http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11010316
America's performing arts
Made in Europe
Apr 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition
AGED nine, a Russian-Georgian boy called Georgi Balanchivadze moved in 1913 from rural Finland to St Petersburg to enrol as a ballet student in the Imperial Theatre School. Some 11 years later, he travelled to East Prussia with the Soviet State Dancers; refusing an order to return home, he defected and fled to Paris, where another Russian exile, Sergei Diaghilev, hired him as a choreographer for the Ballets Russes. After a brief stint in London, George Balanchine (as he was by then) moved to America in 1933, where he founded American ballet, and became perhaps the most inventive choreographer of the 20th century. He called America “land of the lovely bodies” and he started an athletic, limber style of dance that celebrated those bodies, explicitly rejecting the mannered, regal European tradition.
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Mr Horowitz tells his story through brief biographies. This lets him showcase his excellent analytical skills, particularly when it comes to music: his discussion of Erich Korngold, a composing prodigy who grew rich and famous writing rather saccharine film scores, is especially insightful. He also has a taste for the endearing, if a bit gossipy, personal anecdote: Arnold Schoenberg watched “The Lone Ranger” and “Hopalong Cassidy”; Arturo Toscanini enjoyed New Orleans jazz and televised boxing.
As a coda, Mr Horowitz compares the experiences of Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov in the United States. The former fled the Nazis, settled in Los Angeles and became America's “good German”: he allegorised Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in “Joseph the Provider”. Yet the cold war and McCarthyism disillusioned him, and he rejected the “artificial paradise” of California for Switzerland.
Nabokov also left America for Switzerland, but while Mann's subject remained Germany, Nabokov's American masterpiece, “Lolita”, is a love-letter to the country in all its plastic kitsch. “I am as American as April in Arizona,” Nabokov wrote in 1966. It's a beautiful sentence. That it does not really mean anything, makes it no less beautiful or American.