Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Early in March 1944, he was approached by an MGM staff composer, Nathaniel Shilkret, with another proposal for a religious work: a collaborative piece based on episodes from the Book of Genesis. The motivation for this bizarre enterprise remains obscure. Shilkret’s intention seems to have been to make not a film but a gramophone recording, on six 78-rpm discs, and since Stravinsky’s contribution was to occupy only one of the twelve sides, it looks as if Shilkret had eleven other composers in his sights, including himself. In the event there were six others. Schoenberg wrote a wordless choral-orchestral prelude, Shilkret himself composed the Creation, Tansman composed Adam and Eve, Milhaud Cain and Abel, Castelnuovo-Tedesco the Flood, Ernst Toch the Covenant of the Rainbow, and Stravinsky brought up the rear with the Tower of Babel.4 The story was to be told by a narrator, while the chorus and orchestra supplied what was supposed to be background music. According to Tansman, Shilkret envisaged the work “almost cinematographically, as an external synchronization of the text with the musical atmosphere”5—in other words, with the music as a kind of soundtrack to the biblical readings. But just as Stravinsky had opposed the direct representation of the Virgin Mary, so he fought tooth and nail against any musical characterization of God. “Music,” Tansman reports him as having argued, “should illustrate nothing whatsoever. Such is not its function, and in this case less than ever.”6

  In fact Babel, as Stravinsky composed it in the three or four weeks after the meeting described by Tansman, is true to some but not all of this typically extreme statement of principle. Obviously he did not seriously believe that music could never be illustrative, in the sense of responding directly to a visual or narrative stimulus; countless pages of Oedipus Rex and Persephone make nonsense of the idea. He was simply standing out against the crude pictorialism that was the stock-in-trade of Hollywood composers like Shilkret, and that no money on earth would induce him, Stravinsky, to essay. The refusal to portray God is another kind of taboo altogether, and a much more interesting one, since it had significant musical consequences that resonate through later, more substantial works. In Babel there are two kinds of text. On the one hand there is the spoken narrative (verses 1–5 and 8–9), where Stravinsky uses Shilkret’s speaker, accompanied by orchestral writing that is at least broadly descriptive, especially at the point where the Lord scatters the people across the face of the Earth and the music scurries about in suitably bewildered figurations. But when the Lord speaks, in verses six and seven, the music takes on a marmoreal calm, and suddenly we are in the presence of the divinely impersonal. Rather than have the speaker pronounce God’s words, Stravinsky sets them for male chorus in two homophonic (that is, fully aligned) parts—an effect of real power and originality, despite the restricted anecdotal context. That he was engaged by the problems posed by this commission is also suggested by the harmonic style, which refers back to procedures he had largely abandoned with the neoclassical works of the early twenties, procedures that belong deep in his musical past. The main exception had been the Symphony of Psalms—also, of course, a religious work. Another exception—not religious—was still on his desk: the as-yet-incomplete concerto for orchestra. But Babel was the first public signal that a change might be in process.

  Stravinsky finished the draft score on the 29th of March and the full score two weeks later. For a seven-minute piece it was good going; but he had scarcely drawn breath before the next commission landed on his doormat in a letter from his AMP editor, Hugo Winter. This time the approach was from the Blue Network radio station on behalf of the bandleader Paul Whiteman, who wanted a short, easy-listening piece, to go on one or two sides of a record (the timings of 4′20″ or 8′40″ were specified).7 The fact that a popular musician like Whiteman should ask Stravinsky for a soft-centered work might seem to be further evidence of the extent to which the American commercial world regarded him primarily as a Big Name, without having much clue about the sort of music he wrote. But Whiteman had been involved with so-called symphonic jazz for more than twenty years, at least since the Rhapsody in Blue, and must have been well aware that he would not get a popular work in the normal sense from Stravinsky.8 The composer himself was not put off by this one-and-only condition. Once again he liked the thousand-dollar fee (or “advance,” as Whiteman wanted to call it); he liked the absence of technical restrictions of the Babel variety;9 and above all he liked the fact that, as he probably realized at once, he had material on hand that he could easily adapt to Whiteman’s needs.

