Stravinsky
Page 19
Stravinsky had also discovered that it was possible to make money by allowing his works to be adapted in band arrangements, with or without voice, and a few days before the Paramount visit he had made an agreement with an arranger called Gregory Stone, under which Stone was authorized to make adaptations from various Stravinsky works, including the three early ballets and Pulcinella, in return for a fifty percent royalty and an acknowledgment of the composer’s “editorship.”59 This might seem to conflict with Stravinsky’s supposed reluctance to allow any music he wrote for films to be adapted or orchestrated by other hands; but he appears to have felt differently about existing works, especially where the agreement was under his control and did not place him at the mercy of some large, philistine institution. It may nevertheless have been at Stone’s suggestion that he spent several days in early October writing a tango specifically with a view to commercial exploitation.60 Although the Tango is often regarded as a piano piece, the three-line sketch is actually the short-score of a work for band or instrumental ensemble, and the object was to add words to it and turn it into a popular song.61 It is this commercial intention that accounts for the straightforward dance-hall metrical regularity of the piece, compared with the quirky stylizations of the tango in The Soldier’s Tale—a concession that shows a hitherto unheard-of readiness on Stravinsky’s part to compromise in order to break into the marketplace.
Nothing of the kind leapt to the ear when he conducted the premiere of the Symphony in C, “composed to the glory of God [and] dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary,” in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall on the 7th of November.62 To some, a half-hour symphonic work by Stravinsky was still too baffling a phenomenon to call forth more than bemused admiration. A few were struck by the ease with which the new work kept company with popular old scores like The Firebird and Petrushka, but that was more the case with the first two movements than the last two. “The symphony’s immediate appeal,” one critic found, “undoubtedly lessens as it goes on, for the fugue in the third movement plumbs depths which are not easy for a listener to reach on his first try. The fourth movement, too, is a great deal more recondite than the two which open the work.”63 Others were content merely to enjoy the feeling that, for a few short hours, their city was the center of the musical universe, “a privilege,” one wrote, “which Chicago will not cease to value.”64
It was too much to expect the Chicago press to notice the most remarkable fact about the symphony: that it was the first concert work for orchestra without soloist or voices, not counting arrangements or suites, that Stravinsky had written since Fireworks (which happened to be on the program with it). In this simple and obvious sense, it marked a return to something he was conventionally regarded as having rejected. Once before, in 1925, he had thought of writing a symphony, but had dropped the idea in favor of Oedipus Rex, an opera that had nevertheless reinstated the symphony orchestra in his work after years of wind bands and small mixed ensembles.65
This time the idea had not been dropped, though it might well have been if Stravinsky and Claudel had not fallen out over their Ida Rubinstein commission. But the two symphony projects had one other significant thing in common; both, so far as one can judge, were conceived in America, and with American concert life in the foreground of Stravinsky’s field of musical vision. What this would have meant to the 1925 symphony can only be guessed at. What it meant to the Symphony in C is writ large in the music.
Conducting symphony concerts all over provincial America, Stravinsky had become conscious of the intensely conservative world he was invading, and what an incongruous figure he cut in it. He entered it as a tiger might enter a cat’s home: a creature not wholly out of place, yet for all that rather frightening and not ideally to be admitted too often. What sort of work might he himself contribute to such a culture? The obvious answer was a symphony: a symphony in C, of course—like Beethoven’s first and Mozart’s last, the purest, most archetypal, most classical, above all least frightening kind of orchestral concert work. When questioned about the new piece by nosy Boston reporters, he had concocted a technical explanation of the title: it was neither in C major nor in C minor but simply in C, and “instead of all chords gravitating towards one final tonic chord, all notes [would] gravitate towards a single note.”66 Leaving aside the accuracy of this description (it was not accurate), it studiously missed the point. This was a work that would start out from the image of the symphony—something rooted in the consciousness of anyone who had ever attended what was still called a “symphony” concert. Like the post-Brandenburg Dumbarton Oaks concerto, it would pay ritual homage to the various forms and procedures locked up in that basic image: it would employ a Beethoven-sized orchestra and have four movements, sonata forms, first and second subjects, recognizable key sequences, and all the rest of the baggage of the symphonic program-note. But behind all that, and eventually in front of it, it would be doing something essentially different. It would be pursuing Stravinskian methods through the prism of the symbolic idea, just as earlier works like the Piano Sonata or even Oedipus Rex had done. Like all his so-called neoclassical works, in other words, it was an exercise in modelling—in taking some strong idea as the starting point for a personal creative journey like any other. Hence the apparent change of focus as the work proceeded, a change actually no greater, allowing for the difference in scale, than in Dumbarton Oaks; and hence the greater difficulty—greater modernity perhaps—that sensitive critics experienced in the last two movements.
The symphony included the last music Stravinsky conceived and composed in Europe, and for all its American affiliations, it was a fitting climax to his life as a European, just as the Harvard lectures had embodied certain academic and polemical aspects of French thought. And just as the wellbred Gallic framework of the lectures concealed an individuality of a distinctly un-Cartesian type, so the symphony was in reality a most curious and unclassical addition to the classical repertoire it smilingly and reassuringly claimed to represent. The one thing one could safely say about it was that it knew where it stood in relation to that repertoire. From the outposts of the West, that certainty would for a long time be hard to recapture.
