Music and the Gilded Age:
Social Control and Sacralization
Revisited
Joseph Horowitz
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set in Manhattan in the “early
1870s,” begins with Christine Nilsson singing at the Academy of Music.
The opera is Gounod’s Faust. The “world of fashion” has assembled in the
boxes. In their own eyes the embodiment of “New York,” the fashionables
are prisoners of convention: Newland Archer arrives late because “it was
‘not the thing’ to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not ‘the
thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer’s New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.” Newland takes his place among “all the carefullybrushed, white-waist coated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and
turned their opera glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the
product of the system.” That “the German text of French operas sung by
Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences” seems “as natural to Newland Archer as
all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty
of using two silver-baked brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to
part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably
a gardenia) in his buttonhole.” The box opposite belongs to “old Mrs.
Manson Mingott, whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to attend the Opera.” It contains a surprise: the Countess Olenska. This finding is assessed by Laurence Lefferts; the “foremost authority
of ‘form’ in New York,” he has devoted long hours to such questions as
when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and the matter of pumps versus Oxfords for the feet. The countess is next appraised by Sillerton Jackson, as great an expert on “family” as Leffert is on form. Taking it all in,
Newland elects to visit the box in question and inspect the countess for
himself. Meanwhile, little Victor Capoul, as Faust, is “vainly trying, in a
tight purple velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his
artless victim.” Madame Nilsson, “in white cashmere slashed with pale blue
satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully
disposed on each side of her muslin chemisette,” listens “with downcast
eyes to M. Capoul’s impassioned wooing,” and affects “a guileless incomprehension of his designs.” Opera, in short, is here depicted as an expen-
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3:3 (July 2004)
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
sive backdrop to social display and intrigue, a metaphor for artifice and pretension, a pastime as vicarious and silly as the fashionables themselves.
This well-known vignette may be the single most defining image of Gilded Age high culture. It resonates with perceptions of a moneyed elite setting standards of snobbish taste and decorum—a constellation of ideas, including “social control” and “sacralization” as exerted from on high, embedded in such influential studies as Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of
America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982) and Lawrence Levine’s
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). And
yet Wharton no more purports to describe all of New York culture than
her bemused 1921 novel of New York society describes all of New York.
The same Academy of Music, as we know from the Evening Post of July 26,
1859, contained a basement “lager beer cavern:”
A long room…where, in a cloud of cigar smoke and amid
the fumes of lager and liquor, the artists and their friends
refresh themselves with copious libations. The conductor
has a subterranean communication from the stage to the
place, and—with Brignoli, Amodio, the members of the
orchestra, and a number of the initiated habitués of the
opera house—meets there his friends….Between the acts
of the opera the cavern is crowded, but as soon as the music commences, the rotund German drops his lager; the
Frenchman shugs his shoulders and says ‘Mon Dieu’; the
Italian quotes Count Luna in Trovatore and sings ‘Andiamo’;
the yellow Cubans and Spaniards give a twirl to their
moustaches; the English or New York swell struts toward
the stairs, and in a few moments the motley crowd are in
the seats or lobbies…1
This is a fair reflection of New York opera in its boisterous adolescence.
Again, in countless descriptions, the personification of the early
Metropolitan Opera is Caroline Astor, whose annual ball defined high society. It was she who decreed that to appear at the opera every Monday at
nine o’clock was the thing to do. She would enter her box wearing a diamond stomacher that was believed to have belonged to Marie Antoinette;
the entire assemblage of diamonds and emeralds embellishing her considerable figure was said to create, in appearance, a walking chandelier. But although Mrs. Astor and other box holders dictated fashion, and though they
paid the bills, they could not call the tune. Stereotypes notwithstanding,
never in the history of the Met was artistic policy so at war with social purpose than in its first decade. It is true that the Academy of Music, with only
Vera Brodsky Lawrence, ed., Strong on Music, v. 3: Repercussions 1857-1862 (Chicago, 1999),
247.
1
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
229
eighteen boxes, kept out what Wharton called the “new people”2—and that
the Met, with 122 boxes, was the result. But the new house’s inaugural
1883-84 season, with star-studded opera in Italian, was so costly that the
board opted for a less opulent, more practical strategy: a season of opera in
German. That led to six more German seasons that held the box holders
hostage. Wagner dominated the repertoire, and the conductor Anton Seidl,
mentored by Wagner himself at Bayreuth, dominated musical New York.
Even Verdi was given in German. A religious silence was enforced: every
noise from the boxes was shushed by less affluent patrons downstairs and
up. Though the box holders revolted and terminated Seidl and German
opera in 1891, renewed Germanic pressure forced the Met to take Seidl and
Wagner back. An uneasy balance of power afterward prevailed, with rival
German and non-German companies co-inhabiting the same institution.
For the late Gilded Age, as true a picture of the Met as Mrs. Astor’s box are
the “middle-aged women” who when Seidl conducted “stood up in the
chairs and screamed their delight for what seemed hours” at the curtain’s
fall.3 So polyglot was New York that as of 1918 the Met’s president, board
chairman, and dominant shareholder was an immigrant German banker. So
confused were hierarchies of status and wealth that the banker in question,
Otto Kahn, was denied a box because his parents were Jewish—and he
seemed not to care.
