Gradually they began to build up a small circle of Russian, and even non-Russian, acquaintances. On the Russian side there were the Bolms and the painter and theatre designer Eugene Berman, whom Vera had known in Paris but who had come to California, it was said, in pursuit of the film actress Ona Munson after seeing her in Gone with the Wind;21 also their doctor, Prince Galitzin, who like many of their professional advisers was also (or primarily) a friend and drinking companion. Kall had fallen out of true intimacy, partly because of the drink, partly because he had the rare gift of inspiring Vera’s distaste; but he came occasionally and sometimes brought Russian books. A postcard from the Stravinskys in El Paso, on the way to Mexico in July, thanks him for poems by Akhmatova and Blok, as well as, more surprisingly, Pushkin’s Onegin.22 It was through Berman, who specialized in lesbians, that a former, passing acquaintanceship with the playwright Mercedes de Acosta began to turn into a close friendship soon after they moved to North Wetherly Drive. And friendship with Mercedes soon brought them into contact with her reputed lover Greta Garbo, and so back to the inevitable self-congratulatory Hollywood star-circuit, which flattered but did not enrich. Mercedes was witness to a certain mellowing in Stravinsky’s personality during these early Hollywood years. In France, where she had met him through Prince Argutinsky, she had “thought him conceited and ungracious,” but now she warmed to both him and Vera.23 Many of those who had known him in Europe noticed that he became gradually more relaxed, less despotic, on the open-necked West Coast. Mercedes would nevertheless learn in due course that not all his ice had been melted by the Californian sun.
Then there were musician friends like Sol Babitz, a violinist in the LAPO. A Brooklyn Jew of Russian descent, Babitz was a clever thinker about violin technique, contributed a brilliant column on string-playing to the musicians’s federation journal, International Musician, and like Dushkin would often advise Stravinsky on violinistic matters. There were half-unexpected neighbors, like the inescapable Dagmar, who moved to Beverly Hills soon after them and came round one day for what Vera called “having things out” but Dagmar called “remembering.”24 Vera, who knew all about Dagmar but had not met her before, tactfully absented herself, only to return several hours later to find Dagmar still remembering and not having had things out. To suggest that Vera was jealous would be absurd, but she may well have read this ebullient ex-movie star as a potential nuisance. In the next weeks and months they were often at parties with Dagmar, who nearly always got drunk, sometimes paralytically. At one of her own lavish dinners, she and her maid drank so much that they passed out and a doctor had to be summoned. “The men behaved better,” Vera noted drily in her diary.25
Finally, a few doors down Wetherly Drive, another old Paris friend, the Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger, had bought a house, much larger than theirs, eccentrically decorated and furnished from the stock-in-trade of antique and flea markets, and inhabited—apart from its owner—mainly by cats.
Though spacious in its way, the Stravinskys’ new house had few rooms and lacked the thick-walled privacy of Igor’s huge European apartments in Morges or Nice or Paris. Fortunately, it also lacked their density of population. Behind the single large living room, which fronted on to a verandah and the sloping lawn, was a smaller room, with a sofa and large numbers of books, which would in due course serve as a spare bedroom. As he had always done in new premises, Igor quickly had his studio set up, at the other end of a narrow passage out of the sitting room, with a pair of upright pianos, both in mediocre condition and usually out of tune; and here he was soon at work amid the familiar organized clutter of pens, pencils, colored inks, erasers, photographs, icons, ornaments, stravigor stave-rollers, stopwatches, and music paper. There were fragmentary sketches of a work in hand, a score for a chamber orchestra similar (though not identical) to the one he had used for his Tchaikovsky arrangement, as if he had planned to write an original piece for Ballet Theatre’s chamber repertoire; or it may have been the piece he had at some point mentioned to Tchelitcheff. In fact the exact concept of the Danses concertantes was slow to emerge. A sketch for a set of variations made at the time of the Tango back in October might well suggest an idea for a ballet, and this may have remained the intention until, in March, Rieti wrote to tell him (mistakenly) that Ballet Theatre was closing down and merging with Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan for a tour of South America that summer.26 At all events, when Werner Janssen got wind of the piece in September 1941 it was still unattached, though two-thirds written, and he was able to commission it as a concert work for the orchestra he had recently founded in Los Angeles precisely for the performance of bright new works of this type.27
