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Now playing: The centennial

Symphony Hall's notoriously uncomfortable seats - 2,625 or them - have been in use for a century.

THE HALL

Symphony Hall opened on October 15, 1900. Since then, hundreds of coats of paint have built up on its walls, layers that have reflected and absorbed the sounds of a century of musical and social history. Universally ranked as one of the three finest concert halls in the world - along with the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam - Symphony Hall stands as a symbol of Boston's musical culture, a conscience for the city and a voice for its soul. Every audience that enters Symphony Hall feels its traditions and extends them.

Nineteen hundred was the year of the Boxer Rebellion and the first zeppelin flight, and it was also a time of great hope and of excitement in the arts. It was the year that Debussy composed the Nocturnes that would become a centerpiece of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's repertory. It was the year of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, of Sister Carrie, Lord Jim, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and The Flight of the Bumblebee. The paper clip was invented that year, and Kodak introduced the Brownie camera. In Brookline, Arthur Fiedler was 6 years old and taking violin lessons from his father; he may have whistled the hit song of the year, "A Bird in a Gilded Cage." A month and a day after the opening of Symphony Hall, Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn; he would enter the history of the orchestra in 1925 and remain part of its extended family until his death 65 years later.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra had been in existence for 19 years when the home that would shape its sound and its destiny was built. The vision of one man, Major Henry Lee Higginson, created the orchestra, and he also paid the bills. He foresaw the need for Symphony Hall and made sure that it was built. He described it as a construction of wood, brick, steel, and plaster, but it was as much a monument to idealism and public service. "To the more fortunate people of our land," Higginson said on opening night, "belongs the privilege of providing the higher branches of education and of art."

The BSO had begun its great history in 1881 in the Boston Music Hall, which stood on Hamilton Place, where the Orpheum is today. There was a magnificent organ there - the instrument is still resounding in the Memorial Music Hall in Methuen - and an imposing statue of Beethoven from the building now dominates a lobby in the New England Conservatory. But the Boston Music Hall was not a satisfactory home; the building was inconvenient, unsafe, drafty, and acoustically challenged. It was squirreled away in a corner and made no public architectural statement. Although Higginson owned a controlling interest in the Music Hall, he knew that sooner or later his orchestra would want and need to leave.

In 1892, Higginson found the land he wanted in an unfashionable and undeveloped part of town near the Boston & Albany Railroad yards, and the land came at a price that he and a few of his friends were able to afford, $175,000. In choosing this neighborhood, Higginson was a pioneer: The New England Conservatory, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Chickering Piano Co., the Boston Opera Company, and Isabella Stewart Gardner herself would follow his lead.

Proposals to tear down the Music Hall to make way for a street or an elevated railway accelerated the urgency of constructing a new home for the orchestra before the old one was demolished. Higginson turned to a leading American architect, Charles Follen McKim, a Harvard man and a partner in the New York firm of McKim, Mead & White. McKim's masterpiece, the Boston Public Library, was then under construction in Copley Square.

McKim's original design for Symphony Hall, based on the elliptical or oval shape of Greek amphitheaters, was rejected. Fearful of the acoustical consequences of an untested design, Higginson instructed McKim to model his building on the familiar Music Hall and on the Gewandhaus, the great concert hall in Leipzig, Germany (which would later be destroyed by bombs during World War II). Higginson was very clear about what he wanted: natural light, a stage adequate for the 90 players, seating for about 2,500 people, room for a great organ, and an atmosphere of unadorned simplicity.

McKim delivered it all, including a stage somewhat too small for the huge orchestral forces that composers like Strauss and Mahler were already calling for. From opening night on, whenever a big symphony or a work with chorus is on the program, the stage has had to be extended out over the first few rows of seats.

Higginson paid the architect tribute in his brief speech on opening night: "Abandoning his pet idea with absolute cheerfulness, [McKim] set himself to devise a plan not entirely to his liking, and even in the execution of this plan, he has given up many hopes, wishes, and fancies, because the directors had no more money." The final cost of Symphony Hall was $583,000 (not including the cost of the land), $383,000 over budget.

