Book

Horowitz, Joseph, 1948-

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

1st ed.

New York : HarperCollins Publishers, ©2008.

xix, 458 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

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.

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

Europeans -- United States.

Refugees -- United States.

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

List of illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction : cultural exchange -- Dvořák 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 -- 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 -- 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" -- 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" -- 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 Sjöstrom, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls -- Inside operator : Billy Wilder -- Salka Viertel's salon and the blacklist -- 5. Delayed reaction : Stanislavsky, total theater, and Broadway -- 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 -- Summarizing cultural exchange : Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov -- Postscript : the Cold War -- Cultural exchange and the twenty-first century -- Notes -- Index.

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791.086914 Horowitz