Artists in Exile

Joseph Horowitz

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061971303
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

During the first half of the twentieth century—decades of war and revolution in Europe—an "intellectual migration" relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe's supreme performing artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and choreographers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A "foreign homeland" (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them?

George Balanchine, in collaboration with Stravinsky, famously created an Americanized version of Russian classical ballet. Kurt Weill, schooled in Berlin jazz, composed a Broadway opera. Rouben Mamoulian's revolutionary Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! drew upon Russian "total theater." An army of German filmmakers—among them F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder—made Hollywood more edgy and cosmopolitan. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich redefined film sexuality. Erich Korngold upholstered the sound of the movies. Rudolf Serkin inspirationally inculcated dour Germanic canons of musical interpretation. An obscure British organist reinvented himself as "Leopold Stokowski." However, most of these gifted émigrés to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions.

A central theme of Joseph Horowitz's study is that Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"—they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible—they colonized. "The polar extremes, " he writes, "were Balanchine, who shed Petipa to invent a New World template for ballet, and the conductor George Szell, who treated his American players as New World Calibans to be taught Mozart and Beethoven." A symbiotic relationship to African American culture is another ongoing motif emerging from Horowitz's survey: the immigrants "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality"; they proved immune to "the growing pains of a young high culture separating from parents and former slaves alike."

CHAPTER ONE

HOW TO BECOME AN AMERICAN: A FORTUITOUS PARTNERSHIP OF DANCE AND MUSIC

St. Petersburg and Sergey Diaghilev educate Georgi Balanchivadze—Balanchine invents an American ballet—Igor Stravinsky eyes America—The Balanchine/Stravinsky synthesis—Returning to Russia

GEORGI BALANCHIVADZE—A GEORGIAN NAME, because his father was Georgian—was born in St. Petersburg in 1904. His early childhood was spent in a country house in what is now Finland. From the age of nine he was a ballet student back in St. Petersburg, at the Imperial Theatre School. That is: his formative years were spent on his own in a city neither European nor Slavic, where pastel Italian palaces and Venetian canals were darkened by arctic winters or magically lit through the white nights of summer.

As Balanchivadze would prove absorbent and adaptive, St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century was itself as porous and mutable as Leningrad would be monolithic and inbred. And St. Petersburg was youthful, fabricated from swampland as recently as the early 1700s as Peter the Great’s window on the west. The St. Petersburg court of Catherine the Great, later in the century, chiefly spoke French. Court composers included the important Italians Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa, and the Spaniard Vicente MartÍn y Soler—who also, however, composed Italian operas for Russian consumption. The Irish pianist/composer John Field, a significant precursor to Chopin, settled in St. Petersburg in 1803. The German Adolf von Henselt tutored a generation of Russian pianists beginning in 1838. At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the presiding violin pedagogue was the Hungarian Leopold Auer. Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1860s, France’s Marius Petipa guided the fortunes of Russian ballet. With its cosmopolitan court and intelligentsia, its surreal but potent juxtaposition of Russian weather and European architecture, St. Petersburg was a city bristling with artistic achievement. Compared to Moscow—or Berlin, or Paris, or London—it was also to a peculiar degree deracinated. Not unlike New York, it transcended the colonizing influences that had textured and diversified its brief but momentous history.

And St. Petersburg was of course a cauldron of social and political unrest, famously erupting into violence in 1905–1907 and 1917. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, it was—as Petrograd (1914–1924)—the site of civil war and martial law, of barricades and stray bullets. Even after the Imperial Theatre School reopened as the State Academy, unabated hardship and upheaval furnished another kind of schooling, equally valuable in its way for life and art. Students of classical dance scrounged for food and for wood to heat the Russian winter. They sewed their own clothes and costumes. They took odd jobs—in Balanchivadze’s case, as a pianist for a shabby movie theater by night, and by day as a saddler’s assistant, stitching canvas to horses’ bellybands. Pursuing their aristocratic calling amid Marxist slogans and proletarian masses, they were susceptible both to privation and to a radical idealism. Were Tchaikovsky and Petipa antiquated? Did high art best serve society? What constituted art? In fact, the early Soviet period was a crucible for acute experimentation: Mayakovski’s Futurist poems, Malevich’s White on White, Eisenstein’s Potemkin. In dance, Kasyan Goleizovsky—a name little known in the West—scandalized and inspired Russian balletomanes of the twenties. Like Fokine, he believed that classical ballet had degenerated into a superficial entertainment. He espoused a pure dance art eschewing stereotyped steps; his troupe danced barefoot and scantily clad.

