Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  For the Renard sessions, Craft stationed himself just behind Stravinsky in his stalls seat, and then on the day of the Persephone performance, in the short break between the final rehearsal and the broadcast, he sneaked into a photograph of Stravinsky examining the score with a group of young musicians, including the Ebony conductor, Walter Hendl, the composer Lukas Foss, and Claudio Spies, a Boulanger pupil and a close friend of Craft’s from the previous summer at Tanglewood. But Stravinsky was unaware of Craft and they did not meet.46 Nervous and unself-assured, the young man behaved like a lover-from-afar, shadowing his idol from the stage door to his car, hanging around at rehearsals, hoping for some miraculous introduction, but not daring to put himself forward or declare himself in any way. And like many a seemingly hopeless lover, he possessed only the courage of the pen. This was what had helped him to write in 1944, fabricating some pretext about cornet articulations in The Soldier’s Tale and about wanting to borrow scores. This very Christmas, he had written again with an enquiry about unpublished works, but Stravinsky, who received many such letters and now had a new publisher to whom he could refer nuisance correspondence, replied briefly from Hollywood in February with the address of his editor, Hans Heinsheimer, of Boosey and Hawkes, 668 Fifth Avenue.47

  The new contract had been signed in New York in January 1947, and by a neat coincidence the very first work that would bear the exclusive Boosey and Hawkes imprint, the Concerto in D for strings, had its first performance on the 21st of that same month, conducted by Paul Sacher in distant Basle, while its composer was conducting yet another second-rate orchestra in Glinka, Tchaikovsky and his own early ballets in Buffalo.48 From upstate New York, they went home via San Antonio, Texas, where Stravinsky conducted, and where they visited Randolph Field (the Air Force equivalent of West Point) and the maestro again took up his baton to rehearse the Air Force band. But amid these very American experiences, his mind kept straying to Europe. For some time he had been intending to cross back in May, but the plan was complicated by the impending arrival of Milène and André, who had at last received their quota allocation and could be expected to sail within a couple of months. The problem, he wrote to Mildred Bliss from San Antonio, was André’s medical history, which might lead to his being sent to Ellis Island and force Igor and Vera to postpone their departure for Europe. Could she, he pleaded, pull strings in order to avoid any such tiresomeness? She could, and within a week had done so.49 However, his other anxieties about the coming summer were not so easily laid to rest.

  When he resumed work on Orpheus early in February, he may have already half-sensed that time was short to complete the thirty-minute score by the autumn, when Balanchine was planning to stage the new ballet. At least that was the main reason he gave to Heinsheimer when he informed him a month later that he had abandoned his European plans for that year.50 Yet hidden between the lines of this March letter were other worries. His own health, he admitted, was good these days; but was this not an oblique reference to a previous letter from the publisher warning him that living conditions in London were appalling, that it was cold, and with constant power cuts and severe food shortages? Ralph Hawkes’s advice that Stravinsky send himself food parcels in advance might almost have been calculated to shake the comfort-loving composer’s confidence in the wisdom of his journey.51 Then there was the issue of Paris and its likely reception of his music. It was true that Nadia had been writing for months about “those who matter among the young [French] musicians knowing perfectly well whence comes the light”;52 but dear Nadia could never quite see beyond the circle of her own prejudices, and there was something undeniably disconcerting in her well-meant remark about the idiocies that were going around Paris, “the theories, the systems—ravings [that] lead a frenzied dance.” A long letter had come from Pierre Souvtchinsky that put such epithets in an altogether more painful light. The state of music in France, he wrote, “is complicated and confused.…

  For us to succeed, it will be necessary to work carefully and farsightedly, since the enemies of your music (our enemies) are unfortunately cleverer and more “up-to-date” than some of our friends. Naturally, none of these opinions have anything to do with you or your work, but it’s impossible not to worry about the damage to the new generation and necessary to help that generation find the right path once more.53

