Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Mulling over the newspaper cuttings a few weeks later, Stravinsky was bemused by the whole affair, having not even realized that the broadcast concerts had had a live audience. It was one thing to start a riot against The Rite of Spring, violent music in a threatening new language. “But why the Norwegian Moods?” he asked Rosenthal in some puzzlement.21 He naturally knew nothing of the deadly earnestness of the new French modernism, an attitude that held Cocteau’s flippant epigrams in near-homicidal contempt. Above all, he remained largely ignorant of the Schoenberg connection, which he might perhaps have understood better, remembering Lourié’s original antithesis at the time of Apollo.22 The newspapers talked about Messiaen, since it was well known that the rowdies were members of his class. The Paris publisher Roland Bourdariat, who was proposing to bring out a new French edition of the Poétique, mentioned that “for the Messiaenistes, the greatest modern composer is Schoenberg,” but almost in the same breath satirized them as a “coterie of ridiculous disciples, whom [Messiaen] hypnotizes and preaches to in a pseudo-mystical jargon whose nauseating religiosity barely conceals a sensuality of unprecedented vulgarity.”23 As a characterization of the pro-Schoenberg position it was worse than useless. For the time being, Stravinsky seems to have concluded vaguely that the whole thing was a Communist plot, until he was disabused of this by his old friend André Schaeffner.24

  Much more disturbing for Igor than this distant clash of arms were certain rumors that began to reach him about his younger son’s Paris activities during the Occupation. After the fall of France, Soulima had been demobilized from Nevers and had gone back to Paris and settled in his older brother’s flat. Concert work had been scarce, but not unobtainable; there had been the occasional recital, he had taken a piano part in Les Noces under Charles Munch, and the solo part in Scriabin’s piano concerto, and had even presented a lecture about his father at the Lycée Musicale et Dramatique, playing the piano sonata, the Petrushka movements, and the studies, op. 7, despite the supposed ban on all these works. Then, early in 1944, he had given a radio talk on Stravinsky and expatiated on his “taste for the concrete, that quest for the authentic in all things that gives the least of his actions such an extraordinary intensity.”25 Suddenly, after the departure of the Germans, there were no more engagements. Soulima wrote to his father in March 1945 that he was being professionally ostracized and treated as a collaborator. For a time it even seemed that he might have to be denazified, which would mean investigation and possibly a trial.26 To Igor, this was as baffling as the treatment of his Norwegian Moods, and far more upsetting. Was it really so dreadful for a musician to give concerts in whatever situation he found himself in? How else was he supposed to live? Were the Parisians expected to do without music just because they were occupied by a foreign power? “I live in hope,” he wrote to Milhaud, “that this will not last forever and that these people will understand, once passions have cooled, that they are carrying their zeal too far.”27

  Early in 1945, Francis Poulenc had provided Milhaud with a detailed account of wartime goings-on in Paris that revealed the niceties and dangers of a situation which, in some ways, was outside the comprehension of a pragmatist like Stravinsky. France was being torn apart by forces that went well beyond the refined quantification of individual actions: the sense of national humiliation, the search for scapegoats, the settling of personal and institutional scores. “The number of people deported or shot [by the Germans] is alas impossible to tally,” Poulenc wrote. “One needed a good deal of agility to keep out of trouble without giving anything in return.” Not all had succeeded. Honegger had been “a bit weak,” Cocteau “un peu léger” (easygoing); Jacques Rouché, at the Opéra, had behaved well but was hopelessly compromised by his wife’s lack of tact and his daughter’s overt fascism, and was forced to step down. Marcelle Meyer’s husband had made a fortune from sequestrations of Jewish property, and they had both had to flee: “A pity,” Poulenc reflected, “as she was playing better than ever.” Pierre Bernac had “nearly killed himself teaching so as to avoid having any dealings with the radio.”28 There was at first no mention of Soulima. Then, later on, it began to come out. Like his father he had shown a pragmatic streak where the Nazis were concerned. As well as giving concerts and broadcasts, he had played for lectures by Heinrich Strobel at the German Institute. “Perhaps not very serious,” Poulenc added, “but a bit much, all the same.” Igor’s return, he thought, would put things right, though he doubted whether Soulima was a good enough pianist to reopen the doors that mattered.29 Had it emerged about the young man’s attempt to fix concert appearances in Germany early in the Occupation, his outlook in postwar Paris would have been grim indeed.30 But luckily for Soulima, Strecker kept this matter to himself. As for the German Institute concerts, Soulima later claimed to have acted out of friendship for Strobel, whom he knew from the Voreppe days, and who had himself been forced out of Germany because his wife, Hilde, was Jewish. Soulima had even concealed Hilde from the Nazis in his apartment. Alas, such refinements were quickly lost in the tortured atmosphere of post-liberation France. Soulima never defended himself publicly, and perhaps, on the whole, it was just as well.31

