The contribution of Frank Saddler to the art of orchestration for the American musical theatre

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THE CONTRIBUTION OF FRANK SADDLER TO THE ART OF ORCHESTRATION
FOR THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE

by

Eric Davis

_______________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC THORNTON SCHOOL OF MUSIC
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(MUSICOLOGY)

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Eric Davis

ii

To Rachel

iii
Acknowledgments

It is a great pleasure to convey my sincere gratitude for the assistance that so many
people have given me on this dissertation. All the people mentioned below contributed to
this project in meaningful ways and hopefully they will share in any recognition of its
ultimate worth. I hope that those who have given both their time and expertise will see
the effects of their help and good counsel. Inasmuch as anyone has helped to shape
various parts of my work in concrete ways, I must say that the expressions of enthusiasm
for this project I have received throughout the past five years have been at least equally
important to me. For their belief in the inherent value of this work has been the intangible
factor without which this dissertation would not have come to fruition.
The person who deserves first mention here has been with me on this project from
the very beginning. I approached Bruce Brown about the idea of being my Dissertation
Advisor only a couple of weeks after passing my Screening Exams at USC, which
marked my official entrance to the doctoral program. When I explained to him, perhaps
with some chutzpa, that I thought that he (a Mozart and Gluck scholar) would make an
excellent advisor for me on a project about early Broadway orchestration, he hesitated at
first, with good reason. But when I explained that I believed that the musical language
and orchestral practices found in early Broadway comic opera and musical comedy bore
a stronger resemblance to the operatic traditions of the late eighteenth century than to that
of modernism in the twentieth century, he quickly understood and expressed his
eagerness to get to work. As it turned out, I was right to think that Bruce’s expertise in

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European musical traditions would be pertinent to my work, as so much of this
dissertation has focused upon the strong and pervasive transatlantic cultural influences in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially as they bear upon theatre music in
New York. To the extent that Broadway show music is outside of his purview, Bruce
revealed to me his unbounded intellectual curiosity and great respect for all historical
subjects at every turn in this process. His exceptional ability, thoroughness, insight, and
patience as an editor, his genuine interest in the cultural world that Frank Saddler
inhabited, his personal warmth, humor, accessibility, and collegiality, and his faith in me
through several years of research and writing will remain a constant source of inspiration.
I am indebted to Tom Riis for agreeing to join my committee from afar (Boulder,
Colorado), and his knowledge of early American musical theatre traditions has given me
a foundational source of confidence in the value and validity of this work. Tom’s
enthusiasm for “Saddler’s story” also gave me faith that a detailed and substantial
biography of a relatively unknown figure in the realm of Broadway was worthy of the
amount of attention that I was giving it. His keen interest and useful observations
encouraged me to believe that the biographical part of this work was telling us a broader
story about an unjustly neglected area in the American musical and cultural landscape at
a critical point in its development. And his acceptance of my interpretation of the broader
implications of Saddler’s sketches of Kern’s songs gave me an invaluable sense of
conviction that these assertions have merit. Throughout the course of this project, I have
appreciated his patience and faith that this work would someday come to fruition.

v
Given that this dissertation was five years in the making, it should perhaps come
as no surprise that patience and faith would be a persistent theme in these
acknowledgements. My other committee member, Joanna Demers, deserves an equal
share of my gratitude in this regard for her steadfast support of my work. A project of this
magnitude would certainly have foundered without institutional support and Joanna has
fostered it by giving me opportunities all along the way that enabled me to conduct
research and write when other sources of funding were not forthcoming. Her expansive
view of the possibilities for musical scholarship and uncompromising standards of
intellectual excellence encouraged me to set high expectations for my own work that I
will take with me into new projects.
A large part of the pleasure of working in libraries and archives is getting to know
the people who work in them. Their dedication to assisting researchers in their projects
can often make the difference between a story being told with or without critical
information. This was certainly the case in my visits to the Music Division at the Library
of Congress, where I spent many happy days on four occasions over a ten-year period.
For their generous assistance over the years, I wish to thank Betty Auman, Loras
Schissel, Mark Horowitz, Thomas Barrick, and all the people I encountered at the
Reading Room. Betty was an enthusiastic advocate of Frank Saddler’s work even before I
began working on this dissertation. Loras jumped in and helped me get a rush order on a
large number of off-site research materials without which several days of research would
have been lost. I am grateful to Mark for alerting me to Frank Saddler’s correspondence
with Jerome Kern, which I would not have known to look for and which constitutes the

vi
only evidence of the arranger’s writing to have surfaced in my research. Mark was also
enormously helpful in placing and managing large orders of off-site materials in the years
before they were placed through the online system. He was also instrumental in rectifying
a significant mistake I had made in ordering nearly fifty boxes from the Tams-Witmark
Collection that caused them to need to be replaced after I had arrived in Washington,
D. C., which they did all in a period of two days with the same courtesy that they bring to
all their dealings. On the day of my departure during that same visit, Tom Barrick
brought me the final box that, through dogged persistence, he had tracked down in the
Library’s Maryland storage complex. Unbeknownst to me, it contained the earliest Frank
Saddler orchestrations of a Broadway musical (The Red Rose) that I have found; and, as a
result, I was able to discuss these scores in Chapter 10. For these librarians, it may be all
in a day’s work; but, for researchers such as myself, their expertise and conscientiousness
simply make our work better.
In researching the musical and cultural history of Pittsburgh, I was helped by
many people whose enthusiasm for historical subjects concerning their city was
infectious. Dick Price, archivist at Heinz History Center, was a treasure trove of
information about Pittsburgh, which he generously gave in long email messages and
packages of materials. I still hope to take him up on his offer to give me a tour of
“historic” Pittsburgh. I was also capably assisted by C. Art Louderback, Chief Librarian,
Library and Archives, Heinz History Center; Gil Pietrzak, Archivist at Carnegie Library
of Pittsburgh; Jack Widmer, Research Librarian, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania,
who helped me access numerous microfilm rolls of The Pittsburg Press; Jim Cassaro,

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Head Librarian, Finney Music Library, University of Pittsburgh, who sent me digital
copies of Edward Baynam’s history of music in Pittsbugh; Ashley Cox, Archives Service
Center, University of Pittsburgh; Kathy Haines, Center for American Music, University
of Pittsburgh; and by Gary Rogers of the Oakmont/Verona Historical Society, who sent
me some wonderful materials about Verona, Pennsylvania, where Saddler spent several
years during his youth. I have tried to paint an accurate and attractive portrait of the
nineteenth-century Pittsburgh music scene through the activities of a young aspiring
musician, and all the assistance I received by those mentioned here helped me toward this
goal.
I was also ably assisted by many other librarians and archivists along the way,
including Christine Windheuser and Kay Peterson at the Archives Center of the
Smithsonian Institute, Alexandra M. Griffiths in the Interlibrary and Document Services
at the New York Public Library, Susanne Frintrop at the Hochschule für Musik und
Theater München, and Ned Comstock at the Cinematic Arts Library at USC. Without the
generous and enthusiastic help of Putnam County Historian Sarah Johnson, who provided
me with an abundance of material on Saddler’s life and death in Brewster, New York, I
would not have been able to describe the circumstances surrounding the arranger’s
property and estate with any detail. If a historian cannot do his or her work without
libraries and archives, then it is equally true that we cannot do our work without
librarians and archivists to help us translate our general needs into specific and concrete
search requests.

viii
In my effort to locate Frank Saddler’s published orchestral arrangements, I was
fortunate along the way to have been introduced by Kevin Starr to Jack Bethards, an
ardent preservationist who has done as much as any individual in this field to collect
historical musical materials and make them available to the public. In my research at the
Paramount Music Library in Oakland, which Jack founded, I was assisted capably and
congenially by Jean Cunningham and Greg Stephens. In this same research, I was also
helped by Vince Giordano, another key figure in the movement to preserve historical
band arrangements, who provided me with his list of published Frank Saddler scores. I
am also very grateful to Lance Bowling, a great preservationist in his own right, who
provided me with rare copies of Arthur Lange’s published trade journal and Max
Steiner’s unpublished autobiography. I am indebted to Tom Lehrer for his gift of
seventeen Jerome Kern song folios published by Masters Music this past December, an
act of generosity that was more timely than he could have ever imagined as it made my
work on Chapter 9 much more efficient than it otherwise would have been. I would also
like to thank Robert Kimball for introducing me to Andrew Boose, legal advisor for the
Betty Kern Miller Trust, who gave me permission to access the Jerome Kern Collection
at the Library of Congress for the first time back in 2007. I was also fortunate to have
been introduced to Russell Warner by Betty Auman in 2007. Though I spoke with
Russell only once by phone, I knew then that his exceptional talent and deep knowledge
of Frank Saddler’s arranging style was matched by his generosity of spirit. My greatest
regret in this entire process was that I did not continue our correspondence during the two
years that followed as I was facing the challenge of studying for my exams to enter the

ix
program at USC. His passing was not only untimely for his friends and loved ones but for
me as well, as I heard of his death only a month before I settled on Frank Saddler’s career
for my dissertation topic. I can only hope that this work might have given him some
satisfaction in reading it.
It would have been impossible to conduct research on Michael William Balfe’s
The Bohemian Girl without the excellent assistance of Valerie Langfield, who not only
provided me with a copy of Balfe’s autograph, but who introduced me to its rigors and its
splendor and counseled me wisely in my analysis. In much the same way, David Grant,
the world’s leading expert on William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana, was exceedingly
generous with his time and his resources. I enjoyed immensely our correspondence and
having had cause to delve into the colorful world of English opera. I was only sorry that I
could not spend more time studying its riches, especially having been blessed with the
opportunity to learn from these scholars. I am similarly grateful to John Koegel, who
shared his knowledge of Adolf Neuendorff and the Germania Theatre with me as I was
studying orchestral adaptations of Offenbach’s operettas housed in the Tams-Witmark
Collection.
There are two people whose impact on my creative and scholarly life, especially
as it bears directly upon this dissertation, is impossible to measure. Corey Jamason, who I
was fortunate to meet at Indiana University, is both a friend and colleague and someone
whose artistic and intellectual understanding of early American musical theatre styles I
respect more than that of anyone I have ever known. I am fortunate to have had his
counsel and encouragement regularly over the last five years and his heartfelt

x
appreciation of my work has been supremely reassuring during periods of both
confidence and doubt in the preparation of this dissertation. I look forward to hearing him
conduct in the years to come many more of the scores I have written about in the pages
that follow. Miles Kreuger has taught me more about the traditions of American musical
theatre than I could have ever imagined it would be possible to learn before I met him in
2001. Having grown up in a household where my great-grandfather Seymour Felix’ films
from the 1930s and 1940s were often on television and where I was privileged to hear
stories about Larry Hart, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and many other theatrical
luminaries from my grandparents, I thought I knew something about Broadway and
Hollywood musicals—until I met Miles. A veritable encyclopedia of theatre and film
history, a monumental archival collector, a raconteur par excellence, and Broadway’s
native son, Miles Kreuger has forgotten more about the American musical than I will
ever know in my lifetime, but this has never discouraged him from sharing with me his
wealth of experience, knowledge, and his love of the heritage of American popular
culture. His extraordinary generosity in making his unparalleled collection of historical
materials available to me is the singular cause of my believing it was possible to
specialize as a historian of early American musical theatre at the graduate level. I wish to
thank him for his unrelenting enthusiasm for the multitude of questions, large and small,
that I brought to him concerning the history Broadway and the life and career of Frank
Saddler. Above all, I have been privileged to call him a friend and I look forward to
seeing his legacy preserved when his archives are permanently established as a world-
class institution.

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My family has been a bedrock of support during my entire graduate school
experience. It is impossible to imagine my surviving the rigors of this program without
the unflagging encouragement of my large extended family. I will be eternally grateful to
my parents and step-parents—John, Judi, Tom, and Padric—for their love and for their
belief in me and my uncommon life path. To my in-laws, Ruben and Felicia, who met me
at the very beginning of this program: I appreciate your understanding and gentle
prodding more than I can adequately express. I will be forever indebted to Babi Feli,
Nana Judi, and Aunt Silvia for taking such good care of my daughter during these past
four years while I was at home writing. And, to my dear Serene, who has known no other
life but one where “Papa is working on his dissertation,” please know that your cheerful
presence was the constant source of joy that animated these years of labor. I reserve my
final words of gratitude for my wife and life partner, Rachel, without whom I would not
have even begun this dissertation. For it was your love and wisdom and guidance that
kept me firmly on this path. Please accept my dedication of this work for reasons only
you will ever know.

xii
Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures xiv
List of Musical Examples xxi
List of Tables xxix
Note on Musical Examples xxx
Abstract xxxi
Introduction 1
Part I Life and Career
Chapter 1 Family History and Childhood 10
Chapter 2 Musical Activities in Pittsburgh 30
Chapter 3 Musical Studies in Munich 73
Chapter 4 Early Career as a Music Director 114
Chapter 5 An Orchestrator for Publishing Houses 167
Chapter 6 An Orchestrator for Broadway Shows 186
Chapter 7 Death, Settlement of Estate, and Legacy 263
Critical Appraisal: Primary Sources 278
Critical Appraisal: Secondary Sources 310

Part II Works of Orchestration: Tradition, Technique, and Style

Chapter 8 History of the New York Theatre Orchestra and
Techniques of Orchestration for Broadway to 1910 322

A Music Director for New York 324

xiii
European Opera in New York 331
Orchestration of English Operas for
American Theatres 346
Offenbach in the German Theatres
of New York 376
The Pinafore Craze—Gilbert and Sullivan
in America 406
Indigenous Musical Theatre on Broadway 435
The Rise of American Comic Opera 459
Early American Musical Comedy and
Orchestral Ragtime 512

Chapter 9 Frank Saddler’s Arranging and Orchestration 525

Working Methods 538
Use of Instruments 588
Scoring Practices 634

Chapter 10 The Contribution of Frank Saddler to the
Tradition of Broadway Orchestration 685

Maintaining the Tradition 688
Innovation and Iconoclasm 703
The Art of Orchestration for the
American Musical Theatre 715

Epilogue 723

Bibliography 726
Appendix A: Catalogue of Extant and Lost
Frank Saddler Manuscripts 749
Appendix B: List of Frank Saddler’s Published
Arrangements 752
Appendix C: Audio-Visual Examples and Links 756

xiv
List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Isaac Saddler, Jr. and family in the 1810 Census 13
(ancestry.com)

Figure 1.2 John W. Saddler and family in the 1870 Census 16
(ancestry.com)

Figure 1.3 Map of Verona & Oakmont by T. M. Fowler and
James B. Moyer 23
(loc.gov)

Figure 1.4 Second Ward School, Verona, Pennsylvania 25
(historicpittsburgh.org)

Figure 1.5 Advertisement for George Kappel’s music store in
Folio, October, 1881 28
(books.google.com)

Figure 2.1 Mercantile Library Hall, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 33
(sites.google.com/site/pittsburghmusichistory)

Figure 2.2 Music column, The Pittsburg Press, November 3, 1887 43
(new.google.com/newspapers)

Figure 2.3 Members of the newly formed Pittsburgh Symphonic
Society, The Pittsburg Press, September 22, 1887 51

Figure 2.4 Article about the “American Concerts,” The Pittsburg
Press, November 24, 1887 58

Figure 2.5 Press notice about Frank Saddler’s Stephen Foster
arrangement, The Pittsburg Press, March 8, 1888 64

Figure 2.6 Press notice about Frank Saddler’s studies abroad,
The Pittsburg Press, June 7, 1888 70

Figure 3.1 Steamship Eider, Norddeutscher Lloyd Company 74
(norwayheritage.com)

Figure 3.2 Cover of opera libretto for Joseph Stich’s Geiger zu Gmünd 83
(books.google.com)

xv
Figure 3.3 Cover art for Frank Saddler’s Klänge aus Amerika 92
(europeana.eu/portal.record)

Figure 3.4 Article about Frank’s Farewell Concert in Munich
with program, The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 19, 1892 111
(chroniclingamerica.loc.gov)

Figure 4.1 Steamship Lahn, Norddeutscher Lloyd company 115
(norwayheritage.com)

Figure 4.2 Two excerpts from the transportation manifest of the
Steamship Lahn from Bremen 116
(ancestry.com)

Figure 4.3 J. K. Murray and Clara Lane 119
(books.google com)

Figure 4.4 Advertisement for Glendalough at Pittsburgh’s Bijou
Theatre 125
(new.google.com/newspapers)

Figure 4.5 George Monroe as he appeared in My Aunt Bridget 148
(digitalcollections.nypl.org)

Figure 5.1 Cover art for “Zamona” 170
(americanhistory.si.edu)

Figure 5.2 Back cover of M. Witmark and Sons arrangement for
theatre orchestra 172

Figure 5.3 Cover page of E. T. Paull’s “Nero’s Delight” 174
(jfeenstra.com)

Figure 5.4 Cover art for Piff Paff Pouffe “Medley Selection” 177
(digitalcollections.baylor.edu)

Figure 5.5 Excerpt of “Somewhere” by Chas. K. Harris 182
(digitalcommons.commcoll.edu)

Figure 6.1 Cover page of Wallace’s Maritana arranged by Frank
Saddler and detail 192
(Library of Congress)*

* All musical manuscripts on this list are housed at the Library of Congress

xvi
Figure 6.2 Postcard with image of Virginia Earle in Sergeant Kitty 198
(mattsko.wordpress.com)

Figure 6.3 Lew Fields circa 1900 202
(en.wikipedia.org)

Figure 6.4 Blanche Ring circa 1910 205
(travsd.wordpress.com)

Figure 6.5, Manuscript excerpt of Frank Saddler’s arrangement
of Robert Hood Bowers’ The Red Rose 207

Figure 6.6 Nora Bayes circa 1910 209
(findagrave.com)

Figure 6.7 Blossom Seeley circa 1910 215
(pl.tunes.zone)

Figure 6.8 Sheet music cover for “The Gaby Glide” 220
(yorkspace.library.yorku.ca)

Figure 6.9 The Shubert brothers 231
(dcmetrotheaterarts.com)

Figure 6.10 Elisabeth Marbury 235
(ourstory.info)

Figure 6.11 Frank Saddler at his home 242
(books.google.com)

Figure 6.12 Morris Gest, P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton,
F. Ray Comstock, and Jerome Kern 248
(commons.wikimedia.org)

Figure 6.13 Charles Dillingham 254
(en.wikimedia.org)

Figure 7.1 Surety Bond of Administration by Clara Saddler 270

Figure 7.2 Inventory of personal belongings from Frank Saddler’s
residence on Foggintown Road in Brewster, New York 273

xvii
Figure 8.1 Press notice for Hewitt’s ballad opera The Wild Goose
Chase in Greenleaf’s Daily Advertiser, February 19, 1800 330
(historynews.chadwick.com)

Figure 8.2 Interior of the Park Theatre with view of the orchestra 333
(1st-art-gallery.com)

Figure 8.3 Da Ponte’s Italian Opera House in Manhattan 339
(schubincafe.com)

Figure 8.4 Edward and Ann (Mr. and Mrs.) Seguin 341
(en.wikimedia.org)

Figure 8.5 William Vincent Wallace 345
(en.wikimedia.org)

Figure 8.6 The copying room at the Arthur W. Tams Music Library 350

Figure 8.7 Title page of the 1863 Berlin transcription of Jacques
Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers 380

Figure 8.8 Lithograph of Broadway showing Mitchell’s Olympic
Theatre 438
(maryglenchitty.com)

Figure 8.9 George Bristow 441
(en.wikimedia.org)

Figure 8.10 Sheet music cover for the “Transformation Polka” 451
(commons.wikimedia.org)

Figure 8.11 David Braham 454
(wiggles.wikia.com)

Figure 8.12 Page one of the “Opening Chorus” from Reginald
De Koven’s manuscript of Robin Hood 465

Figure 8.13 Victor Herbert’s autograph manuscript of “Duke’s
Entrance” from The Serenade 486

Figure 8.14 Fritzi Scheff as Fifi in Mlle. Modiste 503
(periodpaper.com)

xviii
Figure 8.15 Sheet music of “Ma Blushin’ Rosie, Ma Posie Sweet”
from Fiddle-Dee-Dee 516
(digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org)

Figure 8.16 Sheet music of “Good Evenin’” from In Dahomey 519
(library.indstate.edu)

Figure 8.17 Sheet music of “You’re a Grand Old Rag” from George
Washington, Jr. 522
(levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu)

Figure 9.1 The Lyric Theatre at 213 West Forty-Second Street 527
(nycago.org)

Figure 9.2 Frank Saddler, fair-copy piano-vocal score of Jerome
Kern’s “Old Bill Baker” from Very Good Eddie 535

Figure 9.3 Frank Saddler manuscript arrangement of Jerome Kern’s
“Producers” from Zip Goes a Million 536

Figure 9.4 Jerome Kern, manuscript sketch of melodic fragment from
the opening chorus, Act I, Oh, Lady! Lady!! 550

Figure 9.5 Max Hirschfield, manuscript sketch of opening chorus,
Act I, Oh, Lady! Lady!! 553

Figure 9.6 Frank Saddler, manuscript sketch of “Not Yet” from
Oh, Lady! Lady!!, page 1 557

Figure 9.7 Frank Saddler, manuscript sketch of “Not Yet” from
Oh, Lady! Lady!!, page 2 558

Figure 9.8 Jerome Kern, published sheet music, chorus of
“Not Yet” from Oh, Lady! Lady!! (pages 4-5) 559

Figure 9.9 Jerome Kern sketch of “Moon Song” from
Oh, Lady! Lady!! 566

Figure 9.10 Frank Saddler, fair-copy piano-vocal score,
“Moon Song” from Oh, Lady! Lady!! (pages 1-2) 567

Figure 9.11 Jerome Kern, manuscript sketch of “Nellie from Omaha”
from Toot-Toot! 571

xix
Figure 9.12 Frank Saddler, manuscript sketch of Jerome Kern’s
“When You Wake Up Dancing” from Toot-Toot! 572

Figure 9.13 Frank Saddler, fair copy of Jerome Kern’s
“When You Wake Up Dancing” from Toot-Toot! 573

Figure 9.14 Frank Saddler pencil sketch “Not-You!” from
Rock-a-Bye, Baby 580

Figure 9.15 Frank Saddler manuscript of Jerome Kern’s “Not You” 582

Figure 9.16 Frank Saddler, manuscript of Jerome Kern’s “If I
Find the Girl” from Very Good Eddie 604

Figure 9.17 Frank Saddler, manuscript of Jerome Kern’s “Wait
Till Tomorrow” from Very Good Eddie (strings only) 605

Figure 9.18 Frank Saddler, manuscript of Jerome Kern’s “The Same
Old Game” from Very Good Eddie 625

Figure 9.19 Frank Saddler, manuscript of “Same Old Game” from
Very Good Eddie (strings only) 628

Figure 9.20 Frank Saddler, manuscript of “A ‘13’ Collar” from
Very Good Eddie (strings only) 630

Figure 9.21 Frank Saddler, manuscript of Jerome Kern’s “If I Find
the Girl” from Very Good Eddie 654

Figure 9.22 Frank Saddler, manuscript of Jerome Kern’s “The
Crickets Are Calling” from Leave It to Jane 662

Figure 9.23 Frank Saddler, piano arrangement of Jerome Kern’s
“A Peach of a Life” from Leave It to Jane 666

Figure 9.24 Frank Saddler, manuscript of “Overture” to George Gershwin’s
A Dangerous Maid 673

Figure 9.25 Frank Saddler, manuscript of “Overture” to George Gershwin’s
A Dangerous Maid 674

Figure 9.26 Frank Saddler, manuscript of finale, Act I, from
Jerome Kern’s Leave It to Jane 681

xx
Figure 10.1 Frank Saddler, manuscript of Robert Hood
Bowers, The Red Rose, measures 7-12 692

Figure 10.2 Vocal score of Robert Hood Bowers’ The Red Rose,
measures 6-15 693

Figure 10.3 Frank Saddler, manuscript of “Dance Duet” from
Robert Hood Bowers, The Red Rose, measures 1-8 696

Figure 10.4 Vocal score of “Dance Duet” from Robert Hood Bowers’
The Red Rose, measures 1-10 697

xxi
List of Musical Examples

Example 8.1 Michael William Balfe, opening chorus, The Bohemian
Girl, measures 45-50 353

Example 8.2 Michael William Balfe, opening chorus, The Bohemian
Girl, unknown arranger, measures 45-49 354

Example 8.3 Michael William Balfe, “A Soldier’s Life,”
The Bohemian Girl, measures 1-5 356

Example 8.4 Michael William Balfe, “A Soldier’s Life,”
The Bohemian Girl, unknown arranger, measures 1-5 357

Example 8.5 Michael William Balfe, “In the Gipsy’s Life,” The
Bohemian Girl, measures 15-19 359

Example 8.6 Michael William Balfe, “In the Gipsy’s Life,” The
Bohemian Girl, unknown arranger, measures 15-19 360

Example 8.7 William Vincent Wallace, “Sing, pretty maiden, sing,”
measures 1-5 366

Example 8.8 William Vincent Wallace, “Sing, pretty maiden, sing,”
Maritana, orchestration by Gustave Kerker,
measures 1-6 367

Example 8.9 William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,”
measures 1-4 371

Example 8.10 William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,”
Maritana, orchestration by Gustave Kerker,
measures 1-4 372

Example 8.11 William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,”
measures 5-8 374

xxii
Example 8.12 William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,”
Maritana, orchestration by Gustave Kerker,
measures 5-8 375

Example 8.13 Jacques Offenbach, “Ah! c’est ainsi!” Orphée aux
Enfers, “Arischritzer” score, measures 38-42 384

Example 8.14 Jacques Offenbach, “Ah! c’est ainsi!” Orphée aux
Enfers, “Eberwein” score, measures 38-42 385

Example 8.15 Jacques Offenbach, “Ah! c’est ainsi!” Orphée aux
Enfers, “Neuendorff” score, measures 38-42 386

Example 8.16 Jacques Offenbach, “Allez, jeunes filles, danser et
tournez!” Die Grossherzogin von Gerolstein,
“Herrmann” score, measures 29-34 392

Example 8.17 Jacques Offenbach, “Allez, jeunes filles, danser et
tournez!” Die Grossherzogin von Gerolstein,
“Kerker” score, measures 29-34 393

Example 8.18 Jacques Offenbach, “Et piff, paff, pouff,”
Die Grossherzogin von Gerolstein, “Herrmann” score,
measures 3-8 395

Example 8.19 Jacques Offenbach, “Et piff, paff, pouff,”
Die Grossherzogin von Gerolstein, “Kerker” score,
measures 3-8 396

Example 8.20 Jacques Offenbach, “Amours divins! ardentes flammes!”
La Belle Hélène, “Germania” score, measures 14-19 399

Example 8.21 Jacques Offenbach, “Amours divins! ardentes flammes!”
La Belle Hélène, “Tams” score, measures 14-19 400

Example 8.22 Jacques Offenbach, “Amours divins! ardentes flammes!”
La Belle Hélène, “Germania” score, measures 25-29 402

xxiii
Example 8.23 Jacques Offenbach, “Amours divins! ardentes flammes!”
La Belle Hélène, “Tams” score, measures 25-29 403

Example 8.24 Arthur Sullivan, “We Sail the Ocean Blue,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, measures 10-16 413

Example 8.25 Arthur Sullivan, “We Sail the Ocean Blue,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Germania” score, measures 10-16 414

Example 8.26 Arthur Sullivan, “We Sail the Ocean Blue,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Price” score, measures 10-16 415

Example 8.27 Arthur Sullivan, “I’m Called Little Buttercup,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, measures 57-72 417

Example 8.28 Arthur Sullivan, “I’m Called Little Buttercup,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Germania” score, measures 57-72 420

Example 8.29 Arthur Sullivan, “I’m Called Little Buttercup,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Price” score, measures 57-72 423

Example 8.30 Arthur Sullivan, “When I Was a Lad,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, measures 1-5 425

Example 8.31 Arthur Sullivan, “When I Was a Lad,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Germania” score,
measures 1-5 426

Example 8.32 Arthur Sullivan, “When I Was a Lad,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Price” score, measures 1-5 427

Example 8.33 Arthur Sullivan, “A British Tar Is a Soaring Soul,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, measures 1-4 430

Example 8.34 Arthur Sullivan, “A British Tar Is a Soaring Soul,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Germania” score, measures 1-4 431

xxiv
Example 8.35 Arthur Sullivan, “A British Tar Is a Soaring Soul,”
H. M. S. Pinafore, “Price” score, measures 1-4 432

Example 8.36 George Bristow, “Vivandiere Song,” Rip Van Winkle,
measures 1-4 446

Example 8.37 George Bristow, “Vivandiere Song,” Rip Van Winkle,
measures 10-14 447

Example 8.38 Reginald De Koven, “Entrance of Robin Hood,”
Robin Hood, measures 39-43 468

Example 8.39 Reginald De Koven, “Brown October Ale,”
Robin Hood, measures 5-12 471

Example 8.40 Reginald De Koven, “Oh Promise Me,” Robin Hood,
measures 13-17 475

Example 8.41 Reginald De Koven, “Oh Promise Me,” Robin Hood,
measures 34-38 476

Example 8.42 Reginald De Koven, “Armorer’s Song,” Robin Hood,
measures 4-8 478

Example 8.43 Victor Herbert, “The funny side of that” The Serenade,
measures 24-30 490

Example 8.44 Victor Herbert, “I Love Thee, I Adore Thee”
The Serenade, measures 61-66 492

Example 8.45 Victor Herbert, “In Fair Andalusia” The Serenade,
measures 52-57 494

Example 8.46 Victor Herbert, “The Military Ball,” Babes in Toyland,
measures 65-81 499

Example 8.47 Victor Herbert, “If I Were on the Stage,” Mlle. Modiste
measures 115-122 506

xxv
Example 8.48 Victor Herbert, “The Nightingale and the Star,”
Mlle. Modiste, measures 1-10 508

Example 8.49 Victor Herbert, “The Nightingale and the Star,”
Mlle. Modiste, measures 13-28 510

Example 9.1 Transcription of fair-copy arrangement by Frank
Saddler of melodic fragment from Oh, Lady! Lady!! 551

Example 9.2 Transcription of Burthen from “Not You,” measures 1-4. 581

Example 9.3 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“I Wonder Why” from Love o’ Mike and piano
accompaniment from published sheet music 584

Example 9.4 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Bought and Paid For” from The Laughing Husband,
measures 29-32 592

Example 9.5 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s “If I
Find the Girl” from Very Good Eddie (strings only)
measures 9-16 593

Example 9.6 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Wait Till Tomorrow” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 81-88 595

Example 9.7 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“The Sun Shines Brighter” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 39-43 597

Example 9.8 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 102-106 599

Example 9.9 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“If I Find the Girl” from Very Good Eddie,
measures 41-46 600

xxvi
Example 9.10 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Love Is Like a Violin” from The Laughing Husband,
measures 45-49 607

Example 9.11 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Love Is Like a Violin” from The Laughing Husband,
measures 1-7 608

Example 9.12 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“The Crickets Are Calling” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 4-10 610

Example 9.13 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 30-37 611

Example 9.14 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Louis A. Hirsch’s
“I’ll Bet You” from Going Up, measures 1-6 613

Example 9.15 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Louis A. Hirsch’s
“Do It for Me” from Going Up, measures 17-22 615

Example 9.16 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Touch of a Woman’s Hand” from Going Up,
measures 17-22 616

Example 9.17 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Bought and Paid For” from The Laughing Husband,
measures 101-104 619

Example 9.18 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Bought and Paid For” from The Laughing Husband
measures 39-44 638

Example 9.19 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Babes in the Wood” from Very Good Eddie ,
measures 1-7 642

xxvii
Example 9.20 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“The Crickets Are Calling” (first chorus)
from Leave It to Jane, measures 24-29 646

Example 9.21 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“The Crickets Are Calling” (second chorus)
from Leave It to Jane, measures 78-85 648

Example 9.22 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“I Wonder Why” from Love o’ Mike,
measures 3-17 650

Example 9.23 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 22-26 656

Example 9.24 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 102-106 657

Example 9.25 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 42-48 659

Example 9.26 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 118-124 660

Example 9.27 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“A Peach of a Life” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 1-8 664

Example 9.28 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“A Peach of a Life” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 154-161 667

Example 9.29 Frank Saddler, orchestral melos in Jerome Kern’s
“The Sun Shines Brighter” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 1-8 670

Example 9.30 Frank Saddler, incidental music from Jerome Kern’s
“The Crickets Are Calling” from Leave It to Jane,
measures 92-98 677

xxviii
Example 9.31 Frank Saddler, finale of Act I from Jerome Kern’s
Leave It to Jane, measures 148-155 680

Example 10.1 Victor Herbert, “It Never, Never Can Be Love” from
Naughty Marietta, measures 17-21 708

Example 10.2 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“A Peach of a Life,” measures 114-121 709

Example 10.3 Frank Saddler, orchestration of Jerome Kern’s
“Leave It to Jane” with piano reduction,
measures 98-103 713

xxix
List of Tables

Table 1 List of melodies from Klänge aus Amerika, arranged and
orchestrated by Frank E. Saddler, 1891 96

Table 2 A Happy Little Home, schedule of performances 154

Table 3 “Personal Estate” from the appraiser’s report of Frank
Saddler’s estate 272

Table 4 New York theatres that mounted The Bohemian Girl
in the nineteenth century 343

xxx
Note on Musical Examples

With so many examples of orchestral scores from different times periods being used in
this dissertation, I determined that it would aid the overall clarity of the analysis and
discussion to use one format for all of the scores instead of attempting to reflect the
precise name, language, and spelling of each instrument given in every case. Despite the
value in giving the reader this information, this consideration was weighed against the
competing value of facilitating the most efficient and reliable recognition of the standard
orchestral instruments, and the latter concern won out in my mind as the more important
function of the scores in a dissertation about the art of orchestration. The instrumentation
list that I settled upon for this purpose is the same as was used in Carl Simpson’s edition
of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H. M. S. Pinafore, which not only bore the greatest resemblance
to the greatest number of scores found in Part II, but also seemed appropriate given that
work’s central place in the early history of music for the New York stage.
Some of the musical examples have corresponding audio/visual elements that are
available to the reader on the internet through a YouTube channel that has been set up for
the purpose of supplemental listening and viewing. Videos of a concert given on
November 11-12, 2017 by the students of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in
conjunction with Theatre Comique can be accessed through links in Appendix C
whenever the camera icon appears in the text. The specific place in the
performance that corresponds to each musical example is indicated by a time reference
mark.

xxxi
Abstract

Frank Saddler was the first great orchestrator for the Broadway stage. Once referred to by
George Gershwin as “the father of modern arranging,” Saddler was the most sought-after
orchestrator for the commercial theatre in New York from 1909 until his death in 1921.
During that time, it has been documented that he scored more than sixty shows—an
unprecedented accomplishment that has never been repeated—and the anecdotal record
suggests that he may have been involved in creating orchestrations for many more
productions. Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Saddler learned to play several
instruments at a young age and became an active performer and composer in the local
Pittsburgh music scene during the 1880s. After spending four years in Munich studying
composition, orchestration, and conducting, he embarked on a career as a music director
for touring musical shows that lasted several years. Beginning in 1898, he settled in close
proximity to New York City and devoted himself exclusively to a career as a musical
arranger, at first working primarily as a freelance orchestrator for musical publishers. By
1909, he had established himself as one of the top orchestrators for musical productions
on Broadway and would go on to work for many important producers, including Lew
Fields, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., the Shuberts, Elizabeth Marbury, Charles Dillingham, and
George M. Cohan. Beginning in 1912, Saddler scored almost all of Jerome Kern’s music
for the stage, more than twenty shows that together laid the foundation for the musicals of
the so-called Golden Age of Broadway. At the same time, he was a highly regarded
musical arranger, who was entrusted with creating the musical settings and

xxxii
accompaniments for many of the composers he worked with, including Kern. His
orchestration techniques were grounded in traditional European scoring practices while
also being highly innovative, idiosyncratic, and characteristic of American musical
idioms in the Ragtime Era. Along with Kern’s music, Saddler’s orchestrations were a key
element in the transition of the American musical from an imported style based upon
nineteenth-century European comic opera to the form of musical play that became
standard on Broadway in the mid-twentieth century, from Show Boat to Oklahoma!
to My Fair Lady.

1
Introduction

The Broadway stage has been a thriving center of American musical culture in the
popular arts since the eighteenth century. During that time, more than seven thousand
musical shows produced in New York City have used orchestral music, either as
accompaniment for singers, dancers, and a variety of other entertainers or as pure
instrumental music for overtures, entr’actes, and exit music.
1
The musical materials
created by composers, arrangers, orchestrators, and copyists for most Broadway
productions at one time or another included composer and arranger sketches, fair copies
(legible copies in ink) of piano-vocal arrangements, orchestral partituras (orchestral
scores without vocal parts), and instrumental parts for all musical numbers. Producers
often worked hand in hand with music publishers to create the performance materials that
were vital to the success of Broadway musicals. Sheet music and vocal scores were
central to the marketing and promotion of these shows, and the popularity of music by
Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, and George Gershwin could
drive tickets sales as much as the names of marquee performers.
And yet, despite the abundance of musical activity in the theatres of America’s
cultural capital and the enduring appeal of the music written for the New York stage, the
prevailing opinion about our own indigenous musical theatre has been that it was an art
form that was frivolous and ephemeral, and therefore, dispensable. Paradoxically, the

1
Richard C. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 3:651-70.

2
Broadway musical during the first one hundred and fifty years of its existence was one of
the most vibrant and influential forms of entertainment in the United States while also
being an art form considered unworthy of preservation, even by the civic institutions
entrusted to safeguard our cultural heritage. The people who were responsible for the
scores and parts created for Broadway musicals—composers, arrangers, orchestrators,
publishers, and producers—treated these materials, once a show closed, as having less
intrinsic value than the space on the shelf they occupied. Since these manuscripts were
never believed to have any historical value, they were simply considered a costly burden
once it was determined that they no longer had any immediate economic value. As a
result, musical manuscripts of every type, drafted by many now-obscure composers and
arrangers as well as by many luminaries in the field of American popular music, were
routinely destroyed by the very people who created them, paid for them, and knew their
original value. This has been the case for the overwhelming majority of music written for
Broadway productions that first opened before World War II.
For a researcher in the twenty-first century seeking to understand the art of
Broadway show music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an
orchestral phenomenon, this sobering fact presents a seemingly insurmountable
challenge. Despite this widespread destruction of documents, I made the decision that it
would be valuable to attempt to reconstruct a portion of this neglected aspect of the
history of Broadway through some of the manuscripts that have survived. My primary
goal in studying the relatively few manuscripts that were preserved has been to put to
rest, once and for all, the narrow ideology that led to the casual and unethical destruction

3
of these manuscripts in the first place, and with it a significant portion of our cultural
heritage. In this sense, I have written this dissertation, first and foremost, as an emphatic
argument in support of the historical value of these shows, both as cultural artifacts and
as art objects with cultural currency. Throughout my research for and writing of this
dissertation, I was constantly reminded of the destruction of these documents through
their absence; and, as a result, I have felt it necessary to remind the reader periodically of
this historical erasure. My hope is that these observations have been stated with as much
objectivity as possible and thus are devoid of the frustration (nay, outrage) that I confess
to have felt at times when confronted with this appalling state of affairs. It is difficult to
imagine that any of the orchestral scores of operas we now have by Monteverdi, Handel,
Mozart, Verdi, Offenbach, or Sullivan might have been destroyed, and so why should it
not also be hard to reckon with the fact that we have lost countless pages of orchestral
full scores of shows by Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers, Porter, and a multitude of other
important American composers? For those who love the music of the early Broadway
stage and consider it to be the first flowering of one of this country’s great indigenous art
forms, the thought is horrifying.
Given this lacuna, when a trove of musical materials from this period is unearthed
that was previously considered to be lost, it has the power to shape our understanding of
the music in ways that were previously unimaginable. Such was the case with the
astonishing cache of musical-theatre materials that were discovered at a Warner Bros.
warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, in 1982.
2
Approximately seventy crates of musical

2
Tim Page, “Gershwin, Porter and Rodgers Scores Found,” The New York Times, November 20, 1982.

4
scores that were once the property of music publisher T. B. Harms were found in storage
at that time and fortunately much of the music has made its way to the Music Division of
the Library of Congress in the intervening years. Max Dreyfus, the head of the firm, had
become the premier publisher of Broadway show music by 1920, having by then signed
Kern, Gershwin, Hirsch and a host of other theatre composers to long-term contracts.
Since Warner Bros. purchased the Harms Publishing firm in the late 1920s, a relatively
substantial number of Saddler’s scores were found in the collection. While my decision to
concentrate on Saddler’s work for my dissertation stems in part from the significance of
his achievement and his broad influence, it also arises from the relatively large number of
his original manuscripts that have been preserved and are accessible to researchers at the
Library of Congress.
I first became aware of the discovery in 2002, when I met Miles Kreuger at his
research library, The Institute of the American Musical; and my interest in Frank Saddler
began in earnest the following year when I ordered photocopies of his full scores from
Kern’s Very Good Eddie and Leave It to Jane from the Library of Congress (LOC). I
made my first trip to Washington D. C. in 2007, a few weeks before I entered the
Musicology program at USC. Since then, I have been to the Performing Arts Reading
Room in the Music Division of the LOC three other times (in 2008, 2013, and 2015) and
have collected digital images of over 9,500 pages of music during these visits. In
conducting research on orchestral scores from early Broadway shows, I cast as wide a net
as possible during these week-long research trips, including many scores by Reginald
De Koven and Victor Herbert in addition Saddler’s scores of music by Kern, Gershwin,

5
Hirsch, George M. Cohan, and many scores for nineteenth-century productions from the
Tams-Witmark Collection. Needless to say, it would have been impossible to conceive of
a dissertation on the life and work of Frank Saddler (let alone to execute it) without the
existence of the manuscripts that were preserved by Warner Bros. and Tams-Witmark
that are now housed at the LOC.
The form and length of this dissertation were dictated to some extent by my
original decision to pull together everything that was known about Frank Saddler into this
work. Little did I know then that research on the life and career of a man whose name in
2010 did not garner much more than a page of useful search results on Google would
require more than 700 pages for me to feel as though I had done justice to the facts as
they emerged in the historical record. The rationale behind the structure of this research
narrative involved a twofold decision-making process. First, my curiosity about Saddler
as a musician led me to want to find out everything I could about his career and his
training. What began as a brief genealogy search on Ancestry.com evolved into a fruitful
journey back to Pittsburgh and Munich in the late 1880s and early 1890s through
Saddler’s many appearances in The Pittsburg Press and The Pittsburgh Dispatch.
Learning about Saddler’s early career and training helped me to understand how he
developed his mastery of the craft of orchestration over the course of two decades before
he got his first important job with Lew Fields in 1908 scoring The Midnight Sons, a show
that established him as the most sought-after arranger on Broadway. Second, in order to
do the work of evaluating the contribution of Frank Saddler to the art of orchestration on
Broadway, I decided that I would need to situate his work within a tradition of arranging

6
for the popular theatre in New York. But since there was no existing scholarship on the
subject of Broadway theatre orchestration in the nineteenth century, I concluded that I
would do this work myself. The tantalizing Finding Aid for the Tams-Witmark
Collection at the Library of Congress gave me enough of a lead to move ahead with this
plan in hopes that a narrative would emerge about orchestration practices in New York
theatres during the nineteenth century from these materials. Once again, what I originally
imagined would be a synopsis of instrumentation leading to some conjecture about pit-
orchestra size evolved into a much more substantial survey about orchestral arranging
than I could have envisioned at the outset. Ultimately, this study proved to be
illuminating in terms of the intersection between popular music and classical music in
Broadway musicals, particularly in discussing Saddler’s superb craftsmanship and
modernist aesthetic as being products of his immersion in European musical traditions
during the early part of his career.
At one point in the process of writing Chapter 9 on Saddler’s arranging and
orchestration practices, it occurred to me that I could have instead focused the entire
project more narrowly on the special collaborative relationship between Saddler and
Kern. From an historical perspective, this could have allowed me to present Saddler’s
work in a more efficient and impactful context and to delve deeper into a synergistic
creative dynamic that holds intense interest for me and could well be the most compelling
discovery to emerge out of this work. In the end, though, it was far more gratifying not to
rely upon Kern’s enduring celebrity to grant Saddler contemporary relevance, but instead
to allow his own life and work to make the case for him to be reconsidered as one of the

7
key figures in the history of Broadway in his own right. Originally, I had thought of this
project as being in the tradition of the kleinmeister (“little master”) dissertations that were
much in vogue in musicology several decades ago. But, as with the monumental studies
of Antoine Busnois and Alexander Agricola, the Burgundian chanson composers whose
careers flourished in Italy during the early Renaissance, I suspect their authors arrived at
the same conclusion that I did at the end of the dissertation process: through the lens of
intensive research and analysis these figures appear larger than life; and the only thing
that could be considered “little” about their careers is our perspective on them.
Part of the reason why Frank Saddler is so little-known today is that he was
hardly known by the public in his lifetime. The words “Orchestrations by Frank Saddler”
appeared only inconsistently in small type in theatre programs. The system that kept him
steadily employed for at least thirteen years scoring musical-theatre productions on
Broadway was designed to prioritize commercial promotion and profits over fair credit
and compensation. Early in his career, Jerome Kern was the frequent victim of producer
Charles Frohman’s decision to subsume his songs into the score of another composer
without credit. This might partly explain why Kern allowed Saddler’s name to be absent
from the theatre programs of so many of his shows. Kern was a thoroughgoing
professional and understood and accepted the rules of the game even when he did not
completely agree with them. However, Kern’s complacency toward his friend’s relative
obscurity may have turned into regret upon Saddler’s death, which would explain the
paean that Kern gave in the days following to the arranger’s friend Newton Fuessle:

8
Frank Saddler was far more than an orchestrator or arranger. He was one
of the geniuses of the century. His death is a tragedy. No one had the
routine of the orchestra as greatly at his command as Saddler.
3

Perhaps Kern was inclined to be this effusive in his public testimony because he wanted
somehow to rectify the injustice of Saddler being totally unknown, while his labors out of
the spotlight had enhanced the composer’s own career and those of so many of his
colleagues. No one benefited more from Saddler’s genius and no one knew the extent of
his mastery better than Kern.
In truth, the musical collaboration of Saddler and Kern, which has assumed its
proper place as the centerpiece of my discussion of Saddler’s work, remains an
unfinished study with many unanswered questions. I recognize that this line of inquiry,
which is potentially iconoclastic, as it may disturb our assumptions about the authorship
of Kern’s music, is based on a limited sample and therefore is not presented as the
definitive account of Kern’s compositional method. For this reason, I readily
acknowledge that any assessments that I make while evaluating these primary sources are
provisional, and new materials or information that may surface could alter the
conclusions I have drawn. Even though the materials that have surfaced can only
represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of sample size, I maintain that the caveats that
must arise should not overwhelm any rational inclination to draw general conclusions
from such a limited body of evidence. For, even the scientific community, with its deeply
ingrained tradition of rigor and skepticism, has found it reasonable to extrapolate
information about conditions on the Moon from a few rocks retrieved from our closest

3
Newton Fuessle, “Broadway’s King of Counterpoint,” The Outlook (April 20, 1921), 630-31.

9
neighbor in outer space. By the same token, though we must continue to temper our
conclusions with the knowledge that the great majority of musical scores from the early
Broadway period have not survived, we should proceed both carefully and boldly into
uncharted territory with the hope that in the future provisional answers will be clarified,
enhanced, modified, or, if necessary, replaced by new conclusions drawn from a more
exhaustive study using continually improving methodology. And, with any luck, more
discoveries of original documents.

10
PART I

LIFE AND CAREER

Chapter 1

Family History and Childhood

From its earliest days as a colonial territory, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
demanded that its citizens share the responsibility for defending themselves militarily.
The laws of the Duke of York, requiring every Pennsylvania male between the ages of 16
and 60 to be constantly prepared for armed conflict, were imposed by 1676 and were in
effect through the American Revolution.
1
As a result, every young adult male born within
the Commonwealth’s boundaries was obligated to own a “Good Serviceable Gun” and a
cache of other weapons and tools of war and to know how to use them. This state of
affairs was a constant in Pennsylvania’s early history despite the avowed pacifist
tendencies of the Commonwealth’s founder, William Penn, who cultivated a vision of the
place as a peaceful sanctuary that would embrace the practical implementation of
Christian doctrine in everyday life.
Although Isaac Saddler (Frank Saddler’s great-great-grandfather) was born in

1
Samuel J. Newland, The Pennsylvania Militia: Defending the Commonwealth and the Nation: 1669-1870
(Annville, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, 2002), 3.

11
1720, during a brief respite from armed hostilities that followed Queen Anne’s War, he
would come of age at a time of unrest, just as Lancaster County—a border region of
Pennsylvania—was being invaded by a group of Marylanders claiming the land for their
colony.
2
Later, in 1739, the War of Jenkin’s Ear would galvanize colonists in the
Commonwealth to defend British trade interests from Spanish incursions. When France
joined the war against England and the conflict evolved into what would be known as
King George’s War, Pennsylvania supported the King with a war declaration of its own.
Saddler had already begun his career as a young volunteer soldier fully twenty years
before Pennsylvania, largely through the creative political machinations of Benjamin
Franklin, fended off the Quaker resistance to war readiness within the government and
developed its own official militia. And so, when the Articles of Association were drafted
to establish Pennsylvania’s own fighting force in 1756, Captain Isaac Saddler was
experienced and respected enough to become one of eight commanders to lead the
Commonwealth’s earliest militia formations out of York township.
3

Captain Saddler married in York County around the time the Pennsylvania
Associators were formally established, and his son, Isaac, was born shortly thereafter in
1760. Military service was so ingrained in the Saddler family’s way of life that when the
Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, Isaac, Jr., enlisted as a private in Stephen
Stephenson’s company at the age of fifteen. His voluntary enlistment in September
preceded by three months a rule passed by the Pennsylvania General Assembly that

2
Ibid., 18.
3
Application for membership to the Pennsylvania Society of the Sons of the American Revolution by
Edward Ivanhoe Scott, June 25, 1924.

12
required the establishment of a registry for “every Male white person, capable of bearing
Arms, between the age of sixteen and Fifty years.”
4
In his one-year term, he was
stationed first in the barracks at York for three months and then in Trenton, during which
time New York City fell and British advances in New Jersey had demoralized the
American troops to the point that voluntary reenlistment was a major concern among
leadership.
5
Although he was honorably discharged and back at home when Washington
made his famous crossing of the Delaware just prior to the Battle of Trenton in December
of 1776, Isaac would join the army again in September of 1777 in a wave of reenlistment
following several encouraging American victories. His battalion assembled in Carlisle,
west of Harrisburg, but then was stationed in York County, perhaps as reinforcements to
protect the Continental Congress that had been moved to Yorktown to evade the
advancing British army.
6
By October, Saddler was commissioned to the rank of Major,
elected by his battalion after the resignation of his commander, Major Mull.
7

After the war, Major Isaac Saddler returned to York County, where he married
Jane Hunt and resided with her until 1794, whereupon he moved his family to
Westmoreland County just east of Pittsburgh. In 1807, two years after a fire destroyed the
family house, Isaac P. Saddler was born in North Huntingdon Township, the youngest of

4
Newland, The Pennsylvania Militia, 116.
5
Application for the Pennsylvania Society of the Sons of the American Revolution for Thomas Hoffman
Louis, July 6, 1909. David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), 270.
6
SAR application for Thomas Hoffman Louis. Paul E. Doutrich, “York County,” Beyond Philadelphia,
edited by John B. Franz and William Pencak (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1998), 96.
7
Application for pension under the Pension Act of 1832 by Isaac Sadler.

13

Figure 1.1, Isaac Saddler, Jr. and family in the 1810 Census (seventh from top on left).

five children see Figure 1.1).
8
By the age of twenty-two, Isaac (the third, Frank Saddler’s
grandfather) was residing in Allegheny Township with his wife Sarah Caroline and two
children, Jane and John. Isaac P. Saddler’s stated occupation was “salt manufacturer,”
likely indicating that he worked for the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company in
nearby Natrona, a town located 25 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh that was
built to serve the local mine.
9
Salt, as well as sodium carbonate, which is derived from
sodium chloride and is useful in the production of glass, was a booming industry in
Pennsylvania at the time and Saddler surely found steady employment in the mineral-rich
territory around Pittsburgh. He would welcome this stability, since his family had grown
to include eight children by 1850. Partly as a result of the United States becoming a
leading exporter of beef in the middle of the nineteenth century, salt production rose to

8
The 1810 census for Isaac Saddler Jr.’s family shows—reading left to right—that there was one male
under 10, one male aged 16 to 25, one male over 45, two females under 10, one female aged 16 to 25, and
one female over the age of 45. U. S. Census Bureau, 1810 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing
Office). Viewed at http://www.ancestry.com/ (accessed on August 5, 2017).
9
“Natron” is the traditional common name of sodium carbonate. Robert P. Multhauf, Neptune’s Gift: A
History of Common Salt (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 206.

14
meet the demand for meat packing and preservation; and, just as the Unites States would
surpass Great Britain as the leading salt-producing nation in the world by 1900, by 1880
Pennsylvania would outpace New York as the leading salt-producing state in the nation.
10

When E. L. Drake successfully drilled for oil in Titusville in 1859, one hundred
miles north of Pittsburgh, the impact of his discovery was felt throughout the region,
giving western Pennsylvania a new mineral-based industry that would eclipse any its
inhabitants had previously known. So, it was natural for John Wesley Saddler (Frank
Saddler’s father), who was raised in the vicinity of the Natrona salt mines, to seek
employment in the oil fields and refineries that were springing up around Oil Creek. In
1852, he married Hannah Kipp, the daughter of a shoemaker whom he had known
growing up in Allegheny Township. Having grown up with three siblings in a household
next door to her aunt Elizabeth, who had eight children, Hannah was thoroughly
accustomed to living with a large family when she started her own at the age of eighteen.
Within a few years, the young couple had two boys, Cassius and Charles, as the oil
industry began its rapid development in 1860. Following new opportunities for work in
the oil fields, John decided to move the young family from Tarentum, three miles from
his hometown Natrona along the Allegheny River, to Cornplanter Township, which was
established just ten miles from Drake’s well.
11
Among its first 1,000 residents, the
Saddlers were early arrivals in a population explosion in the boomtowns of Venango

10
Ibid., 241, 273.
11
Cornplanter Township was named for the land’s original owner, a chief in the Seneca tribe. The land had
been presented to him by Congress as a reward for service to the colonies during the Revolution, but was
later sold for a pittance as a result of drunken folly. Andrew Cone and Walter R. Johns, Petrolia: A Brief
History of the Petroleum Region, Its Development, Growth, Resources, Etc. From 1859 to 1869 (New
York: Appleton and Company, 1870), 562-63.

15
County that caused the nascent townships of Cornplanter, Cherrytree, Oil Creek, and
Pithole to grow tenfold in the decade from 1860 to 1870.
12
The growth of the region
followed a course that could be traced from town to town, through boom and bust.
Commencing at Titusville in 1859, the tide of development swept over the
valley of Oil Creek, and along the Allegheny River, above and below Oil
City, for a considerable distance. Cherry Run, in 1864, furnished the first
subsequent excitement. Then came Pithole Creek. Bennehoff and Pioneer
Run, the Woods and Stevenson farms, on Oil Creek, near Petroleum
Centre, came, in succession, in 1865 and 1866. Tidiout, or rather Dennis
Run and Triumph Hill, was a promising candidate for public favor in
1867, and in the latter part of the same year, Shamburgh, on Upper Cherry
Run, made its brilliant debut.
13

Being at the mercy of the fortunes of the industry, the Saddler family, which by the end
of the decade would be living in Limestone Township near Tidiout, was very likely
following the oil farms as they went in and out of business.
14
And so, when Frank Saddler
was born on September 9, 1864, we can surmise that the family was probably still in
Cornplanter at the time, since most of the oil farms in the vicinity of Tidiout would not
spring up for another few years.
15
It is possible that his father was called to serve in the
Civil War around the time of Frank’s birth, since war records indicate a John Sadler (or
Saddler) was a member of the 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry.
16
The alternate spellings of the

12
Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), 146.
13
Cone and Johns, Petrolia, 77.
14
According to the 1870 census, inhabitants of Limestone used the post office at Tidiout.
15
U. S. Census Bureau, 1870 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office). Viewed at
http://www.ancestry.com/ (accessed on August 5, 2017).
16
Of the seventeen John Sadlers (or Saddlers), there were none with W as a middle initial, and only two
with no initial. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Family Search website,
https://familysearch. org/learn/wiki/en/United_States_Civil_War_ Soldiers_Index_(FamilySearch_
Historical_Records) (accessed February 24, 2014).

16

Figure 1.2a, John W. Saddler and family in the 1870 Census (Frank age 5).

17

Figure 1.2b, John W. Saddler and family in the 1870 Census (Frank age 5).

family surname occurred in census lists for Major Isaac Saddler going back to 1810, a
further indication that the John Sadler from Pennsylvania in the United States Civil War
Soldiers Index was indeed Frank’s father. If so, it should come as no surprise that John
would enlist in the nation’s most protracted and costly conflict, given his family’s
distinguished military heritage.
Whether or not his father was involved in the war, Frank’s arrival came at a time
of national strife and turmoil that would compound his family’s insecurity at the mercy of
the unstable oil economy. In the years following the cessation of hostilities, the family
would migrate to Limestone Township, nestled along the Allegheny River. This
Pennsylvania hamlet was not one of the temporary shanty towns that emerged for the sole
purpose of housing the influx of migrant workers that labored on the oil farms.
Established in 1829, it was formed to serve yet another regional industry: lumber.
17
In

17
J. S. Schenck, ed., The History of Warren County Pennsylvania with Illustrations and Biographical

18
fact, early settlers who had staked their claims as many as twenty years before prospered
from the healthy forest that was abundantly watered by the multitude of springs and
tributaries that ran through the area to join the Allegheny. And when the timber was
completely harvested, residents set up large farms on the cleared land. In 1854, a
communal organization with religious underpinnings called the Harmony Society
purchased a large swath of land in Limestone; and when the land was soon discovered to
yield an abundance of oil, it was surely considered to be a stroke of divine providence.
The group soon established the Economy Oil Company to manage the business of
production, labor, and administration. At its peak, the commune oversaw the output of
seventy-five wells, which garnered them vast wealth that supported the organization long
after the drilling had ceased. The Saddler family arrived in Limestone sometime before
1870, and both John and his son Cassius sought employment with the local company.
John’s stated occupation in 1860 was “oil miner,” and in 1870 both he and his oldest son,
who was now sixteen years of age, referred to their line of work as “Engineer,” which we
may assume refers to the same thing. Even ten years later, in 1880, after moving the
family to Verona on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, John called himself an “oil well driller,”
even though his move to a distant suburb of the city coincided with a severe downturn of
the oil industry in western Pennsylvania.
Not much is known about Frank Saddler’s early childhood. His first eight years of
life, spent within the bucolic landscapes of northwest Pennsylvania, left a lasting
impression on him. Despite the ravages of the oil industry—exemplified by large swaths

Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason & Co., 1887), 493-98.

19
of deforested countryside polluted by oil derricks—the natural beauty of the untouched
portions of his surroundings in Limestone gave him an abiding appreciation for rural life.
At the height of his career, in 1916, Frank would purchase property in Brewster, a small
farming enclave in Putnam County, New York, and this house would become his
permanent residence during the last five years of his life, as he increasingly became a
prisoner of his own success. The little township of Limestone afforded him a decent
childhood education in one of several school houses in the area. The Harmony Society
clearly valued education, since by 1887 there were six schools established to
accommodate one hundred children. On weekends, the same buildings were used for
Sunday school and religious services by the Evangelical Association. For adults and
children alike, religious education was one of the chief preoccupations of the town’s
inhabitants, apart from the business of oil, which was the singular means of economic
survival for the commune. Founded by George Rapp of Württemburg, Germany, the
Harmony Society was dedicated to the spiritual goals of evangelical Christianity while
manifesting the social and economic mores of utopian socialism. As a result, its members
were compelled to relinquish all individual property and gain in exchange for full
participation in the collective. According to The History of Warren County, people who
joined the Society were not typical speculators in the oil economy of western
Pennsylvania: “The basis of their association in its inception was a deep and earnest
conviction of the necessity of a purer life, and the exercise of practical and personal piety,
by a walk and a conversation personally and socially in accordance with their

20
understanding of the Scriptures.”
18
Frank’s parents must have joined the Society for
spiritual as well as financial reasons, since there were hundreds of oil farms in the region
that would have appreciated his father’s skill and experience as a drilling engineer. John
may have developed his religious inclination from his father, who was sometimes
referred to as Reverend Isaac P. Saddler.
19
Despite the fact that the family had moved
away from Limestone by 1880, the experience of living in a commune with its idealistic
and egalitarian social order must have made an indelible impression on Frank, since at
the end of his life he left behind a lengthy, rambling manifesto detailing plans for a
community in the utopian socialist mode.
20

It is unclear exactly why the Saddler family left Limestone, but it was probably a
result of the oil supply in the area becoming exhausted and the land being converted to
agricultural farms. Disenchantment with the Harmony Society may have been another
factor, since the communal wealth of the organization supported some of its members
long after their wells had stopped producing crude. Other former Limestone residents
brought lawsuits against the Society once they left the association with the aim of
recovering personal property and money they had surrendered to the commune when they
joined.
21
They also sought financial reparations for economic benefits that the Society
accrued as a result of their labor. Whatever the cause, in 1872 the Saddlers resettled in
Verona, another village established around that time along the Allegheny River to serve

18
Schenck, The History of Warren County, 498.
19
SAR applications for Edward Ivanhoe Scott and Thomas Hoffman Louis.
20
Frank Saddler’s writings can be found in the Jerome Kern Collection at the Library of Congress in a box
labeled: “Jerome Kern Collection Additions: Frank Saddler materials.”
21
Schenck, The History of Warren County, 496.

21
the railroad between Pittsburgh and Warren.
When they returned from their twelve-year stay in the oil-producing regions to the
north, John and Hannah Saddler picked a town that was ten miles closer to Pittsburgh
than Tarentum, where the family started out. The land in the vicinity of Verona was
originally selected by officials of the Allegheny Valley Railway Company to serve as its
industrial rail yards on account of the large swath of level ground at the mouth of nearby
Plum Creek.
22
The borough was incorporated in 1871, just one year before the Saddlers’
arrival, by which time the population had grown to 1,500, its citizens predominantly
laborers who worked in the rail yards, the engine house, the machine shop, or the
impressive 44-stall roundhouse that was built in 1876. John Saddler’s engineering skills,
acquired from years working with oil derricks, would have made him a valued employee
at any one of the newly established steel shops in the area. Most of his neighbors either
worked in and around the rail yards or in the local factory run by the Agnew Glass
Company, which manufactured bottles and jars that were shipped all over the country.
Only one other resident of Verona’s Second Ward claimed to work in the oil industry,
suggesting this may have been more a past occupation than a present one.
23
At the same
time, Saddler might have commuted to work on the Allegheny Valley Railway, which by
1858 had been extended north to Oil City and beyond. The railroad not only served as the
primary engine of the local economy, it was the only mode of transport for the oil that
was pumped out of the ground in the region surrounding Oil City during the boom. The

22
Gary Rogers and the Verona Historical Society, All Aboard!: A Historical Tour of Verona, PA (Verona,
PA: Rogers and DeTurck, 2013), 5-7.
23
U. S. Census Bureau, 1880: Heads of Families (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office).
http://www.ancestry.com/ (accessed on April 17, 2014).

22
original name of the company—Pittsburgh, Kittanning & Warren Railroad Company—
projected the route of the railroad for 200 miles along the Allegheny River more than
twenty years before the oil industry experienced its extraordinary expansion in the 1860s.
And only after oil became a major industry in the region did the railroad company itself
become profitable for the first time.
In the 1870s, Verona was the last stop for several of the passenger trains on the
Allegheny Valley Railroad, bringing commuters, shoppers, and travelers to and from
Pittsburgh and points in between. Hulton Station, named after Jonathan Hulton, who
owned the property on which it was built, featured a turntable that sent 26 trains daily
back to the city. It also housed the last train of the night—known locally as the “Owl”—
which arrived at 12:30 a.m. and spent the night on the table before returning at six the
next morning.
24
Located in Verona’s Second Ward, which comprised the portion of the
borough that was north of Plum Creek and nestled beneath an eastward bend in the river,
the station was the first of five eventually built in the area. During the first eight years the
Saddlers lived in Verona, there was no post office in the town and residents had to use
one that was three miles away in Sandy Creek.
The incorporation of the borough of Verona, which occurred on May 10, 1871,
also made provisions for the establishment of a public school and an elected school board
with six members. The first school building in Verona was built in 1868 on College
Avenue, perhaps an indication of the aspirations school officials hoped to instill in the

24
Robert H. Heill, “1871-1881: Early Days of Oakmont,” Let Me Tell You a Story: An Oral History of
Oakmont, Pennsylvania (Oakmont, PA: Oakmont Historical Society, 2012), 85-7.

23

Figure 1.3, Map of Verona & Oakmont (1898) by T. M. Fowler and James B. Moyer.

24
town’s youth. When the borough incorporated, the school was renamed Second Ward
School, and two years later the First Ward School was built to serve the student
population in that section of the borough. Frank Saddler lived here from the time he was
eight years old until he was twenty, leaving his education during this crucial period in his
intellectual development to a school district that had only been in existence one year prior
to his arrival. Nonetheless, judging from the sophisticated use of language in his
correspondence years later, as well as the fine development of his musical sensibilities
during that time, the Verona school system must have served him well.
Getting to and from school, Frank would have only needed to walk two or three
blocks alongside the horse-drawn carriages that traveled the unpaved Fifth Avenue, the
main residential thoroughfare in town at that time, apart from the large street that
hemmed the railroad tracks (see Figure 1.3).
25
As the Allegheny River dominated
Verona’s geography, town planners shrewdly laid out the streets in the Second Ward so
that the large avenues ran parallel to the course of the waterway. The Second Ward
School was housed in a square, two-story brick building with a large wooden belfry that
stood prominently on the south side of town near Plum Creek, which peeled off the river
and ran perpendicular to it, dividing the borough’s two districts (see Figure 1.4).
26
With
only two large rooms, the school provided elementary education to students through sixth
grade. Students seeking advanced instruction would be able to attend the Verona
Academy, which some parents helped to establish. It is likely that Frank continued his

25
T. M. Fowler, Verona & Oakmont, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, 1898, map (T. M. Fowler and James
B. Moyer).
26
Oakmont Historical Society, photograph, http://www.oakmonthistoricalsociety.org/photos.html (accessed
on April 18, 2014)

25

Figure 1.4, Second Ward School, Verona, Pennsylvania.

formal education after graduating from the Second Ward School (in addition to receiving
music lessons), given the trajectory of his early career as a composer, arranger, and
instrumentalist, which would emerge fifteen years later in Pittsburgh.

26
Being the youngest of three boys, Frank had ample opportunity while growing up
to learn from his brothers, particularly as he began to consider taking an occupation for
himself. The oldest, Cassius, was, like his father, a manual laborer, who found
employment in the iron works around the rail yards, forging tools.
27
But Frank seemed to
have followed more closely in the footsteps of his brother Charles. At fifteen, Frank had a
newspaper route, delivering either the Pittsburgh Dispatch or the Evening Pittsburg
Penny Press.
28
Five years later, he was working as a clerk in a retail music store owned
by George Kappel in Pittsburgh. His brother Charles had worked for George Kappel
behind the counter and as a regional traveling salesman from the time he purchased the
retail store in 1879; and with Frank developing his talent for playing multiple
instruments, it was natural for him also to find work there.
For twenty years, George Kappel was one of Pittsburgh’s most prominent
merchants. His music stores, which sold a wide range of musical instruments—from
pianos and organs to violins, trumpets, and drums—as well as high-end music boxes,
sheet music, and “trimmings for all instruments,” was located at 77-79 5th Avenue, in the
heart of the downtown commercial district.
29
Kappel revealed his enterprising nature
early in life, working for a company that made tin boxes for the Union Army in 1862 at
the age of thirteen.
30
Two years later, he got a job as an errand boy at C. C. Meller’s
music store and worked his way up to become a salesman, bookkeeper, and eventually

27
U. S. Census Bureau, 1880: Heads of Families (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office).
http://www.ancestry.com/ (accessed on April 17, 2014).
28
Ibid.
29
City Directory Pittsburgh and Allegheny, 1881, advertisement (Pittsburgh, PA: J. F. Diffenbacher Co.,
1881); The Folio, advertisement (December, 1881), 49.
30
History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Vol. II (Chicago, IL: A. Warner and Co., 1889), 698.

27
the proprietor of its sheet music and small instruments section, in 1879. He procured his
own storefront on Smithfield Avenue soon after, and another shop further east on 5th
Avenue near Jumonville Street. Of the former, Ben Janssen of Music Trade Review wrote
in 1894: “What a fine store he has, the best building in the city, and he should certainly
do as well as anyone.”
31
However, in the same report, Janssen also revealed signs of the
music dealer’s struggle to stay afloat, quoting Kappel’s comments about the business of
selling pianos: “Business with me is slow in the piano line, very slow, Janssen. I don’t
know why. I try everything, but it’s slow for all that. Our sheet music trade is picking up,
also our instrument department, but pianos don’t seem to move.”
32
By the end of the
decade, Kappel’s good fortune had run out, and his business dissolved into an
unmanageable abundance of debt that forced him to relinquish his assets.
33
He remained
well-respected in the community despite his financial adversity, perhaps due to the
frequency with which he appeared over the years as a benefactor in local music-related
fundraising projects and charities.
Working for Kappel in Pittsburgh required a forty-five-minute train ride on the
Allegheny Valley Railway from Hulton Station in Verona to Union Station on the days

31
Music Trade Review (November 17, 1894), 9.
32
Ibid., 9.
33
Kappel is named in a news item in the February 6, 1897 issue of Music Trade Review: “The music store
of George Kappel, on Smithfield Street, Pittsburg, Pa., (sic.) been closed by the sheriff on executions for
$44,000 issued by his mother, who was his security for a large amount.” Music Trade Review (Vol. XXIV,
No. 6), 12. His name appears again in a news report the following year: “Dorothea J. Kappel, wife of
George Kappel, a Smithfield street music dealer has made an assignment to W. I. Craig … There were $45
worth of revenue stamps placed on the deed of assignment. This would indicate that $45,000 worth of real
estate is included in the assignment, as the law requires $1 worth of stamps for each $1,000 worth of real
estate … The real estate assigned is described as consisting of two lots on 5th avenue and Jumonville
Street, Fourteenth ward, one lot on Penn avenue, and two lots at Edgewood, the home of Mr. and Mrs.
Kappel.” Music Trade Review (December 31, 1898), 17.

28

Figure 1.5, Advertisement for George Kappel’s music store (right column) in Folio,
October, 1881.

29
Charles went into the city to work.
34
This fact may provide the best explanation as to why
the family decided upon Verona as the right location to resettle in 1872, as the boys were
getting old enough to work: it was midway between Oil City and Pittsburgh on the AVR,
allowing for an easy commute on the train for both John and Charles (and eventually
Frank), while Cassius could find work in the railroad yards or the metal works near
home. Since Charles was such a strong early influence on Frank, his premature death in
1885 at the age of 29 was surely an enormous blow to him personally (as it must have
been to the entire family), particularly as the brothers all lived in their parent’s home in
Verona. And yet, the event may have also precipitated Frank’s hiring at Kappel’s music
store, which occurred around the same time.
35
Charles had been employed with Kappel
since Frank was sixteen, and through this job he exposed his younger brother to the
nascent classical concert music scene in Pittsburgh, where he would establish his career
over the next several years.

34
City Directory Pittsburgh and Allegheny, 1888 (Pittsburgh, PA: J. F. Diffenbacher Co., 1888), 582.
35
City Directory Pittsburgh and Allegheny, 1885 (Pittsburgh, PA: J. F. Diffenbacher Co., 1885), 771.

