Category: City Managers Political Bosses 1920’s

The Cleveland Orchestra History (from Telarc)

Another brief history of the Cleveland Orchestra from Telarc, long a recording company for the Cleveland Orchestra

Cleveland Orchestra

Long considered one of this country’s best symphony orchestras, The Cleveland Orchestra celebrated its 75th anniversary during the 1993-94 season. Under the leadership of its music director, Christoph von Dohnanyi, it has won unanimous acclaim from music lovers and critics throughout the world. Its performances at home, on tour, and on recordings continually demonstrate the orchestra’s ranking among the handful of great international orchestras. In its artistic, educational and community programming, The Cleveland Orchestra consistently shows its commitment to the people of the city for which it is named.

Among the last of America’s major symphony orchestras to be created, The Cleveland Orchestra was founded in 1918 by Cleveland music patron Adella Prentiss Hughes. The new orchestra soon became the primary concern of the Musical Arts Association, a non-profit community organization that had been incorporated three years earlier to help facilitate the ongoing presentation of concerts by visiting ensembles.

The orchestra’s first concerts were given at Grays’ Armory in downtown Cleveland during the opening 1918-19 season, after which they were moved to Cleveland’s Masonic Auditorium. In 1931, Severance Hall opened as The Cleveland Orchestra’s permanent concert home. Located five miles east of downtown in Cleveland’s “University Circle” area, Severance Hall was built for the orchestra by industrialist/philanthropist John Long Severance. It is today considered one of the world’s finer music halls.

Russian-American Nikolai Sokoloff served as The Cleveland Orchestra’s first conductor and music director. During his tenure, Sokoloff initiated an extensive domestic touring schedule that included annual trips throughout the Midwest and special tours to Canada and Cuba. In January 1922, Sokoloff and the orchestra made their first concert appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Over the following decade, they appeared together annually there in the nation’s music capital, garnering favorable press for themselves and for their hometown of Cleveland.

Among early mandates handed to Sokoloff from Mrs. Hughes was the creation of a series of educational concerts for young people. These matinee concerts have continued up to the present day as an integral part of the orchestra’s music-making each season, and, to date, have helped to introduce nearly 3 million children to classical orchestral music.

Sokoloff also led the orchestra’s first commercial disc recording of Tchaikovsky’s “1812” Overture and first radio broadcasts. By 1930, the orchestra’s recordings, radio broadcasts and tours were carrying the name of the city of Cleveland throughout the United States and Canada.

In 1933, Sokoloff was succeeded by Artur Rodzinski. Rodzinski remained with the orchestra for ten seasons and, amid many recordings and radio broadcasts, polished Sokoloff’s ensemble into one of America’s best symphony orchestras. Among highlights of his tenure was the presentation of 15 fully-staged opera productions at Severance Hall. Erich Leinsdorf served as music director from 1943 to 1946 although largely in absentia while serving in the United State armed forces during World War II.

In 1946, George Szell was named the orchestra’s fourth music director. Under Szell, the orchestra entered a new period of dramatic and sustained growth. The orchestra’s personnel was enlarged, eventually reaching 105 members, and the length of the season gradually grew from 30 to 52 weeks.

In 1948 Szell reinstituted annual Cleveland Orchestra performances at New York’s Carnegie Hall and, in 1958, inaugurated the orchestra’s own yearly subscription series there. These annual appearances quickly helped to establish and then to confirm the ensemble’s place at the forefront of the musical world.

With Szell, the orchestra made its first international tours – to Europe (1957, 1965, 1967), and to Eastern Asia (1970) – and was widely acknowledged to be not only among America’s best but – for the first time – to be among the world’s handful of top orchestral ensembles. New series were also inaugurated or expanded to meet audience demand, and popular family programs and summer pops concerts were produced. In addition, the orchestra and Szell made numerous recordings of both classic and contemporary repertoire – recordings that today are regarded as “classic” of the LP era.

