No one ever writes about Tanglewood without using the word magic, without rhapsodizing about the perfect blend of art and natural beauty. That glorification of the land began 100 years before the music festival when the same spot inspired painters, poets, and prose writers. One hundred-plus years before that, the 330 contiguous acres in the northeast corner of Stockbridge was Native American common ground—land set aside by the Muh-he-con-neok or People of the Waters for the benefit of the whole community.
In 1736, the General Court of Boston authorized a mission to “civilize and Christianize” the Natives in the village of Stockbridge and granted 400 acres to each of the six original white settlers. The common ground of the Muh-he-con-neok (sounded like Mohican to European ears) was granted to Elijah Williams.
The white settlers brought with them a strident belief in private property and little understanding of land held in common. Among the settlers, Elijah Williams and his son, Ephraim Jr., stood out as the most acquisitive. As the Stockbridge-Munsee Community of the Mohican Nation were dispossessed of more and more land, not by war but by sharp practice, they abandoned Berkshire County. The Williams family continued to survey and claim land as far north as Hoosac (later called Williamstown).
A hundred years later, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, a Boston Brahmin and Transcendental poet, purchased 210 of those 330 acres. She built her summer estate and called it Tanglewood. A hundred years after that, her spinster daughter, Mary Aspinwall Tappan, and niece, Mrs. Gorham Brooks, gave Tanglewood to Serge Koussevitzky, Maestro of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Walking the grounds excited by the spectacular view, Koussevitzky said, “We [will] make beautiful music here. Festivals of music grow up … on a scale commensurate with their surroundings.”
Koussevitzky was not the first or only artist to be inspired by what he saw. As Tappan was purchasing the land for her estate, the same spot attracted and inspired many American writers and artists. Overlooking the same body of water, contemplating the same backdrop of mountains, standing on the same grounds—Ralph Waldo Emerson discussed Nature with Samuel Gray Ward (1846). George Inness painted “Storm Clouds” (1847) and “A View Near Berkshire” (1848). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow went a courting to a house “somewhat back from the village street” in Pittsfield (“The Old Clock on the Stair,” 1845) and then traveled south to the Oxbow in Stockbridge pausing to visit friends and exclaim in his journal: “What a lovely place!” (1848). Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The House of Seven Gables” (1851) and “A Wonder Book” (1852), cracked open a bottle of champagne and discussed the great white whale with Herman Melville (Moby Dick 1851).
In 1940, Serge Koussevitzky realized his dream and on the same land founded his music school where Aaron Copeland taught, and Leonard Bernstein studied. There in 1941, Randell Thompson wrote his “Alleluia” dedicated to the “Berkshire Music Center, and all the angels that hover there, 21.VII.’41.” These creators of American prose, poetry, art, and music shared the same view, and the same viewpoint: the very grounds were inspirational, and perhaps most important, a place for them to gather.
It may seem incredible so many important writers, thinkers, and artists gathered on the same few hundred acres of land in the semi-rural village of Stockbridge whose population never exceeded 2000. The reasons provide a unique glimpse of another age.
The 1840s was an era of great optimism, spirit, energy, and success in America. Elias Howe invented the sewing machine, Nathan Appleton developed a method for printing on fabric, Morse invented the telegraph, and Cornelius Vanderbilt backed development of the steam ship. There were 20 million American citizens of which approximately 15 percent were slaves. Reform was in the air: Frederick Douglass spoke against slavery and Margaret Fuller in favor of women’s rights. There were societies against capital punishment, and for temperance, mass education, and humane treatment of the insane. It was trumpeted as a scientific age. The Smithsonian Institution was founded for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” At Massachusetts General Hospital, the use of ether during surgery was demonstrated for the first time, but alas, more people were prepared to believe in the “science” of phrenology and the efficacy of a séance.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “No people in the world have made such rapid progress in trade and manufacture as the Americans; they arrived but as yesterday … and they have already changed the whole order of nature for their own advantage.” Progress in trade was not sufficient. A desire was born out of combined religious reform and nationalism to perfect America, to improve life through the pursuit and achievement of noble goals. By wedding Christian principles to business practices, America would be a model for the entire world. It was considered the role of societies and churches to carry these reforms forward and make America a model for the entire world.
These were also the formative years of American art and an American aesthetic. Born out of an exuberant nationalism, societies sought to advance and promote American art and literature and challenge the notion that all fine art and great literature was European. It was a bloodless war of independence from the tyranny of Classical and European art forms and extended to American Independence in art, letters, and architecture. In New York City one hundred men founded the Century Association in 1847 for the purpose of “advancing American art.” In Boston, a literary group searching for the American voice formed around Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Dial magazine (1840-1844). Architectural critic Andrew Jackson Dowling wrote in 1846, “The Greek temple disease has passed its crisis. The people have survived it.”
The progress and rapid growth of the mid-Nineteenth century had positive and negative impacts. Success was changing the landscape. The new urban and industrial centers bore scant resemblance to the Jeffersonian ideal of the Agrarian Republic.
“In the minds of many Americans, Virgil’s pastoral ideal could have flourished in the United States, but urbanism and industrialization were pressing in on them with the attending disorders and anxieties.”
The new industrialization and rapid urbanization created a desire to return to nature to find the mythical landscape located between the contending forces of city and wilderness, that pastoral sanctuary—Arcadia. Arcadia represented more than an aesthetic and political ideal, there was a religious aspect.
“By the start of the nineteenth century many of the Puritan dogmas—predestination, infant damnation, and the total depravity of man—had been rejected … and replaced by a God of Love.” For Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” And in a letter, Asher B. Durand wrote that the natural landscape “is fraught with high and holy meaning.” Life was not pre-destined, but could be shaped, changed, improved by human exertion. The God of love was found in nature; God was in the landscape.
200 years later in 1937, the owner of 210 of the original 330 contiguous acres gave some of that landscape to the Boston Symphony Orchestra ensuring a permanent home for the summer music festival. A close friend, Nany Keefe, remembered walking the ground with Mrs. Gorham Brooks. Brooks said, “This place should be for thousands.”
In increments the land was not returned to the Natives but the Native purpose: common ground for the common good.
One could weary of the superlatives about Tanglewood, the blend of nature and culture, and all the attempts to write about the land in the northeast corner of Stockbridge without mentioning the word magic … except … it is magic.
End note: In December 1986, BSO purchased the 120-acre Highwood estate for $1.75 million, and the 330 acres of Native common ground were once again intact.
