Stravinsky
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Piovesan had at last managed to produce a draft contract for the Venice commission, and he had turned up in Rome early in April to discuss the finer points. A youngish man, in his mid-forties, courteous, smiling, simple in his manner, he made a very different impression from the slightly condescending, self-important bureaucratic types who tended to be in charge of major events, in Italy as elsewhere. His effectiveness, though, remained to be proven. Curiously, the contract referred to a “Passion according to St. Mark,” but said nothing about its length, perhaps because it had not occurred to those drafting it that a Passion setting could be anything but very long.50 Piovesan must also have raised a doubt over the availability of St. Mark’s, after all, for what would amount to a “profane” concert; and since the acoustical properties of that cavernous and sepulchral building were bound to be a factor in the music Stravinsky composed to be played there, he decided to go straight to Venice to sound out alternatives. Santa Maria della Salute proved too resonant (though not more so, surely, than San Marco itself); the gothic church of the Frari was drier, and you could make out the rapid semiquaver passages of an accompanied motet by Giovanni Croce reasonably well.51 The musicians were laid on by Piovesan, but Stravinsky no doubt indicated what kind of music would provide the best index for his own needs. Croce was a transitional composer—a predecessor of Monteverdi as maestro di capella at St. Mark’s—whose highly sectional motets combine the brilliant modern (that is, Baroque) instrumental style with the more stately Renaissance vocal idiom associated with the double galleries of St. Mark’s. At the very least, Stravinsky was already including Venetian church architecture, and possibly Venetian church music, in his mental image of the new work. Soon he was starting to talk about what Craft calls his “musico-theological-architectural concepts,”52 and it must have been at this moment that the idea of a narrative, English-language Passion finally faded away and was replaced by a more severely exhortatory sequence with Vulgate (Latin) texts.
After concerts in Baden-Baden and Lugano, Stuttgart and Mannheim, with a visit to Webern’s grave at Mittersill in between, they flew back to Los Angeles by the so-called polar route (over Greenland) and arrived home on the 6th of May. Stravinsky at once cast around for texts, and within barely a week he was describing the new work to Roth as a “sacred concerto for soloists, chorus and limited instrumental ensemble, based on the Gospel of St. Mark and fragments of the Old Testament (Psalms).”53 At that month’s Ojai Festival, in his second year as director of music, Craft was conducting Monteverdi’s Vespers, a work well known to musicologists but still at that period very seldom performed, and this time Stravinsky was in the audience, as well as conducting a concert of his own despite severe arthritis in his left leg. By the last week of May, however, they were firmly reinstalled at North Wetherly Drive, and within a fortnight Stravinsky had drafted the short, intonation-like “Dedicatio” for two male voices and three trombones that opens the Canticum sacrum.
22
AN ECHO CHAMBER BY CANDLELIGHT
APART FROM short excursions, Stravinsky scarcely moved from Wetherly Drive throughout the summer and autumn of 1955, and the Canticum sacrum was written without a break during those six months. Domestically, it was not the easiest of times. André Marion, who had been working as his father-in-law’s secretary, had now taken a job in a travel agency, and for a while Stravinsky had to handle routine correspondence on his own. Vera, it seems, had encouraged André to break away, but Igor was annoyed by what he saw as a challenge to his authority, and when Gerald Heard’s companion, Michael Barrie, came one day in July to discuss taking on some of the work, Igor kept him waiting, then brusquely refused to see him.1
It was typical of him that he could see only the inconvenience and—as he imagined—slight to himself in what was in truth a wholly natural bid for independence on André’s part. Igor must have been aware that Marion and Craft, since working together amicably enough on the translation of Theodore’s Message d’Igor Strawinsky three years before, had been getting on less well, whether or not because (as the family automatically assumed) Craft and Vera had been systematically undermining Marion’s position, which—the argument continued—was in some way interpreted as a threat to Craft’s. Such possibilities are, of course, latent in any clash of personalities, but in this case there is no particular evidence that André left for any more sinister reason than the simple desire to better himself.
