Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The goodwill was positively cloying. Whether it would survive the realization that the master was not only far from dead but was actually embarking on a new and distinctly awkward creative phase: that was another matter.

  24

  TALKING THE BOOK

  RETURNING TO LOS ANGELES on 26 January 1957, Stravinsky at once resumed work on Agon. According to his own timings, painstakingly worked out for Balanchine’s benefit and studiously recorded on a separate sheet of paper, the music so far written lasted twelve and a quarter minutes; but that was for three-quarters of the entire three-part scheme, which had originally been supposed to last twenty-six. As with the Canticum sacrum, the septuagenarian composer was embarrassing himself by the growing concentration of his musical thought, and it scarcely helped that, now that the moment had arrived to “explode”—as Kirstein had put it—into the twentieth century, his preferred model was that arch-compressor, Anton Webern. The “Pas de deux” he now began to write would be as far as possible from the lyrical periods of his last two essays in the genre—in Scènes de ballet and Orpheus. Instead it would mysteriously translate the rarefied musical hieroglyphics of late Webern into a dance idiom—hesitant at first, then increasingly bold and impulsive, a vivid image of the mental transformed into the physical.

  By nevertheless carefully respecting the conventional sequence, with solos for each dancer framed by their duos, Stravinsky was able to preserve the traditional function of the “Pas de deux” as a moment of intensification and repose. The music is intricate but reflective, and it is by far the longest dance in the whole work, playing for the best part of six minutes (including the short Interlude that precedes it). The orchestration, though, is light and airy. “My score,” he later told his Boosey and Hawkes editor, “is not an orchestra score but an instrumental score,”1 and he composed the piece in three weeks and dispatched it to Boosey’s New York office on 15 February. At this point there came yet another, and in its way remarkably suggestive, interruption.

  On the day the Stravinskys had spent in Paris on their way to London early in December, Souvtchinsky had set up a meeting at the Ritz between Craft, Boulez, and Gérard Worms, the proprietor of a Monaco publishing house called Éditions du Rocher. Worms wanted Craft to write a book about24 Stravinsky, and he wanted Stravinsky himself to write an introduction; but when Craft put this idea to him later that same day, the composer typically declined to write anything of his own, and instead proposed a dialogue in the form of a series of questions and answers. In the back of his mind, no doubt, was Deborah Ishlon’s recent suggestion that he “should write—or talk—a book,”2 and he may also have reflected, or been reminded by Craft, that his seventy-fifth birthday was looming, a time when interviews would be requested, reminiscences sought, statements demanded. The world would want to be told once more about the premiere of The Rite of Spring, about Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev, and Debussy, about how Stravinsky composed his own music and what he thought of other people’s. Why not take the opportunity to put together a text of this kind under Craft’s informed and sympathetic prompting? The whole thing could be handled conversationally, without the stupid and unhelpful questions so often put by journalists, and above all without significant loss of time from his own increasingly crowded schedule, and it could be published widely in many languages and publications as well as in the commissioned French volume.

  Exactly when and under what circumstances Craft began to assemble these dialogues is hard now to establish, since hardly any draft material survives from the initial stages. By early March 1957, however, a series of “Answers to Thirty-Six Questions” had been compiled and dispatched to Deborah Ishlon, who was acting as agent for the dialogues and who acknowledged their receipt by telegram on the 11th.3 Boulez had just arrived in Los Angeles for the performance of his Marteau sans maître planned for a Monday Evening concert on 18 March, and he read the dialogue over and offered to translate it into French. But it can hardly be true that, as Craft claims, much of it was written during Boulez’s visit “and under his influence.”4 The only unmistakable sign of Boulez’s influence on Stravinsky’s remarks is in his answer to the question, “What piece of music has most attracted you from a composer of the younger generation?” to which he replies, “Le Marteau sans maître by Pierre Boulez,” a choice which may or may not have reflected the young Frenchman’s West Coast visit, since Stravinsky certainly already knew the work from the recording that Boulez had given Craft when they first met in Paris in November.5 The obsession with Webern that comes out in several answers—for instance, the claim that “an entirely new principle of order is found in the Webern songs which in time will be recognised and conventionalised,” or the seemingly arbitrary comparison of his own habit of composing at the piano with that of the Viennese composer6—has less to do with Boulez directly than with the whole musical environment at Wetherly Drive since Craft had started recording the entire oeuvre two or three years before and Stravinsky had modelled his own serial manner (in the “Surge aquilo” of the Canticum sacrum) on Webern’s. Even the final dithyramb to Webern as a divine essence of music (“the juste de la musique”), though it was sent to Ishlon a few days later and may therefore seem to reflect conversation with Boulez, is no different in tone from the panegyric Stravinsky had penned for Die Reihe in 1955.7 In any case, of all the first series of “Answers,” this is the only one that, for some obscure reason, was omitted from the Rocher volume when it came out the following year.8

