Egon Petri, Busoni’s most renowned pupil, later repeated the same Busoni program of 1891 in the music room as a tribute to his teacher, concluding with Busoni’s Carmen Fantasia.  The day after his monumental Busoni program in the Mason music room, he had just finished breakfast and preparations were being made to take him back to the station.  Spontaneously, he asked Miss Mason and a guest if they would like to hear him play something.  He then launched immediately into the “Hammerklavier” Sonata of Beethoven, and to their delight and astonishment, played the work in its entirety.

            With his long mane of white hair and aristocratic bearing when he performed, the Polish pianist Paderewski was a personality who created such excitement wherever he went that people lost their breath to catch sight of him.  Isabella Stewart Gardner, the heiress whose Venetian-style mansion is now one of the most splendid museums of Boston, astonished Boston society by engaging Paderewski to play a concert for only herself and Fanny Peabody Mason, who sat in Mrs. Gardner’s living room under an enormous mimosa tree brought in specially from her greenhouse for the occasion.

            Conversation was a brilliant as the musical dimension and the interiors.  Literature, philosophy and art were part of the texture, and few Bostonians escaped the biting wit of the guests.  Henry James, a frequent visitor to the Mason home, was continually laboring to find the exact word to express his thought.  Santayana, when a guest of Miss Mason, had just seen Mrs. Gardner’s house and could not resist noting, “Visting a museum is a pleasure, but one must be a pedant to live in one.”

            Like all illustrious guests who came to the Mason home after their concerts in Boston, Artur Rubinstein was always ready with many entertaining anecdotes.  His American concert tour of 1937, preceded by an extended period of technical self-scrutiny, marked a turning point in his career.

            The sophisticated audience at the Mason home was privileged to hear many legendary performances.  One of these was the premiere of the Piano Quintet of the prolific Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinu, commissioned by Miss Mason.  The composer, who had been blacklisted by the Nazis a few years before, and forced by hardship to sleep on train station platforms in France, was well received in Boston, with Koussevitzky commissioning his First Symphony.  In the Mason music room, string players of the Boston Symphony Orchestra combined with Monsieur Doguereau to perform the spontaneous, neo-classical work with its highly original harmonies.  The composer’s only comment during the rehearsals was that the piano part was too accurate, and that the pianist should throw in a few more wrong notes to add color to the texture.

            The young French pianist Paul Doguereau kept the guests amused with his anecdotes of personal acquaintance with some of the greatest musicians of the day.  When Maurice Ravel came to Boston to conduct his own works for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he suffered so severely from stage fright that the young pianist had to literally push him on to the stage to beat time, never looking up from the score.  And when Doguereau helped to organize a series of historic concerts in Rome, he met Stravinsky who, upon arrival, insisted in being paid in cash immediately.  The Roman concert, in 1935, during which he directed the music of Debussy as well as his own Petruska and The Firebird, was disrupted by the Fascists who insisted in being paid a special tax.  Doguereau, with a letter from the Comte de Chambrun, raced in a taxi to the villa of Mussolini, who responded immediately.  The concert took place, an hour later, before an enthusiastic public that had refused to leave.

            Following each concert there were feasts of food and drink.  For the guests of Fanny Peabody Mason, initiated into a concert life “behind closed doors,” the daylight hours would serve as a short moment of repose before another entrance into the musical life of Boston.

Peabody Mason Music

The name Peabody Mason comes from Miss Fanny Peabody Mason, who until her death in 1948 was an active patron of music both in the United States and abroad. Her musical interests were piano, singing and chamber music.

Concert Series Premier

The Peabody Mason Concerts were inaugurated in 1891 with a performance by Ferruccio Busoni.  The inaugural concert took place in the Mason music room, which had not been used by the family since the death of Miss Mason's mother.

In the years that followed, at her homes in Boston and in Paris, in Beverly on the North Shore and on her two-thousand acre estate in Walpole, New Hampshire, Miss Mason continued to offer recitals by Ignaz Paderewski, Arthur Rubinstein, the Alfred Cortot-Jacques Thibaud-Pablo Casals trio, Emma Calvé, Maggie Teyte, the Nadia Boulanger Chamber Ensemble, Alexander Brailowsky, Egon Petri and Earl Wild, among many others. In 1945, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she gave a festival of Fauré’s music, including his opera Pénélope in concert form as a centennial commemoration of the birth of Gabriel Fauré. Miss Mason also commissioned Bohuslav Martinu’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, which was performed at her Boston residence at 211 Commonwealth Avenue in the presence of the composer.

