Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Six days after Schoenberg’s death, the Stravinskys dined at Alma Mahler-Werfel’s house, and they were there when Anna Mahler arrived with Schoenberg’s death mask (which she herself had sculpted), and unwrapped it for their inspection.78 Stravinsky had just begun a new work, a song for mezzo-soprano to an anonymous Elizabethan poem taken from the first volume of Auden’s recently published Poets of the English Language:

  The maidens came

  When I was in my mothers bower.

  I had all that I wolde.

  The baily berith the bell away,

  The lilly, the rose, the rose I lay,…

  Auden had given him the five compact volumes as a Christmas present, and had perhaps drawn his attention to the marvelous series of “anonymous lyrics and songs” of volume I as the possible starting point for a songbook that would build on the word-setting techniques he had evolved in The Rake’s Progress. Or Stravinsky may have asked for poems of a progressive character, to judge by a letter Auden wrote to Craft in mid-September with further suggestions from all five chronological volumes, including lyrics by Philip Sidney, Campion, Herrick, Pope, Blake, and Christina Rossetti.79

  None of these later ideas was ever taken up, but Stravinsky’s music for “The maidens came” is in many respects that of a starting point. The whole song is a model of melodic simplicity and clarity combined with an intricacy of rhythm obviously inspired by the fascinating and elaborate imagery of the poem. The curious unaccompanied apostrophe to the “Right mighty and famous / Elizabeth, our quen princis” is set boldly and simply in C major, as if for the white notes of a piano, but in a metric style that cuts across the idiosyncratic scansion of the poem by bringing “Elizabeth” up into the previous line and then spreading out the rest of her original line so that it occupies the same metric space as its elongated predecessor. Most strikingly, the piece is a study in the ancient technique of strict melodic imitation known as canon. At the start, the cor anglais copies the flute, a seventh lower and in inversion (upside down), and later, at “The baily berith the bell away,” the soprano and flute are in strict canon, again by inversion, with a freer imitation in the oboe. The lines weave perceptible patterns, like the rose branches in a Schongauer Madonna.

  How much of the song Stravinsky wrote before setting off for New York at the end of July is not clear from the sketches. But it is somehow pleasing that even this fragment existed to carry forward the Rake style before anybody had heard or seen the opera itself. It might seem a very innocent little seed; but a seed it undoubtedly was.

  18

  THE TIME-TRAVELLER COMES ASHORE

  CRAFT WAS to have travelled to New York by train with the Stravinskys, but at the last minute he went down with severe stomach pains and was whisked into the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital with suspected polio. The diagnosis was neither confirmed nor, in so many words, denied; but it was a week before he was well enough to fly east, and he must for a time have even wondered whether he would get to Europe at all. He reached New York with only two days to spare before the SS Constitution sailed for Naples on the 7th of August.

  No doubt the symptoms were in part nervous in origin, and in any case they seem to have had no noticeable consequences. Instead, as they approached the Azores four days out, Stravinsky suddenly collapsed with pneumonia, brought on, he maintained, by the intermittent blasts of air from the ship’s somewhat primitive air conditioning.1 He was still ailing when they docked at Naples on the 15th, and the following Tuesday, when the illness persisted, his doctor ordered him to bed for the rest of the week. Rehearsals for the Rake, due to start in Milan, were postponed. It was a distinctly subdued, low-spirited return to European soil.

  The pneumonia had, however, one fortunate result. The travellers were met on the quay by Auden and Kallman, by Leitner, the reserve conductor, and by Theodore, Denise, and their fourteen-year-old niece and adoptive daughter, Kitty. Igor had not set eyes on his eldest son for almost twelve years, and though his illness robbed him of all but the gentlest Neapolitan sightseeing, it repaid him with time to spend with his family while Craft, who was on his first visit to Europe, nosed round the city, took the bus to Pompeii and Sorrento, visited Auden and Kallman on Ischia and the Blue Grotto on Capri, and for once enjoyed the riches of his new life without its sometimes wearying obligations. Not until the 26th was Stravinsky pronounced fit to take the train north to Milan, where to their astonishment they were greeted at the Hotel Duomo by cheering crowds undeterred by the fact that the train had arrived two hours late.2

