The New York Philharmonic began as a musicians' cooperative that split the takings
America's oldest major orchestra started in 1842 with players voting on who could join, what to play and who would conduct, then dividing any profit at season's end. It took near-bankruptcy, rival orchestras and a committee of wealthy guarantors to turn that cooperative into the institution that hired Gustav Mahler.
Ureli Corelli Hill founded the Philharmonic Society of New York with help from the Irish composer William Vincent Wallace. Its first concert, on December 7, 1842, drew 600 people to the Apollo Rooms on lower Broadway and opened with Beethoven's Fifth under Hill's baton, followed by a three-hour mix of chamber music and opera arias. In 1846 it staged the American premiere of Beethoven's Ninth, sung in English for the first time anywhere, hoping to fund a new hall. A steep two-dollar ticket and a war rally uptown kept the crowds away.
Seven musicians took turns conducting in the early seasons until Theodore Eisfeld became sole conductor in 1849. At the 1865 memorial concert for Lincoln the orchestra oddly left out the Ode to Joy, drawing press criticism. By 1877 it was in dire straits, averaging just 168 dollars a concert, so it gave the conductorship without conditions to Theodore Thomas, whose own orchestra had been its rival. He restored its finances and polish over 14 years before leaving to found the Chicago Symphony, taking 13 players along. His successor Anton Seidl gave the world premiere of Dvořák's New World Symphony; when Seidl died at 47, twelve thousand people sought funeral tickets.
In 1909 a group of rich New Yorkers led by Mary Seney Sheldon and Minnie Untermyer ended the cooperative model and installed corporate management. They brought in Mahler, stretched the season from 18 concerts to 54 and guaranteed salaries. It was the only orchestra Mahler directed without an opera house attached. He died in 1911, and his successor Josef Stránský made the orchestra's first recordings in 1917.
Mergers followed: with a National Symphony in 1921, bringing Willem Mengelberg, and in 1928 with the New York Symphony Society, the rival founded by Leopold Damrosch, whose son had persuaded Andrew Carnegie to build his hall. In 1922 harpist Stephanie Goldner became the first woman in the orchestra.
Source: New York Philharmonic
