Stravinsky
Page 3
Dagmar had a way of collecting celebrities and insinuating herself into their lives. When Stravinsky and Dushkin arrived in Washington in the last week of March, there she was too; and whoever threw a party for the visiting musicians, Dagmar would get herself invited and somehow, every time, she would find herself next to Stravinsky. At the end of their stay, while her father flew back to New York with Engel, Igor asked her to go with him on the train. But then, instead of the hoped-for passionate declarations, he told her only about his tragic life and the illness of his wife and children. In the dining car, a friend of Dagmar’s at the next table sensed electricity. “She would indeed have been shocked to discover,” Dagmar confesses disarmingly, “that for once all the sparks were emanating from me. It was a most disappointing trip.”26 But that was not the end of Dagmar.
From New York, early in February, Stravinsky and Dushkin had headed west once more. In St. Louis on the 10th they combined forces with the local symphony orchestra in front of an audience of three thousand, interspersing duo items with orchestral works, including the Divertimento, and donating a third of their fee to the orchestra’s pension fund. The concert had started twenty minutes late because Stravinsky overslept in his hotel, and perhaps it was remorse at such a rare lapse into the strictly unprofessional that prompted him to add another hundred-dollar donation at the end of the evening. As for Sam, it was his first public outing for a fortnight. But this changed abruptly in San Francisco, where they played in the Opera House and at Stanford University on consecutive days, then at Carmel two days later, before finally reaching Los Angeles on the evening of the 17th.
The next morning, in Kall’s house, Stravinsky gave his first West Coast conference for the English-language press, with Sam as interpreter. The modern world, he told California, had had enough of great long works and program music. “Contemporary composers write abstract music, that is pure music, and pack so much into a small work that it is suited to the minds of today.”27 He himself was constantly striving for compression; and he cited the string-orchestral Apollo (which was in his Los Angeles programs) as an example of reduced scoring, and the Duo Concertant, which he and Sam would be playing in their recital on the 28th, as a recent case of formal economy, while studiously omitting to mention that his very latest completed score was a narrative work for larger forces and on a bigger scale than anything apart from Oedipus Rex that he had written since The Nightingale. Did he find any change in America in the ten years since he was last there? Yes, and so much, indeed, that he had no doubt the experience would eventually reflect in his music.
As it turned out, America would soon be changing his music, in ways he can hardly have had in mind that February morning in South Gramercy. But by 1935, in any case, no student of Stravinsky’s newspaper interviews would have thought of taking anything he told a press conference at face value. On the one hand, he was merely relaying old dogmas to a new audience; on the other, he was reacting to a naïveté he detected in the automatic questions, teasing their assumptions, deliberately outraging their proprieties. For instance, jazz, which in 1925 had been the most interesting modern music around, was now very old hat. But what jazz was he talking about? Was this the considered judgment of someone who had visited cellar clubs in Greenwich Village or spent time on the Chicago Black Belt? Did it embrace popular so-called jazz, the music of Gershwin, for instance, or the recent Irving Berlin, whose Top Hat was about to hit the screen more or less as Stravinsky was speaking? Or was it simply that what had seemed a new and offbeat enthusiasm a decade earlier had now come to seem jejune and conventional, and ripe for rejection, like opera in 1913 or folk Russianism in 1920?
No doubt the frisson provoked by such remarks was, and was meant to be, a direct anticipation of the likely effect of Stravinsky’s music on what was still a somewhat provincial audience. “In the light of the latest advances in musical theory,” wrote one critic of the Stravinsky/Dushkin recital at the Philharmonic on the 28th, “there is nothing particularly disturbing about these pieces of Stravinsky [the Suite italienne, the Divertimento, the Duo Concertant, and smaller transcriptions]. But to a public like ours, which has been nourished on the Melba toast and spumoni of the Romantics, the bitter herbs of the Russian were a bit biting.”28 What most excited Los Angeles about Stravinsky was his celebrity, not its cause. “Only the recent visit of Einstein,” the Times reported a day or two later, “has created such interest,”29 and the rehearsals with the Philharmonic Orchestra, which Stravinsky conducted in a bizarre but brilliantly effective mixture of French, German, Russian, and English, were almost as widely reported as the concerts.30 Philharmonic Hall was sold out for both evenings with the LAPO, and the reception was uproarious, with an ovation at the end that lasted a full half-hour. As in Chicago, Stravinsky had been careful not to test the cultural frontiersmen’s endurance too far. He offered them only Petrushka and Firebird, together with the two little orchestral suites and Apollo; and even this last work (which as a matter of fact Klemperer had already programmed the previous season) caused puzzlement, needing “study and more frequent hearings to be fully appreciated.”31
