Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  As communicants, they never wavered from the Orthodox Church, but as in the past Stravinsky’s intellectual interest in Christianity was essentially Catholic. His Orthodox reading was confined to the prayers and precepts of the Dobrotolyubiye—the Russian version of the Greek Philokalia—with its injunctions to a humbler and more ordered spiritual life. “What shall we say of the belly, the queen of passions? If you can slay it or half kill it, keep a tight hold.” “Nothing is more ruinous than talkativeness, and more harmful than an uncontrolled tongue; and nothing is more destructive and disorganizing to the treasure of the soul.” “Increasing knowledge of God decreases knowledge of all else.” To subdue the activities of the mind, the tongue, and the digestion was a pious goal but, for the thinking, drinking man, not necessarily a consistent or desirable one. From the twenties on, Igor and Katya had read Maritain and Aquinas (especially the Summa Theologiae), Bossuet, Francis of Sales, and much else in the great central tradition of Catholic theology that sought to reconcile the brain and the spirit.70 Igor had run into Maritain at his Chicago lecture early in 1944; they had dined and talked, surely, about the Thomist aspects of the Poétique and their residue in the Chicago text. Later in the year he had made the acquaintance, through Nadia, of a Québecois priest named Elzear Fortier, who had given him Bossuet’s Élévations sur les mystères in return for a copy of the two-piano sonata, which Fortier had heard at Edgewood College.71

  Whether these contacts, scattered as they were and in any case not essentially new, explain the Mass settings might be doubted. They merely reveal an openness and, in some respects, a preference. Having spent more than a year dancing to commercial tunes, and producing—as he must have felt—nothing of the first rank, Stravinsky may simply have experienced an urge to write something of a more detached and spiritual character. What more natural than to turn to the liturgy: to imagine a music that would be sung in church, not in the manner of a concert, but as a humble enrichment of a solemn observance? That would be a suitably austere pleasure. But if he were to write for the Russian Church, he would have to forgo instruments, which were forbidden in the Orthodox rite. In any case, a work for the Russian liturgy—and to a Slavonic text—would sink without trace outside that liturgy. With music, as with theology, the Orthodox tradition was narrow and restrictive, while the Catholic Church offered precedents of an unbelievable wealth and variety, from the severest to the most sumptuous, and from the simplest to the most technically and intellectually complex. It was in this direction, especially, that his thoughts were now beginning to turn.

  It would be good to know more about the meeting with Bukofzer at Mills that October. Craft reports that while writing the Kyrie and Gloria Stravinsky was immersed in the music of the fourteenth-century composers Guillaume de Machaut and Jacopo da Bologna, though Stravinsky himself claimed (in conversations recorded by Craft) not to have known any Machaut—or at any rate not his only surviving Mass—until later, and not to have been influenced at all by early models.72 This latter claim, like others of the same kind, is hard to take seriously. Herbert Murrill long ago pointed out the remarkable similarity of flavor between passages in Stravinsky’s Gloria (as well as in the later Sanctus) and an early fifteenth-century Mass setting by Perusio (Matteo da Perugia).73 His examples show the same decorative, incantatory manner, with an intricate and very fluid rhythmic relationship between the different parts—entirely vocal in the Matteo Mass, vocal and instrumental in Stravinsky’s. Murrill was not suggesting that Stravinsky copied this or any other particular work, only that he seems consciously to have adopted a certain general style—that of the Ars Nova—to go with his strict concept of a musical liturgy. The music comes, so to speak, complete with the image of chanting monks, candlelit misericords, and echoing vaults. But the vision is neither romanticized nor a retreat into the past. As with all his modelings, Stravinsky is concerned to reinvent his own language by oblique reference to other styles and techniques; their appeal lies in their severity and impersonality, and not in any impressionistic suggestiveness.

  He must have planned a complete Mass from the outset, but for various reasons he got no farther than the Gloria before he was once again diverted by the insistent call of Mammon.

