Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  A panikhida service for Yury was hastily arranged in the little Russian church in downtown Hollywood, where there had already been a service for Katya in March and would soon be one for Mika at the end of November. It is hard to know what Igor actually felt about the loss of this already long-lost sibling, beyond his sense of what was right at such moments. He told Theodore that “this death has caused me profound grief.”56 Yet to dwell on the past was scarcely in his nature; and though he had grown fond of his sister-in-law and through her of Yury himself after their marriage, and been charmed by Tanya when she came to Nice in 1925, he lacked the ability—even perhaps the will—to hold on to such affections through so many empty years. At bottom Yury had never been his favorite brother; if anything, living as he still did at No. 66 Kryukov Canal, he reminded Igor of gloomy and difficult times. And he stood for Russia: old, unfriendly Russia, but also new, frightening Soviet Russia, the Russia that was grinding down his fellow artists and had ground Yury down too—just as it was now in its turn being ground down by the German army. It all doubtless proved how right he had been not to go back.

  The day before Stravinsky received Borodin’s letter, he was telephoned from New York by Balanchine, who had been approached by Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey’s Circus to choreograph a polka for the circus elephants, and wanted Stravinsky to compose the music. Stravinsky told him that he could not write even a short piece before March, because of the Janssen project.57 All the same he certainly tinkered with the idea long before that. He noticed that by an odd coincidence there were polka rhythms everywhere in the Danses concertantes, and at about Christmastime he started sketching ideas for the elephant piece while still working on the ending of the Danses. Then, as soon as that work was finished, he rapidly composed the Circus Polka as a piano solo and completed the draft score by the 5th of February. The point about this, for him, slightly unusual way of working was that Ringling would need a score for a circus band, and for the first time in his life Stravinsky did not feel equal to the task. So he approached the best-known Hollywood arranger of the day, Robert Russell Bennett, and Bennett recommended a young composer called David Raksin—a pupil of Schoenberg, as it turned out, and already an experienced filmwriter—who duly orchestrated the polka for the bizarre combination of wind and percussion instruments (including hammond organ) that Ringling had assembled for their circus performances.58

  As a piece of barefaced opportunism, the Circus Polka would be hard to beat. A few years later Stravinsky gratefully accepted a Canadian radio interviewer’s suggestion that the piece was a musical equivalent of the circus paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec,59 but at the time he was mainly concerned to write it as quickly as possible for the biggest fee Balanchine could get him.60 Later still, he reconstructed the original phone conversation in terms of an imaginary aesthetic discrimination. “I wonder if you’d like to do a little ballet with me, a polka perhaps,” Balanchine is supposed to have said. “For whom?” “For some elephants.” “How old?” “Very young.” (After a pause) “All right. If they are very young elephants, I will do it.”61 As for the music, the piece galumphs amusingly enough through vestiges of rhythmic ideas from the Danses concertantes reimagined for pachyderms, with an unexpected nod at one point toward Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and ending with a heavily underlined and quotation-marked parody of the same Schubert march that he had merely hinted at in the Janssen score.62

  In fact the ballet—which Stravinsky never saw—was danced, when the circus opened at New York’s Madison Square Garden on the 9th of April, by fifty elephants in pink tutus, all apparently of mature age, like the fifty girls who sat atop them. At their head, lovely Vera Zorina rode in on Old Modoc, the chief and oldest elephant.

