In 1887 I visited Boston for the first time professionally. I had begun
my Wagnerian lecture recitals in New York a year or two before, and they
had spread like wildfire in all directions. The enthusiasm for Wagner,
which had been kindled into a bright flame by my father’s founding of
German opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, had produced a wide-spread
desire for better acquaintance with Wagner’s music and his theories
regarding the music-drama.
I received an invitation from a group of Boston women, including Mrs.
John L. Gardner, Mrs. O. B. Frothingham, Mrs. George Tyson, and Mrs.
Henry Whitman, to give my lecture recitals on the “Nibelungen Trilogy.”
Boston at that time occupied a unique position as the only city in
America which possessed a permanent orchestra, maintained by Major Henry
Lee Higginson, for the cultivation of symphonic music. A small group of
highly educated and socially prominent Bostonians, belonging to the
oldest New England families, made this orchestra almost the focus of
their social life. The weekly concerts were the great events, the
programmes eagerly discussed, and its conductor, Wilhelm Gericke, was
alternately cursed or blessed according to their attitude toward some
novelty which he had just produced.
Among this group I was made heartily welcome. The atmosphere was
intensely local, if not provincial, and as against the searching,
feverish life of a great metropolis like New York, with its many
conflicting interests and racial currents, the tranquillity and purely
American quality of Boston life, as it presented itself to me, was a
complete contrast. I am speaking of Boston of thirty-five years ago and
of conditions that have to a certain extent disappeared, for to-day even
the young descendants of the New Englanders of that era seem to find
their pleasures in different and more restless fashion.
In the group of which I have spoken, Mrs. Gardner was among the most
original and fascinating. She was certainly the leaven in the Boston
lump and sometimes shocked the more staid element by her innovations and
interest in more modern currents in art and literature than had hitherto
rippled its calm Emersonian surface. Boston was at that time perhaps the
best example of that typically American musical culture of which I have
spoken elsewhere, which instead of growing upward from the masses was
carefully introduced and nurtured by an aristocratic and cultivated
community through symphony concerts and lectures on music. Its original
impulse sprang perhaps more from the head than the heart, but it would
not be fair therefore to say that New Englanders approached music only
from the intellectual standpoint. I have seen very emotional outbursts
among Boston audiences, both at my Wagner recitals and years after when
I returned with the Damrosch Opera Company to give the Wagner
music-dramas. While it is possible that they felt heartily ashamed of
these enthusiasms afterward, and exclaimed, “Is this Boston?” the fact
remains that even a Bostonian is human, like other Americans, and needs
only to be encouraged to prove that he too has a heart which can beat
warmly and respond to the emotions kindled by art.
Their capacity for friendship in the finest sense of the word is
wonderful, and I achieved many of my dearest friends at that time. We
have all grown much older since then, with the exception of Mrs.
Gardner, on whom the years leave no imprint and whose enthusiasms for
life and art flame just as brightly to-day as then.
I was certainly very young in those days, and remember, after one of my
lectures, which had gone off with great enthusiasm, walking along
Boylston Street toward my hotel, thinking in my young conceit that I was
evidently a good deal of a personage, when I saw that the street was
filled with crowds of people and the police were making a passage with
difficulty so as to allow an open carriage, drawn by two horses, to pass
through. In it sat a rather stout, smooth-shaven gentleman with a very
shiny high silk hat, and the people were cheering him like mad. “Who is
this?” I asked a bystander. He gave me a contemptuous look and stopped
cheering just long enough to say: “Don’t you know John L. Sullivan when
you see him?” I accepted the rebuke meekly and entered my hotel a much
more modest man than I had left it a few hours before. John L. Sullivan,
“Boston’s greatest citizen,” had just come home from a fight in London,
but I do not know to this day whether he had won or lost.
The Boston orchestra was at that time conducted by Wilhelm Gericke, who
had brought it to a remarkable state of proficiency. I found him to be a
very likable man, a thorough musician, and always gentle and friendly in
his attitude. I used to envy him because, while I had to maintain my
orchestra at that time by my own exertions, he had a great
philanthropist behind him. His orchestra was engaged by the year, played
under no other conductor, and assembled every morning at 9.30, like
clockwork, for rehearsal. Gericke brought the orchestra up to a high
standard of virtuosity. His sense of values was absolute, and under his
training and greatly assisted by Franz Kneisel, his concert master, the
strings soon acquired great unanimity and a ravishing quality of tone.
His readings were always musicianly, although I felt occasionally that
they were too reserved. He had a horror of the exaggeration of the brass
instruments, and perhaps erred on the other side in subduing them too
much; but when he returned, years after, for another five years in
Boston his readings had gained in freedom and elasticity, and the
balance of the different choirs seemed perfectly adjusted. Boston, and
indeed the country, owes him much. He was fortunate in his
opportunities, but he proved himself worthy of them.
