The photograph in Wilda Tinsley Moennig’s scrapbook has grown brittle with age. Time has colored it sepia, almost tan—the color of World War II soldiers’ uniforms.
There are a good many soldiers in that picture, taken in War Memorial Auditorium on a December night some 50 years ago. The war had just ended, and the audience included a number of veterans recently returned from service. Even though the photograph in the newspaper clipping is small and faded, it still clearly shows the faces of the audience members. All their attention, all their concentration, is focused on the brightly lit stage. Clearly, they are witnessing something important. Onstage, on that December night, a symphony orchestra is being born.
Along with the soldiers and sailors in uniform and the audience in evening dress, the packed house in War Memorial includes a hefty sampling of local and regional luminaries, including Tennessee Gov. Jim McCord, Mr. and Mrs. Brownlee Currey Sr., Louisville Orchestra conductor Robert Whitney, and Mr. and Mrs. Maxey Jarman. Onstage, attorney Ovid Collins Jr., back from wartime service in the navy, is seated in the orchestra’s second violin section. Decked out in evening clothes are former servicemen attorney Reber Boult, lieutenant, USNR, and architect Edwin A. Keeble, lieutenant, USNR. Perhaps the proudest of all, however, is Capt. Walter Sharp, freshly mustered out of the army.
Along with local music lover Mary Ragland, Collins, Boult, Keeble and Sharp form the executive committee of the Nashville Civic Music Association. This evening is, to a great extent, the result of their handiwork, and it turns out to be a tribute to their labor. The inaugural concert of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra is, by all accounts, a stunning success.
For six months, since the previous summer, the NCMA’s executive committee, supported by 27 board members and a host of volunteers, had been canvassing for season subscribers, selling single tickets and raising monies for an endowment fund. Nevertheless, it was generally accepted that the newly created Nashville Symphony Orchestra was, for all intents and purposes, a one-man operation and the result of one man’s dreams.
“You must understand,” says Mary Ragland, “Walter Sharp was the Nashville Symphony. It was his idea and his work, and he promoted it tirelessly. There would have been no Nashville Symphony without Walter Sharp.” Ovid Collins, who would continue to play in the orchestra for over four decades, agrees: “Walter was the repository of all the early information on the symphony,” Collins says. “He made so many of the decisions by himself.”
Walter Sharp’s commitment to building a cultural life for Nashville antedated his stint in the army. The establishment of an orchestra, it seems, was only part of a broader plan, one that he did not live to see to its actual fulfillment. In an often quoted statement, Sharp described the origin of his lifelong crusade to bring sophistication to Nashville: “I think it began as far back as my student days at Vanderbilt,” he wrote. “It seemed part of our social tradition that most people left Nashville to pursue careers and make a name. I determined to stay here, and, by gum, I did. I never wanted a ‘messianic’ role, but I suppose what I’ve tried to do is to dislodge to some extent what seems to be my home town’s commitment to the second rate. Since my family was not dependent on me economically, I could devote time to civic and cultural responsibilities. It was my obligation to do so.”
Indeed, Sharp had the financial freedom to pursue his civic and cultural dreams. In 1942 he had married Huldah Warfield Cheek, daughter of the Leslie Cheeks, the builders of Cheekwood and one of Nashville’s most socially formidable couples. Sharp had met Huldah Cheek, the only daughter of a wealthy family, at a party given by Curtis Walker, who had been Sharp’s history professor at Vanderbilt. “Huldah was a very shy person,” recalls one longtime friend. “Sometimes at these big parties, she would have to slip away to the bathroom to avoid the crowd.” Still, she turned out to be the perfect, complementary colleague and soulmate for the more outgoing Sharp. “They had a companionable and compatible marriage,” the longtime friend recalls. “Yet for all the shyness, she also shared in Walter’s work. Huldah preferred to let Walter be the public face of their work, but she was very much involved in a behind-the-scenes way.” Sharp would go on to serve as chairman of the Department of Fine Arts and Music at Vanderbilt, and he would be the first president of the now-defunct Nashville Arts Council and a founding member of the Tennessee Commission on the Performing Arts (predecessor the Tennessee Arts Commission). With his wife’s full cooperation, he would present the city of Nashville with Cheekwood, the 55-acre estate that he hoped to see transformed into an art museum and botanical center.
