Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Whether or not this Rake’s Progress would be for the English Opera Group was a question that occupied Hawkes (who was also Britten’s publisher) more than it did Stravinsky. The EOG, Hawkes wrote at the end of September, would be very interested in a chamber opera but only if there were no chorus.7 Stravinsky, however, doubtless understood at once that he would not get a proper commission fee from a new young company playing to small audiences on a public subsidy; so why commit himself to a type of work that, outside that company, would have such limited usefulness? The whole point about a full-length opera by Stravinsky in, say, 1950 was that there would be international competition to stage its premiere. In any case the Hogarth, with its varied and crowded urban setting, cried out for a well-populated stage, and that, in the end, meant precisely the chorus that EOG would want to avoid. So Stravinsky’s Rake was left to make his own way, although, as we shall see, some aspects of the original chamber-opera idea survived in the work as it gradually took shape.

  Before thinking of writing any operatic music, however, he had his Mass to finish, a debt only to his own muse, since for a work of this kind there was no chance of a commission and not even much prospect of a performance. True, the two existing movements had been sung in February to an enthusiastic Harvard audience, with the accompaniment arranged for two pianos by Claudio Spies and conducted by Irving Fine. But when Spies had tried to get up a performance with wind instruments a month later, attendance at rehearsal had been so halfhearted that he had had to abandon the project.8 Stravinsky had authorized but not heard Fine’s performance, and in fact it was almost three years since he had worked on the piece at all, a break in composition longer than with any work since he had taken up The Nightingale in July 1913. Fine had certainly not been able to respect one particular requirement that the composer only told Hawkes about in September: the fact that the soprano parts were supposed to be sung by children.9 This stipulation, so impracticable for West Coast, or even East Coast, America in the forties, reflected the unworldly spirituality and medieval remoteness of the original inspiration, which seems to have welled up out of the commercial ghastliness of Stravinsky’s artistic environment in 1944. That environment had changed, but not entirely for the better. The tintinnabulation of the cash register remained the defining ambient sound in postwar Los Angeles; and it was never far from Stravinsky’s ears, whatever he might happen to be composing.

  That summer, having lost faith in Columbia’s willingness to release his recordings, he had signed an exclusive three-year contract with RCA Victor, and for several days in September—just as he was finishing Orpheus—he was in the Republic Studios in Hollywood, recording the Danses concertantes, the Divertimento, and the Scherzo à la russe, three works that for some reason had been left out of his Columbia contract in 1945.10 So far so good. But when it came to rival publishers, the situation was by no means without its annoyances. Against Boosey and Hawkes he had no serious complaints; they were taking an interest both in his new works and in reprinting the old ones. It was Leeds, whose original idea it had been to establish new copyrights, who were now giving him trouble. And it was no consolation that the trouble was largely of his own making.

  It all went back to the old Billboard announcement about the pop songs that were being made out of two tunes from Firebird.11 After the debacle of the Ballet Theatre Firebird in October 1945, Stravinsky’s irritation with Leeds had boiled over in arguments about accounting and proof-setting, which at one point in July 1946, thanks to Aaron Sapiro’s bullishness over such matters, had almost come to court. Later the whole thing had been patched up, and in May 1947 Stravinsky had actually signed a contract for the adaptation of the oboe tune in the Khorovod (the “Princesses’ Round Dance”) as a popular song called “Summer Moon,” with lyrics this time by a certain John Klenner. The composer was to receive an advance of one dollar but a twenty-five percent royalty on sales, which he and his lawyer evidently expected to be considerable. Three months later, Sapiro wrote to Aaron Goldmark authorizing Leeds to exploit “Summer Moon,” and adding a sententious aside about “the thousands of people who may perhaps be humming and whistling this melody from the Firebird Suite all over America, much as they hummed and whistled and sang the famous Andante from Tschaikowsky’s Fifth Symphony after it was adapted from one of the world’s great classics.”12

