|
Inside This Issue:
Music
of Williamsburg by Carol J. Oja
The Germania Musical Society by Nancy Newman
Music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen Slottow
Scorsese's Narratives of Blues Discovery: Review
by Ray Allen
Eric Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?:
Review by Salim Washington
Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger: Review by Anton
Vishio
Sondheim's Bounce:
Review by Gayle Sherwood and Jeffrey Magee
Home
|
The Germania Musical Society and Other Forty-Eighters
By Nancy
Newman
In July 1853, Dwight’s
Journal of Music printed an “open letter” that had appeared
recently in Leipzig’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.1 The subject
of the letter was the Journal’s own accounts of musical activity in
Boston during the previous year. The
letter’s author, Richard Pohl, described these accounts as “truly
astonishing,” and compared the excitement of learning that orchestral
music was thriving in the United States to the discovery of “a new tract of fertile
soil or a rich gold mine.” An
ardent advocate of symphonic music generally and Wagner specifically, Pohl
proclaimed that Boston’s latest season proved that the American
contribution to the progress of art could no longer be ignored.
Pohl’s appraisal was
drawn from tallies of the 1852-53 concert season that had appeared in Dwight’s
Journal that spring. He commended the
fact that all Beethoven’s symphonies had been performed multiple times,
noting especially that the Ninth had been presented twice by the Germania
Musical Society and the Handel and Haydn Society. “By this one fact Boston raises herself to a musical rank, which neither Old
England, nor many highly celebrated German chapels [sic] will dispute with
her.” Boston also surpassed England in appreciation of newer composers, namely
Schumann, Berlioz, and Wagner. Pohl prophesied that America would attain artistic perfection quickly, leaving Europe
behind.
Perhaps we shall, within a
shorter time than we ourselves imagine, meet again “over there,”
to witness the first performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Boston, and to cry out with newly confirmed conviction to
the land of the Future: WESTWARD MOVES THE HISTORY OF ART! [Emphasis in the original.]
The focus on Tannhäuser was
not accidental, as the Germania Musical Society, Boston’s foremost resident orchestra, had given the U. S. premiere of the opera’s Finale in autumn
1852. As if in response to Pohl, the
Germanians offered a “Wagner Night” the following December that
included selections from Tannhäuser, Rienzi, and Lohengrin, interspersed with
works by Rossini, Bellini, and Paganini.
The notion of the
“westward movement” of art was not intended metaphorically. As Pohl penned these words, many musicians
were literally moving west, part of the transatlantic immigration that
brought at least one and a half million German-speakers to the United States
in the period 1840-1860.2 Those individuals who left Europe as a
result of political or economic difficulties in the decades straddling 1848,
the “year of revolutions,” have become known collectively as
“Forty-Eighters.”3 It was during 1848 that the members of the
newly formed Germania Musical Society emigrated from Berlin to escape the constraints of aristocratic
patronage and worsening conditions for musicians. For six years, the Germania’s two
dozen members concertized in North America, offering upwards of 900 performances in dozens of cities and
towns along the eastern seaboard and as far west as the Mississippi. The Germanians brought the “sounds of
home” to many immigrants in these places, appearing “as a renewal
of artistic bonds between the old and new homes.”4 Their
influence went well beyond nostalgia, however. Like many Forty-Eighters, the Germanians
embodied a cosmopolitanism that superceded political boundaries. And like other Forty-Eighters, their
experiences were gathered from disparate sources, part of a transatlantic
exchange whose ramifications are still felt today.
Musically active Forty-Eighters
who performed with the Germania include Otto Dresel and non-Germans such as Teresa
Parodi and Edouard Reményi. Other
“refugees of revolution” include Hans Balatka and the
sometime-impresario, Henry Börnstein.5 Still others came to visit, displaced by
the disruptions that followed the failure of the revolutionary movements:
Henriette Sontag, Giovanni Mario, and Giulia Grisi. The conductor Joseph Gungl, with whom most
of the Germanians had worked in Berlin, arrived in September 1848. Many of Gungl’s musicians, like those
of the Saxonia and Steyermark Orchestras, decided to remain in the U. S.6 Pohl’s
colleague at the Neue Zeitschrift, Theodor Hagen, immigrated in 1854 and
became a writer for the Mason Brothers’ New York Musical Review. An ardent Wagnerian, Hagen fulfilled
Pohl’s dream and witnessed the first complete American performance of Tannhäuser,
conducted by former Germanian Carl Bergmann,
in 1859.
