Synopsis

Hold on tight: we’re about to cover 150 years of musical — and presidential — history in just two minutes!

On today’s date in 1821, when James Monroe was president, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 was performed in Philadelphia at a concert of the Musical Fund Society. That occasion marks the first documented performance of a complete Beethoven symphony in America and occurred when Beethoven was 50 years old and residing in Vienna.

In 1853, when Franklin Pierce was in the White House, the Germania Musical Society took Beethoven’s Second Symphony No. 2 on its American tour, presenting it in St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago. That 1853 tour marked the first time an entire Beethoven Symphony was performed in the Windy City. Additional 19th century “firsts” for the symphony occurred over the next two decades in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and San Francisco, during the administrations of James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson.

Ulysses S. Grant was president in 1870, when Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 debuted in Washington, D.C., and Grant was still President in 1872, when it was the first symphony to be performed in Minneapolis.

A hundred years later, in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, you could hear performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 from Maine to Hawaii, all while sitting comfortably in your own Executive Mansion, courtesy of your local government-assisted public radio station.

If you wish, you may now stand and salute your radio!

Music Played in Today's Program

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 2; New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Sony 61835