Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  That same day following the first performance there was a pompous little ceremony in the City Hall at which Stravinsky was officially welcomed to La Serenissima and thanked for his opera by the mayor.17 On the 13th he sat in the audience while Leitner conducted an altogether tidier, less nervy, and no doubt less interesting second performance of the Rake. Their remaining ten days in Venice were a much-needed holiday. They went to Torcello, with its unforgettable mosaics, and Chioggia, at the southern end of the lagoon, where the people were if anything even poorer than in the city but knew who their visitor was and applauded him as he came ashore. Later they drove to Padua and Vicenza and had tea with the Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna (cousin of Tsar Nicholas II) at the Villa Malcontenta, one of the Veneto properties of their Wetherly Drive neighbor, the Baroness d’Erlanger. Since their chauffeur was another Russian aristocrat, Baron Raffaello de Banfield Tripcovich, who also drove them in his Lancia to Ravenna and Ferrara before returning them to their Royal Suite at the Bauer Grünwald, it may well have crossed their minds that, whatever Europeans in general thought of modern art, they knew how to treat modern artists. It was their first real taste of VIP life on the grand scale, and they rather enjoyed it.18 But reality called, and on the 23rd of September they finally left Venice for Milan and the start of a very different kind of tour.

  Stravinsky’s two concerts in La Scala at the end of the month were the quid pro quo for Ghiringhelli’s backing down over the Rake, and for the fact that the composer would not be staying to conduct the Milan performances of the opera itself at the end of the year. The main part of the autumn tour, however, was through Germany and German Switzerland, and was the outcome of much pressure from Strecker and, more recently, Heinrich Strobel, now the music director of the Südwestfunk—the South-West German Radio—at Baden-Baden. Since Ralph Hawkes’s death the previous September, Strecker had been engaged in heavy discussions with AMP and a battery of New York lawyers in the hope of securing for Schott some kind of joint agreement over Stravinsky’s music, and with it a permanent deal to replace his Boosey and Hawkes contract, which was due to expire at the end of 1951. The negotiations (which came to nothing, Strecker thought, because of the bullying tactics of AMP’s attorneys) partly indicated Stravinsky’s extreme nervousness about the situation at Boosey’s after Hawkes’s death, but they also reflected the energy of German regrowth and the determination of administrators there to reassert the richness and efficient organization of the German cultural scene after the desert years of the Third Reich. Bringing Stravinsky back to Germany was a vital symbolic act for the regeneration of the country’s musical life.

  The tour started in Cologne, where he conducted a public concert of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Apollo, and Oedipus Rex with the North-West German Radio Orchestra, and also recorded the Symphonies and Oedipus Rex for Columbia, with whom he had signed a new exclusive contract only six weeks earlier in Naples.19 Such a program showed at once the serious intentions and elastic resources of the new German radio stations, in stark contrast with the wreckage of the city’s buildings and bridges. The radio building itself, Craft noted, was still under construction, but the orchestra and chorus were alike of a high standard. On the 9th of October they took the Rheingold Express to Baden-Baden, where Stravinsky conducted a single concert with the Südwestfunk orchestra that same day, but otherwise spent his time in the mild air and soothing environment of the Black Forest spa town trying to shake off an attack of laryngitis picked up in draughty Cologne.

  As the guest of two successive radio orchestras, Stravinsky was invited to listen to recent recordings of which they were especially proud. Thus “kleine Modernsky,” as Schoenberg had once satirically dubbed him, found himself in a Cologne studio with Robert Craft, listening probably for the first time to major orchestral works by the Viennese master, in the shape of the Violin Concerto, and the “Dance round the Golden Calf” from Moses und Aron, which Scherchen had premiered in a Darmstadt concert three months before. What Stravinsky thought of this orgiastic but hypersophisticated music, history does not relate. Craft reports only that he listened “attentively” and displayed no reaction.20 But Baden-Baden had a far more disconcertingly esoteric experience in store for him. On the day after his own concert there on the 14th, Strobel ushered him into a listening room of the Südwestfunk and played him recordings of music by Webern, Pierre Boulez, and others from the radio station’s extensive tape library. Whether or not Stravinsky had met Webern in Vienna at the ISCM reception in 1926, there is no evidence that he had ever heard a note of his music.21 His encounter now with the late orchestral Variations, op. 30, one of Webern’s most mysterious and attenuated works, must have been at best puzzling, and it may have been as much because of the music’s strangeness as for anything more specific in its impact that Stravinsky twice asked for it to be repeated. He also heard a recording of Boulez’s recent Polyphonie X, which Hans Rosbaud had conducted at the Donaueschingen Festival the previous week. He listened in a state of bewilderment to the furious complexities of this dense chamber-orchestral piece in which every element was governed by serial thinking, and of which Rosbaud’s far from accurate performance was accompanied by hoots of laughter, catcalls and at one point a blast from a police whistle. By comparison, Hans Werner Henze’s Third Symphony and Krenek’s Violin Concerto, which Strobel also probably played him, will have sounded agreeably old-fashioned, though both are in one way or another post-Schoenbergian in spirit and technique, and essentially unlike anything Stravinsky had heard in America.22

