Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Rehearsals for the Canticum sacrum began in the Fenice on 30 August. It had finally been settled that the actual performance would take place in St. Mark’s on 13 September, and although Stravinsky and Craft had called on the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII), a month before the concert to request permission for the profane use of the cathedral, the visit was a formality and a refusal not in question.59 But rehearsals did not move to St. Mark’s until three days before the concert, at which point it became evident that whatever allowances Stravinsky may have made for the cavernous acoustics were insufficient. “We need blotting paper, not echo chambers,” he muttered to Craft.60 The music’s precisions and refinements were drifting up into the domes and mingling with the timeless echoes that seem to hang in those vast spaces without the necessity of any initiating sound from below. The Canticum, however neo-Venetian in some respects, simply did not partake of the stately, slow-pulsed harmonies that the composers of three and a half centuries before had found suitable for a building where chords run like colors in a bowl of water.

  Stravinsky had at least never had any illusions about the likely quality of the performers. He had expressed his anxieties about the ability of the Fenice choir and orchestra to cope with the work’s difficult and unfamiliar idiom in a letter to Roth in early May, adding that “I have never heard trombones and trumpets in any Italian orchestra of the calibre I need.”61 Craft, who took nearly all the rehearsals, duly found the music to be too difficult for the local performers, though there was no such reservation about the soloists, Richard Lewis and Gérard Souzay.62 By any measurable standard, the concert was destined to be a nerve-wracking occasion. The cathedral, in a glow of red candlelight, was packed with the Great and the Good for what was said to be the first concert in St. Mark’s for three hundred years, and was certainly the first high-profile Stravinsky premiere since the Rake, here in Venice exactly five years before. When Craft came on to open proceedings with music by the Gabrielis, Monteverdi and Schütz, he bowed ceremoniously to Cardinal Roncalli, who was ringed by what one newspaper described as “other high authorities of the international ecclesiastical, political and artistic world.”63 The atmosphere was tense and noisy, as is often the way in crowded churches especially in Italy, where piety is not normally felt to entail silence. Photographers roamed about; flashbulbs popped in all directions. Only when, during the first piece, a flashbulb fell from one of the balconies and went off like a cannon did the audience go comparatively quiet and the music come genuinely to the front of the acoustical stage. But in truth the audience was waiting for the new work and its composer. Craft was experiencing for the first time the consciousness, if not the actual sound, of the words being mouthed behind his back: “Where is Stravinsky? Who is this young man?”

  The Canticum sacrum was, in the event, played twice, once before and once after the interval, and Stravinsky conducted both performances—almost as much, in total, as he had conducted it in rehearsal. According to Craft himself, the performances were uneasy, because Stravinsky had rehearsed so little and the musicians were unaccustomed to his beat. “There was nothing about the choral singing,” Peter Heyworth reported in the London Observer, “that suggested that we were hearing the work in favourable conditions,” a roundabout way of saying that the choir was execrable.64 The concert ended, no less muddily, with the “Vom Himmel hoch” transcription, also conducted by Stravinsky. In the cathedral itself neither applause nor (as the Corriere reviewer pointedly noted) protest was permitted.65 But the Cardinal had arranged for the concert to be relayed into the piazza outside, and when Stravinsky emerged from the basilica, a shade reluctantly, at the end of the concert, there was a spontaneous outburst of clapping and cheering from the still considerable crowd who had heard the music and had waited in the warm Venetian evening for a glimpse of its composer.66

  Moved by what he instinctively knew to be a genuine, not a polite or snobbish, enthusiasm, Stravinsky walked slowly across the great square toward the Taverna La Fenice.

  23

  THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN HOLDS HIS COAT

  EVER SINCE the Cantata, it had been well known in the trade, and to some extent more widely reported, that Stravinsky was flirting with serial technique, but on the whole the rumors had not been borne out in practice. For the musical world at large, serialism still meant twelve-note rows like the ones in Schoenberg, and it meant atonality—music with no sense of key, music which made you grit your teeth and wish it would stop. Nothing of the kind had come from Stravinsky. The Cantata itself had proved somewhat esoteric and learned, but neither technically nor stylistically was it anything like Schoenberg; and since then he seemed to have composed rather little, and mainly small-scale pieces consistent with the general impression that he was quietly winding down and growing old with grace. The Canticum sacrum was a rebuke to such ideas, and it at first caused something close to consternation in the Stravinsky camp, just as Erwin Stein had predicted it would.1 For here, irrefutably, was a serious and important score by the great supposed enemy of Schoenbergism substantially made out of twelve-note rows; and, at least to the casual or untutored ear, much of it was atonal.

  On the whole the newspaper men who flocked to Venice that September were well briefed and knew what to expect. “Stravinsky has gone dodecaphonic!” exclaimed one French critic, halfway through a long review which showed that the change was no surprise to him, however much it might disconcert his readers.2 The sophisticated Peter Heyworth made hardly anything of the work’s serial elements in his London Observer notice, beyond drawing attention to the influence of Webern on the “Surge aquilo” (fluidly sung by the British tenor Richard Lewis). And even this, he insisted, was “no more than a half-truth.”