  At about the time of the Strecker approach, Soulima had fallen in love with a married French woman called Françoise Bon, who had left her army-officer husband and was studying law in Paris. For some time now she and Soulima had been living together, and by the spring of 1945—though still not free to remarry—she was expecting a baby by him. An earlier rumor that Milène had had a child had proved false. But it was precisely this unreliable flow of worrying news that Igor found hardest to support and that decided him that, if he and Vera were going to stay in America, he would have to bring his children out to be close to him there. It was the patriarchal urge that had last been satisfied at Monthoux, in that ill-fated summer of 1937 when sickness and decay had infected the very air. Now it was Milène and her new husband, André Marion, who were ill and in need. As soon as the money could be found, they must come and get better—as Igor had done—in California.32

  The last and most curious dispatch from France had to do with Bourdariat’s interest in the Poétique, and was a disconcerting reminder of the psychological distance the world had travelled since the winter of 1940. The fifth lecture of the six, “The Avatars of Russian Music,” composed before the outbreak of war and delivered under the shadow of the Nazi-Soviet pact, was a swingeing if not very well-directed attack on Soviet policy toward music and the arts, and by implication on the Soviet Union itself. In 1941, however, the U.S.S.R. had perforce changed sides, and in 1945 was part of the victorious Western Alliance. This difficulty had, for some reason, passed unnoticed at the time of the Harvard publication of the original French text in 1942; indeed, it was still being ignored by Harvard as their thoughts turned once more to an English translation early in 1945. But in Paris such questions were complicated by France’s ambiguous and subordinate position in the Alliance, and, to cut a long story short, Bourdariat wanted to leave the problematical chapter out, “all the more because there is a high risk of its being banned [and with it the whole book] by the military censorship.”33

  Stravinsky bade temporary farewell to his Russian revenge without much of a qualm. In the last four years he had been feeling his roots more strongly once again as he tried to keep track of the devastation of his native city and the slow reversal of fortunes since the raising of the siege. Not that he can have expected Stalin to change his spots after the war, or even thought very hard about that likelihood. With him, attitudes to such matters were entirely ruled by feeling, and blood was always thicker than water. At the time of North Star he had immersed himself in arrangements of Russian folk tunes, along precisely the lines that he had mocked in his “Avatars” lecture as “this fad for folklore” and “the unfailingly conventional and often suspect harmonizations of these folk songs.”34 At the same time he had involved himself in Russian war relief. Now on 16 May, barely a week after the end of the European
war, he agreed to conduct his Firebird suite (not yet in its revised form) without fee at an American-Russian friendship concert in Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, attended by Soviet delegates to the recent San Francisco conference of the United Nations. It was a starchy sort of occasion; the mayor of Los Angeles greeted the Russians, Edward G. Robinson made a speech, and Otto Klemperer conducted Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata without enthusiasm.35 But the mere act of participation showed the degree of change in the wind; it might not last, but for the moment it was unmistakable.

