A line of some fifty policemen kept hundreds of expectant operagoers from entering the theater that second evening, while exchanges for the next night’s performance were promised to all ticket holders. Standing nearby in reserve were another five hundred police officers. At around 8:00, a group of sailors who drove up Lexington Avenue in a truck were stopped by the police and forced to scatter. They re-formed on a side street, marched to the theater, and realizing there would be no performance, cheered enthusiastically and left the scene. An hour later, a man approaching the theater with a suitcase, broke through the police line, pulled out a hammer, and smashed one of the theater’s windows. He was arrested and hauled away. There was no more unrest that night.105
Yet, the very next day, on October 22, 1919, German music in the form of Lortzing’s Tsar und Zimmermann was offered at the Lexington Theater. The company’s producers had secured a temporary injunction in state supreme court the night before, restraining the police from barring the production. Although the performance was sold out, many stayed away fearing that violence would occur—which it did. For several hours, mobs clashed with police who swung nightsticks and fired their revolvers. If mayhem ruled outside, the auditorium was hardly free from commotion, as one man in the third tier stood up at the end of the first act, reached into a bag and, winding up like a baseball pitcher, proceeded to throw eggs down to the stage, where Herman Weil was singing, along with the full chorus. An agile Weil leapt to one side, making the first projectile miss its mark. The left-handed protester continued hurling eggs at the stage, while the singer repeatedly managed to dodge them; the chorus scattered and the audience fled their seats for the aisles. Finally, after the strong-armed patron broke free from the clutches of another audience member, the police apprehended him and carted him off to the station house, where he was booked as John Doe, a salesman. More distressingly, a sailor was taken to the hospital with serious injuries to his skull, suffered outside the theater.106
Over the next few days, the Lexington Theater continued to offer German-language performances, which, by and large, went off uneventfully. Crowds of a few hundred to a thousand would mill around outside, only to be dispersed by the police, who arrested groups of protesting sailors. Despite a police officer firing his gun one night, the furor was beginning to ebb.107
Nevertheless, as the week wore on it seemed likely that the Star Company’s run of German-language performances would end, especially after its business manager resigned upon questioning the wisdom of offering German opera. But the decision on whether such pieces could be performed rested with the courts.108 Representing the city before the New York State Supreme Court, counsel George Nicholson acknowledged that, under ordinary circumstance, producing German opera would be neither wrong nor illegal. But under “existing conditions,” he said, it was clear that such pieces aroused “the emotions” of the community and excited “disorder.” The lawyer claimed the company’s productions sought to glorify the “German spirit which could not be conquered by American cannon.” Moreover, Nicholson observed, neither America nor New York were appropriate locations for preserving the “Hun spirit.”109
In the end, the court ruled it was illegal to perform opera in German in New York City prior to the formal ratification of the peace treaty with Germany. According to the ruling, the police could prevent such performances because, as one newspaper noted, “a state of feeling existed” that made German-language opera a “provocation to large numbers in a community still deeply stirred against Germany.” The ruling noted that Otto Goritz, the company’s director, had embittered the public because he had allegedly declared he had no intention of becoming an American, had claimed he had remained in the United States only for the money, and had supposedly celebrated the Lusitania sinking in song. Remarkably, the judge acknowledged that he could not ascertain whether any of these charges were true, but contended it was unnecessary to do so. What mattered, he wrote, was that “they are made and widely believed, and the effect upon the people not yet recovered from the passions of the war is substantially the same as though every charge had been proven.”110 In postwar New York, feelings trumped facts.
