Читать онлайн «The Rest Is Noise Series: Music for All: Music in FDR’s America»
Автор Алекс Росс
This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music,
It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you're attending concerts in the episode America: a new world discovers its voice.
Alex Ross, music critic for the
MUSIC FOR ALL
Music in FDR’s America
From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross
Contents
About the Publisher
Music in FDR’s America
In 1934, Arnold Schoenberg moved to California, bought a Ford sedan, and declared, “I was driven into Paradise. ” By the beginning of the forties, when the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and their respective satellites controlled Europe from Madrid to Warsaw, crowds of cultural luminaries sought refuge in the United States, and they were greeted by a significant irony. Europeans had long depicted America as a wilderness of vulgarity; the cult of the dollar had driven Gustav Mahler to an early grave, or so his widow claimed.
Now, with Europe in the grip of totalitarianism, America had unexpectedly become the last hope of civilization. The impresario and Zionist activist Meyer Weisgal, in a telegram to the Austrian director Max Reinhardt, put it this way: “IF HITLER DOESN’T WANT YOU I’LL TAKE YOU. ” Many leading composers of the early twentieth century—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, and Eisler, among others—settled in the United States. Entire artistic communities of Paris, Berlin, and the former St. Petersburg reconstituted themselves in neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles. Alma Mahler was herself among the refugees; she escaped the German invasion of France by hiking across the Pyrenees with her latest husband, Franz Werfel, and by the end of 1940 she was living on Los Tilos Road in the Hollywood Hills.That such disparate personalities as the White Russian Stravinsky and the hard-core Communist Eisler could feel temporarily at home in America was a tribute to the inclusive spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as president from 1933 until his death in 1945. A patrician with a populist flair, Roosevelt embodied what came to be known as the “middlebrow” vision of American culture—the idea that Democratic capitalism operating at full tilt could still accommodate high culture of the European variety.
