Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  There is no particular evidence that Nadia had suggested to Stravinsky the idea of a two-piano sonata, but it seems a distinct possibility, despite his own later memory that the piece was not commissioned and that he originally conceived it for one piano and only switched to two to avoid confusion in the texture of criss-crossing melodic lines.8 In fact, the earliest surviving version of the eventual three-movement sonata seems to consist of two short pieces laid out like songs without words, with the melody on the top stave and the “accompaniment” on two staves underneath. Both pieces were copied out of Pesni russkago naroda, but with the harmonies and barrings Stravinskyized, exactly as in the Norwegian Moods. One of them survives as the middle section of the finale of the published sonata, completed eighteen months later; the other remains in manuscript as a kind of sad memory, more than just a copy, something less than a finished, independent movement.9 Most critics have taken it for granted that Stravinsky’s interest in the Pesni russkago naroda was prompted by his need for Russian material for the Goldwyn film North Star, Lillian Hellman’s account of a Nazi attack on a communal farm in Soviet Ukraine. But the existence of an early form of the Sonata for Two Pianos—a work almost entirely derived from the Bernard collection—argues against this. When he did start thinking about North Star, he probably turned to the Russian songs; but that was still several months in the future, and his active interest in the film was to be relatively short-lived.

  Meanwhile, he was virtually becalmed creatively, unable to bury himself in his big concerto for orchestra—if such it was to be—but at the same time unsettled in his commercial plans, with no conducting dates before January, and utterly without firm creative projects. The nearest he came to a finished product those late summer months of 1942 was the publication in August of the original French text of the Poétique musicale, and even this was not greatly to his satisfaction, since he had hoped for a parallel text edition and could not see the point of an American publication of the lectures in French.10 The irony was that he had withdrawn from Tanglewood on the assumption that his time would be taken up with film projects, and instead all he had to do was orchestrate the Circus Polka and the concerto movement, both of which he finished by mid-October.11 Then in November he had planned a run-through of the Circus Polka in its new symphonic version, but he went down with flu and it had to be cancelled. Just when the situation in Europe was worsening to a frightening degree, with the total Nazi occupation of France and a murderous battle raging round Stalingrad, it was beginning to seem as if his own brave new world was turning into a bundle of empty promises.

  Among their growing circle of friends in Hollywood were the playwright and novelist Franz Werfel and his wife, Alma Mahler. That November they lunched and dined together,12 and a certain common intellectual ground emerged between the two artists that to some extent belied their apparently incompatible backgrounds, Werfel being a product of that Jugendstil expressionism that Stravinsky had been publicly rejecting, on and off, for the past twenty years. Of course in faraway Los Angeles such differences shrank into insignificance compared with their shared plight as intellectual refugees from the Old World. One evening at the Werfels’ a few months later, Stravinsky met Thomas Mann for the first time since the twenties, and had a long conversation with him about Schoenberg.13 But there was more to the connection than solidarity among castaways. Werfel, though not a musician (unlike his wife), loved music passionately, and especially Verdi, whose letters he had edited and about whom he had written a novel. He had also, like Mahler before him, converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and he had recently fallen under the spell of St. Bernadette. His novel about the visionary of Lourdes, The Song of Bernadette, had just come out (unlike the Poétique) in English as well as its original German, and that autumn he presented the Stravinskys with a copy of each edition. The book was about to be filmed by Twentieth Century–Fox. Perhaps they might commission Stravinsky to compose the music?

  Whether the Bernadette idea was ever anything more than an after-dinner proposition between gentlemen is impossible now to establish. The trouble with all Stravinsky’s wartime film projects is that (except in the case of Fantasia) no contract was ever signed, and the only evidence of negotiations is a diary entry here or there, a passing reference in a letter to a publisher, a few sketches in an archive, and the composer’s reminiscences. Of the Werfel film, Stravinsky remarked that he had liked the idea but found the terms unacceptable.14 Whether or not he was ever seriously considered by the studio for a film that so signally called for precisely the kind of soft-centered music that he was famous for not writing, the score was eventually produced by Fox’s head of music, Alfred Newman. Three months later, on the 15th of February, 1943, Stravinsky began composing music that he later maintained had been intended for the “Apparition of the Virgin” scene in the film, but which by mid-March, when it was completed, had turned into the second of his concerto-for-orchestra movements—a piece of great subtlety and refinement, but about as suited to the climactic moment of a film about the intervention of God in the life of a peasant girl as it would have been to accompany the sinking of the Titanic or Moses’s descent from Mount Sinai.

