INTRODUCTION

“He’s cuter than Tony Perkins,” an admiring woman exclaimed, while a man, less smitten, called out, “He needs a haircut but he beat the Russkies.” The cries came from two of the one hundred thousand New Yorkers who turned up in May 1958 to watch the ticker tape parade honoring Van Cliburn, the winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition, held in Moscow the previous month. Cheers and bravos cascaded down on the young pianist as the parade made its way up Broadway, with America’s newest celebrity blowing kisses and waving to the crowd from the back of an open car. Young women lunged toward Cliburn, straining to touch the country’s musical heartthrob.¹

In Moscow, a few weeks earlier, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had been a buoyant participant in the Cliburn affair, and millions of Americans read about the way he had playfully chatted with the young musician at a Kremlin party. The Soviet leader had even given the American a bear hug. For several weeks, the pianist’s achievement commanded widespread coverage across the United States, starting with news reports in April about his triumph in Moscow, where he captured the hearts of Russian men and women.

Upon his return, Cliburn mania swept the nation. The pianist was invited to meet President Eisenhower at the White House, where the politician praised the musician for his accomplishment. Millions of Americans read breathless accounts of Cliburn’s every move, as a flood of portraits and opinion pieces appeared in newspapers and magazines, which examined everything from the pianist’s devotion to his Baptist roots to the possibility that his victory might transform US-Soviet relations. Humorous items were part of the mix, as suggested by a Chicago Tribune cartoon showing two boys at a piano, one standing impatiently with a baseball cap and glove, while the other, seated at the keyboard in a state of distress, declared, “Some guy named Van Cliburn made a big hit with Mom, so I’m stuck with piano lessons all summer!”² There was more than a little truth to the crack uttered by a New Yorker standing in the crowd outside Carnegie Hall on the night of Cliburn’s first post-Moscow performance: “Two months ago, these people never heard of this kid. Now they’re all worked up because he plays the piano.”³

Can one imagine such a scenario today? Would the overseas accomplishments of a classical musician capture the attention of America’s political leaders or the country’s newspapers and magazines? Would a ticker tape parade attracting one hundred thousand delirious fans be held for an artist with a gift for playing Tchaikovsky? Clearly, the answer is no. But in an earlier time, a pianist’s triumph could mesmerize the American people—and not just classical-music devotees, but political leaders, journalists, and ordinary city dwellers.

Few would question the notion that classical music has little relevance in contemporary America. Its connection to the larger culture is tenuous, and the average adult, even if well educated, has scant interest in the activities of performers, composers, symphony orchestras, and opera companies. The vast majority of urban residents would be hard-pressed to identify the conductor of their local ensemble, and across America, few people can name even one “famous” classical musician. Leading magazines offer almost no coverage of the goings-on in classical music, and newspapers supply little more than short reviews. For nearly all Americans, the classical-music landscape in the United States—the performances by orchestras and opera companies, and the work of singers, instrumentalists, conductors, and composers—is alien terrain.

But this was not always so. This book tells the story of a different time, of an age when classical music occupied a prominent place not only in the nation’s cultural life, but in its political life, as well. To tell that story, Dangerous Melodies explores the interconnection between the world of classical music in the United States and some of the crucial international developments of the twentieth century: World War I, the emergence of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Cold War. As we shall see, over the course of several decades, classical music was genuinely consequential in America, achieving a position of considerable significance, which the music had never known before and which it surely lacks today. And that was so, in no small measure, because the domain of classical music became entangled in momentous events across the globe.

For now, I offer a couple of snapshots to suggest the extent to which classical music once commanded America’s attention. In July 1942, not long after the United States entered World War II, the American premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony captured the country’s imagination. Arturo Toscanini, the conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, was chosen to lead the premiere of the Seventh, part of which the Russian composer had completed in Leningrad as German troops besieged the city. The broadcast performance, covered extensively in the press, was heard by millions of Americans, who were exhorted to tune in and listen, in a nationwide act of patriotism that the US government believed would fortify the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow.⁴

But the story of classical music’s importance was not always inspiring, for there was a sinister side to the music’s place in American life. At times, symphony and opera administrators, responding to an outcry from the public, banned “dangerous melodies” from the concert hall or the opera house. Equally disturbing, scorn often rained down on “enemy” singers, conductors, and instrumentalists, who learned they were not welcome to perform in the United States. Some were fired or imprisoned, and a few were forced to leave the country.

