Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Early in February Stravinsky reopened his first volume of Poets of the English Language and started work on a setting of “Westron winde,” a mysterious little poem about wet weather and lost love. A few days later, on the 8th, he turned a couple of pages and composed the first line of “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day,” a carol of uncertain antiquity cast in the form of an autobiography of Christ. The setting of the first line remains inchoate in the sketch, but Stravinsky quickly found something like a definitive music for the line that in different forms serves as refrain to each of the eleven verses, “To call my true love to my dance.” On the same page of sketches there is also some practice counterpoint involving canon. He had recently once again been immersing himself in old music of various kinds and periods, from Bach’s “48” backwards. He and Craft had just been playing through Heinrich Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus on the piano, and on the day of the first “Westron winde” sketch, they spent the evening at the Huxleys’ and listened to music by the fifteenth-century French master Dufay.43 He had also heard Hugues Cuénod’s recent recording of the Leçons de Ténèbres of Couperin, and had written to him pleading to know where he could get hold of the printed music.44 Then on the 12th he attended a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Suite, op. 29, which Craft was due to conduct at a Roof concert a couple of weeks later. After the rehearsal Craft tried to explain to him how the music was made, but found it hard, at first, to overcome his prejudices, and, perhaps, his instinctive distaste for the idiom.45

  It was always Stravinsky’s advice to young composers to “find a model,”46 and no doubt he was at this moment practicing what he preached. But for once the old music did not afford him what he needed. Eric Walter White once suggested that “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day” was reminiscent of the Leçons de Ténèbres, but the comparison (no doubt prompted by Stravinsky) argues unfamiliarity with Couperin’s elegant baroque “Lamentations” and above all with their peculiar form, which Stravinsky stored up and copied only much later on.47 For the moment, it was the Schoenberg (rather than Webern’s Quartet, op. 22, which was also on Craft’s program) that, against all probability, caught his imagination.48

  The Suite was in fact one of the few Schoenberg works that he claimed to have heard before (in Venice in 1937). But whereas a quarter-century before he had assured readers of the Daily Mail that “Schoenberg is one of the greatest creative spirits of our age,” by the late thirties he was describing him as

  a chemist of music more than an artistic creator. His investigations are interesting, since they tend to expand the possibilities of auditory pleasure, but just as with Haba, the discoverer of quarter-tones, they have more to do with the quantity than with the quality of the music.49

  In 1936, Stravinsky had almost certainly not heard any of Schoenberg’s serial music, but he had had it described to him, mostly by hostile judges such as Lourié.50 In the circumstances, his opinion is much what one would expect. Schoenberg had devised a method that involved taking the twelve different notes in the octave, arranging them in a certain order, then using that order—or series—as a fixed template for the melodic and harmonic material of an entire work. Put so crudely, it sounded about as pointless artistically as change-ringing. You could play the series forwards, backwards, or upside down, or the upside-down version backwards, and you could do all these things starting on any note you liked. Every music student has experienced that moment of despair on first hearing Schoenberg “explained” in these terms, that feeling of disbelief that anyone would bother to write, listen to, or study music conceived in such a way. What Craft achieved with Stravinsky was simply what any sensible music teacher would at once see as necessary: he transmitted his own enthusiasm for the actual music, and only then, when pressed, showed how the music and the method interacted—how this particular music came out of this particular set of procedures, exactly as one might do in analyzing a Josquin motet or a Bach fugue. After all, only a simpleton really imagines that large-scale pieces of music can be written without any structural or thematic scaffolding. The one question that matters is whether the music itself makes one want to find out how it is made.

