Oscar Sonneck Writes to Carl Engel

The name of Oscar George Sonneck is an honored one in the annals of American music; but it has been honored more in the breach than the observance of scholarly research and critical elucidation. To parody another clich6, his was a short life but not a merry one. He had no job until he was near thirty, and was dead at fifty-five; yet in that quarter-century he had two countries, three jobs, and four professions. None of the latter satisfied his boyhood's burning desire, to be known as a great composer. Near his twentieth birthday he wrote a long letter of chagrin and disillusionment to his mother, confessing his disappointment in himself, evincing the wry sense of realism tinged with pessimism that his friends always associated with him. He buried himself in work, one senses, not alone because there was always so much to be done but also because work gave him the constant reassurance of ability and accomplishment that his psyche needed to avoid too-frequent fits of depression. A sense of humor was by no means lacking in him, but its symptom was an ironic half-smile rather than a belly laugh. His bicultural orientation resulted from the fact that, though born in a suburb of Jersey City in 1873, he lost his father when he was fifteen months old and was soon taken to Germany, his mother's homeland, where he was reared in well-to-do circumstances, sent to good schools, and established at the University of Munich with postgraduate work elsewhere. Early in 1900, realizing that the few bits of music and poetry he had managed to publish were not the produce of a large talent, he returned (apparently for the first time) to his native land. He had investigated, I judge, and found that little attention had been paid by American historians and writers on music to the art as it had existed in the English colonies and their successor states. He spent over two years in libraries from Boston to Charleston, and when he had finished his research and formed it into the manuscript for a book on music in early English (and German) America he offered the manuscript to Herbert Putnam, then the Librarian of Congress. He came away from that meeting with no

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