Karl Muck
Muck endured a trial by media in 1917, after Providence Journal editor John R. Rathom falsely accused him of knowingly refusing a request to have the BSO play the Star Spangled Banner following American entry into World War I.
Although Muck was a citizen of neutral Switzerland, he was arrested based on Rathom's accusation and incarcerated as an enemy alien at Fort Oglethorpe, a German-American internment camp in Georgia from March 1918 until August 1919.
Muck's father, a senior court official[1] and amateur musician, moved the family to Switzerland in 1867 and acquired Swiss citizenship.
He began his conducting career in comparatively minor provincial cities,[5] starting in 1880 as Second Conductor (Zweiter Kapellmeister) in Zurich (Aktientheater), moving to Salzburg (k.k.
His first position in a major musical center came in Prague as Principal Conductor at Angelo Neumann's Deutsches Landestheater, starting with a performance of Die Meistersinger on August 15, 1886, and ending in June 1892.
"[10] He led the Vienna Philharmonic from 1903 to 1906[4] and the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1906 to 1918, and took visiting assignments in other cities, including Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Brussels.
At the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition held in San Francisco May 14–26, 1915, Muck conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 13 concerts of music of all nations.
Artur Schnabel called Muck: "a very great master, whose reliability, maturity and selfless dedication are not equaled by any living artist.
"[17] Muck served as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) from 1906 to 1908 and then again from 1912 to 1918 (with a yearly salary of 28,000 dollars as the New York Times reported on March 26, 1918).
In Berlin he was on close personal terms with Kaiser Wilhelm, but American gossip held that he preferred his freedom and for that reason refused the post of director of the royal opera in Munich in 1911.
[20] Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity made him an honorary member in 1916[21] and he judged a piano competition in the spring of 1917.
[23] Philip Hale, music critic of the Boston Herald during Muck's years there, wrote: "He stands there calm, undemonstrative, graceful, elegant, aristocratic; a man of singularly commanding and magnetic personality even in repose.
"[24] Nevertheless, he continued his former practice and programmed concerts of Classical music only by German and Austro-Hungarian composers on his first tour of American cities following U.S. entry into the war, which some found not at all sensitive to the public's mood in wartime.
[24] On October 30, 1917, the day of the concert, the Providence Journal published an editorial that said "Professor Muck is a man of notoriously pro-German affiliations and the programme as announced is almost entirely German in character."
Muck never saw the request, but Higginson and others viewed it as the work of John R. Rathom, editor and publisher of the Providence Journal, whose motto was "Raise hell and sell newspapers."
As the orchestra publicity manager wrote years later of Muck, "his fate, so far as America was concerned, was settled that night in Providence because of the short-sighted stubbornness of Henry L. Higginson and Charles A.
[25] Meanwhile, Major Higginson claimed responsibility for the BSO's initial failure to play the anthem, with little effect on the outrage stirred by the now nationwide press coverage.
"[19] In November, the BSO performed in New York City, where at last Higginson and Ellis reluctantly gave in to Muck's insistence on playing the anthem.
[32] The Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity that had elected him to national honorary membership in 1916 expelled Muck in 1919 for allegedly sympathizing with the Central Powers.
[33] Fellow internees had heard that Muck had decided in protest to never conduct in America again, but they persuaded him that the camp was more of a German village — which was facetiously dubbed "Orglesdorf."
A memoir of the event written in 1940 recalled the mess hall packed with 2000 internees, with honored guests like their doctors and government censors on the front benches, facing 100 musicians.
He expressed his devotion to the Festival and Wagner's music in a letter advising Fritz Busch that all he needed to succeed there was "the unassuming humility and the holy fanaticism of the Believer.
[40] He never accommodated himself to being upstaged by Toscanini,[41] but writing privately to Winifred Wagner, he said he had been committed to serving her husband, but the Festival now required someone other than "I, whose artistic standpoint and convictions, so far as Baireuth [sic] is concerned, stem from the preceding century.
[43] In October 1939, Muck "on his 80th birthday in Berlin received from Adolf Hitler the Plaque of the German Eagle" with the inscription DEM GROSSEN DIRIGENTEN (TO THE GREAT CONDUCTOR).
[44] A widower since 1921, whose only child, a son, had died young, Muck spent his last years at the Stuttgart home of Baroness von Scholley, the daughter of his close friend and fellow Fort Oglethorpe internee, who had served the German Foreign Office as Consul General in New York City.
[4] Geraldine Farrar wrote a letter to the New York Times recalling that she sang with him and the Boston Symphony on the night when Muck was "bitterly and unjustly assailed" for not playing the National Anthem and adding: "As your editorial correctly reports, he knew nothing of the request."
In October 1917 he made a series of sound recordings in the US with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the Victor Talking Machine Company in their Camden, New Jersey auditorium.
Unusually for the time (when the pre-electric purely mechanical “acoustic” process was in use) the orchestra seems to have been recorded at full strength as the 1919 Victor catalogue refers to "approximately a hundred men".
The music critic Alan Blyth described this as "the most uplifting, superbly executed reading of Act 3 ... in the history of recording"[49] and Robin Holloway commented that "It realizes better than any other Wagner performance the idea of endless melody".
[51] HMV also recorded eight further Wagner orchestral pieces, including the Siegfried Idyll, with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra in December 1927, May 1928, and November 1929.
