Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  On the very day that filming ended, they rehearsed Agon, and three days later Craft directed its first performance in the UCLA Royce Hall, along with the Canticum sacrum (its U.S. premiere) and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, while Stravinsky himself conducted the Bach variations and the Symphony of Psalms. It was altogether a gala occasion. President Eisenhower sent a message, which was read out; scrolls were presented from various august bodies; Franz Waxman, the L.A. Festival director, opened the concert with Stravinsky’s Greeting Prelude; and Aldous Huxley made a speech. Isherwood, who was in the audience, had his creative camera fully trained: Craft, “pale as a lily and quite beautiful in his exhaustion” as if “purged through hard work and so curiously innocent and good;” Igor, “limp with sweat but wonderfully svelte,” conducting “with the most graceful, campy gestures, like a ballerina;” Vera and her “sweetly lovable dazed innocent fatness.”38

  “Of course,” the novelist, who loathed concerts, added, “I didn’t enjoy the music. It seems chiefly to consist of nervous stabbing sounds, the creakings and squeaks of a door swinging in the wind …” Igor himself, had he read his friend’s diary, might well have felt that such insights qualified him to be a music critic (“Do music critics perform a useful function?” Graff had asked. Stravinsky: “They think so.”39) But in general, as a matter of fact, the local reviews were neither unfavorable nor obtuse. Admittedly the Los Angeles Times critic, Albert Goldberg, thought the Canticum sacrum “recondite and uncompromising,” but he was engrossed by Agon, with its “characteristic rhythmic vitality [and] endless imagination for musical surprise.”40 Alfred Frankenstein, of the San Francisco Chronicle, found both works “completely and instantly enchanting.” Agon he thought “one of Stravinsky’s wittiest, most effervescent compositions … a ballet score that clicks its heels, bows formally, and proceeds to enact a ritual in highly complex rhythms and with an utterly bewildering array of coloristic inventions.…” “You might think,” he went on, “that after fifty years of research and discovery in the blending and contrasting of instrumental sounds, Stravinsky would run out of new orchestral piquancies, but ‘Agon’ suggests that he has only just begun.” And Frankenstein drew attention to the astonishing use of the mandolin, as an example of Stravinsky’s ability to “imagine every component of the orchestra in a new way every time he sets to work.”41 This was exactly right. Purely as sonority, and quite apart from its pulsating energy and dazzling control of form, the music proclaimed in every bar the activity of a sound-inventor without rival even among the younger generation of avant-garde composers for whom instrumental color, texture, and the invention of new sounds were a vital expression of their rejection of the past.

  The next day—his actual birthday, as he nowadays chose to convert the Old Style date—he recorded Agon for Columbia, this time conducting it himself apparently without ill effects or undue difficulty; and the day after that he similarly recorded the Canticum sacrum. The performances are, for the most part, crisp and assured, though no doubt much edited and, as always from now on, likely to include takes from rehearsals conducted by Craft.42 The next day Craft left for Boston, where he was conducting a pair of Stravinsky concerts (including the Capriccio with Soulima); and a fortnight or so later Igor and Vera went by train to Santa Fe, where The Rake’s Progress was being staged to inaugurate a new open-air theatre and a new summer opera festival. No wonder Stravinsky had been hesitant about Basle; and no wonder Nika Nabokov wrote to him at the end of June, not for the first time, in alarm at his schedule of work and travel and its likely effect on his health.43 Yet Nabokov was hardly in a position to offer counsel in such matters. He had already written on the day of the Agon premiere, referring to a scheme he had in mind for the composer to conduct in Japan, and conveying to him a commission from Rolf Liebermann, the newly appointed musical director of Hamburg Radio, to write and conduct a twenty-minute work for a European Cultural Conference in that city in September 1958. Everything, he assured Stravinsky, would be done properly, and “not in the sort of zuppa inglese atmosphere of Venice.”44 The fee would be five thousand dollars, plus half that figure for conducting. Once again Stravinsky hesitated. Would he have the time? He had already started on another commission, long promised, and now necessarily shelved for six months. “Too bad,” he lamented modestly, “I do not feel able to compose interesting music in Mozart’s speed.”45

  What, though, was this long-promised commission? One’s first thought is that Stravinsky was using the half-agreed Sacher project as a lever to ensure the most favorable terms from Hamburg. After all, he had made no similar excuse to Sacher, and he had told Roth (without mentioning any other project) that he was postponing Sacher because of Europe. Yet there is good reason to believe that he had indeed started another work, and that his hesitation sprang from the fact that it had not yet been formally contracted and the money for it was still uncertain. Nabokov’s joke about zuppa inglese was much too near the bone for comfort. Stravinsky actually was writing another work for Venice, and he already knew its subject and general character.

