Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War 9780520950092

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. The Paris of the West: San Francisco at the Turn of the Century
Part One. From the Quake to the Crash
2. The Politics of Class The San Francisco Symphony, the People’s Philharmonic, and the Lure of European Culture (1911 - 1930)
3. The Politics of Race: Chinatown, Forbidden and Alluring
INTERLUDE 1: Two Musical Tributes to San Francisco’s Chinatown
4. The Politics of Labor: The Union(s), the Clubs and Theaters, and the Predicament of Black Musicians
5. Musical Utopias: Ada Clement, Ernest Bloch, and the San Francisco Conservatory
6. Opera: The People’s Music or a Diversion for the Rich?
Part Two. The Depression and Beyond
7. The Despair of the Depression and the Clash of Race
8. Ultramodernism and Other Contemporary Offerings: Looking West, Challenging the East
9. The Politics of Work: Idealism Confronts Bureaucracy in the Federal Music Project
INTERLUDE 2. Highlights from San Francisco’s Federal Music Project: Take Your Choice and Keeton’s Concert Spirituals
10. Welcoming the World: San Francisco’s Fairs of 1915 and 1939 - 1940
11. Aftermath
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Music and Politics in San Francisco

CA LIFOR N I A STU DIE S I N 20TH-CEN TU RY MUSIC Richard Taruskin, General Editor 1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy

Music and Politics in San Francisco From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War

Leta E. Miller

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR NIA PR ESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Leta E. Music and politics in San Francisco : from the 1906 quake to the Second World War / Leta E. Miller. p. cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26891-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Music—Political aspects—California—San Francisco— History—20th century. I. Title. ml3917.u6m55 2012 780.9794'6109041—dc22 2011013960  

Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

12

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

To the memory of my dear friend and colleague Catherine Parsons Smith who first encouraged me to focus my research on music in the United States, and whose book on the musical life of Los Angeles served as an inspiration for the present volume

Con ten ts

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. The Paris of the West: San Francisco at the Turn of the Century

ix xi xiii 1

Part One. From the Quake to the Crash 2. The Politics of Class: The San Francisco Symphony, the People’s Philharmonic, and the Lure of European Culture (1911–1930)

31

3. The Politics of Race: Chinatown, Forbidden and Alluring

63

interlude 1. Two Musical Tributes to San Francisco’s Chinatown 4. The Politics of Labor: The Union(s), the Clubs and Theaters, and the Predicament of Black Musicians

83

92

5. Musical Utopias: Ada Clement, Ernest Bloch, and the San Francisco Conservatory

106

6. Opera: The People’s Music or a Diversion for the Rich?

131

Part Two. The Depression and Beyond 7. The Despair of the Depression and the Clash of Race

167

8. Ultramodernism and Other Contemporary Offerings: Looking West, Challenging the East

180

9. The Politics of Work: Idealism Confronts Bureaucracy in the Federal Music Project

214

interlude 2. Highlights from San Francisco’s Federal Music Project: Take Your Choice and Keeton’s Concert Spirituals

238

10. Welcoming the World: San Francisco’s Fairs of 1915 and 1939–1940

247

11. Aftermath

266

Notes References Index

279 315 343

I l lust r at ions

MAPS

1. San Francisco in 1913 5 2. Historical map of San Francisco dated 1909, showing pre-1906 street configuration 10 3. The stages in the location of the opera house, 1912–1932 146 F IGU R E S

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Lobby of the Palace Hotel before 1906 12 San Francisco’s old city hall before the 1906 quake 13 The old city hall and Larkin Street after the 1906 quake 19 Woodcut of Henry Kimball Hadley 38 Herman Perlet 46 Caricature of Alfred Hertz 54 Women’s gallery, Jackson Street Chinese Theater, mid-1880s Chinese instruments: erhu and dizi 66 Inside the Jackson Street Chinese Theater before 1906 69 Paderewski and Marsick listening to Chinese music at a merchants’ club 70 Postcard of the Mandarin Theatre, ca. 1940 76 Sid LeProtti’s So Different Orchestra, 1915 100 Ada Clement 107 Albert Elkus, 1946 109 ix

65

x

Illustrations

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Ernest Bloch, 1928 117 Luisa Tetrazzini performing on Christmas Eve, 1910 133 Tivoli Theater, ca. 1880 140 Columbia Theater 144 Wilbert Baranco and his jazz trio 175 Henry Cowell, ca. 1923–24 183 Lou Harrison in the 1930s 194 The Northwestern University Band, 1905 231 W. Elmer Keeton and his FMP chorus 232 Sculpture of a Chinese musician by Helen Phillips 252 Justitia Davis and Everett Boucré in Run Little Chillun’ 261 TA BL E S

1. Population comparison of the country’s largest cities, 1900–1920 32 2. The original members of the Board of Governors of the Musical Association 36 3. Compositions by Henry Hadley programmed during his tenure as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony 43 4. Financial summary for the San Francisco Symphony’s first three seasons 45 5. Repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera in San Francisco, 1900 and 1901 6. Cities and number of performances on the Metropolitan Opera’s 1901 tour 138 7. Some of the major subscribers to the opera house project, 1912 147 8. Bohemian Club Grove Plays, 1902–1933 159 9. Henry Cowell’s New Music Society concerts 193 10. San Francisco Federal Music Project concerts, March 1937 226 11. San Francisco Federal Music Project classes, March 1937 227 12. Comparison of the musical offerings on two days of the PPIE and GGIE 254 13. San Francisco’s population in 1940, 1950, and 2000 275

137

For additional images related to this book, visit www.ucpress.edu/go/letamiller

Ack now l ed gm en ts

This book could not have been written without the invaluable help of friends, colleagues, librarians, and assistants. Jonathan Elkus, David Nicholls, and Wayne Shirley read the entire manuscript. Bell Yung and Nancy Rao read the chapter on Chinese music. Paul Machlin and David Brackett commented on portions of chapter 4 dealing with jazz. Larry Rothe read material on the San Francisco Symphony. John Koegel sent extensive comments on the original proposal. The observations of all of these generous colleagues were very much welcome and have found their way into the final version of the text. Yen-ling Liu provided a wonderful service by searching through Chineselanguage newspapers and translating relevant articles. Daniel Brown and Danny Driver worked with me on the transcription of the Keeton choir recordings. The examples presented in “Interlude 2” reflect this joint work. Other colleagues, too, lent their ears to evaluating these recordings: Anatole Leikin, Patrice Maginnis, and Brian Staufenbiel. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to interview several people who could shed light on topics of interest by relating their personal experiences. I particularly thank in this regard Jonathan Elkus, who has been an inspiration and a continuous source of new observations for the past three years. Earl Watkins (who died in 2007) provided fascinating observations on the musical labor unions, and Carmen Fraetis and Caesar Caiati kindly provided information relating to the early years of the San Francisco Opera. Lou Harrison was the inspiration that launched this project in the first place, and my numerous interviews and conversations with him continue to inspire my work. Among the many librarians and archivists who have helped with this project, xi

xii

Acknowledgments

I particularly thank Jason Gibbs, head of the music division of the San Francisco Public Library. He was always available for consultation, and his extensive knowledge proved crucial to my research. Jeff Thomas, the library’s photo archivist, located the amazing photo shown as figure 16 and arranged for my use of selections from the library’s rich collection of visual images. Joseph Evans, archivist with the San Francisco Symphony, graciously provided me with information and images, as did the staff at the California Historical Society. Shannon McQueen at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, and Janet Olson at Northwestern University, helped me track down background information about Elmer Keeton, and Charlotte Brown at the University of California, Los Angeles, helped locate information on Harlé Jervis. The staff at the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, and members of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation (particularly Bill Carter and Leon Oakley), kindly provided me with access to the interview tapes and photos featuring pianist Sid LeProtti. Manuel Erviti, Matthew Weber, and John Shepard at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kevin McLaughlin at the San Francisco Conservatory welcomed me and aided with my research on Hertz, Bloch, and Perlet. Kate Rivers and other staff members at the Library of Congress were extremely gracious and efficient. And the constantly friendly service and encouragement of the library staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made this project possible. Officials of the San Francisco Musicians’ Union Local No. 6 were very supportive of my work. I would particularly like to acknowledge Gretchen Elliott, Alex Walsh, and Melinda Wagner. Thanks are due as well to Charles Hanson, executor of the Harrison estate, and to Ellen Bacon, widow of Ernst Bacon, both of whom made photographs, documents, and permissions readily available. Richard Teitelbaum kindly provided permission for me to use Cowell materials. Peter-Gabriel de Loriol was an invaluable source of information on his godmother, Harlé Jervis. Rabbis Paula Marcus and Yitzhak Miller provided valuable advice relating to Ernest Bloch’s Abodah. David Kear was a wonderful help in typesetting the musical examples, and Bill Nelson helped create the lovely maps. This book was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Committee on Research and Arts Research Institute). These grants provided funding for graduate student assistants Alissa Roedig, Mark Davidson, and Jessica Loranger. Victor Carvellas helped with the photographs. Mary Francis, music editor at the University of California Press, encouraged the project from the outset and was extremely patient with my many inquiries. Eric Schmidt rendered excellent advice regarding the text and photo images. Finally, I must thank my wonderful husband, Alan, who not only provided constant support through the long years of research but also contributed his own photography skills to enhancing the visual image of the book.

A bbr ev i at ions

AFL AFM ASCAP BMI BSO CHS CIO

CM CWA EO FERA FMP FTP GGIE ICG IEB MA MMS

American Federation of Labor (national organization of federated labor unions structured by craft) American Federation of Musicians (an affiliate of the AFL) American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (a nonprofit performance rights organization) Broadcast Music, Inc. (a performing rights organization and competitor to ASCAP) Boston Symphony Orchestra California Historical Society Originally the Committee for Industrial Organization, later changed to Congress of Industrial Organizations (national organization of federated labor unions structured by industry) Concertmaster Civil Works Administration (pre-WPA work project) Exposition Orchestra (the official orchestra of the PPIE) Federal Emergency Relief Administration (pre-WPA work project) Federal Music Project (part of the WPA) Federal Theatre Project (part of the WPA) Golden Gate International Exposition (1939–40) International Composers’ Guild International Executive Board (an arm of the AFM) Musical Association (the supervising body of the San Francisco Symphony from 1909 to 1935) Metropolitan Music Society xiii

xiv

Abbreviations

NAACC NAACP NARA NLM NMQ NMS NYPL PAAC PCMR PPIE SERA SF SFC SFMPD SFPL SFPP SFSS UC

UCB UCLA UCSC ULP WPA WPC

National Association for American Composers and Conductors National Association for the Advancement of Colored People National Archives and Records Administration National League of Musicians (early musicians’ union, precursor of the AFM) New Music Quarterly New Music Society of California New York Public Library Pan American Association of Composers Pacific Coast Musical Review Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915) State Emergency Relief Administration (California work project during the Depression) San Francisco San Francisco Conservatory San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design San Francisco Public Library San Francisco People’s Philharmonic (1912–17) San Francisco Symphony Society (predates the MA) University of California, founded 1868. Until 1919, there was only one campus, in Berkeley. In 1919 the “Southern Branch” was founded in Los Angeles; in 1927 its name was changed to UCLA. University of California, Berkeley University of California, Los Angeles University of California, Santa Cruz Union Labor Party Works Progress Administration (after 1939, called Work Projects Administration) Workingmen’s Party of California

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Music in America Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti, Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Dragan Plamenac Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

1

The Paris of the West San Francisco at the Turn of the Century

San Francisco is “a mad city,” wrote Rudyard Kipling of his visit in 1889, “inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.”1 Indeed, San Francisco’s reputation as brash, exotic, offbeat, diverse, free-spirited, opinionated, self-confident, quirky, and above all, fun was well established by the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, it was already known as the Paris of the West—a must-visit destination for tourists, mariners, sightseers, and fortune seekers, a city of mystery and intrigue, a gathering place for the world’s adventurers. San Francisco “is not only the most interesting city in the Union and the hugest smelting-pot of races,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but “she keeps, besides, the doors of the Pacific, and is the port of entry to another world and an earlier epoch in man’s history.”2 The city had grown up haphazardly—with little or no urban planning—as the locus of the gold rush, and it boasted a fiercely independent population of adventurers hailing from Europe, Asia, and the eastern United States. These immigrants, of course, brought with them not only their material possessions but also their musical cultures, fostering a fascinating, if at times unrefined, sonic diversity. Among the early settlers who particularly prized music as a historical marker were the Germans, who came to San Francisco in large numbers and proudly built on their long-established tradition of instrumental music.3 From the 1850s through the early years of the twentieth century, a series of conductors—mostly German (or German-trained)—attempted to establish high-quality professional orchestras. Rudolph Herold, Louis Homeier, Gustav Hinrichs, Fritz Scheel, Paul Steindorff, Frederick Wolle, William Zech: all founded symphonic groups that 1

2

The Paris of the West

flourished for short periods. All ultimately failed. When the San Francisco Symphony finally opened its first season in 1911, a U.S.-born conductor, Henry Hadley, was at the helm. Four years later, however, he was replaced by another German, Alfred Hertz, who built the orchestra into an outstanding ensemble and who remained in charge until the Depression. A large Italian contingent set up its own subcommunity in the North Beach area of the city and promoted opera so successfully that San Francisco became a magnet for traveling companies from the eastern United States, as well as from South America. The city’s first complete opera presentation took place in February 1851, only three years after James Marshall discovered gold at John Sutter’s mill.4 The establishment of a resident company, however, was hampered in the early twentieth century not only by the dearth of experienced singers, managers, and directors but also by the absence of a suitable venue. After April 1906, when all the major theaters were destroyed in the devastating earthquake and fire, political squabbling blocked the construction of an opera house for another twenty-six years. Nevertheless, an enterprising Italian, Gaetano Merola, managed to found the San Francisco Opera in the early 1920s; it performed in venues with frustratingly poor acoustics for a decade. Rival statues in Golden Gate Park mark the German and Italian musical territories. In 1914 the Italians erected a vibrant bronze tribute to Verdi at the climax of a grandiose operatic festival; it was unveiled in a ceremony that reportedly attracted twenty thousand people. Adult and children’s choirs sang, but the biggest attraction was San Francisco’s prized musical discovery—prima donna Luisa Tetrazzini, who had made her U.S. debut in the city in 1905.5 The following year the Germans weighed in with a sober tribute to Beethoven (a replica of the statue in New York’s Central Park), whose dedication inaugurated a threeday Beethoven Festival. A thousand people attended the statue’s unveiling and “bared their heads” as they listened to the band play the second movement of the Fifth Symphony. The dark-colored Beethoven, head bowed in deep contemplation, stands next to the park’s Temple of Music, an elegant stone shell and stage erected in 1900 with a donation from sugar king Claus Spreckels. In stark contrast, the gold-colored Verdi holds his head high, looking down on Beethoven and the music concourse from a hill behind the stage. Jewish entrepreneurs also arrived during San Francisco’s gold rush years and discovered a welcoming community in which to establish businesses that served the mining pioneers. By 1850 two synagogues (still functioning today) served the growing population: Temple Emanu-El, catering to the wealthy German Jews, and Sherith Israel, serving the eastern European immigrants. Among the early arrivals was Levi Strauss, who came to the city in March 1853. Two of his nephews, Jacob and Sigmund Stern—heirs to Strauss’s blue-jeans fortune—became particularly strong supporters of the arts, both visual and aural, as did numer-

The Paris of the West

3

ous other members of the Jewish community.6 Among the founders of the San Francisco Symphony, Jewish names appear in far greater numbers than their proportion in the population: Ehrman, Esberg, Fleischhacker, Gerstle, Haas, Hecht, Hellman, Jacobi, Koshland, Lilienthal, Schloss, Sloss, Stern, to name but a few. In later years, many of these patrons continued to serve San Francisco’s cultural community. Sidney Ehrman was one of the principal supporters of local violin wunderkind Yehudi Menuhin (whose father was a San Francisco Hebrew-school teacher); the Fleischhackers founded the San Francisco Zoo; Cora Koshland delighted in hosting elaborate musicales at her Presidio Heights mansion—modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles and complete with pipe organ—in which she could seat an audience of a hundred or host informal gatherings three times that size;7 and Rosalie Stern, in the 1930s, donated to the city a thirty-three-anda-half-acre grove near Golden Gate Park. The Sigmund Stern Grove, named in memory of her husband, continues to host operatic and orchestral outdoor music events that attract thousands of attendees. As early as 1849, Chinese gold-seekers began arriving in San Francisco in response to reports of the Sutter’s Mill discovery brought to China by U.S. sea traders. Thus began a virtual flood of Chinese immigrants to what they called Gam Saan (the “Golden Mountains”). By December of the following year, some 10,000 residents of the Guangdong (Canton) region had arrived in California to try their luck in the mining frenzy. Between 1848 and 1876, more than 200,000 Chinese arrived in the United States through San Francisco. Ineligible for citizenship, most came with the intention of making a quick fortune and returning to China; more than 90,000 returned to Asia in this same period.8 San Francisco became home to the largest community of Chinese in the nation. At the end of the century, there were twice as many Chinese in California as in the rest of the states combined. And within California, the largest community, by far, was in San Francisco. Out of 75,132 Chinese in California in 1880, for example, 21,745 lived in San Francisco, about four-and-a-half times the size of the next largest community (in Sacramento).9 San Francisco’s Chinese population—at first almost exclusively male—set up its own insular community, called Tangrenbu (Port of the People of Tang), occupying, by the century’s end, an area of about fifteen blocks in the heart of the city. Reviled by the surrounding white community, Chinatown provoked exaggerated tales of opium consumption, prostitution, and gambling in labyrinthine underground tunnels. At the same time, the area’s illicit reputation became a source of titillating curiosity, and Chinatown served, even in that era, as one of San Francisco’s main tourist attractions. Gullible visitors were led through the area by unscrupulous guides who staged street fights and paid residents to simulate drug havens. The Chinese opera, a link to these residents’ home culture, flourished in the era before the earthquake. Most white visitors—with some notable exceptions, as we will see—reported on the opera

4

The Paris of the West

with disdain, describing rudimentary scenery, endless and uninteresting plots, inattentive audiences, ear-splitting percussion, and screeching string sounds. The costumes were the sole element consistently praised. By the 1890s other Asian immigrants had begun to seek their fortunes in California—particularly the Japanese, who years earlier had established a large community in Hawaii. Near the end of the century, thousands of Japanese began coming to the mainland; many of them chose to work as farmers. In 1890 there were only 2,039 Japanese on the U.S. mainland; two decades later there were more than 72,000. Among these, 4,500 lived in San Francisco, about half the number of Chinese residents in the city in the same year.10 Unlike most other immigrants from either Europe or Asia, the Japanese tended to be highly educated (the Japanese government screened its emigrants to assure that they would represent their country well in their new homes),11 and at least some of them sympathized with the white vilification of the Chinese. They also brought their families, in contrast to the overwhelmingly male Chinese population. A fortune could be made (and quickly lost) in San Francisco through gold and, later, silver mining and its related industries—as well as through enterprising business dealings, the most visible of which was the transcontinental railroad. The Big Four railroad entrepreneurs—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—made big money and built big houses on Nob Hill (derisively dubbed Snob Hill by the less fortunate). Their descendants, in many cases, also became big supporters of the arts. The railroad, of course, brought other, less affluent newcomers. African Americans, who found employment as porters on the trains (one of the few jobs available to them in this openly racist industry) settled in large numbers in Oakland, the line’s terminus. The black population of San Francisco itself, however, remained small (less than 1 percent) until the early 1940s. The Oakland jazz scene, on the other hand, gained a rich history from the activities of this community.12 Discriminatory practices in the American Federation of Labor led black musicians to organize a separate “colored local” in the 1920s, covering the San Francisco and East Bay areas. Tensions with the far larger white local erupted during the next decade in a bitter legal battle.13 These (and other) ethnic communities rubbed shoulders uneasily in a small geographical area: The city’s outward expansion was contained by water on three sides, and its internal development was challenged by steep hills in the east and sand dunes in the west (Map 1). The rich and the poor lived almost within arm’s length of one another. From the mansions of the Big Four atop Nob Hill to the heart of Chinatown is less than a half mile (nearly straight down). Adjoining Chinatown on the north and east and stretching to the waterfront was the Barbary Coast, a shabby area of high crime, prostitution, gambling, general debauchery, and lively music. Pacific Street, its most active area, was, for

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Map 1. The northeastern part of San Francisco, based on an original map from 1913, showing areas of the city and some of the major hills and streets.

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1 Present day location of the opera house (1932) 2 Present day location of city hall (1915) 3 Present day location of Civic (Exposition) Auditorium (1915)

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6

The Paris of the West

the most part, “a solid mass of dance-halls, melodeons, cheap groggeries, wine and beer dens, which were popularly known as deadfalls; and concert saloons, which offered both dancing and entertainment.”14 At the turn of the century this area was the toughest in town. Murders were commonplace, and saloons dominated the landscape. In 1890 alone, the city issued 3,117 liquor licenses (one for every ninety-six residents), and many other establishments served alcoholic beverages illegally. Some of the more reputable places, such as the Bella Union, offered low-brow variety shows, and a few performers who appeared there, such as Lotta Crabtree, later established stage careers. Featured artists near the end of the century included the original Little Egypt from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Big Bertha, “a sprightly lass of two hundred and eighty pounds who sang sentimental ballads in a squeaky soprano.” 15 Big Bertha achieved renown in the mid-1880s as “a singer who couldn’t sing . . . and an actress who couldn’t act.” Her acting, indeed, was “so remarkably bad that she attracted audiences from all over San Francisco and brought to the Bella Union and the Barbary Coast hundreds of citizens who had never visited the quarter before and never did again.”16 Prostitution was rampant and tolerated by authorities; in fact, one place that operated a lively flesh trade from 1904 to 1907 was dubbed the “municipal crib”: patronized by a number of upstanding citizens, it offered sizeable kickbacks to city officials.17 Chinatown and the Barbary Coast shared close access to Portsmouth Square, an open area at Kearny and Washington Streets that was the center of San Francisco’s life in the city’s earliest years and continues today to serve as a recreational park for Chinatown residents. San Francisco in 1900 boasted an ethnic diversity remarkable to its visitors, but religiously and politically the city would hardly be recognizable to today’s inhabitants: it was predominantly Catholic and Republican.18 The clamor of its political infighting, the outspoken independence of its residents, and the unbridled candor of its various factions were as apparent then as they are now, but the city’s current reputation as a standard-bearer of the U.S. Left was hardly in evidence. There was, of course, a vocal liberal contingent, but there was also rampant racism, particularly directed toward the Chinese. The depression of 1873–78 spawned the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC), headed by Irish immigrant Denis Kearney. As part of its platform, the party promulgated a simpleminded, provocative, and contentious slogan: “The Chinese must go!” It even managed to elect a mayor, Isaac Kalloch, who served one two-year term (1879– 81).19 By 1881, the WPC was largely defunct, but its racist message was not. Passage of the national Exclusion Act of 1882—directed at the Chinese and prompted by racist agitation in California—forbade entry of Chinese laborers into the United States for ten years and set restrictions on reentry for those who had returned to Asia. (The new California constitution, adopted two years earlier, had contained even more severe anti-Chinese provisions, declaring the Chinese dangerous to

The Paris of the West

7

the well-being of the state, forbidding their employment by corporations and on public works projects, and excluding them from land ownership.) The national law, which was repeatedly extended, and whose restrictions were tightened before its ultimate repeal in 1943, effectively ended the massive influx of Chinese to San Francisco. The city’s Chinese population peaked in 1890 at 25,833.20 By 1900 it had dropped by almost half, to 13,954, and it continued to decline for the next twenty years. Aside from the overwhelming disdain directed at the Chinese, San Francisco otherwise heralded labor. Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city was truly a union town. Its musicians, like workers in other professions, began organizing as early as 1869; a branch of the National League of Musicians (NLM), precursor to the present-day American Federation of Musicians (AFM), was established in 1886; and when the AFM was founded as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1896, San Francisco musicians were among the first to join. AFM Local No. 6 dates from 1897.21 In 1901 a massive waterfront strike closed the port of San Francisco for two months, prompted by a conflict between the newly founded Teamsters National Union and the Draymen’s Association.22 Furious at Democratic mayor James Phelan’s support for the employers, and disaffected as well by the Republicans, who were beholden to the railroad and business interests, organized labor decided to found its own political entity: the Union Labor Party. On a platform of radical labor policy (including public ownership of utilities) and reactionary social views (notably the exclusion of Asians), the ULP succeeded in electing a mayor, Eugene Schmitz, in 1901.23 Schmitz was the president of the local musicians’ union. A violinist and theater musician, he had also tried his hand at composition. The city’s musicians turned out in force to celebrate his victory: Local 6 members marched at the heads of parades, and “whole orchestras joined them as soon as evening performances ended at the theaters.” 24 The choice of Schmitz for mayor was an odd one from the standpoint of the traditional blue-collar union contingent: many of them saw the musicians as an elitist group unwilling to get its hands dirty. Among the broader public voter base, however, Schmitz’s nomination was a brilliant move. It was engineered by a smart, ambitious, and unscrupulous lawyer and Republican party operative named Abraham Ruef, who had graduated from the University of California and held a law degree from its Hastings College. “Handsome Gene” Schmitz—who had no prior political experience—cut an attractive figure, articulated the ULP’s platform with eloquence, and marshaled, through his mother’s ethnic background, the support of the city’s ninety-five thousand Irish Catholics. Unfortunately, his six years as mayor (spanning the devastating quake of 1906) were marked by rampant graft. During Schmitz’s three terms, Ruef found his way onto the regular payroll of most important corporations doing business with the

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city. (He was paid as a legal consultant, allowing him later to justify outrageously large attorney fees.) He split his “fees” with Schmitz and the members of the board of supervisors. Schmitz himself was not blameless; but Ruef appears to have been the propulsive force behind the escalating graft. (Some historians, however, have argued that Ruef’s crimes were no worse than those of officials in other cities at the time.)25 San Francisco’s factionalism was fueled by a boisterous and sensationalistic press. At the turn of the century, five major dailies dominated the newspaper scene. Three vied for the morning readership: the Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Call. The Call was the oldest of them, founded by James Joseph Ayers and partners in 1856. John D. Spreckels, eldest son of industrialist Claus (who established the Spreckels Sugar Company), bought the paper in 1897. The Chronicle began life in January 1865 as a theatrical promotional sheet; the Daily Dramatic Chronicle was founded by Charles de Young and his two younger brothers, sons of a Dutch Jewish family from Saint Louis.26 By 1869, the paper, now called the Daily Morning Chronicle, boasted a circulation of sixteen thousand, stimulated by its blatant, tactless, and frequently unsubstantiated reports of scandalous gossip. Charles thrived on such controversy. By 1871 he had been sued for libel a dozen times and physically assaulted by two irate judges.27 At first, Charles supported the Workingmen’s Party, but he became disaffected with the group after it failed to back his efforts to form his own New Constitution Party— with himself as party boss. After the WPC nominated Isaac Kalloch for mayor in 1879, Charles launched a barrage of anti-Kalloch propaganda, digging up a twenty-two-year-old trial in Boston in which Kalloch faced charges of adultery (but which ended in a hung jury). Kalloch, minister of San Francisco’s enormous Baptist Metropolitan Temple, had for years fended off accusations of debauchery. He returned Charles’s verbal abuse in kind from his pulpit—adding to it an inflammatory accusation that de Young’s mother was a prostitute—prompting de Young to shoot him at point-blank range on August 23, 1879. Kalloch miraculously survived, despite two bullet wounds (one in the chest), and he won the sympathy (and the votes) of the populace: in the mayoral election of September 3, he defeated his Republican challenger by 519 votes. Seven months later, Kalloch’s son returned de Young’s favor, fatally shooting the editor in his office. Milton Kalloch was acquitted in the subsequent trial. After this Wild West drama, Michael (M. H.) de Young took charge of “a somewhat chastened” Chronicle, remaining at its helm for the next forty-five years. (His name lives on in San Francisco’s cultural life in the form of the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park.) The Examiner was founded in June 1865 on the ruins of the Daily Democratic Press, a short-lived pro-Confederacy publication that folded in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Mining entrepreneur George Hearst (later a U.S. senator) bought the Examiner in 1880 and seven years later gave it to his son,

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William Randolph, whose parlaying of the paper into a national chain of sensationalistic rags and subsequent rise to fame and fortune are legendary. Hearst’s elegant mansion near Santa Barbara, with its priceless collection of art and furnishings, continues to attract thousands of visitors a year. The evening newspaper audience was dominated by the San Francisco Bulletin, founded in 1855 and boasting, in the early years of the twentieth century, an activist managing editor, Fremont Older, who strenuously crusaded against the graft-ridden Schmitz administration. The Bulletin competed with the smaller evening Post, controlled by Patrick Calhoun, grandson of John Calhoun, the former South Carolina senator and U.S. vice president who openly advocated for the preservation—and expansion—of slavery. Patrick Calhoun was president of United Railroads, the company that controlled San Francisco’s cable-car and streetcar system. Among the other periodicals in the city was the weekly Argonaut, founded in 1877 and featuring critical arts coverage. Various foreign language papers, too, attracted a local readership. The Oriental (Zhongxi hui bao), for instance, was one of the first Chinese language papers in the country. Other ethnic communities had their own papers: Two that figure prominently in San Francisco’s musical life targeted Italian residents: L’Italia, edited by Ettore Patrizi, and La Voce del Popolo, edited by Ottorino Ronchi. Of particular interest to the present study is the weekly Pacific Coast Musical Review (PCMR), founded in the early years of the century. From 1907 to 1924 the PCMR published every Saturday; it then continued less frequently (and increasingly irregularly) up to 1931. Its editor, Alfred Metzger, tried to document all of the classical music concerts in the city—and evaluate the majority of them. His (nonindexed) publication is thus a treasure trove of information, providing a portrait, during more than a quarter century, of the classical music scene. San Francisco experienced exponential expansion during its first fifty years— growing from about 500 inhabitants in 1847 to 342,782 in 1900—unrestricted by any coherent urban planning. Although largely unremarkable architecturally in this early period, the city could boast a few notable landmarks. Among the most prominent was a new ferry building, celebrating San Francisco’s most important business: shipping. Designed by local architect Arthur Page Brown (but not completed until after his tragic death at age thirty-six in 1896), the ferry building opened in 1898.28 With its impressive clock tower, inspired by the Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain, the ferry building still stands proudly at the base of Market Street, a 120-foot-wide thoroughfare that sweeps diagonally from the waterfront through the heart of the city’s commercial center (see Map 2). Proceeding down Market, away from the harbor, a visitor in the early years of the century would soon encounter the eleven-story flatiron Crocker Building, also designed by Brown, which distinctively marked the intersection of Market,

N

3 7

4

5

2

6

8

1

1 2 3 4

Old city hall area Newspaper corner, Lotta’s Fountain Barbary Coast Portsmouth Square

5 6 7 8

Dupont Street (now Grant Ave.) Palace Hotel (1875) Ferry Building Grand Opera House (1873–1906)

Map 2. Detail of a historical map of San Francisco, dated 1909, but showing the pre1906 arrangement of streets in the northeastern part of the city. Note especially the city hall area, which was reconfigured after the quake as shown in map 1. (Original map at the University of California, Santa Cruz.)

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Post, and Montgomery. Just ahead on the left was (and still is) the massive Palace Hotel, completed in 1875 at a cost of about $5 million.29 Seven stories high, with 755 rooms (most with fifteen-foot ceilings), and potentially accommodating twelve hundred guests, the Palace, upon its completion, projected an image of ostentatious overabundance in a town that Oscar Lewis and Carroll Hall characterize as “crude, noisy, unkempt, . . . its streets lined with buildings reflecting the worst features of the debased architectural taste of the period.”30 Indeed, photos taken at the time show the Palace to be the biggest structure in downtown, completely overshadowing anything around it. The prequake hotel featured a famous Grand Court (84 by 144 feet) covered by a skylight—originally a carriage entrance, but converted around the turn of the century into a luxurious lobby. Colonnaded balconies beneath this glass roof offered guests stunning views of the lobby’s opulent furniture and oversized potted palms. (Figure 1 shows the Palm Court in the lobby as well as several stories of rooms and balconies.) Reinforcing iron rods built into the Palace’s two-foot-thick brick walls protected the building from earthquakes, and a private water supply promised to forestall any possible damage by fire. A series of artesian wells with a capacity of 28,000 gallons per hour were drilled on the site, and a storage reservoir in the subbasement held 630,000 gallons of water. Another 130,000 gallons were held in seven tanks on the roof. Pumps in the basement, twenty thousand feet of fire hose, and five miles of pipe assured distribution of water throughout the building—a reflection of San Francisco’s many fires in its early years. The Palace proudly housed visiting nobility, including famous stars of opera and theater. Adelina Patti stayed there in 1884 and Sarah Bernhardt in 1887, Ignacy Paderewski in 1896, and Enrico Caruso in 1905 and 1906. Nearly across the street from the Palace, at the intersection of Market, Kearny, Geary, and Third, was Lotta’s Fountain, donated to the city by actress-singer Lotta Crabtree and erected in the same year that the Palace opened. At that same intersection—dubbed “newspaper corner”—rose the tallest building in the city, the 315-foot Call tower, erected by John Spreckels in 1896 and adorned at the time with an ornate dome and four eight-sided corner turrets.31 The striking Chronicle building (begun in 1889 and completed in June 1890), with its distinctive clock tower, stood across the street; heralded as earthquake- and fireproof, the building was the first steel-framed skyscraper in the city. The more modest Hearst Building, housing the Examiner, was on the other side of Market. A block south—on Mission, between Third and Fourth—stood the Grand Opera House, which accommodated nearly four thousand patrons. The theater’s location proved highly convenient for visiting opera stars staying nearby at the Palace. Formerly called Wade’s Opera House (1873–76) and renamed the Grand in 1876, the theater was one of the largest opera houses in the country but, like the

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Figure 1. The Palm Court section of the lobby of the Palace Hotel, before 1906. The entire lobby was covered by a massive glass canopy. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN-04771/CHS2010.354.tif.)

Palace, was too big for its locale. The Grand paid for itself only toward the end of its life, when it featured melodrama.32 About eight blocks farther from the wharves, Market Street intersects Van Ness Avenue at an angle of about forty-five degrees (see Map 2). Van Ness, at that time the site of numerous luxurious mansions, constitutes the main thoroughfare from downtown to Fort Mason at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. Near this intersection, on a triangle of land bounded by McAllister, Larkin, and the no-longer-existing City Hall Avenue, stood San Francisco’s brand new city hall (Figure 2). The building’s cornerstone had been laid on February 22, 1872, but (in typical San Francisco fashion) political wrangling and graft delayed its construction for more than a quarter century.33 The completed building, designed by Augustus Laver but modified by “numerous profiteering ‘builders,’ ” 34 featured an ostentatious dome that was dedicated on July 12, 1897, with two concerts of “high-class music.” A thirty-piece orchestra performed excerpts from operas by Bizet, Gounod, Wagner, and others.35 Even then the building’s woes did not end:

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Figure 2. San Francisco’s old city hall. The streets shown are McAllister and City Hall Avenue (see Map 2). The building’s dome was dedicated in 1897, and the entire structure collapsed in the 1906 quake. (Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; photo AAB-7791.)

unfinished interiors, roof leaks, and a small fire delayed its completion until the turn of the century. The total cost for the structure, when it was finally finished, was $5,723,000. West of Van Ness is the area called the Western Addition, inhabited in this era by an eclectic mix of racial groups and professional interests (see Map 1). Except in the case of the Chinese, residential segregation in San Francisco was rare, and many blacks moved into this part of the city during the 1920s. By 1930 this onesquare-mile area—which later hosted the postwar, jazz-rich Fillmore district— “became the hub of black life.” 36 Farther west is the thousand-acre, rectangular Golden Gate Park, begun during the 1870s on “outside lands” composed of sand dunes. The Midwinter International Exhibition of 1894 destroyed a large portion of the newly developed park, despite the strenuous opposition of conservationists, but the area was subsequently restored and today hosts museums (including the de Young), the music concourse, and the ever-popular Japanese Tea Garden, whose caretaker during the 1894 fair, Makoto Hagiwara, invented the so-called Chinese fortune cookie.37

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T H R E E DAYS T H AT C H A NGE D SA N F R A NC I S C O

In the wee hours of the morning of April 16, 1906, more than two hundred members of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company arrived in San Francisco as part of a cross-country tour. They took up residence at the city’s luxury hotels, many of them at the Palace, including conductor Alfred Hertz, business manager Ernest Goerlitz, and famed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. The trip was the Met’s fourth visit to San Francisco since the beginning of the century. A three-week season in November 1900 had been followed by a thirty-performance extravaganza the following fall. The 1905 season was shorter, but proved extremely lucrative: the ten-day residency generated a record-breaking income of nearly $120,000 (equivalent to about $2.6 million in 2010). Indeed, San Francisco had developed a reputation as “the best grand opera city in the United States outside of New York,”38 and the 1905 season held two tantalizing attractions. One was Caruso, who had made his debut with the Met only sixteen months earlier. The second was Wagner’s Parsifal, which had had its U.S. stage premiere in New York on Christmas Eve 1903, conducted by Hertz. Parsifal was featured in every city except Salt Lake on the Met’s sixteen-city 1905 tour. The company’s stop in San Francisco was the longest in any town, and only there was the opera performed three times, with packed houses. Hertz again conducted.39 Given this illustrious history, the return of the Met (and Caruso) in 1906 generated great excitement. The Metropolitan Opera Company’s local manager predicted that the season “would go on record as the most brilliant occasion of the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast,”40 and reviews of the opening performance on Monday night, April 16, not only dealt with the music but also provided a detailed listing of the occupants of the boxes, caricatures of some of the wealthy patrons, and descriptions of the gowns of about a hundred women of the “smart set.”41 Reviews of the music were far less enthusiastic. Ashton Stevens in the Examiner was particularly harsh: he liked the sets and ensembles, but found Hertz’s conducting “heavy-handed” and suggested that Karl Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba (The Queen of Sheba) was the “wrong opera and wrong singers,” an ill-chosen opener that failed to feature the company’s famous stars. Peter Robertson in the Chronicle was somewhat kinder; he found Hertz “effective,” but disparaged Goldmark: “Whatever the subtle something in music is that seizes and arouses our excitement, Goldmark’s ‘The Queen of Sheba’ has not got it.” 42 No matter, though. The Goldmark performance was simply a warm-up for the next night’s sold-out production of Carmen, featuring Olive Fremstad in the title role and Caruso as Don José. (Caruso had sung the role for the first time only two months earlier in Philadelphia.)43 Slated for later in the week were a series of productions sure to draw record crowds: on Wednesday, Figaro in the afternoon and Lohengrin in the evening (Hertz again conducting); on Thursday, La bohème (again with Caruso);

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on Friday, Die Walküre; and on Saturday, a grand finale featuring a double bill in the afternoon—Don Pasquale and Hansel and Gretel—and Faust in the evening. Carmen, by all reports, was a triumph, though it was Caruso, not Fremstad, who made the headlines. The leading lady elicited decidedly lukewarm reviews. Critics judged her intelligent, but stiff, “dutchy,” nonseductive, and temperamentally unsuited to the role. Furthermore, they compared her unfavorably to others who had previously sung Carmen in San Francisco. In contrast, they raved about Caruso: “It did not seem possible to put anything new into Don Jose . . . but Caruso did it,” thrilling the audience with his “effortless art” and “dramatic fire.” Blanche Partington summed up the prevailing sentiment about the unchallenged hero of the evening: “He made one forget that it was only an opera.”44 In the audience that night were several singers from the University of California’s Glee Club and its pianist, Albert Elkus, who would later head the university’s music department. The group had been in Santa Rosa (north of San Francisco, in Sonoma County) during the spring break. “They were to have performed that night at the hotel where they were to have spent the night,” recalls Elkus’s son Jonathan, “but everyone wanted to go to San Francisco to hear Caruso and Fremstad—and Carmen itself, which was but thirty years old at the time and still vivid. The Glee Club persuaded the management to announce the concert for that afternoon [instead], which it did, freeing the Cal boys to take the late afternoon train and the Sausalito ferry to San Francisco. After Carmen, Albert proceeded to an uncle’s house in Oakland. A few hours later the hotel in Santa Rosa collapsed,” with numerous fatalities.45 Indeed, at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, San Francisco residents were shaken awake first by a foreshock and then, about twenty seconds later, by a massive earthquake that lasted for nearly a minute.46 Amazingly, although the tall buildings in the downtown area waved “like trees in a storm,” their tops “nodding good morning to each other,”47 most of them survived, with considerable interior damage, but structurally intact. Terrified guests at the Palace hid under covers, rolled under beds, braced themselves under door lintels, or grabbed frantically on to anything that could offer protection. As soon as the shaking stopped, they ran out of their rooms in their nightclothes. Alfred Hertz, who had been awakened by a pitcher of ice water falling on his head and then had watched an upright piano and a wardrobe trunk converge on his bed from opposite sides of the room, stumbled down the Palace Hotel’s fire escape into the lobby, which was littered with broken shards from its shattered glass canopy.48 “The spectacle it presented was amazing,” reported O. M. Nichols, a commercial traveler from New York. “All the potted plants that had adorned the balustrade had been shaken down and smashed on the pavement of the courtyard. In the court itself, and in the halls and corridors, were hundreds of guests in the skimpiest of raiment, many of them sobbing or screaming.”49