Soon after America went to war in 1917, for example, fear and fury exploded across the United States as thousands of people of German ancestry, especially those without American citizenship, became the object of hostility. All things German, whether German language classes, books, or the sale of barroom pretzels, were banned. The performance of German compositions, especially by Wagner and Richard Strauss, caused a ferocious reaction. The concert hall and the opera house became a minefield, and German musicians faced unbridled animosity from a public unwilling to allow “enemy artists” to perform. During the Great War, many Americans looked upon Germans as demons, whether they were fighting on European battlefields, singing in America’s opera houses, or conducting the nation’s symphony orchestras. And in decades to come, the appearance of numerous foreign musicians could unleash hatred, arouse fear, or engender angry protest.

The Cliburn triumph, the Shostakovich premiere, the wartime plight of German music and musicians: These are but a few of the stories that point to a time when classical music could pull thousands onto the streets in celebration, compel millions to listen to a wartime broadcast, or induce countless devoted concertgoers and ordinary citizens to reject “dangerous melodies.”

But why did classical music once command such attention and how to explain its centrality in American life? What caused the world of classical music in America to become so politicized and why did the activities of musicians and performing institutions in the United States become enmeshed in the epochal events of the twentieth century?⁵

As the pages that follow make clear, from World War I through the Cold War, the classical-music community in the United States became entangled in international affairs—in the two world wars the United States fought against Germany (with the Soviet Union a crucial American ally and Italy a foe in World War II), in the emergence of Italian and German fascism between the wars, and in the protracted struggle America waged against the Soviet Union after 1945. These three countries—Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union—were wellsprings of rich musical traditions and the birthplaces of distinguished musical figures, and Americans had long admired those traditions and the musicians who embodied them. It was difficult, therefore, for people in the United States to separate America’s relations with Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union from the music and musicians of those three lands. Consequently, over several decades, the classical-music community in the United States was drawn into the swirl of international politics, and the nexus between that community and momentous events overseas supplied classical music with a degree of political significance that is now difficult to comprehend. That convergence—between the world of classical music in the United States and developments abroad—helps to explain why, for some fifty years, the music occupied a critical place in American life.

By suggesting that classical music achieved an unprecedented degree of political significance during these years, I must emphasize that my aim is not to diminish the profound impact classical music has long had on those drawn to it, whether their passion for music was expressed through performing or through listening. Indeed, having spent a number of years in the music world—practicing, rehearsing, performing, studying, and teaching—I am acutely aware of classical music’s capacity to enrich, enliven, and make life infinitely more meaningful for those who regard music as essential to a fulfilling existence. My contention about the significance of classical music in America is, instead, an assertion that in the life of the nation, in the cultural sphere—and, more than that, in the political sphere—the convergence of the world of classical music in the United States with developments in the wider world supplied the music with a degree of importance that was unlike anything the American people had known.

To tell this story, I consider the work of instrumentalists, singers, conductors, and composers, along with the activities of symphony orchestras and opera companies. I look, too, at the myriad ways listeners understood and responded to classical music, whether they were devotees, music critics, or journalists. But the entanglement of America’s classical-music community and the wider world also extended to ordinary Americans. Time and again, those with no deep affection for the music took to the streets in large numbers to protest or celebrate a musical event that was linked to overseas developments; they penned letters to newspapers and magazines on the relationship between music and the outside world; or watched and listened, by the millions, to television and radio broadcasts in which classical music was intertwined with transformative events like World War II or the Cold War. Thus, regular people are integral to this story of art and world politics in America.