  Exactly how much of the Scherzo à la russe existed before 11 April 1944, when Stravinsky first heard about the commission, is curiously hard to establish. At some stage, probably in the autumn of 1943, he worked on a two-piano version of the main scherzo and first trio, perhaps with some idea of incorporating them into the sonata he was writing at that time. Meanwhile, the second trio had existed for two pianos, quite separately, at least since the previous January. All the material for these pieces comes, like that of the sonata, from Bernard, but if, as Stravinsky himself later claimed,10 the scherzo started life as music for North Star, then it must all have been written by that January of 1943 (when the film project fell through), which is certainly possible but fails to explain the two-piano form of many of the drafts. The best explanation might be that the themes were first worked for the film, then reworked for two pianos at a time when the eventual form of the sonata was still unclear. Stravinsky says that the film version was exactly the same as the Scherzo à la russe in its version for symphony orchestra, but this is certainly wrong.11 The band version came directly from the two-piano drafts, and the orchestral score was made some months later.12

  In any case, writing the music up for band took several weeks of May and June 1944, a fact only partly attributable to the unfamiliar medium. Whiteman’s band was much more like a misshapen symphony orchestra than the circus band for which Stravinsky had had to call in David Raksin to arrange the Circus Polka. It had strings and wind in a fairly normal balance, except that saxophones replaced the clarinets and bassoons. Otherwise, the only “oddities” were the guitar and the fact that Whiteman had a flautist who could also play the saxophone (there was no mandolin, Stravinsky’s memory notwithstanding13). There were questions of balance to resolve, but musically the writing was simple and repetitive—“very Petrushka 1944,” Milhaud thought it, judging from the two-piano version14—and even the little canon in the first trio was child’s play compared with the imitative writing in the sonata variations. It is, one feels, on the refined instrumentation of such episodes that Stravinsky expended the most effort. He was still at work on that in the first week of June, when the next showbiz commission arrived in the shape of a telegram from the Broadway impresario, songwriter, and nightclub owner Billy Rose.15

  By this time it might have struck him that he was in danger of sliding into a creative trough, dragged down by the commercial world’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for the credit attached to his artistic fame. It may or may not have been the Rose commission that led him to turn down a request a week later for a cello concerto from the director of the Kansas Symphony Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz.16 He had never liked the cello as a solo instrument anyway, and after all, Rose was asking for a ballet, which certainly was his kind of thing, if not entirely in the sense understood by Rose. The new work was wanted for a Broadway revue called The Seven Lively Arts, and although the pitch of the show would certainly be elevated by the normal standards of New York revue (it would have Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin as dancers, and Rose was even commissioning a series of paintings by Salvador Dalí for the Ziegfeld Theatre lounge), the “lively arts” would mostly not be the ones that Diaghilev and Benois used to dream of combining in their Mir iskusstva days: there would be comedians, Cole Porter songs, a jazz combo, and the inevitable chorus line. The atmosphere would be that of a revue, with audience to match. Rose was investing a huge sum of money in the show, more than a million dollars according to one report. Even so, he nearly fainted when Stravinsky demanded f
ifteen thousand dollars for a single season’s performance rights. In the end they agreed on five thousand, plus two hundred dollars for each week in which the show ran; but Rose must have wondered if he had been misinformed about the unworldliness of great artists.17

  What Stravinsky undoubtedly liked about Rose was his clear specification of what he did and did not want. Rose’s original idea had been to transplant into his revue a shortened version of the second act of Giselle, which Markova had been dancing for Hurok at the Met. But Markova had jibbed, and instead Rose had approached Kurt Weill, then, when Weill declined and at his suggestion, Stravinsky, to supply a fifteen-minute score “after” Giselle for a theatre orchestra of forty exactly itemized players.18 What Weill—even in his Broadway incarnation—would have made of this pallid-sounding task can only be imagined, but for Stravinsky it was as natural as the air he breathed. A week or so after the initial approach, Dolin himself called on him at Wetherly Drive, and between them they concocted a semiabstract scenario, loosely derived from Giselle, Act 2, complete with timings and suggested musical references (including pages from Coppelia and Swan Lake as well as Giselle, all of which scores Stravinsky borrowed from Dolin). The piece would be called L’Étoile (“The Star”), as a tribute to Markova’s preeminence as Adam’s ill-fated heroine. Within days of this meeting, however, Stravinsky suddenly remembered past battles with Ramuz and others over the derivation of concert suites from stage works, and he wrote to Winter arguing for a title that Dolin would not be able to claim as his when the music migrated to the concert hall. The neutral but suggestive Scènes de ballet seems to have been devised expressly to avoid that danger.19