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Everyone seemed to have a story about Caruso, who embraced Hertz “hysterically, and, crying like a child, repeatedly insisted that [they were] doomed and all were about to die.”50 A. W. Benson, another hotel guest, recalled that “in the halls and corridors and down the stairways[,] people were leaping and galloping in a frenzy of terror”; the stairways were covered with plaster, their boards torn loose. Caruso “was running about in the scantiest of attire, shouting excitedly and twirling at his moustache with unconscious nervousness.” Josephine Jacoby, who had sung in Carmen the previous night, described the tenor as tearing “about in a frantic state, rejecting all attempts at consolation.”51 Locals, who had survived numerous quakes—including several small ones in 1903 and two stronger ones in 1905—seemed unperturbed. Hertz watched a Chinese employee of the Palace calmly clean glass fragments from the easy chairs and carpets in the lobby, as if the quake “were a daily occurrence.”52 After the first shock subsided, most of the guests struggled back to their rooms to dress. “Great chasms had opened in the stairways and seemed to yawn at us,” recalled Benson. “These we had to crawl across or jump over; and all the time we had the apprehension that the quake would start again and the whole building would come tumbling over our heads.”53 Outside, the streets were littered with fallen masonry, trolley tracks were twisted into bizarre shapes, and gaping holes trapped unsuspecting animals loosed from their pens. Three days later, a visitor from Nebraska remembered the pitiful scene of cattle and horses “swallowed in a gap made by the earthquake,” and then trapped by a fallen wall. Newspaperman Frank Louis Ames remembered “electric wires . . . on the pavements, spitting blue flames and writhing like snakes. I saw a fire team run into one, which tangled about one of the horses’ legs. The horse fell and then his mate went down[;] both were electrocuted in an instant.”54 In a ten-page (unpublished) reminiscence, Goerlitz, the Met’s manager, recounted his frantic (and ultimately successful) efforts to track down the twohundred-plus members of the opera company over the next two days.55 In the immediate aftermath of the quake, Goerlitz found his way back to his room and tried to wash up, “but only an ink-like fluid flowed from the faucets.” After dressing, he made his way through the treacherous streets, where “bricks and cornices were still falling promiscuously,” first to the St. Francis Hotel to check on other opera personnel, and then to the Grand Opera House. To his amazement, Goerlitz found the hall almost untouched: “The marble tiling around the lobby was somewhat disarranged and a little mortar from the ceiling lay on the floor; otherwise the fine large lobby showed no signs of destruction. I looked into the Auditorium, and as far as I could notice in the dim light, all orchestra chairs looked perfectly clean and the ceiling, curtain and proscenium perfectly intact.” At first Goerlitz thought that the Figaro matinee could proceed as planned, but then wisely decided to cancel it. Ominously, as he returned to the Palace to

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organize the company for the rest of the performances, he spotted fires in the distance. The Met singers transferred their trunks to the basement of the St. Francis (thought to be a safer location) and set up Union Square as a meeting place. The fires that ultimately consumed the heart of San Francisco erupted simultaneously at numerous locations during the early morning. More than fifty initial blazes ignited from overturned stoves, ruptured gas mains, and broken electrical wires. The fire department turned out in force, but found most of the hydrants dry. Three outlying major reservoirs and nine smaller distribution reservoirs had withstood the quake and potentially held enough water to combat the blazes. 56 In many cases, however, they were rendered nearly useless by the rupture of smaller distribution lines feeding thousands of service pipes. About 300 distribution mains and 23,200 connecting pipes simply shattered from the land displacement. In the downtown area, brittle iron pipes had been buried in spongy soil. These low-lying areas, which had been part of the bay a half century earlier, had been filled with sand, earth, and garbage to create buildable lots. When the quake struck, the unstable landfill shook like jelly and, in some cases, liquefied and sank as much as four or five feet. The iron pipes shattered, unleashing their water into the soil or in useless water jets that dowsed areas where the water was not needed. Smaller reservoirs quickly emptied as a result. Exacerbating the firefighters’ predicament was the heat of the flames, which, at temperatures of up to two thousand degrees, scorched the hoses, turning what little water there was into steam.57 Efforts to pump water from the bay over the next two days were hampered not only by logistical inconveniences and broken hoses, but also by mismatched couplings (a result of differing federal and municipal standards) that thwarted attempts at creating usable connections.58 By 9 a.m. on the morning of the quake, the fire department, in desperation, began using explosives to create firebreaks. Through inexperience, ignorance, and simple ineptitude, these efforts for the most part spread the fires more widely. With dynamite in short supply, the firemen turned to gunpowder—and often ignited woodwork in the process. Inexperienced workers placed explosives in unwise locations, blasted the wrong sides of walls, accidentally set wooden buildings ablaze instead of collapsing them, and generally acted without any coherent or informed plan. By 9:30 the opera house had burned to the ground. By 11 the fire had reached Market Street, and the Call building was engulfed in flames.59 The Examiner’s offices, housed in a flimsier structure, had collapsed in the initial temblor. The Chronicle building withstood the quake, but, despite being heralded in 1889 as the “only absolutely fire-proof structure on the coast,” 60 it too succumbed to the inferno. The Palace, on the other hand, had its own water supply, and its employees began hosing down the building to protect it from the approaching conflagration. James Byrne, later one of the founders of the city’s symphony, was staying at the Palace at the time and reported on the ultimately futile attempts by

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the hotel staff to fend off the flames. “The heat on the fire escapes was at times terrific,” he wrote, “and the boys were often compelled to hold an arm up to protect their faces while trying to manage the hose with only one hand. Nevertheless they stuck to their job manfully, and they fought off the fires on the west and south sides of the hotel so successfully that it seemed to me at this time,—I suppose it was somewhere about 9:30 o’clock,—that no menace to the Palace any longer existed.”61 While the other buildings in the area burned uncontrollably, the Palace, by late morning, was still 92 percent intact.62 By early afternoon, however, the fire department had attached its own hoses to the Palace’s hydrants, and the army (which had arrived in force to maintain order in the increasingly chaotic city) commandeered the basement reservoir in an effort to save the mint. (It survived.) Deprived of protection, the Palace caught on fire, and by the end of the day this magnificent altar to opulence was in complete ruin. Mechanics’ Pavilion, near the city hall, was at first used as an infirmary. By the afternoon, however, it too was threatened and all patients were evacuated. The building caught on fire soon after. San Francisco’s new city hall, so long in the planning and construction, and inaugurated with such fanfare only nine years earlier, was reduced to ruin, its ostentatious spire broken into rubble (Figure 3). In the crowded areas around Portsmouth Square, bedlam reigned. “The panic was indescribable,” wrote Charles Morris, a Pennsylvania writer who arrived in San Francisco soon after the quake and published one of the first balanced accounts of events, which he assembled from eyewitness reports, most of them dependable, a few utterly fantastic. Reflecting the racism pervasive in the city, Morris portrayed the Chinese as rushing into the square “from their underground burrows like so many rats . . . , trembling in terror . . . , and seeking by beating gongs and other noise-making instruments to scare off the underground demons.” On the other side of the square lived “thousands of Italians, Spaniards and Mexicans, while close at hand lived the riff-raff of the ‘Barbary Coast.’ Seemingly the whole of these rushed for that one square of open ground, the two streams meeting in the centre of the square and heaping up on its edges. There they squabbled and fought in the madness of panic and despair, as so many mad wolves might have fought when caught in the red whirl of a prairie fire, until the soldiers broke in and at the bayonet’s point brought some semblance of order out of the confusion of panic terror.” 63 Opera impresario Fortune Gallo, who was resident in the city at the time, provides a strikingly contradictory account. “The San Francisco Chinese came plodding out of their flats and houses, dragging trunks, baby carriages, furniture of all descriptions with them,” Gallo recalled. “There was no panic, no wild wailing, no hysteria. There was about them a sort of fatalistic calm acceptance of their lot.” 64 Gallo’s image of trunks appears frequently in other eyewitness reports as well.

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Figure 3. The old city hall and Larkin Street on April 23, 1906, five days after the earthquake. (Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; photo AAC-2952.)

Jack London, who lived forty miles from San Francisco, arrived in the city that first evening to prepare a report for Collier’s. “Throughout the night,” he wrote, fled tens of thousands of homeless ones. Some were wrapped in blankets, others carried bundles of bedding and dear household treasures. . . . Baby buggies, toy wagons, and go-cars were used as trucks, while every other person was dragging a trunk. Yet . . . the most perfect courtesy obtained. Never, in all San Francisco’s history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror. All night these tens of thousands fled before the flames. Many of them, the poor people from the labor ghetto, had fled all day as well. They held on longest to their trunks, and over these trunks many a strong man broke his heart that night. . . . Before the march of the flames were flung picket lines of soldiers. And a block at a time, as the flames advanced, these pickets retreated. One of their tasks was to keep the trunk-pullers moving. The exhausted creatures, stirred on by the menace of bayonets, would arise and struggle up the steep pavements, pausing from weakness every five or ten feet.65

Residents from all parts of the city headed for the ferries, which the Southern Pacific operated without charge.66 Others took refuge in the open spaces of Gol-

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den Gate Park, far to the west of the ravaging flames, where a makeshift tent city offered a modicum of protection and privacy, and where people from diverse social classes—united in a single body of the homeless—mingled in uncommon bonds of mutual sympathy. Those with some money were only slightly better off. Alfred Hertz managed to hire a buggy to Golden Gate Park that first day: “We had to pass through streets where, on both sides, houses were burning and the heat was almost unbearable.” He spent the night squeezed with other refugees into an abandoned streetcar, kept awake by the “sirens, the blowing of horns of automobiles policing the streets, the constant firing of guns and the continuous dynamiting of buildings.” 67 The following day Hertz found his way to the Presidio. There he discovered Caruso, who had been brandishing a signed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt in an attempt to bypass the riffraff and secure favored treatment from military and police officials.68 The tenor, by most reports, was dazed and bewildered, but he joked with Gallo, saying he hoped his voice had not set off the quake.69 The previous morning, photographer Arnold Genthe had seen Caruso near the entrance to the St. Francis Hotel “with a fur coat over his pajamas, smoking a cigarette and muttering . . . ‘ ’Ell of a place! I never come back here.’ ”70 Both he and Hertz managed to board a ferry for Oakland, where they found Goerlitz and most of the opera company. The manager himself crossed to and from the burning city by ferry until he had accounted for all members of the troupe and assured their arrival in the East Bay. Through the cooperation of the railroad, the Met’s special train, with its eight Pullman cars, dining car, and baggage cars, left Oakland on Friday, April 20, and arrived in New York six days later. The company and its artists lost nearly everything but their lives. Out of about five hundred trunks, only thirty were recovered. Heinrich Conried, the Met’s director, settled with the artists and orchestra members for about a quarter of a million dollars (equivalent to about $6 million in 2010). Scenery, costumes, properties, and music for nineteen operas had been destroyed.71 Caruso, true to his word, never returned to San Francisco. Hertz too, one would imagine, had by now seen quite enough of the Paris of the West. His reaction, however, was the opposite. Moved by the spirit of the people and the beauty of the landscape, he accepted a position, nine years later, as the symphony’s second conductor. Most of San Francisco’s society crowd left the city more comfortably than had the walking masses heading for the bay or the homeless refugees seeking shelter in Golden Gate Park. Many of the rich drove or hired buggies that took them southward down the peninsula to vacation estates or the homes of relatives. Others crossed northward into Marin County by ferry across the Golden Gate. Though the fire department tried to save the mansions of Nob Hill, by Thursday morning (the day after the quake) the Stanford mansion and the multi-milliondollar Hopkins house (“San Francisco’s first cultural center held in trust by the

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University of California for the San Francisco Art Institute”)72 were ablaze. Both were ultimately destroyed. On Thursday, a decision was made to blow up residences along Van Ness Avenue, a street wide enough to serve as a firebreak and thus prevent the flames from engulfing the western part of the city. This drastic action, coupled with a change in wind direction, halted the fire’s westward trek and marked the major turning point in the battle against the blaze. New outbreaks on Friday were more easily quelled, and by Saturday morning the fires had been extinguished. Then a cold driving rain drenched the city, arriving too late to help the firefighters, but adding to the misery of the homeless. That night on Broderick Street near Golden Gate Park, Charles Morris witnessed an incident that reflected the city’s indomitable spirit: It was nigh ten o-clock and the stars were shining after the rain. Fires gleamed up and down through the shrubbery[,] and the refugees sat huddled together about the flames, with their blankets about their heads, Apache-like, in an effort to dry out after the wetting of the afternoon. [A] piano, dripping with moisture, stood on the curb, near the front of a cottage which had been wrecked by the earthquake. A youth with a shock of red hair sat on a cracker box and pecked at the ivories. “Home Ain’t Nothing Like This” was thrummed from the rusting wires with true vaudeville dash and syncopation. “Bill Bailey,” “Good Old Summer Time,” “Dixie” and “In Toyland” followed. Three young men with handkerchiefs wrapped about their throats in lieu of collars stood near the pianist and with him lifted up their voices in melody. The harmony was execrable, the time without excuse, but the songs ran through the trees of the Panhandle, and the crows, forgetting their misery for a time, joined the strange chorus.73

OU T OF T H E RU I NS

The three disastrous days sparked by one minute of terror on the morning of April 18, 1906, marked a watershed in San Francisco’s political, social, and cultural history. With 4.7 square miles of the city center in ruins, the town’s utilities disabled, its financial institutions dysfunctional, its political infrastructure discredited by graft, its cultural institutions deprived of their homes, and its inhabitants scattered to Oakland, to Marin, to the peninsula, and to refugee camps in Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, San Francisco was in sorry shape indeed. Aid poured in from around the globe. Provisions arrived almost immediately by train from Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. The federal government appropriated $1 million, which was then more than doubled within a week of the disaster. Funds from sympathizers across the country broke all previous records of relief support. Within three days, more than $5 million had been donated;

22

The Paris of the West

within ten days the figure had risen to $18 million.74 John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie gave a hundred thousand dollars each, which was then doubled by their respective oil and steel companies. E. H. Harrison, president of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads, donated two hundred thousand dollars and ordered that all trains to San Francisco be granted priority. Foreign governments and individuals contributed as well. A fund was set up in London. Contributions from the Japanese alone amounted to a quarter million dollars.75 And so, with astonishing rapidity, the city began to effect a rejuvenation. The Spring Valley Water Company enlisted a thousand workers to repair the water pipes. Within a week, trolley cars were running, and electricity and phone service were partially restored. Temporary housing was erected in Golden Gate Park. Five days after the fires had been extinguished, Amadeo Peter Giannini opened a makeshift office of his tiny Bank of Italy at his brother’s home on Van Ness Avenue and another “on a plank laid over two barrels on the Washington Street wharf.”76 Giannini had managed to remove eighty thousand dollars in cash from his bank on the day of the quake, surreptitiously transporting the money in two produce wagons to San Mateo and then stashing it in the ash trap of a nonfunctioning fireplace. Within a week of the calamity, Giannini was providing muchneeded banking services and helping to underwrite the city’s reconstruction. Over the next twenty years, the Bank of Italy would grow into the third-largest bank in the country; in 1929 it became the Bank of America. Typically, some unprincipled businessmen took advantage of the confusion in the immediate aftermath of the disaster to push through personally advantageous financial deals. Patrick Calhoun’s United Railroads managed to obtain the authorization it had long been seeking to install overhead trolley lines, a solution to San Francisco’s mishmash of trolley, cable-car, steam, and horse-drawn conveyances that was less costly, but far more unsightly, than the alternative strongly advocated by Calhoun’s competitors—burying cables in underground conduits.77 Home Telephone Company managed to obtain a franchise to compete with Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph in a May 5 meeting whose location was announced only two hours in advance via a sign posted on the still-smoldering city hall.78 Substantial bribes (some amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars), paid to Ruef as attorney fees and then distributed by him (in the best tradition of the Schmitz administration) to the mayor and the members of the board of supervisors, assured quick passage of the these and other ordinances favoring “cooperating” businesses. A newly energized citizenry, spurred by a zealous press and an even more zealous prosecution team (whose funding was guaranteed to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars by Rudolph Spreckels, brother of John and disaffected son of Claus),79 now began to clamor for an ethical cleanup of city hall. On June 13, 1907, Eugene Schmitz was convicted of extortion and sentenced to five years

The Paris of the West

23

in San Quentin Prison, thus leaving the mayor’s office vacant. His successor was Edward Robeson Taylor, a lawyer and physician.80 The following January, Schmitz’s conviction was overturned on appeal. Brought to trial on additional charges four years later, he was acquitted, and, remarkably, he ran for mayor again in 1915. This time he was defeated. Meanwhile, Schmitz continued to work as a musician. In 1912 he composed music for an opera, Lily of Poverty Flat (later renamed The Maid of San Joaquin), with a libretto by his lawyer Frank C. Drew. According to Schmitz’s obituary, it was performed in New York without success. In 1917 and again in the 1920s, Schmitz managed to reenter politics by winning a seat on the board of supervisors.81 Abe Ruef was not so fortunate. Following confessions from members of the board of supervisors (who were granted immunity in exchange for turning state’s witnesses); extraordinary pressure by prosecutors (they held Ruef in captivity, exhausted him with repeated visits, and elicited remorse by an appeal from his sick mother); a feeding frenzy by the press; threats against Ruef’s lawyers; the granting and then rescinding of partial immunity; and a near-fatal shooting of Assistant D.A. Francis J. Heney by a disenfranchised juror (who killed himself in jail the next day), Ruef was convicted on December 10, 1908, of bribing a member of the board of supervisors and sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin Prison. Unlike Schmitz’s appeals, Ruef’s were unsuccessful, and he began serving his sentence in 1911. His nemesis, Fremont Older (the crusading editor of the Bulletin who had helped orchestrate his downfall), ultimately turned into Ruef’s champion. Appalled by the severity of Ruef’s punishment compared to the leniency accorded to his partners in crime (Schmitz, the supervisors, and the corporate bribers), Older began to campaign loudly for Ruef’s release.82 “I should not have directed my rage against one man, human like myself, but [rather] . . . against the forces that made him what he was,” Older wrote eight years later, reflecting on both the corruption and the apathy ingrained in San Francisco society. “Those forces were not changed by our putting Ruef in San Quentin. Money was still the only standard of success, the only measure of power, and it still is; great corporations still continued to control an apathetic people; all the influences that had made Ruef were still busy at work making more Ruefs. We had done nothing but take one man from beneath those influences, leaving an empty place that another man would immediately fill. We had done nothing but wholly wreck one man’s life.” 83 After four and a half years in prison, Ruef was released on parole. Though disbarred, he was able to prosper in real estate, and was pardoned by the governor in 1920.84 Two years before the earthquake, then-mayor James Phelan had formed the Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, whose mission was to develop a grand plan for the city. The association hired renowned architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham of Chicago, who devised a plan

24

The Paris of the West

that featured “a great semicircular civic center place at Van Ness Avenue and Market Street from which nine broad arterial boulevards would radiate outward to meet inner and outer rings of concentric streets.” 85 The destruction of downtown San Francisco in 1906 offered the perfect opportunity to implement Burnham’s coherent and architecturally compelling vision. However, in the frantic efforts to rebuild the city, speed took precedence over planning. In the absence of decisive control from the center, the municipal government fell under the sway of a business and financial oligarchy headed by a Committee of Fifty, many from the same “smart set” that had patronized the Met’s performances. Their priority was restoration, as quickly as possible, of the city’s tourist industry and West Coast financial leadership. San Francisco thus re-formed along the same uninspired and haphazard lines that existed before the quake. By 1909 the Palace Hotel had reopened in the same location. The Call building too was quickly restored, but, in the 1930s, was stripped of its distinctive top. “Its five domes were removed, and its columns, arches, cornices and terra cotta enriched façades were sent to landfills.” Now known as the Central Tower, the building assumed an Art Deco appearance, “its walls . . . streamlined with painted brick and inset sash windows.”86 A new city hall was designed, and opened in 1915 on a site near the old one. Plans were laid as well for a more reliable water supply, ultimately leading to the highly controversial decision to dam the Tuolumne River in Yosemite, a project so complex and costly that the dam was not completed until the 1920s and the 156-mile Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct carrying water to San Francisco did not begin functioning until 1934.87 This system still serves as the primary source of water for San Francisco and the peninsula. The almost total “destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah [that is, the Barbary Coast] by fire and brimstone from heaven” also proved temporary. Within three months of the quake, a half dozen brothels and numerous dance halls had sprung up from the ruins, and by 1907 a new Barbary Coast was “roaring in full blast.”88 The postquake Barbary Coast, though still the roughest area in town, was marked by less depravity than in earlier years. A slummer’s paradise, it attracted tourists, who were often seated in visitors’ galleries. A vibrant and innovative music scene developed in the area’s clubs, which also offered entertainment to dancecrazy pleasure seekers. Photographer Arnold Genthe took two such visitors to the Olympia on November 27, 1910. The dance floor was crowded with sailors, drifters, rowdies, painted women . . . , but the crowd ignored Genthe and his companions. Slumming parties were a familiar sight on the Barbary Coast. The man and the woman with Genthe . . . joined the crowd on the floor and began to dance. That was a less familiar move, since the slummers usually kept themselves superciliously aloof.

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25

But these two danced, and little by little . . . the crowd on the floor became silent, and drifted to the sidelines and watched. When the honky-tonk music stopped and the two dancers stood still, the crowd broke into a roar of cheers. . . . The dancers were [Russian ballet stars Anna] Pavlova and [Mikhail] Mordkin.89

Among the most popular dances at the clubs in this period was the Turkey Trot, which, accompanied by ragtime music, became a sensation throughout the nation. Pavlova told a reporter from the Examiner that she was delighted to have learned the dance in the Barbary Coast, and was determined to introduce it to Russia and “throughout Europe” (an endorsement she subsequently withdrew). San Francisco’s Barbary Coast was finally closed down in February 1917 after the state supreme court upheld the California Red Light Abatement Act, which had nominally taken effect three years earlier.90 Perhaps the most astonishing and auspicious development to arise from the ashes of the fire, however, was a new Chinatown. The conflagration had left the area in ruin, and some conservative politicians gloated over its destruction. In the aftermath of the fires, Chinese refugees had been forced into camps in the least desirable areas of the Presidio and in Oakland, and some businessmen, notably former mayor Phelan (whose campaign slogans had been openly antiAsian and anti-Semitic),91 advocated relocating Chinatown away from the prime real estate in the center of the city to undesirable outlying areas such as Hunter’s Point. Ruef, in this battle, came out on the side of the Chinese, asserting that the city had no right to confiscate their property.92 Valuing international trade and good relations with China—which had been sorely tested by the strengthening of the Exclusion Act in 1904—the federal government also supported the rights of the Chinese community. Local Chinese representatives seized the opportunity to counteract the area’s negative reputation and responded with unity, acumen, and shrewdness in effecting its transformation. Negotiating in good faith with city officials, they spread word to the displaced residents to begin rebuilding as soon as possible. By the end of May 1906, the reconstruction of Chinatown in its original location had begun. Furthermore, overtures from other Pacific Coast cities strengthened the negotiating position of the district’s leaders. Portland and Seattle offered to take in the refugees and establish Chinatowns that would potentially divert tourist dollars from San Francisco. By 1908 a new Chinese quarter had arisen like a phoenix in the heart of San Francisco. Streets were wider than before the quake and more open to the surrounding neighborhoods. Blind alleys were mostly eliminated. Buildings sported decorative facades that attracted tourists. The returning Chinese residents actively fought the opium, prostitution, and gambling interests, and local merchants squelched the notorious tong wars instigated by rival gangs. By 1910 a Chinese Chamber of Commerce was functioning. Assimilation, in fact, became the goal;

26

The Paris of the West

the returnees aimed to prove themselves model citizens—which enhanced the area’s reputation but also, unfortunately, temporarily stifled much of the district’s ethnic art forms, including the Cantonese opera. Children were trained to play Western instruments, and Chinese marching bands became popular.93 In time the unique culture of Chinese opera reemerged, though in a much-altered form that appealed to a new class of United States–born second-generation citizens. The rapid rebuilding in Chinatown was mirrored elsewhere in the city. In fact, the destruction of 1906 seemed to unify the normally fractious subcommunities in a common purpose. And in the heady rush to restore the city to its former glory, some cultural institutions took root, notably the symphony, which, after years of squabbling among potential supporters, finally found a dedicated cohort of guarantors and presented its first concert in December 1911. Earlier the same year, President William Howard Taft had signed a congressional resolution designating San Francisco as the official site for an international exposition nominally celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal—an honor San Francisco had been seeking against competing cities (notably New Orleans). The Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), attended by 18  million people over ten months in 1915, and including exhibits by thirty-one foreign countries and twenty-five U.S. states, indeed celebrated the canal.94 More important, however, it broadcast to the nation the triumphal recovery of the country’s “gate to the Orient.” Frank Todd, the fair’s chronicler, noted that “music was the soul of the place.”95 The exhibition’s 2,206 concerts included 368 organ recitals, 13 performances by the Boston Symphony, 575 concerts by the official Exposition Orchestra, and 1,201 free outdoor band concerts. The giddy energy and unified sense of purpose that spurred the rebuilding of San Francisco in the decade after the 1906 tragedy soon dissipated, however, and the city returned to its former divisiveness. The politics of class, race, and labor reemerged, apparent not only in the city’s government and economic life but also in its artistic institutions. Other metropolises no doubt harbored similar differences of opinion, but in San Francisco the passion with which they were voiced was particularly strident. Perhaps it was the city’s free-spirited, Wild West heritage. Or perhaps it was the constricted geography, which forced competing interests into close geographical proximity. But it seems that San Francisco’s history is marked by particularly virulent expressions of partisanship, which on the one hand facilitated frank (and occasionally thoughtful) discussion, but on the other hampered the establishment of institutions that required compromise and consensus. This factionalism, so characteristic of the city in the first half of the twentieth century, was counterbalanced by a utopian vision that emerged periodically to inspire San Francisco’s most successful cultural endeavors. The sensitive artist, in fact, was hard-pressed to resist the breathtaking beauty of the Pacific, the city’s invigorating climate, or the lure of its cultural treasures, and

The Paris of the West

27

the literature is filled with often banal, but at times eloquent, tributes to San Francisco’s virtues. These competing ideologies guide the present discussion of music in San Francisco during the first part of the twentieth century. On the negative side, political wrangling delayed the establishment of the symphony and the opera and, once they were under way, continued to impede their primary business of music making. Racism persisted as a distressing element of the local scene. The derision directed at the Chinese hardly disappeared after the postquake rebuilding. Furthermore, during the mid-1930s, black and white union musicians clashed in a heated legal battle. By this time, segregated locals (one representing black musicians, the other restricted to whites) existed in more than fifty cities across the nation. In many communities, tension between these competing organizations was palpable, but in San Francisco the black and white locals ended up confronting each other in court. Considerable strain also marked the implementation of San Francisco’s Federal Music Project (FMP) during the Depression years. Throughout the country, the FMP dealt uneasily with the opposing goals of artistic quality and economic relief; in San Francisco, however, the project’s internal conflicts erupted in a major, and highly public, battle between administrators and artists. The utopian strain forms a consistent, competing strand woven into these vociferous battles. One of its most idealistic voices was composer Ernest Bloch, for five years director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who untiringly promoted cross-cultural and interreligious musical expression on a grand scale—bringing national and international attention to San Francisco and to Bloch’s dream of unifying humankind through the medium of sound. A similar, though less grandiose, vision of cross-cultural collaboration appears in the AsianWestern syntheses and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations of Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and others, and in the adventurous new music scene of the 1930s, which presaged developments elsewhere in the country. It is no less evident in the two world fairs—in 1915 and 1939–40—both of which celebrated California’s beauty and diversity, heralding commonalities among various peoples while war raged across the rest of the globe. The aim of this book is not to chronicle every musical event in San Francisco during the period under consideration. An undertaking of this scope must necessarily be selective. In choosing the foci for various chapters, I was guided by the ways in which they illuminate the book’s central concern: namely, the centrifugal forces of factionalism and idealism that played out so colorfully in San Francisco’s musical life. Understanding these powerful forces requires us to examine San Francisco in the context of the wider U.S. culture. Whereas a book on New York City might justify an inward gaze, San Francisco is not large enough, or isolated enough, to be considered outside the national scene. Throughout the

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The Paris of the West

book, then, the reader will be drawn into making comparisons with musical life elsewhere. In this light, San Francisco sometimes emerges at the leading edge of artistic developments; at other times it reflects ideas pioneered elsewhere, while offering its own locally colored interpretation of the nation’s musical landscape. For the specialist reader, the book’s two interludes focus on a few little-known works, enriching our understanding of the music of this period, much of which has been forgotten in a single-minded teleological emphasis on modernism. To aid the reader in remembering the many unfamiliar figures introduced in these pages, the index provides a reference source with dates and brief identifications of persons cited. The book is divided into two broad parts. The first covers the period up to 1930. Most chapters begin with a prequake retrospective, situating the developments of the first quarter of the twentieth century in historical perspective. The book’s second part focuses on the specific conflicts provoked by the economic stress of the 1930s. Whereas each part has a clear beginning point, delineated by a defining historical event (the quake and the crash), the various stories have no single logical ending-marker. Some institutions, such as the symphony, reached defining points in the late 1930s; in other areas, the tale does not become complete until the 1950s. Rather than being bound by an artificial chronological limitation, I follow each story to a distinctive turning point (or ending, as the case may be). Although these endings may be staggered, the broad sweep of nearly a half century nevertheless suggests some conclusions, not only about music as an evolving discipline, but also about its changing role in a changing social context.

Pa rt On e

From the Quake to the Crash

2

The Politics of Class The San Francisco Symphony, the People’s Philharmonic, and the Lure of European Culture (1911-1930)

The San Francisco Symphony opened its first season on December 8, 1911. Considering that the city was, at the time, the largest urban center west of Saint Louis (Table 1), its entry into the symphonic realm was notably tardy. Los Angeles, only three-quarters the size of its northern neighbor, had had a professional orchestra in place since 1898. (In 1920 the Los Angeles Symphony, conducted by Harley Hamilton, was driven out of business by the newly formed Los Angeles Philharmonic.) The Denver Symphony began in 1900, and even Seattle—less than a quarter the size of San Francisco at the turn of the century—had a functioning professional orchestra beginning in 1903.1 San Francisco’s late arrival on the orchestral scene did not stem from a lack of local interest in the medium. In fact, symphonic ensembles in the city date back to 1853–56, when George Loder—an English composer, arranger, pianist, flutist, and contrabassist who had conducted occasional concerts of the New York Philharmonic—mounted chamber orchestra and opera performances.2 Rudolph Herold, a friend of the Mendelssohn family who had come to California to accompany soprano Catherine Hayes in her acclaimed series of local recitals in 1852–53, presented Mendelssohn’s Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt overture under the auspices of the Germania Society in March 1856, at a time when the work had been heard in only a handful of U.S. cities. 3 Thereafter Herold staged occasional “grand orchestra” concerts, with groups ranging from thirty to sixty players, and eventually established a matinee series in 1877–79.4 Music patron John Parrott Jr. (whose banker father built one of the first large buildings in the city’s financial district) supported violinist and conductor Louis Homeier in a concert series beginning in 1880, and Gustav 31

Table 1 Population comparison of the country’s largest cities, with emphasis on the West Coast, 1900–1920 Rank

City

Population 1900 a

1 2 3 4 5 9 15 25 36 42 48

New York Chicago Philadelphia Saint Louis Boston San Francisco Washington, D.C. Denver Los Angeles Portland Seattle

3,437,202 1,698,575 1,293,697 575,238 560,892 342,782 278,718 133,859 102,479 90,426 80,671

1910 b 1 2 3 4 5 11 16 17 21 27 28 32

New York Chicago Philadelphia Saint Louis Boston San Francisco Washington, D.C. Los Angeles Seattle Denver Portland Oakland

4,766,883 2,185,283 1,549,008 687,029 670,585 416,912 331,069 319,198 237,194 213,381 207,214 150,174

1920 c 1 2 3 6 7 10 12 20 24 25 31

New York Chicago Philadelphia Saint Louis Boston Los Angeles San Francisco Seattle Portland Denver Oakland

5,620,048 2,701,705 1,823,779 772,897 748,060 576,673 506,676 315,312 258,288 256,491 216,261

a 6: Baltimore; 7: Cleveland; 8: Buffalo, N.Y. b

6: Cleveland; 7: Baltimore; 8: Pittsburgh; 9: Detroit; 10: Buffalo, N.Y.

c

4: Detroit; 5: Cleveland; 8: Baltimore; 9: Pittsburgh; 11: Buffalo, N.Y.

Source: Data from the U.S. Census Bureau, www.census.gov/ population/ www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027 .html; accessed June 16, 2009.

The San Francisco Symphony

33

Hinrichs conducted concerts of the San Francisco Philharmonic Society from 1881 to 1885.5 During these early years, San Francisco was frequently reminded of its need for a resident orchestra by excellent touring ensembles. Among the most legendary performances was a weeklong festival by Theodore Thomas’s orchestra in June 1883: seven orchestral concerts in as many days, with high-profile soloists (notably soprano Emma Thursby) and a chorus of 522.6 On this two-and-halfmonth, seventy-three-concert tour, Thomas received his most enthusiastic reception in San Francisco, where a program booklet of 110 pages was prepared and concerts were packed.7 No wonder: 363 prominent citizens (many of whom later supported the San Francisco Symphony) contributed to a guarantee fund. Among the members of the advisory board was a lawyer named Joseph D. Redding, who had offices in San Francisco and New York, and who also wrote opera libretti and composed dramatic music (including a full-scale opera, Fay-Yen-Fah). Redding, as we shall see, would later play a prominent—and controversial—role in the symphony’s early years. In the mid-1890s a new conductor, whose talents astonished the local populace, arrived on the scene. Fritz Scheel came to San Francisco in January 1894 for the Midwinter International Exhibition, a project promoted by Chronicle publisher M. H. de Young as a local economic stimulus.8 Scheel brought with him fifty musicians from the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, which served as the inspiration for San Francisco’s fair. (De Young had been vice president of the national commission for the Chicago fair and Commissioner of the California Exhibits there.) Within a month Scheel began a concert series with the so-called Imperial Vienna Prater Orchestra. He was so successful that a Metropolitan Music Society (MMS) formed the following year and presented a month of concerts, with four performances and an open rehearsal every week.9 On its board of directors were a number of men who would later figure among the guarantors of the San Francisco Symphony, including, among others, John Parrott Jr., Louis Sloss Jr., and Levi Strauss’s nephew and beneficiary, Jacob Stern. Although the MMS ended its month of concerts with a balance of $323,10 it folded after its first season because Scheel left town. He returned in 1897 to present three seasons of orchestral concerts under the auspices of a San Francisco Symphony Society (SFSS), again supported by the philanthropic John Parrott. In 1899 Scheel moved to Pennsylvania, where he founded the Philadelphia Orchestra: its first performance, under his direction, took place on November 16, 1900. Although he remained in Philadelphia until his death in 1907, Scheel returned one last time to San Francisco. In 1903 he conducted a successful series of weekly afternoon performances, this time under the patronage of Phoebe Hearst (mother of William Randolph Hearst), who was a stalwart supporter of music.11 In Scheel’s absence Hearst had struggled to keep

34

From the Quake to the Crash

the SFSS alive, first under Henry Holmes (an English violinist who came to the city from the Royal College of Music in London) and then under Paul Steindorff, Leandro Campanari, and others—all in vain.12 For years after Scheel’s departure, critics exalted him as the model of inspired conducting. His image swelled to mythic proportions, and future conductors were measured against his standard. After Scheel left San Francisco, one more conductor temporarily grabbed the limelight: J. Fred Wolle (pronounced “Wally”), an organist from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who in 1905 became the first chairman of the newly formed music department at UC Berkeley (the only campus of the state university at the time). The following year Wolle established a highly proficient professional orchestra that performed a six-concert season in Berkeley’s outdoor Greek Theater to audiences of nearly five thousand.13 Nineteen orchestral concerts, starting right after the quake, followed: from June 1906 to October 1907. Alfred Metzger, editor of the Pacific Coast Musical Review (PCMR), lauded the effort, crediting the university with reaching out to the general public with high-quality music at low (or no) cost—an egalitarian theme that would repeatedly form the rationale for new orchestral ensembles in later years. “The reason that the general public has never lent a willing ear to the appealing strains of music,” wrote Metzger, is “. . . the difficulties put in the way of the public. . . . High priced opera, impossible prices for hearing great artists, exclusive admission fees for symphony concerts and . . . pure commercial spirit” form the “principal causes for the apparent lack of musical taste in the United States.” 14 Despite Metzger’s passionate advocacy of Wolle’s programs, audience size declined dramatically the following season, the result of inconvenient ferry transport, as well as simple saturation. The local sponsor withdrew his support, and the orchestra eventually disbanded. Nevertheless, symphony-hungry patrons recognized Wolle’s excellent musicianship, and he was able to mount two massive Bach festivals in April 1909 and May 1910.15 Estimates of the crowd size vary—and tend to be exaggerated—but a photo of the 1909 performance of the B-Minor Mass in the PCMR, captioned “Showing the Monster Audience That Assembled to Do Honor to Dr. J. Fred Wolle and His Matchless Choir on the Occasion of the Initiatory Bach Festival in Western America,” confirms that the huge Greek Theater was packed. According to the PCMR, nine thousand people attended that year and two thousand more were turned away.16 At the same time, Wolle’s concerts provoked vicious infighting. Metzger fumed at the typical San Francisco factionalism in an editorial in 1909: If teachers and artists could control their feelings sufficiently to either speak well of their colleagues or keep silent[,] the public would cultivate a far greater respect for the profession than is possible under a policy of mutual vilification. . . . Whenever the idea of a series of symphony concerts arises a number of people stand up and oppose such [a] movement. . . . When a musical enterprise proves successful, notwithstanding morbid predictions, there appear immediately a number of

The San Francisco Symphony

35

people who endeavor to discredit it. . . . When a newcomer in this community [read “Wolle”] succeeds to establish for himself a responsible position . . . , there come upon the scene a number of vultures, who seek to rob the successful conqueror of the trophies which he has earned by the sweat of his brow.17

Discouraged by backbiting and jealousy, coupled with a lack of support from the university, Wolle left Berkeley in 1911 to return to Pennsylvania. Metzger’s assessment of his talents proved well justified: in Bethlehem, Wolle reestablished his annual Bach festivals and conducted a famed Bach Choir that attracted wide praise up to his death in 1933.18

T H E FOU N DI NG OF T H E M USIC A L A S S O C I AT ION

Five days before Metzger’s tirade against factionalism appeared in the Christmas 1909 issue of the PCMR, a group of ten business and professional leaders met quietly at the Mercantile Trust Company to form an association “to foster the Musical Art in all its forms, and particularly to establish a Symphony Orchestra in San Francisco.”19 Now that the city was back on its feet, the absence of a resident professional orchestra—a major symbol of a sophisticated urban culture— was becoming increasingly embarrassing. The largest city in the West, in this view, should not have to rely for its fix of grand orchestral music on an ensemble sponsored by the state university, on quarterly concerts of amateur groups (such as an orchestra under William Zech that operated from the turn of the century to the midthirties), or on touring ensembles such as Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony, which came to the Bay Area in 1908 for a week of highly publicized concerts billed as “the Greatest Musical Event in San Francisco since the Fire.”20 The December 20 meeting produced a slate of nominees for the board of governors of the newly forming Musical Association (MA), which would run the symphony until 1935. Not surprisingly, this slate (ratified at the first regular meeting of the membership on February 3, 1910) included many of the city’s business, professional, and social elite (Table 2). From 1909 to 1911 the twenty-one members of this board would coax and cajole the city’s wealthy residents into making multiyear pledges guaranteeing the establishment of the San Francisco Symphony. Lacking a benevolent benefactor such as Boston had in the person of Henry Higginson (or Los Angeles would have in William Andrews Clark), and recalling the recent failures of the SFSS and the Wolle orchestra, the MA at first moved cautiously, seeking multiyear pledges of one hundred dollars a year from three hundred guarantors (equivalent to about twenty-two hundred dollars a year in 2010). Their caution, even in the face of the perceived urgency to develop a model of suave urbanity, reflects the experience of other U.S. orchestras that lacked massive private funding. Chicago, for example, started its orchestra with three-year

Table 2 The original twenty-one members of the Board of Governors of the Musical Association

Name

Profession

Barkan, Dr. A(dolph) Berry, Thiernen Brien Beylard, E. D. Borel, Antoine Bourn, William B.

Physician (oculist) Partner: Berry & Bangs Real Estate “Capitalist”* Antoine Borel and Co.; banker President, Spring Valley Water Co.

