Birth of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Twilight concerts launched inaugural season in 1923
The rumbling of empty stomachs would not have been ideal accompaniment for the quiet opening passage of Weber’s Der Freischutz overture. But at a 5 p.m. performance, it would not have been unexpected.
The concert on April 23, 1923 was conveniently scheduled to allow patrons to return home before dinner and musicians to get to their evening gigs accompanying silent films.
Thus was the debut of the New Symphony Orchestra, renamed the Toronto Symphony Orchestra four years later. The performance in then 30-year-old Massey Hall was an “unqualified success,” declared historian Donald Jones in his 1992 book, Fifty Tales of Toronto.
The concert was also a bargain at 25 cents for low-end seating. More affluent posteriors could park themselves in the best seats for 75 cents — about the price of two pounds of lamb chops.
Conductor Luigi von Kunits’s playlist was a safe one, featuring Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor, and Slavonic and Hungarian dances by Dvorak and Brahms respectively.
The 58 players received $3.95 each for the hour-long concert and four rehearsals. But it wasn’t so much money that motivated them as a desire to tackle a more challenging repertoire than that of vaudeville shows and movie theatres.
Attempts to give the city a permanent symphony orchestra in previous decades had proved unsuccessful. But the tide turned when a handful of players asked von Kunits to pick up the baton. Eager to build a bright future for music in Toronto, the Vienna-born composer and violinist quickly rounded up recruits, including his best students and a couple of gifted amateurs.
Rehearsals were held in his home, which suggests he either lived in a very big house or worked the orchestra in shifts. (The TSO’s late archivist Richard Warren doesn’t explain this detail in his 2002 book, Begins with the Oboe.)
Six months later, the excited ensemble was ready for the first of 20 “twilight” concerts that inaugural season. But if the orchestra’s debut raised nary a newsman’s eyebrow in the Toronto Daily Star, its appearance at a spring festival two days later caught the ear of music critic Augustus Bridle.
Lauding the “remarkable color and atmosphere and tonal support accorded by these men,” he concluded they were “as real as any orchestra that comes here.”
But they couldn’t pack the house, much to the concern of a regular patron months later. “One fails to see why musical Toronto does not completely fill Massey Hall to hear its own orchestra, especially when the best seat in the house can be had for the sum of 75 cents,” lamented Gladstone Evans in a letter to the editor.
There was no faulting the venue, the TSO’s home for 60 years before moving to Roy Thomson Hall in 1982. The hall at Victoria and Shuter Sts. was already a vital and popular part of the city’s cultural and entertainment scene, in those days hosting everything from weddings and beauty contests to boxing matches and typing competitions.
In 1920, the year before he died, acclaimed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso took Massey Hall’s fame to new heights when he perched on one of its trademark fire escapes to sing to the overflow crowd below.
Torontonians had plenty else to choose from in the way of arts and amusement the year of the orchestra’s birth. The Royal Alexandra was presenting star performer Eddie Cantor in the musical revue, “Make It Snappy,” and the Regent Theatre boasted that “for the first time in any theatre in the world,” it was showing pictures on an illuminated stage of big-game hunting in Africa.
Radio was still an emerging innovation but even the Daily Star got into the act with its fledgling station, CFCA, making history with hockey’s first live play-by-play broadcast in February, 1923. That same month, the station’s talented legend-in-themaking, Foster Hewitt, called his first hockey game.
CFCA soon added music concerts to the airwaves, most notably the spring festival. A front-page story trumpeted the news that, “for the first time in the history of the world,” a program would be broadcast involving a chorus of 400 and orchestra of 60. The only thing missing for radio listeners, the newspaper said, would be the visuals.
In its second season, the TSO reached another new audience at the Canadian National Exhibition, where it played popular music, “no heavy things, no symphonies,” just “one good rousing overture” and a variety of short works, the paper reported.
Children’s concerts were added to the lineup, making the orchestra a pioneer in music education. The critic Bridle tooted von Kunits’s horn for having the “patience, scholarship, personal magnetism and willpower” to create such a “band.”
But it was radio that helped catapult the TSO to national prominence. In 1929, before the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had arrived on the scene, the Canadian National Railway began a series of onehour radio shows live from the Arcadian Court in Simpson’s flagship store. With dining tables pushed aside in the acoustically blessed restaurant, the orchestra gave its first broadcast across Canada on a Sunday afternoon.
Two years later, the much beloved and admired von Kunits died suddenly, leaving a solid foundation for what was to become a world-class cultural institution. Changes came quickly as successor Ernest MacMillan, himself an acclaimed conductor and composer, chose more ambitious pieces that included works by then-contemporary composers Sibelius, Elgar and Stravinsky. Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” became their most played work and one of the first recorded by the orchestra.
The departure from tried-and-true musical mainstays, however, hit a sour note with the women’s committee, which preferred the sweet sounds of familiar favourites for their bid to boost attendance.
But with the arrival of talking pictures, musicians were freed up for evening concerts. Thus began a new era of after-dinner entertainment wherein ears were filled after stomachs.