New Haven Museum
The orchestra in 1901.
In December 1894, a group of amateur musicians from Dorscht Lodge No. 2, a music club on Crown Street, approached a local piano dealer named Morris Steinert about helping to grow their modest ensemble into a full-fledged orchestra.
Together, those musicians represented “one of those many small private groups founded by German-Americans in the interests of preserving their old-world musical traditions in the less appreciative United States,” Steinert later explained, according to a 1950 monograph by William Bacon Carey titled The New Haven Symphony Orchestra: The Origin, Development, and Present Problems of a Secondary American Orchestra.
Of that day in December 1894, Steinert wrote, matter-of-factly: “One fine morning a body of musicians came to me to organize an orchestra.” It wasn’t a foreign concept to Steinert. In fact, it was something he’d tried to do decades earlier.
Born in Bavaria in 1831, Steinert had immigrated to the United States in 1850, before the outbreak of the Civil War. After bouncing around a bit working as a violinist, Steinert found himself in Georgia — first working in a music store in Savannah before accepting a gig as a church organist in Athens. In 1860 he opened a piano dealership there and taught privately until the war began.
At that point, Steinert moved his family to New York, where he struggled to find work.
In Reminiscences of Morris Steinert, Steinert recounted: “I visited the playhouses over and over again, trying to get some position in the orchestra. I also called upon orchestral leaders and conductors for some employment, but there was no opening for me in New York.… Mrs. Steinert [the former Caroline Dreyfuss] had a sister residing in New Haven, and in our distress my wife wrote to her, telling her of our troubles.”
In New Haven, Steinert found work as a substitute organist at a Congregational church that is now the New Haven Free Public Library, and then as the organist at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. He also had a growing roster of private students. The modest good fortune continued. Steinert was hired by the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire to teach music. He, Caroline, and their growing family settled into a house on Crown Street. It was a time of “prosperous circumstances,” as Steinert described it.
At this point Steinert, who’d been playing chamber music with local musicians, set his mind to starting a larger ensemble. It “was not an easy task, as the woods were not then full of musicians who could play upon orchestral instruments.” Fortunately, Steinert had a healthy sense of humor.
Steinert in 1912.
“Our rehearsals were simply frightful,” he recalled. “The volume of tone which the men succeeded in bringing out of their instruments reminded me of the heavy artillery and lamentations of the wounded at that time congregated upon the battlefield at Bull Run, which was quite as disastrous to our army as my little Yankee and Dutch band was to the peaceful neighborhood of Crown Street.… They were a d — d bad lot of musicians, and I looked upon them, when professionally engaged, as children of Hades.”
Undaunted, Steinert subjected members of the public in Meriden to what he’d dubbed the Steinert Orchestra. And while that concert was a success, the next one was anything but. The orchestra performed before a lecture by temperance advocate John B. Gough, a gig that coincided with violinist Peter Fischer’s birthday. Naturally, the musicians decided to celebrate at a nearby bar.
“I was in despair when I looked around and saw the condition of my little band and, knowing their musical state when sober, I naturally felt that the engagement to play for the lecture that evening would be connected with great risk,” Steinert recounted. “I was just congratulating myself upon the success of the affair, and we were on the last waltz, when the double-bass utterly collapsed and fell to the floor, his big instrument on top of him.… I regret to say that we were not re-engaged.”
Steinert soon thereafter reconsidered his options, though at first not too carefully. He decided to go into the hoop-skirt business only to learn that hoop skirts had gone out of style — in large part due to the introduction of the modern-day bicycle, for which Pierre Lallement, a Frenchman living in Ansonia, Connecticut secured a patent in 1866. Steinert then returned to what he knew best and opened a music store on Grand Avenue, eventually building his own instruments — an enterprise that yielded little reward — before becoming a successful Steinway & Sons dealer with showrooms in numerous U.S. cities.
But it was in New Haven, in 1894, that the musicians from Dorscht Lodge No. 2 came calling.
It was an important year in New Haven, musically speaking. The Yale School of Music conferred its first degrees and American composer Horatio Parker was named the school’s Battell Professor of the Theory of Music. He became the school’s dean a decade later. When the Dorscht Lodge musicians appeared at Steinert’s door in December seeking help in forming a full-fledged orchestra, Steinert obliged. Parker was invited to the group’s first rehearsal, which took place at an M. Steinert & Sons storefront at 777 Chapel St., and he conducted the nascent New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s first public performance on January 25, 1895, at Carll’s Opera House on Chapel Street. The earliest surviving concert program erroneously indicates that the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s debut performance took place on March 14 of that year. Tickets were $.25.
A New Haven Register review of the fledgling orchestra praised Parker’s musical leadership, opining that “the orchestra was at all times under his control. Professor Parker showed an artistic conception of the works performed and his readings were musicianly and dramatic.”
In his 1950 monograph, William Bacon Carey wrote: “While few people knew much about music there was great enthusiasm for keeping up with the neighboring cities of Boston and New York.”
On October 9, 1895, a group of enthusiastic townspeople gathered at Yale University economics professor Henry Wolcott Farnam’s house, at 43 Hillhouse Ave., to pledge their financial support to the new orchestra. Five years later, Yale University assumed responsibility for the orchestra’s financial stability. It was an organizational relationship that lasted 36 years.
Reached in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Farnam’s granddaughter Louise Guion, now 91, said her grandfather “was very much into [the] arts, music particularly.” Guion started going to the symphony in New Haven, with her sister, mother, and grandmother, when she was 11 — an age at which she had a “hard time staying awake.”
“We were regular members of the audience,” she said, and “usually sat up in the balcony in that first row,” once the orchestra moved into Woolsey Hall in 1903.
Talking about the cultural atmosphere in New Haven in 1895, New Haven Symphony Orchestra artistic director William Boughton said “it was a place and a time of great forward-thinking people, in business, commerce, and the arts.” That three decades passed between Steinert’s initial attempt to form an orchestra and the organization’s formal founding and debut under Parker’s baton in no way diminishes the instrumental role Steinert played in establishing an orchestra in New Haven. Eventually, the orchestra’s executive director, Elaine Carroll, pointed out, “the community stepped up and helped him to do it.”
This article originally appeared in the Arts Paper.