30
Chapter 2

Musical Activities in Pittsburgh

Musical life in Pittsburgh during the 1880s was almost exclusively a local phenomenon.
Although newspapers often reported on musicians of international fame, such as Josef
Hofmann and Adelina Patti, artists of that caliber rarely performed there.
1
As if to
demonstrate the fact, once a journalist devoted an entire column to the extravagant
lifestyle and lavish boudoir of the Spanish-born diva on the occasion of her “passing
through” the Iron City, since she did not perform there that season, but rather was laying
over in transit between engagements in Baltimore and Cincinnati.
2
This dearth of touring
celebrity artists appearing in Pittsburgh was due in part to the fact that the city lacked a
proper recital hall. In February, 1888, The Pittsburg Press reported that the deficiency
was even causing local events to be cancelled.
Prof. Whiting states that Pittsburg will have no May music festival this
year. Why? For the same reason that causes traveling organizations to
omit this city from their routes. There is no suitable place in which to have
a musical entertainment of any magnitude. The music festivals have all
been conducted at a financial loss to them.
3

1
In his thorough history of music in Pittsburgh, Edward Gladstone Baynham wrote that during the 1870s
many artists of international reputation gave concerts in Pittsburgh: “Among the visitors were John H.
Wilcox in a series of organ recitals, Christina Nilsson and Clara Louise Kellogg, Rubenstein, and
Wieniawski, Hans von Bülow, Ole Bull and Patti.” Nevertheless, he conceded that “both in variety and
volume more was coming from local musicians than visitors.” Edward Gladstone Baynham, A History of
Pittsburgh Music, 1758-1958 (unpublished manuscript, 1970), 144.
2
On that occasion she was thrown violently to the floor of her cabin as a result of the train’s brakes failing
during a switch, causing a collision with the Cincinnati Express. Nonetheless, Patti did return to perform in
Pittsburgh the following season much to the delight of the city’s cultural elite. The Pittsburg Press,
December 9, 1886.
3
The Pittsburg Press, February 23, 1888.

31
In addition, Pittsburgh was still developing an audience for classical music among its
social elite, which was dedicated more to theatrical entertainments. As a result, when the
Boston Symphony Orchestra traveled to Pittsburgh to perform in 1887, the event was
observed to be “the all-absorbing topic in musical circles.”
4
And yet, the columnist of
The Pittsburg Press also lamented that “the sale of reserved seats has been fair, but not as
large as it should be considering the reputation of the orchestra and the excellent program
to be presented.”
5
The appearance of the BSO in Pittsburgh was a point of pride for the
cultural leaders of the city, who were eager to show that inhabitants of the industrial
metropolis were capable of appreciating great symphonic music, along with the artistry
and technique of the oldest orchestra in the country. But when advance tickets to the
concert were not selling well, the Press columnist expressed his consternation.
Now the Boston symphony orchestra should have a full house, and I have
no doubt they will on Saturday night after they have been heard once, but
two-thirds of the seats in the hall ought to have been taken before this.
Why I know people who are coming from Beaver, Rochester,
McKeesport, and other places to hear them, yet here are plenty of people
who pretend to appreciate good music who won’t go three squares. It’s a
shame, but it’s true. People make great pretensions to be lovers of music,
attend performances like the Patti concert, where they can make a show,
yet when anything like this orchestra comes, they hold back until the last
and probably don’t go at all. No wonder that people in other places speak
in a sneering way and say such things can’t be appreciated by iron and gas
Pittsburgers.
6

In appealing to people’s sense of cultural pride as a way of cajoling them to buy tickets,

4
The Pittsburg Press, April 21, 1887.
5
For several years, the paper used this spelling for “Pittsburg,” without an “h” at the end of the city’s name.
Nonetheless, this spelling will only be used in this dissertation when referring to the paper or in quotation
from its text.
6
Ibid.

32
this journalist was probably responding not only to his own personal sense of
disappointment at the lack of advance sales for such an important event in Pittsburgh’s
cultural life, but also to pressure from the organizers of the event, who were getting
nervous about losing their investment if the concert was not well attended.
7

Social and political leaders in Pittsburgh in the mid-nineteenth century had
increasingly become cognizant of how the city’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse
was giving outsiders the impression that its citizens lacked cultural sophistication. To
dispel this reputation, Pittsburgh natives embraced the Lyceum movement, which arose
in the Northeast and spread west primarily as lecture circuits created to edify local
denizens and to lift the quality of public discourse.
8
In 1870, the movement precipitated
the construction of Pittsburgh’s Mercantile Library Hall, a public building that included a
10,000-volume library and a 1,500-seat auditorium that could serve as a concert hall.
9

Early programs offered performances by local musical organizations such as the
Pittsburgh Cantata Society and the Mozart Club, however within a year the experiment
gave way to the city’s demand for theatre and was leased to a managing company that
planned to present light opera. Trading on its reputation as an erudite venue, the new
managers successfully established Library Hall as a theatre where Pittsburgh theatregoers
could enjoy imported European opéra bouffe presented by touring theatrical
organizations.

7
Baynham, A History of Pittsburgh Music, 158-59.
8
Angela Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State University Press, 2005).
9
Lynne Conner, Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theatre (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2007), 45.

33
Figure 2.1, Mercantile Library Hall (circa 1870), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The cultural capital accrued by the sophisticated programming at Library Hall
was further enhanced by the fact that the other theatres in town served the growing
middle class and their decidedly middlebrow appetite for melodrama and variety
entertainment. For example, Pittsburgh’s theatrical entertainment for the week of January
19, 1885, featured The Boston Ideal Opera Company—arguably the finest theatrical
organization in the country—at Library Hall in a formidable program of light opera that
included Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo (Monday), Gaston Serpette’s Fanchonette
(Tuesday and Saturday matinee), William Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl
(Wednesday matinee), Charles Lecocq’s Giroflé-Girofla (Thursday), Friedrich von

34
Flowtow’s Martha (Friday), and Edmond Audran’s La Mascotte (Saturday evening).
10

By contrast, the other theatres in the city were dedicated to satisfying the tastes of the
merchant and working classes, offering “combinations” of vaudeville entertainers and
dramatic miniatures (later these were standardized in vaudeville programming and came
to be known as olios). Combination companies were on the rise in the 1880s, capitalizing
on the expendable income and aesthetic predilections of an emerging class of the
American public that P. T. Barnum had notoriously targeted only a few decades earlier.
During the same week that the Boston Ideals were appearing at Library Hall, one of
Pittsburgh’s most dynamic managers, Harry Williams, presented “17 of the Brightest
Vaudeville Stars, and the new comedy, AN IRISH STEW” at the Academy of Music.
11

The Sixth Street Museum offered a program that included the “three-legged man, turtle
boy, and the New York Comedy Co.,” headlined by Prof. Johnson, Mesmerist. At the
same time, Harris’ Mammoth Museum featured an Irish melodrama The Colleen Bawn in
the early part of the week and Augustin Daly’s Leah, the Forsaken for the weekend. As
an added attraction, the proprietor sought to expand his box office by including Zuma, the
Floating Mystery to his show, possibly an indication of the waning popularity of
melodrama in the wake of the rising tide of vaudeville on America’s theatrical landscape
of the 1880s.
12

The conversion of Library Hall from a concert hall to a theatre was not, as it may

10
The Evening Penny Press, Pittsburgh, PA, January 14, 1885.
11
Connor, Pittsburgh in Stages, 53-4.
12
Connor, Pittsburgh in Stages, 48.

35
be assumed, a reflection upon the sophistication or enthusiasm of Pittsburgh’s concert-
going public. Rather, as theatrical entertainments dominated Pittsburgh’s culture of
amusements for decades after the Civil War, it was more likely a practical result of the
regularity with which touring theatrical troupes could be booked into a 1,500-seat venue
at that time as compared with local and imported concert-music ensembles. The lower-
than-expected ticket reservations for the concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra
could be similarly deceptive as an indicator of Pittsburgh’s cultural maturity. Instead,
they simply demonstrated that producing concerts in an uncomfortable, acoustically
inferior hall was bound to be a deterrent to audiences, irrespective of the music’s quality.
The swift repurposing of Library Hall did leave the musical community in Pittsburgh
without an adequate performance space for high-profile events; and this dearth of high-
quality performance venues for concert music was spotlighted by The Pittsburg Press
columnist, who considered solving the problem to be paramount for the cultural
advancement of the city:
Whenever there is any large musical event in this city, the need of a
suitable music hall looms up like a patent medicine advertisement on a
country fence. It is one of the greatest obstacles to musical development
here, and one which the local musical societies, as well as the visiting
combinations have to work against. In securing Old City Hall for their
regular concerts this season, as well as for the Boston Symphony concerts
last week, the Mozart club did the best they could, yet the place is entirely
unsuitable for the purpose, its acoustic properties being far from what they
should be, the ventilation poor and seats on a level that makes it difficult
for those back of the center of the room to get a view of the stage. The
July Saengerfest Committee will build a temporary wooden building. The
Fifth Avenue Music Hall is too inaccessible, and there is in fact no
suitable hall at all. The bell could have been rung on this subject long ago,
but he only has a right to ring it who will head a list for a more suitable
place for entertainments of this kind—a hall similar to those in Cincinnati,

36
Cleveland, and even other places smaller and of much poorer standing in
the commercial world than Pittsburg.
13

Ironically, it was the renovations at Library Hall by its new managers, William Canning
and Harry Ellsler, that helped spur the demand by Pittsburgh audiences for better interior
appointments in the theatres. Improvements to the auditorium went well beyond the
construction of a proscenium and backstage area suitable for theatrical productions; in
their hands, Library Hall had become the most comfortable, attractive theatre in
Pittsburgh for a time, and was the inspiration for other theatrical managers to create even
more elegant venues. According to Lynne Conner, Canning and Ellsler made Library
Hall a “destination” in and of itself. After the renovation, people did not just come to see
the actors or the play; they came to enjoy being at the theatre, with all its attendant
luxuries and glamour.
Though Pittsburgh did not possess a satisfactory large hall in the 1880s dedicated
exclusively to concert music, the local classical-music scene flourished in smaller, more
modest venues. Musical organizations such as the Mozart Club, the Philharmonic
Society, Allegheny Musical Club, The Frohsinn Society, and the Schubert Club were
active at this time, providing Pittsburgh residents with programs of orchestral, choral, and
chamber music by professional and amateur ensembles. Large groups would perform in
Old City Hall, the East End Gymnasium, Liberty Hall (also in the East End), and
occasionally Library Hall. Chamber music and vocal recitals frequently took place in
smaller performance spaces like Hamilton’s Music Hall, Fifth Avenue Music Hall, and

13
The Pittsburg Press, April 28, 1887.

37
the Pleasant Valley Music Hall across the river in Allegheny. Churches, then as today,
were natural locations for concerts, and the Christ M. E. Church (at the corner of 8th and
Penn), the First M. P. Church, St. Peter’s, the Fourth Avenue Baptist Church, as well as
the Ross Street Synagogue were in constant use as musical venues at the time. Roller-
skating rinks such as the Grand Central Rink and the Royal Arcaneum at the Union Rink
in Allegheny were also popular as places to hold concerts, partly due to the built-in
audience that came for recreational purposes. Other sites such as Masonic Hall, the
Y.M.C.A Chapel, and Odd Fellows Hall on the South Side were designed for social clubs
and yet were often sought out by musicians because of their moderate size, accessibility,
and connection to prominent, active members of local Pittsburgh residential communities.
Although the Lyceum movement was principally represented by the lecture
circuits that were bringing poets, authors, religious figures, and intellectuals of every
stripe to auditoriums across the country, the rise of a vibrant concert-music community in
Pittsburgh and other American cities was a part of this trend. Classical music was
believed to offer intellectual and spiritual edification and uplift rather than mere
entertainment, more so than even the moralistic melodramas that were popular in the
nineteenth century. Before the advent of the phonograph at the turn of the century,
amateur musicians supplied most of the music heard in private homes, making audiences
accustomed to hearing a wide range of technical skill and artistry in public performances
as well.
14
However, as audiences in the cities began to expect better-trained musicians

14
Some mechanical instruments had become affordable for upper middle-class households (e.g. music
boxes, player pianos).

38
and more sophisticated repertoire for the best of their public concerts, professional
musicians were needed to lead the sections of ensembles that could not afford to pay
more than a few of its players. Over time, tensions began to develop between professional
musicians and amateur musical organizations. The Mozart Club, by some accounts the
most popular ensemble in Pittsburgh in the late-1880s, supported an amateur orchestra
that presented concerts throughout the musical season.
15
The Musical Union objected to
the hiring of professional musicians for these concerts, arguing that the organization was
selling out large venues and could afford to hire more than a handful of union members.
When Union musicians boycotted a concert with only a week’s notice, the Club
responded by hiring ringers from Cleveland. In the end, the Union submitted to the
demands of the Mozart Club due to the success and popularity of its concerts. This
decision was made in accordance with recommendations by the National Musician’s
Association, which recognized that most cities had thriving amateur musical communities
that held sway over musical performance guilds due to the preponderance of ensembles
still being populated by skilled non-professional players.
16
Forcing amateur orchestras to
stop hiring professionals would only hurt the union members, who would have preferred
secure employment with an orchestra for an entire season, but understood that amateur
ensembles provided an excellent source of jobs for local musicians.
Pittsburgh had several orchestras that played strictly classical repertoire in the
1880s, in addition to those that played in the theatres. It was common in American cities

15
The Mozart Club was arguably the most distinguished of Pittsburgh’s amateur musical organizations in
the 19th century. For more information on The Mozart Club, see Baynham, A History of Pittsburgh Music,
152-65.
16
The Evening Penny Press, March 10, 1887.

39
during the nineteeth century for many local orchestras to coexist, and even for these
ensembles to use many of the same musicians in their concerts.
17
In the decade before the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra was established in 1895, orchestras that generally
consisted of around twenty to thirty-five players performed a wide array of orchestral
literature from vocal music, opera overtures, and dance music to tone poems and
movements from symphonies. Musical events would combine a local orchestra with a
band, a chorus, a vocal quartet, several soloists (vocal and instrumental), and piano for
accompaniments. Orchestras were often sponsored by societies that designed subscription
concerts in order to provide a degree of financial stability. The 1886-1887 season in
Pittsburgh offered three concerts by the Philharmonic Society, conducted by T. F. Kirk,
three concerts by the orchestra of the Mozart Club, along with many appearances of the
Gernert & Guenther Orchestra led by John Gernert (violin) and William Guenther (flute),
and the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra, led by Mrs. Dr. J. S. Walters. The state of orchestral
music in Pittsburgh was reported upon in a laudatory article from December 16, 1886 in
the Pittsburg Press:
Of the various classes of music in this city none rank higher than the
orchestral. While in other directions her artists compare favorably with
other cities, Pittsburg’s orchestras excel many of them. The high standing
and proficiency of her orchestral bodies is due largely to the unremitting
efforts of a small number of leaders, among whom are George Toerge,
William Guenther, John Gernert, Louis Litterbart, Philip Weiss, John
Oberhauser, and Peter Schwartz…The principal orchestras of the city
now, Toerge’s and Gernert & Guenther’s, will compare favorably of those
in any the larger inland cities. The Allegheny Musical Club and the Great
Western Band orchestras are excellent and those at the theatres have

17
John Spitzer, “The Ubiquity and Diversity of Nineteenth-Century American Orchestras,” in American
Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Spitzer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 20.

40
attained a high standard. There are a number of smaller orchestras which
give good music on various occasions.
18

Pittsburgh in the 1880s was typical of many cities at that time in that it had several
orchestras capable of fulfilling the multiplicity of social and cultural needs of the
community and yet not one professional organization that supplied music to its citizens
that was comparable with the finest ensembles in the country and Europe. While the
Mozart Club’s orchestra was popular and its concerts well attended, their repertoire was
largely not from the symphonic literature, but rather comprised of smaller works that
were less ambitious for ensembles to play as well as for the audience to hear, such as
opera overtures and descriptive pieces. After Theodore Thomas toured throughout the
country with his orchestra of New York-based instrumentalists during the 1870s and
1880s, the sponsors of local orchestras in cities such as Pittsburgh began to desire a
higher order of symphonic music from its local organizations, which precipitated the
development of world-class professional orchestras located in America’s cosmopolitan
centers. Pittsburgh followed Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati by inaugurating
an orchestra of national standing in 1895 with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, led by
Frederick Archer, a British composer and conductor who was formerly music director of
the Boston Oratorio Society. While the music columnist from the Press might have been
honest in his appraisal of Pittsburgh’s relative good standing among other cities in the
Midwest at the time (his own apparent bias notwithstanding), the standards of
professional orchestral music were in flux at the time in American classical-music

18
“Iron City Orchestral Music,” The Pittsburg Press, December 16, 1886.

41
performance. And so, it should come as no surprise that in order to bring a higher caliber
of performance and more sophisticated repertoire to Pittsburgh’s new Symphony
Orchestra, the new music director felt it was necessary to bring many musicians over
from the Boston Symphony Orchestra to fill out its ranks and occupy principle chairs.
19

Though still lacking an orchestra in the 1880s that aspired to national prominence,
Pittsburgh’s musical community, nonetheless, provided Frank Saddler with an
uncommonly nurturing environment in which to develop his musical skills and explore
his options to become a professional musician. The local amateur music scene there,
which flourished during the years he began performing in chamber-music and orchestral
concerts, gave him opportunities to try his hand at various projects that perhaps would
not have been available in a more competitive environment such as New York. While his
pre-professional activities were seemingly the unfocused efforts of a jack of all trades, in
retrospect it was the opportunity to experiment with performing on several different
instruments and with composing and arranging for small and large ensembles that helped
him to discover the field that he would ultimately come to master.
Frank Saddler’s early musical career in Pittsburgh can be traced through a series
of press notices in The Evening Penny Press. Although it became an excellent source for

19
Richard James Wolf, “A Short History of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, 1896 to 1910” (master’s
thesis, 1954), 107-9. This was a trend to be repeated in cities across America, engendering resentment from
local musicians whose livelihoods were being threatened by imported musicians from New York and
Europe. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon was in Chicago, when Theodore Thomas established
the Symphony Orchestra with many of his colleagues from New York, who had been touring with him for
years. Spitzer, American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, 107.

42
information about concerts, musicians, and current issues regarding classical music in
Pittsburgh, the newspaper was hardly concerned with the subject at first. Established in
1884, the paper was, according to the History of Allegheny County, “republican in
politics, and … a sprightly and industrious collector of the news.”
20
Equally dedicated to
reporting local and national politics, labor disputes, news from the oil, gas, and steel
industries, fatal injuries and murders, scores and stories from regional baseball teams, and
the affairs of Pittsburgh high society, when it came the arts Press editors preferred to
spotlight news from the theatre over music. Two theatre columns—“Thespian Tattle” and
“Footlight Flashes”—appeared regularly on the front page, sometimes twice or even three
times a week during 1885 and 1886, while music was given occasional mention in the
middle of page two once every couple of weeks. Articles about Edwin Booth’s malaise,
Sarah Bernhardt’s marriages, Lotta Crabtree’s enormous wealth, Ellen Terry’s prodigal
son, or J. K. Emmett’s drunken binges were all grist for the gossip mill and helped lift the
paper’s circulation given their appearance on the front page.
By the middle of 1887, a column entitled “Keyboard and Baton,” which reported
on local concerts and artists, began to appear intermittently in the Press. This irregular
feature evolved by the fall of 1887 into a weekly column (“Music”), appearing every
Thursday, and by November was adorned with a rotating series of quaint lithographic
images of musicians playing instruments and singing. By late 1887, the column’s regular
author began to occasionally frame topics of local interest in a fictitious dialogue between

20
This source incorrectly states that The Evening Penny Press was started in 1885, and also mistakenly
refers to the paper as the Penny Press. History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Vol. 1 (Chicago: A.
Warner & Co., 1889), 658.

43

Figure 2.2, Music column (excerpt), The Pittsburg Press, November 3, 1887.

44
“the Young Tenor” and “the Old Baritone.” The conversations gently probed current
issues in music—such as the consequences of Pittsburgh audiences favoring touring
artists and ensembles over local ones and the relative merit of programming new music
by American composers as opposed to music by established Europeans—in a manner that
conveyed the author’s perspective without committing him to one position or another. It
was standard journalistic practice in the nineteenth century for columns to be published
anonymously, and reporting and criticism on music in the Press was no different. And
yet, one suspects that most readers, in particular the local musicians, who would have
been keenly interested in the Thursday edition each week, knew well who the writer was,
since ensemble leaders needed to submit concerts notices for mention to the same person
who provided commentaries and reviews. Since the Press only advertised theatrical
“amusements,” the music column was the best opportunity for musicians to promote their
concerts in the newspaper and the editors were dedicated to listing a wide range of
events, from touring artists and ensembles to local glee clubs, salon musicales, and music
school recitals.
On May 5, 1887, the music column of The Evening Penny Press bore the headline
“FESTIVAL PROGRAMS.”
21
For the second year in a row, Gilmore’s Band had been
engaged as the main attraction of Pittsburgh’s May music festival and the “long delayed”
programs were finally being presented to the public.
22
Not wanting to repeat any music

21
The Evening Penny Press, May 5, 1887.
22
Patrick S. Gilmore (1829-1892) was born in Ireland and immigrated to the United States, where he
became the leading musical figure in the development of the military band in the mid-19th century. John
Ogasapian, Music of the Gilded Age (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 124. The Pittsburg Press
reported that the Gilmore Band toured with a library of 5,000 pieces of music stored in 28 boxes. He
employed two librarians and three to five arrangers at any time, and when the indefatigable leader would

45
from the previous year, the band leader asked the festival organizer, Fred Parke, to send
him a copy of the earlier program, and yet one could not be located for three weeks, thus
increasing the anticipation considerably.
23
In addition to the three weekend programs
featuring the Gilmore Band, the column announced an event to celebrate the opening of
the East End Gymnasium as a new musical venue, a concert accompanying W. H.
McMillan’s lecture on “Scotland and France” at the Y.M.C.A., a recital at the First
Presbyterian Church sociable featuring students of Prof. Bussman, as well as programs by
the Ladies’ Quartet Club of Wheeling, pianist Theodore Salmon of the Pittsburgh Female
College, the Frohsinn Society, the Pleasant Valley Cornet Band, the Mandoline
Troubadours, and the Young People’s Association. The notice for this last event reads:
An excellent musical program has been arranged to be given under the
auspices of the Young People’s Association in the Fourth Avenue Baptist
church this evening. It will be carried out by Miss Nettie McFadden,
contralto; H. B. Brackett, tenor; A. H. Brackett, and S. S. Amberson, bass;
Prof. George Craig, pianist; and Frank Sadler, viola. Miss Burrows,
elocutionist, will take part. The entertainment is designed to raise money
for the new chapel to be built by this church at Oakland in honor of their
seventy-fifth anniversary.
24

Frank was twenty-two in the spring of 1887 and had surely been performing with
chamber ensembles and orchestras for years before this announcement appeared in The
Evening Penny Press. His family had moved two years earlier from Verona to Clawson

add new arrangements, he did not hesitate to surprise his players with music to sight read during
performance “to keep the boys from going to sleep over their parts.” The Evening Penny Press, July 21,
1887. The May festivals were inaugurated in 1881, from 1883-1891 under the direction of pianist, Carl
Retter. Baynham, A History of Pittsburgh Music, 131-36.
23
The Evening Penny Press, April 28, 1887.
24
Frank’s last name appears in the historical record as both “Sadler” and “Saddler” as we find with his
father, grandfather, and ancestors Isaac, Jr. and Isaac, Sr.

46
Street in Homewood, a suburb of Pittsburgh in the East End. One may speculate that the
family had decided to leave the small hamlet along the Allegheny upon the death of the
middle brother, Charles, since these events both occurred in the same year. Clawson
Street, perhaps not coincidentally, was one block from the Homewood Public School
where Thomas F. Kirk, director of the Philharmonic Society and a prominent conductor
and pedagogue in Pittsburgh, had established the first school orchestra in the region in
1872.
25
Given Homewood’s proximity to Verona (5 miles), it is not unreasonable to
assume that Frank could have received some of his early musical training playing with
the Homewood School orchestra in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when he would have
been in his teens. If so, the Saddlers would certainly have been familiar with the
neighborhood and this might have made the decision to move there easier when the time
came to leave Verona. The family home was also situated one block from Homewood
Station serving the Pennsylvania Railroad, which would have made it a short ride into
Union Station, where Frank could have walked in a few minutes to either of George
Kappel’s stores on 5th Avenue and on Smithfield Street.
26
Another reason to move closer
to Pittsburgh would have been to bring Frank in closer proximity to downtown
Pittsburgh, where he was increasingly active as a performer and composer.
One week after the Young Person’s Association concert, Frank participated in a
musical event celebrating the opening of the East End Gymnasium at 205-207 Shady

25
Baynham, A History of Pittsburgh Music, 173.
26
This information was culled from plat maps created by G. M. Hopkins Company in 1889 and 1890. The
maps are housed digitally on the site, Historic Pittsburgh, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Digital
Research Library: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/maps/20091019-hopkins.html. (accessed July 1, 2014).

47
Avenue in the Shadyside and East Liberty section of Pittsburgh.
27
The building was the
home of the East End Gymnastics Club, however its auditorium also functioned as a
venue for orchestral concerts in the exclusive neighborhood, enabling residents to go to
musical events without taking a train into the downtown district. Frank himself lived
close enough to the new venue that he could have walked the one-and-a-half miles to the
concert from his home, but more likely he took the train inbound three stops to East
Liberty Station, located just a few blocks from Shady Ave. The inaugural program was
typical of the heterogeneous musical affairs of the day in Pittsburgh, with a number of
vocal and instrumental genres offered on the same bill and variety being a primary
audience draw. There were orchestral selections by the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra, choral
works (the “Inflamatus” from Rossini’s Stabat Mater, the “Miserere” from Verdi’s Il
Trovatore, and passages from Flotow’s Martha) performed by the East End Musical
Club, in addition to a vocal quartet and a zither solo. According to the The Evening Penny
Press, “the rest of the program [was]: Messrs. J. F. Cullen and F. E. Saddler, violin duet;
Messrs. J. Liggett and F. Van Oasten, piccolo duet, and an instrumental quartet by
Messrs. Cullen, McIntyre, Saddler and Walters.”
28
The opening of the East End
Gymnasium was likely viewed by the participants as a welcome addition to the concert
venues in Pittsburgh, although Frank probably did not realize on that evening the
important role the auditorium and the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra would play in determining
his future during the next year. Mrs. Dr. J. S. Walters, whose marriage to a prominent

27
The Evening Penny Press, May 12, 1887.
28
Ibid.

48
Pittsburgh physician and Who’s Who status in Pittsburgh society caused her to use her
husband’s name in all press related to her own career, was developing a reputation in
local musical circles as a competent conductor.
29
Within six months, she would become
Frank’s biggest champion in Pittsburgh musical circles, and during the spring was a
catalyst for his being sponsored by one of the city’s wealthiest businessmen to continue
his musical studies abroad.
Following the May festival, the primary musical event during the summer of 1887
in Pittsburgh was the Sängerfest.
30
Every other year, a different Midwestern city would
host the regional choral festival and each one treated the occasion as a cause to
demonstrate civic pride and attempt to outdo every previous fest in both quality and
abundance of entertainment and hospitality. At the conclusion of the 1887 festival, the
columnist from The Evening Penny Press lavished praise on the organizers of the event,
saying “all the German musicians within a radius of 150 miles of Pittsburgh had been
looking forward in pleasant anticipation to this event…and [their] expectations were
more than realized by the excellent musical feast given.”
31
There is no indication in the
paper that Frank participated in the Sängerfest, although he might have performed with
one of the orchestras that accompanied the choral concerts. At the very least, he was

29
Dr. Walters was also a musician who played the cello and often performed with Frank Saddler (see
personnel list for the May 12 program listed above).
30
The Sängerfest was a festival of choral music held in a different Midwestern host city every other June.
Sponsored by the Sängerbund, an organization of choruses established in 1848 that celebrated and
preserved the German choral tradition in America, the Sängerfest featured multiple events during the week-
long festival that involved hundreds and sometimes thousands of singers. Karen Ahlquist, “Musical
Assimilation and “the German Element” at the Cincinnati Sängerfest, 1879,” The Musical Quarterly (Fall
2011), 381.
31
The Evening Penny Press, July 21, 1887.

49
probably in attendance for one of more of the concerts.
Later in the summer, Frank was involved in one of the first concerts of the season
with pianist Henry P. Ecker in Venetia, a township approximately fifteen miles south of
Pittsburgh. Ecker was born in Saarbrücken, Germany, in 1865, and following his
graduation from the Leipzig Conservatory, immigrated to the United States in 1885.
32

Having settled in Pittsburgh, he was already asserting himself as a leader in local musical
circles at the age of twenty-two, and Frank, who was less than a year his senior, was often
asked to play with him. The event at Venetia followed a trend of Pittsburgh musicians
being engaged to provide concerts in surrounding towns. The ensemble that was gathered
for the performance included “Signor G. Gilli, tenor; Charles Corcoran, baritone; F. E.
Saddler, bassoon; Prof. Frey, cornet; H. A. Rogers, oboe; and Prof. Ecker, piano.”
33

Despite being nearly the same age as Frank, Ecker was accorded the title “Professor” as a
result of having graduated from a European conservatory, while Frank had yet to travel to
Europe to pursue his education further.
Organizers of the Inter-State Fair at Exposition Park started to announce the
musical entertainments that were being planned in conjunction with the harvest-season
event in mid-September. Concerts were scheduled for each night of the fair in addition to
an invitational brass band competition involving 30 groups from Western Pennsylvania

32
Henry P. Ecker (1865-1914) was also a choral conductor and organist of distinction in Pittsburgh. In
1896 he was vice-chairman of the North American Sängerfest held in Pittsburgh. For nearly twelve years
he was the city organist and gave weekly recitals on Saturday afternoons until 1902, when Andrew
Carnegie suggested he play two per week and agreed to subsidize the additional concerts. Baynham, A
History of Pittsburgh Music, 214.
33
The Evening Penny Press, August 25, 1887.

50
and Eastern Ohio.
34
The fair brought tens of thousands of people to Pittsburgh for a week
of festivities that included livestock and farm-tool exhibits, fruit, grain, and vegetable
stands, and displays of home crafts such as embroidering and quilts.
35
The concert
scheduled for the opening night of the fair was again organized by Henry Ecker, and he
invited the Great Western Band and the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra comprised of 15 players
to join a program with a vocal quartet, and chamber players on violin, oboe, bassoon, and
piano.
36
Frank performed “a bassoon and oboe duet with band accompaniment,” while
also playing in the orchestra. Around the same time, a new orchestra sponsored by The
Pittsburgh Symphony Society was beginning to rehearse in the East End Gymnasium in
advance of a concert planned for November 10. Members of the Society notified The
Evening Penny Press of their ambitious agenda:
It is the design of those who organized this orchestra to make a first-class
symphony orchestra out of it. Only the highest class of music will be
given, and the very best local players will be secured.
37

In selecting the name “Pittsburgh Symphonic Society” the organization’s founders were
announcing their intention to elevate the programming to include repertoire of a higher
order than the typical orchestral fare played by the majority of ensembles in town.
38

34
The Evening Penny Press, August 25, 1887.
35
The county fair in Butler, 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, occurred just two weeks before the Inter-State
Fair and was either similar in scope or smaller. A reporter for the Butler Citizen wrote: “On Thursday
morning the people crowded into Butler faster than we ever seen them do so before, and the attendance at
the Fair that afternoon must have reached nearly or altogether 20,000.” Butler Citizen, September 16, 1887.
This issue is available on the Library of Congress website, Chronicling America:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86071045/1887-09-16/ed-1/seq-3/ (accessed on June 13, 2014).
36
The Evening Penny Press, September 8, September 15, 1887.
37
The Evening Penny Press, September 8, September 22, 1887.
38
There was an earlier organization called the Pittsburgh Symphonic Society, started in 1877 by Carl
Retter, however it was not in existence in 1887 when the new group was formed. Baynham, A History of
Pittsburgh Music, 130-32.

51
Examples of the upcoming program (“two movements from Mozart’s sixth symphony
and Brahms’ Hungarian dances”) were provided to the press and reflected the
discriminating criteria of the organization’s founders. The ensemble had eighteen
players—eight violins, two cellos, bass, two flutes, clarionet (sic.), oboe, bassoon, and

Figure 2.3, Members of the newly formed Pittsburgh Symphonic Society,
The Pittsburg Press, September 22, 1887 (“bassoon—F. E. Saddler”).

two cornets—and was led by violinist John Gernert. The list of musicians published in
the Press shows Frank to be the ensemble’s bassoonist, as he likely was for the Poco-a-
Poco Orchestra (see Figure 2.3).
39
Although Frank played both the violin and viola in
chamber music contexts, there is no indication that he played these instruments in local
orchestras.

39
The orchestral forces were listed by name in The Evening Penny Press, probably for the benefit
of local audiences so they could get a sense of just how good the ensemble would be. The Evening
Penny Press, September 22, 1887.

52
During the fall, Frank’s name began to appear with increasing regularity in The
Evening Penny Press, which covered local performances large and small. His name was
probably considered a draw for a Thursday-evening church sociable on September 29:
“Mrs. M. E. Scott, contralto of the Third church, will sing at an entertainment in the
Fourth Avenue Baptist church this evening. F. E. Sadler will give a violin solo, and
several other musicians will also take part.”
40
Five weeks later on November 3, Frank
played a violin solo again in what was described as “a very pleasant event” at the Fifth
United Presbyterian Church at the corner of Washington Street and Webster Avenue.
41

The varied program included a vocal quartet (Jerult’s “Bridal of Hardanger”), several
vocal solos and duets (Becker’s “Springtide”, Sayer’s “The Night Birds Are Cooing,” and
Millard’s “Buried at Sea” among them), and a piano solo, in addition to Frank’s
contribution.
42
In addition to the concert by the newly-formed orchestra of the Pittsburgh
Symphony Society on November 10, Frank also played in a concert on November 15 by
the Sacred Heart Church Choir, which performed at the Palace Rink in the East End
assisted by the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra.
While his activities as a performer appear to have kept him busy enough in
the fall of 1887, Frank demonstrated a seemingly unending reservoir of energy

40
The Evening Penny Press, September 29, 1887.
41
The Fifth United Presbyterian Church, which has since been demolished, sat on property that is on the
east end of a parking lot for the Consol Energy Center, the arena home for Pittsburgh’s hockey team, the
Penguins. G. M. Hopkins Company maps, Historic Pittsburgh, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s
Digital Research Library: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/maps/20091019-hopkins.html. (accessed July 1,
2014).
42
The Evening Penny Press, November 3, 1887.

53
and enthusiasm for musical projects, whether they involved assisting other
musicians or developing an idea of his own. Not only was he practicing, rehearsing, and
performing on three instruments, he was composing and working as a copyist for Carl
Retter.
43
And yet, in addition to these activities, Frank was also trying his hand at
producing concerts. With his colleague W. W. Colville, he planned to present a series of
concerts dedicated to American music, a project that would become a major
preoccupation for him throughout the late fall and winter months. The young producers
set an ambitious agenda for themselves, reaching out to many prominent composers from
several cities in the East and Midwest. By late November, they had received
commitments from Dudley Buck (Brooklyn), Arthur Foote (Boston), Wilson G. Smith
(Cleveland), George F. Bristow (New York), John K. Paine (Cambridge), August
Hytlester (Chicago), Silas G. Pratt (Chicago), Willard Burr, Jr. (Boston), Edward S.
Mathoon (Columbus), and Edgar S. Kelley (New York) to send compositions, while
Pittsburgh would be represented principally by Adolph M. Foerster.
44
The composers
were asked to submit works of their own choosing, in particular “those which [they

43
Carl Retter graduated from the Königliches Conservatorium für Musik und Theater in Munich in 1871,
where he studied with Hans von Bülow. He was one of the leading figures in Pittsburgh music during the
last three decades of the 19th century, having started the Pittsburgh Symphonic Society (first incarnation),
directed the May festivals and Retter-Toerge Chamber Music Concerts, played organ at numerous places of
worship for over 40 years, and having been a recitalist of distinction on the piano. Baynham, A History of
Pittsburgh Music, 129-37. Regarding Frank Saddler’s work with Retter, it was reported that “Carl Retter
had written a Te Deum for the choir at Trinity church. F. E. Saddler has just finished copying it, and it will
be rehearsed under the supervision of E. H. McDermitt, director of the choir, to-morrow evening.” Frank
Saddler’s compositional activity at this time included “a cantata domino (sic.) for St. Andrew’s church”
(The Evening Penny Press, November 24, 1887) and a song he wrote for Mrs. Adah S. Thomas to sing at
an entertainment at the East End Gymnasium (The Evening Penny Press, December 8, 1887).
44
The notice in The Evening Penny Press gives the name “John V. Paine of Cambridge,” which we assume
was a typographical error made when giving the name of John Knowles Paine. The Evening Penny Press,
November 24, 1887. From the 1880s to the end of his life, Adolph M. Foerster (1854-1927) was the
foremost composer in his native Pittsburgh. He graduated from the Leipzig Conservatory in 1875 and
returned to the United States, where he performed on the piano in addition to his extensive compositional

54
considered to be] the best to represent their merits.”
45

The works that Saddler and Colville received were typical of American classical
music in the late nineteenth century, with its heavy reliance upon German models.
46

Arthur Foote’s Drei Characterstücke für Violine und Clavier, Op. 9, from which he
contributed the third movement, “Romanze,” to the concerts, bears many hallmarks of the
conservative romanticism of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.
47
Foote also sent an
Allegro movement from his Trio für Pianoforte, Violine, und Violoncello, Op. 5, which
was dedicated to his friend Georg Henschel, the first Music Director of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra (1881-1884) who was also a close colleague and friend of Brahms.
While the music that John Knowles Paine and George Bristow sent was vocal and
instrumental chamber music, both men were important early American symphonists,
whose music was splendidly crafted, but not innovative or original in its use of the
European romantic style.
48
Willard Burr, Jr., who offered his Grand Sonata in B flat

activity. A dedicated music teacher, he was active in the National Music Teachers Association in addition
to being a professor at the Pittsburgh Female College and keeping a large private studio. Baynham, A
History of Pittsburgh Music, 149.
45
The Evening Penny Press, November 24, 1887.
46
There are differing opinions about whether the musical styles of American composers in the 19th century
collectively sounded like that of the German romanticists. To addresses the question adequately would
require deeper inquiry and analysis than is possible in this dissertation. For two somewhat differing views
on the American compositional styles and models in the 19th century, see H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in
the United States (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 55-65, 148-70. Richard Crawford,
America’s Musical Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 351-71.
47
Arthur Foote (1853-1937) began his musical studies at 12 at the New England Conservatory and was a
student of John Knowles Paine at Harvard. He was the only major composer of his generation to be trained
entirely in the United States. Foote’s published works totaled more than 75 opus numbers, including many
solos for piano and organ, chamber music, song, choral music, and eight orchestral works, all in the
German romantic vein. Wilma Reid Cipolla, “Arthur Foote,” Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/09960
(accessed July 2, 2014).
48
John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) came from a musical family in Maine and studied composition in
Berlin with Karl-August Haupt. He was an organ recitalist that performed J. S. Bach at a time when his
music was rarely heard in the United States. Influential as both a composer and pedagogue, Paine was on

55
Minor, received this review in the Boston Home Journal on February 5, 1887:
“Mr. Burr’s sonata for piano and violin in B minor is an admirable composition. While a
certain romanticism in the work suggests that he has unconsciously been influenced by
Mendelssohn, it is a pleasure to bear testimony that the music, as a whole, is manifestly
the composer’s own.”
49
Silas Pratt, who submitted his Serenade for string quartet, may
have been the most adventuresome artist of the group that the producers sought for their
enterprise. A composer of three operas, whose style was influenced more by the New
German School of Wagner and Lizst, Pratt used progressive musical ideas in Zenobia,
which was observed by a music critic of the Chicago Tribune to contain bizarre harmonic
progressions that were “beyond our comprehension”:
Compared with Pratt, Wagner is in some respects but another Rossini.
Instances of Mr. Pratt’s absurd modulations are to be found on almost
every one of the 203 pages of the score…The most remarkable example
perhaps is on page 159. In Longinus’ air, “Calm and Serene,” there are
modulations of frightful proportions written to a text calling for the
simplest harmonies. There is not a singer in this city who could sing the
first four measures of this air at sight.
50

the faculty at Harvard University for 43 years and is acknowledged as creating the model for the university
music department as well as being the first important American symphonist. Kenneth C. Roberts, Jr. and
John C. Schmidt, “John Knowles Paine,” Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2253739?q=john+kn
owles+paine&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed July 2, 2014). George Bristow (1825-
1898) was a violinist who performed with the New York Philharmonic in its second season and with theatre
orchestras in his native New York City from the time he was 13. He was also noted as a conductor,
principally of choruses such as the New York Harmony Society and The Mendelssohn Society. His
compositions include an opera, an oratorio, two symphonies, and several works of chamber music. Delmer
D. Rogers, “George Bristow,” Oxford Music Online
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/04008?
q=George+Bristow&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (accessed on July 2, 2014).
49
Boston Home Journal, February 5, 1887, as quoted in Brainard’s Biography of American Musicians, 57.
50
Elise K. Kirk, American Opera (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 127-28. Silas G.
Pratt (1846-1916) was a composer, organist, and pianist who studied in Germany with Theodor Kullak. He
received complimentary advice from Franz Liszt and was reported to have been told by Richard Wagner
that he was “the Richard Wagner of America” to which he replied, “and you, Sir, are the Silas G. Pratt of
Germany.” Robert Stevenson, “Silas G. Pratt,” Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/22268?q=silas+pratt&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#first

56

Despite being grounded in Wagnerian tonal practice, Pratt’s flights of harmonic fancy
may have been his way of reaching for a distinctly American sound, one that may have
sounded eccentric in 1880, while foreshadowing the modernism of Charles Ives a
generation later.
The “American Concerts,” as they became known, received a significant amount
of attention in The Evening Penny Press in the weeks leading up to the opening
performance. The music columnist devoted one of his dialogues between “The Old
Baritone” and “The Young Tenor” to exploring the issue of whether creating all-
American programs is necessary to advance the cause of American music, or whether it
would help more to have concert producers simply program more music by American
composers along with European music.
51
The Young Tenor took the former line of
reasoning, in an attempt to “draw out” his friend:
This American composition idea to concerts is being a trifle overdone…It
appears to me that musical people are swinging from one extreme to the
other. From a total disregard of American composers they have changed
around and now go in for them altogether. They might strike a medium
somewhere, and give American compositions a fair showing without
leaving others out entirely. I think this would be better than the present
craze. Don’t you?
52

In reply, the Old Baritone embraced the idea of programming exclusively American
composers, understanding that music that is underrepresented often needs a champion to
get heard:

hit (accessed on July 2, 20143). Percy A. Scholes, Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1938), 822-23.
51
The Evening Penny Press, November 17, 1887.
52
Ibid.

57
The American composers have never had a “show,” and there are so
many persons who believe that all merit is bound up in foreign artists that
it is necessary to swing to the other extreme in order to get home
compositions any hearing at all. There is no danger, however, of the “other
extreme,” as you call it, being reached. They are only the enthusiasts who
dare go ahead with this American idea. They are succeeding everywhere
and it is a good thing. What nonsense it is to give [this] music at the
ordinary concert where a great majority of the audience can neither
understand nor appreciate it. It is a taste which the people must be
educated to and it can’t be [done] except by covering the intervening
steps.
53

It was a new facet of American concert music at the time to produce programs using
exclusively the music of native-born composers.
54
Not only would this type of themed
festival programming bring opportunities and attention to an otherwise underserved
community in American musical life, it would appeal to a niche audience for new music,
one predisposed to hearing the peculiarities of style by what the Press columnist referred
to as “home talent.” Otherwise, American composers and their work would always be
competing with established European composers and time-tested classics for program
space in the concert hall, which was at the time increasingly taking on the characteristics
of a museum rather than a venue for presenting new works of art.
55
As composers in the
United States struggled to define themselves in an era when musical nationalism was on
the rise and the pervasive dominance of German romantic styles—both conservative and

53
Ibid. The brackets indicate suggestions for how the passage might make better sense. The original
language reads: “What nonsense it is to give music at the ordinary concert…” and “It is a taste to which the
people must be educated to and it can’t be don’t except by covering…”
54
The author of this column makes reference to the Music Teachers’ National Association initiating “this
idea of using only American compositions.” More information about the July 5-8, 1887 conference that
took place in Indianapolis, Indiana, can be found at The Musical Year Book of the United States, Volume V,
Season of 1887-1888 (Boston: G. H. Wilson, 1888), 97-100.
55
J. Peter Burkholder, “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years,”
The Journal of Musicology (Spring, 1983), 115-34.

58

Figure 2.4, Article about the “American Concerts,”
The Pittsburg Press, November 24, 1887.

59
progressive—was being challenged throughout Europe, Frank Saddler was, as a young
musician, on the vanguard of the movement to recognize and champion an American
school of composition in its nascent stage of development.
The date for the first concert in the series was eventually set for January 27. There
were to be four concerts in all, one per month during the remainder of the season at the
theatre of the Pittsburgh Club. For the first concert, the producers engaged ten players—
four singers, four string players, and two pianists. In a promising development, it was
announced in late December that the orchestra of the Pittsburgh Symphonic Society
would participate in the second concert, coming most likely as a result of Frank’s
involvement with the new organization.
56
Having an orchestra at their disposal would
have significantly changed the managers’ programming possibilities, perhaps causing
several of the composers to send large-scale works in addition to the vocal and chamber
music selections they had already made. In fact, Dudley Buck had mentioned in a letter
accompanying his submissions that he would have preferred sending other works but they
“would require greater musical resources than those of the proposed concerts.”
57

Managing a concert series with multiple programs of new music, in addition to his
numerous other activities, was proving more difficult than Frank had at first imagined.
He had been corresponding with prospective composers for several months during the
late summer and early fall and received positive responses and performance editions from
many of the leading figures in American concert music across the country. But Frank and

56
The Evening Penny Press, November 17, 1887.
57
The Evening Penny Press, November 24, 1887.

60
his partner’s energy and acumen for developing their idea beyond its conception
apparently did not extend to all aspects of concert production. The Evening Penny Press
(renamed The Pittsburg Press at the end of 1887) gave the first sign that the organization
of the concerts was not being handled properly for the events when it stated that “the
cloud which for a moment cast a shadow over the American concert movement has
passed away, and the preparations for the first one are almost completed.”
58
The
proverbial clouds of organizational conflict had apparently only parted briefly, though,
for it was soon reported that tension was mounting within the ranks of the
instrumentalists as the date set for the inaugural concert approached and scores and parts
had not yet been handed out. The matter reached a crisis stage when on January 25 the
musicians boycotted the penultimate rehearsal, thus forcing the producers to postpone the
first concert for one month.
59
The cause of the cancellation was explained candidly in
The Pittsburgh Press:
The reason assigned is the indisposition of two of the instrumentalists, but
back of this is the fact that the gentlemen realized that they were not
prepared to present the music in such a manner as to do credit to
themselves or justice to the composers. They have not had the opportunity
for rehearsing which a proper interpretation of the compositions requires.
Some of the music was not given out until Tuesday of this week [January
24] and none of it until about ten days ago [January 16], although it has
been in the hands of the managers for several weeks.

It would have probably come as no surprise to Frank’s friends and colleagues that he was
forced to reschedule the first event of his concert series, not because they doubted his
ability and industry, but because he was so busy during the month of January doing other

58
The Pittsburg Press, January 12, 1888.
59
The Pittsburg Press, January 26, 1888.

61
things when he needed to be focused upon finalizing preparations for the first concert. In
addition to managing the American concerts, he was rehearsing regularly with the
Pittsburgh Symphonic Society orchestra and the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra, both of which
had concerts scheduled for early February. On January 31, Frank participated in a
Schubert Club event celebrating the composer’s birthday. Continuing the trend of
programming new American music, the Club decided to sponsor a concert of works
exclusively by Pittsburgh composers and Frank was invited to contribute to a program
that included music by Adolph Foerster, Carl Retter, Stephen Foster, and four other local
musicians.
60
The biggest and most time-consuming activity that Frank was undertaking at
this time, however, would not come to light until February, shortly after the news broke
that the American Concerts had been cancelled permanently.
When it was announced that the first concert in the series needed to be
rescheduled, it was also reported that “the management were very much put out at the
necessity of postponement.” And yet, as we have seen, Saddler and Colville had created
the trouble themselves by not handing out scores and parts to their players in a timely
way—a particularly important managerial responsibility given that the music was
unfamiliar and likely needed more than ordinary preparation and rehearsal time, not less.
With the second attempt at producing the first concert slated to take place on February
24, the project received an even bigger blow with the resignation of W. W. Colville,
Frank’s partner. He published a letter in The Pittsburg Press that explained his motive:
I regret very much the necessity of advising you of my withdrawal from
the management of the American Chamber Recitals. Owing to the press of

60
The Pittsburg Press, January 5, 1888.

62
other business, it will be impossible for me to give it the attention it
deserves, and as it is my earnest desire that they be a success in every
particular, I leave the field that another may take charge.
61

With that notice, everyone concerned looked to Frank for guidance to see what he was
going to do to save the project from its premature demise. A press notice on February 16
was intended to leave no doubt in anybody’s mind that the concert series was going
forward as planned despite Colville’s departure. Frank was quoted directly in order to
reassure the public that the project was still underway and moving forward:
Already enough tickets have been sold to assure the carrying out of the
original plan, and the whole series will be given. Heretofore the tickets
have been disposed of through the individual efforts of myself and the
other musicians concerned, but they will be put on sale for the benefit of
the general public this week. I have no doubt of the success of the
concerts, both artistically and financially.
62

Frank’s tone had the appearance of certainty and confidence; however, in retrospect, it
seems manufactured for the purpose of damage control. One can gather the extent to
which the music columnist was colluding with him to give the public the impression that
all was well from the press announcement the day before the concert, which stated:
“Everything is in readiness, and there is no doubt that it will be a financial and artistic
success,” repeating verbatim what Frank had said the week before.
63
The concert,
however, did not go well, forcing Frank to cancel the rest of the season he had projected.
Following a week in which there was no mention of the concert in the press, one final
notice put the project permanently to rest.

61
The Pittsburg Press, February 9, 1888.
62
The Pittsburgh Press, February 16, 1888.
63
The Pittsburgh Press, February 23, 1888.

63
The second concert of the American composers’ series was to have been
given to-morrow night, but after the dismal failure of the first, no one
expected the second to take place and no one will be disappointed. The sad
history of the American concert movement in Pittsburg has become a part
of the musical record of the past. Toll the bell and let the mourners gather
‘round. Never strong, it succumbed early in the struggle. Close up the
record of its short existence and at the end write, as the verdict of the
public: “Died from the lack of proper management.”
64

Though the language of this passage dramatizes the cancellation of the series with a tone
that perhaps sounds maudlin today, reading this epitaph in the press must have stung
Frank, for he never again embarked upon another project of this kind (or any other for
that matter) as a producer. For the rest of his career, which lasted over thirty years, he
always worked for other people, fulfilling jobs either as an employee or an independent
contractor, primarily for New York music publishing companies and for independent
producers on Broadway. Through these early professional experiences working in
Pittsburgh’s classical music community, he was involved in so many different
activities—retail sales, performing, composing, copying, managing—that, in retrospect, it
appears as though he came to discover the area of music that best suited his skills and
temperament through a gradual process of elimination. Ultimately, it was a combination
of resilience, intellectual curiosity, and an innate sense of showmanship that led Frank, in
the midst of his embarrassing public failure at arts management, to discover the craft that
would bring him enduring success.
In the same issue of The Pittsburg Press that contained the harsh rebuke of Frank
and his American Concerts project, a press notice appeared announcing the second

64
The Pittsburg Press, March 8, 1888.

64
concert featuring the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra during the 1887-1888 season. The
centerpiece of the news item was information about an orchestral medley of tunes by
Stephen C. Foster that was arranged and orchestrated by Frank and was to be premiered
at the concert.
65
In stating that the songs “have just been arranged for orchestra use by
Frank E. Saddler,” whoever placed the announcement was also unwittingly disclosing
that the reason why the American concerts were so poorly managed was because Frank,
too, was far too busy to properly organize the business side of that project. Instead, he

Figure 2.5, Press notice about Frank Saddler’s Stephen Foster
arrangement, The Pittsburg Press, March 8, 1888.

was preoccupied with arranging ten of Foster’s songs for orchestra, among his various
other activities. Perhaps the most noteworthy piece of information conveyed in this press
release was the fact that the medley was being dedicated to Capt. C. W. Batchelor,
suggesting that Frank was also spending some of his time cultivating a personal
relationship with a musical sponsor—one of Pittsburgh’s growing class of wealthy elites

65
Ibid.

65
who made a fortune in the region’s booming industrial economy.
Charles W. Batchelor was for decades one of Pittsburgh’s most prominent
citizens. At the time Frank met him, most of the noteworthy accomplishments and
distinctions in his career were behind him, and he had settled into a comfortable
retirement, leaving him the time to attend to local philanthropy of the kind that made him
decide to become the benefactor of a promising young Pittsburgh musician. Born in
1823, Batchelor was educated in private schools in his home town of Steubenville, Ohio,
located on the Ohio River.
66
At the age of 18, he apprenticed on the steamship Tioga out
of Wheeling, West Virginia (then still a part of the Commonwealth of Virginia), and four
years later become a full pilot. He purchased his own steamship, Hibernia, No. 2, in 1849
at the age of 26 and commanded it along the Pittsburgh and Cincinnati Packet line. He
owned and operated sixteen steamers in his shipping career, which led him to take up
other business interests in insurance and banking.
67
In 1855, he ended his career as an
active river-boat captain to become vice president of the Eureka Insurance Company.
During the Civil War, he was appointed surveyor of the port and depository for the
United States at Pittsburgh by President Lincoln. His career in banking began in 1868,
when he was made president of the Masonic Bank of Pittsburgh, where he served for
fourteen years, at which point he resigned to become vice president of Keystone Bank.
His other affiliations during the 1870s and 1880s included leadership positions with the

66
History of Allegheny County (Chicago: A. Warner & Co., 1884), 2:276-77.
67
C. W. Batchelor built or owned the following steamers: Hibernia, No. 2, Allegheny, Americus, W. I.
Maclay, Eunice, Lucy Gwin, Paragon, Mary E. Forsyth, George W. Graham, W. R. Arthur, Emma Duncan,
Darling, Norman, Guidon, F. Y. Batchelor, Lac La Bell. Ibid.

66
Oil Exchange, Manufacturers’ & Merchants Insurance Company, Natural Gas Company
of West Virginia in Wheeling, and the Natural Gas Company, Limited, of Pittsburgh. He
was committee chairman and commodore of the fleet for the celebration of the opening of
the Davis Island Dam in 1885 and, as a Freemason, served as grand commander of the
Knights Templar of Pennsylvania.
In light of the failure of Frank’s American Concerts project and its potential for
public humiliation due to the heavy local press coverage, the concurrence of the Poco-a-
Poco Orchestra’s announcement of their concert in May, fully two months in advance of
the event, appears strategically designed to deflect negative attention away from the
young musician. Likewise, mention of the C. W. Batchelor dedication had a purpose
beyond merely stating the facts. Not only did Frank’s public association with one of
Pittsburgh’s most prominent and affluent citizens accrue newfound credibility to him, the
relationship would ultimately develop into a substantial, multi-year patronage of his
European education. Batchelor insisted upon withholding his name when it was reported
in the wake of the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra concerts that Frank had received sponsorship to
study music in Germany. However, newspaper accounts of the events surrounding his
plans and departure mention the Pittsburgh shipping magnate and industrial banker
frequently in relation to the orchestral concerts featuring the Foster medley, such that
Batchelor’s central role in Frank’s patronage was probably considered the worst-kept
secret in Pittsburgh musical circles during the summer of 1888.
The other key figure in the resuscitation of Frank’s reputation was the music
director of the Poco-a-Poco Orchestra, Mrs. J. S. Walters, known publicly as Mrs. Dr.

67
Walters. She was not only a champion of Frank’s orchestral medley of Stephen Foster
tunes, her efforts to use her social connections among Pittsburgh’s elite to advance
Frank’s career made her the prime catalyst in his finding a sponsor. Walters was
establishing herself at the time not only as an able conductor, but also as a musical
philanthropist, donating her services and those of the orchestra in support of other
organizations in the area. In February, at the time of the orchestra’s first concert under its
own name, the Press stated that “the orchestra has played so much for benefits and
charitable entertainments without compensation that now when they give a concert for
their own benefit a large audience is assured.”
68
The second concert was set for May 15
at the auditorium in the East End Gymnasium, five weeks after the initial press release in
March in a notice that identified Frank’s Stephen Foster medley as the “chief attraction”
on the program.
69
Choosing to orchestrate no fewer than ten of Foster’s well-known
melodies was an enterprising idea, since he could at once clothe the Pittsburgh
songwriter’s music in instrumental timbres that were entirely novel while also aligning
himself at the beginning of his career with one of the nation’s best-known composers.
Though he likely was not aware of it at the time, in orchestrating Stephen Foster’s songs,
Frank was also collaborating with the local composer whose career path would most
closely resemble his as a Pittsburgh native who courted fame in the bright lights of New

68
The Pittsburg Press, February 8, 1888.
69
Although the columnist for The Pittsburg Press acknowledged at one time that he was not
qualified to review concerts, this did not prevent him from making general assessments about the
musical ability of a musician or ensemble, such as when he stated that “Mrs. Dr. Walters, the
directress, waves the baton with good effect.” The Pittsburg Press, April 19, 1888.

68
York’s popular-music industry.
70

The Pittsburgh Dispatch gave the concert “a brief but glowing account” of the
May 15 concert by the Poco-a-Poco orchestra with Mrs. Dr. Walters at the helm.
71
At the
dress rehearsal, C. W. Batchelor presented Walters with a gold-plated conductor’s baton,
presumably for her commitment to artistic excellence as well as to the betterment of
musical culture in Pittsburgh.
72
The relationship between Walters and Batchelor would
continue to evolve over the course of the next week, during which time Walters
implemented a plan to add a “series” of concerts to the orchestra’s schedule dedicated to
helping Frank raise money to attend music school in Europe.
The concert to be given by the Poco-a-Poco orchestra in the East End
gymnasium on May 22 is the first in a series for the benefit of Frank E.
Saddler…designed to assist him in pursuing his musical studies abroad.
Frank has labored long and patiently in the cause of music in Pittsburg,
and especially in the East End. The Poco-a-Poco especially feels under
obligation to him, and takes this opportunity of showing its appreciation of
his work.
73

The program featured the Stephen Foster medley, but also included an array of overtures
and arias: Phillippe Fahrbach’s “Lustig Wein,” a selection from Charles Lecocq’s Le
Petit Duc, the overture to Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa, “Non più di fiori” from Mozart’s
La clemenza di Tito, “Honor and Arms” from Handel’s Samson, a trio from Verdi’s

70
Stephen C. Foster (1826-1864) received early musical training from Henry Kleber, in Pittsburgh, and,
after several years living in Cincinnati, returned to Pennsylvania, where he wrote many of his finest songs
during the 1850s. Foster moved to New York City in 1860 and after an unsuccessful career died there four
years later. For more information, see Ken Emerson, Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American
Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997).
71
This quote from The Pittsburgh Dispatch was culled from an article in The Pittsburg Press, May 17,
1888.
72
Ibid.
73
The Pittsburg Press, May 10, 1888.

69
Attila, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Frühlings Erwachen (“Spring Awakening”),
among other works.
74
The benefit concert was so successful, both musically and
philanthropically, that there was no need to hold another, as originally planned, for Frank
had found a sponsor and thus the only other announcement that needed to be made was
one regarding his departure. According to a brief Press article on June 7, he would be
sailing for Germany on August 26, where he would study music in Munich for at least
one year, but with the hope of staying abroad for three years.
75
That he had found a
patron to fund his studies was not made explicit immediately, however another press
notice of a social event in the same issue made the fact abundantly clear.
A very pleasant event was the serenade of Capt. C. W. Batchelor at his
residence on Hiland avenue by the Poco-a-Poco orchestra Monday
evening [June 4]. After the serenade Capt. Batchelor thanked the
musicians for the honor and tendered them the hospitality of his home,
which they enjoyed until a late hour.
76

Batchelor’s desire to keep his support of Frank’s musical education out of the newspaper
did not mean that the fact would be kept a secret, only that the reporting would be discreet.
The serenade outside his residence was clearly an expression of gratitude for his
generosity, while the impromptu celebration was an opportunity for Walters, Batchelor,
and the orchestra to revel in the success of a fruitful collaboration that would help send
one of their own into a promising course of study abroad. Though it was probably hoped
that Frank would return to Pittsburgh to enrich its musical community after his German

74
“Spring Awakening” may have been spuriously attributed to C. P. E. Bach, instead being composed by
Emanuel Bach, who lived in the late 19th century.
75
The Pittsburg Press, June 7, 1888.
76
Ibid.

70
studies were complete, his patron unwittingly enabled him gain the skill and experience to
pursue a career in America’s growing musical-theatre industry—one that would press him
to go to New York, ultimately making his departure from Pittsburgh a permanent one.
It was standard for aspiring American musicians to study in Europe during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before music schools in the United States
became competitive with French and German institutions. Frank’s decision to study
abroad at that particular time was probably hastened by the debacle of the American
Concerts. Whatever the case may be, he received a passport to travel abroad on July 31st,
which indicated that he still resided at home with his parents at 18 Clawson Street in the

Figure 2.6, Press notice about Frank Saddler’s studies abroad,
The Pittsburg Press, June 7, 1888.

East End. Frank’s departure, announced in The Pittsburg Press on August 9, brought to a
close the first period in his musical career with a journalistic flourish that reflected the
affection and high regard that he had found in Pittsburgh:
Frank E. Saddler, the popular young musician of the East End, leaves to-
night for New York and will sail Saturday on the steamer Eider. He goes
to Munich for a course of three years or more in the study of music. Mr.
Saddler is a young man possessing extraordinary ability in a musical way,
and with the thorough course which he has mapped out for himself, will be
heard from in the future. The public-spirited gentleman, who, appreciating

71
Mr. Saddler’s ability, furnished the funds necessary to defray the expense
of foreign study, has been kept a profound secret at his own request. The
best wishes of hundreds of friends, both in the musical profession and out,
will go with Mr. Saddler across the water, and they will be glad to hear of
his success and progress.
77

Considering that only five months earlier he had suffered a potentially devastating
setback in his career—having made contact with several of the most important American
composers and then publicly failed to present their works adequately in a concert series—
this tribute shows that, even as a young man, Frank had already developed the personal
and professional skills that endeared him to a large community of people in his home
town. And, as he continued to pursue his musical career, both his impeccable artistic
craftsmanship and his personal charm earned him the respect and admiration of his
colleagues wherever he went. His resilience and ability to reinvent himself in order to
adapt to new circumstances would also serve him well—first in Munich, where he
succeeded in staying several years longer than he had originally planned and was again
celebrated upon his departure, and then back in the United States, where he was faced
with needing to make a living and support a family. In each place where he sought to
develop his career as a musician, he followed the same pattern of his final success in
Pittsburgh by turning to the art of arranging as a vehicle for professional advancement.
Moreover, what he discovered after he left Pittsburgh was that orchestral arranging could
not only provide him with a path to success, but that it could give him a platform through
which to fulfill his desire to champion the works of American composers, as he had
attempted to do unsuccessfully as a producer. Ironically, it was through his ability to

77
The Pittsburg Press, August 9, 1888.

72
surrender his own compositional creativity to support the music of other artists that he
would find his own musical voice. In the end, his capacity to enrich the musical ideas of
the composers whose work he orchestrated with vivid instrumental color and inventive
timbral combinations allowed him to transform a medium that was previously considered
a perfunctory technical craft into mode of personal artistic expression, and thus into an art
form in its own right.

73
Chapter 3

Musical Training in Munich

Taking the Pennsylvania Railroad out of Pittsburgh’s Union Station, Frank bid goodbye
to his family and friends on Thursday evening, August 9, 1892, heading for Hoboken,
New Jersey, where he would board a steamship bound for Bremen, Germany, two days
later. The ship he traveled on—the Eider—was put into service by the Norddeutscher
Lloyd steamship company in 1884 and was the fourth in a new line of express steamers
that cut the time of the Atlantic crossing by fully three days, from eleven to somewhere
between eight and nine.
1
While the new speeds were welcomed by the mail service on
both continents, the ships were primarily passenger vessels and were built for large-
capacity transport in steerage. According to The New York Times, “there are
accommodations on the Eider for 150 first class and 200 second class passengers and
1,200 immigrants,” showing how the company sought to serve the great influx of people
making the journey to the United States to start a new life at that time. The relative
handful of people traveling first class were treated to comforts unknown to the
immigrants: a dining-saloon with walls “paneled in walnut” and ceiling made “of
artistically carved wood,” a large cupola offering “ample light and ventilation,” interior
decoration, including “handsome oil-paintings by prominent German artists,” and

1
The New York Times reported the first trans-Atlantic trip by the Eider and stated that the voyage took 8
days and 10 hours. “The Arrival of the Eider,” The New York Times, March 30, 1884, 3. Some of the
information on the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship line was drawn from the website Norway-Heritage:
Hands Across the Sea: http://www.norwayheritage.com/p_shiplist.asp?co=ndlaa (accessed July 21, 2014).

74
Figure 3.1, Steamship Eider, Norddeutscher Lloyd company (circa 1885).

furniture “of luxurious style.” It was also noted that the state rooms in first class were
situated near the saloon and well forward of the engines. Frank was likely among the
travelers in second class, the cabins of which were “neatly furnished” at half the price,
while steerage cost thirty percent of first-class rates.
Following the eight-day journey, the ship docked at Bremerhaven, the port town
located forty miles by train from the German city of Bremen. From here, Frank took the
450-mile train ride to Munich, where he would spend the next four years of his life
studying music. Munich at the time of Frank’s arrival was a city in transition. As the
capital of Bavaria, it was the political seat of the monarchy, which only three years earlier
had seen the succession from Ludwig II to his uncle Luitpold, through a regency that
became necessary since the King’s brother, Otto, was deemed mentally incompetent.
2

2
Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance, 1890-1914
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 34.

75
Having ruled Bavaria for twenty years with an obsessive predilection for building lavish
castles in the Black Forest and for supporting the artistic ambitions of Richard Wagner,
Ludwig II himself had become incapable of managing the affairs of state by 1884 and
was deposed in advance of his ensuing madness. It has been conjectured that the King’s
mental and emotional instability was precipitated, or at least was exacerbated by,
Wagner’s death in 1883.
3
And yet, by the end of the 1880s the city was still under the
spell of Wagner and Ludwig’s visionary theatrical and artistic worldview, long after the
local premieres of Tristan und Isolde (1865), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868),
Das Rheingold (1869), and Die Walküre (1870). 145 miles to the north, the city of
Bayreuth and Wagner’s Festspielhaus dominated the southern German musical
landscape, just as they captivated the attention of all of Europe. After the unfortunate
circumstances surrounding Ludwig’s demise, Luitpold’s ascension to the throne (though
clouded by suspicions about the ruler playing a role in his nephew’s death) was a
stabilizing force in the region and his regency was marked by relative peace and
prosperity until his death in 1912.
The aesthetic revolution that was gathering momentum in Germany through the
realization of Wagner’s operatic aspirations in Bavaria was a corollary of Ludwig’s social
and political actions as head of state. For Munich’s citizens began to see the benefits of
Ludwig’s liberalism in their daily lives around the same time as they were first attending
Wagner’s operas. Despite reports of the King’s mental instability and nonchalance about
the affairs of government, the laws he enacted in 1867 relieved the Bavarian people of the

3
Frances Gerard, The Romance of Ludwig II. of Bavaria (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1899), 249-51.

76
stranglehold the local magistrates had upon their aspirations and livelihoods. Around that
time, American author Charles Dudley Warner was visiting Munich and was unstinting in
his praise of Ludwig’s liberation of the Munich public from the shackles of bureaucratic
control. People from every trade—from bakers to journeymen to manufacturers—had
previously been regulated to excess by the magistrates, whose draconian laws stifled all
competition and advancement of young people attempting to establish themselves within
the ranks of existing businesses. As Warner later observed, by 1867 the local power of
the bureaucrats was suppressed by the new civic orders of Ludwig II.
Nearly all this mass of useless restriction on trades and business, which
palsied all effort in Bavaria, is removed. Persons are free to enter into any
business they like. The system of apprenticeship continues, but so
modified as not to be oppressive; and all trades are left to regulate
themselves by natural competition. Already Munich has felt the benefit of
the removal of these restrictions, which for nearly a year has been
anticipated, in a growth of population and increased business.
4

Warner saw in Ludwig’s management of Bavarian affairs of state the same enlightened
leadership as he exhibited by championing of Wagner’s operatic agenda. According to
Warner, the most powerful symbol that the composer had designed for Munich to
celebrate their liberation was not the production of one of his own operas, but the revival
of the unadulterated version of Gioachino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. Referring to Ludwig
in his 1872 European travelogue, Warner claimed that “for many years this liberty-
breathing opera was not permitted to be given in Bavaria, except with all the life cut
out…The same liberality that induced him, years ago, to restore William Tell to the stage

4
Charles Dudley Warner, Saunterings (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1872), 108.

77
has characterized the government under him ever since.”
5

Music flourished in Munich during Ludwig’s reign, not only in the opera house,
but in concerts and entertainments throughout the city in concert halls, cafés, and beer
gardens. Every venue featured an orchestra of well-trained musicians, many playing
symphonies, but, according to Warner, “generally with more popular music and a
considerable dash of Wagner, in whom the Munichers believe.”
6
The orchestral
performances at the Hoftheater and the Conservatory, both institutions being under royal
patronage, were among the finest in all of Europe. Warner’s assessment of the quality of
the city’s orchestras was presented as a statement about their reputation: “They say that
the best orchestras are in Germany; that the best in Germany is in Munich; and, therefore,
you can see the inevitable deduction.”
7
Hans von Bülow was responsible for much of this
esteem, bringing such a high degree of discipline and expressivity to his conducting that
Wagner entrusted him with the premieres of several of his operas as well as the
directorship of the Royal Conservatory. By the 1870s, the concert music scene in Munich
was dominated by the conservatory. The voice faculty of the music school in particular
provided Munich with a constant supply of excellent concerts, “so that there are few
evenings without some attraction,” according to Warner, who considered the singers to be
“perhaps not known in Paris or London, but some of them are not unworthy to be.”
8

Apart from the outstanding aspects of musical and cultural life in the Bavarian
capital, it is unclear why Frank chose Munich as the German city where he would pursue

5
Ibid., 107.
6
Ibid., 132.
7
Ibid., 154.
8
Ibid., 155.

78
his education. The idea to study music in Munich may have been suggested to him by
Carl Retter, who attended the Königlichen Musikschule in München in the early 1870s.
9

Frank had probably hoped to study at the conservatory at first, but if so, those plans never
materialized. For more than two decades, the school had been an attractive destination for
aspiring American composers, largely due to its rigorous curriculum in theory and
composition implemented by Joseph Rheinberger, who also gave classes in advanced
counterpoint, canon, and fugue.
10
His reputation as a demanding and inspiring teacher
drew to the school, over the years, many of the leading composers from the Second New
England School, including George Whitefield Chadwick, Horatio Parker, Arthur Battelle
Whiting, and several other lesser-known American musicians.
11

Most promising young American musicians during the latter half of the
nineteenth century felt it was necessary to travel to Europe to complete their education.
For universities and conservatories in the United States had yet to develop programs that
could adequately accommodate talented and ambitious composers and instrumentalists
who sought training in classical music at the highest level. John Knowles Paine, who
established the music department at Harvard University and who became widely
respected as the first important composer of symphonic music in the United States, had

9
Baynham, A History of Pittsburgh Music, 129.
10
Bülow praised him as an unparalleled teacher (if not as a composer): “Rheinberger is a truly ideal
composition teacher, whose skill, refinement and love of detail are unrivalled in all of Germany and the
surrounding area, in short, one of the most respectable musicians and men in the world.” Bill F. Faucett,
George Whitefield Chadwick: The Life and Music of the Pride of New England (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2012), 67-8.
11
Some other American composers that studied with Rheinberger are Franz Xavier Arens, Henry Holden
Huss, Frederick F. Bullard, Wallace Goodrich, Philip Hale, Francis Limbert, Lewis Leo Rich, Louis
Adophe Coerne, Walter Raymond Spaulding, and Frederick Shepherd Converse. Elam Douglas
Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students, 1850-1900,” PhD diss. (University of
Maryland, 1991), 122.

79
exhausted his educational resources by the time he was twenty, studying in his hometown
in Maine. Biographer John C. Schmidt wrote that it was natural for Paine to look to
Germany to further his development.
Paine had obtained all the training possible in Portland, and for a young
man of such obvious talent, a period of study in Europe, preferably
Germany, was mandatory, both for growth as a musician and for stature in
the profession. Moreover, the musical experiences available in the small
city of Portland were extremely limited when compared to those in Boston
and New York. Opportunities in Berlin, in turn, greatly overshadowed
what Boston and New York had to offer. And Paine certainly had the self-
confidence and ambition that would motivate him to work toward the very
highest goal—professional training in Europe.
12

The idea to study abroad must have occurred to Frank as a result of his exposure to the
many fine musicians he worked with in Pittsburgh who received their training in
Germany. Carl Retter, Henry Ecker, Adolph Foerster, Wilhelm Guenther, George and
Fred Toerge all either went to Germany to study or were born there. In addition, Frank’s
work on the American concerts project brought him into contact with several of the
leading composers in the United States, many of whom—Dudley Buck, Silas Pratt, John
Knowles Paine, Willard Burr, Jr., and Edgar Kelley among them—were German-trained.
Arthur Foote, who later studied with Paine at Harvard, was the first American composer
to develop a significant career without European training. Not surprisingly, he
accomplished this by studying with teachers who themselves were educated in Germany.
Owing to the dearth of art music composers and institutions in American
cultural history, a musical neophyte had to look to Europe for an
education, either by studying abroad or with a local instructor well versed
in European practices. Foote did not travel to Germany to complete his
studies, as did most of his colleagues and teachers, Stephen Emery, John

12
John C. Schmidt, The Life and Work of John Knowles Paine (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms
International, 1980, 31.