The judge then turned to what he called a more pressing reason to stop the performances. It was “desirable,” he said, that “the passions of the war subside as rapidly as may be,” and continuing such productions would retard that process. It was clear, he suggested, that public sentiment was not ready for performances of opera in German.111 The Star Opera Company was ordered to end its New York run.112 Within a month, it had passed into receivership.113
Besides the Star uproar, New Yorkers experienced no shortage of opera in this period, though the language question persisted. The postwar restoration of Wagner, sung in German, would take three years, a change that unfolded gradually. The announcement in mid-1919 that Parsifal would be performed at the Met in English was memorably described in the Literary Digest, which said a “German foot” would once more be “thrust inside the partly open door” of the city’s leading opera house, though it would be “wear[ing] a home-made shoe.” According to the Brooklyn Eagle, the Met’s Italian administrator, Gatti-Casazza, waited to announce the news until just before sailing for Europe. Nevertheless, the paper suggested it was reasonable to choose Parsifal to start the “experiment” of performing Wagner in English because the piece lacked the bellicose spirit of the Ring and did not glorify “Teutonism,” which had likely made Die Meistersinger “unacceptable.”114
And so in February 1920, Parsifal was sung before a large audience, using an English text prepared by the critic H. E. Krehbiel. The work had not been performed at the Metropolitan since April 6, 1917—the day the United States went to war with Germany. According to Richard Aldrich of the Times, Bodanzky led a “masterly” performance and Krehbiel’s translation was a superb example of the librettist’s art.115 Not everyone agreed. One critic asserted that Bodanzky’s interpretation moved “heavily on leaden feet,” while Krehbiel’s contribution was “tedious.”116
Whatever the quality of the performance, a more interesting question concerned whether to offer Wagner at all. Those pondering Wagner’s return to the Met had the chance to hear from Gatti-Casazza, who claimed he had suspended performances of Wagner not because of public opinion, but because of the “lack of tact and petulance” on the part of Wagner’s compatriots. Without elaboration, he lauded the composer for creating a “new musical world.” But then, reflecting on opera’s significance, Gatti-Casazza opined bizarrely that Wagner’s works had “no influence, either philosophical or moral or social, because the operatic stage cannot exceed its confines or its mission, which is [only] to educate and refine the taste and produce emotions of an artistic nature.” Performing Parsifal would have no social or religious function, but only an “artistic” one.117
While one can perhaps understand Gatti-Casazza’s inclination to downplay opera’s significance, his contention that it lacked philosophical, moral, or social influence was belied by the events of the past several years. Developments in New York and across the country made it impossible to believe that the power of opera, and of classical music more generally, was limited to the refinement of taste or to producing emotions of an artistic nature. Without question, thousands were convinced that opera possessed the power to do far more than that, with countless Americans believing it could strengthen the cause of a bitter foe, thus imperiling the United States.
Whatever Gatti-Casazza’s convictions, in late November 1921, Wagner was heard in German at the Metropolitan for the first time since the war, as Tristan was offered in the composer’s tongue after being performed in English the previous year. According to Aldrich, the “masterpiece . . . wrought its old magic” in a performance of “dramatic power” and “emotional poignancy.”118 A few weeks later, Die Walküre was offered in German, with a performance that thrilled New Yorkers, who had not heard it since the 1916–1917 season. As one reviewer noted, the music “swept and swirled” in a “colossal tide
of surging sound, through three and a half hours of tonal glory.” With the opera’s return, it appeared the anti-Wagnerian clamor had all but evaporated, as the December performance demonstrated that the “rightful sound” of the piece was the language in which it had been conceived.119
Thus, some three years after the end of the war, the Metropolitan was again a place from which the German language rang out, as Wagner’s operas began to assume their accustomed place in New York’s cultural life. But memories of the war had not evaporated entirely. In late November 1922, a few weeks before the company’s restoration of Parsifal in German, the city’s grandest operatic space was the scene of an emotional appeal served up by the eighty-one-year-old “Tiger” of France, Georges Clemenceau. The former prime minister spoke to an audience of four thousand and claimed the threat Germany posed to Europe had not disappeared. In an address lasting more than ninety minutes, he described the peril faced by France, and asked for a commitment from the American people to help preserve French security and that of all Europe. It was essential, he said, for the United States not to forget its international obligations.120
