Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War
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- 20,99 €
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- 20,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
A Juilliard-trained musician and professor of history explores the fascinating entanglement of classical music with American foreign relations.
Dangerous Melodies vividly evokes a time when classical music stood at the center of twentieth-century American life, occupying a prominent place in the nation’s culture and politics. The work of renowned conductors, instrumentalists, and singers—and the activities of orchestras and opera companies—were intertwined with momentous international events, especially the two world wars and the long Cold War.
Jonathan Rosenberg exposes the politics behind classical music, showing how German musicians were dismissed or imprisoned during World War I, while numerous German compositions were swept from American auditoriums. He writes of the accompanying impassioned protests, some of which verged on riots, by soldiers and ordinary citizens. Yet, during World War II, those same compositions were no longer part of the political discussion, while Russian music, especially Shostakovich’s, was used as a tool to strengthen the US-Soviet alliance. During the Cold War, accusations of communism were leveled against members of the American music community, while the State Department sent symphony orchestras to play around the world, even performing behind the Iron Curtain.
Rich with a stunning array of composers and musicians, including Karl Muck, Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Kirsten Flagstad, Aaron Copland, Van Cliburn, and Leonard Bernstein, Dangerous Melodies delves into the volatile intersection of classical music and world politics to reveal a tumultuous history of twentieth-century America.
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Seemingly staid concert halls that were once roiled by ideological battles come into consideration in this probing study of the geopolitics of classical music. Hunter College history professor Rosenberg (How Far the Promised Land) starts with America's musical hysteria during WWI, including riots against "German" music, purges of German (or German-American) musicians and conductors from orchestras, and bans on Wagner's operas. The 1930s and '40s, he notes, saw less jingoism but equally ferocious protests against musicians tied to Germany's Nazi regime; meanwhile, Americans applauded Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich's "Seventh Symphony" in 1942 to signal wartime solidarity with the Soviets. The Cold War saw America weaponize classical music against Soviet communism, in this telling, as orchestras and musicians went abroad to display American cultural achievements, climaxing in pianist Van Cliburn's triumph at Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, which won him a ticker tape parade back in New York. Rosenberg smartly frames this history as a battle between a "musical nationalism" that saw classical music as a projection of national diplomacy and influence, and a "musical universalism" that emphasized its power to unite humanity. Rosenberg's prose can be dry, but classical music aficionados will find much enjoyable lore from a time when the music was at the center of international rivalries. Photos.