Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars

Singing in the Age of Anxiety

Singing in the Age of Anxiety

Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars

Laura Tunbridge

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56357-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56360-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226563602.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tunbridge, Laura, 1974– author.

Title: Singing in the age of anxiety : lieder performances in New York and London between the World Wars / Laura Tunbridge.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059451 | ISBN 9780226563572 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226563602 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Singing—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Singing—England—London—History—20th century. | Songs, German—Social aspects. | Music—Social aspects. | Music—Performance—History—20th century. | World War, 1914–1918—Influence.

Classification: LCC ML2811.8.N48 T76 2018 | DDC 782.421680943/097471—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059451

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of David Tunbridge and Catherine Stewart

Contents

INTRODUCTION  An Anxious Age

ONE  Transatlantic Arrivals

TWO  Languages of Listening

THREE  Lieder Society

FOUR  Saving Music

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

An Anxious Age

Three men and a woman sit in a bar on Third Avenue in New York City during the Second World War. Their thoughts and talk are interrupted now and again by the radio, compelling them to pay attention to a common world of great slaughter and much sorrow.¹ The men initially think mostly of battle. The woman of a concert: To war-orphans and widowed ladies, Grieving in gloves.² The quartet of characters who people W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety (1947) reflect the poet’s observation that during wartime everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or of a displaced person.³ That displacement need not be literal, although many—including Auden himself, who had left England for the United States in 1939—found themselves in new countries and new situations. It could also have to do with the way in which the modern world was mediated: through the disembodied voices of radio broadcasts, or the combination of mourning and musical appreciation signified by applause muted by fashion both artistic and sartorial. Amongst all that was new, there was concern for the old. This book follows the fortunes of a musical genre whose future in twentieth-century America and Britain was also uncertain: lieder, or German art song. By the late 1930s, this small-scale, primarily romantic form was akin to a musical refugee. Those who engaged with lieder—performers, listeners, critics, and scholars—may have been anxious about how the repertoire might survive the vicissitudes of international politics and the technologies of mass culture. Yet the mobility and adaptability of these songs and their singers enabled them not only to survive, but to stand as symbols of hope for what the sociologist Norbert Elias termed the civilizing process.

Anxiety and civilization run as dual themes throughout the following chapters, refracting some of the major preoccupations of the interwar period in Europe and the United States that pertain to lieder: nationalism and internationalism, and their ugly cousins xenophobia and racism; the status of high-culture and leisured society and aspirations to share it with and spare it from other classes; and the impact of this first media age on social activities, including live music making.⁴ It may seem strange to claim that a book about five white, male, Austro-German composers of the nineteenth century—Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Robert Schumann (1810–1856), Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Hugo Wolf (1860–1903), and Richard Strauss (1864–1949)—presents a decentered account of a period in musical and cultural history. However, this is an unusual study of the interwar years in New York and London: my concern is not with large-scale institutions—opera houses or symphony halls—nor is its focus on modernism or popular music, which receive the lion’s share of scholarly attention.⁵ Moreover, this is not a book about composers, nor would I like to think of it as reception history in the traditional sense, which, as Daniel Cavicchi explains, continues to privilege works as drivers of musical culture.⁶ Instead, this is what the historian of science David Edgerton would call a use-history.⁷ His point is that older technologies continue to be used despite the historian’s emphasis on the new (his most often cited example is horses on battlefields alongside tanks). Along similar lines, I am writing not about new music, but about repertoire that was learned, sung, and listened to in regular concerts—about what constituted everyday concert life for members of a certain social class (and, occasionally, beyond them). I am also concerned with the ways in which new media—recordings, radio, and sound film—interacted with live performance and vice versa, rather than treating them as separate activities. This book might still be taken as a narrative about canon formation. More than that, though, it illustrates the precarious fortunes of those canons. Lieder fell out of Anglo-American recitalists’ repertoire during the First World War, and it was not until after the Second that they came to be as respected as they are today. One of the main findings of this book is that, rather than reaching back to nineteenth-century practices, it was during the 1920s and ’30s that the performance culture surrounding lieder with which we are now familiar came into being.