  12

  DISTANT CLASHES OF ARMS

  THAT YEAR’S New York trip was to be twice as long as its predecessor, fully six weeks. They set off by train on the 24th of January 1945, traveling with Arthur and Georgette Sachs, and by the 30th, Stravinsky—with his usual feverish January cold—was in the thick of rehearsals in Carnegie Hall. The concerts (on the first four days of February) were his first with the New York Philharmonic for almost five years, and unlike his 1940 programs they painted a bizarre picture of the great composer in wartime. Half of each was devoted to Glinka’s Ruslan overture and Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, while the Stravinsky halves were various permutations of the recent semipotboilers—the Four Norwegian Moods, the Circus Polka, the Scènes de ballet, alongside the Ode, all of them new to the Manhattan concert platform—together with Beveridge Webster playing the piano concerto, a piece Virgil Thomson reckoned had not been heard in New York since Stravinsky himself played it there in 1925.1

  All this was welcome enough money in the bank. But the New York stay was important for another reason; it put him back in touch with the machinery of the music business, just at the moment when the war seemed to be coming to an end and a certain modest optimism was in the air. For more than two years since August 1942, the whole recording industry in the U.S.A. had been crippled by a strike of the American Federation of Musicians; but by November 1944, with war restrictions on materials starting to relax, the record companies could no longer justify holding out against the AFM demands for a proper distribution of royalties, and that month both Columbia and RCA Victor came to terms with the Federation.2 On the 5th of February, the day after his last New York concert, Stravinsky went back to Carnegie Hall to record the four recent works he had just been conducting, and on the same day he signed a nonexclusive recording contract with Columbia.

  It was an early example of the type of concert-recording deal that later became something like a blood-transfusion system for concert life. The circumstances, however, reflected a particular reality of the political structure of music in New York, since Arthur Judson, the all-powerful manager of the Philharmonic, was also co-founder and a major stockholder of CBS, and Goddard Lieberson, who had produced Stravinsky’s 1940 recordings with the NYPSO, was now director of Masterworks at Columbia. Ten days after signing for Lieberson, Stravinsky lunched with Judson’s assistant, Bruno Zirato, and accepted a commission for what was optimistically described as a “victory” symphony, at a fee of five thousand dollars, to be premiered by the orchestra in January 1946.3 The new work was not added to the Columbia contract until August 1945 at the earliest. But two whole movements of it already existed, in the form of the symphonic Allegro and Andante supposedly intended for his concerto for orchestra, and Stravinsky may have made a snap decision that only one more movement was needed to round off this long-projected but never properly formulated work. A few days after the Zirato lunch, there was a heavy session at AMP, at which Stravinsky almost certainly put pressure on Gretl Urban to start acting as his main publisher, rather than as a somewhat cautious agent for Schott. For years he had been assuring her that he had no exclusive contract with Schott and was therefore free to offer his new works to whom he pleased.4 His lawyer, Sapiro, had, with what was to prove a characteristic blend of sycophantic wheedling and injured rectitude, bullied AMP into signing a deal with Chappell of London, to whom Stravinsky had already sold the two-piano sonata and the viola Elegy. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had seen Koussevitzky, heard nothing but bad news about the Galaxy squabble, and learnt that the great man was thinking of backing out of music publishing altogether, selling his catalogue and transferring his rights.5 The company’s Berlin offices had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944, and for the second time in less than thirty years the old Russi
sche Musikverlag—Édition Russe—had effectively been put out of business as a result of what had once seemed a shrewd and strategic choice of headquarters.

  For all the worrying condition of his publishing contracts, Stravinsky returned to Hollywood in the second week of March with a clearer idea of the work to be done. The symphony, already by far his most powerful and complex piece of writing since the mid-thirties, could now presumably be completed, without fear of its again being pushed aside by footling, money-spinning commissions. He also planned to rescore one of those commissions, the Scherzo à la russe, for symphony orchestra, and after that he would finish the Mass. But the publishing trade had by no means finished with him. He and Vera had been home for barely two weeks when he was contacted by Lou Levy, the president of Leeds Music Corporation, with a proposal about his three most famous ballets, Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, all of which were still in the public domain in the U.S.A.6 It had come to Levy’s notice that Stravinsky was about to acquire U.S. citizenship, and he had also somehow found out that Koussevitzky might be interested in selling the Édition Russe catalogue. If Stravinsky could revise or rewrite these pieces sufficiently to distinguish the new versions from the old, it would then be possible to re-copyright them in the U.S.A. under the protection of the composer’s citizenship; and if Koussevitzky would sell, then such protection as Petrushka and The Rite of Spring enjoyed abroad would likewise accrue to Leeds.7

