Anxiety over these troubles made Stravinsky irritable, and it was just at this moment that things started going wrong with Kall. Igor himself had always been able to put up with the muddles and eccentricities of his helpers if he found them personally congenial; but the cold weather seemed to have affected Kall, who was drunker and more disorganized than ever in the past, added to which Igor was no longer a grass-widower but a newly married man whose wife, however easygoing, would not like to see her husband’s affairs being run by an alcoholic. There was another, complicating factor. Dagmar had been busy in New York fixing Igor’s Columbia bookings and concert dates in return for a commission. But Dagmar liked to mix business with passion, and she was still in undiminished pursuit of her client, with Kall as go-between and confidant. “Woof, dear,” she urged, “write to me as promised right away and I shall destroy at once as promised.—Am so anxious to hear how ‘he’ is … I haven’t had one drop of alcohol since you left—I will become again beautiful. I pray your cough has left you. It seems only what one loves leaves one though.…”35 At other times, Dagmar and Kall would talk on the phone, and after one of these conversations Kall made a scene of some kind with Stravinsky.36 Whether or not Kall was playing Pandarus as Dagmar hoped, his ineptitude as an organizer was unlikely to help her cause. At the end of March, when he and the Stravinskys set off for New York, he left the rail tickets at the hotel and lost two suitcases and a wallet at Grand Central Station when they arrived. Igor lost his temper, and it began to look as if their happy winter together would end in tears.37
Dagmar, fortunately, was a more dependable planner, and she had set up the Carnegie Hall concerts and recordings, together with all necessary press coverage, with dedicated efficiency. From the start, she had been instrumental in persuading Columbia’s classical music director, Moses Smith, to record Stravinsky, and it was probably her fixing that tied the sessions in with a concert series—the composer’s second with the New York Philharmonic that year—including his two great early ballets.38 In the space of a week he conducted four concerts with what was surely America’s best orchestra and probably, therefore, the best in the world at that particular moment when Europe’s finest had been decimated by conscription and anti-Semitism. On the 4th of April, he recorded both The Rite of Spring and Petrushka (the short suite, starting with the “Tour de passe-passe”), in two heavy Carnegie Hall sessions that left him dripping and exhausted. Yet, whatever the strain of recording nearly fifty minutes of the most arduous and complicated modern music in five hours, the results set new standards for both works. Compared to the almost routine precision of postwar performances, they may lack absolute rhythmic security. On the other hand, for brilliance of sound and for sheer physical, balletic energy, they were unmatched in their day, and they still have a unique immediacy and authenticity that must have been a shattering experience to new listeners who acquired these discs in the early forties. Particularly in The Rite of Spring, there are grounds for thinking that the 1940 recording established a view of the music that effectively rendered earlier versions (including of course Stravinsky’s own) obsolete. The fact that the recordings were themselves of outstanding modern quality and could be bought very cheaply also naturally did the music’s dissemination no harm.
The Harvard semester still had a month to run, but Igor’s route back to Boston lay via Washington, where the Blisses had set up a meeting with the director of the U.S. Visa Division and a lunch at the French Embassy, with a view to smoothing over the formalities of his and Vera’s quota application. A certain added urgency may have crept into the deliberations with the news, which arrived during the embassy lunch, that the Germans had occupied Denmark and were at that moment launching an attack on Oslo. The next day, at Harvard, Stravinsky delivered his final lecture, and the day after that he started work on the finale of the symphony. He still had seminars to give, and even a few private lessons. But on 6 May the Forbeses threw a farewell party, and on the 7th the three Russians—husband, wife, and secretary—left Boston Harbor on a ship bound for New York, the first leg of a honeymoon trip that would eventually take them by a circuitous route to California. Before leaving, Igor wrote to his children describing his recent schedule and raising an issue that had been worrying him ever since he had received a letter from Yury Mandelstam announcing that he had himself remarried. “I was struck,” he told Theodore,
by the suddenness of the news of Yura Mandelstam’s remarriage, which he told me by letter. By marrying Vera, I have regularized before the world and the laws of humanity the nineteen years of our union, but with him it’s quite another matter, only a year after Mikusha’s death.39
A brave son might have pointed out that Yury had at least waited for his wife to die. But above all there is a certain defiance in the composer’s statement, a claim for special status, even while its gratuitousness (since the matter had not been raised by Theodore) suggests a bad conscience. This double image of his moral position apparently had not perished with Katya but remained with him, haunting and enriching his feelings, until—decades later—he followed her to the grave.
