Last December 2 was the 95th anniversary of the Cuban cultural association with the most extensive accomplishments in the 20th century: the Pro Arte Musical Society. Created on December 2, 1918 by María Teresa García Montes de Giberga and a group of enthusiastic collaborators, it prolonged its existence until the seventh decade of that century and not only did they sponsor brilliant opera, ballet and concert seasons but also made considerable contributions to artistic teaching on the island.

The book Pro Arte Musical y su labor de divulgación de cultura en Cuba (1918-1967) appeared in New York in 1990, written by Célida Parera Villalón, who worked for almost two decades in the society’s administrative office. In Cuba, Unión publishers brought out in 2009 the book La Sociedad Pro Arte Musical, a text with which its author, Sigryd Padrón Díaz, won the Annual Argeliers León Musicology Award. Two years later, La Memoria publishers of the Pablo de la Torriente Brau Cultural Centre published La Sociedad Pro Arte Musical. Testimonio de su tiempo, by Irina Pacheco Valera. However, for decades the value of that institution was more or less shunned in our histories of culture, while it was considered an “exclusivist society.”

However, the emergence of Pro Arte was an audacious initiative for many reasons. In the first place, it was created and became consolidated as a women’s group that admitted men in their ranks, but its statutes demanded that the board of directors be exclusively made up by women. In second place, its aim never was to be an exclusive club. The membership fees it demanded were notoriously low and they facilitated access to performances by the most famous Cuban artists, as well as other internationally renowned figures, so that its membership not only comprised large proprietors and government officials but also a wide layer of the middle class, professionals, intellectual creators, not forgetting that in the presentations that were not only for members, the upper floor seats were full of students and even workers attracted by art.

Mrs. García Montes’ initiative was not due to the fact that until then Havana lacked decent artistic presentations, on the contrary, she and her women friends had been able to applaud in the National Theatre Adolfo Bracale’s opera seasons as well as the concerts given by Polish virtuoso Ignaz Paderewski and Anna Pavlova’s ballet seasons. But, on the one hand, it was necessary to depend on the whims of certain impresarios to achieve a bit more than isolated functions, badly promoted and with worse guarantees, that, to top it off, were offered to a very limited public who could show off that it paid for expensive seats and who did not know how to behave correctly in the theatre. In fact, a paper airplane thrown from one of the coliseum’s top floors landed on top of the piano of the famous Paderewski during one of his concerts.

María Teresa sought the support of several Havana high-society ladies with monetary resources to devote to that artistic enterprise or with sufficient influence in the government departments and in the media to promote her endeavour: Oria Varela de Albarrán, Conchita Giberga de Oña, Laura Rayneri de Alonso, María Teresa Velasco de González Gordon, Natalia Aróstegui. Moreover, she usually had the backing of intellectuals who served as a compass to orient her projects. Musician and teacher Hubert de Blanck and the learned patron Gonzalo Aróstegui were very useful at the beginning.

Pro Arte’s first activity was a recital in the Espadero Hall of the Hubert de Blanck Conservatory, located at No. 47 Galiano Street, of the Society of Classic Quartets of Havana, and in March 1919 it presented on the same stage the first hired foreign artist: violinist Mayo Walder. At that time the personal ticket for those presentations cost a peso.

Some people thought the ladies were dreaming too much and would not persevere in their endeavour, but five years later it was difficult to not recognise that the Society was growing and becoming consolidated. In fact, in late 1923 it already had the magazine Pro Arte Musical and that same year it had created the Circuit of Musical Expansion, an initiative to make known music among the less favoured sectors. Thus, in April 1923, guitarist Andrés Segovia gave a concert in the Havana Presidium and others were given in the Women’s Prison, the Orphanage and the Carvajal and Santovenia homes for the elderly.

By 1924 there were so many members that the board of directors had to say that it was necessary to limit the admission of members “because none of the theatres of Havana, not even the Payret, which has the most capacity, have sufficient seats to accommodate them.”

An extraordinary general meeting of the board of directors agreed in May 1925 to build their own theatre and the following year they purchased the plot of land on Calzada and D. Through a contest they got the most attractive draft, conceived by architects Moenck and Quintana, and on August 6, 1927 they were able to place the first stone of the building. It was inaugurated on December 2, 1928, with a concert by the Havana Symphony Orchestra directed by Gonzalo Roig, in which the poem for choir and orchestra Anacaona by Eduardo Sanchéz Fuentes was premiered.