Singing in the Age of Anxiety grew out of my survey of the song cycle, from which I discovered that the interwar period was transformative for performance practices because of the spread of technology and because of tensions between what appeared to be an idiom defined to a large extent by its national identity within an international context.⁸ What was a paragraph or two became a project that offers insights not only about the Anglo-American reception of lieder, but also about musical life during the first half of the twentieth century. Within its generic, temporal, and geographic limits, this is a book about how musical performance can articulate identity, about the evolution of recording technologies and modes of listening, and about hierarchies of taste. The discussion is necessarily wide-ranging, and an introduction to its themes and sources, as well as the book’s structure, may be helpful before delving into its main chapters, which, while arranged in loosely chronological order, concentrate on particular topics: the reintroduction of German music and musicians to New York and London after the First World War; issues of language and listening practices raised by the presentation of lieder in concerts, recordings, radio broadcasts, and films; the social standing of classical song; and attitudes to German music and musicians from the 1930s until the aftermath of the Second World War.

· · ·

Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, according to the literary scholar Edward Mendelson, ends with an almost instinctive wish for a shared community we can imagine but never achieve.⁹ The notion of imagined communities has been a powerful positive concept for many scholarly accounts of the way nations are defined and culture is shared around the world.¹⁰ Anxiety about the ramifications of nation and culture being fragmented or, indeed, united was shared by many writers and commentators of the time. For example, Erich Maria Remarque left Germany in 1933, eventually making his way to the United States.¹¹ His unfinished novel The Promised Land depicted refugees striving to make a new life in New York. One such character is Robert Hirsch, who had fought for the French resistance and now manages a small appliance shop. He takes the narrator with him to shake down another Jewish émigré for money. On being asked how it is possible to intimidate anyone now they are no longer in Nazi Germany but the land of the free, Hirsch responds: Haven’t you understood yet that we are living in the age of anxiety? The age of real and imaginary fear? [. . .] And that as emigrants we’re never going to be able to shake this fear, whatever happens?¹² Yet it was not only emigrants who felt anxious. The anxiety of displacement was also existential. German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his 1927 tract Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), described anxiety (Angst) as a state of hovering, of feeling detached from the world in the face of the infinite, of being at once nothing and nowhere. A striking aspect of the 1920s and ’30s—particularly in Europe, but also in the United States—is that the notion of this being an interwar period is not a retrospective construct: it was felt at the time.¹³ Although after 1918 many tried not to mention the war, and to distract themselves with all manner of entertainments, beneath the gaiety there was perpetual dread that the horrors might return. References to being anxious abound in texts on everything from performance nerves to music’s therapeutic properties to the perils of cosmopolitanism. There were, as the historian Richard Overy has discussed, networks of anxiety manifested in a preoccupation with the destruction of what was referred to as civilization.¹⁴

Writing in the 1920s, Norbert Elias was careful to distinguish between Kultur and Zivilisation.¹⁵ Kultur, he explained, referred to human products, such as works of arts, books, religious or philosophical systems; it was a uniquely German concept that played an important role in nation building (which had taken place relatively late in Germany), and it paid little heed to attitudes or behavior. Zivilisation, by contrast, played down national differences by emphasizing commonalities among all human beings.¹⁶ It was the purview of those people, Elias explained, whose national boundaries and national identity have for centuries been so fully established that they have ceased to be the subject of any particular discussion, peoples which have long expanded outside their borders and colonized beyond them: in other words, the British and French. Elias acknowledged that the function of the German concept of Kultur took on new life as the First World War raged, for the Allies fought in the name of civilization. It is a word that will recur throughout this book, in situations as diverse as explorations of hotel civilization to antifascist rhetoric, and with certain kinds of music—not always those associated with Kultur—being co-opted as symbols of civilization.

