In certain inessential ways, Auden fitted less well into the Stravinskys’ lives. For one thing, he was too tall for the guest couch in the den next-door to the composer’s studio, and had to sleep with his feet propped up on a chair, “like the victim of a more humane and reasonable Procrustes.”36 He was also unkempt, and careless about personal hygiene, qualities which struck a discordant note in the somewhat bourgeois environment that Igor and Vera had created for themselves in trim North Wetherly Drive. According to the housekeeper, Mrs. Gates, the soap and towels put out for him in the den remained unused, and when the Sokolovs came to dinner on his final evening, Lisa remarked on his dirty fingernails. “Who was that extraordinary woman?” Auden asked Stravinsky when the guests had left.37 And certainly there was nothing of La Boutique about the great English poet, however delightful he and Vera may have found each other in all other respects.
Stravinsky took Auden to an amateur production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, not for pleasure (there was no orchestra, only a piano accompaniment), but strictly to acquaint him at first hand with the kinds of model he was interested in for the Rake. He had already started planning his musical references. Before Auden’s arrival he had attended performances of The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni by the visiting San Francisco Opera, and had written to Hawkes asking him to send the orchestral scores of these works, as well as Così and The Magic Flute, “this genuine source of inspiration for my future opera.”38 But Così was his particular favorite at this juncture, perhaps partly because (as with his sources for Mavra a quarter-century before) it was by far the least well known of the late comedies, but also no doubt because of its rich ensembles and schematic narrative. The manipulative elements in the story must have caught his interest as well, notwithstanding the more obvious relevance of Don Giovanni, with its graveyard scene, its retributive ending, and its cautionary epilogue. There would be other models for the Rake. Stravinsky was soon sending for Handel oratorios (curiously enough as models for the setting of English39), and The Beggar’s Opera—a work Hogarth himself saw and painted and that may have influenced his Rake series.40 But Mozart, though strictly too late for the subject, remained paramount.
Stravinsky also took Auden to a performance of Lorca’s last play, La casa de Bernarda Alba (with music by Milhaud), and afterwards there was a small party at North Wetherly Drive with, among the guests, the stage director John Houseman. Houseman was busy organizing support for the composer Hanns Eisler, who had been hauled up before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and charged with having concealed his links with the Communist Party when he reentered the U.S.A. in 1940. Stravinsky had recently seen and liked the Eisler-Brecht play Galileo, and he agreed to lend his name to a sponsorship committee of American composers for a concert of Eisler’s music at Hollywood’s Coronet Theatre in December.
Stravinsky seldom made political gestures, and the ones he did make he usually lived to regret. The Eisler sponsorship was no exception. His support for his German colleague was certainly genuine, since he went out of his way to write to him praising Galileo some weeks after seeing it, and immediately after the House Committee hearing at the start of October.41 But his intentions were probably quite vague: pro-composer, perhaps still residually pro-Russian-Allies (Communist or not), certainly not pro-Communist as such. It was only after the appearance in New Republic of a brilliant but provocative article by Martha Gellhorn denouncing the “Un-Americans,” as she labelled the Committee’s examiners, that the more alert members of the nonpolitical community saw a faint but distinct red light. Virgil Thomson, for instance, wrote cautiously to Bette Odets declining to sign a petition in Eisler’s support, on the grounds that it contained “statements about matters of which I have no knowledge.… I am deeply sorry for him, but the best I can do is to certify his musical and intellectual achievements. I know nothing about his character and private life, having met him only once or twice and that briefly.”42 Stravinsky could have said much the same, but he failed to see the intricacies of the situation until Aaron Sapiro—prompt as ever with his advice—warned him that he was being used by “the Communist crowd” (since the Gellhorn article had been posted to subscribers in the same envelope as the Eisler concert program) and urged him to withdraw his support for the concert.43 This, to his credit, Stravinsky was unwilling to do, but he did write to the Los Angeles Times on the 12th of December insisting that his interest in the concert was apolitical and purely musical. Unfortunately, his letter failed to appear before the concert on the 14th, and instead the paper ran a news item on the 13th that specifically identified him as heading “the list of internationally noted composers” who were sponsoring the event. At this point, he wrote to Houseman, “the only thing I could do to protest was not to attend the concert.”44
