Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Perhaps only a musician can appreciate the extreme technical discipline involved in such an experiment. It makes no obvious appeal to anything within the average listener’s range of experience, yet by its very starkness it creates a perfect setting both historically and musically for the old English texts involved. Once again, it would seem, Stravinsky has opened new paths for others to follow.48

  The remark was more perceptive than Goldberg himself knew. Word had somehow got out that Stravinsky was interesting himself in serial devices. More than a week before the premiere, Darius Milhaud had written to enquire: “Is it true you’ve used a twelve-note row? It would interest me a lot to know if this is true, and if so, how you treat it.”49 Strictly, of course, it was not true. The only row in the Cantata was eleven-note and unashamedly tonal, and though its technical apparatus was certainly in part prompted by Schoenberg, Stravinsky himself was far from ready to admit as much openly. A few weeks later, when asked by a New York journalist if it was true that he was “embracing twelve-tone atonal principles,” he replied firmly that “certain twelve-tone things I like, certain I don’t.

  For instance, I have tremendous respect for the discipline imposed on the twelve-tone man. It is a discipline that you find nowhere else. But on the other hand there are too many twelve-tone swindlers working today. […] Not, of course, Schoenberg, Berg or Webern. These are masters, wonderful musicians, luxury composers. But some others do not hear what they are writing.

  This kind of discipline, he added, could easily become a prison.

  Twelve-tone composers have to use the twelve-tones. I can use five, eleven, six—anything I like. I am not obliged to use more. I do as I wish in the scale or mode I prefer. I am also able to work in series, like the atonalists, if I want to. But what is important is that I do not have to.50

  What Goldberg had spotted, however, was that in its essential character the Cantata was simply a continuation of earlier tendencies in Stravinsky’s music with a few new twists. Naturally enough, there was the desire to carry on setting English texts after The Rake’s Progress; but on the other hand, there was an asceticism that harked back to the pre-Rake Stravinsky of the Mass and (though Goldberg did not mention it) Orpheus. He drew attention to the music’s deliberately limited harmonic range, and to its melodic debt to Gregorian chant, and he indicated that the contrapuntal devices were those of music of the same period as the poems, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—a point he may have got from the composer himself, who was letting it be known that he had been studying Heinrich Isaac: “He is my honey, my daily bread. I love him. I study him constantly. And between his musical thinking and writing and my own there is a very close connection.”51 In such company, the work’s serial element hardly seemed worth mentioning at all.

  Esoteric the Cantata may have been, or—as the Daily News critic Mildred Norton put it more candidly—a “mercilessly dull, wholly unleavened essay in boredom,”52 but it turned out to have unexpected power to arouse indignation. The trouble was an unobtrusive line in the sixth of the eleven verses of “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day,” exactly at the halfway point of the poem:

  The Jews on me they made great suit,

  And with me made great variance,

  Because they lov’d darkness rather than light,

  To call my true love to my dance.53

  There must have been some early sign of a wounded reaction to this passage, since Stravinsky promptly wired Boosey and Hawkes: “To avoid biased comments from narrow minded groups necessary state clearly Christian character Cantata adding to Ricercar 2nd parenthetical subtitle quote Sacred History unquote.”54 It was soon evident that such a response was too technical to meet the case, since the Christian character, far from distancing the offense, was exactly its cause. “As one of those who presumably ‘lov’d darkness rather than light,’” wrote one Daily News reader,

  […] I was shocked and offended as a human being, who has not forgotten the voices of the millions of innocents of all creeds and races, choked by the hands of the fanatics and tyrants, who segregated, hated, incited and destroyed through centuries until today.