80
Knowles Paine, and B. J. Lang. Yet, through these three men, he acquired
a style closely akin to that of Central Europe.
13

Starting around 1850, coinciding with the establishment of several world-class
musical conservatories in Germany, American musicians in greater and greater numbers
began to travel overseas to learn from the finest musicians in the European tradition.
14
By
the end of the century, over 5,000 American students had enrolled in German
conservatories, the majority of them at institutions in Berlin, Leipzig, Weimar, Stuttgart,
Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, and Dresden.
15
Many studied at several institutions,
traversing the German-speaking Confederation of states in search of teachers that could
impart the secrets and rigors of their musical tradition, which these musicians hoped to
bring back home to America in order to improve their artistic abilities and enhance their
professional careers. Perhaps most famously, pianist Amy Fay attended conservatories in
Berlin, Weimar, and Hamburg, studying with renowned pedagogues Carl Tausig,
Theodor Kullak, Franz Liszt, and Ludwig Deppe in the process.
16
Both Edward
MacDowell and George Whitefield Chadwick studied in multiple European cities,
relocating when they were dissatisfied with the type or quality of training they were

13
Nicholas E. Tawa, Arthur Foote: A Musician in the Frame of Time and Place (Lanham, MD: The
Scarecrow Press, 1997), 87.
14
The conservatory at Leipzig, started by Felix Mendelssohn in 1843, was the first of several German
musical institutions to come into existence. Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American
Students,” 9.
15
The institutions listed here were the most popular for American students, with conservatories at Berlin
and Leipzig hosting more than 1,500 students each. Schools with smaller contingents of Americans
included those at Baden-Baden, Bayreuth, Bonn, Breslau, Coburg, Freiburg, Göttingen, Halle, Hamburg,
Heidelberg, Homberg, Karlsruhe, Mainz, Mannheim, Sondershausen, Stockhausen, Strassburg, Wiesbaden,
and Würzburg, Ibid., 2, 318-442.
16
Amy Fay, Music-Study in Germany: From the Home Correspondence of Amy Fay (Chicago: A. C.
McClurg and Company, 1891).

81
receiving.
17

Frank’s arrival in Munich in the middle of August would likely have given
him enough time to apply for admittance to the Royal Conservatory, since the
Wintersemester in most German music schools began in mid-October and ran through
February.
18
Applications could not be made from home due to the necessity of passing
the entrance exams (Aufnahmeprüfung), thus requiring that prospective students make the
trip with no reasonable guarantee (beyond their own self-confidence) that they would be
able to study at a German conservatory. The requirements went beyond testing applicants
for sufficient technical ability in music; they were also designed to determine students’
general education and ability to speak and understand German. A composer seeking to
study at the Royal Conservatory in music would need to pass the school’s daunting
entrance exams in music theory, which were not typically given as written exams taken at
a desk, but instead conducted on a blackboard in front of the examiners. George
Whitefield Chadwick, who applied to the conservatory in Munich in 1879, described the
circumstances of the test, which he failed despite having already studied at the
conservatory in Leipzig.
The entire faculty of the music school, many of whom wore very
pessimistic countenances, sat about in a ring and watched the victim write
Harmony and Counterpoint exercises on the blackboard. These were all in
C clef, with which I was none too familiar…Besides I was a good deal
rattled by the presence of the ogres who surrounded the altar on which the
victim was immolated. The consequence was that I made a pretty poor
showing, which elicited some ironical remarks about graduates of the
Leipzig Conservatory.
19

17
Alan Howard Levy, Edward MacDowell, An American Master (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1998).
Faucett, George Whitefield Chadwick.
18
Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students,” 9-10.
19
Faucett, George Whitefield Chadwick, 67.

82
Afterward, Chadwick appealed directly to Rheinberger and asked to be tested again in
private. Without the pressure of performing his exam in front of all the teachers, he was
ultimately admitted and allowed to take the professor’s courses in counterpoint. Upon his
return to Boston, the composer recommended many of his students to Rheinberger in the
ensuing years.
Given the rigorous nature of the school’s requirements, it is entirely possible that
Frank Saddler may have applied to study at the conservatory and was not accepted, either
due to insufficient musical skills, or because his German was lacking, or both. In any
event, being determined to make good use of his patronage, he found himself a teacher
who could give him private instruction in harmony, counterpoint, composition, and
conducting. Joseph Stich was a conductor and composer whose most notable success was
a “romantic opera” in one act, Der Geiger zu Gmünd, which premiered in 1875 at the
Staattsheatre in Düsseldorf. He was appointed first conductor at the Royal Theater in
Munich in 1878 and was still actively involved with the opera house when Frank came to
Munich.
20
Having studied composition at the Royal Conservatory in the early 1870s with
Wendelin Weissheimer, who was a close associate of Wagner, Stich also knew
Rheinberger well, and hence could have been recommended by him as a private teacher
for Frank upon his failure to pass the entrance exams.
21

During Frank’s first year of study with Stich, he focused on advanced subjects in

20
The Musical World, London, March 2, 1878, 159.
21
Stephan Schmitt, Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München von den Anfängen bis
1945 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), 94.

83

Figure 3.2, Cover of opera libretto for Joseph Stich’s Geiger zu Gmünd.

84
musical theory, including harmony and counterpoint, suspending his urge to compose
freely in favor of developing his compositional skills. In a letter home at the end of his
first year, he provided Pittsburgh readers of the Dispatch with evidence of the benefits of
the tutelage he was receiving by describing in detail a sophisticated musical puzzle he
had devised: “It is in two parts for violins, written on the violin clefs. When these two
parts are turned upside down and played backwards, with the base [sic] clef and viola or
alto clef, they move smoothly and chord [sic] with the two parts when played forward
with violin clefs.”
22
The end result of this unusual musical invention was a string quartet,
the bottom two lines of which are in precise inverted retrograde from the top two lines.
Full of pride, Frank claimed that the form of his composition was unique, that “Mozart
wrote a couple of duets for two violins in this way and Haydn also…But no person ever
put a quartet together in this shape before.” The columnist for the Dispatch, who was
clearly impressed by Frank’s (self-described) singular contrapuntal achievement, took his
letter as a prompt to engage in a little hometown gloating over the accomplishment:
It is now in order for some contrapuntal sharp to step up and inform us
that every musical student at Cambridge or Kamschatka has to write a
patent reversible double-back-action quartet before he can get his
bachelor’s degree. But, honestly now, has any one ever done it before our
Pittsburg boy?
23

While Frank’s friends and family were probably delighted at the accolades he was
receiving, this bit of folksy press coverage of his studies seems quaint in retrospect. By
contrast, when George Whitefield Chadwick completed his first year at the Leipzig

22
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 22, 1890.
23
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 22, 1890.

85
Conservatory, the first two movements of a string quartet that would become his Op. 1
were selected to be performed at the final exam concert (Hauptprüfungskonzert). The
music was reviewed favorably in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and yet the
accomplishment did not seem sufficiently press-worthy to be mentioned in the
newspapers of Portland, Maine.
24
Despite the sophomoric tone of the letter and resulting
press notice, they both served the purpose for which Frank had intended them: to justify
the continuation of his funding to study in Germany for another year. Since he was not
studying at the conservatory, Frank needed to report his progress in creative ways, and
for this purpose he relied upon The Pittsburgh Dispatch increasingly over the next three
years to publish articles about his musical studies and experiences. The editors were
willing collaborators with Frank as he made his case, considering his correspondence
good copy among Pittsburgh music circles; and he reciprocated by acting at times as a
German correspondent, writing about current events in Munich in amusing ways that
made good reading and enhanced the newspaper’s cachet.
By late summer, funding for a second year of study had been secured. An article
in the Dispatch on August 24 reported that “Mr. Saddler…looks forward with great
pleasure to the coming year’s study in the freer, wider lines of composition.”
25
He
traveled during the summer months with Joseph Stich, whose mentorship was developing
beyond tutoring in theory and composition; the elder composer sought to introduce his
student to the German landscape, culture, and way of life. Travel during an American’s

24
Faucett, George Whitefield Chadwick, 51-2.
25
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, August 24, 1890.

86
term of German study was considered a necessary component of their musical education.
Sometimes referred to as the “Grand Tour,” this sort of summer excursion cultivated their
historical awareness and cultural sensibility, spending time visiting museums, castles, and
cathedrals, not to mention restaurants and beer gardens in towns and cities throughout the
German territories.
26
Stich probably introduced Frank to nearby Bayreuth as well as other
German cities that hosted music festivals that took place during the summer months. At
some point, they were likely joined by Frank’s Pittsburgh colleagues, Dr. and Mrs.
Walters, who spent several months in Europe during the summer of 1890—so long, in
fact, that rumors arose in Pittsburgh that the Poco-a-Poco orchestra was disbanding due in
part to their prolonged absence “until late in the fall.”
27

Once he returned to Munich after his summer travels, Frank began work on a
composition for string quartet and orchestra.
28
The rarity of the instrumental combination
was enhanced by the unusual timbral choice of requiring the quartet to play with mutes.
Frank’s designation of this unique instrumental feature suggests that he was thinking of
the piece as being more in the form of a concerto rather than in concertante style, since
the mutes would clearly distinguish the sonority of the quartet from the orchestra. A letter
reported in the Dispatch announced that the piece (titled Phantasia) had been completed
and was being given a reading by the Verkehrsbeamtenverein (“Transportation Officials
Union”) Orchestra as well as a performance in concert by the Bürger-Sänger-Zunft, a

26
Bomberger, “The German Musical Training of American Students,” 32.
27
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, November 16, 1890.
28
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, December 14, 1890.

87
music society in Munich with a rich history.
29
The correspondence was once again
framed as a report by Frank that “the studies in composition he is now pursuing at
Munich, under Director Joseph Stich, are bearing fruit,” demonstrating his attentiveness
to the need for concrete evidence of the value of his benefactor’s investment. The work
itself, which has been lost along with all of Frank Saddler’s compositions, was about six
minutes in length. In the opinion of Stich, the music was “spicy and interesting
throughout,” suggesting that Frank was learning to manage sustained dissonance from his
teacher, whom Rheinberger, with his conservative aesthetic musical outlook, considered
to be an “experimental” composer.
30

The Pittsburgh Dispatch published the first of Frank’s foreign correspondence
letters in an article titled “Musical Matters from Munich,” in February of the following
year.
31
His story is a satirical exposé on a humorous circumstance at the Royal Opera
House, where Mozart’s Don Giovanni was playing, which gives some insight into
Frank’s wry sense of humor.
There was a very unusual cast of characters in the latest production of
“Don Juan” at the Royal Opera House here. As it happened a couple of the
younger members of the company were on the sick list and their places
were filled with old stagers. It is probably the most aged representation of
Mozart’s great opera ever given.
I procured the list of ages from Siehr, who, as “one of the oldest,”
was particularly pleased that all the gray beards were on the boards at
once. The following are the ages of the eight principal characters:
Years
Herr Gura (Don Juan) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Frau Weckerlin (Donna Anna) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Frau Vogel (Elvira) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

29
The Bürger-Sänger-Zunft was founded in 1840. The organization, which supports a chorus and orchestra,
is still in existence. For more information, see http://www.buergersaengerzunft.de/
30
Schmitt, Geschichte der Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, 94.
31
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, February 8, 1891.

88
Herr Vogel (Ottario) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Herr Siehr (Comthur) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Herr Bausewein (Leporello) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Herr Th. Mayer (Masetto) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Frau Meysenheim (Zerlina) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
_____

A total of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384

Or an exact average of 48 years for each character. Frau
Meysenheim, as Zerline, was the “baby” at 42 years, and Siehr holds the
ticket for the position of grandpa, as he has the advantage of Bausewein by
a couple of months. If the same cast gives this opera in two years from
now their combined ages will reach back to the discovery of America by
Columbus (400 years).
“Asrael”—poor Franchetti’s opera, has been taken from rehearsal
and will not be given. On Thursday, Mascagni’s new opera, “Cavaliera
Rusticana,” will be given here for the first time. According to the
“Triumvirate,” Levi, Fischer, and Stich, the music is brilliant, sparkling,
melodious, and the instrumentation fine.
There are so few novelties on the board this winter that the
excitement of a “first time” is felt even to the semi-musical classes. The
carnival has knocked the bottom out of all serious musical projects for the
present.

Aside from noticing the obvious amusement Frank derived from writing this article for
public consumption in Pittsburgh, there are several important observations one can draw
from this piece. For one thing, it shows the degree to which Frank was engaged with the
music scene in Munich. His active involvement with concert life in the Bavarian capital
seems to have been facilitated by his work with Stich. In fact, not being a student at the
conservatory seems to have afforded him opportunities that would not have otherwise
been available. On the one hand, he was not as busy preparing schoolwork as he would
have been, and on the other, he was less insulated socially by not attending school every
day, better enabling him to meet professional musicians such as the singer Siehr,
conductors Herman Levi and Franz Fischer, and others. Also, this article provides us with

89
the first glimpse of Frank’s developing interest in music for the theatre. Although Munich
in the early 1890s was still in the throes of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic
(Levi, Fischer, and Stich were all Wagner acolytes), the Hoftheater was not merely a
satellite of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, but rather produced a range of operatic
repertory. Though Frank did not arrive in Munich with any discernible theatrical
experience, his exposure to professional German opera productions, especially as an
apprentice to a long-serving music director at the Royal Opera House, left him with an
enduring passion for working in the theatre. His subsequent decision to seek a career first
as a music director in the theatre and later as an orchestrator were at least partly
attributable to theatrical ambitions acquired during his European studies, as much as to
pragmatic motives related to personal circumstances upon his return to the United States.
And yet, as he immersed himself in the productions and milieus surrounding the
Hoftheater in Munich, Frank continued to compose and perform concert music for local
audiences. Frank’s conducting career began around this time with a several performances
of his Phantasia (now retitled Phantasie Stück) for muted string quartet and orchestra.
32

His success with the public presentation of his concerto led to a commission by the
Allotria artists’ club to compose a characteristic piece for 12 waldhorns, an unusual genre
by any measure. A meeting place for Munich’s intelligentsia, the Allotria “was a centre
of social and intellectual intercourse,” according to Sidney Whitman, correspondent for
the London Times and New York Herald and author of German Memories about his
travels in the 1880s and 1890s.

32
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, May 24, 1891.

90
In many ways the “Allotria” was expressive of the strong democratic
character of South Germany, which only recognizes the aristocracy of
talent. The club consisted of several large rooms at the back of a
beerhouse in the Barer Strasse. The annual subscription was only thirty-
two marks, and the membership was supposed to be restricted to people
connected with art and science—either writers, authors, the eminent black
and white artists of the Fliegende Blätter, painters, sculptors, architects,
musicians, and a few professors of the Munich University. An exception
as regards membership was made in favour of some prominent brewer
millionaires—the Allsopps, Basses and Guinnesses of Bavaria. They were
admitted, but it was understood that they were not to have a voice or vote
in the administration of the club which was entirely confined to the artistic
element; this in spite of their wealth and capacity for playing the part of
Mæcenas. The only privilege accorded to these beer magnates, I am told,
was that of being allowed to “endow” the club now and then on festive
occasions with a cask or two of their choicest brews.
33

Given the exclusive nature of the Allotria, Stich had probably invited Frank and
introduced him to the club’s members, who took an interest in the young American
composer and offered him a commission for a choir of waldhorns when they heard how
deftly he handled the interplay of instruments in his concerto. The work he composed,
Zwei Stücke aus “Erinnerung an das Kaiserthal” für Jagdhörner, was in two
movements, “Morgengruss” and “Abendlied,” that represented two aspects of the
Kaiserthal valley in the Tyrolian Alps, at morning and evening. Located less than sixty
miles south of Munich, the glen, rimmed by the impressive peaks of the Kaisergebirge,
was a popular summer destination for travelers from the southern regions of Germany,
due its grandeur and proximity.
34
Frank’s “Souvenir” was a musical portrait likely drawn
from the memory of his travels with Stich. The Allotria club members must have been
delighted with the Alpine impressions of a young Pennsylvanian whose experience of

33
Sidney Whitman, German Memories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912), 151.
34
John Ball, A Guide to the Eastern Alps (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870), 66-70.

91
mountains up to that point was limited to the Alleghenies, which topped out at 5,000 feet.
As a result of Stich’s connections within the artistic community, Frank’s
apprenticeship enabled him to begin working as a freelance composer in Munich, when
his musical activities otherwise might well have been confined to the conservatory. Not
only was he composing effectively with Stich’s guidance; he was conducting as well, a
skill he would put to good use during the first decade of his career in New York.
Nonetheless, at the end of his third year abroad, Frank once again faced the prospect of
his sponsor’s patronage coming to an end. Not surprisingly, it was just at this time that
Pittsburgh readers of the Dispatch began to read about the excitement being generated by
another orchestral work that was not a composition of his own, but rather an arrangement.
Remembering his recent success in Pittsburgh with his Stephen Foster medley, Frank
arranged and orchestrated a collection of American tunes into a piece that he began to
perform to acclaim in and around Munich. The Pittsburgh Dispatch reported upon the
positive reception accorded to Frank’s most important work up to that time: Klänge aus
Amerika (“Sounds from America”).
Yet greater popularity has been won by an orchestral pot-pourri of
American melodies, a fully scored piece of 15 minutes’ length,
including various national and negro tunes and winding up with the
“Star-Spangled Banner.” It was first given at one of Fach’s
concerts last month, Mr. Saddler conducting the orchestra, which
was that of the King’s First Infantry Regiment, reputed the most
efficient in Munich outside of the Royal Theatre. The young
Pittsburgher’s orchestration of this homely masterpiece won
repeated recalls, compelling a repetition. The work has since been
frequently given with like results, and a liberal offer for its
publication accepted by Mr. Saddler.
35

35
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, May 24, 1891.

92
Figure 3.3, Cover art for Frank Saddler’s Klänge aus Amerika.

93
Utilizing no fewer than eighteen popular melodies—military and patriotic songs,
childrens’ ditties, parlor airs, minstrel songs, and folk tunes—Frank crafted a substantial
orchestral medley out of musical materials that were modest compared to the progressive
tonal and formal language found in the late-Romantic operas, symphonies, and tone
poems to which Munich audiences were accustomed.
Klänge aus Amerika captured the imagination of some of the region’s finest
musicians and was briefly popular with German audiences. Due partly to the taste for
musical exoticism among Europeans in the 1890s and partly to Frank’s ingenuity as an
orchestrator, the work registered a degree of enthusiasm that would have been enviable to
any American musician in Germany at the time. At the premiere, Frank conducted the
Erste Infanterie-Regiments König (“King’s First Infantry Regiment”), a Bavarian military
band directed by Adolf Fach that was “reputed the most efficient in Munich outside of
the Royal Theater.”
36
Following the performance, Frank was recalled to the stage several
times, the audience ultimately demanding a repetition. One month later, the Dispatch
reported:
At one of the many performances of this work in Munich under Mr.
Saddler’s baton it was most vigorously applauded by a noted singer, who
had just before remarked to the composer that “he did not believe that a
country like America could have national or characteristic music.” No less
a personage than the great conductor [Hermann] Levi, who has been
general director of the Bayreuth Festivals for years past, expressed the
opinion that these melodies are just as characteristic as, and much newer

36
The passage beginning “reputed the most efficient,” presumably from Frank’s own pen, is from The
Pittsburgh Dispatch, May 24, 1891. The reference to Adolf Fach as the director of the Munich band can be
found in Verordnungs-Blatt des Königlich Bayernischen Kriegministeriums. 1899. No. 1 mit 37, p. 35,
https://books.google.com/books?id=lfSH9eizakwC&pg=RA1-PA35&lpg=RA1-
PA35&dq=%22adolf+fach%22&source=bl&ots=0QzVS_jqU0&sig=atMBt0p0cVcAgqvI9bolFrLXb7Q&h
l=en&sa=X&ei=qlxjVYaKNofeoATNnoOgDQ&ved=0CEoQ6AEwCjgK#v=onepage&q=%22adolf%20fac
h%22&f=false (accessed May 25, 2015).

94
than, the Hungarian dances that Brahms has orchestrated, arranged and
composed. Paul Hein, the Dresden conductor, after he had produced the
potpourri in MS. [manuscript], wrote to the publisher a letter with these
expressions: “Immense success—most tastefully orchestrated—I cannot
now get along without it, at least in Dresden.” Though the work has only
been published a few weeks, prominent orchestras in the principal cities
and watering places of Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria have
already ordered copies, beside a half-dozen orders from Russia and others
from Norway and Sweden.

Receiving the imprimatur of three distinguished musicians in Munich for his orchestral
medley of American tunes gave Frank ample reason to write home. The compliment by
Hermann Levi was probably considered the highest honor. At the time, Levi was Court
Kapellmeister in Munich, a position he held for nearly twenty-five years, from 1872 to
1896. Through most of his career, he was closely associated, both personally and
professionally, with both Wagner and Brahms. An early performance by Levi in
Karlsruhe of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg won praise from Wagner and helped to
cement a lifelong friendship and working relationship. As a reflection of Wagner’s great
trust and respect for Levi, the composer asked him to conduct the premiere of Parsifal at
Bayreuth in 1882, having overcome enormous personal resistance to having his opera
about the quest for the Holy Grail conducted by a Jew.
37
As a young man, Levi had
befriended Johannes Brahms and over the years had been closely associated with his
works, having conducted the Piano Concerto in D minor with the composer as soloist as

37
James Deavile, ed., Wagner in Rehearsal, 1875-1876: The Diaries of Richard Fricke, translated by
George R. Fricke (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1998), 31. Englebert Humperdink, Bayreuth: The
Early Years: An Account of the Early Decades of the Wagner Festival as Seen by the Celebrated Visitors &
Participants, compiled and edited by Robert Hartford (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1980), 117.

95
well as the premiere of the German Requiem in 1868.
38
His favorable comparison of
Klänge aus Amerika to Brahms’ Hungarian Dances was, therefore, an opinion to be
prized. It was also a testament to Frank’s ingenuity in arranging for orchestra, since the
novelty of hearing a succession of eighteen American melodies in an orchestral setting
would never have interested the conductor had the piece not been exceptionally well
crafted.
The success of Klänge aus Amerika in Munich prompted the local Munich
publisher Josef Seiling to offer to print the work in three arrangements: a piano reduction
and two versions for orchestra, large and small. Issued with the subtitle “Grosses
Potpourri über amerikanische Nationalmelodien,” the sheet music was adorned with
cover illustrations depicting in one corner a European American in top hat and tails
astride a globe (standing on the eastern United States), with the Statue of Liberty in the
background, and in the other corner a scene from the rural south with two African
Americans making music with a banjo and bones. The label “Potpourri” was common in
the nineteenth century with composers of light music such as Johann Strauss II and was
appropriate for a piece featuring eighteen distinct tunes related thematically. The title
“Klänge aus Amerika” had previously been used by a German composer, Theodor Östen,
in 1850 for a piano medley of three American tunes: “Jankee Doodle,” “Hail, Columbia,”
and “The Star Spangled Banner.”
39
Though it may have been purely coincidental that two
German publications using American melodies bore the same title, if Frank did know of

38
Frithjof Haas, Hermann Levi: From Brahms to Wagner, translated by Cynthia Klohr (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2012), 85-6.
39
Augener & Co.’s Universal Circulating Musical Library with Supplements (London: Augener & Co.,
1861), 1173.

96
Table 1, List of melodies from Klänge aus Amerika, arranged and orchestrated by
Frank E. Saddler, 1891.

Melody Composer
1. Dixie’s Land - Dan Emmett
2. White Wings - Banks Winter
3. Yankee Doodle - Traditional
4. Listen to the Mockingbird - Septimus Winner
5. Pop Goes the Weasel - Traditional
6. Tenting on the Old Campground - Walter Kittredge
7. Johnny Get Your Gun - Fred Belasco
8. Sebastopol - Henry Worall
9. Marching Through Georgia - H. C. Work
10. Shuffle - Traditional
11. Old Black Joe - Stephen C. Foster
12. Arkansaw Traveller - Traditional
13. Home, Sweet Home - Henry Bishop
14. Stumptailed Dog - Traditional
15. Old Folks at Home - Stephen C. Foster
16. Hoe Dat Corn! - Traditional
17. Three Crows - Traditional
18. Star Spangled Banner - J. Stafford Smith

97
Östen’s piano piece, he was determined to represent the music of his homeland with a
work of grander scope.
Of the eighteen melodies, twelve were composed by nineteenth-century
songwriters and seven were traditional folk tunes with no credited author (see Table 1).
Reflecting the central role that music played in the Civil War, most of the tunes Frank
selected to express American nationalism were either written during the war or were
popularized and gained new meaning during the conflict. Dan Emmett of the Virginia
Minstrels is commonly associated with the composition of “Dixie’s Land” (a.k.a.
“Dixie”), although authorship has also been claimed by others as well.
40
Frank chose to
begin his medley with a song that in 1891 still had great significance in the United States,
having become the unofficial anthem of the defunct Confederacy (though it was written
more than a decade before the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1860). His use of “Dixie’s Land”
alongside other pro-Union songs, therefore, may show that the stigma it has acquired as a
symbol of racial injustice and intolerance did not develop until the twentieth century.
“White Wings,” written by Banks Winter (another performer in minstrelsy), after a novel
of the same name by Scottish author William Black, depicts the spreading sails of a boat
bringing a traveler back to his lover.
41
Using the pseudonym Alice Hawthorn, Septimus
Winner arranged “Listen to the Mockingbird” in 1855 from a tune she garnered from
Richard Milburn, an African-American barber.
42
Its cheerful tune and dark lyrics about a

40
Jon W. Finson, The Voices that Are Gone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 195-98.
41
Ibid., 153.
42
Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 114. Ibid., 109-10;
David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Birdsong (New York: Basic Books,
2005), 172.

98
bird singing near a lover’s grave gained poignancy during the war, and the song was a
noted favorite of Abraham Lincoln. The words of “Tenting on the Old Campground” are
a soldier’s plea for peace that constituted a protest against the Civil War when they were
composed. The bellicose refrain of “Johnny Get Your Gun” takes an aggressive view of
war and was refashioned (along with its instrumental dance tune) fifty years later into the
verse of “Over There” by George M. Cohan, which became America’s call-to-arms to
join World War I. Henry Worrall was a music teacher at the Ohio Woman’s College near
Cincinnati in the 1850s when he began to publish a series of instructional manuals for
parlor guitar. His popular classic “Sebastopol” (sometimes known as “Siege of
Sebastopol” commemorating the Crimean War) become widely influential as a method
piece for teaching the technique of playing with open tunings, and later played a central
role in the development of indigenous American folk and blues guitar styles.
43
According
to the original sheet music, H. C. Work wrote “Marching Through Georgia” “in honor of
General Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea,” making strange bedfellows with the
nostalgic strains of “Dixie’s Land.” Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” was written in
memory of an African-American butler whom the composer came to know when he was
courting his wife and has the melodic ingenuousness of a traditional folk song.
44
“Home,
Sweet Home,” by British composer Henry Bishop, first appeared in the opera Clari, or
The Maid from Milan, of 1823, on a libretto by American playwright John Howard

43
More information about Henry Worrall’s music and its influence on traditional guitar styles can be found
at the Kansas Historical Society: https://www.kshs.org/p/henry-worrall-collection/14139 (accessed on June
29, 2015).
44
A Treasury of Stephen Foster, historical notes by John Tasker Howard (New York: Random House,
1946.

99
Payne. The aria was refashioned as a parlor ballad in 1852 and was enormously popular
during the Civil War as an expression of the soldier’s homesickness and war weariness.
When Frank incorporated Foster’s well-known “Old Folks at Home,” he incorrectly
called it “Way Down Upon the Suane River.” For many Americans, the song evoked an
image of the traveler longing for home, albeit from the now-controversial perspective of
the African-American slave wanting to return to “the old plantation” where “the old folks
stay.” During the California gold rush, the song “Away Up the Yuba,” with new lyrics
tailored to Foster’s solemn melody, was popular among miners who were longing to
return home. The last song Frank used, which also served as the medley’s finale, was
“The Star Spangled Banner.” Not yet recognized as the American national anthem, the
ballad was nonetheless an important patriotic song during the Civil War as the soldiers of
the Union fought to keep the country under one flag.
Several of the tunes that comprised the musical materials of Klänge aus Amerika
were drawn from the rich array of folk music that had developed in the United States
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The origins of many traditional American
songs are difficult to trace precisely, however many had some connection to repertories in
the British Isles. Some were clearly airs and reels transported by the waves of British,
Irish, and Scottish immigrants coming to American shores, and refashioned with new
lyrics about local events, characters, and imagery, using regional dialect and idiomatic
expressions. The history of “Yankee Doodle” is unusually complicated and has generated

100
an array of articles arguing both for and against American origination.
45
One way or
another, the song has taken pride of place among American patriotic ballads from the
time of the Revolution until the present. The “Arkansas Traveler” is a miniature comic
entertainment from the 1840s of uncertain authorship, featuring music and dialogue.
Published in 1863 by Mose Case, an itinerant African-American performer, the musical
playlet was “intended to represent an Eastern man’s experience among the inhabitants of
Arkansas, showing their hospitality and the mode of obtaining it.”
46
This description is
purely ironic, however, as the interaction between the “Old Man” and the “Stranger”
represented in the score is anything but friendly. At first, the “Stranger” is received in a
most unwelcome manner. However, when “The Stranger” is able to recall the second half
of a tune—the “Arkansas Traveler”—which the “Old Man” had heard in New Orleans
but cannot recall in its entirety, he is invited to stay. In 1909, Thomas Wilson described
the performance practice of the dramatic miniature as largely improvisational:
Of course I do not remember the entire dialogue—I do not know if it was
ever given twice the same way. It was a matter of improvisation,
depending upon the skill and ability of the players, the humor they were
in, the time at their command, and the extent to which the audience could
arouse them to enthusiasm…I have known [the play] to last for an hour,
and I have never seen an audience go away from any entertainment better
pleased than were the citizens of the town of Salem [Columbiana County,
Ohio], were they guests, traveler or waggoners, when was played, in this
simple and country style, the drama of “The Arkansas Traveler.”
47

45
For more information on the origin of “Yankee Doodle,” see Oscar G. Sonneck, Report on “The Star-
Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” “America,” “Yankee Doodle” (Washington, D. C.: Govt. Print. Off.,
1909), 79-156; J. A. Leo Lemay, “The American Origins of ‘Yankee Doodle’,” The William and Mary
Quarterly (July, 1976), 435-64.
46
The sheet music for “Arkansas Traveler” by Mose Case can be found at the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music
Collection: http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/046/015 (accessed on March 7, 2018).
47
Quoted in John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1934), 267-71.

101
Today, the melody in “Arkansas Traveler” remains popular as the children’s song,
“Baby Bumble Bee.” Making a brief appearance in the medley, “Stumptailed Dog” is a
fiddle tune that has remained popular with musicians in Kentucky.
48
The title of “Hoe
Dat Corn” clearly suggests that it came into existence in the antebellum south as an
African American work song. And, though most contemporary listeners would hear the
melody of “Three Crows” and think of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” made
famous during the American Civil War, a lyric with the same cadence (“While going the
road to sweet Athy, Hurroo! Harroo!”) was offered as an Irish street ballad in H. Halliday
Sparling’s Irish Minstrelsy.
49

The implied meanings that these tunes would convey to most Americans would
have been lost on typical late-nineteenth century European listeners, unfamiliar as they
were not only with their lyrics and titles, but also with the lived social and political
history that would have been a necessary frame of reference to comprehend their
manifold textual associations. Instead, the cornucopia of American melodies Frank
presented in Klänge aus Amerika were considered by his German audiences to be
authentic representations of musical culture in the United States simply because they
sounded American. While other American composers who studied in Germany developed
compositional skills that enabled them to write music of considerable tonal and formal

48
A study of fiddle playing in Kentucky has a transcription of the tune “Dolly,” which has also been
recorded in a similar version under the name “Stumptailed Dolly.” The note for this recording states that
“John Salyer’s father, Morgan, had a bob-tailed dog named Dolly and gave the tune her name; the tune was
originally “Stumptailed Dog.” Jeff Todd Titon, Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 2001), 67.
49
H. Halliday Sparling’s Irish Minstrelsy: Being a Selection of Irish Songs, Lyrics, and Ballads (London:
Walter Scott, 1888), 491. The song is also known by the name “Three Ravens.” James F. Leisy, The Folk
Song Abecedary (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), 194-95.

102
sophistication, their music also retained many of the signature stylistic traits of European
Romanticism. Without discovering musical materials that departed substantially from
German style, many of the finest American composers of the nineteenth century, such as
Paine, Chadwick, and Foote, found it difficult to establish an orchestral sound that was
distinctly American. However, by creating sophisticated orchestral arrangements of
American popular and folk music, Frank Saddler identified a strategy by which he could
make American music both accessible and recognizable to European audiences
accustomed to hearing the orchestral music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner.
In reporting Frank’s success with Klänge aus Amerika, the columnist for The
Pittsburgh Dispatch ventured to speculate upon the relative merit of his idea to
orchestrate American folk tunes and popular songs as a way to convey the musical
heritage of a nation.
It may indeed be seriously questioned whether he has not, in giving to
these songs of the people a permanent, musicianly form and a wide
circulation abroad, actually accomplished more for the musical reputation
of the American nation than has been gained by certain much more
pretentious efforts in that direction.
50

Not surprisingly, the leading question put forth by the Dispatch stirred controversy in the
press. A writer for the Chicago Indicator took exception to the suggestion that Frank’s
orchestral potpourri could reasonably be said to do more to enhance America’s reputation
in the field of classical music than original compositions, however derivative.
The orchestral arrangement [Klänge aus Amerika] may be all right and
reflect credit upon the musician referred to, but to seriously intimate that a

50
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 28, 1891.

103
conglomeration of cheap tunes has “accomplished” anything creditable for
the musical reputation of this country is putting it rather strong.
51

Such open condescension toward traditional American musical styles was not uncommon
during the Gilded Age, when critics regularly set themselves up as protectors of cultural
hierarchies manufactured for the social and economic benefit of the upper class, as well
as for the advancement of the conceptual agendas of religious, moral, and intellectual
conservatives.
52
The editors of the Chicago Indicator, who were no strangers to battles
between newspapers (largely because they saw them as good copy), succeeded at getting
the Dispatch to respond to their “off-hand style,” or knee-jerk criticism. In defending
their position on the potential value of Frank’s arrangement for America’s reputation as a
musical culture, the Dispatch also went to extraordinary lengths to defend Frank’s
arrangement. Speaking directly of Klänge aus Amerika, the paper made an impassioned
and persuasive case for the serious treatment of America’s traditional songs and dance
tunes as substantial musical material worthy of orchestral treatment.
On hearing serious high-class works by American composers, the foreign
critics are wont to say, and generally with much truth, that all the good in
them is but the reflection of European studies and models. Through this
plausible plea American compositions often do not add to our reputation
abroad nearly so much as they ought. At best, our serious musical works
are looked upon over there rather as the exceptional freaks than as the
natural products of our nation’s civilization.
These popular songs, be they good, bad or indifferent, are at least our
very own. European masters or models have had nothing to do with them.
Indeed, they are not even the project of our own more cultured and learned
musician class. They have sprung from the people; they are sung and
loved by the people, and they represent, as nothing else possibly can, the
musical quality of the people…

51
Quoted in The Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 12, 1891.
52
For more information about high culture in the United States during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy
in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

104
At any rate, whether we agree or not with the high foreign approval
now being evoked by our national airs in Mr. Saddler’s orchestral setting,
we cannot fail to see with pleasure that it adds an entirely new element to
America’s musical reputation abroad. The prevalent idea over there is not
merely that America is musically far behind Europe—which is true—but
that our people at large care only for such recreations as baseball and prize
fighting, having no musical inclinations with taking into account. Mr.
Saddler’s work has been widely received over there as proving the
contrary.
53

European composers during the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century were
preoccupied with incorporating folk music into their orchestral works both as a way to
expand their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic palette and as a strategy to further their
broader nationalistic agendas. In absorbing the musical materials from folk traditions into
classical compositions, these composers generally used them as the basis for complex
tonal and contrapuntal procedures totally foreign to the cultural awareness of the people
from whom the music was gathered. By contrast, in limiting his creative interaction with
the music from American popular and folk traditions to arranging and orchestration of the
materials, Frank preserved much more of the primitive design elements of the original
than if he had embroidered these simple melodies into vastly more sophisticated musical
contexts. Perhaps this was what impressed Hermann Levi, Paul Hein, and the Munich
musical elite most about Klänge aus Amerika and what made it so attractive to European
audiences in 1891: for the first time they were hearing skillfully arranged orchestral
music by an American that did not sound European.
The motive that drove Frank to create his orchestral arrangement of American

53
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, July 21, 1891.

105
popular music was essentially the same as his impulse to promote American classical
composers in Pittsburgh. National pride and his belief in the unique cultural identity of
the United States compelled him to advance the cause of American music within the
broader tradition of classical music manifested by Europe and its satellites. In using
popular music as a source for national character in American orchestral music, he began
to migrate aesthetically in a direction that would ultimately lead him to abandon classical
music permanently in favor of a career in the swiftly evolving field of musical theatre. It
is hard to know whether Frank realized that in the realm of classical music in the 1890s
the United States would remain a colonial outpost of European culture for several
decades to come. Even less likely is the possibility that he somehow understood that
Broadway during the same period would flourish as a vital expression of American
identity as no other performing-arts tradition had up to that time. Nonetheless, his abrupt
transition from being an aspiring American composer in Germany to an itinerant music
director for touring burlesque shows upon arrival back in the United States does not seem
so surprising when seen in the context of his work on Klänge aus Amerika, which to
some extent foretold his future commitment to being an orchestrator of American popular
music.
Despite his new standing as a published composer (or, rather, arranger), Frank
was once again confronting the reality that his success was achieved at the financial
expense of his benefactor in Pittsburgh. After four years of study abroad, he could no
longer justify requesting another extension of support, and he needed to make plans for
his return. In the meanwhile, he continued to send letters to The Pittsburgh Dispatch

106
reporting and commenting on events in the world of classical music from the perspective
of an American in Munich. As we can recall, at the end of his amusing post about the
“elderly” cast of Don Giovanni in February, Frank finished by reporting on other
happenings at the Hoftheatre, the most important being the Munich premiere of
Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana.
54
The opera had been presented to the public for the
first time in Italy only nine months earlier, and productions were been arranged all over
Europe and the United States in the wake of its unexpected triumph in Rome.
55
The
qualities that made Cavalleria both extraordinary and highly successful were not
appreciated by one critic in America, A. P. Dunlop, whose cynical view of the
composer’s achievement received wide readership through his widely distributed
theatrical trade magazine, Dunlop’s Stage News. The journalistic attack was ruthless,
exposing its author (who also happened to be the publisher) as a shameless muckraker
determined to cause a furor for the purpose of selling papers. Dunlop had made a career
out of stirring up controversy in order to sell his journal. In early 1891, he was arrested
“at the instance of Harrison Grey Fiske, editor of the [New York] Dramatic Mirror on the
charge of criminal libel.”
56
The dubious nature of such a charge notwithstanding, this
police action makes clear that Dunlop had made a business of making enemies and that
his journalistic priority was to increase circulation at all cost. Whereas the critic of the
New York Times praised the opera and made a point of referring to Mascagni’s score as
“music that goes deeper than the skin,” Dunlop was preoccupied with his agenda of

54
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, February 8, 1891.
55
Alan Mallach, Pietro Mascagni and His Operas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 59-61.
56
Rome Semi-Weekly, Rome, NY, February 25, 1891.

107
denouncing the composer’s novel forms and techniques as gimmickry.
Cavalleria Rusticana is as full of tricks as the monkey on an Italian organ.
It is a trick to sing the principal tenor song before the curtain rises; a trick
to use the church as a contrast to the passionate scenes before it; a trick to
call this singing pantomime a melodrama; a trick to give the same soft,
sweet, sensuous Sicilian song over and over again, as a tenor solo, as a
soprano solo, as a duet, as a chorus—now in the minor, now in the major,
now as an intermezzo, then as a finale; a trick to pass suddenly from piano
to forte, from fortissimo to silence; a trick to add Wagnerian orchestration
to tunes that may be whistled.
57

When Dunlop’s article reached Frank in Munich, he wrote a lengthy response that
was published in the Dispatch as well as in the Musical Courier (another journal that was
always looking for a good fight). Frank believed he was standing on solid ground,
aesthetically speaking, having written in his earlier epistle that “according to the
‘Triumvirate’, Levi, Fischer, and Stich, the music is brilliant, sparkling, melodious, and
the instrumentation fine.” In addition, Dunlop’s suggestion that adding “Wagnerian
orchestration to tunes that may be whistled” was a comment that ridiculed a technique
that Frank had employed successfully in Klänge aus Amerika, and thus required a
vigorous defense or else Dunlop’s pejorative characterization might be allowed to stand
unquestioned. His approach was to fight fire with fire, to redress Dunlop’s sarcasm with
some irony of his own, inverting the connotation of the word “trick” to mean something
closer to “invention.”
Apropos of [Dunlop’s] sarcastic paragraph, it may be of interest to recall a
few tricks of the masters.
Let us begin with Bach, he was a trickster of the deepest dye. His
favorite trick was to sketch a theme for a single voice, turn it over to
another voice, continuing the first as accompaniment and so on till the
theme had appeared in all voices, then he would weave the themes

57
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, December 5, 1891.

108
together in a close netting—then spin off this webb [sic.] while holding a
long bass note that did not chord with another single voice. This trick was
called the Fugue, and Bach became such an adept at it that no composer
since his time has been able to approach him in this trickery.
“Let there be light, and there was light.” What a glorious trick of
Haydn’s in his Creation, that C major chord (on the word light) “passing
suddenly from piano to forte;” and what a grand trick of Handel’s in the
“Hallelujah” Chorus, “passing suddenly from fortissimo to silence,” then
ending in a much slower tempo with the plagal cadence.
One of Gluck’s best tricks was the splendid conception of the
barking of the three-headed dog, Cerberus, that guards the passage to hell,
which he produced with the double basses by merely slipping the hand
quickly along the fingerboard from the great B to small F—a diminished
fifth. Beethoven’s final and most audacious trick was that of introducing a
chorus in his ninth symphony.
Mozart died at an early age with a trick on his hands—the trick of
adding to his orchestra, in the Requiem (which he felt he was writing for
himself) two Basset-Horns; weird, grave sounding instruments which
never have and probably never will have a permanent place in the
orchestra. What a peculiar trick Mehul resorted to in his one-act opera
Uthal, wherein he cuts out the violins entirely, scoring his melodies for
Viola. Weber’s music to the “Wolfschlucht” scene in Freischutz was
pronounced the most transparent trickery by the public of his time, and
was ridiculed. And Meyerbeer! With his bassoon solos, bass clarinet solos,
kettle drum solos, etc., he was certainly a trickster par excellence.
Then still another, Berlioz, with his English horn solo with
kettledrum accompaniment in his Fantastic Symphony; introduction of the
piano into the orchestra as an orchestral instrument in the “Storm;” his
Requiem with four brass bands at the four corners of an immense body of
strings and wood, among which were ten kettle drums, several bass drums,
cymbals, etc. But as we come down to modern masters we find nothing
but tricks, and as it would be impossible to enumerate the tricks of that
prince of tricksters, Wagner, we will let the foregoing suffice.
Now, Mr. Dunlop, you will see that the great masters are addicted
to trickery, but this need not lessen your admiration for them a bit. These
tricks are merely the means of producing a desired effect, and that
constitutes the science of all art.
And now as to Mascagni’s opera. The first mentioned trick, the
singing of the tenor solo before the curtain rises, is merely a variation of
such usages as the tenor solo introducing the first act of “Tristan,” or
serenades from behind the scenes such as the beautiful one in Lachner’s
Catharino Cornaro during which there is a perfect suspension of all action
on the stage.

109
As to the second point, every person who has traveled on the
continent knows that in all peasant villages, church and inn stand either
side by side or opposite each other. Turriddu’s mother being the
proprietress of the inn, it is perfectly natural to have the scenes transpire
before her house. Had he selected any other day than Sunday for his
action, the peasants would have been in the fields at work and he would
have had no chorus. Having thus provided for his chorus, he took the most
natural means of bringing them on and off the stage by sending them to
and from church; everything just as natural and void of trickery as you
could wish.
Mascagni did not call his opera a “melodrama,” therefore the
responsibility for the third trick lies on other shoulders. The other tricks
mentioned by Mr. Dunlop may all be proven legitimate by reference to the
work of the masters. Regarding the last trick, the richness of Mascagni’s
orchestration has led many to call it “Wagnerian,” which it is far from
being. It is the genuine Italian system, as any student of instrumentation
will recognize from his manner of handling the wood wind and the heavy
brass (tuba and trombones).
Now listen to what happened in Vienna a few weeks ago at the
performance of a burlesque of Mascagni’s opera. The writer of the
burlesque had that noble intermezzo arranged for and played on a hand
organ of the meanest species. Imagine his surprise, when at the first note
of the grindorgan solo, the audience took a receptive attitude, listened in
perfect silence till the last cord [sic.] had died out, then broke into
rapturous and prolonged applause. Even the harsh, grating tones of the
hand organ could not conceal the beauty of the beloved intermezzo.
Let this be a lesson to all who would attempt to belittle Mascagni
or detract one jot from the honor that is due him for giving Cavalleria
Rusticana to the world.
58

With the exception of the example of Bach and his use of fugue, Frank’s argument is
persuasive. Fugue writing was a traditional procedure, and since the purpose of
presenting these historical examples was to demonstrate that acknowledged masters were,
like Mascagni, prone to creating novel forms, genres, and instrumental combinations, this
comparison does not work. He does make a good case with the other examples (albeit

58
Ibid.

110
somewhat to excess) that the best composers often sought to innovate with sound. The
article is less important, though, as an indication of Frank’s reasoning ability than for the
insight it yields about his musical education as well as important aspects of his
personality: his cleverness, ethical judgment, and sense of humor. It is yet another
example of his passionate engagement with new music, which in years to come would
manifest itself through his work as an orchestrator on Broadway. His work on musical
comedies and revues in collaboration with Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, Jerome Kern,
George Gershwin, and others was at the cutting edge of a new art form in which together
they crafted a modern American orchestral sound a decade before Aaron Copland, Virgil
Thompson, Roy Harris, and Marc Blitzstein returned from their studies in France and
began to get their works performed in concert.
As Frank prepared for his departure from Germany, his friends and colleagues
organized a farewell concert in his honor. The event was sponsored by the American
Artists’ Club of Munich and took place on May 25, 1892, at the Concert Hall of the Neue
Akademie.
59
A program for the event featured a handsome drawing on the cover of Frank
with a full beard that he had been growing during his years in Germany. Several
distinguished local artists took part in the concert, including Franz Fischer, Bruno Hoyer,
and Ludwig Vollnhals. The program began with Zwei Stücke aus “Erinnerung das
Kaiserthal” für Jagdhörner performed again by the Allotroia Horn Club, which had
commissioned the work during the previous year. This piece was followed by two
movements of a solo for viola called Fragments, performed by Vollnhals, and then the

59
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 19, 1892.

111

Figure 3.4, Article about Frank’s Farewell Concert in Munich
with program, The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 19, 1892.

112
three Lieder für Baryton (“Das Hüttchen,” “Winters Ahnung,” “Der Schmeid”),
performed by Johannes Wankmüller, a singer at the Hoftheater. Next on the program was
a trio in for waldhorn, viola, and piano called Stimmungsbilder, (“Atmospheric Pictures”)
in four movements: Im Waldesschatten (“In Forest Shadows”), Auf sonniger Flur (“On a
Sunny Meadow”), Auf bluehender Au, and Märzlied (“March Song”). Frank’s setting of
the poem “Drei Fräulein sah’n vom Schlosse” by Johann Ludwig Uhland for
Männerquartett was then followed by Sketches for Two Violins and Viola in three
movements. The concert concluded with the Allotroia Horn Club returning to perform
Jäger’s Ruh (“Hunter’s Rest”), a Waldszene für Jagdhörner.
While a concert of chamber music and song could not adequately represent the
entire body of work Frank created during his time in Germany, this program shows both
how productive he had been over the course of those four years and how engaged he had
been with the musical community in Munich. In each city where he lived and worked—
Pittsburgh, Munich, and later, New York City—Frank enjoyed great camaraderie and
fellowship with his colleagues. The farewell concert he was given in Munich mirrored
similar events in Pittsburgh four years earlier, just before he had left. The music is
unfortunately impossible to evaluate, having been lost with nearly all his other personal
papers; and yet, the titles of the music are suggestive of certain characteristics in his
German compositions. On the one hand, his music was typical of German romanticism in
the late nineteenth century: the lieder, the männerquartet, the waldhorn choir, and the
instrumental pieces based upon scenes in nature are all traditional German forms and
genres. And yet, on the other hand, his choices were often unusual, indicative of his

113
independent musical thinking. For example, his string trio consisted of two violins and
viola instead of Beethoven’s violin, viola, and cello, and his horn trio was not quite the
same as Brahms’ configuration, featuring viola instead of violin. His use of the titles
“Sketches” and “Fragments” sounds more like works in the style of American modernism
than anything by Schumann or Brahms. And Bach wrote many solos for violin and cello,
but not one for viola. Writing a viola solo, as opposed to one for the violin or cello, was
not the mere indulgence of a penchant for unorthodoxy; Frank’s predilection for the
instrument can be traced back to his Pittsburgh days as a performing violist. His
appreciation of the viola would continue twenty years later as an orchestrator through his
innovative approach to scoring show music.
60

More than anything, the program of the farewell concert reveals that Frank had
been working diligently during his years of European study and would bring back to
America a solid working knowledge of how to write chamber music and how to
collaborate with professional musicians of a high caliber. Combining this skill set with
his ability to conduct and arrange music for orchestra, and his extensive experience over
four years with Stich, Fischer, and Levi at the opera house, Frank had developed the tools
he would need to pursue a career in music—at first as an itinerant music director of
touring theatrical productions, and later at the highest level in the professional theatres of
New York City, just as the American musical comedy was beginning to take shape and
come into its own.

60
See Chapter 9 of this dissertation for more information on Frank Saddler’s innovative use of the viola in
his theatre orchestrations.

114
Chapter 4

Early Career as a Music Director

Four weeks after his farewell concert on May 25, 1892, Frank Saddler returned to the
United States on the Steamship Lahn departing out of Bremen on June 22.
1
The
transatlantic passage took roughly the same amount of time—about nine days—as when
he crossed the ocean heading to Europe. Built in 1887, the Lahn was considered one of
the fastest ships in the Norddeutscher Lloyd fleet, having made the trip from England to
New York in six days and twenty-two hours once in 1889, within an hour and seventeen
minutes of record time.
2
The German steamship line ran transport ships out of Bremen
bound for New York twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays, passing through the
English Channel and stopping to pick up additional passengers at the port of
Southampton.
3
An original color-print engraving from 1888, which shows three lavish
interiors of the S.S. Lahn—the smoking room, the Grand Saloon, and the ladies’ room—
refers to the liner as “An Ocean Palace.”
4
As a second-class passenger, Saddler enjoyed
luxuries similar to those he experienced on his previous ocean voyage. Occupying cabins

1
List of Passengers, District of the City of New York, Port of New York, S. S. Lahn, June 30, 1892.
2
The original source for this information was Ocean: Magazine of Travel (September, 1889), 41.
http://www.gjenvick.com/SteamshipLines/NorthGermanLloyd/1887-Lahn-
SteamshipHistoryAndInformation.html#axzz3K0Wl4Tbk (accessed on November 25, 2014).
3
This information was drawn from a pamphlet with general information for passengers in 1888-1889.
http://www.norwayheritage.com/articles/templates/voyages.asp?articleid=151&zoneid=6. (accessed on
November 25, 2014).
4
For more information, see http://www.printsoldandrare.com/passengerships/ (accessed on November 25,
2014).

115

Figure 4.1, Steamship Lahn, Norddeutscher Lloyd company (circa 1888).

reserved in the rear of the ship, the second-class passengers had at their disposal a large
smoking room on the upper deck and a handsome saloon paneled in walnut.
The ship arrived in New York Harbor on June 30 and landed at the Norddeutscher
Lloyd docks in Newark. Before disembarkation, the ship master was required to list all
passengers in the ship’s manifest, indicating their country of origin, nationality, expected
period of stay, and other personal details. For some unknown reason, Saddler gave
“photograph[er]” for his occupation, although one may suspect he simply did it to amuse
himself. Also intriguing was the fact that he referred to his status as “transient,”
suggesting that he was already planning a return to Europe on the trip home (although

116

Figures 4.2a & 4.2b, Two excerpts from the transportation manifest of the Steamship
Lahn from Bremen with Frank Saddler listed number 153.

this never happened). Saddler traveled to Pittsburgh via the Pennsylvania Railroad, and,
pulling into Union Station, he must have felt as though he had changed much more than
the city from which he departed four years earlier. Preparations for the official Fourth of
July celebration were in full swing, the main preoccupation in the mayor’s office being to
decide where to set off the fireworks to ensure the best effect.
5
As usual, local concert-
music circles were largely dormant during the summer, and many of the people who were
participating in concerts when Saddler was so busy during the fall of 1887 and spring
1888 were either on vacation or taking a break from regular musical activities. The
theatres were all closed for the summer. The drama correspondent for The Pittsburg

5
The Pittsburg Press, July 2, 1892.

117
Press summed up the dearth of activity in histrionic fashion:
If anyone wanted a quiet place to die in, just now, I know of no place so
suitable as in the local theatrical field. There is no danger of being
disturbed there in the present time. One could go into the pretty Alvin and
shoot himself and it might be days before his body would be discovered.
Hang yourself in the Duquesne, Bijou, or Opera House and you are
perfectly safe from discovery.
6

Having spent the last four summers traveling in and around the Black Forest and visiting
Bayreuth, he would inevitably have experienced a certain degree of culture shock during
the days and weeks after his return to Pittsburgh.
Saddler spent most of the balance of summer in retreat with his family. His name
resurfaced in The Pittsburg Press on August 28, two months after his arrival, following a
chance meeting with the music columnist, who proceeded to give the public an update on
his activities, plans, and prospects.
I met, yesterday, Frank Sadler [sic]. He has just arrived from Europe. It is
not necessary to go into any extended notice of this young and earnest
musician. Pittsburg is very proud of him, for among very few Americans,
he has been honored in the musical circles of Germany. His compositions
have been played at the best concerts; he has received more favorable
mention than even he himself, ambitious as he is, has expected. He has
been quietly resting at home since his return, and but few know that he is
in the city. What Mr. Sadler will do is not known. His plans are as yet
undetermined in his own mind, but very probably Pittsburg will keep him
here, at least for one season. As to what success he will have he need not
worry about that. New York has offered him inducements. Pittsburg will
not deal harshly with the Verona boy. It is proud of him, and so are those
who know what difficulties he has had to contend with in rising to an
honorable place among our foremost musicians. Stay here, Mr. Sadler, and
let some of our best orchestras, under your own direction, produce the
same compositions that did you honor in Germany.
7

6
Ibid.
7
The Pittsburg Press, August 28, 1892.

118
Part of the reason it appeared as though he kept a low profile in the weeks following his
return was the scarcity of musical events in the city during the summer months. But while
opportunities for chance meetings with old friends and colleagues were limited, he would
certainly have gone out of his way to pay a visit to the people who made his German
training possible: Carl Retter, Dr. and Mrs. Walters, and Capt. Batchelor. They were
probably just as interested in having him recount his experiences of the past four years as
they were in hearing about his plans for the future. The question on the mind of
everybody who knew Saddler was not so much whether he was going to stay and find
work in Pittsburgh, but how long would he remain before moving on. One may suspect
from the tenor of the article that he was not expected to stay by anyone, but rather that
remaining in Pittsburgh for one year was a provisional plan that he would fall back upon
in the event that no more fruitful opportunities arose. No doubt, he felt a certain
indebtedness to friends and family in his home city—to the musicians he performed with
and, of course, to Capt. Batchelor himself—as well as many emotional ties to his parents,
with whom he was living. However, the imploring tone at the end of the passage in the
Press belies the seriousness with which Saddler was looking elsewhere for opportunities
for gainful employment as a musician. As soon as a good job came along, he would take
it; and given the ubiquity of orchestras in the theatres—legitimate, light opera, musical
comedy, and vaudeville—in every city in the country, it would not take long for him to
begin his career in earnest.
By October, he found the opportunity to work in the theatre he had been looking
for. Light-opera singers Clara Lane and J. K. Murray were to be starring in the American

119

Figures 4.3a and 4.3b, J. K. Murray and Clara Lane.

premiere of Glendalough, an Irish romantic drama that had played in England during the
previous year. Following an opening in Baltimore, the production was to go on tour and
Saddler had signed on to compose music for the play and conduct the orchestra.
8
Murray
and Lane were both itinerant stage performers at a time before most cities (with the
exception of New York, Boston, Chicago, and a handful of others) had their own opera
companies; and, at that time, even these cultural centers relied upon touring troupes to
bring popular operatic works to the public. In 1886, Murray, a charismatic baritone,
joined the Carlton opera company, where he met and married Lane, its prima donna.

8
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, October 23, 1892.

120
After several years of touring, the husband-and-wife team had developed a degree of
fame on the light-opera circuit and decided to strike out on their own. They began their
new venture by returning to Pittsburgh, where Murray spent his boyhood years.
9
He was
born in Liverpool, England, but moved to the Iron City with his family at a young age
and lived there for fifteen years until he began to act and sing professionally in touring
opera companies. It is not known whether Saddler knew Murray from his youth, although
it seems likely, given that both were raised in the East End and both were once
newspaper carriers (Murray having delivered for the Pittsburgh Leader in 1871 when the
paper was first established).
10

After three months at home, Saddler was ready to entertain any serious proposal
that would give him an opportunity to put to use the musical skills and experience he
acquired in Germany. Being hired as a music director and composer for a fledging
American opera company suited his abilities perfectly after four years of composing,
conducting, and hanging around the Hoftheater in Munich. As a reflection of his
ambition, The Pittsburgh Dispatch noted in its announcement that his contribution to the
production would be more substantial than people were accustomed to experiencing in
the theatre at the time.
The music of the play is to be of unusual extent, comprising an overture,
entr’actes, dances, songs, and considerable incidental music. Mr. Saddler’s
opportunity will thus be more in keeping with his musical talent and
equipment than would be the case with most melodramas.
11

9
The Pittsburg Press, September 11, 1892.
10
Leone Cass Baer, “J. K. Murray Tells of Early Portland Visit,” The Morning Oregonian, June 29, 1915.
11
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, October 23, 1892.

121
Glendalough was written by actor and playwright Edmund Gurney.
12
The play
premiered in Manchester at the Queen’s Theatre on December 14th, 1891 with the author
in the leading role of Terence O’Toole.
13
It apparently never made it out of the provinces
to London, despite the Daily Telegraph reporting that “quite an unusual amount of
interest is being taken in the production of Glendalough” and that “a number of London
pressmen [were] specially invited to go and criticize.”
14
In the end, London producers
took no interest in mounting the drama, while the Australian rights to Gurney’s play were
picked up by Mr. J. C. Williamson, who took the risk several weeks before it opened.
15

Six months after Glendalough ran its course outside of London, J. K. Murray seized the
opportunity to bring the play to the United States (with a newly fashioned script by
E. E. Kidder for American audiences) as a vehicle to help launch the new Murray-Lane
Opera Company.
The plot concerned the love affair of Terence and Kathleen O’Connor. Set in the
Irish town of Glendalough in the County of Wicklow, south of Dublin, the play borrows

12
Edmund Gurney (1851-1925) was an actor, producer, and playwright. Born in Cork, Ireland, he decided
to try a career on the stage after a road company passing through Dundalk, where he attended school, asked
him to fill a minor part. He then joined a Shakespearean company and played many roles, including Bottom
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at His Majesty’s Theatre. Later, he appeared at the Court Theatre in the
plays of George Bernard Shaw. His portrayal of the character Dr. Blekinsop in The Doctor’s Dilemma won
him praise from the playwright himself, who wrote that Gurney “made more of the character…that I did.”
His most memorable role was that of Alfred Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion, for which The Theatre
recognized him as “a comedian of resourceful grotesque humor.” Glendalough is the only play he authored
to be successfully produced. The Theatre (December, 1914), magazine, 264, 309.
13
Charles Smith Cheltnam, ed., The Dramatic Year Book and Stage Directory for the United Kingdom,
1892 (London: Trischler and Company, 1892), 285.
14
The Daily Telegraph, London, January 30, 1892.
15
“Our London Letter,” The Press, Canterbury, England, October 31, 1891. J. C. Williamson was one of
the most successful and influential theatre managers in Australia, working primarily at the Theatre Royal
and the Princess Theatre in Melbourne from the mid-1880s until 1899. Peter Kuch, “Kilkenny, Melbourne,
New York,” Irish Theatre in America, edited by John P. Harrington (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2009), 81-87.

122
freely from the romantic lore of the region as a backdrop for the action. The temptation of
St. Kevin by Kathleen, portrayed in verse by Thomas Moore in the 1870s, looms over the
drama, its characters enacting their complications in the same locations as in the ancient
legend.
16
Several scenes take place at St. Kevin’s Kitchen and St. Kevin’s Bed, two spots
near Glendalough Lake that were faithfully recreated by W. H. Power for the production.
When the play came to Pittsburgh, the Press reported that “for historical accuracy in
scenic embellishment ‘Glen-da-lough’ stands alone, not only as to the quantity of scenery
used, but as to the quality in a sense of artistic accuracy and value.”
17
In addition, the
paper noted that “the costumes are accurate reproductions from drawings made by the
eminent J. Ward Dunsmore of the costumes worn at the period in which the acting of the
play takes place.” As evidence of the fine realistic acting in the play, the paper also
described a backstage vignette between J. W. Murray and an “old Irish gentleman,” who
told the singer, “you have to-night, by your singing and acting, recalled the happiest
moments of my life, when I was a boy in County Wicklow. Your song recalled the
bright-faced Irish lasses, the devil-may-care lads, and again I could feel the cool breezes
from the lakes as I ran over the green turf to join in the village games…I thank you most
heartily for the pleasure your performance afforded me.”
Limited press coverage of the musical component of Glendalough makes it
difficult to know to what extent Saddler was able to fulfill his plan to compose

16
The dramatic narrative of Thomas Moore’s poem, By That Lake Whose Gloomy Shore, which depicts St.
Kevin casting his would-be lover, Kathleen, off the cliff and into the sea, is not supported by the historical
record. John O’Hanlon’s hagiography tells of how Kathleen, after pursuing Kevin to his hermetic retreat, is
transformed by his piety and devotes her life to religious sanctity. Rev. John O’Hanlon, The Lives of the
Irish Saints (Dublin: Duffy & Co., 1873), 36-37.
17
This hyphenated variant of the name was in use at the time. The Pittsburg Press, January 7, 1894.

123
instrumental pieces to frame the drama. By all accounts, much of the play’s success
rested with the songs and their rendering by J. K. Murray. Saddler appears to have only
composed one of the many new songs featured in the production, while the others were
by Murray and Charles A. Burke. The Evening Telegram in New York reported that “Mr.
Murray’s sweetest new songs were ‘Mine’s a Simple Village Maid,’ written and
composed by himself, ‘The Three Beggars’ and ‘Awake, Ye Sons of Erin,’ the last
mentioned song the composition of Mr. Saddler.”
18
Terence sang “Kathleen O’Connor,”
a waltz song proclaiming his wish to marry the girl, at an optimistic time in their love
affair. The hit of the show, however, was not written expressly for it, but rather was the
popular Irish ballad “Kathleen Mavourneen,” composed more than fifty years earlier by
F. W. Nicholls Crouch with lyrics by Annie Crawford.
19
Since Terence O’Toole’s love
interest was named Kathleen, the popular classic may have been interpolated into a place
toward the end of the drama when the lovers were seemingly doomed to part. When
Glendalough opened at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, following its
opening in Baltimore and a brief tryout in Chicago, audiences saw the ninety-three-year-
old Crouch take the podium for the performance of his song “Kathleen Mavourneen.”
A delightful feature of last night’s performance was the appearance in the
orchestra, as leader pro tem, of Professor F. Nichols Crouch, the venerable
author of ‘Kathleen Mavourneen.’ Mr. Frank Saddler, musical director of

18
The Evening Telegram, January 31, 1893. P. J. Howley & Sons. published a set of three Gems from Glen-
da-Lough (“Kathleen O’Connor,” “Sweet Kitty Fay,” and “Still the Same Irishman” with words and music
by Charles A. Burke.
19
“Kathleen Mavourneen” was written some time before 1845 by the English actress Annie Crawford and
F. W. Nicholls Crouch when the latter was a music teacher in Plymouth on the southern coast of England.
Crouch, who was born in 1800, had been a cellist at King’s Theatre, London, in his youth and after 1848
came to America with an Italian opera company. He lived for many years in Portland, Maine, and then
moved to Philadelphia and later Baltimore, where he taught music. The composition for which he is best
known garnered him 5 pounds for the copyright. Helen Kendrick Johnson, Our Familiar Songs and Those
Who Made Them (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 333.

124
the company, gracefully yielded the baton to Professor Crouch in the third
act, and Mr. Murray sang the famous old song very sweetly and
touchingly. Several repetitions were demanded, and both composer and
singer were the recipients of beautiful coral [sic] offerings from friends.
20

From this vignette, it is not difficult to picture Saddler, at this very early stage of his
career, gladly deferring to his elderly colleague by offering him the spotlight during the
most important musical number in the drama. The gracious and audience-pleasing gesture
was repeated when the play opened in Boston.
21
Each time, the critics were charmed by
the turn; and they made a special point of mentioning the singing of Murray, who must
have been moved to be collaborating with the elderly musician on his mournful ballad.
Critical reception of the play itself was not entirely favorable. The Evening
Telegram delivered faint praise for the drama, which the reviewer felt was at least
“sufficiently melodramatic and interesting to absorb attention.” Perhaps more important
in the 1890s, when melodrama was the order of the day, the critic noted that “it certainly
pleased the audience and brought forth frequent applause.” The New York Times drama
critic found its plot lines conventional, but not shopworn, writing that “the situations are
well-conceived, the stage settings are really beautiful, the humor is of the truly Irish style,
and is either new or so old that it has been forgotten, and long clap-trap speeches are not
an offense.”
22
In Chicago, the critic found fault with every aspect of the production
except Murray’s rendition of “Kathleen Mavourneen.” Historical Irish settings and
characters all seem grotesquely sentimental and maudlin when cast in this unforgiving

20
The Evening Telegram, January 31, 1893.
21
The Boston Evening Transcript, September 30, 1893.
22
The New York Times, January 31, 1893.

125

Figure 4.4, Advertisement for Glendalough at Pittsburgh’s Bijou Theatre.

126
light: “With its three-cornered hats, its knee-breeches, its Denny Mann villains, its
virtuously indignant colleens, and its impudent peasant heroes, [Glendalough] should be
relegated to the limbo of the rags and odds-and-ends of the stage.”
23
Enthusiastic reviews
concentrated on Murray’s fine singing voice and stage charisma. The critic for The New
York Clipper extolled the winning performances of the two principals in Baltimore before
the New York opening, writing that “J. K. Murray, as Terence, and Clara Lane, as
Kathleen, made instantaneous hits, their fine voices being heard to advantage in
numerous Irish ballads.”
24
The New York Times reserved its unstinting praise for the
actor: “Glendalough introduces a new ‘star.’ He is J. K. Murray, who has hitherto played
minor parts in operetta. He bears his role easily, even gallantly, and he sings even better
than he acts.”
25

Following its tryouts in Baltimore and Chicago, the play was staged twice in 1893
at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, once in winter (opening January 30) and then again in
the early fall (opening August 28), the first run lasting two weeks while the latter was
installed for four.
26
The production went to the Windsor Theatre in the Bowery on
February 27, but apparently did not tour at that time. Instead, after the second time it was
staged on Broadway, Glendalough was taken to the Columbia Theatre in Boston
(opening September 30) for a successful five-week engagement and then on to Lowell,
Massachusetts (November 10). By the end of the year, it was also seen in Rochester, New

23
The Chicago Tribune, December 18, 1892, 36.
24
The New York Clipper, November 26, 1892.
25
The New York Times, January 31, 1893.
26
George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, Vol. XV [1891-1894] (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1949), 328, 603.

127
York, at Cook’s Opera House.
In early January, Glendalough was staged in Pittsburgh, the city where the idea
for the American production was born several months earlier. But while J. K. Murray was
celebrated in the newspapers as a hometown success story, Saddler, who was the subject
of some attention by The Pittsburg Press only the previous summer, was not mentioned
at all.
27
Clearly, he must have departed the company at some point during the East Coast
swing of the tour, for what else could explain the absence of any mention of him in the
Pittsburgh newspapers, which had so enthusiastically followed his activities over the past
five years? The dearth of information about Saddler’s activities in 1894 makes it difficult
to speculate as to precisely why he missed the opportunity to return to Pittsburgh as a
music director with the Murray-Lane opera company. But it is possible that he decided to
stop touring with the production as a result of having met a young woman named Clara,
whom he would marry later that year. The 1900 census shows that Saddler was married
sometime between June of 1894 and 1895 and that his first and only child, Frank, Jr., was
born in October of 1894. These facts suggest that his son was born only four months after
the earliest possible date of his parents’ marriage, thus making him conceived, though not
born, out of wedlock. Despite the fact that the first signs of pregnancy would not have
occurred until sometime in March or April of 1894, the young couple would have likely
felt the need to settle down in anticipation of the birth of their child.

27
Advance press for Glendalough in Pittsburgh focused on Murray’s local roots: “J. K. Murray, who will
appear at the Bijou next week…in his picturesque Irish drama, ‘Glen-da-lough,’ is a Pittsburgher, and
always lived in the East End until a few years ago, when he forsook the church choir for the stage.” The
Pittsburg Press, December 31, 1893.

128
Though it is difficult to know whether or not the circumstances of Saddler’s
personal life precipitated his departure from the Murray-Lane company, one can easily
imagine that his parents did not approve of their son’s new relationship. Though he was
to have his thirtieth birthday in September and should have reasonably been able to
manage his own personal affairs, Saddler had only recently returned from his extended
course of study in Europe and had yet to established himself in a career. Having met
Clara during Glendalough’s East Coast tour, he could not have known her very long
before they became intimate. His marriage to her, therefore, was probably necessitated, or
at least hastened by, her pregnancy. Saddler was clearly prepared to take the burden of
responsibility commensurate with his actions, and yet his behavior in this regard was
surely met with disapproval by his parents. Their innate Victorian-era values, combined
with a moral conservatism that likely intensified during their years living in the religious
commune in Limestone, would have made them intolerant of their son’s transgression.
Though he would not need to inform his family of his impending fatherhood until March
or April (or even later in the year, depending upon whether he planned on introducing his
family to his bride), clearly something made him feel it was necessary to part with a
company that was having a moderate degree of success, both in New York and on the
road, before the production had run its full course.
Another explanation as to why he did not travel with Glendalough to Pittsburgh is
that during 1893 Saddler had settled upon a career in the theatre on Broadway. His
ambition to be a composer of concert music, which he cultivated in Pittsburgh and
Munich, quickly gave way to a practical desire to work in the theatre when he was

129
confronted with the exigencies of life without a wealthy sponsor. His mind had already
turned to New York as the place to pursue his career in America during the final year of
his Munich residency. In reporting upon the reception of Klänge aus Amerika among the
Bavarian musical cognoscenti, The Pittsburgh Dispatch noted in June of 1891 that “Mr.
Saddler—who, by the way, will return in a month or two, and will probably locate in
New York—is to be congratulated upon the extraordinary vein of success he has
struck.”
28
Though he would end up staying on in Germany for another year, the thought
that he would go to New York remained with him. After his lengthy exposure to the
world-class artistry and stagecraft of Munich’s Hoftheater and the Festspielhaus at
Bayreuth, Saddler’s confidence made him gravitate naturally to the most prestigious
theatrical venues in the United States in search of an occupation. It would take him
several years to establish himself as a professional working musician in the theatres of
Broadway, however his relatively brief career as a touring music director would not only
give him an appetite for jobs in the entertainment capital of the United States, it would
also give him invaluable practical experience with pit musicians and orchestras before he
ultimately decided to become a full-time arranger. During the five years he spent on the
road (between 1893 and 1898), a number of developments would occur in the field of
Broadway musical theatre that would pave the way for Saddler to abandon his career as a
pit conductor in favor of the new field of theatre orchestrator. Chief among these would
be the advent of the musical comedy and the revue, which, within twenty years, would
ultimately surpass comic opera in both popularity and influence. These novel forms not

28
The Pittsburgh Dispatch, June 28, 1891.

130
only gave songwriters who did not have the compositional skill necessary to write a full-
length operetta opportunities to work in the theatre, they also made arrangers who could
score musical numbers for orchestra indispensable to theatre composers and producers.
The commercial theatre in America in the mid-1890s was in transition, both as an
art form and a business. The mammoth productions in the extravaganza mold that were
heavy on visual and dramatic effects and light on lyric and musical content were on the
wane, as was the once-favorite nineteenth-century tradition of melodrama. On the rise
were various forms of light opera—inspired by the sensational success of productions by
Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan in Paris and London—and the all-embracing medium
of variety.
29
Vaudeville by this time had also established itself, at the expense of the
moralistic and sentimental art of melodrama, as the most popular form of entertainment
for the middle and lower classes in cities and towns all across the country. Light-hearted
song-and-dance routines, comedic monologists, acrobats, magicians, and trained-animal
acts had replaced the hyper-emotional plot turns of morality plays by century’s end, and
these troupes of carnivalesque performers toured the country on the nation’s increasingly
complex web of interlocking railroad lines to deliver virtuosic lowbrow entertainment to
large and small theatres along routes up and down the East Coast and to points south and
west.
In the decade before motion pictures began to compete effectively with live
theatre for entertainment revenue, there were approximately 1,350 theatrical venues

29
Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118-19.

