The National Conservatory

The weight of such a failure would have been enough to crush most people. At the same time that all this was going on, though, Jeannette Thurber was also developing her other great project, the National Conservatory. For the formation of that school she persuaded Andrew Carnegie, William K. Vanderbilt, Joseph W. Drexel, and August Belmont to join with her in establishing a school of music whose most important goal would be to foster a "national musical spirit." Mrs. Thurber served as president and the eminent retired jurist William Gardner Choate as vice president. On 21 September 1885, the organizers obtained a certificate of incorporation from the state of New York.

The incorporators on the original petition constituted a select list of New York's most prominent industrialists and musicians, some of whom were also on the board of the American Opera Company:

Two adjoining houses at 126–128 East Seventeenth Street, near Irving Place, in New York City, were converted for the conservatory's use, and the school opened its doors in the fall of 1885 with 84 pupils. The opera and the conservatory were conceived of as interlocking, mutually supportive, institutions. The opera company, it was felt, would provide professional opportunities for the most gifted of the conservatory's students, as well as a model of artistry, a locus to bring leading performers into contact with students, and a means for recruiting outstanding talent from all over the country to the school in New York. The curricular model was the Paris Conservatory, where Mrs. Thurber had been a student; but its narrowly conceived purpose was originally to provide a venue for training young Americans to take their places in the opera company. It is hardly surprising, then, that the first account books of the conservatory show the name of the school as "The American School of Opera."^[35] The school operated under that name for seven months until it was changed by petition of Mrs. Thurber on 15 April 1886 in the flurry of activity detaching assets from the opera company.

The National Conservatory quickly outgrew its original narrow focus to become the outstanding institution for professional musical preparation in the United States, a reputation it would continue to hold for more than a quarter century. Unlike the more glamorous but ill-fated opera company, the National Conservatory achieved and sustained success, and as late as 1955 Victor Herbert's biographer still lauded the institution in the most glowing terms, writing that the National Conservatory "boasted a truly brilliant faculty, offered comprehensive curricula, and proved itself a vital force in this county's musical development. To this day no institute of musical instruction can be said to have surpassed it in potentialities."^[36]

Mrs. Thurber initiated the school with a brilliant coup by naming the famous baritone Jacques Bouhy (1848–1929) as its first director, a post in which he served from 1885 to 1889. A product of the conservatories of Liège and Paris, Bouhy had established an outstanding international reputation on the European opera stage, where he had created the role of the fiery Don Escamillo in Bizet's Carmen . At the height of his career at the time of his appointment, he was an enormous asset as a voice coach. Under his direction the conservatory's first curriculum was dominated by sight-singing (solfeggio, or solfège, which was required of instrumentalists and vocalists alike), voice training, and opera. To head the voice department, Bouhy brought in the renowned French soprano Emma Fursch-Madi, who was also a box-office attraction for the American Opera Company.

Neither race nor gender, both of which placed insurmountable hurdles before applicants at other conservatories, played a part in the selection of students at Mrs. Thurber's school. Minority pupils made up a significant percentage of the conservatory's student body at every level. The African-American composers Will Marion Cook, Edward Bolin,^[37] and Maurice Arnold Strothotte were all students there, and the great black soprano Sissieretta Jones was featured with the conservatory's orchestra and chorus. Following one of the school's orchestra concerts, a critic noted in wonder at the participation of female students: "The violins, especially, among whom there is a sprinkling of girls, covered themselves with credit."^[38]

While studying in France Mrs. Thurber had been impressed by the French educational system, which provided advanced musical schooling at government expense. She planned to match it by subsidizing talented students from across the country without regard to their backgrounds, meeting the cost from private donations. The National Conservatory was the first such institution in the United States to make a special mission of seeking out and encouraging female, minority, and physically disabled students, and the school soon earned a reputation for being "specially successful in helping students of foreign birth and certain special classes, like the blind and those of negro blood."^[39]

Mrs. Thurber's scholarship plan resulted in financial problems from the very beginning. She was reported to have donated $100,000 herself to get the project started.^[40] Nevertheless, there were often shortfalls to be met from the Thurbers' own pockets. Mrs. Thurber's report to the trustees during the second year of op-

eration reminded them pointedly that they had an "honorable obligation" to cover the debt of $15,000–20,000 "due to teachers only."^[41]

