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Having had his fill of agitprop with Brecht in Berlin, Weill began to visualize
himself as a mainstream theater composer. He had his first Broadway hit with
Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938 and struck again with Lady in the Dark in 1941.
Weill’s hard-bitten Berlin style transferred to the American stage with
remarkable ease; the bittersweet added-sixth harmonies of “September Song,”
the big number in Knickerbocker Holiday, bear a family resemblance to “Mack
the Knife.” Weill’s Americanization proceeded to the point where he could swear
like Clark Gable in a 1940 interview: “I don’t give a damn about writing for
posterity…I have never acknowledged the difference between ‘serious’ music
and ‘light’ music. There is only good music and bad music.”
In this same period, the Broadway musical grew more ambitious. The grand
new mode of music theater that Kern had set in motion with Show Boat and
Gershwin had carried forward in Porgy and Bess achieved maximum
commercial impact with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!
-whose legendary first run began in 1943 and ended in 1948. While Weill
generally told New York stories, Rodgers and Hammerstein extolled the
heartland. The work’s “open-air spirit,” as Rodgers called it, had much in
common with Copland’s “open prairie,” and when Rodgers set about writing a
dance sequence for farm boys and girls, he apparently looked to Copland’s
cowboy ballet Rodeo for inspiration.
The rapid advance of Broadway composers set in relief the fact that their
counterparts in the classical world were writing relatively few operas or music-
theater pieces, preferring to concentrate on orchestral writing. The Broadway
musical was splitting off as a separate genre of American music, with its own
language, its own styles of singing, its own schools and subgenres. The
distinction between “opera” and “Broadway” was hardening into fact-a missed
opportunity for the populist generation.
In the elections of 1938, the Republicans picked up a large number of seats in
Congress and joined forces with conservative Democrats to mount an assault
on the New Deal. The House Un-American Activities Committee, under the
leadership of Congressman Martin Dies, launched an investigation of the WPA,
and the arts programs proved a juicy target. Congressman J. Parnell Thomas
charged that the Theatre Project was “one more link in the vast and
unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine.” The Music Project faced a
separate challenge from the American Federation of Musicians, which saw
governmentfunded performances as unfair competition for professional
orchestras, opera companies, and bands. Roosevelt came to the conclusion-
justified or not-that the broad American middle would not accept the burden of
“encouraging art, music, and literature,” as he put it in a letter to Nelson
Rockefeller.
The death knell for the federal arts programs sounded on June 30, 1939, when
Congress called for the abolition of the Federal Theatre Project and allowed the
other arts projects to continue only under state and local sponsorship.
Roosevelt made a show of decrying the way in which the FTP had been singled
out for abuse, claiming that it could have carried on under the terms extended to
the other divisions, but all that was a whitewash: as had been predicted in the
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House hearings, few WPA organizations were able to survive on local support
alone.
A late efflorescence of WPA spirit took place at the New York World’s Fair,
which opened in Queens in April 1939. Money for this grand venture came
largely from private sources, but New Deal idealism still filled the air, blending
uneasily with the adspeak of corporate America. Millions of visitors gazed
awestruck at the self-styled “World of Tomorrow”-the sleek forms of the Trylon
and Perisphere at the center of the fairgrounds; the “Futurama” spectacular,
with its radiant vision of suburban communities interconnected by
superhighways; and, at the RCA pavilion, a device called television, which the
ever-optimistic David Sarnoff hailed as “a new art.” Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms
were monumentalized in sculptures that Mussolini might have found appealing.
Several prominent composers of Popular Front orientation contributed to the
fair, struggling to reconcile their ideals with the requirements of big business.
Weill wrote music for the historical pageant Railroads on Parade, in which
fifteen working locomotives moved across a massive reinforced stage and blew
their whistles on cue. Eisler, suspending his anticapitalist crusade, teamed with
Joseph Losey on the puppet film Pete Roleum and His Cousins, which
explained the oil industry to children.
