The Kindness of Strangers: Edward MacDowell and Breslau

Born to a nonmusical family in New York City in 1860, Edward Alexander MacDowell had few advantages for building a career other than his natural talent and ambition. By 1900, though, he was widely acknowledged as the greatest classical composer America had ever produced, and by his death in 1908 he was eulogized on both sides of the Atlantic as the first American classical composer to achieve a major international reputation. He found, as did many of his contemporaries, that success in the competitive music world of the late nineteenth century required hard work, influential friends, patience, and luck. Famously, he received timely help from Franz Liszt, a former colleague of MacDowell’s teacher Joachim Raff, who selected his Erste moderne Suite, op. 10, for performance at the 1882 gathering of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) in Zürich. He also benefited from the advocacy of his mother’s close friend Teresa Carreño, who played his works frequently in the United States and abroad, most notably when she insisted on playing his First Piano Concerto, op. 15, in Berlin on February 13, 1890, by telling her agent, “No MacDowell, no Carreño!”

But the real proof of a growing reputation comes when a composer’s music is championed by strangers. In MacDowell’s case, we can gauge this reputation by following his progress in the German city of Breslau. Despite living for twelve years in Europe, MacDowell never visited this Silesian city on the far eastern reaches of the German empire. Nonetheless, his works received important attention from a prominent publisher and a respected conductor in this major city, helping to speed his acceptance throughout central Europe. Because of the unique history of this troubled city in the twentieth century, previous MacDowell scholars have not examined the surviving archival materials there; this article draws on important sources available only in the city’s libraries and archives and described here for the first time. MacDowell’s reception in Breslau demonstrates the appeal of his music for contemporary audiences, an appeal that transcended nationalism to achieve his ideal of an international musical style.

The History of Breslau/Wrocław

Figure 1.

Map of the German empire during MacDowell’s residence. Frankfurt and Darmstadt are in the west-central portion of the empire, and Breslau is on the Oder River in the southeast. The current German-Polish border follows the Oder and Neisse rivers from Stettin south to a point just east of Dresden.

Located on the Oder River at the junction of two important trade routes, the city has been a major regional center of trade and culture since the Middle Ages. It changed hands frequently as the ethnic makeup of Silesia evolved, vacillating between Polish, Bohemian, and German influence. It was incorporated in 1335 into the Bohemian Kingdom, part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was annexed by Prussia in the 1740s, and by the late nineteenth century was the third-largest Prussian city, after Hamburg and Berlin.¹

In the closing months of World War II, Breslau was declared a “Fortress,” with orders to resist the advancing Soviet armies at all costs. The resulting siege laid waste to much of the city, which lay in ruins when the Nazis finally surrendered on May 6, 1945. When the Potsdam Conference moved the Polish border to the Oder-Neisse line, the former German city of Breslau became the Polish city of Wrocław. The remaining German residents were relocated, and the city became home to Polish citizens, many of them relocated from the city of Lviv (Lwów), which had been transferred from Poland to the Ukraine. After decades of rebuilding, Wrocław has become an important Polish city.²

Immediately after the war, Zofia Gostomska-Zarzycka, a newly arrived archivist at the University of Wrocław, founded the Silesia-Lausitz Collection in order to preserve the legacy of the city’s German heritage. This collection contains books, concert programs, and other printed materials dating from before 1945, including a nearly complete collection of Breslau periodicals...