A R T I S T S I N E X I L E HOW REFUGEES FROM TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAR AND REVOLUTION TRANSFORMED THE AMERICAN PERFORMING ARTS JOSEPH HOROWITZ What today is the meaning of foreign, the meaning of homeland? . . . When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland. —Thomas Mann, 1941 Santa Monica, California C O N T E N T S Epigraph iii Preface vi INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL EXCHANGE 1 Dvorˇák 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 22 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 76 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, Béla Bartók—Erich Korngold wows Hollywood—Kurt Weill tackles Broadway 3. THE MUSICAL “MARGIN OF THE UNGERMAN” 158 Edgard Varèse 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” 214 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 Sjöström, René 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 304 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 CONCLUSION 384 Summarizing cultural exchange: Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov—Postscript: The Cold War—Cultural exchange and the twenty-first century Notes 411 Index 429 About the Author Praise Other Books by Joseph Horowitz Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher v CONTENTS P R E F A C E THE COMPOSER ROGER SESSIONS, whose grandmother’s great- grandfather was a Civil War general, did not believe in consciously seeking an “American” musical identity. “I never worried about it,” he once told an interviewer. “Now, Aaron Copland said that I didn’t worry about it because I came from an old family, and that is undoubtedly part of my life, because I realized that with that background I always had a basic sense of social security—security in American society.”1 Copland’s parents came from Russia. So did George Gersh- win’s. So did Leonard Bernstein’s. Copland, Gershwin, and Bern- stein all thought and wrote about what makes music sound “American.” Other American composers left this topic alone; like Sessions, they preferred to let it take care of itself. John Knowles Paine, who could trace his ancestry directly to the Mayflower, counseled against imitating folk songs, Negro melodies, or Indian tunes in conscious pursuit of national style. Virgil Thomson, who traced his ancestry to the American Revolution, defined “Ameri- can” music as music composed by Americans, period. As newcomers, the performing arts immigrants of my book were all confronted by the puzzle of American culture. It seemed elusive in comparison with the cultural identities of nations older and less polyglot. “What is America?” is a question they necessar- ily addressed, publicly or privately, crucially or tangentially. It was in this spirit that Kurt Weill sought out iconic American writers as collaborators; that George Balanchine chose to cross the United States by car a dozen times, camping in New Mexico and Wyoming; that Fritz Lang visited Indian reservations and clipped American newspapers; that Boris Aronson inspected five- and-ten-cent stores, and also the shacks and hotel rooms of poor blacks. As Hugh van Dusen of HarperCollins recognized when he proposed that I write about the twentieth-century “intellectual migration” to the United States, the topic of my books has ever been the fate of Old World art and artists transplanted to the New World. Like Copland, Gershwin, and Bernstein, I have felt a need to figure out what it is to be American. Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987) studies a flawed de- mocratization of European high culture. The Ivory Trade: Music and the Business of Music at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (1980), a kind of sequel, scrutinizes the culture of the piano as transformed—as buoyed or disfigured—in and by Fort Worth, Texas. Wagner Nights: An American History (1994) shows how Wagnerism was reinterpreted by Americans as a meliorist crusade in the late Gilded Age. Classical Music in America: A His- tory of Its Rise and Fall (2005) pays special attention to practitio- ners—beleaguered, outnumbered—who “charted paths remote from Old World models.” Dvorˇák in America: In Search of the New World (2003) uses Europe to help young readers define what makes America different. The Post-Classical Predicament: Essays on Music and Society (1995) includes, as “The Composer as Emi- grant,” the kernel of Artists in Exile. Even Conversations with Arrau vii PREFACE (1982), a piano book, happens to deal with an artist who relo- cated to the United States—and with how relocation impacted on his life and career. My fascination with cultural displacement and accommoda- tion must say something about my own cultural condition. I am neither an immigrant nor the son of immigrants. But all my grand- parents were born abroad, within the “Jewish pale” of Russia and Eastern Europe. My father grew up in a Yiddish home on Man- hattan’s Lower East Side. As a New Yorker, I inhabit what re- mains a city of immigrants. My Upper West Side neighborhood resists homogenization. My daughter, who was born in China, at- tends school with Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, African- Americans. My wife was born in Budapest. Many of my close friends are European, Russian, or Asian. My son was, like myself, born in New York. I do and do not feel “American.” That classical music has been a lifelong personal passion com- pounds my situation. Born in Europe, imported to the United States, it has since World War I occupied an increasingly odd and insular corner of the American experience. To be an American classical musician is a challenged vocation. Even Bernstein, whose vocation in music triumphed internationally, pursued the puzzle of American identity so tenaciously as to embody it: his TV lec- tures and Young People’s Concerts chronicle a never-ending quest for validation. They mount argument after argument to buttress the case for a distinct American music worthy of comparison to the parent culture—that Of Thee I Sing exhibits a technical mas- tery equivalent to that of The Mikado; that Rodgers and Hammer- stein is akin to Carmen in its original opéra comique form; that “orchestration” is as typically exemplified by a Gershwin clarinet riff as by a Debussy flute solo. My own pertinent experience was to discover myself, in young adulthood, brainwashed into equat- ing great music with dead European masters, and subsequently to PREFACE viii discover the intellectual decline of classical music generally. My remedial activities have included writing books and producing concerts that seek to expand the parameters of the concert experi- ence, and to celebrate a “post-classical” American musical land- scape with excursions into film, dance, and literature, and into the popular and indigenous arts. The condition of cultural exile explored in the present book is, in part, a heightened instance of the condition of the American artist, for whom transaction with foreign models is a nearly ines- capable exercise. The American experience is itself an experience of cultural exchange. The arts of the United States have not un- dergone many centuries of rooted organic growth. That they are instead recent transplants, subject to sudden shock and jarring contradiction, creates both obstacles and opportunities for native and immigrant practitioners alike. IN ANY CULTURAL HISTORY, the breadth of subject matter re- quires a writer to tackle many topics others know more about than he does. My chapter on theater was read in manuscript by Rob Marx and Bill Coco. The film chapter was read by Kenny Turan and Richard Schickel. Joan Acocella and Bernard Taper read the chapter on George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky. Hans Vaget read what I had to say about Thomas Mann. Olivia Mattis and Sabine Feisst read the sections on Edgard Varèse and Arnold Schoenberg, respectively. I am indebted to all of them for their shrewd and informative feedback. I enjoyed the opportunity to interview people with unique personal knowledge of six of my principal subjects: Joan Roberts, who was an original member of the Oklahoma! cast directed by Rouben Mamoulian; Chou Wen- Chung, who studied with and later assisted Varèse; Nancy Shear, who was Leopold Stokowski’s personal librarian; Lukas Foss, who with Leonard Bernstein was one of Serge Koussevitzky’s surro- ix PREFACE