  As carefully as if La Zorina were spun glass—which she is!—the giant deposited her in the center of the forest of elephants, and when she had completed her exquisite pirouetting upon the sawdust picked her up and carried her away. But not before she had handed [Modoc] a huge bunch of American Beauties, which he promptly coiled up in his trunk like a commuter filing his copy of The New York Sun under his arm to read after dinner.63

  The impression that the elephants took Balanchine’s Circus Polka in their stride was nevertheless perhaps misleading. “Aside from the dancing of old Modoc,” one observer wrote,

  “Display no. 18” was not a pretty act. The ballet skirts made the bulls appear ridiculous. The music didn’t suit them. In spite of some of the stunts which they are made to perform, elephants are dignified animals. They respond instantly to waltz tunes and soft, dreamy music, even to some military numbers of a particular circusy tempo. The involved music of Stravinsky’s “Elephant Ballet” was both confusing and frightening to them. It robbed them of their feeling of security and confidence in the world about them—so alien to their native condition of life. It would have taken very little at any time during the many performances of the ballet music to cause a stampede.64

  Fortunately there was no stampede except to the box office, and though the Ringlings never revived the piece after the first season, the publicity it attracted served them well until, after less than two months, the band was paid off because of a pay dispute, and the circus continued with gramophone recordings, which of course precluded the Stravinsky ballet.65

  From the composer’s point of view, such commissions were lucrative but artistically frustrating. He could and did use the Circus Polka as a bait for Associated Music Press, hoping to persuade them to take him on as a directly contracted composer, which would avoid the problem of blocked royalties; but musically it was not at all what he wanted to write.66 Instead, his thoughts were turning in a completely new direction. Early in April he began sketching an orchestral work that soon evolved into a symphonic movement of a character strikingly unlike anything in his recent music. The movement was built up episodically from obscure beginnings, and without any clear sense of order; but already in the early sketches there are a kinetic energy and a certain harmonic ferocity quite different from the clumping rhythms and raucous dissonance of the Circus Polka, or the brisk needle-point refinement of the Danses concertantes. At one point the music explodes into a violent C major Allegro. Later a piano is added to the orchestra and begins to articulate hard, diamantine rhythms and brittle textures that might suggest an altogether earlier, more “Stravinskian” Stravinsky. From nowhere, and in a matter of ten weeks or so, the master has created out of nothing, and in the most unpropitious circumstances, the first part of what will in due course grow into one of his greatest works, the Symphony in Three Movements.

  What did he think he was writing at the time? Outside the sketches there is no contemporary record of the piece, but another of his musician friends, the composer Alexandre Tansman, later reported hearing him play through well-developed fragments of the sketches and describe them as part of “a symphonic work with a piano concertant.”67 Much later still, Stravinsky told Robert Craft that he had originally been thinking in terms of a concerto for orchestra, a type of writing in which different instruments or groups of instruments are thrown into prominence in the manner of a stage play, where a narrative or argument is articulated through a pattern of dialogues.68 If so, he was deliberately confronting in an abstract form a problem that had been at the core of his orchestral writing for a decade or more: how to reconcile an essentially sectional style like that of his early ballets and songs with the needs of a complex and integrated symphonic discourse of the classical type that had begun to provide him with his stylistic models in the early twenties. The terms “concerto” and “concertante” resonate like a litany through his works of the thirties and early forties. The Symphony in C had clearly been an attempt—whether or not wholly successful—to force this dramatic, oppositional way of thinking into symphonic, dialectical molds. But the 1942 essay seems in some significant way different. Here the conception is quite openly sectional, and the ideas as they emerge in the sketches bear no perceptible relation to the sequence of the music Str
avinsky eventually settled on. For instance, the strident opening was a late discovery, and the brilliant, pulsating music that follows was originally conceived in the position it occupies later in the movement, which is presumably why (as Craft points out69) the actual opening only comes back at the very end of the movement, which was in fact written last.

