Just as Craft could talk to Auden, he was at home in the literary and intellectual world of Auden’s old friend and former collaborator. He could shine in it. He had read everything Isherwood had published, was hugely articulate, in his nervy, associative way, and his cleverness and encyclopedic knowledge “didn’t annoy Christopher, [who] had an entirely different set of pretensions—to intuition, psychological insight, sensibility, etc.—which Bob was prepared to respect.”42 With Huxley it was different. Huxley’s conversational form was the monologue, and his erudition was such that even Craft was, by his own frequent admission, silenced. The philosopher-novelist, like Philip Quarles in Point Counter Point, could discourse in his unexpectedly squeaky voice on every conceivable subject except (in this company) music: on every aspect of history and anthropology, on the latest findings in microbiology, on linguistics, astronomy, astrology, religion, mythology, and poetry, on the sexual habits of the frog, on techniques for improving the defective vision of the eye and the mind. Stravinsky, according to Craft,43 valued Huxley as a walking encyclopedia who could save him from hours of futile (if admittedly pleasurable) rummaging through dictionaries and encyclopedias; but Huxley’s scientific rationalism consorted ill with the composer’s “mystagogic view of human existence,”44 and when they all went for tea and carrot cake at the Huxley’s sub-baronial King’s Road residence, Craft thought him intimidated by the Friends-of-the-Earth atmosphere, the London-club separation of wives and husbands, and the absence of hard liquor.45
Craft’s reports of these encounters, insofar as they are genuinely contemporary,46 certainly suggest a mild inferiority complex where Huxley was concerned. He as good as admits this in a later note to his diaries (labelled “Postscript 1965” in the original edition of Dialogues and a Diary, then disarmingly relabelled “Postscript 1994” in the second edition of Chronicle of a Friendship47), but he never corrects the impression that Stravinsky was bewildered by Huxley’s personality and cultivated his friendship only out of some mutual attraction of genius, or even simply out of intellectual snobbery. That the two great men met so often, in fact, proves that the attraction was personal, and that intellectual differences did not interfere on that level, any more than they had done between Stravinsky and Valéry or Ocampo. Why else would Vera have telephoned one evening to solicit an invitation, since “they could not bear going to another cinema”?48 Igor to some extent drew social sustenance from the admiration of the famous, but this was hardly an overt factor with Huxley, whose musical tastes were classical and who had written disparagingly about Stravinsky’s music in the twenties. As for Huxley’s rationalism, it was tempered (much more than his brother Julian’s) by a preoccupation with the paranormal, various brands of hysteria, and “alternative” patterns of thought. “Has anyone ever detested humanity more?” he would ask admiringly about the nineteenth-century German caricaturist and epigrammatist Wilhelm Busch, a hero of Stravinsky’s, too.49 Of course, there was a scientific slant to all this; even the irrational and destructive were phenomena to be studied, and the Devil was of interest precisely because people like Stravinsky believed in him and (presumably) acted on that belief. Yet, as Craft himself observes, Huxley was credulous in his own way and took seriously all kinds of metaphysical quackery and pseudo-science.50 The difference lay, perhaps, between Stravinsky’s instinctive acceptance of the supernatural and Huxley’s need to explain it positivistically. But that still left a great deal of common ground for them to explore from their very different starting points.