Copland, for his part, wrote a score for a film documentary titled The City, which
played every day on the fairgrounds. The narration, written by Lewis Mumford,
advanced the thesis that the American city had become frenzied, oppressive,
and inhumane. First, New England scenes illustrate a golden age before
humanity and nature fell out of balance, Copland’s music making liberal use of
plainspoken melody and pure-hearted harmony. Then industry invades. “Smoke
makes prosperity,” the narrator intones, “no matter if you choke on it.” Copland
responds with brassy dissonance. A sequence depicting the congestion of the
city inspires vamping repetitive music that anticipates the minimalism of Philip
Glass. (Koyaanisqatsi, Glass’s film symphony about the ruination of the planet,
is essentially an update of The City.) Finally, we are given the solution-the
model community of Greenbelt, Maryland, where modern convenience was
joined to rural values, “where children play under trees and the people who laid
out this place didn’t forget that air and sun was what we need for growing.”
Despite the overlay of Popular Front rhetoric, the film was trumpeting the
concept of the commuter suburb, which served the interests of the big
automobile manufacturers. General Motors was a major investor in the fair.
The summer of 1939 was a somber time for leftist artists. News of the abrupt
termination of the Federal Arts Projects coincided with the even more shocking
news of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Some American Communists were beginning
to realize that blood, prisons, ruin, and darkness, to paraphrase Joshua Kunitz,
were very much part of Stalin’s world. Copland, though, was in a buoyant frame
of mind; long a force behind the scenes, he was now tasting real popularity. “Mr.
Copland Here, There, and at the Fair” was The New Yorker’s headline for a
column on his doings. If one avenue, the way of New Deal art, was blocked,
others were opening up. In October 1939, Copland went west to Hollywood.
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Ever the optimist, he wrote to Koussevitzky: “Hollywood is an extraordinary
place…It’s like nothing else in the world. Thank heavens.”
Schoenberg’s epigram about his California exile—“I was driven into Paradise”—
is sometimes used as the setup for a grim punch line, along the lines of “For
émigré artists, the Hollywood paradise soon became a nightmare.” Or, to quote
a line from Brecht that Hanns Eisler set to music in his
Hollywood Music
Hollywood Elegies
Schoenberg, an Austro-German chauvinist turned American patriot, would
never have condoned such a simplistic formula. Los Angeles, and Hollywood in
particular, became a nightmare only for those who arrived with irrational
expectations. Hollywood was in the business of generating maximum revenue
from entertainment. Any composer—or writer or director—who came west with
the intention of indulging his genius was bound to go away embittered. “The
man who insists on complete self-expression had better stay home and write
symphonies,” Copland wrote in 1940. “He will never be happy in Hollywood.”
of
1942: “Paradise and hell can be the same city.”
Say this for the movie people: they were certainly mad for music. Lauritz
Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad flirted with film stardom; Nelson Eddy became
one of the biggest box-office draws of the period; there were biopics of Schubert
(Melody Master), Chopin (A Song to Remember), Robert and Clara Schumann
(Song of Love), even Rimsky-Korsakov (Song of Scheherazade). John Garfield
played a violinist in Humoresque; Bette Davis played a pianist entangled with a
cellist and a composer in Deception; Leopold Stokowski played Leopold
Stokowski in the Deanna Durbin comedy One Hundred Men and a Girl.
Hollywood may have been hazardous territory for composers, but they at least
felt
Each
major studio assembled a symphony orchestra to record its scores, providing
employment to the throngs of Jewish musical émigrés who had been driven out
of the great ensembles of Central Europe. The director of music at Paramount
Studios was a curious character named Boris Morros, who made it his mission
to sign up famous composers for film work. He negotiated at various times with
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Copland, and Weill, and even tried to get Shostakovich
on loan from the Soviet Union. All the while, he was serving as a KGB agent,
with an assignment to generate pro-Soviet propaganda. Morros seems to have
used his subversive activities mainly as an ingenious way of raising cash for his
own projects and accounts.
wanted there, as they never did in American concert halls. The shift to
talkies had created a mania for continuous sound. Just as actors in screwball
comedies had to talk a mile a minute, composers were called upon to underline
every gesture and emphasize every emotion. An actress could hardly serve a
cup of coffee without having fifty Max Steiner strings swoop in to assist her.