From his sun-drenched Hollywood hillside, Igor kept track of events in Europe and, while he never shared the Paris-born Nadia’s agonized sense of guilt at having fled the country of Joan of Arc, he did worry ceaselessly about his family stranded there.28 Nadia had seen Soulima in good spirits at Vichy, which was encouraging news in one sense and discouraging in another, since the collaborationist Vichy government was behaving in a more and more Nazi-like, xenophobic way. Luckily by the time Stravinsky heard, in May 1941, that Vichy was deporting Jews and others in large numbers, he already knew that Soulima was in Paris and taking part in concerts;29 he had given a Salle Gaveau recital in January, taken one of the piano parts in Les Noces under Charles Munch at the Conservatoire in early March, and appeared as soloist in Scriabin’s Piano Concerto at the Châtelet later that month. Igor remained blissfully unaware that in April Soulima had also asked a Nazi acquaintance in Paris to enquire of Willy Strecker whether he might be able to arrange concert work in Germany, a request Strecker was forced to refuse because he mistakenly believed Soulima to be a French citizen.30 Theodore, meanwhile, had managed to arrange an exhibition in Toulouse, but regular work was unobtainable in Villemursur-Tarn, where he and Denise were living, and money had become a desperate problem. In midsummer, Igor’s fears about the Vichy regime proved only too justified when Theodore was interned, as an enemy alien, in the concentration camp at Recebedou, where he was left virtually without food for four days and was only released when a local farmer came looking for hands to help with the haymaking.31
Since the winter, Igor had been frantically in search of ways of sending money and provisions to his three children, as well as to Kitty Mandelstam and Ira Belyankin, and to the Nosenko sisters in Switzerland, who were in charge of Kitty and were also paying the upkeep of Berthe Essert’s grave in Lausanne. He was meeting Milène’s fees at Sancellemoz and Kitty’s at Leysin. Some of his European funds, he wrote to Theodore in June, were still accessible, but for the rest he was having to find devious ways of transmitting money from the neutral U.S.A. to combatant France, which was both difficult and technically illegal.32 This usually involved French or Italian friends in America instructing relatives in Europe according to some agreed code. For instance, Darius Milhaud, who had recently taken up a post at Mills College in Oakland (near San Francisco) would instruct his mother in Aix-en-Provence to “give [Theodore] Strawinsky news of his father, as you did recently. All well.”33 Later, when the American censor became suspicious, the formula was changed to “Just seen Stravinsky. Health as usual. Transmit children.”34 For Darius’s mother, in Vichy France, the transaction was at first not much more than an inconvenience; but when the Nazis occupied the whole of France in November 1942, the money transfers assumed a far more dangerous complexion. Mme. Milhaud (who was seventy-five, had just had a cataract operation, and was generally in poor health) had seventy German soldiers billeted on the ground floor of her family house at L’Enclos.35 Later, the whole house was seized and the remarkable lady was transferred to a clinic, where, in January 1944, she died. On her instructions, however, the Stravinsky payments continued, while the composer gradually—and, it must be said, on terms somewhat generous to himself—repaid the money to her son in California.36
The trouble was that, exactly as he had feared, Igor’s own normal income was threa
