The vast difference in attitude between the French and certain of my compatriots regarding the proper stand to be taken in time of war toward the art of an enemy nation was very striking. I had myself decided that the New York Symphony Orchestra should not play the works of living German composers, and that the German language should not be sung at our concerts during the war. There seemed to me good and valid reasons for such a course. But Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner I considered as classics, belonging to us just as much as to Germany, and their divine message had naught to do with the political and military leaders of Germany who had plunged the world into this horrible bath of blood. There was, however, in New York a small but noisy group led by a few women who sought to demonstrate their “patriotism” by hysterical outbursts and newspaper protests against the performance of all music composed by Germans, no matter how many years ago. Some of these women, through the curious psychosis of war, really thought that they were serving their country by their protests. In the winter of 1918 the orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire made a tour through America under their conductor, André Messager. When I called on him the day after his arrival he showed me a letter he had just received from one of these women protesting against his performing a Beethoven Symphony during his stay in America. He was white with anger, and when I asked him how he would answer it, he said: “I will answer it as a French artist should.” I said: “The best way to answer would be to put Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony on your first programme.” “I will,” he said; and he did. The opposition to Wagner was based on very amusing premises. Because some of his heroes were wont to appear on the stage in very blond wigs and beards, these lady sleuth-hounds seemed to perceive some evil and subtle connection between _Siegfried_ in the “Nibelungen Trilogy” and Nietzsche’s “blond beast,” which, according to his prophecy, was eventually to control the earth. Their studies of Wagner were too shallow to enable them to realize that the whole philosophy of life as expressed by Wagner in the “Nibelungen Trilogy” was in direct contrast to the desire of the modern militaristic German to rule and control the world by force. Wagner depicts a prehistoric world in which the gods of greed, lust, and power rule, carrying, however, the seed of their own destruction within them because of the materialistic quality of their desires. As their power wanes and the old gods perish, a new religion is born, the religion of self-sacrifice through love, as symbolized by _Brunhilde_ in her self-immolation on the funeral pyre of _Siegfried_. But all this is already ancient history, and I for one confidently believe that the racial spirit which created the Germany of Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Kant, and Wagner will soon return again to brighten and ennoble the world.