(“What that awful music does,” Bette Davis once said to Gore Vidal, “is erase
the actor’s performance, note by note.”) Early movie scores had a purely
illustrative function, which composers called “Mickey-Mousing”: if a British
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frigate sails into the frame, “Rule, Britannia” plays. Later, composers introduced
techniques of musical distancing and irony, along the lines of Sergei
Eisenstein’s counterpointing of image and sound. Music could be used to reveal
a hidden psychological subtext, to indicate absent figures and forces, to subvert
whatever film reality the viewer was seeing.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Shadow of a Doubt, Franz Lehár’s “Merry Widow
Waltz” undergoes spooky variations by Dimitri Tiomkin, thereby tracing out the
tortured psychology of Joseph Cotten’s serial-killer character. As the film
scholar Royal Brown writes, the tune stands in for Uncle Charlie’s “loathing of
the present day in favor of an idealized past.” In Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die
Copland, when he came to Hollywood, had the luck to work with directors who
let him write in his accustomed style. His favorite collaborator was the literate,
left-wing, musically sensitive director Lewis Milestone, who hired him to score a
film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s
(co-written by Brecht), Hanns Eisler had the pleasant assignment of depicting
the assassination of the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, and marked the moment
of death by writing rapid, sibilant string figures in the upper register, suggestive
of a squealing rat. When a portrait of Hitler appears on-screen, Eisler responds
with a cackling eruption of atonality.
Of Mice and Men. As the Los Angeles
Times noted in wonder, there was no music director looking over the
composer’s shoulder as he worked. The setting for the novel, the agricultural
valleys of California, elicited winsome stretches of music in the now familiar
pastoral mode, while the later tragic twists in the drama prompted Copland to
revive his “modernist” voice; the music for the climactic scene of Lennie’s death
is a near-recapitulation of the Piano Variations. What’s distinctive about the
score is its reticence; its commentaries tend to be subtle rather than obvious,
and for long stretches it stays silent. It’s as if the composer were watching the
drama along with the audience. David Raksin, one of the most gifted native-
born film composers, singled out the “absolutely clear and pure and wonderful
style” in Of Mice and Men,
The crown prince of the Hollywood music community was Erich Wolfgang
Korngold. In his youth Korngold had been one of history’s most remarkable
composer-prodigies, astonishing both Mahler and Strauss with his
prepubescent mastery of the Wagnerian orchestra. Back in 1920, at the age of
twenty-three, he had conquered the opera houses of Central Europe with
noting that it set the tone for dozens of classic
Hollywood Westerns.
Die
tote Stadt, or The Dead City, a tale of artistic and romantic obsession in the vein
of Schreker’s Der ferne Klang.
Korngold’s first assignment, in 1934, was to arrange Mendelssohn’s
As the twenties went on, the opulent style that
Korngold had so easily mastered fell out of European fashion, although it
remained in demand in thirties Hollywood, especially for social dramas and
period pictures.
Midsummer Night’s Dream music—banned in Nazi Germany—for a Max
Reinhardt adaptation of the play. Korngold all but took over the production,
telling the actors how to recite their lines and letting the cinematographer know
how many feet of film would be needed to cover his musical cues. On a second
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visit the following year, Korngold scored the Errol Flynn picture Captain Blood,
Korngold was the flashiest, but the most original of Hollywood composers was
Bernard Herrmann, who began with Orson Welles’s
his muscular, flamboyant style transforming what might have been a run-of-the-
mill adventure into the first of Flynn’s box-office-smashing “swashbucklers.” All
told, Korngold won for film composing a degree of respectability that soon drew
other international celebrities into the game.
