No one, friend or foe, pointed out that the Orphic tragedy of the Greeks was in fact a very violent phenomenon, and that in consciously introverting this quality Stravinsky had adopted what was psychologically, if not stylistically, a hypermodern, post-Freudian view of the legend. This Orpheus stands, at the outset, “motionless, with his back to the audience,” and even his dismemberment by the Bacchantes is played out, for much of its length, mezzo-forte and half in secret, as if veiled by the large tulle curtain that figures prominently in the stage directions, and that Balanchine was only able to procure by the last-minute acquisition from an unknown sponsor of a thousand dollars in cash.25 The image, musically as well as dramaturgically, is of a legend that retains beauty but has lost force and immediacy, one that we witness with the superior detachment of a post-legendary age, or like the children in Auden’s account of Breughel’s Icarus, “who did not specially want it to happen,” and the ship that had “somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”26 But for Stravinsky it seems clear that the element of sublimation was at bottom religious, and that therein lay the deeper significance of his importing of devices like canon and fugue, which belonged symbolically to the musical language of an ancient time when old men really did wait reverently and passionately for the miraculous birth. It was much as when Apollo had prompted Boris de Schloezer to predict, from the note of renunciation he detected in that ballet, that Stravinsky’s next work would be a Mass.27 This time, his next work would be—was already—just that.
Kirstein was so delighted with the outcome of his commission that he promptly wrote to ask Stravinsky to undertake another after The Rake’s Progress. “Apollo,” he revealed, “was actually my start in musical education; it was a door through which I passed into the music of the past, and out of which I heard the music of the present and the future.… To me Orpheus is the second act of a great lyric-drama.”28 For a third act he suggested—somewhat predictably—“the maturity of Apollo.… At least let us talk about it.” But as de Schloezer had himself enquired on that earlier occasion twenty years before: “is our logic that of the artist?”
Just over a week later, Stravinsky was back in Hollywood and embarking at last on the composition of Auden’s first scene, starting as he intended to continue, with an unashamed accent on Anne Trulove’s opening definite article (“THE woods ARE green”), thereby twisting the poet’s iamb into a trochee. Craft had been left behind in New York with various duties, including editorial work on Orpheus and the compilation of a reading list to help sustain Stravinsky in his English-language studies, but also with a firm invitation to come and stay at North Wetherly Drive later in the summer. For forty years, Stravinsky had been delegating tasks that he found irksome or inconvenient or simply too expensive or remote. Now with “Bobe,” as he had quickly become, there was a qualitative change, and errands were allocated without inhibition, as a quid pro quo, no doubt, for the leg-up he had received in his career, for meals bought and introductions given, yet essentially not for these reasons at all, but rather, simply, as the natural flow and return of a more particular affection, exactly as if this clever, sensitive, and efficient young man had been specially laid on by Providence to soothe the eight-year pangs of son-starvation. For in truth Craft had come on the scene at an amazingly providential moment. For two years running, Stravinsky had hoped and planned to greet his family in Europe, and for two years he had been denied. Now at this very moment his younger son, Soulima, was making final arrangements to fly to America with the wife and child his father had never seen. He would actually arrive in New York on—or almost on—his father’s sixty-sixth birthday. Igor Stravinsky’s paternal instincts were on maximum alert.29
There was nothing particularly unusual about his writing to Craft at the start of June, asking him if he would go to La Guardia to meet Soulima off the plane and see him safely to his Manhattan hotel.30 In fact it was the most natural thing in the world. Either Rieti or Sam Dushkin would normally have gone to the airfield, but both were going to be out of town. And while it was true that they both knew Soulima well and could talk to him in French, Craft more than made up for his deficiencies in these departments by his willingness and dependability, and by the fact that Stravinsky already felt close enough to him to trust him with family responsibilities. The closeness is almost tangible in his and Vera’s letters to the young conductor. They are direct, simple, warm, and devoid of formality. Igor’s “it would be wonderful if you could meet them there and help them at their arrival” is in marked contrast to the often slightly officious tone of his instructions to others. In a second letter he confides to Craft his contempt for “the ridiculous old man” (Koussevitzky) and his anxiety about the way American choirs will sing his Mass: “you are right in mistrusting the ppppp-fffff technic of this kind of organization.”31 As for Vera, Craft had had the impression in New York that she was puzzled by him and had befriended him chiefly for Igor’s sake, knowing his thirst for acceptance by intelligent and well-informed young Americans. Now, though, she talks to him like a favorite aunt. She asks him about Isherwood and the identity of the characters in his autobiography, adding without irony “you know everything—that is why I ask you.”32 She lists her stepson’s various names: Sviatoslav, Svetik, Nini, Soulima—and she gently repeats the invitation to Hollywood. It seems that they have already half-adopted Craft, for what he is as well as for what he knows.