The new building was elegant, functional and had excellent acoustics. But the initial budget of 250,000 pesos rose to 430,000, which during that period of economic crisis even worried the most fortunate capitalists of the island. By 1931 the debt contracted by Pro Arte forced the board of directors to seek a rapid palliative measure. Then Natalia Aróstegui de Suárez thought of a happy initiative: the creation of three schools: Declamation, Guitar and Ballet, open to the public. The enrolment fees would help get the entity’s depleted funds in shape.

The Declamation School was entrusted to Jesús Tordesillas, who at the time was the director of the Principal Theatre Comedy Company, and subsequently it was directed by Guillermo de Mancha and Hortensia Gelabert. This gave rise to the formation of declamation artists who staged between 1931 and 1952 some appreciable productions like La muerte alegre by Russian Evreinoff, with incidental music by Amadeo Roldán, in 1935 and the premier in Cuba of Historia de una escalera, by Spanish playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo, in March 1950, a very short time after its premier in Madrid.

The guitar school was the one that had the shortest life, since it stopped in 1943. Professor Clara Romero de Nicola, director of the Tárrega Conservatory, originally headed the school, and she was later replaced by her son Isaac Nicola in 1942. It can be considered one of the milestones in the development of the Cuban teaching of that instrument.

The ballet academy was entrusted to the Russian Nicolas Yavorski, a personage with more love for dance than training to teach it, who starting that same year would stage productions of his versions of Sleeping Beauty, Blue Danube and Coppelia. This is where Alberto and Fernando Alonso received their initial formation, as well as Alicia Martínez – later Alicia Alonso -, thus the three major founders of ballet on the island came from that institution.

That school was the one with the most sustained results, especially when the direction passed on to maestro Alberto Alonso, who brought about a more demanding teaching of dance and encouraged the holding of dance festivals with guest figures that enabled the public of Pro Arte to get to know important works of the universal repertoire. The emergence of the Alicia Alonso Ballet and a few years later her ballet academy, would not put an end to that effort, thanks to which figures like Josefina Méndez, Loipa Araujp and María Elena Llorente got to professional dance. It was also the oldest school, since it worked until 1967.

Beyond the unquestionable limitations with which these schools had to work, they were an indisputable landmark for the teaching of art in Cuba.

Apart from that teaching action, there was a work geared at educating the audiences, which the board of directors carried out more or less relentlessly. Access to the hall was not allowed once the function had started until the following pause. An eye was kept out to make sure the public did not talk during the concerts or generate other acts of indiscipline. More than once, political and financial figures were unreservedly reprimanded by those ladies who did not tolerate acts of indiscipline in their theatre.

If a review is made of the programmes of the successive seasons sponsored by Pro Arte it is possible to create a catalogue of great artists with presentations that today are legendary: suffice it to remember the functions of the American Ballet Theatre, the production of Wagner’s Tristram and Isolde, with Kirsten Flagstadt in the leading role, that season with Renata Tebaldi when the residents of Havana fell in love with her Boheme and her Faust and the recitals by Jasha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, Marian Anderson. This does not mean that Cuban artists were shunned, proof of this being the functions headed by Gonzalo Roig, Ernesto Lecuona, Alicia and Fernando Alonso, Marta Pérez, Jorge Bolet, Iris Burguet and many others.

At the triumph of the Revolution the social conflicts had an impact on a great many of Pro Arte’s members; many of them emigrated or kept to their home, but the Society made an effort to continue its work. Even when the theatre and social venue were confiscated on January 1, 1961, the board of directors got a special permit from the government to offer its members its last two concerts. Afterwards it sought refuge in a house on C Street, the former venue of the Children’s Society of Fine Arts, where it offered activities to a faithful group of members until 1967.

For many years, several of my intellectual friends, like Nara Araujo, César López, Monsignor Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Eduardo Heras León, have assured me that Pro Arte Musical had a fundamental importance for their cultural formation. Perhaps now, with less five years to go for its centennial, it would not be a bad idea – in tune with the structural reforms Cuban society is living – to try out associative forms in the cultural field that collect the best of that tradition. (2013)