Even as Clemenceau was inveighing against the Teutonic threat, plans were afoot to bring to America a German opera company, which would offer a large helping of German fare. In January 1923, members of the Berlin State Opera arrived in the United States, where they would perform works in New York and other cities, including an uncut version of the Ring, along with compositions by Wagner, Beethoven, and Richard and Johann Strauss. The Manhattan Opera House would be the site for four weeks of what was billed as the “Wagnerian Opera Festival,” followed by three additional weeks at the Lexington Theater, where violent protests had exploded a few years before.121
New Yorkers responded enthusiastically to the offerings of the Berlin troupe under conductor Leo Blech. Over seven weeks, the company gave fifty-six performances of fifteen German operas. Surely, the forty performances of Wagner, including multiple Rings, slaked the thirst of the most devoted Wagnerites,122 who formed crowds that “literally fought their way into the doors” of the auditorium.123 According to one critic, “the war reaction to German music and the German language had vanished with hardly a trace.”124
Nor was this enthusiasm limited to New York. In Baltimore, the company played to sold-out houses, and on opening night, the audience was enthralled.125 Bostonians were similarly enraptured by the company, including one mesmerized listener who wrote to “Mr. Richard Wagner” at the Boston Opera House, telling him she had written a song and asking whether he would “kindly look it over.” While there is no record of Mr. Wagner’s reply, the letter suggests a measure of support for the return of the icon’s music, especially the Ring cycle, which had not been heard in Boston since 1889.126
From the excitement the German troupe created in the operatic realm, we consider New York’s orchestral domain, in which the Philharmonic and the Symphony confronted the question of performing German music, particularly Wagner and Richard Strauss. The symphonic challenge was less daunting than that encountered in the operatic sphere, where one faced the prickly matter of the German language. Damrosch’s New York Symphony had played Strauss, who was alive and well, for the last time during the war in December 1917, and did not revisit his work until 1922. In January 1918 under Stransky, the Philharmonic had offered its final wartime performance of Strauss, whose music was not heard again until December 1920. Both orchestras had continued to play Wagner throughout the war, though they limited themselves to orchestral excerpts, which satisfied New York audiences without forcing them to endure the German tongue. In conducting Wagner, Stransky did not engage a singer until late 1919, while Damrosch waited until late 1920.127
In time, the less fevered postwar atmosphere even tempered the outlook of Lucie Jay. In early 1919, she railed against an orchestral concert to be led by a Japanese conductor, who was scheduled to direct a program comprised partly of Wagner’s music. While the one vocal excerpt on the program, an aria from Die Walküre, would be performed in English, Jay’s postwar posture remained the same as it had been in wartime. The Carnegie Hall concert was “a monstrous attempt to introduce things German in this country,” she declared.128 Despite the objections of Jay and her allies, the concert was given and the audience was unperturbed.129
A few months later, in the summer of 1919, Jay was in a different humor, which she discussed in a letter to the Times. “Peace has come at last!” she exclaimed. “Germany is on her knees before outraged but forgiving humanity.” Explaining her wartime opposition to German creative culture, she said that she and her circle had “uncovered ample evidence that German propaganda lurked in these apparently harmless entertainments.” But all had changed and she would protest no more.130 The next day, the Times offered a positive response, noting that Jay was now in line with most Americans. The editors spoke of their past support for her position against German music, while acknowledging that it was problematic to draw “national or racial lines in art.” But the circumstances had left no other option, they insisted, for the Germans had acted as “enemies of civilization.” Now, with the crisis over, German compositions could again “delight the ear.”131
By early in the next decade, New Yorkers would again enjoy their Wagner and Strauss.132 Indeed, on several Sunday afternoons in the autumn of 1921, a hungry musical public gathered in Aeolian Hall to listen to a series of lectures on the Ring given by Walter Damrosch. For more than a thousand auditors, the conductor explored the complexity of the music dramas, pointing out in the first lecture that it had been a mistake to spurn the composer’s music during the war.133
Despite the milder musical temperature, American passions had not cooled entirely, though unsavory sentiments were now expressed more privately. Writing to a New York Symphony administrator, a long-time subscriber expressed dismay at the decision to hire Bruno Walter to lead a handful of concerts in 1923. Of the Berlin-born Walter, who had obtained Austrian citizenship before the war, the subscriber wrote, “I am sorry that the conductor for those concerts is not to be a Frenchman, an Italian or anyone but a German. I need not weary you with the usual twaddle about music having no nationality.” What was most important, the subscriber averred, was that Walter was, in every way, German.134 This xenophobic subscriber could not have known that ten years later, Walter, who was Jewish, would decide to flee Europe for America.
