Böcker av Joseph Horowitz

A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"-how it got to be that way and what can be done about it.

A stunning debut novel from renowned cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, reimagining the tumultuous marriage between Gustav and Alma Mahler in New York City in 1907. Invited to lead the Metropolitan opera, his wife accompanied him to the New World, though they soon find that leaving their pasts behind is not going to be so easy.

"Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Horowitz shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian "psychology of exile" traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov's hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a "freedom not to matter," and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration's arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today's fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, this book newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement"--

Joseph Horowitz writes in Moral Fire: "e;If the Met's screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs (in the 1890s) are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy."e; Arguing that the past can prove instructive and inspirational, Horowitz revisits four astonishing personalities-Henry Higginson, Laura Langford, Henry Krehbiel and Charles Ives-whose missionary work in the realm of culture signaled a belief in the fundamental decency of civilized human nature, in the universality of moral values, and in progress toward a kingdom of peace and love.

A revelatory history of the operatic masterpiece that both made and destroyed Rouben Mamoulian, its director and unsung hero.