Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  It was curious how the egotism still in some ways shone through what was evidently meant to be an admission of guilt. After talking about his orchestra in Geneva, the conductor brought up the old issue of his phenomenological study of music that had originally triggered his diatribes about Jeu de cartes. He foresaw a book on the subject. “If this book comes out, I wouldn’t want it to shock you, but I know that there are certain essential points that we don’t approach in the same way, and I wouldn’t want these differences to prevent your being aware that my admiration for what you do and my affection for you have not changed.” Thus the thinker addresses the maker. Stravinsky, who in any case seldom wrote discursive letters these days, was probably glad of a genuine excuse—that he was shortly leaving for San Francisco—for sending nothing but a night letter in reply. “Glad have your moving letter. Too bad no more time left for correspondence.…”63

  15

  THE PROGRESS BEGINS

  THE SAN FRANCISCO date was followed by a ten-day trip to Mexico City and a pair of concerts in Los Angeles in mid-March. It was his first appearance at the L.A. Philharmonic for seven years, and while the centerpiece was the abrasive Symphony in Three Movements, the rest of the program was a familiar selection from the “easy” Stravinsky of wartime potboilers and the Divertimento (studiously billed as “1949 version,” though the changes to the prewar score were minimal indeed). On 15 March 1948, three days before the first concert, he at last completed his Mass, and on the 28th they set off for the East Coast, travelling via Chicago and Pittsburgh to Washington, where they were due to meet Auden to discuss his completed libretto and certain contractual matters on the 31st.

  Auden had, as he put it in his note covering the dispatch of the first act, “taken in a collaborator, an old friend of mine in whose talents I have the greatest confidence.”1 He did have confidence in Chester Kallman’s talents, more perhaps than was fully justified. But to call him an old friend was a distinct if permissible clouding of the truth. Auden and Kallman had been lovers since soon after their first meeting, at an evening of the League of American Writers in New York in 1939. Chester was now twenty-seven, wavy-haired, blond, chubby-faced, a serious poet in his own right, and above all a passionate and knowledgeable opera lover who brought to this first of several operatic collaborations an instinct for the genre that Auden did not strictly possess. Stravinsky was disconcerted to learn that there was a co-author whose existence had been kept from him, but he never seems to have minded, or even noticed, differences in style or quality that might have disturbed him if his English had been more acute. For instance, of the three scenes in Act 1, Auden wrote the first half of the first scene and the whole of the second, Kallman the rest;2 and while Kallman’s verses are consciously operatic (like highly polished translations from some Italian original), Auden’s are precise, stylized English poetry, beautifully conceived for patterned musical setting, but, as Stravinsky did quickly observe, not amenable to conventional operatic manipulations of the kind that routinely destroy scansion and rhyme schemes. The libretto was brilliant, he agreed with Hawkes, but “from time to time a little bit complicated for musical purposes.” Moreover, its language was sometimes self-consciously arcane, with its budding groves and pliant streams, and its Cyprian Queen whose “genial charm translates our mortal scene.” There were plenty of things here that needed explaining to a self-taught and still somewhat hesitant anglophone like Stravinsky.

  Above all, something had happened to the governing idea behind the scenario. Before going to California, Auden had been frankly baffled by the task of converting Hogarth’s vague morality into a narrative for the stage. He had, as we saw, some notion of associating the seven characters with the Seven Deadly Sins, with the hero as Pride crowned as Lucifer in the final scene. “But what am I going to do with the plot?” he enquired helplessly of his secretary, Alan Ansen.3 Then in discussion with Stravinsky a clear, if inconsistent, story had begun to emerge, in which the still unnamed hero, having sacrificed simple rustic happiness for a rich but loveless urban marriage and doubtful success in business, unexpectedly outwits the villain-devil only to die of a broken heart in the madhouse. But once Auden had chewed over the scenario with Kallman, a more incisive theme crystallized, which he set out in a letter accompanying the second act.

  Have made a few slight alterations in our original plot in order to make each step of the Rake’s Progress unique, i.e.:

  Bordel—Le plaisir.