  Stravinsky seems condemned to wander the face of Western music, but where he has seized hold of a technique or of a manner it has not been for purposes of pastiche but to gain, as it were, a point of departure for a genius that has no roots other than its own individuality. If in “Surge aquilo” the hand of Webern is apparent, there is also a liturgical austerity about the vocal line. Yet all this is curiously inessential. A cuckoo among composers, Stravinsky has an astonishing ability to make other men’s nests his own, so that the final impression left by this song is not of an odd amalgam of styles but of a severe yet deeply expressive lyricism, highly characteristic of Stravinsky and of no one else.3

  For a review of a difficult work in a poor first performance, this was very shrewd. It was exactly true that, while technically hybrid, the Canticum sacrum breathed its own air, just as Stravinsky’s music had always done, whatever its apparent points of reference. Heyworth may well have attended rehearsals as well as the concert. But no doubt the physical context of the premiere itself—the Byzantine architecture, the candles, the stately Venetian motets, the Patriarch in his scarlet habit, the chattering grandees, the lapping Adriatic nearby—all helped draw attention away from the crude mechanics of the rule of twelve, and made it easier to locate this austere yet vibrant music within the glowing hieratic tradition of the Eastern church, with which, after all, Stravinsky’s work had often rubbed shoulders in the past. The names of old masterpieces like Les Noces, the Symphony of Psalms, the Mass, were on many lips. On the other hand, as another, less excitable Frenchman, Fred Goldbeck, observed,

  the real find of Stravinsky’s Canticum—a find not of technique but of style—is to have passed from analogy to synthesis. And, medievalism for medievalism, troubled age (ours) for troubled age (that of the birth of Venice), everything fades into irrelevance, as if Stravinsky had discovered that the twelve-note technique could turn into the technique of a style strangely akin to that of a Byzantine mosaic: in the orchestra, the carousel of disjointed intervals is laid out like a metallic background—compartmentalized, multicolored—from which the cantilena of solo or choral voices emerges in fixed and enigmatic figures like the figures of Ravenna—discretely terrifying and discretely seductive like the glances of Justinian and Theodo
ra.4

  Most strikingly of all, the Canticum press bore witness to a drastic change in Stravinsky’s standing in the European worldview. Five years before, The Rake’s Progress had been eyed with a certain condescension, as the effusion—however accomplished—of an aging master left behind by an irretrievably altered world. Now suddenly, he was once more the pathfinder, the challenging, esoteric genius, the dazzling synthesizer of past, present, and future. Knowledgeable critics like Heyworth and Goldbeck—sympathetic to the new music and inclined to be hostile to revisionism—were even prepared to admit to not having grasped everything in the Canticum. Heyworth was baffled by the “Virtues” section but took it for granted that further, better hearings would “make its exceedingly intricate structure apparent to the ear as well as to the eye.” Stravinsky himself might be pleased, but could hardly be astonished, by this transformation. After all, it was precisely out of the misery of rejection that he had evolved the new style in the first place, so there was no need to be surprised at its success with its target audience. Some, naturally, would ridicule him as a mere straw in the wind. There would be mutterings among the Stravinskian old-stagers, who would see the Canticum as a betrayal of thirty years of shoulder-to-shoulder opposition to Vienna and all its works. Robert Craft would be identified as the evil influence, the seducer, the serpent with the forbidden fruit. All this would come to pass. But no matter what anyone thought about it, Stravinsky was back where he belonged, in the vanguard of European music, and once more asserting his mastery. As Poulenc, who disliked the idea of twelve-note music and had mixed feelings about the Canticum sacrum, wrote to Henri Hell after the premiere: “I’d still be happy to write like that at 72.”5

  A FEW DAYS after the premiere, the party split up. Stravinsky was conducting in Montreux on the 25th—a concert fixed for him by Theodore—while Craft had a recording session in Turin on the same day. So the composer duly set off for the Vaud in his son’s car, and a day or two later Vera and Craft took the train to Turin. On the 26th they met up again in Berlin, where Stravinsky had yet another concert in the Titania Palast the following Tuesday, 2 October 1956—his first public appearance in the old German capital since 1931. On the day of their arrival, however, he felt unwell and asked Craft to take over his evening rehearsal with the radio orchestra.6 This had happened before, and was never thought cause for alarm. But the concert went badly from the start. The orchestra—the strings especially—struggled with ensemble and intonation throughout the first movement of the opening work on the program, the Symphony in C. Then suddenly, near the end of the movement, Stravinsky dropped his hands and stopped conducting. Somehow the orchestra got to the end, but for several minutes the composer did not raise his arms to start the Larghetto. There was an awkward pause. Then he seemed to recollect himself, the music resumed, and by some half-conscious, half-instinctive process he managed to shepherd this awkward and intricate work to some kind of acceptable conclusion.

