Mary Seney Sheldon - The New York Philharmonic

The New York Philharmonic

In 1908, Mary Sheldon was a forty-five-year-old worldly woman with financial and political experience, when she maneuvered to put Mahler on the Philharmonic’s podium and determined to build “the greatest orchestra America has ever heard.” She had two daughters, kept a yacht at Glen Cove on Long Island, and opened her home in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan’s east side for frequent musicales. Sheldon had watched her husband, a high-level Republican Party official, help put Charles Evans Hughes in the governor’s mansion in Albany in 1906 and Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in the White House in 1904 and 1908.

Her colleagues in the endeavor to reorganize the New York Philharmonic were sixty-year-old Ruth Draper, the daughter of the publisher of the New York Sun and the widow of a prominent professor of clinical medicine at Columbia, Dr. William Draper, who had also been a gifted musician; and Nelson S. Spencer, a fifty-two-year-old pioneer in the artificial silk industry and a public-interest lawyer who had been counsel for Governor Hughes in 1907. Two younger men rounded out the core of Mrs. Sheldon’s group: Henry Lane Eno, at thirty-seven years of age president of the Fifth Avenue Building Co. but far better known in cultural and intellectual circles as a psychologist, poet, and author (his verse play Baglioni was published in 1905); and the European-trained pianist and composer Ernest H. Schelling, age thirty-two, “a connoisseur of books, prints and objects of art”, whose wife, Lucy How Draper, had been one of the signatories of the original 1903 plan.

Supporting Mrs. Sheldon's reorganization efforts were sustaining members of the Guarantors’ Committee who made three-year financial pledges. These included wealthy men like John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, August Belmont, Jr., and Thomas Fortune Ryan, but also some formidable women. Harriet (Mrs. Charles Beatty) Alexander and Mary (Mrs. Edward H.) Harriman, both prominent hostesses and philanthropists in their own right, served as Philharmonic Guarantors and, in spite of Walter Damrosch’s comments about rich ladies, also as directors of the Symphony Society (so did Henry Lane Eno).

Not least among the women of the Guarantors was Minnie Carl (Mrs. Samuel) Untermyer, the daughter of a German political refugee and the wife of the prominent attorney. Their town house at 2 East 54th Street was open to a wide variety of artists, musicians, and statesmen. Untermyer was a delegate to the National Democratic Party conventions in 1904 and 1908 yet when it came to musical matters, political affiliations were set aside. He had served as legal counsel for Damrosch, Sheldon, and others who proposed the takeover of the Philharmonic in 1903. With Mahler in the city, Sheldon now worked with Minnie Untermyer, Ruth Draper, and others to resurrect the 1903 plan. Their Committee for the two Festival Concerts, which evolved into the Philharmonic Guarantors’ Committee, drew up a circular letter in April 1908 that declared:

We feel that a man of Mr. Mahler’s eminence who has entered so wholly into the spirit of training a really fine orchestra for this City, will have trained the men to such a degree of perfection, that, if in the future, another conductor should have to be considered, this orchestra already formed, shall be of such a standard of excellence as to appeal to other eminent conductors should the moment arise to engage them. Mr. Mahler sees the promise of the very best in orchestral development in this country and it only rests with us to determine whether we will support the best.

Two and a half years later, in November 1910, the Musical Courier confirmed Mary Sheldon’s vision. “A woman, forceful as well as tender, with a consuming love of art and a deep love for humanity, has, by the aid of a few friends and her own determination, provided New York with a great orchestra, a thing that never existed until this new combination took matters in hand. Like almost every one who does something extraordinary for the world, this woman, outside of her immediate circle of friends and acquaintances, has not received the appreciation due her. Mrs. George R. Sheldon . . . is the lady who has wrought this marvel, and it is high time the American musical public was convinced of the fact.”

On May 28, 1912, Mary R. Seney Sheldon became the first woman elected president of the New York Philharmonic, a position not to be held by a woman again for nearly seven decades. She died after a long illness on June 16, 1913, a month shy of her fiftieth birthday, Mahler’s age when he died just two years before. As late as May 22, she hosted in her home what was to be the last meeting of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors before her death. The minutes of their first gathering after her death, in an unusually long tribute, express “the great affection and regard in which she was held by all its members” recording “her untiring services to the Society and the cause of music and . . . the immeasurable loss which the Society and the individual members of the Board will suffer in their deprivation of her presence and of her activities.”

Sheldon worked both behind the scenes and in the public eye nearly 100 years ago to strengthen the New York Philharmonic financially and artistically. Through her efforts, the sum of $300,000 (equal to $3.4 million today) was raised to support the orchestra at the very moment that Mahler assumed its musical leadership. The confluence of these two achievements was pivotal in the history of the orchestra, setting a new standard of excellence for the future. Mahler’s music as interpreted by the New York Philharmonic on their historic CD collection carries Sheldon’s legacy into the 21st century.