ONCE AGAIN work on the Mass had been held up, this time by the decision to rewrite the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and he probably made little progress on the choral work before completing the Symphonies revision toward the end of November 1947, shortly after Auden left for New York. What was involved in the wind piece was similar to his work on Petrushka the previous year. In substance the music remained virtually the same, but from start to finish it was radically retextured, rephrased, and rebarred, and the result was to make it drier, clearer, and more astringent. In the revised version, the thin, nasal tone of oboes and bassoons colors the music where, in the original, the fruitier sound of the clarinets and horns was more prominent. The phrases are now shorter and more staccato, and the shorter bars increase the number of accents and so break up the flow of the old melodic lines. Most intriguingly of all, Stravinsky experimented with his harmonies by adding bass notes whose sole purpose seems to be to reinforce notes at the top of the chords through a process of overtone resonance—in the way that one matches colors in a room by picking out particular tones in a carpet or chair cover. The subtlety of these changes is astonishing, and it tells us a great deal about Stravinsky’s priorities as a composer: his concern for the exact spacing and timing of chords and the correct placing of accents. It also perhaps indicates why he had never himself conducted the Symphonies, and even why it had never been published. He simply had not been happy with it in its original scoring, but had had neither opportunity nor incentive to rework it.
In one other respect, the revised score is deeply revealing of Stravinsky’s creative attitudes; it bears out a remark he had made in the Poetics of Music about the role of sheer accident in the compositional process. “If his finger slips,” he had said there, “[the true creator] will notice it; on occasion he may even draw profit from something unforeseen that a momentary lapse reveals to him.”45 In revising the Symphonies, as we saw, he had to work from a proof copy of the original with Ansermet’s corrections. But in fact the music was so strange, so richly unconventional, that some of these corrections were actually mistakes based on wrong assumptions about what was likely. It seems that, in 1947, Stravinsky either failed to notice the errors, or else decided that he liked them after all. For whatever reason, the revised score accepts quite a few details that can be proved beyond doubt to have originated in mistakes, though whether this is “profit” or loss is, of course, another question.46
Having completed this task, and some other less extensive revisions, he was at last free to resume work on the Mass. He had scarcely touched it for three years, unless (which is possible) the little two-part vocal canon he tossed off as a sixtieth-birthday present (“Hommage”) for Nadia on the 16th of September was a discarded sketch. He may still have had some difficulty picking up the liturgical mood, after several weeks immersed in another wind score of a superficially similar but in many ways profoundly different character. On 10 December he wrote to Hawkes asking for copies of Palestrina masses, presumably as models for his own, and the next day he broke off, for reasons that are hard to fathom, to compose a sombre little piece for string quartet apparently inspired by the proposed graveyard scene in the opera (and eventually used as prelude to
that scene). This piece, too, with its oscillating, chantlike melodic figuration, could be a discarded fragment of the Mass, though there is no external evidence beyond the fact that he was probably working at the time on the “Sanctus,” which is similarly and intensively based on rocking figures worked in four-part polyphony.47
Then, just when this creative difficulty was perhaps approaching resolution, he was again distracted by visitors. First René Leibowitz, the éminence grise of the Paris anti-Stravinsky demonstrations, turned up requesting an interview to discuss the Symphony in Three Movements and “certain problems relative to your music in general.” Stravinsky had been warned by André Schaeffner against this “stateless arriviste,”48 but for some reason agreed to talk to him. Leibowitz rewarded his hospitality with a vicious attack in the left-wing Partisan Review.
