Though Theodore Thomas had introduced Wagner’s music to America in 1861, following a ‘Grand Wagner Night’ in Boston in 1853, it was not until 1872 that Wagner rose to fame in America with a performance of ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Thereafter Wagner’s music assumed a dominant place in American music and cultural life for the better part of the next four decades.

This chapter explores unusual facets of Wagner in relationship to America, including the heretofore unexamined influence on Wagner of writers such as Friedrich Gerstäcker, the German migration to America, Wagner in the Yiddish theatre, and Wagner’s views on America. For Wagner, America was the harbinger of modernity and represented a new frontier for his pioneering music dramas, which enabled an untutored mass audience to experience the intensity and spiritual claims in Wagner’s alluring realisation of drama with music. Wagner’s innovations in narration through sound would have the greatest influence through a novel modern medium – motion picture – and would define how music in the twentieth century became an indispensable instrument of mass entertainment within American film.

This chapter opens with a consideration of the parallels in the careers of Puccini and Rachmaninoff, both disparaged as conservative throwbacks to an earlier era and purveyors of a cloying sentimentality who reached larger audiences than any of their contemporaries. The author shows, however, that these stereotypes have been reconsidered in recent years, before proceeding to consider Puccini’s influence on the composers who followed him, including both composers of art music and the creators of mid-twentieth-century musical theatre. He argues that Puccini’s works came to be seen as having established the dominant rhetorical conventions of how music expresses human emotion, and argues that in Puccini’s hands, music rather than text becomes the primary driver of storytelling (an approach the author contrasts with that of Richard Strauss). The emotions in Puccini’s works have a universality to them, which has been a key factor in their global success. The author argues, however, that Puccini’s hegemony is now under threat, partly because contemporary popular music now diverges so sharply from the classical tradition and partly because the idea of universal human emotions and experience is being challenged in an era of identity politics.

Strauss at the turn of the century was seen as an enfant terrible who used music as an instrument for candid, unsentimental, and realist explorations of the human experience. Although embraced by the public, critics attacked his works as self-indulgent; they found him glib and shallow, content with superficial drama punctuated by a desire to shock. After World War I, both the right and left dismissed his lush, hyperrealist aesthetic as a relic of a bygone era, one side lamenting that Strauss was too cosmopolitan and the other ignoring him as benignly irrelevant. When the preeminence enjoyed by radical modernism ended mid-century, a neglected historical reality came into view: the resilience of tradition. In that reassessment, Strauss’ innovations, with those of composers such as Pfitzner, Schrecker, Martinů, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, and Braunfels, suggest an alternative formulation of the modern, one that helped define the trajectory of twenty-first-century music.

For the first one hundred and fifty year of its existence, the Eroica was a mirror of shifting political aspirations and fears. It framed the hopes of the century as well as its disappointments. This chapter discusses the views of Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz, as well as the opinions of Felix Weingartner and Anton von Webern. Brahms’s connection to the symphony is examined in the context of ideologies of cultural decline at the turn of the century, and the public perception of the Eroica is looked at by examining the analyses of the symphony as presented and popularised in several guidebooks to the symphonic repertoire. Throughout the chapter the connection to Napoleon and the ideals of heroism in politics and the arts functions as a recurring theme.

A symbiosis in music between performance and composition prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. It was particularly evident among conductors. Conducting did not emerge as a distinct profession until the last quarter of the century. But even then, those who sought to make conducting a career either dabbled in composition or harboured lifelong hopes to succeed with their own music. The instincts of a fellow composer dominated the approach to interpretation from the podium.

In Johannes Brahms’s circle of close friends and colleagues, there was perhaps no better example of this link between composing and conducting than Otto Dessoff (1835–92). Dessoff is remembered only as a conductor, despite many fine works to his name. It was to Dessoff that Brahms entrusted the first performance, in 1876, of his First Symphony Op. 68Dessoff was born in Leipzig to Jewish parents; he met Brahms in 1853 but became a close friend in the 1860s, after they both settled in Vienna.

