American city, capital of Georgia. Concert life in Atlanta probably began in February 1858 when Sigismond Thalberg, assisted by Henry Vieuxtemps, brought his Grand Concert to the recently completed Athaeneum Theater. Opera appeared for the first time in October 1866 when Max Strakosch and the Ghioni and Sussini Grand Italian Opera company opened the Bell-Johnson Hall (cap. 600) with Il trovatore, Norma, and Il barbiere di Siviglia. The next month the Grover Opera Troupe staged an operatic concert, and in 1868 Grau’s German Opera Company presented excerpts from various operas, followed by the McCulloch Opera Troupe with performances of Il barbiere di Siviglia and Don Pasquale. Demand for a better theatre prompted the Belgian Consul Laurent DeGive to build DeGive’s Opera House (cap. 1200); in 1873 he increased the seating to 2000. During the 1870s Italian opera performances dwindled, supplanted by a succession of British opera companies, who presented a few of the stock Italian favourites in English. English operetta appeared in 1879 with HMS Pinafore. Several concert organizations were founded during this period, most importantly the Mozart Club (1867), the Beethoven Society (1872) and the Rossini Club (1876). The city gained its first professional musician when Alfredo Barili moved there in 1880. Barili organized Atlanta’s first music festival in the autumn of 1883, when he oversaw the première of five major symphonic works in the city during the three-day festival. The first week of February 1889 saw Atlanta’s first week-long operatic festival when the Emma Abbott Company staged eight operas, including Faust, Norma, Il trovatore and Martha. Increasingly frequent visits by major companies and concert artists continued throughout the final years of the century.
The year 1901 brought the first visit by singers from the Metropolitan Opera House under Maurice Grau, which included conductor Walter Damrosch, soprano Emma Eames and contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink. The Atlanta Music Festival Association was established in 1905. It organized music festivals in 1907 and 1909, and supported the construction of a city auditorium and the installation of a 77-stop Austin organ, which was inaugurated under Percy Starnes for an audience of 7000. Enthusiasm for the highly successful music festivals finally resulted in annual tours by the Metropolitan Opera, beginning in 1910 and featuring such stars as Caruso, Geraldine Farrar and Louise Homer. From 1911 to 1923 Atlanta was the only city outside the North-east to which the Metropolitan toured. The annual visits continued, with a few interruptions, until the company ceased national tours after the 1986 season.
The Atlanta Music Club was formed in 1915 to enrich the city’s musical life by sponsoring noted artists in recitals. Primarily a women’s organization, the club continues its vital role of supporting the community’s artistic life. It was instrumental in the establishment of the Atlanta SO, the Choral Guild of Atlanta (1940) and other groups, as well as providing music scholarships for talented young people.
Early attempts to establish a symphony orchestra proved frustrating. In 1923 the first organization to bear the title the Atlanta SO was formed, with 60 players drawn from the Howard and Metropolitan theatre orchestras under the direction of Enrico Leide. In 1944 the Atlanta Music Club founded the Atlanta Youth SO by the merging of two school orchestras, under the Chicago conductor Henry Sopkin. Two years later the group began adding professional players and changed its name to the Atlanta SO. Sopkin gradually built the group into a competent semi-professional ensemble until his retirement in 1966.
An air crash in Paris on 3 June 1962 took the lives of more than 100 leading Atlanta art patrons, who were commemorated with the construction of the Memorial Arts Center (later renamed the Robert W. Woodruff Memorial Arts Center). The largest of its four performance halls is Symphony Hall (cap. 1762), the first permanent home of the Atlanta SO; the complex also houses an art school and the professional Alliance Theater. A decision was made to upgrade the orchestra to full professional status and Robert Shaw was engaged as music director. For his first season in 1967 the orchestra numbered 87 musicians. Shaw founded the Atlanta SO Chorus and under his direction the orchestra and chorus grew into one of the nation’s finest. When Shaw retired in 1988 he was succeeded by Yoel Levi.
Atlanta continues its thriving choral and organ tradition, mainly in its many churches, which contain some notable organs, especially the magnificent Flentrop organ at St Ann’s Episcopal and the large Aeolian-Skinner at St Philip’s Cathedral. Virtually all of the universities, colleges and junior colleges provide some musical instruction. The most important is Georgia State University (24,000 students), where the School of Music has 450 music majors taught by a staff of nearly 70 faculty members. Its new Rialto Theater (cap. 1200) has become the finest medium-sized concert hall in the area. Emory University also contributes to Atlanta’s concert life with its Flora Glenn Candler concert series. Two predominantly black colleges, Spelman and Morehouse, also provide advanced music training programmes. The Georgia Academy of Music, a private institution, has enjoyed noteworthy success in teaching music to children. Other prominent musical groups include the Atlanta Boy Choir, the Pro-Mozart Society and the Atlanta Festival Singers, the finest small ensemble in the region. Several chamber groups enjoy widespread recognition, notably the Atlanta Chamber Players and Thamryis, which specializes in contemporary music.
Opera in Atlanta experienced the same difficulty as the Atlanta SO in establishing itself. Productions in the Memorial Arts Center began in 1968 with the American première of Purcell’s King Arthur. Two ambitious professional companies emerged in the mid-1970s: the Atlanta Lyric Opera (1976) and the Music Theater Guild of Atlanta (1974), which became Georgia Opera in 1977, when it moved to the Woodruff Arts Center and added an orchestra. In 1979 the two companies merged to form the Atlanta Civic Opera. Financial problems plagued the company and both directors left by 1984. The following year the company was reorganized with William Fred Scott as conductor and artistic director, under whom Atlanta Opera has become the largest operatic organization in the South-east.
N.L. Orr: Alfredo Barili and the Rise of Classical Music in Atlanta (Atlanta, 1996)
N. LEE ORR