  In the south they had already come face to face with the agonizing contrasts of postwar Europe—contrasts for which nothing in the America they knew had seriously prepared them. Poverty and Naples were historic companions, of course, but the violent bombardments of 1943 had left a moral and physical wreckage that eight years had done little to repair. For the first time in their lives, the well-heeled Stravinskys were made to feel uneasy, even a little frightened, by the deprivation through which they passed. Milan was more modern-feeling, and it was comforting to be reminded that, whatever the young bloods of the Messiaen set might think, Stravinsky was still a celebrity in cultivated Europe, just as on his prewar tours when he had routinely been met at railway stations by photographers and local dignitaries bearing bouquets. In any case, Milan meant rehearsals more than sightseeing, and though they might visit the cathedral and the Sforza castle, or lunch at Bellaggio or Certosa di Pavia, the important thing now was to teach the Rake to the Scala orchestra and English pronunciation to its chorus. The language coaching was delegated to Auden, who made no complaint about this necessary task but grumbled furiously about Ebert’s production, which “could hardly be worse if the director were Erwin Piscator and the singers were climbing and descending ladders,” and about Stravinsky’s conducting (“he can’t conduct … doesn’t know the score … is deaf”3). For the composer it certainly was in some ways a process of discovery. He would sometimes rehearse at unnecessary length out of sheer curiosity to experience the orchestral sound imagined for so long at the piano. When they proceeded to Venice a week before the opening, he mostly preferred to sit in on Leitner’s rehearsals rather than take his own. Not until the first dress rehearsal in the Fenice on the 9th of September did he conduct a proper run-through on his own account.4

  The atmosphere in Venice was a disagreeable reminder of Naples and its extremes of poverty and disaffection. A vigorously Communist city, it reeked of an anti-Americanism as unmistakable as the exhalations of its canals and gutters. The wealthy sailed in in their yachts and the smart hotels did good business, but for the wretched Venetians such things were no better than a sideshow at which they might be permitted to gawp, preferably from a safe distance behind a rope. As a symbol of these disparities, The Rake’s Progress could hardly have been better chosen. Its costume drama about a rich wastrel who marries a bearded lady and tries to make bread out of stones epitomized the incurable frivolity of the international rich, and the fact that its composer was known to have been paid fifty times the average annual income just to come and conduct it was calculated to send a shiver down the spine of even the moderate left-wing press. When the audience itself began to forgather, and the conductors, opera managers, modern-music addicts, composers, and publishers began, in Nicolas Nabokov’s words, to mingle with “the most elegant and snobbish set of international café society and titled owners of Venetian palaces,”5 the picture was complete and the stage set for a crucial showdown between the World of Art and the world of painful modern reality.

  Whatever the standing of the Fenice as an international opera house, the annual music festival (for some reason known as the Biennale) was rapidly acquiring a prestige that would, in the next few years, give it real importance as a showcase for new work and star performers. Only three days before the Rake premiere, Victor de Sabata had conducted a stunning Verdi Requiem in the Fenice, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Stravinsky’s Anne Trulove) among the soloists. On the night of The Rake’s Progress, in
stifling sirocco heat, the jam of gondolas and motoscafi at the theatre’s canal entrance was so great, and the crush of old friends in the foyer so intense, that the start was delayed for more than half an hour and it was nine thirty-five by the time Stravinsky sped to the rostrum, spread his arms to acknowledge the audience’s ecstatic welcome, and gave the downbeat for the opening E-major chord of the fanfare-prelude. He was understandably nervous. He had been absent from Europe for twelve years, he had seldom conducted stage opera and not at all since The Nightingale at La Scala in 1926, and the Rake was a long and deceptively complicated work, full of tricky cues and awkward tempo changes—not difficult in the Rite of Spring sense, but in its own way unforgiving and, as he knew perfectly well, underprepared. From the start the audience fidgeted and rustled their programs, trying to grasp crucial details of the plot—the dead uncle, the catechism, the bearded lady—from the sometimes involved poetry and convoluted action of the libretto. The composer’s initial insistence on a premiere in an anglophone city may well have come back to haunt him, since only three of his Venice soloists were native English-speakers, the chorus might as well have been singing in Swahili, and in neither case could the Italian audience be expected to understand more than the occasional phrase.6

