The Revolt of the Pendulum (15 page)

There was, on the whole, but what America most wanted was the performers, not the composers, who would always be up against it unless, like Korngold, they went to Hollywood because they already
had Hollywood in their souls. Stravinsky is famous now mainly for what he composed before he got to America in 1939. Horowitz can make such judgments boldly, out of deep knowledge. The quondam
New York Times
music critic and executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic knows the American classical music scene inside out, which is a good thing because that’s largely what
the European influence did to it, although part of his central point is that the switch had already been worked before the main influx arrived.

Horowitz has a paradox to deal with here, and out of it he makes his most useful general argument. According to him, the American home-grown composers were up against it too. The pressure was
always on them to produce a uniquely American equivalent of the European serious musical tradition. This being so, they tended to ignore the implications of the American popular music tradition
that had already burgeoned in the jazz joints, in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway. George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, both of Russian parentage, would be exceptions in seeing a way ahead in the
Broadway musical show. Copland, also of Russian parentage, was more typical in finding no time at all for jazz: he sought a more elevated way of sounding American. Most of the immigrant composers,
however, were impressed by the native vernacular energy, just as Dvorak had been, although he was in America for only two years and wrote the Negro Spiritual themes in the ‘New World
Symphony’ well before he had ever travelled far enough outside New York to hear them being sung in their locations of origin.

For the new arrivals in the twentieth century, most of whom made landfall with nothing but their luggage to call their own, the upsurge of American popular music was so clamorous that they had
to be theorists to miss it. Adorno ran true to form by dismissing jazz out of hand, but he was only an intellectual. Kurt Weill, Adorno’s
bete noire
(the feeling was mutual), immersed
himself in the new vitality. It had already reached him at long range when he was still in Weimar Germany, composing the music for Bertolt Brecht’s words. Closer now to the source of the
theatrical exuberance he felt himself cut out for, Weill embraced Broadway with an intensity that most of the American native big names - they included Sessions and Ives as well as Copland - never
dreamed of.

George Gershwin, the most gifted of all the home-grown American composers, was similarly open to the demotic allure of his birthplace, but he died young. Weill himself was dead when he was
fifty, but in his time alive in America he exemplified how a newcomer was more likely to be impressed by his new country than anyone who was born and raised there. Weill built up an achievement
with his Broadway show music but after the war the achievement was put in the shade by the arrival in New York of a
Threepenny Opera
production, starring Lotte Lenya, that enabled his
critics to say he had expressed his real strength in the old country and had been dissipating it ever since he arrived on the Great White Way.

Horowitz rather agrees with them, saying that Brecht’s lyrics had given Weill’s music the ‘distance’ it needed not to sound compromised by the desire to please. Horowitz
doesn’t say what Lotte Lenya once said on television in her old age. (She said, ‘What was Brecht without Kurt?’) Most of us rate the
Mahagonny
music above, say,
Lost in
the Stars
, but surely we should avoid the kind of determinism that would blame America for restricting Weill’s range. Weill himself thought his range had been increased, and only a snob
would call him materialist for viewing the cash-flow that rolled in from a hit show like
One Touch of Venus
as hard evidence that it had.

Bartok wrote some of his best music in America. In 1945 he died broke, but only after a wave of artistic success that included the Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin, the Concerto for Orchestra,
and the Third Piano Concerto. If he had accepted either of the posts offered to him by the Curtis Institute and Tanglewood he might even have had some money in the bank. Krenek, Eisler, Dessau and
Zerlinsky all flopped in America but they would have cared less about that if they had really thought that the odds were stacked against art. The odds were stacked against a free ride. When Krenek,
who had made his name in Europe as the composer of
Jonny Spielt Auf
, denounced the American requirement of ‘comprehensibility’ as an automatic diluent, he was really saying that
there was nobody to pay him for incomprehensibility. By the time he died, at ninety-one, the day had already arrived when American cultural foundations were ready to pay for anything, down to and
including John Cage composing passages of modified silence, but for Krenek that final expansion of American hospitality had come too late. Even when the last door was still shut, however, all the
other doors were open. Schoenberg, Hindemith and Bartok couldn’t make a living like Stravinsky, but at least they had the chance. Sometimes it must have seemed tantalisingly close. In
Hollywood, Schoenberg played ping-pong with a neighbour. It was George Gershwin.

