Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  For well over a year Hawkes had been plotting a British premiere, either at Covent Garden itself or by the Garden (Royal Opera) company at the Edinburgh Festival. On the whole this suited Stravinsky, who wanted a small house and an English-speaking audience and was implacably opposed to Rudolf Bing’s desire to have the work for his first season (1950–51) at the Met, a much bigger house than Covent Garden, and a vastly bigger one than Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre.12 But there were snags. David Webster, of Covent Garden, kept pressing for a 1950 premiere until Stravinsky irritably insisted that the work could not be ready before 1951. Then the question of a conductor arose. Stravinsky had no commission for the opera, nor was he likely to get one from a house like the Royal Opera, which had no such funds at its disposal; so his only hope of a fee remotely commensurate with the work’s scale was to conduct it himself. But that would mean going to Europe in 1951, and he was still by no means certain he wanted to commit himself to the trip. In any case, as Hawkes incautiously hinted, Webster might well not want to book an expensive guest conductor when he had a salaried music director, Karl Rankl, with experience as a conductor of new music.13 This was altogether too much for Stravinsky, who began rapidly to cool toward the whole idea of a British Rake. “I have been interested,” he wrote crossly to Hawkes, in his own unmediated English,

  in creating myself the original tradition of my opera and in cashing on my personal appearance to compensate for my loss of income during the time I work for nothing composing it, as this work is a noncommissioned one. I see that from now on I shall not expect any help from the sources we had considered.14

  Hawkes tried to insist that he was by no means ruled out as conductor, but the damage was done and Stravinsky was soon looking for alternative theatres, especially in America, while merely continuing to pay lip service to Hawkes’s British schemes.

  He was now composing the final scene of Act 2, in which Tom, sent to sleep by Baba’s chatter, dreams of a machine that can turn stones into loaves of bread. Such a machine, at this particular moment, would doubtless have pleased Stravinsky as much as it pleased his feather-brained hero. And meanwhile, Tom and Baba’s curious marriage had its real-life counterpart at the end of January in the composer’s own living room, where Eugene Berman and the film actress Ona Munson—“a necrophiliac homosexual and a lesbian,” as Craft noted in his diary15—were married by a judge, with Craft himself as best man. Five days later, Stravinsky composed Tom’s “My wife? I have no wife. I’ve buried her,” which ends the second act of the opera; and five days after that he, Vera, and Craft set out, for the first time, to drive in their old Dodge to New York.

  The direct route from Los Angeles across the central states is some two and a half thousand miles long and might be traversed, in that pre-freeway age, in six or seven days. But the Stravinskys had decided to follow the southern fringe of the country to Miami and Key West, then drive up the Eastern Seaboard to New York, a total distance of nearly four thousand miles through some of the most mournful and unvarying terrain that even an experienced rail-traveller from Tsarist Russia would ever have seen. Craft later described the journey in matter-of-fact terms.16 There was trouble over money, since some hotels would not take checks, but in truth there were several days on which money was hardly an issue, there being nowhere to spend it. Driving through the empty Texan sierra between El Paso and Del Rio, they found nowhere to eat and soon finished off the supplies provided for the trip by Mrs. Gates. Stravinsky, who had long years ago given up driving, sat in the passenger seat and took the occasional swig of claret or armagnac. At Del Rio the only available rooms were in a brothel. Later they drove twelve hundred miles across the flatlands of the Missisippi delta and Florida, down through the Everglades from St. Petersburg to Miami, then on another hundred and fifty miles along the causeway to Key West, only to find that the hotels were full and they had to drive back to Miami for the night. They finally arrived in New York City on 18 February after twelve days of solid driving. Three days later, Stravinsky was conducting Firebird at City Center.

