The Entrepreneurial Conductor: Insights from the German-American Circuit

In October 1905, German conductor Max Kaempfert launched a new business idea. Kaempfert dreamt of founding a Deutsches Volks-Orchester, consisting of around 70 musicians. Under his leadership, the orchestra would tour the German Lands during the whole winter season from October to April. The idea was to bring good symphonic music, especially from the German masters, to smaller German cities which could not afford to subsidize a residential orchestra. Pre-condition to this venture was the readiness of a certain amount of municipalities to subscribe to this “non-profit-making organization”, as Kaempfert called it. Hence he contacted town councils all over the Reich in order to enlist their support for his project.
Conventional wisdom has it that conductors do art, not business. Their energies focus on performance, while they are entirely disinterested in entrepreneurial organization. Elias Canetti in his classical study on Crowds and Power even portrayed conductors as so focused on their art that they would not have the slightest sense for anything extra-musical – only to demonstrate afterwards the great extent of their social power over musicians and the audience.
Taking a social history perspective, the aim of my paper is to also question this purely artistic self-depiction. While Canetti was successful in deconstructing the wide-ranging effects of allegedly innocent conducting, I will follow up upon projects such as Kaempfert’s and delve into the everyday activities of ordinary conductors in the German American circuit in order to unleash their entrepreneurial qualities. Following up on seminal research on musicians as entrepreneurs by William Weber and John Spitzer, I argue that the figure of the entrepreneurial conductor emerged at the crossing of the public and the private; that it fostered performances for the musical omnivores; and that it persisted until far into the 20th century on both sides of the German-American circuit.