History
The Boston Music Hall was built in 1852, thanks to a donation of $100,000, made by the Harvard Musical Association, for its construction. The hall was the first home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1881 and was also the birthplace of the New England Conservatory of Music. The BSO performed the American premiere of the Piano Concerto No. 1, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky here. After being threatened by road building and subway construction, the Music Hall was replaced as the home of the Boston Symphony in 1900, by Symphony Hall.
In addition to concerts, the hall presented important speakers of the time. Methodist minister Henry Morgan lectured in the hall ca.1859. On December 31, 1862, the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect, Northern abolitionists gathered at the Music Hall to celebrate as the clock struck midnight. Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Tubman were all in attendance. Oscar Wilde lectured here in 1882.
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“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)