Astonishing is the ease with which Balanchine understands the flow of the unsymmetrical periods of the music and gives them a visual grace and a logic that illuminates the musician’s musical intentions. The music is delicious instrumentally, but it is very firm in its melodic and rhythmic logic, and the absence of any rhetoric gives it a gentle serenity that is strangely bewitching. It is that rarity, a modest masterpiece.39
Unlike his colleagues, Denby was not at all put out by Balanchine’s rejection of narrative.
The dance is like a conversation in Henry James, as surprising, as sensitive, as forbearing, as full of slyness and fancy. The joyousness of it is the pleasure of being civilized, of being what we really are, born into a millennial urban civilization. This is where we are and this is what the mind makes beautiful.40
Compared with Louis Biancolli’s “I can be wrong [but] I merely like ballet that heads somewhere,” this was penetrating indeed.41
Stravinsky naturally soon began to receive inside reports as well. “The choreography is perfect,” Berman wrote, “at once noble, gay, roguish, always marvellously designed and composed.” The company itself was the best since Diaghilev: calm and serene, no hanging of heads, everything ready for curtain-up. Needless to add, the success had gone down badly in the trade. “Among the other Ballet Russe companies, everyone is now against you and Balanchine, and they say that Hurok is doing everything he can to scupper Denham and bad-mouth Danses concertantes and especially your music.”42 No doubt Berman was making trouble on his own account, but still Stravinsky began to worry about all these goings-on in his absence; about the way his music was being handled by Denham’s new young conductor whose name he didn’t know (intelligently, Rieti said; timidly according to others: the conductor was Emanuel Balaban43); and about the fate of his Scènes de ballet, to be conducted by God knew whom. He half expected—hoped—that Rose would invite him to do it;44 then, when he heard it would be a certain Maurice Abravanel, he claimed ignorance of this pupil of Kurt Weill’s whom he had, in fact, met (Hugo Winter reminded him) at the Paris premiere of the Mahagonny Songspiel and Der Jasager in 1932.45
Rose had arranged a pre-Broadway run of The Seven Lively Arts in the form of public rehearsals in the Forrest Theatre, Philadelphia, opening on 27 November. On the 30th, the composer received a long telegram from Dolin, reporting a “great success,” confessing to one or two cuts, and imploring him to rescore the soupy trumpet melody in the Pas de deux for strings and to strengthen the orchestra in the Apotheosis. “Please believe me,” the telegram concluded, “this is important and then I know ballet will be tremendous.”46 Stravinsky promptly wired Abravanel: “Refuse to consider Dolin’s extremely shocking suggestions of crippling my music by cuts and reorchestrations to obtain what he calls tremendous success being entirely satisfied with merely great success mentioned in his wire today.”47 Three days later Abravanel telephoned. He assured Stravinsky that there was no question of rescoring his music, but there were practical reasons why cuts were needed. The male dancers in the corps de ballet were what he called “hoofers”—tap-dancers who could skip around in four-four time for as long as you liked, but who simply could not manage the five-eight of their opening dance. This piece had already been cut in Philadelphia, and the conductor wanted Stravinsky’s approval for the same cut in the Broadway run.48
Naturally it was Rose who was calling for these changes. When Abravanel had first played him the music he had wanted “to cut everything that was not Markova.” Then in the performances he noticed that in the pas de deux on Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love” there were constant bursts of applause, whereas in Stravinsky’s ballet the audience sat on their hands until the end. To his mind, this was a defect, and the remedy lay in the pit. Abravanel, by his own account, refused to accept alterations in the scoring, and Dolin backed him up in front of Rose but then double-crossed him with his telegram to Stravinsky. The conductor knew perfectly well, of course, that Stravinsky’s schmalz-free scoring was wrong for a Broadway show, but he could not bring himself to side with Rose’s philistinism.49 Dolin simply disliked the music: “Its only merit,” he wrote later, “was it was short, and Alicia danced in it.”50 It seems not to have occurred to him that Stravinsky, who had year after year fought Diaghilev off over such matters, might not agree with him.
