Stravinsky
Page 35
The fact that something was lacking is painfully evident in his correspondence with Craft that autumn. “Yes, am glad to hear from you,” he wrote on one occasion, “for I too miss you greatly. Please, do come at Christmas, please, please! Please answer YES.”49 His letters now begin “Dearest Bob” and close with “Love” or “Love-Kisses,” a formula that Stravinsky must have realized carried more impact than its conventional Russian equivalent, obnimayu (I embrace [you]). The more elaborate effusions are admittedly quite rare amid the barrage of commissions that is the real content and purpose of the letters. But it would be a great mistake to interpret the shows of affection as in some way distinct from—or an emollient to—the use to which the competent young man was unashamedly being put. On the contrary, it is precisely in the trust he places in Craft that Stravinsky’s affection comes out most forcibly, implying as it does a complete confidence in his ability to act as he himself would act, to understand the relative importance of this or that concern, and above all to do so on the basis of a deep knowledge of the central fact of the music. While Soulima the musician-son was backing away from the vortex, Craft the musician-arriviste seemed to be welcoming it, revelling in it, and to all outward appearances able to survive in it. In view of Stravinsky’s deep self-centeredness, this contrast is quite enough to explain the difficult family situation that gradually began to develop—a situation which Stravinsky should have foreseen but certainly did not will, and which eventually came close to destroying all but the central character of the drama himself.
There were so many things in his life that needed the on-the-spot attention of an efficient and loving slave. That autumn there were plans for Craft’s own concerts, including Mavra at the end of December and the Mass (to be conducted by the composer) at the end of February; there was Soulima to meet at the airport and see safely to his rehearsals for the Mozart concerto and the performance itself; there was Boosey and Hawkes to keep in order over the publication of the Mass and the small matter of their printed list of his works. “Enclosed,” he wrote to Craft,
a new nonsense from B & H which they probably call catalogue. Even as a proof it is not acceptable. In order to avoid writing them a letter with high words which they deserve, please explain them, as you can, their utmost stupidity and neglect. You will be an Angel!50
Craft could indeed be tactful in such matters; and he could also explain gently to Minna Lederman, the editor of Modern Music, why Stravinsky preferred not to have his new opera, still largely unwritten, discussed in her forthcoming anthology of essays on his theatre music, however desirable this might seem to everyone else.51
Finally, the young man had become a crucial go-between in Stravinsky’s difficult relations with the recording industry. For a year or more the composer had been grumbling about Columbia’s failure to release all the recordings he had made for them, but now the dagger was being twisted in his breast by another strike in the industry, this time caused by a dispute over union welfare funds. Early in June 1948, he wrote abusively to Lieberson disputing his claim that the releases were being blocked by his superiors, and Lieberson was so incensed that he in as many words invited Stravinsky to take his problems to RCA Victor and leave them there.52 Stravinsky had chosen a bad moment to pick a quarrel with Columbia, who, that very spring, had announced their revolutionary new LP (33 rpm) records but were still by no means certain of winning a marketing war against RCA Victor’s 45 rpm extended-play discs. Lieberson did not hesitate to remind the Master that his recent works had not exactly burnt themselves into the popular consciousness. So it seemed just as well that Orpheus and the Mass were booked to be recorded in February 1949 by RCA. Then in October, with the strike still not settled, Stravinsky’s RCA producer, Dick Gilbert, blithely informed him that he had moved over to Columbia.53 The composer made the best of it. “I am very pleased,” he told Gilbert pointedly, “to find myself a good friend at Columbia.”54 It was no less pleasant, though, to have someone as well-informed, not to say personally involved, as Craft to negotiate face to face with Gilbert’s successor, Richard A. Mohr, over such awkward matters as side-breaks and numbers of recording sessions, in which his authority as a musician might be seen as outweighing his lack of direct practical experience.
JUST AT this moment, when Stravinsky was discovering for the first time the joys of a reliable organizer, nemesis struck down one of his last and least reliable. For some years now, Alexis Kall had been an infrequent visitor to North Wetherly Drive, partly because of his own poor health since his leg amputation, partly no doubt because of Vera’s impatience with his drinking habits. But on his seventieth birthday this last February the Stravinskys had risen to the occasion and dispatched a congratulatory telegram. To be exact what they sent was a night letter, but that was out of consideration for his finances rather than theirs, since they sent it collect. “Dearest Woof, too bad not to be present on your birthday celebration. We wish you many happy returns …”55
It was to be their penultimate gesture, and there were no returns. On the 7th of September 1948, Kall died, and three days later they attended his funeral.