  Baba—L’acte gratuit.

  La Machine—Il désire devenir Dieu.4

  Instead of the Ugly Duchess, Rakewell (as he had become) would now marry the bearded lady, Baba the Turk, and he would do so, not for money or title, but as an existential act: precisely, that is, because he had no reason to. Having thereby escaped the “twin tyrants of appetite and conscience,” as his diabolical servant, Nick Shadow, dubs the basic motives of human conduct, he would in the third act play God by inventing a machine that could magically transform stones into bread. Baba would in due course create as many problems for the composer as she solved for the librettists. As a plot mechanism, she introduced an element of implausibility that bothered lovers of operatic verisimilitude,5 while as a character she had to be sentimental and warmhearted in a way that here and there threatened to reduce the drama to the level of soap opera. However, the real problem of Baba was that she looked dangerously like a bad homosexual joke (Kirstein told Craft that she was modelled on the bearded painter Christian Bérard),6 but one without consequences, a mere jest, as Baba describes herself to Anne. Stravinsky seems not to have protested about these difficulties, and was only troubled by technical questions such as how to integrate Baba into Tom and Anne’s duet in the second act without convulsing the audience with untimely laughter.7 But that was in the future, and for the time being he apparently expressed no formal reservations about Baba herself.

  The Washington meeting with Auden had been fixed because he was sailing for Europe only a day or two after Stravinsky was due in New York, and for similar reasons of shortage of time Robert Craft was coming from New York to discuss arrangements for their Town Hall concert on 11 April. Craft arrived at the Raleigh Hotel on the morning of the 31st to find Auden waiting impatiently in the lobby, because “the night train from Pittsburgh was late, and the Stravs aren’t receiving yet.”8 This accidental encounter was probably fortunate for Craft, since it enabled him to break the ice with Auden before entering the Stravinskys’ suite, and to appear, therefore, as a useful intermediary with the idiosyncratic and to them not always comprehensible English poet. At all events the meeting was a success. Auden had brought a revised version of the libretto, and Stravinsky insisted that a toast be drunk in the form of small tumblers of scotch all round. Feeling less nervous, Craft began to observe his host: his tiny stature but broad shoulders and huge hands, his way of slapping his knee in frustration when a reply failed to satisfy him, above all his taste for categorical and unanswerable propositions like (of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto) “that D-sharp in the first movement is such an ugly note,” to which, even in his lubricated state, Craft found it difficult to respond adequately. Nevertheless after a substantial, well-irrigated lunch and a solitary afternoon walk along the Potomac, he returned for dinner to what he felt was a warm and sympathetic welcome. The Stravinskys, he sensed, had taken a liking to him, and—not much less important—perceived in him a usefulness that went beyond the musical qualities and enthusiasms that his letters had already revealed.

  Craft was later inclined to emphasize the practical grounds for this openness so early in their acquaintance. Though now settled in America, Stravinsky could not feel confident of his reputation there, which continued to depend on the activities of a handful of well-disposed (mainly immigrant) conductors and a limited coterie of admirers, likewise in many cases Europeans and many of them composers of a distinctly sub-Stravinskian cast. His own conducting remained confined largely to “soft-centered” works like the two early ballets, the Pergoles
i and Tchaikovsky pasticcios, and the wartime commercial parodies. Now here was a young New Yorker who seemed to know all his music, in some cases better than he knew it himself, and was itching to perform hitherto unprogrammable scores like the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Dumbarton Oaks or technically forbidding ones like the Symphony in C. It turned out, besides, that this same young man was not only highly literate and well read, but that he knew how to talk about books, could hold his own with so brilliant a literary gossip as Auden, and not least had a fascination for the pure mechanics of language that—like Stravinsky’s own—was amusingly just this side of the unbearably pedantic, while always hinting at the importance of exactitude and economy, criteria which, as a composer, he had always set above all others. “Delighted you enjoy reading dictionaries,” Stravinsky had written a few weeks before, in reply to the gift of a copy of Dr. Johnson, “so do I.”9 From all this, he might naturally have concluded that Craft was just the person to assist him in the delicate task of setting Auden’s beautiful verse to music that, at the very least, did not do unintentional damage to its rhythm or accentuation.

