Stravinsky
Page 50
It was unfortunate, in some ways, that the Canticum had been composed so much in one breath and so far from reality. It had not come easily; quite the opposite, its composition had been an intricate, hardworking process, and for once Stravinsky had lost sight of practicalities. It was clearly true, as he told Piovesan, that his music had become very compressed, whether through the shortwindedness of old age or because of the concentration imposed on him by the serial technique, which he was not yet handling with complete fluency. But events would prove that compression did not inevitably mean brevity, even to a composer in his mid-seventies.
At the same time, the whole issue of the rest of the program showed a similar detachment from reality. The idea that two performances of so severe and forbidding a work in one concert could possibly either compensate the promoters or (more important) please the audience was obviously sheer fantasy. As for the “Venetian” items that Stravinsky had placed at the start of the program (Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Schütz, and the rogue Gesualdo), he clearly had never had any intention of conducting these himself, but always meant to leave them to Craft, who had conducted several programs of such music at recent Monday Evenings. He as good as admitted this later when he explained to Roth that “Craft has a great deal of experience conducting and recording this music, whereas I have none.”22 He had not, however, made this plain at the outset, and Piovesan was understandably annoyed when he found out. Once again he pleaded with Stravinsky to conduct an entire program of his own works, and promised to find an outside engagement for Craft.23 Then, when Stravinsky agreed to add the Mass to his two performances of the Canticum plus the Bach arrangement, but only if this rather short concert took place in the Fenice, Piovesan with difficulty persuaded his superiors to accept Craft and the Fenice, whereupon Stravinsky smoothly expressed a preference for St. Mark’s.24 He had in effect won the war of nerves. As late as June 1956, neither the exact date nor the venue had been settled for the performance in September; but the composer eventually got his way, the concert was at last agreed for St. Mark’s, and half of it was conducted by Craft, only the second time he had shared a rostrum with Stravinsky since their early concerts for the Chamber Arts Society.25
IN PRINCIPLE, Stravinsky had wanted to finish the Canticum sacrum by the end of November 1955, because he intended as usual to spend December and part of January on the East Coast. There was even some vague plan to live for six months of 1956 in Europe, perhaps with a view to settling there in due course for good.26 More immediately there were concerts in New Orleans and (with the usual geographical profligacy) Cleveland, where he was also recording The Fairy’s Kiss, before reaching New York in the middle of December.
For once the New York trip seems to have been motivated by nothing more urgent than the need for a change from the monotony of West Coast life.27 “Going back to L.A, hélas,” Vera lamented in her diary for 11 January, after a month of energetic dining out and theatre-going, punctuated by the usual bouts (in Igor’s case) of unexplained illness.28 As far as business was concerned, nothing much happened beyond a lunch with his Columbia producer, David Oppenheim, and meetings with the company’s lively and sociable new publicity director, Deborah Ishlon. But while there were neither concerts nor recordings and his only formal engagement was a ceremony at the Finnish consulate on the 4th at which he was presented with the Sibelius Medal, he by no means wasted his time. Having promised Piovesan a transcription of “Vom Himmel hoch,” he now had to carry out what was at the very least a laborious process entailing creative decisions. Before embarking on it—and perhaps by way of preparation—he made an arrangement for two recorders of Ann’s lullaby in the final scene of The Rake’s Progress, a task that involved a reduction from three parts to two in the solo verses and a still more drastic condensation of the short choral interludes.29 He then turned at once to the Bach. From the start he refused to confine himself to a straight instrumentation of the organ work, with its increasingly elaborate canonic embroidery of the well-known chorale tune. Already in the first variation, which he worked on after Christmas, there is a certain impatience with the plain act of orchestration and an inability to resist little touches of his own, an added canon for bassoon and cor anglais, extra fragments of harp melody or string pizzicato, and, at the very start of the second variation, a countermelody for trombone.
