Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  not to reflect with a certain anguish on the Stravinsky “case.” How to explain, after Les Noces, that rapid exhaustion which comes out in a sclerosis of every element: harmony and melody (ending in a kind of fake academicism), and even rhythm, where a painful atrophy is to be seen developing? … His technical defects have left their mark on his rhythmic discoveries, and prevented their realization: technical defects of every type, in the domain as much of language as of [musical] development. Logically Stravinsky should not have been content with a system clogged up with composite and anarchizing formulae.… For the rest, we can ignore this swapping of conjuring roles—in which the object vanishes the magician—since there did once exist a true Stravinsky domain.…17

  “There is no more risk of my being charmed by Boulez,” Stravinsky had fulminated to Nadia Boulanger on reading this diatribe, “than he claims to be by me.”18 But that was not all. The volume also contained an introductory essay on Russian music by Souvtchinsky himself, between whose lines Stravinsky seemed to detect still more weasel words.

  Stravinsky requires of music that it be a living and active synthesis of the domains of the intelligence and the spirit, while assigning to sensibility and sensuality (lyricism) the role of a mere resultant. This conception has had and continues to have a more general import; it remains valid, in a sense, for the aspirations of the young music of our time that is no longer with Stravinsky; but while it could have been a particularly effective influence on Russian music, this tendency has been deliberately opposed.…

  And so on, about Soviet music. But then, a few lines down, there was reference to “the effective presence of Stravinsky’s work,” together with a footnote indicating that “obviously this means, above all, Stravinsky’s great works, such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, The Nightingale …”19 So that was it! Souvtchinsky pretended to talk about Stravinsky’s music as a whole, but was then careful not to admire anything that might put him at odds with his beloved young turks. Suddenly, no mention of Oedipus Rex or Apollo, or Persephone, music which the singer-philosopher had once professed to love. Stravinsky’s pen tasted the poison and passed it on. “Salon careerism,” he told Nadia, “is alive and well.”20

  Souvtchinsky and Boulez had by that time been intimate friends for five years or more, possibly even since 1946, when Boulez remembered Souvtchinsky coming up to him at a symposium at which he had spoken, and proposing that they meet again to discuss the issues raised.21 Souvtchinsky was clearly on the lookout for a new intellectual cause. He would turn up at Leibowitz’s in order to find out more about Schoenberg and serialism. In Boulez he sensed an exceptional mind, but one as yet unformed, undirected, an inchoate genius possessed of a fierce, intolerant energy that, with proper guidance, could change the world. Souvtchinsky in effect appointed himself Boulez’s mentor. They would talk for hours on the telephone, and Souvtchinsky would use all his formidable knowledge of the psychology of genius and the historical evolution of music to press on Boulez the role of the Chosen One, “the predestined musician,” who would allow the new generation of composers “at last to achieve awareness of itself and of its historical worth; for it is always an event—a creator—who, by his arrival on the scene, his presence, the assertion of his gifts, his judgement, makes everything suddenly once again clear and visible, near and far.”22

  Above all, Souvtchinsky was a source of social, financial, and literary contacts for the young Frenchman. He introduced him to Cocteau’s and Stravinsky’s old friend Count Etienne de Beaumont (Radiguet’s Comte d’Orgel) and to Suzanne Tézenas, an old-style beau monde patroness with a taste for the ultramodern, whose companion of many years, the fascist writer Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, had committed suicide at the end of the war rather than face trial as a collaborator. Then in 1953, the year of Musique russe, Souvtchinsky took Boulez to a performance of Berlioz’s Troyens conducted by Hermann Scherchen, and introduced the two musicians. Scherchen agreed to lend his weight to the new avant-garde concert organization that Souvtchinsky and Boulez were putting together for the coming season; and it was Scherchen who duly conducted the inaugural concert of the Domaine Musical in the Théâtre du Petit Marigny in January 1954.23