  Yet none of this would have counted for a great deal if he had not taken personally to Craft, had not experienced that quickening of sympathy and interest that we occasionally feel toward others in ways that are ultimately inexplicable—neither passionate nor sensual, but quietly tingling, a pleasure of recognition. On the face of it Craft was not at all Stravinsky’s type. The descendant of educated but steady Kingston (New York) businessmen, he was not cosmopolitan, not in any sense “old-world,” not forthright, certainly not authoritative or autocratic, did not have the gift of tongues, above all knew almost nothing about Russia or the Russians. He was not even intellectual, in the usual sense of that much-abused term. He had, rather, a lateral brain, fed by astonishing powers of recall and a speed of association that appealed and enlivened in a way that stark reason could not. As a young American he was far from “typical.” He was not cool, but edgy, even vulnerable, likeable only sometimes and not by all, complex, quick, almost Jewish but apparently (like Stravinsky) with no Semitic blood. If Stravinsky warmed to this unusual character, it was not only because he saw in it qualities he needed, but also and at least as much because he grasped that it was a character that needed him. The sense of being used had become all too familiar since his arrival in America. The sense of being needed, and by a gifted man younger than his own children, was not at all familiar, and it left a strong and agreeable impression that, as events were to show, he was increasingly anxious to explore.10

  Auden went straight back to New York, but Craft hung around in Washington, sitting in on Stravinsky’s rehearsals with the National Symphony Orchestra and going with him and Vera to a Mozart concert at Dumbarton Oaks. On the 3rd he flew to New York, but he was back in the capital for Stravinsky’s matinee concert the next day, and later they took the same night train to New York. During the next month, Craft was a constant item in the Stravinsky retinue. At first there were rehearsals for their joint Town Hall concert, interspersed with lunches with Haieff, who was also much in attendance and who, Craft later recalled, did his best to smooth the young man’s path and “cover up for my gaucheness and inadequacies.”11 Later there were the preparations for the premiere of Orpheus at the end of April, and it was at this point that Craft began to belong obviously to the Stravinsky circle, since there was now no immediate reason for his continued presence. But the path was still sometimes thorny. On one occasion, he decided to repay the composer’s hospitality by taking him, Vera, and Lisa Sokolov (who was also with them in Manhattan) out to lunch, without having yet learnt enough about Stravinsky’s somewhat elevated standards in such matters. At the Town and Country restaurant there was no wine list and the specialty was that curious American muffin known as the popover. Vera dissuaded her husband from walking out, but she recorded it laconically in her diary as an “unsuccessful luncheon.”12 In spite of this debacle, Craft went with them that same day to a production of Oedipus Rex at the Juilliard School, and there the atmosphere was strained for a quite different reason. As an ex-student, he sensed guiltily that his former teachers looked on him as an interloper in this exalted company, as if the incident of the Hunter College photograph had become the key to his entire life.13

  They stepped before the public together for the first time the day before the Town Hall concert, in a live radio “Stravinsky Tribute” with Balanchine and Kirstein.14 But the concert was the significant debut. Stravinsky’s presence transformed the audience, as Craft had known it would. Friends and associates like the Balanchines, Nicolas Nabokov and his new wife, the novelist Stark Young, Pavel Tchelitcheff, together with what Virgil Thomson called “the musico-intellectual world,”15 turned out to hear the Master conduct his Symphonies and Danses concertantes. But if they were also in some measure curious to take a look at the young conducting graduate who had talked him into gracing so inauspicious an event, the same could not be said of the hard-bitten Manhattan critics, who volunteered little or nothing on Craft’s conducting of the difficult Symphony in C and failed to notice that the Capriccio all but broke down when the soloist, Elly Kassman, missed a bar in the finale.16 Thomson instead discoursed airily on neoclassicism; and Stravinsky was so disappointed by this that he penned an instant complaint, which, in turn, drew from the Tribune critic a second review praising Craft’s musicianship while noting his lack of “platform elegance.”17