When they returned to Los Angeles, he took these two variations with him. He then composed the remaining three in draft form by early February, but it was the end of March before he completed the admittedly quite complicated, but after all largely derivative, orchestral score. Why the delay? Certainly there were distractions. Soon after getting home from New York, he had been offered ten thousand dollars to make and record an abbreviated version of Petrushka to accompany a television cartoon film,30 and though he excused himself with the pure-minded Nadia Boulanger (“Yes sir, it’s certainly reprehensible, but also explicable when you think of the taxes they so pitilessly squeeze out of us”31), there was really no sensible reason to refuse such a commission with a work that for thirty years or more had earned him nothing in the United States and that even now the producers could—as they were careful to hint—have used free of charge provided they chose the unrevised original and did not distribute the film outside America. Acceptance meant that Stravinsky could select the excerpts, compose the new links, and conduct the result, which he duly did in a Los Angeles studio at the beginning of March.32
What he must have been itching to do was restart work on Agon, as yet only half-composed and still scheduled for production in February 1957. The earliest dated sketch from this period is on a full draft of the second dance, the “bransle gai,” completed on the 8th of June. But he must have been working on these dances for several weeks before that, since he probably composed them in order, and there are extensive serial workings and the usual rough sketches and drafts for both pieces. There was one interruption of a week or so in May for the Ojai Festival, of which Craft was again musical director. On the 27th Craft conducted the first performance of the “Vom Himmel hoch” arrangement, and Stravinsky himself took the baton for a rare concert performance of Les Noces. Otherwise he probably devoted the whole of April and May to Agon, starting with the canonic trumpet duet that begins the “bransle simple” and openly suggests the types of movement and texture, though certainly not the harmony, of Bach’s variations. The work was unusually intricate, since he was combining a variety of note-ordering techniques (different in each dance) with his usual process of modelling. For instance, the sketches show that the rhythm of the “bransle simple” was at first taken from the dance of that name in Mersenne, though it would be hard to detect this fact from the final version.33 As so often with Stravinsky, it is the richness and apparent promiscuity of reference that give the music its peculiar feeling of transparent depth, as if it were a series of perspex sheets laid against one another and lit (as Debussy had once said of Parsifal) from behind.34
That Easter, just when Stravinsky was taking up Agon once again, Deborah Ishlon came up with a new promotional idea, perhaps originally prompted by a rather unsatisfactory documentary film they had gone to see in New York of him rehearsing and conducting The Soldier’s Tale.35 She wanted to send a photographer to take pictures of him at work; but more particularly she had had the idea of recording him reading extracts from his published writings.36 It says a good deal for her persuasive powers and personal charm that Stravinsky did not simply reject this latter proposal out of hand. On the contrary, he declared himself “very interested in it” and eager “to do it at a later date.” The trouble was that there was nothing he had written that he would now care to associate himself with in that kind of way. What he meant was that there was nothing that, in his new anglophone, American existence, he felt would adequately represent his character and thinking, or would belong, whether implicitly or explicitly, to the latest developments in his music. “It would certainly be of more interest to you,” he told Ishlon, “to have a statement from me
in my own style and from my present point of view. I will try to write this during the free time on our travels, and I can work on it with Bob Craft during our concert tours.”37
The publicity director, however, was not willing to wait on such a vague eventuality, and as soon as the Stravinskys arrived in New York in mid-June, at the outset of the European trip that would take them to Venice in September, she appeared with a tape recorder and a set of questions, recorded the composer’s answers, then wrote them up in part and sent the typescript for his approval the very next day. It was, she assured him, “an exact transcription of your own delightful phrases and ideas, [and] reads, I think, with the precision and charm of your own conversation.”38 No doubt he had prompted her as to what questions he cared to answer; he may even have had written notes. The remarks themselves would have surprised no one who knew the Poetics or had heard the Chicago lecture. Their interest lies in their tone of voice, so to speak, and their choice of language. One has no difficulty in sensing, through these written words, what Huxley had meant when he wrote that “Stravinsky’s talk has a curious and fascinating quality all its own.”39 You can hear, for the first time, the deep Russian accent, the idiosyncratic, not always quite accurate, use of English, and the vivid, always surprising wit and concreteness of imagery.
