At this juncture, New York was no more than a staging post on a curiously parochial conducting tour Stravinsky had fixed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, starting in Cambridge on 8 February, then taking in Boston itself and, after a repeat performance in Carnegie Hall, striking out beyond Manhattan to Newark and Brooklyn. Thanks to Koussevitzky’s influence, the repertoire for these concerts was more uncompromising than often of late. Soulima had been engaged, at his father’s urging,14 to play the Capriccio and Piano Concerto, and there were also the first concert performances of Orpheus, together with the Ode and the Basle concerto. As a matter of routine, Craft travelled with them, and he not only participated in their socializing but was even beginning to exercise some influence on it. For instance, he seems to have decided that it would be fun for the Stravinskys to meet Evelyn Waugh, since they had expressed enthusiasm for his books; and he had accordingly—with a touch of the same bravado that had taken him to the Stravinskys’ door in the first place—arranged for the three of them to dine with the novelist and his wife, Laura, the day after their arrival in New York.15
It was an early example of those faintly contrived Meetings of the Great that pepper Craft’s diaries and that one often suspects of having been arranged at his suggestion and for his benefit. His account of the dinner is brilliant and convincing. Waugh showed not the slightest sign of being intimidated by his famous and twenty-years-older host, but typically sought to exert control by rejecting courtesies: he refused any aperitif, denied conversational ability in French, denounced the U.S. Constitution, and expressed interest only in American methods of burial, while claiming (untruthfully, of course) that he himself had “arranged to be buried at sea.” At dinner, in a small and crowded Italian restaurant, Stravinsky tried politely to relate his own recent work to the theme of Waugh’s lecture tour (the Catholic writers Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and Graham Greene) by describing his Mass and inviting the couple to the forthcoming performance. To this the novelist’s deathless—and alas characteristic—response was “All music is positively painful to me.”16
Once the Boston Symphony tour was out of the way, rehearsals began in earnest for the Mass concert in Town Hall on the 26th of February. Craft had managed to find at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament that New York rarity, a choir with boy trebles to sing the new work, and had also booked Soulima to play his father’s solo sonata and the double concerto with Beveridge Webster. Although Stravinsky was conducting the Mass, Craft took some of the rehearsals, and the schedule was punishing. In the four days before the concert, Stravinsky was recording Orpheus and the Mass under his contract with RCA, together with his unaccompanied settings of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria in new Latin versions made specially for the Town Hall concert (but with the same Catholic intention as the Mass) and sung by a small and slightly squeaky adult chorus prepared by Robert Shaw.17
Despite these pressures, the concert went well enough, and Stravinsky was able to feel vindicated in his insistence on children’s voices in the Mass, even if, as he reported to Nadia Boulanger, “they were not quite first-rate, [since] unlike in Europe, there is no tradition here of choir schools for discanti and alti. I had to opt for children, nevertheless, as the presence of women, however perfect, in the music of my Mass would be a much more serious mistake (for the sense and spirit of this music) than the imperfection of a chorus of children.”18 As leavening for the musical items, Auden stepped up and read three of his poems, including the subtle and intricate and, in some of its byways, curiously Stravinskian “In Praise of Limestone”:
Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell.19
The poet fidgeted nervously as he read, twice wiped his nose on his cuff, but gripped the audience’s attention, Craft noted, “by sheer force of intellect.”20 Then Stravinsky, ignoring the stern injunction about the beasts, conducted the Mass twice, just as he had repeated the Symphonies in the same hall the previous year.
