Tanglewood, Summer Home of the Boston Symphony

You are approaching Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and one of the most storied music festivals in America. The name itself comes from literature. In the early eighteen fifties, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a little red farmhouse on this very hillside, and here he wrote a collection of children's stories he called Tanglewood Tales, coining the name that would outlive him and define the place.

The orchestra's Berkshire story began in nineteen thirty six, when the Boston Symphony, led by its Russian born conductor Serge Koussevitzky, gave its first concert in these hills at a nearby estate. The following year, in nineteen thirty seven, two women, Rosamond Brooks and Mary Aspinwall Tappan, donated the Tanglewood estate to the orchestra, giving the festival a permanent home. That first Tanglewood season opened on the fifth of August with an all Beethoven program broadcast across the country by radio, and some eight thousand listeners crowded under a tent to hear it.

Koussevitzky wanted a proper concert hall. He hired the celebrated Finnish born architect Eliel Saarinen, but when Saarinen's designs kept running past the budget, the architect warned the trustees that they would end up with, in his words, just a shed. A local engineer named Joseph Franz simplified the plans, and the fan shaped open air building that opened in nineteen thirty eight has been known ever since as the Shed, now the Koussevitzky Music Shed, seating more than five thousand people.

In nineteen forty, Koussevitzky founded a summer academy for young musicians, today called the Tanglewood Music Center. Among its earliest students was a twenty two year old conductor named Leonard Bernstein, who studied here and returned to Tanglewood for the rest of his life, a bond so deep that he gave one of his final performances here in nineteen ninety. Generations of the world's finest musicians have trained on these lawns.

On a summer evening, families spread blankets and picnics across the great lawn as the sound of the orchestra drifts out over the Berkshire hills, exactly as it has for the better part of a century.