Greenwich Street, though close by New York’s financial temples, has seen better times. These days, the neighborhood is home to a financial printer (whose house python once amused lawyers and jaded investment bankers at its feeding time), a two-thousand-car Port Authority carpark, and the Thunder XXX Video. In 1835, however, when young George Templeton Strong lived at 180, Greenwich Street was home to a far tonier crowd than the clientele of Buttman II and On Golden Blonde. A future Wall Street lawyer, Columbia College trustee, founding member and treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission (predecessor of the American Red Cross), and autocrat-at-large, Strong was also to be one of the great diarists in American history, and his pungent chronicles are the point of departure for the highly informative and amusing second volume of Strong on Music. (Resonances, 1836–1849, the first volume in the projected three-volume set, was published in 1988.)

Strong kept his diary for forty years, from 1835, when he was a precocious sophomore at Columbia College, to the year of his death, 1875. It was a lively time, when the country sensed, in differing degrees, economic superiority, cultural inferiority, and its ability to use the advantages of the one to deal with the shortcomings of the other. At midcentury, while novelists like James Fenimore Cooper and artists like Benjamin West had long since presented satisfactory cultural credentials to Europe, our musical achievements were considered so modest as to permit the director of the Paris Conservatoire to think he was upholding standards by slamming the audition-room door on the phenomenal young American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk while hissing that “America is only good for steam engines!”

The perception of the United States as a giant machine-tool shop and Americans as a nation of mechanics in search of gratification was pounced upon by armies of European performers. Lured westward, a steady procession of virtuosi visited New York as the first stopping place in this “Land of Musical Promise … with cities … filled … with gold and silver and ivory.” Our forebears attended concerts for a variety of reasons: curiosity, fashion, sensation, and even for the performances themselves. For whatever motive, however, they heard music to which they would not otherwise have been exposed. While the violinists Ole Bull, Henri Vieuxtemps, and Camillo Sivori, the pianists Sigismund Thalberg, Henri Herz, and Leopold de Meyer, and the sopranos Henriette Sontag, Jenny Lind (the “Swedish Nightingale”), and Marietta Alboni (the “elephant that swallowed the nightingale”) all came to reap their share of the bountiful harvest of American shekels, they also left their profound effect on American musical life.

Part of the freshness and vitality of Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s excellent series stems from the curious fact that the history of nineteenth-century American music has been so little explored. While the éclat of Phineas T. Barnum and Jenny Lind was such that even today non-musicians still half-remember their names, the deadening apathy surrounding our musical history ensures that only few remember why. There is certainly no dearth of raw material: in addition to the immense press coverage that music and its practitioners received, there are roguish and beguiling works left by many of the heroes of Mrs. Lawrence’s tale. On the scholarly side, students of the period have contributed useful studies, but these tend to focus on isolated individuals and events. Perhaps the sheer size of the endeavor has been the chief repelling factor? Or is it that much of the music of the period has long been considered trash (particularly by those who have established this fact secondhand) and thus unworthy of serious study? At any rate, not since Gilbert Chase’s America’s Music and Arthur Loesser’s famous social history, Men, Women, and Pianos, has anyone taken such a stimulating and successful approach to the musical history of the time.

“To write a truly great diary, one should keep its composition secret and should intend no early publication of its contents.” So wrote Allan Nevins in 1952 in the preface to his and Milton Halsey Thomas’s edition of The Diary of George Templeton Strong. Circumstances conspired to ensure the complete satisfaction of this principle. The diary was closely guarded by Strong’s heirs for over fifty years until a descendent lent it to the museum of the American Red Cross. Little scholarly interest was paid to the document, possibly because of Strong’s appalling handwriting. Cramped and minuscule, it appears to describe the erratic wanderings of a hemorrhaging ant. By coincidence, however, the diary came to the attention of Henry Waters Taft, who was writing a history of his law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the successor to Strong’s legal practice. Taft informed Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, that Taft was holding a document of considerable historical interest, and, in due season, the diary was published in four volumes by Columbia University Press. Formerly, the diary was easy to find secondhand. These days it is seldom found, and expensive when it is.