  As for the new Firebird suite, its completion in June by no means put an end to the tensions and ill feeling prompted by the legalistic nature of its conception.36 Sapiro was having a field day with the (as he at least thought) wily Leeds executives, demanding contracts and accusing them of “deliberate bad faith” over the allocation of payments for the production by Ballet Theatre.37 Undeterred by this barrage, Leeds’s Hollywood manager, Aaron Goldmark, now came up with a fresh proposition. He had been approached by the clarinettist and bandleader Woody Herman to act as go-between in persuading Stravinsky to compose a work specially for Herman’s band—the Herd, as it was known in the trade. Stravinsky agreed to write a seven-and-a-half-minute piece by the end of December for a fee of two thousand dollars.38

  For the time being he was burying his head in the sand and finishing off the finale of his “Victory” symphony, a movement of stunning complexity and brilliance that must have been mapped out and partly composed in the spring for him to have brought it so swiftly to an end, as he did, on the 7th of August. The previous day, the Americans had dropped their first atom bomb on Hiroshima, and Craft has observed that on the 7th Stravinsky made a subtle change to the last chord to lend it greater finality, and invented the dismissive rhythmic gesture that so superbly concludes this most volcanic of all his concert works.39 The curious thing is that, in his much later description of the supposed war-program of the finale (“goose-stepping soldiers,” and so forth), Stravinsky does not so much as mention Hiroshima or the Japanese, who in fact surrendered three days after the symphony’s completion.40 If the work celebrates any particular victory, it must be this one. In truth, though, its music is not of that kind.

  A month or so after he had completed the fair copy of the Symphony in Three Movements, as he had finally decided to call it,41 a brief report on the Herman commission appeared in the show-business broadsheet The Billboard, couched in the typical language of Tin Pan Alley, to the effect that “Igor Stravinsky, noted classical composer, has agreed to write a special composition titled The Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s ork [sic].… Stravinsky is expected to bring forth something of a new era in music expression for the modern day 20-piece dance band of the jump type Woody Herman leads.”42 After reading this masterpiece, Stravinsky took umbrage and tried to withdraw, but he was dissuaded by the ever-judicious Sapiro, who was able to use Herman’s embarrassment over the leak as a lever in the subsequent negotiations.43 However, what really upset him about the Billboard report was probably the final paragraph, which had nothing to do with Herman but contained the bald announcement that “Kermit Goell, lyric writer, is doing a couple of pop songs based on themes from Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.” Here, no doubt, was the real object of the Leeds connection. Whether Stravinsky knew about it, had agreed to it, but did not expect the fact to be blurted from the housetops, or alternatively was learning about it for the first time from the columns of The Billboard, is by no means clear. The subsequent history of the affair suggests the former. But in any case there was little he could do except grumble, or relinquish a lucrative commission, since Firebird—as has many times been noted—was public property in America and its music was fair game to anyone who cared to make use of it. Stravinsky might succeed in recopyrighting the suite, if he could somehow persuade orchestras and ballet companies to prefer his revised version, but the individual tunes (not all of them in any case composed by him) were quite out of his reach.

  Ballet Theatre, at least, were using the new suite for their Met production that October, conducted by Jascha Horenstein. It seems likely in fact that the choice of “pantomime” links, which are what mainly distinguish it from the popular 1919 version, came out of discussions with Bolm and Hurok’s representative, the former dance critic Irving Deakin.44 But however much the new Firebird score may have been tailored to Bolm’s conception, the results did not measure up to the degree of integration Edwin Denby had observed in Balanchine’s Danses concertantes the previous year. Part of the trouble was Marc Chagall’s décors, which were so sumptuous and fantastic that everything else was overwhelmed, Markova in the title role was made to look insignificant, and the playing was scrappy, partly because—as Horenstein reported in an anguished telegram the day after the premiere—the Leeds orchestral parts were “simply horrible[,] manuscripts done by nonprofessional copyists[,] worse than anything ever experienced.”45 As for Apollo, revived in Balanchine’s choreography (rather than Bolm’s, which presumably was lost), the performance had been ruined by the mediocre playing of a too-small string orchestra. “The conclusion,” Rieti reported, “is that Ballet Theatre ‘stinks.’”46 So Hurok’s machinations against Denham had not helped his own project, and for the time being it was Denham who was in Stravinsky’s good books and had his ear. At the end of November in Los Angeles, the composer attended the Ballet Russe opening night, even though Pulcinella was being danced in a truncated form and under a title (Commedia balletica) to which he might have been expected to take exception. After the show he and Vera dined amicably with Denham.47

