Theodore Thomas

Prussian-born American musician

• Born: October 11, 1835
• Birthplace: Esens, East Friesland, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: January 4, 1905
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

A professional musician from childhood, Thomas pioneered the role of virtuoso conductor, markedly raising standards of orchestral performance in both light and serious works. With the Chicago Orchestra, he also perfected the means of supporting and maintaining ensembles of the highest quality. He was virtually the founder of the modern American symphony orchestra.

Early Life

Theodore Christian Friedrich Thomas was the son of Johann August Thomas, the master of music for the Prussian town of Esens. Surrounded by music and musicians from birth, young Theodore quickly established himself as a prodigy. As a child he could read any music set before him by the town’s musicians and was an accomplished violinist by the time he was ten and his family emigrated to were chosen.

At first, the Thomas family scarcely prospered; son as well as father found it necessary to play in a variety of theater orchestras, dancing schools, and even saloons to support the household. In 1848, they traveled to Portsmouth, Virginia, for steady employment; Theodore, thirteen years old, was nominally in the United States Navy, in whose band he was playing second horn. A year later, Theodore resigned; he would reminisce at the end of his life that his father had so increased his income that the son’s contribution was no longer needed. The fourteen-year-old fiddler then took off by himself on a tour of the American South, playing concerts wherever he could drum up an audience and attending to every detail, from putting up posters to selling tickets. It should not be imagined that he did nothing but play unaccompanied violin, however, for whenever the materials presented themselves, he formed ad hoc ensembles. His wanderlust satisfied for the time being, he returned to New York City in 1850.

Thomas had virtually no formal schooling in the United States. His performing jobs usually kept him up well past midnight, and there were no laws either forbidding child labor or compelling attendance at school. Nevertheless, he grew up to be not only cultivated but also a genuine intellectual. In part, this achievement reflected the high culture of his parents, as well as his keen receptivity to the many plays, poems, and librettos he encountered in his many musical jobs. What he did not pick up from the orchestra pit, he supplied by self-directed reading.

Between 1850 and 1860, Thomas established himself as one of the finest violinists in the booming cultural milieu of New York City. In 1854, the New York Philharmonic Society elected him to membership; in the same year, he accepted a position in a small orchestra, touring the United States with what surely was the leading concert attraction of the season, Adelina Patti, soprano; Maurice Strakosch, piano; and Ole Bull, violin. It should be pointed out that orchestras were then ephemeral things, summoned into being by managers of theaters, opera houses, choral societies, or concert tours. National and international concert circuits were also relatively new, especially in the United States. Even the most famous musical celebrities normally toured in groups, to provide their audiences with the greatest possible variety of musical delights.

In 1855, at the age of twenty, Thomas accepted the invitation of William Mason to play first violin in his string quartet. Mason, the son of the pioneering New England musician Lowell Mason, had recently returned from studying music in Europe, culminating in piano lessons with Franz Liszt in Weimar. He and the quartet became the nucleus for a series of chamber-music concerts that would last until 1870. Thomas soon assumed so much responsibility and radiated so much leadership that the series became known as the Mason-Thomas concerts. During the early years, guest artists, especially vocalists, abounded, and each program would contain a single weighty work otherwise surrounded by short, melodious, and popular numbers. Within the first year, however, the quartet was playing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 130, a work that can daunt all but the most serious audiences. In their later years, however, Mason and Thomas offered nothing but major works by major composers.

Thomas first led an orchestra in 1860, taking over an opera performance on short notice because the regular conductor was unhappy about his pay being in arrears. In 1862, the Brooklyn Philharmonic hired Thomas as coconductor. He was sole conductor there from 1866, and that proved to be his longest employment, ending only in 1891, when he moved to Chicago. More significant for the future, however, were the concerts of 1862 that Thomas organized and conducted himself in New York City.

Thomas had long since determined that most conductors merely kept time, that most orchestras had such shifting and unreliable personnel and so little rehearsal time that no really fine performances could possibly be drawn from them. Furthermore, the musicians themselves, needing to pursue jobs whenever and wherever they could, were unable to enforce standards of quality even when they planned concerts through their own guilds or unions. The Philharmonic Society, founded in 1842, was such a guild and retained that organization into the early twentieth century. The orchestra hired its conductors, usually from among the membership; such conductors were always fine musicians, but they had no disciplinary powers whatever.

