ABSTRACT
Between August Johannes Jaeger's birth in 1860 and the beginning of his preserved correspondence in the 1890s there exists a huge documentary gap. Detailed biographical information concerning the larger part of his life is scanty and the vast majority of extant letters cover only slightly more than his last ten years. Virtually all that is known of Jaeger's earlier life is contained in two articles that appeared after his death, one a brief and anonymous obituary in the Musical Times, the other a longer article in the Spectator by a longstanding friend, the musical enthusiast and writer, Charles Larcom Graves.2 In the circumstances it seems possible to do no more than attempt to sketch in various kinds of background to Jaeger's lost years
He was born on 18 March 1860, the third son of the ten children of Gottfried and Caroline Jaeger of Dusseldorf, in what was then Western Prussia. The family name is based on the German word for hunter, and may have associations with towns named Jaegerndorf in Bavaria or Silesia; although it is a documented Jewish surname, there is no evidence that the family was of Jewish descent. There were to be altogether three boys and seven girls, although only three of August's sisters survived to undertake the journey to England in the late 1870s; one of them, Joanna, later remembered the large family living in a house on the Reichstrasse, in the Neustadt area of the city, near the corner with the adjacent Elizabethstrasse. The house was opposite a park with a lake, the Schwanenspiegel, where the children skated in winter. It was a fairly central, prosperous part of town, close to the famous Kõnigsallee on the one hand and the Rhine on the other, offering cherished associations with musical figures such as the Schumanns, Brahms and Joachim. One of August's early musical experiences consisted of following the processions of military bands, and a special memory was of childish pride in being allowed to hold the music of one of the players; Basil Maine found in this a symbol of his whole life.3 But there was a less pleasant military accompaniment to Jaeger's childhood after the appointment of the ruthless and opportunist Otto von Bismarck as Chief Minister in 1862. Over the next eight years he fought three wars to enlarge Prussian territories and create a unified German state under Prussian control. Earlier the Rhineland had been a French possession, governed under French law, and the majority of its population wished to maintain that tradition and belong to France permanently. The new adjustment was hard to make, especially as in 1871 Bismarck became Imperial Chancellor, dominating Germany for nearly two decades with an increasingly harsh and corrupt regime. It was a process not without significance for the cultural and scientific life of England and America.