Nevins and Thomas’s preface noted a conscious editorial omission: “Though we give numerous excerpts from his discriminating criticism of concerts, oratorios, and operas … an interesting volume of musical comment could—and some day will—be compiled.” A quarter-century after it was written, this remark gave Mrs. Lawrence the idea for her series, but she soon found that, unless she provided some sort of substantive context (such as New York’s musical life or the rest of the diary), those music entries by themselves would seem to be too fragmented to make the exercise worthwhile. In the event, Mrs. Lawrence’s title is somewhat misleading. Although Strong himself was president of the New York Philharmonic and an enthusiastic amateur musician particularly taken with the Masses of Haydn and Mozart (an amusing indulgence for one so caustic about Catholics), Strong on Music covers considerably more territory than the diarist’s often irascible mutterings about the state of music and musicians in his hometown. In truth, the author uses the diary as a point of departure for the wider (and wilder) musical life of the period.

The series ranges through the highs and lows of New York’s midcentury musical life. In addition to the performances of the great and famous, we see grotesque blackface minstrel shows like the Albino Minstrels and heavy-handed opera travesties like Lucy Did Sham Amour (Lucia di Lammermoor), as well as the sobrieties of the oratorio-and-motette crowd, who preferred their music as an adjunct to more soulful activity. Musical life is described mostly from the perspective of the critic—sometimes Strong himself (as chiefly found in the chapters headed “GTS”) but more often his critical brethren (in the chapters headed “Obbligato”), whose blood-in-the-water approach led them to attack one another with the same savage abandon with which they greeted a performer.

Although New York City’s musical life had altogether changed from its small-scale beginnings, a number of quaint absurdities persisted well into the nineteenth century. Professional musicians were still rare; some organizations debarred them completely (along with that other pariah class: women). Recitals were almost unheard-of and concerts were a mishmash of chamber music, popular songs (often sung in dialect), sentimental ballads, chunks of oratorios, and piano reductions of the overture or symphony of the moment. For the Upper Ten, the nose was an organ with which to look down on what they regarded as unspeakably debased theatrical and “operatic” performances.

They may have had a point. In those days “opera” belonged more to the genus Nashville than La Scala and was an art form of infinitely elastic definition. There were horse-operas (animals on stage, with the equine performer assuming a prominent role), aquatic operas (with stage-length tanks of water on which the action took place), ballet burlesques, dramatic travesties of plays, and the frantically popular blackface minstrel productions of Thomas Dartmouth (Daddy) Rice, including that perennial favorite, Bone Squash Diavolo (1835). There were gift concerts where prizes rather than performers got top billing, ethnic concerts, temperance concerts (countering the nineteenth-century equivalent of karaoke), bizarre brother/sister and family acts, a group of renegade religious nuts billed as the Shaking Quakers, bell ringers, and strategically draped nudes with names like the Grecian Exercises and the Model Artistes, who, in their own less cynical versions of performance art, re-enacted patriotic, artistic, or even biblical scenes to the accompaniment of a brass band.

These noisy and vaudevillian aspects of musical life contrasted sharply with the received tastes of New York’s aristocracy. For Strong and his coevals, musical life started with the foursquare harmonies of church music and did not progress much further. Outside of church, musical life was pursued through sodalities and private performance societies featuring excellent local performers and conductors like Ureli Corelli Hill, George Loder, and Henry Christian Timm, who, aside from their work in the concert hall, were not averse to supplementing their living by arranging travesties and Ethiopian operas for the music hall.

