Stravinsky
Page 43
Two days later, on 5 May, Stravinsky and Cocteau at last met again, for the first time for thirteen years. “He is unchanged,” Cocteau recorded. “As soon as you begin talking to this man, everything is numbers, and disorder ceases.” The two of them dined alone, and Cocteau explained his staging to the composer, with the help of diagrams on the tablecloth. The next day they met again at the theatre, where Cocteau was already rehearsing his three dancers, and Stravinsky started talking about Powell’s idea for a film of the Odyssey, trying to arouse his collaborator’s interest. But Cocteau was wary of the unpredictable degree of commitment involved in such a project.21 Though pleased to hear that Stravinsky had had difficulty getting tickets for his Orphée film in the States, he had become deeply skeptical about popular or indeed fashionable success, and knew that his Oedipus would win him no friends in Paris. He longed to walk out onto the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and instead of the familiar “Spectateurs, vous allez entendre …,” shout, “Poor fools, enjoy your filth. I’m clearing out, and you won’t ever hear from me again.”22 The real trouble was that the Parisian public, like certain types of venomous snake, could sense the artist’s unease in their regard and tended to react accordingly.
In their first week there, thanks to the scope of Nabokov’s festival, the Stravinskys had ample reminders of the factious nature of artistic life in the French capital. A few days after Wozzeck they went to a concert in the Comédie des Champs-Élysées at which Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez played Boulez’s Structures Ia for two pianos. Having already heard Polyphonie X, Stravinsky can hardly have been surprised at the uncompromising complexity and ferocity of this work in which every element—including rhythm, dynamics, and even types of attack and articulation—is serially organized; and from his own past experience, he may actually have felt some sympathy for the composer when a girl in the audience started clapping ironically, a young man leapt across the auditorium, slapped her in the face, and was promptly led away by a policeman.23 The pianists, however, took the whole incident in their stride and carried on playing; there was, Boulez remarked casually to John Cage, “some disturbance of a mildly irritating kind.”24 In fact, the provocation was plainly deliberate, the music’s aggression being logically unconnected with its intellectualism. The next day, by an odd quirk of planning, the Stravinskys found themselves in the main Théâtre des Champs-Élysées listening to Monteux conducting The Rite of Spring, exactly as he had done on another May night thirty-nine years before; but there was no riot, nobody was attacked, and the police were not needed.
There were to be two performances of Oedipus Rex, of which Stravinsky was conducting only the first, on the 19th. The second performance, on the 20th, was under Hans Rosbaud, who, with typical apostolic fervor, was playing it in a double bill with Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Stravinsky, who had wanted to play Oedipus on its own with an interval between the acts, but had been persuaded by Nabokov to add Scènes de ballet as a curtain-raiser, went to Rosbaud’s rehearsal of Erwartung, which he had never heard before, and cordially disliked it.25 Fifteen years later he told Craft that he was pleased at the coupling of Schoenberg’s work with his,26 but as usual with the conversation books (and leaving aside the question of authorship), one has to understand such remarks entirely within their own context. By the sixties, the Stravinsky image was that of a sage of modernism and an omniscient if waspish chronicler of the great trends to which he himself belonged. But in 1952, he would have had good reason not to be so pleased. Rosbaud’s double bill would inevitably attract the young progressives, in respect of whom he was already feeling vulnerable and insecure, leaving him with the “gala” audience so despised by Cocteau, the pashas and maharanis, the princesses and the bankers and the whole international set.
At his performance, everything went reasonably well, the opera (with Léopold Simoneau as Oedipus and Eugenia Zareska as Jocasta) was adequate and well sung, and the production—camp as it was—warmly received apart from some titters, Craft noted, when Cocteau declaimed that “the tableau vivant [for the scene with the Messenger and the Shepherd] represents the Oedipus complex.”27 But if the post-cubist mannerism of Cocteau’s large masks, with their angular ears and noses and popping eyes, pleased the middle-aged art buffs of the first-night audience, for whom cubism and surrealism conjured up memories of the Picasso and Matisse of their youth, they were a provocation to the neomoderns at Rosbaud’s double bill, who had come to hear Erwartung but either to miss or to mock Oedipus Rex after the interval. At one point, when Cocteau rose to narrate, there was an outburst of whistles and boos from the upper regions of the house, and instead of his set speech—and not daring the fantasy rebuke of his dreams—he said, in a voice different from that of the Speaker: “Stravinsky and I have always worked with great respect for the public. We ask for the same respect in return.”28 Then at the end, the booing resumed but was increasingly swamped by the applause, so that Cocteau, from the stage, believed the approval to be in the ascendant, while Craft, in the stalls, was conscious of an unassuaged “war between the claques,” backed up by shouts of “enough of Cocteau.”29 By this time, in any case, Stravinsky himself had long since fled back to his hotel. “I know my way out of this theatre,” he remarked acidly as he left.30
They lingered on in Paris for almost another week. Stravinsky had to conduct an orchestral concert on the 22nd, with Monique Haas playing his Capriccio, and Fred Goldbeck, who was in charge of the chamber music programs of the CCF festival, had booked Craft to conduct Walton’s Façade on the 24th. On their last evening (the 25th) they trooped off dutifully with Nadia Boulanger to the Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire for a concert of musique concrète (music made from manipulations of tape-recorded sounds). According to Craft, they soon retreated to Nadia’s apartment in the rue Ballu for dinner;31 but Stravinsky’s own account suggests a less dismissive reaction.
Endless pieces whose substance was a mélange of sounds and noises.… The participants were professional composers, very antipathetic, and amateurs, “revolutionaries,” rather sympathetic. A lady next to me raged in the intermission, declaring that this “music” was horrible. I had … a great desire to ask her: “But how do you know, Madame?” Was she acquainted with other examples that were not so bad?32
He himself must nevertheless have left Paris the next day (for concerts in Belgium and at the Holland Festival) with mixed feelings about his own position on the European new-music stage. As far as Nabokov’s festival went, he could be satisfied that Oedipus Rex had stood its ground as a major representative of “L’Oeuvre du XXe Siècle.” Yet it was painfully evident that this very “standing” placed it beyond the pale for a whole new generation of young enthusiasts. He was uncomfortably aware that the protests at the second performance were partly directed at his music’s semi-official status, as opposed to the outlandishness and hence progressiveness of Erwartung. Moreover, this confirmed an impression he had formed in Germany the previous autumn that, whatever his prestige as a historic figure and modern-art grandee, he was by way of being regarded as a back number by those who saw postwar music as a new adventure with a minimum of historical baggage. It was horribly likely that the young man who had hit the girl at the Structures concert was also among the whistlers and booers at Oedipus—had perhaps even been one of the rowdies at the Rosenthal concerts seven years before. Igor had not forgotten Souvtchinsky’s worrying enthusiasm for that “talented circle of youngsters, [… the] musical ‘Trotskyites.’”33 In Paris he had avoided Souvtchinsky, mainly for that reason.34 But what if Boulez himself were one of Pyotr Petrovich’s permanent international revolutionaries? It was a distinctly disagreeable thought.
The flight from old Amsterdam to New on the 9th of June was also, paradoxically, a flight from such anxieties. Before leaving America, Stravinsky had ordered a new Buick, the one disadvantage of which was that it had to be collected in Flint, Michigan. So from New York they flew—the three of them plus Alexei Haieff—to Detroit, and the nex
t day they took a taxi to Flint, sixty-five miles to the northwest, where they picked up the Buick and drove off into the northern hinterland of the Midwest. It was another of their long detours round the edge of the United States. On 18 June in Duluth, at the far western end of Lake Superior, they celebrated Stravinsky’s seventieth birthday in a restaurant that served only iced Beaujolais—not necessarily in itself a solecism on a hot summer afternoon in Minnesota, but enough of an irritant, for the claret-loving composer, to provoke one of his most petulant displays of restaurant hostilities.35 From Duluth they drove for a thousand miles along U.S. 2, before cutting north into Canada via the winding and precipitous Going-to-the-Sun Road through Glacier National Park. “I despise mountains,” Stravinsky announced defiantly, “they tell me nothing,” as if by visiting them at all he were posing a question.36 After almost a fortnight of beating the bounds in this fashion, they arrived home on the 29th, and Stravinsky had once again to confront his own anxieties.