* * *
THEY WERE in Manhattan for a week, planning the next stage of their cruise and catching up with important people in Igor’s life: his doctor (Garbat); his New York publisher, Ernest Voigt, editor in chief of Schott’s U.S. representative, Associated Music Press; and useful local friends like the Dushkins. It should have been an agreeable time, constructive yet relaxed, but the news from Europe was such as to murder sleep. On the 10th of May, the Nazis invaded the Low Countries on the pretext of protecting their neutrality, and within five days not only had Holland surrendered, but the Wehrmacht had crossed the Meuse at Sedan, smashed the defending French army, and headed swiftly for the Channel. Seldom can a honeymoon trip have taken place under such dark shadows of anxiety. On the 15th, with no letup in the flow of frightening news, Igor and Vera embarked with Kall and a new assistant, Grigory Golubeff, on the Seminole bound for Galveston.40 The idyll of sailing into warm blue seas in spring was regularly shattered by news of what seemed to them the destruction of the Europe they knew. On the 21st, the day they docked at Galveston, came reports that the Germans had reached Abbeville, trapping the British Expeditionary Force and a large part of the French and Belgian armies in the coastal region of Flanders. They did not have the heart to make their intended trip to the Grand Canyon, but instead took a train direct from Houston to Los Angeles, where they arrived on the 23rd “like refugees,” as Vera noted in a burst of empathy with France as she was imagining it.41
They spent their first night at Kall’s house in South Gramercy, but what had been for Igor a cozy and congenial refuge now struck his wife as mean, dirty, and uncomfortable. It had suffered greatly in its owner’s absence and with the passing years. Bills had been left unpaid, there was no electricity or gas, and the telephone had been cut off. It was all somehow symptomatic of poor Woof’s slow disintegration, and Igor, who had had almost eight months of his secretary’s company, could not resist telling him so. There was a quarrel, which was then patched up well enough for them to stay with a roof over their heads. But it was the more imperative for them to find a house or apartment of their own, if only as a temporary recourse for the two months until Mexico, after which, as properly registered immigrants, they could look for something permanent. The decision to stay in America was now irrevocable. With the Nazis in France and advancing on Paris, there could be no thought of an early return.
In the days that followed, they were driven round the more salubrious parts of Los Angeles by friends, looking for somewhere to live: by Otto Klemperer, who was entering one of his manic phases and must have made a somewhat nerve-wracking chauffeur;42 by a piano pupil of Kall’s named Dorothy McQuoid, whom Stravinsky had met on his December visit; and by the dancer Adolph Bolm, who had settled on the West Coast with his wife, Beata, and been appointed resident choreographer of the Hollywood Bowl. Bolm’s latest Bowl project was a stage production of The Firebird
that coming August—with designs by Nicholas Remisoff, who had collaborated with Bolm on the Washington Apollo in 1928—and this he now pressed Stravinsky to agree to conduct. Stravinsky said something like: “I will conduct your Firebird if you will be my guarantor in my application for U.S. citizenship.” And so it was settled.
In 1940, Los Angeles was already a sprawling and confusing city, and there were many immigrants looking for houses that summer.43 It took them ten days to find one they liked, at 124 South Swall Drive in Beverly Hills, an unassuming single-story house in one of the gridded streets that run south off Wilshire Boulevard. So desperate were they by this time that they signed on the spot, and within three days they had moved in, with such belongings as they had with them. Thus their Californian life together stumbled into motion: two more Russians in a city created by migration and rapidly filling up with Europeans in flight from a conflict which, it was increasingly being said, spelt the end of civilization as they knew it and the beginning of a new European Dark Age. On the very day that the Stravinskys found their house, Paris was bombed by the Luftwaffe for the first time, and eleven days later, on the 14th of June, the German army took possession of the grandest and most desirable real estate even they had yet violated. The swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and, the next day, the Palace of Versailles. A week later, France fell. Of the Stravinskys scattered around the French provinces, nothing was known.
