Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The composer was booked to conduct the opera himself three months later with student performers of the Boston University Opera Workshop, directed by Sarah Caldwell. But in the intervening weeks there was little time for repose. Immediately after the Met opening, he had a concert in Baltimore (on the 18th), followed by a series with the New York Philharmonic at the end of February. Between recording sessions for the Rake, he coached the New Music Quartet in his own quartet pieces and music by Webern for a private concert at the home of the critic Arthur Berger.80 On the 11th of March they flew back to Los Angeles, where Stravinsky spent several days rewriting the cimbalom part of Renard for piano, for a performance at a Roof concert on the 30th. He naturally felt that, the good cimbalomist being an even rarer animal than the good viola player of orchestral folklore, the work would receive more performances if that instrument were excluded. The curious fact is that Renard has remained a comparative rarity, but Renard with piano almost an extinct species. The mystery of popularity is not so easily reduced to a matter of accessibility.

  The day after the Roof concert, Stravinsky flew to Havana with André, conducted a pair of concerts there in intense heat, then flew on to Caracas for further concerts, before proceeding to Boston via New York. While he was away, a Gordian knot was cut in Hollywood, and Gertrud and Nuria Schoenberg—the composer’s widow and daughter—were invited to dinner by Vera Stravinsky. “This should have happened twenty years ago,” Mrs. Schoenberg remarked, but added that “the fault was not Schoenberg’s and not Stravinsky’s, but that of intermediaries,” a suggestion only partly contradicted by the fact that Vera had deemed it wise to invite them for the first time in Stravinsky’s absence.81

  The Boston Rake involved the composer in his most difficult series of rehearsals for many years, partly because of the inexperience of the students, partly because the two performances—on the 17th and 18th of May—had been double cast. At one point, the tension became so great that he completely lost his temper with the harpsichordist, Ralph Kirkpatrick, who was having difficulty following his beat, and ordered him out of the hall.82 In the end the experience made him ill. In the heat of Havana he had suffered nausea and diarrhea; in New York, on the way to Boston, he had gone down with flu. The first Boston performance nevertheless went extremely well, and Stravinsky was delighted with his idea of transferring the auction scene to the end of the second act—a change that his librettists and Balanchine had opposed. The second performance, however, was insecure or worse, and the next day he was assailed by colitis, promptly cancelled his next concert in Chicago, and retired to his bed at the Sheraton Hotel.

  There, on the 22nd of May, he received an important visitor.

  20

  BRIEF ENCOUNTER

  DYLAN THOMAS had been giving readings and lectures in America on and off for more than three years, but Stravinsky had not set eyes on him. Vera had attended one of his early performances, at Urbana in March 1950, and at about that time Auden had talked enthusiastically about his poetry but despairingly about his physical condition.1 The first suggestion of a collaboration had come from Michael Powell. Powell’s idea of a film version of the Odyssey had survived the Harcourt-Smith project, and by January 1953 was for the moment taking the more specific and contained form of a filmed “tale” (in the manner of Powell’s recent Tales of Hoffman) based on the Nausicaa episode in Homer’s epic.2 The intention was to commission Thomas to write the script, while Stravinsky would compose a prelude, a pair of dances, and perhaps some brief vocal numbers. Stravinsky was delighted with the whole idea, and he wanted Roth (his go-between with Powell) to negotiate a quick deal on exact terms that he communicated to the publisher in mid-January.3 Perhaps his terms were too exact—or too exacting—since he wanted twelve thousand dollars for twelve minutes of chamber-ensemble music, and he wanted to retain the film and television rights. In any case, and for whatever reason, nothing more was ever heard from Powell, who did not have settled financial backing and may, like Billy Rose before him, have expected a less worldly response to his go-ahead ideas from a fellow progressive.

