Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Katya settled willingly if not easily into this pattern of benign, authoritarian tedium. For years she had been sustained through a prolonged and incurable infirmity in her emotional life by an unshakable Christian faith, which as her physical health declined turned increasingly toward pious resignation. At home, in Biarritz, in Nice, Voreppe, and now Paris, she had endured the burden of Igor’s double life in the interests of the stable family home that he, as much as any of the family, needed. She had forced herself to befriend his mistress, whether as an act of mortification or because to have refused this solace to his own sense of wrongdoing would have risked driving him away altogether. While she had always disliked and where possible avoided the social consequences of his fame, she had never compromised the integrity of their home life so far as it was in her power to determine its character and content. Shy and retiring though she was, she had never been afraid to involve Igor in domestic or family problems; and he, perhaps surprisingly, had accepted them without reluctance or irony. For all his huge infidelity, he remained profoundly, impeccably dynastic, while Katya’s role had been the still, dependable center, the guardian, the focus of continuity.

  Now, at Sancellemoz, she could only exercise these functions at a distance and through almost daily letters that are less like written communications than intimate conversation, full of clinical detail, accounts of the boring daily round, family news, money worries, trivial pieties, and the occasional admonition.12 The Stravinskys had never spared each other their full medical reports, so why should Katya, whose illness was dangerous and under close clinical scrutiny, refrain from recording the daily temperature changes, the frequencies of coughing and blood-spitting, the X-rays, the pneumothoraxes, and all the other gruesome data of sanatorium life? In the slow tempo of Sancellemoz, in any case, such things took on greater significance, marking out the long hours and days into a quietly dramatic routine. Katya had leisure to occupy herself with their children’s emotional lives. While Mika happily received letters and visits from her betrothed in Paris, who was preparing for baptism under instruction from a rather dry catechist called Father Vassily, Milène had fallen in love with her singing teacher and was resisting her father’s efforts to detach her from him. But when she was eventually persuaded to leave Paris and appeared at Sancellemoz with her cousin Ganya Belyankin, she was soon engaged in a mild flirtation with a certain Marquis d’Anoville. Meanwhile, Soulima’s unwanted Serb girlfriend had turned up in Paris. “What’s to be done?” Katya wrote anxiously to her husband. “Our children are now at the age when they will be involved in all sorts of amorous relationships. I understand that all these worries are difficult for you what with your work and travels, but one has somehow to keep an eye on them.”13

  Igor did try to keep an eye on them, even though—as Katya knew better than anyone else—he was always at his least calm when preoccupied by composition.14 As he grappled with his concerto fugue and prepared for a Scandinavian recital tour with Dushkin at the end of September, he worried quite as much as his wife about his family’s health and romantic entanglements. His mother, who had naturally moved into the Faubourg apartment with them, had also been a source of anxiety. Now turned eighty, she had been suffering from a nervous ailment, and her hair had started falling out. But when the question of a wig came up, Igor muttered something about the expense, and in the end Katya proposed a kind of installment plan whereby Anna would repay the cost of the wig out of her weekly allowance.15 Unfortunately, Stravinsky was going through one of his periodic bouts of penny-pinching. His American tour had earned him much less than he had expected, he had no conducting dates in France or Germany, and now he was having to stump up for not one but three rooms at Sancellemoz on top of the enormous Faubourg rent, the four or five servants, and an allowance to Vera; and meanwhile his children, instead of working, were getting married and falling ill. Yury Mandelstam might be something of a figure in émigré literary circles, but he hardly earned any money. True, Theodore had been painting and had a “successful” vernissage in Paris in June, but without actually selling any pictures.16 And then, no sooner had Katya and Mika returned to Paris in time for Yury’s baptism on the 12th of September than Theodore’s intended, Denise Guerzoni, went down with pleurisy and a severe kidney ailment. No wonder Katya’s letters began to take fright at the least extra expense, even those involved in essential medical tests; and no wonder that, helpless as she was to change these circumstances for the better, she could only “pray to God for help … and at the same time ask him to give me that ‘holy indifference’—la sainte indifférence—about which St. Francis of Sales talks so much.”17

  STRAVINSKY HAD abandoned his intention of touring the U.S.A. again that coming winter,18 and instead he found himself caught up in aspects of Parisian musical and intellectual life that one might suppose, at first glance, to have held little interest for him. The principal agent of this change was his friend Nadia Boulanger; but the decisive event was the death of the composer Paul Dukas in May 1935.

  Nadia had been teaching at the École Normale de Musique ever since it was founded by Alfred Cortot and Auguste Mangeot in 1919. She was in many ways the obvious successor to Dukas’s chair of composition—had indeed been famously teaching composition both at the École and privately in her rue Ballu flat—but there were difficulties connected with the undeniable fact that she was not (or at least no longer) herself a composer, to say nothing of the even more undeniable misfortune that she was a woman. The École Normale was and remains, in both its virtues and its defects, a peculiarly French kind of institution. Founded with the specific aim of providing high-quality tuition in the theory, history, and practice of music to gifted students of any age or nationality, with no existing paper qualifications and not much money, it depended more than the Conservatoire on its ability to sell its wares on the open market; and in practice this meant humoring the prejudices of an essentially conservative, middlebrow clientele. The board’s solution was to appoint Nadia to the chair, but to give her a distinguished and reassuringly male co-professor in the person of Stravinsky. Cortot’s letter confirming Stravinsky’s appointment in September 1935 envisages him as “inspecting” Nadia’s composition course and “participating in her analyses of the works of the Masters.”19 But it is clear that his real function was simply to legitimize her appointment in the eyes of the lay world.