The artist for many of the concerts presented by Miss Mason was pianist Paul Doguereau. Doguereau organized the commemorative Fauré Festival and was also the pianist for the performance of the Martinu Piano Quintet. First prize recipient in piano at the Paris Conservatory, Doguereau studied under several eminent musicians including Emil von Sauer, Egon Petri, Ignaz Paderewski and Maurice Ravel. He concertized in Europe and North America and devoted much of his time to organizing the Peabody Mason concerts.

Passing The Torch

In her later years, Miss Mason transferred more of the responsibilities to her friend, pianist Paul Doguereau. They had often discussed presenting classical music at its best as a gift to general audiences. Upon her death in 1948, Miss Mason left a trust for musical enterprises under Mr. Doguereau’s direction. The Peabody Mason concerts continued to faithfully reflect the aspirations and purposes of Miss Mason.

In 1950, the Peabody Mason concerts were re-dedicated to the ideal of presenting established artists as well as young artists in concert. In keeping with this aim, the concerts that followed from 1950 to 1985 featured some of the world’s most celebrated musicians.

In April 1950, the re-dedicated Peabody Mason concerts began its first series with the Boston debut of the Julliard String Quartet. During the first year, excerpts were given from Henry Purcell’s opera The Fairy Queen, conducted by Daniel Pinkham, who was in the early stages of his career, with Phyllis Curtin, a rising opera star at the time who sang the title role. As part of the same program, Pinkham conducted his own composition, a concertino for small orchestra and piano, composed for and dedicated to Paul Doguereau, the soloist.

The concerts took place in Sanders Theater and in Paine Hall in Cambridge, and in Jordan Hall and at the Gardner Museum in Boston. Under the auspices of Peabody Mason, concerts were also given at Columbia University and Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Brown University in Providence and at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Brookline.

Appearing during the years since the re-dedication of the Peabody Mason concerts were the Boston/Cambridge debut recitals of pianists Glenn Gould, Maurizio Pollini, Horacio Gutierrez, Nelson Freire, Gerhard Oppitz, Antonio Barbosa, Ronald Turini and Pascal Devoyon; baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Gérard Souzay and Håkan Hagegård; harpsichordist Rafael Puyana; sopranos Régine Crespin and Elly Ameling; guitarist Julian Bream; the New York Pro Musica with Noah Greenberg, conductor; the Quartetto di Roma, the Quintetto Chigiano and the Trio Pasquier. These are only several of many distinguished debut performances.

Returning to the Boston area to give Peabody Mason concerts were guitarist Julian Bream; flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal; violinist Joseph Fuchs; pianists Guiomar Novaes, Earl Wild, Alicia de Larrocha, Andre Watts, Maurizio Pollini, Georg Demus, Paul Badura-Skoda, Noël Lee, Andrew Rangell, Eugene Indjic and Misha Dichter; mezzo-sopranos Dame Janet Baker and Teresa Berganza; and renowned ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic Octet, the Hungarian String Quartet, the Virtuosi di Roma, the Stuttgart Orchestra, the Lukas Foss Improvisation Chamber Ensemble, the Emerson String Quartet and the New York Vocal Arts Ensemble. Among well-known Boston artists, Donna Roll performed a lieder recital and pianist Luise Vosgerchian gave a concert of chamber music with the violinist Emanuel Borok. These performances were but a few from a long list of illustrious artists who appeared in the Peabody Mason concerts.

The Legacy Continues

In 1995, the trust was gifted to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, although Doguereau’s adopted son, Dr. Harrison Slater continued to present outstanding artists in his Boston home at 192 Commonwealth Avenue in the ten years after Paul Doguereau’s death. Artists at Slater’s concerts included: David Korevaar; Sergey Schepkin; Richard Bosworth; Janice Weber; Ian Lindsey, Marcus Thompson, Igor Lovchinsky; Laura Villafranca; Stephen Porter; cellist Francesco Vila; Joel Cohen and Anne Azéma of the Boston Camerata; tenor Zachary Stains; Joanna Kurkowitz; and Oleksandr Poliykov.

Peabody Mason International Piano Competition

In recent years, Peabody Mason has also held a piano competition. In the past, the winner received a yearly stipend plus a New York and a Boston recital. The first competition was in 1981, with others following in 1984 and 1985. In 2010, Dr. Harrison Gradwell Slater, the adopted son of Paul Doguereau, once again launched the piano competition as an international event for the 2010 Chopin year (200th anniversary of his birth). Previous winners have included Peter Orth, David Korevaar and Robert Taub.