To the extent that American attitudes toward enemies foreign and domestic were reflected in the world of classical music, it seemed unlikely that the country was ready for a period of healing.137 Instead, the hypernationalism and wanton patriotism that characterized the war years would continue to roil American domestic life. In pondering the Muck affair, especially, one is struck by the downward trajectory of his story, particularly as one contemplates the baseless charges leveled against him and the way his character came to be reviled in increasingly vituperative fashion.138 During those months when the attention of the American people was drawn to Muck, the conductor went from being a revered maestro who led a distinguished ensemble to an artist charged with refusing to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” to a sinister figure accused of signaling German vessels at sea, to a German saboteur suspected of participating in a violent plot to overthrow the United States government, to the final and perhaps inevitable image of the Teutonic defiler of American womanhood. That a man whose energies had, in reality, been devoted to leading the finest orchestra in the United States had come to be viewed in this fashion sheds light on the pathologies that plagued wartime America—a nation that came to see Germans as demonic, whether they were fighting on European battlefields or directing symphony orchestras. With such bile coursing through the body politic, it was difficult to imagine that all would be forgotten (or forgiven) once the guns fell silent.
CHAPTER THREE
“There Is No Visible Relationship between a Wagner Opera and a Submarine”
From Manhattan Riots to Wagner’s Piano
ON THE DAY THE GREAT WAR ENDED, the Metropolitan Opera inaugurated its new season with Pierre Monteaux conducting Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delila, which featured the acclaimed tenor Enrico Caruso as Samson. According to one reviewer, the evening of November 11, 1918, was marked by a “scene of blazing patriotic spectacularism,” which allowed an audience of 3,500 to experience not simply a magnificent performance by Caruso but a stirring example of musical nationalism.1 While another review noted that the proceedings began with no great sense of excitement, with the start of the intermission after the second act, the energy level changed dramatically as the curtain rose to reveal an explosion of color, which dazzled the throng of opera lovers. Dozens of performers filled the stage, all waving American flags. Standing in front were the principal singers, holding the banners of America, England, France, and Serbia, with Caruso in the middle, waving the Italian flag. The anthems of France, England, and Italy were sung, as were “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” After Monteux departed, cries of “Vive la Belgique” rang out, which led the concertmaster, an Italian, to leap from his seat to lead the ensemble in a performance of the Belgian national air.2
Two weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, music resounded across the country; thousands participated in a national event that saw America raise its voice in song, expressing gratitude for the war’s victorious end. In Atlanta, from atop an army truck, a conductor led a throng of several thousand citizens, accompanied by a regimental band, in a variety of pieces—from Sousa marches to “Suwanee River.” In St. Paul, ten thousand residents packed the municipal auditorium, where renditions of everything from “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” to “Long, Long Trail” rang out. And on it went, this musical catharsis, from Lima, Ohio, to Scranton, Pennsylvania; and over to Philadelphia, Providence, Boston, and to a multitude of other cities and towns, where the nation reacquainted itself with peace.
In Madison Square Garden, more than eight thousand New Yorkers expressed their thanks in song, as one publication reported, for “the victory won by the nations of the civilized world.” A Boy Scout bugler began the proceedings, during which one speaker called song the best way to express the nation’s gratitude for those who had helped win the war. Singing had been essential to the Allied triumph, a major-general told the crowd, for it enabled soldiers to endure the challenges they faced.3 Commenting on the importance of hundreds of similar events across America, the Musical Courier highlighted music’s crucial role in the day’s proceedings.4
But the most intriguing matter on the classical-music agenda concerned a subject raised by Musical America: “German Music or Not?—‘That Is the Question.’ ” While the shooting was over, it was unclear whether the wartime rancor had evaporated, even if, as the article observed, Americans were different from others in their willingness to reconsider “enemy art.” It behooved the United States, the journal noted, to ponder which German music should be “reinstated.”5 But as the battle raged over the fate of German music, it seemed no armistice had been signed and few weapons laid to rest.
