Internment
Muck was arrested on March 25, 1918 just before midnight and therefore the BSO's performances of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion on March 26 and April 2, which Muck had been preparing for months, had to be conducted by Ernst Schmidt. Government officials were free to ignore the fact that he was a Swiss citizen and bearer of a Swiss passport, since the law sanctioned the arrest of those born anywhere in Germany before the founding of the German Empire without respect to citizenship. Boston police and federal agents also searched Muck's home at 50 Fenway and removed personal papers and scores. They suspected the conductor's markings in the score of the St. Matthew Passion were code indicative of pro-German activity. He was imprisoned at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia until on August 21, 1919, an agent of the Department of Justice put him and his wife on a ship to Copenhagen. The Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity that had elected him to national honorary membership in 1916 expelled Muck in 1919 for sympathizing with the Central powers.
Fellow internees had heard that Muck had vowed not to conduct in America again, but they persuaded him that the camp was more of a German village — some of them even called it "Orglesdorf." A memoir of the event written in 1940 recalled the mess hall packed with 2000 internees, with honored guests like their doctors and government censors on the front benches, facing 100 musicians. Under Muck's baton, he wrote, "the Eroica rushed at us and carried us far away and above war and worry and barbed wire."
When sailing from New York on August 21, 1919, Muck told reporters: "I am not a German, although they said I was. I considered myself an American." He said he had "bitter feelings" toward the newspapers for their unfair treatment of him. He expressed doubts that the BSO, then in a sorry state of organization, could recover from the internment of 29 of its German members. After his deportation from the United States, he declined all offers to bring him back to the United States after the war.
Later that year the Boston Post disclosed that Muck had been having an affair with a 20-year-old in Boston's Back Bay and had written her a letter reading in part: "I am on my way to the concert hall to entertain the crowds of dogs and swine who think that because they pay the entrance fee they have the right to dictate to me my selections. I hate to play for this rabble ... a very short time our gracious Kaiser will smile on my request and recall me to Berlin ... Our Kaiser will be prevailed upon to see the benefit to the Fatherland of my obtaining a divorce and making you my own."
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