Stravinsky

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Stravinsky Page 10

by Stephen Walsh


  There followed a series of forays into the interior: a recital with Dushkin in Montreal, another in Worcester, Massachusetts, and, in between, a Town Hall recital that was greeted with quite astounding obtuseness by the bemused New York press (“The program opened,” wrote one, “with a ‘Suite Italienne’ on themes by Tschaikowsky, which did not impress one hearer as being particularly Italian or Tschaikowskian”).12 Somehow, amid all these concerts, Stravinsky drafted a two-minute piece for radio orchestra, which he later christened Praeludium for Jazz Band (though it included strings) and which years later he told his publisher was written at the request of a band leader called Reichman, “who wanted it in full property, I disagreed, and there it was.”13 The piece is a ragbag of things heard in Manhattan bars and clubs, including perhaps “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” But though intriguing as the master’s first on-the-spot creative response to American music—and composed at a time when he was telling everyone that jazz was done for—its musical interest is extremely slight.

  From New York the duo headed west to Ohio, gave a pair of recitals in Columbus on 8 and 9 February, then later in the month went on tour with the Cleveland Orchestra in a program that included, most intriguingly, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony and, at Severance Hall, Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto. In these remote parts, the composer was still, as on his previous visits, treated something like a two-headed dog or a bearded lady. “If you would see this provocative figure in the flesh,” gasped one newsman, “go to Severance Hall next week.” The Cleveland Press headline—IGOR STRAVINSKY—SMALL BODY BUT A GIANT BRAIN—perfectly encapsulated the image of a stunted alien with freakish intellectual powers, while the paper’s cartoonist, James Herron, added his own impression of the composer-conductor as a goggle-eyed automaton jerking around in front of a page of the Danse russe from Petrushka.14 Yet the Clevelanders had seen and heard Stravinsky twelve years before and were being no more severely tested this second visit: the Violin Concerto in place of The Song of the Nightingale, and Petrushka for Fireworks, hardly amounted to a voyage into the unknown.

  For Stravinsky himself, the human, earthly side of life had, these past few weeks, been asserting itself in no uncertain terms. The news from home was as disturbing as ever in the past. Early on 18 January, when he will have been sipping his evening cocktail in New York’s Sulgrave Hotel after the Sunday-matinee Philharmonic concert, Mika gave birth to the daughter she had so longed for and Igor and Katya had so dreaded, knowing that her own life was being placed in the balance. Not that Mika had bothered herself in the least about such trifles. While pregnant, she had merrily taken twelve-mile hikes in the mountains with Yury, and now she went on foot to the hospital before enduring a seventeen-hour labor from which she emerged the happiest mother anyone could remember and ready, as she told Vera, “to do it all over again.”15 Katya, true to family tradition, worried over seemingly trivial defects in the child’s health and physique: her stomach, her complexion, and of course—in view of her ancestry—her nose, which, as Katya calmly reminded Igor, would be the ultimate insignia of her Jewishness. But the little Catherine—or Kitty, as everyone called her from the start—was the unhappy herald of another misfortune than the ones she seemed marked out for. Less than three weeks after she was born her great-aunt Lyudmila Belyankin suffered a catastrophic stroke, and on the 10th of February, surrounded by her distraught family, at the age of only fifty-seven, died.

  Of all exiled Russians, the Belyankins were the least equipped to cope with such a disaster. Ganya—epileptic and sickly—could barely do more than fend for himself and work on homely things. Hardly anybody was buying Ira’s dresses, despite a complimentary review recently in Le Jour. As for Grigory, his habitually disordered world lay in fragments. The Café de la Paix was no more, while his latest venture, yogurt making, had depended crucially on Lyudmila’s calm business head and her reassuring smile. To run anything of the kind on his own was quite beyond him. He had a weak heart. The Polish money had alleviated but by no means cured his chronic indebtedness, and now, just when he was beginning to feel that the world owed him a peaceful retirement, his sole emotional support had been brutally kicked away. The Belyankins were so poor and everything so untidy, Katya wrote, that “there’s nothing to lay your hands on, neither clothes, nor blankets nor sheets.”16 Needless to say, she in her grief had to pay the doctor’s bill, and later she gave three thousand francs toward the funeral expenses. “We buried her today,” she wrote on the 12th,

  in the Russian cemetery at Ste Geneviève-des-Bois, forty kilometers outside Paris … The cemetery is just a large segment of a field enclosed within walls, without a single tree for the time being, but today, in the sunny, bright spring weather, it was very nice there and we all are comforted to think that she is lying there, among Russians, far away from the city, in the middle of a field.17