Citizen Kane, reached his
peak with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and ended his career with Martin
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
When Welles went to Hollywood to launch what promised to be a history-
making film career, he took Herrmann with him. Welles remained a model
Popular Front activist, as he had been in New York, and
Herrmann started out as a feisty youngster on the New
York scene, a sometime member of Copland’s “commando unit.” Keenly aware
of the possibilities of radio and film, he went to work as an arranger, conductor,
and composer at the CBS network in 1934. It was at CBS that Herrmann met
Welles, who, on the heels of his Federal Theatre Project successes, was
presenting innovative radio productions under the title Mercury Theatre on the
Air.
Citizen Kane
Like his idol Sergei Eisenstein, Welles possessed exceptional musical instincts.
An opera maven in his youth, he understood how music could amplify stage
action, draw out hidden moods and emotions, even expose a lie.
was
perhaps the supreme Popular Front work; it told of a great American who
betrays the progressive ideals of his youth and becomes a decrepit capitalist
relic. The right-wing newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who was the
main target of Welles’s satire, tried to have the film suppressed, but it opened
anyway, on May Day 1941.
Kane’s
opening two-and-a-half-minute sequence, showing the protagonist’s last
moments and death, is propelled entirely by Herrmann’s score, the only
nonmusical sound being Kane’s whisper of “Rosebud!” The principal motif, a
five-note phrase that drops down a tritone at the end, recalls, aptly,
Rachmaninov’s tone poem Isle of the Dead.
The most amazing synergy of music and image comes when Kane’s second
wife, the would-be singer Susan Alexander, makes a disastrous debut on the
opera stage that the tycoon has built for her. It is the turning point in Kane’s
transformation from hero to monster, and grand opera epitomizes his delusions.
As Herrmann’s gloriously overwrought French verismo aria plays, the camera
pans up to show a stagehand holding his nose in disgust. Is he a working-class
opera lover who knows a fake voice when he hears one? Or a pop-music
devotee who rejects opera as upper-crust foolery? The viewer decides.
Following Eisenstein’s practice in
Throughout the film those notes
undergo variations and mutations; for example, in the rapid-fire sequence that
describes Kane’s early days in the newspaper business, they are heard sped up
and in a major key.
Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible,
Welles shot this sequence and also the final scene with Herrmann’s music
already composed and recorded. He later remarked that Herrmann was “50
percent responsible” for the success of Kane.
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Herrmann’s scores for Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons (mangled
along with the film in release), Vertigo, and Psycho
contain some of the
century’s most piercingly effective dramatic music, but film work was terminally
unfulfilling for this arrogant, irascible, impassioned man, who dreamed of
returning in triumph to concert music and opera. Korngold, likewise, yearned to
reassert himself as a “serious” composer but could not shake the Hollywood
tag. His Symphony in F-sharp, a valedictory utterance whose slow movement
takes the form of a shatteringly eloquent funeral oration for FDR, met with
dismissive shrugs after its 1954 premiere. Other Hollywood émigrés, such as
Ernst Toch, Karol Rathaus, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, and Eric Zeisl,
labored under the kitsch-composer stereotype. They were generally considered
too serious for Hollywood and not serious enough for the concert hall. Most
would have identified with Toch when he wrote, “I am the forgotten composer of
the twentieth century.”
Exile Music
Had there been a demand, the vendors who hawked maps of movie stars’
homes on street corners in Beverly Hills could also have sold maps for the stars
of Eusopean music. Schoenberg had a house on North Rockingham Avenue in
Brentwood, down the way from Tyrone Power. Stravinsky lived on North
Wetherly Drive, up the hill from the Sunset Strip. Rachmaninov was on North
Elm Drive, in the center of the movie colony. Bruno Walter was on North
Bedford Drive, next door to Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel; Theodor Adorno on
South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood, near the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky; Otto
Klemperer, former head of the Kroll Opera, on Bel Air Road, up the street from
the directors Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch; and Eisler on Amalfi Drive, in
Pacific Palisades, close to Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley. Korngold,
befitting his high station, lived in the elite Toluca Lake development, near Frank
Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope. The more culturally attuned movie stars,
such as Charles Chaplin and Charles Laughton, mixed comfortably with their
impressive new neighbors. Others committed the occasional faux pas. At a
dinner at Harpo Marx’s, the comedienne Fanny Brice walked up to Schoenberg
and said, “C’mon, Professor, play us a tune.”