The composer did nevertheless consent to the excision of the opening dance, provided the performance was billed as excerpts;51 and so it duly was when the show opened at the Ziegfeld on the 7th of December. Even incomplete, Scènes de ballet attracted a highbrow leavening of the usual revue clientele, but they cannot have enjoyed themselves all that much. For one thing, the work was badly placed at the beginning of the second half, which meant that the audience were still struggling to their seats after it had started. For another, it was merely one rather modest ingredient in what one critic appetizingly described as “an opulent grab-bag of entertainment.”52 There were comedy sketches by Moss Hart played by Beatrice Lillie, there were new songs by Cole Porter (including “Every Time We Say Goodbye”), there was a talkative M.C. and a standup comic, and an extravagant set piece called “Billy Rose Buys the Metropolitan Opera House,” which ended with Benny Goodman and his band playing in the Diamond Horseshoe; and the whole show lasted nearly until midnight. “Stripped of its fancy wrappings,” Time magazine lamented, “The Seven Lively Arts is oversized and overstuffed. At times the whole thing seems less like the seven lively arts (which presumably include dressmaking and sex) than like seven luxury hotels.”53 Mercedes de Acosta, who had moved to New York to take up a job at the Office of War Information, attended the opening and was appalled by the sight of Rose himself standing in the foyer dispensing bad champagne “to fat Jewish women, and fat Christian women too, all dripping in mink coats and bosoms dripping in orchids.”54 She thought Porter’s music poor and Dolin’s choreography banal. Markova was too much the dying swan; the orchestra played too loud. But in spite of everything, Igor’s ballet “shone out like a star on a dark night.” No doubt life was hard in the Office of War Information, but with all allowances made, Stravinsky was probably fortunate to be two thousand miles away that night.
The show ran for 183 performances, but long before it closed Rose—previously so keen to enrich the sound—now tried to save money by reducing the orchestra. “Except for your composition,” he wrote to Stravinsky, in a much-misquoted telegram,
there is nothing in the Cole Porter score that requires a forty-piece orchestra. Robert Russell Bennett assures me he can reorchestrate the Porter music very effectively for twenty-eight men. This will mean a saving to me of $60,000 on the year. As a practical man of the theatre I hope you can appreciate my problem and reorchestrate your composition for this smaller number of men. Otherwise I would have no choice but to replace it with other music. I would very much like to retain it and if you are willing to do this will wire you the new instrumentation.55
At first, Stravinsky did his best to avoid reworking his orchestration, and instead suggested that Rose use a two-piano version, with the pianos on the stage—a bizarre throwback to the design idea of Les Noces. In the end, however, they compromised by dropping the tuba, one of the trombones, and seven out of twenty strings.56 Probably, with the audience still tripping over one another’s feet and the music cut to about ten minutes, the difference was in any case not too noticeable. In its reduced form, Scènes de ballet was still in the show on the 3rd of February, when Stravinsky conducted it complete for the first time in a Carnegie Hall concert with the New York Philharmonic, so that, as that was a Saturday, an energetic Manhattan enthusiast could have heard most of it three times that day, including the Rose matinée, if so inclined.
