I’ll do it, but I beg you not to, as I’m dismayed by this score, which I have in my hand, and which I find desperately empty and boring. It’s really the first frankly bad thing I’ve seen by Stravinsky. I shall not give it [in Geneva].29
No doubt Ansermet was still feeling cross with his old friend; but after all, this new opinion was consistent with the one that had caused the breach in the first place. The fact is that these various judgments did genuinely hint at a looming crisis for the comfortable, settled neoclassicism of the 1930s, however unjust the criticisms of individual works may now seem. In the event, circumstances would conspire to lead Stravinsky out of it by a route that he could hardly have predicted at the time of Dumbarton Oaks. But it would be by no means an easy or straightforward journey.
DAGMAR GODOWSKY had been working at full throttle on Stravinsky’s interests in New York, but there was disappointingly little to show for her efforts. The Morros plan had faded out. She was in touch with both the New York Philharmonic and the recently formed NBC Symphony Orchestra, but Copley was yet again having difficulty putting together a tour that would be lucrative enough to justify the time and travel. The one promising approach from the States had come from Walt Disney’s agent, Harry Fox, who wanted permission to use music from The Firebird to accompany part of an animated cartoon film. Stravinsky, well aware of his tenuous hold on the rights in his first ballet, once again had dreams of a collaboration in which music he would compose specially would mesh with Disney’s animations. But these were still inchoate ideas. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Dagmar turned up in Paris, claiming to have been caught on board saying goodbye to friends when the Britannic weighed anchor in New York harbor. Though she had made no films since the silent era, her arrival did not go unnoticed. Photographers and reporters tracked her, no doubt not without her connivance, to her Paris hotel, where she told them that she was planning to take a slimming cure at Brides-les-Bains. The truth, which to his certain relief she did not mention to the newsmen, was that she had come to see Igor.
Stravinsky himself may have been displeased at her arrival, but he cannot have been wholly surprised. Back in February she had written him what was probably no more than a passionate reminder of past conversations.
My only love. I love you so madly and am so happy when I hear from you and your last letter was so specially sweet and I still simply couldn’t pull myself together to write to you, my darling … My blood pressure is low (80) but it would certainly go up if I were to see you …30
Now, in the middle of May, she turned up unannounced at the Faubourg, just as he was about to leave with Soulima for a concert in Brussels on the 19th. This was too much to endure, and—roughly or gently—he gave her short shrift. Back at her hotel, she poured out her despair:
But once in my life—my beloved one—have I felt such utter misery as today—To have you send me away, when all I care about is you—all my dreams, all my life means you—is hard to bear. I understand your motive and will respect it, but emotionally I don’t see how I will carry the burden. It is sad to love someone to whom one is merely an incident. And it is really you to blame who made me feel as I do. Now it is too late—No matter what you do to me, it can’t alter the fact that it is you around whom my whole life revolves—And you send me away—coldly, unfeelingly with only one thought—not to complicate your life. I am not reproaching you—but only myself, that I wasn’t capable of making you care. If only religion would help, but nothing, nothing seems to be able to stop the terrible pain in my heart.31
A day or two later, while he was away in Brussels, there was a phone call from another woman out of his recent, but also more distant, past: Ida Rubinstein. Ida had yet another new idea for a stage work which would give her fresh opportunities to develop her talents as a diseuse, and when Stravinsky returned her call it transpired that the target of her literary attentions this time was Paul Claudel.32 Like Gide in 1933, Claudel was by no means unknown to him. They had first met in Paris before the war,33 then during the war in Switzerland, where the author of Partage de midi was sometimes a fellow guest at Ramuz’s, and to judge from Stravinsky’s conversations, which often mention Claudel casually, they met socially a good deal thereafter. According to Craft,34 Stravinsky disliked Claudel from their first meeting—which would not be surprising, as the playwright was difficult and quick-tempered—and he was certainly not much in sympathy with his particular kind of intellectual dogmatism. It seems, nevertheless, to have been Claudel who suddenly took against Stravinsky when they met for lunch at Ida’s early that June. “I do not take to him,” he noted in his diary, and he told Milhaud that “I actually didn’t get on with Stravinsky, [but] I don’t particularly mind, since during the conversation he developed for my benefit some implausible ideas about music and art.”35 Perhaps Stravinsky lectured him on Wagner and Berlioz, about whom Claudel had recently published an article, “The Wagnerian Poison,” that had annoyed him.36 Stravinsky was himself no Wagnerite by this time, but, as he scribbled in the margin of the article, “it really isn’t worth rejecting Wagner in order to exalt the beauties of … Berlioz—it’s too stupid.” Unfortunately, Berlioz reminded him too much of the St. Petersburg of his youth, where the French composer had been God. But he always in any case reacted against the musical asseverations of literary men; he, a musician, had the right to detest Wagner precisely because he understood the scale of Wagner’s genius. Literary critics of the Bayreuth master did not have that right.