  If this be “light,” then let me remain in the darkness, and preserve the dignity, endurance, patience and tolerance of my fathers, as well as their faith in a better and more brotherly world. In that spirit I repudiate any work that reflects a bigoted and narrow outlook, and as a musician I am saddened beyond words by the spectacle of a man who—admired as a great composer—has shrunk in his stature to the level of those who kneel in pious devotion, yet hammer still another nail into the bleeding body of Him who died to redeem the world.55

  Stravinsky would no doubt have replied that, in setting a sixteenth-century poem as a “virtual” entity, he should not feel obliged to alter any sentiment or shade of sentiment it contained in order to fit his own views (whatever they may have been in 1952) or the finer feelings of any imaginable listener. The poem had been set many times before and printed without expurgation in countless anthologies, including Auden’s. As Peter Yates wrote a few months later, “I believe that we have hunted anti-semitism far enough through the poems of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound without holding it up for abhorrence in the words of a sixteenth century Anonymous.”56 Yet, so soon after Auschwitz and Dachau, the issue understandably remained, for many, so painful as to cloud reasoned argument and forbid artistic license. Even to a converted Jew, like (presumably) the Daily News correspondent, the line was as much an incitement to pogroms as it was a recrucifixion of Christ, and even the clearheaded Yates had to admit that “the stanza does jar, and I should be happier to see it altered to characterize the nature of the persecutors rather than their race.” In fact, although the East Coast premiere five weeks later kept the authentic text (and duly drew down on the Cantata the anathema of the Jewish paper Congress Weekly57), it was for many years thereafter usually performed in New York with the words modified. Stravinsky seems never to have objected to such alteration, and Richard Taruskin is probably right that in setting it in the first place he scarcely even noticed the offending lines.58

  After the Cantata premiere there was little immediate chance of resuming work on the Septet. The next day, Vera was booked in for a thyroid operation, and although Igor described the surgery to Nabokov as “long rather than serious,”59 she was in hospital for eight days and remained convalescent when Stravinsky set off with André Marion (who was still working as his secretary) for concerts and recordings in Cleveland on 6 December. In Cleveland they had a two-day visit from Soulima, Françoise, and Zizi, looking—as Igor reported to Vera—“very Ladies’ Home Journal in style.”60 Having had nothing much to do with children for twenty-five years (and even then having been well protected against his own), he found his little grandson noisy but fun, as he rushed round the hotel corridors playing cowboys and Indians, talking bad French, and mixing it up with American slang. The Cleveland Orchestra, similarly, he found too noisy and not adept at the “almost chamber-music quality,” as he called it, of the Symphony in C, though the recording he made with them in Severance Hall on the 14th shows at least that this difficult work held relatively few terrors for them on any technical level. On the 15th he and André flew on to New York, and five days later Vera and Craft arrived by train to join them.

  The main purpose of this latest New York visit was to assist in the preparation of the U.S. premiere of The Rake’s Progress, which Fritz Reiner was to conduct at the Met in February. But meanwhile Stravinsky had a concert of his own. On 21 December he conducted New York premieres of the Cantata and the Concertino in Town Hall, again with Cuénod but with Jennie Tourel in place of Marni Nixon, who had sung in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, Stravinsky’s first new concert music for six years attracted a big, highbrow audience, a “turn-out of New York’s musical and intellectual public such as this reporter [Virgil Thomson] has not witnessed in some years.” The reaction, though, was inscrutable. Thomson himself praised the music’s “weight” and “ritual quality,”
but his compliments were full of ifs and buts, and it was evident that he was unsure of the work’s effect. “Its power to move people,” he noted cautiously, “cannot be known yet; it has not been heard enough.” The packed house, he added, “listened with absorption, [but] reserved judgment in its intermission talk.”61

  In the following Sunday’s Tribune, Thomson elaborated on this theme of inscrutability, pointing out that nobody he knew had really warmed to the piece, and yet nobody was prepared to blame Stravinsky for this disconcerting fact. He tried, without much conviction, to explain it by reference to the composer’s past neoclassical work, and he drew a comparison with the Mass, the last new Stravinsky piece to have been heard in Manhattan. What he apparently did not think of doing, curiously enough, was to compare the Cantata with the Rake, which he may not yet have heard but must surely have known from the published score. Almost everything that is stylistically strange about the Cantata—including its fascinating but idiosyncratic wordsetting and its curious “flatness” of harmony and form—is best understood as an attempt to build experimentally on the opera. Its balancing technical intricacies (which Thomson tended to wave away as “gothic ingenuities”) have other origins as well, of course, but are not in themselves at all hard to understand. It is almost as if Thomson, himself the author of works of a studied, agonizing simplicity, wanted to ignore this new complicating aspect of Stravinsky’s music altogether.62

