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From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland.

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From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland. By R. Allen Lott. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xviii, 366 p. ISBN 0-19-514883-5. $39.95.] Music examples, facsimiles, illustrations, bibliography, index.

In 1846, Philadelphia composer and critic William Henry Fry traveled to Paris as correspondent for the New York Tribune. While there he approached the director of the Paris Opera about engaging the company for a rehearsal of his opera Leonora, which had recently received its premiere in Philadelphia. The director dismissed Fry's request with the oft-quoted remark, "We look upon America as an industrial country--excellent for electric telegraphs and railroads but not for Art.... They would think me crazy to produce an opera by an American" (Fry in The Musical World and New York Musical Times 5 [26 March 1853]: 195-96).

Such was a common European view of America during the nineteenth century. Some Europeans, on the other hand, saw the U.S. as an "El Dorado," a "Land of Musical Promise running with rivers of milk and honey," as Czech-born opera impresario Max Maretzek noted in his memoirs, Crolchets and Quavers (New York: S. French, 1855; quoted in Lott, p. 6). From the 1840s on, European performers began traveling to...