  Despite this comparatively simple equation, it was Firebird—a score not published by ERM—that came first out of the hat, and for reasons not hard to fathom. Of all Stravinsky’s works, it was the only one that could conceivably be called popular in the normal sense of the term, and while its potential earnings were hard to establish (precisely because it was in the public domain in the States, and its score and materials had naturally been pirated there), it was a reasonable bet that it was played more in the U.S.A. alone than were the other two ballets in Europe and America combined. Moreover, Levy may have had a concealed motive, in the shape of an intention to plunder Stravinsky’s most conventionally melodious score for popular hit tunes. Leeds were certainly much less enthusiastic about the two later ballets than their opening gambit had implied. Their initial contract with Stravinsky in early May related only to Firebird, and they were soon indicating, ever so sweetly, that they would rather wait and see how the first ballet went before doing anything about the second.8 Sapiro, who had attended the early Leeds meetings, was swiftly reduced to a tone of pious apoplexy. He was shocked that “people like yourselves can treat one of the greatest creative musicians of this last century with the same kind of light disdain that you use towards the ephemeral writers of Broadway brass.”9 Levy must have been surprised to encounter a lawyer who based his arguments on aesthetic value judgments, but he would doubtless have replied—if a reply had been called for—that Sapiro should not have let his client sign the contract if he disliked its terms.

  Meanwhile, word had got out that Stravinsky was revising Firebird, and within minutes, it almost seemed, Levy’s hunch was being proved right. Goddard Lieberson wanted to record the new version; then Lucia Chase wanted to use it as the basis for a new ballet, with choreography by Bolm, to be staged by Ballet Theatre in the autumn.10 Stravinsky had finished his reorchestration of the Scherzo à la russe at the end of May. So now after all, instead of completing his symphony finale, he had to take up what amounted to further hack rewriting, and spend time on a work that belonged to his most distant past, a work he had so often grumbled at having to conduct, and one he even claimed he had never really wanted to compose at all. The sole consolation, he told Theodore several months later, was that he could “at last get rid of those superfluous pantomimes willed on me by Fokine.”11 But that was not quite true. What he in fact did was altogether more time-saving and practical. He simply expanded the 1919 suite (with its reduced orchestra) by adding to it six or seven minutes of the superfluous pantomimes, reorchestrated from the full score. He pointedly—and regrettably—did not include such brilliantly distinctive movements as the Magic Carillon and the Dialogue and Intercession that follow it, presumably because they did not easily reduce for the smaller orchestra. The 1945 suite is to all intents and purposes the 1919 suite, extended to make it copyrightable, and diffused to make it danceable. What it is not is a compressed and lightened version of the whole ballet, which would have been a marvelous idea but would simply have taken Stravinsky too long to do.

  While he was thus detained in the land of the bellyboshkies and the demon Kashchey, the world of mortals had been busy slaying its own monsters. By early May Hitler was dead and the Russians were ensconced amid the ruins of Berlin. The day before the formal German surrender, the Stravinskys went, as they often did, to a newsreel cinema and were profoundly shaken by film of Nazi atrocities. On VE Day, the 8th of May, they patriotically hoisted a flag over their house. For them, unlike many others, the end of the war did not mean an imminent return to Europe; they had, for the time being at least, cast their lot with America and the Americans. But it did mean—or so they must have hoped—reestablishing contact, and the possibility of travel. France, especially, beckoned. Paris, as it happened, had already begun some kind of postwar life straight after her own liberation, without waiting for the final destruction of the Nazi machine elsewhere.

