Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  In the event, the Concerto in D, as the new string piece was called, was practically if not quite ready before Mexico, and the complicated new Petrushka score not until October.17 Stravinsky had struggled with Ebony, but his “Basler” concerto finds him so much on home ground that one could even wish for a little more grit in the oyster, to turn a very polished demonstration of modern classical technique into something urgent and out of the way. To call the Ebony Concerto the better piece would be a perversion of critical values; and yet in overcoming a more bizarre and difficult set of challenges, it emerged in some respects as the more distinctive and personable of the two works. The string concerto is exactly the kind of score Sacher must have expected: a clinching if lightweight expression of the neoclassical spirit, immaculate and inscrutable. For the first time in his long career, Stravinsky was starting to do what his admirers wanted, walking the tightropes they stretched for him, or—to subvert Schopenhauer’s image of genius—hitting the targets they pointed out.18

  It was much the same in May, when Lincoln Kirstein invited him to write a work for the School of American Ballet.19 Stravinsky had already spent part of April working with Balanchine on the latter’s idea of the Orpheus legend as subject, apparently unconcerned at the too-evident logic of the great neoclassicist crowning his ballet career with the archetypal Greek musical myth. The final details of the scenario were worked out between them when Balanchine visited the West Coast in June; but it was an essentially smooth, linear process, a true meeting of great minds. Balanchine had composed a Russian acrostic on the name “Igor” for Stravinsky’s sixty-fourth birthday, a little chorale that Stravinsky promptly copied out and reharmonized.20 On the ballet, they worked together like friends planning a holiday. It was such a pleasure to be with Stravinsky, Balanchine later told his biographer Bernard Taper, “because he’s a happy man.” They agreed on the essentially practical nature of artistic work, priding themselves “on being disciplined craftsmen, able to apply themselves to a job of work and produce it in good fashion and on time.”21 Stravinsky’s working notes, which itemize the action from start to finish complete with detailed timings (“Begin with Eurydice’s funeral: Orpheus stands for a ½ minute immobile; friends arrive with gifts, offer condolence, and leave 1½ [minutes]”), confirm this beyond doubt.22 It was all quite without the personal and aesthetic tensions of the composer’s last major theatrical collaborations, with Gide and Cocteau, not least because Balanchine instinctively deferred to Stravinsky, who was twenty-two years his senior and the unquestioned master.

  In 1939 Stravinsky had arrived in America as a guest lecturer, but he had stayed as a refugee, a suppliant for admission to a land that did not obviously want or need him even if it sometimes condescended to recognize the value of his name. For Europe he was by then simply an outsider. Virtually the whole continent east of the Rhine and south of the Alps was or soon would be closed to him and his music, and France—even before the Nazis came—had shown time and again that it did not greatly value his presence. Seven years on, all that had changed. Now an American citizen, he was fast turning into a Masterwork—as he later announced himself to the Columbia series director Schuyler Chapin.23 France at least thought him worth another riot or two. Above all, Germany was preparing to make handsome amends for its years of darkness. Willy Strecker had written in January, his first letter for almost six years, reporting on the destruction of Mainz and of the Schott printing works and warehouses, but sensing an optimism in German musical life.24 Three months later, seven months later, the Symphony in C was at the printers, was printed; interest in Stravinsky was huge and growing, many performances were planned, a German edition of the Poétique was needed, and so forth.25 Surely the Master would soon arrive in person.

  It was a question that he was naturally asking himself, but reports of the destruction and paralysis of European life—whether from Strecker or Nabokov or from friends in France or England—were not very encouraging to the cautious and insecure exile that lurked behind his fearless creative façade. Ordinary luxuries were said to be unobtainable. He himself had for some time been dispatching food parcels to a whole battery of European friends, including the widow of his old priest, Nikolay Podossenov, Katya’s cousin Olga Nosenko-Schwartz, Vera’s friend Olga Sallard, and RMV’s Berlin manager, F. V. Weber. The political situation was tense. America itself was crippled by strikes for much of 1946—his own Columbia recording of the Symphony of Psalms in February had been postponed because of one. On the other hand he was desperately anxious to see his children and grandchildren, not one of whom he had set eyes on since 1939. There was terrifying news of his Pavlovka Yelachich cousins, several of whom had found themselves in Yugoslavia when the Germans arrived in 1941. Zhenya, the closest to Igor in age and his companion in tarantula hunting at Pechisky, had been murdered in Belgrade by Cetnik partisans, Zhenya’s younger brother Ganya had been killed there by a German bomb, and young Alyosha—whom Stravinsky remembered being “confiscated” by Aunt Yekaterina at Pechisky26—had been murdered by the Croat Ustase. Igor’s oldest cousin, Nikolay, the Pavlovka tease, had been arrested by the N.K.V.D. in 1936, sent to the gulag, and later shot. In Igor’s mind, the urge to gather his family around him grew all the stronger with such reports.