Ida was clear from the start that she wanted a big stage work with a choir and speaking parts, but though possible subjects were aired at the lunch, no decision was made. Stravinsky wanted a Homeric myth in the line of Persephone, and he proposed the legend of Prometheus. Claudel was only interested in religious subjects of a moralizing tendency, and he suggested the Apocryphal Old Testament story of Tobit. A few days later, Claudel attended Stravinsky’s Sérénade concert and experienced a revelation that put their meeting in a different perspective. It seemed that literary men understood perfectly well after all. “What an Elysian language you make music speak!” Claudel wrote:
What perfection! What sovereign elegance! The concentration of the entire soul in what is heard obviates the need for words, ideas, even feelings, leaving attention only for the divine voices, which make music together, and separate only in order to recombine. But how to introduce a foreign element into this superior and self-sufficient world? The chief impression that I retain from yesterday evening, one of the most beautiful in my artistic life, is one of intimidation.37
He nevertheless announced a week later that he was starting on “the work you requested,” still without saying what it was about. Stravinsky, who had not paid much attention to Claudel’s views on the matter and merely stood by his own opposition to the staging of scriptural stories, took it for granted that it was Prometheus. Claudel’s response was as dismissive as his reaction to Stravinsky’s music had been fulsome. No, the subject was not Prometheus but Tobit. “Not for the world,” he added sadistically, “would I again poke my nose into that antique pagan frippery, worn to a thread, and reminiscent only of Offenbach.” Small wonder that the composer of Oedipus Rex and Apollo later remembered Claudel without much affection. At the time, however, they preserved a cordial tone. “We were not made to collaborate,” Claudel suggested. “You are too great a musician, and we could never have penetrated each other’s mind.” As to that, replied the musician, “the only obstacle I saw, as you know very well, was the choice of a subject from scripture.”38 But on this occasion the writer saw more clearly. Stravinsky reserved his venom for poor Ida, telling Strecker that she was to blame for the rejection of Prometheus, and that he had broken off negotiations over the biblical story, “conveying to her my regret at having wasted a month on her for nothing when she knew from the beginning of our talks that I would not and could not do her a stage piece on a subject of that type.”39
There is no sign that current affairs or politics at large figured i
n the conversation at Ida’s. And yet the omission would have been astonishing. Claudel had been heavily engaged a year earlier in a row with a group of Catholic writers of the Left—including Maritain, Mauriac, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, and Jacques Madaule—who had invited him to sign an open letter of protest at the bombing of Guernica in April 1937. Essentially, Claudel’s line had been that to condemn the atrocity without decisively establishing Franco’s complicity (which was questioned by some) amounted to connivance at the thousands of murders of Catholic priests by republicans, against which no protest had been made.40 Stravinsky, who was pro-Franco, pro-clerical, and not overburdened with humanitarian scruples of a more general kind, would certainly have sided with Claudel on this issue, though whether he would have gone so far as to publicly endorse his open manifesto on the subject, as its author may have suggested, is another question.41
Any reference to the Nazis at Guernica would have brought up Stravinsky’s chief political grouse of the moment: the exhibition of so-called Entartete Musik—“Degenerate Music”—which had just opened in the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, and in which The Soldier’s Tale was among the prize exhibits. This curious event, which echoed the previous year’s Munich exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” was in fact little more than a sideshow in the weeklong Reichsmusiktage, an official celebration of Nazi-approved music, musical aesthetics, and musicology, organized under the patronage of the minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Outwardly, Entartete Musik