Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  In spite of his anxieties about the genre, he had finished the Ebony Concerto by the 10th of December, three weeks ahead of schedule, and the next day he embarked on yet another work of revision, this time of only part of a work, and one which he had hardly so much as glanced at for well over a decade. In addition to his coming January Carnegie Hall concerts with the symphony premiere, he was conducting the NYPO in a late-evening half-hour broadcast of the Symphony of Psalms in the CBS Invitation to Music series on the 30th on WABC. But because the broadcast would be live and the symphony was only twenty-one and a half minutes long, a filler was needed, and for some reason Stravinsky’s mind fell on the final chorale of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, a work that he had never conducted, that had not been published except as a piano reduction, and for which no performing materials existed in the U.S.A. In one day, working from a copy of the original piano reduction as published in 1920 by the Revue musicale for its Debussy memorial, he rescored this three-minute piece for a wind ensemble without clarinets, instruments not required for the Symphony of Psalms.54

  What prompted him to think of this work, apparently so remote from his current creative preoccupations? One answer is that it is less remote than it seems. He had just been writing a piece in which trumpets dialogue with saxophones, and the melodies rock back and forth just as they do in the Symphonies chorale, albeit in a style as urban-modern as that of the Symphonies is ethnic-antique. It is just possible, in other words, that the chorale was actually suggested by his work on the Ebony Concerto. On the other hand, the Kyrie and Gloria of a year before are actually quite close in atmosphere to this almost forgotten quarter-century-old music for wind. There was another, more mundane factor. A week or so earlier, he had had a wire from Koussevitzky, urging him to meet Ralph Hawkes, the director of the London publishing house Boosey and Hawkes, with whom Koussevitzky was in the process of negotiating a deal for the sale of the Édition Russe catalogue, and who was visiting Los Angeles over Christmas. With such a meeting in view, and in the light of his unsettled relations with AMP, his growing disillusion with Leeds, and his fury over the unresolved situation with Galaxy, Stravinsky’s instinct would certainly have been to take stock of his own ERM catalogue and brief himself on the likely details of any discussion with Hawkes. The existence of an unpublished, undistributed, and virtually unperformed nine-minute instrumental score, which could now be kept out of the hated U.S. public domain, is most unlikely to have escaped his notice.

  The ERM sale was already a foregone conclusion. Koussevitzky himself had long since lost interest in his publishing operation and had been effectively running it down since the mid-thirties. These days his great enthusiasm, apart from conducting, was for the educational work of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, to which he had tried without success to entice Stravinsky. ERM in Europe had in any case been fatally damaged by the war both in Germany (Berlin and Leipzig)—where its offices had as in 1914 been politically isolated even before they were bombed—and in Paris, where the Occupation throttled practically the entire catalogue, consisting as it did mainly of music by modern Russians not looked on with favor by the Nazis. At least the Paris operation was theoretically intact. Amid the ruins of the German capital it was more a case of rescuing what could be rescued. Nicolas Nabokov, himself an ERM composer, had been in Berlin since August working as civilian cultural adviser to the American military government, and in October he wrote Koussevitzky a progress report on his efforts to have the cellars of the wrecked Russische Musikverlag offices in the Martin Luther Strasse dug out for surviving scores and orchestral parts while at the same time trying to protect the position of the old office chief, F. V. Weber, who was destitute and without work. Nabokov’s short-term aim was to index the materials and set up an emergency catalogue for occupied Germany. But as a longer-term publishing proposition, the RMV was to all intents and purposes dead.

  Stravinsky lunched with Hawkes on the 28th of December, 1945, and on that same day he and Vera took the oath as U.S. citizens, sponsored by Edward G. Robinson, who in the course of the proceedings turned out not to be a proper citizen himself—to have been, in fact, an illegal immigrant for the past forty years.55 His testimony, however, was merely the visible sign of a hidden network of venial untruths. Not only had Igor made a fraudulent statement about Vera’s supposed divorce from Sudeykin in Tiflis in 1920 (a statement that also falsely claimed it to have been her first marriage), but Vera herself lied about her age in her naturalization papers, stating that she was fifty-three rather than fifty-six. What was crucially truthful, on the other hand, was their intention, as the certificate put it, “to reside permanently in the United States (when so required by the Naturalization Laws of the United States).”56 With the war over, this was a more momentous decision than it might previously have seemed. Many of the distinguished refugees who had formed part of their world were going back to Europe. Nadia Boulanger sailed for France three days after the naturalization, bearing with her packages of food for her starving compatriots, a photographic copy of the manuscript of Stravinsky’s symphony finale, and baby clothes for Soulima and Françoise, and leaving behind her old car, which she was donating to the Stravinskys. Others would soon follow. But Igor and Vera themselves were becoming not less but more settled. Their household was growing again. They had a new, vaguely genteel Russian housekeeper named Yevgenia Petrovna but usually known—mysteriously—as Mrs. Gates. Vera was now much occupied with a new project of her own, a small gallery on La Cienega Boulevard called La Boutique, which she had opened in partnership with Lisa Sokolov at the end of August. They presented select exhibitions of modern art (starting in December with Tchelitcheff), but also of various artefacts and collages that Vera herself made out of painted stones, dried sponges, and other more or less unlikely materials.57 Igor had been offered a new European commission (his first since Persephone): a string piece for the twentieth anniversary of Paul Sacher’s Basle Chamber Orchestra.58 After a lifetime of moving house, and seven thousand miles from his starting point, he seemed to have found a home.

  * * *

  FEW CAN have been prepared for the sheer impact of the Symphony in Three Movements, when Stravinsky conducted its premiere in Carnegie Hall on 24 January 1946. In one sense, of course, it was more gratifyingly Stravinskian than anything he had composed since, at the latest, Oedipus Rex: it was rhythmic, aggressive, strident—a Scythian wind blowing in from the Russian steppes. But that was precisely the difficulty. It was a kind of music that Stravinsky had recently abandoned in favor of soft-centered commercial parodies like Scènes de ballet, which—just to confuse matters further—was again in the Carnegie program. One could doubtless understand it as simply the latest turn in the Stravinsky zigzag; one could call it (rather unconvincingly) a “Victory” symphony, as Zirato had done, or a “War” symphony, as the critics were more inclined to do. None of this, however, helped locate it in the composer’s notoriously unpredictable and changeable oeuvre.

  It would certainly have helped to know (as the Carnegie Hall audience did not) that the symphony had been more than three years in the writing and that at various times its composition had got badly entangled with Stravinsky’s various commercial projects. The first movement, after all, was closer in time to the finale of the Symphony in C than to its own finale, and in many respects its music related stylistically to certain preoccupations in Stravinsky’s music of the thirties rather than to any of the motley collection of Americana that he had brought to the same hall a year before. For instance, its descent from the concerto for two pianos would have been apparent to anyone familiar with that little-played masterpiece. At the same time it might have been clear that the finale was not an expression of the excitement of the end of the war but the solution to a formal problem: how to unite two movements, one of them violent and with a percussive piano solo, the other delicate and bardic, with a solo for harp. Stravinsky probably only approached this problem in quite those terms after receiving the commission;
but it was a problem that, in some ways, recalled the troubled history of the Symphony in C, where, for all that work’s brilliance, it had been less decisively solved.

  Like many of the greatest works of art, the Symphony in Three Movements is a work of synthesis. True, it recaptures the Scythian fury of The Rite of Spring, but in no sense is it a revisionist score. Like all Stravinsky’s main works of the thirties and early forties, it channels energy into counterpoint, a kind of writing where the individual parts enjoy a certain autonomy but within what might be called socially defined limits—like an intense and animated conversation whose participants talk across one another but who each still manage to take account of what the others say. The wildly independent instrumental lines in the introduction to The Rite of Spring, which retain, in Peter Hill’s apt phrase, “a reptilian indifference to one another,” for that very reason tend to sound—and no doubt were meant to sound—inhuman and pitiless.59 But the symphony finale, with its dazzling fugal and imitative exchanges, breathes a refinement that civilizes the ferocity, without in any way drawing its sting. It is neoclassicism without fancy dress and come of age.

