Jeannette Meyers Thurber was born on January 29, 1850 in New York City. She was the daughter of Henry Meyer and Anne Maria Coffin (Price) Meyer. The ancestry of her mother, born in Wappingers Falls, N. Y. , earned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her father was a Danish immigrant of some means and an amateur violinist.
Nettie Meyer, as Jeannette was called, was privately educated and then sent to France to study music. There she became acquainted with the Paris-centered, government-funded system of musical education; her attempts to introduce the system to her native country were to make her the outstanding American nonprofessional supporter of music prior to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.
Her ambition was to establish a government-supported musical conservatory in Washington with branches in numerous cities, where talented young Americans would receive superior musical training. Meanwhile, she supported foreign musical study for Americans and numerous New York musical activities, including Theodore Thomas' free youth concerts in 1883 and his first American Wagner festival in 1884.
She also supported the first appearance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in New York (1887). By 1885 she had secured a New York State charter for her American School of Opera, which opened in New York City in December of that year with eighty-four voice pupils. Soon to be known as the National Conservatory of Music, it had among its trustees the August Belmonts, Andrew Carnegie, and Theodore Thomas. Its incorporators included prominent persons from such cities as Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco, where it was hoped branches could be established. To forward her plans, she induced Thomas to join her in forming a company to produce operas in English, preferably with American singers (a distinct handicap), and with Thomas as musical director. Her husband joined her in contributing lavishly to her two projects.
The American Opera Company, called by the New York Times an audacious experiment, opened in New York in January 1886 and presented, among other works, the first American performance of Delibes' Lakmé. Even in competition with the Metropolitan Opera Company, the new organization's productions surpassed any New York had seen, with one qualification--the capability of some of the soloists. Thurber accompanied the group's tour that spring, trying to form auxiliary organizations in the cities where it appeared.
She was only moderately successful, and the whole venture, although artistically impressive, was financially disappointing. The resultant defection of several backers forced its reorganization as the National Opera Company. A second season ended as the first, and Thomas resigned; the disastrous management of Charles E. Locke caused the enterprise to collapse early in January 1888. The National Conservatory of Music thereafter received Thurber's undivided energies. Mme. Fursch-Madi had been the conservatory's first director, and when the curriculum was expanded to include all departments of operatic production, other outstanding musicians were engaged for all positions.
Thurber's dream of making it a national institution was realized when Congress, in a unique act, incorporated it, with the power to grant diplomas, in 1891. As a result, Thurber was able to persuade Antonin Dvořák to become its head in 1892. The school's pioneering policy of giving financial aid without discrimination according to sex or race enabled many blacks to receive a musical education. Among them was Harry T. Burleigh, an accomplished baritone who called Dvořák's attention to American plantation melodies. At Thurber's suggestion the composer wrote several compositions influenced by these themes, including his Symphony No. 9 (From the New World). Dvořák returned to his homeland in 1895 and was succeeded by other notable directors, among them Emil Paur (1899 - 1902) and Vassily Safonoff (1906 - 1909), and the school enjoyed an international reputation. But Thurber's hopes for federal grants-in-aid to the arts were premature, and with Thomas' departure for Chicago in 1891, she lost an influential ally in her efforts to solicit private funds.
Consequently, the conservatory gradually declined, a process abetted by the increasing conservatism of her musical tastes. By the 1920's the school was little more than a name, but Thurber fought on for her ideal. In a letter to the New York Times of January 1, 1928, she reported that she was seeking from Congress a grant of land in the national capital on which to erect a conservatory. Jeannette Thurber's commitment to bettering opportunities for women was expressed in her support of such organizations as the Woman's Art School of Cooper Union, the New York Exchange for Woman's Work, and the YWCA.
Thurber died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Bronxville, N. Y.
Jeanette Thurber was amongst the first major patrons of classical music in the United States. Thurber established the National Conservatory of Music of America in 1885—the first of its kind and an endeavor that some say ushered in the first orchestral music with a distinctively American sound. But in a very radical stance for the day, Thurber championed the rights of women, people of color and the handicapped to attend her school, sometimes on full scholarship. Thurber founded the school in part because of her belief that a nation should cultivate its own unique music—an unusual stance when the prevailing attitude was that all cultured art, especially orchestral music, came from Germany or Italy. While running the school, she sponsored competitions for American musicians to develop American music.
She was a member of the Presbyterian church.
A dark-eyed slight woman, she was striking in appearance, simple in tastes, courageous, persistent, and daring. Except for a skirt, she wore tailored masculine clothes. She was a devoted mother, taking her children and their nurse with her when traveling with the opera company's first tour.
She was encouraged in her ambition by her well-to-do husband, Francis Beatty Thurber, a wholesale grocer, later a lawyer, and an organizer of the National Anti-Monopoly League (1881), whom she married on September 15, 1869.
Her children were Jeannette and Francis, Jr. and Marianne.