16
A FAMILY HAPPY IN ITS OWN WAY
SINCE ROBERT CRAFT’S return to New York in August 1948, Stravinsky had been working away quietly on the first act of the Rake. By early October the first scene was finished and he was starting the Brothel scene, with its coded religious imagery and somewhat less veiled allusions to the street life of Hogarth’s London. But progress, though steady, was slower than he (and above all his publisher) would have liked.1 Hawkes was already pondering the venue for the first performance before the opening scene was written, and while he was dreaming of Covent Garden, the composer was held up by the need for an extra verse of poetry in the second chorus of Roaring Boys and Whores.2 Auden was proving brilliantly adept at manufacturing additional or variant text. Nevertheless the opera’s composition stretched away into a dark and uncertain future, and Stravinsky may already have been half-regretting the commitment it entailed. On the 15th of October he wrote to Hawkes ruling out a European tour until the opera was finished, which he knew would be at least two years hence.3
To say that the work was giving him stylistic anxieties would probably be an exaggeration, but there is evidence that the subject matter and the kind of text Auden and Kallman had matched to it were between them taking him along musical paths somewhat different from those he imagined when he first conceived the idea. From the start his prime model had been Mozart; he had requested Mozart operas in score and was taking every opportunity to see and hear them onstage, and Craft dutifully told Auden that what had so far been written (in August) was “very Mozartian.”4 But that was at best a half-truth. For one thing, end-rhyme in English is by its nature more obtrusive than in Italian (whose inflected vowel-endings are naturally recurrent); and for another thing, Auden was sometimes modelling himself on a style much closer to the popular verse in The Beggar’s Opera than to anything in da Ponte. In such cases the challenge for Stravinsky was to avoid falling into the kind of four-square jog-trot that bedevils that epoch-making but musically trivial work, and to do so by dodging what are in part linguistic traps in a language with which he was no more than half-familiar. The problem is already apparent in Tom’s first aria, “Since it is not by merit,” with its consciously Augustan patterning, but it intensifies in the second scene, where Mother Goose’s entourage naturally express themselves in doggerel, albeit of a subtle, even elegant variety. At these points, the music had to preserve a demotic tone without lapsing into coarseness or naïveté. By an odd coincidence, Craft was this very autumn preparing a New York concert performance of Stravinsky’s one earlier opera whose text in some ways foreshadowed Auden’s stylizations, his Pushkin one-acter, Mavra. The difference was that in 1922, with Mavra, the whole idea of modelling had been new and surprising, whereas by the time of the Rake it was what Stravinsky’s audience (including perhaps his librettists) had come to expect. So there was a conceivable dange
r that the new opera would slip into a comfortable rut of the predictable: updated ballad opera with Mozartian attachments.
Stravinsky did not discuss such matters, certainly not in letters. But he knew that his recent music was regarded in some quarters as old-fashioned, head-in-the-sand, or worse, and not only by a handful of student modernists in liberated Paris. Nicolas Nabokov had replied to Leibowitz’s poisonous article in Partisan Review, but not all that convincingly, and as always in such cases the reply had given Leibowitz a second platform on which to reinforce his accusations. “The fact,” he remarked smugly, “that a theoretical defense of a composer who betrays a total creative impotence turns out to be equally impotent […] is not astonishing.”5 It would certainly have been wiser to leave Leibowitz’s attack to gather dust in those relatively little-read left-wing pages. But a much more dangerous adversary was at this precise moment bringing out, in Germany, a book-length demolition of the whole basis of Stravinskian aesthetics that would transfer the arguments from the murky depths of the analysis class to the sunlit uplands of philosophy, psychology, and political sociology. To what extent Stravinsky was aware of Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik at the time of its publication in Frankfurt at the end of 1948 is hard to establish; but he certainly knew Adorno’s name, not only as that of a critic on the Berlin Neue Musik Zeitung at the time of the Kroll Oedipus Rex in 1928,6 but also probably as a friend of Thomas Mann’s in Los Angeles in the forties. Stravinsky had met the novelist from time to time since the end of the war, and Mann had adapted certain of Stravinsky’s childhood memories from the Chroniques for Adrian Leverkühn, the composer-hero of his recent novel Doctor Faustus.7 Adorno’s connection with Doctor Faustus was much closer, since he had provided Mann with the technical information about Schoenberg’s twelve-note method that had formed the basis of Leverkühn’s compositional “system.”
