Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3: Repercussions, 1857-1862 (review)

Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong. Vol. 3: Repercussions, 1857-1862. By Vera Brodsky Lawrence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. [xxviii, 630 p. ISBN 0-226-47015-6 (cloth); 0-226-47016-4 (pbk.). $65 (cloth); $25 (pbk.).]

It is simultaneously awe-inspiring and humbling to read the third and final volume of Vera Brodsky Lawrence's Strong on Music. There is so much information packed into 547 pages that the sheer task of assembling it must have been herculean. Indeed, when I think of how much one can glean from this volume about music and the musical scene in New York City from 1857 through 1862, I wonder whether "herculean" does Lawrence's work justice. This is a handsome book, with wonderful illustrations and an extraordinary index compiled by Marilyn Bliss.

Lawrence began her voyage with George Templeton Strong's diaries in the mid-1970s. Though they were published in truncated form in the 1950s (Diary, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, 4 vols. [New York: Macmillan, 1952]), the editors purposely omitted much of Strong's criticism on musical matters; in their preface, they noted that his numerous comments on music might better be served in a separate publication. At the outset of her project, Lawrence thought she would be able to document the forty years of musical events that coincided with Strong's diary in two or three volumes. But as she progressed with her research, it became clear that music was a "growth industry" during this period. As recently as the early 1990s, she had hoped to discuss the last nineteen years in a single volume. But the amount of new information she was uncovering precluded that plan, and she reluctantly decided to end volume 3 with 1865. Unfortunately, her health declined, and this volume ends in the middle of the Civil War.

As Lawrence tells us in the preface to the first volume, Resonances: 1836-1850, once she had begun to decipher Strong's minuscule handwriting, she was faced with the names of many musicians barely known to twentieth-century music historians. To fill out their biographies and assess their contributions to the cause of American music, Lawrence had to construct a bibliography from mostly uncataloged ephemera, as well as letters, performer contracts, memoirs, and reviews and notices in newspapers and periodicals. As anyone knows who has attempted to search for and synthesize these kinds of materials for just one nineteenth-century music personality, this is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating task. To multiply that task for the hundreds upon hundreds of individuals who, between 1836 and 1862, were residents of the city for several months or more is monumental. That Lawrence was able to complete twenty-seven years of Strong's diaries before her death in 1996 demonstrates her persistence and unquestioning search for the historical detail that enlightens the reader with the context of the events that shaped musical culture in New York City.

Repercussions continues the binary form Lawrence followed in the two earlier volumes, with each year divided into two complementary chapters labeled GTS and Obbligato respectively. The GTS chapters are intended to surround Strong's diary entries with discussion of musical events he attended; the Obbligato chapters are devoted to events he did not attend or record. The reader meets the opera impresarios Bernard Ullman, Maurice Strakosch, and Emanuele Muzio, who vie for audiences by importing many of the greatest prima donnas of the period. During the seven seasons discussed, New Yorkers heard Cora de Wilhorst, Anna de LaGrange, Felicita Vestvali, Erminia Frezzolini, Inez Fabbri, Adelaide Cortesi, the three Mariettas--Gazzaniga, Piccolomini, and Alboni--the sixteen-year-old Adelina Patti, and the young American singer Clara Louise Kellogg. Lawrence quotes extensively both Strong's and the music critics...