In October 1947, less than a year after the orchestra’s debut, Huldah Sharp did step briefly into the limelight, but then only to address the socially prestigious Query Club. And even then, her purpose was to detail her husband’s early work on the symphony project.
Walter Sharp’s Nashville Symphony was, in fact, the second attempt to build a symphony orchestra for Nashville. In the late 1920s, on the very eve of the Great Depression, a number of Nashville’s best-known businessmen—Rogers Caldwell and Col. Luke Lea among them—had underwritten a symphony orchestra, which performed under the baton of Arthur Henkel, a distinguished member of the faculty at the then-flourishing Nashville Conservatory of Music and the organist and choirmaster at Christ Episcopal Church. That era had, in fact, been a sort of first Golden Age of classical music for Nashville. The Nashville Conservatory, which was located on West End, near the spot now occupied by a rollerblade supply store, was directed by the Italian-born S.G. De Luca, several of whose vocal students went on to sing leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera. With De Luca and Henkel spearheading the effort, Nashville staged its first locally produced opera—a stunningly well-received production of Cavalleria rusticana—during the same period. If the city’s musical activity had continued at the same level, Sharp might well have had a better opinion of his city’s cultural climate. Unfortunately, the Depression had intervened, many fortunes had crashed, the old symphony’s guarantors could not afford to cover its debts, De Luca had died, and the Nashville Conservatory of Music had long been out of business.
Still, Walter Sharp’s appetite had been whetted, and the Cheek fortune had weathered the storms of the Depression handsomely. With the war over, Walter Sharp, sensitive to charges of dilettantism, needed a project. “The new Nashville Symphony,” Huldah Sharp noted, “actually started at Fort Washington, Md., where my husband was stationed. At the fort Walter met Warrant Officer William Strickland, who had taken a run-down lazy army band and made of it something well worth hearing.” Strickland, as it turned out, was one of a rising generation of young American conductors. He had been organizing concerts at the National Gallery of Art and teaching in the Army Music School outside Washington, D.C., and had come into contact with what Huldah Sharp describes as “the foremost young composers of America.” Strickland would go on to become a renowned champion of American music, but, even then, Huldah Sharp insisted, Strickland was convinced that “contemporary American music is too little appreciated because it is too little heard.”
While he was stationed at Fort Washington, Sharp apparently discussed with Strickland the idea of a symphony for Nashville, but the project did not really begin to take shape until some months later when Sharp and Strickland discovered that they had both been stationed in Texas at Fort Sam Houston. There, Strickland was directing his band and directing successful concerts of choral works. According to Huldah Sharp, her husband reached “the conclusion that Strickland was our man—if we could get him, and if Nashville would see fit to choose him.”
In choosing Strickland as the new orchestra’s music director, Walter Sharp made a decision that was to place an indelible stamp on the symphony’s future. Strickland declared that the ensemble would be organized—and would operate—as a professional orchestra. It would not be merely a community-based group composed of volunteers and rehearsing on random occasions. To maintain professional standards of musicianship, Strickland and Sharp decided early on to tap what was already a healthy pool of musical talent. At that time, WSM Radio broadcast a great deal more than the Grand Ole Opry, and Nashville could boast several high-class studio ensembles. Likewise, many of the musicians who had been attracted to Nashville to participate in the old Nashville Conservatory had settled in on the faculties of George Peabody College, the Ward-Belmont Conservatory and Fisk University.
Strickland raided the WSM orchestras to find his concertmaster, Harold Johnson, and the leader of his second violins, Ovid Collins. Andrew Ponder, principal viola, and soon to be appointed the orchestra’s assistant musical director, was an assistant professor of music at Peabody College. Kenneth Rose, another member of the violin section, had Ward-Belmont connections; and so it went. Because the ensemble already included so many professional musicians, the Civic Music Association was forced to deal with the local chapter of the musicians’ union, then called the Nashville Branch, Musicians Association (AFM).