  13

  ORPHEUS IN A NEW GUISE

  THE SYMPHONY CONCERTS were the focus of that winter’s Manhattan stay; after all, the Symphony in Three Movements was Stravinsky’s first orchestral work ever to be premiered on the New York concert platform. But they were by no means its only excitement. Early in February he went to Baltimore to conduct the symphony orchestra and give his Chicago lecture at the Peabody Conservatory, where both Nadia and Nicolas Nabokov had been teaching during the war. Then on the 8th he took part, without fee, in a Carnegie Hall recital in aid of the New York Philharmonic’s pension fund, playing the Duo Concertant with Joseph Szigeti—a partnership whose brief but distinguished life had begun in Hollywood in October with a recording of the Duo for Columbia, and ended there seven months later with a recording of the so-called “Russian Maiden’s Song” from Mavra.1 Still more enticing was the prospect of Woody Herman’s premiere of the Ebony Concerto in March. Stravinsky would be gone by then, but he was taking care to make his intentions clear before quitting the East Coast.

  Herman must originally have assumed that he would do the concerto as a band piece without conductor, but Stravinsky’s floating meters proved too much for players used to working their syncopations against a rigid barline, and soon a conductor was engaged in the person of the NYPO’s permanent associate conductor, Walter Hendl. Hendl was Stravinsky’s own choice, but his real alter ego in ensuring a properly literate performance was Alexei Haieff, the young composition pupil of Nadia’s whom he had met at Harvard at the start of his lecture series in 1939. Haieff had since become a regular New York helper, who would book hotels for Igor and Vera, would meet them at the railway station, and had even been engaged by AMP—not very successfully—as copyist for the Symphony in C.2 But the Ebony Concerto sealed their intimacy. The thirty-one-year-old Haieff worked tirelessly with Herman’s players, partly with the intention of conducting the work himself in subsequent performances for which Hendl was unavailable. His letters praised the band’s “‘humbleness’ and seriousness of approach to the work …, such that one could only wish that all orchestras had the same attitude.”3 In return, Stravinsky gave him a reference for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which—no doubt in consequence—he duly received that spring. The fact was that Haieff was a composer and musician with whom Stravinsky felt comfortable. It was not just that the young man wrote his kind of music—though the debt was easy enough to spot; Haieff also had a deep and abiding love for Stravinsky’s work, and he talked as if he understood it. Best of all, he was Russian, born in Blagoveshchensk near the Sino-Siberian border, which meant that they could communicate quickly and semi-intuitively in what amounted to a private language, in a word or a phrase, about people or music or social situations, a facility Stravinsky had not previously encountered in an American musician of Haieff’s generation.

  On the day of the Ebony premiere, the 25th of March 1946, Igor and Vera arrived home at North Wetherly Drive from concerts in San Francisco, at the end of a punishing tour that more than anything so far resembled their European travels of the late twenties and early thirties. After attending a performance of The Fairy’s Kiss danced by Balanchine’s pupils at the School of American Ballet, they had taken the night train with Haieff to Boston, where Igor had concerts in Symphony Hall and at Cambridge.4 They had then abandoned him to the tender mercies of Herman’s Herd, had gone by train to Miami and from there flown to Havana for a ten-day stay that had almost turned into a state visit, including a courtesy call by President Aixala, a pair of concerts, and a hundred-mile journey by private train, in tropical heat, for a three-day holiday on a sugar plantation.5 Later there had been another long train journey via New Orleans to Dallas, where they lost their baggage and Vera had to go on an emergency shirt-buying expedition for her husband. After a single concert in Dallas they flew to San Francisco, and thence home.6 As a concert tour it was the beginning of a postwar odyssey that would make a sizable annual dent in Stravinsky’s composing schedule but would accumulate an income, as well as a degree of limelight, which he continued to find indispensable to maintaining the high subsistence level to which they had become used. Artistically such tours would often seem quite pointless, and this one was hardly an exception. Everywhere it was Firebird, as often as not Petrushka, one or more of the recent potboilers, and perhaps Pulcinella or the Tchaikovsky-based Divertimento, or else Tchaikovsky’s own Second Symphony and Glinka’s Ruslan overture, which Olin Downes had insultingly, but not without a certain perverse logic, described as the best work in Stravinsky’s Carnegie Hall concert of a year ago.7 Of course, Downes was not a serious critic. And yet Stravinsky could easily have found himself wondering what he was doing on a rostrum in Cuba conducting a second-class orchestra in a second-rank and not particularly brief Russian symphony of the nineteenth century, while a tricky new piece of his own was being prepared and performed by other hands a thousand miles away.