* * *
As important as the
performance of individual works was to American cultural life, it was just
one aspect of the profound changes transforming the experience of
instrumental music at mid-century.
Concerts of the Germanians represent an entirely new era in the
history of the public concert.
Beginning in the 1830s, conductors such as Johann Strauss Sr. in Vienna and Philippe Musard in Paris broadened the audience for orchestral music by
offering frequent, low-priced, mixed-repertory programs. During the following decade,
charismatic leaders such as Gungl in Berlin and Louis Antoine Jullien in London expanded these events into the “mass
orchestral concert.”7 Their programs were designed to attract
audiences numbering in the thousands—rather than the hundreds that had
previously comprised the audience for individual concerts of instrumental
music. To accommodate the diverse
expectations inherent in such large gatherings, their repertory ranged from
the new, popular dance genres (such as waltzes and polkas) to opera
selections (overtures, arias, and finales), from virtuoso variations and
medleys (“potpourris”) to complete symphonies. Concerts were held frequently, often in
series. Instead of the four to nine
annual concerts typical of court orchestras and philharmonics, the new-style
ensembles offered dozens of programs each season.
The Germanians brought these
practices to the United States, probably the best place at that historical moment
for the realization of the artistic and entrepreneurial spirit that had
inspired such ensembles. Their careful
programming of substantial compositions and lighter works, low ticket prices
(lower still at public rehearsals), and extensive series (twelve to thirty
concerts per season) were all in keeping with the phenomenon of the
“private orchestras.” The Germania’s
conductors, Carl Lenschow and (from 1850) Carl Bergmann, used the publication
of original works arranged for solo piano to promote the orchestra. More than sixty compositions were intended
as souvenirs for the domestic market, such as Bergmann’s twelve-title
series, “A Choice Collection of Waltzes and Polkas as performed by the
Germania Musical Society,” or “The Season in Newport,” a
set of polkas whose titles recall the large hotels where the Germanians performed
during their summer residency at the Rhode Island ocean resort. The abundance of such compositions
demonstrates that a mid-century musician could advocate for both the symphony
and the commodification of culture, for a “classical” repertory
and “modern” composition.
Furthermore, what we identify today as the techniques of mass
culture—marketing and inexpensive reproduction—helped secure the
position of an instrumental music that was secular and autonomous, controlled
by musicians rather than church and state.8
The democratizing tendency
of the mass concert was not lost on the Forty-Eighters and their
contemporaries. Audiences in the
European capitals averaged 2,500, despite conservatives’ suspicion of
large gatherings. The Germania’s
audience in Boston often exceeded 3,000. On both sides of the Atlantic,
these events provided ample evidence of the commercial potential and social
meaning of the middle-class public, a multifarious population that did not
necessarily recognize itself as something other than a collection of
competing interests. The process of coming together for concerts afforded the
middle-class an opportunity for self-reflection that helped changed the
nature of public life itself.
Critical theorist Jürgen
Habermas has noted the importance of cultural, seemingly non-political
activities to the formation of a new “public sphere” that
operated outside the boundaries of traditional authority.9 The
situation of the Germanians and other Forty-Eighters offers an opportunity to
explore the United
States’
role in this development. Certainly
Dwight perceived the potential relationship between aesthetics and political
ideology when he characterized the annual festivals of German singing clubs
in the U.
S.
as “popular mass-gatherings so brimming with the sentiment of
liberty.”10 Implicitly
acknowledging the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, Dwight observed that,
“music-loving Germans must seek out a republic for the free continuance
of their musical existence.”