It was no secret, of course, that Stravinsky and Auden were working on an opera together. Yet it was impossible to imagine, from the intriguing miscellany of this concert, what on earth it would be like. Auden’s poetry, though suggestive of musical ideas, was hardly such as could actually be set to music, while the austere incantations of the Mass were miles from any normal person’s image of the operatic, as Stravinsky had been quick to point out when confronted with Ansermet’s Milan premiere. The privileged few who had heard the run-through of the Rake at Schneider’s three weeks before might have picked up a resonance of the opera’s first scene, with its tendrils of what would eventually be oboe and bassoon sound, just as in the Mass. They might even have been aware of a dawning element of redemptive ceremony in Tom and Anne’s opening duet. But comparison would have ended there. The Mass certainly did sow important seeds for Stravinsky, but they were not on the whole seeds that would germinate under greasepaint or in the glare of footlights. For the time being the work came to rest in the shape of a neoclassical medievalism, a mixture no more bizarre, perhaps, but also not obviously more forward-looking than the neoclassical commercialism of the works that had immediately preceded it.
Leaving New York by train at the end of February, the Stravinskys crisscrossed America on their way home, stopping for “wonderful concerts” in Urbana and, once again, Denver.21 Soulima was with them, and he played the piano concerto with real success in both cities. Craft stayed behind in New York. He had concerts of his own planned, including an April Les Noces and further performances of the Mass, but he would be coming to Hollywood in June, this time for three full months, to begin the task of sorting and identifying the contents of several large boxes of manuscripts that had at last arrived from the bank vault in Paris, where they had been gathering dust for the past ten years.22
By quitting New York when he did, Stravinsky narrowly missed getting involved with a much-publicized official visit to the city by a seven-man delegation from the Soviet Union to what was grandly called the First Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace. On the 13th of March Olin Downes wired him in Hollywood asking him to add his name to an open telegram from American musicians specifically welcoming the composer Shostakovich to the United States as a member of the delegation. But Stravinsky was unimpressed by Downes’s arguments about “symbolizing the bond which music can create among all peoples,” and he wired back that “all my ethic and esthetic convictions oppose such gesture.” A few days later, when asked by a West Coast reporter if he would take part in a debate with Shostakovich, he retorted: “How can you talk to them? They are not free. There is no discussion possible with people who are not free.”23
This dignified response was less straightforward than it seemed. Stravinsky had known all about the Peace Congress from Nicolas Nabokov, who was organizing an action group to oppose the propaganda of the Soviet delegation, and had already enlisted Stravinsky as a member of his “international” sponsorship committee.24 When a speech allegedly by Shostakovich was read out by an interpreter, in his presence, to a large audience in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 26 March, condemning Western music in general as decadent and bourgeois, and Stravinsky in particular as having “betrayed his native land and severed himself from his people by joining the camp of reactionary modern musicians,”25 it was Nabokov who stood up and asked Shostakovich if he agreed personally with Soviet denunciations of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith, whereupon Shostakovich “was handed a microphone, and, looking down at the floor, said in Russian: ‘I fully agree with the statements made in Pravda.’”26 But Shostakovich’s role in this charade was in any case of secondary importance. Like all White Russians in postwar America, Stravinsky had long since made his ch
oice, and he was certainly not going to jeopardize his hard-won status as a loyal American by the slightest appearance of supporting a pro-Communist propaganda exercise. On this point, the lawyer Sapiro had given him firm advice at the time of the Eisler case two years before; and it was Sapiro again who drew a line under the Waldorf affair by issuing a press release that Stravinsky had decided “that public controversy is not his field; and that he should refrain from the unnecessary continuation of such controversies.”27