  Six months before, in Rome, Stravinsky had received a visit from the Biennale director, Piovesan, who had come, Craft notes in his diary, “to discuss the commission for the Scuola di San Rocco.”46 What happened after that is to some extent a matter for speculation. Stravinsky heard nothing further from Piovesan except New Year’s greetings, and we may assume that, as with the Canticum sacrum, the director was engaged in a protracted struggle with his bureaucratic superiors and had meanwhile simply gone to ground. Despite this silence, after finishing Agon early in May, Stravinsky certainly started thinking about the Venice commission, and by the end of that month at the latest he had decided on a text. We know this because the subject is mentioned in the first British publication of the “Answers to Thirty-six Questions” (reduced mysteriously to thirty-four), which came out in the July 1957 issue of Encounter, and must therefore have been in press early in June. Asking Stravinsky about the harmonic implications of his serial method, Craft refers to “your new Tenebrae service,” in terms suggesting that some of its music already existed.47 The point about harmony in the new work may admittedly have been a guess on Craft’s part, but in any case the reference proves the existence of the idea. Moreover the intention to write a choral setting of the Lamentations texts, which Stravinsky had heard sung in recent months to music by Couperin and Tallis, and which he had discussed before that with Krenek in connection with his own setting, explains his anxiety to establish that Sacher would, if need be, accept a choral work for Basle, and it also explains Stravinsky’s stalling tactics. He was still hoping for a Venice commission, but was preparing an escape route for the new work in case, as seemed increasingly probable, Piovesan let him down.

  Not much if anything had been written, all the same, by the time they went to Santa Fe, a two-week visit that Stravinsky may well by now have been beginning to regret. The whole idea had come from their friend Mirandi Masocco, whom they had known since their first trip to New Mexico in 1950, and who had been responsible for introducing them to Frieda Lawrence and taking them to the corn dance at San Domingo. Mirandi, a tough, warmhearted, dry-humored Venice-born jewelry designer, had offered to persuade Stravinsky to come to Santa Fe, and had succeeded, characteristically, by the direct approach. She had described the conductor John Crosby’s plans for the new opera house and for inaugurating it with the Rake, and when Stravinsky had expressed interest, she had simply got on a plane and flown to Hollywood to show him the designs. Mirandi knew how to combine boldness with a certain relaxed formality. Soon after the Stravinskys arrived at Santa Fe, she invited them to dinner at the house of Brink Jackson and entertained them in style but without imposing official guests on them. They met the novelist Paul Horgan, a couple of retired headmistresses from Pennsylvania, and Jackson’s bouncy pair of labrador retrievers.48

  Craft was conducting the opera, but Stravinsky involved himself as usual in rehearsals and took an interest in every aspect
of the production. As at the Venetian premiere, there was a piano in place of the harpsichord, but this time the composer rewrote certain passages to suit the modern instrument.49 It was typical of him that, where a youthful venture was in question and there was enthusiasm for his work but no apparent intention to overexploit his name and presence, he gave himself unstintingly to the common effort. He took a liking to Santa Fe. It was true that it had its off-duty-Hollywood aspect. The adobe houses and yucca-clad mountainsides concealed a chic diaspora of retired film stars and fashionable artists, who exhibited in a string of smart local galleries (where Mirandi had even organized a show of Vera’s paintings); and the social atmosphere was only incidentally related to the Pueblo culture that had made the region famous. On the other hand, the air—like Mirandi—was dry, warm, and invigorating, and the climate was on the whole settled, though by a curious twist of fate it rained hard on the first night of the Rake and the opening had to be postponed. The one thing that did not suit Stravinsky was the altitude—seven thousand feet—which dangerously boosted his red corpuscle count.50 But above all, Santa Fe was interested in his music and wanted to commission him to write a new opera.

  From the semi-desert of New Mexico, they travelled to the verdant landscape that enfolded the medieval hall and model cottages of Dartington, in South Devon, arriving there by way of New York and Plymouth on 7 August. As in Santa Fe, it was Craft who was doing the work, conducting several concerts (including The Soldier’s Tale narrated by Christopher Hassall), while Stravinsky was present, on the invitation of the summer school’s director, William Glock, as an icon, a walking legend, a slice of history. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was growing a little bored with this role. He loved the Devonshire countryside, got on well with his English hosts, and was amused by the things one did in rural England, like drinking in pubs and looking at old churches. But when all was said and done, the countryside was not for him a place of prolonged entertainment. In this respect he and Vera (not to mention Craft) were strictly urban animals, drawn to art galleries and restaurants, theatres and a certain variety of social intercourse. It was a relief to get back to London and to be setting off from there for Paris and Venice, even though none of these cities was offering him any performances of his music—not, at any rate, until he returned to Paris to conduct the European premiere of Agon in mid-October.51