From the beginning, labor problems would rankle. The problem, however, had nothing to do with musicians demanding higher salaries. As Sharp began soliciting funds, he repeatedly ran up against anti-union sentiment among Nashville’s white-collar society. In 1947 Huldah Sharp still felt the need to assure her Query Club audience that, far from being adversaries, the leaders of the local union had been admirably cooperative, “making a substantial donation to a cause which is manifestly a great benefit to musicians.”
Meanwhile, arriving in a city not known for its cosmopolitan musical tastes, Strickland planned programs that emphasized the young composers whom he had befriended before and during his army days. Every concert during the orchestra’s inaugural season included at least one work by a contemporary composer. Some included more. It seems reasonable today that Strickland would have championed Copland, Thomson and Hanson—whose names were as familiar then as Philip Glass and John Adams are now. But Strickland also assiduously included works by the likes of Kennan, Bryan, Ward, and Kubik. Even in the postwar era, before the universal onslaught of television, classical music was regularly programmed by all the radio networks, and living composers were not considered oddities. Programming the works of American composers, in fact, was considered to be something of a patriotic duty. Many of them had put in time overseas, or at least doing desk work at an army base.
Apparently, local audiences and musicians did not turn up their noses at programs including new works. For many of them, after all, Bruckner was hardly any more familiar than Howard Hanson was. Ovid Collins remembers that, inevitably, some of the then-contemporary music was pretty forgettable stuff, but he also remembers playing works such as Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, which was then, quite literally, “new” music. Meanwhile, many of the orchestra members, lacking extensive academic backgrounds, were being introduced to repertory that other classical musicians would have considered to be the “standard literature.”
Violinist Wilda Tinsley Moennig, who played in the orchestra’s first concert, had returned to Nashville after studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and after teaching at the German Friends School in Philadelphia. Moennig was an experienced teacher and recitalist, but she was not entirely typical of the orchestra’s personnel. She recalls that, when the individual parts of the Beethoven symphonies were distributed, some of the orchestra’s musicians were seeing them for the first time.
Even before Strickland began selecting his musicians—even before he had been formally offered the job of directing Nashville’s still unformed orchestra—Sharp’s volunteers were scurrying to set up the symphony’s business operations. Board member Reber Boult had drawn up a charter for the Nashville Civic Music Association in June of 1946, stating that the organization’s purposes were “to encourage the musical development of Nashville and the State of Tennessee, stimulating a greater interest in hearing musicians and to provide opportunities for professional and amateur musicians of the State to appear in public performances.” Sixty individuals—including local business leaders, professional and amateur musicians, and members of local professional organizations—subscribed to the charter.
One group that signed on was a body of players who had taken part in the Nashville Symphony’s previous incarnation. With the specter of that orchestra’s financial failure looming over him, Sharp decreed that the new symphony would operate in the black.
To accomplish such a miracle, while keeping ticket prices within reach of the average music lover, the NCMA set up a scheme not all that different from the modern concept of personal seat licenses: Contributors who made donations of $25 or more to the NCMA would become members and would have to pay extra for their concert tickets, but they would have first choice when it came to the selection of seats. Meanwhile, their contributions would go into a permanent, untouchable fund. The association's leadership also decided that the symphony would operate on a strict cash basis. The budget would be set according to the amount that had been raised before each season started. The orchestra would only spend money that was actually in the bank, and the association would never be in debt.
Although Sharp was the principal fund-raiser, his volunteers doggedly hit the streets. Fund-raising flagged in the summer months, but as cooler weather returned, Sharp set out on a 20-day marathon, during which he averaged raising $1,000 dollars a day, most of it collected from “sustaining” members who contributed $25 a year. Once enough association members had been enlisted, the NCMA held its first general membership meeting at the Andrew Jackson Hotel. A 27-member board of directors and the five-member executive committee were elected. Strickland—who had been visiting Nashville to help Sharp sell civic leaders on the idea of a symphony—was tapped as music director. Marjorie Cooney, who had experience as a traveling representative for the powerful Columbia Artists Management agency, was persuaded to become the orchestra’s personnel manager. By late October, Strickland had moved to Nashville and was pulling together his ensemble.