  It was entirely typical of the composer of Renard and the Octet to respond to Pearl Harbor, the U.S. declaration of war, and the whole apparatus of air-raid sirens, blackouts, and searchlights that soon became part of West Coast life, by absorbing himself in the problems of symphonic form. Yet, curiously, this merciless opponent of music as the representation of nonmusical images was soon describing the result as war music, in which it was possible to find repercussions of “this our arduous time of sharp and shifting events, of despair and hope, of continual torments, of tension, and at last cessation and relief.”70 This was admittedly a postwar description applied to the whole symphony. Years later still, Stravinsky supposedly elaborated it into a full-blown program inspired, in the case of the first movement, by scenes from a war documentary about China, including one episode “conceived as a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a cinematographic scene showing the Chinese people scratching and digging in their fields.”71 If that sounds farfetched, one might be tempted to take out the words “Chinese people” and substitute “chickens.” On 25 April, three weeks after the first sketch for the symphonic movement, Stravinsky registered for war-defense work, as he was required to do by law, and in due course this involved building and stocking a hen coop and starting a kitchen garden. Everybody hated the cocks, which had a bad habit of crowing at four in the morning and soon had to be given away. But Igor grew fond of the hens; “I like their rhythmic clucking,” he told one reporter,72 and it is more than tempting to suppose that particular sound memorialized in, for instance, the ostinato piano figuring at 66 in the symphony’s first movement.73

  Whatever its inspiration, the piece clearly reflects a desire to escape from the treadmill of more or less unsuitable hackwork commissions that were continuing to assail him. The film industry was still trying desperately to grab hold of his name, while evading his high-minded conditions. In March he had been visited by Morris Stoloff, director of music for Columbia Pictures, with a proposal that he write music for a film about the Norwegian landings called The Commandos Strike at Dawn. Then later in the spring he was approached by the ultimate film mogul, Samuel Goldwyn, who was planning another war film (North Star), about the Nazi invasion of Russia, and also by Louis B. Mayer, with whom he dined at the end of May in connection with a project for Russian War Relief.74 The Goldwyn and Mayer encounters gave birth to some mildly amusing anecdotes about money, but little or no film music.

  Goldwyn: I understand it’s twenty-five thousand you want? Stravinsky: Whatever my agent says. Goldwyn: Well, you have to have an arranger. Stravinsky: What’s an arranger? Goldwyn: An arranger! Why, that’s a man who has to arrange your music, who has to fit it to the instruments. Stravinsky: Oh. Goldwyn: Sure, that’ll cost you $6,000. And it’ll have to come off your $20,000. Stravinsky: I thought it was $25,000.75

  The Norway film was more promising for a time, and Stravinsky probably worked on a score for it. The music for North Star was eventually provided by Aaron Copland, but Stravinsky was involved for long enough to turn his mind to the question of what kind of music he, as a Russian, ought to be writing for such a subject. In both cases there would eventually be a residue to be used up one way or another in concert works.

  It was symptomatic of his insecure and unsettled frame of mind that for a time in February 1942 he even seriously considered a project with Massine to compose a ballet for Serge Denham on excerpts from Donizetti. Denham told Rieti that the idea had been Stravinsky’s, though it was surely in fact Massine’s; and the sweet-natured Italian took fright at the thought that his own recent Bellini ballet, The Night Shadow (of which Stravinsky was perfectly well aware), might be accused of plagiarism.76 Fortunately for Rieti, Massine, who was supposed to come up with suggestions for suitable Donizetti excerpts, was so long in doing so that Stravinsky, still believing his summer to be fully occupied with the Columbia film, more or less abandoned the project.77 Soon afterwards he cancelled his planned visit to Tanglewood that summer for the same optimistic reason, that he was expecting the Norway film to be quickly followed by the Russian one.78

  THAT JUNE he celebrated his sixtieth birthday. It was an altogether more subdued affair than his fiftieth, and not only because not a single member of his own family was now within five thousand miles of him. The war was a real, if ghostly presence: occasional air-raid warnings and rumors of Japanese shelling from offshore. Family news from Europe was not much less upsetting than its frequent absence. Milène had left Sancellemoz and was staying with Theodore; Milène had had a relapse and gone back to Sancellemoz; Milène (most worryingly of all) had got engaged to a fellow patient, a step apparently as inevitable—not to say fatal—as marrying your first cousin if your parents were also first cousins. Igor had lost one daughter too recently to be anything but disturbed by the marriage of the other. Every time he thought of little Kitty, he told Theodore, he had sad memories of Mika.79 Soulima was presumably still in Paris, but he seldom wrote. Milène wired and asked for money.