Rightly or wrongly, Major Higginson had made it his rule to engage none
but German conductors for his orchestra. He had gained his first
enthusiasm for symphonic music as a young man in Vienna, and had got the
idea firmly in his mind that only Germany could give his orchestra the
leaders which it required. Among the long line of conductors who came
and went, not all, naturally, were of equal worth. A few were distinctly
second-raters, and I remember one whose blustering incompetence and
conceit finally so enraged Major Higginson that, as the gentleman would
not resign when requested because his contract still had another year to
run, Higginson sent him a check for the entire amount and dismissed him.
Curiously enough the impetus which the reputation of having been
conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave was so great that it
landed him in two other American orchestras, one of which he brought to
the very verge of ruin and the other he ruined altogether, so that the
city which had founded it and lavished hundreds of thousands upon it is
now without any symphony orchestra and seems to have lost the courage to
begin again.
But among the conductors of the Boston Orchestra two stand out as among
the best that Europe has sent over. These are Arthur Nikisch and Doctor
Karl Muck. The one died last winter, beloved and mourned by the musical
public of all Europe and of North and South America; the other was sent
from our country back to Germany after the war in deserved disgrace,
after having been interned as prisoner of war at Fort Oglethorpe.
When I first met Arthur Nikisch in 1887 he was conductor at the Leipsig
Opera House. I had gone there to attend an annual meeting and festival
of the Tonkünstler-Verein, an association of which Franz Liszt had
always been the president and which had originally been formed by a
small group of Liszt-Wagner-Berlioz adherents, of whom my father was
one. One of the features of the festival was a stage performance of
Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” given in honor of Liszt. The work
fascinated me, and its performance under the young Nikisch delighted me
beyond words. In appearance he already had the same characteristics
which his enemies decried but which among his friends only aroused a
delighted chuckle when he appeared on the platform, and which quickly
changed to a hurricane of enthusiasm after he had demonstrated his
marvellous skill as an interpreter. I refer to the long black lock which
always hung low over his forehead and his still longer white cuffs which
more and more enveloped his little white hands as the performance
progressed.
Gericke had developed the orchestra into a perfect instrument, and when
Nikisch arrived he played upon it like a virtuoso. I have always
maintained that Nikisch achieved still greater mastery during his years
in America, because until then he had had no such orchestra at his
disposal. The much-vaunted Leipsig Gewandhaus and the Berlin
Philharmonic, which he conducted, suffer from the troubles common to all
co-operative organizations. Their members outstay their period of
usefulness and retain permanent places in the orchestra after they
should give way to younger and better men.
The readings of Nikisch were distinctly personal and therefore, because
they reflected his own nature, so ingratiating that I have often enjoyed
certain of his interpretations although I considered them wrong and
contrary to the intentions of the composer. Nikisch made them convincing
for the moment.
Doctor Muck, who became conductor of the Boston Symphony some years
later, was less personal in his readings. His principal work in Germany
had been the conducting of opera, and occasionally a lack of routine in
symphonic work showed itself in badly combined programmes, but only in
that one respect. As a conductor of the symphonies of Beethoven and
Brahms he was a master, and to me his interpretations of Brahms rank
among the finest that I have heard. It was a tragedy that this man, who
had gained not only the confidence and respect of his patron, Major
Higginson, to a greater degree than any other of the Boston conductors,
who was admired not only in Boston but in every city which the orchestra
visited, and to whom America had given unbounded acclaim, should at the
crucial moment have proved himself a supercilious, arrogant Prussian of
the worst Junker type, ungrateful toward the man to whom he owed his
many successful years in America, and finally even an abject coward and
renegade toward the country to which he owed national allegiance.
The story in its entirety is too unpleasant to be told, but as after
Muck’s return to Germany he saw fit to indulge in the most violent
diatribes against America and its treatment of him, it is justifiable to
tell a little of the truth in these pages.
In order to understand the story properly it is necessary to recall the
excitement which swept through the country when we finally entered the
Great War. Wars arouse prejudice as well as patriotism, and suspicion as
well as faith. One of the curious, almost pathological, results of the
psychosis of war is the spy mania, and this manifested itself in the
years of 1917 and 1918 to a remarkable extent—in America as well as in
Europe. One need only recall the many stories of concrete tennis-courts
which were discovered and vouched for by reputable people as having been
built years before by German army officers, who, disguised as “rich
American financiers” (!) had constructed lavish country places along the
Atlantic seaboard, all of which possessed these remarkable concrete
tennis-courts. These were to support great guns which at the proper
moment were to put the American navy out of existence! There were also
wonderful stories of secret wires discovered in private houses, and of
strange beacon-lights suddenly flaming up at regular intervals along the
coast in order to signal messages to some mysterious German submarine.
It was all like a war novel of Oppenheim, and as some of our ladies
joined the secret-service in an unofficial capacity, they together with
others—who conceived it to be the height of faithlessness to our
country to enjoy a symphony of Beethoven or an opera of Wagner while we
were at war with Germany—had a beautiful time in the happy illusion
that they were doing real war work.
Doctor Muck immediately became a centre of suspicion. He had taken a
cottage at Seal Harbor, Maine, for the summer of 1917, and of course he
was immediately accused of having a wireless outfit and signalling to a
whole fleet of German submarines which were cruising off Mount Desert
Island and whose immediate object was, of course, to capture all the
millionaires of Bar Harbor and hold them captives for huge ransoms.
