A Windfall of Musicians [antikvár]

PREFACE This book's subject arises from a historical coincidence: the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime in 1930s Germany, and the simultaneous development of sound in the Hollywood film industry. The former caused many talented musicians (among, of course, thousands of other people) to flee Europe; the latter produced an unprecedented and far-reaching surge of musical development in Southern California. Inevitably, many European musicians found their way to California; together, they constituted Hitler's (unintentional) gift to American music. Starting in early 1933, Hitler began banning, arresting, and curtailing the civil liberties of prominent musicians in Germany. His policies to exterminate lews, socialists, homosexuals, and modernists became a wider threat as he invaded or assumed control of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and Hungary, formed an alliance with Italy, and exerted ideological pressure on Switzerland. Musicians from each of these countries also found their work banned or eliminated, their civil liberties denied, and their means of survival extinguished. An enormous exodus of highly trained musicians from Europe ensued. Some were prominent members of the Europe's intellectual and artistic elite; others were younger and not yet secure or well known. These political refugees initially sought safety elsewhere in Europe. But because the global Great Depression created economic barriers to sustaining work in other nations, many emigrated to the United States. Conditions there were hardly better: insufficient opportunities in America's northeastern and midwestern cities, their own poverty, and the expenses of living in harsh climates led many to turn their hopes toward Los Angeles, which offered the possibility of work in film for performers and composers. Large studio orchestras were hiring masses of musicians who had been left without work when American vaudeville and burlesque theaters closed in the face of competition from the new talkies and musical films. The movie industry was hardly unknown to the émigrés: several important German producers and directors had been lured to Hollywood during the silent-film era, and Berlin was well aware of technical advancements there.