 Beck was engaged as the director of the Beethoven Männerchor in San Antonio, then succeeded in that role by Carl Hahn in about 1904.Hahn worked with Anna Goodman Hertzberg, a leading local musician and arts patron, to create the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, which gave its first concert on May 18, 1905.The orchestra performed sporadically for the next several years but was revived in 1914 (as the "San Antonio Philharmonic") by a new conductor, Arthur Claassen.