From Paris to Peoria

It is not easy to imagine Franz Liszt performing in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Macon, Georgia; Peoria, Illinois; or Zanesville, Ohio. But his foremost rival, Sigismund Thalberg, did just that. In fact, during the mid-nineteenth century, citizens in more than one hundred American cities from Portland, Maine, to Charleston, South Carolina, and from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Dubuque, Iowa, had the opportunity to hear one or more of the world's most celebrated pianists, including—in addition to Thalberg—Leopold de Meyer, Henri Herz, Anton Rubinstein, and Hans von Bülow. Although some of their names have faded into obscurity, each of these virtuosos had already won acclaim in major European musical centers before embarking on an American tour. In the New World as in the Old, they captivated audiences through their unsurpassed technical skills, interpretive gifts, and colorful personalities.

The American visits of these five pianists took place between 1845 and 1876, a period of expansion and transformation in American musical life. Totaling nearly one thousand concerts (listed in Itineraries), their tours are representative of the rapid spread throughout the country of European concert music by foreign virtuosos of the highest order, who began to flock to the United States in the 1840s. As a result of their extensive appearances, many Americans were introduced to the glories of the concert hall by some of the finest performers the world had to offer.

A chronicle of these tours contains a wealth of stories that will appeal to pianists, music historians, and general readers alike. The piano was reaching its apex as the central instrument of music making, artists were seeking fortune and adventure, entrepreneurs were inventing the profession of musical impresario, a still-adolescent country was striving to prove to itself and the world its appreciation of the art of music, and performers and audiences were establishing concert traditions that have yet to be superseded. As we explore these tours, I will document America's fascination with foreign virtuosos, examine the varied composition of audiences and their behavior, and chart the establishment of a canon of masterworks for the piano and the evolution of concert-giving into a highly organized commercial enterprise. In addition, tales will be told of humbug, romance, nervous breakdowns, physical exhaustion, and, most important, sublime musical experiences.

It is those experiences, shared by thousands of listeners in large cities and small towns across the country, that have come to intrigue me most. Trying to determine the influence or long-term effect of these virtuosos—positive, negative, or indifferent—is the most typical aim of a study such as this. Yet that goal misses the significance the audiences placed on these concerts. To understand what these musical experiences meant to nineteenth-century American listeners, we cannot afford to snicker at our predecessors or at the focus of their attention. The earliest of these pianists and their contemporaries have often been portrayed as first-rate performers but second-rate musicians, who flooded the New World with their misguided virtuosity, wowed musically uneducated Americans with technical displays of music of dubious value, and thereby delayed America's musical maturity by several decades. For many people, however, these performers offered thrilling, memorable, and sometimes intensely emotional experiences. I encourage you to attune yourself to the perspective of these audiences and to postpone worrying about whether their perception was true or not. It was true as far as they were concerned.

To this end, I have let the participants and observers speak for themselves as much as possible. We hear not only from the revered critic John Sullivan Dwight in Boston and the outspoken composer William Henry Fry in New York but also from unnamed reviewers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Janesville, Wisconsin; and other small cities, who reflect the opinions of a wide range of concertgoers. Some audience members understood little that they heard, preferring folk tunes or sentimental ballads; others appreciated the music or at least attempted to do so; and still others, though possessing little musical knowledge, were moved to tears and could express their feelings beautifully and powerfully.

I have, however, relied heavily on Dwight for several reasons. He is one of the few people who heard and wrote extensively about each of the pianists highlighted here, and thus his comments provide a consistent viewpoint. He was among the most knowledgeable and articulate of the critics, and his conservative tastes—though these are frequently exaggerated—make him a perfect foil to these pianists. He was neither oblivious to nor silent about the negative aspects of the early virtuosos, who were often willing to subordinate musical concerns to the display of technical skills. Nevertheless, he found something to relish in what each of these pianists had to offer.

The nineteenth-century observer was more aware of the pros and cons of the traveling virtuoso than most modern writers will admit. There are enough caricatures and parodies, visual as well as literary, to make this clear, and they will be served up here on a regular basis. It is true that Barnum made some far-fetched claims about Jenny Lind, to take the most famous (and extreme) example, but most people knew it. Still, the chance to hear a legendary singer when she came to one's own small town drew audiences regardless of absurd advertising stunts. The distance between auctioning off tickets to Lind's concerts and the modern-day phenomenon of "The Three Tenors" is not so large. Of course, today we have more choices. If "The Three Tenors" arena performance is too vulgar and overtly commercial, we can still hear these great voices in more artistic venues. It is fine to laugh with our nineteenth-century counterparts, but there is no reason for us to feel smug when the problems and paradoxes created by the intersection of commerce and art are still with us today.

