Documented Aliens

Left: George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky


This review ran today in the Houston Chronicle:

ARTISTS IN EXILE: How Refugees From Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts
By Joseph Horowitz
HarperCollins, 458 pp., $27.50

Give us your talented, your proud, your harassed geniuses yearning to breathe free….

That’s not how Emma Lazarus put it, but it’s pretty much the invitation extended to European artists by American orchestras, theatrical and opera impresarios and film studios in the period from the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II. In “Artists in Exile,” Joseph Horowitz documents the profound effect these immigrants – especially Russians and Germans – had on American culture. And how the American experience changed the course of the artists’ creative lives.

For many of the émigrés, America was artistically as well as politically liberating. George Balanchine, for example, discovered his true self here. “He did not,” Horowitz tells us, “share the nostalgia for Mother Russia of many Russian émigrés.” And this enabled him to create something new: a distinctively American form of ballet, emphasizing this country’s worship of athleticism, speed and strength. It took someone trained in Russian ballet to bring it off: “No American could have achieved such an ‘American’ renewal of classical ballet,” Horowitz asserts.

On the other hand, for some émigrés, such as Balanchine’s compatriot and sometime collaborator, Igor Stravinsky, adapting to America proved more difficult. Stravinsky loved American jazz, as many of the European immigrants did, unlike some American composers such as Aaron Copland, who “claimed that two moods – ‘blues’ and ‘the wild, abandoned, almost hysterical and grotesque mood so dear to the youth of all ages’ – encompassed ‘the whole gamut of jazz emotion.’ ” Stravinsky composed a concerto for Woody Herman and his band, and his Symphony in Three Movements is heavily influenced by jazz. But on the whole Stravinsky’s American output is less highly regarded than his earlier work in Europe. Whereas “Balanchine is today remembered exclusively for his American legacy,” Horowitz comments, “Stravinsky is today remembered by Americans mainly for the music he composed before undertaking his long American sojourn in 1939.”

Indeed, Balanchine serves as something of a touchstone throughout the book. For Horowitz he represents the peak of émigré success: achieving not only his own greatest work here, but also showing Americans how to create something both new and distinctly American. Others, like Stravinsky, adapted indigenous American art forms like jazz, but failed to advance upon their earlier European achievements. Some artists, such as Rudolf Serkin and Arturo Toscanini, didn’t even try: They achieved success in America by continuing to do what they had done in Europe, not bothering to adapt and change, but rather sticking to the European classical repertoire that had made them famous. But their emphasis on that repertoire may have retarded America’s acceptance of American composers.

Others took their old style and imposed it on American genres. Erich Wolfgang Korngold had been a prodigy in Vienna, writing a cantata at the age of 9 that made Mahler call him a genius. He later dazzled Richard Strauss, and achieved international fame with his opera “Die tote Stadt.” But when he came to America he turned his attention to movie music, becoming one of the greatest exponents of that art with his lush, operatic scores for Warner Bros. movies like “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “The Sea Hawk” and “Kings Row.” He simply imposed his European style on the medium, or as Horowitz puts it, “the crowning irony of his singular exile is that for more than a decade America adapted to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, not the other way around.”

Though he’s best known as a writer on music, having been a critic for the New York Times and the author of seven books including “Classical Music in America: A History,” Horowitz discusses film and theater as well, and with similar insight and suavity of prose. The pages of “Artists in Exile” brim with perceptive analysis of the creations and the careers of composers (Schoenberg, Hindemith, Bartók, Weill, Varèse), performers (Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz), conductors (Klemperer, Mitropoulos, Stokowski, Koussevitzky, Walter, Kleiber), actors (Dietrich, Garbo, Nazimova), directors (Murnau, Lubitsch, Lang, Sjöström, Clair, Renoir, Ophuls, Wilder, Reinhardt, Mamoulian), writers (Brecht, Mann, Nabokov) and theatrical designers (Boris Aronson).

“Artists in Exile” sometimes feels capricious in its choice of figures to focus on: Does Edgard Varèse, for example, deserve the amount of space devoted to him? But this is a highly valuable contribution to our understanding of the shaping of American culture, and of “Americanness” in general. Again and again, Horowitz shows us how the clear-sightedness of these immigrants, their discovery of what was unique about American life, enabled Americans to see themselves.