Stravinsky writes slowly, meticulously, every day at regular hours, with the cold determination and control of an engineer […]. These works are brilliantly made as far as craftsmanship goes, and every note seems to be the result of absolute lucidity. But behind these frozen and sometimes readymade patterns (or rather, these petrified sound forms, put together with such diabolical skill) there is nothing except perhaps the illusion of music. In Stravinsky’s hands the musical materials are like stone, wood, or leather. The complete work is, in the long run, a grouping of diverse elements which sounds because it is made of sounds but which only conveys the deadly Maya of a musical work.49
Leibowitz naturally also visited Schoenberg, and his article is above all a confrontation of the one composer with the other, like Lourié’s of twenty years before, but now heavily weighted against Stravinsky. While Stravinsky’s recent music displayed “an ever increasing mastery and control applied to less and less significant musical problems,” Schoenberg’s was “full of renewal, dominated by passion, boldness and risk.”
It is an incredible sight to watch a composer who for fifty years has been the exponent of musical economy, now unfold an amazing abundance of ideas without ever falling into chaos or disorder. Every new work has an absolute novelty of its own. The wild and utterly fresh features of the Survivor from Warsaw … demonstrate a vitality and creative strength which are almost inconceivable: it is frankly a masterpiece.50
The sole, qualified consolation for Wetherly Drive was that Leibowitz’s comparison was a Manichaean one between the light and the dark, God and the Devil: two undoubted powers. He had heard the recording of Genesis, and concluded that, whatever he might think about Schoenberg and Stravinsky, “not one of the other participants betrays the slightest ability to write a coherent piece of music.”
A week after Leibowitz’s visit, Nicolas Nabokov came for Christmas, arriving by train with Balanchine. Since the end of the war he had been in Berlin with the U.S. military government, but he had been back in New York since January, Stravinsky had seen a good deal of him there in April, and their friendship had grown closer than before. For twenty years Nika had been a bird of passage in Stravinsky’s life. At first, at the time of Apollo and Ode, he had been very much the junior composer, to be patronized and, on occasion, reprimanded; later he had acted as go-between with Balanchine over the commissioning of Jeu de cartes, and during the war there had been occasional meetings on the East Coast. Somehow this first Californian stay was different. Stravinsky had badly wanted the visit, had been urging Nika to come for more than a year, and was now candidly delighted to see this tall, benign, cosmopolitan forty-four-year-old Russian, with his lopsided smile and his mop of prematurely graying black hair. “Please don’t change your mind,” Igor had written. And naturally there were errands; bring some Handel scores, bring your own Pushkin cantata (“Auden admires it very much”), bring some Bols Dutch gin (“unobtainable here”); above all: “Do you know Robert Craft—to all appearances a serious man […]. Get in touch with him and let me know what you think of him.”51
Nabokov spent five days in Hollywood, sleeping on the same couch as his friend Auden had so recently done, and after he left he immortalized the visit in a long article in Atlantic Monthly.52 He was unique among Stravinsky’s surviving prewar Russian friends in being a composer, and although Igor’s interest in his music was never much more than (and occasionally somewhat less than) polite, it remained a sort of bond between them. It is true that, when Stravinsky suggested looking at Nabokov’s latest scores, he was rather too easily persuaded to show his visitor his own instead. He played through Orpheus, drawing attention to the curious way in which the closing fugue keeps breaking off, “like a kind of … compulsion, like something unable to stop … Orpheus is dead, the song is gone, but the accompaniment goes on.”53 Then they looked at the work-in-progress on the Mass, presumably the Sanctus and the Credo. Nika, feeling tired, sat down on a sofa, while Stravinsky continued to fuss over his score. Soon he had forgotten all about his visitor. “He was playing the same passage over and over again. It looked as if he were testing the quality of what he had written. He was remeasuring the interval relations and recalculating the rhythmical patterns. His head and body jerked and bobbed and he was quite distinctly humming the words of the Mass.”54
