Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  One Boston invitation he did not turn down was to dine with Sergey and Natalie Koussevitzky on the 20th of November, a week or so before he was due to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts in Providence and Boston itself. The Koussevitzkys, of all his Russian acquaintances, were among the most sympathetic and least censorious toward his association with Vera and his plan to marry her as soon as she could divorce Sudeykin. And he now knew enough about American provincial society to know that, if she came to the States, there could be no acceptable arrangement outside marriage.

  Almost since arriving in Cambridge, he had been receiving anguished letters from her about the hardships of Paris in wartime, the wretchedness of old friends like Valechka Nouvel and Fred Osten-Saken, the lack of heating, the shortages, her experiences with divorce lawyers, and above all the seeming impossibility of obtaining a U.S. visa and even a French exit permit now that emergency regulations were in force. These regulations changed all the time, but were also much embroidered by rumor. There were laws against foreigners leaving, against women leaving, against French citizens marrying non-French citizens abroad; the French would not issue return visas to America, but America routinely refused visas to anyone without a return visa; and so on. For her divorce, Vera needed her birth certificate, the only copy of which was in Georgia because she had taken Georgian citizenship on her escape from the Soviet Union in 1920; she might try to prove that Sudeykin never legally divorced his previous wife, Olga, or (more difficult) that her own marriage to him was unconsummated, but in either case it would help to have her own previous divorce papers, which (needless to say) were in the possession of her husband in New York. To get almost any documentation she needed a new identity card, as was now required of all foreigners, but issue was slow and alphabetical, so it would benefit her to change from Sudeykina to her maiden name, de Bosset, which, however, she could not do quickly without the very papers she needed for her divorce.12

  It so happened that Natalya Koussevitzky’s much younger half sister, Tanya, and Tanya’s husband Joseph Iorgy were at the Koussevitzkys’ in Boston that evening. Iorgy had just been appointed U.S. delegate-general of the Union Féminine Française, and Stravinsky seized the opportunity to point out to him the possible benefits to the UFF in America of so well-connected a Parisienne and her even better-connected French fiancé. Iorgy had contacts with the French military authorities, and he could supply letters that would enable Vera—with a certain amount of footwork and a well-placed charitable donation—to obtain a visa swiftly and without bureaucratic interference. Igor wanted her to do all this at once and not wait until spring; the divorce could be arranged in America. As ever, his will was paramount.13

  He had ample evidence of opposition to that will, and not only on the part of immigration officials and divorce lawyers. A few weeks after his departure from Paris, his son Theodore had come to Paris from Le Mans and, without consulting his co-signatories, transferred all but a token sum in the joint bank account to an account in his own name at a bank in Le Mans. He did this, he told Vera, because he had heard a rumor that the bank in question (the ultra-solid Crédit Commercial) was in danger of failing. But Vera, remembering the incident at Sancellemoz, saw in it the hand of Denise, who, she alleged, had organized the transfer out of a desire to exercise control. Everyone was so furious with Theodore that the money had to be returned and he went around for weeks with his tail between his legs. Meanwhile his father fired off at him a letter of such grinding, inflexible reproof that Vera refused to forward it and in due course persuaded Igor to allow her to burn it.14

  That Denise was the éminence grise behind this calculated snub to Vera can hardly be doubted. For all her gentle disposition and sweet charm, she was a woman of character and spirit, not without a certain consciousness of rectitude, and inclined—like any young wife—to be touchy about her husband’s standing in family circles, not to mention in his case artistic ones. Theodore, as the eldest child, deserved better of his father than to be placed on an equal footing of financial responsibility with the woman who, for nearly eighteen years, had cuckolded his dying mother; and it did not improve matters that he had personally been on friendly terms with her, been helped by her, even been watched over by her, nor that he was still, at the age of thirty-two, financially partly dependent on his father. Vera had for some time understood that Denise resented her, and she seems to have reciprocated the dislike, as far as was in her nature. Recently, in her letters to Igor, she had been lauding Soulima to the skies, sharing his wide-eyed accounts of life in the barracks at Cosne-sur-Loire, near Nevers, whither he had been conscripted, and praising his positive, enthusiastic attitude to work that he could easily have found soul-destroying. She knew perfectly well that all this would be balm to Soulima’s father, who had been deeply agitated by his quarrel with his younger son earlier in the year. Vera had also sided with Madubo in a separate dispute, over whether the ex-governess stayed in Paris and kept the Antoine-Chantin flat warm for Soulima on his weekends off, or went to Le Mans to keep house for Denise and Theodore. Madubo—and Vera on her behalf—naturally preferred Paris, where she had fewer duties, greater independence, and more fun. Still, Denise might well reason that Madubo, in her late forties, was effectively pensioned by Stravinsky and could hardly object to a little cleaning and cooking for his childless son and daughter-in-law. To the easygoing and still somewhat bohemian Vera, this was bourgeois opportunism writ large. What Igor thought about it, nobody seems to have troubled to find out; but the money transfer left him “tormented in my soul,” and when Denise sent him condolences on the first anniversary of Mika’s death, it left him “with a heavy heart, for I do not believe her any more.”15