9
A HOUSE IN THE HILLS
STRAVINSKY was not returning to Los Angeles from Chicago, but planned instead to spend the next three months in the East, conducting, socializing, and living out of suitcases. He and Vera gave up the Beverly Hills house, and for the second consecutive winter they did without a fixed abode. In Chicago they stayed for two weeks with the composer John Alden Carpenter and his wife, but rather as in a hotel, coming and going as they pleased and rarely seeing their hosts.1 Igor had three concerts with the orchestra, always with the new symphony, which—he told Nadia—went beautifully, even though there had been terrible trouble with mistakes in the printed orchestral materials.2 He also sat in on a rehearsal of his host’s own recent symphony. And they went to see a triple bill put on by a new company called Ballet Theatre, which had been set up in 1939 by a well-to-do young dancer by the name of Lucia Chase.
From Chicago, they proceeded to Cincinnati, where Eugene Goossens was now the orchestra’s chief conductor. There were more performances of the symphony, and the audiences were so enthusiastic that, after The Rite of Spring in the second concert, they went on cheering and refused to leave. But by the 26th of November they were in New York, and there were still more reunions. Balanchine was there with a new young wife, Brigitta Hartwig (the dancer Vera Zorina); they saw Dushkin and Rieti and the painter Pavel Tchelitcheff, who had designed Nabokov’s Ode for Diaghilev and Balanchine’s Schubert ballet Errante for Les Ballets 1933; and they lunched with Serge Denham, the manager of the latest incarnation of the old Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They even went to Harlem and listened to the swing bands.3 It was all cheerfully remote from the concert circuit and New York was numbingly unlike Los Angeles. In Cincinnati it had been unseasonably warm, but in Manhattan it was snowing
hard in good time for Christmas, and as the festive season approached Igor promptly went down with a heavy cold that by Christmas Day itself was threatening to turn into full-blown flu. Just as in the old days in St. Petersburg, it was enough to keep him indoors for a week, until New Year’s Day 1941, when he and Vera went to Central Park and fed the squirrels.4
Behind all this jollity and pampering, there was hard professional planning. Balanchine, who had for years been choreographing concert music but had never risked anything of the kind with Stravinsky, had now got his agreement to turn the Violin Concerto into a ballet for a one-off triple bill being promoted by Sol Hurok under the aegis of the provocatively titled Original Ballet Russe. At the same time Lucia Chase’s manager, Richard Pleasant, had commissioned Stravinsky to make a chamber-orchestral arrangement of the so-called “Bluebird” pas de deux in the third-act divertissement of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, for inclusion in the rival Ballet Theatre’s coming February season of chamber ballets. So while using New York as a base for conducting trips to Minneapolis, Washington—his first appearance there with an orchestra—and Boston (where Nadia, who had arrived from Europe two months before and was teaching at the Longy School, threw a party for them at Gerry’s Landing), Igor spent his time going through the concerto with Sam Dushkin, rehearsing the ballet in the icy-cold 51st Street Theatre with Balanchine, and mulling over the score of Tchaikovsky’s pas de deux.5 On 22 January he conducted the first of three performances of Balustrade, as the new ballet was called.6 A fortnight later, having completed the Tchaikovsky arrangement and banked five hundred dollars for his modest pains, he once again boarded a train with Vera bound for Los Angeles.
In each of his previous Stravinsky ballets, Balanchine had leant toward an abstract rendering of plot, whether the scenario was inherently neutral and architectural, as in Apollo, or detailed and anecdotal, as in Jeu de cartes and The Fairy’s Kiss, which he had also staged in the 1937 Met season. But Balustrade was from start to finish abstract; there was, simply, no plot, and the choreography, which Balanchine composed while listening to a record of the concerto,7 was a direct response to the music in terms of movement, texture, and dynamic contour. In this, it curiously resembled dance routines of the kind Balanchine had been composing in Hollywood. And it had one other disconcerting property: whereas narrative dancing was a continuous interweaving of gesture and response, as in a play, Balustrade was rather a succession of linked dialogues, parallel to the ones in the music.8 “Its novelty,” Edwin Denby wrote,
is that it is not complex at each moment, in the manner we are accustomed to. The individual part has almost no countermovement, no angular breaking of the dance impulse or direction. The impulse is allowed to flow out, so to speak, through the arms and legs, which delineate the dance figure lightly, as it were in passing. As they do in our show dancing … Once more, dancing like any living art has moved ahead of what we had come to think of as the modern style; and this time without even any manifestos to warn us.9
Another sympathetic reviewer admitted that it was “scarcely a pretty piece.”10 But Stravinsky himself remembered the ballet, which was never revived, as “one of the most satisfactory visualizations of any of my works.”11 Tchelitcheff’s designs were barely more allusive than the music: “a white balustrade [presumably the source of the title] flanked by a couple of thin, conventionalized trees,”12 and his costumes began “after the first minute or so [to] look like a bunch of rags cutting the line of the body at the knee, obscuring the differentiation of steps, and messing up the dance.”13 But even Denby had to acknowledge that “it was right of the management to take a first-rate painter for a work of this kind; an artist’s mistake is infuriating but it isn’t vulgar.”
