Nationalist Anthems

DANGEROUS MELODIES: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War

BY JONATHAN ROSENBERG

Norton, 512 pp., $39.95

IF YOU HAD WANDERED into an American concert hall in the late 19th century, the odds of your encountering a work of German symphonic music would have been astonishingly high. Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Wagner were the lifeblood of American orchestras, with Wagner also reigning in the opera house. American conservatories, meanwhile, were run according to the German pedagogic tradition, and American composers largely wrote tone poems and symphonies in the manner of their continental cousins. With every major conductor of German extraction, and with so many German musicians making up the ranks of symphony rosters—from New York to St. Louis, Boston to Chicago—the lingua franca of orchestral rehearsals was, more often than not, the language of Goethe, not Thoreau.

This state of affairs