Thomas was determined to change all this; in the course of his lifetime, he succeeded. By 1864, established both as a virtuoso violinist and a rising conductor, Thomas married Minna Rhodes; in subsequent years, they had three sons and two daughters, the marriage ending with Minna’s death in 1889. As a young man, he was strikingly handsome, slender, and of medium height, with a well-trimmed dark mustache, penetrating eyes, and the look of a sensitive artist. As an older man, he was no longer slender, and the mustache became bushy, while his aura of authority continued to grow.

Life’s Work

In 1864, Thomas began his series of Symphony Soirees, in competition with the New York Philharmonic Concerts, but since each organization presented only six programs a year, the small but growing concert audience in New York City was hardly overtaxed. Seeking more work for himself and his players, he began, in 1865, his long series of “summer garden” concerts, chiefly in New York, but also on tour and, from 1877 onward, often in Chicago. The touring began in 1869 and, in conjunction with the popular summer concerts, gave the Theodore Thomas Orchestra something like full-time employment. This was unique in the United States at the time; indeed, only the remaining court and church orchestras of Europe then provided full-time work for classically trained players.

The Theodore Thomas Orchestra grew from thirty to sixty players in its years of touring and summer concerts; it was never of the size and force of modern virtuoso orchestras, and it played chiefly the sort of light concert music that survives in the programs of the Boston Pops and its imitators. However, Thomas was still preparing the way for the future great orchestras of the United States by the quality of his ensemble, which profited from his devoted leadership and from the unprecedented advantage of staying together, month after month and year after year. Although his programming assumed an unsophisticated audience, he managed to include at least one serious work in each concert, thereby gradually educating the public.

In 1873, Thomas began a new phase of his career by taking his orchestra to the first Cincinnati May Festival. He was musical director of the whole undertaking and continued as such through the sixteenth festival in 1904, just before his death. The United States had seen several music festivals already, but they had tended mainly toward massive accumulations of singers, players, and fireworks, rather than aiming at the highest possible expressions of musical art.

The idea of concentrating large ensembles and audiences for a few intense days of music-making, especially when the weather is neither paralyzingly cold nor suffocatingly hot, has always made sense. Although Thomas’s music festivals had plenty of symphonies, concertos, and concert arias, they were built around large-scale works for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. The oratorio, perfected by George Frideric Handel in eighteenth century England, became one of the most popular musical forms in nineteenth century Germany, Britain, and the United States. The music festival gave Thomas an unprecedented opportunity to raise public taste, so he tried to promote similar festivals in other leading cities. He succeeded in several, including Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago, and New York, but after one or two festivals these cities failed to maintain the required level of commitment; only the Cincinnati Festival became permanent.

The exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876 proved that Thomas had become the most celebrated musician in the United States, for he was chosen to direct its music. In the end, he overreached himself, planning more concerts than the public could support, but even with cancellations and unpaid debts, the Centennial Exposition advanced both Thomas’s career and his sacred cause of serious music. He commissioned several works by such American composers as John Knowles Paine and Dudley Buck and invited leading performers from all over the world. However, there was one more source of discord. Thomas encouraged the Women’s Committee to raise the unprecedented sum of five thousand dollars for an original piece of music by the great Richard Wagner. That curious genius applied more energy to getting himself paid than to executing his commission; the work he submitted was inferior in quality to the contribution of the Americans, or indeed to anything Wagner himself had composed since his student days.

In 1877, Thomas accepted the post of conductor of the New York Philharmonic, on the understanding that he would continue to give a separate series of concerts with his own orchestra. This appointment also continued, with brief interruptions, until his move to Chicago. He tried a permanent move in 1878, accepting the leadership of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Autocrat that he was, however, he soon resigned: The trustees of the organization would not grant him the power he deemed necessary to produce good musicians. Based again in New York, with increasingly long guest appearances elsewhere, he continued strengthening his position through the 1880’s, though he barely survived the collapse of the American Opera Company. That was an attempt to present modern operas in English translation with American-trained singers; altogether worthy in plan, it was inadequately financed and poorly managed. It was also in competition with the new Metropolitan Opera, where young Walter Damrosch was successfully presenting the music dramas of Richard Wagner with European-trained singers.

