Early Chautauqua visitors were music-lovers
by Silvia Pettem
In 1898, when Chautauqua opened as a summer resort, the auditorium and the dining hall were its only buildings.
Out-of-town attendees lived in tents, and luxuries were few. But those who came and stayed demanded live music.
"Without music," stated an early Chautauqua Bulletin, "Chautauqua could not exist. All lovers of music are invited to the feast, spread daily under the cooling shadows of the rock-ribbed mountains."
The fifteen-piece Kansas City Orchestra (known for livening up the mostly Texas crowds with the song "Dixie") gave weekly full-length concerts in the Auditorium during the venue's first year. The orchestra also played six weekly outdoor concerts, as well as "sacred" concerts on Sundays.
Chautauqua's most popular early instrumental group, though, was the internationally known Louis Rischar's Band from Chicago. The group first came in 1903 and stayed all summer. Its members played all the usual concerts and also accompanied Chautauquans on train excursions into the mountains. There, summer vacationists played baseball, picked wildflowers, and soaked up the scenery –– all to the accompaniment of the lively musicians.
Audiences clamored for patriotic tunes and "old favorites." Often requested were Negro spirituals, operatic arias, and Sousa marches. John Philip Sousa, himself (better known as the "March King"), played in the Auditorium in 1904.
The writers of the Chautauqua Bulletin, however, gave most of their praise to the conductor, Rischar. "Under his guiding hand," they wrote, "the members of the orchestra play as one man, and the result is something to please and delight. He has received unstilted praise from all quarters and from men and women who have reached the highest pinnacle of musical fame." That might even have included Sousa.
The Denver Symphony was in residence all summer, in 1907, but its classical selections were not well-received.
Unlike today's large audiences for the Colorado Music Festival, a reviewer in 1907 wrote, "People did not enthuse over it [classical music]." ….