  Stravinsky had reached Detroit when he received Katya’s telegram, and Cleveland by the time Katya’s and Vera’s letters arrived. Both women took it for granted that he would be profoundly shaken by the news. Milochka was not only his sister-in-law but a cousin to whom he had been close since Ustilug days, and for him blood really was thicker than water. In his way he loved all the Belyankins. Milochka’s daughter Ira, his favorite, would, he knew, be overwhelmed with grief, not least because she had quarrelled with her mother over Yury Mandelstam; but now, Katya reported, she had become a reformed character, was calmly taking over domestic responsibilities, going to church, and even behaving well toward Yury, whom she had previously loathed. Above all, from so far away he could feel the coming together of the different strands of his life. Vera had dropped everything to help the Belyankins, not only out of friendship for Ira but from genuine affection for Milochka. “This is the first time that I have witnessed the death of someone close to me,” she wrote, “and I cannot get over it.”18 Her liberal upbringing and easygoing nature had not prepared her for the Dostoyevskian torments of an Orthodox death in exile, but while she therefore sometimes adapted uneasily to the mortuary tone of the Belyankin household, her innate goodness overcame all difficulties except the most fundamental one of her own relationship with the two families, and for that it was now much too late.

  In a series of letters to Katya, Igor reflected on the bereavement.19 And it was at this precise moment, on the 3rd of March, that he jotted down his first idea for a new symphony he had decided to write a month or so before, perhaps as a result of his New York concerts or even (though one hesitates to talk about outside inspiration where Stravinsky is concerned) after hearing about Kitty. The sketch theme, written on hotel notepaper in Evanston, Illinois, is at the same time an offshoot of the Rossini quotation in the final tableau of Jeu de cartes and an obvious precursor of the main theme of the Symphony in C.20 Stravinsky had mentioned this project in a letter to Strecker at the end of January,21 and probably it had already been discussed with Bruno Zirato, the assistant manager of the New York Philharmonic, as an inducement to engage Stravinsky again the following winter. At any rate, Copley later told Dushkin that Zirato would only want Stravinsky if he could have the symphony (adding, still less kindly, that he would only want Dushkin if he could have Stravinsky).22 But the composer, under pressure from Katya not to tie himself down with deadlines, declined a formal commission, and there the matter for the time being rested.23

  He and the Dushkins at last reached Los Angeles on the 8th of March.24 At the railway station they were met by an impressive reception committee, including Otto Klemperer (who had been away from L.A. at the time of their visit in 1935); Theodore Kosloff, an ex-Diaghilev dancer well-known for his Hollywood Bowl productions and work in films; Alexis Kall; and—rather encouragingly—Boris Morros, head of music at Paramount Pictures.

  The idea for a film collaboration had come this time from Merle Armitage, who had discovered that Morros was a graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire and yet another voice (however faintly recalled) from Stravinsky’s past.25 But now the former movie actress
Dagmar Godowsky decided on a pincer movement, and wired Morros on the 10th that he should at all costs book Stravinsky. Three days later, the two musicians dined together and drew up a contract under which Paramount would supply Stravinsky with scenarios, from which he would choose one to compose at the not inconsiderable fee of twenty-five thousand dollars.26 The contract itself was vague about the actual process, but Stravinsky later told reporters that the intention was for him to propose a subject that would be worked up by staff writers into a screenplay for which he would then compose music, after which the filming itself would take place. Unfortunately this interesting—if, for Hollywood, somewhat optimistic—idea was understood differently by different interviewers. One quoted Stravinsky as saying that “the story and the setting and all the rest will be written around the music, and the music will be composed in terms of the sound film. Thus the whole production will be conceived as a unit.”27 Another heard him say that “I have left them my subject. They have given it to a noted writer. If I like what he does with it, I will then develop the story and music into an artistic unity.”28 A French journalist who cornered him in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré soon after his return to Paris elicited the view that

  the time has come when music must stop being the accompaniment to film. It can in certain cases provide the theme, underline the scenario, make sense of a cinematographic work and doubtless even inspire it … So I’ve suggested to our Hollywood friends that I provide them with the score for a film in the same way that one gives a ballet score to the scenarist. They are very excited by this proposition.29