  Her biographer Léonie Rosenstiel suggests that

  someone as proud as Nadia could only have been incensed by the situation that resulted. She would be expected to be subservient to Stravinsky when he appeared in “her” classroom and relinquish control to him meekly, the moment he arrived.20

  Stravinsky was nevertheless presumably her recommendation, and if she did feel momentary pangs of injured pride, she knew perfectly well that whatever theoretical authority his appointment gave over her, he would never dream of exercising it. After all, he had never taught composition, had no interest in analysis, and was far too busy composing and performing to waste time poking his nose into her classes. All that was required of him was that he should take a composition class of his own once a month. Sometimes this would involve discussion of works presented by the students, sometimes discussion of his own music, which Nadia would play at the piano, pointing out salient features as she went along, while Stravinsky supplied the occasional confirmatory apothegm. With the student works, his method was to try and improve weak spots in the same way as he composed his own music, by trial and error at the piano. It must have been a strange experience for the young composers (who included the eighteen-year-old Dinu Lipatti) to have their inspirations assayed by this clinical, chord-by-chord method, so bizarrely at odds with sound conservatoire practice based on linear, grammatical thinking away from the piano. But it was the only kind of tuition the master could or would offer.21

  Meanwhile his own concerto was scheduled for a series of performances on 21 and 22 November in the Salle Gaveau by a very different kind of further-educational enterprise,
the so-called Université des Annales, a society which put on talks, readings, discussions, and lecture-recitals for a membership consisting mainly of well-heeled ladies of a self-improving disposition. From the intellectual heights of the Nouvelle Revue française and the Paris Russian-language paper Posledniye novosti, Boris de Schloezer was inclined to adopt a condescending tone toward this kind of event: “The speakers at these sessions are usually recognized celebrities—academics of the present or future, fashionable writers, professors, and with their largely female audience they have to maintain the tone of a refined causerie.”22 But that was by no means Stravinsky’s style. Instead, he mapped out a rather straight-faced, studiously nonconfessional disquisition under the highly misleading title “Mes Confidences,” by way of prelude to the actual first performance of his severely unchatty concerto, after which Soulima was to end the hour-long presentation by playing the Three Movements from Petrushka.23

  Apart from his description of the new concerto, most of Stravinsky’s “confidences” were lifted with minor modifications from Chroniques, including some prefatory remarks on the relationship between effort and inspiration, the familiar account of the origins of Petrushka, and an admonition to the audience to think of the piano version of that ballet, not as a reduction of the orchestral score, but as a piano work in its own right. Some of these ideas, admittedly, were from the as-yet-unpublished second part of the autobiography. On the new work, he confined himself to a few generalities about the concerto as a genre and a brief program note about the music, ending with a stern injunction to any sentimentally inclined members of his audience not to look for hidden meanings in the music, or “for anything other than its actual constituents.”24 The audience at all three performances apparently cheered this evasive little speech to the echo, but its effect on the critics was merely to inspire their regret at the supposed absence of those very elements Stravinsky did not want them to look for. “Certainly,” Robert Brussel lamented in Le Figaro, “the first movement bears in its outward form the imprint of authority and mastery. But I prefer the mysterious poetry which floats on the nocturne, the Beethovenian vehemence of the third and fourth variations, and everything that the prelude to the fugue exudes in its plays of sonority and voluptuous plenitude.”25 As for Boris de Schloezer, after his assault on Persephone eighteen months before, he was happy to acknowledge “the perfection of workmanship, the rigorous logic, the suppleness and complexity of the polyphonic tissue,” and so forth.

  But what’s missing, as in all Stravinsky’s recent works, is some essential element of mystery—mystery in that sense which is impossible to define, what I call the gratuitous but others call chance. Everything is “made,” admirably made, but this very perfection proves that it is impossible in art to be solely beholden to oneself, to one’s will, one’s intelligence, that you have to know how to accept with humility and trust what may be given you, what you are incapable of understanding and justifying.26

  Stravinsky, it seems, had been at such pains to play down individual expression and play up the virtues of objective order and construction that he was in danger of being taken too literally even by his most intelligent critics. True, he had for years made war on inspiration, in the vulgar romantic sense of the term. But no careful reader of the first part of Chroniques, for instance, could doubt that he nevertheless accepted inspiration under a different guise, that of the “trouvaille” or “découverte.”27 For him inspiration was a matter of “finding,” and this process of discovery was both a delight and, precisely, something given—in de Schloezer’s sense—which the composer had to “know how to accept with humility and trust.” Sometimes Stravinsky’s homo faber explanations might seem to reduce art a little too easily to the level of cabinetmaking or regular mealtimes. But after all, these were merely images. As Stravinsky had assured an interviewer in Trieste a few years earlier:

