Caricatures of the Concertgebouw: Satirical Cartoons on the 1920 Amsterdam Mahler-Feest

The Amsterdam Concertgebouw’s Mahler-Feest, held in May 1920, was the first major music festival in Europe following the First World War. The event was cast simultaneously as a celebration of the works of Gustav Mahler about ten years after his death, a commemoration of Willem Mengelberg’s twenty-fifth anniversary as the orchestra’s director, and a grandiose return to public concert life after the war. The festival committee invited musicians and guests from across Europe and North America, and the foreign press largely characterized the event as a musical ‘peace conference’ on the ‘neutral soil’ of the Netherlands. Simultaneously, however, several satirical cartoons were printed in Dutch newspapers, mocking the festival’s audiences and public messaging. By examining the sentiments advanced through these cartoons and their accompanying texts – in contrast with those in the foreign reporting – this article argues that these journalistic depictions show a tension between competing views of musical democracy in the post-war period. While the Concertgebouw administrators felt that the festival supported democratic ideals by bringing together an international roster of participants, the cartoonists humorously questioned this perspective and considered the implications of a potential shift away from the class-based hierarchies that had formerly predominated in music performance.