tening to dry up altogether. After February 1941, and apart from Werner Janssen, Los Angeles seemed to lose interest alike in his conducting and in his music, while the so-called music industry itself remained all too alive to the prestige of his name. In May he signed an endorsement for a “radio-phonograph” made by Stromberg-Carlson, which was then marketed as the “Igor Stravinsky Autograph Model” at the exalted price of four hundred dollars. But the charming and elegant couple pictured in the company’s advertisement in intimate enjoyment of their “Stravinsky Autograph” would have been hard pressed to find their nominal hero or his music on the Los Angeles billboards during these troubled times. Indeed his sole conducting date anywhere until almost the end of the year was a return visit to Mexico in July, where, thanks to Chávez’s energy and enthusiasm, he directed a pair of concerts of his music (including the symphony), and re-recorded the Divertimento. Meanwhile in the States it was the pot-boiling little Tango that was attracting the most interest. At the end of March, Sam Dushkin had included a transcription for violin and piano in his Town Hall recital, and three months later, while Stravinsky was in Mexico and Mercury were still trying to resolve the problem of the lyric, the jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman conducted an orchestral arrangement in a Philadelphia concert: a very poor performance, Leonard Feist (of Mercury) wrote to the composer, “and poorly publicized. There were ten thousand jitterbugs who came only to hear Goodman’s band.”37 The press, however, foresaw a bright future for the new piece; “it might,” one even thought, “become a rival of Ravel’s Bolero as a public favorite.”38
To add insult to these various injuries, a substantial part of Stravinsky’s royalty income was being blocked by Édition Russe’s New York agent, Galaxy. The irony of this particular situation was that all or most of his ERM works were in the public domain in the U.S.A., while Galaxy were refusing to pass on his income from sales and rentals on the grounds that their contract was not with Stravinsky but with ERM’s Paris representative Païchadze, a French resident with whom it was regrettably not permitted for them to do business. Igor’s fury at this bland obstructiveness was compounded by the fact that he was in regular contact with ERM’s proprietor, Koussevitzky, who was at that very moment in the process of booking him to conduct a composition class at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately, Koussevitzky was not in possession of any legal documentation with which to override Païchadze’s authority. Why, Stravinsky asked despairingly, could Galaxy not make ex gratia payments for the time being, as Associated were doing in respect of his (unfortunately more modest) Schott royalties?39 As with most expressions of the ordinary man’s bewilderment at the bureaucratic mentality, the question went unanswered and no money was forthcoming.
In the midst of all these anxieties and clashes of culture, Stravinsky suddenly took one of the most extraordinary decisions of his life. In an access of goodwill toward his new hosts, and out of a desire to write what he called “a work of national importance,” he made an arrangement for chorus and orchestra of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and invited Mercury to publish it.40
Early that July, Earnest Andersson was coming for a lesson almost every day, but he did not come on the 4th of July, and instead Stravinsky spent the day making the arrangement, apparently at Andersson’s suggestion.41 He had, of course, sometimes conducted the anthem at the start of his American concerts, and he must often have thought that he could improve on the standard arrangement, especially when he found out that the Federal law establishing the tune as the national anthem said nothing about any particular harmonization.42 Perhaps, he suggested to Feist, Congress might even standardize his version by law. In any case, the premiere was fixed for Washington in early September, President Roosevelt would be there and the manuscript would be presented to him. The composer would waive all performance fees and rejected the obvious solecism of dedicating to the American people what, in the best sense, was already theirs.
Feist was enthusiastic, even though Stravinsky’s generosity over fees meant that Mercury would make hardly any money on the deal. After all, it indicated “a background of feeling towards this country and a sense of service” that Feist could not but reciprocate.43 He grew more nervous, admittedly, when it turned out that he would have to print “eight different versions in this slightly speculative market.”44 What he meant, of course, was that it would be optimistic to expect choirs or orchestras to replace their copies of the traditional arrangement with a new and—to be frank—somewhat more challenging version of an anthem which, in any case, most of them knew by heart. He may also have foreseen positive resistance to Stravinsky’s arrangement, even though it was less a complete reharmonization than a freewheeling gloss on the familiar text—a sort of Pulcinellification, with some scrunchy added notes here and there and a few quirks in the bass line.