The case of Schoenberg raises the character issue: he actually had to concentrate quite hard to stay unpopular, cursing himself whenever he lapsed from the atonal back into something that a
non-expert audience might have liked. Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines. They had fallen into a larger competitive market than the one that they
had been driven out of, and even if they failed in it they would have liked to succeed. Korngold’s success might have seemed silly and Weill’s meretricious, but the possibilities were
there: more possibilities than most of them could handle. Weill welcomed the chance to work without subsidy in a country where he had to make his luck. Weill phrased these opinions in press
releases that now sound like publicity material for a right-wing think-tank, thereby handing his latter-day critics large sticks with which to beat him. But none of those critics could have written
‘September Song’.

All six of Martinu’s symphonies came from his time in the US, between 1941 and 1953. In sum, even when they failed, the non-American composers did a more thorough job than the home-grown
Americans of being turned on by America. Some of them felt limited by the indifference of the audience to anything labelled as art, but there was always a minority audience for that. There was a
minority audience even for Schoenberg. On a world scale, Schoenberg’s audience, for his atonal music that came after
Verklarte Nacht,
is still a minority today, but most of the
minority is in America, where the minorities are larger. As for the American majority audience, they wanted music they could enjoy on the night. They wanted to go home whistling the tune. (Horowitz
could have made a lot more of this point. There was a crisis going on in serious music, not just in world politics.) They wanted a show.

They so much wanted a show that they rated performers over composers. Performers stood out from the orchestra and could be admired for their virtuosity. The financial rewards for virtuosity were
so huge that they needed satirical apology: Heifitz had a cash register standing on the bar of his apartment. The conductors stood out more than anybody and could inspire cults. Horowitz is
particularly good on the conductors. Koussevitsky and Toscanini come out of the book as towering figures, as we might have expected. But Horowitz, always with his fine ear turned towards the
quality of the music, generously lets Stokowski do a bit of towering too. The Stokowski paragraphs add up to a box of chocolate-dusted truffles.

As opposed to some of the other European con-men, Stokowski was fake to the roots. Erich von Stroheim at least knew how to pronounce the word ‘von’ before he stole it. ‘Leopold
Antoni Stanislaw Boleslawowicz Stokowski’ undoubtedly had a Polish background back there somewhere, but his real name was Leopold Anthony Stokowski and he was born in England. His first wife,
Olga Samaroff, was really Lucy Hickenlooper. She had met the right man. Stokowski made up the whole thing. Even his accent was made up.

Yet Stokowski, where it counted, was the real McCoy. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1912, he built up its orchestra into a sensationally effective musical instrument all on its own. Rachmaninov
thought it was the finest orchestra he had ever heard. And whether or not Stokowski ever slept with Greta Garbo – his personal testimony on the subject might be comparable to the Hollywood
restaurateur Mike ‘Prince’ Romanoff’s personal testimony that he was a Russian nobleman who shot Rasputin – there can be no doubt that the conductor could read the dots.
Admirers of Furtwa¨ngler must always deal with accusations that too much rubato alters the score. Stokowski practically rewrote the score. (After every performance, all the parts had to be
returned to his safekeeping, as if they were atomic secrets.) But the results were stunning.

Stokowski conducted the first performance in America of Mahler’s 8th Symphony. Brought up on the Solti rendition, I had never got around to seeking out a recording of Stokowski’s
later live concert performance of the work. Now I will. Similarly, Horowitz recommends the recording of Stokowski with the Boston Symphony on the night of January 13, 1968. The way Horowitz raves
learnedly about the great Eurofraud’s treatment of Tchaikovsky’s
Hamlet
Fantasy Overture (‘such lightning velocity, hair-trigger intensity, and opulent upholstery . . . the
plush but tensile string choir’) should send any reader diving into Amazon like Lara Croft into a tomb. I couldn’t find the recording listed, but now I know it exists. eBay next
stop.