Balanchivadze was galvanized by Goleizovsky’s heresies. Two years after graduating in 1921, he created Evenings of the Young Ballet, of which the first was titled “The Evolution of Ballet: From Petipa through Fokine to Balanchivadze.” Balanchivadze’s contributions, set to Ravel and Chopin, and to his own Extase, created a sensation. Subsequent Evenings ranged from classical adagios to fox-trots. Balanchivadze’s vocabulary included elements of acrobatics, popular dance, and cabaret. This intermingling of tradition and innovation fed the American dance artist to come. The turbulent Petrograd years equally shaped Balanchivadze the man: his resourcefulness, adaptability, self-sufficiency. And he acquired—unless it was always there—a fatalistic equanimity under pressure that would become one of his most pronounced and unfathomable personal attributes.

Many years later, George Balanchine was asked why he emigrated to the West. He replied:

It was impossible to live in Russia, it was terrible—there was nothing to eat. People here can’t understand what that means. We were hungry all the time. We dreamed of moving anywhere at all, just to get away. To go or not to go—I never had the slightest doubts about it. None! I never doubted, I always knew: if there were ever an opportunity—I’d leave!¹

The opportunity came in 1924: he was permitted to go abroad as part of a tiny troupe called the Soviet State Dancers. The dancers, hastily packed, took a German steamer to East Prussia. A telegram from the Soviet Union ordered them back. Balanchivadze and five others chose to defect. Some work was found in German resorts, then in a London music hall. They took cheap rooms in Paris with money enough to last two weeks. Another telegram arrived: from Sergey Diaghilev. He urgently needed a choreographer for his Ballets Russes. He had scouted Balanchivadze. He wanted to know if Balanchivadze could work quickly. Balanchivadze said he could. And so, at the age of twenty-one, George Balanchine—as he would now be known—became ballet master for the premier ballet company in the world.

Like Balanchine, Diaghilev was a Russian exile of notably fluid identity. He had last visited his homeland in 1914. His Ballets Russes, created in 1911, had never appeared in Russia. Rather, he and it were peripatetic, with special ties to Paris, Monte Carlo, and London. Whether Balanchine was at first aware of it, Diaghilev had already revolutionized ballet. Though his dancers retained the benefits of rigorous classical training, such training was put to new uses. The full-length Petipa-style narrative ballets, with their exogenous star turns and complicated plots, their mixture of mime, character dance, and formulaic finales, were overthrown. Diaghilev espoused an integrated performance art in which music and design figured significantly. To this end, he engaged (at one time or another) Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Falla, and Prokofiev; Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, MirÓ, and Braque. His choreographers Fokine, Massine, Nijinsky, and Nijinska variously dispensed with plot and with classical steps. Pursuing the modernist imperative to innovate, Diaghilev had even—in Parade—embraced a Satie score punctuated by typewriter sounds; the occupants of its three-dimensional cubist costumes eschewed balletic movement. He set taste and redefined art. He was a genius, one of a kind.

Diaghilev tutored and advised his new ballet master. He introduced Balanchine to music he did not know. He shared with him the mysteries and treasures of Italian churches and museums. Meanwhile, Balanchine sharpened the Ballets Russes corps, revised ballets in repertoire, and created new works. He also did a certain amount of dancing. In blackface as Snowball, in The Triumph of Neptune, he created an American minstrel type whose cakewalk antics—a “paradoxical blend of pretended nervous apprehension and blustering confidence,” wrote the British dance critic Cyril Beaumont²—capitalized on the blurring of art and entertainment that Diaghilev the worldly eclectic and provocateur more than sanctioned.