  Somehow the opera trundled along, kept alive by the quality of the Scala orchestra, the excellence of individual performances—Schwarzkopf’s Anne, Hugues Cuénod’s auctioneer Sellem—and above all by Stravinsky’s own presence, which imparted a sense of excitement and uniqueness to the whole occasion. Details were often untidy or worse; there were missed entries, wrong notes, and sloppy rhythms, attributable partly to Stravinsky’s inexperience at cueing the stage, partly to the singers’ own unfamiliarity with the idiom. Ebert had been able to do little more by way of stage direction than simply get the work on, sometimes in the teeth of Auden’s unconcealed animosity during production rehearsals. As for Ratto’s sets, they were too Italian and too stately. “With a house as grand as [Trulove’s],” Auden had remarked, “the Rake would be better off marrying the daughter right away and forgoing his progress.”7 They were also too complicated. To the composer’s annoyance, there were unscripted pauses for scene changes, to add to the excessively long intervals during which the audience spilled out into the Campo San Fantin and discussed the music’s stylistic borrowings and Mme. Schwarzkopf’s unforgettable top C over their grappa and caffè espresso. By the time Stravinsky swung into the moralistic epilogue, it was one o’clock and not a few of the audience had gone home. The majority that remained gave him a huge ovation with twenty or more curtain calls, and the newspaper headlines the next day duly reported “uno straordinario successo” and “un avvenimento d’arte.” But the small print of the local reviews, which Vera spirited away before the maestro could be troubled by them, told a different, more intricate story.

  On the whole, the Italian critics were willing to allow Stravinsky the mastery of his craft, at least as regards the fine detail of the new work, even if there were complaints that it was, as Guido Pannain put it, “a flightless opera [senza voli], constructed piece by piece, which you listen to without abandon, without ever being taken over by it, but with curiosity, sometimes with annoyance, while at the same time admiring its skillful, painstaking craftsmanship.”8 They were, however, almost universally puzzled by the music’s synthetic qualities, its seemingly pointless reanimation of dead conventions. Pannain detected in the Rake “the artifice of an essay in imitation, […] an industrialized eighteenth century. A return to past forms? Yes, but in the manner of a collector: a reflective meditation, without spontaneity and limited in its initiative.” His Giornale colleague grumbled at the whole implication that the dramatic relationship between stage action and music could be reduced to such purely conventional terms, an error, he went on, “compounded by a worn out invention which certainly cannot compare with that of an ‘Oedipus Rex’ or a ‘Persephone’ [notwithstanding] joyous pages of an exquisite intimacy, and others of a life-giving wit, the product of a lucky hand which manages to transform into music whatever it touches.”9 Behind such qualifications there lurked an evident fear of what it later became normal to call “irrelevance,” whether social or aesthetic. The Milan critic, Franco Abbiati, saw in the Rake “an act of birth and a certificate of death, a declaration of love and a sign of impotence, a miracle of open-mindedness and a triumph of conventionality.” It was “everything and nothing, everything that has for centuries existed within the orbit of melodrama, nothing that can stand comparison with all that those centuries have given us—nothing, that is, which might open up the hope of a substantial renewal of dramatic expression.”10 And Teodoro Celli ended a long and by no means unfriendly review by identifying “the fearful sadness which issues from this score, technically so rigorous and ‘perfect,’ as if it were the proof of some theorem in geometry,” and concluding that the opera was nevertheless “the document of a sentimental shame which verges on the pathological.”11