  Stravinsky and Thomson were personally on good terms, though Stravinsky loathed his colleague’s music and had fidgeted his way through Four Saints in Three Acts the previous April (as he had through The Mother of Us All in Boulder in 1948) mainly out of diplomatic expedience. One evening early in Stravinsky’s New York stay, Thomson threw a dinner party in his Chelsea Hotel apartment and invited Stravinsky, and also the young French composer whose Structures he had heard in Paris and whose Polyphonie X Craft had recently conducted at a Roof concert in Los Angeles. Pierre Boulez was in New York with the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. “Everyone,” Boulez later told his biographer Joan Peyser, “waited for the clash between Stravinsky and me because of my past polemics against him.”63 But there is in fact little evidence that Stravinsky knew anything about Boulez’s connection with the Rosenthal disturbances in Paris in 1945. Souvtchinsky had not mentioned his name, and because he had recently been out of touch with Souvtchinsky, Stravinsky was unaware of Boulez’s verbal assaults on his neoclassical music in various articles in the Paris music journal Contrepoints.64 Boulez relates, with a certain pride, that he quarreled at Thomson’s party with the conductor Jean Morel about Carmen, and that Morel left in a huff. Boulez and Stravinsky, on the other hand, got on—Thomson himself recalled—“like comets.”65 “The two of them sat talking on a sofa, in spite of milling guests, for two straight hours.”66 What did they talk about? Perhaps not Structures and surely not The Rake’s Progress (“What ugliness!” Boulez had exploded in a letter to Cage after hearing its premiere on the radio67). The most likely topic was Webern. Boulez was writing a short article about his music for the Tribune by way of introduction to an ISCM all-Webern concert on the 28th of December, and since Stravinsky was now a candid admirer of the most austere of the three modern Viennese masters, there would have been no difficulties on that ground. The Stravinskys duly went to the ISCM concert with Craft (who was uncharacteristically critical, in his diary, of Webern’s obsession with “limitations”: “architecture with no furniture,” he called it68). The irony of the fact that Boulez’s Webern article appeared next to Thomson’s second article about the Cantata would have struck nobody at the time, except perhaps their respective authors.69

  Now twenty-seven, Boulez could be provocative and quarrelsome; he could not let disagreement on what he saw as fundamental issues pass without retaliation. Yet he was susceptible to lifestyle, that element of opulence combined with fine taste that Stravinsky himself had aspired to, as a matter of course, since the early Diaghilev days of automatic first-class travel and bon vivant dining. It was an aspect of Boulez that Cage, who had drawn close to him in an intense correspondence of shared technical and aesthetic ideas, was finding hard to come to terms with. With him, Cage told Joan Peyser, “things had to be exactly where they should be. I was still terribly poor. I wanted to make poverty elegant but Pierre was not interested in that. What he wanted was an excellent richness. Everything had to be exactly right, aesthetically right.”70 But with all these complications, Boulez had one set of irresistible qualities: he was charming, intelligent, and quick. Starved of Gallic urbanity and sophistication behind his West Coast stockade, Stravinsky reacted instinctively to this lively, magnetic, and above all intensely musical Frenchman. The Frenchman was no less attracted. After Stravinsky had left Thomson’s dinner, Boulez stayed on for several hours “in a very excited state,” almost like a man who has just fallen in love.71

  Perhaps not all of Stravinsky’s social life would have impressed the young French composer by its “excellent richness.” On Boxing Day he, Vera, and Craft dined with Auden and Kallman in their decrepit fifth-floor apartment on Seventh Avenue, and Craft noted in detail the squalor of empty bottles and dirty glasses and crockery, and the filth in the bathroom, which disoriented Vera to such an extent that she unthinkingly flushed away a dish of brown liquid that turned out to have been Chester’s chocolate pudding.72 Auden continued to gratify a certain need for the bohemian in Stravinsky, which, all the same, he preferred to keep at a safe distance in the personalities of others. It was his vicarious form of nostalgie de la boue. Yet Auden famously combined lack of physical hygiene with a mental, moral purity that at times approached the old-maidish. A few weeks after the Christmas dinner, he walked out of Pal Joey in disgust at its bawdiness. “There are three cardinal rules,” he would say: “don’t take somebody else’s boyfriend unless you’ve been specifically invited to do so, don’t take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.”73

