Lyric Opera House

Maryland Historical Society

For most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, two halls of the Academy of Music of Baltimore City on North Howard Street (opened in 1868) and the Conservatory of Music on South Eutaw Street (opened in 1874), accommodated performances of "serious" music in Baltimore. In 1891, civic leaders saw both a need and an opportunity to build a new hall commensurate with Baltimore's stature as one of the nation's largest cities. Construction on the Lyric Theater began in the summer of 1893.

The campaign to build the concert hall was led by Frank Frick, president of Baltimore's Board of Trade. Frick organized a group of civic leaders that would incorporate under the title of the Auditorium Company of Baltimore. The Company solicited competitive designs from architects in Baltimore and New York. Richard M. Hunt, Esq, dean of American architects, assisted in the final selection. The site chosen for the new hall would be sensibly located beside main trolley lines and in close proximity to the Pennsylvania and the proposed B&O Railroad station with service to downtown Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. Architect Henry Randall produced a design based upon the Gewandhaus, the great music hall in Leipzig. The interior of the hall would be decorated with Corinthian pilasters and round keystoned arches with decorative panels bearing the names of composers. The proscenium arch would bear the Calvert family coat-of-arms. Randall's design also called for an impressive Renaissance Revival faÁade reminiscent of the Paris Opera. For the sake of economy, the hall was built without the grand exterior finishes envisioned by the architect.

The doors of the new Music Hall opened on October 31. Concertgoers in their evening clothes passed beneath a striped canvas canopy that substituted for a lobby. The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed the inaugural concert. After praising the hall's acoustics and its graceful interior, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun observed that the building's exterior was "but little more attractive looking than the storage warehouse a few blocks away." The hall would be known simply as Music Hall until after the turn-of-the-century when it adopted The Lyric as its name.

Paderewski was the first of the musical giants to perform at the Lyric, following the Boston Symphony. The Lyric hosted performances by Anna Pavlova and Arthur Rubenstein as well as a bicycle festival featuring riders dressed as Hottentots, revival and temperance meetings, and debutante balls. Baltimore debutantes began making their bows at the Lyric on November 13, 1894, at a Monday German given by the newly organized Fidelia Assembly. Operatic drama and concerts all gave way each year for the "coming out" of a select group of young women from Maryland's oldest and most important families at the Bachelor's Cotillion. Despite the threat of prohibition and the clouds of war gathering over Europe, the Bachelor's Cotillion of 1914 went on as usual. A young woman named Wallis Warfield, later the Duchess of Windsor, would be among the debutantes making their debut at the Lyric Theater.

The first renovations to the Lyric were celebrated on September 20, 1920, when Major John Philip Sousa, recently retired from the U.S. Marine Corps, played a spirited inaugural concert of military and classical music. Drastic changes would follow as the Twenties unfolded. The Lyric was designed as a music hall with a stage of modest proportions. The Metropolitan Opera Company refused the Lyric Company's offer to host a small season of opera, citing the difficulty of performing opera at the hall. Undeterred, the Lyric Company set about to make accommodations for opera. With money provided by Captain Isaac E. Emerson, the Bromo Seltzer King, the company engaged an architect who carved out space for an opera orchestra modeled on the orchestra pit at the Metropolitan Opera House. Eight dressing rooms were clapped onto the outside of the building, the stage was enlarged and its lighting upgraded. The Lyric Company even succeeded in eliminating a long-time source of irritation to musicians and concert-goers by having the Pennsylvania Railroad abstain from all switching operations in the adjacent Bolton Yards during performances. Years before, Paderewski fled the Lyric's stage when the noise of the switching completely drowned out a pianissimo passage in the concerto he was performing.

The Lyric's limited seating capacity (then approximately 220) prompted the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra to threaten to end their concerts at there. After an architect engaged to provide a scheme for enlarging the Lyric failed to produce a workable plan, Dr. Hugh Young worked with a builder of fire escapes to devise a plan that would involve combining the stairs and fire escapes in one exterior construction, removing the main hall's rear wall and gutting the Lyric's small recital hall. These drastic changes to the hall netted 600 additional seats.

For years the Lyric would serve as home to two of Maryland's most important performing arts organizations. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra began performing at the Lyric in 1916, and was later joined by the Baltimore Civic Opera, forerunner of today's Baltimore Opera Company.

By the 1960s the Lyric and its surrounding neighborhood had fallen into disrepair, prompting Baltimore's mayor, Theodore McKeldin, to take action. In 1966 McKeldin put forth a plan to acquire the Lyric and make it the centerpiece of a "cultural center" that would embrace the Maryland Institute and the University of Baltimore and spark the rehabilitation of Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue. McKeldin's vision became a reality under Mayor William Donald Schaefer's administration. A gift by the Clarence E. Elderkin Foundation paid off the Lyric's mortgage. A nonprofit corporation affiliated with the University of Baltimore offered to absorb the Lyric Foundation to help move the proposed renovations forward. The Lyric received a $2.5 million matching gift from the state and by 1976 the proposed transformation was underway. In 1981 the doors of the "New Lyric" reopened with a stark modern entry.

Note: Much of the information for this entry comes from original source material, including newspaper and microfilm, from the archives of The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Historical Society, and the vertical files at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.