’You play exactly as if you came from America.’ Transatlantic Relations and Anti-American Bias in the Musical Life of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 1880-1915

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christiane Tewinkel
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441570120

Anti-American bias was widespread in German speaking lands around 1900. While the term 'Americanization' was used to criticize the commercialization of musical life, Anti-American bias also arose within the realm of artistic practice itself. For example, American pianists were accused of technical deficiencies or purely mechanical play, a lack of depth and a lack of love for music, as well as a merely economic interest in music. The aim of this project is to illuminate American grand tours into German speaking lands between 1880 and 1915, to highlight the transatlantic networks that were inaugurated by teachers like Franz Liszt (Weimar) and Theodor Leschetizky (Vienna), and to analyze the music-related discourse in German in which Anti-American biases became explicit. In doing this, the project combines perspectives of musicology with those of history, linguistics and American studies.The time frame relates to the rich array of sources on the Weimar gatherings around Liszt in the 1880s on the one hand and Leschetizky’s final year in Vienna (1915) on the other, when his international acclaim as a piano teacher was addressed by countless obituaries. In Berlin, an equally attractive destination for American pianists, Liszt and Leschetizky were present through their work as composers and pianists and through numerous students that had become piano teachers themselves. Meanwhile, the American weekly Musical Courier entertained a Berlin office with specific Berlin pages that covered musical life in the capital for Americans at home and abroad.Working with such texts as well as with concert reviews, teaching protocols, biographical literature and other sources, I seek to describe the basic layout of the grand tours young American pianists undertook in those years. Secondly, I wish to discuss recurring elements of the German-speaking discourse on ‘the American/s’ in Berlin, Weimar, and Vienna: What were the specific biases that American pianists met with, and what was the function of these biases with regard to contemporary German-language debates on virtuosity and inwardness, on the concept of autonomous music, the economics of musical performances, and different ways of listening to music?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants