Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  As for London, Stravinsky had had further unsettling news about Covent Garden from Lincoln Kirstein, who had taken the New York City Ballet to England for an August season and was spitting venom at the conservatism of the British press and the chilly arrogance of the London ballet aristocracy. Kirstein praised Tyrone Guthrie, whom Hawkes had mentioned months before as a possible director for the Rake, and he named the Earl of Harewood as a man of influence who could pull strings on the work’s behalf. But his account of the critics’ reaction to Balanchine was so lurid (Firebird had been “peed on in every part of the intellectual press”), and his portrait of the arts establishment’s loathing of “the way we sabotaged your music and [our] violation of the late holy Fokine” so angry, that Stravinsky could have been forgiven for then and there making up his mind never to let the British within earshot of his new opera. Kirstein was planning a Stravinsky ballet festival for a commercial London theatre such as Drury Lane the following spring, and he was imagining the composer there in person “to be icy and polite, and have those dead eels and kippered herrings come around and say well, maybe you have some rights even in your, alack-a-day, non-Russian scores.”40 This was not, however, a vision that was likely to appeal to the hypersensitive composer. Kirstein’s account he claimed to find “very comforting and you and George come out as the happy winners, despite all traps laid in your path by the old London press idiots and the new British chauvinists,” but his only reaction to the festival plan was that “London would be impossible,” while the idea of a Rake production there he simply ignored.41

  Kirstein was the kind of organizer—what the French aptly call an animateur—who never lets go of a project until it has been comprehensively explored and pronounced irretrievably dead. Above all, he was making sure that Stravinsky did not forget that he, Kirstein, was first in the queue to commission the next work after the Rake, and his way of ensuring this was to keep proposing new subjects until he hit on one that the composer was unable to resist. Apollo architectons and the Bacchae had come and gone.42 Now Kirstein had been talking in London to T. S. Eliot, and after Eliot had expressed enthusiasm for Orpheus, Kirstein had opportunistically asked him to suggest a sequel. Eliot had been shy of doing anything of the kind, but he had later not only somewhat hesitantly suggested his own Sweeney Agonistes as a subject, but had even seemed interested in a collaboration. Partly no doubt for tactical reasons, Kirstein affected to see this as the most natural suggestion imaginable, though he might well have wondered how the fragmentary Aristophanic (as Eliot called it) doggerel of these two unfinished scenes could conceivably be turned into a dance scenario, even by their own author (who would no doubt have new ideas about them). Stravinsky, as before, held his peace.43

  It must have been the growing confusion of all these apparently conflicting plans, aggravated by Hawkes’s death and a lack of immediate confidence in his successors’ ability to grasp the special needs of the situation, that drove Stravinsky to the decision that eventually led to the Rake being premiered in a city and theatre not previously discussed, and which for a time threatened to drown the whole project in waves of recrimination and legal wrangling. In November, just when it looked as if the Ricketson deal might be falling through, there came a new and financially more dazzling proposal from the University of Southern California, who offered Stravinsky a commission fee of ten thousand dollars, with the possibility of an extra five thousand if he would also conduct the performances.44 It was a deal first suggested by Hawkes on the strength of USC’s highly regarded opera school, of which the German producer Carl Ebert, one of the original founders of Glyndebourne, was director.45 For Stravinsky, of course, it had the added virtue of being a mere taxi-ride from his own home. With all these things in its favor, it is not at once clear why the project melted away within a few weeks of crystallizing. Perhaps USC, who wanted the production for autumn 1952, were put off by Stravinsky’s insistence on 1951. In any case, as it faded it left echoes, the clearest of which was a true realization on his part of what the premiere might be worth in crude monetary terms.

  Just at that moment, a letter arrived from Nicolas Nabokov, recently returned from Europe, where he had been elected president of a new American-funded anti-Soviet organization with the magnificent title of Congress for Cultural Freedom. Feeling in the mood for further organizing, Nabokov had gone on from Berlin—where the Congress had met—to Rome, had discussions with the music chief of Italian Radio (RAI), Mario Labroca, and persuaded him that the Rake should be premiered in Italy under the auspices of the RAI, either at the Florence or the Venice festival or at La Scala, in return for a one-off fee to the composer of twenty thousand dollars.46 Nabokov seems to have had no particular brief for these discussions, and he admitted to Stravinsky that he had plucked the sum of money out of the air. On the other hand it was Stravinsky who, in his own letter to Labroca, at once stated a preference for Venice. The Fenice had, as it happened, expressed an interest in the Rake before he had composed so much as a note of it, and he had himself mentioned Venice to Hawkes in 1949.47 There was every reason why he should want the Fenice—it was a small theatre with excellent acoustics, and the city was one he knew well and had loved ever since his first visit there with Diaghilev in 1912. But nobody had in fact said anything definite about Venice until Auden mentioned it casually, out of the blue, early that same December of 1950: “the ideal premiere would be La Fenice, don’t you think.”48 As for the fee, Auden was not alone in being taken completely unwares by its scale and precise intention.

  The objections to La Serenissima were obvious enough. It had no adequate opera company, the organization of the Biennale was notoriously shambolic, and the question of language remained. When Roth, Boosey and Hawkes’s London director heard toward the end of January that Stravinsky had accepted Venice behind his back, his first reaction was that it would be a miracle if the curtain ever went up on The Rake’s Progress at the Fenice at all.49 He quickly realized, however, that whatever might eventually happen operatically in Venice was as nothing compared to the histrionics he would have to endure in the intervening months. After all the discussions about Edinburgh and London, and all the more recent American proposals, the European premiere had finally been promised to Covent Garden for December 1951, with a continental premiere at La Scala immediately afterwards. Both houses, he told the composer, would be “very annoyed” about the Fenice agreement.50 But even he underestimated the full impact Italy’s highly politicized musical life would have on a dispute of this kind. Ghiringhelli, the Milan intendant, at once threatened legal action, his fury if anything intensified by Stravinsky’s bungling attempt to console him by offering him the Italian-language premiere while describing La Scala as a house of “an essentially national [that is, not international] character.”51 Soon Ghiringhelli was threatening to bring the matter of the twenty thousand dollars before the Italian parliament, which naturally had the power to refuse exchange clearance for such a sum.52 Roth tried desperately to broker a collaboration between La Scala and the Biennale. He endured interminable meetings in Rome and Milan, entirely Latin in tone and temperature, with Ghiringhelli, Labroca, and Ferdinando Ballo, the director of the Biennale—meetings that even at one point involved the director general of Italian radio, Giulio Razzi. The Italian consul in Los Angeles cabled Ghiringhelli urging him to make terms with Ballo.53 But by the end of May, with the premiere contracted for the second week of September, there was still no agreement. Ballo kept wiring optimistic news, and by mid-June it was clear that a settlement really was near. But Ghiringhelli maintained the tension until the very last minute, and it was only on the 20th of June, a mere twelve weeks before the premiere, that Roth was able to confirm a definitive agreement under which La Scala would itself produce the Rake in English at the Fenice in September and would then take it into their own repertoire for performances in Italian during the winter. “There have been,” Roth reported drily, “many harsh words.”54 And he pressed Stravinsky, for the sake of good rela
tions, to agree to conduct concerts at La Scala in October, after the Venice performances, at a concessionary fee.

  When David Webster heard about the Venice deal from the composer’s own lips, he nearly fainted, Stravinsky told Roth.55 From Covent Garden a chilly Anglo-Saxon fog spread slowly over the whole affair, the planned December production was withdrawn, and for twenty-eight years The Rake’s Progress simply ceased, as far as the Royal Opera was concerned, to exist.56

  While Roth thus dealt with the enraged Ghiringhelli, Stravinsky was composing the final scene of his opera, set in a madhouse. He had hoped to finish the whole work before flying to Cuba, where he had concerts booked in early March, but by the day of their departure, the 20th of February, he had not got beyond Tom’s “Madmen, where have you hidden her?,” just before the end of Act 3 scene 3, which still left the epilogue and a short prelude to be written. Seemingly untroubled by the interruption, he then set off by road with Vera and Craft in their new Buick for Miami, from where they flew to Havana. They stayed one week, then drove home after an absence of fully three.

  It was almost as if Stravinsky had decided that if the world was going to obstruct the performance of this most time-consuming of his works, he would not exert himself to finish it. He had tried to explain to Roth that the Venice deal would mean that he could afford to complete the opera that year, but that otherwise he would have to shelve it and accept a new commission.57 After three years of being a “prisoner” of his opera, as he had grumbled to Theodore, he was feeling intensely protective about the money it was going to earn him. So when Auden wrote suggesting that he and Kallman might be entitled to a cut of the twenty thousand dollars, Stravinsky replied unblinkingly that, since the money was not a commission fee but a payment for preparing and conducting the premiere, there was no question of a percentage. Of course, he wanted Wystan and Chester to be there in Venice, but alas it was not his responsibility “to provide for your active role with Kallman.”58

  This dispute, like all the others, eventually landed on Roth’s desk. Auden made what trouble he could about the technicalities of the situation, but was eventually appeased by a payment for expenses, free tickets, and a participation in rehearsals. The incident must all the same have confirmed him in his original character assessment of Stravinsky, “in whose case, obviously, the mother figure is money,”59 and it was much used against the composer in later years, especially by highminded critics who took literally a footnote in his published correspondence to the effect that he was “pretending that the $20,000 for the opera … was not a commission (which he would have had to share with the librettists) but a fee for conducting the premiere.”60 But Auden and Kallman had received payment for the libretto at the outset (in the form of an advance on royalties), and they would have had neither a contractual nor even a clear moral right to any share in a commission fee, whatever their rights in the matter of royalties or performance dues.61 Stravinsky obviously nevertheless feared the apparent ambiguity of a commission fee negotiated so late in the process, which is why he insisted that “I have not sold La Biennale anything but my conducting.”62 Later, he was more cautious in his dealings with Auden from the start, and as we shall see the world may thereby have been deprived of a second collaboration between them.

  In addition to the twenty thousand, he also had high hopes of a deal over the recording rights for the first performance. His exclusive contract with RCA had expired the previous summer, and he had been looking around for some new association, possibly out of disillusion with RCA’s lingering commitment to the 45-rpm extended-play record.63 For a time it looked as if Cetra-Soria, a small but progressive Italian company with good contacts at RAI, would be well placed to make the recording. Then, when Soria backed out, there was a brief flirtation with Decca. The difficulty was that both companies understandably wanted to market the discs as soon as possible, while Roth was shrewdly insisting that to do this would be to undermine the local broadcasting rights on which many opera houses depended for the production of new works.64 Stravinsky, on the other hand, was working on the assumption that no studio recording of such a long work was likely in the foreseeable future, and he was anxious not to miss what he saw as an artistic as well as a commercial opportunity.65 His bizarre solution, not for the first time, was to get his lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, to write one of his “I’d hate to think you didn’t have my client’s best interests at heart” letters to Roth, throwing in a number of hugely speculative statistics that the canny publisher had little difficulty in politely demolishing.66 The final straw in this curious but in the short term unproductive episode snapped when Roth discovered that British Decca, with whom he had been dealing, and American Decca, with whom Stravinsky had been dealing, were completely different companies. By that time it was too late to conclude a new agreement, and though RAI kept a recording of the first performance, Roth got more than his wish and it was not released commercially for another thirty years.

  Amid all this hocus-pocus, as André Marion later called it,67 Stravinsky quietly finished the opera that had dogged his footsteps for the past three and a half years. The epilogue, with its flippant moralizing tone in the manner of Don Giovanni, was completed on the 7th of April, and the brief invocatory prelude to Act 1 a few days later. On the 3rd of May, the composer parcelled up the orchestral scores of these movements and sent them off to Erwin Stein in London.

