From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland.(Historical and Analytical Studies)(Book Review)

From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland. By R. Allen Lott. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xviii, 366 p. ISBN 0-19-514883-5. $39.95.] Music examples, facsimiles, illustrations, bibliography, index.

In 1846, Philadelphia composer and critic William Henry Fry traveled to Paris as correspondent for the New York Tribune. While there he approached the director of the Paris Opera about engaging the company for a rehearsal of his opera Leonora, which had recently received its premiere in Philadelphia. The director dismissed Fry's request with the oft-quoted remark, "We look upon America as an industrial country--excellent for electric telegraphs and railroads but not for Art.... They would think me crazy to produce an opera by an American" (Fry in The Musical World and New York Musical Times 5 [26 March 1853]: 195-96).

Such was a common European view of America during the nineteenth century. Some Europeans, on the other hand, saw the U.S. as an "El Dorado," a "Land of Musical Promise running with rivers of milk and honey," as Czech-born opera impresario Max Maretzek noted in his memoirs, Crolchets and Quavers (New York: S. French, 1855; quoted in Lott, p. 6). From the 1840s on, European performers began traveling to this country in ever-increasing numbers, some seeking adventure, others fleeing political unrest, and still others lured by the promise of wealth. R. Allen Lott's book From Paris to Peoria: How European Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland examines this phenomenon, focusing on five European concert pianists whose extensive tours of this country from the 1840s through the 1870s did much to establish Western European art music as the chief benchmark by which Americans measured their own cultural "progress."

The five men Lott has chosen to present in this book, an expansion of his doctoral thesis, were all highly acclaimed virtuosos, although most of them are largely forgotten today. The first, Leopold de Meyer (1816-1883), made his American debut at New York's Park Theater in October 1845. Lott reports that de Meyer, an Austrian who had gallicized his surname from von Meyer, was "at the height of his European celebrity" (p. 13) when he arrived, fresh from his success in Paris, at the time the center of fashionable musicmaking in Europe. De Meyer was, moreover, the first bona fide virtuoso pianist to visit here, although celebrated violinists Alexandre Artot, Ole Bull, and Henry Vieuxtemps had paved the way with successful American tours beginning in 1843.

As Lott notes, de Meyer's triumphs here were due as much to skillful promotion as to the pianist's own musical abilities, impressive though his talents surely were. Promoters played on European perceptions of America as a cultural backwater with hyperbole and sensationalistic advertising, which came to be known as "humbug." Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight and others denounced such humbuggery, while praising de Meyer's pianism, if not his repertoire, which tended toward flashy bravura pieces, including fantasies on popular and operatic tunes of the day--music sure to please crowds, but less satisfying to the cognoscenti.

Henri Herz (1803-1888), the next of Lott's virtuosos, presented a stark contrast to de Meyer on his New York debut in October 1846. Whereas de Meyer cultivated a wild and tempestuous musical persona, Herz was all refinement and delicacy. His repertoire, however, like de Meyer's, consisted primarily of his own works, which were widely known and played in this country, and which also tended toward the brilliant and overly sentimental, works popular in American parlors but denounced by critics for their superficiality. Following the prevailing custom, Herz did not appear alone in his performances. Promoters programmed what were known as "miscellaneous concerts," featuring, in addition to the top attraction, a number of assisting performers, usually a vocalist or two and one or more instrumentalists. The idea of a truly solo recital took hold very slowly, as Lott notes, and only later in the century did the miscellaneous concert begin to disappear.

Herz's American itinerary is impressive. In addition to major Eastern cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, as well as Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans in the South, Herz (and his assistants) indeed brought classical music to the heartland, also ...