Stravinsky

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Stravinsky Page 9

by Stephen Walsh


  Igor returned on the 24th of June to a Paris that was shaking with collective terror after the Nazi occupation of the Rhineland in March. Fear of war alternated almost daily with fear of revolution, and after Léon Blum’s election victory in early May at the head of a Popular Front which included Communists, dread of a Communist takeover persisted, especially of course among White Russians, who detested the new government and probably agreed with the right-wing slogan “Better Hitler than Léon Blum.” Katya’s letters show that the Stravinskys were sympathetic to Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, who resigned in January amid protests over the pro-Mussolini peace plan for Abyssinia. Even after Blum’s victory, strikes continued to break out, bread was scarce, petrol unobtainable, and, Vera wrote, Jews were afraid to leave their homes for fear of right-wing reprisals. “Some say that in a few days all this will be over,” she added, “but we Russians, remembering the revolution, think otherwise.”47

  Soon after Igor’s return a curious light was thrown on these events by a project in Berlin for a production of The Soldier’s Tale by the so-called Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Association), a “ghetto” organization that was officially sanctioned but whose performances were attended only by Jews and reviewed only in the Jewish press. Strecker saw this as a sign that the composer’s Baden-Baden concert in April had “broken the boycott,” but he advised against approval, since The Soldier’s Tale was still regarded as Bolshevik in Nazi circles, and the production would merely revive allegations that Stravinsky was himself a Jew. When he heard, however, that the Reichstheaterkammer had approved the production, Strecker changed his tune. He now advised Stravinsky to give his approval and make a special reduction in the performance fee, since if it became known that a performance permitted by the Nazis had been stopped by the composer, there could be a disagreeable reaction abroad, especially in America, where Jewish opinion was influential. No wonder the poor composer, as usual mainly anxious not to lose German royalties, was left confused by his publisher’s Realpolitik. But he gave permission, and the production duly took place on 4 November, to mixed reactions that partly justified Strecker’s initial hesitation. One critic regretted a work “that lets man be destroyed by life’s adversities;” another compared it—worryingly—to the Jewish Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. All agreed that the performance was excellent; but how far any of this affected Stravinsky’s German reputation in the longer run remained (and remains) an open question.48

  Theodore duly married his young Roman Catholic bride on 29 June 1936, in the upstairs chapel in the rue d’Odessa in which Mika and Yury had wed eight months before. A service of Catholic benediction followed at Montrouge, on the south side of Paris.49 Katya was released from Sancellemoz for the occasion, but three weeks later she went back there with Milène, who was herself now displaying mild symptoms of the family disease.50 Within weeks, her profoundly tubercular sister had announced that she was pregnant, in open defiance of her doctors’ orders. Igor, apparently suffering from nothing more infectious than worry, took refuge, for neither the first nor the last time, in composition.

  It was nearly a year since Balanchine had raised the matter of a new ballet, and there was still no firm contract and no clear idea of a subject. Back in the winter, Stravinsky had made substantial sketches for an opening scene, and even played some of the music to Katya before she left for Sancellemoz in mid-January.51 But by late February, Balanchine was still waiting on the Met, and for most of the next four months Stravinsky was on tour and essentially unable to compose.52 On his return from South America in late June, he found waiting for him a letter from Balanchine that was still no more than hopeful about a commission but was starting to hint at subject matter. Stravinsky may not have realized that the choreographer was smarting from the failure of his danced production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice three weeks before—the only proper chance the Met had so far given him to do more than provide divertissements in existing productions of operas like Faust and Carmen—and was desperate to set a new and significant work in motion almost regardless of plot, an issue which in any case never greatly bothered him. He now mentioned Andersen, and specifically his tale “The Flowered Ball.” But the composer had had enough of fairy tales, and in any case, he remarked loftily, “I must tell you that I have never yet composed ballet music without knowing the subject in advance … The ballet I am now composing is not a divertissement in the sense you warn me against; my ballet has a definite and wholly intelligible subject with light intrigue …”53