  Typically, a new work of such length and importance would have been cast, and the director and designer engaged, long before this. But it was impossible to sign contracts with busy and expensive solo artists while the performance itself remained uncertain. Carl Ebert had long been envisaged as director, ever since the USC plan had come and gone the previous autumn. Stravinsky felt safe with Ebert, who had been staging operas since his time as intendant of the Berlin Städtische Oper in the early thirties, and while Auden—who had aspirations to direct the Rake himself68—made difficulties, the composer stuck to his guns and Ebert was duly booked, though it was late in July before he received a contract from the sluggish Italian bureaucrats.69 For the designs Stravinsky had wanted Eugene Berman, with his penchant for neo-baroque curlicues, but Venice could not make it worth the indigent painter’s while to fly from New York to Italy, and after the French artist Balthasar Balthus and the Englishman John Piper had for one reason or another likewise fallen out of the reckoning, the composer had to accept the fait accompli of two Italian designers, Gianni Ratto and Ebe Colciaghi.70 As for the musicians, by July most of the cast was fixed: in fact all except the title role, for which Stravinsky, intent on an anglophone tenor, eventually unearthed a Hollywood operetta singer named Robert Rounseville, a friend of the Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger and fresh from starring in Michael Powell’s film of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. Rounseville must have been quick of study, since he had barely four weeks—including a few days with the composer in New York at the start of August—to learn the lengthy and difficult part before rehearsals began later that month. The question of a reserve conductor—since Stravinsky refused to conduct anything but the premiere—was even more nerve-wracking. Not until he arrived in Naples in mid-August did he learn the identity of his deputy, Ferdinand Leitner. It was much as Roth had warned: in Venice it was always a matter of good fortune if the curtain rose at all.

  OBSESSED, as ever, with his own health, Stravinsky was also acutely sensitive to the ill health of others, as if conscious of some need to propitiate the gods who watched over the territory between life and death. Condolences or a get-well message, where appropriate, would invariably precede all else even in a business letter. The death of a friend or associate, past or present, was like a memento mori, a warning of his own mortality as he approached his biblical quota of years. When André Gide died in February 1951, Stravinsky was visibly upset and for a long time silent, even though he had not set eyes on his Persephone collaborator since the ill-fated run-through at Ida Rubinstein’s seventeen years before.71 He even expressed grief—perhaps of a more ritual
istic kind—at the death of his fellow Rimsky-Korsakov pupil Max Steinberg when he heard about it that March, more than four years after the actual event, and more than a quarter-century after he had avoided Steinberg in Paris in 1925.72 Eugenia Errazuriz (killed in a road accident in Chile), Serge Koussevitzky, and Adolph Bolm—who had been “declining before my eyes,” Stravinsky told Soulima, and died in his sleep one April morning—all went to their graves during the first half of 1951.73 But the most momentous death was reserved for July, when Arnold Schoenberg died of heart failure on Friday the 13th at his home in Brentwood Park. Stravinsky, who had not communicated with Schoenberg since 1919, at once sent a telegram to his widow: “Deeply shocked by saddening news of terrible blow inflicted to all musical world by loss of Arnold Schoenberg. Please accept my heartfelt sympathy.”74

  What Stravinsky really thought of Schoenberg at this precise moment is far from clear. Craft has asserted that, in the first year or two of his association with Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s name was seldom if ever mentioned in the house, and mutual friends such as David Diamond, Ingolf Dahl, Klemperer, or even Milhaud, tended to keep quiet about their dual loyalty.75 But this is not quite believable; or, if it was true, it can only have been because Stravinsky himself found it awkward to go against the persona long since created for him by factious associates like Arthur Lourié or, on the other side, René Leibowitz. The ice may have formed too thick to break. Nevertheless Stravinsky had discussed Schoenberg with Stuckenschmidt, and he had attended the Freedom of Vienna concert. When Craft went to Mitropoulos’s Carnegie Hall performance of A Survivor from Warsaw in April 1950, Stravinsky, who was in New York, must have known about it, and when the young man called on Schoenberg three months later, it was Vera who drove him there.76 No doubt Stravinsky disliked such of Schoenberg’s music as he had heard; but he cannot any longer have been unaware that many of the musicians in whose company he spent so much time admired the Viennese master and his so-called “school.” In April 1951, Mitropoulos’s concert performance of Berg’s Wozzeck had been broadcast, and they had all sat and listened.77 But Craft is silent about Stravinsky’s reaction.