At North Wetherly Drive there now began a long period of calm, during which Stravinsky had no conducting engagements except for a single production of The Soldier’s Tale at UCLA in June. He worked on the second act of the Rake in an atmosphere as near as he had yet come, in America, to the coeur du foyer—the bosom of the family—that had meant so much to him in prewar France. André Marion had for the time being given up “enterprise,” and was working as his father-in-law’s secretary. Soulima gave occasional concerts, and was meanwhile completing a ballet based, Pulcinella-fashion, on the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Theodore, in far-off Switzerland, was being employed—on a twenty percent commission—as agent for the sale of certain of his father’s manuscripts, picked out from the boxes that had gone to Hollywood. Now and then, however, these apparently smooth waters were ruffled by gusts of emotion. Early in April, news came of the death of Igor’s oldest friend, Valechka Nouvel, who had long been living in something close to destitution in Paris. “His death,” the composer told Theodore, “didn’t surprise us … and upsets me less than his life in recent years—that slow, agonizing process of decline, both physical and, I think, mental.”28 Meanwhile, poor Madubo, having fallen out with the Marions, had moved in with the Soulimas in Holloway Drive and was now engaged in a battle of wills with the sweet-tempered but strong-minded Françoise. One day in April the charge detonated, and Madubo was once more cast into outer darkness.29 The reasons for this particular quarrel have long vanished into oblivion, but it surely reflected some new aspect of Soulima’s problem of subservience. He adored his father and had never, it seemed, escaped the overpowering magnetic force of his will. Now here he was living in a house rented by him, driving a car bought by him, living with a nanny imposed by him, and—the crowning irritant for which Soulima had only himself to blame—writing a ballet that everyone would say was an inferior imitation, based on music that Soulima loved but in which nothing could persuade his father to take any interest.30
Craft’s arrival on 1 June injected a new and volatile ingredient into this unstable mixture. On the face of it his role was purely professional, though unpaid. He was there to sort manuscripts, a task that called for skills which, of the children, only Soulima remotely possessed but that it would hardly have been possible, in the circumstances, for him to perform.31 Craft’s real position, though, was plainly supra-professional. Both Igor and Vera had already developed an affection for him that went well beyond ordinary friendship and verged at times on the parental. In letters, even where the contents were businesslike, the tone was nearly always noticeably tender. This feeling—as it became apparent—was not resented by the Stravinsky children, but if anything shared. “Everybody here eager to see you soon,” the composer wrote with patent sincerity at the end of April.32 Soulima had good reason to echo such sentiments, knowing the praise that Craft had heaped on his recording of the Piano Concerto, and recalling how charming he and Françoise had found him in New York. Craft, for his part, had liked Soulima from the start, had been touched by his politeness, and felt no sense of competition between them. Soulima, after all, was a pianist, he a conductor; as for any questions of family, they were far from his or anyone else’s thoughts.
As before, Craft slept at first in the Procrustean den, but then he moved into the studio, where there was a more comfortable couch on which Stravinsky would himself take his afternoon naps. Both arrangements were purely temporary, however. Soulima had landed a summer job as a piano teacher at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, and Craft was to move into the Holloway Drive apartment at the start of July. From there each day he would walk the few blocks to 1260 North Wetherly Drive in time for breakfast, and he was always included in its nonstop social and musical life. One day early on, David Diamond came to lunch, and they ate a kulebyaka cooked by Vera and listened to Stravinsky recordings.33 A week or two later, at the UCLA Soldier’s Tale in Royce Hall, they ran into Bronislava Nijinska, who had danced in L’Après-midi d’un faune and The Rite of Spring but had now grown stout and showed her age. There were visits from Koussevitzky and from Ralph Hawkes, who was still energetically plotting a British premiere for the Rake and whom Craft found a notably aggressive man; and there were trips to Santa Barbara to see and hear Soulima, and to San Diego, from where they crossed into Mexico for a bullfight at Tijuana, a ceremony that thrilled Stravinsky at least as much as in the old days at Bayonne.34