If Bruno Walter was not yet a musical luminary, Richard Strauss surely was, and his visit to the United States in 1921 and 1922 suggests how American attitudes had begun to shift. In the spring of 1921, it was announced that Strauss would be in the United States from October to January to conduct orchestral concerts and to perform as a pianist in recitals featuring his chamber music and songs.135 Prior to the trip, a small tempest swirled due to an interview published in The Nation in which the composer offered disparaging observations about the United States. Declaring that Salzburg needed a new concert hall and that the million-dollar price tag should be picked up by the United States, Strauss explained that it should do so because America was devoid of culture. “Culture will always come from Europe. America needs Europe. Europe does not need America—only her dollars.”136
Before his autumn arrival, Strauss denied having uttered those words, claiming his “alleged statements” were “maliciously garbled and contrary to my opinions.” He was looking forward to his visit, he said.137 Upon reaching New York in late October, the composer offered the hopeful observation that “all art must become happier in the present age.”138
Whether all art would be happier was an open question. What was surely happy was the response to the opening concert in which the German musician conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in a program comprising three of his tone poems. The audience greeted the visitor with a cry of approval, and the performance, lauded in the Times, suggested that Strauss was poised for a triumphant visit. It was not surprising when Carnegie Hall erupted in applause and audience members placed flowers and a wre
ath upon the stage.139
Earlier that day, Mayor Hylan had received Strauss at a City Hall reception where historic grievances seemed consigned to the past, even if a critical letter or two appeared in the local press.140 The mayor welcomed the musician, while Strauss apologized for speaking in German. He had not yet mastered the “beautiful language of Shakespeare,” and did not wish to offend anyone’s ears. In his native tongue, Strauss acknowledged that he was honored by the reception, and accepted it as a “representative of the noble German music,” which had always been “a welcome guest in this impressive country.” He concluded by envisioning a tranquil future, especially between America and Germany. He hoped the United States would “blossom and prosper,” and wished the “blessing of true peace” might bring the two countries closer together.141
While in New York, Strauss conducted several orchestral concerts, comprising mainly his own music, with the Philadelphia Orchestra (and once with the New York Philharmonic); he also performed as a pianist in his chamber music pieces and as an accompanist for his songs. The orchestral concerts received glowing reviews and the audience was thrilled to hear the iconic figure direct the Philadelphians in such familiar fare.142 Describing Strauss’s conducting style, one critic spoke of the “economical rhythmic beats of his baton.” And this observer of the Philharmonic concert gushed that the “strange genius of the man reaches everyone with whom he comes in contact. His cerebral vibrations are irresistible.”143
Perhaps the most luminous writing on Strauss came from the pen of the Tribune’s H. E. Krehbiel, who rhapsodized about the opening concert at Carnegie Hall, writing of the performance and of Strauss’s interpretation of his own music, that it was “full of delicate witcheries, pellucid as the waters of a mountain brook, sparkling as a mountain cascade.” Equally notable was Krehbiel’s assessment of the audience, whose behavior was marked by “rapt attention.” As for its political bent, the audience “proclaimed only honor for the artist—not a political or national tone could be heard.” The response of those who gathered at Carnegie was “glowing . . . as a stream of lava hot from a volcanic crater.”144
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