  Whether the basic idea was for a kind of World of Art cinema in which all the elements would cohere, or simply for a film in which the composer would call the tune, it got nowhere, though Stravinsky was serious enough about it to let it be known that the symphony was being put aside until the film score was done.30 Morros was supposed to turn up in New York in April with a worked-up scenario, but never appeared, and although he did contact Copley after Stravinsky’s departure, the trail eventually went dead. Stravinsky later told an admiring Darius Milhaud that Morros had rejected his demand that his music, once delivered, should not be tampered with, and he had therefore refused to sign.31 Certainly he did not sign; the draft contract was never executed. More remarkable is that Morros, a working Hollywood musician, so much as contemplated such a bizarre transaction. He must have assumed that the score, once in his hands, would be his to manipulate as he pleased. But it remains odd that this rather obvious difficulty did not surface at their first dinner.32

  For Stravinsky the failure was all the more galling because the two-year-old Chaplin project was also still theoretically alive but in practice just as elusive. After dining at the Robinsons’ with Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and George Gershwin that March, he preserved the idea that Chaplin was serious about a collaboration, and it was only after several months of vain transatlantic correspondence involving Dushkin, Strecker, and Robinson himself that he at last came to share Robinson’s opinion that Chaplin was simply untrustworthy, and promiscuous in his attitude to such commitments.33 He was learning a painful lesson about the fickle Hollywood mentality of gushing enthusiasm for high culture and intellectual respectability. Of course he was starstruck. It was flattering, even for the world’s most famous composer, to receive, as he had done, requests for autographed copies of his Chroniques from Douglas Fairbanks and Marlene Dietrich.34 Yet he knew perfectly well what the silver screen was really made of. Precisely at this time another aspect of Hollywood possessiveness—its artistic kleptomania—was invading his life in the form of a lawsuit he had instigated in 1936 against Warner Bros. for the “misuse” of his music in a detective film in which excerpts from The Firebird were used as leitmotif for a seduction, interspersed with fragments of a Viennese waltz. Such litigation nearly always proved painful, not only because Stravinsky’s rights were often questionable (the courts already knew that the material interest in Firebird was vested in Jurgenson’s former agent, Forberg, who had as a matter of fact sold the soundtrack rights to Warner Bros.), but also because his grumbles tended to look trivial to judges who did not share his pure ethical code where music was concerned. In this particular case the court found for him over the misuse, but showed its contempt for the principle at stake by awarding him damages of one franc.35

  As before, Stravinsky and Dushkin stayed with Kall in Los Angeles. But their visit was shorter than in 1935, and there were fewer bookings, thanks to the financial crisis that had beset the Philharmonic Orchestra after it had shown a deficit of $156,000 at the close of the previous season.36 In the end Armitage himself backed Stravinsky’s pair of concerts in the Shrine Auditorium, but not without misgivings in view of the somewhat unusual character of the program. The first half would be conventional enough: the Divertimento followed by the Firebird suite. But for the second half the orchestra had engaged Kosloff—an old Petersburg crony of Kall’s—to choreograph and dance the title role in a staged version of Petrushka.37 Kosloff was a prominent and influential figure in Hollywood dance, but his reputation with serious balletomanes was, Armitage reported, “only so-so.”38

  Where Stravinsky was concerned, Kosloff had nevertheless been taking his duties seriously. For months before the performances he virtually withdrew from the real world in order to be free to imagine himself back into Benois’s St. Petersburg, and when rehearsals began he made his two hundred and fifty dancers practice for hours to Stravinsky’s own Petrushka recording. The same care was lavished on the (anonymous) costumes. And it does seem that, whatever may have been the quality of the playing by an orchestra whose very existence had been under threat, the show itself was so spectacular—and so spectacularly promoted—that the auditorium was packed for both performances and produced a healthy profit for Armitage and the Philharmonic. Kosloff, one critic wrote (with an eye, perhaps, to future billings), “blended action, waves of color and individual dances in a glittering parade of entertainment, which dazzled the eye and charmed the senses.”39 This was modern music as only Tinseltown could understand and appreciate it.

