Jeannette Thurber

Jeannette Thurber ( born January 29, 1850 in Delhi as Jeannette Meyers, New York, † January 2, 1946 in Bronxville, New York) was an American musical patron and founder and president of the National Conservatory of Music of America.

Life

Jeannette Meyers was the daughter of Danish immigrants Henry Meyers, a well-known violinist, and his wife Anna Marie Coffin Price. She later studied at the Conservatoire de Paris. At the age of nineteen years, Jeannette Meyers married on September 15, 1869 in New York City millionaire Francis Beattie Thurber. From the marriage, which by all accounts was a happy one, were born two sons.

In 1884, Mrs. Thurber founded in Manhattan, the National Conservatory of Music of America and a year later, the American Opera Company, where young American talent, even those with black skin should be formed. In 1884 she funded the first Wagner Festival and the debut of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in New York City.

The music-loving lady wanted to help her school with a famous teacher to breakthrough to promote a national American Kunstidiom. It submitted in 1891 to the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák ( 1841-1904 ) a financially and artistically alluring two-year contract for eight months a year working as a teacher of composition and orchestral conductor. After much hesitation, the composer took a year later the offer. Aside from homesickness seizures sometimes came over Dvořák financial panic as Mrs. Thurber's husband, former millionaire, near bankruptcy and Mrs. Thurber was therefore in arrears with their royalty payments. Nevertheless, he eventually extended his contract in May 1894 and returned after a long furlough to New York.