Byrne, James W.

Grant, Joseph D.

“Capitalist”*; president, San Francisco Golf and Country Club President, H. S. Crocker Co. (lithography, real estate) President, Crocker National Bank (son of Charles Crocker, railroad magnate) Attorney Vice president, M . Gunst Co. (tobacco importers); president, S.F. Board of Education President, Murphy, Grant Co. (dry goods)

Griffin, Frank

President, Griffin Co. (mining; conveyor belts)

Heller, Emanuel S.

Attorney

McKee, John Dempster

Vice president and cashier, Mercantile Trust; by 1918, President, Mercantile National Bank

Mintzer, William

Attorney

Redding, Joseph Deighn Rothschild, John

Attorney (also composer and librettist) President, John Rothschild & Co. (wholesale grocers)

Sloss, Leon

President, Northern Commercial Company; son of Louis Sloss, founder of Alaska Commercial Co. (fur trade) Vice president, Levi Strauss & Co.; nephew of Levi Strauss Physician (surgeon: Stanford) Secretary, Hibernia Savings and Loan; later, ambassador to the Netherlands; president, Hibernia Savings

Crocker, Charles H. Crocker, William H. Deering, Frank Esberg, Alfred I.

Stern, Sigmund Stillman, Stanley Tobin, Richard Montgomery

* As listed in Armsby, “The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.”

Additional Role in the Musical Association Member, Music Committee President of the Association Member, Music Committee Member, Executive and Finance Committee Member, Executive and Finance Committee Member, Publicity Committee

Member, Music Committee

Member, Executive and Finance Committee Member, Executive and Finance Committee, Publicity Committee Member, Executive and Finance Committee Treasurer of the Association; member, Publicity Committee Member, Publicity Committee Member, Music Committee Secretary of the Association; member, Music Committee; chair, Publicity Committee Chair, Executive and Finance Committee Member, Executive and Finance Committee Member, Music Committee Chair, Music Committee

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pledges of a thousand dollars from fifty supporters, but its deficits soon mounted to thirty-three thousand dollars a year. More ominously, the Pittsburgh Orchestra was forced to disband in 1910 due to overwhelming debt. 21 Despite the MA’s optimism, enlistment of guarantors proceeded slowly. By August 1911 the total had reached only 205, but the board decided to proceed anyway. On the advice of its music committee, headed by banker Richard Tobin, the organization hired a conductor: Henry Hadley, a prominent composer from New England with an aristocratic bearing and impeccable social credentials (Figure 4). Hadley’s appointment prompted enthusiastic articles in the press. As a composer he had won prestigious awards for a cantata and two symphonic works. As a conductor he had appeared with several European orchestras and, in 1909, had accepted a six-thousand-dollar-a-year appointment with the Seattle Symphony. San Francisco lured him with four thousand dollars more, equivalent to more than two hundred thousand dollars in 2010. Seattle critics lauded Hadley’s versatility and educational programming, and an article in Musical America commended him for improving the orchestra’s quality.22 Hadley was astute enough to realize that success in the job required more than musical skills, and herein lay his greatest strength: he immediately charmed the locals with his suavity. Upon Hadley’s arrival, Chronicle reviewer Harvey Wickham interviewed him. Attired “in a flowing dressing gown of quite Oriental tint,” Hadley flashed a magnetic smile and Wickham “knew that the success of the great undertaking for which he has been summoned here was assured.” After the first concert, Thomas Nunan wrote in the Examiner that Hadley was not only “a musician of international reputation” but also “the kind of a man that society takes to, and without society music cannot succeed in San Francisco.” 23 Among Hadley’s most important social connections was membership in San Francisco’s exclusive Bohemian Club, a secret male organization that even today includes many of the country’s most prominent businessmen and politicians. In 1974 John Van der Zee noted that the club had included in its membership every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge and every California governor except one since Hiram Johnson.24 Founded in 1872 as a social outlet for a group of friends (many of them journalists, but also a number of artists and musicians), the club soon lost its bohemian character and became a meeting place for the richest and most powerful men in the city. In its early years, a notable attraction was a series of informal monthly entertainments (called Jinks) that included original skits, amateur music making, and short dramatic presentations on a set theme. The tradition soon expanded into a major annual “Hi Jinks,” which grew to epic proportions at the organization’s annual two-week retreat in the redwoods. These summer retreats, which began informally in 1878 and then became an established tradition the following year, at first featured Shakespearean scenes but soon evolved into the production of original plays centering on the subject of

38

From the Quake to the Crash

Figure 4. Woodcut of Henry Kimball Hadley (1871–1937), the first conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, by Howard Jacob Simon. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony.)

the abolition of Care—a symbol of the freedom from quotidian worries that these prominent businessmen hoped to find in their forest camp. The early entertainments were spoken dramas with interpolated musical numbers. Beginning in 1880, they were followed by a special ceremony, the Cremation of Care, during which a torch-lit procession of robed and hooded club members, accompanied by dirgelike music, carried an effigy of Care to a funeral pyre and burned it. The idea was to place on the pyre all prejudices, resentments, harmful thoughts, and unpaid bills; to “forgive and forget”; and to fill the night with music.25

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As the years went on, the annual retreat and its Midsummer High Jinks grew into grandiose extravaganzas. In 1900 the club purchased a permanent site in Sonoma County, about seventy-five miles north of San Francisco, and erected a stage in the Bohemian Grove. The spoken productions blossomed into resplendent operas, complete with full orchestra, lighting, costumes, staging, and original music composed by members of the club. The 1902 production, the first with through-composed music, featured an original score by lawyer-composer Joseph Redding, whom we have already encountered on the advisory board for the Thomas orchestra. Many of San Francisco’s other (male) composers were tapped to write scores for the plays in succeeding years, and some of this music found its way onto regular concert programs. (These virtual operas are still referred to as Grove Plays. A list of them from 1902 to 1933 is given in Table 8.) In 1910, a year before his appointment in San Francisco, Hadley conducted his overture In Bohemia at a concert held on the last day of the club’s summer retreat. Two days later, on August 9, he repeated the work in a demonstration concert in the city.26 Despite the overture’s appropriate title, Hadley had composed it ten years earlier, and Victor Herbert, a stalwart champion of Hadley’s music, had premiered it in 1901 with the Pittsburgh Orchestra. Also featured on the 1910 San Francisco concert was a work by Herman Perlet, a composer of Broadway show tunes and operettas who had settled in San Francisco two years previously and would soon direct another new orchestra, the People’s Philharmonic. (See Figure 5.) Hadley and Perlet developed a mutually respectful relationship, and Hadley invited Perlet to Seattle to conduct Perlet’s own ballet suite Im Walde.27 Redding was a friend of both Hadley and Victor Herbert. In fact, he had written the libretto for Herbert’s only full-length grand opera, Natoma, produced with extraordinary advance publicity in Philadelphia and New York in 1911. Conveniently for Hadley, Redding was also a member of the MA’s music committee, which recommended Hadley’s appointment to the board of governors. PCMR editor Metzger strongly supported the hiring decision, but also smelled an unpleasant conflict of interest: Redding favored Hadley, suggested Metzger, so that the two could collaborate on a Grove Play. His prediction proved correct. The year after Hadley’s appointment, Redding wrote the text, Hadley the music, for the 1912 production, The Atonement of Pan. Upon his appointment in San Francisco, Hadley immediately ceded to Redding—who was often at his New York law office—the job of hiring a concertmaster. Hadley’s desire to import an experienced leader from the East Coast is not surprising, given his upbringing in Massachusetts and his previous professional engagement as music instructor at St. Paul’s Episcopal School for Boys in Garden City, New York. In fact, most of the local players he would recruit for the new San Francisco orchestra were inexperienced symphonists who earned their living playing in theaters. Nevertheless, there were two strong local candidates

40

From the Quake to the Crash

for the leadership position: Sigmund Beel, who became the concertmaster of the Los Angeles Symphony two years later, and Giulio Minetti, who had served as concertmaster of the orchestra at San Francisco’s Tivoli Opera House and of ensembles conducted by Wolle and Scheel.28 Under these circumstances, Hadley’s detachment from the selection process seems extraordinary, as does his trust in Redding’s musical judgment. Hadley was apparently counting on Redding’s connections with the best East Coast players, stemming from the lawyer’s prominent role in the production of Natoma. The press had heralded Herbert’s opera with extraordinary advance publicity: it was not only a grand opera, but it was also an opera in English featuring Mary Garden in the title role.29 Reviewers, for the most part, praised Herbert’s music; but they almost unanimously panned Redding’s text, although none of them mentioned the (at best) patronizing, (at worst) racist, nature of the libretto. Natoma is set in Mexican California in the 1820s. In a stereotypical plot for its time, the opera’s beautiful nonwhite protagonist—in this case, the Indian girl Natoma, handmaiden of Barbara, the (even more beautiful, but dramatically less interesting) daughter of a Spanish nobleman—sacrifices her own happiness for that of her mistress. During a crowded fiesta in broad daylight, Natoma murders a hot-headed Spaniard anxious to secure Barbara’s hand. In doing so, she facilitates Barbara’s union with the handsome American lieutenant Paul Merrill—whom Natoma herself secretly loves. Having thus elevated Barbara’s desires above her own and committed a horrific crime to bring about the happiness of her white mistress, Natoma converts to Christianity and enters a convent. 30 Lawrence Gilman’s review in Harper’s was typical, if more blunt than most: “Natoma is cruelly handicapped by a preposterous libretto. Mr. Redding’s ‘book’ tells a story that is void of plausibility and dramatic suspense—one that is, for the most part, frankly dull. In construction it is amateurish to the last degree; and in its literary form it is incredibly fatuous and inane. Many of the lines verge on doggerel; for the most part they are trite, feeble, hackneyed, sophomoric. It is a conservative statement to say that this is probably the worst libretto that has ever been set to music.”31 Even Joseph Kaye, Herbert’s first biographer, wrote in 1931 that Herbert “was satisfied with the libretto, and thus placed himself in the unique position of being the only one who was.” 32 When the Chicago Grand Opera Company brought Natoma to San Francisco in March 1913, Redding’s book fared only a little better, even with hometown critics. Josephine Hart Phelps found it “stilted and commonplace,” Metzger called it “illiterate” and “unpoetic,” and Walter Anthony said it was an example “of how not to write poetry.”33 Nevertheless, Hadley placed full trust in Redding, who enlisted as concertmaster Eduard Tak, a Dutch violinist who had come to the United States in 1903 to play in Chicago under Theodore Thomas. From 1905 to 1907, Tak played in

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the Philadelphia Orchestra and in Damrosch’s New York Symphony. Emil Paur engaged him in 1908 as concertmaster in Pittsburgh, where he made a good impression,34 and when that orchestra folded he returned to New York, where he played under Herbert. In San Francisco, however, Tak proved disastrous. H A DL E Y E VOK E S A M I X E D R E SP ONSE

Reviews of Hadley’s first concert—containing Wagner’s Meistersinger overture, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, an orchestration of the theme and variations movement of Haydn’s Emperor Quartet (op. 76, no. 3), and Liszt’s Les Préludes— were dramatically polarized.35 Wickham was delighted, Nunan somewhat less so. Metzger, in contrast, was enraged. Despite his repeated editorial pleas for polite civility, his astute musicianship would not tolerate sloppiness—or worse, interpretive mediocrity. (Metzger is the only reviewer in this early period to provide substantive detail on the technical and musical aspects of a performance. Later he would be joined by other similarly perceptive, but more temperate, voices, such as Redfern Mason, Alexander Fried, and most notably, Alfred Frankenstein.) On December 16, 1911, Metzger let loose with a tirade of indignation: “We awaited with bated breath the auspicious occasion of [Hadley’s] first appearance,” he wrote. “To say that we were disappointed would be expressing our paralyzed state of astonishment but very mildly. The truth is we were shocked. . . . How a man of such average ability could be acclaimed with such frantic manifestations of hysteria was indeed a mystery to us that left us dumb in the presence of the plaudits of the society audience.” Metzger noted balance and pitch problems, poor ensemble, lack of resonance in the basses, weak tone in the brass, and overpowering percussion. He found Hadley a “drill master” who was unable to control tempi, lacked a concept of broad phrasing, and missed opportunities for emotional climax. In the following few concerts, Hadley fared little better. Walter Anthony complained about his condescending programming in the first pops concert on December 29; and Tak’s solo debut in Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole on January 19, 1912, was marred by the concertmaster’s evident nervousness, leading to faulty intonation and a small, unsatisfying tone that even Wickham noted.36 The critical controversy took a national turn in February 1912 with an unsigned editorial on the front page of Musical America (“San Francisco Has an Orchestral War”): “musical america is informed on good authority that the Pacific Coast Musical Review and an Eastern musical journal [probably the Musical Courier] have given a wrong impression to the world concerning the quality of the San Francisco symphony concerts.” 37 (Metzger had previously served as a West Coast correspondent for New York’s Musical Courier.) Hadley, it seemed, had seriously underestimated the sophistication of San Francisco audiences. As he adapted to the community, the reviews showed some improvement, though Metzger never

42

From the Quake to the Crash

let up in his condemnation. The critic himself came under attack for speaking his mind, but he repeatedly (and vociferously) asserted that he was leveling legitimate critiques at a mediocre conductor who was bereft of ideas, thwarted climactic buildup by choosing tempi that were too fast or dynamics that were too loud, and employed a conducting style marked by “hopeless pirouetting through the atmosphere.”38 In contrast to evaluations of his conducting, Hadley received nothing but praise for his compositions, even from Metzger, who expressed his delight with the first such offering, judging Hadley’s second symphony to be “one of the best compositions presented by a modern composer in recent years.”39 During his four years in San Francisco, Hadley programmed Hadley, Hadley, Hadley, and more Hadley—ten works in four seasons (Table 3). Neither the public nor the press objected. In February 1912, Richard Tobin, the chairman of the MA’s Music Committee, presented a progress report on the first season.40 The venue (the new Cort Theater) was judged very good acoustically and the audience was numerous. The first violin section was salaried and finances were in good shape; in fact, a surplus was projected. The only sour note in Tobin’s report concerned the orchestra’s manager, Will Greenbaum, San Francisco’s most influential impresario from about 1895 until his death in 1917. “For reasons difficult to understand,” Tobin reported, “Mr. Greenbaum is most disaffected and antagonistic to the Conductor, to the Orchestra, [and] to the Directors.” Greenbaum had for years brought major touring artists to San Francisco. He was known for his musical judgment, generosity, and uncompromising honesty, but also for his lack of tact and his impatience with politics, society, and glitter—areas in which Hadley was notably successful. The MA responded to Tobin’s report by rehiring Hadley for three years and firing Greenbaum. In June, Frank W. Healy became the symphony’s new manager. In the second season, Hadley introduced two major personnel changes: the concertmaster and the principal cellist. Adolph Rosenbecker from Chicago replaced Tak, who took a position in the first violin section of the Boston Symphony.41 Rosenbecker at the time was the conductor of a sixty-five-member touring orchestra called the Chicago Symphony—unassociated with today’s Chicago Symphony, which at that time was called the Chicago Orchestra. Hardly by coincidence, Frank Healy, the new manager, had acted as Rosenbecker’s advance man when the group performed in the East Bay in 1908 and 1909.42 Born in 1851 in a small village near Frankfurt am Main, Rosenbecker had come to New York in 1869, played in Theodore Thomas’s orchestra for eight years, and then moved to Chicago. There he financed and directed chamber orchestra concerts; conducted the Chicago Reed Band at the 1893 Columbian Exposition; and established the touring Chicago Festival Orchestra in 1896 and the Chicago Symphony in 1899.

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Table 3 Compositions by Henry Hadley programmed during his tenure as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (1911–15)

Season

Number of Subscription Concerts

Subscription Concert Works by Hadley, with Concert Dates

Number of Pops Concerts

1911–12

6

5

1912–13

15

1913–14

10

1914–15

10

Symphony 2 (Seasons), op. 30 (February 2) Symphony 4 (No/E/So/W), op. 64 (December 20; honoring Hadley on his birthday); Konzertstück for cello and orchestra (with Arthur Hadley, soloist; January 3) Rhapsody The Culprit Fay (January 9) Tone poem Salome, op. 55 (January 22)

10

Pops Concert Works by Hadley, with Concert Dates Herod Overture (February 9); Fascination (encore, February 9) In Bohemia overture (December 22); Suite from The Atonement of Pan (January 10); In Music’s Praise, cantata (February 2)

0 0

Although these groups were short-lived, Rosenbecker himself was praised for his strong musicianship.43 His arrival in San Francisco brought more effective leadership to the strings, and reviewers noted dramatic improvement. The new principal cellist was far more controversial. He was Hadley’s younger brother Arthur, who came from the Boston Symphony, was paid a salary equivalent to that of the concertmaster, and was one of only two players offered a three-year contract.44 This blatant nepotism was coupled with Arthur Hadley’s unremarkable level of performance. Metzger published a scathing review of his concerto performance on January 3, 1913, and even the kindly Anna Cora Winchell highlighted his “scraping sound” in a recital performance later the same year.45 Hadley vigorously defended his brother’s expensive contract, and further angered the Music Committee by promoting a December 1913 recital featuring Arthur with Metropolitan Opera baritone Clarence Whitehill, prior to Whitehill’s appearance with the symphony.46 Other conflicts began to appear as well. At the beginning of the second season, for instance, Hadley demanded payment over seven months instead of twelve. The board acquiesced. The following month they objected to paying for framed photographs of him and having his portrait appear prominently in the program. They lost this battle, too: from the second season to the end of his years in San Francisco, an aristocratic image of Hadley appeared in every symphony program.47

44

From the Quake to the Crash

A N E W C OM PE T I T OR A PPE A R S ON T H E S C E N E

In the blush of a financially successful first year, the MA unwisely expanded the programming for the second season from eleven concerts to twenty. Expenses rose dramatically, and when income failed to keep pace Healy proposed compressing the scheduled twenty concerts into fifteen weeks. The board of governors was enthusiastic and announced the new dates, but they underestimated the players’ anger over receiving less pay for the same work. In the end Healy’s solution exacerbated the problem: the Association was forced to add a supplementary set of concerts (thereby increasing the number of performances to twenty-five) and the members of the board of governors, at the season’s end, dug into their pockets to meet a six-thousand-dollar deficit (Table 4).48 To make matters worse, in the fall of 1912 the young symphony suddenly found itself in competition with a new orchestra, whose stated goal was to reach the general public—rather than the wealthy—with the magic of symphonic music. The San Francisco People’s Philharmonic (SFPP), conducted by Herman Perlet (Figure 5), was launched with a “grand orchestra concert” at Mission High School on November 14, 1912, sponsored by the Recreation League.49 Charles Seeger, newly appointed head of the University of California’s music department, spoke on this occasion, endorsing music “as a means of good government.”50 In keeping with commonly held views of social engineering (and long before Seeger’s association with folk music and the Composers’ Collective in New York), he advocated “music as a preventative of crime, a stimulator of intelligence and a force for character development.” Seeger advised that “good music, taught to children, will cause the child to control his or her emotions” and “feel, think and act in harmony with his surroundings.” The Examiner quoted him at length: “What we want to do,” said Seeger, “is to get inside a person. Change radically the brain-working, teach control of emotion . . . , make him think. Good music will do this. The harmony of all life is in music.” Although Seeger himself might have embraced a wide variety of musical styles under the umbrella of “good music,” many in his audience would have understood the term to mean the music of the classical European tradition, which, like other forms of cultivated artistic expression patronized by the wealthy, was seen to carry a transformative power that could enact widespread social “uplift.” The music programmed by the orchestra on this occasion—by Weber, Schumann, Gounod, Haydn, and others— was indeed “good” in the broadest sense of the word, and the aim of the concert was to bring such fine art to young people without its high-society trimmings and formidable admission prices. The semiprofessional SFPP exemplified this philosophy, viewing itself as an instrument of social change through the spread of culture to a population unaccustomed to concert attendance. This goal was in no way unique to the People’s

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Table 4 Financial summary for the San Francisco Symphony’s first three seasons

Season

Report Date

1911–12 1912–13

1912, April 17 1913, February 11 1913, March 18 1914, March 23

1913–14

Total Disbursements (in Dollars)

Total Receipts (in Dollars)

Surplus (in Dollars)

45,574.43 67,979.01 78,390.32 49,026.00

49,292.45 69,329.49 78,475.19c 50,148.00

+ 3,718.02a + 1,350.48b + 84.87 + 1,121.53

a

An additional library concert, featuring Luisa Tetrazzini, netted $1,025.85 giving a total surplus of $4,743.87, most of which was spent on acquiring the Pittsburgh Orchestra’s library. (The figure of Dec 3, 1912, is slightly different, giving a surplus of $4,759.05.)

b Prior to supplementary season. c Includes $6,000 in special contributions by members of the board of governors.

Philharmonic or, in fact, to San Francisco. The idea of using classical “masterworks”—especially German ones—as a means of social uplift had been widely espoused throughout the nation since the late nineteenth century. Among its most ardent and vocal exponents was Theodore Thomas, who aspired to effect such elevation of the populace through ventures such as his 1875 Central Park concerts in New York, his highly successful and widely acclaimed national tours, and his establishment of orchestras at the world’s fairs in Philadelphia (1876) and Chicago (1893). The problem, of course, is that an orchestra (arguably the most effective vehicle for attracting the classically uninitiated) is an inherently expensive undertaking. So the People’s Philharmonic faced conflicting aims: on the one hand, supporting a costly art with a small investment of funds; on the other, properly compensating the numerous performers who were themselves barely able to make a living by providing artistic entertainment for the rich. The philharmonic’s solution was the creation of a training orchestra. Musicians’ pay was low (about ten dollars per concert). So was the admission price (tickets started at a third the price of symphony admission). In principle, the musicians gained experience that would lead to more remunerative work, while audiences developed a habit of concert attendance that would translate into support of more professional organizations. The “people” seemed not to object at all to such efforts at uplifting them. In fact they turned out by the thousands to hear their symphony, which performed at the forty-six-hundred-seat Dreamland Skating Rink, and which—on February 4, 1915—presented the first concert in the cavernous new Civic Auditorium, completed just in time for the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Eight thousand patrons appeared on this occasion to hear a program of

46

From the Quake to the Crash

Figure 5. Herman Perlet (1862–1916), founder and conductor of the San Francisco People’s Philharmonic. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Jean Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley.)

light classics. The SFPP saw itself as support, rather than competition, for the symphony—and at first gave the professional organization little to fear. “The more good music the people heard the more recruits there would be for the symphony [audience],” said Perlet.51 During its first year, the SFPP offered only two concerts. Soon, however, the New Era League, a women’s political and civic organization, raised enough money for the philharmonic to mount a substantial season: ten concerts from

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May 1913 through March 1914. Press reports were enthusiastic; the league, said one, was “spreading the joys of life among those to whom they are least accessible. . . . Its founders believe that amusements are cheaper than jails.”52 The reviewers, too, were positive, despite the considerable acoustical drawbacks of the Dreamland Rink. They praised Perlet most consistently in the area for which Hadley was criticized: inspired interpretation. (If Perlet outpaced Hadley in the conducting realm, he could hardly compete as a composer. His music, though competent, is typically clichéd and lacks originality. Like Hadley, Perlet was active in the Bohemian Club, for which he composed the Grove Play of 1913, The Fall of Ug.) Overlaps between the personnel of the two orchestras were minimal. During the San Francisco Symphony’s fourth season, five philharmonic concerts took place on the days preceding a symphony performance: only sixteen musicians played for both organizations in these side-by-side concerts. Despite the ostensible camaraderie, however, the MA must have developed fears about sustaining its audience, as it watched the philharmonic’s low-cost performances draw large crowds and high praise, particularly for the inspiration of its leader. Meanwhile, reviews of the symphony became increasingly polarized. During the second season, Nunan emerged as Hadley’s strongest defender. At the other extreme was Metzger, whose evaluations became increasingly acerbic. Excerpts from three reviews of the concert of November 1, 1912, vividly demonstrate the critical disagreement: Nunan, “S. F. Orchestra Delights Big Audience”: The second symphony concert . . . was made memorable by a faultless performance of the Richard Strauss tonepoem . . . “Death and Transfiguration. . . . ” The orchestra performance was ideal in its beauty. . . . Schumann’s bright Symphony No. 1 was a fine first part of yesterday’s concert. The orchestra showed decided improvement. Wickham, “Strauss Featured by Hadley’s Men”: Hadley believes in Strauss and conducts him with a power and insight which make him a master conductor. . . . The Schumann showed the orchestra to less advantage. . . . Yesterday’s performance was excellent as to strings, in spite of an occasional neglected accent and now and then a horn sticking out like a sore thumb. Metzger, “Hadley Misconducts Schumann’s Great Symphony”: The Schumann Symphony No. 1 . . . was the most incompetent, the most ridiculous and the most disgraceful reading of this beautiful work we have ever listened to. . . . The tempi were so fast that it was impossible to recognize the beautiful themes. The cantilena passages, instead of being actually sung upon the instruments, were rushed along at top speed. There was no attempt at phrasing and the effective staccato periods lacked rhythm and accentuation. . . . The program closed with Richard Strauss’ Tone Poem “Death and Transfiguration.” We noted more of the death quality than the transfiguration.

48

From the Quake to the Crash

In February 1913, Walter Anthony added his (gentler) voice to Metzger’s critical stance. In a lengthy article in the weekly Argonaut, he reviewed the symphony’s first two seasons: The first year of the symphony orchestra closed with agreeable artistic finish and made no burdensome demands on the purses of those who guaranteed the payment of all the bills. . . . I understand that the losses this year have been heavier. . . . Too much was paid to certain of the “soloists” in the orchestra, particularly in the case of Arthur Hadley. . . . So far as the general public is concerned, Henry Hadley . . . has failed to “draw”. . . . It is notorious that some of the greatest composers have been failures as conductors. Perhaps it would be correct to say that Hadley is not quite great enough as a creator to be a complete failure as a conductor. It is certain that his fame as a composer is in no danger of being rivalled by his fame as a conductor.53

A few days later, Anthony sounded the same theme in a review of the popular series concert on February 2, 1913. The performance featured Massenet’s Eve, conducted by Paul Steindorff, and Hadley’s In Music’s Praise, conducted by Hadley. The first work, said Anthony, “demonstrated what a splendidly reliable and effective director Paul Steindorff is. The other [work] demonstrated what an excellent composer Hadley is. . . . Where Steindorff held his body of 250 singers in a compact mass, and controlled his instrumental forces in the big ensembles of Massenet with absolute security, there was raggedness and indecision in the same kind of climax moments when Hadley led. The singers did not seem to understand his beat, and the orchestra was neglectful of its cues.”54 In the third season, Redfern Mason replaced Nunan at the Examiner. Though less strident than Metzger, he was unswerving in his criticism while at the same time probing Hadley’s weaknesses with sympathy. On November 22, 1913, Mason wrote: There are two Henry Hadleys, and it was only yesterday afternoon that I got a good look at the real one. It was when the orchestra played the finale of Mozart’s Symphony in E Flat. . . . The earlier movements went smoothly along; but lacked just that something which is necessary to convert elegance into living beauty. Then something happened. The real Hadley broke through the husk of ultrarespectability. . . . I could almost hear alarmed propriety whispering: “Whatever you do, Henry, don’t let your emotions get the better of you. . . . ” Something woke up in the conductor and his best self asserted itself. [In that finale] Mr. Hadley’s New England self-consciousness took flight. It went somewhere into the Ewigkeit and left behind a man who was not ashamed to let his instincts assert themselves. . . . We should have been damned with mediocrity, if it had not been for that Mozart finale.55

Metzger, after the second season, was silent. Noting that he was increasingly accused of bias, he stopped reviewing the symphony concerts entirely, a notable

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lacuna in a publication that prided itself on evaluating every significant classical music performance in the Bay Area. In addition to the competition from the People’s Philharmonic, the Musical Association found itself struggling with budgets. In the third season, the board brought expenses back to the first-year level by abandoning the pops series and hiring the majority of players only for the weeks in which concerts took place, a scheme that involved hiring and firing nearly the entire orchestra every other week. The players were seriously disadvantaged by this system and registered protests, alleging that they were unable to meet expenses.56 When the biweeklyhiring policy continued in the fourth season, Healy reported “considerable disquietude and uncertainty among our musicians.” 57 This uncertainty was fueled as well by the forthcoming expiration of Hadley’s contract in spring 1915. Fearing the demise of the orchestra, sixty-nine players signed a letter requesting his reappointment. In December 1914, Tobin, still head of the Music Committee, urged approval of the following year’s season at a maximum cost of fifty thousand dollars, but the vote ended in a tie. Opposing members awaited a report on the current season’s finances. As the end of Hadley’s contract and the initial term of the guarantors’ pledges approached, it seemed clear that the excitement of the venture had worn off. Indeed, the models of the SFSS and the various failed philharmonic societies seemed about to repeat themselves. Hadley, who saw his position weakening, moved to protect his job. In May 1914, Tobin received a letter from Redding conveying a message from the conductor: if his contract were extended for an additional year, “Mr. Arthur Hadley would also consent to waive the terms of his own engagement and would sign a new ten weeks contract for the Fourth Season, on the same footing as the other members of the Orchestra.”58 The minutes record no response to this blatant bribe. At the end of 1914, the cautious MA board felt uneasy about authorizing a continuation of the orchestra, much less extending the contract of a conductor whose luster seemed increasingly tarnished. The board’s discomfiture would be, if anything, increased by the events of the following year. Yet the symphony ultimately emerged strengthened as a result of a controversial decision that elicited the worst in San Francisco factionalism. T H E S Y M PHON Y C HO O SE S A N E W L E A DE R (1 91 5 – 1 918)

At 6 a.m. on February 20, 1915, fire department bells rang, automobile horns blared, and policemen began beating iron trolley poles with their clubs. The din awakened the city, and 150,000 people poured out of their homes to begin a citizens’ march to the fair grounds to open the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). At the opening ceremony, 250 singers performed a chorus

50

From the Quake to the Crash

from Haydn’s Creation and then, accompanied by the Exposition Band, sang Amy Beach’s commissioned “Panama Hymn.”59 After the final benediction, a telegram was dispatched to President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, who “pressed a golden key connected with the 835-foot aerial tower at Tuckerton, N.J., which was equipped with a wireless set.” At the other end of the country, the telegraphy “tripped a delicate galvanometer, closed a relay, and the main portal of the Machinery Palace swung open, the wheels of the great Diesel engine began to rotate, bombs exploded, flags fluttered, whistles and sirens screamed joyfully from all the factories in the city . . . and the Exposition was open.” 60 The PPIE’s budget allocation for music was $665,000, offset in part by ticket sales to concerts and a substantial contribution from the politically powerful Union Pacific Railroad, which underwrote 50 percent of the cost of an official Exposition Orchestra (EO). In return, the EO gave more than five hundred casual performances at the Union Pacific’s full-scale replica of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn.61 Among the featured guest artists during the fair’s ten months were Ignacy Paderewski, Fritz Kreisler, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Karl Muck, John Philip Sousa, Victor Herbert, and Camille Saint-Saëns, who conducted the EO and Sousa’s band in his newly commissioned Hail, California.62 The PPIE had been in the planning stages since the symphony’s inception, and Hadley fully expected to be hired as conductor of its official orchestra.63 (In addition to its free casual concerts at the Old Faithful Inn, this orchestra presented twenty-five symphonic performances at Festival Hall, for which admission was charged.) That he was not chosen as conductor should have been a clear sign to Hadley that disaffection with his musicianship ran deeper than the reviews by Metzger and Mason. After all, the chair of the PPIE’s local music committee was Jacob Bertha (“Jake”) Levison, vice president of the Fireman’s Fund and a member of the MA’s executive committee. (Levison was an accomplished amateur flutist who had played under Scheel.)64 Levison, who appointed George Stewart from Boston as the fair’s music director, was in a strong position to influence the choice of conductor and musicians. Hadley must have been chagrined as well by the EO’s ecstatic critical reception. After its first concerts on February 20 and 22, Mason wrote that “the most remarkable orchestra ever heard in the city is now playing nightly at the Old Faithful Inn.” 65 Part of the EO’s success resulted from the importation of eleven players— including most of the principals—from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. At the same time, the vast majority of the players were local. Thirtytwo of its eighty members currently played in the symphony, six had played in that organization in previous years, and five had been members of the People’s Philharmonic. The remaining two dozen had not played in either orchestra, but eleven of them joined the symphony in the years following the fair. Among them was Paul Whiteman, who played in the viola section for two seasons (1915–16

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and 1917–1918), and who would secure his place in music history by premiering Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with his symphonic jazz orchestra in New York in 1924. Instead of Hadley, Stewart hired as principal conductor Max Bendix, who had been the concertmaster of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, the (real) Chicago Orchestra, and the 1893 Chicago Exposition Orchestra; he had also conducted the orchestra at the 1904 Saint Louis Exposition.66 Like the People’s Philharmonic (but on a much more professional level), the EO aimed in part to bring about social uplift—its organizers recognized an opportunity to bring good music to a massive audience. A similar social aim had motivated the formation of orchestras at previous fairs in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Saint Louis, but all had failed to attract large crowds. In Chicago, in fact, the low attendance proved so disastrous that the orchestra had to disband.67 Similarly, attendance at the PPIE’s weekly Sunday afternoon performances was significantly lower than expected (averaging six hundred to eleven hundred people). The reason for the small audiences was probably less the extra charge (twenty-five to fifty cents) than the fact that visitors could hear the orchestra free at the Old Faithful Inn and were reluctant to take several hours away from outdoor attractions to attend a concert of highbrow music. As the months passed, Metzger campaigned to increase attendance and make the EO “permanent.” In May, Karl Muck arrived with the Boston Symphony to present two weeks of daily performances at the fair (May 14–26). Despite much higher ticket prices than for the EO, these concerts were heavily attended. The audience included a large local contingent, showing the public’s thirst for symphonic music and further demonstrating its ennui with Hadley’s offerings. In fact, so popular was the BSO series that a thirteenth performance had to be added to the original twelve. On June 23 the MA’s music and finance committees met to plan the orchestra’s fifth season. Notably absent was Richard Tobin, one of Hadley’s strongest supporters. Secretary John Rothschild reported that the conductor-selection committee had narrowed the field to four: Hadley, Max Fiedler (who had been replaced by Muck at the BSO in 1912), Karl Pohlig (who was replaced by Stokowski in Philadelphia in the same year), and Alfred Hertz (who had just left the Metropolitan Opera). President William Bourn also reported on a generous offer from San Mateo music patron Cecilia Casserly, whose attorney husband John had just joined the music committee: if the MA hired Nikolai Sokoloff as director, she would underwrite his entire fee.68 Casserly (an amateur pianist) had met violinist Sokoloff in Paris in 1913. Together the two had played chamber music informally and later given benefit concerts in Chicago. With an inheritance from her mother, Casserly organized a professional string quartet on the model of the Flonzaley Quartet in New York and invited Sokoloff to California to lead the group.69 Her Innisfail Quartet

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From the Quake to the Crash

(named after her estate) performed to great acclaim on the peninsula, at the PPIE, and in three San Francisco concerts in the fall of 1915. Despite Casserly’s tempting offer, the MA decided to favor a well-known, experienced conductor—thereby provoking her animosity and that of her husband for years to come. Bourn then raised the delicate question of Hadley, noting that while he “had done admirable work artistically, as well as in the up-building of the Orchestra,” after four years it was time for a change. He moved “to eliminate [Hadley’s] name and consider another leader.”70 The committee adopted his recommendation unanimously. On July 19 the board voted to offer the position to Hertz, who at the time was in Los Angeles preparing to conduct the high-profile premiere of Horatio Parker’s award-winning opera Fairyland.71 Hertz had become “the idol of the hour.” Ten curtain calls followed the first act, reported Edwin Schallert in the Los Angeles Times, and the applause lasted for eight minutes. “Then someone called for Alfred Hertz, and the name was taken up and reiterated again and again, until finally somewhere amid the mass of scenery and busy stage hands, the conductor was found.”72 Early the next month Hertz came to San Francisco to conduct a three-day Beethoven Festival sponsored by the German-American Auxiliary of the PPIE. This event ended “German-American Week” at the fair, which coincided with the four-day national convention of the German-American Alliance. Mindful of the anti-German hysteria sweeping the country in the wake of the European war, San Francisco’s musically active German community found it prudent to highlight its heritage and its contributions to the artistic life of the city with a high-profile cultural event—and what better way to do so than with a grandiose festival of orchestral music? And who was the logical choice to conduct at such a festival but Hertz, the newly appointed German-born director of the symphony, who had won plaudits for his conducting of German opera at the Met? On the morning of the first concert, a dignified ceremony dedicated the statue of Beethoven in Golden Gate Park (the Beethoven Choir of New York, which donated it, had come to San Francisco for the convention), and that evening a huge crowd turned out at the ten-thousand-seat Civic Auditorium to hear the Ninth Symphony. Thereafter Beethoven nearly disappeared from his own festival. Saturday and Sunday concerts offered large helpings of Wagner and smaller portions of other Germans (Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schubert, Weber, Strauss, and Wolf). The event was a triumphal success and the critics effused in columns of purple prose. After the first concert, Walter Anthony wrote that Hertz was “almost everything that Henry Hadley, his predecessor in our midst, wasn’t. . . . He epitomized the energies of 100 men and in the climaxes exposed a Dionysiac joy in their tumultuous shoutings”—an image captured graphically in the caricature reproduced in Figure 6. Mason wrote that “we in San Francisco have often attended

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performances of Beethoven’s works; but we have rarely heard Beethoven. Last night we heard him, authentic and unmistakable.” Metzger called Hertz’s performance “one of the most sensational successes ever achieved in San Francisco by an orchestral leader,” and, evoking the city’s near-mythic hero, noted that the “reception was . . . the most remarkable recognition of genuine musicianship accorded a symphony leader since Fritz Scheel first made his bow to the musical public.”73 The end of this concert, however, was marred by an event that would haunt Hertz and the MA for years. While the conductor was offstage after taking his first bow, Max Magnus, the president of the Beethoven Monument and Festival Committee, decided that it would be a good idea for San Francisco Germans to show their patriotism by having the orchestra play the “Star-Spangled Banner.” (Although the United States had no official national anthem until 1931, the army and navy had adopted the “Star-Spangled Banner” as the accompaniment to their flag ceremonies, and it served as an unofficial anthem.)74 Instead of awaiting Hertz’s reappearance, Magnus whispered the idea to the concertmaster—none other than Adolph Rosenbecker, a former conductor himself. Rosenbecker leapt onto the podium. When Hertz returned for another bow, he found Rosenbecker leading the orchestra in the patriotic display. The storm took several weeks to brew, but when it did, it spread quickly across the nation. Hadley’s disaffected supporters seized the opportunity to discredit Hertz. In a sensationalistic August 27 article, featured on page 1, the Bulletin blared: “Hadley’s Friends, in Huff, Quit Music Association.” Richard Tobin and physician Grant Selfridge (also a member of the Music Committee), the article reported, had resigned in protest over the hiring of Hertz, who had shown sympathy for Germany in the European conflict. He had allegedly refused to conduct the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and, furthermore, had programmed Wagner’s Kaisermarsch on the festival’s final concert. Because the march celebrated German victory in the Franco-Prussian War, the Bulletin writer viewed its programming in 1915 as an expression of support for Kaiser Wilhelm II. Furthermore, Hertz’s (dismissed) valet, Joseph Guttman, asserted that the conductor had rejoiced over the sinking of the Lusitania. Although Rosenbecker apologized to Hertz, and Selfridge said he resigned because of time conflicts, the New York World repeated the essential allegations the following day.75 In vain Hertz protested that he had had no idea the “Star-Spangled Banner” was to be performed, and that he had programmed the Kaisermarsch as a substitute for Liszt’s Les Préludes to reduce personnel costs. Metzger (like Hertz, a German Jewish émigré) fumed at the Bulletin: “Don’t miss this; Emperor William is also being mixed up in our symphony concerts. . . . It is awful! Surely we have never heard of a crime worse than this! Why, come to think of it, it is treason against the United States Government! Can you imagine a greater offense than for Mr. Hertz to play the Kaisermarsch

Figure 6. Caricature of Alfred Hertz (1872–1942), drawn by Ulderico Marcelli, ca. 1916–19. (Courtesy of the Jean Hargrove Music Library, University of California, Berkeley.)  