  There was a certain bravado in Stravinsky’s reply. He quoted Mark Twain: “It’s difference of opinion that makes horse races,” but he also reported on a visit he had had a month before from Yves Baudrier, from whom he had derived an utterly depressing picture of French music and musical thought. Baudrier had brought a recording of Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies, and Stravinsky was moved to a decidedly un-Twain-like expression of disgust: “Why write such tedious stuff? Who needs it? Your ‘progressive’ Belgian … is probably in ecstasy, since César Franck (that compatriot of Messiaen’s) is rather hard to listen to nowadays. So that’s how they swap an old bore for a new one! But why does Lalique have to be more interesting than Wagner?”54 More to the point, if Stravinsky optimistically supposed that Messiaen’s faintly unctuous and far from atonal Liturgies were the starting point for the young Parisian progressives, Souvtchinsky’s next letter would have come as a severe disappointment.

  Lately in Paris (as everywhere, I suppose) there has emerged a youthful school of “atonalists” which, with all its heresies, has unfortunately attracted a very talented circle of youngsters. I’ve got into a “love-hate” relationship with this group, since I find that when it comes to culture these musical “Trotskyites” are very interesting. The group has broken with Messiaen and is, of course, much more interesting than he is.…55

  This was not quite the music to Stravinsky’s ears that Souvtchinsky may have hoped, and there may even have passed through his mind the ghost of a memory of prewar Russia and his reluctance to subject himself to the disputes and name-calling that his own reappearance there would have occasioned. By an odd coincidence, Souvtchinsky had actually announced in his previous letter that he and his wife, Marianna, had made up their minds not to go back to Russia but to become French citizens instead. Whatever Stravinsky thought of this particular decision, he seems not to have replied a second time. A shadow fell across his friendship with Souvtchinsky, so recently revived.56 And he did not for now return to France.

  On the 4th of April, Milène phoned from New York; they had arrived and were well. Four days later, they were in Los Angeles and settling into the house Igor had set up for them. They seemed radiantly happy, he informed Nadia, and he himself was overjoyed to see them and once again have family around him, his first sight of any blood relation—near or distant—for almost eight years.57 André Marion was admittedly a very different type from his previous son-in-law. Where Yury Mandelstam had been a bookish, poetic, unworldly, and profoundly unpractical Russian Jew, André turned out to be a businesslike, matter-of-fact Frenchman, culturally a shade provincial, by no means uneducated, but nothing of an aesthete or a literary sophisticate. As with many Frenchmen, there was a certain air of native superiority about him, not always softened by an ability to laugh at himself. Milène was and remained utterly devoted to him, but his entry into the Stravinsky household was not without its difficulties, since his interests were not essentially artistic and he understandably did not take kindly to being patronized by intellectuals. Olga Sallard, who had observed him for a short time in Paris, had taken against him and warned Vera of his tendency, as she saw it, to bully Milène and suppress her artistic abilities. Worse, André did not get on with Madubo, of whom—Olga claimed—he was in fact somewhat scared.58

  Within days of welcoming the newcomers, Igor and Vera were away on their travels once again. Though Europe was off the itinerary, there were associated East Coast bookings that, for various reasons, the composer did not want to abandon. He had agreed to conduct two concerts at Dumbarton Oaks at the end of April, transparently as a quid pro quo for Mrs. Bliss’s string-pulling in the matter of Ellis Islan
d; and he was also recording the Dumbarton Oaks concerto in New York on the 28th for a small company called Keynote. This would not have been precluded by his Columbia agreement, which was nonexclusive. But as it happened, that contract had expired in February, and Stravinsky had no immediate plans to renew it.59 He was furious with Goddard Lieberson about the non-release of several recordings (including the Ode and Circus Polka, which had been sitting on the Columbia shelves for two whole years), and he was fidgeting under Lieberson’s claim that he was being blocked by his superiors. As usual, he could not, or would not, understand the commercial factors that inevitably governed such decisions, but always took them as specific, if not actually malicious, conspiracies against his music. What had seemed good, friendly, even jocular relations with Columbia’s chief producer were rapidly turning sour.