The orchestra’s first rehearsal took place Sunday, Nov. 3, 1946, downtown on the fourth floor of the YMHA on Union Street. (It existed across the street from the old YMCA and only disappeared with the advent of the Jewish Community Center on West End.) Twice-weekly rehearsals were held on Sunday and Monday evenings and, in a brilliant public relations coup, were strictly off limits to the public. According to one newspaper report, Cooney had already gained “something of a reputation as one of the politest bouncers in the business.” According to Huldah Sharp, Cooney had to put down a small mutiny when women in the orchestra learned that they would not be allowed to wear sleeveless dresses. (After the announcement of the somber dress code, one young woman asked if it would be all right if she wore makeup.)
Rehearsals began promptly at 7:30 p.m., and both Collins and Moennig remember that Strickland gave the downbeat precisely as the clock reached the half hour. Tardiness was not tolerated.
At the first rehearsal, Huldah Sharp remembered, only those in the orchestra’s absolute inner circle were admitted to the fourth floor of the YMHA—even she was left at home. She did not, however, miss out on the drama of the moment. “I was the recipient of a dramatic phone call that evening,” she recalled. “With a voice cracking from fatigue and emotion, Walter said, ‘It sounds wonderful.’ He held the phone while I strained my ears for bits of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony.”
Tuesday, Dec. 10, was set as the date for the first concert. It was probably because of Cooney’s good connections, as well as Strickland’s reputation, that Helen Jepson, a glamorous blond soprano with experience both in Hollywood and at the Metropolitan, was engaged as vocal soloist for the evening. Strickland chose to close the concert with an American work, Cecil Effinger’s Tennessee Variations, while the first half was mostly devoted to the Beethoven symphony and “Noêl” from George Whitefield Chadwick’s Symphonic Sketches. The program opened with Hans Kindler’s orchestration of the Frescobaldi Toccata.
Taking his cue from Strickland, Walter Sharp had decreed that the concert would begin promptly at 8:30 p.m., which was, in Sharp’s opinion, “the only civilized time.” Precisely at 8:30, the doors to War Memorial Auditorium were closed, barring latecomers from their seats until after the Frescobaldi.
A half-century has passed since that night, and it is not surprising that many who participated in that first evening cannot recall many of the particulars of the concert, but all of them can remember that the sense of occasion that surrounded it. Collins remembers that Strickland’s conducting was intense— “like Toscannini.” Mary Ragland remembers the splendor of Jepson’s stage presence, especially the dazzling white of her gown as contrasted with the unbroken blackness of the orchestra’s evening clothes. But Wilda Tinsley Moennig’s scrapbook again provides the documentation from the morning after:
A review by the Banner’s respected critic, Sydney Dalton, was headlined “Strickland’s Direction of Group Lauded.” Other reviews called the evening a “complete success” and spoke of the “cheering audience.” Ovid Collins remembers Strickland as a skilled accompanist, and more than one writer noted the symphony’s work alongside Jepson. To her planned performance of Liszt’s “Oh! Quand je dors,” Mendelssohn’s “Infelice” and the famous “Gavotte” from Massenet’s Manon, Jepson added encores from The Merry Widow by Léhar and Bizet’s “Ouvre ton coeur.”
For the members of the Query Club, many of whom had probably been among the audience at War Memorial on that December evening, Huldah Sharp described the crowd as “superb—gay, dressed up, sympathetic, receptive, ready with vociferous and long applause. That night we were impressed with what character an audience can have. We were grateful for the attitude of 2,211 people in the auditorium.”
Determined that the evening would be as splendid as possible, the Sharps hosted a post-concert reception at Cheekwood for Jepson and a flock of distinguished guests, including members of the NCMA and the orchestra. The Sharps themselves had only taken up residence in the mansion a few months before, and anticipation was high.
“Before Strickland had finished his final curtain calls,” Huldah Sharp recalled, “Walter and I hurried out to our car.” In a breathtaking display of small-town privilege, the police department had “obligingly” reserved good parking spaces for the Sharps and several of their guests and treated them to “a siren-blowing escort out to Cheekwood.”
At Cheekwood, everything worked perfectly. Relieved, Huldah Sharp remembered that “the receiving line formed when Miss Jepson had repaired her face.” In the early days of the symphony’s existence, receptions at Cheekwood became a tradition, adding social cachet to the concert evenings.