Throughout the summer, work continued on the second act of the Rake. As always, Stravinsky composed in the mornings, closeting himself behind the double doors of his studio, and the evidence of Craft’s diaries for this period is that composition was still proving somewhat intractable, since he reports Stravinsky as being usually in a bad mood when he emerged at lunchtime, which in later years was by no means always the case.51 Matters were not helped by an attack of neuritis in his right arm, which lasted several weeks in July, kept him awake at night, and prevented him from playing the piano—an essential element in his composing method.52 In the afternoons, he was writing up the full score of the first act, and at such times Craft took over the old family task of reading to him. Craft was also enlisted as correspondence secretary, a duty he either shared with or inherited from André Marion (who in any case took it up again when he left). It was bad luck for André that, so soon after assuming this function, he should be displaced by an American who could write fluently and was familiar with the musical world with which the bulk of the correspondence was concerned. This was the first sign that the newcomer might interpose himself, intentionally or otherwise, between Stravinsky and his family, and it unfortunately happened just at a time when André, having cast about unsuccessfully for a livelihood, was finding his feet and making himself useful to his loving but despotic father-in-law. Not that the secretarial role was in itself agreeable. The post came early, and Stravinsky expected to deal with it before starting composition, a fact which made him impatient and sometimes ill-tempered. Craft came to dread this part of the day, and he soon understood why Vera would prefer to have breakfast and go out in the car rather than face the sour expression and unreasonable resentments of her consort.53
Exactly how Craft coped with these moods is far from clear. That he was at first sometimes upset by them is hardly surprising. Once, when the phone rang, he failed to reach it before Stravinsky emerged in a fury from his studio, shouting for it to be answered immediately. It was the first time that he had spoken sharply to his new young assistant, and the shock was such that Craft walked out of the front door and would have left for good if Vera had not talked him into staying. On another, later, occasion, Vera sent him into the studio with a message and, after knocking, he entered tremulously to find the Master praying in front of his personal icon. This time there was no open expression of anger, but Craft was made to feel that he had trespassed on sacred ground, had broken some fundamental law of the household. Noise and physical interruption were the twin prohibitions of the Stravinsky studio. “He notices,” Craft recorded in his journal, “noises heard by no one else.”54 As for the day-to-day sounds dreaded by all working musicians, like pneumatic drills or the tinkling ice-cream vans of summer afternoons, such things were torture to him, and it was because of the inevitability of these intrusions in a city like Los Angeles that he always composed with his studio windows shut, even in the hottest July weather.55
At the start of September, after the Tijuana corrida, Craft flew back to New York, but he left, now, unwillingly and with a lump in his throat. Vera took him to the Greyhound bus terminal, but after she had driven away his courage failed him; claiming to have lost his bus ticket, he pursued her back to North Wetherly Drive in a taxi, and it was only the following evening, the 6th, that he could finally bring himself to leave Los Angeles by plane.56 Stravinsky had just been composing Anne’s arioso in the second scene of Act 2: “O heart be stronger … No step in fear shall wander, nor in weakness delay.” A few weeks later, he was once again in difficulties, this time with the scene in which Baba, from her sedan chair, continually interrupts Anne and Tom’s duet of lost love. Baba was supposed to interject spoken lines, but Stravinsky found it impossible to integrate these into the duet without risking the music becoming drowned by audience laughter. So instead, he asked Auden to supply verse lines for Baba to sing, thereby turning the duet into a trio.57 Once more, Auden obliged without hesitation, and Stravinsky then rapidly composed the ensemble that was to remain both musically and psychologically the most intricate and sustained movement in the whole opera. At the trio’s climax, where Anne, forever abandoned, “exits hurriedly,” Stravinsky achieved a superb dramatic irony by attaching the empty shell of Tom’s “love” for Baba to a stately but unfeeling Chaconne, culminating in the ludicrous coup de théâtre of her unveiling.
At this point he must at last have felt in control of his stylistic means, whatever the anxieties of the preceding yea
r. The scene resembles the Act 1 finale of Don Giovanni in its integration of formal dance elements with a dramatic situation that is in part ceremonious, in part chaotic, and in part absurd, and like a typical Mozart finale it abandons the so-called secco recitative (with keyboard) that elsewhere provides the conversational interludes between arias and ensembles, in favor of a continuous musical montage that propels the action swiftly to its climax.58 Whether in writing this music he was in any sense conscious of a summing-up after thirty years of what he would still have refused to call “neoclassicism” is a moot point. Conscious of his models he undoubtedly was, and conscious, too, that the process was essentially the same (though the models were different) as in the key works of the start of that whole phase, Pulcinella and especially Mavra. But there are no open letters about the Rake, no apostrophes to Mozart at the expense of later music, and certainly no attempt to “locate” the opera in relation to public expectation, as in his article on Tchaikovsky which Figaro had published just before the premiere of Mavra in 1922.59 There is perhaps some tension in the Rake between what might be thought of as the “automatic” aspects of neoclassical writing and the perennial need to master what had never ceased to be difficult techniques, to write well, as Maritain would have put it; but these are private, workshop matters. The progress of the Rake—as everybody including the composer joked ad nauseam—was a progress toward the mastering of, rather than by, the classical simplicity and elegance that had been its inspiration. And this is perhaps why the music increases in density as it goes along, and why in the end the final act would turn out appreciably the longest and most involved of the three.