Lewis Mumford, in a famous 1931 study, called the decades from 1865 to
1895 “brown.” “The prevailing palette…ran most easily through the gamut
from yellow brown to dark sienna. In the best work of the period these
somber autumnal colours took on a new loveliness: a warm russet brown.”4
Dour Theodore Thomas, the messianic conductor who with his touring
Thomas Orchestra validated Wagner for the Gilded Age, turned him a respectable brown, even russet brown. But Seidl’s Wagner unleashed the red
lava of erotic turmoil: catalyst for a veritable fin de siècle supported by the
aroused intellectual advocacy of Henry Krehbiel, W.J. Henderson, and other New York critics, all formidable apostles of Wagnerian Music of the Future. If meliorist American Wagnerites were innocent of European decadence and modernism, the visceral thrill and transformative impact of concerts and opera would never again so galvanize classical music in the United
States—except briefly, in wartime, when Arturo Toscanini’s Beethoven
would do battle with Hitler. Even in Boston, bastion of respectability and
tradition, the late nineteenth century was a period of dynamic achievement
Martin Mayer, The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera (New York, 1983), 13.
Recalled in “Information Bureau,” The Musical Courier, June 22, 1922. The Met’s German
seasons are described in detail in Joseph Horowitz, Wagner Nights: An American History
(Berkeley, 1994).
4
Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America 1865-1895 (New York,
1931), 3-8.
2
3
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
for American classical music, remote from the complacency of orchestras
and opera companies a century later.
* * *
The imagery of Newland Archer and Mrs. Astor nevertheless remains. In
a 1991 survey of the whole of America’s late nineteenth century musical
high culture, Charles Hamm—a leading music historian—found a “mystifying ritual of dress, behaviour, and repertory” prized by an elite determined
to maintain class privilege.5 Outside music, too many Americanists treat
Gilded Age institutions of culture as agencies of elite empowerment. Gilded Age culture-bearers and intellectuals are depicted as inane, timid, arrogant, or stupidly racist.6 Such portraiture misapplies a twentieth century
template of understanding. The present-day observer of late nineteenth
century behavior must grapple with a different reality: people of intelligence
once believed in superior and inferior races, in religion being threatened by
science, in the inevitability of sharp class distinctions. They also lived in
times of substantial economic and social instability. They were not any
more obtuse or self-interested than we are today.
The mantra of social control bedevils such accounts. Art museums, libraries, universities, orchestras, and opera companies, we are told, were created partly in order to co-opt the restless energies of the less privileged. In
Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America, high culture is subjected to a political analysis revealing a chimerical “vision of a harmonious body politic
under the rule of reason, light, and sweet, cheerful emotion,” a “normative
ideal of culture which served as protection against other realities.” Commensurately, Trachtenberg observes “the wish for a conspicuous display of
philanthropy on the part of wealthy donors, and for status on the part of
the gentry, for whom the custodianship of culture provided desirable opportunities for noblesse oblige.” The aesthetic experience is essentially “feminine”—“receptive, passive, spectatorial.” Its utility as “an alternative to
class hostilities” earned it “a cardinal place among instruments of social
control and reform.” It embodied an “anti-democratic bias,” a “hierarchy
of values corresponding to a social hierarchy of stations or classes.”7
5
Charles Hamm, “The USA: Classical, Industrial and Invisible Music,” in Music and Society:
The Late Romantic Era From the Mid-19th Century to World War I, ed. Jim Samson (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, 1991), 303.
6
Some examples: Mark Rydell, All the World’s a Fair (Chicago, 1984); Carl Smith, Urban
Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of
Pullman (Chicago, 1995); Richard Schickel, The World of Carnegie Hall (New York, 1960); M.
H. Dunlop, Gilded City (New York, 2000).
7
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New
York, 1982), ch. 5. A key text propagating a pertinent stereotype is Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977), which sees Gilded Age women confined to “a claustrophobic private world of over-responsive sensibility.” For a critique, see Horowitz, Wagner Nights,
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
231
Trachtenberg’s analysis, fresh in its day, shrewdly ferrets hidden meanings. But applied to actual institutions of culture, it is more a hunch than a
study. While “concert halls” are cited in passing, only museums receive any
specific attention: “organized by the urban elite, dominated by ladies of
high society,” their palatial architecture and “hushed corridors” conveying
“an idea of art as public magnificence” supported by private wealth, their
holdings celebrating “European and classical masterpieces” as the “highest,
purest art.” Not mentioned in this seminal study of “culture and society in
the Gilded Age” are Theodore Thomas or Anton Seidl or the subversive
erotic maelstrom of the Wagnerites. In fact, the argument for social control
is not supported by close acquaintance with the musical high culture of the
period. Though genteel habits of thought and feeling could act as a suppressant, though “civilization” could tame rowdy dissidence, it does not
follow that America’s pioneer institutions of classical music can be summarized as fundamentally patronizing and anti-democratic.
In Boston, John Sullivan Dwight, whose Dwight’s Journal of Music (18521881) shaped and embodied musical taste, was at times an explicit strategist
of social control, eyeing the rabble with a fretful mistrust. Philip Hale, arguably Boston’s most influential turn-of-the-century critic, was a snob. Of
Boston’s composers, Amy Beach, supported by her physician husband (an
intimate of Longfellow and Holmes), was cut off from the larger urban reality. Charles Martin Loeffler, part of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s aesthetes’
coterie, was hyper-refined. Charles Eliot Norton, though he retained belief
in democratic society, deplored “modern democracy.” But Boston’s central
musical institution—the Boston Symphony Orchestra, invented, owned,
and operated by Henry Lee Higginson beginning in 1881—does not fit this
picture.
