November, bidding farewell with his own Second Symphony. To his ardent fans, it was as though he had been driven out by the forces of ignorance and reaction. When he left the city, at the end of the year, two hundred admirers, Schoenberg and his pupils among them, gathered at the train station to bid him farewell, garlanding his compartment with flowers. It seemed the end of a golden age. “Vorbei!” said Gustav Klimt—“It’s over!”
The reality was a bit less romantic. Throughout the spring of 1907, Mahler had been negotiating secretly with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and not the least of the management’s enticements was what it called “the highest fee a musician has ever received”: 75,000 kronen for three months’ work, or, in today’s money, $300,000. Mahler said yes.
The New World
There was no lack of music in the American republic at the beginning of the twentieth century. Every major city had an orchestra. International opera stars circulated through the opera houses of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Virtuosos, maestros, and national geniuses landed in Manhattan by the boatload. European visitors found the musical scene in the New World congenially similar to that in the Old. The orchestral repertory gravitated toward the Austro-German tradition, most musicians were immigrants, and many rehearsals took place in German. Operatic life was divided among the French, German, and Italian traditions. The Metropolitan Opera experienced a fad for Gounod, a cult of Wagner, and, finally, a wave of Puccini.
For the rich, classical music was a status symbol, a collector’s delight. Millionaires signed up musicians in much the same way they bought up and brought home pieces of European art. Yet the appeal of composers such as Wagner and Puccini went much wider. In 1884, for example, Theodore Thomas led his virtuoso orchestra in a cross-country tour, playing to audiences of five, eight, even ten thousand people. And, as the historian Joseph Horowitz relates, Anton Seidl conducted all-Wagner concerts on Coney Island, his series advertised by means of a newfangled “electric sign” on Broadway. Enrico Caruso, who began singing in America in 1903, was probably the biggest cultural celebrity of the day; when he was arrested for groping the wife of a baseball player in the monkey house in Central Park, the story played on the front pages of newspapers across the country, and, far from ruining the tenor’s reputation, it only augmented his already enormous popularity. In the New York Times, advertisements for classical events were jumbled together with myriad other offerings under the rubric “Amusements.” One night the Met would put on John Philip Sousa’s band, the next night the Ring. Elgar’s oratorios rubbed shoulders with midget performers and Barnum’s Original Skeleton Dude.
New technologies helped bring the music to those who had never heard it live. In 1906, the year of Salome in Graz, the Victor Talking Machine Company introduced its new-model Victrola phonograph, which, though priced at an astronomical two hundred dollars, proved wildly successful. Caruso ruled the medium; his sobbing rendition of “Vesti la giubba” was apparently the first record to sell a million copies. Also in 1906, the inventor Thaddeus Cahill unveiled a two-hundred-ton electronic instrument called the Telharmonium, which, by way of an ingenious if unwieldy array of alternators, broadcast arrangements of Bach, Chopin, and Grieg to audiences in Telharmonic Hall, opposite the Met.
The hall closed after two seasons; local phone customers complained that the Telharmonium was disrupting their calls. But the future had been glimpsed. The electrification of music would forever change the world in which Mahler and Strauss came of age, bringing classical music to unprecedented mass audiences but also publicizing popular genres that would challenge composers’ long-standing cultural hegemony. Even in 1906, ragtime numbers and other syncopated dances were thriving on the new medium. Small bands made a crisp, vital sound, while symphony orchestras came across as tinny and feeble.
What classical music in America lacked was American classical music. Composition remained in the condition of cultural subservience that Ralph Waldo Emerson had diagnosed in his essay “The American Scholar” back in 1837: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” American writers answered Emerson’s call: by the turn of the century, libraries contained the works of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, and the brothers James. The roster of American composers, on the other hand, included the likes of John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, and Edward MacDowell—skilled craftsmen who did credit to their European training but who failed to find a language that was either singularly American or singularly their own. Audiences saved their deepest genuflections for European figures who deigned to cross the Atlantic.
Strauss came to America in 1904. Notwithstanding his mildly dangerous aura—the American critic James Huneker labeled him an “anarch of art”—he was greeted almost as a head of state. Theodore Roosevelt received him at the White House, and Senator Stephen B. Elkins, a powerful operator in the pro-business Republican Party, invited him onto the floor of the Senate. In return, Strauss granted America the honor of hosting the premiere of his latest work, the Symphonia domestica. The program stirred controversy: it described a day in the life of a well-to-do family, including breakfast, the baby’s bath, and connubial bliss. Despite some extended patches of note-spinning, the new work gave vigorous expression to Strauss’s belief that anything could be set to music as long as it was felt intensely. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, observed that music could find as much pathos in the disagreements of an ordinary house hold as in the agonies of the house of Agamemnon. There in one sentence was Strauss’s career from Domestica to Elektra.
Demand for Strauss in New York grew so strong that two additional orchestral performances were arranged. They took place on the fourth floor of Wanamaker’s department store, which was one of the original American superstores, occupying two blocks along Broadway between Eighth and Tenth streets. Wanamaker’s felt that it had a duty to provide cultural uplift: its piano showroom, like Carnegie Hall uptown, regularly featured recitals by celebrated artists. “They do things sumptuously at the Wanamaker store,” the Times wrote of the first Strauss concert. “There was, of course, an eager desire on the part of many people to hear the great German composer conduct his own compositions, and though there were fully five thousand people accommodated at the concerts last evening, there were many applicants who had to be refused, and every inch of space was occupied, many people standing.” In the European press, however, Strauss was promptly pilloried as a moneygrubbing vulgarian who so desperately wanted to add to his coffers that he performed in supermarkets.
The Symphonia domestica entertained Manhattanites; Salome scandalized them. When the Metropolitan Opera presented the latter work in January 1907, there was a kerfuffle in the Golden Horse shoe, as the elite ring of boxes was known. Boxes 27 and 29 emptied out before the scene of the kissing of the head. J. P. Morgan’s daughter allegedly asked her father to shut down the production; Salome did not return to the Met until 1934. A physician vented his disgust in a letter to the New York Times:
I am a man of middle life, who has devoted upward of twenty years to the practice of a profession that necessitates, in the treatment of nervous and mental diseases, a daily intimacy with degenerates … I say after deliberation, and a familiarity with the emotional productions of Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss, that Salome is a detailed and explicit exposition of the most horrible, disgusting, revolting and unmentionable features of degeneracy (using the word now in its customary social, sexual significance) that I have ever heard, read of, or imagined … That which it depicts is naught else than the motive of the indescribable acts of Jack the Ripper.
The greater part of the audience couldn’t turn away. One critic reported that the spectacle filled him with “indefinable dread.”
Giacomo Puccini arrived for his first American visit just a few days before the Salome affair. When his ship was trapped for a day in a fogbank off Sandy Hook, bulletins of his progress went out to opera-loving readers of the New York Times. Puccini’s operas had lately become runaway hits in the city; during his five-week stay, all four of his mature works to date—Manon Lescaut, La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly—played at