General tuition was not free, as some have thought; it was $100 per semester, as an 1892 advertisement in the Musical Courier indicates. To compare that to tuition costs today, one might think in terms of how much $100 would buy then. In 1892, coal was $3.94/ton, and $100 would have bought over 227 pounds of sugar at 44¢/lb. Bacon was 11¢/lb. and eggs were 22¢/dozen. Free tuition had from the beginning been intended for only the most talented and needy students in the "artist" course. For them, Mrs. Thurber developed what appeared to be an ingenious, self-perpetuating loan scheme, in which a student's education would be underwritten and within a few years that same student would begin to provide funds to continue and enlarge the scholarship program. Gifted students who could not afford to pay signed an agreement that read, in part: "Students are bound, on the completion of their studies, to assist in carrying on the National Educational work of the Conservatory, by contributing, for a specified time in each case, one-fourth of all monies earned professionally by them over and above the sum of one thousand dollars per annum."^[42]

Unfortunately, such a clause was not enforceable, because most students were minors at the time they entered into the contract. Furthermore, since many of those students were members of minority groups or women, their earnings after graduation were limited. Indeed, for most young women at that time, marriage meant the end of career aspirations and often abrogated such ephemeral obligations as school loans.

In November 1887, with the National Opera Company in a shambles and Mrs. Thurber beset by lawsuits, advertisements for the National Conservatory began appearing in the New York area, listing a faculty whose areas of specialization clearly reflected the school's original purpose as an opera training institute:

J. Bouhy (voice), director
Frida Ashforth, voice
Mamert Bibeyran, stage deportment, choreography
C. Bournemann, solfeggio
Pietro Cianelli, Italian
Ferdinand Q. Dulcken, repertoire, piano
Alberto Francelli, solfeggio
Christian Fritsch, voice
Gertrude Griswold, voice
F. F. Mackay, elocution
Ilma di Murska, voice
Fred Rumpf, solfeggio
Regio Senac, fencing

Advertisements of 1888 show seven new faculty members, whose addition reflected a philosophical change in the direction of a more comprehensive pro-

gram, since ties to the opera company no longer existed. Other prominent musicians who would later join the faculty included Anton Seidl (opera conductor), Frank van der Stucken (orchestra conductor), Rafael Joseffy (piano), Adele Margulies (piano), James Gibbons Huneker (piano), Rubin Goldmark (piano, harmony, chorus), Horatio Parker (organ), Oscar Klein (piano, organ, and composition), Leopold Lichtenberg (violin), Victor Herbert (cello), and Henry Theophilus Finck (music history). By 1890–91 there were more than forty on the faculty, and the student body had increased proportionately, with some 207 registered in piano classes alone. Various sources mention other distinguished faculty as well.^[43]

The school was aggressively advertised. In keeping with the conservatory's aspirations to national scope, marketing was not restricted to greater New York. Besides notices in national journals (Etude, Musical America, Musical Courier , etc.), announcements and paid advertisements of the New York auditions appeared in local newspapers all across the country, and the conservatory's secretary, Charles Inslee Pardee, fired off regular news releases trumpeting each new faculty acquisition. By 1890 the National Conservatory claimed, with some justification, to be "the only musical institute in America in which the ground work of a thorough musical education is laid, and its structure afterward carried to completion."^[44] Courses of study were not designed exclusively for the aspiring professional, though. An admiring article in Harper's explained various aspects of the curriculum:

Among the few music schools in this country which really merit the name of conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York deserves special attention because it was not organized as a money-making institution, but as a sort of musical high-school where pupils could prepare themselves for the career of concert, church, or opera singers, of solo or orchestral players, or of teachers, for a merely nominal sum, or if talented, without any charge for tuition. . . . The National Conservatory is not, however, intended solely for those who wish to devote themselves to music as a profession, but also for amateurs. . . . Church-choir singers who have passed through the [solfeggio] course will never thereafter experience any difficulty in singing at sight the most difficult harmonic parts of a sacred composition.^[45]

As early as the third season of the conservatory's existence, when over 220 students had passed through its doors, Jeannette Thurber sought a federal endowment for the National Conservatory. Had her proposal been passed as submitted, it would have made it a truly national institution, chartered and subsidized by the federal government. "Among the arts the first rank is held by music," Thurber asserted in an 1888 petition to Congress.^[46] Noting the near-universal subsidization of music in Europe, she argued that something similar was "inevitable" in the United States and should be instituted at once: "America has, so far, done nothing in a National way either to promote the musical education of its people or to develop any musical genius they possess, and . . . in this, she stands alone among the civilized nations of the world."^[47]

The crux of her proposal was to have a line item placed in the federal budget funding the National Conservatory in the amount of $200,000 per year. Each senator and each member of the House of Representatives would have the privilege of nominating one scholarship pupil, in much the same manner as was done at the military academies. Her prose was sweeping, her arguments persuasive, and circumstances seemed propitious: a large and embarrassing tax surplus existed, and Congress was looking for politically expeditious ways to spend it. Political support was weak, though, and the petition failed.^[48]

She soon rallied her forces for another attack. The ground was laid with a concert of American music in Washington on 26 March 1890, in a program including music of John Knowles Paine, Dudley Buck, Frank van der Stucken, and Arthur Weld. The following year, 1891, with a new administration in place, she mustered support from the political and legal communities as well as the worlds of finance and the arts, and achieved partial victory in the form of a congressional charter. While there was no grant of funds attached to it, the distinction did provide an enormous boost for the school's prestige.

