Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  He was in hospital for ten days, but weak for much longer, and he could scarcely work for another month. He may have toyed with the Shakespeare song, or contemplated another one or two. He looked at the score of Britten’s Gloriana (sent at his request by Lesley Boosey), interested above all, no doubt, in its word-setting.29 He went to a lecture by Gerald Heard on the concept of “abandon,” lunched with Isherwood, dined with Huxley and his tame fakir, Tara Bey, and went to a Walton concert in the Hollywood Bowl.30 It was all a curious cross-section of expatriate West Coast Englishry. Meanwhile he was informing his British publisher, Ernst Roth, that “I will never go to either Vienna or Berlin for reasons you may guess.”31 Roth did not have to guess the reasons. He knew perfectly well that Stravinsky was terrified of being stranded on the wrong edge of civilization in the event of war or revolution, still widely expected in those tense years of the Cold War. However much they might dislike Hollywood (and Vera, especially, detested it), they felt safe there; for them, it was the right edge.

  Then suddenly at the end of August, practically on the same day, the question of commissions began to unravel. On the 26th Stravinsky wrote again to Dylan Thomas. He explained that he would not know about the Boston money until the autumn, but suggested that they might discreetly start work in any case, then if the Boston deal went through they would be under way, and if it did not, they would have something to sell elsewhere. He urged Dylan to come to Hollywood as soon as possible.32 However, the very next day, a letter arrived from Lincoln Kirstein, who had at last found the money (from the Rockefeller Foundation) to pay for a ballet commission. He could offer ten thousand dollars for a work up to forty-five minutes long, and he was again promoting the idea of an Apollo sequel: “Apollo Architectons: builder of shelters and bridges.”33 Without hesitation, Stravinsky accepted this new commission in principle, and asked for more details about the subject: “The title is not enough for me to start with. […] The reason for my insisting on this is that I want to start working on this ballet right away instead of starting on some more intricate projects which can wait.”34 Then a mere twenty-four hours later he wrote again. He had now decided that the Apollo-Orpheus-Apollo idea imposed too slow a prevailing tempo for an evening’s ballet, and instead he suggested a completely different program made up of Scènes de ballet and Pulcinella, with, in between, the new ballet, for which he now put forward the Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey, exactly as originally proposed by Powell for their film collaboration with Dylan Thomas.35

  Behind this mild duplicitousness, there plainly lurked some anxiety about his own Thomas project. Dylan had never replied to his June letter, the Boston money was uncertain, and, whatever he might say to Dylan about having “something of our own to produce and for which we should well be able to find an underwriter,” he had no intention of embarking on a two-year operatic project—as he knew it would be—without some kind of advance money.36 This was precisely the reef on which Delia had foundered. Then again there was the question of health. He was too soon out of hospital not to remember that Dylan himself had not looked well, had complained of gout and doctors, famously had a drink problem, and had subsequently fallen downstairs and broken his arm. Obviously the composer’s safest tactic was to accept the Kirstein commission, which he could count on, and assume that, even if the Boston money were forthcoming, he would have to wait for the libretto, by which time the new ballet would be well in hand and its completion foreseeable.

  The question of subject, though, was not so easily resolved. Neither Kirstein nor Balanchine liked the Nausicaa idea. It had charm but no outcome, since once Odysseus has been welcomed by Nausicaa’s father, Alcinous, the princess herself fades out of the story. On the other hand Balanchine’s own ideas were becoming more and more grandiose. He wanted, Kirstein reported, “a ballet which would seem to be the enormous finale of a ballet to end all the ballets the world has ever seen.” One version of this might be “a competition before the gods; the audience are statues; the gods are tired and old; the dancers re-animate them by a series of historic dances, […] courante, bransle, passepied, rigaudon, menuet, etc. etc. It is as if time called the tune, and the dances which began quite simply in the sixteenth century took fire in the twentieth and exploded.”37 To back up this idea, Kirstein was sending a copy of a recent critical edition of de Lauze’s seventeenth-century dance manual, Apologie de la danse, which included music examples by the contemporary theorist Marin Mersenne.38 None of this met Stravinsky’s need for precise specifications, those limitations which, he told Kirstein, “generate the form.” So instead he simply washed his hands of subject, and decided to compose a “‘Concerto for the dance’ for which George will create a matching choreographic construction.”39 Nevertheless, many details of Balanchine’s idea stuck in his mind and in due course found their reflection, suitably transformed, in the new ballet.