  Sitting together in the Dodge for hours on end, day after day, with Vera and Craft taking turns at the wheel, they talked about many things, and as they talked they grew more and more intimate. Stravinsky was not particularly interested in his young friend’s middle-class, upstate New York background, nor was he very attentive to the admittedly somewhat monotonous scenery, even though the object of the drive had been for him and Vera to see the country of which they were now in their fifth year as citizens. Instead Craft prompted him to talk about his own family in Russia before the revolution, about Rimsky-Korsakov and Diaghilev and what life had been like in old St. Petersburg. They discussed books: literature and philosophy, words, music, and ideas. Perhaps they talked about religion; and perhaps, even, it was on this trip that Craft first realized that he could disagree with Stravinsky “and survive,” as Vera put it, which few of his older friends had ever been able to do.17 Conversing in so easy, natural a fashion without the intrusion of telephones or appointments, without the possibility of work or the threat of visitors, they could begin to feel close in a way subtly different from the proximity of parents and children or brothers and sisters, who may live together all their lives without ever exploring each other’s ideas on anything more profound than the temperature of the bathwater or the time it takes to boil an egg.

  Having conducted a single performance of Firebird and another of Orpheus for Kirstein’s still-fledgling New York City Ballet, Stravinsky settled into a long, concertless Manhattan stay interrupted only by a trip to Urbana and St. Louis in mid-March. For Kirstein, the ballet performances were emblematic, since the new company had actually risen from the ashes of the old Ballet Society in the autumn of 1948 thanks to the patronage of a certain Morton Baum, chairman of the City Center finance committee. Baum had gone to see Orpheus out of semi-official curiosity and been so bowled over that he had at once proposed that Kirstein re-form his society as a resident company with the direct financial support of the Center. But though Kirstein dropped frequent gentle reminders to Stravinsky about his next ballet commission, and even came up with ideas for subject matter (his latest suggestion was the Bacchae),18 he knew there was no realistic chance of an agreement until the Rake was finished. So instead he now proposed that the Rake itself be given its first production at the Center.19 This hardly seemed a serious idea, since City Center had its own resident opera company with very limited resources, and in any case it would be difficult to imagine a less suitable venue for so intimate a work. Stravinsky, though, was prepared to favor any U.S. theatre that could meet his financial conditions, and it was true that in the past Kirstein had never failed to find the backing he needed for even the most harebrained projects. At the end of March, the composer received a visit from the A&P grocery millionaire and art lover, Huntington Hartford, who was a Kirstein possible to finance either a City Center production, or conceivably a Broadway run like that of Menotti’s The Medium (in 1947), or his Consul, which had recently opened at the Ethel Barrymore and was likewise, to Stravinsky’s intense irritation, settling in for a long stay.20 Unfortunately, Hartford wanted to hear the music, while Stravinsky was unwilling to be judged (as he saw it) by a non-musician. In the end, Craft arranged for Billy Rose to be spirited into a piano run-through of the first two acts, which Stravinsky and Marcelle de Manziarly gave in her Manhattan apartment on the 20th of April. As they played, Craft kept his eyes on Rose’s face, and it soon dawned on him that the Rake had no chance of commercial backing.21

  Stravinsky had been working with Auden on details of the libretto before Auden’s departure for Europe at the end of March 1950. They had tried out the episode of the bread machine, with practice timings for its entrance and exit, and they had devised a bidding sequence for the auction scene that was to open Act 3.22 But Stravinsky seems to have become generally disillusioned about the opera’s prospects. According to Craft, he even for a brief time thought of postponing its completion in order to
write the music for a ballet about St. Francis that Clare Booth Luce, the author of the scenario, described to him—perhaps at Kirstein’s instigation—at a cocktail party in late March.23 He was now more or less openly hostile to Hawkes’s British plans, not least because Berman, who was in London for the revival of Ashton’s Scènes de ballet (for which he had designed the sets), was writing him black letters about the standard of performance there, the bad food, and the horrible weather.24 Such things made him more than ever determined—as he wrote to Theodore a few weeks later—to insist on a premiere in America, where he could personally supervise the preparations without having to endure “six weeks of poverty in London.”25 Hawkes was also hinting at France, Italy, or Germany; but after all, the opera was going to be sung in English; and in any case he could not think of the Rake in vast, ceremonious houses like La Scala or the Paris Opéra, where, moreover, money was short for such projects.26