As ever, Stravinsky, absorbed by the technical aspect of his new score, was able to close his studio door on all such troubles. Before composing the “Dedicatio,” he had worked out a schematic ground-plan recognizably like that of a church—in fact like that of St. Mark’s itself. As Craft himself pointed out in an early article about the Canticum, the five main movements were like the five domes of the basilica.2 You went in through the vestibule (the “Dedicatio”) and then proceeded round the building, passing under the large central dome (alias the three-part middle movement), returning to the exit by way of the first dome, which you experienced of course in the opposite direction.3 The text was even more scrupulously planned. Jesus’s admonition “Go ye into all the world” was answered at the end by St. Mark’s “And they went forth;” at the center were the three virtues—faith, hope, and charity, but in the reverse order—with “Caritas” (spiritual love) preceded by carnal love in the form of a passage from The Song of Songs, and “Faith” followed by the casting out of the Devil: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
Everything about the setting of the opening text, “Euntes in mundum,” was purpose-built for St. Mark’s. The loud choral exclamations with brass semiquavers in the Gabrieli manner were interrupted by soft passages for organ, to let the cathedral’s booming echo clear, and one could imagine the brass players themselves disposed around the famous galleries, even though there is nothing in the music to indicate who would stand where. After writing this brilliant piece in June, Stravinsky then spent the first part of July working on the subtle and intricate tenor aria “Surge aquilo,” from the Song of Songs. For some reason, the enticing poem (“Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits”) inspired in him the desire to write cerebrally. For the first time he composed an entire movement based on a twelve-note row, adopting for the purpose a slightly modified form of the row he had already used in the puckish coda to the “Gaillarde” in Agon, but with strikingly different results. The tenor line exudes sensuality, as well as a certain airiness, almost like Oedipus’s music in the last work Stravinsky had composed to a profane Latin text.
He completed the “Surge aquilo” on 20 July 1955, and three days later they all dined with the Kreneks at their house at Tujunga, an hour away in the far north of Los Angeles. They had recently been seeing Krenek more often than before, enjoying long musical conversations about theoretical matters in which he was expert, especially serial technique, Monteverdi, and the complex polyphonic music of the high Renaissance (he had written a book and an important technical paper on Ockeghem).4 Krenek, a learned, courteous Viennese Jew, would play them tapes of his own latest works, or older pieces he thought would interest Stravinsky, like his prewar opera Karl V or his choral Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, in which he had invented some particularly esoteric rotational procedures that he was at pains to analyze for their benefit. Curiously enough, Stravinsky, who had never liked discussing his own music in analytical terms, seems to have found these sessions stimulating. He even discussed his own work-in-progress with Krenek, if not analytically, at least to the extent of describing the music in general terms or showing him the text. When he talked about his latest cantata, or “sacred concerto,” Krenek at once came up with a suitably ceremonious Latin title: Canticum Sacrum Ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis, which Stravinsky liked so much that he adopted it forthwith.5
After recording the new version of the Russian choruses and the Three Little Songs (with Marilyn Horne) on the 28th, and after a three-day trip to Yosemite at the start of August, he got down to work on th
e tripartite central movement of the Canticum. At this point, the music takes on a significantly new aspect. The energetic and the sensual are alike discarded, in favor of a certain catechistic tone which is already established in the organ solo at the start of “Caritas,” a plain, twelve-note melody of a quite nondescript rhythmic profile and based on a new series. In the same way, the choral setting of the words from Deuteronomy, “Diliges Dominum”—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart”—is like the reading-out of school regulations: strict, unmodulated, and with a strong sense of the difficulty of things. The expression relaxes a little in the two later sections, “Spes” and “Fides,” but so to speak under the same rubric: always the organ solo warning us of serious matters and the vocal lines constrained by the necessity of good order.
