Wagnerism in America differed to a considerable degree from its better-known European variant. This first part examines its early stages, focusing mainly on Anton Seidl's tenure at the Metropolitan Opera, the activities of the Seidl Society and the pioneering work of two leading critics: Henry Krehbiel and Henry T. Finck.
Author : Jos Hermans
In his final years, Wagner flirted with the notion of immigrating to the United States, a place he never saw. Reeling from the financial disaster of the first Bayreuth Festival, he spoke of selling Wahnfried and moving with his family to the New World. Cosima wrote in her diary: “America?? Then never again a return to Germany!”
By 1880, the American plan had become an idée fixe. Cosima wrote: “Again and again he keeps coming back to America, says it is the only place on the whole map which he can gaze upon with any pleasure.” He went so far as to draft a financial prospectus, in consultation with Newell Sill Jenkins, his American-born, German-based dentist. The idea was that American supporters would raise a million dollars—around twenty-five million in today’s currency—to resettle Wagner and his family in “some State of the Union with favourable climate.” In return, the United States would receive earnings from Parsifal and all other future work. “Thus would America have bought me from Europe for all time.” The pleasant climate he had in mind was, curiously, Minnesota. The conceit was not as absurd as it seems. Around a million Germans had immigrated to the United States between 1846 and 1855.
Wagner’s music arrived in the United States in the luggage of the Germania Musical Society—two dozen radical-minded musicians who formed a collective in Berlin in early 1848 and then emigrated en masse. In 1852, the Germanians played an excerpt from Tannhäuser in Boston. The following year, in the same city, they organized a Grand Wagner Night, augmenting selections from Rienzi, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin with Rossini and Bellini arias.
The Germanians toured widely with this repertory, and news of their activities reached the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, one of whose contributors, Richard Pohl, made this prediction: “Wagner, the man of the liberal arts and the man of the future, will rise anew in the land of freedom and the future, and find a permanent home.” The essay ends with the sentence “Westwards moves the history of art!” The composer proudly noted, “In Boston they are now even presenting Wagnernights, evening concerts at which only my own compositions are performed.” He did not know about the Rossini and Bellini. The Germania disbanded in 1854, but its influence lingered, especially in New York City. Carl Bergmann, one of its leaders, began conducting the Philharmonic Society of New York in 1855, causing excitement there with performances of Wagner.
Wagner’s most decisive advocate in the post–Civil War years was the German-born conductor Theodore Thomas, who came to the United States with his family in 1845, when he was ten. Thomas was one of the first modern conductors—a strong-willed podium technician in the lineage of Berlioz, Wagner, and Hans von Bülow. Thomas’s first orchestral concert, in New York in 1862, began with the Flying Dutchman overture. In subsequent years, he led the Philharmonic Society of New York and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and in 1891 he helped found the Chicago Symphony. Thomas often included Wagner excerpts on the summertime concerts that he led in the Central Park Garden, starting in the late sixties. In 1872, he presented “The Ride of the Valkyries,” using a copy of the manuscript. “The people jumped on the chairs and shouted,” he wrote in his memoirs.
American Wagnerism entered its peak phase in 1884, when Theodore Thomas marshaled a grand tour of seventy-four Wagner concerts in twenty North American cities, employing monster choruses and drawing audiences as large as eight thousand people. The success of that endeavor caught the attention of a fledgling New York company, the Metropolitan Opera, which had opened the previous year and immediately run into financial trouble. For the second season, the Met board, led by James A. Roosevelt, Theodore’s uncle, decided to switch from Italian opera to German fare. The émigré conductor Leopold Damrosch, well acquainted with Wagner, was engaged as music director. Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Walküre formed the core of the repertory, the last causing a sensation that probably ensured the survival of the house.