AS 1944 drew toward its close, Stravinsky must surely have surveyed his year’s work with mixed feelings. He had kept busy and he had made money; but the musical results were a curious and, on the face of it, aimless miscellany, mostly written to other people’s specifications, or using up material he might not have co
nsidered but for the imagined needs of the silver screen. Meanwhile his big orchestral work had not advanced beyond its second movement, and he had conducted nothing since January apart from a handful of ballet performances. Even a brief spell conducting run-through performances with a pick-up orchestra of Hollywood musicians had come to an end after the occasion in May 1943 when so many players had failed to turn up to a rehearsal of Dumbarton Oaks that he had walked out in dudgeon.57
Yet whatever he may have thought of American commercial and musical life in general and its effects on his work in particular, he was inevitably being drawn more and more into its fabric, and discovering more of its variety. Social activities were still dominated by the tedious Hollywood round. A fortnight after the liberation of Paris, Elsa Maxwell threw what she called a “victory” party for the beautiful and famous of Los Angeles, with glittering fashions and diamonds but, Vera confessed to Mercedes, “no brains or soul.”58 But while the Stravinskys still saw a good deal of fellow expatriates like Artur Rubinstein, the Werfels, and the Milhauds, and stuck to their close Russian friends like the film actor Vladimir Sokolov and his wife Lisa, or Eugene Berman, or Adolf Bolm and his wife, Beata (who worked for a time as Igor’s secretary), they seem in some ways to have begun to feel, in themselves, more American than before. Many years had passed since the composer had cultivated the image of a dandy, with his check plus-fours and mustard-colored pullovers. His early-forties persona, at least in photographs, is more that of a prosperous businessman—though he would have denied at least the adjective—who has no particular desire, perhaps no need, to distinguish himself from his well-to-do surroundings. Most remarkably, his politics had turned turtle. Having watched the destruction of ordered society in Europe by precisely those right-wing forces he had believed destined to protect it, he now candidly sided with the political “strength” of his adopted home and became, practically overnight, a new-deal democrat. When Roosevelt won his fourth term in November 1944, the Stravinskys, though they did not have the vote, could and did thank heaven,59 and after his death they happily transferred their allegiance to his successor. “As far as I am concerned,” the composer would now say, “they can have their generalissimos and Führers. Leave me Mr. Truman and I’m quite satisfied.”60
One day in late February 1944 a letter had arrived from a young New York musician called Robert Craft, asking certain technical questions to do with the performance of The Soldier’s Tale and other matters.61 Craft was a twenty-year-old Juilliard conducting student who had decided at the age of twelve that his life’s ambition was to study with Stravinsky, but who was still, eight years later, frustrated by the fact that Stravinsky’s work did not figure in the Juilliard syllabus.62 His letter was a desperate personal thrust at his target, like Tatyana’s to Eugene Onegin. And its immediate outcome was nearly as unhappy since, although Stravinsky did not, like Onegin, reply in stern schoolmasterly tones, the friendly reply he did dictate to Beata Bolm was never posted, for the supposed reason that he suddenly became afraid that Craft’s own handwritten letter, which he was enclosing because he deduced its author had not kept a copy, might get lost. This explanation is so unlikely—bearing in mind that Stravinsky had only to extract Craft’s letter and post his own—that one automatically looks for another: that Stravinsky simply forgot to post it, later found it, and kept it, as he kept most pieces of paper, on file. The more interesting question is whether the “fear of loss” story was concocted by Stravinsky to excuse his oversight, or by Craft to evade its implications. Craft wrote again a few weeks later, without apparently referring to his earlier letter; but for the time being thereafter, the correspondence faltered.63 Stravinsky often received letters from musicians, young and old, and there was little beyond evident enthusiasm to distinguish Craft’s from countless others. Their first communications were, simply, unimpressively one-sided.
