For some two weeks, Muck would be held in East Cambridge, facing an uncertain future. The musician’s spirits were low, despite the occasional visitor and the special meals brought to him from the outside. To make matters worse, Muck’s Boston home had been searched by federal agents, who carted off a trove of personal documents, which reportedly implicated him in a variety of pro-German activities.111 It was not clear why the US government had arrested him, though as an enemy alien, he was vulnerable to incarceration in wartime.112
Within a few days after Muck had been hauled off to jail, the Boston Symphony management, which had backed him through thick and thin, said it had accepted his resignation, thus ending Muck’s American conducting career.113 Soon afterward, with rumors swirling about Muck’s plight, the Department of Justice announced that he would be sent to Fort Oglethorpe where he would be held for the rest of the war, along with fellow conductor Ernst Kunwald and thousands of other enemy aliens.114
Prior to Muck’s incarceration, the issue of his citizenship status had arisen. The German maestro claimed he was actually a naturalized citizen of Switzerland, which he believed meant the presidential proclamation directed at enemy aliens—mostly Germans and Austrians—did not apply to him. Late in 1917, Muck’s assertion received support from the Swiss legation in Washington, though a few months after that, the Swiss minister to the United States backed away from the maestro’s claim, leaving Muck unable to dig himself out of the deep hole into which the American legal system had tossed him. Muck’s contention, which proved accurate, was that at age eight, he had gone with his German father to Switzerland, where the elder Muck had taken out naturalization papers. As a result, despite the younger Muck’s German birth, he became a Swiss subject, and upon reaching adulthood, Muck filed for Swiss citizenship, fortifying his connection to that country, where he had lived and worked early on.115 Some saw this, at least initially, as reason to leave Boston’s conductor alone, for as one report observed, he was no longer a “Prussian . . . favorite,” but was “one of the progeny of William Tell.”116
Questions about Muck’s citizenship persisted into 1918, with people demanding that the conductor resolve the matter definitively, which he sought to do by presenting an 1881 certificate establishing that he was indeed a Swiss subject, a document the Swiss minister said was authentic.117 In late April, with Muck incarcerated at Fort Oglethorpe, the situation changed dramatically, as Swiss officials in Washington said they would no longer support his claim of Swiss citizenship. As a result of records collected by the Department of Justice, the Swiss minister was now convinced that the musician had in fact repeatedly declared himself a German subject. According to a statement issued by the minister, during the maestro’s many years in Germany and later in the United States, Muck was seen as a “German subject by the German authorities,” and saw himself as German. Consequently, the Swiss legation said it would no longer consider him a Swiss citizen, which nullified Muck’s claim that he was not subject to the president’s proclamation on enemy aliens.118 Pleased by the Swiss government’s decision, a Boston paper denounced the conductor: “We think the citizenship of Muck is more than Switzerland could support without nausea.”119
Another facet of the case that appeared in newspaper reports across the country concerned Muck’s activities outside the concert hall. Given the demonization of all things German, it was predictable that the conductor would be described as a threat to the safety of the United States. In March 1918, as federal officials began going through the private papers they had confiscated from his home, press reports surfaced about the musician’s alleged participation in a German plan to use “a wireless outfit” in Boston, which the kaiser’s agents had supposedly deployed to facilitate communication with Germany. By the following month, reports about Muck’s involvement in the use of wireless telegraphy shifted to Maine, where Muck had previously rented a summer cottage at Seal Harbor, from which, according to his neighbors, he had been transmitting wireless messages to aid the German war effort. These neighbors claimed their vigilance had revealed that Muck’s cottage, with its unobstructed hilltop view of the ocean, had allowed the maestro to transmit light signals to ships at sea. Some declared they had witnessed alternating flashes of light emanating from the cottage, signals which they believed were part of a scheme designed to relay messages to German vessels located far off the coast. Beyond such treacheries, the press reported that Muck had developed a particular interest in a serum fabricated by a New York chemist, which had been used to treat war wounds in military hospitals in England and France. The implication was that the conductor aimed to pass on this salutary concoction to his countrymen, who would use it to assist the wounded. With Muck imprisoned for more than a month, his alleged malevolence reached its nadir in mid-May, when a report emerged, claiming he had visited a New York warehouse packed with one hundred thousand rifles that would be used to aid a plot that would lead to a German uprising in the United States.120
If Muck’s purported willingness to participate in a plot to overthrow the US government was not enough, it was also learned that the conductor was involved in an affair with a nineteen-year-old voice student, Bostonian Rosamond Young. Federal agents had become aware of the affair shortly after Muck’s arrest; his private papers were seized, revealing a collection of love letters the young woman had written to the older man. Muck’s letters to Miss Young, which were also soon confiscated, apparently included numerous anti-American statements and suggestions of the conductor’s allegiance to Germany. Although these missives contained nothing criminal, they did not aid Muck’s cause. While the public did not become aware of Muck’s amorous activities until late 1919, when, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Boston Post published a sensational series revealing the affair, this dimension of the Muck saga confirmed for many the sense that he epitomized the archetypal German, an insidious and malevolent figure, as apt to despoil the purity of American womanhood as to topple the American government.121 But for now, Muck would languish in rural Georgia, where, as Prisoner 1337 in Fort Oglethorpe, he passed his days mending shoes rather than interpreting Beethoven.