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in San Francisco when the Emperor of Germany is contemplating marching into Warsaw. . . . Words fail us to express our indignation!” 76 Even though the United States had not yet joined the war, the stakes for Hertz and the Association were far from trivial, as shown by the subsequent fate of Boston Symphony conductor Karl Muck. In 1917 Muck was similarly accused (falsely) of refusing to perform the anthem. However, unlike Hertz, who raised no objections to its programming (the San Francisco Symphony played it at every concert until well after the end of the war),77 Muck lashed out at its inappropriateness. Popular fury mounted, and in March 1918, Muck was arrested and interned in Georgia until the end of the war, when he was deported to Germany. There he excoriated the United States and never returned to the country, despite numerous invitations for guest conducting engagements.78 Hertz accepted the symphony position on the condition that the orchestra’s size be expanded and the number of rehearsals increased. His insistence on intensive preparation paid off in a stellar debut on December 17. “At the close of last season,” wrote Mason, “the San Francisco Symphony was an orchestral mediocrity. Yesterday afternoon it opened the fifth season an organization of the first class.” Walter Anthony called the performance a “harvest day for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.” Metzger was ecstatic.79 Soon thereafter, the People’s Philharmonic faced its own leadership crisis: on January 7, 1916, Herman Perlet died suddenly of a heart attack. Among the applicants for his position was violinist Giulio Minetti, who had conducted numerous amateur groups in the city for years. Receiving no response to his application, Minetti formed his own ensemble: the San Francisco People’s Orchestra, which scheduled five concerts at the Civic Auditorium. Three weeks later the People’s Philharmonic announced that it had hired Sokoloff and planned ten concerts at the Dreamland Rink. Not surprisingly, the philharmonic’s new president was Cecilia Casserly, still smarting from her perceived rebuff by the Musical Association. The orchestral field thus mushroomed into three organizations competing for the public’s attention. Under Casserly’s leadership, the People’s Philharmonic abandoned its former populist goals. Mason, who was quoted in one of its programs, hastened to separate himself from the reconstituted organization: “The Philharmonic which ‘The Examiner’ supported so warmly two years ago,” he wrote, “is not the Philharmonic of today. . . . The old Philharmonic aimed to supplement the Symphony; it is difficult to believe that the Philharmonic of today is not trying to supplant it.” 80 Sokoloff proved highly talented, though at this point inexperienced. He bore no personal ill will toward Hertz, and remarkably, the two conductors managed to remain above the fray and develop a cordial relationship that would endure for many years. The People’s Orchestra, on the other hand, worked cooperatively with the symphony. Employing many symphony players,

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it began its season after the symphony’s season ended, and several symphony patrons contributed to its maintenance.81 Hertz, who was hired on a single-year contract, continued to face opposition from Hadley’s supporters, including manager Frank Healy, whose ineffective (and sometimes obstructionist) leadership led to his dismissal in 1916. As Hertz’s appointment came up for renewal, Casserly and her colleagues made a futile attempt to unseat him. And to add fuel to the fire, the Chronicle reopened the issue of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Hertz was repeatedly rehired, however, for another fourteen years. In his second season he doubled the number of concerts and the budget; and he insisted on establishing, at last, the “permanent” orchestra envisioned from the outset. Players were offered full-year contracts. In return, they agreed not to play in competing orchestras during the symphony’s season, an arrangement that, coupled with financial troubles, sounded the death knell for the People’s Philharmonic. Its last concert was July 29, 1917. Sokoloff’s conducting ambitions were not at all harmed by this development. In 1918 he became the founding director of the Cleveland Orchestra, a position he retained until 1933.82 Two years later he was tapped to act as national director of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Music Project (chapter 9), and shortly thereafter found himself again embroiled in a San Francisco turf battle, this time over the administration of the Northern California project. His ultimate solution, as we will see, was to turn to his rival-turned-comrade Alfred Hertz. Despite Hertz’s strong work and the support of (most of) the MA, anti-German sentiment remained strong. In fall 1918, Casserly wrote to the executive committee demanding to know why the Association kept a German conductor at the helm. She cited an inflammatory piece by Henry Krehbiel in the New York Tribune, reprinted in the Literary Digest. “Is Mr. Stock [of Chicago] an American citizen?” Krehbiel asked. “Is Mr. Oberhoffer [of Minneapolis]? Is Mr. Hertz? Is Mr. Bodanzky [at the Met] . . . ? All but the last have lived through a period in which Germany conducted an insidious campaign to establish imperium in imperio here. . . . If we can not have conductors of native birth let us at least have Britons, Frenchmen, Italians, or Belgians.”83 By this time Hertz was indeed a U.S. citizen, a fact Casserly must have known, because the press covered his extended legal battle in detail. Out of respect for his father, Hertz had waited until the older man died in 1914 before applying for citizenship. As a result, the process was incomplete when German immigrants became ineligible for naturalization after the United States entered the war. Following a prolonged—and public—legal debate, a San Francisco judge ruled in Hertz’s favor on June 11, 1917. As an unanticipated consequence, citizenship was granted as well to about a hundred other less prominent German residents in the area, who were similarly caught in the political maelstrom.84

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H E RT Z ’ S R E M A I N I NG Y E A R S W I T H T H E S Y M PHON Y: 1 918 – 1 93 0

Whether Hertz, in his insistence on annual contracts for the symphony players, intended to drive the People’s Philharmonic out of business is not clear. What is evident, however, is that throughout his tenure as conductor, he not only lobbied vehemently for the welfare of his musicians but also fully sympathized with SFPP’s goal of making symphonic music attractive and affordable to a far broader audience than the social coterie that had selected him (and Hadley before him). Hertz’s outreach to a wider constituency over the next decade (and beyond) reflects his faith in the efficacy of orchestral music to contribute to the improvement of society and in the potential of an inspired and vibrant San Francisco Symphony to help promote that goal. Many members of the MA’s board of governors concurred with Hertz’s vision for the organization. Within the symphony’s governing body, his utopian sentiment was repeatedly challenged by a destructive factionalism, however, and Hertz’s tenure was marked by both notable expansion and repeated attempts to unseat him. Alfred Hertz cut a figure very different from that of the aristocratic Hadley. Stocky and bald, Hertz walked with a noticeable limp from a bout of polio during childhood. Furthermore, he lacked Hadley’s social pedigree. A German-Jewish immigrant from Frankfurt, he was by his own admission nonreligious; but neither did he reject Judaism, though his failure to do so in 1901–2 had blocked him from prestigious positions in Berlin and Dresden.85 Like Hadley, Hertz recognized the social obligations of his position, but not at the expense of the music. Though by no means a social recluse (he reputedly had a delightful sense of humor and could be the life of a party), he did not hobnob with the wealthy, nor did he associate actively with either of the prominent San Francisco synagogues (even though the fashionable German-Jewish community heavily supported the orchestra). Hertz was not a member of the Bohemian Club. Indeed, although the club did not have official restrictions regarding race or religion, it reputedly did not welcome Jews, blacks, or Asians. On December 28, 1915 (soon after he settled in San Francisco), Hertz joined another all-male social club, The Family, which attracted a more diverse clientele. The Family began in 1902, after the assassination of President William McKinley. The Examiner, as well as other Hearst papers, had attacked McKinley viciously during the campaign of 1900, and two items published in its associated newspapers even obliquely suggested assassination. When McKinley was actually shot in September 1901, the Hearst papers were vilified and members of the Examiner staff were ejected from the Bohemian Club. These men formed the nucleus of The Family, which organized the following year and adopted an explicit mandate against any “distinction of caste or

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religion.”86 Another member of the club was Albert Elkus (already introduced as the pianist with the UCB Glee Club), who, by the late 1910s, was conducting vocal ensembles in the city. A pianist and composer, Elkus would become head of the theory department at the newly founded San Francisco Conservatory in 1923; an instructor at Mills College, Stanford, and Berkeley during the 1930s; and chair of the UC Berkeley music department from 1937 to 1951.87 In 1928 he composed the quintet Traveled Roads for one of The Family’s appreciation plays—dramatic enactments with newly composed music, but on a much more modest scale than the elaborate productions of the Bohemian Club.88 Elkus and Hertz became close friends. They lunched together once a month and regularly played four-hand piano duets, including reading through Mahler and Bruckner symphonies from full score.89 Under Hertz’s leadership, the symphony’s offerings underwent an impressive expansion. Acutely aware of its exclusive reputation, the orchestra reached out to the constituencies previously targeted by the SFPP by means of run-out concerts, children’s programs, and, most significantly, a popular budget-priced municipal series developed in the 1920s. Hertz began to present children’s concerts almost as soon as he arrived. The first one was a Christmas performance on December 28, 1916 (although the only “Christmas” work was the Nutcracker Suite), and by the mid-1920s there were five per year. Up to 1925, Hertz conducted these performances himself. Hadley had tried to establish run-out engagements, but under Hertz these events mushroomed. By the 1922–23 season, the orchestra was playing nearly twenty extra performances per season, in Oakland, Berkeley, Stanford, and elsewhere. And by the end of Hertz’s tenure, the symphony began an exchange with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well.90 However, the most noteworthy effort to reach out to the San Francisco public at large was a budget-priced municipal series (funded primarily by the city), which had its origin in a wildly successful “Grand Popular Concert” at the Civic Auditorium on March 5, 1918. This event came close on the heels of a concert by yet another low-priced symphony that targeted the budget audience in the aftermath of the SFPP: the short-lived Municipal Orchestra, ostensibly formed to “democratize” music.91 (The competing concerts probably resulted from an accident of scheduling rather than from a desire on the part of either organization to challenge the other head-on.) The symphony’s event attracted nearly ten thousand people, effectively eclipsing the Municipal Orchestra, and for the next four seasons, the Grand Pops event was repeated with a substantial municipal subsidy.92 By 1922 Hertz was becoming discouraged by his organization’s factionalism and his battles over finances. He was constantly lobbying to attract the best players, to increase their salaries, to hire high-profile soloists, and to perform little-known

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works. His letters are filled with signs of frustration over budgetary issues, and indeed, the orchestra’s financial situation became increasingly precarious as his outreach efforts expanded. The MA, in fact, kept Hertz on a tight leash professionally and personally, limiting expenditures severely and insisting on annual, and then two-year, contracts. On March 30, 1922, the local papers announced Hertz’s resignation, prompting, once again, a confrontation between the moneyed interests and the idealistic audience, who expressed their support for this “people’s conductor” with resounding force. The next evening the attendees at the last concert of the season greeted Hertz with passionate hysteria. “Volleys upon volleys of applause, stamping of feet, shouts and cheers mingled with the occasional exclamations from the house,” reported Metzger.93 During intermission, Kathryn Roberts, a young supporter from Berkeley (and, incidentally, a voice student of Hertz’s wife, Lilly), leapt on stage and exhorted the listeners to contribute to the Alfred Hertz Retention Fund.94 In fifteen minutes, more than $10,500 was pledged. Mason wrote the next morning, “We came for a funeral, but we stayed for a wedding.” MA board member Elias Hecht, too, spoke from the stage, attributing the most recent delay in renewing Hertz’s contract to the “machinations of a certain clique. . . . To lose this man because certain people do not fancy him,” said Hecht, “would be an outrage and a shame.” 95 Hertz withdrew his resignation and stayed for another eight years. This event combined with an even more extraordinary one that same spring to reinvigorate Hertz’s idealism and energize his utopian vision of a symphony that could excite the masses. In the spring of 1922 Hertz received a visit from Artie Mason Carter, a Los Angeles music supporter who proposed to him “a most original plan to democratize music in the southern part of California.”96 Carter asked Hertz if he would consider conducting a series of concerts featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic in “a natural amphitheater in the shape of a ‘bowl’ in the hills of Hollywood.” Despite his trepidation at the thought of outdoor concerts, Hertz was won over by her passion. Walter Henry Rothwell, the conductor of the philharmonic (whom Hertz had strongly endorsed when the orchestra was founded two years earlier), made a special trip to San Francisco to dissuade Hertz from accepting. “His claim,” Hertz wrote later, “was that it was beneath my dignity and that it would be bad for the orchestra to play out of doors.”97 Despite Rothwell’s rather self-serving plea, Hertz agreed to conduct at the Hollywood Bowl. “He never forgave me,” Hertz lamented years later, “. . . and I am sorry to say that I could not regain his friendship before his untimely death.” (In March 1927 Rothwell had a heart attack while driving to the beach in Los Angeles. He managed to steer his car into the curb and turn off the engine before dying behind the wheel. He was fifty-five.)98 Despite the precarious financial situation of the Hollywood Bowl that first

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year, the concerts were a resounding success. Hertz found the acoustics surprisingly good and conducted ten weeks of performances with four concerts a week. Returning to San Francisco that fall, he determined to effect a similar democratization in the north. “When I realized how marvelously the general public supported the movement for symphony concerts in the South, as compared to the relatively small group of wealthy people who were controlling the destiny of the San Francisco Symphony,” Hertz wrote later, “I felt more and more that the time had come to break away from the tradition of giving concerts primarily for the ‘upper four hundred.’ ”99 At Hertz’s urging, the symphony and the city initiated a municipal concert series at the Civic Auditorium on November 8, 1922. For the next decade the city, in effect, hired the orchestra for a five-concert festival, featuring—at bargain ticket prices—major soloists such as Harold Bauer, Alexander Brailowsky, Alfred Cortot, Claire Dux, Mischa Elman, Georges Enesco, Eva Gauthier, Beniamino Gigli, Percy Grainger, Frieda Hempel, Albert Spalding, and Efrem Zimbalist. On November 16, 1926, local prodigy Yehudi Menuhin (age ten) appeared on the series, playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Menuhin had grown up in San Francisco and studied with the symphony’s concertmaster, Louis Persinger; the previous year he had performed Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole on a subscription concert.100 After the Tchaikovsky performance, however, word of his talent spread like the 1906 fires, and when the eleven-year-old was featured in the Beethoven concerto, performed as part of the municipal concert of February 23, 1928, the largest audience that had ever crowded into the Civic Center filled the place to overflowing. The municipal concerts continued beyond Hertz’s years as conductor, drawing huge crowds at low prices well into the Depression years. The success of the municipal concerts spurred Hertz to further outreach. In 1924 and 1925 he presented two Spring Music Festivals, each with four concerts, one of them including a large choral work. The first featured Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the work with which he had introduced himself to the San Francisco public nearly ten years earlier; the second included Verdi’s Requiem Mass. Enlisting the cooperation of J. Emmett Hayden, a music supporter on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who had promoted the municipal concerts and was heading a committee to build a new auditorium, Hertz successfully advocated for the establishment of a municipal chorus for the festivals as well. Hans Leschke came from Berlin to serve as director. The effort was highly successful. According to a review by Bruno David Ussher, the first festival attracted an audience of more than thirty-four thousand and resulted in a profit of nearly eleven thousand dollars.101 In 1926 a symphony summer series began, featuring about a half dozen concerts in both San Francisco and San Mateo directed by a series of renowned guest conductors. In the early years, these conductors included Bruno Walter,

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Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Bernardino Molinari, Eugène Goossens, Artur Rodzinski, Willem Van Hoogstraten, E. Fernández Arbós, and, in 1930, Antonia Brico, who had grown up in Oakland, attended UCB, studied in Germany with Muck, and was, at the time, attracting national attention as the founding director of the New York Women’s Symphony. The San Mateo series was the brainchild of Cecilia Casserly, but she enlisted an energetic woman, Leonora Wood Armsby, to run it. (Armsby would eventually become the symphony’s most important and energetic administrator.) Casserly’s inspiration for a summer series on the peninsula was the Hollywood Bowl. Since Hertz was its first (and frequent) conductor, she could hardly exclude him, despite her antipathy toward him after the MA’s rejection of Sokoloff. Fortunately, Armsby basically ran the series and made sure that Hertz was included most years as one of the conductors. Hadley came back as well, as did Sokoloff (still one of Casserly’s favorites and by now making a name for himself in Cleveland).102 In 1924 Hertz signed a contract with the Victor Company, thereby making the San Francisco Symphony one of the first in the nation to issue recordings. The initial record set appeared in 1925, and among the works included were excerpts from Parsifal (which Hertz, as we have seen, conducted in its U.S. premiere in New York in 1903). Since each twelve-inch side could hold only four to five minutes of music, considerable correspondence and debate ensued about how to break these works into coherent sections. The success of this first project led to additional recordings with Victor every year until Hertz’s retirement in 1930. Recently reissued on CD, the recordings speak to the outstanding quality of the orchestra as well as to Hertz’s dynamic interpretation: he does not shy away from very fast tempi or extremes of dynamics.103 Under Hertz, the symphony also began radio broadcasts on Sunday afternoons, supported by a ten-thousand-dollar donation from Standard Oil. The first Standard Symphony Hour was aired in October 1926, and the series as a whole brought a season of concerts to listeners in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles. This venture represented the first corporate sponsorship of an arts organization in the United States, and the first radio series devoted to symphonic music.104 In addition, Hertz was the first among the country’s major symphony conductors to admit women other than as harpists. Nonprofessional orchestras had done so much earlier. For example, a photo of the Zech Orchestra in 1911 shows thirteen women, including the group’s leader.105 Sokoloff included eight in the SFPP’s fourth season, perhaps partly out of necessity because of the unavailability of men conscripted into the army. The professional scene, however, embraced female performers far more reluctantly. Hertz included five string players in the 1924–25 season: Helen Atkinson, Eugenia Argiewicz Bem, Modesta Mortensen, and two sisters—Mary and Dorothy Pasmore (a violinist and cellist, respectively).

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They entered without fanfare or special consideration, for which Hertz was commended in the press,106 even though their admission broke new ground, setting an important model for the professional symphonic world. Eugenia Bem had performed extensively in New York before 1915, when she married Stanislas Bem, a cellist who joined the San Francisco Symphony in the following year.107 The Pasmore women—along with a third sister (pianist Suzanne)—had been in the musical news of San Francisco for years. As early as September 1908, they were praised for their trio performances after returning from study and performance in Berlin. Their father was Henry Bickford Pasmore, a composer, pianist, and singer who first came to San Francisco in 1875, taught widely, and prepared the chorus for the city’s first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1898.108 A fourth sister, Harriet, was also a notable musician. She adopted the stage name Radiana Pazmor and became a renowned contralto who specialized in avant-garde music. In San Francisco she premiered works by Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and others, and she made the first recording of Charles Ives’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.”109 On October 31, 1927, Hertz appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which commended him for his “splendid stewardship” in transforming the “undernourished group of players” he had inherited from Hadley into a first-rate orchestra that was opening its seventeenth season in the black financially.110 The extraordinary expansion that Hertz brought to the orchestra, however, also led to personal stress, and after the crash of 1929 he apparently saw the financial handwriting on the wall. The following spring—April 15, 1930—he submitted his letter of resignation for the second time, citing no reason but mentioning “constant handicaps and endless difficulties,” through which the organization had nevertheless developed “from the most modest beginnings into a first-class symphony orchestra.” 111 Two years later, Time published a far less optimistic report, bluntly pointing to the factionalism that had contributed to this decision: the San Francisco Symphony, the article claimed, “has given many a noteworthy concert, but for years it was a bone of contention between wealthy Jews who liked and supported hulking Conductor Alfred Hertz, and the Bohemian Club element who have never quite forgiven Hertz for displacing their convivial club member, Henry Hadley.” 112 Hertz’s decision turned out to be wise, for after his retirement the symphony entered a troubled period and nearly disappeared entirely. But therein lies a story for a later chapter.

3

The Politics of Race Chinatown, Forbidden and Alluring

Descriptions by white tourists of Tangrenbu (Chinatown) before the 1906 quake are marked by stark contradictions: gloomy but gaudy, dingy but quaint, crowded but colorful; an area of reeking alleys and enticing restaurants; “painted balconies . . . hung with windbells and flowered lanterns,” but “a habitat for listless idlers . . . perhaps dreaming of crime and heathen debauchery”; inscrutable inhabitants—lazy yet industrious, depraved but clever; and in the air, the “scent of sandalwood and exotic herbs . . . , the sickly sweetness of opium smoke, the fumes of incense and roast pork . . . [,] and . . . always the sound of temple gongs, the clashing of cymbals and the shrill notes of an orchestra.”1 Chinatown, in short, was at once forbidden and irresistible, repulsive and alluring, its reputed danger more than counterbalanced by its attraction as an exotic Other: a little slice of the Orient in the heart of one of America’s great cities. Never mind that San Francisco’s Chinatown—the largest such community in the United States—with its lack of women and its reliance on providing services to the surrounding white community, hardly resembled Guangdong, much less China as a whole. White tourists flocked to the area to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of one of the world’s oldest civilizations (and, incidentally, to gape at what they viewed as its present depravity)—providing, of course, that they could tour its streets under the protection of guides, many of whom hastened to show them its seamiest dives. Thanks to this reputation (which was hardly discouraged by San Francisco’s business interests), numerous eyewitness reports of prequake Chinatown survive. These writings take on an uncanny and depressing similarity: a slovenly area filled with dazed opium smokers and gamblers, offering prostitution services to whites and Asians alike, emitting overpowering odors. And most of these travel reports take for granted the superiority of Western Civilization.2 63

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Many nineteenth-century reports on Chinatown include descriptions, in greater or lesser detail, of its most unusual theatrical offering: Cantonese opera. Given the enormous differences between Chinese and Western opera, it is hardly surprising that Westerners found the genre largely incomprehensible. Most of them, however, also characterized it as reprehensible. The numerous descriptions of Chinese opera performances from the 1860s to the 1890s, like descriptions of Chinatown itself, bear a numbing consistency. Most observers begin with a generally bewildered description of the theater itself: the simple raised platform as stage, nearly devoid of props; the lack of curtain or scenery; the two doors at the platform’s rear (one for the entrance, one for the exit, of the actors); the onstage orchestra of about a half dozen players; the low wooden benches for the Chinese audience, filled on the main floor with men who looked identical; the women’s small, stifling balcony; the separate box for white visitors; the food vendors (“slim Chinese boys, bearing napkin-covered baskets”)3 wending their way through the audience during the production; the lack of applause; the pervasive smoking by audience members and orchestra musicians alike; the brilliant costumes; the role of the property man, who changed the “rudimentary” stage accoutrements in full view of the audience; and, inevitably, the deafening din of the orchestra. (Figure 7 shows an 1884 drawing of the women’s gallery; the interior of one of the main theaters is pictured later in the chapter, in Figure 9.) A few remarked on the English-speaking ticket-seller, who catered to non-Chinese-speaking visitors and charged double the admission price exacted from the Chinese. Whites paid fifty cents for the evening; the Chinese rate began at twenty-five and decreased as the evening progressed. Many in the know would arrive only in the last hour, when the price went down to a dime.4 Although most of the visitors had limited comprehension of the plot, they understood the battle scenes, and many commented wryly on the lack of realism and the miraculous onstage revivification of the dead. The warriors fell, rolled, and writhed, and died, and, having remained dead for a minute or two, jumped up again, and plunged anew into the fray. . . . Presently, an individual rushed on the stage, who was evidently a hero. He had a whole arsenal of weapons; his raiment was gorgeous; his nose was painted flake-white, and stripes of blue and red adorned his cheeks. . . . Before his slashing strokes, the warriors went down like nine-pins, till the whole army lay strewn dead around him. . . . Then the slain army rose up, and all, performing various acrobatic feats, turned and tumbled themselves off the stage.5

The accounts almost universally disparage the instrumental music that accompanies the action throughout a Chinese opera. The small orchestra created, in these accounts, a “diabolical din,” a “strident wail,” “outlandish noise,” a hullabaloo, pandemonium. The musicians, said one observer, must have been “paid

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Figure 7. The women’s gallery of the Jackson Street Chinese Theater in the mid-1880s. (From McDowell, “The Chinese Theater,” 32).

for the quantity instead of the quality of the music produced.” Many commentators invited their readers to envision an incoherent cacophony of unrelated sounds: “Imagine a room in which one man is mending pots, another filing a saw, another hammering boards, another beating a gong, and two boys trying to tune fiddles.” Another advised: “Fancy one frog-pond, one Sunday school with pumpkin whistles, one militia training, and two gongs for supper . . . all at once.” The most pervasive metaphor, however, was an unruly chorus of battling cats.6 A report from the 1860s is typical in its value judgments but more detailed than normal in its description of the music: The orchestra, five or six persons, sits at the back part of the stage. One holds a small metallic instrument, a sort of cross between a small gong and a flat bell; another has several blocks, of different sizes and shapes, upon which he beats with two sticks, making a noise but surely not music; another beats a drum, looking and sounding like a half-barrel tub covered with leather. A large gong hangs beside him, which he pounds in the “terrific” portions of the play. Another plays most of the time on a stringed instrument, in principle something like a fiddle with two strings, but entirely unlike a fiddle, or anything else describable, in both shape and sounds. In the more noisy parts of the play he beats a pair of huge cymbals—about as musical as would be the clashing together of two pieces of sheet iron.7

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Figure 8. Chinese instruments: erhu and dizi. On the erhu, the bow passes between the two strings. On the dizi, a membranecovered hole lies between the finger holes and the embouchure hole. (Photo by Victor Carvellas; used by permission.)

Most of the other reports also make note of the bowed fiddle, presumably the traditional two-stringed erhu (the most common member of the huqin family of bowed strings; see Figure 8). They almost universally characterize the instrument’s tone as harsh and scratchy: “an ear-piercing sound like a multitude of insane bagpipes,” according to one observer.8 Although they were quick to point out the apparent deficiencies of the instrument, most white visitors failed to notice that the bow hair on the erhu passes between the two strings, thus facilitating a remarkable virtuosity that requires a prodigious technique quite unlike that required on the Western violin family. Expert erhu performance requires intensive training and practice, as well as a good ear, since the erhu player must

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closely follow the singer’s melody and then signal the other melodic players.9 The erhu player thus functions in a crucial role in the production, leading the ensemble of melodic instruments. Other visitors remarked on the boisterous, double-reed suona, variously characterized as a bugle, “clarionet,” flageolet, or trumpet. The suona typically made its appearance in the military scenes, where it functioned in essence as part of the percussion ensemble.10 Other melodic instruments described can be identified as the sanxian (a three-string fretless lute) and the dizi (a transverse flute with six finger holes and a membrane hole that adds a buzzing quality to the timbre; Figure 8). Mostly, however, the descriptions centered on the omnipresent gongs, which elicited almost unanimous condemnation, but whose essential function in punctuating the dramatic action escaped most of these Western listeners. George Sala in 1882 described a kind of “shrieking stove,”11 along with the typical gongs. “One instrumentalist,” he wrote, . . . sate [sic] before a curious metallic “arrangement” on four legs, which bore the appearance of a miniature “kitchener” or cooking-stove. In the centre of the top of this weird machine there was a circular orifice with a metal cover, like a saucepanlid, and at irregular intervals the instrumentalist lifted this saucepan-lid as if to see what was going on in the kitchener below. I fancied at first that he was the cook of the Theatre Royal, Jackson-street, and that he was busy preparing the company’s supper; but I noticed that when he replaced the saucepan-lid he brought it down with a clang, and that the seeming cooking-stove thereupon emitted a sepulchral and ear-piercing shriek, such as, with a lively fancy, you might imagine to have been uttered by the Oracle of Dodona with a toothache brought on by a continuity of easterly winds. The chief instrumentalist, however, was a man with a gong, who contrived to keep up a perfectly diabolical din. There seemed to be some standing feud between him and the man at the kitchener, for, immediately after the latter had made play with his saucepan-lid, the presiding genius at the gong would frantically thump that instrument as though to drown the reverberations of his rival’s apparatus. . . . It was a sad thing to suspect that such a sentiment as jealousy existed between these two accomplished artists. Let us be thankful—proudly thankful, my brethren—that no such envious rivalries are to be found among artists in Europe.12

Cantonese music specialist Bell Yung interprets the “kitchener” as a pair of large civil or military cymbals, with one member of the pair “suspended over a fourlegged frame, and the other half resting on it when the cymbals were not played. Such a construction would free one hand of the cymbal player to play another instrument, such as a wood block.” 13 The drums, gongs, and cymbals in Cantonese opera work as a unit, performing specific patterns in various distinctive combinations developed over many centuries. These patterns, which “range from a single stroke on a gong to complex juxtapositions of several instruments in a prescribed rhythm,” reflect the degree

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of complexity in the stage movements. Action sequences are accompanied by complex, though relatively fixed, patterns. Prolonged sequences of movements, such as combat scenes, require music that has no fixed length. Although repetitive rhythmic figuration characterizes these sections of the opera, fixed patterns appear only as terminal markers.14 The vocal sounds were no more comprehensible to these visitors than the instrumental, and most observers were repulsed or amused by the typical male falsetto. “When we got home from the theatre,” reported Charles Nordhoff in his 1882 travel guide to California, “one of my children made a door to creak in the room, and we all burst out laughing as we recognized the most impassioned tones of the chief actor in the play.” 15 As for form and structure, many noted incessant repetition, but few remarked on it admiringly. George Fitch’s 1882 summary succinctly captures a typical reaction: “One emerges from the smokeladen atmosphere into the fresh night-air with the same sense of relief felt in escaping from a railway-car, after an entire day spent amid the dust and grime and clatter of the train. The confused sound of that awful orchestra still rings in the ears, and its barbaric strains tyrannize over one’s dreams.” 16 Chinese opera performances in San Francisco date back almost to the discovery of gold: the first documented production—by the visiting Hong Took Tong company—took place on October 18, 1852.17 By the 1870s (the “golden period” for the Chinese theater), a lively competition had developed among at least four, and perhaps as many as six establishments. 18 Visiting actors-singers— who in China had frequently been trapped in a life of poverty and ostracized as a despised social class—reputedly commanded phenomenal salaries in the United States. (One suspects, however, that reports of up to ten thousand dollars per year may have been considerably exaggerated.)19 Beginning in the 1880s, the San Francisco scene shrank, leaving two competitors: the Tan Kwai Yuen on Washington Street and the Po Hing on Jackson Street (Figure 9).20 According to Frederick Masters, the troupe at the Washington Street theater in the mid-1890s numbered only thirty, too small to present historical dramas, which sometimes required up to double that number. Salaries of about five hundred dollars per year were reportedly about half what they had been fifteen years previously.21 (Actors also received room and board; many observers report on their squalid, windowless, underground rooms.) Audiences in the last decade of the century were apparently so small that the two theaters agreed to operate on alternate weeks.22 Interspersed among these reports—particularly in the last years before the quake—is an occasional sympathetic view, the most notable of them from one of Europe’s most famous pianists.23 In February 1896, Ignacy Jan Paderewski visited San Francisco, performing seven solo recitals and then accompanying Belgian violinist Martin Marsick. To judge from the reviews, the San Francisco

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Figure 9. Inside the Jackson Street Chinese Theater before 1906. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN-08059/CHS2010.355.tif.)

public had never heard piano playing like it: “The very spirit of the composer seem[ed] to be speaking, singing, lamenting, suffering, exulting, agonizing.”24 As in other cities, the press reported that Paderewski brought tears to the eyes of the women who constituted the majority of his audience and filled his dressing room with floral tributes. On February 16, 1896, the Call ran a full-page article on Paderewski’s impression of Chinese music, complete with a sketch of him, in top hat and evening jacket, at the Chinese opera.25 “This music infatuates me!” he told the reporter. For the previous three nights he had apparently walked quietly through Chinatown, marveling at the lanterns and gaily painted house fronts. “The art of these people is glorious. We see here the genius of 2500 years ago and not to-day. Their primitive colors please me as much as their music. . . . I never saw more dramatic expression put into tones. . . . And there were such splendid climaxes! . . . What appealed to me most was the beautiful simplicity of it all.” The reviewer, who apparently accompanied Paderewski to the theater, commented on the “shrill shrieks” of the erhu, but the pianist contradicted him, insisting that the man had “an artistic soul.” The “rhythm is perfect,” he said. “Through long bits of recitative the entire orchestra rests, yet the measure is never lost.” (Nordhoff, despite his otherwise disparaging comments on the instrumentalists, had also taken note of the controlled rhythm and the expert leadership of the erhu player more than a dozen years earlier. “The leader,” he wrote, “had his

Figure 10. Drawing of Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Martin Marsick listening to Chinese music at a merchants’ club, and Paderewski’s notated version of one of the tunes he heard. (San Francisco Call, March 3, 1896, 16.)

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shirt-sleeved orchestra under full control; and the singers and the players all kept admirable time.”)26 When Marsick arrived in San Francisco, Paderewski took the violinist to a merchants’ club, where a small Chinese orchestra was playing.27 For an hour, the two listened intently, occasionally singing along with what the reporter called the falsettist’s “screeching” (see Figure 10). Paderewski admired the dizi. Marsick tried the erhu but could produce only “several plaintive shrieks.” Paderewski later commented on the repetition of two distinct melodies, which he noted were subjected to “embellishments and additions,” tempo variation, and an occasional tremolo effect. “The extra fiddles would make additional flourishes and ‘bang! bang!’ the great cymbals would mark some emphatic feature,” but the basic melodies remained unchanged. Asked to notate one of them, Paderewski balked, claiming his lack of knowledge. But the reporter cajoled him into writing down at least the beginning of what he remembered (Figure 10). Is it possible that what Paderewski heard was the two differentiated tune families characteristic of the Chinese opera, sometimes designated as “mother tunes”: xipi and erhuang?28 The two families share the same basic scale but are distinct in terms of cadential pitches and fundamental melodic and rhythmic features. Erhuang typically appears in somber or serious situations, xipi in livelier dramatic scenes. Aria types within the same family share modal and structural features, leading some scholars to postulate a common origin. Paderewski left town with “many dollars, the entire outfit of a Chinese string and wind orchestra, a very happy impression of California and a very decided admiration for the music of the Mongolians.”29 Marsick was less impressed. “ ‘I was amused by the orchestra,’ he said, ‘but not interested. It was not music—how could it be with such primitive instruments?’ ”30 As for the Chinese residents of the city, they recognized the pianist from his first visits to Chinatown and were honored by his presence. Said a Chinese man “dressed in rich clothes,” when asked if he knew who the visitor was: “Of course. . . . That is Paderewski, the man who makes the piano sound like a singing girl.”31 F ROM T H E T U R N OF T H E C E N T U RY T H ROUGH T H E 1 9 2 0 s

Despite Chinatown’s attraction for tourists—who, of course, generated considerable revenue—the area’s unwholesome reputation during the late nineteenth century prompted repeated calls for its demolition. These sentiments were reinforced by an outbreak of bubonic plague in March 1900. The disease struck first in Chinatown and for five months remained confined to that area. As word spread outside the city and tourism declined, officials imposed a restriction on all Asians: none could leave San Francisco without being vaccinated (a painful,

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dangerous, and minimally effective preventative).32 Despite a court ruling nullifying this mandate, the state board of health ordered a quarantine of Chinatown on May 28. A rectangle within Stockton, Kearny, California, and Broadway was cordoned off (carefully circumventing white-owned businesses), and the Call demanded that Chinatown be burnt to the ground. After two weeks of complaints by both the Chinese and the white residents who depended on Chinese service workers, the quarantine was lifted. City and state officials repeatedly denied that the disease was plague, and the governor and his medical team even managed to thwart an investigation by a panel of external experts. Cleansing the area temporarily stemmed the disease, but each spring the rats emerged from their winter hibernation to reinfect the populace. By 1905, after 121 cases and 113 deaths (many among whites as well as Chinese), the plague seemed to be conquered. The 1906 quake, however, shook rats loose from fractured walls and cracked pipes, and the animals bred in the refugee camps. Motivated by a scheduled appearance of the Great White Fleet in May 1908, Mayor Edward Robeson Taylor (himself a physician) spearheaded another massive cleanup. The plague was finally defeated in February of that year, after an additional 160 cases and 77 fatalities. The extended epidemic hardly enhanced Chinatown’s already squalid reputation. Following the quake, most of San Francisco’s Chinese residents were relocated to Oakland, where a new Chinatown sprang up almost overnight. “The Chinese are in full control of some of the most desirable business portions of the city,” noted a New York Times correspondent five months later. “What used to be demure little rose-covered cottages have . . . [been] lifted in the air, half stories added, little balconies thrown out, and they simply teem with life. Splendid color tones strike one on every hand, gorgeous, primitive color schemes, flaming orange, deep reds, yellows, greens, striking blues. . . . Narrow Chinese alleys are built everywhere through the blocks . . . but the broader streets are filled with a teeming population.” 33 While debates raged over reconstruction in San Francisco, white residents could be seen rummaging through Chinatown’s ruins in search of souvenirs from destroyed residences and digging for valuables that Chinese merchants had buried in their frantic escape from the fires.34 The Times reporter captured the prevailing sentiment: In all the great San Francisco destruction no part of the city has been more sincerely regretted than Chinatown. While it existed, at intervals, loud and deep were the protests against it—against its dark alleys, its underground tunnels, its opium joints, against the whole Oriental scheme of life so different from our own. But now that the pitiless fire has swept over Chinatown, that only menacing walls remain, that the ruins are the most desolate and pitiful in all the city, only the picturesque memories linger, and a wail has gone up across the bay for the

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Chinatown that is no more in ‘the city that was.’ San Francisco remembers now only the gorgeous coloring of Chinatown, the quaint ceremonies, the wonderful brasses, the rare porcelain, the carving, the ivories, the superb embroideries, the exquisite, artistic effects representing the rare art of the Orient.”