There is a watercolor of the exterior of Symphony Hall that shows some of the hopes, wishes, and fancies that McKim dreamed of. The outline of the building is familiar, but much of the detail and ornamentation - carving, statuary, flourishes on the roof line - was never put into place. The ultimate exterior is an unadorned theme, without variations or a triumphant concluding fugue; you might mistake the place for a railroad station or an industrial building, even a factory, or some kind of institution. A panel on the Huntington Avenue facade, obviously intended to bear the building's name, remains blank. The public, civic statement McKim must have wanted to make became instead an understatement that has withstood changes in the winds of fashion. (A minor curiosity appears in the monograms in the wrought-iron railings for the twin grand staircases, which read "BMH," suggesting that McKim and his associates must have expected the building to be called the Boston Music Hall.)

The interior of the main hall is to a significant extent a co-creation of McKim and a Harvard physicist, Wallace C. Sabine, a pioneer in the art and science of acoustics. In shape, proportions, and architectural detail, McKim's work is a response to Sabine's suggestions and imperatives. The coffered ceiling, niched walls, and statuary have acoustical consequences, as does the shape of the stage, with its angled ceiling, side walls, and floor, all of which project the sound out into the hall, the same way a musical instrument does. Sabine also designed heating and ventilation systems that were quiet enough for a concert hall.

The main hall today looks much as it did in 1900. The dominant image is of the great golden organ pipes, which are those of the original instrument, although the rest of it needed replacement by 1949. Some feel the mid-century organ designed by G. Donald Harrison and built by Aeolian-Skinner is a masterpiece; others feel it was built on the cheap and now needs replacement itself. Both sides agree that organs are high-maintenance instruments and the ones in Symphony Hall have never been adequately taken care of.

The same seats, 2,625 of them, have been in regular use for a century, although what was originally a green leather covering has long since aged to black; many of the seats are now covered in Naugahyde. The seats are notoriously uncomfortable, but the real problem may lie in the decision to abridge legroom in order to make space for additional rows.

Several times each year, the seats on the main floor travel to basement storage areas from an elevator beneath Row Q, along with risers that slope the floor upward toward the back to ensure good sightlines. Then 288 Pops tables and their folding chairs ride up.

Few contemporary concertgoers remember what Higginson's natural light in Symphony Hall looked like; the semicircular windows above the statues were covered and blacked out during World War II and have never been returned to their original condition. The electrical and lighting systems have changed over the years: The five tacky chandeliers were not part of the original design. In 1997, nearly a century's worth of electrical patchwork was replaced by a new coordinated and computerized system that is equipped, as prior systems never really were, for a world wired for sight and sound.

The auditorium has periodically changed its colors - for years, its maroon walls were annually painted green at the start of each Pops season. The appearance of the auditorium also changes during activities the public never sees. The celebrated acoustics are ideal only when the hall is full; for rehearsals, a canvas curtain is raised at about Row F to block excess reverberation. During much of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's history, engineers preferred to record the orchestra sitting on the auditorium floor rather than on the stage.

What has been altered more than the main hall is the part of the building that surrounds it and isolates it acoustically from the outside world. The biggest change came in the early 1940s, when the Huntington Avenue underpass was built, making McKim's original grand entrance, lobby, and box office dysfunctional. These features were moved around to the side, on Massachusetts Avenue, creating problems of entrance, egress, and internal traffic flow that more than a half-century of accumulated experience has not solved.

The public areas, hallways, and reception rooms, the furniture, the carpeting, and light fixtures, reflect the conflicting taste in interior design of several different eras of the 20th century. Walking around the interior perimeter of Symphony Hall can feel like an exercise in time travel. Restrooms adequate for demand during intermission have posed problems for a century, problems only compounded by the most recent remodeling, a bungled 1997 job that left one of the men's rooms with a bottleneck entrance and a ladies' room that was open to inspection from patrons in the hallway before an unsightly screen was installed.

In the early days, the orchestra's administrative needs were restricted to a few rolltop desks for Higginson and a skeletal administration. Now the BSO staff numbers more than 100 and works in exceedingly cramped quarters. Those quarters became farflung 20 years ago with the addition of the Cohen Wing, constructed next door in a building that the orchestra acquired in 1979. (Later, the BSO bought the rest of the block, down to Gainsborough Street, which makes the orchestra the landlord of Burger King.) The Cohen Wing now houses the orchestra's gift shop, instrument collection, archives, chorus room, and a large reception area.

