Hambourg Conservatory of Music

Hambourg Conservatory of Music

Hambourg Conservatory of Music. Toronto private school operated 1911-51 by members of the Hambourg family. Michael, who had directed the Hambourg Conservatoire in London, began teaching with his sons Jan and Boris at the Heintzman studios in Toronto in 1910. They opened the Hambourg Cons on Gloucester St on the occasion of a visit to Toronto by Mark Hambourg. In 1913 they moved to 194 Wellesley St E at the corner of Sherbourne St. The new conservatory's attic was converted into a student recital hall. After Michael's death in 1916 Jan and Boris served as co-directors until Jan's return to Europe in the early 1920s. Boris was sole director thereafter. His wife Maria Bauchope, a New-Zealand born pianist, served as business manager and also, with intuitive awareness of Toronto's growing social and cultural needs, developed the conservatory as a centre for the arts with an international flavour. The Hart House String Quartet and the Hambourg Trio prepared their concerts there. Many visual artists and writers (eg, the painters Arthur Lismer and John Russell and the poets E.J. Pratt, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Arthur Stringer) dropped by habitually for the pleasure of cosmopolitan company and conversation about the arts.

The Hambourgs brought to Toronto many fine teachers from Europe and also recruited local instructors. The faculty was a large one. In 1914 it comprised 30 teachers of piano, 11 of voice, 8 of violin, 4 of theory, 2 each of cello, organ, flute, mandolin/banjo, and composition, and 1 each of drama, French, German, and dancing. Among notable faculty members, over the school's 40 years of activity, were Marcus Adeney, Boris Berlin, Helmut Blume, Giuseppe Carboni, Rachel Cavalho, Ernest J. Farmer, Eduardo Ferrari-Fontana, Emil Gartner, Alberto Guerrero, Clement Hambourg, Redfern Hollinshead, Eustache Horodyski, Gerald Moore, Elie Spivak, and Reginald Stewart. Branches of the conservatory, operated by associated teachers, flourished throughout the city from 1918 to the 1940s, the longest-lived (1919-43) located at 481 Roncesvalles and on Queen St E. During the 1930s some of the teachers travelled to their pupils' homes.