By the end of the decade, San Francisco’s Chinatown was largely rebuilt, and visitors marveled once again at this quaint slice of old Asia in the heart of San Francisco, now appearing to them cleaner, safer, and more inviting. Indeed, the area became a showpiece for the city. In October 1917 the Chronicle began a series of weekly articles on “Historical Chinatown,” part of a campaign to attract tourists but also to spur the city into effecting street repairs and building parks for the children.35 Chinatown was a minicity, noted the reports, with its own newspapers, schools, governing body, telephone exchange, and band. The “governing body” comprised the traditional Zhonghua Huiguan, commonly called the Six Companies, which mediated disputes, dispensed charity, provided services to the Chinese immigrants, and served as a communication link to the white population. (The huiguan, which dated back to the 1850s, were associations of residents based on their districts of origin in China. The chairmanship of the group rotated, and whites typically referred to the current leader as the “mayor of Chinatown.”) Restaurants, noted the articles, offered strange but delicious dishes eaten to the accompaniment of “weird,” “wailing,” and “haunting” music. The streets were filled with honest, law-abiding people. Parisian gowns and Western suits were well in evidence. Indeed, Western musical ensembles had sprouted in the area: The Cathay Boys’ Band was founded in 1911 and, notes the Chronicle, provided entertainment to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the birth of the Chinese Republic. By 1916 a chamber orchestra was functioning at the Chinese YMCA.36 Descriptions of the Chinese opera in the postquake decade nearly disappear. In fact, Wood’s tourist guide of 1914 states that the theater was but a memory. Occasional performances continued to take place in temporary locations and even in tents, but the spectacles that attracted so many residents and tourists in the prequake period were for the most part defunct.37 In part, this change reflects the priorities of the Chinese community itself. So determined were its members to rebuild a quarter that would be seen as clean, civilized, and respectable that they imitated Western music-making practices, as well as dress, customs, and other forms of entertainment. In addition, the new fad for motion pictures supplanted interest in the old theatrical traditions. As it turns out, however, the Chinese opera was simply dormant, soon to emerge in a new and somewhat altered form, recalling many of the old theatrical traditions but reconfigured in a modern guise that would appeal to a modern audience. Indeed, San Francisco’s Chinese population was itself transformed in many

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ways during the years following the quake. After a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1898 (United States v. Wong Kim Ark), Chinese children born in the country became U.S. citizens at the time of their birth. (The 1882 Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens, but conflicted with the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to persons born in the country. By a six-to-two vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment took precedence.) Moreover, the quake unexpectedly facilitated increased Chinese immigration. The collapse of city hall brought with it the destruction of nearly all municipal records. As a result, some Chinese men staked claims of U.S. birth and then, as citizens, took advantage of their newfound eligibility to return to China and bring back wives and children. Because children of U.S. citizens were automatically citizens, even if born abroad, these foreign-born offspring were automatically eligible to enter the country. Others came as imposters, with purchased U.S. birth certificates, having memorized information about their presumed families. Despite close questioning at the immigration station on Angel Island, only about 10 percent of these “paper sons” were denied entry.38 Thus, the nature of San Francisco’s Chinese community changed radically—to include more women and numerous second-generation young people; the latter, in particular, tended to emulate U.S., rather than Chinese, customs. A number of articles in the mainstream press during the 1920s focus particularly on the transformed Chinese woman—smart, liberated, fashionable, and attractive, yet anxious to maintain ties to her historical culture. “Miss Mah Jong is the most Parisian thing in all America,” claimed a full-page feature article in the New York Times in 1923, “. . . with her black bobbed hair and her silk pantaloons and her clicking high heels.” These modern Chinese “flappers” could be found working as waitresses in tearooms or staffing Chinatown’s independent telephone exchange, which apparently required prodigious memorization skills. “The old-time Chinese dislike numbers: When Ah Fun wants to telephone to Wong Ng . . . the girl on the board must know Ng’s number by heart.”39 The article exhibits the familiar self-assured confidence in the superiority of Western clothes, habits, and entertainments—including music—over the “primitive” artistic expression of an immigrant population that had lived in the city since before the quake. It is noteworthy, however, that many second-generation Chinese Americans themselves harbored some sympathy with assimilationist goals—and it is certainly not only the Chinese who strived in this period to blend into the majority culture and become undifferentiated “Americans.” The melting pot ideal also characterized the ambitions of many European immigrants, who rushed to shed negative stereotypes and “melt” into their adopted culture. At the same time, the “new” women of Chinatown seemingly had no objection to playing old-fashioned, stereotypical roles in their day jobs as, for example, a “hat girl, tearoom waitress, coffee girl, cigarette girl, or maid in waiting, in Oriental

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costume.” When they returned home in the evening, though, they would don “the latest gowns from American shops.” 40 This dual allegiance—to the adopted country’s dress and habits, but also to a revered ancient cultural ancestry—led to a resurgence of the Chinese opera during the 1920s, but in a form that appealed to a chic, sophisticated clientele. One major change was the acceptance of women on the stage, and the mainstream press published several complimentary feature articles on female Chinese opera stars. In April 1922 the focus was “prima donna” Jue Quon Tai at the Orpheum. In December of the same year, an extended article, accompanied by a large, twocolumn photo, introduced the San Francisco public to newly arrived actress Tam Wai Jon, who was leading a company performing at the Crescent. “She tackles the tremendous roles of the Chinese drama,” wrote the reviewer in a refreshingly nonpatronizing tone, “—roles that for sheer length would make an Occidental actor seek refuge in the wordless movies—with perfect composure.”41 (Visiting Chinese actors and actresses were admitted to the United States during the 1920s under strict rules, including the requirement that they post a bond of a thousand dollars. They could sign on for renewable six-month permits, but were allowed a maximum stay of only three years.)42 The second change in the Chinese opera involved modernization of the sets: the use of more elaborate scenery and props, the addition of lighting, the adoption of a proscenium stage, and the introduction of a curtain. Finally, seating for patrons was updated: it was made more comfortable, no longer segregated by gender, and available by reservation. Similar changes were taking place in the opera in China. By the early 1920s, women were not strangers to the Chinese stage, and opera productions began to show a heavy Western influence, not only in their staging and lighting, but also in their use of Western instruments (notably the violin, but the clarinet and saxophone as well). Western popular tunes and even European harmonies made their way into the productions.43 In June 1924 the Mandarin Theatre opened at 1021–25 Grant Avenue and soon attracted both Chinese and Western patrons (Figure 11).44 It was still active in the mid-1940s, when a postcard advertised: “Famous Chinese actors and actresses cross the Pacific making periodical visits here and Chinese plays are produced in the most fantastic settings, while the actors adorn themselves in gowns of exquisite Oriental richness.” (The building still stands in the same location, now devoid of its past theatrical glory.) Indeed, the year before the Mandarin opened, fish shop owner Tai Kee took writer Idwal Jones to a performance of visiting Chinese artists at the Crescent Theater. Featured that night was a sixteen-year-old female star, Lee Sut Moey, her “shrill voice” (in Jones’s words) imitating the male falsettists who had traditionally impersonated female characters on stage. (Jones wrote that “pleasant old” Tai Kee was “one of the bondsmen who put up the $30,000” to admit the company

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Figure 11. Postcard of the Mandarin Theatre, 1021–25 Grant Avenue, ca. 1940.

into the country.)45 An “extraordinary condition has come about,” wrote George Kin Leung in 1931, “wherein actresses imitate, often to the minutest detail, the style of men who are foremost in the profession. In the beginning, youths created a stylized manner in order to present a highly conventionalized picture of a woman; now an actress is obliged to mimic what originally was an imitation of her own sex.”46 The essence of this theatrical art is the creation of illusion, “a theatre of symbolism” in the words of Nancy Rao.47 The actor is not the thing, but rather is “like” the thing. For the traditional connoisseurs of Chinese opera, then, females were simply too real. Leung’s statement, however, does not portray the complexity of casting typical of San Francisco’s Chinatown stages in this period. Although the timbre of the male falsetto voice, as we have seen, was a vital part of the history of Chinese opera, his comment about actresses seeking simply to imitate the imitators may well have been intended to accentuate the accomplishments of Mei Lanfang, the most renowned female impersonator in China at the time. In contrast to the sensibilities of the older traditionalists, the modern environment of U.S. Chinatowns during the 1920s offered visiting actresses a highly lucrative venue where they were greeted with enthusiasm for their performances in a variety of roles. Rao has documented a fascinating culture of gender fluidity in this era when realism began to dominate the Chinese opera stage. Women played roles as females and

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cross-dressed as males; male falsettists portraying female characters interacted with actresses playing women’s roles; and mixed troupes made frequent appearances. Casting for couples, she notes, could involve actor and actress, actor and female impersonator, male impersonator and actress, and male impersonator and female impersonator.48 In December 1924, Idwal Jones visited the new Mandarin to hear actress Jung Shook Kan (Cheung Sook Kun), “a young woman of most expressive hands and a voice that can be transposed to a male falsetto. . . . She is a fine improvatrice, and, given a plot, can so pad and interpolate that it becomes a sizeable play.” After a change of costume Jung then appeared in a trousers role, portraying the leading man in the drama.49 Within a year a rival theater had opened on Jackson Street: the Great China, which, like the Mandarin, paid hefty fees to prominent traveling companies and offered competing specialty programs. Attendance at these theaters was encouraged by the older generation, who had helped finance their construction not only to preserve and celebrate the native arts of their ancestral country but also to provide wholesome entertainment for their offspring (or more specifically, as Frank Taylor noted in 1929, to keep them away from the movies). 50 By the end of the decade, the opera had become a fashionable evening attraction for young Chinese Americans. “Before the opera came the Chinese people stayed home in the evening and social intercourse was within the family,” Taylor reported hearing from a Chinese American friend. “After the opera came the young people began giving supper parties and inviting friends to each other’s houses” before attending the productions. The renewed interest in traditional music and theater is also manifest in the founding of the Nam Chung Musical Society in 1925. The largest and most active music club in Chinatown, the society aimed to increase the professionalism of Cantonese opera productions.51 Not all of the theatrical modernizations were effected with grace, however. Sometimes attempts at integrating Western theatrical practices with traditional Chinese music, acting, and drama resulted in incongruous, even amusing contradictions. In a comprehensive overview of the Chinese theater in the United States, produced under the WPA in 1936, the authors cite, as an example, a scene in which an official of the imperial court appeared in resplendent raiment, enacting with stylistic gestures the traditional portrayal of horse riding. The scenic backdrop, however, showed a modern city complete with vehicles. “Why does he ride a horse when he could take the bus?” asked one observer.52 M E I A N D M A V I SI T SA N F R A NC I S C O (1 93 0 – 1 931)

Despite the introduction of women on stage, the female impersonator (known in Chinese as nan dan—a man playing a female, or dan, role) did not disappear. The most extraordinary man to perfect this art in the early twentieth century

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was Mei Lanfang, who debuted as a nan dan at age twelve. His grandfather, Mei Qiaoling, was also a female impersonator, and his paternal uncle Mei Yutian— one of the most famous musicians in China—was a master of the huqin and other instruments.53 Mei became renowned through his performances in Beijing and Shanghai beginning in 1913, and was repeatedly heralded for his ability to portray equally effectively the various dan roles (i.e., the coquette, the female warrior, the unmarried girl, the virtuous wife, the old woman, and the evil woman). In his early years, Mei wrote and performed in some modern Chinese plays, but then turned to resurrecting the classical theater, in which his talents as a female impersonator could come to the fore. (His performances were in the Beijing Opera tradition, which is distinct from, but shares many of the qualities of, the Cantonese heritage of San Francisco’s Chinatown residents.)54 In 1930 Mei performed in the United States over a period of five months. Although he entered the country in Seattle, he went immediately to Washington D.C., where he appeared in a private showing that was greeted, for the most part, laconically. After hiring a Broadway agent, however, Mei began a triumphal series of performances in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Honolulu under the auspices of the China Institute of America. 55 At 5:30 p.m. on April 20, 1930, Mei arrived in San Francisco, preceded by extraordinary advance publicity in both the mainstream and the Chinese press. He was greeted upon his arrival at the ferry building by the mayor, other city dignitaries, Chinatown leaders, and a great throng of Chinese residents, including two hundred school children bearing flowers. “Chinese boy and girl scout bands and the Chung Wah School band formed an aisle through which the actor passed.” Then a parade up Market Street to Grant Avenue and Jackson Street, featuring the Six Companies band, took Mei to the heart of Chinatown.56 The area had been prepared for his arrival with hundreds of lanterns. Flowers decorated sidewalks, cars, and bicycles, and hundreds of Chinese and U.S. flags waved their welcome. A sign at the Great China Theater proclaimed: “San Francisco welcomes Mei, a desire for sharing Chinese culture through theater and music.” 57 In the theater itself a reception featured an introduction with music, welcoming speeches, a talk by Mei, and presentations. The Chronicle alone ran twenty-six articles before and during Mei’s two-anda-half-week visit, reflecting a more embracing, yet ambivalent, attitude among the white population. On the one hand, the extensive press coverage underscores the respect with which he was welcomed to San Francisco. At the same time, he was viewed in some sense as a precious antique—an image of an ancient civilization to be admired from a distance, but one with little everyday connection to the local inhabitants. Throughout his U.S. tour, in fact, Mei projected a dual persona, representing an ancient (yet artistically dead) national culture on stage and modern China off stage.58

Chinatown

79

Underscoring Mei’s central mission—to reach the non-Chinese population in the United States—he did not perform in Chinese theaters, except in San Francisco. Even here, however, his first appearance on April 23 was not at the Great China (one of the sponsors of his tour), but rather at the Tivoli, one of San Francisco’s oldest and most venerable performance halls. Begun in 1875, first as a beer garden and then as a moderate-sized theater, the Tivoli had hosted more than four thousand light and grand operatic performances before its destruction in the 1906 quake. In 1913 the theater arose from the ashes of the great catastrophe and opened in splendor with a production of Rigoletto by the Chicago Grand Opera Company. In this time-honored locale, Mei made his own San Francisco debut. The society crowd showed up en masse, dressed in formal gowns as for the Western opera. “Lady Teazle” described the elegant attire in the next day’s Chronicle.59 Before each number a young woman, Soo Yong, explained the plots. Indeed, Mei’s visit had been prepared for this largely white audience by a lecturedemonstration at the Fairmont Hotel, featuring a talk by Ernest Moy, which he illustrated with a demonstration by actors from the Great China Theater.60 George Warren, reviewing Mei’s Tivoli debut for the Chronicle, noted that the audience was “icy . . . at first, but thawed into genuine enthusiasm after the sword dance.”61 In contrast to prequake attitudes, Warren listened to Mei’s falsetto with genuine respect. Mei’s voice, he wrote, was “a trifle unpleasant at first, but when the ears become accustomed to its cadences and shrillness [it became] rather agreeable.” At the same time, the foreignness, the exoticism, and the Otherness of Mei’s performance appears in comments throughout the review, despite the fact that the Chinese community—and Chinese opera—had been part of San Francisco’s life for nearly eighty years. “The medium is strange to Occidental eyes,” wrote Warren, “but no less interesting for its exotic quality.” There were even “two or three supreme moments when his acting transcended the trammels of the foreign medium and became universal.” That the historical culture of Chinese America, the inherited tradition of a local community of more than sixteen thousand residents at this time, most of whom lived in the heart of the city less than a half mile from Nob Hill, could still be considered foreign testifies to the extraordinary insularity among San Francisco’s microcommunities.62 Mei, of course, was foreign; but most of Chinatown’s residents by this time were not, and the tradition of Chinese opera in the United States, present for years not only in San Francisco but also in many other cities, was simply one of many musics of America’s numerous subcultures. The evening after his Tivoli debut, Mei performed for a sold-out house at the Great China Theater, this time catering to a mostly Chinese American audience. His five performances at the Great China constituted the only time on Mei’s U.S. tour in which he appeared in a specifically Chinese theater.63 Both the Chineseand English-language press followed the performances with eagerness, and Mei

80

From the Quake to the Crash

then moved to another Western venue (the Capitol Theater) for a final week before departing for Los Angeles. Although San Francisco’s Chinese community welcomed Mei ecstatically, his Beijing opera style was rather different from the Cantonese style familiar to the majority of local residents. Cantonese opera was traditionally louder and featured more percussion instruments, grander theatrical displays, and a great variety of tunes.64 Mei had, in fact, already toned down the volume of his own percussion to appeal to non-Chinese audiences and he often hid the orchestra in the wings.65 Five years later, in preparation for his famous tour to Russia, Mei went even further, arranging for modifications to some of the traditional instruments so as to mimic more closely the Western scale. In addition, the vocal styles of Beijing and Cantonese opera necessarily reflect differences between Mandarin and Cantonese speech. Because Chinese is a tonal language, theatrical vocal renditions are necessarily influenced by speech patterns.66 (Cantonese has nine tones as opposed to four in Mandarin, making it particularly intricate.) Adding to the complexity, Mandarin and Cantonese dialects typically intermingled in Cantonese opera during the 1920s, with formal songs and arias often reflecting an older dialect characteristic of the Beijing Opera.67 Mei himself did not speak Cantonese, but some members of the San Francisco Chinese community spoke Mandarin and were able to serve as translators. The following April a leading exponent of Cantonese opera, Ma Shizeng, arrived in San Francisco with his opera troupe and played at the Mandarin Theatre intermittently over a period of eighteen months.68 Although the mainstream press took no notice of this visit, Ma’s performances received even more attention in the Chinese press than Mei’s. The Chinese community viewed Ma (who played male roles) as an example of the “new actor”: educated, socially acceptable, and glamorous. Exemplifying a developing internationalism, Ma made overt attempts to bridge Asian and Western dramatic and musical traditions. For example, he introduced some Western instruments, such as the violin, and performed at times in Western dress, while supporting actors appeared in Chinese costumes. An article in the Jinshan shi bao (Chinese Times) noted that, on May 23, Ma was scheduled to perform his most recent work, “Jazz King,” which included a Western-style dance.69 At the same time, however, he explicitly stated his own devotion to the preservation of traditional culture. In a speech to local residents on April 26, he emphasized the moral obligations of the theater and the need to preserve a balance between old and new. “It is good to learn about the advantages of others in compensating for our own drawbacks,” he said. However, it is not right to forget about tradition in pursuing the new. By doing so . . . our thousand-year-old tradition will be extinguished. Under these circumstances, we not only cannot cultivate people, we will also be cultivated by others. . . . I intend

Chinatown

81

to promote our traditional culture by adopting moral concepts in librettos. The operas are entertainment as well as edifying tools. Our tradition will not vanish because of the influence of new trends. . . . I hope my performance can comfort the immigrants here in appreciating their emphasis on traditional culture. In addition, I hope my performance can provide a chance for the Western people to understand the beauty of our culture.70

T H E C H I N E SE T H E AT E R I N T H E DE PR E S SION A N D  BE YON D

The Depression of the 1930s took a serious toll on San Francisco’s Chinese theaters. By the end of 1935, the Great China had closed, and the following summer it became a movie house. The Mandarin, though forced to cut costs, managed to continue mounting opera performances directed at both white and Chinese American patrons. In fact, in 1935 it advertised in the English-language Chinese Digest that it offered “the only Chinese Opera in America.”71 Twelve years later the Mandarin served as the filming site for the penultimate scene of Orson Welles’s Lady from Shanghai. (While the jury is deciding the protagonist’s fate, he escapes from the courthouse and probable conviction for a murder he did not commit, taking refuge in the Mandarin Theatre. There he witnesses a production of a Chinese opera.) As late as 1983, Ronald Riddle noted that the Mandarin, at the time a movie theater, hosted occasional performances of touring opera groups from Hong Kong. San Francisco’s Chinese theaters, during their heyday in the 1920s and early 1930s, provided inspiration for several non-Chinese composers (among them Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Ernest Bloch), whose experiences energized their own creative expression and led to works fusing Chinese and Western influences. A number of lesser-known composers also produced Western operas on Chinese subjects, such as Joseph Redding (the lawyer-librettist-composer we met in chapter 2 and whose Fay-Yen-Fah is discussed in chapter 6). Respectful interest in chinoiserie and in musics from other Asian countries during this period is also evident in Alfred Hertz’s programming for the symphony, most notably his presentation of a suite by Santa Barbara composer Henry Eichheim, whose imaginative aural impressions were inspired by three extensive tours of East Asia. These syncretic works, coupled with the warm reception afforded to Mei Lanfang, suggest a new appreciation for cultural diversity that began to emerge in the 1930s (and which we will see manifest in our concluding comparison of the sensibilities of the 1915 and 1939 world’s fairs). Although many middle- and upper-class whites began to adopt a complacent view of the United States as a heterogeneous, culturally pluralistic society, this image remained mostly a fiction in terms of the quotidian life of minority populations. The Chinese  Exclusion

82

From the Quake to the Crash

Law was not only in effect (it was not repealed until 1943) but had even been strengthened through passage, in 1924, of the Johnson-Reed, or National Origins, Act. (This law used the 1890 census as the basis for new immigration quotas. Henceforth, the number of immigrants admitted annually from a particular country was limited to 2 percent of the foreign-born persons of that country residing in the United States in that year.) The law effectively halted the arrival of any Asians, since it forbade immigration by persons ineligible for naturalization. According to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which was still in effect in 1924, all nonwhites fell into this category. The 1924 law also targeted “undesirable” southern and eastern Europeans, who arrived in the country in large numbers after 1890. Some of the act’s numerous supporters (it passed with only a handful of dissenting votes in Congress) were directly influenced by reactionary eugenicist views made popular by works such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Grant purported to document a threat to the “superior” Nordic (northern European) people in the United States by unrestricted immigration of the “lower” races, who, he said, polluted the gene pool and bred in large numbers. “The American,” asserted Grant, “sold his birthright in a continent to solve a labor problem.” 72 Most of the act’s supporters were, in fact, motivated by economic concerns: namely, avoiding competition for U.S. workers by foreign laborers. Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, was one of the bill’s strongest advocates. Mei Lanfang, then, functioned in the United States in an ambivalent role. His tour in some ways highlighted “the fractured, heterogeneous nature of the US at the same time that it was rhetorically positioned to shore up the fiction of national stability and unity.”73 Through his performances, whites could travel to Asia without leaving the comfort of their home cities. Furthermore, their vision of the Chinese as “Other” was reinforced by the inherent artificiality of the theater. Whites could thus congratulate themselves for their patronage of, and praise for, Mei’s work while ignoring the very real discrimination that was embedded in national, state, and local institutions. U.S. economic interests, of course, had a large stake in preserving a productive relationship with China, which, in the early 1930s began to be threatened by the rise in importance of Japan—a country that had steadfastly resisted Western imperialism, refusing for centuries to open its ports to most U.S. and European traders. Mei’s tour thus served an economic interest as well: it helped to preserve historic trade and cultural exchanges between the United States and China while ignoring the considerable modernization of Chinese society in favor of an image of the country as ancient, courtly, precious, remote, and unchanging. At the same time, Mei’s visit, and that of Ma, mark the dawning of a cultural sensibility on the part of the white population that would eventually lead a quilt mentality to replace that of the melting pot.

I N T E R LU DE

1

Two Musical Tributes to San Francisco’s Chinatown

During the most active years of the postquake Chinese opera—from the opening of the Mandarin Theatre in 1924 to the middle of the 1930s—several white composers took particular delight in watching Chinese opera performances in San Francisco.1 Among them was Harry Partch, who attended the Mandarin soon after it opened. Although Partch rarely quoted Chinese tunes directly in his work, one manifestation of the theater’s influence on him is his 1932 “On Hearing the Flute in the Yellow Crane House,” a setting of a text by Li Po in which he used the Chinese folk song “Mo Li Hua.” Henry Cowell, too, readily acknowledged the profound influence of Chinatown’s music on his own works.2 Cowell spent part of his early childhood in San Francisco, and many years later he recalled his mother taking him to the Chinese theater in the prequake period. The most obvious connection between this experience and Cowell’s own music, however, did not emerge until the mid-1920s, when he began to make use of sliding tones, a technique he later explored at length both compositionally and theoretically. Nevertheless, the evidence for a direct link between Cowell’s slides and the Chinese theater is at best circumstantial (see chapter 8). On the other hand, Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch, who served as director of the San Francisco Conservatory from 1925 to 1930, penned an explicit tribute to Chinatown and its music after repeatedly visiting its cafes and theaters. The summer before Bloch moved to San Francisco, he visited the city to teach a summer course. One day after his arrival, Redfern Mason took him to lunch in Chinatown. Bloch was intrigued. On June 22, 1924, he went back on his own, and that night he wrote to his wife about a musical ensemble he heard in a restaurant: 83

84

INTERLUDE 1

a quintet of two percussionists and three string players recently arrived from China. A large room, where small tables, not luxurious, are set, as for a banquet, but no one is there yet. One or two waiters, busy, and Chinese of all types. No one pays any attention to me. I direct my attention to the musicians. There are five. One plays a ravanastron [a bowed stringed instrument from India made from a gourd with a skin or parchment soundboard] which produces a melody of five or six tones. Another reinforces it. Another plays pizzicati. Then two men for the percussion. One plays a large sonorous tam-tam which sounds a higher pitch than the low tam-tam; the other plays a wood block and on strange enamel vases, upturned, which give a sharp percussive note; the tune passes from one of the percussion players to the other! And exactly like our Cantonese records. . . . I question two or three Chinese; no one speaks English! Finally a waiter answers me: “No, these musicians do not play every evening; this is unusual; many months go by without them playing; they’ve come from China,” and that was all I could learn!3

The group Bloch heard might well have been a generic type of opera ensemble comprising a small and large erhu, sanxian, and percussion. After moving to San Francisco the following year, Bloch returned often to Chinatown, not only to its restaurants, but also to the theater. “I went there every evening for a whole week from 7 p.m. to midnight,” he wrote in the program notes for his Four Episodes of 1926, “fascinated by its music, its colors, its odors, its mysteries, its little fragile and chaste princesses, its wild warriors with their dreadful beards, their terrifying dragons, all this fantastic imagination. . . . I shuddered at times like a child in a dream.”4 In the last of these Episodes, Bloch captured the theater’s sounds while embedding them in his own distinctive compositional language. Four Episodes, a fifteen-minute suite for chamber orchestra (“Humoresque macabre,” “Obsession,” “Calm,” and “Chinese”) is set for strings, wind quintet, and piano. Without any percussion, Bloch nevertheless evoked gongs and large cymbals in the finale’s opening through clusters, pizzicato/arco alternation, and heavy accents. Small, high-pitched cymbals ring out through jangling tremolos and trills (Example 1a). Then, over a rippling piano ostinato articulating four of the five pitches of the pentatonic mode to follow, Bloch recalled his impression of the opera’s singers by means of a pseudo-Chinese melody he himself composed (Example 1b). Near the end of the movement, he quoted an actual theatrical melody as he remembered it (Example 1c), and appearing twice—once near the beginning and a second time near the end—is what he characterized as a “shrill, menacing,” yet “tragic” trumpet-oboe effect, possibly an evocation of the doublereed suona (Example 1d). These themes are closely related—echoing Paderewski’s observations a quarter century earlier about multiple variations within a small

Example 1a. Ernest Bloch, Four Episodes (1926), movement 4, “Chinese” (reduced score; octave doublings not shown), measures 1–5 and 18–21: evocation of gongs and cymbals by low-pitched clusters, accents, jangling tremolos, and trills.

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Two Musical Tributes to San Francisco’s Chinatown

87

number of basic tune families. Underlying these main motives, Bloch injected occasional references to a motive from the first movement, which has nothing to do with the Chinese theater per se. He placed this motive in the piano and low strings, making it crawl, as he said, beneath the singers and instruments like one of the theater’s terrifying dragons (Example 1e). A tour de force compositionally, Bloch’s Four Episodes won the thousand-dollar Beebe Prize from the New York Chamber Society in 1927. Four years later Henry Hadley wrote his own tribute to San Francisco, including, as Bloch had, a Chinese movement. There is no evidence that Hadley ever attended the Chinese opera, and indeed, during the period in which he conducted the San Francisco Symphony, there was no venue in which he could easily have done so. After he left the city in 1915, Hadley returned to New York, where he served as associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic from 1920 to 1927 and conducted the Manhattan Symphony (1929–32). In the latter position Hadley promoted U.S. works (including, typically, his own): during three seasons, he conducted thirty-six U.S. compositions, eight of them by himself.5 Periodically, Hadley returned to the Bohemian Club’s summer retreats north of San Francisco and, after his 1912 Atonement of Pan, composed the music for two more Grove Plays: Semper virens (1923; a second collaboration with Joseph Redding) and The Legend of Hani (1933). When Cecilia Casserly and Leonora Wood Armsby began their San Mateo summer concert series in 1926, they invited Hadley to direct the orchestra he had started fifteen years earlier.6 Despite Hadley’s uncomfortable dismissal from the directorship of the San Francisco Symphony in 1915, he apparently retained positive feelings for the city, reinforced by a cohort of local supporters who touted his East Coast accomplishments. Musical America, which had strongly advocated his reappointment (its San Francisco correspondent was the Examiner critic and Hadley supporter Thomas Nunan), ran articles on him occasionally, including a lengthy hagiographic piece in 1921 describing his “place in American music.” The author compared him to Sir Galahad: he “drinks deep at the well of inspiration and the tiny stream gushes forth to end in the majestic ocean of unfathomed depth.”7 Such hyperbole notwithstanding, Hadley’s national reputation as a creator was well deserved. His music, written in a neo-Romantic idiom, is far from revolutionary, but at the same time, it is composed with skill and an imaginative use of instrumental color. Hadley’s works were performed by major orchestras in the United States and Europe, partly as a result of his own promotional efforts; in 1933 the Musical Courier labeled him the country’s most important contemporary composer.8 In time, the hurt Hadley must have felt over losing the San Francisco job apparently waned, and in 1931 he composed the three-movement orchestral suite San Francisco, intended for Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony. Its

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INTERLUDE 1

Example 2d. Hadley, San Francisco, movement 2, measures 83–88.



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movements are titled “The Harbor,” “The Chinese Quarter,” and, oddly, “Mardi Gras.” The San Francisco Symphony premiered the suite in a pops concert at the Tivoli on February 26, 1932. Later that year the Philadelphia Orchestra performed it as part of its Robin Hood Dell summer series, and, two years later, the Chicago Symphony, too, played it. The Chicago critic commented on Hadley’s “unfailing gift of melody . . . [and] characterization, together with the technical ability to make it vivid,” a succinct statement of the composer’s strengths.9 The suite’s outer movements offer nothing particularly distinctive, but the middle “Chinese” movement is remarkable. Like Bloch, Hadley evokes musical characteristics of the Chinese opera while at the same time avoiding mimicry. In the opening eighteen measures, for instance, he makes use of sliding tones in the low brass, and then imitates such slides by a quick chromatic line in the bassoon. Open fifths appear as accompanimental figures in the violins, violas, and cellos (and later in the bassoons), while the oboe d’amore suggests the suona. Its pen-

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tatonic theme is set to a percussive accompaniment, suggested by the pizzicato strings reinforced by wood blocks (Example 2a). Hadley soon moves away from a strict use of a single pentatonic mode, however, embracing ancillary pitches and suggesting the virtuosity characteristic of the dizi, though without a Chinese modal structure (Example 2b). In the central section, a motive in the flutes and xylophone built from falling fourths and fifths, which might otherwise be seen as stereotypically (and unflatteringly) “Chinese,” is given an imaginative setting, which then leads into a half-step transposition (Example 2c). Small cymbals and a Chinese bell (measures 35–38) suggest the percussive interjections typical of Chinese opera, and the loud clashes that mark dramatic points in an opera are evoked by accented brass/string/cymbal chords featuring minor seconds that alternate with octaves in the woodwinds (Example 2d). Among the other composers who attended the Mandarin Theatre during the Depression years was Lou Harrison, whose San Francisco residency is discussed in some detail in chapter 8. The experience strongly influenced his own creative energy and he later produced several works that fused Chinese and Western styles. The most direct derivation from San Francisco’s Chinatown, however, are the recitatives in Harrison’s 1971 opera Young Caesar, which were inspired by his frequent visits to the Mandarin.10 Harrison notated many of these recitatives without rhythm and accompanied the singer only by occasional percussion interjections in the style he recalled watching nearly forty years earlier.

4

The Politics of Labor The Union(s), the Clubs and Theaters, and the Predicament of Black Musicians

Among San Francisco’s noisy political battles during the first half of the twentieth century, those involving labor were perhaps the most vicious—and certainly the most public. Like other union workers, the city’s musicians included some of the nation’s most vocal exponents for respectable pay, reasonable hours, and decent working conditions. We have already seen that the symphony management in the Hadley years was able to hire and fire the entire orchestra between each concert set. During Hertz’s early years, contracts for the players and for the conductor himself were rarely settled before the late spring, and were issued for only a year or two at a time. Musicians in casual employment experienced far worse exploitation from fly-by-night theater managers, who would sometimes skip town without paying hired orchestras, and from restaurant and club owners, who found creative ways to stiff their employees. The “musicians’ protective unions” that sprouted throughout the country by the turn of the century aimed at curbing such abuses. Musical labor agitation dates back to California’s earliest years: the statehood celebrations of 1850, and the July Fourth celebrations of 1852, were marred by clashes, although in both cases musicians failed in their attempts to win higher pay.1 Following short-lived organizing attempts in 1869 and 1874, San Francisco musicians formed a protective association on September 3, 1885. The next May, its 137 members joined the National League of Musicians (NLM) as Local No.  10. The NLM grew rapidly and at first appeared to wield the power necessary to combat worker exploitation; within ten years there were more than a hundred affiliates. However, the organization’s impact was ultimately crippled by its overcommitment to local autonomy and its refusal to join other laborers in a wider national constituency. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded 92

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in 1886, repeatedly urged the NLM to join it, but the musicians viewed themselves as artists rather than laborers and thus declined—a fatal misjudgment. A rival organization, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), was formed in 1896 and affiliated from the start with the AFL. The two musicians’ unions clashed head-on at the national convention that year, ultimately leading to the NLM’s demise. Within months, half of its locals had switched their affiliation to the AFM, and by 1904 the NLM was defunct.2 San Francisco musicians were among the first to affiliate with the AFM: Local 6 was chartered on February 2, 1897. Its president, Eugene Schmitz, as we saw in chapter 1, became mayor of the city for three terms during the quake period. Close interunion relationships among San Francisco’s workers later helped Local 6 win important concessions from theater managers. L A B OR A N D R AC E ; E A R LY “JA Z Z ” ON T H E BA R BA RY C OA S T

Issues of race arose almost immediately after the founding of the American Federation of Labor. In its early years, the national umbrella organization tried to enforce a color-blind admission policy. In fact, in 1890 it refused to admit the machinists’ union because of a “whites only” clause in its constitution. Five years later the machinists removed the offensive passage, but replaced it with a pledge in the initiation ritual whereby new members agreed to propose only white men for membership.3 AFL officials were hardly fooled by this ruse. Nevertheless, they decided that they could only hope to effect labor reforms if the AFL included a wide range of trades and a large, dedicated membership. Thus, they winked at the new rules and admitted the machinists. Thereafter—for more than forty years—the AFL turned a blind eye to racial inequity in favor of local autonomy. In fact, the organization even encouraged other unions to follow the model of the machinists. In 1900 the AFL began to issue separate “federal” charters to unions “composed exclusively of colored members.” Under this practice, black workers could organize their own locals, which were chartered directly by the national organization rather than by its member organizations. African American workers were seriously disadvantaged by these federal charters: Jurisdictional disputes became common, and black workers had minimal representation at national conventions and ineffective representation in labor negotiations.4 At AFL conventions in 1919 and 1920, resolutions were introduced to reject discriminatory practices, but they were either defeated or sent to committees to die a quiet death. 5 As late as 1946—more than a decade after the founding of the competing CIO, which actively courted African Americans—nine unions (five of them associated with the AFL), with 707,500 members among them, still barred blacks.6

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The American Federation of Musicians was not—and had never been—among these overtly discriminatory unions. Fifteen musicians in any unorganized territory could apply for a new charter. Membership was restricted to instrumentalists who were citizens (or intended citizens) of the United States. Both men and women were eligible. Local 6, in fact, did admit some African American musicians in its early years. Lawrence Gushee, for example, discovered that nine black musicians from Fer-Don’s medicine show band joined Local 6 in 1908–9.7 (Fer-Don, a medical quack, traveled widely, advertising his miraculous cures. He appeared, accompanied by a thirty-member vaudeville stock company, in Los Angeles beginning in January 1908, and later moved into Northern California. In 1910 he and his wife were indicted for fraud in Sacramento. Fer-Don never appeared for the trial; his wife was released on the condition that she and her husband leave the state.) The apparent racial inclusivity of the AFM and some other unions did not, however, prevent blacks from experiencing discrimination by more subtle means. In some unions, such as the plumbers’, licensing boards served as barriers to admission. In the musicians’ union, auditions sometimes played a similar role. Audition requirements were common in the AFM, and Local 6 was no exception; its membership application form, up until September 1945, included a box in which a committee could record its decision (although on many surviving forms this box is empty). At the same time, there is no evidence that Local 6 used this audition as a means of racial discrimination. In fact, as we will see, evidence from the early period suggests the opposite—auditions were occasionally repeated several times. Deliberately or not, the audition prioritized concert musicians over improvisers and thereby posed a stumbling block for some African American applicants. The lively scene that developed in the postquake Barbary Coast featured ragtime music and dances. Although some black musicians in the clubs during this period apparently used sheet music, others became renowned for their imaginative improvisatory skills in a music that would later be called jazz. Indeed, the term jazz itself has been closely associated with San Francisco and the Barbary Coast. Sports writer Edgar “Scoop” Gleeson’s 1913 article in the Bulletin about the Seals baseball team training “on ragtime and ‘jazz’ ” has given rise to considerable debate about the first printed use of the word in relation to music.8 As a (somewhat dangerous) slang term meaning excitement (with sexual overtones), jazz had been used for some time before Gleeson’s column and had appeared in print previously in relation to sports.9 In his 1913 article Gleeson linked the term loosely to music, although with no attempt to define a new musical style. The Seals had been in training in Sonoma County, and lively ragtime had bolstered the players’ enthusiasm. “String up the big harp and give us all a tune!” Gleeson wrote. “Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old

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‘jazz.’ ” Later in the same article he defined the term as “a little of that ‘old life,’ the ‘gin-i-ker,’ the ‘pep,’ otherwise known as the enthusiasalum. A grain of ‘jazz’ and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks” (two of San Francisco’s highest hills). A quarter century later, Gleeson clarified that bandleader Art Hickman had shown up at the Seals’ training camp “in the guise of a camp follower” and proposed putting on dances to “relieve the tedium of the evenings.” Hickman volunteered to bring up “several musicians out of work [and] as a feature . . . included a banjo player in his orchestra—some one said he got the notion from watching one of the Negro orchestras at Purcell’s on the Barbary Coast.” 10 As with many other early uses of jazz, Gleeson here evoked the word to reference a generalized “pep-inducing” spirit rather than a particular musical style. At the same time, however, he also associated jazz with music and dance on the Barbary Coast, citing particularly “that old ‘Texas Tommy’ stuff.” The Texas Tommy grew out of newfangled dance trends popularized on the Coast in the period after the quake, among them animal dances such as the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Pony Prance, the Chicken Glide, and the Bunny Hug. From these dances, accompanied by music in ragtime style, grew the Texas Tommy, which became a national sensation. The sheet music of Sid Brown’s Texas Tommy Swing (with lyrics by Val Harris), published in 1911, had a novel cover: It featured a faux newspaper called the Texas Tommy Swing, vol. 1, Jan 1, 1911, and two (real) articles that had appeared on the front pages of the Examiner at the end of 1910.11 One recounted Pavlova’s famous visit to the Olympia (but without the club’s name or the detailed description provided by photographer Genthe quoted in chapter 1), and was headlined “Pavlowa Endorses Texas Tommy Swing” instead of the real headline: “Pavlowa Will Show Czar ‘Turkey Trot.’ ” The other article recounted a visit a month later by millionaire Theresa Oelrichs to a roadside club at the beach, where she saw the Turkey Trot and danced a barn dance with former mayor (and future U.S. senator) James Phelan. The fake newspaper cover of the published song gives a short history of the dance, stating that it combines “the rhythm of the Grizzly Bear, the inspiration of the Loving Hug, the grace of the Walk-Back and the abandon of the Turkey-Trot.” 12 The dance, states this short history, and “a suggestion of the melody,” were brought to the Barbary Coast by African Americans from the South, where the tune then was “rounded into perfect harmony.” (Despite the anonymous credit given to the “darkies” in this little history, pictured above the text are two white dancers.) In this altered form, the ragtime dances found their way to the elegant Fairmont Hotel (named after Oelrichs’s father, Nevada senator James Graham Fair), where Hickman’s band played. Val Harris’s 1911 lyrics credit San Francisco for their popularization (if not their origin):

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From the Quake to the Crash You may talk about your Grizzly Bear Out in San Francisco fair And the Turkey Trot And the Lovin’ Rag. You all have heard the story ’bout the Dance in all its glory, But there’s one that’s made a hit with me. . . . Hear the piano man! Ain’t the music grand Get ready now to swing. [Chorus:] It’s ahopping on the right And ahopping on the left Like a good old buck and wing Do a graceful slide by your baby’s side Like a birdie on the wing. . . . It’s the Texas Tommy Swing.

These dances took the nation by storm but also provoked condemnation by some religious authorities—which only enhanced their popularity. The perceived dangers of ragtime music (associated with blacks and denounced in many quarters during the 1910s) also prompted parodies such as the 1913 “Anti-Rag-time Girl” (words and music by Elsie Janis), which described “this little girl of mine” who is “just the kind your mother would have liked to have you know. She don’t do the Bunny Hug, nor dance the Grizzly Bear. She hasn’t learned the Turkey Trot and somehow she don’t care.” She’s just, in short, “my little anti-ragtime girl.” Pavlova, in the same year, significantly backpedaled from her endorsement of the Turkey Trot, decrying the sexual overtones of such dances and predicting that “the furious blaze of rag-time will burn itself out . . . , and a revival of the graceful, dignified dances of the past will follow.”13 Hickman was not the only white bandleader-arranger to be influenced by the Barbary Coast culture, of course. Paul Whiteman, who heard Hickman’s band at the Fairmont, hung out at the Coast’s clubs after he left the San Francisco Symphony; following the first World War he formed an orchestra of former navy musicians (violin, sax, banjo, accordion, drums, and piano) that played at Neptune’s Palace. Ferde Grofé, who worked for Hickman as a pianist and arranger, was apparently “an extra piano player on call” at the Hippodrome and Thalia clubs.14 SI D L e PRO T T I A N D H I S S O DI F F E R E N T ORC H E S T R A

Among the most notable African American musicians playing on the Barbary Coast in the postquake years was pianist Louis Sidney (Sid) LeProtti, who

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was born and raised in Oakland. LeProtti’s grandmother, contralto Amanda Marsdon, was, he says, the first black woman to appear on stage in California;15 she made sure that Sid had early training from a German classical pianist. LeProtti became enamored with ragtime as a child, and he began making inroads into the Barbary Coast club scene right after the earthquake. There he played for Louis V. (Lew) Purcell and Sam King, both former porters. Prior to the 1906 fire that virtually destroyed the Coast, Purcell and King jointly ran the So Different Saloon at 520 Pacific Street. By 1907, however, they had gone their separate ways. The original site was renamed Purcell’s; King opened his own place down the block. LeProtti at first played in a piano and percussion duo for King, but later directed an ensemble (eventually named the So Different Orchestra) that performed for years at Purcell’s. It began as a quartet: piano, drums, clarinet, and euphonium. LeProtti credits New Orleans bassist William Manuel “Bill” Johnson as a formative influence on his own group. When Johnson’s Creole Band came to San Francisco (an event Gushee dates to 1908), LeProtti was “amazed to see a man pick a bass.” 16 He soon included the instrument in his own ensemble and modified his band’s style from a rather relaxed pattern of bass notes every other beat to a more intense and dynamic four bass notes per bar.17 By 1915 the So Different Orchestra included LeProtti on piano, Clarence Williams on bass,18 Adam “Slocum” Mitchell on clarinet, Gerald Wells on flute, Reb Spikes on baritone saxophone, and “Old Pete” Stanley on drums. Spikes, by his own account, had replaced George Leroy Tayborn, a euphonium player who “played variations and country melodies and . . . could fake just like Slocum could on the clarinet.”19 According to Spikes, Lester Mapp—who took over the club after Lew Purcell died around 1910—fired Tayborn because of a drinking problem; LeProtti and Spikes, however, recall that Tayborn won money in the Chinese lottery and left voluntarily.20 The euphonium player, who, according to Spikes, was a graduate of Oberlin, had come to California with the Fer-Don medicine show band and was one of the players admitted to Local 6 in 1908–9. In 1952 George Avakian of Columbia Records interviewed LeProtti—who was sixty-six at the time.21 LeProtti recounted colorful tales of the old Barbary Coast and performed about a half dozen piano works. The tapes show a gifted, if a bit out-of-practice, performer with a joyful spirit. Spikes claimed that LeProtti played from sheet music, but the pianist himself said that his performance was mechanical until he took the advice of a minstrel singer to “get around some of them ear piano players and learn how to fill in and fake.”22 (On the other hand, the rhythmic strictness in the left hand in some of LeProtti’s performances suggests that he was accustomed to reading from a score.) In these interview tapes, LeProtti improvises on some of the hit tunes of the day in a ragtime style reminiscent of piano arrangements of popular sheet music from the period. He also

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explicitly demonstrates changes in his own playing over several decades by performing the same work in different styles. (Of course, since these performances were recorded in the 1950s, it is difficult to determine precisely how LeProtti’s playing sounded in the teens, despite his assertion, on several occasions, that “this is the way I played it on the Coast.”)23 LeProtti became not only an ear player but also a composer. The Barbary Coast musicians generously shared their creations with one another, and LeProtti thought nothing of teaching one of his creations, “Sid’s Rag,” to a fellow pianist. The recipient later passed it off as his own work to an unsuspecting third party in Chicago, and LeProtti’s rag appeared, in altered form, as the second strain of Canadian Capers, with attribution to Chandler, White, and Cohen (see Example 3). Another member of the band renowned for his improvisational skills was clarinetist “Slocum” Mitchell, who came to San Francisco with a minstrel show but soon began playing with LeProtti’s ensemble. “He set San Francisco wild,” recalls Spikes. “Slocum was the daddy of all the clarinet players.” He would improvise solos while the rest of the band accompanied in wonder. “He could play a piece fifty times and never play it the same way. . . . Slocum would be all over the place . . . with variations and jazz and whinin’, all the same time.” 24 Aiming to improve their exposure, pay, and prestige, Wells, the band’s flutist, approached “Old Man” (Charles) Swanberg of the Portola Louvre Café, an establishment on Powell near Market, not far from Union Square and well outside the rough Barbary Coast area. After hearing the band, Swanberg (who was white) was anxious to employ them. The problem, however, was that he ran a union establishment, and the band members had not joined Local 6. “We went down and took the union examination,” recounted Spikes years later, and they said three of us could read and the other three couldn’t read. They said Sidney [LeProtti], [Clarence] Williams, and Slocum couldn’t read, but we could all read.” 25 Information from Local 6’s minutes differs slightly in detail but largely substantiates this story. Saxophonist Spikes, bassist Williams, and clarinetist Mitchell were admitted to Local 6 on April 25, 1916, but LeProtti and drummer Pete Stanley failed two different auditions. On May 8, a lawyer “appeared before the board on behalf of two colored applicants who had failed to pass the examination. [He] was given assurance that this Board would not make any race discrimination and would give [the] applicants [the] privilege of taking a third examination.” Eight days later LeProtti and Stanley were rejected a third time.26 Some insight into this decision—and the union’s apparent prerequisite for advanced reading skills—can be derived from Spikes’s characterizations of the band members. He says of himself, “I was never much of a jazzman. . . . I played a lot of counterpoint like cello parts. . . . Sometimes I’d play behind Slocum’s variations.” Williams, he says, treated the bass in the same way. He “would play

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Example 3. Gus Chandler, Bert White, and Henry Cohen, Canadian Capers (Roger Graham, 1915): beginning of the second strain, which originated as part of “Sid’s Rag,” a work composed by Sid LeProtti.