Horowitz’s book, always interesting, starts looking essential when it lights up like that, evoking a specific subject of his enthusiasm with sufficient vividness to make the reader want to
get in for a share of the delight. I would still recommend the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1997 catalogue album
Exiles + Emigres
(published in conjunction with Abrams and edited
by Stephanie Barron) as the indispensable first book on the subject, but it is narrated by many voices, and there is always room for a single voice that knows how to register informed excitement.
After all, any big picture we might have is bound to have started among those small responses, none of which seemed small at the time – each of them, in fact, was so all-consuming that it
drove any question of a big picture clean out of our heads.

Individual works of art can make it hard to get a big picture even of the single mind that produced them. Forty years into its life and still the epitome of international American chic, the iced
refinement of Balanchine’s ‘Jewels’ for the New York City Ballet began with the raunch of his ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’ routine for the Broadway show
On Your
Toes
in 1936. Balanchine didn’t create music directly but he had a means of interpreting it that made his influence profound. He could remake American ballet in his own manner because
America didn’t have much ballet in the first place. Once again, a sophisticated American elite’s fondness for Europe was a big help. Balanchine’s impresario, Lincoln Kirstein,
didn’t want a Martha Graham-style company. He wanted New York to have a European-style ballet corps. Balanchine, always mad for the girls, was glad to oblige. Crucially, however, Balanchine
himself was no longer European. He loved Jack Benny, he had seen the Western movies, he had driven across the country. And he had seen the cheerleaders. The embodiment of high aims yet uninhibited
by hierarchy, he could lend style even to the vulgar: his tribute to its energy. It wasn’t Walt Disney, it was Balanchine, who first put elephants in tutus so that they might dance to music
by Stravinsky. The commission came from Ringling Brothers Circus.

Horowitz sensibly leaves the question open of whether Balanchine brought Europe to America or else helped America develop something it already had. Our author would have been wise to show
similar openness when talking about the movies. He tries to, but can’t help suggesting that such eminent Europeans as Murnau and Fritz Lang had a hard time adapting to the new populist idiom.
He fudges the question of whether the new populist idiom might not have had a narrative power far in advance of expressionism, symbolism or any other ism that the refugees had been forced to leave
behind. One gets the sense that Horowitz, worthily brought up in the concert hall, missed the chance to waste his early years in the movie house, and has only recently been catching up with the
filmed masterpieces.

But there were plenty of second-rate Hollywood movies that would have told him how the studio moguls often had first-rate tastes. (They were continually spatchcocking operatic arias into musical
comedies otherwise uniformly dire.) Stuck with nothing except quality, Horowitz can appreciate the achievements of Wilder and Lubitsch. He appreciates Lubitsch so well that he crosses his own wires
when he calls Lubitsch ‘a clever middlebrow craftsman mistaken for a highbrow genius.’ After spending a whole book usefully arguing that the refugee highbrows seldom got the point about
democratic art, it seems Quixotic to belittle Lubitsch for not having been one of them.

Still, Horowitz can see that
Ninotchka
is an extraordinary example of America projecting a liberal vision of Europe back into its own ruins. He just might have made more of the
possibility that it wasn’t only a case of the refugees changing the American arts, it was a case of the American arts changing the world, refugees included. Through the movies, a single
refugee, Rouben Mamoulian – the star of the book’s useful chapters on theatre – opened the way for the most globally influential trend of the lot: the Broadway show expanded for
the screen. One could only wish that Horowitz had seen
Luxury Liner
the year it came out, and had therefore seen Lauritz Melchior singing from
Aida
for Jane Powell. But he has seen
and remembered every frame of a much earlier movie,
Love Me Tonight
, in which Mamoulian created, almost in its entirety, the cinematic language for the Hollywood musical, at a time when,
many critics will tell you, the sound-proofed camera was still confined to its booth. Mamoulian made it fly.