When Damrosch died suddenly of pneumonia toward the end of his first season, the Met brought in Anton Seidl, a greatly gifted young conductor who had assisted Wagner in Bayreuth. Although Wagner operas had been staged in New York long before the 35-year-old became music director of the Metropolitan Opera in the 1885/86 season - Tannhäuser (1859), Lohengrin (1871), Die Walküre (1877), Rienzi (1878) - it was Seidl who helped Wagner, the German avant-gardist, achieve a breakthrough in the New World.
Born in Pest in 1850 and educated in Leipzig and Bayreuth, the high-flyer, whom Wagner considered the "Kapellmeister of the future," presided over the Metropolitan for six years and, with his six "German seasons," ensured the economic survival of the financially shaky house, which had opened its doors in 1883. After the first two years of the new opera house, on the corner of Broadway and 39th Street, proved a financial failure, Seidl was entrusted with the experiment of a "German season," which meant that all performances, including those of Italian and French operas, were given in German. The success was so overwhelming that the experiment was sustained for six years.
In those early years, the Met had to compete with the traditional dominance of Italian opera at the Academy of Music, which had been operating since 1854 and had a capacity of 4,000 spectators. Seidl's artistic and commercial success was primarily due to his conducting of Wagner. In the six years of his tenure, he was on stage a total of 589 times, whereas the Met season at that time ran only from late November to late March and on average only sixty performances were held. On the other hand, however, there were extensive tours to the other music centers of the young country, such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis. The lion's share of Seidl's conducting sessions at the Met and on tour, 321 of 589 performances, were devoted to Wagner. To the extent that one can speak of an American wagnerism, in terms of the musical realization of the stage works, this was largely shaped by Seidl.
The decisive factor for audiences and critics was undoubtedly the "Bayreuth" hallmark that preceded his reputation and clung to his work in America. Already as a young man, Seidl entered Wagner's sphere of influence and also got to know him from his most attractive side: as a work-obsessed theater man and as a family man. Originally destined to become a priest and reportedly losing his calling after a performance of Lohengrin in Vienna, the young Seidl went to Leipzig in 1870 to continue his studies at the university and conservatory. After two years, he returned to Budapest to be instructed in Wagner's new music by Hans Richter. When Wagner asked Richter to recommend a young musician to assist him in Bayreuth, the choice was not difficult. Thus Seidl, unspoiled by the opera business of his day, came to the sanctuary of future music already at the age of twenty-two.
In Bayreuth, he was almost in daily contact with Wagner, whom he assisted in the completion of Götterdämmerung. With Franz Fischer, Felix Mottl and Hermann Zumpe, he formed the so-called Nibelungen-Kanzlei. He helped with the many orchestra rehearsals and had to move Wellgunde's chariot in the first scene of Rheingold at the festival - not only physically but also musically a delicate task. Seidl's Wellgunde was Lilli Lehmann, a native of Würzburg, whom he would later lead to her great triumphs in New York as Isolde and Brünnhilde. Wagner was so taken with the skills of his favorite pupil that, had Richter failed, he would not have hesitated to entrust Seidl with the direction of the first Ring in Bayreuth. After six years at Wagner's side, Seidl could rest assured that he was well acquainted with Wagner's intentions in all matters of tempi and phrasing and the coordination of music and stage action. This familiarity was the basis of his widely recognized authority as a musician and enabled him to play a prominent role in the promotion of Wagner's canonical works in Europe and America.
The first stop in the career of the "Kapellmeister of the future" was Leipzig. There he met Angelo Neumann, formerly a tenor, now a theater director and, since the Vienna Lohengrin of 1861, an energetic supporter of Wagner. Neumann was undoubtedly one of the most colorful figures in the service of the Wagner cause. Barely two years after the Bayreuth premiere, he staged the entire Ring in Leipzig, demonstrating that the Nibelungen cycle could be realized by both court and city theaters. This was followed in May 1881 by four highly successful Ring cycles at the Viktoria Theater in Berlin. The following year Neumann and Seidl achieved an almost sensational success with Wagner's problem child Tristan und Isolde, which surprised even the composer. Already here it became clear that Anton Seidl would play a key role in Wagner's hoped-for triumphant victory march on the world's opera stages.
