Australian music lovers may be familiar with the Eugene Goossens scandal, which saw the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s first permanent conductor forced to leave the country in disgrace in 1956 after indecent photographs were discovered in his possession, but they may be less familiar with the ousting of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s feted conductor Karl Muck, who was targeted, interned as an enemy alien and ultimately deported from the USA amidst rising anti-German sentiment during the First World War.

Muck’s experiences in the USA are the subject of Melissa D. Burrage’s thoroughly researched book The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America. The toast of Bayreuth, mentioned in the same breath as Hans Richter and Felix Weingartner, Muck was brought out to America in 1906 as the result of diplomatic negotiations that extended all the way to President Theodore Roosevelt and Emperor Wilhelm II.

Using Muck’s plight to illustrate broader shifts in social and political sentiment in America, Burrage traces the way the German community in Boston was valued for its contributions to the culture and sophistication of the city before the government...