Hadley, Henry

Henry Hadley – In Bohemia, Op. 28 (1902)

(b. Somerville, MA 20 December 1871 – d. New York, NY 6 September 1937)

Preface
Henry Hadley was one of the most prominent American musicians of the early twentieth century. He was founder and first conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (1911-15), the Berkshire Music Festival (1934-35, better known today as Tanglewood, the summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), and the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra (1929-32, an ensemble dedicated to promote music by American composers).1 He was internationally recognized as a conductor including work in Germany, Japan, and South America. His Second Symphony (1901) was frequently performed during his lifetime and he conducted his opera, Cleopatra’s Night (1918), at the Metropolitan Opera.2

Hadley was born and educated around Boston where his musical interests were furthered by George Chadwick, who became his mentor and lifelong friend. He studied violin and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music before traveling to Europe (Vienna), where he established his career as a conductor and composer. Like his peers, Hadley’s compositions are in a lyric, late-Romantic style. Although the narrative of American music history is focused on “mavericks” who rejected musical traditions of nineteenth-century Europe in search of truly “American” sounds, such as Henry Cowell or George Gershwin, Hadley and the other New England composers marked an early acceptance of American composers into concert programming. The style of emotionally direct, descriptive orchestral works would find its fullest expression in movies, rather than the concert hall. Hadley’s most productive period of composition predates movies with orchestral soundtracks, nevertheless, he was one of the first to compose and conduct the score to a silent movie, When a Man Loves (1926). It is ironic that such an American genre (the Hollywood movie soundtrack) would become associated with European composers who came to America (such as Erich Korngold and Max Steiner), when America had already produced several composers who had traveled to Europe to master this style a generation earlier. …

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