  A few days later the two musicians shook the Los Angeles glitter off their heels and set off northward up the West Coast. A recital at Santa Barbara on the 16th was followed by half a concert in San Francisco, consisting of the West Coast premiere of the Symphony of Psalms (coupled with Rossini’s Stabat Mater conducted by Hans Leschke—though the orchestra’s regular conductor, Pierre Monteux, was present and introduced Stravinsky to the orchestra).40 They then proceeded to Tacoma and Seattle for three further recitals, and the backwoods atmosphere deepened. The concerts were a success, Stravinsky told Kall,

  but God, the things you overhear! Just like what you heard in Santa Barbara—you remember, when someone told you he understood nothing in the entire concert (after performances of things like Pulcinella and the Fairy’s Kiss Divertimento, the Firebird Scherzo and Lullaby, and the Russian Dance from Petrushka—really baffling stuff), but understood only that Stravinsky the violinist had a remarkable accompanist (Stravinsky?). And this in 1937. It’s obvious it’ll be the same in 4937, since recent history teaches us that a century or so ago Napoleon had never heard of Beethoven, his contemporary.41

  On 1 April they gave their last West Coast recital in Seattle and headed back eastward to New York. Stravinsky had reason to feel optimistic about his work. Jeu de cartes was coming up; he at last had the prospect of a serious and lucrative film project; and after that he would write his symphony. If only everybody’s health could be better; if only the world could be less confused emotionally and politically. And now there was an even bigger anxiety: he himself was coughing. It had started, of all places, in Los Angeles. For weeks he had been suffering from a persistent, debilitating colitis. Then suddenly, every morning, there would be a coughing fit, brought on, it seemed, by the notorious drafts in halls like the Shrine. Samples were taken, tests made, and his worst fears confirmed; he himself had the dread disease that had been ravaging his family and th
at both he and Katya had presumably inherited from their Kholodovsky mothers. It was no mild attack. Soon after arriving in New York he began coughing blood, and his doctor ordered him to bed and allowed him up only for essential rehearsals and performances. Worse still, he had for a time to give up smoking, after nearly forty years of the habit. “It never rains but it pours,” he grumbled to Kall as he also reported to him Morros’s failure to put in an appearance in New York.42

  All the same, he was less in bed than medical science would have liked. He went with Dagmar to Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball on the 11th, and Paul Hindemith spotted him four days later at the New York premiere of his Schwanendreher viola concerto, sitting in the front row and looking “very decorative and detached,” but afterwards telling everyone what an important piece it was.43 Daily rehearsals for Jeu de cartes (or The Card Party, as Kirstein had decided to call it) lasted six hours, and Stravinsky was assiduous in his attendance; he would even, Kirstein recalled, take the pianist (sixteen-year-old Leo Smit) back to his hotel in the evening to work on tempi. He was as vigorous a rehearser as ever. “He would slap his knee like a metronome for the dancers, then suddenly interrupt everything, rise and, gesticulating rapidly to emphasize his points, suggest a change.”44 He and Balanchine were working closely together for the first time (their collaboration on Apollo nine years earlier having been intermittent at best),45 but they clearly understood each other from the start. Balanchine always choreographed at rehearsal, working from the merest outline of a scenario and preferring to respond directly to the music; so while he retained the skeletal narrative of Stravinsky’s three deals, he largely ignored the anecdotal stage directions. Indeed, the composer’s account of the ballet a few months later to an interviewer from the Paris paper Le Jour reads more like a report on Balanchine’s approach than a description of his own original intentions: “a work,” he called it, “in which the saltatory essence, the act of dancing, would be respected. You can introduce into dance any kind of movement, on condition that you respect what I call the ‘canons’ of dance, its immutable laws, if you like.”46 This is certainly not incompatible with Balanchine’s own remark that in Jeu de cartes he “used the bodies of the dancers to feel out [the] volatile quality of the rhythm.”47

 

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