  In London that August they put up at the Dorchester, and it was there that the first documented sessions of “conversations” took place whose results would eventually emerge in printed form. Already the so-called 36 Answers (in fact either thirty-four or thirty-five) had appeared in journals in America, England, and West Germany, but we have no record of the way they were put together.52 For some reason, these London sessions, and others that followed in Venice in September, have come down to us, albeit in fragmentary form, on sheets of hotel letterhead or odd scraps of paper. They reveal, above all, the essential authenticity of the process in its early stages. This is not to say (nor does Craft himself claim) that the “interviews” took place in exactly the form in which they were published. Sometimes he would put questions, which Stravinsky would answer either in writing or, presumably, viva voce. At other times, Craft would simply devise questions to go in front of casual remarks or reminiscences, obiter dicta, anecdotes—what he calls the composer’s table talk. Of such cases there is little or no record prior to a typescript, corrected usually by Craft but with occasional marks by Stravinsky. But the evidence of the surviving written replies is that Craft’s editing mostly consisted of improving Stravinsky’s English and cutting out errors, indiscretions, or—now and then—unacceptable opinions. For instance, Stravinsky’s famous account of the origin of the “Petit concert” theme in The Soldier’s Tale (which he dreamt being played by a Gypsy fiddler to her child) is here more or less verbatim, in his hand.53 Craft prompts him by formulating the general question about how he gets his musical ideas, then reminding him of the—evidently oft-told—dream story. Stravinsky then writes out his answer in Russian, and finally (no doubt with Craft’s help) in English on the other side of the paper. On another sheet he tells (in French) the story of his half-remembered visit to Modigliani with Bakst in 1912 or 1913. But his suggestion that Modigliani failed to paint him because of the war and his death in 1920 was edited out, perhaps because a portrait (done from memory) had meanwhile turned up.54 Another famous remark about Mahler in St. Petersburg—that “Mahler impressed me greatly, himself, his conducting, and his music”—was added by Craft to Stravinsky’s own account of foreign musicians in St. Petersburg (and for some reason lost its final term in print).55 None of this alters one’s basic feeling that in essence this first series of dialogues, as it gradually came out in various excerpts and languages culminating in the definitive book form as Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, is a fair reflection of his thoughts and memories at that time, even if the language is too slick and versatile, too innocent of the mistakes and eccentricities of his actual speech, as preserved (for instance) in the Ishlon transcript or in countless recordings and films. But as we shall see, the matter would not always be so simple.

  They were in Paris for no more than forty-eight hours, but the hours were crowded, and even in one respect decisive. Boulez played through Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck XI in his flat, and later they dined with Giacometti, whom Boulez had asked to draw Stravinsky for the cover of the Agon recording that Rosbaud was due to make just before the Domaine Musical premiere in October. Most significant of all, Nabokov was in Paris, and with a brilliant solution to Stravinsky’s dilemma over the Hamburg commission. The composer was worried about Piovesan; but wait—Nabokov’s own Congress for Cultural Freedom was now going to have its conference, precisely, at the 1958 Venice Biennale. As usual there would be concerts. So what could be simpler than for him to book the Hamburg radio orchestra, and for the orchestra to include the new work as part of the agreement? Stravinsky could conduct it in Hamburg soon afterwards, and as for Venice, Piovesan could be in or out of the deal, as he chose. At any rate, the discussions must have taken some such turn, though even when Stravinsky met Liebermann in Venice a fortnight later, the Biennale’s active participation in the Hamburg scheme was still uncertain, and the protocol for an agreement that Stravinsky drew up with North German Radio on 13 September makes no reference to a Venice performance. This aspect of the project crystallizes only with the NDR’s formal offer of nearly a month later.56

  Nevertheless the conversation with Nabokov gave Stravinsky the impulse he needed to start work in earnest on his Tenebrae setting, and practically on the day they reached Venice he descended to the cellar nightclub of the Bauer Grünwald, where he had worked on Agon the year before, and took up the Latin text from Jeremiah. Incipit lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae—“Here beginneth the lamentation of the Prophet Jeremiah.” Like Tallis and Couperin before him, he set the “incipit” and also the Hebrew letters at the start of each verse: “Aleph,” “Beth,” and so on. If the “bransle double” of Agon had consorted strangely with the stale smoke and the upturned chairs, how much odder these austere lacerations of the exiled Jewish spirit in that paradise bar of the great Serenissima. On the 15th of September, when the master was photographed at work by Gjon Mili, he was probably composing the “Quomodo sedet,” with its muttered, anxious choric chant and its curiously dislocated duet for flügelhorn and tenor.57 This is surely the music of that other famous dream in the Conversations, in which the intervals in the new work appeared to him as an “elastic substance” stretched between the notes and weighed down at each end by “a large testicular egg.”58 Generally speaking, the thing that distinguishes one serial work from another is the particular coloring it derives from the arrangement of its intervals—the ups and downs, that is, of the row thought of as a melody. In one way or another, these intervals constantly recur, if not quite with the precision of Proust’s “little phrase,” at least as a kind of atmosphere, or defining color, like the rise and fall of a familiar voice. This was an at
tribute Stravinsky had so far always evaded, since, although he had written serial music using twelve-note rows, he had never based a long work on a single series, as had been Schoenberg’s invariable practice. In fact, he had never started off a work with twelve-note writing at all—the serial workings in Agon and the Canticum sacrum came in inner movements, and all his earlier pieces had used partial series or series with repeated notes. But Threni, as he decided to call his Tenebrae on the day of the Mili photograph,59 was dodecaphonic from the start; and from the start, Stravinsky does things quite differently from Schoenberg, or even Webern, “weighing” the intervals in his row like an assayer, tossing them from hand to hand, turning them over, subtracting one element and adding another, until the whole makeup of the music seems almost cruelly clear and peremptory. The famous opacity of Schoenberg is completely absent. This is par excellence an objectified music, take it or leave it.