To that end, Angelo Neumann organized the legendary tour of his Richard Wagner Theater, which lasted from September 1882 to June 1883 and made the Ring accessible to a wide circle of music lovers for the first time. It traveled through the German provinces, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Russia. The Nibelungen work was performed on a total of 158 evenings; in addition, there were 58 concerts featuring Wagner pieces. Almost all of these performances were conducted by Seidl. In his memoirs, Neumann only occasionally grants us a glimpse of the perilous organizational and transportation problems that had to be overcome. Unlike the Bayreuth Festival, however, Neumann's tour of traveling theater was a financial success! In light of these heroic deeds, it was not surprising that when Leopold Damrosch died in February 1885 and a replacement had to be found, the Met turned to Seidl, who in the meantime was committed to Bremen but stayed there for only a short time. The Met's new chief opened the season on Nov. 23, 1885, with Lohengrin. The New York music critics were unanimously impressed: it was the beginning of a glorious, unexpectedly long working history.
Although there were all sorts of objections to the renegade in Wahnfried, he was nevertheless invited in 1897 to share the musical direction of Parsifal with Felix Mottl. It was to be his last opera conducting job. Anton Seidl died of food poisoning in the prime of his life on March 28, 1898, mourned by the entire New York music world. The funeral service in the house where he held his greatest triumphs was a memorable event in the annals of the New York cultural history.
A very important factor in Anton Seidl's pioneering work were the New York music critics; they received Wagner predominantly with an open mind. As many as five New York newspapers sent reporters to the first Bayreuth Festival. Chief among them was Henry E. Krehbiel (1854-1923), music critic of the prestigious New York Tribune, from 1880 until his death. As early as 1891, he made his mark with his "Studies in Wagnerian Drama," a concise, intelligent Wagnerian breviary that has been reprinted several times. Concentrating on the more mature works, the book displays a critical level unparalleled at the time in the English-speaking world and one that competes well with the Wagner texts of George Bernard Shaw.
In second position was Henry T. Finck (1854-1926), who wrote for the New York Evening Post. Compared to the down-to-earth, analytical Krehbiel, the doyen of New York music criticism, Henry Finck must be counted among the species of Wagner enthusiasts. A good storyteller and a spirited polemicist, he gloated in mocking Wagner's German opponents such as Eduard Hanslick. Finck's impact was perhaps even greater than Krehbiel's, since he also distinguished himself in the Evening Post as an expert on cooking and gardening.
Finck studied philosophy, classical philology and music at Harvard College. After graduating in the spring of 1876, he immediately went to Europe and hurried to Bayreuth. There, with money advanced by his uncle, he bought three patronage tickets that gave him access to all three Ring cycles. With Wagner's personal permission, he was even allowed to attend the rehearsals. In his memoirs, he wrote: "It was a wonderful experience for me to be in the workshop of the greatest opera company the world has ever known. This Bayreuth festival was certainly the beginning of the Golden Age of Music.” Such adventurous involvement in the daring enterprise of the first festival gave direction to his career and resulted in 1893 in a two-volume compendium entitled "Wagner and His Works. The Story of His Life with Critical Comments," which went through seven editions in ten years and is still worth reading today for its eyewitness accounts.
Despite all their differences in temperament, Krehbiel and Finck had much in common. Both were of German descent, both had grown up in a musical family. They had read their Schopenhauer and regarded music as the highest in art. Armed with an excellent education, they raised music criticism to a level hitherto unheard of. Moreover, both were young, born in 1854, a circumstance with which Finck thought to explain why Wagner was received with enthusiasm in America, while in Germany, where music criticism was mainly the domain of older gentlemen, he met with sometimes stubborn opposition. Only the writings of Krehbiel, Finck and other like-minded people helped Anton Seidl's work, which was confined to music, achieve its broad impact, so that, as Anne Dzamba Sessa and Joseph Horowitz have shown, one may very well speak of a wagnerism in terms of the cultural history of the United States - an independent Wagnerism that differs in some respects from its European variants in Germany, France and England.
