Karl Muck and His Compatriots: German Conductors in America during World War I (and How They Coped)

By Edmund A. Bowles

The intense and often irrational hostility of Americans and their government toward Germans and Austrians during World War I is well known. A subtext of this hostility was the difficulty faced by conductors and musicians from these countries generally in trying to make music in so nativistic and alien an environment. Most of them, of course, were loyal American citizens (or soon were to be), who managed to work despite attempts to bring them down. Others fell victim to charges, real or imagined, that led to arrest and incarceration for the duration of the war. A few were unapologetically pro-German and ultimately paid the price for their political beliefs. A total of nine conductors of major American symphony orchestras had been born in Germany, Austria, Hungary, or Bohemia. Only two of them, however, were considered enough of a threat to be imprisoned in a special camp, located in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia: Karl Muck of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Ernst Kunwald of the Cincinnati Symphony.