In contending that classical music occupied a key place in American life from World War I through the Cold War, I am mindful that earlier on, as a number of scholars have shown, the music had considerable appeal in the United States and attracted an impressive number of listeners.⁶ As one reflects on the popularity of classical music in nineteenth-century America, the excitement the music generated across the country is clear. With that in mind, I offer some thoughts on America’s engagement with classical music in the nineteenth century as context for understanding how, starting with the First World War and continuing for several decades thereafter, Americans responded in a wholly distinctive way to classical music.

Along with America’s developing affection for the music of Beethoven and German compositions more generally, among the most memorable musical episodes of the nineteenth century were the performances offered by gifted European female singers. Spanish mezzo-soprano Maria Garćia, who arrived in New York with her father’s opera company in 1825, became a star by the age of eighteen, dazzling audiences with her extraordinary voice and captivating stage presence. While in New York for only a little more than a year, upon her departure for Europe in 1827, she was earning $500 per performance and filling the theaters, as well as the coffers of those who owned them. That same year, an English soprano, Elizabeth Austin, landed in the United States, and for several years toured the eastern half of the country, as far south as New Orleans, singing solo concerts in small towns and operas in larger cities. With her wide-ranging repertoire, Austin performed for adoring fans who admired her superb voice, which spanned almost three octaves. According to one critic, Austin’s instrument was notable for its “remarkable purity and sweetness.”⁷

The most celebrated female singer to visit America in the nineteenth century was Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano who arrived in 1850 on a tour organized, fittingly enough, by P. T. Barnum, a man who understood the financial gain that he and the gifted Swede could realize from a full concert schedule. Indeed, for the ninety-five Lind concerts that Barnum arranged, he grossed half a million dollars, while the singer earned some $200,000 during her two-year visit. To welcome Lind to New York in 1850, Barnum deployed his gift for manufacturing a public spectacle, and arranged to have some thirty thousand city dwellers turn out to greet her ship.⁸

Lind’s concert programs comprised a wide range of pieces, from Italian arias to folk tunes, along with compositions from her native land. American popular pieces were sometimes part of the mix, and Lind even offered “The Bird Song,” a piece written for her by a now-forgotten German. Always a crowd-pleaser, the song, a Boston critic observed, offered a “delightful imitation” of “feathered warblers.”⁹

America’s fascination with Lind was considerable, and while people wanted to hear her perform, they were also eager to learn what made her tick and how she spent her time when not on stage. After she married her accompanist during the tour, some of the mystery enveloping Lind evaporated, for she could no longer be portrayed as an unmarried woman whose love was reserved for her art. Worse still, the soprano’s new husband was younger and a complete unknown—the latter fact dimming the aura of Lind’s celebrity. Moreover, he was a Jew, which hardly improved the soprano’s reputation in the eyes of many among her adoring public.¹⁰ The virtuous Jenny Lind was now Madame Goldschmidt.

While Lind’s audiences surely appreciated her artistry, her American tour was characterized by qualities far less sublime. A large dollop of celebrity worship marked America’s reaction to the Swedish performer. As Barnum acknowledged some years later, it would be a mistake to think that Lind’s fame rested only on her vocal ability. “She is a woman,” he asserted, “who would have been adored if she had had the voice of a crow.” Lind herself was distressed by the way Barnum had exploited her, declaring later that he had “exhibited me just as he did the big giant and any of his other monstrosities. I was nothing more than a show in the showman’s hands.”¹¹

Other tours by accomplished singers exposed nineteenth-century Americans to classical music, including several visits by soprano Adelina Patti, who was born in Madrid of Italian parents. Returning to the United States in 1881 after an absence of some twenty years, she toured the country several times, traversing the land in an opulent railway carriage. In Salt Lake City, Patti lunched with Mormon leaders who invited her to sing in the tabernacle; and in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the state legislature adjourned so representatives could meet her party outside the city. In her prime, thousands lined up as part of the “Patti epidemic” to hear her glorious voice.¹²

