Arthur Fiedler (1894-1979) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 17 December, 1894. He studied violin first with his father Emanuel (a founder of the Kneisel Quartet and sometime first violin of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), and later with Willy Hess at the Berlin Royal Academy, from 1911 to 1914. After a brief spell as second violin with the Boston Symphony in 1915, he served in the US Army until 1918 when he returned to the orchestra as a violist.
In 1924 he founded the Fiedler Sinfonietta, later re-named Boston Sinfonietta, and during the mid-1920s also doubled as a choral conductor, notably with the Boston Male Choir and the Cecilia Society. Fiedler’s 1929 season of open-air Esplanade concerts with the Boston Sinfonietta proved so successful that he was appointed director of the Boston Pops Orchestra, a position he held for more than thirty years, until his death, in Boston, on 10 July, 1979.
In 1935 he recorded Jealousy, an arrangement of the Danish composer Jacob Gade’s well-known 1926 Tango Tzigane and this sold a million copies between its release in 1938 and 1952. Dubbed ‘Mr. Pops’, Fiedler’s commercial success at Boston in popularising the classics (alongside his promotion of music by native Americans) inevitably led to his appointment as director of a series of similar ventures elsewhere in the USA, notably with the San Francisco Symphony (1951-1978), the Boston Pops Tour Orchestra (from 1953) and also internationally, as a guest conductor (from 1957).
Peter Dempsey, 2002