According to others he had placed a telephone receiver in the cellar of
his house in Boston which skilfully tapped the wire of the telephone of
the lady next door, and she, to her horror, had one morning on lifting
her telephone, in order to call up her butcher, heard his “guttural”
German voice conversing with some mysterious German at the other end
about a shipment of dynamite, which was to be used, of course, to
destroy Faneuil Hall and the birthplace of Henry W. Longfellow in Maine.
There was not a story so wild that it did not gain credence, but it was
not so strange that many of these preposterous rumors should centre
around Doctor Muck. His attitude toward us had become more and more
supercilious. That he should sympathize with his own country was perhaps
natural, but that he should use some tact and reticence in this respect
was equally to be expected. He might have taken example from Fritz
Kreisler who, as an Austrian citizen, served at the beginning of the war
in the Austrian army, but was retired and returned to this country
before we entered the conflict. From then on he acted with such dignity
and tact, giving up all playing in public during that critical period,
that he retained the personal respect and affection of all
right-thinking Americans.
As the war situation became more and more serious, Doctor Muck seemed to
become more and more supercilious. In response to a perfectly natural
impulse, the public demanded that our orchestras begin or end their
concerts with the playing of the national anthem. This had become the
symbol of our patriotism, and as millions of our young men began to
gather in the camps and to be sent abroad in the transports, “The
Star-Spangled Banner” was beginning to awaken in every heart emotions
that were hardly known to our generation before the war. Doctor Muck
refused to play the anthem. Not from Boston nor New York, alas, but from
Providence, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh angry mutterings began to be
heard. These cities insisted that an orchestra which in time of war was
not willing to play our national anthem should not be permitted to play
at all. Doctor Muck’s answer to this, in a newspaper interview, was that
he conducted an artistic institution, that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is
not a work of art, and therefore “only fit to be played by ballroom
orchestras and military bands.”
Up till then I had upheld Doctor Muck in so far as it seemed just as bad
taste for him, as a German, to conduct our national hymn in time of war
with his country as it was for our public to insist that a German should
do so. He could have said: “I am a German; my country is at war with
yours. I am your guest because in 1915 Major Higginson insisted that I
should return to America as he thought that the orchestra could not
exist without me. I am now in an unfortunate position. Let me retire
from conducting here during the war, or at least let your national
anthem be conducted by the concert master.”
But this interview was a flippant evasion of the real point at issue,
and when the reporter of the _New York Tribune_ brought it to me, I
exclaimed that I did not believe Doctor Muck could have said anything so
outrageous, whereupon the reporter told me that his editor had expected
me to say this and had therefore telegraphed to Boston and obtained a
confirmation of the interview. I then expressed myself in very plain
language regarding Doctor Muck’s attitude, but his only answer was a new
interview in which he declared that it was all a mistake, that he was
not a German but a Swiss! This belated claim, which was based on
technicalities and contrary to the facts, was promptly denied by the
Swiss minister in Washington, and then suddenly Doctor Muck proceeded to
conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but in listless fashion, although
half a dozen cities by that time barred their doors to him and the
concerts of the orchestra had to be cancelled.
In the meantime the secret-service men of the government had been
patiently following every rumor and clew regarding Muck’s supposed spy
activities, and while they discovered that his attitude toward us was
absolutely inimical and that he was therefore decidedly _persona non
grata_, there was no foundation of truth in the rumors connecting him
with wires, wireless, beacon-lights, dynamite, or German submarines. The
secret-service men, however, discovered other disagreeable things in
regard to him which had no connection with the war but which made him
liable under the laws of our country. An incriminating package of
letters was shown to him, and on his acknowledgment that he had written
them he was given the choice of internment as a prisoner of war at Fort
Oglethorpe or of being arrested on another charge and brought before the
civil courts for trial. He naturally threw up his hands and accepted the
former as the lesser evil. As he was released after the war on condition
that he return to his own country, I cannot see that he has cause for
anything but gratitude toward this country and its lenient treatment of
him.
The whole affair was a terrible shock to Major Higginson. He was an old
man and the discoveries regarding Doctor Muck, in whom he had placed
such confidence and for whom he had vouched so absolutely, were
unendurable to him. He had expected to continue his support of the
orchestra, and it was generally assumed that he would leave the
organization an endowment sufficient to maintain it after his death.
Instead of this, he announced his determination to withdraw altogether,
and left the decision whether they wished to continue the orchestra with
a group of music lovers whom he had called together. For a time its
future was in great doubt. Thirty of the players were discharged because
of their German nationality, but money was subscribed by various Boston
citizens to rebuild the orchestra, and to-day, under the leadership of
Pierre Monteux, it is fast regaining its old excellence. It will never
again occupy the unique position it held twenty-five years and more ago,
because since then so many other symphony orchestras have been founded
in America on similar lines and with similar generous endowments. But to
Major Higginson will always belong the glory of having blazed the trail.
He set the standard, and America will give his memory loving reverence
and gratitude.