The most surreal thing about the Los Angeles music scene was that
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the twin giants of modernism, now lived just eight
miles apart, each on a side street north of Sunset Boulevard. On four occasions
the masters were within sight of each other: at Franz Werfel’s funeral, in 1945;
at the dress rehearsal for a multicomposer work called the Genesis Suite, for
which both had written movements, in the same year; at a dinner for Alma
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Mahler at the Crystal Ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1948; and at a
seventy-fifth-birthday concert in Schoenberg’s honor, in 1949. They might have
enjoyed speaking to each other, but in this imaginary Europe it was somehow
inconceivable that they should meet.
Schoenberg had been living in the Los Angeles area since 1934, teaching first
at the University of Southern California and then at UCLA. He adapted to his
new surroundings with alacrity; the Weimar Republic, with its health fads and
cult of sport, prepared him well for the Republic of California. He tooled around
in his Ford sedan, followed UCLA football, and played a mean set of tennis.
Welcome anytime on George and Ira Gershwin’s court, he would show up
almost every week, accompanied by a gaggle of pupils. He also played tennis
with Chaplin, who enjoyed the sight of the “frank and abrupt little man” in a
white T-shirt and cap. He took pride in the all-American lifestyles of his
daughter, Nuria, and his sons, Lawrence and Ronald; the latter’s victory in a
junior tennis championship occasioned much celebration. Although the
composer never fully mastered English, he did pick up a fair amount of
American slang, which he would wield to lacerating effect. When one pupil
presented a piece that had an exaggerated galloping rhythm, Schoenberg
started to jump around like the Lone Ranger, shouting, “Hi-yo, Silver!” His dress
grew funky. According to his student Dika Newlin, he came to one class at
UCLA wearing “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit
belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an
unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes.”
In his music Schoenberg experienced what he called an “upsurge of desire for
tonality.” With a series of more or less tonal works—the Suite in G for Strings,
the Variations on a Recitative in D Minor for organ, Kol nidre for synagogue
choir, and the Theme and Variations in G Minor for high-school band—he
evidently hoped to create marketable “hits,” whose profits would then allow him
to carry on with Moses und Aron and other more advanced endeavors. Even
the twelve-tone Violin and Piano Concertos were written in the hope that the
classical virtuosos of the radio age would popularize them. These pieces proved
no more financially rewarding in America than the comic opera From Today
Until Tomorrow had been in the Weimar Republic.
As a teacher, Schoenberg remained tough as nails, but he did not foist his
methods on students. He raised eyebrows by praising the tonal symphonic art
of Sibelius and Shostakovich, which he might have been expected to deplore.
When one of his pupils started attacking Shostakovich, Schoenberg cut him off,
saying, “That man is a composer born.” He once or twice caught his class off
guard with the announcement that “there is still plenty of good music to be
written in C major.”
Schoenberg loved the movies and hoped to write a film score himself. In late
1934, Irving Thalberg, the frail, cultured head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer, heard Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night or perhaps the Suite in G on the
radio one day and asked the composer in for a meeting. The screenwriter Salka
Viertel, who was present, described the scene unforgettably in her memoir, The
Kindness of Strangers:
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I still see [Schoenberg] before me, leaning forward in his chair, both
hands clasped over the handle of the umbrella, his burning genius’s eyes
on Thalberg, who, standing behind his desk, was explaining why he
wanted a great composer for the scoring of the Good Earth. When he
came to: “Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written
…” Schoenberg interrupted sharply: “I don’t write ‘lovely’ music”…He had
read the Good Earth and he would not undertake the assignment unless
he was given complete control over the sound, including the spoken
words. “What do you mean by complete control?” asked Thalberg,
incredulously. “I mean that I would have to work with the actors,”
answered Schoenberg. “They would have to speak in the same pitch and
key as I compose it in. It would be similar to Pierrot lunaire but, of course,
less difficult.”