  STRAVINSKY began sitting in on rehearsals for the Rake early in January, but he was so stimulated by his meeting with Boulez that he broke his normal habit of not composing in hotel bedrooms and got to work on the finale of his Septet—already begun at home in November during Vera’s thyroid crisis. The piece was a gigue, like the finale of Schoenberg’s Suite and beyond question intended as a sort of answer to that movement. For Stravinsky, a gigue had to dance, and Schoenberg’s didn’t. From the first notes of the viola’s opening theme, the music pulsates with an energy and a vibrancy of rhythm and color that utterly belie the fact that from start to finish it is composed in strict fugal style, complete with an inversion of the fugue at the halfway mark (like the ones in Beethoven’s late A-flat piano sonata and Stravinsky’s own two-piano concerto) and a double fugue by augmentation—that is with a second, half-speed fugue on top of the original quick one—by way of coda. The music is admittedly not serial (though it well could be). Instead it uses a “repertoire” of notes—in effect an unordered set—derived from the eight different notes of the sixteen-note row in the passacaglia, which supplies whatever melodic and harmonic unity a movement of such irresistible impetus needs. Luckily, the music made out of these devices is a great deal less arid, hugely more exciting, than the mere description of the devices themselves. It invites direct comparison with Bach, who, of all great contrapuntalists, was able to make fugues leap with joy.

  Stravinsky completed the Septet on the 21st of January, by which time he had been attending Rake rehearsals for a fortnight. Fritz Reiner was one of the few conductors whom he unreservedly respected, and while Reiner had been the natural choice to conduct the Rake, since he was the Met’s musical director and a Stravinsky enthusiast, it was a choice that the composer had strongly urged. Working with him, however, was not always a comfortable experience. At rehearsal, Reiner could be irritable and even downright rude, and at one point, Craft reports, he as good as told Stravinsky to shut up.74 This was certainly not an injunction Stravinsky was likely to heed for long. When
orchestral rehearsals began, the composer “admonished Reiner to make the orchestra play more softly and with shorter note values,”75 which is exactly what he had told the Cleveland Orchestra at his own December rehearsals, as a surviving recording shows. Stravinsky would sit immediately behind Reiner and from time to time interrupt.76 Several months after the premiere, Esquire ran an account by Martin Mayer of the recording sessions that Stravinsky conducted (with the Met cast) in early March, which alleged that “Stravinsky himself came across the continent to quarrel with conductor Fritz Reiner about the proper way to perform the music,” a suggestion that so upset the composer that he sent a specific disclaimer to the editor (and to Reiner himself). “I never,” he insisted, “approached my work with him in a quarrelling spirit and—on the contrary—all decisions made by him always met with my full support. And I am glad to add that all his ideas and suggestions proved in the light of the experience to have been master-minded by one of the most talented conductors of our time.”77

  All the same, Mayer’s observation that Stravinsky liked the recording better than the production was probably accurate. The Met staging, by Balanchine with designs by Horace Armistead, was stolid and conventional, and it clearly reflected Balanchine’s feeling that the stage was too large and the acoustics too gross for the work.78 To fill the space, he felt obliged to use a bigger chorus and more ostentatious choreography than the opera called for, while Reiner had doubled up the woodwind as well as substituting a piano for Stravinsky’s harpsichord in the recitatives (which, as a matter of fact, Stravinsky himself had also done in Venice). For the recording, of course, Stravinsky restored the correct numbers of woodwind, and the harpsichord. He and Reiner had a stronger cast and a better orchestra than at the Fenice. Yet it can hardly have comforted him to read in the New York Times, the morning after the premiere on 14 February 1953, that the performance came “nearer the ideal representation of the opera than any production the work has received in lyric theatres of European cities,” by way of justifying what amounted to a complete demolition of every musical and dramaturgical aspect of the opera.79 No doubt he reflected that Olin Downes—for it was he—would have demolished the work under whatever circumstances it had been given. The fact that his review betrayed not a shadow of insight into the aesthetic bases of the opera, nor a shred of information as to its background in Stravinsky’s own work, would have seemed proof enough of that.