Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The sea crossing from Boulogne to Rio, starting on the 9th of April 1936, took twelve days, with stops at Vigo, Lisbon, and Funchal. At Rio they spent a day ashore, then sailed on to Santos (the port for São Paulo), then for two more days to Montevideo, before finally crossing the vast River Plate estuary to Buenos Aires on the 24th.15 Having embarked in spring, they arrived in autumn, but a distinctly Mediterranean autumn—warm, sunny, and dry. They must have hoped to get ashore without delay and start to flesh out their mental images of urban South America, with its curious blend of the familiar and the strange, the stately and the ramshackle, its elegance and squalor, confronting one another, even then, with a violence both shocking and outmoded to the northern eye. But the press were too quick for them, and almost before they could gather up their belongings they found themselves surrounded on deck by photographers and reporters anxious as ever to put a face and a set of opinions to one of the most famous names in music. It seems that Victoria had omitted to brief Stravinsky on the political nuances of the situation, and he may have been caught unawares. Perhaps he felt lightheaded so far from home, as if he were talking to moon men; or he may have felt goaded into a certain contrariness by recent experiences in Germany and Spain. Whatever the cause, even he must have been startled by the apparent irrelevance but stark, simple truth of the headline above the report in the left-wing paper Crítica the next morning: STRAVINSKY ES ENEMIGO DE LA DEMOCRACIA.

  What on earth had he told them? He only had to read the various interviews to remind himself. He had been answering questions about his favorite modern composers, a rum lot, as usual: Conrad Beck (whom he happened to have met in Baden-Baden three weeks before); Vittorio Rieti, a friend and disciple; Goffredo Petrassi, whom he had seen in Rome. Debussy he venerated, of course. Who else? Well, he was very fond of Manuel de Falla. And then out it came:

  I admire his profoundly religious spirit, and this pleases me, because with faith you can create great works. You’ll know that when the Republic came in in Spain, Falla was made an honorary citizen of Granada, but feeling that a town which burnt down convents and churches was a sacrilegious town, he replied: “I believe in Christ; and so I don’t accept such honors.” Beautiful, don’t you think? And I find it beautiful because materialism is something very far from me. It’s what has stopped me going back to my country. To give one’s life for a material paradise I find unworthy of mankind; by contrast, I understand perfectly the ideal which inspires the Crusades, for example. Politics leaves me remote from its oscillations. I am neither realist nor republican. But yes, I am anti-parliamentarian. I can’t stand it, as a horse couldn’t put up with a camel …16

  At this point in Madrid, shots might have been fired. In Buenos Aires there was merely the fury of a press which reflected at a fairly safe distance the quarrels then threatening to tear Europe apart. Crítica, for instance, was enraged by Stravinsky’s remark that the music of the Soviet Union didn’t count as art “because it is simply propaganda.” The composer, it felt, was ignorant of the most elementary facts that it was every citizen’s duty to know. Hadn’t he heard that things had now changed in Russia, the Writers’ Association had been dissolved and “art is recovering the climate of freedom in which masterpieces can begin to flourish”?17 In any case, the writer pointed out with rather more justice, it was hardly tactful to arrive as the guest of a state-run theatre and before even setting foot on land denounce the political system under which, at least nominally, that theatre flourished. But the Catholic paper Criterio defended the maestro. His words showed “his understanding of the kind of revolution needed for salvation in our time. He knows that creative toil is for man an imitation of the work of God, and man must turn to God if he wants to find strength to imitate with fulfillment.”18

  Stravinsky was in Argentina for over three weeks and the press continued to snap at his heels. The next bone of contention was his supposed (and admittedly somewhat bizarre) refusal to allow his concerts to be broadcast, in a huge country where—as one pained commentator observed—radio had helped raise the level of musical culture in remote areas where families would tune in eagerly to hear the latest program from the Colón.19 Another, less temperate columnist bafflingly headlined an article mainly about Mussolini and the Spanish prime minister, Manuel Azaña, with what was practically an article in its own right excoriating Stravinsky as “a pinhead with a rudimentary brain, and a nose for a bargain: a villainous composer, bad conductor, and worse pianist,” who had come to Argentina in order to suck its exchequer dry.20 What his hostess said or thought about such invective left no echo in their correspondence, but she was probably much too chic either to be disconcerted by her guest’s opinions or to notice the reactions of the Fourth Estate. She was far from thinking as he did. She had long since renounced the church, and though no Communist (of any stripe), she was an instinctive progressive and candid feminist—in a country where women still could not vote and until recently had been legally not much better than their husbands’ chattels. But she also knew quite enough artists and writers not to expect their opinions to coincide with hers or each other’s. A woman who could find equal room in her heart for Ortega y Gasset, Tagore, Huxley, Maritain, and, later, Camus and Graham Greene was not likely to be put out by the perversities of an exiled White Russian. “What mattered to me,” she said in an interview near the end of her life,

  was talent, not politics. Each person held the right to think as he wished in that zone. Of course those who put themselves at the service of a party and made “propaganda” for it dropped immediately to another level. There’s no reason to name names. And let it be noted that I refer to propaganda, not to an honest expression of opinions (even though they may appear mistaken to us).21