To be a good listener you must acquire a musical culture, as in literature. You must be familiar with the history and development of music, you must listen. The person with the subscription ticket for concerts, he is not necessarily a musically cultured person. He is musical only because the music is performed in front of him. To receive music you have to open the ears and wait, not for Godot, but for the music; you must feel that it is something you need. Some let the ear be present and they make no effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
The larger the audience, the worse. I have never attached much importance to the collective mind and collective opinion. You can imagine what collective opinion looks like. Especially in America, they like to speak and work with masses. But music is not a moral activity, to render the masses more happy. Music cannot deal with such things. Music never was for the masses. I am not against masses. But please do not confuse the value of the music which is addressed from ear to ear with the value of music addressed from one ear to a million ears. That doesn’t mean for millions, but for each of the millions. Don’t make the mistake of merely multiplying.
No audiences are good anywhere, but the major level, the best musical level, is that of the Germans. They have a higher level of listeners because of their musical history and musical culture. You can think how it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The people who listened to music were much more learned; music was for them a language which they knew well. They knew not only by passive listening but by active playing. Everybody played—harpsichords, organs, flutes, violins. They had the habit of music played with their own hands, not only by ears. Now we hear music by the gramophone. This gives maybe more people a connection with music, but the result is not the same because the passive is not the active.
Accustomcy to music is a fact with which we have to count. We think that very difficult works like all the last works of Beethoven are better understood now. No, people are simply more accustomed to them. It isn’t that they understand better. People are not shocked by dissonances. Otherwise, why should we write them? And shocking really means striking. To be merely shocking is vulgar. It could not be the legal goal merely to be shocking. Music should be striking.
A composer thinks about the audience, but not primarily. If you think about audience, you don’t think about your work. You think about a reaction which will come from certain things. If the audience is yourself, that is quite different. To be yourself the audience is difficult; it is difficult to multiply yourself. To become an audience by imaginary multiplication does not give you new value.
Where is music going? How can we see the direction? Even going very high we can see very little. The higher we go, the less we see, because we are far away. If we are very close we see only a part of the mountain. We can judge about some facts. But to draw a conclusion is another thing. We can never be absolutely right.40
The latest idea was for these remarks to be included in an article in Newsweek. Whether Ishlon also still intended them to be published as a recording is not entirely clear, but in any case Stravinsky seems to have decided not to let the text be printed, and there the matter might have rested but for the energetic Miss Ishlon’s firm conviction, as she told the composer, “that you should write—or talk—a book.”41
After a week in Manhattan they sailed, as the previous year, for Lisbon. Two days out from New York, a cable announced that Madubo had died in Switzerland.42 The news was more disturbing than unexpected, since she had been slowly dying of an agonizing though long-undiagnosed cancer for almost a year. But for the Stravinskys pain at her loss was compounded by a nagging sense of guilt over their past treatment of her. They had brought her to California, but she had never settled down there; and while it was perfectly true—as Stravinsky told her brother—that the main problem had been her own inability to come to terms with the fact that her former charges were no longer naughty children, he could not shake off a feeling of responsibility for what had been, for all of them, an unhappy episode.43 Madubo had gone back to Switzerland in 1954, and Vera and Craft had visited her in Berne in April 1955, and endured what Vera recorded as a “very emotional” day with her.44 The composer could only salve his conscience by the gift of money. He had contributed to her hospital expenses, and now he helped pay for her funeral. But it was a very abstract recompense for almost forty years of devotion tainted, at the end, by a sense of neglect.
