Dangerous Melodies Page 3
Margarete Ober
That German music and musicians would come under scrutiny in the United States was not surprising, though dramatic change would not immediately touch the music community. In fact, before America entered the war, from its beginning in the summer of 1914, until the end of American neutrality in the spring of 1917, performances of German music and the presence of German musicians caused little distress in the nation’s opera houses and concert halls.
Despite the pervasive fear and anxiety that would emerge later, few Americans harbored intense anti-German feelings when the First World War began in the summer of 1914. Instead, the war, which pitted Britain, France, and Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and (later) the Ottoman Empire, seemed a distant eruption unlikely to touch the lives of the American people in a meaningful way. Many saw the clash of armies as yet another example of the Old World’s endless folly, and most Americans thought it was a good thing the Atlantic Ocean separated their country from the warring nations. One publication spoke confidently of America’s “isolated position,” claiming the country was in “no peril of being drawn into the European quarrel.”5
While the United States had become one of the leading players on the world stage by the early twentieth century, for Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1912 during an era of political and social reform, and for the American people, international affairs were not a central concern. And in the summer of 1914, with the start of the war, the president believed it best for the nation to remain neutral. Motivated by a genuine aversion to war, the erstwhile professor, president of Princeton, and governor of New Jersey, Wilson instructed his fellow citizens to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.”6 Across the country, there was little sense that the rhythms of daily life would be upset by the war, and people went about their business that summer and fall with a sense of detachment from Europe.
Among observers of the classical-music scene, the advent of war led to a flood of concerns, which did not foreshadow the debate on German music or the hostility toward German musicians that would occur later. The first issue of Musical America published after the war began said its impact on the concert season was unknowable. According to the journal, one of the nation’s foremost music publications, the length of the war, which many predicted would be brief, would determine its effect on American concert life. Some feared that American musicians could be marooned overseas, or in the case of male European nationals, forced to put aside their creative aspirations to shoulder a rifle. In New York, devoted listeners worried that the country’s most esteemed opera company, the Metropolitan, would have to cancel its entire season if several of its greatest figures were called to war. There was even concern that the Met’s director, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, an Italian naval engineer, would be forced to serve his country.7
As the whereabouts of artists scattered overseas became clear, even as observers acknowledged that the war would lead to interruptions in America’s musical life, they began to recognize that events abroad would not cause classical music to grind to a halt.8 But this realization did not mean the war would no longer attract attention among music commentators and musicians. To the contrary, in the conflict’s opening months, reflections on its significance continued, and a rich discussion emerged about the war’s implications for classical music in the United States. Musical America suggested it would be foolish for those involved in music to assume they could pursue lives untouched by the struggle. Musicians had “civic duties,” after all. Politics could not be shrugged off.9
In the fall of 1914, New York Philharmonic conductor Josef Stransky discussed the war’s potential for reshaping musical life. Born in Bohemia in 1872, Stransky, an Austrian citizen, had become the orchestra’s maestro in 1911, having made his name as a conductor in Prague, Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden.10 With the world in a state of “emotional upheaval,” he observed, art’s mission is to “soothe.” The war would “stimulate art in wonderful fashion,” he claimed. Gazing hopefully toward the coming concert season, the conductor said he was optimistic not just about the Philharmonic’s health, but about the state of classical music in America.11
President Wilson’s call to remain impartial shaped the way some thought about classical music. That autumn, one of the nation’s foremost musical figures, Walter Damrosch, considered the wisdom of adhering to the president’s advice. Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony Society, the city’s other leading ensemble, hailed from a family steeped in the musical world of nineteenth-century Europe. Born in Silesia in 1862, Walter was the son of the esteemed conductor Leopold Damrosch, who was close to many of the iconic musical figures of the period, including Liszt, Wagner, and Clara Schumann. Arriving in the United States in 1871, Walter would eventually become one of America’s most celebrated musical leaders. In 1878, Leopold founded New York’s Symphony Society, and in 1885, Walter became its assistant conductor.12
In October 1914, Damrosch spoke to his orchestra, which had gathered in Aeolian Hall for its first rehearsal of the season. He noted that some thirteen nationalities were represented in the ensemble, including many of those fighting in Europe. It would be wise, the conductor explained, for the men of the orchestra to follow Wilson’s instruction, and to “maintain a coherent neutrality,” even if that would be difficult for a group of artists inclined to intense feelings, and whose powerful ties bound them to their homelands.
