The four impressive volumes considered here, of symphonies by Charles Hommann (1803–72?), George Frederick Bristow (1825–98), Leopold Damrosch (1832–85), and John Knowles Paine (1839–1906), published by A-R Editions between 2005 and 2011, are largely products of the growth over the last several decades of studies of nineteenth-century U.S. musical repertory and musical life. They appear in the Recent Researches in American Music and Music of the United States of America (MUSA) series. They are not only complete individual studies, but are also related and interconnected in ways in which their editors probably didn't intend. Collectively, they are representative of the entire history of nineteenth-century symphonic music composed in the United States, and the composers’ lives span all but the first two decades of the “long” nineteenth century.

Charles Hommann was born in Philadelphia in 1803, the son of a German musician and an English mother. He grew up in a musical household and by his teens was a competent string player, eventually ranking among the city's best. Joanne Swenson-Eldridge has dug out of deep obscurity the details of the life of this reclusive, but important figure. She traces his life and career in Philadelphia against the historical backdrop of the city's importance as a musical and theatrical center in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in particular his connection with the Musical Fund Society, established in 1820. It was only through this “micro-historical” chronicle that information about his activities in chamber and orchestral performances has come to light, despite continuing unanswered questions. “Fitting together the facts,” she says, “to reveal the trajectory of Hommann's life has had much in common with assembling a puzzle” (liv). And she has done a very fine job of it.

The orchestral works in this volume—a Symphony in E♭ major and two Overtures, both in D major—all seem to date from this Philadelphia period, when his association as a first violinist with local orchestras gave him an entrée to possible performances. In the late 1840s he appears to have become disenchanted with Philadelphia and moved, perhaps by the early 1850s, to Brooklyn, where his compositional activities turned to chamber music. He seems to have worked as a church organist from time to time.Footnote ¹ Hommann may have died in 1872, although details are lacking. Summing things up and assessing why nearly two centuries have passed since his unknown works were first written, Swenson-Eldridge notes that “When Hommann had cause to compose orchestral music, the music was not championed beyond its locale [Philadelphia], and lack of public demand for orchestral music meant it went unpublished” (lvi). In addition, “Hommann's modesty seemingly prevented him from promoting his own cause” (lvi). Fortunately, all of his “surviving” orchestral and chamber works are now available, thanks to the editor's efforts.

The works themselves reflect a very competent grounding in the music of the classical era, and also some aspects of early Romanticism. Hommann knew and responded to the music he heard and played in Philadelphia, as Swenson-Eldridge notes in her comments on the music of the edition, and shows in her copious lists of the concert repertoire that Hommann was likely to have performed. The Symphony (ca. 1821–23), with its very light scoring, harks back as far as Haydn. It is conceived in a conventional four-movement sonata cycle, including an expressive slow introduction to the first movement, and even a Menuetto, long after this ceased to be a social dance and several decades after it was typically replaced by the Beethovenian scherzo. Its main interest is probably historical rather than aesthetic. Nonetheless, the editor points out that these works of Hommann “are the first known orchestral works of their kind by a native-born American composer.” The Overtures are somewhat more attractive: first the “Weiss” Overture of ca. 1822–23 (so-called after its dedication to a trombonist friend, Jedidiah Weiss [1796–1873]), and then a “Prize” Overture (1835), for which Hommann won a gold medal in a competition sponsored by the Philharmonic Society (founded in 1833 by French émigré conductor, Leopold Meignen [1793–1873]). These overtures are the works that probably will have more appeal today. It is especially interesting to compare them, and to note the development of Hommann's compositional voice, from the shorter “Weiss” Overture (discovered as recently as 1961) with its Beethovenian introduction (in D minor), and the rather decorous Allegro Vivace section that follows (with hints of French opera composers such as Auber and Méhul), to the musically more substantial and brilliant “Prize” Overture, with its extra piccolo in the woodwinds.

Meignen, who conducted the first performance of Hommann's “Prize” Overture in December 1835, was also the teacher of William Henry Fry (1813–64), whose outspoken and often raucous support of native composers is well known. Fry, who thought well of Hommann's music, and which he probably came to know in Philadelphia, is today more frequently linked with his younger contemporary, George Frederick Bristow (1825–98), whose Symphony No. 2 in D minor, dedicated to the French conductor/composer, Louis-Antoine Jullien (1812–60), is the subject of the second volume considered here, most ably edited by Katherine K. Preston.