  They lingered on in New York for the whole of April. Stravinsky had recordings for RCA at the start of the month, including the Piano Concerto with Soulima, who was bubbling with excitement, having just been offered a post as professor of piano at the University of Illinois, Urbana.27 At the end of April, Craft reconvened the Chamber Arts Society for a concert that included Schoenberg’s Serenade and Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, as well as Stravinsky’s early Russian songs; but Stravinsky himself was ill, according to Craft’s later memory, and unable to attend.28 They did go together to a Carnegie Hall concert in which Mitropoulos conducted Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw. To what extent this enthusiasm of Craft’s was beginning to chip away the ice can only be imagined. From the Warsaw ghetto to Hogarth’s London—whatever they may have had in common of cruelty and deprivation—remained aesthetically an unbridgeable gulf.

  The return drive to Los Angeles was by a more direct and northerly route, and they were home within nine days. It was a trip through American folklore, cinematic and otherwise, and hugely to the Stravinskys’ taste. They saw the South Dakota badlands, Deadwood, and the Little Bighorn, drove through Yellowstone Park, and spent their last night in Monterey on the Pacific coast. In Gillette, Wyoming, they sat in an audience of cowboys in a fleapit cinema and watched a bad Western, an image to put beside that of Rimsky-Korsakov playing Glinka’s Life for the Tsar on the lounge piano in the Niagara Hotel almost ninety years before.29 But alas, Hollywood offered no escape from the problems of New York. As Stravinsky embarked on composing the scene in which the bankrupt Tom’s possessions are sold off, he was more and more conscious of the extent to which the two years already spent on the opera and the year that still remained were eroding his own finances. There were minor items of good news. Hawkes wrote at one point to announce that the French royalties, blocked for more than a year by postwar exchange regulations, had at last been cleared.30 No doubt it was comforting to learn from his librettists on Ischia that apart from Mozart and Beethoven, “Stravinsky is the most played on the European radio.”31 But for him the real news about Europe was that his dependants there were showing little sign of achieving self-sufficiency. Olga Sallard, for instance, seemed as happy to accept his money as she was to feed Vera with vaguely discreditable information about his children.32 Above all, his granddaughter, now thirteen, had scarcely improved in health and still needed expensive medical care, which her grandfather was paying for through the sale of his manuscripts. “Alas, what you write about our Kitty,” he told Theodore,

  has not yet eased my constant state of alarm, although I should like to hope that you will manage to protect her from the worst. Her improvement in weight, appetite and general appearance nourishes this hope in me. [But] the old terrible gaping wound in my life of eleven years ago, which was gradually healing, has started to nag at me again.… I’m so glad that you and Soulima could meet and have a good talk. Whenever shall I have that joy myself? But I’m a complete prisoner of my opera; until I finish it I can’t plan anything.…33

  In this tense and anxious condition he nevertheless composed what is in many ways the most brilliant and certainly the most entertaining scene in the entire opera. The problem of Baba, it is true, was never completely solved. The wonderful idea of her being revealed as the final lot in the sale and resuming her “Rage” aria where she had left off in the previous scene, when Tom had covered her head like a parrot’s at bedtime, is somewhat dissipated by her sentimental change of heart toward Anne. But the choruses and Sellem’s aria are a dazzling achievement for a composer who had never written for a genuinely participatory stage chorus, and whose last proper tenor aria before the Rake had been for Oedipus almost a quarter of a century before. The technique is magisterial. The rapid changes of pace and intensity—notoriously the hardest part of composing for the lyric stage—work like a dream. And when he turned to the graveyard scene in October or early November, he at once found the sinister and ritualistic tone to match, a switch of mood for which Mozart’s Don Giovanni was the only conceivable model. But while the working of these two scenes, and the way they interlock musically, reveal the hand of a master, they did not come easily or fluently. Not until the very end of 1950 did he complete the second scene with Tom’s deranged closing verse of the ballad song, “With roses crowned, I sit on ground.” As usual, he rolled up what he had composed and sent it off to the publishers, even though there was still a whole scene, an epilogue, and an overture to be written.