  Boulez, who was in America with the Barrault company, had arrived in Hollywood at the beginning of March from a visit to a friend in San Francisco. He told his biographer Joan Peyser (as he later told the present author) that he passed through Los Angeles in order to assist in preparing the Marteau performance, which as a matter of fact Craft was slated to conduct, but that the rehearsals were so chaotic, and in particular Craft was having such difficulty with the constant pauses and tempo changes in the long fourth movement, that the musicians implored Boulez to take over and direct the performance himself.9 Craft has maintained, on the other hand, that it was always the intention for Boulez to conduct, and he even refers specifically to a letter of January 1957 in which Boulez announces that Lawrence Morton has invited him to do so.10 This letter, if it ever existed, is mysteriously absent from both Stravinsky’s and Craft’s consultable archives. Boulez’s surviving letters to Craft discuss his series of UCLA lectures in early March, and the possibility of his attending the Marteau concert, but they say nothing about his conducting or rehearsing it.11 The date was admittedly brought forward for his convenience. In one letter, Craft offered him the baton—whether out of courtesy or nervousness—but he declined.12 The plain fact seems to be that Craft was down to conduct but withdrew because of the work’s extreme difficulty, and that Boulez not only took over but managed to prepare the performance a week earlier than scheduled to fit his own Barrault commitments. Craft conducted Tallis’s Lamentations, and the program also included Stockhausen’s tape work, Gesang der Jünglinge.13

  Whatever the circumstances of his arrival, and whatever was talked about during his stay, Boulez’s visit was a huge success so far as Wetherly Drive was concerned. Stravinsky was bewitched almost equally by his musicality, his professionalism, his quickness of mind, and his subtle Gallic charm. At the concert, just as the Marteau was about to begin, Stravinsky lost his score, and Boulez held up the performance until it was found.14 They dined together several times (including once—an irresistible picture—with Marlene Dietrich), and they all went to a “marvellously interesting” lecture Boulez gave at UCLA in connection with a symposium on modern music in which both he and Craft took part. The whole experience was a shot in the arm for the provincial West Coast. Stravinsky told Nika Nabokov that “both as man and musician, [Boulez] made a splendid impression on us all and on the musicians he conducted,”15 and to Nadia Boulanger he was still more effusive.

  Boulez made an excellent impression on us all: an absolutely top-class musician
, highly intelligent, he has fine manners and is probably a generous man. His Marteau, which he conducted so well here, is an admirably well-organized score, comprehensible to both ear and eye, for all its complications (counterpoint, rhythm, meter). Without feeling at home with this music of Boulez, I find it frankly preferable to a lot of things by his generation.16

  Admittedly, both Nika and Nadia were inclined to be skeptical about Boulez, who—whatever his obvious talent—stood out against everything that gave substance to their musical instincts. Scarcely a year had passed since Nabokov had described Marteau to Stravinsky as “so many gnawed bones,”17 and though Nadia was more indulgent, being well aware of Boulez’s musical brilliance, she could not bring herself to say anything better of his work than that it contained “no trickery or bluff.”18 She may have hoped that contact with Stravinsky would mellow the young turk, perhaps even convert him to more civilized ways. She had talked to him about his Hollywood trip, which, she optimistically suggested to Stravinsky, would “have a big influence on him.”19