According to Germanian Henry
Albrecht, it was “the free continuance of their musical
existence” that the orchestra members sought in coming to the United States. In the only
known memoir of the ensemble, Albrecht described their idealistic attitude
toward relations between musicians. The Germanians worked cooperatively. Neither conductor nor soloists were
accorded rank; the integrity of the ensemble was always emphasized. As Albrecht noted, the organization was
founded on “the communist principle,” a term synonymous with
democracy in some quarters. In their
quest for “a completely independent, truly free life,” the
Germanians agreed to share equally in rights, duties, and rewards. Their motto, “One for all and all for
one,” was an allusion to the French social utopianism that flourished
in the 1840s.11
* * *
Fifty years have passed
since the publication of H. Earle Johnson’s article, “The
Germania Musical Society,” and it is still a good introduction to the
orchestra.12 Not
surprisingly, however, aspects of the Germania that were less intriguing in
the 1950s are of greater interest now: the ideological and historical
developments that shaped the members’ experience; the mix of
“highbrow and lowbrow” compositions that filled their repertory;
the orchestra’s origins in the private orchestras of Europe and their
legacy in the Symphony Orchestras of Boston and Chicago. This is not to diminish what the Germania
is most well-known for, the premiere and repeat performances of compositions
that became part of the standard repertory, especially works by Beethoven and
Mendelssohn. Nor should their frequent
performance of Italian and French opera excerpts be neglected. But we can now consider the
Germanians’ activities in the context of a new perspective on
1848. Instead of focusing on the failure
of the Revolutions to alter the political landscape, historians have begun to
emphasize the social and cultural shifts that precipitated the uprisings.13 Paramount to these shifts was an exchange of ideas that
transcended national boundaries, made possible by the movement of people on
an unprecedented scale. For evidence
of such an exchange, we need only to consider the cosmopolitanism that
blended a German predilection for instrumental forms, pan-European programming
practices, French social theory, and the American marketplace in an ensemble
called the Germania Musical Society.
—Nancy Newman
Wesleyan University
Editors’
note: This essay is drawn from Newman’s Ph.D. dissertation, Good Music
for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society and Transatlantic Musical
Culture of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Brown University, 2002).
Notes
1“OPEN LETTER TO MR. J. S. DWIGHT,” as
printed in Dwight’s Journal of Music (30 July 1853), 133-34.
Originally published as “Ein Blick nach dem ‘fernen
Westen,’” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (17 June 1853), 269-73,
and signed with Richard Pohl’s pseudonym,
“Hoplit.”
2 Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German
Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (University of
Illinois Press, 1992), 15.
3 Beginning in January 1848, popular uprisings
inspired partly by the French and American Revolutions engulfed continental Europe. The outcome varied according to place, but
in the German lands the movement toward democracy failed completely. In mid-1849, the Prussian king rejected the
constitution offered him by the first pan-German parliament, leading to a
period of reaction. For a succint
account of events, see Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4 Frederic Ritter, Music in America, 2d ed.
(Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 342.
5 On Balatka and Börnstein, see Carl Wittke, Refugees
of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952), 289 and
295.
6 On the ensembles, see Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong
on Music, vol. 1, Resonances (Oxford University Press, 1988), 545 and 598.
7 The term is borrowed from William Weber, Music and
the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna (Holmes and Meier, 1975), 109-13.
8 William Weber, “Mass Culture and the
Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870,” International Review
of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 8, no. 1 (June 1977): 5-21.
9 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (MIT Press, 1989), 27-43.
10 Dwight’s Journal (2 July 1853), 101-102.
11 All quotations are translated by the author from
Henry Albrecht’s Skizzen aus dem Leben der Musik-Gesellschaft Germania
(King and Baird, 1869), 5-6.
12 H. Earle Johnson, “The Germania
Musical Society,” Musical Quarterly 39, no. 1 (January 1953): 75-93.
13 See, for example, Jonathan Sperber, The European
Revolutions, cited in note 3.
|