Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars 9780226563602

Citation preview

SINGING IN THE AGE OF ANXIETY

SINGING I N T H E AG E OF ANXIETY '" Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars

L au ra Tu n bri d ge

T h e U n iv er si t y of C h icag o P r e s s Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56357-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56360-2 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226563602.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tunbridge, Laura, 1974– author. Title: Singing in the age of anxiety : lieder performances in New York and London between the World Wars / Laura Tunbridge. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017059451 | ISBN 9780226563572 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226563602 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Singing—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Singing—England—London—History—20th century. | Songs, German— Social aspects. | Music—Social aspects. | Music—Performance— History—20th century. | World War, 1914–1918—Influence. Classification: LCC ML2811.8.N48 T76 2018 | DDC 782.421680943/097471—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2017059451 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of David Tunbridge and Catherine Stewart

C on t en t s

I nt r od uct ion

An Anxious Age 1

one

Transatlantic Arrivals 13

t wo

Languages of Listening 42

t hree

Lieder Society 92

four

Saving Music 132

Acknowledgments 169 Notes 173

Selected Bibliography 219 Index 229

vii

I n t r od uct ion

An Anxious Age

T

hree men and a woman sit in a bar on Third Avenue in New York City during the Second World War. Their thoughts and talk are interrupted now and again by the radio, “compelling them to pay attention to a common world of great slaughter and much sorrow.”1 The men initially think mostly of battle. The woman of a concert: “To war-­orphans and widowed ladies, Grieving in gloves.”2 The quartet of characters who people W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (1947) reflect the poet’s observation that during wartime “everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or of a displaced person.”3 That displacement need not be literal, although many—including Auden himself, who had left England for the United States in 1939—found themselves in new countries and new situations. It could also have to do with the way in which the modern world was mediated: through the disembodied voices of radio broadcasts, or the combination of mourning and musical appreciation signified by applause muted by fashion both artistic and sartorial. Amongst all that was new, there was concern for the old. This book follows the fortunes of a musical genre whose future in twentieth-­century America and Britain was also uncertain: lieder, or German art song. By the late 1930s, this small-­scale, primarily romantic form was akin to a musical refugee. Those who engaged with lieder—performers, listeners, critics, and scholars—may have been anxious about how the repertoire might survive the vicissitudes of international politics and the technologies of mass culture. Yet the mobility and 1

2 I n t r od uct ion

adaptability of these songs and their singers enabled them not only to survive, but to stand as symbols of hope for what the sociologist Norbert Elias termed “the civilizing process.” Anxiety and civilization run as dual themes throughout the following chapters, refracting some of the major preoccupations of the interwar period in Europe and the United States that pertain to lieder: nationalism and internationalism, and their ugly cousins xenophobia and racism; the status of high-­culture and “leisured” society and aspirations to share it with and spare it from other classes; and the impact of this “first media age” on social activities, including live music making.4 It may seem strange to claim that a book about five white, male, Austro-­German composers of the nineteenth century—Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Robert Schumann (1810–1856), Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Hugo Wolf (1860–1903), and Richard Strauss (1864–1949)—presents a decentered account of a period in musical and cultural history. However, this is an unusual study of the interwar years in New York and London: my concern is not with large-­scale institutions—opera houses or symphony halls—nor is its focus on modernism or popular music, which receive the lion’s share of scholarly attention.5 Moreover, this is not a book about composers, nor would I like to think of it as reception history in the traditional sense, which, as Daniel Cavicchi explains, continues to privilege works as drivers of musical culture.6 Instead, this is what the historian of science David Edgerton would call a “use-­history.”7 His point is that older technologies continue to be used despite the historian’s emphasis on the new (his most often cited example is horses on battlefields alongside tanks). Along similar lines, I am writing not about new music, but about repertoire that was learned, sung, and listened to in regular concerts—about what constituted everyday concert life for members of a certain social class (and, occasionally, beyond them). I am also concerned with the ways in which new media—recordings, radio, and sound film—interacted with live performance and vice versa, rather than treating them as separate activities. This book might still be taken as a narrative about canon formation. More than that, though, it illustrates the precarious fortunes of those canons. Lieder fell out of Anglo-­American recitalists’ repertoire during the First World War, and it was not until after the Second that they came to be as respected as they are today. One of the main findings of this book is that, rather than reaching back to nineteenth-­ century practices, it was during the 1920s and ’30s that the performance culture surrounding lieder with which we are now familiar came into being. Singing in the Age of Anxiety grew out of my survey of the song cycle, from

A n Anx io us Age

3

which I discovered that the interwar period was transformative for performance practices because of the spread of technology and because of tensions between what appeared to be an idiom defined to a large extent by its national identity within an international context.8 What was a paragraph or two became a project that offers insights not only about the Anglo-­ American reception of lieder, but also about musical life during the first half of the twentieth century. Within its generic, temporal, and geographic limits, this is a book about how musical performance can articulate identity, about the evolution of recording technologies and modes of listening, and about hierarchies of taste. The discussion is necessarily wide-­ranging, and an introduction to its themes and sources, as well as the book’s structure, may be helpful before delving into its main chapters, which, while arranged in loosely chronological order, concentrate on particular topics: the reintroduction of German music and musicians to New York and London after the First World War; issues of language and listening practices raised by the presentation of lieder in concerts, recordings, radio broadcasts, and films; the social standing of classical song; and attitudes to German music and musicians from the 1930s until the aftermath of the Second World War. 

Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, according to the literary scholar Edward Men­ delson, ends with “an almost instinctive wish for a shared community we can imagine but never achieve.”9 The notion of imagined communities has been a powerful positive concept for many scholarly accounts of the way nations are defined and culture is shared around the world.10 Anxiety about the ramifications of nation and culture being fragmented or, indeed, united was shared by many writers and commentators of the time. For example, Erich Maria Remarque left Germany in 1933, eventually making his way to the United States.11 His unfinished novel The Promised Land depicted refugees striving to make a new life in New York. One such character is Robert Hirsch, who had fought for the French resistance and now manages a small appliance shop. He takes the narrator with him to shake down another Jewish émigré for money. On being asked how it is possible to intimidate anyone now they are no longer in Nazi Germany but “the land of the free,” Hirsch responds: “Haven’t you understood yet that we are living in the age of anxiety? The age of real and imaginary fear? [. . .] And that as emigrants we’re never going to be able to shake this fear, whatever happens?”12 Yet it was not only emigrants who felt anxious. The anxiety of displacement was also existential. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in

4 I n t r od uct ion

his 1927 tract Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), described anxiety (Angst) as a state of hovering, of feeling detached from the world in the face of the infinite, of being at once nothing and nowhere. A striking aspect of the 1920s and ’30s—particularly in Europe, but also in the United States—is that the notion of this being an “interwar” period is not a retrospective construct: it was felt at the time.13 Although after 1918 many tried not to mention the war, and to distract themselves with all manner of entertainments, beneath the gaiety there was perpetual dread that the horrors might return. References to being anxious abound in texts on everything from performance nerves to music’s therapeutic properties to the perils of cosmopolitanism. There were, as the historian Richard Overy has discussed, “networks of anxiety” manifested in a preoccupation with the destruction of what was referred to as “civilization.”14 Writing in the 1920s, Norbert Elias was careful to distinguish between Kultur and Zivilisation.15 Kultur, he explained, referred to human products, such as works of arts, books, religious or philosophical systems; it was a uniquely German concept that played an important role in nation building (which had taken place relatively late in Germany), and it paid little heed to attitudes or behavior. Zivilisation, by contrast, played down national differences by emphasizing commonalities among all human beings.16 It was the purview of those people, Elias explained, “whose national boundaries and national identity have for centuries been so fully established that they have ceased to be the subject of any particular discussion, peoples which have long expanded outside their borders and colonized beyond them”: in other words, the British and French. Elias acknowledged that the function of the German concept of Kultur took on new life as the First World War raged, for the Allies fought in the name of “civilization.” It is a word that will recur throughout this book, in situations as diverse as explorations of “hotel civilization” to antifascist rhetoric, and with certain kinds of music—not always those associated with Kultur—being co-­opted as symbols of civilization. Other writers, from other countries, may have used slightly different terms from those chosen by Elias, but the polarity of national and supranational remained.17 For the English art critic and member of the Bloomsbury group Clive Bell, the meaning of civilization was social and artistic, encapsulated, after the savagery of the war, in “the artificial pleasures of a fashionable dinner party, where we can sit and rail in security against the unheroic quietude of civilized life.”18 “A man or woman entirely insensitive to all the arts can barely be deemed civilized,” Bell claimed, with all the condescen-

A n Anx io us Age

5

sion of his class. He conceded, however, that the civilized person was not born but made. The civilizing process went hand in hand with an impulse toward arts education during the interwar period. The nurture of a civilized sensibility thereby had a conflicted relationship with what many perceived as another threat to peace and quiet: mass media.19 Arts educators would attempt to harness the forces of broadcasting and the record industry to improve the taste of the general public; at the same time, as will be seen, there was a drive to protect certain music and modes of being from the hoi polloi. Joseph Horowitz argues that the Great War shattered “the concept of civilization as pursuant to truth and beauty”; that the “rhetoric of uplift” that had accompanied classical music in America’s Gilded Age rang hollow, particularly after it was co-­opted by European dictators for a very different type of cultural, communal catharsis.20 Although repertoire was co-­ opted to political ends, it was not only by dictators. The ability of music to forge communities, to raise morale, and to bolster propaganda during wartime was recognized by both sides. However, as this book demonstrates, the ways in which classical music was used, rhetorically and affectively, during the First and Second World Wars fundamentally contrasted. That said, there were historical continuities between and beyond the outbreak of hostilities. What constitutes “between the wars,” in other words, needs to be defined loosely. Both wars were cataclysmic, but while they may have accelerated some things and curtailed others, certain practices and people remained. In order to explain attitudes and activities after 1918, it is necessary to say something about what happened beforehand; in order to comprehend the import of 1945, its aftermath needs to be acknowledged (note that Auden’s The Age of Anxiety was written not during but following the war). In terms of geographical coverage, New York and London may seem an odd couple of cities through which to consider the performance culture of German song. As wealthy metropolitan centers they were “beyond both city and nation”;21 neither can really be taken as representative of American or British attitudes, and a quite different story would be told by looking at, say, Chicago or Manchester, Atlantic City or Lyme Regis. It is worth clarifying that, within London, discussion focuses on the West End, where most venues were located; for similar reasons, in New York City attention is primarily on midtown Manhattan.22 Comparing these two centers is revealing of shared attitudes and significant differences. Both cities were known as international hubs for the performance of classical music. Both had complicated relationships with German culture: New York, because of its historically large Germanic population and the prominent role that

6 I n t r od uct ion

community played in musical and philanthropic life; London, because its relative geographical proximity meant that it could fear German invasion of a militaristic as well as a cultural kind, and because of long-­standing connections with German society (not least the royal family). Britain and the United States were, of course, allies in both world wars and shared a common language. Yet, as the divergences in how they dealt with songs of their enemy illustrate, they defined themselves as much against each other as they did in response to the shared threat of Germany.23 New York and London were, throughout this period, important nodes on the transatlantic musical network.24 Typically, a German or Austrian singer wanting to expand his or her reputation internationally would venture from Berlin or Vienna to London and from there to New York. (There were other European nodes, of course—Paris and Amsterdam being the most obvious—but they are beyond the scope of this study.) This was not to say, however, that travel went only one way: American artists continued to visit Europe, and Europeans often returned home, so long as the political situation allowed. Thinking of the relationship between the two cities within the transatlantic unit helps nuance questions of national difference and exceptionalism: as Daniel T. Rodgers argues, the ocean functioned “less as a barrier than as a connective lifeline—a seaway for the movement of people, goods, ideas, and aspirations.”25 The transactional nature of musical life is at the heart of my first chapter, which takes as its starting point the role of the transatlantic liner as what Stephen Greenblatt would call a “contact zone,” where cultural goods are exchanged. The goods in question here were songs and their singers, who mingled at ship’s concerts with a freedom prohibited on land by wartime politics. “It is impossible to understand mobility without understanding the glacial weight of what appears bounded and static,” writes Greenblatt, and the arrivals and departures of the musicians discussed were freighted with significance.26 The contralto Ernestine Schumann-­Heink returned to New York after the First World War, determined to reintroduce the performance of songs in German; the tenor Roland Hayes arrived in London to start a long career as one of the most prominent African American classical singers of the age; the composer Richard Strauss and the soprano Elisabeth Schumann commenced an American tour that demonstrated the continuing influence and prestige of German music in New York, as well as the financial allure of “Dollarland.”27 Chapter 2 turns from studies of individual singers to questions of repertoire and the debates over which songs should be sung, by whom, and in

A n Anx io us Age

7

what language. Those questions were asked not only in New York and London concert halls after 1918, when hearing the enemy’s vernacular, never mind enemy musicians, was resisted. They were also asked as lieder began to be heard on gramophone recordings and radio broadcasts, and in sound films. The plurality of media, and their points of (dis)connection, are important to take into account, not only in relation to each other but with regard to their intersections with live performance. Songs were encountered—“used,” to borrow again from Edgerton—in numerous different spaces and formats. While their message may, pace Marshall McLuhan, have been inflected by their medium, the ways in which these different versions and experiences overlapped are vital to the understanding of the significance of lieder. How to access that understanding, however, remains a challenge. Cavicchi notes that research into the aesthetic lives of listeners is rare; the reason, surely, is the limitations of available sources.28 There might be access to diaries, memoirs, and correspondence that report directly on a musical experience; these are scarce, though, and it is likely that the kinds of comments made are about practical and personal aspects such as who the writer saw or the difficulties he or she experienced in traveling, rather than about the qualities of the performance. It is rarer still to find someone describing hearing lieder on the wireless or at the cinema; yet, increasingly, music was consumed at home rather than in the concert hall, and it is evident that experience informed interpretations in other situations.29 One is left, then, with published criticism, compared with the archives of venues, management companies, and other institutions to check claims about audience sizes, financial matters, and details of programs. This is not disastrous, for the interwar period saw a flowering of arts criticism in Britain and the United States.30 As well as specialist periodicals, mainstream newspapers— broadsheet and tabloid alike—covered concerts and musical news to an extent unthinkable now. 31 In such a competitive market and a time of so much political upheaval, they were bound to be partisan. The role of big-­ name critics as gatekeepers was underscored in London by the fact that all the critics sat in the same rows at concerts: the Musical Mirror and Fanfare described them as slouching into Queen’s Hall, “looking like retired parsnips obliged to inspect the drains against their better judgement” (it has to be said that critics then were allowed much greater freedom in the excoriation of their subjects).32 Many did not limit themselves to reviewing but also wrote books: Ernest Newman, who had gained his first full-­time position as a critic at the age of fifty, after the First World War, served as the

8 I n t r od uct ion

Observer’s London critic before becoming chief music critic of the Sunday Times. His book length studies of the German composers Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the Austrian Hugo Wolf, were hugely influential in persuading readers of their music’s merits. Richard Capell wrote for the Daily Mail for twenty years before moving to the Daily Telegraph in 1931. Despite both papers’ famously warmongering, anti-­German stance, he covered song recitals extensively and authored the first English-­language monograph on Schubert’s songs.33 Richard Aldrich presided at the New York Times from 1902 until 1923 and also wrote on Wagner, as well as working with the tetchy critic for the New York Tribune, Henry Edward Krehbiel, on the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.34 Aldrich was replaced at the New York Times by Olin Downes, who remained chief music critic until 1955 as well as chairing the Metropolitan Opera Quiz on the radio. In other words, critics were gatekeepers not only in the concert hall but of various music-­appreciation projects, be they monographs or broadcasts. The long tenures of Newman, Capell, Aldrich, and Downes also means that there is a relatively steady stream of their views through the interwar period, against which the opinions of less established voices—some of whom wrote anonymously or were only named by their initials—can be judged. The sense of there being establishment and peripheral voices within music criticism, as well as specialist and generalist ones, also applied to venues within New York and London and, in some ways, to performers. Lieder were sung in the home, by amateurs, students, and at informal musical gatherings (including high-­society “at homes”), seemingly continuing nineteenth-­century practices.35 Usually those activities can only be glimpsed in historical sources, with exceptional happenings noted more often than the day-­to-­day. More public and better documented renditions, by professional and aspiring singers, took place most regularly at moderately sized concert halls built in the early twentieth century, such as the Wigmore Hall (London) or Town Hall (New York), or at the various piano showrooms (Steinway, Aeolian) with attached recital spaces.36 Lieder also appeared, however, in huge venues such as the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Carnegie Hall and even the Hippodrome in Manhattan; then they were almost invariably sung by well-­established stars. It is worth remembering, however, that these venues were all available for hire, if one could afford it (hence Florence Foster Jenkins’s notorious Carnegie Hall recital in October 1944).37 There had been a shift, by the 1920s, away from the “hybrid” recital—

A n Anx io us Age

9

which presented a mixture of genres and ensembles—toward the “group” recital, which divided the program into sections according to historical period and place. (Occasionally singers still shared programs with an instrumentalist, usually a violinist or pianist.) Typically, that meant that a recital began with “early” music (Italian arias, Handel, Bach), followed by a group of lieder, then a group of songs from another country, and finally something lighter: popular airs, folk songs, or spirituals. The geographical range was often determined by the singer’s ethnic background, although demonstrating mastery of different languages increasingly was thought to be a sign of good training. Very few singers gave dedicated lieder recitals. On the one hand, this type of programming meant that when German song fell out of favor, during the First World War, it was easily replaced. On the other hand, it also meant that it was rare for larger-­scale works to be performed onstage. Only with the celebrations around Beethoven’s and Schubert’s centenaries in 1927 and 1928 respectively did the marketing strategies of gramophone companies, the educational projects of broadcasters, the proliferation of music journalism, and willing singers converge to foster a receptive audience for complete song cycles. As chapter 3 explores, another important environment for the performance and consumption of lieder in Manhattan were clubs and societies dedicated either to music or to a particular social group. These semi-­private affairs—accessible by invitation or subscription—were often hosted by another phenomenon of the early twentieth century, which transformed definitions of public space: the luxury hotel. Several of the clubs, such as the Bagby Musical Mornings, had been founded before the war and might have been expected to have died out in the Jazz Age; their persistence illuminates both historical continuities and the influence of especially the women of “old” New York within the modern city. Clubs and hotels also hosted concerts in London. The London Lieder Club, for example, was founded in 1933 as “back-­up” to a new recording venture, the subscription-­based Hugo Wolf Society. The series exemplified the complex ways in which live and recorded music intersected, and how what might be thought of as older practices were shaped, indeed in many ways created, by new media. Projects to re­cord the collected works of composers, sung in the original language, encouraged the type of dedicated recital promoted by the London Lieder Club. The texts around these recordings—program notes and criticism—put forward a particular kind of informed, attentive listening as desirable, which transferred to the concert hall. The notion of what now seems to be the traditional approach to lieder

10 I n t r od uct ion

performance—in concert dress, in the original language—arguably resulted from new technologies and the proliferation of writing about music in the interwar period. The influx of German and Austrian musicians arriving in London in the 1930s was still more influential, for they brought with them performance practices from Vienna and Berlin; notably, the model of the dedicated lieder recital or Liederabend.38 It was the best of these performers who were hired to re­cord for the Hugo Wolf Society and to sing at the London Lieder Club. Around them grew a culture of specialist interpretation. There was, inevitably, an explicitly political angle, for many of these musicians stayed in the country as refugees from the Nazi regime. Chapter 4 explains how, while lieder continued to be associated with Germanic culture, in contrast to British and American attitudes during the First World War, they were no longer approached as songs of the enemy. Instead, the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and even, up to a point, Strauss became symbols of a civilization in danger of being destroyed by fascism. Throughout the course of the Second World War, classical music was mobilized as a vehicle for cultural uplift and morale boosting. Twenty years earlier it would have been unthinkable for lieder to have been on wartime concert programs in London and New York, particularly sung in German. This time round, though, they were heard at flagship series such as the National Gallery concerts. There were objections to particular performers—Kirsten Flagstad’s return to New York after the war, for instance, was greeted with protests because her husband had been a member of Norway’s Nazi party—but attitudes to repertoire generally were more open. One further case study in this concluding chapter, though, serves as a reminder that while lieder may have become an accepted part of musical life, prejudices against performers were prompted not only by war: Marian Anderson gave a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, in effect protesting racial segregation; while she was heard by millions over the radio and received enthusiastically in New York shortly afterward, it was not until 1955 that she appeared as the first African American singer to be hired by the Metropolitan Opera.39 The contrast between what could be achieved in recital and what might be acceptable on the operatic stage points to the myriad ways in which lieder were used between the wars and the “songwork,” to borrow Gary Tomlinson’s term, that they executed.40 Modest in scale, they slipped between private and public spheres and between categories of high-­, low-­,

A n Anx io us Age

11

and—a term invented in the interwar period—middlebrow. Part of the challenge of this project has been trying to account for the multiple identities in whose name lieder were sung and for the many ways in which they were heard and interpreted. The sounds of the singers discussed in these pages are likewise elusive: although many were captured on record, listening to them now is desperately compromised by the limitations of technology and current tastes.41 For that reason, their aesthetic qualities are rarely described in what follows; but I hope that readers may be encouraged to seek out some of the recordings—many of which are now available as reissues or online—and to listen, if not quite with a period ear, then with a richer understanding of their motivations and contingencies.42 Recordings and, with them, radio and film promised to expand markets for lieder nationally and internationally. Their increased dissemination boosted postwar claims for the “universal” qualities of classical music. The centrality within that universe of the Austro-­German tradition is surprising only in that there might have been expected to be continued resistance to the music of those who had been the enemy (as there was, of course, from some factions).43 Nationalism was a powerful and increasingly aggressive force during the interwar period. However, it was challenged by the self-­conscious development of internationalist projects that, Akira Iriye argues, strove to achieve peace through political, economic, and cultural exchange.44 A term often associated with the latter was “cosmopolitanism,” which surfaces occasionally in the following chapters as a description of activities with an international aspect that may also imply something about the outlook of those involved.45 Quite what that outlook was is sometimes ambiguous. Cosmopolitanism might have been egalitarian in principle but in practice typically has depended on the social, economic, and cultural mobility of the elite.46 It has, according to Amanda Anderson, articulated intellectual and ethical “ideals for the cultivation of character and for negotiating the experience of otherness.”47 The performance culture of lieder in London and New York during the interwar period was in many ways inherently cosmopolitan, for it enmeshed ideas about cultural and social improvement within what was often an international environment. However, this was an age acutely aware—anxious, even—about national identity and difference. Civilization did not mean the erasure or leveling of those identities, but respect for and engagement with other nations. “Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein”—even little things can be precious—the poet Paul Heyse reminds us in the first song of Hugo Wolf ’s

12 I nt r od uct ion

Italienisches Liederbuch. The story of transatlantic musical life during the interwar years, as told through the performance and reception of lieder, yields no grand, overarching narrative. It does, however, intersect with concerns about the importance of art and culture, within and beyond an individual’s own nation and social group, which remain key to evaluating what might be meant by civilization today.

One

Transatlantic Arrivals

“The boat has not only been for our civilization [. . .] the great instrument of economic development [. . .] but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination.” —Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1986)

B

etween the world wars, transatlantic travel between Europe and the United States held a special place in the imagination of the cultural elite. It represented a temporal rift, both between old and new worlds, and because—before flight became routine—it took on average six days to make the journey by steam ship.1 Time, then, to dream and to be bored; time to be entertained. Music played a significant role on board.2 There were hired orchestras and dance bands, and it was customary for cabin and first-­class passengers to give a concert, typically for nautically themed charities. The diary that the German soprano Elisabeth Schumann kept during her American tour with Richard Strauss—of which more later—conveys the voyage’s tedium and its potential for discomfort or luxury, depending on one’s class of ticket. On their first evening aboard the SS Adriatic (19 October 1921) she recorded: “I am lying in a narrow, wobbly cabin.” Franz Strauss came by to say that the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin was on board, sharing a bottle of wine with his father and offering to find them better quarters. After two 13

14

C h apt er One

days of fatigue and headaches, Schumann was finally able to enjoy herself: “Wonderful day, sunshine, completely calm sea, great boredom. I completely forgot to mention that we already met [Lucrezia] Bori on the train from Paris to Cherbourg. We don’t see much of Chaliapin; he sits all morning in the Turkish bath, and unfortunately only speaks French, not English.”3 Despite, or perhaps because of, the language barrier the musicians seem to have spent the remainder of their journey playing poker together. On the penultimate evening, 25 October, they gave a charity concert for the widows and orphans of sailors. Schumann recorded that she “had a great success with three Strauss songs. Chaliapin also sang. Wonderful artist. Unfortunately not quite on top form any more. Then a lady played a violin sonata by Strauss too.” Few transatlantic passengers were treated to such impressive programs; the musicians on board were more often amateurs or less well-­known professionals, and those instances when an opera company or famous soloists were on board were noted as significant (the German soprano Frieda Hempel recalled in her memoirs that on a 1922 trip to New York the passengers of the SS Olympic heard the three Hs: herself, the pianist Josef Hofmann, and the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, who, together with—yet again—Chaliapin, raised an unprecedented $3000 for the Seamen’s Fund).4 Whoever performed, the concerts were striking for their wide-­ranging programs: in the cabin dining saloon of Cunard’s R.M.S. Alaunia on 20 March 1934, the program was light and varied: the ship’s orchestra played Franz von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant overture and “Capstan and Windlass,” a medley of sea shanties by Ernest Reeves; there were solos on the musical saw, cello, and Hawaiian guitar; turns by comedians and a dancer; a recitation; and “O, Donna Clara” and “You’re Gonna Lose Your Girl,” sung in German by a Miss Gerda Drebing.5 In October 1938 Lisa Reitler, the wife of a Viennese Jewish banker and a friend of Elisabeth Schumann, fled Nazi-­occupied Austria for New York. She described the concert during her voyage as “just like being in Paris”: she was accompanied by the “wonderful pianist” Myra Hess; there were a tenor and a lyric soprano from the Chicago Opera; “and afterwards cabaret artists, a banjo player who’s just done a big tour of Africa, then a pair who did some apache dances.”6 It is apparent from such lists that, while liners may have reinforced social boundaries according to the different classes of passengers, they were ideal spaces for chance meetings between nations and cultures. Although inherently cosmopolitan, the entertainments available were also intended to introduce passengers to their destinations, for instance



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

15

through special restaurant menus that offered either a taste of home or an indication of unknown pleasures to come. An advertisement for United States Lines described their ships as “America Afloat”: All bound for America and already in America—afloat. Going home and already home. They find themselves each other’s friends—fellow citizens of a floating city. Their club is the smoking room. Their sports grounds: the great decks, the swimming pool and gymnasium. They go on shopping expeditions—there are fine shops on board. They dance, dine, go to film shows. They live on board a few full memorable days— and then they reach New York.

That life on board might replicate and perhaps exceed what would be offered on arrival encourages us to view these ships as what Michel Foucault would call heterotopic spaces: sites that, unlike utopias, actually exist, but that represent, contest, and invert reality, primarily through juxtaposing incompatible elements. Indeed, Foucault cites the boat—“a floating piece of space, a place without a place”—as the “heterotopia par excellence.”7 Hans-­Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that transatlantic travel during the 1920s (particularly from the United States to Europe) signified “ultimate refinement in lifestyle and culture,” with ocean liners becoming opportunities for displays of cultural capital and technological advancements.8 Theatrical entertainments and concerts on board—despite or even because of their class associations—were an integral part of this imaginary civilized cosmopolitanism.9 But all ships return to port eventually, and, particularly during times of conflict, their arrivals could be sharply political. Each of the next three sections takes as its starting point the disembarkation of musicians in New York or London as a means of illustrating the ways in which the First World War impacted musical life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their organization is loosely chronological. First, I consider American attitudes toward German music and musicians during the hostilities, through the examples of the German-­American contralto Ernestine Schumann-­Heink, the Irish-­American tenor John McCormack, and the multiple identities of Louis Graveure. Second, I illustrate how similar attitudes influenced approaches to repertoire and performance in London in the immediate aftermath of the war, taking as my guide the African American tenor Roland Hayes. The final chapter examines responses to the return of two German musicians, the composer Richard Strauss and the soprano Elisabeth Schumann, to New York in the early 1920s.

16

C h apt er One

“The Time to Sing German Songs” (Ernestine Schumann-­Heink) The Dutch accompanist Coenraad Bos recalled traveling by steamship to New York from Europe shortly after the First World War. The famous contralto Ernestine Schumann-­Heink was also on board and, as was the custom on transatlantic trips, they planned a concert. Among their fellow travelers was a Swiss choral group. Bos was horrified to discover the titles of the songs they proposed to sing: “Du, deutscher Rhein,” “Mein Vaterland,” and so on. At that time, he explained, “the performance of music with German text, and frequently of German composers,” was out of favor. He asked Schumann-­Heink what to do: she told him not to print the titles on the program; she would handle it. (She herself, “realizing the delicacy of the situation,” had planned to sing an Italian aria and some English songs.) At the concert Schumann-­Heink said to the audience: “You are going to hear a group of songs by the Swiss Singing Society. The language in which they sing sounds like German. But it is not German! Please don’t shoot them! ” Whereupon they sang, “in the plainest German,” “Mein Vaterland” and “Du, deutscher Rhein,” and, commented Bos, it “was a great success: if anyone was the wiser, nothing was said.” “Shortly after this,” Bos continued, Schumann-­Heink sang in Newark, New Jersey. For the first time, after the war, she included German lieder by Brahms, purposely as a final group on the program. The audience numbered some 4000 people. Just prior to beginning the closing group, Schumann-­Heink announced: “The war is over. The time to sing German songs is here. If there are any in the audience who do not wish to hear them, they may leave now.”

And quietly, without demonstration, about two hundred people left the auditorium.10 These anecdotes illustrate the complex cultural negotiations musicians undertook in order to reestablish themselves after the war. Schumann-­ Heink’s willingness to pretend that the language in which the Swiss choir sang was not German was in keeping with the knowing playfulness of the performance situation.11 It seems that the degree to which the ship’s audience cared about the “politics” of the music they heard was negligible, as if while on board they were subsumed by the transatlantic rather than beholden to any particular place. It also demonstrates a determination on Schumann-­Heink’s part to continue as best she could, whatever the cir-



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

17

cumstances; an attribute well borne out by other incidents in her long and varied career. The large audience that welcomed her onshore in Newark was not unusual for a singer of her stature. However, it is striking that many listeners were not prepared to accept all the repertoire she offered because they still felt offended by the prospect of hearing the German language. The United States may not have been threatened by military attack at home to the same degree as her allies, but there had been the enemy within: the large Germanic populations of metropolitan centers such as New York and Chicago, whose cultural authority was established through money, language, and music. German immigration to the United States peaked in the mid-­nineteenth century, spurred by economic depression and political uncertainty in central Europe and the promise of fresh opportunities in the New World (after all, the most famous dynasties in New York, the Astors and the Waldorfs, were of German heritage). By 1910 New York was, next to Berlin, the largest German city in the world, even if midwestern cities such as Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Chicago had higher per capita German immigrant populations.12 There was a seemingly separate German world in New York, divided into neighborhoods according to when residents had arrived, or their religion (a large proportion of the German community was Jewish, for they hoped to find greater tolerance across the Atlantic; Brahms’s collaborator George Henschel explained that he decided in part to settle in London to escape Prussian anti-­Semitism).13 Before the war, many second-­generation Germans lived in Harlem. After the war, one commentator complained: Harlem! The old Harlem is dead. [. . .] All the Gemütlichkeit of it is gone. Gone are the comfortable Weinstüben where one could smoke his pipe and peacefully drink his Rhein wine. Gone is the old Liedertafel and the hundred-­and-­one social organizations, and the Turnvereins and the singing clubs where one could pass the evening peacefully. They have all moved elsewhere, and the new places do not have the atmosphere of the old ones. It used to be so pleasant to pass a Harlem street on a summer evening. The young ladies were accompanying their Lieder with the twanging of the soft zither, and the stirring robust melodies from the Lutheran churches used to fill the air on a Sunday. It is all gone now.14

The account is implicitly racist: Harlem has become black, noisy, and selfish.15 It is the nostalgic description of German identity within the city that

18

C h apt er One

is of interest, however. There is an emphasis on socializing, be it through wine bars or societies and clubs, and on musicality—communal and individual. Finally, there is the sprinkling of German terms, marked as other by the use of italics but not translated or explained. Migrants had come from many different German-­speaking lands; language—in the city of New York, Hochdeutsch, not dialect—was their most obvious commonality and so became “the major indicator of ethnic belonging.”16 Language and, evidently, music. The majority of studies of German-­ American musical identities have focused on folk and choral singing, which helped to maintain the coherence of immigrant communities.17 Classical music was part of that continuum of music making, but complicated categorization by ethnic identity because of the core role German and Austrian repertoire had long played in transatlantic concert life. Neither the United States nor Britain was known as a musical nation, although they were major importers (to the consternation of those who favored the aesthetic and economic development of home-­grown talent). Germans were not the only nationalities who took advantage of Anglo-­American markets—Italians and Russians were also prominent, particularly in opera—but they dominated the classical music scene in many American cities, particularly where there were large German populations.18 A few conductors were particularly influential in terms of repertoire and infrastructure. Leopold Damrosch, once Liszt’s concertmaster at Weimar, arrived in New York in 1871 to take over the Arion Society’s male chorus; he soon founded the New York Oratorio Society and the New York Symphony. On his death in 1885 his son Walter literally took up his baton; he would prove one of the most influential musicians in the city, not least because of his ability to befriend wealthy patrons such as Andrew Carnegie, whom he would persuade to build a concert hall.19 Another German-­trained conductor, Anton Seidl, like Damrosch, promoted the operas of Richard Wagner at the socially exclusive Metropolitan Opera House and through populist concerts on Coney Island. Even those orchestras not conducted by Germans were substantially peopled by musicians of German origin: by 1890 they constituted 90 percent of the New York Philharmonic. German musicians were visible not only as performers: instrument makers, such as the Steinway piano company, were well established, and there were countless music teachers who advertised that they were of German extraction or had trained abroad.20 The historian Jessica Gienow-­Hecht claims that five thousand Americans studied music in Germany between 1850 and 1900; the New York Times calculated that be-



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

19

fore the First World War American families paid about $15 million annually to foreign countries (primarily Germany and Austria) for musical tuition.21 What distinguished German classical music making from that of other immigrant groups in the city was the seriousness with which it was taken. In the nineteenth-­century “sacralization” of high culture, it was not Verdi and Tchaikovsky but Beethoven and Wagner who were musical idols, to be revered in silence.22 The degree to which this new type of attentive (or at least reverent) listening was a form of social control will be discussed in a later chapter; here, the point is simply that these were German composers. They represented their nation’s Kultur, the singularity of which was emphasized in the anglophone press by the word’s remaining italicized and untranslated. The superiority accorded Kultur was evident throughout music criticism, and especially in German commentaries about American, typically popular, culture: for example, Wilhelm von Polenz criticized the so-­ called Land of the Future as trivial, stupefying, and mechanical.23 However, such voices were increasingly drowned out by the rapid spread of mass entertainment, the majority of New York’s German population proving no less susceptible than their American counterparts to the charms of baseball, vaudeville, and amusement parks. According to the literary historian Peter Conolly-­Smith, for Americans the First World War “sealed the tomb of Kultur.”24 German-­language theaters closed, German-­language newspapers folded (there were 488 in New York City in 1910, just 152 in 1920), and Germans endeavored to make themselves indistinguishable from “real” Americans. They signaled their assimilation, as they had flagged their difference, in no small part through language: sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage,” German measles (probably to the bemusement of the afflicted) became “liberty measles,” Coney Island’s Kaisergarten—a replica of the one in Munich—was renamed, and many Germans applied to alter their surnames ( just as the British royal family changed Saxe-­Coburg to Windsor). Several states prohibited German instruction in schools; California even ordered the removal of German folk songs from children’s music books.25 The power and influence of German musicians was also diminished by the United States’ entry into the war. In the eyes of many scholars, war was no watershed; rather, it simply sped up a process of assimilation begun by the spread of mass media, through which popular culture asserted its hegemony. Kultur’s tomb, however, was not sealed as tightly as some suggest. As we shall see, after the hiatus imposed by the war, Germans and musi-

20

C h a pt er One

cians of German origin came once more to play a prominent role in Anglo-­ American concert life.26 The musical world certainly changed during the subsequent period, in response to the growth of the recording, radio, and film industries, which encouraged new modes of consumption and listening, and had the potential to broaden the dissemination of different repertoires. It was also, and again, impacted by global politics, as musicians dealt with economic crises and then the rise of fascism. Despite all this, German music somehow retained its central position in the Anglo-­American classical canon. Few artists were as adept at negotiating German-­American identities as Schumann-­Heink, whose career and family—were already transatlantic and for whom lieder remained a staple of her repertoire, no matter where she traveled or to whom she sang. Born Ernestine Rössler in 1861 to a German-­speaking family living near Prague, she met her first husband, Ernst Heink, when he was secretary of the Semperoper Dresden, where she had made her debut in 1878; they had four children before divorcing in 1893, after which she married Paul Schumann, with whom she had three more children. An actor and director at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, he was credited with improving her dramatic delivery. Schumann-­Heink’s career had taken off at the Hamburg Opera in 1889, when she replaced the prima donna Maria Götze at the last minute (as Carmen, Fidès, and Ortrud on consecutive nights); she performed at the Bayreuth Festival between 1896 and 1914 and in 1899 made her first appearance at the Metropolitan (her last would be in 1932). Paul Schumann died in 1904; the following year Schumann-­Heink married her American manager, Paul Rapp. The couple lived together in New Jersey as Schumann-­Heink pursued a lengthy court case to try to reclaim some of her savings from Germany, which she had forfeited when she married a foreigner. She left her two oldest children, August and Charlotte, in Germany and became a naturalized American citizen in 1908. She and Rapp divorced in 1915 (fourteen years her junior, he was apparently jealous of the attention she paid her offspring), by which time she had settled in San Diego. Despite her new passport, there could be no doubt about Schumann-­ Heink’s German heritage. She was strongly associated with the music of Wagner and performed lieder on her extensive concert tours. Yet she was also keen to cultivate a popular following, and, while this partly concerned, as promotional materials put it, “arousing a love for classical songs among the masses,” she was—unlike some of her colleagues—willing to appear in less elevated venues. There she often played up her Germanness



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

21

to humorous effect: on Broadway, appearing in Julian Edwards’s operetta Love’s Lottery (1904), she broke off to ask the audience whether her English was satisfactory, and she hammed up her accent in later vaudeville appearances. Much has been written about the use of comedy as a means by which immigrant communities could assimilate, according to which the presentation of negative stereotypes enabled a disavowal of ethnic identity. Classical musicians could play a prominent part in this “community of laughter,” either by lampooning themselves or by being mimicked by others.27 So far as Schumann-­Heink and other native German speakers were concerned, humor seemed to derive from careless or unidiomatic English and—­particularly for listeners today—musical delivery. For example, at a concert in June 1915 Schumann-­Heink performed Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Bizet, and Saint-­Saëns before ending with “The Star-­ Spangled Banner.” She had not, however, learned the words to the latter, which caused “some of her hearers to wonder in what language she was singing.”28 Listening to her recordings of the anthem we might wonder at the way her words are, at any rate, lost in her formidable vibrato, as well as her extensive use of rubato toward the climactic final note of the line “O’er the land of the free.” Schumann-­Heink saved face with regard to “The Star-­Spangled Banner” by claiming that she was eventually taught the words by an army captain. Still, her German-­American identity became more problematic as the war continued in Europe and threatened to cross the Atlantic; the way she navigated her career during this period illuminates the potential conflicts between the political situation and the musical community. As someone with family in Germany and the United States, she had sons fighting on both sides. The diary of her accompanist, Edith Evans Braun (1887–1976), reveals both the energy the singer devoted to looking after her family and career and the extent to which America’s entry into the war affected musical life.29 Schumann-­Heink’s fourth son, Hans, died of pneumonia in San Diego in early January 1916; by February she and Evans Braun were on a tour of the East Coast. On arriving in Washington, D.C., Schumann-­ Heink visited the German embassy to discuss her son August, who was serving in the navy (he died in his U-­boat in December 1918). The next day she sang for President Woodrow Wilson and his new wife at the White House; the duo then moved on to Atlantic City, where Schumann-­Heink wanted to meet a Judge Jerome to discuss the fortunes of another of her sons. Although Schumann-­Heink sometimes found it hard to perform— “I think memories proved too much for her and her grief is still too fresh,”

22

C h apt er One

Evans Braun recorded of a morning concert on 14 February—she had a busy schedule. She sang Erda in Wagner’s Siegfried at the Metropolitan that month, as well as appearing at benefit concerts at the Ritz and the Hotel Astor and giving recitals in Connecticut, Atlantic City, and Philadelphia. The Astor benefit, Evans Braun noted, was a “real German fest” in which the Met stars Otto Goritz, Johanna Gadski, Johannes Sembach, Albert Reiss, and Carl Braun also participated. (Their sense of humor can be gleaned from a play they put on alongside the musical performances, which featured Goritz “dressed as [the cartoon character] Buster Brown with a pink suit and yellow wig and eyes made to look cross-­eyed. It was a scream!”)30 By March Schumann-­Heink was hoarse, but she continued concertizing at a similar rate. Although she was received enthusiastically at New York State’s Auburn correctional facility on 25 April, the organizers were said to be worried that her program contained too much German repertoire. In early May she thought, wrongly as it turned out, that war had been declared; to soothe her nerves she and Evans Braun went to the singer’s favorite spot, on the pier across from Maison de Paris in Atlantic City: “We sat there for a long time watching the ocean.” Schumann-­Heink may well have contemplated her peculiar personal and professional situation with regard to transatlantic politics as the tide went out. After Congress declared the United States’ entry into the war, on 6 April 1917, those concerns about performing German music proved well founded. German artists at the Met were fired because they were now enemy aliens (Gadski announced her retirement rather than be dismissed);31 Schumann-­Heink would not perform there again until the mid-­ 1920s. To avoid paying royalties to enemy countries, the music of living composers such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Richard Strauss was cut from programs. Even opera repertoire by dead composers, including the ever-­popular Wagner, was canceled.32 The problem, as the critic Krehbiel pointed out, was not the composer, but that the works were in the enemy’s vernacular. Thus, while instrumental music by Beethoven and Brahms continued to be performed (a brief hiatus had proved untenable), singers had either to choose politically acceptable repertoire—that is, music by the United States and its allies—or to start using translations, decisions with implications beyond wartime politics. In a speech made to the Republican Party Convention on 31 May 1916, Theodore Roosevelt spoke out against “hyphenated citizens”: “There can be no fifty-­fifty Americanism,” he exhorted, echoing President Woodrow Wilson’s 1915 State of the Union message but now with the added po-



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

23

litical weight of war.33 Like many others, Schumann-­Heink reformulated her German-­American identity into something more patriotic. She announced that she would sever her relationship with Wolfsohn’s Musical Bureau, the longest-­established agency in New York City, who had paid her the princely sum of $500 for her first American concert tour back in 1892 (indeed, the founder, Henry Wolfsohn, claimed that his clients the heroic tenor Albert Niemann, Marcella Sembrich, and Schumann-­Heink had helped to popularize the song recital). Not only would that distance her from association with a German firm (although Wolfsohn, who had died in 1909, had moved to the United States as a child, and his firm was now run by an American, A. F. Adams), it meant that she could donate the proceeds from her concerts to charitable organizations such as the Red Cross and Jewish War Relief. Schumann-­Heink was far from the only artist to undertake such fund-­raising, and although performers in legitimate concerts and opera were exempted from the draft after 1 July 1918, artists were expected to contribute to the war effort in other ways (including a 10 percent tax implemented on concert tickets).34 Many adapted their concert programs to incorporate fund-­raising and appropriately rousing repertoire and speeches. For instance, Margaret Matzenauer, another contralto born in the Austro-­Hungarian empire, who had previously sung German and Italian repertoire at the Met, now programmed songs in English, French, Italian, Russian, and Norwegian, breaking off a Carnegie Hall recital for a “patriotic interruption” of “Dear Lord of Mine” and “The Star-­Spangled Banner” and a “stirring speech” by Mrs. Slade of the Women’s Committee. It was a presentational strategy shared by other singers of Germanic origin and, no less, by those representing the nations of the Triple Entente—France, Russia, and Britain—or who had been born in the United States. The New York Times noted that for the Matzenauer concert the hall was decorated with banners and posters for the national war savings campaign (war stamps were sold during the intermission): one read, “Joan of Arc saved France—Women of America, save your country.” Over the stage hung a battle picture inscribed “These boys are giving their lives will you lend your quarters?”35 Other singers with German backgrounds appeared at military bases, such as soprano Frieda Hempel, shown entertaining the troops in figure 1.1. But whereas Hempel wore a gown, as if giving a conventional concert, Schumann-­Heink entered more fully into the spirit of war. Many performers were photographed with soldiers or banners as backdrops, but the image of Schumann-­Heink at a Wall Street rally, draped in the American flag with her arms around two doughboys, encouraged

24

C h a pt er One

1.1 Frieda Hempel singing to soldiers. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

familial as well as patriotic associations (figure 1.2). She attempted to distract attention from her Germanic identity by constantly emphasizing her understanding of military life—her autobiography begins, “I am a soldier’s daughter”—and she gained great fame and popularity for performing, as it seemed, tirelessly, for the troops, for “her boys.”36 Her repertoire consisted of American songs and spirituals, as well as Italian and French numbers. A description of the setting for one of her performances at Camp Dix, the army’s training and staging ground in New Jersey, is evocative: There were no lofty cathedral arches lost in misty shadows; no air heavy with long said, passionate prayers and burning incense. Only a vast, sandy plain, and a red sunset slowly fading into ghostly dusk. It meant war; it meant heroic, inescapable resolve: it meant bloody battlefields to come, and the bringing to many of an eternal dusk. [. . .] Against this setting Madame Schumann-­Heink sang with her soul in songs of home, of mother, and of cheer [. . .] it was the words of “mother” songs which sank the deepest. Many a boy, as he listened there, brushed away tears sneakingly with a grimy hand.37



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

25

1.2 Ernestine Schumann-­Heink at war rally. Music Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Schumann-­Heink’s reputation as a mother was unrivaled: earlier in her career stories had circulated of her acting as a wet nurse, so full was she of milk from her seven children; in the 1930s she would host a radio show sponsored by a baby food company. Her image served to promote the maternal values considered vital to the war effort;38 her songs helped to universalize the conflict by reminding her audience that every soldier—­

26

C h a pt er One

everywhere—was somebody’s son. But her appearances were also promoted as “her tribute of love, devotion and gratitude to the people of the United States, to whom she freely admits she owes everything she possesses”— a marked change of tune from statements made before the United States’ entry into the war, which revealed her sympathy for the German cause.39 Popular music and group singing were often used as means of fostering camaraderie during wartime,40 but classical repertoire played a slightly different role. As will be discussed at length in the next chapter, it is important to distinguish here between instrumental and texted music—the latter considered more politically suspect, because it could carry clearer messages from the enemy. It is also worth distinguishing between music experienced as a performer and that consumed more passively as a listener: there was safety in numbers, in all singing together, but attending to one voice alone meant that the listener risked falling prey to demagoguery. These different modes of performance and listening are evident in a report from an American singer who spent the First World War touring army hospitals and whom, in general, the wounded soldiers liked: “the sort of thing they can’t sing themselves. One young vaudeville singer, Gretchen Morris, was told by her soldier audience when she started ‘Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,’ ‘we’ll show you how to sing that; sing us something else.’ So she did some concert ballads and they were delighted.”41 As was apparent in the popularity of Schumann-­Heink’s songs for her boys, there was a marked preference among the troops for nostalgic topics, such as songs about home, school, or nature: the Irish-­American tenor John McCormack—another hyphenated citizen who proved his newly minted American citizenship through endless wartime concertizing for the Red Cross— was said to endear himself to audiences through his “heart songs more than in his art songs.” He, like Schumann-­Heink, was adept at devising a multifaceted performing identity, forged through an assumed nationality, and by musical genre (at other points in his career McCormack would stress his Irishness, or—after the war—announce an intention to study German pronunciation). Such malleability raises questions about authenticity that would become heated through the interwar period, and which are latent in many discussions of vocal performance today. A further, colorful example of the potential slipperiness of a singer’s persona, which casts a slightly different light on political allegiances versus commercial gain, was the arrival in New York—apparently from Western Canada—of the Belgian baritone Louis Graveure in autumn 1915. His Aeolian Hall debut revealed a powerful and virile voice; the program



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

1.3.1 Wilfrid Douthitt, English baritone. © Look and Learn / Rosenberg Collection.

27

1.3.2 Louis Graveure, between ca. 1915 and ca. 1920. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

was reported by the New York Times to have consisted of a group of Schubert lieder, some old English songs, three French numbers by Argentinian Herman Bemberg, and Alexander von Feilitz’s song cycle Eliland, “concluding, as is the custom of Belgian baritones, with a group of modern English ballads.” “His German diction was good, his French excellent, his English unimpeachable” the critic concluded somewhat ironically, as Graveure was widely recognized to be Wilfrid Douthitt, an Englishman who had appeared in musical comedy the previous season (figure 1.3.1).42 Graveure’s concert was a marked improvement on Douthitt’s one recital, the Times acknowledged; indeed, commentators implied that it was because of the resounding silence that had met his previous appearance that he had decided to adopt an alternative, foreign guise (further confirmation, some might say, of American preference for “exotic” musicians).43 Although Douthitt’s decision to redefine himself as Belgian might have suggested an affinity with plucky resistance to the Germans, another motivation might have been that he thereby avoided serving in the British Armed Forces; what’s more, claiming Belgian nationality in the United States prevented

28

C h apt er One

1.3.3 Louis Graveure, German postcard from the 1930s, collection of Paul van Yperen.

his having to return home to fight.44 Tellingly, Graveure refused to confirm or deny rumors about his true identity, admitting that either way the publicity was too good to pass up, and he continued giving song recitals through the 1920s, to acclaim in both the United States and Germany (figure 1.3.2). He made many recordings for Columbia, taught singing, and wrote a performance treatise, Super-­Diction.45 But name and nationality were not the last migrations in Graveure’s career.46 In 1928 he shaved off his goatee and announced that he would no longer perform as a baritone but as a tenor;47 subsequently he decided to give up singing songs to concentrate on opera. In 1931 Graveure moved to Berlin, where he appeared regularly at the Deutsche Oper (as Faust, Rodolfo, Tonio, Don José, and Lohengrin). He also starred in four musical films made under the Nazi regime. Ich sehne mich nach dir (1934) was directed by a Party member, Johannes Riemann (who later made Ave Maria, starring Beniamino Gigli). It was about a sports teacher who finds fame as a singer but, probably inevitably, his marriage suffers. The title song was newly composed by Willy Engel-­Berger, as were most of the other numbers, but in one scene Graveure performed a lied: while his wife, played by Camilla Horn, smoked a cigarette on the balcony



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

29

with another man, he sang Schubert’s “Ständchen” (“Leise flehen meine Lieder”). The camera pans around the audience in the marbled atrium, revealing the singer’s face only at the end. The rendition is slow and rubato-­ rich, a serenade more melancholic than seductive. Although the inclusion of Schubert confirms that lieder had a place in the cinema (there is more on appearances of “Ständchen” in films in chapter 2) as diegetic song, presented in concert it suggests that Schubert deserves to be taken more seriously than the other music in Ich sehne mich nach dir, even if the performer remains the same. In 1938 Graveure fled Germany—and Horn, with whom he had been in a relationship since they met on the set of Ein Walzer für Euch (1934, directed by Georg Zoch)—for unoccupied France. Accused by the Germans of espionage, he eventually made his way to England, returning to the United States with a new wife and child in 1947. He ended his career teaching singing in Hollywood. The many voices of Schumann-­Heink, McCormack, and Graveure— from vaudeville and musical comedy to concert singing, from opera to film—serve as a reminder of the flexibility with which performers approached high- and lowbrow registers during the interwar period. Money, inevitably, played an important part in determining what roles they chose to play: Schumann-­Heink returned to vaudeville after she lost most of her savings in 1929, and Graveure’s move to Germany was also said to have been prompted by the economic downturn. Before that happened, though, in the intervening years between the end of the war and the Depression, German vocal music had been reestablished in opera houses on concert programs. It was a slow process, entangled with what to some degree proved to be thwarted hopes for the future of anglophone repertoire.

An American in London (Roland Hayes) One of the first American classical singers to appear in London after the war was the tenor Roland Hayes. He and his accompanist, Lawrence Brown, arrived in 1920, intending—if all went well—to stay for a few years.48 He became one of the most successful recitalists in the city, regularly attracting large audiences in a variety of venues. Hayes had already gained some recognition in the States; he had toured with the a cappella group the Fisk Jubilee Singers and as a recitalist sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1917. But his American career was limited by his race: even after his success in Boston Hayes could not find a manager, nor would all concert halls—­ particularly in the segregated South—book a black singer. Attitudes in

30

C h a pt er One

London were somewhat different, and, while it could not be said that white audiences and reviewers were necessarily less prejudiced, the city’s mix of African Americans, Africans, and long-­established black British communities promised a fertile environment in which Hayes could explore his racial identity. In many ways the singer exemplified what the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, earlier in the century, had characterized as the “double consciousness” of the African American, torn into parts by issues such as awareness of his African heritage and the influence of his European upbringing and education.49 By moving to London he was able to confront both aspects: the city served as a staging point for the European continent and, potentially, for Africa.50 Discussions of Hayes’s African American identity intersected with questions about who had the right to sing certain repertoires, and how they should do so. His reception in England, it seems, was thus shaped by both his race and his eventual mastery of German song.51 Early in his career Hayes had decided to dedicate himself to standard European repertoire, and he was recognized as a particularly versatile performer: one critic described him as “downright Italianate in ‘Vesti la giubba’ and Irish as Paddy in ‘I hear you calling me.’ ” That versatility served him well when he tried to establish himself in London. Sampling what was happening, musically, in the week of Hayes’s 1920 debut illustrates the preoccupations of postwar concert life. Foreign instrumentalists were prominent, as was homegrown talent. There was a great deal of opera to be had, with the seasons of both Covent Garden and the Lyceum underway, as well as a glut of old and new English works presented by the Carl Rosa company, the Glastonbury Company at the Old Vic, and The Beggar’s Opera at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith.52 There were seemingly few orchestral concerts— the Times lists only Frank Lafitte playing the Schumann and Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos with the Albert Hall orchestra, and a choral-­orchestral concert of Delius’s The Song of the High Hills, Holst’s Hymn of Jesus, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Chamber music was fairly well represented, with recitals by the violinists Jascha Heifetz and Isolde Menges; the Flonzalay String Quartet playing Mozart, Smetana, and Loeffler; and piano recitals concentrating on Scriabin and on Norwegian and Czechoslovakian repertoire. Vocalists included the English tenors John Coates and Gervase Elwes (Coates singing French and English love songs at the Queen’s Hall, and Elwes contributing to a concert of music by Rebecca Clarke at the Aeolian Hall); the English soprano Dorothy Silk mixing Schütz, Bach, and modern works (Wigmore Hall); and the returning American Reinhold Werrenrath, who sang music by living English, French, and American composers



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

31

(Queen’s Hall).53 More information about singers’ programming strategies are provided in the second and third chapters. Here it is worth noting that most vocal recitals—like Hayes’s—took place in the mid-­afternoon (the exceptions here were the better-­known Coates and Clarke), which limited the available audience to the leisured classes. All the same, Hayes’s London debut at 3:15 P.M. at the Aeolian Hall, on 31 May 1920, was said to be well attended by his compatriots. There were few reviews of that first concert. The Daily Mail judged Hayes to “be more suited by the less sophisticated music” of his program, but noted that his diction in English and French was good, and that he had “natural vocal gifts and temperament,” predicting that he would be able to command that holy grail of song, the mezza voce or half voice.54 (The rise of this type of singing in vocal recitals would become particularly significant for lieder, because it encouraged the view that this was a quiet art, meant for intimate performance in small halls or, indeed, for listening to at home on headphones.) Gradually, his reputation grew, and there was less equivocation: in April 1921 the Times declared Hayes exceptional, a first-­class musician, with an impeccable sense of rhythm and excellent taste (despite allowing himself one “final high note for the groundlings”). Moreover, he had personality, said to be evident in his renditions of the songs from his own country, spirituals. It is here that the Times review invokes some significant tropes for the interpretation of vocal recitals: that the best renditions are when the performers are completely absorbed in their material, and that that absorption is connected with their singing repertoire with which they have a strong personal connection.“He meant them,” wrote the reviewer, “whereas some other people who undertake them sing them because they are ‘quaint.’ That practice ruins the song and stamps the singer; whoever cannot get inside a song makes it a sham and the singing a pose.” Brown’s devised accompaniments were apt—“the simple treated simply”— and at the end of the recital “a curious thing happened. Nobody moved or took his eyes off the platform. They had had reality before them, and it had gone.”55 Arguably, the quality of a singer’s voice is always a prime concern of critics, and their background was often an important factor in assessing their performances, be it through discussions of their diction or their renditions of repertoire in their mother tongue. It will come as little surprise, then, that the vocabulary used to describe Hayes’s voice frequently reflected his race. Many British reviews emphasized the singer’s “natural” gifts. Ezra Pound, writing for the New Age, explained: “I can at the moment think

32

C h apt er One

of no singer who employs so many different qualities of voice, from operatic delivery to a singing which is almost speech [. . .] Hayes’s great advantage over the remaining ‘white hopes’ is in his splendid grip on the rhythm-­sweep.” He conceded, however, that Hayes’s rendition of Hebridean songs was “given with vigour but not quite assimilated.”56 By 1924 Richard Capell felt able to explain that the secret to Hayes’s art was that it was never forced.57 Americans tended to be more explicit: for example, Musical America reported that critics “found his voice big in power, beautiful in quality, saturated with the racial color belonging alone to the Negro voice.” 58 Hayes came to agree that “even the voice I was born with was colored” but also pointed out that when he started listening closely to white singers, “to my amazement I discovered that their voices were as white their skin.”59 He decided to exploit his “unique” tone more explicitly and, while he continued to perform European classics, embarked on a project to reclaim African American spirituals (or “Aframerican spirituals,” as he came to call them) from their association with the comic antics of minstrels that would become increasingly politicized through his career.60 Spirituals enjoyed great popularity in London during the 1920s; they were performed by singers both black and white, visiting and local.61 Their inclusion on regular concert programs signaled a desire for this repertoire to be taken seriously—to stand shoulder to shoulder with the songs of other nations, rather than being presented as something of a novelty act.62 Hayes encouraged a distinction to be made between spirituals and the other music associated with African Americans, jazz. Ahead of his debut, the “Negro Caruso,” as the Daily Express characterized him, expounded: “My people are a race of singers. Every thought and sentiment finds expression in song. I want to convince the white man that we have a contribution to give to the world of music beyond that of jazz bands and banjos on the beach.”63 Hayes, perhaps remarkably, later found sympathizers among the British right-­wing press: in 1926 Charles B. Cochran wrote in the Daily Mail that the American Negro should not be blamed for jazz, which in fact was “an international product,” influenced by those who, for Cochran, were the greater threat: Jews. The spiritual, as sung by Hayes, Robeson, and the songwriting duo Layton and Johnstone, however, had been shown to be “an artistic achievement of great expressiveness, poignancy, humor, and profound religious sentiment.”64 Not that all reviewers were comfortable with the transplantation of such repertoire to the concert hall. Hayes’s performance of spirituals in the Savoy Chapel Royal was decreed—again by the Daily Mail—to have



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

33

been the strangest service the four-­hundred-­year-­old church had ever witnessed. It is unclear from the report whether the strangeness stemmed from the repertoire, the musicians’ race, or simply the presentation of a voice-­ and-­piano recital in a chapel overshadowed by a hotel, but for the Mail “nothing could have been further from the conventional Anglican music of a Lent service.”65 The presentation of spirituals in church and in concert halls bolstered claims for the status of a genre some still characterized, disparagingly, as slave music. Importantly, it was not necessarily white audiences who thought in those terms: members of the African American middle classes during the 1920s, as author Zora Neale Hurston observed, preferred to distance themselves from spirituals, considering them a form of retrogressive “niggerism.”66 Only after Hayes was accepted by white audiences, according to Hurston, were they willing to change their mind, leading to Hayes’s concerts’ being recognized as “tremendous propaganda” for racial equality by bringing together white and black audiences.67 Importantly, Hayes’s ability to sing everything well, from Italian opera to Nigerian folk songs, not only was significant racially, but also served to highlight the inadequacies of London’s own: his versatility was recognized by the Daily Telegraph as being “beyond the scope of our own singers,” suggesting, among other things, a frustration with available recital repertoire that would cause a change from wartime practices.68 Hayes became one of the most popular recitalists at the Wigmore Hall in the early 1920s; the financial records document that his audiences grew with each season.69 One major step forward in terms of his British reception was recognized in the press as being a successful visit to Buckingham Palace on 23 April 1921.70 By 1923 he had attained a remarkably high profile for any singer in London: for example, he was said to be the “chief attraction” at a concert arranged by Lady Leconfield and Countess Hochberg for St. George’s Home for Friendless Girls (a charitable institution founded in 1836 to assist poor and destitute girls of good character by finding them situations).71 The well-­attended event took place at 25 Park Lane, the vast and extravagantly decorated London town house of Sir Philip Sassoon, a scion of the Rothschild family and a prominent British politician, art collector, and host. The event’s patrons included royalty—Princesses Helena and Mary—and aristocrats with political connections, such as the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn, the Marchioness of Salisbury, and the Countess of Shaftesbury (all married to conservative Members of Parliament, and all of whom served as ladies-­in-­waiting at Court). Some had belonged to the so-­called Marlborough House set, which had gathered around the Prince

34

C h apt er One

of Wales at his residence on Pall Mall at the end of the nineteenth century. While often characterized as louche and extravagant by the standards of the day, the Marlborough set invested heavily in cultural life and philanthropy, as evidenced by their continued involvement in concerts such as this. Their patronage was a crucial means of support for artists trying to make their name on the London concert scene and could even extend across the Atlantic (other members of the Marlborough set, such as the Lister-­Kayes and Naticia Consuelo, will reappear as participants in New York’s Bagby Musical Mornings).72 What is particularly interesting is that, as Hayes’s audiences expanded— or, one might say, became more elevated—so did his repertoire. Specifically, he began to include more highbrow, and even some German, music.73 West Africa had reported of a concert that took place on 24 September 1921: The programme [at the Wigmore Hall], on the whole, was more worthy of Mr Hayes than some of his former ones. Although his renditions of Afro-­American folksongs are artistic to a degree, it is in composers like Schubert, Handel, Scarlatti etc., that he shows the power of his voice and his perfect training. What can be more delightful than to hear Handel’s “Where’er you walk’ ” or Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh’,” that gem amongst this great composer’s songs, as Mr Hayes sings them?74

The remarkable aspect of Hayes’s program here was less his race or training than that this was the first Schubert he had sung in London. That he now braved “ ‘Du bist die Ruh’ ” suggests, as well as his growing professional surety, that postwar attitudes toward German repertoire were gradually changing. As outlined in further detail in chapter 2, just as in New York, there had been resistance to hearing lieder in London during and for some years after the war; when the songs were reintroduced, they were usually sung in English rather than the original language. The transition to singing lieder in German, whatever one’s nationality, occurred slightly later in the 1920s. It was partly brought about by the lifting of immigration restrictions so that German singers could return to British and American stages. Such eminent interpreters as the mezzo-­soprano Elena Gerhardt and the composer-­conductor Richard Strauss (discussed in the next section) took up their careers more or less where they had left them before the war, reengaging with their previous audience and introducing a younger generation to lieder repertoire in German.75 As touched



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

35

on already in regard to the reception of Schumann-­Heink and Hayes, as a German-­American and an African American respectively, a singer’s race or ethnicity was often taken into account when evaluating whether his or her take on a particular musical repertoire might be considered authentic. A similar essentialism transferred to the interpretation of lieder as works, in that it was argued that to fully appreciate the poems and their musical setting, one must pre­sent the songs in their original language. Before the war young American and British musicians had studied in Europe, and they began to do so again, despite efforts to encourage them to study closer to home (interestingly, language tuition at institutions such as New York’s Juilliard School increased dramatically through the 1920s). Several singers made a point of their linguistic abilities as a means to prove their intellect and cosmopolitanism.76 Such qualities encouraged the view of lieder as a highbrow genre, to be appreciated by the cultural elite. It was in part because of this association that figures such as Hayes and John McCormack became keen to sing lieder; their fame for singing spirituals and Irish ballads meant that they were not always taken seriously by certain critics and audiences, but including a group of Schubert or Wolf could prove their musical mastery across genres and brows.77 The classical vocal recital, in other words, became a performative nexus for identifying as belonging to a certain race or nation while simultaneously demonstrating one’s command over a number of different languages and styles.78 Such displays of cultural internationalism also opened up new markets for singers such as McCormack and Hayes in central Europe. Having studied with George Henschel and Amanda Ira Alridge in London, Hayes traveled to Vienna in 1923 to work with the Polish-­Austrian tenor and renowned teacher Theodor Lierhammer.79 His concert debut in the city was greeted with expressions of surprise that an African American could show such mastery over Schubert. The Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung stated: “Do not imagine that it is sufficient to be white to become an artist. Try first to sing as well as this black man did.”80 Yet the announcement the following year that Hayes would perform in Berlin (as McCormack had just done, to some acclaim) provoked an outcry in the city’s press and complaints to the American ambassador.81 Time magazine reported that Berliners were against “the ‘impertinence’ of permitting a Negro to be heard on the concert stage, against the lèst majesté [sic] of offering musically scrupulous Berlin the tunes of the Georgia cotton-­pickers.”82 Hayes was greeted at the Beethovensaal with boos and hisses. He recalled:

36

C h a pt er One

I found myself standing in a flood of light; in front of me, a black-­out audience sat unquietly. From the rear there rolled out a great volley of hisses, which seemed to fill the hall entirely. I was terribly apprehensive, but I took my place in the curve of the piano, closed my eyes, lifted my head into singing position, and stood still as a statue. I waited moment after moment, perhaps for five or ten minutes altogether, listening to the ebb and flow of antagonistic sound. [. . .] When the silence came, as it absolutely did at length, the hall was more still than any I had ever sung in. It was so quiet that the hush began to hurt. I conveyed my readiness to my accompanist with the slightest movement of my lips, without turning my head or my body, and began to sing Schubert’s “Du bist die ruh’,” which otherwise would have occurred later in the program. The entry to that song is almost as silent as silence itself. The German text, stealing out of my mouth in sustained pianissimo, seemed to win my hostile audience over.83

According to Hayes’s daughter, “the greatest sign of approval at that time was the pounding of walking sticks, which all the gentlemen carried, on the floor. So halfway through the song, the pounding of the sticks started. There was so much noise, that by the time he reached the last note, it couldn’t even be heard, because the audience was up on their feet already. And after that, he quietly continued with the rest of the program.”84 Critics subsequently were generous in their praise: according to the right-­ leaning national newspaper Deutsche Tageszeitung, Hayes showed his dedication to Schubert and Brahms by singing in the German language, while the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung declared him to be “a real artist, not just a singer but a musician.”85 Siegmund Piesling, writing for the Berliner Börsen-­Zeitung, again compared Hayes favorably to his white competitors: “A Moor, who sings Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf in German without much of an accent, is worth listening to if he can feel the spirit of the German lied. And Hayes gets it. How he sings Schumann’s ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’! A black man! A couple of white singers could learn a lesson from him.”86 Kira Thurman points out that when he returned to Vienna, Hayes was described as “a black [Franz] Steiner,” suggesting that the singer was evaluated as a native German despite being foreign.87 Hayes’s mastery over musical expression and technique, as well as over the German language, was reported back by critics to London and New York.88 It was a significant message that elided racial and sonic identities: if an African American singer could undertake what Kathrin Sieg



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

37

calls “ethnic drag” to the extent of being judged convincingly German in his performance of lieder, so too could—and should—white anglophone musicians.89 The transatlantic circuit for musicians was expanding, and it never went in just one direction.