But if Stravinsky’s work struck Los Angeles as obscure, he himself was prepared to take an interest, and more than an interest, in L.A.’s own far from obscure artistic produce. Once again, it was Kall who had suggested the contact and undertook to make the arrangements. “It struck me,” he had written, “that you should without fail visit a Movie-studio, such as Metro-Goldwyn, Paramount, Universal, etc. And you need to be received in suitable fashion. This is necessary not for fun or diversion, but strictly for business. Even if they ask you for just one scene (a ballet!), believe me it pays more than conducting symphonies.”32
Kall duly set up visits to studios, and arranged to introduce the composer to Edward G. Robinson, Chaplin, and others. On the Wednesday after his arrival Stravinsky called on Robinson in his “ersatz Tudor mansion”33 and added his signature to the collection on the soundboard of the actor’s Steinway grand. Later, Robinson threw a reception for Stravinsky, and the two were photographed by and with Kall. There was a guided tour of the MGM studios in Culver City with the company’s senior composer, Herbert Stothart; and Stravinsky made a speech in German to the assembled staff of the music department, with Merovitch, who had joined them in Los Angeles a few days earlier, interpreting. He even shook hands with Louis B. Mayer, who remarked tersely, “I am a man like all the others, but I have a lot to do,” and passed on. Whether or not this encounter satisfied Kall’s concept of “strictly for business,” at least it proved, as Stravinsky told a reporter in Rome three months later, “that Mr. Mayer was not a myth.”34
On the whole, it was a moderately inauspicious start to what was to become an eventful but ultimately barren association with the silver screen. Stravinsky, who adored the movies as a consumer, must quickly have seen that professionally they were not his world—seen it even in the eyes of MGM’s salaried musicians, a team of fluent, multitalented hacks some of whom probably felt indifference, if not out-and-out hostility, to this intrusion by a “genius” who patently lacked their applied skills. For his part, he could not suppress a mild disdain for this music factory, not least because its most obvious effect—in the “business” sense—was to do composers like himself out of the royalties they might reasonably expect to earn from the use of their existing music as accompaniment to films. Events were to prove, of course, that if the studios did try to use Stravinsky’s existing music for that purpose, they did so at their peril. As for the idea that they might interest themselves in what he now, in the 1930s, was willing to offer them on his own terms, that was an illusion that would take time to fade.
On the face of it, his meeting with Chaplin, probably at the Robinson reception, held out some promise. The idea of a collaboration seems to have occurred to them both, but it was Stravinsky who first sensed its impracticality and, perhaps precisely because he loved and understood Chaplin’s genius, saw that their artistic ideas did not coin
cide. In his autobiography, Chaplin outlines an elaborate scenario which he says he invented on the spur of the moment in response to a suggestion by Stravinsky that they collaborate on a film. The setting is a nightclub, with a Passion play as floor show, while the tables occupied by the customers symbolize various aspects of mankind’s disinclination to let God interfere with his pleasures. At the moment of crucifixion, a drunk protests that “they’re crucifying Him! And nobody cares!” but is thrown out, as Chaplin explains, “for upsetting the show.”35 This idea must have emerged at least in part from some prior discussion, however cursory, about religion and art; but its moralizing, sententious tone was essentially alien to Stravinsky’s cast of thought, and the representation of Christ on stage at once struck him as sacrilegious—as he told Chaplin, to the actor’s considerable surprise.
Exactly when this idea was broached is not completely certain. Later in 1935, Chaplin wrote to Stravinsky’s Mainz publisher, Willy Strecker, with a proposition which, in principle, the composer thought “not at all utopian, but very, very difficult to realize particularly if I decide not to go to America this year.”36 When he did eventually return to Los Angeles, in March 1937, he and Chaplin met again at dinner at the Robinsons’ house, and it may conceivably have been on that occasion that the actor devised his crucifixion scenario. Back in Europe, Stravinsky continued to press Chaplin on the idea of a collaboration, both directly and through Dushkin, who was still in the States. But, as Chaplin admits, “my enthusiasm had cooled off and I became interested in making a film of my own.”37 Quietly the project died.