In 1952, Szell founded The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus to serve as the orchestra’s performing companion for choral works. This 170-voice volunteer choir was brought to early brilliance by Robert Shaw, the orchestra’s associate conductor from 1956-67, and has continued to join the orchestra in critically acclaimed concerts at home in Cleveland, on recordings and on tour.

The expansion of The Cleveland Orchestra’s performing schedule to a 52-week, year-round season was made possible in 1968 with the opening of Blossom Music Center. Located 25 miles south of Cleveland on 800 acres in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Blossom was conceived as both a summer home for the orchestra and as a regional performing arts center. Presentations at Blossom have included fully-staged ballet, musical and opera productions, as well as concerts by rock, pop and jazz artists.

Following George Szell’s death in 1970, French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez was appointed the orchestra’s musical advisor, a post he held through the end of the 1971-72 season. He and the orchestra made several prize-winning recordings during this time. In the fall of 1971, Lorin Maazel was appointed the orchestra’s fifth music director. His tenure began at the start of the 1972-73 season. Maazel continued The Cleveland Orchestra’s tradition of regular domestic and international touring, as well as recording activities with CBS, Decca/London and Telarc Records. Following a decade of achievement with The Cleveland Orchestra, Maazel resigned to accept the post of general manager and artistic director of the Vienna State Opera.

In March 1982, Christoph von Dohnanyi was named music director-designate and subsequently assumed his full-time duties with The Cleveland orchestra with the 1984-85 season. His contract was recently extended through the 1999-2000 season.

At home and on tour in the United States and abroad, the orchestra and Dohnanyi are today widely hailed as one of the world’s premier orchestra-conductor partnerships. Under Dohnanyi, The Cleveland Orchestra has become the most recorded orchestra in America.

The orchestra and Dohnanyi have made three concert tours to Eastern Asia (1987, 1990 and 1993) and four to Europe (1986, 1989, 1990 and 1992). The last two included performances at Austria’s prestigious Salzburg Festival, to which they returned in 1994 and will again in 1995. Their most recent Asian tour included performances of all nine Beethoven symphonies at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall.

 

Szell Was Musical Turning Point For City

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on May 5, 1996

 

SZELL WAS MUSICAL TURNING POINT FOR CITY

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, May 5, 1996
Author: BOB RICH

Vienna-born Erich Leinsdorf was 31 when he replaced the dynamic Artur Rodzinski as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1943. He had been the boy wonder of the New York Metropolitan Opera when he caught the eye of Adella Prentiss Hughes, at 73 still a dominant force in Cleveland music.

The Cleveland Press stated that his appointment was a gamble “on talent, intelligence and youth rather than an established symphonic experience. …”

And Rodzinski was a tough act to follow. He had a loyal following and a national reputation. Board members who found Leinsdorf aloof or just plain brash were able to put off worrying about him when he was drafted into the Army in January 1944. By the time Leinsdorf was discharged and returned to Severance in the autumn of ’45, his musical world had turned upside down. Orchestral standards had dropped because of the effects of the draft, and this was blamed on the conductor – not the war.

There had been a great parade of guest conductors in Cleveland during those war years, but the turning point was Nov. 2, 1944, when a conductor named George Szell walked on stage and electrified the audience with a performance the likes of which no Clevelander had ever heard before.

In December, a second series of concerts of Beethoven, French and Russian music, followed by Brahms and Bartok, swept the audience, musicians and critics completely away.

One critic said, “This was surely not the same orchestra we have been listening to all season.” The Cleveland Press said, “Cleveland probably can have Mr. Szell, but on his terms and his terms only – absolute power!” Exactly. And when George Szell was made orchestra director in 1946, Cleveland’s whole musical world was changed forever.

Actually, the Szell legend had been forming earlier. He was born in Budapest in 1897 of Czech background, was a child prodigy who appeared in a public concert at the age of 11, and at 16 led the Vienna Philharmonic when the regular conductor fell ill. Szell was a conductor of a type that no longer exists: Philadelphia’s Ormandy, Boston’s Koussevitsky, NBC’s Arturo Toscanini – men with a commitment to their orchestras.

