At 8:45 pm on October 28, 1925, Lynnwood Farnam played Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale prelude Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr, BWV 715, on a newly built E. M. Skinner organ, to open the inaugural concert of what was then known as the Chamber Music Auditorium of the Library of Congress but was re-named the Coolidge Auditorium in 1938 – an appropriate change, for this exquisite 485-seat performance space owes its existence to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953), a pianist and philanthropist who grew up in Chicago and began her relationship with the Library of Congress in 1923 when she started donating the manuscripts of compositions she commissioned (including works by Barber, Bartók, Britten and Stravinsky). Her reasoning: “My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor necessarily that we should even understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document.” It’s a tribute to her generosity and tenacity that the Auditorium, which required an act of Congress to build, opened two years later, in accordance with her stipulation that its events would always remain “freely open to the national public as any other exhibits in the Library of Congress”.
That initial concert was the first of a three-day festival that closed on Coolidge’s birthday, October 30. Nineteen years later, when she turned eighty, that date took on added significance for the Auditorium when it presented the world premiere of what is perhaps her most famous commission: Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring, choreographed by Martha Graham.
And it will be on October 30, 2025 that WETA Classical will present the first in a series of programs dedicated to the historic legacy of live music at the Library of Congress. This will include such storied performances as the 1940 recital by Béla Bartók and violinist Joseph Szigeti, the 1947 recital by cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and performances by the Budapest and Juilliard string quartets on the Library’s collection of Stradivarius instruments. The series will also feature extensive commentary by Anne McLean, the longtime producer of the Coolidge’s concert series and a treasure trove of institutional memories.
Please join us for this celebration of one of the cultural jewels of the nation’s capital. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from his tribute to Coolidge on October 30, 1944: “she has given the music on the shelves of the Library a living voice and let the people hear it.”
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