Cultural life

The arts

Boston has a rich and varied cultural life, and the love of music attracts many Bostonians throughout the year. The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), founded in 1881, is one of the foremost orchestras in the world. The BSO performs at Symphony Hall during the winter months and at the Tanglewood Music Festival, in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, in July and August. The longtime conductor Arthur Fiedler made the BSO’s Boston Pops series a local music institution, and each spring Bostonians crowd around café-style tables in Symphony Hall and listen to a mixture of classical and popular favourites. During the summer the Pops also performs outdoors at the Hatch Shell along the Charles River. A much-anticipated annual event is the orchestra’s Fourth of July concert, which culminates with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Noted Boston music schools include the New England Conservatory of Music (1867) and the Berklee College of Music (1945).

Boston’s reputation as a cultural centre is built in large part on the prominent museums that are its patrimony. The Museum of Fine Arts (opened 1876), a major world institution, preserves and exhibits East Asian, Egyptian, and Classical collections as well as other important examples of paintings, prints, textiles, and the decorative arts. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1903) in the Fenway has a notable collection of Italian Renaissance paintings and remains an important monument as well as a history of taste. Harvard University maintains a fine arts museum as well as several museums devoted to science and natural history. The Museum of Science (1949) at Science Park, overlooking the Charles River basin, and the Children’s Museum at Museum Wharf are aimed at the instruction of young people.

Among American cities, Boston is particularly noted for the abundance of its scholarly and public libraries. The Boston Public Library (1854) was the first major tax-supported free library in the United States. Since 1895 it has been housed in a building designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The library, with its fine collection of books, carries out many of its functions through branches spread throughout the city. The Boston Athenæum, a proprietary library founded in 1807, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the State Library, and the libraries of the colleges and universities in the area provide remarkable resources, while across the Charles Harvard has one of the greatest libraries for scholarship in the world.

Boston has a flourishing theatre district near the common that provides venues for both mainstream and more-offbeat shows. Broadway shows and professional stage productions are mounted at the Boston Opera House. The Citi Performing Arts Center—which operates the Shubert and Wang theatres and coadministers the Colonial Theatre, the city’s oldest operating theatre, with Emerson College—provides facilities for grand opera and large theatrical productions. The Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College runs various operatic and theatrical productions. The Wilbur, built in 1914 in the Federal style, was a Broadway and professional stage theatre, and it became primarily a stand-up comedy and music venue in 2008. In addition to professional productions, there are numerous small playhouses and repertory theatres in the Greater Boston area as well as notable dramatic productions at many of the area’s colleges and universities, such as the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard (home of the American Repertory Theater), the Kresge Auditorium at MIT, the Spingold Theater Center at Brandeis University, the Robsham Theater Arts Center at Boston College, and the Boston University Theater and the Boston Playwrights’ Theater, both at Boston University.

Boston’s stature in American literary culture is long-standing. Boston has hosted eminent writers since colonial times, and the city has continued to be a publishing capital into the early 21st century. Many early luminaries such as the essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau not only had their masterpieces first published within the city but often met downtown at such centres of cultural life as the Old Corner Bookstore on Washington Street (then also the location of the publisher Ticknor and Fields) and the bookstore that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody operated out of her home on West Street. The essayist and social reformer Margaret Fuller held the “Conversations,” a series of lectures and discussions for women on philosophy and politics, at Peabody’s bookstore. William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper The Liberator was published in the city’s Cornhill section (now the site of City Hall). Poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, although more often associated with the American South, was born in Boston (a statue commemorating his birth was unveiled in 2014). Many leading poets of the early and mid-20th century such as Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot attended Harvard, although they are associated with other parts of New England (Frost), with New York City and Hartford, Connecticut (Stevens), or with England (Eliot). Many of the most-renowned Modernist poets of the mid-20th-century—e.g., Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell—also lived in Boston. From the late 20th century, institutions such as Boston University and Emerson College became well known and well respected for their graduate programs in creative writing. The city’s legacy of contribution to American letters was recognized with the formation of the first literary cultural district in the United States, including a broad swath of the downtown, in 2014.