By Charlotte Fellman’s telling, music was part of her life from her first breath. “My mother said I was born singing,’’ she told the Globe last year as she turned 97.
A former music teacher and administrator in the Boston Public Schools for more than four decades, Ms. Fellman was a Boston Symphony Orchestra subscriber for 79 years – since before World War II. She watched music directors from Serge Koussevitzky to Andris Nelsons conduct the BSO and even picked up the baton herself while still in elementary school.
At age 8, she was chosen to lead the rhythmic orchestra of more than 150 pupils in Symphony Hall during the annual music festival for schoolchildren. “I thought it was heaven,’’ she said, recalling the first time she stepped inside the building. “Music has become part of my soul. And that hall has become a shrine.’’
Ms. Fellman was 98 when she died May 9 in her Hyde Park home, where she had lived since purchasing the house in the 1970s from her older sister and brother-in-law. Emily Wollock, who is Ms. Fellman’s niece and closest relative, will plan a service in the fall, once the BSO season begins and her aunt’s many Symphony Hall friends return from summer travels.
“There was something that was very magnetic about her. You just got drawn into that world,’’ said her niece, who lives in Upton. “She had this way of talking about music — the conductors, how it was played — so that it all became very real and very enveloping.’’
Marianne Connolly of Boston often accompanied Ms. Fellman to BSO performances. “Being one of Charlotte’s symphony partners was a gift,’’ she said. “As I think back, I experienced decades of this beautiful music with Charlotte, but I came to realize that for me, it wasn’t about the music. It was about spending time with Charlotte. She was so great.’’
More than 90 years ago, before most of the patrons who will fill this fall’s seats in Symphony Hall were born, Ms. Fellman took her turn with the baton. Plucked from the second grade at Atherton School in Dorchester, she led the rhythmic orchestra in May 1927 during a music program that included children and youths from kindergarten to high school. John O’Shea was the music director who arranged the performance for the school department’s festival.
“Little Miss Fellman, after being introduced to the audience by Mr. O’Shea and making her bow, was lifted to the top of a concert grand piano, where she stood and used her baton with the grace and assurance of a veteran conductor,’’ the Globe reported.
Her baton was decorated with a pink bow, and afterward, a reporter asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Though young, she already knew: a music teacher.
“She was such a music lover,’’ her niece said. “She loved and lived symphony music. She just had that passion for it.’’
Born in Boston on Feb. 4, 1919, Charlotte Fellman was the younger of two sisters whose parents, Julius Fellman and the former Bessie Levy, were Russian immigrants. Her father had been a tailor in St. Petersburg, and was in Boston, too, until work became scarce during the Great Depression. After that, he worked in a cousin’s store, selling tires and auto parts.
Her mother was a homemaker, and “when she was cooking, she told me to go play the piano,’’ Ms. Fellman said last year.
She went to Boston Girls’ Latin School and graduated in 1940 from Boston Teachers College, often heading to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in her school years to read and do homework while sitting on the stone benches that flank the courtyard. Ms. Fellman wrote the class song her college classmates sang to open their 1940 graduation ceremony.
“Who was the eighth wonder of our sophomore symphonic course? With one voice the senior class will answer — ‘Little Charlotte,’ ’’ Ms. Fellman’s classmates wrote in Lampas, the college yearbook. “Whose competent hands directed the madrigal singers? Who played the title role of the operetta, Patience, with keen dramatic as well as exceptional music power? Charlotte again. Not only did she receive honor grades consistently, but she was one of the most dependable and capable girls in the music and history clubs.’’
Ms. Fellman’s “intimate friends respect her for her modesty and love her for her sincerity and loyalty,’’ the yearbook said.
She spent 42 years with the Boston Public Schools, from graduation until retiring in 1982. Ms. Fellman was a junior high music teacher, associate director of the music magnet program, and a coordinator who oversaw classroom music teaching throughout the city. For many years, she supervised SEREL, the summer elementary remediation and enrichment laboratories, and she was associate director of the school system’s music department when she retired.
Education ran in the family. Her late sister and brother-in-law, Reva and Philip Wollock, were teachers, too, and Ms. Fellman received a master’s from Boston University. In 1974, the Massachusetts Music Educators Association presented Ms. Fellman with its distinguished service award. Four years later, she received the association’s Lowell Mason Award for outstanding contributions to music education.
Though she preferred to be addressed as Charlotte, and never aunt, Ms. Fellman lavished attention on her niece, taking her to restaurants and the ballet. “She indulged me,’’ her niece said. “She took me to places I otherwise would not have gotten to when I was young.’’
During summers when school was out, Ms. Fellman went to Tanglewood, and to music seminars there and elsewhere, where she studied with and attended performances conducted by the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, and Sarah Caldwell.
Ms. Fellman’s musical home, however, was Symphony Hall, where she volunteered along with attending concerts. She sat in the center of the second balcony’s first row “and would say, ‘These are the best seats in the house,’ ’’ Connolly recalled. “She thought that, legitimately from a music perspective, the music was better up there.’’
Ms. Fellman was fond of purple and known for her fashion sense, topping each outfit with a hat from “her fabulous millinery collection,’’ Connolly said. “Nobody uses that word any more, but we did.’’ Because Ms. Fellman was not much taller than 5 feet, those in rows behind could easily see over her — and each evening’s hat.
She was featured in the Globe last year for her 97th birthday, a celebration that included going backstage after the BSO concert to meet Nelsons and regale him with stories of famous conductors she had seen decades before he was born.
“That night at the symphony she was a celebrity,’’ Connolly said. “Everybody had read the article and she was holding court. I remember stepping away and seeing people line up to speak with Charlotte. It was a birthday worth remembering. She said, ‘You can’t top this.’ ’’
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