It is impossible to separate any discussion of approaches to the performance of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (and therefore conducting Mendelssohn) from the thorny and troubled history of the reception of Mendelssohn's music since his death in 1847. The dynamics of listening are such that when a performer is determined to make a case for the music that is at odds with a reigning albeit reductive sense of a composer's aesthetic, audience expectations will offer resistance. Whether a conductor implicitly or explicitly concedes an established construct of Mendelssohn or not, a particular set of prejudices is present, derived from the standard account of Mendelssohn in music history. In that standard view Mendelssohn is distinct, in terms of surface, sound, and meaning, from Wagner and late Romanticism. This assumption of a stark contrast between Wagner and Mendelssohn concedes the Wagnerian version of the development of nineteenth-century music. The consequences are that one should not expect to hear nearly so radical a disjunction in basic performance practices and sound between Mendelssohn and, for example, Beethoven and Schubert. Yet the audience expects such a contrast when it comes to Wagner, vindicating the idea that Wagner's music and aesthetic contain a stark originality. This may apply as well in a subordinate way to Liszt. The self-justifying rhetoric of the “new” German school has been integrated into our approach to performance. Wagner and Liszt have been set apart from their predecessors by succeeding generations in a manner that suggests a fundamental paradigm shift, requiring a different approach to performance.

The predicament: a musical culture at the margins

From the perspective of the first decade of the current century, the career of high-art concert music during the twentieth century is not a story with a happy end. A significant number of contemporary participants in the world of so-called classical music, particularly journalists, look back at the twentieth century as an era of deepening gloom and decay. The last century, it is argued, bequeathed to the next an unresolved and deepening crisis. The traditions of instrumental and vocal music cultivated in the public sphere since 1750 gradually lost their appeal and a significant hold on the public imagination. Despite striking developments in the transmission of music by electronic means throughout the twentieth century (thereby ensuring music’s wide accessibility), classical music moved to the periphery of culture and politics. In particular, new music for the concert stage commanded less attention during the second half of the century than at any time in the previous two hundred years. The suggestion made by Carl Dahlhaus in 1972 that the Mahler revival of the 1960s might function as a bridge between the traditions of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde of the twentieth seems, in retrospect, not to have been prescient. The embrace of Mahler coincided with a shift away from modernism. The accessible postmodernism of Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, and Arvo Pärt has not succeeded in creating a resurgence of wide audience interest in new music, the brief success of Henryk Górecki’s 1976 Third Symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Sounds) notwithstanding.

When Hans Keller set about debunking musical professions he considered “phoney,” his “hit list” was predictable: opera producers, music critics, musicologists, and of course, violists and conductors. These professions were new to his generation as independent full-time activities; they were consequences of a historical process in Western Europe sociologists once termed “rationalization.” During the second half of the nineteenth century, professions became more bureaucratized along lines of ever more narrowly defined specialties. These in turn demanded the creation of targeted processes of training and certification. Expertise, particularly in medicine and science, but in the arts as well became more competitive on a massive international scale justifying discrete divisions and narrow fields.

Music critics once did something else as professionals. They were composers (Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Virgil Thomson), teachers (Richard Wallaschek, Robert Hirsch feld, Eduard Hanslick, and Paul Henry Lang) or writers (consider Max Kalbeck, Ludwig Speidel, and, in the extreme George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound). Musicology became an autonomous academic field relatively late, and only in the generation of Guido Adler and Hermann Kretszchmar did music history emerge as a distinct branch of scholarship. In Keller's world (he trained in Vienna as a violinist and was forced to flee to England in 1938) great violists were actually violinists; no one set out to become a violist. Opera producers, in the contemporary sense, were entirely unknown.