Perceptions of Higginson are necessarily skewed. A Brahmin financier,
he is described by his biographer, Bliss Perry, as “soldierly” and “erect.”
His speech was “abrupt” and “vigorous.” He bore a “sabre-scar across his
finely modeled face.”8 At the same time, Higginson endured banking and
craved music. He not only secured a great symphony orchestra for Boston
but one that would, as a signature priority, “offer the best music at low
prices.”9 Higginson undeniably benefited from his lineage, which connected
him to Lees, Cabots, Lowells, Channings, Putnams, Storrows, and other
elite Boston clans. But compared to Dwight or Hale, he was less a pure
product of New England. He was actually born in New York, in 1834, and
moved to Boston four years later. His father was far from wealthy. His
poor eyesight forced him to abandon Harvard after a few months. The following years were mainly spent abroad: a series of Wanderjahre that eventu230-32.
8
Bliss Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (New York, 1921), 298.
9
Henry Higginson, “In the Interest of Good Music,” a statement published in various
Boston newspapers on March 30, 1881.
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
Henry Lee Higginson, creator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Courtesy: Boston
Symphony Orchestra Archives.
ally landed him in Vienna. Higginson now aspired to a modest career in
music. He pursued a Spartan curriculum, arising every morning at 6:30. His
weekly educational intake was nine music lessons and two lectures. His dietary intake—usually omitting supper—was limited by his financial resources. He emerged from his Viennese “second home,” then from the
crucible of Civil War service, a thirty-one-year-old of wide and varied experience who spoke French and German fluently; who had soldiered with
Americans from every walk of life; who had married the daughter of Louis
Agassiz. He joined the banking film of Lee, Higginson and Company, cofounded by his father—taken in, he once recalled, “as a matter of charity,
to keep me out of the poorhouse.” Though Higginson claimed that he never walked into 44 State Street without wanting to sit down on the doorstep
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
233
and cry, he proceeded to amass a sufficient fortune to undertake his true
life-work. The Boston Symphony, upon which he expended nearly $1 million in deficit-relief alone, was the most generous of his many philanthropies. His own business sometimes hovered on the brink of bankruptcy.
He found money useful to the degree that he could usefully give it away.10
What kind of man was Henry Higginson? Lawrence Levine and others
have depicted him and his Symphony patrons as essentially conservative
and elitist, staid and authoritarian. But his talent was less for banking than
for friendship. Music, plainly, remained his “inner world” and Beethoven
his moral bedrock. Even in later life, consumed by professional duties, he
could write of the Eroica Symphony (presumably the finale’s slow variations): “The gates of Heaven open, and we see the angels singing and
reaching their hands to us with perfect welcome. No words are of any avail,
and never does that passage of entire relief and joy come to me without
tears—and I wait for it through life, and hear it, and wonder.”11 The most
famous portrait of Higginson, by John Singer Sargent, suggests aloofness or
arrogance. Though Higginson disliked this picture, Sargent rendered his
idealism decisively and bluntly. His relationship to his musicians was paternalistic: he scrutinized them, individually, in performance; he promoted or
dismissed them; he supported them in illness or misfortune; he censured
those who drank or gambled; he advised them on investments. He attested:
“If the world consisted only of musicians, it would go to pieces at once.”12
As an orchestra owner, Higginson singularly prohibited his players from
undertaking work on symphony days. Spurning the union movement, he
supported the addition of new members from abroad. Spurning Boston’s
own conductors, he hired George Henschel, Wilhelm, Gericke, and Arthur
Nikisch—a twelve-year sequence of music directors plotting a crescendo of
artistic growth. The conductor upon whom he eventually settled in 1906,
Karl Muck, embodied something like Higginson’s own relatively conservative taste in repertoire and interpretation. By this time the orchestra, only
twenty-five years old, was recognized at home and abroad as one of the
world’s supreme symphonic ensembles. Meanwhile, Higginson built a new
hall whose most notable physical feature was its plainness. It was, and is, a
functional space in which to hear music—or, at most, a spare church in
which to worship it. As Higginson modestly refused to bequeath his name,
it initially did not have one; the name it eventually acquired was, simply,
Symphony Hall. A larger, more opulent, more stratified space—a Boston
Carnegie, in which lesser patrons would have sat hidden beneath the eaves
in the topmost balcony—would have made a different statement altogether.
Higginson quote in Symphony Hall: The First One Hundred Years (Boston Symphony Orchestra, 2000), 13. One million dollars cited in Perry, The Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, 294.
11
Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, 392.
12
Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, 315.
10
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
A “spare church” for music. The interior of Boston’s Symphony Hall, 1900.
Courtesy: Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives.
