Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts

By Joseph Horowitz

Book Overview

During the first half of the twentieth century--decades of war and revolution in Europe--an "intellectual migration" relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe's supreme performing artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and choreographers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A "foreign homeland" (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them? George Balanchine, in collaboration with Stravinsky, famously created an Americanized version of Russian classical ballet. Kurt Weill, schooled in Berlin jazz, composed a Broadway opera. Rouben Mamoulian's revolutionary Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma drew upon Russian "total theater." An army of German filmmakers--among them F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder--made Hollywood more edgy and cosmopolitan. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich redefined film sexuality. Erich Korngold upholstered the sound of the movies. Rudolf Serkin inspirationally inculcated dour Germanic canons of musical interpretation. An obscure British organist reinvented himself as "Leopold Stokowski." However, most of these gifted migr s to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions. A central theme of Joseph Horowitz's study is that Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"--they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible--they colonized. "The polar extremes," he writes, "were Balanchine, who shed Petipa to invent a New World template for ballet, and the conductor George Szell, who treated his American players as New World Calibans to be taught Mozart and Beethoven." A symbiotic relationship to African American culture is another ongoing motif emerging from Horowitz's survey: the immigrants "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality"; they proved immune to "the growing pains of a young high culture separating from parents and former slaves alike."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006074846X
• ISBN13: 9780060748463
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

definitely worth reading

I agree that Horowitz does a better job with music, which is after all his specialty, than with film, but I found his assessments of the costs of exile very interesting and well-argued. His appreciations of Mamoulian, Nazimova, Mitropoulos, Varèse, and other less-currently-heralded artists are particularly welcome, though often quite heartbreaking.

A fascinating read

This is a great book, very well researched and written in an easy-to-read manner. I don't understand the other two reviewers - I even checked to see if I had bought a second edition when I read about the language being a "disgrace". There are a couple of typos early on, but the rest of the book is beautifully written. I can't judge about the correct year of a movie being 1915 or 1916 or 1918, which another reviewer lists as one of the "wince-making" errors in the book, but in my opinion this is beside the point. Scholars interested in a specific person profiled here will not buy this book; they will buy a biography of that person instead. This book is for anyone who wants to learn more about the impact of a sudden change in culture on people's ability to make art - the change being of course the ascent of the Nazis to power and World War II, which drove many Europeans to exile in the United States. The author doesn't restrict himself to one genre, instead choosing to cover dance, music, cinema and theater; as a result, he spends only a few pages on each of the many celebrities (Toscanini, Dietrich, etc) he writes about, but there are enough notes at the end of the book to help the curious reader find references regarding this or that person. Besides, many artists with high potential did not fare too well after they arrived in the States and are now largely forgotten. I can see how the lack of space devoted to any one person might frustrate some readers, though. The book is more an overview than an in-depth examination of how exile has affected specific individuals. I loved that book, and highly recommend it to anyone who wonders how changing cultures in adulthood affects artists and their ability to make art.

Fascinating But Sloppy

Great subject, interestingly told, but did anybody edit the language? It's a disgrace. If so many mistakes made it through, I wonder whether anybody did any fact-checking either.