1871–1937 · United States
Henry Hadley lived from 20 December 1871 to 6 September 1937 and worked as an American composer and conductor. He grew up in a musical family in Somerville and studied with his father, with George Whitefield Chadwick and later in Vienna. The site catalogue holds his Elégie, Op. 36, for cello and piano. He helped to found the Tanglewood festival.
Henry Hadley was born on 20 December 1871 in Somerville, Massachusetts, into a musical household. His father taught music at a secondary school and gave him his first violin and piano lessons. His mother was involved with music at church, and Arthur, his brother, became a professional cellist.
The brothers played string quartets at home; their father took the viola part, while Henry F. Gilbert, also a composer, sat in on second violin. Henry learned harmony from his father and from Stephen A. Emery. Beginning at fourteen he studied composition with George Whitefield Chadwick, a leading American composer. With Chadwick guiding him he wrote quite a lot of music: songs, chamber pieces, a musical and an overture for orchestra.
In 1893 Hadley toured as a violinist with the Laura Schirmer-Mapleson Opera Company. He quit the tour once the company ran into money trouble and could no longer pay his wages.
In 1894 he went to Vienna to continue his studies with Eusebius Mandyczewski. The artistic life of the city delighted him: there were concerts and operas to attend in great number, and now and then he spotted Brahms in the cafes. In Vienna he heard Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, which left a deep mark on him. During those years he also made friends with the conductor Adolf Neuendorff, a German American, who advised him on his compositions.
In 1896 Hadley returned to the United States and found work teaching music at the Episcopal school for boys named after St. Paul, in the New York town of Garden City; he stayed until 1902. Several important early works date from those years. Among them are the overture In Bohemia along with the first two symphonies.
Well-known conductors agreed to play them: Walter Damrosch, Victor Herbert, Anton Seidl and John Philip Sousa. The Waldorf-Astoria hotel hosted his own conducting debut on 16 January 1900, with a programme made up mostly of his own music.
American orchestras of the time tended to hire European conductors rather than local ones. Hadley concluded that he had to make his name in Europe, and in 1904 he went back there to tour, compose and study in Munich with Ludwig Thuille. Richard Strauss, whom he met soon after arriving, may have recommended Thuille.
In 1905 Hadley wrote the symphonic poem Salome, unaware that Strauss, whom he admired greatly, was at work on an opera with the same subject. The poem went on to be played in at least nineteen European cities. In 1907 he received an invitation to conduct it with the Berlin Philharmonic, together with his freshly completed third symphony. That same year he became assistant conductor at the Mainz opera house, and Safié, his first opera, was premiered there in April 1909 with Hadley conducting.
In that same year, 1909, Hadley came back to the United States to lead the Seattle Symphony. Two years later, in 1911, the San Francisco Symphony appointed him as its very first conductor. His time there was not easy, since he was trying to turn a band of theatre players into an orchestra of the highest quality. He recruited several fine players from the east, his brother Arthur among them, to lead the sections, which caused some resentment among local musicians. By the time he left in 1915, the orchestra had come a long way.
Hadley went back to New York in 1915. He was often a guest conductor there and gave first performances of many of his most familiar pieces. In 1918 he wed Inez Barbour, a lyric soprano whom he first met in San Francisco; she had made recordings of his music already in 1915 and later sang many of his pieces. Three of his operas had prominent premieres between 1917 and 1920. One was Cleopatra's Night, first given at the Met on 31 January 1920. Hadley led some of the performances, and no American composer had previously directed an opera of his own there. Several critics ranked it above the other nine American operas the house had presented up to then.
In 1921 the New York Philharmonic invited Hadley to be its associate conductor, and no American conductor before him had been on the permanent staff of a leading orchestra in his country. His conducting earned excellent reviews. He sometimes took charge of ordinary Philharmonic concerts, and in the summer he was given the stadium series, where he programmed a lot of American music. In time he was asked to select American pieces for the Philharmonic on a regular basis. He held the post until he resigned in 1927.