Since settling in America, Stravinsky—always a keen patron of zoos—had become a lover of domestic animals of various kinds. Nika met the cat, Vaska, and the aviary of house-birds, not all of whom spent the day in cages. (“Be careful,” Stravinsky warned him when Pópka the parrot started delousing his hair, “you know what birds do on people’s heads.”) They sampled Igor’s cellar, in which vin ordinaire did not figure prominently: at lunch they drank Mouton Rothschild ’37, while Nika briefed them on the political situation in Europe—a continuing worry of his host’s, because of his need to decide for or against a tour there the next summer.55 Constantly in his mind was the terror of a new war or revolution and of being stranded in France or Germany without means of returning home. In October their Wetherly Drive neighbor Baroness d’Erlanger had written from Venice about the ruinous state in which she had found her house there, and about the growing threat of bolshevism in Italy, where strike after strike was being fomented by Communist infiltrators of the trade unions.56 Willy Strecker had just written assuring Stravinsky that, despite the awfulness of conditions in Germany, life was going on in a surprisingly lively and constructive way. But then, he was trying to persuade the composer to participate in a Stravinsky Festival in Bayreuth, of all places, in July or August, and was obviously painting as rosy a picture as he could.57 In any case, whatever Nika told them that Christmas, he must have been noncommittal on the question of a European trip, since a week after his departure they were still equivocating, telling the Milhauds (who were now themselves back in Paris) that they were coming, and Olga Sallard that they might not be.58 Not until mid-March, after much hesitation over contracts, and after successively booking then cancelling ship berths and airline seats, did fear finally overcome the spirit of adventure and their minds turn instead to the possibility of Soulima, Françoise, and little Zizi taking ship for America.59
ROBERT CRAFT’S object in inviting Stravinsky to conduct the revised Symphonies had patently been to get Stravinsky, rather than to get the premiere of the Symphonies, but it did look, all the same, as if that is what the April performance would be. Then something unexpected, yet bizarrely appropriate, happened: the work’s oldest advocate and most practiced exponent, Ernest Ansermet, turned up in New York, intending to conduct the Symphonies in the original version in a radio concert with the NBC Symphony Orchestra at the end of January. It was almost exactly ten years since the quarrel over Jeu de cartes, and Ansermet knew little about Stravinsky’s wartime doings and nothing at all about the new version of the Symphonies. When he saw it, on his arrival in Manhattan in the second week of January, he expressed himself somewhat coolly, and indicated that he would rather conduct the version he knew, “unless you would rather I gave the new one.”60 Stravinsky certainly would rather, however, and Ansermet was happy to oblige. With the new score in hand, he proceeded to bombard the
composer with detailed questions about it, questions that revealed yet again the problems and pitfalls of establishing correct texts for so radical a musical language. Stravinsky nevertheless answered everything patiently, if not always accurately, and after listening to Ansermet’s broadcast performance on the 31st, cabled his enthusiastic congratulations and thanks.61
Much had altered in both musicians’ lives since they had parted in angry correspondence in 1937. Yet in one particularly catastrophic way their paths had run along parallel tracks. Ansermet, too, had lost his wife and married another, younger one. There, however, the similarity ended. Marguérite Ansermet had died in 1940 in an agony that was moral and emotional as well as physical, since her husband had pursued his affair with the increasingly neurotic Elena Hurtado to the bitter end, and it was only when Hurtado had subsequently abused Marguérite’s memory to his face that Ernest had broken with her, “even though I knew very well the drama that this would inevitably provoke. One day in February 1942, Elena killed herself in front of me by swallowing several tubes of phenobarbitone. The poor woman ought never to have met me, but I equally could not sacrifice my life to no purpose.” He had remarried four months later. “It seems to me,” he went on, “that I owed you this frightful narrative; you’ve been too involved in my life, you and Vera, for me not to confess it all at the moment that we meet again.”62
Stravinsky Page 32