Between the news bulletins on the one hand and the peculiarly detached Hollywood social world on the other, Stravinsky could again turn to his symphony finale. For the first time there was real pressure to finish the work, now firmly scheduled for Chicago in November. But he seems in any case to have had no difficulty reentering the music’s particular world each time he took up the score, and though the symphony is diverse in character, it shows few outward signs of its disjointed manufacture. Perhaps the slightly self-conscious finale references to the main theme of the first movement (an atypical device for Stravinsky) could be seen as a symptom of anxiety, but only with inside knowledge, since musically it makes perfect sense. On the other hand, the main finale theme, with its curious suggestion of Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov, derives from an idea Stravinsky had scribbled on the back of a telegram form, then rejected, the previous autumn—an idea that eventually resurfaced in the “Pas d’Action” of the Danses concertantes.44
Outside working hours, the Stravinskys slipped effortlessly into the round of star-studded garden parties, charity teas, and drive-in dinners that were Los Angeles’s special contribution to civilized life. They saw a good deal of Edward G. Robinson, an old but never intimate friend (to whom they remained “Mr. and Mrs. Stravinsky”); there were Marlene Dietrich, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Remarque, Cecil B. De Mille, Hedda Hopper, Max Steiner, and an ever-expanding credit sequence of Hollywood names, some of whom doubtless wondered who exactly this diminutive Russian and his large but still-beautiful wife were, while others certainly knew enough to hope that his intellectual eminence and artistic genius would rub off on them. These days they were both speaking passable English, Vera having studied assiduously in Paris the previous autumn; and their rich, sonorous accents were far from out of place in that land of the immigrant and the B-feature thriller. There is no particular evidence that, at so early a stage, they were bored by these gleamingly vapid, self-congratulatory gatherings. What is certain is that the climate suited them after Northern Europe and New England, which—Igor complained to one reporter—had only two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July. In many subtle ways, California soon began to affect their temper as well as their health. In Beverly Hills, surrounded by celluloid showbiz smiles in the unbroken sunshine, even Igor’s hitherto inscrutable camera-face started to soften and the wonderful radiance which his family and friends had always known made its belated début in photographs.
Six weeks after settling into South Swall Drive they set off for Mexico, having at last managed—through interminable meetings with lawyers—to secure quota allocations without needing to leave the country before applying. It was, all the same, no token visit. Chávez had arranged for Stravinsky to conduct no fewer than four concerts with his Orquesta Sinfónica, and he was also booked to record his Divertimento for RCA Victor. Either because of the immigration rules or because there was no air service, they had to make the seventeen-hundred-mile journey by train, via El Paso and Guadalajara, a languid four-day trek with delays for paperwork and innumerable stops at wayside halts to take on peasants with their bundles, their babies, and their guitars. Mexico City itself, with its nearby Aztec ruins and its rim of volcanic mountains, was more than worth the discomfort, and Stravinsky liked working with the excitable but disciplined Mexican musicians. The concerts went well. But when it came to the recording session, it turned out that radio interference had broken in on the tape, and it could not be used.45
The final concert was on 4 August, and on the 5th they again boarded the train for Los Angeles, travelling this time with an immigration lawyer via Nogales on the border with Arizona. Here, on 8 August, it was necessary to leave the train and submit to medical examination and a lengthy form-filling process. One of the immigration officers asked Stravinsky if he wanted to change his name; “well, most of them do,” he drawled when Stravinsky chortled at the suggestion.46 The inquisition lasted three hours—a long wait in the scorching early afternoon heat of the Arizona desert, but a short enough time, in all conscience, in which to change the direction of one’s life. When the U.S. consul eventually drove them to their train on the Arizona side of the border, they were not yet Americans; but they had embarked on a process that, after five years and barring accidents, would bring them to that desirable state. When they in due course got back to South Swall Drive, it felt, Vera said, like coming home.47
AT LAST there was news of the family in Europe. Theodore and Milène had both written, and there was a letter from Rieti, who had left Paris just before the German takeover and was now in New York. He had seen Soulima at Nevers and found him in good heart. “But I think our France is really done for, alas,” he added.48 Theodore had moved to the region of Toulouse, in unoccupied France, though whether voluntarily or by evacuation was not clear. His father was now worrying desperately about how they would all survive the coming winter, since Milène had written from Sancellemoz that she had no money and was unable to get access to the Paris bank account.49 He had already sent fifty dollars via Vera’s friend Olga Sallard, but he had no idea whether it had arrived; and now he wanted to send more. He was desperate for news of Soulima and Madubo (this was before Rieti’s letter came), and anxious about Kitty in her mountain fastness at Leysin: “I suppose,” he told Theodore, “that [Aunts Vera and Olga] are offended that I didn’t send them an offical announcement of my marriage with Vera.”50 Even in wartime, there was to be no excuse for failure to communicate.