In his eagerness to share music, Higginson set ticket prices significantly
lower than the Boston norm—and less than half what tickets cost for the
New York Philharmonic or (as of its founding in 1891) the Chicago Orchestra.13 He also set aside twenty-five-cent matinee “rush tickets” for nonsubscribers. One hour before concert time, they would race into the second
balcony, where hundreds of seats would fill within minutes. The remaining
rush-ticket holders would sit or stand where they could—including aisles
and (at the Music Hall) the steps to the stage. The Boston Symphony waiting line, where they had patiently queued, was a local phenomenon. “There
you see people from all over this vast country, young and old, many music
students, making the sacrifice of the whole day and studying while they
wait,” a “graduate” of the “rush-line” once wrote to Higginson. “Then the
excitement of not knowing whether you’ll get in and the joy of a seat if you
do; and the brilliancy of the music from the second balcony. Oh! it’s Paradise!…and the neighborliness of dividing your bread and butter and apple
with the fellow next, if he hasn’t any, and the profitable and pleasant chats
it often leads to.”14 Boston Symphony listeners grew ever more demonstrative. At his farewell concert in 1884, Henschel gave the downbeat for Schumann’s Manfred Overture—at which point the orchestra arose and struck
As of 1891, Chicago Orchestra subscriptions cost the equivalent of 50 cents to $1.50
per ticket. New York Philharmonic subscriptions averaged 67 cents to $1.70 per ticket. Higginson’s subscription prices averaged 31 to 50 cents per ticket. (Information furnished by the
Archives of the three orchestras.)
14
Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, 317-18.
13
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
235
up “Auld Lang Syne,” and the entire audience spontaneously arose and
joined in. During Gericke’s regime, audiences were observed to “get as excitable” as at Milan’s La Scala opera.15 The Svengali-like Nikisch, a romantic
wizard, ignited a firestorm of controversy. As documented in the daily
press, his adherents shouted approval, clapped “wildly,” and thumped
canes and umbrellas. His interpretation of Beethoven’s Fifth, on November
8, 1889, was hotly debated in the Boston press for twenty-four days as a
matter of urgent civic import bearing on the city’s cultural pedigree.
According to the social control model, late Gilded Age museums and orchestras mutually embody an escape from social strife, insulated by rituals
of decorous behavior. Allegedly, they intimidated and co-opted neophytes;
they neutralized class unrest. But attending a Symphony Hall concert was
not a suppressive experience. The rush tickets, the cheering and applause,
the town-hall plainness of democratic décor supported an exercise communal, articulate, and demonstrative. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Red Sox hat-
The interior of Carnegie Hall. From Harper’s Weekly’s coverage of the hall’s opening night,
May 5, 1891. Courtesy: Carnegie Hall Archives.
band, however startling, was less out of place at the symphony than in any
gallery of books or fine art. If Symphony Hall, and not the university, was
Higginson’s house of worship, it was partly because compared to his friend
Charles Eliot Norton he was (for all his breeding and aspiration) relatively
The critic Louis Elson quoted in M.A. Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra 1881-1931
(Boston, 1931), 69.
15
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
self-made and earthbound. It was not merely his limited formal education,
but his admired simplicity of speech and manner that distinguished him.
Nor was Higginson remotely the cultural captain of industry portrayed by
Levine or the “cultural policeman” limned by Martin Green.16 The most
obvious explanation for his high-handedness was the one he himself furnished: he was determined to create a world-class orchestra for Boston. If
he showed no mercy for the Harvard Musical Association (from which he
resigned) and Boston Philharmonic, they represented the casual conditions
—lax rehearsal, changing membership, provincial leadership—that Higginson recognized as retarding influences on musical Boston. He rebuffed
unionization not as a coal or steel baron might have, resisting higher wages
and better working conditions, but because local musicians so empowered
would have prevented him from hiring better players from abroad.
When in 1889 Higginson had occasion to bid a public farewell to Gericke
from the stage of the Music Hall, he did not praise the ennobling rectitude
of music, after the fashion of Norton, but said:
…why is the hall so crowded? Why do so many listeners
of all ages sit on the steps and stands in the aisles each
week and each year? They do not come there to please Mr.
Gericke or me; they do not come twenty miles to show
their good clothes; they come to hear the music, and they
listen attentively and quietly, and go away with only a whisper of approval, perhaps, but they are happy. You and I
know that very well. That audience is not from the Back
Bay or from any particular set of people. They are town
folks and country folks, and they come to hear the music
at the hands of Mr. Gericke and his Orchestra.17
The music historian Steven Ledbetter has written that “there was no element in [Higginson] of noblesse oblige”—a pardonable overstatement. Ledbetter is surely correct to emphasize that Higginson
was caught in the grip of powerful enthusiasm for music
—the kind that makes one a proselytizer, eager to spread
as widely as possible the pleasures that he himself felt in
the art. Power for its own sake, even such as comes to a
leader in cultural circles, was less important to him than
making available the wherewithal for the kind of musical
experiences that had so delighted him.18
Martin Green, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (New York, 1966),
16
110.
Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, 87.
17
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
237
To reduce Higginson to an agent (however unwitting) of “control” applies a cramped stereotype to behavior astonishing for its generosity.19 To
reduce the Boston Symphony to such an agent—to ignore the spontaneous
sung farewell to George Henschel, the uproar over Nikisch’s Beethoven,
the rush-ticket holders racing upstairs or sitting on the steps to the stage,
the sheer urgency of mission as communally experienced on a weekly basis
—is an exercise in sophistry. One cannot summarize, as an important sociologist has done, that Boston’s orchestras and museums were creations of
“cultural capitalists” for whom high culture, which they defined and segregated, represented “refuge from the slings and arrows of the troubled world
around them.”20 Henry Higginson did not seek to civilize out of fear.
* * *
Chicago is where social control most credibly applies to institutions of
music. Thanks to Haymarket and the specter of German anarchists, the
psychology of social crisis and class conflict was more acute than elsewhere.
