1 Mahler in New York (I) Discovering the New World—New York in 1908 The Metropolitan Opera and Heinrich Conried Tristan and Don Giovanni (January–February 1908) The public here is not blase´. It is greedy for anything new.... N the early years of the twentieth century, everything concerning the New IWorld, and particularly New York, was already a matter of intense interest to Europeans. Mahler had numerous friends and acquaintances who had visited the United States, including Richard Strauss, Franz Schalk, Lilli Lehmann, Moriz Rosenthal,1 and Gerhard Hauptmann, and he must certainly have questioned them about their experiences. But the picture he obtained from them concern- ing that distant world was doubtless a confusing one. So Mahler’s emotions on leaving Vienna were surely divided: on the one hand, he could feel satisfaction at leaving behind a country which had shown itself unable to appreciate his true value; on the other, there must have been quite a considerable degree of apprehension as he contemplated such a huge new challenge. The European perception of America was largely one of a continent where money was omnipo- tent, enterprise untrammelled, and advertising deafening. Beyond that, it was a place where virtuosos hogged the limelight: Mahler would scarcely have contem- plated becoming a star in the American style, but how else would he have a hope of succeeding in a society which was said to be a desert of ignorance and philistinism? 1 Concerning Moriz Rosenthal, see above, Vol. ii, Chap. 10, 325, and n. 35, and Vol. iii, Chap. 10, 722. Rosenthal’s writings have now been collected and edited by Mark Mitchell and Allan Evans in Moriz Rosenthal in Word and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2006). Of Rosenthal’s conversation with Mahler about America, there remains only the following sentence: ‘The discussion turned to America, to the material chances of an American artistic tour, and unfortunately I gave him favourable news.’ Obviously Rosenthal was one of the many European musicians who believed that America had ‘killed’ Mahler. 2 Gustav Mahler We now have evidence that Mahler’s interest in America may have begun a whole decade before he first crossed the ocean. As early as 1887 one of his letters mentions an offer received from a New York agent to replace Anton Seidl, no doubt at the Metropolitan Opera.2 What is more, Mahler is clearly taking the offer seriously.3 Later on, in a letter he wrote to his friend Lilli Lehmann, who had sung no less than 260 performances at the Met,4 he mentions a second proposal that had come his way. The letter which refers to it is undated, but Zolta´n Roman compared it with a much later one (1907)5 addressed to Mahler by the impresario Charles Lo¨wenstein. Roman concluded that the first letter men- tioned above must have been written after Anton Seidl’s death, which occurred on 28 March 1898, and that it refers to Lo¨wenstein’s proposal that Mahler should direct the National Conservatory of Music (a position left vacant since Anton Dvorˇa´k’s departure in 1895) and conduct fifty concerts per season in New York.6 What is particularly surprising is that Mahler should seriously have considered accepting such an offer only two years after being appointed to the directorship of the Vienna Opera, a position that he had only managed to achieve after a long struggle over many years.7 As it soon turned out, there was justification for Mahler’s hopes and for his fears concerning America. However, for an understanding of the world which he was about to encounter in 1908, a brief description of New York and the influential families which supported the arts there seems indispensable. This is not because Mahler’s contacts with these circles were ever any closer than with their Viennese counterparts, but because this high society had brought into being the Metropolitan Opera, the setting for most of his activity throughout his first two transatlantic visits. It has often been claimed that at the turn of the century the spectacle at the Met was to be seen in the audience rather than on the stage. The society which had founded the institution had indeed planned it as a showcase for the rich and the successful, and it had become the faithful reflection of a swiftly changing milieu. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, New York society was ruled by a money aristocracy consisting of families whose fortunes went back no further than a hundred years, and sometimes a good deal less than that. The small world of the ‘Knickerbocker Gentry’, of the ‘four hundred families’, was haughty, closed, and exclusive, the more so since the criteria underlying its establishment were ill-defined and artificial. In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, who better than anyone else knew the milieu into which she had been 2 A summary of Anton Seidl’s American career is given further on in this chapter. 3 See MBR2, no. 62, to Fritz Lo¨hr. 4 Concerning Lilli Lehmann’s activity at the Metropolitan Opera, see below in this chapter. 5 AMS. Lo¨wenstein’s mention of the death of Johann Nepomuk Fuchs, one of Mahler’s assistant conductors at the Hofoper, which occurred in 1899, is a vital clue to the dating of Mahler’s letter to Lehmann. 6 See above, Vol. ii, 102 ff. 7 See Zolta´n Roman, ‘Gustav Mahler and Lilli Lehmann’, NBLS, 105 ff.; and Gustav Mahler’s American Years (Pendragon, Stuyvesant, New York, 1989), 2ff. This book will hereinafter be referred to with the initials MAY. January–February 1908 3 born, describes New York and its society in the 1870s with a subtle mixture of irony and nostalgia. Here was a closed circle, with its own rites, habits, and taboos. The unique identity of the clan was characterized by its favourite sports and pastimes, its winter balls and summer resorts. It bragged of being out of the reach of anyone not born an Astor, Goelet, Roosevelt, Cutting, Livingston, Lorillard, Bayard, or Schuyler, or who was not at least related to these illustrious clans by marriage. Yet this society also had its parvenus. The most famous among them was certainly August Belmont, born Aaron Belmont8 in the vicinity of Frankfurt. He had been sent over to the United States by the Rothschild Bank earlier in the century, and so successful were his first years there that in 1837 he founded his own bank. After marrying a Christian, Commodore Perry’s9 daughter, he had taken to collecting works of art, built an elegant mansion on Fifth Avenue, and would become President of the Jockey Club. Soon nicknamed ‘the King of Fifth Avenue’, he was one of New York’s most prominent personalities, and as such was appointed president of the Stockholders’ Committee at the Academy of Music. The Academy was the small, shabby theatre (luxury was not yet con- sidered good form) that stood at the corner of 14th Street and Irving Place, and was New York’s leading opera house for nearly three decades. In those days, in New York as elsewhere, opera had been the favourite pastime of the well-to-do, although one that belonged more to the sphere of ‘good form’ than to culture. In this world, ruled by affectation and boredom, works of art—mainly paintings—were collected largely for their market value, although artists and intellectuals were definitely not welcome in fashionable drawing rooms. In this decidedly provincial New York of the 1860s and 1870s, the opera house was of crucial importance as a showcase for successful business families. For preference, one went to the Academy of Music on Monday evenings, and those were also the evenings reserved for grand balls. Edith Wharton describes one such Monday evening at the Opera: On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York: Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances ‘above the Forties,’ of a new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the 8 The name of Belmont was common in Frankfurt, as was its German-language equivalent: Scho¨nberg. 9 Matthew Galbraith Perry (1794–1858), American naval officer, diplomat, and younger brother of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, became famous for entering the Bay of Yedo (Tokyo) with four ships and delivering a letter from the president of the United States to the emperor of Japan. The letter requested a number of favours which were later granted by the Japanese. The resulting changes in the country were far-reaching: in two generations the nation was raised from a feudal level to the status of a world power. 4 Gustav Mahler sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music. It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily press had already learned to describe as ‘an exceptionally brilliant audience’ had gathered to hear her.10 Newland Archer, the hero of the novel, arrives late at the Opera, for New Yorkwas a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises 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 terrors that ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.