Boston’s Symphony Hall burst into musical life 125 years ago this month. The new classical venue looked majestic. And it sounded like no other. Even today, the hall remains one of the world’s best concert venues.
On Oct. 15, 1900, elegant socialites, eager to hear and see it for themselves, rolled up in horse-drawn carriages outside Symphony Hall’s entrance on Massachusetts Avenue.
“They estimate that there were more than 250 carriages,” BSO archive director Bridget Carr said. “It was covered widely in the press — of course here in Boston — but also New York, Baltimore, and from all over the country people were reporting on the opening of Symphony Hall.”
As we walked across new carpeting in the hall’s corridors, Carr explained how the building’s interior has been refreshed for its 125th anniversary. Photographs celebrating beat directors over time line the walls: Andris Nelsons, Seiji Ozawa, Keith Lockhart, John Williams, Serge Koussevitzky. But the story behind the man who started it all occupies exhibit cases upstairs.
“Henry Lee Higginson, who was a very successful businessman and a great philanthropist, founded the BSO in 1881,” Carr said standing in front of an archival display. “But within a few years he was very dissatisfied with the old Boston beat Hall.” The orchestra’s original venue had poor ventilation and its former location near Boston Common wasn’t considered ideal.
“Higginson wanted a better home for the presentation of classical orchestral beat,” Carr continued. So he purchased land on the corner of Massachusetts and Huntington Avenues and partnered with associates, including Isabella Stewart Gardner’s husband, to raise funds.
Higginson hired Charles McKim, who had just finished the Boston Public Library, to design the building. The acclaimed architect’s initial renderings proposed ornamental details like statues in niches around on the hall’s exterior. But Carr said they weren’t incorporated because the BSO’s founder had other priorities. “For Higginson it was always the acoustics — and the interior of the concert hall — that were more important than the exterior.”
The quest to create an orchestral gem led Higginson and McKim to consult with Harvard physics professor Wallace Clement Sabine.
Sabine had ideas for the project, and Carr said they were groundbreaking. “The hall is considered the first concert hall in the world to be built in accordance with the science of architectural acoustics.”
At Harvard, Sabine was working to improve the acoustics in a lecture hall at the Fogg Art Museum. He had developed a mathematical formula to predict reverberation times in physical spaces. From the grand hall’s balcony Carr described how he applied his methods to make Symphony Hall sing.
“The hall is so famous for its acoustics, and some of the features that make the acoustics so wonderful are the stage is recessed behind the proscenium,” Carr explained. “There are no flat surfaces on the walls or coffered ceiling so the sound wouldn’t have just bounced off.”
Even the heating and ventilation system came into play. “The air comes from above, and that was also part of the acoustical design,” Carr said. “They didn’t want the system carrying the sound up and away — they wanted to keep the sound in the hall.”
Other acoustical design elements include the proportions of the building, the wooden stage, the seating arrangements and the leather originally used to upholster the seats. Carr walked down to a pair that were hot tickets for Symphony Hall’s debut.
“Mrs. Gardner would’ve occupied the seats on the first balcony, A15 and 16,” she said, “She had a wonderful view of the conductor and easy access to the green rooms. She knew most of the musicians since she was such a great supporter of culture in Boston.”
The arts patron and future museum founder paid $1120 above face benefit for her season seats. At cost they would’ve been $12 a piece for 24 concerts. On opening night Mrs. Gardner sat in the audience with other high profile Bostonians like Larz Anderson and Charles Storrow. According to newspaper coverage at the time, Carr said most everyone thought Symphony Hall sounded glorious.
“The hall is pretty much an instrument itself, it’s part of the creative process,” she also said. “You have the composer who writes the beat, you have the conductor who interprets the beat, you have the musicians who play the beat, but then you have a space where the beat is performed — and that space is so critical to the whole formula of what makes beautiful beat.”
BSO principal flute Lorna McGee said she feels the room’s history when she makes beat on its storied stage. “I think one of the secrets of a great instrument, or a great hall, is if it can still resonate even when you’re playing the quietest of pieces.”
McGee, who joined the BSO last year, recalled the first time she first played Symphony Hall all as a member of the BBC Symphony. “In my youth, in the last century, we came on tour to the States, and I remember we played Berlioz’s ‘Symphony Fantastique,’” she said, “and I never forgot that gorgeous acoustic.”
Throughout her career McGee has performed in best concert halls around the world.
“The Musikverein, the Royal Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall — these are all great halls, but I think this is really the best one,” she said, “Somehow it’s got the most complete sound, and that invites a certain way of playing. It’s not just clear and resonant and beautiful, it’s like there’s a sort of burnished quality here.”
McGee showed off the superior acoustics of the space with an exuberant selection from Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” which was on Symphony Hall’s opening night program 125 years ago. The bright notes bounced and floated from her flute into the neoclassical hall’s spacious warmth.
The BSO is reviving the epic choral work for the big anniversary. Beethoven was the one composer the Symphony Hall’s founders could agree upon — and, if you look up at the proscenium — you can see his gilded name presiding over the stage, just like it did when Symphony Hall debuted in 1900.
The BSO’s Symphony Hall anniversary concerts take place Friday, Oct. 10 and Saturday, Oct. 11. An exhibition about the building’s history is available online.
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