Artists in exile : how refugees from twentieth-century war and revolution transformed the American performing arts / Joseph Horowitz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Horowitz, Joseph, 1948-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Performing arts--United States--History--20th century.

Performing arts.

Europeans--United States.

Europeans.

History.

United States.

Refugees--United States.

Refugees.

Physical Description:

xix, 458 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Harper, [2008]

Summary:

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 émigrés to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions. Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"--they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible--they colonized.--From publisher description.

Contents:

Introduction: Cultural Exchange 1

Dvorak and the New World

The intellectual migration

The American performing arts in 1900

1 How to Become an American: A Fortuitous Partnership of Dance and Music 23

St. Petersburg and Sergey Diaghilev educate Georgi Balanchivadze

Balanchine invents an American ballet

Igor Stravinsky eyes America

The Balanchine /Stravinsky synthesis

Returning to Russia

2 The German Colonization of American Classical Music 77

Rudolf Serkin, Adolf Busch, and the Berlinerisch spirit

The German-American juggernaut

Strangers in America: Otto Klemperer and Dimitri Mitropoulos

Composers on the sidelines: Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Bela Bartok

Erich Korngold wows Hollywood

Kurt Weill tackles Broadway

3 The Musical "Margin of the Ungerman" 161

Edgard Varese and the sirens of Manhattan

Leopold Stokowski invents himself

Serge Koussevitzky in search of the Great American Symphony

Arturo Toscanini and the culture of performance

4 "In Hollywood We Speak German" 217

Marlene Dietrich and The Blue Angel

The New German Cinema relocates to California

Fox's "German genius": F. W. Murnau

The Lubitsch touch

Garbo laughs

Fritz Lang's American exile

Four who came and went: Victor Sjostrom, Rene Clair, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls

An inside operator: Billy Wilder

Salka Viertel's salon and the blacklist

5 Delayed Reaction: Stanislavsky, Total Theater, and Broadway 311

Max Reinhardt: An unattainable opportunity

Bertolt Brecht and HUAC

Alla Nazimova inhabits Hedda Gabler

The Stanislavsky influence

Rouben Mamoulian's choreographic touch

Boris Aronson and the Meyerhold ideal

Immigrants and American musical theater

Summarizing cultural exchange: Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov

Postscript: The Cold War

Cultural exchange and the twenty-first century.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [423]-440) and index.

ISBN:

9780060748463

006074846X

9780060748500

0060748508

OCLC:

145431769