  Still he could not start work. For one thing, he was writing two more Shakespeare settings, this time of songs from the plays, which, as before, he found in the Auden anthology: “When dasies pied” (from Love’s Labour’s Lost) and “Full fadom five” (from The Tempest). These he completed on 6 October. For another thing, he had by no means given up on the Thomas project. Dylan had eventually written from Laugharne on 22 September that he would be in New York in the second half of October and could come to Hollywood at the end of that month, but that he had no money to pay for the West Coast trip. “I’ll have to work these things out the best I can,” he added disingenuously, “and I mustn’t bother you with them now. […] The main thing, I know, is for me to get to you as soon as possible, so that we can begin—well, so that we can begin, whatever it will turn out to be. I’ve been thinking an awful lot about it.”40 Stravinsky, who had already started extending his house precisely to accommodate essential guests like Thomas, promptly offered to fix him reading engagements to help pay his fare. “I am as eager as you are,” he insisted, “to actually see ‘our’ (yes) work started.”41 Yet Thomas still seems privately to have been shy about the project. In any case he did not, as promised, write from New York when he arrived there on the 20th of October. A week later, having heard nothing, Stravinsky wrote again, pressing him to come and as good as promising him reading dates to cover the fare. “You know,” he added, “that you will be my guest here and therefore you do not have to worry about your living expenses. Do come, the weather is beautiful, too much maybe … we live in short sleeves … Please drop me a line.”42

  Stravinsky was not to know that the real reason that Dylan had not written from New York was that he was ill. Since arriving there, he had been leading his usual irregular life, with too little food and sleep, and from time to time too much drink. But the long-accepted theory that he was destroying himself with alcohol is, as we saw, no longer tenable. The likely cause of his illness was diabetes, untreated for many years, and aggravated by increasing injections of cortisone and (later) morphine, and by regular doses of benzedrine, prescribed for alcoholism and supposed delirium tremens by his “Dr. Feelgood” (the sinisterly named Milton Darwin Feltenstein), and all counterindicated for diabetics. Early on 5 November 1953, Dylan was brought into St. Vincent’s Hospital in a coma apparently induced by a huge intake of whisky the previous night, but in fact probably the direct result of a series of morphine injections administered by Feltenstein later on the 4th. Four days later he died, without regaining consciousness, and with his wife, Caitlin, still trying to talk her way out of the mental institution to which she had been committed when she had turned violent and hysterical at his bedside the previous day.43

  The news reached Wetherly Drive within little more than an hour by telegram from a London newspaper seeking a tribute from Stravinsky, whose plan to collaborate with Thomas was widely known despite the poet’s promise a mere seven weeks before “not to tell anyone about it.”44 Stravinsky went into his studio, closed the door, and wept.45

  HE HAD already started planning his new ballet, but had as yet sketched no music. On 1
9 October Craft had conducted the Roof concert of so-called Stravinsky jazz, including Ragtime with piano instead of cimbalom, the new version of the Tango, and the world premiere of the Praeludium “for jazz ensemble,” written in 1937 for something more like a “radio orchestra,” and discreetly revised for this first performance.46 Still not fully recovered from his operation, Stravinsky then promptly went down with flu; and what with this illness, the all-too-brief uncertainty over Thomas, and a four-day tour he had planned with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in mid-November, there was precious little time for concentrated work before he flew to New York with Milène and André just before Christmas. As far as actual composition went, he managed only to sketch a brief fanfare for three trumpets which he may or may not already have envisaged as the ballet’s opening.47 Otherwise the year wound to its close with nothing to show creatively since the completion of the Septet in January, apart from one or two stalled projects, a tiny set of songs, and a few minor revisions. It was his most frustrating year, and his sickliest, since he had left France. Fortunately the auguries for 1954 were better.