Germans in New York (Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Strauss) On his return to New York City in October 1921, after an absence of almost twenty years, Richard Strauss was greeted as a celebrity. “Twenty reporters and photographers rushed towards us like wild animals,” exclaimed Elisabeth Schumann in her diary; “we were even filmed—that sort of thing doesn’t happen every day.” A police cavalcade escorted the musicians from the Hotel St. Regis to a reception at City Hall, prior to a concert at Carnegie Hall that, according to Schumann, was “like a victor’s triumph.” Strauss was one of the first prominent European composers to return to the United States after the war. He did so primarily for financial reasons: he had been unable to claim copyright fees during the hostilities.90 His visit also marked a turning point in the fortunes of German music and musicians in New York. By 1921 German opera, sung in the original language, had just been reinstated at the Metropolitan.91 German songs, however, were only beginning to reappear on concert programs. In this New York trailed behind London; however, German musicians had not yet returned in person to British stages.92 Part of the pomp surrounding Strauss’s arrival, therefore, was to help prove New York’s international status as a cultural hub.93 Strauss’s presence had further significance in that, despite still being alive, his lieder were grouped among the “classics,” with Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf: he was the embodiment of the great German tradition. His visit was thus taken as an opportunity for elite German musicians to publicly reassert themselves in the city. Crowds and photographers lined the streets of Manhattan to watch the arrival of Strauss at City Hall. The dozen or so municipal taxis following the composer’s car contained representatives of the main classical-­music institutions—orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories—all of whom had Central European connections. They included the conductors Artur Bodansky, Walter Damrosch, Leopold Stokowski (whose Philadelphia Orchestra Strauss used throughout his tour), and Josef Stránský (despite Strauss’s disparaging remarks about his replacing Mahler at the New York Philharmonic); Beethoven Association bigwigs, the pianist Harold Bauer and the composer Rubin Gold-

38

C h apt er One

mark (nephew of Viennese composer Karl Goldmark); the violinist Franz Kneisel, the singer Herbert Witherspoon, and the composers Leo Ornstein and Hugo Riesenfeld. The Polish soprano Claire Dux, about to embark on a career in Chicago, and the German pianist Elly Ney also attended. Mayor John F. Hylan was lauded by the Bavarian-­born City Chamberlain Philip Berolzheimer (himself a notable supporter of music in the city) as a patron of the arts and for promoting free concerts for the poor. Goldmark introduced Strauss, the “greatest living composer,” to what had, since his last visit in 1904, become “one of the great musical centers of the world.” In response, Strauss—speaking in German, with a translator to hand— thanked his hosts for their “new and generous welcome to German music” and expressed hope for true peace, which would “bring together the United States of America and my fatherland in closer and closer friendship and labor for that culture which is the property of all peoples.”94 The notion that culture belonged to all peoples was in keeping with the internationalist rhetoric of the postwar period. Strauss was no doubt also anxious to smooth over a minor scandal that had erupted before his arrival, caused by an interview with the Nation, in which he was reported to have said that “culture will always come from Europe,” and that “Europe does not need America— only her dollars.”95 The composer was quick to fight back, claiming that his comments had been “maliciously garbled” and that the interviewer was an amateur who did not speak German.96 He subsequently remarked positively on the influence of jazz and the potential for the United States to develop her own culture, along similar lines to his speech at City Hall. Strauss’s position as “greatest living composer” was, however, contentious.97 The vocal recitals he gave on tour included some Schubert but were predominantly of his own lieder. Few were convinced that he now had much to offer creatively, and even his new songs—several of which would be sung on the 1921 tour—were received with only muted respect. Richard Aldrich reported that there was only “a very moderately sized audience” at the Town Hall and that Strauss was an “indifferent” accompanist, in both manner and quality. Schumann apparently sang with “intelligent phrasing and an excellent German enunciation; and presumably interprets Dr. Strauss’s songs as Dr. Strauss wishes them sung,” but Aldrich said he had heard them sung “with more spirit, more variety of expression, and deeper reach into their emotional significance.”98 A report of Strauss’s appearances in London, on the heels of his American tour, suggested that even the composer’s biographer, Ernest Newman, seemed bored by hearing works that were over thirty years old.99



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

39

The composer’s New York concerts, however, attracted an audience that had not been seen since before the war. According to the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel, those at his first Carnegie Hall concert were “seemingly wholly German,” with few familiar faces from the regular symphony orchestra series.100 A similar sense that Strauss attracted a predominantly German audience can be gathered from Schumann’s diary; in Baltimore she received comments such as “Yes, that is how we sing in Germany!” while she was surprised by the warmth with which they were greeted in Boston, supposed to have been the most “anti-­German” town.101 By this stage, opined the Boston Daily Globe, Strauss’s nationality “is comparatively unimportant [. . .] German citizens who perform in our concert halls should be judged on the musical value of their work, and by that alone.”102 Strauss’s eminence did not prevent several halls on the tour being barely full (there were many empty seats in Brooklyn, and a concert in Duluth was canceled because of poor sales) and there were negative reviews, some reflecting the persistent anti-­German sentiment of newspapers such as the New York Times. Strauss’s reputation was confirmed by his social engagements during the 1921 tour, which were undeniably Germanic. He and his entourage were entertained in style by wealthy New Yorkers typically of German Jewish descent. At the Hudson estate of the lawyer Samuel Untermyer, they met the banker and art collector Henry Goldman; he and his wife were friends of the mezzo-­soprano Elena Gerhardt. They attended the premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt at the Metropolitan with the opera house’s manager, Otto H. Kahn, and lunched with the financier and philanthropist Sir Edgar Speyer and his wife, Lady Leonora. On the surface it might seem as if the financial and charitable networks that had supported the arts were just as they were before the war, but note that Henry Goldman had resigned from his family’s firm, Goldman Sachs, because of its support for the Allies, and that Sir Edgar’s naturalization as a British citizen had been revoked in response to accusations that he had traded with the enemy. They may still have been gatekeepers of certain kinds of culture, but were also somewhat tarnished remnants of the Gilded Age. The musicians appreciated being wined and dined (Strauss devised a new nickname for Schumann: Elobsterbeth) but, as usual, their status was kept in check. Schumann occasionally resented being asked to sing at social gatherings—after an evening at the Speyers with Mrs. Untermyer and the Bodanskys, she noted in her diary, “I did not sing—I don’t see why I always should. These people sit on their pots of money and never hand out fees or

40

C h a pt er One

presents.”103 Despite her complaints, and halls not being sold out, the tour was financially lucrative. Strauss was reported to have made $50,000— a magnificent sum in German marks, the New York Times pointed out, and an even more magnificent sum in Austrian kroner (Strauss was then director of the Vienna State Opera).104 He had also collected $500 to support musicians from Central Europe still suffering the effects of the war. The more helpful action, critics claimed, would be for Strauss to promote American culture. Apparently Europeans still considered the United States “ ‘the land of the dollar,’ peopled by crass materialists, ignorant of the finer things of art and without sympathy for the aspirations and achievements of artists.”105 Strauss’s willingness to work with American artists, such as the tenor George Meader, was taken to signal his high regard for the quality of music making in New York (although, of course, Meader was German trained). To be sure, the composer’s visit boosted performances and sales of his songs, which appeared regularly on recital programs through the 1920s. Transatlantic travel became easier as German-­American shipping lines reopened. The Johnson-­Reed Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of people from one country living in the United States to 2 percent of those living there according to the 1890 census. The intent was to curb the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans, East Asians, and Asian Indians.106 Because the German population in America during the nineteenth century was comparatively large, their annual quota was relatively generous and has been said to reflect race-­based nativism in favor of Nordic peoples.107 Wartime hostility was thereby overridden by other prejudices, and plenty of German musicians took advantage of “Dollar-­land” during the 1920s. However, the kind of art they associated with America had more to do with mass media—with recordings, radio, and sound film—than with composers such as Strauss. Nonetheless, there were concerts of Strauss’s music on player piano (the Ampico was said to have “reproduced the ‘Devotion’ accompaniment with a faithfulness that surprised even the composer”), and he arranged for Schumann to make some gramophone recordings just hours before she left New York.108 She was thrilled finally to have the opportunity: although, as it turned out, the recordings were never released, within the year she recorded some Strauss songs for Polydor, marking the start of a long career as a gramophone artist, in a technology that, as discussed in the next chapter, promised to profoundly shape the interpretation of lieder. In its establishment of transatlantic relationships and its combination of live and recorded music making, the American tour was an important stage in Schumann’s



Trans atl an t ic A r r i va l s

41

international career, something she seemed to recognize when she self-­ consciously eulogized Strauss in her diary. Yet despite the glamour and excitement of New York, her heart was in Germany. “Now I’m sitting here on the boat, and with every second I am getting closer to home,” Schumann wrote in her final diary entry, on 31 December 1921, adding: “Frisch weht der Wind, der Heimat zu” (Fresh blows the wind homeward)—lines from the opening scene of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde that suggest that, for now, she was happy to be Europe-­bound.

T wo

Languages of Listening

E

rnest Newman, the “ leading music critic of the day, ” 1 no less, fell asleep at a concert and dreamed that machines had replaced human musicians. The Perfectist, or perfect pianist, could play more notes, at greater speed, than ever achieved before. The inventors had wisely avoided giving the mechanical prima donna anything but vowels to sing. Those who complained that words were necessary were made to look foolish by showing that only 1 percent of audiences knew the text, or even the gist, of arias such as “Caro nome” or “Una voce poco fa.” The mechanical singers beat their human counterparts in power, range, accuracy, and intonation. “Then, after a hundred years or so of experimentation, the secret of producing perfect consonants was discovered, and it became possible to produce as faultless Lieder or operatic singing on the machine as it was to produce faultless piano playing.”2 Living musicians risked impoverishment, but the “paternal Government” tried to alleviate their problems by employing them to make “last ditches” for politicians to die in. Insufficient numbers of politicians willingly expired, so they devised a new profession: “the teaching of people to appreciate and understand music [. . .] the art of listening.” Newman’s dream might have been a parody; he had recently read Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam’s 1886 novel L’Ève future (Future Eve), in which Thomas Edison builds an “ideal woman” android who can sing.3 Nonetheless, it reflected recurring anxieties of the interwar period about 42



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

43

the impact of media technologies on the consumption and appreciation of music. During these decades, gramophone recordings became more reliable and affordable. Radio broadcasting was established, nationally and internationally. Cinema introduced sound. Access to music grew ever easier; it was, many complained, all too present in everyday life. As demonstrated by Newman, there were concerns that live performance would be rendered obsolete and that music would become a passive, rather than a participatory, activity. Education in “the art of listening” indeed developed into a major industry during the 1920s, most obviously through “music appreciation” radio broadcasts but also through the marketing of recordings and films, as well as pedagogical literature. Technology became a means to improve taste. Theoretically such edification was intended for the masses, but more often it was directed at a newly recognized cultural phenomenon, constituted primarily but not exclusively by the middle classes: the “middlebrow.” Socially aspirational, with some leisure time and spare cash at their disposal, these individuals were an audience willing to “like what they ought to like”—fertile ground for media companies, critics, and educators to tout their ever-­expanding wares.4 This chapter considers the transformation of attitudes toward the performance and status of art song during the interwar period as gramophone records, radio broadcasts, and sound film became embedded in British and American culture. My interest is not so much in technologies themselves as in how their mediation of music invariably proved a means to renegotiate boundaries between cultural hierarchies. One further theme is pursued throughout, which I would describe as “language politics.” The “ban” on singing German texts during the First World War may have been motivated by the hostilities, but it had further ramifications. On the one hand, it boosted campaigns to promote Anglo-­American music and musicians and their use of the vernacular. On the other, it was encouraged by factions of the music-­appreciation movement, who thought that using translations would aid in the general understanding of foreign songs and opera. Recordings, radio, and films all played their part in what, at heart, defined interwar national and international interests. But before turning to them, it is necessary to discuss debates about singing in translation that took place through the more old-­fashioned technologies of print and live performance.

44

C h a pt er T w o

Singing Translations The geographical spread of recital programs around the time of the First World War varied according to international politics. Thus, in both London and New York, German lieder were replaced with songs by the Triple Entente: French, Russian, and English repertoire, and a fair amount of Grieg.5 The vogue for Scandinavian songs was credited to their being the “best substitutes for the great classics” of Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms.6 There continued to be an emphasis on using the original language (with the exception of Russian, which thwarted most singers).7 Singers gradually reintroduced lieder into their recitals, but these works remained contentious, particularly when sung in German. The safer option was to sing them in translation; if not in English, then in French. Using translations was political not only in the sense that it quarantined “enemy” music; it also was in keeping with contemporary campaigns to establish an international language (English proving more viable than Esperanto),8 and to promote broader access to and appreciation of highbrow culture. The British soprano Carrie Tubb broke with the wartime pattern of programming in February 1918 at London’s Aeolian Hall, starting not with old Italian and English songs but instead with “Widmung,” “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” and “Minnelied.” It was a pity she sang Schubert and Brahms to English words, the Times reviewer wrote, “but she may have felt happier in so doing.”9 It is unclear whether the critic’s disappointment was due to the quality of the translation, Tubb’s delivery, or the fact that the war was still going on. After the Armistice, lieder began to reappear on London recital programs, but take-­up was fairly slow. In comparison to before the war, when there were a number of dedicated Liederabende (about a fifth of all vocal concerts at the Bechstein Hall) and German song routinely appeared on mixed programs, they were now included in slightly less than a third of vocal recitals given at the Wigmore Hall between November 1918 and the end of 1920.10 There was no particular pattern to which lieder were performed: Schubert and Brahms appeared about twice as often as Schumann and Wolf. With the striking exception of Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, which made three appearances—once sung by Harry Plunket Greene, who had given the first complete performance of the cycle in England in 1895—and Brahms’s two songs with viola, only Schubert’s “Lachen und Weinen” was done more than twice. Not all were happy to see lieder resurface. Ezra Pound, then the music critic for the London-­based socialist weekly the New Age, complained:



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

45

It is sheer pig-­headed stupidity to pretend that there are no other song-­ writers than Brahms, Schumann and Schubert; it is quite possible to fill programmes without German music; it is rank bad art to use his German music with foreign words which have no relation to the melody of the spirit of the originals.11

While generally a fan of Russian tenor Vladimir Rosing, he found his singing of Schumann in French “very queer:” one realized after a time that [“J’ai pardonné”] was “Ich grolle nicht”; once rendered in English as “I do not growl, when thou the heart me break, I do not growl.” We might almost lay it down as axiomatic that a song must be sung in its original language. It is probably impossible to sing even Heine (the Kaiser’s pet detestation) in German at present; but the perfect union of word and note is so subtle and rare a thing that, once attained, no substitute is likely to give satisfaction.12

On hearing the same song a year later Pound declared: “If Rosing wishes still further and yet again to declaim ‘J’ai pardonné’ let him make it clear that it is their translator he is pardoning, we cannot do so.”13 Pound was not alone in decrying the French translations; Newman, for example, declared that he was unable to judge whether he should be “annoyed or amused.”14 While Rosing could probably just as easily have sung Schumann in English, it is important to note that in continental Europe it was common practice to translate texted music into the vernacular (this was true of opera as well as song), so Rosing’s decision to sing in French might have reflected his time spent studying in Paris. It fell to non-­British singers to first brave singing lieder in German, but they were not yet native speakers. Despite the widespread criticism of his French translations, Rosing was applauded by several critics for asking his audience at a concert in early 1920 whether they would object to his singing a Schumann song in German. They did not, “and the German language was heard in an English concert-­room for the first time,” Ernest Newman imagined, “since summer 1914.”15 However, a notice of the Danish tenor Mischa Léon’s next recital, which would include a group of lieder, caused an uproar. It read: “As M. Mischa-­Léon understands and appreciates that the German language may be unpleasant to some members of the audience he has placed the lieder group last, so as to enable those who object to retire. This group will be sung in the original.”16 A letter of complaint

46

C h a pt er T w o

was sent by “a well-­known English musician” to the Danish ambassador protesting against a foreigner—if admittedly a neutral—abusing London’s hospitality.17 On the ambassador’s advice, Léon withdrew the lieder from his program, replacing them with Scandinavian songs. Subscribers to his concerts fought back, nine of them signing a letter to the ambassador explaining that that to cancel the program was a misapprehension of “the majority of the English concert-­going public.”18 Emboldened, in March 1920 Léon announced a whole recital of lieder, in German: there would be Beethoven, Schubert, Carl Loewe, ten songs from Dichterliebe, and half a dozen by Wolf. Léon was greeted with loud hisses as well as applause. As he began “Adelaide,” protests started from various parts of the Aeolian Hall. This “small but very noisy section of patriots,” as Newman described them, made it clear that they were “not going to allow him to sing in what they called the language of the Hun.”19 Léon remonstrated with them. The tabloid Daily Mirror reported that he also leapt from the platform to his wife’s defense (she was the Canadian soprano Pauline Lightstone Donalda), but no other papers corroborated that part of the story.20 Eventually the hall manager acknowledged the “very effectual” protest and asked those responsible to leave, so that those who had come to hear the music could do so in peace.21 A reporter for the Lady magazine—arriving late at the scene—­ explained: “All I heard of the protest was a demonstration in the street from an excited lady, who, I understand, was saying that it was an insult to sing songs by people who had murdered our officers.”22 There was some disagreement about the quality of the performance itself: the Times was unwilling to find fault when the singer “had to begin by shouting down his audience, and is naturally feverishly anxious to hold their attention to keep their good will once gained.” Newman thought Léon sang better than ever before, but the Lady was less sympathetic, perhaps because the critic had missed the contretemps itself: “[Léon] was not in good form, and his pronunciation of the German language was sufficient proof that his interest in the songs of Germany was purely artistic.” 23 When he sang in his native Danish a month later his delivery was judged more successful—yet another instance of the authority of the mother tongue. Most critics seem to have been amused that such a scandal (or “delightful distraction,” as Newman patronizingly put it) could have taken place among “probably the politest concert audience in Europe,” who were “usually apathetic.”24 Some said the disruption lasted fifteen minutes; others half an hour. “We came away wondering why he should have provoked the skirmish,” explained the Times.25 In fact, Léon’s experiment brought to the



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

47

surface some unresolved issues. There was critical consensus that it had been right not to perform songs in German during the war, so that the day’s horrors might be forgotten during the evening’s entertainment. However, now that it was peacetime, the boycott was deemed unnecessary. For example, the Lady magazine critic “C. M.” described admitting German songs onto programs but not allowing them to be sung in German as “Pecksniffian in the highest degree” (a reference to a character renowned for hypocrisy in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit),26 and even the original protest letter to the Danish ambassador acknowledged that German music was bound to return to concert rooms, “just as commercial intercourse is bound to come again.”27 The one exception to this view was the conservative Daily Mail, which declared itself unconvinced that it was yet time to again “sit at the feet of Kultur and Kunst.”28 Its music critic Richard Capell—somewhat ironically, given his later promotion of lieder—wrote disparagingly about the “gush” of the “Amorous Teuton” as represented by the songs of Schubert and Schumann sung by the “mediocre” Léon, though he conceded that the songs could be “attractive in small doses” when sung in English.29 Capell’s objection was not only to the quality and quantity of lieder offered. He complained that in Britain before the war good music was accessible only through knowledge of German, and he did not want to return to the same situation. The majority of music critics, however, welcomed the return of lieder in the original language. First, because it improved the metrical and rhythmical correspondences between word and music; second, because, although for some it had been interesting to hear more English, French, and Russian songs, they missed “the greater German music.”30 Newman, a biographer of Strauss and Wolf, probably inevitably was the repertoire’s strongest advocate. He pilloried attempts “to brand as war criminals Chamisso or Goethe,” who belonged to the Germany of three or four generations ago.31 He was also dismissive of those who advocated other national styles for political reasons (“we would not be so extreme as to try to keep the French or Italian tongues out of our concert rooms because some Frenchmen and Italians seem bent on making a bad peace,” he wrote).32 Art song wasn’t inherently German; it was merely that, “for a long time, the Germans gave us the largest number of the best specimens of it.”33 The best examples of modern song—by the Russians Musorgsky and Nikolai Medtner, the British John Ireland and Roger Quilter, and the Norwegian Grieg—could well have been written by a German but were certainly not German songs, as each was stamped by the composer’s individuality and “culture-­group.”34

48

C h apt er T w o

The broader issue raised by the return of German songs to the concert room, Newman proposed, had to do with personal freedom. In a curious reversal of the stereotypical relationship between critic and readers, in which the former attempts to shape the tastes and opinions of the latter, in this instance the former invoked the authority of the latter. Mischa Léon’s German program effectively was, “right and proper,” decided by “the plebiscite of the audience”; it was asked for by “the plain man” not a “few conspirators and traitors [. . .] as some sections of the press seem to imagine.”35 Ninety-­ nine percent of concertgoers made no objection, by Newman’s reckoning, and being dictated to by the one percent would be a “form of Prussianism that we must kick against if we have any spirit left in us.”36 In a free country, people should be allowed to hear what they liked. Although protestors claimed that veterans would be offended by hearing the German language, counterexamples were given of British soldiers who had enjoyed concerts and opera while in the Rhineland and who would be pleased to hear that music again.37 Scientists, artists, and literary men were reengaging with German scholarship and culture, Newman argued, and so should the musical world. Indeed, with Léon’s recital, Newman declared: “The fight for the German language in German songs may be regarded as won.”38 The reestablishment of German music was likewise felt in the symphonic world: in February 1920 Henry Wood and Adrian Boult conducted tone poems by Richard Strauss for the first time since the war. Similarly, they were included at the end of the program, and some people left the hall—although, as Alfred Kalisch commented, “how far this was due to patriotism, or a longing for tea, or the need for catching a last train, it is impossible to say.”39 By 1922 Léon was presenting recitals entirely made up of Wolf lieder, suggesting that the case for performing in German had been made, as did the return of German singers such as Elena Gerhardt to London.40 However, there continued to be advocates for singing translations. In New York, the Australian baritone Nelson Illingworth was said to have single-­handedly “revived” the art of lieder singing in English in the fall of 1920, through his performances of Robert Franz, Brahms, Strauss, and the Norwegian Christian Sinding, as well as of Schubert’s Winter’s Journey and Swan Song—the latter being especially notable because complete Schubert cycles were very rarely performed in the city. Objections in New York were primarily aesthetic rather than political. Richard Aldrich, critic for the New York Times, acknowledged that Illingworth’s voice had little beauty or volume, and that it was often flat in pitch. However, he appreciated



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

49

Illingworth’s sincerity, intelligible enunciation, and use of facial expressions and bodily movements—he finished a song, according to Aldrich, “as one emerging from a hypnotic trance.”41 While Illingworth’s initial audiences in New York “might properly be called small,” as a song interpreter he attracted the attention of musicians in the city.42 Slowly, other singers began to include Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms in their recitals. As singing lieder in English became established on both sides of the Atlantic, more serious attempts at translation were made, sometimes supported by commentary or even pedagogical apparatus.43 In 1921 Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (editor of the newly founded Music and Letters and, before that, the German master at Wellington College) met the tenor Steuart Wilson, who had only recently encountered Schubert’s songs and was keen “to consider translations as a practical question.”44 They began to collaborate on translations of lieder texts “which a singer need not blush for,” many of which were published. Fox Strangways explained their motivation in a lengthy article.45 He claimed that the average English singer argued against translation because the music itself is German, and it will not sound natural with any other words. I want to sing a certain number of foreign songs, in any case, to give variety to my programme. A foreign language has the additional merit of a certain obscurity which veils difficulties of enunciation and throws a glamour over rather trivial phrases. No translation I have ever seen was worth the paper it was written on. Suppose there were a good translation—better, even, than the original, as it might well be in Schubert’s case—I should still feel awkward singing words that the composer had never heard. I have learnt the song with the original words which I should now have to unlearn.46

Fox Strangways dismissed all these objections. He set out as his ideal a translation that could “put into an English mouth singable words which do not falsify the original, and which succeed in making singer and listener forget that there is such a thing.”47 There were many challenges, not least cultural associations: “There are a good many songs which no one but a German can sing with any conviction”; for example, “we have no word for der Jäger; ‘hunter’ calls up foreign travel, and the green coat, which the plot of Die schöne Müllerin gives him by implication, spirits us off to Sherwood and a set of chivalrous or, at any rate, quite other ideas.”48 Fox Strangways advocated rewriting the situation of the song or leaving out what is

50

C h a pt er T w o

merely local: “it is to be remembered that we are translating not Goethe, but Goethe (or anyone else) as set by Schubert and sung by an Englishman, and we cannot afford to make either of the latter ridiculous.”49 Translating the songs of other countries was necessary, he concluded, much as the British make foreign food palatable by fortifying wines and turning oranges into marmalade. Fox Strangways’s article began a debate about approaches to translation that continued in subsequent issues of Music and Letters and spread elsewhere. As evident from the responses to Rosing and Léon discussed above, it was, up to a point, a question of aesthetics. Some argued that the musical setting rather than the poetry should determine the scansion, to honor the composer’s intentions.50 Others opined that the poetic import of the songs should be privileged. Even if Fox-­Strangways’s and Wilson’s superior translations were not taken up as widely as they’d hoped, it became standard practice for translations of song texts, or a précis of their meaning, to be provided in program booklets.51 Apparently the Russian bass Chaliapin did not announce the running order of his recitals beforehand but announced each song by its number in the book of English translations, which the audience was expected to purchase. “It is the same process as announcing hymns [. . .] in church, but unlike the hymn book, the collection of Mr Chaliapin’s words is sold at 25 cents,” Richard Aldrich commented.52 It may have been no more than a wry aside, but Aldrich’s point about the cost of Chaliapin’s book of translations serves as a reminder that singing in the vernacular was as much about society as it was about aesthetics. Access to the arts became a pressing political issue during the interwar period. There had been educational concerts in the late nineteenth century, geared toward moral betterment.53 Many music critics in broadsheet newspapers and specialist journal courted those whom novelist Arnold Bennett called “the passionate few” and whom Ernest Newman referred to as “the intelligent average.”54 During the interwar period there was greater concern with the musical education of the masses, especially schoolchildren, but also “the business men, townspeople, farmers and factory workers” who did not have the language skills of the upper classes.55 Of course, a further aspect to singing translations was that their use advocated for the performance and composition of English-­language song. An article in Musical America featured a number of international stars advocating the use of translations not only to enhance the accessibility of repertoire, but also to nurture native composers.56 Finally, while singing in English might have encouraged stronger con-



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

51

nections across the North Atlantic, it also caused some tensions between the United States and Britain, countries famously divided by a common language. Several organizations in the postwar era either encouraged the adoption of English among immigrant groups (the “Americanization” movement) or attempted to foster stronger relations between anglophone countries.57 For example, the English-­Speaking Union, founded in 1918, promoted the “common language, common sympathies, common traditions and common ideals” of the United States and the British Commonwealth.58 At the same time, many British commentators complained about the spreading influence of American popular culture, while a number of Americans were keen to break with the old country. Within the classical realm, there was talk about an “American invasion” as soon after the war as 1920, with commentators noting that whereas previously musical culture had moved from East (Europe) to West (the United States), now there was “a real danger” of its setting in from West to East.59 The English-­Speaking Union supported the activities of institutions such as the Society for Pure English, founded in 1913 to preserve linguistic standards. However, after the war the focus of the Society shifted. Its members—who ranged from academics to authors and politicians—­ became increasingly convinced of the merits of defining a standard English or “received pronunciation,” or, as some did not hesitate to call it, “the best English.”60 The basic premise was that “received pronunciation” represented a “non-­localized accent,” but it was evident that it derived from a particular social group: the educated elite. The phonetician Daniel Jones, for instance, was explicit that his English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917) described the pronunciation of those southern English families whose men had been educated at Eton or Harrow. Similar debates over accent took place in the United States, where the ideal model was the East Coast universities.61 Improving one’s speech had long been considered essential for social and professional elevation, as was apparent from the Victorian fashion for elocution lessons.62 The spread of radio broadcasting in the 1920s was conceived to be an ideal way to educate the masses in this regard as well as many others. The authority of the cultural elites in charge of the British Broadcasting Company, however, was undermined by the ever-­expanding influence of what Genevieve Abravanel calls the “Entertainment Empire”: Hollywood.63 It was feared that the standards of the English language—not to mention English morals—were under constant attack from corrupting foreign influences. From the intertitles of silent films to the voices heard in early talkies (and of course on imported gramophone records), it was all

52

C h a pt er T w o

too easy for the British to pick up American slang and its accompanying twang.64 Even before American cultural hegemony became a constant source of anxiety for Britain’s cultural elite, the English-­Speaking Union’s British president, the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, was keen to stress that he would “not wish to see all the world moulded into one form of culture,” as the Germans had intended.65 After all, “what made Germans themselves more odious during the war than the assumption of the superiority of their ‘Kultur’?” asked another contributor to the E-­SU’s magazine, the Landmark.66 Thus, alongside the sometimes problematic emphasis on a shared transnational identity, expressed through language, there was a desire to cultivate what the theorist Akira Iriye calls “cultural internationalism.”67 In the postwar climate of the 1920s and early 1930s, Iriye argues, there was unprecedented enthusiasm for international projects that would enhance cooperation between nation-­states. Artists were considered to be among the foremost ambassadors for that kind of cosmopolitanism because of the view, as one contributor to the Landmark reported, that “for artists there is no barrier of nationality. Artists are the best internationalists! They see the good in other races!”68—idealization of a kind that, to a degree, was reflected in musical life. Yet the problem of language, made evident as debates over the merits of translation were reiterated with every new media, underscores how much that “cultural internationalism” depended on continuing negotiations between political, social, and technological powers.

Electric Schubert The development of the recording industry during the interwar years was far from continuous.69 Within the transatlantic network fortunes fluctuated for political and commercial reasons. Simply put, American sales rose through the 1910s until the Great Depression. In Europe, by contrast, the market collapsed with the outbreak of war, and although it resuscitated itself during the 1920s, it too succumbed to the economic crash at the end of the decade. Inevitably these changing fortunes impacted the kinds of repertoire and artists supported by the transatlantic gramophone industry: Lieder recordings similarly peaked at the end of the decade, around the centenary of Schubert’s death, but also managed to find a place within the cultural marketplace of the next decade. A sense of the complex international relationships between gramophone companies can be gleaned from the ways in which they changed hands.



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

53

Before the war, Columbia-­owned American Victor was represented in Europe by the Gramophone Company; between them they divided international markets, with Victor taking North and South America and East Asia, and the Gramophone Company the rest of Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe.70 Deutsche Grammophon started as a subsidiary of the UK Gramophone company but was handed over to the Germans at the start of the war. Threatened by the authorities that its record matrices would be melted down as scrap metal, it managed to save most of them by transferring them to their parent company in neutral Holland. However, contracts with artists were broken, and the factory itself was turned to munitions work. During the hostilities the Germans confiscated the Pathé factory in Belgium; retaliation came in the form of a mob which burned down the German-­owned Lindström factory in Paris. British record companies—like other industries—tried to assert their claims to be protecting the interests of the nation during wartime. The house publication of the Gramophone Company, the Voice, noted that, until 1914, HMV had produced all its European records, including British ones, in Hannover, Germany. War thus provided an opportunity to promote British industry, music, and musicians against the “prejudiced believer-­ in-­foreign-­music-­only.”71 Furthermore, the gramophone was said to have found “a new place in world affairs” with the outbreak of war. It played its part by providing entertainment in front-­line trenches, hospitals, and canteens, as well as at home; Captain Edward Symons of the Navy and Army Canteen Board explained that “music is most comforting to the tired and anxious mind.”72 Apparently soldiers demanded an equal mix of popular music and “good standard selections and operatic airs,” while officers brought back from leave dozens of records of the current London shows.73 Sales increased at the end of hostilities, with the Gramophone Company reporting in December 1918 that that year’s profits had broken all records from before and after the war commenced.74 The last October had seen its largest sales for any month ever. Despite the industrial unrest that swept the country the following year, monthly sales were reported to be up by 100 percent.75 Partly because of its late entry into the war, the American record industry had flourished. Indeed, by 1921 it had reached a historic high: 100 million records had been sold the year before. On the back of this success, Victor bought out 50 percent of its European partner, the Gramophone Company. In 1919 the Supreme Court had declared the Victor and Columbia cartel illegal, opening up the market. As gramophone companies pro-

54

C h a pt er T w o

liferated, some collapsed in the face of competition and market saturation. In 1922 no less a giant than Columbia Graphophone filed for insolvency; it was bought by its British sibling, which subsequently listed itself as independent. In 1926 Columbia took over the majority of shares in the German Lindström company and its Dutch subsidiary Transocean Trading, thereby extending its global reach. By 1928 British Columbia was the largest phonograph company in the world, supported by a tight distribution network. The recording industry during the 1920s, then, was a complex web of international competition and collaboration.76 There was a strong sense of individual markets, with British, American, and continental European branches specializing in particular repertoires. American companies for the most part avoided classical music, with the exception of a few star series (such as the conductor Leopold Stokowski), preferring to import European counterparts.77 Writing in 1923 in the new London-­based monthly magazine Gramophone, Francis Brett Young complained that in one section of music the producing companies seem to me to have been negligent. We have already records of all the great operatic singers, but scarcely any of the great singers of lieder: for instance, Elena Gerhardt.78 Quite apart from the importance of the lied as a musical form essential to education, producers might remember that when Elena Gerhardt comes to England she is capable of filling the Queen’s Hall with enthusiasm as often as she sings. In sheer perfection of technique she has no living rival. It is true that the majority of great lieder demand the imperfect support—as things now are—of a piano accompaniment; but many of the masterpieces of Schubert, Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Brahms and Grieg have been scored for orchestra by their composers. If we could hear Gerhardt sing Grieg’s Ein Schwan, Strauss’s Morgen, or the Five Songs that Wagner used as a sketchbook for Tristan we might dispense with a host of superfluous Shadow Songs, and Una voces, and Un bel di vedremos.79

Young’s objection to operatic numbers by Meyerbeer, Rossini, and Puccini, and to the poor reproduction of piano accompaniments, was shared by many highbrow critics of the period.80 The lack of lieder recordings was partly a legacy of the war; as in concertizing, it was not until the return of German and Austrian musicians to Britain that there was a greater possibility of hearing more lieder sung well, in the original language. It was hoped by another Gramophone reviewer that Gerhardt’s recording of Schu-



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

55

mann’s “Der Nussbaum,” released in the UK in 1923, would convince the Vocalion Company that it should not pander to “the accursed superstition that the English nation is unable to hear the German language without being seized on the spot with convulsions.”81 Gradually, more German-­ made gramophone recordings became available.82 Despite some early complaints about surface noise, they were recognized as an invaluable resource for those interested in lieder repertoire. Yet there was still insufficient demand to warrant significant investment in lieder and art songs by British and American gramophone companies; those recordings that were made were done in English.83 The British recording industry peaked between 1926 and 1929, during which time, as David Patmore explains, gramophone companies could take advantage of new and attractive technologies because of limited external competition from radio and cinema and buoyant social and economic conditions.84 The most significant advance was the development of electrical recording, which proved a boost for sales as consumers began to replace their acoustic machines and to update and supplement their record collections with new releases. In comparison to the preceding technology of acoustic recording, which carved grooves into wax discs directly from the sounds sung or played into the recording horn, electrical recordings, with their amplified microphone system, could capture a greater range of frequencies and sound sources. This more sensitive technology refined the quality of recordings. Indeed, it was claimed to be kinder to great artists and more severe to the mediocre, for microphones could more readily pick up such defects as technical mistakes, faulty production, even heavy breathing.85 The new methods also facilitated the recording of larger ensembles, including orchestras and opera, and improved the reproduction of piano music. A greater range of repertoire thereby became available on recordings. So far as lieder singers were concerned, one major benefit of electrical recordings was that they could finally get rid of the orchestral accompaniments to which they had previously had to resort. As with all new technologies, some listeners remained nostalgic for the earlier, softer acoustic method, but generally electrical recordings were considered a vast improvement: Newman recalled that at first they seemed “more like the real thing than anything previously heard.”86 Realism was a quality also highlighted, but as something problematic, in a lengthy review-­ article by Cardus from 1925. He outlined two tendencies in what he calls “gramophone music,” interestingly making listening into an active rather than a passive activity. On the one hand were the “realists,” converts to the

56

C h a pt er T w o

new “electrical” process, who value “the sense of the authentic orchestral clangour in our own homes, of full-­blooded collision between bow and string and between Italian tenor and his glottis.” These louder recordings were “perhaps a little too loud for human nature’s domestic natural requirements [. . .] more hysterical than the sane air of fireside comfort will tolerate.” On the other were those who held an “absolute” view of the gramophone as a “medium of musical expression in itself, with a miniature style that is suitable for hearthside enjoyment.” Cardus likened the “ ‘absolute’ gramophonist” to a translator who “seeks in his own language for compensating qualities which will not be aesthetically out of keeping with those of the poem he is trying to reproduce: “He distrusts attempts at realistic imitation of musical performances for much the same reason that most of us distrust attempts at the literal translation of poetry. [. . .] Moreover, the ‘absolutist’ gramophonist would probably argue that realism [. . .] is out of place in the home.”87 The resistance to the “realism” of electrical recordings evident in Cardus’s account of the two tendencies in gramophone music recurs in other writings on the impact of gramophones and wireless broadcasts from around this time.88 For example, an article in the Times the following year pointed out—notably, a decade before Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—that “gramophone lovers do, in fact, generally recognize that what they enjoy is a reminder and not a substitute for real music. They accept the fact that it is a mechanical reproduction like the photograph of a picture, and admit that, however skilful, it cannot replace the original work of art.” In many ways, the important question seems to be the context for listening; whether it is appropriate to hear something so “full-­blooded” in one’s home, or whether one should acknowledge, even embrace, the mediatized experience. So far as Cardus’s article goes, the main risk is upsetting the neighbors; either because of the type of music one listened to, or because of its volume—this was, after all, an age in which noise abatement was vigorously debated.89 It also has to do with the size of venues in which music was played and, in perhaps less obvious ways, with whether music making was going to continue to be a part of education and social attainment. These last two points—about how recordings transformed the spaces and manner in which music was practiced and consumed—were particularly pertinent for the status of lieder during the interwar period. This was a genre that had historically been closely allied with domestic performance. The simpler songs of Schubert and Brahms formed a core part of amateur and student repertoires, as is evident from published sheet music cata-



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

57

logs.90 With the replacement of the piano by the gramophone as the locus of musical entertainment in middle-­class homes, however, familiarity with music through performance was supplemented, if not entirely supplanted, by listening to others. This did not mean that domestic music making entirely died out, although it was certainly much diminished. It was more that the divide between amateur and professional became more pronounced, as it became easier to hear superior renditions, sometimes of more complex pieces. The range of repertoire available to record buyers thus expanded and, as will be seen here through the example of Schubert (and, in a later chapter, Hugo Wolf ), could transform the image and status of composers. Historian Brian Currid has pointed out that the important question to ask is not what was being listened to, but how.91 According to Jonathan Sterne, through recordings “listening became more directional and directed, more oriented towards constructions of private space and private property.”92 To be sure, as can be gleaned from the critical discourse, the number of references to the “intimacy” of recordings increased throughout the period. Yet the spaces in which gramophones were listened to varied widely in the 1920s and straddled the public-­private divide. Electronic amplification greatly improved the range and control of volume, to the glee of those who wanted to dance to records.93 It also enabled group listening at home, as it was no longer necessary to rely on headsets.94 Records remained less suited to providing background music than radio broadcasts because the length of the music they could accommodate was still limited to a few minutes per side. However, as items of furniture they could convey a great deal about the social standing—or aspirations—of the family.95 In New York what had been piano, and then pianola, showrooms were sometimes reconfigured to sell gramophones. Occasionally they demonstrated, through various decors, how the gramophone might suit every age and style. A trope of advertising was that, through recordings, one could hear famous performers in your own home: for instance, an advertisement for an HMV recording of Brahms songs inserted in a concert program promised that one could thereby “hear John McCormack again in your home.”96 Listening booths had become common in American and European record stores as a way to encourage customers to try out their merchandise— and to linger and socialize. More serious-­minded “gramophiles” attended meetings of regional societies dedicated to exploring new releases and comparing gadgetry. The “gramophone concert” persisted and was idealized as a means of escaping the distractions of live conditions. In 1919 a critic for London’s Evening News had explained: “In a gramophone performance

58

C h a pt er T w o

one’s attention is concentrated on the purely musical effect in a way that is not possible otherwise. In the concert room and theatre the mind is inevitably distracted to some extent by external things—the movements of the performers, the surroundings, the audience, etc. etc. Hence many things escape our notice which the gramophone can point out to us, in its own way.”97 The quiet pleasures of consuming music on record continued to be extolled throughout the interwar period: in 1931 Gary Joel August, writing for the American scholarly journal Musical Quarterly, explained his enjoyment of listening in the privacy of his living room, where “he won’t be bothered by tenors with colds nor be forced to look for an hour at fat contraltos going through their facial contortions. Moreover, there was no need to hear the other pieces on a programme, and one could listen to them again if desired.”98 It was this kind of attentive, critical listening that critics and educators wanted to encourage, along with—it might be argued—a degree of selection determined by which repertoire was worth hearing. The campaign for translations that had been under way in the discourse surrounding live performance transferred to the pages of Gramophone, which, soon after its foundation in 1923, began to include in each issue a supplement of English versions of opera arias and, soon after that, lieder. Articles encouraged readers to listen to recordings with the translations, and by the end of the decade some gramophone recordings were issued with accompanying translations. Education and consumption were being carefully combined. 

Apparently it was a young American gramophone executive, Frederic N. Sard, who came up with the idea of celebrating the centenary of Beethoven’s death in 1927 with a series of new recordings dedicated to the composer; a project so successful that it led to similar projects the following year for Schubert.99 Inevitably, these commemorations came to serve political as well as commercial ends. For example, there were extended festivals in Austria, Germany, and France.100 Two worldwide competitions, sponsored by the Columbia Graphophone Company, to complete the “Unfinished” Symphony or to compose a symphony “inspired” by Schubert were announced.101 Vienna—which had celebrated the 125th anniversary of Schubert’s birth in 1923 with a weeklong festival at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde—held a series of concerts over the summer of 1928 that included a massive choral festival, which attracted over 100,000 singers from around the world, and produced mementos from medallions to special “Schubert” raincoats, bath



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

59

sponges, lipstick, and confectionary.102 Plans were announced to transform Schubert’s final apartment on Kettenbrückengasse into a museum (today it is the Sterbewohnung) and for a memorial scholarship for visiting young musicians to be established.103 At the end of his speech at the opening ceremonies, the president of the Austrian Republic, Michael Hainisch, took the opportunity to claim that “in spite of economic difficulties Vienna was still a great musical centre, as when she had Mozart and Schubert among her citizens.” In other words, by attracting hundreds of thousands of people to the city for the Schubert festival, Vienna could potentially reestablish itself as a cultural and tourist destination, something Hainisch worked hard to achieve through the 1920s.104 Others feared it would be taken as an opportunity to rally for the reunification of Austria with Germany.105 In Britain and the United States the Schubert centenary was not done on quite the “stupendous scale” accorded Beethoven the previous year.106 The advisory committee, chaired by the Metropolitan Opera Company’s Otto Kahn, however, conceived its celebrations nationally, and with pedagogical intent. Smaller communities that did not have access to live performances would be provided with phonograph and radio facilities, along with relevant educational literature.107 As well as the aforementioned composition competitions, there would be outdoor singing festivals, special concerts during the week of the November anniversary, and an array of commemorative exercises at public schools and the facilities of civic organizations. The emphasis was on symphonic and chamber music, but lieder were also featured during Manhattan’s “Seven Days of Schubert.”108 At what was the first concert of the recently formed Musical Forum, the German baritone Heinrich Schlusnus made his American concert debut, singing Heine settings by Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Franz, and Strauss.109 Meanwhile, the contralto Ernestine Schumann-­Heink sang with such “consuming sincerity” at the Beethoven Association’s concert at Town Hall, Olin Downes reported, that the society’s ban on encores was broken.110 Earlier in the year a radio broadcast featuring Columbia artists had recreated a concert program Schubert had presented at the Vienna Musikverein, which included performances, in translation, of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” “Du bist die Ruh’,” “Ständchen,” “Wer ist Sylvia?” and “Die Allmacht” alongside the overture and ballet music of Rosamunde, the B-­flat Piano Trio op. 100, the Moment musical op. 94 no. 3, and the “Unfinished” Symphony.111 A new radio concert series devised by Damrosch, devoted to introducing the works of famous composers, was inaugurated with a Schubert program.112 A survey undertaken by the Edison Company suggested that the public was

60

C h apt er T w o

listening: Schubert was listed as America’s second-­favorite composer, after Beethoven and before the operetta composer Victor Herbert.113 There was, according to some, still a risk of overdose.114 There were complaints about an epidemic of anniversaries.115 Others were averse to hearing so much Schubert. It was a shame that at the same concert at which Schumann-­Heink excelled, Downes commented, other pieces on the program hadn’t been shortened: Georges Barrère might be “the monarch of flute players,” but the Introduction and Variations on an Original Theme was a trivial work, reminding Downes that “Schubert wrote not only an incredible amount of great music, but more poor music than almost any other great composer.”116 Across the Atlantic, discrimination was similarly advised: there was no need to take in all the works, the Musical Mirror argued; the historian can study the lesser pieces if he wishes.117 The British celebrations of the centenary were less systematically organized than those in the United States, but nonetheless there was no shortage of Schubert to be heard in concert, on recordings, and on the radio. During the anniversary year several artists presented recitals dedicated to the composer, including complete performances of the song cycles. This was still a relatively rare programming decision in London, and was associated with German and Austrian singers—particularly Elena Gerhardt.118 She gave four subscription evening concerts at the Queen’s Hall between 14 November 1928 and 5 March 1929—according to the advertising, “to commemorate the centenary of Schubert.”119 (Interestingly, the newspaper notices of the concerts named her simply as “Gerhardt,” an indication of the seriousness of her purpose and her fame, given that there were other Gerhardts singing in London at the time.) The second program was dedicated to Goethe settings, accompanied by Bos; and the last to Winterreise, with Harold Craxton. Ivor Newton accompanied the other two recitals, which featured both familiar and less well-­known songs. The German baritone Reinhold von Warlich, who enjoyed a lengthy transatlantic career, was already renowned for singing Schubert’s complete cycles. He had performed Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall in 1927, accompanied by Berkeley Mason; apparently the singer was put out by the audience’s insistence on applauding between songs despite a request that they refrain from doing so. On 13 November 1928 he sang Schwanengesang and Musorgsky’s Sans Soleil, accompanied by the composer Philipp Jarnach, who, it was noted, did not hesitate to “add here and there a touch to Schubert.”120 It becomes clear from observations such as these that, while certain artists advocated performances of complete cycles, neither their audi-



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

61

ences nor their accompanists necessarily displayed the same dedication to the score.121 Significantly, it was not only famous foreign singers who presented Schubert concerts as part of the London celebrations, but also British talent, such as the baritone Mark Raphael, who sang Die schöne Müllerin with George Reeves at the Wigmore Hall on 20 November 1928. Raphael, the star student of one of the most highly regarded teachers in London, Raimund von zur Mühlen, was an important local advocate for lieder.122 He had already presented complete cycles and one-­composer programs fairly regularly.123 It is evident from the takings of the Wigmore Hall that he had a loyal following, probably enhanced by his regular appearances on the radio.124 Although Raphael later made recordings of Roger Quilter, he seems not to have recorded lieder until 1937, when he recorded two Wolf songs with Gerald Moore for HMV.125 The divide between radio and recording artists was critical. As will be discussed in the next section, in the 1920s British and American broadcasts favored homegrown musicians; by contrast, the records made by HMV and Columbia for the Schubert centenary—especially those of the songs— were predominantly by foreign artists. In part this reflected the expertise of German and Austrian musicians and national interests—as mentioned, up until this time only central European record labels had invested much in lieder. Among the 1928 releases were what were considered to be superlative performances by figures such as the Viennese tenor Richard Tauber and the German sopranos Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann.126 British singers such as Mavis Bennett and Elsie Suddaby not only struggled to compete with these big names, but were considered to perform less interesting repertoire, for they tended to stick to familiar territory such as “Ave Maria” and “Ständchen.” The more adventurous, larger-­scale lieder projects were almost all made by German or Austrian singers, reflecting their own concert practices and introducing anglophone audiences on both sides of the Atlantic to a new, more imposing and serious take on Schubert.127 Coincidentally, this was also the moment at which records began to be catalogued and advertised not by singer but by work (though specialist magazines such as Gramophone segregated lieder into its “operatic and foreign songs” reviews section). Among the less well-­known songs recorded were selections from the song cycles. For the most part, individual numbers were chosen. Certain songs attracted more attention than others: “Der Lindenbaum” was recorded by fifteen different artists in 1927–28, “Frühlingstraum” by six,

62

C h apt er T w o

and “Der Leiermann” by nine.128 This trio were already relatively popular; for example “Der Lindenbaum” had been recorded by almost thirty artists since the start of the century. There seemed to be no limit on gender or voice type: for the centenary, as well as the more common tenors and baritones (Hermann Jadlowker, Roland Hell, Leo Slezak, Franz Baumann, Karl Tannert, Fritz Gabsch, Franz Steiner) there were recordings made by sopranos—the American Lucy Isabelle Marsh (under the pseudonym Anna Howard), who sang an abridged arrangement accompanied by harp, and the Germans Elisabeth van Endert and Emmy Bettendorf, the latter accompanied by piano trio—and by the Russian bass Alexander Kipnis. “Der Leiermann” attracted more anglophone singers: McCormack released a version with orchestra and the British bass Norman Allin one with piano, both in translation. Other songs from Winterreise, by contrast, had never been recorded before (with the exception of some made by the German baritone Julius von Raatz-­Brockmann before the war). Tauber and the German baritone Heinrich Rehkemper offered selections from Winterreise, and Gerhardt released an album of eighteen songs, including eight from Winterreise, that she had recorded at the Queen’s Hall with Bos.129 Arguably the most novel and ambitious lieder projects of 1928 were Hans Duhan’s complete Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise for HMV, accompanied by Ferdinand Foll.130 Although highly regarded in Austria (he performed at the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival), the Viennese baritone had not yet performed in London.131 There were complaints and disagreements about the quality of the recordings: Duhan was said to sing far too loudly, and not all were won over by his style. Still, it was considered helpful to finally have discs of “Die Wetterfahne,” “Gefrorne Tränen,” “Rast,” “Einsamkeit,” “Letzte Hoffnung,” and “Täuschung”; and to have more than one available recording of “Erstarrung,” “Wasserflut,” “Auf dem Flusse,” “Rückblick,” “Der stürmische Morgen,” and “Mut!” At least, the Times opined, Duhan’s albums would “convey the substance of the work to those who have no other means of acquainting themselves with it.”132 As it was, there would not be further complete versions of the cycles on disc until Gerhard Hüsch made his recordings five years later, in 1933; it was considered a technical as well as a musical improvement, with Neville Cardus declaring that “the voice tells almost of a physical presence [. . .] a reproduction as happy as this makes one wonder whether the day will not soon come when it will be a superfluous labour for us to attend a concert hall. Why leave the comfort of one’s house and risk the distractions of a concert-­room if the gramophone



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

63

is able to catch the essence of an interpretation, especially an interpretation of anything so intimate as lieder?”133 The voices captured on these centennial recordings, and criticism of them, reveal a further facet in the history of the performance of lieder during the interwar period. Generations were changing, and with them attitudes toward performance practices. One of the most celebrated new recordings was made by the seventy-­eight-­year-­old George Henschel, who earlier in his career had worked with Brahms and was renowned as an authoritative teacher (it was to him that McCormack and Hayes turned when they decided to master lieder). Age—and possibly gender—counted against Gerhardt, however, whose recording of “Leiermann” was compared unfavorably with Henschel’s, and whose voice was said to be showing signs of wear.134 Then there were the younger singers, not yet forty, who came from Vienna. It is difficult to disentangle German and Austrian performances in this situation, not least because the question of nationality was barely addressed directly in anglophone criticism. Nonetheless, Tauber and Duhan were recognized to adopt a different style from that to which British audiences were accustomed. In the case of Tauber, that sense of difference was largely informed by awareness of his multiple appearances in operetta.135 Although he had sung new operas by Franz Schreker, Korngold, and Puccini to critical acclaim in Vienna in the early 1920s, as the decade progressed he began to include lighter fare by Johann Strauss and Franz Léhar alongside songs by Schubert, Grieg, and Strauss on his recital programs. His motivation was, in large part, financial. He also enjoyed stardom on an international stage; he delighted in singing in different languages and appearing at unexpected locations in the theater, to serenade the audience from the stalls or elsewhere. Peter Franklin has argued that Tauber’s willingness to participate in popular culture can be interpreted as a type of cultural appeasement— a democratization of all that was “good” about European culture.136 London audiences, however, had not heard Tauber in modernist opera; he was encountered primarily through operetta, recordings, and broadcasts of songs such as “In Your Arms” and “I Love Thee” and cinema, and as a result his vocal style was interpreted by some as having been tainted by musical ­comedy. Critics were therefore somewhat surprised when Tauber’s rendition of Schubert at his first public recital in London—at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1933—was sung “in a ‘straight’ musicianly manner.”137 He was, after all, better known for appearing as Schubert in Lilac Time, one of sev-

64

C h apt er T w o

eral reworkings of the hagiographic operetta Die Dreimäderlhaus (of which more later). Of his impersonation of the composer in the German-­language version, performed for a short, three-­and-­a-­half-­week season by the Vienna Opera Company at the Aldwych Theatre in London in September 1933, the Times critic praised Tauber for achieving melodiousness without mawkishness, even if he did not “neglect the tricks which his admirers have come to expect his fine voice to perform.”138 As was typical of musical comedy, he distorted melodies and made extensive use of portamento or sliding between notes.139 Even those who thought the habit tasteless acknowledged that his voice had rare lustre and warmth, and his technical mastery was much admired (his musicianship and grace were said to be equaled only by McCormack).140 Critics at subsequent recitals—in less cavernous venues— bemoaned the fact that it was more profitable for Tauber to perform in Lilac Time or The Land of Smiles than to use his gifts on “the real Schubert and the wealth of great music which is going unheard and neglected because there is no other German singer who can do justice to it.”141 That it was now possible to hear someone of Tauber’s status sing Schubert on recordings, however, was acknowledged to be an important step forward for music appreciation. Alec Rowley declared it astounding that now, for the price of a seat, one could have “a master’s finest works always to hand, superbly rendered, and awaiting the magic touch of the needle.”142 The gramophone provided “the finest monument” to Schubert, Rowley claimed. According to Henry Coates, “There is now a newly-­awakened interest in Schubert, and for this the musical world is indebted, in part, to the gramophone.”143 Although it is tempting to interpret the glut of Schubert and Beethoven recordings as signs of an expanding classical market, relatively small numbers of discs were actually released: only a few thousand, as opposed to the millions made for popular music. They were also expensive: the publicity manager for Columbia, Herbert Ridout, in a series of articles for Gramophone published in the 1940s, observed that the centennial projects were taken on despite knowing that there would be a long period before they would break even financially. Crucially, they were considered the “right kind of musical propaganda for the gramophone,” because of their cultural prestige.144 The 1928 centenary, then, served to promote the gramophone industry. The new electrical recordings of Schubert also helped to revise opinions of the composer by enlarging the available catalog to include some more challenging material, including the notion that the cycles could, and perhaps



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

65

should, be consumed complete. There was an accompanying outpouring of journalism and scholarship, from special issues of journals to new translations of the letters and biographies.145 The first English-­language book devoted to the lieder, Richard Capell’s Schubert’s Songs, was serialized in the Monthly Musical Record from April through June 1928.146 In his prefatory note Capell pointed out the shortcomings of the available editions of the songs, considering those best suited to the amateur. The English versions, he warned, tended not to observe chronology; Boosey even scattered songs from the cycles across its volumes. By contrast, his book presented brief accounts of five hundred of the songs in chronological order, along with chapters introducing Schubert’s characteristics, circles, and chosen poets. These were significant interventions, guiding students toward a wider selection of songs in better-­quality versions according to voice type (Fox Strangways and Steuart Wilson’s translations were recommended; Max Friedländer’s edition for Peters was said to be haphazardly organized but offered various transpositions). By approaching the lieder chronologically, Capell also strove to pre­sent a narrative of the life and works of the composer that directed attention away from juvenilia and toward the later songs. A strong case was made for the alertness and inventiveness of a collection such as Schwanengesang, with Capell pointing out the need for sensitive renditions of famous songs such as “Ständchen.” “Every attempt has been made to murder this music,” he observed, advising that “a merely pretty performance is not right. Ardour and imagination are required” and recommending Chaliapin’s “wheedling, anticipative, irresistible” delivery of the line “Komm, beglücke mich.”147 The book reached out, in other words, to student singers and, importantly, to listeners, urging them to dig beneath the surface of Schubert’s music. Revisionist writers such as Capell had their work cut out, for the operetta and film industry crafted a sentimental portrait of the composer, as will be discussed later in this chapter with reference to further renditions of “Ständchen.” Before turning to cinema, the next section examines the changing social and aesthetic status of nineteenth-­century lieder in late 1920s anglophone culture through its representation on the radio, considered by many to be a more “democratic” means of entertainment and education than recordings. Capell claimed that Schubert was the first composer to belong to the middle class—that he was “literate without being urbane.”148 The composer belonged, in other words, to that same class of listener simultaneously courted and chastised by critics and broadcasters: the middlebrow.

66

C h apt er T w o

Listening In, with Furrowed Brow In 1926 the Times described three classes of listeners to broadcast music. The largest group were “those who do not really listen at all but just switch on the loud speaker and let sound, be it a symphony or a piece of super-­ syncopation, buzz round their ears. They are negligible for musical purposes.” Then there were those “who have heard orchestral and other serious music on the wireless and have begun to find it interesting and entertaining,” and it was from this “middle class” that “musical converts are to made or marred.” Finally, the “comparatively few, who know enough about real music to be able to make a mental translation from the ethereal shadow which they hear and form some concept of the original.” The “middle class,” with their potential to be converted to “good” music, were objects of fascination to cultural commentators and purveyors in the 1920s.149 They were subject to sociological study in the United States (as in Helen and Robert Lynd’s 1929 Middletown: A Study in American Culture), and British broadcasting journalists coined a new category, bridging the nineteenth-­ century’s divide into “high”- and “lowbrow”: the “middlebrow,” which the British satirical magazine Punch explained were those “hoping that someday they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like.”150 While all three categories—high, middle, and low—were used, deliberately, by critics during the interwar period, typically they were pejorative labels. Erica Brown and Mary Grover explain that the “battle” of the brows “was the product of powerful anxieties about cultural authority and processes of cultural transmission,” with the middlebrow functioning as a nexus for prejudice toward the lower middle classes, the feminine and domestic, and—in literature—outdated narrative modes.151 Defined as a social phenomenon, the middlebrow can characterize aspirational cultural endeavors that used or mimicked highbrow cultural products. In that sense, the promotion of lieder by journalists and broadcasters under the auspices of the music-­appreciation movement, as discussed in this section, might be thought of as a middlebrow venture. Yet there was also a sense of middlebrow repertoire, particularly in the realm of song, where aesthetics of moderation, synthesis, and sincerity came to the fore.152 The social mobility of lieder has been mentioned elsewhere in this book.153 Not all, but some, stretches of Schubert and Schumann could fulfill the middlebrow desire to combine the pleasures of the low with the prestige of the high. It is a kind of multivalence that can make categorization awkward and the musicologist’s brow furrowed.