Szell was a pefectionist, a taskmaster who some feared, dictatorial, as demanding in rehearsal as on the concert stage – but just as demanding of himself. Legend has it that he transformed the orchestra with one rehearsal, saying. “There are no bad orchestras, only bad conductors.” True or not, he definitely did say, “where others stop playing, we begin to rehearse.”

Somebody once said that “the Cleveland Orchestra plays six concerts a week and admits the public to the final two.”

His repertoire emphasized the classic and romantic periods, but he did the “modern classics” also, and was hardly the Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann captive that legend would have him.

It was once said he was his own worst enemy – until the Metropolitan Opera’s Rudolf Bing retorted, “Not as long as I’m alive!”

He would tell the musicians what color socks to wear, how to have their glasses adjusted, how to take a nap. He once fired a musician for driving too good a car and not spending enough on his violin. He ordered the stationery, approved record jackets, and checked the box-office receipts every morning, arriving ahead of the orchestra. He would rehearse the national anthem, “Happy Birthday,” a comedy routine with Jack Benny – all with equal intensity.

Szell lived to see the realization of his dream of a summer home for his orchestra when Blossom Music Center opened in 1968, built on 500 acres in the Cuyahoga River Valley halfway between Cleveland and Akron. He died July 30, 1970, when the orchestra under Pierre Boulez was playing a concert there, leaving a city stunned.

Harold Schonberg of the New York Times said, “The world of music will miss the authoritarian, profound George Szell, he of the perfect ear and flawless technique, the master of rhythm, balances, and textures, the creator of structure in sound. …” Time magazine said, “He demonstrated an unswerving aural vision of how music should sound … and the almost psychic power of leadership to make it sound that way. …”

Szell would say with pride of his Cleveland Orchestra, “That is how we make music in Cleveland!” To cities all over the world, Cleveland was known because of how the “Szell orchestra” made music.

Garrett A. Morgan Biography

from the Ohio Historical Journal

Garrett Augustus Morgan was born on March 4, 1877, in Paris, Kentucky. He attended elementary school in Kentucky, but he spent most of his time working on his parents’ farm. His parents were former slaves. As a teenager, Morgan moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he hired a personal tutor and worked different jobs to support himself.

In 1895, Morgan moved to Cleveland, Ohio. He took a position as a sewing-machine repairman. Twelve years later, Morgan had accumulated enough money to begin his own sewing machine-repair business. Over the next several years, Morgan expanded his business interests to include a tailoring establishment, a personal-grooming products company, and also a newspaper, the Cleveland Call. By 1920, Morgan had become a wealthy man with dozens of workers in his employ.

Morgan was always interested in inventions. His tailoring business was equipped with machines that he personally designed. During the 1910s and 1920s, Morgan continued to invent new items. Most of these items were to improve safety on the streets and in the workplace. Morgan was most famous for patenting the first traffic signal in the United States. Morgan, himself an automobile owner, witnessed a crash between a car and a buggy. This event supposedly convinced the inventor to create the stoplight. On November 20, 1923, Morgan received his patent. His traffic signal was mounted on a T-shaped pole. It had three different types of signals stop, go, and stop in all directions. The stop in all directions signal was to allow pedestrians to cross streets safely. Morgan eventually patented this device in Canada and Great Britain as well. He sold his patent to General Electric Corporation for forty thousand dollars.

Morgan also invented numerous other products. In 1916, he patented his version of the gas mask. Morgan demonstrated his superior design when a group of miners were trapped in a shaft under Lake Erie. He immediately received orders for his product from fire departments and mine owners across the United States and Europe. The United States Army also utilized a slightly redesigned Morgan gas mask during World War I. In addition to the traffic signal and the gas mask, Morgan also invented a zigzag stitching device for manually-operated sewing machines.

For more on Garrett Morgan, click here

 

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