Personalities, Politics, and Prophecy: Frederic Archer and the Birth of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

Abstract

Several years ago I was apprised of the existence of an extensive collection of correspondence and related documents pertaining to the early history of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The collection had languished for many years in the obscurity of a basement archive at the Carnegie Institute. It remained inaccessible to scholars until the late 1960s, when the decision was made to bind and catalog it and to relocate it in the music division of the Carnegie Library. Thus, although an adequate indexing system has yet to be achieved, the fascinating contents of what are now twenty-three volumes of American musical history can now be examined.' The collection contains a wealth of information. Letters of conductors, business managers, and financial backers, together with newspaper reviews, clippings, and programs, provide new insights into the growing pains of the city's orchestra and shed light on the more general struggle to define a national cultural identity. The travails of this organization were similar to those faced by most American orchestras in the late nineteenth century, and the availability of such a collection offers a rare opportunity to study firsthand the solutions reached in Pittsburgh to several interesting and universal questions. There can be little doubt that the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century was subject to the cultural domination of foreign-born and foreign-trained composers, performers, and conductors. Most conductors of American orchestras during this period were