  By the end of June he and Vera had bought another house near their own, and Vera was busy having it furnished and decorated ready for Milène and André and the faithful Madubo, as soon as their journey could be organized. In a certain sense, this was the easiest decision to take and (more important) impose, because the Marions, after years in a sanatorium, were without means of support and could scarcely refuse to come even if they had wanted to. With Theodore and Soulima matters stood rather differently. Theodore had settled in his wife’s native Geneva, and he was becoming a Roman Catholic and adopting his orphan niece, Kitty. They had no desire to cross the Atlantic. Soulima meanwhile had resumed his career in Paris, still amid a palpable atmosphere of recrimination. Whenever Nadia wrote she made a point of including praise of Soulima’s playing and of Françoise and their little son Zizi (Jean), whom Igor was impatient to meet, having been sent a photograph that he described gushingly to Nadia as “superbe, ravissant, tellement brave.”27 Yet neither son could be certain of self-sufficiency in the immediate term. Theodore was still waiting on a work permit from the notoriously recalcitrant Swiss, and he had meanwhile touched his father for a two-hundred-dollar subsidy, which Igor sent somewhat querulously and with a short homily to his thirty-eight-year-old son on the subject of his behavior toward his younger brother.28 Soulima had received an equivalent sum from Païchadze out of the composer’s undistributed wartime royalties.29 But his own professional prospects in France remained murky and unpredictable.

  IGOR AND VERA were away in Mexico for three weeks of July and August 1946, travelling by train with their friends the Sokolovs: the film actor Vladimir and his wife Lisa, Vera’s business partner. As in Havana, there were concerts and guided trips, to the shrine of Our Lady at Guadalupe and the pre-Columbian city of Cholula. But on the journey home, Lisa Sokolov went down with jaundice and was so ill that when they got to Los Angeles she had to be taken to the car in a wheelchair. Alexei Haieff had come west for the summer, and luckily he was there to meet them at the station and relieve the strain with his lively and obliging disposition. His main task that summer was to help prepare for Stravinsky’s recording of the Ebony Concerto two weeks later. But he stayed on until October, living in what was to be Milène’s house, and helping with musical chores, including perhaps the score of Petrushka, which was Stravinsky’s only remaining project until he started Orpheus in October, just after Haieff’s return to New York. Haieff became exceptionally close to Igor and Vera during this two-month visit. Back in Manhattan he performed the usual sub-Stravinskian errands, booking hotels ready for their arrival in December, fixing rehearsals, and so forth, and then duly reported back, adding: “I’ve said everything except what I meant to say at the start, which is that I love you
both unendingly and am so grateful for your kindness, and for the refuge, and for all the wonderful time I’ve spent with you.”30 It was a relationship that might have grown into something unique, only fate had other plans for them all. Lisa Sokolov, meanwhile, did not immediately recover from her illness, and when the Stravinskys went east for two months at the start of December, Vera simply had to close La Boutique down.

