Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Pan-American Symphonic Ideal

Abstract

Receptivity to the cultural and musical values of Western Europe, especially the German-speaking lands, laid the foundation for the growth of classical music in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. The ascendancy of German musical culture in the United States began with American musicians’ importation and performance of scores by famous German composers in the 1820s and 1830s. The rise continued throughout the century as waves of German-speaking immigrant musicians played leading roles in the establishment of performing ensembles. Prominent critics such as John Sullivan Dwight, Richard Storrs Willis, and Theodore Hagen bolstered the efforts of these organizations by roundly applauding their performances of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and others. Moreover, as political historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht has recently argued, the establishment of foundational components of the United States’ musical infrastructure, including the solidification of a canonical symphonic repertoire, was the result of a “soft diplomacy” rooted in an aggressive agenda of German cultural expansionism. 1 It is easy, then, for us to conceive of the world of classical music in the nineteenth-century United States as a sponge perpetually absorbing musical