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nearly all cello parts on his bass. . . . He’d play counter-melodies like I’d play on the saxophone. Williams was a trained bass player.” 27 How well LeProtti could read is open to interpretation. He himself emphasizes the importance of his early classical training (though his wife claims it lasted only eleven months), 28 but he only came into his own as a performer once he mastered “ear playing.” Banjo player Alfred Levy, who saw LeProtti perform in Oakland in the early 1920s (after the Barbary Coast closed down), characterized him as “one of them good readers and steady and not what you’d call a take-off man.”29 LeProtti’s effectiveness as a jazz pianist, however, did not depend on his reading ability, which was apparently not strong enough to satisfy Local 6’s audition committee. His failure to gain acceptance into the union after three attempts illustrates a barrier faced by many black improvisers: the quality of their performance was judged by traditional classical standards. (In its defense, the union needed to be able to recommend its members for jobs, most of which, in this period, required good reading skills.) Under the circumstances, then, taking a job at the Portola Louvre would have required breaking up the band. Instead, the group went to Los Angeles, where they were hired at Levy’s Tavern on a recommendation from Swanberg. (A week after the Local 6 audition, in another typical San Francisco Wild West incident, Swanberg was shot three times by an irate [white] waiter who was disappointed at not being made manager of the cafe. Swanberg survived. The shooter eventually committed suicide.)30 When Local 6 went on strike in August, LeProtti and his colleagues returned to San Francisco to play in clubs that were hiring nonunion personnel.31 Indeed, Spikes notes that Swanberg (now recovered from the attempted assassination) came down to Los Angeles and brought the band back to San Francisco, where they played for eight or nine months (see Figure 12). 32 Swanberg seems to have been very gracious: he not only sent LeProtti’s band off to L.A. with a strong endorsement and hired them when he could, but he also repeatedly urged the courts to be lenient with his assailant. He clearly had no problems employing a black band in his white-owned establishment, and it is important to note here that the Barbary Coast itself was not racially segre-

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From the Quake to the Crash

Figure 12. Sid LeProtti’s So Different Orchestra at the Portola Louvre Café, 1915. Left to right: Clarence Williams, bass; Reb Spikes, saxophone; Adam “Slocum” Mitchell, clarinet; Sid LeProtti, piano and leader; and Gerald Wells, flute. Percussionist not identified. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation; used by permission.)

gated. White patrons frequently visited Purcell’s, though generally in the role of detached observers. Spikes recalled that Sid Grauman (who later founded the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles) would bring wealthy white patrons into the club several times a week.33 Purcell’s was also a regular stop on the itineraries of the notorious Chinatown tour guides. In fact, the club had a promotional “spieler” in the person of “Old Folks,” a former soft-shoe dancer who stood outside to entice white slummers. For many of these visitors, Purcell’s served as a cautionary example of moral depravity, to be ogled and later reviled in the same breath as the reputed opium dens and the gambling joints of Chinatown. LeProtti and Spikes also emphasize that the place could be dangerous. Their accounts are riddled with tales of fights, beatings, and even murders. Asbury calls Purcell’s the “most turbulent” of the Coast dance halls, and notes that the bar next door lined the adjoining wall with sheet metal to deflect stray bullets. Spikes called the club a “dump.”34 At the same time, Purcell’s was the

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scene of the most innovative and exciting ragtime music in the city during this period. LeProtti’s musicians dutifully avoided alcohol and drugs, and the dangers of the place were clearly not so formidable as to keep out the gawkers. In fact, in San Francisco through the early 1930s, the number of black residents was so small (ranging from .4 to .6 percent from 1900 to 1930) that most whites did not see them as an employment threat. Racial mixing was common (though not in performing ensembles). As we will see, however, this same openness eventually led to a nasty showdown during the Depression. After the Red Light Abatement Act finally began to be enforced in 1917, the Barbary Coast, in effect, closed down. (Repeated appeals by opponents after the act’s approval in 1914 stalled club closures but ultimately proved unsuccessful.) Some establishments managed to stumble on for a few more years, however. In 1919 Jelly Roll Morton came to San Francisco and opened the Jupiter Club on Columbus Avenue.35 Morton’s new establishment operated in direct competition with Purcell’s, which Lester Mapp moved to the corner of Columbus and Jackson in 1919–20. Morton’s aim, according to LeProtti, was to put him out of business by enticing the members of the So Different Orchestra with high wages. LeProtti claims that his musicians refused to play for Morton, however, because of his star-dominated manner of running his ensemble. “If you didn’t play according to Jelly Roll’s idea, why he just likely to ball you out,” LeProtti told Avakian. “My boys that we had, why we was always like a family. We got along. We had our rehearsals together and you know it’s the Dixieland style now. I’ll take a chorus, I’ll take two choruses, and you take a chorus.”36 Morton didn’t last long in San Francisco. He claimed he was denied a liquor license due to intervention by jealous competitors. LeProtti, in contrast, recounts a fight in which Morton drew a pistol, and a police reprimand drove him out of town.37 By 1922 he was no longer in California. Whatever the reason for Jelly Roll Morton’s departure, the event that ultimately closed down the Barbary Coast was the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution—Prohibition— in 1920. Without liquor, the Coast’s clubs lost their raison d’être. Attempts to maintain the music-and-dance culture proved fruitless, and repeated raids on prostitution rings led to numerous arrests. Without the clubs, the musicians abandoned the area. Some went to Los Angeles; others joined the lively Seventh Street jazz scene in Oakland.38 T H E F OR M AT ION OF A “C OL OR E D L O C A L” I N SA N F R A NC I S C O

Finding themselves disadvantaged within the AFM structure by circumstance, if not by regulation, black musicians across the country began to consider the possibility of forming separate unions. The first of these so-called colored locals was

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No. 208 in Chicago, chartered in 1902. It eventually grew into the most powerful black local in the country and one of the most influential groups within the entire AFM. In this case, the motivation for establishing a separate local was prompted by a vote within white Local 10 denying membership to African Americans.39 In other cities, discrimination was less overt but still insidious. Blacks, for example, were sometimes admitted to integrated locals but denied privileges, such as use of the clubhouse;40 or they were simply passed over in favor of whites when the local was asked to supply musicians for pickup jobs. Even in the absence of such restrictions, however, black musicians sometimes found it necessary—or desirable—to organize independently. Boston’s Local No. 9 was integrated at its inception in 1897, for example, but black members requested and obtained a separate charter in 1915. Although these musicians may have “wanted to have their own identity,”41 as one commentator suggests, the more likely motivation was economic. Members of the new black local not only gained national recognition through representation at the AFM convention but, more important, they could also offer more competitive pricing, since each local set its own pay scale—as the locals still do today. In cities where work venues were segregated, such dual pay scales rarely resulted in head-on competition for the same jobs. In more integrated locales such as San Francisco, however, competing wage scales proved extremely problematic, leading to direct racial confrontation. Pervasive discrimination in the U.S. labor market compelled most black unions to set wage scales lower than those of competing white locals. If the rates were equal, black workers simply lost jobs to whites. In industries that employed both races, the differential in pay scales could be appalling. An illustrative (though much later) example involves a dispute between the AFM and Ringling Brothers Circus in the early 1940s. The circus proposed raising wages for whites but not blacks. The AFM insisted on raises for both. Richard Leiter reports, “Eventually the salaries of the white musicians were raised from $47.50 to $54.00 per week while those of the Negroes were increased from $26.50 to $30.50.” The circus justified the pay difference on the basis of duties: blacks worked only in sideshows.42 Unlike the AFL-chartered locals for the machinists and other unions that practiced overt discrimination, the black musicians’ locals were chartered by the AFM. They sent delegates to the conventions in proportion to their size. However, the advantages of national representation were balanced by significant drawbacks. For example, black musicians residing in, or traveling to, a jurisdiction with segregated unions were obliged to register with the “colored” local, no matter how prominent they might be. In cities where dual unions operated, the two AFM affiliates were theoretically equal. In practice, however, the (much larger) white locals were far more powerful. In 1916, a year after the black musicians of Boston formed their own union, African American musicians in the San Francisco area tried to follow suit. On

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January 13, “Messrs. Jackson and Long addressed the organization [i.e., the board of directors of Local 6] relative to a permit for a strictly colored union, to operate indiscriminately within and without this jurisdiction. Permission [was] not granted.”43 (Chartering a new local required approval from the nearest existing local.) For the next eight years, the Bay Area’s black musicians tried to reverse this decision. Their efforts finally succeeded in December 1923, when the International Musician announced a charter for (“colored”) Local 648. Although based in Oakland, Local 648’s jurisdiction was nearly identical to that of Local 6. Both groups operated in San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, and various towns in the East Bay and Marin County. For the next ten years, these parallel locals functioned side by side with minimal (though increasing) conflict. Ultimately, however, Local 6 would regret its decision to allow a competing union in its territory. And as we will see in chapter 7, the wrath of the white union ultimately brought the black one to its knees. BAT T L E S W I T H T H E T H E AT E R S

A number of factors converged to eventually convince Local 6 to allow a competing union in its territory. In addition to repeated appeals by black musicians, the number of “colored” locals nationwide was becoming so great that San Francisco began to look racist in continuing to block the proposal. By 1919 there were twenty-two such locals; six years later there were forty-three.44 Perhaps an even more powerful factor, however, was the employment situation in the mid-1920s: life for union musicians was so good that the members of Local 6 seemed to have little to fear from a separate African American unit. True, Prohibition (which had been implemented on January 16, 1920) had led to job losses for musicians who were accustomed to playing in taverns and bars. But this loss was more than counterbalanced by new opportunities in radio and motion pictures. Theater orchestras accompanied silent films and vaudeville acts, and radio stations paid top dollar for live music. By 1927–28, radio musicians in San Francisco were earning a minimum of six dollars an hour for casual engagements (equivalent to about seventy-five dollars in 2010), with an additional four dollars an hour for overtime. The minimum wage for theater musicians the following year was about fifty dollars per week for seven performances (equivalent to more than six hundred dollars in 2010), with an additional three and a half dollars for extra performances, a six-hour daily maximum, and one twenty-minute intermission per hour of work.45 In this arena, San Francisco’s Local 6 wielded extraordinary power. In fact, in a 1929 study of the local’s history, Anna Green wrote (with perhaps a bit of hyperbole) that it enjoyed “practically 100% control over the so-called ‘steady’ engagements and approximately 90% control over the casual engagements.”46

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The organization had no hesitation entering into battles for higher wages and improved working conditions—and often emerged victorious. In 1926, for example, it challenged Allied Amusement Industries, the umbrella organization for most major theaters in California. In addition to higher wages, Local 6 sought a six-day week when musicians performed both afternoons and evenings. As the August 31 expiration date of the previous contract approached, the theaters encouraged a rival union, which, they claimed had expressed willingness to sign a five-year contract. Local 6—by now twenty-seven hundred members strong— fought back. In a general meeting on August 25, it squelched the internal revolt and dug in its heels on contract demands.47 In this era before the antiunion Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the local’s position was considerably strengthened by tactics later banned, such as sympathy strikes by other unions. Thus, when musicians walked off the job on September 1, 1926, projectionists and stagehands in San Francisco and Oakland followed. For four days the theaters operated with nonunion help. On September 4, however, four hundred bandsmen, spearheaded by Local 6 musician Phil Sapiro, marched down the streets of San Francisco, cheered by enthusiastic crowds. Furthermore, national AFM president Joseph Weber threatened a walkout by all locals in areas “in whose jurisdiction the Orpheum maintains theaters.”48 A fifteen-hour negotiating session ended at 5 a.m. on Sunday, September 5. The six-day week and wage increases were approved. Peace, however, was short-lived. The next year brought about a much bigger threat to theater orchestras, one that neither Local 6 nor the AFM could stop, no matter how reasonable their demands or how widespread their support from fellow unionists: with the release of The Jazz Singer in October 1927, “talkies” began to supplant silent films—threatening to silence the lucrative movie theater orchestras. In August 1928, San Francisco’s Embassy Theater dismissed its eight-piece orchestra and two organists. The previous year, owner William B. Wagnon had installed Vitaphones and immediately made a sensation by presenting music on sound film, ranging from operatic arias to performances by night club orchestras.49 Within a year Wagnon was mounting continuous sound films, and claimed the now-useless musicians would cost him thirty thousand dollars a year. Although projectionists, janitors, and stagehands again walked out in support of the fired musicians, the theater continued to operate with scabs.50 This time the strike led to violence: two strikebreakers imported from Los Angeles were waylaid and one was severely beaten. The unions disclaimed involvement and posted a five-hundred-dollar reward for information leading to the apprehension of the thugs.51 The following year a more extended and equally ugly conflict erupted between Local 6 and Nasser Brothers, operators of twenty-five theaters in the Bay Area.

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The owners, who had installed Vitaphones in March 1929, dismissed orchestras at the Castro, Royal, and Alhambra Theaters. The musicians, they claimed, were playing cards.52 Again projectionists and stagehands supported the musicians, and the city’s Theatrical Union joined in as well. And again the conflict became confrontational: in April and May, stench bombs were set off in several theaters operating with scabs.53 This time the union took matters to court, bringing in Sapiro’s brother Aaron, a New York attorney with a record of prolabor legal victories, who argued that the theaters were obliged to honor two-year contracts that expired September 1, 1930.54 On June 1 a bomb exploded in the Royal Theater, damaging the projection room and equipment. Unions again denied involvement.55 By the time the case wound its way through the appeal process to the state supreme court, the original contract had expired. In its fight against the talkies, the AFM shied away from attacking technology per se. Instead, officials offered aesthetic arguments. “Mechanical music can never substitute adequately for real music because you cannot mechanize an art,” proclaimed AFM national president Joseph Weber. Furthermore, he said, the “substitution of canned music for real music in theatres would seriously injure national culture through . . . lowering the public taste and . . . discouraging young talent.”56 The fight, of course, was doomed from the outset, and by the early 1930s movie theater orchestras were becoming a thing of the past. By 1934, badly hurt by both the economic crash and the victory of technology, the once-powerful Local 6, winner of concessions from the theater industry, found itself struggling to find even meager work for many of its twenty-five hundred members. Its officers also came to rue the decision to allow a “colored” local in the area, for the talented black musicians of Local 648 were capturing the little that was left of the club and theater market—and at rates below the scale of Local 6. In retrospect, the battle that erupted between the two organizations that year seems almost inevitable. That troubling story, which is recounted in chapter 7, had ramifications well beyond the 1930s. In fact, San Francisco’s musical labor troubles were not put to rest until 1960.

5

Musical Utopias Ada Clement, Ernest Bloch, and the San Francisco Conservatory

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music owes its origin to a talented, determined, and energetic woman who, for a half decade in the 1920s, subjugated her own ambitions to those of a famous yet eccentric dreamer. Although she hardly knew him, Ada Clement found in this dreamer a mentor to whom she entrusted the artistic direction of a school she had nurtured for the previous eight years. The conservatory’s story is also, in part, the story of that dreamer—who envisioned a world unified through music, religious differences nullified through art, and the country brought together under a national anthem that would celebrate peace rather than glorifying war. When he left the city after five years to return to the imposing solitude of his native Alps, Ernest Bloch left behind a legacy of students, a philosophy of teaching grounded in works rather than in theory, and a devotion to scholarship. One of his most enduring compositions arose from his dream of interfaith cooperation, with which he inspired his fellow San Franciscans during the late 1920s. The conservatory’s early years yield a third tale as well—that of an extraordinary boy who was encouraged by the institution, honored by the dreamer, and adored by a public that showered him with accolades. Together these three personalities illustrate the best of San Francisco—a city that for these utopians, at least, provided an environment that could stimulate inspired musical composition, bring competing factions (temporarily) into cooperation, and provide a solid education to its youth. A DA C L E M E N T (18 78 – 1 9 52)

Ada Clement (Figure 13) was a good pianist—not an extraordinary one, not one likely to make international headlines, but a solid, dependable, engaged musi106

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Figure 13. Pianist Ada Clement (1878–1952), founder of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)

cian. Although Clement performed often in San Francisco and received complimentary reviews, the ephemeral art of performance would not be her legacy to the city. Rather, that legacy would be the permanence of an institution that would train thousands of young musicians and continues to do so today. Most of these students, like Clement herself, would not prove to be of international caliber, though some were—Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern, and Leon Fleisher, to name a few. But Clement’s goal was not to train prodigies. It was to provide a solid music education to a wide range of young people, whom she nurtured as if they were the children she never bore. In a memorial essay after her death in 1952, Albert Elkus wrote that “to her pupils she gave of her effort and time without stint. . . . They

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were as much at ease in her home as in her studio.” Critic Alfred Frankenstein remembered her as “one of the leading spirits in the musical life of the Pacific Coast.”1 Clement was born on March 15, 1878, to a schoolteacher mother and a lawyer father (who was also an amateur musician). The youngest of three children, she started piano lessons at age seven and, in her brief reminiscences, recalled home musicales on Sunday evenings, during which she played along with brother Jabish on violin, brother Walter on piano, and her two singing parents. Ada studied with local teachers and was part of an amateur group that met monthly and eventually became the San Francisco Musical Club.2 Members played for one another, read papers about composers, and generally expanded their musical education beyond practical training. Her father died before the 1906 quake, and Clement began teaching piano to support herself and help her mother Mary (who died in 1911).3 Among Clement’s early teachers was Oscar Weil, a violinist and a composer of light opera, piano works, lieder, and choral compositions, as well as a critic with an acerbic pen and uncompromisingly conservative taste. (He wrote of Tchaikovsky: “Strange, how near he became to being a really great musician— and how entirely he missed it,” and of Sibelius: He “very much needs a period of roast beef diet [Bach]”).4 By the time Clement studied with him, Weil was semiretired and crippled in one hand, but still active as a critic and teacher. He took a broad approach to music education, introducing relevant references to history, literature, painting, and poetry—a model Clement would later follow in her own school.5 One of her fellow students was Albert Elkus, who became her close friend and colleague, and who later played a major role in the development of the conservatory (Figure 14). Around 1909 Clement went to Berlin and Paris for two years of (then-consideredrequisite) European study. Supported by funds from a benefit concert sponsored by her students, she worked with Josef Lhévinne in Berlin and then with Harold Bauer in Paris. By 1911 Clement was back in San Francisco, where she presented a recital that prompted a highly positive review from Metzger in the PCMR. He called her a “brilliant pianist” who showed “unusual versatility” and “made the best of her splendid opportunities to fathom the intricacies of pianistic literature.” His basis of comparison, he noted, was the typical student “returning from study abroad.” In this company he found Clement far above average in terms of insight and “poetic” interpretation. The anonymous critic in the Chronicle was somewhat less effusive, but made a point of noting the “virility” of her playing (a typical mark of praise in this period), which he attributed specifically to Lhévinne’s training.6 Two years later Hadley enlisted Clement to perform Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony (on November 21, 1913), a perfor-

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Figure 14. Albert Elkus (1884–1962), faculty member (and later director), San Francisco Conservatory of Music; faculty member and music department chair, University of California, Berkeley. Shown in his office at UCB in 1946. Photo by Otto Hagel. (© 1998 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation; used by permission.)

mance that elicited much harsher criticism. Redfern Mason, who was not given to prejudicial judgments about women or ethnic minorities, was particularly hard on her, rating the performance “satisfactory” and judging her playing, in which “the element of poetry was, for the most part, lacking,” the best that her “artistic endowment” would allow.7 Considering Clement’s inexperience (she had never played with an orchestra and had only one rehearsal), 8 the vigor of Mason’s

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attack must have undermined her self-confidence. “All that teachers can do for a musician has been done for her,” he wrote; and then, condemning her with faint praise: “Her training shows in a reliable technique, and in [her] devotion to the spirit of the work she is interpreting.” Mason’s disparaging evaluation appeared in the same review cited in chapter 2, in which he condemned Henry Hadley’s conducting; perhaps his expressed dissatisfaction with this concert in general colored, to a certain extent, his evaluation of her performance. For whatever reason, however, Mason subsequently moderated his criticism. The following year, he found that Clement accompanied cellist Arthur Weiss with “whole-hearted musicianship . . . , sympathy, insight and enthusiasm”; two months later he complimented her again on her ensemble sensitivity in the Brahms F-Minor quintet.9 The PCMR, in an unsigned review of the same concert that was probably written by Metzger (who authored most of the articles in his paper and consistently encouraged local talent), called Clement’s playing an example of “consummate artistic skill.”10 This pattern was typical of most of her reviews: she repeatedly received polite, though rarely ecstatic, evaluations of her solo playing, but far stronger praise for her chamber music performances. Nine months later Clement presented solo works by local composer Ivan Shed Langstroth. The composer came in for a heavy verbal beating: “a talented, earnest young musician . . . but without high distinction,” said Walter Anthony; a composer whose works “revealed skill in theoretical construction and adequate ingenuity in working out several enjoyable themes . . . [but lacked] individuality of style or independence of thought,” said Metzger, who was rarely a fan of contemporary music anyway. In contrast, both of them praised Clement for her interpretation, “no easy task with [the works’] restless harmonies and apparent formlessness.”11 For the quintet performance of January 1915, Clement had collaborated with violinist Giulio Minetti (introduced in chapter 2). Thus, when he started the People’s Orchestra in 1916, Minetti brought her in as soloist in the Schumann concerto. As with her previous solo appearances, reviews were appreciative, but restrained.12 Critics warmed up to Clement’s playing over the years, but the consistent impression one gains from reading her reviews is of a solid, intelligent interpreter who displayed particular sensitivity in chamber ensembles, but whose solo performances lacked the electricity and individuality needed to launch a major career. The consistency of these reviews probably reinforced Clement’s decision to direct her efforts not to public performance but to teaching—an area in which she excelled. Indeed, Clement began to throw herself into her pedagogy with wholehearted enthusiasm, which soon led to the launching of a full-scale music school. The impetus came through her association with two other women: Lillian Hodghead and Nettiemae Felder. In 1910 Hodghead received a diploma from the Institute

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of Musical Art in New York (later Juilliard),13 and during her time there she met Felder at the Three Arts Club. After a year in Texas, where both of them taught at the Chapel Hill Girls College near Houston, they moved to San Francisco, and Hodghead began piano study with Clement. Felder, for her part, proved particularly talented at working with young children. Soon Clement and Felder began to room together, and the three women decided to open a music school. Hodghead’s parents owned a home on Sacramento Street that had a cottage on the side. Since “the large house seemed to be more than Mrs. Hodghead could manage . . . we gayly [sic] suggested that they move into the cottage and let us take over the big house for our little school,” Clement recalled years later.14 Thus was born the Ada Clement Piano School, which opened in 1917 with “three pianos, four studios, two blackboards and forty students.” 15 Clement taught the advanced pianists; Hodghead instructed the less advanced ones and offered theory courses; Felder taught children’s classes. Two years later Felder married Clement’s brother Jabish.16 Clement and her school hardly lacked competition in the city. The 1918 city directory lists 352 individuals and three businesses in the category of “Teachers— Music,” including Clement, Hodghead, and Felder as individuals (but not the piano school, whose name does appear on programs, however). The most prominent school in this listing is the Arrillaga Musical College, founded by pianist and composer Santiago Arrillaga y Ansola, who came to San Francisco in 1875. By the time Clement founded her own school, Arrillaga himself was no longer alive, but his college continued through the end of the decade under the direction of his son. By 1920 Clement’s school had added instructors in violin and cello: Artur Argiewicz, who served as assistant concertmaster of the symphony from 1917 to 1925, and Stanislas Bem, who played in the symphony’s cello section from 1916 to 1919. The two men were also brothers-in-law: Bem’s wife Eugenia, one of the five women who would join the symphony in 1924, was Artur’s sister. The name “Ada Clement Piano School” thus became obsolete, and so in 1921 the women changed it to the Ada Clement Music School.17 Soon instructors in voice and other instruments joined the growing institution, and in January 1923, the school incorporated under the name San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Albert Elkus became head of its theory department.18 Meanwhile, in January 1919 Clement attended a performance of the San Francisco Symphony that would permanently change her life and, through her efforts, the musical face of San Francisco. Principal cellist Horace Britt—who had come to San Francisco to lead the cello section of the 1915 Exposition Orchestra and then remained in the city—performed Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo to high critical acclaim. Reviewers heaped praise not only on the soloist and orchestra but also, most notably, on the work itself.

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Schelomo (1915–16), along with Three Jewish Poems (1913), was first performed on the East Coast two years earlier, but the difficulty of the work discouraged quick repetition. The San Francisco performance of January 3 and 5, 1919, was one of the earliest in the country. These two works, along with others from this period, firmly branded Bloch with the reputation he would bear the rest of his life: the quintessential Jewish composer. It was not a role he assumed without internal struggle, however. He was not particularly religious and, in fact, was repelled both by many aspects of Orthodox Judaic practice (which seemed to him to have strayed from the idealism of the ancient religion) and by what he viewed as the hypocritical behavior of many modern Reform Jews, whom he saw as single-mindedly pursuing the golden calf. On the other hand, Bloch revered the ancient vision of the prophets and the potential for a pure, idealized Judaic practice potentially positioned to transform a crass materialistic society into a universalist message of peace. Schelomo, in this sense, has been seen as projecting a lonely prophetic voice (the cello) set against the voluptuousness of a world gorging itself.19 The power of the music and its idealistic vision were not lost on the San Francisco critics. Walter Anthony’s review in the Chronicle spoke of no other work on the program. Bloch, he said, sought to represent “the soul of the Jew, complex, devoted, persistent, passionate, just, resistant, and sensual” in a score bursting with “melodic fecundity” indebted to its “Hebraic origin.” “There is more of Jeremiah in his music than of David,” wrote Anthony, whose rhapsodic prose rivaled the expansiveness of the music itself.20 Ray C. B. Brown in the Examiner was equally melodramatic. Contrasting the cello as Solomon with the “the multitude of his subjects” (i.e., the orchestra), Brown wrote: “Now in pomp and dignity, now in furious outbursts of triumphant pride, now in splendid hieratic ceremonies, now in piercing lamentations, now in impassioned invocations the procession passes,” but inevitably, the cello responds: “All is vanity and vexation of spirit.”21 Clement, like the critics, was strongly moved, and after Bloch’s viola and piano suite won the Coolidge Prize that August, she wrote to him to obtain a score. Bloch responded from New York (where at the time he was teaching at the Mannes School) that he had no copy to send her but that the work would be published “in a few weeks.”22 Four years later Clement and Nathan Firestone presented the suite’s San Francisco premiere. The occasion was a reception for Britt at the conservatory on November 2, 1923, following his third performance of Schelomo with the symphony.23 Earlier the same year, Clement had presented another local Bloch premiere: she and Argiewicz performed the first sonata for violin and piano.24 At the end of this productive year, Clement and Hodghead finally met Bloch in person. The opportunity arose quite incidentally out of an unrelated event—a

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series of theatrical performances in New York by Italian tragedienne Eleonora Duse who, on October 29, 1923, appeared for the first time on the U.S. stage after an absence of twenty years. New Yorkers turned out in force to see her. The Metropolitan Opera House was packed to the gills with people standing three to four rows deep behind the orchestra seats for her first performance in Ibsen’s “The Lady from the Sea”; and the ovations continued through the end of her engagement on November 30, when she was recalled to the stage for twenty-seven curtain calls.25 Shortly after the San Francisco performance of Bloch’s viola suite, Clement and Hodghead set out for New York to see the legendary actress. While there, Clement developed the idea of stopping during their return trip in Cleveland, where Bloch had been hired in 1920 as the first director of its music conservatory. Her objective was not only to meet the famed composer but also to obtain his critique of her interpretation of the viola suite. Bloch agreed, and the three spent a delightful afternoon at his Cleveland home on December 26, 1923.26 He listened sympathetically to her performance, and told her about his pedagogical philosophy and summer course, expressing interest San Francisco’s “little music school” (as Clement called it). The two women subsequently arranged for Bloch to offer this course at the conservatory for five weeks in summer 1924. Bloch’s meeting with Clement and Hodghead in 1923 was certainly not the first time he had dreamt of coming to San Francisco. As early as 1919, he had written to his mother about the ecstatic reception that greeted the first Schelomo performance and about the congenial conductor Hertz, who was “grieved” to see him “vegetating” in New York.27 Rose Rinder, whose husband, Reuben, was the cantor of Temple Emanu-El, claims that Reuben paved the way for Bloch’s eventual hiring as director of the San Francisco Conservatory. In her oral history, she recounted that her husband, on a cross-country train trip, impulsively disembarked in Cleveland with the objective of meeting Bloch. To the composer’s surprise—and delight—the cantor showed up unannounced at the Cleveland Conservatory, and thereafter they developed a warm and mutually beneficial friendship.28 BL O C H ’ S F I R S T C OU R SE I N SA N F R A NC I S C O : SUMMER 1924

Ernest Bloch’s love affair with San Francisco began with his five-day-a-week course that the San Francisco Conservatory offered from June 23 to July 25, 1924. As in his courses in Cleveland and New York, Bloch covered five large topics: pedagogy (introducing his approach to music education); form (a broad sweep from motive to sentence to song form to the basics of complex structures); counterpoint (mostly two-part, but ending with an analysis of renaissance motets); elementary harmony; and fugue. On June 22 he wrote to his wife that his first

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presentation was an amazing success, with nearly a hundred people in the room. 29 By July 1 more than forty students had formally enrolled. Bloch responded to San Francisco as warmly as the city responded to him. He came west through Yosemite, which epitomized for him the beauty of the country but also the crassness of its citizens. Mobbed with tourists, he found not a moment to be alone with nature, as he wrote to Clement on June 16: This incessant talking! It made me wish that “God” . . . had made them all dumb! Then you could enjoy this tremendous nature. . . . Not a single minute were we left to admire, to absorb, the beauty of the landscape! We have to hear the name . . . of every tree, every mountain, every spot! No rock was even allowed to have its own life, its own personality! . . . Here it is an Indian “head,” a “lion,” a pig, or even a “milk bottle”! Poor rocks! Then, when nothing can be said, in order to avoid silence (how people hate silence too!) the man told us a so called “Indian legend” and in such a manner that no doubt was left—everybody laughed (on aurait plutôt peut en pleurer).30

Indeed, Bloch’s wonder at quiet, unspoiled nature, and his impatience with humanity’s disrespect for it is as persistent a theme in his life as his devotion to music and his dream of leaving the world a better place than he found it (musically and otherwise). This wonder influenced, in the best sense of the word, the musical hues in his compositions and the excitement he inspired in his audiences. His daughter Lucienne (a painter, sculptor, and photographer) cherished most among her memories of her father the “long hikes with ‘le Papa.’  . . . With his knapsack of fruit and Swiss chocolate, his camera slung over his shoulder, he would lead us into the country. He taught us all about mushrooms. We picked berries, climbed mountains. . . . Even in New York . . . we went to Central Park every day before we knew enough English to go to school. We would sit on a bench . . . and he would read to us about prehistoric times.”31 Bloch found San Francisco’s geography overpowering: the panorama of the ocean, the hills, and the nearby redwood forests (which he visited on this first trip). His letters from this period are full of awe about the city, particularly in comparison to Cleveland, which he berated repeatedly for its noise, “rotten air,” smoke, undrinkable water, terrible weather, and human climate of intrigue, gossip, and suspicion.32 San Francisco also fascinated Bloch with its diverse population, as I have already noted in the discussion of his Four Episodes, a work that, in part, pays tribute to the city’s Chinese culture. After his summer course, Bloch returned to Cleveland with expressed resignation, but the climate of artifice continued unabated, as did his oppressive administrative duties and the expectation that he would devote himself to fund-raising, enrollment issues, and other nonmusical tasks.33 His resistance to these demands eventually made his position as director untenable, and in May 1925 the conser-

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vatory requested his resignation. There were, of course, those who recognized the profound loss to the city, among them composer Roger Sessions, who had studied with Bloch in New York and then had come to Cleveland as his assistant. Eleanor Clarage bemoaned his departure more publicly in the Cleveland Times: “No one who has attended one of Mr. Bloch’s lectures can ever forget the volatile little figure as he stood with one hand in his pocket while the other sawed the air, pounded on the piano top and shook vehemently toward his audience to emphasize points,” she wrote. “It is doubtful whether there will ever be anyone else who can bring to his pupils the same contagious enthusiasm or the same sincere, deep-rooted love of music and reverence for the highest ideals of his art.”34 On the twenty-ninth of May, Bloch gave his last public concert in Cleveland, featuring the world premiere of his Concerto Grosso No. 1, which he had composed for the school orchestra.35 In July he left the Midwest with few regrets, but also, at the age of forty-five, few prospects for his future. In the meantime, Bloch had been actively pursuing a return to San Francisco, and in February 1925 the San Francisco Conservatory’s informal newsletter, The Lyre, announced that he would offer a two-month course at the beginning of 1926. The commitment, however, was only verbal.36 Nevertheless, after conducting his Concerto Grosso and the early symphonic poems Hiver–Printemps at the Hollywood Bowl on August 7 and 15,37 Bloch came to San Francisco armed with a tentative offer from Clement to assume the institution’s directorship—though without the funds to make that vision a reality. He trusted that San Francisco— one of two cities in the country he truly loved (the other being Santa Fe)—offered an environment that was free and welcoming, and an opportunity to create and to encourage others to do the same. In September he wrote ecstatically to his sister Loulette, full of hope for his still uncertain future: “I am on one of the seven hills of this extraordinary town! My windows open on the clean air all around; staggered roofs, streets tumbling downwards, and in the distance the San Francisco Bay, blue-green water, boats, and gold-colored hills and mountains; it’s splendid and truly I need it after nine years of ugliness. . . . Our desire will be to unite the most diverse elements, the city’s mayor, the rabbi, the arch-bishop.”38 On October 21 Bloch initiated a series of seven lectures at the conservatory on “vital questions in music.” Three weeks later he introduced a program at the Fairmont Hotel that featured the music and dance of the Pueblo Indians. Bloch had witnessed their ceremonies a year earlier at the Santo Domingo Pueblo in New Mexico and found the music “beautiful, not only in its profound sincerity, but in its rhythmic inevitability and its unfailing truth to pitch.”39 Redfern Mason championed the opportunity to make the conservatory, with Bloch at its head, the rival of European music schools. “For years past we have been sending our young people to make their studies in Europe,” he wrote, echoing a nationalistic call that was becoming increasingly strident throughout the country in this period.

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“We want American symphony players, American directors, American pianists and fiddlers, American prima donnas.”40 By the end of the year Clement had garnered enough money from private contributors to engage Bloch as director for three years (eventually extended to five). Unsurprisingly, the Jewish community was at the forefront of the fund-raising campaign; Rosalie Stern, wife of Levi Strauss’s nephew Sigmund, led the executive board. On December 4 and 6, Hertz turned over the baton to Bloch, who conducted the San Francisco Symphony in his own Concerto Grosso. Ada Clement played the piano obbligato. BL O C H I N SA N F R A NC I S C O : 1 9 2 5 – 1 93 0

As director of the San Francisco Conservatory, Bloch was able to compose, teach, and present lectures in the community, free from the quotidian administrative duties he had found so oppressive in Cleveland. (A portrait of him by Bay Area photographer Dorothea Lange is shown in Figure 15.) Clement handled the nonmusical tasks, freeing him to explore his strengths. No sooner had Bloch completed his Four Episodes in May 1926 than he started work on the largest composition he would write in San Francisco: the fifty-minute “Epic Rhapsody” for orchestra called America. Bloch composed the work in response to a competition sponsored by the magazine Musical America, announced the previous December. The prize was three thousand dollars for a symphonic work by a U.S. citizen. (Bloch barely qualified; he became a citizen in November 1924.) All submissions were to be marked with a code and judged anonymously by a panel of five conductors (all of them, ironically, foreign born): Walter Damrosch (New York Symphony), Serge Koussevitzky (Boston), Frederick Stock (Chicago), Leopold Stokowski (Philadelphia), and Alfred Hertz (San Francisco). By early 1927, ninety-two works had been submitted, including Bloch’s threemovement composition, which programmatically traces U.S. history from 1620 (movement 1: the Soil, the Indians, the Mayflower, Pilgrims) through the Civil War era (movement 2), to 1926 (the finale). Neo-Romantic in style and conception, the grandiose rhapsody contains verbal annotations to historical events and periodic quotations of folk music from the country’s microcultures, including Native Americans, pilgrims, Celts, African Americans, and Creoles. Bloch dedicated the symphony, “written in love for this country, in reverence to its past, in faith in its future,” to Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, “whose vision[s] have upheld its inspiration.”41 The work begins pianissimo with great delicacy, and then features, in its opening minutes, quotations from Pueblo Indian songs. The British heritage finds voice in this first movement in the form of an old English march and a sea chantey. The Civil War middle movement juxtaposes folk songs of the slaves with traditional Southern melodies (e.g., “Old Folks at Home”) and “Dixie.”

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Figure 15. Ernest Bloch (1880–1959) in 1928. Photographic portrait by Dorothea Lange. (American, 1895–1965; © The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. Used by permission.)