Bristow's Symphony, while also previously unpublished, has had the chance to be more perceptible on the radar of Americanists. This is largely due to a pioneering recording made in 1969 by Karl Kroeger for the American Musical Heritage label. Kroeger expressed some doubts about the work, pointing to “repetitiousness . . . within the phrase,” but went ahead and recorded the entire work without cuts to, as he put it, “convey a completely faithful picture of Bristow's idiosyncrasy” (222). (The whole symphony was recently performed from Preston's edition in November 2011 at the San Francisco Conservatory, in connection with the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society.)

As with Swenson-Eldridge's volume, this edition also contains a very lengthy introduction that seeks not only to illuminate the music of the edition, but also to place it and the composer in the further context of his life and times. According to Preston, the Symphony “is a tuneful and well-crafted composition that is undeservedly unknown today” (xvii). In explaining why this neglect is undeserved, she has taken the opportunity to write an informative and expansive study that provides a “portrait of mid nineteenth-century musical culture in New York” that “shed[s] light on the relationship between the United States and Western Europe as [a] place in which orchestral music was composed and performed” (xviii). Bristow's career is carefully described, as is concert life at midcentury in the section “Mid-Century American Concert Life: Transatlanticism and American Identity.” The next section, “American Orchestral Composers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” leads to a discussion of Bristow's place in this milieu, followed by the accounts of “Louis Jullien in America” and “Jullien and American Composers.” Here we find a very interesting discussion of opposing views of Jullien and his activities. Was he, as some felt, a godsend to American composers such as Bristow, or was he just an opportunist, milking them for a bit of sensationalism? Preston gives us both readings of this issue. We come ultimately to a discussion of the Jullien Symphony, its early performances (Jullien surprisingly seems never to have performed the work in its entirety), the aftermath of the celebrated conductor's departure from the United States, and the Fry/Bristow vs. Willis/Dwight debate of 1854. This debate, which began over the commitment of the New York Philharmonic Society to American composers, quickly took on larger dimensions, and has been exhaustively parsed elsewhere. Preston here offers new insights, particularly in her discussion of the “us-vs.-them” dialectic that arose between American musicians, such as Fry and Bristow, and German émigrés who in the 1840s and 1850s rapidly established a power base in New York music institutions. Then comes an extensive descriptive and formal analysis of the work, which Preston characterizes as

Bristow's position (a first violinist with the New York Philharmonic Society, at least until the great debate, when he resigned, though he later rejoined) gave him a kind a profile that Hommann never achieved. This profile, as well as his aggressive personality, enabled him to eventually get a complete performance of his symphony, by the New York Philharmonic in 1856, after which it was never heard again. This marked the start of the neglect, which is undeserved, according to the editor.

In her analysis, Preston seeks to show how and why in Bristow's own time his music was not fairly judged (lxxxvi–cv). However, what we learn from this is largely that Bristow's was a creative mind, and he had the normative tonal musical language and formal properties of sonata cycle under his fingers, so to speak. To be in possession of this musical language does not in itself create an “intrinsically worthy work.” A more persuasive argument can be made by looking at aspects of the work that go beyond this parameter. In support of her assertion of Bristow's worthiness, Preston does point out in detail irregular phrase structures and unexpected tonal shifts, as well as large-scale departures from common practice, such as the replacement of the triple-meter scherzo with a kind of polka (or schottische), something that excited much critical comment in the first performances.Footnote ² I also wonder about the unremarked-upon key relationships in the first movement—a first group in D minor, and a second group and cadence in F major (III). After a formal repeat, the development section begins with a lurch to D♭ major (♭VI, hinted at in the closing group, see mm. 193–94). Tertian relationships are of course common in this period, and show up in mid-period Beethoven (the first movement of the Waldstein sonata, for example.) But to take the leading tone, respell it enharmonically, and then make it a consonant major triad, is what my teacher Randall Thompson (a composer of three symphonies himself) would have called “really quelque chose!”Footnote ³ Whether this large-scale dissonance is intentional (and resolved) or unintentional, is an issue not addressed.

