Music in Turn-of-the-Century America: A View from the "Old World"

Abstract

A Viennese newspaper has gravely given vent to the information that Gustav Mahler was offered the neat sum of $120,000 a year to be director of the Metropolitan Opera House and refused it.... It is most instructive to study the logic of the European intellect when it is engaged in its favorite amusement, that of demonstrating that the American is the product of a distinctly inferior order of the dust of the earth. In one sentence it writes us down a nation of moneymaking merchants and in the next it charges us with business methods fit only for the ravings of an asylum. For the amusement of the Viennese newspapers . .. let it be here recorded that Mr. Mahler. . . has not refused either the exclusive direction of the Metropolitan Opera House nor $120,000 for the sufficient reason that neither has been offered to him.... It is always instructive to read European newspapers on American affairs. It gives us the much needed opportunity to see ourselves as others see us-with their eyes shut.'