Arts in Exile How Refugees Went From Twentieth Century Pdf
Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century State of war and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts
Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transfo BY Joseph Horowitz. Harper. Hardcover, 480 pages. $27.
In 1941, while residing in Santa Monica, Thomas Mann mused, "What today is the meaning of foreign, the meaning of homeland? . . . When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland." He lived in California for xiv years before returning to Europe in 1952, his version of the American dream crushed, writes Joseph Horowitz, past the cold state of war, McCarthyism, and the Golden State's "artificial paradise." Mann'southward poignant question—and declarative response—is central to Artists in Exile, Horowitz's erudite if sometimes exhausting survey of European refugee artists in America during the first half of the twentieth century.
The book opens with the story of George Balanchine. (On why he emigrated to the West: "Information technology was impossible to live in Russia, it was terrible—there was nothing to eat. People here can't sympathize what that means. Nosotros were hungry all the time.") His disdain of glamour, his egalitarian spirit, and his "loftier-low eclecticism" infused his art with a distinctly American sensibility. Horowitz organizes his study by genre, beginning with an analysis of the partnership between Balanchine and Stravinsky, with chapters following on American classical music and its German "colonization," the influence of not-German musicians such as Varèse and Toscanini, Hollywood (Dietrich, Garbo, Murnau, Lang), and Broadway (focused on musical theater). Each section reveals a meticulously researched, collagelike collection of case studies of the virtually eminent artistic figures of the twentieth century who "stayed strange and became American." Horowitz'south main concern is unraveling the complex layers of "cultural exchange" between Europe and the United states, the "synergies of Quondam Globe and New, outsider and insider, retentivity and discovery," which, he argues, ultimately compose "an exercise in American self-understanding," most conspicuously epitomized by the work of an before voluntary company, Dvoˇrák.
In the sciences and in mathematics, adaptation to America was comparatively piece of cake. Writers had the hardest lot, as "masters of the wrong languages." Horowitz sardonically remarks that Brecht'due south nearly memorable English script was his deposition to the House United nations-American Activities Committee. And of the "Parnassus of High german literature" that came to California during Globe War II—Thomas and Heinrich Isle of mann, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, Remarque, Werfel—only Thomas Mann's career flourished. Though Murnau, Lang, Schoenberg, and Bartók institute their growth stunted in the New Globe, the "shallower" artists—those who, for case, played to mainstream, commercial American civilization, or whose work wasn't fully "adult"—were natural transplants. German exiles such as Thomas Isle of man and Rudolf Serkin possessed a much stronger sense of national identity than did the more than culturally diverse Russians, who, the writer argues, were more open to cultural modify and less prone to didacticism. A receptiveness to African-American civilisation served as the greatest unifying factor among European artists from disparate nations. Jewish refugee artists in detail, Horowitz notes, "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality."
Horowitz, a former New York Times music critic, has written extensively and with rare acuity on the crosscurrents of European and American influence on classical music (well-nigh recently, Classical Music in America [2005]). All the same one wishes he had spent as much time exploring the fascinating themes and motifs underlying his study—such as the ambiguous, contradictory nature of American cultural identity epitomized by many of his examples—as he did dissecting the variations within his many case studies. Horowitz also offers judgment without case: In ane instance, he argues that American culture's current quest for "synergies in other parts of the globe" has created "a plague of slapdash hybrids that debase cultural exchange as a kind of aesthetic opportunism." What exactly are these hybrids? Horowitz's prose is meticulously crafted, yet for all its elegance, it is unequal to the vitality of its bailiwick affair. His narrative's fragmented polyphonic style, which forces the reader to brand quick and constant shifts between periods and personalities, is ofttimes more dissonantly distracting than it is finer engaging.
A brief portrait of Horowitz'southward skilful friend the Georgian pianist Alexander Toradze concludes this wide-ranging and important, if uneven, study and is the book's most heartfelt and vivid account. Toradze, now based in South Bend, Indiana, is eloquently impassioned on the emotional complexities of exile: "For my generation, even the musical aspect of freedom was symbolized past American jazz. . . . That gave us a sense of freedom. Then life goes by and you actually go to this country and you carry this notion with you, even if you lot grow disappointed. . . . It'south a condition of hope associated with a faraway place. It'due south actually a dream stronger than any reality."
Source: https://www.bookforum.com/print/1405/joseph-horowitz-s-artists-in-exile-how-refugees-from-twentieth-century-war-and-revolution-transformed-the-american-performing-arts-2087
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