131
throughout the country and 195 in the state of New York alone.
30
The proliferation of
theatres across the country made some kind of venue—be it opera house, vaudeville
theatre, melodeon, or dime museum—a presence in most every town that was accessible
by train, while the cities often had many of each type.
31
Over the course of the nineteenth
century, the managers of theatrical stock companies across America were gradually
ceding their artistic and business practices to large corporate booking agencies located in
the big cities.
32
The more ambitious owners began to purchase multiple theatres that
served theatre troupes, comic opera companies, and variety artists in order to capitalize
upon the need for performers to have sufficient bookings to justify taking the long trip
into the heart of the country. Eventually, a handful of the most powerful business
managers in New York City controlled one or more large regional conglomerations of
theatrical chains designed around the expanding network of railroads that were making
travel quicker, easier, and cheaper for touring artists. These circuits were mapped out
along convenient train routes in order to regularize advance scheduling for plays and
variety acts that were travelling farther and farther into the country in search of new

30
In 1896, coincidentally the same year that motion pictures were introduced to the American public in an
exhibition at Koster and Bial’s Theatre in New York City, The New York Dramatic Mirror published a
series of articles entitled “The Making of the Theatre” in which the author, George J. Manson, gave
statistical information about the number of theatres nationwide and in various states. The New York
Dramatic Mirror, October 31, 1896. Information on the earliest manifestations of film as a commercial art
from can be found in Robert C. Allen, “Vitascope/Cinématographe: Initial Patterns of American Film
Industrial Practice,” in Film Before Griffith edited by John L. Fell (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1983), 144-52.
31
Before the rise of cinema, the business of tent shows—touring theatrical productions that provided even
their own venue—served those small towns and hamlets that did not have a theatre. As late as 1920
approximately four hundred tent shows were on tour simultaneously in the United States. Gerben Bakker,
Entertainment Industrialized (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26.
http://librarun.org/book/36333/46 (accessed May 26, 2015).
32
Mina Rebecca Brooks, “The Development of American Theatre Management Practices Between 1830
and 1896,” PhD Diss. (Texas Tech University, 1981).

132
audiences for their material.
33
By the 1890s most venues across the country were
collectivized according to entertainment genre: theatrical companies and variety players
toured the circuits of combination and vaudeville houses; and burlesque
companies played strings of theatres known commonly as “wheels.” Combination
companies—complete theatrical troupes that toured non-musical plays—after the
collapse of the stock-company system in the United States in the 1860s, fulfilled
contracts to play theatres all over the country dedicated to presenting imported
productions. These theatres were known as “combination houses.”
34

Prior to 1895 the majority of theatrical circuits in the United States were
circumscribed regionally, often within the boundaries of one or two states.
35
There were
independent chains that ran exclusively within the boundaries of New York (Central New
York Circuit), Michigan (Saginaw Valley Circuit), Wisconsin (Wisconsin Theatrical
Circuit), Ohio (Ohio Association of Opera House Producers and Managers), Illinois
(Illinois Opera House Managers Association), Kansas (Albert Patterson’s Circuit),
Nebraska (Nebraska Circuit), Pennsylvania (Oil and Iron Circuit), and Texas (Texas
Circuit). The regional routes that crossed over state lines included the Mischler Circuit
(Pennsylvania and Ohio), the Eastern Circuit (between New York and Halifax), the
Northwest Circuit (Utah and Montana), the Southwestern Opera House Circuit (Montana
and Kansas), J. S. Tannenbaum (Georgia and Florida), Lone Star Circuit (Texas and

33
M. B. Leavitt’s memoire is a compendium of American theatre in the nineteenth century. Chapter 29
contains an excellent description of the railroad lines that were frequented by theatre people in the second
half of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. M. B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in
Theatrical Management (New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1912), 428-43.
34
Ibid., 91.
35
Bakker, Entertainment Industrialized, 27.

133
Arkansas), M. B. Leavitt (Nebraska to California), Hayman (New York, Illinois, Utah,
and California), the Kansas and Nebraska Circuit (Kansas and Nebraska), and the Silver
Circuit (Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Arkansas, and New Mexico). Some
theatre owners acquired holdings over a considerably larger area. Col. Albert Weis,
president of the American Theatrical Exchange, owned theatres across a large portion of
the south, including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, and South
Carolina.
36
In 1912, M. B. Leavitt wrote that “no star or company of prominence tours
below the Mason and Dixon line without first consulting the American Theatrical
Exchange.”
37
With the exception of the Mischler Circuit, which originated in 1873, all of
these networks of theatres were created within a ten-year period between 1879 and 1889,
largely in response to the rapid expansion of the railroad, opportunities afforded by
limited restrictions on monopolies and trusts in the United States, and the resultant
tendency among American businessmen to consolidate commercial interests and exploit
the capitalist system to its fullest extent.
The custom of booking theatres nationwide during the 1880s was an informal and,
some would say, haphazard business. Beginning in June of each year, theatre managers
from all over the country came to New York to build their schedules for the upcoming
season. The center of the theatrical world in the United States at the time was the
business district that developed around Union Square, at the intersection of 14th Street
and Broadway in Manhattan, which for the duration of the summer months was the scene

36
American Biography: A New Cyclopedia, vol. IX (New York: American Historical Society, 1921), 293.
37
Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 564.

134
of innumerable deals between theatre managers and booking agents representing artists
and theatrical troupes.
38
This loosely organized convention of business people, whose
practices more closely resembled the horse trading of congressional politics than the
booking of theatres, could take the appearance of a street market or bazaar, particularly
when viewed retrospectively after such negotiations no longer happened in person. Alfred
L. Bernheim described the district in Manhattan known as “the Rialto,” where theatre
managers from all over the country descended upon Union Square during the summer
months:
Permanent theatrical offices were at first virtually unknown, and the
business was conducted almost entirely in the street, on the park benches,
or in the lobbies and barrooms of the hotels which served as the
headquarters for the visiting theatrical people. Managers of theatres rushed
about looking for the managers of the attractions they wanted to book,
while they dodged the less desirable offerings; the attractions sought the
theatres they were anxious to play and remained cold to the others until
driven toward them by a lack of anything better. Every company manager
boasted of the drawing power of his star and production. Every theatre
manager talked of attendance records which his house had rolled up
during the previous season. Disengaged actors were there too, all of them
stars in the telling, besieging the managers for engagements. Rumor and
gossip filled the air. Friendships were renewed, rivalries sharpened,
enmities engendered. It was a grand game of hide-and-seek, of bluff and
call. The general scene, judging from the descriptions that have come
down to us, must have resembled a sort of hybrid between a county fair
and the New York Curb market in the days when it still operated in the
open air on Broad Street.
39

38
Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre (New York: Actors’ Equity Association, 1932), 34.
39
Ibid. For two decades after the Civil War, the theatrical hub in Manhattan, which centered around Union
Square at 14th Street and Broadway, was known loosely as “the Rialto.” By 1881, the district was home to
some of the city’s most prestigious venues: Wallack’s, the Academy of Music, the Union Square Theatre,
and Tony Pastor’s (previously the Germania Theatre). However, the district retained its position as the
center of theatrical enterprise in the city (and the country) because of the numerous businesses serving the
theatre—from costume and scenic shops to printing companies to booking agencies—that were established
there. Union Square remained a central location for theatrical enterprises that served the expanding
combination industry even as important theatres began to accumulate around Madison Square and Herald
Square in the decades to follow. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York
City to 1898 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 946-48; Mary Henderson, The City and the Theatre: New

135
According to M. B. Leavitt, early efforts to formalize the business practices of
theatrical booking in the 1880s were initiated by John E. Warner, an agent and manager
who set up two offices at 23 East 14th Street and rented desk space to managers from
across the country who had travelled to the city to schedules acts for their theatres. The
business was then sold to H. S. Taylor and ultimately ended up in the hands of Klaw &
Erlanger, who subsequently became the most powerful booking agents in the country.
In 1884, when Warner returned to theatrical management, Taylor, who
had established a large and thriving business, took the lease from Warner
and added the remainder of the floor—a large rear room—and filled the
entire place with desks and inaugurated the method of renting them to the
principal theatre managers from all parts of the country. In 1888 Taylor
sold out to Klaw & Erlanger, who continued this renting system till the
last of the Eighties.
40

The inevitable result of this ever-increasing commercialization of theatrical entertainment
was the formation of a grand trust. In 1896, six theatre owners representing four
circuits—Charles Frohman, Al Hayman, Marc Klaw, Abraham Erlanger, Samuel Nixon,
and Frederick Zimmerman—developed a plan to join forces and create a single chain of
theatres across the country. Dubbed the Theatrical Syndicate, the organization was the
most ambitious business venture of its kind ever attempted in the theatre. While there had
certainly been larger circuits—the group’s opening gambit involved only twenty-one
theatres—there had never before been such an important string of theatres in all the major
metropolitan areas managed by a single controlling interest. In addition, the scheme

York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square (Clifton, NJ: James T. White & Company, 1973),
139-40.
40
Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management, 265-66.

136
involved a secondary plan to acquire theatres outside of these cities that were necessary
stops for theatrical troupes on their approach to the major population centers, thus
enabling the Syndicate to control the bookings of every artist who wanted to play their
circuit without needing to own every theatre between cities.
41
And, by controlling the
majority of artists’ bookings between New York and Chicago, for example, the trust had
critical bargaining leverage with which to book the many stopover points in between
these cities—stopovers that were necessary to pay the enormous railroad cartage fees for
costumes and scenery that would otherwise have made the entire venture prohibitively
expensive. Theatre managers in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo, thus, were forced to
accept the artists and the programs that the Syndicate had to offer on their terms or else
they were barred from booking any of their talent. By the end of the decade, most actors
would be represented by the Syndicate.
42

On February 22, 1896, The New York Dramatic Mirror announced that the
formation of the new trust was in the works.
A plan is afoot for a combination of theatrical interests that will be
the most important, if it is effected, of any yet known in the history of the
American stage. The scheme is not yet completed, but it contemplates a
union in one circuit and general control of the various theatres in different
cities conducted by Al Hayman, Nixon and Zimmerman, Charles
Frohman, and Rich and Harris.

41
Walter Prichard Eaton, “The Rise and Fall of the Theatrical Syndicate,” The American Magazine
(October, 1910), 832.
42
Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932), the leading figure on the American stage for a generation, was the
sole exception to this rule. As an actress of enormous popularity and a savvy and experienced theatrical
producer, she was able to maintain a prominent and successful career with a rigorous touring schedule
entirely without the assistance of the Syndicate. She famously rebelled against the system and single-
handedly fought a tireless campaign to end the monopoly. For more information on the career of Minnie
Maddern Fiske, see Archie Binns, Mrs. Fiske and the American Theatre (New York: Crown Publishers,
Inc., 1955).

137
If this goes through it will create a chain of twenty-one houses
extending from Boston to San Francisco.
The complete list of theatres involved is as follows: Hollis Street,
Columbia, and Museum, Boston; Empire and Garrick, New York;
Columbia, Brooklyn; Chestnut Street Opera House, Broad Street and
Chestnut Street, Philadelphia; Academy of Music, Baltimore; a theatre in
Washington which Nixon and Zimmerman have arranged to secure;
Duquesne, Pittsburg; Century Theatre, St. Louis; Columbia and
Haymarket, Chicago; Marquam Grand, Portland; Tabor Grand, Denver;
Salt Lake Theatre, Salt Lake, Utah; Baldwin and California, San
Francisco; Opera House, Los Angeles, Cal.; and several theatres in smaller
cities.
43

The benefits of organized touring schemes were many, and for a time they outweighed
the disadvantages of the system. The chief problem that centralized booking agencies
remedied was the common occurrence of double-bookings, where one theatrical troupe or
artist would arrive in a small town only to find that their engagement had been cancelled
and another had been installed in their place merely because they arrived earlier at the
theatre. Centralized booking would largely alleviate this problem, since the Syndicate
levied severe penalties for theatres and artists that did not fulfill their contracts. In
addition, the Syndicate would prevent similar acts from playing simultaneously in the
same city, thereby reducing competition for audiences with a predilection for one type of
artist. The Syndicate also offered artists other significant improvements over the old
decentralized booking system, such as longer contracts with more performances per tour.
Early statements by members of the Syndicate suggest that their mission was to make the
system work better for stage performers. Al Hayman, one of the six members of the trust,
was interviewed at the outset by representatives of the Dramatic Mirror and spoke as a

43
The New York Dramatic Mirror, February 22, 1896, 17.

138
representative in describing the ostensible purpose of the organization: “Our object of
obtaining control in the wholesale manner is that we can thereby offer exceptional
inducements to the best theatrical attractions by booking them for several months
continuously, thus saving long jumps, expensive railway travel and booking expenses.
We think that stars and combinations will look upon the move with satisfaction.”
44

Although several theatre managers and talent agents interviewed by The New
York Dramatic Mirror during the early days of the formation of the Syndicate stated that,
at a minimum, they saw no harm in the trust, and at best, they saw many advantages,
voices of dissent began to emerge almost immediately.
45
Among the theatre managers
believing that the Syndicate would be beneficial were: Augustus Pitou, who stated “the
scheme will expedite business transactions, and for that reason be beneficial”; Edwin
Knowles, who stated “I think the idea of managers combining a good one, but they
should not form in cliques”; and J. Charles Davis, representing H. C. Miner, who stated,
“I cannot see that in it there is any menace to managers not included in the ring.” Among
the agents for performers who saw benefits in the system were E. E. Rice, who stated “it
will facilitate the booking of attractions, and that it a very important consideration”;
Joseph Brooks, who stated “I do not see in the combine referred to any serious menace to
first-rate attractions”; and Ben Stevens, manager for De Wolf Hopper, who stated, “I
consider it a good idea and a boon to the profession.” Concerns arose with several
managers, however, who saw the potential for abuse in the system.
46
More than anyone

44
Ibid.
45
The New York Dramatic Mirror, March 7, 1896, 17.
46
Among the managers who expressed their suspicions and concerns were A. M. Palmer, W. D. Mann of
the Herald Square Theatre, and E. P. Simpson, manager of the People’s theatre. Ibid.

139
speaking with the Dramatic Mirror, it was W. A. Brady who anticipated the negative
impact of the Theatrical Syndicate upon the commercial theatre in America over the next
fifteen years:
This new scheme of trusts will not hurt good attractions. I doubt, however,
if it will have a beneficial effect upon the theatrical business. It will throw
the balance of power into the hands of the few. It will give a few
attractions the very choice time. The movement is bound to culminate in
two big trusts and that will mean a war to the knife. It will be the old story
of the big fish swallowing all the little ones.
47

The argument that Brady makes is more a critique of commercial trusts in general than a
reflection of his apprehension about the Syndicate and it particulars. His intuition that
collectivization would lead to the development of a rival organization and ultimately to a
business war was prophetic, given the rise of the Shubert brothers’ empire in the first
decade of the twentieth century and the confrontation they instigated that ultimately
broke the monopoly held by the Syndicate in 1910.
48

The American commercial theatre in 1895 was also in flux as an art form. Comic
operas by Reginal De Koven and Victor Herbert, written for Broadway audiences, began
to supplant light opera of French and English origin. When New York audiences first
heard a French production of Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers in 1867, it had
been playing in European theatres for nine years already.
49
Its success on Broadway (in

47
Ibid.
48
For more information on the role of the Shuberts in the demise of the Theatrical Syndicate, see Steve
Travis, “The Rise and Fall of the Theatrical Syndicate,” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 10, no. 1 (Mar.
1958), 35-40; Monroe Lippman, “The History of the Theatrical Syndicate: Its Effect Upon the Theatre in
America,” PhD Diss. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1937), 106-66; and Foster Hirsch, The Boys
from Syracuse: The Shuberts’ Theatrical Empire (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1998).
49
Two German productions of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (Orpheus in der Unterwelt)
appeared in New York in 1861 and 1866. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 1:48, 1:80.

140
the form of a four-week run) precipitated a windfall of Offenbach premieres during the
following two seasons—La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, La Belle Hélène, Barbe-
Bleue, Geneviève de Brabant, La Péricole, and La Vie Parisienne—as New York
audiences developed an appetite for opéra bouffe and sought to make up for lost time.
50

The rage for Offenbach continued unabated throughout the remainder of the nineteenth
century, with no fewer than fifty revivals of the aforementioned operettas being produced
in French and English before 1900 in Broadway theatres.
Having developed a taste for light opera during the late 1860s and 1870s,
Broadway theatregoers were primed for the comic-opera revolution that W. S. Gilbert
and Arthur Sullivan instigated with the premiere of H. M. S. Pinafore at the Opera
Comique theatre in London. The first New York production occurred a mere seven
months later, a short wait compared to the nine years it took for the first Offenbach
production to appear in New York after it was staged in Paris. Fifteen revivals of
Pinafore were mounted in Broadway theatres during 1879 alone, an unprecedented
phenomenon in theatrical history.
51
To combat the proliferation of unlicensed productions
of their property, Gilbert and Sullivan completed their next comic opera—Pirates of
Penzance—in New York and oversaw its first New York production, which premiered on
December 31, 1879, thus protecting the creative team with an American copyright. Over
the next twenty years, H. M. S. Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance together were given
fifty revivals, while every other Gilbert and Sullivan play to subsequently emerge was

50
Ibid., 1:82-117.
51
Ibid., 1:239-47.

141
produced in New York theatres. As with the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the
last two decades of the twentieth century, it seems as though there was never a week
during the 1880s and ‘90s when there was not at least one show by the Savoyards in
lights along the Great White Way.
While twenty years of British, French, and German light opera on Broadway had
fostered a taste for sung romantic and farcical plots among New Yorkers, the influx of
foreign shows also made operetta synonymous with imported musical theatre before
1890. These assumptions were first challenged by the comic operas of two composers—
Reginald De Koven and Victor Herbert—whose debt to European models contributed to
their early success. Both drew liberally from the music of Offenbach and Gilbert and
Sullivan, as well as that of other popular European composers of the day (e.g., Edmond
Audran, Charles Lecocq, Franz von Suppé, and Richard Genée), while adapting these
styles to the unique talents and idiosyncrasies of American performers with their
vernacular speech patterns, home-grown vocal technique, and penchant for eccentric
characterization. The enduring success of Robin Hood was unprecedented in the history
of American theatre. During the twelve years that the Bostonians theatre company
remained in existence after the production’s inauspicious premiere in Chicago, they
performed the opera 1,900 times, according to Henry Clay Barnabee, who played the role
of the Sheriff of Nottingham for the duration (cast beside no fewer than fourteen Robin
Hoods).
52
Though De Koven would struggle to repeat his early achievement, which had

52
Henry Clay Barnabee, My Wanderings: Reminiscences of Henry Clay Barnabee (Boston: Chapple
Publishing Company, 1913), 390-95.

142
ten revivals on Broadway between 1892 and 1902, the more than twenty stage works that
he composed during his career built a secure foundation for the reception of American
light opera on Broadway as a legitimate rival to the imported works of European
composers.
Victor Herbert was the composer whose music would not only help to establish a
credible reputation for American light opera in its own right but would also precipitate a
shift in the balance of power in the theatrical world from London, Paris, and Vienna to
New York City. Herbert’s emigration from Germany to the United States in 1886 made
him widely recognized as a citizen in his adopted country by the time he began
composing theatre music in the mid-1890s.
53
More than any other single factor, the
decision by Herbert, who at that time was one of the world’s leading musicians, to
dedicate himself almost exclusively to the field of comic opera on Broadway for thirty
years laid the groundwork for the dominance of American musical theatre after World
War I ended in 1918. With the exception of De Koven’s operettas, Broadway, as a center
of original musical theatre, was largely a home for pantomimes, burlesques, spectacles,
and musical plays about local affairs, created to satisfy the parochial interests of
Manhattanites before the premiere of Herbert’s first comic opera, Prince Ananais, in
1894. Though the respective successes of Herbert’s fifty operettas were uneven, the
consistent high quality of his composition lifted the critical and public reputation of
American musical theatre composers as a group and was partly responsible for making

53
Victor Herbert, who was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1859, was raised and received his musical training in
Stuttgart, Germany. For more information on Herbert’s life and work, see Edward Waters, Victor Herbert:
A Life in Music (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955).

143
Broadway a bigger exporter of musical theatre than an importer by 1920.
Both De Koven and Herbert received their musical training in Europe—the
former studied in Paris and Vienna and the latter in Stuttgart.
54
In addition to being well-
trained in the craft of musical composition, both men were also professional
conductors—De Koven was a music director in Washington D. C. and Herbert spent five
years with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. As a result of their musical skill and
experience, they were also theatre composers who naturally did their own orchestration.
In the light-opera traditions of Jacques Offenbach and Arthur Sullivan to which
De Koven and Herbert belonged, composers did not need to leave the job of arranging
their music for orchestra to a specialist. Nor was it desirable for these trained composers
to let another musician, whose aesthetic sensitivity may or may not be in accord with a
composer’s style or intent, make the final decisions about how their musical ideas would
be realized in the orchestra, despite the efficiency this division of labor provides. The
professional orchestrator in the theatre only became a necessity in situations where the
composers for a show were primarily songwriters who understood the mechanics of how
to create a piano accompaniment at best but had little knowledge of the practical
workings of the orchestra. When Frank Saddler began his career in the theatre in the early
1890s, the opportunities to make a living as a professional orchestrator for Broadway
productions were limited to some extent by the number of light-opera composers in the
field who orchestrated their own music.
55

54
Waters, Victor Herbert, 12-16; Mrs. Reginald De Koven, A Musician and His Wife (New York: Harper
& Brothers Publishers, 1926), 127.
55
Among the composers whom Gerald Bordman describes as “musicianly, competent enough to
orchestrate their own works” were Ludwig Englander, William Furst, Gustave Kerker, and A. Baldwin

144
Another theatrical development in the mid-1890s in England would not only
come to dominate musical theatre trends in London and New York, hastening the demise
of comic opera, but it would usher in a new type of theatre composer capable of writing
attractive, memorable melodies that could drive the popularity of a show. Musical
comedy, a term created by George Edwardes, the mastermind producer behind the Gaiety
musicals in London’s West End, was a combination of light farce, feminine fashion
displays, chorus lines, and fetching songs that satisfied the tastes of Victorian- and
Edwardian-era British theatregoers seeking theatrical experiences that reflected both their
own contemporary social circumstances and the pinnacle of sophistication and glamour
in society.
56
Edwardes first experimented with this novel form when he produced In
Town (1892), The Gaiety Girl (1893), and The Shop Girl (1894), and their success
prompted the enterprising American producers Charles Frohman and Al Hayman (soon to
be central figures in the Theatrical Syndicate) to license the properties for Broadway.
Gaiety musicals, and other British musical comedies in their mold, were imported to
Broadway generally without alteration at first; however, by the early 1900s, American
producers sought to give their audiences modified versions of the London productions
with new songs by American composers that had the potential to become hits in the
absence of any standout numbers in the original English scores.
The perennial search for hit songs fueled the burgeoning musical industries in the

Sloane, all but the last being house conductors on Broadway between 1890 and 1910. Bordman, American
Musical Theatre, 119.
56
For more information on the Gaiety Theatre and its milieus, see James Jupp, The Gaiety Stage Door:
Thirty Years’ Reminiscences of the Theatre (London: Jonathan Cape, 1923).

145
United States, and Broadway composers were increasingly expected to supply
productions with musical box-office magic that could give producers free advertising in
the form of dance band arrangements, sheet music, piano rolls, and phonograph records.
The skills of advanced musical knowledge—counterpoint, conducting, orchestration—
were unnecessary (and some would say undesirable) tools for the most successful
Broadway tunesmiths, who relied more on the mysterious gift of musical inspiration in
creating their melodies. With the rise of the musical comedy songwriter, and the
concomitant decline of the comic-opera composer, over the course of the first two
decades of the twentieth century, the professional orchestrator found an expanding niche
for his particular skills in the complex collaborative process that goes into creating a
Broadway musical.
The theatrical offerings during the season of 1895-1896 on Broadway were a
reflection of the shifting trends in public taste that continued to favor Irish-themed plays
and topical burlesque while ushering in waves of comic-opera and musical-comedy
productions.
57
Musical shows during the hot and humid summer months were
traditionally light in content, and the summer of 1895 was no exception. The new season
began on June 3 with an “operatic burlesque” titled Thrilby, a send-up of the novel by
George du Maurier, which was published in book form earlier that year and had been
adapted into a play soon after by Paul M. Potter. Five days later at the Casino Theatre,
The Merry World opened, a follow-up to the first stage revue, The Passing Show, which
presaged the annual summer theatrical potpourris by Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., the Shuberts,

57
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 1:561-69.

146
George White, and Earl Carroll that would come to rival the musical comedy in
popularity and influence during the 1910s and later. A procession of comic operas came
and went through New York theatres throughout the summer and fall—The Sphinx,
Dorothy, Kismet, Fleur-de-Lis, Rob Roy (a revival of the De Koven opera), Princess
Bonnie, The Chieftain, His Excellency, Leonardo—none of them exceeding 65
performances, despite two of them being by Gilbert and Sullivan, although not as a team,
but rather each working with another collaborator. By far the most successful comic
opera of the season was Victor Herbert’s The Wizard of the Nile, which ran for 105
performances and was the composer’s first theatrical hit. The show starred Frank Daniels
as a Persian magician named Kibosh, who is “weak in the black arts, but favored by
luck.”
58
Daniels’ most memorable theatrical gag in the show was when he cavorted
around the stage hitting people over the head, causing them to produce an egg from their
mouths, in turn causing the eccentric sorcerer to declare, “I’m a wiz!” Several musical
comedies with farcical plots appeared in the fall as well, including The Shop Girl,
imported directly from the Gaiety Theatre in London along with the original cast,
including George Grossmith, Jr. and Seymour Hicks. A revival of the “Comedy Drama”
Mavoureen, undoubtedly capitalizing on the renewed interest in the song “Kathleen
Mavoureen” created by Glendalough two seasons earlier, featured Chauncey Olcott, who
would star in numerous Irish-themed musical plays over the next twenty years on
Broadway.
When Frank Saddler returned to Broadway as a music director on November 25,

58
The New York Times, November 5, 1895.

147
1895, he would once again appear at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, this time with
A Happy Little Home, a comedy vehicle for the rotund, jovial, cross-dressing funny man,
George W. Monroe.
59
For ten years, Monroe had been delighting audiences throughout
the eastern states and the Midwest with his lowbrow farces: My Aunt Bridget, which
opened in 1886, and its equally amusing sequel, Aunt Bridget’s Baby from 1891. A critic
from the Michigan Argonaut described Monroe’s comic character Bridget McVeigh in an
article from 1888.
George Monroe’s delineation of the good-natured, uncouth Irish woman
trying to be a “nice lady” is unparalleled in brilliant eccentric character
painting. Bridget’s studying etiquette from a book to avoid improprieties
while entertaining some guests, whom she invited especially to “show off”
before, and awkward stumbling into the blunders she studied to avoid,
gives opportunities of delicate bits of humorous satire, which Monroe’s
quick, keen perception takes advantage of and keeps his auditors in a
constant roar. Nature gifted Monroe with wonderful versatility of facial
expression. He pantomimes his satire and comedy with a breadth and
depth of facial gesture that needs no words to impress even the most
obtuse.
60

Monroe’s first departure from the role of Bridget came in 1895 with his production of
A Happy Little Home. In it he displayed an even greater versatility than had previously

59
George W. Monroe (1851-1932) hailed from Philadelphia, where he got his start with the Wheatley
Dramatic Association. He met John C. Rice at that time and with him created a variety act that would
exploit Monroe’s gift for female impersonation. The first appearance of Monroe’s signature character,
Bridget McVeigh, was in Over the Garden Wall, which opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York
City on March 23, 1885. Having upstaged the star of the show with his “sketch of an Irish servant girl of
the familiar ‘Greenhorn’ type, placid, moon-faced, with a wild, meaningless laugh and stupid stare,”
Monroe struck out on his own the following season with a play built around his own eccentric talents. His
“Aunt Bridget” plays toured for ten years, after which he continued to be a top-rank comedian in numerous
Broadway shows, such as The Doings of Mrs. Dooley (1902), The Top o’ the World (1908), The Mimic
World (1908), The Midnight Suns (1910), The Never Homes (1911), The Sun Dodgers (1912), and the
Passing Show of 1914 and Passing Show of 1915. “George W. Monroe, Actor, Dies at 70,” The New York
Times, January 30, 1932, 17; “George W. Monroe,” The Internet Broadway Database
http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=68344 (accessed August 4, 2015).
60
The Michigan Argonaut (Ann Arbor, MI), January 21, 1888.

148

Figure 4.5, George Monroe as he appeared in My Aunt Bridget (circa 1891).

149
been witnessed in his performances by playing the character of a man who dresses up as a
woman in order to be close to his sweetheart.
61
The plot revolves loosely around the
character of Owen Moore (played by Monroe) and his romantic liaison with Rose, whose
guardian, Cornelius Gayfeather, disapproves of the relationship.
62
Complications arise
when Moore arrives at the household only to be confused with a detective hired by Mrs.
Gayfeather to keep an eye on her husband, whom she distrusts and on whom she seeks
evidence in order to file for divorce. The merrymaking begins when Moore agrees to
assume the character of a housekeeper, to disguise his presumed identity as the private
investigator. The presence of Theophilus Doolittle, who also seeks to win the heart of
Rose, contributes to the tension in the household, as does that of an attractive danseuse,
who comes to the house to be hired by Gayfeather for his nightclub and arouses intense
suspicion in his wife. The arrival of both the real housekeeper (Mrs. McGruder) and the
real detective (Mr. Burke) expose Moore as an imposter, adding to the chaos and hilarity.
While impersonating the Gayfeather’s housekeeper, Monroe also managed to play the
role of a female fortuneteller, who takes full advantage of Mrs. Gayfeather’s
susceptibility to the occult given her adherence to the theosophical works of Madame
Blavatsky.
63
The third act is comprised essentially of a series of specialties, a common
practice in the period when variety theatre was more popular than musical shows and
before musical comedy scores and scripts merited an entire program without

61
“The Theatrical Week,” The New York Times, November 24, 1895, 12.
62
Information about the plot of A Happy Little Home was taken from “‘A Happy Little Home’ Is Merry,”
The New York Herald,” November 25, 1895, and “George W. Monroe in Comedy,” The Chicago Tribune,
February 13, 1898.
63
Queens County Sentinel, April 9, 1896.

150
supplemental vaudevillian entertainment. The play’s author, Charles Klein, concocted the
rather thin pretense of the entire cast retiring to the reception room of the Bicycle Club,
where many of them offer their talents to the show. The critic for The Philadephia
Inquirer gave a detailed accounting of the performers and their contributions:
In the third act specialties are introduced, which for brightness and vim
richly deserved the encores so lavishly bestowed. George L. Tallman
[Pantata, the “jealous Frenchman”], the tenor soloist, sang several pleasing
songs; Blanche Chapman [Mrs. McGruder] seemed to have all her old-
time vivacity in her songs and dances; Idalene Cotton [Victoria
Gayfeather], a sprightly little woman, gave a very faithful imitation of
Vesta Tilley and Mlle. Paquerette, and was notably happy in her mimicry
of the latter; Harry C. Stanley’s [Boker, a servant] wonderful clarionette
solos were given with his usual addition of funnyisms; and the dancing of
Dorothy Drew [Lulu Montmorency, a danceuse] was of the kind which
causes palpitation.
64

Monroe himself also contributed several songs during the specialties, according to the
New York Herald, “and the audience liked the words, judging from the applause received,
even though the voice was not altogether musical.”
65
One song with which he delighted
audiences was “Arrah, Go On,” an Irish brogue comedy number by Felix McGlennon
that was ideally suited to be sung by the portly, impish Monroe in female garb. The lyrics
tell of several suitors who have been turned away by a girl who cannot seem to get the
boys to leave her alone.
I’m a dacent young colleen just over from Ireland,
And all of the boys seem to run after me;
Sure they think ‘kase I’m Irish there’s green in my optic,
But, faith, there’s no green in my eye you can see.
I know which from whether, and this from the other;
I know they’re decavin’, delutherin’ way—

64
The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 5, 1895.
65
The New York Herald, November 25, 1895.

151
And so, when they come wid their coaxin’ and mashin’,
I only wink at them and to them I say:
“Arrah, go on! you’re simply tazin’!
‘Pon my word you’re simply awful!
Lave me alone! you’re mighty plazin’!
Arrah! go ‘way, go on, go wid ye, go way,
Go wid ye, go ‘way, go on!
66

Delivered in drag with his signature falsetto and clever stage business, “Arrah, Go On!”
was sure to be a crowd pleaser wherever the show played, so much so that the advance
press singled out the song and Monroe’s performance as “excruciatingly funny.”
67

The reviews for A Happy Little Home were uniformly positive. Most of the praise
centered around Monroe’s ability to conjure sustained laughter from audiences with his
signature cross-dressing antics, eccentric facial gestures, feminine vocalism, and robust
physical comedy. However, no small amount of attention was paid to the play itself,
which most critics noticed was of a higher order than many other farces that toured the
country at that time. Author Charles Klein sold the rights to Monroe before the show
opened, hoping to avoid recognition for his work on the play, but his efforts at
concealment were in vain and apparently unnecessary.
68
The Albany Evening Journal
previewed A Happy Little Home by reporting that “the author has, from all accounts,
furnished a book, which for crisp, witty sayings and up-to-date dialogue, is fully equal, if

66
The sheet music can be found at http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/fa-spnc/id/8155
(accessed on September 25, 2015).
67
The Pittsburg Press, October 17, 1895, 6.
68
The New York Herald, November 25, 1895. Charles Klein (1867-1915), who was born in England and
came the United States at the age of sixteen, was an author of numerous plays, the most successful being
“The Lion and the Mouse” in 1905. He also wrote the libretto for John Philip Sousa’s most successful
comic opera El Capitan (1896). He died on the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, while travelling in the company
of his friend and colleague Charles Frohman. http://www.rmslusitania.info/people/saloon/charles-klein/
(accessed August 24, 2015); “The Stage,” Munsey’s Magazine (April, 1909).

152
not superior, to most of the comedy successes lately presented on the American stage.”
69

The Philadephia Inquirer concurred with this assessment, adding that “the new
entertainment is reminiscent of Mr. Monroe’s former success, Aunt Bridget,” because he
again assumes female attire, but the play is brighter and more of a play than the old
one.”
70

As the music director for the play, Saddler was responsible for conducting the
overture, entr’acts, exit music, and musical accompaniment for the specialty numbers;
however, the job also required that he do the arrangements for the show. With the rise of
the travelling combination, it became mandatory for theatres all over the country to
supply an orchestra with excellent musicians capable of rendering music proficiently, if
not artistically, with limited rehearsal.
71
A conductor would generally spend several hours
during the morning preparing the orchestra for a show that would play that evening,
sometimes making the opening show in an engagement a bit rough from a musical
standpoint. One of the many grievances that combination players had for the dreaded
one-night stand was the inability to improve one’s performance through an orchestra’s
familiarity with the musical material over the course of several days. In response to the
constraints of a lengthy tour with multiple stops, the arrangements not only needed to be
as easy as possible for orchestra members to read at sight without diminishing the quality
of the music, but they also need to be versatile. A good orchestration would easily

69
Albany Evening Journal, March 27, 1896.
70
The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 5, 1895.
71
George J. Manson, “The Making of the Theatre: VII. The Orchestra,” The New York Dramatic Mirror,
October 3, 1896, 23.

153
contract from the standard fifteen parts to as few as seven or eight, if necessary, without
losing the essential components of the melody, harmony, and rhythm. Parts were
designed with redundant doublings that would only be used in the event of a missing
instrument. This way players could readily cover for important parts that would otherwise
be absent during sections where they were not playing (particularly on solos or important
countermelodies): for example, a muted trumpet could cover for an oboe, a horn could
cover for a clarinet or a trumpet, or a violin could cover for a flute; and, in many cases, it
worked both ways. The morning rehearsal, therefore, not only gave the musicians an
opportunity to familiarize themselves with the music itself, but also to learn what parts
they would be responsible for in addition to their own. Music directors were considered a
vital component of a travelling combination because they were expected to anticipate and
navigate the problems inherent with acclimating a new orchestra with the arrangement
and to perform the function of a liaison between the pit band and the stage performers.
For this reason, music directors were listed among the players in theatrical notices in
The New York Dramatic Mirror during this period.
72

Before A Happy Little Home opened at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New
York in late November of 1895, it toured throughout the northeast, mostly one-night
stands in small towns during the first month on the road, but then easing into several
longer runs in bigger cities leading up the New York engagement. Beginning on
September 18, George W. Monroe and the company of A Happy Little Home embarked

72
The Pittsburg Press Oct. 17, 1895.

154
Table 2, A Happy Little Home, schedule of performances.
73

Date Theatre City

Sept. 18, 1895 City Cohoes, N.Y.
Sept. 19, 1895 Rand Opera House Troy, N.Y.
Sept. 20, 1895 Kasson Opera House Gloversville, N.Y.
Sept. 21, 1895 Amsterdam Opera House Amsterdam, N.Y.
Sept. 23, 1895 City Opera House Watertown, N.Y.
Sept. 24, 1895 Richardson Oswego, N.Y.
Sept. 25, 1895 Burtis Opera House Auburn, N.Y.
Sept. 26-28, 1895 H.R. Jacobs’ Opera House Syracuse, N.Y.
Sept. 30-
Oct. 2, 1895 Lyric Hoboken, N.J.
Oct. 3, 1895 Stillman Plainfield, N.J.
Oct. 4- 5, 1895 Paterson Opera House Paterson, N.J.
Oct. 8, 1895 Red Bank Opera House Red Bank, N.J.
Oct. 9, 1895 Lyceum Elizabeth, N.J.
Oct. 10-12, 1895 H.R. Jacobs’ Newark, N.J.
Oct. 14-19, 1895 Grand Opera House Brooklyn, N.Y.
Oct. 21-26, 1895 Bijou Pittsburgh, Pa.
Oct. 28-
Nov. 2, 1895 Gayety Brooklyn, N.Y.
Nov. 4- 9, 1895 National Philadelphia, Pa.
Nov. 11-16, 1895 Columbia Boston, Mass.
Nov. 18-23, 1895 National Philadelphia, Pa.
Nov. 25-30, 1895 Fourteenth Street New York, N.Y.
Dec. 4, 1895 Grand Opera House Chester, Pa.
Dec. 6, 1895 Grand Opera House Harrisburg, Pa.
Dec. 9, 1895 White Opera House McKeesport, Pa.
Dec. 11, 1895 Grand Opera House E. Liverpool, Ohio
Dec. 12, 1895 Sixth Avenue Beaver Falls, Pa.
Dec. 13, 1895 New Castle O.H. New Castle, Pa.
Dec. 14, 1895 Park Opera House Erie, Pa.
Dec. 16-18, 1895 Cook Opera House Rochester, N.Y.
Dec. 19-21, 1895 Lyceum Cleveland, Ohio
Dec. 22-26, 1895 People’s Toledo, Ohio
Dec. 27, 1895 Faurot Opera House Lima, Ohio

73
This schedule of performances was created in collaboration with Herbert Goldman, the pre-eminent
scholar in the field of research for touring musical-theatre productions. He took the 22 performances that I
was able to unearth and expanded it to the present 124, giving a much fuller view of the production’s four-
year touring schedule.

155

Dec. 29, 1895
-Jan. 4, 1896 Heuck’s Cincinnati, Ohio
Jan. 5-11, 1896 Hagan St. Louis, Mo.
Jan. 12-18, 1896 Ninth Street Opera House Kansas City, Mo.
Jan. 19-21, 1896 Boyd Omaha, Neb.
Jan. 23, 1896 Foster Opera House Des Moines, Ia.
Jan. 26-
Feb. 1, 1896 Lyceum Detroit, Mich.
Feb. 2- 8, 1896 Alhambra Chicago, Ill.
Feb. 9-15, 1896 Academy of Music Chicago, Ill.
Feb. 16-22, 1896 Bijou Opera House Milwaukee, Wis.
Feb. 27-29, 1896 Lyceum Cleveland, Ohio
Mar. 2- 7, 1896 Grand Opera House Brooklyn, N.Y.
Mar. 9-14, 1896 Gayety Brooklyn, N.Y.
Mar. 16-21, 1896 Columbus Harlem, N.Y.
Mar. 23-25, 1896 H.R. Jacobs’ Opera House Syracuse, N.Y.
Mar. 26, 1896 Utica Opera House Utica, N.Y.
Mar. 27-28, 1896 Leland Opera House Albany, N.Y.
Apr. 6-11, 1896 Sanford’s New York, N.Y.
Apr. 13-15, 1896 Lyric Hoboken, N.J.
Apr. 20-25, 1896 National Philadelphia, Pa.
Apr. 27-
May 2, 1896 Keith Opera House Providence, R.I.
May 4- 9, 1896 Holliday Street Baltimore, Md.
May 11-16, 1896 Academy of Music Washington, D.C.
Aug. 3, 1896 Toronto, Ont.
Sept. 7, 1896 Queen’s Opera House Montreal, Que.
Sept. 14-16, 1896 Cook Opera House Rochester, N.Y.
Sept. 19, 1896 Kasson Opera House Gloversville, N.Y.
Sept. 21-26, 1896 Grand Opera House Pittsburgh, Pa.
Sept. 28-
Oct. 3, 1896 People’s New York, N.Y.
Oct. 5-10, 1896 Fourteenth Street New York, N.Y.
Oct. 12-17, 1896 Grand Opera House Brooklyn, N.Y.
Oct. 19-24, 1896 People’s Philadelphia, Pa.
Oct. 26-31, 1896 Gayety Brooklyn, N.Y.
Nov. 5- 7, 1896 Grand Opera House Columbus, Ohio
Nov. 15, 1896 Fountain Covington, Ky.
Nov. 16-21, 1896 Fountain Cincinnati, Ohio
Nov. 23-28, 1896 Grand Opera House Yonkers, N.Y.
Nov. 30-
Dec. 12, 1896 Star New York, N.Y.
Dec. 14-19, 1896 Grand Opera House New York, N.Y.

156
Dec. 21-26, 1896 Newark Newark, N.J.
Dec. 28, 1896 Parsons’ Hartford, Conn.
Nov. 25, 1897 Able Opera House Easton, Pa.
Nov. 26, 1897 Grand Opera House Bethlehem, Pa.
Nov. 27, 1897 Academy of Music Atlantic City, N.J.
Nov. 29-
Dec. 4, 1897 National Philadelphia, Pa.
Dec. 6, 1897 Academy of Music Allentown, Pa.
Dec. 7, 1897 Taylor Opera House Trenton, N.J.
Dec. 8, 1897 Music Hall Yonkers, N.Y.
Dec. 9-11, 1897 Griswold Opera House Troy, N.Y.
Dec. 13-18, 1897 Grand Opera House New York, N.Y.
Dec. 20-25, 1897 Jacobs’ Newark, N.J.
Dec. 27, 1897
-Jan. 1, 1898 Bijou Brooklyn, N.Y.
Jan. 10-15, 1898 Columbia Boston, Mass.
Jan. 17-22, 1898 Bijou Pittsburgh, Pa.
Jan. 23-29, 1898 Walnut Cincinnati, Ohio
Jan. 31-
Feb. 2, 1898 Park Indianapolis, Ind.
Feb. 6-12, 1898 Schiller Chicago, Ill.
Feb. 13-19, 1898 Havlin’s St. Louis, Mo.
Feb. 20, 1898 People’s Evansville, Ind.
Feb. 22, 1898 McJimsey’s Vincennes, Ind.
Feb. 23, 1898 Grand Opera House Terre Haute, Ind.
Feb. 27-
Mar. 5, 1898 Alhambra Milwaukee, Wis.
Mar. 6-12, 1898
Mar. 13, 1898 Belleville, Ill.
Mar. 14, 1898 Cairo, Ill.
Mar. 16-19, 1898 Memphis, Tenn.
Mar. 20-26, 1898 St. Charles New Orleans, La.
Mar. 28, 1898 Mobile Mobile, Alabama
Mar. 29, 1898 Academy of Music Selma, Alabama
Mar. 30, 1898 Montgomery, Ala.
Apr. 1, 1898 Nashville, Tenn.
__________________________________________________________________
on a tour that included performances in fourteen venues over a period of three weeks,
including eleven one-night stands. The grueling schedule was typical in the 1890s, when
actors (who were still more than twenty years away from unionization) were forced to

157
play multiple back-to-back one-night stands and deliver outstanding performances that
lived up to their press notices night after night. Players in traveling combination
companies (particularly those that toured farce comedies) needed to become inured to the
demoralizing ritual of constant arrival and departure and compartmentalize any personal
hardships that might arise during show time. The grind of being a traveling actor,
however, inevitably took its toll. George J. Manson described the realities of touring in
The New York Dramatic Mirror, as if to shatter any romantic illusions a neophyte actor
might hold about life on the road.
In the view of the actor, ‘a one night stand is like death: it overtakes the
best of us.’ Many young and inexperienced actors yearn to join a traveling
company because they think it will give them such an excellent
opportunity to see the country. The experienced actor who has been a
member of a traveling combination will tell you that the opportunities for
seeing the country are very limited. You often leave town in the middle of
the night, or in the cold gray of the early morning. It is not at all
uncommon for the company to travel from 4 o’clock in the morning until
4 in the afternoon, getting their food from the dreary eating-houses at the
stations along the road. Traveling under these circumstances does not
conduce to hilarity. In fact, a close observer who has witnessed the
departure of many theatrical companies from the Grand Central depot says
that each one resembles a funeral party. As they are waiting listlessly for
the train they appear to be suffering various stages of mental depression
and physical prostration. The general air of gloom on such an occasion,
supposed by the inexperienced to be one of joy and expectation is thick
enough to be sliced for the railway sandwiches which so often must be the
only variety of food the strolling player can secure. A manager whose
attention was called to the peculiarly gruesome expression of a party of
merry comedians standing at a railway depot and who were going through
a season of one-night stands, said they looked as though they hadn’t drawn
any salaries for a month.
74

74
George J. Manson, “The Making of the Theatre, IX. The Traveling Combination,” The New York
Dramatic Mirror (October 31,1896), 23.

158
After ten days in upstate New York, another twelve in New Jersey, and longer
stints at six theatres in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Boston, the show was
deemed worthy of New York audiences and was installed for one week at the Fourteenth
Street Theatre. Situated two long blocks to the west of Union Square at the corner of 14th
Street and Sixth Avenue, the Fourteenth Street Theatre was not nearly as accessible to the
foot traffic of the Rialto as Wallack’s, the Union Square Theatre, the Academy of Music,
or Tony Pastor’s, forcing the proprietors to offer theatregoers attractions that did not
directly compete with other more centrally located venues. The original theatre building
on the site of the Fourteenth Street Theatre first opened its doors in 1866 under the name
Théâtre Français (or sometimes the New French Theatre) and featured predominantly
French plays and opéra bouffes.
75
After fire destroyed it in 1871, the newly-constructed
theatre at this location changed hands several times, first as The Lyceum and then as
Haverly’s Theatre, finally settling in as the Fourteenth Street Theatre in 1886, a name it
kept until well into the twentieth century. As melodrama was on the wane in the 1890s,
shows such as Glendalough, which, as we have seen, were perpetuating the once-popular
form, found a home at the Fourteenth Street Theatre.
76
George W. Monroe’s female
impersonations also found success there for similar reasons: since, on the one hand, he
was not a major Broadway headliner, but, on the other hand, his reputation as a first-rate
comedian with a fine supporting cast was able to draw audiences over to Sixth Avenue,

75
Ruth Crosby Dimmick, Our Theatres To-day and Yesterday (New York: H. K. Fly Company, 1913), 45-
46; Henderson, The City and the Theatre, 139-40.
76
Ruth Crosby Dimmick wrote in 1913 that the Fourteenth Street was “the home of popular melodrama,”
listing “The Still Alarm, Blue Jeans, Darkest Russia, Lost River, and such” as the theatre’s typical offerings.
Dimmick, Our Theatres To-day and Yesterday, 46.

159
as he did with My Aunt Bridget in 1890.
77

Touring productions that visited New York did not view Broadway as a
destination in the late nineteenth century as they would after World War I, largely
because they did not depend upon a lengthy Broadway run to be lucrative and considered
successful. Theatrical managers made traveling productions financially solvent both by
coordinating the tours through the centralized booking system of the Syndicate and also
by generating good press in small towns as a result of the resourceful work of the
advance theatrical agent.
78
So, while good reviews in New York City were always
desirable—in particular, for producers who sought the stamp of approval by the most
seasoned and demanding critics in the country—they were not necessary for a lengthy
tour that could rely entirely upon a well-organized production and the reputation of a
well-known favorite actor or comedian. And so, when A Happy Little Home visited New
York City during the week of November 25, it was just one more brief stop on a long tour
that headed out the following week on a three-month swing through Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Missouri, and several major cities throughout the Midwestern states. The company got so

77
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 465.
78
“The advance agent of a traveling combination must also be a very bright business man. It is his business
to travel ahead of the company, visiting each town where the attraction is billed to appear. He works in
conjunction with the local manager; sees that the printing has arrived and is put in the hands of the bill-
posters; that the bills are properly posted where they will do the most good; distributes passes for the
window privileges, which must also be carefully looked after; arrange for the board of the company, getting
the best rates he can from hotels and boarding-houses; visits the newspaper offices and sees that notices are
written of the coming arrival of the company; attends to any extra bill-posting that he may deem
necessary—and then breathlessly leaves for the next town where the attraction is to appear and goes
through the same work.” George J. Manson, “The Making of the Theatre, IX. The Traveling Combination,”
The New York Dramatic Mirror (October 31,1896), 23.

160
far as Des Moines, Iowa, by the end of January before heading east again for one week in
Detroit, two weeks in Chicago (at two different theatres), and another week in
Milwaukee. They spent the rest of the spring in New York state and rounded out the
season in theatres along the east coast.
George W. Monroe and his company toured with A Happy Little Home for three
seasons, returning to many of the same theatres during 1896 and 1897 that they had
played previously. Saddler left the company before the show ran its course in April,
1898, however, having joined The Broadway Belles Burlesque Co. by February 12, when
they opened at the Wonderland Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania.
79
Two days later,
Broadway Belles played the People’s Theatre in Trenton, where the company “satisfied
large audiences.”
80
The roster of the show included thirteen players listed by name and a
chorus of sixteen players. They offered the public two burlesques, A Bowery
Enchantment and The Two Orphans.
81
The production must have encountered some
difficulties during the third week of February, because reports came in to The New York
Dramatic Mirror on March 5 that the company had a “poor performance” on February 22
at the Grand Opera House in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania and “failed to appear” the
following night in Berwick. This was a harbinger of things to come, for the show did not
last through the end of the season.
82

Having established himself as a competent music director in three productions,

79
The New York Clipper, February 12, 1898.
80
The New York Dramatic Mirror, February 26, 1898.
81
Ibid., March 26, 1898.
82
Ibid., March 5, 1898.

161
two of which were successful travelling combinations that played multiple seasons,
Saddler did not spend more than the summer without work and was back in the pit for
another show in the fall. The new production was a theatrical vehicle for the Russell
Brothers, who had made a hit in vaudeville playing a pair of Irish chamber maids and, in
the same fashion as George W. Monroe, sought an evening-length book tailored to their
particular comedic gifts. The brothers, John and James Russell, grew up in the Lower
East Side of Manhattan and began appearing in vaudeville in 1877, when they developed
a blackface routine.
83
They rose through the ranks of traveling variety artists, eventually
developing routines based solely around their most successful turn as "grotesque
impersonators of Irish servant girls,” which ultimately became their signature act.
84
After
signing with Weber and Fields in 1891, they assumed the position of headliners in their
touring company for the next five years.
The trend of creating evening-length Broadway vehicles for established
vaudeville stars was in its germinal stage of development. However, despite the poor
reviews of the plots that often plagued these productions, the form continued to succeed
due to the ability of performers to draw the audience purely on the strength of their name
and then to carry the show even in the absence of excellent comedy writing. From the
time that George L. Fox, Joseph K. Emmett, Lotta Crabtree, Nat C. Goodwin, and Frank
Daniels held the stage in the mid-nineteenth century, home-grown musical theatre
productions relied more heavily on the native wit of American performers and traditions

83
Armond Fields and L. Marc Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 100.
84
The Sun, New York, June 12, 1892.

162
than the negligible dramatic and literary aspirations of its authors, the professional
craftsmanship inherent in writing lowbrow vehicles for physical comedy notwithstanding.
George W. Monroe and the Russell Brothers were artists at the vanguard of a tradition
that would become standard practice on Broadway during the next two decades, as
singing comedians such as Richard Carle, Sam Bernard, Eddie Foy, Nora Bayes,
Blanche Ring, Al Jolson, Raymond Hitchcock, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor and others were
having theatrical productions built around their unique talents. As these shows
proliferated, Broadway theatre owners and producers could rely more and more upon
New York-based performers and creative teams to supply their audiences with
indigenous theatrical entertainment instead of imported light opera and musical comedy.
The transformation would take at least another twenty years to materialize fully, but by
the end of World War I Broadway was no longer a theatre culture dependent upon
foreign imports to satisfy its local audiences.
Maids to Order was a hodge-podge of “many old-time popular afterpieces” by
farce comedy writers W. F. Carroll and Frank Dumont, with little or no discernible plot
beyond each scene having the similar purpose of getting the Russell Brothers into as
many amusing situations as possible and setting up opportunities for specialty numbers.
85

Since reviewers were generally dismissive of the book or the three-act show, the closest
thing to praise that the writers received in the press was in a preview conveying that the
book was serviceable to the needs of the comedians and other performers: “The authors
have, it is said, carved characters on the style that the Russells have become identified

85
The Daily Standard Union, Brooklyn, NY, December 10, 1898.

163
with, and in doing so have strung together many amusing complications and ludicrous
incidents.”
86
The Philadelphia reviewer who attended the show at the Auditorium that
this news item was intended to promote was not so forgiving, however, writing that
“Maids to Order serves as a convenient sort of a structure upon which to hang a number
of acceptable specialties by more or less well-known vaudeville people, but as a play it is
wholly lacking in any semblance of a plot and it also is shy of coherence.”
87
But this was
not a show that aspired to any purpose other than to give the Russell Brothers an excuse
to take the stage in their starched white floor-length dresses and aprons and provoke the
audience to laugh. The same Philadelphia reviewer acknowledged this fact when he
pointed out that “Of course the Russell Brothers are funny—they can’t very well help
being so—and their very appearance on the stage was the signal for roars of laughter and
uproarious applause.”
88
According to the critic for The New York Dramatic Mirror in
Jersey City, the show’s smaller parts (often taken by players with talents that were on
display during the various specialties sprinkled throughout the play) were taken by skilled
and experienced vaudevillians and who could take some measure of responsibility for the
show holding the stage.
89
The play was full of special numbers for the cast, each one
being singled out for special praise:
Haines and Pettingill share honors with the stars. Dyllyn sings as well as
ever. John T. Cody is a very good Dutch comedian. George Leslie does his
eccentric dancing. Thomas Woods is a good singer. Victoria Walters is a
capital soubrette and sings and dances as well as she acts. Lillian Heckler

86
The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 16, 1898.
87
The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 18, 1898.
88
Ibid.
89
The New York Dramatic Mirror, December 17, 1898.

164
is a sweet soprano singer. The patrons were well pleased with Maids to
Order.
90

Although the show did not have a unique score with numbers written to support the
action in any way, theatrical farces of this type kept their music directors and pit
orchestras busy. Following an overture, and between the entr’actes and exit music, the
show’s numerous specialties all required orchestral music to support the singing and
dancing of the players. The Russell Brothers’ venture into Broadway was brief, however,
and, when the show closed in the Spring of 1899, the comedy team returned to
vaudeville, where they continued to amuse audiences for another eight years with their
caricatures of Irish servant girls, until they were forced to discontinue their act by
organizations determined to redress negative stereotypes of Irish culture in America.
91

It is hard to know whether or not Saddler was still leading the orchestra when
Maids to Order curtailed its tour since the only theatrical notice that gives his name is
from October 17, 1898.
92
One way or another, as he completed work on his fourth touring
show, he determined it would be his last job as a conductor and that he would
subsequently commit himself full time to being a professional arranger and orchestrator.
While he left little or no trace of his personal or artistic motivations in print or in private
correspondence, if past is indeed prologue, Saddler’s youthful career in Pittsburgh tells us
much about his seemingly abrupt departure from the career path he was on in 1898. His

90
Ibid.
91
The Russell Brothers vaudeville career came to an abrupt end instigated by the “Society for the
Prevention of Ridiculous and Perverse Misrepresentation of the Irish Character” and other groups
protesting inside the theatres where they performed. Margaret Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget: Irish
Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 78.
92
The New York Dramatic Mirror, October 17, 1898.

165
early proficiency on several instruments, good enough for him to perform in public
(however modest the circumstances), reveals a fascination with instrumental technique
and timbre in his youth. And though his utter lack of management skills doomed the
American Concerts project before it got off the ground, his brief experiment as a concert
producer in Pittsburgh revealed Saddler’s ambition, which led him to become the most
outstanding arranger of his time and to work with the best composers and the most
successful producers on Broadway. Although his aspiration to be a composer revealed in
him a desire to create original music, his large-scale orchestral arrangements of American
popular music—the Stephen Foster medley and Klänge aus Amerika—were his most
significant creative works during his youth. Without knowing how any of his music from
his years in Pittsburgh and Munich actually sounded, we can still see that his musical
predisposition for setting other composers’ music in orchestral sound was formed early
on in his career by the scope of these arrangements and the recognition he achieved with
them. In the end, Saddler’s decision speaks for itself; and his successful career as an
orchestrator for Broadway productions and Tin Pan Alley publishing houses only serves
to reinforce the perception that, once he learned that there was a viable career to be had as
an arranger, he jumped at the opportunity in spite of the obvious risks involved in
abruptly changing career paths with a young family to support.
As a thirty-four-year-old music director with European training and four shows on
his résumé, there is no reason to doubt that he could have established himself as a
conductor in the theatres of New York City. However, his passion for creating orchestral
sound on the page exceeded his desire to hear someone else’s orchestral arrangements

166
night after night in the pit. And though his music-director positions in the 1890s likely
required that he provide the cast with their arrangements, the trends on Broadway at that
time were leading toward increased division of labor for shows that were becoming more
elaborate, sophisticated, and expensive. Saddler’s move coincided with changes in the
music and theatrical industries at the time, and, as a result, he was able to rise to the top
his chosen profession by bringing the craftsmanship he acquired over the previous ten
years to the field of orchestration of popular music in New York City.

167
Chapter 5

An Orchestrator for Publishing Houses

When Frank Saddler finished his work on Maids to Order, he returned home to Bergen,
New Jersey, where he had purchased a modest house at 82 Grove Street in Maywood, a
suburb of Hackensack.
1
Here he could raise his five-year-old son in a suburban
residential neighborhood while putting himself just a short train ride away from Fort Lee,
where he could easily commute by ferry to Manhattan during the week.
2
Perhaps the
enormous physical and mental challenges of being on the road nine months out of the
year, compounded by the emotional challenges of being away from his wife and son, also
played a significant role in his decision to seek a different type of work after having
successfully established himself as a theatre conductor. While there may have been
personal reasons for Saddler to abandon his new career as a music director and to make a
fresh start as a professional orchestrator, his previous success as an arranger during his
years as an aspiring composer also suggests that creating orchestral arrangements of
popular music was an occupation that best suited his musical talents and interests.
And, as previously mentioned, his decision came at a time when musical theatre in New
York was increasingly in need of competent arrangers to create orchestral settings of
music by composers with songwriting skills but no advanced musical training.

1
U. S. Census Bureau, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office). Viewed at
http://www.ancestry.com/ (accessed on August 20, 2017).
2
The ferry ride from Fort Lee to 130th Street cost 10 cents in 1891. Gustav Kobbé, New York and Its
Environs (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 32.

168
When Saddler began to look for work as an orchestral arranger, the first place he
found employment was with The Witmark Music Library, a branch of M. Witmark and
Sons. The tale of the “House of Witmark” is one of the great success stories in American
music publishing. A marvel of youthful enterprise, M. Witmark & Sons was established
in 1886 by Isador, Julius, and Jay Witmark at the respective ages of seventeen, sixteen,
and nine, their father Marcus being the nominal head of the enterprise and a silent
partner.
3
The boys built their business from a steam printing house at 402 West 40th
Street into one of the most prestigious music publishing firms in the country, having
exclusive rights to the scores of musical shows by Victor Herbert, George M. Cohan, and
Sigmund Romberg.
4
In his memoirs, From Ragtime to Swingtime, Isador Witmark
remembered Saddler from his earliest days as an arranger.
An unknown who rose to fame as an orchestrator was Frank Saddler. After
being a musical director for road shows, he worked in the Witmark Library—
a later development—scoring, among other things, orchestrations at fifty
cents a page.
5

It appears as though his first assignment was to create a new arrangement of
William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana for the Castle Square Opera Company’s first season
in New York.
6
M. Witmark & Sons was twelve years old in 1898 and, having already
established themselves as successful publishers of sheet music, the boys were looking to

3
David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 432.
4
The business’ first location at 402 West 40th Street in Manhattan was a comparatively remote setting at
the time, being more than three blocks west of Broadway near Longacre Square more than fifteen years
before it became Times Square.
5
Isador Witmark and Isaac Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime
(New York: Lee Furman, 1939), 166.
6
For more information about Saddler’s orchestration of Maritana, see Chapter 6.

169
expand their business at that time into the lucrative area of band and orchestral
arrangements. Saddler’s first published orchestral arrangement, “Zamona” by William
Loraine, was issued by M. Witmark & Sons in 1901. The composer had a noted success
during the previous year with his instrumental composition “Salome” and the publicity by
the Witmark House sought to portray “Zamona”—subtitled “An Arabian Intermezzo”
and also featuring an “Oriental” style—as its musical sequel.
7
The Music Trade Review
corroborated this view when describing “Zamona” among the year’s new musical
offerings:
“Zamona,” the new beautiful intermezzo by William Loraine, composer of
the famous “Salome,” was played for the first time by a full orchestra at
the Mystic Shrine Ladies’ Night of Mecca Temple, February 5th. It was
enthusiastically received and everyone spoke of it in words of praise. Mr.
Loraine is to be congratulated on his second success.
8

Loraine’s Arabian musical allusion was a product of his affiliation with the Ancient
Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (otherwise known as the “Shriners”), as
his dedication of “Zamona” to the “Illustrious Potentate Chas. A Benedict, Mecca
Temple, New York” indicates.
9
The notice of the first public performance of “Zamona”
by an orchestra at the Shriners’ Mecca Temple in New York City (which also happened
to be the first public performance of a published arrangement by Frank Saddler) strongly
suggests that the piece was written for just such an occasion. The piano solo arrangement

7
An M. Witmark & Sons ad in The Music Trade Review refers to “Zamona” as “A Music Tid Bit of the
Orient.” The Music Trade Review (February 9, 1901), 26.
8
“With the Music Publishers,” The Music Trade Review (February 9, 1901), 25-6.
9
For more on the history of the Shriners, see Mecca Temple: Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the
Mystic Shrine: Its History and Pleasures Together with the Origin and History of the Order (New York:
Andrew H. Kellogg, 1894).

170

Figure 5.1, Cover art for “Zamona.”

171
of the instrumental novelty promoted the music as being “Immensely popular with
Sousa’s Band,” and indeed the Sousa Band (with Arthur Pryor conducting) recorded
“Zamona” in 1901 for the Victor Talking Machine Co.
10
As one would expect, Saddler’s
arrangement for orchestra was substantially different from the one for wind band, since
the string body provided the foundation of the orchestral sound while the woodwinds and
brass double the melody and accompaniment.
11
The Witmark Theatre and Concert
Collection for Orchestra offered the arrangement for sale in several different ensemble
sizes: 10 parts, 14 parts, and “full orchestra” (see Figure 5.2). The instrumentation for the
10-part sets are for flute, clarinet 1, cornets 1 and 2, trombone, drums, and four string
parts—violins I and II, viola, and bass—while the 14-part sets include cello, clarinet 2,
and horns 1 and 2 in addition. The “full orchestra” arrangement offered three additional
parts: oboe, bassoon for a total of sixteen parts in all.
12
Although the piano/conductor
parts were sold separately by Witmark, suggesting that they did not consider them to be
necessary components of the orchestral ensemble, it one of the outstanding features of
these arrangements that they could be played by several different instrumental
combinations and still work. The versatility of these arrangements allowed them to be
played by the string band with any assortment of winds and brass, by the string band

10
William Loraine, “Zamona: An Arabian Intermezzo,” performed by Sousa’s Band, Victor Talking
Machine Co., Victor 3261. A digital recording can be found at
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/5810/ (accessed September 19, 2016).
11
The parts for this arrangement (Rudolph 10,776) can be found at the Paramount Theatre Music Library,
Oakland, California.
12
The set of parts for “Zamona” at the Paramount Theatre Music Library includes duplicate parts for the
strings: 5 violin I, 2 violin II, 2 viola, 2 cello, 2 bass. These parts may have been added from other
collections and do not necessary reflect the number of parts that M. Witmark & Sons sent to their
customers.

172

Figure 5.2, Back cover of M. Witmark and Sons arrangement for theatre orchestra
(circa 1904).

173
alone, or even as a piano trio, quartet, or quintet.
13
Since the piano parts were designed as
orchestral reductions and could cover any missing parts, they could also function as a
substitute for the entire orchestral ensemble in smaller settings where only a handful of
players were hired. Thus, the primary job of the arranger was to create an orchestration
that could function for any ensemble size with any configuration.
While Saddler began his career as an employee of the Witmark Music Library,
within a year or two he became a freelance artist and he was able to remain independent
throughout most of his career. Though he would continue to create arrangements for the
Witmarks for another ten years, by 1902 he was also contracted to create arrangements
for three other publishers: E. T. Paull, Harry Von Tilzer, and Sol Bloom. E. T. Paull was
an enterprising publisher who was also a composer, perhaps best known for his
descriptive pieces which all featured colorful lithographic cover art on his sheet music.
14

In addition to his own music, Paull published the compositions of many songwriters who
were prominent musical craftsmen in the 1890s, but who are largely unknown today. One
such figure who has nearly slipped into obscurity is Ion Arnold, who was both a
composer and a music publisher in his own right. A set of waltzes collectively titled
“Nero’s Delight” was arranged by Saddler for an orchestra of two woodwinds (flute and
clarinet), three brass instruments (two cornets and trombone), percussion (“drums and
bells”), piano, and strings.
15
We may never know whether or not Arnold’s music for

13
I am indebted to Jack Bethards (the original owner of the more than 200,000 published arrangements in
the Paramount Theatre Music Library) for this little-known fact about the versatility of the average
commercial stock arrangement.
14
Bill Edwards, The Music, Art, and Life of E. T. Paull: America’s Other March King (William G.
Edwards, 2011).
15
This arrangement (16-027) was found at the Paramount Theatre Music Library, Oakland, CA.

174

Figure 5.3, Cover page of E. T. Paull’s “Nero’s Delight.”

175
“Nero’s Delight,” or perhaps even just the title, gave E. T. Paull the idea for his magnum
opus “The Burning of Rome,” published only the following year.
16
Saddler made an
arrangement of another instrumental descriptive piece, “Fighting the Flames,” in 1904 by
Paul Rubens, the British composer of musical comedies whose 1913 score for The Girl
from Utah would feature several interpolations by Jerome Kern (orchestrated by Saddler)
when it opened on Broadway the following year.
Harry Von Tilzer opened a publishing house under his own name in 1902 after
having been a member of the firm Shapiro, Bernstein & Von Tilzer for three years.
17
He
wrote numerous hits that made him a fortune, such as “Bird in a Gilded Cage,” “Down
Where the Wurtzberger Flows,” “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie,” and “Take Me Out to
the Ballgame,” but he also published songs by other composers and had a keen sense for
musical talent. Three dynamic songwriters, R. C. McPherson (“Cecil Mack”), Harry B.
Smith, and Will Marion Cook, collaborated to write “The Little Gypsy Maid,” and, after
it was interpolated into The Wild Rose, Saddler created an arrangement of waltzes
(composed by Cook) based on the song, which is a ragtime two-step in four-four.
18
That
same year, the show In Dahomey starring Bert Williams and George Walker played on
Broadway and Saddler scored the song “Molly Green” by Cecil Mack and Will Marion
Cook for Harry Von Tilzer.

16
Edwards, The Music, Art, and Life of E. T. Paull, 118-22.
17
David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and their Times: The Golden
Age of American Popular Music from 1886 to 1956 (New York: Donald I. Fine: 1988), 31-2, 38-9.
18
David A. Jasen, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters: 1880-1930 (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 127; Cecil Mack, Harry B. Smith, and Will Marion Cook, “The Little Gypsy Maid” from
The Wild Rose, https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/28889, (accessed on October 1, 2016).

176
Sol Bloom came to prominence as a music publisher in the late 1890s in Chicago.
He made his first foray into the music industry in 1895 as the Chicago field manager of
M. Witmark & Sons, but quickly moved on to establish himself as a music publisher in
his own right.
19
By 1903, Bloom had moved his primary business offices to New York
City and Saddler began to work for him as soon as he set up shop. Beginning with his
first published arrangement for Sol Bloom—a William Penn novelty called “Ping
Pong”—Saddler created twelve in all over the next three years, several of music by the
noted songwriters A. Baldwin Sloane and Ben Jerome.
20
Bloom left the music publishing
industry altogether in 1910. After pursuing several other lucrative business ventures, he
began a political career in 1922 when he was elected to the House of Representatives,
where he went on to serve for twenty-seven years as congressman from the West Side of
Manhattan.
Over the course of two years, between 1901 and 1903, Saddler became one of the
leading creators of stock arrangements in New York City. His reputation as a master
arranger of popular music for theatre orchestra was established on the basis of more than
a dozen published scores he made during the two years after he committed himself
exclusively to being a professional orchestrator. In 1904, two developments signaled the
steady upward trajectory that his career would take, advances that would lift him
ultimately into the highest echelon of New York’s entertainment industry. First, during
that year, he was hired to score two Broadway musicals: Sergeant Kitty (January 18,

19
Sol Bloom, The Autobiography of Sol Bloom (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1948), 179.
20
Saddler created one arrangement by A. Baldwin Sloane (“My Japanese Baby”) and five by Ben M.
Jerome (“Darling of the Gallery Gods Selection” “Ella,” “Mozart Lincoln,” Keep on a’ Shining, Silvery
Moon,” “Watch Me Tonight in the Torchlight Parade”).

177

Figure 5.4, Cover art for “Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!” Medley Selection.”