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

67

In the interwar period “highbrow” was rarely used as a compliment. Most often it was used with reference to those who professed to like difficult moderns—especially Arnold Schoenberg.154 More generally it denoted anyone with aesthetic pretensions, such as harboring a predilection for foreign music, which of course could include lieder.155 H. C. Colles, writing in the Musical News, explained that the ordinary Englishman “dislikes talk about ‘Art’ and suspects the conscious artist of affectation. He has lately taken into his vocabulary the most hideous of American slang terms in order to express his dislike and suspicion; and anyone who arouses it is dubbed a ‘highbrow.’ ”156 As is evident in Colles’s reference to “the ordinary Englishman” and American slang, class, education, and nationality were caught up in definitions of the “brows.” Adoption of language from across the Atlantic in order to resist European cultural hegemony points to the difficulties of treating the middlebrow as a transnational phenomenon: it had multiple locally defined identifiers that defied global categorization. Although “highbrow” and “lowbrow” had had critical currency in the United States since the nineteenth century, New Yorkers were slower to use the term “middlebrow” than their British counterparts. Issues of class, which riddled British discourse on the subject, were in some ways less significant than issues surrounding the interplay of ethnicity and race; the contentious and complex concept of “whiteness” would perhaps be a better lens through which to consider American interwar attitudes toward aspirational cultural endeavors.157 The commercial as well as the educative aspect of the promotion of the middlebrow was also foregrounded.158 In 1933 the poet and novelist Margaret Widdener defined it as those “men and women, fairly civilized, fairly literate, who support the critics and lecturers and publishers by purchasing their wares.”159 For Lawrence Rainey the term “middlebrow” “acknowledges not just increasing stratification but also increasing interchanges among different cultural sectors”; he sees British criticism of the middlebrow as a resistance to American consumerism.160 There is an assumption among many writers on middlebrow culture that modernity was virtually inseparable from aesthetic modernism, thereby deepening “the great divide” from mass culture—a chasm the middlebrow might breach.161 Given the ways in which all manner of musical forms interacted with new media and the importance of consumption, however, this seems simplistic. The economic uncertainty and social unrest of the interwar period has been thought to have fostered a desire to belong and feel important, such as may be provided by cultural attachments.162 On a basic level that might be expressed through the adoption of certain types of be-

68

C h a pt er T w o

havior, or in the aspirational imagery used in advertising campaigns.163 Or, indeed, in the kind of music to which one decided to listen. None of those things needed to be “modern” apart from their mode of consumption.164 For instance, there was a surge in the sales of etiquette manuals in the 1920s, presumably for those wanting to convey “proper” modes of behavior; tours to Europe were advertised as providing access to the Old World; and music might be “classic” even though it was heard through the latest amplification system. Historian Jeffrey Herf has argued that the Nazi regime managed to use media to connect past and present; “reactionary modernists,” as he terms them, could claim to be both technologically advanced and true to German cultural heritage.165 It is possible to make a similar case for understanding musical history in the Anglo-­American sphere, without the fascist political overtones: to be modern need not mean to be modernist; it could instead relate to how and by whom cultural products were consumed. Joan Shelley Rubin claims that the middlebrow was defined by long-­ established institutions, self-­education, and a quest for “culture.” Although, as she has subsequently pointed out, mediators—publishers, editors, critics, civic leaders, orchestra funders—intervened “both to popularise high culture and to mark it off as sacred,” the “middling social and cultural space” between them was dynamic and elusive.166 There are few better examples of this dynamism and elusiveness than in the medium with which the middlebrow was most closely associated: broadcasting. Radio’s ability to combine verbal commentary on music with performances, its emphasis on native musicians, and, last but far from least, its large number of listeners promised an ideal vehicle with which to court middlebrow audiences nationally and internationally. By 1923 Britain, the United States, and Germany had established continuous broadcasting on a national level. As with all new media technologies, radio was cause for both celebration and anxiety. Many heralded it as a means to educate the masses; the spread of radio broadcasting, along with the cheaper and better-­quality gramophone recordings discussed earlier, promised to broaden both the geographical and the social range of audiences for classical music. Others worried that broadcasting would reduce the value of music, as serious and light genres jostled for program slots. Concert promoters frequently refused to cooperate with broadcasters, complaining about the paltry fees and low quality of the selected performers (“third-­rate artists and hyenas,” according to Lionel Powell)167 and fearing that broadcasters would steal their stars and detract from the appeal



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

69

of live performances. Publishing houses and gramophone companies also felt threatened: arrangements over royalties were not always satisfactory, and technological and artistic competition increased.168 At a meeting of the British Music Society, Hugh Allen, director of the Royal College of Music, declared that broadcasting had to stop. He warned, among other things, that it would only help those with established reputations, not new artists, and that the “younger generation, except the very serious minded, will not bother to learn the piano at all.”169 The shift from active participation to passive consumption is a familiar theme in writings on the so-­called first media age; that narrative can be complicated by taking its cue from recent scholarship on radio that emphasizes audience agency over broadcaster hegemony.170 Lieder may have had a specialist niche in gramophone catalogs, but radio was an altogether more challenging environment, because broadcasters insisted, at least initially, on English-­language performances and preferred native musicians who did not necessarily have German art song in their repertoires. This does not mean that broadcasting was insignificant for the performance culture of lieder; as will be discussed, there were resonances with its association with music in the home. It does, though, highlight why something such as lieder performance can slip under the historical radar in comparison to other genres: it was ever present yet rarely noteworthy, at once familiar and esoteric.171 Before going further, an overview of the broadcasting system in both Britain and the United States will help to contextualize claims made about radio’s significance as a cultural provider.172 More than anything it was the scale and speed with which radio caught on that made it such a powerful force. The number of American households that owned a wireless set doubled between 1922 and 1924 (and for the first time sales of factory-­ built sets overtook home-­built ones). It reached 50 percent of the population by 1931 and 67 percent by 1935; three years later Fortune magazine reported that “88.1% of all United States homes including more than half the Negro homes have radios.”173 The price of sets had dropped during the 1930s, making them more affordable. By 1940 over a quarter of American automobiles were outfitted with radios. It seemed at first as though broadcasting was slow to reach the masses in Britain—only two million sets were licensed by 1926, out of a population of forty-­five million, but the number of license holders in Britain quadrupled between 1927 (2,178,259), the year the BBC became a public corporation, and 1939 (9,082,666). Of course, many more people listened to broadcasts than owned sets. By 1925 it was

70

C h a pt er T w o

estimated that 85 percent of the population could receive at least regional programs on a basic receiving set; ten years later it was estimated that 98 percent of the population could listen to at least one BBC station.174 Complicated networks were used to achieve national coverage in Britain and, still more so, over the much larger terrain of the United States. By the end of 1924, eight stations served different regions in Britain. The London station was 2LO, which began broadcasting in 1922 and continued to use its own name when it became part of the British Broadcasting Company the following year. From 1927 the company became the British Broadcasting Corporation and on 9 March 1930 2LO was replaced—as were other provincial stations—by the BBC Regional Programme and the BBC National Programme. The monopoly was initially funded by contributions from wireless manufacturers and a license fee (initially ten shillings per year; a higher rate of fifteen shillings became available later for people to use homemade, non-­BBC sets). Initially music programming was technically restricted because of small studios and poor equipment. An experimental but sophisticated schedule was swiftly devised to cater to a wide range of tastes and interests. According to Jennifer Doctor, during the 1920s music constituted about two-­thirds of the BBC’s daily output, with classical music representing a fifth of that programming and popular music about two-­thirds.175 Most performances were live, though gramophone recordings were sometimes used. Once outside broadcasting became possible, music was available on a larger scale (the first live broadcast from Covent Garden, of an act from Die Zauberflöte, occurred in January 1923), although hostility from venue managers meant that it was a few years before prime sites for classical music, such as the Queen’s Hall, were used.176 The first two commercial radio networks in the United States were the Red and Blue networks of the New York–­based National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which launched in November 1926; by connecting through twenty-­five stations, it reached as far west as Kansas City.177 The Red Network was the flagship station, for premium, big-­budget content; Blue Network programs tended to be more experimental or “sustaining” (current affairs, educational or cultural) and lower-­cost, though successful shows could transfer. The opening was heralded as “the most pretentious broadcasting program ever presented,” with four hundred artists appearing over the course of a four-­hour-­long gala, broadcast from the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor in New York.178 They included the baritone Reinald Werrenrath and the soprano Evelyn Herbert, the Silver Mask Tenor,



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

71

the Everready Revellers Orchestra, the Chicago comic duo Sam ’n’ Henry (later reworked as the long-­running radio show Amos ’n’ Andy), and the combined opera companies of NBC. As will be apparent from this partial list—with its tenor sponsored by Silvertown Tires and an orchestra run, financially at least, on batteries179—unlike the BBC, American networks were primarily financed through advertising and corporate sponsorship (the first Metropolitan Opera broadcasts were supported by a heady combination of Lucky Strike cigarettes and Listerine mouthwash).180 Radio complemented and competed with other forms of music production and consumption; it cannot be considered in isolation. Its swift technological advances and access to high-­quality performers put gramophone companies under pressure: Garry Joel August recalled that “until the radio came to terrify record manufacturers, actual phonographic treasures were disconcertingly rare.”181 There was concern that hearing recordings over the radio “for free” might dissuade listeners from purchasing them.182 What is more, radio hovered between recorded and live performance, particularly once outside broadcasts became routine. It was both “event”—as Evan Eisenberg characterized the unique experience of early recordings—and everyday “ritual.”183 Hearing music from Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera House, or Carnegie Hall from the comfort of one’s armchair thousands of miles away was undoubtedly novel.184 Amid the discourse that radio enabled everyone—shepherds, laborers, invalids—to “sit side by side with the patron of the stalls and hear some of the best performances in the world,” it was, however, acknowledged that the music was mediated, and often poorly.185 For example, Daniel Gregory Mason, writing for the American academic journal Musical Quarterly in 1929, bemoaned the “standardized, wholesale, impersonal quality” of “music from the machine [. . .] violating the essential uniqueness, particularity, and personal reference of all vital artistic experience.”186 If the “virtual perfection” achievable in recordings made the listener passive, according to Mason, the radio was still worse: How can any artistic experience have value, in which the audience is in a purely passive condition—in which it may turn off at any moment the performance, as an observer in a garage one Sunday morning saw a bored chauffeur turn off a religious service in the middle of a prayer, or, what is even worse, turn it on at any moment as a not quite successfully ignored background for conversation?187

72

C h a pt er T w o

Yet broadcasts were considered preferable to “wholly correct and lifeless” American concert halls (Mason complained that applause was no longer allowed between movements), leaving listeners “to embalm ourselves in the living death of radio.”188 The sepulchral metaphors continued elsewhere: a Times critic referred to broadcast music as “the ethereal shadow,” and an “emancipated concert-­goer,” letting off steam in the British Musical News, claimed that through mechanization “the lifeless remains of electrocuted music [are] delivered at your armchair by that prince of undertakers, radio.”189 This may all seem to prefigure Theodor Adorno’s 1938 essay on the regression of listening, but there were plenty of counterarguments:190 John Erskine, writing for The World’s Work, pointed out that debating the “loss of beauty, power and tone” was a luxury for Manhattanites: “For the majority of Americans the choice is between hearing that orchestra over the air, and never hearing an orchestra at all.”191 If, as David Trotter argues, radio was identified with suburbia, it might seem that a book about music in New York and London need have little to do with broadcasting.192 However, it remained the case for much of the interwar period that these cities were central to the production of programs and that through them might be gauged the extent of metropolitan influence. On both sides of the Atlantic, broadcasting companies endeavored to make high culture digestible and fortifying. Indeed, radio was viewed as the ideal medium for the music-­appreciation movement, which was more actively promoted in the United States than Britain, although the BBC’s mandate to “inform, educate and entertain” and determination to give the public “not what it wants, but what it needs” seemed formulated along similar principles.193 The most prominent figurehead for the movement in the late 1920s was the New York–­based conductor Walter Damrosch, who came out of retirement to pre­sent programs designed for schoolchildren that eventually became the NBC Musical Appreciation Hour, which ran from 1928 to 1942 (by 1938 it was reported to have a weekly enrollment of seven million pupils, with four million adults also tuning in).194 Teachers were provided with textbooks and worksheets to use with the broadcasts, which introduced instruments, genres, and composers and suggested practical exercises (until 1933 these were supplied for free).195 The repertoire was made up mostly of nineteenth-­century instrumental works, with an emphasis on German and Austrian music.196 Despite that emphasis, lieder rarely featured in the Musical Appreciation Hour, or on the British equivalents presented by Percy Scholes and Sir Walford Davies. 197 If they did, it was invariably in translation, as a way to encourage a broader range of lis-



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

73

teners to engage with the music. Adorno, in his critique of the Damrosch series, complained that when Schubert’s songs were mentioned, the tone in which they were discussed was nothing short of barbaric (“he speaks of Schubert’s song in terms of the output of a factory, stressing the quantitative element,” Adorno fumed).198 Lieder did appear occasionally in other music-­appreciation materials—as they did in editions of songs for young singers, often as examples of “appropriate” repertoire. Carl Engel, reviewing the “Appreciation of Music Series” that advertised the volume Songs for Girls as making “no reference to romance or religion,” reflected: “So long as the Theodore Presser Co. exists, our civilisation is not in immediate danger of succumbing to jazz or any other maleficent force.”199 Cynics such as Adorno and Engel aside, among many American commentators there was a conviction that the benefits of a musical education such as was experienced by the cultured classes should extend through all social and economic levels of society, across the nation.200 The purpose of the music-­appreciation movement, according to the musicologist Mark Katz, was to create a more “enlightened citizenry” through the “moral uplift” of classical music, thereby diverting young people from corrupting influences such as jazz.201 In his 1926 Christmas letter to staff, the first director general of the BBC, John Reith, had no qualms about the corporation taking on the responsibility of contributing consistently and cumulatively to the intellectual and moral happiness of the community. We have broadcast systematically and increasingly good music, we have developed educational courses for school children and for adults; we have broadcast the Christian religion and tried to reflect that spirit of commonsense Christian ethics which we believe to be a necessary component of citizenship and culture.202

The triumvirate of “good music,” education, and ethical citizenship did not necessarily make music appreciation a vehicle for democratization. Instead, it was a means of social improvement, raising morals and expectations. In other words, it provided access to the elite rather than representing a massification of high culture.203 Cultural hierarchies were not only thereby confirmed; they provided, David Goodman argues, “a crucial legitimizing story for radio.”204 It is in this context that considering the history of lieder performance on the radio is illuminating. As mentioned, they did not appear often in Musi-

74

C h a pt er T w o

cal Appreciation volumes, nor were they regularly programmed in dedicated recitals. A mid-­evening piano or vocal recital was scheduled by 2LO, the London broadcasting station of the BBC, until January 1927, when it was canceled so that the concert beginning at 7:45 P.M. could continue uninterrupted until 9; a commentator in the Musical Times conjectured that part of the problem with vocal recitals was the poor quality of material and the preponderance of performers from the “wobbling sisterhood.”205 German art songs were heard first on American and British radio stations in translation, and while—mirroring live concert practice—original-­language versions were introduced, they did not come to dominate programs to the same degree as in the concert hall and gramophone catalogs.206 The continued use of translations was in keeping with broadcasters’ emphasis on comprehensibility. Moreover, in Britain it was more likely for radio stations to feature local musicians, selected by audition.207 A singer such as Mark Raphael, mentioned in the previous section, could establish a strong following in London through his appearances on the radio, which enhanced his live audiences and vice versa; George Henschel, whose singing career had begun back in the 1870s, found new fame on the radio.208 Foreign singers initially were rarely heard and, as mentioned, there was a reluctance among some agents to allow their artists to appear on the wireless.209 There was, then, a crowd of British singers known foremost through the radio, and lieder, if heard at all, were transmitted to the “invisible audience” by their voices. Although some also made recordings and had healthy concert careers, historically speaking their names have not featured as prominently as artists who managed to acquire an international reputation or extensive gramophone listings. It was partly through these artists’ efforts on the radio, though, that music began to be perceived in terms of a canon of works rather than through its performers.210 The first Schubert song broadcast on 2LO was “The Shepherd on the Rock,” performed by the soprano Winifred Fisher and the London Wind Ensemble on 2 October 1923; the rest of the program comprised Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds, an arrangement of a Scarlatti suite, Four Parodies (songs) by Herbert Hughes, Weber’s Concertino for Clarinet, and the first two movements of Beethoven’s Quintet for Piano and Winds. Regional stations sometimes broadcast singers, but for the most part lieder were performed in arrangements for orchestra or organ. Even relatively short song cycles, such as Schumann’s Dichterliebe, were rarely performed in their entirety: for example, for 2LO on 21 February 1927, Dale Smith sang only the first nine songs; three years later, sometime Elgar collaborator



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

75

the baritone Herbert Heyner gave the cycle over two evenings on national radio, as part of the Foundations of Music series, which began that year to introduce listeners to the classics.211 The first broadcast of all the songs from Schubert’s Winterreise also occurred in the series, sung by the Welsh tenor Gwynn Parry Jones over the course of a week in October 1928, concurrently with the celebrations of the composer’s centenary.212 The machinery of the middlebrow is evident in these broadcasts: “good” music was introduced in digestible chunks, with explanatory commentaries designed to aid its consumption. Given that gramophone recordings were still severely limited in length, perhaps it did not seem so strange to only hear a few songs at a time; perhaps, too, the broadcasts could serve as appetizers to encourage attendance at concerts of the complete cycles. There were even fewer lieder heard on NBC, though Schubert’s instrumental music was broadcast during the centennial celebrations of 1928. It was mostly left to famous singers to include them, as Schumann-­Heink did on a program broadcast by fifteen stations in January 1926.213 It began with “But the Lord is mindful of his own” from Mendelssohn’s St. Paul, followed by “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht”; the violinist Florence Hardman then played the Andante from Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Fritz Kreisler’s Tambourin chinois. There followed Ethelbert Nevin’s “The Rosary,” Lieurance’s “By the Waters of Minnetonka” (with violin obbligato), Weatherly’s “Danny Boy,” Schubert’s “Erlking,” Oscar Rasbach’s “Trees,” a sixteenth-­ century “Spinnerliedchen,” and finally Bizet’s Agnus Dei (with violin obbligato). Other singers announced as appearing that week were Mary Garden (the first time she “has actuated the microphone”); the tenor Charles Hackett, singing French and Irish songs; the soprano Anna Case; and, from Jacksonville, Florida, Louise Homer, who included not only Schubert’s “Serenade” and Mendelssohn’s “On the Wings of Song” alongside Handel, Haydn, Sidney Homer, Arnold Bax, and “Dixie.” Asked whether she missed an audience’s applause in the radio studio, Homer claimed that an artist always knows if one has deserved it. Perhaps that need to rely on one’s own perception of the performance was one reason Schumann-­ Heink’s program was so well-­worn; as will be seen in the next section, she sang several of the same songs for Vitaphone. Schumann-­Heink’s willingness to sing popular fare while slipping in more “legitimate” repertoire was typical of singers who appeared on American radio. Their willingness to participate in the variety format—even embracing its humor—is often cited as evidence of radio’s potential as cultural leveler.214 At the same time, Louis Carlat observes that commercial spon-

76

C h apt er T w o

sors—and the broadcasters—often sought “to create goodwill” by associating themselves with the elite musical canon.215 However, classical programming was not yet fixed, and singers of Schubert still appeared in miscellany concerts and vaudeville. It is important, then, to recognize radio as one node in a network of venues in which lieder might be encountered, perhaps garnering fresh interest but at the same time typically requiring some form of exegetical adaptation through arrangements and translations.216 For example, the New Jersey–­born tenor Richard Crooks hosted the Voice of Firestone radio broadcasts from its debut in 1928 until 1945.217 Promising “a song for everybody,” the program was dedicated to opera and operetta and was broadcast on NBC’s Blue network every Monday at the prime time of 8:30 P.M., Eastern Standard Time (in the days of live radio it had to be rerecorded later in the evening for the West Coast). Occasionally, art songs such Grieg’s “Traum” and “Jeg elsker dig” were included. They were typically presented in arrangements. When Jussi Björling sang Schubert’s “Die Allmacht,” he did so in translation (as “Omnipotence”) to the accompaniment of the Firestone orchestra and chorus. Crooks himself performed a wide range of musical genres on the show. He had studied with the pianist Michael Raucheisen in Germany—­recalling later that he was advised to sing more lieder—and enjoyed a transatlantic career, performing opera in Germany, Belgium, and Sweden, as well as at the Met following his debut there in 1933. He sang mostly Massenet and Puccini and some Wagner; he was also part of the American premiere of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (he complained that his repertoire was more limited in the United States than in Europe). Crooks was a popular recording artist for Victor; along with performing operatic excerpts and folk and show tunes, he was one of first American singers to produce a complete recording of Die schöne Müllerin (in 1934, accompanied by Frank La Forge). That only ten tracks were released, in 1941 (the complete set were issued in 1997), indicates the challenge Schubert’s song cycles were thought to pose for the record-­buying public: if Crooks, well-­known on the radio, at the Met, as a recitalist, and as a frequent guest at society musicales such as the Bagbys, could not persuade an American gramophone company to release Die schöne Müllerin, who could? A partial answer to the question might be that the type of German culture represented by lieder was not quite in keeping with the stereotype. The historian Brian Currid has written about how broadcasts presented “an acoustic fantasy” of a nation for domestic and international markets.218 Symphonic music—and perhaps Wagner—may have been part of the fan-



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

77

tasy propagated by and of Germany, but on American radio especially, the most common presentation of Germanic culture was at the kitschier end of the spectrum. Song in German meant not Die schöne Müllerin but Christmas music.219 Schumann-­Heink had long included “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” in her recital and radio programs outside the festive season; starting in 1926 she was broadcast annually singing it at midnight on Christmas Eve. Advertised as “the song considered by millions the greatest Christmas music,” Schumann-­Heink claimed that words and music had been written at the spinet by a poor Austrian schoolteacher in 1806; she had known it— as did everyone in Germany and Austria—since she was a child and began to sing it in the United States when she was homesick and thinking of her children back in Europe.220 It was almost inconsequential that Franz Xaver Gruber’s melody had been composed in 1818 to words by Joseph Mohr penned two years earlier; that it hailed, in other words, from the same era as the songs of Schubert and Beethoven. “Stille Nacht!” was too popular to be considered a lied and, maybe for that reason, transcended national borders and any issues of linguistic authenticity (not to mention its transformation from a lively 6/8). Moreover, it was already ringed with postwar sentiment; soldiers at the front had marked the 1914 Christmas truce by singing it in English and German. Now, in 1920s America, Schumann-­Heink also sang it in both languages (using John Freeman Young’s 1859 translation), as would Elisabeth Schumann after her.221 As time passed they may have done so aware that “Stille Nacht!” was claimed for Nazi propaganda; when Schumann sang it in German on American radio in the late 1930s, there were complaints at hearing the language of the enemy.222 However, there were no objections to hearing “Silent Night,” as is evident from the huge success of the version made by one of the most influential broadcasting artists of the time, Bing Crosby. “Silent Night” (first in 1935) and “White Christmas” (1942) were his best-­selling records. Although they marked an important turning point in Crosby’s career—foregrounding his Catholicism over his earlier playboy persona—in one respect there was continuity: “Silent Night” was performed as a ballad, using the crooning technique with which Crosby had become synonymous. Crooning, according to Allison McCracken, was primarily a creation of radio broadcasting.223 More sensitive microphones were well suited to softer voices, encouraging an intimate, conversational tone that befit radio programs broadcast into people’s homes. There had been “small-­voiced” classical singers, such as the Dutch mezzo Julia Culp, often credited with being one of the first lied specialists (though she did give concerts in Car-

78

C h apt er T w o

negie Hall). The majority of singers trained for concert and opera halls, and even those used to making gramophone recordings (especially during the acoustic era) were used to singing at greater volume. Many sopranos had been known to blow out tubes on transmitters,224 and John McCormack was said to have blanched at the prospect of singing into a broadcasting studio’s microphone.225 After all, as one journalist noted, it tended to make defects more glaring.226 Crooning has been hailed as a way for singers without conventional musical educations to establish successful performance careers, and, as McCracken notes, between the mid-­1920s and mid-­1930s, was almost synonymous with the rise of “pop” as a genre. Obviously, singers with large voices—such as McCormack and Schumann-­Heink, and Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad, discussed in chapter 4—found ways to cope with the challenge of the new microphones.227 The way this technology began to alter the ways in which performances were delivered is beyond the scope of this book. Its reception, though, is not, because the “up-­close” experience of singing voices encouraged the perception of lieder as an intimate art form—in some senses a return to the Innigkeit ascribed to this repertoire, and its domestic modes of performance, within nineteenth-­century German culture.228 For instance, an introduction to a recital by Elisabeth Schumann, broadcast in August 1938, described Schubert’s songwriting as “an art of glow, not glitter; a personal outburst from a poetic wanderer to a fireside listener, untheatrical and only indirectly dramatic.” 229 Through new media, lieder found a way back into the home. Domestic consumption of lieder through broadcasting, however, did not mean music making; instead, it indicated education and—despite its mass-­media connotations—connoisseurship. Radio’s impact on the spaces in which music was heard is often acknowledged, with much made of its noisiness and disruption and its capacity to democratize culture “by mobile privatization.”230 There is an alternative narrative to be told, however, about attentive listening. The stereotypical images of early enthusiasts were of either a man making his own crystal set in the attic, leaving a “wireless widow” downstairs, or of a family gathered around the set to listen to particular broadcasts. As loudspeaker technology advanced, radio could be listened to more or less attentively, by the distracted housewife rather than the man of leisure.231 According to Ross McKibbin, while working-­class listeners in Britain tended to leave the wireless playing all day, no matter what it was broadcasting, the middle classes tended to wait for specific programs.232 It was these listeners who were more likely to encounter or



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

79

even seek out lieder on evening broadcasts (although information about who among the public “listened in”—not to mention what they thought about it—can be infuriatingly scant).233 Unlike gramophone enthusiasts, who might be guided by what they had read and harbor a collecting, library mentality, radio audiences might be thought of as being in the hands of a curator, for the broadcaster determined who and what was heard. What is more, it was a transient experience: these were not performances that could be played again like a record, although of course some recordings were broadcast. None of this meant that members of the “unseen audience” had no agency: they themselves decided, after all, to tune in or switch off, and there were plenty of solo auditors (novelist Rebecca West described being alone in the dark, listening to Elisabeth Schumann on the wireless, as “the ultimate luxury”).234 Susan Douglas has discussed how listening to broadcasts only gradually became a routine part of everyday life in the United States and cautions against making generalizations, arguing that patterns of consumption and reception were determined with a degree of flexibility and individuality.235 There were attempts to encourage critical engagement: the BBC urged their audience to “cultivate the art of listening; to discriminate in what they listen to, and to listen with their mind as well as their ears.”236 Claims about the circular process of establishing “audile” regimes—the way in which predicting or fantasizing about listening practices comes to shape them—are exemplified in contemporary accounts of experiencing broadcasting.237 Or, at least, within the rarefied world of music criticism, there was ample support for radio’s potential not as a cultural leveler but as a means to access “the best” music from around the world. As broadcasting networks expanded, radio too participated in the discourse of cultural internationalism. Writing for the New York–­based left-­ wing weekly The Nation in 1928, B. H. Haggin complained that the music business was determined by profits rather than taste. Phonograph companies had only recently begun to list entire symphonies and quartets; before that, “a few isolated middle movements, badly cut, with a few of the most popular lieder and piano and violin pieces, were the extent of their departure from the arias and ballads which they believed most people wanted.” The present situation was an improvement, with the phonograph companies “just catching up with the more popular of ordinary concert programs.” However, “With radio the story has begun all over again. The person with developed taste who wept formerly over the lists of European phonograph records may now weep to read of Parsifal and Rosenkavalier being broad-

80

C h a pt er T w o

cast, with concert programs of the same calibre, by the British Broadcasting Company.”238 Broadcasts from and to other countries became more common soon after; according to an account by Samuel Chotzinoff, manager of NBC’s music division, the first symphonic concerts from Europe were broadcast in 1929; six programs from Russia were heard in 1933, and European opera was available from 1935.239 The result, claimed Chotzinoff, was that the “musical fare of a metropolis like New York” was extended to every part of the United States.240 In fact, NBC entered into a five-­year agreement with the German national broadcaster in 1929, retaining the rights for first refusal on all German programs and exchanging programs reflecting their national characters. Further European broadcasts took place during the following decade, but by 1938 NBC’s only foreign contractual arrangement was with Germany. Negotiations with Goebbels and the payment of $1000 per day to the Nazi government were justified as catering to the United States’ large immigrant population and providing all sides of an argument.241 The BBC also maintained broadcasts from abroad (by 1930 it also offered foreign-­language lessons). As early as 1922 the novelist and critic Aldous Huxley had commented that radio concerts and lectures were now “a regular feature of trans-­Atlantic life.”242 In her 1936 survey Music on the Air, Hazel Gertrude Kinsella observed that international broadcasts brought music “from all parts of the civilized world a dozen times a month.”243 There was an intriguing discourse of authenticity inherent in many accounts of listening to broadcasts from afar, with reports attesting to the fact that listeners could tell where music came from.244 Arthur Henry Fox Strangways recounted an evening when he and two companions “sat down with scores, being certain of no interruptions,” and listened through their “Lion” loudspeaker to the second act of Siegfried from Covent Garden, switching to broadcasts from Paris and Amsterdam before returning to London, just in time to hear that Sir George Henschel would sing for a quarter of an hour: Schumann’s “Die beiden Grenadiere,” Loewe’s “Erlkönig,” and Schubert’s “Das Wandern,” each song seeming “perfect of its kind.”245 The mixture of deliberate tuning in to attend to music from other countries—with score in hand, no less—and the happenstance of catching Henschel singing lieder as an added treat seems exactly the kind of cultivated listening to which institutions such as the BBC aspired. Two years later, however, Fox Strangways complained about the effect of broadcasting on live performances: they set the example of shorter concerts and, “by telling people that they may come and go when they please



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

81

[. . . are] going to kill the recital in its own form.”246 There would come to be a “wireless style” (“it will consist mainly in controlling whispers, which are perfectly audible, and taming outbursts of tone which lead to blurs”), but the greatest impact of “mechanisation” would be the deepening divide between amateur and professional: Amateurs will have to learn gradually that public and private singing are two quite different things: that you want one kind of voice if you are going to impress people in the hall or the studio, and another it you are going to ingratiate yourself in a room; that the latter can be done on one year’s training, and the other on from five to ten. For wireless, as it improves year by year, will not only necessitate a higher standard of performance, but raise the power of discrimination.

The music heard over the airwaves at home, in other words, was now shaping the music that would be made in the home. Improving taste through broadcasting was not necessarily a democratizing process. Rather, it could reify musical and social divisions: between participant and consumer, professional and amateur. There was, though, for Fox Strangways, one positive and perhaps paradoxical outcome: it would “dethrone the diva.” Because her extravagances and diction were unsuited to mechanical reproduction, gradually “she will retire to the position of the film stars.” As will be seen in the next section, though, the presence of singers on cinema screens would also contribute to new strategies for listening to and performing lieder with, again, an international purview.

Atlantik /Atlantic In the early years of sound film it was common for European and American studios to produce “multi-­language versions” (MLV; sometimes referred to as foreign-­language versions or FLV) that were distributed to international markets. Before dubbing and subtitling became widespread, it was not simply that the sound track was translated: the whole film was immediately remade, sometimes using the same director, sets, and actors, in a different language. The first MLV was Atlantic /Atlantik /Atlantis, a retelling of the Titanic disaster, made in 1929 by British International Pictures in English and German, as a silent film, and subsequently in French. There were operetta films, such as Melodie des Herzens (1929), available in Hungarian (where it was filmed for the German studio Ufa), German, En-

82

C h a pt er T w o

glish, and French; Laurel and Hardy shorts were extended into longer versions in German, French, and Spanish. Der blaue Engel (1930), which made Marlene Dietrich an international star, was originally distributed in German and English, though those enthralled by her heavily accented voice may have thought translation barely necessary.247 MLVs pre­sent another perspective on media technology and language during the interwar period, replaying some of the debates already encountered in other sections. As with music publishing, gramophone recordings, and radio broadcasts, films promised to reach ever-­larger audiences (by 1927 there were eight hundred movie theaters, each with an average capacity of twelve hundred, in New York City—one for every six people). If silent film had erased the linguistic dimension of communication and converted it into visual stereotypes, thereby enabling easy international dissemination, the introduction of spoken language to the cinema was one of the only obstacles to Hollywood’s global domination. Non-­English-­speaking countries found, through the MLV, means to assert a degree of cinematic independence.248 Britain inevitably found it harder to resist, and there was much discomfort at “Americanization,” the primary vehicles for which were thought to be cinema and popular music.249 So far as film went, the question was who controlled circuits of distribution as much as who made the products; American films dominated British cinema networks even after the Cinematograph Films Acts of 1927, which established quotas to ensure that a certain percentage of films shown were made in Britain (including the Dominions, Canada, and Australia).250 The economic situation of the late 1920s and the resources and expertise of Hollywood still made it hard for Britain to compete, and its interest and investment in the MLV process was one way to improve quality and variety.251 That all this occurred around the same time lieder began to be sung more consistently in their original language in New York and London is probably nothing more than coincidence, but it nevertheless suggests a heightened awareness of linguistic and cultural difference in the international marketplace, contra the flattening effect of globalization.252 Songs included in MLVs were not necessarily translated or substituted, so this was one way in which sound film promised access to less easily accessible musical repertoires and their performers. The first “classical” singer to appear in a full-­length sound film was John McCormack, allegedly decided upon by Winfield Sheehan, vice president of production for William Fox, because he was famous, charming, and said to be able to speak English without a foreign accent (apparently an Irish brogue didn’t count).253 McCormack’s



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

83

contract with Fox for Song o’ My Heart (directed by Frank Borzage) was for $500,000, a sum all the more impressive for being arranged in 1929. The contract specified that McCormack would sing six to eight songs, including one theme song, in English, and three songs that may be in French, German or Italian, to be determined at the artist’s discretion.254 Some filming took place in Ireland, and all the musical tracks were recorded on site.255 McCormack played a great tenor, Sean, who returns to Ireland to help look after the children of his old sweetheart, Mary, who has been deserted by the husband her aunt forced her to marry instead of Sean and is now embarking on an ill-­advised affair with someone else. Sean is persuaded to go on tour in the United States. The central scene of the film, in terms of length and significance, is a recital in New York (in fact it was filmed in Los Angeles’s Philharmonic Auditorium). The program included songs in English (“Little Boy Blue,” “Ireland, Mother Ireland,” “I Hear You Calling Me”) and Italian (“Luoghi sereni e cari”), and there were numbers in French and German ( Jean Paul Martini’s “Plaisir d’amour” and the Minnelied “All’ mein Gedanken”), which may have been intended only for foreign audiences but seem also to have been included in the American version. The original version of Song o’ My Heart included spoken dialogue; Fox catered to international audiences by replacing it with a continuous musical score and intertitles. The original song performances were kept, however, meaning that all could hear McCormack’s voice. It was unmistakably him performing: in recital he had his usual accompanist, Edwin Schneider, and maintained his characteristic habit of holding a book of the texts while he sang (figure 2.1). There were attempts to embed the recital into the film’s world—for example, during the rendition of “Little Boy Blue” the camera cut away from the concert platform to show a little boy playing with wooly toy dog and soldiers; he kisses them goodnight and, as the singer wonders “what happened to little boy blue?” the toys are shown deserted, covered in cobwebs. Yet from its premiere—on 11 March 1930, in the unusual venue of Broadway’s 44th Street Theatre, rather than a cinema—the main appeal of Song o’ My heart was recognized to be the access it provided to the famous tenor. Apparently Schumann-­Heink advised “all students of singing” to see it, particularly for McCormack’s diction.256 The use of film as a heuristic tool was widely recognized; there was also an implication that the medium could not only introduce audiences to more repertoire, but also spread a certain manner and standard of performance.257 Schumann-­Heink herself had appeared on one of the earliest forms of sound film, the Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone, making three out of four con-

84

C h a pt er T w o

2.1 John McCormack, brochure for Song o’ My Heart. Lordprice Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

tracted shorts in September 1926 and May 1927 (each one earned her $3500).258 The Vitaphone was an important step forward because it recorded (and played back) sound on disc at the same time as the images. Schumann-­ Heink was filmed on a concert stage and presented as if viewed and heard from the audience.259 As James Lastra and Gavin Williams have observed, through their hitherto unexperienced synchronization of voice and body



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

85

the Vitaphone foregrounded “human presences”; while today it seems unbelievable that one could watch these images, shakily corresponding to their sound tracks, as somehow accessing real experiences, there remains something compelling about viewing the redoubtable form of Schumann-­ Heink at (almost) the same time as hearing her voice.260 Her first session was of “Danny Boy,” “The Rosary,” and “Stille Nacht”—it was noted that “her voice lends itself to the Vitaphone in splendid fashion” (perhaps significantly, the most suitable vocalists were said to be male)261—the second, “By the Waters of Minnetonka,” “Bolero leggiero,” and “Spinnerliedchen”; and the third, Schubert’s “Erlking” (always sung in German, yet always given its English-­language title), Oscar Rasbach’s setting of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees,” and Charles Huerter’s lullaby “Pirate Dreams.” As mentioned with regard to Schumann-­Heink’s radio broadcasts, these were songs she sang often. Their selection in this instance probably reflected, then, a need to pre­sent material that was familiar to her prospective audience and that were reliable selections for the sixty-­five-­year-­old. The decision to begin Schumann-­Heink’s third Vitaphone release with “Erlking” rather than more audience-­friendly fare, though, was striking. With shades of early gramophone recordings, the title screen of the Vitaphone warned viewers that Schubert’s song would be sung in German, and the initial musical introduction was orchestral before switching to Josefin H. Vollmer accompanying, energetic but impassive, at the piano. Deciding to include Schubert on the Vitaphone may, as has been argued with regard to the appearance of opera stars, have lent an aesthetic stamp of approval to a new form of entertainment that might otherwise be treated with suspicion.262 Through the Vitaphone one might see a famous figure such as Schumann-­Heink and be treated to a dose of high art alongside more sentimental songs. Of all Schubert’s songs, however, “Erlking” was perhaps most familiar to audiences in the United States—and also in Britain (and for that matter probably in German-­speaking lands too). Shortly after Schumann-­Heink made her Vitaphone, the singer Harry Plunket Greene declared: If one were to ask the average man which of Schubert’s songs he liked best the answer would unquestionably be “The Erlking.” [. . .] For once in a way the man in the street is right. That song is immortal, undefeatable. For nearly 120 years it has stood the test of time and has borne the battle and the breeze. It has been the warhorse of the virtuoso. It has been battered by plethoric prima donnas, smothered in birdlime

86

C h a pt er T w o

by rhythmless contraltos, boomed by manly basses, bleated at penny-­ readings, chunked on cinema pianos. It has disembowelled pirates with Douglas Fairbanks, unhorsed riders at Becher’s Brook and tracked murderers with Rin Tin Tin across the snow. Twisted, strangled, worried, ridiculed, it emerges with undiminished grace each time from sea or cesspool, undrowned, unsullied, unconquerable.263

The notion that “Erlking” could survive all that the modern world threw at it is in keeping with the rhetoric of the masterwork. With his reference to human and canine heroes, Plunket Greene also indicates the extent to which Schubert had infiltrated the world of movies (even if, in the same essay, he describes himself as stealing away from the cinema to Schubert’s “ ‘holy art’ which leaves things to the imagination”). The composer enjoyed an active, if fantastical, cinematic afterlife during the interwar years. The singer most closely associated with Schubert on film during the 1930s was the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber. He had appeared onstage in Heinrich Berté’s popular operetta Das Dreimäderlhaus in the early 1920s, including in the original production at the Theater an der Wien. The many spinoffs of Das Dreimäderlhaus serve as another reminder of the ways in which musical works were freely adapted for international markets in terms of language, style, content, and media.264 Berté’s operetta, based on Rudolf Hans Bartsch’s 1912 novel Schwammerl, had premiered in Vienna in 1916 and was hugely successful in Germany and Austria. In 1921 it was adapted for Paris as Chanson d’amour and for Broadway as Blossom Time. Such was the show’s success in New York it was played across the street from Shubert’s, at the 44th Street Theatre, at the same time; on 31 May 1923 the two troupes swapped venues mid-­performance.265 The following year it was reworked as Lilac Time, which opened at London’s Lyric Theatre. Each version had a new libretto and musical score, which included Schubert’s music to varying degrees. Berté originally used only “Ungeduld”; Sigmund Romberg inserted more lieder (notably “Ständchen” and “Ave Maria”) for Broadway, and while the Australian George Clutsam returned to Berté in many respects, he added more Schubert for London audiences. Many of the numbers from the American and British versions were released on record. Arguably it was through these anachronistic, anglophone adaptations that Schubert’s lieder became most widely known. There were reports of road companies singing Schubert songs together in the United States, while a reviewer complained in the Manchester Guardian: “it is a sad reflection on the state of the art and popular taste that Schubert’s divine melodies must



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

87

be vulgarized and tacked on to a sentimental story before the public will make it worth an artist’s while to sing them.”266 That the reviewer was probably Walter Legge—who became one of the most powerful advocates for serious lieder performance in England—foretells the counternarrative of specialization that will be pursued in the next chapters. Tauber began singing operetta in England in 1931.267 He had already been heard on Parlophone gramophone recordings and film and, over the decade, built up a strong following in concert and on the radio.268 In 1933 he appeared in a three-­and-­a-­half week run of Lilac Time at the Aldwych Theatre. This, however, was not the familiar operetta but a production devised by Tauber and Sylvio Mossée, presented in German, with a cast from the Vienna Opera Company.269 Seeing the tale in another language helped mitigate some of the English version’s harshness, its inappropriately somber tone and crude Edwardian comic relief, according to the Times.270 Although other critics expressed relief that “Schubert’s exquisitely shaped melodies rather than the ‘number’ of Charing Cross Road should be the coin of theatreland,” and the singing was in general highly praised, there were reservations about Tauber’s mannerisms, expressed most colorfully by the Observer: His performance is, of course, pulverising, no less in its comparatively straight passages than in its embellishments—those multiple encores sung in full voice, half voice, sopranic whispers, vox humana, and above all, vox populi—which squeeze, as it were, the last drop of sweetness from melodies whose honey, if occasionally a little waxy, seems inexhaustible.271

As mentioned earlier, Tauber would win over critics with his more serious performances, which demonstrated, as John Potter has discussed, his ability to shift styles according to his audience.272 This was, Peter Franklin argues, a singer adept at courting the “middlebrow,” the audience for that which lay between high and popular art, and cinema was an important vehicle for his reputation.273 A film starring Tauber as Schubert, Blossom Time, was released in 1934.274 Critics acknowledged that, were it not that Tauber “made up well as the composer and enjoys singing his songs, there is little reason why the character should be called Schubert.”275 His accent in this, his first British film, was said to be remarkably improved, though the “fine diction” of the English actors, especially Athene Seyler as the Duchess, emphasized “the in-

88

C h a pt er T w o

felicity of introducing a variety of foreign accents into a British picture.”276 There was no shortage of skepticism among critics about the historical accuracy of the film; however, most acknowledged that the sentimental affect and quality of the singing were the keys to its success: “It is the golden voice that really matters,” admitted the Illustrated London News, while the Daily Mirror described Blossom Time as “one of the most enchanting films ever made in a British studio,” recommending it to “every lover of good singing.”277 The spell was said to not even be broken by the decision of the director, Stein, to provide close-­ups of the singer’s “facial gymnastics.” The Times of India, reporting on the film’s popularity in Britain and suggesting that audiences in Bombay would demonstrate their good taste by following suit, nevertheless reassured readers that Blossom Time “is in no sense ‘high-­brow.’ ”278 In the film, Schubert and his friends arrange a concert of his music to raise funds so that the composer can marry a woman who, as ever, loves another. The famous Vogl is supposed to give the recital, but he loses his voice just before the concert. Schubert decides to sing instead and, while the crowd is restless at first, they are eventually won over by numbers such as “Heidenröslein” and “Ungeduld.” The high point is “Ständchen”: Schubert begins singing propped against the piano but gradually moves away. The audience is rapt. Tauber’s rendition is quick and relatively straight; there is no embellishment until the end, when the piano accompaniment is enhanced by the addition of harp and strings. Remarkably, this is the only song in Schubert’s recital that is sung in German; all the others are in English. It is not clear why, unless its familiarity rendered a translation unnecessary. The song obviously has an emotional cachet; when, later that evening, Schubert asks his beloved to marry him, strains of “Ständchen” are heard on cello with plucked accompaniment. A similar idea can be detected in another Schubert film from the time, which was often favorably compared to Blossom Time: the singer-­director Willi Forst’s first feature, Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933). It was released in English the following year as Unfinished Symphony, and also in Spanish, French, and Italian versions.279 The Spectator observed that there had been an exodus of Jewish filmmakers from Nazi Germany to Vienna, which had revived the Austrian film industry; with its clever use of music and atmospheric filming (featuring Hungarian landscapes), Unfinished Symphony was considered to provide a “refreshing contract to the harsh efficiency of Hollywood.”280 An indication of the esteem with which some viewed Unfinished Symphony in Britain is that it was chosen to inaugurate the new



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

89

Curzon cinema, a “modernist theatre,” in Mayfair. American critics were less sympathetic, complaining about its “mediocre and sometimes wretched photography” but noting the high-­quality performances, which featured the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Wiener Sängerknaben, the chorus of the State Opera at Vienna, and the Gypsy Band Gyula Howath, which altogether provided “a politely winning background for the immortal lieder of the great composer.”281 Hans Jaray stars as Schubert, a man of the people who against his better judgment falls for Countess Karoline Esterházy (in this the film partly follows the plot of Franz von Suppé’s 1864 operetta Franz Schubert). He first encounters the countess when she comes late to a salon performance of his new symphony. She ignores Schubert’s music, powdering her face instead; one of her admirers traces the name of the composer in dust on her mirror and, unimpressed, she blows it away. Her chatter and laughter interrupts Schubert as he begins the second movement—and the symphony, of course, remains unfinished. Later, to make amends, she arranges to take lessons from the composer. This is, again, an informal performance, sung from an armchair rather than onstage. Schubert explains that music is made up of rhythm, harmony, and melody, but that the last two elements are nothing without the first. The countess proves to be a quick learner: she swiftly moves from declaiming against the ticking metronome to singing, her eyes lifting from the page as if she already knows this music by heart, as does the accompanying sound track. She indulges in some portamento and rubato, further demonstrating her command of the material. As with all serenades, the aim is seduction, but here the traditional gender roles are subverted. The countess’s performance exhibits a knowing eroticism: she deliberately seduces Schubert with his song (and indeed the metronome, overtaken by her voice, stands erect). There is also a further level of knowingness at play in that the revelation of the countess’s musical abilities would have come as no surprise to the audience: she was played by singer Marta Eggerth, star of Viennese operetta and dozens of musical films, including works based on the lives of Liszt (Karl Komjati’s 1933 operetta Ein Liebestraum) and Bellini (Carmine Gallone’s Casta Diva [1935], also known as The Divine Spark and Bezaubernde Augen). Lieder appeared in historical contexts but, as in Leise flehen meine Lieder, in domestic, even intimate settings. For example, in Das Hofkonzert (1936, directed by Detlef Sierck) the heroine, Christine (Eggerth), sings Robert Schumann’s “Die Soldatenbraut,” op. 64 no. 1, in response to her maid’s romance with a soldier. Strikingly, while the film’s new musi-

90

C h apt er T w o

cal numbers by Edmund Nick are frequently performed in formal concert settings, Schumann is sung in the bath, with Eggerth splashing her toes in time to the music. It is a charming moment that, significantly, connects Schumann not with high art but with something more folkish. Das Hofkonzert was one of the last of Ufa’s MLV films, appearing simultaneously in German, French (La chanson du souvenir) and English (The Court Concert). Shortly afterward both Sierck and Eggerth emigrated to the United States, he to earn greater fame as the Hollywood director Douglas Sirk, she to appear in films with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly (For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Mars), while her husband, the Polish tenor Jan Kiepura, made his debut at the Met. Continental artists had long worked for the British and American film industry, but from the late 1930s, as they sought refuge from fascist regimes, they became more firmly transplanted into the anglophone world (one exception was Louis Graveure, whose performance of “Ständchen” in the film Ich sehne mich nach dir [1934] was mentioned in chapter 1).282 In some ways this period takes us away from the East Coast of the United States: by the middle of the decade flagship radio shows such as Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall had moved to Los Angeles in order to take advantage of the film stars and celebrities working in Hollywood. As is well-­known, many central European exiles of modernist persuasion, from Thomas Mann and Adorno to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ended up living within a few blocks of one another in Beverly Hills.283 The stories of their creative responses to America are beyond the scope of this book. What is clear is that their exilic identities were also expressed by their routine consumption of music in a variety of media. In his celebrated novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), Thomas Mann had described the residents of the Alpine asylum as discovering “an overflowing cornucopia of artistic enjoyment from the grave to the gay” through the apparatus of the gramophone. In that novel, the protagonist’s attachment to a recording of “Der Lindenbaum” becomes symbolic of the prewar world order; each listening is accorded the kind of attentiveness advocated by certain writers on how to appreciate “the enchanted Lied”: “Kingdoms might be founded upon it, earthly, all-­too-­earthly kingdoms, solid, ‘progressive,’ not at all nostalgic—in which the song degenerated to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity.”284 By contrast, Mann’s diaries from the 1930s and ’40s, when he lived in London, then Princeton, and finally Los Angeles, reflect the importance of music in his everyday life. He yearned for good performances of Wagner, read nineteenth-­



L anguage s of Li st eni n g

91

century novels, and watched almost anything at the cinema. The “mixture of the historic and humdrum” in the life of exile may seem a little surprising but was a common experience.285 The musician and writer Joseph Braunstein, for instance, arrived in New York from Vienna on 23 May 1940 (he eventually became the reference librarian at the music division of the New York Public Library). His diaries re­cord that alongside trips to Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, he went to Broadway shows and saw films as diverse as the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup and the epic Gone with the Wind.286 This cultural eclecticism among the exile community illustrates the fluidity of transatlantic cultural life during the interwar period. The distances traveled by individuals and by music in its many mediated forms were considerable, yet this did not necessarily mean that everything was translated into the same language or leveled to a “middlebrow.” Cultural hierarchies remained in place and, whether ultimately affirmed or denied, were constantly being questioned and renegotiated.

Three

Lieder Society

G

ramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and sound films, along with their accompanying discourse of “music appreciation,” may have expanded audiences for classical song but did not entirely displace more traditional means of cultural consumption and appreciation. In fact, in many ways they reified it. The “meaning of a format” and its impact on the listener’s experience of the musical work in the world were undeniably transformative.1 As Mark Katz explains, “every manifestation of recording’s influence”—from solitary listening to the length of works— demonstrates it to be “differently able than live music.”2 While there have been studies of the studio experience and discussions of media technologies with regard to (dis)embodiment and liveness (or deadness), they are rarely considered against the backdrop of actual performances, other than from a spatial or temporal perspective.3 Yet, as discussed in the previous chapter, it is apparent from the ways in which recordings, radio, and film were consumed and critiqued that during the interwar period they existed alongside and even in dialogue with encounters in concerts. Although those technologies undoubtedly transformed musical appreciation and practices, the process was gradual and incomplete. This chapter, then, considers the continuing role played by vocal recitals in New York and London from the perspective of venues and the constitution of audiences. Concerts continued to play an important role in the musical life of New York and London. Few new halls were built during the interwar period, and 92



Li eder S o c i e t y

93

while several struggled during the economic depression, hardly any closed. They catered to different audiences according to size and location; often attendance was determined by accessibility. While many concerts were open to all—or, at least, open to all who could afford them—there continued to be subscription series whose members were determined primarily by the society they kept. Through the example of venues in Manhattan—from public, purpose-­built halls to music societies hosted by hotels—the first section of this chapter investigates the persistence of the musicale, a type of concert that provided bread-­and-­butter music making for a number of early twentieth-­century singers, but which has rarely found its way into accounts of interwar music making, perhaps because it seemed primarily concerned with high society. The musicale, in lots of ways, represented “old world” New York, presenting continuities with the nineteenth century even as its members discovered that they could not avoid the twentieth. The series and clubs that supported them also cast lines across the Atlantic, to connect with expatriate communities in London, as discussed in the chapter’s second half. There, though, music societies also became associated with the promotion of a new world: recordings. The activities of organizations such as the Hugo Wolf Society and the London Lieder Club, which capitalized on the synergy between live and recorded musical experience, nurtured a specialist approach to lieder that had ramifications for the genre’s status and interpretation. In both New York and London, concert series and recording societies had privileged access to international networks of musicians. The influx of musicians from Nazi-­occupied territories during the 1930s presented these British and American audiences with further opportunities to hear lieder sung by native German speakers, trained in the central European tradition. In so doing they highlighted yet again tensions between nationalism and cosmopolitanism during the interwar period.

Old Worlds Histories and memoires of early twentieth-­century Manhattan portray the metropolis as a melting pot of ethnicities, where high and low cultures constantly collided.4 For instance, the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee recalled the “exciting flamboyance” of Forty-­second Street in 1931, with its legitimate theaters “sandwiched between Hubert’s Museum, hot-­dog stands and burlesque houses.”5 Amidst the financial struggles of the Depression, it seems, New Yorkers could still find a spectrum of entertainments within a few feet of one another. But another story of the city emerges when we

94

C h apt er Th r ee

start to look a little more closely at spaces associated with classical music, which were deeply territorial and concerned with, as Emily Thompson puts it, “civilization rather than nature.”6 By the beginning of the twentieth century the American Symphony Hall and Opera House were established institutions of sacralized musical culture, their audiences worshipping Beethoven and Wagner, and subscribing—so the conventional historical narrative goes—to social conventions.7 Joseph Horowitz has argued that, in fact, classical music did not become so “parochially ‘elitist’ and restrictively ‘undemocratic”’ in the United States until the interwar decades, when “sacralization turned into a popular movement, a midculture, rejecting contemporary culture, enshrining dead European masters and celebrity performers.”8 Classical vocal recitals in New York in many ways fits Horowitz’s criteria: during the 1920s and ’30s they were dominated by stars singing nineteenth-­century European repertoire. Another way to understand what Horowitz calls midculture, however, would be to see this “sacralization” as indicative of the continuing sway of the “genteel tradition” in the United States that supposedly had ended with the First World War, which preferred to treat art as ornamental and removed from ordinary life.9 According to Joan Shelley Rubin, although the attention of historians may have been directed toward the avant-­garde or the spread of mass culture, the “terrain of middlebrow culture was solid ground on which the genteel outlook could be reconstituted,” and, during the interwar period that outlook flourished.10 Describing the concerts discussed in this chapter as “middlebrow” does not seem correct. They were peopled primarily by professional musicians and high society who privileged canonical works. What is more, they took place in seemingly undemocratic spaces poised between private and public worlds, entry to which was determined by social and economic class: they seem to be the quintessential illustration of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a habitus defined by cultural capital.11 Although quite often they had an educational element, they did not have the heuristic or aspirational qualities that defined the term in Britain.12 Yet it is helpful to connect the musical practices they embodied with preceding generations and to acknowledge that the performing canon they represented was not always as the highest of the highbrow: it was indicative of tastefulness rather being challenging or avant-­garde or, indeed, strongly marked ethnically.13 In contrast to the previous century, the most significant musical venues in Manhattan during the interwar years were in midtown (figure 3.1). First, and perhaps most surprisingly, came the Hippodrome, which, when it

3.1 Annotated map of New York. Bodleian Libraries.

96

C h apt er Th r ee

3.2 John McCormack singing at the New York Hippodrome, 1918. From John McCormack: His Own Life Story, transcribed by Pierre V. R. Key (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1918), 138–39.

opened in 1905, had a stage twelve times larger than that of any legitimate theater (its swimming and diving shows were big attractions) and could seat 5200; in 1923 it was converted into a vaudeville theater, with a smaller stage, and subsequently hosted opera, sports, and finally movies.14 Star vocalists such as the Irish tenor John McCormack, along with Metropolitan opera singers including the Italian soprano Amelita Galli-­Curci and the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin, regularly gave concerts there, often for charity causes (figure 3.2). The aspirational venue for professional vocal recitalists was Carnegie Hall, which housed three auditoriums: singers often performed in the largest, which held 2800. In 1921 the Town Hall, a new, medium-­sized venue (seating 1500) opened for meetings and concerts and was considered by many the ideal space for vocal recitals. The Brooklyn Academy of Music also hosted vocal concerts, as did Kaufman Hall at the Ninety-­second Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association, which opened in 1930. There were then halls sponsored by piano and “talking machine” companies such as Aeolian and Steinway, as there were in London. The format of programs varied according to venue, with lieder a consistent if marginal presence amid a varied musical diet; an overview of these will provide some useful context for subsequent discussion. At Carnegie Hall, solo singer programs usually followed the pattern of early—classic— late romantic—popular, as demonstrated by John McCormack’s and Reinald Werrenrath’s appearances from 1923. On 26 October McCormack and



Li eder S o c i e t y

97

his regular pianist, Edwin Schneider, shared the stage with the cellist Lauri Kennedy, who was accompanied by Dorothy Kennedy. Movements from Tartini and Senaille were followed by arias by Bach (“Seht, was die Liebe tut” from the cantata Ich bin der guter Hirt, BWV 85) and Handel (“Vanne sì, superba và,” from Giustino); that group closed with an encore, Samuel Endicott’s arrangement of “The Heavy Hours.” A movement from a concerto by Boccherini prefaced Brahms’s “Die Mainacht” and “Komm bald,” Rachmaninoff ’s “U moyego okna” (“Before My Window”) and Tchaikovsky’s “Otchevo?” (“Why?”), followed by two encores: Rachmaninoff ’s “K detyam” (“To the Children”) and Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Folk songs arranged by Herbert Hughes and Charles Villiers Stanford were sung before Kennedy played “Melody” by Rachmaninoff and Zsolt’s “Dragonflies”; the concert closed with McCormack singing Dunhill, Macmurrough, and Quilter before a final flourish of Hummel’s “Hallelujah!” The baritone Werrenrath, accompanied by Herbert Carrick, on 11 November, did not share his program with another soloist but followed a similar pattern: Ochs, Haydn, and Bach were followed by Schubert (“Du bist die Ruh’ ” and “Der Doppelgänger”), Grieg, and Sinding. The first encore was the Irish folk song “Over the Hills and Far Away.” There followed four spirituals with an encore of the Largo from Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony (entitled “Going Home”). Next came shanties, American songs, a spoken recitation of “On the Road to Mandalay,” and, as the final encore, “Kashmiri Song” from Woodforde-­F inden’s Four Indian Love Lyrics. The only singer to pre­sent a recital nearly exclusively of lieder at the Carnegie was Elena Gerhardt, but even she broke up her program of 16 January 1923 (accompanied by Coenraad Bos) of Franz, Beethoven, Brahms, Jensen, Erich Wolff, and Strauss with a penultimate group by Smith (“Rain on the Down”), Crist (“Coloured Stars”), and Fox (“Tears”), presumably to offer something in the American vernacular.15 Gerhardt and Bos had performed Die Winterreise at the Town Hall on 9 December 1922 (the program announced that the songs would be sung “without interruption”), but this was highly unusual. More typical was Alexander Kipnis’s recital of 19 October 1923, which included Haydn and Schubert’s “Das Meer,” “Ständchen,” “Der Wanderer,” and “Abschied.” There were four further vocal recitals at the Town Hall that week, two devoted to modern repertoire (Hercules Pascal and Penelope Davies), one to English song (Calista Regers), and one to Italian (Nana Genovese); then the venue was taken over for four days by the Ukrainian National Chorus. A similarly disparate range of concerts occurred during the last week of October 1923 at

98

C h a pt er Th r ee

the Aeolian Hall. Among them were four song recitals. The first was determinedly populist: an afternoon concert by Lawrence Tibbett, Irene Holland Nicoll, and the actor Violet Horner, which included a second group of Schumann (“The Chestnut Tree”), Schubert (“Hark! Hark! The Lark!”), and Strauss (“Serenade”). The second was the Canadian soprano Éva Gauthier’s infamous recital that programmed Schoenberg, Bartók, Milhaud, and Hindemith next to George Gershwin.16 As well as proposing numerous concert reforms, from providing comfier seats to getting rid of intermissions, Gauthier promoted living composers, arguing: “It is futile [. . .] to repeat forever the Schubert, Schumann and Brahms songs, lovely as they may be. [. . .] People who are dead do not need our help any longer.”17 While some critics enthused about the inclusion of jazz in concerts, agreeing with Gauthier that it was representative of American music, others objected that neither the venue of the concert hall nor Gauthier’s “straight” performance style was appropriate.18 Apparently Schumann-­Heink and Gerhardt attended one of Gauthier’s rehearsals (Paul Whiteman was there too): they listened “with keen enjoyment” until Gauthier sang Gershwin’s “Stairway to Paradise,” and then they burst into “good round teutonic laughter.”19 Gerhardt herself appeared at the same venue that week, presenting Dvořák’s Four Biblical Songs, a group of lieder by Weingartner, Brahms’s Six Gypsy Songs, and a Strauss group (“Frühlingsgedränge,” “Schlechtes Wetter,” “Hat gesagt-­bleibt’s nichts dabei,” “Wiegenlied,” and “Zueignung”). M. H. Flint, reporting from New York for the Musical Times, compared Gauthier unfavorably with Gerhardt, because of the former’s “excruciating” repertoire: “From this disciple of the moderns, we turn to the disciple of the classics, and listen to Elena Gerhardt, rejoicing that the days have not departed when we can hear real music performed by real artists.”20 The fourth vocal recital at the Aeolian Hall during that last week of October was the husband-­and-­wife tenor-­and-­contralto team of Reed Miller and Nevada van der Veer: she sang Strauss’s “Ruhe meine seele” and “Cäcilie,” and they joined together for Schumann duets. There was also a concert given under the auspices of the Beethoven Association (of which more later), one violin recital, three piano recitals, one “noonday musicale,” and a concert by Elsie Janis and her concert company—a recasting of her wartime “gang” of entertainers. Beyond those at public concert halls, other types of musical entertainments were available to cultural and social elites, primarily through subscription concert series attached to societies and clubs. Clubs had played an important role in New York society throughout the nineteenth cen-



Li eder S o c i e t y

99

tury. Initially they represented those families who claimed to have built the city: those descended from Dutch settlers, who first formed the exclusive Union club in 1836 and then—as the Civil War and personal differences divided allegiances—the Knickerbocker, the Brook, and so on.21 There were clubs for university alumni, for professions (press, law, the stage), for political parties, and for societal and self-­improvement, including artistic and literary clubs representing different generations and varying levels of formality.22 Some had their own clubhouses; others met in peoples’ homes. An individual’s membership was listed in his or her entry in the Social Register, a catalog of prominent families (modeled on England’s Burke’s Peerage and Landed Gentry and Who’s Who) published yearly in New York from 1886. Club membership, according to the historian David Hammack, thus “served as a better index of social standing than presence on a single hostess’s guest list.”23 Their multiplication, however, did more to divide than to unify the city’s wealthy, particularly with the influx of those families made newly rich by the railroads and oil and mining industries. Who was excluded, inevitably, was as significant as who was included. For example, the high proportion of Germans among the city’s economic elite (the second-­ largest group after those of American, Canadian, or British origin) may have created “an independent and almost self-­sufficient German world within New York,” but Hammack points out that they were excluded from most clubs: only the Deutscher Verein, founded in 1842 to support the intellectual, cultural, and social life of Germans and Americans of German ancestry living in New York City, was listed in the Social Register.24 In response, they—and another prominent but doubly quarantined group, German Jews—formed their own organizations, many of which had musical associations. The Deutscher Liederkranz der Stadt New York, founded as a men’s singing society in 1847, translated its name and changed its official language to English only after the First World War (concert programs were still typically printed in German).25 Replete with bowling alleys, card rooms, and a bar (beer was not allowed to be drunk during rehearsals), the Liederkranz emphasized traditional, gemütlich qualities. Along similar lines, the Bohemians—intended to promote both social intercourse and the interests of musicians—began in the famous New York German restaurant Lüchows in 1907. Members were designated either “active” (meaning that they were professional musicians, working within fifty miles of New York City), “associates” (who were not professionals but were interested in music), or “non-­resident active” (professionals working further than fifty

100

C h apt er Th r ee

miles away).26 Socializing and music making were combined at their regular meetings on the first Monday of the month, which ranged from informal “smokers” to elaborate banquets (to which women were sometimes invited), cabaret, operas, and chamber music concerts, some honoring visiting musicians.27 Lieder often featured in their concerts, though, like the umlaut in Lüchow’s name, they were dropped during wartime.28 It was not unusual for there to be an educational element to programs: Max Heinrich spoke about “The Song Singer’s Art,” with illustrations from Schubert and Schumann, at a Monthly Musicale in November 1914 that also featured piano music by Arnold Schoenberg and Lee Ornstein; at a reception in honor of Cyril Scott, in 1921, his lecture “What Constitutes a Musical Nation” was framed by performances of Loewe, Schumann, and Alfred Hile by Nelson Illingworth, accompanied by Coenraad Bos. Music appreciation was also fundamental to the Society of the “Friends of Music,” formed in 1912, one wag said, to allow “the masses to hear and the learned to enjoy Bach, and Bach, and more Bach.”29 While the Society’s concerts included performances of lieder (including more challenging pieces such as Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, Mahler’s Rückert-­Lieder, and some Wolf ) the majority of programs consisted of choral music (again, ambitious works: Haydn’s Creation, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Schubert masses, Hans Pfitzner’s Von deutscher Seele, and Artur Honegger’s Le roi David), co-­opting the chorus from the Metropolitan Opera. The “Friends of Music” was funded privately, by a mixture of musicians and businessmen. Its directorship was led by the Lanier family, who had made their money in railways; other directors included the lawyer for the Metropolitan Opera House, Alfred Seligsberg; E. J. Berwind, who owned one of the largest coal-­mining companies in the country; the wife of the banker Otto Kahn, a patron of the Metropolitan Opera House;30 Mrs. Marshall Field, a transatlantically renowned hostess and the widow of a Chicago department store owner known at the time of their 1905 marriage as the “world’s richest man” (he died five months later); Adolph Lewison, a German Jewish immigrant who made his fortune mining copper and was a noted philanthropist to both Columbia University and the arts; Gerrish Milligan, founder of the Irving National Exchange Bank; Mrs. Adolf Pavenstedt, whose first husband was the German ambassador, her second the former head of the banking house G. Amsinck and Company;31 and the owner of the Astor Hotel, F. A. Muschenheim. An insight into the Society’s financial situation can be gained from an advertisement for funds posted in 1926, which admitted that it had been running at a loss—­



Li eder S o c i e t y

101

reported to be over $40,000—for over a decade; its debts were cleared by a single donor.32 By contrast, the Beethoven Association, founded by the pianist Harold Bauer in 1919, brought together established artists to make “musicians’ music.”33 Members were not paid for their participation in concerts, and they voted on how the proceeds of each season should be spent. Liberated from financial constraints, the Association declared itself unconcerned with popularity and emphasized connoisseurship: for instance, lights were kept on during performances so that the audience could read the programs. Significantly, the Beethoven Association was one of the only places in the immediate aftermath of the First World War where German-­texted songs could still be heard. Yet, as will be seen, this did not mean that they presented dedicated Liederabende. The initial members of the Beethoven Association represented some of the most influential performers and teachers of the day. On the executive committee sat, alongside President Bauer (born in London to a German father), Adolfo Betti (the Italian leader of the Flonzaley Quartet), Franz Kneisel (the Romanian-­born leader of the Kneisel Quartet), the New York composer and pianist Rubin Goldmark (who founded the musicians’ club the Bohemians), and the violinist and violist Louis Svencenski. Among the associate members were several conductors: the Austrian-­born Artur Bodansky; Frank and Walter Damrosch; the Frenchman Pierre Monteux; Mahler’s replacement at the New York Philharmonic, the Czech Josef Stránský; the German-­born Frederick Stock, director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the London-­born conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski; and the American violinists and conductors Sam Franko and David Mannes. The Association’s secretary was the librarian and musicologist Oscar Sonneck. Composers were represented by Arnold Volpe, Arthur Whiting, and George Chadwick. This list of names shows that despite attempts to loosen Europe’s grip over classical music making in New York, the establishment remained European or European trained (and solidly masculine). All of the Americans—Goldmark, Chadwick, Franko, Mannes, Sonneck, and Whiting—had studied in Europe.34 Kneisel and Goldmark both taught at the Institute of Musical Art, which had been founded by Frank Damrosch in 1905; Bauer taught at the Manhattan School of Music; and David Mannes had founded a music school in his own name in 1916. The Association stressed its international credentials and forged links with institutions such as the newly founded Salzburg Festival.35 By 1925 the Beethoven Association had about ninety “active” members,

102

C h a pt er Th r ee

including the accompanists Coenraad Bos, Paula Hegner, and Michael Raucheisen, and the singers Julia Culp, Claire Dux, Florence Easton, Fraser Gange, Éva Gauthier, Elena Gerhardt, Dusolina Giannini, Alma Gluck, Louis Graveure, Richard Hamlin, John McCormack, Margaret Matzenauer, George Meader, Elly Ney, Sigrid Onegin, Ernestine Schumann-­ Heink, and Herbert Witherspoon.36 Its programs were impressive: a concert in January 1922 featured Gerhardt, Pablo Casals, and Paul Kochanski (the committee hoped Richard Strauss would also attend). Many considered it a privilege to perform there: McCormack, keen to assert his high-­ art credentials, was delighted to have impressed the Association.37 If lieder were included they were usually heard as a group of songs sandwiched between selections of chamber music: for example, at the Aeolian Hall on 8 January 1923, Mme. Charles Cahier sang Frauenliebe und -­Leben, accompanied by Bauer (there was a request in the program not to applaud between songs), in between performances of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-­flat Major, op. 70 no. 2, and Brahms’s First Piano Quartet in G Minor, op. 25. In the following season, on 26 November, the soprano Claire Dux, accompanied by Richard Hageman, performed, as their second group, Brahms’s “In Waldeseinsamkeit,” “Geheimnis,” and “Vergebliches Ständchen,” and Wolf ’s “Die Bekehrte,” “Su-­Su,” and “Elfenlied.” Incidentally, an advertisement in that program for a Beethoven recital on 4 December by Frederich Freemantel explained that the songs would be sung in English and that, while their value had been queried, “they will prove of musical interest and educational value to the serious-­minded student,” indicating the relative unfamiliarity of Beethoven’s lieder and the educational aspect of the Association. An emphasis on attentive listening was revealed also at an all-­Schubert concert given on 27 December 1928 (perhaps a belated contribution to the composer’s centenary discussed in chapter 2), the program for which explained that “to preserve the unity of their programs, the artists of the Beethoven Association have agreed to give no encores.” Between the Octet and the Quartet op. 29, a selection from Die schöne Müllerin was sung by Fraser Gange.38 Even this august institution, it seems, was not ready to consume whole cycles. At first the Beethoven Association met in rooms on West Fortieth Street, sometimes using the Aeolian Hall for concerts, as evidenced above. Toward the end of the 1920s the Juilliard School offered a permanent home in one of its buildings on Claremont Avenue and 122nd Street (which now houses the Manhattan School of Music). Members of the committee could see the benefit of being in the environs of Columbia University: moving “to



Li eder S o c i e t y

103

a quarter already dignified by the atmosphere of a real university might accomplish much towards the establishment of a centre of culture and art in our city,” acknowledged Bauer. However, he was wary of making their concerts overtly educational (“an impression of this kind, once formed, would be difficult to eradicate”).39 Moreover, the Upper West side seemed remote from midtown, which was the city’s musical hub. “There is no valid reason why persons in motors should not drive up Riverside Drive as easily as Fifth Avenue except they do not!” observed Sonneck, who preferred the option of giving concerts at the Town Hall: “Its public, while not exactly musical, is very intelligent, and one with which it would be advantageous to be identified physically (as it were)—in distinction, for instance, to being neighborly with an ordinary apartment house!”40 The significance Sonneck attributed to location and architecture in defining musical audiences was justified: mapping out venues in the city demonstrates that place and space mattered very much in attracting the right kind of clientele. As the working-­class neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, with their garment-­makers and sweatshops, spread to the West Thirties and Forties off Sixth Avenue, the city’s elite moved uptown in order to get away from the hustle and bustle of commercial life.41 They brought with them their clubs and new, ever more luxurious styles of apartment and hotel living. It was in this rarefied world that the most obvious manifestations of the musical “genteel tradition” flourished. Despite the spread of mass media, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a swath of high society—predominantly white Anglo-­Saxon Protestant women— regularly hosted and attended musicales in Manhattan. This was a kind of concert with roots in an earlier age of “at homes” and salon concerts that maintained a social as well as a musical aspect, but it was not domestic or amateur music making; they were professional performances. The relocation of musicales to the modern space of the hotel partly gestured toward the age of celebrity. It was also a way for a group of women who typically had no public role to begin to assume one, as patrons and philanthropists. The musicales exemplify how certain kinds of entertainment were branded as a luxury commodity within the network of societies, clubs, and concert series that made up musical life in the metropolis. As with the concerts on board transatlantic ocean liners, hotel musicales signaled participation in a kind of moderately cosmopolitan civilization: artists were a mixture of native and foreign, and the repertoire they sang was predominantly European, but with some American music. Attending hotel musicales was not cheap. Eight-­concert subscriptions

104

C h a pt er Th r ee

to the Biltmore Friday Morning Musicales for the 1920–21 season were $20 for a single seat; boxes seating six people were $150. A war tax of 10 percent was levied on all tickets. (For comparison, that season a five-­seat box at the Metropolitan Opera House for twenty-­three performances was $805, and a ticket in the first three rows of the family circle was $41.50.) According to the surviving programs, normally they featured a well-­known singer or two (if the latter, usually male and female) and an instrumentalist (usually a string player or pianist). The following examples were typical: on 25 January 1928, the newly minted tenor Louis Graveure (see chapter 1), the coloratura soprano Emma Otero, and the harpist Alberto Salvi appeared on the same program at a Biltmore Friday Morning Musicale. Graveure included some lieder in his first group (Brahms’s “An eine Aeolsharfe” and Dvořák’s “Songs My Mother Taught Me”) but finished with “Salut demeure” from Gou­nod’s Faust; his second group consisted of songs by Elgar and Clutsam, as well as “La donna è mobile.” On 9 November 1928, also at the Biltmore series, the German soprano Frieda Hempel appeared alongside the American baritone Donald Pirnie and the violinist Erna Rubinstein.42 In her first group Hempel sang Schumann’s “Widmung,” the “Old English” song “I’d Be a Butterfly,” Hahn’s “Fêtes galantes,” and Reger’s “Virgin’s Lullaby” and “The Finch,” sung from manuscript (several of these were numbers Hem­ pel had sung at her “Jenny Lind” concerts).43 Her second stint featured Puc­cini’s “Mimì” and Strauss’s “Blue Danube Waltz.” Hempel appeared often at the Biltmore Musicales, advertisements hailing her as “not being an American by birth, but by adoption”; although one of world’s greatest artists, it explained, she was known as “ ‘The Lady of the People,’ so very democratic and sympathetic is she in her tastes.”44 The notion that these luxury events could also be aesthetically accessible complicates categorization of these concerts as highbrow; social exclusivity did not necessarily equate to particularly esoteric musical taste. The clubs and societies that proliferated in Manhattan were in many ways concerned with community building, to social but also to political or cultural ends. Many of the professional women’s clubs founded in the 1860s—such as the Heterodoxy Club—played important roles in nurturing the American women’s suffrage movement. These establishments tended to provide little more than opportunities for friends to meet for luncheon, perhaps followed by a talk and some discussion.45 Some offered rooms for out-­of-­town visitors, which was helpful because most hotels would not allow unchaperoned women to stay there. In 1903 the Colony Club, the first exclusively social club founded by and for women, opened at 120 Madi-



