Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Yet even here, appearances can be deceptive. Stravinsky was soon telling Craft that his use of the flügelhorn may have been suggested by the playing of the jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers.60 So perhaps the cellar bar was not such an incongruous workshop after all.

  At the end of September they set off for Paris by way of Baden-Baden, where Rosbaud was preparing the Paris Agon with the radio orchestra, and also—on 8 October—making a commercial recording. In engaging the Sudwestfunk orchestra for the Domaine Musical, Boulez had taken a calculated financial risk, well aware that on strict budgetary grounds the organization could not afford such an extravagant gesture, but convinced that no Parisian orchestra would be likely to do the work justice, and anxious to avoid any repetition of the previous year’s troubles with the Canticum sacrum. In the same spirit, he had booked the two-thousand-seat Salle Pleyel, and he had agreed, this time, to pay Stravinsky’s hefty fee, even though the master would conduct only Agon, while the rest of the program—the orchestral pieces by Webern and Berg (both op. 6), and Schoenberg (op. 16)—would be taken by Rosbaud himself.

  For Stravinsky it was an occasion almost as nerve-wracking as the Canticum premiere in St. Mark’s: his public debut with Agon, and in front of a packed hall in a city that had often in the past seemed hostile to his music. Moreover, for all the excellence of the orchestra, his solitary rehearsal with them in the Salle Pleyel had gone uneasily, with all kinds of rhythmic and ensemble problems, which the composer struggled to resolve while Craft fidgeted irritably in the stalls. Somehow the actual performance came out reasonably well, the audience was ecstatic, the press, with some notable exceptions, sympathetic.61 But this was Paris, and as ever it was difficult to disentangle the good and bad opinions from the political posturing and the aesthetic point-scoring. It was widely assumed that Stravinsky was being used by Boulez for the publicity value of his name, and as a weapon in his ongoing war against neoclassicism and the Boulanger traditionalists. For the pro-Boulez Antoine Goléa, the whole affair was a promotional triumph for the Domaine Musical and its presiding genius. “Not even the most loyal friends of the ‘Domaine Musical,’” he wrote, “would dream of attributing the sell-out to anything other than the desire of the crowd and the snobs to see Stravinsky again in the flesh. But all the same, compared to 1952 … something had changed. A sensational element had meanwhile intervened: the interest Stravinsky had shown in serial music … It was the rout of all those who, for thirty years, had carried Stravinsky on the shoulders of their neoclassical faith, had made him their beacon, their standard-bearer.”62 One critic, who had carried Stravinsky on his metaphorical shoulders for a good deal longer than that, heard and repudiated these “derisive sniggers of the adolescent hotheads who regard Agon as a masterpiece and despise Firebird and Petrushka.” “They will not prevent me,” the composer’s old Apache friend Emile Vuillermoz wrote tragically,

  from representing the feelings of Stravinsky’s first friends, the faithful comrades-in-arms of the heroic time of his Paris débuts, all those who have been pushed out of the “serial” gala in favor of the snobs of Panurge and who are grief-stricken at the latest evolution in taste and technique of a genius who, at the end of his marvelous career, wastes his time on crazy undertakings and pointless challenges and seems to make it a point of honor to deny his past every time he writes a new score.63

  AT WHATEVER point he eventually read such diatribes, Stravinsky would have paid them little heed. He never, of course, denied his past in quite Vuillermoz’s sense, though he often misrepresented it in print. It was delightful to him to have achieved a popular success, in Paris of all places, with a work that at the same time propelled him into controversy and, to cap it all, was well received by bright young musicians. At Suzanne Tézenas’s reception after the performance he was in sparkling form and stayed up until three. The next day there was a birthday party at Nabokov’s. Nika was waiting for him at the door with “a cake crowned with candles in his hands. Igor Stravinsky grabbed it, held it over his head and entered the drawing-room, applauded by the guests, singing: ‘Happy birthday to me.… ’”64

  Above all, Stravinsky felt intellectually revitalized. Boulez, who had just recorded the two existing movements of his Third Piano Sonata, was at the height of his enthusiasm for Mallarmé’s Livre and presented Stravinsky with a copy of Jacques Schérer’s study of that work.65 They discussed the relevance of Mallarmé’s coup de dés to Boulez’s recent music; and they talked about Klee with Giacometti, who had started to draw Stravinsky.66 Something of Stravinsky’s partly undigested engagement with these subjects emerges in the Conversations, where he quotes Klee on Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire and reports on Boulez’s latest concepts of form—a passage presumably compiled during these Paris days.67 By an irony that would have appealed to Vuillermoz, the first edition of Conversations printed it opposite an early photograph of Igor and Katya Stravinsky with Rimsky-Korsakov in his Zagorodny apartment in St. Petersburg, and it is impossible not to be struck by the thought that Stravinsky was as impressionable at seventy-five as he had been at twenty-five.

