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Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 14:17:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: Premise Checker <checker at (no spam) panix.com>
Subject: TLS 0.7.7: David Drew: The flight from Behemoth
TLS 0.7.7: David Drew: The flight from Behemoth
Beyond Hitler's reach: American music and the cultural diaspora of the
1930s
[It's Adolph Busch, Rudolf Serkin, and Adolf Hitler. I wonder how often
the oft misspelling of Hitler's first name is deliberate, for many writers
known for their carefulness misspell it. I searched the TLS for Adolph
Hitler out of curiosity. All I came up with was this article and one on
Adolph Loos.]
DRIVEN INTO PARADISE. The musical migration from Nazi Germany to the
United States. By Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, editors. 373pp.
Berkeley: University of California Press; distributed in the UK by Wiley.
Pounds 35. TLS Pounds 33. 0 520 21413 7
In the calendar of America's long struggle for cultural autonomy, the last
day of October 1933 carries an admonitory asterisk. Across the river from
Manhattan, the Ile de France docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, and among the
disembarking passengers were Gertrude and Arnold Schoenberg and their
one-year-old daughter. There were no reporters or press photographers
waiting for them. But five frustrating months of exile in Paris were over,
and for the remaining fifteen years of his life Schoenberg was to be a
formidable presence in the United States. The authority he commanded in
his lifetime survived him for about a quarter of a century.
Well before the first anniversary of his arrival, Schoenberg was happily
ensconced in Hollywood. In October 1934, barely a month after celebrating
his sixtieth birthday, he wrote the first of his two speeches "On the
Jewish Question". In its closing passage, the image of the expulsion from
Eden is transformed by a double inversion, the ironies of which are at
once aggressive and benign; he begins by parodying the view of his
Austro-German enemies, identifying himself with the snake that has been
sentenced to "go on its belly and to eat dust all the days of its life",
but ends with a hymn to the new-found land where he can once again "go on
his feet", where kindness and good cheer are the norm, and where "to be an
expatriate of another country is the grace of God". Thus to be "driven
into paradise", as Schoenberg saw it in 1934, was indeed to be fortunate.
Sixty years later, some such conclusion was also implicit in the
proceedings of an inter-national conference concerning the musical
migration from Austria and Germany to the US in the 1930s and 40s.
Convened by the music department at Harvard University, it was jointly
chaired by Reinhold Brinkmann - Harvard's Ditson Professor of Music and a
leading Schoenberg scholar and editor - and his colleague from the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Christoph Wolff. Papers delivered at
that conference have now been elaborated and ably edited, by Brinkmann and
Wolff, for publication in the present form. The results are almost always
interesting and sometimes outstanding. But, despite the references to
recent literature, Driven into Paradise is manifestly a product of the
period when Fukuyama's notion of the "End of History" achieved its widest
circulation.
In that context, so patriarchal and authoritarian a figure as Schoenberg
would have been inadmissible, unless stripped of his grand narratives and
reduced to human proportions. Once his 1934 speech has disgorged a
suitably paradoxical title, it is relegated to a philosophical backwater,
and replaced in the foreground by a letter Schoenberg sent in February
1940 to a recently arrived Austrian friend. Practical rather than
idealistic, it is the text for the first of two synoptic essays under the
rubric "Introductory Thoughts". Brinkmann's "Reading a Letter" serves to
introduce such leading motifs as emigration versus exile, psychic trauma,
acculturation, and the problems and perils of an actual or hoped-for
homecoming. It also provides a platform for the cultural historian Peter
Gay, whose own "Introductory Thoughts" tellingly borrow their title - "We
miss our Jews" - from the sudden and emotional exclamation with which
Willy Brandt in the mid-1960s electrified a New York audience that
included a number of German-born social scientists.