The backstage area, too, was built for a different era, and by present-day standards it is inadequate. There is only one dressing room for soloists, which is fine when there is only one of them but presents difficulties when opera or oratorio is on the bill. There were no women members of the BSO in 1900, so no provision was made for separate dressing areas. The players' "lounge" in the basement area has all the ambience of a boiler room.

Other great American concert halls built early in the 20th century share similar problems; two of them, Carnegie Hall in New York and Orchestra Hall in Chicago, have in recent years triumphantly survived major restoration and renovation projects. Similar projects have been contemplated for Symphony Hall.

A few years ago, one dramatic plan, not made public until this fall's publication of the BSO's official history, Symphony Hall: The First 100 Years, called for constructing a commanding new entrance on the present back of the building. Currently, two architectural firms are working on a new plan, while BSO management and trustees develop a corresponding financial superstructure to pay for it all. They must have been chagrined to read the stories about the Red Sox's efforts to build a new ballpark with the help of public money even while learning how much money other cities and government agencies have poured into building or renovating concert halls.

Everyone agrees on two things: One is that the time has come to stop addressing issues and problems with temporary solutions that interfere with one another and that create further problems; the other is the imperative to preserve everything about Symphony Hall that is historic and unique.

Symphony Hall opened in 1900 with a gala performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, as did its centennial last month. Wood, brick, steel, and plaster began to acquire history and memory.

Beethoven's name stands alone above the proscenium; the other cartouches to the right and left and down the sides were left blank, because there has never been consensus about what other names belong there. One part of Symphony Hall's mission has been to preserve and cherish traditions, and the Boston Symphony and its 10 music directors who have served in Symphony Hall have been faithful to that charge: Wilhelm Gericke, Karl Muck, Max Fiedler, Henri Rabaud, Pierre Monteux, Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg, and Seiji Ozawa (between them, Ozawa and Koussevitzky account for more than half the history of the hall).

At the same time, each of these conductors introduced new music, and some of those works are now part of the international standard repertory - Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms head the list. A principal glory of the hall's history is how many composers came to conduct the BSO, appear as soloists, or simply sit in the hall while their music was played: Saint-Saens, D'Indy, Enesco, Glazounov, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Prokofiev, Copland, Piston, and Britten, among others, in the first half-century. Another musical titan of the 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg, was living in Boston in 1933-34 and must have attended the orchestra's performances of his Verklaerte Nacht that season. Later, regular visitors have included Messiaen, Dutilleux, Gubaidulina, Henze, Takemitsu, Schuller, Lutoslawski, Maxwell Davies, Knussen, and Harbison.

The Boston Pops was part of Higginson's original master plan; it has brought hundreds of thousands of people into Symphony Hall who might not otherwise have come. The 50-year tenure of Arthur Fiedler as conductor (1930-80) set a pattern of programming that his successors, John Williams and Keith Lockhart, have used as the foundation for their own evolving sense of the Pops. In 1949, Harry Ellis Dickson founded the Youth Concerts that still flourish under Lockhart's direction.

The international reputation of both orchestras is the result of the interplay of many factors: the individual talents of the players; the interests and abilities of the conductors and music directors; the support of a loyal and discerning public enlarged by the electronic media; and the good fortune to rehearse and perform in Symphony Hall. The BSO and the Pops have learned how to use the space and how to make it work for them; the hall allows the players to hear one another and the audience to hear them.

Symphony Hall has welcomed, sometimes gingerly, many other tenants. A Frank Sinatra concert in the 1940s led Koussevitzky into open warfare with Fiedler, who had conducted the event. Choral ensembles like the Boston Cecilia, which sang on opening night, and the Handel & Haydn Society were active in Symphony Hall from the beginning, and H & H still performs there.

Visiting orchestras from around the world ritually appear in Symphony Hall, where the history of the home team and the prestige of the venue put them on their mettle. Gustav Mahler led the New York Philharmonic in a Symphony Hall concert in 1910. The most famous conductor of the 20th century, Arturo Toscanini, appeared with three different orchestras - La Scala, the New York Philharmonic, and the NBC Symphony. The intrepid Cleveland Orchestra has visited more often than any other, more than 30 times. In recent years, Benjamin Zander's Boston Philharmonic and various student and youth orchestras have played there, always with a sense of occasion and accomplishment.