  Unfortunately it turned out that, while looking forward to the income, Stravinsky had not expected his name to be directly associated with the commodity. It was one thing to describe the song as “adapted from Stravinsky’s Firebird,” quite another to label it “adapted by Stravinsky from his own Firebird,” as Leeds had (of course, quite knowingly) done. Once again Sapiro bared his teeth. A disclaimer appeared in the Los Angeles Times,13 and this time the long-threatened suit against the enterprising but not overscrupulous publisher was duly instituted. “It is as difficult for you to understand a man like Stravinsky,” Sapiro told Lou Levy amiably, “as it is for a skunk to understand a lion.”14 But while never at a loss for words, Sapiro was for the second time to prove wanting in practical experience of contract law. The case grumbled on expensively for nearly a year, and in the end the court decided that while Leeds should not have used the wording they had, Stravinsky should not have sued on tort (that is, non-contractual injury) but on contract. “We worked,” Sapiro ruefully told his famous client (for whom he indeed worked, and without fee), “but the result is nil—and costly!”15

  While Leeds were doing their best to exploit Stravinsky’s reputation, Hawkes was merely anxious to consolidate his work as a marketable product in its proper form. The first thing he discovered about the ERM catalogue was that many of the items listed were in fact unobtainable.16 For ten years or more Païchadze had been prevented—whether by political and economic circumstances or by the caprice of his proprietor—from running an effective day-to-day publishing business, and the Occupation, followed by the destruction of the Berlin offices, had hammered the final nails into the coffin. The only solution, Hawkes felt, was to reprint everything, while at the same time establishing new copyrights, which would now be valid in America since Stravinsky was a U.S. citizen. In many cases, he told the composer, only the barest alterations were needed. In Oedipus Rex, for instance, it would be enough to revise the performance markings, dynamics, and editor’s notes. Much of the necessary work could even be done by an amanuensis without so much as bothering the composer.

  The snag in all this was that over the years Stravinsky had made many revisions to his works that had never reached print: blue or red pencil markings in his own conducting scores, corrections of misprints, altered phrasings, and so forth. The Firebird revision had admittedly been not much more than an expanded version of an old suite; but the new Petrushka was a radical retexturing, based partly on old changes, partly on new ones. Once he had started looking at the score, he had wanted to work it over thoroughly; and the result was like a painting whose colors had been completely reorganized: Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon recolored in the style of his Woman in a Blue Dress. Hawkes was also desperate for a revised version of The Rite of Spring, of which there were several printed editions (in many respects incompatible with one another) but no definitive score. The idea of reducing or in any way reconstructing its orchestration à la Petrushka made Stravinsky feel weak at the knees, but a cleaned-up text was obviously desirable. Then there were the various orchestral scores that had never come out at all: Oedipus and The Fairy’s Kiss, Persephone, and above all the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which Stravinsky had never conducted, and of which he possessed no score at all except a battered old proof from 1933—recently sent by Soulima from Paris—with Ansermet’s (sometimes wrong) corrections all over it.17