  Meanwhile Nicolas Nabokov, having acted as midwife for the Venice Rake, was incubating a plan for a festival of twentieth-century music in Paris the following spring, under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The idea was for a kind of grand retrospective of the first half of the century, and naturally Stravinsky was to figure prominently. Nabokov hoped to secure the French premiere of the opera, he wanted Balanchine to stage The Rite of Spring, and he wanted Stravinsky himself to conduct a concert of his works. His intentions, which he later claimed to have formulated in detail during an eleven-hour transatlantic flight in May, were in every sense high-minded, but he knew enough about Paris—and probably (despite his subsequent denials) about the politics and CIA funding of the CCF—not to expect to get his way without obstruction.23 As designer for the Rite he had hoped to get Picasso, but Picasso’s Communist sympathies and his recent anti-American, Guernica-like canvas Massacre in Korea ruled him out, while Tchelitcheff, whom Stravinsky favored, was still refusing to work in the theatre. As for the Rake, it turned out that the Opéra already had a contract for the Paris premiere, and Nabokov’s only hope was for some kind of co-production. At this point, Nabokov turned up in Baden-Baden, and on 12 October Stravinsky signed an agreement to direct three separate events in Paris for a fee of four and a half thousand dollars plus two thousand for expenses. Then just over a week later, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, he again conducted Oedipus Rex, and it must have been the success of this performance (which still survives on tape) that decided him to offer Nabokov Oedipus instead of The Rite of Spring.24

  For more than two months they had been wandering round Italy, Germany, and now Switzerland, and from the very start Stravinsky had never been quite well. His Cologne laryngitis had turned into flu. Baden-Baden had been a partial rest cure, but even so when they reached Geneva on 24 October he was still getting mild temperatures, which he had already used as a pretext for cancelling a concert he was to have given in Lausanne. In his mind, Switzerland remained the natural home of the chronically ill. Vera Nosenko had written from Leysin in the hope of calling on them, and Igor had shuddered at the memory of those snowy heights where Katya had first been treated for tuberculosis, and at the thought of the debt of honor he owed to this kindhearted but not hugely loved cousin-in-law who had looked after his sickly granddaughter throughout the war years. The visit could not be avoided. On 2 November they went to Lausanne and paid their respects to Vera and her older sist
er Olga, the companions of his Ustilug summers of half a century ago. The last time he had seen Vera, in 1939, she had pressed a stethoscope to his chest, and perhaps she did the same again now. She might as well have done at any rate; the information would have been less distressing but still probably not altogether welcome.25

  In Geneva they saw much of Theodore and Denise, but could not be accommodated by them, and instead put up at the smart Hôtel des Bergues, on the Rhône at the point where it flows on out of the lake. At Theodore’s, predictably enough, they met a new doctor, Maurice Gilbert, who at once, like so many of the Stravinskys’ professional advisers, became a friend as well as a physician and took them on a tour of Fribourg and the Vaud, ending up at Les Tilleuls in Clarens, the birthplace of The Rite of Spring. Somewhat uncharacteristically, they went about Geneva by public transport, and one day they ran into Ansermet on a tram.26 Later he and they dined together, but though relations were amicable, the old intimacy eluded them, not just because of memories of Jeu de cartes or the more recent awkwardness over the Mass premiere, but because Ansermet in person had become judicial and intellectually obstinate, and his enthusiasms—formerly so dependable—now often seemed provisional or subject to analysis. “It’s clear,” Stravinsky had written to Theodore, “that he’s impossible to get on with.”27 Matters were not helped by the fact that, since Ansermet had programmed Orpheus in a pair of concerts the previous week, pressure had been put on the composer not to include it in his own concert on 4 November. He insisted on doing so, however, and pointedly absented himself from Ansermet’s concert four days before. Stravinsky, too, could be obstinate.

