100 Percent Americanism in the Concert Hall: the Minneapolis Symphony in the Great War

100 Percent Americanism in the Concert Hall: The Minneapolis Symphony in the Great War

Michael J. Pfeifer

In 1918 a Minnesota music critic assessed a Minneapolis Symphony concert warmly, noting that the orchestra’s recent “racial house-cleansing” – a purge of some of the orchestra’s German and Austrian-born musicians – had not com- promised the quality of the ensemble’s playing. While the critic believed that “like gasoline and whiskey, music and war really ought not to have anything in particular to do with each other”, he nonetheless judged it well worthwhile from a “standpoint of musical interest” to hear the orchestra “magnificently” perform the national anthems of the Allied nations that opened the concert. Earlier, at the beginning of the 1918–1919 season, members of the Minneapolis Symphony had been required to sign loyalty oaths to the United States, while a cellist had been compelled to leave the orchestra for a period because he sup- posedly had hung portraits of the Kaiser and his wife over his fireplace (these were actually pictures of “the deceased Austrian emperor Franz Josef and his wife”).1 While the Minneapolis Symphony and its Munich-born founder Emil Oberhoffer (1867–1933) did not encounter the extreme repercussions that led to the arrest, internment, and deportation of Karl Muck (1859–1940) and Ernst Kunwald (1868–1939), respectively the German and Austrian conductors of the Boston Symphony and the Cincinnati Symphony,2 a significant nativist, anti- German, backlash did mark the orchestra’s experience of the latter years of the Great War. The upper Midwestern state of Minnesota was substantially German in nativity and ancestry at the outbreak of the war, which may have mitigated some of the harshly jingoistic reaction that German symphonic

* I am grateful to Frank Jacob and William H. Thomas for their comments on a draft of this chapter. 1 Clipping with Minneapolis Symphony concert program, November 21, 1918, in Minnesota Orchestra Archives, Manuscript Division, University of Minnesota-Minneapolis; the St. Paul critic may have been referring to the suspension of cellist Emil Schultz, discussed below. Edmund A. Bowles, “Karl Muck and His Compatriots: German Conductors in America during World War I (and How They Coped)”, American Music 25, no. 4 (2007): 408, 431fn18. 2 Bowles, “Karl Muck and His Compatriots”; Barbara L. Tischler, “One Hundred Percent Ameri- canism and Music in Boston during World War I”, American Music 4, no. 2 (1986): 164–176.

musicians encountered elsewhere in the United States.3 But many of the same tendencies emerged in milder fashion in Minnesota with demands for changes in orchestral repertoire to include “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the deletion of works by German composers, and rampant suspicions regard- ing the loyalties of German and Austrian musicians. As with many American orchestras, the Minneapolis Symphony from its founding under Oberhoffer in 1903 had embodied the German cultural dominance of symphonic music in the early twentieth century United States,4 employing many musicians that had been born or trained in German lands and often performing the works of German composers such as Beethoven and Wagner. This chapter will use a number of primary sources such as reminiscences of musicians and orchestra board members, concert programs, and newspaper sources, to analyze the anti-German fervor that swept the Minneapolis Symphony and symphonic music more generally in the United States during the Great War.5 The history of orchestral music performance in Minneapolis, a flour mill- ing metropolis on the upper Mississippi River commanding an extensive agricultural and extractive (iron mining & timber) hinterland,6 drew substantially on the contributions of musicians who had been born in German lands. Hamburg-born Ludwig Harmsen arrived in 1868 and organized the Orchestral Union in the 1870s, pairing Schubert and Schumann with lighter fare, even as some critiqued “Professor” Harmsen’s ostentatious conducting style.7 Franz Danz, a violist and cornetist from Darmstadt via New York City arrived in the

3 For the anti-German backlash in Minnesota during World War I see, for example, Art Lee, “Hometown Hysteria: Bemidji at the Start of World War I”, Minnesota History 49, no. 2 (1984); 65–75; Steven J. Gross, “‘Perils of Prussianism’: Main Street German America, Local Autono- my, and the Great War”, Agricultural History 78, no. 1 (2004): 78–116; La Vern J. Rippley, “Con- flict in the Classroom: Anti-Germanism in Minnesota Schools, 1917–19”, Minnesota History 47, no. 5 (1981): 170–183; William E. Matsen, “Professor William S. Schaper, War Hysteria, and the Price of Academic Freedom”, Minnesota History 51, no. 4 (Winter 1988), 130–137. The classic work on the German-American experience in World War I is Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, 1974). 4 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: The Politics of Art, Mu- sic, and Emotion in German-American Relations, 1870–1920”, Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (2003): 585–613. 5 For a recent assessment of the state of the field of Great War/World War scholarship with an emphasis on the American experience in transnational perspective, see Chris Capozzola, et al., “Interchange: World War I”, Journal of American History 102, no. 2 (2015): 463–499. 6 For an economic and social profile of early twentieth century Minneapolis, see Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Min- neapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 23. 7 John K. Sherman, Music and Maestros: the History of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1952), 11–14.