In Massachusetts' green and social Berkshire hills, a pioneer landowner in 1849 was William Aspinwall Tappan, Boston merchant and banker. He purchased 210 acres between Lenox and Stockbridge, called it "Tanglewood," built a Victorian mansion on it. He also built a small red cottage which he rented to Author Nathaniel Hawthorne. There Hawthorne wrote his Tanglewood Tales for children and began his The House of the Seven Gables. Nothing very important had since happened at sedate Tanglewood until last week. From the nearby Berkshire Hunt and Country Club, where he and his wife had been put up in the best suite, Conductor Sergei Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony drove over to Tanglewood, noted with approval that a tan tent, 280 ft. by 120 ft. and 60 ft. high at its peak, had been raised on the property. Dr. Koussevitzky entered the tent, commanded that two sticks be clicked together before the big plywood orchestra shell. Listening judiciously from the rear of the tent, Conductor Koussevitzky heard the distinct click, beamed, pronounced: "Fine! Fine! Very good!'' Next evening as the sun dropped behind the green hills, Conductor Koussevitzky stood on the podium in un-summery white tie and tail coat, tapped his baton, raised his arms for the portentous opening of Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3.
Thus began the fourth annual Berkshire Symphonic Festival, which in its first two years was nothing more pretentious than a few concerts by New York Philharmonic Symphony men under oldtime Conductor Henry Hadley on the Hanna Farm at Lenox. Last summer, on an estate near Stockbridge, three concerts by the Boston Symphony under Dr. Kaussevitzky netted $1,800, caused organizers of the Festival to begin to talk of "an American Salzburg" and impelled the stately Boston maestro to urge that the number of summer concerts be increased and the Festival obtain a permanent home. Result was that the present owners of Tanglewood, Mrs. Gorham Brooks and Miss Mary Aspinwall Tappan of Brookline, turned their estate over to the Festival committee, which raised $16,000 in pledges for an orchestra pavilion to be designed by famed Finnish-born Architect Eliel Saarinen.
Last week at the first of six Berkshire concerts to be given during the fortnight, the audience of 5,500—near capacity of the temporary tent—was as impeccable and polite as any in Symphony Hall or Carnegie Hall, included such folk as Violinists Efrem Zimbalist, Albert Spalding, Jacques Gordon, Mrs. E. Parmalee (Alta Rockefeller) Prentice, Dancer Ted Shawn, Mrs. Alvan T. Fuller (wife of Massachusetts' onetime Governor), U. S. Ambassador-at-large Norman Hezekiah Davis, Novelist Owen Johnson, Mrs. Edward S. Harkness and many another social column name. Most of them sat in boxes which were shrewdly placed in a double row in the middle of the tent so that their occupants could be thoroughly seen.