178
1904, Daly’s Theatre) and Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!! (April 2, 1904, Casino Theatre).
21
While he
had previously only been credited with making the arrangements for Broadway to Tokio in
1900, ostensibly leaving a large four-year interval between jobs, it is likely that he scored
several shows for which he did not receive credit during this period.
22
Nonetheless, the fact
that Saddler was given credit in the playbill for his work as an arranger as early as 1904
demonstrates his growing clout within the industry. The fact that he was increasingly being
hired to score Broadway shows is another indication that his career was on the rise. Despite
the fact that orchestrators on Broadway were among the least heralded of the creative
personnel working in the theatres of New York, and conversely that stock arrangers were
routinely given credit in published scores and parts, the prestige of scoring a Broadway show
far exceeded that of creating stock arrangements of orchestral medleys.
The other significant development in Saddler’s career during 1904 was his
employment as a freelance arranger for the Charles K. Harris Music Company. Harris
entered the music business in 1891 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with financial backing
from two associates and the promise of splitting the proceeds on all profits from the sale
of his songs. Within two years, however, he not only had bought out the interests of his
partners, he also had written two songs that sold more than 1,000,000 copies: “After the
Ball” and “Break the News to Mother.”
23
Harris soon after parlayed his success as a
music publisher into an eastward expansion of his enterprise, setting up offices in

21
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 199-200.
22
As evidence for this statement, see Newton Fuessle’s anecdote in his memorial appreciation of Saddler in
which he recalled that he worked on Sergeant Brue in 1905. See pages 284-85 of this dissertation.
23
Charles K. Harris, After the Ball: Forty Years of Melody, An Autobiography (New York: Frank Maurice,
1926), 52-53.

179
Chicago and New York by 1903.
24
The New York branch of the company was managed
by Meyer Cohen, who was originally hired by Harris to sell his catalogue of songs on the
road for a commission, but eventually was asked to set up his Manhattan offices. Cohen
was an imposing figure who knew every performer in vaudeville and was one of the best
song pluggers in the business.
25
The promotion of a song at Charles K. Harris’s firm was
entrusted to the “Professional Department,” which was charged with placing the song
with singers and dance bands who would give the music its best chance at success.
26
The
noisy scene at the publishing house, typical of Tin Pan Alley firms at the time, was
described years later by music director and arranger Arthur Lange, who applied for work
there as a musician in 1905 at the age of fifteen only to be hired as an office assistant.
27

Soon I was facing a pair of glass-paneled doors on which appeared in
gold-leaf letters: Chas. K. Harris Music Co. Professional Dept.”
Through the closed doors I could hear a conglomerate scramble of
singing, piano playing, and loud talking, which crescendoed to a
fortissimo as I timidly walked in and found myself in a crowded reception
room.
The singing and piano playing was emanating from four small
rooms that led off from the reception room. The four of them were going
full blast. From Room 1 came the strains of “Just One Word of
Consolation” squeezing their way past the adenoids of a bar-room tenor,
while from Room 2, the strident voice of a vaudeville comedian was
piping “Mother, Mother, Mother, Pin a Rose on Me.” And while in Room

24
Jasen, Tin Pan Alley, The Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and their Times, 12.
25
Harris, After the Ball, 141.
26
Arthur Lange, “I Grew Up in Tin Pan Alley,” in Co-Art Turntable, Henri Lloyd Clement, ed. (August,
1942), 5.
27
Arthur Lange was born in Philadelphia in 1889 and began working for music publishers in New York as
a young man. He created arrangements for several dance bands in New York and was music director for his
own band from 1922 to 1928, with which he made numerous recordings. Lange took over as head of the
music department of M-G-M in 1929 and scored several films, including The Great Victor Herbert and The
Great Ziegfeld. He is also the author of Arranging for the Modern Dance Orchestra, published in 1926 by
Robbins Music Corporation.

180
3, a coon-shouter was loudly pleading “Is Ebrybody Happy?”, a nightclub
primadonna was going through the labor pains of eking out a high-C finish
to “Would You Care?” in Room 4. Counterpoint this musical cacophony
against the din of loud talking and general hub-bub going on in the
reception room, and you have a fairly good idea of the world in which I
suddenly found myself.
28

The melodious cacophony from which Tin Pan Alley derived its name was also described
by Lange as a phenomenon one heard outside along the music publishers’ block.
29

Lange also recalled that the staff of the “Professional Dept.” included three piano
players, a “song plugger” (vocalist and song promoter), two arrangers, and a manager of
the band and orchestra department. Saddler was not a regular employee in Harris’
company as demand for his work as a freelance arranger enabled him to remain
independent. The high quality of Saddler’s work had earned him a sterling reputation
among music publishers and arrangers by that time. Arthur Lange describes the special
position he had already achieved in the industry.
Chas. K. Harris was a person of great refinement, and although he carried
himself with great dignity, he had a pleasing personality and was very
democratic. His musical talents were equal to his accomplishments, which
did not demand great dexterity at the piano, not a well-trained vocal

28
Arthur Lange, “I Grew Up in Tin Pan Alley,” in Co-Art Turntable, ed. Henri Lloyd Clement (July, 1942),
5.
29
Lange summarized Tin Pan Alley around the turn of the century in this way: “At the top of the ladder
were the publisher-writers, who either had the good fortune to have an ‘angel’ back them in the publishing
business, or who started off on a shoe-string and managed to get by until a break would put them over as a
big publisher overnight; provided of course that the song was a hit. A hit song was usually good for at least
six months, and if it was a ‘smash hit,’ the sheet music sale would often exceed the two-million-copy mark.
Charles K. Harris, Harry Von Tilzer, Albert Von Tilzer, Helf and Hager, Rose and Snyder, F. A. Mills, E.
B. Marks, and J. W. Stern were some of the outstanding publisher-writers. Mostly all of these firms were
crowded into a short block on Twenty-Eighth Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, the original Tin
Pan Alley. Both sides of the street were lined with old-fashioned brownstone houses with steps leading up
to the first floor. It was quite an experience to wander through this Tin Pan Alley at the peak of the day’s
activities, particularly during the summer months when all the windows were open, and hear piano playing
and singing pouring out from all sides.” Arthur Lange, “I Grew Up in Tin Pan Alley,” in Co-Art Turntable
(August, 1942), 6-7.

181
equipment. He wrote both words and music to his songs, and occasionally
he would lock himself in his office and plunge into the throes of creation.
One day his quivery, tremolo voice, supported by a few C and G
chords, drifted down into the professional department. Immediately the
atmosphere was filled with awed whisperings about a “new song Charlie
is writing.” This went on occasionally for several days, but no one knew
what the song was going to be. Then one day, Meyer Cohen, smiling with
satisfaction, announced “Charlie has just written a great song.” The title of
the song turned out to be “Somewhere.” And, it was through this song that
I first heard of Frank Saddler.
Frank Saddler was at that time considered the foremost arranger,
who practically revolutionized orchestrating for musical shows. His
approach was entirely fresh and different from the conventional, and being
a good showman, he would incorporate novel effects in his orchestrations,
so attractive that, in many cases, they were greatly responsible for the
success of the show. Of course his services were in great demand, and it
was only natural then that Chas. K. Harris, considering “Somewhere” to
be his masterpiece, decided that Frank Saddler, and no other, should make
the arrangement.
When [staff pianist] Steve Jones gave me all this information, he
smiled quizzically and said, “I wonder how the boys on the top floor are
going to like that?” meaning [staff arrangers] Tom Clark and Charlie Hirst.
Steve was a great admirer of Saddler, and soon had my interest stirred up in
him.
30

Lange’s assessment that Saddler was “at that time considered the foremost arranger” was
likely a reputation that he had earned through his extensive work for the music publishing
houses, about which we know, as well as his increasing prestige as an arranger for
Broadway shows, although evidence to support this interpretation is lacking. Lange’s
statement that Saddler had “practically revolutionized orchestrating for musical shows” is
one we generally think of in terms of his achievement over the course of his career, or at

30
Arthur Lange, “I Grew Up in Tin Pan Alley,” in Co-Art Turntable, Henri Lloyd Clement, ed.
(September, 1942), 5.

182

Figure 5.5, Excerpt of “Somewhere” by Chas. K. Harris.

183
least in terms of his work in the 1910s, and so this assessment probably should not be
taken to mean that he has already accomplished this by the Lange first encountered him.
While Lange was giving an accurate portrayal of Saddler’s unique status as the “foremost
arranger,” he may well have conflated the appraisal of his reputation from 1905 with his
knowledge of Saddler’s later career as an orchestrator for Broadway shows, in particular
for Kern’s innovative musicals during the 1910s.
Between 1905 and 1910, Saddler made several orchestral medleys of songs from
musical shows. He arranged a selection of songs from The Ham Tree, the 1905 Broadway
vehicle for the vaudeville duo McIntyre and Heath, and he did the same with music from
Joseph E. Howard’s The District Leader the following year and John Golden’s songs for
The Candy Shop in 1909.
31
The “characteristic piece” was another type of music that
Saddler was often asked to orchestrate for publishers of commercial music during the
1910s. The term generally refers to a short instrumental work that explores a single mood
or theme, a form that was popular with nineteenth-century German composers such as
Robert Schumann (who sometimes used the name “Stimmungsbild” or
“Charakterstück”), and which continued to be used by American composers into the early
twentieth century.
32
It was applied to several pieces by John W. Bratton that Saddler
arranged in this period, including “An American Abroad” (1903) and “The Wooden
Soldier” (1906). Bratton was a music director for several operas and musical comedies,
who published over 250 compositions, the best-known being his 1907 hit “Teddy Bears’

31
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 212, 220, 249.
32
Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 176.

184
Picnic,” which was variously subtitled a “Characteristic Novelty” and a “Characteristic
Two-Step.”
33
Several recordings of Bratton’s music were released in 1907 and 1908,
including one by Arthur Pryor’s Band for the Victor Talking Machine Company.
34

Saddler also developed several individual songs from the shows he created
“special” theatrical arrangements for into “stock” commercial arrangements for orchestra.
Jerome Kern had interpolated the song “Honeymoon Lane” into Paul Rubens’ score for
The Sunshine Girl scored by Saddler, who by then had become the Kern’s primary
orchestrator. By creating an instrumental version of the song, Saddler could make some
additional income from his work on the show by converting his vocal arrangement into a
piece for dance and theatre orchestra. Three days after The Sunshine Girl opened at the
Knickerbocker Theatre on Broadway, Al Jolson appeared for the first time in Honeymoon
Express, produced by The Winter Garden Company, a corporate name used by the
Shubert Brothers. Saddler did all the orchestrations for the show, including “You Made
Me Love You,” which was brought over from the Shubert’s annual summer revue The
Passing Show of 1913.
35
He then transformed this hit song into an instrumental
arrangement for dance orchestra. In 1916, Charles Dillingham produced The Big Show,
one of his lavish spectacles at the Hippodrome, and Saddler was entrusted with the
orchestrations for the massive theatre, having worked for Dillingham previously on

33
John Leonard, ed., Who’s Who in New York City and State (New York City: L. R. Hamersly & Company,
1907), 176.
34
Saddler was not responsible for the band arrangement. John Bratton, “Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” performed
by Arthur Pryor’s Band (Victor B-6405). A digital recording may be found at:
http://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/200007352/B-6405-Teddy_bears_picnic. (accessed on
October 10, 2016).
35
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2:22.

185
Irving Berlin’s Stop! Look! Listen! (1916) and Jerome Kern’s Miss Information (1915).
36

His arrangement of “Poor Butterfly,” the enduring hit from the score by Raymond
Hubbell (with references to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly), was published by T. B. Harms
and Francis, Day & Hunter. Kern’s “The First Rose of Summer,” which Saddler had
scored for the production of She’s a Good Fellow at the Globe Theatre in 1919, was an
elegant song that was recorded by Irish tenor John McCormack and that subsequently
became the arranger’s final commercial publication.

36
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 316.

186
Chapter 6

An Orchestrator for Broadway Shows

When Frank Saddler stopped touring as a music director, he had acquired enough
experience working in the theatres of New York over a six-year period to feel
comfortable abandoning an established career path and starting over as an orchestrator,
an emerging profession centered in the most competitive theatrical district in the world.
At the turn of the century, New York had already outpaced London, Paris, and Vienna as
the city that had the most commercial theatres, with at least twenty-six active venues that
offered stage plays, comic operas, musical comedies, and vaudeville, and with another
seven to be built by 1905.
1
The many theatres that appeared progressively northward up
Broadway from Herald Square were built to meet a growing demand by local audiences.
No fewer than twenty musicals and three times as many legitimate plays were produced
during the 1899-1900 season alone, and this number was considered low by comparison
to other years.
2
That fifteen of these musicals were original American productions was a
promising trend for Saddler as he was making the transition from conductor to
orchestrator. And with musical comedy productions on the rise at this time, orchestral
arrangers were increasingly in demand, since theatre composers who wrote shows with

1
A handful theatres were also demolished between 1900 and 1905. These numbers were culled from
several sources, including William Morrison, Broadway Theatres: History and Architecture (Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications, 1999). Dimmick, Our Theatres To-day and Yesterday; Henderson, The City and the
Theatre.
2
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 166.

187
songs and a preponderance of dialogue were much more likely than the average comic-
opera composer to need their scores orchestrated for them.
Although most of the shows Saddler worked on throughout his career were
musical comedies and revues, his first job as a professional arranger on Broadway was to
create a new orchestration for William Vincent Wallace’s opera Maritana. It was also by
far the largest score he ever worked on, requiring over five hundred pages of manuscript
paper.
3
As the proprietor of the Castle Square Opera Company, Henry Savage was the
leading purveyor of opera in English in the United States during the 1890s.
4
Originally
operating out of the Castle Square Theatre in Boston (which Savage owned) during its
inaugural year in 1895, the company was soon expanded to perform operas in other cities,
including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D. C., New York, Chicago, and St.
Louis.
5
Having decided to present his first full season in New York beginning in the fall
of 1897, Savage secured the American Theatre, which was only four years old, and, with
a seating capacity of 1,900, was not much bigger than his own theatre in Boston.
6
The
Castle Square Opera Company performed a range of operatic repertoire at the American
that included La Traviata, Faust, Carmen, Cavalleria rusticana, Fra Diavolo, H.M.S.

3
William Vincent Wallace, Maritana, arranged by Frank Saddler, Box 719, Tams-Witmark Collection,
Library of Congress.
4
James Clarence Hyde, “Grand Opera in English” Pearson’s Magazine (September, 1903), 301-07.
5
Jim McPherson, “The Savage Innocents, Part 1: King of the Castle: Henry W. Savage and the Castle
Square Opera Company” in The Opera Quarterly (Autumn, 2002), 509.
6
The Castle Square Opera Company specialized in light opera during its first few seasons, but within five
seasons Savage had guided the organization toward his goal of presenting mostly grand opera. This
transition was so successful that Savage was able to strike a deal with Maurice Grau, the manager of the
Metropolitan Opera House, to produce a series of operas in English with his company at the Met under the
name Savage English Grand Opera Company. Samuel Swift, “Opera in English,” in Harper’s Weekly
September 14, 1901, 936; Jim McPherson, “The Savage Innocents, Part 2: On the Road with Parsifal,
Butterfly, the Widow, and the Girl” in The Opera Quarterly (Winter, 2003), 28.

188
Pinafore, Johann Strauss’ The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief, and Julius Benedict’s The
Lily of Killarney. On March 21, 1898, the company embarked on a series of eight
performances of William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana, which had not been staged in
New York for fourteen years. The New York Times reported that the opera was “well
played” by the company, which featured Grace Golden in the title role and Joseph
Sheehan as Don Caesar de Bazan.
7
Nearly two years later, on February 12, 1900, the
Castle Square Opera Company revived Maritana again for eight performances, most
likely a result of the previous production having “scored a distinct success.”
8
After fifty
years of being successfully revived in New York, Wallace’s opera would be performed
for the last time in a Broadway Theatre at the end of these two brief runs.
Nowhere in these press announcements was there any mention of a new orchestral
arrangement having been commissioned for the occasion, which is not unusual, since
information about technical upgrades in the music would not have ordinarily received
notice in the press. And yet, Henry Savage’s two productions of Maritana at the
American Theatre are the most likely reason for the existence of a complete score of
Wallace’s opera orchestrated by Frank Saddler. It should not seem strange that Henry
Savage would have commissioned a new arrangement for his New York production,
despite the fact that the Castle Square Opera Company had performed Maritana in
Boston only two years earlier.
9
Since the Castle Square Opera Company performances of
Maritana in 1898 and 1900 at the American Theatre in New York were the first revivals

7
The New York Times, “‘Maritana’ Seen Again,” March 22, 1898, 7.
8
The New York Times, “Announcements for the Week,” February 11, 1900, 18.
9
Charles Elwell French, A Year of Opera at the Castle Square Theatre from May 6, ’95, to May 6, ’96
(Boston: Charles Elwell French, 1896), 140.

189
of Wallace’s opera since 1884 (a fact that was not overlooked by the critic of the Times),
Savage may have wanted to make sure that his production was not handicapped by an
inferior arrangement. An ambitious manager who later became one of the most powerful
figures on Broadway, Savage was known for spending lavishly upon his productions to
make sure they met with public approval and were competitive with the leading opera
companies in New York. An account of his spare-no-expense philosophy as an opera
manager was given by James Clarence Hyde in 1903 for Pearson’s Magazine.
He took the view that grand opera in English would pay, provided it were
given by a company capable of good work in all departments and provided
the productions were made upon an adequate scale. These requisites can
be expressed in a few words, but they involved an immense amount of
work. To succeed meant that the principals must be of recognized ability;
that the chorus must be large and able to sing; that thoroughly experienced
stage managers and musical conductors must be employed; that complete
sets of scenery for a large repertoire of grand operas music be painted;
costumes provided—not the remnants of a theatrical storehouse; that the
public must be informed of the venture through liberal use of printers’ ink,
and it meant, more than anything else, that the man behind the guns must
back up his judgment with a substantial amount of cash before the curtain
was rung up on the first performance.
10

Although Hyde neglects to mention the necessary expense for musical scores—which is
understandable given that most of the scores and parts that Savage produced were not as
unstable as Maritana and generally had easily obtainable performance editions for rent—
Savage was clearly the type of theatrical manager who would have made the commission
of a new orchestral arrangement a priority in his budget, if it was deemed necessary.
One possible connection between Savage and Saddler was their mutual

10
Hyde, “Grand Opera in English,” 301-02.

190
relationship with J. W. Murray and Clara Lane, who played the lead roles in Savage’s
1896 production of Maritana and with whom Saddler had worked on Glendalough in
1893 and 1894. If there were deficiencies in the orchestral arrangement that Savage used
in Boston (and we know this was not Wallace’s original score), Murray and Lane, who
knew Saddler’s musical aspirations and abilities better than most, may have
recommended him as an orchestrator who could handle the responsibility of creating a
new score for the American Theatre in New York. After all, leaving such an important
and demanding job to a musician who was primarily known as a conductor would have
required the strong endorsement of other musicians who knew the extent of his ability.
Murray and Lane, who were trusted by Savage, and for whom Saddler had composed so
much instrumental music for Glendalough, would have been well positioned to
recommend him for the job.
Other important circumstantial evidence placing the manuscript in 1898 can be
found in the score itself.
11
From the penmanship to the ink to the layout of the instrument
names, Saddler’s partitura (orchestration score without vocal parts) is laid out in a way
that is unlike any of his scores from the 1910s. For example, at the beginning of each
musical number he writes the name in careful cursive italics with double underlines, an
artful flourish that is absent in his later scores, which are more workmanlike in these

11
The score once resided at The Witmark Music Library in New York and then was subsequently housed at
the Tams-Witmark Music Library before it was donated to the Library of Congress where it now resides.
This chain of custody is established by the imprint of an oval ink stamp that reads “Property of The
Witmark Music Library, New York” and appears on several signatures of the score. Since the score is
undated, it is difficult to know with certainty its provenance. However, one possibility is that he created the
score when he was employed by M. Witmark & Sons; the other is that he was commissioned to create the
score for Henry Savage before it was acquired by the Witmarks.

191
presentation details. The type of pen Saddler used is wider at the tip such that note heads
and bar lines are thicker than one generally finds in the later scores. The names of
instruments in pairs are given with roman numerals, while the numerical contractions of
the ordinals are inconsistently applied, sometimes indicating the Italian “primo” and
“secondo” (as with the clarinets and cornets) and other times the English “first,”
“second,” “third,” and “fourth” (as with the horns and violins). Saddler never uses this
style of ordinal in his later scores, preferring instead to simply allow the roman numerals
to stand alone or to give the plural (e.g. “Trumpets in A,” “Fagotti,” etc.). All of these
aspects of the manuscript suggest that the score was created very early in Saddler’s career
as an orchestrator.
Despite his lack of specificity regarding dates and other details, Isador Witmark
recalled that Frank’s employment at the Witmark Library followed immediately after his
career as a music director ended, which may have coincided with Henry Savage’s
preparations for the production of Maritana at the American Theatre in the first few
months of 1898. If Saddler did create the score for the Witmarks, it would have earned
him enough money at fifty cents a page—the Overture and three Acts of Maritana were
515 pages of music (yielding $257.50 of income)—to make the occupational transition
easier and give him confidence that he could support his family with his new line of
work.
12

The season of 1899-1900 on Broadway offered shows by several people that

12
Witmark, From Ragtime to Swingtime, 166.

192

Figures 6.1a & 6.1b, Cover page of Wallace’s Maritana arranged by Frank
Saddler and detail.

193
would remain fixtures in the theatre for the next two decades.
13
Although Victor Herbert
had been the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony since 1898, he managed to find
time to score three musicals—Cyrano de Bergerac (Knickerbocker, 9-18-99), The
Singing Girl (Casino, 10-23-99), and The Ameer (Wallack’s, 12-4-99)—that opened
within three months of each other in late 1899. Lou Fields and Joe Weber, who had built
their own theatre, Weber and Fields’ Music Hall, in 1896, supplied their audiences with
“A Dramatic Conundrum in Two Guesses (Double Bill of Vaudeville and a Burlesque in
Two Acts),” whimsically titled Whirl-i-Gig, which featured Lillian Russell and David
Warfield, two of their brilliant constellation of repertory actors and comedians.
Pioneering black comedians Bert Williams and George Walker introduced their first
musical production, The Policy Players (Star, 10-16-99), for a brief run that prefigured
the team’s great successes to come. Producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. found a suitable
vehicle for his theatrical and romantic partner, Anna Held, in the libretti to two works by
Hervé, which he reconfigured with new book, lyrics, and music by Harry B. Smith and
Reginald De Koven and retitled Papa’s Wife (Manhattan, 11-13-99). Twelve other
original productions were mounted during the season before the appearance of Max
Freeman’s Broadway to Tokio, which opened on January 23, 1900 at the New York
Theatre. The score was composed by A. Baldwin Sloane, who was largely responsible for
the vocal numbers, and Reginald De Koven, who wrote the dance music. Broadway to
Tokio was Frank Saddler’s first job as an arranger of new theatre music on Broadway,

13
The information in this paragraph is all derived from Bordman’s American Musical Theatre and Norton’s
A Chronology of American Musical Theater.

194
and he shared the work with Karl L. Hoschna, who would establish himself as one of
Broadway’s leading composers at the end of the decade.
At another time, Broadway to Tokio might have been dubbed an extravaganza,
however The New York Times referred to the eclectic production as a “new scenic and
terpsichorean spectacle” that was “a combination of operetta, burlesque, ‘vaudeville,’ and
ballet.”
14
The star of the show was Fay Templeton, who had developed her career in
Weber and Fields’ company, but was borrowed for the occasion by Freeman, who saw
the potential for an entire show in her portrayal of Cleopatra’s mummy in Hurly Burly
(Weber and Fields, 9-8-98) during the previous season. The plot involved the Egyptian
queen travelling from New York to San Francisco, back to New York, and then to Japan
in search of her heart, which had been mysteriously removed from her mummified
corpse. While the show’s success (88 performances) was undoubtedly attributable in part
to its “brilliant” ballets and meticulously crafted sets, the lengthy run it enjoyed would
have been impossible without a well-designed vehicle for its star.
15
The Times reviewer
explained that the show’s dramatic structure gave full latitude to Templeton’s
capabilities: “Her triumph was due partly to the good opportunities the not-too-restricted
scheme of the piece gives her, partly to her rich fund of humor and her experienced skill,
and largely to the sheer force of her personality.”
16

The score for Broadway to Tokio was a combination of songs, choruses, ballet

14
The New York Times, January 24, 1900, 7.
15
One particularly extravagant set noted in the New York Tribune was the recreation of the Eden Musée in
which its wax figures of the crowned heads of the world danced and sang to honor Cleopatra. New York
Tribune, January 5, 1900, 5.
16
The New York Times, January 24, 1900, 7.

195
music, and other music for eccentric dance specialties. A. Baldwin Sloane wrote several
numbers to establish the characters, their motives, and their milieus, such as “The Serpent
of the Nile” for Fay Templeton (as Cleopatra), “When I’m Traveling on the Road” for
Otis Harlan (as Calcium Lightwayte), and “The Story of the Dance” for Templeton,
Harlan, Ignacio Martinetti (as Dynamite D’Cognac), and Charles Kirke (as Lee High
Hung).
17
Cleopatra was also made to sing several “coon” songs, reflecting the growing
rage for ragtime music in the United States at the time. “Now I’se Got Some Money,
Well, I’m Comin’ ‘Round” was Templeton’s response to May Irwin’s hit “When You
Ain’t Got No Money, You Needn’t Come Around,” and “Susie, Mah, Sue” was a
specialty number that she may have sung while doing her impression of Parisian
chanteuse Eugénie Fougère, who had toured America in the 1890s and brought cakewalk
rag songs into her risqué act back in Europe.
18
Reginald De Koven composed two ballets
for the show, “Firefly’s Revel” and “The Cherry Blossom Ballet,” the latter coming in
Act 3, which took place in Japan and featured essentialized Orientalism in music and
dance that was typical of the period.
19

Although there is no physical evidence to support the claim, it is likely that

17
Alfred Baldwin Sloane (1872-1925) composed his first operatic score for the Paint and Powder Club in
his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. He began working thereafter with prominent theatrical managers
and producers in New York, including Edward E. Rice, Klaw & Erlanger and Charles Hoyt. He wrote
operas and musical comedies for Anna Held, Lillian Russell, Nora Bayes and many other stars of the
Gilded Age. Walter Browne and E. De Roy Koch. eds., Who’s Who on the Stage 1908 (New York: B. W.
Dodge & Company, 1908), 403.
18
Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875-1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2009), 239. An 1899 film of Eugénie Fougère can be viewed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qjTnX9H3pTk#!
19
G. Schirmer published a piano reduction of the two numbers with more generic titles. Reginald
De Koven, Ballet Music: Fireflies’ Ballet, Japanese Ballet as Performed in “Broadway to Tokio” (New
York: G. Schirmer, 1900).

196
De Koven did his own arrangements, since he had routinely scored his own music for
orchestra when composing his comic operas. There was, nonetheless, plenty of music that
needed to be orchestrated aside from these two ballets: four songs and five choruses in
Act I; fourteen individual numbers, including three dances (not by De Koven), in Act II;
and, two additional choruses in Act III. It is not known how Saddler and Hoschna divided
the work load. Although this was Saddler’s first job, Hoschna himself was only twenty-
four at the time (twelve years Saddler’s junior) and had emigrated to the United States
only four years earlier from Vienna.
20
Hoschna was also working for the Witmark Music
Library at the time and they may have been given the job together as a result of this
connection. The only notice given to the orchestra in the opening night review in the
Times was the observation that music director Signor Antonio DeNovellis did not prepare
the orchestra well for opening night.
21

The record indicates that Saddler was hired infrequently by Broadway producers
during the 1910s. But though it appears as though Saddler only worked on two other
shows—Sergeant Kitty and Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!!—over the course of the next seven years,
it is far more likely that he worked on several musical shows but was not credited for his
work. Though Saddler would be the first of his profession to regularly receive credit for
his work as an orchestrator, these large gaps in his work chronology suggest that his
contribution to many shows was left out musical theatre programs. As we shall
see, he was denied credit on many shows throughout his life, even after he had

20
“Carl Hoschna Dead: Composer of Music of ‘Madame Sherry’ and Other Plays Was 35 Years Old,” The
New York Times, December 24, 1911, 9.
21
The New York Times, January 24, 1900, 7.

197
established himself as the most sought-after arranger on Broadway.
Sergeant Kitty was billed as a comic opera with music by A. Baldwin Sloane,
whose music Saddler had scored for Broadway to Tokio four years earlier. The show’s
plot had a military theme that was built around the talents of Virginia Earle, whose
success in a string of musical comedies prompted the producer to celebrate her
accomplishments in the lobby with “a mammoth floral horseshoe in-woven with the
names of all the plays in which Miss Earle has ever been seen.”
22
The book for Sergeant
Kitty centered around the confusion created by Kitty la Tour being tricked into believing
that her lover, Lucien Valliere of the Twenty-fourth Hussars, was already married to the
wife of his friend, Henri. The plot about the case of mistaken betrothal was met with
mixed reviews, The New York Times stating simply that “it seems to be rather dull,”
while The Bronxville Review called it “a remarkably funny show” where “there is an even
balance of hearty laughter and genuine applause from curtain to curtain.”
23
Yet, as with
most musicals from this period, it was the charismatic personality of the show’s star that
carried the production, along with the skill, humor, and charm of the supporting cast
members, who contributed comedy songs or eccentric dance numbers. The score was
substantial, as one would expect of a comic opera, with twenty-two distinct numbers—
opening choruses and finales bookending both acts, four duets, one trio, eleven solo
songs, and several songs with chorus. The influence of musical comedy on American

22
The New York Times, January 19, 1904, 5.
23
Even though the reviewer was covering a theatre in Harlem, the difference in opinion could well have
been a result of the disparity between the theatrical quality necessary to maintain a show on Broadway
compared to that needed to fill any theatre for a couple of nights outside of the Great White Way. The
Bronxville Review, April 7, 1904.

198

Figure 6.2, Postcard with image of Virginia Earle in Sergeant Kitty.

199
comic opera at the turn of the century can be seen in the fact that the only mention of
Sloane’s music, either praise or criticism, in the New Era Illustrated Magazine review
says that the show “abounds in catchy airs.”
24
The reviewer for The New York Times
mustered faint praise for the music in referring to the songs as “different from the talk in
that they are rather interesting.” He also credited Sloane with the show’s survival on
Broadway in writing that “the music was the best feature of the play and will probably
make it a moderate success.”
25
With 55 performances at Daly’s Theatre, Sergeant Kitty
not only fulfilled this prognostication, but was also considered popular enough to prompt
a season-long nationwide tour (with several dates in Canada) between September 1906
and April 1907, more than two years later.
26
Saddler shared the arranging duties on this
show with Al LaRue.
Subtitled “A Musical Cocktail,” Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!! was another show with a
weak book that was saved by a captivating star and specialty act. In this case, the star was
the veteran comedian Eddie Foy and the specialty was the Original English Pony Ballet,
which the Cambridge Chronicle referred to as “the greatest octette [sic] of dancing girls
in the world.”
27
Foy played the part of Peter Pouffle to Templar Saxe’s Lord George
Piffle and John Hyams’ Macaroni Paffle in a farce by Stanislaus Stange that was
dismissed in The New York Times as being “for the most part low without being comical,
and when it was at its best was most ancient.”
28
The highlight of the evening was the

24
New Era Illustrated Magazine, February, 1904, 72.
25
The New York Times, January 19, 1904, 5.
26
Information on the extensive touring schedule for Sergeant Kitty was provided by Herbert Goldman.
27
Cambridge Chronicle, December 10, 1904.
28
The New York Times, April 3, 1904.

200
“Radium Dance” featuring the Original English Pony Ballet clad “in Pierrot costumes
illuminated by discs of phosphorus and [dancing] a skipping rope ballet with
phosphorescent ropes.”
29
As the featured star of the production, Foy lived up to his
billing, doing “wonders with his lines,” and, in a gag that had him buried in sand as the
victim of a charlatan sand sculptor, gave the audience “a very artistic and amusing bit of
clowning.” When Foy sang the song “The Ghost That Never Walked,” he delivered a
poignant tear-jerker drawn from experience as a seasoned veteran of touring musical
shows. The number was so emotionally charged for the players that The New York Times
dedicated a five-column article to the backstory of Foy’s original rejection of the song on
the grounds that he was a comedian and could not be asked to sing something as
depressing as that, especially when many of his colleagues had similar traumatic
experiences.
30
Without knowing it, the songwriters had touched a nerve with the more

29
The phenomenon of radium peaked in popular culture in 1904 when the new element was demonstrated
to large audiences at the World’s Fair in St. Louis by Marie and Pierre Curie, who discovered it in 1898.
Fascination with the glowing substance led to the creation of the Radium Dance on Broadway, and the
subsequent mutual appreciation of the choreographer and the scientists as described in the Los Angeles
Herald: “Loie Fuller, the famous American danseuse, has just invented a ‘radium dance’ and M. and Mme.
Curie have seen it and approved. The famous physicists say that Miss Fuller makes them look upon their
own discovery in a new light. The name ‘radium dance’ is not, as might be imagined, a fanciful one. No
actual salt of radium is manipulated by Miss Fuller in the production of her new effects, though she does
use a substance very nearly akin to radium. Certain fluorescent salts are extracted from the residue of
pitchblende, whence the Curies obtained the mysterious matter discovered by them.” “Lois Fuller
Introduces New Radium Dance,” Los Angeles Herald, May 1, 1904.
30
According to the article, the day of the week that wages were paid to actors in a given production was
different depending on whether a show was being mounted in a theatre owned by the manager or not.
Therefore, when a company was being managed by the theatre owner, payments were made on Saturday
night. But, when a manager did not own the theatre in which the show was being produced (which
happened the overwhelming majority of the time back then), payments were made on Tuesday. This was
done to put pressure on players to remain with a troubled production through the beginning of the new
week even when they suspected that a show was going to close. Until this policy was implemented, it was
not uncommon for actors to jump ship on Saturday night before receiving their notice of termination in
order to avoid being stranded on the road at the beginning of the week with no work and no pay. “When the
Ghost Walks: With Tearful Tales by Eddie Foy and Other ‘Piff, Paff, Pouf’ Actors of Times When the
Green-Backed Theatrical Wraith Failed to Materialize,” The New York Times, April 24, 1904.

201
experienced actors who had been active in the theatre before the Syndicate organized
theatre scheduling in 1896. Before then, performers on tour had no guarantee that they
would not be stranded across the country with money owed to them by unscrupulous
managers, in which case the “ghost” (either the manager or treasurer) did not “walk”
(hand out payment envelopes). Regarding the scope of the orchestration job on the show,
the Times counted “twenty big musical numbers” in Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!! composed by
Jean Schwartz with lyrics by William Jerome, and Frank Saddler arranged the entire
score himself.
Four seasons on Broadway would come and go without Saddler receiving credit
for his orchestration of a show. It was not until the very end of the 1908-1909 season,
when Lew Fields asked him to join the team of The Midnight Sons, that Saddler’s name
appeared in a Broadway playbill. It seems all the more implausible that Saddler would
not have been asked to score another musical in the five-year interval between Piff! Paff!!
Pouf!!! and The Midnight Sons due to the immensity of Fields’ production, with so much
riding on its success. Over a period of thirty years, Fields had established himself as one
of New York’s leading theatre producers, working at first in variety as part of the
“Dutch” knockabout comedy team Weber and Fields, and later as actor, writer, manager,
and proprietor of his own theatre company with his partner, Joe Weber.
31
Following the
breakup of the partnership in 1904, Fields embarked on a career as a producer that would

31
So-called “Dutch acts” in New York in the nineteenth century were comedy teams that played on the
ethnic stereotypes of newly arrived immigrants from Germany. Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway,
46-7.

202

Figure 6.3, Lew Fields circa 1900.

203
continue for another twenty years. The Midnight Sons was the fifth production he was
involved in after the demise of Weber & Fields Enterprises.
Dubbed “a musical moving picture,” the show featured eight scenes that were
meant to replicate early single-reel films both in their brevity and their absence
of plot.
32
The book by Glen MacDonough, which was the production’s most trivial
component, followed the job search and high jinks of the four playboy sons of Senator
Constant Noyes, whom he threatened to disinherit if they do not find gainful
employment.
33
Having failed to secure a substantial book or score for the show, Fields
marshaled his skills as a veteran showman to deliver a theatrical experience that was sure
to dazzle his audience, since he was already convinced it would not move them. In the
end, he managed to create a hit that began during the uncomfortable summer months and
ran through to the end of the year with a reliable formula of sensational players and
scenic design. Only two years before, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. had inaugurated his Follies in
order to lure summer playgoers with his signature blend of attractive promenading
showgirls and first-rate song-and-dance acts, and Fields knew he needed to present
comparable talent and stagecraft in order to compete. The New York Times ventured an
accurate prediction in the opening line of its review when speculating that “two novel
scenes, Blanche Ring’s songs, Lotta Faust’s back, and Vernon Castle’s clever fooling
may carry The Midnight Sons…into Summer success.”
34
Indeed, the fourth and fifth
scenes made a spectacular technical display: the setting before intermission replicated

32
Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 241-47.
33
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 249-50.
34
“‘The Midnight Sons’ Has Two Good Parts,” The New York Times, May 23, 1909, 11.

204
Grand Central Terminal with its teeming crowds, a departing train, and the novel medium
of film projection outside the passenger car’s windows to give the impression of
movement; and the setting after intermission faced the real audience with another
fictitious theatre audience on stage, replete with orchestra, balcony, boxes, and gallery all
filled to capacity with approximately 300 extras and stage dummies. To make the illusion
complete, the players performed with their backs to the audience in the house.
Comedienne Lotta Faust, who revived the role of Merri Murray (with which she had first
thrilled New York audiences two years earlier in The Girl Behind the Counter), was
becoming known as much for her dancing as for her svelte figure and backless blouses.
Vernon Castle played Sousberry Lushmore, an alcoholic whose eccentric dance during
the opening chorus gave the impression of his nearly losing his balance with every step,
“stumbling from one waitress—chorus girl to another, using a conventional One-step or
Hesitation Walk as an excuse for the swaying, dips, and trip steps that characterize a
drunk.”
35
Undoubtedly, the biggest musical attraction of the evening was Blanche Ring,
“with her wholesome, refined, exuberant charm of voice and personality, most
exquisitely gowned, and bringing a whole armful of song-trophies from the wilds of
vaudeville,” according to the reviewer for The Theatre magazine.
36
Her winning
performances of “The Billiken Man” and “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” were both
recorded on the prestigious purple-label “Personality” series for Victor Talking Machine
Company during the first month of the show’s run, a sure sign that these hits would be

35
Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 243.
36
“Some Old and New Plays,” The Theatre, vol. X, No. 101 (July, 1909), 3.

205

Figure 6.4, Blanche Ring circa 1910.

206
remembered long after the show closed.
37
Although these two songs were interpolations,
and therefore may well have come to the production with their arrangements, most of The
Midnight Sons’ twenty-one distinct musical numbers were written by composer Raymond
Hubbell and lyricist Glen MacDonough and scored by Frank Saddler.
Whether or not we should interpret the long period of time between shows that we
know Saddler worked on—Piff! Paff!! Pouf!!! (April, 1904) and The Midnight Sons
(May, 1909) as an actual hiatus in his work on Broadway, he would never again go this
long without working on Broadway (or being acknowledged for his work). From 1909
until his sudden death in 1921 while he was working on the score for Charles
Dillingham’s Get Together, Saddler was almost never without work on Broadway during
his lifetime. Over the next twelve years, only once did he score fewer than three shows in
a single season (1913-1914), while he orchestrated at least six shows in a single season
three times (1915-1916, 1917-1918, 1919-1920). And he might have worked on even
more shows than we know during these periods of heavy activity. For example, although
Saddler’s name was not given in the program for Robert Hood Bowers’ The Red Rose
(6-22-11, Globe Theatre) his score for the show has survived and is currently preserved at
the Library of Congress. (see Figure 6.6).
38
Nor was he given credit for his work on
several of the extravaganzas at the Hippodrome, although the fact was so well known that

37
Blanche Ring recorded “The Billiken Man” and “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” on June 24, 1909, one
month after the show opened. Although it is impossible to know with certainty, it is entirely possible that
she used Saddler’s orchestrations for these recordings since she was a specialty artist and could easily have
brought them from the theatre for the occasion. “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” can be heard through this
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2T_pv4vT8E. Brian Rust, The Complete Entertainment
Discography, from the mid-1890s to 1942 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), 550-51.
38
Saddler’s orchestrations for The Red Rose are located in Box 82 of the Tams-Witmark Collection at the
Library of Congress.

207

Figure 6.5, Manuscript excerpt (unsigned) of Frank Saddler’s arrangement of Robert
Hood Bowers’ The Red Rose.

this was the only musical accomplishment for which he was remembered in his brief
obituary in The New York Times.
39
And, despite the fact that it was taken for granted that
Saddler would be the orchestrator on all of Kern’s shows, he was only given credit in the
programs for about half of these productions. Ultimately, we will never know how many
troubled productions he was called in to fix on short notice for which no scores survive
and no program credit was given.
During the summer of 1909, Saddler created the orchestrations for a musical

39
“Obituaries,” The New York Times, March 29, 1921, 15.

208
comedy vehicle designed for the blackface minstrel team McIntyre and Heath. Produced
by Klaw and Erlanger, In Hayti (8-30-09, Circle Theatre) was a musical that was
designed to give fans of the vaudeville team a show that would keep them entertained for
three acts of theatrical absurdity. Much of the business of the play revolved around the
two comedians each carrying a live chicken around, sometimes successfully, sometimes
dropping them and allowing them to run around the stage. All this theatrical hokum
culminated in a production number appropriately called “Chicken,” performed by chorus
girls at the end of Act II dressed up in a strange twist as roosters.
40
Jean Schwartz’
ragtime songs were well received and, in an implicit reference to Saddler’s contribution,
The New York Times reviewer wrote that “the finales were arranged as complicated song
and dance numbers, and always succeeded in rousing the audience to call for
repetitions.”
41

The success of Lew Fields’ theatrical formula in his latest production caused him
to use a similar template for The Jolly Bachelors, which was designed as another summer
revue even though the timing of the show’s development and its unusually long gestation
made for a January 1910 opening. After two weeks of tryout performances in New Haven
and Philadelphia that yielded tepid reviews, Fields decided that he was unhappy with the
book, the score, and the collection of vaudevillians he had hired to bring the levity to the
show.
42
For three weeks during the month of December, while Glen MacDonough
reworked his script and Fields acquired the services of performers that were experienced

40
“Chorus as Roosters in Play at Circle,” The New York Times, August 31, 1909.
41
Ibid.
42
Fields and Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 263.

209

Figure 6.6, Nora Bayes circa 1910.

in musical comedy, the company rehearsed the play and routined the numbers. Among
the reinforcements was Nora Bayes, who had catapulted to fame when she appeared in
the first three installments of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.’s Follies. Since June, Bayes and her
husband Jack Norworth, who was also her stage partner, had been engaged in a bitter

210
dispute with Ziegfeld during the Follies of 1909 causing them to leave the show and
break their contracts.
43
By September, the producer sued and succeeded in placing an
injunction upon the couple to restrict their ability to work for anyone else; and so, when
Fields asked them to join the cast of The Jolly Bachelors in November, everyone knew
that signing another contract would put them in contempt of court. However, this obstacle
did not prevent them both from accepting the offer, which ultimately led to their greatest
success on Broadway. Their songs—“Rosa Rosetta,” “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?”
“Medley of College Songs,” “Come Along, My Mandy,” and “Young America”—were
all recorded by Victor on the “Personality” series, raising the distinct possibility that
Saddler’s arrangements were captured on record for the first time if the performers
brought their arrangements with them to the recording sessions at Victor’s Camden, New
Jersey studios in March 1910.
44

Lew Fields’ next installment at the Broadway Theatre during the summer of 1910
would be his most spectacular production yet. The Summer Widowers featured several

43
The fight was precipitated by Bayes insisting that Ziegfeld fire Sophie Tucker, who was at the beginning
of her career and had made a hit singing several ragtime songs that caused Bayes to fear that she was being
upstaged. After he capitulated to her demand, Ziegfeld asked Bayes to take one of Tucker’s song, which
entailed wearing tights and riding on an elephant, which she declined to do. In the court case that followed
in April 1910, Bayes also complained of several other factors that made employment in the Follies
intolerable, from the noise from overhead fans and waiters taking drink orders during her singing to
Ziegfeld telling her on opening night in Atlantic City that “the play was rotten, you looked rotten, and sang
rotten,” which the producer denied on the stand. For his part, Ziegfeld complained that Bayes not only
refused to wear the costume, but also declined to sing the songs assigned to her. Ultimately, Ziegfeld won
the case and Bayes was ordered to observe the injunction until her contract expired in 1911. “Refuses to
Suspend Bayes Injunction,” The New York Times, September 21, 1909, 9; “Bayes and Norworth Rebel,”
The New York Times, December 4, 1909, 11; “She Drew the Line at Wearing Tights,” The New York Times,
April 28, 1910, 9; Reports of Cases Heard and Determined in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court
of the State of New York, vol. CXLVIII (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Company, 1912), 185-92.
44
Rust, The Complete Entertainment Discography, 44.

211
brilliant entertainers—Irene Franklin, Vernon Castle, Lew Fields himself, and a young
Helen Hayes among them—in another frivolous comedy by Glen MacDonough.
However, the actors were by no means the main event. Subtitled “A Musical Panorama in
Seven Views,” the show presented the audience with unparalleled theatrical realism that
was largely the work of director Ned Wayburn and scenic designer Arthur Voegtlin. In
the opening scene, the boardwalk in Atlantic City was depicted with all its hustle and
bustle, which was followed by a scene of a street in New York. Scenes four and five took
place on the beach, which The New York Times called “a splendid effect” that gave the
illusion of chorus girls diving from a springboard into the ocean.
45
In fact, the technology
was so innovative that Fields went to the trouble to take out both a patent and copyright
on it and issue a written warning in the program threatening any infringement with
prosecution. And yet, the pièce de résistance of stage wizardry did not occur until after
intermission, when the curtain opened on a cutaway of three floors of the St. Vitus
Apartments (“near Amsterdam Avenue, N. Y.”) revealing “the inside of nine different
rooms…into and out of which the characters move during a supposed midnight supper
given by the prima donna heroine of the Bohemian side of the story.”
46

Though the music was largely unspectacular compared to Bayes and Norworth’s
contributions in The Jolly Bachelors, Irene Franklin’s “slangy” songs, which she wrote
with composer Burt Green, received favorable notice. The show was liberally garnished

45
Armond and Marc Fields described this technology as “rear-screen motion picture footage of girls
frolicking in the waves…seamlessly combined with painted flats and sets reproducing the pier and beach in
the moonlight.” Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 270. “Big Summer Show at the Broadway,” The
New York Times, June 5, 1910, 11.
46
Ibid.

212
with music—nineteen vocal numbers (songs and choruses) and three dance specialties
were placed to appear intermittently throughout the action. The playbill tellingly credited
the score as a collection of melodies (“Tunes by A. Baldwin Sloane”), suggesting that the
composer relied upon the show’s arranger for more than just scoring the music for
orchestra. While his credit at the end of the program (“All Orchestrations by Mr. Frank
Saddler”) was a clear indication of the growing importance of the orchestrator in the
creation of musical comedies during the 1910s, it probably does not do justice to the
complex and essential collaborative role of the arranger in the creation of the sound
canvas that accompanied the action in musical comedies during the 1910s. In an
illuminating essay by Newton Fuessle written upon the news of Saddler’s untimely death,
the author describes how
[p]roducers, composers, stars, came to him sometimes with only vague
fragments of tunes and Saddler made music out of them. For years there
was hardly a musical comedy success on Broadway the music of which
Frank Saddler had not fashioned into its finished form.
47

In spite of Fuessle’s tendency to exaggerate in other parts of his piece, he gives us a
crucial insight in this passage into the broad authority Saddler held over the musical
component of Broadway shows on which he worked. If we are to take A. Baldwin
Sloane’s credit as a tunesmith literally (and even if it was intended to be tongue-in-cheek,
the frank admission of the composer’s creative role suggests that we should), the art of
Broadway orchestration in Saddler’s case involved much more than creating orchestral
settings from a piano score as he had done with Maritana. In this way, the job he was

47
Fuessle, “Broadway’s King of Counterpoint.”

213
asked to do on The Summer Widowers would have been more aptly referred to as
“orchestral arranging” in the fullest sense of the term. His understanding of the
requirements of musical comedy, his knowledge of the inner workings of the theatre
orchestra, his creative versatility with popular musical forms, and his willingness to see a
theatrical project through to its completion all made him an asset to every production on
which he worked.
Saddler was employed in regular intervals over the next two years, scoring three
shows each season—one show in the fall, one in the winter, and one in the summer. The
Bachelor Belles (11-7-10, Globe Theatre) gave Saddler another chance to work with
composer Raymond Hubbell, who continued to be given large assignments and to return
undistinguished work. His scores for The Midnight Sons and The Jolly Bachelors both
were overshadowed by the song interpolations introduced by Blanche Ring and Nora
Bayes, respectively, which Lew Fields deemed to be necessary to each show’s success
from a musical standpoint. Despite the fine dancing of Adeline Genee, the musical had a
short run principally due to a book and score that left much to be desired.
48
Lew Fields
hired Saddler again for The Hen-Pecks (2-4-11, Broadway Theatre), his fourth show with
the great Broadway impresario, which was a clear sign of his value to his productions.
The team of Ned Wayburn, Arthur Voegtlin, Glen MacDonough, and A. Baldwin Sloane
all returned for the new edition of Fields’ spectacular brand of musical revue. Bringing to
the stage his finest comedy yet, Fields outdid himself by relying more on traditional farce
than on extravagant scenic design, which inspired more awe than pure, unbridled

48
“‘Bachelor Belles’ Weak,” The New York Times, November 8, 1910, 9.

214
laughter. This is not to say that in this show he abandoned his penchant for realistic sets;
in fact, the opening barnyard scene with actual roosters, pigs, geese, and ducks was
convincing enough to grab the headlines in the review from The New York Times.
49
The
most memorable scene in the show, however, was a violent confrontation between the
farmer, Henry Peck (Fields) and Zowie (Vernon Castle), the man who convinced Peck’s
daughter to move to the city with him. In the scenario, Peck created a scheme to
impersonate a barber in order to physically abuse Zowie while trapped in the barber’s
chair, a bout of physical comedy that was a tour de force of knockabout that recalled
Fields’ Dutch act with Joe Weber. By some accounts, Fields’ scene with Castle took on a
sadistic fury that made the old vaudeville act seem tame by comparison.
50
Blossom
Seeley, a Broadway newcomer from San Francisco who would become a star in
vaudeville over the next decade, performed several songs in the role of Peck’s daughter
that earned her high marks in the press, not least of which for her wild, provocative
dancing during “Toddlin’ the Todalo.” Eighteen musical numbers by Sloane and
MacDonough were sprinkled throughout the play and Saddler, once again, did all the
orchestrations.
Saddler did not score another show for Lew Fields until 1915, and so without his
usual spring job he found work instead in the aforementioned production of The Red
Rose, which was originally called The Pet of Paris (6-22-11, Globe Theatre). The book
concerned a Parisian girl of noble heritage who is presumed to be the daughter of a

49
“A Real Barnyard in New Fields Show,” The New York Times, February 5, 1911, 8.
50
Fields, From the Bowery to Broadway, 285.

215

Figure 6.7, Blossom Seeley circa 1910.

216
concierge by an art student who falls in love with her but who does not win her hand
without enduring a complex string of obstacles. The New York Times summed up the
current trend among Broadway producers to put together a show by stringing together
several interesting scenes without a strong book when the reviewer noted that The Red
Rose “has a plot,” suggesting this was out of the ordinary.
51
The production’s most
distinguished feature was apparently not the book, music, or the performances, but rather
the costumes, which were created by Valeska Suratt and were considered “remarkable in
color, arrangements, and design.” Perhaps most remarkable though was the fact that
Suratt was also the play’s set designer and leading lady. The third act featured a number
called “Russian Dance Classique” by Lillian Graham, a specialty dance en pointe that
was encored three times. The score by Robert Hood Bower, which received no mention
whatsoever in the Times, was comprised of twenty vocal numbers evenly dispersed over
three acts, with duets and solos bookended by opening choruses and finales in typical
fashion. No credit was given to Saddler for the orchestrations in the program.
52

In the fall of 1911, Saddler was asked to join forces again with lyricist R. H.
Burnside and composer Raymond Hubbell on The Three Romeos (11-13-11, Globe
Theatre), which suffered from an unimaginative plot and a dearth of original music.
53
The
show closed within six weeks, sustained largely by the efforts of several fine actors. A
review in the Washington Times during the pre-Broadway tryout featured one of the only
occasions in which Saddler received notice for his work on a specific show in the press.

51
“‘The Red Rose’ Blooms at Globe,” The New York Times, June 23, 1911, 11.
52
Robert Hood Bowers, The Red Rose, (Box 82) Tams-Witmark Collection, Library of Congress.
53
“Something Lacking in ‘Three Romeos’,” The New York Times, November 14, 1911, 13.

217
A great deal of the success of the play is due to the orchestration of the
piece, which is the work of Frank Saddler. Anton Heindl conducted the
augmented orchestra last evening to the entire satisfaction of the large and
enthusiastic audience.
54

His next assignment was to orchestrate the music for The Man from Cook’s (3-25-12,
New Amsterdam Theatre), his fourth score for Raymond Hubbell. The music was
damned with faint praise in The New York Times, which called it “pleasant”—an
adjective that was not likely to persuade many playgoers to buy tickets, but still a
stronger endorsement than Hubbell got for his work on The Three Romeos, which did not
receive any mention whatsoever. By far the most significant production that Saddler
worked on during the 1911-1912 season was The Passing Show of 1912 (7-22-12, Winter
Garden), the first installment of what would become an annual summer spectacle by
Messrs. Shubert at the Winter Garden Theatre, a venue that opened that same year. The
Shubert brothers—Lee, J. J., and Sam—were arguably the most powerful producers on
Broadway, having recently accomplished the unthinkable: they broke the Syndicate’s
monopoly on theatrical booking that had been in force for fifteen years.
55
Having wrested
control of the system from the Trust by developing their own competitive theatrical
circuit and attracting many of the finest productions to tour using their exclusive
combination, the Shuberts were then looking to establish themselves as formidable
producers of the Broadway revue—a hybrid form of musical that borrowed extensively

54
The Washington Times, October 4, 1911.
55
For more information on the struggle between the Shuberts and the Trust, see Hirsch, The Boys from
Syracuse.

218
from American vaudeville in form, style, and content, while often using a thematic
superstructure to give the show coherence. The annual Passing Shows were born of the
same competitive spirit and keen business sense that compelled Lew Fields to create his
summer spectacles; five years of Florenz Ziegfeld’s demonstrable success with the
summer revue drove the Shuberts to establish a series of seasonal shows that rivaled the
Follies.
The Passing Show of 1912 was a conglomeration of burlesques based on nine
well-known plays or shows interspersed with songs and routines that were typically the
stuff of vaudeville.
56
The libretto was created by Harold Atteridge, who ultimately
became the Shubert’s book writer for all of their Winter Garden musicals over a period of
twelve years, including thirteen Passing Shows and thirty-seven additional musical
comedies and revues, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of
Broadway. The process of putting together a Shubert revue during this period, according
to Atteridge, involved a tremendous amount of overwriting and cutting, such that the
original scenario that went into the tryout period was about five hours in length, with
about thirty-five numbers.
57
Then, after approximately four weeks of rehearsals, the final

56
The burlesques in The Passing Show of 1912 were of “Bought and Paid For,” Bunty Pulls the Strings,”
“A Butterfly on the Wheel,” “Kismet,” “The Typhoon,” “The Quaker Girl,” “The Pirates of Penzance, and
“Oliver Twist.” Playwright and critic Channing Pollock took a somewhat jaundiced view of the summer
musical in a 1912 article called “Why Is the Summer Show?” in which he speaks of the form as “the
triumph of quantity over quality.” Of The Passing Show of 1912, he wrote: “Except for these burlesques,
[it] is pretty largely a collection of vaudeville stunts.” He added that “there are oodles of pretty girls, with
and without frocks; there are expensive principals who have made hits in vaudeville; there are seven
elaborate settings; there is no end of hustle and hurry and noise and confusion, not to mention ‘The
Kangaroo Hop’ and ‘The Philadelphia Drag.’ To me it was as exciting and amusing as the clatter of dishes
in a cheap restaurant. I’d rather have one setting, sixteen girls and a cast of characters in an interesting story
with a clever incident or two.” He concluded that “nobody would enjoy it in the least bit in cool weather.”
“Channing Pollock’s Review,” The Green Book Magazine (October, 1912), 635-36.
57
“Harold Atteridge, A Rapid-Fire Librettist,” The New York Times, June 14, 1914

219
product that was offered on opening night was whittled down to three hours and around
twenty-five numbers.
Given the patchwork form of the revue, the music was one of the most cohesive
elements in the show, since much of it was by a single composer, Louis A. Hirsch. Before
he was contracted to write the music for the Shuberts’ first revue, Hirsch had established
himself as one of the leading composers of ragtime on Broadway, having contributed to
sixteen shows over a five-year period, beginning with The Gay White Way in 1907.
58
The
composer had his first breakout opportunity when he was asked to write the entire score
for He Came From Milwaukee, a 1910 musical comedy vehicle by the Shuberts that was
built around the talents of Sam Bernard, a veteran of Weber and Fields’ company who
was noted for his caricatures of German immigrants. This led to other opportunities to
contribute scores as the principal composer for shows at the Winter Garden, including
Vera Violetta in 1911. The show featured “The Gaby Glide,” which became an
international hit celebrating the French star Gaby Deslys, who played Mme. Adele de St.
Cloche. For the score of The Passing Show of 1912, Hirsch wrote several ragtime
numbers, the syncopated two-step having become one of the most popular song forms of
the day. Like most rag songs in the early 1910s, when social dancing had begun to adopt
the Turkey Trot and its successors, “The Wedding Glide” was both a hit song and a hit as
a dance tune. And so, when the song was interpolated by Hirsch into Hullo, Ragtime! at
the London Hippodrome, he recorded it for His Master’s Voice both as a song (with

58
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 3:931.

220

Figure 6.8, Sheet music cover for “The Gaby Glide.”

221
Shirley Kellogg, who introduced it both in London and on Broadway) and as an
instrumental number for dancing.
59
The waltz song “When Was There Ever a Night Like
This” was published not only as sheet music but as an orchestral arrangement that kept it
before the public in theatres, hotels, and social clubs. The revue had twenty-three vocal
numbers and three instrumentals exclusively for dance routines. Three of the songs were
contributions from other composers, Irving Berlin (“(The) Ragtime Jockey Man”), Al
Piantadosi (“Cohen’s (Yiddisha) Band”), and Harold Orlob (“The Philadelphia Drag”).
Since Saddler did not do all the arrangements himself, sharing the duties with fellow
Pittsburgher Oscar Radin, we do not know how many of the approximately thirty-five
numbers that were originally written for the show (according to Atteridge) that Saddler
orchestrated before it took its final shape on July 22, 1912.
60
The Passing Show of 1912
was the beginning of a long relationship Saddler would have with the Shuberts, for whom
he would orchestrate at least seven more shows during the 1910s, including their next
two summer revues.
The Shuberts were fortunate that The Passing Show of 1912 did not compete
directly with the Ziegfeld Follies of 1912 (10-21-12, Moulin Rouge), since Ziegfeld’s
show The Winsome Widow was held over at the Moulin Rouge throughout the summer,
forcing him to postpone the opening of the Follies until the fall. This circumstance also
enabled Saddler to do the orchestrations for the Follies, which would otherwise have

59
Hirsch’s Ragtime Band, “The Wedding Glide” (side A) and “How do you do, Miss Ragtime?” (side B),
His Master’s Voice B-188.
60
Jonas Westover gives a brief biography of Oscar Radin in his book on the Passing Shows. Jonas
Westover, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Story of Ziegfeld’s Rivals (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2016), 32.

222
created a conflict if he was contracted during the spring to have them ready for a summer
opening. Saddler’s professional status as a freelance arranger made it possible for him to
accept the first best offer at any time according to his availability. His independent status
enabled the Shuberts to hire him after he had done several shows for Lew Fields (for
whom he would not work again for another three years), and then, in turn, allowed
Ziegfeld to be able to hire him immediately after the Shuberts had given him his first
contract, though the producers were all rivals known for their acrimonious
relationships.
61

The winter Follies was noted primarily for its bevy of attractive, beautifully
costumed women and for the comic genius of Bert Williams.
62
Williams began appearing
in Ziegfeld’s annual revues in 1910, giving the producer a box-office draw to compensate
for the loss of Nora Bayes. He began his career as a performer with his partner George
Walker appearing in numerous all-black musicals. Upon the death of Walker, he was
given the opportunity to join the Follies of 1910 by Ziegfeld, who defended him
courageously against the members of the cast who objected to performing with a black
man. His success during the first two seasons caused the producer to give him a three-
year contract with the highest salary in the company, an unprecedented guarantee for an
actor on Broadway, which assured Ziegfeld that Williams would not be lured away by his
competitors once he broke the color barrier.
63
Williams received special notice in The

61
“Orders Shubert from Play, Rival Manager and Mr. and Mrs. Fields Made to Give Up Seats by Ziegfeld,”
The New York Times, June 11, 1909, 9.
62
“‘Follies of 1912’ Is a Beauty Show,” The New York Times, October 22, 1912, 11.
63
Williams was guaranteed $62,400 a year by the contract. Camille Forbes, Introducing Bert Williams:
Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star (New York: Basic Civitas Books,
2008), 223.

223
New York Times for his role in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1912, in which he played “a driver
of a broken-down hansom and the most woe-begone stage horse that ever crossed its legs
against the side of a proscenium arch.”
64
As the show’s top headliner, he was given a spot
for three numbers toward the end of the show. The reviewer took special pleasure in
Williams’ rendition of “Borrow from Me,” in which “he describes the conditions under
which he could be induced to lend money to a friend.” The other song that was singled
out for notice was Lillian Lorraine’s performance of the waltz song “Row, Row, Row,”
in which she depicted an amorous ride on a rowboat that was likely intended to cause the
men in the audience to imagine themselves in the boat beside her. Ziegfeld’s highly
publicized tryst with his star, which caused the breakup of his relationship with Anna
Held, gave the number an element of sensationalism that would not have been lost on his
audience. The show had eighteen musical numbers, all of which were vocal pieces—
songs and choruses—except one: a Pierrot-and-Pierette dance by Leon Errol and Stella
Chatalaine.
65
With the exception of Bert Williams’ specialty numbers (which he wrote
himself), “Row, Row, Row” (by James V. Monaco and William Jerome), and a couple of
other songs, the score was composed by Raymond Hubbell, with whom Saddler had
frequently worked in the previous few seasons.
The opening of the next show for which Saddler did the orchestrations came less
than one month after the opening of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1912 in mid-October. This
may not have been the first time that he accepted two jobs with pre-production schedules

64
“‘Follies of 1912’ Is a Beauty Show,” The New York Times.
65
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2:12-13.

224
that overlapped (given the inconsistency of acknowledgement for his work in the public
record), but it does show an overall acceleration in the pace of jobs that was receiving
and accepting during this period. Having finished his work on The Passing Show of 1912
well in advance of its mid-July opening, he was available to begin work during the
summer on a musical comedy with a complete score by the rising young composer
Jerome Kern. The show was a redraft of a flop from the previous season with a script by
Rida Johnson Young that had several working titles—All After Sophie, The Girl and the
Miner, Look Who’s Here—that were tried before the production team settled upon The
Red Petticoat (11-13-12, Daly’s Theatre).
66
Since Kern’s unpublished manuscripts for the
musical survive with dates that indicate that he completed the score in mid-May, we
know that Saddler had plenty of time to complete both scores during June, July, and
August, enough to be ready for the usual four-week rehearsal schedule that would have
begun for both productions during the first two weeks of September, given that out-of-
town tryouts began in Philadelphia on October 7 (for Ziegfeld) and October 24 (for the
Shuberts), respectively.
67

Saddler’s collaboration with Jerome Kern, which came through their mutual ties
with the Shuberts, would be the most fruitful of his entire career. Over the next eight
years, Kern and Saddler would collaborate on at least fifteen complete scores (and many
other shows for which Kern interpolated songs) of musical comedies that formed the
foundation of Broadway show music for the next half century. Not only was his artistic

66
Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 74-79.
67
Saddler’s manuscript score for The Red Petticoat is housed at the Shubert Archives in New York City.

225
relationship with Kern unique up to that time in the history of Broadway, Kern’s
exclusive reliance on Saddler for the orchestration of his music helped establish the
arranger as a critical member of the composer’s creative team. As Kern rose in stature to
become the dean of musical-comedy composers by 1918, Saddler concurrently became
the most innovative and influential arranger on Broadway. The fortuitous circumstances
that brought Kern and Saddler together on the composer’s first complete score marked an
important turning point in the careers of both men. For Kern, it was the beginning of his
rise to prominence, when he was free to create complete scores rather than interpolate
songs into scores by other composers; and, for Saddler, although he was already at the
top of his field by 1912, meeting Kern was the beginning of his association with the
greatest songwriters of his time—not only Kern, but also Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch,
and George Gershwin—who together precipitated the shift away from theatrical spectacle
and toward appealing words and music as the driving force behind the success of a
Broadway show.
While The Red Petticoat did not repeat the failure of its predecessor from the
previous year, it was far from a hit. However, the lukewarm reception that the show
received in New York, which caused the Shuberts to pull it after sixty-six performances,
did not prevent it from touring into the spring, albeit on a limited circuit. While the plot,
which was set in the American West, was a refreshing change from the typical comic
opera scenario based on shopworn themes of romance prevented by class division, it also
invited some comparisons with Puccini’s setting of David Belasco’s The Girl of the

226
Golden West.
68
The show did not succeed, however, because of the lack of stars in the
cast, the inability of the drama to carry the production, and because the music was not
nearly as memorable as Kern’s scores would be in the coming years.
Saddler remained with the Shuberts through the spring and summer of 1913,
scoring Al Jolson’s fourth major Winter Garden production—The Honeymoon Express
(2-6-13, Winter Garden)—and the second edition of The Passing Show. Al Jolson had
been playing characters in blackface on Broadway ever since his breakout role in La
Belle Paree in 1911. The Shuberts had signed him after several years of touring across
the country as a vaudeville performer and later as a headliner in Lew Dockstader’s
Minstrels during its final years in existence. Jolson’s success as a stage performer was
unparalleled during his fifteen seasons with the Shubert organization. He played his
trademark role, Gus the servant, for the second time in The Honeymoon Express, while
Fanny Brice was cast as a domestic and Gaby Deslys was given ample opportunity to
display several colorful outfits as the aristocratic wife of a Parisian aristocrat named
Henri Dubonet. The most memorable scene in the show was a chase involving a car
driven by Gus with several passengers, including Yvonne Dubonet, and a passenger train.
With the aid of spectacular cinematic visual effects reminiscent of Lew Fields’ The
Midnight Sons, the scene gave the audience the sense of being in the high-speed race
themselves instead of simply being told about it by one of the actors. The New York
Times reviewer described the novel theatrical impression in detail: “What moved the
Winter Garden audience most was a [representation] of a race between a train of cars and

68
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 75.

227
an automobile, so devised that from the first faint glimmer of distant lights way up on the
mountain side, through the devious turns of the road and down to the valleys, on to the
level stretch, into tunnels and out of them, and, finally, right down to the footlights with a
rush and a roar, it could all be seen and heard.”
69

It is impossible to imagine this exciting scene being presented without incidental
music to accompany and enhance the visceral experience of the twists and turns of the
chase; and yet, there is no way to know anything about what the orchestra was doing
during this scene since all the musical materials were apparently destroyed. What we do
know about the music can be ascertained from the program, which lists twenty-two
numbers, not including the “selections” by Gus in the third-to-last position, requiring the
orchestra to have sometimes more than an hour’s worth of song arrangements at the ready
for Jolson to call for at will during his infamous tour-de-force departures from the
script.
70
With the exception of a couple of songs—“The Moving Man” (by Al W. Brown)
and “Up on the Hudson Shore” (by Al Jolson)—and “The Oriental Bacchanale”
(arranged using music by Alexander Borodin), all the music was by Jean Schwartz, with
whom Saddler had worked on Piff! Paff!! Pouffe!!! nearly ten years earlier. Schwartz was
also responsible for the score to The Passing Show of 1913 (7-24-13, Winter Garden), for
which Saddler did the orchestrations in the spring.
It is hard to know how much work Saddler did during the 1913-1914 season,
since he began working with Jerome Kern more frequently at this time and many of the

69
“Lightning Speed to Honeymoon Express,” The New York Times, February 7, 1913, 11.
70
For more information on Jolson’s extemporaneous post-theatrical entertainments at the Winter Garden,
see Herbert Goldman, Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

228
programs of shows featuring the composer’s work did not offer credit to his orchestrator.
In fact, Kern was having trouble receiving credit for himself in imported shows into
which he interpolated songs. Charles Frohman, who had worked successfully for over a
decade to bring foreign shows from London, Vienna, and elsewhere to Broadway,
dressing them up with modified books and scores for American audiences, employed
Kern frequently during these years. However, taking these opportunities as an American
composer on Broadway also meant that Kern had to endure the indignity and professional
hardship of foregoing credit for himself in cases where Frohman and other producers
wanted to preserve the illusion that the show was composed entirely by a European. As
the foremost producer of theatrical imports on Broadway, Frohman was acutely aware of
the prestige afforded to European works in the United States, particularly in the field of
light opera. And so, when he purchased the American rights to The Doll Girl (8-25-13,
Globe Theatre) by Leo Fall and contracted Kern to compose several songs for the New
York production, Frohman did not assign him credit in the program.
71
Fortunately, Kern
had developed allies in the New York press at that time, notably Alan Dale, who was a
theatre reviewer for the American and who exposed the scheme.
…the music of “The Doll Girl” was better than its book. It is said to be the
work of Leo Fall, but without first aid to the wounded, Leo would
probably have taken—his last name. It was probably Mr. Jerome Kern
(who was not made in Germany) who was responsible for the pretty things
in “The Doll Girl”—such as “Come on Over Here,” “On Our
Honeymoon” and “When Three Is Company.”
72

71
After Frohman purchased the rights for a French farce Riquette et sa Mère, a German team requested that
he make an arrangement for them to create a play with music by Leo Fall. The German show that resulted
from this arrangement, Das Puppenmädel, was then handed over to Harry B. Smith and Jerome Kern to
create an American musical, The Doll Girl. Bordman, Jerome Kern, 81-82.
72
Ibid.