  They were in Philadelphia for concerts around Christmas, then returned to New York, where Stravinsky had recordings at the end of January. In between, he conducted the Septet for the first time at Dumbarton Oaks on the 23rd. It seems to have gone down well enough—smartly played by an ensemble that included the clarinettist David Oppenheim and the pianist Ralph Kirkpatrick, now evidently restored to favor after the contretemps in Boston. But not surprisingly the occasion passed without much notice, and it was left to Richard RePass, writing in the British monthly The Musical Times, to point out the work’s importance (as compared, in his opinion, with The Rake’s Progress, which was being revived at the Met that very week amid general apathy). “The septet,” he wrote, “is a fascinating piece of music, full of intricate polyphony and exciting rhythmic effects. Perhaps the most extraordinary side to it is the close resemblance of the style to the twelve-note method of Schönberg …”48 To so much as notice this fact was quite impressive; to admire it was positively prophetic. A few days later, in New York, Stravinsky recorded the work with the same performers under his Columbia contract, adding the Octet and Soldier’s Tale suite for good measure.

  Craft seems to have opted out of this winter’s New York visit partly because he was conducting Roof concerts in mid-January and early February, and partly because he was embarking on a project to record the complete works of Webern for Columbia only ten days after Stravinsky’s return. But a certain pattern is worth remarking. Craft had gone late to New York, missing Cleveland, the previous December, and he had also missed the trip to Cuba and Venezuela in April. On every occasion, Vera had stayed behind with him. The reason, no doubt, was perfectly simple. It boiled down to family. For Igor to travel with Milène and André was a chance to be with them in a way that was not quite possible at home, where André was the secretary and Milène a visitor; and though he disliked travelling alone, needing company and all kinds of attention and support on tour, especially when conducting, he was by no means inseparable from either his wife or his young musical assistant, notwithstanding the impression one might get from the various published chronicles (entirely from the pen or under the editorship of Craft himself).

  The exact situation is admittedly by no means easy to read. Whether by accident or design, Stravinsky’s children flit in and out of Craft’s writings on these early years like tolerated presences but without open hostility, even if certain nuances (especially to do with poor Madubo) show them in a disagreeable light. Such colorings, though, are editorial, the product of attitudes that emerged later. There is no contemporary evidence, in early 1954, that Craft thought poorly of, or was on poor terms with, any of Stravinsky’s children. We cannot, for instance, tell—without sight of an original, authentic text of his diaries—whether the omission of Theodore from the account of the Swiss visit in 1952 was a decision of the diarist or the editor. Nor can we say what was the children’s true attitude to Craft in those years. It would certainly have been strange for them to have had no hostile feelings whatever toward the younger man who had, in a sense, usurped their position in their father’s household. And it would have been equally remarkable if they had viewed with complete equanimity the woman who had displaced their own mother, under circumstances of such atrocious pain and humiliation to her. No doubt their feelings, like so much intense emotion, were confused. They may have both loved and resented Vera, liked and resented Craft; and that complication of sentiments was very likely reciprocated in one form or another. Of only one thing can we be certain: Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft were an axis in their minds. They were that part of their father which, whatever else happened, did not belong to them.

  Stravinsky himself saw little of his children these days except for Milène, who still lived nearby. But the dispersal of his family by no means reduced his patriarchal need of their dependence. Soulima, now firmly settled in Urbana, was slowly rebuilding his concert career but at the age of forty-three had still not fully escaped from his father’s gravitational field. That January he was booked to play the Piano Concerto and Capriccio under Stravinsky’s baton in Chicago. Barely a month before the concert, his father cabled him about an extra date with the same program at Milwaukee, taking it for granted that Soulima would make himself available, and when his son told him that he had a Mozart concert elsewhere, he replied angrily that “you must decide whom you prefer: Mozart or me.” It was a typical piece of emotional blackmail, and Soulima could not resist. He cancelled his Mozart date and played for Stravinsky. But he paid the price. The Mozart engagement was not repeated; there was tension between father and son, and they never again appeared on the concert platform together.49

