Music's original Prof. Hill unveiled

NEW YORK, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- American music's original Prof. Hill was not Prof. Harold Hill of Meredith Willson's musical, "The Music Man," but Ureli Corelli Hill, founder of the New York Philharmonic, whose recently discovered diaries are likely to rewrite musical history.

Hill (1802-1875) founded the Philharmonic, the nation's oldest continuing orchestra, in 1842 as the New York Philharmonic Society and remained with it as a violinist long after he retired as its conductor in 1855. Little information about him has come down to us in modern times until some 20,000 items relating to him, including a leather-bound diary, turned up in the estate of Harold R. Lineback, a St. Louis real estate developer who died in 1994.

Lineback's heirs recently sold this collection of Philharmonic material, stored in 350 cardboard cartons, to the symphony for an undisclosed sum, according to its archivist, Barbara Hawes. Excerpts from Hill's diary will be read for the first time Dec. 1 at ceremonies marking the Philharmonic's 160th anniversary.

Nearly 200 pages of diary entries for the years 1835 to 1837 record a visit Hill made to Europe in what may have been the first overseas trip by any American musicologist. Hill's thin, delicate script reveals his meetings with leading European composers and musicians and sheds new light on the sophistication of early 19th-century American musicians.

"Hill's diary shows how much more knowledgeable American musicians were than we ever suspected," Hawes said in an interview. "It's a truly revealing manuscript."

She said Hill went to Europe to study with Ludwig Spohr, an eminent German violin virtuoso, composer, and conductor whose tutelary fee was $1 per lesson, and to visit as many concert halls as possible, critiquing both orchestras, musicians and vocal artists. He was impressed with Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio," remarked on the talents of mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, and struck up a friendship with composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Inspired by what he had seen and heard abroad, Hill returned to New York determined to start an orchestra of his own and set the pace for the best of music in America. Co-founders of the orchestra were Charles Edward Horn, a composer, and Henry Christian Timm and William Scharfenberg, European-born musicians. The New York Philharmonic Society merged with the New York Symphony in 1928 to form the existing orchestra.

Hawes, who has been the orchestra's archivist for 18 years, is assessing the Hill material, the catalog of which takes up 406 pages.

Some of the material is extraneous to the history of the Philharmonic, such as a daguerreotype of singer Jenny Lind and her husband, and will be sold to help pay for the collection. One of the items that will not be sold is a unique silver medallion of an even earlier New York Philharmonic Society that disappeared into history after playing at George Washington's funeral in 1799.

Hawes said Lineback contacted the Philharmonic in the 1940s in his quest for memorabilia including programs and other historical material. One of the first to view Lineback's acquisitions 30 years later was Howard Shanet, chairman of the music department at Columbia Univerity, who observed that whenever the collection would be made available to scholars, "the history of the Philharmonic's early years will have to be rewritten."

Hill premiered his orchestra at the Apollo Rooms, a concert hall on lower Broadway in Manhattan, on Dec. 7, 1842, with a program that included Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which he had first heard, according to his diaries, at a musical festival in Germany. One of the most discerning critics of the day, George Templeton Strong, recorded in his diary that the Philharmonic's debut was a "glorious event" and praised the Beethoven as "splendidly played."

Although Hill clung to his association with his orchestra until he was past 70, he gradually fell into debt and depression and at the time of his death he was living in poverty in Paterson, N.J. He wrote a farewell note to wife, saying, "Why should or how can a man exist and be powerless to earn means for his family?" then gave his daughter a music lesson and took a lethal dose of morphine.