Other writers, from other countries, may have used slightly different terms from those chosen by Elias, but the polarity of national and supranational remained.¹⁷ For the English art critic and member of the Bloomsbury group Clive Bell, the meaning of civilization was social and artistic, encapsulated, after the savagery of the war, in the artificial pleasures of a fashionable dinner party, where we can sit and rail in security against the unheroic quietude of civilized life.¹⁸ A man or woman entirely insensitive to all the arts can barely be deemed civilized, Bell claimed, with all the condescension of his class. He conceded, however, that the civilized person was not born but made. The civilizing process went hand in hand with an impulse toward arts education during the interwar period. The nurture of a civilized sensibility thereby had a conflicted relationship with what many perceived as another threat to peace and quiet: mass media.¹⁹ Arts educators would attempt to harness the forces of broadcasting and the record industry to improve the taste of the general public; at the same time, as will be seen, there was a drive to protect certain music and modes of being from the hoi polloi.

Joseph Horowitz argues that the Great War shattered the concept of civilization as pursuant to truth and beauty; that the rhetoric of uplift that had accompanied classical music in America’s Gilded Age rang hollow, particularly after it was co-opted by European dictators for a very different type of cultural, communal catharsis.²⁰ Although repertoire was co-opted to political ends, it was not only by dictators. The ability of music to forge communities, to raise morale, and to bolster propaganda during wartime was recognized by both sides. However, as this book demonstrates, the ways in which classical music was used, rhetorically and affectively, during the First and Second World Wars fundamentally contrasted. That said, there were historical continuities between and beyond the outbreak of hostilities. What constitutes between the wars, in other words, needs to be defined loosely. Both wars were cataclysmic, but while they may have accelerated some things and curtailed others, certain practices and people remained. In order to explain attitudes and activities after 1918, it is necessary to say something about what happened beforehand; in order to comprehend the import of 1945, its aftermath needs to be acknowledged (note that Auden’s The Age of Anxiety was written not during but following the war).

In terms of geographical coverage, New York and London may seem an odd couple of cities through which to consider the performance culture of German song. As wealthy metropolitan centers they were beyond both city and nation;²¹ neither can really be taken as representative of American or British attitudes, and a quite different story would be told by looking at, say, Chicago or Manchester, Atlantic City or Lyme Regis. It is worth clarifying that, within London, discussion focuses on the West End, where most venues were located; for similar reasons, in New York City attention is primarily on midtown Manhattan.²² Comparing these two centers is revealing of shared attitudes and significant differences. Both cities were known as international hubs for the performance of classical music. Both had complicated relationships with German culture: New York, because of its historically large Germanic population and the prominent role that community played in musical and philanthropic life; London, because its relative geographical proximity meant that it could fear German invasion of a militaristic as well as a cultural kind, and because of long-standing connections with German society (not least the royal family). Britain and the United States were, of course, allies in both world wars and shared a common language. Yet, as the divergences in how they dealt with songs of their enemy illustrate, they defined themselves as much against each other as they did in response to the shared threat of Germany.²³

New York and London were, throughout this period, important nodes on the transatlantic musical network.²⁴ Typically, a German or Austrian singer wanting to expand his or her reputation internationally would venture from Berlin or Vienna to London and from there to New York. (There were other European nodes, of course—Paris and Amsterdam being the most obvious—but they are beyond the scope of this study.) This was not to say, however, that travel went only one way: American artists continued to visit Europe, and Europeans often returned home, so long as the political situation allowed. Thinking of the relationship between the two cities within the transatlantic unit helps nuance questions of national difference and exceptionalism: as Daniel T. Rodgers argues, the ocean functioned less as a barrier than as a connective lifeline—a seaway for the movement of people, goods, ideas, and aspirations.²⁵ The transactional nature of musical life is at the heart of my first chapter, which takes as its starting point the role of the transatlantic liner as what Stephen Greenblatt would call a contact zone, where cultural goods are exchanged. The goods in question here were songs and their singers, who mingled at ship’s concerts with a freedom prohibited on land by wartime politics. It is impossible to understand mobility without understanding the glacial weight of what appears bounded and static, writes Greenblatt, and the arrivals and departures of the musicians discussed were freighted with significance.²⁶ The contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink returned to New York after the First World War, determined to reintroduce the performance of songs in German; the tenor Roland Hayes arrived in London to start a long career as one of the most prominent African American classical singers of the age; the composer Richard Strauss and the soprano Elisabeth Schumann commenced an American tour that demonstrated the continuing influence and prestige of German music in New York, as well as the financial allure of Dollarland.²⁷