  On the afternoon of Dolin’s visit, on the 16th of June, Balanchine also came to work with Stravinsky at his house.20 He and Rieti had conceived the idea of a choreographic version of Danses concertantes for a new ballet company they were proposing to set up in New York.21 Then Balanchine had for some reason turned against the Rieti idea, and by early June was arguing in favor of Denham’s Ballet Russe, whose dancers, he said, were superior and whose terms were less demanding.22 In fact Stravinsky attended Balanchine’s rehearsals in late June and found his dancers poor; then, a few days later, when Eugene Berman came with his designs for the production, Stravinsky took against them so abruptly that he left the room and went back to his score for Billy Rose. After all, it cannot have been easy to move between two such different abstract projects. While Scènes de ballet was, by its very nature, a showcase presentation of the essence of romantic ballet by a pair of spotlit soloists, Balanchine was interested only in movement as a virtual construct in its own right, inspired by music, but with its own autonomous laws, and performed by a company of individuals, “like characters in a garden, […] who communicate, respond, who modify and return without losing their distinctness.”23

  Stravinsky was in any case under pressure to complete his new score. He had three months in which to compose and copy a quarter of an hour of orchestral music—not a huge task, but for him a steady enough rate of production. On two separate occasions in August he was again conducting Petrushka in the Bowl, and in between he attended other Bowl concerts, including one in which the twenty-six-year-old Leonard Bernstein conducted Firebird (disappointingly, Vera noted),24 and another directed by Dimitri Mitropoulos, who later came to dinner and stayed until two in the morning discussing the Orthodox church. And these same three months had been marked out by fate as the most critical and frightening of the entire European war so far. When British and American troops landed in Normandy on the 6th of June, the Stravinskys bought an assortment of French guidebooks to help them follow the progress of the invasion. Among the expatriate community in Los Angeles, the anxiety was almost tangible. Igor’s fears for his family were compounded by the fact that he had little news of Soulima, who was still in Paris, while all he knew of Milène was that she had married a fellow consumptive at Sancellemoz in the spring. Only Theodore, now in Geneva, was presumably safe. Kitty, in Leysin, was also out of Hitler’s reach, whatever the smaller microbes might have in store for her. Above all she—like the rest of her family—was for now spared the news that her Jewish father, Yury Mandelstam, had been deported in July 1943 from the transit camp in the Paris suburb of Drancy, where he had been incarcerated after his arrest fifteen months previously, and sent in a cattle truck to the Polish mining town of Jaworzno, near Katowice. There, on the 18th of October, 1943, in unknown circumstances, he had perished, leaving his sickly daughter an orphan at the age of six.25

  As the Allied troops advanced slowly through northern France, Stravinsky gradually assembled his ballet about a ballet about a girl who turns into a fairy. To say that he was unaware of the world outside his studio would be a grotesque perversion of his view of the meaning and function of music. Yet there remains something disturbing about the degree of detachment involved in this case, apparently so much greater than the isolationism of Renard (where a new language was being forged out of fragments of the old), and if anything thrown into relief by its sudden abandonment in the work’s final two minutes. By the time the French Second Armored Division and U.S. Fourth Infantry entered Paris on the 25th of August, Scènes de ballet was complete in draft, apart from a few particulars. On the 23rd, the day the Nazis actually fled the French capital, Stravinsky kept breaking off work on the Apotheosis to listen to the radio news,26 and he appended to the final draft page the laconic inscription “Paris n’est plus aux allemands”—Paris is no longer in German hands. The music inflates from the simple “finale” of the original outline into a peroration as extended as, and a great deal more grandiose than, the equivalent ending of the Symphony of Psalms or The Fairy’s Kiss, and it culminates in a sequence of uncouth fortissimo chords that can only be understood as a response, so to speak outside the frame of the work, to events that have not concerned it, still do not concern it, and in some way betray its innocence. Rose himself was maintaining that his revue had nothing to do with the war, though he did also later claim that, by opening in New York on the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, he was “paying tribute to the nation’s strength and stability.”27 But few who understood the ways of Broadway will have lent much credence to that.

