Stravinsky
Page 23
In any case, and whatever he may have said in later years, he took full responsibility at the time. After firing off a routine if slightly barbed congratulatory telegram (“Just heard Ode in your most penetrating performance. Profoundly touched …”),31 he looked more closely at his score and saw with horror that the fault was his. He, the composer, had produced a misleading manuscript, and moreover he had failed to read the proofs with sufficient care. On the 11th he sent Koussevitzky a detailed explanation in English complete with errata sheet, and on the 12th he did what one might have supposed unthinkable: he wrote, in Russian, a second, more personal letter of abject apology to this conductor whom he had so often, in private, spoken of with derision.
Errare humanum est: to err is human. So I think you will forgive me. But what I can’t forgive myself is that I tormented your ears through my absurd carelessness, or rather absent-mindedness, in checking the parts. This is very, very disagreeable to me, my dear.32
A few days after sending the Ode in July, Stravinsky had conducted the Massine-Bolm Petrushka in the Hollywood Bowl, his second appearance there. Two days after that, on the 15th, there was an intimate but probably none too cheerful Russian lunch at North Wetherly Drive with Vasily Kibalchich, the former director of the Geneva Russian choir that had sung the first performance of Les Noces, and an even older friend, Alexis Kall. Kall’s immoderate lifestyle, which had come between him and the Stravinskys three years earlier, had at last begun to catch up with him. He was suffering from diabetes, bad circulation, and severe leg pains, and the prognosis was bad. Six weeks later, poor Kall went into the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with a gangrenous foot, and his left leg was amputated above the knee. For months afterwards he needed further treatment; for a time he went around in a wheelchair, then a year or so after the operation he had a prosthetic leg fitted. One hopes that at least his sense of humor remained intact. On his nameday (perhaps in July 1944), Igor and Vera sent him a short note of congratulations appended to a quotation from Igor’s children’s song about the bear whose leg is cut off by an old peasant but who makes himself a new one out of limewood and comes and gobbles up the old peasant and his wife. “Creak, my leg; creak, my limewood leg,” goes the song, in a tone of grim jollity.33
Having finished the Ode in July, and having nothing new on the stocks apart from the incomplete concerto for orchestra, Stravinsky again took up the two-piano sonata that Nadia had hoped to perform the previous summer. Exactly what that early version had amounted to is hard now to establish for certain, but what he drafted in July and August 1943 was what became the first movement of the work in its final form. Curiously, he also made an orchestral draft of part of this same music, dating it 12 August. Craft says that it was another piece of aborted film music.34 But the sketches give no such indication, and the orchestration may just as well have been an attempt at another section of the concerto. The only Hollywood project still being discussed at this stage was a bizarre Warner Bros. film about Gershwin in which Stravinsky was to play himself in a scene in which Gershwin asks him for lessons but, on learning Gershwin’s income, Stravinsky demands lessons from him instead.35 But for this there was no suggestion that Stravinsky should compose any music.
In any case, the two-piano work soon took over, and by October Stravinsky had drafted the first movement and sketched a finale, with one of the earlier three-stave pieces incorporated as a middle section. All the music was extensively based on tunes from Pesni russkago naroda, which strongly suggests that the new material derived at least in part from music originally intended for North Star. As before, however, any cinematic character it may ever have had is quite undetectable in what remains: placid, equable music, devoid of narrative elements, and with even its folkish ingredients homogenized to the point where its precise ethnic origins—unacknowledged by the composer—went unnoticed for almost forty years.36
Toward the end of October, with the two-piano work still unfinished, the Stravinskys went to Santa Barbara for a month. Koussevitzky had been pressing Igor to include The Rite of Spring in his Boston concerts in January, and although nervous about rehearsal time he had at last agreed, perhaps partly out of a desire to make up for the Ode fiasco.37 He nevertheless remained edgy about the idea, not least because, being out of touch with Païchadze and not on speaking terms with Galaxy, he had no access to new or cleaner performance materials and above all no proprietorial shoulder to lean on in his difficulty. He had in mind a radical solution. He planned a new version of the work’s technically and notationally most problematic movement, the Danse sacrale. He would get Nadia Boulanger, who was staying at the Sachses’, to help him, and he would hand the revised score to AMP for publication—a recourse that was open to him because The Rite of Spring was in the public domain in America.38 Nadia would be useful in other ways, too. Stravinsky had agreed to give a lecture at the University of Chicago on his way home from Boston, and he desperately needed her help excerpting the Poétique and turning it into usable English, since John Nef, Chicago professor of economics and chairman of the Moody Foundation lecture committee, wanted him to deliver it in that language.39
The revisions to the Danse sacrale were merely the latest stage in a process that had gone on since the first performances in 1913. Even the first published orchestral score of 1921 was different in many important details from the manuscript from which Monteux had conducted the riotous premiere, and since then there had been new published revisions and a great many tinkerings in pencil or blue crayon that had never figured in any printed score. This was the music that, Stravinsky claimed much later, he had been able to play but not write down.40 Its difficulties were inherent in its revolutionary musical language. But it was also extremely hard for an orchestra to perform, and some of the changes had been designed to make it less so. At the same time, Stravinsky kept having new ideas about particular effects; he would cut out a gong here or a timpani thwack there, he would remove or reinstate tricky string pizzicatos, and he would constantly reposition the barlines or connect the notes in different ways so as to make the score easier to read. Yet when people asked him to simplify the actual music or reduce the size of the orchestra, he always claimed it was impossible, that he had tried and given up. The music was what it was, and that was that.41
