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American
Music On Stage
In the early decades of the 19th
century, notable European musicians began to tour America, primarily
along the Eastern seaboard where cities that offered respectable
performance facilities were linked by passable highways and waterways.
Pianists like Leopold de Meyer were book by tour managers, and
violinists such as Henri Vieuxtemps. The Norwegian virtuoso
violinist Ole Bull
 became
Watson's friend and associate. Photos of Bull, his ornate home and
his violins, as well as biographical information, are at
home.online.no/~aarvoll/ole_bull.htm. The
website credits Museet Lysøen as its source for the photographs.
Bull won the hearts of Americans when he toured widely across the new
country, venturing as far as St. Louis on the Western frontier to
perform for audiences that had never heard serious music played
properly.
In 1850, P. T. Barnum promoted a
landmark American tour by "Swedish Nightingale"
Jenny Lind.
As European artists traveled more frequently across the Atlantic,
Americans came to expect higher standards of musical performance.
Concert halls, opera houses and assembly rooms were constructed in every
city and town worth its salt, and a demand was created for bookings by
professional entertainers, acrobats and musicians.
The elevating of American musical
taste came about slowly. While orchestras were thought of as
basically playing in the background for dancing, it took a brass band to
draw a crowd into a hall or outdoor pavilion.
 Patrick
S. Gilmore, bandmaster and showman, combined huge brass ensembles with
strings and choirs. For a National Peace Jubilee held in Boston in
1869, Gilmore assembled a thousand-member band, augmented by an
orchestra of 500 musicians and a chorus of 10,000 voices. Over
five days of thunderous sound in a cavernous pavilion, band numbers and
the singing of schoolchildren alternated with oratorio excerpts and
classical pieces accentuated by clanging anvils and cannon fire.
It was a satisfying event for audiences who thought of entertainment in
terms of prize fights and minstrel shows. This image of the
pavilion is from the Boston Irish Heritage Trail website at
http://www.irishheritagetrail.com/psgilmore.html. The home
site of the Patrick Gilmore Society is at
http://www.psgilmore-society.org/.
As more European artists steeped in
the classical tradition crossed the Atlantic, Americans became more
receptive to music of the Italian operatic and German symphonic schools.
Concert halls were built along the lines of musical palaces being
constructed in Europe, with a new emphasis on acoustics as well as
grandeur. In New York, Steinway Hall served as a performance
center - and incidentally as a showplace for Steinway pianos.
Documentation on the old Steinway Hall on 14th Street (shown here) is
preserved in the LaGuardia and Wagner archives of Fiorello H. LaGuardia
Community College,
http://www.ny.com/museums/lwarchives.html. It was in Steinway Hall that John
Watson was featured as solo violinist in a concert to arouse support for
New York's participation in the United States Centennial observances of
1876. Chickering Hall was the next concert hall to be built in New
York City, and both were superseded later in the century by Carnegie
Hall. At the same time, symphony halls were being erected in
Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Still, Americans remained
unsophisticated in their musical tastes. They listed to light
music in restaurants and to the three or four musicians accompanying the
stage antics in tent shows, traveling museums, minstrel shows, and the
raucous variety shows staged in beer halls and saloons.
There was little musical
entertainment for family audiences at reasonable prices. Except
for "dime entertainments" that featured instrumental soloists, vocal
renditions and comic monologues. John Watson produced and appeared
in dozens of these modestly produced concerts in the Great Hall of New
York's Cooper Union.
The Great Hall was a gathering place for the people, for entertainment,
sermons, lectures and laborers' rallies - all in keeping with Peter
Cooper's ideal of establishing Cooper Union as a "workingmen's college."
Today Cooper Union
http://www.cooper.edu/ is the only private, full-scholarship college
in the United States dedicated exclusively to preparing students for the
professions of art, architecture and engineering.
In the 1870s, though, the days were
numbered for programs of miscellaneous musical entertainment. In
New York Tony Pastor was presenting musical reviews that featured
marquee celebrities - notably Lillian Russell.
Aside from the striking figure she struck on the stage, Lillian Russell
was an ornament in New York cafe society, especially when she arrived on
the arm of "Diamond Jim" Brady.
Then pirated versions of Gilbert &
Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore were greeted enthusiastically in major
cities - and the age of the musical theatre in America was born.
A stylish history of the writing,
performance and early reviews of Pinafore may be found at
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~melbear/pinafore.htm.
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