A WINDFALL OF MUSICIANS: Hitler's Emigres and Exiles in Southern California, by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. Yale; 318 pages; $35.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Let us pause to give thanks to the law of unintended consequences. Hitler wanted to obliterate all the Jews in Europe, which meant that a lot of the Jews who got out came to America, thereby enriching our cultural, scientific and business life, while at the same time leaving German arts and letters a tattered sump for a generation.
Dorothy Lamb Crawford's "A Windfall of Musicians" narrows the focus of the forced Jewish diaspora to composers and conductors such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Toch, Franz Waxman, Otto Klemperer and many others who almost certainly would never have come to America to live had circumstances in Europe been different.
Most of them came from Berlin or Vienna, places with deep musical cultures. Berlin had three opera companies, several orchestras, 40 theaters and 20 music schools. Los Angeles had precisely one orchestra, and it was living hand to mouth.
The reason so many musicians migrated to the Los Angeles area was twofold: To begin with, there already was a nucleus of German artists living there: Ernst Lubitsch and the group around him had come over during the '20s and very early '30s. Beyond that, the movie industry offered more work for musicians and composers than was to be had in New York. Each of the major studios maintained an in-house orchestra of 50 or 60 players, and each needed a large staff of composers and arrangers.
Nevertheless, some of these men were destined to be permanent odd men out. Klemperer, already renowned in Germany, became the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but the orchestra had no endowment to speak of, and was constantly fighting for survival. On top of that, Klemperer was bedeviled by physical and emotional problems that cut his conductorship short.
Schoenberg's music was always a minority enthusiasm, but he got by on his celebrity, which brought private pupils such as Oscar Levant and Alfred Newman to his door. Schoenberg also found that he enjoyed playing tennis with George Gershwin.
For every Korngold or Weill that flourished, there were a half-dozen who struggled. Toch was paid only $550 for 12 weeks of teaching at the University of Southern California, while a class in harmony paid him $120 per academic quarter. Even his private lessons went for only $3.75 per half hour.
You can't help wondering how Toch and those like him survived, but Crawford's stimulating new book uncovers evidence of a lot of musical ghostwriting that the emigres did, especially at MGM.
Even those who did well financially and creatively maintained a lifelong sense of unease about where they were and what they were doing. Korngold's film scores ("The Adventures of Robin Hood," "The Sea Hawk," etc.) were resplendent with heraldry and lyricism, but he was a man caught between two worlds. A childhood spent amidst the cafes of Vienna could not easily adjust to the hills of Santa Monica, and by the time Korngold found his way back to Europe after the war, musical styles had changed and he was regarded as archaic.
He couldn't go forward because nobody was interested in his music anymore, and he didn't want to go back to the movies. Korngold died in 1957, at the age of 60 — in Hollywood.
American politics also could be difficult, because not only were almost all of the emigres Jews, a lot of them also were left-wing. Hanns Eisler was the brother of the noted Stalinist Gerhard Eisler. Hanns wrote some good film scores and became a close friend of Charlie Chaplin, which didn't work to his advantage when the Red Scare erupted.
Although nobody ever turned up any evidence that Hanns Eisler was himself a communist, he was nonetheless deported to Czechoslovakia in 1948.
Chaplin and a few friends rallied around, but a lot of the Germans stayed away out of nervous self-preservation. They had had to flee one country erupting in political intolerance and had no desire to have to do it again.
Thomas Mann, the most prestigious of all the German artists living in California, knew that Eisler was innocent, but, as he wrote to a friend, "I have a wife and children, and am not inquiring further into the matter." Then as now, artistry is no guarantee of moral courage.
The story of the men and women who bailed out of Germany and Austria has been told before, but Crawford's narrow focus, and her assiduous trawling through the archives turns up a lot of untold material that proves consistently fascinating.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.