  No sooner had Boulez left than Stravinsky started coming under pressure to provide more questions and answers for hungry publishers. Herbert Weinstock, of the New York house Knopf, wanted to bring out a new edition of the old Chronicle of My Life with updated autobiographical material and a section of dialogue, but Stravinsky was adamant that he would not answer any more questions until he had finished Agon.20 He now had only a few weeks in which to complete the score in time for the concert premiere in June, and, as he assured Nabokov, “this music doesn’t at all lend itself to haste.”21 Nevertheless on the 26th of April 1957 he at last completed the draft score of this much-interrupted masterpiece of stylistic time-travelling, and a week later he posted to David Adams the final section of the full score.22 At about the same time, he sent Balanchine a copy of the piano reduction, with the serial workings helpfully indicated, not, of course—as he had claimed with the bracketings in his earlier serial scores—because he had forgotten to rub them out, but because the technical intricacies of the music would be an important aspect of the ballet’s dramaturgy for this choreographer who, on the whole, rejected storytelling and conventional figurative imagery.23

  With Agon finished, Stravinsky found himself staring, for the first time since the Septet, at an empty commissions diary. At any rate it was almost empty. There was, as we shall shortly see, a whisper of a new Venice project. Moreover for the past three years Paul Sacher had been pursuing him for a new work for his Basle Chamber Orchestra, and it was true that at the third time of asking, in May 1956, Stravinsky had more or less promised but without agreeing any details.24 Now, as he worked on the final pages of his ballet, he replied almost casually to Sacher’s fourth annual enquiry, to the effect that another string piece like the Concerto in D would cost at least five thousand dollars.25 He certainly cannot have expected Sacher to balk at such a fee. Yet there is something curiously unenthusiastic—something bland and unpromising—about the suggestion, so un-Stravinskian in its implication that he might have the remotest interest in a formulaic proposal of this kind. Sacher must have sensed it, too, and hastened to reply that the work need not limit itself to string orchestra. “What about choir and soloists?” the composer suggested. Why not? Sacher had actually programmed the Canticum sacrum for Basle the following month.26 Vocal music was in the air.

  There were various reasons why vocal commissions had suddenly become attractive to Stravinsky. Although Agon had provided him with a canvas on which to work out some of the consequences of serialism for his own way of writing, it was the Canticum sacrum that had satisfied a certain feeling that all these canons and inversions and number manipulations led inexorably toward the setting of sacred texts, just as the medieval and Renaissance composers who had brought these techniques to a pitch of complexity had used them exclusively in the service of church music and the liturgy. He had been playing and studying their work for well over a decade, but it was only now, with a genuinely modern equivalent of their methodology under his hands, that he felt drawn to emulating them fully on his own terms. As we saw earlier, the key to this linkage was Webern. He was now trying to get hold of Webern’s 1909 edition of Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus (part 2), in order to study its elaborate canonic settings of the Mass liturgy, but also presumably to find out how Webern had explained his own enthusiasm for this esoteric music, so seemingly distant from the preoccupations of late Romanticism and the Sezession.27 Webern, after all, had never remotely aped the Renaissance style of polyphony, and when he eventually started writing canons of his own, toward the end of the First World War, their style was uncompromisingly modern and dissonant, in a way that suggested that the strict imitation was what counted with him, and that any chords that resulted were a mere fortunate or unfortunate accident.

  Stravinsky, on the other hand, minded desperately about the chords and harmonies his music contained. When he composed at the piano, such muffled sounds as could be faintly heard in adjacent rooms were more often than not isolated chords—chords repeated over and over again, with minute adjustments, until both the sound and the harmony were, to his ear, perfectly tuned. No wonder his interest in polyphonic music was matched by an enthusiasm for the rich harmonies of the early Baroque—composers like Schütz, Gabrieli, and Monteverdi, whose music generally avoided the intricacies of the old polyphony but relished the sheer dramatic thrill of a sonorous chord or, occasionally, an excruciating discord. In the past two or three seasons, Craft had conducted a good deal of this music at the Monday Evenings, culminating, just recently, in two almost absurdly contrasted settings of Lamentations texts: Couperin’s ornate third Leçon de Ténèbres, and the solemnly expressive consort setting by Tallis.28 Now Craft had a new project. He was preparing to record an album of motets and madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo, the Neapolitan prince who in 1590 famously murdered his wife and her lover, and whose music became not much less notorious for its extravagant dissonances and bold vocal polyphony. Craft had got hold of a microfilm of the second part of Gesualdo’s Sacrae cantiones (1603), a collection of six- and seven-part motets of which, however, the bass parts and the so-called sextus, or sixth, parts were lost. Starting with the single seven-part motet, “Illumina nos misericordiarum,” he had made up a score out of the five surviving part-books, and he now persuaded Stravinsky—fresh from posting off the last batch of material for Agon—to complete the score by adding the two missing parts.29

