The Nearly Forgotten Emigre Composers

One of the most important concerts ever given in this country was a performance at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 14, 1943, that was broadcast throughout the nation. It was the historic New York Philharmonic debut of Leonard Bernstein, a last-minute replacement for an ailing Bruno Walter. His performance was a sensation; it was front-page news and made Bernstein a household name. And on the program happened to be Theme, Variations and Finale by Miklos Rozsa.

A recording of that broadcast has just been issued by the New York Philharmonic, and on it Rozsa is introduced by the radio announcer as a modern Hungarian composer. But in fact, he was an emigre who had recently arrived in Hollywood and would, the next year, compose the music for “Double Indemnity” and then “Spellbound.” Later, his music, his sound, would come to be associated with the epics he scored--”Ben-Hur,” “El Cid,” “King of Kings,” “Quo Vadis.”

Rozsa is but one of the many European composers and musicians Hitler sent to the United States. And most of them settled here, in Southern California. There were the film composers--Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman--who, along with Rozsa, essentially invented the genre. The great German conductor Otto Klemperer became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, serving from 1933 to 1939. Stravinsky and Schoenberg, the two most influential composers of the first half of the 20th century, lived only a few miles apart in Beverly Hills and Brentwood. Such highly regarded emigre composers as Ernst Toch and Ingolf Dahl taught at USC. Ernst Krenek, one of the most celebrated composers of Weimar Germany, wound up in Palm Springs. Although there were noted emigre writers, such as Thomas Mann and briefly Bertolt Brecht, and emigre painters and filmmakers, it is the musicians who had the greatest and most immediate influence on American culture.

Music, however, is not a significant part of “Exiles and Emigres.” The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present just two concerts in conjunction with the exhibition, one of music by Bartok, Stravinsky, Stefan Wolpe, Toch, Hanns Eisler, Schoenberg and Krenek; another of string quartets by Rozsa and Korngold. Nor have other local institutions taken up the slack. USC will turn its attention only to cabaret and operetta songs written in exile. An academic symposium organized by LACMA for April 12 and 13, moreover, seems to have no room for music at all.

Maybe they felt it isn’t needed. We hear, after all, music from emigres all the time. Hardly a week passes when the Los Angeles Philharmonic or some other ensemble doesn’t play Stravinsky or Bartok or Rachmaninoff. A day rarely passes without the opportunity to hear one of the great film scores by emigre composers on television, thanks to cable’s insatiable appetite for old movies. The music of the emigres and that influenced by them is so much a part of the fabric of our lives that we hardly think of it as having distant roots.

Indeed, what is so extraordinary about the emigre musicians, and especially those who came to California, is the way they helped determine what we now think of as purely indigenous art. This is most apparent in the movies. The music that we think of as film music, the music that began being written in the ‘30s to underscore drama, is based purely on European tradition. Korngold, a Viennese prodigy who came to Hollywood with a great bag of Richard Straussian tricks and with several operas to his credit, always said that film music should function the way music does in opera.

The whole tradition of 19th century Romanticism went into the emigres’ movie scores. When Russian-born Dimitri Tiomkin accepted his Oscar for the score of “The High and the Mighty” in 1955, he thanked Beethoven, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Wagner and Richard Strauss. It is a lineage that continues to color symphonic movie music to this day, sometimes imaginatively, sometimes not.

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The influence of the more high-minded emigre composers here was slightly different but no less important to the indigenous sound. They too retained their European qualities--Schoenberg taught his American students only Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. Dahl remained a died-in-the-wool neoclassicist. Toch and Krenek, experimenters in the old country, became fairly traditional modernists, probably no different than they would have had they been able to stay in Europe.

Still, it was through contact with these men that young Californians got their musical bearings and learned solid technique.

John Cage and Lou Harrison, for instance, studied with Schoenberg, and that contact with the most important German composer of the time gave them a special sense of their destinies and the confidence to make a different kind of music altogether. Michael Tilson Thomas, a product of the emigre teachers at USC in the early ‘60s, discovered his deep Americanism through the simultaneous absorption of all the different musical traditions to be found at that time in Los Angeles.

But if these composers helped a generation or two of Californians find their own musical voice, Southern California did take its toll on the emigres themselves. None of them ever felt appreciated. Marlene Dietrich, Jeanette MacDonald and Josef von Sternberg may have come to see Klemperer conduct his first Hollywood Bowl concert on July 16, 1935, but he still had an uphill battle programming interesting repertory. The film composers, especially Korngold and Rozsa, felt that their concert careers were wrecked by their Hollywood day jobs; only now are their works beginning to find their posthumous ways back onto concert programs.

The worst neglect, though, was for Toch, Dahl and Krenek, whose music was played mostly for specialized audiences when they were alive and then pretty much disappeared altogether after their deaths, in 1964, 1970 and 1991, respectively. That neglect is being redressed today--but barely. Tilson Thomas has taken to championing Dahl, his old teacher. Interest for Toch and Krenek is growing too, though principally back in Germany and Austria, where their operas are starting to be produced and enthusiastically received.

And that brings up another issue of emigre culture. Not only have Europeans become more interested in the emigre music made here than we are, but many of our most imaginative artists are increasing becoming emigres themselves. Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, John Adams, Steve Reich, Peter Sellars, Meredith Monk and many, many others find that Europe now supports their art far more actively than America does. One still hears many more performances of Cage and Morton Feldman in Europe than in America, and more and more young American composers have become expatriates in London, Berlin, Amsterdam and Rome.

But that’s grist for a different exhibition, one our musical institutions, let alone LACMA, seem to have no stomach for at all.

* The Los Angeles String Quartet performs quartets by Korngold and Rozsa, with film clips from movies they scored, March 5, 8 p.m., and MEC Ensemble performs works by Bartok, Stravinsky, Wolpe, Toch, Eisler, Schoenberg and Krenek, March 10, 8 p.m., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. $6-$15. (213) 857-6010. “Exiles and Emigres” will be open for 90 minutes before the concerts, and admission is free with purchase of a concert ticket.