For Damrosch, living in the United States had taught him there was “no place” for ethnic hatred. His years of service to the orchestra had demonstrated that quarrels need not arise over ethnic differences, and such a cooperative environment was attributable, he said, to an American milieu in which there was no reason one group should hate another. All that mattered in the orchestra, and by implication, in the United States, was one’s ability. Imploring his musicians to remember that they were all Americans, Damrosch said it did not matter where they were born; they should not talk about who started the war. Instead, they should be grateful to live in a “peaceful” land.13
Damrosch’s Wilsonian spirit could be heard in a thoughtful letter penned to Musical America in November 1914 by New Yorker Helene Koelling. It was essential to preserve “neutrality in art,” especially as the United States depended upon music from overseas. According to Koelling, art should be understood in universal not individual terms. It was silly for Americans to allow their views on the war to shape their attitudes about music. Koelling said the American listener had to maintain a “strict neutrality” and protect the spirit of music from being “vandalized.”14 Audiences seemed willing to go along with her suggestion.
Walter Damrosch
In tracing the listening habits of American concertgoers in the period of American neutrality (through the spring of 1917), one is struck by the degree to which a passion for German music remained untouched by the carnage on Europe’s battlefields. Before America went to war, the country’s hunger for the music of Germany remained insatiable. This was despite reports of German atrocities against civilians on land and murderous acts at sea, which led to the death of noncombatants, as German submarines sank not just military vessels but freighters and passenger ships, as well.15 Still, there was “no surer magnet” for attracting large audiences than an all-Wagner symphonic concert or a Wagner opera. Indeed, Josef Stransky played nothing but Wagner with the New York Philharmonic on the orchestra’s highly popular Saturday evening series.16 And there was nothing unusual about this enchantment with Wagner, for as music historian Joseph Horowitz has so memorably shown, American music lovers had been captivated by the German’s music, which had garnered a cult-like following in the United States since the late nineteenth century.17
On Thanksgiving Day 1914, the Metropolitan performed Parsifal, which had become a company tradition. Aside from scolding some in the audience for flouting convention by applauding at inappropriate moments, one critic saluted the artists for offering a “moving performance,” which allowed the spirit of Wagner to ring out. In an obvio
us reference to the war, the reviewer claimed the power of the performance was fortified by the connection between the plot line of the drama, based on an epic medieval poem about the search for the Holy Grail, and contemporary events, granting the work a “transcendent splendor.”18
Six months later and a few hundred miles to the north, thousands thrilled to an outdoor performance of the composer’s Siegfried in Harvard Stadium. The event, which included contributions by some of the leading singers from the Metropolitan, was preceded by enormous excitement. Music shops displayed plot summaries, musical scores, and pictures of the composer. Hotel lobbies, railway stations, and trolley cars were plastered with announcements of the performance that June, and special trains were arranged to carry listeners to the stadium. The atmosphere, one writer declared, was “Bayreuthian.”19 The coming performance was reportedly the start of an annual tradition that would allow Wagner devotees to hear a work by the composer each season. Despite the venue’s less-than-perfect acoustics, the audience listened in an “almost awe-inspiring silence.”20 The bloodletting in Europe was a distant distraction.
Even two years into the conflict, with evidence of Germany’s wartime brutality firmly established, Wagner fever persisted, a point illustrated by the glowing response to an October 1916 concert performance in Boston by the esteemed local orchestra, which saw the celebrated German soprano Johanna Gadski offer excerpts from Tristan and Isolde. The press spoke with unrestrained praise about the quality of her singing and the orchestral playing. As for the synergy between Gadski and the Boston Symphony, which was led by the German conductor Karl Muck, another reviewer exulted, her “voice exchanged with the orchestra gold for gold and held its gleam against all the brightness that violins [and] trumpets . . . could shed.” While the time would come when Muck and Gadski would be engulfed by a storm of anti-German hatred, with America at peace, both received unstinting praise.21
In these years, the German presence in America was considerable; more than 2.3 million German immigrants lived in the United States in 1917, a figure representing the largest number of foreign-born residents in the nation. Moreover, Germans had long maintained a high profile in North America, having journeyed to the continent in significant numbers for centuries, the first arrivals immigrating to the colonies in the seventeenth century. Between 1850 and 1900, their number would never fall below one-quarter of the total of foreign-born people in the country. By the turn of the century, as one historian has observed, the American public had come to see the Germans as an especially “reputable” immigrant group. Among older Americans, they were perceived as “law-abiding” and “patriotic.” Rising from the working class, they had become “businessmen, farmers, clerks,” and skilled workmen.22
Illustrating this benign view, nineteenth-century American school textbooks characterized Germans as “hard-working, productive, thrifty, and reliable,”23 while students in US public high schools studied the German language in increasing numbers from the late nineteenth century to the start of the First World War. In 1890, 10.5 percent of high school students studied German, a number that climbed to 24 percent in 1910, about twice the number as those studying French.24