  Then, as if to clinch the old master’s new youthfulness, they went by train and car to Donaueschingen, the little town in the Black Forest whose modern-music festival had, since 1950, turned itself into the country retreat of the serial avant-garde, under the auspices of Heinrich Strobel and the Sudwestfunk in Baden-Baden. The mere suggestion of programming neoclassical Stravinsky in fifties Donaueschingen would have aroused merriment or worse, but Agon was of course another matter, and the composer duly conducted it there on the 19th. The next day, in Zurich, he signed a firm contract for the Venice Threni with Liebermann and Piovesan before flying on to Rome for yet another performance of Agon, this time conducted by Craft. By the 26th they were back in Paris, and on the 29th they sailed from Le Havre.

  25

  HE HATH SET ME IN DARK PLACES

  AFTER A GOOD DEAL of vacillation, Kirstein had finally made up his mind to stage Agon with Balanchine’s choreography in New York at the end of November. He had intended to mount an ambitious autumn festival of Stravinsky ballets, with the composer conducting at least one or two of them.1 But as 1957 advanced, it gradually became apparent that no such festival was likely to happen, and by September Stravinsky had even come to the conclusion that Agon itself would not be done.2 Balanchine had lost practically a year’s work since his fourth wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq, had been struck down by polio the previous October, but he had nevertheless turned up at the Los Angeles concert premiere of Agon, and he and the composer had spent a day together working on the score and discussing how it might be danced. Now Balanchine had gone silent once again; and by the time he wired Stravinsky in the second week of October, inviting him to a charity performance of the new ballet on the 26th of November in aid of polio victims, the composer had decided that he needed to be back home by the 14th in order (though he implied a more pressing and specific reason to Balanchine) to resume work on Threni.3

  Why did he not change his plans and stay an extra fortnight in New York? The reason is sometimes given that he deliberately avoided the premiere because he expected it to fail.4 No doubt he did not anticipate any sensational success. But while he certainly had reservations about one or two details of Balanchine’s staging, there is no evidence that he was anxious about its artistic effect as a whole. He was irritated with Kirstein for having cancelled most of the planned festival without consultation, and he may well have felt sulky at being treated in such an offhand way, by no means for the first time.5 He had heard only through his lawyer-agent that Kirstein could not afford to book him to conduct the ballet.6 He agreed with some reluctance to attend one of Balanchine’s rehearsals two days before leaving for Los Angeles; but once in the studio, he reacted with his usual ebullient energy and enthusiasm, offering strong, constructive advice, and frequently exploding in praise of the young dancers.7 Later he described the25 occasion to Souvtchinsky with whom he was now back on good terms after their Paris re
union the previous December. “Balanchine,” he reported, “showed me his dances in rehearsal. Superb. There won’t be any scenery, and to tell the truth none is needed, though it’s a shame there are no costumes either, since dancing in practice kit has been done in other ballets and is no longer very convincing.”8 Above all, though, he insisted he was simply unable to hang around in New York after an absence of four months. They had had a “nice” week at sea, and a “tiresome” week in Manhattan.9 It was time to catch up with things at home.

