Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi by Reinhold Brinkmann, Christoph Wolff

Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi by Reinhold Brinkmann, Christoph Wolff

By Reinhold Brinkmann, Christoph Wolff

The compelled migration of artists and students from Nazi Germany is a compelling and sometimes wrenching tale. the tale is twofold, of impoverishment for the international locations the musicians left at the back of and enrichment for the USA. The latter is the focal point of this eminent assortment, which techniques the topic from different views, together with documentary-style newspaper bills and an exploration of Walt Whitman's poetry within the paintings of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill. The flood of musical migration from Germany and Austria from 1933 to 1944 had a long-lasting effect. 1000s of musicians and musicologists got here to the us and remained the following, and the shaping strength of their skills is incalculable. a number of essays offer firsthand insights into elements of yankee cultural historical past to which those emigres made crucial contributions as conductors, professors, and composers; different essays inform of the worrying event of being exiled and the problems of discovering one's method in a overseas kingdom. whereas the migration infused the U.S. with a extraordinarily eu musical know-how, even as the prestige and authority of its members tended to intrude within the improvement of a certainly American cultural voice. the tale of the remarkable migration that resulted from Nazism has many dimensions, and pushed Into Paradise illuminates them in deeply human phrases. members: Milton Babbitt Reinhold Brinkmann Hermann Danuser Peter homosexual Bryan Gilliam Lydia Goehr Stephen Hinton David Josephson Kim H. Kowalke Walter Levin Bruno Nettl Pamela M. Potter Alexander L. Ringer Anne C. Shreffler Christoph Wolff Claudia Maurer Zenck "This is an extended late and terrific contribution to our knowing of the highbrow migration from Europe. The essays in this quantity remove darkness from in new methods the studies of musicians and students who fled Europe." --Leon Botstein, tune Director, American Symphony Orchestra "With a sweep and coherence very infrequent in essay collections, this quantity instantly takes its position as probably the most vital guides on twentieth-century tune. the variety of resource fabrics is outstanding: anecdotes, letters, memoirs, interviews, newspaper articles, musical rankings, motion pictures, and archival records. dealt with with deft scholarship, they upload as much as a balanced but deeply relocating account of ways figures of exile skilled and remodeled American culture." --Walter Frisch, writer of The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg

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Extra info for Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Book)

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His motive for telling me this was surely complex, but it was clear that, however disappointed, even hurt, he had been, he had been, even more, flattered by a candor that bespoke collegial rapport and even intimacy. Surely Steuermann had been the condign accompanist for the convoluted Karl Kraus. I confess that I felt obliged constantly to measure my words when I was with these musicians from abroad, even those I came to know well, particularly as the news of the enormousness of the enormities reached us throughout the decade.

People have often observed, and rightly, that the language of music is international. Frequently it was difficulties with English that kept so many refugees in general from making a success of it in America. " But the musicians were even better off: they could communicate on instruments, or with notes, if not at first with words. Theythe musicians, like their colleagues in the theater, in the arts, and in literaturebelieved, and with justice, that they had taken the best of German culture with them and yielded their onetime home, Germany, to barbarians.

33. Quoted in Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg: His Life, Worlds, and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer, 1978), 405-6. 34. Even Hanns-Werner Heister's attempt to reevaluate the "American Weill" from a leftist perspective is not free of such a prejudice. S. perhaps not always at the level of quality of his pre-exile works"; typically his argument points to a missing ''congenial 'American Brecht'" as the reason for Weill's perceived failure. This judgment implies that the outstanding quality of Weill's "European" works rests primarily on Brecht's merits.

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