Gay contends that Schoenberg "benefited from his transplantation to
American soil" in two respects: he became "more human", and he entered
"into closer contact with the contemporary world". But had the composer
really been any less "human" during the exceptionally happy and productive
winter and spring of 1931-2, when he was living more or less incognito in
Catalonia? Or more closely in touch with "the contemporary world" than he
had been in cosmopolitan Berlin, on a good salary, after his lean post-war
years in a provincialized Vienna? The benefits and blessings of
"transplantation" were by no means unfamiliar to the Schoenbergs by the
time they disembarked at Hoboken.
Gay appears to be on more solid ground in his fascinating account of the
social scientist and former trade-union lawyer Franz Neumann, who
emigrated to London in 1933, studied at the London School of Economics,
and was adopted by Harold Laski, among others. Perhaps because it is so
clearly part of a discarded narrative, Gay does not mention the major work
Neumann began in London and completed in New York in December 1941.
Behemoth was a Marxist study of the totalitarian structures of Nazi
Germany, and it concludes with the prophecy that, because of its internal
contradictions, the regime will eventually be overthrown by "conscious
action of the oppressed masses".
During the fifteen years following Hitler's defeat by quite other means,
Neumann was a highly popular teacher of postgraduate students at Columbia.
As one of them, Gay suggests that they helped influence Neumann's
conversion to a liberal/left outlook. His perception that Neumann "was
becoming Americanized without losing his European roots" reminds him of
Laura Fermi's image, in her book Illustrious Immigrants (1971), of a "more
human" Schoenberg, and allows him to pause at the Master's graveside for
long enough to pay his respects but not a moment longer; for "the most
brilliant instance of this musical symbiosis is of course Kurt Weill".
Weill has already appeared in Brinkmann's own "Introductory Thoughts" as
the "paradigm" of an artist who "embraced" immigration and integrated
himself and his art so thoroughly into his new homeland and its culture
that "even the term 'immigrant' is no longer applicable". Understandably
taking exception to "postwar German musicologists" who have been unkind
about "the so-called American Weill", Brinkmann almost inadvertently
reminds us of the "so-called" German Weill that American musicologists
occasionally wrote about in less cautious days - not to mention the
generally unnoticed French Weill and, above all, the "so-called" Jewish
Weill.
About this side of himself, the composer was distinctively reticent. But
together with Schoenberg and Franz Werfel, he is central to an important
contribution, "Strangers in a strangers' land", by Alexander J. Ringer,
who is perhaps best known for his book Arnold Schoenberg: The composer as
Jew. Born in Berlin in 1921, Ringer writes with unique authority in the
present context: though never directly referred to, his own experiences of
the Nazi terror colour much that he has to say, and help explain why for
him music and song still seem to constitute the grandest of all
narratives, and yet remain inseparable from ironies, scepticism, and
ruptures of every sort. For Ringer as listener and seeker, there are no
categorical or hierarchical distinctions between, say, Schoenberg's music
and Weill's, or between Hebrew cantillation and the universe of popular
song.
It is a resolute essay, and a warm one. Its closest companions, though
nominally among the furthest removed, are those by Bruno Nettl and Walter
Levin. Nettl's account of his musicologist father, Paul Nettl, is humanly
one of the most telling passages in the entire book, comparable to Gay's
account of Franz Neumann but quietly regretful that Nettl, already in his
sixtieth year when he arrived in the United States, was perhaps too old to
"embrace" America as fully as his family did. Levin, for his part, speaks
of the wider family of chamber music - of the quartets and ensembles
formed by such immigrant musicians as Adolph Busch, Rudolf Serkin and
Rudolf Kolisch. It was they, says Levin, who laid new foundations and
prepared for a time when America would become what it is today: "a major
centre of instrumental and chamber music study for musicians from around
the world".
