Doctor Muck, who became conductor of the Boston Symphony some years later, was bamwar less personal in his readings. His principal work in Germany had been the conducting of opera, and occasionally a lack of routine in symphonic work showed itself in badly combined programmes, but only in that one respect. As a conductor of the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms he was a master, and to me his interpretations of Brahms rank among the finest that I have heard. It was a tragedy that this man, who had gained not only the confidence and respect of his patron, Major Higginson, to a greater degree than any other of the Boston conductors, who was admired not only in Boston but in every city which the orchestra visited, and to whom America had given unbounded acclaim, should at the crucial moment have proved himself a supercilious, arrogant Prussian of the worst Junker type, ungrateful toward the man to whom he owed his many successful years in America, and finally even an abject coward and renegade toward the country to which he owed national allegiance.
The story in its entirety is too unpleasant to be told, but as after Muck’s return to Germany he saw fit to indulge in the most violent diatribes against America and its treatment of him, it is justifiable to tell a little of the truth in these pages.
In order to understand the story properly it is necessary to recall the excitement which swept through the country when we finally entered the Great War. Wars arouse prejudice as well as patriotism, and suspicion as well as faith. One of the curious, almost pathological, results of the psychosis of war is the spy mania, and this manifested itself in the years of 1917 and 1918 to a remarkable extent—in America as well as in Europe. One need only recall the many stories of concrete tennis-courts which were discovered and vouched for by reputable people as having been built years before by German army officers, who, disguised as “rich American financiers” (!) had constructed lavish country places along the Atlantic seaboard, all of which possessed these remarkable concrete tennis-courts. These were to support great guns which at the proper moment were to put the American navy out of existence! There were also wonderful stories of secret wires discovered in private houses, and of strange beacon-lights suddenly flaming up at regular intervals along the coast in order to signal messages to some mysterious German submarine.
It was all like a war novel of Oppenheim, and as some of our ladies joined the secret-service in an unofficial capacity, they together with others—who conceived it to be the height of faithlessness to our country to enjoy a symphony of Beethoven or an opera of Wagner while we were at war with Germany—had a beautiful time in the happy illusion that they were doing real war work.
Doctor Muck immediately became a centre of suspicion. He had taken a cottage at Seal Harbor, Maine, for the summer of 1917, and of course he was immediately accused of having a wireless outfit and signalling to a whole fleet of German submarines which were cruising off Mount Desert Island and whose immediate object was, of course, to capture all the millionaires of Bar Harbor and hold them captives for huge ransoms.
According to others he had placed a telephone receiver in the cellar of his house in Boston which skilfully tapped the wire of the telephone of the lady next door, and she, to her horror, had one morning on lifting her telephone, in order to call up her butcher, heard his “guttural” German voice conversing with some mysterious German at the other end about a shipment of dynamite, which was to be used, of course, to destroy Faneuil Hall and the birthplace of Henry W. Longfellow in Maine.
There was not a story so wild that it did not gain credence, but it was not so strange that many of these preposterous rumors should centre around Doctor Muck. His attitude toward us had become more and more supercilious. That he should sympathize with his own country was perhaps natural, but that he should use some tact and reticence in this respect was equally to be expected. He might have taken example from Fritz Kreisler who, as an Austrian citizen, served at the beginning of the war in the Austrian army, but was retired and returned to this country before we entered the conflict. From then on he acted with such dignity and tact, giving up all playing in public during that critical period, that he retained the personal respect and affection of all right-thinking Americans.