  Oddly enough, only three days before starting this movement, he had drafted another piece that he later insisted was meant for a film: hunting music with prominent horn-calls and cascading string figures. This time the film in question was Jane Eyre, another Twentieth Century–Fox blockbuster, which would be starring Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester. According to Stravinsky, Welles had personally urged him to write the music “for his Jane Eyre,” though in fact the film was not his (unlike Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons); he was merely in it. Nevertheless Stravinsky did for a time work on ideas for the film; he copied out tunes from a collection of English songs, and he made notes about the scenario. Whether he read the novel as he claimed, or indeed the film script, may be doubted, since he unblinkingly described his only actual piece of music as “for one of the hunting scenes,” of which there is not a single one in Charlotte Brontë’s novel and only one in the film—a typical Hollywood confection in which Jane first encounters Rochester on the hunting field.15 Still more curious is the fact that the piece, as drafted that February, is not film music at all but a well-formed concert piece in A-B-A form, complete with a second theme that, in an earlier sketch, was labeled “Song for Bessie” (presumably Jane’s childhood nurse, a character unconnected with Rochester). This movement would soon figure as the central panel in the orchestral triptych called Ode, which Stravinsky wrote in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky, who had died in January 1942. But no such work had yet been mentioned, much less commissioned, in February 1943; and this jolly, ebullient piece is in any case hardly music one would naturally associate with such a commission.

  Work on Jane Eyre, whatever it was, doubtless followed the final collapse of discussions about North Star in January. On the 7th, Igor had paid a visit to Sam Goldwyn and had taken home Hellman’s script to read overnight. It was, he reported next morning, “a veritable Schlafmittel” (sleeping draught), and he disliked it so much that, without quite being ready to drop out there and then, he was soon hoping that Goldwyn would not accept his as usual somewhat inflexible terms. His hopes were gratified, and by the 18th the deal was off.16 How much work he had actually done on North Star before reading the script is, once again, a matter for speculation, but since there is a gap of almost three months during which he otherwise composed nothing at all, it looks as if he was at least tinkering with possible material for the Russian subject, which he already knew about in general terms. He still had the Pesni russkago naroda to hand, and he had the sonata draft that Nadia had probably in the end not played at Indiana, but which he himself did play through with the French pianist-composer Marcelle de Manziarly, when they saw her at the Sachses’ farm in Santa Barbara in October 1942.17 That autumn and early winter he sketched other music, all of it based on songs from the Bernard collection, and all of it in due course reused in works that t
oday form part of the Stravinsky canon: specifically the Sonata for Two Pianos, which he returned to and elaborated toward the end of 1943, and an as yet unthought-of work, the Scherzo à la russe, eventually composed in 1944.

  These various folk-derived scores form an island of naïve charm at the very heart of Stravinsky’s early American years. In one sense they seem like a throwback to his late twenties and thirties, when folk song, real or imaginary, had been a common thread through his greatest works, from Petrushka to the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. But the similarity is superficial. The tunes in these wartime pieces are accepted for what they are, dressed up in a Stravinskian manner, but never for a minute treated as ammunition in a full-scale assault on the very foundations of musical language, as the folk material had been in The Rite of Spring or Les Noces or Renard. Instead, as with the Four Norwegian Moods, the Russian pieces take in elements from the style of the published arrangements, which were nineteenth-century salon pieces with no serious claim to authenticity at all. It was rather as if Stravinsky had used settings from the New National Songbook or Cecil Sharp’s arrangements of English or American folk songs as the basis for more or less free adaptations of his own. In this sense these Hollywood leftovers still partake of a certain vestigial neoclassicism; they are style copies, attempts to fuse local color, popularism, and a sprinkling of modernism. They show how Stravinsky thought it might be possible for him to write film music; but they also show how badly he got it wrong.

