Stravinsky completed the setting of “Do not go gentle” on the 14th of March, echoing the severe rhyme scheme of the villanelle with his own strictest piece of serial writing so far. The work has a row of only five notes, but as with Schoenberg repetitions are avoided and the treatment would seem much more “classical” to ears attuned to the Viennese style than anything Stravinsky had written before. The next day, the critic Lawrence Morton, who had taken over the running of the Evenings on the Roof for the next season and was rechristening them the “Monday Evening Concerts,” wrote to him about his complicated plans for the opening program in September, which was to be a Dylan Thomas memorial.57 Stravinsky’s tribute would be done, but also a Bach cantata and a series of early baroque works including a repeat performance of Schütz’s “Fili mi, Absalon,” with its highly structured accompaniment for four trombones—a piece that Craft had recently conducted in a Roof concert. Having set the son’s admonition to his dying father, Igor liked the idea of matching King David’s lament for his son with a solemn dirge of his own for the same four trombones. So on the 21st of March he composed the “Dirge-Canons,” as he called them, for trombones and string quartet, using the same series as for the song and placing them as a prelude.
Four days later he and Vera took off for New York, this time with Milène and André as well as Craft in tow, on the first stage of a two-and-a-half-month European tour, their third in less than four years.
21
COMPETITION OF THE GODS
AFTER THE SPECTACULAR success of his Paris festival in 1952, Nicolas Nabokov had been enthusiastically planning a sequel to take place in Rome eighteen months later, in the autumn of 1953. The focus was broadly the same: “Music in Our Time.” But to lend it intellectual credibility (and no doubt to open a few additional purses), he was attaching it to a conference with the modest title “The Situation of Music in the Twentieth Century.” Stravinsky, he optimistically hoped, might accept the presidency of the Advisory Board, and would participate in discussions, perhaps give a talk, as well as conduct performances of his works.1 Such a hope was naturally the purest fantasy. Stravinsky would only agree to be president if there were no duties, and he would only come at all if he could arrange a European concert tour.2 The upshot of all this was that Nabokov found himself acting as his friend’s European agent, for which service Stravinsky paid him a commission while contributing little of significance to the Rome festival apart from conducting two fairly conventional orchestral concerts and presenting the prize in the composers’ competition.
The arrangements were dogged by bad luck from the start. In the early stages of planning, Nika’s marriage to Patricia Blake collapsed.3 Then, when he postponed the festival to April 1954, he ran into difficulties with the Italian authorities over the programming of concerts in Holy Week. Stravinsky’s first concert—an essentially profane affair framed by Orpheus, the Scènes de ballet, and Firebird—had to be moved at a late stage from 15 April to the 14th because Rome Radio refused to broadcast a secular concert on Maundy Thursday. In general, Roman officialdom proved quite as obstructive as its Parisian counterpart. When Stravinsky and Craft turned up at the Opera for Henze’s Boulevard Solitude in lounge suits rather than dinner jackets, they were refused admittance until Stravinsky revealed his identity, whereupon an exception was made for him but not for Craft. Nabokov did his dignified best, as Festival Director, to overrule the doorman, but when that failed he simply rolled up his sleeves and punched the man in the eye. It was all to no avail. Craft was not admitted, Stravinsky declined to enter without him, and the two of them went back to their hotel with Vera. They thus missed a scandal which, in terms of sheer noise and audience hostility, was fully the equal of a well-remembered riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées forty-one years before.4
Stravinsky had met Henze at the opening reception two or three days earlier, and had asked him about his attitude to serialism and how he had used the technique in his recent work. According to Henze, Stravinsky himself was still unsure about it, and if anything somewhat skeptical. Perhaps he was wary of associating himself too directly, talking to a German composer, with what was still widely regarded as a Germanic way of doing things; and he was certainly cautious about his own standing with the young generation of European progressives, among whom he doubtless numbered Henze, a onetime student of the hated Leibowitz. It was true that he had not yet composed anything with a twelve-note row; but then Henze’s own use of the method was flexible, to put it mildly, and in fact Boulevard Solitude was a roundly eclectic piece with roots in the semipopular theatre of Weill and the allusive atonality of Berg, as Stravinsky will have realized when he heard the second performance (this time overdressed in a dinner jacket) a few nights later.5
There were several other concerts while they were in Rome. They heard Milhaud conduct Satie’s Socrate—a piece whose unvarying gait Stravinsky inevitably found monotonous—and they went to what Craft described as a “dreadful concert” of works by Britten, Prokofiev, and Poulenc, in the Foro Italico.6 In another Foro concert, Craft conducted Stravinsky’s Septet, and in yet another, they heard Peter Racine Fricker’s second violin concerto, and Stravinsky scribbled a warning to his neighbor, Stephen Spender, to “fasten your seat belt.”7 But they spent as much time out of Rome as in it. They went to Frascati, in the Alban Hills, the monster park of the Orsinis at Bomarzo and the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, the Etruscan tombs at Cerveteri, and the gardens at Ninfa.8 They felt at home in Italy, and for a time seriously thought of moving there: according to Craft, who (in memory at least) firmly included himself in these plans, it was as usual Stravinsky’s medical needs that ultimately prevented them from doing so. Being in Rome, with its ancient stones and small trattorias, its vibrant social activity, brought out Vera’s loathing of the trimmed lawns and endless boulevards of faraway Los Angeles, a city in which—as she announced in something more than an undertone at an American Academy reception—“there is no one to talk to.”9