For some time Stravinsky had been putting heavy pressure on his pianist son to come to the States, using a technique that derived partly from his own impatient and authoritarian nature. Think seriously about it, he told Soulima, but decide quickly; I don’t want to wait. At the back of his mind, no doubt, were the difficulties he knew his son to be experiencing in Paris in the shadow of his wartime activities. Life and work would be better and easier for Soulima in America, and there need be no backward glances. But Igor was in any case an instinctive patriarch, and he would have transported all his children and installed them in North Wetherly Drive if money and space had permitted, whatever their circumstances in Europe.
They themselves, it was true, wavered in their acquiescence to such plans. Theodore had his painting work in Geneva, and though money was often short they had a house and friends there; they felt, Denise said, “decidedly Europeans,”33 and it suited them to be outside the Stravinsky gravitational field. Meanwhile in Beverly Hills, Milène and André were finding life less amenable. After barely three months, André’s problems with Madubo had reached the point at which she decamped to North Wetherly Drive and refused to go back until the cramped arrangements there made it inevitable. No doubt André was, as Olga Sallard had suggested, an uncongenial employer. But as always there were two sides to the argument. Now in her mid-fifties, Madubo was still finding it hard to break her lifelong habit of treating Milène as a child, while the Marions in their turn, feeling that Madubo had been dumped on them and unable to assign her a role in their lives, tended to treat her as an unwanted guest in their house. Matters were made worse by the fact that André had no job and few prospects; his health was indifferent, his temper volatile, and he resented the lack of privacy in his own home. At one point he even consulted Stravinsky’s lawyer Aaron Sapiro about how he might legally evict the poor woman.34 How Stravinsky himself reacted to such developments can only be guessed, but he certainly occupied himself with the Marions’ troubles. Vera’s diary often refers to serious talks, heart-to-hearts, and plans involving the unlucky pair. Nevertheless the situation was still unresolved when the Soulima Stravinskys arrived in Hollywood in the fourth week of June and installed themselves in a flat that Igor and Vera had rented for them from the Sokolovs and had furnished partly with objects brought from the Sachs mansion in Santa Barbara.
Their arrival could hardly have been worse timed. On the 22nd, the very day that they stepped onto a train in New York, Lisa Sokolov, who had seemed to recover from her Mexican jaundice of two years before, suddenly and quite unexpectedly died of a heart attack. Lisa was not on
ly Vera’s business partner but her best Californian friend, and the atmosphere that greeted Soulima and his family when they got off the train at Pasadena and drove to the bereaved widower’s flat in Holloway Drive must have been muted indeed. Nevertheless the auguries for the newcomers were at least better than for the Marions. Stravinsky had managed to arrange a handful of performing dates for his son, including the Capriccio in a concert he was himself conducting at Red Rocks, Colorado, in four weeks’ time. Robert Craft would be meeting them in Denver, then coming on later to spend a week or two in Hollywood.