  He had been looking through this work and had decided, he told Hawkes, “to rewrite it [and] make it easier for performers as well as for audiences, and that without sacrificing any of my intentions.”18 The idea may have been in the back of his mind ever since he had rescored the final ch
orale as a filler for his radio concert in January 1946. But if so, a more recent communication had brought it forward. A few weeks earlier, Robert Craft had been in touch again, enquiring about precisely this score, which he wanted to perform with his Chamber Arts Society in New York, but which of course he had been unable to obtain there.19 This time, Stravinsky could not refer his young correspondent to Boosey and Hawkes, since he knew that they had no better materials for the Symphonies than he had himself. In any case, Craft had made it hard for him to avoid writing a more detailed reply than in the past, by offering (rather than simply sending) him a copy of a recording of the Piano Concerto that Soulima had recently made in Paris and that Craft had acquired through Marcelle de Manziarly.20 This shrewd tactic worked better than he can have thought possible. Returning to New York at the start of September from Hancock, Maine, after dropping out of Monteux’s conducting class there, he was astonished to find Stravinsky’s reply waiting for him, and so nervous at what it might contain that he left it unopened for several hours.21 What he read when he finally plucked up the courage to take it out of its envelope was friendly if not particularly encouraging. No, there was no material for the Symphonies; but yes, “I shall be more than glad receiving Sviatoslav’s record of my Piano Concerto, which you so generously offer me.” Craft had mentioned the autumn premiere of Orpheus, and Stravinsky expressed surprise that he was unaware of the postponement to April. Finally, Craft had—again very shrewdly—recommended some reading matter, especially T. E. Hulme’s Speculations, which Stravinsky did not know, and Souvtchinsky’s recent essay on his music, which he did.22

  It was like threading a needle. Twice the cotton snags on the eye, the third time, by some instinctive correction between brain and hand, it slips through. Craft’s timing on this occasion had been immaculate. Stravinsky had just been looking at his notoriously intractable Symphonies, and hey presto, along comes a conductor offering to perform it. The young man is determined; he has written before. And he gets things done. Had Stravinsky not recently heard good reports of a Juilliard performance of his Octet under, surely, this same young conductor?23 Nor was that all. The conductor read books, and had with his first shot come up with an intriguing suggestion that gave the highly literate but not preeminently anglophone composer a twinge of guilt. Even with Huxley, his closest English-speaking friend outside music, Stravinsky’s conversation was French, but in fact ranged so wide that Huxley’s superiority in Anglo-Saxon fields of enquiry was not much more noticeable than his superiority in all other fields except music. Craft, on the other hand, seemed to be hinting at ideas and avenues of thought that Stravinsky himself had neglected for too long.

  In the course of the next weeks and months, the correspondence burgeoned. Craft sent the concerto recording, along with tactful words of praise for Soulima’s performance, and further reading suggestions.24 Stravinsky confided (early in October) that he was rewriting the Symphonies and would like the work played when complete, and he vouchsafed some uninhibited criticism of Leonard Bernstein’s recent recordings of the Octet and The Soldier’s Tale, to which Craft had also referred. “I am praying those records would never be published,” he remarked, in the picturesque English of North Wetherly Drive.25 There was a sense here of an alliance being forged, an enlisting of aid through shared indiscretion. But it was also clear that Craft knew these works and was an observant critic. For instance, he had spotted, and questioned, Bernstein’s use of pedal timpani in The Soldier’s Tale. He also turned out to be an efficient sleuth when Stravinsky asked him to find out why his Dumbarton Oaks recording was unobtainable in Los Angeles record shops; the vinylite discs, Craft learnt, had come out in blisters, and were now being repressed in an alloy.26 At last, when Stravinsky indicated at the end of October that his reorchestration of the Symphonies was practically complete, Craft boldly invited him to conduct the piece himself in a Chamber Arts Society concert in the near future, and Stravinsky promptly wired back his acceptance.27 More remarkably, he offered to conduct without fee, as he informed Ralph Hawkes, “to help that young and gifted Robert Craft and by the way to hear myself how it sounds.”28