Back in Boston, in late April 1918, Henry Higginson resigned his position as head of the symphony.122 The decision stemmed from the Muck affair, which had proved exhausting to the octogenarian, who, for nearly forty years, had guided the finest symphonic organization in the United States. On May 4, Higginson stood before the audience in Symphony Hall to bid the listeners and his orchestra farewell. In a perfect expression of the noblesse oblige that animated those of his social class, Higginson discussed his reasons for founding the ensemble, explaining his aim had been to make sure the United States had “great and permanent orchestras,” which could provide “pleasure and comfort.” Many led lives devoid of enjoyment, he said, and he was determined to satisfy their “longings for the beautiful art.” Arranging the concerts had given him great joy. For those who led “gray lives,” he hoped the concerts had provided “sunshine” to the multitudes, the people he called his “unknown friends,” who had sent him countless kind letters. But the war had dampened his desire to continue in this role, for it had unleashed “many troubles,” including some for the orchestra. After a few more words of thanks, some addressed directly to his orchestra, Higginson left the stage.123
A few months later, in June, eighteen German musicians, described in the press as enemy aliens, were expelled from the orchestra, including Ernst Schmidt, the assistant conductor and violinist who had filled in admirably for Muck after he was arrested. Henceforth, only American citizens and Allied subjects would be permitted to take the stage as members of the group. Almost immediately, five of the vacant positions were filled by distinguished French musicians, members of a French military band touring the United States at the time. All were veterans, and one, bass clarinetist Emil Stevenard, had been wounded on the Western Front. While some accounts expressed displeasure that the orchestra had not done more to hire Americans, dismissing the Germans ca
used no distress. With the ensemble purged of its Germanic element, it could now perform without the drama that, for months, had plagued the group.124
When the 1918–1919 season began, Bostonians looked forward to a new era in the history of their esteemed ensemble. With the departure of Higginson and the disgraced ex-conductor now in Fort Oglethorpe, the orchestra would welcome a new maestro, Pierre Monteux, albeit temporarily. The Frenchman had actually agreed to take up his duties in the spring of 1918 and said he would remain through the start of the 1918–1919 season, until a permanent conductor arrived. Destined to become one of the century’s most distinguished conductors, Monteux had achieved renown by leading the first performance of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps in Paris in 1913 and had started to establish his American profile at the Metropolitan Opera. He made clear his anti-German feelings, declaring what he would and would not conduct in Boston.125 Shortly before the season began, Monteaux, who had served in his country’s army during the first two years of the war, spoke candidly with the Boston Herald. “If I can help win the war by giving up sugar, I will give up sugar gladly. I will give up gasoline. . . . [and] go short on rations of bread.” As a Frenchman, he would do anything to help win the war, and if he could be convinced that proscribing the classics of German music—Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, Schubert, and Brahms—would accomplish that, he would do so. But “I cannot see how the silencing of [their] music” can help achieve victory. Monteux insisted that Beethoven, especially, was a republican at heart and would have opposed the war, adding, the music of these “masters” belonged to the world.126
But Monteux had his limits. “I will not play Wagner, nor will I play the works of any living German or Austrian.” Pointing to the Franco-German conflict of the previous century, he said his audiences would hear no Wagner because of the German’s “attitude toward France in the war of ’70–’71.” Equally important, according to the conductor, much of Wagner’s best music, including the Ring and Die Meistersinger, was consonant with the glorification of contemporary German ideals. Monteux was especially scathing about Richard Strauss, recalling an episode just before the war when the Frenchman was scheduled to conduct a Paris production of a Strauss ballet. The composer was unbearable, Monteux recalled, his disdain palpable for France, its art, its music, and its musicians. Nor was Frau Strauss any better, a point betrayed by her comment upon walking into the opera house where the French conductor was at work. “Monsieur Monteux, this beautiful theater may soon have an emperor in it.” Not amused, Monteux had refused to conduct Strauss’s music ever since.127
With Monteux temporarily at the helm, the orchestra entered what a local paper called “a new epoch,” which in part meant it had shed nearly a quarter of its personnel whose loyalties had been thought suspect.128 The centerpiece Monteux chose for the opening program of the 1918–1919 season was the Symphony in D Minor by the Belgian-born César Franck, who had pursued his career and made his mark in France. How better to commemorate Belgium, the first victim of German rapacity, and France, which had fought valiantly against the kaiser’s forces? According to the Boston Globe, Monteux imbued the work with a “note of flaming rapture.”129
However stellar Monteux’s work, in early October the music community was excited to learn that a new man had been chosen to become the Boston Symphony’s permanent conductor. In the weeks before the decision was reached, an execrable ditty, “A Ballad for Boston,” which appeared in the press, pointed to the importance of making sure the incoming figure was a good fit for the job:
They need a man in Boston
To lead the Boston band—
A baton in his fingers,
A score upon his stand . . .
