In the Gilded Age, a Czech visionary saw America’s musical future in ‘negro melodies’
That scholars of American culture ignore classical music is understandable. In our own time, America’s musical high culture has degenerated into a formulaic entertainment divorced from the contemporary moment. Intellectuals know theater, dance, cinema, literature. Missing out on what our orchestras and opera companies are up to, they are for the most part not missing much. In the late Gilded Age, however, music was widely esteemed as the “queen of the arts.” Classical music was in its American heyday, centrally embedded in the culture at large. Merely to glimpse its institutions and practitioners in the 1880s and 1890s is to rethink the “genteel tradition” and other sweeping generalizations that have shaped (and distorted) our understanding of the period.
The figure of Antonin Dvorak looms large in this story. In the throes of a New World epiphany, he impetuously espoused a future for American music based on “negro melodies.” For three years, beginning in the fall of 1892, he found himself embroiled in a sustained and often bitter debate over issues of race and national identity that pitted against each other the two cities in which American classical music was born. In Boston — a Brahmin enclave with entrenched traditions, however young — the Czech composer was denounced as a “negrophile”; in New York — then, as now, a city of immigrants — he was embraced as a mentor of genius.
Jeannette Thurber, an educational visionary, was the agent of his coming. A graduate of the Paris Conservatory, she dreamed of creating an American music school of comparable distinction. American composers of the time typically studied in Germany — and as typically their symphonies and string quartets sounded German. Thurber reasoned that acquiring a native musical canon — a concert idiom Americans would recognize as their own — would help keep gifted young musicians at home. She chose Dvorak, a self-made butcher’s son, to direct her National Conservatory of Music, in New York; she knew him to be a cultural nationalist and instinctive democrat. Enticed by a salary he could not refuse, Dvorak arrived to discover himself appointed (as he put it in a letter to Prague) to show Americans “the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music.” Overwhelmed by the scale and pace of American life and by the caliber of American orchestras, he accepted the mandate with wonderful enthusiasm.
Dvorak had already read Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in Czech. He attended Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at Madison Square Garden. In Iowa, where he summered in 1893, he spent long evenings with the members of the Kickapoo Medicine Show. His fascination with Native American music was productive. But it was the “negro melodies” — “Swing Low,” “Deep River,” and other songs whose existence he had never suspected — that struck with revelatory force. His insight into the crucial pertinence of black culture to American identity was far from unique. Thurber herself had already enrolled African-Americans on full scholarships. But only an outsider, taken unawares, could have experienced plantation songs as a tumultuous surprise; and no American composer could have validated black culture as Dvorak would.
The most famous and controversial words Dvorak ever uttered were transcribed by a reporter for the New York Herald in May 1893: “In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” The great event of the following New York concert season, on December 16, was the premiere of Dvorak’s symphony “From the New World” at Carnegie Music Hall. W.J. Henderson’s review in The New York Times the next morning remains one of the most vivid and acute descriptions of the popular symphony ever rendered. Grasping the twin identity of the Largo, with its admixture of Hiawatha and plantation song, Henderson wrote, “It is an idealized slave song made to fit the impressive quiet of night on the prairie.”
To clinch his encomium, Henderson asked the inescapable question: Was Dvorak’s symphony “American”? His answer was clarion: “Our system of slavery, with all its domestic and racial conditions, was ours, and its twin never existed. Out of the heart of this slavery, environed by this sweet and languorous South, from the canebrake and the cotton field, arose the spontaneous musical utterance of a people. That folk-music struck an answering note in the American heart. ... If those songs are not national, then there is no such thing as national music.”
But Boston’s most influential music critic, Philip Hale, denounced the influence of Dvorak the “negrophile.” In 1910 — fully six years after Dvorak’s death — Hale was still contesting the New York view that the composer had struck an American chord. “The negro,” he wrote, was “not inherently musical.” His “folk-songs” were founded “on sentimental ballads sung by the white women of the plantation, or on camp-meeting tunes.” It would be “absurd,” Hale concluded, “to characterize a school of music based on such a foundation as an ‘American school.’”
In the mid-19th century, Boston’s most famous scientist was Harvard University’s Louis Agassiz, who taught that black and white human beings belonged to distinct species. After 1860, Agassiz had few scientific allies in Cambridge. But his views fed bias in the culture at large long after his death in 1873. In the 1890s — the decade of Dvorak in America — music reviews in the Boston daily press routinely employed the adjectives “barbarian” and “primitive” in “scientific” assessments of compositions by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and other “Slavs” (in contradistinction to “Anglo-Saxon” masters occupying a higher evolutionary rung). Dvorak was viewed in Boston as an unwanted interloper. His view that “red” and “black” Americans could be considered emblematic or representative was thought naïve at best.