While the upper-caste prejudice against opera and theater performance gradually dissipated, Strong’s own distrust of what was heard there largely did not. Strong was among the highest of the High Episcopalians and after the Episcopal Hymnal, Bach and Handel seem to have been his formative influences. The early years of the diary show Strong’s wrestling with Beethoven and Weber, and, as far as he was concerned, much of their music bordered terra incognita. While still in his twenties, Strong discovered the roots of his lifelong ambivalence toward Donizetti (“ought to be hanged”), Mendelssohn (“unmeaning, stupid, and wearisome”), and Bellini (“stupid and silly”), as well as the foundation of his furious loathing of Berlioz, Verdi, and the other High Romantics.

Strong’s somewhat closeted musical education proved to be no impediment to his ability to deliver himself of a vivid and memorable line. A matchless adept of the poisonous phrase, Strong was also capable of elegant and touching praise. He once wrote that the effect of an aria from Weber’s Preciosa was “one of those things that carry one away with them at the very first note and go on in a perfect glow of intense beauty to the end—it did seem as if the Tabernacle [concert hall] and all in it were beginning slowly to whirl round and round.”

The music critic, a subspecies of the murderously belligerent New York journalist, added fizz to this potent broth. With editor-owners beating, suing, and horsewhipping one another as a stress-relieving consequence of their vicious circulation wars, there was plenty of spare bellicosity to trickle into their critics’ copy. Their primus inter pares was Henry Cood Watson, who, even when professing to admire a performer, couldn’t resist the dig. “Antognini has a beautiful tenor voice,” he wrote. “We should advise him, however, to keep from public view the disgusting practice of indiscriminate expectoration so peculiar to Italian vocalists.” Partisanship and the occasional cash payment were also known to help nudge critical opinion for (or against) a performer. Critical consistency was rare, at least when it came to musical matters. Strong put it well: “Niminy will call it quaint, and Piminy will call it very bad … so they’ll cackle and bray, according to their several gifts.” Personality clashes were another matter entirely, and the fraternity was much more predictable when it came to taking sides during their frequent and acrimonious personal disputes.

While the United States was not unknown to European performers before Strong’s time, artistic peregrinations to the New World were scarcely causing a shortage of steamship tickets. Starting in 1841, however, the stream of performers steadily increased and, by 1843, Europe’s superstars began to arrive. The Norwegian violinist Ole Bull (“as beautiful as Apollo”) and the Belgian Henri Vieuxtemps (who played with gold drops pendant from his ears) captivated New York. The press was quick to divide on the merits of the “Norwegian Paganini” and the “Belgian Paganini.” While Paganini himself never set foot in the United States, this was a mere trifle to critics who wrote as if they were on familiar terms with Niccolò. Thus, there were French, Irish, and Australian Paganinis, a Paganini of the harp, Paganinis of the accordion and the double-bass and even a Paganini whistler. The Ethiopians also laid their claim: a verse in “Daddy” Rice’s notorious song “Jim Crow” contained the line “An’ down in old Virginny/ Day say I play/ Like massa Paganinny.”

Indeed, “humbug,” that quality so dearly beloved of the American public, enjoyed one of its vintage years in 1850, the beginning point of Reverberations. Its qualities were described by the critic Richard Grant White. “Humbug,” he wrote, “does not necessarily imply a cheat on one side and a dupe on the other. It is the art of drawing attention and attaining success by … allowing people to deceive themselves.” Its fixed and immutable goal was the seduction and capture of other people’s money, generally with the willing connivance of the victim. In the hands of its most able practitioners, music itself was redefined as “the art of attracting … by secondary devices which often become the principal ones, the greatest possible number of curious people so that when expenses are tallied against receipts, the latter exceed the former by the widest possible margin.” This was what the legendary proto-impresario Bernard Ullman called “financial music.” Musical affect was nice, but what really counted was, as they say in baseball, putting butts in bleachers.

Situated at the midpoint of both the Romantic movement and the nineteenth century, 1850 was a pivotal year. The United States was at one of its many cultural crossroads. Still beholden to the colonial tradition, most of our music was imported from Europe. Fourteen years before, however, Ralph Waldo Emerson had famously enquired, “Should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition? … There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works.”

