European Composers on the American Tour, 1900-1914: Richard Strauss, Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, and Cole

Explores American concert life and cultural history around 1900 through the lens of four visiting European composers.

"America may not be the promised land of music, but it is the promised land of musicians." Lines like these abound in the reminiscences of European musicians at the fin de siècle. Foreign tours could be mammoth financial enterprises, and in the early decades of the twentieth century, many of Europe's most eminent composers came to the United States to conduct and perform. But these tours were about far more than the bottom line--they became studies in cultural self-fashioning and symbols of the transatlantic exchange.

Matthew F. Reese's European Composers on the American Tour, 1900-1914 documents--for the first time--the concert tours of Richard Strauss (1904), Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, and Coleridge-Taylor (all 1906-07). It charts how these men adapted to the American scene, and the complex, variegated ways that Americans received them. Each tour illustrates different issues of race, gender, and musical aesthetics in a moment of extraordinary cultural flux. Considered together, they demonstrate how Americans, reckoning with their European heritage, treated that relationship as a way of articulating their cultural identity. Critics saw America's future in its synthesis of the best elements of the Old World. In affirming the virtues--and limitations--of European art, critics deliberately positioned American music as its eventual heir.