Music was the fair's steadiest gift. The budget gave it the largest single operating allowance, $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, appointed Director of Music on March 4, 1913, had gone to Europe in 1914 to hire the Grenadier Guards Band, the Garde Républicaine of Paris and the Banda Comunale of Rome, had seen Saint-Saëns, and had tried in Vienna for Oskar Nedbal, and 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, and the ensemble was built, Todd says, 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, with Richard Hageman of the Metropolitan Opera taking his place for ten weeks and Auguste Bosc of Paris among its leaders; Camille Saint-Saëns and Walter Damrosch were its guest conductors. It played 575 concerts in the season, 500 of them 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, and 25 in Festival Hall, where American composers conducted their own work. When it 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 in April 1917 and remains.
Sousa, Saint-Saëns and the Boston Symphony
Sousa's Band played nine weeks before the grandstand in the Court of the Universe, the well-known gestures that vaudeville had been imitating for years delighting the crowds daily. 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 each night of his stay to ovations; 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.
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.