From late 1918 to the mid-1920s, one sees an evolving capacity to move beyond wartime anti-Germanism, as concern over the Teutonic threat and anger toward all things German dissipated. Vanquishing the kaiser made it difficult to believe that Germany continued to imperil the United States. But equanimity did not emerge overnight, as many continued to believe German compositions were a toxin to be held at arm’s length.
Speaking in New Haven one week after the war’s end, Professor William Lyon Phelps, who taught at Yale and was president of the city’s symphony orchestra, claimed the only standard for judging music was its quality. Calling music humanity’s “only universal language,” the professor recounted hearing the Paris Orchestra’s recent performance of Beethoven’s Fifth, which demonstrated that the “classics belong to no one nation but represent universal feeling.”6 Writer Owen Wister expressed a similar idealism, telling the Drama League in Philadelphia that Beethoven had composed “no hymn of hate,” but a “hymn of brotherhood.” Banning German music was wrong, Wister claimed, as most German music had been composed by men who did not share the “spirit of the modern Hun.” The time for such misguided patriotism was over.7
Adding to the conversation was the more cautious voice of Reginald De Koven, the composer and critic, who remarked that some German music should be heard in the postwar concert hall. If the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms belonged to the “whole world,” De Koven believed Wagner’s case was different, for his music now reflected the “modern German spirit.” De Koven would welcome back the old masters, while restricting Wagner and the works of living Germans.8 On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times observed that it was no longer necessary to “endure the spectacle of Germans who had become Dutch or Belgian.” At last, Beethoven could be German again.9
In late November 1918, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra opened its season led by Belgian maestro Eugène Ysaÿe, the replacement for Ernst Kunwald, who continued to languish in a Georgia prison camp. With Beethoven’s Fifth on the program, the audience experienced an evening’s music-making, which, in the words of the city’s Commercial Tribune, was “in the nature of a patriotic celebration.” On the right side of the stage stood the flags of the Allies, while on the left, stood the orchestra’s service flag, whose stars represented members who had served in the war, including a gold star for one musician who had fallen. The spectacle was enhanced by the performance of five national anthems, for which the audience rose. Before the American air was played, the Belgian turned to his listeners and asked them to sing along. As for the Beethoven, no one was reluctant to embrace the German’s creative spirit. Instead, in the four-note theme, one heard “a relentless rush of retribution over the face of the universe.” It was said that Maestro Ysaÿe’s interpretation of the symphony’s triumphant final march was energized by events taking place that day across the Atlantic, where the Belgian king and queen returned to Brussels. Thus, German music heralded the revival of the small nation Germany had invaded four years earlier, suggesting such compositions could help rebuild the world.10
A few weeks later, Henri Rabaud, the man who had supplanted Karl Muck in Boston, led a highly successful concert at Carnegie Hall, where the Bostonians performed Beethoven’s Third, demonstrating that German music would not be denied to American concertgoers. The reaction of
Rabaud’s listeners suggested an audience eager to consign the Muck era to the past.11
There were rumblings, however, from some who remained distressed by German compositions, especially by Wagner. Reviewing a December concert by the New York Philharmonic, Reginald De Koven claimed it was “unthinkable” for Stransky to offer an excerpt from Tristan and Isolde so soon after the war, when many attendees undoubtedly had relatives who had been wounded by the Germans. Connecticut-born and British-educated, De Koven wondered whether a “native born” American conductor would have done this, noting that Stransky had just become an American citizen. While offering the well-worn trope that music’s great figures belonged to the entire world, De Koven asserted that Wagner was different, for his music symbolized the “German spirit of lust of conquest,” which had “plunged the world into a slough of blood, of rapine, wanton destruction and unspeakable cruelty.” The critic was shocked that the audience had endured the music “without protest.”12
De Koven’s lament foreshadowed what, in some places, would be a tumultuous year in the music world. In other locales, however, the concert hall and the opera house would become more tranquil, suggesting a desire to move beyond the travails of war.