229

What Dale did not mention, because he had more pressing concerns in bringing Kern’s
name to light, was that the orchestrator of the Kern songs (also uncredited) was Frank
Saddler. As soon as Kern began to work with Saddler the two men maintained an
exclusive artistic collaboration until Saddler’s death.
The evidence that Saddler was not credited with several of his early projects for
Kern lies in his surviving manuscripts. The program for Oh, I Say! (10-30-13, Casino
Theatre), which Kern wrote for the Shuberts, did not list the music director or
orchestrator, and yet some of Saddler’s scores are extant for this musical, which was
Kern’s second complete score for the Shuberts.
73
We also know from surviving
manuscripts that Kern’s interpolations for The Laughing Husband (2-2-14,
Knickerbocker Theatre) were orchestrated by Saddler along with a new overture,
although neither composer nor arranger received credit in the program.
74
In addition, the
program for Kern’s Ninety in the Shade (1-25-15, Knickerbocker Theatre) does not list an
orchestrator, though Saddler’s schedule of known jobs has an uncommonly large gap
between the opening of Dancing Around in October 1914 and Nobody Home in April of
1915, giving him plenty of time in the fall to be working on the scores for a winter show.
Neither Kern nor Saddler received credit for the composition or orchestration of
“Honeymoon Lane,” in the program for The Sunshine Girl in 1913, and yet Kern’s name
is on the published sheet-music arrangement of the song while Saddler’s name is on an

73
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 89.
74
Jerome Kern, The Laughing Husband, manuscript full score by Frank Saddler, Tams-Witmark Wisconsin
Collection, Mills Music Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

230
orchestral arrangement published by T. B. Harms.
75
All this serves to reinforce the fact
that once Saddler and Kern began working together in 1912, their exclusive collaboration
began in earnest and remained consistent for eight years whether or not they were
acknowledged in official playbills.
In the spring of 1914, Saddler assumed a familiar routine as he was asked to
prepare the orchestrations for The Passing Show of 1914. The third summer revue by the
Shuberts was, by all accounts, their most extravagant production yet. The New York
Times singled out the revue’s leviathan proportions as its leading feature:
“The Passing Show of 1914,” which opening at the Winter Garden last
night, simply out-summers and out-shows anything in its line seen in a
New York theatre, and sets considerable of a mark for winter
entertainments as well.
Local theatregoers are accustomed to seeing things done on a big scale,
but even the massive productions at the Hippodrome must take a back seat
when compared to the entertainment which began at 8 o’clock last night
and ran along merrily until after midnight. Of course, some of it will have
to be cut out. Four hours of almost continual laughter is too much for the
tired business man, but just what to cut is something which will prove
puzzling to the Shuberts. Perhaps they will chop off an hour and a half and
use that part in another theatre.
76

Four hours of non-stop entertainment without an overarching storyline is a significant
achievement, even on Broadway, which had been the scene of so many extravaganzas,
spectacles, and revues that audiences had come to expect an emphasis of style over
substance in musicals. And, while the colossal program of The Passing Show of 1914 was
subjected to the same cutting process in mounting the show, Harold Atteridge allowed

75
See page 185 of this dissertation.
76
“Fun and Glitter in “Passing Show,” The New York Times, June 11, 1914, 11.

231

Figure 6.9, The Shubert brothers: J. J., Sam, and Lee (left to right).

more material to survive the tryout period than in years past, trusting as much in the high
quality of the show as in his audience’s endurance. The opening-night program lists
twenty-four distinct musical numbers (including Marilyn Miller’s imitations), which is in
keeping with the scope of previous editions. None of the four orchestrators who worked
on the show—Saddler, Sol Levy, Hildig Anderson, and a fourth unknown arranger—
were given credit in the program. In his thorough study of The Passing Show of 1914,
Jonas Westover has identified the arrangers for each individual number and shown that,
of the twenty-one extant scores for individual numbers, Saddler was responsible for the
bulk of the work (eighteen numbers), while Levy contributed two scores, and Anderson

232
and the anonymous arranger each contributed one.
77
This unbalanced distribution of work
demonstrates Saddler’s stature as an orchestrator at that time, in particular with the
Shuberts. His ability to produce superb arrangements of vocal accompaniments, dance
arrangements, and instrumental numbers in a variety of musical styles for a large-scale
theatrical works was developed during his tenure with Lew Fields; and now the Shuberts
relied upon him to supply a rich, elegant orchestral sound to their shows as they strove to
outdo their competitors in every facet of production.
Saddler’s schedule in 1914 became increasingly busy. While The Passing Show of
1914 occupied his time throughout most of the spring, he had little time to rest in the
summer, having been hired to provide the orchestrations for three shows that opened
within two months of each other in the fall—The Dancing Duchess (8-19-14, Casino
Theatre), The Girl from Utah (8-24-14, Knickerbocker Theatre), and Dancing Around
(10-10-14, Winter Garden). Saddler shared the arranging work with Otto C. A. Meorz on
The Dancing Duchess, which was burdened with a dull book and unenthusiastic reviews
and closed after two weeks.
78
The Girl from Utah originated with the musical comedy
impresario George Edwardes in London and was subsequently imported by Charles
Frohman, who finally was compelled to give Jerome Kern his due in the program,
although no such courtesy was extended to Saddler for his efforts. The songs were so

77
Jonas Westover, “A Study and Reconstruction of The Passing Show of 1914: The American Musical
Revue and Its Development in the Early Twentieth Century,” PhD diss. (The City University of New York,
2010), 165.
78
“New Musical Play Is Familiar Stuff,” The New York Times, August 21, 1914, 9. Norton, A Chronology
of American Musical Theater, 2:55.

233
innovative and attractive that this score marked a turning point in Kern’s career: from this
time forward, he established himself as a composer of original musicals and would no
longer be asked to interpolate his music into an imported show. Indeed, Kern’s transition
from an interpolator of songs to a theatre composer of complete scores would also mark a
turning point for the American musical comedy as producers began to rely less and less
on imported scores and scripts. This trend was accelerated by the advent of World War I,
which suppressed the American appetite for middle-European operetta.
Saddler was once again called upon to orchestrate for the Shuberts during the
summer of 1914 in advance of their fall revue, Dancing Around. The frequency with
which Saddler worked for the Shuberts could make it appear as though he was employed
by the organization in the same exclusive way that Harold Atteridge was, but this was not
the case. As his work schedule demonstrates, Saddler always maintained his status as a
freelance arranger. His ability to produce finely crafted and colorful scores with
increasing efficiency allowed him to accept jobs for several producers at the same time,
even after he became the exclusive orchestrator for Jerome Kern. In five seasons, he had
scored the music for several of the most lavish shows ever mounted in New York and
was trusted with the orchestral arrangements for some of Broadway’s biggest stars.
Ironically, though, his résumé to date—as orchestrator for Lew Fields, Florenz Ziegfeld,
and the Shuberts primarily—could not have prepared him for what, in hindsight, is
widely considered to be the most important work of his entire career. Even the shows that
he scored with music by Kern up to this point were not anything like what he would do
next in the theatre. The musical comedies with which Kern was associated in the early

234
1910s were generally housed at large or moderately sized theatres, such as the Casino,
(1,458 seats), the Globe (1,416 seats), and the Knickerbocker (1,500 seats).
79
However,
Kern’s next show would not be another musical comedy in the George Edwardes Gaiety
Theatre mold, but rather part of an innovative project to create a series of original
“intimate” musicals at the 299-seat Princess Theatre. The idea, conceived of by theatrical
agent Elisabeth Marbury in her first bid to become a Broadway producer, was given a
distinctly American tone through her choice of Kern to compose the scores of the first
four musicals to be presented at the theatre. And, presumably on Kern’s recommendation,
Saddler would be hired to orchestrate them all.
The series that later became widely known as the “Princess Theatre shows” would
offer Kern and his creative team substantial challenges to create musicals that integrated
songs into sophisticated contemporary plays that featured only a handful of musical
comedy stars (and sometimes none at all). Likewise, the challenge for Saddler to create
elegant orchestral settings using significantly reduced forces was unlike anything he had
previously encountered. The standard Broadway orchestra at the time had twenty-three to
twenty-five players, whereas the orchestra pit at the Princess Theatre would allow for
fewer players and any larger ensemble would have been overpowering in the confines of
the Princess. In reducing the forces of the pit band, Saddler had to make other
accommodations in the instrumentation and scoring in order to support the singers and

79
Morrison, Broadway Theatres, 5, 63. None of the secondary sources on the history of Broadway Theatres
give a seating capacity figure for the Knickerbocker. Fortunately, a New York Times article on the opening
of Abbey’s Theatre (which was renamed the Knickerbocker in 1896) gives the figure 1,500 as the precise
seating capacity for the new venue. “Complete in Every Detail: No Expense Has Been Spared in the
Construction of Abbey’s Theatre,” The New York Times, November 8, 1893, 10.

235

Figure 6.10, Elisabeth Marbury.

236
provide the show with traditional instrumental dance numbers, overtures, and entr’actes.
The orchestral forces in the large theatres during the 1910s were much the same in size
and instrumentation as the orchestras from the late nineteenth century. The earliest
example of an extant Saddler score from a musical comedy are excerpts from The Red
Rose, which opened in June of 1911 at the Globe Theatre. The pit orchestra for this
production had either twenty-five or twenty-three instruments: flute, oboe, two clarinets,
bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, two percussionists, and eleven or thirteen
strings (six or eight violins, two violas, two cellos, and bass).
80
The orchestra for The
Passing Show of 1914 similarly had almost the same instrumentation, with the sole
exception of an added harp.
81
By contrast, the orchestra for Very Good Eddie, the second
Kern show at the Princess, had fifteen to nineteen players (depending upon the string
forces employed): flute, two bassoons, two trumpets, percussion, two pianos, and
anywhere from seven strings (three violins, two violas, cello, and bass) to as many as
eleven (four violins, four violas, two cello, and bass). Saddler’s stripped-down ensemble
for the Princess, while born of necessity, was also highly innovative in its potential to
allow for maximum orchestral efficiency.
The first musical to be presented at the Princess was Nobody Home, which opened
on April 15, 1915. Reviews were generally tepid and gave no indication of the
importance of the event as it is generally seen in hindsight. The New York Dramatic
Mirror suggested that the score was show’s strength by saying it was “a good musical

80
Robert Hood Bowers, The Red Rose, orchestral manuscript by Frank Saddler (Box 82) Tams-Witmark
Collection, Library of Congress.
81
Westover, “A Study and Reconstruction of The Passing Show of 1914,” 164.

237
entertainment with nothing of special sensational interest.”
82
Because the producers did
not buy advertising space for the Princess Theatre in The New York Times (and pointed
this out in their programs), the paper did not send a critic. All this did not prevent the
show from staying open until June, moving to the 934-seat Maxine Elliott Theatre where
it continued through the summer, and then touring the East Coast, Midwest, and parts of
Canada throughout the following season.
83

Once the orchestration of Nobody Home was complete, Saddler set to work on
three or possibly four new jobs that would come to Broadway, one per month, in June,
July, August, and September. Given the haphazard way in which orchestrators were
acknowledged on Broadway at the time, we may instead speculate on some of the shows
that Saddler likely worked on during this period. Though The Passing Show of 1915 did
not credit Saddler with the orchestrations, neither did the program for The Passing Show
of 1914, which was one of his biggest jobs.
84
Since the show was such a large
undertaking and no one else was credited, there is a distinct possibility that he was at
least part of a team of orchestrators working on the show, particularly since he would
have been available to do the work, with the script of the revue coming together in April.
He did get credit for arranging the music for another Shubert summer musical, Hands Up,
which opened on July 22 at the 44th Street Theatre. In a remarkable flurry of activity,
Saddler orchestrated two other shows during the summer that were about as different as
possible from each other. Cousin Lucy (8-27-15, George M. Cohan Theatre) was a play

82
Quoted in Bordman, Jerome Kern, 111.
83
Morrison, Broadway Theatres, 58.
84
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2: 72.

238
with four songs, all by Jerome Kern, while Ned Wayburn’s Town Topics (9-23-15,
Century Theatre) was a gigantic musical revue with no fewer than thirty-eight distinct
musical numbers, both dances and songs. The great variety of productions that Saddler
was working on, often one after another or even simultaneously, was helping him
develop tremendous versatility as an orchestrator, whose job it was, after all, both to
create the musical settings for a specific production in a specific theatre for a specific
audience and also to realize in orchestral sound the musical ideas of an individual
composer to be performed by an individual singer. By this time, Saddler had long since
mastered the art of arranging the orchestral “special,” customized scores created for
theatrical productions.
If the first musical at the Princess was considered only mildly successful, the
second show was a bona fide hit. Very Good Eddie (12-23-15, Princess Theatre)
struggled out of town until the producers replaced the lead, restaged the dances, and
revamped the book, which ultimately helped to consolidate the show’s strengths—a blend
of smart dialogue, original songs, and strong performances—into a very successful
musical play.
85
After five months at the Princess, the show was selling well enough at the
Princess that the producers sent it to the 1,458-seat Casino with the hope that reduced
ticket prices would help to fill a theatre that was nearly five times as large. A new
orchestral arrangement was prepared for the Casino by C. M. Selling, Saddler being
otherwise occupied with the score for Lew Fields’ Step This Way, which opened the very

85
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 117.

239
same day.
86

The production difficulties with Very Good Eddie required an unusually long
period of time on the road (six weeks) in advance of the New York opening in order to
successfully address the show’s the problems. As a result, it ended up opening only two
days before another show that Saddler had orchestrated that fall, Stop! Look! Listen!,
which was first seen by a Broadway audience on Christmas Day. This date was special
because the show’s producer, Charles B. Dillingham, wished to mark the opening date of
the most important show of his career. For Mlle. Modiste with Fritzi Scheff, had opened
on Christmas Day ten years earlier and still lingered in the public memory and
Dillingham was, by 1915, one of the most successful producers on Broadway.
87
He began
his career in the theatre first as an agent for Charles Frohman, and later as a talent agent,
representing many great stars of the American stage, including Julia Marlowe, Fritzi
Scheff, Maxine Elliott, Frank Daniels, Elsie Janis, Montgomery and Stone, and Bessie
McCoy.
88
He owned and managed the Globe Theatre and presented many of his own
stars there in musical shows that were largely vehicles for their artistry. The star of
Dillingham’s Stop! Look! Listen! was not a performer, according to The New York Times,
but rather the composer, Irving Berlin, who crafted a score with a preponderance of

86
Fortunately, Selling’s score for Very Good Eddie was saved along with Saddler’s and both reside in the
Jerome Kern Collection at the Library of Congress.
87
Another reason that we know that Dillingham was making a big effort to recapture some of the magic of
the Victor Herbert operetta in selecting this date for the opening of Stop! Look! Listen! was because
Christmas in 1915 fell on a Saturday. This was a day of the week that was generally avoided for openings
because the performers would play one night and then take a day off, Sundays generally being dark days on
Broadway at the beginning of the twentieth century.
88
Dixie Hines and Harry Prescott Hanaford, eds., Who’s Who in Music and Drama: An Encyclopaedia of
Biography of Notable Men and Women in Music and the Drama, 1914 (New York: H. P. Hanaford, 1914),
96.

240
tuneful ragtime songs, which was his specialty.
89
Dillingham had produced Berlin’s first
full-length show (Watch Your Step) the previous year, and it was duly noted that the stars
of their first collaboration, Vernon and Irene Castle, were absent from the next one,
apparently to the show’s detriment. Nonetheless, with a stable of popular vaudevillians
and a fine Berlin score, the production received high marks and occupied the Casino
Theatre for three months. Although Saddler was credited with orchestration duties on
Step This Way, it is unclear whether he worked on Watch Your Step. It is possible that his
summer schedule would have allowed for it, despite having the Dancing Duchess, The
Girl from Utah, and Dancing Around on his agenda, particularly since the Kern show
only required that he score six interpolated numbers.
During the spring, Saddler orchestrated two shows for familiar bosses: Robinson
Crusoe, Jr. (2-17-16, Winter Garden) for the Shuberts and Step This Way (5-29-16, Sam
S. Shubert Theatre) for Lew Fields. We are forced to surmise how Saddler occupied
himself through the summer of 1916, since he was not officially acknowledged for his
work on any musicals through the end of the year. However, there is no reason to doubt
that he was employed throughout the summer months. He might have worked on all or
part of the score for The Passing Show of 1916, which was conducted by Oscar Radin,
with whom Saddler shared the orchestration responsibilities with on Robinson Crusoe, Jr.
earlier in the year. He also likely did the orchestrations for Jerome Kern’s contributions
to two musicals—the Ziegfeld Follies of 1916 and Miss Springtime, each of which only

89
“Words and Music by Irving Berlin,” The New York Times, December 26, 1915.

241
contained four of his songs.
90
Another likely possibility is that Saddler did the
orchestration for The Big Show, the 1916 edition of the Hippodrome extravaganzas,
which featured, among other things, the astonishing juxtaposition of Anna Pavlova in an
abbreviated version of Sleeping Beauty with sets by Leon Bakst billed alongside Powers’
elephants playing baseball in pantomime. Another highlight of the entertainment was
Haru Onuki, the Elm City Four, and the Hippodrome Chorus singing the haunting “Poor
Butterfly,” with musical and visual references to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Two clues
suggest that Saddler at least shared the job of scoring the arrangements for The Big Show:
first, he scored an instrumental version of “Poor Butterfly” that was published by T. B.
Harms and Francis, Day & Hunter at a time when all his stock arrangements were of
music that he had already orchestrated for the theatre; and, second, he scored several later
editions of the Hippodrome shows and was so closely identified with them that they were
the only shows that were specifically noted in his obituary in The New York Times.
91

None of these shows give credit to any orchestrator whatsoever, but Saddler was well
situated to have done the work.
Some of Saddler’s time during the summer of 1916 was spent tending to the
business of purchasing property in rural upstate New York. In reference to his acquisition
of land sixty miles north of Manhattan, a notice in The New York Times in September
states that “The Batson Farm Agency has sold…a farm near Brewster, Dutchess County,
to Frank Saddler.”
92
Saddler had realized a dream in buying for himself a bucolic retreat

90
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 128-32.
91
Saddler’s brief (seven-line) obituary in the Times stated that “[f]or many years he had orchestrated the
music for the Hippodrome shows and many musical comedies.” The New York Times, March 29, 1921, 15.
92
“Latest Dealings in the Realty Field,” The New York Times, September 17, 1916, XXI

242

Figure 6.11, Frank Saddler at his home in
Brewster, Putnam County, New York.

in a place that was reminiscent of his childhood days in western Pennsylvania. His desire
to immerse himself in nature and small-town living far from the grit of Manhattan and the
hurly-burly of Broadway suggests that he was growing weary of city life and envisioned
for himself after twenty years of working in the theatre. A photograph of Saddler in

243
repose on his property, sporting work boots and dungarees and smoking a long pipe,
projects an air of peaceful contentment.
93
The Brewster farm house was also a place for
work, a refuge from the distractions of the city where he could fulfill his contracts
uninterrupted by personal and professional obligations and diversions.
The acquisition of property outside of New York City was a hard-earned
achievement for a theatrical arranger in a business that did not value the contributions of
orchestrators enough to regularly grant them credit in the small print of theatre playbills.
It was also a significant measure of success for Saddler, who rose to the very top of his
field, and yet still was forced to work relentlessly due to the inequitable compensation for
arrangers in the theatrical business that were standard practice during his lifetime.
Although his rate was top dollar in those days, it was still a flat rate granting him no stake
in the success of the commercial product that was making composers, lyricists, and
producers around him wealthy.
94
Though producers sometimes relied heavily on him to
create alluring orchestral tapestries out of mediocre or half-baked melodic and harmonic
material, he was never offered royalties, even when a show was salvaged by his brilliant
and efficient craftsmanship, as they often were.
95
For this reason, he was among the
earliest members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers
(ASCAP), although this distinction helped him little during the last years of his life, when
he was busy scoring theatrical specials that were never published and therefore not

93
“Broadway’s King of Counterpoint,” The Outlook, April 20, 1921, 630.
94
In his recollection of Saddler’s economic status during his prime, Isador Witmark wrote that “[b]efore he
died he was doing [orchestration] for the prominent writers of musical comedies and operettas, scoring at
five dollars a page and working day and night at that.” Witmark, From Ragtime to Swingtime, 166.
95
Perriton Maxwell, “The Man Behind the Gun,” The Theatre (September, 1916), 178.

244
subject to royalty payments.
96

Without any large productions to tend to in the late fall of 1916, Saddler probably
spent several weeks at a time in his new rural dwelling preparing for the busiest winter of
his career. With several new Kern shows in development, Saddler needed to work
steadily through October, November, and December to provide scores to his music
copyists preparing the orchestral parts for the out-of-town tryouts of Love o’ Mike (which
opened at Philadelphia’s Lyric Theatre as Girls Will Be Girls on November 20), Have a
Heart (which opened at Nixon’s Apollo in Atlantic City on December 28), and Oh, Boy!
(which opened at the Van Curler Opera House in Schenectady on January 15). Thus
began the flurry of theatrical activity referred to by Gerald Bordman as Jerome Kern’s
“Annus Mirabilis.”
97
And yet, one may suspect that it was not so much the quantity of
Kern’s output during this period that led Bordman to give 1917 this high distinction, but
rather the quality. For the seven shows that the composer contributed to during this year
were not merely successful, but at least four of them, when taken together, may be seen
in retrospect as establishing a firm foundation upon which the Broadway musical theatre
of the mid-twentieth century would be built. The common reference to this string of
influential shows as the “Princess Theatre shows” is a convenient, though not accurate,
appellation. Although it is true that the new spirit of sophisticated American musical
comedy built on books with contemporary plots, witty lyrics, and elegant songs in the
American grain was born at the Princess, most of the new musicals were written for and

96
Frank Saddler’s name appears on a long list of members in a published ad in the trade journal The New
York Clipper. “List of Members whose works are controlled by the American Society of Composers,
Authors, and Publishers,” The New York Clipper, March 7, 1917.
97
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 125.

245
seen at other Broadway venues. Have a Heart opened at the Liberty Theatre, Love o’
Mike opened at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre and moved to the Casino for the summer after
five months, and Leave it to Jane opened at the Longacre Theatre, where it ran for four-
and-a-half months. Of the seminal Kern musicals of 1917 that formed the nucleus of his
World War I-era successes, only Oh, Boy! opened at the Princess Theatre, and even then,
due to the limited availability of tickets, many New Yorkers would not see the show until
it moved over to the Casino in November, eight months later. The same pattern would
continue with Oh, Lady! Lady!!, which opened in January of 1918 at the Princess, and as
a result of the overwhelming demand for tickets, moved over to the Casino for the
summer, where ticket prices could be reduced and eager middle-class theatregoers could
afford to attend the show in greater numbers.
Several veterans of the Ziegfeld Follies, most notably actor Leon Errol and stage
director Julian Mitchell, brought their talents to a new revue centered around the comic
personality of Raymond Hitchcock in the self-referential show Hitchy-Koo (6-7-17,
Cohan and Harris Theatre). Positioned to compete directly with Ziegfeld’s ongoing
summer production, the revue was noted for its intimacy, which was ensured by
Hitchcock’s periodic addresses to the audience in his well-known avuncular stage
manner.
98
Delivering fourteen scenes in two acts, Hitchy-Koo was full of music,
interspersing eleven numbers amongst the burlesque sketches by Glen Macdonough and
E. Ray Goetz.
99
The reviewer from the Times took care to notice the performance of the

98
“‘Hitchy-Koo’ Wins by Its Originality,” The New York Times, June 8, 1917, 9.
99
The number of songs given does not include the two hits sung by Frances White—
“M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I” and “I’d Like to Be a Monkey in the Zoo” that were introduced later in the run.
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2:119.

246
orchestral settings, however not those of Saddler, but rather the interpolations of music
by Franz Lehár, Edvard Grieg, and Edward German. With no published credit for any
orchestrator on the production of the 1917 Hippodrome show, Cheer Up, we may never
know if Saddler actually worked on this show. With the score of Kern’s Leave It to Jane
(8-28-17, Longacre Theatre) on his schedule during the summer, Saddler would have
needed to be finished with them in late spring.
Saddler worked on three projects in the fall of 1917 that opened on Broadway
within five weeks of each other during the winter months. Two were shows with holiday
openings—Going Up (12-25-17, Liberty Theatre) and The Cohan Revue of 1918 (12-31-
17, New Amsterdam Theatre)—that needed scores submitted for preparation in early
November. Going Up was Saddler’s first orchestration job for a score by Louis A. Hirsch
in five years, The Passing Show of 1912 having been their first collaboration. While
Hirsch’s music had earned him critical praise from the beginning, he continued to
distinguish himself throughout the 1910s as one of the elite theatre composers in
America, along with Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern. In fact, when
producers F. Ray Comstock and William Elliott needed to find a composer to replace
Kern for their next musical at the Princess Theatre during the following season, they
hired Hirsch, despite the fact that The Grass Widow, which was moved from the Liberty
to the Princess in December of 1917, stayed open only a week. This was likely due to the
composer’s successful track record, which had continued with Going Up, a tremendous
hit that ran for ten months at the Liberty Theatre, continued in Boston for two months,
and then went on to Chicago for nearly another five months before going on tour for the

247
entire 1919-1920 season. The Cohan Revue of 1918 gave Saddler his first opportunity to
orchestrate the songs of George M. Cohan. Although Cohan composed much of the score
for the revue, he shared the responsibilities with Irving Berlin, who, according to the
reviewer for The New York Times, made a superior contribution.
100
The third winter show
on Saddler’s schedule was Oh, Lady! Lady!! (2-1-18, Princess Theatre), Jerome Kern’s
final show at the Princess. The review in The New York Times was practically jubilant,
bestowing the highest praise in its title and three subtitles: “‘Oh, Lady! Lady!!’ Is After
‘Oh, Boy!’: Another Musical Comedy of the Princess Theatre Type Scores Heavily:
Bolton, Wodehouse, Kern: A Good Story, Clever Lines, Tasteful Music, and Girls Long
on Grace and Refinement.”
101
The creative team of Guy Bolton (book and lyrics), P. G.
Wodehouse (book and lyrics), and Jerome Kern (music) had achieved a degree of fame in
the public imagination by that time with their collaboration on previous shows at the
Princess and elsewhere that gave the iteration of their names a kind of luster that one
critic likened to the famous trio of Chicago Cubs that inspired the woeful refrain in New
York baseball lore: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
102
The names of Bolton, Wodehouse,
and Kern sounded together had achieved considerable éclat even by 1918, and their
position as the progenitors of the modern American musical comedy was assured by the

100
“‘Cohan Revue, 1918,’ Joyful Hodge-Podge,” The New York Times, January 1, 1918, 15.
101
“‘Oh, Lady! Lady!!’ Is After ‘Oh, Boy!’” The New York Times, February 2, 1918.
102
This reference to the Chicago Cubs’ notorious double-play-inducing infield trio was initiated by a New
York theatre critic, whose review of Kern’s Oh, Lady! Lady!! included a poem fashioned after “Baseball’s
Sad Lexicon,” the first two lines of which read: “These are the saddest of possible words:/‘Tinker to Evers
to Chance.’/Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,/Tinker to Evers to Chance.” The updated musical
theatre version started this way: “This is the trio of musical fame,/Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern:/Better
than anyone else you can name,/Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.” Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse,
Bring on the Girls (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 101.

248

Figure 6.12, (left to right) Morris Gest, P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, F. Ray Comstock,
and Jerome Kern.

end of the century.
103
For creators of musical comedy, such prestige was unprecedented;
and the fact that it has not diminished over time is a sure sign of the profound influence
that their work would have on the next generation of composers, lyricists, and book
writers working on Broadway.
Saddler would continue to orchestrate all of Jerome Kern’s theatre music for the
next three years, and yet he was only acknowledged intermittently for his contribution.
This is particularly surprising given the growing clout that Kern had with Broadway

103
Although P. G. Wodehouse would not join the team until their next show, in discussing Very Good
Eddie, Gerald Bordman gives an idea of the vaunted status accorded to the Princess Theatre shows as the
seminal modern musical comedies: “More than any other piece it formed the mold out of which poured a
half-century of American Musical Comedy.” Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 312.

249
producers and the high esteem in which he held his colleague, who was twenty years his
elder. The fact that Kern did not advocate more actively on Saddler’s behalf for him to
receive credit in theatre programs is not hard to explain, however, since the composer
understood the conventions of Broadway as a commercial industry that valued the
contribution of orchestrators during the preparation of their shows, but found that
acknowledging it for the public to serve little or no useful purpose in the promotion of
their business enterprise. And yet, Kern knew well the extent to which Saddler was
responsible for the quality of the sound of his music in the theatre. Upon Saddler’s death,
he eulogized him in an interview with Newton Fuessle:
No one has had the routine of the orchestra as greatly at his command as
Saddler. Where others could rely upon the entire symphony orchestra for
their effects, Saddler was usually restricted to the much smaller theater
orchestra of twenty-eight instruments at most. But his amazing
resourcefulness enabled him to get the tone and color effects he wanted.
Working alone, and unaided by propaganda, he improved the standards of
theatre musicians by five hundred per cent.
104

Although it is unclear precisely what Kern meant by Saddler being “unaided by
propaganda,” one may suppose that he was referring to the arranger’s woeful lack of
recognition in his field. If this is what he meant, it is significant that Kern would have
made this claim, since Saddler received credit more often than any orchestrator of his
generation. Of the nine shows that Saddler scored for Kern from 1918 to 1921, he was
not given credit as the orchestrator for at least six of them: Toot-Toot, Rock-a-Bye, Baby,

104
Quoted in Fuessle, “Broadway’s King of Counterpoint.”

250

Head Over Heels, She’s a Good Fellow, The Night Boat, and Sally.
105

While Kern’s Toot-Toot (3-11-18, George M. Cohan’s Theatre), Rock-a-Bye,
Baby (5-22-18, Astor Theatre) and Head Over Heels (8-29-18, George M. Cohan
Theatre) occupied Saddler during the spring and summer of 1918, he also scored the
gargantuan Hippodrome spectacle, appropriately titled Everything (8-22-18, Hippodrome
Theatre) as the production listed no arranger in its program and Saddler would be given
credit during the following two years for his participation in later incarnations of the
annual summer revue: Happy Days and Good Times. Saddler also did not receive credit
as an arranger for his work on any shows during the fall of 1918, although he might well
have worked on at least two, Ladies First! and Oh! My Dear, both of which gave no
credit to any orchestrator in their playbill. Saddler’s longtime colleagues A. Baldwin
Sloane and Oscar Radin from his days working with the Shuberts were contracted as
composer and music director respectively. In addition, the show was a vehicle for Nora
Bayes, whose early triumphs with Lew Fields were orchestrated by Saddler, and so the
demanding chanteuse would have been pleased to have him also scoring her latest
Broadway show. Another musician who worked on the production was George
Gershwin, who interpolated the song “The Real American Folksong Is a Rag” and who
was the show’s rehearsal pianist. Saddler would be assigned the young composer’s first
complete score, La-La-Lucille only a few months later as part of his new exclusive

105
Fragments of Saddler’s manuscripts—both orchestral and piano-vocal scores—for all of these musicals
survive in archives at the Library of Congress.

251
contract with T. B. Harms’ composers.
106
The other show with which Saddler had strong
professional ties was Oh, My Dear!, which opened at the Princess Theatre on November
26, 1918. All the previous musicals at the Princess had featured a score by Jerome Kern,
dating back to 1915, and yet, since Kern had moved on to other projects and could not be
obtained, the producers hired Louis A. Hirsch to compose the music.
107
But since his
score was not deemed worthy of the series, interpolations (composed by Jean Schwartz)
were allowed for the first time in a musical at the Princess. Given that Saddler had long
connections with Hirsch and Schwartz (whose music for Piff! Paff!! Pouffe!!! he had
scored fourteen years earlier) and was intimately aware of the theatre’s special acoustic
requirements, it seems quite plausible that he was asked by producers Comstock and
Elliott to assist with the orchestrations for the show. After all, with Guy Bolton and P. G.
Wodehouse responsible for the book and lyrics and Saddler doing the musical
arrangements, three of the original members of the creative team were participating and
thus able to maintain a degree of consistency in Kern’s absence. With these assets, the
musical succeeded in lasting into April, despite its disappointing score. However, the
writing was on the wall: without Kern’s music, the Princess Theatre shows were unable
to maintain their previous quality and the series was curtailed after the show moved to the
Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre on May 9.
George M. Cohan called upon Saddler in the winter of 1919 to orchestrate his
music for The Royal Vagabond (2-17-19, Cohan and Harris Theatre), which was the new

106
Although no credit was given in the program, several of Saddler’s scores for this show survive (as a
result of Ira Gershwin saving them) and are housed in the George and Ira Gershwin Collection at the
Library of Congress.
107
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 336.

252
title for an operetta with music by Anselm Goetzl that was struggling until Cohan took
over production and wrote several songs and ensemble numbers to help it along.
108
The
show was an experiment for Cohan, who had contributed significantly to the
developments of the musical comedy and revue in America, but who did not have the
same theatrical instincts with light opera. During the spring, Saddler also prepared
orchestrations for Kern’s She’s a Good Fellow (5-5-19, Globe Theatre) and parts of
Gershwin’s La-La-Lucille! (5-26-19, Henry Miller’s Theatre), which opened three weeks
apart in May. His work on Gershwin’s score may have been a “rush job,” which caused
him to farm out part of the work to Maurice DePackh, one of his young protégés.
109

While it is clear that Saddler scored one of the extant manuscripts (“Love of a Wife”),
there is some uncertainty about whether it was Saddler or DePackh who scored the music
contained in the three other manuscripts from La-La-Lucille! housed at the Library of
Congress. Although three of the four surviving scores are signed by DePackh (“Money,”
“Kitchenette,” and “The Ten Commandment of Love”), his authorship of all three scores
remains unstable for a number of reasons.
110
Ira Gershwin recalled that he had given

108
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 338.
109
In a letter included with his donation to the Library of Congress of four orchestrations from La-La-
Lucille, Ira Gershwin wrote: “Frank Saddler was the outstanding orchestrator of Broadway musicals for
many years. George, of course, having worked with him, knew him well. On a rush job it was said that
Saddler would always come through if it meant working steadily for 36 or even more hours without sleep.”
In the same letter, he also wrote: “I have just looked up DePackh in the ASCAP Biog. Dict. [ASCAP
Biographical Dictionary]. I knew that he had been Saddler’s assistant for some years when a rush job came
along but didn’t know that he had studied harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration under Saddler. I. G.
May 17, ’66.” George Gershwin, La-La-Lucille, Box 11, Folders 9-12, George and Ira Gershwin
Collection, Library of Congress.
110
There are two primary causes for the uncertainty about who orchestrated the four extant scores from La-
La-Lucille. First, the scores with DePackh’s name on them are written in a hand that, if it not Saddler’s
own, was so close to his signature musical script that they would be identified as Saddler’s by anyone
familiar with his scores without someone else’s name on them. Later scores by DePackh clearly show that
he modeled his manuscript style on Saddler’s, but this knowledge only serves to increase the confusion
about the La-La-Lucille scores. Second, the score of “Kitchenette,” which was cut from the show during

253
DePackh a “half-a-dozen or so” of Saddler’s arrangements from the show, clearly
indicating that one way or another Saddler had done most of the job.
Work for Saddler continued at an unrelenting pace throughout the 1919-1920
season, during which time he did the arrangements for eight musicals. He began
organizing and preparing the music for the colossal Hippodrome show that would open in
August in the early months of spring in 1919. Perhaps as a reward for his work on the
colossal revues at the enormous theatre over the past few years, Charles Dillingham
credited Saddler with scoring the orchestrations for the annual summer spectacle at the
Hippodrome (Happy Days), which was the only musical to open during the five-week
Equity Actors’ Association strike.
111
But when its players walked out in solidarity with
other performers after five days, the show was forced to close, which forced a resolution
to the crisis. When the show opened again on September 1, it ran for eight-and-a-half
months.
112
The musical extravaganza featured fifteen distinct musical numbers—solos,
duets, trios, and one quartet with chorus—as well as at least eight specialty acts,
including The Four Amaranths, Powers’ Performing Elephants, comedy sketches by Bert
Levy, and The Great Hanneford Family horseback riding team. Although it is impossible
to know how much music was required for these acts (or even what the music was),
Saddler was depended upon to either oversee or create the scores for these orchestral

tryout, has a cover page that gives the name of the song, the name of the composer (“Geo. Gershwin”),
beneath which are the words “scored by MBP [Maurice B. DePackh] & FS [the S has a line through it from
top to bottom—Saddler’s customary treble-clef insignia]”. This clear indication that Saddler and DePackh
collaborated on the score was then thrown in doubt by the fact that someone scratched out the words
“scored by MBP,” leaving one to wonder who marked the score so as to remove DePackh’s name and why.
111
Bordman, American Musical Theatre, 341-42.
112
Norton, A Chronicle of American Musical Theater, 2:185.

254

Figure 6.13, Charles Dillingham.

255
diversions.
Ned Wayburn, who staged revues for Lew Fields, the Shuberts, and Flo Ziegfeld,
was asked to produce a large-scale theatrical event to mark the opening of the Capitol
Theatre, then being touted as the largest movie palace in the world.
113
Knowing the
singular importance of the event, the program of which was called the Capitol Revue (10-
24-19), Wayburn asked Saddler to do the orchestrations for the smaller show-within-a-
show, Demi-Tasse Revue, which took place on an enormous program that included films,
band performances, and an organ recital. The two men had worked together for years on
big productions before Saddler scored Wayburn’s own Town Topics in 1915, and so it
was natural for them to be reunited on such a noteworthy production. Though the
theatrical portion of the show was not on such a grand scale as their other projects, it
would involve an unusually large concert-band orchestra: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, E-flat
clarinet, 4 B-flat clarinets, 2 bassoons, 5 saxophones, harp, 4 cornets, 2 trumpets, 3 horns,
3 trombones, 2 baritones (Wagner tubas), bass (tuba), and 4 percussionists. George
Gershwin wrote two songs with lyricist Irving Caesar for the occasion, “Come to the
Moon” and “Swanee,” which are the only numbers that have survived from the show in
their orchestral form.
114

Two of Saddler’s colleagues from the Hippodrome shows—Raymond Hubbell
and R. H. Burnside—collaborated on a musical comedy for the diminutive Punch and
Judy Theatre, and, according to Alexander Woollcott, succeeded in the task of creating an

113
Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006,
236-37.
114
The title on Saddler’s manuscript partitura of the song is “Suanee.”

256
entertaining musical on a much smaller scale than that to which they were accustomed.
115

Though none of the nineteen distinct numbers that Hubbell composed for Miss Millions
became song hits, the collection as a whole was described as “a gay and fetching score
certain to set the foot a-tapping.” Despite the laudatory review, which suggested that the
show was particularly suitable for children to attend during the holiday, the production
did not last much beyond the Christmas season, closing on January 21 after only 47
performances. Another show for which Saddler did the arrangements that was slated for
an early 1920 opening came to an even more disappointing end. Based on the popular
1906 play Brewster’s Millions, a musical newly titled Zip Goes a Million brought
together the team of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern for a promising reunion intended to
recapture the former glory of musicals at the Princess Theatre.
116
Somehow, despite a
score that was brimming with song hits, the production lost steam during tryouts in
Washington, D. C. during the week of December 22 due to weak reviews, and thus had
the dubious distinction of being the only Kern show that died before making it to
Broadway. Although two songs—“Whip-Poor-Will” and “Look For the Silver Lining”—
achieved the recognition they deserved when they appeared in Sally the following season,
much of Kern’s score was returned to the musical trunk where it never again saw the light
of day during the composer’s lifetime. One consolation that of the show’s collapse is that
Saddler’s scores were largely set aside and preserved at T. B. Harms, which often

115
“The Play,” The New York Times, December 10, 1919, 11.
116
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 191-93.

257
occurred with numbers that were cut from productions.
117

Kern’s next project, his next-to-last show with Saddler, surely restored hope with
both men. In his second collaboration with lyricist Anne Caldwell—She’s a Good Fellow
being the first—the composer created one of his finest scores. The New York Times
ventured that The Night Boat (2-2-20, Liberty Theatre) contained several melodies that
“will be popular in the song shops.”
118
However, as we have seen, a good score does not
a good production make. Much of the credit for the musical’s success was therefore due
to producer Charles Dillingham, whose “taste and showmanship [were] imprinted even
more deeply than usual” upon the proceedings. Ed Wynn was another type of impresario
entirely, playing multiple roles in his eponymous production The Ed Wynn Carnival as
book writer, composer, lyricist, actor, and master of ceremonies.
119
Having ingratiated
himself with his actor colleagues for his part in the Equity Actors’ Association strike the
previous fall, Wynn found a large delegation of his peers in attendance on opening night
cheering him on. The show was rich with variety entertainment and featured lots of
music, much of it contributed by Wynn himself: out of fourteen musical numbers, Wynn
composed all or part of ten.
120
Saddler shared the orchestration duties with Stephen Jones,
a T. B. Harms arranger whom he knew from his days at the Charles K. Harris company

117
Most of the scores that were preserved from She’s a Good Fellow, for example, were from numbers that
were removed during tryouts. We do not know exactly why these scores were preserved and what this
pattern may tell us about the routine destruction of orchestral scores created for Broadway shows in this
era. For more on this question, see Chapter 9 of this dissertation.
118
“‘The Night Boat’ Arrives: Breezy and Brisk Musical Comedy Made from a French Farce,” The New
York Times, February 3, 1920.
119
“Wynn Carnival Hilarious,” The New York Times, April 6, 1920.
120
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2:208.

258
more than a decade earlier.
121

George Gershwin continued to establish himself as one of the finest young
composers on Broadway with his score for the George White Scandals (6-7-20, Globe
Theatre). Despite the presence of some jazz-inflected songs in Gershwin’s score, Saddler
did not use saxophones, drum kits, or other instruments that were common among the
legion of dance bands that had been appearing throughout the country since 1917 and the
emergence of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band on record.
122
Although Saddler did not
incorporate the new wind instruments being used by jazz and dance band into his scores,
one notable exception is the Demi-Tasse Revue, which Saddler scored using saxophones.
However, this concert band was closer to the concert bands of Patrick Gilmore and John
Philip Sousa than Paul Whiteman’s dance band. Though Gershwin would become an
important figure in the transition of the Broadway sound from the string-based ragtime
orchestra to an ensemble that used more wind and brass, he respected both Saddler’s
traditional technique as well as his innovativeness. Gershwin and Saddler were both
contracted by T. B. Harms, which enabled them to work together frequently during the
first few years of the composer’s career.
Saddler’s final season working on Broadway, which was cut short by his sudden
death in March, 1921, was occupied with work on four shows, two of which he left
unfinished. The 1920 edition of the annual Hippodrome shows, Good Times, which

121
For more on Stephen Jones, see Robert Russell Bennett, “The Broadway Sound” The Autobiography of
Robert Russell Bennett, edited by George J. Ferencz (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999),
66-7.
122
Although Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra would be enormously influential upon the
Broadway sound in the coming years, his first recordings did not appear until the fall of 1920 and the
Scandals opened in the summer.

259
opened on August 9, kept him busy through the summer. By 1919, the work on these
shows had become routine, as one can sense from Saddler’s parting comments in a letter
to Jerome Kern dated July 27, 1919, where he writes: “Will close now Jerry and get to
work on a few of the Hippodrome Numbers, which of course demand a regular UM-
PAH.”
123
Then, at the very end of the letter, he reports, jokingly: “Am staying at the farm
all next week to try to get ahead on the Hippodrome “fortissimi.” Saddler’s sarcastic
comments about his job on the summer spectacles appears in stark contrast to his intense
interest in communicating about minute details regarding his work with Kern on the score
for Zip Goes a Million:
By the way, I have the instrumentation for the next Princess show, subject
of course to your approval.
It will call for 18 men, but I think they [the producers] can stand this,
considering that they had twenty in their last failure.
On a separate sheet I am sending you a complete list of the eighteen
men and a few remarks as to their capabilities and duties.
I realize that in one particular, but in one particular only, I will have to
do a little “dodging” and that is the “um-pa”.
By omitting both second violins and violas, I have nothing
(apparently) for my after time but the Harp or Piano, or the pizzicato of
the Celli. These I shall use in moderation and the reason I mentioned in
parenthesis, (apparently) is because I am going to spend a lot of time on
the drum part and that means that I must have one of the best drummers in
the city.
124

Saddler’s engagement with the challenges of setting Kern’s music was a tribute to his
keen sense of musical curiosity and genuine desire to find novel ways to make the theatre

123
Frank Saddler’s correspondence can be found in a box labeled “Jerome Kern Collection Additions:
Frank Saddler Materials” at the Performing Arts Division of the Library of Congress.
124
Ibid.

260
orchestra as efficient as possible. At the same time, one can see from this passage how his
mastery over every aspect of his craft allowed him to be working at the same time on an
extravaganza-style revue for the 5,200-seat Hippodrome and for a musical farce at the
299-seat Princess with unusual instrumentation.
125

Saddler worked on Hitchy-Koo of 1920 (10-19-20, New Amsterdam Theatre) into
the early fall, and turned his attention to Kern’s music for Ziegfeld’s Sally in preparation
for a late-November out-of-town tryout in Baltimore. Around the same time, he began
work on George Gershwin’s A Dangerous Maid, a score that would be his last
arrangement of a complete show. The musical, which closed on the road before it arrived
on Broadway, opened at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre in Atlantic City on March 21, 1921, just
two days before Saddler was found dead in his home in Brewster. At the time of his
passing, Saddler had already begun to work on the 1921 edition of the shows at the
Hippodrome. While the 1920 edition was successful enough to run well into 1921, and
closed on April 30, one week after Saddler had died, preparations for the 1921 edition of
the series must have been well under way in April, since he is given credit posthumously
for his work on Better Times. Strangely telling, however, is the fact that Better Times,
which featured orchestrations by Saddler, Hilding Anderson, and Charles Miller, did not
appear until September of 1922, strongly suggesting not only that Saddler’s work was
completed by these two men (whom he knew well), but that Charles Dillingham needed
to postpone the 1921 production due to Saddler’s unexpected demise.
126
The show that

125
Milton Epstein, The New York Hippodrome: A Complete Chronology of Performances from 1905 to
1939 (New York: Theatre Library Association, 1993), 1.
126
Anderson was well known to Saddler as a conductor and orchestrator with whom he often collaborated
and Miller was the young head of arranging at T. B. Harms, where Saddler had been under contract since

261
was mounted in its place, Get Together, was subtitled a “vaudeville revue,” which was
likely more vaudeville than revue, due to the absence of songs or sketches.
127
With a
musical director but no composer on the playbill, Dillingham apparently cobbled together
a program of acts until he could recover from the loss of his reliable musical arranger.
The possibility that Saddler’s death upended the entire production in progress lends
credibility to Perriton Maxwell’s seemingly hyperbolic contention that his work took the
merest of melodic fragments from composers and turned them into elegant canvases of
orchestral sound.
One man is conspicuously alone among the “undiscovered” genius of the
American stage—a man whose work is unique and stupendous. His name
adorns no billboard, is not in the smallest type on any program; his
abilities are familiar to but a handful of those on the inner circle of his
own profession, but his work has evoked the applause of the multitude; the
multitude that did not so much as suspect his existence. He is Frank
Saddler, orchestral arranger, the oracle of counterpoint, the magician of
harmonics, the translator of piano tinklings into masterpieces of concerted
music masses. The composer of an attenuated theme hands over to this
man his kindergarten annotations and Saddler hands back a full score for
forty instruments; the single song becomes a surging symphony, the jingle
expands to an arrangement of undertones and overtones and bristles with
combinations of melody and contrast, the penny whistle becomes
transmogrified into a thundering pipe-organ. There are many orchestral
arrangers; it is an established business like mending shoes or trading in
horse-flesh; there are nearly as many arrangers as composers, but not quite
as many. There is only one Frank Saddler.
128

the beginning of 1919. In 1919, The New York Clipper reported candidly that “Frank Saddler, arranger,
whose fine orchestral settings have helped many a young musical comedy composer over a difficult spot,
has been placed under contract by the T. B. Harms Co. For a term of years the Saddler arrangements will be
confined to the melodies of the Harms’ composers. “Arranger Under Contract,” The New York Clipper,
January 15, 1919, 17. Philharmonic Chamber Soloists, Strings in Swingtime, biography of Charles Miller
by Eric Davis, Bridge 9439.
127
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2:260.
128
Perriton Maxwell, “The Man Behind the Gun,” The Theatre, vol. XXIV, 1916, 17

262

In retrospect, this passage, written five years before Saddler’s death, reads like a eulogy
for a musician who was not fully appreciated in his day, but who was, nonetheless,
responsible for developing the Broadway sound to a degree unimaginable without his
musical ingenuity, craftsmanship, and artistry.

263
Chapter 7

Death, Settlement of Estate, and Legacy

The exact cause of Frank Saddler’s death is not definitively known. He was working at
his rural home in Brewster when he died suddenly on the evening of March 23, 1921.
According to his friends, Saddler lived alone in his Putnam County residence, his wife
and son continuing to live in Manhattan during his long work retreats at his country
home.
1
The fact that he was found dead at his home suggests that the physiological
trauma that took his life—perhaps a massive heart attack or stroke—was so devastating
that it swiftly rendered him immobile and unable to seek help. On April 1, The Putnam
County Courier left this rather blunt description of Saddler’s demise:
The funeral services of the late Frank Saddler, noted musician and
composer of the music at the Hippodrome, who dropped dead at his
Milltown home on Wednesday evening, and of M. Berninger, also a
resident of the same locality, were held on Sunday afternoon at their late
homes. Interments took place at Milltown Rural Cemetery.
2

Saddler’s death was mysterious enough to have precipitated a coroner’s inquest, which
was filed in Putnam County on June 6, 1921, but the contents of that report are

1
The 1920 census lists Frank in Brewster and Clara and Frank, Jr. in Manhattan, suggesting that the couple
was estranged. Court documents registered in Putnam Country concerning Saddler’s estate showing that
Clara was living at 383 Central Park West in 1921 also support this assumption, as does a letter that Frank
wrote to Jerome Kern in 1919 saying “Will call you up Tuesday from the hotel.” U. S. Census Bureau,
1920 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office). Viewed at http://www.ancestry.com/ (accessed on
December 18, 2017).
2
The Putnam Country Courier, April 1, 1921, 8.

264
sealed.
3
Without knowing the results of the medical inquiry, it is impossible to know
Saddler’s cause of death with absolute certainty. Nonetheless, the circumstantial evidence
in his case suggests that he most likely died as a result of overexposure to toxic levels of
kerosene exhaust.
When Saddler purchased his property in Brewster, he envisioned that it would be
a bucolic retreat where he could work for weeks at a time on orchestration assignments
and travel to New York City as necessary to deliver his scores, meet with collaborators
and producers, and assist with rehearsals. Over the course of four years, he remodeled the
farmhouse into comfortable quarters with a large work studio, a project that was not yet
finished at the time of his death. He had developed an elaborate system whereby he could
maintain his habit of working through the night as he had always done in Manhattan,
despite the fact that the farm had no electricity. This sophisticated setup was described in
an article that appeared in The Brewster Standard on May 25, 1923, over two years after
Saddler’s passing.
One of the eccentricities of Saddler’s peculiar genius was his habit of
working at night. For this purpose he made for himself two rustic work
tables with a special arrangement for double burner kerosene lamps and
reflectors to throw the light directly on his work. At these tables one
placed in a north room and the other in a south room, Saddler composed
practically all his works for Harms, the orchestration for the New York

3
The existence of the Coroner’s Inquest was brought to my attention by Sarah Johnson with the Putnam
County Historical Society. I subsequently filed a request (“Application for Genealogical Requests”) to
access the report but was denied by the Putnam County Coroner’s Office (Michael J. Nesheiwat, MD,
Coroner) on the grounds that “reports are not to be used for commercial purposes.” After pressing the
office for an explanation as to why they would prevent a researcher from viewing a report about a man who
died in 1921 and had no living heirs, the office stated that “autopsy and toxicology reports, no matter how
old, are strictly confidential” and that they only make exceptions for “families doing their genealogy.”
Through Sarah Johnson, I appealed to Putnam County District Attorney Robert V. Tendy, but he replied
that his office would not “get involved,” but suggested that I could file a Freedom of Information Law
(FOIL) request to access the materials, which I have yet to do at this writing.

265
Hippodrome and many popular songs, such as “Whose Baby Are You?”
which ran a considerable vogue a couple of years ago.
4

When Saddler worked all night in Manhattan, he used electric lamps, and so when he
designed his work space in Brewster, he needed to find another powerful source of
illumination in order to continue his nocturnal routine. Apparently, he was unaware of the
considerable health risks associated with the use of kerosene indoors, which most people
probably did not encounter since they did not stay up all night working near a big lamp
with a double burner. And yet, the lack of widespread public awareness in 1920 about the
danger of using kerosene lamps in the home should come as no surprise, as it remains a
problem in some parts of the world today.
5
Although we don’t know what the coroner
determined at the time as the health crisis that ended Saddler’s life prematurely, there can
be little doubt that he died either from a stroke or a heart attack that was precipitated by
nearly five years of working regularly throughout the night by the light of kerosene
lamps.
The details of time and place of both his death and burial provided by the Courier

4
“Brewster and the N. Y. Hippodrome,” The Brewster Standard, May 25, 1923.
5
I am indebted to Miles Kreuger for drawing this conclusion and for bringing the issue to my attention.
The problem is particularly common in poor nations. The World Health Organization has developed a
campaign to raise awareness about the significant health risks of kerosene exposure. Their website features
a page on household air pollution and health, stating that “in poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke can
be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for fine particles.” It also states that “the lack of access to
electricity for at least 1.2 billion people (many of whom use kerosene lamps for lighting) exposes
households to very high levels of fine particulate matter.” More specifically, the WHO recognizes that
“[n]early one quarter of all premature deaths due to stroke…can be attributed to the chronic exposure to
household air pollution” and “[a]pproximately 15% of all deaths due to ischaemic heart disease, accounting
for over a million premature deaths annually, can be attributed to exposure to household pollution.” World
Health Organization, “Household air pollution and health,” (updated February 2016),
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/ (accessed on December 5, 2017).

266
have turned out to be useful in determining the exact date of Saddler’s death, since the
brief obituary published in The New York Times on March 29 prompted several other
newspapers to report that he died on the day before the paper was issued.
Frank Saddler, musician, died on his farm in Brewster, N. Y., yesterday.
For many years, he had orchestrated the music for the Hippodrome shows
and many musical comedies. He was born in Pennsylvania and studied
music in Munich.
6

Obviously more concerned with appearances than with accuracy, the Times did not
bother to check its facts, as it would have been inconvenient to report that Saddler had
died almost a week before its notice went to print. For, according to the Courier, Saddler
had died on a Wednesday evening and then was buried on Sunday, which must have been
the week before the notice was published on Friday, April 1. Ironically, if we assume that
the notice in the Courier is accurate, then it is even more inconvenient, historically
speaking, for the Times that Saddler was, in fact, buried on the day before it had claimed
that he had died.
It might have been even more embarrassing for the Times if those readers who
came across their obituary of Saddler also read the New York Evening Telegram, for its
obituary ran on March 28, the same day that he was said to have died in the Times.
Frank Saddler, musician, whose orchestrations at the Hippodrome and
other musical comedy houses have been heard by thousands of theatre-
goers, is dead.
Frank Saddler was born in Pennsylvania and studied music in
Munich. His life work was to establish a school to simplify the theory of
harmony and to put the study of music within the reach of everybody. He

6
“Frank Saddler, Musician,” The New York Times, March 29, 1921.

267
was a master of the small orchestra, and at one time had made
orchestrations for every musical play appearing on Broadway. He also
perfected a system of synchronizing musical accompaniments with
moving pictures by timing the films with a stop watch.
7

The obituary in the Telegram was clearly based upon information provided by his wife, a
friend, or a colleague. Saddler may have experimented with new technology for
composing film music and certainly may have known people in the nascent film industry
in New York, but this information was not part of the public record, and so it had to be
acquired through an interview with someone who knew him well. Although Saddler’s
career centered largely around creating scores for live theatrical performance, his
penchant for innovative orchestral ensembles and combinations is consistent with the
notion that he would have taken a great interest in the technological developments in film
that were on the horizon. Since Saddler died at age 57, it is not hard to imagine him living
well beyond the advent of talking pictures six years later, and like many of his younger
colleagues—Max Steiner, Arthur Lange, Frank Tours, and many others—becoming a
pioneer in film music. Regarding his development of a pedagogical system for advanced
harmonic training: Saddler did create a booklet advertised as the “Wagner-Stich System
of Harmony” in 1906 in the New York Tribune and possibly other newspapers.
8
It is
strange, however, that the Telegram would focus on these relatively inconsequential facts

7
“Frank Saddler, Noted Broadway Musician, Dies,” The Evening Telegram, March 28, 1921.
8
An ad placed by Saddler in the New York Tribune read: “No Singer or Instrumentalist should be without a
thorough knowledge of Harmony. The Wagner-Stich System of Harmony has but three vital laws which
govern the progression and resolution of all Triads, Sevenths, Ninths, and chromatically altered chords.
Write for a booklet: FRANK SADDLER 280 West 40th St., New York. New York Tribune, October 7,
1906, 5.

268
about his career and neglect to mention his work as an arranger beyond the shows he
scored for Dillingham at the Hippodrome, a cruel irony given Saddler’s low estimation of
the musical content of these productions.
On March 30, an obituary for Saddler appeared in The New York Clipper that
borrowed from the notices in the Telegram and Times of the two previous days. It stated
erroneously that he had “died suddenly at his house in this city on Monday morning,” a
claim that, similar to that in The New York Times, gave the trade paper the benefit of
sounding as though it was reporting news that was only a day old.
9
The suggestion that he
died in Manhattan, however, did run contrary to facts given in the Times the day before.
Given more column space for its notice on the assumption that more of its readership
would take a personal interest in the story, the obituary in the Clipper included some
reference to his influence on Broadway and in the field of theatre orchestration.
Saddler’s arrangements were in great demand in the musical comedy and
light opera productions and many of the present day composers of this
type [of] music give Saddler much credit for their success. His musical
knowledge was so deep and his orchestra sense so keen that he could take
the simplest melodies and give them an orchestral setting that made them
sound like a classic.
10

Saddler actually created comparatively few arrangements for light opera. However, he
was surely asked to score numbers for musical revues, and even some musical comedies,
that had the expansive melodic contours of light opera, and he was fully equipped to
make orchestral accompaniments that support this type of vocal line, especially given his

9
“Frank Saddler Is Dead,” in “Orchestra News,” The New York Clipper, March 30, 1921.
10 Ibid.

269
training in Munich during the decade following Wagner’s death. The trade paper Musical
America posted a perfunctory death notice that parroted the Times obituary on April 2. Its
brevity is understandable given their wide readership outside the field of theatre and the
popular arts.
11

Since Frank was survived by his wife and son, one could reasonably expect that
they were the natural beneficiaries of his estate. Frank, Jr., was twenty-six in 1921 and,
therefore, should have taken a keen interest in the legal proceedings that would follow in
the wake of his father’s passing. Unfortunately, the elder Frank died intestate, having
failed to draft a will.
12
It is unclear whether this state of affairs was a result of the
couple’s estrangement or rather of a general disorganization in Saddler’s personal affairs.
Nonetheless, this circumstance required that Clara apply to become the administrator of
her husband’s estate, and she immediately retained the services of the New York
Casualty Company though an administration bond of $1,000 guaranteeing her reliable
performance in settling Frank’s estate. Soon after, Frank, Jr., legally renounced his rights
to his father’s “goods, chattels, and credits” in the Surrogate’s Court, an action that
cleared the way for his mother to take charge of the matter.

11
“Passed Away,” Musical America, April 2, 1921, 47.
12
The primary documents in the case of Saddler’s intestate succession, which were preserved in the
Putnam County Courthouse, provide numerous facts related to Saddler’s residence, both in New York City
and in Brewster, and also help us understand the legal problems that his wife faced in the aftermath of his
death in asserting her claim to his estate and resolving his personal financial matters. Chief among these
are: the original 1917 mortgage on Saddler’s property in Brewster; eleven pages of documents from the
Putnam County Surrogate’s Court (including many separate forms—some signed by Clara and her
lawyers—representing legal actions over a period of thirteen months from April 25, 1921, to May 29,
1922); an indenture signed by the referee charged with selling Saddler’s Brewster property confirming that
it was sold in May 1924; Clara’s affidavit, also eleven pages, acknowledging and detailing her actions to
resolve Frank’s estate; and a legal appraisal of Frank’s estate. Putnam County Courthouse, Carmel, New
York.

270
Figure 7.1, Surety Bond of Administration by Clara Saddler.

271
Another reason that the specificity of events surrounding Saddler’s death and
funeral in the April 1 obituary in the Putnam County Courier is so helpful in establishing
the exact date of his passing is that Clara gave his death date as March 25 in all the
documentation she presented to the court. There are at least three reasons that she would
have more likely been wrong than the local newspaper: (1) she was probably not notified
for several days (March 25 could have the day she was first contacted) as word did not
spread fast in rural parts of the country in 1921; (2) she probably did not see the Brewster
newspaper because it was not printed until Friday, April 1, five days after his funeral; (3)
the first time she was required to give his death date on a legal document was December
19, nine months later. Clara’s legal petition in probate began with her application for
Letters of Administration upon Frank’s estate, an affadavit from May 2, 1921, naming
Clara Saddler and Frank Saddler, Jr., as individuals asserting a claim as Frank Sr.’s “next
of kin.” Clara was able to establish her rights to manage Frank’s estate by May 2 and
resolve his financial liabilities to the state with a bond of surety from the New
Amsterdam Casualty Company. A week later, she received from the Surrogate Court an
order to publish a notice in the Brewster Standard once a week for six months indicating
that everyone to whom Saddler owed money should make their claim by presenting
vouchers to Clara’s lawyers. One year later, Clara’s lawyer, J. Bennett Southard, reported
to the court that “Clara Saddler has fully accounted for all the monies and property of the
estate of said deceased which have come into her hands as such Administratrix.”
An appraiser was engaged on December 30, 1921 to establish the value of Frank’s

272
Table 3, “Personal Estate” from the appraiser’s report of Frank Saddler’s estate.

Description of Property Fair Market Value
Contents of cottage and barn on farm at Brewster N. Y. $1,327
Automobile $300
Deposit in First National Bank, Brewster, N. Y. $268.31
Deposit in Corn Exchange Bank, 42nd Street Branch, New York City $29.75
Liberty Bonds held by Corn Exchange Bank, 42nd Street Branch $33.05
Interest from Equitable Trust Co. $10.75
TOTAL $1,968.86

estate. Frank’s personal property at the time of his death was reported to be worth
$1,968.86 (see Table 3). These documents provide many details about his property and
financial assets that together help to illuminate the portrait of his life, so often depicted
through his musical accomplishments. For example, Schedule A described Frank’s car as
a “second hand Dodge touring car, Motor #176632.” In addition, the list of his personal
effects is lengthy, including fifty-three discrete entries that open up a window that allows
us to view the human dimension of his day-to-day existence. The furnishings of his home
show that the residence itself was not small and that his lifestyle was comfortable, though
not extravagant. His furniture consisted of a dining room table and six chairs, two kitchen
tables, two side tables and a sideboard, six old chairs for entertaining guests, a hat rack, a
felt mattress with a brass headboard, and two bureaus. As one would expect, he owned

273

Figures 7.2a & 7.2b, Inventory of personal belongings from Frank Saddler’s
residence on Foggintown Road in Brewster, New York.

274
kitchen utensils, a set of dishes, and a small clock, in addition to a crockery punch bowl
and four glasses. His living room contained a revolving bookcase with 37 books, an oil
painting, an upright Pease piano, an old organ, two rugs, and two runners. He also owned
a Columbia bicycle, a portable typewriter, a sewing machine, a suitcase, a camera, and
photographic supplies. The camera equipment and (one may assume by the term
“supplies”) materials for developing film recall Frank’s practical joke upon arriving in
the United States after four years abroad, claiming on the ship’s manifest that he was a
photographer by trade.
13
His upstairs room contained his two large work tables and the
two large kerosene lamps that he used to work by night. His outdoor supplies included a
hand lawn mower, a force pump, a coal stove, and garden tools. Undoubtedly the most
intriguing part of the list is a note by the appraiser that states “this list includes all
furnishings of the house and barns excluding, however, sheet music which I did not
examine and on which I have placed no value.” One may read into this one of two things:
that he believed that the music had no value or that he believed that he was unable to
appraise the value of the sheet music accurately and so he did not assign a specific value
to it. One can be certain that by referring to “sheet music” the appraiser was not only
referring to published song sheets, but also musical manuscripts, of which there was
surely an abundance. While many of these items could be sold and would be of no
personal value to his wife and son, the list itself suggests the existence of personal effects
that should have had enormous personal value to his family: namely, photographs and
musical manuscripts. Therefore, while being a useful lens through which to view

13
See pages 115-116 of this dissertation.

275
Saddler’s personal life, the inventory also invites the question: were any of his personal
belongings preserved?
14

The same appraiser established a value of $8,500 for his “farm containing about
80 acres of land, more or less, with buildings thereon,” which was reduced by a $4,500
mortgage, giving an adjusted total of $4,000 for this real-estate asset. According to the
1917 mortgage of Saddler’s farm, he had purchased the property for $3,400 with a
mortgage in the amount of $1,100 owed directly to the seller, Edward L. Hoag, who gave
him three years to pay it off at a rate of 6% interest to be paid semi-annually. The
mortgage describes in detail the perimeter of the land in terms of its borders with his
neighbors and gives an estimate of 80 acres in total area. The mortgage of $4,500 on the
property at the time of his death likely was accrued as a result of loans taken by Saddler
to renovate the residence. In a letter to Jerome Kern dated May 1919, Saddler wrote
about spending time “up in the little retreat in the East Woods, where I am building
myself a little rustic study,” corroborating this suspicion.
15
In June, he gave additional
details on the heavy construction involved in the project: “Mr. Holt the carpenter has
been at work tearing down portions of the old house preparatory to putting on the new
roof with the studio room in the rear and the dormer windows in front as well as new
floors, and also the Mason is busy for the last two days laying a new wall in front and
ready to continue on the foundation for the new chimney. So, you can imagine things are
humming in Foggintown.” Then, in a note to Kern dated October 30, 1919, Saddler filled

14
The only clue to this question may lie with the fact that his son, Frank Jr., who married a woman named
Helen in 1918, spent most of his adult life in Newton, Massachusetts. Both died there in the 1970s.
15
All of the extant letters from Saddler to Kern were procured by the Library of Congress and are housed in
the Music Division in a box titled “Jerome Kern Collection additions: Frank Saddler materials.”

276
him in on some of the latest details about his remodeling: “I am at last up-stairs in my
studio, but only a few floors are laid in the old wigwam and it will still be a couple of
weeks until I can clean up and feel real ‘homey.’ There are some doors and a few
windows to be put in down-stairs and then I can start up my two big fire-places and get
things dried out a bit and livable.” The existence of a second mortgage indicates that all
these improvements were likely expenses that Saddler borrowed against the value of his
house in order to afford. Saddler also had inherited his parents’ home at 546 Clawson
Avenue in Pittsburgh and maintained the residence until his death. The property was
assessed to be worth $2,250, and yet Saddler somehow had a $1,500 mortgage on the
family residence as well, suggesting that he had also borrowed against its value to make
improvements on the Brewster house.
Sadly for both Clara and Frank, Jr., the settlement of the estate did not end well.
After running six months of ads in the local newspaper, she had received claims totaling
$1,594.42 for automobile expenses, plumbing, farm equipment, lumber, telephone
service, and one from William H. Baker, whom Frank owed $1.25 for sharpening his
saws. She also owed $425 for expenses related to the resolution of the estate and Frank’s
burial. After paying a total of $2,019.42 for her husband’s debts (not including the cost of
six months of newspapers ads required by the Surrogate’s Court or the amount that she
spent on the surety bond), Clara still needed to sell the property in his estate to recoup her
losses. For all of her time, effort, and money, she had surely expected some financial
reward from the sale of the farm, and she had been given good reason to believe that the
farm had sufficient value to settle his estate and leave her and her son with a small nest

277
egg. Unfortunately, even with all of its improvements, the property in Brewster did not
yield nearly the $8,500 it was appraised at in 1922. When it was finally sold at public
auction in March 1924, the property was purchased for $5,000, which, when offset by the
$4,500 lien, left the estate with only five hundred dollars, less than a hundred dollars
more than she had spent to settle Frank’s debt. And, this did not include the hundreds of
dollars she must have spent in lawyers’ fees.
Adding insult to injury, Frank seemed to have had an extramarital affair with a
woman by the name of Mary, someone with whom he spent enough time with in
Brewster that she was known to and familiar with Jerome Kern and his wife, Eva.
Although the evidence is not substantial or clear, it seems as though Frank probably had a
significant relationship with her (and presumably with her son), as the brief mention of
her name at the end of his letter to Kern reveals: “Tommy sends his regards, and Mary is
setting a hen on a half dozen turkey eggs I got from the teller of the Corn Exchange
Bank.” Although friends have described Saddler as living alone in Brewster and this
relationship was probably one that he did not want everyone to know about, he obviously
did not keep it a secret from Kern, who must have come at least once for a visit. Saddler’s
friendship with the Kerns went back at least to 1912, when the two men began working
together and they were close enough personally for Frank to borrow money from the
composer and then to repay the loan directly to Eva accompanied by an amusing personal
letter to her.
16
And, indeed, it was during a trip that the three of them took out of the city

16
The letter from Saddler to Eva, sent from Bronxwood Park on March 1st 1912, begins: “My Dear Mrs.
Kern: A few days since, Jerry cashed an invisible check for me. This is known in business circles as a
transaction in futures, and is supposed to net a small profit. At the legal rate of interest in New York State, I
would owe Jerry one and 1/7 cents for the use of his funds for the week. As I should have some difficulty in

278
that Saddler found the farm in Foggintown.
17

Critical Appraisal: Primary Sources

When Frank Saddler died, his passing was keenly felt throughout the creative and
production milieus of Broadway. His absence would not merely affect the show he was
working on at the time of his demise, it would impact the work of several composers,
arrangers, and producers who relied on his experience and craftsmanship to guarantee a
high-quality orchestral sound for their show music. Most notably, Jerome Kern, who had
collaborated with Saddler exclusively on many Broadway shows, would need to find a
new musical partner. According to Gerald Bordman, Kern’s biographer, “[n]ot until
Robert Russell Bennett provided the scoring for Stepping Stones two years later did Kern
find another orchestrator he was happy to work with.”
18
And, be it a direct cause or
coincidence, Charles Dillingham, who was finally able to mount Better Times at the
Hippodrome in 1922, having had to postpone its opening following Saddler’s death,

scraping together exactly one and one-seventh cents, and you might encounter some obstacles in circulating
that exact amount (and money justifies its existence only when circulating) I have decided to dedicate to
Jerry through your good offices a little esoteric knowledge that will be of great benefit to him in his
struggle with moving picture music…Incidentally—please find enclosed check for ten dollars ($10.00) the
amount spoken of in Paragraph 1.—Sincerely, Frank Saddler.” The “esoteric knowledge” about which
Saddler wrote is contained on two pages of musical theory in thirteen “instructions” in Saddler’s hand with
personal notes to Eva about how to impart these ideas to her husband. Jerome Kern Collection, “Jerome
Kern Collection additions: Frank Saddler materials,” Library of Congress.
17
Saddler recalled the trip in his letter of June 6, 1919: “There is dirt and dust and old bricks and lumber,
and laths all over the place; and also noises galore. However it will repay me for the present inconvenience
when it is once done and I sit in the last home I shall occupy in this world comfortable and happy—let us at
least hope. I feel in some mysterious way that my real life work is bound up with this lovely old spot, and
at present I have the same confident felling as to the HOME that I had in regard to the farm itself, on the
day that you and Mrs. Eva and myself practically decided that it was THE place.” Ibid.
18
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 211.

279
would never produce another show at the leviathan theatre.
Apart from the few somewhat perfunctory obituaries in the newspapers described
above, there were a couple of substantial appreciations published in the wake of Saddler’s
death that articulated his contribution to the art of theatre orchestration and to the field of
the Broadway musical in general. Gordon Whyte wrote a generously detailed piece on
Saddler for The Billboard, which was the first posthumous article to celebrate his career
in a way that attempted to convey the significance of his achievement. Whyte titled the
column, “A Great Loss Is Passing of Frank Saddler,” and sub-titled it with an overview:
“As an Arranger He Was at the Top of His Profession—Will Be Hard to Replace.”
With the death of Frank Saddler last week, one of the most important
figures in musical comedy, and at the same time one of the least known
men to the general public, passed away. Saddler was an arranger, and as
such at the very top of his profession. He was born in Pennsylvania and
received his musical education in Munich. He was a splendid musician
and applied musical knowledge in a practical way to the scores he
arranged. He could take a commonplace melody and score it so that it
sounded like a minor masterpiece.
Under modern conditions it is seldom that a musical comedy
composer has the time, even if he has the ability, to arrange his numbers
for orchestra. This work is usually given out to arrangers, and Frank
Saddler was the best of the lot, in the opinion of those who know. It was
his habit to attend the rehearsals of the piece he was to score and watch the
business that the director was putting in for the number. Then he would
work these ideas into the orchestral arrangement and give point to the
business instrumentally. There were some managers he would not work
for. These were men who would not give him the orchestra he called for in
his arrangements. If this happened once he made a mental note of the
manager responsible and would never again arrange anything for him.
Saddler lived in Brewster, N. Y., coming to the city only at infrequent
intervals for conferences with composers or publishers. He lived alone and
worked incessantly. This season he scored sixteen musical comedies and
labored night and day at them.