The Santa Barbara revision followed this pattern. The only crucial difference was that, because he had ditched Galaxy (and therefore Édition Russe), there was no question of printing from old plates, and since new ones would have to be made anyway the whole notation could be rethought. For instance, he could, and did, change the basic note value from a semiquaver (sixteenth) to a quaver (eighth), though he characteristically forgot to alter the metronome mark accordingly, so that the score would have made nonsense if the mistake had not been obvious. As for the revisions to the orchestration, many of them reflected his own recent performances, especially his New York recording of 1940, where the excellence of the orchestra had evidently justified taking certain risks. The trouble with this version, from the practical point of view, was that, since it involved only one movement, anyone performing the whole work would still have to hire material from Galaxy/ERM and would be understandably reluctant to pay a second hire charge for the AMP Danse sacrale. The value of the revision might be, more simply, as a guide to the composer’s latest intentions. Its importance—another matter—would remain that it was the first of a whole series of revisions of his works which, while partly motivated by the practicalities of the marketplace or copyright law, ended in musical reassessments, sometimes of a quite radical kind. They soon became a favorite aspect of the Stravinsky myth: the myth of revision for copyright—like all the best myths, a half-truth at the very most.
In spite of all this hard work, The Rite was not given in his January concerts in Boston, and instead he conducted the Symphony in C, Pulcinella, Jeu de cartes, and a string of first performances: the concert premiere of the Circus Polka (in its symphonic dress), the first performance anywhere of the Four Norwegian Moods,
and the East Coast premiere of his arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Everything went off calmly enough in Cambridge’s Sanders Theatre on the 13th and Boston’s Symphony Hall on the 14th, but by the second Boston concert on the 15th word had got about, and to his astonishment the composer was visited in his dressing-room by a policeman and warned that if he conducted his “Star-Spangled Banner” that evening he would be in breach of a Massachusetts state law banning performance of the national anthem in any “embellished” form. The anthem was duly omitted and no further action taken. But the incident soon established itself as yet another myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested, held in police custody for several nights, and even photographed full-face and in profile for police records.42 It soon emerged that the police reading of the law was in any case suspect, to say the least. What was actually forbidden was to play the anthem in part, or “as dance music, as an exit march, or as a part of a medley of any kind.” Stravinsky’s arrangement, of course, infringed none of these prohibitions, “unless,” Nadia’s friend Winifred Johnstone suggested, “the fact that a few indignant and conservative members of that Friday audience departed at the first strains [put it] under the heading of ‘Exit March.’”43
From Boston, they proceeded (via New York) to Chicago, where, on the 20th of January, Stravinsky presented his lecture “Composing, Performing, Listening,” reading from a heavily annotated typescript that cannot much have eased the nervous strain of delivering a formal lecture in English for the first time. He and Nadia had somehow managed to knock together a coherent hour-long discourse from the six-hour Poétique, basing themselves mainly on the third lecture, about his working method as a composer, and the sixth, on the duties of the performer, together with an expanded ending about the role of the listener in the whole process. Much of this is little more than a précis of relevant parts of the Poétique turned into colorful and occasionally, it must be said, barely comprehensible English, such as in the image of art as a product of human artifice rather than nature, which seems to have been offered to the bemused audience in the Leon Mandel Assembly Hall as: “For if art does not drop from heaven as a bird’s song, it is unfailingly so be it only the simplest of modulations correctly realized.”44 One can only hope that this sounded intelligent in Stravinsky’s richly accented basso profondo English, and with its convolutions somewhat absorbed into those of his own personality and presence.
Not only the language, but to some extent also the tone of Stravinsky’s remarks about the performer-listener axis was discreetly modified in Chicago, compared with the severe admonitions of the Harvard text. After four years away from France and French absolutism, he seems to have resigned himself to an at least marginally more benign view of the role of the interpreter, insisting that “nothing worthy to live is done without enthusiasm, love and joy” (in the Poétique “loving care” had been deemed sufficient), and quoting with approval Apollinaire’s praise of good taste, Gauguin’s distinction between technique and natural flair, and Cocteau’s famous epigram about “the secret of knowing how far one can go too far.” A marginal note in Stravinsky’s hand even admits that in the realms of tempo and dynamics the performer is “u sebya doma” (“on home ground”). As for the listener, who had received short shrift at Harvard, he too is now required to commit himself actively, to give of himself in a loving and sympathetic spirit, and to accept joyfully the assaults on his habits of mind that all worthwhile music will make. Whether, as has been suggested, such changes of nuance were due to the influence of Nadia Boulanger and “her sense of the practical importance of the subject,”45 or alternatively to the effects of four years amid the easygoing pragmatism of American daily life, is an intriguing but of course insoluble question.
