Trumpeting down the walls of Jericho: The politics of art, music and emotion in German-American relations, 1870-1920

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2003 by Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht

Due to the influx and impact of this ensemble as well as countless other German orchestral musicians and the music they performed, symphonic music became synonymous with German. To be German meant to be extremely musical, emotionally gifted, and a member of a universally admired cultural club. Musicians who wanted to be professional artists saw their chances immensely increased if they could refer to a German background or at least German training. Leopold Stokowski, renowned conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and then the Philadelphia Orchestra, not only claimed to be from Pomerania or Poland (he was actually British). He temporarily even changed the spelling of his name (substituting a "v" for the "w") to make it look more continental, then cultivated a pidgin Central European accent complete with a crippled vocabulary, all of this to convince people of his "foreignness." (32) Even Louis Gottschalk, the only U.S. artist who ever reached the kind of fame otherwise reserved for foreign soloists, p roudly and consistently hinted to his European background: his father was a German-educated Englishman, his mother a member of the French upper class. The strategy apparently worked. When Gottschalk played at a matinee, women would rush on stage, grasp his handkerchief, touch his clothes--and faint. (33)

The New York Philharmonic did not hire a single long-term non-German conductor until 1906. And once the orchestra had signed contracts with Russian maestro Vassily Safonoff, it smuggled in the Austrian conductor, Gustav Mahler, and finally appointed the latter, in 1909. In Boston, the symphony counted 22 Germans, 8 Austrians, 2 Italians and 2 French players as late as 1917--after the United States had entered World War I. Karl Muck, formerly conductor at the Royal Opera in Berlin, personally hand-picked his players in Europe. (34) Rehearsals were typically held in German, and the music director would be addressed with "Herr." Programs were heavily dominated by Wagner and the three Bs (that is Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), notwithstanding the performance of other European compositions as well. (35)

Great orchestras came to be identified increasingly with German conductors. Until 1920, at least a dozen metropolises, among those New York (1842), St. Louis (1879), Boston (1881), Chicago (1891), Cincinnati (1895), Pittsburgh (1896), Philadelphia (1900), Minneapolis (1903), and San Francisco (1911) established philharmonics, with others such as Baltimore, Cleveland and Detroit following suit during or shortly after the war. The symphony craze reached its climax in the 1890s with the simultaneous establishment of five orchestras, within roughly a dozen years. Most of these orchestras were sponsored by local elites and organized under the tutelage of a German-born conductor like Anton Seidl, Leopold and Walter Damrosch in New York, Theodore Thomas in Chicago, and Emil Oberhoffer in Minneapolis.

The artists performing with and in these orchestras did not count among the typical melee of immigrants who had turned their backs on Europe in order to settle in the United States. Instead, they very much resembled today's international artistic community personified by stars like Daniel Barenboim, Placido Domingo and Frank Zimmermann; these men and some women were constantly on the road, performing one week in Berlin, the next one in Paris and two weeks later in New York. And even if they had seasonal contracts in an American metropolis, most of them shuttled back across the ocean for the summer in order to visit the various musical centers, hire new instrumentalists and acquire novel compositions.