Subsequent concerts in that first year featured violinist Albert Spaulding, American-born soprano Rose Bampton, Puerto Rican pianist Jesus Maria San Roma, and a program featuring local pianists Mary Phillips Street and Elmer Schoettle playing Mozart’s two-piano concerto. The newly formed Nashville Choral Society made its debut in a performance of Bruckner’s Te Deum, for which Mary Ragland was soprano soloist. Given the predictably all-instrumental fare offered by so many symphony orchestras in the ’90s, it is intriguing to look down the repertory for the 1946-47 season and see that fully one-third of the works performed were vocal works and that more than a quarter of the season’s repertory consisted of works by contemporary American composers.
Subsequent seasons under Strickland’s hands—he did not, according to press reports, use a baton in concert—brought still more well-known soloists but also featured local talent and continued Strickland’s campaign to promote the works of contemporary American composers. Visiting soloists were complimentary of the orchestra’s work. In 1948 the highly esteemed violist William Primrose went on record as saying, “I hope Nashville realizes what it has got in its symphony orchestra.” Endorsements from performers such as violinist Zino Francescatti, mezzo-soprano Blanche Thebom, cellist Gregor Piatagorsky and soprano Eleanor Steber eventually earned the young orchestra a photo spread in Look magazine and an appearance on the NBC radio network’s “Orchestras of the Nation.” The orchestra’s educational program received a boost when the symphony’s assistant conductor, Andrew Ponder, formed a youth symphony in 1947.
Sharp’s term as president of the NCMA executive committee ended in 1949 when Walter Stokes Jr. was elected to succeed him. In subsequent years he continued to support the association, but by the late 1940s or the early ’50s the friendship between Sharp and Strickland had begun to sour. Relations between the two became so uncomfortable that they ceased all direct communication, and Strickland, who had been living at Cheekwood ever since his arrival in Nashville, moved into rooms at the Hermitage Hotel. In April of 1951, Strickland conducted his last concert with the symphony.
The next year Sharp completed a master’s of fine arts at Harvard. For the next two decades, the Sharps remained central figures—perhaps the central figures in Nashville’s cultural and social life, but, inevitably, some of Walter Sharp’s postwar optimism and energy had faded.
During the ’50s and the ’60s, Sharp directed even more of his attention toward the visual arts. In a move that thrilled much of the city, the Sharps donated Cheekwood to Nashville in 1966 for use as a fine arts center and the site of a botanical garden. Walter Sharp would serve as chairman of the board of the Tennessee Botanical Gardens and Fine Arts Center, but, still, his “messianic” dreams for Nashville continued to fall apart. In the late 1960s, family friends began to notice the inescapable symptoms of depression. He had hoped to be named to the chairmanship of the newly created National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., but he was passed over for the job. A long-running feud with Vanderbilt Chancellor Harvie Branscomb finally resulted in Sharp’s resignation from his position as chairman of the university’s Department of Fine Arts and Music.
According to Ovid Collins, Sharp began around that time put more and more distance between himself and the symphony’s operations. Guy Taylor and Willis Page had succeeded Strickland as the orchestra’s music directors, but the time had come to find yet another new conductor. Thor Johnson, still another champion of American music, was a leading candidate for the job, but Sharp seemed to have less interest in the interviewing process. He asked Collins to take his place during visits with Johnson at his home orchestras in Cincinnati and at the Interlochen Arts Camp in Interlochen, Mich.
Friends recall that Sharp seemed to be increasingly regretful that his work with the symphony and at Cheekwood was not bringing the results for which he had hoped. Without his tireless leadership, fund-raising in the business and social communities was not expanded the way he felt it needed to. For years, he had been working on a book, supposedly a study of the fine arts, but even that project had apparently reached an impasse. Nashville had not grown into the Southern cultural oasis that he had envisioned. Walter Sharp died, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on Oct. 29, 1970. He was 59 years old.
At the time of her husband’s death, Huldah Sharp was on a trip to Gatlinburg. He had died without even her unstinting support and constant companionship. All of Nashville mourned his passing, and much of the city was left in shock. But there was no fixing the loneliness of the man who had dreamed that Nashville should have a symphony. Like so many others who dream the right dreams at impossible moments, like so many others who see what few others can see, like so many others given to the grand life and the public gesture, Walter Sharp died alone.
