Henry Kimball Hadley (20 December 1871 – 6 September 1937) was an American composer and conductor.
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Hadley was born into a musical family in Somerville, Massachusetts. His father, from whom he received his first musical instruction, was a secondary school music teacher, his mother was active in church music, and his brother Arthur went on to a successful career as a professional cellist. Hadley studied violin and harmony, and, from the age of fourteen, he took composition lessons from the prominent American composer George Whitefield Chadwick. Under Chadwick's tuteladge, Hadley composed many works, including songs, chamber music, a musical, and an orchestral overture.
In 1893, Hadley toured with the Laura Schirmer-Mapleson Opera Company as a violinist. But he left the tour when the company encountered financial difficulties and was unable to pay his salary.
In 1894, he travelled to Vienna to further his studies with Eusebius Mandyczewski. Hadley loved the artistic atmosphere of the city, where he could attend countless concerts and operas, and where he occasionlly saw Brahms in the cafes. During this period Hadley also befriended the German-American conductor Adolf Neuendorff, who gave him gave him advice regarding his compositions.
Returning to the United States in 1896, Hadley took a position as the musical instructor at St. Paul's Episcopal School for Boys in Garden City, New York. He wrote some of his important early compositions during his time there, including his overture In Bohemia, and his first and second symphonies. He also found prominent conductors to perform them, such as Walter Damrosch, Victor Herbert, John Philip Sousa, and Anton Seidl. Hadley made his own debut as a conductor on January 16, 1900, at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, leading a program mostly made up of his own works.
In an age when American orchestras preferred European conductors to home grown ones, Hadley felt that he needed to establish himself in Europe. So he returned to Europe in 1904 to tour, compose, and study with Ludwig Thuille in Munich. It is possible that his studies with Thuille were suggested by Richard Strauss, whom Hadley met shortly after arriving in Europe. Hadley composed his symphonic poem Salome in 1905, not realizing that Strauss, whom he greatly admired, was working on an opera on the same subject. The work was eventually performed in at least 19 European cities, and he was invited to conduct it, along with his newly finished third symphony, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1907. In the same year, he obtained a position as an assistant conductor at the opera house in Mainz. In April 1909, his first opera, Safié, premiered in Mainz under the composer's baton.
Later that year he returned to the United States to take a position as conductor of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. In 1911, he became the first conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. Hadley encountered some difficulties in San Francisco, where he tried to turn a group of theater musicians in to a first rate orchestra. He brought a number of excellent musicians from the east, including his brother Arthur, to be principals in the new orchestra, but this created some resentments among the locals. None-the-less, by his departure in 1915, the orchestra had made great strides.
Hadley returned to New York in 1915, where he made many appearances as a guest conductor, and premiered many of his best known works. In 1918 he married the concert singer Inez Barbour, who thereafter sang many of her husband's works. Between 1917 and 1920 three of Hadley's operas received high profile premieres, including Cleopatra's Night which bowed at the Metropolitan Opera on January 31, 1920. Hadley conducted some of the performances, becoming the first American composer to conduct his own opera at the Met, and the opera was revived the following season. Several critics judged it the best among the ten American operas to appear at the Met to that point.
In 1921 Hadley was invited to become the associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the first American conductor to hold a full-time post with a major American orchestra. During his years there, his conducting received excellent reviews. As well as occasionally taking the helm for regular Philharmonic concerts, Hadley was assigned to lead stadium concerts during the summer, where he selected many works by American composers. He was eventually asked to regularly select American works for the Philharmonic to perform. He remained in this post until 1927, when he resigned.
In that same year, Hadley was invited to conduct the first half of the season of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, the first American to conduct the orchestra (the second half was conducted by legendary Clemens Krauss).
In 1929, Hadley was invited to become the conductor of the newly formed Manhattan Symphony Orchestra. He led the orchestra for three seasons, including an American work in every concert. He then stepped down due to his frustrations with fundraising for the orchestra in the wake of the stock market crash.
In 1930, was invited to conduct six concerts with New Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, Japan. His visit to the orient was met with great enthusiasm, and he composed a new orchestral suite, Streets of Pekin, inspired by a side trip to China, and led its world premiere with the Japanese orchestra.
In 1933, Hadley founded the National Association for American Composers and Conductors, which exists to this day. He was also instrumental in establishing the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1934.
In 1932, Hadley was diagnosed with cancer. Surgery was initially successful, and Hadley continued his career as a composer and guest conductor. However, Hadley's popularity as a composer began to wane, as popular and especially critical opinion turned against the robust romanticism which Hadley's music embodied. Hadley's cancer recurred, and he died in New York City in 1937.
Henry Hadley was one of the most performed and published American composers of his day. He considered himself first and foremost an orchestral composer, to which his many overtures, symphonic poems, orchestral suites, and symphonies attest. He also wrote brief concertos for both cello (his Konzertstuck) and piano (his Concertino, Op. 131).
Yet he also wrote a large number of stage works, including several operettas and musicals, along with his five operas. Though his operas Azora and Cleopatra's Night received the most attention, his comedy Bianca, which won a prize offered by the American Society of Singers for the best chamber opera in English, perhaps due to its modest demands, received a number of performances during Hadley's lifetime and a few afterawards, even appearing in Japan in the early 1950s.
During his years in San Francisco, Hadley made friends among the city's elite, which led him to become a member of the exclusive Bohemian Club, for which he wrote three "music dramas", designed to be given a single performance outdoors at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California. These works were very similar to operas, but also contained some spoken dialogue. Hadley later adapted music from these works to be performed as orchestral suites.
Hadley also wrote a large number of cantatas and oratorios, some of them, such as Resurgam, conceived on a very large scale. Among his more modestly scaled works are a large number of art songs, some of which he orchestrated. He also wrote a number of chamber works.
Hadley was also a pioneer in film music. He was invited by Warner Bros. to conduct The New York Philharmonic for the soundtrack music for its 1926 film, Don Juan with John Barrymore; this was the first feature film with synchronized music and sound effects. He was also filmed with the New York Philharmonic conducting the overture to Wagner's opera Tannhäuser. He wrote a complete original score for the 1927 Barrymore film When a Man Loves.
The majority of Hadley's personal papers and scores are housed in the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
During his lifetime, Hadley's music was immensely popular, and was a regular part of the repertory of America's top orchestras, and was also performed in Europe. Many legendary conductors performed his music, including Gustav Mahler, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky, and Karl Muck. But recently his music has been largely neglected, although a few recordings of his music have been issued.
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