It was Charles Norman Fay, a utilities executive, who spearheaded the creation of the Chicago Orchestra (today, the Chicago Symphony) expressly
for Theodore Thomas. Around the same time, Thomas married into wealth
in the person of Fay’s sister, Rose. Rose Fay Thomas distinguished “the
highest forms of art” and their elite audience from “cheap musical entertainments” for “riff raff” and “the masses”21—language never heard from
Henry Higginson. In fact, Chicago’s Auditorium Theater, opened in 1889,
was built in response to an explicit call for social engineering from the philanthropist Ferdinand Peck. A leading historian of Gilded Age Chicago has
identified “culture”—meaning top-down high culture—as Chicago’s answer to social instability. A study of Chicago’s Gilded Age cultural institutions states that Anglo-Saxon benefactors attempted “to use art to alter
18
Steven Ledbetter, “Higginson and Chadwick: Non-Brahmins in Boston,” American Music, 19 (Spring 2001): 58-59.
19
Higginson’s initiative excited appreciation as far away as Britain, where the London Musical Times (July, 1881) marveled: “We believe we are safe in saying [it] has no parallel in musical history. We have many instance of wealthy patrons of art helping young composers, not
only to make a reputation, but to practically free them from the great battle of existence, so
that they can sustain and add to that reputation in maturer years….The object of our Boston
patron is avowedly to further the knowledge of the art itself,—not to draw forth new treasures from rising composers, but to make thousands acquainted with the treasures lying
around them. The realization of this object is still in the future; but meantime we cannot
withhold the expression of our admiration at the noble manner in which the project has been
organized.” Reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, July 16, 1881.
20
Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th Century Boston,” parts 1 and 2, in
Media, Culture, and Society 4 (1982): 318.
21
Ezra Schabas, Theodore Thomas: America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835-1905
(Urbana, 1989), 190.
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Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
what disturbed them about American life.”22 And, to be sure, the Chicago
Orchestra was not the kind of answer articulated at Hull House, where Jane
Addams rejected the ideal of philanthropy as a unilateral act of enlightenment just as she rejected top-down social reform. At the same time, Peck,
equally an advocate for opera and for the poor, was not a plutocratic elitist
but a utopian pragmatist, not a social controller but a full-blown social reformer for whom the Auditorium Theater would bridge the gap between
rich and poor; in his experience, the elevating effects of high culture were
an article not of wishful thinking but of earnest conviction.23 As for Charles
Norman Fay: had social engineering been foremost in his mind he would
not have made his plan for a Chicago orchestra contingent on the availability of a single conductor. And whatever one makes of the orchestra’s policy
of neither advertising in nor sending complimentary tickets to German-language newspapers24—a precinct of the local press associated with political
agitation—this was not the behavior of an agency of social control.
If the case of Chicago (which I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming
book) retains aspects of social control, it is in New York, finally, that the
social control model completely parts company with the real world of concerts and opera. If in Chicago Thomas mobilized upward through marriage,
for Anton Seidl, in New York, this scenario of professional advancement
was unnecessary. The German community which honored him was powerful. When shortly before his early death in 1898 a movement was begun to
create a permanent Seidl Orchestra, the philanthropists, both Anglo and
German, came to him.25 Many influential New York Germans, including
the opera impresarios Maurice Grau, Heinrich Conried, and Oscar Hammerstein, were Jewish. James Gibbons Huneker, a connoisseur of Russian
and German downtown haunts, was also a connoisseur of Jewish contributions to the cultural mix; he once wrote: “In Europe there is room for race
prejudice, but not in America….We need the Jewish blood as spiritual leaven; the race is art-loving.”26 William Dean Howells, arriving in New York,
wrote to a Boston friend: “There are lots of interesting young painting and
22
Culture and instability: Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, 31. Benefactors, Helen
Lefkowitz Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917
(Chicago, 1976), 6.
23
When Auditorium stockholders objected to the sale of box seats (for fifty cents) at the
Apollo Club’s workingmen’s concerts, Peck and Apollo director William Tomlins refused to
bar workingmen from the boxes. When the stockholders next asked that the velvet appointments of the boxes by protected by canvas from the “tobacco, grease, and other ill-advised
concomitants of poorly educated existence,” Peck replied via the press: “Protect nothing! If I
had my way I would double the velvet hangings for the occasion.” Peck himself shunned the
box seats of the city’s theaters. On Peck, see Mark Clague, “Chicago Counterpoint: The Auditorium Theater Building and the Civic Imagination” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago,
2002): esp. 99, 376.
24
Horowitz, Culture and the City, 111.
25
Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 248-49.
26
James G. Huneker, New Cosmopolis (New York, 1915), 70.
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
239
writing fellows, and the place is lordly free, with foreign touches of all
kinds….Boston seems of another planet.”27 The Musical Courier testified:
“In New York, where there is no civic pride,…the mixture of population
prevents a consolidation of any one artistic direction.”28 A 1987 sociological
analysis, by Paul DiMaggio, amplifies: “New York elites…were less successful than Boston’s in reproducing their status intergenerationally and in
controlling positions of influence….Although New York’s population was
larger, wealthier and included more artists than Boston’s, the greater cohesion of Boston’s upper class facilitated cultural entrepreneurship, while the
size and fragmentation of New York’s elite impeded it.”29
In Boston, the genteel paraphernalia of culture, Charles Eliot Norton
presiding, sounded a loud chorus of instruction, approbation, and alarm.