Exactly a quarter century separates the Jullien Symphony from Leopold Damrosch's Symphony in A Major (1878), edited by Kati Agócs. A greater contrast in musical substance with Bristow's symphony is hard to imagine; and here we have an individual who as a composer, if it is possible, is even less recognized than Hommann, despite his distinguished family name.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, the Damrosch (and later, Damrosch-Mannes) family has sometimes been called “America's First Family of Music.”Footnote ⁵

The patriarch of this family, Leopold Damrosch was born in Poznań, then part of Prussia, and was given a formidable musical education without, however, receiving initial support from his father for pursuing a musical career. He later studied in Berlin, and obtained a medical degree in 1854, continuing his musical pursuits as a violinist. It was here that he came to the attention of Hans von Bülow, who recommended him to Franz Liszt. He joined the Grand Ducal orchestra in Weimar in 1857. (Liszt's symphonic poem, Tasso, is dedicated to Damrosch.) In 1860, Damrosch moved his young family to Breslau (now Wrocław), where he founded his own orchestra and spent eleven relatively unsatisfying years, according to Agócs's absorbing introductory essay. In 1871, he immigrated to the United States, where despite the struggles of composers such as Fry and Bristow, he found a musical life then very much dominated by German émigrés and German-educated Americans—by this point less ruffled by the debates of the previous generation—and a wide sphere for activity.

Damrosch, among many others, was thus determined to “shape his musical environment” (xi) and he did this by taking up important leadership roles with many prominent musical organizations, including the Männersangverein Arion, the Handel and Haydn Society, the New York Philharmonic, the New York Symphony Society (which he founded in 1878, to compete with Theodore Thomas, who had taken over the Philharmonic), and the Metropolitan Opera. Among other distinctions, he conducted the U.S. premiere of Brahms's First Symphony (in 1877, beating Thomas by six days.) Through his sons, Frank and Walter, and his daughter Clara (who married David Mannes, establishing the Damrosch-Mannes side of the “dynasty”), his ideals were continued through the Julliard and Mannes schools into the twentieth century. His fourteen years in the United States were cut short by a premature death at the age of fifty-two, from pneumonia.

Agócs is unsure as to why the work (composed in 1878) was never performed in Damrosch's lifetime; a heavy conducting workload and legal difficulties over his contracts with various organizations may have been to blame in part. However, “the most tangible reason behind the symphony's lack of performance is Damrosch's early death. If he had lived past the age of fifty-two, chances are much greater that he would have heard it realized in performance. Many of Damrosch's works have remained in manuscript form, and some important ones, such as his two violin concertos, still await publication” (xv).

Damrosch's symphony is steeped in his love of Wagner, and is by far the most progressive of all the works considered here. From the open string tremolo on the flat submediant, heralding fragmentary motivic ideas from the winds and horns, it adumbrates things to come in Bruckner and early Richard Strauss, and even beyond. If I must cite just one passage of astonishing originality, it must be the transition from the Mahleresque slow march of the third movement's opening: two bassoons, snorting away (pianissimo) in their lowest register, are accompanied by low divided tremolo strings and a pianissimo bash from time to time of the tam-tam, before the scene changes, breaking out into a demonic and completely unexpected Presto in 6/8 time (119–20). As befits her training as a composer as well as a musicologist, Agócs's analytical comments penetrate deeply into the work's musical content, and as such are exemplary. In concluding her concise yet informative Introduction (nine double-columned pages), she observes that “Damrosch was challenged to break new ground even while maintaining his adherence to the Austro-German symphonic tradition. Anticipating Brahms's Third Symphony, Damrosch recapitulated material from the first movement . . . in the final movement . . . [and] he carried over contrapuntal and harmonic aspects of Wagner's operatic style.” Agócs also notes the work's “affinity of its thematic treatment to leitmotif technique” (xvii). In sum, this is an outstanding edition of a fascinating work, composed very much as an example of the “music of emigration” (to use terminology advanced by Phillip Bohlman), but nonetheless “American” in some important respects given Damrosch's residence in and influence upon New York's musical life.Footnote ⁶