Whitman’s words appear periodically throughout the score, most notably in the finale. Following a section marked “frenetico” that climaxes a representation of the frantic, mechanized depersonalization of modern urban life with its “heavy hammers” (evoked by anvils and steel plates in the percussion), Bloch predicts “the inevitable collapse”—an eerie foreshadowing of the economic crisis to come three years later.42 This depiction of devastation is followed by a plaintive line in the English horn, recapping the opening motive of the first movement, where Bloch had annotated its melody with the words “Primeval Nature . . . Indian life.” In this third-movement recollection, he underscores the motive with an excerpt from Whitman’s “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”: “Give me solitude,

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the “Call of America,” again annotated with a quote from Whitman: “Then turn, and be not alarm’d O Libertad—turn your undying face, / To where the future, greater than all the past, / Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.” America then concludes in a manner that excited considerable controversy: a simple anthem with a newly written patriotic text. In June 1928, Musical America announced that Bloch had won the prize and predicted (overly optimistically) that the work would become a classic of the repertoire.43 Some critics derided the committee for selecting a composition by a foreign-born (indeed, recently naturalized) musician; others speculated—with some justification perhaps—that only an immigrant could fully appreciate the uniqueness of the American experiment. A scramble then ensued among the five judges, each of whom vied for the honor of presenting the premiere. Hertz, ever the conciliator, proposed a simultaneous performance, but “only after an exchange of over twenty five heated telegrams” was a date accepted by all—the one Hertz had originally proposed.44 Other orchestras were invited to join, and on December 20–22, 1928 (Thursday through Saturday), nine orchestras throughout the country played the winning composition. The printed program included the music and text of the closing hymn with the instruction that the audience should rise and join in song with the choir, which performs only in this two-minute ending. The hymn’s music—as well as its display of patriotic fervor—came in for severe condemnation by many critics. H. T. Parker in the Boston Transcript dismissed it as banal; Lawrence Gilman found it trite.45 Others, however, lauded its simplicity. Nicolas Slonimsky praised Bloch for finding wonder in the commonplace, and some supporters began to lobby for the hymn’s adoption as the official national anthem (a move that Bloch in no way discouraged). The composer himself wrote that the hymn was the apotheosis of the symphony, symbolizing “the Destiny, the Mission of America.” Indeed, it shows up in various guises throughout the work. Hertz, at least publicly, paid tribute to the power of the simple ending. “The anthem which winds up so gloriously this colossal work is conceived by a man who has unlimited faith in this country,” he said in a lecture preceding the premiere. “The sincerity, enthusiasm and almost religious belief in the future of America make this anthem so inspiring that it cannot help but carry everyone away with its overwhelming majestic power.” At the same time, Hertz doubted that it would be adopted as the country’s symbol. “If this National anthem will, as the composer hopes, be eventually accepted by this great nation to replace the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ is not for us to say. . . . All that I know today is, that its words as well as its inspiring music compare favorably with most of the national anthems known to us.”46 The “Star-Spangled Banner,” as we have seen, did not become the official anthem of the United States until 1931—and Hertz certainly

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Example 5a. Ernest Bloch, America, movement 3, hymn tune analyzed.

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had no love for the piece, following his rude introduction to San Francisco politics on the occasion of his not conducting it sixteen years earlier. Bloch’s anthem, although no masterpiece of originality, is a good, solid, wellbuilt tune. Its full-voiced, chorale-like setting for the enormous orchestral body accompanying the choir—and, ideally, the entire audience as well—was meant to stimulate fervor in the hearts of post–World War I Americans. For Bloch—who was accused, even in this work, of imbuing all his music with a distinctively Jewish flavor—this ending evoked instead the elegant simplicity of the U.S. Protestant hymn tradition. Indeed, its apparent naïveté hides a creative originality, for the melody (Example 5a) contains an asymmetrical structural twist. Four predictable four-bar phrases (the last of which ends with a two-beat extension) are capped by a final phrase of seven measures. This last phrase can be seen as originating from a hypothetical four-measure phrase (Example 5b) that has been expanded

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through a process of interpolation (mm. 19–20) and rhythmic augmentation (mm. 21–22). (The part indicated in brackets in Example 5a could conceivably be omitted entirely without damage to the harmonic or melodic flow.) Musically, the ending is a triumphal cap to the fifty-minute orchestral rhapsody and its stark simplicity forms a personal commentary on the composer’s musical, as well as social, vision. The banality seen in it by some critics was prompted, I believe, less by the hymn’s music than by its text, which could hardly rival the elegance of Whitman’s poetry. Had Bloch simply omitted the words and allowed the triumphant brass to lead the orchestra in articulating the hymn instrumentally, his point would perhaps have been made more effectively. But his utopian worldview demanded that his symphony create a cooperative community. And what better way to do so than by having the audience join the orchestra in song? America’s grandiose vision reflects the buoyant optimism of the country during the 1920s, the “war to end all wars” now well in the past and the vision of a future prosperity seemingly well on its way to being realized. The awarding of the Musical America prize to this work, and the enthusiasm for it expressed by the renowned panel of judges, reflects that national zeitgeist on a broad scale. At the same time, America’s grandiosity is also its failing: the music does not sustain itself consistently over its fifty-minute span, though it is skillfully composed and colorfully orchestrated, offering moments of drama and elegant beauty. The year after its premiere, America became part of a trilogy of patriotic symphonies by Bloch when he completed Helvetia, extolling his native Switzerland.47 This piece, too, won a national award, from the Victor Talking Machine Company. A prize of twenty-five thousand dollars was shared among four composers and five works: Robert Russell Bennett (two pieces), Louis Gruenberg, Aaron Copland, and Bloch. With his two award-winning orchestral works, and his Israel Symphony of 1916, Bloch thus honored the land of his ancestors, the land of his birth, and his adopted country. BL O C H A N D M E N U H I N

About three weeks before the premiere of America, Bloch attended a dinner party at the home of Moshe and Marutha Menuhin, who had moved to the San Francisco area in 1918 with their first child, Yehudi. After a short stint on Moshe’s brother’s poultry farm, the Menuhin family moved into a small apartment in Berkeley. Yehudi, the later-to-be-superstar violinist, had been born in New York on April 22, 1916;48 in 1920–21 he was joined by two sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah. Both sisters became accomplished pianists, although their mother, in particular,

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discouraged them from seeking any career at all.49 Despite the parents’ ambivalence regarding a public life for a woman outside the home, they strongly supported Hephzibah’s debut recital at the Scottish Rite Hall on October 25, 1928, and she and Yehudi would perform and record together in later years. Moshe and Marutha had met in Tel Aviv in 1910 and renewed their acquaintance after both had emigrated, separately, to the United States. After their marriage in August 1914, Moshe taught Hebrew school and then became principal of a school in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In the Bay Area, he followed the same career path. With the support of the rabbis at Temple Emanu-El and Sherith Israel, and that of Cantor Rinder, he opened a community Hebrew school that began with seventy students but eventually expanded to several branches serving three hundred to four hundred children.50 The family soon moved to San Francisco, and by 1923 was occupying a comfortable home on Steiner Street in the Western Addition. All three children were homeschooled by a series of tutors and given rigorous training in music. Yehudi, however, proved to be the most remarkable of the three. Rose Rinder recalls signs of his talent even as a toddler: she visited the Menuhins soon after they arrived in California, in their “little shack on the wrong side of the tracks” in Berkeley, where she heard two-year-old Yehudi “humming an arpeggio.”51 At the end of May 1921 the five-year-old boy began violin lessons with Sigmund Anker, who later expressed bitter resentment over the lack of recognition he was accorded for Yehudi’s early training.52 After a series of recital performances under Anker’s tutelage, reviewers began to take notice. Yehudi was so small, wrote an unnamed critic in the San Francisco Journal in February 1923, that he “had to be guided on the platform”; but “his attack of the first note made the large audience ‘sit up’ with wonderment.”53 Three months later he played—in a recital with piano accompaniment—the first movement of the Mendelssohn concerto. That year Yehudi began to study with Louis Persinger, the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony, and in March 1924 he performed, accompanied by his teacher on the piano, at a young people’s concert at the Civic Center. The following year Persinger left the orchestra to pursue a possible career in chamber music, supported financially in this venture by none other than Cecilia Casserly, whose bitterness toward Hertz and the symphony board has already been recounted. Yehudi, with his mother and sisters, followed Persinger to New York after Yehudi’s debut recital at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in March 1925. His patron for this move was lawyer Sidney Ehrman, who supported the violinist for years thereafter. By 1926 Yehudi and his family had returned to San Francisco, where he played his first concerto, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, with Persinger conducting the San Francisco Symphony. Eight months later—at the age of ten and a half and

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on a three-quarter-size instrument—he presented the Tchaikovsky concerto on one of the orchestra’s high-profile municipal concerts, with Hertz conducting. As expected, the child’s performance elicited amazement from audience and critics.54 After a year’s study in Europe, Menuhin marked his triumphant return with a homecoming recital, followed by a performance of the Beethoven violin concerto, both at the Civic Center. An overflow crowd for the concerto performance, estimated at eleven thousand people, packed the huge space. Metzger reported that they came from “all walks of life—rich or poor, professional or workman, young or old—. . . to hear one of their home city’s children perform a feat, which possibly he alone in the world could do.” News reports of audience size can be exaggerated, but photographs don’t lie. The huge crowd is pictured in an image now at UCB.55 Thus Menuhin, like Bloch, managed to transcend San Francisco’s factionalism and tap into the city’s civic pride. Through this child, the city could prove to the East its potential to bring forth a musician to rival any from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago (or anywhere in Europe, for that matter). Persinger, by this time, was in Santa Barbara with his quartet, and Menuhin began study at the San Francisco Conservatory.56 Bloch had met the boy before leaving for Europe at the end of the 1927–28 school term but remained skeptical of prodigies until that dinner party at the Menuhin home late in the fall of 1928. Yehudi, who was about to embark on tour, had scheduled a farewell recital to take place on December 5 and programmed Bloch’s “Nigun,” the second movement of the Baal Shem suite for violin and piano. (A nigun is a song without words.) Moshe had been anxious for Bloch to hear the piece in advance. Among the other guests for dinner than night were the Rinders—and Rose recalled the memorable evening clearly in later years.57 After the meal the critics came and, along with many friends, were treated to an informal concert. Hephzibah played, as did pianists Guy Maier and Lee Pattison, who had presented a duo piano concert for three thousand people at the Dreamland Rink on November 27.58 Then Yehudi, accompanied by Bloch, played two movements of the Baal Shem suite. Bloch was overwhelmed. In his typical flamboyant prose, so often characterized by juxtapositions of suffering and ecstasy, he wrote to the Menuhins on December 2 that his lost faith in humanity had been restored. “We have to go through years of darkness, of emptiness, of miseries, to come across a few minutes of real life, where we still can believe in human nature,” he wrote. “. . . The other night, it was as if I was reborn, as if the little lonely child I was myself at eight was still alive, with its naïve belief in beauty, in love, in humanity, as it ought to be. . . . How Christ was right! Only children know the Truth! We poor men obliterate it, and what we call ‘education’ is mostly the crushing of it! It is the children who could teach us much more than we can teach them.” 59 Two days later, Bloch composed Abodah for the young violinist. He was in the audience

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as well for Menuhin’s performance of the “Nigun,” which Yehudi played twice. Eleven days later Menuhin premiered Abodah in Los Angeles. This five-minute piece for violin and piano bears a remarkable resemblance to the “Prayer” movement of Bloch’s suite for cello and piano, From Jewish Life, composed in 1924, one year before he moved to San Francisco. Both works feature simple melodies characterized by stereotypical “Jewish” augmented seconds, played by the string instrument over a chordal piano accompaniment; both rise at the end of their central sections to a dramatic emotional climax recalling the feverish, weeping outbursts of a cantor; and both then return to the opening tune and end with two solemn chords in the piano. Unlike the “Prayer,” however, in Abodah Bloch quoted a precomposed melody, in this case a chant sung during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On this day, the most solemn in the Jewish calendar, Jews fast, reflecting through communal and personal prayer on their actions during the past year and taking vows to turn their lives in a better direction in the year to come. The Avodah (or Abodah) service, which takes place on Yom Kippur afternoon, commemorates an ancient ritual of the Jerusalem temple in which the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum of the temple, to atone for his sins and those of the people. At the climactic points of this ritual, the high priest placed his hands on the scapegoat and confessed three times: to his own shortcomings, then to those of the priestly tribe, and finally to those of the populace. During each of his confessions, the people fell to the ground in awe and repentance at the sound of God’s name: “When the priests [hakohanim] and the people, standing in the Temple court, heard the glorious, awesome, Ineffable Name, pronounced by the High Priest in holiness and in purity, they would bow and kneel and prostrate themselves, exclaiming: ‘Praised be His glorious sovereignty forever.’ ” 60 In typical modern Jewish ritual, this occasion is the only time in which prostration is still practiced. It is hardly surprising that this emotional Yom Kippur ceremony would have spoken in a profound way to Ernest Bloch, the mystic who berated humankind for its failures but also clung to a utopian hope for repentance. The likely source for Bloch’s musical quotation is a version of the Avodah service’s “V’hakohanim” chant, the thrice-repeated account of the prostration of the priests and the people. The opening melody of Abodah closely resembles the beginning of the chant as given in Abraham Baer’s Ba’al T’filah, a collection of cantorials issued around 1880 and widely used in the training of synagogue cantors in the early twentieth century (compare Examples 6a and 6b).61 Slightly later in Abodah Bloch drew again from the chant in an ecstatic ornamental flourish (Examples 6c and 6d). As an oral tradition, cantorial singing was subject to endless variation by its practitioners; thus the similarity of the melodic material here suggests that Baer’s collection constituted Bloch’s source. (Was Cantor Rinder perhaps the supplier of the collection?)

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Example 6a. Ernest Bloch, Abodah (1928): prominent motives in the work compared to their cantorial source (the “V’hakohanim” chant from the Avodah service on Yom Kippur afternoon, as given in Abraham Baer, Ba’al T’filah, ca. 1880). Here, Abodah, measures 7–10, violin part.  7  K ˆ        

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Example 6b. “V’hakohanim” chant, opening.

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Example 6c. Bloch, Abodah, measure 22 ff. (violin solo).

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In Abodah, then, Bloch captured in an introspective, miniature composition the same idealistic spirit he expressed in his extroverted extravaganza America, first performed only a few weeks after his visit to the Menuhins. In both works he hoped to bring together a world, and a city, fractured by politics. Yehudi Menuhin, for his part, appeared periodically in San Francisco after

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his December 5, 1928, farewell concert. Although he became an international sensation, Menuhin held the city warmly in his memory. During the Depression he even traveled across the country to present a benefit recital in order to save the symphony from financial ruin. Hertz conducted on this occasion with no fee. T H E E N D OF BL O C H ’ S SA N F R A NC I S C O Y E A R S ; T H E GE N E SIS OF T H E SAC R E D SE RV IC E

On February 11, 1930, Ernest Bloch submitted his resignation as director of the San Francisco Conservatory.62 After the stock market crash of October 1929, Clement simply found it impossible to fund his salary. “The contributions which were raised for the purpose of establishing a great Western Conservatory with Ernest Bloch as artistic Director covered a five year period[,] 1925–1930,” she explained years later. “Most of our Board were bankers and financial leaders strongly effected [sic] by the financial panic.” 63 On July 24 Bloch left for his native Switzerland. His influence in the Bay Area remained beyond his departure, however. Not only was he graced with the title “honorary artistic director” of the conservatory, but he also left with an endowment of five thousand dollars a year from the Rosa and Jacob Stern Foundation (descendents of Levi Strauss), which allowed him the freedom to compose in leisure and mandated that he donate one score per year to the University of California.64 Bloch left San Francisco with an even more important mission, however: a commission from Temple Emanu-El to set the text of the Jewish Sabbath service. The impetus came, once again, from Rinder, who would later add to this 1929 commission similar ones from Darius Milhaud, Marc Lavry, and Paul Ben-Haim. Rinder was able to raise only three thousand dollars for Bloch, but that sum was augmented to ten thousand the following spring by cellist Gerald Warburg, who performed in the Bay Area from March to May 1930. Rinder gave Bloch a copy of the Reform movement’s prayer book, but the composer felt that his knowledge of Hebrew was too rudimentary for him to do justice to the text. Although Bloch was not an observant Jew, he did know some Hebrew at this point. He had become a bar mitzvah at age thirteen, as is the custom, and had often signed his letters to Clement in Hebrew characters. But he felt that he needed to plumb the meanings of individual words, and thus he began to study the language in depth with Rinder before he left the United States. Bloch’s Avodath Hakodesh sets the texts of the major prayers from the Saturday morning Sabbath service as expressed in the Reform movement’s Union Prayerbook. Although it remains one of Bloch’s most profound and enduring works, the music did not come easily to him. In fact, he struggled with it for three years after his return to Switzerland and completed it only on June 7, 1933. It is

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a large-scale composition, both in terms of length and performance forces, and cannot easily be incorporated into a service—even in Reform synagogues, which have no prohibitions against instrumental use. Scored for chorus and orchestra (though frequently performed with organ), the work’s five sections are intended to be rendered without interruption in an attempt to unify the morning service into a wider universalist expression. (Klára Móricz suggests that the fivefold division of the work might have been intended as a connection to the Catholic mass;65 at the same time, however, the ends of each section also mark logical division points within the Jewish service). The last twenty-five measures, Bloch said when he revisited San Francisco in 1933, took him two years to refine, “two years of groping . . . to deliver the message to the people, the conquering of death, life, suffering.”66 Indeed, Bloch searched for a message that would transcend his own heritage and speak to all peoples, uplifting them via a recognition of their commonalities and uniting them in the awe of life and nature. In his 1933 lecture at the conservatory, he recounted his struggle with a section of the text in part 4: the ancient call to “lift up your heads, oh ye gates and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors and the King of Glory shall come in.” In a typically Blochian encomium to nature, he claimed to have understood the passage only after watching the parting of the clouds over the Alps after a foggy day. The prayer’s doors were those “painted with the varnish of communism, technocracy, the cults, sects, fetishisms of today,” he said. “When the clouds lift from out of our mind and life, and our hearts become as a little child, then the Truth will come in.”67 Despite its genesis in the San Francisco commission, the Avodath Hakodesh was not performed in the city until March 1938. On that occasion, the conductor was not Bloch but rather Giulio Silva, an ardent Catholic whom Bloch had brought to San Francisco in 1926 to handle choral activities at the conservatory. The orchestra was that of the Federal Music Project; the venue, Temple Emanu-El. Reuben Rinder recited the spoken prayer in part 5. Two months later Silva programmed the work again, this time at the thirty-three-hundred-seat opera house in a “three faiths” concert sponsored by the San Francisco Conference of Jews and Christians.68 The Bloch service shared the stage with Bach’s Cantata 79 and Palestrina’s Missa Brevis. BL O C H A S T E AC H E R

Bloch’s emotive language in his lectures and writings gives some insight into the power of his presence in the classroom, a factor to which his students attest and which prompted Clement to hire him in the first place. She was originally moved by the intensity of his music, then by the magnetism of his personality and the breadth of his pedagogical philosophy. Her own humility shows in her vision of

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herself as a perpetual student—perhaps the same quality that allowed her to modestly restrain the piano’s potential power in her chamber music performances. Clement thus profoundly changed the artistic landscape of San Francisco, not only by founding an ongoing educational institution, but also by bringing to the city a visionary whose highest goal was to unite competing factions and stimulate beauty through sound. Bloch was a man of contradictions, however, given to frequent bouts of depression over human frailty, contrasted with ecstatic bursts of optimism. Carl Engel, chief of the music division of the Library of Congress, recalled the composer’s visit to Washington in 1922. His “lament . . . that he had reached the end of his patience with rank commercialism, base intrigue, and flagrant hypocrisy” was suddenly transformed into “wonder” as Engel showed him the library and its offerings. “He became as voluble in his admiration as he had been before in his reproof,” and determined at that moment to complete his U.S. citizenship.69 In fact, Bloch treated education as a spiritual mission. The object of a school of music, he told Redfern Mason when he first arrived in San Francisco, “is to help people to create beauty. Art is an awakening, an unfolding, a becoming. No one knows the hour of visitation. All we can do is to prepare the way, and that can only be done by the exercise of infinite patience and a thoroughness as painstaking as the processes of Nature herself. . . . Everyone cannot be a great artist, of course; but everyone, within his range, is potentially artistic.”70 Bloch discovered his most effective teaching method not in textbooks but in the texts themselves, taking as his point of departure “the direct musical experience of the pupil” and seeking “to enlarge, to co-ordinate this experience through observation rather than rules.” 71 Composer Jacob Avshalomov recalls that Bloch’s later classes at UCB became “legendary” for the way in which he made Bach fugues miraculously appear on the board. Bloch’s daughter Suzanne recounts her father’s method: he would begin with one of Bach’s subjects and then, proceeding step by step, compose the most logical extension while “checking with Bach” along the way to show “how one single changed note affected the whole work.” 72 Like Clement, Bloch considered himself a perpetual student, and would be pleased by the continuation of his pedagogical legacy in the form of the current Ernest Bloch Lectures at UCB. When he left San Francisco for the summer following the 1927–28 academic year, he wrote to Yehudi Menuhin that he was taking with him his “old friends and teachers: Orlando Di Lasso and Josquin des Prez, both very alive still!”73 Indeed, after his death Suzanne found in his study eleven books of species counterpoint exercises dating from this study of renaissance compositions, which Bloch undertook in the late 1920s.74 “I have started studying again, from the beginning,” he wrote to Menuhin. “And in a few years I may know something about music!”75

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Near the end of Bloch’s life, Avshalomov visited him in a Portland hospital. He brought with him Josquin’s Pange Lingua mass, and together they sang the two-part “Pleni sunt coeli” section of the Sanctus. And there they were, recounts Avshalomov, “two Jews singing an ancient Catholic mass in a Protestant hospital.” A fitting tribute, indeed, to Bloch’s utopian dream.76

6

Opera The People’s Music or a Diversion for the Rich?

Christmas Eve 1910. The weather in San Francisco was a balmy sixty degrees as the city prepared for the most celebrated musical event in its history. A large, elevated platform had been erected in front of Lotta’s Fountain at the intersection of Third, Market, Kearny, and Geary in front of the Chronicle building, across the street from the Palace Hotel. By 7 p.m. the platform was bedecked with flowers, brought by young and old, rich and poor, to honor the evening’s heroine and, not coincidentally, to show off the wonders of California to the rest of the country by means of the photographs that would follow. Streets in every direction were closed to automobiles. One hundred and fifty police were arrayed to keep order, but, as it turned out, no incidents required their intervention. Streetcar traffic in three directions was diverted as well, both to avoid the intersection and to provide quiet. Spectators began to amass at 6 p.m. and by 8, people were crowded so closely that retrieving keys from one’s pockets became nearly impossible. Windows in the surrounding buildings were “black with human forms”;1 even the rooftops were full. One man hung a phone receiver out the window of his Geary Street office to transmit the event to his family across town. A telephone line was opened to Los Angeles as well for members of the Bohemian Club who were absent from the city. At 7:45 a thirty-piece orchestra conducted by Paul Steindorff, director of the Tivoli Theater orchestra, began the introductory music. The orchestra alternated with a choir of fifty from the Cathedral Mission of the Good Samaritan, augmented by singers from other churches, who sang songs of the season. Then, at 8:27, coloratura Luisa Tetrazzini, garbed in a rose pink cloak over “a white gown covered with thousands of diamond-flashing spangles,” a “white pic131

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ture hat with sweeping white ostrich plumes ornamented . . . with rhinestones,” and a “white ostrich boa fluffing under her round chin,”2 left her temporary quarters on the second floor of the Chronicle building and descended by a specially built elevator to the street level. An hour earlier Tetrazzini had been brought by taxi across the street from her room at the Palace,3 and in the interim had been joking and singing with friends and assembled dignitaries in the newspaper’s editorial rooms, watching and waving to the crowds gathering in the street below. As she reached the street level, green lights on the surrounding buildings flashed. Tetrazzini mounted the platform’s few steps and was greeted by a roar “like the pounding of storm waves upon a pebbled beach.”4 Three spotlights mounted on neighboring buildings brightened the platform. (See Figure 16.) The city’s welcome, delivered by Mayor Patrick McCarthy, led into a bugle fanfare commanding complete silence. Men removed their hats in respect but also, as the Chronicle explained, to allow photographers to capture the scene for promotion to the snowbound East Coast.5 Then, “walled in by rows of mammoth skyscrapers, from every window of which peered hundreds of . . . eager faces,” the enormous crowd—estimated in various sources as numbering from a hundred thousand to a quarter million—“stood stock still and held their breath,” 6 awaiting the voice of their own Luisa with worshipful civic pride. Accompanied by André Benoist at the piano and a subdued orchestra led by Steindorff, her voice amplified by “an immense sounding board [at the back of] the platform” and reflected off of the “monolithic buildings of Market Street,” 7 Tetrazzini sang “The Last Rose of Summer” and then Gounod’s “Je veux vivre dans le rêve” from Romeo and Juliet. She let go with all the power she could muster: “The flood of sound,” said one reporter, “was overwhelming.” Walter Anthony, seated on a ledge in the Call building across the street, had barely been able to hear the chorus or the orchestra’s introductory music. The mayor’s speech was inaudible. But when Tetrazzini began “The Last Rose of Summer,” he reported, “her song was upborne on wings and floated, free, untrammeled and lovely, to the extreme verge of the silent crowd.”8 Attendees for a full block in five directions reported hearing her clearly. An “old, white-haired, bare-headed man bowed his head and began to weep.”9 Tetrazzini apparently chose the repertoire with a view to maximizing both projection and awe. Gounod’s virtuosic waltz song accented her brilliant, crystalline high notes and formidable technique. Featuring a familiar, tuneful, almost folklike melody that many of the observers would have known well, the piece climaxes in a blaze of glory, hovering perilously in the octave c''-d''' for several measures at a time and ending in a succession of sparkling trills. The Chronicle’s music critic noted that “that last great high note . . . was sustained as if there was no limit to the breath behind it.”10 A moment of astonished silence followed, and then a “hurricane” of approba-

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Figure 16. Christmas Eve 1910 at “newspaper corner,” the intersection of Market, Kearny, Geary, and Third (see Map 2). Luisa Tetrazzini (shown on the specially built platform with piano and orchestra, and, at the rear, a large sound shell) sings for hundreds of thousands of people who crowded the streets and surrounding buildings. (Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.)

tion. “Heads were flung back, wild arms sprang upward shaking hats and caps, while a hoarse and deafening shout issued from throats repeating itself again and again.”11 The orchestra, Tetrazzini, and the assembled crowd joined in “Auld Lang Syne.” Some had predicted that this immense free performance would detract from Tetrazzini’s formal concert two days later at the Dreamland Rink. But such fears proved unwarranted. “Doc” Leahy, general manager of the Tivoli Theater, who, as we will see, had “discovered” the singer five years earlier and was paying her twenty-five hundred dollars per concert for her latest visit to San Francisco, knew better. He enthusiastically encouraged the outdoor event and seemed to be present everywhere in the frantic last-minute preparations. An astute manager, Leahy recognized that the fabulous Christmas Eve celebration would boost enthusiasm for the formal concert to follow. Indeed, since her U.S. debut in San Francisco

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in 1905, Tetrazzini had been making headlines in New York and London and had nothing to fear. Her two concerts at the forty-six-hundred-seat Dreamland Rink—one of them preceding the Christmas Eve event, the other following it— were sold out with standing room packed; many fans were turned away. She ended her final concert in the city with a five-word speech: “Not good-by,” she assured the audience, “but au revoir.”12 Newspaper coverage of the outdoor performance filled page after page with melodramatic prose reveling in the memory of the voice of an angel and the uniqueness of a city, only recently risen from the ruins of fire, that could stage such an event in the middle of winter. The Chronicle, which proudly proclaimed its sponsorship, ran nearly three full pages of reflections from seven different reporters. The Call covered the event in equal detail. Huge photos of the crowd and the platform covered multiple columns. The Examiner‘s full-page headline summarized the general reaction: “Singer Has Greatest Audience and City Its Greatest Song.”13 Reporters emphasized Tetrazzini’s innocence, her childlike delight in singing, her generosity in sharing her talent, and her vain attempts to be dignified— mirroring in some sense the spirit of joy and fellowship the city itself felt in its triumphant recovery from disaster. Indeed, the open-air concert was part of a larger charitable project aiding the poor: the Red Cross’s Christmas Seal drive. The day before her appearance, Tetrazzini, in her famous “peacock” gown, sold Christmas Seals in the Palm Garden of the recently reopened Palace Hotel. Ensconced at “a post of honor,” she dispensed one hundred thousand in less than an hour and rewarded the assembled crowd by mounting the balcony and singing Lotti’s “Pur dicesti, o bocca bella.”14 On December 28, “the first and most intensely loved of the city’s adopted daughters” departed,15 accompanied on the ferry across the bay by hundreds of admirers. City officials prepared their own, more official thanks in the form of a gold platter engraved with a musical staff bearing the opening notes of “The Last Rose of Summer,” as well as a warm inscription: “Presented to Mme. Luisa Tetrazzini by the People of San Francisco, California, as an Expression of Love and Appreciation. Christmas Eve, 1910.” She returned in January to receive it in a special ceremony. In her honor, Chef Ernest Arbogast of the Palace Hotel created a new dish: chicken tetrazzini.16 Her concert the next day was sold out (again)—at $5 a ticket. The December 24, 1910, concert constituted Tetrazzini’s own donation to the city that had welcomed her ecstatically to the United States. The papers characterized her gratis performance in the square as an indescribable, if ephemeral Christmas present—a view she eagerly reinforced. Oscar Hammerstein, for whom Tetrazzini had been singing for three seasons, had just sold his Manhattan Opera Company to the Metropolitan for $1.2 million and had promised them sole

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rights over her.17 Through a lawsuit, he tried to prevent her from singing in San Francisco. Her indignation aroused, Tetrazzini swore she would never be “sold like a package of breakfast food” 18 and, if necessary, would sing in the streets. Fortunately for her San Francisco admirers, a New York judge found a solution: She would deposit half her earnings from Leahy (i.e., $1,250 per concert) in a trust account to await the outcome of Hammerstein’s suit. If she prevailed in court, she would recover the money. She never saw it again.19 Without financial benefit for herself (but with plenty of priceless national publicity), Tetrazzini thus presided over a populist musical outpouring unequalled at the time. She herself said she was singing “to the poor people of San Francisco[,] . . . for all . . . who cannot afford to buy tickets for my concerts.”20 In fact, those who could afford tickets showed up for the outdoor event as well. Everyone, it seemed, appeared, the beggar and the banker sharing equal access to her art, equal “seats” for the production. “Bootblacks rubbed elbows with bankers,” wrote Ralph Renaud, “and painted creatures with the fat and wholesome mothers of families.”21 The rich for once were no more privileged than the poor. Tetrazzini had truly united the city. SA N F R A NC I S C O, T H E OPE R AT IC G OL D M I N E

Opera as social leveler? Despite the idealistic commentary on Tetrazzini’s egalitarian outdoor performance, opera’s history generally presents a different picture. In San Francisco, as elsewhere, the rich found it an ideal opportunity to show off their latest gowns and exchange gossip with the rest of the smart set. The press encouraged such elitism; articles detailing the garb of the wealthy took up as much space as reviews of the music. In the view of many—though certainly not all—of these wealthy patrons, the music was less important than seeing and being seen. In this regard, San Francisco was no different from New York. Hertz recalled that, at his first performance at the Met in 1902, which had been sold out, his heart sank as he entered the pit. “Most of the boxes were empty! I had yet to learn that . . . these good people rarely arrived before the end of the first act, and generally left during the last.”22 Despite its reputation as one of the most opera-supporting communities in the nation, San Francisco could not command better behavior. On the Met’s first tour in 1900, reviewers noted that the punctual attendees had to catch what they could of the music “above the clatter and bustle of seating the tardy ones”—to the obvious annoyance of the singers.23 It was typically well into the first act before silence prevailed. When Wagner’s Ring cycle began on November 26, the papers begged for punctuality, threatening that latecomers would be seated only at the intermissions. Matters had been little different in earlier years. In 1884, James Henry

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Mapleson brought international sensations Adelina Patti and Etelka Gerster to San Francisco during a season at the four-thousand-seat Grand Opera House. In his memoirs Mapleson himself spends more time talking about the hall’s decor and the society crowd than about the music. The preparations at the Grand Opera were most elaborate, and the decorations particularly so. The theatre and passages had been repapered, flags festooned, and in the centre facing the main door was a huge crystal fountain, having ten smaller jets throwing streams of eau de Cologne into glass basins hung with crystal pendants. . . . On the opening night the Grand Opera-house presented a spectacle of magnificence which I may say without exaggeration can never have been surpassed in any city. The auditorium was quite dazzling with a bewildering mass of laces, jewels, and fair faces. . . . Outside in the street . . . the broad steps of the church opposite were occupied by persons anxious to catch a glimpse of the toilettes of the ladies as they sprang out of the carriages into the vestibule. 24

Mapleson reported prices for places in line at two to four pounds sterling, and noted that scalpers received 400 percent above box office prices for seats in the dress circle. Indeed, the regular box office prices for such productions at the Grand Opera House were far above the means of ordinary citizens. When the Met performed in the city at the turn of the century, they ranged from $3 to $10 (equivalent to about $70–$240 in 2010). Managers could hardly have charged less, however. Opera, by its very nature, is expensive, entailing high costs for orchestras, singers, costumes, scenery, and venue rental. In addition, the major stars demanded extraordinary fees. (According to Mapleson, no one rivaled Patti in her ability to extract from a manager the greatest sums possible.) Without the stars, the patrons stayed home. With the stars, a manager found it nearly impossible to recoup expenses. (Indeed, on his third trip to San Francisco in 1886, Mapleson came without Patti and could barely meet his costs.)25 San Francisco, however, was viewed by many opera companies as a musical gold mine. From its first opera production, Bellini’s La Sonnambula on February 12, 1851, to Mapleson’s arrival with Patti in 1884, the city had welcomed a succession of prominent prime donne. Among the temporary residents from 1850 to 1860 were Eliza Biscaccianti, Catherine (Kate) Hayes (“The Swan of Erin”), Anna Bishop (who had abandoned three children and her husband, Henry Bishop, composer of “Home Sweet Home,” to run off with her manager Nicholas Bochsa), Clotilda Barili-Thorn (Patti’s half sister), Drusilla Garbato and husband Luigi, and the tenor/soprano couple Eugenio and Giovanna Bianchi. They performed at the Adelphi, the Metropolitan, the American, the Jenny Lind, Maguire’s—some of which repeatedly appeared in new incarnations after burning in San Francisco’s numerous fires. A number of these companies achieved financial success, and by

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Table 5 Repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera in San Francisco, 1900 and 1901 seasons

Opera Aida (Verdi) Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rossini) La bohème (Puccini) Carmen (Bizet) Cavalleria rusticana (Mascagni) Don Giovanni (Mozart) Don Pasquale (Donizetti) Faust (Gounod) Der fliegende Holländer (Wagner) Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer) Lohengrin (Wagner) Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti) Manon (Massenet) Die Meistersinger (Wagner) Le nozze di Figaro (Mozart) Pagliacci (Leoncavallo) Rigoletto (Verdi) Ring: Das Rheingold (Wagner) Ring: Die Walküre (Wagner) Ring: Siegfried (Wagner) Ring: Götterdämmerung (Wagner) Roméo et Juliette (Gounod) Tannhäuser (Wagner) La Traviata (Verdi) Tristan und Isolde (Wagner) Il Trovatore (Verdi)

Number of Number of Performances, Performances, 1900 1901 (Nov. 12–Dec. 2) (Nov. 11–Dec. 5) 1 2

1 2 2 4 1

1 2 1 1 3 1

1 2 2 3 1 2 3 1

1 1 1 1 1 2 3 1

2

1 2 1 1

1

1860, the city had developed a national reputation for its love of grand opera. In that year alone, San Francisco hosted 145 opera performances, with an approximate attendance of more than 217,000, from a population of only 60,000. 26 When the Met scheduled cross-country tours at the beginning of the next century, San Francisco hosted the company far longer than any other city. In 1900 the Met stayed for three weeks, giving twenty-four performances of seventeen different operas, including the entire Ring cycle. The company’s next longest stay that year was five days in Denver. The 1901 residency was even more extended: twenty-five days, embracing thirty performances of eighteen operas, nine of which had been performed the previous year. Table 5 shows the repertoire

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From the Quake to the Crash Table 6 Cities and number of performances on the Metropolitan Opera’s 1901 tour (October 7–December 21)

City Albany Montreal Toronto Rochester Syracuse Buffalo Louisville Nashville Memphis Atlanta Birmingham New Orleans Houston San Antonio Los Angeles San Francisco Kansas City Saint Louis Indianapolis Cincinnati Cleveland

Number of performances 1 4 4 2 1 5 3 2 3 3 1 5 1 1 3 30 3 4 1 5 3

performed during these two seasons. Table 6 compares the length of stay in various cities on the 1901 tour.27 The Met, in fact, expected that its San Francisco residency could generate enough revenue to make the entire tour worthwhile. Box office receipts from the 1901 tour record a total of more than $179,000 for this stop alone.28 OPE R A F OR T H E M A S SE S : T H E T I VOL I T H E AT E R A N D T H E DI S C OV E RY OF T E T R A Z Z I N I (1 9 0 5)

Despite the attraction of opera for the wealthy crowd, there had always been a movement in San Francisco to make the art form affordable—and democratic. To a limited degree, the motivation may have involved some of the same “ennobling of the masses” spirit that stimulated the symphony’s outreach. But to a much greater extent than the orchestral tradition, opera was also inherently a music of the people—beloved especially to the city’s large Italian community, who gloried in song and delighted in hearing sopranos and tenors trilling

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perilously in the stratosphere. Italians rightfully identified with opera as their national heritage: the country had seen the birth of the art in the seventeenth century, and Italy’s historical devotion to melody remained a source of national pride. Among San Francisco’s Italians, opera was as familiar to the humble as to the wealthy, and low-priced local productions sprang up periodically during the early years of the century. In 1917, for example, Redfern Mason wrote admiringly about a new company of local singers under the directorship of Augusto Serantoni that provided opera accompanied by piano at the Liberty Theater. On any evening, reported Mason, one could “lasso a cast for ‘Il Trovatore’ in the course of an hour” while walking through the North Beach area. “As you walk along Columbus Avenue you will hear a barber tinkling a mandolin while he sings ‘La Donna Mobile.’ Here are chorus singers who tend bar between engagements, shoemakers who chant Bellini while they ply the awl, dressmakers who have ambitions to sing Mimi or Santuzza.”29 Indeed, the empathy that opera aroused in the city’s Italian residents is reflected in an aside by one reporter who had observed Tetrazzini’s Christmas Eve program from the dais. “I saw an obscure Italian listening to his famous countrywoman,” wrote Ralph Renaud. “His head was bent down and he was making no attempt to see, only listening. As Tetrazzini sang the tears dripped steadily from his eyes and rolled ludicrously into his mustache.” 30 Among the many theaters of San Francisco, one in particular continually strove to realize populist goals—to provide a venue where “the millionaire came and dropped into a seat beside the laborer.”31 That theater was the Tivoli (Figure 17). This famous performance space had its origin in 1875 as a beer garden where locals gathered to imbibe spirits “to the strains of the Vienna Ladies’ Orchestra.”32 Joe Kreling, who started the venture, soon found his quarters too crowded and built the first Tivoli Theater in 1879—a concert hall with a small gallery, which held about a thousand people. Six years after Kreling’s premature death from pleurisy in 1887, his widow Ernestine hired as the theater’s general manager William H. (“Doc”) Leahy, whose name became synonymous with the venue and who spearheaded the Tivoli’s greatest triumphs. Leahy married Ernestine Kreling at Saint Mary’s Cathedral in January 1910. From the time the Tivoli opened until its destruction in the 1906 fires, the theater typically offered four months of grand opera and eight months of light opera each year. For twenty-six years—except for a period of rebuilding after it was condemned as a firetrap in November 1903—the Tivoli never closed its doors.33 Pietro Mascagni appeared there in February–March 1903, conducting his own Cavalleria Rusticana as well as opera excerpts and orchestral works. He was greeted with enormous acclaim and left the city with gifts, ovations, and ecstatic reviews. Ruggero Leoncavallo followed ten years later, presenting Pagliacci. In December 1904, Leahy, exhausted from overwork, took a trip to Mexico

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Figure 17. The Tivoli Theater, ca. 1880. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN-16870/CHS2010.353.tif.)

