Will Europeans Curate Our Receding Cultural Past?

My 2022 book Dvorak’s Prophecy has just been published in German (by Wolke Verlag) with a new Foreword for German-language readers: “The European/American Transaction.” I take note that the recent Charles Ives Sesquicentenary “was mainly celebrated in Europe”; that it is in Europe “that every city boasts a jazz scene engaging Americans who cannot find American gigs beyond a few major cities;” and that my novel about Gustav Mahler “sells far more briskly in Germany than in the United States.”

A few weeks ago I was apprised of Ingo Metzmacher’s remarkable Ives tribute in Hanover last June 8 featuring Thomas Hampson, the NDR Radio Philharmonic, a university orchestra, and nine choirs, plus running commentary by Metzmacher. Would that a major American orchestra would even consider something of this kind.

Here’s how my new Foreword ends:

“Among the reviews greeting Dvorak’s Prophecy, my new paradigm was most personally embraced not by a musician or music critic, but by a prominent African-American arbiter of  American mores: John McWhorter in the New York Times. ‘Horowitz has taught me a new way of processing the timeline of American classical music,’ McWhorter wrote. Addressing Porgy and Bess, he added: ‘Horowitz teaches us to stop hearing [it] narrowly, as a Black opera, or as some sideline oddity called a folk opera. It is what opera should be in this country, with our history, period. Under this analysis, the scores to Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo, for all their beauty, are the fascinating but sideline development, not Porgy and Bess.’ More informative, in its way, was an unsigned review in Publishers Weekly by a writer so impatient with my book that he obviously skimmed parts of it, misidentifying Arthur Farwell as a Black composer and summarizing: ‘Horowitz’s preoccupation with long-forgotten, avant-garde critical controversies make this interpretation of America’s protean musical development feel dated.’

“Precisely. The quest for a usable literary past once undertaken by Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and F. O. Matthiessen, the useless musical past once proclaimed by Copland and Thomson, were mainstream intellectual events, not ‘avant-garde.’ If in fact they are ‘long-forgotten’ and ‘dated,’ so much the worse for us. Equally informative, I would say, is that a publication kindred to Dvorak’s Prophecy, in the form of a provocative piece of historical fiction, was concurrently undertaken not by an American writer, but by Christian Much, who was born in Luxemburg and writes in German. .  . . 

“A related perspective: the recent Charles Ives Sesquicentenary (he was born in 1874) was mainly celebrated in Europe. And so is jazz (so vital to American identity): it is in Europe that every city boasts a jazz scene engaging Americans who cannot find American gigs beyond a few major cities. I am reminded that when the American West was initially documented, among the first prominent professional artists to portray Native America happened to be Swiss: Karl Bodmer. The most celebrated painter of Rocky Mountain landscapes was German-born: Albert Bierstadt. The German-Russian painter Louis Choris was an important early chronicler of the Pacific coast. The most important chronicler of musical New York, in its fin-de-siecle heyday, was Henry Krehbiel, a bilingual product of German immigrant parents. . . .

“Will Europeans, in decades to come, prove necessary custodians of the American cultural past? I can only hope so.“