The day after the lecture, Stravinsky practiced what he preached by taking part, in a spirit of “enthusiasm, love and joy,” in a concert of his music organized by Remi Gassman of the university’s music department. For no more than half his official fee, he played the Duo Concertant (with the violinist John Weicher) and the two-piano concerto (with Willard McGregor), and he also conducted a performance of the suite from The Soldier’s Tale, in defiance of his habitual refusal to play and conduct in the same concert. Moreover, he went to considerable pains to ensure the success of the occasion, supplying the players with recordings of the works in advance, and making himself available for rehearsals at all kinds of unsavory hour. Vera’s diary reveals that he spent the greater part of their three-day stay in Chicago rehearsing for this concert.46 Two days later they were in Madison, Wisconsin, where Igor repeated his lecture for the benefit of the Dominican sisters of Edgewood College, an invitation set up by Nadia, who had pupils there.
By the 27th they were back in Hollywood (“what joy to come home,” Vera enthused), and within three days he was once again hard at work on his much interrupted but now almost complete piano-duo sonata.
11
THE BROAD WAY AND THE STRAIT GATE
FOR SOME MONTHS now, and at least since the landings in southern Italy in September 1943, the Stravinskys had kept track of the progress of the war by pasting up large-scale maps of Europe and marking the Allied advances with colored pins. Isolated as they were from the vortex of events, they could watch the drama of the rescue of European civilization unfold as though on a screen, like the war films to which Americans flocked and for which Igor had never quite written the music. But local tremors from the far-off earthquake were comparatively slight. Blackouts, fuel rationing, and censorship were minor inconveniences when set beside the death and destruction one read about in the newspapers every day. They meant that permission was needed to drive to Santa Barbara; they meant afternoon concerts; and they meant writing family letters in French rather than Russian, to avoid the appearance of code or the suspiciously incomprehensible. When Western Union rang on New Year’s Day 1944 to say that a telegram to Theodore, who had been living in Switzerland since the occupation of the south, had been suppressed on grounds of security, it was annoying rather than deeply worrying.1 And yet the anxiety of extreme distance is never to be discounted, and Igor had good reason to be anxious about the scattered remnants of his family.
Worry gave life a provisional quality and made it hard to settle down to large-scale projects. So instead of finishing the concerto for orchestra, he worked on a set of variations as central movement for the two-piano sonata, again taking his theme from Bernard. He seems to have gone out of his way to create music of an unclouded harmonic texture, yet the workmanship is deceptively intricate and in some ways quite unlike anything he had tried before. The secret lies in the tune itself, which, though melodically plain, has a curiously fluid, seamless phraseology that Stravinsky emphasizes by repeating it twice against two upside-down versions of itself. The sense of discourse is not unlike that of late-medieval polyphony. In the same way the variations seem to hint at the keyboard writing of Bach, and especially the Goldberg Variations, a work that as it happens Stravinsky was on the lookout for but did not possess, though he did own Wanda Landowska’s recording.2 When he completed the sonata with this movement on 11 February, it had been on his desk, in one form or another, for more than eighteen months. Yet like the two-piano concerto, which had also had a disrupted gestation, it betrays few signs of hesitancy or unevenness. It may be a minor work, but it is the minor work of a great master, who can relax without falling into the casual or inconsequential.
A few days after finishing it, and precisely when he must have been wondering what to compose next, he received a letter from Mercedes de Acosta inviting him to write the music for a stage production of her play The Mother of Christ.3 Religious subjects, she pointed out, were all the rage in Hollywood at that moment, as if Igor and Vera hadn’t noticed, having sobbed their way through The Song of Bernadette only a week or so before. But Mercedes was no Franz Werfel, and her proposition was accompanied by a hard-cash offer of impressive dimensions: ten thousand dollars plus thirty percent of the takings, on condition that the
score be ready by the 1st of September. It says a great deal for Stravinsky’s powers of artistic resistance that, while agreeing to the idea in principle, he attached a condition of his own that he must have known Mercedes would be unlikely to accept. He insisted that Our Lady (who after all was presumably the play’s central character) be represented on the stage not by a human actress but by a light. In fact the tone of his letter suggests that they had previously discussed the idea in person and that Mercedes’s letter was by way of a formal contract. She had already expressed doubts about the light (“too hackneyed”). By the time they next had a chance to discuss alternative possibilities, other commissions had come up, and the intriguing prospect of a neo-Bachian theatre score by Stravinsky was lost forever.