184 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
Thomas found his audiences by blending idealism with prag-
matism. Three related concerns dominated the Thomas Orchestra’s
early years: how the ensemble played, what it played, and where it
played. Since much of the music he programmed was hard to play, the
precise, polished performances he strove for relied on skilled players
and time to rehearse them. To recruit the players most in demand,
Thomas had to pay good wages, which hinged on the quantity of work
he could provide them. Thus, as well as performing the classics in con-
cert halls, from 1865 on the orchestra also made a specialty of outdoor
concerts, mixing symphonic movements with overtures, dances, and
lighter selections in settings where customers could smoke, drink, and
socialize. Such concessions to public taste, Thomas believed, chipped
away at barriers between audience and orchestra. At the same time, a
full performance schedule enabled the Thomas Orchestra to improve
until it outstripped all other American ensembles.
Yet Thomas was able to stay in business only by touring. In 1869 his
orchestra made the fi rst of many cross-country journeys, and through
the 1870s the orchestra sometimes spent more than half the year on
the road. While the touring life was diffi cult, the quality of the playing
remained high. Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein testi-
fi ed after an 1873 tour with Thomas that only the orchestra of the Paris Conser-
vatory was the Thomas Orchestra’s equal in personnel—“but alas, they have no
Theodore Thomas to conduct them.”
Thomas believed that listeners as well as performers benefi ted from the
challenge of hearing symphonic music by Beethoven and other great composers:
“faculties are called into action and appealed to other than those [the listener]
ordinarily uses,” absorbing attention and freeing listeners “from worldly cares.”
Recognizing that “the complexities of symphonic form are far beyond the grasp
of beginners,” Thomas planned his outdoor concerts with just such novices in
mind: the concerts, featuring music with “very clearly defi ned melody and well-
marked rhythms, such... as is played by the best bands,” were meant to prepare
inexperienced listeners “for a higher grade of musical performances.” Charles
Edward Russell, Thomas’s biographer, remembered hearing an 1877 concert in
the Mississippi town of his boyhood, including works of Mendelssohn, Berlioz,
and Liszt: “Life was never the same afterward,” for the audience had been shown
that “there really existed as a fact, and not as something heard of as unattain-
able, this world of beauty, wholly apart from everyday experiences.”
In Europe, most orchestras were local organizations fi nanced by local
resources and addressed to local audiences. But before a similar situation could
arise in the United States, three elements had to come together: (1) a belief in
the artistic importance of the symphony orchestra; (2) civic pride, centered in
the feeling that an orchestra enriched community life; and (3) wealth, donated
in recognition that the marketplace could not support an orchestra of the fi rst
rank. Thomas supported the fi rst element by helping to establish the ritual ele-
ments in a symphony concert: an atmosphere of attentive restraint, a code of
behavior and dress, and an understanding that performers aspire to honor the
composer’s artistic intentions. His search for the other two came to an end when
Chicago businessman Charles Norman Fay asked if he would consider moving
to Chicago to direct a full-time, permanent orchestra whose funding would notK When German-born
conductor Theodore Thomas
(1835–1905) left New York in
1891 to direct Chicago’s new
orchestra, one New York magazine
called it a move “from the
metropolis to the porkopolis.”172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 184 23/01/13 10:23 AM