While national demigods such as Walt Whitman effused about all things American, other Yankees, such as Strong, were more reserved. In Europe, the revolutions of 1848 had galvanized, either through terror or elation, almost everyone. Against this backdrop were the successful conclusion of Liszt’s revolution of performance practice and the ascendancy of Beethoven’s music. Richard Wagner was writing murky tracts entitled Art and Revolution and The Art Work of the Future, and Europe had been subjugated by Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini in preparation for their even greater successor, Giuseppi Verdi. Quarantine of this febrile artistic atmosphere was impossible. When it finally arrived in the United States at around 4:00 in the afternoon of September 1, 1850, with the Swedish mega-soprano Jenny Lind, the dock-side band welcomed her with “God Save the Queen,” and all hell broke loose.

Lind had retired from opera performance the previous year. Her timing was auspicious. That unerring barometer of the American character, Phineas T. Barnum, “the True Prophet and Patron Saint of Media Hype,” in Mrs. Lawrence’s deft phrase, sensed that our tastes had changed. While Barnum knew we had always been infatuated with entertainment (such as his own credulity-straining attractions like the Feejee Mermaid and the Woolly Horse), he was willing to bet his fortune that America was ready for “Art.” Emersonian sentiments notwithstanding, Barnum knew people would not accept music as “Art” unless it was European.

While the Barnum and Lind episode has been frequently told, it has seldom been told as well or as amusingly. Mrs. Lawrence, a master of the throwaway line, describes Barnum’s unprecedented PR campaign with its endless public confidences, commissioned biographies, marketing paraphernalia (Jenny Lind “Segars,” Hair Gloss, and Chewing Tobacco), a poetry competition, a Jenny Lind Music Hall, and, above all, adroit, continual, and shameless manipulation of the press. It worked: Lind’s performances in this country earned, in the author’s words, “all but orgasmic” reviews, even from notorious party-poopers like John Sullivan Dwight. Even Strong, ever suspicious of popular enthusiasms, liked Lind. Artfully placed stories about the Nightingale’s church attendance and charitable activities added additional luster to her already absurdly gleaming halo.

Even haloes have their dark sides, however. One of the most interesting features of Reverberations is its portrayal of Lind as substantially more than some species of earthbound angel, as Barnum’s publicity machine had had it. Before breaking with Barnum (she un-angelically objected to performing in a Philadelphia amphitheater redolent of fresh horse turds), Lind accumulated much professional and personal criticism, which only increased as she continued her tours. But as the author shows, so effective was Barnum’s hard sell that even today the surviving image of Lind is that of a wedding-cake bride.

Other renowned singers visited the opera-mad United States during this period. The rotundly sensuous Marietta Alboni (“her embonpoint exceeds even the most accommodating standard of symmetry,” wrote White) and Henriette Sontag, a particular favorite of Beethoven and Weber, flourished. The brilliant Giulia Grisi and Mario arrived in 1854 and quickly established themselves as the team to beat. The opera world itself was, by Mrs. Lawrence’s account, a maze of intrigue, sabotage, backbiting, and petty jealousy—how different from today!—and shaky finances exacerbated matters. While classical companies like Don Francisco Martí’s Havana Opera Company and the troupes of Maurice Strakosch and Max Maretzek struggled to remain solvent, Ethiopian opera had no such troubles. Night after night, Christy’s Minstrels, Eph Horn (“the prince of Darkies”), and Maximilian Zohrer (who specialized in blackface falsetto imitations of Lind, Sontag, and Alboni) packed ’em in. The year 1853 saw the arrival of Lola Montez. Most of Europe thought Lola was only wasting her strength when standing, as her reputation as slut far exceeded her fame as dancer. But here’s a quibble: Mrs. Lawrence recycles Lola’s old claim that she and Liszt once enjoyed an indiscretion, although modern scholarship has corroborated Liszt’s always forcible denial of the liaison.