was a compendium of those aspects of modern music that were excluded from the Music Days; it had sections on jazz, school music, and atonal theory, and a room of listening alcoves where you could hear excerpts from works by Hindemith, Weill, Berg, and others at the touch of a button—a situation purposely designed, of course, to emphasize the “incoherence” of the music in question. But the exhibition also had the political function of propitiating the Nazi Kulturgemeinde run by Goebbels’s most dangerous rival, Alfred Rosenberg, which is why a mere two days before The Soldier’s Tale and the Chroniques de ma vie were pilloried as degenerate in Düsseldorf, Persephone was performed in Braunschweig and the recently published German edition of Chroniques remained on sale in bookshops everywhere, as if Stravinsky’s “rehabilitation” had never come into question.42
The inconsistency was typical of Goebbels’s somewhat pragmatic approach to propaganda, as opposed to Rosenberg’s unflinching ideological purity, but not surprisingly this distinction was lost on Stravinsky, who at once fired off a letter of protest to Willy Strecker43 and was soon engaged in a laborious correspondence through various cultural and diplomatic channels in an attempt to secure some kind of retraction from the Nazi authorities.44 He had come to the conclusion, mainly on the basis of press cuttings and hearsay, that he was the victim of a conspiracy on the part of German musicians; but he also noted with alarm that he was still being described in press reports as a Jew, an error that concerned him—he told one harassed French official—only because he knew the importance that was now attached to such questions in Germany.45 He seems not to have noticed that other composers targetted by Entartete Musik (including Hindemith and Berg) were also gentiles, or to have grasped the fact that his music was still being played at all in the Reich only because it suited Goebbels to encourage an air of uncertainty at home while parading his cultural liberalism abroad. In any case, there was no longer any serious likelihood that Stravinsky would be engaged to conduct there. To do him justice, none of these intricacies was ever explained to him by his publisher, who was perhaps himself in the dark. As late as January 1939, Strecker wrote to him that “I can happily inform you that your position in Germany is apparently completely reestablished. You will be played and nobody will raise any objections.”46 The following June, less than three months before war was declared, Telefunken contacted Strecker about the possibility of Stravinsky recording his first three ballets for them.47 If such relatively well-placed Germans could delude themselves to such an extent, it is hardly surprising that Stravinsky himself continued to dwell in cloud-cuckoo-land.
His reaction does nevertheless now strike one, with all allowances made, as grotesque. How could so subtle and intelligent a man abase himself in such a manner before a regime which, as he knew perfectly well, made no consideration of matters of art but was simply engaged in a policy of suppression and manipulation? It is almost as if he accepted the principle of political interference as long as it was not turned against him, an attitude that would have found little favor with his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been sacked from his post for supporting his students’ protests against the arbitrary closure of the Conservatoire.48 For Stravinsky, such anti-authoritarian behavior was not quite impossible; but it ran sharply counter to his instincts.
On the very day that Entartete Musik opened in Düsseldorf, he had written to the official Italian concert agency, the Centro Lirico Italiano, suggesting Rieti’s Second Piano Concerto for inclusion in a program he was contracting for Turin radio in early December 1938.49 It was a policy of the Ministry of Popular Culture that twenty-five percent of such concerts should be devoted to music by Italian composers. So Stravinsky, who probably knew hardly any non-operatic Italian music later than Pergolesi, naturally offered the one work he had heard recently, which happened to be by a friend and in the repertoire of another friend, Marcelle Meyer. Unfortunately he neglected to brief himself about recent tendencies in racial attitudes in Italy; and he overlooked the fact that Rieti was a Jew.