  For much of November 1945 Stravinsky worked on the Ebony Concerto, whose main hazard as far as he was concerned was its scoring for a small swing band very different in character from the jazz orchestra for which he had composed the Scherzo à la russe. There would be a clarinet solo for Herman, and the band was otherwise dominated by choirs of saxophones and trumpets, with harp, piano, guitar, and drums, but no strings except the ubiquitous bass. Apart from the orchestral parts in the Scherzo, he had never written for saxophone before, and he needed to have the fingering explained to him by a saxophonist (a precaution that shows the importance he attached to an exact sense of the instruments he wrote for).48 He was, he confessed to Nadia early in the month, “a bit unnerved in view of the short time available, and the fact that I am unfamiliar with this sort of thing.”49 And yet he had already by that time finished the first movement, a piece which cunningly adapts the rhythmic-ostinato style of Stravinskian neoclassicism to the jazz clichés he had picked up from Herman’s records. By the 13th the bluesy slow movement was also finished. There was then a minor but significant interruption. Nathaniel Shilkret had at last managed to place his Genesis suite, in a concert by Janssen’s orchestra in the Wilshire-Ebell Theatre on the 18th, and Stravinsky attended three afternoons of rehearsals, as well as of course the concert itself, in which Janssen combined the composite work with Beethoven’s Egmont overture and an eightieth-birthday performance of Sibelius’s First Symphony.

  Musically, the performance was as frustrating as such occasions invariably are. The forty-five-minute bundle of scores had consistency of neither style nor treatment, some composers having opted merely to illustrate the spoken text, while others (including Milhaud and Stravinsky himself) attempted a greater dramatic or symbolic intensity. The prelude, for orchestra with wordless chorus, an authentic and uncompromising piece of late, serial Schoenberg, certainly fell into this latter category: “the prelude,” as one later critic remarked, “to something only [Schoenberg himself] could have composed,”50 but followed in the event by Shilkret’s account of the Creation, which Isabel Morse Jones called “straightforward picture-music [written] with the devices which film and radio experience has taught him.”51 Babel must have made a confusing ending to this potpourri of what Morse Jones somewhat vaguely called “the modern idiom,” not least because Edward Arnold’s narration was often inaudible even above Stravinsky’s comparatively discreet scor
ing.

  Two weeks before the concert, Shilkret and Janssen had arranged a lunch for the participating composers, but Stravinsky seems not to have attended. Nor did he and Schoenberg meet at the rehearsals. At the dress rehearsal they chose, according to Leonard Stein (who was with Schoenberg), “to remain on opposite sides of the hall,” and the same thing happened at the concert.52 At the rehearsal, Stein recalled,

  Not a word was exchanged. I left the hall with Schoenberg just at the completion of Stravinsky’s piece. Only one sentence was forthcoming from Schoenberg when I asked him what he thought of the piece. “It didn’t end; it just stopped.”

  But if Schoenberg and Stravinsky did not meet at such an obvious opportunity, it can only have been because they did not want to, whether out of fear, or simple shyness, or some awkwardness engendered by old hostilities or the polemics of their various acolytes (not including Stein, who had copied the parts for the revised Danse sacrale and remained on a friendly footing with both masters). They had, as it happened, almost met less than three months before at the funeral of Franz Werfel, one of the few others who had managed, through his wife Alma Mahler, to remain on terms with both composers, and who yet seems never to have attempted a reconciliation. At the cemetery, Stravinsky observed Schoenberg’s “angry, tortured, burning face,” but no words were exchanged.53 Perhaps the anger was, or seemed, personal in intent. Unfortunately, Stravinsky’s is the only account.