Then, in 1928, Balanchine choreographed Stravinsky’s Apollon musagÈte for the Ballets Russes. He later called Apollo (the title Stravinsky subsequently preferred) “the turning point in my life.” The score “was a revelation. It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use all my ideas, that I, too, could eliminate. I began to see how I could clarify, by limiting, by reducing what seemed to be myriad possibilities to the one possibility that is inevitable.”

Diaghilev found the music “part Glinka and part sixteenth century Italian, though without any intentional Russianizing”; in fact, Stravinsky had arguably never before composed anything so relatively free of overt national markers. Restricting himself to an orchestra of strings, he conceived a “ballet blanc” eschewing “many-colored effects and…all superfluities.”³ Eschewed, as well, were chromatic and textural density. A vigorous classical lucidity was Stravinsky’s goal. Balanchine, accordingly, restricted himself to seven dancers (a later version, dropping the Prologue, used only four) to convey the simple scenario of Apollo empowering the muses Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore. Like Stravinsky’s, Balanchine’s return to classical ideals was at the same time contemporary; the composer’s modernist sharpness of rhythm and contour—his frequent biting accents and angularity of movement—correlated with the dancers’ frequent turned-in legs, torso distortions, jutting hips and shoulders. In both cases, the effect was not agitating but wonderfully bracing, an energized scrubbing action renewing traditions gone soft and limp. The essential serenity of Apollo was sealed by the first of Stravinsky’s iconic frozen codas, supported by a physical tableau also iconic: the three muses, legs splayed, radiating from the backside of the god.* With Apollo, Stravinsky stabilized the post-Romantic search for order. Balanchine, too, limned a virgin new world. These achievements, individually historic, also comprised (as time would tell) an historic conjunction of music and dance.

A year later, Diaghilev was dead at the age of fifty-seven. No less than would Balanchine, he had managed to turn the experience of exile into an opportunity for renewal. Balanchine’s debt to Diaghilev was immense: the advanced music of Stravinsky, the instances of abstract choreography by Fokine, the marriage of ballet with revue, of classicism with modernism, were all Diaghilev lessons; so too was the new phenomenon of an independent ballet troupe, dispensing with state support. But Balanchine, whose relations with his employer were sometimes tense, was not a submissive or passive recipient of instruction. His own predilections had long pointed toward many of Diaghilev’s, and with Diaghilev’s passing he continued in transit. He worked in Paris, in Monte Carlo, in Denmark. In London, his employers were the showmen Sir Charles B. Cochran of the Cochran Revue and Sir Oswald Stoll of the Coliseum. He even began to fancy himself an Englishman, nattily attired at Anderson and Sheppard.

Alexandra Danilova, who accompanied Balanchine from revolutionary Russia to the Ballets Russes (and later lived with him), once reminisced: “In a way we were like little wild animals. We were forced to bring ourselves up, to improvise our lives—and that left its mark.”⁴ Balanchine’s experimental bowler hat and umbrella conveyed a cheerful rootlessness in London at the age of twenty-six—and an infinitude of possibilities.

LINCOLN KIRSTEIN WAS BORN in 1907 to a wealthy Jewish family in Rochester, New York. He was raised in Boston. At ten, he bought his first work of art. At fourteen, he wrote a play and got it published. At fifteen, he spent the summer in London, where he mingled with the Bloomsbury set. At Harvard, he won a prize for drawing, wrote a novel, helped to establish the literary quarterly Hound and Horn, and cofounded a society for contemporary art that led to the creation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

But ballet was Kirstein’s reigning passion. He saw Pavlova in Boston and, beginning at the age of seventeen, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Europe. After college, he wrote a history of dance, helped Romola Nijinsky write her biography of her husband, and took ballet lessons from Fokine. Having already claimed his inheritance, he was fired with an ambition to bring ballet to the United States—not as some worn but gaudy import, afflicted with what (following Cocteau) he called “red and gold disease,” but as an experience that would draw fresh breath from a fresh environment. As ballet had been imported from France to Russia by Petipa and others, Kirstein sought a great ballet master to affect a comprehensive transplantation. He fixed on George Balanchine.