In 1918, Paul Bekker argued that the symphonies of Beethoven had been revolutionary and still captured the imagination of listeners in a unique way. It was not the color and variety of Beethoven's instrumental sound or his ingenuity as an orchestrator that set his symphonic works apart, but rather his exploitation of the sheer volume and presence of sound; Beethoven opened up the sonic power implicit in the orchestral forces of Mozart and Haydn, and the symphony now became more than a sonata for orchestra. Bekker suggested that Beethoven composed with a new “idealized picture of the space and listening public” in mind; his goal was to reach a “mass” public with the symphony, and to create a “community” through the act of shared listening. That community was far reaching, representing humankind, a spectrum of listeners that extended beyond the aristocracy and embraced those liberated from the shackles of the past by the ideas and events surrounding the French Revolution. Beethoven's orchestral music, through its implied extra-musical narratives and its impact on listeners, became associated not only with Romanticism but also pre-1848 political liberalism.

Bekker construed Beethoven's political and social ambition as a causal element in the act of symphonic composition. Beethoven sought a clear break with an older tradition of symphonic writing that had been directed at a circumscribed public consisting of the elite connoisseur and patron in favor of a strategy that could reach beyond and forge solidarity within a wider audience.

Music in the public sphere: Brahms and the spectre of Wagnerism

The writing of music history frequently gains its primary impetus from that which we regard in our own time as great music: those works through which we have chosen to define the essential achievement and identity of a composer. Working backwards, so to speak, from a retrospective evaluation of an entire corpus of music, we distort biography and history to fit our judgements, justifying our own tastes through the medium of scholarly historical explanation. In the case of Johannes Brahms, his popularity and renown are now most often associated with his orchestral music. Therefore, among the most carefully scrutinised aspects of his evolution as a composer is his presumedly difficult and sustained struggle with the task of writing a symphony. His first explicit public foray into this genre was completed relatively late in his career. The C minor Symphony was finished and first performed in 1876. Brahms was already well established and world famous. His substantial early reputation throughout Europe obviously did not derive from his work as a composer of symphonies. His most spectacular success before the completion of Op. 68 was achieved with Ein deutsches Requiem in 1868 and (with the added fifth movement) in 1869. The prominent Berlin critic Louis Ehlert, who considered himself a fair-minded but not uncritical Brahms enthusiast, had little doubt, writing in 1880, that the symphonic form was not, and would likely never be, Brahms's forte.

The Haydn paradox: from engaged affection to distant respect

The mystery that plagues the contemporary conception and reception of Haydn and his music has a long and remarkably unbroken history. Perhaps Haydn experienced the misfortune (an ironic one when one considers the frequency of premature deaths among his great contemporaries or near contemporaries) of living too long. Years before his death in 1809 he was considered so old that the French and English had already presumed him dead in 1805. Many wrote condolence letters and a Requiem Mass was planned in Paris. Haydn's music was both familiar and venerated. Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773–1850), writing in Vienna in 1846, reflected the perspective of the beginning of the nineteenth century in his Geschichte der europaeisch-abendlaendischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik. Haydn had ‘elevated all of instrumental music to a never before anticipated level of perfection’. Haydn had a ‘perfect knowledge of instrumental effects’ and with Mozart (for whom Haydn was the ‘example and ideal’) created a ‘new school which may be called the German or … the “Viennese” school’. Theirs was the ‘golden age’ of music. Most significantly, Haydn's instrumental works represented the standard of what was ‘true beauty’ in music.

This was the way the eminent Austrian author and painter Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), writing during the mid 1840s, recalled his first impression of Vienna. He penned this description in a thinly veiled autobiographical sketch about himself and two friends who came to Vienna to enter the university. The year was 1826. Stifter was twenty-one years old when he arrived from Bohemia to take up the study of law. Franz Schubert, already quite well known in the city, was twenty-nine and living with his close companion Franz von Schober, two blocks from St. Stephen's.

To the young Stifter – and to most other literate contemporaries of his generation raised in the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Empire – Vienna was already the stuff of legend. It was a place of seductive paradoxes and symbol of both past grandeur and modernity. Danger, opportunity, squalor, and beauty existed side by side. Vienna with its own uniquely alluring surface possessed (as Stifter recounted) the power to render the ugly seemingly invisible, as if by magic. Yet the conditions of daily life in the city during Schubert's adult life were grim if not sinister. Vienna simultaneously ennobled and threatened the lives of those drawn to it.