Given such foreign visitors, it is not surprising that throughout the nineteenth century, Americans were drawn to opera, which was performed in cities large and small. Just before the Civil War, New York and New Orleans were the only American cities with their own opera companies; but as the century unfolded, urban dwellers in places like Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco were able to hear opera on a regular basis offered by touring companies, often from overseas. San Francisco possessed an especially rich operatic culture, presented in several theaters built between the 1850s and the 1880s.¹³ Those residing in out of the way places could also hear music played by touring groups, which performed in theaters springing up across America. Even if one lived far from a big city, in places like Bozeman, Montana; Springfield, Ohio; Ogden, Utah; or Corinth, Mississippi, it was possible to spend an evening listening to operatic music, though selections might be limited to a few arias or some musical excerpts. And in the century’s closing decades, as historian Joseph Horowitz has shown in luminous detail, the operas of Wagner transported a good number of New Yorkers, especially women, who found the German’s creations profoundly affecting.¹⁴

Nineteenth-century America also witnessed the emergence of orchestral performance, a development that gained momentum over several decades, a phenomenon historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht explores in her fascinating study on music and emotion.¹⁵ The first permanent symphonic ensemble, the New York Philharmonic Society, was established in 1842, offering four programs each season. In time, it would become one of the country’s most distinguished musical organizations.¹⁶ Later in the decade, several ensembles arrived in the United States from the German-speaking areas of Europe; these orchestras initially offered audiences the opportunity to hear light classical music. The most impressive of these, the Germania Musical Society, made its New York debut in 1848. Comprising twenty-five musicians, the group played hundreds of concerts in cities across the country over the next six years, thrilling audiences with performances of works by masters like Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, along with lighter fare. For many, this was their first encounter with Europe’s great composers, and the orchestra was received enthusiastically.¹⁷

Theodore Thomas, the most significant figure in the development of the symphony orchestra in nineteenth-century America, was born in Germany in 1835. Ten years later, he arrived in the United States, and by age nineteen, he was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic Society. Like many others in the annals of classical music, Thomas’s ambition extended to the podium, and in his late twenties he began conducting in New York, a path that led him to establish his own orchestra in 1865. As head of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra for the next twenty-five years, he was propelled by a missionary zeal. “My aim,” Thomas said, “has been to make good music popular.” To that end, beginning in 1869, Thomas led his orchestra on numerous tours across the United States, bringing symphonic music, which he described as “the highest flower of art,” to the nation’s cities and towns. Thomas’s superb ensemble often spent half the year touring, which permitted the conductor to introduce thousands of Americans to a range of symphonic masterworks. One listener, who heard the orchestra as a boy in a Mississippi River town, described the transformative impact of the experience, declaring that it caused him to comprehend that “there really existed as a fact . . . this world of beauty, wholly apart from everyday experience.” Thomas would go on to direct the New York Philharmonic, after which he headed to Chicago, where he established the ensemble that would become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.¹⁸

The final years of the nineteenth century saw a growing commitment to symphonic music, with the founding of several symphony orchestras, including the New York Symphony Society (the city’s second major orchestra), along with groups in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Moreover, in a country experiencing rapid urbanization, the establishment of symphony orchestras offered America’s burgeoning cities a way to enhance their cultural legitimacy.¹⁹ Shortly before those ensembles were formed, several musical extravaganzas between 1869 and the early 1880s illustrate how thousands of Americans encountered classical music, particularly symphonic compositions. In 1869, to commemorate the Civil War’s end, “the Grandest Musical Demonstration that the world has ever witnessed” took place in Boston, where thousands of singers and hundreds of instrumentalists performed Schubert’s Symphony in C and other works before an audience of more than twenty thousand, including President Ulysses Grant. Sadly, the former general asked that “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” be played, which necessitated eliminating the first and third movements of Schubert’s masterwork.²⁰

In 1872, a similar Boston spectacle marked the end of the Franco-Prussian War. This event included 17,000 singers, an orchestra of 1,500, and 40 vocal soloists performing arias from operas and oratorios, along with “The Blue Danube” waltz led by Johann Strauss himself. While some expressed reservations about the success of the event—it was simply too big, critics claimed—Chicago arranged a huge jubilee of its own in 1873. Cincinnati held one that same year featuring works by Handel, Mendelssohn, Haydn, and Beethoven, performed by an orchestra of more than 100 and a chorus more than seven times that size. Embracing the idea of gigantism in music, organizers in New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Louis all followed suit, believing that concerts by huge orchestras and enormous choruses were an effective way to offer classical music to American listeners.²¹ As these episodes suggest, and as one scholar has observed, by the end of the nineteenth century, classical music “enjoyed high prestige in America.”²²