  They were away on this occasion for no more than a fortnight, including the best part of five days on railway trains; but it was to be a journey more productive than could ever have been measured by favors repaid or money earnt. As on the previous trip, they stopped off in Chicago, this time in both directions, and went to exhibitions. The Institute was still preoccupied with British artists. On the outward journey it was Henry Moore. On the way home—the 2nd of May—there was a Hogarth show, including the entertaining and instructive series of prints known as “The Rake’s Progress.”60 Stravinsky’s attention was particularly arrested by these pictures, and not simply on account of their artistic merit or historical interest, but because he was on the lookout for a subject for an opera.

  Precisely when he decided to compose his first-ever full-length theatre piece is a matter for conjecture, but it may well have been in New York in January 1947 when he saw Hawkes and signed the definitive version of his new publishing agreement. The five-year contract provided for an annual guarantee of ten thousand dollars, rising to twelve thousand after two years, and this meant that from 1949 onward he would be assured an annual sum more than double the commission fee for the Symphony in Three Movements. It must have struck either him or Hawkes at once that under these circumstances it was at least possible to contemplate a work that would effectively shut out other commissions for a minimum of two years.61 He would be able to put behind him once and for all those frustrating wartime years when he had bounced from one potboiler to the next, and his own most serious projects, like the symphony and the still unfinished Mass, had constantly been pushed aside because nobody was asking for them, or to be more exact, paying for them. But there was also a more specific impulse. Hawkes was full of a new British venture called the English Opera Group, which had emerged from the previous season’s Glyndebourne production of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia. Britten was setting up the EOG with the specific aim of creating a repertory of English-language opera for small forces, and when Stravinsky reacted with interest to this whole scheme, Hawkes was quick to take the possibility back to the Group’s founder. That April, before Stravinsky had set eyes on the Hogarth series, Hawkes sent him the EOG prospectus, “just to keep you reminded of the fact that they are more than interested in your idea of a new piece.”62

  By the 4th of May, they were home, and Igor was taking out his twice-interrupted Orpheus score. Seven weeks later he wrote to Hawkes that “as to composing a new operatic work, you are right—impossible for some time to come. As soon as I finish Orpheus, I have to complete my Mass.”63 He had barely thought about an English-speaking librettist for any such new work, and he was already planning his postponed European tour for 1948.

  At that very moment, on the 23rd of May, the author of Stravinsky’s first ever non-Russian theatre text, C. F. Ramuz, died in Lausanne after an operation for sclerosis. They had not seen each other for nine years, since Stravinsky had failed to turn up to Mermod’s lunch for Ramuz’s sixtieth birthday, though in truth they had been slowly drifting apart for years before that, their friendship constantly undermined by the painful question of Soldier’s Tale royalties and by growing artistic differences. The composer’s response to a request by the Suisse Contemporaine for a tribute was curiously lacking in warmth. “Do not ask me to write.… Facts reconstructed by memory are deformed if invoked during a state of grief. That grief is still fresh and too precious for me to renounce at will.…”64 It might have been an epitaph for a whole period of his existence, a time once vivid, now best forgotten. He did not, it is true, much love the past. The present, for him, was always too immediate and compelling; and now, moreover, the future was bright.

  14

  THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

  THE CANCELLATION of their European trip left the summer of 1947 free of burdensome commitments, and Stravinsky could give his whole attention to writing the second half of Orpheus, and to settling the Marions into their new home. Balanchine had been in Paris since March, working as ballet master at the Opéra while Lifar, who had held the post throughout the Occupation, was being investigated for collaboration. Meanwhile the idea of an autumn premiere had been dropped, and Kirstein was looking for a theatre for an opening in April 1948. The Metropolitan, he thought, would be suitably distinguished but hopelessly expensive, and when he tried to circumvent this problem by slipping Orpheus into the spring program of Lucia Chase’s Ballet Theatre he found himself embroiled in a row between her and Hurok, who still held the concession for ballet promotion at the Met. In the end he had to settle for City Center, a huge former Shriners temple on Fifty-fifth Street with seating for two thousand, but a cramped stage, a narrow pit, mediocre acoustics and sight lines, and the general atmosphere of a municipal hall decorated by Ali Baba.