Forty years before Jeannette Thurber had picked AntonÍn Dvo

ák to help Americans cultivate their own classical music. Thurber reasoned that as a cultural nationalist, Dvo

ák could help Americans acquire a national concert music. Perhaps, too, she intuited from his origins that he would prove an instinctive democrat. Kirstein, appraising Balanchine, perceived a young choreographer with something new to offer. What is more, as Kirstein must have appreciated, Balanchine was a young man—barely older than himself—in flux.

They met in London in July 1933. Kirstein expressed his admiration for Balanchine and his dreams for ballet in America. Balanchine expressed his admiration for Ginger Rogers. Three months later, Balanchine arrived in New York. “I liked New York immediately,” he later recalled.

I liked America better than Europe. First of all, compared to America, Europe is small. Secondly, everything was over for me in Paris, there was no work. And I didn’t like the people there; it was all the same thing, over and over. And it was impossible to get work in England. I wanted to go to America, I thought it would be more interesting there, something would happen, something different…. Life in America, I thought, would be fun.

To which Balanchine’s biographer Bernard Taper has added:

One of the things he found congenial about America was that, like Russia, it was unfinished. Most of all, he liked the way the people moved—their athleticism and unself-conscious freedom of gesture, which showed in their games and daily activities, if not yet in their dance. The long-limbed girls he found a pleasure to behold…. “The land of lovely bodies,” he called America.⁵

As ever, Balanchine lived in the present. He chose an apartment, then moved to another, and another. He bought a car on impulse and enjoyed driving with friends to Connecticut or Long Island. Then in 1935 he took a false step that unexpectedly reconfirmed that for him Europe was over. The American Ballet, which he had created with Kirstein, accepted an invitation to furnish ballets for the Metropolitan Opera, as Balanchine and Diaghilev had once done for the opera in Monte Carlo. The Met had a new manager, the former tenor Edward Johnson. In retrospect, neither partner in this misalliance knew much about the other. Johnson upheld Eurocentric past practice. For American works he had even less use than his predecessor, Giulio Gatti-Casazza—and Gatti did not even speak English. This was because with his background at La Scala, Gatti understood opera as a living art; he assumed a commitment, however modest, to native and contemporary repertoire. Johnson, as an American, understood opera as something hallowed, exotic, and old. The twentieth-century composers represented in his 1935–36 repertoire were Humperdinck, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Massenet, and Puccini. And this was the Depression: new productions, new costumes, new toe shoes, were at a premium. Nevertheless, in addition to contributing to Aida, Die Meistersinger, and the like, Balanchine was asked to stage and choreograph an entire work: Orpheus and Eurydice. He turned Gluck’s opera into a dance drama, with singers and chorus relegated to the pit. Pavel Tchelitchev, in Kirstein’s opinion “the most gifted scenic designer of his epoch,” created what Kirstein considered “the most beautiful visual spectacle I have seen on any stage.” The scenery “was made out of chicken wire, cheesecloth, and dead birch branches…. The entire production was conceived without an element of paint. Rather, pigment was actually light. All hand-props and scenery were three-dimensional. Backgrounds were impalpable, chosen for their capacity to transmit, reflect, or change light. Everything occurred in air.”⁶ The premiere, on May 19, 1936, was received with titters, yawns, and weak applause. There was one subsequent performance.

When the American Ballet quit the company in 1938, Balanchine permitted himself a rare expression of anger. “The Met is a heap of ruins,” he told the press. For the moment, he had found happier employment uptown. Choreographing Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes (1936), he had created a landmark Broadway ballet, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, for Tamara Geva (whom he had both partnered and married in Petrograd) and Ray Bolger. For the first time, a Broadway show listed a “choreographer.” Bolger, who danced in two more shows choreographed by Balanchine, said that it was like spinning from Juilliard to the Louvre to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to Stillman’s Gymnasium. Bolger also said that Balanchine taught Broadway “that in the American musical you don’t have to do kick, stomp, thump, turn, jump, turn, kick. You can dance.” The sophistication an...