2 - Presenting Berlioz's Music in New York, 1846–1890: Carl Bergmann, Theodore Thomas, Leopold Damrosch

Summary

The music of French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) gradually appeared in New York concerts under a radical banner unfurled primarily by three intrepid German-born conductors. They were gifted leaders whose dedication to his challenging scores enabled them to wield immense re-creative power, whether perceived as symbols of “the composer's actual authority” or as important interpreters of culture. Berlioz's reputation in the United States depended on their efforts, since he never visited this country to conduct his own works. That situation differed notably from those in Western Europe and Russia, where his heralded concert tours produced authoritative performances of his music that he had personally rehearsed and conducted. Knowing that in other hands his scores could be rendered incomprehensible without sensitive treatment, Berlioz advised composers to conduct their own pieces, for “conductors, never forget, are the most dangerous of all your interpreters.”

Berlioz's reputation in New York benefited from the favorable impact of his extensive travels, especially to Germany. Well before his published account of 1844, Voyage musical en Allemagne et en Italie, which chronicled the early concert tours, press reports by Berlioz and others had disseminated vivid details of his German successes. Before and especially after 1848, emigrant musicians from Germany increasingly dominated musical organizations in New York and Brooklyn. Berlioz's name would have been familiar to them and to New York audiences, less as the leading French composer of the era than as an artist admired in German locations.

In 1846, Berlioz's overtures Les francs-juges and Le roi Lear became the first complete original compositions to be introduced to New York and America. Other occasional performances followed. In 1858, when program notes for a Berlioz Night at Alfred Musard's Concerts referred to Les francs-juges and Le carnaval romain as the “music of the future,” a skeptical reporter for The Albion could not discern the reason; nor could he understand why Berlioz should have been called “the father of the future.” The phrase music of the future recurs frequently in Berlioz criticism in New York. It may represent a distorted reference to Wagner's book, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) (1850), but it was used by Liszt and his disciples at Weimar, where Berlioz had been honored, in connection with their idealistic goals for new music. Carolyne, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt's close friend, claimed she had created the term Zukunftsmusik in connection with Wagner's Lohengrin.