John Knowles Paine's Symphony No. 2 in A Major is probably the best-known work considered here. In part this has to do with Paine's profile, “the earliest of the Second New England School of American composers . . . to gain the compositional craft needed to produce works equal in quality to those of his European contemporaries,” (vii) according to the editor, John C. Schmidt. In 1978, musicologist Steven Ledbetter declared that the premieres (in 1876 and 1880) of Paine's two symphonies might be said “to mark the effective beginning of the American symphonic tradition” (Swenson-Eldridge, lxxxii). Swenson-Eldridge corrects Ledbetter on this point in her volume; she points out that “Hommann's symphony preceded Paine's First Symphony by more than half a century” and counters, with some sympathy, that “historians cannot be faulted completely for this omission, because until now Hommann's compositional role has not be thoroughly investigated” (lxxxi). Ledbetter, however, was writing about an “effective” beginning of a tradition, not mere chronological precedence. It is hard to escape the fact that of all the works considered here, only Paine's Second Symphony was performed multiple times, was met with general critical approval, and was quickly published (full score, parts, and a piano four-hands arrangement) in a joint U.S.-German edition, the first time a symphony by a U.S. composer had been published in full score.Footnote ⁷

Schmidt's edition is very much about the music (his introduction runs to four double-columned pages). Illuminating the “Spring” subtitle to the work, in his edition he restores the paratextual headers for each movement, and explains the reasons why these slight indications of a programmatic content of the work may have been suppressed (largely, it seems, to avoid the continuing sort of criticism from conservatives suffered by Fry and Bristow). By utilizing the autograph full score now at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Schmidt has been able to correct numerous errors and inconsistencies, making an admirable edition of a true “monument” of American music. My only comment on his editorial approach has to do with the way in which “spelling, orthography, and placement of performance markings have been modernized and regularized” (243). Comparing the opening of the work (3) with the facsimile of the autograph (plate 3), I note that the indication “Solo” on the entry of Horn IV in m. 5 has been suppressed. The elimination of an earlier entry of Horn IV (in m. 2, visible in the plate) is given no comment. Details and revisions of this kind are interesting, but the rationale for not including or noting them is not really explained.

These are very minor points on which different editors will take varying points of view. In general, with the faultless engraving and production of A-R Editions, these four volumes do a great service to the dissemination of nineteenth-century symphonic music of the United States. I found few typos, the most significant in the Hommann volume, where at the start of the introduction his date of death is given incorrectly as 1862 (xiv), although we are given the correct date (presumed to be 1872—the evidence is scant) on page xvi. One aspect of the editorial approach taken in the Bristow symphony also gave me pause. In the Critical Report, Preston notes in connection with slurs, that “if Bristow wrote several slurs where one will suffice, they are here replaced by a single slur” (225). That is a very standard editorial policy, and it works just fine with piano music. But string parts are more complex: here, slurring is not just an expressive performance directive, but also an indication of bowing, especially important as Bristow was a violinist, his “fairly inconsistent and somewhat sloppy” slurring notwithstanding (ibid). In the autograph (plate 5, third movement, mm. 29–41), mm. 39–41 show a very ornate melody with decorative triplets containing two slurs per measure, presumably for bowing reasons. In the edition, m. 39 (115–16) is presented as in the score, but the four slurs in mm. 40–41 are combined into a single slur over two measures because of syncopated ties over the beats. This makes no sense from a performance point of view; string players will need to restore Bristow's (or some other workable) bowing in performance.

Finally, I cannot help noting that in the MUSA volumes the monograph-length introductions may overwhelm the music.Footnote ⁸ Writing at this length is admittedly difficult to “place”: too long for a journal article, not long enough for a book. It took me two concentrated readings to get through each of these introductions, and I was able to do that in the comfort of my living room. It is a concern that this important research, in volumes that are out of the price range of most musicians, and usually consigned to non-circulating sections of music libraries, will not get the exposure they deserve. Perhaps the MUSA mandarins might consider collecting a volume of linked and mutually relevant monographs, and release them as a book, apart from their scores.