Dangerous Melodies Read online

  Theodore Thomas, the most significant figure in the development of the symphony orchestra in nineteenth-century America, was born in Germany in 1835. Ten years later, he arrived in the United States, and by age nineteen, he was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic Society. Like many others in the annals of classical music, Thomas’s ambition extended to the podium, and in his late twenties he began conducting in New York, a path that led him to establish his own orchestra in 1865. As head of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra for the next twenty-five years, he was propelled by a missionary zeal. “My aim,” Thomas said, “has been to make good music popular.” To that end, beginning in 1869, Thomas led his orchestra on numerous tours across the United States, bringing symphonic music, which he described as “the highest flower of art,” to the nation’s cities and towns. Thomas’s superb ensemble often spent half the year touring, which permitted the conductor to introduce thousands of Americans to a range of symphonic masterworks. One listener, who heard the orchestra as a boy in a Mississippi River town, described the transformative impact of the experience, declaring that it caused him to comprehend that “there really existed as a fact . . . this world of beauty, wholly apart from everyday experience.” Thomas would go on to direct the New York Philharmonic, after which he headed to Chicago, where he established the ensemble that would become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.18

  The final years of the nineteenth century saw a growing commitment to symphonic music, with the founding of several symphony orchestras, including the New York Symphony Society (the city’s second major orchestra), along with groups in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Moreover, in a country experiencing rapid urbanization, the establishment of symphony orchestras offered America’s burgeoning cities a way to enhance their cultural legitimacy.19 Shortly before those ensembles were formed, several musical extravaganzas between 1869 and the early 1880s illustrate how thousands of Americans encountered classical music, particularly symphonic compositions. In 1869, to commemorate the Civil War’s end, “the Grandest Musical Demonstration that the world has ever witnessed” took place in Boston, where thousands of singers and hundreds of instrumentalists performed Schubert’s Symphony in C and other works before an audience of more than twenty thousand, including President Ulysses Grant. Sadly, the former general asked that “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” be played, which necessitated eliminating the first and third movements of Schubert’s masterwork.20

  In 1872, a similar Boston spectacle marked the end of the Franco-Prussian War. This event included 17,000 singers, an orchestra of 1,500, and 40 vocal soloists performing arias from operas and oratorios, along with “The Blue Danube” waltz led by Johann Strauss himself. While some expressed reservations about the success of the event—it was simply too big, critics claimed—Chicago arranged a huge jubilee of its own in 1873. Cincinnati held one that same year featuring works by Handel, Mendelssohn, Haydn, and Beethoven, performed by an orchestra of more than 100 and a chorus more than seven times that size. Embracing the idea of gigantism in music, organizers in New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Louis all followed suit, believing that concerts by huge orchestras and enormous choruses were an effective way to offer classical music to American listeners.21 As these episodes suggest, and as one scholar has observed, by the end of the nineteenth century, classical music “enjoyed high prestige in America.”22

  Despite the impressive character of these musical spectacles and the great enthusiasm generated by the many symphonic, operatic, and vocal performances Americans experienced in that earlier time, I would contend that in the twentieth century, from the First World War through the Cold War years, classical music came to occupy a fundamentally different place in American life than it did before or has since, achieving an unprecedented degree of political importance. As historian Lawrence Levine has observed, it is easy to forget that “precisely the same forms of culture can perform markedly distinct functions in different periods.”23 With that crucial insight in mind, in these years, Americans imbued classical music in the United States with political and ideological meaning, and they responded to the music and those who performed it as they never had. The world of classical music helped Americans grapple with a range of critical questions in the life of the nation. It helped them decide what was worth fighting for and why. It helped illuminate the meaning of democracy, freedom, and patriotism. It supplied insight into the nature of tyranny and oppression. And classical music and the work of classical musicians even helped Americans reflect upon what the United States represented on the world stage, which enhanced their understanding of the country’s purpose in a dangerous century.

  That classical music could help people ponder such essential questions is a phenomenon considered by the late literary scholar and music critic Edward Said. “Serious musical thought,” Said observed, “occurs in conjunction with, not in separation from, other serious thought, both musical and nonmusical.”24 One aim of this book, which examines how people in the United States melded their reflections on classical music and musicians to their understanding of a variety of global challenges America faced, is to explore this notion—that one’s ideas about the world of music can be related to one’s thinking about matters that are decidedly nonmusical, and often of great consequence.

  It is also worth emphasizing, as musicologist Nicholas Cook has written, that music is not just something “nice to listen to.” Instead, he insists, it is “what we make it, and what we make of it.” According to Cook, “People think through music” and use it to “decide who they are.”25 In examining how Americans considered the convergence between the world of classical music and international affairs, I would suggest that, over many decades, the American people did a great deal of “thinking through music,” and as they reflected upon the music, and upon the work of musicians and performing institutions, they achieved a deeper understanding of America’s role in the twentieth-century world.

