BOOK REVIEWS 361 Artists in Exile

BOOK REVIEWS 361 Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. By Joseph Horowitz. (New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Pp. xix, 458. Illustra- tions. $27.50.) Joseph Horowitz, formerly a music critic for the New York Times and prolific author of valued books about music and musicians in the United States, has now expanded his scope of interests to include the American blend of classical ballet with modern dance (most notably through George Balanchine); Hollywood films directed by such emigr´ es´ as Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch with glamorous stars like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo; serious theater and Broadway musicals (directed by the likes of Rouben Mamoulian and scenes designed by the brilliant Boris Aronson); along with composers and conductors ranging from George Szell to Leopold Stokowski (Garbo’s sometime traveling companion). It’s a very full and rich menu, organized biographically within those topical categories, with a few writers (Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov) thrown in rather cursorily at the end. The author states his purpose near the outset: “how during the first half of the twentieth century immigrants in the performing arts impacted American culture—and how, as part of the same process of transference and exchange, the United States impacted upon them” (p. 8). The book reads well despite the repeated use of “impacted” as an active verb (federalese lapsing into common usage, alas) and a few spots where syntax and phrasing seem oddly off-key. Preparing the book required prodigious research: examining many musical scores and listening to numerous recorded performances; watching countless films, many of them obscure; reading raft- loads of biographies and theater criticism; and looking at numerous manuscript collections. The project comes across as a labor of love, and we learn just how intrigued many of these refugees were by African American music and folklore and how quite a few became great enthusiasts for jazz, most notably Igor Stravinsky (see pp. 63, 407–8). Almost the entire cast of characters is continen- tal (save Charlie Chaplin); and Germans and Russians predominate over French and Italian emigr´ es.´ Horowitz strongly emphasizes the Germanic impact upon American musical taste (see p. 212) while crediting the “unGermans” with greater influence in theater and on Broadway (see p. 330). He devotes careful attention to those who adapted successfully by “Americanizing” (like Balanchine and film Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.2.361 by guest on 28 September 2021 362 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY director Billy Wilder) and those whose work gained only grudging ac- ceptance or was rejected outright because they insisted upon radical modernism (like Edgard Varese` and Arnold Schoenberg). Horowitz ultimately believes that many in his extensive dramatis personae did their most enduring work while still in Europe and suf- fered careers of “shackled creativity” in the U.S. (p. 363). He argues, for example, that Hollywood wasted the talents of Dietrich, Garbo, and the brilliant actress Alla Nazimova: the first two received too few truly great roles, and most of those cast the actresses as “exotic curiosities,” while Nazimova, the leading exponent of Stanislavsky’s influential method of naturalistic (rather than histrionic) acting, received none at all. On balance, Horowitz concludes, immigrants in the performing arts “were not able to sustain a full growth curve upon relocating. Some lost their way entirely. Of those who did not . almost all enjoyed a more consummated European calling. The exceptions—the major Old World careers that accelerated in the New World—can be counted on the fingers of one hand. ...More typically, unreplantable Old World roots signified stunted cumula- tive growth. Murnau and Lang, whose great talents [in film] dipped, fit this picture. So do Weill, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Bartok,´ and Stravinsky, all of whose highest achievements preceded immigration to the United States” (pp. 410–11). In some instances, notably Kurt Weill and Fritz Lang, that summary judgment seems at odds with the much more positive and substantive sections devoted to them earlier. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be the pages devoted to Rudolf Serkin, who purchased a farm in rustic Vermont where he created a highly successful and enduring summer music festival, and Serge Koussevitzky, who led the Boston Symphony Or- chestra from 1924 until 1949.In1936, Koussevitzky began giving summer concerts near Lenox, Massachusetts, leading swiftly to the creation of a Tanglewood school for young musicians, which included Paul Hindemith and Aaron Copland among the composition fac- ulty. Determined to democratize serious music in the United States, Koussevitzky succeeded to an astonishing degree. He also enthusiasti- cally fostered American musical talent. Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss became his disciples and “adopted sons,” thereby extending his influence for generations, and Tanglewood became a permanent legacy of international renown. Erich Leinsdorf ’s tenure as conduc- tor of the BSO from 1962 to 1969 receives much briefer treatment because his impact was modest compared with Koussevitzky’s. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.2.361 by guest on 28 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 363 Despite occasional passages where Horowitz assumes too much knowledge of the intricacies of classical music on the part of layper- sons (see pp. 64, 88, 198), despite minor inaccuracies involving figures like Nabokov and Willis Conover, and despite summations about a few figures that seem inconsistent with some of his substantive chap- ters, Artists in Exile is an engaging, richly informative, and worthwhile volume. Michael Kammen, Professor of American History and Culture at Cornell University, is the author most recently of Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (2006). Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Litera- ture. By Bridget Bennett. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. 247.$69.95.) Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity. By Sam Halliday. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. 245.$69.95.) Reality in the nineteenth century swirled with invisible, imponder- able forces. Electricity was one; spirits, another. The term “impon- derable,” when applied to these energies, had a double meaning. On the one hand, the forces appeared to be weightless and therefore lacking measurable physical heft; on the other, because they were not easily apprehended, their behavior could seem capricious and super-natural and they inspired awe and sometimes fear. They were, in a sense, unimaginable. Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds, and Sam Halliday, who teaches at the Univer- sity of London, explore the various cultural meanings of the energies that haunted individuals during a tumultuous century of technologi- cal, cultural, social, and political change. Both authors acknowledge much previous work on this subject, and yet their particular per- spectives result in fresh insights that make important contributions to nineteenth-century studies. Bennett looks at the movement of ideas across the Atlantic to ar- gue that spiritualism in America was influenced by—and, in turn, influenced—spiritualism in Europe. Like contemporary scholar Wai Chee Dimock, Bennett uses the term “American literature” with the understanding that it simplifies complex relationships between the United States and the rest of the world. Bennett is strongest in Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.2.361 by guest on 28 September 2021.

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