A few weeks later, after attending Strauss’s other New York performances, Krehbiel was less charitable, observing that his current visit “offered nothing new.” Reflecting upon an earlier Strauss tour that had brought him to America in 1904, Krehbiel said the musician had done little since to enhance his stature, having composed only Salome, Elektra, and the Alpine Symphony, which suggests the esteemed critic was more than a bit harsh in judging the German’s creative output.145
America’s renewed enthusiasm was not confined to New York, for Strauss appeared in cities across the country. In Boston, where he accompanied on piano a violinist and a singer, the Globe noted that Strauss was “excelled by no living composer.” While acknowledging that Strauss’s thinking on the war and the United States undoubtedly differed from that of the audience, the paper said his reflections on politics were not worthy of attention. He was in Boston not to give a lecture but to allow people to hear his music.146 At the program’s end, the response was so fervent that Strauss’s admirers were driven off only when the lights at Symphony Hall were extinguished.147 Audiences in Pittsburgh, the site of virulent wartime opposition to German music, welcomed Strauss excitedly; likewise did large crowds in Baltimore, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.148
In Philadelphia, the mayor hailed America’s esteemed visitor, who offered remarks in German at the annual luncheon of the Matinee Musical Club, a women’s organization, where he said women were the “greatest supporters and appreciators of music.” That evening, Strauss offered another of his many successful recitals.149 Detroit music lovers had the opportunity to hear the composer conduct their orchestra in superb performances of three of his tone poems. A delirious audience recalled him to the stage nearly thirty times.150
Chicagoans saw Strauss perform as accompanist in a German Lieder recital in November, and then return in December to conduct their symphony in two of his orchestral masterworks, Death and Transfiguration and Also Sprach Zarathustra, both of which the ensemble had played for years under Frederick Stock. These were extraordinary performances, the Tribune reported, and the praise for the composer was “resounding.” One critic observed that in his tone poems, Strauss “became the culmination of a school, so high that no one could improve upon what he had done.”151 In the words of another critic, with “a genius like Strauss” offering “musical joys,” life was “really worth living.”152
The night before Strauss departed, Josef Stransky delivered an intermission message to the composer on the stage of New York’s Hippodrome, where the visitor was conducting his final concert. The encomium had been penned by Otto Kahn, Met board chairman, who regretted he had to miss the concert but wanted to thank Strauss for his visit. According to Kahn, “Your genius had brought joy and inspiration to millions.” Noting there was “no country” where the composer’s art was “held in higher . . . appreciation” than in the United States, Kahn claimed Americans were a generous and forgiving people. It was not in their character to “store up national ill-will.” Instead, Americans loved music and great art, and their country was assuming its place among those “foremost in striving for the higher things in life.” Finally, Kahn looked toward a time when “the sun of true peace and reconcilement will shed its beneficent rays upon a world that too long has walked in the shadow of strife.”153
For his part, Strauss was deeply impressed by the quality of American orchestral playing, with the Philadelphia and Chicago ensembles meriting special praise. He wrote glowingly to Philadelphia’s conductor, Leopold Stokowski, conveying his appreciation for the superb instrument he had created, which had provided him with “hours of the purest joy.”154
In all, it was a remarkable tour, as the German was revered by a country now ready to set aside the bitterness of the war. As one critic observed, the arrival of Strauss was akin to the ongoing international disarmament conference in Washington, which sought to stabilize great power relations in the war’s aftermath. The only difference was that “disarmament in music . . . [had] already been consummated.”155
If Strauss’s sojourn pointed to a condition of musical disarmament, a visit two years later by Siegfried Wagner, the only son of the other creative bête noire of the war years, left no doubt that anti-Germanism had faded. In January 1924, Siegfried arrived in the United States, along with his wife, in order to raise $200,000 to revive one of his father’s most consequential achievements, the Bayreuth Festival, which had been interrupted by the war. A conductor and sometime opera composer, the younger Wagner (who was also the grandson of Liszt), had come to tour America as a speaker and conductor. Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and New York were among the cities in which he would conduct.156
In Chicago, he was honored with a luncheon by that city’s German Club, before and after which members of the Chicago Symphony offered scaled-down versions of his father’s music. After the mayor welcomed the fifty-four-year-old Wagner, an orator delivered an appealing speech on the life and accomplishments of the father. Siegfried then offered some amusing remarks, after which he unexpectedly took up the baton to lead the small ensemble in a performance of Siegfried Idyll, which had been composed by his father as a birthday gift for his wife Cosima. The guest’s conducting prowess, especially with a group he had not rehearsed, was “masterly,” and the rendition concluded to great applause.157
Between the arrival of Strauss in 1921 and Siegfried Wagner’s visit in 1924, further signs indicated the German musical tradition would again be embraced. The establishment of the Austro-German Musicians’ Relief Fund, which asked American artists to aid starving Austrian and German performers, suggested that anti-Germanism was receding. According to a January 1923 advertisement in the Musical Courier, the musicians of Germany and Austria were starving to death, which had led the American music community to join together to aid their musical brethren. Among those backing the call to action were figures like the pianist Josef Hofmann, the composer Victor Herbert, the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and the violinist Bronislaw Huberman. This distinguished group asked their colleagues to help save the life of “a brother artist,” who was stretching his “sad, yearning arms toward us.” American musicians were told that art knew “no geography and no nationality,” and that in saving the life of an artist, they could save their own.158
