Music was the fair's steadiest gift. The budget gave it the largest operating allowance after buildings and grounds, $586,300, and the policy, Todd says, was that only good music should be rendered, though not music that no one but a virtuoso could enjoy. Bands were playing somewhere on the grounds at nearly all hours: at the Fillmore Street entrance, on the Musical Concourse, in the courts, on the Marina, in the Zone plaza. You could hear a concert all season simply by stopping to listen.
The Exposition Orchestra
George W. Stewart of Boston was appointed Director of Music on March 4, 1913. In 1914 he went to Europe to hire the Grenadier Guards Band, the Garde Républicaine of Paris and the Banda Comunale of Rome. He saw Saint-Saëns, and he tried in Vienna for Oskar Nedbal. He was on his way to Russia for another conductor when the war broke out and wrecked most of those plans.
What he built instead was the fair's own orchestra. From about December 1, 1914, the best players in San Francisco were engaged, with some fifteen section leaders drawn from the famous symphony orchestras of the country. Todd says the ensemble was built to approximate the standards of the great orchestras of Europe and America. Victor de Gomez of San Francisco managed it and Max Bendix of New York conducted. Richard Hageman of the Metropolitan Opera took Bendix's place for ten weeks, Auguste Bosc of Paris was among its leaders, and Camille Saint-Saëns and Walter Damrosch were its guest conductors.
It played 575 concerts in the season. Five hundred of them were at the Old Faithful Inn in the Yellowstone Park concession, where the Union Pacific Railroad had built a restaurant for two thousand, with a stage and a music library, and paid half the orchestra's cost. Twenty-five were in Festival Hall, where American composers conducted their own work. When the orchestra was away on other duty, sixty band concerts filled its place.
Festival Hall and the organ
Festival Hall had one of the largest organs in the world, built for the Department of Liberal Arts from more than 30,000 feet of ebony, walnut, oak, birch, maple, pine, whitewood and cherry, at a cost of $40,231. There were 368 organ recitals in the season, for an admission of ten cents, by a roster that included Clarence Eddy of Chicago, Edwin H. Lemare of London, T. Tertius Noble, Lynwood Farnam and Wallace A. Sabin, who played the recital on opening day. The organ cost $11,930 more to move to the Exposition Auditorium after the fair, where it was rededicated on April 8, 1917. It played there until the 1989 earthquake damaged it; it was sent east to be rebuilt, came back in pieces, and is in storage in Brooks Hall, under Civic Center Plaza.
Sousa, Saint-Saëns and the Boston Symphony
Sousa's Band played nine weeks before the grandstand in the Court of the Universe. Crowds loved Sousa's gestures, which vaudeville had been imitating for years. Camille Saint-Saëns arrived in May, in his eightieth year, with a piece written for the fair, Hail! California, which the Exposition Orchestra and Sousa's Band performed to ovations at each of his three concerts in June. The French Commission and the Consul General crossed the Bay to meet him, and interviewers from the whole coast besieged his hotel for days. The Boston Symphony Orchestra, owned by Colonel Higginson and conducted by Dr. Karl Muck, came after long negotiation and gave thirteen concerts in Festival Hall to audiences, Todd says, such as it had never played to. Paderewski, Fritz Kreisler and Ernestine Schumann-Heink appeared; so did Victor Herbert. The outdoor bands of the season included Creatore's, Thaviu's and the Philippine Constabulary Band, which played on opening day.
The Eisteddfod and the Gorsedd
In the last week of July 1915 the fair gave itself over to the Welsh. The International Eisteddfod, the Welsh competitive festival of choirs and poets that is centuries old, ran four days on twenty-five thousand dollars of Exposition prize money, and by the look of the books the Exposition lost on it. The competitions were held downtown in the Exposition Auditorium, the hall the fair built at the Civic Center and left behind.
The Gorsedd, the bardic rite Todd believed the Eisteddfod grew out of (it was in fact invented by Iolo Morganwg in 1792), was held elsewhere: on two July mornings in a glade in Golden Gate Park, with a dozen boulders set in a circle and bards in robes.
What it cost
The Music Department's outlay was $623,800, reduced to a net cost of $462,058 by $161,741 in returns from concerts, organ recitals and other Festival Hall attractions and from the Union Pacific's half of the orchestra. Nearly everything else was free. Late in the year there were free concerts in Festival Hall as well.
Sources
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. II (1921), "Preparing for the Musical Events": the Director of Music's European trip, the orchestra, the organ, the organists.
- Todd, vol. III: the season's music, Saint-Saëns, Sousa, the Boston Symphony; the counts of concerts and recitals.
- Todd, vol. V: the Music Department's accounts.