  Made devout once again by anxiety and fear, Igor was going to church more often than before. There were the inevitable panikhidas, the Easter duties, and other important dates in the Orthodox calendar. On his birthday he and Vera took communion, a habit that was to remain with him and turn the occasion into something closer to a penance than a celebration.80 In 1942, at least, that was appropriate enough. “One day,” a friend would write at the end of the war, “it will be universally recognized that [Stravinsky’s] white house in the Hollywood hills … which was regarded by some as an ivory tower, was just as close to the core of a world at war as the place where Picasso painted Guernica.”81

  After church they drove to Big Bear Lake, in the San Bernardino Mountains, and went boating.

  10

  TO EARN IS HUMAN

  THE NORWEGIAN film project finally broke down in early July 1942, either because Stravinsky was as usual unwilling to fit in with Hollywood’s whirlwind production schedules, or because the music that he had in fact written was not liked. At any rate, the eight-minute, four-movement, orchestral piece that he put together apparently from the sketches within about two weeks of the collapse of negotiations would have cut a bizarre figure in a war film about commandos, although it might have suited a travelogue on country life in Norway. Stravinsky did suggest to Ernest Voigt, in his still uncertain English, that the pieces “could be no doubt very actual” (that is, topical);1 but the title he gave the little suite—Four Norwegian Moods—implies no such ambition, even allowing for the linguistic error of “moods” for “modes,” which he himself later pointed out.2 The real intention is indicated by the standard French title, “Quatre pièces à la norvégienne”—four pieces in Norwegian style.3

  Stravinsky had decided that the best way to write music that Hollywood could understand was to use folk tunes and stray as little as possible from their native idiom. Virtually all the material in the Norwegian Moods comes from a published nineteenth-century collection called The Norway Music Album, which he found in a secondhand bookshop in Los Angeles.4 It was in no sense a scholarly tome, but rather a popular anthology of songs and piano pieces in arrangements by Grieg, Lindeman, and their contemporaries, and in pinching the tunes Stravinsky also pinched the drawing-room style of the arrangements—a style familiar enough from Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, though Stravinsky later denied the connection.5 As usual he gingered up the harmonies a little, dislocated the rhythms, and orchestrated the music in a crisp and highly differentiated style more like Glinka than Grieg. But the modernization is painless and slightly routine—scarcely challenging or provocative, as it was in Pulcinella.

  The piece has a certain importance in that it
marks out procedures that were to prove useful to him during an awkward two years of adjustment and insecurity as a new immigrant. In fact, while working on the Norwegian materials, he had also been tinkering with a volume of Russian tunes—Bernard’s Pesni russkago naroda (Songs of the Russian People)—which may have turned up at the same time in the same bookshop or in the public library.6 He probably leafed through the collection in a more or less nostalgic spirit, thinking of his homeland under the Nazi boot. Then, just when he was turning his attention to the Norway film, he decided for some reason to make similar workings from the Bernard volume. Exactly what he wrote at this stage is hard to establish, but by the time the film commission fell through on 8 July he had concocted enough music, in the form of a draft sonata for two pianos, for Nadia Boulanger to plan a private run-through at Bloomington, Indiana, later that summer. Alas, disaster struck, as she wrote on the 15th:

  Since yesterday, a struggle between despair and rage! As I told you, I wanted to give an (informal) try-out at Indiana University, Bloomington. When I briefed my pupil, I told him: private performance, while insisting that he publish nothing until I give him an exact text for the program. In the excess of his joy, the idiot has indeed published nothing except the one thing that he was not supposed to say—and has announced the premiere of your Sonata. I have just sent him a furious note informing him that, barring some kind of miracle, we can no longer play the sonata.7