125 years ago this week, on October 15, 1900, Boston’s Symphony Hall opened its doors to the public for the very first time. A project many years (and many hundreds of thousands of dollars) in the making, the hall would be the new home for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and was designed with aesthetic and acoustic perfection in mind.
The full roster of Boston's fashionable high society made up a good part of the audience for this first concert. In a New York Times article published on October 16th, 1900, the reviewer wrote of the concert that, “In brilliancy of appearance and in the social distinction of its composition the audience was the most important ever seen in Boston.”
The list of reserved seats reads like a map of the city: Coolidge, Sullivan, Thorndike, Aspinwall, Storrow. Composer Arthur Foote and New England Conservatory director George Chadwick were there; senator Henry Cabot Lodge was there; descendants of founding father Robert Treat Paine were there. Isabella Stewart Gardner paid a then-record-breaking $1120 for a seat (“the talk of the day in Back Bay circles,” according to a Boston Post article from earlier that year).
But the real star of the show was the new hall. The headline of The Boston Herald’s review of the inaugural performance took up an entire page, reading:
CITY’S NEW GLORY.
SYMPHONY HALL SEEN BY THE PUBLIC.
A MEMORABLE OCCASION.
SOCIETY AND TALENT WORSHIP AT MUSIC’S SHRINE.
ACOUSTIC EXCELLENCE ACHIEVED.
A SOLEMN MASS OF BEETHOVEN IS MAGNIFICENTLY RENDERED.
That Herald review begins rapturously: “No more brilliant or important event has ever figured in the musical history of Boston, it is quite safe to say, than that which occurred in so eminently successful a manner last evening — the formal inauguration of Symphony Hall.”
The New York Times agreed: “The general verdict seemed to be that Boston had obtained a Music Hall commensurate in beauty, tastefulness, and comfort with the dignity of the city as a musical and artistic centre.”
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When building a great concert hall, pursuing visual aesthetic perfection was simply what one did. Acoustics, however, were not. The architectural firm who designed the hall, McKim, Mead, & White, made waves consulting with a young Harvard physics professor named Wallace Sabine, who had authored a few papers on the science of sound and reverberation. With his input, Boston's new Symphony Hall became the first of its kind: a concert hall built based on the scientific principles of acoustics, engineered to show off the Boston Symphony Orchestra to its best advantage. Nobody had ever seen, or heard, anything like it.
The program for that first performance, though, was unexpected. For a hall built around the sound of a symphony orchestra, the first music anybody heard there also included an enormous chorus. Beginning with a Bach chorale and then diving into Beethoven’s monumental Missa Solemnis, the orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Gericke, shared the Symphony Hall stage with more than 250 singers from Boston's Cecilia Society.
Reviews of the concert were all in agreement that, musically, the program was well-matched to the momentous occasion. And if attendees were not yet fully convinced by the hall's acoustic excellence, they were at least willing to accept the premise. The following day, the New York Times wrote, "The acoustics upon which Prof. Sabine has spent much time and study are, so far as could be judged to-night, satisfactory." The Boston Herald was more enthusiastic, stating, "The acoustic qualities of the hall are surprisingly near perfection."
Today, 125 years later, Boston’s Symphony Hall is still largely unchanged, and is listed among the best concert halls in the world. The Boston Symphony spends the majority of each concert season on that very stage, though usually not with the addition of such an enormous chorus. But the building has also played host to many non-musical events over the past century-and-a-quarter. Here are just a few:
- 1906: Boston Automobile Dealer’s Association Automobile and Power Boat Show
- 1919: Boston Shoe Style Show
- 1925: Harry Houdini presentation denouncing mediums and seances
- 1946 and 1950: Mayoral inaugurations for James M. Curley and John B. Hynes
- 1993: Unveiling of Apple’s Newton MessagePad
- 2011: World Squash Championships
To celebrate this 125th birthday, the Boston Symphony has spent the last few weeks playing programs that show off the Hall, and the orchestra, to its full advantage, including a performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the very same music the BSO played in that inaugural concert in 1900. There's also a fantastic collection of digital exhibits from the BSO Archives about the history of Symphony Hall — and you can plan your own visit to check it out in person. CRB's Operations Manager Phil Jones visited for the first time last year; he shared his experience here.