  The day they arrived in New York, the Stravinskys had dined with Auden, and there they for the first time met his co-librettist, Chester Kallman. Luckily they got on well with him from the start, and they even found that, in some ways, Auden was more relaxed and amenable when Chester was there, being entertaining in the extrovert, slightly theatrical way that came naturally to him. It was nevertheless, Vera recorded, a “strange dinner,” whether because of the food or the company is not wholly clear.18 The two poets already had a new idea for a libretto—something about Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Rossini, though if they mentioned it (as Auden did the very next day at lunch with his secretary)19 Stravinsky must surely have raised his hand and begged to be left in peace with the existing text, of which he had, after all, not yet composed a note. Two days later Auden and Kallman sailed for Europe, where they stayed for a time in England, and then proceeded for the summer to Ischia, where Auden had taken a house at Forio.

  Stravinsky’s own next port of call was the studio of Isamu Noguchi, the designer of Orpheus. After Tchelitcheff’s defection, Kirstein had turned against the idea of hiring a painter, and he had decided on Noguchi precisely because he was a sculptor with, as Kirstein told Stravinsky, “a charming delicacy and justice of handling forms; they are not wildly original, but he creates space and airiness, and this is what Balanchine wants.”20 Noguchi, in other words, would not trouble them with any heavy ideas of his own about the Orpheus legend, but would create a neutral, abstract geometry that would coalesce with Balanchine’s integrated choreographic style. The sculptor showed Stravinsky his Orpheus maquette, a “wonderful construction,” as Vera called it,21 of spheroids and hat stands, with paper cutout figures for the dancers. They would have been less happy if Noguchi had produced his finished masks, which—it transpired—blocked the dancers’ vision and made them look like baseball catchers.22 But these they were spared until the first dress rehearsal in City Center on the 26th, two days before the premiere, when it was still possible to adjust the masks but too late to change the concept.

  Lucia Chase had resolved her dispute with Hurok, and Ballet Theatre’s Met season was already running as the preparations for Orpheus reached their climax. A mere eight days before the Ballet Society opening, Balanchine himself took the baton and conducted the orchestra for his own Tchaikovsky ballet Theme and Variations; then on the 26th Stravinsky conducted Apollo, a work Kirstein would himself have liked to pair with the new ballet. It was as if Chase had gone out of her amiable way to steal Ballet Society’s thunder. But Kirstein still held by far th
e strongest card.

  Ballet Society opened its own season at City Center on 28 April 1948, with the world premiere of Orpheus (with Nicholas Magallanes in the title role, Maria Tallchief as Eurydice, and the composer conducting), together with three other Balanchine works: Renard, Symphonie concertante (based on Mozart’s K. 364), and a curious little piece of plastique in which a pair of dancers (Tanaquil Le Clercq and Patricia McBride) tied themselves in elegant knots to the austere strains of Stravinsky’s viola Elegy. Kirstein had relaxed his members-only policy, and though the first night was still restricted, the press were invited and for the subsequent three performances tickets were sold, a change that released the critics from their village-wedding politeness and gave them back their judicial role. There were the now-familiar disagreements about the Balanchine manner. While, for some, it hardly amounted to dancing at all, others sensed the intimacy of the relationship between the suppressed eloquence of the score and the plainness of the choreography. The Times dance critic, John Martin, saw in the whole work the quintessence of the Greek concept of ritual tragedy. “The music,” he wrote, “is remote, hieratic, tender with the memory of distant emotion, purified and distilled by time and perspective,” and Balanchine had “treated it with the utmost simplicity” and “told the story with complete directness and a minimum of ornamentation.”23 Martin’s Tribune colleague, Walter Terry, was firmly of the “dancing? what dancing?” school of Balanchine criticism, but the paper made amends by running a separate piece by Virgil Thomson, who loved the music and, as a composer himself, understood that “only the repose of thorough concentration ever produces a work so abundant in its variety and withal so restrained in style.”24