  During all these months, the only working interruptions had been a trip to Colorado to conduct two concerts in the inaugural Aspen Festival at the end of July, and a series of concerts in San Francisco in mid-December. In the big tent at Aspen he conducted twice, the first time in jeans, as his suitcase had been delayed by a rail strike;34 and it was also during a rehearsal at Aspen that he brought down his baton expecting to hear the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony and was regaled instead by a tune he did not recognize but which turned out to be “Happy Birthday to You,” played in honor of one of the players’ wives, who had just had a baby.35 The trip otherwise was something of a holiday. They had again gone by car, making a huge detour via Portland, Seattle, and Coeur d’Alene in Idaho, before travelling down to Colorado through the Rockies. Between concerts, they drove off to Santa Fe, where they stayed with the piano-duo couple Victor Babin and his wife, Vitya Vronsky, watched the corn dance at San Domingo Pueblo, and visited Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge at Taos.

  These huge and often arduous sightseeing adventures into wild or lonely terrain had become a feature of their life with Craft, whether at his instigation or simply because his presence as a young, dependable cicerone and reserve driver gave them the confidence to sally forth in a way that might otherwise have daunted them. Some weeks before the Aspen trip, they had driven out the two hundred or so miles to Sequoia National Park with Isherwood and Caskey, and gazed up at the 280-foot General Sherman tree. “That’s very serious,” said Stravinsky solemnly, and Craft felt so good in the dry mountain air that he drove them the whole way home that same evening, arriving at two in the morning, “quite silly with exhaustion.”36 Then early in September they again headed up into Oregon with Milène and André. They went to Gold Beach, and Crater Lake with its deep, clear blue water, and were away five days.

  When they got home on the 12th there was a telegram waiting; Ralph Hawkes had died of a heart attack four days before at his home in Connecticut, at the age of fifty-two. For Stravinsky it was a disagreeable reminder of the sudden death of Ernest Oeberg in 1925, for although the choleric and at times ruthless Hawkes had not become a close friend, his surefooted professionalism had been indispensable at a time of complex and difficult negotiations, and—for the composer—drastic forward commitments. At this precise moment, with the Rake approaching completion and the issue of its first performance hanging in the air like an outsize question mark, Hawkes’s loss was doubly disturbing, and Stravinsky was soon writing anxiously to Ernst Roth, the director of Boosey and Hawkes’s London office, wanting to know who would be taking over in
New York.37 When he learnt that it would be Hawkes’s young assistant Betty Bean, he was pleased enough to be dealing with a known quantity, whatever doubts he may have harbored as to her experience or likely toughness. A more subtle anxiety, with the Connecticut-based Hawkes gone, was which office would assume the overriding authority. The Bean arrangement strongly suggested that the answer would be London.

  At the time of Hawkes’s death, Stravinsky was still strongly in favor of an American premiere for the Rake, and the leading contender as far as he was concerned was now the little old Victorian theatre in Central City, Colorado, where they had seen Così fan tutte in 1948, and whose director, Frank Ricketson, was offering good money for him to supervise and conduct the first performance.38 Hawkes had been well aware of this situation, but he had nevertheless continued negotiating with various European houses on the basis of a possible world premiere, and apparently without much regard for Stravinsky’s frequently expressed hostility to large theatres in non-anglophone cities. By October, La Scala was being announced as firm for the following autumn, and Covent Garden as nearly so, with what would therefore possibly be the premiere. Yet Stravinsky had categorically rejected an approach that very June from the Milan intendant, Antonio Ghiringhelli, even though Ghiringhelli was offering to stage the work in English and with Stravinsky conducting.39