Two of Stravinsky’s closest musician friends in Hollywood, Sol Babitz and the composer Ingolf Dahl, a refugee from Nazi Germany who was undergoing a course of study with Nadia and had worked with Stravinsky on the piano reduction of Danses concertantes, had recently become involved in a new concert venture in Hollywood called “Evenings on the Roof.” The concerts had been started in 1939 by a passionate, impoverished young music-loving idealist by the name of Peter Yates and his pianist wife Frances Mullen, in a specially built loft-chamber cantilevered out over their decrepit hillside bungalow in Silverlake. In 1942 the monthly concerts had moved to the Assistance League Playhouse in central Hollywood, and two years later they had moved again to a studio of KFWB radio, just off Sunset Boulevard. Yates was an explorer with a mission, not merely to fill a gap in Los Angeles’s limited and conservative musical life—“a veritable Sahara,” he called it, “of artistic incomprehension”—but more especially to present a new type of concert where unusual music of all kinds would be played by musicians dedicated to what they were doing, at low admission cost, without consideration of profit, and with a minimum of ostentation. Early audiences had been tiny and select, but by the time Stravinsky attended his first Roof concert (as they continued to be called) on 6 March 1944, audiences of two or three hundred had become normal.64
Los Angeles being what it was, “unusual music” was a much wider category than it would have been in London or New York; and though Yates had started out as an apostle of modernism, he had also begun to delve into what came to be known as “early music” (pre-Bach), while at the same time making an exhaustive personal study of the lesser-known works of the classical masters: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven. Among other things, he was a pioneer of the composer retrospective; he programed whole concerts of Bartók and Ives—whose music was little known and greatly feared on the West Coast—and whole series of Beethoven sonatas. But he was also a vigorous mixed-programmer, a repertory opportunist who was not afraid to mix the seemingly incompatible and challenge the audience’s knowledge of its own taste. Stravinsky went to hear Babitz play a Mozart violin sonata, but he also heard a Haydn piano sonata and, more remarkably, keyboard pieces by Gibbons, Byrd, and Purcell, played by Yates’s resident early music specialist, Wesley Kuhnle, on a harpsichord he had built himself.65
It would be fanciful to suggest that this or any other single encounter with ancient music had a significant effect on Stravinsky’s own creative thinking. For twenty-five years he had been modeling himself on music of the early eighteenth century. Jacques Handschin, the Swiss medievalist, had been a good friend in the early thirties. He knew Nadia Boulanger’s investigations into early baroque vocal chamber music, had lapped up Cingria’s Pétrarque with its remarks about the Renaissance instrumental canzona, and had recently composed something like a canzona of his own in the slow movement of the two-piano sonata, based on a barely recognizable Russian folk song. It is perfectly true that within a few weeks of hearing Kuhnle play, he and Vera were listening to Landowska’s recording of the Goldberg Variations, and trying to acquire the music.66 But far more interesting than these apparently chance encounters with, after all, unrelated old music is a connection that was forming in his mind between the styles and techniques of pre-classical music in general and the context in which such techniques were most comprehensively displayed—the music of the medieval Catholic Church.
Exactly when he began composing a Kyrie and Gloria for mixed chorus and ten wind instruments is uncertain, but he was definitely working on the Gloria just before Christmas 1944, and probably on the Kyrie just before that.67 Although they were not his first sacred music of 1944, these two movements stand apart from Babel for the simple reason that there is no evidence of a commission for them, and the presumption therefore is that Stravinsky wrote them on some inner prompting. Craft thought that a spiritual crisis was involved, but if so, the two Mass movements are its only outward and visible sign.68 It is perhaps natural for the nonbeliever to assume that sudden expressions of faith must have some powerful psychological origin. But Stravinsky had never stopped being a devout, somewhat credulous believer since th
e time in the twenties when he had forced his entire family to kneel and pray in front of their domestic icons,69 or the years of Katya’s illness, when her letters had been peppered with invocations to the saints, and they had, as a family, followed the dissident Church in Exile to its chapel above a garage in the rue d’Odessa. Now, at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, the icons still graced the walls and desk, the panikhidï still came round with grim regularity, and Christmas, Easter, and birthdays—if not always other festivals—were honored as much in church as at the dinner table. Stravinsky was and remained profoundly superstitious, a literal believer—as Craft often later recorded—in the person of the devil and the actuality of holy relics. Only the context had changed. Vera, so far from sharing Katya’s intense piety, was a happy rationalist who went to church when Igor went and stayed away when—increasingly often—he stayed away. Thus the tone of religious life at Wetherly Drive was very different from its tone at the Faubourg. There it had centred on Katya, while Igor was the wayward element. Here it focused on Igor, and fluctuated with his waywardness.
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