CRAFT HAD ORGANIZED no fewer than three major concerts with his Chamber Arts Society in New York that autumn, including a string of difficult Stravinsky rarities—Renard, Persephone, and the U.S. premieres of Zvezdoliki and the complete Pulcinella; and since Stravinsky’s friends had always kept him informed about East Coast performances of his music, they naturally reported to him on the Craft concerts. It was known, of course, that the young conductor was on more than visiting terms with the composer, and—whether or not for this reason—many of the reports were favorable. Auden risked a reservation about the voices in Renard (“a bit frightened”60); the critic and composer Arthur Berger, whom Stravinsky regarded as a good friend of his music and a supporter of Craft, complained in his Tribune review that the Persephone concert on the 21st of November had stretched the young conductor beyond his abilities.61 More painfully than either of these, Vittorio Rieti at first delayed writing at all, then wrote mainly in praise of Balanchine’s “overwhelming” new production of Firebird, and added simply: “I’m sorry that I can’t be as enthusiastic about Craft’s work in his last two concerts; and that’s why I didn’t write.”62 Pressed by Stravinsky, he elaborated: everything had been rigorous but lacking in vitality. Renard, in particular, was “dead.” As for Berg’s Chamber Concerto, it had seemed interminable, people had walked out, Craft had carried on relentlessly, then the music had suddenly stopped and nobody had known if it was over or not.63
It was curious how things went in symmetry. Less than three months before, Soulima’s Scarlatti ballet (The Mute Wife) had been played in New York to a uniformly mediocre press and it had been Craft who had found himself writing tactfully to Soulima’s father.64 Now Soulima was wanting to leave the West Coast altogether and try to establish himself in New York, while Craft could hardly wait to cut his ties with Manhattan and move to the West Coast for good. After his October concert he flew back to Los Angeles for a week. Then in mid-December, after conducting concert performances of Mavra and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, he disbanded the Chamber Arts Society and headed west by bus, at almost precisely the moment that Soulima, Françoise, and little Zizi left Hollywood for New York.
It seems doubtful whether Igor Stravinsky understood this as the simple changing of places that it can easily seem in retrospect. He knew why Soulima wanted to leave, but he did not approve and probably never altogether forgave what he saw as a betrayal.65 Craft, on the other hand, he needed for reasons that had nothing much to do with family and everything to do with music. Yet in filling one gap, Craft almost inevitably filled several others. He became “family” in a different, perhaps more functional sense, but he displaced nobody, until the accumulation of circumstances presented him with what amounted to a fait accompli, by which time it was too late to resist.
17
DEATH OF A PROPHET
ALTHOUGH STRAVINSKY was his great love, Robert Craft was also a keen student of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, of certain other (preferably unfashionable) strains of twentieth-century music, and of all kinds of so-called early music, especially of the late renaissance and early baroque. He was a musician who flourished above all in ungrazed pasture, but in 1949 that was still, as Peter Yates had found, a broad terrain inhabited by several great composers and many little-known masterpieces. His October Town Hall concert had included Berg and Falla as well as Stravinsky, and in December there had been Monteverdi, still at that time generally regarded as a prehistoric figure. His closer involvement with Stravinsky had not in the least dulled his enthusiasm for other brands of the remote and exploratory.