The FleetBoston Celebrity Series has presented soloists and ensembles in Symphony Hall under several different names since Aaron Richmond founded the series in 1938. The list of distinguished artists who have appeared in recital is endless. The most popular soloist in the history of the hall was the Irish tenor John McCormack, whose career record of 67 Symphony Hall recitals is unlikely to be excelled even by Yo-Yo Ma; today's crossover equivalents to McCormack are more likely to perform in the FleetCenter than Symphony Hall. The beloved violinist Fritz Kreisler played in Symphony Hall twice as often as McCormack sang, because he gave several recitals a season in addition to making frequent appearances with the BSO. The Boston tenor Roland Hayes broke through the color barrier when he rented the hall for a recital in 1917. In 1923, when Pierre Monteux hired him to sing with the BSO, Hayes became the first African-American artist to appear as a soloist with a major American orchestra. Once the barrier was removed, Marian Anderson sang 15 recitals in Symphony Hall between 1938 and her farewell in 1964, and Leontyne Price sang 10.

Classical music is not the only kind of music that has been heard in Symphony Hall. There is a rich tradition of jazz, crossover, and ethnic events. Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Benny Goodman, and Charlie Parker played and sang there. Popular singers as diverse as Jeanette MacDonald and Rosemary Clooney warbled there. Spike Jones and his City Slickers made fun of classical music and just about everything else. So did cultural comedians like Anna Russell and Victor Borge. Some recent guests like the waltz princeling Andre Rieu and the crossover tenor Helmut Lotti did not intend to be as funny as they were.

Two of the 16 statues in Symphony Hall represent Greek orators, and in 1900, oratory was expected to be one of the resident arts, although the golden age of resonant public speaking in America was already past. Julia Ward Howe did declaim "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on more than one occasion from Symphony Hall stage; Robert E. Peary recounted his journey toward the North Pole and Ernest Shackleton his attempt to reach its antipode. At least one president, William Howard Taft, and one first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, lectured there, and so did such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and H. G. Wells.

The voices of famous actors also resonated in the hall: Dame Ellen Terry gave a program of Shakespeare and so, decades later, did Sir Michael Redgrave; Mrs. Patrick Campbell acted Hedda Gabler; Charles Laughton and the First Drama Quartette performed Shaw's Don Juan in Hell; and Dame Judith Anderson impersonated Hamlet. Dancers included ballerina Anna Pavlova and modern-dance icons Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan, who bared her breasts, perhaps in emulation of the statues, which she denounced as "canned art." Perhaps one of the layers of paint blushed.

Symphony Hall has also hosted its share of miscellaneous events, from an early auto show to plate-spinning Chinese acrobats and socialist and Communist Party meetings, that it's a good thing Major Higginson didn't live long enough to know about. In 1915, it hosted the world premiere of a movie, Carmen, starring the great Metropolitan Opera diva from Melrose, Geraldine Farrar. On 17 occasions she would sing in Symphony Hall; on the night of her movie, she swept into the audience in a "Cleopatra gown of green and white" to watch her flickering shadow smoke, bite, flirt, slug, pull a knife from her stocking, and wipe her nose on her arm. Symphony Hall's film tradition would continue when Arthur Fiedler conducted the soundtrack for Duel in the Sun and when Itzhak Perlman joined John Williams to record the score for Schindler's List.

Symphony Hall has seen it all, heard it all; when it is silent, however, it is full of anticipation of the next music.

THE ARTISTS

I have spent more than 3,000 afternoons and evenings in Symphony Hall, but thanks to broadcasts and recordings, this great building was a presence in my life for years before I first entered the hall in January 1964.

When I was a child, growing up in Oklahoma, my favorite record was an RCA Victor 78 of Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops in Leroy Anderson's The Syncopated Clock. I played that record often, until it mysteriously disappeared, and my parents said they couldn't imagine what had become of it.