  Whatever the effects on his music, the physical restrictions imposed by war were playing havoc with Stravinsky’s ability to attend and participate in his own first performances. Early in August, Nadia Boulanger and Richard Johnson had at last played the Sonata for Two Pianos in its definitive form to the Dominican sisters at Edgewood College, who heard it “with devotion” in appalling heat. Then on the 8th, Nadia and Robert Tangeman gave what was curiously billed as the “official private premiere” at the university at Bloomington, Indiana, thus at last fulfilling Nadia’s promise and intention of two years earlier. “How the two pianos sound,” Nadia had enthused. “We are preparing a Palestrina mass for the feast of St. Dominic [8 August], and the mass and sonata shed mutual light on one another.”28 The comparison must have delighted Stravinsky, who had worked hard on the sonata’s seemingly effortless texture of flowing polyphony and had probably said as much to Nadia in conversation.

  The performance even brought another, more modest commission his way. Among the supporting musicians at Edgewood had been Germain Prévost, the violist in the Pro Arte Quartet, who had played Stravinsky’s Concertino in Paris in the Wiéner retrospective of December 1923 and again in Brussels in 1924.29 The quartet had come to the U.S.A. in 1940, but its leader, Alphonse Onnou, had died at Madison that same year, and Prévost—anxious and homesick for Belgium, where he had left his wife and children—nourished the idea of commissioning and performing a work in Onnou’s memory. Alas, he had no money to spare except his hundred-dollar fee for playing at Edgewood. Nadia urged Igor to agree.30

  A few weeks later, toward the end of October, he at last performed the sonata with her as part of a short program of two-piano works to go with a repeat of his Chicago lecture at Mills College. They played the Scherzo à la russe and the Circu
s Polka; and Madeleine and Darius Milhaud (now in a wheelchair because of chronic arthritis) threw a party for twenty-five professors and their wives “[and] the most interesting people” in Mills College, Vera noted drily.31 The most interesting people did however include at least one who caught and held Stravinsky’s attention: a young associate from Berkeley called Manfred Bukofzer, who talked learnedly about medieval music and played them some of his recordings.32 Then, back in Hollywood on the 27th, Igor composed the beautiful and intimate Elegy for solo viola for Prévost, placing at its heart a fully worked fugue in two parts, worthy of Bach in its skillful suggestion of a polyphonic texture within the limitations of what is essentially a melody instrument.33

  Meanwhile Whiteman’s Blue Network transmission of the Scherzo à la russe on the 5th of September had failed to reach the West Coast, and Stravinsky had to wait for an acetate recording that AMP made for him from the broadcast. When he did hear it, he found the performance mediocre and much too fast.34 He was absent too, of course, from the ballet premiere of Danses concertantes, in the New York City Center five days later. That would soon be remedied, however, when Denham’s company came to the West Coast at the start of December, and Stravinsky would himself—as it turned out—be in the pit.35

  The echoes from New York were disconcertingly contradictory. According to Denham, the new ballet was greeted with “wild acclamation.”36 But Balanchine was not yet the godlike figure in Manhattan that he later became, and it was still considered chic among hard-bitten pressmen to describe his choreography as “twinkle-toed mathematics,” “almost totally devoid of dancing,” “an illustrated exercise book,”37 and so forth, just as the recent Stravinsky could safely be written off as anti-dance and even (so rapidly had New York’s critics now caught up with the latest styles), “gravely démodé, belonging to that avant-gardisme of about 1925 which is now as quaint as grandmother’s antimacassar.”38 These studious imbecilities were happily counteracted by a pair of brilliant notices from the Tribune’s dance critic, Edwin Denby, who was perfectly conscious of the “rare luxury” of having “a ballet composer, a choreographer and a ballet decorator [Berman] so eminent that each in his field can be called the best in the world.” Denby grasped at once something exceptional in Balanchine’s relation to the music, and his remarks amount to the first detailed perception of the intimacy of the choreographer’s response to Stravinsky’s writing.