  Stravinsky not unnaturally considered that securing concert dates for Soulima was the best way of helping him financially. It hardly seems to have crossed his mind that in the long run it might have the opposite effect. Nor did it occur to him to refuse direct fiscal aid when his children asked for it, merely on the grounds that they ought to be supporting themselves. Craft was later inclined to suggest that at such times it was usually Vera who intervened on her stepchildren’s behalf, just as she had (certainly) poured oil on the troubled waters of Theodore’s bank transfers in 1939. But this is at best an oversimplification. When Theodore asked his father for money to build a garage onto his Geneva house in 1952, Stravinsky was forced to refuse, but with unconcealed reluctance, simply because he could not afford it. He was seventy years old, he reminded Theodore, and dependent on conducting—a power that might fail him at any time—to enable him to maintain a “good but modest” standard of living. He was, he said, “sincerely distressed at being unable to fulfil your request.… Please don’t be angry with me, but try and understand my situation.”50 In the end when Theodore persisted, he did send three thousand francs—about a third of the amount Theodore had asked for.51 It was conscience money, and accompanied by mild reproaches, but it seems unlikely that Vera was directly responsible, since she had been in hospital for her thyroid operation, and barely able to talk, for several days.

  Craft’s place in the composer’s affections and budgeting was essentially different from that of his children. He certainly never received a tiny fraction of the fifteen thousand dollars Stravinsky gave to each of his offspring to purchase a house after the war, and he was paid no salary (until much later) for what had gradually evolved into an undivided professional commitment. When he moved into the Baroness’s house, the composer paid half his rent, and since he took all his meals at no. 1260, he had relatively few basic living costs, especially for as long as he could pay his own share of the rent by reading to his increasingly eccentric and decrepit landlady.52 As for pocket money, Stravinsky was constantly trying to wangle paid work for him, just as he had pulled strings for Soulima before the war and continued to do for Theodore after it.53 He would put him forward as a program annotator or translator, and he was even beginning to recommend him as a stand-
in or support conductor.54 When they travelled together, he would pay the young man’s fares and hotel bills, albeit in “steerage” class and often in the cheapest rooms. But any idea that Craft was milking the situation financially would be absurd. Of course he was enjoying a glamorous existence in the shadow of one of the world’s great men and in the company of many others. He was the object of female attention, to which he was far from immune, to put it no more strongly; and he was seeing the world and forming an extraordinary network of social and professional contacts. But by 1953 he was nearly thirty years old; he knew—or suspected—that his privileged position with Stravinsky was making him an object of envy and ridicule; he had no money and no career. It was surely time for him to move on.

  Why did he stay? One part of the answer is that, just when he was weighing up all these factors and seriously thinking of taking to the road, Stravinsky fell ill—so ill, in fact, that few if any of his many doctors would have counted on his living more than another year or two. His prostate operation aged him to the extent that he gave up his daily exercises, lost his speed of foot, and for the first time began to look and behave like a septuagenarian. He was frequently, inexplicably unwell. To leave at that moment, Craft felt, was simply not possible.55 Perhaps he reasoned that his imprisonment would not be indefinitely prolonged. But there was something else as well. The fact was that Stravinsky had come to depend on him, not just emotionally, but musically as well, and this was such an astonishing, flattering, inspiring thing that no young musician with blood in his veins could have dreamt of decamping at that moment without waiting to see how the situation would develop. From the day he had moved to Wetherly Drive, Craft had advised on matters such as the accentuation of English verse (in the Rake and the Cantata), the choice of texts (for the Shakespeare songs), even the technical capabilities of the trumpet—his own instrument. He had talked Stravinsky out of his creative block, had demonstrated serial technique to him, and could legitimately regard the composer’s latest masterpiece, the Septet, as in some measure a product of his own influence. At this very moment, with Dylan Thomas so recently dead and Stravinsky away on the East Coast, Craft had an idea for a commemorative piece based on “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the villanelle Thomas had written when his father was dying in 1951. Early in January 1954 he wrote to Stravinsky in New York, suggesting a setting of the poem for voice and string quartet, and when Stravinsky arrived home at the start of February he set to work almost at once composing exactly the piece the young man had outlined.56 Meanwhile Craft himself was preparing the Three Songs from William Shakespeare with the mezzo-soprano Grace-Lynn Martin for their first performance in a Roof concert on 8 March, a program in which he was also conducting the West Coast premiere of the Septet. On this occasion he would be literally acting as representative of the composer, who was away in Seattle on yet another concert trip with André. It was certainly no exaggeration to say that Stravinsky was coming to depend on his young American assistant.