Chapter 2 turns from studies of individual singers to questions of repertoire and the debates over which songs should be sung, by whom, and in what language. Those questions were asked not only in New York and London concert halls after 1918, when hearing the enemy’s vernacular, never mind enemy musicians, was resisted. They were also asked as lieder began to be heard on gramophone recordings and radio broadcasts, and in sound films. The plurality of media, and their points of (dis)connection, are important to take into account, not only in relation to each other but with regard to their intersections with live performance. Songs were encountered—used, to borrow again from Edgerton—in numerous different spaces and formats. While their message may, pace Marshall McLuhan, have been inflected by their medium, the ways in which these different versions and experiences overlapped are vital to the understanding of the significance of lieder.

How to access that understanding, however, remains a challenge. Cavicchi notes that research into the aesthetic lives of listeners is rare; the reason, surely, is the limitations of available sources.²⁸ There might be access to diaries, memoirs, and correspondence that report directly on a musical experience; these are scarce, though, and it is likely that the kinds of comments made are about practical and personal aspects such as who the writer saw or the difficulties he or she experienced in traveling, rather than about the qualities of the performance. It is rarer still to find someone describing hearing lieder on the wireless or at the cinema; yet, increasingly, music was consumed at home rather than in the concert hall, and it is evident that experience informed interpretations in other situations.²⁹ One is left, then, with published criticism, compared with the archives of venues, management companies, and other institutions to check claims about audience sizes, financial matters, and details of programs. This is not disastrous, for the interwar period saw a flowering of arts criticism in Britain and the United States.³⁰ As well as specialist periodicals, mainstream newspapers—broadsheet and tabloid alike—covered concerts and musical news to an extent unthinkable now.³¹ In such a competitive market and a time of so much political upheaval, they were bound to be partisan. The role of big-name critics as gatekeepers was underscored in London by the fact that all the critics sat in the same rows at concerts: the Musical Mirror and Fanfare described them as slouching into Queen’s Hall, looking like retired parsnips obliged to inspect the drains against their better judgement (it has to be said that critics then were allowed much greater freedom in the excoriation of their subjects).³² Many did not limit themselves to reviewing but also wrote books: Ernest Newman, who had gained his first full-time position as a critic at the age of fifty, after the First World War, served as the Observer’s London critic before becoming chief music critic of the Sunday Times. His book length studies of the German composers Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the Austrian Hugo Wolf, were hugely influential in persuading readers of their music’s merits. Richard Capell wrote for the Daily Mail for twenty years before moving to the Daily Telegraph in 1931. Despite both papers’ famously warmongering, anti-German stance, he covered song recitals extensively and authored the first English-language monograph on Schubert’s songs.³³ Richard Aldrich presided at the New York Times from 1902 until 1923 and also wrote on Wagner, as well as working with the tetchy critic for the New York Tribune, Henry Edward Krehbiel, on the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.³⁴ Aldrich was replaced at the New York Times by Olin Downes, who remained chief music critic until 1955 as well as chairing the Metropolitan Opera Quiz on the radio. In other words, critics were gatekeepers not only in the concert hall but of various music-appreciation projects, be they monographs or broadcasts. The long tenures of Newman, Capell, Aldrich, and Downes also means that there is a relatively steady stream of their views through the interwar period, against which the opinions of less established voices—some of whom wrote anonymously or were only named by their initials—can be judged.