During the winter of 1940-1, the employment or otherwise of "refugee"
teachers and academics in American schools and colleges became the subject
of a debate about positive discrimination that rings many a bell in
present-day Europe. The debate forms the culmination of David Josephson's
enthralling and superbly organized "Documentation of Upheaval and
Immigration in the New York Times". It was opened in the Times by Olin
Downes, the paper's music critic. Downes had been a frequent visitor to
Europe since his appointment in 1924. Although predisposed towards
Sibelius's Finland, Kodaly's Hungary, and the England of Holst and Vaughan
Williams, he had attended the major Austro-German festivals and noted what
was afoot. Insisting that the future of American music depended on the
development of "healthy" national roots, he was deeply suspicious of what
he called the hothouses of Central Europe and their sterile
intellectualism. Yet his Times readers were left in no doubt as to the
realities and the cultural implications of the Nazi seizure of power.
Josephson's own expert summary of the upheavals in Germany after March
1933 owes much to his long experience with the documents and music of
Tudor times - another period of persecution and recusancy, of probity and
betrayal, of craven or flagrant opportunism. Taken too far, the obvious
parallels might explain why the coolly documentary precision with which
Josephson records the main and purely American part of his story becomes a
little fuzzy in the culminating debate about jobs for "refugee" musicians.
For it is here that he charges the East Coast musical Establishment with
elitism, snobbery, abject hero-worship and, in the exemplary case of Roger
Sessions, callous indifference.
Not as a composer (whose eminence equalled that of his slightly younger
contemporary Aaron Copland), but as a teacher based in Princeton and New
York, Sessions had written to the Times deploring "a movement among
certain musicians and 'music lovers' towards a kind of chauvinism which is
neither musical nor American", and citing as a particularly vicious
example an article about refugee musicians. According to Josephson's
indictment, Sessions then took his own "cheap shots" at American
musicians, and having made a "straw man" of the "master craftsman",
invidiously compared him with the "artist" (in truth, a travesty of his
lifelong convictions). Appalled by Sessions's "indifference", Josephson
brings forward his principal witness, a voice-teacher from Indianapolis
whose plain-speaking honesty and common sense about unexplored
possibilities in "smaller communities" put the city slickers to shame.
In sixty pages of otherwise scrupulous documentation, commentary and
end-notes, Sessions's prolonged and intensive engagement with political
and cultural issues central to Driven into Paradise somehow escapes
notice. Equally relevant and likewise unremarked is the crucial year
Sessions spent in Berlin during the early 1930s - a year that included the
Nazi seizure of power and its immediate aftermath. Throughout the rest of
that unhappy decade, and indeed for the remainder of his life, Sessions's
political, philosophical and cultural outlook was profoundly affected by
the experience of witnessing the birth of a new Behemoth. It was not only
because Schnabel, Klemperer and Feuermann were among his friends and
colleagues during their last year in Berlin that he spoke repeatedly and
with such vehemence about America's responsibilities towards refugees and
immigrants, and warned against isolationism in all its forms.
The merely parochial is one of those forms, and complacency is its
watchword. On neither count is Driven into Paradise entirely innocent. So
what does it have to say in the test case of the composer Stefan Wolpe?
Fleeing from Berlin to Vienna in March 1933, Wolpe spent the rest of the
year there, and then moved to
Palestine. During the four years he was teaching at the conservatory in
Jerusalem, he steeped himself in Jewish and other folk musics, made
settings of contemporary Hebrew and Yiddish poets and of biblical texts,
and renewed the entire basis of his thinking. In 1938, he left Palestine
for the States, where Aaron Copland was notable among those who welcomed
his arrival. Some of his earliest students were to become leading figures
in American big-band jazz, an area that had fascinated him since the
heyday of Paul Whiteman.
Anne C. Schreffler's invaluable contribution to the Harvard symposium
concentrates on Wolpe's four happy and productive years teaching at Black
Mountain College in rural North Carolina. Founded in 1933 by a pioneering
American educationist whose vision of progressive education owed much to
post-1918 Germany and England and a bit to the kibbutz ideal, Black
Mountain had become by the 1950s an essentially American venture. When
Wolpe arrived with his third wife - Hilda
Morley, the young American poet he had married in 1948 - it must have
seemed a sort of Eden. Among the friends he made there were John Cage,
Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg; but his closest bond was with
the leading American poet and Moby-Dick interpreter, Charles Olson.
