American Academy of Music papers

The American Academy of Music, incorporated on March 24, 1852, built in Philadelphia one of America's grandest nineteenth-century opera houses. Not long after its incorporation, the Academy came under the influence of the Baker family of Philadelphia. Two successive generations of the Baker family presided over the Academy from the 1880s to the 1920s. Under their tenure, the Academy became widely known for presentations of opera and classical music. The American Academy of Music papers provide an incomplete, but useful, glimpse of the institutional structure and entertainment programming of this Philadelphia hall in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the collection spans almost a hundred years between 1852 and circa 1940, it primarily consists of correspondence and a limited number of printed items from the years 1896-1897 and 1901-1919. Only scattered materials are preserved from before 1896, and no information from the period 1898-1900 is available in this collection.