The sense of there being establishment and peripheral voices within music criticism, as well as specialist and generalist ones, also applied to venues within New York and London and, in some ways, to performers. Lieder were sung in the home, by amateurs, students, and at informal musical gatherings (including high-society at homes), seemingly continuing nineteenth-century practices.³⁵ Usually those activities can only be glimpsed in historical sources, with exceptional happenings noted more often than the day-to-day. More public and better documented renditions, by professional and aspiring singers, took place most regularly at moderately sized concert halls built in the early twentieth century, such as the Wigmore Hall (London) or Town Hall (New York), or at the various piano showrooms (Steinway, Aeolian) with attached recital spaces.³⁶ Lieder also appeared, however, in huge venues such as the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Carnegie Hall and even the Hippodrome in Manhattan; then they were almost invariably sung by well-established stars. It is worth remembering, however, that these venues were all available for hire, if one could afford it (hence Florence Foster Jenkins’s notorious Carnegie Hall recital in October 1944).³⁷

There had been a shift, by the 1920s, away from the hybrid recital—which presented a mixture of genres and ensembles—toward the group recital, which divided the program into sections according to historical period and place. (Occasionally singers still shared programs with an instrumentalist, usually a violinist or pianist.) Typically, that meant that a recital began with early music (Italian arias, Handel, Bach), followed by a group of lieder, then a group of songs from another country, and finally something lighter: popular airs, folk songs, or spirituals. The geographical range was often determined by the singer’s ethnic background, although demonstrating mastery of different languages increasingly was thought to be a sign of good training. Very few singers gave dedicated lieder recitals. On the one hand, this type of programming meant that when German song fell out of favor, during the First World War, it was easily replaced. On the other hand, it also meant that it was rare for larger-scale works to be performed onstage. Only with the celebrations around Beethoven’s and Schubert’s centenaries in 1927 and 1928 respectively did the marketing strategies of gramophone companies, the educational projects of broadcasters, the proliferation of music journalism, and willing singers converge to foster a receptive audience for complete song cycles.

As chapter 3 explores, another important environment for the performance and consumption of lieder in Manhattan were clubs and societies dedicated either to music or to a particular social group. These semi-private affairs—accessible by invitation or subscription—were often hosted by another phenomenon of the early twentieth century, which transformed definitions of public space: the luxury hotel. Several of the clubs, such as the Bagby Musical Mornings, had been founded before the war and might have been expected to have died out in the Jazz Age; their persistence illuminates both historical continuities and the influence of especially the women of old New York within the modern city.

Clubs and hotels also hosted concerts in London. The London Lieder Club, for example, was founded in 1933 as back-up to a new recording venture, the subscription-based Hugo Wolf Society. The series exemplified the complex ways in which live and recorded music intersected, and how what might be thought of as older practices were shaped, indeed in many ways created, by new media. Projects to record the collected works of composers, sung in the original language, encouraged the type of dedicated recital promoted by the London Lieder Club. The texts around these recordings—program notes and criticism—put forward a particular kind of informed, attentive listening as desirable, which transferred to the concert hall. The notion of what now seems to be the traditional approach to lieder performance—in concert dress, in the original language—arguably resulted from new technologies and the proliferation of writing about music in the interwar period.

The influx of German and Austrian musicians arriving in London in the 1930s was still more influential, for they brought with them performance practices from Vienna and Berlin; notably, the model of the dedicated lieder recital or Liederabend.³⁸ It was the best of these performers who were hired to record for the Hugo Wolf Society and to sing at the London Lieder Club. Around them grew a culture of specialist interpretation. There was, inevitably, an explicitly political angle, for many of these musicians stayed in the country as refugees from the Nazi regime. Chapter 4 explains how, while lieder continued to be associated with Germanic culture, in contrast to British and American attitudes during the First World War, they were no longer approached as songs of the enemy. Instead, the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and even, up to a point, Strauss became symbols of a civilization in danger of being destroyed by fascism.

Throughout the course of the Second World War, classical music was mobilized as a vehicle for cultural uplift and morale boosting. Twenty years earlier it would have been unthinkable for lieder to have been on wartime concert programs in London and New York, particularly sung in German. This time round, though, they were heard at flagship series such as the National Gallery concerts. There were objections to particular performers—Kirsten Flagstad’s return to New York after the war, for instance, was greeted with protests because her husband had been a member of Norway’s Nazi party—but attitudes to repertoire generally were more open. One further case study in this concluding chapter, though, serves as a reminder that while lieder may have become an accepted part of musical life, prejudices against performers were prompted not only by war: Marian Anderson gave a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, in effect protesting racial segregation; while she was heard by millions over the radio and received enthusiastically in New York shortly afterward, it was not until 1955 that she appeared as the first African American singer to be hired by the Metropolitan Opera.³⁹