As for the music Wolpe wrote at Black Mountain, Schreffler is at once
helped and hindered by Wolpe's explosively discontinuous and "open"
descriptions. Just as Olson's "projective verse" opposed the
print-oriented verse that could only end up as
"private-soul-at-any-public-wall", so do Wolpe's writings resist closure
and strive for the same kinetic energy and subversive power that animate
his finest music. From the war years onwards, it had been an identifiably
American music, if not in the sense Downes might easily have recognized.
Yet the positive impression of it conveyed by Schreffler's essay is by no
means as clear as the strikingly negative one left by a single paragraph
in Kim H. Kowalke's key essay, "Reading Whitman / Responding to America:
Hindemith, Weill, and Others".
Having distanced himself from "the fundamental assumptions of postwar
European modernism" in general, and Eurocentric Exile Studies in
particular, Kowalke asks which European composers were "fluent enough in
the American idioms of both language and music to tackle Whitman", and
wonders whether "outsiders" could cope with the problems Whitman had posed
for "even the most talented American composers".
Could a composer - could any composer, he seems to mean - surmount the
cultural barriers "that Whitman himself transcended"? In the "case" of
Stefan Wolpe, Kowalke continues, "the answer would seem to be no". The
evidence he cites in support of this fairly sweeping judgment is an
uncharacteristic and long-forgotten (if ever remembered) setting of
Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" Kowalke proceeds to demolish it.
Published in 1946 and clearly intended for the kind of musical events
still being promoted in the pre-McCarthy era by the far Left and its
remaining allies in the labour unions, "My Captain!" is Wolpe's only
Whitman setting. Unlike his pre-war settings from the Hebrew, or even the
relatively unimportant Brecht settings dating from the Black Mountain
period, it is not a song that even the most fervent of his admirers would
be keen to promote. No worse and perhaps slightly better than many a
political song concocted for the French and Italian Resistance movements
only two or three years earlier, it owes little or nothing to European
modernism, and is relevant to Kowalke's purposes only because a setting of
"My Captain!" is the first in a set of Whitman songs composed in 1942 by
Kurt Weill. Including in his appraisal a song Weill added in July 1947 for
a commercial recording, Kowalke boldly describes the Four Walt Whitman
Songs as "a compelling mini-drama, inflected with vernacular Americanisms
but resonating with Schumann, Puccini, and Mahler - a mediation, if not a
resolution, of the conflict between the Old World and the New". This is
asking much of a handful of songs, however richly endowed they may be with
American homespun and alleged intertextual subtleties from the other side.
As if from the clandestine cellars of Anton von Webern's Vienna in the
early 1940s, one lonely essay, by Claudia Maurer Zenck, issues forth and
studies the "Challenges and Opportunities of Acculturation" as exemplified
in the Californian "exile" of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Ernst Krenek.
Whether it is Schoenberg's fault for allegedly lowering his standards and
postponing his obligations to serialism so as to meet the demands of the
American marketplace, or Stravinsky's for worrying about his cash-flow
problems in wartime Hollywood, or Krenek's for flirting with American
folklore in Palm Springs, the remorselessly misconstrued evidence of
compromise, backsliding and venality already reveals itself for what it is
in the third of the eighty-five footnotes: "The outward forms of
adaptation may be as obvious as they are amusing, such as Schoenberg
watching a tennis match clad in a T-shirt and cap, Stravinsky wearing
swimming trunks in his garden, or Krenek switching to
orange-juice-and-whisky cocktails."