From Lisbon they embarked on four weeks of pure holiday, albeit of that peculiarly gruelling, self-improving variety that saps the intellect and leaves the body screaming for mercy. “What one has to suffer,” Huxley exclaimed when he heard about the trip, “in the name of culture.”45 Travelling with Lawrence Morton, they continued by boat from Lisbon to Barcelona, then on to Naples and Palermo, and eventually, in excruciating heat, to Patras, from where they drove for seven hours to Delphi. The next day, on the road to Athens, they passed the Oedipus crossroads, in a wide-open landscape not at all like the narrow defile that the composer had imagined as the setting for Oedipus’s enraged slaughter of the unknown but obstructive old man.46 But then Stravinsky, usually such an eager and attentive tourist, was in a grumpy mood and made unwell by the heat, and soon after reaching Athens he took to his bed and did not go with Craft and Morton to Nauplia. From Athens they escaped (perhaps at the suggestion of Robert and Mildred Bliss, who were making the same move) to Istanbul, where they spent a week seeing the city and enduring the disconcerting blend of luxury and squalor inseparable at that time, and to some extent still, from five-star tourism in Eastern lands. One night (in the Hilton Hotel) Craft was kept awake by bedbugs, and captured three of them in an envelope that Vera, the next morning, painstakingly tipped out onto the reception desk in front of a crowd of the hotel’s clientele.47 Small wonder that when the four travellers finally chugged into the Serenissima from Piraeus and Brindisi on 30 July, and despite the unremitting heat, Vera recorded in her diary, “What a bon-heur! to be in Venice!”48
It is clear from Morton’s brief accounts of this trip49 and from Craft’s diaries, especially, that the Stravinskys were Baedeker travellers par excellence. They would insistently visit the major sites, sometimes journeying considerable distances and enduring real discomfort, but invariably returning to the security of a good hotel and a first-class dinner. Not for them the sheep’s-eye stew and the rough palliasse at the end of a nine-hour walk through hill country. At Stravinsky’s age such things would certainly have been absurd; yet one is constantly struck by the laborious routines even of well-to-do tourism in their case. Craft stands there with the guidebook or discoursing learnedly from his astonishing memory of what he has read i
n advance, while the Stravinskys inspect the mosaics, remark on their likeness to Torcello or their inferiority to Ravenna.50 In suits and ties, with the temperature in the high nineties, they struggle round Delphi, or stagger up the Acropolis, returning as often as not to hotels whose comfort is most clearly expressed in their price. To many of their friends the pace seemed excessive. Huxley, who had done more than his fair share of rough travel but was no hotel-hopper, found their postcards from Greece more disturbing than reassuring: “So much heat and attendant ills,” he wrote.51 Arriving in Venice for what might seem like a rest six weeks before the Canticum premiere, they continued the round of churches, villas, and art galleries, lunches and dinners, in the greater relaxation of a settled and familiar environment, and now with Eugene Berman, who had settled in Rome after his wife’s suicide, as a specialist guide. But they must have felt, in some way, that enough was enough, since Stravinsky promptly announced to his publisher that they had decided to cancel a planned visit to Egypt in the autumn, not—to be sure—in the interests of repose, but in order for him to accept a conducting date in Hamburg.52
Morton was struck by the energy and perceptiveness of the Stravinskys’ sightseeing; and he also noted that Stravinsky never stopped composing, even when on tour.53 In the past, as we have seen, this had not been the case. In France before the war, he had composed at home and, to some extent, in his Paris studio, but he had seldom if ever written music in hotel bedrooms. Since the war he had sometimes composed in hotels. The Septet was completed in one, and the first two variations of “Vom Himmel hoch” were transcribed in the same one. But when actually travelling, as in Greece and Turkey in 1956, Stravinsky probably still did not compose, unless he perhaps toyed with note-rows or serial charts on long flights or train journeys. In Venice that year, however, he made up his mind to work. As soon as they were ensconced in the Hotel Bauer-Grünwald, a piano was ordered, and a few days later it arrived and was winched up to his bedroom, exactly as at the time of the Rake.54 The hotel staff watched this procedure somewhat nervously, no doubt imagining that the air would from now on be rent by cascades of Lisztian arpeggios and shrieks of Wagnerian frustration.55 In fact, though Stravinsky’s way of composing was altogether more discreet, it does seem that some difficulty arose about his working in his bedroom, since by the end of August he had moved down two floors into the stale smoke of the hotel’s cellar bar and was working on the “bransle double” at a pink grand piano by the light of an angle lamp.56 The image is at least as bizarre as that of The Rite of Spring taking shape in a suburban Swiss rooming house. There is little enough of the nightclub about any single page of Agon, but the “bransle double” was certainly the least smoochy so far, its rhythms articulated by jagged, serial string melodies more suggestive of a pole-vaulting contest than cheek-to-cheek dancing. In Balanchine’s original scheme, Stravinsky had evidently reached the point at which “the dances which began quite simply in the sixteenth century took fire in the twentieth and exploded.”57 For him it was the critical moment in the whole work, the moment at which his new, esoteric compositional technique had to be invested with a vibrant physicality alien to the music of its inventors and only found spasmodically, if at all, in a handful of works by younger composers—Boulez’s Structures, Stockhausen’s Kontra-punkte—that he had heard but not studied.58