  Though also an admirer of Gandhi’s antimaterialism, and notoriously abstemious in her personal habits (she was, for instance, teetotal, and imposed this abstinence on all but her most imperious guests), Victoria never disowned the Ocampo estate. She had first thought of putting Igor and Soulima up in the family home at San Isidro, then considered the “Corbusier” house in Palermo Chico, but it was already let. In the end they stayed in another of her town houses, in the Calle Tucumán, a place of unhappy memories for her because she had lived there in the dead years of her marriage after 1914, when she and her too-conventional husband had occupied the same building but scarcely communicated. Yet it had also resonated to music she had heard in Europe. “How happy I am,” she told Igor, “that you are in the house where your music has been so much played (mainly on records, of course) … the house to which I returned from my Europe trip in 1913 with the score of The Rite.”22 There was a piano for Soulima’s practice; and he needed it, as he had eight concerts in three weeks, including a pair of solo recitals, two performances of the two-piano concerto complete with Igor’s lecture and his own solo items, and three concerto appearances under his father, in one of which he was giving both the Piano Concerto and the Capriccio—something Stravinsky senior had invariably refused to do. Igor’s program was still heavier. His Colón concerts, with The Rite, Apollo, and the Symphony of Psalms, among much else, were interspersed with ballet performances, including The Fairy’s Kiss revived in person by its original choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska.

  Essentially none of this music was new to Buenos Aires, where Ansermet had worked for several seasons, always programming major works by Stravinsky. But that naturally did not prevent what one paper called a “numerous and well-qualified audience”23 from turning out to witness the great iconoclast at first hand, and presumably the reports of his reactionary politics did no harm at all to his box office. He may himself have been mildly relieved to find that the press reviews of the opening Colón concert on the 28th ignored such questions and instead treated him as an international master whose works were admired and whose conducting was of course authoritative, even if the orchestral playing was not always of the best quality. Even Soulima’s performance of the Piano Concerto was treated without condescension: “a
pianist of rare quality and extraordinary musical intelligence,” the Nación called him, which must have been a huge comfort to a young musician who, barely six weeks before in Barcelona, had lost his way and all but come to grief in this same concerto.24

  The sole novelty of the three weeks was the concert performance of Persephone with Victoria herself in the title role, at the climax of the visit on 17 May. She had claimed not to be deterred by the composer’s admonitions about rhythm, but instead she scared herself by going down with flu less than a week before the performance, then panicked when she found she could not hear the orchestra—even in the “perfect sound box” of the Colón.25 Yet the performance seems to have gone extremely well, and Victoria declaimed her lines “with a French articulation and accent of unsurpassable purity” in which “Gide’s mystical essence and exaltation emerged in all their significance, thanks to the fine qualities of this consummate artist.”26 Whatever the composer may have thought of this description of the text, he surely agreed with the assessment of Victoria’s delivery, since he soon afterwards persuaded her, against her better judgment, to rejoin them in Rio so that he could program further performances there early in June.27 On the 19th, he and Soulima crossed back to Montevideo, where there were more concerts before they again set sail on the 27th, with Victoria and her sister Angelica, up the coast of Uruguay and Brazil back to Rio.

  “Do you remember,” Victoria wrote to Igor almost eighteen years later,

  our voyage to Rio? Your cold on the boat? My fear of catching it? The rehearsals which gave you so much trouble with the English tenor who trembled with fear and gave himself confidence by beating time with his score? Our lunches and dinners at the Copacabana? The evening at the G’s (the garden with the huge palm trees. It’s now the Argentine embassy at Rio)? The variegated chorus-singers? The heat? The pineapples? The seafood at night? Your way at table of putting your napkin on your head, like a turban, when the orchestra was playing (and what an orchestra!)? The scent of the East in the air? Your way of saying to me: “She has a bad character …”?28

  At the time, though, she recalled only “the disagreements and the heat and the inedible food and the monkeys.”29 They did Persephone two or three times in the Teatro Municipal, and Victoria contributed some readings to their recital program with the two-piano concerto. Then, on Victoria’s very last evening, the “bad character,” Dagmar Godowsky, turned up in person.

  Dagmar’s memory, too, tended to romanticize. She had come down from New York with the pianist Josef Hofmann and his wife, Betty, and put up at the Copacabana in complete ignorance, she claimed, that Stravinsky was so much as in the same hemisphere. Then the phone is supposed to have rung. “Dagmar! This is Stravinsky.” “Stravinsky! Where are you, in Paris or New York?” “Right here at the Copacabana. I’m here with my son Soulima. Will you dine with us tonight?” “I’d adore to.”30 But Dagmar had in reality soon sniffed Stravinsky out, and tried to invite him for cocktails. “I’ve called you often but never have any luck.”31 Then, after the last Persephone on 10 June, her luck suddenly changed. Perhaps after the performance Victoria went early to bed, since she was returning to Buenos Aires the next day. Dagmar reported, no doubt truthfully, that Stravinsky asked her to dine. But somehow he missed her at the Copacabana, and after a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing they all ended up at the Hotel Gloria, with the Hofmanns, in intense heat and humidity. “It was,” she says with more than her usual accuracy, “an unfortunate decision.”32