Los Angeles, for its part, was not quite the cultural desert it had begun to seem in the war years and just afterward. Even Schoenberg’s seventy-fifth birthday had been celebrated. Izler Solomon had conducted Berg’s Chamber Concerto (originally composed for Schoenberg’s fiftieth) at a Roof concert, and on the actual birthday, 13 September 1949, the series had mounted a whole Schoenberg evening, including Pierrot Lunaire, the Cello Concerto, and the world premiere of the violin Phantasy, played by Adolf Koldofsky and Leonard Stein. Soulima Stravinsky remembered attending with his father, though Vera’s diary records a dinner that evening at the house of the painter Eugene Lourié and says nothing about the concert.1 But they certainly did go six weeks later to a concert at which Harold Byrnes conducted the First Chamber Symphony, and Schoenberg read out a speech—written in huge letters on many sheets of paper, because of his failing eyesight—publicly accepting the Freedom of the City of Vienna.2 It was later alleged that at a reception after the concert the two composers came within an ace of meeting but that as Stravinsky approached, Schoenberg was whisked away by the Austrian consul to meet someone else.3 Stravinsky never referred to this incident, but he did remember the concert as the last occasion on which he set eyes on the Viennese master. A month after arriving in Los Angeles that December, Craft went to a Schoenberg matinée in the County Museum; but Stravinsky stayed at home.4
Between Stravinsky and certain of Schoenberg’s followers there was no such difficulty. In August 1949 he had gone with Craft to an ISCM concert of twelve-note music and renewed his old acquaintance with Ernst Krenek, whom he had first met when Krenek came to Nice in the 1920s.5 These days, the composer of the jazzy Jonny spielt auf was much preoccupied with, and liked to talk about, serial manipulations of a more or less complicated kind, but though Stravinsky still knew absolutely nothing about such techniques they did not in themselves constitute a social obstacle. Nor was he invariably cautious about rival reputations. When Benjamin Britten came to Los Angeles with Peter Pears in November, Stravinsky went to both of their concerts and entertained them at North Wetherly Drive. Their meeting seemed the most natural thing in the world, and it was only as a result of something that happened at the time that a trace of poison entered into their subsequent attitudes to one another. Britten later put it about that Stravinsky, while claiming (truthfully) to have seen The Rape of Lucretia, seemed unaware that it contained recitative with piano.
When was Stravinsky himself going to write a full-length opera, asked Britten. “I have one in progress even now,” said the old master. “But opera, not music drama, is my interest—and I shall write it in closed forms.” “Just as I did in Lucretia,” said Britten. “Not at all,” said Stravinsky. “My opera will have secco recitative accompanied only by piano, not by orchestra!” Brit
ten was dumbfounded […] Either the master was a liar, or a fool.6
Had Stravinsky slept through Lucretia, or had he simply misheard Britten’s remark? Why, if it comes to that, did Britten ask his question about full-length opera? He must have known, from Hawkes or any one of several other sources, that Stravinsky’s EOG plan had long since turned into a big opera; it was actually common knowledge. At all events, something took place that unsettled the older composer, to judge from the ambivalence of his account of the visit to Nabokov. “We listened for a whole week here to Auntie Britten and Uncle Pears,” he wrote.
Well, we’ll talk about it when we meet. Britten himself makes a very nice impression and has a huge success with an audience. He has an unquestionable talent as a performer (especially at the piano).7
In the few days since Britten’s departure, Stravinsky had been to see Albert Herring and had very clearly disliked it. Perhaps the central joke in Eric Crozier’s libretto, about the male May Queen, struck an uncomfortable chord with him after Kirstein’s remarks about Baba the Turk;8 or perhaps Britten had said something about Auden as a librettist, or even—since Britten these days was paranoid where his old collaborator was concerned—about Auden as a person.9 All one can say with confidence is that Britten’s account of the conversation is incomplete, but in what respect, it is impossible at this distance to make out.
It must in fairness be added that when he saw Albert Herring, and certainly by the time he was writing to Nabokov, Stravinsky was suffering from a duodenal ulcer. On the 16th of December his doctor put him on a milk-only diet for two days, then, just when he was recovering his temper, he went down with a heavy cold and once again retired to bed, leaving Craft to deal with an irritating correspondence with Boosey and Hawkes about the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and a supposed revision of The Rite of Spring.10 It was two years since Stravinsky had sent Hawkes his revised score of the Symphonies. Since when nothing had been heard until this very month, when Boosey’s chief editor, Erwin Stein, suddenly produced an old set of 1930s proofs from ERM’s Paris office, apparently quite unaware that the revision existed.11 On the other hand, the publishers had for months been pestering Stravinsky to produce a corrected score of The Rite of Spring for them to copyright like Petrushka, something that only interested him if they were able to incorporate his 1943 revision of the Danse sacrale (which belonged to AMP), since he continued to maintain that a reduced-orchestra Rite was impossible. When Craft in his turn went down with pleurisy at the start of January, Stravinsky’s frustration boiled over in a thoroughly old-fashioned diatribe directed at Hawkes, and on another subject altogether, the question of the first performance of The Rake’s Progress.
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