280
The thing that made Saddler great was the ideas he had and the
way he had of applying them. Very often he would arrange the chorus of a
number in several ways. If it was repeated three times it would have three
separate arrangements, and each way it was played a different effect
would be obtained. This added much to the color of any score he arranged,
and the fertility of his invention assured a constant stream of novel effects.
This was what made the demand so great for his services. He could not
nearly supply the demand for his arrangements.
With Frank Saddler’s passing the musical comedy field has lost a
man of real ability, sound musicianship and a rare character. It will be a
fine thing if a man can be found who can fill the place he has left vacant—
but it is doubtful if this will come to pass for some time to come.
19

Whyte’s appreciation is reminiscent of Perriton Maxwell’s article about Saddler
published in The Theatre magazine in 1916 in its lavish praise and generous assessment
of his value in the world of musical theatre. Among his friends and colleagues, Saddler
had acquired a reputation by the mid-1910s that, for all his outstanding ability and
accomplishments, sometimes exceeded even the brilliance of his achievement, perhaps in
an attempt to compensate for the recognition and credit that many felt he deserved but did
not receive during his lifetime. The most startling fact that Whyte asserted in his piece
was that Saddler had worked on sixteen musicals during the 1920-1921 season. If this is
indeed true and not a gross exaggeration, born of the apocryphal hyperbole that attaches
itself in hagiographic fashion to figures who lived great lives in relative obscurity, then
we must admit that it will be impossible to assess the orchestrator’s actual achievement
with any fidelity. However, the injustices (which were often as much historical injustices
as they were social and economic) that have been inflicted on the careers of thousands of

19
Gordon Whyte, “Musical Comedy, Comic Opera, Spectacle, Pageantry,” The Billboard, April 9, 1921.

281
men and women who made substantial contributions to any field while toiling in relative
obscurity and financial insecurity, are not rectified by an overestimation of their
accomplishments in retrospect. We may never know the truth of the matter, since these
historical injustices were accompanied by a concomitant artistic injustice carried out by
the careless producers and publishers who destroyed the creative work of Saddler and
dozens of his colleagues i the early decades of the twentieth century.
The case for Saddler’s central importance in the development of the Broadway
sound during the 1910s was never again made as eloquently and persuasively as it was by
Newton A. Fuessle. Despite the article’s tendency toward exaggeration and effusive
praise bordering on hagiography, none of Saddler’s contemporaries burnished his legacy
quite as effectively as Fuessle did in his article “Broadway’s King of Counterpoint,”
which he wrote for The Outlook and published on April 20, 1921. Due to its singularity
and relative significance, it is presented here in full to facilitate a discussion of its tone
and content.
Frank Saddler had been dead for more than a week before I learned of the
passing of, to me, the most interesting man on Broadway. I read the New
York newspapers every day, but did not see a line in them about Saddler;
the news reached me from Dayton, Ohio, from Theodore Stearns,
conductor of “Apple Blossoms.” Silent about Saddler in death, the
newspapers had also been silent about him during his life.
But if the newspapers were silent about this extraordinary
musician, there was hardly an orchestra on earth, hardly a musical comedy
stage, surely no piano or phonograph, that was silent about him. Frank
Saddler’s countless compositions have been played for twenty years, and
yet, as far as I know, the name Saddler has never been signed to a score.
Saddler was known on Broadway as an orchestrator. Producers,
composers, stars came to him sometimes with only vague fragments of
tunes and Saddler made music out of them. For years there was hardly a

282
musical comedy success on Broadway the music of which Frank Saddler
had not fashioned into its finished form. Over the many hundreds of
musical shows he genially bent his ear for music.
“Call in Saddler!” was the cry whenever there was something
wrong with the music; and Saddler would set it right. You have heard it
said that the music of nearly all Broadway shows was alike. How could
they help being something alike when Saddler put together and in part
actually composed many of them?
Saddler worked himself to death; millions of notes streamed from
his untiring pen; but he never became a hack, never a mere blacksmith of
composition. It was rather the composers whose names appeared on some
of the scores who were usually the hacks. Some of them could no more
than drum out a limping melody on the piano with one finger, and it took
Saddler to change it into a lively hit. Ragtime he wrung into satin texture
and velvet measures.
“Here are a couple of bars; can you make a song of them?” men
with noted names have said to him in despair; and the grizzled warrior of
counterpoint always could. In his little office in the Lyric Theatre
Building, its window open to the glare and roar of Broadway, he would
work for fourteen, eighteen, twenty-four, and sometimes thirty-six hours at
a stretch, until he fell asleep before his clefs, but no one ever accused him
of declining into a blacksmith of composition; smith he was, but a
goldsmith.
Jerome Kern, whose magic musicianship is responsible for eighty-
nine successful musical comedies, on nearly all of which Saddler worked
with him, tells me this: “Frank Saddler was far more than an orchestrator
or arranger. He was one of the geniuses of the century. His death is a
tragedy. No one had the routine of the orchestra as greatly at his command
as Saddler. Where others could rely upon the entire symphony orchestra
for their effects Saddler was usually restricted to the much smaller theatre
orchestra of twenty-eight instruments at most. But his most amazing
resourcefulness enabled him to get the tone and color effects he wanted.
Working alone, and unaided by propaganda, he improved the standards of
theatre musicians by five-hundred per cent. Finding the second violins
inactive and playing lethargically, a bugbear to him for years, he removed
them from his orchestras. Finding the French horns blowing two or three
notes at long intervals, he eliminated them or else made them play. He
drove unaccomplished musicians out of his orchestras by piling on work

283
that only the accomplished could perform. Foreign composers,
accustomed to composing for large orchestras, were at a loss how to gain
their effects when they reached Broadway, and Saddler showed them how.
It is a matter of record that one year he orchestrated every show produced
on Broadway.”
It was a significant tribute to Frank Saddler that so eminent a
composer as Jerome Kern should have intrusted [sic] to him the scoring of
his creative labors. The artistic alliance between these two men goes down
as of the fine phenomena of musical history in America.
It was Saddler who applied the art of chamber music to the theatre
and made possible the intimate musical comedy form which recently
began to flourish. This opened the stage-doors to comediennes who could
act but could not sing: the orchestras of these intimate productions gave
support to the voice without drowning it. The Saddler orchestrations were
subtle and beguiling, and intriguing lace-work; he could embroider a
commonplace theme into rare distinction. For the Jerome Kerns and Fritz
Kreislers are not often to be found on Broadway, and every man with a
tune clamored at Saddler’s door.
Charles Miller, editor for T. B. Harms & Francis, Day & Hunter,
the New York music publishers, declares that Saddler’s orchestrations
practically revolutionized the ensemble of the present-day theatre
orchestra. He says: “Frank Saddler was the presiding genius of the theater
orchestra. He was an innovator and had the courage of his convictions to
carry out his ideas to a practical conclusion. He met the economic
conditions of the times and created startling and colorful orchestral effects
with a limited number of musicians.
His use of novel combinations of instruments has had a far-
reaching effect on the ensemble of the average American theater orchestra
We will long remember his little “tricks” with the trumpets (over which he
used to chuckle at rehearsals), the “feathery” effects with the two flutes,
and the “silky” tone of the viola parts.
Aside from his profound musical knowledge, Frank Saddler was beloved
by all who knew him. his place will be hard to fill and the theater has lost
one of its most refining influences.”
Years ago Henry W. Savage put on a musical production. Its title
has long since been forgotten. In it was a song called “Dearie,” but that
name has not been forgotten. “Dearie” was so bad that it was ordered
killed at the close of the opening performance. A few nights later “Dearie”

284
was reinserted without Mr. Savage’s knowledge or consent. This time it
stopped the show: encore after encore was demanded. It became the most
popular song of its time; the furor it caused had probably never been
surpassed. It was Saddler’s orchestration that saved “Dearie” and made it
live; he had dressed it in new and fascinating garments. He did that for
countless songs, for innumerable overtures and incidental passages.
For years Frank Saddler was on the verge of stealing time from his
incessant labors for the Shuberts, Comstock and Gest, George Cohan,
Colonel Savage, C. B. Dillingham, Mr. Ziegfeld, and Klaw and Erlanger
to compose a musical show of his own. Tucked away in his genius were
orchestral effects that he had never used. He was saving them for the work
that was to bear his name. I have heard him play golden fragments of what
he meant some day to write, have sat with him in his manuscript-littered
office and in his hillside home at Foggintown, near Brewster, Putnam
County, New York, while he recounted his plans and dreams.
“In three more weeks there will be a let-up in my work, and I’ll be ready
to start,” he would say. But no let-up ever came; always there were more
producers waiting at his doors than he could serve; he grew old making
music out of measures of others; and he died before he could say his own
musical say.
And the charming sameness of some of Broadway’s music will no
longer be noted, for Frank Saddler is no more.
20

Fuessle may have known Saddler for over fifteen years, since he seems to have recalled
the anecdote about the song “Dearie” as if he experienced it first-hand. Written by Clare
Kummer, the song was introduced by Sallie Fisher in Charles Dillingham’s production of
Sergeant Brue, which played at the Knickerbocker Theatre in 1905.
21
If his recollection is
true, it shows how early Saddler had established himself among the top ranks in the field

20
Fuessle, “Broadway’s King of Counterpoint.”
21
The New York Times review of Sergeant Brue made no mention of “Dearie,” corroborating Fuessle’s
account that it gained no immediate attention. The fact that it subsequently became a major hit is borne out
by the number of recordings made of it, including a parody version by Billy Murray. Richard Norton gives
Blanche Ring as the singer who introduced “Dearie,” however the cover of the sheet music states “As Sung
by Miss Sallie Fisher” of the Frank Daniel’s Company.” Clare Kummer, “Dearie,” Jos. W. Stern & Co.,
1905. Norton, A Chronology of American Theater, 1:798.

285
of orchestration in New York. By the same token, the extraordinary statement made by
Gordon Whyte that Saddler scored nineteen shows in his final year of life seems more
plausible when we consider that he could have been asked to score individual numbers
for that many shows. His outstanding reputation as a “doctor” of musical numbers would
have brought to his office the many producers mentioned by Fuessle, producers seeking
solutions to songs and arrangements for large production pieces that were not working for
one reason of another and into which much time and money had already been invested.
In his appreciation, Fuessle also describes Saddler’s work as an impediment to his
own creative aspirations as an opera composer. The image of the Broadway arranger,
classically trained, who was over-burdened with orchestration assignments and thereby
frustrated in his desire to compose music for the concert stage or opera, was certainly
applicable to both Saddler and Robert Russell Bennett, Saddler’s successor as Kern’s
exclusive arranger. While Bennett was far more prolific, Saddler did compose
occasionally during his years as a working orchestrator. The Central New York Music
Association’s annual festival featured an “American Night” program with music from
Victor Herbert’s Natoma, Walter Damrosch’s Cyrano and an aria by Frank Saddler, “The
Birth of Song.”
22
Performed by mezzo-soprano Genevieve Finlay Stewart, the aria, set to
words by Edward Freiberger (after Jean Paul), was considered “an unusually appealing
work” by the Post-Standard in Syracuse.
23

22
Information about this festival can be found in its “Official Program,” which reads on the cover: “Music
Festival, The New Arena, Syracuse, N. Y., Nineteen Thirteen, Auspices of Central New York Music
Festival Association.”
23
The Post-Standard, Syracuse, New York, May 6, 1913.

286
Through correspondence and the testimony of friends, we know that Saddler was
working on a one-act opera during the final years of his life. Although none of the music
has survived, he wrote about his intentions in some detail in his letters to Kern. He
confided in Kern not only his ambitions (which included a production at the Metropolitan
Opera House), but his struggles in developing the characters, the scenario, the musical
themes, musical expression, even the title. He felt comfortable being candid with Kern
about his uncertainties, both technical and creative:
As regards the little story for the Metropolitan, I may say that in
pursuiance [sic] of your suggestion as to the closing scene, I have given it
much thought, and consequently wouldn’t like to have you think I have
decided hastily, or carelessly. In the first place I have brought back the
Grinder, and the Mother and the Son, but they would of their own account
do nothing for me, not say a word, only stand and grin at each other. After
much thought I have attributed this to a lack of technique on my part. Had
I the technique I could force them to do or say something proper and
acceptable to the audience. After more deep thinking, I made up my mind
that I could never achieve this technique. This meant one of two things:
either to give up this sort of dramatic composition or do it without the
more refined technique.
24

On another occasion he felt emboldened by having some time on his hands in
Brewster, and yet still wrote about composing with some self-conscious reflection on the
quality of the outcome, perhaps born out of his having spent decades without exercising
his own compositional voice: “I am going to listen hard for the sounds and themes that
will tell the story of the Soldier, and his Mother and the Grinder and the little Bare-foot

24
Letter to Jerome Kern dated “May the Tuesdayeth 1919,” Jerome Kern Collection, “Jerome Kern
Collection additions: Frank Saddler materials,” Library of Congress.

287
boy, speak my own musical speech as God has given me the understanding to speak, and
then the musical world will soon tell me whether I have spoken wisely, or am only a
stuttering ass.”
25
And then, he questioned the absence of a villain in his plot, which
forced him to rely entirely on sounds bereft of darkness and angst: “What a relief it would
be to be able to hurl in some terrific runs for Contra Bass, and some smashing
dissonances for Brass, but instead I will be compelled to try, if it lies within my powers,
to run the gamut of healthy human emotions, from the fundamental pedal tones of the
Grinder, through the rich diapason of mother love, the gentle fantastic “mezzo” of the
soldier boy, to the happy, bubbling heights of the Fisher lad, all on the left hand side of
the decimal point!!!!! -----Some undertaking!!!!” Having scored thousands of measures
of light music in his career, Saddler naturally gravitated toward the sounds and
techniques within his grasp, and yet he still sought to commiserate with Kern about the
desire to write music with darker themes and harmonies:
In order to give a little relief I have thought that if during one of the scenes
between the Grinder and the Fisher lad, I could ring in a ghost story, I
could at least have a bit of a chance to offset the inevitable smoother
harmonies that must accompany my characters by a little “shivery” music.
You know yourself have much fun it is, after you have composed a
lot of love songs in a show, and some dance tunes and then get a whack at
a set of lyrics like “Blood, Blood, Blood” or a semi-villainous number like
“Sir Galahad” or the “Cave Man” number and can let yourself loose with
all the funny rhythms and odd harmonies that your heart may desire.
Of course the ghost number would have to be rung in in a perfectly
plausible way, and I am not sure that I am going to attempt it, but I am
beginning to have a fear that I shall be too “sugary” and will lack the
“acid” that is necessarily a part of every work.

25
Ibid.

288
These were the few examples of Kern’s “shivery” music that Saddler could call to mind
in 1919, and surely Saddler would have known them all. Reading this from the
perspective of Kern’s work up to 1919, it would seem as though Saddler was projecting
his desire to write dramatic music onto his friend, who was largely content to compose
charming light music. And yet, these words seem insightful to the point of being
prophetic when viewed in light of the fact that in 1927, a mere eight years later, Kern
would compose Show Boat—the darkest work of American musical theatre to be created
for Broadway until Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was produced eight years later in 1935.
Because the manuscript of Saddler’s unfinished opera has been lost along with all
of his other original music, it is impossible to know whether he was composing a work
that had any real merit or whether he was merely struggling to create his own music and
instead frequently retreated to the comfort of his mastery of orchestration and the
constant demand of new productions. It is possible that most of the creative energy
Saddler spent working on large-scale compositions was conceptual, something he merely
enjoyed talking and writing about. For example, Ira Gershwin recalled him saying that he
was working on a symphony based entirely on “Turkey in the Straw.”
26
After exerting
himself considerably in writing about his creative dilemma with his opera in a letter to
Kern, Saddler ended the correspondence on a cheerful note about returning to his routine:
“Will close now Jerry and get to work on a few of the Hippodrome Numbers, which of
course demand a regular UM-PAH. Very best regards to Mrs. Eva, and little Miss

26
Ira Gershwin wrote about his recollections of Saddler in a commentary that he included with his donation
of Saddler’s manuscript orchestration of George Gershwin’s “Love of a Wife” from La-La-Lucille! George
and Ira Gershwin Collection (Box 11), Library of Congress.

289
Elizabeth Jane and to yourself. Am staying at the farm all next week to try to get ahead
on the Hippodrome “fortissimi.” [signed] Sincerely, F.$.”
27

One of the most important features of Fuessle’s article is the substantial quotation
by Jerome Kern. Having worked so closely with Saddler over nine years on at least thirty
musical shows, Kern was not only an authority on the subject of orchestration for
Broadway, but also on Saddler’s achievement. But when Kern states that “no one had the
routine of the orchestra as greatly at his command as Saddler,” we must take this to mean
specifically the routine of the theatre orchestras of Broadway rather than the orchestra at
large. At the same time, Kern made perhaps the most salient statement about Saddler’s
impact on the art of arranging for the theatre when he wrote that “[f]oreign composers,
accustomed to composing for large orchestras, were at a loss how to gain their effects
when they reached Broadway, and Saddler showed them how.” Kern was keenly aware in
1921 not only of how Saddler had guided the transformation of the Broadway theatre
orchestra through the shift from European operetta before World War I to the American
musical comedy with its more economical orchestral design, but then, in turn, how
European composers who were determined to once again seek their fortunes on
Broadway needed to modify their sound after the conflict had ended. The list of European
composers who were working on Broadway between 1919 and 1921 included Victor
Jacobi (The Half Moon), Percy Fletcher (Mecca), Frederick Norton (Chu Chin Chow),
Charles Cuvillier (Afgar), Henri Février (Aphrodite), Armand Vecsey (The Rose of

27
The insignia that Saddler often used was his initials with a slash through the S representing a G-clef. The
dollar sign given here is a close approximation and shows that he used the insignia on this letter.

290
China), Efrem Zimbalist, Sr. (Honeydew), Fritz Kreisler (Apple Blossoms), André
Messager (Monsieur Beaucaire). One may well suspect that European light opera
composers at work during this same period, who were themselves Broadway veterans—
Victor Herbert (The Girl in the Spotlight), Rudolf Friml (The Little Whopper), Ivan
Caryll (Kissing Time), Sigmund Romberg (The Magic Melody)—also looked to Saddler’s
extraordinary effectiveness in his use of small ensembles for ideas on how to maximize
their sound with the post-war Broadway pit orchestra.
28
Kern’s explicit description of
how Saddler improved the standards of the Broadway orchestra by reorganizing the
forces and asking more of the musicians shows Saddler’s enormous influence upon the
overall sound of the Broadway show. Saddler’s favoring of the violas (which he split into
two parts and gave the work of the second violins) and bassoons (which he substituted for
the horns) shows his preference for two instruments that he played in his youth. Kern’s
description of the arranger’s reorganization of the string section is also reminiscent of
Leonard Bernstein’s scoring of West Side Story without violas in order to work around
the union rules at the Winter Garden Theatre that forced the production to use inferior
house players.
29
In the case of Saddler, however, the string section modifications favored
the violas by dividing the section and giving them more work. Still, both Bernstein (with
orchestrators Sid Ramin and Irving Kostal) and Saddler were determined to use
orchestration to instill discipline in their respective ensembles.
Fuessle’s decision to quote Charles Miller—whom the author refers to as an

28
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 2:176-237.
29
Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 270.

291
editor at T. B. Harms, but who was in fact the brilliant young head of the arranging
department—reflected his interest in giving testimonials from the most credible sources
in the field.
30
Miller, like Kern, was able to give practical examples with some technical
language without descending into insider shop talk, giving his statement an authenticity
that would have been difficult to garner with some of Saddler’s other well-known
colleagues. He also echoed many of Kern’s observations with regard to Saddler’s
innovative approach to the orchestra and its lasting impact on the Broadway sound. While
Saddler’s ideas were certainly idiosyncratic and reflected his musical individuality,
Miller suggests that his innovations, born to some extent of necessity, were far more than
mere novelties, but instead were central to the modernization of the Broadway orchestra.
This fact is borne out to some extent by Max Steiner, who in an unpublished
autobiography discussed his experiences as a young arranger with Saddler in the 1910s,
stated that “[Saddler’s] arrangement we use today even in the big orchestras” in
Hollywood, where “we follow the same combination although we may have 16 violins
and 6 violas, 6 cellos, etc., and sometime no horns at all.”
31
Also noteworthy, especially
when the claim is so subjective, is that both Miller and Kern open their testimonials with
powerful statements about Saddler’s “genius.” Despite the seeming ease with which this
assessment can be given, it is likely that these men did not use the word carelessly. It is
possible that the term was merited in this case precisely because of the lack of
recognition that Saddler received in his lifetime relative to the significance of his

30
Philharmonic Chamber Soloists, Strings in Swingtime, biography of Charles Miller by Eric Davis, Bridge
9439, CD.
31
Autobiography of Max Steiner, unpublished autobiography, private collection, 84.

292
achievement and its wide-ranging impact on the field of Broadway theatre music.
As one would expect, letters from Saddler to Kern often involved details about
musical shows on which they were working. In a letter sent mid-May 1919, just after the
opening of She’s a Good Fellow at the Globe Theatre, he spent some time defending
book-writer Anne Caldwell, whose effort had suffered some bruising criticism in the
papers.
32
While Heywood Broun of the New York Tribune had called it the “silliest plot
of the season” and John Corbin wrote that the book “has few virtues beyond the basic
idea,” both also described numerous opportunities for hilarity in the acting afforded by
the then shopworn conceit of having a young man don female attire in order to gain entry
to a boarding school and be close to the girl he loves.
33
Saddler attacked the “narrow
gauge” of these and other critics, who missed the point that cross-dressing characters are
“old as the hills” and thus only to be viewed as hackneyed to the extent that they are
poorly handled. And, he noted that in their rush to judge they were “not able to see what
wonders she has done with a threadbare plot,” also missing “the brightness and human
qualities, and the cleanliness of [Caldwell’s] book.” Saddler’s vigorous, and yet subtle,
defense of the script is indicative of his long experience in the theatre, the arranger
having attended hundreds of shows on Broadway over two decades, thus enabling him to
understand just how far the musical comedy had come, especially since the beginning of
World War I and the rise of American composers and sophisticated book musicals.
Saddler also gives high praise to Kern’s opening chorus (“Faith, Hope, and

32
Jerome Kern Collection, “Jerome Kern Collection additions: Frank Saddler materials,” Library of
Congress.
33
Heywood Broun, “‘She’s a Good Fellow’ Is New Musical Show at the Globe,” The New York Tribune,
May 6, 1919, 11; John Corbin, “Joseph Santley, Heroine” The New York Times May 6, 1919, 16.

293
Charity”), commenting that “in all the things that have been done by Victor the fatuous,
and Ivan the perspiring to open their acts or suggest color or atmosphere, nothing has
been done which even remotely approaches your opening of Act II.”
34
Unfortunately, we
may never know to what extent Saddler’s praise was a fair and insightful evaluation of
Kern’s music, comparatively speaking, since the piano-vocal and orchestral scores for
this number have been lost. Caryll and Herbert came in for more biting criticism by
Saddler in another letter, where he commented that one of Caryll’s finales “might just as
well have been written on an adding machine,” and that he “missed seeing [Herbert’s]
The Velvet Lady, and it is probably just as well, for if Mrs. Eva Kern ‘busted’ a perfectly
good phonograf [sic] record on account of ONE number, what would I have done had I
been forced to listen to the WHOLE SCORE?!!!?” These derogatory remarks about two
of the leading figures on Broadway since the turn of the century—Victor Herbert and
Ivan Caryll—show the extent to which Kern had successfully established a new
American musical idiom for Broadway by 1919, rendering these elder statesmen
comparatively outmoded and obsolete, at least in Saddler’s estimation. At the same time,
Saddler’s comments about Herbert were also directly the result of an incident that had
occurred at the rehearsals for Miss 1917, during which Kern had an open confrontation
with Herbert that devolved into a shouting match in the theatre.
35
The incident ended with
Kern storming out and leaving the production over his frustration with the decision by
producer Charles Dillingham to use Herbert’s “Kiss Me Again” over his “They Didn’t

34
Jerome Kern Collection, “Jerome Kern Collection additions: Frank Saddler materials,” Library of
Congress.
35
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 157.

294
Believe Me” in a scene with Vivienne Segal. Saddler naturally sided with Kern in the
matter and knew that he and his wife would enjoy reading these insults hurled at Herbert
and his music. This also explains why we find so many pejorative comments about
Dillingham and the Hippodrome shows in these letters, since Kern probably continued to
harbor resentment toward him and yet Saddler needed this work to pay the bills.
Arthur Lange, who became a dance-band leader in the 1920s and then worked
extensively in Hollywood as a music director in the 1930s, began his career as a young
man working at Charles K. Harris Music, J. W. Stern Company, and other music
publishers in New York. He gave a detailed narrative of his encounters with Frank
Saddler in a larger serialized memoire called “I Grew Up on Tin Pan Alley,” published in
the trade journal Keynote in 1941. One anecdote in particular shows how Saddler was
regarded as both an arbiter of quality and a congenial mentor in the field of musical
arranging at that time.
The professional department of the J. W. Stern Company occupied
the entire fourth floor of the new building. The department consisted of a
large reception room and five adjacent piano rehearsal rooms. The
personnel included Eddie Ross, professional manager, George W.
Reynolds, plugger, and five piano players, namely, Tom Kelly, Joe Macy,
Herman Wade, myself, and Harry Israel, who was also in charge of
phonograph exploitation. Besides playing piano, it was also my job to
preside over the arranging activities connected with the professional
department, such as, making transpositions of orchestrations, piano parts,
quartet arrangements, and any other type of special arrangements required
by singers, dancers, and vaudeville acts of all descriptions. Naturally, I felt
rather important, this being my first experience in an executive position. In
reality, it was more of a bookkeeping than an arranging job. However I
also made transpositions, but owing to other activities, it was impossible
for me to do all the work myself, so I farmed out most of it to free-lance
copyists and arrangers.

295
Arranging for publication was out of my domain. This was
somewhat of a disappointment to me, but I soon realized that it would be
rather presumptious [sic] on my part to expect a big publishing house to
entrust me with such an important work. However it wasn’t long before I
had a chance at arranging for print…
Now songwriters make it a point to try out their new brain-storms
on the professional staff just to get a reaction. And so it was that Tom
Kelly, one of our piano players, wrote a new song, and not being as yet a
songwriter, Tom played it over for me in secret. Incidentally, Tom was
considered one of the top-ranking piano players on his time, being one of
the first exponents of the “left-hand tenths” so common today. The title of
his song was “I Like a Little Lovin’ Now and Then” with lyric Earl C.
Jones, a recognized writer. Naturally, I became excited and eager to try
my hand at arranging it.
“Do you want me to take it down?” I asked.
“Sure,” he answered, jumping at the suggestion.
I got pencil and music paper and took it down. Then I sat down at
the piano and played it, approximating the harmonies Tom had played, but
interpolating a few of my own ideas.
“That’s great!” Tom exclaimed. “Say! Why don’t you make a
piano arrangement of it just the way you played it?”
Okay, I’ll try, “ I answered, happy for the chance.
“But be sure that it’ll be easy to play,” he warned, “You know—so
that little Susie Glutz can play it.”
“Oh I know it’s got to be easy to play,” I agreed, “but there are a
few new tricks you played that ought to go into the arrangement and
they’re not exactly easy to play.”
“You better leave them out,” Tom suggested.
“But,” I interrupted, “the tricks are part of the song and if I leave
them out, it won’t be the same song.”
This seemed to have won Tom over to my way of thinking.
“Alright then,” he answered, “see what you can do with it. We can
always change it.”
Thus the struggle with my first print arrangement began.
It was several days before I had it the way I wanted it. However by
this time the whole professional staff had heard the song and thought it
was a sure-fire hit. Naturally, my arrangement became the object of great
interest and I was fortunate in that it passed muster right off the bat.

296
Everyone, including Eddie Ross (who couldn’t read a note) thought it was
great and that it should be printed. The only thing that stood in the way of
this was the fact that the song was still to be accepted by the firm. In the
meantime, I had busied myself with an attempt at the orchestration—on
speculation of course. I realized that it had to be good and very
professional; and that it had to please Tom s well as everybody else. And
so I would buttonhole Tom every time I got an idea for a cello part or a
flute part. We would play them over on the piano, Tom playing the piano
part while I would play various other parts in duet fashion. Unconsciously
I was developing the art of salesmanship, so necessary in the song game.
And by the time I had finished the arrangement, the song had been
accepted and I had everybody sold on the idea that it was “the greatest
arrangement they ever heard.”
But when J. W. Stern heard about my arrangement, he was very
skeptical, thinking that the boys in the professional department had gone
overboard in their enthusiasm. Regardless of Eddie Ross’ and Tom
Kelly’s recommendation, he insisted that I take the arrangement to Frank
Saddler for appraisal. If Saddler okayed it, it would be published.
When I was told of this, my heart sank. “Surely Saddler would not
approve of some of the things I did,” was my thought. Nevertheless, there
was nothing else for me to do but follow orders. I distinctly remember
shivering in my boots as I walked into Saddler’s office, in a building at
Forty-eighth and Broadway directly above T. B. Harms Publishing
Company.
As I walked in, he was seated at his specially-constructed music-
writing desk, busily writing.
Presently he looked up.
“Oh!” he exclaimed in surprise as if suddenly coming out of a
dream, “Are you from J. W. Stern with an arrangement I’m supposed to
look over?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Well, just leave it and come back tomorrow.”
I handed it to him and started to go.
“You’re not by any chance the young man who made this
arrangement?”
The question took me by surprise.
“Yes, I am.”
He smiled.

297
“And your name is--?”
“Arthur Lange,” I answered.
“Hm,” he commented, “so you’re the young man Joe told me about
over the phone.” Then he laughed. “I mistook you for an errand boy—sit
down—I’ll look it over right away.”
With this he unrolled the orchestration and spread it out before
him.
“Where is the score?” he asked.
“Oh, I didn’t score it.”
He frowned, reprimanding me with his eyes.
“Umm—and why didn’t you score it?”
“Well—because—I had it all worked out in my mind, and,—I
didn’t think it necessary to write it out in score form.”
There was a moment of silence.
“That’s a bad practice,” he finally said, “particularly for anyone
who wants to do fine work. In the future I advise you to score everything,
and not rely on your memory.”
Then he carefully examined the orchestration, comparing the
various parts. Occasionally he would comment on something I had done
and voice his approval. He became warm and friendly, which put me
completely at ease; and soon I was discussing the orchestration with him
very freely. He pointed out several things which he said were not over-
important, but that he would have done differently. He advised me not to
make changes simply because he had suggested them, and that in the
main, the orchestration was very good and publishable just as it stood.
However, he recommended changing the second violin part.
“Try and avoid the open G-string when writing double-stop after
beats, rather use a higher inversion of the same chord. You’ find it sounds
much better.”
Thank you very much, Mr. Saddler.” I said, “Should I tell Mr.
Stern that you recommend publishing my orchestration?”
“I think I’d better call him myself,” he suggested.
I was very happy and elated.
Again thanking Saddler for his advice, I gather up the orchestration
and hurried back to my job, walking on air.
And so it was that in 1907 my first orchestration was published.
Fortunately for me, the song became a hit, thus gaining for me the
confidence of my employers.

298
However, at the time, I did not appreciate the wisdom of Saddler’s
suggestions about the second violin part, so—I didn’t change it.
36

Lange’s narrative paints a portrait of Saddler as a kind, thoughtful man who nonetheless
demanded the highest professional standards of quality, even with a young man of
eighteen. Furthermore, it demonstrates how Saddler had a natural interest in and ability to
teach musicians with less experience, which led him to tutor aspiring arrangers such as
Maurice DePackh and Steven Jones.
It is an established fact that Maurice DePackh was Saddler’s student and assistant,
as verified by the accounts of several men who knew them both at T. B. Harms (such as
Max Steiner and Robert Russell Bennett) and by DePackh’s own reference to Saddler as
one of his teachers in the ASCAP Biographical Dictionary.
37
In a letter accompanying his
donation of several Saddler orchestrations of George Gershwin songs to the Library of
Congress, Ira Gershwin stated that “DePackh, who had studied with Frank Saddler, was
occasionally called on by Saddler when the latter was rushed.”
38
DePackh had worked on
several Broadway shows in the 1920s and later in Hollywood as an arranger. In 1929, he
established an orchestra dedicated to performing the music of the Broadway theatre
orchestra of the 1910s, a pioneering effort to rescue a musical style that had only recently
passed out of fashion. At the outset of this project, he wrote a poignant letter to the The
New York Times informing the public of his efforts to preserve the style of his mentor.

36
Lange, “I Grew Up in Tin Pan Alley,” Chapter Five, 6-7.
37
The Lynn Farnol Group, eds., The ASCAP Biographical Dictionary of Composers, Authors, and
Publishers (New York: The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, 1966), 168.
38
Letter included with DePackh’s arrangement of “Tonight’s the Night” from Show Girl, George and Ira
Gershwin Collection (Box 35), Library of Congress.

299
It is a pity that in the maelstrom of this day such men as Franz Stich and
Frank Saddler should be forgotten, their work scattered to the winds and
they themselves buried under the ashes of materialism. It would take too
much space to tell of the experiences of my master, Frank Saddler, which
finally brought him to the toils of a great business, in which he occupied a
unique position. Since death in 1921, he has never quite been replaced.
Doctor to hundreds of musical shows, friend and co-worker of
such composers as Jerome Kern, Louis Hirsch and Irving Berlin, he
witnessed the débuts of nearly all the young composers on Broadway
today. George Gershwin gratefully recalls the days when, as a very young
man, he played his early efforts for the grand old sage of Broadway, and
got help and advice to speed him on his way.
It was during the war, when Europe ceased to supply us with the
greater part of our light music, that Jerome Kern came to the fore, creating
a new and individual style of musical entertainment. Saddler worked with
Kern to create in the orchestra a fitting accompaniment. Many will
remember the charming and delightful scores of the Princess Theatre
shows, with their lilting melodies.
Because of the lack of space in the tiny Princess Theatre, it became
necessary to reduce the size of the orchestra. For “Nobody Home,” the
first of the series, only seventeen musicians were used. In those days
before Arden and Ohman, Whiteman and Lopez, saxophones and two
pianos, then new to the theatre orchestra, were included, with one man
doubling on several instruments. Saddler invented a number of strange
orchestral devices, which quite changed the contour of the music, giving it
a clear brilliance, without sacrificing the inherent refinements of Kern’s
melodies.
A year or so later a crusade was started by Paul Whiteman for
better dance music. Coming here from the Pacific Coast, he took the
country by storm, leaving in his wake the debris of Dixie bands and like
atrocities, which fed the populace with ear-splitting din through the early
part of the war. For years jazz bands and theatre orchestras went their
divers ways, borrowing from each other, but never for an instant crossing
paths. Then George Gershwin swept all musical inhibitions aside with his
“Rhapsody in Blue.” People commenced to show a keener appreciation of
the possibilities contained in the rough exterior of the jazz band.
The noise and blatancy, the monotony caused by the homogenous
quality of the saxophone and overworked brasses, the omission of

300
sufficient stringed instruments to accompany voices; all these, together
with the noisy rhythm of the banjo, did not tend to charm the hearer. Many
favored the change, and far be it from the writer to consider himself arbiter
of public taste.
George Gershwin has long since turned his back on the hostilities,
and is invading the symphonic field with his quaint harmonies and his use
of the idiom of Broadway. In none of his musical comedies did he employ
saxophones or banjos, preferring the straight orchestra, with the touch of
Arden and Ohman’s two-piano improvisations. With the exception of
Vincent Youmans, all the other young composers have deserted the ranks
of orthodoxy as we knew it. Sadness filled his many admirers as the saw
Frank Saddler’s life work crumble to ruin.
A few musicians to whom I imparted my story suggested that I
form an organization to keep up the ideals of the master to carry on and
spread my belief in the theatre orchestra as he developed it. We started
with eleven men, and as no literature had been written for the peculiar
combination of instruments I had at my disposal, William Spielter, my co-
worker in the cause, and I set out to create one. Not content to keep the
results of our experience to ourselves, we gave a concert last Spring at
Chalif Hall of the De Packh Symphonic Ensemble. Then the Shuberts saw
the value of the new orchestral combination, and at their request I
organized a similar group to play with “White Lilacs.”
Now, with an ensemble grown to thirty men, we are on the eve of
giving at Jolson’s Theatre our first concert this season. We are
endeavoring to inculcate into that friendless orphan, the theatre orchestra,
some spirit of artistic worth.
39

DePackh’s inclusion of the name Franz Stich at the beginning of his letter is strange, both
because he gives the wrong first name for Saddler’s teacher in Munich (Joseph Stich) and
also because it is thoroughly unclear, even knowing this fact, what exactly the American
public was missing by not knowing his name or his work. We can glean from the mention
of Stich that DePackh was undoubtedly a “disciple” of Saddler, as George Ferencz has

39
This letter is dated January 28, 1929. Maurice DePackh, “The Dramatic Mailbag,” The New York Times,
February 3, 1929, 108.

301
called him in his book on Robert Russell Bennett.
40
DePackh’s reference to Stich shows
that the young musician studied the “Wagner-Stich System of Harmony” while Saddler
was also teaching him the craft of orchestration, thereby leading the young arranger to
see himself in a tradition that could be traced back to Germany.
In attempting to persuade his reader of the legitimacy of his effort to revive a
neglected musical tradition, DePackh’s letter gives a first-hand account of the
transformation of the theatre orchestra from a string-based ragtime ensemble of the 1910s
to the wind- and piano-based jazz ensemble of the 1920s. From the perspective of
someone profoundly knowledgeable and intimately aware of the subtle changes in styles
on Broadway during the 1910s and 1920s, his dissatisfaction with the “noise and
blatancy” of the modern theatre orchestra shows that the sound of Broadway had changed
significantly and permanently with the rise in popularity of the dance bands in New York.
However, by attributing the sound of the ragtime orchestra entirely to Saddler, DePackh
misses the point that songwriting styles had also changed between 1915 and 1929, and
these changes required new orchestral sounds. His effort to preserve the orchestral sound
developed by Saddler in the previous decade was not only a touching tribute to his
master, but a legitimate attempt (albeit futile) to revive a defunct musical style at a time
when many musicians could still recall the old practice that had recently fallen out of
fashion. And yet, the most successful musicians in American popular music, Jerome Kern
and Irving Berlin among them, did not look back to the past with nostalgia, but rather

40
Bennett, “The Broadway Sound,” 66.

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kept pace with the changes and stayed ahead of them. DePackh’s effort to preserve
Saddler’s orchestral style of the 1910s reminds us that, while his death certainly marked a
shift in the sound of the Broadway orchestra, we do not know if he would have remained
a steadfast conservator of the old tradition he helped to create or if he would have
continued to advance the new Broadway sound of the 1920s. Though he might have
brought traditional sensibility to Gershwin’s Oh, Kay! and Kern’s Show Boat had he
worked on those shows, one may also suspect from his penchant for innovation and
fascination with film music that he would have remained at the forefront of American
popular music throughout its radical transformation over the course of the next two
decades after his death.
Robert Russell Bennett was hired at T. B. Harms shortly after Saddler died.
41

Having known Saddler’s work from going to Kern’s shows on Broadway, Bennett
retained an awareness of his predecessor’s pivotal contribution to his field throughout his
lifetime. In his essay “Orchestration for Theatre and Dance Music,” Bennett gave what is
surely the most salient and significant assessment of Saddler’s contribution to the art of
orchestration for Broadway in a single concise statement.
Frank Saddler wrote no operettas of his own. He was an orchestrator,
versatile and inventive, with a fine ear for every novel effect of the great
writers of symphonic music and a genius for adapting their tricks to the
current musical-comedy tunes. His arrangements fairly sparkled and a
melody of no distinction whatsoever became alluring in his
interpretation.
42

41
In his autobiography, Bennett described being hired by Max Dreyfus, who gave him the job of scoring
the musical Daffy Dill in 1922 with music by Vincent Youmans early in his tenure. He said, “By that time,
however, [Saddler] had died of a heart attack and most of the show music was being arranged by Maurice
De Packh and Stephen O. Jones.” Bennett, “The Broadway Sound,” 65-66.
42
Ibid., 287.

303

Here Bennett gives a description of the special qualities of Saddler’s arrangements that
echoes the comments of so many specialists in the field who reveled in his ability to
devise appealing instrumental combinations. Bennett also credited Saddler with
engineering a successful reduction of forces in the Broadway orchestra without a loss of
quality: “He was a champion of the small orchestras, filling up his refrain with the
charming tricks of muted brass, unexpected bass progressions, pizzicato effects, duets for
two violins against the melody in the lower instruments and many other devices.”
43
Given
his experience and singular position in the field of musical theatre arranging, Saddler
found in Bennett one of his most credible advocates. Because he was another young
arranger who openly admired Saddler and was, subsequently, the only musician capable
of satisfying Kern’s high requirements of an orchestrator, it might be tempting to view
Bennett as one of the elder musician’s students, like DePackh and Jones. In his well-
researched and detailed book The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows, Jonas Westover
refers to Saddler’s “mentorship” of Robert Russell Bennett as one of the key factors that
cemented his legacy as “the most important person in the development of Broadway
orchestration.”
44
But this assessment overstates both the nature of their relationship and
the degree to which Bennett’s own outstanding career reflects directly upon Saddler’s.
Bennett got his chops as an orchestrator doing stock arrangements, as Saddler did, and
was promoted at T. B. Harms to chief orchestrator by Max Dreyfus only after Saddler’s

43
Ibid.
44
Westover, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows, 21.

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death.
45
It is well known that he was the only orchestrator at Harms apart from Saddler
who was able to work with Kern on an ongoing basis, but there is no indication that
Bennett ever worked closely with Saddler or knew him personally. Most orchestrators at
the time admired Saddler, some to the point of veneration, but very few could be
considered his student.
Perhaps the most important musician to work directly with Saddler was Max
Steiner, largely known for his role in establishing the film score as a central component
of the cinematic experience. In an unpublished autobiography, Steiner described Saddler
in his office and acknowledged the arranger’s influence upon him succinctly: “I learned
American orchestration from him”; and then, he added “[i]n Austria we had orchestrated
entirely different from over here.”
46
Steiner’s assessment is so important because, more
than any other musician, in evaluating Saddler’s contribution to his own craft, he also
sums up the arranger’s contribution to American popular music, which is especially
valuable in light of his unique perspective as a young European prodigy trained in the
Viennese theatre tradition and working on Broadway in his teens. While Steiner also
worked closely with Victor Herbert over a period of eight years, he attributed his
knowledge of American scoring of popular music to Saddler instead. This extraordinary
admission shows the extent to which Steiner understood how his own style of
orchestrating for Broadway musicals, which laid the foundation for his film-scoring
technique, was based more closely on Saddler’s work than on Herbert’s, suggesting that

45
Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music, 15, 25-26.
46
Steiner, unpublished autobiography, 84.

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the latter used an arranging style that still adhered to that of his European roots.
While aspiring young composers for Broadway were listening to and seeking
direction for their own Broadway show music in Kern’s melodies in the late 1910s, they
were also aware that the subtle art of Frank Saddler was an important component of the
new style. Richard Rodgers was careful to include Saddler in his lofty appraisal of Kern’s
role in his own development as a composer.
It was at the Standard [Theatre] that I saw my first Jerome Kern musical,
Very Good Eddie. In the cast were Georgie Mack (who had succeeded
Ernest Truex), Earl Benham (who later became a successful tailor), Ada
Lewis and Helen Raymond. They were all good, but it was the Kern score
that captivated me and made me a Kern worshipper. The sound of a
Jerome Kern tune was not ragtime; nor did it have any of the Middle
European inflections of Victor Herbert. It was all his own—the first truly
American theatre music—and it pointed the way I wanted to be led. On
Saturday afternoons I would take my allowance and get a seat in the
balcony or gallery of a subway circuit or Broadway theatre to see and hear
whatever musicals were being shown. If it was a Kern musical, I’d see it
over and over again. I must have seen Very Good Eddie at least a half
dozen times, and even lesser-known Kern, such as Have a Heart and Love
o’ Mike, enticed me back more than once.
Most of the successful early Kern shows, such as Very Good
Eddie, Oh, Boy!, Leave It to Jane, and Oh, Lady! Lady!!, were known as
Princess Theatre musicals, in honor of the tiny theatre where all but Leave
It to Jane first opened. Most of them were written in collaboration with
Guy Bolton (co-librettist) and P. G. Wodehouse (co-librettist and lyricist).
They were intimate and uncluttered and tried to deal in a humorous way
with modern, everyday characters. They were certainly different—and far
more appealing to me—from the overblown operettas, mostly imported,
that dominated the Broadway scene in the wake of The Merry Widow and
The Chocolate Soldier.
Kern’s orchestral arranger for most of these early shows was Frank
Sadler [sic]. Here again was something new. Sadler used comparatively
few musicians, and his work was contrapuntal and delicate, so that the
sound emanating from the orchestra pit was very much in the nature of

306
chamber music. The lyrics floated out with clarity, and there was good
humor as well as sentiment in the use of instruments. Actually, I was
watching and listening to the beginning of a new form of musical theatre
in this country. Somehow I knew it and wanted desperately to be a part of
it.
47

Though it is a gross misrepresentation of Kern’s role in Broadway’s history to call him
the composer of “the first truly American theatre music” and it is unfathomable why he
did not consider ragtime (or any other pre-WWI song style) to be American, Rodgers’
statement about the music of the Princess Theatre shows of 1915-1918 is nonetheless
significant because it reveals how influential Kern had become to a young generation of
aspiring Broadway composers by presenting them with an alternative style that
negotiated a middle ground between comic opera and Tin Pan Alley. This passage about
Kern’s influence on Rodgers’ own musical style is also particularly important in
evaluating Saddler’s role in the composer’s sound and style, since he seems to position
the orchestrator as a key figure in the “beginning of a new form of musical theatre in this
country.” The complementary interweaving of sophisticated light verse, elegant melodic
lines with a rhythmic and harmonic signature that was distinctly American, and an
orchestral sound that many of Saddler’s contemporaries recall as being clear, sweet,
interesting, colorful, and refined—these elements in combination pointed to a new
direction in musical theatre, which inspired Rodgers, Vincent Youmans, George
Gershwin, and others to compose sophisticated music for Broadway in the 1920s.

47
Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1975), 20.

307
George Gershwin worked with Saddler on several of his early shows and spoke
about the arranger with others who quoted him in print. The best-known and most-often
quoted comment about Saddler, crediting him as “the father of modern arranging,” was
included in Bernard Sobel’s 1931 book Burleycue about the history of burlesque in
America. Sobel must have gotten the statement directly from the composer himself:
Burlesque…gave us the father of modern arranging—Frank Saddler.
From a leader of a burlesque orchestra, he developed into a professional
arranger; did all the early works of Jerome Kern, Oh Boy [sic], and other
Princess Theatre hits. His method was a new one, different, started a new
school.
48

Saddler apparently had told Gershwin that he started his career as a music director in
burlesque, since his work in this field was not particularly distinguished, and since he
curtailed this early phase of his career in 1898, the year the composer was born. Of all the
things that Gershwin might have shared with Sobel on the subject of burlesque when
asked, he was reminded of a conversation he had with Saddler about his brief career
conducting burlesque in the 1890s and used the interview as an opportunity to make his
bold pronouncement about the arranger being the progenitor of “a new school” of
Broadway orchestration. Gershwin’s respect for and appreciation of Saddler is similarly
evident in Maurice DePackh’s description of his conversation in 1929 with Gershwin,
who “gratefully [recalled] the days when, as a young man, he played his early efforts for
the grand old sage of Broadway, and got help and advice to speed him on his way to
success.” Even after the composer’s rise to international fame as one of the leading

48
Bernard Sobel, Burleycue: An Underground History of Burlesque Days (New York: Farrar & Reinhart,
1931), 252.

308
figures on Broadway and in American concert music, he remembered, and in this context
memorialized, Saddler as one of his early influences. The fact that first George, and later
Ira, kept Saddler’s orchestrations of several unimportant and cut songs from his earliest
shows while most of the arrangements from his well-known musicals and greatest song
hits from the mid- to late 1920s were lost shows us just how valuable manuscripts of the
arranger’s work were to Broadway composers and arrangers. When Ira Gershwin gave
much of George’s and his manuscripts to the Library of Congress, he made sure to
identify the precious nature of the few Saddler scores he was donating in a letter to the
librarians. He also sought to explain his own personal experiences of Saddler, who by
1966 remained something of a legend among the veterans of Broadway.
Frank Saddler was the outstanding orchestrator of Broadway musicals for
many years. George, of course, having worked with him, knew him well.
On a rush job it was said that Saddler would always come through even if
it meant working steadily for 36 or even more hours without sleep.
I met him 3 or 4 times at the old Harms Publishing Company, in the
office at 62 W. 45th St. I recall him as a charming man, who usually wore
a black woolen shirt when he came from his home in the country. One
time he told me he was going to write a symphony based mainly on
“Turkey in the Straw.” Another time I was standing near when he and
Victor Herbert were having an unheated discussion about the use of
second violins in theatre musicals. It was too technical for me so Left no
impression as to whether they were arguing or agreeing.
This “Love of a Wife” orchestration is the only one I have from La-
La-Lucille. I once had several more that George had saved from that show
and from A Dangerous Maid, but 15 or more years ago when Maurice
DePackh came to see me (he was orchestrating Hollywood musicals) I
gave him half-a-dozen or so of Saddler’s arrangements.
49

49
George and Ira Gershwin Collection (Box 11), Library of Congress.

309
The description of Saddler at the offices of T. B. Harms, eschewing the de rigueur
business attire of the day, making quirky claims about his aspiration to compose a large-
scale orchestral work based on traditional music, is a rich anecdotal vignette. And when
the lyricist observed Saddler and Victor Herbert discussing the advantages and
disadvantages of a traditional instrumental format for strings versus Saddler’s innovative
set-up, he was privy to a conversation that would have historical importance, if only he
had understood its technical aspects well enough to pass them along. Still, the eyewitness
account that such a conversation took place without knowing its details is tantalizing, to
say the least. Three years later, Ira submitted a hand-written note with his donation of
Saddler’s arrangement of “On My Mind the Whole Night Long” from (George White’s)
Scandals of 1920 that reiterated his recollection of having given several Saddler scores
away around 1950 to some of the musicians who came to visit him at his Beverly Hills
home.
Incidentally, I’m quite sure this is the last of the Saddler orchestrations in
my files. I once (perhaps 15 years ago) had several other by him but gave
those away to various musicians (conductor Al Newman is one I recall)
who were delighted to have them.
50

While Gershwin was helping to preserve Saddler’s legacy by dispersing his scores
amongst some of the musicians who could best appreciate his special gifts as the founder
of the American school of theatre orchestration, it is unfortunate, at the same time, that he
did not merely loan these scores to his colleagues and instead ensure that they would be

50
George and Ira Gershwin Collection (Box 7), Library of Congress.

310
preserved in perpetuity with George’s other musical materials at the Library of Congress.
With such a small percentage of Saddler’s scores having survived, every additional
arrangement that surfaces could enrich our understanding of his art.
Isador Witmark, who gave Saddler his first job as an arranger in 1898,
remembered him forty years later as someone who ultimately rose to the top of his
profession and earned top dollar for his work.
51
He also attested to Saddler’s
innovativeness, writing that he “introduced an entirely new school of orchestration, in
fact he was the first modern in this field, and got some very striking effects,” which is
reminiscent of George Gershwin’s statement about Saddler’s contribution in 1931. In
describing Saddler as “the first modern,” Witmark was recognizing him as a pioneer in a
tradition of orchestration that led directly to work of Robert Russell Bennett, Maurice
DePackh, Hans Spialek, and the orchestrators who helped to create the orchestral sound
of the American musical in the 1920s and 1930s.
Critical Appraisal: Secondary Sources
Frank Saddler’s name did not appear in print for several decades during the mid-
twentieth century. After appearing in Isador Witmark’s From Ragtime to Swingtime in
1939, he disappeared from the public record for more than three decades.
52
His re-
emergence began with a brief mention of the Saddler scores of George’s songs that Ira

51
As a testament of Saddler’s extraordinary earning power for an arranger, Witmark wrote: “Before he died
he was doing [arrangements] for the most prominent writers of musical comedies and operettas, scoring at
five dollars a page and working day and night at that.” Witmark, From Ragtime to Swingtime, 166-67.
52
To read Witmark’s recollection of Saddler, see page 168 of this dissertation.

311
donated to the Library of Congress in Lawrence D. Stewart’s chapter on “The Gershwin
Archives” in his and Edward Jablonski’s 1973 book The Gershwin Years.
53
When listing
the scores among Ira’s donations, he described them as “orchestrations that George had
saved and studied with Milton Ager.” Stewart did not, as one would assume, learn this
information from Ira, for whom he worked as an archivist for fifteen years, but rather
from Ager, with whom he was friendly. Ager’s daughter, Shana Alexander, reveals in her
memoir Happy Days: My Mother, My Father, My Sister, and Me how it came to pass that
a songwriter who wrote “Ain’t She Sweet?” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” came to
be the person with whom George Gershwin studied the craft of orchestration.
It was from [Lawrence] Stewart, not my father or mother, that I learned
that Milton had spent years trying to teach George Gershwin orchestration.
My father gave Stewart the text they’d used, as a memento. It was an 1889
German classic, The Material Used in Musical Composition: A System of
Harmony Designed Originally for Use in the English Harmony Classes of
the Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart, by Percy Goetschius. Milton’s
copy was the twentieth edition, published in 1914, which would have been
about the time he and Gershwin met as fellows trying to break into the
music business. Fifteen-year-old George had just quit high school to
become “the world’s youngest piano pounder” at J. W. Remick’s, music
publishers, and twenty-year-old Milton was doing the same thing a few
blocks away at Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, Inc.
Unfortunately, Stewart’s Goetschius has no handwritten marginal
notations, but it does bear the same MILTON AGER stamp in violet ink
that I remember seeing as a child on all my father’s opera and symphonic
scores in our hall closet, and on the miniature scores that Milton read in
bed while waiting for his latest brand of sleeping pill to kick in.
54

53
Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart, The Gershwin Years (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
54
Shana Alexander, My Mother, My Father, My Sister, and Me (Open Road Media, 2015).

312

According to his daughter, Ager had apparently been reluctant to discuss his relationship
with Gershwin with her since he felt that she would not understand technical matters
related to music. Nonetheless, Ager explained to Stewart that he was the one who tried to
impress upon Gershwin the importance of mastering the art of orchestration. Saddler’s
scores in Gershwin’s collection would have held great interest for Ager, since real
examples by a master arranger would have been very difficult to acquire at that time.
When Gerald Bordman published his seminal biography of Jerome Kern in 1980,
Saddler made several appearances, mostly where credit was given to him for his
orchestrations. Bordman was not aware of the existence of correspondence between
Saddler and Kern or else he would surely have given more attention to their close
personal and professional relationship. Through archival research, he was able to identify
several shows for which Saddler did the orchestration and yet did not receive public
credit. In this way, Bordman was not only the first writer and researcher to identify
Saddler’s important role in Kern’s career; he was also the first to establish much of
Saddler’s work in the public record. Of the roughly thirty musicals that Saddler scored
for Kern, Bordman recognized Saddler for ten, no small achievement given that most of
the programs for those shows did not credit any orchestrator. His brief discussion of
Saddler’s contribution to Kern’s music in the book mostly speculates on their good
working relationship based upon the absence of evidence to the contrary. In addition,
Bordman’s training gave him the ability to conduct a sufficient comparative analysis of
the orchestral and piano-vocal scores to allow him to observe “Saddler’s practice of

313
faithfully retaining a composer’s harmonies and suggestions.”
55
However the suggestion
that Saddler was exercising restraint with Kern’s music out of respect is baseless for two
reasons: (1) there is no evidence that he or any other arranger in the 1910s modified
composers’ harmonies as established in the piano-vocal score; (2) Saddler, as we shall
see, was largely responsible for creating Kern’s piano-vocal scores, and therefore the
adventurous harmonies in his songs could just as easily be attributable to Saddler. In
addition, his observation that “the texture of Saddler’s instrumentation urges that he
heeded Kern’s plea for delicacy and charm” ignores the fact the aesthetic basis for their
musical partnership was mutual, and that Saddler’s natural predilection for lightness and
sweetness in his scoring was precisely the reason why Kern preferred Saddler over all
other arrangers. In the end, despite his pioneering work in uncovering the details of the
creative team that worked with Kern, it is hard not to conclude that Bordman’s treatment
of Saddler is somewhat paltry, particularly given the importance and depth of their
working relationship.
Kern’s subsequent biographer, Stephen Banfield, clearly understood Saddler’s
central position in the composer’s creative life during its first flowering in the 1910s. To
his credit, Banfield’s analyses of Kern’s songs often include detailed descriptions of the
arrangements, not only showing that he has studied the orchestral scores themselves, but
implying that Saddler’s theatre orchestration was an essential ingredient of the music. He
has also read and evaluated Saddler’s letters to Kern, which enabled him to incorporate
the arranger’s perspectives into his understanding of their relationship, giving it a rich

55
Bordman, Jerome Kern, 138.

314
personal dimension that would be impossible to know otherwise. He was correct to
regard their friendship as “domestic and intimate,” but clearly Kern would have insisted
that their collaboration was between equals from a creative standpoint.
56
Therefore,
Banfield’s characterization of their partnership as a “symbiotic relationship between
genius songwriter and professional technician” is probably partly a result of his not being
aware of Kern’s unflinching public testimony of Saddler’s genius and partly a result of
his only having analyzed a few of Saddler’s sketches. At the same time, Banfield does
considerably more to arouse curiosity about Saddler’s creative relationship with Kern
than any other writer (he does even more to explore Kern’s sometimes contentious
relationship with orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett). In particular, he engages in a
meaningful way with Saddler’s piano-vocal scores at the Library of Congress, which are
important documents of Kern’s music that contain useful clues to many elusive aspects of
Kern’s creative process.
57

One important area of inquiry regarding the relationship between Kern and
Saddler that Banfield explores is whether Saddler was “Kern’s musical mentor to the
extent depicted in Till the Clouds Roll By?”
58
While the figure of Jim Hessler—the
musician in the Kern biopic who abandoned his career arranging light music on
Broadway for one composing serious music in Europe—was as thoroughly fabricated as
the scrambled chronology in Kern’s own career, the character is clearly modeled on the
image of the older, more experienced, European-educated musician that Saddler was

56
Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 42-43.
57
This discussion is taken up at length in Chapter 9 of this dissertation.
58
Banfield, Jerome Kern, 42-43.

315
when he and Kern first met.
59
However, the portrayal of Hessler as a Broadway arranger
with aspirations to compose in the European classical tradition did not romanticize the
extent to which Saddler mentored Kern; after all, it was Kern who enjoyed wealth, fame
and artistic independence while Saddler was bound to work around the clock on
productions for which he had no real artistic investment. Rather it used the figure of
Saddler obliquely to create a mentor for Kern where one did not exist. Therefore,
Banfield’s answer—“Possibly not”—to his own question about whether Saddler was
Kern’s mentor does not go nearly far enough in suppressing any lingering doubt that the
arranger played such a role in Kern’s development, the faint similarities between Saddler
and the figure of Hessler notwithstanding. Still, the image of Kern having a relationship
that inspired him to create music that rose above the mediocrity of so much Broadway
show music at the time may well have reflected the essence of Saddler’s actual musical
influence on Kern. Though Banfield correctly acknowledges that Saddler may have
gently and amusingly suggested that Kern could learn something from him in 1912 by
sharing his knowledge of German late-romantic harmony in a letter to his wife, the most
substantial influence that the arranger actually had upon the composer was in the
reassurance that his music would always be presented to the public with all the artistic
innovativeness and integrity of the finest European composers of both light music and

59
Guy Bolton, who wrote the screenplay, certainly knew Saddler, albeit peripherally, through their mutual
work on several shows from 1915 to 1918. The first show that all three men worked on together was Very
Good Eddie and the last was Oh, Lady! Lady!! The fact that they did not know each other well despite
working together often is reflected in the fact that Saddler does not appear anywhere in Bolton and P. G.
Wodehouse’s memoir Bring on the Girls!

316
serious music.
The first book to seriously investigate the art of Broadway orchestration is Steven
Suskin’s The Sound of Broadway, published in 2009.
60
Though the book focuses
primarily on the period beginning after Saddler’s death, Suskin inevitably encounters the
arranger at various points in his narrative. Toward the beginning of the book, he gives a
thumbnail sketch of “The Dreyfus System,” a reference to Max Dreyfus’ offices at T. B.
Harms where musical theatre scores were published and orchestral arrangements were
created. Though Dreyfus had admittedly created a juggernaut by 1920, a powerful
copyright monopoly of many of the finest musical theatre composers and arrangers in
New York, his business was not appreciably different from the Arthur Tams Company or
M. Witmark & Sons, both which featured arranging stables and copyists’ rooms. These
businesses—a music rental company and music publisher respectively—were run on the
premise that it would be more cost-effective not to outsource music arranging and
copying of parts and so these allied crafts were all done in house. Thus, the key aspect of
the “system” was in Dreyfus’ ability to acquire and retain the best talent exclusively for
T. B. Harms. This exceptional business acumen was evident both in Dreyfus’ ability to
place Saddler under contract for the first time in his life as well as his ability to maintain
Kern’s exclusive contract by shrewdly allowing him to purchase a stake in the company
in 1917. Suskin is correct when he gives 1911 as the year that Dreyfus engaged Saddler,
who first worked for a T. B. Harms musical when he scored The Three Romeos. For the

60
Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators & Orchestrations (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009).

317
first time in print, he also ascertained that the “pre-1920 Harms stable included
orchestrators Saddler, Maurice de Packh, Hilding Anderson, Charles L. Miller, and
Stephen O. Jones,” which in itself paints a lively portrait of the offices at 62 W. 45th
Street, where Saddler was chief orchestrator for nearly a decade. While Suskin
acknowledges that his narrative does not effectively cover the “pre-1920 period,” he errs
in assuming that because his research has not uncovered materials from the Ragtime Era
they do not exist in sufficient numbers to be representative of the work of the early
masters. When he attempts to explain that he is unable to effectively compare Saddler
and Victor Herbert’s achievements to those of Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, and
Philip J. Lang because “evidence from the pre-1920 period is minimal,” the argument
does not hold up to scrutiny. Using 1920 as a date that divides the modern period of
Broadway theatre orchestration from the early period, as Suskin does, offers a natural
transition point in the history of the field that accurately centers around Saddler’s death as
a defining moment. Whether or not his passing actually precipitated these changes or
merely reflected the demise of the old guard is impossible to say. However, any
implication that the period in Broadway orchestration before 1920 (or, less conveniently,
1921) was a kind of pre-history, an era shrouded in mystery due to a lack of documentary
evidence, reflects only upon the insufficiency of our current state of knowledge, not upon
the lack of information and sources. Although the absence of scores certainly presents
obstacles to our understanding the orchestral sound of musicals in the first decades of the
twentieth century, the widespread destruction of manuscripts continued unabated during
the 1920s and ‘30s as well.

318
The writer who has contributed more to scholarship on Frank Saddler than any
other, past or present, is Jonas Westover. His book The Shuberts and Their Passing
Shows (2016) focuses significant attention on the arranger and expresses its author’s
conviction that Saddler’s scores were essential to the Shuberts’ success in creating a
series of theatrical spectacles that rivaled in opulence and brilliance any production ever
mounted on Broadway. Westover was accurate in his assessment that Saddler’s
reputation as the orchestrator of the Princess Theatre shows has promoted a narrow view
of his extensive body of work, which included scores for Lew Fields’ extravaganzas,
Charles Dillingham’s massive productions at the Hippodrome, and the Shuberts’
grandiose summer revues.
61
Though Saddler was largely remembered by some of the
leading figures on Broadway during the 1920s—most notably Richard Rodgers and
Robert Russell Bennett—for his sparkling scores for small orchestra at the diminutive
Princess with its reduced forces, his arrangements of music by composers who were less
innovative than Kern—men such as Jean Schwartz, A. Baldwin Sloane, and Raymond
Hubbell, for whom he scored dozens of shows—laid the foundation for the orchestral
sound of Broadway show music in the Ragtime Era. Indeed, the musicals that Saddler
worked on at the Princess represent a small percentage of the total number of productions
he contributed to over a ten-year period, while he did arrangements for numerous large
venues, including the Broadway Theatre, Winter Garden, Knickerbocker Theatre, New
Amsterdam Theatre, Casino Theatre, 44th Street Theatre, Globe Theatre, Sam S. Shubert

61
Westover, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows, 21.

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Theatre, Liberty Theatre, George M. Cohan Theatre, Century Theatre, Cohan and Harris
Theatre, Henry Miller’s Theatre, and the Capitol Theatre, most of which had a seating
capacity of well over 1,000 audience members.
Westover makes the case for Saddler to be considered a master orchestrator that
was head-and-shoulders above his colleagues in his chapter in John Koegel’s expansive
festschrift Music, American Made. The centerpiece of the essay is an analysis of some of
Saddler’s orchestration techniques in comparison with an arrangement by Sol Levy, one
of Saddler’s assistants. Through extensive research on the musical materials of the show,
Westover reveals that Saddler, in fact, did the bulk of the orchestrations for The Passing
Show of 1914 —24 numbers out of a total of 32, a handful of numbers having been taken
by three or more associates.
62
In his analysis of Saddler’s work, Westover was the first to
describe his instrumental ensembles and combinations and their sonic effects in a theatre
orchestra before 1920. The most compelling statement that he makes in the essay is a
passage in which he discusses the music for the Omar Khayyam sequence, where he
states that “[s]ince so much of the section relies on the orchestration for effects, it is hard
to know where the contribution of the composer ends and the orchestrator begins.”
63
This
is an astute observation that is as applicable to Saddler’s work with Harry Carroll and
Sigmund Romberg [composers of The Passing Show of 1914] as it is for his work with
Jerome Kern. It also aligns to some extent with Newton Fuessle’s revelatory admonition
that “some of [the composers the arranger worked with] could no more than drum out a

62
Jonas Westover, “Orchestrations for the Passing Show of 1914: An Analysis of the Techniques of Frank
Saddler and Sol Levy,” Music, American Made edited by John Koegel (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie
Park Press, 2011), 445.
63
Westover, “Orchestrations for the Passing Show of 1914,” 446.

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limping melody on the piano with one finger, and it took Saddler to change it into a lively
hit,”

although one might suspect that none of the three distinguished musicians mentioned
above were among those that Fuessle had in mind when he wrote this.
64

Saddler’s legacy as the founder of an original school of Broadway orchestration is
reinforced by Dominic Symonds’ chapter “Orchestration and Arrangement: Creating the
Broadway Sound” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical.
65
Viewed as the
primary figure to merge the contemporaneous orchestral traditions American comic opera
and vaudeville, Saddler’s career is primarily framed in this thumbnail portrait as Kern’s
orchestrator and as the creator of the small wartime pit ensemble. And again, while this is
indeed Saddler’s most noteworthy innovation, his contribution to the tradition is also
reduced appreciably by ignoring his work for composers other than Kern, including
Irving Berlin’s and Louis A. Hirsch’s ragtime scores, as well as the arrangements for
many of the great singers of the era, including Nora Bayes, Jack Norworth, Stella
Mayhew, Blanche Ring, Bert Williams, Al Jolson, Charles King, Elizabeth Brice, the
Duncan Sisters, Anna Wheaton, Marilyn Miller, and many others. Symonds recognizes
Saddler’s innovative use of instruments, but his examples are limited to the piano
attachments that Saddler enjoyed using to create novel percussive keyboard sonorities
and to his supposed use of saxophones in the score of Oh! I Say.
66
Paradoxically, while

64
Fuessle, “Broadway’s King of Counterpoint.”
65
Dominic Symonds, “Orchestration and Arrangement: Creating the Broadway Sound,” The Oxford
Handbook of the American Musical, edited by Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacey Wolf (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 266-80.
66
For more on Saddler’s piano attachments, see page 624 of this dissertation. As Symonds points out,
Gerald Bordman writes about Kern’s pride in urging Saddler to use saxophones in this 1913 score, but it
should be noted that no score for this shows exists and there is a set of parts for “Katy-Did” from Oh! I Say
at the Library of Congress that includes all the standard instruments and no saxophones.

321
Saddler is singled out by Symonds for his innovativeness, he is simultaneously
pigeonholed as a master of the standard Broadway arrangement, boiled down by Robert
Russell Bennett into a routine blueprint.
67
However, Saddler’s work for the standard
theatre orchestra of approximately twenty-five players was probably never routine, even
when he was scoring Dillingham’s oom-pahs for the Hippodrome. In an attempt to return
to the narrative of Saddler as innovator, Symonds seeks to demonstrate how Saddler’s
scores “sparkled” (Bennett’s word) by presenting the example of “Till the Clouds Roll
By” by Kern from Oh, Boy! However, this score, as performed by John McGlinn on his
1993 CD Jerome Kern Treasury (and included on the book’s Oxford University Press
website), is not by Frank Saddler, but rather a reconstruction of Saddler’s original
orchestration by Russell Warner, who was a master arranger and a pioneer in the field of
period Broadway orchestration.
68
To suggest that the score is an original by Saddler is not
only inaccurate but also a crucial omission, since the job of reconstructing Broadway
scores in the original style is central to the revival of early American musical theatre as
an art form. Still, without consulting the CD booklet, the mistake can be easy to make,
since there was no one better than Warner at orchestrating in Saddler’s style.

67
Part textbook description, part tongue-in-cheek criticism, Robert Russell Bennett’s description is a
classic expression of his love-hate relationship with the Broadway orchestra: “An arrangement of a song
was: a loud introduction, a vamp-soft with ooh-pahs, a soft verse, a soft chorus (refrain) and a loud chorus
made by repeating the same arrangement with the brass and drums added and the first violin up an
octave...” Robert Russell Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY: Belwin Mills, 1975), 8-9.
68
Jerome Kern, Jerome Kern Treasury, conducted by John McGlinn, Angel Records CDC 7 54883, 1993.

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PART II

WORKS OF ORCHESTRATION: TRADITION, TECHNIQUE, AND STYLE

Chapter 8

History of the New York Theatre Orchestra
and Techniques of Orchestration on Broadway to 1910

Musical theatre in New York during the eighteenth century was, as one might expect,
dominated by British imports and American ballad operas in the English mold. Not only
was the city a territorial holding of King George III until 1776, but this outpost of the
British Empire had experienced a vast expansion of immigration by citizens of the British
Isles after 1680, such that the majority population had not been Dutch for nearly a
century by the time revolution broke out in the colonies.
1
Though the opera houses of
London had been dominated by Italian opera during the first three decades of the
eighteenth century, the success of John Gay’s The Beggar‘s Opera in 1728 established
ballad opera as a force to be reckoned with in London’s theatres, and its numerous
offspring subsequently held the stage with substantial, if not equal, success throughout
the rest of the century.
2
While New Yorkers would not develop an appetite for Italian

1
Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 87, 194.
2
For more about the history of The Beggar’s Opera and its progeny, see Madeline Smith Atkins, The
Beggar’s Children: How John Gay Changed the Course of England’s Musical Theatre (Newcastle-upon-
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006).

323
opera in significant numbers until at least three decades into the nineteenth century,
ballad opera’s distinctly populist elements—contemporary plots, characters drawn from
all walks of life, uncomplicated scores, spoken dialogue, and librettos in English
vernacular—were well-suited to serve the as yet uncultivated tastes of American
audiences.
The John Street Theatre, built in 1767, was not the first theatre in New York, but
it was the first venue with enough longevity to have made a significant and lasting impact
upon the cultural life of the city. For thirty years, until it was razed in 1797, the modest
wooden theatre at the corner of John Street and Broadway was without rival in the city.
Playwright, author, and librettist William Dunlap wrote that the John Street Theatre, with
“two rows of boxes, with a pit and gallery, could accommodate all the play-going people
of that time, and yield to the sharers [investors] eight hundred dollars when full, at the
usual prices.”
3
As the New York home of the Old American Company, the most active
theatre troupe in the Colonies (and soon-to-be new nation),

the John Street Theatre
housed no fewer than sixty-four individual works during its first year in existence alone,
many of which were ballad operas.
4

By 1792, the company was suffering from years of acrimony between two of its
managers—John Henry and Thomas Wignell—and so it was determined that a new
contingent of actors from England would be needed to revive the flagging organization, a
decisive move that had the effect of pressuring Wignell, also one of the company’s

3
William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre from its Origins to 1832, vol. 1 (London: Richard
Bentley, 1833), 51.
4
O. G. Sonneck, Early Opera in America (New York: G. Schirmer, 1915), 40.

324
leading actors, to quit New York and join forces with composer and music director
Alexander Reinagle in Philadelphia.
5
In addition to eight or nine actors (depending upon
which account is more reliable), many of whom were contracted at the theatre in Bath,
John Henry, during his recruiting trip, may have also enticed five musicians from
London—James Hewitt, Jean Gehot, Mr. Phillips, B. Bergmann, and William Young—to
journey to America and seek their fortunes in a less competitive environment, for they all
arrived in New York on the same ship during September of that year.
6

A Music Director for New York

James Hewitt was a versatile musician, who was sufficiently skilled on both the violin
and cello at the age of twenty to have been hired to play them in the orchestra at the
Theatre Royal in London on Saturday nights.
7
Encouraged by his early professional
success at Drury Lane, and after having likely been associated with several early
performances of music by Joseph Haydn while the composer was in London, Hewitt took
his chances by sailing for America and quickly rose to become the acknowledged leader
of New York musical life, both as a concert artist and as music director of the John Street
Theatre.
8
Among the artists who sailed with Hewitt from England was John Hodgkinson,

5
Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre, 172-76.
6
The varying accounts are in William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre, 1:179-80, and Joseph N.
Ireland, Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860, vol. 1 (New York: T. H. Morrell, 1866), 94. An
account of the musicians’ arrival can be found in O. G. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America (1731-
1800) (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1907), 191.
7
Jane Girdham, English Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London: Stephen Storace at Drury Lane
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 74.
8
Vera Brodsky Lawrence, “Mr. Hewitt Lays It on the Line,” 19th-Century Music (Summer, 1981), 6-7.