New York had Richard Watson Gilder, a voice in the crowd. In Boston and
Chicago, the great orchestras ruled musical affairs. In New York, the rivalry
between the Philharmonic, the New York Symphony, and the visiting
Boston Symphony, between the conductors Thomas, Seidl, and Walter
Damrosch, between the Metropolitan and Hammerstein’s Manhattan
Opera seemed never ending. The lager cavern at the Academy of Music assembled ethnic constituencies that coexisted, sometimes uneasily, in the
community of culture. The omnipresent Germans, who migrated uptown
to Carnegie Hall and the Met in the closing decades of the century, were
themselves a complex amalgam of rich and less rich, traditional and progressive, Catholic, Protestant, and Jew interacting with or displacing the
genteel elite. The Manhattan Opera, which (like Higginson’s orchestra) had
no board, was partly undone by Hammerstein’s hostility—a veritable phobia—toward persons of great wealth. In a concert milieu so cosmopolitan
and dynamic, social rites served no predominant purpose. Noblesse oblige was
a fractional part of the whole, as was a plutocracy of wealth in which musical philanthropists as different, and differently motivated, as Andrew
Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, William Steinway, William K.
Vanderbilt somehow commingled (or did not). In any case, it was not the
plutocrats who set the tone but such democrats as Thomas, who performed Beethoven and other masters nightly at Central Park Garden,
where beer and refreshments were served; or Antonín Dvořák, who as director of the National Conservatory instructed American composers to cull
“negro melodies” and Indian chants; or Seidl, who preached democracy—
missionary work for “good men and women” versus “the rich”—at his
twenty-five-cent Brighton Beach concerts on Coney Island; or Henry Krehbiel, who as the “dean” of New York music critics espoused a polyglot
America, a national identity rooted not in parentage but in the soil, to fortiWilliam Dean Howells, Selected Letters (Boston, 1983), vol. 3, 223.
The Musical Courier, December 23, 1903.
29
Paul DiMaggio, “Classification in Art,” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440-55.
27
28
240
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
fy and uplift a common culture.30 Unimaginable in Boston or Chicago was
the inter-racial charity concert presented by the National Conservatory at
Madison Square Garden on January 23, 1894. Dvořák conducted the conservatory orchestra in music by Mendelssohn, Rossini, Liszt, and Volkmann. Maurice Arnold, an African-American composition student whom
Dvořák prized, led his own American Plantation Dances. The finale was the
premiere of Dvořák’s new arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at
Home” for soprano, baritone, and chorus. The soprano soloist was
Sisieretta Jones, nationally famous as the “Black Patti.” The baritone was
Dvořák’s gifted African-American assistant Harry Burleigh. The chorus was
all-black. The capacity audience spilled into every available standing room
space.
Amplifying this picture of intermingling genres, races, and classes was the
city’s democratic social fabric. Francis Neilson, a young writer and actor
closely associated with Seidl, recalled half a century later the hotel restaurants, where “free-lunch counters” provided hearty meals, for a five-cent
tip, to any imbiber who purchased a cocktail, beer, or milk-and-seltzer: “Almost any day of the week, between the hours of eleven and one, a sprinkling of men connected with the drama, literature, journalism, and art might
be found in the barrooms of Broadway’s big hotel….In those days the man
of business, the scientist, the doctor and lawyer would be found in the
company of artists, glad to be in close touch with them and to dispense
their quips and sallies to an ever-widening circle.”31 Of Seidl, the New York
Sun recalled: “No conductor was ever so popular with a mass of people in
this city…he was recognized everywhere in public.”32 In the absence of
telephones and radios, face to face social relations were the norm. “When a
man would stroll down Broadway,” Neilson wrote, “people became better
acquainted.”33 The café, as in Europe, was—in Huneker’s words—“a rendezvous for newspaper men, musicians, artists, Bohemians generally…the
best stamping-ground for men of talent.”34
It is difficult to say in what sense this city’s musical life was “anti-democratic.” Even the cherished notion that the high culture of the late Gilded
Age was “elitist” is hard to reconcile with the New York reality. The Philharmonic was a musicians’ cooperative dominated by Germans. Its most
acclaimed concert, in 1893, presented a symphony— Dvořák’s New World
—infused with plantation song and Indianist refrains. At the Metropolitan
Opera, Wagnerism excited a leveling passion. Germans took possession of
30
Significantly, Thomas and Krehbiel were self-made immigrants’ sons. Hammerstein was
himself a self-made immigrant. For more on the New York music scene, see Horowitz, Wagner Nights. For Seidl and democracy, Horowitz, Wagner Nights, 211.
31
Francis Neilson, My Life in Two Worlds (Appleton, WI, 1953), 94-97.
32
Quoted in Henry T. Finck, ed., Anton Seidl: A Memorial by his Friends (New York, 1899;
rept. 1983), 32.
33
Neilson, My Life in Two Worlds, 143-53.
34
James G. Huneker, Steeplejack, vol. 2 (New York, 1923), 10.
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
241
the house. Their singing societies even invaded the stage, for Die Meistersinger. Their controversial eviction in 1891 evinced ongoing cultural warfare in which class distinctions were neither decisive nor irrelevant.
