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

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

• 
  Eric

  This is one of those suggestive, compendious, richly anecdotal cultural histories that are impossible to summarize. Suffice to say that Horowitz provoked me to rehearse everything I've ever thought about American Life, dum dum dum!
  
  Horowitz's focus is not entirely on the performing arts--he writes briefly but significantly about Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov. His discussion of those two writers, in the book's coda, ties up what for me was the most interesting theme: the difference between the Germans and the Russians as agents of cultural exchange. The German composers, conductors and performers (and social critics and writers) come off as imperious cultural colonizers, bearing on high the monstrance of Kultur into the wilds of the New World, where they were received with fawning deference by an American musical establishment already thoroughly Eurocentric and Germanized long before the emigrations of the 20s-40s. Horowitz argues that the isolated high-mindedness of the Germans (Germans as in imbued with a worship of Bach-Mozart-Beethoven; many were Austrian, Czech, or Hungarian by birth) and the trying-too-hard snobbery of American classical music audiences combined to sideline living American composers and indigenous American dance and music traditions. The Russians--Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Dukelsky, Nabokov, Aronson, etc--by contrast, are paragons of adaptability and openness. Horowitz speaks of them all when he says of Balanchine that he came to America a layered personality that had no trouble accepting yet another--this time American--layer. The Russians in Horowitz's account graft American realities to their ongoing creative and personal lives: Balanchine works on Broadway and for the circus, spikes classic ballet with western and African-American influences (and sports bolo ties and vests); Nabokov switches to English and writes, in Lolita, a road-novel, a prose poem of "delicious Americana"; and Stravinsky remains, as ever, "the cultural magpie." Tellingly, they all had a thing for road trips. Horowitz's Russians are poised, balanced, confident enough of their inner artistic missions to assimilate "lowbrow" fare, less prone to depression and less burdened than the Germans by fidelity to some portentous and exclusive religion of high culture.
  
  And there's of course so much more to this book than the above. Horowitz writes extensively and brilliantly about film and theater. His prose is polished and pregnant--he reminds me of David Thomson and the New Biographical Dictionary of Film in the laconism imposed by the encyclopedic format, and the compressed, epigrammatic elegance of his judgments and descriptions.
  
• 
  Charles Matthews

  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.
  
• 
  Dan

  I cannot comment authoritatively on Horowitz's writing with regard to the composers, conductors and dancers he discusses, as I am unfamiliar with their works. However, I am familiar with some of the films and directors he writes about, so I was able to follow his commentary on the work of directors like Lang and Murnau somewhat more closely, and found this part of the book very interesting reading.
  
  Acquired May 12, 2007
  Gift from Jenn
• 
  Kathleen Hulser

  Probe into the roots of American culture. Seems like we need cultural others to show us ourselves. The local talent for synthesizing various cultural streams is at the center of this book, which has a transnational perspective that sometimes makes you wonder if the American artists are exiles too. By collecting evidence from across the spectrum of the performing arts, Horowitz underlines the formally productive nature of American borrowing.
• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  A detailed history of how immigrants and refugees contributed and formed the arts in the United States - covering dance, film, art, music, and theater. It really focuses on the first half of the century, with a few dips into the 60s and 70s, and most of the 'refugees' profiled are from Europe and Russia. Note that it is 'performing arts,' so art, poetry, and novels are excluded.
• 
  Robin

  art,history,migration