When Craft arrived in June, the Paris manuscripts were still in their boxes on the floor, but he soon had them out on the sitting-room table and began slowly to go through them, listing the finished scores and identifying and cataloguing the sketches. His excitement was intense. For years he had loved Stravinsky’s music above any other and had sought out copies of his works at a time when many were out of print or unobtainable. Two years before, he had written to Stravinsky asking him for a copy of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, in vain; now here was the original, calligraphic autograph score, intriguingly marked up in pencil and red ink, an exquisite composition draft, and a whole bundle of sketches more or less clearly traceable to this same work. Here were Les Noces in all kinds of fragmentary versions, a composition score of Oedipus Rex with the opening pages composed back to front, the autograph vocal score of Renard without the opening and closing march, the full score of The Fairy’s Kiss completed in near-panic at the end of October 1928, less than four weeks before the premiere. Many famous scores were missing, either because Stravinsky had given them away, or because (as with The Rite of Spring) their publishers had claimed them, or because they had been left in Europe for sale by Theodore. But there were pages of unidentified, sometimes unidentifiable sketches, and several small leather- or cloth-bound notebooks containing annotations for works of the First War years and just afterwards, sketches whose exact intention Stravinsky had clearly often not immediately known. Some bore titles that hinted at unknown works, like the Cinq pièces monométriques, most but not all of which went into the Octet. On one occasion Craft asked Stravinsky to identify a tiny duet for two instruments, but he was unable to remember it, and instead added a punning title on the spot: Lied ohne Name[n]für zwei Fagotten [bassoons]—“Song without a name, for I’ve forgotten [what].”35
Stravinsky himself, though he walked past the table several times a day, seemed completely uninterested in the contents of the boxes.36 It was as if he felt no vestige of nostalgia about these mortal remains of his struggles of the spirit. To him they were a source of income and nothing more, and in those days of postwar austerity and economic neurosis there was little market for any but the most famous or spectacular manuscripts, and of these the most likely were still in Europe. But it went farther than that: he was not even greatly interested in the music itself. His own preoccupation was always with the work he was writing at the time, as he repeatedly told interviewers who asked him to name his favorite among his own works. To an extraordinary extent he was an artist and human being who lived in the present, with neither past nor future. Gabriel Marcel had accused him of lacking “affective memory,”37 and though Marcel’s intention had been hostile, the observation itself was shrewd enough. Above all, Stravinsky had in his own opinion good reason not to wish to revisit his personal history—a history of exile and bereavement, of divided emotions and a family life that, as it receded in time, seemed to take on an ever darker and more menacing color.
The present was both more agreeable and more dependable, and above all it was American. That was where Craft came in: but not only Craft. Rus
sians like Balanchine and Nabokov, Sokolov and the Bolms still played a huge part in the Stravinskys’ lives, sometimes just by virtue of being Russians. They all talked more spontaneously and vividly in Russian and could say things in that language—scatological and otherwise—that they could not express in any other, as well as using it as a convenient code for private communications, a habit to which Igor was prone, often in circumstances where it could give offense. But his intellectual focus had shifted away from Russians, and even—now that so many fellow émigrés had gone back or were preparing to go back to Europe—away from the French and the Germans, to newer English friends who, for one reason or another, had settled in California and showed no particular inclination to leave. Such was Aldous Huxley, whom (with his wife, Maria) Craft was able to observe closely when they all dined together one evening in late July; and such also was Christopher Isherwood, who was at the Farmers’ Market one August day with the Huxleys, and who came to dinner at North Wetherly Drive ten days later with his lover, the photographer Bill Caskey.
This was the Stravinskys’ first encounter with the author of Goodbye to Berlin, and it went well from the start. Isherwood was in many ways like the Christopher of his novels; he was receptive rather than voluble; vital, not cerebral; open to experience: “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”38 In Isherwood’s own opinion, Stravinsky must have found his company relaxing compared to the “chilling” intellectualism of Huxley’s, and his “appetite for good wine and liquor and food, his lack of pretense about his sex life and also indeed his preference for a devotional form of religion […] agreeably ‘Russian.’”39 When he and Caskey arrived for dinner on 20 August, Stravinsky greeted them with the suggestion that “we listen to my Mass before we get drunk.”40 On a similar occasion a few months later, Isherwood got drunk without musical preamble, and remembered lying on the floor, gazing up at the very tall, very blind Huxley, who was tactfully ignoring him while he discussed aesthetics with Stravinsky in French.41
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