Her husband had to be in Turin for rehearsals of Persephone on the 19th; but while André went with him as secretary and factotum, the others took a slower route by car through Tuscany to Siena, and on to Milan and Lugano, where they arrived in time for Stravinsky’s concert in the Kursaal with the local radio orchestra on the 28th. Oddly enough, Craft’s published diary makes no mention of this parting of ways, and you can also read it without the faintest suspicion that the Marions are anywhere but back home in Beverly Hills. Igor is with Vera and Craft again at the Thyssen collection on the shores of Lake Lugano, and they proceed together by train from Stresa to Geneva, where they are pursued by photographers from Paris-Match. Then, after two nights in Geneva, they are in Baden-Baden for rehearsals and recordings, before flying from Frankfurt via London to New York. Only when a telegram arrives for Vera in London from Igor in Geneva do we realize that there has been another separation; and still there is no hint of the family gathering that is in fact at the heart of the composer’s Genevan stay: the presence together, for the first time in fifteen years, of Stravinsky, Theodore and Denise, Milène and Kitty, together with the son-in-law whom he has never previously so much as seen in the same room with his Swiss son and daughter-in-law.10
Craft had preceded Stravinsky to Baden-Baden for recordings with the Südwestfunk Orchestra on 5 May. Meanwhile Stravinsky was due in Cologne for a concert on the 10th, before himself going on to Baden-Baden to conduct the radio orchestra; but by that time Craft would be on his way back to the American West Coast, where he had been engaged as musical director of the festival at Ojai, a small health resort in the hills north of Los Angeles. What seems mildly curious about these arrangements is that the Europe-loving Vera, instead of continuing the tour with Igor, was travelling back with Craft. It looks as if she either did not want to intrude on her husband’s family party in Geneva, or (more plausibly, since otherwise she could have rejoined him in Cologne) for some reason did not want to travel with André, who would be acting as Stravinsky’s assi
stant for the rest of the trip. The most likely explanation of all, though, is that she was fussing about Craft’s having to look after himself on his own at Ojai. This had evidently annoyed Stravinsky. “Was it worthwhile,” he wrote to her petulantly when he heard that the festival’s production of Apollo (which Craft was due to conduct) had been cancelled because of an injury to the choreographer: “All your bother and worry and rush at the hotel in Rome? What an absurdity. I’m furious, and have been thinking about it since yesterday evening and can’t reconcile myself to it.”11 As for him, he never even reached Cologne. Three days after Craft and Vera had left, he bought a bottle of mouthwash from a Geneva chemist’s shop, gargled with it, and suffered an immediate and violent throat reaction. In fact he was in such pain, and so voiceless, that he promptly cancelled his Cologne concert and postponed his appearance in Baden-Baden. The bottle, it turned out, had been wrongly labelled, and contained formaldehyde.
As chance would have it, André also fell ill in Geneva, and when his father-in-law eventually left for Baden-Baden and, a few days later, London, it was Theodore who went with him.12 The London trip was his first since 1937, and, frankly, he went without enthusiasm, as a gesture to his publisher, in order to conduct a single concert in the Royal Festival Hall and to receive the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. Despite—or because of—the venerable history of that society, the fee of five hundred pounds was (so he calculated) below his normal minimum rate, and would be subject to what he regarded as “outrageous” local taxation.13 But then the British have always regarded their ancient awards as in some sense dishonored by commerce, and Stravinsky was certainly by no means the first great composer, nor probably the last, to discover that veneration and remuneration were, in London, seen as opposites. Nevertheless, on the 27th of May 1954 he solemnly accepted the RPS medal, together with a conductor’s baton with silver handle and tip, said to have been used by Haydn.14 The next day he and Milène flew back to Geneva, collected André, then took off again for Lisbon, where he had concerts on the 5th and 8th of June. It was his first proper visit to the Portuguese capital, and, like many before him, he was charmed by the lightness of its coloring: “light pink, light green, light gray—silver white,” he told Craft.15 “The air is exceptionally transparent,” he reported to Vera, “the colors of the landscape, the sky, the streets, the flowers are extraordinary, as if they had gorged themselves on mescalin—unbelievable.”16
Stravinsky flew into Los Angeles on the 11th in a musically hyperactive state. Craft records that he insisted on a musical evening and that they played a four-hand arrangement of Bach’s Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch.” He also claims to have suggested that Stravinsky transcribe the piece for instrumental ensemble.17 It seems that on the long flight (without the company and stimulus of his musical alter ego) the composer had been trying to organize his creative agenda in his own mind. The Dylan Thomas tribute was still in hand but more or less complete and needing only tidying up, perhaps an additional page or two composed. Then there was the Kirstein ballet—not yet seriously begun, and still somewhat obscure as to its subject matter. To complicate matters, among the letters that awaited him on his return was a commission from the new director of the Venice Biennale, Alessandro Piovesan, for a thirty- to forty-minute choral work to be performed in St. Mark’s Cathedral that coming September (which was plainly absurd) or in 1955.18 But this approach cannot have been entirely unexpected; its musical conditions were too well tailored to Stravinsky’s specific needs and interests not to have been the result of actual discussions with somebody in tune with his current thinking. For instance, Piovesan envisaged the new work as forming the second half of a concert whose first half would contain works by the late-sixteenth-century Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli, conducted by Craft. The letter even referred specifically to “evangelical or biblical texts.” Clearly Piovesan had taken soundings; and his most likely contact, apart from Stravinsky or Craft themselves, was Nabokov.