  This was probably untrue. The evidence, on the contrary, is that he had been composing either to an abstract plan or to a partially known but as yet unformulated plot. Soon after the approach from Nabokov in August 1935, he had tried to involve Cocteau in a collaboration on what was presumably this ballet, and Cocteau had even supplied a text (whether preexisting or specially written), which he told the composer to alter as much as he liked.54 But this can hardly have been the “card-game plot” which Stravinsky later claimed to have proposed to Cocteau, nor does it exactly look as if Cocteau declined to collaborate, as the composer also claimed:55 or rather, if the text was preexisting, it cannot have been Stravinsky’s idea; but if it was specially written, then its author had obviously not declined. Several months later, after South America, the composer again solicited the writer’s help in fixing a subject and working out a scenario; there was a meeting, but again apparently with no result.56 Toward the end of July Anna Stravinsky wrote to her daughter-in-law that Igor doubted whether Cocteau would prove useful or “help [him] in [his] difficulty.”57 Up to this point, there is no reference to card games in any surviving correspondence about the new ballet.

  When the idea came to him one evening in a fiacre, he was so pleased—he later told an interviewer—that he invited the cab driver to have a drink with him.58 Such delight argues a long period of uncertainty. Now, with Cocteau finally ruled out, he did something curious: he invited the assistance of a certain Nikita Malayev, a young friend of Soulima’s based in Marseilles. “Why did you consider Malayev?” Katya asked. “Is he qualified for that kind of work?”59 Or did Stravinsky simply yield to pressure from his younger son, who wanted to help a gifted friend of a certain neurasthenic—even suicidal—tendency, as we learn from Katya’s letters of the following April?60 At all events, Malayev duly came to Paris in mid-August, and within a week the subject was finalized and ready to be acknowledged for the first time in a letter to Willy Strecker, who, with the persistent difficulties of the Édition Russe in Paris, was now rapidly emerging as Stravinsky’s main and most energetic publisher.61 Almost at the same moment, coincidentally, Kirstein’s partner Edward Warburg (another enthusiast with a rich father) had come up with clear financial terms for the commission—five thousand dollars for a one-year exclusivity for the American Ballet, including two performances conducted by Stravinsky himself.62 At last the game was on.

  At the start of September Stravinsky visited Katya in Sancellemoz, then went to Alsace with Vera for a few days of what Katya herself indulgently called “Nachkur” (that is, rest, after Vera’s blood-pressure treatment at Wiessee).63 Thereafter he settled down in the Faubourg to concentrated work on Jeu de cartes. He labored steadily on the second of the three tableaux—or “deals,” as he had decided to call them—dispatching the score to Strecker in (not always complete) sections so that copying and publication could be well in hand by his planned departure for America in mid-December.64 By November, what with interruptions for concerts in Zurich and Winterthur and, later, Naples, he was under almost the same intensity of pressure as eight years before with The Fairy’s Kiss. “I work all day long,” he told Strecker, “almost without rest. I sleep well, I eat well, and withal I suffer atrociously (in my sympathetic nervous system) from the bad weather.”65 Meanwhile Malayev elaborated the libretto: the so-called argument, or plot outline, as well as the detailed scenario, much of which figures in the draft score that Stravinsky completed on the 3rd of December. Perhaps be
cause the card-playing idea had been entirely his own and hard-won, Stravinsky afterwards clung to it with an obstinacy in defiance of the fact that the early musical ideas had been conceived without plot and that Balanchine was in any case notoriously uninterested in anecdotal ballets. Of course, in one sense Jeu de cartes remains abstract, since the dramatis personae are playing cards and the plot is a game of poker. But the scenario, with its Alice-like battles between hearts and spades, its strutting, perfidious joker, and its abrupt triumph of good over evil, is a curious relapse into anecdotalism for the composer of Apollo, his one previous American ballet commission. Strecker grumbled at having to print the synopsis in the score, feeling that it would inhibit choreographers. But Stravinsky dug his heels in, and the argument—though not the bar-by-bar scenario—duly featured in the early published editions.66