  At the nadir of his relations with Stravinsky, Souvtchinsky was thus inextricably entangled with Boulez and the whole post-Webern, post-Messiaen axis of young radical composers whose music would be the heart and soul of the early Domaine Musical concerts and was beginning to set up spheres of influence through institutions like the Darmstadt Summer School and the annual festival at Donaueschingen, in the Black Forest. From time to time Stravinsky’s Paris spies sent him morose reports of the goings-on in this circle. “I assure you,” Nabokov wrote after attending a Domaine concert in March 1956, “all this is quite bad and depressing. It’s so many gnawed bones instead of music. Boulez’s Marteau sans maître sounds at best like Burmese or Siamese music, except that there it’s natural, while here it’s artificial (if skilful). As for Stockhausen and Nono, it’s a lot of tedium in a small space.”24 But Nika was for once behind the times. He seems only just to have caught up with the fact that Stravinsky was himself now writing serial music,25 while Boulez’s approach to Craft that summer was certainly prompted by the knowledge that the Master’s latest progeny was likely to be such as might safely grace Domaine programs that were forever closed to anything with the taint of neoclassicism.

  CRAFT WAS in Paris by the 3rd of November, and he lunched with Boulez the next day, a Sunday. They got on well, having much in common musically if not temperamentally. Boulez, so earnestly modernist in public, had a fun-loving, undergraduate side in private. He played the Andante theme of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto on the upright piano in his mansard flat near the Bastille with a spoof Brahms accompaniment, and he talked about the George Washington music at the end of the Ode to Napoleon as “pure César Franck.”26 Presumably there were no such jests at the expense of the serial Stravinsky, though Craft must have suspected that they, too, were part of the young Frenchman’s social repertoire in other company. But Boulez had a charming, agreeable way with him that dissolved mistrust, so that Craft could be struck by his observation that “writers are in a worse way than composers, Mallarmé and Joyce having done it all,” without seeing the implied barb against Stravinsky and Schoenberg, whom Boulez had long since attacked in print for, precisely, failing to do it all—failing, that is, to realize the full consequences of the revolution they had initiated.27

  On the Wednesday, Boulez haled Craft off to lunch with Souvtchinsky, obviously in the conscious hope of rebuilding bridges. Craft’s account of the meeting is one of the best half-dozen pages in his published diary.28 Souvtchinsky expatiated, in his voluble, authoritative White Russian way, about Stravinsky’s character, his obsession with money, his weakness for Fascism and fear of Communism, his failure to grasp the central musical issue of his time—the overriding importance of Schoenberg. From Souvtchinsky’s lips, Craft heard for the first time in detail about Arthur Lourié’s role in Stravinsky’s life in the twenties and thirties, and learnt the full horror of Soulima’s wartime activities, in particular how he had written to Strecker in 1941 to try to secure German concert bookings. The nervy young American had the courage to take issue with the elderly Russian over some of these matters, sensing both a taste for hyperbole and a certain bitterness mixed in with the avant-garde Parisian attitudinizing. But he did not leap to Soulima’s defense, or contradict Souvtchinsky’s description of Theodore as a boor, merely reporting his remark—delivered apparently without irony—that “in all fairness, to know that one has those genes is a burden.”29

  Did this fascinating conversation ever in fact take place? One supposes that at least some of it did. Souvtchinsky loved psychologizing and enjoyed the role of “pilot fish,” as Boulez put it, to young voyagers.30 But he cannot have mentioned Soulima’s wartime letter to Strecker, for the simple reason that he cannot have known it existed, unless he had had illicit Nazi contacts of his own during the war.31 I
n the same way Poulenc’s remark, supposedly brought up at the lunch by Craft, that Stravinsky was “too old for the new hats he tries on in the Canticum sacrum”32 is surely in fact an embroidered quotation from a letter Poulenc had written to his niece in March 1956 but which was not published until many years later.33 In other words, the conversation looks like a reconstruction, for whatever reason, in the light of subsequent information. In no sense is it a reliable account of an actual meeting.