  Already at the start of January, Stravinsky had received enquiries from the French capital about the availability of his recent music for performance. French radio were planning, among other things, a seven-concert festival of his music conducted by Manuel Rosenthal, as a symbolic celebration of that which the Nazis had most energetically suppressed. Meanwhile Roger Desormière wanted to include the Danses concertantes, a work as yet unheard in Europe, in a Salle Gaveau concert in late February. This was all very encouraging, not least in view of Stravinsky’s grumbles about the neglect of his music in Paris in the late thirties. If it crossed his mind to wonder about musical conditions and attitudes in France after four years of brutal occupation and four subsequent months of turbulent and sometimes murderous settling of scores, he said and wrote nothing about it. As news trickled through, a picture soon formed of frightening events and terrifying consequences; of an unprecedented atmosphere of social and artistic crisis that threatened not only his family but his music. Yet its manifestations were strange, and attached themselves to seemingly unworthy or innocent objects. Like Wordsworth, he looked on Paris

  as doth a man

  Upon a volume whose contents he knows

  Are memorable, but from him locked up,

  Being written in a tongue he cannot read.12

  It was several weeks before he began to hear how the concerts were going. At the end of March, after three of the Rosenthal concerts and the Desormière performance, Poulenc sent Milhaud an update on Paris musical life. “The rise of [Olivier] Messiaen,” he reported, “is the most important musical event. You’ll find, in fact, that this musician—genuinely remarkable, despite his impossible literary jargon—is surrounded by a fanatical sect. The Messiaenists are very ‘against Stravinsky last period.’ For them, Igor’s music stops with the Rite. They whistled at Danses concertantes, a work I adore.”13 In fact the Gaveau demonstration had been fairly discreet: “timid murmurs,” Claude Rostand had called them.14 But for the third radio concert at the fabled Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on the 15th of March, there was a more numerous claque armed with whistles and, according to one report, a hammer, which was twice wielded so noisily that the orchestra stopped playing.15 The culprits, it seemed, were a group of Conservatoire students in the top gallery; and although Henri Sauguet observed, tongue-in-cheek, that this merely proved that “academicism always protests against novelty,”16 he knew as well as anyone else that it was not Stravinsky’s novelty that had enraged these students from Messiaen’s harmony class, but on the contrary the banal and outworn insipidities, as they saw them, of his neoclassical works. They nevertheless heard out Jeu de cartes in silence, ignored the e
arly Faun and Shepherdess, then vented their entire fury on the humble Four Norwegian Moods, shouting and booing, banging and whistling, for most of its eight minutes. By contrast the Symphony of Psalms, which ended the concert, was again uninterrupted, the students having perhaps by that time gone home to an early bed.

  As Parisian demonstrations go, it was a feeble and rather insignificant affair, and it might well have passed unnoticed if the press had not taken sides and turned an obscure aesthetic quarrel, of a type much cherished in French intellectual circles, into a public controversy in which Messiaen camp followers like André Jolivet and the young composer Serge Nigg (apparently one of the whistlers) traded journalistic punches with such Stravinsky devotees as Poulenc and Yves Baudrier under headlines like “Assez de Strawinsky” and “Vive Strawinsky.”17 Messiaen himself held his peace and was probably not even party to either the incident or the argument. The intellectual hero of the protesters was not a “Messiaeniste” at all, but a “Schoenbergiste,” a Polish composer and conductor by the name of René Leibowitz, who had recently arrived in Paris from Vichy and had mounted a private performance of Schoenberg’s long and forbidding wind quintet to which several of Messiaen’s class managed to gain admittance, including a brilliant, hot-headed nineteen-year-old named Pierre Boulez. Boulez had seized on Leibowitz’s notion that the only possible way forward for a modern composer lay through “the entirely conscious and rigorous application of a thoroughgoing discipline which has command of all the possibilities of chromatic polyphony,” and that this discipline was only to be found in Schoenberg’s serial technique.18 Boulez had been “very nice,” Messiaen told Joan Peyser, when he first entered the class in 1944. “But soon he became angry with the whole world. He thought everything was wrong with music. The next year he discovered the serial language and converted to it with immense passion, judging it the only viable grammar.”19 Boulez was already thinking, and would soon write, that “all non-serial composers are useless.”20 In the shadow of such a dogma, Stravinsky’s neoclassical music—and his Norwegian Moods especially—was obviously fit only for the junk heap.