Hill's Melody Boys

One hundred years ago this week, a Connecticut Yankee named Ureli Corelli Hill* launched the Philharmonic Society of New York. Impresario Hill, who looked something like a burlesque Irishman, could not find a second trumpet player. But with a dauntless lack of finesse the Philharmonic gave its first program in the gaslit Apollo Rooms on Lower Broadway: Beethoven's Fifth (V for Victory) Symphony, Weber's Oberon Overture and a Gargantuan assortment of operatic arias sung by a lady named Madame Otto. To finance his first season, Ureli Corelli Hill persuaded each man in the orchestra to chip in $25. Profits, at the end of the season, were to be divided equally. When the time came, Ureli Corelli Hill learned what every other symphonic impresario has confirmed: that symphonic music is not a paying proposition. Each of the Philharmonic's musicians got back $15 on his $25 investment.

In later seasons Ureli Corelli Hill bankrupted himself in the California gold rush, returned to borrow the Philharmonic's sinking fund, in the process nearly sank the orchestra. At 70 he retired from music to take a flyer as a bit-part actor in legitimate drama. A disastrous venture in New Jersey real estate catapulted him back into Manhattan concert managing. In 1875 Ureli Corelli Hill took an overdose of morphine. Beside his body, police discovered a note. "Ha, ha!" it read, "I go, the sooner the better!"

This week the Philharmonic, under gangling, Dalmatian-born Artur Rodzinski, celebrated its 100th anniversary with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Weber's Oberon Overture, Ureli Corelli Hill would hardly have recognized his orchestra. Its budget had grown to $750,000 a year. Its chief conductors rated salaries of $50,000 a season and up. Oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S., third oldest in the world,/- the Philharmonic was now the patriarch of some 225 other U.S. orchestras. So stable a feature of Manhattan had the Philharmonic become that only twice in a century had its concerts been postponed: once on the death of Abraham Lincoln, again on the death of Conductor Anton Seidl. One Philharmonic feature would still be familiar to Ureli Corelli Hill: With an annual deficit of about $100,000, the Philharmonic is still a losing proposition.

*Middle-named for famed Italian classical Composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713).

/- London's Royal Philharmonic is 129 years old, Vienna's Philharmonic only 11 days older.

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