Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht (review)

The subject of this highly original book will be familiar to all observers of American musical life: the transfer of German repertory and musicians to the United States from the mid-nineteenth century through World War I. What is novel about Gienow-Hecht’s perspective is that she views this cultural exchange through the lens of diplomatic history and international relations. In addition, the author deploys the concept of “elective affinities” to frame her narrative. The result is a provocative and informative account of institutions, performers, and audiences during a critical period in American history.

A professor of international history at the University of Cologne, Gienow-Hecht sees the “diplomatic dimension” as “key to an understanding of American artistic life,” namely because “foreign artists and administrators played a central role in the United States’ quest for high culture” in the nineteenth century (3). This quest led Americans not only to German conservatories, Weimar, and Bayreuth, but also to seek out French Impressionist paintings and English goods. Noting that in the late twentieth century American popular music and Hollywood film became a dominant global force, Gienow-Hecht reminds us that a century earlier the United States was not an exporter but a target of the European competition for cultural expansion (22). This expansion, however, was not—and could not be—systematically determined by governments. An important feature of Gienow-Hecht’s research is the extension of the term “diplomacy” to include not only official state-to-state relations, but also nongovernmental actors such as missionaries, teachers, and other cultural ambassadors. Her primary focus is on “soft power,” the unofficial, informal negotiations of cultural exchange.

Sound Diplomacy’s largely chronological organization begins a generation before German unification, when large numbers of immigrants exerted significant influence on the American musical scene. The eagerness with which foreign practitioners and practices were embraced by the “host” population is explained by the assertion that the two sides shared an “elective affinity”—a term derived from the title of Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, which was itself borrowed from a late eighteenth-century theory of chemical bonds. The novel’s plot revolves around a married couple who invites two friends to their estate for an extended visit as houseguests. Predictably, strong attractions arise, severely testing their bonds. Goethe’s literary experiment raised the question of whether human relations are governed by laws analogous to those of the physical world determining attraction and repulsion, union and by-product. It is a question that has haunted the social sciences, forming a subtext within Max Weber’s sociology (14; cf. Richard Herbert Howe, “Max Weber’s Elective Affinities: Sociology within the Bounds of Pure Reason,” American Journal of Sociology 84, no. 2 [September 1978]: 366–85).

In Gienow-Hecht’s hands, the novel functions as an allegory of the musical ties between Americans and Germans, structuring the text itself. The first two chapters set the scene, describing “Transatlantic Cultural Relations” and contemporary ideology regarding “Music, Magic, and Emotions.” Americans believed Germans to be “the people of music” and that the classical-romantic symphony epitomized their artistic achievement. Americans visited German centers of activity due to “an almost mythical belief” in their musical atmosphere (57). The United States lacked a comparable environment.

The “houseguests” were musicians capable of filling the perceived voids in American life. The qualifications of conductors such as George Henschel, Theodore Thomas, and Anton Seidl for this mission were several. They were “rooted cosmopolitans,” that is, German by heritage or training, but not necessarily birthplace, and therefore embodied music’s universalism. These musicians were also predominantly male but capable of projecting the emotional nuance of instrumental music. In Victorian America, where “emotions were typically associated with femininity and childhood,” such public expressivity had irresistible appeal (68).

The musicians’ American hosts included philanthropists such as Henry Higginson and Charles Norman...