  He thus missed one of the most spectacular successes of his entire career. Whatever Kirstein may have cancelled, he had actually laid on a dazzling all-Stravinsky evening for the new ballet, programming it not only with Apollo and Orpheus, as always intended, but also with Firebird in Balanchine’s choreography of the 1945 suite. After the charity evening, Soulima wired his enthusiasm for the new work,10 and one or two reviews appeared, notably that of John Martin in the New York Times, by no means always a wholehearted friend of Balanchine or the New York City Ballet, but now enthralled by the intricacy and ingenuity of the collaboration and the wizardry of the dancing.11 But it was only after the official premiere on 1 December that the full extent of the triumph became clear. Agon was greeted with wild acclaim by the packed City Center audience, and with something approaching rapture by a press that, in the past, had often expressed itself coolly about Balanchine’s particular genre of anti-narrative dance. Edwin Denby (a dependable supporter) wrote that “the balcony stood up shouting and whistling when the choreographer took his bow. Downstairs, people came out into the lobby, their eyes bright as if the piece had been champagne.”12 As for the work itself, Louis Biancolli, who had detested Danses concertantes (“an illustrated exercise book”), was fully reconciled to what he now praised as “the very anatomy of dance” and “a living textbook on the art of blending music and motion.”13 The Tribune critic, Walter Terry, found simply that “for sheer invention, for intensive exploitation of the human body and the designs which it can create, ‘Agon’ is quite possibly the most brilliant ballet creation of our day, at least in that area usually described […] as ‘abstract dance.’ True, ‘Agon’ is not warm, not overtly human, but its very coolness is refreshing and it generates excitement because it totally ignores human foibles, dramatic situation, and concentrates wholly upon the miracle of the dancing body.”14 A few days later Kirstein wrote to the composer that the ballet was so successful that they had put in six extra performances,15 and Diana Adams, who had danced the “Pas de deux” with Arthur Mitchell, wrote of their “pleasure and excitement in performing Agon. I wish it were on each program. We are still not ‘note-perfect’ but we seize Kopeikine [Balanchine’s rehearsal pianist] and the stage at every opportunity and our concentration is intense, so we improve! The audience response is tremendous, they seem to love it, and several more performances have been added. I do hope you have seen the notices, they were marvelous. Congratulations, and thank you for our beautiful, beautiful score.”16

  The composer was so delighted by all this that when Balanchine wrote soon afterwards to Boosey’s claiming an exclusivity in Agon and challenging the publisher’s right to allow it to be staged at La Scala, Milan, Stravinsky most uncharacteristically supported his claim, which was certainly not based on any written contract and which contradicted Stravinsky’s own previous agreement to the Milan production. He was motivated, he said, partly by gratitude, but was in any case “quite uninterested” in anyone but Balanchine putting the work on.17

  ON THE DAY of the charity premiere of Agon, Stravinsky had his mind on an utterly different type of dodecaphony and another form of duet writing. For several days he had been working on the first part of Threni. In Venice he had got as far as the setting of the letter “Beth,” and now, back at Wetherly Drive, he was manipulating a pair of unaccompanied solo tenors in the “Plorans ploravit” and “Vide, Domine”: “She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks … See, O Lord, and consider; for I am become vile.” From here he soon moved on to the letter “Caph,” with its curious vocal monosyllables supported by polyphonic writing for strings, and by Christmas he had started on the second part of the whole work, the “Querimonia,” or “Complaint,” where the prophet portrays himself as abandoned by God. In some ways the instrumental music Stravinsky was evolving for the Lamentations was the closest he had yet come to the attenuated, needle-point textures of mature Webern; but the vocal writing was fundamentally unlike anything by the Second Viennese School. In designing his twelve-note row, he had gone out of his way to build into it the very property that Schoenberg had been at such pains to avoid: a sense—however faint and evanescent—of key. Elsewhere in the house, Craft was again rehearsing for a Monday concert: sacred vocal music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Josquin, Lassus, and Gesualdo; and Threni itself at times almost bears traces of some distant choral liturgy, imperfectly overheard. In fact, with its long stretches of unaccompanied voice, it even recalls the Orthodox services at which, of late, Stravinsky had been a somewhat infrequent artender. At any rate “the miracle of the dancing body” is here as remote as New York is from Los Angeles.