He must, of course, be one of us—
A French, or English, Cuban, Dutch
Chinese conductor, or some such
Of us that fight the Hun and Turk.
He might be Yankee for a change,
Italian, Russian, Portugese.
From Canada to Greece we range
And write conductors: “Will you please
Come out . . . to Boston town . . .130
The man chosen to head the Boston Symphony was not a Yankee, a Russian, a Greek, a Cuban, or an Italian. He was another Frenchman, Henri Rabaud, who, it was hoped, would consign the reign of the allegedly traitorous Muck to the past. Shortly after arriving in the United States in October 1918, Rabaud sat down for an interview in New York, his manner marked by modesty and “a conservative idealism,” which revealed the sensibility of the “typical” French musician. When asked his thoughts on performing Wagner, whose music he had banned as director of the Paris Opera, he said he would not yet comment on that, preferring to speak first with symphony officials in Boston. (Interviewed in Paris shortly before leaving for the United States, Rabaud had remarked that while he had long admired and conducted Wagner, those performances had occurred before the war.) Asked whether he was willing to play the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann, he interrupted the questioner, pointing out, “But they are not Boches.”131
In some circles, Rabaud’s appointment had raised chauvinistic hackles because, it was said, no American was seriously considered for the job.132 That did not come up as the maestro made his way from New York to Boston, although Rabaud was again asked to share his thoughts on the orchestra’s repertoire. “A sincere artist cannot refuse great music its place in the sun,” he observed. “Great music is not our enemy.” He intended to perform the German “masters” in Boston from time to time. But he would “follow the Germans no more in their musical than in their political propaganda.” The Frenchman noted acidly, “In the one field they had been nearly as active as in the other.” Turning a still more critical eye on Germans and their music, Rabaud claimed he was astonished to see that just as “the world awoke to the menace of German political domination,” it had come to realize “the boastfulness and falsity” of Germany’s “musical pretensions.” For years, people had been hypnotized by the notion that there were virtually no “great composers outside . . . Germany.” But today, he said with a smile, “we are waking up.” His aim was to be an interpreter not a propagandist. He insisted it was wrong to impose art on another people, and “to force music or a sword down [their] throats.”133
With the war entering its final phase in the fall of 1918, it was unclear what peace would mean to the American classical-music community. What was in store for enemy music once the enemy laid down their arms? And for lovers of Wagner or Strauss—and many continued to adore that music—what would they want to hear when they entered auditoriums in postwar America? And what would those empowered to make such decisions allow them to hear? At some point, presumably, it would be acceptable to perform the music of composers whose work had been deemed toxic in a country at war. Would that happen immediately? Would peace on the battlefield mean tranquility and tolerance in the concert hall? What about the future of those whose careers had been interrupted? Would gifted enemy aliens be permitted to renew their creative work?
Beyond such musical questions, how would the United States engage its erstwhile enemies? And in what way would the American people relate to those in their midst who, millions believed, had attempted to undermine the war effort and to destroy America from within? If one embraced the logic of Woodrow Wilson’s frequent pleas, it was essential to accept the idea that a vindictive peace would be short-sighted. And if the president’s generous prescription prevailed, it was possible to imagine a renewed spirit of tolerance toward those on the home front whose actions were thought un-American. Such lenience, if Americans were prepared to practice it, might manifest itself in musical magnanimity, a generosity of spirit that would allow the country’s musical life to return to what it was before the war. At issue, and the world of music would likely reflect it, was whether the hatred and hyperpatriotism that had washed over America would recede. If it did, one could envision a country in which the American people could again enjoy performances in auditor
iums that were no longer political battlegrounds.
Arguing for an end to the musical hatred released by the war, the Musical Courier had earlier castigated those who, in future years, would continue to “bang the table with their clenched fists and exclaim: ‘We will have nothing more to do with nations that have acted . . . outrageously.’ ” While the war was about politics, the editors contended, music was not, and they looked toward a time when the “green grass and wild flowers grow again.” If the American people were “to forget and forgive in time,” why put off the day “when all is . . . forgotten and forgiven?”134
There was considerable nobility in such sentiments, even if few Americans were willing to embrace them. In fact, it is easy to find much evidence to the contrary, which suggests as the war wound down, there was little enthusiasm for the notion that it was desirable “to forget and forgive.” Instead, one heard an unrelenting, and perhaps unsurprising, discussion in the music world, which was permeated by profound hostility toward Germany.
Just before the war ended, readers of Musical America shared their thoughts on the German foe in response to a denunciation of all things German, including the alleged superiority of German musical culture, which appeared in the journal in mid-October 1918.135 Pittsburgh’s T. Carl Whitmer commended the author’s analysis of the pernicious “Teuton illusion and delusion,” while a New Yorker, Mrs. A. M. Ditson, observed that the October article served as an effective “arraignment of the Prussians.” She hoped it would be turned into a pamphlet, as she was eager to send out many of them. From Omaha, Mrs. H. W. Miller claimed the article should be in the homes of all Americans.136
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