Li eder S o c i e t y

105

son Avenue (between East Thirtieth and Thirty-­first, on the west side of Madison Avenue), and it was in this kind of venue that leisure and cultural activities came to the fore. Said to resemble a “comfortable and dignified private townhouse, rather than a clubhouse,” its seven hundred residential members and two hundred nonresidential members could enjoy “freedom from personal care and responsibility.”46 The interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe, emphasized feminine lightness and modesty—there were no dark dens or gilded faucets, but rather delicate fabrics, pale walls, tiled floors, and wicker chairs. (Music had its place: a gallery opened on to the assembly room from the mezzanine.) However, many of the activities its members pursued transgressed traditional gender boundaries: the women, described by one observer as being as “hard and fit as any man,” nonetheless had access to “joys unknown in fashionable men’s clubs.”47 They worked out in the gymnasium; enjoyed boxing, Turkish baths, and massages; dived into the plunge pool wearing regulation deep-­red bathing costumes; smoked cigarettes; talked headlines, horse racing, and opera; drank alcohol; and played bridge for hours. In 1916 the Colony Club moved to 564 Park Avenue, a neo-­Georgian building by the fashionable architects Delano and Aldrich, who also designed new homes for the Knickerbocker, Brook, and Colony Clubs (as well as the Grand Central Art Galleries, buildings for Cornell and Yale, and parts of the original La Guardia Airport).48 As well as the usual lounges, dining rooms, and bedrooms, it housed a two-­story ballroom, a basement swimming pool and spa that connected via an express lift to a gym on the fifth floor, two squash courts, servants’ rooms, and kennels for members’ pets. The Colony’s membership, explained the journalist Anna McClure Scholl, represented the “inner social circle of the metropolis, with only such charity towards the arts as would include women of indisputable talent and achievement.”49 Such feminine discernment was in keeping with the characterization of American architecture provided by George Santayana in his critique of the “Genteel Tradition” and serves to connect the exteriors of these buildings with what went on within them. Santayana described the country has having two mentalities, reflected in the colonial mansion (surreptitiously modernized for comfort) and the skyscraper standing side-­by-­ side: “The American Will inhabits the sky-­scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise, the other is all genteel tradition.”50 Collaboration between Will and Intellect—or perhaps money and culture—is evident in the next, ex-

106

C h a pt er Th r ee

tended example of the musicale, the story of which begins before the First World War but the continued existence of which into the 1940s supports Rubin’s view that the genteel tradition did not—as Santayana had hoped— vanish during the interwar period but instead was reconfigured. About seventy members of the Colony Club attended the Bagby Musical Mornings, one of the longest-­running Manhattan musical institutions of the first half of the twentieth century.51 They were run by Alfred Morris Bagby, invariably described in the press as “a dapper gentleman with a continental background” (as a piano student in Germany he had played whist with Liszt). Although from Rushville, Illinois, Bagby was well connected in old New York society, with its emphasis on European ancestry and culture. (Described as “old-­fashioned as a clavichord,” Bagby attended the Bayreuth Festival every year; indeed, such was his dedication he was made an honorary citizen of the town.)52 The history of the Bagbys, as they were affectionately known, demonstrates the influence of high society—­ especially its women—on musical life in the city, and its gradual erosion in the face of new forms of entertainment and changing social hierarchies. It also, and importantly for our purposes, illustrates the way the spaces in which music was encountered shaped its significance and how music could be used to inform the understanding and use of those spaces. Bagby had begun the series in 1891 as illustrated talks for two dozen invited women in his studio at 152 West Fifty-­seventh Street, right by the newly built Carnegie Hall:53 examples were played by another Liszt student, the Russian-­born pianist Arthur Friedheim, and Bagby’s maid, Mamie Rose—whom he later memorialized in a novel—provided food.54 Soon there was not enough room to seat everybody who wished to subscribe to the series, so when the Waldorf Hotel was built in 1893, the Bagbys moved to its ballroom. Once established there, Bagby’s lectures were replaced with recitals typically featuring three artists (vocalists and instrumentalists—the latter were usually violinists or pianists). They took place on eight Monday mornings during the social season and were over in time for luncheon at 1 P.M. Although Nellie Melba’s initial response to her invitation was apparently “Sing! I can’t spit at 11 A.M.,” the elite audience and generous fee offered by the Bagbys attracted the most famous artists of the day.55 Their repertoire (as well as their dress) was strictly vetted by Bagby, who escorted women artists on to the stage, which was invariably decorated with two gilt baskets of American Beauty roses. Doormen were imported from the Metropolitan Opera House, and the ticket prices were similar: a single seat



Li eder S o c i e t y

107

at the Bagbys cost $5 in 1940, the same as the grand tier or orchestra circle at the Met. The soprano Frieda Hempel explained, “We presented good but rather light music, entertaining and pleasant”; Time magazine commented that Bagby presented the finest artists but “spared his audiences heavyweight music.”56 An anonymous handwritten note in a program reported, with evident glee, “Not one note of modernistic music!”57 A program featuring two Met stars, the Czech soprano Jarmila Novotna and the American tenor Richard Crooks, was typical: it included songs by Frank Van der Stucken, Frank Bridge, and Dvořák, and scenes from La traviata and Manon as well as virtuosic violin playing by Mischa Elman. That said, when stars such as Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann visited, there were renditions of lieder and Wagner. On 21 November 1938 their program included, alongside Schubert (Lehmann, “Du bist die Ruh’ ”; Melchior, “Der Doppelgänger”), Schumann duets (“Ich denke dein,” “Er und sie,” and “Unter’m Fenster”), Brahms (Lehmann, “Meine Liebe ist grün”), and Grieg (“En Svane”), “Lohengrin’s Farewell,” “Elsa’s Dream,” and the “Spring Song and Love Duet” from act 1 of Die Walküre. The Austrian Jewish violinist Erika Morini (who had made her American debut in 1921 and moved to the United States in 1938) was also on the program. The audience for the Bagbys was predominantly female: one journalist described the average audience as eighteen hundred women and fifty men.58 You might expect nothing else of an event held on a weekday morning, but it was slightly unusual for a music club, which as we have seen tended to have a more masculine set of subscribers. The strong female presence at the Bagbys was in keeping, though, with the powerful role women played in this particular branch of society, in which, as the historian Lewis Erenberg observes, men busied themselves with money making, giving their wives free rein in the cultural realm.59 However, there was a tension between the sense of privilege and exclusivity that accompanied the Bagbys—the concerts were not advertised, and no one was invited to attend—and the large numbers involved.60 What is more, although the popularity of the concerts was said to indicate how integral music was to this segment of society, there were no substantial reviews of the performances, nor were the names of artists typically announced in advance. Instead, as was typical of reviews of salon concerts in other countries, there were simply lists in the newspapers of who went and what they wore.61 The transferal of the Bagbys to the Waldorf reflected some important social changes in the city. The nineteenth-­century luxury hotel—large-­scale,

108

C h apt er Th r ee

with a distinct civic presence, public rooms, and professionalized management and staff—has been considered a uniquely American phenomenon; Henry James wondered whether “the hotel-­spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most finding itself.” James wrote extensively, in his novels and in the travelogue The American Scene (1908), about “hotel-­civilization.” Likening the busy streets of Manhattan to a surging river, he described how the survivor scrambling out of the current and up the bank finds in the amplitude of the entertainment awaiting him an instant sense as of applied restoratives. The amazing hotel-­world quickly closes round him; with the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is transported to conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy, operating— and with proportionate perfection—by laws of their own and expressing after their fashion a complete scheme of life.62

The self-­contained world of the hotel provided a sanctuary from the dirt and din of the metropolis, yet they remained transient, restless spaces, filled with people waiting; either to move on somewhere else or to be entertained.63 Spending time in this manner, as much as hurrying along city streets, was a notable feature of modern life.64 Many members of the older generation were not necessarily comfortable in this new world of what Thorstein Veblen famously characterized as “conspicuous leisure.”65 For the Knickerbockers, the peripatetic inhabitants of “hotel civilization” seemed to have no roots or sense of tradition.66 However, high prices, dress codes, racial discrimination, and gender segregation meant that guests continued to represent the city’s elite, if an ever-­expanding one.67 “Representation” is a significant word here. However civilized and self-­ contained, New York’s luxury hotels certainly were not private residences: in the words of the historian Justin Kaplan, they were “temples of pleasure and theaters of cultural and social life in a great city.”68 Ladies’ lounges and restaurants were given prominent positions at the front of hotels and had large windows through which passers-­by could watch the relatively new phenomenon of rich women at their leisure, without chaperones. Unlike previous establishments, there was no special women’s entrance to the Waldorf, and beginning in 1907, women could dine alone in its restaurants at any hour.69 As the architectural historian Annabel Wharton notes, the hotel thereby “sanctioned the new practice of holding private entertain-



Li eder S o c i e t y

109

ments in public by offering such functions a privileged locus. The Waldorf-­ Astoria thus sustained the emergence of elite women into the public sphere in the ballroom as well as the restaurant at the turn of the century.”70 It is precisely this emergence of elite women that the Bagbys seemed to facilitate, though the transition from private to public space, and between old and new New York, was sometimes awkward.71 The core audience of the Bagbys came from high society: even the title Musical Mornings apparently was suggested by Louise McAllister, daughter of Ward McAllister, who had coined the phrase “the Four Hundred.” That was the number that represented the best of New York society, McAllister claimed: “if you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” Four hundred also happened to be the number of guests at a ball thrown by Mrs. William Backhouse Astor in 1892.72 Mrs. Astor lived next door to the new hotel, the ballroom of which was many times bigger than hers.73 Although she was an early sponsor of the Bagbys, she was so upset by her private dwelling’s being overshadowed by the thirteen-­story Waldorf (which was owned by her nephew) that she moved uptown, and her son built the Astoria Hotel in its place. Eventually the two buildings were annexed, to form the Waldorf-­Astoria, joined by “Peacocks’ Alley,” along which fashionable society paraded. It was said that 25,000 people passed through every day: bringing, according to one wit, “exclusiveness to the masses.”74 In 1929 the Waldorf-­Astoria was torn down, to be rebuilt closer to Grand Central Station on Park Avenue. It was replaced by what seemed, symbolically, to represent the modern city: the Empire State Building. “When the skyscraper sets its heel on the old hotel,” Dudley Nichols of the New York World reflected, “it will grind into oblivion the very headstone of old New York, the New York of the ’90s and the 1900s, of Fifth Avenue instead of Park Avenue homes, of pre-­war and ante-­prohibition, of 15-­cent whiskey and the 5-­cent ‘segar.’ ”75 The Literary Digest proclaimed the demise of the first Waldorf-­Astoria the end of a “social epoch”; Dorothy Dayton, writing for New York Hotel, claimed that the new hotel—which opened in 1931—represented “a bigger, faster New York, more splendid, more powerful, and much more sophisticated.”76 It boasted not only the most stories of any hotel built in the city so far (and the most gold-­plated doorknobs), but also a raft of advanced media technology: it had the largest hotel telephone station, the largest hotel player organ, and an extensive radio and amplification system (the latter installed by Western Electric; when it came to be

110

C h a pt er Th r ee

replaced in the 1940s, the technicians found the speakers were still more sensitive than the available replacements).77 The new ballroom was over four times the size of the old one: it had 38,000 square feet of floor space and was four stories tall.78 Hempel complained that in the new ballroom the Musicales lost their “unique atmosphere,” for the artists were now too far from the audience “for the successful projection of intimate songs.”79 But she was missing the point. Through hosting radio shows and, indeed, concert series, not to mention charity events and meetings of national associations, the Waldorf-­Astoria became, in the words of none other than President Herbert Hoover, a “community institution.”80 The Bagbys might have been expected to die along with the old hotel, but they ran continuously until their founder’s death in 1941 (a further sign of their success was the establishment of commercial musicales at other hotels, such as the Biltmore). There were some changes—in 1925 Bagby’s cousin, the musician George Littlejohn Bagby (1881–1962) founded the Bagby Music Lovers’ Foundation, which provided pensions for musicians who had become impoverished in retirement (recipients included Cosima Wagner, Minnie Hauk, Alice Nielsen, Emma Calvé, and Antonio Scotti). However, as was typical of the Astor set, less emphasis was placed on philanthropy than on entertainment.81 There continued to be long descriptions in the press of who attended the Bagbys, what they wore, and to whom they chatted. One of the striking things about the series was that they were always considered out of time. An article in the New Yorker from 1925, had noted that Bagby’s “cheeks were as ruddy as ever, his manners as unassailable, his social list as extensive, his music as qualitied, and his subscribers as respectable as they are said to have been thirty-­five years ago. Almost two generations [. . . of ] people called Hoppin, Whitney, Iselin, Haskell, Twombly give it their ears. [. . .] If anything is a survival of the Age of Innocence it is this.”82 Only the Waldorf “could have incubated and nourished the Bagby institution,” the New Yorker claimed, for, unlike other hotels around the city, it had not felt compelled to alter its atmosphere to suit the twentieth century. Ten years later, in the new hotel, at a concert featuring the Norwegian soprano Eide Norena, the American baritone Richard Crooks, and the Polish-­American violinist Roman Tolenberg, the ballroom was reported to have overflowed with “elegant dowagers in Queen Mary hats, a few of the younger matrons, a sprinkling here and there of post-­ debutantes seriously interested in music and a good proportion of masculine music lovers, very proper in morning coats and spats. [. . .] Pearls and black velvet far outran any other fashion note in the group” (figure 3.3).83 At



Li eder S o c i e t y

111

3.3 The New Yorker, 19 December 1925. Cover. Image Licensing | Condé Nast Licensing.

a post-­concert luncheon in November 1940, Colonel G. Creighton Webb, “dandy of the elegant 80s,” chatted with Mrs. Orme Wilson while their host divided his time between Princess Alexandre de Caraman-­Chimay and Lady Lister-­Kaye. [. . .] “This is the first time in many years that Mrs. Roosevelt has not been to Mr Bagby’s opening concert,” said Miss Mary Pearsall Field,

112

C h apt er Th r ee

member of New York society’s old guard, addressing Henry Theodore Leggett. [. . .] “It’s like home with the Bagbys on again,” Lawrence Smith Butler told Ferrars Heaton Tows, who reminisced with Frieda Hempel about the golden age of opera.

When Colonel Henry T. Blair complimented Mrs. George W. Crawford on “the best looking hat I’ve seen all year!” she replied, laughing, “I shoot the birds myself.”84 It is apparent from accounts such as these that the Morning Musicales continued to be first and foremost a “social must”; not to attend them, as well as the opera and the Philharmonic, “was to show yourself a rank outsider.”85 Bagby was praised for having “a knack for setting social prestige to music,” which perhaps meant that the reputation of the artists counted for more than what or how they performed (Hempel admitted “they clapped gloved hands with great gentility and often left me wondering if they really had enjoyed my singing!”).86 More likely it meant, as the New York Times recognized, that the audience of the Bagbys were “the backbone of old Knickerbocker society”: it included faces “never photographed in a night club or restaurant. On the other hand, Mr. Bagby does not overlook the fashionables of today, wives of our big industrialists and the international set”; Greta Garbo, star of the Oscar-­winning film Grand Hotel (1932), visited, apparently without causing a stir.87 At the same time the presence of older representatives of European culture suggested the strength and longevity of this sector of society’s transatlantic connections; the Belgian Caraman-­Chimay family were well-­known for their patronage of the arts in a form that, according to Jann Pasler, might be understood as international diplomacy.88 The published lists of subscribers to the Bagbys, as well as the names included in newspaper accounts, reveal a group circumscribed by neighborhood, class, and religion.89 Most Bagby attendees lived within range of the Waldorf-­Astoria, if not actually on Fifth or Park Avenue then between East Fiftieth and Eightieth Streets.90 Many were involved in industry and banking. There were a number of single women listed among the subscribers: some were well-­connected spinsters, with an interest in the arts. (Margaret Wallace, for instance, was the granddaughter of two popular nineteenth-­century writers: General Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben-­Hur: A Tale of the Christ [1880], and the poet and novelist Susan Arnold Elston; Wallace was a book critic for the New York Times during the 1930s and ’40s and published an influential early review of Zora Neale Hurston.) Some



Li eder S o c i e t y

113

were musicians or music teachers, and several had an interest in the arts, if not as practitioners then as collectors; Bagby himself, as well as writing a couple of sentimental novels, had a famous collection of music manuscripts, paintings, and furnishings.91 Importantly, the subscriber lists also indicates who did not attend the Bagbys. There were few major retailers despite, as historian William Leach has explored, the prominent role played by department stores and hotels as sponsors of high culture.92 There were no residents of the German neighborhood of Yorkville, which lies east of Third Avenue, between Seventy-­ ninth and Ninety-­sixth Streets. And there were hardly any native-­born Catholics or Jewish names among them despite, to my knowledge, there being only a scattering of Masons among the subscribers.93 Looking briefly into some of the backgrounds of the bachelors and widows described at the 1940 luncheon, and the location of their homes, can help explain just how tightly knit this community was and the way in which they inhabited the city was changing. Mrs. Orme Wilson, widow of the American ambassador to Haiti, was the youngest daughter of Mrs. Astor, of “Four Hundred” fame. Warren and Wetmore designed for her a five-­story mansion at 3 East Sixty-­fourth Street, just round the corner from her mother’s new place; Caruso sang at the musicale housewarming in 1904. However, as is indicated by other addresses among the Bagby group, by the 1920s Upper East Side mansions were falling out of fashion, reflecting, like luxury hotels, a reconfiguration of the private-­public spatial paradigm. Lawrence Smith Butler (1875–1954) was a Long Island architect from a prominent family (he was involved in the design of New York’s iconic Hotel San Remo);94 his father had been the lawyer for the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White, designers of the first luxury apartment block on Fifth Avenue, where at least two Bagby subscribers lived.95 Opened in 1912, 998 Fifth Avenue was one of the most expensive residences in the city and started the trend for the city’s elite families to move from the traditional mansions and townhouses they had erected by the Park to newly built apartments.96 As public entertaining in hotel ballrooms and restaurants became acceptable, large-­scale dwellings were unnecessary. Apartments were not only cheaper to run than houses (particularly after the introduction of the income tax in 1913), but they reduced the need for private servants, and—with their doormen—were much easier to get away from when one decided to leave town to drive (another relatively new development) to one’s country residence. Americans might have been much slower to adopt apartment life than Europeans, but they did so with

114

C h a pt er Th r ee

alacrity: by 1929, it is said, 98 percent of “respectable New Yorkers” lived in apartments.97 Of the 1940 gathering at the Bagbys, the painter Henry Theodore Leggett (1873–1947) lived toward the end of his life in an apartment at 575 Park Avenue. Mary Pearsall Field (1875–1942) was listed in the 1899 Social Register as living on West Thirty-­seventh Street, but by the 1940s, like many older rich people (including Bagby and Mrs. James Roosevelt), she lived in a hotel—in her case, the Plaza. Leggett and Pearsall Field both came from families who had made their fortunes as merchants and reputations as statesmen: Leggett’s father founded one of the city’s main grocery chains (Francis H. Leggett and Company); his son served as an assistant to Herbert Hoover during the war. Pearsall Field’s father was Manhattan’s first wholesale druggist (Ingersoll and Field); her great-­grandfather, Samuel Osgood, was the first postmaster general of the United States and president of the City Bank of New York.98 Like many attendees of the Bagbys, they could also prove their ancestry. Leggett’s Knickerbocker credentials were signaled by his membership of the Union Club, as well as the St. Nicholas and Holland Societies (the latter two devoted to the city’s original settlers).99 The lawyer, philatelist, and mason Ferrars Heaton Tows (1876–1958) was chancellor of the Society of Colonial Wars, manager of the Sons of the American Revolution (to which Mrs. Roosevelt’s son, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also belonged), and president of the Scandinavian Society. An impressive committee of Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mrs. August Belmont, and Mrs. Huntington Astor had been planning celebrations to mark fifty years of the Morning Musicales, but Bagby died on 26 February 1941, and the series ended. Although many joked about the “aroma of mothballs and lavender which pervades the Waldorf on Mondays during the series,” the end of the Bagbys was also heard as the death knell for a particular branch of New York society and its musical tastes. The concerts’ historical status was confirmed by an exhibition organized by the Women’s Committee of the Museum of the City of New York in May 1942. Gotham Life interpreted the show as an antidote to the horrors of war, by “keeping burning the light of culture and thus keeping America worth fighting to defend”; it would lift morale, a letter to the New York Herald claimed, by reminding one of “the New York of other days.”100 The historian Lloyd Morris claimed that the Waldorf-­Astoria “was a vast, glittering iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new idea—the aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.”101 More than a mere hotel,



Li eder S o c i e t y

115

it was a national university, Morris goes on to claim, whose cultural influence exceeded that of more conventional educational institutions such as the Astor Library, a forerunner of the New York Public Library. It is this kind of rhetoric that has led other late twentieth-­century commentators, such as Jim Collins, to celebrate, with postmodernity, the demise of “Grand Hotel” culture, “a totalizable system that orchestrates all cultural production and reception according to one master system.”102 The extent to which the Bagby Musical Mornings contributed to a totalizing system is debatable, though its members without doubt represented the ruling elite of several generations. “Hotel civilization,” with its reconfiguration of private and public spaces, confirmed and perpetuated the association between classical music and wealthy high society during a period when it could potentially have been destabilized by the spread of mass culture. The persistence of this kind of musical community into the 1940s underscores the importance of personal and social networks, more than technologies, in maintaining its habitus. In the next section, however, I explore how media were used to help assemble new audiences for lieder.

New Worlds Musical life in London was no less varied than in New York, and it hosted a similarly wide range of venues, though most were located within a half-­ mile radius of Oxford Circus (figure 3.4). They included the Royal Albert Hall, a Victorian amphitheater with a capacity of 8000 people and notoriously poor acoustics that hosted celebrity concerts by such figures as John McCormack and Frieda Hempel on Sunday afternoons; the purpose-­built Queen’s Hall, which held 2500 and became associated with the BBC; and smaller concert halls attached to piano or pianola showrooms, such as the Aeolian Hall (owned by the American Orchestrelle Company) on New Bond Street and the Wigmore and Steinway Halls on Wigmore Street, which seated a few hundred and were typically rental venues, available for hire by singers making their debuts as well as by professionals.103 The American practice of founding clubs, however, did not exist in London in the same way. The American woman takes her club seriously as an intellectual center, one commentator explained, while the British woman takes her club socially, adopting “more of the masculine idea of a club as a place of rest and recreation.”104 There was, however, a community of expatriates who endeavored to recreate the kind of activities known on the East Coast. The American Women’s Club (AWC) offered “American

3.4 Map of London. Bodleian Libraries.



Li eder S o c i e t y

117

women living either in London, its suburbs, or even the provinces [. . .] material comforts, social contacts, mental stimulation and charming surroundings” in Mayfair.105 Alongside bridge and “such delicacies as fried chicken, banana fritters, corn-­bread and apple-­pie”—made “doubly delectable” “after a surfeit of the roast beef of Old England (worthy as it is)”—the AWC sponsored many philanthropic projects, from the Knitting Factory, which provided employment for war-­affected British women, to health care and education for American orphans. The Association also invited authors, artists, musicians, and politicians to talk about their work, organize study circles, “and in every way possible try to make ourselves more enlightened and helpful citizens.” In association with the English-­Speaking Union they celebrated British and American national days and hosted dances, lectures, dinners, and luncheons. Its “social, home-­like club rooms where British and American learn to know each other, has [sic] become an institution of great value to the desired entente.”106 Desired, maybe, but also dreaded. Although the AWC encouraged its members to take advantage of the “international point of view” gained by living in London, one recurring theme in contributions to the in-­house magazine is anxiety about “the cosmopolitan character of our environment.”107 Let loose in the city, women risked encountering different cultural practices and, it was implied, alternative moral codes. Music was one way in which an international perspective might be enjoyed, within the safe confines of the clubhouse and members’ homes. “One of the most prominent Americans in London,” the president of the AWC, Caroline Curtis Brown, throughout the 1920s hosted musicales at her Thameside Chelsea home, 27 Cheyne Walk.108 There were some similarities with the Bagbys. There was occasionally an educational element, such as the course of six lectures entitled “The Analysis and Appreciation of Music” given by Ralph Lawton, a professor from Iowa State University. Moreover, Mrs. Curtis Brown instituted a series of “Twelve o’Clocks,” short morning musicales, which usually ended in luncheon parties with music as chief topic of discussion. The Evening Standard noted that at least half a dozen husbands were in attendance (American men having the reputation of being “unusually dutiful” spouses) and that the timing was successful because it did not interfere with other engagements.109 The popularity of musical gatherings such as those arranged at Cheyne Walk resulted in a number of further events being introduced: “Six o’Clocks,” for example, were “at homes” that took place between a thé dansant and a theater dinner. Magazines advised women to invest in a new semi-­evening dress (a cross between an afternoon gown and an evening

118

C h apt er Th r ee

frock) that would “do” for all three functions.110 The hostesses were invariably American “aristocracy” such as Viscountess Astor or Mrs. Benjamin Guinness, whose home at Carlton House Terrace was described as “a meeting place for British and American social and artistic celebrities generally, has many obliging musicians among her many ‘lions,’ and one is certain to enjoy some sort of entertainment one would not be likely to find elsewhere.”111 Jazz and other novelties were featured, but classical programs had their place too. Concerts organized by the AWC committee featured professional artists and amateur members, along with an international repertoire. A program from 18 March 1925 featured Albert Hall favorite, English baritone Eric Marshall, who sang two songs by Madame Guy d’Hardelot, accompanied by the composer,112 and an encore by Tchaikovsky. The Australian Louise Marshall (who would make her Wigmore Hall debut the following year) sang Brahms and Eric Woolff [sic];113 the Russian soprano Tatiana Makusina (said to be considered by some a second Emma Calvé) sang songs by her compatriot Alexander Gretchaninov and the Frenchman Alfred Bruneau.114 Ali Khan sang Indian songs and, finally, the Russian baritone Nikolai Nadejin sang Borodin and Feodor Koeneman.115 The emphasis on Russian music and musicians notwithstanding, this was an eclectic mix of performers and repertoire. The previous year the Association had sponsored a soirée musicale in Grovesnor Street given by the singing teacher Madame Bentham and her pupils. Miss Dorothy Paget (whose mother, Lady Queenborough, was the daughter of the American millionaire William Whitney) closed the soirée with the “Spinning Song” from Wagner’s Flying Dutchman.116 The Lady described it as “a very effective item, for a number of girls in Dutch costume were sitting close up together on the narrow stage spinning away as she sang. They looked so nice in their large stiff white muslin caps, and wore the bright-­hued skirts and black velvet laced bodices which we are accustomed to see when the opera is given at Covent Garden.”117 The element of dressing up, of playing at being opera singers, in this scene seems like a throwback to nineteenth-­century tableaux vivants—though, as is evident from society entertainment columns, the fashion for them continued into the twentieth century. At the very least, it conveys an image of the aristocracy at play. Some singers agreed to perform for the AWC precisely because it was a safer, more sympathetic space. The German baritone Reinhold von Warlich had not appeared in London since 1913; on his return in 1926, he gave a concert for the AWC’s Music Circle and performed Die schöne Müllerin



Li eder S o c i e t y

119

at Chelsea’s new Chenil Galleries. While his performances were found by some to be “a renewal of past pleasures,” his voice was recognized as being weaker than before; more to the point, his style of singing was not to everyone’s taste.118 Mrs. Curtis Brown acknowledged, in her account of his recital for the AWC magazine, that the singer’s greatness lay in the “nobility and perfection of his interpretation, and his entire sincerity and absorption,” rather than in the “quality of his voice.”119 Warlich’s accompanist, Gerald Moore, admitted that “his tone was unbeautiful and his intonation insecure” but claimed his “care and feeling for the word invested his singing with great authority [. . .] he had the taste and style of a great musician.” At this stage in his career, Moore observed, Warlich “steered his course away from the buffetings of advertised public concerts into the more sheltered waters of the American Women’s Club, and drawing-­rooms in Mayfair or Kensington [. . .] the general public could understandably not ‘tune in” to him.’120 Indeed, among the “interested and appreciative” audience at Warlich’s AWC concert were two granddaughters of Queen Victoria who were of part German heritage: Princess Helena Victoria and Lady Patricia Ramsay. Their presence reminds us of the interest this generation of British royals showed in music.121 By the 1930s the AWC’s Music Circle concerts were mostly given by members, with a few professional recitals.122 The emphasis on amateur performance was mainly to save on expenses, but it also signals that music remained integral to the education of upper-­class women. While many still traveled to Germany for coaching, the increasing number of émigrés in London provided coaches closer to home. The German soprano Frida Leider, for example, taught at the “Club of the Three Wise Monkeys, a “rather avant-­garde finishing school for daughters of the well-­connected and well-­to-­do” at 20–24 Pont Street, near Sloane Square.123 According to the youngest Mitford sister, Deborah, who was briefly a member in the mid-­ 1930s, the Monkey Club (as it was known) “was not a domestic-­science kind of place: we attended lectures on politics, history, art and the other subjects thought necessary to be tucked away in our bird brains for further reference.”124 Class and gender elide here to imply the dubious status of musical pursuits within British high society. Other London music clubs were geared more seriously toward musical education and to raising money for good causes.125 The purpose of the South Place Sunday Concerts, run by the People’s Concert Society (an offshoot of the Ethical Society), was to increase the popularity of “good music by means of cheap concerts.” The series had begun in 1898; in 1929

120

C h apt er Th r ee

it moved into the purpose-­built Conway Hall on Red Lion Square in Holborn. Philip Heseltine (better known now as the composer Peter Warlock) recalled the concerts as being of particularly fine quality and populated by an unusually discerning audience of East End Jews.126 The repertoire was primarily chamber music but included vocal numbers, as was also the case for concerts supporting particular charities. For example, on 20 November 1925, in aid of the National Children Adoption Association, First Group Lieutenant-­Colonel Stuart Pleydell-­Bouverie (son of Viscount Folkestone), accompanied by his wife, began their concert with Brahms’s “Sappiche [sic] Ode”; on 22 March 1934 a concert in aid of the Russian Orthodox Church in London featuring South African mezzo-­soprano Vera de Villiers (second wife of the conductor and composer Albert Coates), accompanied by Gerald Moore, singing, as well as Rachmaninoff, Brahms, two songs from Dichterliebe, and Liszt’s “Die Lorelei.” The King Cole Chamber Music Club (founded in 1910), which included songs on its programs, held fortnightly events at the Great Central Hotel on Marylebone Road.127 Dinner took place at seven o’clock, the concert an hour afterward (from 1930 members could take supper during the interval instead). The audience were expected to wear morning dress. Before the war, miniature scores of the pieces being performed were available for purchase prior to the concert. The 1930 season included renditions of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -­Leben and Schubert’s Winterreise. The organizing committee was a mix of the social and musical establishment. The president for the 1925–26 season of the King Cole Chamber Music Club was Lady Cameron, second wife of Sir Maurice Cameron, K.C.M.G., who was one of the Club’s vice presidents, along with Lady Cooper.128 Both women were musically trained: Lady Cameron was the musician Frances Mary Perkins (1967–1959); Lady Cooper, a famously generous charity worker, had studied with Julius Benedict and, while mayor from 1919 to 1920, was made a freeman of the Musicians’ Company.129 The hotel’s proximity to the Royal Academy of Music explains the high number of Academy professors represented (including the violinist Spencer Dyke and the pianist Septimus Webb). We seemed to have arrived here at a similar social-­cultural mix to the music associations and societies of New York. There was a greater emphasis on music appreciation than was apparent in the Bagbys, in part because of the involvement of amateur performers. Again, hotels were used as convenient halfway houses between public and private, yet, as the final example demonstrates, during the 1930s clubs dedicated to lieder had the potential



Li eder S o c i e t y

121

to become politicized; that they did not necessarily become overtly so indicates the complicated relationship between British high society and German—it might even be said cosmopolitan—culture. This last example also serves to illustrate the ways in which live music making and recordings entwined to support, rather than necessarily supplant, one another. On 9 February 1933 the Times announced “a new movement in music.”130 This was not a fresh phalanx of modernists, a jazz or dance craze, or yet another rebirth of English pastoralism. Instead, it was “a new musical enterprise, the London Lieder Club, under the patronage of Princess Marie Louise,” founded by the concert director John Henry Richardson and Walter Legge. This was a surprising development for the capital from the perspectives of business, politics, and culture. At a time of global economic depression and increasingly fraught international relations, the London Lieder Club seemed unabashedly luxurious and cosmopolitan. It had both the prestige of support from an elderly member of the royal family and appealed to the nouveau riche by being hosted by the recently opened, determinedly modern Dorchester Hotel, overlooking Hyde Park (its owner described it as the “perfect hotel,” and it was favored by film stars and writers such as Cecil Day-­Lewis and Somerset Maugham). Given that Hitler assumed power four days after the London Lieder Club’s first concert, though, potentially the most problematic aspect of the new enterprise was its emphasis on German music and musicians. Had it been founded slightly earlier, the Daily Telegraph might have included the London Lieder Club as part of the “German Invasion” it had warned its readers about in May 1932, when the British capital seemed to be swamped with Teutonic plays, films, and music—from Max Reinhardt productions including The Miracle and Hans Müller in Casanova at the Coliseum, to Mädchen in Uniform and, of course, Wagner at Covent Garden.131 Rather than being received as an intrusion, however, the London Lieder Club seemed more an example of the continuation of “normal” musical life in Britain, which, through the 1930s, as Thomas Irvine has observed, maintained strong links with Germany.132 What was less usual about Legge’s venture was that—while it garnered diplomatic interest—it was sponsored by private entities, rather than by the state or philanthropic organizations; and that its emphasis was on what for British audiences remained a fairly recondite genre, lieder. Legge’s passion for music stemmed from his father, who had brought home a cylinder phonograph “for the boy” just six weeks after his birth and went on to collect gramophone recordings. As a teenager Legge began to attend concerts and opera and used the local library to expand his musi-

122

C h apt er Th r ee

cal knowledge. He started working for HMV at the age of twenty and rose swiftly through the ranks, first promoting their recordings around the country, then writing liner notes and editing the company’s in-­house journal the Voice. He befriended the recording manager Fred Gaisberg and soon ventured into production. As his sister’s memoirs explained, during the Depression HMV needed to find a way to expand its catalog “to include the kind of works that so far were regarded as almost unsaleable.”133 Legge had read Ernest Newman’s 1907 monograph of Hugo Wolf, the only English-­ language study of the composer to date; he now started to familiarize himself with the Mörike-­Lieder and to study the German language seriously.134 Wolf was performed with some regularity in London during the 1920s, to the consternation of certain critics. In response to an all-­Wolf recital by Mischa Léon, the Musical Times opined: It is doubtful whether people in this country will ever really want two hours’ Wolf from anyone, and, if they do, it will be Merrie England no more. Often during the recital one could not help thinking that this minor composer’s psychological powers and talent for musical scansion have been grossly overrated; to mention him in the same breath with Schubert as a Lieder composer is—well, not sacrilegious (for respect for the great masters of the past is no longer encouraged)—but at any rate eccentric.135

The critic conceded that “one quite understands why Wolf is the favourite Sunday evening composer of many competent pianists and sight-­readers. You just flog the accompaniments and give a sketch of the voice part— et voilà une homme!” Promoted by performers such as Gerhardt and McCormack, by 1928 Wolf ’s lieder were heard regularly in concert and even occasionally on the radio.136 Some positioned Wolf immediately after Schubert in the pantheon, while others judged Wolf superior.137 A Dr. M. Joubert, in an article entitled “Lieder-­Singing at the Cross-­Ways,” described modern songwriting as still proceeding under Wolf ’s spell.138 Across the Atlantic, the Musical Courier invited musicians to submit their appreciations of Wolf ’s compositions; Percy Grainger and Josef Hofmann admitted to disliking the music, the Damrosch brothers were said to be too busy to reply, and Ravel and Bartók refused to say.139 Rarely swayed by the opinions of others, in the summer of 1931 Legge called on Newman at home and outlined his plan to commence a series of gramophone recordings dedicated to Wolf ’s songs. They would ask for sub-



Li eder S o c i e t y

123

scriptions in order to fund each volume. Newman was enthusiastic in his support, as was the editor of Gramophone, Compton Mackenzie, and the following year the first volume of six records, containing nineteen songs, was issued. The Times reported: Although a certain number of the songs of Hugo Wolf appear with fair regularity in recital programmes, the recording companies have not hitherto felt confident that the somewhat special taste which delights in his peculiarly intimate vision of music and poetry was sufficiently widespread among English people to justify the expense of recording any great number of his songs for sale in the ordinary way of business. The German language has not proved an obstacle to the performance of “Verborgenheit” but it will not be denied that, in general, Wolf demands of his listeners an easier familiarity with the evocations and implications of German poetry than Schubert or Brahms, who are often content with simple strophic settings of tunes to words.140

There were many similar puff pieces written about the Hugo Wolf Society in the broadsheets of the time: because most columns are uncredited it is very difficult to say for sure, but given that Newman was the music critic for the Sunday Times (and that Legge became a reviewer for what was then the Manchester Guardian in 1932), critics’ enthusiasm for the project cannot be taken as disinterested. What is striking about this particular quotation is its concession that the songs of Hugo Wolf require a “special taste”— particularly, a good understanding of German—and that the expense of record production had until this point encouraged companies to stick to well-­known terrain. Legge’s and Newman’s investment in recording Wolf, and their emphasis on international stars, ran contrary to the protectionist mood of many artists and politicians in the early 1930s, as discussed in the next section. It is striking that the roster of the Hugo Wolf Society included no British musicians, with the exception of the pianist Gerald Moore. However, apart from the Irish tenor John McCormack, there were few celebrity names: these were not “stars” familiar from recordings; indeed, many were unknown in Britain or known only in highbrow circles. Legge took care to select musicians who had, as he saw it, a good command of the Austro-­ German musical tradition and its language. Even if not all the singers were native speakers, most had trained or worked extensively in Germany or Austria. The first volume of nineteen songs was made by the German

124

C h a pt er Th r ee

soprano Elena Gerhardt—by then a stalwart of London’s concert scene— and the pianist Coenraad Bos.141 The second volume featured five different artists: Alexandra Trianti, Herbert Janssen, Gerhardt Hüsch, Friedrich Schorr, and the aforementioned McCormack. Subsequent discs included the singers Karl Erb, Marta Fuchs, Ria Ginster, Tiana Lemnitz, Elisabeth Rethberg, and Helge Roswaenge. The pianists, apart from Moore, were Hanns Udo Müller, Michael Raucheisen, and McCormack’s regular partner, the American Edwin Schneider. Some biographical details for the artists listed above help explain the complex and slippery ways in which musical and political identities entwined on trying to assemble a cast of musicians capable of expertly rendering German song. Bayreuth was a common connection—the Germans Hüsch and Fuchs sang there regularly, as did the Hungarian-­born bass-­ baritone Schorr—reflecting Legge’s enthusiasm for the Festival, which he reviewed for the Manchester Guardian in 1933.142 His report deserves a digression here for the light it shines on Legge’s awareness of the political implications of which singers were hired. He noted with some consternation the way in which the Bayreuth Festival had that year become a celebration of Hitler rather than Wagner, with Mein Kampf displacing Mein Leben in bookshop windows, a proliferation of swastikas and brownshirts, and the “Horst Wessel Lied” being emitted by the Café Tannhäuser and Gasthof Rheingold. News of Toscanini’s withdrawal from the Festival was said to have practically stopped foreign bookings. Legge may still have been present, but he took the opportunity to muse on the peculiar musicopolitical situation in which Bayreuth found itself: The national pride that gave birth to the Nazi shibboleth “Only German art performed by German artists” must have been deeply wounded; but is it national pride? Conversations I have had with prominent German musicians of the Nazi persuasion have convinced me that the activating motive is fear. The German performers have seen with dismay that in nearly every instance the finest interpretative artists are foreign, and that the few of the first class who are German are also Jewish. [. . .] Even the business of singing Wagner, their pre-­war stronghold, has passed out of their hands. Of the eminent Wagnerian sopranos, Lehmann is German, Leider is German (but, I believe I am right in stating, of Russian extraction), but Lynnberg is Swedish, so is Larsen Toosen. Of the contraltos Olszewska’s mother was Romanian, Karin Branzell is Swedish. [. . .] The finest dramatic tenor in the world, Melchior, is a



Li eder S o c i e t y

125

Dane; his nearest rival, Graarud, is Norwegian. Among baritones Janssen and Bockelmann are pure Germans, but the most popular of all, Schorr, is a Hungarian Jew. And there are virtually no German basses. Kipnis is Russian and Jewish, List Austrian and Jewish, Andresen is Norwegian. Musically at least, the fanatical nationalism of Germany is to a great extent a fear-­induced protection of inferior home products against superior foreign competition. [. . .] The best singing of the festival came from Maria Muller, a Czech soprano: Rudolf Bockelamnn (Wotan and Sachs), a German baritone, and two Jewish basses, Emanuel List (Hunding, Fafner, and Hagen) and Alexander Kipnis (Titurel and Pogner).143

Legge’s dissection of the singers according to their quality, nationality, and religion is significant for the insight it provides into the challenges the Bayreuth Festival directors faced in 1933. Interestingly, German agents are presented as feeling threatened by foreign competition; as they were in London. Legge was surely aware of these issues when booking musicians for his own musical ventures. However, he appeared to feel no compunction to refuse work to Nazi sympathizers, or to promote native British artists over foreign visitors. While about half the singers involved in the Hugo Wolf Society recordings remained in Germany through the Second World War (including Tiana Lemnitz), others fled. Legge often helped in these situations. For example, Janssen was warned that he had fallen afoul of the Nazis in December 1936 and went to London; he was met by Legge’s sister at Victoria Station and found temporary lodgings (he then moved to Vienna and Paris before leaving for the United States in 1938).144 Legge was not deterred, though, from hiring for the Hugo Wolf Society or the London Lieder Club singers who had remained in Germany. The extent to which Legge knew— or, for that matter, cared—about the political views of many of those musicians is a matter for speculation, as are the musicians’ own sympathies: the priority of those who were neither Jews nor left-­wing (or otherwise vulnerable to Nazi policies) was on maintaining their careers in unstable times. Hüsch, for instance, sang with the Berlin opera companies from 1930 until 1944 (he was also Papageno on Thomas Beecham’s 1938 Berlin-­based recording of Die Zauberflöte), and was a professor at the Munich Akademie der Tonkunst. He also made some of the first complete recordings of Schubert’s cycles: his Winterreise was produced by Legge at Abbey Road and the Beethovensaal in Berlin in the spring and summer of 1933. Müller was his

126

C h a pt er Th r ee

regular accompanist until the pianist-­conductor was killed in a Berlin air raid in 1943. Hüsch could not be a Nazi party member because he had been a Freemason, but he had close relationships with some prominent figures, such as Rosalind von Schirach, sister of the Gauleiter of Vienna; he sang for Hitler’s birthdays, recorded numbers such as “Du, Vaterland,” and was named a Kammersänger by the Führer in 1937.145 All this meant that after the war his career was limited to teaching. Raucheisen, the second husband of the Hungarian soprano Maria Ivogün (her first was the tenor Karl Erb), was also blacklisted.146 Yet there are interesting parallels between his artistic proclivities and Legge’s. From 1933 he embarked on an even more ambitious recording project than that of the Hugo Wolf Society: he began work on a catalog of lieder, which he promoted through his later post as head of song and chamber music at Berlin Radio. As Michael Kater points out, Raucheisen wielded great power, and earned large amounts of money, through his role in broadcasting, and he could determine which artists were employed.147 Unlike Legge, though, his curatorial role in the promotion of German song had overtly political overtones. Despite, or because of, the varied backgrounds of the artists involved, critics paid particular attention to their stylistic and linguistic command of this relatively unknown repertoire. Richard Capell praised the Greek soprano Trianti as a unique singer, who had a typically Mediterranean voice but also possessed “a perfect command of German and great intellectual understanding of German music” (she had studied in Vienna and with Ivogün). Songs written for a naïve German woman were sung with a Mediterranean woman’s “insuppressible knowingness,” to piquant effect (her high notes were daringly open, Capell thrilled).148 Schorr’s rendition of “Prometheus” prompted Capell to recall that the song had been set as a grueling test piece at the Blackpool Festival in 1912, but that he had not heard it since the war. McCormack’s “Ganymed” would surprise any who, for reasons of snobbishness or suspicion of Fenians, might have thought the tenor “restricted to Renumerative songs about Noras, Kathleens and cabbage patches.” Congratulations were due to Legge, Capell concluded, “on spreading the news of this music.” Some explanation of the Hugo Wolf Society has been necessary because the London Lieder Club was devised as its “back-­up” as a way to encourage subscriptions.149 Its inaugural concert was given by Gerhardt and Bos, the same duo who had made the first recordings, and almost all the Hugo Wolf Society musicians appeared at some point. In the second season other big names appeared—Richard Tauber, Alexander Kipnis, Elisabeth



Li eder S o c i e t y

127

Schumann, Julius Patzak—but there was also said to be a policy of introducing new singers to London via the Lieder Club. In the spring of 1934 these included the Danish tenor Helge Roswaenge, Maria Basca, and the Dutch bass-­baritone Hermann Schey.150 In his obituary of Legge, the critic William Mann acknowledged that the Club broadened the repertoire and helped to “build larger, more knowledgeable audiences for that branch of music.”151 Again, as with the Hugo Wolf Society, almost all names on the Lieder Club programs were foreign. The majority were German or Austrian: Tauber, Hedda Kux, and Julius Patzak were Austrian, and Schumann and Ginster German. Göta Ljungberg was Swedish, then singing mostly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; Vladimir Rosing was a Russian tenor who had recently returned to Britain from the United States. The majority sang nineteenth-­century lieder, and complete cycles such as Winterreise and Dichterliebe were featured—still a relatively rare occurrence on regular recital programs. One exception was Alban Berg’s collaborator, the soprano Kux, who included some modern German songs (as well, one reviewer tartly noted, as an Austrian folk song “suggestive of Alpine yodelling”).152 No translations were provided in the program, implying that audiences should be familiar with the songs already, if not multilingual.153 At first critics acclaimed the novelty of the series and the quality of the repertoire and performers. “A millionaire could not arrange for richer experiences,” exclaimed the Manchester Guardian (though this may well have been Legge or one of his supporters): “It is to be doubted whether a comparable body of artists has ever before, in any part of the world, been got together for the purpose of interpreting the most beautiful songs of Wolf, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Strauss, Pfitzner, Marx, Loewe, Jensen, Sibelius, and Moussorgsky.”154 As the Club continued, though, some started to bemoan the dependence on German song and gently lampooned its well-­heeled audience. Edwin Evans, music critic for the Daily Mail, asked: “Admitting that the box-­office suffers from an anti-­national hallucination, with which impresarios find it hard to contend, are there no French, Italian, or Russian songs worthy of similar apotheosis?”155 Meanwhile, Neville Cardus thought that the Lieder Club was “probably getting rather tired of listening to opera singers endeavouring to adapt their extensive powers to the intimate and disciplined plane of lieder.”156 Gramophone imagined that the audience at the Lieder Club would be “brilliant and enlightened” and urged its readers to subscribe to it, as it had encouraged them to join the Hugo Wolf Society, as an opportunity to hear

128

C h apt er Th r ee

live voices they would otherwise only encounter on recordings.157 But this was a club as exclusive socially as it was musically. The audience was expected to attend in full evening dress. Membership cost three guineas for eight recitals (a ticket for one concert was ten shillings and sixpence); programs cost two shillings and were stuffed with advertisements for luxury goods, from Jaeger and Bechstein to Gleneagles and HMV’s “Connoisseur Catalogue” of rare imported records. Profits may have been donated to the Princess Marie Louise’s charities in Sunninghill and Bermondsey, but it is evident that most attendees were there to network. Choosing the Dorchester, the Hyde Park Hotel, or the Langham as a venue suggested that the London Lieder Club was part of the international circuit—as was further emphasized by the raft of diplomats in its audience.158 At Kux’s recital on 21 November 1933, reported in attendance were Princesses Helena Victoria and Marie Louise; the Polish and Belgian ambassadors; the Cuban minister and his daughter, Miss Patterson; and the wife of the Brazilian ambassador, Mme. Régis de Oliveira, with her daughter. Richard Tauber recalled being introduced to Princess Alice; the then-­Chancellor of the University of London, Lord Athlone; the Brazilian ambassador and his wife; the Polish ambassador; and the Austrian minister Baron Georg Franckenstein. Tauber reported to the Daily Mail that they were “all expert critics of music,” which may be nothing more than sycophancy. On the other hand, it might indicate that even in these elevated circles there was a healthy appetite for the middlebrow charms of the operetta star; or, if they really did appreciate the highbrow programs, reflect a prevalent association between cosmopolitanism and high culture.159 During the course of the 1930s many of the artists who appeared at the London Lieder Club fled Nazi Germany, including Gerhardt, who moved permanently to London in October 1934 as her husband awaited trial, and Jews such as Alexander Kipnis, Lotte Schöene, and Hermann Schey. Others, however, remained in Germany and—as indicated by the potted biographies of Hüsch and Raucheisen provided earlier—found ways to navigate the complexities of musical life under the Nazi regime. The London Lieder Club, then, might be considered on the one hand to have been a means to integrate exiles into British musical life or, on the other, as an opportunity for those keen to foster Anglo-­German culture—and, by extension, political relations. It is apparent from the available fragments of Legge’s correspondence that much effort, inevitably, was expended on musicians’ travel arrangements and that these became more complicated as the decade progressed.160



Li eder S o c i e t y

129

Interestingly—for it sheds some light on the support networks for Germans visiting London during the 1930s—he recommended the Anglo-­German Club at 6 Carlton Gardens, not far from the German Embassy, for accommodation: the prices were reasonable, with a comfortable room for eight shillings a day and breakfast for two shillings and sixpence, he wrote to Hüsch on 17 March 1933, adding that he would also have access to a good piano. The Anglo-­German Club had opened only in 1931. Its prospectus explained: Fifty thousand Germans visit Great Britain every year. Whereas visitors from many other countries, including Argentina, for example, Spain or Sweden, receive the hospitality of their own clubs in London, where they can meet and mix with English people, visitors from Germany have no such opportunity. The German visitor therefore not only arrives a stranger among strangers, but, unfortunately, only too often returns without any true understanding of England and the English people. On the other hand, many British nationals who visit Germany are faced with similar difficulties.

The purpose of the club was to foster friendship and understanding, and “to provide a non-­political meeting place for gentlemen of both countries. [. . .] To make similar arrangements with English country clubs for German members. To encourage intellectual intercourse on a social basis between the members of both nationalities by arranging receptions and dinners, lectures and debates, art exhibitions, concerts and private film shows.”161 Among the various events it hosted there was a reception for Thomas Beecham and German opera singers—an instance, perhaps, of artists being introduced to the elite social circles of their host society.162 By the time of its inaugural dinner in July 1931 the Club had two hundred members; two years later it had seven hundred. The German ambassador declared that its foundation came at a time of the “deepest industrial and economic depression, which affected not Germany alone but the whole world. There was no country to-­day which could isolate itself from the affairs of nations.”163 From the available membership lists it seems that many of those who attended the London Lieder Club were also members of the Anglo-­German Club, and its singers—such as Fritz Wolff, Lotte Lehmann, Herbert Janssen, and Frida Leider—appeared at their receptions. By June 1934 the Anglo-­German Club had decided to extend its remit to other countries, including the United States, and renamed itself after

130

C h apt er Th r ee

its then-­president, a former ambassador to Germany and advocate for accommodation with the new Nazi regime, Lord d’Abernon.164 There would be further Anglo-­German associations founded through the decade that, despite declaring themselves “friendly” and nonpartisan, more obviously held anti-­Semitic and Nazi sympathies or were disowned by the German authorities.165 It is difficult to do more than to signal the importance of musical entertainment within these circles (Irvine observes that recitals still took place in German institutions such as the DAAD Headquarters on Russell Square through the 1930s),166 whether or not they might promote a particular image of that nation’s culture. What is apparent, as Christopher Fifield notes, is that the mid-­1930s were “eventful days” for music in Britain.167 Fifield has in mind the founding of Glyndebourne, the capital’s flourishing concert life, and the expansion of the BBC. The London Lieder Club might be but a small, somewhat specialist arm of those musical activities, but it nonetheless helped secure a place for classical song in British concert culture. In 1937 Legge’s colleague the impresario John Henry Richardson, who had promoted the Club and administered its subscriptions, declared bankruptcy. The London Lieder Club, it was reported, had been promoted “at various West End hotels, but the public were not sufficiently interested and the concerts resulted in a loss.”168 It is apparent from programs around London that the case Legge had made for lieder, and particularly the songs of Hugo Wolf, had been successful: dedicated recitals had proliferated, and Wolf was heard more often on the radio.169 Never one to shirk from reviewing artists he had also employed, in March 1938 Legge reported that Janssen had performed the three Harfenspieler lieder, with Wolf ’s orchestral accompaniments, at the second Serenade Concert at Sadler’s Wells.170 He expressed some pleasure that the audience evidently appreciated the singer’s artistry, despite the fact that neither the songs themselves nor Janssen’s performances of them are likely ever to appeal to a large public. [. . .] There is nothing in all music, not even the last act of Tristan or Parsifal, that so searches out the depths of human suffering as these songs. They live in a world of pondering upon spiritual torment, a world of solitude and gnawing grief lit only by the glimmer of the hope for pity. The miracle of Wolf ’s settings of the poems is that they penetrate not only the general and particular sorrows of the words but the personal, morbid anguish of Goethe’s half-­crazed harper. And it is the



Li eder S o c i e t y

131

wonder of Janssen’s art that he lives in Wolf ’s songs as completely and self-­effacingly as the composer absorbed himself in the poet’s imaginings. The naturally elegiac timbre of his voice is an advantage, but he seems to have been born with a peculiar sympathy for and understanding of Wolf ’s mind that enables him to cut to the very core of the musical as well as the emotional texture of the songs.171

Janssen had, of course, recorded the Harfenspieler songs (“Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt,” “An die Türen will ich schleichen,” and “Wer nie sein Brot”), with Bos at the piano, for the sixth and final volume of the Hugo Wolf Society. Legge’s review, then, might be read as little more than promotion for his gramophone series. His stress on the idiosyncrasies of both songs and singer, and the acknowledgment that they were unlikely ever to appeal to a large public, though, reveal an enthusiasm deeper than that of the typical impresario. This was not music the scale of which made it a natural vehicle for Nazi propaganda, although its supposed folkishness certainly allowed it to be hailed as such.172 Wolf ’s lieder may indeed have been Wagnerian in many respects (as perhaps was the root of Legge’s enthusiasm for them), but their relatively modest scale offered a more intimate, personal mode of expression through which a less bombastic kind of Germanness might be accessed. The London Lieder Club might seem more like a clique than a club, the subsequent influence of which could be expected to be negligible. However, the venture nurtured some significant figures, and key factors, in London lieder performance. Legge would play an important role in organizing musical events at home and in occupied territories during the Second World War; afterward he would wield huge power as a record producer and husband of the soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Gerald Moore’s obituary claimed that it was in large part working as the Club’s regular accompanist, with such greats as Alexandra Trianti and Julius Patzak, that made him decide to concentrate on song repertoire; he too became a significant presence on the international lieder scene.173 Finally, the emphasis on hearing singers on recordings, ideally but not necessarily in tandem with live performances, came to play a fundamental role in the appreciation of lieder in the second half of the twentieth century and in the status of the genre as a whole.

F ou r

Saving Music

L

ieder performance offers an alternative route into understanding the history of music making in Britain, the United States, and Germany in the 1930s, a decade in which the status and function of classical music changed dramatically. As with popular and modernist repertoire, or larger-­scale orchestral and operatic works, the spread of mass media and the use of music in cultural diplomacy were key to shaping patterns of consumption and reception. Yet, as earlier chapters have shown, lieder were distinguished from other genres by being indelibly marked as Germanic. Their arcane and individualistic aspects hardly made them ideal as propaganda in the so-­called people’s war, and, in a decade of increasingly aggressive nationalism, it might be expected that, as in the First World War, British and American audiences would be hostile to lieder performance. There were, indeed, some protests. The situation, though, was complicated by a number of factors, as explored in this concluding chapter. First, several of the most famous lieder singers in Britain and the United States were foreign. Initially that meant that there was some resistance to their performing, because they were perceived as threatening the livelihoods of native musicians. Arguments about the importance of maintaining international relations were sharpened by the increasing number of refugees arriving from Nazi Germany; the musicians among them began to be treated with greater sympathy, although there was still concern about the German “invasion.” Secondly, classical repertoire was now treated with 132

S avi ng Mus ic

133

some reverence as a means to lift morale and uphold democratic ideals, even civilization.1 Although lieder, because of their attachment to the German language, could not be made unquestionably “universal,” the composers with which they were associated—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf—were taken as canonic and worthy of preservation. Even Strauss, still living in Germany and for some years affiliated with the Nazi regime, had his songs performed, though not without debate. Two case studies— Marian Anderson’s concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 and the objections to Kirsten Flagstad’s return to the United States after the war—demonstrate that lieder performances, far from being depoliticized, could provoke or constitute protest. In both instances, more significance was placed on the performer than on her repertoire. However, that lieder were programmed at all suggests a role for this genre in aid of cultural diplomacy: to represent pluralism and open-­mindedness in the face of fascism. Finally, this is a story not only about social and political reception, but also about changing performance practices. By the end of the Second World War, most of the singers featured in this book were coming to the end of their careers, if they had not done so already. They had been, in effect, the gramophone generation: as earlier chapters have demonstrated, programs and singing techniques had gradually changed as musicians adapted to the requirements of the recording industry. It would be left to younger singers and pianists to embrace postwar technologies of tape editing and the long-­ playing record, and to adapt their performances accordingly. The transition is an intriguing exception to the rule that, in the history of singing, whatever has just passed tends to be considered “a golden age”: the flaws of the performances, and the recording technologies, of the 1920s and 1930s seem all too obvious to modern ears. This is to overlook, however, the interaction of recordings with live music making. Early gramophone discs documented liveness, rather than studio creations. They were often judged in comparison to experiencing singers onstage, and within that rich and contingent context, how those voices were heard tell us something about the preoccupations and anxieties of the age.

The German “Invasion” The economic depression of the early 1930s and its associated political turmoil impacted the musical world no less than other areas of transatlantic society and culture. By 1931 a series of financial crises (the 1929 stock mar-

134

C h apt er Fo ur

ket crash in America, the collapse of the banking system in central Europe, and Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard and free trade) caused production to plummet, trade to shrink, and unemployment to soar. In 1932–33 unemployment in Britain reached over 20 percent; in the United States it stood at 27 percent; in Germany it was 44 percent.2 Recovery through the decade was only partial: by 1938 trade tariffs and protectionist policies enabled Britain to increase exports within its empire, and the United States concentrated on its domestic markets, although President Roosevelt shifted policy toward limited international expansion. However, trade did not return to pre-­Depression levels, and unemployment remained over 10 percent in both countries. Unemployment had been a key electoral issue when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and by 1938 they had managed, through youth work schemes, attempts to remove women from the unemployment register, and, most significantly, rearmament, to achieve full employment.3 Wage controls, the abolition of trade unions and strike action, and increased government expenditure on civil infrastructure did not enhance living standards, but enabled, as Richard Overy explains, “economic growth to serve military ends.”4 Discussion of cultural activities during the 1930s tends to focus on government-­sponsored projects to encourage the arts, from the Reichsmusikkammer in Nazi Germany to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs in the United States; of the latter, alongside the Federal Arts Project (FAP), the Federal Writers Project (FWP), and the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), there was the Federal Music Project (FMP).5 The FMP ran from 1935 to 1939 and was a forerunner of similar morale-­ boosting touring projects in Britain and the United States during the war, which will be mentioned later. As well as providing employment for musicians, an emphasis was placed on setting high standards and nurturing not only an interested community of listeners, but an intelligent one.6 Popular music was avoided and new American music promoted. Song was certainly a significant element, though the repertoire tended to focus on native folk traditions.7 In this climate the lieder recital, never a mainstream activity, was in jeopardy in the United States;8 according to the available Town Hall programs, they reduced to two or three a month, rather than the half dozen of the 1920s. By 1932 the Boston Evening Transcript reported that the song recital had “gone out of fashion.”9 Artists feared losing opportunities for work altogether: Éva Gauthier, the Canadian soprano who had introduced

S avi ng Mus ic

135

George Gershwin’s songs in her New York recitals, doubted that there was still a place for her.10 Others changed tack, often by turning to more popular genres: Ernestine Schumann-­Heink, for example, was forced back to the vaudeville stage in an attempt to recoup some of her financial losses. The American Guild of American Artists protested against lower concert fees, claiming that they would cause “real concert repertoire” to disappear: many of the younger musicians appearing onstage were not “legitimate concert artists” but presented programs of operatic arias and “cheap music which they designate as representative as American songs, or tried and tested songs which they repeat indefinitely, since few of them dare attempt anything else.”11 Broadcasting, now well established, also caused problems through its schematic divide between high, middle, and low “brows,” especially in Britain.12 Singers who wanted to promote themselves to different markets found themselves in danger of alienating one group in favor of another.13 As is often the case during economic downturns, there was growing mistrust of foreigners, who seemed to be taking jobs away from locals. By 1932 there were reported to be twelve thousand unemployed musicians in the United Kingdom.14 Lengthy fund-­raising concerts were staged by the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund; for example, on 26 May, at Great Billing Hall in Northampton, once the family seat of the tenor Gervase Elwes and now intended to be a nursing home for retired musicians, the violinist Fritz Kreisler appeared alongside the singers John McCormack, Friedrich Schorr, Florence Austral, and Elena Gerhardt (who apparently gave the premiere of the English version of Strauss’s “Ständchen,” an unusual departure from her habitual German). The rest of the program featured military bands and symphonic music by Elgar conducted by Adrian Boult. The strong representation of foreign musicians on such programs—in this instance, the Jewish bass-­baritone Schorr was Austro-­Hungarian and, from 1931, based in the United States; Austral was Australian; and, of course, McCormack, Irish (though now an American citizen) and Gerhardt, German—was not welcomed by all, especially when they were not big names. There were recurrent complaints about the hiring of unknown artists from abroad as well as ones who had been around for too long, particularly when they were not on good form, exemplified by comments such as: “today, the liability of a failing voice is apparently more than balanced by the asset of a foreign name.” Reference to liabilities, balances, and assets underlines the business end of the arts, and the prospect for private financial support

136

C h apt er F o ur

was changing not only because of the financial situation but also because of the loss of key personnel. For example, in London, the concert impresario Lionel Powell—responsible for bringing many star singers to the Royal Albert Hall—died on 23 December 1931 at the age of fifty-­four, leaving his business partner Harold Holt with substantial debts and a client list that included the singers John McCormack, Richard Tauber, Paul Robeson, Nellie Melba, Grace Moore, and Marian Anderson.15 In response to the worsening situation, the reconstituted Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) published its manifesto in London’s Daily Telegraph on 4 November 1931.16 It claimed: “There has existed for many years past, and still exists among certain sections of the community, the idea that only a foreigner can possess the true qualities of a musician: that a foreign composer and foreign performer must of necessity be the superior of our own musicians.” While visits from “many of the great musicians of the world” were privileges to enjoy, there was resistance to “foreign artists of no repute and mediocre attainment” being employed instead of locals. As in the United States, foreign performers should pay income tax on their earnings, the ISM demanded, and there should be safeguards to protect British musicians from unemployment.17 (Another concern was the control the BBC now had over broadcasting.)18 The ISM had support from prominent singers such as Harry Plunket Greene, and organs such as the Musical Times, which thought the tone of the manifesto too mild: Music, it is true, has no frontiers, but musicians have; and the problem now is with musicians rather than the music. As to the internationalism of art, we are frankly disrespectful; so far as this country is concerned, it has long since become a one-­sided arrangement under which the imports swamp the exports. And if the artist has nothing to do with politics, so much the worse for both.19

The following year the National Government invoked the 1920 Aliens Order to prohibit the entry of certain musicians into Britain.20 Concert management company Ibbs and Tillett protested that this would break their contracts with respected foreign singers such as Elisabeth Schumann, Alexandra Trianti, and Emmy Heim and argued that, while in an ideal world a distinction would be made between good and mediocre musicians, one needed to hear them first to decide which was which. They directly contradicted the view of the Musical Times: “Internationalism in the Arts,

S avi ng Mus ic

137

especially music, is an absolute necessity to our national life, and it is a stronger force for world peace and understanding than we can ever measure”—rhetoric that would be heard with increasing vigor through the decade.21 The government clarified that “artists of first-­rate international standing” were issued permits without question, as were those who could claim to contribute something “new, distinctive, or original in the way of musical performance or interpretation”; if no such claims could be made, they may consider allowing them to have two paid engagements.22 Although in the end few famous foreign lieder singers were prevented from working in Britain in the early 1930s, negative criticism of them became more common. The reviewer for the “Singers of the Month” column of the Musical Times in December 1931 was in particularly vituperative form.23 None of the professional singers under review at the Wigmore Hall were immune from criticism: it took time for Alexandra Trianti to warm up, and she was guilty of slurred vowels, a hard tone, and an “occasional out-­of-­tuneness” in Robert Franz’s “Herbst.” One Elena Gerhardt recital was said to be “very much like another”; there will be songs “in which she will exercise her glamorous sway, those in which she will be fussy, and advertise faulty breath techniques.” Elisabeth Schumann was declared “an ideal interpreter of the more fanciful forms of German lieder” but sang in an English that “was at least distinct.” While the Polish singer Ganna Walska’s costumes were becoming, they were “not becoming enough to distract one’s attention from her indifferent singing. She made a hash of Schubert.” The male singers fared slightly better: the baritone Eric Marshall was suffering from a cold but “had a sufficiently authoritative knowledge of the art of singing to steer clear of the rocks [. . .] if only he were a good musician, he would have the world at his feet.” It would “be quite impossible to mistake Mr Keith Falkner for anything but an English singer—or Scotch, perhaps, as one should say”; he had a sturdy tone and straightforward phrasing well suited to oratorio and native song, if not for the histrionics or subtleties of bel canto. Two aspiring singers at the Grotrian Hall, Phyllis Brooks and Joyce Grieg, presented well-­structured programs: “in a considered, homely way they were artistic, but when abandonment was required, they both seemed restrained by considerations of gentility”; it was “drawing-­room singing,” not up to professional standards. Although it would be unwise to read too much into one critic’s week of bad reviews, it is worth noting that while Marshall and Falkner were homegrown, they both included foreign repertoire, including lieder, on their programs. Indeed, command of a range

138

C h apt er F o ur

of genres and languages was an important aspect of establishing a singer’s reputation.24 Resistance to foreign musicians has to be considered in the context of other social changes. The historian Ross McKibbin maintains that, through much of the 1920s, the middle classes in England had remained “recognizably Edwardian.” The predominance of the old free professions (medicine, law, the church, the military, senior civil servants, and architecture), however, was being undermined by rapid growth in the scientific, technical, and commercial sectors, and in the “public” middle class (teachers, librarians, technicians, and social workers).25 That social change was matched by a recasting of cultural hierarchies: classical music became something to which to aspire, but it was one of many types of entertainment available within mass culture. Not only were foreigners (allegedly) taking away jobs; the other threat to musicians’ livelihood in the 1930s was perceived to be “canned music.” Dance bands, hotel orchestras, and cinema organs increasingly were being replaced by gramophone players, radio broadcasts, and soundtracks. In this context Walter Legge’s determination to found the London Lieder Club, discussed in the previous chapter, seems all the more remarkable. The way in which the Club worked in tandem with the Hugo Wolf Society and other recording ventures was another instance of Legge’s canniness: by making live and recorded music codependent, admittedly within a limited, luxury setting, he devised a model for the classical model to survive the vicissitudes of the Depression. Legge, of course, also took advantage of the increasing numbers of foreign artists arriving in Britain as political exiles from Nazi Germany. The news that the conductor Bruno Walter had been forbidden from performing in Leipzig in 1933 was greeted with disbelief by the British music press, though they recognized that the ban on Wagner and Beethoven during the Great War was not dissimilar. As more was reported back from Germany, coverage in the music press began to change its tone: the ISM, the Musical Mirror and Fanfare reported, had been “sounding a cheap and nasty clarion call to wake up the manhood of musical Britain to arise and exterminate the marauding foreigner,” while Herbert Hughes in the Daily Telegraph had been writing weekly bulletins “as sensational as they are unmusical.”26 The executive committee of the ISM and the Musicians’ Union were in touch with the Home Office regarding permits to work and reside in Britain for the increasing numbers of refugee musicians who were arriving; by 1940 it was reported that their numbers had doubled to twelve thousand.27 How would the musical economy cope?