  Stravinsky never grew to like Schoenberg as much as Craft did, but as regards its musical substance the scales fell from his ears. The Suite, written in the mid-twenties, is a rich, strongly wrought, if sometimes hardworking piece, not always felicitous in its scoring (for three clarinets, piano, and string trio), but, from the very first chord, musically compelling. Stravinsky knew at once that it could not be ignored. And suddenly its method began to intrigue him. For much of the day after the first rehearsal, he practiced writing canons—a device fundamental to serialism; and the day after that they dined with Thomas Mann and surely discussed Schoenberg. “Tradition,” Stravinsky remarked, “carries the good artist on its shoulder as St. Christopher carried the Lord,” an observation that fits Schoenberg at least as well as himself.51 The following Sunday (the 17th of February), he drafted part of the canonic setting of the penultimate verse of “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day,” then went to another rehearsal of the Suite. Musically, there is not even a remote similarity between Schoenberg’s work and what Stravinsky was writing, yet there cannot be any doubt that Stravinsky was in a sense using the Suite as a model.52 Soon afterwards, the main theme of the opening emerged, apparently spontaneously, from a phrase of “The maidens came,” and for some reason Stravinsky decided to treat it as a series.53 It has eleven notes, including several duplicates (unlike a true Schoenberg “row,” in which there are always twelve different notes), and this lends it a simple, tonal flavor completely unlike any serial melody by Schoenberg. By the time Craft conducted his performance of the Suite at the University of Southern California on the 24th, the long carol setting, for tenor, two flutes, and a cello, was practically complete in outline. Stravinsky still had no clear idea of what he was writing. He had one three-minute song, one fifteen-minute one, and a fragment of a third, and he had been so absorbed in the intricacies of the work that he had not even noticed, for instance, that his flautists were being expected to play for a quarter of an hour almost without drawing breath.54 He had not decided whether he was writing a song cycle or, if so, how many songs it would contain.55 Never in his life had he been so detached from any idea of the final product.

  Toward the end of February 1952, he took to his bed with a bad dose of flu and had to wire Carlos Chávez in Mexico City, postponing a pair of concerts he was to have conducted there in the second week of March. Instead, on the 8th, they drove out for lunch at Palmdale, in the Mojave Desert, and on the way back Stravinsky did something else that he had never done before: he broke down and wept. He was finished as a composer, he said; the Rake would be his last work. What was more, he felt exposed by Schoenberg’s mastery and incriminated by the years in which he, Stravinsky, had written serialism off as some kind of fin de siècle number-mysticism or chemical experimentation.56 He almost seemed to be adopting Leibowitz’s opinion of his recent music as “the deadly Maya” of art, compared with the “amazing abundance,” the “vitality and creative strength” of late Schoenberg.57 It was a frightening moment of emptiness and fear for a man whose life had for fifty years been founded on composition, but who had also known the terrors of rejection and insecurity.

  Casting about for a remedy, Craft suggested that instead of fighting his creative block head-on, he should reorchestrate an early work such as the string-quartet Concertino, which, he maintained, was admired by progressives but which might benefit from more varied instrumentation and would make a useful concert piece.58 Stravinsky at once took this advice. Two days after the Palmdale confession, he told Roth that he was working on a transcription of the Concertino for twelve instruments, and also on an arrangement for small orchestra of the accompaniment to his early Verlaine songs, of which there in fact already existed a version with standard orchestra, performed by his brother Gury as long ago as 1914, but never published.59 For Roth these two somewhat marginal pieces of work meant
more trouble than they were perhaps worth, since both originals were the property of other publishers, who would automatically own publication rights in any arrangement. Stravinsky, naturally enough, was more interested in their practical creative value. The Concertino, especially, is no simple transcription, but a typically inventive piece of rewriting which makes capital out of unexpected aspects of the quartet movement.60 Though not particularly likable as sound and arguably, for a short piece, too kaleidoscopic in coloring, it nicely symbolizes its composer’s abiding creative energy and opportunism, and it sounds as if the task gave him pleasure.