The harmonization was duly copyrighted, but it proved too much for the White House, who swiftly but politely declined to participate. The first performance was thus delayed until 14 October, when Andersson’s son-in-law, James Sample, conducted it at the end of a concert by the WPA Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the Embassy Auditorium, Los Angeles. The anthem was sung three times, and there were no protests, though “the audience seemed loath to join [in].”45 Stravinsky himself planned to conduct it for the first time at his St. Louis concerts just before Christmas, but it seems that there was adverse comment during rehearsals and he promptly withdrew the arrangement, on the pretext that the parts were full of mistakes or the score unavailable, according to which newspaper you read. He did, however, conduct it in San Francisco three weeks later, by which time the published materials were available. If there were grumbles, they were isolated and unimportant. Even the fact that the United States had been at war for a month did not arouse the patriotic guard dogs of the vulnerable West Coast. As for any hint that the arrangement might be illegal, that was far from the composer’s or his publisher’s mind.46
By the start of December 1941, the Danses concertantes were complete except for the short fifth movement, which in any case was to be an exact reprise of the work’s opening pages with a stitched-up ending, and this Stravinsky wrote in January after his two concerts in San Francisco. The finished score is dated the 13th, but Vera’s diary notes that finishing touches were still being added on the 14th, before the score went for copying.47 Just over three weeks later, on the 8th of February, he conducted the premiere with Janssen’s orchestra in the mock-Renaissance Wilshire Ebell Theatre, his first-ever appearance in that particular hall, and for him a happy début, since he found Janssen’s players first rate and strongly approved his unusual generosity in granting five full rehearsals for the twenty-minute Danses plus the well-known Pulcinella suite.48
The work itself, though, raised some puzzling issues for the Los Angeles press that were not much elucidated by Sol Babitz’s article in the program maintaining that Stravinsky’s neoclassicism was these days a matter of “reliving the music of the past in a new way …
Stravinsky’s means is music, his subject, the music of others. Here he is in the tradition of Bach harmonizing the themes of others; van Gogh repainting famous Rembrandts and Millets in his own style, and Chapman rendering Homer. Not judgment but sympathy is the purpose of these men. Their “imitations” are as good or better than the originals.…49
And he quoted Stravinsky’s own account of his procedure: “After studying many pages of a certain composer, I begin to sense his musical personality and signature. Like a detective, I reconstruct his musical experience.” Reviewing the performance for Modern Music, Alfred Frankenstein wondered how much of this was “official.” “Stravinsky,” he noted, “said nothing even remotely similar during the hour I spent with him over the score.” What he did say was that “the attention span of today’s audience is limited, and the problem of the present-day composer is one of condensation. To say the essential and say it quickly—that’s what counts.”50 Danses concertantes is certainly, as Isabel Morse Jones fou
nd, “compressed, abrupt, and moves rapidly from one idea to another before satiety. Part of it is satire and part sentiment but all of it is concentrated energy, rhythmically exact, highly intense.”51 Its speed and concentration are those of Dumbarton Oaks; but its anecdotalism and fondness for half-quotation are an abstracted form of a tendency that had first emerged in Jeu de cartes, where however there was a plot, if of a stylized kind. Danses concertantes was, by contrast, a disembodied ballet, a card-index ballet, with entries for standard elements such as “pas d’action,” “variations,” and “pas de deux,” and shorthand references to more or less relevant composers like Tchaikovsky, Delibes, Schubert (the “marche militaire” at fig. 161), and Bach.
In the end, however, all this missed the point. Danses concertantes might, when you went into it, seem a derivative or off-the-peg kind of score; but its sound and texture were entirely Stravinskian (of the late-thirties period)—sharp, economical, and above all highly refined. The music might pick up unused bits of the Symphony in C, but it had a tautness and intricacy not, on the whole, typical of that work. Balanchine later drew attention to its rhythmic complexity, which comes not from irregular meters like the ones in The Rite of Spring and Les Noces, but instead from the disruption of simple meters, like the way the shanty-tune of the horn rides across the three-four time of the first variation.52 Done with due precision, it made an excellent concert piece. But it was only a matter of time before it found its way onto the stage.
While Stravinsky was at work on the Danses concertantes, in mid-November, a letter had arrived from a certain Dmitry Borodin in Long Island, telling him that Yury Stravinsky had died in Leningrad the previous May at the age of sixty-two.53 Igor had not seen his sole surviving brother for thirty-three years, and had not even corresponded with him to any significant extent, but Katya had kept in touch with his wife, Yelena Nikolayevna, and through her it was known that Yury had been suffering from angina pectoris since the mid-thirties.54 Lately he had become deeply depressed, and weighed down by the drudgery of his work inspecting and listing Leningrad’s historic buildings. It was just as well, Yelena later told Igor, that he had not lived to see the horrendous bombardment of those buildings by the Nazis and had been spared the nightmare of the blockade, which had begun later that summer. He had died at work in her arms, and those of their daughters, Tanya and Xenya.55
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