Theodore Thomas was an American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator.
Background
Thomas was born at Esens, Germany, on October, 1835. He was the eldest child of Johann August Thomas, the Stadtpfeifer, or chief town musician of Esens, and his wife Sophia, the daughter of a physician at Göttingen.
The boy showed his talent for music when he was only two years old. In 1845 the household emigrated to New York, for the meager income of the Stadtpfeifer was not enough to support the growing family. In New York, matters were not much better and it was necessary for Theodore to play his violin for dances, weddings, in theatres, and sometimes in saloons, where he passed his hat for the coins of the generous.
Education
His father gave him a few violin lessons, and according to the Memoirs of Mrs. Thomas (post) he seemed to be recalling something he had known before whenever he was taught anything in music.
Career
In 1850 Thomas took a concert trip through the South, unaided and alone. When he came to a town he would tack up a few posters announcing a concert by "Master T. T. ," the remarkable prodigy. Then he would stand at the door and sell tickets until he decided that all who were coming had arrived. At this point he would rush backstage to change his clothes, and then appear before the audience with his violin.
When Louis Antoine Jullien came to America in 1853, Thomas was chosen as one of the first violins of the orchestra. He was disgusted with Jullien's antics and showmanship, but he gained his first idea of the symphony from this conductor. In 1855 he joined William Mason, 1829-1908, in the series of Mason-Thomas chamber music concerts which were given at Dodworth's Hall, next to Grace Church, Broadway, for a number of years. During the season 1857-58 he appeared in New York and on tour as a violin soloist with several famous artists, among them Carl Formes and Sigismund Thalberg.
In 1858 he became a member of the orchestra for the opera at the Academy of Music. In December 1860 Carl Anschütz, conductor of the opera at the Academy, was suddenly unable to appear one evening, and Thomas was called to take his place. He conducted Halévy's Jewess, a score he had never seen before, so well that the retirement of Anschütz became permanent and Thomas was made conductor. Conducting was a revelation to him; he found that he could play on an orchestra as he could on a great instrument, and from that time his mission in life became the development of a taste for orchestral and symphonic music throughout the United States. He continued as an operatic conductor in New York, at the same time giving chamber music concerts, as well as recitals with Carl Wolfsohn, in Philadelphia. In 1862 he organized an orchestra of his own, which gave its first concert in Irving Hall, New York, on May 13.
Thomas soon realized that only a permanent orchestra could achieve the results he wanted. In 1862 he was made alternate conductor with Theodore Eisfeld of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society, and four years later he became its sole conductor. During 1863 he continued his own orchestral concerts at Irving Hall, and on December 3, 1864, he began his symphony soirées. In 1865 he was appointed musical director of the New York Institution for the Blind. In the following year he commenced his famous summer concerts at Terrace Garden, and two years later he moved them to the Central Park Garden. By 1867 Thomas was able to guarantee his men a full season's engagement, and his orchestra was permanent in the sense that its members were not engaged in other pursuits.
His concerts in New York were not well enough attended to support the orchestra, so in 1869 Thomas took his men for a tour, discontinuing the New York concerts until a committee of prominent citizens asked that they be resumed. They were accordingly continued from 1872 to 1878. In 1873 Thomas was invited to organize and conduct the music festivals in Cincinnati, which came to be biennial, and in 1876 he conducted the Philadelphia Centennial concerts. The latter led to financial disaster; they were poorly attended, and finally the sheriff put a stop to them and sold Thomas' music library at auction. Although he could have evaded his debts by voluntary bankruptcy, Thomas paid every cent he owed during the following twelve years. By this time Thomas had received several offers to conduct the New York Philharmonic, but he had previously declined them because acceptance would have compelled him to abandon his own orchestra. In 1877, however, the directors renewed the offer and agreed to let him continue his own concerts. He arranged that the programs of his own orchestra would be lighter in character than those of the Philharmonic, to avoid competition.