Later, beloved records of mine were also made in Symphony Hall: Dorothy Maynor singing Handel's O Sleep, why does thou leave me? under Serge Koussevitzky, Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust conducted by Charles Munch and Nuits d'ete, ineffably sung by Victoria de los Angeles.

Erich Leinsdorf was the new music director when I first came to Boston, but the first Symphony Hall conductor I saw in person was his predecessor, Munch, in one of his last appearances, leading the premiere of Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" Symphony with Jennie Tourel as soloist. And the composer was prominently visible in the audience.

In those days, when I was living on a graduate student's monthly stipend of $79.80, trips to Symphony Hall were usually restricted to rush seats and open rehearsals. I went to hear Leontyne Price sing the final scene from Salome at an open rehearsal, but she was saving her voice for the concert and sang only a shorter aria from another opera. The bonus was that I got to hear Joseph Silverstein play the Schoenberg Violin Concerto twice, because neither he nor the maestro was satisfied. And besides, Leinsdorf explained to the audience, his wife had just arrived in the hall, having missed Silverstein's first run-through because she'd been at home watching Bonanza.

Other performances I fondly remember from my pre-critic days include Janet Baker, singing Nuits d'ete under Colin Davis, and Vladimir Horowitz's "comeback" recital, for which I had a pair of seats up next to the statues on the second balcony; they cost me $10 apiece, a fortune at the time, and they were worth every cent.

Another time, another kind of music: Sarah Vaughan was supposed to share a program with Oscar Peterson. The pianist was sick, so Vaughan took over the first half of the program, demonstrating her musicianship from the keyboard. In the second half of the program, she sang Summertime in her low register, doing just about anything with the tune and words that any singer could do. Then she glissed up an octave and sang in the original soprano key.

There was also a memorable occasion during which I made a silent appearance on the stage as part of a plot by the producer of "Evening at Pops" to shock John Williams into a smile. Dressed in a baker's hat, I pushed a huge wooden cake onstage, from the interior of which appeared Victor Borge, who, predictably, did not do one single thing he had rehearsed.

A list of Symphony Hall performances I will cherish always would be long and personal. I love the feeling of history in the place; when Renee Fleming or Cecilia Bartoli sings, I can feel the listening presence of Mary Garden, Eleanor Steber, Beverly Sills, Janet Baker, not to mention Feodor Chaliapin and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. When the latest pianist appears, the shades of Alfred Cortot, Leopold Godowsky, Josef Hoffman, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Artur Schnabel, Paderewski, and Rachmaninoff gather round.

One looks forward to the regular return of today's beloved artists - Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Serkin, Gil Shaham, Ida Haendel, Pamela Frank, Thomas Quasthoff, Garrick Ohlsson, and Dubravka Tomsic - as previous generations awaited the seasonal appearances by their own favorites.

Today, 36 years after first stepping into Symphony Hall, it is easy to feel particularly nostalgic about performances by artists we can't hear anymore, pianists like Horowitz, with his sporty bow tie, unleashing heroic sonorities while hardly lifting his hands above the Steinway colophon; debonair Artur Rubinstein; the rock-ribbed integrity and shy smile of Rudolf Serkin; Annie Fischer, seated at the piano in her plain back dress, disappearing into the music she was recreating.

One strained forward to overhear the musings of Andres Segovia's guitar. Yehudi Menuhin and Nathan Milstein played the violin, but that's not all they did; the violin was an extension of their bodies, their medium of expression.

Birgit Nilsson waltzed around the stage strewing flowers from one of her bouquets as she sang Wien, Wien, nur du allein as an encore; Leontyne Price, beaming, would sing eight or 10 encores before settling on her mother's favorite spiritual as a signal that it was time to go home.

In Symphony Hall, one heard the debuts of a promising young tenor called Pavarotti and a cellist from Harvard named Yo-Yo Ma and bade a sad farewell to Maria Callas. There were great conductors - Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Sergiu Celibidache, Claudio Abbado, Klaus Tennstedt, Bernard Haitink, James Levine, and, yes, Seiji Ozawa - many of the world's greatest orchestras, and, above all, the Boston Symphony.

The official magic number for the reverberation time in Symphony Hall is approximately 1.85 seconds for a middle-range note in a full house. Those of us who have measured our days in Symphony Hall know better; these sounds can last a lifetime.