These three short pieces, jointly titled “Exhortations to the Three Virtues,” are the first music Stravinsky composed in which one is strongly conscious of the influence of Webern, and on the whole it must be said that the effect is inhibiting, even though there is little trace of a Webern sound as such. It is the severe, relentless way of working, and the hesitant rhythmic design, that derive from the most recondite of the three masters of the so-called Second Viennese School. Webern was much in evidence at North Wetherly Drive these days. Craft was steadily recording his way through the whole oeuvre, and Stravinsky would sit in on rehearsals and studio sessions and sometimes help with the editing. Moreover, the tenth anniversary of Webern’s death was coming up in September, and Stravinsky had recently penned a short but glowing tribute by way of foreword to a special Webern issue of the Universal Edition house magazine, Die Reihe. “We must hail not only this great composer, but also a real hero,” he had written. “Doomed to a total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge.”6 Considering that Stravinsky himself had figured prominently in that “deaf world of ignorance and indifference,” this must count as one of the most bizarre voltes-faces in music history, as if Brahms had suddenly announced in 1885 that Wagner was a misunderstood genius and had started composing music dramas.
Like Berg, Webern had been an early pupil of Schoenberg in Vienna, and when Schoenberg had begun writing serial music in the early twenties, Webern had soon followed him—had even preceded him in certain respects. But whereas Schoenberg and Berg never wholly broke with their expressionist past but went on writing a music of the long phrase and the agonized gesture, Webern was drawn farther and farther into a black hole of esoteric serialism, in which every gesture was compressed to an extreme, every phrase rationalized, every note given weight in a highly attenuated sound-space. After the war, when progressive young composers were looking for a rational, contained answer to the chaos in which most of them had grown up, Webern’s compact, highly organized, emotionally inscrutable late works shone for them like a beacon in the darkness, and it certainly did no harm to his image that these works were almost wholly unknown outside a small circle of friends and initiates, that they lacked every imaginable ingredient of popularity, and that their composer had been shot dead at Mittersill by a trigger-happy American sentry four months after the end of the European war. For a young conductor of Craft’s predilections, Webern was at once a cause and an opportunity. Nobody knew or cared about his music; Craft loved it and would make it known. His Los Angeles performances were nearly all West Coast—and in some cases U.S.—premieres, and the recordings he embarked on in 1954 were, in almost every case, the music’s gramophone début. Finally, Webern, like Krenek, had been a student of early music, had edited part of the Choralis Constantinus of Heinrich Isaac (died 1517),7 and so combined in his own work the twin intellectual preoccupations, with the very old and the very new, that were hypermodernism’s answer to the charge that it had abandoned all contact with the past.
Whether it was the spontaneous result of the last two or three years’ exposure to Webern in Craft’s concert programs and recordings, or whether there was any definite pressure from him to study and imitate, is hard to decide. Craft’s own testimony is highly ambiguous. In his diary for 1956 he remarked that nobody “could lead that horse to water, if it didn’t want to go, let alone make it drink”;8 but in an article published long after Stravinsky’s death he claimed to have suffered from Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” “because I had directed Stravinsky. […] for, in truth, every Stravinsky opus, after and including Three Songs from William Shakespeare (1953), was undertaken as a result of discussions between us.”9 Of course, these statements are not quite contradictory, bearing in mind the crucial rider about the horse, “if it didn’t want to go.” Yet if the Canticum sacrum was written in the light of discussions with Craft, then it would be distinctly odd if the question of a Webernian technique had not formed part of those discussions. As for the Die Reihe statement, the only telling evidence that Craft did not simply write it himself might seem to be the strange and irritating grammatical error in the much-quoted final phrase, which ought to read “of whose mines …,” with a double genitive. As we shall see in due course, where Craft is concerned such quibbles are something more than mere pedantic exhortations to linguistic virtue.