The fact was that Tchelitcheff, whatever his flair for stage design, disliked the theatre and could never reconcile himself to its ephemerality. Moreover he was increasingly allergic to what he called “ballet-ivanich”—roughly, “son of Firebird”—and he refused point blank to design a new Stravinsky ballet for Denham: “Just thinking about all those ‘ballets russes,’ invoking poor Sergey Pavlovich, makes me feel sick,” he told the composer. “I’m sure Diaghilev would never have formed his company if he had known what his precedent would lead to.”14 Whether he exempted Balanchine from these strictures is not clear. He had stayed away from the dress rehearsal and the first night, pleading a “high fever,” but he then praised Stravinsky’s music without saying a word about the choreography. It was as if he would have agreed with Claudel that music of the purity and self-containedness of Stravinsky’s simply left the attendant artist with nothing to contribute; and in any case Tchelitcheff, like Claudel, was hardly by nature an “attendant,” whereas Balanchine seemed completely without artistic vanity, accepted—even relished—the subsidiarity and evanescence of the dance, and liked to renew his work rather than revive it. “What is Balustrade?” he asked years later.
Stravinsky never wrote Balustrade; he wrote Violin Concerto. The ballet should be announced as what it is. Then the musicians can come, the young people who love music and who want to hear the composition—they’ll know what they’re getting. They don’t have to look at the ballet if it bores them, they can just listen to the music. And that’s fine with me, that’s wonderful.15
· · ·
THE FIRST THING the Stravinskys did when they got to Los Angeles on the 9th of February was take rooms in the Château Marmont, a luxury apartment block designed like a medieval castle in the Laurel Canyon area of Sunset Boulevard, a favorite base for the less-domesticated Hollywood stars and their hangers-on. For the Stravinskys, the idea was to spend a few days there while they looked for a more permanent home in the area; but what with satisfying the first need of West Coast life—to buy a car—and rehearsing for concerts with the LAPO in Los Angeles and San Diego, they were slow to begin serious househunting and soon decided on a month’s lease on a Château Marmont apartment. They then realized that, as the previous May, rented accommodation would be hard to find and that, for the first time in either of their lives, they would have to take out a mortgage and buy a house. Within days of this momentous and nerve-wracking decision, they had found what Vera described in her diary as “a cozy house on a hill”16 but was, to be more exact, a cramped, secluded single-story cottage with a steep-sloping front garden behind tall hedges near the top of a twisty residential lane called North Wetherly Drive, a mile or so on the Beverly Hills side of the Marmont. You could walk in three or four minutes down to Sunset Boulevard, with its attenuated sprawl of shops, offices, and restaurants, and you could even walk back up again, if you were fit and did not mind the curious scrutiny of neighbors not themselves much accustomed to journeys on foot. The Stravinskys, too, now had their secondhand Dodge, and, though Igor himself did not drive (had not driven for fifteen years or more), Vera had passed her American test the previous summer and enjoyed being at the wheel. She did not, though, much care for suburban Los Angeles. Igor thought the house “ravishing,” but Vera disliked the absence of any local center, the lack of small shops and cafés, the immaculate front lawns on which children never played and dogs never misbehaved, and the enclosed social life where nobody ever dropped in uninvited.17 As an image of the free world, it was undeniably somewhat disappointing.
They moved in on the 6th of April, and on the 7th the hot water system failed and the gas cooker broke down. Somehow they coped; but for Parisian apartment-dwellers, used to concierges and maids and maintenance staff, it was disconcerting to be suddenly alone in a quiet American street with nobody they could call on except by telephone in a language they had not yet fully mastered. Within a few weeks they had hired two gardeners and a cook, but they too were Russians, who spoke little or no English and brought them no nearer to the community. Their most frequent non-Russian contacts in the early days, in fact, were Igor’s dentist, who had embarked on a draconian course of extractions and bridge-building in the neglected interior of his mouth, and an aspiring middle-aged composer nam
ed Earnest Andersson, who had contacted him at the Château Marmont, offered him temporary accommodation in his house, and booked him for a series of lessons in the course of which he was to help Andersson “learn good manners in composition by watching how I rewrite his symphony from the foundations up.”18 During the next two years, Andersson became something of a fixture at 1260 North Wetherly Drive. They met more than two hundred times, so often, in fact, that one suspects Stravinsky of having prolonged the course for the sake of the twenty-five dollars per lesson, which he badly needed not only for his own well-being, as we shall shortly see. He later told an interviewer that he had himself learnt a lot in the process.19 But poor Andersson hardly had time to profit from the experience, for in June 1943, six months after the final lesson, he suddenly died. “All this is very sad,” Stravinsky lamented superstitiously after seeing Andersson in his coffin, “and just shows I shouldn’t teach.”20