  The music itself nevertheless lacks recognizable anecdote and has on the face of it little to do with the poker action, notwithstanding the assertion in Themes and Conclusions that the trombone figure that accompanies the opening theme is an imitation of the croupier’s “Ein neues Spiel, ein neues Glück” remembered from the German casinos of Stravinsky’s childhood.67 In fact the theme itself (though admittedly not the trombone figure) was one of the earliest pencil sketches for the work, on a sheet dated 2 December 1935 and headed “Jeu de Cartes” in a (probably later) red crayon.68 Stravinsky himself was never a serious poker player, and seldom gambled, though like most people he played cards as a social pastime, and later in life became addicted to patience (solitaire).69 The real meaning of this score harks back to that earlier Balanchine collaboration Apollo, which had used a more or less schematic scenario as the pretext for a modern re-creation of the form of classical ballet, complete with solo variations, pas d’action, and a culminating pas de deux for the principal dancers. The detailed scenario (though not the score) of Jeu de cartes reveals a similar framework, if one with a more narrative flavor, faintly reminiscent of Tchaikovsky, with elements of divertissement thrown in—as Stravinsky had hinted to Balanchine. Though not conventionally tuneful, it suggests a certain well-behaved “tunefulness,” as in the opening brass theme, the flute tune of the pas d’action, or the march theme of the second deal. Very unusually for Stravinsky, there are actual or virtual quotations from other composers: Rossini’s Barber of Seville Overture in the third deal, Ravel’s La Valse earlier in the same tableau, and Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus in the second, among others less blatant.

  What Stravinsky seems to be aiming at here is some encapsulation of the idea of a “popular” ballet, without the austerities and intellectualisms of Apollo or the two-piano concerto. He had probably just missed the opening season of the American Ballet in New York in March 1935. But if he talked to Balanchine about the school or those opening performances later that month, he may well have formed the mental picture of a company not yet fully attuned to the esoteric refinements of post-Imperial ballet. In place of the intricacies of Apollo and the rich multilayerings of Persephone, Jeu de cartes offers a simple, direct, slightly brash, studiously conventional image of modern dance theatre. It uses a “normal” (roughly, Beethoven) orchestra, “a single set, and some simple costumes.”70 The form is episodic, the harmony and rhythm bold and uncomplicated, the orchestration brilliant but on the whole unsurprising, the drama inconsequential. More than any other large-scale work by Stravinsky since The Firebird, it feels aesthetically “safe.” How far this reflects some concept of thirties Americanism, how far a particular stage in the composer’s own artistic life, will emerge in the light of his works of the next decade, all of them commissioned by or written for Americans. It certainly cuts a slightly incongruous figure as his first work written wholly as a Frenchman.

  5

  DEATH DEALS …

  FOR HIS THIRD U.S. tour, Stravinsky had the biggest network of unpaid helpers even he had ever assembled. Sam Dushkin, who had married a girl from Cleveland in January 1936, had been watching over his interests in New York, keeping him up to date on the Merovitch crisis, briefing him on Merovitch’s likely successor, Richard Copley, and acting as go-between with Balanchine and Kirstein over the Jeu de cartes commission. Meanwhile Dagmar was back on the warpath, offering to make herself useful by booking hotels, meeting him off the boat, and generally acting as unofficial personal assistant. In Los Angeles “dear fat doctor Kall” liaised with Klemperer and the impresario Merle Armitage, who was effectively managing Stravinsky’s West Coast appearances. Even poor Malayev, having exhausted his usefulness as scenarist, was now detailed to ship to New York two cases of fine claret, which Stravinsky had either forgotten to take with him or made the mistake of assuming would be widely available in post-Prohibition America.1

  The French liner Normandie docked in New York on Christmas Eve 1936, three weeks before his first concert. But there were important matters to attend to in the meantime. The Jeu de cartes score had preceded him by three weeks, and Balanchine had already choreographed the first two deals by the time the composer arrived. Irene Sharaff’s costume and stage designs were also largely ready. Lincoln Kirstein, who had perhaps met Stravinsky in Paris in 1933 but was now getting to know him for the first time, found his response to these preparations “as courtly as it was terrifying.” Sharaff’s designs, based on a set of medieval playing cards, he dismissed as too definite in period and too decorative in manner, and instead he demanded “the banal colors of a deck of ordinary cards, forms and details so simple as to be immediately recognizable.” The choreography seems to have pleased him, but some parts he found too prodigal in invention, and here, “instead of so much variety in the pictures he preferred a repetition of the most effective groupings.”2 The austerity and formalism he sought were of course nothing new in his work, but it looks as if his collaborators may have been disoriented by the anecdotalism of the scenario. Having fussed over its elaboration, Stravinsky now had to reimpose the necessary simplification.