  A day or two after the Souvtchinsky lunch, Boulez flew to Munich and visited Stravinsky in the hospital, but the next day he missed his flight back to Paris and he was not at the Salle Gaveau to stage-manage Craft’s Domaine concert on the 10th. The Gaveau was packed and the audience, Craft reported, enthusiastic.34 But he had had low expectations of the actual performances ever since his first rehearsal with the choir, and it may even have crossed his mind that Boulez’s absence had about it some element of self-preservation. French choirs were notoriously weak and often uncooperative into the bargain, and to confront one, on inadequate rehearsal, with a program that included the Canticum sacrum, the “Vom Himmel hoch” transcription, and both Webern cantatas, verged on the suicidal. Craft was fortunate, in all probability, to get through without major embarrassments. It was an early-evening concert, and when it was over he lingered for only a few minutes before hurrying off to the Gare de l’Est for the Munich sleeper. Boulez, arriving by the next flight, got to the Salle Gaveau soon after eight, just in time to help clear away the music stands.35

  ALTHOUGH out of bed for a short time each day, Stravinsky was not well enough to leave the hospital for another four weeks. He would shuffle round the hospital garden on the arm of one of the sisters, or occasionally take a turn round the block.36 He was still smoking, but much less than before. The idea that he might soon once again conduct would have struck any casual acquaintance as absurd. Berman had written to Craft imploring him to prevent the composer from fulfilling his engagement in Rome at the end of November, but the concert had not been cancelled by the time Stravinsky was discharged from hospital on the 17th of November, and a few days later he and Vera duly boarded the express for the Italian capital, where Craft would meet them from another engagement of his own in Vienna.37

  When friends had told Stravinsky to his face that he should conduct less, he had been in the habit of replying that he could not afford to,38 and it was a wretched irony of this latest illness that, just when the arguments for cutting back started to look irresistible, the reasons for not doing so became unanswerable. All his life, medical charges had been a substantial item of expenditure, but now they would soar into the stratosphere; and it would no longer be a case of settling the bill with the prestige of his friendship. In every city there would be specialists, “crouched like gardeners to pay,” as Nick Shadow put it agreeably in The Rake’s Progress. As soon as he got to Rome, he was examined by a neurologist and a hematologist, who pronounced his blood pressure too high and ordered him to cancel his New York engagements in January. Then in London a week or two later there was more phlebotomy, and a consultation with the great clinical neurologist, Sir Charles Symonds, who made the gloomiest prediction thus far. It so happened that Stravinsky had woken up in his hotel that morning (7 December) feeling numb in his right side. Symonds diagnosed a basilar stenosis (a narrowing of the arteries at the base of the skull) and warned that a second stroke could well be imminent and would, in his opinion, be fatal. Poly-cythemia (a superfluity of red corpuscles over white) he considered a likely but not certain contributory cause. He actually informed Vera that her husband had only “a fair chance” of surviving more than six months, and he told the husband himself that smoking had probably brought on the thrombosis, whereupon Stravinsky at last reluctantly but definitively gave up the habit.39

  Yet notwithstanding all this medical head-shaking and finger-wagging, he had managed to conduct the Canticum sacrum at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome a week before without significant mishap. He had initially been very nervous and had ducked out of his first rehearsal with the orchestra, then, on the evening of the concert, lost his nerve over the “Vom Himmel hoch” variations and asked Craft to take over in that work. The latter noted that the composer’s beat in the Canticum was erratic, but that he—Craft—somehow managed to coordinate the performance from the wings, presumably without Stravinsky noticing. In fact, Stravinsky was so euphoric at this triumph over bodily frailty that he stayed up half the night at the post-concert reception, kept going dangerously by his own adrenaline, by plentiful doses of alcohol, and presumably, for nearly the last time, by nicotine.40

  In London, nevertheless, he did not conduct, having withdrawn from a BBC concert in the Festival Hall and the London premiere of the Canticum sacrum at an ICA concert in St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Craft both rehearsed and directed the St. Martin’s concert on the 11th, while Stravinsky consulted his doctors and endured the December fog. Nobody, though, seems to have said anything about peace and quiet. On his Paris visit, Craft had set up for the journey from Rome to London one of those between-train days that crowd a week’s worth of work and socializing into twelve anxious hours. He himself was recording the Canticum and the Bach variations with his Domaine Musical performers. They were met at the station by Boulez and Souvtchinsky, and for the first time for more than seventeen years Stravinsky talked face-to-face with the friend who had stood by him so loyally just before the war, then—as he had obviously felt—so lightly betrayed him just after it. We do not know what was said or if the encounter was in any way troubled.41 But the composer’s mood was by no means unreservedly conciliatory. At the recording session, he ran into another old friend, Alexander Tansman, who was likewise in his bad books for having written to him at the time of the Cantata protesting at the anti-Semitism of its “Sacred History.” Tansman remained unforgiven, and Stravinsky cut him dead.42

