The Brothers Hambourg

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

Eric Koch has found a worthy subject for his stated goal of depicting
the relationship between the performer and society in England and Canada
between the 1890s and the 1960s. The Hambourgs were a gifted musical
family who were also masters of the art of networking. Rubbing shoulders
easily with the rich and famous, they hosted glittering musical soirées
that had social cachet. Not that the Hambourgs themselves were rich, but
they certainly knew the importance of keeping up appearances.

Like black basketball stars coming out of the ghetto, Jews of the 19th
century from Eastern Europe and Russia used their talent as a passport
to comparative freedom and opportunity in England and North America.
Koch describes the officially anti-Semitic Russian empire where the
piano prodigy Mark was born in 1879. Ten years later, Mark made his
London debut, giving 1000 concerts by 1906. Koch speculates that Mark
may have bankrolled the family for a number of years through his tours,
which took him to the far reaches of the British empire. Most of the
other family members eventually settled in Toronto, where the Hambourg
Conservatory was founded in 1911. It soon became prestigious in every
sense of the word. In 1923, Boris Hambourg was a founding member of the
Hart House String Quartet which, under the patronage of Vincent Massey,
toured North America and Europe. In contrast, Clement Hambourg’s
musical career was in the doldrums until he suddenly reinvented himself
as a jazz promoter after World War II. From 1946 to 1963, his “House
of Hambourg” jazz nightclub was a gathering place for young musicians.

Koch’s portrayal of the political and cultural atmosphere of London
and Toronto is revealing, especially with respect to Toronto’s social
evolution during this time. There are also anecdotes of concert tours,
celebrated artists, radical Russian emigrés, and one brilliant
scoundrel who nearly ruined the Conservatory’s reputation. An
interesting sidelight is the relationship that Jan Hambourg’s wife had
with the writer Willa Cather, which had lesbian overtones and influenced
Cather’s work. Despite some errors in footnoting, this abundantly
illustrated book is well written and researched, and is an engaging,
colorful piece of social history.