S avi ng Mus ic

139

Singers in Exile Despite having sung for many decades on an international circuit, German singers such as Elena Gerhardt, Elisabeth Schumann, and Lotte Lehmann did not find it easy to make a living as émigrés in London or New York. The main problems were the economic privations of the early 1930s and market saturation, because so many acclaimed foreign musicians were attempting to attract students and audiences. Politics also played a role, although these particular singers were themselves in little danger from the Nazi regime; their primary motivation for leaving was to protect their families. There was also the question of genre. Unlike a figure such as Richard Tauber, who was successful in both light and serious repertoire, Gerhardt and, by this stage of her career, Schumann were concert artists, known foremost for their renditions of classical song. Lehmann, while she continued to sing in opera and, by the end of the decade, proved not to be above appearing next to Bing Crosby or in celebrity magazines, was best known as an interpreter of German repertoire. They were, in other words, representative of “highbrow” culture in an age which, until war broke out again, seemed to prioritize the popular. Gerhardt had married Fritz Kohl, director of the Leipzig-­based radio station Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, in November 1932. Kohl was arrested when the Nazis came to power—he had refused to join the Party or to grant them broadcasting time. He was accused of having embezzled funds to finance his daughter’s wedding and held in custody. In solidarity with her husband, and with the assistance of such British musicians as Landon Ronald, who offered her a teaching position at the Guildhall, Gerhardt moved permanently to London, arriving on 12 October 1934 with, in accordance to Nazi law, no more than fifty marks and no belongings. (Kohl joined her after his trial the following March.) In 1938 Schumann married Hans Krüger, a Jewish doctor, and after the Anschluss, to escape anti-­Semitic persecution, the couple went first to London and then to New York. Lehmann’s story was somewhat different and rather complex, as Michael H. Kater has documented.28 Hermann Göring, Heinz Tietjen, and Richard Strauss hoped she would join the Berlin Staatsoper, but negotiations over her contract broke down in 1934. Although Lehmann later claimed this was because Göring would have forbidden her from singing outside Germany, it was mostly because her financial demands were not met. Eventually she settled in New York, while maintaining links with Vienna and, particularly, with the Salzburg Festival.

140

C h apt er Fo ur

As is evident from Lehmann’s continued connection with Austria, exile did not mean the end of these singers’ international careers, but rather their reorientation. Gerhardt made trips to France and the Netherlands and even visited Strauss in Bayreuth but declared that the Festival now belonged not to Wagner but to Hitler. Schumann toured North Africa. She declined offers to sing in Vienna (“Germany and Austria don’t exist for me as long as the Nazis are there,” she wrote to Karl Wisiko) and instead asked Ibbs and Tillett for as many engagements in Britain as possible: the BBC, the Proms, At Homes, seaside towns. She also proposed a two-­month master class on lieder singing, but of the fifteen people who applied, she reported, only two were willing to sign on when they heard her terms.29 Eventually an apartment with a piano was found, and when the Viennese pianist Leo Roseneck arrived, they agreed that he would be her regular accompanist in England. On 7 June 1938 Schumann wrote to her friend Joyce: “Work daily with Rosenek. And one pupil comes three times a week. Ha ha! Then I’m going to make records—oh, how time flies.” Schumann and Roseneck made thirty recordings for HMV in the course of a week that summer: they included eleven songs by Brahms, six by Schubert, some Strauss, Liszt, and English songs. As mentioned in chapter 1, in 1921, when Schumann left New York after her first American tour, she had made her first recordings. By this later stage of her career she was much more established as a recording artist and made frequent visits to Abbey Road to re­cord not only with Roseneck but also with the English pianists George Reeves and Gerald Moore. Although Moore had feared for his livelihood earlier in the decade, the influx of German and Austrian musicians to London was a boon and helped confirm his and Reeves’s reputations as accompanists. It is clear from Schumann’s and Gerhardt’s memoirs and letters that despite all else, musically speaking, the second half of the 1930s in London for some was halcyon days; or, as has been written about German refugee artists in the United States, they were “exiled in paradise,” or something approaching it.30 Both singers visited Glyndebourne, where other German émigrés—Fritz Busch, Carl Ebert, and Rudolf Bing—had been hired by John Christie to run an opera festival at his country estate.31 In London, Toscanini and Furtwängler conducted, and world-­famous singers gave recitals, often to rapturous receptions. After she appeared at a promenade concert at the Queen’s Hall on 19 August 1938, Schumann received a letter from the novelist John Galsworthy’s widow, Ada, thanking her for the pleasure her singing had given: “Could one ever forget that last ‘mein Knab!’ in ‘Vergebliches Ständchen’? I had for a moment the (perhaps ridiculous)

S avi ng Mus ic

141

feeling that if you had put forward the toe of your shoe, the whole audience would have moved forward to kiss it!!”32 Certainly the singers had numerous rich and famous admirers. Schumann claimed she had “a thousand invitations [. . .] London in the season is mad—but wonderful! I love it dearly.”33 Gerhardt recalled a student concert at a house party the summer before war broke out: “It was a lovely event, very international and elegant, cars lining our road from end to end.” In retrospect she added that she was not “to see many of my foreign pupils again.”34 The protests of the ISM had not quite managed to promote British musicians as had been hoped, but war would divert the international circulation of travel. Although she liked London very much, Schumann decided that New York would be a better home; she had a contract to teach at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, her husband would find it easier to practice there, and she hoped her son would move over too. She was concerned, though, by Lotte Lehmann’s report of struggling to support her family and found that her reception in New York was muted: despite good reviews, her recitals were not well attended, and private students were hard to come by.35 There remained a market for German Christmas carols, and Schumann made a recording of some for HMV; she also sang them on the radio, though not always to the satisfaction of listeners.36 According to Schumann’s biographer, “the small-­scale, subtle art form” of the lied, “born in the culture of Europe,” did not suit the “huge, fast-­ moving New World.”37 Lotte Lehmann made a subtler distinction, writing to Schumann after a Town Hall recital in November 1939: There is really a whole world of difference between your art and the “new.” [. . .] It was an experience for me, with the understanding I now have of lieder, to feel the unbelievably sweet and tender art which knows how to sublimate every expression so unspeakably finely that everything comes out of the ether and is made to float, released from all earthly heaviness. [. . .] Oh, one complains and sighs about one’s lost youth, but someone who is capable of giving something of that calibre, which you gave today, is beyond youth or age.38

The inference that Schumann represented an “old” style of musicianship and technique supports the notion of an émigré culture within New York, protecting a Central European school of singing that anglophone students could not, or were unwilling to, obtain.39 Lehmann’s reference to age is also, of course, personal, and signals these singers’ awareness that they would be

142

C h apt er F o ur

superseded by younger generations. Increasingly, Schumann felt that her voice was losing its Blütenstaub (pollen), and while she continued to give recitals and make recordings, having learned some promotional tricks from Lehmann and other colleagues, she decided to concentrate on teaching. The difficulties Schumann had in finding private students were shared by other exiled musicians in New York; cultural differences played a part, but so too did economics. There had been signs of recovery in the financial markets, but toward the end of the decade—and before the approach of war invigorated the munitions industry—there was another dip.40 Musicians who were prepared to participate in popular culture found they could supplement their incomes through advertising and film appearances. Lehmann and the Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior both signed up with the New York agent Constance Hope. Hope was relentless in generating publicity for her artists—concocting stories about how Melchior had met his second wife, Maria Hacker (“Kleinchen”), when she parachuted into his garden, for instance—and in finding opportunities for them to appear in advertising and on the radio. Singers had long endorsed products, but Hope took things to another level, while remaining alert to the need to maintain certain standards. She recalled that “the public wasn’t very much interested in a singer who wasn’t a movie star,” particularly one who performed Wagnerian opera and had an unpronounceable name.41 Her intention was to reveal the man behind the voice (and no doubt to benefit from the lucrative fees; moreover, Melchior found that once he started appearing onscreen he no longer advertised beer but caviar). Hope’s response to a proposal that Melchior, on behalf of the Western Union, should sing a “melodious telegram” to the Duke of Windsor reveals a sensitivity for cultural and political, as well as public, relations: “This gag gets dignity through the personalities involved, plus the serious aspects of the general situation, affecting British-­American co-­operation in the emergency.” The French-­American soprano Lily Pons could do it instead if Melchior would prefer, Hope added, “but the across the continent factor has a special appeal.”42 The Jewish Hope was also able to steer Lehmann through some of the more sensitive aspects of negotiating New York society during the 1930s.43 Melchior’s and Lehmann’s relationship with Hope, and their participation in American popular culture, as will be touched on later in regard to Melchior’s film roles, serve as a reminder that, during the Depression, entertainment provided routes of escape and consolation. In Britain it was a decade of tabloid advertising wars and sensational press stories (the Loch Ness monster was first sighted in 1933), a spectacular production of

S avi ng Mus ic

143

Noël Coward’s patriotic musical play Cavalcade, and a craze for yo-­yos; American-­style cafeterias and milk bars provided new venues for socializing.44 In the United States, Hollywood was enjoying a period of relative freedom. Some films—Gone with the Wind (1939), for instance—might be read as portentous allegories, but contemporary screwball comedies featuring Katherine Hepburn, Cole Porter musicals with dancing by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, anarchic films by the Marx Brothers, and the smiling, singing child star Shirley Temple also graced the screens.45 John F. Kasson has pointed out that spending on amusements increased during this time of financial hardship.46 Newly arrived exiles in New York, with time on their hands, consumed a varied diet of films and music. This was not to say that the entertainment on offer did not have broader implications or that there was no place, within this mix, for listening to classical repertoire.47 The decision and ability of some, if not all, lieder singers to move between legitimate or serious venues and less elevated arenas had been apparent in the 1920s; during the Depression, though, such migrations between high and middle, if not low, became more difficult to negotiate. The question is what manner of politics the continuing presence of songs by Schubert and Schumann in anglophone culture represented. When, in his highly poeticized memoir about walking through central Europe in 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor recalled visiting German castles and turning pages for candlelit performances of lieder by Schubert, Strauss, and Hugo Wolf, he took this to mean that “music played a leading part in all these households.”48 The vignette is automatically overlaid with a cultural nationalism of a precious kind that might be trampled over by Germany’s turn toward fascism. The assumption has always been that music has not played a similarly important role in British and American life. The reality, of course, is more complex. There may have been a premium placed on “imported” performers of lieder, and there were numerous examples of European émigrés using music as a means to remember their homeland.49 What, however, is the message to be inferred from the report that in 1938 the twenty-­one-­year-­old American novelist Carson McCullers spent her time at a Writers’ Conference in Vermont “playing German lieder on the piano and drinking tumblers of gin with the 54-­year-­old [American poet] Louis Untermeyer”?50 Does this not mean, as Leigh Fermor reported of German castles, that music played a leading part in their lives? After all, McCullers had initially moved to New York to train at the Juilliard School of Music. Two years later she joined the February House artists’ commune in Brooklyn, where she associated with the British musicians Benjamin Britten and

144

C h a pt er Fo ur

Peter Pears, who, as a duo, would later be celebrated interpreters of lieder.51 Or did McCullers’s engagement with German music signify her high-­art pretensions or, perhaps worse still, bohemianism? Was it simply one form of music she appreciated besides other kinds? The meaning of performing lieder in American culture, by the end of the 1930s, was not necessarily only about what was happening in Europe, but could also relate to events at home, as demonstrated by the next case study.

Protest Song 1: Schubert on the Steps of the Lincoln Memorial The African American contralto Marian Anderson gave her first solo recital at Carnegie Hall on 30 December 1928.52 She began with a group of seventeenth-­century songs (Purcell, Scarlatti, Martini) followed by Debussy’s “Air de Lia” and “L’enfant prodigue.” “Group number 2” was German: Schubert’s “Der Zwerg” and “Die Allmacht,” Schumann’s “Frühlingsnacht,” and Strauss’s “Zueignung,” the last followed by such “tumultuous applause” that Anderson repeated it. There was then a group of English and American songs as well as spirituals, “such as were suited to the tastes of the large miscellaneous audience in attendance,” though their unusually “refined interpretation” was welcomed. The New York Times remarked upon the different languages featured on the program, admiring Anderson’s clear diction, though claiming that she was “not as much at home in German. [. . .] Schubert’s ‘Allmacht’ could have had a little more intimate understanding.”53 While Anderson’s voice was acknowledged to be “unusual for its largeness and its naturally rich color,” it was also noted that she had a tendency to “scoop” and exhibited occasional unevenness of tone.54 The New York Times reviewer concluded “thoughtfulness, taste and appreciation [. . .] and her sincerity as an interpreter was in most cases matched by ability to communicate the mood of the song she undertook,” but she must continue to study vocalism to make the most of her “natural musical equipment, and her obvious industry.” The condescension of the unsigned critique would be frustrating for any young singer but was made more acute by the racial undertones. Frankye Dixon, whose review appeared a few days later in the New York Amsterdam News (a paper founded in 1909 aimed at an African American readership), by contrast, declared Anderson’s “style and diction in the rendition of these German masters was done in a way that would no doubt be perfectly satisfactory to the authors themselves.” Dixon furthermore took other reviewers to task:

S avi ng Mus ic

145

The haze of the complexional prejudice has so much obscured the vision of many persons that they cannot see (at least there are many who affect not to see) that musical faculties and powers for their artistic development are not in the exclusive possession of the fairer-­skinned race. [. . .] Besides, there are some well-­meaning persons who have formed, for lack of information, erroneous and unfavorable estimates of the art capabilities of the Negro race.55

The discussion of the racial qualities of voice that had surrounded African American male singers such as Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson continued in the reception of Anderson; indeed, she was often likened to Hayes, even though critics did not usually venture to compare male voices to female.56 In this situation, it seemed, race was a stronger identifier than gender. All three singers became more politically active through the 1930s. Hayes—as mentioned in chapter 1—increasingly concentrated on what he referred to as “Aframerican religious folk songs.” Robeson never fully engaged with lieder repertoire in the same way; while, as Grant Olwage documents, his concert repertoire during this period “opened up” to song traditions outside of spirituals and folk song, he was still primarily associated with that repertoire, especially through his performances on stage and film (notably Show Boat, which featured him singing the “fakesong” “Ol’ Man River”).57 Anderson did not change her repertoire and practices as they did, but she found that the sites of her performances were increasingly politicized. Ten years later, in 1939, the New York Times reviewed Anderson’s fourth recital of the Carnegie Hall season. By this time Anderson’s reputation was assured: she had toured successfully in Europe and in North and South America. Despite racist protests, she had appeared at the 1935 Salzburg Festival to sing Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler; afterward she was hailed by Toscanini as the kind of artist only heard once in a hundred years.58 Yet the degree of enthusiasm with which she was greeted in New York, and the guard kept outside, were unusual: “From her first appearance on the stage to the last of many encores the audience paid fervent tribute with unstinting generosity. Outside the hall were twenty policemen waiting possible demonstrations [. . .] but all was peaceful on Fifty-­Seventh Street.”59 Nothing much had changed in terms of Anderson’s programming: she began with two Handel arias and an air by Martini, followed by a French group (Duparc, Fauré, Franck, and Heinrich Bernheim), and Hummel’s “Hallelujah,” then “a brace of varied folksongs” (Swedish, Scottish, Finnish, and Span-

146

C h apt er Fo ur

ish) and spirituals. The final song she sang was Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” “whose opening measures were completely drowned out by delighted applause.”60 The applause for “Ave Maria,” and the reason for the police presence, were recent events in Washington, D.C. Anderson had been prevented from giving a concert at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who voted to uphold a ban on nonwhite artists performing to a nonsegregated audience.61 Musicians—including Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, the singers Lawrence Tibbett and Kirsten Flagstad, and the conductors and broadcasters Leopold Stokowski and Walter Damrosch—and Howard University had petitioned the D.A.R. to reverse its decision. In a telegram the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) wrote: “Barring a world-­famed artist because of color, from a building named by the Daughters of the American Revolution, ‘Constitution Hall,’ violates the very spirit and purpose of the immortal document after which the hall is named.”62 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who resigned her membership from the D.A.R. in protest against their decision—persuaded her husband and the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, to arrange for Anderson instead to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.63 The concert, held on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1939, was attended by over 75,000 people and heard by a huge radio audience (figure 4.1). In his introductory speech Ickes began by making it sound as though the reason that the concert was open-­air was that no building had the capacity to hold such a tremendous crowd. He went on, though, to invoke the overseers of American democracy, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, and declared that “genius, like justice is blind [. . .] genius knows no color lines.”64 Anderson’s voice, he claimed, “lifts any individual above his fellows”; it would be “an exultant pride to any race.” Anderson sang, with her regular accompanist, the Finn Kosti Vehanen, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “O mio, Fernando” from Donizetti’s La favorita, and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” before the intermission, after which followed four spirituals (“Gospel Train,” “Trampin’,” “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord,” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”). She sang the Donizetti and Schubert in their original languages. Anderson’s decision to include classical repertoire was in keeping with her regular recital programs (and, indeed, when invited to perform spirituals at the White House, she insisted on singing Schubert there too). “Ave Maria” was not an esoteric lied to choose—it was already one of Schubert’s most famous tunes, known through countless performances, recordings, and appearances in films

S avi ng Mus ic

147

4.1 Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, 9 April 1939. Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

(from the Schubert biopic Blossom Time, discussed in chapter 2, to Tin Pan Alley arrangements and the 1935 American science-­fiction movie The Bride of Frankenstein) even before the release of Disney’s Fantasia in 1940. Yet the poem’s emphasis on spiritual purity and its slow, stately melody was atypical of the composer in content and style.65 It certainly stood apart, in Anderson’s broadcast, from the gymnastics of the Donizetti and the low register of the spirituals, proving her expressive range and technical mastery of the classics in defiance of those who considered her unfit to appear on stage. Newsreels reported: “Nation’s Capital Gets Lesson in Tolerance.”66 The ecstatic response to her performance of “Ave Maria” at the Carnegie Hall recital two weeks later suggests that the audience in New York was prepared to demonstrate their relative open-­mindedness. This was not, though, just about competition between two East Coast cities. Lieder were, of course, celebrated as symbols of German culture in the Nazi regime. As Kira Thurman has demonstrated, Anderson had won over critics when performing in Berlin and Vienna. The popular Wiener Zeitung even declared: “In the city of Vienna, Marian Anderson is a foreigner no longer”; she was “not a black but rather an artistic sensation.”67

148

C h a pt er F o ur

Anderson left Europe in 1937, aware that Nazi racial policies would prohibit her from performing in Berlin and that they could soon spread to Austria. That she was greeted with racism in the United States serves as a reminder of the parallels between Jim Crow and Nazi race laws.68 Americans may have claimed that they had produced a world-­class lieder singer in Marian Anderson; American race relations in 1939, though, were evidently no less fraught than in the Third Reich. Anderson might, then, be considered to have undertaken two kinds of song work as she stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. First, she represented her race. As Nina Sun Eidsheim points out, although the concert became an iconic moment for the civil rights movement—the ten-­year-­old Martin Luther King had been among the crowd, as he later recalled in a speech—Anderson’s symbolic role ran counter to her own intentions as a classical musician.69 It could be argued that it was with regard to the latter that she undertook the second song work of interest here: the inclusion of German lieder on programs where they might not have been expected. Typically, the presence of Schubert was taken to indicate an artist’s highbrow aspirations, and Anderson certainly had those. It was a two-­way street, however. By including lieder in her concerts, Anderson also underscored their “universal” appeal, a quality that would be questioned when, in September 1939, war in Europe broke out once more.

London at War When the British government declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, London’s musical life abruptly shut down. The Proms season was curtailed, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra was removed from the capital. On the one hand, the absence of artists from abroad was seen as a great opportunity for English musicians, “who have had a greater chance of making their voices heard in the less crowded assaults upon public attention.”70 On the other, the absence of entertainment—musical or otherwise—­ emphasized the precarious state of play during these months of, as it was called, “phony war.” Three concerts broke the silence: the Scottish pianist Frederic Lamond (Liszt’s next-­to-­last pupil) performed Beethoven and Liszt at the Wigmore Hall on the afternoon of 7 October; the next day, also in the afternoon, Myra Hess played Beethoven’s G Major Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, and the Fleet Street Choir performed English motets at St. Margaret’s in Westminster.71 Hess—who had

S avi ng Mus ic

149

enjoyed a transatlantic career since the early 1920s—broke her contract to tour the United States in the autumn of 1939 to run daily concerts in London: “cannot refuse national service,” she explained curtly in a telegram to her New York agent, Annie Friedberg.72 In a letter she expanded: “it is impossible for me to think of leaving England yet. In this greatest disaster we and the whole of Europe have ever faced, everyone’s duty to their own country is essential. [. . .] I realise that music is of the utmost importance. All normal life has suddenly ceased, and every element of spiritual influence will be needed to sustain our courage, and our sanity.”73 Hess had approached the director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, to ask whether she might pre­sent a series of concerts there.74 The Gallery had closed on 23 August 1939, having already begun evacuating its pictures, and Clark declared himself delighted that the now virtually empty space, rather than being used “for the filling in of forms or the sticking up of envelopes,” could be used again “for its true purpose, the enjoyment of beauty.”75 He suggested holding concerts not weekly, but daily. They had to apply for dispensation from the ban on public gatherings. A small wooden platform was installed in an octagonal gallery, with some of the few remaining pictures decorating the walls. Chairs were rented or donated (some from Buckingham Palace), and Steinway and Sons provided a grand piano, as some of their artists were performing and the concerts were otherwise for charity. From the very first concert on 10 October 1939—given by Hess herself— the audiences were large and enthusiastic, ranging from 250 to 1750 people (figure 4.2). Their purpose was announced to be twofold: to “provide much spiritual refreshment in Central London under informal conditions at a price within everyone’s reach” and to provide employment for musicians.76 The novelist and New Yorker columnist Mollie Panter-­Downes recalled that the concerts started “in the first cheerless, mentally stupefying autumn of the war and [. . .] went on serenely making beautiful music in Trafalgar Square even after the sirens had begun their funeral competition.”77 By the end of the year the Times conceded that “the shock of war has not been all loss if it produces something new and valuable like this series of concerts, which is already developing into an institution.”78 Organizing two concerts every day in the center of London during wartime, with blackouts in force, was no mean feat, and Hess was impressive at mobilizing and organizing the British establishment, not to mention playing, speaking on the radio, and dealing with correspondence.79 She was assisted by the musicologist and composer Howard Ferguson, who planned the programs, and Emmie Bass, from Ibbs and Tillett, who booked the art-

150

C h a pt er F o ur

4.2 Audience at the first Myra Hess concert, 10 October 1939. Photo © The National Gallery, London.

ists and advertised the concerts. There was a concert at 1 P.M. every weekday, with a concert at 4 P.M. repeating the same program on Tuesdays and Thursdays (later pushed back to 5:30 P.M. to fit working hours, and then discontinued from 15 December 1939 until springtime, when lighting improved). Tickets could not be booked in advance or seats reserved, and the policy initially was that people could come and go between movements. St.-­Martin-­in-­the-­F ields, the church over the road, were asked to limit their bell ringing so that it did not interrupt the concerts. There were no expectations to dress up or “to be seen” (as there was felt to be at the Queen’s Hall), and the timing was said to be ideal for “a concert [usually only of an hour] given, so to speak, on the spot, at a time when the day’s work is only half done and everybody is feeling fresh enough to enjoy music freely.”80 After expenses, one-­third of the concert’s proceeds went to the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund.81 Advertising in the press was prohibitively expensive, though Hess and her committee often used the Times as an organ for notices to the audience—for instance, requesting that more people come to the afternoon concert in order to help make the numbers more manageable. A radio broadcast reported that while the gallery seated seven hundred

S avi ng Mus ic

151

people, several hundred more had to be turned away, and they remarked on the wide range of people attracted to the concerts: What sort of people were these who felt more hungry for music than for their lunches? All sorts. Young and old, smart and shabby, Tommies in uniform with their tin hats strapped on, old ladies with ear trumpets, musical students, civil servants, office boys, busy public men, all sorts had come, because they were longing for something to take them out of the muddle and uncertainty of the present into a realm where even the most tragic emotions have dignity, order and unassailable independence.82

Those who performed were also touched by the audience, which, as one singer put it, “consisted just of the people any artist is wanting to get hold of, the people who mostly cannot afford the usual concert prices.”83 Ivor Newton reported that a young naval officer who had just arrived, “dirty and extremely tired,” from North Africa was determined to go straight to a concert: “for a ship-­mate and I agreed, coming up in the train, that the one thing that would put us right with the world would be to get up in time to the National Gallery and hear some music.”84 When a time bomb was discovered and the Gallery had to be evacuated, the concert was transferred to South Africa House, across Trafalgar Square. Hess wrote to thank the High Commissioner for making “it possible for us to maintain our record of never having cancelled a concert.”85 At the end of October 1939 Lady Gater, whose husband had become the sole secretary to the Ministry of Supply, suggested running a canteen for concert audiences, which would solve the problem of those who could not bring their own lunch and, less selflessly, “perhaps reduce the ubiquitous rustling of sandwich paper which at times threatened to drown the music.”86 The canteen was only open to war workers but was run by well-­ connected wives and daughters, such as the Honorable Mrs. Egerton, wife of a secretary to the Royal Society, and Mrs. Victor Goodman, daughter of Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose husband was a clerk in the House of Lords and an organizer of the Parliamentary Home Guard.87 Crab and lobster salads were a specialty (both seafoods being readily available during the war), with mayonnaise made by the cook from the household of the long-­ serving governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. Lady Gater was celebrated for her twenty-­five types of sandwiches.88 By November 1942 the Evening News declared “body and soul” to be assuaged by the combina-

152

C h a pt er Fo ur

tion of cheese sandwiches, coffee, and Beethoven at the lunchtime National Gallery concerts.89 While what people ate may seem incidental, the sense of everyone pitching in—posh and poor, young and old—for the sake of physical and cultural nourishment was considered vital to the war effort.90 In Humphrey Jennings’s short film Listen to Britain (1942), there was a shot of Hess performing at the National Gallery before the queen and, as the historian Angus Calder points out, “lots of ordinary people.”91 Musicians, many of whom had their engagements canceled, were keen to perform in the series. Alongside well-­established names such as Roland Hayes, Maggie Teyte, and Pierre Bernac (who appeared with Francis Poulenc in January 1944), young British singers appeared who would become more widely known after the war. For example, the contralto Kathleen Ferrier made her London debut there on 28 December 1942, presenting Brahms and Wolf as well as an English group.92 Peter Pears performed Benjamin Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets on 22 October 1942.93 Hess campaigned to allow those serving in the Royal Air Force to appear when they were on leave and hired young performers as well as more established ones, pointing out: “One of the chief weapons in the war of propaganda must be the performance and broadcasting of serious music, at a standard of performance which shall compare favourably with that heard in enemy countries.”94 She thereby also defended the employment of foreign musicians, explaining that the majority of performances at the National Gallery concerts were “as they should be, British. But the public also appreciates the opportunity of hearing certain proved and distinguished foreign artist, some of whom are allied refugees. Indeed such foreign artists are needed to provide variety in our daily round of music making.”95 Inevitably there were limits to what genres could easily be put on: male choruses, for instance, were almost impossible. Most of the concerts therefore consisted of chamber music and song. An exception was on New Year’s Day 1940, when Clark made his conducting debut in Haydn’s “Toy” Symphony, with famous musicians and actors (including Joyce Grenfell and Elena Gerhardt, of whom more shortly) playing percussion and toy instruments (in the same program a team of pianists performed Schumann’s Carnaval in relay). The National Gallery concerts were granted an exemption from entertainment duty because they were educational and not-­for-­profit. The programs stuck primarily to the classics, with little contemporary or popular fare: news that John McCormack would be keen to sing was greeted with a prediction that Hess would try “to curb his habit of singing a program of

S avi ng Mus ic

153

‘Mother Macrees’ ” (as earlier chapters have shown, that would not have been necessary).96 A great deal of Germanic music was programmed: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were favorites. Although critics rarely attended, the concerts were recognized to have increased the public’s appetite for “serious” music. The Radio Times subsequently described the concerts, along with the Proms, as “libraries” of music in that they included, for example, performances of all of Brahms’s chamber music. The National Gallery concerts also featured lieder, including performances of complete song cycles: Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin was performed four times, as was Winterreise (with individual songs featuring more frequently—“Frühlingstraum,” “Die Krähe,” “Der Wegweiser,” and “Der Leiermann” were each done six times; “Wasserflut,” “Die Post,” “Mut!,” and “Die Nebensonnen” came in a close second at five times each). Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -­Leben was heard thrice, Dichterliebe seven times (with “Ich will meine Seele tauchen” done ten times altogether), and Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge four. Other cycles—such as Schubert’s Schwanengesang and Schumann’s Eichendorff Liederkreis were heard once or twice. The most popular single songs were by Schubert: the highest scorers were “Im Abendrot” and “Im Frühling,” done half a dozen times, with “Liebesbotschaft,” “An die Musik,” and “Die Liebe hat gelogen” close behind. Surprisingly, as the composer was still alive and had been the director of the Reichsmusikkammer in the 1930s, Richard Strauss’s songs appeared regularly, with “Cäcilie” and “Morgen” most popular. The inclusion of lieder at the National Gallery concerts was in marked contrast to programming during the First World War, when there was such resistance to hearing German repertoire, even when sung in translation. The notion that British people would happily listen not only to the language of the enemy, but to it being sung by German citizens, demonstrated the extent to which the force of music as cultural propaganda was recognized. Claims for classical music’s universalism may be treated, rightly, with healthy skepticism today.97 During the Second World War, however, it proved a potent symbol of cosmopolitan civilization in the face of attack from aggressive nationalism, and it provided a rationale for the embrace of foreigners who no longer counted as émigrés but as political exiles.98 As mentioned, Hugo Wolf ’s songs were also programmed at the National Gallery concerts. The recurrence of lieder such as “Das verlassene Mägdlein” (heard seven times), “Auch kleine Dinge” (six), and “Verborgenheit” (five) indicated the success of both Legge’s gramophone society and

154

C h apt er Fo ur

repeat appearances by certain singers—most obviously Elena Gerhardt. The fifty-­five-­year-­old mezzo had assumed that, with the outbreak of war, her performing career was over—that, as before, British audiences would not tolerate German-­language repertoire.99 However, attitudes were different this time round. Gerhardt appeared at the National Gallery twenty-­two times in all, typically alongside other performers. She also gave solo recitals at the Wigmore Hall, sang on the radio (though during the war only for foreign broadcasts, as she would not sing in English and the BBC did not broadcast German), and taught. Gerhardt was able to continue working through the war partly because she was already well established in British musical culture: having made her London debut in 1906, she had been one of the first German singers to return to the city after the First World War. What is more, as discussed, she had moved to London permanently in 1934. Always a popular figure at the Gallery concerts, many of those who came to see her had been following her career for some time, live and on her recordings (between 1907 and 1948 she made over 300 recordings, 132 of which were issued). When she sang at the National Gallery, then, she did so not only as a refugee but as a reminder of previous generations of music and musicians. The librarian Lionel Bradley, who had heard Gerhardt repeatedly since his youth, in his diaries carefully compared her performances with those he had attended previously.100 Her rendition of Frauenliebe und -­Leben, with Hess at the piano, was accorded two encores at the National Gallery in May 1940; when she sang the cycle again in November 1941 he conceded, “The voice cannot be quite what it must have been thirty years ago, but age has only deepened the art and expressiveness.” On 18 March 1942 he could not get a seat but was content: “I didn’t really hear any of these songs but it gave me such nostalgic pleasure to be listening to her again even in such unfavourable circumstances and so far as I could judge her voice was in very good form, with clear ringing notes and she was singing as well as ever.” The nostalgia Bradley acknowledged may well have been primarily for the singer; that he could still hear Gerhardt’s voice in such surroundings no doubt added to the concert’s poignancy. The symbolic status of Gerhardt, and of lieder, in Britain during the Second World War was underscored by Walter Legge, now director of the Musical Entertainment Section of ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association, known colloquially as “Every Night Something Awful”), asking her to give a lieder recital to troops stationed at Salisbury in September 1944. She recalled:

S avi ng Mus ic

155

The hall and side-­rooms were jammed with people, so once more I had to beg to be allowed to get on to the platform. The stillness of the breathlessly listening audience moved me deeply. At the end of the concert hundreds of men wanted to shake hands with me, and I remember a very high-­ranking officer taking my hand in both of his and saying that as long as such art existed there was hope for the world to unite again.101

Gerhardt was far from the only famous singer to perform for ENSA; as in the United States, many artists contributed to the war effort by visiting camps and, after the war, occupied zones. 102 Equivalent edifying entertainments were put on for civilians. For example, Britten and Pears gave concerts in villages around the east of England for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). The composer-­pianist reported to his American friend Elizabeth Mayer: We go all over the place, under the strangest conditions—playing on awful old pianos—singing easy, but always good, programmes—and really have the greatest successes with the simplest audience. [. . .] I feel it is absolutely worth it, because, as we have so often agreed, it does get music really to the people, finds out what they want and puts the emphasis on the music, and not the personality of the artist, or their previous fame. One starts completely from “scratch” as it were, since more often than not, they haven’t even heard of Schubert—much less, Britten or Pears!103

Again, the notion that German songs, not to mention German singers such as Gerhardt, might be suitable for ENSA and CEMA audiences indicates how differently music was used during the Second World War in comparison to the First. In the United States concerts for servicemen were similarly intended to provide moral uplift and emotional succor. As the musicologist Annegret Fauser has observed, while American music was promoted as well, programmers were not shy of Eurocentric, even Germanic, repertoire, especially when sung by winsome young women: one report claimed that when a Miss MacNeill sang “Ave Maria” accompanied by the electric organ and violin, “every heart and mind was flooded with the warmth and tenderness of her soft, clear voice.”104 The major point was to contrast the Allies’ open-­minded pluralism with the cultural policy of the Nazis. “Our kind of

156

C h apt er Fo ur

civilization is at stake,” argued Deems Taylor: “Let us not think of [music] as the private property of any man or any country.” 105 It was a rhetoric shared by the organizers of the National Gallery concerts. “Sanity” was a state yearned for repeatedly in Hess’s correspondence. In the last months of the war, Hess wrote to Clark that it was understandable that the National Gallery Concerts had “provided a point of relief and balance in the early days of the War; but it has been proved in these past five and a half years that music has become part of the daily life of thousands of people.”106 The Gallery should continue to host concerts, she suggested, not least because of the part the arts could play “in reconstituting our permanent values in the shattered world of today.” She reminded Clark that he himself had said that music had helped make the Gallery more “humanly accessible.” A new, less sympathetic Gallery director, and a desire to reinstall the collection, however, meant that the last of Hess’s concerts in the National Gallery took place on 10 April 1946, some seven months after the war ended in Europe.107 A total of 1698 concerts had been presented, to an audience that numbered over 800,000.108 A booklet commemorating the series included an essay by the novelist E. M. Forster, who contemplated the many ways in which this unusually diverse audience would have heard the music. He likened the listeners to a flock of birds, darting around, and spending much of its time where it shouldn’t, thinking now “how lovely!,” now “my foot’s gone to sleep,” and passing in the beat of a bar from “there’s Beethoven back in C minor again!” to “did I turn the gas off ?” or “I do think he might have shaved.”109

The potential level of distraction did not upset Forster; he even suggested that it was part of the reason for the concert: Schumann—or was it Brahms?—sings against the gas and obliterates the squalor, or, sinking deeper till he reaches the soundless, promotes that enlargement of the spirit which is our birthright. The concert is not over when the sweet voices die. It vibrates elsewhere. It discovers treasures which would have remained hidden, and they are the chief part of the human heritage.110

Music’s ability to lift one out of the squalor of wartime, to remind one of one’s humanity, was rarely expressed so poetically. Forster’s tone is gentler

S avi ng Mus ic

157

than that of most advocates for music as a form of cultural uplift. Perhaps it was more in keeping with the ethos of the National Gallery concert series, with its emphasis on the appreciation of canonical chamber works and its canteen proffering honey-­and-­walnut sandwiches. Recent scholarship has begun to reassess the claims of wartime efforts to improve musical tastes among the public.111 It seems likely that the majority of audience members at the National Gallery were city white-­collar workers or members of the leisured classes keen to take advantage of whatever artistic entertainment was on offer, rather than “ordinary” Londoners.112 Certainly, once the concerts ran beyond the end of the war, there were complaints that the audience had been taken over by “leisured women in more or less expensive coats, with a modicum of servicemen and students,” with workers on their lunch break having to stand.113 Others declared a dislike for the concerts’ emphasis on the classics. “Normal” musical life, it seems, was resuming in the city.

Protest Song 2: Kirsten Flagstad One of the signatories protesting the D.A.R.’s decision to ban Marian Anderson from performing at Washington’s Constitutional Hall in 1939 had been Kirsten Flagstad. The Norwegian soprano may have spoken little English when she arrived in New York in December 1934, but she was soon received rapturously in Wagnerian roles.114 Together with Lauritz Melchior she was credited with turning around the fortunes of the Metropolitan Opera House. Radio broadcasts soon followed, as did more lucrative concert work. Flagstad claimed that she knew “precious little about concert style, tradition, and routine” and that she had to work hard to master this type of performance.115 At her first concert appearance (18 March 1935) she again sang excerpts from Tristan but subsequently included lieder. Her voice might be thought too big for the small forms of Schubert; however, other Wagnerians, such as Lauritz Melchior, Alexander Kipnis, and the slightly lighter-­voiced Lehmann also sang lieder very successfully in concert and on recordings.116 Reviewers praised Flagstad’s song recitals for their lack of “histrionic pretences, [. . .] showy tricks of technique, [. . .] exaggeration of emotions.”117 The composer-­cum-­reviewer Virgil Thomson encapsulated her as “correct and beautiful.”118 The young American pianist Edwin McArthur became Flagstad’s accompanist and later her conductor (apart from his musical talent, Flagstad was delighted that at over six feet tall McArthur wouldn’t make her

158

C h a pt er Fo ur

look like a giant on the concert platform).119 She encouraged him to learn Norwegian songs; he suggested including American songs. It was through traveling on concert tours, the singer said, that she gradually discovered “musical America”: Somehow living in Europe and listening to people speak contemptuously of musical taste in America, you never get the true picture. Why, America was far ahead of Europe in many ways! It astonished me to find how many people went to civic concerts and lectures and how many took all kinds of music courses. Thousands and thousands of people came to my concerts, even in the small cities. This was by no means true of Europe, not on this scale!120

What is more, Americans were not “smug” in their tastes. Flagstad found that they liked unfamiliar songs by Wolf and Brahms, “being eager to learn new things rather than hear the ‘hackneyed’ things over and over again.”121 However, she did complain that when singing on American radio “it is always ‘Ho yo to ho’—Brünnhilde’s battle cry—that was asked for, rather than lieder.122 By 1940 there were rumors that Flagstad was thinking of retirement; she announced that she would vacation in Kristiansand, her home, near Oslo, and return to the United States in November, which she did, performing at the Bagbys and giving her first radio broadcast.123 In April 1941 Flagstad once again left New York to travel, via Lisbon, to Norway. Many—­ including Melchior—warned her that she might not be able to return to the United States because of the war.124 By the summer it became clear that she would not be keeping her NBC engagements.125 For the duration of the war, Flagstad explained, she wanted to stay at home with her family ( journalists were quick to point out that, while she had three stepchildren in Norway, her daughter Elsa lived in Montana, and she had another stepdaughter in the United States).126 She later claimed that while living in Norway she sang in public only three times: twice in Switzerland, and once in Sweden.127 She never, she said, sang for the Nazis or in occupied zones; she had even turned down an invitation to sing with the Berlin Philharmonic in Stockholm.128 But after the war many Norwegians and Americans objected to the prospect of Flagstad’s return to concertizing. They pointed out that the Norwegian embassy had refused to sponsor her trip home, but still she made it—with a stopover, it was claimed, in Berlin.129 While there she had also given an interview to Fritt Folk, the official organ of Vid-

S avi ng Mus ic

159

kun Quisling’s fascist Nasjonal Samling party, to which her husband, the wealthy lumber merchant Henry Johannsen, belonged.130 In 1945 Johannsen was convicted of collaboration; Flagstad was accused of having condoned his activities.131 Flagstad’s husband died in 1946. The following year she visited the United States and declared her intention to become a citizen (she was pictured in the newspapers dandling her grandson, her daughter having married a captain in the American Air Force).132 Her recitals in London, singing Wagner at the Royal Albert Hall, were reported to be warmly received.133 Eleanor Belmont argued for Flagstad’s return to the Met, hoping that music could transcend politics, and many prominent musicians defended the singer’s reputation.134 As it had during the First World War, the press debated the relationship between art and politics:135 “There are people who argue that arts and politics are two different things. In times like these, we don’t think so. We feel that if Kirsten Flagstad is allowed to return to the United States and take up her career [. . .] it will create ill feeling with Norway. The people are slow to forget.”136 There were others who queried the necessity of bringing figures such as Flagstad back to New York on the basis that the city’s music scene was “already glutted.”137 Good music should survive, they argued; but enemy composers should not be allowed to make money from it, and artists were replaceable.138 While there were large audiences at some of Flagstad’s American concerts, there were also demonstrations.139 The University of Minnesota, a state with a large Scandinavian community, rejected her offer of a concert, and her membership in the American Guild of Musical Artists was revoked.140 A group of thirty women picketed her Chicago recital, and stink bombs were thrown during a recital in Philadelphia.141 Flagstad recalled that in the auditorium the audience was split between supporters, who cheered, and a group of young college boys who had each been paid $15 and given a free ticket to attend, who booed. Apparently there was silence before she began Beethoven’s “Wonne der Wehmut,” but then someone called out, from the balcony, “in two deliberate, spaced-­out tones: Na . . . zi!”142 Prominent musicians leapt to Flagstad’s defense.143 She departed, issuing a statement denying that she had ever sung for any Nazi.144 She returned in July under the quota visa, now unsure whether she wanted to apply for American citizenship.145 When she returned there were protests from the Musicians’ Chapter of the American Veterans Committee and the Music Division of the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions out-

160

C h apt er Fo ur

side Carnegie Hall. Their signs read: “We fought them, they import them”; “We protest the presence of Nazi collaborators in our concert halls”; “Mme. Flagstad, where were you during the Battle of the Bulge and on VE day?”; and, “N.C.A.C. (the National Concert and Artists Corp., Mme F’s present management) has forgotten. Have you?”146 By the fourth postwar season, however, audience enthusiasm inside the concert hall outweighed the protests outside. As with Marian Anderson, once again it was the New York audience that gave the ultimate seal of approval to a controversial performer. Of her last concert of the forty-­date tour, at Carnegie Hall, the New York Times reported that “in contrast to the five silent and peaceful pickets from the American Veterans Committee, who paraded outside as the crowd assembled, there was an audience of 2700 which greeted her with an ovation and continued cheers and prolonged applause through the evening.”147 The program consisted of songs by Schubert, the American John Alden Carpenter, and Richard Strauss, as well as a group of Scandinavian composers. Her accompanist, still, was Edwin MacArthur. Strauss had died only three months before, and Flagstad, at the composer’s request, would premiere his Four Last Songs in London the following May. It has become routine to cite Strauss’s late lieder as swan songs for a tradition seemingly at odds with the postwar era.148 In many ways, the same aesthetic judgment was passed on his songs from four decades earlier. The continued presence of his songs on recital programs in Britain and the United States through the twentieth century, despite two wars with Germany, is thus all the more remarkable and underscores once again the ability of performance history to offer alternative narratives. The seriousness with which Flagstad’s recitals were taken were thrown into (light) relief by the wartime activities of her Metropolitan costar Lauritz Melchior. He remained in New York, continuing to sing Wagner (a notable difference from the opera houses’ approach to German repertoire during the First World War) and sustaining his concert career with the help of his agent, Constance Hope. During the hostilities there were attempts by the American media to acknowledge the birth nations of artists who appeared on their shows: Deems Taylor’s radio program America Preferred thus welcomed Melchior with some Grieg.149 Melchior similarly played up his Nordic identity in a series of musical films he made in Hollywood just after the war.150 He was perfectly willing to lampoon himself as “a Great Dane” onscreen and seemed happy to fulfill Hollywood’s desire for “an overture, the curtain, and zowie, a tenor aria for Melchior.”151 Although the inclusion of a classical music star was no doubt commercially driven,

S avi ng Mus ic

161

4.3 Lauritz Melchior, still from The Thrill of a Romance. Getty Images.

it is also possible to read the inclusion of art song and opera as driven by a similar desire for cultural uplift—or at least distraction—that drove more earnest, government-­backed wartime entertainment agencies.152 Melchior typically played cameo characters (invariably famous opera singers with a Nordic name, with running jokes about being forced to diet and highly strung classical musicians), who functioned as the romantic linchpin of the films, helping couples (usually the man was a returning soldier) declare their love through his performances, which were staged in those heterotopic spaces of the mid-­century discussed in other chapters: opera houses, hotels, and cruise ships. There was always a climactic high note from the tenor, and often a scene where his “classical” music would be transformed into a more popular style (typically by groups led by famous bandleaders such as Xavier Cugat or Tommy Dorsey), about which the singer would be outraged or delighted, depending on the situation. It was in these situations that Schubert’s “Ständchen” (in Thrill of a Romance; figure 4.3) or Grieg’s “Ja elsker dig” (This Time for Keeps) would make an appearance.153 While their melodies would be recognizable, they were often sung to words that suited the scene; or, if they were sung in their

162

C h apt er Fo ur

original language, their incomprehensibility would be highlighted.154 The necessity to translate art song, both musically and linguistically, had less to do with Melchior’s émigré status and wartime politics than with the associations between singing in foreign languages and elite culture.155 It made this music palatable to a wide audience—Thrill of a Romance was the fourth-­ highest-­grossing film of 1945156—by being identifiable as at once “other” and American. If this was intended as musical appreciation or cultural uplift, it was stealthily done; more than anything, it feels like a lucky escape.

An die Musik Elisabeth Schumann made the return journey from New York to London soon after victory in Europe was announced in 1945. It was not the kind of transatlantic voyage she had enjoyed before the war; rather than participating in onboard entertainment “just like Paris,” she was the only woman among four passengers on the freight steamer Prometheus. On 14 August, however, news came over the radio that Japan had surrendered. Her biography recounts the improvised celebrations: The men slapped each other on the shoulders, jumped for joy and hugged each other. Sailors dragged crates of flares and signal rockets up and started setting them off until the sky was cracking and popping and brilliant with red, white and green light. Hardly had the light dimmed when singing and piano-­playing could be heard from below: “The Stars and Stripes.” The old honky-­tonk piano, not too badly out of tune, was woken up from its dusty sleep. Elisabeth’s voice joined in with the rest—high and clear above the men’s voices and the tinny piano. There were shouts for a solo, and the song which came to Elisabeth’s mind, the song seemingly made for this evening, was the gloriously peaceful “Nacht und Träume” by Schubert. No one wanted to accompany, so Elisabeth sat herself at the old upright: “Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder . . .” (“Holy night, you descend upon us”).157

In a later interview, Schumann claimed, “I will probably never again in my life have such an attentive and deeply moved audience.” Schumann’s lone voice singing a lied to her own accompaniment on the high seas conjures a very different musical image from the concerts on

S avi ng Mus ic

163

transatlantic liners with which this book began. Music was no longer mere distraction; it could function as a means of celebration and commemoration, for crew as well as passengers. And not just any music, but Schubert. Granted, the language of “Nacht und Träume” probably mattered less to Schumann’s attentive listeners than its soaring melody—remember Schumann-­Heink advising the ship’s audience in 1919 that “it might sound like German, but it is not.” Schumann had become an American citizen, but it seems unlikely anyone thought of her as anything other than German; they were simply willing, in this instance, to hear beyond nationality. The singer did not expect such a warm reception at her first London concerts after the war and decided to program more English than German songs. There was no need: her lieder were received with enthusiasm, even in the concerts she gave for ENSA in the British zone. Reunited with Walter Legge, now producing records again, and Gerald Moore, it seemed that Schumann would be able to pick up her career in England almost as if nothing had happened. Other perspectives can be given on musical life during the postwar period, as already indicated by the reception of Kirsten Flagstad’s return to the United States. Inevitably hostility remained toward those who had been the enemy, as the lengthy—if to some minds ineffectual—­denazification trials attested.158 In new music, there seemed to be a desire to wipe the slate clean: total serialism and the use of chance operations have often been touted as counterextremes of the German tradition, though their tabula rasa status has perhaps been overstated.159 With regard to performance, the situation was not so revolutionary either. Musical life was swiftly reestablished, despite postwar deprivation, and in East and West there were continuities with previous practices.160 Although now embracing composers such as Mahler, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky, the repertoire was firmly canonic.161 Among the many stories of music being made amid the ruins of war, Celia Applegate notes, one of the most striking was of the Berlin Singakademie performing Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem in the shell of the Philharmonie.162 It was not just large-­scale music making that took place, however.163 For this book’s purposes, also notable was a concert at the Titania-­Palast given by Dietrich Fischer-­Dieskau, a young German baritone who had sung Schubert to fellow prisoners of war in Italy. Fischer-­ Dieskau’s debut at a cinema converted into an entertainment venue in the American zone presaged a long career of international fame. The historian David Monod claims that the Americans “failed to pre-

164

C h apt er F o ur

vent the reassertion of German confidence in their own cultural superiority or the cover-­up of classical music’s collaboration in the crimes of National Socialism.”164 In part this was because, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, at least in the sphere of art song they valued the same repertoire. A turning point in postwar European musical life came in 1951: that year the Bayreuth Festival reopened with a radical staging of Parsifal by Wieland Wagner and, more in the manner of business as usual, the recently denazified Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with another ex-­Party member, the soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, as one of the ­soloists.165 It was also the year of the Festival of Britain, which had a somewhat broader impetus. Conceived, as one account put it, “among the untidied ruins of a war and fashioned through days of harsh economy,” it was designed to show off the country’s achievements.166 In science and industry, exhibits were exclusively by members of Britain and the Commonwealth. The Festival was one of the first major projects of the recently established Arts Council, which had grown out of wartime ventures such as ENSA. Musically, there was an emphasis on British repertoire and performers, with new works commissioned and a series of recitals of English song at the Wigmore Hall (broadcast on the Third Programme), as well as choral and orchestral concerts at the new three-­thousand-­seat Royal Festival Hall. However, at the same time, foreign composers were commissioned, and there were concerts by foreign artists of foreign music.167 Wagner was sung in German at Covent Garden. Fischer-­Dieskau made his British debut at the Festival, in Frederick Delius’s A Mass of Life. In this outward-­facing aspect the event was akin to the Edinburgh International Festival, which had begun in 1947 (and at which, in 1951, Bruno Walter conducted Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the now celebrated Kathleen Ferrier singing). There were, unsurprisingly, objections raised by the Daily Telegraph, the Musicians’ Union, and the ISM. The conductor Adrian Boult explained in the Festival program: It was not intended that the music of the Festival should be limited to the music of Britain. It was essential that the foreign visitor should be shown the full extent of music-­making in Britain. [. . .] For many years the foreigner received far too large a share of hero-­worship from the English musical public; but today we have so much of our own production to show, and receive so full an appreciation for it, that we would be “little-­Englanders” indeed if we banned the foreign guest artist.168

S avi ng Mus ic

165

This more generous attitude toward foreign musicians, and acknowledgment of their significance in Britain’s musical life, signaled a change in rhetoric among the musical establishment. It seems at odds with the emphasis on memory, nostalgia, and nativism found in many accounts of the postwar period that focus on the music produced, rather than the music performed.169 The careers and collaborations of performers such as Ferrier, Britten, and Pears suggest that certain British singers could now participate in an international network of concertizing and recording without forsaking—and in some ways that encouraged maintaining—the particularities of their national identity. The function and nature of gramophone recordings also changed after the Second World War. The advent of the long-­playing record allowed for more extended stretches of music to be heard in one sitting, which in terms of lieder repertoire encouraged more recordings of song cycles to be made. 1951 also saw the beginning of Fischer-­Dieskau’s collaboration with Gerald Moore on “complete” recordings of lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, which they would work on until Moore’s retirement in 1972. The producer of the project, and indeed the driving force behind Fischer-­ Dieskau’s and Schwarzkopf ’s appearances in Britain, was none other than Legge. While not all were won over immediately by Fischer-­Dieskau’s singing style, he would become immensely influential for subsequent generations of singers. The reciprocal relationship between recording and live performance was fundamentally altered as studio editing techniques improved (Legge being famously interventionist).170 Records no longer had to be snapshots of live performances, and increasingly, if problematically, audiences attended concerts expecting to hear exactly what they had become familiar with on their hi-­fi at home. This brings me to my final example from 1951, but this time from the United States, which, unlike Europe, enjoyed a boost to its prosperity in the postwar years. As a new generation of singers was launched on the international scene, others, who represented what seemed like a very different age, retired. Lotte Lehmann was feeling overlooked by bookers, critics, and audiences; she was jealous of the success of her contemporaries and fearful of competition from younger artists. With the “war long over,” her biographer Kater observes, “she could no longer blame any lack of success on her being German.”171 She had, the impresario Richard Pleasant pointed out, backed the wrong horse by returning to Victor after a stint with Columbia, for the latter was now producing long-­playing records whereas Victor was not, and sales of their recordings would fall.172

166

C h apt er F o ur

Lehmann decided to announce her farewell recital at New York’s Town Hall on 16 February. (Like most farewell concerts, it was not quite her last, but she did not sing in the city again.) Her final encore was Schubert’s “An die Musik,” and she broke down before the end, leaving her accompanist, Paul Ulanowsky, to finish the final phrase alone. Lehmann had made studio recordings of “An die Musik” in 1927 and 1947 and during a radio broadcast in 1941. There is also a recording of the 1951 concert, including its encore.173 These sonic documents trace her voice from its prime to its declining years as well as changes in recording technology and, to an extent, performance practice. The version from 1927 is with piano and strings;174 the basic pulse is 60 beats per minute, but Lehmann habitually slows toward the ends, and sometimes in the middle, of phrases. For the radio broadcast, with Ulanowsky, the pulse is brisker (80 m.m.); Lehmann still takes time over some phrases, but nowhere near as indulgently as before. In 1947, when she recorded the song for Victor, also with Ulanowksy (she and the Austrian had worked together since 1937), the tempo is much the same.175 In 1951—in concert—she sang it in similar fashion, supporting those accounts of other singers, such as Gerhardt, that they were nothing if not consistent in their taking of musical liberties. Listening to Lehmann break down in “An die Musik” is deeply moving and makes one contemplate how to write about expressive surplus in performance, as well as aging and failing voices. The speech she gave before the encore in which she announced her retirement, to the surprise of the audience, is also included in the recording. It was affectionate—thanking Ulanowsky and her public (“you were the wings on which I soared [. . .] a flight into beauty and another world”)—and greeted with warm applause and laughter. “After forty-­one years of anxiety, nerves, strain, and hard work,” she explained, borrowing words from Strauss’s Marschallin, the role with which she ended her career at the Metropolitan Opera in February 1935, “it is time.” It is tempting to pre­sent Lehmann’s farewell and its recording as indicative of the changing status of Schubert’s lied. It might be considered a paean to the power of music in postwar American concert life, symbolizing the repertoire’s canonization and, perhaps, fossilization. Alluring as such a reading may be, details of the farewell concert suggest that, as always, an element of showmanship was involved, even if Lehmann later professed that it made her “boil not to be actress enough to hide my feelings.”176 The long hand of Lehmann’s promotional agent, Constance Hope, may be detected in the photo-­story presented by Life magazine, which started with a picture of her, head bowed, face behind her fingers,

S avi ng Mus ic

167

4.4 Lotte Lehmann crying onstage, 1951. Photo by Ruth Orkin.

as the pianist carried on (figure 4.4). The next page of the magazine happened to be taken up by an advertisement illustrated by a silver-­fox couple in evening dress in a moonlit garden and the tagline, “Time is the art of the Swiss,” suggesting that the Marschallin’s timepiece may have been an expensive wristwatch. Further photographs from the Lehmann concert showed the audience flooding the stage afterward, a mix of old and youthful fans and students already making a name for themselves. The singer was caught kissing family photos before she went onstage (wearing an orchid from “a friend named Toscanini”); then peeking through a door to glimpse the audience, overseen by the hall attendant, Joseph Coker, who had been at her New York debut in 1932; then packing up for California to write her sixth book, Of Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood (it never emerged). However stage-­managed her farewell concert may have been, Lehmann’s sense of her time as past was probably genuine and was shared by many of her contemporaries. In 1939 Lehmann had already distinguished between Elisabeth Schumann’s art and “the ‘new.’ ” There is a well-­established tradition of comparing singers to those who have gone before, and of female singers in particular being aware of the next generation’s arrival. This was the case even before recordings were available as reminders of past practices. The spread of the gramophone certainly increased the possibility of listening to voices from the past. It is important to remember—as pointed out in earlier chapters—that discs were fragile, and although lieder were available,

168

C h a pt er Fo ur

they were generally considered esoteric and were very easily deleted from catalogs. Yet this did not mean that by the interwar period recordings were conceived as representing the voices of the dead, as Jonathan Sterne and others have claimed for recording technologies.177 Nor were they disembodied. The challenge of listening to these recordings, in many ways, was that they all too obviously belonged to breathing bodies. What is more, even if the sound quality of many recordings and gramophone players improved through the interwar period, they continued to be recognized as imperfect reproductions of the live experience. As Daniel LeMahieu points out, recorded sound did not destroy musical traditions, but reconfigured them.178 So far as lieder were concerned, through the interwar period there was a move away from and back to star singers, the majority of whom were native German-­speakers. Authenticity was located in language, even if national schools of singing were being gradually eroded by the internationalism of musical life. While a cluster of individual songs maintained their popularity in performance, developments in the marketing strategies of the recording industry, in tandem with expanding musicological activity (itself driven by European émigrés to the United States), prompted a move toward a collected-­works ethos. After the Second World War the preference for complete cycles rather than selections from them would become more pronounced. Before that move toward the more serious end of lieder interpretation, in heft and affect, the songs and their singers moved between legitimate and popular realms more or less freely. The rarefied world of the lieder recital was only one aspect of how Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss were encountered in American and British musical life in the first half of the twentieth century. That it became the dominant mode of performance was the result of a confluence of postwar politics, commercialism, and specialization. It may not have been the better world hoped for in Schubert’s “An die Musik,” but the civilization many interwar commentators had feared would be destroyed completely, of which lieder became a symbol, had found, for now at least, what seemed to be safe harbor.

Ac know l ed g m en t s

T

he initial archival research for this project was funded by a Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship and an Early Career Research Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/ H034374/1). I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Manchester, who granted me leave to begin research in September 2010; to the Department of Music at Columbia University in New York for hosting me as a Visiting Fellow that semester; and to the Emmy Noether Listening Research Group led by Nikolaus Bacht, then at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, for a visiting fellowship the following summer. Thanks also to the Faculty of Music and St. Catherine’s College at Oxford, who, as well as providing a supportive and stimulating environment in which to work, allowed me a sabbatical to complete this book at the start of 2017. I am indebted to Marta Tonegutti, Evan White, Susannah Engstrom, and Caterina MacLean at the University of Chicago Press, and to my copy editor, Barbara Norton, who have nurtured this project with care and enthusiasm. As well as being grateful to the readers for the press for their helpful feedback I have benefited hugely from comments on drafts from Neil Gregor, Wayne Heisler Jr., Roger Parker, Scott Paulin, Susan Rutherford, Mary Ann Smart, Flora Will­son, and Ben Winters. Invitations to pre­sent my research at reading groups, departmental colloquia, and conferences have also shaped this manuscript in numerous ways. 169

170 Ac k now l ed g m en t s

This project would not have been possible without the help of expert librarians and archivists, among them Jonathan Hiam and Robert Kosovsky of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; John Pennino of the Metropolitan Opera; Alex Collinson at the Royal Albert Hall; Paula Chan of the Waldorf-­Astoria; Steven Siegel of the Ninety-­second Street Y; Richard Warren of Yale Historical Sound Recordings; Morgen Stevens-­Garmon of the Museum of the City of New York; Lisa Darms of the Fales Library, New York University; Jeni Dahmus, archivist at the Juilliard School of Music; Marian Smith, Chief of the Historical Research Branch, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; Rob Hudson at Carnegie Hall; Paul Banks, Paul Collen, and Katy Hamilton, then of the Centre for Performance History at the Royal College of Music; and Paula Best of the Wigmore Hall. Lots of people have offered guidance and information with tremendous generosity. They include Nicholas Attfield, Michael Beckerman, David Butler, Philip Bullock, Brendan Carroll, Hannah Clancy, Sarah Collins, Jane Craxton, Gerald Davidson, Christopher Dingle, Barbara Eichner, Lydia Goehr, John Graziano, Tony Henfrey, Karen Henson, Lily E. Hirsch, Mary Hunter, Aaron J. Johnson, Bernard Keeffe, Marjan Kiepura, Debra Kinzler, Jane Knox-­Kiepura, Daniel Leech-­Wilkinson, Erik Levi, Tim Lockley, Natasha Loges, Jeremy Meehan, Donald V. Mehus, Charlotte Morgan, Nick Morgan, Carol Oja, Ceri Owen, Jim Parakilas, Hilary Poriss, Peter Pulzer, Andrea Rauter, Kristy Riggs, Paul Rodmell, Florian Scheding, Irene Schreier-­Scott, Daniel Snowman, Stein Helge Solstad, Richard Stokes, Heather Wiebe, Emile Wennekes, and Alexandra Wilson. I was fortunate to be able to speak to Martin Isepp, Michael Kennedy, and Marta Eggerth while they were still alive; each gave invaluable insights into musical life of the mid-­twentieth century. Many thanks to friends and their families who have put me up and put up with me while I’ve worked on this project, especially Mark Campbell, Carl Chastenay, Ian Cull, Andy Fry, Emily Howard, Gundula Kreuzer, Katrina McGrath, Kavita Misra, Matthew Sergeant, Jennifer Sheppard, Julia Vazquez, Ben Walton, and Nina Whiteman. My dad and my old friend Catherine died in 2016. I miss them, and their warmth, wisdom, and wit, immensely. Love and thanks to my mum and brother for their support and patience throughout; and to Richard Strivens, who, among other things, made me feel not only that I could finish this book, but that I would.

Ac k now l ed g m en t s 171



The first section of chapter 2 reuses and alters portions of my “Singing Translations: The Politics of Listening between the Wars,” Representations 123 (2013): 53–86. Parts of chapters 2 and 4, relating to the filmic use of Schubert’s “Ständchen,” draw on material that first appeared in “Singing against Late Style: The Problem of Performance History,” in Schubert’s Late Music in History and Theory, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 426–41.

Notes

Introduction 1. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 9. 2. Ibid., 13. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 5. Musicological studies of the interwar period in New York and London that indicate these predilections include Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ralph Giordano, Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008); John Howland, “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press, 2009); and Alexandra Wilson’s forthcoming book on operatic culture in 1920s Britain. 6. Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). 7. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 8. Laura Tunbridge, The Song Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 9. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), 243. 10. The locus classicus is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 11. Remarque’s first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, was about the struggles of a young German who joined the army after the First World War. Despite publishers’ belief that the appetite for war-­related material had waned, it was one of the best sellers of the late 1920s, including in translation. Heralded as a tribute to pacifism, it was banned in the Third Reich as degenerate. 12. Erich Maria Remarque, The Promised Land, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Vintage, 2015), 293. Remarque’s widow had published a version of the manuscript in 1971, the year after he died.

173

174 N ot e s t o Page s 4 – 7 13. See Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970); of course, in the 1920s many conceived of the era as postwar. 14. Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 7; and, on the period experiencing “a crisis of civilization,” 363–69. Alexandra Harris discusses anxiety and civilization in the interwar period in the preface to her Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); David W. Ellwood touches on pessimism about Europe and the “civilization under threat” mentality of the later 1920s in The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 145–46. 15. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Gouldsblom, and Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 16. On the context of Elias’s conception of Kultur and Zivilisation, with particular reference to the contradictory opinions of his contemporaries Oswald Spengler and Siegmund Freud, see Jacinta O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations: From Spengler to Said (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 59–82; and Harry Redner, The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2015). 17. See Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 18. Clive Bell, Civilization: An Essay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1928), 13. 19. The contentious boundaries between high-­, middle-­, and lowbrow cultural experiences, particularly with regard to new media, are discussed by, among others, David Savran, Highbrow/ Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Erica Brown and Mary Grover, eds., Middlebrow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (London: Palgrave, 2011). 20. Joseph Horowitz, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-­de-­Siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012). 21. Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” (1985), in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 37–48. 22. There were, of course, significant venues outside of these neighborhoods, such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 23. For more on Anglo-­American relations, see Genevieve Abravanel, Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. In his discussion of network analysis, Jürgen Osterhammel cautions against overlooking hierarchies and argues for considering nodes that may be of varying “thicknesses”; see his The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 710–24. 25. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. 26. Stephen Greenblatt, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-­Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–53. 27. The term “Dollarland” appears in newspaper clippings from 1915 and 1921 in Frieda Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, annotated William R. Moran, with a prologue and epilogue by Elizabeth Johnston (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1998), 226 and 339. 28. Cavicchi, Listening and Longing, 5. 29. An exception is the theorist Heinrich Schenker’s diary of his wireless listening; see Kirsty Hewlett, “Heinrich Schenker and the Radio,” Music Analysis 34 (2015): 244–64. 30. See Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–13). An equivalent history is

No t e s t o Page s 7 – 1 1

175

not available for music, but some information on New York is available in Walter B. Bailey, “ ‘For the Serious Listeners Who Swear Neither At nor By Schoenberg: Music Criticism, the Great War, and the Dawning of a New Attitude towards Schoenberg and Ultra-­Modern Music,” Journal of Musicology 32 (2015): 279–322; and The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle, is forthcoming. 31. According to the Grove Dictionary, 103 music journals were founded in Great Britain between 1920 and 1940; in North America the total was 91. This was not more than had appeared in the first decade of the century, but they included some titles that became very well established (for comparison, between 1900 and 1909 fifty-­five such journals appeared; however, most did not last more than five years). Many of the smaller interwar journals admittedly were also very short-­ lived and unstable: in a 1921 editorial the Monthly Musical Record pointed out that The Sackbut had changed editorship three times in eighteen months, and that Percy Scholes had already resigned from editorship of the Music Student, which had merged with the Musician. The other significant change was that many general arts reviews, as well as newspapers, increased their music coverage during the interwar period. Nigel Clifford Scaife, “British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought, 1895–1945” (D.Phil, diss., University of Oxford, 1994), provides useful context. 32. Ralph Hill, “Current Calamo,” Musical Mirror and Fanfare 1 (1933): 35–36. 33. In October 1918 Ezra Pound reported in The New Age: “The Daily Telegraph is popu‑ larly supposed to consult the war-­map of the week before deciding on the merits of foreign composers.” 34. Horowitz discusses Krehbiel and “the German-­American transaction” in Moral Fire, 75–124. 35. On nineteenth-­century performance practices, see Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges, eds., Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Jennifer Ronyak, Intimate Expressions: Lied Performance at the Start of the Nineteenth Century (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, forthcoming). 36. The Wigmore Hall had originally been the Bechstein Hall, attached to the German company’s piano studios. For an overview of venues, see Lewis Foreman and Susan Foreman, London: A Musical Gazetteer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005). 37. Although she did not include any at Carnegie Hall (concentrating instead on English, Russian, and Spanish songs, as well as operatic arias), Foster Jenkins did perform lieder: according to a Time magazine report of a 1934 Ritz-­Carlton concert, Brahms’s “Die Mainacht” was subtitled “O singer, if thou canst not dream, leave this song unsung,” while “Vergebliches Ständchen” was labeled “the serenade in vain.” “Music. Dreamer,” 19 November 1934. 38. See Edward F. Kravitt, The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 39. See Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera,” American Quarterly (2011): 641–71. 40. Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. 41. Wolfgang Ernst argues that one listens to the articulation of the medium itself, but that on hearing voice one forgets the archive; this seems unlikely. “History or Resonance? Techno-­Sonic Tempor(e)alities,” Journal of Visual Culture 14 (2015): 99–110. 42. On the enticing but problematic notion of the period ear, see Shai Burstyn, “In Quest of the Period Ear,” Early Music 25 (1997): 692–97 and 699–701. 43. Long-­held views on the supremacy of German classical music are interrogated in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 44. Transnationalism and internationalism as challenges to nationalism are explored in Christophe Charle, Jürgen Schriewer, and Peter Wagner, eds., Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (Frankfurt, NY: Campus, 2004); and in Celia Applegate’s and Dörte Schmidt’s chapters in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C.