The idea that Stravinsky may already have been planning a sacred work of some kind is borne out by subsequent events. Within ten days he had accepted Piovesan’s commission, named a fee of twelve thousand dollars (plus three thousand for conducting the premiere), and indicated that only a select group of instruments—not a full orchestra—would be involved.19 Such decisiveness was not quite normal with him. Several months later, while Piovesan was still trying to raise money for the commission, Craft told him that Stravinsky had begun a St. Mark Passion, though when Piovesan mentioned this in a letter to the composer, the reply was evasive.20 In fact the Schütz-like Dirge-Canons in the Thomas memorial piece already suggest a fascination with the sonority of late-Renaissance or early Baroque brass music, of the kind Craft had recently been exploring in Roof programs and was planning to explore further in the memorial concert in September. The days in Rome, the saturation with the sound and atmosphere of Italian churches, the sacral power emanating from the Vatican and St. Peter’s: one can imagine all these as influences on the particular creative image that lay behind the initial conception of the Canticum sacrum.
Meanwhile Stravinsky concentrated on other work. Soon after getting home that June, he completed the In Memoriam Dylan Thomas by adding a second set of Dirge-Canons as a postlude, with the trombones playing the string music from the original set, and the strings the trombone music.21 It was the closest he had yet come to Webern’s practice of eliminating waste by constant reduplication and self-referencing, though there is not much similarity in the actual musical language, which studiously avoids Webern’s way of scattering the melodic line across the different registers like so many flashes on a radar screen. He also worked on a series of arrangements. He completed his flute, harp, and guitar version of the two Russian songs of 1919, then decided (in August) to add “Tilimbom” and “Gusi-Lebedi” (“The ducks, the swans, the geese …”) from the Three Children’s Tales of 1917 to make a new set of Four Songs.22 He rewrote the piano accompaniment of his early Balmont songs (1911) for the same ensemble as he had used in the original version of the Three Japanese Lyrics, and finally made a radical revision of his four Russian women’s choruses—the Podblyudniye—with a completely new accompaniment for four horns.23 The object of these occasionally somewhat curious instrumentations was above all practical. They were designed, at least in thought, to be included in the Monday Evening Concerts, an institution Stravinsky had come to regard with huge affection, especially now that it was being run by his friend Lawrence Morton, and with Craft as one of its regular and most influential conductors. “An organization that puts on a program like that,” he had told Morton after the opening autumn concert in 1953, “is going to be a dedicatee of my next piece,” and he duly honored the promise by dedicating his Shakespeare songs to Peter Yates and the Evenings “as a tribute to their artistic achievement during sixteen seasons of concerts.”24 In particular, the bizarre idea of adding horns to the unaccompanied female voices of the Podblyudniye looks as if it was prompted by the availability of those instruments in the band for Strauss’s early wind suite, which Craft was conducting that coming autumn. Stravinsky told Douglas Gibson at Chester’s that the intention was simply to make the choruses easier to sing.25 Not surprisingly, such arguments cut little ice with his poor, harassed publishers, who were being invited to bring out even less marketable versions of works that they were already hardly able to justify keeping in print in the first place.
As far as the new ballet was concerned, of course, all this was simply so much displacement activity. The project was still suffering, as Stravinsky had so often grumbled in the past, from a shortage of precise specification, since even a dance symphony has to have a form, and that form must depend at least partly on dance criteria. Fortunately, help was at hand. Balanchine was arriving in Los Angeles early in July with the New York City Ballet for a season at the Greek Theatre. He would bring with him the last five thousand dollars of the commission fee, and it would be Stravinsky’s chance to pin him down,
not on subject matter as such, but on questions of dramaturgy and architecture. They met several times, as Stravinsky reported to Kirstein, and “established the whole structure of [the] new ballet.”26 By early August Stravinsky was composing in earnest, and by the 12th they had settled on a title:27 Agon, the Greek for “contest” (the sketches have it in Greek capital letters, with a long “o” (omega), so that the second syllable rhymes with “bone”). One recalls that an early idea for the (or at least a) ballet was Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, but there seems to be no deeper connection. Balanchine’s idea of a contest is on the face of it a highly abstracted, schematic affair involving twelve solo dancers (four male, eight female) in varying combinations whose starting positions are represented by stick men drawn by the composer at appropriate places in the draft plan they drew up together. Balanchine thought of it as “less a struggle or contest than a measured construction in space, demonstrated by moving bodies set to certain patterns or sequences in rhythm and melody.”28
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