The audience sat in wooden pews. The orchestra, 63 "professors of music," of whom only a lordly few wore evening dress, played standing up (except for the cellists). The most presentable of the professors acted as ushers, wore white gloves, carried long white wands. The main piece on the program was the "Grand Symphony in C Minor"—the Fifth by Herr van Beethoven, who had been dead for 15 years. That was in 1842, in the Apollo Rooms, on lower Broadway.
Last week the audience, biggest and flashiest in a decade, sat in the middling...
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