325
a charismatic actor of low comedy, who, according to Dunlap “deserved great praise, and
was [in the ensuing years] the delight of New York audiences.”
9
His arrival in New York
intimidated the managers of the Old American Company enough to prompt them to yield
him part ownership immediately upon joining them. In addition to his dynamic presence
on stage, Hodgkinson began to make improvements in other key areas of the company,
including the orchestra. By the spring of 1793, he had hired Hewitt as music director,
who, by that time, had already participated in several high-profile concerts in New York
as a composer, conductor, and violin soloist.
10
His first appearance at the John Street
Theatre occurred on March 26, 1793, in a production of The Beggar’s Opera with
Hodgkinson in the role of Macheath.
11

The band at the John Street Theatre before Hewitt’s hiring was anemic and in
disarray. Hodgkinson remembered that “the Orchestra was composed of about six
Musicians, some of whom were incapable of their Business; and had I not been induced
by Considerations for my own Reputation as an Actor, to take care that the Stage
Department was not totally destroyed where I was concerned, this Neglect would have
been more apparent than it was!”
12
However, within a few years after Hewitt took
control, Dunlap observed that the orchestral music at the theatre had been upgraded
considerably.
We have noticed the improvements made by Mr. Hodgkinson [manager
and primary stock holder in the John Street Theatre] in the orchestra at
New York, improvements rendered necessary by the excellence of this

9
Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre, 189-90.
10
Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America, 230-33.
11
Ireland, Records of the New York Stage, 1:173.
12
John Hodgkinson, A Narrative of His Connection with the Old American Company, from the Fifth of
September, 1792, to the Thirty-First of March, 1797 (New York: J. Oram, 1797), 5.

326
branch of theatrical arrangement in the rival company of Philadelphia.
Instead of the “one Mr. Pelham,” and his harpsichord, or the single fiddle
of Mr. Hewlett, performers of great skill filled the bands of the two rival
cities. In New York the musicians were principally French. Most of them
gentlemen who had seen better days, some driven from Paris by the
revolution, some of them nobles, some officers of the army of the king,
others who had sought refuge from the devastation at St. Domingo.
13

With new theatrical reinforcements—both on the stage and in the band—firmly in place,
the Old American Company was revived and flourishing to such an extent that they
would soon outgrow the old wooden theatre on John Street, in part sparked by theatrical
advances being made in Philadelphia.
The New Theatre in Philadelphia (also called the Chestnut Street Theatre) was
built in 1794 at the instigation of Alexander Reinagle, the composer and music director,
and Thomas Wignell, following his departure from New York. Dunlap acknowledged
that their partnership was both a business and an artistic collaboration when he stated that
“the orchestra, under the direction of Reinagle, who sat at the harpsichord, was equally
superior in power and talent with the other departments of the drama.”
14
Not to be
outdone by their neighbors to the south, the theatergoing citizens of New York sensed the
need for a larger and more elegant home for the dramatic arts soon after the New Theatre
in Philadelphia was open for business, and they subsequently began to lay out plans and
raise funds for a new building of their own.
15
The New Theatre in New York opened on
January 28, 1798, before the building and its appointments were completed; and, since it

13
Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, 1:391. The “devastation” that Dunlap was referring to is now
known as the Haitian Revolution, in which a rebellion of the enslaved people successfully won their
freedom and independence from the French. For more information, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the
New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2004).
14
Ibid., 224.
15
Ireland, Records of the New York Stage, 1:173.

327
was located two blocks to the north of John Street on Park Row, the playhouse was soon
referred to by the public as the Park Theatre. Projections on the cost of construction for
the theatre were originally $42,375, although Joseph Ireland insists that the total cost for
local patrons in the end was $130,000.
16
A description of the theatre’s qualities, full of
superlatives, was given in the Daily Advertiser on January 31st, 1798:
The essential requisites of hearing and seeing have been happily attained.
We do not remember to have been in any theatre where the view of the
stage is so complete from all parts of the house, or where the actors are
heard with such distinctness. The house is made to contain about 2,000
persons. The audience part, though wanting in those brilliant decorations
which the artists have designed for it, yet exhibited a neatness and
simplicity which were highly agreeable. The stage was everything that
could be wished. The scenery was executed in a most masterly style. The
extensiveness of the scale upon which the scenes are executed, the
correctness of the designs, and the elegance of the painting, presented the
most beautiful views which the imagination can conceive. The scenery
was of itself worth a visit to the theatre.
17

William Dunlap became the first manager of the Park Theatre and, needing a
good band for the new house, contracted Hewitt to lead the orchestra and “attend to the
getting up of Operas for $14 per week.”
18
The ensemble had been expanded to thirteen
players at a cost of $140 per week, or about $10 per player, more or less, depending upon
the instrument they played and their duties. Dunlap recorded the names and instruments
of his orchestra this way in his diary:

16
Ibid.
17
Quoted in Ireland, Records of the New York Stage, 1:175.
18
William Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap, 1766-1839: The Memoires of a Dramatist, Theatrical
Manager, Painter, Critic Novelist, and Historian, vol. 1 (New York: The New York Historical Society,
1931), 268-69, 302.

328
Mr. Hewit [sic.] leader, 1st Violin
Everdel d° [secondo]
Nicolai 2nd Violin
Samo d° [secondo]
Henri 1st Clarinet
Libichiski 2d d° [secondo]
Pelesier [sic.] 1 Horn
Dupuy 2d d° [secondo]
Gilfert Tenor [viola]
Nicolai, Jr. Bass [cello]
Adet d° [secondo]
Hoffman Bassoon
Dangle Double Bass

With three woodwinds, two horns, and a string section of eight players, Hewitt could
muster an adequate orchestral sound by the core ensemble, and add woodwinds, brass,
and percussion as necessary. Dunlap’s list, which is historically significant due to its
specificity, has one major anomaly, though: by his account, the orchestra had two
clarinets and no oboes. This instrumental choice seems highly unusual for a New York
theatre orchestra in 1798, since clarinets, which only appear infrequently in European
orchestras before 1790 were always added to the woodwind section, never appearing
without oboes.
19
And while the clarinet came late in the development of the Classical

19
John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650-1815 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 25-26.

329
orchestra, the oboe was fundamental to the ensemble from the beginning.
20
Hence, when
Hewitt performed single movements from Haydn’s symphonies (which he called
“overtures” or “minuets” depending upon the selection), as he did in his theatrical
programs and at almost every one of his concerts, these scores call for a pair of oboes and
no clarinets.
21
The same is true of the theatre music that Hewitt performed at the Park.
Two staples of his repertoire around 1800 were the overtures to Christoph Willibald
Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Lodoïska.
22
The instrumentation
for both pieces would have required Hewitt to hire a few additional players for the
orchestra (flute [or piccolo], trumpet, and timpani); however, both are scored for two
oboes and neither calls for clarinets. Similarly, when Hewitt composed his New Medley
Overture (1802) and quoted the entire ritornello of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor,
he was able to perform the score by adding only two flutes and timpani to his orchestra—
that is, if we assume that he substituted clarinets for oboes in performance.
23
These
instrumental substitutions were not made by design, but rather but necessity, caused by a
scarcity of oboe players in New York and elsewhere in America. The dearth of
instrumental specialists in the United States would remain a persistent problem in New

20
Mozart composed for clarinets in his final three symphonies and Beethoven always used them, however
Haydn did not begin to include clarinets in his orchestral music until 1793 with his Symphony No. 99 in
E♭. He used them again in his final two symphonies (Nos. 103 and 104), which he composed in 1795.
21
Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America, 192-249.
22
Commercial Advertiser, New York, May 5, 1801; Evening Post, New York, June 6, 1802.
23
This was an adventurous idea, as Mozart’s music was entirely unknown to New York audiences at the
time. Despite the attraction of introducing Mozart’s music to New York audiences, he changed his mind
about using so much of another composer’s music in this way and removed this passage when he published
the work. Bertil van Boer, “Federalists, Immigrants, and Wild Irish Savages,” Haydn and His
Contemporaries, edited by Sterling E. Murray (Ann Arbor, MI: Steglein Publishing, 2011), 200-201.

330

Figure 8.1, Press notice for Hewitt’s ballad opera The Wild Goose
Chase in Greenleaf’s Daily Advertiser, February 19, 1800.

331
York theatres for at least another thirty years. Of course, theatre orchestras varied in size
and composition in different theatres, and even varied in the same theatre on different
occasions. Benjamin Carr’s Federalist Overture, which was performed by Hewitt’s band
at the John Street Theatre on December 15, 1794, required greatly expanded orchestral
forces, according to Dunlap, who also referred to the ensemble as “the best band
collected that had ever been heard in the New York theatre.”
24
Bertil van Boer
conjectures that the additional instruments engaged to perform the Federalist Overture
“most likely included one or two flutes, a pair of oboes, a pair of trumpets (given the
fanfares in the piece), and timpani,” although this reference to the oboes as added forces
assumes that such musicians were available.
25
He also suggests that a second pair of
horns may have been employed to manage the abrupt key changes from E♭ major to G
major, and one might also suspect that additional strings may have been added to balance
the larger wind and brass contingent. Even without the extra strings, the total number of
musicians in the pit at the John Street Theatre, given these assumptions, would have been
twenty-one on this occasion, a remarkable reversal of fortunes for the musical theatre in
New York occurring within two years of Hewitt’s arrival in America.

European Opera in New York

For more than five decades after Hewitt was dismissed from his job at the Park Theatre in

24
Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, 1:261.
25
Van Boer, “Federalists, Immigrants, and Wild Irish Savages,” 183-84.

332
1808, musical theatre as an indigenous art form was essentially dormant on
Broadway.
26
Eighteenth-century ballad opera composed in New York continued to hold
the stage during the first two decades of the new century, but gradually ran its course,
particularly as continental European operatic forms were beginning to be embraced by
New York audiences. After the Park Theatre burned and was rebuilt in 1822, public taste
was gradually drawn to operas with more complex, sophisticated scores. On May 10,
1823, the English “singing actor” Pearman, who had recently helped to elevate the
repertory and performance quality at the Park Theatre, appeared as Figaro in The
Marriage of Figaro, which, according to George Odell, was heard on that evening “for
the first time in America with Mozart’s music.”
27
The first performance at the Park of
Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz took place on March 2, 1825, but it did not
appear again on the stage in New York until the fall.
28
New York was introduced to Il
barbiere di Siviglia on November 29, 1825 by Manuel García and his celebrated
company, which included his children, Manuel and María, and his wife, Joaquina.
29
For
the first time, audiences of the Park were exposed to Rossini sung in Italian by an

26
James Hewitt was relieved of his duties as music director of the Park Theatre in a labor dispute that pitted
the musicians in his band against manager Thomas A. Cooper, who succeeded William Dunlap in 1805.
The circumstances of this conflict, which resulted in Hewitt’s dismissal, are detailed in Lawrence, “Mr.
Hewitt Lays it on the Line.”
27
Odell, who referred to Pearman only by his last name, described him as a “singing actor.” Odell, The
Annals of the New York Stage, 2:96.
28
Ibid., 148, 174.
29
Manuel García was born in Seville, Spain, in 1775 and was singing professionally throughout his native
country by the time he was in his mid-twenties. He made his operatic debuts in Paris and Naples in 1807 and
1811, respectively, and came to the attention of Rossini, who wrote several roles for him, including
Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia. His wife was a fine singer, who dedicated herself to raising her three
children, each of whom became professional singers. Manuel Jr. was a high baritone, who eventually
became one the leading vocal teachers in the world, while María [Malibran] became the most celebrated
soprano of her day during her brief career, which ended with her tragic death at the age of 28. Michelle
[Pauline Viardot], who also became a celebrated pianist and singer, was only an infant during the family’s
introduction to New York. John Dizikes, Opera in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 3-5.

333

Figure 8.2, Interior of the Park Theatre with view of the orchestra (painting by John
Searle circa 1822).

334

unparalleled company of singers, who produced vocal music of a quality, according to
one observer, “such as had never been heard before in America; the deep full bass of
Angrisani, the fine, clear tenor of the elder Garcia, and above all, the silver tones of the
Senorina, poured forth without effort of distortion.”
30
The orchestra was singled out for
praise on this occasion, the band considered by one observer as being “better, as a whole,
than that of the London opera house itself.”
31
The ensemble put together for Manuel
García’s production was relatively large for the time—twenty-four players—including
some of the finest instrumentalists in the city. The individual members were known to the
public well enough to make it worthwhile to announce them in the press account along
with their instruments: “De Luce, W. Taylor, Milon, Hill, Dumahault, Holloway, jun.,
Moriere, violins; Holloway and Nicolai (sic in the American), tenors, Geer and Davis,
basses, Bocock, Moran, Gentil, violoncellos; Blondeau and P. Taylor, flutes; Merline
(sic) and Beck, clarionets; Eberle, se. and Eberle, jun., horns; Hornung, bassoon; Metz
and Peterson, trumpets; Carroll, kettle-drum.”
32
The orchestra was directed by violinist
Nathaniel De Luce, assisted by Mr. Etienne at the piano, who functioned partly as a
répétiteur for the orchestra, their collective abilities having been stretched to the utmost
by Rossini’s music.
33
The lack of oboists in the city continued to be a problem at the

30
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 2:183.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
A critic who attended the García’s production of Il barbiere di Siviglia noted the coordination of the two
musicians in directing the band: “One soul seemed to inspire and a single hand to guide the whole band
through the magic mazes of Rossini’s most intricate flights, under the direction of Mr. De Luce; while M.
Étienne presided in an effective manner at a fine-toned piano, of which every now and then he might be
heard to touch the keynote just loud enough to be heard by the orchestra, for whose guidance it was

335
Park, even more than it was for Hewitt, since Rossini scored his opera for pairs of oboes
and clarinets. Thus, the clarinetists in the Park’s band would only be able to take those
lines in the oboe parts that did not coincide with their own, leaving holes in the
woodwind choirs and sections scored for oboes that were not doubled in any of the other
instruments.
Opera continued to be mounted at the Park, however infrequently, in the years
after Manuel García and his company returned to Europe. Once again, it was The
Marriage of Figaro and Der Freischütz with Pearman in the principal roles that the
Park’s manager Edmund Simpson brought before the public in January 1828 in hope of
reviving their previous successes.
34
It is impossible to know with any certainty whether
the quality of these productions was adequate. In fact, one might reasonably assume that
it was not, due to the lack of any tradition for performing operas by composers of the
caliber of Mozart and Weber, as well as the infrequency with which their works were
staged since their New York premieres only five earlier. This supposition is confirmed by
a letter written in 1828, possibly by a traveling clarinetist named Schott, who took the
opportunity to write his observations on the state of musical affairs in the city.
New York has four theatres—Park Theatre, Bowery Theatre, Lafayette
Theatre, and Chatham Theatre. Dramas, comedies, and spectacle pieces,
also the Wolf’s den scene from Der Freyschütz [sic], but without singing,
as melodrama and small operettas are given. The performance of the
whole opera is not to be thought of. However, they have no sufficient
orchestra to do it. The orchestras are very bad indeed, as bad as it is
possible to imagine, and incomplete. Sometimes they have two clarinets,
which is a great deal; sometimes there is only one first instrument. Of

intended.” Rupert Hughes, “The Great Conductors,” Famous Composers and Their Works, vol. 1, edited by
Philip Hale (Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1900), 34.
34
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 2:311.

336
bassoons, oboes, trumpets, and kettle-drums, one never sees a sight.
However, once in a while a first bassoon is employed. Oboes are totally
unknown in this country. Only one oboist exists in North America, and he
is said to live in Baltimore.
In spite of this incompleteness they play symphonies by Haydn,
and grand overtures; and if a gap occurs, they think “this is only of passing
importance” provided it rattles away again afterwards.
One is sure to find a trombone in every one of their orchestras.
This instrument is used in order to increase the power of the band. It never
plays an independent part, but doubles the violoncello part; and, if the
player happens to be good, he then occasionally plays a passage with the
violin. This instrument and the doublebass are paid best. They sometimes
receive from sixteen to seventeen dollars per week. The other instruments
receive generally ten dollars per week, the better ones twelve dollars; and
the best price paid to the first clarinet is fifteen dollars, because this
instrument is considered nearest in importance to the trombone and double
bass.
It is a self-understood custom that the leader, with his violin, takes
part in every solo. Hence one never hears a solo played alone by one
person. This is probably done in order to get a fuller sound.
35

While this detailed appraisal bears a tone of authority and is a useful first-hand
perspective, the musician’s observations cannot be taken as a complete and thoroughly
accurate assessment of the state of the opera orchestra in New York in 1828. For
example, his comments about New York theatres being incapable of mounting Der
Freischütz should be weighed against the fact that Pearman was joined in productions
that year by Charles Edward Horn, an operatic bass, who had achieved critical success in
London in the role of Caspar from Der Freischütz.
36
While Pearman and Horn may have
sung abridged versions of Mozart’s and Weber’s operas, it is seems highly improbable
that Der Freischütz would have been staged at the Park as a play with Horn in the cast.

35
Text quoted in Frédéric Louis Ritter, Music in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), 199-
200.
36
In addition to being a singer and actor, Charles Edward Horn was also an accomplished composer, whose
works had already won favor in New York, in particular The Devil’s Bridge. Margaret Ross Griffel, Operas
in English (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 124.

337
At the same time, Schott’s comments regarding the dearth of oboists in the United States
is corroborated by the evidence of this problem in Hewitt’s and De Luce’s orchestras at
the Park; and it is a problem that would persist for at least another decade.
37

Italian opera did not return to New York until 1832, seven years after the Garcías
took New York by storm, making the project to bring another European troupe for the
purpose seem experimental. The plan was instigated by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist
for several of Mozart’s late operatic masterpieces, who had been living in New York
since 1805 and teaching Italian at Columbia University, among other odd jobs.
38
Inspired
by the Garcías’ triumph, which had rekindled memories of his former glory, Da Ponte
collaborated with Giacomo Montresor to bring his opera company to New York and
Philadelphia, where they mounted La Cenerentola and L’italiana in Algeri by Rossini
and Elisa e Claudio by Saverio Mercadante.
39
By all accounts, with the exception of one
or two nights, the project was considered a failure, both artistically and financially. And
yet, amidst all the bad press, a critic with The American praised the band: “No such
orchestra was …ever before heard in this country…the overture was listened to with
breathless attention…For the worn and dirty finery of the Park, we had new and
appropriate dresses.”
40
Once again, the musicians were listed by name in the review,

37
The oboist in Baltimore was likely Gottlieb Graupner (1767-1836), who resided in the United States
from 1798 until his death in 1836. As a young man, he played in a regimental band in Hanover, and, after
being honorably discharged, went to London, where he played in orchestras led by Joseph Haydn. He was
an important leader in Boston’s musical life for many years, directing and playing oboe in the Federal
Street Theatre and helping to found both the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Handel and Haydn Society.
Waldo Selden Pratt, American Music and Musicians (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920), 227.
38
Dizikes, Opera in America, 71-3.
39
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 2:642-44.
40
Ibid., 643.

338
which shows that the ensemble now included two oboists in addition to a pair of
clarinetists. Many of these players had been engaged in Europe for the new opera season
in New York, including two Italian oboists, Paggi and Conti. In 1892 Henry Edward
Krehbiel wrote that “Montresor seems to have been advised as to the prevailing
instrumental penury” in New York and, as a result, invited these men and several other
European musicians to play in the opera house.
41
Despite Frédéric Louis Ritter’s
contention that these instrumentalists stayed behind in America after Montresor’s
company returned to Europe, difficulties remained for American managers seeking to
stage opera in the 1830s.
42
Krehbiel offered three instances where incremental advances
were made in the instrumental forces of New York musical organizations:
When Madame Caradori Allan gave a season of Italian opera at the Park
Theatre in 1838 there was no oboe in the orchestra, the first oboe part
being played on a flute. This was one means of supplying the deficiency.
Another, more common, is illustrated in the composition of the orchestra
which played at a concert of the Musical Fund in 1836. In this there were
thirteen violins, two violas, three violoncellos, two double-basses, two
flutes, four clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, one trumpet, three
trombones, kettle-drums and cymbals—in all, thirty-eight men. Here the
presence of four clarinets is explained by the circumstance that two of
them played the oboes parts. At the annual concert of the Euterpean in
1839, when the orchestra (a mixed band of professionals and amateurs)
numbered forty, and was described by the editor of The Musical Review as
“superior to any that we have heard in New York in respect to the amount
of talent it contained,” two oboists took part, one of them probably a new-
comer or an amateur, as his name is not given in the list of professional
players printed in the Review.
43

41
Henry Edward Krehbiel, The Philharmonic Society of New York (New York: Novello, Ewer & Co.,
1892), 30.
42
Ritter, Music in America, 202.
43
Krehbiel, The Philharmonic Society of New York, 30-31.

339

Figure 8.3, Da Ponte’s Italian Opera House in Manhattan.

The uncommonly large size of the orchestra that played at the event for the Musical Fund
was a concert orchestra and therefore not representative of the string forces that would be
used in a theatre at that time. But while the size of the orchestras in New York were
steadily growing, the remedy that Hewitt had found for the paucity of oboes in New
York, namely, the substitution of clarinets, continued to be a staple feature of the
orchestral sound in the city approaching mid-century.
After the failure of the Montresor Opera Company, Lorenzo De Ponte determined

340
that the cause was the lack of a proper opera house in New York and subsequently
organized a campaign to raise $150,000 to build a theatre dedicated to Italian opera one
block west of Broadway on the corner of Leonard and Church streets.
44
But while the
project to build a permanent home in New York for the operas of Mozart, Rossini, and
Bellini succeeded, the theatre itself failed to attract enough customers to keep it in
business for more than three years. After Da Ponte handed over the Italian Opera House
to new management and the name was changed to the National, the theatre continued be
used periodically as an opera house. John William Wallack, the English actor and
manager who took control of the National in 1837, satisfied the ongoing public appetite
for opera by mounting Mozart and Rossini operas (interspersed within the usual programs
of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and popular melodramas) and by bringing in new singers from
England to perform them.
When a city depends upon the importation of foreign works in order to evolve
into a cultural capital with a flourishing theatrical life (as was the case with musical
theatre in New York throughout the nineteenth century), nearly every aspect of theatrical
production must also be imported in order to mount them adequately. In order to stage
European ballad operas, grand operas, and comic operas, therefore, New York producers
required the services of trained singers; and most of the finest singers who appeared on
New York’s musical stages in the first half of the nineteenth century were from
England.
45
Among the many British opera singers who traveled to or settled in New York

44
For more on the Italian Opera House and its successor, the National Theatre, see Dizikes, Opera in
America, 73-75 and Henderson, The City and the Theatre, 75.
45
Dizikes, Opera in America, 92-93.

341

Figures 8.4a & 8.4b, Edward and Ann (Mr. and Mrs.) Seguin.

in the late 1830s, Edward and Ann (known formally by the public as Mr. and Mrs.)
Seguin were among the mainstays of the opera programs at the Park. Odell described the
voice of Mrs. Seguin as being “of superb quality, produced with all the elegance and
finish of the English school of that day.”
46
In support of his own assessment, which was
not gained from personal experience, Odell quoted a critic from the Knickerbocker
Magazine in its praise of Mrs. Seguin’s artistry: “The Marriage of Figaro, which
crowded the National to the very street-doors, introduced us to Mrs. Seguin as the
Countess, a part which she sustained with the highest honors, receiving, ever and anon,
the most rapturous applause, in return for the finished efforts of her powerful and well-
managed contralto voice.”
47
During the next five seasons after her debut in 1838, she

46
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 2:297.
47
Ibid., 298-99.

342
appeared as Rosina in Il barbiere de Siviglia, Countess Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro,
Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Amina in La Sonnambula, Camilla in Ferdinand Hérold’s
Zampa, Peki in Auber’s The Bronze Horse, Biju in Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillion de
Longjumeau, and the title role in Bellini’s Norma. In addition to serving these
advancements in the opera culture of New York, the Seguins proved to be influential in
the introduction of English opera to America in the wake of the operatic successes of
Michael William Balfe and William Vincent Wallace in London.
The Seguins travelled to England in the summer of 1844 and brought back with
them Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl, which had scored a hit at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane
during the previous season.
48
The opera was produced for the first time in New York at
the Park Theatre on November 25, 1844, almost one year to the day after it opened in
London, and since then it was revived over twenty-five times on Broadway, the last time
being in 1933.
49
After the initial run of twenty-three performances at the Park between
November 25 and January 18, The Bohemian Girl moved to the Bowery Theatre during
the spring of 1845, and then on the Chatham Theatre in the fall.
50
It would return to the
Bowery Theatre in 1848 and again in 1852 and would not be absent from Broadway for
that amount of time for another forty years. Over the course of the second half of the
nineteenth century, The Bohemian Girl played at fourteen different venues in New York
City alone (see Table 1). While these theatres varied in size, none were larger than the
Park and the Bowery, both of which had a significantly smaller seating capacity—

48
William Alexander Barrett, Balfe: His Life and Work (London: Remington and Co., 1882), 157-61.
49
Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater, 3:653.
50
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 5:92-120.

343
Table 4, New York theatres that mounted The Bohemian Girl in the nineteenth century.
Park Theatre 1844
Bowery Theatre 1845
Chatham Theatre 1845
Bowery Theatre 1848
Bowery Theatre 1852
Niblo’s Garden 1855
Burton’s Theatre 1858
Burton’s Theatre 1859
Olympic Theatre 1864
Olympic Theatre 1867
Théâtre Français 1868
Grand Opera House 1869
Bryant’s Opera House 1872
Olympic Theatre 1874
Fifth Avenue Theatre 1877
Grand Opera House 1878
Grand Opera House 1882
Booth’s Theatre 1882
Bijou Opera House 1884
Fifth Avenue Theatre 1885
Grand Opera House 1889
American Theatre 1896
American Theatre 1898

approximately 1,000 fewer seats—than Drury Lane.
As Italian, French, and German grand operas were increasingly produced in
theatres that were dedicated exclusively to opera as a distinct genre, The Bohemian Girl
continued to be performed in Broadway theatres alongside Offenbach and Gilbert and
Sullivan. The special appeal of Balfe’s opera for New Yorkers was partly due to the
accessibility of its English libretto and partly to the disarming simplicity and elegance of
the melodic writing in its arias. While audiences at the Park had been exposed to the
musical complexities of Mozart and Rossini for twenty years by the time The Bohemian

344
Girl was first mounted, they were particularly well equipped to appreciate Balfe’s
English style of operatic lyricism given their long relationship with ballad opera. The
musical and literary content in Balfe’s work, however, brought to English opera an
enduring quality that would lay the foundation for composers writing light opera for the
American stage later in the century. By the same token, it also instilled in New Yorkers
an appetite for larger musico-dramatic forms that nonetheless retained a lightness of
touch.
The other British opera from the same era to achieve comparable, if not equal,
popularity in New York was William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana, which also opened
originally at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, four years after The Bohemian Girl. On
April 13, 1848 Mr. and Mrs. Seguin had brought Balfe’s opera to the Bowery Theatre,
and over the course of the next two weeks they were both seen in Fra Diavolo, La
Cenerentola, and La Sonnambula, as well as Louise Bertin’s Guy Mannering and John
Davy’s Rob Roy.
51
Somehow the repertory ensemble found time in their busy rehearsal
schedule to learn Wallace’s new opera, which was produced on May 4 for the first time
in New York and was repeated three times in three days to conclude the season at the
Bowery.
52
The New York Herald noted at the time that the opera played “to a very
brilliant and fashionable house” and that it was “received with much favor and deserves
all the applause it got.”
53

Maritana was not revived nearly as often as The Bohemian Girl, but it was

51
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 6:351.
52
Ireland, Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860, 2:503.
53
The New York Herald, May 6, 1848.

345

Figure 8.5, William Vincent Wallace.

produced consistently in New York over the next several decades, beginning with a
performance conducted by the composer on October 19, 1854 at the Broadway Theatre
with Louisa Pyne in the lead role, Susan Pyne as Lazarillo, and William Harrison as Don
Caesar.
54
One month later the Harrison-Pyne Troupe gave a benefit performance for the

54
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 6:344.

346
composer at the same house along with a farce, My Friend, The Major; and in December,
it was staged several times in repertory. During the summer of 1855, the Harrison-Pyne
Troupe produced Maritana at Niblo’s Garden along with five other operas, including
Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment in its American premiere.
55
The musical director of the
company at the time was George F. Bristow, who would present his own opera, Rip Van
Winkle, with them at the same theatre in the fall.
56
Maritana was not produced again on
Broadway until 1864, when Harrison’s English Opera Troupe included it with The
Bohemian Girl in their repertory during January at Niblo’s Saloon. From that time, the
opera was revived five more times in Broadway Theatres: at the Olympic Theatre (1867),
Théâtre Français (1868), Bijou Theatre (1884), and the American Theatre (1898 and
1900).
57

Orchestration of English Operas for American Theatres

The challenge of contracting orchestras with a full complement of instruments—
particularly winds and brass—for the theatres of New York surely had an impact upon
the musical representation of The Bohemian Girl and Maritana when they were produced
there in the 1840s. Balfe’s score for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, called for a

55
Ibid., 381.
56
Ibid., 469.
57
These final two productions were mounted by Henry Savage and the Castle Square Opera Company with
new orchestrations by Frank Saddler, then an unknown arranger who had been hired by M. Witmark &
Sons in 1898 after a brief career as a music director on the burlesque circuit. For more on this development
in Saddler’s career, see Chapter 4 of this dissertation. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical Theater,
3:661.

347
woodwind section with pairs of flutes (the second doubling on piccolo), oboes, clarinets,
and bassoons; a brass section with four horns, two trumpets (occasionally substituted by
cornets à pistons), three trombones (two tenors and a bass), and ophicleide (a part often
played at first on the serpent); a percussion section for timpani, snare, triangle, and bass
drum/cymbal; and a string section with violin I, violin II, viola, violoncello, and double
bass parts played by a minimum of eight musicians.
58
Balfe’s opera was not only written
for this large theatre, but it was also created in the tradition of Mozart and Rossini, whose
theatrical works were models for the British composer since he had been singing their
music in the cultural capitals of Europe since the 1820s.
59
In fact, The Bohemian Girl
expands somewhat upon Rossini’s orchestra for Il barbiere di Siviglia; in addition to the
usual pairs of woodwinds and trumpets, Rossini only calls for two horns and no
trombones or ophicleide. This development is natural for a work that was written almost
thirty years later. It is not surprising that Maritana was scored by Wallace for essentially
the same forces, given that it was premiered at the same theatre only two years later. The
only difference in the instrumentation of the two operas is that Wallace does not call for
the ophicleide (or serpent) and cornets à pistons, a decision that may have been
precipitated by the composer’s desire to create a score that could be performed in cities
around the world that did not have easy access to unusual European instruments or

58
Since a full score of The Bohemian Girl has never been published, the instrumentation for Balfe’s score
can be found on the composer’s autograph, housed at the British Library. The score cited here is described
in the catalogue as “Fragments of the French version of The Bohemian Girl, mostly in full score.” Michael
William Balfe, The Bohemian Girl, Edgerton MS 2741, cf. Add. 29355, British Library, Archives and
Manuscripts.
59
Balfe began his career as an opera singer. In 1827 he met and sang for Rossini, who offered to
recommend him to the Italian Opera on the condition that he study for one year with Bordogni. He also
studied music privately with Luigi Cherubini during this period. Barrett, Michael William Balfe, 63-78.

348
players to take the parts.
Given the difficulties of finding professional oboists to play in the theatres of
New York in the 1830s, it is unlikely that either score was performed using the
composers’ instrumentation, whether or not they used parts derived from their original
scores. Other factors contributed to making the performance of these operas in their
original form untenable in New York. The Park and Bowery were commercial theatres
with no governmental subsidy, and so it was probably considered impractical, both
logistically as well as economically, to attempt to contract thirty musicians to play
Balfe’s or Wallace’s scores as they were originally orchestrated. And besides, it was
unnecessary to hire the same forces as these composers intended for Drury Lane. New
York audiences, as we have seen, were accustomed to theatre orchestras that were modest
in size, regularly incomplete, and sometimes lacking in proficiency, which would have
made the managers less inclined to spend more money for a large orchestra when reduced
forces would be sufficient under the circumstances. As it was, Balfe’s attractive music
artfully sung by the Seguins and adequately rendered by an orchestra of reduced forces
was appealing enough make The Bohemian Girl the theatrical hit of the 1844-1845
season in New York. And two years later Maritana was successfully introduced into the
operatic repertory for the duration of the nineteenth century.
Orchestral music in the theatres of New York during the nineteenth century was
constrained by these conditions to the extent that managers eventually began to
commission reduced orchestrations of imported operas as a way to ameliorate some of
the worst inconsistencies in performances of theatre music. In 1875 Arthur W. Tams,

349
who was at that time the chorus master of the Clara Louise Kellogg Opera Co., began to
collect musical materials for operas that could be used by his company and loaned to
others. In time, the Arthur W. Tams Musical Library, located at 109 West 28th Street in
Manhattan, became the leading supplier of musical scores and parts in the United States
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1900 Tams published a small
pamphlet, Souvenir and Greeting from the Arthur W. Tams celebrating its twenty-fifth
anniversary Circulating Musical Library.
60
It described, among the firm’s many offerings,
a catalogue of “Condensed Orchestrations”: “The Library has, at great expense, had the
orchestration of all the standard works condensed, so that it can be played by the usual

60
Arthur W. Tams (1848-1927) was a singer, chorus master, stage manager, musical director, in addition to
being the sole proprietor of the largest music copying and lending business in the country. He was raised in
Philadelphia, where he began to perform as a baritone at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church at the age of
nineteen. Over the next fifteen years, he worked with the Carncross & Dixie Minstrel Co. and Caroline
Ritchings Olde Folkes Co., Crystal Palace Opera Co. (as director), Kellogg Opera Co. (as chorus master),
the C. D. Hess Co. (as stage manager), the Emma Abbott Co. (as stage manager and music director), and
the American Opera Co. In 1886, he began to work at the New York Casino as a stage manager and
continued in this capacity for seven years until the demands of his Musical Library required that he
concentrate entirely on his business. The Arthur W. Tams Musical Library was conceived in 1875, when he
was working with Clara Louise Kellogg’s opera company, as a solution to the difficulty of obtaining
orchestral scores and parts by American musical organizations. A 1923 profile in the Musical Digest
describes Tams’ method of developing his library: “Once the idea came to him, Mr. Tams started out to
buy wherever he heard of music being for sale. His business took him to every part of the world. And in
each city he visited, he collected music. At the same time he encountered musicians and musical
organizations whose need he learned and whose requirements he studied.” Over the years, Tams acquired
many large collections, including those of bandleader Patrick S. Gilmore, orchestral conductors Adolf
Neuendorff and George Henschel, and opera directors Heinrich Conreid and John A. McCaull. Tams’
music copying office provided scores and parts to choral societies, symphony orchestras, opera companies,
and solo artists, serving amateur groups as well as some of the finest professional organizations in the
country, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York
Metropolitan Opera House. The Tams collection of 3,000 grand, light, and comic operas was a reliable
source of musical materials for companies throughout the United States and in London, Paris, Berlin, and
Milan. In 1902, Tams opened a department dedicated to costumes and other theatrical properties for rent
exclusively to amateur companies. The Arthur W. Tams Musical Library was merged with the musical
library of M. Witmark & Sons in 1925. Souvenir and Greeting from the Arthur W. Tams Circulating
Musical Library (New York, 1900) (box 6, folder 2), Warshaw Collection of Business Americana—Music,
Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; and Dorle Jarmel,
“Music and Costumes by—Tams Is a Treasure House as Exciting as Tutankhamen’s Tomb and Not Nearly
so Exclusive,” Musical Digest, February 27, 1923 (box 6, folder 1), Warshaw Collection of Business
Americana—Music, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

350

Figure 8.6, The copying room at the Arthur W. Tams Music Library (circa 1900).

theatre orchestra of from nine to twenty men. This will be found a great help to the
average societies.”
61
These condensed scores were created for classical music standards
such as Handel’s Messiah and Haydn’s The Creation as well as much of the standard
operatic repertoire. A catalogue of the Music Library’s materials for rent—
“Orchestrations, Vocal Scores, Chorus Parts, Prompt books, Dialogue Parts and Stage
Manager’s Guide”—lists 684 works in four categories: Operettas without Chorus,
Operettas with Chorus, Comic Operas, and Grand Operas.
62

61
Souvenir and Greeting from the Arthur W. Tams Circulating Musical Library, 14.
62
Arthur W. Tams Importer and Publisher of Music and Circulating Musical Library, Catalogue No. 1
(New York, 1902), (box 6, folder 1), Warshaw Collection of Business Americana—Music, Archives
Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

351
A fine example of an orchestral reduction of a theatrical work is a score of The
Bohemian Girl that was associated with The Bostonians, a theatrical company that toured
extensively in the 1880s and was responsible for many important premieres and
commissions of comic opera in the 1890s.
63
Handwritten on the folder containing the
Director’s Score is both the Bostonians name and an anonymous note that states: “Purely
an arrangement and nothing at all like the original.”
64
While the presence of the comic
opera troupe’s name is clearly an indication that they used this orchestral arrangement of
The Bohemian Girl when they performed the opera regularly in the 1880s, nothing else is
known about its provenance and it is not clear whether or not it was used by other
productions companies. (Nonetheless, this score will be referred to as the “Bostonians”
for a convenient point of reference.) The cautionary message that accompanied the name
on the folder may have been in reference to the fact that the score contained an abridged
version of The Bohemian Girl, or to the fact that it was a reduced orchestration, or both.
Act One alone has significant cuts to the opening chorus “Up with the Banner” and to
Thaddeus’s air “’Tis Sad to Leave Our Fatherland” in addition to a complete cut of the
Waltz and a different Overture from that in the original score.
65

The arrangement from the score used by the Bostonians differs in several

63
For more information on The Bostonians (also known as the Boston Ideals), see Barnabee, My
Wanderings.
64
Michael William Balfe, The Bohemian Girl, unknown arranger, Box 43, Tams-Witmark Collection,
Music Division, Library of Congress.
65
The overture in the Bostonians arrangement follows the vocal score published by the Oliver Ditson
Company and edited by Arthur Sullivan and J. Pittman, whereas the original can be found in the rare
original vocal score from 1843 or in the French vocal score La Bohémienne published by E. Gerard et
Companie. Michael William Balfe, The Bohemian Girl, words by Alfred Bunn, edited by Arthur Sullivan
and J. Pittman (Philadelphia: Oliver Ditson Company); Michael William Balfe, La Bohémienne, poéme de
M. de St. Georges (Paris: E. Gérard et Companie).

352
significant ways from Balfe’s orchestral writing in the opera. The most common
differences are a result of the arranger’s need to adapt the score to fit the needs of theatre
orchestras with smaller woodwind and brass sections. The Bostonians score was arranged
for an ensemble with ten woodwind and brass instruments—flute, oboe, two clarinets,
bassoon, two horns, two cornets, and trombone—while Balfe’s original score calls for
eighteen players from the same two groups. As a result, the orchestrator of the American
score from the 1880s used strings to compensate for fewer woodwind and brass. The
second section of the opening chorus marked Allegro Vivace features a persistent rhythm
on the beat in four-four time in the orchestra supporting a mixed chorus singing
homophonically on beats two, three, and four: “It’s pinion flies free in the skies as that of
the airy king.”
66
Balfe relies primarily on three trombones and two horns in close position
supported by the ophicleide in the bass to punch out the pulsing F-sharp-minor chords in
rhythm (see Example 8.1). Violin II, viola, and double bass reinforce the sound with
doublings of three notes in the triad, but they do not provide the primary sonority or
dynamic in this passage. By contrast, the Bostonians arrangement features the entire
string body as the principle sound with the violins producing double stops to provide the
punch that the brass gives in the scoring by Balfe (see Example 8.2). Violin I is asked to
break away from the chords in order to carry the broken chord motive with the trill by
itself while Balfe asks woodwinds to join in this figure. It is unclear why the arranger of
the Bostonians’ score does not employ the woodwinds in this motive, since they are
available. However, it would be impossible to match Balfe’s orchestration without more

66
“The airy king” refers to the eagle that appeared on the Austrian flag during the mid-nineteenth century.

353
Example 8.1, Michael William Balfe, opening chorus, The Bohemian Girl,
measures 45-50.

354

Example 8.2, Michael William Balfe, opening chorus, The Bohemian Girl,
unknown arranger, measures 45-50.

instruments, as we can see how he uses the woodwinds to broadly amplify the antecedent
phrase in bars 49-50 with parallel thirds and a bouquet of orchestral color while the
doublings by clarinet and flute at the octave in the score for the Bostonians’ carries the
motive but not the richness of sound in the original.

355
The New York arranger’s reliance on strings to compensate for lighter brass and
woodwind sections is evident in a fanfare-like introductory chord at the beginning of
Count Arnheim’s first air, “A Soldier’s Life.” Balfe is able to score an F-major chord
spanning six octaves from the piccolo to the ophicleide with twelve instruments playing
the tonic, four playing the third, and two playing the fifth among the woodwinds and
brass alone (see Example 8.3). The strings have less responsibility for the forte dynamic
and regal sonority with which Balfe intended to introduce his royal character, hence the
light scoring for that section in which he even leaves the cello out of the texture. For this
chord, the arranger of the Bostonians score felt it was necessary for the strings to play a
larger role in representing the Count’s grandeur—the two violins and viola each being
given double stops (see Example 8.4)—with an ensemble of ten woodwind and brass
only able to cover four octaves and thus not able to carry the bulk of the responsibility to
create the requisite majesty of sound. Evidence that the New York arranger did not have
access to Balfe’s full score can be found in this same passage, for while the composer
uses bassoons and violas to create a sustained legato accompaniment in half notes against
which the triplet figuration was scored (with cello tacet), the American score has a bass-
chord figure in its place with staccato triplets. Far from Balfe’s delicate sostenuto texture,
the passage becomes brittle and plodding with this scoring, losing much of the
composer’s deep sentiment and lyricism in the process, in spite of the melody being
doubled by the flute and clarinet. The absence of Balfe’s elegant and varied
countermelodies in horn III and ophicleide confirms this suspicion. Since Balfe’s full

356
Example 8.3, Michael William Balfe, “A Soldier’s Life,” The Bohemian Girl,
measures 1-5.

357
Example 8.4, Michael William Balfe, “A Soldier’s Life,” The Bohemian Girl,
unknown arranger, measures 1-5.

score has never been published, the New York arranger was compelled to use the
American vocal score published by Oliver Ditson as his only point of reference in order

358
to create a serviceable arrangement for American theatres with reduced orchestral forces
at their disposal.
Another example that the anonymous arranger of the American score was skilled
and practical but not particularly artful in the craft of orchestration can be found by doing
a comparison of his setting of “In the gipsy’s life” with the composer’s. This passage
involves a homophonic setting for mixed chorus which provides most of the sonority and
dynamic, however the two orchestral arrangements of the instrumental accompaniment
reveal two different approaches to the handling of instrumental combinations that are not
compelled by constraints in the instrumental forces. Balfe’s orchestration is efficient,
appropriate, and maximizes the effect of the instruments available to him to enhance the
choral writing, while the American score is unnecessarily dense and heavy in a part of the
opera that is already dominated by a thick vocal texture. The primary instruments that are
traditionally used to create orchestral “glue”—sustained tones that bind the various
orchestral sounds and articulations together—are the horns. Demonstrating his immersion
in the tradition of Mozart and Rossini, Balfe scores long, multi-measure sustained notes for
the horns in octaves on the fifth with the low strings providing the tonic. This open
harmonic texture gives the chorus a framework that supports without intruding on the
singers’ homophonic chords while the violin II and viola provide a light, gently pulsating
texture with oscillating thirds and octaves (see Example 8.5). The choral melody, which is
emblematic in the opera for “gypsy” culture, is played by violin I and doubled by flute
oboe and bassoon with octaves above and below, giving a luminous sound to the voices.

359
Example 8.5, Michael William Balfe, “In the Gipsy’s Life,” The Bohemian Girl,
measures 15-19.

360
Example 8.6, Michael William Balfe, “In the Gipsy’s Life,” The Bohemian Girl,
unknown arranger, measures 15-19.

361
The Bostonians arrangement has a similar set up in the strings, however the arrangement
calls for the cellos to play tonic and dominant, which is establishes a dense sound as a
foundation for the texture (see Example 8.6). Similarly, the brass is scored in a sustained
close position chords (which involves a major second in the dominant sonority), bringing
an even more turgid sound to the musical canvas. The choral melody is doubled by violin I
and clarinet with no octave displacement, and yet the flute and oboe are unused, missing
an opportunity to add instrumental color and body to the line. And, once again, without
Balfe’s orchestral full score, the arranger would not know that the composer wrote the
brass triplets on beat four that act as an instrumental echo to the triplet at the end of the
melody, but also as a hinge that binds the musical phrases together.
Just as the orchestral arrangement of The Bohemian Girl for the Bostonians was
created several decades after the American premiere, the two extant American
orchestrations of Wallace’s Maritana were not made for early American productions of
the opera in the 1840s, but rather for those in the 1880s and 1890s. One of the two
manuscripts, also originally from the Arthur W. Tams Music Library, was drafted on
14-stave paper in landscape format and bound with a heavy cardboard cover.
67
A label on
the front with the name of the opera written in pen refers to the contents as a
“Conductor’s Score,” and yet this is probably a generic paper adhesive that was used for
reference as there is no indication that it was ever used in performance. Although the
score is undated, circumstantial evidence places its origin firmly in 1884, when Maritana

67
This score may be found in Box 720 of the Tams-Witmark Collection at the Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.

362
was produced at the Bijou Opera House by John Donnelly and Gustave Kerker.
68
Kerker,
who soon after became the resident conductor at the Casino Theatre, and who composed
many musical comedies for the extravagantly appointed Moorish-style Broadway theatre,
was also the music director and the arranger of the new version of Maritana at the Bijou.
While there is no credit or attribution in the manuscript, Kerker’s hand is clearly
discernible when compared to his own score for The Tourists (1906).
69
Further evidence
of the manuscript originating with the 1884 production at the Bijou Theatre is the fact
that the stage manager was Arthur W. Tams, who had just opened his music copying and
lending house the previous year.
70
And when Maritana was mounted again in 1898 at the
American Theatre by the Castle Square Opera Company another orchestration was
created for the new production by Frank Saddler, who was employed by the M. Witmark
& Sons Publishing House and Music Library as an arranger.
71
After the merger of the
Arthur W. Tams Music Library and M. Witmark & Sons in 1925, both scores for
Maritana were housed together, first at the Tams-Witmark Company and then, after
1969, at the Library of Congress. Since Saddler’s orchestration for Maritana was his first
major job as a professional arranger, this score will be discussed in another chapter
dedicated to his work.
72

Wallace’s original score was composed over a period of a little more than three

68
Norton, A Chronology of American Theater, 1:359.
69
Part of Kerker’s score for The Tourists is housed in the Tams-Witmark Collection (Box 255) at the
Library of Congress.
70
The inception of the Arthur W. Tams Music Library in 1883 is described in the Finding Aid to the Tams-
Witmark Collection at the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/rr/perform/special/gd-index.html
(accessed on December 23, 2015).
71
Witmark and Goldberg, From Ragtime to Swingtime, 166.
72
See Chapter 9 of this dissertation.

363
months, from late July to early November of 1844.
73
After Maritana premiered in
London, Dublin, and Philadelphia, Wallace managed to secure a production in Vienna at
the Theatre an der Wien, which took place on January 8, 1848. The opera was given in a
German translation by Alfred Julius Becher, whose execution during the revolution that
year precipitated both the abandonment of plans to produce Maritana at the Hofoper and
Wallace’s premature return to London. Departing Vienna in haste, the composer left his
score behind and it was fortunately preserved at the Musiksammlung of the
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in addition to a fair copy that was created using his
original manuscript. The fair copy was commissioned for the revival at the Hofoper
incorporating Becher’s German translation, but was shelved after the plans for the new
production were cancelled. The autograph score, the copyist’s full score, and the original
parts from the 1848 production remained unknown to scholars of nineteenth century
English opera until they were rediscovered in the Vienna archive by David Grant in
1999.
74
Similar to Balfe’s autograph score of The Bohemian Girl, Wallace’s manuscript
is not a fair copy and shows signs of him composing directly into full score. The lack of
key signatures and instrument names on every page is evidence of the composer’s
urgency to document the musical and orchestral ideas from his memory as a part of the
creative process rather than the more deliberate, careful, and precise notation by hand that
is the by-product of transcription from one score to another. While the manuscript was
primarily intended to be a score from which a fair copy and parts could be derived,

73
David Grant, “Critical Notes” from A New Critical Edition of William Vincent Wallace’s Maritana
(1845/1848) with Biographical Information and Selected Reception History of the Opera to 1855 (PhD
diss., Open University, 2011), 137-38.
74
Ibid., 159.

364
markings in pencil to show tempo modification and other performance notes show that it
was used to conduct from by Wallace and others.
75
David Grant utilized both scores to
create his New Critical Edition of Maritana, which provided the basis for the following
comparative analysis between the original 1848 score for Vienna and the 1883 score for
the Bijou Theatre in New York.
The score by Gustave Kerker is preceded by a note in pencil on the flyleaf that
reads: “Somewhat freely condensed from the original.” The script in large pencil bears no
resemblance to the fine ink notation in the score and therefore is most likely not by
Kerker himself. The meaning of this message to the user is not as ambiguous as the
similar note on the Bostonian’s score of The Bohemian Girl (“Purely an arrangement and
nothing at all like the original”), which could have referred to the form as well as the
orchestration. In the case of Kerker’s arrangement of Maritana, only the overture and
No. 26 (Trio: “Remorse and Dishonour”) are missing, leaving no question that the
reduction being referred to is merely in the forces and scoring. Compared to Wallace’s
instrumentation—two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two
trumpets, three trombones, percussion, and strings—Kerker’s orchestra is much smaller,
with two horns, one trombone, and only clarinets paired amongst the woodwinds: an
overall decrease of seven players (from nineteen to twelve) in the non-string parts alone.
As a result, Kerker relies on the strings to do the job that woodwinds and brass are
assigned by Wallace, just as the anonymous arranger of the Bostonian’s score for The

75
Information about the original materials of Maritana was provided by David Grant in a brief white paper
called Notes on Sources of Wallace’s Maritana – Miscellaneous Considerations, private correspondence
with the author, October, 2015.

365
Bohemian Girl did. The pulsating F-major chords at the beginning of the opening chorus
are taken by four horns, two clarinets, and two bassoons in Wallace’s original, while
Kerker compensates for the reduction of two horns and one bassoon by adding two
cornets, trombone, and the entire string body with the violins playing double stops (see
Examples 8.7 and 8.8). The decision to include the strings changes both the sonority and
dynamic considerably, however, particularly with the doubling of the fundamental in the
lower strings. In Wallace’s score, when the melody enters in measure 3, it comes in three
parts—flute 1, oboes 1 & 2, and bassoon 1—over two octaves. Kerker assigns the same
line to violin I with doublings on single flute and oboe (an octave below), making the
melody an ensemble string sound with woodwind coloring as opposed to a woodwind
sound.
Since we now know that Wallace’s autograph and the Viennese fair copy were
inaccessible to North American opera producers in the nineteenth century, having been
housed in the Hofoper and Österreichische Nationalbibliothek after Wallace left the
country, the first question to answer when evaluating Kerker’s orchestration of Maritana
is: which vocal score as the source of his arrangement? Unfortunately, a close
comparison of Kerker’s score with several original vocal scores does not yield a clear
conclusion. Following the Viennese premiere, a vocal score of Maritana was first
published in London by Cramer & Beale in 1846 and then, later, another was published
in Vienna by Diabelli & Co. in 1848. Since Wallace’s original full score was abandoned
in Vienna in 1848 and the Diabelli became unusually rare as a result of the revolution, the
Cramer & Beale became a common source for two vocal scores from the 1880s,

366
including one edited by Myles B. Foster and published by Boosey & Co. and another
published by Oliver Ditson in the United States. There are two parts of Kerker’s score
that have deviations from Wallace’s original, however these do not correspond to one of
Example 8.7, William Vincent Wallace, “Sing, pretty maiden, sing,” Maritana,
measures 1-5.

367

Example 8.8, William Vincent Wallace, “Sing, pretty maiden, sing,” Maritana,
orchestration by Gustave Kerker, measures 1-6.

368
the vocal scores indicating that it was his source. First, the Cramer and Diabelli both have
a mistake in the harmony in the third measure of the Opening Chorus: the F-major tonic
harmony is maintained instead of changing to the sub-dominant (B♭) over a tonic pedal.
This mistake was also made by Kerker (see ˇ in Example 8.8) while Wallace’s autograph
and the fair copy show the harmonic change. The mistake is also revealed by comparing
measure 3 with measure 57, which has the same melodic material in counterpoint with
the vocal setting of the lyrics “Sing, pretty maiden, the thrilling airs of Spain.” In the later
section, the subdominant appears in the second beat of the vocal scores, making it clear
that the first harmonization was a simple copyist’s error in the 1846 edition. The presence
of the same mistake in the 1880s vocal scores (Boosey and Ditson) should be expected,
since we know Wallace’s score was unavailable to them, however finding it in the
Diabelli as well is confounding. There is every reason to believe that the Viennese
publisher would have had access at least to the fair copy of Wallace’s score that was
made during the same year that the opera was premiered in the city where the firm was
based. Reinforcing this notion of the Diabelli firm having access to Wallace’s full score
in 1848 is the fact that an eight-measure instrumental introduction that Wallace composed
for the ballad “Scenes that Are Brightest” is present in the Diabelli vocal score, but not in
the Cramer and Beale, Boosey, or Ditson versions. Instead of the eight-measure
introduction, which is a closing version of the melodic period, the British score has a
two-measure introduction—one measure with a free arpeggio and another with the
accompanimental texture—preceding the vocal line. But though the Diabelli is the only
vocal score to feature Wallace’s introduction, the harmonization of the melody is not

369
faithful to the composer’s original setting. In measure three, Wallace uses the dominant
with a tonic pedal (C
7
/F) during the vocal accompaniment, whereas the Diabelli has a
root position dominant (C
7
) sonority instead, and Kerker uses this harmonization as well.
Despite the fact that the Diabelli vocal score was not in wide circulation due to the
revolution in Vienna in 1848 that disrupted the opera’s success, and despite some
inconsistencies in the score, the best guess we can make is that Kerker used this early
score as the basis for his arrangement.
76

One way or another, knowing that Kerker did not use the original score as a basis
for his arrangement helps us to understand the extent to which his instrumental
assignments were conventional and the product of tradition while at the same time
helping us to know in what ways his choices were made in response to the different
instrumental forces at his disposal. Wallace arranged the air “Scenes that are brightest”
with a disarming simplicity that differed in small but significant ways from Kerker’s
setting. With its sweet melody, deep lyric sentiment, and elegant instrumental setting,
“Scene that are brightest” situates Wallace in the finest bel canto opera tradition. As an
independent solo, the song had great longevity in the operatic recital repertory of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appearing regularly in collections of vocal music
promoted as favorites of female opera singers such as Adelina Patti, Christine Nilsson,

76
Most of the information presented here regarding the provenance of the musical sources of Maritana was
garnered from my fruitful correspondence with David Grant, whose knowledge of Wallace’s opera is
unparalleled. He also suggested that Wallace’s introduction might have been dropped during the original
Drury Lane production after the soprano Emma Romer or the manager Alfred Bunn realized that “Scenes
that Are Brightest” was going to be the hit of the show and, as a result, did not want to give away the
melody before the vocal entrance.

370
Sofia Scalchi, Marcella Sembrich, and Nellie Melba.
77
The eighth-note sextuplet
figuration in Wallace’s score was assigned to the harp, such a natural choice that it
appears as though the composer conceived of the musical idea with the instrument in
mind, just as he had done in another aria from the opera, “’Tis the harp in the air” (see
Example 8.9). Wallace scored the melody in the flutes and clarinets, doubled and in
octaves, giving the line both strength and clarity. Kerker gave the line the same sound
except that he did not have the paired flutes at his disposal, causing him to use a single
clarinet as well, which results in a thinner sound overall (see Example 8.10). Kerker’s
band at the Bijou did not include a harp either and so the idiomatic arpeggiated figure
was given to violin I instead, causing him to score the string chords in close position
amongst the remaining instruments. Wallace’s original voicing of the F-major chord in
open position would have allowed the harp to play within the confines of the string
sonority and is colorful with the third in the upper voice of the first two chords. Though
he changed the violin I sonority from A to F, leaving the string chord without a third, this
pure octave and fifth still provides the harp with a light underpinning. The open voicing,
enhanced by his designation of bridge mutes (con sordino) for the upper strings and his
scoring of short notes in the bass, gives the strings an ethereal sheen through which the
harp punctuates the chord tones in slow pulsating triplets. By contrast, Kerker’s close-

77
Two examples of these collections are Superb Songs: A Magnificent Collection of Popular Songs with
Accompaniments for the Piano or Organ (B. F. Banes, 1884) and Twenty-Six World Famous Songs (New
York: The Circle Publishing Company, 1909). Both publications included images of these and other singers
within the book or as part of their promotional materials. In the 1960s and 1970s, “Scenes that are
brightest” was often sung by Dame Joan Sutherland in solo recitals (including as an encore) that were
conducted by her husband Richard Bonynge, who was also the music director for a complete recording of
Maritana released in 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJlFlHK2Vkk (accessed January 4, 2016).

371
position chords are denser and darker and less melodically interesting, since he keeps the
common tone (C) in the top line in static parallel motion with the pedal bass (F) (see
Example 8.10). He clearly wants to make sure the long tones do not cover the violin
arpeggios, since they both have the same sonority, and is constrained by the
circumstances. From the perspective of sound, he might have used clarinet 2 to play this
line, since it is available, but the relentless procession of sextuplets would have made the

Example 8.9, William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,” Maritana,
measures 1-4.

372
Example 8.10, William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,” Maritana,
orchestration by Gustave Kerker, measures 1-4.

line difficult to render by a single wind player with the requisite ease. This is yet another
example of an American arranger forced to rely upon the violins to play musical lines that
are more idiomatic to other instruments that the arranger does not have at his disposal. In
the consequent half of the melodic period, Wallace introduces the oboe as a doubling of
the clarinet in the lower octave of the melody to build a dynamic increase into the musical
texture using increased forces. This effect is supported by the addition of paired bassoons
playing three successive dissonances—major second, tritone, tritone—which give
enhanced intensity to the progression of secondary dominants—VI7-II7-V7-I—

373
that set up the vocal entrance (see Example 8.11). Kerker adds the oboe to the second half
of the melody, just as the composer did, demonstrating his good orchestral instincts and
training; but because he only has one flute and one oboe in his band, he assigns clarinet 2
to the role played by bassoon 1 in Wallace’s score, albeit using different contrapuntal
lines (see Example 8.12). At this point in the score of the American arrangement, we find
doublings of the clarinet 2 and bassoon lines in the trumpets and trombone, but because
Kerker marks the brass parts with the names of their corresponding woodwind
instruments, it can be assumed that these were intended only as substitutes in the event
that either of the winds were absent. This practical strategy—providing instrumentalists
with substitute lines to be played during the breaks in their original parts—solves the
problem going back to the 1820s of musicians needing to negotiate two parts during a
performance when an instrument or player is unavailable.
78
The distinct possibility of
unusual pairings of woodwinds and brass (e.g., clarinet and trombone in counterpoint that
Wallace had scored for two bassoons), made more likely by this technique, tells us that
music directors such as Kerker were not nearly as concerned with instrumental color as
they were with making sure the music had the proper dynamics and that all the melodies
and counter melodies were being represented—a particularly important element in the
orchestral texture since singers often took instrumental cues from these lines to help them
with their entrances. Not only was this practice typical of American theatrical arranging
during the late-nineteenth century, it can be found in scores well into the twentieth

78
For example, one may recall this problem during the Garcías’ operatic residency at the Park Theatre. See
pages 332-335 of this dissertation.

374
century, suggesting that instrumental substitution was an ongoing practical solution to the
persistent challenge of incomplete forces in New York theatre orchestras on any given
night at least through World War I. As the arranging techniques that Kerker used in
adapting Maritana were becoming standard practice in New York in the 1880s,
Example 8.11, William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,” Maritana,
measures 5-8.

375

Example 8.12, William Vincent Wallace, “Scenes that are brightest,” Maritana,
orchestration by Gustave Kerker, measures 5-8.

orchestration was increasingly being considered to be an indispensable element in the
composition of European operas—a development that gained momentum in the works of
Berlioz, whose influence was particularly strong in the field of opera. So while the scores

376
of Balfe and Wallace are examples of solid, if conventional, Italianate orchestral writing,
where, as Adam Carse describes, “noisy and rather blatant tutti alternate with agreeably
light and well-balanced accompaniments to vocal melodies,” the arrangements of their
works by their American counterparts are makeshift products by pragmatic craftsmen
whose objective is merely to create effective settings of operatic favorites for American
theatres, where the orchestras were smaller and the audiences were less discriminating
than their European counterparts.
79
The model created by Broadway arrangers such as
Kerker of a serviceable division of labor between composers and orchestrators would
form the foundation of the tradition of orchestration for the American musical theatre in
the twentieth century, when composers came from the ranks of popular songwriters and
orchestrators were trained musicians whose compositional abilities were incompatible
with the zeitgeist of musical styles on Broadway.

Offenbach in the German Theatres of New York

The Théâtre Français in New York was originally the name of a troupe of actors
presenting French plays. The group was established at the theatre located at 585
Broadway—previously called Bryant’s Minstrel Hall and famous in the 1870s as Tony
Pastor’s Theatre—which was renamed the New Olympic just before the Théâtre Français
was officially formed on May 11, 1858.
80
For eight years, they were a “nomadic” troupe

79
Adam Carse, The History of Orchestration (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925), 251-52.
80
From 1873 to 1881 Tony Pastor was the manager of 585 Broadway, where he developed his brand of
“respectable” vaudeville, and where many great stars of the New York stage—Lillian Russell, Nat C.

377
(according to Odell) that produced French theatre in several venues: primarily at 585
Broadway, 201 Bowery, and at Niblo’s Saloon.
81
Though the ensemble’s programs were
largely dedicated to plays, they occasionally presented, as part of an evening’s pot-
pourri, one-act musical farces by Offenbach: in January and February of 1863, for
example, they staged Les Deux Aveugles (1855), Tromb al Cazar (1856), and Le
Violoneux (1855).
82
It was not until the Théâtre Français had a new theatre built for them
in 1866—off Broadway on the northwest corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue—that
they were able to produce Offenbach’s evening-length opéras bouffes, scores which he
had been composing for Parisian audiences since 1858, when the French government
lifted its public ban of large-scale musical comedies.
83
Once the American company
produced Orphée aux Enfers, New York audiences became more enamored of
Offenbach’s music than of that of any other composer in the city’s theatrical history.
Within two years of the January 1867 production of Orphée aux Enfers, five more of
Offenbach’s operas—La Grande-Duchesse de Gérostein, La Belle Hélène, Barbe-Bleue,
Les Bavards, and La Péricole—were introduced in New York theatres, along with five
burlesques.
84

While the rage for Offenbach in New York was instigated by Orphée aux Enfers

Goodwin, Evans & Hoey, and May and Flo Irwin among them—got their starts. Dimmick, Our Theatres
Today and Yesterday, 40-41; Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 7:69.
81
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 8:56.
82
Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage, 7:585.
83
For more information, see Mark Everist, “The Music of Power: Parisian Opera and the Politics of Genre,
1806-1864, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 67, no. 3 (Fall 2014), 685-734.
84
The names of the burlesques were: Ye Legend of Ye Grand Queen Bess!, (Leon’s Own) Grand Dutch
“S”, Leon’s La! Bell-L.N., Bar-ber Blu, Gin-Nevieve de Graw. Norton, A Chronology of American Musical
Theater, 1:91-104.

378
at the Théâtre Français in 1867, the operetta had been performed many times before in
German, going back to the American premiere of Orpheus in der Unterwelt in March of
1861 at the Stadttheatre.
85
The Viennese premiere had been mounted by Johann Nestroy
at the Karltheater the year before in an unauthorized edition that was orchestrated by Carl
Binder and translated by himself.
86
But when Offenbach was invited to Vienna to conduct
three of his one-act operas shortly thereafter, the critics discounted the counterfeit
productions, citing, in particular, the superiority of his orchestration over that of his
imitators.
87
Not only was this negative criticism in the press most likely unavailable to
American managers, if they did learn about it, it was irrelevant to their concerns. In order
to produce Offenbach’s musical plays, they needed orchestral scores that were going to
be effective in their theatres, whether or not they were orchestrated by the composer
himself. And, as soon as Offenbach’s works were produced in Vienna and other German-
speaking cultural centers, American theatrical managers sought to mount them in the
German theatres of New York.
As evidence of the willingness of American theatrical producers to use new
arrangements of Offenbach’s music despite the composer’s attempts to have these pirated

85
Although Norton lists only two productions of Opheus in der Unterwelt, Odell accounts for five
productions before the French opening and five after. George C. Odell, The Annals of the New York Stage
(vol. 7) 343, 422, 590, (hereafter from vol. 8) 193, 195, 321, 325, 332, 614, 623.
86
Alexander Faris, Jacques Offenbach (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), 104. Nestroy’s musical
play Der böse Geist Lumpacivagabundus, oder Das liederliche Kleeblatt (The Evil Spirit
Lumpacivagabundus, or The Roguish Trio) from 1833 was performed frequently in New York in the
nineteenth century. For more about Nestroy’s career, see John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant
Theatre: New York City, 1840-1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 21-26.
87
One of the critics was the well-known anti-Wagnerian Eduard Hanslick, who subsequently became an
Offenbach supporter. Faris Binder also created a popular arrangement of music from Orphée aux Enfers,
which he has called an “Overture,” although the music bears no relation to the opening of Offenbach’s
opera bouffe.

379
editions banned and the negative press they were getting, the Arthur W. Tams Music
Library had three different German scores of Orpheus in der Unterwelt.
88
One score that
is bound in marbled cardboard bears the title in French on the first page of the score,
although the libretto text is Nestroy’s German translation. The title page also has the
word “original” in pencil in the top right corner with a note on the bottom right that
reads: “Für Herrn Theaterdirektor Arischritzer, / zum Gebrauch in New York, Phila- /
delphia + Boston, [pencil] + New Orleans, Berlin, d. 1. Septbr. 1863 [illegible signature
and location]” (“For Mr. Arischritzer for use in New York, Philadelphia & Boston &
New Orleans, Berlin, 1 September, 1863.”).
89
As indicated by the pencil marking (likely
added much later), this early pirated edition of Offenbach’s first major international hit
was simply a copy of the original orchestration by the composer. This is easily confirmed
by comparing any portion of it to a current published edition.
90
Another pirated version of
the operetta also is bound in marbled cardboard, but with a label on the front from
Edward Uhlig’s Musical Library, 229 East Twelfth Street, New York. The title page does
not have the name of the work in ink, but “Orpheus in der Unterwelt” is written in pencil
in the upper left-hand corner. Several markings disclose both the European and American
provenance of the score. Two oval ink stamps—one for the “DIRECTION DES II.
THEATERS IN DRESDEN.” and another for the “Edward Uhlig / Musical Library / 229
E. 12th St. / New York”—adorn the top of the score along with an inscription by

88
All three German scores of Orphée aux Enfers can found in boxes 435, 436, and 437 of the Tams-
Witmark Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
89
I am indebted to Bruce A. Brown for his translation of this German text (and for the deciphering of its
nineteenth-century script) on this score and those that follow in this section.
90
Jacques Offenbach, Orfée aux Enfers, ed. Jean-Christophe Keck, Full Score (Boosey and Hawkes, n.d.).

380

Figure 8.7, Title page of the 1863 Berlin transcription of Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée
aux Enfers.

J. F. (Josef Ferdinand) Nesmüller that reads: “arrangirt für das zweite Theatre /
in Dresden von Herrn Eduard Eberwein” (“Arranged for the second theatre / in Dresden
by Mr. Eduard Eberwein”). Nesmüller was a director and entrepreneur at the Dresden
Second Theatre in 1860 and 1861, just when Orpheus in der Unterwelt was gaining

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traction in German-speaking cities.
91
The score was acquired first by Edward Uhlig’s
General Musical Library in the 1860s and later purchased by Arthur Tams for his Musical
Library. Uhlig was in business in New York City during the 1860s and ultimately sold his
collection to Tams, who had been a competitor in the music rental business.
92
The
instrumentation of the “Eberwein” score is reduced from the original: flute, oboe, two
clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings.
The third score is bound with cardboard covered in blue paper with a
“Conductor’s score” label from the Arthur W. Tams Musical Library on the front with
only the name “Orpheus” written in ink. On the flyleaf, the names of the characters are
listed in the top of the page, below the full title “Orpheus in der Unterwelt von J.
Offenbach. Orchester partitur.” Apart from these generic markings, there is no other
information given in the original ink score to indicate any aspect of its provenance,
including the name of the arranger. However, the score is marked throughout with an
orange-colored pencil—underlining of dynamics, reinforcement of time signatures and
tempo markings, and long X’s indicating cuts—a clear sign that it was used in
performance. On an otherwise blank page preceding the second act, the arranger wrote
“Zweiter Act” in ink and the conductor presumably wrote in orange pencil: “II. Act”
(above) and “12/2 1868” (below). The date is a key marking that places the score in the
possession of Adolf Neuendorff—music director of the Stadttheater from 1867 to 1872—

91
A. Heinrich’s Deutcher Buhnen-Almanach, 62. Jahrgang, ed. A. Antsch (Berlin, 1 January 1862), 73.
92
Later Uhlig became the librarian for the New York Philharmonic Society and held the position for many
years. Obituary for Mrs. Mary Cullen Uhlig (wife of Edward Uhlig), New York Times, January 4, 1918.

382
on the occasion of a two-night staging of Orpheus in der Unterwelt at the Stadt on
December 2 and 3 of 1868.
93
Neuendorff’s marking of the second act in English suggests
that the score was German in origin and acquired for use in New York. Despite these
helpful historical clues, there is no indication of who the arranger was. The
instrumentation of the “Neuendorff” score is even further reduced from Offenbach’s
original: flute, two clarinets, two horns, trumpet, trombone, and strings.
These German orchestrations of Offenbach’s 1858 score composed for his newly
formed theatre troupe Les Bouffes-Parisiens at the Salle Choiseul were diverse in their
treatment of the musical material. And yet, comparing these scores to each other, the
different strategies these German arrangers used suggests that one did not have access to
Offenbach’s original manuscript while the other one did. The Eberwein arrangement is
consistent with the aforementioned provenance that indicates that it was created in 1861,
in the wake of Nestroy’s Viennese premiere of Orpheus in der Unterwelt, but before
Offenbach would conduct his own score in the city. Offenbach’s first duet between
Orpheus and Eurydice (“Ah! c’est ainsi!”), in which she tells him how she deplores his
violin playing, builds to an initial climax in measures 40-42. In the two preceding
measures the harmony alternates between tonic and dominant in the key of B major while
the instrumental melody features triplet neighbor-tone figures on beats two and four that
mark the amusing charm of Eurydice’s withering critique. As the harmonic rhythm
increases from a change every measure to one every half measure (measure 38),

93
Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 8:614-15. Adolf Neuendorff was an influential composer,
conductor, and manager in the German theatres of New York in the second half of the nineteenth century.
For more information about his career, see Koegel, Music in the German Immigrant Theater, 54-73.

383
Offenbach also adds instruments to the texture to heighten the intensity. Oboe, clarinets,
horns, and trumpet join violin II and viola (with double stops) in pulsing eighth notes
(strings) and quarter notes (woodwinds/brass), leaving the flutes and violin I to play the
melody in unison in the upper register and the bassoon, trombone, and low strings to play
the roots (see Example 8.13). The Eberwein arrangement shows that the arranger was
forced to make some accommodations due to the reduced instrumentation imposed upon
him, however he also does not use the resources at his disposal to compensate for this
lack of power in sound. While Offenbach employs an orchestral tutti in this passage,
Eberwein leaves out the clarinet, trumpets, and trombone, in addition to maintaining a
bass (on the beat) chord (on the after beat) dance-rhythm texture in the strings and horns
instead of using the composer’s idea of repeated chords on eighth notes (see Example
8.14). Oboe and bassoon are scored in a unison countermelody that vaguely outlines the
harmony and violin I and flute are left to play the melody in octaves. This scoring
supports the singer economically, however it does little to increase the dynamic in
advance of the crescendo, as the composer does, a clear sign that Eberwein was using the
vocal score to make his arrangement, which maintains the dance-rhythm texture during
these two measures. The Neuendorff score is, by contrast, a fine example of
orchestrational efficiency, since it employs even fewer instruments than the
arrangement—eight instruments plus strings as opposed to eleven—but accomplishes
nearly as big a dynamic increase as in the composer’s score (see Example 10.15). The
arranger of the Neuendorff score clearly had the advantage of access to Offenbach’s
orchestration, which wa