  Stravinsky had first heard Hofmann in St. Petersburg more than thirty years before, when his “serious, precise, and finished playing filled me with such enthusiasm that I redoubled my zeal in studying the piano.”33 Since then they had met in New York, and they had crossed the Atlantic together at the end of 1934, “at which time,” Stravinsky told Craft, “I discovered that he had a querulous character and drank heavily, and that the latter made the former worse.”34 Now in the Brazilian heat, they ate little but drank much, and Stravinsky was moved by the atmosphere and the alcohol to enthuse once again about Hofmann’s playing and what it had meant to him. The reaction was unexpected. Hofmann became apoplectic. He certainly could not say the same for Stravinsky’s music. In fact he detested it, and he despised Stravinsky as a musician. “You’ve taken music back a hundred years. You are terrible. You are a menace!”35 Somehow a worse scene was averted; the Stravinskys coldly departed, and Hofmann was left to face Dagmar’s furious resentment. The next day, she and the Stravinskys dined again; there were explanations, walks through old Rio, visits to the zoo, the botanical gardens, the parks and caves. Igor magnanimously invited the Hofmanns to his final concert on the 12th. But the pianist was unrepentant. “I’m glad,” he muttered, “I’m glad I said what I did.”36

  Did Stravinsky go to bed with Dagmar in Rio, as Craft maintains?37 Dagmar, to do her credit, does not openly claim so, though she did soon find herself falling in love with this fascinating genius whose music, she admits, did not on the whole greatly please her. Craft, however, whose information on such matters presumably comes from Vera, implies that the affair was common gossip by the summer of 1936, and he finds coded statements to this effect in Dagmar’s book.38 Stravinsky was obviously more than capable of infidelity: and if unfaithful to Katya, why not to Vera? Craft has even hinted at an affair with Victoria Ocampo, who had admitted to Coco Chanel, in 1929, that she was jealous of Coco’s relationship with Stravinsky.39 But whereas Dagmar was a loose cannon, Victoria was an aristocrat of carefully regulated indiscretions, who would surely never have countenanced misbehavior under Soulima’s eyes. A mutual attraction there may have been, and something of the sort would help account for Victoria’s mildly irresponsible excursion to Rio. Throughout these years, though, her emotional life centered on someone quite different, an Argentinian whose anonymity, in her six-volume autobiography, is studiously preserved: he is almost invariably “J,” at most “Julián.” Ansermet’s daughter, Anne, who knew Victoria in Buenos Aires, regarded her in such matters as “prudent and honest, and even if one never saw her lover, she let no one remain unconscious of his existence.”40 Victoria recorded that “J” was not gifted himself but had faith in her talents, and this was the unconventional basis of their understanding. “If [his virtues] had been limited to attractions of a physical or sexual order, my relationship [with him] would have endured as long as a rose—a single morning. I can now speak about this with special knowledge from other experiences.”41 Whether Stravinsky was ever one of them remains a matter for speculation.

  For Vera these possibilities were no doubt painful, and she skirted round them in her letters. At the best of times Igor’s affections were subject to mood. “Your goodbye was hasty,” she had complained when he left, “not very tender, and at the last moment you did not call me ‘Sobachkina’ [dear little doggie].”42 The infrequency of his letters sometimes saddened her too. But she continued to involve herself in his family affairs. She would walk in the Bois de Boulogne with Theodore and listen to his anxieties about Denise’s liver, or drive out with the two of them and Milène to Meudon and drink fresh milk at a farm. As soon as Igor was back Theodore and Denise were going to get married, and Vera was eager to approve. She already knew what he subsequently told Victoria:

  My feelings toward my children, and especially my sons, are of that well-known type in which joy at seeing them happy is offset by a bitterness at parting that is infinitely painful to me. So don’t be surprised to see me counting Theodore’s marriage among the other cares which never cease to harass me.43

  Vera may have become so gloomy about their relationship while he was away that she embarked on an affair with one of her oldest admirers, Baron Fred Osten-Saken, a scion of the aristocratic Balt family which had included one of Igor’s school friends. Baron Fred had known Vera since her Moscow and Berlin days, and remained her loyal courtier in thirties Paris, both in her old rue du Ranelagh flat and now in the new apartment in the parallel rue de l’Assomption to which she moved whil
e Igor was in South America.44 Then, later that summer, long after Igor’s return, Fred was with her at Wiessee, in Bavaria, where she was taking a cure for high blood pressure.45 But such episodes should perhaps be understood as an aspect of Vera’s generosity to suffering friends, of whom she had more than her fair share. A few days after Igor left Paris in April, she arranged to meet Arthur Lourié for lunch, but at the last minute he telephoned to cancel. Then two weeks later she ran into him in the street, looking the color of his green overcoat and clearly in need of moral, not to say financial, support. Some trouble had blown up between him and Stravinsky, trouble in which Vera felt powerless—or unwilling—to intervene. Exactly what this was, however, we do not know.46