From the Economist: America's Performing Arts

[Guy Berger]

America's performing arts

Made in Europe

Apr 10th 2008

From The Economist print edition

AGED nine, a Russian-Georgian boy called Georgi Balanchivadze moved in 1913 from rural Finland to St Petersburg to enrol as a ballet student in the Imperial Theatre School. Some 11 years later, he travelled to East Prussia with the Soviet State Dancers; refusing an order to return home, he defected and fled to Paris, where another Russian exile, Sergei Diaghilev, hired him as a choreographer for the Ballets Russes. After a brief stint in London, George Balanchine (as he was by then) moved to America in 1933, where he founded American ballet, and became perhaps the most inventive choreographer of the 20th century. He called America "land of the lovely bodies" and he started an athletic, limber style of dance that celebrated those bodies, explicitly rejecting the mannered, regal European tradition. Six years after Balanchine came to America, the exclusive Curtis Institute, a music academy in Philadelphia, extended an invitation to teach to Rudolf Serkin, an Austrian-trained pianist. In his youth he had advised his sister to restrict her listening to "real music—nothing modern! Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert." Every recital he played at Carnegie Hall during his 50 years there included something by Beethoven; in his entire performing career he played only two pieces written by Americans. He saw himself as standard-bearer for the pre-war Teutonic civilisation ruined by the Nazis, and he brought this civilisation to America as an enlightening service, something to benefit the natives.

These two poles of experience—roughly speaking, Russian acclimatisation and Germanic colonisation—anchor Joseph Horowitz's masterful study of how the Russian revolution, the rise of European fascism and the second world war all transformed the American performing arts by sending an unprecedented wave of immigrants and refugees from Eastern Europe. Between those poles lay a variety of experience, from the reinvented success of Marlene Dietrich to the pioneering loneliness of Edgard Varèse, a French-Italian Russophile who was one of the first composers to mine non-Western traditions.

These immigrants came to a country with barely a single ballet company, a few young orchestras, a dramatic tradition of instructive melodrama, a film industry whose greatest director was a nativist bigot (D.W. Griffith) and whose greatest star (Mary Pickford) exuded wholesome blandness. Its most renowned writers and painters (such as Henry James and John Singer Sargent) emulated Europeans and sought their approval. The immigrants Mr Horowitz profiles did not simply fit in to American culture; they created it, giving a young country cultural self-confidence to match its growing political strength.

Mr Horowitz tells his story through brief biographies. This lets him showcase his excellent analytical skills, particularly when it comes to music: his discussion of Erich Korngold, a composing prodigy who grew rich and famous writing rather saccharine film scores, is especially insightful. He also has a taste for the endearing, if a bit gossipy, personal anecdote: Arnold Schoenberg watched "The Lone Ranger" and "Hopalong Cassidy"; Arturo Toscanini enjoyed New Orleans jazz and televised boxing.

As a coda, Mr Horowitz compares the experiences of Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov in the United States. The former fled the Nazis, settled in Los Angeles and became America's "good German": he allegorised Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in "Joseph the Provider". Yet the cold war and McCarthyism disillusioned him, and he rejected the "artificial paradise" of California for Switzerland.

Nabokov also left America for Switzerland, but while Mann's subject remained Germany, Nabokov's American masterpiece, "Lolita", is a love-letter to the country in all its plastic kitsch. "I am as American as April in Arizona," Nabokov wrote in 1966. It's a beautiful sentence. That it does not really mean anything, makes it no less beautiful or American.