  Stravinsky chose the scoring from the instruments needed for a Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concert he had agreed to conduct in the autumn, and in which he had decided to include his new songs and the old Octet.61 So the Concertino is linked to the evolving shape of the songbook, and Stravinsky worked on them side by side. A fortnight after Palmdale he rewrote “Westron winde” as a duet for the two voices (mezzo-soprano and tenor) that he now needed for the other songs, and then, after his postponed Mexican tour in the last week of the month, he scored “The maidens came” for flutes, oboes, and a cello, as in the carol. At last he was beginning to make sense of what he was writing. He was soon telling Craft that the vocal pieces would be interspersed with a series of instrumental chorales.62 Later, the chorales themselves became vocal. The work would be a semi-sacred Cantata about death and rebirth, love and the seasons, with the long carol, or “Sacred History,” at its center, and braced at its four “corners” by verses of the “Lyke-wake Dirge” composed for a small female choir. Thus Christ’s Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection would be framed by the recurrent memento mori of “This ae nighte,” like the panels of a Last Judgment or a Romanesque arch with Christ in Glory surrounded by human souls in various states of redemption or damnation. And as so often in late medieval work, the beauty and simplicity of the conception would conceal an immense intricacy and even cerebration in the craftsmanship.

  On Palm Sunday, the 13th of April, the grateful composer presented Craft with a manuscript page from “The maidens came,” the exquisite wedding piece out of which the Cantata had sprung, inscribing it “To Bob whom I lob.”63

  And through the glasse window

  Shines the sone.

  How shuld I love and I so young?

  The next day Craft himself conducted another Schoenberg score, the Serenade, op. 24, a work that passingly resembles the Cantata in some formal respects, having seven movements with a serial vocal movement (a setting of a Petrarch sonnet) at its center. That Saturday, the 19th, Stravinsky completed his arrangement of the Concertino. For him, the Easter Vigil had, that year, a special significance.

  19

  COUNT ONE, COUNT TWO, COUNT TWELVE

  WHILE STRAVINSKY had been engaged in a struggle with his artistic identity, Nicolas Nabokov had been doing battle with the more tangible, but in some ways no less slippery, bureaucracy of the Parisian musical world over the question of the French premiere of the Rake. At the Opéra there was the usual problem of knowing who exactly was in charge and what were his true intentions. Maurice Lehmann, the director, had an exclusive agreement with Boosey and Hawkes for the French premiere, which would expire in July 1952, and this seemed to be in Nabokov’s favor. But Lehmann wanted Stravinsky to take the baton, while Stravinsky had announced, in December, that for reasons of his own he declined to conduct the Rake in Paris.1 At one point Roth even floated the bizarre idea that he might at least direct one act.2 Then Stravinsky changed his mind and agreed to conduct the whole opera for the small matter of five thousand dollars.3 Nobody seems to have taken this offer very seriously, and the next idea was that Roger Desormière, a prewar friend of Stravinsky’s and an experienced hand at his music, might conduct instead. Unfortunately Desormière, a card-carrying Communist, seemed unlikely to agree to take part in an anti-Communist event, and it was for the same reason still more doubtful whether Nabokov, or for that matter the Opéra, could engage him. Thus the plan foundered partly on the political question and partly, Roth thought, on Nabokov’s lack of diplomatic subtlety,4 and the Rake was duly postponed, as Nabokov noted with a faint sneer, in favor of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes.5

  Stravinsky was understandably nervous about his Paris appearances, his first anywhere in France since 1938. Paris had never been kind to his music, and now it was as far as he knew the epicenter of a ferocious avant-garde neomodernism which had already made trouble for works of his and of which he had felt disconcerting tremors in the SWF studios in Baden-Baden. That may have been why he had decided to conduct Oedipus Rex rather than The Rite of Spring—of evil Parisian memory, though popular with the modernists—and why he had asked for an old friend, Jean Cocteau, to speak the narrations and design the staging. Cocteau responded in a sympathetic spirit. Although he had invented the original visual concept of Oedipus, he had never seen the work staged, and now his new idea was to replace the static, two-dimensional tableau (with the singers onstage) with a series of tableaux vivants set on a platform behind the orchestra, and revealed and hidden at selected moments by a drop curtain with, as Jean described it, “a rather violent picture painted on it.”6 The tableaux would be presented by a trio of masked dancers, and Cocteau intended to construct the masks himself, with the help of a team of theatrical craftsmen, out of whatever materials came to hand: raffia for the hair, ping-pong balls for Oedipus’s eyes, old cork panelling, discarded photographic lamps, and so forth.7

  What he wanted, he explained to Stravinsky, was a series of aggressive images that nevertheless did not interfere with the music.