  In these matters, Vera was to blame only, perhaps, in failing to understand the natural currents of feeling of those who, this side of sainthood, were bound to wake up some mornings and feel that, on the whole, the world would be a more acceptable place without the likes of Madame Sudeykina. But how could she understand such a thing? Herself so devoid of bitterness, so easy in her view of the world, so generous yet so little beholden to others, she knew almost nothing of the ordinary horrors of family life. As for the extraordinary horrors of being the children of an egocentric, possessive, unfaithful genius, these she could see perfectly and help to moderate as well as she could. But she would always remain in some way outside them, in some way above them, vulnerable in their sufferers’ affections to any passing squall of unfavorable circumstance. She would be, after all, a stepmother, but of grown-up children who could act and reflect but not escape.

  BY THE TIME Vera reached his headquarters, Iorgy’s military contact had been transferred, and it was only through Païchadze that she managed to trace him and make the arrangements for her visa. In spite of this delay, she suddenly had the papers she needed just after Christmas, and she made up her mind to leave at once on one of the fast but expensive Italian liners, rather than pay less for slightly more comfort on a later, slower American boat. On New Year’s evening 1940 she dined with Ira Belyankin in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, then took the night train for Genoa, sharing a couchette as far as Chambéry. Her boat ticket was two-way, but the return half was token—a third-class passage for fifty dollars—and it must have occurred to her that it would be a long time before she saw Ira, or any of the Belyankins, or her future stepchildren again. They receded from view: Milène cut off in Sancellemoz, Soulima playing at soldiers in Cosne, Theodore licking his wounds in Le Mans, Kitty—the only grandchild—sent to Switzerland while her father, whom Vera had wined and dined after the panikhida for Mika a month before, sat in a café in Montparnasse, playing cards, writing poetry, and from time to time editing the literary pages of Vozrozhdeniye. War had not yet come to France, but its effects were everywhere to be seen.16

  New York was another planet. Stravinsky and Kall had arrived well before the Rex docked on the 12th of January, and the sense of freedom and a new start lasted as far as the Great Northern Hot
el, where Vera and Igor checked into separate rooms and he could not visit her in hers because they were not married.17 In the Park Lane Cafeteria—another astonishing concept to a Parisienne—he could bring her up to date with his Harvard experiences and his recent trip to the West Coast, where he had conducted two concerts for Monteux in San Francisco the week before Christmas, then gone on to stay with Kall in Los Angeles, seen Balanchine—who was working in Hollywood—and visited the Disney studios with him to examine the models for Fantasia and listen to the Rite of Spring part of the soundtrack.18 Since arriving in New York he had been working on a series of concerts with the Philharmonic, including a program of unadulterated Tchaikovsky.19 The next thing now—curiously, in view of Le Mans—was an exhibition of Theodore’s pictures organized at the Perls Gallery by the indefatigable and ever-hopeful Dagmar.20 Then they were all off to Pittsburgh for more concerts, before Igor went back to Harvard to be a professor once more and Vera headed south to stay with her old Paris friend Georgette in Charleston.21 The problem of her divorce and American social conventions still stood between them and an uncomplicated future.

  At the Webster Hall Hotel in Pittsburgh, Igor tried checking them in as Mr. and Mrs. Stravinsky; but their passports betrayed them, and the embarrassment was all the keener for the fact that the Websters in question were the family of Soulima’s pianist friend Beveridge, whose brother had just met them at the station and was standing beside them as they registered. So for more than two weeks of January in what Vera thought a “sad, provincial city full of factories,”22 they kept separate rooms and a platonic façade, while Igor worked on his symphony and rehearsed Fritz Reiner’s orchestra in Apollo, Jeu de cartes, and the two early ballet suites. His Syria Mosque concerts on the 26th and 28th were his début appearances as a conductor in the smoky city, and after the first concert he made a speech to the members of the Musicians’ Club praising their orchestra and the musical life of America in general. “You see before you a happy man,” he assured them, without telling them all the reasons.23 But a week later, back in New York, the happy man had to watch his intended steam away to South Carolina while he faced a chilly journey in the opposite direction. There had been more hotel troubles. A reporter had traced them to the Great Northern and started asking indiscreet questions about their relationship, after which they had hastily changed hotels, tempers had become frayed, and Igor had ended up having a row, on some pretext or other, with poor Woof.24

  The second block of Harvard lectures was timetabled to begin in March, but the semester, and with it the composition seminars, was starting up again in early February and the professor was required to be in residence. So there was nothing for it but to beard the New England winter in its lair. On the 14th of February so much snow fell in Cambridge that for two or three days nothing moved and it was a relief to get away by train to Chicago on the 18th for another series of concerts, especially as a Chicago premiere for the symphony was back on the schedule for the autumn, Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Carpenter having at last found the extra money to guarantee the commission as well as the purchase of the manuscript.25 Admittedly, Stravinsky still had quite a lot of the music to compose; but Harvard in the spring would be a stimulating environment, and if the weather continued bad, so much the better for indoor work, not least because he had now decided to cut the Gordian knot of American prudery and marry Vera as soon as he could get her in front of a New England justice of the peace.

