Chapter 7 - America

Summary

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.