  One day at the Farmers’ Market on Fairfax Avenue, at about the time of Alexei’s departure, Stravinsky was spotted by two young Belgian women who claimed to have met him at a party and now flirtatiously reintroduced themselves. They were Claire and Sylvia Nicolas, the nieces of Aldous Huxley’s Belgian wife Maria; and Huxley himself was with them, came up, and presented himself as “a friend of Victoria Ocampo’s.”31 They had in fact met briefly once before, through Victoria, in London in 1934. But in Los Angeles they had missed one another, partly because the Huxleys had been living up in the Mojave Desert at Llano and more recently at Wrightwood, in the San Gabriel Mountains, and merely kept a pied-à-terre in Beverly Hills. Now they at once struck up a friendship, based less on a common worldview than on some less readily definable mutual fascination, and they began to meet regularly, at first on the Huxleys’ routine expeditions to the Farmers’ Market, then socially at each other’s houses and elsewhere. In November, the Stravinskys spent a day at Wrightwood, and later they entertained Maria’s sculptor sister and the two daughters, and the twenty-one-year-old Claire, who was a writer, interviewed the composer for a magazine called Junior Bazaar. For Igor it all amounted to a soft landing in the world of Anglo-Saxon culture, which, on the whole, he had so far avoided—not just because Huxley’s in-laws were Francophone Belgian but because Huxley was himself a polyglot who conversed with complete fluency in French. For the Huxleys it was a refreshing antidote to what Robert Craft later called the “sovereignty of scientific rationalism” in Aldous’s own conversation.32 “Today,” Maria Huxley wrote to their son, Matthew, a year or so later, “we had a most delightful dinner with the Stravinskys.… I must say it was delightful to listen to Stravinsky. He pours out—what he pours is very intelligent—it is often very new—sometimes quite difficult to explain, but always immensely worth listening to and the French, not perfect, is intelligent and colorful.” They talked about books and pictures. Eugene Berman was there, and showed his drawings (“competent,” Maria thought, “but not nice. Somehow—méchant …”). And Vera cooked “a vegetarian dinner for Aldous, just right, simple, good. She is so easy and very nice.”33

  Stravinsky completed his revision of Petrushka on the 14th of October 1946, and six days later made his first sketches for Orpheus. Much of the ballet’s character had already been fixed in his discussions with Balanchine. They had worked out a sequence of dances and a scenario derived from a copy of Ovid and a classical dictionary, which also supplied some of the dance titles,34 and they had agreed on timings and tempos. At one point Balanchine had suggested modeling the action on that of a seventeenth-century opera.35 But that simply meant that the action, though more eventful than that of Apollo, was to be stereotyped, or ritualized, in the same kind of way. Its main features would be the ones that everyone knows about Orpheus, with some embroidery; the narrative would be poised, statuesque, and with anecdote reduced to a minimum.

  In fact, as Robert Craft has observed, Orpheus turned out a far more pantomimic, less danced, ballet than Apollo.36 He compares it with Persephone, with its similar setting and heavy dependence on mime, and as it happens Persephone was on Stravinsky’s mind as he started writing the new ballet, since he was planning a broadcast with Madeleine Milhaud in the title role and wanted to get hold of the manuscript score, which was still in a bank vault in Paris. But in truth the music of Orpheus is both drier and stiller than that of its Ovidian predecessor. The opening scene—the first music Stravinsky composed—has Orpheus standing “motionless, with his back to the audience,” while “friends pass, bringing presents and offering him sympathy.”37 The music is like a slow chorale prelude with a counter-melody for harp and two brief interjections of wind chords (for the friends). Later, a series of formal dances is punctuated by curiously inert narrative episodes, as the oddly named Angel of Death (or Dark Angel) leads Orpheus to the nether regions and the “tormented souls … implore [Orpheus] to continue his song.” These interludes preserve the quality of chorale, if sometimes with more intricate counterpoint. For instance, in the last scene, where Orpheus’s severed head sings on and Apollo presents the singer’s lyre to heaven, the opening music is enriched by a fugue for two horns with an extra part for a trumpet—a strange and austerely beautiful effect.

  Stravinsky himself is supposed to have denied any influence of early music on Orpheus,38 and it is true that there is no obvious stylistic reference in the sense that Dumbarton Oaks might suggest Bach or Oedipus Rex Verdi. Yet it is hard to avoid the feeling that his growing excitement with strict contrapuntal technique in recent works like the Symphony in Three Movements, the Elegy, and the unfinished Mass is a signal just as definite in its way as the hints at sonata form and the key of E-flat in the Octet. How appropriate to represent Orpheus, the primal musician, through the most esoteric ways of writing, and to cloak them in an atmosphere of cabbalistic secrecy. And yet as with the original neoclassicism, the allusions go well beyond the obvious schoolroom techniques or idioms. There is a good deal of fugue in Orpheus, but there are many other places where some flavor of counterpoint or some curious figuration suggests an antique music, without one being able to put one’s finger on precisely what it is. Stravinsky expressly denied Monteverdi, yet the brass writing in the Interlude after Eurydice’s death or in the Apotheosis irresistibly suggests the composer of the Vespers, as well as certain of Schütz’s Symphoniae sacrae, even though it has not the faintest flavor of baroquism in any more conventional sense. Similarly, there is not much in Orpheus to make the casual listener think of medieval music, apart perhaps from the trumpet and violin melody in the Apotheosis, which Stravinsky himself thought sounded like a medieval fiddle.39 Nevertheless he was in touch with Manfred Bukofzer—his Berkeley medievalist of two years before—while composing it, and in April 1947, when half the score was still unwritten, Bukofzer sent him an essay on the isorhythmic motet.40 The pas de deux, which was written soon afterwards, contains some of the most intensely polyphonic writing in the whole ballet and has rhythmic motives that might have been suggested by medieval practice; but an antique flavor is lacking, and the music sounds more like an astringent, purified version of a neo-romantic piece like Barber’s Adagio.