Although the reasons for concertgoing, ranging from curiosity and fashion to instruction and edification, have changed little in the past century and a half, concert etiquette was strikingly different in the 1840s. The transformation of audience behavior is an important thread in this study and one that has lately received scholarly attention. Early in the century, music was considered as much entertainment as art, and the audiences of De Meyer and Herz, for example, were often disorderly and raucous. Gradually, music came to be valued for its edifying qualities and was approached more reverently by audiences and performers, including Rubinstein and Bülow. This process, now commonly referred to by scholars as sacralization and brought to public attention by Lawrence Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), was a complex one in which social and musical issues intertwined. Some scholars have suggested that the social elite attempted to restrict the access of the lower classes to cultural activities such as operas and symphony concerts by imposing restrictions on concert decorum. This tactic was irrelevant to the concerts of the visiting pianists, which survived on their own in the marketplace. In their concerts, sacralization occurred as the role of pianists changed and their repertoire shifted from the bravura works popular in the 1840s and 1850s, mostly fantasias based on operatic arias that were written by the pianists themselves, to the more serious works of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann. While interpreting the works of other composers, the performers demanded respect for the music so that listeners might have a profound aesthetic experience.

Although many pianists toured the United States during the mid-nineteenth century, I have focused on only five of them; a few of the other pianists who toured during this period, lesser known though perhaps as talented, will be mentioned briefly. In my opinion, a thorough study of a selected number of performers based on extensive primary research will further our knowledge and understanding more than a survey of a larger number of pianists that relies too heavily on secondary sources.

In choosing my subjects, I looked for pianists who made the most dramatic impact on American audiences because of their well-established European reputation and their extensive travels throughout the United States. The earlier years of touring virtuosos, from the 1840s through the 1870s, were more uncharted and therefore seemed the best place to begin. Straddling the Civil War, the chronological period covered here was lengthy enough to trace the dramatic changes in concert life in the United States. By the 1880s and 1890s, the touring pianist was a well-established presence, and the proliferation of famous virtuosos impractical to document as thoroughly. Although the American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk met my criteria, I excluded him as a principal subject because his career has already received considerable documentation, most importantly through his own diary, Notes of a Pianist (1964), and a recent biography, Bamboula! by S. Frederick Starr (1995).

It is merely one of the felicities of history that my chosen subjects represent a variety of personalities (in order of appearance: a publicity hound, an adventurous raconteur, a refined gentleman, a passionate but aloof genius, and a neurotic intellectual) and are nicely spaced chronologically (two were here in the 1840s, one in the 1850s, and two in the 1870s). These pianists shared some traits, but no two were identical; each had a unique combination of personality, performance style, and repertoire, and each played a slightly different role in American musical life. Leopold de Meyer (U.S. tour 1845–47), the most flamboyant and least established of the five, was the first visiting pianist to create a sensation in America soon after first-rank European musicians began to brave the Atlantic. He relied as much on outlandish publicity as on his genuine pianistic ability to attract American audiences. Henri Herz (1846–50), a household name in America because of his many pieces for amateur pianists, followed closely behind De Meyer. More restrained than his predecessor, Herz nevertheless enticed American audiences with his extravaganzas for multiple pianos and was the first notable musician to perform in gold-rush California (1850). Appearing the following decade was Sigismund Thalberg (1856–58), at one time considered the only challenger to Liszt, one of the few top-ranked nineteenth-century pianists to forgo an American tour. Widely viewed as a significant innovator in piano composition and as a consummate performer, Thalberg was almost unanimously admired and of the five pianists gave the most concerts in the United States—more than three hundred in two seasons.

A drought in touring virtuosos during the 1860s, due partly to the hazards posed by the Civil War, was compensated by the appearances during the 1870s of Anton Rubinstein (1872–73) and Hans von Bülow (1875–76). Rubinstein was hailed for his charismatic interpretations of works by master composers during his now fabled tour, and Bülow, a prize pupil of Liszt, was praised for his scholarly and accurate performances that, however, failed to generate as much excitement as Rubinstein's. From the advent of De Meyer's tour to the close of Bülow's, audiences, repertoire, and traditions were transformed and were to change little thereafter: boisterous audiences were gradually replaced by more quiet, respectful ones; virtuoso showpieces were supplanted by Beethoven sonatas and Chopin ballades; and the piano recital as it is known today was very much in place. That fascinating process is the subject of this chronicle.