Despite the impressive character of these musical spectacles and the great enthusiasm generated by the many symphonic, operatic, and vocal performances Americans experienced in that earlier time, I would contend that in the twentieth century, from the First World War through the Cold War years, classical music came to occupy a fundamentally different place in American life than it did before or has since, achieving an unprecedented degree of political importance. As historian Lawrence Levine has observed, it is easy to forget that “precisely the same forms of culture can perform markedly distinct functions in different periods.”²³ With that crucial insight in mind, in these years, Americans imbued classical music in the United States with political and ideological meaning, and they responded to the music and those who performed it as they never had. The world of classical music helped Americans grapple with a range of critical questions in the life of the nation. It helped them decide what was worth fighting for and why. It helped illuminate the meaning of democracy, freedom, and patriotism. It supplied insight into the nature of tyranny and oppression. And classical music and the work of classical musicians even helped Americans reflect upon what the United States represented on the world stage, which enhanced their understanding of the country’s purpose in a dangerous century.

That classical music could help people ponder such essential questions is a phenomenon considered by the late literary scholar and music critic Edward Said. “Serious musical thought,” Said observed, “occurs in conjunction with, not in separation from, other serious thought, both musical and nonmusical.”²⁴ One aim of this book, which examines how people in the United States melded their reflections on classical music and musicians to their understanding of a variety of global challenges America faced, is to explore this notion—that one’s ideas about the world of music can be related to one’s thinking about matters that are decidedly nonmusical, and often of great consequence.

It is also worth emphasizing, as musicologist Nicholas Cook has written, that music is not just something “nice to listen to.” Instead, he insists, it is “what we make it, and what we make of it.” According to Cook, “People think through music” and use it to “decide who they are.”²⁵ In examining how Americans considered the convergence between the world of classical music and international affairs, I would suggest that, over many decades, the American people did a great deal of “thinking through music,” and as they reflected upon the music, and upon the work of musicians and performing institutions, they achieved a deeper understanding of America’s role in the twentieth-century world.

In researching this book, I encountered a body of source material, vast and rich, that demonstrated the importance of classical music in American life; my work in libraries and archives revealed some fascinating currents that flowed from the convergence between the world of classical music and the wider world. The first concerns a decades-long debate on the relationship between art and politics in the United States, which energized musicians, listeners, and even those with no particular devotion to classical music. Pitting those who viewed classical music in highly nationalistic terms against those possessing a more idealistic perspective, this often bitter disagreement created a divide both inside and outside the classical-music domain. Despite their distinctive outlooks, the two groups—I call them the musical nationalists and the musical universalists—did share one conviction: They believed America’s classical-music community was enmeshed in and inseparable from overseas developments.²⁶

But it was their profound differences that were especially meaningful. As was true of many Americans, the musical nationalists saw the world as a perilous place, especially for the United States. They were convinced that the act of listening to pieces of music by certain composers or attending performances by particular singers, instrumentalists, or conductors could somehow contaminate the country or even endanger the American people. Consequently, at times, especially when the country felt particularly vulnerable, the musical nationalists favored banning the music of certain composers or preventing certain artists from performing in American concert halls and opera houses.

As I came to recognize, there was more to musical nationalism than this proscriptive reaction; during the Cold War it assumed a different form. In those unsettled years, the musical nationalists held that overseas performances by American symphony orchestras had the capacity to advance the national interest of the United States vis-à-vis its enemies. Such overseas offerings could transform a leading American orchestra into an instrument of diplomacy, which could be used for reasons of self-interest in a divided world. For the musical nationalists, the world was dangerous and classical music was capable of exacerbating or mitigating the foreign perils the United States confronted in the twentieth century.

