‘Voices of all the nations’: Strauss, Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, and the American concert tour at the Fin de Siècle

From the 1880s to the First World War, some of Europe’s most eminent composers were invited to the United States to conduct and perform. Almost invariably, American audiences, critics, and musicians experienced these visits as major cultural events, influencing contemporary discussion about the future of art, the nature of American concert life, and its relationship to that in Europe. In defining their relationship to a musical Other, American critics helped fashion a national musical Self. This dissertation documents, for the first time, the tours of Strauss (1904), Saint- Saëns (1906), and Scriabin (1907), and adds to the growing literature on music economics and the changing social status of performers. The critical reception of these tours also demonstrates a complex American understanding of its European heritage, adapted by commentators to their own ends. The success of Strauss intersects with the end of Gilded-Age aestheticism and, I argue, a deliberate ‘re-masculinisation’ of the artistic sphere. To understand Saint-Saëns’s visit, I explore evolutionary methodologies in music history and a national enthusiasm for cultural acquisition. In discussing the relative failure of Scriabin, I address enduring racial and gendered prejudice. Each tour introduces a variety of critical issues. Considered together, they demonstrate how Americans, reckoning with their European heritage, treated that relationship as a way of articulating the Self. Critics saw America’s future in its synthesis of the best elements of the Old World. In affirming the virtues of European art, critics deliberately positioned American music as its eventual heir.