Whether because of his Paris experiences or, more probably, because his work on the Cantata was beginning to ferment in his unconscious, he now had a completely new idea for an instrumental piece on which he was desperate to get down to work. It was at this point that he abandoned his intention to write instrumental chorales in the vocal work and decided to deploy the nine verses of the “Lyke-wake Dirge” as a frame for the solo movements that he had already written. The music being the same for every verse (apart from the changing harmonies at the end of each pair), he was able to compose the entire text in a single day. Early that morning, 21 July, a minor earthquake had struck Los Angeles, and several objects in the house were smashed. But Stravinsky’s lyke-wake is an amiable, unapocalyptic, almost neutral piece of writing, studiously evading Whinnymuir and the Brigg o’Dread, and with none of the scurryings and wailings of Britten’s brilliant setting in his Serenade, which Stravinsky told the critic Lawrence Morton he did not know.37 The next day he started to compose the music that was by now at the forefront of his mind, and that he saw as the real way out of his technical and stylistic impasse.
The curious thing about the first movement of this new work, the Septet, is nevertheless that to all outward appearances it reverts to a chamber-instrumental style that had been second nature to him at least since the Dumbarton Oaks concerto of fifteen years earlier. In fact the opening even somewhat resembles the start of that work. It has the same irresistible vitality, the same eventfulness of texture, the same miraculous balance and economy of effort and movement. The only obvious reference to recent experience lies in the choice of instruments. Stravinsky’s Septet, like the one in Schoenberg’s Suite, is grouped round a piano, with a string trio on the one hand, and a wind trio (clarinet, horn, and bassoon in place of Schoenberg’s three clarinets) on the other. There seems no question of any stylistic influence. Schoenberg’s churning, embattled counterpoint is answered by a jolly explosion of rhythmic conversation, and the glowering E-flattish atonality of the Suite is laughed off by Stravinsky’s unabashed key of A minor-major. The music bursts out like water from a broken main. And this ease does seem, for once, to have come easily. The movement, with its deceptive intricacy of inner voicing (including a dazzling little fugue by way of development section) took only just over a fortnight to compose—slow enough for Schoenberg, but quick for Stravinsky, whose speed of production seldom matched that of the resulting music. Four days after finishing it, on the 12th of August, he conducted Soulima in the Capriccio in a poorly rehearsed, mediocrely played Hollywood Bowl concert.38 Then he turned at once to the second movement of his Septet.