176 No t e s to Page s 1 1 – 1 7 Schreffler (Woodbridge: Boydell-­Paul Sacher, 2014). See also Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 45. Musicological interest in cosmopolitanism has expanded in recent years: as an introduction see the colloquy by Dana Gooley, Ryan Minor, Katherine G. Preston, and Jann Pasler, “Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2015): 523–50. 46. Historical specificity is important: the “new cosmopolitanism” tends to be conceived in relation to globalisation in the twenty-­first century and so does not necessarily ascribe the same kind of values or deal with means of dissemination that are relevant to the 1920s and ’30s. 47. Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 269.

Chapter One 1. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes the long ocean voyage as a “temporal rift”; see his In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 168. Transatlantic telegraphic cables were laid in the mid-­nineteenth century; telephone services were radio-­based from the late 1920s. 2. For more on life on the liners, see Lorraine Coons and Alexander Varias, Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 3. In 1906 the SS Adriatic had been the first ocean liner to provide a Turkish bath suite for passengers. Other passengers not mentioned in the diary included the author H. G. Wells, en route to a disarmament conference, and the British war correspondent Colonel Charles Repington. 4. Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, 241. 5. Held by the Cunard Archive, University of Liverpool. 6. The Reitler family represented Vienna’s cultural elite, meaning that (Alice) Lisa’s comparison with Paris was well-­informed: among other connections, her brother-­in-­law, Joseph Reitler (1864–1948), was a director of the Neues Wiener Konservatorium (1916–1938), the co-­founder, with Strauss, Hugo Hofmannsthal, and Max Reinhardt, of the Salzburg Festival in 1920, and the music critic for the Austrian Neue freie Presse (1906–1936); upon arriving in the United States he headed the opera department of New York College of Music before founding the Opera Workshop at Hunter. 7. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27. 8. Gumbrecht, In 1926, 13. 9. Marlis Schweitzer, “Networking the Waves: Ocean Liners, Impresarios, and Broadway’s Atlantic Expansion,” Theatre Survey 53, no. 2 (2012): 241–67. 10. Bos, The Well-­Tempered Accompanist (New York: T. Presser, 1949). From the Ellis Island records for Bos, he seems likely to have been on the Rotterdam, which had sailed from Rotterdam and arrived on 7 September 1919. Schumann-­Heink had traveled to Europe in August 1919 to collect two of her grandchildren; I have found no record of the Newark concert beyond Bos’s account. 11. A comparison might be drawn to the knowingness of music hall, on which see Peter Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-­Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture,” Past and Present 144 (1994): 138–70. 12. Expressions of German identity in the United States are discussed in Melvin G. Holli, “German-­American Ethnic Identity from 1890 Onwards: The Chicago Case,” Great Lakes Review 11 (1985): 1–11; Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-­American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 13. George Henschel, Musings and Memories of a Musician (London: Macmillan, 1918); quoted in George S. Bozarth, Johannes Brahms and George Henschel: An Enduring Friendship (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2008), 56. 14. Konrad Bercovici, “The Black Blocks of Manhattan,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1924, 614–15.

No t e s t o Page s 1 7 – 22

177

15. On the neighborhood’s interwar history see David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (London: Penguin, 1997); and Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16. Barbara Lorenzkowski points out that in other regions—her focus is on the Great Lakes— rather than Hochdeutsch German communities used dialects, often mixed with English; see Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010). 17. See, for instance, Thomas Adam, ed., Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2005); the essays in Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel, eds., Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-­America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); and Philip V. Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2004), 160–208. On the musical definition of German communities with particular reference to choral singing, see Victor Greene, A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants between Old World and New, 1830–1930 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 19–40. 18. Jessica Gienow-­Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 19. For more, see Horowitz, Classical Music in America. 20. Richard K. Lieberman, Steinway and Sons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 21. Gienow-­Hecht, Sound Diplomacy, 55 and 57. 22. The sacralization of classical music in the United States is discussed in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 121–147 and 242–65. 23. Wilhelm von Polenz, Das Land der Zukunft, 6th ed. (Berlin: Fontane; Chicago: Brentano’s, 1905). 24. Peter Conolly-­Smith, Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 189; see also Erik Kirschbaum, The Eradication of German Culture in the United States, 1917–1918 (Stuttgart: Hans-­Dieter Heinz, 1986). 25. For more on American responses to German musical culture during wartime, see Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a 300-­Year History. vol. 1, Immigration, Language, Ethnicity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 26. John Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840–1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 377. 27. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 152. 28. On Flag Day in 1918, the front page of New York’s Staats-­Zeitung featured an illustration of the Stars and Stripes along with a German translation of “The Star-­Spangled Banner.” See Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), on the importance of singing it in English. 29. Edith Evans Braun Collection, JPB 91–96, Music Division, New York Public Library. 30. Gadski hosted a party at Yorkville’s Café Bismarck on New Year’s Eve 1916, at which Otto Goritz was said to have sung a parody on the sinking the year before of the Lusitania, each verse ending, “Give my regards to Neptune.” The strong German culture at the Met is evident from practices such as the singing of “Deutschland über alles” between the second and third acts of Meistersinger at the Met for the annual benefit of the German Press Club (see Deutsches Journal, 12 January 1916). 31. On Gadski see Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 309. See also J. E. Vacha, “When Wagner Was Verboten: The Campaign against German Music in World War I,” New York History 64 (1983): 171–88. 32. Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

178 N o te s t o Page s 23– 29 33. Theodore Roosevelt, “America for Americans,” in The Progressive Party: Its Record from January to July 1916, Including Statements and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Press of the Mail and Express Job Print, 1916). Further consideration of the significance of the hyphen in conceptions of ethnic identity can be found in Jennifer De Vere Brody, “Hyphen-­Nations,” in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality and Sexuality, ed. Sue-­Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 149–62. 34. “Artists Exempt in Government’s New Draft Law,” Musical America 28 (1 June 1918): 1. 35. “Mme. Matzenauer Sings: Gives Our Anthem amid Patriotic Decorations in Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, 6 April 1918, 13. Geraldine Farrar similarly asserted her political allegiance through patriotic concerts and photo shoots showing her draped in the American flag; see Jennifer Fleeger, Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song through the Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 36. Mary Lawton, Schumann-­Heink: The Last of the Titans; A Life of Ernestine Schumann-­Heink in Autobiographical Form (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 1. 37. William Armstrong, The Romantic World of Music (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 108. 38. On the role of mothers in wartime propaganda, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987). 39. Musical America 28, no. 1 (1918): 27. 40. On the use of songs as propaganda, see Watkins, Proof through the Night, 251–69; and John Mullen, The Show Must Go On! Popular Songs in Britain during the First World War (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). 41. C. P., “ ‘Small Towns Notice Details Such as Diction,’ Affirms Gretchen Morris,” Musical America 29 (4 January 1919): 40. 42. “Louis Graveure Sings: ‘Belgian’ Baritone, Erstwhile Wilfrid Douthitt, Gives Recital,” New York Times, 21 October 1915, 11. Apart from their striking physical similarity (the New York Herald compared photographs of the clean-­shaven Englishman with the bearded and monocled Belgian), Graveure married Eleanor Painter, with whom Douthitt had starred in The Lilac Domino (see “Mr. Graveure or Mr. Douthitt? Concert Mystery?,” New York Herald, quoted in Ellis O. Moore, Francis Moore: A Musician’s Life (New York: XLibris, 2007), 151). Douthitt was born in London in 1888 (his mother’s maiden name apparently was Graveur) and studied architecture at the Royal College of Art and singing with the Welsh soprano Clara Novello-­Davies. He appeared in ballad concerts and pantomime in London from 1911, as well as in Henry Wood’s Proms. Douthitt was described as the “baritone Caruso” and said to have toured with Tetrazzini and in South Africa in an article advertising a Dr. Macaura’s demonstration of his cure-­all “Pulscon” treatment at the Albert Hall: see “Royal Albert Hall,” Daily Mail, 11 May 1911, 10. 43. Apparently even his accompanist for the 1915–16, 1916–17, and 1917–18 seasons, Francis Moore, who had lived in the same boarding house as Douthitt, could never persuade him to admit that they were the same man. Ellis O. Moore, Francis Moore: A Musician’s Life (New York: Xlibris, 2007), 151. 44. “Graveure is Douthitt: Concert Singer in Whiskers, Says ‘No,’ and Deplores Press Agent,” New York Times, 8 October 1915, 11. 45. Louis Graveure, “Super-­Diction”: Twelve Studies in the Art of Song, music settings by Bryceson Treharne (New York: Schirmer, 1917). Reviews include “Music by Richard Aldrich: Louis Graveure’s Recital,” New York Times, 29 February 1920, 22; and “American Musicians Make Record in Berlin Recitals,” 31 March 1929, NY-­Paris Herald, George Hamlin Scrapbooks, Box 4. 46. For a more detailed account of his varied career, see Myron Meyers, “Louis Graveure, 1888– 1965,” Journal of Singing, 1 March 2010. 47. “Musik-­Chronik: Graveure und andere Sänger,” Vossische Zeitung Berlin, 29 March 1929 (George Hamlin Scrapbooks). 48. See his letter to Amanda Ira Aldridge. Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library, Aldridge Collection, 1846–1959, Series MS4, Box 4.

N o t e s t o Page s 30 – 3 3

179

49. “Strivings of the Negro People” first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and was later reworked for The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Bantam Classics, 1903). 50. Hayes’s first concerts in London coincided with the National Congress of British West Africa; on 8 October 1921 he gave an afternoon recital at Wigmore Hall in aid of the African Progress Union. As Jeffrey P. Green discusses, journals dedicated to African matters, such as West Africa and African World, paid attention to Hayes’s activities and reception. Jeffry P. Green, “Roland Hayes in London, 1921,” Black Perspective in Music 10 (1982): 29–42. 51. Robert C. Hayden, Singing for All People: Roland Hayes, a Biography (Boston: Select Publications, 1995); and MacKinley Helm, Angel Mo’ and Her Son, Roland Hayes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942). 52. Carl Rosa put on Alec Maclean’s Quentin Durwand and Percy Colson’s Pro Patria; Glastonbury staged Boughton’s The Immortal Hour and Blow’s Venus and Adonis. 53. Werrenrath’s Danish father, George, had sung lieder in recitals in the United States since 1879 (see Heather Platt’s forthcoming essay, “ ‘A Risky Undertaking’: Performing Lieder Cycles on the American Stage”); his son was hailed in the American press for giving entire programs in English, including Grieg in translation. See “Reinhard Werrenrath at his first New York recital of the season [1918],” Wolfsohn Musical Bureau promotional page, Musical America. 54. “Coloured Tenor,” Daily Mail, 1 June 1920. 55. “A Fine Singer: Mr Roland Hayes’s Recital,” Times (London), 22 April 1921, 8. 56. “Roland Hayes, “Wigmore,” New Age, October 28, 1920; reprinted in Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. with commentary by R. Murray Schafer (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 233 and 236. 57. R. C., “Three Good Singers: Secret of Negro Tenor’s Charms,” Daily Mail, 23 May 1924, 10. By contrast, the African World (11 November 1921) complained that Hayes’s rendition of two Nyasaland songs, arranged by Ella Kidney, had an atmosphere that “was too much Europe, too little Africa”; in 1926 the poet Carl Sandberg acknowledged Hayes’s superior technique but felt Robeson was the “real thing.” 58. “Roland Hayes, Gifted Negro Tenor, ‘Got Start’ in an Iron Foundry,” Musical America 28, no. 5 (1 June 1918): 36. 59. Quoted in Jennifer Hildebrand, “ ‘Two Souls, Two Thoughts, Two Unrecognised Strivings’: The Sound of Double Consciousness in Roland Hayes’s Early Career,” Black Music Research Journal 30 (2010): 284. 60. On the creation, perpetuation, and denial of racial categories in minstrelsy of the previous century, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 61. Anne Thursfield, Sibyl Cropper, and Helen Henschel were three British singers who promoted spirituals. They were also popular in New York: in 1926 Carl Engels, writing for the Musical Quarterly, acknowledged a “veritable vogue” for spirituals, claiming, “They are now a fixed part of any well-­ordered song program.” For more on the growing popularity of spirituals, see Charles J. Shinde, 1927 and the Rise of Modern America (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 164. 62. Hayes was said to have explained: “Before my time white singers had too often been in the habit of burlesquing the spirituals with rolling eyes, heaving breasts and shuffling feet, on the blasphemous assumption that they were singing comic songs.” Helm, Angel Mo’ and Her Son, 188–89. 63. “Negro Caruso: Folk Songs That Mean More than Jazz,” Daily Express, 20 May 1920, 5. 64. Charles B. Cochran, “Negro Art,” Daily Mail, 26 July 1926, 6. 65. “Negro Songs in Church,” Daily Mail, 18 March 1921, 5. 66. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), reprinted in African-­ American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 38. 67. Anon., “The Crisis,” asked “How many of us realize the tremendous propaganda of Roland Hayes?” quoted in Jon Michael Spencer, The New Negroes and Their Music: The Success of the Harlem

180 No t e s to Page s 33– 35 Renaissance (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997)., 10; quoted in Hildebrand, “ ‘Two Souls, Two Thoughts, Two Unrecognised Strivings,’ ” 298. 68. “A Negro’s Recital,” The Daily Telegraph, 23 April 1920, 5. Singers’ delivery of languages was often judged with reference to their nationality and sometimes their race. Reporting on vocal recitals during a foggy spell in London in late fall 1920, [H. J. K] noted Hayes’s “famous mellifluous voice” and welcomed Nellie Melba to the Royal Albert Hall, but asked, “Why does Melba sing English like a foreigner?” The Japanese tenor Yosie Fujiwara was said to be “terribly hampered by a large number of crabbed European languages. [. . .] Not even at Wigmore Hall have we heard such strange French.” Brabazon Lowther, however, was praised for the “beauty of his English diction,” and Bertram Binyan sang Respighi, Santoliquido, and Pizzetti “in which his Italian was like an Italian.” “Some Singers of the Month,” Musical Times 63 (1 December 1922): 875–76. 69. In 1924 the New York Times claimed he was making $100,000 per year in Europe; see Roland Hayes with F. W. Woolsey, “Roland Hayes,” Black Perspective in Music 2 (1974): 184. 70. According to the “Spotted Dog” gossip column (written by editor Albert Cartwright) of West Africa, 30 April 1921, 337, after watching Chelsea play soccer, King George V and his queen heard Hayes sing for half an hour; tea was served, during which time he explained to Queen Mary the “syncopated” beat of minstrel music from Africa, and then they asked him to sing again, congratulating him on his superb voice and presenting him with a tie pin. Hayes sang Massenet’s “Le rêve” (from Manon), Félix Fourdrain’s “Cossack Song,” various arrangements of spirituals by himself and Burleigh, and, at the queen and Princess Mary’s request, an arrangement of an old English song, “Over the Mountains,” by Roger Quilter, with whom he gave several recitals. See Green, “Roland Hayes in London,” 34. 71. “Court and Society,” Daily Mail, 14 May 1923, 8. Hayes sang three spirituals and another as an encore, Marjorie Clarke-­Jervoise recited, Dorothy Heimrich sang, and Sybil Eaton played the violin. 72. In terms of interwar politics, association with London’s high society was not without its perils. Many British aristocrats, including the royal family, were of German heritage, had married central Europeans, or were simply sympathetic to German culture: of the group named above, Countess Hochberg (1857–1940), daughter of the first Baron Fermoy, a Liberal MP, had married Friedrich Maximilian, Count Hochberg (1868–1921), the author of a travelogue about the British Empire in the East. Her British nationality was only readmitted in 1925. Princess Helena had married Prince Christian of Schleswig-­Holstein (admittedly favoring the Danish claim on that principality, to Queen Victoria’s chagrin), while Princess Mary, George V’s only daughter, who had recently married the art- and racehorse-­collecting Lord Harewood, was close to her appeasement-­ (and abdicating-­) favoring brother Edward VIII. (Lady Violet’s husband, John Jacob Astor, the proprietor of the Times, also promoted appeasement.) 73. Paul Robeson, by contrast, was reported to have struggled to master lieder repertoire, explaining that the language and rhythms did not feel natural. See Sheila Tully Boyle and Andrew Bunie, Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 236–37. 74. A. A. C. [Albert Cartwright], “Mr. Roland Hayes’s Song Recital,” West Africa, 1 October 1921, 1167; quoted in Green, “Roland Hayes in London,” 36. 75. On Gerhardt’s long career in England, see my “Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages,” in Autorschaft—Genie—Geschlecht, ed. Kordula Knaus and Susanne Kogler (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013), 179–94. 76. Later in the period the British contralto Astra Desmond, who studied classics at Cambridge, prided herself on her study of languages, “the outcome of her insatiable passion for discovering new songs, as she heartily dislikes singing translations, and if a new and appealing song is discovered among the works of a composer whose language she does not understand she sets about hearing that tongue forthwith”; see D. Brook, Singers of Today (London: Rockliff, 1949), 72. 77. McCormack’s return to London in October 1924 was said to have packed the Queen’s Hall with an Albert Hall audience. His program was noted as substantial, not the hackneyed arias and ballads “which famous singers often think, no doubt correctly, are good enough for such an audi-

N o t e s t o Page s 35 – 37

181

ence,” but “a scheme of songs in four groups, calculated to show very different sides of his art.” The second group was of lieder, which he was reported to have only begun singing in public in the United States a year or two ago. “Mr. John McCormack’s Recital: A Scheme of Songs,” Times (London), 6 October 1924, 10. Compton Mackenzie explained that the singer’s “own taste has been growing all this time like the taste of his listeners.” “John McCormack,” Gramophone 17, no. 195 (1939): 128; reprinted from October 1924. 78. Guido Adler wrote of “the golden season of German art song” that “this artform, endowed with Italian songfulness, French charm of rhythm, and the frank, true feeling of its Nordic origin, set out upon its journey around the world, winning votaries everywhere, and thus attaining international currency.” “Internationalism in Music,” Musical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1925): 289. 79. His choice of teachers in London was significant, as it demonstrated the earnestness with which he approached the European tradition of lieder performance: Henschel had worked with Brahms, and Aldridge had studied under Jenny Lind. 80. Quoted in Helm, Angel Mo’ and Her Son, 171. 81. Kira Thurman discusses the presence of black classical singers in interwar Germany in “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961: Race, Performance, and Reception” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2013), and in “The German Lied and the Songs of Black Volk,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 565–70. According to Thurman, they came in search of better teachers and more employment opportunities, but by 1924 German attitudes were beginning to change from fascination with the unfamiliar to fear of the threat of invasion, embodied in the presence of African troops stationed in the Rhineland. For more see Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Suzanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 82. “Music: Hayes in Berlin,” Time 4, no. 11 (15 September 1924): 15. 83. Roland Hayes, My Songs, accessed 29 October 2017, http://www.hiddenbrookline.org/free dom/in_brookline.html. 84. “Afrika Hayes Interview: Growing Up with Roland Hayes,” Fidelio 3, no. 2 (1994), accessed 9 July 2014, http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91–96/942_afrika_hayes.html . 85. “Konzerte,” Deutsche Tageszeitung, 15 May 1924; and “Der schwarze Tenor,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 May 1924. Both translated in Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961,” 122. 86. Siegmund Piesling, “Konzertchronik,” Berliner Börsen-­Zeitung, 14 May 1924, 4. Quoted in Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961,” 124; translation amended. 87. Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961,” 124. 88. See, for instance, African World: “the German accent being incidentally noticed to be perfect.” “Mr. Roland Hayes’ Recital,” 14 April 1923, 420. Clipping from the Craxton archive. 89. Kathrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 90. The United States did not ratify peace treaties between the Allied Powers and Germany and Austria until July 1921, making travel before then almost impossible for Strauss. 91. From 1919 Weber and Wagner were sung in English at the Met. That same year some of German stars sacked during the war, led by Otto Goritz, made a short-­lived attempt to bring back German opera at the Lexington Theater. Koegel charts the decline of German-­language theatre through the 1920s in Music in German Immigrant Theater, 361–80; so does Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, 217–42. More on the fortunes of English-­language opera performance in the United States can be found in David Suisman, “The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890–1925” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002). 92. “London View of Strauss,” 16 October 1921, New York Times, 73. Immigration restrictions on enemy aliens were not lifted in the UK until 30 December 1922. 93. His tour was carefully stage-­managed by Milton Diamond of International Concert Direction. Sections from Schumann’s diary along with contextual discussion of Strauss’s reputation can

182 N o t e s t o Page s 38 – 4 2 be found in Wayne Heisler Jr. and Laura Tunbridge, “Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Specht: Strauss before Sixty,” Opera Quarterly 31 (2015): 273–88. 94. “Strauss Is Guest at the City Hall,” New York Times, 1 November 1921, 18. 95. Henrietta Straus, Nation, 3 August 1921; quoted in “H. G. Wells Arrives, Hopeful of Parley,” New York Times, 28 October 1921, 2. 96. “Strauss to Visit America,” New York Times, 16 September 1921, 17. 97. Oja, Making Music Modern, 285–96, argues that while ties to Europe were reconfigured during the 1920s, they remained vital. She does not list Strauss among the composers who visited New York in the 1920s, but does discuss how musicians were treated as celebrities. 98. Richard Aldrich, “Music: Dr. Strauss accompanies his own songs,” New York Times, 16 December 1921, 27. 99. “Richard Strauss in London,” New York Times, 5 February 1922, 71. In his 1908 monograph on the composer, Ernest Newman had been “cautiously optimistic about his potential.” However, war persuaded Newman that German music was “an almost exhausted field.” “The War and the Future of Music,” Musical Times 55 (1 September 1914): 571–72. 100. H. E. Krehbiel, “German Audience Fills Met to Cheer Strauss,” New York Tribune, 16 November 1921, 10. Julia Culp’s decision to sing in New York was noted by the Berlin Lokal-­ Anzeiger as “among the interesting signs of the time” (“Julia Culp to Sing Here,” New York Times, 17 January 1919, 11). She was said to have been greeted by “an audience of demonstrative friendliness” at the Aeolian Hall. Culp doctored her program in recognition of wartime practices, presenting a selection of French, Russian, English, and American numbers, but was said to have excelled when she sang Schubert in German at the exclusive Beethoven Association. Richard Aldrich, “Mme. Culp’s Song Recital,” New York Times, 24 April 1921, 22. 101. According to Donald Brook, Singers of Today (London: Rockliff, 1949), 173, when Schumann announced in 1921 that she would sing in German in Detroit, “many of those who had booked seats demanded their money back,” as they were certain they would not understand. 102. “Music and Musicians: German Musicians Return,” Boston Daily Globe, 6 November 1921, 41. 103. Diary entry, 3 November 1921; on 25 December she received gifts of lace from Mrs. Untermyer and an antique pearl bag from Lady Speyer. 104. “Music: Farewell to Dr. Strauss,” New York Times, 8 January 1922, 73. 105. Otto H. Kahn wrote in a letter to Strauss, published in the Music Trade Review, 14 January 1922, 23b, that “more and more, this country, mistakenly termed ‘the land of the almighty dollar,’ is taking its rank among those foremost in striving for the higher things of life, for spiritual attainments, for the realization of ideals.” 106. On American immigration policies after the war, see Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Politicy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), points out that the 1924 Act—which also prohibited the entrance of those with certain hereditary illnesses—was taken by the Nazi party as a model for racial policies. 107. Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 67–92. 108. “Reception to Richard Strauss at Ampico Studios,” Music Trade Review, 14 January 1922, 23b. The Ampico concert took place at their studios on Fifth Avenue on 22 December 1921. Schumann made a recording of Strauss for Polydor within the year and performed his songs to Ampico accompaniment in Vienna in 1923; see “The Ampico Scores in Vienna,” Music Trade Review, 19 May 1923, 24.

Chapter Two 1. Announcement in the Musical Herald that Newman had joined the Sunday Times on 7 March 1920.

N o t e s t o Page s 4 2 – 46

183

2. Ernest Newman, “Traum durch die Dämmerung,” in A Musical Motley (London: Bodley Head, 1919), 29. 3. L’Isle-­Adam’s novel prompted Newman to reflect on the opportunities missed by the gramophone’s not having been invented earlier; see Newman, “The Gramophone in the Past,” in A Musical Motley, 217–22. On the musical and gender implications of L’Ève future, see Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 /1900, trans. Michael Metter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 347–49; and Cormac Newark, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 131. 4. Quote from Punch, 23 December 1925, 673; cited in Melba Cuddy-­Keane, Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18–19. 5. Adolf Weissmann recalled, in “English and German Musical Life Compared,” Musical Times 65 (1924): 138, that “the principal performers of German music were not allowed to appear, and managers had to content themselves with programs which, from the political standpoint, were generally regarded as harmless.” In Germany, enemy composers were similarly removed from programs; see Watkins, Proof through the Night. 6. Matzenauer, quoted in “Hints on Building and Interpreting Song Programs, Proferred by Frank La Forge.” Musical America 23, no. 6 (8 June 1918), 5. The Scandinavian vogue is noted in, among other places, “Biltmore Program Opens Auspiciously: Anna Case, Louis Graveure and Mischa Elman Give First Concert,” Musical America 29, no. 3 (16 November 1918): 25. 7. O. P. J., “Claussen Scores in Scandinavian Songs,” Musical America 29, nos. 1–2 (2–9 November 1918): 55. Claussen (1879–1941) was born in Stockholm and trained there and in Berlin. She made her Met debut in November 1917—presumably as a replacement for some of the voices lost with the departure of German cast members—and remained with the company until her retirement in 1932. 8. The world’s first Esperanto Congress took place in 1905. Esther Shor follows its fortunes in Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016). 9. “Miss Carrie Tubb’s Recital,” Times (London), 13 February 1918, 8. 10. On lieder performance in London in the nineteenth century, see Christina Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 357–60. 11. William Atheling [pseud. Ezra Pound], “Music,” New Age, 13 November 1919, 28–29; reprinted in Pound, Ezra Pound and Music, 192. 12. William Atheling [pseud. Ezra Pound], “Music,” New Age, 31 October 1918, 428–29; reprinted in Pound, Ezra Pound on Music, 133–34. 13. New Age, 13 November 1919, 28–29. Pound was not alone: a critic for the Lady noted that the English translation used by the British tenor Riddell Hunter was “passable”: “I murmur not” certainly came nearer to the original “Ich grolle nicht” than the French version, “J’ai pardonné.” “Concerts and Entertainments,” Lady, 2 January 1920, 10; on 1 July 1920 Jean Facon gave a rendition of Schubert and Schumann “in poor French versions.” 14. Ernest Newman, “Music and Musicians: German Song and the German Language,” Observer, 15 October 1920, 11. 15. Ibid. He later conceded, as readers’ letters had pointed out, that a Bach cantata had been performed at the Wigmore Hall a week before, and that German songs had been sung in various towns around the country over the last fifteen months, with London as an anomaly. “Music of the Week,” Observer, 22 February 1920. 16. Announcement of 21 February, quoted in Newman, “Music and Musicians.” The letter cannot be located. 17. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1920, 7. 18. Ibid. 19. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 3 March 1920, 7. 20. “Scene at German Song Concert,” Daily Mirror, 15 March 1920, 2. 21. “Songs in German and a Protest,” Times (London), 15 March 1920, 14.

184 N o t e s t o Page s 46 – 49 22. C. M., “Musical Notes,” Lady, 18 March 1920, 293. 23. Lady, 15 April 1920. 24. R. C., “London Concert Protest: Songs in German,” Daily Mail, 15 March 1920, 5; Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 17 March 1920, 7; and “Songs in German and a Protest,” Times (London), 15 March 1920, 14. A fairly even-­handed account of the Léon debate was given in “News of the Month: London,” Musical Herald (1920), 174. 25. “Songs in German and a Protest,” Times (London), 15 March 1920, 14. 26. C. M., “Musical Notes,” Lady, 19 February 1920, 177. 27. The letter was quoted in Ernest Newman, “Music and Musicians: German Song and the German Language,” Observer, 15 March 1920, 11. 28. “An English Singer and Another,” Daily Mail, 13 March 1920, 4. 29. R. C., “London Concert Protest: Songs in German,” Daily Mail, 15 March 1920, 5. 30. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 17 March 1920, 7. 31. Ibid.; and Newman, “Our London Correspondence: German Songs in London,” Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1920, 8. 32. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1920, 7. 33. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 14 April 1920, 7. 34. Ibid. 35. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 17 March 1920, 7; and Newman, “Our London Correspondence: German Songs in London,” Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1920, 8. There were actual “plebiscite” concert programs throughout this period. 36. “Music of the Week,” Observer, 22 February 1920, 11. 37. Alfred Kalisch, “London Concerts” [13 March 1920], Musical Times 61, no. 182 (April): 247, also pointed out that soldiers didn’t mind hearing German songs. 38. Ernest Newman, “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1920, 7. 39. Alfred Kalisch, “London Concerts,” Musical Times 61 (1 April 1920): 247. Wood conducted Don Juan at Queen’s Hall on 6 March, and Boult did Tod und Verklärung on 16 March. 40. There were, however, empty seats at his all-­Wolf Wigmore Hall recital of 13 May 1922. Elena Gerhardt might sell out the Queen’s Hall with Wolf, The Musical Times observed, but “she is a consummate artist from whom one would take almost anything, whereas M. Léon (press notices to the contrary), is still an aspiring talent.” R. L., “Mischa-­Léon—Hugo Wolf Recital,” Musical Times 63 (1 June 1922): 419. 41. “Music by Richard Aldrich: Nelson Illingworth’s Recital,” New York Times, 6 November 1920, 21. 42. “Nelson Illingworth’s Recital” and “Nelson Illingworth Reappears,” New York Times, 4 February 1921, 16. 43. See Schubert’s Songs Translated (Oxford, 1924) and Schumann’s Songs Translated: A Selection (Oxford, 1929). One way in which Fox Strangways and Wilson hoped to encourage the use of their translations was to charge no fee for using them in public concerts; artists were simply required to provide a credit in the program. Quotation from Frank Howes, “A. H. Fox Strangways,” Music and Letters 50 (1969): 9–14. The use of translations was still much discussed at the end of the decade; see, for example, M. Joubert, “Lieder-­Singing at the Cross-­Ways,” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 227–28. 44. Steuart Wilson, “A. H. Fox Strangways (1859–1948),” Music and Letters 24 (1948): 236. 45. A. H. Fox Strangways, “Song-­Translation,” Music and Letters 2 (1921): 211–24. 46. Ibid., 218. 47. Ibid., 211. 48. Ibid. One reviewer praised the decision to replace Müller’s “Lindenbaum” (“nothing much of a tree,” it commented, obviously with little awareness of its significance in German romantic poetry) with an English elm; “C.,” review of Schubert’s Songs Translated, Musical Times 66 (1925): 133. However, not all were convinced by Fox Strangways’s replacements: “gillyflowers” was thought a poor substitute for “Nachtviolen,” “for surely they belong rather to trim cottage gardens than

N o t e s t o Page s 5 0 – 52

185

wanderers’ under the velvet sky”; “Schubert’s Songs Translated: Mr Steuart Wilson’s Recital,” Times (London), 10 March 1925, 12. 49. Fox Strangways, “Song-­Translation,” 212. Four of the numbers in Schubert’s Songs Translated were translated into Scots by Alexander Gray because Scots was thought to be a closer acoustic cousin to German than English was. For more on Gray see John Corbett, Written in the Language of the Scottish Nation: A History of Literary Translation into Scots (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999), 161–63. 50. M.-­D. Calvocoressi, “The Practice of Song-­Translation,” Music and Letters 2 (1921): 314–22; and C. M., “Musical Notes,” Lady, 18 March 1920, 293. 51. Some singers provided texts but no translations; for example, a program for a 1928 recital by John McCormack provided German words for the Schubert and Wolf but no translation (it gave the English words for the English songs too). 52. Richard Aldrich, Concert Life in New York, 1902–1923 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), 681. 53. See Joseph A. Mussulman, Music in the Cultured Generation: A Social History of Music in America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). 54. Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It, with Detailed Instructions for Collecting a Complete Library of English Literature, 8th ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914); and Ernest Newman, A Musical Critic’s Holiday (London: Cassell, 1925), 260. 55. Clay Smith, “A Call of American Musicians: Why Do Native Singers Fail?” Billboard, 20 January 1923, 56–57. 56. Similar articles abounded in national trade journals like Billboard (e.g., “ ‘American Singers Should Sing More American Songs,’ Said Charles Marshall [interviewed by Clay Smith],” 9 June 1923, 30). 57. For an overview of global politics during this period see Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 58. Landmark: The Monthly Magazine of the English Speaking Union 1 (1919): 1. The English Speaking Union was founded by Evelyn Wrench, who had started what became the Royal Over-­ Seas League in 1910 (as well as editing the Over-­Seas Daily Mail from 1907 to 1914, and the Spectator from 1925 to 1932), with the purpose of encouraging comradeship between British citizens throughout the Commonwealth. Adele Smith, The Royal Over-­Seas League: From Empire into Commonwealth; A History of the First 100 Years (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 59. H. G., “The American Invasion,” Monthly Musical Record 50 (1920): 145. 60. Henry Cecil Wyld, The Best English: A Claim for the Superiority of Received Standard English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 605. 61. See Richard W. Bailey, Speaking American: A History of English in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 62. Mark Morrison, “Performing the Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 3 (1996): 25–50.; and Marian Wilson Kimber, “Mr. Riddle’s Readings: Music and Elocution in Nineteenth-­Century Concert Life,” Nineteenth Century Studies 21 (2007): 163–81. 63. Abravanel, Americanizing Britain, 85–109. 64. See Lawrence Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). 65. Balfour, “The Future of the World,” speech given at the first public meeting of ESU, a luncheon for a group of American editors at the Criterion Restaurant on Friday, 11 October 1918, reprinted in the Landmark: 7. 66. Member from Washington, “No Jingoism,” Landmark 2 (1920): 315. 67. Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order. 68. Amelia Dorothy Defries, “And Then We’ll Get Together,” Landmark 1 (1919): 449–51. 69. Peter Tschmuck, Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer-­ Verlag, 2012), 77.

186 N o te s t o Page s 5 3– 5 7 70. Pekka Gronow and Ilpo Saunio, An International History of the Recording Industry, trans. Christopher Moseley (London and New York: Cassell, 1998), 11. 71. “ ‘London Opinion’ Says,” Voice 1 (1917): 7. 72. Capt. Edward Symons, “The Gramophone Banishes the Horrors of War,” Voice 3 (1919): 9. 73. H. C. R. [Daily Mail, 11 June 1918], “Gramophone Incidents: Send Them Records,” reprinted in Voice 2, no. 7 (1918): 5. 74. “Gramophone Company: Record Sales; Strong Financial Position,” Voice 2 (1918): 13; reproduced from the Financial Times. 75. “Be Prepared,” Voice 3 (December 1919): 111–12; reproduced from the Financial Times. 76. International copyright and piracy were major concerns: multiple pirated recordings were in circulation in Germany after the war. American phonograph companies, meanwhile, ignored foreign claims unless they had registered their copyright in the United States. 77. Tschmuck, Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry, 65. 78. “We have the new Vocalion records referred to elsewhere in this number, and the Germans have any amount waiting for the blessed day when Europe is free again.” 79. Francis Brett Young, “At Random,” Gramophone 1, no. 3 (August 1923): 47. 80. See Laura Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2013): 437–74; and Alexandra Wilson, “Galli-­Curci Comes to Town: The Prima Donna’s Presence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 328–48. 81. Z., “Review of the Second Quarter of 1923,” Gramophone 1, no. 3 (August 1923): 48–52. 82. Some artists made recordings for American and German companies; for example, Richard Crooks made discs for Victor and its German subsidiary, Electrola. Records were also found to be a useful way of learning languages. See “Criticus: New Gramophone Records,” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 13. 83. Hermann Klein complained that the “subtly harmonized but essentially commonplace modern ballad still holds sway” while “the portions of the Continent now called Central Europe yield many more Lieder singers of the first rank than we have yet heard in that capacity in England; and, second, that it is quite immaterial to which sex the singer belongs—a particular Lied is not regarded as the particular property of either.” “The Gramophone and the Singer (continued): Modern English Songs I,” Gramophone 5, no. 4 (September 1927): 140. 84. David Patmore, “The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1923–1921: Commercial Competition, Cultural Plurality and Beyond,” Musicae Scientiae 14, no. 2 (2010): 115–37. 85. Henry Coates, “Gramophone Gossip,” Musical Times 73 (1928): 120. 86. According to his widow, Ernest Newman spent a great deal of time listening to the first new electrical recordings in the summer of 1926; Vera Newman, Ernest Newman: A Memoir (London: Putman, 1963), 61. 87. N. C., “Gramophone Music. Two Tendencies,” Manchester Guardian, 24 December 1925; and “Music and Wireless: The Listener’s Education,” Times (London), 13 November 1926. 88. Emily Thompson discusses how during this period it was increasingly fidelity, rather than sound, that was the commodity sold by distributors of phonographs; see her The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 237; and “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925,” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 131–71. 89. On noise abatement see James Mansell, “Neurasthenia, Civilization and the Sounds of Modern Life: Narratives of Nervous Illness in the Interwar Campaign against Noise,” in Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­Century Europe, ed. Daniel Morat (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 278–304; and Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 90. G. E. H. Abraham, “Schubert for the Amateur Singer I—The Simpler Songs,” Musical Mirror 8 (1928): 178, advised that the cycles were beyond most amateurs.

No t e s t o Page s 5 7 – 59

187

91. Brian Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 6. 92. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 24. 93. Kyle Devine, “Imperfect Sound Forever: Loudness Wars, Listening Formations and the History of Sound Reproduction,” Popular Music 32, no. 2 (2013): 159–72. 94. Kirsty Hewlett discusses the impact of changing from using headsets to loudspeakers on listening practices in “Heinrich Schenker and the Radio” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southampton, 2014), 1:38–73. 95. In its transformation “from a musical instrument into a piece of bourgeois furniture,” Theodor W. Adorno pointed out (citing Max Weber) that the gramophone resembled the piano. “The Curves of the Needle [1927/1965],” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music: Selection, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 273. 96. The recordings advertised were DA635, “Feldeinsamkeit” and “Komm bald,” and DA628, “Mainacht” and “Waldeinsamkeit.” For more on these promotional strategies see Thompson, “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity.” 97. F. F., “The Individuality of the Gramophone,” Voice 3 (1919): 12. Gradually the attentive listening encouraged by the discourse surrounding lieder recordings filtered into the live concert experience. A program booklet for a McCormack recital as late as 1928 “courteously requested” the audience not to leave the hall except between completed groups. 98. Garry Joel August, “In Defense of Canned Music,” Musical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1931): 144. 99. On the significance of the Beethoven and Schubert projects see Patmore, “The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1923–1921,”122–25. 100. On the political motivations for the celebrations in France, see Xavier Hascher, “La célébration du centenaire de Schubert à Sorbonne en 1928,” Cahiers Franz Schubert: Revue de musique classique et romantique 11 (1997): 55–60. On the German-­language celebration of Schubert’s centenary, see Esteban Buch, “Adorno’s ‘Schubert’: From the Critique of the Garden Gnome to the Defense of Atonalism,” Nineteenth-­Century Music 29 (2005): 25–30. 101. The competition to complete the “Unfinished” was contentious and prompted furious correspondence in the New York Times. The winner of the second competition—the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg’s Sixth Symphony in C, op. 31—was nicknamed the “Dollar” Symphony, in part for its generous prize of ten thousand guineas, but also because Atterberg was claimed to have conceived the last movement as a satire “on those persons who, in connection with the centenary celebrations, posed as great lovers and connoisseurs of Schubert, without any real knowledge or love of his work.” Columbia was not amused—“such an act,” they said, “would be comparable to playing jazz at a memorial service”—and they threatened to reclaim the prize money should Atterberg’s music prove not to be original (“Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony: Swedish Prizewinner’s Idea of Satire,” Observer, 16 December 1928). The symphony was played by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Franz Schalk, on 2 December 1928. See Gabriele Johanna Eder, “ ‘Finishing Schubert’s Symphony’: Chronik eines Fehlgeschlagenen Vollendungsversuchs,” Schubert durch die Brille: Internationale Franz Schubert Institut 8 (1992): 85–86; Bo Marschner, “Schubert-­Konkurrencen 1928: Om dollars og Dallas I klassik music i det 20. Århundrede,” in Festskrift til Finn Mathiassen, ed. Thomas Holme Hansen, Bo Marschner, and Carl Chr. Møller (Århus: Musikvidenskabeligt Institut, Århus Universitet, 1998), 227–47. 102. In “The Schubert ‘Go-­Getters,’ ” the New York Times described Vienna’s commercialization of Schubert as having “reached limits as yet undreamed-­of even in a phonographic America”; 5 August 1928, 98. 103. “Schubert Memorial Scholarships,” Musical Mirror 8 (1928): 312. 104. “Centenary of Franz Schubert: Commemoration in Vienna,” Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1928. 105. Indeed, because of that fear France was reported to have withdrawn its representative from

188 N ot e s t o Page s 59 – 61 the celebrations; see “Ban on Schubert Festival,” New York Times, 18 July 1928, 36; and “Acclaim in Vienna Union with Germany,” New York Times, 22 July 1928, 34. 106. Coates, “Gramophone Gossip,” Musical News 73 (1928): 120. One correspondent to the Musical News considered it a pity that Schubert hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine, as we “we might have seen his centenary given almost as much space in the daily Press as film-­ stars’ divorces!” 107. “Schubert by Radio,” New York Times, 9 September 1928, 116. 108. “Seven Days of Schubert,” New York Times, 18 November 1928, X10. 109. The three Wolf songs had only recently been published in Cologne; they were “Mir träumte von einem Königskind,” “Mein Liebchen wir saßen beisammen,” and “Es blasen die blauen Husaren.” The artistic director of the Musical Forum was Kurt Schindler, and its president was Alfred Knopf. The Forum’s purpose was to give artists the chance to play music not usually heard in the New York season, as well as “to give music lovers an opportunity of hearing on Sunday nights concerts of good music intimately and informally presented without specialization either in the fields of antiquarian classicism or exclusive modernism.” The concerts took place at the Guild Theater and often were introduced by short explanatory lectures; Deems Taylor provided one on Heine for Schlusnus. “New Organization Will Perform Seldom-­Heard Works of Varied Range,” New York Times, 18 September 1927, X6. 110. Downes commented: “The audience realized the presence of an artist whose vocal powers are inevitably declining, but whose wisdom and kindling spirit make her a more engrossing performer, within the limits which she wisely sets herself, than she has been before in her career.” Her encore was “Die Erlkönig.” 111. “Ripples of Radio News Eddying in the Ether,” New York Times, 18 March 1928, 158. 112. “Damrosch Music Aids Radio Sales,” New York Times, 18 November 1928, XX21. 113. “Testing Taste in Music,” New York Times, 4 October 1927, 28. Their preferred works were the Marche militaire and the “Unfinished” Symphony. For more on the popularity of the first work see Scott Messing, Marching to the Canon: The Life of Schubert’s “Marche militaire” (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014). 114. Coates, “Gramophone Gossip: An Overdose of Schubert,” Musical News 73 (1928): 329. 115. P. W. Wilson, “The ‘Class of ’28’ Is Rich in Notables,” New York Times, 26 February 1928, 83. 116. Olin Downes, “Schumann-­Heink in Schubert Songs,” New York Times, 20 November 1928, 38. 117. “Music To-­day: The Schubert Centenary,” Musical Mirror 8 (1928): 253. 118. Before Gerhardt’s return to London, according to Neville Cardus, “a concert wholly devoted to lieder was out of the common market of Britain’s concert traffic and economy.” Neville Cardus, Full Score (London: Cassell, 1970), 58. On the singer’s reception in London see my “Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages.” 119. Prices for subscriptions (including tax) ranged from thirty-­three shillings and sixpence to nine shillings; single tickets from twelve shillings to two shillings and fourpence. At the start of the year Gerhardt had sung Winterreise in New York, a snowstorm making her repertoire timely. She presented the cycle in three uninterrupted groups, “with all the art, if not all the power of voice, that Miss Gerhardt has commanded in other years.” “Recital by Elena Gerhardt,” New York Times, 19 February 1928, 28. In January 1929 it was announced that she had been engaged as a member of faculty at the Leipzig Conservatory. 120. “In the Concert Room: Schubert’s Songs,” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 365. Born in France, Jarnach was based in Germany in the 1920s, where he also worked as a conductor and pianist. 121. Richard Strauss was notorious among singers he accompanied for improvising between songs, typically using material from his other works, and for “improving” on his piano parts in performance. See Heisler and Tunbridge, “Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Specht.” 122. Gerald Moore regarded Raphael highly; see his Collected Memoirs (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books and Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 336.

No t e s t o Page s 61 – 6 3

189

123. He performed Die schöne Müllerin with Reeves at the Wigmore on 23 January 1925 (like Warlich, he was frustrated by the audience’s insistence on clapping between songs), and at the Chenil Galleries on 10 November 1925. He performed Dichterliebe at the Grotrian Hall on 30 November 1926 and gave a Brahms recital in concert and on the radio in 1927. As well as lieder in 1928, Raphael performed in The Beggar’s Opera at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and in a concert of Hebridean folk songs at the Queen’s Hall. 124. Raphael did not appear, but, like its American counterparts, the BBC scheduled a week of special broadcasts, and the Foundations of Music series designated November Schubert month. As well as orchestral, military band, and chamber music concerts, Solomon played the Wanderer Fantasy, and Megan Foster and George Parker performed Schwanengesang. George Henschel was also featured. 125. See the discography in Gillian Thornhill, The Life, Times and Music of Mark Raphael (London: AuthorHouse, 2012), 150–53. 126. The hold that company had over international record production in the late 1920s is apparent in the list of labels under which Tauber distributed his Winterreise discs—Columbia, Nippon Columbia (its Japanese branch), and the originally German-­owned Odeon and Parlophone. The Anglo-­American label HMV/Victor made the recordings by Gerhardt, Endert, and Gabsch, whereas the German label Homocord produced Tannert’s disc, and Jadlowker, Slezak, and Baumann all appeared with the export label of Deutsche Grammophon, Polydor. Tauber’s selection from Winterreise was said to have been delivered “in what must be an ideal manner for the Schubert song”; what is more, he was declared greater than Gerhardt, for ‘he lives in them, and you are hardly conscious of anything but the lyric drama of the pieces while he is unfolding the story.’ “Schubert Centenary Gramophone Recordings,” Music and Letters 9 (1928):404–6. 127. See Aldous Huxley, “The Interpreter and the Creator [4 March 1922],” reprinted in Temporaries and Eternals: The Music Criticism of Aldous Huxley, 1922–23, ed. Michael Allis (Newcastle-­ upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 50–52. 128. Numbers are taken from Karsten Lehl discography of 78 rpm recordings of Winterreise accessed 3 August 2015, http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/discography/disco_special_44.html. 129. Schubert Centenary Albums plus two others (DB1021, 1030). 130. HMV E509–15 (four shillings and sixpence each); D1466–8 (six shillings and sixpence each). 131. His London debut occurred in 1936, when he sang at an exhibition of nineteenth-­century French art at the Burlington Galleries alongside Astra Desmond and the young violinist Grisha Goluboff. “Anglo French Art Society,” Times (London), 13 October 1936, 19. 132. “The Musician’s Gramophone: Mozart and Schubert,” Times (London), 20 September 1928, 12. 133. N. C., “Gramophone Music: The Winter’s Journey,” Manchester Guardian, 20 December 1933, 7. He continues: “In music as gentle and frail in its sentiment as these songs of Schubert the realism of physical presence in actual performance might well seem crude and disillusioning. Better to listen to these records in a room darkened, with only the firelight flickering, if we would get close to Schubert and to a spirituality that belongs no longer to the world in which we live.” 134. “The Musician’s Gramophone. Mozart and Schubert,” Times (London), 20 September 1920, 12; and “Gramophone Notes: by ‘Discus,’ ” Musical Times (1 October 1928): 910. The recordings were HMV D1262–6; D1459–62 (six shillings and sixpence each); and E.460 (four shillings and sixpence). Some critics also objected to her singing “male” songs; this was not a criticism encountered before, and such a heightened awareness of gender identity may have been related to the passing of the Equal Franchise Act in July 1928, which finally granted British women over the age of twenty-­one the right to vote. For more on these recordings, see my “Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages.” 135. Others still considered his renditions tainted by association. The Monthly Musical Record opined: “Some of his Schubert singing was admirable in every way, so long as one was free from the feeling of something antipathetic in the singer’s personality—a feeling some of us have to confess

190 N o te s t o Page s 6 3– 66 to as a result of his musical-­comedy performances. On this occasion Tauber was behaving himself properly. But his thin pianissimo wins admiration only from the ignorant. There is nothing in it.” “In the Concert Room,” Monthly Musical Record (December 1933): 228–29. 136. Peter Franklin, “Between the Wars: Traditions, Modernisms, and ‘the Little People from the Suburbs,’ ” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 198–206. 137. “Week-­End Concerts,” Times (London), 4 November 1933, 9. The program was probably similar to the one he gave on 4 December, at which he sang “Frühlingsglaube,” “Der Doppelgänger,” and “Ungeduld”; Grieg’s “Letzter Frühling” and “Ein Traum”; and Strauss’s “Traum durch die Dämmerung” and “Heimliche Aufforderung.” He shared the program with the celebrity piano duo Vitya Vronsky and Victor Brabin. 138. “Aldwych Theatre: ‘Lilac Time,’ ” Times (London), 23 September 1933, 8. 139. As John Potter observes, Tauber adapted his performances according to his audience, using less portamento in Schubert than he did as Schubert; see his “Beggar at the Door: The Rise and Fall of Portamento in Singing,” Music and Letters 87 (2006): 543. 140. W. L. [William Langford], “Richard Tauber in ‘Lilac Time,’ ” Manchester Guardian, 25 September 1933, 7. 141. Ibid. 142. Alec Rowley, “Schubert and the Gramophone: A Review of his Recorded Instrumental Work,” Musical Mirror 8 (1928): 289 and 295. 143. Henry Coates, Gramophone Gossip,” Musical News 73 (1928): 204. 144. Patmore, “The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1923–1921,” 123; and H. C. Ridout, “Behind the Needle,” Gramophone 31 (1943): 108–9. 145. Schubert’s Letters, trans. Venetia Savile (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928); Newman Flower, Franz Schubert: The Man and His Circle (London: Cassell, 1928); Karl Kobald, Franz Schubert, trans. Beatrice Marshall (London: A. A. Knopf ); and Richard Capell, Schubert’s Songs (London: Ernest Benn, 1928). G. E. H. Abraham also published a series of articles, “Schubert for the Amateur Singer,” in The Musical Mirror, from May to July; in its October issue there was a supplement dedicated to Schubert, which included scores of some of his songs (the English translations in larger font and above the German). 146. Richard Capell, Schubert’s Songs (London: Ernest Benn, 1928). 147. Ibid., 250. 148. Richard Capell, “Schubert’s Sentiment,” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 686. 149. The extent to which this cultural “middle class” mapped onto social and economic middle class is much debated; hierarchies of taste did not necessarily match economic or educational status. 150. See Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow; and Nicholas Tawa, High-­Minded and Low-­Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800–1861 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003). 151. Erica Brown and Mary Grover, “Introduction: Middlebrow Matters,” in Brown and Grover, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, 1. John Baxendale and Chris Pawling describe middlebrow audiences as seeking a continuation of nineteenth-­century realism; see Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 49. Although in literary and film studies there seems to be a willingness to define certain genres or stylistic devices as middlebrow, in musicology definition seems more complicated, or, at least, seems to be reserved for some moderate modernists (such as Hindemith and Copland) and easy listening. 152. The way taste was determined on a dual basis of the social and the cultural is discussed in Shin-­Kap Han, “Unraveling the Brow: What and How of Choice in Musical Preference,” Sociological Perspectives 46 (2003): 435–59. On the aesthetics of the middlebrow (derived primarily from J. B. Priestley), see Christopher Chowrimootoo, “Reviving the Middlebrow, or: Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014): 187–93. 153. The prolific and popular, if now mostly forgotten, German composer Carl Bohm (1844– 1920) was exemplary of this mode of lieder composition. A colonel from the British army who had been imprisoned in Japan during the Second World War wrote to Elisabeth Schumann that they

N o t e s t o Page s 6 7 – 69

191

were allowed to have gramophone concerts in the camp; her recording of Bohm’s “Still wie die Nacht” was a favorite, “enjoyed alike by the high-­brows, low-­brows and even the jazz enthusiasts.” The appeal may well have been Schumann’s voice as well as Bohm’s song, for the colonel continued: “I can hardly express to you what it meant to exiles so far away from our homes to hear your lovely voice just when the hush, which comes with the tropical sunset, was falling”; the audience was literally captive, but the ability for all “types” to enjoy the music suggests a broad aesthetic appeal. Gerd Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1993), 273. 154. George Coulter, “An Open Letter to Schönberg and Company,” informed the “de-­ composers” that “if there is any such thing as Higherbrowism in music, you are It.” Musical Mirror 8 (1928): 117. On the literary equivalent, see Sean Latham, Am I a Snob? Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 155. A preference for foreign songs was taken as a sign of “snobbishness” by some American journals and artists; see “ ‘American Singers Should Sing More American Songs,’ Said Charles Marshall [interviewed by Clay Smith],” Billboard, 9 June 1923, 30. Deems Taylor, of the New York Times, was quoted in the article as saying, “the American public considers everything sung in a foreign tongue (even though no word of it is understood) to be of the highest rank.” 156. H. C. Colles, “The Good Song,” Musical News 73 (1928): 95–96. 157. Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 (2002): 154–73. 158. Jonathan M. Hess points out that access to elite culture was provided by its commodification; see his Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-­Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 159. Margaret Middener, “Message and Middlebrow,” Saturday Review (1933), quoted in Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xii. Before her Van Wyck Brooks, “ ‘Highbrow’ and ‘Lowbrow’ in America’s Coming of Age” (1915), had detected a “middle ground” on which cultural life could thrive. The middlebrow was taken up with more vigor and hostility by the American critics Clement Greenberg, Russell Lynes, and Dwight Macdonald after the Second World War. 160. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3. 161. See, for instance, Lisa Botshan and Meredith Goldsmith, eds., Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); and on “the great divide” see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). Chowrimootoo, “Reviving the Middlebrow,” advocates the middlebrow as a means to acknowledge and look beyond modernist critical opposites. 162. See, among others, Ina Haberman, Myth, Memory, and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier, and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 163. Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 216–17. 164. Michael Levenson argues for modernism changing from something provocative and decentered to something more contemplative and searching for authority through institutional support such as periodicals and patrons; A Genealogy of Modernism: Constituents of a Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 7. 165. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 166. Joan Shelley Rubin, “Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 6 (2014): 11, where she also draws on David D. Hall’s critique of Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow. 167. Ursula Greville, “Radio in Britain,” Musical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1925):162; reprinted from The Sackbut, December 1924. 168. William Boosey in the National Review August 1923; quoted in the editorial of the Monthly Musical Review (1 September 1923): 633.

192 No te s t o Page s 69 – 7 1 169. “Music and Broadcasting,” Monthly Musical Review (1923): 633. Others argued that music encouraged instrumental learning among amateurs; see Philip Kerby, “Radio’s Music,” North American Review 245, no. 2 (Summer 1938): 300. 170. See, for instance, Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age; and David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 171. More often scholars have concentrated on new or popular music on the radio. See, for instance, Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-­Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); James Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Deborah S. Petersen-­Perlman, “Opera for the People: The Metropolitan Opera Goes On the Air,” Journal of Radio Studies 2 (1993): 189–204; and Louis Carlat, “Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic Music and American Culture, 1922–1939” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995). Ross McKibbin declares his focus to be on popular culture because he has no interest in classical music and, he claims, it is so well covered elsewhere. 172. William Boddy explains that “the transition between radio’s enabling technology and its commercial application is strikingly extended and discontinuous”; New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10; see also Mark Pegg, “British Radio Broadcasting and Its Audience, 1918–1939” (D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 1980). 173. See Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), 2002, 862; and Kerby, “Radio’s Music.” Richard Butsch points out the variance in the market according to geography, race, religion, and wealth: in 1930 “rural saturation nationwide” was 21 percent, compared to 50 percent in urban areas, and 44 percent of white families had a radio, compared with 7.5 percent of African American families. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 175. 174. Figures provided by Overy, The Morbid Age, 375; see also Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-­ Modern Music, 8 and 20. 175. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-­Modern Music, 39. 176. Ibid., 62–63. The first recording made at the Wigmore Hall seems to have been undertaken in 1927; the BBC broadcast some of the Wigmore’s concerts from 1951. Foreman and Foreman, London: A Musical Gazetteer, 169. 177. This was made possible by Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchasing the stations WEAF (New York) and WCAP (Washington, DC) from AT&T, which had decided that running a radio network was incompatible with its telegraph and telephone service. 178. “Pretentious Program Will Be Heard Sept. 21: Reinald Werrenrath to Be One of Many Well-­Known Participants,” Washington Post, 13 September 1927, 18. 179. The tenor had appeared on WEAF since 1925, never failing to conceal his identity behind a silver mask until he was dropped by his sponsors (Silvertown Tires), after which he worked as Joseph White; he later taught at the Juilliard School. See George Ansbro, I Have a Lady in the Balcony: Memoirs of a Broadcaster in Radio and Television ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 94. 180. Petersen-­Perlman, “Opera for the People.” Louis E. Carlat observes that commercial sponsors—and the broadcasters—often sought “to create goodwill” by associating themselves with the elite musical canon. Carlat, “Sound Values,”, 188. Kerby observed a demand for concert artists to supplement their regular recital engagements with radio appearances and noted that by such broadcasts singers could often double their income. 181. “In Defense of Canned Music,” Musical Quarterly 17 (1931): 142. Tschmuck, Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry, 71, points out that many American record companies perceived radio as competition, not as complementation;. On competition between American gramophone and radio companies, see Allan Sutton, Recording the Twenties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1920–1929 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2008). 182. An experiment sponsored by the Victor Gramophone Company, to see whether listeners

N ot e s t o Page s 7 1 – 7 2

193

would tune in to hear John McCormack and Lucrezia Bori sing live repertoire they had released on record, indicated that the concert managers were right to feel in peril—broadcast across all the eastern states they were heard by “an invisible audience of over eight millions, the largest yet reached for music in this country,” supposedly leaving theaters unfilled. “Broadcasting by U.S. Opera Singers: Theatre Managers’ Alarm,” New York Times, 2 January 1925, 3. 183. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography, expanded ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 41. 184. In the early 1930s RCA became the main tenant of the Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan and opened Radio City Music Hall, which became a significant venue for NBC broadcasts. The first nationwide Met broadcast was of Hansel and Gretel, Christmas Day, 1931; the year before had seen the first broadcast of the Philharmonic Symphony Society with Toscanini from Carnegie Hall. 185. Quoted in Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 513. A report on social trends prepared for President Herbert Hoover in 1933 compared radio to the newspaper in that it widened the horizons of the individual; more than that, radio also made him “an auditory participant in distant events.” Quoted in Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5. Susan Douglas comments on the mid-­1920s practice in the United States of “DX-­ing,” that is, listening for distant transmissions. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 186. Daniel Gregory Mason, “The Depreciation of Music,” Musical Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1929): 8. 187. Ibid., 9–10. 188. Ibid., 12–13. Cf. Eric Blom, “The Influence of the Radio and Music in Great Britain,” New York Herald Tribune, 30 October 1927, L7. 189. “Music Lovers Library: Reflections of an Emancipated Concert-­Goer,” Musical News 73 (1928): 24. 190. See his essay “On the Fetish-­Character in Music and the Regression of Listening [1938],” trans. Richard Leppert, in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); and the essays included in Theodor Adorno Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), which date from 1938 to 1941. 191. John Erskine, “Is There a Career in Music?,” reprinted from The World’s Work in Annual Reports 1928, Juilliard School of Music, 16. 192. Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, 171. 193. Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (Boston: Wadsworth, 2013), 58–59. The BBC quickly formed a national educational advisory committee, and by the autumn of 1924 broadcasts to schools had become a regular feature. The music-­ appreciation movement in Great Britain, said to have started in 1905, caught quite a lot of flak from music critics through the interwar period; see, for example, Thomas F. Dunhill, “The Musical Depreciation Movement,” Monthly Musical Record 53 (1923): 101–2. A. Eaglesfield Hull, in a later issue of the same journal, declared it “the worst term ever invented.” “Music Appreciation,” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 39. 194. Philip Kerby, “Radio’s Music,” North American Review (Summer 1938): 300. 195. An overview of the series is provided in Sondra Wieland Howe, “The NBC Music Appreciation Hour: Radio Broadcasts of Walter Damrosch, 1928–1942,” Journal of Research in Music Education 51 (2003): 64–77; see also Shawn VanCour, “Popularizing the Classics: Radio’s Role in the American Music Appreciation Movement, 1922–1934,” Media, Culture and Society 31 (2009): 289–307. 196. Joseph Horowitz describes Damrosch as “a model embodiment of classical music [. . . he was] august and remote. He spoke with a German accent”; Classical Music in America, 404. 197. Scholes was the BBC’s Music Advisor from 1923, while Walford’s Davies designed programs for schoolchildren and, starting on 5 January 1926, the series “Music and the Ordinary Listener.”

194 N o t e s t o Page s 7 3– 7 6 198. Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour [1938–1940],” in Current of Music, ed. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 189. 199. Engel, “Views and Reviews,” Musical Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1925): 308. Theodore Presser was the Pennsylvanian-­born son of German immigrants and founder of the Music Teachers National Association. In 1883 he launched the Etude magazine, and later he founded the Presser Company to publish educational music supplements. Theodor Presser and Co. continues to be successful; over the decades it has bought out several other music presses (including Oliver Ditson in 1931) and become the American representative for major French and German firms, including Universal Edition and Bärenreiter. 200. Mussulman, Music in the Cultured Generation, 197. 201. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 50. 202. Quoted in J. C. W. Reith, Into the Wind (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1949), 116. 203. Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, 6. 204. Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 00; on radio’s regulatory function see also M. Bailey, “Rethinking Public Service Broadcasting: The Historical Limits to Publicness,” in Media and Public Spheres, ed. R. Butsch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96–108. 205. “London and Daventry News and Notes,” Radio Times 14 (28 January 1927): 199; quoted in Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-­Modern Music, 44. “Ariel,” “Wireless Notes,” Musical Times 70 (1 July 1929): 619. 206. In the United States, German and Austrian orchestral works—principally Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Wagner—dominated classical radio programming in the interwar period, as they did in the concert hall; see John H. Mueller and Kate Heynes, Trends in Musical Taste (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1941), 86. According to Goodman, in 1932 popular music constituted 60 percent of NBC’s broadcasts; a decade later its share had increased to 75 percent. 207. Christopher Fifield goes into details of the audition process in Ibbs and Tillett: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 208. See “George Henschel, 1850–1934,” Musical Times 75 (1934): 894–95. 209. However, they became more frequent guests—often via gramophone concerts rather than studio appearances—in the 1930s. Elena Gerhardt’s first song recital for 2LO was broadcast on Sunday, 23 February 1930, at 5:45 in the afternoon. 210. The impact of hearing music over the radio, it was claimed, meant that “people who ten years earlier would have known nothing of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann or Chopin could now distinguish between ‘good scholarly performances’ and really fine interpretation.” “Recitals,” Musical News 73 (1928): 279. By 1944 the long-­serving Musical Courier editor Leonard Liebling felt able to assert that the contemporary listener “knows music better than grandma and grandpa” because they had become less star- and more work-­orientated.” “The Golden Age of Music Is Now,” Vogue, 1 June 1944), 174. 211. As mentioned elsewhere, it was not as if Dichterliebe was heard with great frequency or enthusiasm in concert either; of a rendition at the Wigmore one critic sniffed: “There are lovely songs among them, but a whole recital in this mood produced a tedium only relieved by the pleasure gained from the singer’s art.” “Mr. R. von Warlich’s Recital,” Times (London), 13 November 1926, 10. 212. Data on programming: accessed 19 July 2016, http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. 213. “Schumann-­Heink on Radio Tonight over 15 Stations,” New York Times, 31 January 1926, XX16. 214. See Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 144. 215. Carlat, “Sound Values,” 188. 216. This was true of lieder’s presence in musical theatre and popular song (consider Tin Pan Alley arrangements, for example of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” to words by Jerry Castillo (Calumet Music, 1935) in Fordham University Archives and Special Collections); or jazz versions in Germany, as discussed in Stephan Pennington, “Reading Uncle Bumba and the Rumba: The Comedian

N ot e s t o Page s 7 6 – 7 8

195

Harmonists and Transnational Youth Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140 (2015): 371–416. 217. Lawrence Tibbett, Nelson Eddy, and Gladys Swather also hosted the program. Initially called The Firestone Hour, the program was sponsored by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company; its two theme songs were composed by Idabelle Firestone, wife of the company’s founder. In 1948 it became the first commercial program to be broadcast on both AM and FM; from 1949 it was simulcast on television, a practice that continued into the 1950s. 218. Currid, A National Acoustics. 219. The volume Christmas Carols of Germany was produced in 1936 by the Terramare Office, a Berlin-­based organization established by the Foreign Office in 1925 for the purpose of cultural exchange. See Dörte Schmidt, “The Most American City in Europe? Americans and Images of America in Berlin between the Wars,” in Meyer, Oja, Rathert, and Schreffler, Crosscurrents, 83. 220. Radio Corporation of America advertisement in Life magazine, 6 December 1937. On “Christmas records” see Thom Holmes, ed., The Routledge Guide to Music Technology (New York: Routledge, 2006), 46. Broadcast from 21 December 1935. 221. Lydia Goehr might consider this a strikingly populist example of the “double” existence of the exiled artist. See her “Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life,” in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 66–91. “Silent Night” is now a UNESCO item of “intangible cultural heritage” of Austria, as a transnational and cross-­confessional carol that has been translated into over three hundred languages. Its dissemination is discussed in Thomas Hochradner, ed., “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” Zwischen Nostalgie und Realität: Joseph Mohr—Franz Xaver Gruber—ihre Zeit (Salzburg: Vereins Freunde Salzburger Geschichte, 2002). 222. Helmut Brenner points out that it was also used in the Franco-­Prussian and First World War; see his “Ihm bleibt auch wirklich nichts erspart! Stille Nacht im Theoriegebäude politischer Musikverwendung,” in 175 Jahre Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht! Symposiumsbericht, ed. Thomas Hochradner and Gerhard Walterskirchen (Salzburg: Veröffentlichungen zur Salzburger Musikgeschichte, 1993), 221–37. 223. Allison McCracken, Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 308. 224. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999); and Carolyn Abbate on Lawrence Tibbett overloading the microphone in his first sound film The Rogue Song (1930), “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69 (2016): 817. 225. McCormack soon recovered and went on to become a popular figure on the radio; on 1 January 1926 he was part of one of the first international transatlantic broadcasts alongside the U.S. Marine Band and Lucrezia Bori. McCormack was critical of crooning; see Richard O’Brien, “Crooners in Spotlight as Year Nears an End,” New York Times, 6 December 1931, XX29, discussed in Jonathan Ross Greenberg, “Singing Up Close: Voice, Language, and Race in American Popular Music, 1925–1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2008), 102. Elena Gerhardt complained that the “bottomless pit” of radio had destroyed all perspective on the art of singing through distortion of the quality and sonority of voices by amplification, so that a coloratura soprano has the volume of a basso profundo and vice versa. “Singing Lessons from the Great of the Past,” Musical America 59, no. 3 (10 February 1939): 24–25. 226. Henry Coates, “Gramophone Gossip: The Musician and the Microphone,” Musical News 73 (1928): 266. 227. Ernest LaPrade, Broadcasting Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1947), 179–86, offered tips such as not to sing or speak too close to a velocity mike as it emphasizes low-­frequency sounds at less than twenty-­four inches, and that clarity of enunciation is better when closer to the mike, so one should lean in and reduce volume. 228. See Friedrich Geiger, “ ‘Innigkeit’ und ‘Tiefe’ als komplementäre Kriterien der Bewertung

196 No t e s t o Page s 7 8 – 8 1 von Musik,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 60 (2003): 265–78; Benjamin Binder, “Intimacy, Introversion and Schumann’s Lieder” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2006); and Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 229. A. E. Dickinson, “Intimate German Songs,” Listener, 11 August 1938, 308. There are echoes here of Cardus’s description of Winterreise quoted in the previous section; see n. 118. 230. Trotter, Lieder in the First Media Age, 172. 231. On gender ideologies in radio broadcasting and reception, see Kate Lacey, “Continuities and Change in Women’s Radio,” in More than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-­Media World, ed. Andrew Crisell (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 148; David Goodman, “Distracted Listening: On Not Making Choices in the 1930s,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 24; David Morley, Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure (London, 1986), 147; and Richard Butsch, “Crystal Sets and Scarf-­In Radios: Gender, Technology and the Construction of American Radio Listening in the 1920s,” Media, Culture and Society 20 (1998): 559. 232. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 458. 233. There are glimpses of lieder being listened to live and on recordings, radio, and film in the Archive of Mass-­Observation, which was founded in Britain in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, and the poet Charles Madge. 234. Rebecca West, ‘‘This Listening—Together with Some Remarks on Broadcasting,’’ Radio Times 6 (20 December 1929): 863. Katz discusses the disembodiment of the listening experience through media in Capturing Sound, 20–21; as does Nicholas Cook, with reference to 1920s skepticism about the benefits of solitary listening, in Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 344–46. 235. Douglas, Listening In. 236. BBC Handbook (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1928), 351; quoted in Hewlett, Heinrich Schenker and the Radio, 36. 237. See Carolyn Abbate and particularly her invocation of James Q. Davies’s Romantic Anatomies in “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69 (2016): 798. 238. B. H. [Bernard H.] Haggin, “Music: Democracy and Music,” Nation, 8 February 1928, 170. 239. Samuel Chotzinoff, “Music in Radio,” in Music in Radio Broadcasting, ed. Gilbert Chase (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1946), 5. 240. Ibid., 16. 241. See Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition, 158–61. 242. Aldous Huxley, “Music and Machinery [29 April 1922],” in Allis, Temporaries and Eternals, 71–73. Five years later Huxley would say there could be no resistance to America, “the future of the world,” and the “instruments of vulgarity” of the machine age—the rotary press, the process block, the cinema, the radio, and the phonograph. Quoted in Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture, 40. 243. Hazel Gertrude Kinsella, “Music on the Air,” in Music on the Air, ed. Hazel Gertrude Kinsella, with a foreword by Walter Damrosch and introduction by Daniel Gregory Mason (New York: Garden City, 1937), 5. 244. “Those who have ‘listened in’ can soon tell whether a Jazz is coming from Germany or some part of England”; P. Morgan-­Browne, “Music and Language,” Musical Mirror and Fanfare, February 1933, 139. Although some programs were nationally syndicated, it is apparent that there were fierce attachments to local stations among radio-­listening publics in the United States; see Clifford Doerksen, American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcaster of the Jazz Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 10. 245. A. H. Fox Strangways, “Music and Musicians: An Evening of Wireless,” Observer, 19 May 1929, 10. 246. A. H. Fox Strangways, “Music and Musicians: The Song Recital,” Observer, 1 February 131, 12.