  Though originally commissioned for the dance school, Orpheus had naturally been taken over as a star project of the newly formed Ballet Society. Kirstein, who was much given to laying out elaborate but idealistic plans, imagined the society as “the repository of the classic productions of your works, done by George and you.…

  We want to have in our permanent repertory Apollo, Jeu de cartes, Baiser de la fée, Renard, Balustrade, Orpheus, those other ballets of yours which you wish revived, and, we sincerely hope, new works when you write them. I feel that Balanchine is the Petipa de nos jours; he alone has brought the great tradition of western theatrical dancing to its possible high peak. His repertory, and that is largely based on your scores, is the single stable repertory. He deserves a frame where it can be well presented, and all my efforts are toward securing it.1

  He also longed to entice Pavel Tchelitcheff, the designer of Balustrade, back to the stage. Tchelitcheff still claimed to detest the theatre but had profound ideas about Orpheus, with which he bombarded Kirstein from his summer retreat in Arizona. Alas, no sooner had Stravinsky finished his score in late September than Tchelitcheff once more turned against the whole project, resenting, as Kirstein reported, “George’s inability to think in mystical terms; he [Tchelitcheff] sees the drama of Orpheus as the story of man and his soul; Orpheus as Bacchus, as Apollo, as the artist-scientist-magician; and here we are, making it into a ballet-ivanich.”2 Not until January did they settle on Isamu Noguchi as a designer who could think sculpturally, but by this time Kirstein had eaten the dust of Manhattan indifference to new work. “Frankly,” he moaned, “no one but Balanchine, Barzin and I care whether we live or die;

  it is of accidental or superficial interest to everyone else; people simply don’t give a damn, and what we do is well done, and it costs money, and I have no more of my own left, so it is an agony to ask other people to help, knowing that there is no social prestige for them through us; we do unpopular things, etc; but we struggle along.3

  Stravinsky received these various dispatches with a good grace but without obvious involvement. Long gone were the World of Art days when design ideas were part and parcel of the musical conception, as with Petrushka and The Nightingale, and even with Oedipus Rex. Stravinsky had a high opinion of Tchelitcheff as a stage designer, but one shudders to think how he must have reacted to the prospect of a Jungian visualization of his Orpheus, a w
ork that moves so inscrutably through that legend’s accumulated tangle of myth and meaning. “When you wrote Orpheus, did you think about classical Greece?” a critic once asked him. “I thought about strings,” he replied;4 and it is true that his letters of the time say more about the number of instruments needed (forty-three) than about the work’s symbolism. Nor can he have forgotten that, less than twenty years before, Benois had refused to design the final scene of The Fairy’s Kiss without some sight of the music. Yet here was Tchelitcheff promoting a whole psychological concept without the least idea of the sound or rhetoric of the score.

  As for collaboration, in any case, Stravinsky’s sights were now set elsewhere; he needed to find a librettist for his opera, and he needed to decide what kind of work it was to be. He had gone with Huxley to the West Coast premiere of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia in June, hoping to learn something about the EOG from the character of its source opera. But alas it was a very amateurish staging by local performers, he reported sadly to Hawkes, and he made no comment about the music.5 What was at issue, of course, was the intended scale of his own work and probably also its subject. On these matters, he kept his counsel until the completion of Orpheus on 23 September, after which he promptly announced to Hawkes that he had decided on the Hogarth subject and that on Huxley’s advice he intended to invite W. H. Auden to write the libretto.6 He had some experience of Auden’s work in performance. He had seen the GPO film Night Mail (with Auden’s verse commentary and Britten’s music) only two or three weeks before the Rape, and he must have talked with Huxley about this short but brilliantly successful collaboration; Huxley may or may not have known that Auden had written other texts for Britten, including the libretto for his operetta Paul Bunyan. The central question was: could Auden write a verse libretto, not just in the sense of rhyming quatrains but in the larger sense of discrete formal structures governed by strict conventions, something Stravinsky had originally found himself insisting on twenty years before when Cocteau had appeared with his blank-verse first draft of Oedipus Rex? That Auden could concoct musical verse of a certain kind was obvious from Night Mail, whatever the weight or significance of the lines. It was the quality of mind and technique behind these jig-jogging couplets that Stravinsky needed confirmed by Huxley, by now his vade mecum on all matters to do with English literature and culture generally.