The contrast between what could be achieved in recital and what might be acceptable on the operatic stage points to the myriad ways in which lieder were used between the wars and the songwork, to borrow Gary Tomlinson’s term, that they executed.⁴⁰ Modest in scale, they slipped between private and public spheres and between categories of high-, low-, and—a term invented in the interwar period—middlebrow. Part of the challenge of this project has been trying to account for the multiple identities in whose name lieder were sung and for the many ways in which they were heard and interpreted. The sounds of the singers discussed in these pages are likewise elusive: although many were captured on record, listening to them now is desperately compromised by the limitations of technology and current tastes.⁴¹ For that reason, their aesthetic qualities are rarely described in what follows; but I hope that readers may be encouraged to seek out some of the recordings—many of which are now available as reissues or online—and to listen, if not quite with a period ear, then with a richer understanding of their motivations and contingencies.⁴²

Recordings and, with them, radio and film promised to expand markets for lieder nationally and internationally. Their increased dissemination boosted postwar claims for the universal qualities of classical music. The centrality within that universe of the Austro-German tradition is surprising only in that there might have been expected to be continued resistance to the music of those who had been the enemy (as there was, of course, from some factions).⁴³ Nationalism was a powerful and increasingly aggressive force during the interwar period. However, it was challenged by the self-conscious development of internationalist projects that, Akira Iriye argues, strove to achieve peace through political, economic, and cultural exchange.⁴⁴ A term often associated with the latter was cosmopolitanism, which surfaces occasionally in the following chapters as a description of activities with an international aspect that may also imply something about the outlook of those involved.⁴⁵ Quite what that outlook was is sometimes ambiguous. Cosmopolitanism might have been egalitarian in principle but in practice typically has depended on the social, economic, and cultural mobility of the elite.⁴⁶ It has, according to Amanda Anderson, articulated intellectual and ethical ideals for the cultivation of character and for negotiating the experience of otherness.⁴⁷ The performance culture of lieder in London and New York during the interwar period was in many ways inherently cosmopolitan, for it enmeshed ideas about cultural and social improvement within what was often an international environment. However, this was an age acutely aware—anxious, even—about national identity and difference. Civilization did not mean the erasure or leveling of those identities, but respect for and engagement with other nations.

Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein—even little things can be precious—the poet Paul Heyse reminds us in the first song of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch. The story of transatlantic musical life during the interwar years, as told through the performance and reception of lieder, yields no grand, overarching narrative. It does, however, intersect with concerns about the importance of art and culture, within and beyond an individual’s own nation and social group, which remain key to evaluating what might be meant by civilization today.

ONE

Transatlantic Arrivals

The boat has not only been for our civilization [. . .] the great instrument of economic development [. . .] but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination.

—MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces (1986)

Between the world wars, transatlantic travel between Europe and the United States held a special place in the imagination of the cultural elite. It represented a temporal rift, both between old and new worlds, and because—before flight became routine—it took on average six days to make the journey by steam ship.¹ Time, then, to dream and to be bored; time to be entertained.

Music played a significant role on board.² There were hired orchestras and dance bands, and it was customary for cabin and first-class passengers to give a concert, typically for nautically themed charities. The diary that the German soprano Elisabeth Schumann kept during her American tour with Richard Strauss—of which more later—conveys the voyage’s tedium and its potential for discomfort or luxury, depending on one’s class of ticket. On their first evening aboard the SS Adriatic (19 October 1921) she recorded: I am lying in a narrow, wobbly cabin. Franz Strauss came by to say that the Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin was on board, sharing a bottle of wine with his father and offering to find them better quarters. After two days of fatigue and headaches, Schumann was finally able to enjoy herself: Wonderful day, sunshine, completely calm sea, great boredom. I completely forgot to mention that we already met [Lucrezia] Bori on the train from Paris to Cherbourg. We don’t see much of Chaliapin; he sits all morning in the Turkish bath, and unfortunately only speaks French, not English.³ Despite, or perhaps because of, the language