  Threni was well ahead of schedule for its Venice premiere, now fixed for September, and the only trouble—as with the Canticum sacrum—was its length. But this time the score was turning out not shorter, but considerably longer than expected. Already in the second week of January, with the music barely half-written, Stravinsky was warning Liebermann about the extra length, and suggesting a program for the Venice concert (Threni plus the Mass and Symphonies of Wind Instruments), which shows that he feared—because of the amount of still-unset text—that it was likely to end up nearly twice as long as the twenty minutes stipulated by the commission.18 Whatever the reason for this new miscalculation—whether it was the rigidity of the serial technique or the sheer length of a text being composed, so to speak, litany-fashion, line by line—Stravinsky was once again inclined to be evasive on the subject, and when a month later Nabokov relayed to him Craft’s report that the duration might be as much as forty minutes, he denied it firmly. Threni, he insisted, “is gradually nearing completion [he had only the final section, “De Elegia Quinta,” to compose] and its length is still far from what Bob, exaggeration-prone as ever, tells you.”19 But the exaggeration-prone Bob had merely been conveying information given him by the Master himself. On the 19th of March, two days before the actual completion of the “short” score, he updated Nabokov to the effect that the whole work lasted only twenty minutes, “despite IS’s prediction a month ago.” Instead of the Symphonies, they were now proposing the Tallis Lamentations with, most intriguingly, a canonic prelude, interlude, and postlude for instruments by Stravinsky, and a Lassus motet, “Laudate Dominum,” transcribed by him for orchestra.20 Alas for these shining hopes, Threni did turn out to last upwards of half an hour, as Stravinsky finally admitted to Liebermann a few days later;21 nothing came of the bonus works, and the whole episode proved only that the composer, usually so sure-footed over timings, was for once confused about the structural effect of this difficult new style, pursued relentlessly from start to finish and for the most part at slowish tempo.

  In Paris, Boulez was also having to juggle programs for the planned Domaine Musical performance of Threni in November on the basis of these erratic predictions. But he was to some extent distracted by performances of his own music. In December, his lavishly scored René Char cycle Le Visage nuptial had had its belated premiere in Cologne, more than a decade after the completion of its original chamber version, and he was now working on a complicated idea for a mixed orchestral and electronic piece to be done at Donaueschingen in the autumn.22 Souvtchinsky had attended the Cologne premiere, and reported back to Stravinsky. “Boulez,” he announced, “turned overnight into some sort of Mahler, and everyone was open-mouthed with astonishment, including our friend Scherchen [who was conducting].” Souvtchinsky himself had found it all very sumptuous, in its jingling, tinkling, twitt
ering way, and he saw the work as a kind of Schoenberg Gurrelieder in Boulez’s development.23 Despite these slightly barbed compliments, Stravinsky greeted the score with something approaching rapture when it arrived from the publisher a few weeks later. “Oh Boulez!” he wrote. “You’ve given me such a beautiful present!” He longed to hear the music, about which Souvtchinsky had spoken so enthusiastically. At the same time he was anxious to learn whether Boulez had managed to secure the Cologne radio orchestra for Threni, since he knew that the Sudwestfunk were otherwise committed, likewise at Donaueschingen.24

  Over the Venice premiere, there had been no lack of communication from Liebermann and Nabokov, but Piovesan had again gone silent and was refusing to answer letters. By February they needed to be engaging singers; and there was the nice, helpless Biennale director, as usual with “no money, no power, and no authority to sign contracts,” as Stravinsky grumbled to Nabokov.25 Afterwards, it was as if the complaint had echoed round the caverns of doom. A week later Craft, who had flown to New York after repeating Tallis’s Lamentations at a Monday concert, phoned to report that Piovesan had died suddenly of pneumonia—aged only fifty—on the very day of Stravinsky’s letter, as the composer superstitiously admitted when he next wrote to Nika.26 For some reason, Wetherly Drive took this death more personally than might have been thought likely from their frequent tirades against Piovesan’s dilatoriness. Stravinsky mourned, Craft told Nabokov, “for two black weeks,” while he himself found it so cruel and unjust that he had no desire ever to go back to Venice.27 Nika came to the conclusion that Piovesan had suffered at the hands of his fellow bureaucrats “precisely because he was such a good man … the one astonishingly decent, intelligent, and kind person I came across in that black hole of musical operators.”28 But Stravinsky’s mood had also another cause. The weekend after Craft’s phone call, a telegram brought news of the death of Willy Strecker. For Stravinsky, this was a more genuinely personal loss, since Strecker had for nearly thirty years acted as a strong business adviser and energetic supporter when times were hard and decisions difficult. He had been less in evidence of late, certainly, but Igor had not forgotten his steady support in the thirties or his vigorous promotion of his music amid the ruins of postwar Germany. “I’m overwhelmed by this death,” he told Sam Dushkin (who had first come into his life through Strecker), “to the point of being unable to go on with this letter.”29 “Perhaps at our age,” he wrote, more stoically, to Nika, “it is natural to pass away like that, but it causes nevertheless a very painful reaction.”30 As for Piovesan, all he could do was send money to the director’s widow, who was without means and had a little son.