Far from obvious and much more amusing is Bryan Gilliam's splendid account
of how the former Viennese opera composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold coped
with the challenges and opportunities America offered him. Driven into
paradise only in the sense that he was invited to its West Coast by Max
Reinhardt, Korngold refused to call himself a refugee, succeeded
brilliantly as a Hollywood film composer, and was never the victim of
anything but the fickleness of fashion, once the opera he had composed in
Vienna at the age of twenty, Die tote Stadt, had brought him temporary
fame and fortune on both sides of the Atlantic. Gilliam's remarkable essay
on "Korngold's Double Exile in America" argues that European composers who
reached the New World without any high-modernist credentials were fated to
suffer a second exile, once they were there.
Even while Korngold and Weill are occupying the commanding heights that
once were reserved for the likes of Schoenberg and Sessions, the editors
of the Harvard symposium observe the old-world courtesies, and invite
Sessions's former pupil Milton Babbitt to reminisce. Anecdotal history
with a touch of valedictory poignancy, Babbitt's reports and reflections
concern a landscape of exile exactly half-way between Europe and
California - a semi-paradise where all was harmony, and Schoenberg's
imperfectly translated Harmonielehre was there to prove it. As the doyen
among the contributors to Driven into Paradise, Babbitt is an
indispensable witness to the once-vivid reality of a musical culture that
has vanished more slowly but quite as surely as the ice in Krenek's
cocktail glass.
Safely docked across the river from Hoboken, Driven into Paradise is that
much closer to Broadway and the faltering narratives of Show Business. Its
arrival in time for the new millennium was not inopportune, for even the
glaring omissions signal the need for new endeavour. As if to correct, at
the last hour, the otherwise incorrigible, the volume ends with an "honor
roll" of 150 musicologists who emigrated from Germany, Austria and Central
Europe during the fifteen years beginning c1930. Compiled at the
suggestion of Bruno Nettl, it is far from comprehensive; yet it
recognizes, as the book itself does not, the multiplicity of the host
cultures that remained beyond Hitler's reach, and the dangers of isolating
and privileging any one of them. If the US represented a kind of paradise
(or its opposite, though one doesn't hear of that) for those who had fled
from mainland Europe by the summer of 1940, so did Palestine, Australia,
South America, Japan and, closest to hand, the British Isles. While there
is space on the "honor roll" for a German music critic who left for France
in 1938 and yet became an assiduous contributor to the Pariser Zeitung
during the Occupation, there is none for the unfortunates who ended up in
Stalin's Russia.
"Perhaps it is part of our destiny", wrote Sessions in August 1945, "to
help bring once more to existence something like that 'good European' of
whom Goethe and others dreamed, and whom our common late enemy sought,
above all else, to destroy." For the Willy Brandt who electrified that New
York meeting in the mid-1960s, the elderly German-born academics he was
directly addressing had been personal witnesses to the last great betrayal
of classical Weimar humanism. But exactly half a century after the new
Behemoth had been defeated, there were no scholars from either side of the
Atlantic waiting to declare at the Harvard conference that the much more
recent defeat of another "common late enemy" might be the occasion for
demonstrating that if the Enlightenment project, despite majority reports
to the contrary, remained unfinished, it might yet be revived in the
reciprocal form proposed by Sessions in 1945. The Old World was no longer
on the agenda, except in so far as its former gods were driven from its
shores and made "more human" in the New.
"You become American by choosing America", exclaimed Susan Sontag on Radio
4 the other day. Weill chose America, and so did Schoenberg; Korngold
chose America, and so did Wolpe. Good for them. So how did they fare in
later years? Pretty well on the whole; but not always and not everywhere.
"You complain of lack of culture in this amusement-arcade world", wrote
Schoenberg (from LA) to Oskar Kokoschka (in London) in 1946; "I wonder
what you'd say to the world in which I nearly die of disgust." He surely
wasn't thinking of Alma Mahler-Werfel's champagne parties up the road in
Beverly Hills. He didn't only mean "the movies", as he assured his old
friend. He was talking, by way of example, about an advertisement; and
describing, without knowing it, that looming hyperreality into which he
and his world would eventually seem to dissolve.
David Drew is currently co-ordinating European plans for the Wolpe
centenary in 2002. |
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