Benjamin Johnson Lang

Benjamin Johnson Lang (December 28, 1837April 3 or 4, 1909) was an American conductor, pianist, organist, teacher and composer. He introduced a large amount of music to American audiences, including the world premiere of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, which he conducted in Boston in 1875. His daughter Margaret Ruthven Lang was an accomplished composer.

Biography Benjamin Johnson Lang was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of a piano maker, music teacher and organist. By age 12, he was showing sufficient promise as a pianist to play Chopin's Ballade No. 3 in A flat. He began organ lessons at 12, and by 18 he was the organist of the largest instrument in Boston, the First Baptist Church on Somerset Street. He excelled in improvisation.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was so impressed with Lang's piano playing that he hired him as a collaborator for a series of twenty concerts in which compositions for two pianos were featured. Lang himself appeared as soloist in a performance of the concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on February 20, 1885. The first U.S. performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (1900) With the Apollo Club he gave the first Boston performances of (among others) Brahms' Rinaldo, Grieg's Discovery, Mendelssohn's Sons of Art, Antigone, and Oedipus, and several premieres by the Boston composers Chadwick, Foote (Farewell of Hiawatha), Thayer, and Whiting (March of the Monks of Bangor, Free Lances, and Henry of Navarre) the first Boston performance of Niels Gade's Crusaders (January 11, 1877). The Lang home entertained prominent guests such as Antonín Dvořák and Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

In 1891, at great personal expense he brought the entire New York Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra to Boston to present the first performance in Boston of Wagner's Parsifal, conducted by Anton Seidl, who had assisted Wagner in the first complete performance of the Ring in 1876 and who in 1889 he led the first complete Ring in America.