  Auden, meanwhile, had reacted enthusiastically to the idea of collaborating on an opera. As with Craft, the time was ripe. “I don’t think I am overanxious about the future,” he had written to Ursula Niebuhr from his room in Greenwich Village a month or so earlier, “though I do quail a bit sometimes before the probability that it will be lonely.”29 He had completed The Age of Anxiety, his immense reflection on this very theme, the previous November; now, for the opera-loving poet, a Rake’s Progress might suggest an invigorating satyr-play on a not unrelated topic. Its moral implications at any rate resonated with the ethical, Christian strain in his own recent work, and Stravinsky himself, writing early that October, was careful not to dictate too many details of plot (the Hogarth series itself being loose in narrative continuity). “Please,” he insisted, “do feel absolutely free in your creative work on the chosen theme. Of course there is a sort of limitation as to form in view of Hogarth’s style and period. Yet make it as contemporary as I treated Pergolesi in my Pulcinella.” Had he known that Auden was already thinking in terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, and had a vision of the Bedlam scene as a coronation service in which the hero is anointed with a chamber pot (since “piss is the only proper chrism”),30 he might have felt less indulgent on the question of theme. He was, though, adamant about the type of opera he wanted to write. “Bear in mind that I will compose not a musical drama, but just an opera with definitely separated numbers connected by spoken (not sung) words of the text, because I want to avoid the customary operatic recitative.”31

  After a brisk exchange of letters, it became obvious that working together at such a distance on so complicated a project would be impossible; there were too many unconnected strands. Stravinsky wanted a “Choreographic Divertissement” in the first act finale; Auden was suggesting an Aristophanic parabasis (where the chorus would address the audience directly) between the acts. So the composer wired for him to come to Hollywood, expenses paid, for a few days in November, Auden duly turned up on the 11th, and for a week they chipped away at the scenario and some aspects of the text. In outline, and considering the vagueness of the initial idea, their work together comes remarkably close to the finished version. The two acts originally envisaged by Stravinsky became—and would remain—three (though with a different scene distribution), and the spoken text was after all replaced by recitative, with piano accompaniment. The characters are not yet named, and there is no bearded lady, only an ugly duchess. But in essence the story is complete: of the young wastrel who, led astray by an inheritance communicated to him by a diabolical servant, abandons his faithful country bride for the fleshpots of London, grows bored to the point at which he marries the ugly duchess for her money, loses it all in a ludicrous business venture (involving, at this stage, a machine that turns water into gold; later it will be stones into bread), escapes the devil’s clutches by beating him at cards, but ends up in a madhouse, where he is visited by his country bride and then dies of a broken heart when she goes away. This first scenario also contains many musical descriptions and indications for dialogue (partly in French), many of which were retained. The divertissement has disappeared, but Auden’s parabasis has shifted to the end, where the characters address the audience in the manner of a Mozartian epilogue.

  It was Stravinsky’s first literary collaboration for nearly fifteen years, and possibly his most congenial since The Nightingale with Stepan Mitusov almost thirty-five years before. Like Mitusov, Auden was infinitely adaptable and self-effacing, and like him believed that it was “the librettist’s job to satisfy the composer, not the other way round.”32 But Auden was also a versifying genius who could turn any practical requirement into memorable poetry; like Stravinsky himself he had a brilliant associative mind that was quick to see the familiar in the strange, the new in the old; and he was someone for whom the dividing line between the earnest a
nd the satirical or the poetic and the banal was often hard to detect. “Tristan and Isolde,” he would say, “were unloved only children”;33 or “Don Giovanni was a certain type of male homosexual;” or “Roosevelt developed paralysis in order to become President.”34 Such remarks can seem juvenile in print, and there was something schoolboyish about Auden, but attached to a mental quickness and a range of allusion that were conversationally dazzling. Stravinsky claimed to have been puzzled by such inconsistencies: the apparent conflict, for instance, between reasoned argument and the belief in astrology or “the telepathic powers of cats.”35 But the truth was that Stravinsky’s own built-in contradictions, though culturally very different, chimed well with Auden’s. He too, while addicted to clarity and an almost mathematical precision in his own work, had the religious superstitions of an Italian peasant. Just as Auden was a fluent Carrollian nonsense versifier, so Stravinsky was obsessed with dictionaries and with words and etymologies for their own sake, without regard to their sense. In his case, it was the old Russian tension between system and fantasy, in Auden’s the English public schoolboy’s distaste for intellect and sensibility, even his own. Once they grasped this similarity-in-contrast, they got on splendidly.