  The most important reunion, though, was with Theodore himself. Their long separation had ended in Naples; but the Geneva meetings were probably more relaxed, if only because the Rake and the German concert tour were now over and done with and, after all, Theodore was at home here and could enjoy his father’s and stepmother’s company in a calm domestic environment. One might suppose that those who observed them at close hand would be anxious to record how it was: the joys and hesitations, the tensions and stiffnesses, the entire manner of the forty-four-year-old son toward his devoted but despotic father. But there is nothing of the kind in Craft’s published diaries, nor in the reports that Vera sent back to Theodore’s sister in Los Angeles. In the latest and fullest version of his chronicle, Craft mentions that Theodore was on the quay at Naples with Denise and Kitty but says not one word about them, though he must surely have been curious at the time.28 His Geneva diary refers to the Ansermet meeting and Dr. Gilbert; but the only family name that figures is Vera Nosenko’s, which is included merely to record Stravinsky’s irritation at having to visit her.29 Of course, the Chronicle of a Friendship is a published “work,” much preoccupied with the famous and describable, brilliant in its way if somewhat self-conscious like all such documents, and demonstrably false as a contemporary record in the sense that the various published texts differ substantially one from another. If no cloud of suspicion hung over the subsequent relations between Stravinsky’s family and his American companion, one might not give the omission a second thought. As it is, it will gradually and inevitably assume a certain significance.

  Before flying back to the States, Stravinsky had concert bookings in Rome and Naples, and in the event he gave an extra concert in Rome, at the Teatro Argentina on the 19th of November, in aid of the victims of the Po Valley floods. Chester Kallman was alone on Ischia, Auden having returned to New York from Venice, and he and the Stravinskys met and for the first time, according to Craft, became intimate.30 Kallman was hoping to be invited to help stage the Rake at La Scala, and had been tinkering with the work’s theatrical detailing. He had even come up with what he called “a very private extra scene. […] It’s to open the third act and be between Mother Goose, Trulove and Sellem … We can reveal that Mother Goose and Trulove go off together at the end.”31 The point of this particular little jest was that in the Venice production there had been a long pause between the first two scenes of the final act, the auction and the graveyard, and to avoid this problem in future it would be necessary either to move the auction scene to the end of the second act or to add some front-of-curtain business to cover the scene-change. In their Naples discussions in November, Stravinsky must have argued for the former solution, since Kallman wrote to him soon afterwards specifically refuting it, and Stravinsky acknowledged his arguments, while insisting that “I will not accept any stops between scenes as it was in Venice.”32

  Their first transatlantic flight, starting from Rome on the 21st of November, was a protracted, complicated, and exhausting affair. Earlier in the year, Charles Blair had set a new record of just under eight hours for the opposite, west-east, crossing; but the Rome airliner made stops in Paris (where there was time for them to have dinner at the airport with Arthur Sachs), Shannon, Gander, and Boston, was in the air for some fourteen hours, and finally put down at Idlewild a full thirty hours after initial takeoff.33 Not surprisingly Stravinsky, who was in any case scared of flying, arrived at the Lombardy in an edgy mood, took against the expensive “modernized” discomfort of a hotel they had used before and liked, and checked for the first time into the Gladstone, on East 52nd Street, which thereafter became their regular Manhattan base. Yet within hours he was standing up in front of the New York City Ballet orchestra, rehearsing The Fairy’s Kiss for a performance a mere three days later.34