As American musicians were implored to send funds across the Atlantic, the piano of Richard Wagner had made the journey in the opposite direction, to be displayed in New York at 437 Fifth Avenue, the home of Knabe Pianos. On a December evening in 1922, just a few blocks from where soldiers had clashed violently with police three years earlier over the performance of German opera, an invited audience gathered to see the master’s piano. The instrument had been discovered in Berlin by an American soldier who had purchased it from a music teacher in whose home it had stood for nearly fifty years. Made by Bechstein, the esteemed manufacturer, the instrument had been given to the composer in 1864 by King Ludwig of Bavaria, and it was said that Wagner had written or orchestrated much of his greatest work while seated at its keyboard.159
At the studio that evening, the ceremony, which one publication likened to “an unveiling,” was attended by numerous celebrated artists, including some of the Metropolitan Opera’s leading Wagnerians, who sang to the accompaniment of the iconic instrument. In addition to the distinguished singers and a handful of pianists, several women described as “patronesses” were in attendance. Not only did the guests have the opportunity to see and hear the instrument, which had assumed the character of a sacred relic, but they could also view the original pencil score of Das Rheingold, which a New Yorker had acquired.160
If some had yet to move beyond the war’s enmity, within five years of the conflict’s end, those drawn to classical music had largely made peace with the compositions of their former enemies and with the German and Austrian musicians working in the United States. The Teutonic threat had receded as a concern, the musical nationalists were mainly tranquil, and the fear of German autocracy
that had swept the nation no longer inflamed the landscape. Most devotees of American concert and operatic life would now have agreed with the Musical Courier’s sentiments, that it made no difference where art came from. “A Strauss [tone] poem is not loaded with dynamite,” the editors observed, “nor is there any visible relationship between a Wagner opera and a submarine.”161 While developments in the next decade would compel the United States to reevaluate its perception of Germany, for now, Americans were content to hear their Strauss and their Wagner. Germany had been tamed, and its music could again inspire, soothe, and invigorate the American listener.
PART II
Hitler’s Specter
CHAPTER FOUR
“I Want to Teach a Lesson to Those Ill-Bred Nazis”
Toscanini, Furtwängler, and Hitler
ON APRIL 1, 1933, a group of distinguished figures from the American classical-music community cabled Adolf Hitler, asking his government to stop persecuting musicians in Nazi Germany. Distressed at the harsh treatment of artists like conductors Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and Fritz Busch, the New York Philharmonic’s Arturo Toscanini and ten leading musicians petitioned Hitler in a highly public initiative, which attracted considerable coverage across the United States. In addition to Toscanini’s signature, the cable, brief and respectful, was signed by several conductors, a pianist, two composers, and a music educator:
The undersigned artists who live, and execute their art, in the United States of America feel the moral obligation to appeal to your excellency to put a stop to the persecution of their colleagues in Germany, for political or religious reasons. We beg you to consider that the artist all over the world is estimated for his talent alone and not for his national or religious convictions.
We are convinced that such persecutions as take place in Germany at present are not based on your instructions, and that it cannot possibly be your desire to damage the high cultural esteem Germany, until now, has been enjoying in the eyes of the whole civilized world.
The following day, newspapers across the country informed readers of the cable’s contents, which made clear the link between art and politics.1
That afternoon, the New York Philharmonic took the stage at Carnegie Hall to perform an especially fitting program. Led by Toscanini, the concert, which was part of a Beethoven cycle offered by the orchestra and its esteemed conductor, included the Eroica, a piece that was richly symbolic at this particular moment. In the program notes, the audience encountered the oft-told tale of Beethoven’s having torn the title page, inscribed with the name Bonaparte, from the original score. Raging against the man who had proclaimed himself emperor, the composer was said to have declared, “Then he, too, is only an ordinary human being! Now we shall see him trample on the rights of men to gratify his own ambitions; he will exalt himself above everyone and become a tyrant!”2 In hearing the Beethoven Third Symphony that afternoon, the audience surely perceived a convergence between music and the wider world, in a performance the New York Times described as so remarkable that even the composer could not have conceived of it. The concert allowed one to experience both “joy and tragedy,” which reminded listeners that “mankind need not be submerged in . . . hatred.”3
The audience appreciated the magnificence of what they had heard and was no doubt moved by the confluence of listening to this piece led by this conductor on this day. Beyond responding feverishly to the Eroica’s thrilling conclusion, the audience had given the maestro a sustained ovation as he walked onto the stage to begin the concert with Beethoven’s Fourth. The Times reviewer surmised that the response signaled approval of the conductor’s lead role in the cable to Hitler, an account of which had appeared in the newspaper that morning.4 In the days after the cable was published, each time the Italian musician strode onto the stage, the demonstration far exceeded the applause he usually received.5
• • •
With the end of the 1920s and the start of the new decade, the attention of the American people was trained on domestic matters, as the country moved from an era of economic prosperity and a rising standard of living, to a period of tumbling stocks, economic contraction, and widespread hardship. Because of the Great Depression of the 1930s, for much of the decade, overseas developments were not terribly important to most Americans. They were concerned, instead, with the day-to-day struggle for economic survival. For millions, unemployment, homelessness, and malnutrition were a greater foe than any dictator.
