Music: Boston Major

The ghost of an old man with a sabre scar across his cheek hovered over Boston’s Symphony Hall last week. In his honor Conductor Sergei Koussevitzky had prepared a six-day Bach festival and undertaken to give two complete performances of the great B Minor Mass. Contralto Margaret Matzenauer had come to do some of the soloing in her deep, vibrant voice. Singers from Harvard University and Radcliffe College had worked for weeks polishing the difficult choruses. Conductor Koussevitzky was keyed to a pitch where no amount of effort was too much to spend in the memory of Major Henry Lee Higginson, who 50 years ago founded the Boston Orchestra and for nearly 40 years supported it.

On the second day of the festival the old Major’s bust was taken out of the Symphony Hall lobby, set on the stage in the centre of a floral display. Instead of music, speeches were the meat of the afternoon, with the Major’s widow, a little old lady of 93, one of the guests on the stage. Professor Bliss Perry of Harvard, the Major’s friend & biographer, recalled many an interesting fact: Henry Lee Higginson went only a part of one year to Harvard although he was described by President Hadley of Yale as the “ideal Harvard man.” He gave the university Soldiers’ Field and the Harvard Union (meeting house for undergraduates).

For years Major Higginson knew every player in the orchestra just as he knew the names of every soldier in the two regiments which fought under him in the Civil War. Because of his great philanthropy, he was widely regarded as an enormously rich, successful businessman. It was news to most of last week’s audience that he failed twice in business before he was taken into the family brokerage firm of Lee, Higginson & Co., that his generosity ran him close to bankruptcy again in his eightieth year (1914) when his brother, the late Francis Lee Higginson, anonymously took over the burden of the orchestra.

Boston’s oldest families are all connected—Lowells, Cabots, Jacksons, Lees and Higginsons. Founder of the U. S. line of Higginsons was Rev. Francis Higginson, Salem’s first religious teacher. The brokerage firm of Lee & Higginson was founded seven generations later (1848) by George Higginson and John Clarke Lee, his wife’s cousin. George Higginson’s best known sons were Henry Lee and Francis Lee. Francis Lee’s son is the only Higginson now in the big investment banking house. George Cabot Lee, grandson of John Clarke Lee, is also a partner.

Major Henry Lee Higginson married the daughter of the late great Naturalist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz. Their son, Alexander (“Aleck”) Henry Higginson is a famed foxhunter, divides his time between his 400-acre farm in South Lin-coln, Mass, and England where he is a Master of the Cattistock Hunt. His son, Henry Lee Higginson, is also a gentleman of leisure.