Music and Letters
Oxford University Press
February 2023
Volume 104, Issue 1

In this sophisticated and thought-provoking monograph, the historian Melissa D. Burrage provides an insightful account of how the notable German-born conductor Karl Muck (1859-1940)—Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) from 1906 to 1908, and again from 1912 to 1918—was mistreated, vilified, and witch-hunted in the United States at the time of
the First World War. The Karl Muck Scandal traces the progressive downfall of the once celebrated and popular conductor and underlines how, ironically, his constitutional rights and freedoms were stripped in a country known as the world’s leading democracy.

The book begins with a chapter outlining Karl Muck’s rise to fame in both his native Germany and in Boston before 1914. As Principal Conductor of the Berlin Court Opera and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Muck was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s favorite conductor. Burrage concentrates on showing how the two men shared a mutual affection and how the Kaiser’s belief in Germany’s greatness played a part in shaping Muck’s worldview. As part of the German aristocracy, Muck was deeply nationalistic and chauvinistic, as well as proud of his country’s racial and cultural superiority. Exposed to anti-Semitism at a young age, Muck learned ‘how to discriminate just as he learned how to study academic subjects and how to play musical instruments’ (p. 11).

Burrage convincingly demonstrates why Boston’s social and cultural environment appealed to Muck. With a strong German diaspora, the city was filled with German shops, restaurants, and street names. German Americans enriched the city with their holiday traditions, helped to shape American middle-class cultures, and were actively involved in Boston’s academic domain. The city also benefitted from a rich musical life, with its musically literate community revering German composers and musicians. Moreover, Boston’s Brahmin elites, Henry Lee Higginson (the founder of the BSTO) and Muck all shared an elitist, flawed world- view with anti-Semitic racial thinking. Indeed, Muck and the BSO, which he skillfully shaped into a widely acclaimed institution, appeared to be a match made in heaven.

However, this deep-rooted Germanophilia, as shown in the next two chapters, began to dissipate from 1914 onwards. Burrage uses a wealth of examples to underline how Americans became horrified by German atrocities in the war and how Germany posed a particular threat to the northeast of the United States. She further demonstrates the ways in which Bostonians mobilized for war, through patriotic rallies and parades, and how the city’s ‘physical environment changed dramatically’ and ‘became a military center’ (p. 77). What is most interesting, though, is Burrage’s analysis of how the American federal government played a crucial role in demonizing the enemy. President Woodrow Wilson and the previous President Theodore Roosevelt—who was instrumental in luring Muck to the United States in the first place—voiced anti-German rhetoric, escalating the level of bigotry and paranoia, fanning flames of anger and hostility towards Germans.

To a large extent, the pre-war Germanophilia, Burrage argues, was replaced by a wartime Germanophobia that directly threatened the livelihood and security of Muck. In chapter 4, the author presents a compelling account of how the conductor was ‘caught in the middle of a rivalry between Boston and New York’ and subjugated to a witch hunt by a devious board member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra: the wealthy sociality Mrs. Lucie Jay (p. 117). New York was the center of American capitalism, a leading tourist destination, and a cultural capital. Yet, its musical institutions failed to court Muck, whose conductorship at the BSO turned this New England orchestra into a powerhouse and made the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (NYP) look inferior.

By working in tandem with journalists to produce fake news and by mobilizing a network of influential, wealthy individuals in leadership positions, Mrs. Jay successfully exploited the wartime anti-German hysteria to destabilize the BSO and tarnish Muck’s reputation. Burrage mines a vast wealth of sources, in particular contemporary new stories, to support her chilling argument that the federal government, the Department of Justice, the American Defense Society, and local Boston authorities all played a role in persecuting Muck, hoping to find some form of guilt that would allow them to destroy the conductor’s professional and personal life.

In the subsequent two chapters, Burrage elaborates on Muck’s mistreatment by illustrating how he was continually harassed and accused of different crimes, from miscommunicating by ham radio with German submarines at sea, to being a dangerous spy, tampering with weapons used by American soldiers, and even sending prostitutes with venereal diseases to American military bases. No evidence had ever been found that Muck was guilty of any of these, nor was he an enemy alien, given that he held Swiss citizenship.

Nevertheless, his actions constantly drew suspicion. By being close to high-ranking German military officers and the aristocracy; as well as connected to the Kaiser, Muck was what Burrage called ‘guilty by association’ (p. 207).

Through these accusations, Burrage closely examines how Muck became progressively agitated and bitter, and also disillusioned by the United States, his adopted homeland. Correspondingly, she considers the ways in which Muck’s colleagues—especially Henry Lee Higginson and the BSO players—turned paranoid and began to doubt the innocence of their music director. Indeed, Burrage aptly points out that while Muck considered himself an ambassador of German culture, seen as a form of elite goods and activity, the wider American public saw Muck as a manifestation of Kultur (the German word for ‘culture’), a term that not only referred to the nation’s artistic identity, but also its militaristic goals for domination and conquest.

In chapters 6 and 7, Burrage eerily documents how American authorities eventually found Muck’s ‘one weak spot’ in 1918 through sexual surveillance. The conductor’s questionable romantic and erotic relationships with Margaret Herter, and more importantly Rosamond Young, provided the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) the basis to arrest and charged Muck through two somewhat obscure federal acts. Burrage underlines the absurdity of the situation by showing how Muck was offered two choices by the BOI: either ‘serve a military sentence as a “dangerous enemy alien” at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia’, and they would keep his love affairs under seal, or ‘accept an indictment for the sexual charges under the [two federal acts] and serve a criminal sentence in a local penitentiary” which would turn his sex life into a public affair (p. 252). To protect Young and his wife from public shame, Muck accepted to being prosecuted for bogus enemy charges. Little did he know that the government would decide to expose the affair a year later anyway, or that it would seize all his belongings and income. For the first seven chapters, one could not help but feel that Burrage was generating sympathy for muck, especially by emphasizing how his civil rights and his constitutional right to privacy were violated, how he was arbitrarily stripped of his position and status and made penniless, and how he was traumatized, humiliated, and dehumanized by the whole experience. Nonetheless, the author recognizes in the final chapter, which focuses on mucks life in Germany after deportation from the united states, how the conductor was a jealous, bitter man with moral shortcomings and a flawed personality. His elitism, antisemitism, and belief in German superiority were all compatible with Nazi ideologies. Furthermore, muck’s friendship with Hitler and his active involvement in persecuting jews in the Third Reich seem to suggest that Mrs. Jay might have had a valid point all along—that muck was a carrier ‘not only of German culture but of extreme political ideology as well’ (p. 290).

This book is interesting not only with regard to First World War history, but also sheds light on American cultural, music, political history in the first two decades of the twentieth century. More importantly, it tells a compelling story concerning immigration, national belonging, and vigilante justice against the backdrop of the first total war in history. Readers can draw many enlightening insights into the interrelations between music, politics, and nationalism from this work, and also appreciate that the United States in the 1910s was not necessarily a cosmopolitan country of freedom and liberty. Last but not least, the author’s informative endnotes and extensive bibliography (nearing 100 pages) will probably delight the attentive reader, while the abundance of photographs throughout provides an added dimension to this dark episode of history.

Percy Leung
University of St. Andrews
Published by Oxford University Press (2022)