Cincinnati May Festival concerts at Music Hall. Since founding the festival in 1873, Thomas had regularly led concerts, inviting his Chicago Orchestra after its founding in 1891.
Cover of the 1904 Cincinnati May Festival program book
Programming for the five-concert festival was nothing short of epic and included orchestral works, opera excerpts, and large-scale choral works. The Orchestra had been expanded to over one hundred and ten players and the May Festival Chorus numbered over 500. And for the final concert, Thomas had chosen Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and the Ninth Symphony.
According to Philo Adams Otis in his book The Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Its Organization, Growth, and Development, 1891–1924: “The program was of the highest order . . . But with due regard to soloists and chorus, the strength of the Festival, to my mind, was Mr. Thomas and the Orchestra. Never have I heard the Beethoven Eighth Symphony played as at the first matinée! What a performance he gave us Friday evening of Death and Transfiguration!”
And in Memoirs of Theodore Thomas (edited by his widow Rose Fay Thomas): “The May Festival of 1904 brought the work of Thomas to a close in Cincinnati, and its programmes were of such a caliber that it was the artistic climax, not only of the long series of festivals in that city, but, perhaps, even of Thomas’ own career. One colossal work was piled on another, regardless of everything but the one object of making this festival surpass, in standard and perfection, all that had preceded it. . . . the chorus, under the able and musicianly training of its director, Mr. Edwin W. Glover, was in splendid condition, and Thomas had nothing to correct about its performance. . . . The performances at the Cincinnati Festival were, therefore, amongst the very finest that he ever gave in his life, and no one in his audience had the slightest idea of the strain under which he worked.”
The complete concert programs are below.
First concert
Wednesday evening, May 11, 1904, 7:30 p.m.
BACH Suite No. 2 in B Minor, BWV 1067
Alfred Quensel, flute
BACH Mass in B Minor, BWV 232
Agnes Nicholls, soprano
Ernestine Schumann-Heink, contralto
William Green, tenor
Robert Watkin-Mills, bass
Wilhelm Middelschulte, organ
May Festival Chorus
Edwin W. Glover, director
(an intermission followed the conclusion of the Gloria)
Second concert
Thursday afternoon, May 12, 1904, 2:00 p.m.
MOZART Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K. 543
MOZART Nie wird mich Hymen (Parto, ma tu ben mio) from La clemenza di Tito, K. 621
Ernestine Schumann-Heink, contralto
Joseph Schreurs, clarinet obbligato
SCHUBERT Entr’acte No. 1 from Rosamunde, D. 797
WEBER Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster from Oberon
Agnes Nicholls, soprano
ELGAR Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 (Enigma)
ELGAR Pomp and Circumstance Marches No. 2 in A Minor and No. 1 in D Major, Op. 39
Intermission
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93
LISZT The Three Gypsies (Die drei Zigeuner)
Ernestine Schumann-Heink, contralto
Leopold Kramer, violin obbligato
WAGNER Bacchanale from Tannhäuser
WAGNER Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
Agnes Nicholls, soprano
Third concert
Friday evening, May 13, 1904, 7:30 p.m.
ELGAR Incidental Music and Funeral March from Grania and Diarmid, Op. 42
ELGAR The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38
Muriel Foster, contralto
William Green, tenor
Robert Watkin-Mills, bass
Wilhelm Middelschulte, organ
May Festival Chorus
Edwin W. Glover, director
Intermission
STRAUSS Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24
BEETHOVEN Abscheulicher! from Fidelio, Op. 72
Agnes Nicholls, soprano
BERLIOZ Imperial Hymn, Op. 26
May Festival Chorus
Edwin W. Glover, director
Fourth concert
Saturday afternoon, May 14, 1904, 1:30 p.m.
GLUCK Overture and Divinités du Styx from Alceste
Ernestine Schumann-Heink, contralto
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (Unfinished)
BRAHMS Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53
Ernestine Schumann-Heink, contralto
Men of the May Festival Chorus
Edwin W. Glover, director
Intermission
WAGNER Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
ELGAR In Haven, Where Corals Lie, and The Swimmer from Sea Pictures, Op. 37
Muriel Foster, contralto
STRAUSS Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op. 28
STRAUSS Hymnus, Op. 33 No. 3
Muriel Foster, contralto
TCHAIKOVSKY 1812 Overture, Op. 49
Fifth concert
Saturday evening, May 14, 1904, 7:30 p.m.