  I feel that we should leave to the oratorio its oratorio style. […] The illustration will be no more than allusive, for since the opera isn’t being put on as an opera, it would be a serious mistake to duplicate for the eye the action meant for the ear. […] Your work is of such force that a visual pleonasm cannot be made of it. What is needed is a number of presentations to underline the grandeur with a calm violence. No one could understand better than you how impossible it is for us to acquiesce in the stupidity of an audience to which we are condemned by “galas.”8

  Poor Jean had just come from a society dinner at which the hostess, a maharani, wore “pink veils and fifty million francs’ worth of pearls around her neck.” “It is for this ridiculous public,” he noted in his diary, “that I am preparing the production of Oedipus Rex.”9 But even Stravinsky, while professing a liking for his ideas,10 was slow to understand the degree of detachment he intended between the scenario and the tableaux, which were to follow the oratorio “at a considerable distance.”11 Stravinsky had gathered that the singers would be involved in the tableaux. Had he known the tableaux’ titles—which included “The Sadness of Athena,” “The Sphinx,” “The Oedipus Complex,” and “The Three Jocastas” (mother, wife, and queen)—he would surely have got the point, though he might have been less sure of the effect.12 His incomprehension made Cocteau nervous. “I am still worried,” he noted in mid-April, “about this work for a luxury audience and a theatre booked in advance. Since Stravinsky doesn’t seem to want my tableaux to be used during the oratorio, I will make them coincide with my texts. All I want is to finish this disagreeable work and get away.”13

  After a few days in New York, Stravinsky flew into Paris at Orly on 29 April 1952. He was en route initially for Geneva, where Theodore had persuaded him to attend a production of The Rake’s Progress for which he had made the designs; but there was time at Orly for a program meeting with Nabokov, and Stravinsky also hoped to see Cocteau. “Where’s Jean?” he demanded as he came off the plane.14 But Jean was at Montsouris working on his masks, and Stravinsky flew on to Switzerland without seeing him or them. The Geneva Rake, conducted by Samuel Baud-Bovy, was its French-language premiere, but apart from Cuénod’s Sellem, Craft found it “very provincial [and] underprepared,” and seems once more to have noticed nothing about Theodore’s family except that Kitty’s adoption had recently been completed.15


  The next day they were back in Paris for the CCF festival and attending another sort of premiere, the first French stage performance (by the visiting Vienna State Opera) of Berg’s Wozzeck. Vera noted the event in her diary in big letters,16 but beyond this it is hard to discern the exact character of the impression made on her husband by this great but, one would think, essentially alien masterpiece. When Craft, in his own diary, has Stravinsky praise the apparent spontaneity of a work “compounded of strict formal devices,” one might suspect that it is the diarist speaking, just as the lengthy Berg critique in the Conversations, a few years later, is clearly the writer’s—not the converser’s—work.17 The Stravinskys shared their box that night and dined afterwards with Albert Camus, who—for all his pianist wife—had no ear for the music and insisted on discussing Büchner’s play.18 It was evidently another of those occasions when great men meet and talk because, like Virgil and Dante, great men must meet and talk, or be reported as having talked, in quotable utterances. Camus later, unsuccessfully, tried to interest Stravinsky in a ballet scenario by René Char.19 Nevertheless, Stravinsky did feel intellectually drawn to him, because of his recently published attack on the Stalinist wing of French socialism in L’Homme révolté. “He is the only person in France,” he told Theodore, “who can stand up to Sartre, who has a very powerful brain, but for whom, unfortunately, I have absolutely no sympathy.”20 Whether this kind of issue came up between them, aside from its embodiment in the figures of Wozzeck and his tormentors, we unfortunately do not know.