That same year, 1927, Hadley was asked to lead the opening half of a season with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. No American had led that orchestra before, and Clemens Krauss took the second half. In 1929 he was asked to head the newly founded Manhattan Symphony Orchestra. Over three seasons he put an American work on every programme, then left, discouraged by the effort of raising funds after the stock market crash.
In 1930 six concerts with Tokyo's New Symphony Orchestra were offered to Hadley. His trip to Asia was received with great enthusiasm. After a side trip to China he wrote an orchestral suite entitled Streets of Pekin, and himself directed the Japanese orchestra at its first performance anywhere.
In 1933 Hadley established an organisation for American composers and conductors (the National Association for American Composers and Conductors), still active today. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 1932, yet he chose to follow his dream of starting a summer festival of classical music.
In spring 1934 he scouted the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts for a location and backing for a seasonal festival. His enquiries led him to Gertrude Robinson Smith. A few months later, in August, they put on three days of concerts, with Hadley conducting sixty-five players from the New York Philharmonic. The opening concert on 23 August was held outdoors in front of 3,000 listeners, Sara Roosevelt, the president's mother, among them. Hadley and Smith spent two more summers working towards a lasting festival. It began as the Berkshire Symphonic Music Festival and soon became known as Tanglewood.
The cancer surgery went well at first, and Hadley continued to compose and to conduct as a guest. His standing as a composer began to slip, though, as audiences and above all critics turned away from the robust romanticism his music stood for. The festival's first three seasons brought swift success, a dream realised late in his life. The cancer came back, and Hadley died on 6 September 1937 in New York City. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Several honours came to Hadley while he was alive. Tufts University gave him an honorary doctorate in 1925. He joined two bodies: the National Institute of Arts and Letters and, separately, the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The French government awarded him the Order of Merit.
The bulk of his own papers and scores is kept in New York, in the Music Division of the Public Library for the Performing Arts. While he lived, his music was enormously popular: leading American orchestras played it routinely, and it was heard in Europe as well. Conductors such as Karl Muck, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski and Gustav Mahler performed it. Lately it has been largely overlooked, although a few recordings have appeared. Tanglewood remains a lasting part of his legacy.
Hadley regarded himself first and foremost as an orchestral composer, which his many overtures, tone poems, orchestral suites and symphonies bear out. In his day he was among the most frequently performed and published American composers. For cello he wrote a short concerto, the Konzertstück, and for piano a Concertino, Op. 131.
He wrote a great deal for the stage as well: five operas plus several operettas and musicals. Nancy Brown, a musical of 1903 on Broadway, was built as a showcase for the actress Marie Cahill. Among the operas Azora and Cleopatra's Night drew the most notice. The comedy Bianca took a prize, from the singers' society of America, for best chamber opera in English. It was staged during Hadley's life and a few times after his death, including in Japan at the start of the 1950s.
Hadley's chamber output consists of a violin sonata, a pair of string quartets and a pair of piano trios. By Tawa's judgement the most noteworthy of them is a quintet for strings and piano in A minor, Op. 50, dating from 1919. He also composed cantatas and oratorios; some, Resurgam for one, were planned on a very big scale. His songs number nearly two hundred.
While living in San Francisco, Hadley befriended the city's elite and joined the exclusive Bohemian Club. For it he wrote three music dramas, each meant to be performed once in the open air in the Northern California grove the club used. They were much like operas but included spoken dialogue. Hadley later reworked music from them into orchestral suites.
Hadley was also among the first to write for film. Warner Bros. recorded him leading the New York Philharmonic through the Tannhäuser overture by Wagner, a short that opened a programme including the 1926 John Barrymore film Don Juan. Later he wrote a complete Vitaphone score of his own for the 1927 film When a Man Loves, for which Herman Heller conducted the Vitaphone orchestra.
The site has his Elégie, Op. 36: the cello part from the edition Elégie Op. 36 & Piano, at the level "Средний+" (upper intermediate). It is the only Hadley edition in the catalogue.