Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 2).djvu/84

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DANA
DANA

the literature of that instrument. It was as a conductor, however, that he gained his greatest celebrity. He possessed strong personal magnetism, united with power to impart his ideas, which made him an ideal conductor. His aim was always to produce the inner meaning and spirit of a composition. Through his gentle bearing and high culture he gained many warm friends. Never seeking for immediate fame or personal success, he found that high truth which he extended in his art. — His son, Walter Johannes, b. in Breslau, Prussia, 30 Jan., 1862, received his musical education chiefly from his father, but also had instruction from other noted musicians. During the great music festival given by Dr. Damrosch in May, 1881, he first acted as conductor in drilling several sections of the large chorus, one in New York, and another in Newark, N. J. The latter, consisting chiefly of members of the Harmonic society, elected him to be their conductor. Under his leadership this society regained its former reputation, and during this time a series of concerts was given, in which such works as Rubinstein's “Tower of Babel,” Berlioz's “Damnation de Faust,” and Verdi's “Requiem” were performed. He was then only nineteen years of age, but showed marked ability in drilling large masses. During Dr. Damrosch's last illness his son was suddenly called upon to conduct the German opera, which he did with success, and after his father's death was appointed to be assistant director and conductor at the Metropolitan opera-house, and also to succeed him as conductor of the Symphony and Oratorio societies. One of his principal achievements was the successful performance of “Parsifal,” perhaps the most difficult of Wagner's operas, for the first time in the United States, in March, 1886, by the Oratorio and Symphony societies. During his visit to Europe in the summer of 1886 he was invited by the Deutsche Tonkünstler-Verein, of which Dr. Franz Liszt was president, to conduct some of his father's compositions at Sondershausen, Thuringia. Carl Goldmark's opera “Merlin” was produced for the first time in the United States under his direction, at the Metropolitan opera-house, 3 Jan., 1887.


DANA, Charles Anderson, editor, b. in Hinsdale, N. H., 8 Aug., 1819; d. near Glen Cove, Long Island, 17 Oct., 1897. He was a descendant of Richard, progenitor of most of the Danas in the United States. His boyhood was spent in Buffalo, N. Y., where he worked in a store until he was eighteen years old. At that age he first studied the Latin grammar, and prepared himself for college, entering Harvard in 1839, but after two years a serious trouble with his eyesight compelled him to leave. He received an honorable dismissal, and was afterward given his bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1842 he became a member of the Brook Farm association for agriculture and education, being associated with George and Sophia Ripley, George William Curtis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, John Sullivan Dwight, Margaret Fuller, and other philosophers more or less directly concerned in the remarkable attempt to realize at Roxbury a high ideal of social and intellectual life. One of the survivors of Brook Farm speaks of Mr. Dana as the only man of affairs connected with that Unitarian, humanitarian, and socialistic experiment. His earliest newspaper experience was gained in the management of the “Harbinger,” which was devoted to social reform and general literature. After about two years of editorial work on Elizur Wright's Boston “Chromotype,” a daily newspaper, Mr. Dana joined the staff of the New York “Tribune” in 1847. The next year he spent eight months in Europe, and after his return he became one of the proprietors and the managing editor of the “Tribune,” a post which he held until 1 April, 1862. The extraordinary influence and circulation attained by that newspaper during the ten years preceding the civil war was in a degree due to the development of Mr. Dana's genius for journalism. This remark applies not only to the making of the “Tribune” as a newspaper, but also to the management of its staff of writers, and to the steadiness of its policy as the leading organ of anti-slavery sentiment. The great struggle of the “Tribune” under Greeley and Dana was not so much for the overthrow of slavery where it already existed as against the further spread of the institution over unoccupied territory, and the acquisition of slave-holding countries outside of the Union. It was not less firm in its resistance of the designs of the slave-holding interest than wise in its attitude toward the extremists and impracticables at the north. In the “Tribune's” opposition to the attempt to break down the Missouri compromise and to carry slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and in the development and organization of that popular sentiment which gave birth to the Republican party and led to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Mr. Dana bore no unimportant part. Writing of the political situation in 1854, Henry Wilson says, in his “Rise and Fall of the Slave Power”: “At the outset, Mr. Greeley was hopeless and seemed disinclined to enter the contest. He told his associates that he would not restrain them, but, as for himself, he had no heart for the strife. They were more hopeful; and Richard Hildreth, the historian, Charles A. Dana, the veteran journalist, James S. Pike, and other able writers, opened and continued a powerful opposition in its columns, and did very much to rally and reassure the friends of freedom and to nerve them for the fight,” In 1861 Mr. Dana went to Albany to advance the cause of Mr. Greeley as a candidate for the U. S. senate, and nearly succeeded in nominating him. The caucus was about equally divided between Mr. Greeley's friends and those of Mr. Evarts, while Ira Harris had a few votes which held the balance of power, and, at the instigation of Thurlow Weed, the supporters of Mr. Evarts went over to Judge Harris. During the first year of the war the ideas of Mr. Greeley and those of Mr. Dana in regard to the proper conduct of military operations were somewhat at variance; and this disagreement resulted in the resignation of Mr. Dana, after fifteen years' service on the “Tribune.” He was at once employed by Secretary Stanton in special work of importance for the war department, and in 1863 was appointed assistant secretary of war, which office he held until after the surrender of Lee. His duties as the representative of the civil authority at the scene of