  For the rest of the concert and throughout the next day and a half Stravinsky behaved as if nothing out of the way had occurred.7 He felt numb, he said, on his right side, his speech was slurred, and he was visibly having difficulty with balance and coordination. Yet not until almost forty-eight hours after his blackout on the rostrum, by which time they had flown to Munich, did Craft manage to override his refusal to be examined by a doctor. The diagnosis was chilling. He had suffered a serious stroke, and a second one, still more severe, was possible and might be fatal. Yet even now, incredibly, he did not go to hospital. Instead he spent a day with Karl Amadeus Hartmann, the director of the Musica Viva series in Munich, and enjoyed a highprotein dinner cooked specially for him by the chef of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. His Munich concert on the 10th was cancelled. But only when Maurice Gilbert arrived from Geneva and talked to the local specialist was Stravinsky finally persuaded to abandon his Swiss tour and, on that same 10 October, enter the Red Cross Hospital in Munich. There he stayed for more than five weeks, forced into an unwilling quiescence while the world shook at events in Budapest, Warsaw, and Suez. Vera stayed with him, sustained by tranquillizers, terrified of the future, desperate to go home. Letters flowed in from friends urging him to rest, to give up conducting, to save himself for composition. Eugene Berman wrote to Craft, insisting that he, or Vera, or even Theodore, should act.8 The newspapers hovered. After a month, the patient received a visit from the holy trinity of the avant-garde—Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono—as if they hoped for a “Weihekuss,” a consecrating kiss, like Beethoven’s on the child Liszt.

  For Craft, the whole episode was in some ways as disturbing as for its protagonist. For seven years he had lived and travelled with the Stravinskys, and on more than one occasion he had come close to deciding it was time to move on.9 On the day the composer tottered out of his hospital bed for the first time—the 20th of October—Craft turned 33. He had no dependable work, no career, and a reputation as something between a minder and a famulus that, among fellow musicians, earned him envy and disapproval as much as respect. Many of Stravinsky’s older musical friends regarded him as a troublemaker whose influence had driven a wedge between them and the composer. Yet, as he admits in his published diaries, he did not want to leave.10 For one thing, the Stravinskys now needed him more than ever, and he was too entangled in their lives simply to consult his own professional interests and go. He was surely by now conscious of a definite sense of family rivalry with Stravinsky’s children. He is careful to record in his diary that, when he returned to Munich with Theodore and Denise after a three-day absence substituting for Stravinsky as conductor in Lausanne, Vera told him, in Theodore’s hearing, that the composer was longing to see him, Craft, but did not want to see his eldest son.11 As an expression of Stravinsky’s (as opposed to his wife’s) wishes, the story is frankly incredible, but what is very striking is that Craft was so ready to believe, not to mention report it. Elsewhere he drops a heavy hint that the reason he and Vera had not travelled with Stravinsky to Montreux was that Theodore was with him, even though less than a month later Craft was perfectly happy to drive with Theodore from Lausanne to Munich.12 No doubt one reason for the Montreux split was the purely practical question of car passenger space. Another simple explanation is that it was specifically Vera who, for some reason, would not travel with Theodore and Denise.

  Two weeks after returning from Lausanne, Craft was due in Paris, where he was conducting the Canticum sacrum, the Bach variations, and some late Webern for Boulez’s Domaine Musical series in the Salle Gaveau. This was not a stand-in engagement but a deal struck directly, with Stravinsky’s approval, between Craft and Boulez, who had written to Craft in July requesting the French premiere of the Canticum, and suggesting that it be recorded at the same time.13 The approach seems to have come out of the blue, since Boulez had not been in touch with the Stravinskys since their meeting at Virgil Thomson’s in New York in December 1952. There had even been bad blood between them, at least of a vicarious, unspoken kind, also involving Souvtchinsky and that old Stravinsky bugbear, Parisian musical politics, which was no doubt why Boulez had preferred to communicate initially with Craft, rather than beard the lion in person.

  The old trouble with Souvtchinsky had never been resolved. Stravinsky still associated him with the group of young French composers whom Souvtchinsky himself had unguardedly described as “enemies of your music” who were “unfortunately cleverer and more ‘up-to-date’” than some of its friends,14 and he also had not forgiven his old colleague for—as he thought—siding with the Parisian faction that had ostracized Soulima after the liberation.15 In Paris in May 1952 he had ignored Souvtchinsky’s invitation to arrange a meeting,16 and barely a year later Souvtchinsky had edited two volumes of essays under the umbrella title Musique Russe that seemed to confirm his worst fears. Among the essays was a hugely extended and detailed analysis of The Rite of Spring by none other than Pierre Boulez, sympathetic enough in its painstakingly arithmetical way, but ending with some general observations about
Stravinsky’s subsequent works that at once raised the specter of Souvtchinsky’s musical Trotskyites and the disturbances at the Rosenthal concerts in 1945. “It is impossible,” Boulez had written,