At this nervous moment, when so little was known and outcomes were shrouded in mist, he at long last finished his Symphony in C—of all his works the one that bears covert witness to the most terrible and tragic events. Later that day, the 17th of August, he stepped onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl to rehearse his Firebird, in the form of its short 1919 suite, with Bolm’s troupe and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.51 The change of mood could hardly have been more abrupt. He had attended concerts at the Bowl and endured the queues of cars and the nightmare of parking, to say nothing of the doubtful advantages of listening in the open air, the polyphony of nature noises and distant traffic, the cool air and the rustle of fur coats, but he had never conducted there before, and he had certainly not seen the Bowl as it would be for the concert on the 27th. For the danced part of the program, Remisoff had designed a screen of brightly painted and brilliantly lit shrubbery to conceal the orchestra. At the end of The Firebird the bushes slid sideways “to reveal a fairy-tale city that reached into a rainbow” and the Firebird “mounted the topmost tower in triumph over all the monsters, kikimoras and boliboshki who had been so terrifying in their chartreu
se, green, devil-red and bright blue costumes.” Even the audience was invited to contribute to this spectacular Russian son et lumière. Before The Firebird began the lights were extinguished, and the eighteen thousand patrons held lighted matches above their heads, “like a vast field of fire-flies.”52 In the interval the critic Deems Taylor made a speech in which he claimed that Bolm had choreographed the suite because the complete ballet score was in Paris and “he doubted the propriety of asking for it at present.”53
Such events were comforting to Stravinsky’s sense of belonging in this new and remote land, but they could not disguise the fact that his future there as a working composer was at best uncertain. He had no commissions nor prospect of any. From Europe he could expect nothing. Since the spring, his music had been under a formal Nazi ban, so the more countries Hitler invaded, the fewer would perform his work.54 In any case, the distribution of royalties (especially from Schott and Édition Russe) was bound to be curtailed, as it had been in the last war. So if he wanted to earn his living by his pen as well as his baton, he would have to adapt to the environment in which he found himself, an environment in which the serious composer was an object of prestige rather than comprehension, and in which commercial criteria held almost universal sway.
Accordingly, early in October, he again visited Paramount, toured the studios, and lunched with the new music director, Louis Lipstone. A few days later, on the 12th, he attended a screening of Fantasia at the Disney studios, an experience that sorely tested his goodwill toward what was, after all, very much the “intellectual” end of the Hollywood spectrum.55 He knew, of course, that his score had been cut and reorganized; but he now had to confront the dinosaurs in all their animated grotesquerie, and watch the conductor, Leopold Stokowski, walk up and down a color-lit staircase and shake hands with Mickey Mouse. Yet however distasteful he may have found this whole performance,56 he swallowed his pride and, a few days later, entered into negotiations with Disney over possible film animations of other works of his. On the 28th of October, before Fantasia had even been shown to a paying audience,57 he signed a new contract for the exploitation of The Firebird, Renard, and Fireworks, an option for which he was paid $1,500. Had Disney ever used any of these works, there would have been more cash, but he never did.58
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