  Stravinsky worked on Orpheus for some six weeks, but he had then to break off for what was becoming his annual midwinter trip to the East Coast. They stopped in Chicago (on the 5th of December 1946) and visited an exhibition of English painting at the Art Institute (including, Vera noted, works by Hogarth, Constable, and Turner).41 From New York they went straight to Montreal for a pair of concerts with the local orchestra; then, after Christmas, there were side trips to Cleveland, where the audience, Vera recorded, was “very rich and very dull,” and Philadelphia, where the concerts were so successful that, just as after the Paris Rite of Spring in 1914, they needed a police escort back to their hotel.

  In New York, Stravinsky again conducted a late-night broadcast of the Symphony of Psalms, and this time—the strike having been settled—he managed also to record it, on the 19th of December, the day after the broadcast. But he had no public concerts. He saw a good deal of Haieff, dined with Victoria Ocampo, with Rieti, and with the Milhauds. Above all, he spent many hours with Balanchine, discussing Orpheus, but especially helping plan a new staging of Renard that Balanchine was choreographing for his latest venture with Kirstein, an exclusive-sounding but none-too-glamorous enterprise called Ballet Society.

  Ballet Society had opened its doors in November 1946 in the improbable surroundings of the Central High School of Needle Trades, with the world premiere of a specially commissioned ballet by Hindemith call
ed The Four Temperaments. The new staging of Renard, on the other hand, was booked for the marginally more suitable Hunter College Playhouse in mid-January, on a bill with Paul Bowles’s Pastorela, Haieff’s Divertimento, and a display of Javanese dancing. The program was typical of Kirstein’s new society in its early days. The whole intention, as the society’s publicity put it, was “the encouragement of the lyric theatre by the production of new works.”42 Admission to performances was open only to members, profit was not an issue, and the press were not invited but instead bought their own tickets and published rather sheepish, uninformative notices that indicated the importance they attached to the venture without quite revealing why. The society’s conductor was the Belgian-born Leon Barzin, but Stravinsky auditioned the singers and attended rehearsals while he was in Manhattan, as well as both performances (on the 13th and 14th of January). After the first night there was a supper party in the apartment of Lucia Davidova, an old Russian acquaintance of Vera’s and a notable Balanchine groupie, an occasion so bibulous that when Stravinsky turned up at the Columbia studios at ten the next morning to rehearse for his coming broadcast of Persephone, he was still drunk.43

  Until that December, Robert Craft had not been back in touch since their interrupted exchange of letters in 1944, but he quietly missed nothing of Stravinsky’s doings in New York. He had of course heard the first performance of the Symphony in Three Movements and was in Carnegie Hall for the recital with Szigeti and Arrau. Quite apart from his excitement at the music, whose composer (he later claimed) was neither admired nor much studied at the Juilliard School, his sharp eye and mind recorded vivid images of Stravinsky’s manner and physique: the unusual speed of his walk to and from the rostrum, his brisk, punctilious platform presence, his way of acknowledging the audience, “unsmiling and aloof, … his right hand above his heart and with a single deep bow.”44 Now Craft had somehow talked his way into the Renard rehearsals, as well as into the rehearsals and studio performance of Persephone, a little-known work that was still only published in vocal score. He was intrigued by Stravinsky’s rehearsal technique. The composer would dash up and down the aisle with a towel round his neck, grumbling in French at Barzin or shouting directions to Balanchine in his deep-throated Russian. He would leap onstage and demonstrate the required actions to the dancers. Always that same amazing quickness and athleticism, like those of a bird.45