The scholarship of transatlantic musical interaction has expanded significantly in recent years. From the sixteenth century to the present, music has reflected the vibrant and sometimes troubled cultural connections between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Although the music of the Old World has exerted multiple influences on that of the New World, the reverse has also been true, especially in the twentieth century; almost from the beginning, there has been a fluid interchange of composers and performers across the Atlantic. Prof. Marianne Betz of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in Leipzig has added a significant contribution to this burgeoning field of study through her biography of the American composer George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931).
Chadwick's life has been examined in two previous biographies. Victor Fell Yellin's Chadwick, Yankee Composer (1990) followed the traditional life and works format, with a relatively brief overview of the composer's long and varied career followed by extensive discussion of his works categorized by genre. Bill F. Faucett's George Whitefield Chadwick: The Life and Music of the Pride of New England (2012) situated the composer in time and place through extensive discussion of his career and personal relations with friends, family, and professional colleagues.
Chadwick's musical works have been chronicled extensively in Steven Ledbetter's “George W. Chadwick: A Sourcebook” (1990); and Faucett's George Whitefield Chadwick: His Symphonic Works (1996); and George Whitefield Chadwick: A Bio-Bibliography (1998). A-R Editions has published sumptuous scholarly editions of two orchestral overtures (Faucett 2005) and the six string quartets (Betz 2006 and 2007). His opera The Padrone was analyzed in a 2009 dissertation by Charles S. Freeman and is the subject of a MUSA volume edited by Betz.
This biography makes two significant additions to the literature on Chadwick. First, it draws more extensively than any previous study on the trove of archival materials donated by the composer's heirs to the New England Conservatory in 2000 and 2001. In a Musical Quarterly article of 2001, Betz provided an overview of the contents of this bequest and detailed her role in convincing the family to donate it to the institution that Chadwick led for over three decades. This biography shows an intimate familiarity with the letters, memoirs, and musical manuscripts preserved in the collection. Coordinating these materials with publication dates and newspaper reports, Betz is able to provide a level of chronological accuracy that has hitherto eluded Chadwick scholars. She is also able to follow the evolving feelings and opinions of a man whose strong passions led him to modify his views on music and musicians over the course of a long and active career. The final chapter of Betz's book, entitled “Chadwick as ‘Zeitzeuge’: Autobiographer and Witness of his Time,” examines the memoirs from a literary standpoint and assesses Chadwick's role as an eyewitness to an important era in US musical history. She makes a convincing case for the broad relevance of what seems to have been planned as a document for his family.
The second and most significant contribution of this new biography, in my opinion, is its extensive engagement with questions of transatlantic musical interaction. Chadwick is a prime candidate for this sort of assessment because of both the era in which he lived and his own personal tastes. During the late nineteenth century, Americans were strongly committed to an international orientation in music and art, leading them to establish the great art museums of the country on European foundations and to establish the leading opera companies and symphony orchestras with European performers, conductors, and composers. Americans studied in Europe, they admired European culture, and—until World War I disrupted these connections with a period of rabid nationalism—they aspired to an American culture that participated fully in international aesthetics. Betz approaches Chadwick's European connections not as some sort of preliminary stage in his development into a “real” American artist but rather as an essential part of his character and aesthetic orientation, even after he disavowed it.
In his youth, Chadwick chafed under the demands of his autocratic father and witnessed the tensions that eventually led his father and stepmother to separate. Music was not only a solace but also a contested space in a family where his brother introduced him to music and musicians while his father tried to steer him into the family insurance business. For the young George, the opportunity to teach at Olivet College in Michigan and earn enough money to finance a period of study in Germany represented a break from his past, a decisive victory over his father, and a new direction for his life.
With access to the archives of the Leipzig Conservatory and an insider's knowledge of the culture and history of Leipzig, Betz is able to present a richly nuanced discussion of Chadwick's period of study in Germany from 1877 to 1879. Her insights allow us to understand the challenges he faced, the means by which he attained success, and the rarity of his accomplishments in the eyes of his German teachers and critics. In this section of the book she deftly balances his surviving letters from Germany, his later recollections of those years, and the documentary evidence from German sources in ways that previous biographers have not.
As she continues to trace Chadwick's life, Betz regularly returns to the transatlantic themes that were established during his study tour. He continued to pepper his writing with German phrases, he made multiple return trips to Europe, and he regularly sought out opportunities for conviviality with Germans as well as with Americans who shared his love of German Gemütlichkeit. She details his relationships with the German and Austrian conductors of the Boston Symphony Orchestra along with his crucial role in hiring conductor Karl Muck during a sabbatical tour of Germany in 1905–1906. She also examines in detail the cold reception he received for his own works during this trip, which contributed to a cooling of his affections for the German people. When the United States entered World War I a decade later and his sons enlisted in the military, Chadwick's former love turned to intense distaste, coloring the cherished memories of past experiences with cynicism toward the Prussian government.
Musical analysis does not play a large role in the book, but Chadwick's major works are described and set in the context of composition and performance. Throughout his compositional career, Chadwick was confronted with the desire to be simultaneously a representative of the best of American culture and a full-fledged member of the international circle of respected composers. Betz traces both his own compositional aspirations and the reactions of the critics to his musical style. Again, the transatlantic perspective is essential to understand his position in the musical culture of the late Romantic era. He became known for an American style that was not as doggedly cosmopolitan as that of Paine and MacDowell but which did not participate in the overt nationalism embraced by Henry Schoenefeld and Arthur Farwell. Particularly insightful is her discussion of Chadwick's opera The Padrone (1913), which set an explosive story of Italian immigrants in the United States in a musical style strongly influenced by recent developments in Italian verismo opera. His inability to get the work staged may have been the result of the work's bilingual libretto or the realistic portrayal of a social problem that wealthy Americans preferred to ignore; in either case it left him embittered about the operatic establishment. Betz describes thoroughly this important attempt at a different sort of transatlantic aesthetic in Chadwick's work.
The first six chapters of the book are organized chronologically, tracing Chadwick's career and personal life from his youthful struggles through his fame in the first decade of the twentieth century to his final years of illness and comparative neglect. Three additional chapters (fifty pages) address overarching themes in the composer's life. Chapter 7 addresses his reputation, especially as it relates to his perceived Americanism. Chapter 8 chronicles his teaching and administrative work at the New England Conservatory. Examining this part of his career in relation to the Leipzig Conservatory model and the dramatic expansion of conservatories in the United States following the Civil War, Betz details Chadwick's efforts to develop the NEC from a struggling local music school to one of the world's premiere institutions for advanced musical training. Chapter 9, as noted above, concludes the book with a discussion of his autobiographical writings.
In summary, Marianne Betz has made a significant contribution to music historiography with this book. It sheds new light on one of our country's most important orchestral composers and music educators with a detailed archival study of little-known sources. It makes a compelling case for the importance of Chadwick's music not only as a historical document but as viable material for today's performers. Finally, it broadens our understanding of transatlantic musical interactions through a case study of a central figure in this trend.