City with Ettore Patrizi, editor of San Francisco’s Italian-language newspaper L’Italia. Patrizi, a staunch opera supporter constantly in search of talent to bring to San Francisco, had heard that an obscure Italian coloratura was “astounding audiences” in the Mexican capital.34 (Many Italian touring companies in this period came to San Francisco by way of South America, Mexico, and Cuba.) In Mexico the two men met conductor Giorgio Polacco, who told them about the traveling opera troupe performing at the Circo Orrin. (Polacco had made a name for himself in Europe and Russia and would later serve as a conductor of Italian

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repertory at the Met from 1912 to 1917.) Many in the cast were mediocre, confessed Polacco, but three were noteworthy, particularly a diva named Luisa Tetrazzini. Intrigued, Leahy and Patrizi attended a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor on December 8 and were stunned. Tetrazzini had the potential to become another Patti, they thought.35 The opera company, however, was in trouble. Brought to Mexico by the impresario Ettore Drog, the group ran up the typical deficits incurred by traveling troupes, and the Mexican subsecretary of public instruction, who administered the government subsidy to the sponsoring theater (the Teatro Arbeu), withdrew his support. Without a subsidy, the season closed. Tetrazzini, along with the other principal artists, then decided on a risky course. They assumed financial responsibility and hired the Circo Orrin. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of her career. Luisa Tetrazzini had been singing widely in Italy, Spain, eastern Europe, Russia, and Latin America, but had appeared neither in London nor the United States. The previous year a talent scout for the Met named Gaetano Merola heard her in Mexico and relayed his enthusiasm to the Met’s director, Heinrich Conried. (Merola, as we will see, ultimately played the most important role of anyone in the history of opera in San Francisco, but for the present he figures in the story only as a footnote.) As a result, Tetrazzini sang for Conried, who signed her up for the Met beginning in November 1905. After the December 1904 performance of Lucia in Mexico City, Leahy invited Tetrazzini to sing at the Tivoli. She agreed on one condition: that he bring the whole troupe—more than a hundred people. Leahy’s resistance was no match for Tetrazzini’s stubbornness, a trait that would manifest itself repeatedly during her colorful career. He finally agreed—a decision that, like hers, would prove momentous. He was about to discover one of the world’s leading coloraturas. On January 11, 1905, Luisa Tetrazzini made her U.S. debut at San Francisco’s Tivoli Theater in the role of Gilda in Rigoletto. The audience was not the fashionable crowd who could “talk down the very kettledrums,” but instead resembled “a great army of poor but music-loving relations that had been given seats for a mid-week performance.”36 Journalist Samuel Dickson was among them. As the last note of “Caro Nome” faded into silence, he recalled, “there was a breathtaking pause, and then they went mad. . . . All the audience stood up and cheered, and the orchestra men stood up and cheered. Men stood on the seats of their chairs and threw their hats in the air; women tore flowers from their dresses and threw them on the stage. And when that mad pandemonium had finally stilled . . . Tetrazzini sang the “Caro Nome” again.”37 Indeed, the audience at the popular-priced theater was there for music, not fashion; and it got its reward in the revelation of one of opera’s great stars. The gallery was “full of Italy,” and they “shouted [to] her in the native tongue.” In the family circle, attendees behaved “in anything but a dignified way—it was a crescent of swinging arms.”38

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Three days later Dickson dined with his grandmother at the Marie Antoinette apartments on Van Ness Avenue. “We suddenly heard an exquisite voice coming through the wall. . . . The soprano was singing harmony, singing an Italian street song with an equally beautiful tenor voice.”39 It was Tetrazzini, singing duets with Caruso’s voice projected from a gramophone. Day after day Dickson returned to visit his grandmother. He lay on the floor, his ear pressed against the wall, enjoying his own private concert. The company ended its residency with a concert by Tetrazzini on February 26: “There were wild demonstrations, and the prima donna and her admirers in the boxes played battledore and shuttlecock with flowers, while somebody presented her with an Angora cat over the footlights.” The orchestra ended the evening with the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Proceeds from the season amounted to $127,265.40 Although San Francisco gloated over its coup, Conried was far from pleased. Tetrazzini, he asserted, had undercut him by singing for two dollars per ticket, when he himself planned to bring the Met to San Francisco at far higher prices. The singer, in fact, remained in San Francisco after the closing and performed for even less. Numerous reports recount her singing without any fee at all in public areas for simple enjoyment. She appeared unexpectedly on the balcony of the Palace Hotel and sang at high mass at the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Church (where Santiago Arrillaga served as organist). She was still in San Francisco when the Met came for its lucrative 1905 season, and she paid her humble respects to one of its featured divas, Marcella Sembrich, who was nearly fifteen years her senior. After additional performances in Latin America, Tetrazzini’s troupe returned to San Francisco in September for another six-week run, culminating in a highly acclaimed performance of Meyerbeer’s Dinorah. This time, however, Conried tried to stop her legally—much as Hammerstein would try to do five years later. She responded that she had no commitment to the Met before November, and a local judge agreed. She capped her visit with a farewell concert on November 7, and in the dozen curtain calls she “rollicked to the footlights waving an American flag and wearing a Mayor Schmitz election button.”41 Her carefree and flamboyant spirit, as much as her extraordinary voice, captivated the city. Abandoning her commitment to the Met, Tetrazzini left the United States at that point. Her career hardly suffered, however. She made her London debut in November 1907 and, the following January, joined Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company in what must have seemed like a deliberate snub to New York’s older and more venerable operatic institution. (She finally did sing with the Met for a few performances between 1911 and 1913, but otherwise made her career in London, Boston, and other locales.)

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OPE R A HOUSE , S TAG E 1

By the time Tetrazzini returned to San Francisco for the celebrated Christmas Eve performance of 1910, the Tivoli was no more. Neither was there a Grand Opera House or, for that matter, any other theater suitable for large symphony or opera performances. All had been consumed in the fires of 1906. Leahy announced that the (relatively small) Tivoli would soon be rebuilt. As for the larger opera house, however, a replacement would not materialize for another twenty-two years. In the years after the quake, traveling companies performed in smaller—or decidedly inappropriate—venues. As early as March 1907, the Savage Company opened the new Van Ness Theater with a production of Madama Butterfly conducted by Walter Henry Rothwell, who would later become the first director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In the same month, Henry Russell’s San Carlo Company (a troupe different from the one later founded by Fortune Gallo) opened a two-week run at the Chutes, a theater in an amusement park in the city’s Richmond District that showcased vaudeville acts. The most notable troupe to visit San Francisco in the early postquake period, however, was under the direction of Mario Lambardi, who recruited singers from Italy and arranged tours throughout the western United States in this period. Lambardi’s company first appeared in San Francisco in September 1907 under the name Milan Grand Opera Company. He brought with him about half of his forty-five-piece orchestra, recruiting the remaining players locally, and then returned to San Francisco almost annually thereafter, his productions prompting mixed reviews but also gratitude for the few tidbits they supplied to satisfy the local operatic appetite. In 1910 the Lambardi troupe performed for a week in a new, elegant space: the fifteen-hundred-seat Columbia Theater, two blocks west of Union Square (Figure 18). The Chronicle heralded the theater’s glittery inauguration that January as ushering in “a new municipal period, when actual rehabilitation” would cease and “enjoyment begin.”42 Reviews, as usual, included the tedious descriptions of gowns and jewels. The wealthy, in fact, had bid on seats at an auction the previous week, with proceeds supporting local orphanages. Lambardi’s productions, however, hardly matched the sophistication of the venue. The San Francisco premiere of Mascagni’s Iris, for example, prompted a pale but polite review in the Chronicle and an acerbic one from Metzger, who called it “disgracefully slipshod.” An uninteresting score was made drearier by mediocre singers, he wrote, several of whom warbled with “goatic” tremolos; tenor Attilio Maurini (who two weeks earlier had been highly praised by a Los Angeles Times critic) “yelped like a ‘holy terrier.’ ”43 Nevertheless, at the week’s close, the Chronicle’s critic looked longingly toward the restoration of San Francisco as the opera Mecca it had once been.44 The Columbia Theater’s manager urged visits by the Met or

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Figure 18. Columbia Theater (opened 1910). (Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, photo AAA-8708.)

Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera, but the stars could not be assured and the smallish venue could not guarantee financial solvency. Thus began a campaign of more than two decades for a new opera house. In March 1910, just after the Lambardi season closed, Metzger published a long article promoting a self-supporting “temple of music,” to be built on property donated by some landowner-philanthropist whose buildings had been destroyed during the quake. The temple itself would feature music stores on the ground floor, a performance hall above, and, on the top floors, teaching studios that could be rented. Metzger optimistically projected that the stores and studios would yield a large enough profit to assure continued investor support.45 Unfortunately, no such philanthropist leapt to the fore. Meanwhile, the Musical Association, which at the time was just beginning its drive to establish the symphony, also made moves to meet the need. New York banker Otto Kahn, chairman of the Metropolitan Opera’s board of directors, came to San Francisco in the fall of 1910 and encouraged the campaign, even promising a half million to a million dollars—which never materialized.46

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The following year, preceding the symphony’s season, another moderatesized theater opened. In March 1911 John Cort, president of the national Theater Owners’ Association, took over the American Music Hall under construction near Market and Fourth, not far from the site of the old Grand Opera House. Seven years later Cort sold out to his manager, Homer F. Curran, and the hall was renamed the Curran. Seating 1827, the Cort/Curran proved more appropriate for the new symphony than the smaller, but more elegant Columbia. Both theaters vied for the MA’s business, and in the second year the Cort offered an irresistibly low fee of two thousand dollars for a season of twenty concerts, including rehearsals.47 With one year’s exception, the symphony performed there for the next two decades. With the symphony off to a successful start—and a profitable first season—the MA then took on the additional, ambitious task of raising money for an opera house. William H. Crocker, son of railroad magnate Charles Crocker and president of the Crocker National Bank, spearheaded the effort, assisted by William Bourn (president of both the MA board and the Spring Valley Water Company), Isaias Wolf Hellman (president of Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank), attorney Emanuel S. Heller, and attorney-composer-librettist Joseph Redding. The site they envisioned was that of the old destroyed city hall. A new civic center complex was being designed at the time, with a general purpose auditorium on the site of the old Mechanics Pavilion and a new city hall on the west side of a plaza, taking up two blocks bordering on Van Ness and Polk. Both new buildings would open in 1915 (see items 4 and 7 on Map 3). An opera house on the east side of the plaza (item 1 on Map 3) seemed a logical addition to these plans. By early November 1912, the MA had raised $764,000 in pledges for purchase of seats, enough for the building (without the land). The subscribers, predictably, included the most prominent socialites of the city, many of whom we have encountered previously. Table 7 lists some of those subscribers who have figured in our story thus far. The MA’s minutes of November 6, 1912, ecstatically recorded that the building was “practically assured” and spelled out in detail a proposed contract between the Association and the city. The agreement bound the MA to financing and erecting an opera house on public land. The organization would donate the building to the municipality but, at the same time, retain control of it to assure that it would be used only for the “ennobling” purposes of music. The rich, in short, were now pledging to give the city a four-thousand-seat building designed to lift up the masses through fine art. Or, asked some cynically, was this opera house to be a playground where they could stage the most lavish social events of the season? Over the next year, this debate rose to hysterical levels, and the all-too-typical infighting led to the proposal’s ultimate defeat. In the process, opera suffered, musical concerns took a back seat to those of class,

1 2 3 4 5

Site envisioned for opera house in 1912–14 Present day location of Veterans Building (1932) Present day location of War Memorial Opera House (1932) Present day location of city hall (1915) St. Ignatius block. Site envisioned for the War Memorial Opera House complex after WW1 (currently Davies Symphony Hall) 6 Tivoli Theater (reopened in 1913) 7 Present day location of the Civic (Exposition) Auditorium (1915)

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Map 3. The Civic Center area, showing the pre-1906 configuration of streets overlaid with indications of the various sites envisioned for the opera house, from the original proposal of 1912–14 to the present-day location (completed in 1932).

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Table 7 Some of the major subscribers to the opera house project, 1912

Name

Profession/Role

Bourn, William

President, MA Board of Governors; president, Spring Valley Water Company Businessman President, Crocker Bank; son of Charles Crocker Wife of William Crocker Publisher, San Francisco Chronicle Banker, Anglo-California Bank Arts patron; mother of William Randolph Hearst Director, Emporium Department Store; founder, S.F. Chamber Music Society President, Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank Music patron Attorney Banker, Mercantile Trust; later president, MA Board of Governors Attorney, composer, librettist Owner, wholesale grocery company; secretary, MA Board of Governors Music store Owner, Spreckels Sugar Company; brother of John D. (publisher, San Francisco Call) Publisher, San Francisco Call Levi Strauss and Company (nephew of Levi Strauss) Levi Strauss and Company (nephew of Levi Strauss) Banker, Hibernia Bank

Byrne, James W. Crocker, William Crocker, Mrs. William De Young, M. H. Fleischhacker, Mortimer Hearst, Phoebe Hecht, Elias Hellman, Isaias Wolf Koshland, Cora Lilienthal, Jesse McKee, John Redding, [Joseph?]* Rothschild, John Sherman Clay Spreckels, Adolph Spreckels, John D. Stern, Jacob Stern, Sigmund Tobin, Richard

Type of Seat

Total Contribution

Box

$15,000

Box Box 2 seats Box Box Box 1 seat

$15,000 $15,000 $2,000 $15,000 $15,000 $15,000 $1,000

Box 3 seats Loge 2 seats

$15,000 $3,000 $6,000 $2,000

2 seats 2 seats

$2,000 $2,000

2 seats Box

$2,000 $15,000

2 seats 4 seats 4 seats Loge

$2,000 $4,000 $4,000 $6,000

* Original list says A. P. Redding, which may be an error. Source: MA minutes of November 6, 1912. This list includes only those people mentioned in the present book.

and politics blocked the realization of the city’s real need for a large, acoustically flattering hall. The 1912 proposal stipulated these essential provisions:48 •

•

•

•

The MA would “erect, decorate, furnish, equip and complete” an opera house on land to be donated by the city in the Civic Center plaza area. Title would be “vested in perpetuity” to the city, but usage would be determined by a fifteen-member board of trustees. The building would be used exclusively for opera, music drama, ballet, concerts, and other musical purposes, but could, as well, be rented to other users approved by the trustees. Political gatherings would be permanently excluded.

148 •

•

•

•

From the Quake to the Crash The MA would retain control over the decoration, furnishing, and equipment of the theater; exterior design would be under the city’s jurisdiction and would conform to that of other buildings in the plaza area. The trustees would become the opera house’s governing body and, as such, would be responsible for its upkeep and maintenance; the city, however, would assume the costs for water, exterior lighting, and heat. As a municipal building, the opera house would be free from city, state, and federal taxes. Four hundred seats would be reserved as a “family circle,” available up to noon on performance days at $1.50 or less.

Other provisions proved far more controversial. The board of trustees—which would have the “sole right to direct and prescribe the quality of performances,” determine admission fees, and oversee the finances—would remain under the MA’s control. In exchange for funding the building, the agreement specified that nine of its fifteen members would be appointed by the MA’s own board of governors. The other six would include the mayor, the president of the Board of Education, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, an independent citizen, and two professors (one from UCB and one from Stanford). This proposed assignation of a majority of the trustee seats to the MA aroused widespread public criticism. Even more indignation, however, arose from the privileges that would accrue to the subscribers—and that issue ultimately torpedoed the project. Under the proposal, these subscribers would hold in perpetuity the right to use the seats they purchased, although they would have to pay the normal ticket price for them and exercise their rights twenty-four hours before the performance. This privilege could “be disposed of by will or transfer” and at the subscriber’s death would pass to his or her heirs. The Chronicle, in a series of articles and editorials, strongly supported the building, explaining to doubters that the wealthy would have to buy their seats, just like everyone else, and that the facility would not charge rent, thereby allowing low ticket prices and making opera available to everyone. San Francisco was heralded once again as the people’s opera capital: here would be the only municipal opera house in the country—high art supported by the city for the enrichment of the populace, surely a model to lead the rest of the nation. Others, however, were not convinced. Metzger, despite his strong support for opera and his advocacy of a temple of music, expressed considerable discomfort over the project’s apparent elitism. In two separate editorials on December 21, 1912, he highlighted its class implications, accusing the contributors of buying their way into a “Snobbery House” rather than showing genuine concern with musical education. If this building were to be a true municipal opera house, he maintained, it should offer at least a thousand seats at fifty cents and a proportional number at seventy-five cents and at a dollar.49

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Despite the controversy, seat subscriptions rose and a new level of loges was added to the plans. By the end of January 1913, nine hundred thousand dollars had been pledged, a preliminary design had been completed, and the building appeared to be on track for an opening in time for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, when “thousands of visiting music lovers” would descend on the city.50 Grand opera, admitted an editorial writer for the Chronicle, was largely a cultivated taste, but San Francisco had a history of broad-based interest, encouraged by “its large sprinkling of Latin and German population.” 51 In a by-now-familiar appeal invoking the ennobling potential of the art, the editorial begged the indulgence of doubters; opera, it noted, is not possible without “whole-hearted support of private individuals of wealth, or municipal encouragement.” At the beginning of February 1913, the board of supervisors agreed to a revised agreement (eliminating the city’s obligation to provide heat, exterior lighting, and water), and Mayor James Rolph signed it. The parties to this agreement, however, realized that it contained potential legal pitfalls and decided to test it in the courts before expending large sums of money. Therefore a friendly suit was initiated, intended to put to rest all areas of controversy. In summary, the suit asked three questions: Does a municipality have the right to own an opera house? If so, does the city have the right to dedicate public property for it? And finally, does the city have the right to delegate management of the enterprise to a body other than its own board of supervisors? At the beginning of March 1913, Judge James M. Seawell in the superior court answered all questions in the affirmative. A week later the rebuilt Tivoli reopened “amidst scenes of unrivalled splendor”—another social opportunity for the wealthy, who turned out in force. (The new theater seated about two thousand people.)52 Music lovers also thronged to the opening because the featured artist was San Francisco’s darling, Luisa Tetrazzini, singing in Rigoletto, the opera in which she had first appeared in 1905. Moreover, the company was the Chicago-Philadelphia Grand Opera, which reminded residents of the San Francisco of old: it featured three hundred members, including thirty-seven principals, thirty-six dancers, and an orchestra of seventy-five.53 This troupe had grown out of the Chicago Grand Opera Company, which formed after the Met bought out Hammerstein in 1910. The Met gave the Chicago endeavor strong financial and artistic backing, and Andreas Dippel, assistant to general manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza, became its director. After a loss the first year, the company arranged with Philadelphia to perform there for a follow-up season, and thus the organization became known for several years as the Chicago-Philadelphia Grand Opera. It was this company that premiered Victor Herbert’s Natoma in Philadelphia and New York in 1911, featuring the libretto of Joseph Redding.54 Coming to Redding’s hometown, the company now presented the San Francisco premiere of the opera—with Mary Garden, who had

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sung the title role in the East. As noted earlier, the San Francisco production, for the most part, prompted the same reactions as earlier ones: the music was judged excellent, but most critics agreed with Walter Anthony’s characterization of the libretto as “ludicrous.” 55 Braced by the affirmative court ruling and the glittery new opera productions, the Chronicle resumed its promotional publicity. The projected opera house “will not be a white elephant,” it declared defensively; San Francisco’s hunger for grand opera was proven not only by the successful Chicago-Philadelphia performances at the Tivoli but also by two popular residencies of the Lambardi traveling company this same season.56 The previous year had featured the Grazi French Grand Opera Company, as well as Henry Savage’s English language production of Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West, whose theme centers on the California gold rush. Savage’s troupe featured Giorgio Polacco (the conductor of the 1905 Tetrazzini debut), as well as a San Francisco–born prima donna, Luisa Villani. Reviewing the city’s history of opera from the glorious years before the quake, the paper assured its readers that a municipal opera house would make San Francisco into another Bayreuth. Meanwhile, to close the door firmly on any potential legal problems, the friendly suit was appealed to the state supreme court, and here the project ran into a major obstacle. The city, ruled the court in June 1913, could not enter into an agreement by which perpetual control of municipal property would be vested in a private corporation, especially one that, under the agreement, would have a majority on the board of trustees.57 The court, however, expressed its regret, and left open an alternative: if the board of trustees were organized so as to give the city a majority, the agreement might be legal. Metzger crowed that the court had “sustained the Musical Review’s opera house judgment” and labeled the project “nothing but a private enterprise established through the assistance of the City of San Francisco and maintained through money from the taxpayers.” 58 Meanwhile the MA governors, the board of supervisors, and the city attorneys went back to the drawing board. By November 1913 the lawyers, in consultation with the MA, had developed a new plan. Five members of the board of trustees would be city officials; the other ten would be appointed by the mayor. The unspoken understanding, however, was that these ten would represent the donors. The supervisors voted to accept the agreement, and all seemed to be in readiness. At this point, however, the mayor began to have his own doubts about the project’s aristocratic implications. William Crocker, Joseph Redding, and a third MA board member, along with Supervisor Henry Payot (dubbed the “father” of the opera house), huddled in closed door sessions with Rolph, but ultimately the mayor’s inclination to veto the agreement could not be shaken. On November 20, 1913, Rolph squelched the project, to the shock, dismay, and anger of the organizers, who, two years previously, had rejected a now-too-expensive option of erecting a building on a different site.

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Rolph’s objections centered on the privileged rights of the donors, which, he felt, would create in perpetuity a class structure in a city-owned facility and would divide the opera patrons between the wealthy seat- or box-owning crowd and everyone else. The subscribers, he said, need to make “an absolute gift” of the opera house with no specifications concerning management or seats.59 The sponsors, responded the MA representatives, could not now change the terms under which the money had been pledged. A move to override Rolph’s veto never got off the ground, and the project died a quiet death. Subscribers paid 1 percent of their pledges for what they called “funeral expenses.”60 In vetoing the project, the mayor confronted head-on the contradictory class implications of opera: its appeal to the wealthy as a social, as well as musical, event, versus its attraction to a large contingent of the less privileged. Weighing his options, Rolph (a Republican banker) chose to cast himself somewhat uncomfortably as a populist, apparently recognizing that his own social credentials could withstand the ire of the rich, and his veto would garner broad-based support from the “ordinary.” His decision, as much political as principled, proved savvy. He was reelected handily year after year, serving as the city’s longest-term mayor—from 1912 to 1931. He then resigned to become governor of California and died three years later. About two months after Rolph’s veto, the Turner and Dahnken Circuit, which controlled the moving picture theater business in California, signed a long-term lease on the Tivoli. Despite its high-profile reopening as an opera venue, the theater became “the finest motion picture house in America.”61 P O S T WA R BU I L DI NG E F F ORT S

After the first World War, William Crocker and colleagues revived efforts to build an opera house. Associated with him in this new endeavor were many of the same civic leaders and MA board members who had backed the earlier, failed project: Chronicle editor M. H. de Young; businessman Milton Esberg and bankers Herbert Fleischhacker and John McKee (among the founders of the MA); and Charles Templeton Crocker (grandson of Charles Crocker) who had authored the libretto of a Bohemian Club Grove Play, later turned opera, with music by Joseph Redding. This group broadened the plan to include an art museum and a small memorial court dedicated to peace and the conclusion of the Great War. They even took an option on a block bounded by Van Ness, Franklin, Hayes, and Grove, where the enormous Saint Ignatius Church had stood before the quake and fire, and where Davies Symphony Hall stands today. (See item 5 on Map 3. The church was part of the Jesuit Saint Ignatius College, currently the University of San Francisco.) Although some members of the initial group made large pledges and ap-

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proached other potential donors, by the end of 1919 the fund-raising effort had garnered less than half of the $2 million now needed. 62 At this point Major Charles Kendrick, a national committeeman, and later vice commander, of the American Legion, suggested an appealing (and eventually successful) proposal: “The soldiers killed in the war deserved a memorial. But why build a hall for only the dead? Why not raise a building for the use of the living as well?”63 The opera house/art museum could function as such a memorial; and the American Legion could devote its considerable influence to fund-raising. Proponents were intrigued. The Legion was amenable. And the veterans were enthusiastic, because the building would house meeting and office space. Thus an effective—yet ultimately troubled—alliance was born. Under this new cooperative umbrella, raising funds turned out to be the easy task. The harder one was navigating through San Francisco’s political minefields. At first, however, all went well, and the Saint Ignatius block was purchased for three hundred thousand dollars in February 1920. The goal was to reach $2.5 million by Memorial Day. To that end, the sponsors staged a mass meeting at the Civic Auditorium, preceded by intensive publicity. On May 17 schoolchildren heard a performance at the war memorial site by three hundred students of the San Francisco State Normal School, led by the supervisor of music in the public schools. “Women’s Day” on May 18 featured a forty-piece band. And the big event itself—on May 19—was billed as a campaign for a memorial to honor the “men and women, living and dead, who sacrificed so much in order that American ideals might endure.”64 Excitement rose to a feverish pitch. “San Francisco’s fighting spirit, exemplified in the will to do and the soul to dare, will find ample opportunity for expression tonight,” heralded the Chronicle. The entire city was asked to attend: “Every man, woman, and child will have an opportunity to determine by his individual act whether or not the proposed war memorial here shall stand as a living monument, commemorative of those who made the supreme sacrifice and indicative of the community idealism of this city.”65 Who could fail to support such an altruistic effort? Buried deep within the promotional material was the suggestion of an opera house. Indeed, sponsors had learned a bitter lesson from their previous experience. They not only downplayed the centrality of the performance hall in the projected group of memorial buildings, but also took pains to emphasize the other fine arts, which would be represented by the local organizations that had fostered them. And to forestall any repetition of the earlier fight, the administration was to be overseen by the regents of the University of California. Specifically, the plan called for three buildings surrounding a memorial court: on the west an auditorium for music and drama; on the east (on Van Ness), the San Francisco Art Institute and two buildings to be used by veterans organizations. The event of May 19, 1920, included performances by army and navy bands.

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Presiding was David Barrows, president of the University of California and state commander of the American Legion. By May 21, $1.6 million had been subscribed, and promoters made a final effort and tapped small donors. Businesses were encouraged to report 100 percent employee participation. One of the first to meet the goal was the Sing Fat Company in Chinatown, where residents supported the effort unsparingly. A street fair in the Chinese quarter attracted thousands, “with merrymakers pouring a steady flow of coins into the coffers of the amusements, which [would] go to swell the war memorial fund.”66 Another fund-raiser, an all-night dance at the Dreamland Rink, featured the Art Hickman jazz band. By the end of the campaign, $2,150,000 had been pledged. The project was on its way. The money was turned over to the university’s regents, who appointed a board of trustees in August 1921. Included, unsurprisingly, were the men behind the 1918 campaign—William and Charles Templeton Crocker, Esberg, Fleischhacker, McKee, and others—as well as Kendrick. The following year, they named a board of architects. Plans proceeded apace, held up by bureaucratic details, but otherwise seemingly on track. Then in May 1922 a startling development led to a scramble to prevent disruption of the architectural integrity of the civic center area and ultimately to a change of site. The Lyon Fireproof Warehouse Company bought half the block across Van Ness from the City Hall and proposed to erect an eight-story warehouse. Although the company promised to design an attractive building, warmemorial planners were alarmed and moved quickly to block it. In fact, the site they already owned was proving inadequate in size; after borrowing money from the trustees and filing condemnation charges against the warehouse company, the memorial committee managed to purchase the land. The trustees bought the rest of the block, providing a much-larger site directly across the street from city hall, on the land bounded by Van Ness, Franklin, McAllister, and Grove (see items 2 and 3 on Map 3). HOM E GROW N OPE R A

Meanwhile, San Franciscans were still having to satisfy their opera appetites with less-than-highly-professional ventures. Augusto Serantoni continued his small indigenous local company until 1920, offering opera for twenty-five cents, but his “orchestra” consisted of only a single piano.67 Otherwise, touring companies offered the most attractive options. Most notable among them was the San Carlo Opera, founded by a colorful and ambitious impresario, Fortune Gallo, who came to the United States in 1895 and worked his way from poverty to the role of advanceman for the Royal Italian Band. In 1910 Mario Lambardi contacted Gallo to manage his opera company’s tour. Gallo’s hilarious description of the Lambardi troupe in his autobiography portrays it as a group of disorganized

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Bohemians traveling with a menagerie of birds, monkeys, and other animals that occasionally disrupted the performances. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times the next season, Gallo was able to bring order, greater expertise, and profitability to the organization, as well as a spirit of energy and modernity.68 After a few seasons managing this motley crew, Gallo founded his own opera troupe and named it San Carlo after the opera house in Naples where he had heard his first opera.69 The San Carlo Company’s premiere took place in New York in December 1913, but Gallo did not bring the group to San Francisco until February 1919, when they opened at the Curran Theater with a hundred performers (including an orchestra of thirty-five) and a repertory of sixteen works. The year was an auspicious one for opera. With the war now ended, people gravitated toward the joys of theatrical entertainment, and Gallo’s low prices packed the theaters. The New York Times reported on standing-room-only crowds for the company’s performances in Omaha, Pittsburgh, Denver, Montreal, and elsewhere. “In Winnipeg . . . the operas were given in sub-zero weather, eight performances being sung to standees who had waited in a temperature of 25 below while offering $5 to get inside.”70 San Francisco was no exception. The Curran was full, reviews were strong, and, though no works new to the city were presented, the 1919 tour was a success. Among the singers was a San Francisco girl, Sofia Charlebois, a socialite Gallo had met during his Lambardi adventure and married in 1912. Among the conductors was Gaetano Merola; reviewers noted that he led with a firm decisive beat, preventing the singers from indulging in too much liberty. The son of a court violinist, Merola had come to the United States in 1899 from Naples, served as an assistant at the Met, and then joined Henry Savage’s touring company, which presented opera in English. After working as a chorus master for Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera in 1906–7 and the touring International Grand Opera (which came to San Francisco in 1909), Merola joined Gallo’s company. When Gallo brought his troupe to San Francisco for a second season in February 1920, Merola again conducted, and Mason singled him out for special praise in leading Rigoletto with notable vibrancy.71 Merola returned a third time in January–February 1921. That summer he took up residence in the city, to the ultimate benefit of San Francisco’s opera fans. The San Carlo Company was not the only touring opera troupe in town during these postwar years. One that created a particular sensation was started by Metropolitan opera baritone Antonio Scotti, who had appeared in San Francisco before the quake to great acclaim. Along with other Met colleagues, Scotti formed an all-star organization in 1919 that toured for four years. Apparently recalling the profitable prequake period in San Francisco, Scotti included San Francisco in his 1920 and 1921 fall tours, despite the lack of a proper venue. The troupe performed at the Civic (Exposition) Auditorium, which lacked not only appro-

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priate acoustics but also the luxurious trimmings of a proper operatic theater. Nevertheless, opera-hungry San Francisco showed up en masse, dressed in their best, for the first reappearance of Metropolitan stars since the quake. Among the featured works in both seasons was Franco Leoni’s one-act L’Oracolo, whose plot is set in San Francisco’s prequake Chinatown. Scotti had starred as the opium dealer Chim-Fen in the opera’s premiere at Covent Garden in 1905, and reappeared in that role in San Francisco. The opera attracted more than passing interest because of its local setting, but reviewers were unimpressed by Leoni’s music, although they found Scotti’s portrayal of the villainous protagonist outstanding. Mason called the composer’s “Chinesery” an “artistic fiction[,] . . . a few strains out of the musical encyclopedia, a series of orchestral tricks that may be learned in any score devoted to the Orient.” 72 Ray Brown in the Chronicle agreed, labeling the work a “tabloid thriller” with an interesting plot but unoriginal music (“as full of reminiscences as a pudding is of plums”). “The composer missed his opportunity to write a score essentially Oriental in its color. The music contains only a few passages that even faintly suggest the Chinese idiom, and those characteristics are superficial,” said Brown after the second season’s performance. Indeed, Leoni’s sixty-five-minute opera, though skillful, is not particularly innovative. The plot features the usual murders and an insane heroine (one among many mad women in grand opera). The setting might be Chinatown, the villain an opium dealer, and the wise man an oracle, but the characters show no particular association with San Francisco (real or imagined), and the opera offers no images of Chinese life or the city’s history of Chinese exclusion, segregation, and prejudicial stereotyping. The characters behave, in fact, much like operatic Italians. Moments of pseudo-Chinese-sounding orchestral writing appear within an otherwise Pucciniesque score, elements of which unashamedly suggest Butterfly (itself Asia-at-a-remove). Example 7a shows one of the rare moments of Chinese reference; Example 7b presents a portion of the love-duet, which, despite its open fifths and fourths, sports a thoroughly Italianate language. The reception of the Scotti Company in September 1921 was even more enthusiastic than for its first San Francisco appearance. North Beach’s Italian community presented baritone Riccardo Stracciari a solid gold medallion inscribed “to . . . the Poet of Song,” moving the singer to tears. And to cap the short season, 6,313 people paid $30,652.50 to watch Geraldine Farrar in Madama Butterfly, setting a national record for the highest box office receipts for a single performance of grand opera. San Francisco thus reaffirmed its reputation “as a city of discernment and appreciation in matters musical,” second only to Chicago and New York, crowed the Chronicle; only opera, said critic Brown, could bring out such crowds and highlight so appropriately the city’s musical season.73 Merola, who was a resident of San Francisco by this time, must have been struck by the

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Example 7a. Franco Leoni, L’Oracolo (1905), (piano-vocal reduction), rehearsal 44, showing a pseudo-Chinese section.

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citizens’ lavish support of (and hunger for) grand opera, as well as by the feasibility of mounting financially successful productions at the acoustically unforgiving Civic Auditorium. He would soon take advantage of both. That fall Merola attended the Stanford–UCB football game—known then, as now, as “Big Game”—at the Stanford stadium on the university’s Palo Alto campus, about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco. The experience led him to an audacious plan: open-air opera featuring big-name stars from the East Coast. Stanford officials were enthusiastic about the idea, hoping to support the university’s endowment for a pipe organ, its new Memorial Auditorium, its medical clinic in San Francisco, and its home for convalescent children.74 A stage was erected at the north end of the stadium, and a performance space configured that could seat seventeen thousand. Except for the principals, the entire company was local: A chorus of 150, trained in San Francisco, rehearsed for months before the

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Example 7b. Leoni, L’Oracolo, excerpt from the love duet between San-Lui (tenor) and Ah-Joe (soprano), beginning 6 measures before rehearsal 56.

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June 1922 opening. The orchestra drew players from the San Francisco Symphony. Featured soloists included Metropolitan Opera tenor Giovanni Martinelli, making his first appearance on the Pacific Coast, and soprano Bianca Saroya. The Southern Pacific ran special trains from San Francisco and San Jose. San Francisco, of course, already had a long tradition of open-air opera in the form of the annual Bohemian Club Grove Plays. But these productions—though lavish and characterized by through-composed music, orchestral accompani-

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ment, and theatrical lighting—were hardly public. In fact, they were—and remain—secret, and though the goal of having local composers produce new works was laudable, the musical quality of many of them was mediocre. The Bohemian Club operas were designed for a single outdoor performance, and the composers’ aesthetic and social goals differed radically from those of major productions repeated for large urban audiences. The club’s spectacles served no particular “elevating” function. They were composed, staged, funded, and produced by the wealthy for the wealthy. Their purpose was solely entertainment at a secluded location for a select, restricted audience of men escaping from the cares of their everyday lives and engaging, for a short period, in a world of fantasy. Nevertheless, it was a high honor to be entrusted with composing the music for a Bohemian Club Grove Play, and the officers tapped the talents of local composers (or those with ties to San Francisco), sometimes more than once, as shown in Table 8. Reputedly one of the most beautiful of the early grove operas was The Hamadryads of 1904, celebrating the defeat of Meledon, the spirit of Care, and the consequent release from captivity of the tree spirits (Hamadryads). The libretto symbolizes, in the form of a pseudo-Greek drama, the Bohemian Club’s efforts to preserve Northern California’s redwood forests. It recounts the tale of Meledon’s defeat of Apollo and the other gods, and the subsequent imprisonment the Hamadryads in the trees: They “strained at bonds invisible, and sank to rest in bitter, dull despair.”75 Apollo, however, was still living in Limbo. Heralded by a Naiad, who appears from a hillside stream, he returns to the forest after submitting to a New Power. The voices of angels herald the new Savior, the Lord who will bring deliverance. He frees Apollo, who then kills Meledon with an arrow from his golden bow. William McCoy, a composer and multi-instrumentalist (violin, organ, clarinet) who later joined the music faculty at Mills College, composed the score. Typically, the orchestra articulated a series of leitmotifs: the Meledon theme, the Music of Hope, the Illumination Music, the Supplication theme, the Song of Deliverance, and many others.76 In contrast to these annual private productions, Merola’s 1922 Stanford venture aimed at the largest public audience he could muster. The series turned out to be an artistic success (attendance ranged from six thousand to ten thousand people per performance), but a financial failure.77 Despite incurring a large deficit, however, the adventure highlighted San Francisco’s need for its own opera company. Support grew over the next year, in part because of Merola’s entrepreneurial skills, and in part reflecting the fund-raising efforts of a group of supporters, such as Rosalie Stern, Cora Koshland, and banker A. P. Giannini. Some locals suggested bringing in Giorgio Polacco, now conductor of the Chicago opera and its musical director beginning in 1922; but the financial fiasco of that company in the 1921–22 season under Mary Garden made donors wary (the Chicago Grand

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Table 8 Bohemian Club Grove Plays, 1902–1933 Year

Title

Author

Composer

1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933

The Man in the Forest Montezuma The Hamadryads The Quest of the Gorgon The Owl and the Care The Triumph of Bohemia The Sons of Baldur St. Patrick at Tara The Cave Man The Green Knight The Atonement of Pan The Fall of Ug Nec-Natama Apollo Gold The Land of Happiness The Twilight of the Kings Life Ilya of Murom St. John of Nepomuk The Rout of the Philistines Semper Virens Rajvara, the Dwelling Place of Princes Wings Truth St. Francis of Assisi Nanda A Gest of Robin Hood Birds of Rhiannon Joan The Sorcerer’s Drum The Legend of Hani

Charles Field Louis Robertson Will Irwin Newton Tharp Charles Field George Sterling Herman Scheffauer H. Morse Stephens Charles Field Porter Garnett Joseph Redding Rufus Steele J. Wilson Shiels Frank Pixley Frederick Myrtle Charles Templeton Crocker Richard Hotaling Harry Leon Wilson Charles Caldwell Dobie Clay M. Greene Charles Norris Joseph Redding Roy McGregor Neily Joseph Thompson George Sterling Irving Pichel Garnet Holme Charles Gilman Norris Waldemar Young W. G. Garthwaite Daniel Evans Junius Cravens

Joseph Redding Humphrey John Stewart William McCoy Theodor Vogt Humphrey John Stewart Edward Schneider Arthur Weiss Wallace Sabin William McCoy Edward Stricklen Henry Hadley Herman Perlet Uda Waldrop Edward Schneider Humphrey John Stewart Joseph Redding Wallace Sabin Domenico Brescia Ulderico Marcelli Humphrey John Stewart Nino Marcelli Henry Hadley Wheeler Beckett George Edwards Domenico Brescia Charles Hart Edward Schneider Robert Newell Edward Harris Charles Safford Charles Hart Henry Hadley

Sources: History of Opera in San Francisco, v 2, and Buck, “Music and Musicians in Bohemia”; see either for a complete list.

Opera Association lost a million dollars that year).78 Merola, in contrast, managed to raise sufficient funding from the local Italian community and added funds from his own family. (His niece Carmen Fraetis recalls that her mother, Merola’s sister-in-law, invested a large inheritance in his projected company.)79 The San Francisco Opera Association formed on April 23, 1923, and staged its first production on September 26. Merola brought back Martinelli and Saroya, as well as tenor Beniamino Gigli. The first season, including ten performances and

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ten different operas in thirteen days, ended with ticket sales of $124,000, yielding a tiny profit. The city’s resident opera company was now a reality, even without an adequate facility to house it. During its first nine seasons, the opera company performed primarily in the acoustically poor and visually unflattering Civic Auditorium. The productions took place in the fall, before the start of the symphony’s season, allowing the opera to use the orchestra’s players. Furthermore, Merola guarded against enormous deficits by teaming up with Merle Armitage in Los Angeles to present a supplementary season in Southern California. (The two men had previously worked together in New York.)80 Merola’s programming was more varied than that of the traveling companies whose productions had served as the city’s only opera offerings since the earthquake. Most seasons included at least one or two unfamiliar works. Among the most unusual operas presented in these early years was Fay-YenFah, with music by Joseph Redding and libretto by Charles Templeton Crocker. The opera had its origins in a Bohemian Club Grove Play, The Land of Happiness (1917), and was first produced (in French) in Monte Carlo on February 26, 1925. The occasion had been one of national pride and social snobbery. “For the first time in the history of music,” reported Time magazine, “a full-length opera composed by an American, on a libretto written by an American, was produced in Europe. . . . In the Monte Carlo Opera House, which is not large, sat Mrs. Claus A. Spreckels of San Francisco, [British actress] Lily Langtry, [French singer and actress] Yvonne-Printemps, the Duke of Connaught, the Count and Countess Vignal, [Polish tenor and former Metropolitan Opera star] Jean de Reszke, Lady Waterlow, Princess Radziwill and some 400 others. They listened to a score which is modern without eccentricity, melodious without stickiness, [and which] followed the poetic story of a Chinese beauty damned for loving too well.” 81 The following January Merola conducted Fay-Yen-Fah at San Francisco’s Columbia Theater—a much smaller venue than the Civic Auditorium but also more elegant and offering better acoustics—a fitting locale for the social occasion it became. San Francisco society appeared in large numbers, making the performance a “dazzling success.” 82 Even Metzger, now writing for the Chronicle, praised Redding’s accomplishment. Never a fan of modern music, he called the opera “a refreshing breeze in a hothouse of artificiality.”83 The plot, unlike some of the patronizing portrayals of Asians earlier in the century, exemplifies the new respect for Chinese culture that emerged in this era. It draws from mythology, recounting the bravery and ambition of the youthful Shiunin, the innocent (but ultimately fatal) love for him by the princess Fay-Yen-Fah, and the evil deeds and final downfall of the Fox-God. Much of the score is clichéd, but there are some surprisingly beautiful and original moments, such as the princess’s prayer scene shown in Example 8.

Example 8. Joseph Redding, Fay-Yen-Fah (1925), excerpt from the princess’s prayer scene in act 2.

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