The 1918 Pandemic’s Impact on Music? Surprisingly Little
May 6, 2020
“Music Nets Millions for Liberty Loan Drive,” proclaimed a front-page headline in October 1918. A major gala at the Metropolitan Opera had just raised more than $20 million for that World War I bond campaign. The New York Philharmonic had raised another million in its own patriotic concert, with George M. Cohan leading his hit “Over There.”
But further down the page in Musical Courier magazine were bleaker notices: National tours of the Chicago Opera Association and the Paris Conservatory’s orchestra had been put on hold because of quarantines in East Coast and Midwestern cities, a response to the influenza outbreak then sweeping the world.
“One thing can be said for the influenza,” Musical America magazine noted a few months later. “It has taken away the certainty from symphony concerts, with the result that one never knows on starting forth these days whether it will be the soloist, the conductor or the entire personnel of the orchestra that will be unable to appear. The only sure thing is that someone will be ill.”
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