One of music's best kept secrets celebrates 100 years, quietly

"For 100 years, performers of all stripes have graced the Library stage, from classical music luminaries like Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky to Stevie Wonder, Audra McDonald and Max Roach. Today, it remains one of the capitol city's most beautiful, best sounding and perhaps best kept secrets. The idea for a concert hall at the Library of Congress did not stem from congress. It came from philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and one bespoke piece of bipartisan legislation."

""She was indefatigable and intrepid," says Anne McLean, senior producer for concerts at the Library, "a remarkable woman, six feet tall, a brilliant pianist." McLean is sitting with me on the stage, overlooking the empty auditorium. To mark the centennial, celebratory concerts and commissions have been heard in the hall all year. But not now. The government shutdown has forced the hall to close its doors, and unless a deal is reached before Tuesday, it'll be closed on the anniversary itself."

"Coolidge was born into a wealthy Chicago family in 1864. She studied music, traveled abroad, married a Harvard-trained orthopedic surgeon and, in 1924, came to Washington to establish a foothold in the nation's capitol. She approached Carl Engel, the Library's music chief, about the possibility of adding a small concert hall to the Library's voluptuous and voluminous Thomas Jefferson building, designed after the Paris opera house and completed in 1897."

The Library of Congress concert hall opened on October 28, 1925, hidden inside the Thomas Jefferson Building's Northwest Courtyard. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge proposed the hall, wrote a $60,000 check to Librarian Herbert Putnam on November 12, 1924, and navigated the absence of a legal mechanism for such a civilian gift. The hall hosted a century of performers from Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky to Stevie Wonder, Audra McDonald and Max Roach. Anne McLean, senior producer for concerts, describes Coolidge as indefatigable and intrepid. Centennial concerts and commissions marked the year, though a government shutdown temporarily closed the hall.

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