In 1878 Thomas left New York to assume the directorate of the College of Music in Cincinnati. He immediately clashed with the backers of the school when he concluded that they intended the institution to be a commercial enterprise, rather than one which would fulfil his own ideals as an educational center. He accordingly returned to New York in the spring of 1880 and again became the conductor of the Philharmonic Society. The orchestra at this time was distressed financially, and its playing was mediocre. In his first season as its conductor, Thomas brought it to artistic heights far beyond any of its former achievements, and the attendance accordingly increased. The players were engaged on a cooperative basis, and they made more money. From this period Thomas became something of a storm center.
The Symphony Society of New York was organized in 1878, and Leopold Damrosch was appointed its conductor. Musical New York was soon divided into Thomas and Damrosch factions, and, while the two conductors might have remained at peace had they been allowed to arrange matters themselves, their followers urged them to bitter rivalry. In 1885 Thomas was induced to accept the directorship of the American Opera Company (first performance in January 1886), thinking that its wealthy sponsors would continue to back it even though its first seasons showed a deficit. He accordingly employed all his resources to present opera as finely as it could be given, and it was generally agreed that he had done so; but after the first season, and a resulting loss, the sponsors left the company to founder, and Thomas, merely a salaried employee, was blamed for the unpaid debts of the company. This tragedy was followed by several years in New York, and on tour with his own orchestra, before it disbanded in 1888, journeying to small cities which had never heard an orchestra before, and where later there were permanent orchestras for which Thomas originally planted the seeds.
In 1891 he received an offer to go to Chicago, to conduct an orchestra whose existence would be guaranteed by a group of public-spirited citizens. He was not eager to leave New York, but he saw an opportunity to realize his ideals. He accordingly accepted, and conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the next fourteen years, until his death in Chicago in 1905.
In 1893 Thomas acted as music director for the World's Fair in Chicago. He planned an all-summer series of programs, designed to show the world what America had accomplished musically, and to show America the music of the world. The plans for the festival offered one of the most comprehensive schemes that had ever been presented in the country. Thomas arranged for an orchestra of over a hundred players, and for an exposition chorus. He invited the leading soloists of the world to appear in the concert hall, and asked the foremost orchestras of the world to give concerts. He again became the storm center in a controversy between artistic ideals and commercial interests. The exhibitors of musical instruments made a rule that no instruments not exhibited at the Fair should be used in the concert hall. Paderewski had already been engaged as a soloist, and since Steinway & Sons had not rented exhibit space the exhibitors sought to prevent Paderewski from using his own Steinway piano. Thomas insisted that there be no interference with Paderewski, and the exhibitors accused the conductor of being in the pay of instrument manufacturers. Even though the charges were disproved and attempts to force Thomas' resignation were fruitless, he incurred the enmity of those who controlled the exposition. Finally the panic of 1893 necessitated curtailment of expenditures for music, so Thomas resigned, and though he was asked to resume his duties at the Fair when matters improved he declined the invitation.
Thomas was an able conductor, yet it was as a musical missionary that he accomplished his greatest work, by taking his orchestra through the country and cultivating a taste for the best in music. As a program maker he was shrewd. Rather than conceiving a program as a single unit, he concerned himself with series of programs, planned to elevate the public taste progressively and gradually. At first he would select lighter pieces to play between heavier selections--melodious compositions chosen for their relation to the more substantial works with which they were paired. Thomas knew that if he could enable his hearers to recognize the themes of a symphony, they would grow eventually to like it. Consequently, when he played a movement of a symphony, he would follow it with a waltz or light overture in which the themes had some relation to those of the symphony. Eventually he found his audiences prepared to listen to an entire symphony, without the interruption of other pieces between its movements.
Achievements
He is considered the first renowned American orchestral conductor and was the founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891–1905). Thomas is honored with a memorial monument and garden in Chicago's Grant Park, near Orchestra Hall.
In 1854 he was elected a member of the Philharmonic Society of New York.
Connections
Thomas was married twice – in 1864 to Minna L. Rhodes, who died April 4, 1889. She bore him three sons and two daughters. His second wife was Rose Fay, whom he married May 7, 1890, and who survived him without issue.