  While working on North Star, he was not wholly without prospects as a performer. Later in January 1943 he went to San Francisco to conduct a new Ballet Theatre production of Petrushka with Massine in the title role; and there would be six weeks in New York in the spring. But for the most part he and Vera stayed at home and cultivated their friends, their chickens, and, until its sad demise that February, their parrot. Their circle still had an essentially émigré complexion with a strong Russian bias. Since the summer of 1942, Rachmaninov had been a neighbor and had sent his spies to find out whether a social contact would be welcomed at 1260 North Wetherly Drive. It was, and the Stravinskys had duly dined at the Rachmaninovs’ in Beverly Hills—one of those classic encounters between artists of similar background but radically different outlook that one feels ought to change the course of civilization. For most of the evening, however, the two most famous Russian musicians of the twentieth century “talked about managers, concert bureaus, agents, ASCAP [the American performance-rights agency that Stravinsky had recently, after much heart-searching, joined], and royalties.”18 A few days later, Rachmaninov arrived on his colleague’s doorstep with a huge jar of honey, a product for which Stravinsky had confessed a liking.

  Alas for this newfound amity and sweetness, Rachmaninov was already dying of a rapidly advancing melanoma. In February 1943, the great pianist-composer collapsed after a recital in Knoxville and arrived home at Beverly Hills in an ambulance. Five weeks later he was dead.

  As far as American acquaintanceships were concerned, the Stravinskys were still mainly limited to a few old friends, to showbiz, and to professional contacts of one kind or another. Many of the latter were composers, ex-pupils of Nadia, like Copland, or Arthur Berger, whom Igor had met at a rehearsal for Danses concertantes in Los Angeles but who by 1943 was in New York writing music criticism and editing a music journal called Listen; or David Diamond, a nervy, quarrelsome character who had fought tooth and nail with Nadia in Paris but who admired Stravinsky so much that he happily ran errands for him on the East Coast, tracking down scores that were unobtainable in California and reporting on New York performances of his music.19 There was Alexei Haieff, the Boulanger pupil whom Stravinsky had met at Harvard, and whom, when he saw him again in New York that spring, he helped in some way or other with his new symphony.20 Equally there were West Coast musicians like Sol Babitz or the pianist Leonard Stein. Stein was unusual among Stravinsky’s acquaintances in being an associate of Schoenberg, who lived a mere eight miles away in Brentwood Heights but with whom Stravinsky still had absolutely no contact.

  Their closest American friends, however, were a handful of music-loving non-musicians, who tended to include professional advisers like their new lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, a former army sergeant-major, cousin of Tansman, and a huge, even at times oppressive admirer of Stravinsky’s music. Above all there was the ex-banker Arthur Sachs—a board member of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—and his French wife, Georgette, who lived in Santa Barbara on an estate called Rayben Farm with a well-appointed guest cottage where their friends could stay in comfort and with a measure of independence. The Sachses were the focus of a social life that preserved a certain old-fashioned style. There were often visitors from the East, including the Blisses (who had a house of their own in Santa Barbara), Nadia herself, and other former pupils, including Marcelle de Manziarly and Richard Hammond, who had helped try to secure Stravinsky’s American copyright in the early twenties.21 This circle was so congenial, so much of a home-from-home compared with shapeless and heartless Los Angeles, that for a time Igor and Vera seriously contemplated moving to Santa Barbara and spent several weeks there with that end in view in the autumn of 1943.22 They did not move, however, perhaps because, for a peripatetic musician (as Stravinsky still partly regarded himself) Santa Barbara, a hundred miles north of Los Angeles, was simply too remote and provincial to be a permanent home, rather than an occasional weekend retreat.

  That spring of 1943, in showery New York for the first time for two years, he might have reflected that from a certain angle Los Angeles could seem provincial in its turn. In Manhattan, even—perhaps especially—in wartime, one felt the proximity of Europe. Where else, apart from Paris, could one dine with Tchelitcheff, Léger, and André Maurois, practically on consecutive nights? Where else could one run into Beecham and Koussevitzky and Ziloti, the three conductors to whom Stravinsky perhaps owed most, whether or not he might care to admit it? Vladimir Golschmann, a former Diaghilev conductor, was giving the East Coast premiere of the Danses concertantes, and Stravinsky spent many hours coaching him in the work, in the interstices of his own heavy schedule conducting at the Met for Ballet Theatre, who had brought the Massine-Bolm Petrushka from the West Coast and were reviving Balanchine’s Apollo. Busy as it was musically and socially, however, it was a somewhat restricted visit artistically, and it would have been almost wholly unproductive if Koussevitzky had not come to see him early in April and presented him with a commission of a thousand dollars for an orchestral work, to be paid for by a new fund Koussevitzky had established in memory of his wife.23

