A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California

Building on her study Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Dorothy Lamb Crawford presents in her new book, A Windfall of Musicians, an account of how thirty-two Jewish and non-Jewish musicians settled in Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s after their expulsion from Nazi Europe and reshaped their careers. Crawford opens her volume—comprising ten chapters, a preface and an epilogue—with a glimpse into music and politics in Europe during the Weimar Republic and an introduction of each of the main characters and their respective situations during this turbulent period. In the second chapter, she examines the paradoxical reasons for Southern California's attraction for so many European musicians in the first half of the twentieth century. Thereafter she dedicates one chapter to Otto Klemperer's achievements as a conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1933 to 1939, and another slightly longer chapter to thirteen musicians—conductors, pianists, a harpsichordist, string performers, and a singer—among them Bruno Walter, Artur Rubinstein, Jakob and Bronislav Gimpel, Joseph Szigeti, Emanuel Feuermann, and Lotte Lehmann. In the fifth chapter, Crawford focuses on seven "Innovative Teachers in the Performing Arts," including the dance pedagogue Pia Gilbert, and the conductors Jan Popper, Hugo Strelitzer, and Herbert Zipper. As a professor in UCLA's dance department (1947–85), Gilbert developed new methods to teach music to dancers. Strelitzer pioneered a highly successful state- and city-subsidized opera workshop at Los Angeles City College (1937–61). The last five chapters are devoted to composers. Yet while Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky (not exactly a Hitler exile) and Ernst Toch each receive an entire chapter, the trio of Ernst Krenek, Eric Zeisl and Ingolf Dahl, and a group of eight composers working in the "picture business"—Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Hanns Eisler, Frederick Hollander, Erich Korngold, Alexandre Tansman, Franz Waxman, Kurt Weill, and Eugene Zador—are respectively lumped together in a chapter. Crawford has undoubtedly amassed a lot of new information (although the Schoen berg chapter was published earlier: "Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles," Musical Quarterly 86, no. 1 [Spring 2002]: 6–48) and sheds light on many musicians who are little known and absent from today's musical canons. Yet with the exception of the Toch essay, she allots most coverage to the already much discussed musical figures Klemperer, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, and grants the neglected voices of lesser-known figures working in the film studios and of female musicians, of which she only considers a total of three (harpsichordist Alice Ehlers, composer-dance pedagogue Gilbert, and singer Lehmann), comparatively little exposure. Her decision to include over thirty characters—most of them crammed into three chapters of about twenty-five to thirty pages each—leads to structurally wearisome strings of short biographies with little room for detail or discussion of musical works.

Crawford's narrative is unmistakably Eurocentric and reflects the largely biased European views of American (music) culture, promoted by such exiled writers and musicians as Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Hindemith, and Krenek, and adopted in early European exile studies about this period. Crawford suggests that, for her chosen displaced musicians, Southern California, despite its sunny weather, beautiful landscapes, recreational opportunities, more or less lucrative job opportunities, and low living expenses, "justified the title of Bertolt Brecht's poem about Los Angeles, "On Thinking about Hell" (p. x). She characterizes their new environment as a "cultural desert," and "musically a relatively sleepy region" (pp. x, xi). In 1930, Southern California had "only one shakily established orchestra" (p. 26), and lacked opera houses, goodconcert halls, educational music institutions, and philanthropic support. Deficient in "cultural coherence" (p. 28), the region was dominated by conservative and superficial dictators who shaped the audience's unsophisticated artistic tastes. One of the dictators was the shallow and commercially oriented classical music impresario Lynden Ellsworth Behymer in Los Angeles. The other "dictatorships" were the Hollywood film studios, which offered almost impossible conditions for creative artists and forced composers into a kind of musical prostitution (pp. x, 139). Because of Southern California's location, conservatism, and "natural anti-intellectualism," it was ignored by the rest of America and isolated (pp. 25–26). However, notwithstanding these and such other obstacles as the émigré musicians' supposedly ignorant students and their allegedly culturally inferior American neighbors and colleagues, they stayed—in Crawford's view—mostly amongst themselves and worked tirelessly to transform "hell" into "heaven," taking on the role of moral leaders, fighting the rampant materialism, and trying to replicate European-style musical infrastructures in the American Southwest. Only occasionally did they receive help from such non-Europeans as music patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge; benevolent critic Isabel Morse Jones; and Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based Peter Yates, a fierce promoter of contemporary music, who together with his pianist-wife Frances Mullen initiated in 1939 the highly successful European-style chamber music series, the Evenings on the Roof, which featured many performances of modernist works by émigré, American, and European composers. Yates's achievements and opinions mark Crawford's narrative throughout. The émigré musicians' struggles, however, bore fruit as they successfully converted the musical wasteland into a "musical mecca in the postwar years" (p. xi). Thanks to Klemperer's tenure as musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, "orchestral music in Los Angeles was brought to maturity" (p. 78). Between 1933 and 1970, Crawford claims, quoting Peter Heyworth, that "Los Angeles became host to a 'greater concentration of musical talent than existed in any other city at that time' " (p. 24).

There is no doubt that Hitler's émigré musicians in Southern California enriched and transformed that region's musical culture. They taught fledgling young musicians and elevated teaching standards; Waxman founded the Los Angeles Music Festival (1947–67) and Harold Byrns (née Hans Bernstein) founded the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1949. Many composers in the Hollywood studios, especially Eisler, Korngold and Waxman, wrote sophisticated scores for the movies. Yet Crawford's portrayal of the area as a "cultural desert" is problematic and disregards such recent investigations of musical culture in Southern California as Catherine Parsons Smith's Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and Mina Yang's dissertation "New Directions in California Music: Construction of a Pacific Rim Cultural Identity, 1925–1945" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2001), and book California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Smith points out that in 1930 the proportion of musicians and music teachers in Los Angeles, a city whose population had exceeded a million, was higher than in any other American city. Although Los Angeles continued to take pride in classical music institutions and events in addition to much ethnically diverse music in the 1930s, they were largely ignored by the émigrés because they lacked the ambition and prestige of European venues and were chiefly associated with women. The achievements of many American-born musicians active in Southern California before World War II—among them Charles Wakefield Cadman, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Henry Eichheim, George Gershwin, Mary Carr Moore, William Grant Still, and representatives of progressive jazz—have been commonly overshadowed by the presence and views of certain musical émigrés, although the Americans should also deserve some credit for their contributions to the postwar "musical mecca" in Southern California, if such a thing has indeed ever existed.

Discounting newer approaches in the field of exile studies, Crawford barely focuses on the Americanization of musical émigrés, and their gradual change from refugee to immigrant, even though most of them, unlike many émigré writers, grew roots in their adopted home country and decided not to return to Europe after the war. Crawford based her book mainly on interviews, letters, and other unpublished sources from which she quotes abundantly in order to allow "individuals to speak for themselves" about their American years (p. xi). In lieu of a bibliography, she pro-vides a list of archives she accessed. While this approach enables Crawford to convey the individual flavor of her characters' voices, her heavy reliance on these documents leads to a considerable number of factual errors and distortions. Misremembered or anecdotal information, biased views, and myths are often uncritically adopted. Editorial errors, however, are few.

Attractively illustrated with rare photographs, the book may be of interest to musicians, music lovers, and students of the cultural history of Southern California, yet it should be read with awareness of its shortcomings.