A feature of American wagnerism is the remarkably high participation rate of politically active, culturally aware women, who gave it an almost protofeminist spin. Chief among these was Laura Holloway Langford (1843-1930), author of the bestseller ("Ladies of the White House") that made her wealthy and independent, also editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the leading daily newspaper in Brooklyn. With a few like-minded women, she founded an "Anton Seidl Society" in 1889. Whether these ladies loved Wagner or Seidl more is hard to say. A "Seidl Orchestra" was composed of members of the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Met Orchestra, which for several years gave numerous concerts in a huge 3,000-seat music pavilion on Brighton Beach, in a relaxed atmosphere of beer and tobacco, labeled the "Wagner Nights." Seidl also traveled to inland cities with these programs. In the era before the mechanical reproducibility of music, it was mostly these popular concerts that brought Wagner close to the people.
Apart from the music, which, like everywhere else, almost never missed its mark, certain aspects of the Wagner phenomenon were admired in America in a distinctive way. Many Americans saw the amazing man from faraway, small Bayreuth as a pioneer and entrepreneur, blessed with the talent to know how to assert himself and his work. This impressed and continues to attract attention. Moreover, Wagner was especially appreciated by Americans of German descent. Many of them were former Americans who had been forced to flee to America and who, for political reasons, felt an emotional affinity with the former barricade man and political refugee. In that politically positive context, it is understandable that the Marine Band played Wagner at the inauguration ceremonies of President Grover Cleveland in both 1885 and 1893 (he was the 22nd and 24th president) at the White House - an event that has not occurred since. At the 1893 inauguration, Seidl, then head of the New York Philharmonic, was allowed to conduct; he had pieces from Die Meistersinger, Tristan und Isolde, Götterdämmerung and Parsifal performed.
However, the historically most notable act of the Seidl Society was the staged performance of Parsifal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on March 31, 1890 (Palm Sunday) - a social event of the first order, in which even President Cleveland (although not in office at the time) participated. Needless to say, the work's Christian packaging was a particularly attractive attraction for the American public. The extent to which Wagner's legacy was Americanized in the sense of an unconditional Christian interpretation can be seen in a Seidl Society announcement: "The Finding of Christ Through Art." The musical direction of the most auratic of Wagner's works could not have been entrusted to anyone better, for Seidl had been Wagner's right hand in the years when the score was written.
No one was more familiar with this music than he, since he had learned it in statu nascendi. In Brooklyn, however, the entire Bühnenweihfestspiel was not performed: the choruses and flower girls had to be omitted. Still, about three-quarters of the score could be heard in Brooklyn, New York and Boston, with first-rate singers: Emil Fischer, Theodor Reichmann, Paul Kalisch and Lilli Lehmann. New York could thus claim a certain Parsifal tradition for itself when, thirteen years later, the Met under Alfred Hertz committed the "sacrilege" of performing the entire Parsifal for the first time outside Bayreuth on Christmas Eve 1903 - an event that provoked outrage not only in Bayreuth but throughout the German press.
It was Heinrich Conried's idea, the Met's new general manager, to mount a full production of Parsifal in defiance of Bayreuth's exclusivity claim. Cosima tried to prevent the staging with a lawsuit -Wagner v. Conried et al.- but the U.S. Circuit Court ruled against her. Because the United States was not a signatory to the Berne Convention, Parsifal fell outside of German copyright.
The man then occupying the White House took notice. “Mother came back yesterday, having thoroughly enjoyed Parsifal,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit.
Sources :
1. Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Wagner in Amerika. Stationen einer alternativen Wirkungsgeschichte. Teil I:1885-1917”, Wagnerspectrum, Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Heft 2 / 2013.
2. Alex Ross, “Wagnerism. Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music”, 4th Estate, 2020
Originally published in the blogger-edition of Leitmotif, april 2021. Update : august 2023