The sacralization of music, to take a term from the scholar Lawrence Levine, had its advantages. Many composers liked the fact that the public was quieting down; the subtle shock of a C-sharp wouldn’t register if noise and chatter filled the hall. They began to write with a silent, well-schooled crowd in mind. Even so, the emergence of a self-styled elite audience had limited appeal for the likes of Beethoven and Verdi. The nineteenth-century masters were, most of them, egomaniacs, but they were not snobs. Wagner, surrounded by luxury, royalty, and pretension, nonetheless railed against the idea of a “classical” repertory, for which he blamed the Jews. His nauseating anti-Semitism went hand in hand with a sometimes charming populism. In a letter to Franz Liszt, he raged against the “monumental character” of the music of his time, the “clinging firmly to the past.” Another letter demanded, “Kinder! macht Neues! Neues!, und abermals Neues!” Or, as Ezra Pound later put it, “Make it new.”
Unfortunately, the European bourgeoisie, having made a demigod of Beethoven, began losing interest in even the most vital living composers. In 1859, a critic wrote, “New works do not succeed in Leipzig. Again at the fourteenth Gewandhaus concert a composition was borne to its grave.” The music in question was Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. (Brahms knew that things were going badly when he heard no applause after the first movement.) At around the same time, organizers of a Paris series observed that their subscribers “get upset when they see the name of a single contemporary composer on the programs.” The scholar William Weber has shown how historical repertory came to dominate concerts across Europe. In 1782, in Leipzig, the proportion of music by living composers was as high as 89 percent. By 1845, it had declined to around 50 percent, and later in the nineteenth century, it hovered around 25 percent.
The fetishizing of the past had a degrading effect on composers’ morale. They started to doubt their ability to please this implacable audience, which seemed prepared to reject their wares no matter what style they wrote in. If no one cares, composers reasoned, we might as well write for one another. This was the attitude that led to the intransigent, sometimes antisocial mentality of the twentieth-century avant-garde. A critic who attended the premiere of the Eroica saw the impasse coming: “Music could quickly come to such a point, that everyone who is not precisely familiar with the rules and difficulties of the art would find absolutely no enjoyment in it.”
In America, the middle classes carried the worship of the classics to a necrophiliac extreme. Lawrence Levine, in his book Highbrow/Lowbrow, gives a devastating portrait of the country’s musical culture at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a world that abhorred virtuosity, extravagance, anything that smacked of entertainment. Orchestras dedicated themselves to “the great works of the great composers greatly performed, the best and profoundest art, these and these alone,” in the redundant words of the conductor Theodore Thomas, who more or less founded the modern American orchestra.
In some ways, Levine’s sharp critique of Gilded Age culture goes too far; while much of the audience unquestionably appropriated European music as a status symbol, many leaders of the orchestral world—among them Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony—saw their mission in altruistic terms, welcoming listeners of all classes, nationalities, and races. The cheaper seats at the big urban concert halls didn’t cost much more than tickets for the vaudeville, usually starting at twenty-five cents. All the same, paternalism stalked the scene; classical music began to define itself as a mode of spiritual uplift, of collective self-improvement, rather than as a sphere of uninhibited artistic expression.
Within a decade or two, the American symphony orchestra seemed so ossified that progressive spirits were calling for change. “America is saddled, hag-ridden, with culture,” the critic-composer Arthur Farwell wrote in 1912. “There is a conventionalism, a cynicism, a self-consciousness, in symphony concert, recital, and opera.” Daniel Gregory Mason, a maverick Columbia professor, similarly attacked the “prestige-hypnotized” plutocrats who ran the New York Philharmonic; he found more excitement at open-air concerts at Lewisohn Stadium, in Harlem, where the audience expressed itself freely. Mason delightedly quoted a notice that read, “We would respectfully request that the audience refrain from throwing mats.”
In the concert halls, a stricter etiquette took hold. Applause was rationed once again; listeners were admonished to control themselves not only during the music but between movements of a large-scale composition—even after those noisy first-movement codas that practically beg for a round of clapping and shouting. German musicians and critics concocted this rule in the first years of the twentieth century. Leopold Stokowski, when he led the Philadelphia Orchestra, was instrumental in bringing the practice to America. Mason wrote in his book: “After the Funeral March of the Eroica, someone suggested, Mr. Stokowski might at least have pressed a button to inform the audience by (noiseless) illuminated sign: ‘You may now cross the other leg.’ ”
In the 1930s, a new generation of composers, conductors, and broadcasters embraced Farwell’s idea of “music for all.” The storied middlebrow age began. David Sarnoff, the head of NBC, had a vision of Toscanini conducting for a mass public, and the public duly materialized, in the millions. Hollywood studios hired composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Aaron Copland, and Bernard Herrmann, and even pursued the modernist giants Schoenberg and Stravinsky (both of whom asked for too much money). The Roosevelt administration funded the Federal Music Project, which in two and a half years entertained ninety-five million people; there were concerts in delinquent-boys’ homes and rural Oklahoma towns. Never before had classical music reached such vast and diverse audiences. Those who consider the art form inherently elitist might ponder an irony: at a time of sustained economic crisis, when America moved more to the left than at any time in its history, when socialistic ideas threatened the national religion of free enterprise, classical music attained maximum popularity. Toscanini’s Beethoven performances symbolized a spirit of selflessness and togetherness, both during the Great Depression and in the war years that followed.
Yet many young sophisticates of the twenties and thirties didn’t look at it that way. They saw the opera and the symphony as cobwebbed fortresses of high society, and seized on popular culture as an avenue of escape. In 1925, a young socialite named Ellin Mackay, the daughter of the chairman of the board of the New York Philharmonic, caused a stir by abandoning the usual round of debutante balls for the cabaret and nightclub circuit. She justified her proclivities in a witty article titled “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains,” which appeared in a fledgling magazine called The New Yorker; the ensuing publicity enabled that publication to get on its feet. Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera was one of the dreaded rituals from which the Jazz Age debutante felt liberated. Mackay caused an even greater scandal when she became engaged to Irving Berlin, the composer of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Her father publicly announced that he would disinherit his daughter if she went through with her plans. Ellin and Irving married anyway, and Clarence Mackay became a buffoonish figure in the popular press, the very image of the high-culture snob.
The defections were legion. Carl Van Vechten, the notorious author of Nigger Heaven, started out as a classical critic for The New York Times; he witnessed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and hailed the composer as a savior. Then his attention began to wander, and he found more life and truth in ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, blues, and jazz. Gilbert Seldes, in his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, declared that “ ‘ Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and ‘I Love a Piano’ are musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than Indian Love Lyrics and ‘The Rosary’ ”—Gilded Age parlor songs—and that “the circus can be and often is more artistic than the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.” For young African-American music mavens, the disenchantment was more bitter and more personal. In 1893, Antonín Dvořàk, the director of the National Conservatory in New York, had prophesied a great age of Negro music, and his words raised hopes that classical music would assist in the advancement of the race. The likes of James Weldon Johnson awaited the black Beethoven who would write the music of God’s trombones. Soon enough, aspiring young singers,