Stravinsky completed the third of his own Exhortations, “Fides,” on 30 September, then spent much of October on the so-called “Brevis Motus Cantilenae,” the “help thou mine unbelief” setting for baritone and chorus (which really is quite brief), and the next three weeks after that turning “Euntes in mundum” back-to-front to make the final section of the whole work. He completed this largely mechanical process on 21 November 1955; and having finished the whole work, he was able to confirm what he had already warned Roth to expect—namely that, far from being “thirty to forty minutes” long, the Canticum was barely more than a quarter of an hour of music.10 This was, as Stravinsky knew, a serious discrepancy. Piovesan had almost certainly secured the commission fee by inflating the likely scale of the work, and even at the expected length of thirty minutes he was worried about the shape of the concert and the reaction of city fathers who were quite used to valuing pictures by the square foot, and who moreover were having to curtail the festival budget severely to meet Stravinsky’s demands. Now it turned out that they would be getting only half a canvas, while Stravinsky’s somewhat airy initial solution to the problem of filling the program was simply to perform the new work twice.11 In desperation, Piovesan suggested to Roth that the Maestro might at least consider composing one additional ten-minute movement, and conduct a complete program of his own sacred works, including the Mass and the Symphony of Psalms.12 But the Maestro would have none of either of these ideas. The symphony, he told Roth, would overpower the Canticum sacrum, while the mere thought of performing his Mass as a concert piece in a Catholic church had suddenly become anathema to him.13 As for extending the Canticum, that was obviously impossible on artistic grounds, but in case Piovesan should start making insinuations about the amount of work that had gone into its writing, he advised Roth not to let him know that the score was finished for at least another four months.14 Meanwhile he had decided to transcribe Bach’s famous organ variations on “Vom Himmel hoch” for the Canticum sacrum orchestra, and this (as he claimed) twenty-five-minute work he was prepared to throw in free of charge.15
For all his unusual niceness, Piovesan was, when all was said and done, an Italian man of the theatre trapped between an autocratic composer and an army of soulless and wily bureaucrats. “One will have to talk to him carefully,” Roth said, “because he is a bit of a showman,” knowing that, as with the Rake, he was the one who would have to do most of the talking.16 So off he duly set for Venice in January 1956, hoping to pacify Piovesan as he had once pacified Ghiringhelli. But to his surprise Piovesan pleaded illness, like an opera star, and refused to see him.17 Obviously, Roth told Stravinsky, he is very upset—a deduction that, by this time, the composer was well able to make for himself. “Am in a situation I hope w
ill never be repeated,” Piovesan had wired melodramatically to Roth,18 and Stravinsky realized that the time had come for some further gesture on his part. With breathtaking pomposity, and not a little disingenuity, he chided Piovesan for entertaining unreasonable expectations:
If you and your organization ever expected a substantially longer piece it shouldn’t have been commissioned from me at this time because the contrapuntal line of my music today—which is by no means an unknown fact—makes it a must to keep the duration of a composition strictly within rigid limits. This is due to the requirements and possibilities of the human ear and because this kind of music is of the densest kind. This incidentally means also that it is the one which takes the hardest work to compose. To illustrate my point I will refer you to the works of Schoenberg, Webern, etc.19
He nevertheless offered to accept a reduced honorarium of ten thousand dollars, and to waive his conducting fee, concessions that clearly show that he was aware of some element of chicanery on his own part. “I do not believe,” Piovesan responded ambiguously through Roth, “that there is any proposal capable of changing the course of events.” He admitted that no duration had been specified in the contract; but if Stravinsky refused to include his Mass, he—Piovesan—could also be awkward about the inclusion of a motet by Gesualdo, a disreputable Neapolitan composer whom the Venetians could hardly be expected to welcome on so important a program in their cathedral.20 And, rather grandly, he ignored Stravinsky’s offer, instead announcing (prematurely, as it transpired) that the first half of the contracted twelve thousand dollars had now, in late February, been paid into the composer’s bank.21