If you had wandered into an American concert hall in the late 19th century, the odds of your encountering a work of German symphonic music would have been astonishingly high. Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Wagner were the lifeblood of American orchestras, with Wagner also reigning in the opera house. American conservatories, meanwhile, were run according to the German pedagogic tradition, and American composers largely wrote tone poems and symphonies in the manner of their continental cousins. With every major conductor of German extraction, and with so many German musicians making up the ranks of symphony rosters—from New York to St. Louis, Boston to Chicago—the lingua franca of orchestral rehearsals was, more often than not, the language of Goethe, not Thoreau.
This state of affairs persisted through the early 20th century, but with the entrance of the United States into the First World War, in the spring of 1917, the national disposition toward German music and culture turned temporarily sour. As the historian Jonathan Rosenberg writes in his illuminating new book on classical music in 20th-century America, this enmity led not only to the proscription of German composers (both living and dead) but also to the forced resignations or dismissals of many prominent musicians. Even those who pledged allegiance to their adopted land were viewed with increasing suspicion, their loyalties called into question. Sometimes a mere unsubstantiated rumor was enough for an enraged public to turn on a once-beloved musician.
The Darmstadt-born conductor Karl Muck, the man responsible for molding the Boston Symphony into one of the world’s finest ensembles, was one victim of the anti-German hysteria spreading across the nation. In Muck’s case, the trouble started with a debate over aesthetics. It became common in those days—indeed, necessary—for orchestras to include “The Star-Spangled Banner” on programs of symphonic music. But for Muck (and for his boss, Henry Higginson, the Boston Symphony’s founder and chief administrator), patriotic tunes had no place in the rarefied environs of the concert hall. Although “The Star-Spangled Banner” would not become the national anthem until 1931, it nevertheless turned into a wartime litmus test: the failure to perform it, on whatever grounds, was to risk being accused of treachery. Theodore Roosevelt bluntly demanded that any musician who didn’t play the tune be deported at once. Sure enough, after failing to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a concert in Rhode Island, Muck was arrested, branded a civilian enemy alien, and transported to an internment camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Among the internees there was another eminent artist, the Viennese-born Ernst Kunwald, who had until recently been the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony.