Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Stravinsky’s own music had never openly involved itself in the worries of its creator’s daily life, and certainly never in the politics of the world beyond. Since the explosion of The Rite of Spring more than twenty years before, it had cultivated an increasingly detached, impassive tone. Its composer would have agreed with Jacques Maritain that “the tedium of living and willing stops at the door of every studio.”3 In 1916, while the opposing armies were slaughtering tens of thousands of young men on the Somme, Stravinsky had sat in a turret room in a small town on the shores of Lake Geneva and written a song-and-dance piece about farmyard animals. After the war, settled now in France, he perfected a cool, objective, formalist language that seemed studiously to deny any possible emotional engagement or nervous instability. The homosexual Tchaikovsky, while his ill-conceived marriage was disintegrating in 1877, had composed an intense, romantic opera dramatizing the very situation that had led to the disaster. But when Stravinsky fell passionately in love with Vera Sudeykina in 1921, he celebrated with a mild comedy based on a style parody by Pushkin about the servant problem in early nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. He then followed this with a series of neoclassical instrumental works, an opera-oratorio about Oedipus in which the characters were masked and inert throughout, and a ballet blanc for string orchestra on the birth and apotheosis of Apollo. While Communists and Royalists fought pitched battles in the Place de la Concorde in early 1934, Stravinsky was putting the finishing touches on one of his most serene masterpieces, a large-scale dance drama about Persephone, the pomegranate, and the origin of the seasons. If these great works had any single message for the sublunary world, it could only be that disorder—whether political or psychic—must be neutralized through stern formal control and a refusal of facile emotion.

  Now the Stravinskys had decided to move to Paris. Their children were grown up, and increasingly frustrated by the boredom and emptiness of genteel rural life. Katya was constantly ill and in need of more sophisticated medical care than could ever be provided by country doctoring. Anna Stravinsky, her mother-in-law, was eighty, and growing frail, though outwardly in good enough health. As for Anna’s son, he must have felt some pull toward the focus of things, some desire to be fully in contact with the heart of the country of which he and Katya were now citizens. Paris would not solve the central problem of his existence; it would aggravate it, pulling the two halves uncomfortably close, like opposite magnetic poles forced reluctantly together. It would not help his bookings, either, and it would if anything hinder his composing. Perhaps he was himself simply weary of the interminable travel, the incessant journeys like this nine-hour trip to Grenoble. Perhaps he had made up his mind to challenge the division in his life, to negate it by sheer force of will. Or perhaps, in his inmost heart, he sensed that Paris was no more than a staging post on some longer, as yet unmapped journey.

  1

  A GENTLE AND A FREE SPIRIT

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1934, Stravinsky celebrated his new nationality by writing his memoirs. Ever since the seed had been sown on a car journey from Biarritz to Paris in 1932, it had been assumed that he would have a collaborator, and probably that the collaborator would be his old friend from the Diaghilev years Walter Nouvel.1 In fact Nouvel’s role in the Chroniques de ma vie was never openly acknowledged, and nothing much survives to tell us exactly what it was, apart from a contract awarding him a quarter of the book’s proceeds in recognition of his part in “establishing a French text,” together with a series of receipts. Remembering Stravinsky’s businesslike attitude to collaborators, one can take it that a quarter allocation represented a fairly substantial contribution; but to assert unequivocally that the autobiography was ghost-written by Nouvel2 is greatly to overstate what we know. When Prokofiev and Pierre Souvtchinsky called on Stravinsky in Voreppe at the end of August, they found him writing both the memoirs and a new piece for two pianos (this was the large-scale work left hanging at the start of 1933 when the Persephone commission came along). Nouvel was there too, but working—according to Prokofiev—on a book about Diaghilev.3 Six months later Katya Stravinsky talks, in a letter to her husband on tour in the U.S.A., about “your finishing your little book by the time you arrive,”4 and their younger son, Svetik (Soulima),5 who was often present, remembers the collaboration as something like free dictation, in which Stravinsky would walk up and down in his study reminiscing and developing ideas in Russian which Nouvel would then convert into literate French.6

  Whoever wrote the actual text, Stravinsky certainly put a lot of time and effort into it. The main evidence for this is not anything in the book itself, but the striking absence of other work from the period when it was being written. Compositionally the seventeen months between finishing Persephone in January 1934 and the first movement of the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos in June 1935 were by far his leanest time since the start of his studies with Rimsky-Korsakov more than thirty years before. Of course, there were plenty of distractions, as there always had been in his complicated family and professional life. The summer was disrupted by recordings and illness, and by the impending move from Voreppe, which eventually happened at the end of September. The vast new apartment in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was a challenge to even the Stravinskys’ home-making prowess. And there were the usual autumn concerts. Stravinsky had tinkered with the new concerto in the spring, after the Persephone performances, and he pulled it out again, more productively, back in Voreppe in early August. But by December, when he handed the first part of his Chroniques to the Paris publisher Denoël and Steele and set off with his duo partner, the violinist Samuel Dushkin, on a recital tour of eastern and southern France, the first movement was still in fragments, and it stayed that way until after his return from the United States the following April. Of any other movement there was still no sign.

  The French tour, from Liège to Lyons via Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Toulon, Monte Carlo, and Marseilles, was a natural, if not particularly lucrative, response to the effective closure of Germany to Stravinsky’s music.7 But all his instincts told him that a second American tour was the only serious practical alternative, and he had in fact appointed a New York agent for just that purpose a whole year before, in September 1933. Alexander Merovitch was a maddeningly vague, likable, but self-important entrepreneur, fond of expatiating on the complexities of New York concert life and his own somewhat airy-fairy schemes for introducing great artists like Stravinsky to the American public, but apparently much less interested in fixing firm, precise itineraries within specified budgets. For Stravinsky, nevertheless, he had the inestimable virtue of being Russian, and this seems to have calmed the composer as first September, then October, 1934 passed without clear information about bookings for a tour that was supposed to begin in early January. In the end Merovitch came up with an itinerary a mere three weeks before Stravinsky and Dushkin sailed from Villefranche on the SS Rex, on 27 December; but for Igor’s optimistic hope (which he confided to Katya) of bringing home a hundred and fifty thousand francs at the end of the three-and-a-half-month trip, the outlook was far from good.8

  Compared with the reasonably compact visit of a decade earlier, Merovitch had laid on a wasteful and exhausting tour that involved much backtracking and several empty weeks. His grumbles about the difficulties of New York life had proved only too justified, and he had failed to book Stravinsky a single Philharmonic concert in the city of his greatest 1925 success. On the other hand, he had organized things in such a way that the two musicians had to go twice to Chicago, the second time on a branch from Washington, D.C. (750 miles away), and travel from Indianapolis to St. Louis (250 miles to the west) via New York (700 miles to the east). From St. Louis they would then journey two thousand miles to San Francisco, and give a recital on the day of their arrival. All these trips, of course, were by rail, with Stravinsky bearing the cost of both his and Dushkin’s tickets as well as all their accommodation and Dushkin’s fees. Stravinsky’s letters home have not surfaced, but there is curiously little
echo in either Katya’s or Vera’s voluminous letters of any complaint on his part about what must have been a gruelling and sometimes futile-seeming sixteen weeks. At the end of it all, Merovitch was firmly engaged to organize the next tour the following season, and would actually have done so had he not suffered a mental breakdown in November, become violent, and had to be confined in an asylum.9

  Arriving from the storm-tossed Atlantic in early January 1935, Stravinsky lingered for a week in New York with Dushkin, giving much the same half-theatrical press interviews as ten years before, and taking part in chamber concerts at the League of Composers and the Plaza Hotel, before setting off to Chicago, which was to be their base for concerts both there and in Milwaukee and Minneapolis (a mere 450 miles away) over the next ten days. As on Stravinsky’s previous visit, there was a reception and concert at the Chicago Arts Club, followed by a string of symphony concerts with programs carefully selected to massage provincial vanities without discommoding unpracticed ears. Thus an evening of Pulcinella (Pergolesi et al.), the Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss (Tchaikovsky), Petrushka, and The Firebird (folk song) was welcomed by the critic of the Milwaukee Wisconsin News as proof of Stravinsky’s gifts as a tunesmith (whereas the New York Town Crier had deduced from his other work that “like most lesser composers of great talent [Stravinsky] is an inferior melodist”).10

  Of course, the success of these concerts was gratifying, with packed halls and largely sympathetic reviews which accepted his musical importance without question and praised his conducting for its energy and precision.11 Yet it must have been hard to view with much pleasure the prospect of another three months of this kind of thing. The programs with Dushkin, in Minneapolis, Toledo, and points west, were inevitably unvaried, restricted as they were to Stravinsky’s own music for violin and piano.12 Whereas in Paris money was still to some extent in the hands of people with educated and progressive taste, in provincial America much larger sums were dispensed by the wives of bankers and industrialists who were attracted as much by the notoriety of the European artistic lion as by anything particular to do with his work. Then there was the question of language. For while the Russian-American Dushkin spoke native English, Stravinsky could still do no better than half-understand it and reply in French or German.13 Worse still were the interminable and unvarying hotels, where the phone never stopped ringing and people you hardly knew walked into your room at any hour of the day practically without knocking.

  One January morning in Chicago, Stravinsky received a letter that was like a shaft of sunlight out of this leaden sky. It was an invitation to stay in Los Angeles, where he had concerts in late February, from someone claiming to be an old friend from St. Petersburg. “Dear Igor,” it began, “I had wanted to start this letter ‘deeply respected Igor Fyodorovich, you probably don’t remember me,’ but then it struck me that that was stupid, you might forget the giddiest successes of your premieres, but you would never forget your own youth and all our mutual friends: F. A. Luther, N. Richter, Misha Yelachich, Oreus, Bilibin, Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, and the rest.”14 It was the first indication Stravinsky had had that the journey west would not inevitably take him beyond contact with a world he knew and understood. Alexis Kall may not have been the most distinguished alumnus of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire and the Rimsky-Korsakov Wednesdays, but he had survived and made an artistic life for himself outside Russia, in which respect he was much more like Stravinsky than any of the “mutual friends.” A pianist with academic credentials, and a formidable linguist, Kall had a doctorate from Leipzig but had held a university teaching post in St. Petersburg until driven out by the Revolution. He had then taught for a year in Tokyo before fetching up in Los Angeles in 1919 and starting what he grandly christened the Institute of Musical Art, with himself as director. There he gathered about him a school of adoring and in some cases talented, predominantly female, piano pupils. A large, avuncular, bibulous, cigar-puffing, rather seedy bachelor, Kall was not without some hint of the aging faun in his portly benevolence. But like so many émigré Russians, he had adapted only in part to this profoundly alien environment, and the house to which he was inviting his old friend, in South Gramercy, three or four miles from downtown Los Angeles, was a modest, slightly unkempt, and exceedingly un-American establishment, small and cozy—as Kall euphemistically described it—with a Chekhovian patch of grass where tea could be drunk, and well-to-do Russian neighbors who would happily lend Igor their chauffeur-driven cars, since Kall had no car and did not drive.15

  Stravinsky’s reply was not quite a refusal, but it doubted whether Kall could also find room for Dushkin, whom the composer would not abandon: “He’s my great friend,” he wrote, “and has agreed to accompany me everywhere, even to cities where we’re not both playing.”16 Once Kall (whose “cozy little domik” turned out to have nine rooms) had warmly extended his invitation to include the violinist, all difficulties evaporated and Stravinsky could accept without hesitation.17 It was a decision he never regretted. When he next wrote to Kall, “dorogoy [dear] Alexey [sic] Fyodorovich” had become “milïy [dearest] Woof”—a nickname supposedly due to Kall’s way of expressing surprise or mild physical distress. Bumping along in the train from Los Angeles to Denver six weeks later, Stravinsky would write of his

  warm feelings of heartfelt friendship ripened by twelve days of Californian sun. How I can thank you for them I don’t know. I only know that it’s a long, long time since I’ve felt so spiritually well and at ease as in your company and thanks to your endless touching attentions. May God give you good health and me once again the pleasure of staying with you.18

  Kall was gifted with the power of calming waters. There was something reassuring about this “huge, gentle Russian,”19 with his tactful, convivial manner and spontaneous generosity. Women, including his students, confided in him, often revealing to him their most intimate emotional secrets. Perhaps men like Stravinsky did the same, if not in correspondence, then in person. In any case, he sensed even before their reunion that Kall would be a sympathetic intermediary in those matters of musical planning that were awkward to deal with from a distance; and so, in his very first letter, he asks him to discuss his Los Angeles programs with Otto Klemperer, the resident conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra, and to find out the rehearsal schedule from him. The fact that, as it gradually transpired, Kall was far from being a reliable organizer was a matter of secondary importance. Although Stravinsky affected to hate inefficiency in his professional agents, what he feared most was their deviousness and hostility (imagined or otherwise) and their insufficient care over his interests, and it was his needs in these respects that he constantly strove to satisfy by delegating business matters to close—often the very closest—friends and relations. So Woof, though in a sense his oldest friend apart possibly from Valechka Nouvel, became the latest in a long line of associates for whom affection meant errands and practical responsibilities, as well as the more usual intimacies and convivialities.

  All this was still several weeks in the future. From Toledo the two travelling musicians had steamed back across Ohio to Pittsburgh, then back again to Indianapolis, then turned on their tracks a third time to head for New York, where Stravinsky was to conduct the General Motors Symphony Orchestra on 3 February. This curious event, one of a series sponsored by General Motors in which conductors were specifically not allowed to direct their own music, was thus devoted to Russian music other than Stravinsky (though an excerpt from Petrushka and his arrangement of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” were somehow smuggled into a program of popular Tchaikovsky and Glinka, the first time that he had conducted music by these composers).20 As a modest revenge, he made a short speech in English at the start of the concert, apparently his first public attempt at the language, in which he expressed his pleasure at conducting a program of works by the great Russian composers, from whom, he added, “I consider myself descending in some ways directly.”21

  For two weeks they had no other concerts. Ins
tead, Stravinsky signed copies of his scores and records at Schirmer’s (the New York agent of Schott and Co.) and lunched with René Auberjonois’s son Fernand, eating wild rice and talking about bison hunting.22 The day after his concert, he went to see the visiting Cleveland semistaged production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District under Artur Rodzinski. He had already heard and liked the young Soviet composer’s First Symphony. But the opera, which Pravda would soon anathematize as “Muddle Instead of Music,”23 made a no less baleful impression on the great Russian outcast. “It’s nothing but doom and gloom,” he told San Francisco’s Russian-language newspaper a week or two later. “This kind of tragic realism would be excusable in an old man disillusioned with life, but from a youngster of twenty-eight something more cheerful might have been expected.”24 Moscow could not have put it more succinctly.

  Carl Engel, onetime head of the Music Division of the Library of Congress and now president of the Schirmer publishing house, had talked Stravinsky into the book-signing session, then made amends by throwing a big reception in his honor. It was one of those glamorous, faceless world-of-art events where you might meet everybody or nobody. Among the musical grandees invited for their notability rather than any connection with or interest in the guest of honor was the composer-pianist Leopold Godowsky; and with him was his daughter Dagmar, a former silent-film star now grounded by the talkies and, in her late thirties, no longer quite the svelt femme fatale who had played opposite Valentino in A Sainted Devil. Dagmar, according to her memoirs, had left at least one husband and a trail of broken hearts and ruined lives from Hollywood to Paris and Berlin. Her conquests had included Chaplin, Hayakawa, Heifetz, Rubinstein. Stravinsky, however, had somehow eluded her. And now here he was in front of her, talking to her father about “everything in the world but music” while she smoldered, attending “not to what he was saying [the conversation was in Russian], but to that voice … a very deep basso, and vibrant … like far-off thunder.”25 Impulsively, she invited him to tea. “My tea was small,” she notes modestly. “I had, besides Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Mischa Elman, Artur Schnabel, David and Lisette Sarnoff, Emanuel Feuermann, Artur Rubinstein, and, of course, [her father] Popsy.”