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As you might suspect with the orchestra growing ever larger,
producing an ever larger sound, the concert hall got larger as well.
And they changed in function or in purpose, too.
Here again we go back to Vienna in Beethoven's day.
The Theater an der Wien where Beethoven premiered his famous Symphony No.,
5 in 1808.
This image dates from only about two years later.
Here we see drapped in red bunking here,
the imperial box with the double headed eagle.
Down here to the left up next to the stage is the orchestra with the musician.
And on the stage here to the bottom lower left what do we see?
Horses.
This was a civic auditorium, an entertainment center.
Almost as in a Las Vegas auditorium or Radio City Music Hall in New York.
But after Beethoven's death two things happened.
First some of Beethoven's admirers in Vienna built a music only concert hall.
The beautiful Music Society Hall.
The Musikverein as its called in Vienna.
Here just music.
No circus acts.
On this stage Johannes Brahms, we just heard his music not long ago.
Johannes Brahms conducted.
So, too, did Gustav Mahler, whose music we'll hear shortly.
And too, and this is the second point,
a sudden hush came over the concert hall and its listeners.
The idea of a quiet, quiet only concert hall enters now.
Music was no longer thought of to be entertainment, but it become,
in the romantic era, high art, art that was to be heard in reverential silence.
And this new temple to the god of music came to be replicated elsewhere.
First in Leipzig, Germany and then in the United States.
Now admittedly Carnegie Hall in New York,
well that's the first great American concert hall.
And it was a little bit different.
It does have a circular model.
But the Symphony Hall in Boston is almost an exact
reproduction of the Musikverein, as you see here.
And this sort of shoebox effect is drawn again from the Musikverein.
And here, let's go to Woolsey Hall at the Yale University in New Haven.
Again, a sort of shoebox design.
It has many similarities with the Musikverein in Vienna.
And even in modern times,
the Vienna prototype has been adopted at Avery Fisher Hall in New York and
most recently at the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall in Nashville.
So this is the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall in Nashville.
But it all started in Vienna with the Musikverein, with sounds such
as those produced by, as you will hear here, symphonic composer Jean Sibelius.
Great music and great acoustics for music.
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So these ever larger concert halls for music only of the late 19th, early 20th
centuries, well they were not only visually stunning but acoustical marvels.
And in many ways, they were the finest concert halls for music ever created,
home to the largest symphony orchestras ever created.