New Year’s Eves of Yesteryear

NOTE:  As you begin reading, click on this Youtube link and listen to Tchaikovsky’s “Andante Cantabile,” which will be referred to later in the piece.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDQuWlz37iw

On with the dance! 

let joy be unconfined; 

no sleep ‘till morn, 

when Youth and Pleasure meet

To chase the Glowing Hours 

with Flying feet.

                                              — Byron

In the late 19th century, and on into the early decades of the 20th, Hermann Dossenbach was a musician and conductor in Rochester, New York.  He is often credited with establishing the musical foundation in Rochester which led to the founding of the Eastman School of Music.  

Early 1890s
Hermann Dossenbach and young wife Daisy Chapman
(Photo Courtesy of Polly Smith)

Hermann is my great-granduncle.  

He was the third son of a musical family of poor German immigrants who had settled in Rochester in 1873.  His older brothers had had some success as violinists, and his father, Matthias, had great hopes that Hermann would continue the tradition.

But Hermann wasn’t terribly interested in the violin, and so when he was still a little boy, his father took him to hear the great conductor Theodore Thomas and his orchestra in Rochester’s old Fitzhugh Hall.  Hermann remembered:  “Then and there I knew what I wanted to do — I wanted to conduct a symphony orchestra.”  (D&C 2/5/1924)

         When he reached his 20s, and had become a very good violinist, he began to work towards his dream, and organized a dance orchestra, which played in Rochester and towns beyond.

In 1894, to celebrate “the departure of the old and the arrival of the new year,” the Dossenbach Orchestra, along with the Jung-Maennerchor, performed at Germania Hall in Rochester on New Year’s Eve, which was still referred to at that time as “Sylvester Eve” by the Germans and German-Americans.  At the stroke of midnight, the bells rang, and then the orchestra “struck up a grand march” and several hundred people danced into the wee hours of the morning.  (D&C 1/1/1894)

This was possibly the Palmyra Masonic Hall

And then three years later, on December 30 of 1898, the “celebrated” Dossenbach Orchestra performed at the Ninth Annual Ball and Reception of the Zenobia Commandery, Knights Templar, in the Masonic Hall in Palmyra.  Picture the scene.  It was a splendid evening and the hall was “a perfect bower of beauty,” having been decorated by Rochester’s Bickford Decorating Company.  

At 9:00pm, “The sir knights in full regalia” performed their templar drill, and then the orchestra played a “perfectly irresistible deux temps” and “the ball room floor was filled by a swaying, joyous assemblage, all mindful of the dictates of the goddess Terpsichore.  From that hour, in the language of Byron, ’twas ‘On with the dance, let joy be unconfined; no sleep ‘till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet.’”  

Food was served at midnight; then dancing was resumed until nearly 4:00am, at which time the “orchestra wafted over the scene the strains of the old but ever popular ‘Home Sweet Home,’ and the guests realized that the ninth annual ball of the Zenobia Commandery was a treasure of their pleasant recollections.”  (D&C 12/31/1898)

Such were the beginnings of Hermann’s orchestral dream.

Jump ahead a few years and we can see the fruits of his labors.  In 1905, Hermann’s Dossenbach Quartette performed earlier in the evening of New Year’s Eve, in the grand living room of Mister George Eastman, the Kodak King of Rochester, at his brand new mansion on East Avenue.  They played Tchaikovsky’s “Andante Cantabile” (link above) and Schubert’s “Theme-Variations.”

Hermann and his musicians continued to entertain for Mr. Eastman for the next fourteen years, and Hermann’s orchestra flourished and was loved by the the good citizens of Rochester, New York, throughout the first four decades of the 20th century.