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(Barr, Cyrilla)
Barr, Cyrilla
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Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was born on October 30, 1864 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She was the eldest child (and the only one to reach maturity) of Albert Arnold and Nancy Ann Atwood Sprague. Her father, a prominent wholesale grocer, was one of the sponsors of the Chicago Symphony. Elizabeth Sprague began to study the piano at an early age.
She was educated in a private school, and developed a deep interest in literature.
In 1916, at the suggestion of Hugo Kortschak of the Chicago Symphony, she first sponsored what became the Berkshire Quartet.
By sponsoring a festival in Rome in 1923, Coolidge began her support of concerts that extended from London to Moscow and from Massachusetts to Hawaii. In 1925 the United States government accepted her offer to build an auditorium for chamber music in the Library of Congress and to support concerts there.
By congressional creation of a Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation was established, and in October 1925 the hall was opened with a three-day festival. Forceful and tenacious, Coolidge was an active partner in her sponsorships. Asked whether the opening ceremony should not begin with a prayer, Coolidge, an atheist, replied that she thought Charles Martin Loeffler's Canticle of the Sun, commissioned for the occasion, was "surely a more exultant hymn of praise and devotion than would be likely to issue from the Senate or the House of Representatives. " The festival, however, opened with Bach's "To God on High All Glory Be. "
Coolidge gave unrecorded assistance to many musicians and aided such famous composers as Samuel Barber, Béla Bartók, Ernest Bloch, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Honneger, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Walter Piston, Maurice Ravel, Ottorino Respighi, Arnold Schoenberg, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. In addition, she encouraged modern dance by commissioning Igor Stravinsky's score for Apollon Musagète (first choreographed by Adolf Bolm); William Schuman's Night Journey (choreographed by Martha Graham); Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring; Paul Hindemith's Mirror Before Me (retitled Herodiade); and Darius Milhaud's Imagined Wing (all three given world premieres by Graham and her company in the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium in 1944). Among the performers she sponsored were Myra Hess, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Rudolf Serkin, Alexander Schneider, and the Pro Arte, the Kolisch, and the Budapest quartets.
The Division of Music of the Library of Congress was enriched by the copious material growing out of this support of music, which Olin Downes believed to be "without parallel in the modern period on either side of the Atlantic. " Coolidge devoted most of her energy to her musical endeavors--she even composed a number of pieces (not regarded highly by critics) and sometimes performed in her own concerts, as did her son.
Following her death in Cambridge, Massachussets, a two-day memorial festival, sponsored by the South Mountain Association, was held at Pittsfield in the Temple of Music that she had built.
Coolidge established the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival. She also built the Frederic Shurtleff Coolidge Memorial Home for Incipient Consumptives in Pittsfield, Massachussets. Coolidge was awarded the Cobbett Medal of London and the Order of Leopold and the Order of the Crown of Belgium. She was made an honorary citizen of Frankfurt, Germany, and a member of the Legion of Honor of France.
Coolidge was a woman of strong character, sagacity, and wit who enjoyed laughing at herself.
Deaf for many years, she first used a jeweled ear trumpet, but later resorted to a hearing aid.
On November 12, 1891, Elizabeth Sprague married Frederic Shurtleff Coolidge, a Boston orthopedic surgeon; they then spent a year abroad; during that time he studied surgery and she studied piano in Vienna. They had one child, Albert Sprague Coolidge, who became a skilled violist and oboist and a professor of chemistry at Harvard University.