  In researching this book, I encountered a body of source material, vast and rich, that demonstrated the importance of classical music in American life; my work in libraries and archives revealed some fascinating currents that flowed from the convergence between the world of classical music and the wider world. The first concerns a decades-long debate on the relationship between art and politics in the United States, which energized musicians, listeners, and even those with no particular devotion to classical music. Pitting those who viewed classical music in highly nationalistic terms against those possessing a more idealistic perspective, this often bitter disagreement created a divide both inside and outside the classical-music domain. Despite their distinctive outlooks, the two groups—I call them the musical nationalists and the musical universalists—did share one conviction: They believed America’s classical-music community was enmeshed in and inseparable from overseas developments.26

  But it was their profound differences that were especially meaningful. As was true of many Americans, the musical nationalists saw the world as a perilous place, especially for the United States. They were convinced that the act of listening to pieces of music by certain composers or attending performances by particular singers, instrumentalists, or conductors could somehow contaminate the country or even endanger the American people. Consequently, at times, especially when the country felt particularly vulnerable, the musical nationalists favored banning the music of certain composers or preventing certain artists from performing in American concert halls and opera houses.

  As I came to recognize, there was more to musical nationalism than this proscriptive reaction; during the Cold War it assumed a different form. In those unsettled years, the musical nationalists held that overseas performances by American symphony orchestras had the capacity to advance the national interest of the United States vis-à-vis its enemies. Such overseas offerings could transform a leading American orchestra into an instrument of diplomacy, which could be used for reasons of self-interest in a divided world. Fo
r the musical nationalists, the world was dangerous and classical music was capable of exacerbating or mitigating the foreign perils the United States confronted in the twentieth century.

  Unlike the musical nationalists, the musical universalists were convinced that art transcended politics and national rivalries. They believed music could have a salutary impact on domestic and international life—that it could act as a balm, a unifier, a force for uplift, and even as a catalyst for global cooperation. This idea—that music could be a constructive force—was hardly novel; indeed, it stretched back to the Greeks. Considering the importance of educating students in poetry and music, Plato contended that knowledge of “rhythm and harmony [would] sink deep into the recesses of the soul,” which would produce an individual capable of embracing “all that is lovely.” Such a person would become someone “of noble spirit.”27

  Beyond ennobling the individual and invigorating one’s appreciation for beauty, the musical universalists believed music was a universal language, a notion that was ardently embraced, for example, by the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, who was certain that music—classical music, especially—could speak to the hopes and dreams of all humanity. For the musical universalists who fill these pages, a powerful conviction animated their thinking: They were certain that classical music could communicate directly and constructively with all people, wherever they lived. And during the Cold War, the musical universalists believed, as the musical nationalists did not, that by sending symphonic ensembles to perform in foreign lands, the United States could contribute to the creation of a more empathetic and cooperative world.28 They were convinced that American orchestras could enhance the prospects for peace.

  For many years, the debate between the musical nationalists and the musical universalists roiled in newspapers, magazines, and competing public pronouncements, causing rancor and division inside and outside the classical-music community. Whatever the merits of each position, this fervid dispute helped classical music remain in the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, and over many decades, the passion that marked the public wrangling between the nationalists and the universalists heightened classical music’s political significance across America.

  My research pointed to two additional historical currents that I did not expect to find, both essential to this volume. Embedded in the book’s sources are two crucial aspects of twentieth-century American history: the country’s expanding engagement with the world and its increasing anxiety over antidemocratic regimes. To my great surprise, the sources I uncovered—concert and opera reviews; editorials, opinion pieces, and news reports on classical music and musicians; material in symphony and opera archives; and countless letters on classical music and performers published in newspapers and magazines—revealed these twin developments with unusual clarity. The world of classical music thus offers a powerful, and wholly unconventional, lens through which to examine these currents; both are vital to understanding the contours of twentieth-century American history: the country’s increasing engagement with the world, and the evolving and, ultimately, unremitting sense that affairs overseas threatened America’s safety.

  The sources imparted the story of a nation that, decade by decade, became more engaged and assertive in world politics. It was equally clear that the American people and their leaders experienced a growing sense of distress over the existence of antidemocratic rule. Having helped vanquish the threat posed by Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in World War I, the United States experienced a tranquil, if brief, postwar interlude. After that, the sources revealed a nation that became more and more troubled by regimes and ideologies that were thought to threaten its safety or were, at the very least, inimical to American values: fascism in Mussolini’s Italy; Nazism in Hitler’s Germany; and communism in the Soviet Union of Stalin and his successors.