The historian Thomas Kessner, in a recent study of Gilded Age New
York, revisits the city’s business magnates—including Carnegie, Morgan,
Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt—with fresh appreciation for their audacious
aspiration and colossal resolve. “All New York was demanding new men,”
Henry Adams recalled in his Education:
And all the new forces condensed into corporations, were
demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times the
endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type;—for
whom they were ready to pay millions at sight…for the
old one had plainly reached the end of his strength and his
failure had become catastrophic. The Trusts and Corporations…were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values. The new man could be only a child born
of contact between the new and old energies.
Kessner also observes that these new men distrusted one another.
“Rather than work together to advance a big-business hegemony, they kept
their exchanges to a minimum at a level that was barely civil….New York’s
circle of businessmen was too large and too diverse for any one group or
interest to dominate.” In New York’s circle of musicians and music businessmen, Theodore Thomas and Oscar Hammerstein were new men of
this stripe. They, too, secured no hegemony. Thomas mistrusted the Damrosches and Anton Seidl. Hammerstein made war on the Met. Kessner observes of Boston that its “tightly organized commercial elite formed a circle
of conservative men who were more concerned with avoiding loss than
venturing for gain.” New York, in comparison, embodied a “distinctive
egalitarianism” rejecting “the past’s confining influence.” By 1900 it had become the center of world capitalism. “It was also the center for social reform, unions of every stripe, intellectual radicalism, elite philanthropy, the
social gospel movement, and a freewheeling municipal politics that empowered the working class.” Classical music deserves inclusion on this list.35
* * *
The historical discourse on social control is reinforced by the discourse
on “sacralization.” The concept is useful, even indispensable, in chronicling
the long emerging distinction between “culture’ and “entertainment.”
35
Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind America’s Rise to Economic
Dominance, 1860-1900 (New York, 2003), esp. xvii, 24, 29, 238-39. Adams quoted on page
332.
242
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
Levine, its best-known practitioner, invaluably tracks the sacralization
movement across the arts—musical, visual, dramatic—in turn-of-the-century America; John Sullivan Dwight, Theodore Thomas, and Henry Higginson figure prominently in his Highbrow/Lowbrow. The account gains urgency
from his impatience with restrictive genteel norms. He decries the “bifurcation” of culture into high and low; he deplores the elevation of symphonies
and plays that had excited more popular, less reverent acclaim before stratification set in. The agents of change he identifies are upper class snobs
spurning the rabble. The outcome is desiccated art worshipped by an elite,
pacified audience preoccupied with status.
Rose Fay Thomas, in Chicago, may plausibly exemplify the new attitudes
Levine describes—but Higginson does not. New York opera at mid-century truly illustrates the raucous vitality Levine admires—but once Rossini
and Donizetti made way for Verdi and Wagner, these same audiences needed disciplining. And it is misleading to further argue that, in subsequent
decades, the Academy of Music and Metropolitan Opera “were deeply influenced if not controlled by wealthy patrons whose impresarios and conductors strove to keep the opera they presented free from the influence of
other genres and other groups.”36
Cultural historians argue shrewdly that late nineteenth century institutions of culture abetted the consolidation of class identity—of a durable
monied elite combining new wealth with old.37 This was overtly the strategy
of the “new people” who created the Metropolitan Opera. The Boston
Symphony, too, was clearly “embedded in a Brahmin community.”38 But it
does not follow that the “sacralization of art” was “the work of…‘cultural
capitalists’”39, or that by the 1880s upper-class New Yorkers “had created a
set of cultural institutions they clearly dominated and in which they set
class-specific aesthetic standards, most prominently at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York
Philharmonic,” or that these institutions “derived their programmatic
ideas” from the upper classes, and “principally catered to the city’s economic elite.”40 Wagnerism dominated the musical high culture of the United States—as it dominated in Europe—during the last two decades of the
nineteenth century.41 A defining vignette for musical sacralization in this period would be the reverent silence imposed by Parsifal or Tristan. Wagner inhabited a Romantic Weltanschauung binding art and religion, adumbrating
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 101-02.
37
See especially Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class,
1800-1870 (Middletown, 1980); and Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and
the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie 1850-1906 (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
38
DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship,” 47.
39
DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship,” 35.
40
Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, 267.
41
This is a central observation of Horowitz, Wagner Nights.
36
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
243
themes of worldly travail and spiritual transcendence: sacralization was aesthetically intrinsic to Wagnerism. Composers, not monied elites, were here
the prime agents. Secondarily, sacralization was instigated by priestly and
hypnotic performers like Seidl or Nikisch; or by performers less “religious”
who nonetheless served a devout repertoire utterly remote from “entertainment” and significantly including late Beethoven as well as Wagner and (in
his spiritual mode) Franz Liszt. Theodore Thomas exemplifies this latter
group, as do the celebrated pianists Anton Rubinstein and Hans von
Bülow, whose American impact in the 1870s was great.
These were artists, too, who incomparably elevated standards of performance for an audience not fashion-enclaved but religiously impassioned.
Attendant socialites and others desiring to be seen were as likely to resist as
to submit.42 For more fervent acolytes, sacralization dictated the insatiable
ovation interrupting the first performance of the New World symphony
halfway through, or frenzied Wagnerites who literally screamed delight.
This phenomenon may have fortuitously served other purposes, including
class consolidation. But it essentially documents aesthetic, not sociological,
change.