In reality, there was more to the first movement than would have met the casual ear. The music is a wonderful example of what Stravinsky later called “a rare form of kleptomania.”39 Without being in the least serial in Schoenberg’s sense, it steals all kinds of device—little melodic imitations, inversions (upside-down copies), augmentations (slowed-down copies)—from the secret drawer of serial technique. For instance, at the very start, the bassoon mimics the clarinet at exactly half speed. The second movement, however, is more systematic. Schoenberg was once again in the air at Wetherly Drive, since Craft had begun rehearsing items for a series of four Evenings on the Roof concerts in his memory, and as before Stravinsky was frequently in attendance. Craft had been explaining something about the application of note-rows, and had written out the series of Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet on a sheet of music manuscript paper. On the other side of the sheet, Stravinsky then devised a series of his own, using the opening of his Septet as a starting point, rather in the way that a schoolboy invents a secret code by writing down his own name then adding the unused letters of the alphabet to make a complete set. The only difference is that Stravinsky, instead of limiting himself to twelve notes, used sixteen; as in the Cantata, he repeated several notes, but in all included only eight of the possible twelve. The resulting “theme” he then proceeded to use as the scaffolding—or ground bass—for the eight variations of his passacaglia second movement.40
From the start, the intention behind this movement was cerebral and methodical, and it took him considerably longer to write. For once there were relatively few distractions, and only one short trip (to Vancouver at the start of October). Craft had moved in April from the Sokolov house into a small house owned by the Baroness d’Erlanger just behind her own home at 1218 North Wetherly Drive, and he was now a mere three minutes’ walk away. He and his explanations, as well as his rehearsals, became part of the landscape of the passacaglia. Yet still the music is not remotely Schoenbergian. The young conductor had shown Stravinsky how Schoenberg used his series to make chords as well as melodies;41 but Stravinsky seems to have been uninterested in that aspect of the method, and his passacaglia is almost entirely made out of superimposed imitative melodies, always with a strong rhythmic profile. With or without its sixteen-note row, it feels much closer to the Bach of the C minor passacaglia, or even The Art of Fugue, than to anything modern and Viennese, while even in its densest passages (such as the seven-part final variation) the lines are invariably distinct, something that certainly cannot always be said of Schoenberg.
The main problem with the Septet, from its composer’s point of view, was the by now all-too-familiar one that it had not been commissioned. Meanwhile, those projects that might have commanded fat advances hung fire. The libretto for Delia had arrived in April, and Craft had read it aloud to Stravinsky; but they had quickly agreed that, money or no money, it was too much of an Elizabethan fantasy to boil down for operatic use.42 As for the proposed new Kirstein work, the New York City Ballet had been in Paris in May, and Stravinsky had conducted the company there in a performance of his Orpheus. But Kirstein was not on the tour, having stayed at home to tend his sick mother. When she died at the end of July, Balanchine wrote to him advising caution in his desire to create new repertoire at too great a pace, and now—as late summer turned to autumn—there was silence on the whole issue.43 The Odyssey film, likewise, seemed to have faded out. Stravinsky had met Harcourt-Smith in Paris and found him as unappealing as his script, but he liked Powell and had enjoyed his films, especially The Red Shoes, which made him feel homesick for Monte Carlo.44 He particularly liked Powell’s idea of a collaboration with Dylan Thomas. But Powell, like Kirstein, had gone quiet. Instead David Adams, who had taken charge of Boosey’s New York office after Betty Bean had—for reasons not known at North Wetherly Drive—been eased out in the spring, was trying to interest Stravinsky in composing music for a one-hour ballet film “about a lonely little window-cleaner,” to be made by a Manhattan advertising agency.45 Balanchine was said, mistakenly, to be involved, and doubtless that was the main reason why Stravinsky did not reject this quaint proposal out of hand. When the mistake was revealed, the project rapidly collapsed.
Early in November, he finished off his passacaglia, and a few days later, on the 11th, he conducted the Cantata, together with the new Concertino arrangement, Danses concertantes and the Pulcinella suite, in a Los Angeles
chamber orchestra concert in Royce Hall. He had gone out of his way to engage strong singers, even to the extent of subsidizing Hugues Cuénod—the brilliant Venice Sellem—to come to the West Coast and sing the long tenor solo.46 The hall was packed and the audience enthusiastic. Yet it was in many ways a puzzling event. Stravinsky seemed to have become so wrapped up in his contrapuntal devices, especially in the long tenor “Ricercar,” that he had most uncharacteristically forgotten about certain elementary practicalities of performance. Not only was the carol relentless and exhausting to sing, but it was tiring and even somewhat tedious to listen to. One critic admitted that “the most invigorating sound I heard was a restive neighbor winding his watch,”47 and even the sympathetic Los Angeles Times critic Albert Goldberg suggested that