Despite the insular character of American life, the classical-music landscape was tightly bound to the European upheavals that flared in the 1930s, especially in Germany. This was due, in part, to the fact that leading performers continued to have one foot in Europe and one in the United States, and because America’s concertgoers remained drawn to German symphonic and operatic fare. Moreover, the increasing persecution of Jewish musicians in Germany did not just capture the attention of performers in the United States. While America’s musical community was distressed over the plight of artists in Europe, Germany’s brutal policies also attracted widespread coverage in the American press—in the arts and news sections—which deepened the American people’s understanding of the malign character of Hitler’s regime.
Beyond the cascade of press reports on Nazi persecution, the well-documented activities of two giants of the podium, Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler, also contributed to America’s growing awareness of fascism. From his perch in New York, Toscanini assumed a heroic stance by forcefully opposing the malevolent policies of Mussolini and Hitler, sometimes at considerable personal risk. And when the Italian conductor stepped down from his New York position in 1936, Furtwängler, Europe’s preeminent conductor, was appointed to replace him, a decision that erupted in a furious and highly public controversy, which again highlighted the debate between the musical nationalists and the musical universalists. Moreover, the tension between these celebrated maestros, which was widely publicized, served as a metaphor for what many saw as the stark contrast between America’s democratic ideals, embodied by Toscanini, and Nazism’s moral bankruptcy, as represented by Furtwängler. Yet again, the classical-music community was entangled in the web of world politics.
Although most Americans were unconcerned about the wider world in these years, a sense of unease did emerge over the rise of foreign dictators. If those pondering European politics in the 1920s and early 1930s initially saw Benito Mussolini’s autocratic rule in Italy in positive terms,6 once Hitler came to power in 1933, distress began to simmer in the United States. Still, most Americans were content to gaze upon the boiling European cauldron, and as late as September 1939, when the war in Europe began, America remained aloof.7
Despite their unwillingness to act assertively during the 1930s, Americans heard frequently about repression in the Third Reich, and learned that conditions in Germany, especially for Jews, were increasingly grim. Reports documenting anti-Jewish policies appeared in newspapers throughout the country, though Americans often responded with incredulity or indifference to stories about German atrocities.8
Within weeks of Hitler’s accession to power on January 30, 1933, stories began to appear in newspapers and the music press documenting the German government’s increasingly repressive artistic policies. As Hitler’s regime started to crack down on “undesirable” musicians and intrude into the affairs of German musical organizations, American readers could follow the sinister tale in considerable detail.9 They learned that men described as representatives of the Nazi Party had forced conductor Fritz Busch to surrender his position as director of the Dresden Opera. The same group shouted “Out with Busch” as he tried to begin a performance of Rigoletto. While Busch had supporters, the eminent musician would be chased from the post he had held since 1922. Known to New York audiences after guest appearances with the New York Symphony, Busch, though not Jewish, was accused, Americans learned, of having excessive social contact with Jews and of hiring too many Jewish artists. Moreover, his younger brother Adolf, a
renowned violinist, had married a Jew and left Germany for Switzerland a few years before.10
In the early days of 1933, stories appeared in the United States about the celebration in Germany commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death. At Bayreuth, the summer festival devoted to the music of Wagner, the composer’s family opened an archive of letters, scores, and articles from his life to be made available to scholars. In Berlin, conductor Otto Klemperer, who would soon have to leave the country, led an innovative staging of Tannhäuser, which caused an uproar among Wagnerians for allegedly desecrating the creator’s memory. Americans also read about the illustrious crowd that had gathered at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig to hear a concert of the icon’s music, which was performed before Chancellor Hitler and members of his cabinet. The performance included excerpts from Parsifal and Die Meistersinger and was led by a man familiar to many Americans, Karl Muck, who could be found most days conducting in Hamburg.11
As Americans pondered this homage to Wagner, readers of Musical America encountered a March 10 editorial calling for tolerance in Germany, especially toward Jewish musicians. With Hitler just weeks into his chancellorship, the publication lamented that his regime had dragged music “violently into the area of political passions.” Pointing to the German leader’s love of Wagner—he was supposedly happier at a performance of Die Meistersinger than anywhere else—the editors called for the Nazi chief to show the humanity of Hans Sachs, a character from his favorite opera.12
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