  As the century unfolded, the United States became increasingly fixated on these antidemocratic lands, an obsession that led America to devote a great deal of energy to thinking about foreign threats, and, ultimately, an enormous amount of blood and treasure to waging wars hot and cold. I became convinced that exploring the intersection between America’s classical-music community and a range of momentous events beyond the nation’s shores could enrich our understanding of how the United States engaged the world. And I could tell this story using sources derived largely from the world of music, which would allow the tale to be told in an entirely new way.

  As one reflects on the place of classical music in American life, it is worth pondering the words of a distinguished scholar and an esteemed artist. According to Lawrence Kramer, music cannot “disentangle us from our worldly destinies.” Rather, its power is to “entangle us with those destinies in ways that can be profoundly important.” In a similar vein, the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, a musician sensitive to the connection between music and politics, has observed that “music is not separated from the world.” Instead, music has the capacity to teach us “that everything is connected.”29 It is this connectedness, between the world of classical music in America and the wider world, which I consider in these pages.

  My aim, I should emphasize, is not to examine or explain why classical music seems less important today than it once was, though that is not an uninteresting question. Instead, I wish to explore a time when countless Americans believed the work of gifted artists and superb musical institutions was inseparable from crucial developments across the world, and were convinced that their very safety might hinge on the performance of a piece of music.

  PART I

  Terrorized by the Kaiser

  CHAPTER ONE

  “We Must Hate the Germans”

  Tormented by Wagner and Strauss

  ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson left the White House for the Capitol, where he would address a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war. For some two and a half anxious years, as Europe tore itself to pieces, Wilson had maintained American neutrality, and his task that night was to explain to the American people why that had become impossible and what the United States aimed to achieve by entering the Great War. To claim the president’s address was imbued with a profound sense of idealism is to understate the character of his remarks. Most famously, Wilson declared, “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Contending that the United States could not allow the violation of its “most sacred rights,” the president said he had not wanted to take the nation into the war, but that Germany, which had decided to target American ships, had left him no alternative in what he called “the most terrible and disastrous of all wars.” At the conclusion of the address, the chamber erupted in cheers and a somber Wilson, surrounded by politicians from both parties, was hailed for his efforts. Upon returning to the White House, the president remarked, “My message tonight was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”1

  On that same night, music and politics intersected in New York City, where the Metropolitan Opera House was the scene of an unprecedented demonstration of patriotic fervor during a performance of The Canterbury Pilgrims, a work by the American Reginald De Koven. At the start of the fourth act, just after the intermission, Austrian conductor Artur Bodanzky strode into the orchestra pit, asked the musicians to rise, and proceeded to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with many in the audience singing energetically. (Earlier, the audience had obtained fresh copies of the newspapers’ war extras with the president’s speech, which created a wave of excitement in the theater.) When the tune ended, James Gerard, until recently America’s ambassador to Germany, rose and called out from the front of his box, “Three cheers for our president!” Loud cheering was followed by further shouts: “Three cheers for Mr. Gerard!” “Three cheers for our allies!” And finally, “Three cheers for the army and navy!” As the crowd roared, Bodanzky asked the orchestra to repeat “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  This demonstration of patriotic zeal would be followed by two freakis
h events. As the Berlin-born contralto Margarete Ober made her entrance as the Wife of Bath and sang her opening phrase, she collapsed on the stage with a thud. Carried off, she would not return. The performance continued in disorganized fashion, and soon thereafter the Austrian baritone Robert Leonhardt fainted backstage, much to the agitation of company members. Once revived, Leonhardt, unlike Ober, was able to complete his evening’s work, in what was surely a memorable performance on a night when American nationalism was unleashed in one of the country’s most august musical settings.2

  Within days, the war declaration was passed by large margins in the House and Senate. While it would take months for the United States to train and transport thousands of troops across the Atlantic, the country was now at war, and American society would be affected in ways large and small. The unsavory passions released by war would singe the home front, with no aspect of domestic life escaping the impact of the world struggle.3

  The decision to go to war would catalyze an explosion of anti-German sentiment, both ridiculous and repugnant, which would sweep across the country. If it was merely absurd to change the name of sauerkraut to “liberty cabbage” or to call German measles “liberty measles,” then it was poisonous when many school boards prohibited German-language instruction or swept German books from library shelves, a decision that, on many occasions, led to book burnings. Worse still, in April 1918 anti-German hatred caused a mob to murder a man of German descent in the small town of Collinsville, Illinois. After he was marched through the streets and forced to sing patriotic songs and kiss the American flag, Robert Prager was strung up from a tree and left to die, though the rabble allowed him to write a letter to his parents in Dresden, in which he described his fate and asked for their prayers. If the lynching of Prager, a drifter falsely accused of being a German spy, was the lone act of outright anti-German murder, the list of violent episodes would grow throughout the period of American belligerency, and included, according to one account, the stoning of dachshunds on the streets of Milwaukee.4