The Fort Wayne Philharmonic

Founded 1944 — the city's orchestra

A society, then an orchestra: The Fort Wayne Philharmonic was founded in 1944 as the Philharmonic Society of Fort Wayne, Inc., organized by citizens under Carl Light, the society's first president, who wanted to raise the standard of orchestral performance in the city. The society quickly grew to a thousand members, consulted musical figures in New York, and hired as its first full-time music director Hans Schwieger, a recent émigré from Germany who had been a conducting assistant at the Berlin state opera and civic conductor in Mainz. The orchestra gave its inaugural concert on October 18, 1944, at the newly refurbished Palace Theatre. It grew fast: the 1945–46 season presented fourteen programs, with pianist William Kapell, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and tenor Mario Lanza among the soloists, and a 1946 performance of Verdi's Requiem fielded Metropolitan Opera soloists and a two-hundred-voice chorus. Isaac Stern played with the orchestra in 1948. The endowment fund that still underwrites the institution was established in 1966. The orchestra's music directors — Schwieger (1944–48); Igor Buketoff (1948–66), still its longest-serving; James Sample; Thomas Briccetti; Ronald Ondrejka; Edvard Tchivzhel; and Andrew Constantine — are profiled as musicians in the Artists record; what belongs to this institutional history is the line's continuity: from 1944 to Constantine's departure at the end of the 2025–26 season, the Philharmonic has never missed its existence, through the movie-palace era, the suburban era, and the downtown revival. In 1975 it moved its principal home to the Embassy Theatre. Since 1980 it has won five ASCAP awards for adventurous programming. When the John and Ruth Rhinehart Music Center opened on the IPFW campus in the fall of 2007 — dedicated October 4, 2007, with the 1,600-seat Auer Performance Hall — the orchestra gained its second home, and it now divides its life between the Embassy's 1928 movie-palace splendor and Auer's modern acoustic room, with chamber series in the Rhinehart Recital Hall and summer concerts outdoors at the Foellinger Theatre.

Sources:

1. Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra, institutional histories (fwphil.org; summarized at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Wayne_Philharmonic_Orchestra and artelize.com) — the 1944 founding and first concert of October 18, 1944, at the Palace Theatre; the 1945–46 expansion and soloists; the 1966 endowment; the 1975 move to the Embassy Theatre.
2. ACGSI, F Surnames of Allen County (acgsi.org) — Carl Light as the founding president and the October 18, 1944 premiere under Schwieger.
3. People–Artists section of this history — the music-director succession in full, Schwieger's Berlin and Mainz posts, and the 1946 Verdi Requiem with its 200-voice chorus, from Time's report.
4. Purdue University Fort Wayne, School of Music, "About Us" (pfw.edu), and The Post & Mail, "IPFW dedicates music center" (October 2007) — the Music Center opened fall 2007; the Rhinehart Music Center dedicated October 4, 2007; Auer Performance Hall at 1,600 seats.