The critic Hale was eighth in line of descent from Thomas Hale, who had settled in Massachusetts in the 17th century. Henry Edward Krehbiel — Hale’s opposite number in Manhattan, the pontifical “dean” of New York music critics — was the son of German immigrants. That Hale felt “American” was a matter of entitlement. Like many another immigrant or immigrant offspring, Krehbiel felt the need to investigate his national identity. A phenomenal autodidact (Hale was a product of Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University; Krehbiel never went to college), he made himself into America’s leading authority on music and race. For the New York Tribune, he furnished treatises (with bibliographies in English and German) on the music of African-Americans, American Indians, Hebrews, Magyars, Orientals, Russians, and Scandinavians, none of whom he ranked or put in a hierarchy. In 1914 he wrote Afro-American Folksongs, a pathbreaking 176-page study. Though Krehbiel’s notion that African-Americans are “inherently musical” sounds dated, his awakening to folk song, densely informed by transcribed details of rhythm and mode, was anything but quaint. Like Dvorak and his fellow critic Henderson, Krehbiel considered plantation song the deepest, truest American folk song, and the most pregnant for American music to come.
If the tale of Dvorak in two cities amplifies issues of race and national identity at the turn of the 20th century, the larger story of New York and Boston as twin birthplaces of American classical music — a story of sudden and dynamic growth — confutes stereotypes of a meretricious Gilded Age as surely as does Dvorak himself. Equally tangential is George Santayana’s famous characterization, in 1911, of a complacent “genteel tradition” shadowing the 19th century. More recently such prominent cultural historians as Lawrence W. Levine and Alan Trachtenberg applied concepts of snobbish “sacralization” and “social control” to Gilded Age highbrow culture in ways that the history of American classical music does not support.
According to the social-control model, fears of class warfare impelled elites to create museums and orchestras, parks and playgrounds intended to co-opt the restless energies of the underprivileged. But to study classical music in Dvorak’s New York is to discover the absence of any cultural elite correlating with class or ethnicity. Old New York wealth had inhabited the boxes at the Academy of Music. New wealth built and occupied the boxes of the Metropolitan Opera, which in 1883 supplanted the academy as New York’s operatic hub. For boxholders at both institutions, opera was a glamorous and expensive French or Italian entertainment purveyed by a Gounod or Bellini. But for the Germans who took over the Metropolitan for seven seasons, beginning in 1884, opera was Wagner. In 1891 the boxholders revolted and banned opera in German. In 1895 the Germans rebelled in turn. The result was an uneasy (and little remembered) balance of power: a coexistence of dual Metropolitan companies, French/Italian and German, each with its own orchestra, chorus, singers, and conductors. Stereotypes notwithstanding, never in the Met’s history was artistic policy so at war with social purpose as during this eventful first decade.
In many accounts, the personification of the early Met was Caroline Astor, whose annual ball defined high society and who arrived at the opera at 9 p.m. every Monday so decked in diamonds and emeralds as to resemble a “walking chandelier.” Equally representative of the early Met, however, were the middle-aged women who, at the close of Tristan und Isolde, observed an awestruck silence and then — the Musical Courier tells us — “stood on the chairs and screamed their delight for what seemed hours.” So polyglot was New York culture that as of 1918 the Met’s president, board chairman, and dominant shareholder was an immigrant German: Otto Kahn. So confused were hierarchies of status and wealth that Kahn was denied a box because his parents were Jewish — and that he appeared not to care.
In Boston, meanwhile, classical music was galvanized by Henry Lee Higginson, who, as of 1881, invented, owned, and operated the world-class Boston Symphony. Though Higginson has been portrayed as an autocratic Brahmin tastemaker, he had not grown up in an atmosphere of privilege. When he strove to imbue others with his philanthropic ideas, he spoke the language of democracy. As the single most dominant force in Boston’s institutional cultural life, he was driven by a passion not for power, but for music.
The excitement once stirred by the “New World” symphony, by Wagnerism, by the widely heralded prospect of an American “canon” of symphonies, sonatas, and opera was not sustained after World War I. Dvorak’s prophesy that “negro melodies” would foster an “American school of music” came true, but in ways he could not have predicted. Dvorak had in mind symphonies and operas audibly infused with the black vernacular — but there is only one Porgy and Bess. Rather, the black tunes Dvorak adored fostered popular genres to which American classical music ceded leadership. As classical music grew obsessed with the act of performance — with “the world’s greatest” orchestras and conductors, pianists and violinists — jazz became the driving creative force in American musical life. The important European composers who flocked to the United States during the interwar decades flocked to Harlem. America’s own composers, by comparison, regarded jazz with indifference or suspicion. Those were the years during which Aaron Copland could find only “two expressions” in jazz, and Roy Harris was hailed by Time magazine as the “great white hope” of American music: Classical music had been colored white.
“It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness,” Dvorak once told the Herald. “If in my own career I have achieved a measure of success and reward, it is to some extent due to the fact that I was the son of poor parents and was reared in an atmosphere of struggle and endeavor.” He could not abide the boxholders at the Met. He stood apart from snobbish agents of social control whose scant influence was far eclipsed by his own impact and renown.
In America, Dvorak pushed for a broad understanding of music — its sources, its audience, its relationship to culture and society. Ultimately he saw music as a necessary means for defining America — an ecumenical vehicle for articulating the polyglot New World. He would not have understood the Eurocentric attitudes of many American classical musicians to come, or sociological theorizing that would pigeonhole classical music as an elitist bludgeon. His American sojourn remains not only instructive, but inspirational.
Joseph Horowitz is an author and artistic adviser to orchestras. Among his books are Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (Norton, 2005) and Artists in Exile: How Refugees From Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (Harper Collins, forthcoming in February). This essay is based on his 2007 David P. Gardner Lecture in the Humanities at the University of Utah.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 18, Page B18