  Of the Ebony Concerto he picked up a recording on the radio four days after the event, but the balance was poor and naturally the peculiar atmosphere of a Carnegie Hall jazz concert was missing. Marcelle de Manziarly described the unusual audience: “a lot of youngsters chewing gum and swaying to the music’s rhythms.”8 Haieff reported that in the hall the balance was good and the performance accurate if timid, since Herman was ill at ease with the unfamiliar idiom—“like a frightened man,” Stravinsky told Marcelle on the evidence of the broadcast.9 Haieff himself had had to take over from Hendl conducting performances in Baltimore and Boston: his “directoral rebirth,” he called it, with a naïve pride that it had not gone badly, Herman had been pleased, and he had even been paid a fee. For Stravinsky, though, it was worrying that he would himself be recording the piece with “Voody” in Hollywood in the summer, when the swaying and the gum-chewing and the whole concert euphoria would vanish behind the simple question of whether the musicians could play the work properly or not.

  He had still not quite made up his mind about the Sacher commission. His initial reaction had been that he was too busy,10 presumably because his preliminary contract with Boosey and Hawkes, drawn up at the start of January, included an undertaking on his part to revise Petrushka for a (slightly) reduced orchestra by the 1st of April—a timetable that in any case his trip to Havana rendered impossible. Then in February in New York, Berman had pressed him to write incidental music for Robinson Jeffers’s version of Euripides’s Medea, a project that was still theoretically afloat at the end of March, when the actress Judith Anderson came to see him at Wetherly Drive in order to discuss it.11 Stravinsky had probably assumed that the Petrushka revision—like the new Firebird suite—would be a largely mechanical process, one of those afternoon activities that he liked to engage in while being read to by some amenable slave. But then as he worked on it, it began to turn into a complete retexturing—a thorough rethinking of the score in the spir
it of his recent music, with a sharper delineation of sonorities and less reliance on rhythmic washes of harmony. So when April came, he took heart from the fact that the Boosey contract was held up by technical matters (including the size of his own emolument),12 abandoned the Petrushka deadline, and accepted Sacher, naming a fee of $2,500, which gave the Swiss conductor, for all his wife’s Hoffmann–La Roche millions, a most disagreeable surprise in his turn.13

  Stravinsky’s idea was to write his string piece before a conducting trip to Mexico that he had planned for the second half of July,14 then finish Petrushka in the late summer. Before Mexico, nevertheless, he worked on both scores, at least if Aaron Sapiro was telling the strict truth when he announced to Hawkes early in July that three of the four tableaux were done.15 Stravinsky was understandably anxious to copyright his new version as quickly as possible. He was constantly being confronted with evidence of the abuse to which his public-domain works were subjected by American orchestras and dance companies. For instance, it turned out that Massine’s recently formed touring company, Ballet Russe Highlights, had been playing excerpts from Petrushka in the American provinces with a hugely reduced orchestra, and with no authorization from the composer whatsoever. This emerged only because Massine now needed his permission to use part of the work in a play called A Bullet in the Ballet, a backstage whodunnit in which a series of dancers in the role of Petrushka were murdered one after the other, and which was going on the stage in England. Massine was disappointed to learn that even Stravinsky’s “reduced” score needed sixty-eight players, whereas the English pits could accommodate no more than forty-five. Reluctantly, Stravinsky gave his former colleague the permission he sought, on condition that the program explicitly dissociated him from the result.16