After almost a fortnight in Los Angeles, and fortified by a party thrown in their honor by another new friend, Mildred Bliss, the music-loving wife of a former U.S. ambassador to Argentina, Robert Woods Bliss, the two musicians waved goodbye to Kall and the West Coast at the start of March, and set off back into the cultural wastelands of the Midwest. Colorado Springs heard them on the 3rd. On the 4th, in the state capital, Stravinsky made a short speech in questionable English to an audience that he characterized as “the artistic elite of Denver”;38 at Fort Worth on the 6th their efforts were greeted with “amiable and bewildered enthusiasm.” And so the tour continued its somewhat aimless course. From Texas they picked their way to Boston, where on the 15th Stravinsky at last presented his most recent work, Persephone, to an American audience. As usual there was stormy applause and the composer was recalled many times to the rostrum. Still more encouragingly, the East Coast press for once proved equal to this latest manifestation of Stravinsky’s protean creative spirit. The New York Times critic, Olin Downes, found it “more integrated and consistent in style than perhaps any other score of Stravinsky’s late period … One of the most distinguished and inspired of Stravinsky’s compositions since Le Sacre du printemps, and in a large measure a vindication of his later tendencies”—this from the critic who had found Apollo “too eclectic and too anachronistic in various places to give the listener any confidence in the composer or the authenticity of his inspiration.”39 Alas, Downes’s conversion to the “synthetic” style, as he neatly called it, was no more than temporary. Hearing Persephone a second time in New York less than a year later, he decided that its virtues were inadequate “to palliate the aridities and banalities which encumber all too many pages” and spoke of “a lack of invention which not all the technic and style in the world can conceal.”40
From Boston to Washington, they yet again passed through New York, spending almost a week without giving a single concert.41 On the other hand, their two Washington recitals (on 24 March and 9 April) were split by a long excursion to Chicago, where they were forced to cancel at the last minute because Stravinsky was laid low by a heavy cold.42 Thus the rambling tour wound slowly to its close. Yet he accepted it all without much complaint. Sitting in the Lowell Hotel in New York on the way back to Washington at the start of April, he composed a long letter to Ernest Ansermet that reserves most of its bile for an extended denunciation of Shostakovich’s opera, but adds that “luckily that isn’t all there is in the United States, which has made a very good impression on me this time.”43 One inevitably wonders what was the basis of that impression. He had been away longer than in 1925, had travelled enormously farther, and had made less money. He had, it was true, had Dushkin’s company throughout, and there had been the heartwarming interlude with Kall, something quite outside his experience of ten years ago, when he had seen hardly anything but hotel rooms and strangers on trains. On the whole, his music had been well played. With the possible exception of St. Louis, he had worked only with the best American orchestras: Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston. Yet he cannot have been satisfied with the spread of his music across these vast distances. His repertory had been dominated by the early ballets, eked out by “easy” later works like Pulcinella, The Fairy’s Kiss, and the little suites, while in New York he had performed not a single complete work of his own. It seems impossible that his Hollywood contacts can yet have figured significantly on his mental balance sheet.
Meanwhile, the news from home was confusing, disturbing, and worse. As Vera put it in her last letter before Igor boarded the Île de France for Le Havre on 13 April: “Surprises await you.”44
2
THE POET OF MONTPARNASSE
TWO WOMEN wept for Igor in his absence. While the long separation was bad for Vera Sudeykina, since she was unused to it, in most ways it was worse for Katya. She was Igor’s wife, but knew that she did not possess him as a wife should, and would not fully possess him even when he came home. Her health was poor. It was true that she had her family as a consolation and that they now lived in a big, luxurious apartment close to the center of things, instead of lost and forgotten deep in the country, while Vera had a lonely domestic life in a small Passy flat that was not even properly heated all the time, since money was short and she was economizing. But Katya had also profound humiliations to endure on Vera’s account. Not only did Igor make his mistress an allowance, but he expected Katya to hand the money over in person, which she dutifully did, meeting Vera at the bank and talking to her for a while in the car afterwards. Any resentment or bitterness she may have felt at this atrocious act of self-immolation she typically sublimated by telling Vera that “she wanted to kiss me and … that she was thinking of me.” The good-hearted Vera was very touched, but seems not to have suffered any more troublesome perturbations.1
In any case she was never entirely lonely. In fact she had so many visitors that she would often complain that her time was not her own.2 For Katya, on the other hand, family life was sometimes as much a trial as a consolation. Her children were now grown up—Milène, the youngest, had her twenty-first birthday in January 1935—but their lives were unsettled and their direction unsure. Milène was studying to be a singer, and lived for her weekly lessons with Monsieur Alberti, perhaps because he believed in her and wanted her to audition for musicals, while Katya only worried about the disappointment that might thereby be in store.3 Milène’s older sister, Mika, had a flair for design and made marble papers for bookbinding while taking life classes and classes in fashion drawing; but she was often unwell, and when she was well she was bored. Though not conventionally pretty, she had a Slavic handsomeness, with broad cheekbones and a narrowing, defiant gaze; and she had her suitors (including, for a while, the younger brother of Serge Lifar).4 But she seemed at times to be in search of something “higher,” something that Katya once described tactfully to Igor as “a suitable milieu.”5 One day, when their aunt Irina Terapiano invited the two sisters to a meeting of one of the Russian literary societies and introduced them to a circle of young Russian writers and poets, Mika was in seventh heaven, as if she had suddenly found something she had been looking for for a long time.6
The girls’ brothers knew better what they wanted from life, but they were feeling their way quite unsteadily toward it. Theodore was hard at work on a series of portraits, including one of Pierre Souvtchinsky, another of a certain Mademoiselle Guerzoni, and a thir
d—to his grandmother’s dismay—of a model who came several times to pose nude for him at the Faubourg. It was the kind of work in the midst of which, for various reasons, he could begin to forget that the girl he loved had coolly announced her engagement to another man.7 Theodore was the healthy one of the four, for all his peritonitis the previous summer. His younger brother, Soulima, had been diagnosed as tubercular a year earlier after collapsing from exhaustion and cancelling recitals in Switzerland, and had spent the first three months of 1934 in the sanatorium of Sancellemoz, at Plateau d’Assy in Haute-Savoie.8 By the summer he had recovered, and by September he was back on the concert platform. That month, while Katya assembled packing cases at Voreppe, Igor had taken his pianist son to Venice, where they had performed the Capriccio together in a Biennale concert and met Alban Berg, whose Der Wein was having its Italian premiere in the same program, conducted by Hermann Scherchen.9