  In their apparently perverse way, these observations touch on an aspect of the Rake that had dogged Stravinsky’s heels ever since he had begun work on the opening scene almost three and a half years before. From the start, the idyllic tone of the lovers’ duet had demanded a clarity of style and texture that seemed to contradict the whole idea of modernism; but then the urban scenes, with their references to Mozart and ballad opera, had insisted on an equivalent, almost demotic, simplicity—the simplicity of a sublimated eighteenth-century popular music. Now, it was perfectly true that “simplification” had always been one of the battle cries of a certain kind of neoclassicism, the kind that reacted against the exaggerated complexity of high romanticism. But in 1951 that was no longer an issue with “progressive” artists. The real problem of postwar neoclassicism was rather the question of how a synthetic style could proceed at all in a world that, as many felt, had rejected the past and was yet again in search of new expressive tongues and new technical resources. Listening to the Rake, with its arias and recitatives, its breezy, lyrical tunes and smooth tonal harmonies, one might imagine that in his seventieth year Stravinsky had at last made his peace with his audience, opted out of the stylistic battle, and would soon be retiring to his Hollywood garden to grow begonias. On any contemporary view, the Rake looked and sounded like the end of the long road from Pulcinella and the Octet. Those critics who sensed its undiminished vitality naturally assumed that its denial of modernism would be decisive for future work. “Stravinsky,” remarked one, “is going in the direction of melody.… He will probably be the Verdi of the second half of the twentieth century.” Another interpreted the opera as “Stravinsky’s warning to other composers that they must not be incomprehensible to the public. The era of ferocious dissonance is ended. Whether this work contains the seeds of life, however, is too early to decide.”12 But if not here, where? The most curious thing of all is that, three decades after Mavra and more than two after Apollo, nobody seems to have expected to be surprised by Stravinsky anymore. The only question left was whether, creatively, he would live and do more of the same, or simply turn over and die.

  IT WAS IN Venice that, so far as his old friends and admirers were concerned, Stravinsky effectively returned to Europe. At the Hotel Bauer Grünwald, he and Vera installed themselves in the vast and airy Royal Suite, looking out over Santa Maria della Salute toward the Giudecca, and the indispensable piano was winched up to the first floor from the Rio di San Moisè at the side of the hotel. Auden was less fortunate. The Scala management had deposited him in a cramped upper room without a bath, and he soon appeared in the Stravinsky suite weeping with mortification, and was promptly found something better through the good offices of the head porter, a part-time composer by the name of Luigi Tortorella. Craft, in his own smaller first-floor room, accepted his menial position, understandably, with a better grace.13

  Well before the first night, the reunions began. Nadia Boulanger and Marcelle Meyer were there early from Paris. Igor Markevitch appeared, and Stephen S
pender, who was in Venice on Auden’s account but soon befriended the composer. The premiere itself brought an avalanche of old acquaintance: Nabokov and Boris Kochno, Leopold Survage and Marya Freund, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Domenico de’ Paoli, Paul Collaer, and Charles-Albert Cingria, among many others.14 “The master and I melted into each other’s arms,” Cingria told a friend, “and we chewed the fat at some length.”15 After the performance, the hardier or more excitable among them repaired with Stravinsky to the Taverna la Fenice, talked about the music and the performance and played spot-the-derivation, until dawn rose over San Marco and they staggered wearily to their beds.16 But through all these proceedings, the composer seems to have preserved a certain detachment from his past. When Vera and Craft took a vaporetto to the San Michele cemetery the day after the premiere to put flowers on Diaghilev’s grave, Stravinsky superstitiously refused to go with them. Venice might be the most beautiful city in the world, but it was also one of the most frightening, especially for someone like Stravinsky, who (like Diaghilev himself) could not swim, and for whom a city of canals was an only half-agreeable reminder of his childhood in St. Petersburg. Looking across the Giudecca or back from San Giorgio Maggiore toward the Piazzetta, he could almost imagine himself on the Palace Embankment by the Neva looking out toward Vasilevsky Island and the Peter and Paul Fortress. Then again, if Venice was redolent of childhood, it also often made you think of death. Even Craft found that the Lido conjured up Mann’s famous novella, a book Stravinsky disliked. The whole place was like an epitome of old Europe, fascinating and irresistible, but somehow finished. If the composer ever, on this trip, thought of moving back permanently, the idea was fleeting and did not take root. Vera was another matter. She by this time detested Los Angeles, liked New York, but really wanted nothing better than to go back to her old friends in Paris, a city Igor did not even want to visit. In such matters her will was never law, and as usual she accepted the inevitable with a wistful shrug of the shoulders.