  I use the word “appetite” in a more spiritual sense—that is, as St. Augustine used it, speaking of the appetites of the soul, which exalts and sublimates itself the greater its appetite for light and God. Now—Stravinsky concludes—all our senses, both our imaginative faculty and our musical ear’s appetite for sounds, would be sterile without light, grace, and the guidance which comes to us from above. To be worthy we must pray in the purest manner—that is, strip the entire soul of its inferior appetites.28

  Perhaps, though, what de Schloezer regretted more than the loss of that wild, unpredictable element in Stravinsky’s musical language was the loss of its effect on audiences and critics. In middle age, the great revolutionary had become an establishment icon. As he left the Salle Gaveau that November afternoon, de Schloezer wistfully recalled “the battles we have fought for Stravinsky, and how dazzled we were by each work of his … The concerto will please some, irritate or sadden others, but the time of furies and enthusiasms is alas well and truly past.”29

  On the Saturday following this premiere, there was to have been an election to the chair at the Académie des Beaux-Arts left vacant by Dukas’s death, but a postponement had been requested by one of the academicians, Jacques-Emile Blanche, who had a special interest in one of the candidates but could not be present on that date. Blanche’s preferred candidate was none other than his old friend Igor Stravinsky.

  Of all the great cultural institutions of the world, the Institut de France—of which the five academies are the main constituents—was and remains one of the most byzantine in its workings and the most obscure in its purpose. Like almost everything in France today, it originated—or at least acquired its modern form—in the Revolution, and its philosophy is Napoleonic: language, art, and science are a state concern, and between them they form a subgroup of learning and civilized values. Unfortunately the idea that the finest artists and writers—by implication the necessary alumni of such an institute—would automatically interest themselves in an Academy of Fine Arts or a guild for the preservation of the French language (which is essentially the role of the Académie française) is the purest fantasy. One might as well imagine a conference of hermits or a sunshine holiday for arctic explorers. The inevitable fate of the Institute has been to attract minor or unsuccessful figures who have known how to manipulate the system, and who—since new members are elected by the academicians themselves—have often made it their business to ensure that on the comparatively rare occasions when a first-rate artist has offered himself for election, somebody less threatening has been voted in instead.

  The idea that Stravinsky might stand had originated with Gabriel Pierné, himself an academician and a symbolic figure in Stravinsky’s association with France, since it was he who had conducted the first performances of The Firebird in 1910. Pierné’s motives can only be guessed at. He may genuinely have wanted to enhance the musical membership of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which at the time was particularly rich in nonentities (Gustave Charpentier and the ninety-one-year-old Charles-Marie Widor were the least obscure); he may conceivably have hoped to clinch Stravinsky’s own commitment to his new French citizenship; or there may have been some more refined political intention. He may even have been inspired by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Firebird premiere on 25 June.30 By involving Stravinsky’s painter friend Blanche, he will have hoped to gain support from the nonmusical academicians, whose votes, far outnumbering those of the musicians, would be decisive. Stravinsky later claimed that “I stood as a candidate solely on the insistence of a few friends, whom I felt it impossible to refuse a gesture of deference toward a venerable French institution to which they themselves belong and to which, in their opinion, I could be useful.”31 But he can hardly have been indifferent to the prestige and hence presumably security that membership would confer, nor can he have failed to be impressed that, so early in his citizenship, the notoriously chauvinist French were laying such honors out for his inspection. For a short time, his head was turned.

  From November, the election was postponed to mid-January 1936, and early that month Stravinsky embarked on t
he laborious and, on the face of it, somewhat humiliating courtesy calls on the academicians which protocol required. Blanche may have led him to believe that his election would be a formality, in which case the visits would lose their supplicatory tone and become merely ceremonial.32 But if so, he reckoned without the internal politics of the Academy, and above all without its esprit de chapelle—its fierce protectiveness toward its own marks of distinction and their possessors. “Mr. Stravinsky’s supporters forgot to tell him,” Camille Mauclair wrote later, “[that] for entry into the Académie des Beaux-Arts, it is almost indispensable to be a Prix de Rome, and professor in a school or conservatoire. Talent only comes later.” Also, “it is better not to have had big successes in the theatre or even concerts, self-esteem and rivalry being part of human nature.”33 No sooner was Stravinsky’s candidacy being generally reported than more comfortable alternatives began to be found: Henri Busser (a former friend of Debussy and orchestrator of his Printemps), Marcel Samuel-Rousseau, and finally Stravinsky’s own old friend Florent Schmitt. All were past winners of the Prix de Rome, and all held Conservatoire professorships except Schmitt, who was a mere ex-director of the Lyons Conservatoire but in other ways, presumably, a more plausible face-saving opponent. According to Mauclair, a novelist and art historian who was also well connected musically, Schmitt agreed to run as a joke, and perhaps did not expect to be elected, being, apart from his musical successes, a well-known journalistic snapper at the heels of the Institute itself.