While it never appeared to trouble George Templeton Strong overly, the fundamental theme of the series that bears his name is the development of American music. According to Mrs. Lawrence, its unlikely protagonist was the peculiar William Henry Fry. Not a very good composer, not a very good lecturer, and not a very good critic, Fry showed how determination and an unfailing sense of amour propre can propel an otherwise mediocre talent into history. Fry used his bully pulpits to bewail the reluctance of New York’s fledgling orchestras to perform American music—in particular, his. Fry offered a gargantuan lecture series covering the history of music from ancient times to modern masters in which his own works were the inevitable criteria of excellence. “Didn’t suppose that it was possible for a sane man … to make such a jackass of himself,” observed Strong sourly. Fry’s The Breaking Heart, Leonora, and The Borderers were, possibly with reason, the subject of barely concealed snickers. One snicker, however, was too much to bear. Upon the critic Richard Willis’s fateful review of Fry’s limp Santa Claus Symphony, Fry screamed into print with a forty-page rant that touched off a decade-long critical free-for-all about the place of American music and musicians. Although Fry’s letter has been read by some as the true start of American music, Mrs. Lawrence convincingly notes that Fry was more akin to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow than the mastermind of a cultural revolution.

While America’s composers were feeling somewhat stifled, its performers were doing a little better. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the Creole pianist, survived a shaky start in New York to become, along with Sigismund Thalberg, the smash hit of 1856. Strong, however, was not a Gottschalk partisan. Ever on the alert for piano-bashing (though he admired Thalberg), Strong described Gottschalk’s virtuosity as an accumulation of “dirty antics and dexterities,” likening it to Romeo pausing in the Balcony Scene and saying “six slim slick saplings” very fast. Warming to his subject, Strong wrote that Gottschalk’s delicate fingering put him in mind of “the traveller [who], having gone to sleep in the depths of the tropical forest, is gradually awakened by ants and other bugs crawling over him.” New York’s critics thought otherwise, reaching a rare concord in their acknowledgment of Gottschalk’s mastery.

Strong’s opinions on music did not mellow with age. “Tolerable music is not to be endured: a decent and creditable symphony is an abomination,” he glowered when but a tender thirty-three, while his furious sentiments about Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz that would so gratify and irritate later generations were incubating nicely. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Strong as just a reactionary hothead. Ignoring our contemporaries is the sport of the ages. Indeed, Strong’s retrospective tastes are shared by many of us, differing only in degree. Strong emerges as a man to whom standards meant everything and who thought, at least as deeply as today’s critics, about aesthetics. It seems that his real sin was the vigor with which he expressed himself. “As Strong’s musical preferences narrowed,” sighs Mrs. Lawrence, “so did his faculty for verbalizing them expand—sometimes to numbing lengths.”

Reverberations, like its predecessor, Resonances, is complex and dense. So rich are its characters and so involved were their times that few will come away after a single reading with their recollections intact. Nevertheless, Reverberations reads wonderfully well. This is due to Mrs. Lawrence’s considerable gifts as organizer and musical historian, but especially to her exceptionally droll observations. Her humor is similar to Arthur Loesser’s—clever and detached, often deadly but always fair. As exasperating as Strong was, and as silly as his contemporaries could often be, the author recounts their shortcomings and qualities with the same benign and tolerant affection. At least as captivating is Mrs. Lawrence’s evocation of Old New York with its music houses, opinionated and noisy population, bizarre enthusiasms, and its collective delight at all of this astonishing new music. After reading Strong on Music, walk around Lower Manhattan to the present-day sights of Strong’s houses, Barnum’s American Museum, Castle Garden, Niblo’s Saloon, the Tabernacle, and the various hotels and dwellings where Lind, Gottschalk, and others slept, and realize that while New York may be young, it too has ghosts.