When they reached the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver on the 19th, it was soon clear that Craft was not in Colorado exclusively for the scenery or the music-making. Stravinsky had actually composed only about half of the first scene of the Rake (up to the end of Nick’s arioso “Fair lady, gracious gentlemen”), but what he now needed from his new young helper was detailed technical advice about the setting of the libretto as a whole. He had composed an English text only once before, in Babel, and even there the sung text had been limited to a few biblical lines for two-part male chorus, in which mistakes of prosody were either inaudible or unimportant. It was one thing, he realized, to misaccentuate a language like French, which he knew well and the effect of whose maltreatment he could calculate in advance; it was quite another thing to mangle an original English text by a great poet in a work lasting three hours simply because he was ignorant of its finer points. He accordingly made Craft go through the whole text with him in great detail, reading it aloud and answering questions about meaning and intonation. It was a vital piece of collaboration, and one that must have convinced Stravinsky that he had found in this young man a priceless assistant who could, so to speak, focus all the different types of help that he had in the past sought from a variety of musicians, writers, factotums of one kind or another—in fact, whoever happened to be available. No doubt in his partisan enthusiasm he in some respects overrated Craft, as he had always tended to overrate the advice he solicited. Nevertheless, it was an astonishing stroke of luck that, just when he needed an educated anglophone musician with a flair for words and a strong literary instinct who adored his music, fate should have sent one along. That this same person should also be a sensitive soul with emotional needs that fitted his own must have seemed little short of miraculous.
For a new visitor, Denver has always been a surprising city. Immediately to the west stands the highest massif of the Rocky Mountains, the source of huge electric storms that, to this day, can set off a chain reaction of havoc to U.S. domestic air transport, for which Denver is a major nexus. Yet this most forbidding of mountain ranges provided, in the summer of 1948, the setting for some curiously rarefied artistic experiences. The Stravinsky concert with the Denver Symphony Orchestra (the Capriccio plus the usual amalgam of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, and Tchaikovsky à la Stravinsky) took place on the 23rd of July in an open-air theatre called Red Rocks, in the foothills twenty miles west of the city; and after rehearsing there in scorching July heat the day before the concert, they drove on to the old gold-mining town of Central City for Così fan tutte in the town’s unexpected Victorian opera house—perhaps Stravinsky’s first orchestral encounter with what Craft calls his “favorite opera of the time.”35 Finally, at the university at Boulder, there was Virgil Thomson’s opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All, with its consciously naïve, repetitious setting of Gertrude Stein. Stravinsky loathed every reduplicated minute but could not leave because Thomson himself—a friend and an influential critic—was present. On the other hand, Soulima’s wife, Françoise, a sophisticated Frenchwoman with little taste for the faux-naïf, became convulsed with mirth and was forced to make a rapid exit.36
Though unimpressed by the Rockies, Stravinsky was intrigued by the ethnic impedimenta of old America, and it may partly have been the native art in the Denver Museum, intermingling with his memories of peasant Russia, that prompted him to insist that instead of coming straight to Hollywood, Craft should go by train to Mexico City, study the villages and the baroque churches, then fly on to Los Angeles the following week.37 Craft thus reached North Wetherly Drive only on the 30th, three days after his hosts, and he missed the spectacle of Stravinsky fidgeting to escape from another, very different musical agony: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony conducted in the Hollywood Bowl by Eugene Ormandy. Just as it was important not to offend Thomson, so it was hard to evade the hospitality of the Bowl, especially since Stravinsky had attended a dinner given by Ormandy in honor of Mahler’s widow only three weeks before. As distinguished guests, the Stravinskys would be seated prominently near the front of the amphitheater, so that discreet departure was out of the question. Igor would shuffle and mutter and Vera would whisper sharply in Russian that they could not leave. No wonder Stravinsky rechristened the composer “malheur.” His attitude to such music is one of many possible starting points for an understanding of his own.38
Craft stayed for ten days, sleeping on the “Procrustes” couch, mentally photographing the house and studio, and lunching or dining out with various members of the Stravinsky circle: with Babitz and Dahl; Eugene Berman; the flamboyant Anglo-Catholic priest James McLane; the composer’s favorite West Coast doctor, Maximilian Edel; and naturally with the Soulima Stravinskys and the Marions, whose new idea of buying a restaurant may well have been discussed in his presence. Igor and Vera took him to the Farmers’ Market and the Forest Lawn Memorial Park—the original of Evelyn Waugh’s Whispering Glades in The Loved One, which the composer had already read in Horizon and admired.39 Stravinsky played Craft his Mass, and what existed of the Rake, on one of the out-of-tune pianos in the studio, groping for the chords and gesturing for Craft to help with notes that were beyond his stretch. Craft was struck by what he saw as Stravinsky’s complete lack of indolence, and astonished to realize that the sixty-six-year-old Master needed the reassurance of his twenty-four-year-old guest’s praise. He also noticed that the bookshelves were dominated by Russian and French literature, including a ninety-eight-volume set of Voltaire. He must have commented on this, because within forty-eight hours he had been whisked off to the Pickwick Book Store with a blank check and an instruction to restock the shelves with books in English, the exact selection, of course, being left to him.40 Then on the 9th of August he flew back to New York, conscious of having “sat at the feet of a man whose horizons were broader and further away than those of other men,”41 even if they did still need broadening in one or two respects. He had a new plan for a Town Hall concert the following February, in which Stravinsky had agreed to conduct the premiere of the Mass.