  After a few days in New York, he took a night train to Toronto, where, on 5 January, he conducted for the first time on Canadian soil. In itself it was no epoch-making event, not even indeed a full concert, since, after he had led the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the suites from his first two ballets, the orchestra’s permanent director, Ernest McMillan, conducted Brahms. But it gave the local press their first chance to interrogate the monster and to discover—as Los Angeles had discovered two years before—that he was a normal human being who looked like a diminutive if nattily dressed bank clerk, loved the cinema, was tired of jazz, and liked Hemingway. Stravinsky had been taking a Berlitz English-language course in Paris; but he still preferred to be interviewed in French, and his claim that “he likes reading the English and American writers best” should perhaps, at this stage, be taken as a broad compliment to his hosts rather than an expression of simple truth.3 His one significant observation was the prophecy that “art in Spain will be held back one hundred years by the present civil war” and that “all art is retarded by revolution,”4 a remark which reiterated his profound distrust of disorder, even in a cause to which he was in principle sympathetic. On his way back to New York he visited Niagara Falls and burst out: “It’s something like a revolution—it’s terrible.”5

  Where Merovitch had failed to book him a single concert with the New York Philharmonic, Copley had arranged no less than six in a fortnight—the familiar scheme of Thursday and Friday evenings and Sunday afternoon in Carnegie Hall, the same concert with minor variations, followed by a second trio, with a different program, the following week. For the first set, Soulima’s young friend Beveridge Webster played the Capriccio and Mozart’s G-major Piano Concerto, K. 453, and Stravinsky conducted Fireworks and Petrushka, plus Weber’s Turandot Overture alternating with Rimsky’s Sadko Intermezzo—the first time he had programmed music by anyone else in New York.6 The second week’s concerts were built round The Rite of Spring, his North American debut in the piece, along with The Firebird suite and Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony. As befo
re, Stravinsky received ovations from packed houses but a somewhat mixed press, which generally found him to be a clear, incisive, efficient, honest but unspectacular performer. “To say that he is an incandescent leader, a mage, a master of that incalculable gift of revelation which a leader has or hasn’t—to say that would be absurd,” the Herald Tribune critic, Lawrence Gilman, insisted.7 And Olin Downes of the Times, after admitting that The Rite “came close to being the most thrilling interpretation of the work that we have heard in this city,” added in mock astonishment that “all this was done by a little scientific-looking man with eye-glasses, who rose from time to time on his heels and beat the measure, frequently in wide windrow motions to be certain that the orchestra understood him.”8 None of the reviews give more than a general flavor of Stravinsky’s impact on the New York Philharmonic at this difficult moment in its history, after the resignation of Toscanini the previous April and the abortive move to appoint Furtwängler in his place. The first half of the 1936–7 season had been entrusted, very successfully, to the young Englishman John Barbirolli, a musician of utterly different character from either Toscanini or Stravinsky (according to one account, Stravinsky’s first rehearsal was actually held up while Barbirolli said goodbye to the orchestra).9 A recording survives of the Sunday concert in the first Stravinsky set (17 January), including both concertos, but alas not of the Rite of Spring program. As for the Capriccio, which New York was hearing for the first time since 1931, there was the usual damning with faint praise. According to the Herald Tribune, “its cleverness and whimsicality, while still apparent, have paled to a noticeable extent since six years ago; there are moments when one is conscious of a sense of length.”10 Downes described it illuminatingly as “ugly, tedious, irritating music.”11

 

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