  That spring was exceptionally busy even by Stravinsky’s standards, and by the time he got to Boston in early May he seems to have forgotten all about the film project. Since finishing the Septet, he had been travelling a good deal and in indifferent health, and he had barely even had time to worry about his complete lack of firm commissioned work. Then, out of the blue, Sarah Caldwell suggested that, since he was so impressed with her Boston students, he might consider writing a new opera for them.4 This was an instantly attractive idea; Boston had not balked at his conducting fee, and might not balk at an expensive commission. Craft told Caldwell that Stravinsky would never again write a full-length piece like the Rake, but might well agree to something shorter—something on the scale of the ill-fated Delia. Whom would he want as librettist? Why, who better than Dylan Thomas, the finest living writer of English—or at least of poetic, musical English, the master of the singing, lilting phrase and the resonant polyphony of images? Thomas was in the States and could be traced through his American fixer, the Boston poet and university teacher John Malcolm Brinnin.

  Thomas had been in New York for a month, finishing off Under Milk Wood and taking part in its first public reading, at the Poetry Centre on Lexington Avenue, on 14 May. But he was giving a poetry reading at Amherst on the 20th, and he came on to stay with Brinnin in Boston the next day. On the 21st Caldwell wired him at Brinnin’s with a provisional commission for a libretto to be set by Stravinsky and suggesting that he contact the composer at his Boston hotel. The following morning, Thomas duly presented himself in Stravinsky’s suite at the Sheraton.5

  Stravinsky, still suffering from colitis, received him in bed, and there was some awkwardness due to what seemed to be nervousness on Thomas’s part and a determination not to allow himself to be bracketed, on either literary or sexual grounds, with the other British writers the composer said he knew. Auden he admired, and he spoke well of the Rake libretto but regretted its wordiness and overuse of verbal conceits. He recited Yeats, “the greatest lyric poet since Shakespeare.”6 Stravinsky gave him a tumbler of scotch, which in Craft’s opinion relaxed him, and he began to talk about his ideas for a libretto—ideas which, curiously enough, were already in a fair state of development. Apparently there were two distinct concepts, though he elaborated only one of them, which was based on the idea of a new creation of the world by “the only man and woman alive on earth.” He described it in detail to Brinnin later.

  These creatures might be visitors from outer space who, by some cosmic mischance, find themselves on an earth recently devastated and silenced by global warfare; or they might be earthlings who somehow have survived an atomic miscalculation. In either case, they would re-experience the whole awakening life of aboriginal man. They would make a new cosmogony. Confronted with a tree pushing its way upward out of radioactive dust, they would have to name it, and learn its uses, and then proceed to find names and a definition for everything on earth. The landscape would be fantastic—everything shaped and coloured by the dreams of primitive man—and even the rocks and trees would sing.7

  Stravinsky liked the idea and promptly invited Thomas to visit him in Hollywood in the autumn to work it out more fully. No doubt he noticed how the prehistoric theme seemed tailor-made for the composer of The Rite of Spring, even though Dylan can hardly have expected a reversion to any such idiom.8 Stravinsky may also have sensed the biblical connotations: the resonances of Genesis, the casting out of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood. As for Dylan himself, he was working himself into an excited state, about the subject, about working with Stravinsky, about the money he would earn. Back in Brinnin’s apartment, he prowled around the room, chain-smoking, outlining the project, his imagination on fire.9 That day or the day after he wrote to his wife, Caitlin, in lyrical terms about the collaboration. “We can get a boat from London, direct but slow, to San Francisco, & then fly to Los Angeles in an hour or so. Outside Holly
wood, in a huge easy house in the hills, we’re to stay for the month with Stravinsky. I’ve seen him, just now, in Boston, and we’ve thought of an opera and it is—for me—so simple that the libretto can be written in the time we’re there. That’s not just optimistic: it can, & will be.”10