On the first of January 1919, Pittsburgh listeners had the opportunity to hear the orchestra of the Paris Conservatory, then touring the United States. The city’s concertgoers, who had heard no German music since the fall of 1917, were treated to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth, which they greeted enthusiastically. According to one critic, it was noteworthy that this excellent orchestra was willing to play German music despite having suffered at German hands for four years. But the French could distinguish the Germany of the past from the Germany of the present, a sentiment shared by three thousand Pittsburgh music lovers, whose behavior demonstrated that the city’s Germanophobia had abated.13
Detroit, too, saw musical barriers begin to fall in January, when Walter Damrosch brought his New York Symphony to the Arcadia Auditorium, where they performed the Prelude to Lohengrin. The piece caused considerable excitement, suggesting the city’s listeners, who had been denied Wagner for more than a year, had sorely missed it.14
Change was afoot in Philadelphia, as well. Early in January, critic H. T. Craven had penned a thoughtful piece on whether continuing the Wagner proscription made sense. Noting that Berlioz’s orchestration of the Rákóczy March, a “stirring national air” of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a wartime foe) was performed regularly, Craven declared it absurd to ban Wagner. A policy that drew “national lines in music” was deficient in logic and common sense, he insisted.15 By the end of the month, the wartime ban on Wagner had been lifted. Under the direction of Walter Damrosch, whose New York Symphony was on tour, and with Leopold Stokowski leading the city’s own estimable ensemble, Philadelphians heard several of Wagner’s orchestral offerings. All were met with enormous enthusiasm.16
In letters and opinion pieces from just after the war, one sees considerable support for the return of German music. A New Jersey man argued that German opera, including Wagner, should be heard. “The great masters of German music” were not to blame for the war, Louis Kohler noted, the kaiser is.17 The director of a Pennsylvania music conservatory insisted that music, a “spiritual asset,” was “universal,” which meant Americans had no more right to ban the work of a German than to ban Protestantism.18 From Albany, New York, Enna King said she again hoped to “rejoice in Wagner’s . . . thrilling harmonies,” remarking that Germany’s legendary composers would not have done what the “contemporary Germans had done.”19 And Ferdinand Dunkley, a musician in Tacoma, Washington, wrote that he had set aside German music during the war because, like the rest of America, he had abhorred the behavior of the “Huns,” and had believed that playing their music would have fortified Germany’s war effort. But the time had come to allow America the “nourishment” that only German music could provide.20
If such observations were widespread, it would be wrong to imagine that discomfort with German music had evaporated. In the summer of 1919, more than six months after the armistice was signed, as Metropolitan Opera singer Marie Sundelius offered songs by Grieg in a solo recital in Milwaukee, several members of the audience stormed out of the concert hall and headed to the ticket office to protest the performance of music sung in German. Demanding a refund, the linguistically challenged listeners were told that the performer had been singing in Norwegian, a revelation they accepted, albeit reluctantly.21
Writing in the New York Times in the spring of 1919, Eleonora de Cisneros, a well-known American mezzo-soprano, offered an imaginative meditation, which condemned those who countenanced listening to German music, especially Wagner, so soon after the war. Recounting her phantasmic experience upon hearing a performance of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Cisneros described being transported to a troubling place made infamous by the war—the Somme—where only the dead had crossed to “No Man’s Land.” On a “moonless night,” thousands of lights “moved over the fantastic field,” and with these strange apparitions rushing past, she heard “a cry of pitiful pleading—Do not forget us!” Cisneros also wrote about actually hearing the Prelude to Tristan, which compelled her to declare that it was too soon for Wagner to return. “Let our dead have time to sleep.”22
But how long would it take to jettison the musical nationalism unleashed by war? As the case of Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler suggests, such questions were difficult to answer. The famed virtuoso, who had served as an officer in his country’s wartime army, had incurred the wrath of American concertgoers, which, in the fall of 1917, led to the cancellation of his recitals in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. To avoid further controversy, the Vienna-born soloist, who had been wounded in battle and had been performing in the United States while on furlough, cancelled his American performances for the duration of the war.23 With the conflict over, the question of Kreisler’s return became the subject of widespread debate.