Like Leibowitz, but for somewhat different reasons, Adorno regarded Schoenberg as the model of a true progressive. He would not necessarily have agreed with Mann’s diagnosis of the “system” as the product of a diabolical possession, but he did regard its difficult or disagreeable aspects—its atonal harmonies and impenetrable textures—as an inevitable reflection of the violence and confusion of the modern world. Above all, he saw in Schoenberg’s evolution an honest and authentic response to the historic needs of individual expression through music. By contrast, he launches a comprehensive, psychologically based attack on Stravinsky and all his works, accusing him in Freudian terms of regression and infantilism, of a pseudo-primitivism masking a sadomasochistic “joy in self-denial,” of a reactionary anti-individualism that “sneers at the tradition of humanistic art” and “does not identify with the victim [in Petrushka], but rather with the destructive element.” Everything in his music is dismissed as inauthentic. Neoclassicism is simply “traditional music combed in the wrong direction.” Even expression, which Stravinsky himself had claimed to reject, is here and there tolerated by his music, “so long as it is no longer true expression, but merely the death-mask thereof.” As for the borrowed styles, they “pay for their accessibility not by revealing the true nature of form, but by hovering meaninglessly over the surface of aesthetic form.” “The will to style replaces style itself and therewith sabotages it.” And as with regressive tendencies in Freud, the primary impulse is fear. It is out of fear that Stravinsky “spares himself the tormenting self-animation of the material” and thus arrives at “the aesthetic transfiguration of the reflective character of present-day man.…
His neo-classicism fashions images of Oedipus and Persephone, but the employed myth has already become the metaphysics of the universally dependent, who neither want nor need metaphysics. They mock the very principle thereof. Therewith objectivism designates itself as that which it fears and the proclamation of which constitutes its entire content.8
Much of what Adorno says about Stravinsky strikes one as true, or at least plausible, and the one (admittedly all-embracing) disaster of the whole critique—apart from its notoriously impenetrable prose—is its unremitting hostility. Stravinsky was no doubt “regressive,” “anal,” and artistically self-denying. That fear and insecurity lay behind many of his aesthetic (and indeed social) attitudes can hardly be gainsaid. Yet out of this “psychosis”—as Adorno would have called it—he created a body of work that has enriched countless lives and continues to do so more than thirty years after his and Adorno’s deaths. Adorno, of course, knew perfectly well that this would be the case. In essence, his attack on Stravinsky is an attack on the whole of modern bourgeois culture, to which he saw Stravinsky’s music as subservient, while Schoenberg’s music alone had resisted commodification and the marketplace, and achieved a kind of negative virtue “more by its denial of any meaning in organized society, of which it will have no part, […] than by any capability of positive meaning within itself.” The fatuity of this remark as a critical judgment from within “organized society” has not prevented Adorno from exerting an overpowering influence on postwar German cultural thought and, more recently, the cultural philosophy programs of Anglo-American universities. But it does also partly explain why the whole shooting match was rejected out of hand by its nominal winner. “So modern music has a philosophy,” Schoenberg wrote to the German critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt.
It would be enough if it had a philosopher. He attacks me quite vehemently in it. Another disloyal person.… I have never been able to bear the fellow … now I know that he has clearly never liked my music.… It is disgusting, by the way, how he treats Stravinsky. I am certainly no admirer of Stravinsky, although I like a piece of his here and there very much—but one should not write like that.9
A few months later, in April 1949, Stuckenschmidt was in Los Angeles, and, after lunching with Mann, called on Schoenberg in Brentwood Park and later took George Antheil and his wife to dine there. Mann had warned him not to refer to the lunch, and Faustus was not mentioned. What surprised the visitor more was that a few days later Stravinsky invited him to tea at North Wetherly Drive and specifically asked after Schoenberg. He admired Schoenberg, he said, and regretted that they met only occasionally “in a third place,” a fact that he attributed to the influence of “the ladies.”10 The picture is irresistible of the two great composers pulling down their hats, turning up their collars, and sloping off without their wives’ knowledge for clandestine meetings in Joe’s Cafe. Alas, Stravinsky was being either polite or self-exculpatory in the presence of a guest he knew to be a true friend and admirer of Schoenberg’s. As for Adorno, it seems unlikely that his name came up in either house.
Nobody gave Stravinsky Adorno’s book for Christmas in 1948, and instead he had to make do with a slim volume that his own Theodore had been writing about his music under the title Le Message d’Igor Strawinsky. It was a book that started no arguments and studiously avoided depth psychology, but it pleased its subject, partly because it reflected closely his own attitudes to his work, partly out of simple fatherly pride. It was, he told Theodore, the first book about his music (“and there have been plenty”) that entirely satisfied him. “If you only knew what rubbish has gone into print about me,” he wrote,
But I like your book not because it’s an apologia (Tansman’s is also an apologia, but God, what a bore, unintelligent and unconvincing; poor Tansman is expecting a letter from me about it, but what can I say?), but above all because your apologia has an entirely solid basis, both ethically and aesthetically.11
“FATHER WILL PLAY Rake’s score to you and Auden, nobody else,” Soulima wrote to Craft on the 23rd of January 1949. “So keep it in absolute secret, don’t tell anybody (even Rieti or Nabokoff, for instance) anything that can reveal it.”12 Stravinsky had at last completed the draft score of Act 1 on the 16th, and a week later he and Vera set off for the East Coast by way of Houston, where he was conducting on the 31st. They finally steamed into Penn Station early on the 3rd of February, and that same evening the composer played the first act throug
h at the apartment of the violinist Alexander Schneider.
Somehow Nabokov had found out and was there with his wife, Patricia, as well as Balanchine, Auden, and Craft, who did his best to turn the pages of the draft score while Stravinsky groaned out the vocal parts. The atmosphere was tense. In recent years Stravinsky had lost the habit of such tryouts, disliked the presence of outsiders, and was irritated by Auden’s non-musician’s way of talking during the performance. Yet when the librettist proposed that Anne be allowed to take a high C at the end of her cabaletta, Stravinsky’s sole objection was that the vowel was wrong, whereupon Auden promptly wrote something more singable.13