  Somehow London was socially more comfortable, less fraught with old antagonisms, yet no less stimulating in its own way. Stravinsky had scarcely been in England since the thirties, and he was still partly under the influence of Kirstein’s diatribes against the British arts establishment at the time of the New York City Ballet’s Covent Garden season in 1950.43 The reality in 1956 was altogether different. For one thing, the musical standards in London turned out, unexpectedly, to be superior to those in Italy or—to judge by Craft’s reports—Paris. The Elizabethan Singers, one of those well-trained, quick-learning small professional choirs in which London was beginning to specialize, sang the Mass stylishly and without fuss, while the amateur London Bach Society choir coped more than adequately with the Canticum sacrum. No less important, Stravinsky found himself among kindred spirits. William Glock, who had organized the ICA concert, was an attentive host and a knowledgeable one, with a genuine—not merely polite—enthusiasm for new music. Glock drove them to Hampton Court, and he threw a reception attended by old friends like Edward Clark and his wife, the composer Elisabeth Lutyens, and sympathetic new people like Michael Tippett, a composer whose own work was at that precise moment entering a Stravinskian phase. Nicolas Nabokov appeared at the Savoy with Isaiah Berlin, and Stephen Spender brought T. S. Eliot for tea. These were perhaps not in themselves momentous encounters; in fact the Eliot tea party, as separately reported by Craft and Spender, seems to have been as slow and viscous as the motion of Stravinsky’s blood, which he described to the two poets while “moving his hands as though moulding an extremely rich substance.”44 But all these meetings were in some sense indicative of a certain acknowledged status in the Anglo-Saxon world. There were, it appeared, advantages to being a Grand Old Man widely thought to be on his last legs. It was a situation well worth preserving.

  New York was no less foggy than London when they sailed in, several days late, on the 21st of December. Stravinsky was desperate to get home and resume work on Agon, which Kirstein was now intending to stage in the City Ballet’s autumn season but which was already half-committed for a concert premiere in Los Angeles at the time of
the composer’s seventy-fifth birthday in June.45 But having ignored his Italian doctor’s advice to cancel his New York concerts, he was effectively trapped on the East Coast for a whole month. Admittedly the concerts themselves were good for morale at this particular juncture. Stravinsky once again left most of the rehearsing to Craft, but he conducted the concerts with growing confidence and vitality, and was rewarded afterwards—if that is the right expression—by a huge throng of admirers in the Carnegie Hall green room and a milling crowd of fans at the stage door.

  New York had not seen him on the podium for four years (since, that is, before his prostatectomy), and no doubt the “warmth and affection” that, according to the Times headline, greeted his reappearance, came as much from the fact that he was known to have been ill and was visibly aged as from any newfound affection for his music. “Igor Stravinsky was in Carnegie Hall last night conducting a concert of his own music,” one critic declared, adding sententiously: “The person for whom that is not enough is an enemy of art.”46 Yet nobody seemed to feel any need to condescend or make allowances about the performances. Craft observed that at the opening concert on 10 January Persephone went exceptionally slowly and took almost an hour (whereas the composer’s studio recording a few days later is if anything on the quick side and lasts barely fifty-three minutes).47 But such details generally went unnoticed in a work that, as the reviews demonstrated, was little known in Manhattan. From a musical point of view, it seemed, the master was still in good shape and mentally alert, less balletic on the rostrum than in the past, maybe, but as ever “meticulous, precise, beating time and signaling cues without mannerisms.… All he was after was to let his music speak for him.”48 Perhaps the Bach variations, which New York was hearing for the first time, were slightly overrated as original work (“far more Stravinsky than it is Bach”), as if to dignify the occasion beyond its real deserts. And if, as the same critic insisted, the NYPO’s playing and the Westminster Choir’s singing were no better than routine, he seemed not remotely to be suggesting that that might have been Stravinsky’s fault.