In Ithaca, New York, an angry mob protested outside the concert hall during a Kreisler recital sponsored by the Cornell music department in December 1919. Police repelled the protesters, many of whom were American Legion members, and the city’s mayor issued a proclamation stating that Ithacans should refuse to attend the performance given by an “enemy alien artist.” Despite the opposition, Kreisler played before a large and supportive crowd, which applauded enthusiastically, even as they endured a period of complete darkness after the mob cut the electrical wires to the recital hall. Unfazed, the Austrian continued playing in the dark for some forty minutes, as shouts of “Hun!” could be heard from outside.24 In Kentucky, Louisville residents felt much the same, and objected strongly to Kreisler’s return. But in Philadelphia, concertgoers responded enthusiastically to his playing. As one listener declared, if floridly, “Come, oh artists of the world. . . . Long have we waited for you. You are ours. We are yours equally.”25
On New Year’s Day 1920, Kreisler played the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Damrosch and the New York Symphony at Carnegie Hall. According to one review, the soloist received remarkable ovations when he strode onto the stage and again at the end of the Beethoven, the second applause lasting some ten minutes. The reviewer speculated that the magnitude of the response was not simply a result of Kreisler’s superb performance, but was meant to send a message to those, small in number, who continued to oppose his return. The reaction could be read as the community’s judgment on the “pygmy-minded provincialism” of those still “hounding” an extraordinary artist. Lauding Kreisler’s Beethoven, the review mocked any who would deny concertgoers the opportunity to hear a musician unfairly charged with contaminating wartime audiences with “propaganda.”26
But some remained unconvinced that a former officer in the Austrian army should be permitted on an American stage. The Musical Courier argued that it was not proper for an “enemy alien” to perform in the United States, which was Kreisler’s status until the peace treaty was ratified.27 In P
ittsburgh, where the anti-Kreisler agitation was especially intense, the violinist was scheduled to return in January 1920, a development that unleashed well-organized opposition. While the mayor did not object to his appearance, a letter issued on behalf of thousands of female members of the Service Star Legion of Allegheny County declared Kreisler’s recital would be the “grossest insult to every mother who ha[d] a boy under the lilies of France.”28
Despite rumors and threats to disrupt the Pittsburgh recital, Kreisler played before an audience that greeted him with fervent applause. According to one review, his technique was “in fine fettle,” and while other violinists had performed in the city, none had the “Kreisler magnetism.”29 By the summer of 1920, Kreisler was being lauded for his humanitarian activities as he helped the suffering children of Europe, and by late 1921, the Austrian government was considering appointing him ambassador to the United States.30
Across postwar America, musical developments were in flux. In Boston, which had endured its share of musical tribulations, Henri Rabaud was on the podium, at least for a season, during which the city’s ensemble would play no Wagner or Richard Strauss. This decision by the French maestro was assessed in the press, which noted that American listeners in some cities could again hear Wagner.31 In early 1919, Rabaud explained his stance, stating that in the United States, as in France, public opinion seemed to oppose reintroducing Wagner; it was a position he was unwilling to ignore. At some point, he imagined, the question might be revisited.32
But Rabaud’s tenure would last only one season, and by the fall of 1919, Pierre Monteux returned to lead the ensemble that he had conducted for six weeks the previous season.33 Until his military discharge in 1916, Monteux had served his country in the war. “I had my violin with me,” he said. “I played in the French churches on Sundays” with an organist and a solo singer. When no singer or organist was available, he recalled, “I played by myself.” Looking back, he said, “I watched the shells flying overhead in Rheims, Verdun, Soissons, and later in Argonne.”34 But the war was over, Monteux said. “Let us forget the war,” which should not influence “our musical programs.”35 In the 1919–1920 season, Monteux’s first with the orchestra, he played no Richard Strauss but he did offer eight pieces by Wagner, including the “Immolation Scene” from Götterdämmerung, sung by Margaret Matzenauer, who was born in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire.36
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