  Many years later, Craft maintained that he had felt from the moment Thomas walked into the Stravinskys’ room that there would be no collaboration.11 Unfortunately his various descriptions of the meeting are bedevilled by hindsight and a familiar penchant for the editorialized reminiscence. Thomas, he reports in one account, had his left arm in a sling.12 Yet not only did Thomas not have his arm in a sling (he broke it a few days later in New York), but Craft never saw him in that condition. As so often where Dylan’s health was concerned, a certain image of the tubby, drunken, red-nosed, cartoon-strip Welshman tends to color the portrait. Another of Craft’s thumbnail sketches suggests that the poet’s edginess portended an attack of delirium tremens, kept at bay only by the hair of the dog—the stiff whisky.13 His own explanation that he was tormented by gout is treated as another aspect of the same joke; for the chronic alcoholic, indeed, there is no escape from affectionate ridicule. But we now know that Thomas’s true condition was no better understood by his doctor than by his mythologists, and that when he told Stravinsky that the cure for gout was worse than the disease, he spoke more truly than he knew. The twice-weekly painkilling cortisone injections, combined with increasing doses of morphine, were slowly but surely killing him by aggravating the diabetes that he himself had known about for years but had neglected to mention to his friends or, more especially, to the expensive Manhattan society quack into whose hands he had carelessly if optimistically placed himself.14

  Toward the end of May, Stravinsky and Craft returned to New York, and from there set off on another of their long drives home, this time taking a route through the middle of the United States, via St. Louis, Oklahoma, and Albuquerque, reaching Los Angeles on the 4th of June. While they were on the road, telegrams were flying back and forth between Nicolas Nabokov in Paris and André Marion in Hollywood. Victoria Ocampo had been falsely implicated in an assassination attempt against the Argentine dictator Juan Perón and incarcerated in the women’s prison of Buen Pastor in Buenos Aires. Nabokov was demanding Stravinsky’s signature to a public protest by leading figures in the art world;15 but by the time Stravinsky could get round to expressing his usual cautious attitude to joint protests Mme. Ocampo had been released, though she continued to be harassed by Perón’s agents and for more than two years was refused a passport or any other of the necessary means for foreign travel. When the question arose of her speaking Persephone in Stravinsky’s planned Columbia recording later that summer, the composer was himself doubtful because, as he put it, “[Vera] Zorina is Mrs. Lieberson” (and wanted the part herself),16 but when a Turin performance came up soon afterwards, Ocampo had eventually to refuse because she was “a prisoner in her own country for having committed the crime of thinking freely.”17

  Meanwhile, Dylan Thomas had flown home to Wales and was back in the Boat House at Laugharne, his arm still in a sling, but “thinking a lot about the opera and [having] a number of ideas—good, bad, and chaotic.”18 Whether Stravinsky had any ideas we do not know, but he was undoubtedly eager to pursue the collaboration, and he pressed Thomas to come to California in the early autumn. “If you can accommodate yourself,” he wrote, “on the convertible sofa in our living room—our home is rather small unfortunately—you will be our most welcomed guest and you and I could work out something very authentic.”19 So much for the huge easy house in the hills. Unfortunately, Boston University was needing time to raise the necessary funds for the commission, and at the end of June Stravinsky wrote encouragingly to the music faculty agreeing to wait until November for the final decision, and insisting that “we will not deliver a work involving an outrageously expensive staging (not another Aida, for example). We can be committed to deliver a work whose production will require only a limited chamber ensemble, a limited number of characters and small chorus numbers. It might eventually be possible to quantify all this in the agreement.”20 Thus the parameters for the work were laid down by the composer himself, almost as a factor in the negotiations. That he was desperately anxious to secure the commission cannot seriously be doubted.