Unfazed, Thalberg asked Schoenberg to think about what kind of music would
best suit the screenplay. The composer prepared several sketches, again
leaning in a tonal direction. The sticking point between composer and studio
head was not style but money; at a follow-up meeting Schoenberg asked for no
less than fifty thousand dollars, whereupon Thalberg lost interest. After hearing
nothing from the executive for three weeks, Schoenberg wrote an
uncharacteristically pleading letter: “I can not believe, this is your intention: to
give me no answer at all. Maybe you are disappointed about the price I asked.
But you will agree, it is not my fault, you did not ask me before and only so late,
that I had already spent so much time, coming twice to you, reading the book,
trying out how I could compose it and making sketches.” But nothing more was
heard from MGM. A few months later, Schoenberg called at Paramount to
discuss a project titled Souls at Sea, but it, too, came to nothing. The twelve-
tone method finally reached the silver screen by way of Scott Bradley’s
inventive scores for Tom and Jerry cartoons in the forties, notably Puttin’ on the
Dog and The Cat That Hated People.
The crucial work of Schoenberg’s “American” period was the String Trio of
1946, which hints at the conflicting pleasures, agonies, hopes, and regrets of
life in California. On its surface, it is a piece of unapologetic difficulty,
reminiscent of Schoenberg’s wildest early atonal music. The score is full of
distortion and noise, with the players asked to execute such eerie effects as sul
ponticello (bowing the strings at the bridge) and col legno (bowing or tapping
the strings with the wood of the bow). Yet the contrasting lyrical episodes
radiate nostalgia for the former tonal world. By his own testimony, Schoenberg
was depicting in musical terms a severe asthma attack he experienced in the
summer of 1946, during which his pulse temporarily stopped and he was given
an injection to the heart. Some passages represented the injections, he said,
others the male nurse who treated him. The composer Allen Shawn, in a book
about Schoenberg, notes that the String Trio is a kind of fantastic
autobiography, “as if in his delirium he had reviewed his life.” The ending is soft
and wistful.
Ronald Schoenberg, the older of the composer’s two American sons, still lives
in the Brentwood house where his father spent the last part of his life. He recalls
that in his childhood tour buses would regularly come up the street, and a voice
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on a loudspeaker would point out the home of Shirley Temple. The guide would
never mention that the composer of Erwartung lived across the way. “My father
was always a little sad about that,” his son says. “But another time, we stopped
at a juice bar out on Highway 1, and the radio was playing Verklärte Nacht, and
I never saw him so happy.”
Igor Stravinsky came to California in 1940. He had arrived on the East Coast
the previous year, to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Not
long after the final lecture, France fell, and Stravinsky again found himself a
refugee from twentieth-century history.
Los Angeles naturally attracted him, not only for the pleasant climate but also
for the opportunity to try his hand at film. Like Schoenberg, Stravinsky was a
movie buff, enjoying Chaplin’s classic silents, the comic masterpieces of Buster
Keaton, the Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedies, and Disney’s cartoons. The
possibility of a Stravinsky-Disney collaboration particularly excited the press.
“America may yet see Mickey Mouse liberating the princess in the Firebird,” the
Cincinnati Enquirer wrote in 1940. There were ambitious ideas for an entire
Disney film built around a Stravinsky score. Stravinsky talked to other studios,
and sketched music for the films Commandos Strike at Dawn (about the Nazi
occupation of Norway), The North Star (about a Russian village under siege),
The Song of Bernadette (based on the novel by his friend Franz Werfel), and
Jane Eyre (starring Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane Stravinsky admired).
In the end, Stravinsky’s music appeared in only one Hollywood movie—
Disney’s animated magnum opus Fantasia, where dinosaurs danced in time to
the rhythms of the Rite. Stravinsky later claimed to have been horrified by
Fantasia, although there is no record of his saying anything negative at the
time. “Igor appears to love it,” Hindemith commented in a 1941 letter.