  Lincoln Kirstein had at last abandoned his efforts to mount the Rake on Broadway, and had instead returned to the charge on the promised new ballet. The latest idea for a subject was a pageant set in “a vast ballroom in space,” in which assorted gods and demigods—Zeus, Apollo, Prometheus, and others—would present a kind of history of the dance, from the pavane to the polka, leading up to “a big jazz finale.”35 The ballet would be called Terpsichore. Kirstein sent Stravinsky a draft scenario at the end of November, and it is obvious from his letter that the idea had already been discussed, probably when Stravinsky was in New York on his way to Venice at the start of August. No doubt it was discussed again now. Stravinsky spent several evenings at the ballet; he saw Tyl Ulenspiegel (the Balanchine version, not the long-lost Nijinsky ballet), Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin, and his own Basle concerto danced as The Cage, a new Jerome Robbins ballet about insect Amazons. But there were too many other distractions for him to settle on anything specific at this moment. During December they went many times to the Metropolitan Opera, as guests of Rudolf Bing, with whom Igor was now in serious negotiations for precisely that big-stage Rake premiere which he had always previously insisted on opposing. And meanwhile, Auden was pressing him on the matter of a second operatic collaboration. The latest project was a one-act adaptation of George Peele’s satirical drama The Old Wives’ Tale, another by-product, like “The maidens came,” of Auden’s work on the Poets of the English Language. He and Stravinsky mapped out a scenario in December in New York,36 and by March, with Kallman back from Ischia, the libretto of Delia, as it was to be called, was complete. But there was a snag. With the Venice twenty thousand dollars still fresh in everyone’s mind, the librettists were insisting on a formal contract, and meanwhile the composer was flatly refusing to compose a note without a firm commission and money on the table.37

  He thus arrived home on New Year’s Day without a major project in view. Either the ballet or the opera might come next, but neither was settled either contractually or as regards subject. Delia was going to be an expensive commission, and when Betty Bean approached the directors of the Aspen Festival, they were enthusiastic but pointed out that the combined fee was five times the figure mentioned to them by another, unnamed but “well-known” composer. Meanwhile, Sam Dushkin had come up with a possible symphonic commission by an anonymous patron whose identity he never revealed but who must likewise have been struck dumb by Stravinsky’s fee of fifteen thousand dollars, since nothing more was heard from that quarter. In some ways more intriguing, because more specific, was a suggestion f
rom an English filmwriter called Simon Harcourt-Smith that Stravinsky should compose music for a film of the Odyssey. Harcourt-Smith had suitably Homeric ideas for the project. His ideal Odysseus was Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and the script, when it landed on the Wetherly Drive doormat, proved to be rich in wide-screen incident: “Wagner, not Stravinsky,” Craft said when invited to read it and give his opinion.38 It soon emerged, however, that Harcourt-Smith was not the only pebble on the Ithacan beach, and when Michael Powell came in mid-March to discuss what was evidently in essence the same project, he had quite other ideas about scripting and casting, and promised that Dylan Thomas would be involved.

  What these various and interesting proposals could not conceal was that in a certain sense Stravinsky was becalmed. It was as if the huge effort involved in composing a full-length opera had left him limp and exhausted, just as conversation can die when a topic that has dominated it for too long suddenly reaches some natural conclusion. The only work in hand was the songbook, or “mezzo-soprano cycle,” as Auden had called it,39 for which “The maidens came” had already been drafted, and he seemed in no immediate hurry to take that up again. In the whole of January the only music he composed was an innocent little improvization theme for Marcel Dupré, the organist of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, which he dispatched via Nadia Boulanger on the 8th.40 A week later he conducted a concert of his own chamber works in the Royce Hall, on the UCLA campus. It might almost have been another benefit for flood victims. The rain came down in torrents, Sunset Boulevard was blocked by a mud slide, and the concert was delayed for an hour because the first trombonist (who was in every piece except the Dumbarton Oaks concerto) could not cross a ravine carved across the road by the floods.41 As if the weather were not bad enough, a more potent misery entered their lives. Huxley suddenly announced that Maria had breast cancer and had already—on the 12th—had a mastectomy. By the end of the month her condition had been diagnosed as terminal, but Aldous himself either did not know the truth or was unable, in his rational mind, to accept it. They did their best to divert him. He came to lunch often, and to the UCLA concert, and continued to take refuge in his vast and sometimes inconsequential erudition. “In a few more weeks,” he wrote to Maria’s sister Jeanne, “I think that M will be back to normal, able to do everything …”42