The trajectory that propelled Wagner from the downtown Stadttheater
(where venders hawked beer down the aisles) to the uptown Met excellently
demonstrates the low-brow to high-brow scenario Levine adduces—but it
does not follow that Wagner was thereby vitiated. As a stage in sacralization, Wagnerism struck a balance between spontaneity and ritual. It refined
taste and behavior without resorting to cultural taxidermy. It illustrates the
sacralizing impulse in American classical music not as inhibitive or intrusive
but, in its only intellectually distinguished phase, substantially resonant with
its subject matter. If Levine’s book is powered by dismay at the damage
wrought by sacralized culture in the course of the twentieth century, there
is nothing wrong with that.43 Determined to root out the culprits, he tracks
them deep into the nineteenth century—which cannot be gainsaid. But
Levine’s heartfelt populism—he prefers democratized cultural expression
and reception; he mistrusts wealth; he dislikes ostentation—misleads him
into overly equating the “highbrow” mentality of his own times, and its
42
Horace Greeley, then a presidential candidate, was observed at an Anton Rubinstein
recital “transported…to the land of dreams….In his ecstatic trance his audible breathing was
a comforting assurance to the myriads who look to him to save the country that he still
lived.” A few months later the New York Weekly Review published “Nature’s Sweet Restorer,”
beginning: “At nearly every concert where the better class of music is performed you may see
somebody asleep….The oratorio, the Thomas Symphony concerts, the Rubinstein concerts
all are attended with great regularity by faithful slumberers….” See Dexter Smith’s, December
1872, and Dwight’s Journal of Music, April 19, 1873. I am indebted to R. Allen Lott for these
references.
43
The same could be said of my own Understanding Toscanini – How He Became an American
Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York, 1987).
244
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / July 2004
anti-democratic disparagement of the popular arts, with the practices and
pronouncements of Thomas and Higginson in another era.
When and how did classical music become parochially “elitist” and restrictively “anti-democratic”? When did reverence degenerate into a species
of snobbery? Less in the Gilded Age, less at the turn of the century, than
during the interwar decades. That Thomas, Higginson, or Seidl religiously
worshipped music did not make them snobs. Even Hammerstein, who despised the rich, sacralized grand opera as “the most elevating influence
upon modern society, after religion.”
To me, [it] so uplifts the soul that I forget its material side
and leave the house with the same feeling I might have after hearing a great sermon or a great church ceremonial. I
sincerely believe that nothing will make better citizenship
than familiarity with grand opera….There cannot be the
slightest question about its refining effect upon a community.44
It was after Higginson, Seidl, and Hammerstein—after World War I—
that sacralization turned into a popular movement, a midculture, rejecting
contemporary culture, enshrining dead European masters and celebrity performers.45 Compared to New York’s late nineteenth century audiences, or
Boston’s—audiences with something to give—the Toscanini audience of
the thirties and forties was intellectually stunted. Juxtaposed with the elitism
of this phenomenon—a distinction not of class, but of kind—Dvořák’s
1895 Madison Square Garden concert, with its Stephen Foster tune and
black singers, its student composer and musicians, more evokes Hull
House than any purported plutocracy of ownership and consumption. Higginson’s Boston Symphony, Seidl’s Metropolitan Opera, dynamic conduits
of new or recent operas and symphonies of unquestioned importance, differed greatly from the curatorial Boston Symphony and Metropolitan
Opera of today.
In truth, the picture of late Gilded Age orchestras and opera houses ensnared by machinations of social control and sacralization is an extrapolation, a cultural metaphor for the social inequities and corporate dominion
of the period. George M. Pullman, in Chicago, created a model workers’
town adjacent to his railroad car works: a supervised environment including
an indoor shopping arcade, a library stocked with 5,000 volumes, a free
school with playground (a rarity), a park with a miniature lake, an athletic
club, a 1,000-seat theater, a hotel, a bank, a church. The streets were paved.
The lawns were maintained. Garbage and sewage were regularly disposed
44
Vincent Sheean, The Amazing Oscar Hammerstein: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario
(London, 1956), 252-53.
45
Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini.
Horowitz / Music and the Gilded Age
245
of. All children were vaccinated for smallpox. Adult education classes were
offered. The theater booked family entertainments only. A military band
gave weekly concerts in the summer. Liquor was prohibited except at the
expensive hotel bar. Prostitution was outlawed. Each facility in the model
town was expected to yield a 6 percent profit. The church was expensive:
no denomination could afford to rent it. The library charged a fee: it had
few members. Rents were relatively high. Workers could not own their
houses; company ownership of all public space and every home, a
spokesman explained, was a necessary part of “a single control of plan and
expenditure, which would have failed if a single lot had been sold.” “Spotters” were employed as informers; potential troublemakers were evicted.
According to an influential 1884 investigative article in Harper’s, by the
economist Richard Ely, the town of Pullman was a “sad spectacle,” a “population of eight thousand souls where not one single person dare speak out
openly his opinion about the town in which he lives. One feels that one is
mingling with a dependent, servile people.”46 This regime cannot be translated into Theodore Thomas’ autocratic style of leadership, or Henry Higginson’s. There were no musical Pullmans.
Not for nothing did Gilded Age culture-bearers decry the new industrial
order as dehumanizing and anti-humanist. Wagnerism, dominating the musical life of the century’s final decades, was in part a compensatory movement, a countervailing initiative against lives over-regulated and controlled.
Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, 199, 206.
46