BEETHOVEN Missa solemnis in D Major, Op. 123
Intermission
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125
Agnes Nicholls, soprano
Ernestine Schumann-Heink, contralto
William Green, tenor
Robert Watkin-Mills, bass-baritone
May Festival Chorus
Edwin W. Glover, director
This article previously appeared here.
In 1891, Theodore Thomas founded the Chicago Orchestra and served as its first music director for nearly fourteen years. But in 1864, he also founded an eponymous ensemble—the Theodore Thomas Orchestra—and for nearly three decades, they traveled around the United States, giving concerts from coast to coast.
Schedule for the Theodore Thomas Orchestra’s 1872-73 tour (* indicates concerts with Rubinstein and Wieniawski)
One of Thomas’s orchestra’s most extensive tours—with stops in Connecticut; Illinois; Indiana; Kentucky; Maine; Maryland; Michigan; Missouri; New York; Ohio; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; Washington, D.C.; and Wisconsin—was given between September 1872 and April 1873, culminating in a series of concerts in New York’s Steinway Hall. And for the last leg of the tour, Thomas was joined by pianist Anton Rubinstein and violinist Henryk Wieniawski.
“These great artists were the leading exponents of their respective instruments,” wrote Rose Fay Thomas in her husband’s Memoirs, “and Thomas knew that the houses would be sold out wherever they played. Consequently, he was able to make the programs without any consideration for the box office, and he was not slow to take advantage of it . . . It was the first time in his life that Thomas had permitted himself to make a series of programs exactly in accordance with his artistic standards . . . and this two weeks of great performance, in association with two of the most renowned executant musicians who ever came to America, was an inspiration to him such as he had never before enjoyed.”
Henryk Wieniawski
Shortly before ending the tour in New York, three concerts were given in Chicago. The programs were as follows:
March 17, 1873, Michigan Avenue Baptist Church
BEETHOVEN Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72b
RUBINSTEIN Piano Concerto No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 70
Anton Rubinstein, piano
MENDELSSOHN First Movement from Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Henryk Wieniawski, violin
LISZT Les préludes
HANDEL Air and Variations from Suite No. 5 in E Major (The Harmonious Blacksmith), MOZART Rondo, BACH Gigue, and SCARLATTI Sonate
Anton Rubinstein, piano
ERNST Fantasie brillante, Op. 11 (Otello)
Henryk Wieniawski, violin
WEBER Overture to Der Freischütz
March 18, 1873, Union Park Congregational Church
CHERUBINI Overture to Les deux journées
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (Emperor)
Anton Rubinstein, piano
BERLIOZ Part 2 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 17
WIENIAWSKI Violin Concerto No. 2 in D Minor, Op. 22
Henryk Wieniawski, violin
SCHUMANN Carnaval, Op. 9
Anton Rubinstein, piano
WAGNER Huldigungsmarsch
Anton Rubinstein
“Those who had the good fortune to hear [Rubinstein in the Emperor concerto] will long remember it, not only as one of the grandest of Beethoven’s compositions, but as the most superb musical performance ever heard in this city,” wrote the critic in the Chicago Tribune. “Wieniawski created a perfect furore by his masterly playing of his own violin concerto, which culminated in a very emphatic encore, to which replied with Paganini’s Carnival of Venice, which was such a marvel of technique that it called out even the loudest applause of the orchestra itself. . . . As a whole, the concert was the best ever given in this city.”
March 19, 1873, Aiken’s Theatre
SCHUMANN Overture to Genoveva, Op. 81
LISZT Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major
Anton Rubinstein, piano
MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64
Henryk Wieniawski, violin
BEETHOVEN Finale from The Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43
WAGNER Overture to Rienzi
MENDELSSOHN Songs Without Words and CHOPIN Nocturne and Ballad
Anton Rubinstein, piano
WIENIAWSKI Legende, Op. 17 and Airs russes, Op. 6
Henryk Wieniawski, violin
LISZT Hungarian March
In a letter to William Steinway of Steinway & Sons (who had sponsored the tour), Wieniawski wrote, “I shall take away with me from America one unexpected reminiscence. Little did I dream to find here the greatest and finest orchestra in the wide world. I have been in Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and all the great European art centers, but never in my life have I found an orchestra and a conductor so in sympathy with one anther, or who followed me as the most gifted accompanist can follow a singer on the piano.”
Portions of this article previously appeared here.
March 31, April 1, 2, and 3, 1873, concerts at Steinway Hall in New York
March 31 and April 1, 1873
April 2 and 3, 1873
from the archives 