N ot e s to Page s 82 – 86

197

247. Chris Wahl, “Babel’s Business: On UFA’s Multiple Language Film Versions, 1929–1933,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian Rogowski (London: Camden House, 2010), 235–48. 248. Not to be outdone, MLVs were also made in Hollywood; see Nataša Ďurovičová, “Translating America: The Hollywood Multilinguals 1929–1933,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 150. On national protectionism in the film industry, see Ellwood, The Shock of America, 133–41. 249. Genevieve Abravanel discusses British anxiety about the influence of American slang and pronunciation in Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 88–90; on the alleged Americanization of Europe, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-­Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 250. See Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture, and “A Despicable Tradition? Quota Quickies in the 1930s,” in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 37–47. 251. An overview of British cinemagoing is provided in McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 419–56. 252. Thomas Peyser sees national identities as being called into question by global technological advances; Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 4. 253. On the Irishness of McCormack’s character see my “Singing Translations.” 254. Miles Kreuger, “Song o’ My Heart: A Hollywood Venture” [1984], reproduced on the McCormack Society website, accessed 28 July 2016, http://www.mccormacksociety.co.uk/Mccor mack/Studies/Song%20o%27%20My%20Heart%20by%20Miles%20Kreuger.htm. 255. Fox’s new 70mm wide-­screen “Grandeur” process supposedly provided a superior soundtrack and a larger image. Distance effects were devised through basic means such as McCormack’s turning away from the microphone. 256. L. A. G. Strong, John McCormack: The Story of a Singer (London: Methuen, 1941), 248. 257. Lawrence Tibbett hailed cinema as a means to spread “good,” i.e., operatic, singing; as told to R. H. Wollstein, “A Talk on the ‘Talkies,’ ” Etude 49 (August 1931): 539–40, reprinted in Andrew Farkas and William R. Moran, Lawrence Tibbett: Singing Actor (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1989), 101, and discussed in Greenberg, Singing Up Close, 60–64. 258. Roy Liebman, Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts ( Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2003), 14. Schumann-­Heink’s contract with Warners was voided in 1928; apparently executives were dismissive of her performances (see Fleeger, Mismatched Women, 67). Praised for her comedic talents, she made one full-­length sound film, in 1935, in which she played herself and sang Brahms. 259. See Suisman, “The Sound of Money,” 5–10. 260. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 31–35; and Gavin Williams, “Machine Speak: Ruggiero Leoncavallo, ‘Vesti la giubba’ (Pagliacci), I Pagliacci, Act I (1892),” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 2 (2016): 241–44. 261. Edwin M. Bradley, The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926–1931 ( Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2005), 404. 262. Although classical acts were initially promoted in favor of popular ones, in order to bring “culture” to the masses, they were outnumbered by eight to one; see Richard Barrios, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). There were, however, lieder sung on British shorts distributed by Pathé that seemed more in line with the vaudeville tradition: see, for instance, Eric Marshall’s 1932 rendition of “The Two Grenadiers” in costume with a sidekick (http://www.britishpathe.com/video/eric-­marshall/) or Elsie Day singing “Ständchen” in crinolines in 1935 (http://www.britishpathe.com/video/rupert-­hazell-­and-­elsie -­day) in between comic turns by Rupert Hazell. 263. “What Schubert Did for Song,” in H. Plunket Greene, From Blue Danube to Shannon (London: Philip Allan, 1934), 8; reprinted from Music and Letters (October 1928). 264. Multiple adaptations were perhaps particularly common in operetta, which often played

198 No t e s t o Page s 86 – 90 fast and loose with languages in the first place; the absurdity of Tauber playing a Chinese German-­ speaker, opposite English-­speaking Austrians, was noted by a reviewer of a London production of Léhar: “The Land of Smiles: Herr Richard Tauber at the Dominion Theater,” Manchester Guardian, 2 June 1932, 8. For more on Das Dreimäderlhaus, see Scott Messing, Schubert in the European Imagination, vol. 2, Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 265. “Still This Persistent Blossom Time,” New York Times, 22 March 1931, X4; apparently Blossom Time came to stand for any show that ran incessantly on Broadway and that toured extensively. 266. See ibid. and W. L., “Richard Tauber in Lilac Time,” Manchester Guardian, 25 September 1933, 7. 267. His first talkie shown in England was End of the Rainbow (1931). He toured the United States that same year—the New York Times observed that most people at his Town Hall debut had heard him in Europe already, and that he was well-­known through his recordings—and then again in October 1937, joining the Vienna Opera Company there as well as giving recitals and appearing on the radio. Olin Downes, “Tauber Is Cheered at American Debut,” New York Times, 29 October 1931, 26. 268. His first national radio recital in Great Britain occurred in July 1931 and included Schubert and Schumann alongside Léhar. Tauber did not make his London operatic debut until Die Zauberflöte in 1938; he applied for British citizenship after the Anschluss. “Richard Tauber’s Radio Recital,” Manchester Guardian, 21 July 1931, 10. 269. A full cast list is provided in J. P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1930–1939: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 306. 270. “Aldwych Theatre,” Times (London), 23 September 1933, 8. 271. H. H., “Lilac Time,” Observer, 24 September 1933, 15. 272. John Potter and Neil Sorrell, A History of Singing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 208. 273. Franklin, in “Between the Wars,” points out that at this stage “modernism” was not really an alternative in England. Tauber seemed to have made a conscious decision to include Léhar and Johann Strauss, as well as more traditional German lieder repertoire, in his recitals around the time he appeared in Wozzeck and Turandot. For more context see Lawrence Napper, “British Cinema and the Middlebrow,” in British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000), 110–23. 274. Tauber later worked with Clutsam on yet another version entitled Blossom Time based on the 1934 film. Clutsam included more new material in this version. It debuted on tour in the British provinces, moving to the Lyric Theatre in London on 17 March 1942. 275. R. H., “Two New Films: Tauber in Another Schubert Story,” Manchester Guardian, 24 August 1934, 10. 276. Michael Orme, “The World of the Kinema,” Illustrated London News, 8 September 1934, 362. 277. “Tauber Triumphant,” Daily Mirror, 14 August 1934, 20. 278. “Richard Tauber in Blossom Time at the Regal,” Times of India, 15 September 1934, 9. 279. Friederike Jary-­Janecka, Franz Schubert am Theater und im Film (Anif: Verlag Müller-­ Speiser, 2000). 280. “Unfinished Symphony at the Curzon Cinema,” Spectator, 16 March 1934, 408; for a comparison of the two films see also “Stage and Screen: Blossom Time at the Regal,” Spectator, 7 September 1934, 322. 281. A. S., “Musical History Revised,” New York Times, January 14, 1935, 11. “The stage show at the Roxy pre­sents Jerry Mann, Jerry Cooper, Bryant, Rains and Young; Freddy Mack and the Gae Foster Girls.” 282. The operetta tenor Angelo Lippich explained: “Hordes of German artists are now coming again to America—to make films.” Quoted in Koegel, Music in German Immigrant Theater, 378. 283. See Dorothy Crawford Lamb, A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

No t e s t o Page s 90 – 98

199

284. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain trans. H. T. Lowe-­Porter (London: Minerva, 1996), 653. 285. T. J. Reed, “Mann as Diarist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 229. 286. The Joseph Braunstein Collection is held at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York.

Chapter Three 1. The quotation is borrowed from the title of Jonathan Sterne’s book on the MP3, but for the early twentieth century the more obvious reference is to his The Audible Past. Arved Ashby discusses the ontology of recordings in Absolute Music: Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010). 2. Katz, Capturing Sound, 189. 3. The literature is vast: as a sample of recent contributions, see Carlo Cenciarelli, “The Limits of Operatic Deadness: Bizet, Habenera (Carmen), Act I,” Cambridge Opera Journal 28 (2016): 221– 26; Jessica A. Teague, “The Recording Studio on Stage: Liveness in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” American Quarterly 63 (2011): 555–71; and Inge van Rij, “ ‘A Living, Fleshy Bond’: The Electric Telegraph, Musical Thought, and Embodiment,” Nineteenth-­Century Music 39 (2015): 142–66. See also Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-­Wilkinson and John Rink, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Cook’s final chapter, pondering the changing relationship of performance and production, in Beyond the Score. 4. See, for instance, Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996). 5. Gypsy Rose Lee, Gypsy: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 254. 6. Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity. 7. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 234. 8. Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 252 and 269–70. 9. Kristen M. Turner provides a case study of an American singer’s career during this period in “ ‘A Joyous Star-­Spangled-­Bannerism’: Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Society for American Music (2014): 219–52. 10. Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, xvi–xviii. 11. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 12. On the challenge of using “middlebrow” across national boundaries, see Caroline Pollentier, “Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, l’Art Moyen and the Broadbrow,” in Brown and Grover, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, 37–53. 13. Glenda Goodman argues that by the twentieth century music was “no longer [. . .] a matter of genteel self-­fashioning, nor was it chiefly a vehicle for expressing abstract political positions, as was the case for the musical communities. [. . .] Instead, early twentieth-­century Chicagoans experienced a heightened awareness ethnic, cultural, and racial differences.” That was certainly the case in other performance situations in New York, as discussed elsewhere in this book, but was not so pronounced in the case of the musicale. Goodman, “American Identities in an Atlantic Musical World: Transhistorical Case Studies” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2012), 230. 14. Milton Epstein, The New York Hippodrome: A Complete Chronology of Performances from 1905 to 1939 (New York: Theatre Library Association, 1993). 15. Erich J. Wolff (1874–1913) moved in the same Viennese circles as Alexander Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alma Schindler (who later married Mahler). As well as composing stage works and 130 lieder, he accompanied Elena Gerhardt and Julia Culp on tour; they sang his lieder in German, but others used translations. Wolff died after a supposedly minor operation in New York while on tour with Gerhardt; although his songs continued to be performed into the 1920s, they did not endure much beyond that, probably because of their challenging piano parts. 16. See Oja, Making Music Modern, 329–30.

200 No t e s t o Page s 9 8 – 10 2 17. “Eva Gauthier Would Make Reforms in Our Concert Halls,” Musical America 40, no. 9 (21 June 1924): 15; and “ ‘Help the Living,’ Says Eva Gauthier,” Musical America 40, no. 17 (16 August 1924): 15. 18. See H. C. Colles, “Miss Eva Gauthier,” New York Times, 2 November 1923, 15. The association of America with jazz is discussed in Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown. 19. Letter from John (otherwise unidentified) to Gauthier, 22 February 1953, in Nadia Turbide, “Biographical Study of Eva Gauthier (1885–1958): First French-­Canadian Singer of the Avant-­ Garde” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 1986), 279. 20. M. H. Flint, “New York,” Musical Times 64, no. 970 (December 1923): 873. 21. The Knickerbocker Club was founded in 1871. Unlike the Union, the Knickerbockers insisted that members be able to prove their descent from colonial ancestors. Membership in the Brook, which was started in 1903, was by invitation only and limited initially to one hundred. It supposedly offered its members twenty-­four-­hour service (supposedly, like Tennyson’s brook, “going on for ever”). 22. The Century Association was dedicated to the fine arts and literature, its members drawn mostly from the merchant and business world; the Lotos was also a literary club (that, like the Brook, also drew its name from Tennyson). 23. David Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982), 72 and 76. Frederic Cople Jaher, however, cautions that the erratic selection criteria for social registers means that they were not always a good index of social standing: virtually all millionaires in New York were included in nineteenth-­century editions, he points out, with no concern for their family background. “Nineteenth Century Elites in Boston and New York,” Journal of Social History 6 (1972): 54. 24. This despite the fact that the founder of New York’s Social Register, Louise Keller, was of German heritage and that “clubbishness” had been deemed a German trait; see Conolly-­Smith, Translating America, 3. Hammack points out that in 1900 less than a quarter of New York City’s employed male residents born in the United States were of American, Canadian, or British origin; however, they constituted 58 percent of the city’s bankers, wholesalers, and professional men. 25. Its sister society in London folded during wartime. 26. By 1921 there were four hundred active and associate members. While Lüchows remained an important venue for the Bohemians, for larger events they used the Hotel Astor. Eventually regular meetings were held at the Harvard Club. 27. In 1914 a philanthropic branch of the Bohemians began, funded by public concerts. The Musicians’ Foundation was intended to provide social welfare, aid, and assistance to professional musicians and their families. It was a pattern that would be followed by several other music societies. 28. On 3 March 1912, at the Hotel Astor, Margaret Matzenauer sang lieder by Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Weingartner and Strauss on a program that also featured the Kneisel Quartet and the pianist Josef Lhévinne. A detailed account of its early history was written by Henry Edward Krehbiel, The Bohemians (New York Musicians’ Club): A Historical Narrative and Record (New York, 1921). 29. Leopold Auer, “Tribute,” in 1924 program. 30. For many years Kahn was not given a box at the Met because he was Jewish. He and his wife hosted many events in the music room of their East Ninety-­first Street home. 31. Quoted in “Baroness Sternburg to Wed A. Pavenstedt,” New York Times, 18 September 1920, 9. 32. Ticket prices for a subscription to the ten concerts of the 1931–32 season ran: orchestra $30, orchestra circle $25, 20, dress circle $15, balcony $12.50, family circle $10 and $7.50. 33. Anna M. Hamlin, Father Was a Tenor (London: Exposition Press, 1978), 82. 34. Much the same was true of Great Britain’s music conservatory faculty, most of whom had studied in Germany or Austria before the war. 35. Harold Bauer, letter to Oscar Sonneck, 6 September 1921. Beethoven Association, JPB 07–9 Box 1: Correspondence, Members, New York Public Library. 36. Folder 43, List of Members of the Beethoven Association, New York Public Library, Bee-

Not e s t o Page s 102 – 106

201

thoven Association JPB 07–9 Box 1: Correspondence, Members. The instrumentalists included Pablo Casals, Ernő Dohnányi, Georges Enesco, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Leopold Godowsky, Percy Grainger, Josef Heifetz, Myra Hess, Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arthur Rubinstein, Artur Schnabel, Bruno Walter, Josef Stránský, Lionel Tertis, Jacques Thibaud, Eugène Ysaÿe, and Efrem Zimbalist. In 1926–27 subscription prices ran: parquet center $18, plus $1.80 tax; parquet side $15 plus $1.50 tax; and balcony $8–12. The loges and first rows of the balcony were reserved for members of the Association. 37. A review of McCormack’s concert, “Beethoven Association [5 November 1919],” is included in Richard Aldrich, Concert Life in New York, 1902–1923 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), 604–5. 38. Program of 27 December 1928. The songs included were “Das Wandern,” “Wohin,” “Halt,” “Dankgesang an den Bach,” “Am Feierabend,” “Der Neugierige,” and “Ungeduld.” Beethoven Association programs *MBD (uncat.), Folder 2. 39. Folder 9, Draft to members, 15 February 1929. 40. Oscar Sonneck, letter to Bauer, 6 July 1928, Box 7, Folder 316. The Town Hall’s initial sponsor was the League for Political Education, an organization established in 1894 by members of the women’s suffrage movement who “felt that men and women to be worthy of the suffrage should earn their right to vote through continued education.” For nominal annual dues there were lectures at eleven o’clock every morning except Thursday; on Thursday evenings there was a varied program of lectures, debates, and public meetings. Beethoven Association programs, Folder 3: “What Is the Town Hall? Brief Answers to some Oft Asked Questions,” 1935–36. 41. Sharon Hamilton describes Manhattan during this period as “a time and place of particular cultural anxiety,” because, despite the rapid expansion of wealth and cultural values, it was still essentially a factory town; see “ ‘Intellectual in Its Looser Sense’: Reading Mencken’s Smart Set,” in Brown and Grover, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, 130–47. 42. The Biltmore had opened in 1919 as the Commodore Hotel, named after Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, next to Grand Central Station. 43. See Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination,” 444. 44. Biltmore Friday Morning Musicales (*MBD (New York). New York Public Library, Clippings File. 45. Many clubs aimed to improve their members’ education, or that of the broader community, as explored in Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr, eds., Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 46. Anna McClure Scholl, “The Colony Club,” Munsey’s Magazine, August 1907, 594–601. The initiation fee was $150, with yearly dues of $100. 47. W. B. B., “A Strenuous Day with the Colony Club,” New York Times, 14 April 1907, SM9. 48. The Knickerbocker moved to Fifth Avenue and Sixty-­second Street in 1915, the Brook Club to East Fifty-­fourth Street in 1925, and the Union to East Sixty-­ninth Street and Park Avenue in 1933. 49. “The Colony Club,” Munsey’s Magazine, August 1907, 594–601. 50. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in Philosophy,” address delivered on 25 August 1911, reprinted in The Genteel Tradition in Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States, ed. and introd. James Seaton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 4. 51. At one time the secretary of the Colony Club was Margaret Blaine, wife of the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Walter Damrosch. 52. According to Lorene Martin, Bagby’s “well-­born” English ancestors had arrived in Virginia in 1628, and his parents came from two of Rushville’s oldest families (his father was a lawyer and a member of Congress; his mother belonged to the Scripps family of newspaper fame; her brother was the editor of the Chicago Tribune). “The Unique Career of an Illinois Musician,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 35 (1942): 140–47. Bagby was listed as a musician and composer in Club Men of New York: Their Clubs, College Alumni Associations, Occupations, and Business and Home Addresses, with Historical Sketches of Many Prominent New York Organizations (New York: Republic Press, 1902).

202 No t e s t o Page s 106 – 108 53. The poet, activist, and daughter of the Manhattan banker Samuel Ward, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, had invited Bagby to speak to Newport’s Town and Country Club after reading an article he had published in Century Magazine; see Alfred Morris Bagby, “A Summer with Liszt in Weimar,” Century Magazine 32 (1886), 655–69. Her daughter, the writer Maud Howe Elliott, subsequently suggested he begin a lecture series in the city. 54. Bagby’s Mammy Rosie (New York: The author, 1904) charts Rosie’s encounters with “sassiety” in Newport and at the Waldorf-­Astoria, and the failed romance of her master with an opera singer. Bagby’s earlier novel, Miss Träumerei: A Weimar Idyll, served both as an introduction to the music of Liszt and as a romance about an American visiting Europe. 55. Caruso was alleged to have made a similar response to Melba’s: “Eleven o’clock is just the time for me to spit and gargle, not the time for me to sing a concert.” Recounted in Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, 112. Before the war performers included Lillian Nordica, Sarah Bernhardt, Lilli Lehmann, Marcella Sembrich, Johanna Gadski, Anton van Rooy, Geraldine Farrar, Alma Gluck, and Emmy Destinn; after the war came Heifetz, Rachmaninoff, Reinald Werrenrath, Beniamino Gigli, Emma Calvé, Elisabeth Rethberg, Tito Schipa, Lucrezia Bori, Frieda Hempel, Lili Pons, Kirstin Flagstad, and Jan Kiepura. Bagby’s obituary stated that orchestra chairs were $12 or $16 for a series of four mornings; each of the concerts was said to net between $8,000 and $10,000. For the annual gala concert in January 1940 (featuring Lily Pons, Elisabeth Rethberg, Frieda Hempel, Richard Crooks, Giovanni Martinelli, Lauritz Melchior, Emanuel List, Roland Gundry, and Jan Smeterlin), reserved seats were $5, floor boxes (seating seven) were $50, first-­tier boxes (seating nine) $75, second-­tier for eight people were $45, and second-­tier for a dozen were $60. 56. Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, 111; and clipping from “Music in the Morning,” Time 37, no. 10 (10 March 1941): 62. Although each had a predominantly female membership, this music club of sorts was a far cry from the women-­sponsored societies promoting new music discussed by Carol J. Oja (“Women Patrons and Crusaders for Modernist Music: New York in the 1920s”) and Joseph Horowitz (“Laura Langford and the Seidl Society: Wagner Comes to Brooklyn”) in Locke and Barr, Cultivating Music in America, 237–63 and 164–84 respectively. 57. “B,” 30 December 1940; in Bagby Music Lovers Foundation Clippings, New York Public Library. 58. See Patricia Coffin, 28 October 1940; in Babgy Music Lovers Foundation Clippings, New York Public Library. 59. Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13. 60. Not advertising who would perform was more typical of private musicales, such as the events held in Boston by Isabelle Stewart Gardner (who may have picked up the idea from her childhood in New York City); see Ralph P. Locke, “Living with Music: Isabella Stewart Gardner,” in Locke and Barr, Cultivating Music in America, 100. 61. Mary van Rensselaer complained that New York newspapers “devoted more space to the entertainments and ceremonies of its residents whose names were in the Social Register than they do to the proceedings of the Congress of the United States.” Mrs. John King van Rensselaer, The Goede Vrouw of Mana-­Ha-­Ta: At Home and in Society, 1609–1760 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 4. On reviewing practices in France, see Jeanice Brooks, “Nadia Boulanger and the Salon of the Princesse de Polignac,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 415–68. 62. Henry James, The American Scene (Createspace ebook, 2010), 51. 63. James, in his descriptions of hotels in novels such as The Reverberator (1888) and The Ambassadors (1903), continually refers to their slippery surfaces; see Robbie Moore, “Henry James, Hotels, and the Invention of Disposable Space,” Modernist Cultures 7 (2012): 254–78. 64. Michael Sayeau, “Waiting,” in Restless Cities, ed. Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (London: Verso, 2010), 279–98. T .J. Jackson Lears points out the rise of metaphors linking money and time in the late nineteenth century in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 11.

N ot e s to Page s 108 – 1 10

203

65. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, ed. Martha Banta (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009). 66. See William Righter and Rosemary Righter, eds., Henry James: Void and Value (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and David McWhirter, Henry James in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 67. The midwesterner John “Betcha-­Million” Gates (who made his money in barbed wire and railroads) paid an unprecedented $20,000 a year for permanent quarters at the Waldorf. Herman Kogan and Lloyd Wendt, Bet-­A-­Million! The Story of John W. Gates (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1948); and Jefferson Williamson, The American Hotel: An Anecdotal History (New York: Knopf, 1930), 273–74. 68. Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (New York: Plume Books, 2007). 69. Carolyn Brucken, “In the Public Eye: Women and the American Luxury Hotel,” Winterthur Portfolio 31 (1996): 203–20. On 25 September 1931 the New York Times announced that the Waldorf-­Astoria had become the first large hotel to employ female cooks, though they appear only to have prepared “old-­fashioned American home-­cooked meals,” haute cuisine remaining the domain of male chefs (the famous Oscar having created the Waldorf salad in 1893). The Waldorf-­ Astoria did not hire its first female chef until 1973. Brucken, “In the Public Eye.” 70. Annabel Wharton, “The Two Waldorf-­Astorias: Spatial Economics as Totem and Fetish,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 528. 71. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s essay “The Hotel Lobby” (1922–25) and using as an example the film Grand Hotel (1932), David Trotter distinguishes between shallow and deep spaces in the hotel, the former being lobbies, balconies, and bars, the latter being bedrooms. See Literature in the First Media Age, 186–91. 72. The constituents of the Four Hundred are listed in Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society? (New York: Harper, 1960). 73. Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 74. Oliver Herford, quoted in “The Coaching Game as the New Yorker Plays It,” New York Times, 30 April 1905, SM3. 75. Quoted in “Personal Glimpses: No More Parades in Peacock Alley,” Literary Digest, 12 January 1929, 31. 76. “Editorial,” Literary Digest, 12 January 1929; and Dorothy Dayton, “New Waldorf-­Astoria,” New York Hotel, 26 September 1931. 77. “Sound Checks In at the Waldorf: An Interview with David Andrews, Whose Audio Consulting Firm Renovated the Sound Systems for the Public Rooms at the Waldorf-­Astoria Hotel,” Sound and Communications, 10–14. The hotel hosted radio broadcasts from the 1920s onward. Eric Barnow mentions the building of a studio at the Waldorf-­Astoria in 1921; in 1926 NBC announced “a new epoch in American life,” with a broadcast from the Grand Ballroom of the hotel that featured the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch, the New York Oratorio Society, “remote features” including Mary Gary from Chicago (apparently there were problems with a feedback whistle), dance bands, and performances by the singer Tito Ruffo and the comedy duo Weber and Fields. See Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 87 and 190. NBC was granted exclusive radio rights for the hotel and planned daily broadcasts of orchestral music, Sunday organ recitals, and talks by prominent persons. It was the first hotel in the country to install short-­wave radio equipment in every room (in 1936); guests paid a dollar per day (fifty cents a day after the first day, or ten pounds per month). 78. Wharton, “The Two Waldorf-­Astorias,” 523–43. 79. Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, 112. 80. Address at the opening of the new hotel, broadcast on NBC. “Old and New Meet as Waldorf Opens,” New York Times, 1 October 1931, 25.

204 No t e s t o Page s 1 10 – 1 13 81. Jaher points out that the Rockefeller, Morgan, Loeb, and Schiff dynasties, who kept slightly out of the social swirl, were more philanthropically inclined. “Nineteenth-­Century Elites in Boston and New York,” 64. 82. “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, 19 December 1925, 3. Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921; one of its working titles was “Old New York.” Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Vintage, 2007), 565. 83. Dorothy Hall, “Bagby’s Musical Mornings: For 45 Years Backbone of Society Has Attended These Monday Concerts; Even Men Like Them,’ ” 10 December 1935, Bagby Music Lovers Foundation, Clippings File, New York Public Library. 84. Patricia Coffin, 26 November 1940; and Bagby Music Lovers Foundation Clippings File. 85. “Waldorf Firsts,” Waldorf-­Astoria Bulletin, 25 April 1937. 86. “Obituary,” New York Times, 28 February 1941, 19; and Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, 112. 87. New York Times, 23 November 1940. The New Yorker observed: “It is a most respectable affair, and it abhors publicity, it says” (19 December 1925). Garbo, of course, was a star also considered out-­of-­time, as Roland Barthes recognized: see Maria DiBattista, Fast-­Talking Dames (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 239. 88. See Jann Pasler, “Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation,” reprinted in Writing through Music: On Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 285–309. 89. The names of people who had taken seats or boxes were printed on the back page of the program. The writer, journalist, and pianist Marguerite Merington (1857–1951), who was involved in arranging the 1941 exhibition about the Bagbys, helpfully tracked down the addresses of subscribers, including some whose names were not published on the list; other addresses can be found in the Social Register. Merington’s opera Daphne, with music by Arthur Bird and Watteau stage pictures, had been staged by Bagby at the Waldorf-­Astoria in December 1897; according to the New York Times (“Society; Events of the Week,” 19 December 1897, 15), over fifteen hundred women were present: “A few men also attended, but were lost to the feminine crowd.” 90. According to Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 404, the lower part of Fifth Avenue (between Sixty-­third and Seventy-­seventh Streets) contained the most expensive apartments in the city. In 1940 residents paid seven-­and-­a-­half times more rent than those in East Harlem; 44 percent of the employed people in the area were servants. 91. Colonel G. Creighton Webb (1854–1948) had served in the Spanish-­American War. After a brief stint practicing law, he became the music librarian for the Metropolitan Opera; he donated some of his ceramics collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Henry Theodore Leggett opened the Leggett Studio Gallery in Waldorf Towers in 1931; his work—mostly society portraits and watercolor seascapes—was described in the New York Times, 12 December 1926, X12, as “pretty rather than impressive, sentimental rather than real.” George L. Bagby collected eighteenth-­ century furnishings in the family mansion in Kentucky. 92. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 2001). 93. The subscriber Mrs. Clarence H. Mackay, wife of the head of the transatlantic Postal Telegraph Cable Company (whose family bought 3 East Seventy-­fifth Street from Stuart Duncan in 1920), tried to dissuade her daughter Ellin from marrying Irving Berlin because he was Jewish and they were Roman Catholic; Ellin left the family home in 1926. 94. Butler’s sister Susan, Mrs. Francis C. Huntington, also attended the Bagbys. She is listed as living at 25 East End Avenue, a Cross and Cross–­designed neo-­Georgian apartment building that opened in 1927 in an attempt to create a riverside rival to Park Avenue; the Depression put paid to the scheme. Christopher Gray, “Along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” New York Times, 2 September 2007, 12. The Huntingtons also owned Rassapeague in Suffolk County, New York; built in 1865, it was refurbished in the Italian style in 1915. Butler’s correspondence with George Santan-

N o te s t o Page s 1 1 3– 1 17

205

yana is held in the Butler-­Huntington-­Smith Family Papers Mss Col NYGB 18243 (1734–1991), New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives. 95. Luxury apartment houses could be found in Manhattan earlier than this (Rutherford Stuyvesant had one built at Eighteenth Street and Irving Place in 1869), but they did not take off until the interwar period. 96. Mrs. Stuart Duncan (née Jermain Stoddard) was the daughter of Reverend Charles A. Stoddard; her husband’s father had made a fortune importing Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce; his son spent the inheritance developing real estate, particularly on East Seventy-­fifth Street. See Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes/75th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenue; Stately Limestone Mansions with a Sense of History,” New York Times, 25 March 2001, RE9 . The husband of Mrs. Henry Evans (née Mary Roland Lopez of Greensboro, Alabama) belonged to the Players and Lawyers clubs and was a member of the Mayflower Descendants. See John Mathews, Complete American Armoury and Blue Book, Combining 1903, 1907 and 1911–1923 Editions (Baltimore, MD: Clearfield, 1991). 97. For more on apartment living in New York, see Andrew Alpern, Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History (New York: Dover, 2003); and Michael Gross, 740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 20. On Europe, see Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-­Century Paris and London (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 98. Pearsall Field was the widow of Henry Wilmerding Payne (d. 1926) and a well-­known socialite, renowned for entertaining (her brother William Broadhurst Osgood Field was a collector and philanthropist and married into the Vanderbilt clan). 99. His more bohemian tendencies were reflected by his belonging to the Society of Arts and Sciences, the Travellers Club in Paris (a “home-­away-­from-­home” at 25 avenue des Champs-­ Élysées, once the residence of the Marquise de la Païva, “La Grande Horizontale”), the New York Athletic Club, the New York Stage Society, and the Workshop Theater of New York. Leggett had studied at the Art Students’ League in New York as well as at the Académie Julian in Paris and with a Ruskin student in London; during the war he was an assistant to Herbert Hoover, who was in charge of Food Administration. 100. W. Thetford Leviness, “Mr. Bagby’s Musical Exhibit: Consisting of about 100 Programmes and Photos of Artists Who Appeared,” Gotham Life: The Official Metropolitan Guide 37 (1942): 5. Unsigned letter to Louis Beebe of the New York Herald Tribune, 1 May 1942. Both clippings in the archive of the City of New York Museum. 101. Lloyd R. Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850 to 1950 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 234. 102. Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Cultures and Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), viii. 103. The Steinway Hall was renamed the Grotrian Hall in 1925; it closed in 1938 and was later demolished, having been damaged in the Second World War. 104. Marion Ryan, “The Woman’s Club in America: The Part It Plays in National Life,” EVE: The Ladies’ Pictorial 3 (1921), 664. There was a class distinction here; these clubs in the metropolis were different in constitution from membership of associations by subscription that McKibbin determines were a propensity of the British middle classes in the interwar years. Classes and Cultures, 87–90. 105. “To Prospective Members,” American Women’s Club Magazine, 1 January 1925, 11. Founded as the Society of American Women in London in May 1899, it changed its name in 1916. Women were eligible for membership if their parents were American or if they had been born in the United States and lived there until they were twenty-­one. Wives of American men could become associate members, and there were some honorary members. In 1923 the AWC moved from Hertford Street to still more splendid premises on Grosvenor Street, taking over the former home of Sir Edgar Speyer, a British baronet degraded for pro-­German sympathies. The Daily Mail reported that the building, which had been valued at £200,000 in 1913, had been bought for less than £30,000; one

206 N o te s t o Page s 1 1 7 – 1 2 0 of the first residents was the actress Peggy O’Neil, whose bedroom featured a sunken silver bathtub. “Notables Open American Woman’s Club in London,” Brooklyn Eagle, 27 June 1923, 6; and “Bargain Building,” Daily Mail, 26 June 1923, 7. 106. Marion Ryan, “Our American Visitors,” EVE: The Lady’s Pictorial, 13 June 1923. 107. Margaret C. Moseley, “The American Woman, Internationalist,” American Women’s Club Magazine, (1 January 1925, 227–28; and “To Prospective Members,” American Women’s Club Magazine, 1 January 1925, 11. See also the interview with Mrs. Curtis Brown quoted in “U.S. Women’s Club in London,” Daily Mail, Atlantic ed., 8 June 1923, 19. 108. Caroline was married to Albert Curtis Brown (1866–1945), an American literary agent with a transatlantic business; his clients included A. A. Milne and D. H. Lawrence. 109. Evening Standard, 24 November 1926. 110. Elizabeth Craig, “America Conquers London Town: Everybody Jazzed Up, from Week-­ End Parties to Supper Parties; U.S.-­isms Evident in Every Home; But Preserve us from the Cranks!” Clipping, AWC archive. 111. Marion Ryan, “Americans in London: The Social Activities of Our Cousins from across the Atlantic,” Eve, 2 June 1926, 415. Born into the English aristocracy, Bridget Henrietta Frances Williams-­Bulkeley had married into the Guinness dynasty in 1902; she died in Cannes in 1931. 112. Madame Guy d’Hardelot was born in France as Helen Guy; her married name was Rhodes. She spent most of her career teaching in London. Marshall performed and recorded many of her songs. 113. “A Singer’s Debut,” Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 1926, 11. 114. Gretchaninov (1864–1956) studied with Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky in Moscow and in St. Petersburg with Rimsky-­Korsakov before emigrating to Paris in 1925 and then the United States in 1939. Gretchaninov’s songs were performed—and recorded—in Russian, French, and English in London and New York through the first half of the twentieth century (including at the 1951 Festival of Britain), by touring musicians such as the Russians Vladimir Rosing and Nina Koshetz, the Dutch soprano Tilly Koenen, and the American tenor Richard Crooks. 115. 129 CCB, “Concerts: ‘An Hour of Song.’ ” 116. Dorothy Paget (1905–1960) made her name, as many Whitneys had done before her, in horse racing. She had an interest in Russian culture and set up a cemetery in Paris. 117. Lady, 27 November 1924. 118. “Recitals of the Week: Reinhold von Warlich,” Times (London), 19 February 1926, 12. 119. C. Curtis-­Brown, “Reinhold von Warlich,” 29 November 1926, 2:28. “Many Club members were present, but the concerts have aroused considerable interest in the musical world and the general public, and have had most excellent notices from the more critical of the music writers.” Warlich (1877–1939) was one of the most influential teachers of the time; his students included Pierre Bernac, John Goss, and Bruce Boyce. 120. Moore, Collected Memoirs, 58. 121. During the war Princess Helena Victoria had arranged musical entertainments for British troops at the front. Afterward, with her sister Maria Louise (later a patron of Walter Legge’s Lieder Club, of which more in a moment), Helena Victoria hosted concerts at their Pall Mall residence, Schomberg House, until it was damaged by an air raid in 1940. 122. In 1932 there were appearances by Maggie Teyte, Warlich, the violist Lionel Tertis, the British pianist Harriet Cohen, and Anthony Bernard with the New English Choir and members of the London Chamber Orchestra (with Betty Bannerman as soloist), 244–45. Caroline S. K. Rowe, “The Music Circle,” annual report for 1932. 123. Maureen Emerson, Escape to Provençe (Cuckfield, Sussex: Chapter & Verse, 2008), 171. 124. Deborah Mitford, Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (London: John Murray, 2010), 76. 125. National Federation of Music Clubs; Paddington Music Club (see London Hotels file), Chelsea Music Club, founded in 1922. 126. Letter from 1919 in The Collected Letters of Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine), vol. 3, 1916–1921, ed. Barry Smith (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 214.

N ot e s t o Page s 1 20 – 1 2 7

207

127. Now the Landmark London, the Grand Central Hotel—originally intended to host travelers through Marylebone Station—closed in the 1920s. 128. Sir Maurice was an old acquaintance of the writer Joseph Conrad. He lived in Fareham, Hampshire. 129. “Obituary: Lady Cooper,” Times (London), 6 April 1932, 9, and 7 April 1932, 14. 130. “A New Movement in Music,” Times (London), 9 February 1933, 10. 131. “The German Invasion,” Daily Telegraph, 19 May 1932, 00. 132. Thomas Irvine, “Normality and Emplotment: Walter’s Leigh’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Third Reich and Britain,” Music and Letters 94, no. 2 (2013): 297. 133. Marie Tobin, “Formative Years and Early Career,” in Walter Legge: Words and Music, ed. Alan Sanders (London: Duckworth, 1998), 10. 134. Later Legge would be the prompt, and a rich source, for Frank Walker’s Hugo Wolf: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952). Newman had of course also been an influential proponent of Wagner’s and Richard Strauss’s music in Great Britain; see Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Wieder die ‘stehengebliebene Wagnerei’: Ernest Newman, Thomas Mann, Adorno,” in Getauft auf Musik: Festschrift für Dieter Borchmeyer, ed. Udo Bermbach and Hans Rudolf Vaget (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 353–72. 135. R. L., “Mischa-­Léon—Hugo Wolf Recital,” Musical Times 63 ( June 1922): 419. 136. For example, in January 1928 “Verborgenheit” was sung by Betty Bannerman and Margherite Marsden at the Aeolian Hall, by Joan Every-­Leggatt at the Grotrian Hall, and by Berghite Blakstad and Esther Coleman on the radio (broadcast by Daventry and Bournemouth respectively). In May “Verborgenheit” appeared on a program of Gerhardt’s at Queen’s Hall and was included by the tenor Roger Clayson in a weeklong series of Wolf broadcasts. See the Monthly Musical Record, which was published by Augener’s—the British agents for Peters Editions, Leipzig—which included in each issue a list of which of its songs had been performed that month. The MMR relied on singers to supply the information, and of course the purpose of the list was promotional (the journal included Wolf ’s “In der Frühe” in the June issue), so the figures must be taken with a pinch of salt. Capell took over the editorship of the MMR in 1928, which might be a further reason for the increase in lieder coverage. 137. S. Brichta, “Hugo Wolf,” Signale, 15 February 1928; reprinted in the Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 170–71; W. S. Meadmore, “Gramophone Gossip: The Music of the Sound Box,” Musical News 73 (1928): 86. 138. Joubert, “Lieder-­Singing at the Cross-­Ways,” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 227–28. 139. “Confession by Post,” Musical News 73 (1928): 100–102. 140. “The Musician’s Gramophone,” Times (London), 20 April 1932, 12. 141. On Gerhardt’s reputation in London, see my “Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages.” 142. The Wagner connection raises some interesting questions about voice types: while certain singers on Legge’s rosters concentrated on lieder, many had voices of a size more suited to the operatic stage. It was also during this period, of course—specifically, in 1934—that the Glyndebourne Festival began; its founders, John Christie and Audrey Mildmay, were inspired in part by their visits to the Salzburg and Bayreuth Festivals. 143. W. L., “The Bayreuth Festival: ‘Featuring’ Herr Hitler (From a Special Correspondent),” Manchester Guardian, 15 August 1933, 16. 144. Sanders, Walter Legge: Words and Music, 88. 145. See Fred K. Prieberg, Handbuch Deutsche Musiker, 1933–1945 (N.p.: The author, 2004). 146. Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 297. 147. Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 69–70. 148. “Notes of the Day,” Monthly Musical Record (February 1933): here 31. 149. Sanders, Walter Legge New York, 1998, 12. 150. “London Lieder Club,” Times (London), 8 March 1934, 10; and Edwin Evans, “New Lieder Singers: Mme. Maria Basca’s London Debut,” Daily Mail, 16 April 1934, 19. 151. William Mann, obituary of Walter Legge, Gramophone 56 (April 1979): 1680.

208 N o te s t o Page s 1 27 – 1 3 3 152. “London Lieder Club: Miss Hedda Kux,” Times (London), 21 November 1933, 10. 153. One performer, the Irish-­born, Vienna-­trained soprano Laelia Finneberg, thought that tastes were changing, with audiences turning away from “white-­voiced coloratura singing,” and argued that lieder should only be sung in the original language. “Laelia Finneberg: Lover of German Song,” Hobart, Transylvania Mercury, 30 June 1934, 11. 154. “Music, Drama, and Films,” Manchester Guardian, 25 February 1933, 15. 155. Edwin Evans, “Schorr Recital: Songs in Masterly Fashion,” Daily Mail, 18 October 1934, 8. Charles Panzéra did appear at the Club in February 1935 and sang an all-­French program. 156. N. C., “Music in London,” Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1933, 18. 157. “Turn Table Talk,” Gramophone 10 (1933): 29. It seems unlikely that many of the ordinary Gramophone readers would have attended the London Lieder Club, given their constitution as outlined in Compton Mackenzie, “Editorial,” Gramophone 9 (1931): 111; cited in Nick Morgan, “ ‘A New Pleasure’: Listening to National Gramophonic Society Records, 1924–31,” Musicae Scientiae 14 (2010): 147. 158. Yet it attempted to maintain a distance from the other entertainments on offer, as is evident by the running foot on the program: “The London Lieder Club have no connection with any other concerts held in the Hyde Park Hotel.” 159. “Onlooker,” “Looking at Life: Musical London,” Daily Mail, 24 October 1933, 10. 160. For example, Hüsch required a traveling permit from the minister of labor to give recitals and make recordings of Winterreise, and tried to negotiate a higher fee for his accompanist Hans Udo Müller (he said he would agree “with a heavy heart” to £8 per evening). Letter of 2 March 1933, in Sanders, Walter Legge, 83. 161. “An Anglo-­German Club in London,” Times (London), 10 March 1931, 16. 162. “The Season: Diary of Chief Events,” Times (London), 30 April 1934, 8. 163. “England and Germany,” Times (London), 24 July 1931, 7. 164. “The D’Abernon Club,” Manchester Guardian, 1 July 1934, 26. For more on D’Abernon (1857–1941) see Richard Davenport-­Hines, Speculators and Patriots: Essays in Business Biography (New York: Routledge, 1986). 165. See G. T. Waddington, “ ‘An Idyllic and Unruffled Atmosphere of Complete Anglo-­ German Misunderstanding’: Aspects of the Operations of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop in Great Britain, 1934–1938,” History 82 (1997): 44–72. 166. See Irvine, “Normality and Emplotment,” 297 n. 11. 167. Fifield, Ibbs and Tillett, 206. 168. “An Impresario’s Affairs,” Times (London), 7 July 1937, 4. 169. To the extent that Penelope Fitzgerald, in her autobiographical novel Human Voices (London: Fourth Estate, 2014) about working at the BBC during the Second World War, has a character complain about the amount of Wolf broadcast. 170. The Serenade Concerts were founded by young conductor Herbert Menges; Legge predicted that they would be popular with the general public because of their varied programs (performed by the London Philharmonic) and cheap tickets (seven shillings and sixpence), and because they allowed smoking. W. L., “The ‘Serenade’ Concerts,” Manchester Guardian, 15 February 1938, 10. 171. W. L., “Janssen at the Second Serenade Concert,” Manchester Guardian, 8 March 1938, 10. 172. See Karl Grunsky, “Hugo Wolf und das Kunstlied,” Die Musik, 25 (1933): 401–5 (Grunsky, who had been a friend of the composer, published a monograph on him in 1928). Erik Levi, in Music in the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 263, describes Grunsky as a “rabid anti-­ Semite.” 173. Joan Chissell, “Obituary: Gerald Moore,” Musical Times 128 (May 1987): 287.

Chapter Four 1. Popular music was also used to raise morale: on its use in Great Britain, see Christina L. Baade, Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (New York: Oxford

No t e s t o Page s 1 34 – 1 36

209

University Press, 2012); James Nott, “The Dancing Front: Dancing, Morale, and the War Effort in Britain during World War II,” Journal of Social History 00 (2016): 00–00; and Kate Guthrie, “Between the Brows: Music and Cultural Values in 1940s Britain” (Ph.D. diss., King’s College London, 2014). On the United States see Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 92–93. An overview of transatlantic relations during this period is given in Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 104–30. 3. See Dan P. Silverman, Hitler’s Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Christoph Buchheim, German Industry in the Nazi Period (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008). Comparative studies are offered by Christopher Buchheim and Redvers Garside, eds., After the Slump: Industry and Politics in 1930s Britain and Germany (Frankfurt-­ am-­Main: Peter Lang, 2000); and Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 4. R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67. 5. The literature on the situation in Germany is extensive: see Erik Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Musical Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Kater, Twisted Muse; and Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller, eds., Music and Nazism: Arts under Tyranny, 1933–1945 (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2003). 6. Kenneth J. Bindas, All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996). 7. See Ronald D. Cohen, Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-­Wing Politics in 1930s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 8. “Lieder-­singing in its highest sense is and always will be the most exclusive art, appealing only to those whose literary culture is guiding their musical sensibility,” concluded Dr. M. Joubert in a 1928 article, “Lieder-­Singing at the Cross-­ways.” Monthly Musical Record 58 (1928): 227–28. 9. H. T. Parker, “Plays and Players—Music and Musicians,” Boston Evening Transcript, 15 January 1932, 10, cols. 1–2; cited in Nadia Turbide, “Biographical Study of Eva Gauthier (1885–1958): First French-­Canadian Singer of the Avant-­Garde” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Montréal, 1986), 394. 10. Letter from Gauthier to Elizabeth Coolidge, 26 November 1930; in Turbide, “Biographical Study of Eva Gauthier,” 386. 11. “Concert Fees for Artists,” New York Times, 19 June 1932. Goddard Lieberson complained that “a goodly number of singers show so little musical intelligence that a song of Bach or Debussy means less to them than ‘I’ll bring you home again Kathleen’ [. . .] and as for the songs of Fauré or Mahler [. . .] they are blissfully unknown”; “Concerts Free and Paid For,” Modern Music 14, no. 3 (1937): 157; cited in Turbide, “Biographical Study of Eva Gauthier,” 429–30. 12. On the BBC’s programming policies, see Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-­Modern Music. 13. For example, the English contralto Gladys Ripley wanted to use a different name when performing light music, but a BBC internal memo concurring that “going gay” would “seriously injure . . . [her] oratorio and concert work.” Fifield, Ibbs and Tillett, 204. 14. More on unemployment figures can be found in John Williamson and Martin Cloonan, Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893–2013 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 15. On Powell’s role see Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination.” Mrs. Samuel Courtauld, wife of a textile millionaire, who had cofounded the Courtauld-­Sargent concerts and whose Portman Square home was an artistic center, also died in 1931. 16. See also Herbert Hughes, “Protection for the British Musician,” Daily Telegraph, 31 Octo-

210 N o t e s t o Page s 1 36 – 1 4 1 ber 1931, quoted in Fifield, Ibbs and Tillett, 217. The Musical Times reprinted the letter along with its own editorial commentary; “Musicians and the Crisis,” Musical Times 72 (1 December 1931): 1073–74. 17. The American journal Musical Courier pointed out on 20 February 1932 that “the United States, which has been the world’s greatest playground for foreign musical talent of all kinds and grades, is not going to cut off its nose to spite its very handsome musical face. [. . .] We did protest against [. . .] people evading the immigration laws under false pretences, but everybody knows that even these stringent laws provide for exceptions in favor of real artists and professionals. Why England, which has set so splendid an example to the world in free trade, should be the one country to favor a narrow-­minded policy in music, is indeed a riddle. Such a policy, if carried to its logical conclusion, would destroy the musical profession, which is, and must be, essentially international.” 18. For more on this see Williamson and Cloonan, Players’ Work Time, 101–2. 19. Editorial, “Musicians and the Crisis,” Musical Times 72 (1931): 1074. 20. There had long been mistrust of “alien” musicians among members of the Musicians’ Union; another perceived threat to livelihoods came the recording and broadcasting industries. The Amalgamated Musicians’ Union had been founded in 1893; in 1921 it merged with the London Orchestral Union of Professional Musicians to form the Musicians’ Union. A history is provided in Martin Cloonan and Matt Brennan, “Alien Invasions: The British Musicians’ Union and Foreign Musicians,” Popular Music 32 (2013): 277–95. 21. Statement quoted in Fifield, Ibbs and Tillett, 221. 22. “Test for Foreign Artists,” Manchester Guardian, 8 January 1932, 6. 23. H. J. K., “[London Concerts:] Singers of the Month,” Musical Times 72 (1931): 1131–32. Kimball acknowledged that he could be a tough reviewer, referring to himself as “the carping critic” in a review of Lily Zaehner; Daily Telegraph, 1 June 1928, from the Craxton archive. 24. Marshall’s program on 10 November had included a group of lieder (Schumann’s “Die Lotosblume” and “Widmung,” and Schubert’s “Der blinde Knabe,” “Der Doppelgänger,” “Du bist die Ruh’,” and “Die Allmacht”). Falkner mostly sang lieder in English: on 9 November 1932 at the Wigmore he included numbers from Dichterliebe in translations by Whistler (“O springtide magic of the May,” “I tell my love,” “The rose and the lily,” “When to your eyes,” “I’ll pour out my soul,” “In Rhine,” “Why blame thee now?”). 25. Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England, 1914–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 178. 26. “Art and Politics,” Musical Mirror and Fanfare 1 (May 1933): 228. 27. “Refugee Musicians,” Gramophone 17 ( June 1939–May 1940): 6. The total number of refugees entering Great Britain was said to be 600,000. 28. Michael H. Kater, Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 153–66. 29. Letter from Schumann to Joyce, mid-­May 1938. Puritz, trans. Joy Puritz, in Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 219–21. 30. See Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 31. The Festival began in 1934; it stopped during the war but since then has run continuously. Further information can be found in Michael Kennedy, Glyndebourne: A Short History (Oxford: Shire Books, 2010); and Spike Hughes, Glyndebourne: A History of the Festival Opera (London: Methuen, 1965). 32. Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 224. 33. Schumann, letter to Joyce, 1 July 1938. Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 223. 34. Elena Gerhardt, Recital (London: Methuen 1953), 121–22. 35. Lehmann’s experiences in New York are discussed in detail by Kater. Lehmann’s generosity to her friends and family—which included checks for Schumann and her ex-­husband, Karl Alwin—was one reason for her financial concerns. Never Sang for Hitler, 189. 36. Letters of complaint were sent to broadcasts on hearing Schumann singing in German, as there were in London to German productions at opera houses, and to the programming of Strauss

Not e s t o Page s 1 4 1 – 1 4 5

211

and Pfitzner on song recitals in New York. H. D. Rosenthal, “The Opera Seasons 1939: Covent Garden and Glyndebourne,” Gramophone 17 (1939–40): 97–99; and G. G., “Song Recital given by Miss Lawrence at Town Hall,” New York Times, 6 January 1938, 22. 37. Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 231. 38. Ibid., 240; and “Elisabeth Schumann at Town Hall,” New York Times, 12 November 1939, 48. 39. For more on the exilic experience see Goehr, “Music and Musicians in Exile.” 40. At the start of 1937 the United States’ production index was higher than it had been for the last ten years, with the national income having risen 75 percent in the last five. But a decline began in August of that year: production dropped, shares fell, and the number of unemployed rose again. 41. Constance Hope, Publicity Is Broccoli (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1941), 124. 42. Letter c. 1940 in the Constance Hope Papers at Columbia University archive (MS#0611), Box 14, Me-­P Melchior, Lauritz folder. 43. See Kater, Never Sang for Hitler, on the prominence of the Jewish community in the musical life of the city. 44. See Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1941). 45. Morris Dickstein discusses the role of musicals and films in the United States in Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009), 357–407. 46. John F. Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 47. For example, Gena Caponi-­Tabery argues that music, sports, and dance helped “to express and form a new African American consciousness”; see Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). 48. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), 142. 49. Britten’s letters provide some insight into how the group spent their time, with music providing solace and distraction as news arrived from Europe. See his letter to Lennox Berkeley, 1 January 1940, in Britten, Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, vol. 2, 1939–1945, ed. Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 752. 50. Sherill Tippins, February House (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 26. 51. At a recital at the Wigmore Hall on 30 April 1944 they performed Die schöne Müllerin. Other artists in their circle were Auden’s partner, Christopher Isherwood; the novelist Carson McCullers; Klaus Mann; Paul and Jane Bowles; and Gypsy Rose Lee. The commune was established by George Davis, the fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar. For more information see Tippins, February House. 52. She had sung there on mixed student and festival programs in 1920 and 1921. Anderson had appeared with the New York Philharmonic Stadium concerts in 1925 and performed extensively in Europe, making her Berlin debut to acclaim in 1930. 53. “Marian Anderson Heard: Young Colored Contralto Gives a Recital in Several Languages,” New York Times, 31 December 1928, 15. 54. In this the review echoed comments made in the British press when Anderson performed there in 1928; see Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness,’,” 659. 55. Frankye Dixon, “MUSIC: Marion Anderson at Carnegie Hall,” New York Amsterdam News, 2 January 1929, 8. 56. Frankye Dixon, for instance, said both Anderson and Hayes possessed “a voice of remarkable refined qualities, singular for its power, softness and depth,” and noted that her low notes were especially sonorous and rich for a female voice. Ibid. 57. Grant Olwage, “ ‘The World Is His Song’: Paul Robeson’s 1958 Carnegie Hall Concerts and the Cosmopolitan Imagination,” Journal of the Society for American Music 7 (2013): 169. The relationship between Hayes and Robeson is probed by Olwage in “Listening B(l)ack: Paul Robeson after Roland Hayes,” Journal of Musicology 32 (2015): 524–57. See also Todd Decker, Who Should Sing “Ol’ Man River”? The Lives of an American Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Dave Harker coined the term “fakesong” in his Fakesong: The Manufacture of British Folk Song, 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).

212 N o t e s t o Page s 1 4 5 – 1 49 58. Marian Anderson, My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography, with a foreword by James Anderson DePreist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 158. On Anderson’s German and Austrian reception, see Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870– 1961.” 59. “Marian Anderson Wins Ovation Here: Capacity Audience Reluctant to Leave Carnegie Hall on Conclusion of Recital,” New York Times, 17 April 1939, 12. 60. While there was no German group on this program, there had been earlier in the season: on 6 December she sang Schubert’s “An den Mond,” “Der Doppelgänger,” and “Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” as well as “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus”; on 6 January 1939 she included Brahms’s “Die Mainacht,” “Der Gang zum Liebchen,” and “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer,” along with Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” and “Ich grolle nicht.” Anderson’s performance of lieder we now tend to think of as “male” songs—such as the late Schubert—was fairly typical of professional female singers at the time. 61. The society, founded in 1890, was open to women whose lineage extended back to those who fought for independence. They adopted the rule excluding African American musicians from performing at Constitution Hall in 1932. 62. “D.A.R. Keeps Ban on Marian Anderson: Vote Upholds Stand Taken by Directors,” Chicago Defender, 11 February 1939, 1. The efforts of the NAACP to advocate for civil rights through internationalist rhetoric is explored in Jonathan Rosenberg, “How Far the Promised Land?” World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 63. Zora Neale Hurston criticized Eleanor Roosevelt for not protesting a similar decision by the District of Columbia Board of Education, while the District was under the control of committees of a Democratic Congress, to first deny, and then place race-­based restrictions on, a proposed concert by Anderson. “A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft,” Saturday Evening Post, 8 December 1951, 151–52. 64. The broadcast (which stopped after the second spiritual) can be heard via the National Archives catalog, accessed 19 December 2016, https://research.archives.gov/id/1729137. 65. The “Ave Maria” text was originally one of three songs sung by the character Ellen Douglas in Walter Scott’s epic poem The Lady of the Lake, which Schubert set in German in his Sieben Gesänge aus Walter Scotts “Fräulein vom See,” op. 52 (1826). The melody was also well-­known in instrumental arrangements, particularly for violin. 66. Quoted in Alex Ross, “Voice of the Century: Celebrating Marian Anderson,” New Yorker, 13 April 2009, 78. 67. “Konzert,” Wiener Zeitung, November 23, 1935, 8. Quoted and translated in Thurman, “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961,” 138. 68. A transnational understanding of racial hygiene is presented in Kühl, The Nazi Connection, and considered from a legal perspective in James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 69. Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness,’ ” 660. 70. “Entertainments: A Stock-­Taking: National Gallery Concerts,” Times (London), 30 December 1939, 4. 71. The London Symphony Orchestra resumed concertizing from then on; the following week John Goss gave a recital titled “Ayres and Ale” at the Wigmore, Figaro was staged at Sadler’s Wells, and a new Balletomane Club presented a triple bill at Collins’s Theatre in Islington. “Music This Week,” Times (London), 9 October 1939, 6. 72. Radiogram to NLT [Annie] Friedberg, 9 October 1939, in “National Gallery Concerts,” British Library. 73. Letter to Annie Friedberg, Hess’s American agent, 29 September 1939. In “National Gallery Concerts,” British Library. 74. There had already been chamber music concerts hosted in galleries as part of the London Music Festival in May 1939, which had been received warmly—though there were complaints

N o t e s t o Page s 1 49 – 15 2

213

about a lack of comfortable seating and poor acoustics. A similar concert series was established in Brussels, and later there were Victory Concerts at the Juilliard School in New York. 75. Announcement by Kenneth Clark, accessed 21 December 2016, https://www.nationalgallery .org.uk/paintings/history/myra-hess-­concerts/how-­the-­concerts-­started. 76. “National Gallery in War-­Time: Series of Lunch-­Hour Concerts,” Times (London), 7 October 1939, 4. 77. Mollie Panter-­Downes, “Letter from London, April 14,” New Yorker, 20 April 1946, 48. 78. “Entertainments: A Stock-­Taking; National Gallery Concerts,” Times (London), 30 December 1939, 4. 79. As she reported to Friedberg in a letter of 4 December 1939. Anita Chase now handled her publicity in the United States, as Friedberg “seemed to have so little understanding of my problems.” Hess had initially been against BBC broadcasts, complaining that the corporation had “relinquished their leadership in music.” 80. “Notes of the Day,” Monthly Musical Record 70 (1940): 1–3. 81. Expenses averaged twenty-­three pounds ten shillings per concert (about £700 today). Gallery attendants agreed to ten shillings a week; by April 1940 solo artists were paid two guineas and ensembles and quartets four (many did not take their fee; Hess never did). Subsidy was given by the government-­funded Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), and there were donations for the series the Allied Relief Fund, Cosmopolitan Club, and other American societies. Ibbs and Tillett received a weekly fee of 10 guineas. Bombing in 1941 caused serious damage to the gallery that caused further financial strain: Arthur Mendel campaigned on behalf of Hess, raising a total of £4000 from the United States and Canada, including donations from world-­famous musicians. 82. Director’s Broadcast (Empire Programme) 24 October 1939, 3. 83. Letter, Nigel Lund to Hess, 1 December 1939. 84. Letter to Hess, 16 December 1942. A collection made by Dame Myra Hess of programs, lists of performers, and works performed, as well as other material relating to the National Gallery Concerts, 1939–1946, held by the British Library. 85. With reference to the concert on 15 October 1942. 86. Howard Ferguson, “A Short History of the Concerts,” in National Gallery Concerts in Aid of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, 10 th October 1939–10 th October 1944 (London: Printed for the Trustees, 1945), 9. 87. “Are You Being Served? The ‘Bystander’ Goes Round the Canteens: No. 27, the National Gallery Canteen,” Bystander, 14 August 1940. National Gallery archive clippings NG24/1940/1. 88. Honey and walnut, curried egg, lobster and cream, and honey and raisin being the most popular flavors, according to the Star (9 April 1940); National Gallery archive clippings NG24/ 1940/1. 89. “Body and Soul,” Evening News, 6 November 1942, National Gallery archive clippings NG24/1940/1. 90. On the voluntary services undertaken by women of the “leisured classes” and complaints against them, see Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 36. 91. Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), 238–41. 92. The audience numbered 428; Ferrier was accompanied by Maurice Jacobson, and the other artist, who played Schubert and Beethoven, was the pianist Maria Donska. Lennox Berkeley attended as a scout for the BBC and described her as having “a fine and powerful voice of real contralto quality” with accurate intonation and good diction, but “found her rather dull.” Ibbs and Tillett, though, were happy to put her on their books. See Christopher Fifield, Letters and Diaries of Katherine Ferrier (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 17 and 244. 93. Pears and Britten performed Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin together for the first time at the Wigmore as part of a series of “one-­composer concerts” with the pianist Clifford Curzon and his wife, the harpischordist Lucille Wallace, in 1944.