There now ensued a bizarre fencing match between Stravinsky and the C.L.I., who wrote on the 3rd of June informing him that Rieti’s concerto was not acceptable and inviting him to choose something else. On the 13th Stravinsky wrote back declining to drop the Rieti; on the 22nd the C.L.I. replied insisting on the change, the next day the composer again wrote a refusal, the C.L.I. insisted again, and finally on the 26th Stravinsky broke off negotiations and cancelled the concert—an almost unheard-of step for him to take purely on programming grounds. The curious aspect of all this is that Stravinsky never showed any sign of understanding why Rieti’s work could not be included, and no reason was ever given by the C.L.I. or by the radio (E.I.A.R.). Rieti was fulsome in his thanks to Stravinsky for taking such a stand, but his own letter is coy, if unambiguous, on the crucial point:
The fact that these gents at the E.I.A.R. wouldn’t give you any explanation of the reason for their refusal is entirely symptomatic of their cause’s bad conscience. It goes without saying that this reason, which they so carefully conceal, is in its turn merely a pretext behind which lurk the tendencies and interests of the diehards, that is, against what they call “modern music.”50
Rieti obviously knew better than most that the tide was rising against Jews in Italy. By September, his son was being denied schooling and his parents had lost their jobs. “I shall soon leave,” he wrote.51 But if Stravinsky had indeed been standing on a point of moral principle, rather than artistic integrity or simple loyalty, it was one that the C.L.I. found it ludicrously easy to circumvent. On the 8th of July they resumed the negotiations as if for a completely different engagement. This time they offered Stravinsky a concert based entirely on his own works, except that he could if he liked include music by an earlier Italian composer. The hint that Pulcinella would, for the present purposes, count as an Italian work was palpable, and it was duly taken. Stravinsky accepted at once to conduct Apollo, the Capriccio (with Soulima), The Song of the Nightingale, and Pulcinella in Turin on the 2nd of December.52
* * *
THE MENACING summer of 1938 wore on, and for the Stravinskys there was to be no respite. Early in July even Vera fell briefly ill, with a throat infection so severe that Igor suggested (wrongly) that it might be diphtheria. As for Mika, her condition had scarcely improved since her return from Sancellemoz in March, but in the middle of July it suddenly took a turn for the worse and she endured ten days of agonized coughing, night after night, that left her exhausted and thin, a mere shadow of the radiant mother of eighteen
months before. Igor could hardly bear to see his adored elder daughter suffer such horrors, and he would go off to lunch with Vera, or take her to some cinema, and earth his misery into her inexhaustible sanity and good humor. In August there was another, less acute crisis, and the doctor reassured them all that Mika’s condition was not dangerous. “He has a very convincing manner,” Igor wrote, without irony, to his eldest son.53 But outside in the streets of Paris you could almost touch the sense of danger. Ever since the annexation of Austria in March, Hitler had been eyeing his Sudetenland border with Czechoslovakia, a country with which France had a treaty of mutual assistance; then at the end of August, amid frightening signs of German mobilization, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, warned Hitler that an attack on Czechoslovakia could mean war. On the 24th of September, the day that the Czechs rejected Hitler’s Godesberg Memorandum by which they were supposed to cede the entire Sudetenland to Germany, France mobilized more than half a million reservists. It was the closest Europe had been to war since 1918.
In Paris they sat glued to their radio sets, listening to speeches by Hitler and Chamberlain and nervously leafing through railway timetables. Everyone knew what Hitler had done to Guernica; now the French capital would certainly be high on his list. Many of Vera’s friends were leaving; a feeling of panic was everywhere.54 But in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré two women were quietly, slowly dying. Both Mika and Katya were in bed, Katya having gone down with pneumonia, and Igor was so anxiously busy helping Milène and Madubo nurse them that for two weeks he hardly went out. On the day of the mobilization, Ramuz’s old publisher Henri-Louis Mermod threw a lunch for the novelist’s sixtieth birthday, the occasion for which Stravinsky had written his little single-line setting of verses from Charles-Albert Cingria’s Petit Ramusianum harmonique. But the composer could not face the company, perhaps above all could not face Ansermet, who would be there, talking nonstop, lecturing him about his latest music.55
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