  All the same, he could not start without a libretto, and in any case the colonic pains of which he had recently been complaining had now been diagnosed as prostatic in origin, and he was booked into the Good Samaritan Hospital for a prostatectomy in late July. Such an operation stands like a wall blocking out the future. So instead of starting anything substantial, he was casting around for casual work to occupy the coming weeks. He had already, during June, been tinkering with finished scores. He had written a band arrangement of the Tango (a piece originally meant as a song with band accompaniment), to go in a concert of his so-called jazz music planned for the Roof autumn season, and he had made a piano duet version of the Septet, apparently for no better (or worse) reason than to enable him to play it with Craft, as he had always in the past played four-hands with Soulima.21 It may have been the Tango instrumentation, which included a guitar, that gave him the idea of arranging a pair of his old Russian songs—“The Drake” and “Sektantskaya,” both from the 1919 set—with accompaniment for that instrument. Or it may have been Craft’s suggestion. Vera had recently bought a guitar and was learning to play it, and no doubt its technique and peculiarly soft, intimate sonority were the subject of discussion at North Wetherly Drive. Early in July, Craft drew Stravinsky’s attention to the first of the Shakespeare sonnets in Poets of the English Language, “Musick to heare,” and suggested he make a setting for soprano with flute, harp, and guitar. Barely two weeks later, the new song had been composed—but for mezzo-soprano, with flute, clarinet, and viola—and the arrangement of the two Russian songs sketched, for the ensemble proposed by Craft.22

  The Shakespeare song is a curious little exercise in pocket-serialism for the voice. When Schoenberg or Webern wrote for voice, they habitually treated it as a virtuoso instrument that could be “played” like a clarinet or a violin. But Stravinsky was fascinated, as ever, by the instrument’s particular limitations; and he was sensitive, as he always claimed, to the exact quality of melodic intervals and to the tendency of singers to be vague about the pitch of a note if they were not given proper clues. It was precisely for this reason that he had insisted on writing an accompanied Mass, which could therefore not be used in the Orthodox liturgy. In the same way “Musick to heare” is serial, but never at all atonal. The series has only four notes and is clearly in G major-minor (just as the Septet had been in A minor-major). The accompaniment apes discreetly the typically jagged outlines of Webern; but they are a mask for tonal figures that have nothing to do with serialism or expressionism or any of the other isms of the Second Viennese School. Viola and clarinet split up a C major scale between them; the singer performs some modest, ladylike zigzags; and every line of the song ends on a nice clean open fifth, like a piano tuner checking his temperament. Whatever Stravinsky thought of Schoenberg’s method, it is quite obvious from this unpretentious piece that he had no interest at all in his style.

  On the 23rd of July, a week after showing Craft the completed draft of “Musick to heare,” Stravinsky went into hospital for his operation. He was understandably frightened of it, and though clinically it went well, it left him, according to Craft, perceptibly older and slower, less sure on his feet, and for some time subject to dizzy spells.23 It also made him unreasonably bad-tempered. A fortnight before the operation, the question had come up of his old article about Diaghilev, ghosted by Nouvel back in the mid-thirties, never published in its original French, but now being considered for publication by Atlantic Monthly, for a fee of five hundred dollars, in an English translation that Mercedes de Acosta had made in 1946. The journal was hoping to persuade Stravinsky to extend the article by answering a series of questions, but when
Stravinsky offered to write the extra pages himself in return for a net five hundred, and Mercedes pointed out that this would leave nothing for either her (as translator) or her agent, Stravinsky dug in his heels and returned the article unextended.24

  It was the day he was being admitted to Good Samaritan, but Mercedes knew nothing of all that, and she was not one to take such petty meannesses lying down. She wrote a direct and reproachful reply,25 and only a few days later, having heard about the prostatectomy from Natasha Nabokov, wrote again to Vera, asking her to explain the situation to her husband, but refusing to give in on what she called Igor’s “very bad habit of always considering only himself when money is concerned.”26 Stravinsky was furious. “Read your letter to Vera,” he wired back. “Let Atlantic Monthly take article as is for 400 and let me not hear of it any more because my time costs more than what they can ever pay.”27 The article duly appeared, without addition, as “The Diaghilev I Knew,” in the November Atlantic. But it seems doubtful whether Stravinsky ever quite forgave Mercedes her sharp character analysis, and though she and Vera stayed in touch, the only subsequent communications from Igor were grumbles to do with royalties in the original French text, which came out in Figaro littéraire soon after the translation.28