Stravinsky had been in touch with Hawkes about this particular scheme while Craft was in Hollywood. He was trying to insist on a New York premiere under his own direction because of the unusual problems the work presented, problems of vocal color and articulation, since the kind of choir envisaged was not the average choral society that might attempt the Symphony of Psalms but rather a superior church choir or large vocal consort, preferably with children’s voices or a very light, vibratoless female timbre, a type of choir that would never before have sung any Stravinsky. In effect he was urging the publisher to forgo immediate profit by declining earlier performances, so that the composer could, as he put it, “establish my own tradition.”42 Not surprisingly, Hawkes was evasive. There had been enquiries, as Stravinsky had indicated to Craft, from choirs in New York and Washington, neither of whom fitted his mental image of the work’s sound, and now there was a proposal from Ansermet to conduct it in Milan in the autumn. Hawkes seems to have argued (his letter is lost) that such a premiere would not harm Stravinsky’s priority. But Stravinsky was trying and failing to imagine what his austere liturgy would sound like in the sumptuously profane surroundings of La Scala, and perhaps at the same time trying to reconcile its cool objectivity with Ansermet’s self-centered lucubrations on phenomenology and the “essential points which we do not approach in the same way.”43 He did not succeed; but nor did he manage to prevent the
performance.
Ansermet duly gave the premiere as part of an orchestral concert, alongside Mozart’s late E-flat symphony, Malipiero’s Third, and Debussy’s Iberia, on the Scala stage on the 27th of October, under conditions that were much as Stravinsky had feared. The chorus was more than a hundred strong with, of course, women sopranos and altos, and the conductor himself admitted that while he could teach them the notes, after years of Aida the austere church style was beyond them.44 In other words they sang it like opera, full-throatedly and vibrantly, con passione. It was just as hard to teach motet manners to the audience and the press. The occasion was like an opera gala, and after the Stravinsky there were cheers answered by hissing. As for the critics, they seemed at a loss to account for the music’s curious reversion to a medieval style. One of them referred to its “impudent modernism,” and detected “a certain flavor of jest, something between the ironic and the balletic.”45 Stravinsky’s old friend Domenico de’ Paoli described it, confusingly, as “a work of humility and submission and diabolical pride.”46 But there was nothing from Ansermet himself for almost a month, and when it came it proved, Stravinsky told Craft,
a very empty letter, indeed, excuses for writing so late, not a word, of course, about his personal reaction to the work (neither about that of the public). The only thing he said was: “singers, instrumentalists and the conductor did their best” [sic]. How very kind of them!47
Craft’s own departure in August had left a hole in Wetherly Drive life which for various reasons Stravinsky’s children were unable or unwilling to fill. Soulima, wisely and deliberately, was building a career for himself and was careful not to get drawn into the ferocious vortex of his father’s work. True, he had concerts in Los Angeles that depended more or less on the family connection. He gave a solo recital for the Evenings on the Roof, then a week later, in early October, took part in a Roof Stravinsky evening in the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, a concert which for some reason his father did not attend.48 No doubt even his New York broadcast of Mozart’s C major piano concerto (K. 503) the previous month was entirely due to Igor’s Columbia connections, and it must have been clear to him that he would soon have to cut the umbilical cord, whatever the consequences. As for the Marions, they were still bouncing from one project to the next: from the restaurant to a sweetshop, from the sweetshop to a French delicatessen—each one as dependent as the next on some kind of financial input from Milène’s father. From Igor’s point of view, they were a presence that was as disturbing in one respect as it was delightful in another. Not for a minute would he have withdrawn his support or encouragement; but from the point of view of his own work, they were for the time being undeniably somewhat of a distraction.
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