Still the best-known and most widely respected conductor in the United States and financially secure after the final liquidation of the opera company, Thomas nevertheless suffered from severe depression in 1889. Minna died after a long and painful illness. Losing the resiliency of youth, he disbanded the orchestra, which depended on touring for most of its engagements. Artistically, he was exasperated with what he called scratch orchestras, by which he meant ensembles whose personnel he could not choose and shape to his own high standards.

In May, 1890, Thomas married Rose Fay, a woman of great musical and literary culture. Her brother, Charles Norman Fay, a utilities executive in Chicago, then organized what Thomas most desired: a permanent association, underwritten by wealthy citizens, to guarantee the budget of an orchestra over which he would have absolute artistic control. Here was the model for virtually all the major orchestras of the United States. The New York Philharmonic had typically played six concerts each season; the Chicago Orchestra (later the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) played twenty.

However, problems remained. Chicago’s great World’s Fair of 1893 tempted Thomas, its music director, to another surfeit of newly commissioned works, guest orchestras and choruses, and famous soloists. After some unpleasant carping caused by merely allowing Ignacy Jan Paderewski to play his own Steinway piano (technically barred from the fairgrounds because Steinway and Sons had declined to exhibit in Chicago), Thomas resigned. Nevertheless, as in 1876, the programs of classical music in Chicago set new standards of scope and virtuosity.

Thomas led the Chicago Orchestra through fourteen seasons; only the Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1881 by Henry Lee Higginson and run on idealistic and autocratic principles similar to those of Thomas, could rival it for the quality of programs and execution. The conductor, however, had one more goal to accomplish. The Auditorium Theater, that landmark of American architecture, was far too vast and cavernous for Thomas’s taste. Also, he had to share it with several other organizations. With the help of his friend Daniel Hudson Burnham, he planned and built Orchestra Hall. Tragically, Thomas died after a brief illness in January, 1905, within a month of playing his first concert, with his own orchestra, in his own hall.

Significance

When Theodore Thomas began his conducting career during the 1860’s, there was no such thing as a famous orchestral conductor in the United States and scarcely a permanent symphony orchestra. Through tours, festivals, considerate programming, persistence, and even through writing essays on the appreciation of good music, he contributed more than anyone else to the emergence of virtuoso orchestras in the United States. Entirely trained in this country, he was a genuine cosmopolite, eager to promote genius wherever it appeared. He was a great musician, and he helped make music a great force for cooperation and civility.

Bibliography

Bowen, José Antonio, and David Mermelstein. “The American Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Conducting, edited by José Antonio Bowen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. This historical survey of American conductors includes information about Thomas.

Burg, David F. Chicago’s White City of 1893. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976. Discusses Thomas’s second venture in planning music for a world’s fair.

Carter, Richard. “The New World Symphony.” Humanities 20, no. 5 (September/October, 1999): 52. A history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, focusing on Thomas and successive conductors.

Davis, Ronald L. A History of Music in American Life. 3 vols. Huntington, N.Y.: R. E. Krieger, 1980-1982. Presents a balanced view of all aspects of American musical life. The second volume treats the era of Theodore Thomas.

Mueller, John H. The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951. Takes a broad, detailed, and scholarly view of its subject.

Otis, Philo Adams. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Its Organization, Growth and Development, 1891-1924. Chicago: Clayton F. Summy, 1925. A valuable compendium of facts by a long-term participant in the musical life of Chicago.

Russell, Charles Edward. The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927. Entertainingly traces Thomas’s role in the development of major orchestras and star conductors.

Thomas, Rose Ray. Memoirs of Theodore Thomas. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1911. Contains the fullest treatment of the conductor’s life. Written by his second wife, it is reverent and idealistic in tone.

Thomas, Theodore. Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography. Edited by George P. Upton. 2 vols. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1906. Falls into several sections. Thomas avoided personal anecdotes and any form of gossip; his essay in the autobiography chiefly outlines his career and expresses his musical ideals. His friend and longtime admirer, George P. Upton, partly makes up the want of personal details in his appreciative essay. The second volume, lovingly gathered from Thomas’s papers by the editor, sets forth the concert programs of more than forty years; it is uniquely valuable as a record of musical performances. The reprint (New York: Da Capo Press, 1965) omits this second volume.

Upton, George P. Musical Memories: My Recollections of Celebrities of the Half Century, 1850-1900. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1908. Contains many reminiscences of Thomas while re-creating the artistic world in which he played so significant a part. Upton was music critic of the Chicago Tribune for more than forty years.