  After her month in the south, Vera reached Boston on the 2nd of March, and the next day she and Igor drove out fifteen miles to Bedford, Massachusetts, to file a notice of intention to marry, a drive which must for him have conjured up strange memories of a similar winter journey in an open droshky thirty-four years before.26 And just as Igor and Catherine had prevaricated about their exact relationship at Novaya Derevnya in 1906, so Igor now told lies about Vera’s history of marriage and divorce. Briefly, he testified that Vera had married Sudeykin in 1918 and divorced him at Tiflis in February 1920. These fabrications were either believed or “believed” by the probate judge, who probably had little choice but to issue the desired divorce certificate. The couple were married in a civil ceremony in Bedford, in the house of a Harvard professor of Russian named Timothy Teracuzio, on 9 March, a year and a week after the death of Stravinsky’s first wife. The sole competent living witness to the truth, Vera’s husband in New York, did not in this case emerge from the shadows.27

  Between the lie and the act, Stravinsky directed two chamber concerts, one in Boston and one in Cambridge. The programs were the same: the Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, the Soldier’s Tale suite, and the two-piano concerto, which he played with a former piano pupil of Kall’s, Adele Marcus, and Mildred Bliss came up from Washington to hear her “house” concerto and to discuss the symphony commission with the composer.28 In Cambridge, the concert on the 8th—fortunately a non-ticketed affair—had been arranged for the Paine Hall, but demand proved so great that it was moved late in the day to the larger Sanders Theater. A certain irony in this would not have been lost on Stravinsky when he strode into the New Lecture Hall for his fourth lecture on the 13th. The auditorium was less than half full, as if, faced with the choice between the composer’s music and his musicology, Boston and Harvard had decisively opted for the former. Or perhaps it was simply that the novelty of his speaking presence had worn off. Attendance remained modest for the last two lectures. The studiedly controversial fifth lecture on the 20th, with its prolonged attack on Soviet music, was preached to an already partly converted audience of expatriate Russians and academic Russianists, many of whom, nevertheless, found Stravinsky’s (or Souvtchinsky’s) thinking excessively dogmatic, while local critics were disappointed that he said so little about the Russian music they knew, including his own.29 At the final lecture after the Easter break, on 10 April, he was “enthusiastically applauded by his small, though appreciative, audience, and he took curtain calls at the end in the manner of an admired performer.”30 But a cheering mob of excited students would have made a more gratifying culmination.

  After the wedding, Vera and Igor had moved out of the Forbes’s into the Hemenway Hotel on the Back Bay Fens in Boston, and there they stayed for the rest of their time in New England. They had been mulling over their future, and had decided that to return to Europe in May would be both pointless and fraught with practical difficulties. The war, instead of ending within weeks as everyone always seemed to think wars would, was grumbling on, and though the news from France so far was unsettling rather than catastrophic, it was clear that concert work in Europe that year would be negligible, while Igor had his own grim memories of what happened to royalty payments and hire fees at such times. Immediately after his 13 March lecture, he had caught the night train to New York to take part in a concert organized in Town Hall by the Blisses in aid of French war relief, a concert for which he was donating his services on condition that a percentage of the money was earmarked for French artists.31 There was not much point in his returning to Paris merely to be himself once again the beneficiary of precisely this kind of American charity. In the States he still seemed able to attract work and command decent fees. Boston itself, thanks to Koussevitzky, liked him, as both composer and performer. He and Adele Marcus played in Exeter, New Hampshire, just after their New York show, and there was a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony at the end of March.32 And if his lectures had sown any doubts about the durability of his appeal to American audiences, they were firmly dispelled by the Boston concerts, every one of which was packed to the doors for programs dominated by difficult or problematical works like Oedipus Rex and Apollo. Now he had concerts in New York, in the course of which he would be recording Petrushka and The Rite of Spring with the Philharmonic, his first-ever sessions for the Columbia parent company, which had recently been taken over by CBS, had a new policy of recording with American orchestras, and was about to turn the whole philosophy of marketing classical records on its head by literally halving the price of a twelve-inch
disc from two dollars to one.

  But if they wanted to stay in the United States, the question of visas would rear its head once more. It turned out that Igor’s temporary visa as the holder of a French passport could routinely be renewed for six-month periods, but Vera had a Nansen passport and had come to America under a so-called “Titre d’identité et de voyage,” which could not be renewed.33 What happened if they wanted to leave the United States and then come back in? This was no hypothetical question, because while he was in New York Stravinsky had met Carlos Chávez, the conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, who wanted him to conduct in Mexico in July. He simply did not dare leave with Vera unless he was certain they could both return. The only serious alternative was to come in permanently, under the American immigration quota system, and to file for U.S. citizenship on reentry. But Robert Bliss now terrified Stravinsky by announcing that there was a waiting list of at least eight months on the Russian quota—a waiting list one could not get on from within the United States.34 For the second time in less than six months, the world’s immigration bureaucracy seemed to have them by the throat.