Why did Stravinsky have so little luck in Hollywood? The trouble wasn’t money,
as in Schoenberg’s case. Studio heads were confident that Stravinsky’s name
would prove a box-office draw; Louis B. Mayer reportedly agreed to give the
composer a whopping $100,000, which would be well over a million dollars in
today’s money. In a review of the composer’s Hollywood activities, Charles
Joseph observes that in almost every case Stravinsky demanded too much time
to finish the music and too much control over the finished product. The studios
may have revered Stravinsky as a cultural figure, but they could not bring
expensive projects to a halt while the composer lined his paper and
manipulated his colored pencils in pursuit of the perfect Norwegian commando
sonorities. In other ways, Stravinsky happily played along with the culture
industry, writing a Tango that was taken up by Benny Goodman’s band; a
Circus Polka that was danced by fifty young women and fifty elephants in pink
tutus at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (choreography by
Balanchine); a Scherzo èla russe for Paul Whiteman; and an Ebony Concerto
for Woody Herman.
Somewhat surprisingly, the main works of Stravinsky’s first years of exile were
symphonies: the Symphony in C (begun in Paris in 1938, finished in Los
Angeles in 1940, premiered by the Chicago Symphony that year); Ode (three
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symphonic movements commissioned by the Boston Symphony, premiered in
1943); and the Symphony in Three Movements (New York Philharmonic, 1946).
America’s seemingly limitless hunger for symphonic utterances, whether by
Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, or Roy Harris, may have given Stravinsky
incentive to explore a form that he had avoided since his studies with Rimsky-
Korsakov (if the Symphony of Psalms is placed in a category by itself).
The Symphony in Three Movements became another peak in a mountain range
of an output. It is unusual among Stravinsky’s works in that it follows a quasi-
Romantic narrative plan, one of struggle and resolution. The first movement is
all dynamism and conflict, the pastoral Andante provides respite, the finale
carries on the conflict at a more strident pitch. Departing from his usual post-
1918 line of defining music as a self-contained, anti-expressive art, Stravinsky
later cited newsreel footage of goose-stepping soldiers as a source of
inspiration. The piece begins with a striking, almost cinematic gesture—a
swooshing upward rush of strings, lower winds, and piano, coupled with a four-
horn fanfare, reminiscent of the columnar opening bars of Oedipus Rex. Then a
rugged, foursquare march begins. Yet Stravinsky remains Stravinsky: the
opening gesture is repeated in irregular fragments, as if the newsreels were
being rearranged in a cubistic collage. Rhythms keep doubling back or
springing ahead, plain chords bang against each other in unexpected ways.
More warlike noises enliven the finale: trudging and swinging rhythms,
exuberant whoops in the horns, and, at the end, a splashy, souped-up, self-
confessedly Hollywoodish chord of victory—the sound of America on the march.
On August 7, 1945, the day after the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima,
Stravinsky added an extra pulse to the final chord, perhaps by way of honoring
the immense military might of the country of which he was about to become a
permanent citizen.
On July 19, 1942, NBC broadcast Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, with
Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony. It was the most spectacular new-
music event of the radio era, heralded by the Time magazine cover portrait of
Shostakovich in his fireman’s helmet.
Most of the émigré composers—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Eisler, Rachmaninov,
Hindemith, and Bartók—were listening, and almost all seem to have
experienced a mass attack of envy and resentment. Schoenberg praised
Shostakovich on other occasions, but this time he snapped, “With composing
like this, one must be grateful that he has not already gone up to Symphony No.
77!” Hindemith condemned the trend toward “despicable rubbish” in orchestral
music and sat down to write a set of fugues—the Ludus tonalis—in which he
hoped to “remind those who have not completely succumbed what music and
composition really are.” None of the émigrés reacted more strongly than Bartók,
who was listening at home in New York. When he wrote his Concerto for
Orchestra the following summer, he included a savage reference to the
Leningrad; in “Intermezzo interrotto,” the fourth movement, the clarinet plays a
sped-up, cartoonish version of the Bolero-ish “invasion” theme, accompanied by
chortling trills and sneering trombone glissandos.