The congressional charter did not, however, address the central problem of public funding, a philosophical as well as a practical consideration that would occupy Mrs. Thurber for the rest of her life, and that would have enormous implications for American music. Mrs. Thurber was determined to win that point, and in another attempt to do so, devised a strategy revolving around an appeal to make the nation's capital the home of the National Conservatory. She included in her new proposal a clause reading, "Said corporation is hereby empowered to found, establish and maintain a national conservatory of music within the District of Columbia."^[49] The District of Columbia, which was then regarded as something of a provincial outpost, could not help but be attracted by the idea of capturing an institution with the panache of the National Conservatory. Speaking on behalf of the bill, Representative Benton MacMillin told the House, "Mrs. Thurber . . . is engaged in a noble exertion to advance music and art in this country. . . . I hope there will not be a single objection to its passing."^[50] There were none: it was approved by both Houses and signed into law within two days.

As might be imagined, passage of the bill was hailed by musicians and patrons of the art as a major step in raising the musical standards of the entire country. The prospect of moving the National Conservatory to Washington, though, seems to have lost its appeal almost immediately, if indeed it had ever been more than a ploy. The New York Post acclaimed the event as a cultural triumph and seemed untroubled about the supposed relocation to Washington: "[This is] the first instance of anything being done by the National Legislature on behalf of music. Hereafter the National Conservatory in New York will be nominally only a branch of the central establishment at Washington, but in reality it will continue, for some time, at least, to be of more importance than the Washington school."^[51] The site in the District of Columbia never became a reality, however, nor does there seem ever to have been a serious effort to make it so.

Whatever else the 1891 charter accomplished, it did not solve the continuing financial problems inherent in the very design of the conservatory. The financial burden of the school and its programs fell almost entirely on incorporators and donors, which, for the most part, meant the Thurbers. In addition to an original sum rumored to have been $100,000, gifts of $5,000 were contributed in 1885 and again in 1886 by Francis Thurber. The conservatory's account books also show several loans from F. B. Thurber noted, "to be repaid when in funds": one of $2,000 on 26 February and another on 2 April 1886, just as paychecks had to be written. Mrs. Thurber obtained another such open-ended loan of $5,000 (2 April 1886) from L. Horton, which enabled the conservatory to balance its books. Except for an initial $5,000 check from Andrew Carnegie, though, the books of those first years are silent about the other members of the board. Within a few years, as the conservatory's fame grew, the picture began to change, but little of the money generated by the school's success came from other incorporators. As an example, following the highly visible concert of American music in Washington, the account books for May and June of 1890 showed over $14,000 in gifts, mostly in checks for $100 or less.

Mrs. Thurber was well aware that the key to the school's quality and prestige lay in its faculty, and she herself made the principal appointments on the basis of prospective teachers' professional reputations rather than open advertisements or auditions. Her own trips abroad were often invested in identifying and interviewing prospective teachers, and it was not uncommon for her to press current faculty into that service as well when they were on tour.

She ruled the faculty graciously but firmly. Her strong personality and idealism inspired them to feel individually responsible for the success of her endeavors. An example of that can be seen in an exchange of letters from December 1889, made public by Charles Inslee Pardee, dean and secretary of the conservatory. Seven of the best-known members of the faculty submitted a letter with the proposal that "[recognizing] how hard and successfully you are laboring to establish a United States Conservatory which shall be truly national in character," they would volunteer their services for a scholarship fund-raising concert. The offer was quickly accepted.^[52] Normally, Mrs. Thurber included the faculty as allies rather than employees, and members of the staff were made to feel privileged to have been chosen for their posts.

With the academic year of 1889–90, when the focus of the school had clearly shifted away from opera, Bouhy returned to Paris. For three years the school operated without a nominal director. It was hardly a fallow period though, for these were the same years in which Mrs. Thurber successfully petitioned the government for a congressional charter, involved the National Conservatory in plans for a concert in Washington to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, and announced a long-range plan to select the best young musicians from communities all across the country for their final stages of professional training in New York. Of that last, Harper's wrote enthusiastically: "It is the intention of Mrs. Thurber to follow the example of the [Paris] Conservatoire . . .

in establishing branches of the National Conservatory, and tributary to it, in other large American cities. . . . These need not necessarily be newly founded schools, but of the already existing schools the best might be brought into connection with the National Conservatory, sending their advanced pupils to receive their 'finishing touches' in the centre of American musical activity."^[53]