  For almost forty years Natalie Koussevitzky had been the engine of her husband’s career. In Russia before the revolution, it had been her money, inherited from her Ushov family tea business, that had supported his orchestra and his publishing house. In the West, she had set herself up as the power behind the throne, bullying her husband’s biographers, like Lourié, and his musical assistants, like Nicholas Slonimsky, whom she once called “a dirty Odessa Jew” to his face.24 She was, Slonimsky recalled, “an imperious-looking woman who rarely spoke, and when she compressed her taciturn lips, she reminded one of an owl at her silent watch.” Stravinsky, who seems not to have disliked her as much as he distrusted her husband, said that she unfortunately always looked cross, “like a hen, even when in good humor.”25 Curiously enough, chickens were once again much in his mind while he was composing the music in her memory. In February, three or four days after he had drafted the Jane Eyre hunting piece that later found its way into the memorial work, almost the entire Stravinsky chicken population were found dead in their run. Three months later, on the couple’s return from New York, Vera recorded the arrival of fifteen new chicks; and on 9 June, the day Igor started the “Eulogy” of the Ode, she noted that he also composed “verses on the chicken coop theme.”26 Whether these were musical or poetic verses, and whether or not they had any connection with the Ode, is impossible to tell.

  In fact the first music Stravinsky compose
d when he got home in May was the “Epitaph,” eventually the final movement of the three. At this point he called the work Triads, perhaps because the instruments in the “Epitaph” are grouped in threes and the music is very transparently scored, so that the groupings are clear and in some sense emblematic. He then turned to the solemn, fugue-like “Eulogy,” which became the first movement. Finally, before sending Koussevitzky the finished score on 9 July, he added the hunting piece, under the title “Eclogue,” not perhaps without a twinge of doubt about its suitability to an elegiac context, since his covering letter calls it a “concert champêtre” and describes it, tendentiously, as “open-air music, a principle defended with such passion by the departed one, and so brilliantly realized by you at Tanglewood.”27 The idea was that Stravinsky would himself conduct the first performance when he came to Boston the following January; but Koussevitzky liked the piece so much that he decided on the spur of the moment to program it in his own Boston concert on 8 October. The score and orchestral parts were far from ready when Stravinsky heard this unwelcome news two weeks before the event. He had not forgotten the disaster of Koussevitzky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments in London twenty-two years before. But it was impossible to object. All he could do was alert Hugo Winter, his new editor at AMP,28 to the urgency now surrounding the copying and checking of the performance materials, note the time of the coast-to-coast broadcast, and cross his fingers.

  Koussevitzky’s difficulty with new music lay essentially in his inability to learn a work from a score, and in the fact that he could not play the piano well enough to pick his way through one—however laboriously—in private. So except when he used a practice pianist (a role performed for him by Slonimsky for some years in the twenties), he would arrive at a first orchestral rehearsal without much idea how a new piece was meant to sound. Nevertheless the fiasco of the Ode premiere, as entertainingly reported by the author of Themes and Conclusions, was by no means entirely his fault.29 It is true that the trumpeter played his solo in the “Epitaph” in the wrong key; but that was because the composer, in his haste, had written the part out at the sounding pitch, failing to allow for the fact that on the B-flat trumpet it would come out a tone lower. It is also true that the performance ended in a mild cacophony, because the AMP copyist had misread two lines (or systems) of the manuscript full score as if they were one, which meant that six bars on the penultimate page were played simultaneously with the next six. But this only came about because of an oddity in the manuscript itself. It so happened that the first six bars in question were for oboes, clarinet, and horns, while the next six were for timpani and strings, so that at first glance the whole thing looked like an ordinary six bars of full score. To add to the confusion, Stravinsky had even written them out so that the barlines in the two systems lined up precisely. In the nature of the music’s style, even the resulting concatenation of sounds was improbable rather than impossible: as Stravinsky himself told Koussevitzky, “the blurring was not too disturbing, for the two lines played together are almost integrated in the same mode.” One might well suspect that Stravinsky himself had been momentarily fooled by the uniform and symmetrical character of his own writing.30