Unlike the musical nationalists, the musical universalists were convinced that art transcended politics and national rivalries. They believed music could have a salutary impact on domestic and international life—that it could act as a balm, a unifier, a force for uplift, and even as a catalyst for global cooperation. This idea—that music could be a constructive force—was hardly novel; indeed, it stretched back to the Greeks. Considering the importance of educating students in poetry and music, Plato contended that knowledge of “rhythm and harmony [would] sink deep into the recesses of the soul,” which would produce an individual capable of embracing “all that is lovely.” Such a person would become someone “of noble spirit.”²⁷

Beyond ennobling the individual and invigorating one’s appreciation for beauty, the musical universalists believed music was a universal language, a notion that was ardently embraced, for example, by the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, who was certain that music—classical music, especially—could speak to the hopes and dreams of all humanity. For the musical universalists who fill these pages, a powerful conviction animated their thinking: They were certain that classical music could communicate directly and constructively with all people, wherever they lived. And during the Cold War, the musical universalists believed, as the musical nationalists did not, that by sending symphonic ensembles to perform in foreign lands, the United States could contribute to the creation of a more empathetic and cooperative world.²⁸ They were convinced that American orchestras could enhance the prospects for peace.

For many years, the debate between the musical nationalists and the musical universalists roiled in newspapers, magazines, and competing public pronouncements, causing rancor and division inside and outside the classical-music community. Whatever the merits of each position, this fervid dispute helped classical music remain in the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, and over many decades, the passion that marked the public wrangling between the nationalists and the universalists heightened classical music’s political significance across America.

My research pointed to two additional historical currents that I did not expect to find, both essential to this volume. Embedded in the book’s sources are two crucial aspects of twentieth-century American history: the country’s expanding engagement with the world and its increasing anxiety over antidemocratic regimes. To my great surprise, the sources I uncovered—concert and opera reviews; editorials, opinion pieces, and news reports on classical music and musicians; material in symphony and opera archives; and countless letters on classical music and performers published in newspapers and magazines—revealed these twin developments with unusual clarity. The world of classical music thus offers a powerful, and wholly unconventional, lens through which to examine these currents; both are vital to understanding the contours of twentieth-century American history: the country’s increasing engagement with the world, and the evolving and, ultimately, unremitting sense that affairs overseas threatened America’s safety.

The sources imparted the story of a nation that, decade by decade, became more engaged and assertive in world politics. It was equally clear that the American people and their leaders experienced a growing sense of distress over the existence of antidemocratic rule. Having helped vanquish the threat posed by Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in World War I, the United States experienced a tranquil, if brief, postwar interlude. After that, the sources revealed a nation that became more and more troubled by regimes and ideologies that were thought to threaten its safety or were, at the very least, inimical to American values: fascism in Mussolini’s Italy; Nazism in Hitler’s Germany; and communism in the Soviet Union of Stalin and his successors.

As the century unfolded, the United States became increasingly fixated on these antidemocratic lands, an obsession that led America to devote a great deal of energy to thinking about foreign threats, and, ultimately, an enormous amount of blood and treasure to waging wars hot and cold. I became convinced that exploring the intersection between America’s classical-music community and a range of momentous events beyond the nation’s shores could enrich our understanding of how the United States engaged the world. And I could tell this story using sources derived largely from the world of music, which would allow the tale to be told in an entirely new way.

As one reflects on the place of classical music in American life, it is worth pondering the words of a distinguished scholar and an esteemed artist. According to Lawrence Kramer, music cannot “disentangle us from our worldly destinies.” Rather, its power is to “entangle us with those destinies in ways that can be profoundly important.” In a similar vein, the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, a musician sensitive to the connection between music and politics, has observed that “music is not separated from the world.” Instead, music has the capacity to teach us “that everything is connected.”²⁹ It is this connectedness, between the world of classical music in America and the wider world, which I consider in these pages.

My aim, I should emphasize, is not to examine or explain why classical music seems less important today than it once was, though that is not an uninteresting question. Instead, I wish to explore a time when countless Americans believed the work of gifted artists and superb musical institutions was inseparable from crucial developments across the world, and were convinced that their very safety might hinge on the performance of a piece of music.