In light of their history in America over some three centuries, what befell the German people in the United States during the First World War was striking. One historian has pointed to a “spectacular reversal [in] judgment” on the part of the American people.25 But some scholars have suggested the wartime eruption of anti-German feeling was not entirely surprising; they have identified an increase in such sentiment in the United States in the late nineteenth century, which intensified as the diplomatic sky darkened in the years before the war. Though the 1870s was a harmonious period between the two countries, a time when most Americans saw Germany as a land of “poets, musicians, writers, philosophers, and scholars,” this amity would not last. By the 1880s, according to this less sanguine view, such positive perceptions had waned, as Washington and Berlin began to see one another as rivals. By the last years of the nineteenth century, some Americans believed Germany threatened US economic and foreign policy interests in the Western Hemisphere, and a series of diplomatic incidents led to the appearance of harsh anti-German stories in the American press, which began referring to “Huns” in assessing Germany’s behavior. Moreover, Americans who feared radical foreign ideologies in an age of violent struggle between labor and capital came to see German Americans as carriers of dangerous ideas. With this in mind, just before the world war, the American public’s attitude toward Germany could best be described as unsettled.26
In reflecting on wartime anti-Germanism, one should also recall that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a virulent strain of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, which prepared the ground for the hostility German Americans would experience during the war.27 By any measure, the period from 1880 to 1920, in which more than twenty million immigrants landed in America, was marked by extraordinary xenophobia, which manifested itself in unbridled hostility toward the so-called “new immigrants” (those from southern and eastern Europe). This created an environment ripe for the animosity Americans would direct at German immigrants and culture once the United States went to war.28 A more immediate catalyst for wartime anti-German feeling was the conduct of German soldiers and seamen. Their malevolent actions, first in Belgium, which Germany brutally invaded in 1914, and later in the North Atlantic, generated revulsion among millions of Americans, who regularly encountered horrific newspaper accounts about the murder of innocent civilians, especially women and children.29
Wartime antipathy grew toward all things German—whether immigrants, German-language books, or the facial hair of a Cleveland elevator operator forced to trim his mustache because it made him look like Kaiser Wilhelm—and the US government exacerbated it all by whipping up support for the war.30 Within weeks of Wilson’s April 1917 war speech, an executive order established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which put in place a government propaganda apparatus. In addition to producing leaflets, newspaper and magazine ads, and short anti-German films demonizing the kaiser, the CPI sent thousands of “Four-Minute Men” to movie theaters across the country to energize support for the war through brief patriotic speeches encouraging “real Americans” to back the war effort. Policy makers believed it was essential to press the American people to do their part, and the government sought to rouse them. Such fabricated patriotism would ultimately flow into unsavory channels, polluting American society in a variety of ways.31
Eventually, wartime anti-Germanism would batter America’s classical-music community, which, since the mid-nineteenth century, had been overwhelmingly Germanic in character. Conductors and orchestral players were predominantly German, as was the repertoire American ensembles played. One heard the German language almost exclusively in orchestra rehearsals, and the largest number of key figures in the classical-music sphere—whether conductors, instrumentalists, singers, teachers, or orchestra builders—hailed from Germany. The way one contemporary described German-born conductor Theodore Thomas would have applied to most figures in America’s classical music world up until the First World War: He “associated with German musicians all his life,” met with them every day, and lived in “a German atmosphere.”32 The Germans, it was widely believed, represented the pinnacle of musical culture.33
Soon after the United States went to war, in the spring of 1917, the question of performing German compositions, especially works by the two Richards—Wagner and Strauss—engendered a fierce debate, which would roil both the classical-music community and the larger culture. Among performers, critics, and listeners, there were some—the musical universalists—who believed German music belonged to the entire world and should remain untouched by the war. Music, they argued, transcended the nasty provincialism the war had forced to the surface of American life, and they thought it perfectly reasonable for all music to be performed without restriction.
But the musical n
ationalists could not have disagreed more. Continuing to perform German music would be unseemly, particularly while battling a brutal foe. More than that, the nationalists were convinced that the very act of performing and listening to German music in wartime might, in some inexplicable way, make it more difficult to defeat Germany, though the logic of this conviction was never fully explored. Consequently, among the musical nationalists, who were more vocal than the universalists, strong support existed for sweeping the work of certain German composers from American opera houses and concert halls. To be sure, there were divisions among those who favored restricting German music, with a small number believing all German compositions should be banned, while others argued that only the music of living Germans should be forbidden. What united the musical nationalists, beyond their antagonism toward Germany, was an antipathy for the German language, which led them to try to silence certain compositions in which the German tongue would be heard. For the nationalists, the experience of hearing German compositions, particularly operas sung in German, aroused feelings of anxiety, pain, sorrow, and rage.