  For a musicologist, whose aim would presumably be to come as close as possible to the composer’s likely intentions, this would be a tall order, especially with a style as deviant and unpredictable as Gesualdo’s. For Stravinsky, in a certain sense, it was easier, since he could always invoke artistic license for any tasteful digressions of his own, and he could cite the waywardness of the original style in support of all but the most improbable vagaries. Craft in fact claims that none of Stravinsky’s harmonies would have been impossible for Gesualdo;30 but this is misleading (the clashing Sextus line in the opening bars already behaves in a way that Gesualdo would not have thought of), and in any case it misses Stravinsky’s point, which was surely to put himself into Gesualdo’s musical shoes without abandoning some favorite sounds of his own—or perhaps to put Gesualdo into his musical shoes, while accepting the constraints of the five authentic parts that could not be altered. The result was a strange but eminently comprehensible and very beautiful piece of space-age polyphony, which somehow managed to look sufficiently like a serious realization to merit an eventual place in the collected Gesualdo edition, and which continues to be cited in the scholarly literature as if Stravinsky had miraculously transformed himself into a scholar while remaining at the same time a creative genius.31

  It was one thing, of course, to spend a day or two adding a pair of lines to a five-minute piece by somebody else, quite another to embark on a full-scale choral work of his own with, presumably, a tight deadline. As in 1956, the second half of the year was badly blocked by a planned European tour. And bef
ore that he was committed to something that, as the time approached, he began increasingly to dread. The first performance of Agon was scheduled for a joint Monday Evenings and Los Angeles Festival concert on the 17th of June; the 18th was his seventy-fifth birthday, which would in fact be spent (along with the 19th) recording Agon and the Canticum sacrum; and for several days before that he had agreed to subject himself to the ordeal of being filmed and interviewed in his own home by an NBC television crew, for a program to be called “A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky.” He grumbled to Roth about this “terrible loss of time in my birthday period.”32 So, having practically come to an agreement with Sacher, he again postponed a final decision on the new piece, and steeled himself for the celebrations.

  He had done his best to avoid the NBC visitation, first by his usual method of demanding an outrageous fee ($7,500 for two or three days’ filming), then by claiming that his doctors had ordered him to rest.33 Somehow these little difficulties were overcome, and at the end of May the NBC producer, Robert Graff, turned up at North Wetherly Drive and spent the day there, discussing the contents of the program and the mechanics of the actual filming. A fortnight later, the crew arrived—no fewer than twenty-seven of them, Stravinsky told Roth.34 They installed their own generator, wrapped the house in canvas, and closed Wetherly Drive to traffic. They then moved all the living-room furniture around in order to provide alternative views of Stravinsky’s “studio,” since they did not have mobile equipment and in any case Stravinsky would not let them film in his real studio. For three whole days, life moved on a different planet. Graff had produced a scenario for the program, complete with questions that Craft was supposed to ask Stravinsky on camera and to which Stravinsky had composed short scripted replies. “How do musical ideas occur to you?—Well, sometimes in the bathroom.” “Do you write them down?—Sometimes.” “Which of the older composers do you like best?” “The older the better.” And so on. Although, as one specialist has observed, these answers “were right on the mark in capturing the composer’s dry wit,” they were not used in the program, which cleaved to “family values” and had no room for shades of irony.35 Instead a more serious, if conventional, view of creativity was promulgated. Craft asked Stravinsky scripted questions about craftsmanship, about conducting, about music itself. Stravinsky sat at the piano “composing,” and the two of them leafed through manuscripts together. Craft, on his own admission, was terrified and tongue-tied by the whole process, and at one point Stravinsky, apparently sensing this, reached across and patted him reassuringly on the hand.36 But Stravinsky, despite his apprehensions, was in his element, acting up to the cameras, happily abetting a theatricalized image of the great composer. After all, as he reminds his viewers, “I am the son of an actor, and the theatre is in my blood.”37