214 N o te s t o Page s 15 2 – 15 7 94. Memo to the Secretary of State for Air, 1942, in the National Gallery archive. 95. Myra Hess, “Foreign Musicians,” Times (London), 20 February 1942, 5. 96. Ronald Jones, letter to Jenneth, 20 December 1939, National Gallery archive. 97. Richard Taruskin chose to use Schubert as his example in a critique of claiming “aesthetic preferences as moral choices”; Paul Harper-­Scott responded, again taking Schubert hostage, in his Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 18. 98. An alternative perspective, politically and affectively, to this public form of music making can be found in Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 99. See Elena Gerhardt, Recital (London: Methuen, 1953), 125. 100. Bradley’s “Bulletins,” as they are known, are held in the Centre for Performance History at the Royal College of Music, London. Further excerpts from them are discussed in my “Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages.” 101. Gerhardt, Recital, 142. 102. Further information can be found in Andrew Merriman, Greasepaint and Cordite: The Story of ENSA and Concert Party Entertainment during the Second World War (London: Aurum, 2013); and Janet Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977). After the war Elisabeth Schumann gave concerts for ENSA in the British Zone so that she might be able to visit her son, who had remained in Germany; later she and Legge visited Vienna under ENSA’s auspices. See Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 262–77. 103. Letter to Elizabeth Meyer, September 30, 1942; in Britten, Letters from a Life, 1089–90. 104. Quoted in Fauser, Sounds of War, 39. 105. Quoted in ibid., 70. 106. Myra Hess, letter to Kenneth Clark, 1 May 1945, NG16/47.2. Along similar lines, in the Evening News she was quoted as having said that, although the first impulse of the National Gallery Concerts had been “to provide an antidote to the prevailing sense of doom and destruction,” gradually they realized an ideal: “that music should be an integral part of the life of the nation.” “The ‘Gallery’ Concerts End,” Evening News, 19 April 1946, NG24.1946.18. 107. The new director was Philip Hendy. On 6 June 1945 William Gibson, a trustee of the National Gallery, wrote to Hess offering his resignation from the concert committee upon learning that the concerts were carrying on for another year, explaining that in his view, “when the welfare of the visual arts clash [sic] with any other interest in this country, the visual arts are sacrificed.” He was replaced by Sir Stanley Marchant. Apparently without informing Hess beforehand, and despite the expressed desire of Steuart Wilson, president of the newly formed Arts Council, for it to continue elsewhere, the end of the series was announced. 108. See Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Émigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London: Pimlico, 2003), 119. 109. E. M. Forster, “From the Audience,” in National Gallery Concerts In Aid of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, 10 th October 1939–10 th October 1944 (London, 1945), 6–7. 110. Ibid., 7. 111. Nick Hayes, “More than “Music-­W hile-­You-­Eat”? Factory and Hostel Concerts, ‘Good Concerts’ and the Workers,” in “Millions Like Us”? British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 209–35. See also Rose, Which People’s War?; and Calder, The Myth of the Blitz. 112. See Hayes, “More than ‘Music-­while-­You-­Eat’?,” 211; quoting Philip Zeigler, London at War, 1939–1945 (London: Sinclair-­Stevenson, 1995), 191. 113. Douglas C. Chamberlain, letter to the editor, Time and Tide, 23 March 1946. NG24/1946/6. 114. On Flagstad’s initial reception at the Met, see Kater, Never Sang for Hitler, 172–78. 115. Louis Biancolli, The Flagstad Manuscript (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 80. According to Joseph Horowitz, the Nordic stars and radio broadcasts from the Met in the 1930s represented a new type of Wagnerism: one which meant that “performers, not composers, would

Not e s t o Page s 15 7 – 159

215

be sacralized.” Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 312. There had been debates in the late 1920s about whether the Nordic races were preferable to southern Italians as immigrants: See Lothrop Stoddard and Maurice Hindus, “Nordics and Others,” Bulletin of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences 34 (28 December 1929). 116. H. H., “Magic of Lotte Lehmann,” Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1929, 5. “We do not easily associate Wagnerian heroines with recitals of intimate music, but Madame Lotte Lehmann, whom we know best on the stage of Covent Garden, showed us on Saturday afternoon how erroneous our preconceived notions may be. [. . .] It was a different Lotte Lehmann who sang to us from the platform of Queen’s Hall; different and still adorable.” 117. Ray C. B. Brown, “Mme. Flagstad Gives Lieder Recital Here,” Washington Post, 12 February 1941, 17. 118. Review of a recital by the soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the pianist Edwin McArthur on 8 November 1940 at Carnegie Hall, performing Grieg’s Haugtussa, op. 67, and songs by Brahms, Wolf, and four contemporary Americans. The review appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 9 November 1940; it was subsequently published in The Musical Scene (1945) and reprinted in Tim Page, ed., Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles, 1940–1954 (New York: Library of America, 2014), 209–10. 119. Biancolli, The Flagstad Manuscript, 80. McArthur wrote Flagstad: A Personal Memoir (New York: Da Capo, 1980). 120. Biancolli, The Flagstad Manuscript, 83–84. 121. Ibid., 84. 122. Lanfranco Rasponi, “Scandinavian Lady: Kirsten Flagstad Discussed Her Work at The Metropolitan Opera House and the ‘Mike,’ ” 29 December 1940 New York Times, X10. Flagstad had been willing to participate in American popular culture, appearing in Paramount Pictures’ The Big Broadcast of 1938. The film’s papery plot concerned a transatlantic race between two steamships, but its main interests were the entertainments offered on board. These ranged from turns by musical and comic stars such as W. C. Fields, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour, to Flagstad, who sang Brünnhilde’s “Battle Cry” from Die Walküre wearing a horned helmet. The critic Frank S. Nugent admired “her complete detachment” from the “hodge-­podge revue”; “The Screen: The Big Broadcast of 1938 at the Paramount, Loses a Sponsor,” New York Times, 10 March 1938, 16. 123. Alice Hughes, “A Woman’s New York,” Washington Post, 8 February 1937, 11. 124. Initially Flagstad had intended to return, according to various newspaper reports: see “Madame Flagstad to Visit Her Husband in Norway,” New York Times, 13 April 1941, 41, in which she claimed, “I am happy to return, but I will be even happier to come back” (though she also conceded that she had kept her Norwegian citizenship; see “Kirsten Flagstad Off for Norway: Opera Star, Aboard Clipper, Expects No Trouble in Trip through Reich: WILL RETURN FOR SEASON,” New York Times, 20 April 1941, 18). 125. “Kirsten Flagstad to Stay in Norway: Decision to Remain till after War Surprises Friends Here,” New York Times, 18 June 1941, 24. 126. Statement to the Associated Press, quoted in “Miss Flagstad in Oslo: Met Singer Plans to Stay Home during War,” New York Times, 10 September 1941, 26. 127. “Flagstad Planning Return from Norway,” New York Times, 16 May 1945, 6. 128. The Norwegian press claimed that the Nazis had not wanted her to return home—she would have been more helpful singing in Allied countries; see “Flagstad Won’t Sing to Norwegians Again: Angered by Charges of Being Pro-­German,” New York Times, 10 June 1945, 33. 129. In 1947 the journalist Tor Myklebost revealed that Flagstad’s return to Norway had been expedited by Hans Thomsen, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington, DC. Reported in “Mme. Flagstad Assailed: Her Wartime Activities by Express-­Attaché in United States,” New York Times, 25 January 1947, 13. Flagstad rebuked the charge: see “Flagstad Applauded by Audience in Paris: Calls Thomsen Charge ‘an Abominable Lie,’ ” New York Times, 26 January 1947, 46; but Myklebost’s version of events was corroborated in “Norwegian Embassy Gives Flagstad Data,” New York Times, 17 May 1947, 16. 130. “Flagstad’s Husband on List,” New York Times, 27 May 1945, 7. Quisling (1887–1945) seized

216 N o te s t o Page s 159 – 1 6 0 power in 1940 and from 1942 to 1945 served as Minister-­President: ministers from the Nasjonal Samling dominated his collaborationist government, known as the Quisling regime. 131. “Oslo Bars Flagstad’s Exit, Seizes Husband’s Estate.” New York Times, 29 June 1946, 22. 132. “Personalities,” New York Times, 30 March 1947. 133. “Flagstad Lauded in London Concert, Second Concert 13 February,” New York Times, 7 February 1947, 29. 134. “Flagstad Held Welcome: Mrs. Belmont Says Artist’s Music Transcends Politics,” New York Times, 20 March 1946, 31; speech given at the Women’s National Republican Club, on West Fifty-­third Street. A column in Harper’s Magazine (“After Hours,” 1 September 1949, 100) complained, with specific reference to Flagstad, that “the arts seem to get more attention these days for their political overtones than from what we are used to thinking of as their intrinsic qualities.” 135. Flagstad was not the only musician whose return to New York was jeopardized by wartime politics. Alfred Cortot was derided as a collaborator, and Wilhelm Backhaus was known as Hitler’s favorite pianist. Walter Gieseking was said by Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein to have been a Nazi supporter, but he was cleared by the U.S. government and, despite protests, toured there in January 1949. Michael Raucheisen, one of the most prominent German accompanists and second husband of the soprano Maria Ivogün, had worked on a complete recording of lieder in Berlin through the 1930s; for many years after the war he appeared in public very rarely, until he toured with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf in 1958. Apparently Roseneck refused to work with Elisabeth Schumann after she had been accompanied by the “big Nazi” Raucheisen; she defended herself by saying he had been denazified and that Dusolina Giannini, a Jew, had sung with him. See Myriam Chimènes, “Alfred Cortot et la politique musicale du gouvernement de Vichy,” in La vie musicale sous Vichy, ed. Myriam Chimènes (Brussels: Complexe, 2001); and Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 297. 136. Irving Spiegel, “Flagstad’s Career Put Up to US as Norwegians Here Attack Her: Met Won’t Consider Star until Her Position Is Clarified—Embassy Say Her Place Was Here, Where She Could Help Norway,” New York Times, 15 June 1945, 21. 137. “From the Mail Pouch: Shall They Return?,” New York Times, 15 December 1945, X7. 138. Hans Tischler, “Suggestion: The Controversy over Art and Politics,” New York Times, 23 March 1947, X9. 139. O. D., “Flagstad Receives a Great Welcome: Noted Soprano Wins Repeated Orations on Her Return to Local Recital Field,” New York Times, 21 April 1947, 20. 140. “Flagstad Intends to Become Citizen: Singers Says the Norwegians Treated Her ‘Badly’— Wasn’t Able to Oppose Nazis,” New York Times, 16 May 1947, 53. 141. “Flagstad Is Picketed: But More than 2000 Jam Hall in Chicago for Concert,” New York Times, 12 April 1947, 19; “Bombs and Boos fail to silence Kirsten Flagstad: Stenchbombs, Boos and Fisticuffs,” New York Times, 23 April 1947, 27. 142. Biancolli, The Flagstad Manuscript, 180–81. 143. “Damrosch Aids Flagstad: Decries Philadelphia Reception, Says He Would Play for Her,” New York Times, 26 April 1947, 15; “Noted Singers Voice Support of Flagstad,” New York Times, 27 April 1947, 62: they included Geraldine Farrar; Gladys Swarthout and her husband, Frank Chapman; Julius Herehn (a former captain in the Marine Corps); Karin Branzell; and Paul Althouse. 144. The statement was distributed by Helen Mobert, representative of the Consolidated Concerts Corporation, as Flagstad flew from La Guardia airfield; “Flagstad Leaves US, Denies Nazi Dealings,” New York Times, 25 May 1947, 55. 145. “Arrivals in America: Flagstad Returns under Quota Visa: Not Sure about Desiring US Citizenship,” New York Times, 25 July 1947, 3. 146. C. H., “Flagstad Cheered at Recital Here,” New York Times, 13 December 1949, 19. “Ovation Accorded Flagstad Concert: Soprano Is Cheered by Large Audience at Carnegie Hall— Strauss Lieder Offered,” New York Times, 23 December 1947, 29; “Carnegie Hall Picketed: American Veterans Committee Group Protested Flagstad and Gieseking Recitals,” New York Times, 8 December 1948, 33.

Not e s t o Page s 1 6 0 – 164

217

147. R. P., “Kirsten Flagstad at Carnegie Hall: Audience of 2, 700 Greets Her with Ovation,” New York Times, 12 December 1949, 28. 148. The complexities of Strauss’s postwar reception are explored in Neil Gregor, “Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War,” Music and Letters 96 (2015): 55–76. 149. See Annegret Fauser, “Music for the Allies; Representations of Nationhood in the United States during World War II,” in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900– 2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Schreffler (Woodbridge: Boydell-­Paul Sacher, 2014), 247–58. 150. They were Thrill of a Romance (1945), Two Sisters from Boston (1946), This Time for Keeps (1947), Luxury Liner (1948), and The Stars Are Singing (1953). 151. Shirlee Emmons, Tristanissimo: The Authorized Biography of Heroic Tenor Lauritz Melchior (New York: Schirmer, 1990), 231; and Esther Williams with Digby Diehl, The Million Dollar Mermaid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 79–80 and 120. 152. The producer Louis B. Mayer was determined to include classical music in MGM films; on the role of classical music in cinema, see Ben Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2016). 153. Otherwise, from the classical repertoire Melchior sang operatic excerpts, mostly from Verdi, and some Wagner: he sang “Winterstürme” at the piano for the maid in Luxury Liner, and in Two Sisters from Boston, in which one of the eponymous sisters (played by Kathryn Grayson) wants to make a career in vaudeville, there is a scene where Melchior re­cords Walter’s Preislied. It is interesting for its portrayal of early recording techniques, and there is a corny moment where Melchior’s dog, Tristan, listens to “his master’s voice” on the gramophone. 154. For more on this scene see my “Singing against Late Style: The Problem of Performance,” in Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 426–41. 155. Fauser has discussed the ways in which, during the Second World War, exiled musicians were distinguished by their nation of origin, which could be reflected in their selection of repertoire. She writes that “this complex engagement with their cultural origins meshed with the expectations of their home country,” meaning that they performed music associated with their homelands—thus Scandinavian singers invariably found themselves represented by the Norwegian Edvard Grieg. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this practice of identification had been going on for decades. Fauser, Sounds of War, 180–81. 156. See Kater, Never Sang for Hitler, 231. 157. Puritz, Elisabeth Schumann: A Biography, 258–59. 158. On musicians and the trials, see Kater, The Twisted Muse; and David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 159. See Gesa Kordes, “Darmstadt, Post-­war Experimentation, and the West German Search for a New Musical Identity,” in Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity, 205–17; Amy Beal, “Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000): 105–39; Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 160. For more on this see Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-­Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 161. See Lily M. Hirsch, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). 162. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially 317–40. 163. Applegate explores the significance of chamber music in Nazi Germany in “The Past and Present of ‘Hausmusik’ in the Third Reich,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 136–49. 164. Monod, Settling Scores; quoted in Celia Applegate, “Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture,” History and Memory 17 (2005): 227.

218 No t e s to Page s 1 64 – 16 8 165. As Neil Gregor has observed, instead of a new beginning, the meaning of these musical figures “drew on a deep-­seated set of pre-­existing ways of understanding.” “Beethoven, Bayreuth and the Origins of the Federal Republic of Germany,” English Historical Review 126 (2011): 837. 166. The Festival of Britain (AAD/1994/9/7/13), 3. Victoria and Albert Museum, Archive of Art and Design. 167. EL6/45: File 1. “Excerpts from the Minutes of the Executive Committee of the Festival of Britain, 1941, held on the 6th July, 1948.” Victoria and Albert Museum. 168. Official souvenir program: London Season of the Arts, 1951, May–June. Sir Malcolm Sargeant, “Music in the London Season,” 10. 169. For an exploration of these themes, see the first chapter of Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 170. The issues about liveness and definitive performance raised by Legge’s editing of Flagstad’s high notes when recording Isolde in 1952 were discussed by Philip Gentry in “Walter Legge’s Tristan and the Magnetophonic Imagination,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, WI, 6 November 2014. 171. Kater, Never Sang for Hitler, 226. 172. In ibid., 224. 173. A link to the recording can be found via my “Reading Lieder Recordings,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 557–58. 174. The orchestra was conducted by Manfred Gurlitt. The recording was made for Odeon on 12 June 1927 (Matrix: xxB 7873). 175. Recorded on 26 June 1947; D7-­RB-­0567–1 (RCA Victor 10–1448). 176. “Exit Crying: Lotte Lehmann Ends 41 Years of Singing,” Life, 5 March 1941, 72–76. 177. The ephemerality of recordings in terms of popular music has been explained by Daniel LeMahieu in slightly different terms: as well as their physical fragility, the repeatability of recordings eroded their allure and hence their permanence. Or, as Sterne glosses, “Sound recording did as much to promote ephemerality as it did to promote permanence in auditory life” (Sterne, The Audible Past, 288). 178. See LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy, 88–98; and Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany, 49–52.

S e l e ct ed B ib l io g ra p h y

I list here writings that have been useful in devising the historical and theoretical framework of this book. It is necessarily a sample rather than a comprehensive account; the large number of archival and ephemeral sources consulted would make such a bibliography unwieldy. I have, for the most part, included books and articles that might guide the reader who wishes to explore this era further. Abravanel, Genevieve. Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Adam, Thomas, ed. Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2005). Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music: Selection, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). ———. Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). Allis, Michael, ed. Temporaries and Eternals: The Music Criticism of Aldous Huxley, 1922–23 (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Anderson, Amanda. “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 265–89. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Applegate, Celia. “Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture,” History and Memory 17 (2005): 217–37. ———, and Pamela Potter, eds. Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Ashby, Arved. Absolute Music: Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010). Cuddy-­Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Baade, Christina L. Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

219

220 Se l ect ed B i b lio gra ph y Bailey, M. “Rethinking Public Service Broadcasting: The Historical Limits to Publicness,” in Media and Public Spheres, ed. Richard Butsch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96–108. Bailey, Richard W. Speaking American: A History of English in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Bailey, Walter B. “ ‘For the Serious Listeners Who Swear Neither At nor By Schoenberg’: Music Criticism, the Great War, and the Dawning of a New Attitude towards Schoenberg and Ultra-­ Modern Music,” Journal of Musicology 32 (2015): 279–322. Barnouw, Erik. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Barrios, Richard. A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Bashford, Christina. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007). Baxendale, John, and Chris Pawling. Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). Bindas, Kenneth J. All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA’s Federal Music Project and American Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996). Bijsterveld, Karin. Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Boddy, William. New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Bohlman, Philip V. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-­CLIO, 2004). ———, and Otto Holzapfel, eds. Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-­ America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Botshan, Lisa, and Meredith Goldsmith, eds. Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003). Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Bozarth, George S. Johannes Brahms and George Henschel: An Enduring Friendship (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2008). Brody, Jennifer De Vere. “Hyphen-­Nations,” in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality and Sexuality, ed. Sue-­Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 149–62. Brown, Erica, and Mary Grover, eds. Middlebrow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Brucken, Carolyn. “In the Public Eye: Women and the American Luxury Hotel,” Winterthur Portfolio 31 (1996): 203–20. Buch, Esteban. “Adorno’s ‘Schubert’: From the Critique of the Garden Gnome to the Defense of Atonalism,” 19th-­Century Music 29 (2005): 25–30. Buchheim, Christoph. German Industry in the Nazi Period (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008). ———, and Redvers Garside, eds. After the Slump: Industry and Politics in 1930s Britain and Germany (Frankfurt-­am-­Main: Peter Lang, 2000). Butsch, Richard. “Crystal Sets and Scarf-­In Radios: Gender, Technology and the Construction of American Radio Listening in the 1920s,” Media, Culture and Society 20 (1998): 557–72. ———. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Calder, Angus. The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991). Caponi-­Tabery, Gena. Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). Carlat, Louis. “Sound Values: Radio Broadcasts of Symphonic Music and American Culture, 1922–1939” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995).

S el ect ed B i b l io gra p h y

221

Cavicchi, Daniel. Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Charle, Christophe, Jürgen Schriewer, and Peter Wagner, eds. Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (Frankfurt, NY: Campus, 2004). Chowrimootoo, Christopher. “Reviving the Middlebrow, or: Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139 (2014): 187–93. Cohen, Ronald D. Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-­Wing Politics in 1930s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Cultures and Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989). Conolly-­Smith, Peter. Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004). Cook, Nicholas. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Coons, Lorraine, and Alexander Varias. Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Currid, Brian. A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Decker, Todd. Who Should Sing “Ol’ Man River”? The Lives of an American Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). de Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-­Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Devine, Kyle. “Imperfect Sound Forever: Loudness Wars, Listening Formations and the History of Sound Reproduction,” Popular Music 32, no. 2 (2013): 159–72. Dickstein, Morris. Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009). Doctor, Jennifer. The BBC and Ultra-­Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Doerksen, Clifford. American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcaster of the Jazz Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996). Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ’n’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999). Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Ehrlich, Cyril. The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Eidsheim, Nina Sun. “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera,” American Quarterly (2011): 641–71. Ellwood, David W. The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987). Erenberg, Lewis A. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Ernst, Wolfgang. “History or Resonance? Techno-­Sonic Tempor(e)alities,” Journal of Visual Culture 14 (2015): 99–110. Fauser, Annegret. Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Fifield, Christopher. Ibbs and Tillett: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Fleeger, Jennifer. Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song through the Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

222 Sel ect ed B i bl io gra p h y Foreman, Lewis, and Susan Foreman. London: A Musical Gazetteer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. Franklin, Peter. “Between the Wars: Traditions, Modernisms, and ‘the Little People from the Suburbs’,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 186–209. Gardiner, Juliet. The Thirties: An Intimate History (London: HarperCollins, 2010). Garrett, Charles Hiroshi. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). Gienow-­Hecht, Jessica. Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Giordano, Ralph. Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008). Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). Goehr, Lydia. “Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life,” in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 66–91. Goodman, David. Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ———. “Distracted Listening: On Not Making Choices in the 1930s,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 00. Gooley, Dana, Ryan Minor, Katherine G. Preston, and Jann Pasler. “Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2015): 523–50. Gorman, Daniel. The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Greene, Victor. A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants between Old World and New, 1830–1930 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004). Greenblatt, Stephen. “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-­Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–53. Gregor, Neil. “Beethoven, Bayreuth and the Origins of the Federal Republic of Germany,” English Historical Review 126 (2011): 835–77. Gronow, Pekka, and Ilpo Saunio. An International History of the Recording Industry, trans. Christopher Moseley (London and New York: Cassell, 1998). Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Haberman, Ina. Myth, Memory, and the Middlebrow: Priestley, du Maurier, and the Symbolic Form of Englishness (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Hascher, Xavier. “La célébration du centenaire de Schubert à Sorbonne en 1928,” Cahiers Franz Schubert: Revue de musique classique et romantique 11 (1997): 55–60. Hamilton, Katy, and Natasha Loges, eds. Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Hammack, David. Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982). Han, Shin-­Kap. “Unraveling the Brow: What and How of Choice in Musical Preference,” Sociological Perspectives 46 (2003): 435–59. Hayes, Nick. “More than ‘Music-­while-­You-­Eat’? Factory and Hostel Concerts, ‘Good Concerts’ and the Workers,” in “Millions like Us”? British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 209–35.

S el ect ed B i b l io gra p h y

223

Heilbut, Anthony. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Heisler, Wayne Jr., and Laura Tunbridge. “Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Specht: Strauss before Sixty,” Opera Quarterly 31 (2015): 273–88. Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Hess, Jonathan M. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-­Jewish Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Hewlett, Kirsty. “Heinrich Schenker and the Radio,” Music Analysis 34 (2015): 244–64. Hildebrand, Jennifer. “ ‘Two Souls, Two Thoughts, Two Unrecognised Strivings’: The Sound of Double Consciousness in Roland Hayes’s Early Career,” Black Music Research Journal 30 (2010): 273–302. Hilmes, Michele. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). ———. Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (Boston: Wadsworth, 2013). Hirsch, Lily M. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). Holli, Melvin G. “German-­American Ethnic Identity from 1890 Onwards: The Chicago Case,” Great Lakes Review 11 (1985): 1–11. Homberger, Eric. Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). Horowitz, Joseph. Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-­de-­Siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012). ———. Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: Norton, 2005). ———. Wagner Nights: An American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). Howe, Sondra Wieland. “The NBC Music Appreciation Hour: Radio Broadcasts of Walter Damrosch, 1928–1942,” Journal of Research in Music Education 51 (2003): 64–77. Howland, John. “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). Huggins, Nathan Irving. Harlem Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). Iriye, Akira. Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Irvine, Thomas. “Normality and Emplotment: Walter’s Leigh’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Third Reich and Britain,” Music and Letters 94, no. 2 (2013): 295–323. Jarausch, Konrad, and Michael Geyer. Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Kaplan, Justin. When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (New York: Plume Books, 2007). Kasson, John F. The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Kater, Michael H. Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). ———, and Albrecht Riethmüller, eds. Music and Nazism: Arts under Tyranny, 1933–1945 (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2003). ———. Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010).

224 Sel ect ed Bi bl io grap h y Kazal, Russell A. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-­American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Kelly, Elaine. Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-­ Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Kirschbaum, Erik. The Eradication of German Culture in the United States, 1917–1918 (Stuttgart: Hans-­Dieter Heinz, 1986). Koegel, John. Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840–1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009). Kravitt, Edward F. The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Lacey, Kate. “Continuities and Change in Women’s Radio,” in More than a Music Box: Radio Cultures and Communities in a Multi-­Media World, ed. Andrew Crisell (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 145–66. Lamb, Dorothy Crawford. A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 2001). Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). LeMahieu, D. L. A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: Constituents of a Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Levi, Erik. Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Musical Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue (London: Penguin, 1997). Lieberman, Richard K. Steinway and Sons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Locke, Ralph P., and Cyrilla Barr, eds. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Lorenzkowski, Barbara. Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010). Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Mansell, James. “Neurasthenia, Civilization and the Sounds of Modern Life: Narratives of Nervous Illness in the Interwar Campaign against Noise.” In Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-­Century Europe, ed. Daniel Morat (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 278–304. McCracken, Allison. Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Merriman, Andrew. Greasepaint and Cordite: The Story of ENSA and Concert Party Entertainment during the Second World War (London: Aurum, 2013). Meyer, Felix, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Schreffler, eds. Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000 (Woodbridge: Boydell-­Paul Sacher, 2014). Minihan, Janet. The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977).

S el ect ed B i b l io gra p h y

225

Monod, David. Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Morris, Lloyd R. Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850 to 1950 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996). Mullen, John. The Show Must Go On! Popular Songs in Britain during the First World War (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). Mussulman, Joseph A. Music in the Cultured Generation: A Social History of Music in America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971). Napper, Lawrence. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). ———. “A Despicable Tradition? Quota Quickies in the 1930s,” in The British Cinema Book, ed. Robert Murphy, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 37–47. ———. “British Cinema and the Middlebrow,” in British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000), 110–23. Nash, Roderick. The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970). Ngai, Mae M. “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 67–92. Nolan, Mary. The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Nott, James. Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). ———. “The Dancing Front: Dancing, Morale, and the War Effort in Britain during World War II,” Journal of Social History 51, no. 2 (18 October 2016), doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw112. O’Hagan, Jacinta. Conceptualizing the West in International Relations: From Spengler to Said (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Oja, Carol J. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Olwage, Grant. “ ‘The World Is His Song’: Paul Robeson’s 1958 Carnegie Hall Concerts and the Cosmopolitan Imagination,” Journal of the Society for American Music 7 (2013): 165–95. ———. “Listening B(l)ack: Paul Robeson after Roland Hayes,” Journal of Musicology 32 (2015): 524–57. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Overy, Richard. The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009). Overy, R. J. War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Pasler, Jann. Writing through Music: On Music, Culture, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Patel, Kiran Klaus. Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Patmore, David. “The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1923–1921: Commercial Competition, Cultural Plurality and Beyond,” Musicae Scientiae 14, no. 2 (2010): 115–37. Pennington, Stephan. “Reading Uncle Bumba and the Rumba: The Comedian Harmonists and Transnational Youth Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140 (2015): 371–416. Petersen-­Perlman, Deborah S. “Opera for the People: The Metropolitan Opera Goes On the Air,” Journal of Radio Studies 2 (1993): 189–204. Peyser, Thomas. Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Pollentier, Caroline. “Configuring Middleness: Bourdieu, l’Art Moyen and the Broadbrow,” in Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960, ed. Erica Brown and Mary Grover (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 37–53.

226 Sel ect ed Bi bl io grap h y Potter, John, and Neil Sorrell. A History of Singing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Potter, Pamela M. Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. with commentary by R. Murray Schafer (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Redner, Harry. The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2015). Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Rose, Sonya O. Which People’s War: National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). ———. “Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 6 (2014): 4–18. Sayeau, Michael. “Waiting,” in Restless Cities, ed. Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (London: Verso, 2010), 279–98. Savran, David. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). Shinde, Charles J. 1927 and the Rise of Modern America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010). Schweitzer, Marlis. “Networking the Waves: Ocean Liners, Impresarios, and Broadway’s Atlantic Expansion,” Theatre Survey 53, no. 2 (2012): 241–67. Silverman, Dan P. Hitler’s Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Snowman, Daniel. The Hitler Émigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (London: Pimlico, 2003). Steiner, Zara. The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Sterling, Christopher H., and John M. Kittross, eds. Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002). Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Sutton, Allan. Recording the Twenties: The Evolution of the American Recording Industry, 1920–1929 (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2008). Tawa, Nicholas. High-­Minded and Low-­Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800–1861 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003). Teague, Jessica A. “The Recording Studio on Stage: Liveness in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” American Quarterly 63 (2011): 555–71. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). ———. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marking the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925,” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 131–71. Thurman, Kira. “A History of Black Musicians in Germany and Austria, 1870–1961: Race, Performance, and Reception” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2013). ———. “The German Lied and the Songs of Black Volk,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 565–70. Tomlinson, Gary. The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

S el ect ed B i b l io gra p h y

227

Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Tschmuck, Peter. Creativity and Innovation in the Music Industry, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer-­Verlag, 2012). Tunbridge, Laura. “Listening to Gerhardt through the Ages,” in Autorschaft—Genie—Geschlecht: Musikalische Schaffenprozesse von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Kordula Knaus and Susanne Kogler (Vienna: Böhlau, 2013), 179–94. ———. “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2013): 437–74. ———. “Singing against Late Style: The Problem of Performance,” in Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 426–41. ———. “Reading Lieder Recordings,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 555– 60. Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). Turner, Kristen M. “ ‘A Joyous Star-­Spangled-­Bannerism’: Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Society for American Music (2014): 219–52. Vacha, J. E. “When Wagner Was Verboten: The Campaign against German Music in World War I,” New York History 64 (1983): 171–88. VanCour, Shawn. “Popularizing the classics: Radio’s Role in the American Music Appreciation movement, 1922–1934,” Media, Culture and Society 31 (2009): 289–307. Wahl, Chris. “Babel’s Business: On UFA’s Multiple Language Film Versions, 1929–1933,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian Rogowski (London: Camden House, 2010), 235– 48. Watkins, Glenn. Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). Wharton, Annabel. “The Two Waldorf-­Astorias: Spatial Economics as Totem and Fetish,” Art Bulletin 85 (2003): 523–43. Whitman, James Q. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). Williams, Gavin. “Machine Speak: Ruggiero Leoncavallo, ‘Vesti la giubba’ (Pagliacci), I Pagliacci, Act I (1892),” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 2 (2016): 241–44. Williams, Raymond. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 37–48. Williamson, John, and Martin Cloonan. Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893–2013 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Winters, Ben. Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2016). Zolberg, Aristide R. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

I ndex

Page numbers in italics indicate figures Abravanel, Genevieve, 51 accent, 36, 52, 67, 82, 87–88 Adorno, Theodor W., 72, 73, 90 Aeolian Hall: in London, 30, 31, 44, 46, 96, 115; in New York, 98, 102 Aldrich, Richard, 8, 38, 48–49, 50 Aldridge, Amanda Ira, 35 Allen, Hugh, 69 Allin, Norman, 62 Americanization, through cinema, 82 Amos ’n’ Andy, 71 Anderson, Amanda, 11 Anderson, Marian, 10, 136, 144–46; Lincoln Memorial concert, 10, 133, 146–48, 147 Andresen, Ivar F., 125 Anglo-German Club, 129–30 anti-Semitism, 130, 139 anxiety, 1, 3, 4, 11, 42, 117, 166; and the middlebrow, 66 Applegate, Celia, 163 Arts Council, 164 Astaire, Fred, 143 Astor, Mrs. Huntington, 114 Astor, Mrs. William Backhouse, 109, 111; Astor set, 110; Library, 115 Astor, Viscountess, 118 Auden, W. H., 1; The Age of Anxiety, 1, 3, 5

August, Garry Joel, 58, 71 Austral, Florence, 135 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 9, 30, 97, 100, 153 Bagby, Alfred Morris, 106; as novelist and collector, 113 Bagby, George Littlejohn, 110; Bagby Music Lovers’ Foundation, 110 Bagby Musical Mornings, 9, 34, 76, 106–15, 158; compared to London clubs, 117, 120; on the cover of the New Yorker, 111 Balfour, Arthur, 52 Barrère, Georges, 60 Bartók, Béla, 98, 122 Bartsch, Rudolf Hans, 86 Basca, Maria, 127 Bass, Emmie, 149 Bauer, Harold, 37, 101–3 Baumann, Franz, 62 Bax, Arnold, 75 Bayreuth Festival, 20, 106, 124, 140, 164 Bechstein Hall. See Wigmore Hall Beecham, Thomas, 125, 129 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 19, 22, 60, 94, 97, 138, 152, 153, 156; “Adelaide,” 46; centenary, 9, 58; lieder, 102; Missa solemnis, 100; Piano Concerto in G major, 148; Piano Trio in

229

230 I ndex Beethoven, Ludwig van (continued  ) E flat major, op. 70 no. 2, 102; Quintet for Piano and Winds, 74; Symphony no. 9, 30, 164; “Wonne der Wehmut,” 159 Beethoven Association, 37, 59, 98, 101–3 Beggar’s Opera, The, 30 Bell, Clive, 4 Bellini, Vincenzo, 89 Belmont, Mrs. August (Eleanor), 114, 159 Bemberg, Herman, 27 Benedict, Julius, 120 Benjamin, Walter, 56 Bennett, Arnold, 50 Bennett, Mavis, 61 Berg, Alban, 127 Berlin, 125; Anderson in, 147; Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem, 163; Fischer-Dieskau in, 163; Hayes debut, 35–36 Bernac, Pierre, 152 Bernheim, Heinrich, 145 Berté, Heinrich, 86 Bettendorf, Emmy, 62 Betti, Adolfo, 101 Biltmore Hotel (New York), 104, 110 Bing, Rudolf, 140 Bizet, Georges, 21, 75 Björling, Jussi, 76 Blossom Time, 86–88, 147 Boccherini, Luigi, 97 Bockelmann, Rudolf, 125 Bodansky, Artur, 37, 39, 101 Bori, Lucrezia, 14 Borodin, Alexander, 118 Borzage, Frank, 83 Bos, Coenraad, 16, 60, 62, 97, 100, 101, 124, 126, 131 Boult, Adrian, 48, 135, 164 Bourdieu, Pierre, 94 Bradley, Lionel, 154 Brahms, Johannes, 2, 21, 22, 36, 48, 57, 63, 97, 98, 118, 120, 127, 140, 145, 152, 153, 156, 158, 165; “An eine Aeolsharfe,” 104; Deutsches Requiem, 163; “Die Mainacht,” 97; “Geheimnis,” 102; “In Waldeinsamkeit,” 102; “Komm bald,” 97; “Meine Liebe ist grün,” 107; “Minnelied,” 44; Piano Quartet in G Minor, op. 25, 102; “Sapphische Ode,” 120; Six Gypsy Songs, 98; Two songs with viola, 44; “Vergebliches Ständchen,” 102, 140; Vier ernste Gesänge, 100, 153 Branzell, Karin, 124 Braun, Carl, 22

Braun, Edith Evans, 21–22 Braunstein, Joseph, 91 Bride of Frankenstein, The, 147 Bridge, Frank, 107 British Music Society, 69 Britten, Benjamin, 143, 155, 165; Michelangelo Sonnets, 152 broadcasting, in Britain, 51, 66, 154; British Broadcasting Company, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 51, 69–70, 72, 80, 136, 140; “intimacy,” 78; middlebrow, 68, 135; protests against, 69; Queen’s Hall, 115; suburbia, 72; Wigmore Hall, 164; Wolf, Hugo, 122 broadcasting, in the United States, 69–70; and amateur performance, 81; Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, 146; and Flagstad, 157–58; German-American culture, 77; international, 80; of lieder, 73–74; and music appreciation, 72; National Broadcasting Company (NBC), 70–71, 75, 80; NBC Musical Appreciation Hour, 72; NBC Voice of Firestone, 76; from the WaldorfAstoria, 109–10 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 96 Brooks, Phyllis, 137 Brown, Caroline Curtis, 117, 119 Brown, Erica, 66 Brown, Lawrence, 29, 31 Bruneau, Alfred, 118 Buckingham Palace, 33, 149 Busch, Fritz, 140 Butler, Lawrence Smith, 112, 113 Cahier, Mme. Charles, 102 Calder, Angus, 152 Calvé, Emma, 110, 118 Cameron, Lady, 120 Capell, Richard, 8, 32, 47, 126; Schubert’s Songs, 65 Caraman-Chimay, Princesse Alexandre de, 112 Cardus, Neville, 127; on electrical recordings, 55–56, 62–63 Carlat, Louis, 75 Carnegie, Andrew, 18 Carnegie Hall, 8, 71, 77, 91, 96–97, 106; Anderson at, 145, 147; Flagstad at, 160; Strauss at, 37, 39 Carpenter, John Alden, 160 Carrick, Herbert, 97 Caruso, Enrico, 113 Casals, Pablo, 102 Case, Anna, 75

I ndex 231 Cavicchi, Daniel, 2, 7 CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), 155 Chadwick, George, 101 Chaliapin, Fyodor, 13–14, 50, 65, 96 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 47 Chotzinoff, Samuel, 80 Christie, John, 140 cinema: Blossom Time, 87; in Britain, 82; lieder in, 29, 82–83; Listen to Britain, 152; McCormack in, 82; in New York City, 82, 91, 96; Schumann-Heink in, 85; talkies, 51; Tauber in, 63; Vitaphone, 75, 83–85. See also “multi-language versions” civilization, 2, 4–5, 10–12, 73, 94, 103, 132, 153, 156, 168; “hotel-civilization,” 108, 128 Clark, Kenneth, 149, 152, 156 Clarke, Rebecca, 30 clubs: American Women’s Club, 115, 117; Anglo-German Club, 129; Beethoven Association, 101–3; Bohemians, 99–100; Colony, 104–6; Deutscher Liederkranz der Stadt New York, 99; Ethical Society, 119; Heterodoxy, 104; King Cole Chamber Music Club, 120; Knickerbocker, 99, 105; in New York, 98–99; People’s Concert Society, 119; Society of “The Friends of Music,” 100–101; Union, 99, 114; women’s, 104–5 Clutsam, George, 86, 104 Coates, Albert, 120 Coates, Henry, 64 Coates, John, 30 Cochran, Charles B., 32 Coker, Joseph, 167 Colles, H. C., 67 Collins, Jim, 115 Columbia (recording company), 54, 58, 59, 61, 64, 165 Columbia University, 102 Conolly-Smith, Peter, 19 Constitution Hall (Washington, D.C.), 146 Consuelo, Naticia, 34 Cooper, Lady, 120 cosmopolitanism, 11, 14, 35, 52, 93, 103, 117, 121, 128, 153 Covent Garden (Royal Opera House), 30, 118, 121, 164; broadcasts from, 70–71, 80 Coward, Noël, 143 Craxton, Harold, 60 Crist, Bainbridge, 97 Crooks, Richard, 76, 107, 110 crooning, 77–78

Crosby, Bing, 139; Kraft Music Hall, 90; “Silent Night,” 77 Cugat, Xavier, 161 Culp, Julia, 77, 102 Currid, Brian, 57, 76 DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch­ dienst) (London), 130 d’Abernon, Lord, 130 Damrosch, Frank, 101, 122 Damrosch, Leopold, 18 Damrosch, Walter, 18, 37, 101, 122, 146; NBC Musical Appreciation Hour, 72 “Danny Boy,” 85 D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Revolution), 146, 157 Das Hofkonzert, 89 Davies, Penelope, 97 Davies, Walford, 72 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 121 Dayton, Dorothy, 109 Debussy, Claude, 144 Delano and Aldrich, 105 Delius, Frederick: A Mass of Life, 164; The Song of the High Hills, 30 Deutsche Grammophon, 53 Deutscher Liederkranz der Stadt New York, 99 Deutscher Verein, 99 d’Hardelot, Madame Guy, 118 Dickens, Charles: Martin Chuzzlewit, 47 Dietrich, Marlene, 82 “Dixie,” 75 Dixon, Frankye, 144–45 Doctor, Jennifer, 70 Donalda, Pauline Lightstone, 46 Donizetti, Gaetano, 146–47 Dorsey, Tommy, 161 Douglas, Susan, 79 Douthitt, Wilfrid. See Graveure, Louis Downes, Olin, 8, 59–60 Du Bois, W. E. B., 30 Duck Soup, 91 Duhan, Hans, 62–63 Dunhill, Thomas Frederick, 97 Duparc, Henri, 145 Dux, Claire, 38, 102 Dvořák, Antonín, 97, 98, 104, 107 Dyke, Spencer, 120 Easton, Florence, 102 Ebert, Carl, 140 Edgerton, David, 2, 7

232 I ndex Edinburgh International Festival, 164 Edison, Thomas, 42 Eggerth, Marta, 89–90 Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 148 Ein Walzer für Euch, 29 Eisenberg, Evan, 71 Elgar, Edward, 104, 135 Elias, Norbert, 2, 4 Elman, Mischa, 107 Elston, Susan Arnold, 112 Elwes, Gervase, 30, 135 émigrés, 3, 90, 119, 128, 139, 140, 141, 153, 162, 168 Endert, Elisabeth van, 62 Endicott, Samuel, 97 Engel, Carl, 73 Engel-Berger, Willy, 28 English-Speaking Union, 51–52, 117; Landmark, 52 ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association), 154, 163, 164 Erb, Karl, 124, 126 Erenberg, Lewis, 107 Erskine, John, 72 Evans, Edwin, 127 Fairbanks, Douglas, 86 Falkner, Keith, 137 Fantasia (Disney), 147 Fauré, Gabriel, 145 Fauser, Annegret, 155 February House, 143 Feilitz, Alexander von, 27 Ferguson, Howard, 149 Fermor, Patrick Leigh, 143 Ferrier, Kathleen, 152, 164, 165 Festival of Britain, 164 Field, Mary Pearsall, 111, 114 Field, Mrs. Marshall, 100 Fifield, Christopher, 130 First World War: ban on German music and musicians, 22–23, 138; United States entry into, 22 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich, 163–65 Fisher, Winifred, 74 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 29 Flagstad, Kirsten, 10, 78, 133, 146, 157; protests against, 159 Fleet Street Choir, 148 FMP (Federal Music Project), 134 Foll, Ferdinand, 62 “foreign-language versions” (FLV). See “multilanguage versions”

For Me and My Gal, 90 Forst, Willi, 88 Forster, E. M., 156 Foster Jenkins, Florence, 8 Foucault, Michel, 13; heterotopia, 15, 161 Fox, William, 82–83 Fox Strangways, Arthur Henry, 49–50, 65; on broadcasting, 80–81 Franck, César, 145 Franckenstein, Baron Georg, 128 Franklin, Peter, 63, 87 Franko, Sam, 101 Franz, Robert, 48, 59, 97, 137 Freemantle, Frederich, 102 Friedberg, Annie, 149 Friedheim, Arthur, 106 Friedländer, Max, 65 Fuchs, Marta, 124 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 140, 164 Gabsch, Fritz, 62 Gadski, Johanna, 22 Gaisberg, Fred, 122 Galli-Curci, Amelita, 96 Gallone, Carmine, 89 Galsworthy, Ada, 140 Galsworthy, John, 140 Gange, Fraser, 102 Garbo, Greta, 112 Garden, Mary, 75 Garland, Judy, 90 Gater, Lady, 151 Gauthier, Éva, 98, 102, 134 Genovese, Nana, 97 Gerhardt, Elena, 34, 39, 48, 54, 63, 97, 98, 102, 135, 137, 166; as émigré in London, 128, 139–41, 152, 154–55; performance of song cycles, 60, 62; performance of Wolf, 122, 124, 126 German-American, 18–21, 40, 99; broadcasting, 76–77; “hyphenated citizens,” 22, 26 Gershwin, George, 98, 135 Giannini, Dusolina, 102 Gienow-Hecht, Jessica, 18 Gigli, Beniamino, 28 Ginster, Ria, 124, 127 Gluck, Alma, 102 Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 130, 140 Goebbels, Joseph, 80 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 47, 60, 130; in translation, 50 Goldman, Henry, 39 Goldmark, Rubin, 38, 101

I ndex 233 Gone with the Wind, 91, 143 Goodman, David, 73 Göring, Hermann, 139 Goritz, Otto, 22 Götze, Maria, 20 Gounod, Charles, 104 Graarud, Gunnar, 125 Grainger, Percy, 122 Gramophone Company, 53 gramophone recordings, 40, 51, 79, 92, 131, 140; Abbey Road, 125, 140; “canned music,” 138; cultural prestige of, 64; electrical recording, 55–57, 64; “gramophone concert,” 57–8; Gramophone magazine, 54, 58, 61, 64, 127; international industry, 52–53; intimacy of, 57; Lehmann, “An die Musik,” 166; long-playing record, 133, 165; performance practice, 133; realism of, 55; replacement for piano, 57; Schubert, 61–64, 76; song cycles, 62, 76, 165; threat of broadcasting to, 69, 71; wartime, 53. See also Hugo Wolf Society Graveure, Louis, 26–29, 90, 102, 104 Great Depression, 52, 82, 93, 121, 122, 129, 133– 35, 138, 142–43 Greenblatt, Stephen, 6 Grenfell, Joyce, 152 Gretchaninov, Alexander, 118 Grieg, Edvard, 44, 47, 63, 97, 160; “Ein Schwan,” 54, 107; “Jeg elsker dig,” 76, 161; “Traum,” 76 Grieg, Joyce, 137 Grotrian Hall, 137 Grover, Mary, 66 Gruber, Franz Xaver, 77. See also “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” Guinness, Mrs. Benjamin, 118 Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, 15 Hacker, Maria, 142 Hackett, Charles, 75 Hageman, Richard, 102 Haggin, B. H., 79 Hahn, Reynaldo, 104 Hainisch, Michael, 59 Hamlin, Richard, 102 Hammack, David, 99 Handel, George Frideric, 9, 34, 75, 97, 145 Hardman, Florence, 75 Hauk, Minnie, 110 Haydn, Joseph, 75, 97, 100, 152 Hayes, Roland, 6, 29–37, 63, 145, 152 Hegner, Paula, 102

Heidegger, Martin, 3 Heifetz, Jascha, 30 Heim, Emmy, 136 Heinrich, Max, 100 Helena Victoria, Princess, 119, 128 Hell, Roland, 62 Hempel, Frieda, 14, 23, 24, 104, 107, 110, 112, 115 Henschel, George, 17, 35, 63; on the radio, 74, 80 Hepburn, Katherine, 143 Herbert, Evelyn, 70 Herbert, Victor, 60 Heseltine, Philip. See Warlock, Peter Hess, Myra, 14, 148–49, 150, 154, 156 Heterodoxy Club, 104 Heyner, Herbert, 75 Heyse, Paul, 11 highbrow, 66, 94, 104; Blossom Time, 88; lieder, 34, 35, 128, 139, 143, 148; modernism, 67 Hile, Alfred, 100 Hindemith, Paul, 98 Hippodrome, 8, 94, 96, 96 Hitler, Adolf, 121, 126; Bayreuth Festival, 124, 140 HMV, 53, 57, 61, 62, 122, 128, 140, 141 Hofmann, Josef, 14, 122 Hollywood, 51, 88, 90, 143; Melchior in, 160– 61 Holst, Gustav: Hymn of Jesus, 30 Holt, Harold, 136 Homer, Louise, 75 Homer, Sidney, 75 Honegger, Artur, 100 Hoover, Herbert, 110, 114 Hope, Constance, 142, 160, 166 Horn, Camilla, 28 Horner, Violet, 98 Horowitz, Joseph, 94 “Horst Wessel Lied,” 124 Hotel Astor, 70 Howard, Anna. See Marsh, Lucy Isabelle Howath, Gyula, 89 Huberman, Bronislaw, 14 Huerter, Charles, 85 Hughes, Herbert, 74, 97, 138 Hugo Wolf Society, 9–10, 93, 122–27, 131, 138, 153 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 97, 145 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 22 Hurok, Sol, 146 Hurston, Zora Neale, 33, 112

234 I ndex Hüsch, Gerhard, 62, 124–26, 128–29 Huxley, Aldous, 80 Ibbs and Tillett, 136, 140, 149 Ich sehne mich nach dir, 28, 90 Ickes, Harold L., 146 Illingworth, Nelson, 48–49, 100 immigration: Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, 40; restrictions lifted, 34 internationalism, 2, 11, 38, 112, 117, 128, 136–37, 165, 168; broadcasting, 79–81; “cultural internationalism,” 52, 79; Esperanto, 44 Ireland, John, 47 Iriye, Akira, 11, 52 Irvine, Thomas, 121, 130 ISM (Incorporated Society of Musicians), 136, 138, 141, 164 Ivogün, Maria, 126 Jadlowker, Hermann, 62 James, Henry, 108 Janis, Elsie, 98 Janssen, Herbert, 124, 125, 129; recording Hugo Wolf, 130–31 Jaray, Hans, 89 Jarnach, Philipp, 60 jazz, 32, 73, 98, 118; Strauss on, 38 Jefferson, Thomas, 146 Jennings, Humphrey, 152 Jensen, Adolf, 97, 127 Jewish artists, 32, 120, 135; Bayreuth Festival, 124–25; émigrés, 128; New York community, 39, 99, 142 Johannsen, Henry, 159 Jones, Daniel, 51 Jones, Gwynn Parry, 75 Juilliard School of Music, 35, 102, 143 Kahn, Otto H., 39, 59, 100 Kalisch, Alfred, 48 Kaplan, Justin, 108 Kasson, John F., 143 Kater, Michael H., 126, 139, 165 Katz, Mark, 73, 92 Kaufman Hall. See Ninety-Second Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association Kelly, Gene, 90 Kennedy, Dorothy, 90 Kennedy, Lauri, 97 Khan, Ali, 118 Kiepura, Jan, 90 Kilmer, Joyce, 85 King, Martin Luther, 148

King Cole Chamber Music Club, 120 Kinsella, Hazel Gertrude, 80 Kipnis, Alexander, 62, 97, 125, 126, 128, 157 Kneisel, Franz, 38, 101 Kochanski, Paul, 102 Koeneman, Feodor, 118 Kohl, Fritz, 139 Komjati, Karl, 89 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 63; Die tote Stadt, 39 Krehbiel, Henry Edward, 8, 22, 39 Kreisler, Fritz, 75, 135 Krüger, Hans, 139 Kultur, 4, 19, 47, 52 Kux, Hedda, 127, 128 Lafitte, Frank, 30 La Forge, Frank, 76 Lalo, Édouard, 75 Lamond, Frederic, 148 Lastra, James, 84 Laurel and Hardy, 82 Lawton, Ralph, 117 Layton and Johnstone, 32 Leach, William, 113 Lee, Gypsy Rose, 93 Legge, Walter, 87, 121–29, 138, 153, 154, 163, 165 Leggett, Henry Theodore, 112, 114 Léhar, Franz, 63 Lehmann, Lotte, 61, 107, 124, 129, 139–42, 157, 165; farewell recital, 166–68, 167 Leider, Frida, 119, 124, 129 Leise flehen meine Lieder, 88 LeMahieu, Daniel, 168 Lemnitz, Tiana, 124, 125 Léon, Mischa, 45–46, 122 Lierhammer, Theodor, 35 Lieurance, Thurlow, 75 Lilac Time. See operetta Lincoln, Abraham, 146 Lincoln Memorial (Washington, D.C.), 146, 147, 148 Lind, Jenny, 104 l’Isle-Adam, Auguste Villiers de: L’Ève future, 42 List, Emanuel, 125 listening, 9, 19, 26, 42, 56, 58, 92, 102, 134; Forster on, 156–57; The Magic Mountain, 90; radio, 66, 71–72, 78–79; recordings, 131, 167–68 Listen to Britain, 152 Lister-Kaye, Lady, 34, 111

I ndex 235 Liszt, Franz, 89, 106, 120, 140, 148 Ljungberg, Göta, 127 Loeffler, Charles Martin, 30 Loewe, Carl, 46, 100, 127; “Erlkönig,” 80 London, 5–6, 141; Abbey Road, 125; clubs in, 115; concert life in 1920, 30–31; Curzon cinema, 89; hotels in, 121, 128, 130; Second World War, 148; venues, 115, 137; Vienna Opera Company in, 64 London Lieder Club, 9–10, 93, 121, 125 Lynd, Helen and Robert, 66 Mackenzie, Compton, 123 Macmurrough, Dermot, 97 Mahler, Gustav, 37, 101, 145, 163; Das Lied von der Erde, 76, 164; Rückert-Lieder, 100 Makusina, Tatiana, 118 Manhattan School of Music, 102 Mann, Thomas, 90; The Magic Mountain, 90 Mann, William, 127 Mannes, David, 101 Marie Louise, Princess, 121, 128 Marlborough House set, 33 Marsh, Lucy Isabelle, 62 Marshall, Eric, 118, 137 Marshall, Louise, 118 Martini, Giovanni Battista, 144, 145 Marx, Joseph, 127 Marx Brothers, 91, 143 Mason, Berkeley, 60 Mason, Daniel Gregory, 71 Massenet, Jules, 76 Matzenauer, Margaret, 23, 102 Maugham, Somerset, 121 Mayer, Elizabeth, 155 McAllister, Louise, 109 McAllister, Ward, 109 McArthur, Edwin, 157, 160 McCormack, John, 26, 35, 57, 62, 63, 64, 77, 96, 97, 102, 115, 135, 136, 152; Hippodrome, 96; in Song o’ My Heart, 82–83, 84; Wolf, 122, 123, 124, 126 McCracken, Allison, 77–78 McCullers, Carson, 143–44 McKibbin, Ross, 78, 138 Meader, George, 40, 102 Medtner, Nikolai, 47 Melba, Nellie, 106, 136 Melchior, Lauritz, 78, 107, 124, 142, 157, 158, 160–62; The Thrill of a Romance, 161, 161–62 Mendelssohn, Felix, 21, 75, 163 Menges, Isolde, 30 Metropolitan Opera House, 10, 18, 22, 37, 39,

59, 76, 90, 96, 100, 104, 106, 107, 127, 166; Flagstad at, 157, 159; Melchior at, 157, 160; radio broadcasts from, 71 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 54 midculture, 94 middlebrow, 11, 43, 65, 66, 91, 128, 143; American usage, 67, 94; broadcasting, 68, 75; cinema, 87 Milhaud, Darius, 98 Miller, Reed, 98 Mitford, Deborah, 119 mobility, 6 Monod, David, 163 Monteux, Pierre, 101 Moore, Gerald, 119, 120, 123, 131, 140, 163, 165 Moore, Grace, 136 Morini, Erika, 107 Morris, Gretchen, 26 Morris, Lloyd, 114–15 Mossée, Sylvio, 87 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 30, 59, 153; Die Zauberflöte, 70, 125; Quintet for Piano and Winds, 74 Mühlen, Raimund von zur, 61 Müller, Hans, 121, 124 Muller, Maria, 125 “multi-language versions” (MLV), 81; Atlantic  /Atlantik  /Atlantis, 81; Casta Diva (The Divine Spark or Bezaubernde Augen), 89; Das Hofkonzert (La chanson du souvenir, The Court Concert ), 90; Der blaue Engel, 82; Leise flehen meine Lieder (Unfinished Symphony), 89; Melodie des Herzens, 81 musicale, 93, 98, 100, 103–4, 106, 110, 117. See also Bagby Musical Mornings music appreciation, 42–43, 50, 92, 100, 162; broadcasting, 72–73; lieder, 73 Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, 150 Musorgsky, Modest, 47, 127; Sans Soleil, 60 “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” 146 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 146 Nadejin, Nikolai, 118 National Gallery (London), 149; concerts at, 10, 149–54, 156–57 nationalism, 2, 93, 124, 132, 143, 153, 164–65 Nazism, 10, 28, 77, 88, 93, 128, 131, 132, 134, 138, 139, 147–48, 155; American broadcasting, 80; appeasement, 130; Bayreuth Festival, 124–25; denazification, 163–64; Flagstad, 158–60; Jim Crow laws, 148. See also émigrés

236 I ndex Nevin, Ethelbert, 75 Newman, Ernest, 7, 38, 42, 50, 55, 122; on Mischa Léon, 45–48 Newton, Ivor, 60, 151 New York City, 5–6, 37, 91, 103, 145, 157; Anderson, 147–48; apartment living, 114; broadcaster, 80; Broadway, 21, 83, 86, 91; cinemas in, 82, 96; clubs, 9, 18; concert venues in, 93, 94–107, 95; émigrés in, 3–4, 141, 143; Empire State Building, 109; Flagstad in, 157, 159–60; German community in, 17–19, 39; Gypsy Rose Lee, 93; Harlem, 17; hotels in, 103, 108–9; Lehmann’s farewell recital in, 166–68; musicale in, 93; New York Philharmonic, 18, 37, 101; Song o’ My Heart, 83. See also clubs Ney, Elly, 38, 102 Nichols, Dudley, 109 Nick, Edmund, 90 Nicoll, Eileen Holland, 98 Nielsen, Alice, 110 Niemann, Albert, 23 Ninety-second Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association, 96 Norena, Eide, 110 Norman, Montagu, 151 Novotna, Jarmila, 107

player piano, 40 Pleasant, Richard, 165 Pleydell-Bouverie, Stuart, 120 Plunket Greene, Harry, 44, 136; on “Erlking,” 85–86 Polenz, Wilhelm von, 19 Polydor, 40 Pons, Lily, 142 Porter, Cole, 143 Potter, John, 87 Poulenc, Francis, 152 Pound, Ezra, 31, 44 Powell, Lionel, 68, 136 Presenting Lily Mars, 90 programming, 96, 100, 102, 135; cultural diplomacy, 133, 148; Gauthier on, 98; “group” recital, 9; “hybrid” recital, 8, 76; Liederabend, 10, 97, 101; National Gallery concerts, 153–54 protectionism, 123 Puccini, Giacomo, 54, 63, 76, 104 Purcell, Henry, 144

Ochs, Siegfried, 97 Olszewska, Maria, 124 Olwage, Grant, 145 Onegin, Sigfrid, 102 operetta, 65, 128; Die Dreimäderlhaus, 63, 86; Ein Liebestraum, 89; films of, 81; Franz Schubert, 89; The Land of Smiles, 64; Lilac Time, 63–64, 86–87; Love’s Lottery, 21; Melodie des Herzens, 81 Ornstein, Leo, 38, 100 Otero, Emma, 104 Overy, Richard, 134

Raatz-Brockmann, Julius von, 62 race, 31, 35, 40, 67; Anderson in Europe, 144, 148; Hayes in Berlin, 35–36; Hayes in London, 30; Hayes in Vienna, 35; racial segregation, 146, 148; voice, 32, 144–45 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 97, 120 radio. See broadcasting, in Britain; broadcasting, in the United States Rainey, Lawrence, 67 Ramsay, Lady Patricia, 119 Raphael, Mark, 61; on the radio, 74 Rasbach, Oscar, 75, 85 Raucheisen, Michael, 76, 102, 124, 126, 128 Ravel, Maurice, 122 received pronunciation, 51 recitation, 97 Reeves, George, 61, 140 refugees, 132, 140, 154 Reger, Max, 104 Regers, Calista, 97 Rehkemper, Heinrich, 62 Reinhardt, Max, 121 Reiss, Albert, 22 Reith, John, 73

Paget, Dorothy, 118 Panter-Downes, Mollie, 149 Pascal, Hercules, 97 Pasler, Jann, 112 Patmore, David, 55 Patzak, Julius, 127, 131 Pears, Peter, 144, 152, 155, 165 Pfitzner, Hans, 100, 127 phonograph. See gramophone recordings Piesling, Sigmund, 36 Pirnie, Donald, 104

Queen’s Hall, 30–31, 70, 115, 140, 148, 150; Gerhardt in, 54, 60, 62 Quilter, Roger, 47, 61, 97 Quisling, Vidkun, 159

I ndex 237 Reitler, Lisa, 14 Remarque, Erich Maria, 3 Rethberg, Elisabeth, 124 Richardson, John Henry, 121, 130 Ridout, Herbert, 64 Riemann, Johannes, 28 Riesenfeld, Hugo, 38 Rin Tin Tin, 86 Robeson, Paul, 32, 136, 145 Rogers, Ginger, 143 Romberg, Sigmund, 86 Ronald, Landon, 139 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 146 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 114, 134 Roosevelt, Mrs. James, 111, 114 Roosevelt, Theodore, 22 Rose, Mamie, 106 Roseneck, Leo, 140 Rosing, Vladimir, 45, 127 Rossini, Gioachino, 54 Roswaenge, Helge, 124, 127 Rowley, Alec, 64 Royal Academy of Music, 120 Royal Albert Hall, 8, 30, 63, 115, 118, 136; Flagstad at, 159 Royal Festival Hall, 164 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 68, 94, 106 Rubinstein, Erna, 104 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 21 Salvi, Alberto, 104 Salzburg Festival, 101, 139, 145 Sam ’n’ Henry, 71 Santanyana, George, 105 Sard, Frederic N., 58 Savoy Chapel Royal, 32 Scarlatti, Domenico, 144 Schey, Hermann, 127, 128 Schirach, Rosalind von, 126 Schlusnus, Heinrich, 59 Schneider, Edwin, 83, 97, 124 Schoenberg, Arnold, 67, 90, 98, 100 Schöene, Lotte, 128 Scholes, Percy, 72 Scholl, Anna McClure, 105 Schorr, Friedrich, 124, 125, 126, 135 Schreker, Franz, 63 Schubert, Franz, 2, 21, 27, 35, 36, 38, 46, 47, 98, 100, 122, 137, 140, 143, 145, 155, 157, 160, 165; “Abschied,” 97; “An die Musik,” 153, 166; “Ave Maria,” 61, 86, 97, 146–47, 155; B-flat Piano Trio, op. 100, 59; Blos-

som Time, 88; broadcast, 73, 75; centenary, 9, 52, 58–65; “Das Meer,” 97; “Das Wandern,” 80; “Der Doppelgänger,” 97, 107; “Der Leiermann,” 62, 63, 153; “Der Lindenbaum,” 61–2; “Der Wanderer,” 97; “Der Wegweiser,” 153; “Der Zwerg,” 144; “Die Allmacht,” 59, 76, 144; “Die Krähe,” 153; “Die Liebe hat gelogen,” 153; “Die Nebensonnen,” 153; “Die Post,” 153; Die schöne Müllerin, 49, 60, 61, 62, 76, 102, 118, 153; “Du bist die Ruh’,” 34, 36, 59, 97, 107; “Erlking,” 75, 85; “Frühlingstraum,” 61, 153; “Gretchen am Spinnade,” 44, 59; “Hark! Hark! The Lark!” 98; “Heidenröslein,” 88; “Im Abendrot,” 153; “Im Frühling,” 153; Introduction and Variations on an Original Theme, 60; “Lachen und Weinen,” 44; “Liebesbotschaft,” 153; Lilac Time, 86; Moment musical op. 94 no. 3, 59; music appreciation, 73; “Mut!” 153; “Nacht und Träume,” 162–63; Octet, 102; performances of complete cycles, 60–61, 127; Rosamunde Quartet, op. 29, 59, 102; Schwanengesang, 60, 65, 153; “Shepherd on the Rock (The),” 74; “Ständchen” (“Leise flehen meine Lieder”), 29, 59, 61, 65, 75, 86, 88, 97, 161; translations, 48, 49, 59; Unfinished Symphony, 58–59; “Ungeduld,” 88; Vitaphone, 85; “Wasserflut,” 153; “Wer ist Sylvia?” 59; Winterreise, 60–62, 75, 97, 125, 127, 153 Schumann, Elisabeth, 6, 13–14, 61, 77, 79, 127, 136, 137, 167; émigré in London, 139–41; New York, 37–41, 141–43; singing “Nacht und Träume,” 162–63 Schumann, Robert, 2, 36, 47, 59, 98, 100, 107, 143, 156, 165; broadcast, 74, 80; Carnaval, 152; Das Hofkonzert, 89; “Der Nussbaum,” 98; Dichterliebe, 44, 46, 74, 120, 127, 153; “Die beiden Grenadiere,” 80; “Die Soldatenbraut,” 89; Eichendorff Liederkreis, 153; Frauenliebe und -Leben, 102, 153, 154; “Frühlingsnacht,” 144; “Ich grolle nicht,” 45; “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,” 36; “Widmung,” 44, 104 Schumann-Heink, Ernestine, 6, 16, 20–26, 25, 35, 59–60, 98, 102, 163; Erda, 22; Mc‑ Cormack, 83; radio, 25, 75, 77, 78; “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” 77, 85; vaudeville, 29, 135; Vitaphone, 83–85 Schütz, Heinrich, 30 Schwarzkopf, Elizabeth, 131, 164, 165

238 I ndex Scott, Cyril, 100 Scotti, Antonio, 110 Scriabin, Alexander, 30 Second World War: attitude to lieder, 153; Flagstad during, 158–59; London musical life, 148–49 Seidl, Anton, 18 Sembach, Johannes, 22 Sembrich, Marcella, 23 Senaillé, Jean Baptiste, 97 Seyler, Athene, 87 Sheehan, Winfield, 82 Show Boat, 145 Sibelius, Jean, 127 Sieg, Kathrin, 36 Sierck, Detlef, 89–90 Silk, Dorothy, 30 Sinding, Christian, 48, 97 Sirk, Douglas, 90 Slezak, Leo, 62 Smetana, Bedřich, 30 Smith, Dale, 74 Society for Pure English, 51 Song o’ My Heart, 83 Sonneck, Oscar, 101, 103 South Place Sunday Concerts, 119 Speyer, Edgar, 39 spirituals, 31, 32, 144, 145; “Gospel Train,” 146; “My Soul is Anchored in the Lord,” 146; “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” 146; Savoy Chapel Royal, 33; “Trampin’,” 146 Stanford, Charles Villiers, 97 “Stars and Stripes, The,” 162 “Star-Spangled Banner, The,” 21, 23 Stein, Paul L., 88 Steiner, Franz, 36, 62 Steinway and Sons, 18, 149 Steinway Hall (London), 96, 115. See also Grotrian Hall Sterne, Jonathan, 57, 168 “Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!” 77, 85, 141 St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, 150 Stock, Frederick, 101 Stokowski, Leopold, 37, 54, 101, 146 Stránský, Josef, 37, 101 Strauss, Johann, Jr., 63, 104 Strauss, Richard, 2, 6, 8, 14, 22, 34, 47, 59, 63, 97, 102, 127, 139, 143, 160; accompanist, 38; “Cäcilie,” 98, 153; “classic,” 37; Der Rosenkavalier, 79, 166–67; Four Last Songs, 160; “Frühlingsgedränge,” 98; “Hat

gesagt,” 98; London, 38, 48; “Morgen,” 54, 153; Nazism, 133; New York, 37–41, 48; player piano, 40; radio, 79; “Ruhe meine Seele,” 98; “Schlechtes Wetter,” 98; “Serenade,” 98, 135; “Wiegenlied,” 98; “Zueignung,” 98, 144 Stravinsky, Igor, 90 Stucken, Frank Van der, 107 Suddaby, Elsie, 61 Suppé, Franz von, 14, 89 Svencenski, Louis, 101 Tannert, Karl, 62 tape recording, 133 Tartini, Giuseppe, 97 Tauber, Richard, 61, 62, 63; Blossom Time, 87– 88; in Britain, 87, 126–28, 136; Lilac Time, 63–64, 86–87 Taylor, Deems, 156; America Preferred, 160 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 19, 97, 118, 163 Temple, Shirley, 143 Teyte, Maggie, 152 This Time for Keeps, 161 Thompson, Emily, 94 Thomson, Virgil, 157 Thrill of a Romance, The, 161–62 Thurman, Kira, 36, 147 Tibbett, Lawrence, 98, 146 Tietjen, Heinz, 139 Tolenberg, Roman, 110 Tomlinson, Gary, 10 Toosen, Larsen, 124 Toscanini, Arturo, 124, 140, 145, 167 Town Hall, 8, 59, 91, 96, 97, 103, 141, 166 Tows, Ferrars Heaton, 114 transatlantic, 6, 51, 133–34, 149; exiles, 91; liners, 13–15, 40–41, 162–63 translation, 34, 35, 43, 55, 56, 135; broadcasting, 69, 74, 76, 77; Hollywood, 162; London after the First World War, 44–52; New York, 48–49, 99, 102; recordings, 58, 62 Trianti, Alexandra, 124, 126, 131, 136, 137 Trotter, David, 72 Tubb, Carrie, 44 Ukrainian National Chorus, 97 Ulanowsky, Paul, 166 Unfinished Symphony. See Leise flehen meine Lieder Untermeyer, Louis, 143 Untermyer, Samuel, 39

I ndex 239 Vanderbilt, Mrs. Cornelius, 114 vaudeville, 19, 21, 26, 29, 76, 96, 135 Veblen, Thorstein, 108 Veer, Nevada van der, 98 Vehanen, Kosti, 146 Verdi, Giuseppe, 19, 107; “La donna è mobile,” 104 Victor Talking Machine Company, 53, 76, 165 Vienna, 35, 40, 61, 62, 63, 88–89, 91, 126, 139, 140; Anderson, 147; Hayes, 35; Schubert centenary, 58–59 Villiers, Vera de, 120 Vitaphone. See cinema Vollmer, Josefin H., 85 Volpe, Arnold, 101 Wagner, Cosima, 110 Wagner, Richard, 8, 18, 19, 20, 22, 76, 90, 94, 107, 118, 121, 124, 138, 142, 158, 164; Flagstad, 157–9; Tristan und Isolde, 41, 130, 157; Wesendonck Lieder, 54; Wolf, 130–31 Wagner, Wieland, 164 Waldorf-Astoria, 106–15 Wallace, General Lew, 112 Wallace, Margaret, 112 Walter, Bruno, 138, 164 Walska, Ganna, 137 Warlich, Reinhold von, 60, 118 Warlock, Peter, 120 Weatherly, Frederic, 75, 85 Webb, Septimus, 120 Weber, Carl Maria von: Concertino for Clarinet, 74 Weingartner, Felix, 98 Werrenrath, Reinhold, 30, 70, 96–97 West, Rebecca, 79

Wharton, Annabel, 108 White House, 146 Whiteman, Paul, 98 whiteness, 67 Whiting, Arthur, 101 Whitney, William, 118 Widdener, Margaret, 67 Wigmore Hall, 8, 30, 61, 115, 118, 137, 148, 154, 164; Hayes, 33, 44 Williams, Gavin, 84 Wilson, Mrs. Orme, 111, 113 Wilson, Steuart, 49, 65 Wilson, Woodrow, 21, 22 Windsor, Duke of, 142 Wisiko, Karl, 140 Witherspoon, Herbert, 38, 102 Wolf, Hugo, 2, 8, 11, 21, 35, 36, 46, 47, 59, 61, 100, 122, 123, 130, 143, 152, 158, 165; “Auch kleine Dinge,” 11–12, 153; “Das verlassene Mägdlein,” 153; “Die Bekehrte,” 102; “Elfenlied,” 102; Harfenspieler lieder, 130; National Gallery concerts, 153–54; “Su-Su,” 102; “Verborgenheit,” 153. See also Hugo Wolf Society Wolfe, Elsie de, 105 Wolff, Erich, 97, 118 Wolff, Fritz, 129 Wolfsohn, Henry, 23 Wolfsohn’s Musical Bureau, 23 Wood, Henry, 48 Woodforde-Finden, Amy, 97 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 134 Young, Francis Brett, 54 Zivilisation, 4. See also civilization Zoch, Georg, 29