With Threni finished, the question now arose as to what he would write next. The thought that he might at last hang up his Stravigor seems never to have occurred to him, but at the same time he plainly had no overriding urge to compose one thing rather than another. He had established that Sacher would accept a choral work, but had then proceeded to write that work for Venice, meanwhile calmly informing Sacher that his commission would have to wait until the season after next.31 Santa Fe were still hoping for an opera for their 1959 season, but were having difficulty raising the fee; Kirstein was already angling for a new ballet. In one way or another these were distant prospects, and as for Sacher, he was suffering the fate of the dependable suitor down the ages. It was a role he accepted with the best possible grace. He was even prepared to act as go-between for a rival Basle commission, in the shape of a request from the university for a cantata setting of its medieval Latin charter to mark its five-hundredth anniversary in 1960. Still more remarkable, Stravinsky did not turn this unprepossessing commission down flat, but instead temporized while, for honor’s sake, upping the fee from seven to ten thousand dollars. Not until late May did he inform the university that he could not write their cantata; and on the same day he wrote to Sacher, postponing his work for yet another year.32
The reason for all these maneuverings was the usual one. A better offer had come up, but was not yet firm; and since “better” in this case meant “better paid,” the contractual question was paramount. Once again it was Nabokov who broke the stalemate. Would Stravinsky, he wrote in mid-March, write a fifteen- or twenty-minute concerto for a good young Swiss pianist, for fifteen thousand dollars paid by a Swiss industrialist and hotel tycoon by the name of Karl Weber?33 Like a dog with a juicy new bone, Stravinsky at once became furtive. He would write the concerto, on condition that the deal was kept secret and the U.S. revenue evaded by having the fee paid direct into his Basle bank account. But he was curious about Weber’s motives. Obviously, the pianist was a “tyotka” (a “queer”), or Weber would hardly stump up that kind of money on his behalf.34 Nabokov hastened to correct him. The pianist was a woman: in fact she was the tycoon’s wife, Margrit. The Webers were typical cultivated Swiss, and owned a big chain of hotels and a magnificent collection of paintings. Nabokov knew about them through the Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay, who had suggested the commission and was hoping to conduct the new work. According to Rolf Liebermann, Nika reported, Frau Weber was a perfectly competent pianist.35
Stravinsky had composed nothing specifically for piano (except orchestral parts and the Septet) for almost fifteen years, and there is no evidence that he had been planning anything of the kind now. His mind was still running on vocal—preferably sacred—music. But he quickly entered into the spirit of this new idea. On about the day that he received Nabokov’s reassuring second letter, he attended a Monday Evening Concert and heard Leonard Stein play four of Stockhausen’s Piano Pieces (nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5) and the three Schoenberg pieces, op. 11. Two days later he wrote to David Adams in New York, asking him to send a score of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto.36 Stockhausen’s refined, diamantine piano textures must have intrigued him as a less drastic—or at least less Dionysian—solution than Boulez’s (in his sonatas and Structures) to the question of how to write serially for the instrument, but at the same time it looks as if he wanted the most recent possible advice on the combination of piano and orchestral sound from the fountain of truth. The lyrical elegance of Schoenberg’s gloss on the Viennese concerto tradition may have surprised him, but in the end it gave him little more than a distant point of departure. It was utterly remote from his interests musically. The Stockhausen pieces had much more to do with the kind of instrumental sound-world that had been crystallizing here and there in his own most recent music, however little he may have known (or cared) about their complex sub-serial manipulations of pitch and of rhythmic and dynamic values.
As far as actual serial technique was concerned, there was a model closer to home and more able and willing to explain itself. It was nearly three years since they had talked to Krenek about the rotating series in his Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, but it was only in recent months that the score had at last come out in a printed edition. Krenek had sent a copy that very December, just as Stravinsky was starting work on the second part of his own Lamentations settings. The preface included a chart that indicated how Krenek had varied his note-row according to a strict cycle of rotations, rather like one of those country dances in which the front couple peels off to the back and the remaining couples move up one place. The musical equivalent of this choreography also involved adjustments of pitch so that the rotated rows all started on the same note. Stravinsky was fascinated by these manipulations, and he drew connecting lines and arrows on Krenek’s chart, as if plotting cavalry movements at Austerlitz. Writing his own “Querimonia” in Threni, he tinkered vaguely with a few rotations of the country-dance variety; but it seems to have struck him only several months later, when he started to think about his new Weber commission, that Krenek’s chart would make a good starting point for a much farther-reaching process, no less rational in its way than the serialization-of-everything methods of the European young bloods, but at the same time beautifully irrational and, within musical limits, unpredictable. At this point he drew his own chart and his own set of cavalry movements. The stage was set for the last and in some respects most hair-raising sidestep in almost fifty years of evading the expectations of his most fervent admirers and virulent detractors.37
By the end of May 1958 he had made up his mind to compose the concerto, even though the agreement with Weber was by no means signed and sealed. He knew that, if by any mischance the Swiss deal fell through, he would still have a highly marketable work, one that he could sell to Sacher, or even possibly to Kirstein. It was true that when Nabokov made this latter suggestion to Balanchine a few weeks later, the choreographer hated the idea.38 But Nika was a tireless networker, and his contacts were second to none. The new director of the Cologne Opera, Oscar Fritz Schuh, had asked his advice about a big Stravinsky festival that he hoped to organize with various German radio stations in the winter of 1959–60, and Nabokov had pounced. “I at once said,” he reported to Stravinsky, “that such a framework would be the best opportunity for you to conduct the new piano concerto, and I am sure the fat Germans would pay you a good fee for the rights of a world premiere. If not, they would obviously want to commission you to write a new piece. I told Schuh he would have to book Bob as organizer, conductor and bibliographer, and George as ballet master.”39 Schuh might have been forgiven for taking to his heels at this point, and it says much for Stravinsky’s vast prestige in Germany as well as for Nabokov’s extraordinary charm and persuasive power that, on the contrary, his interest was aroused, he later went to Venice to meet Stravinsky, and he was still discussing a Stravinsky opera cycle with Nabokov in November, long after the clinching of the Weber agreement.40 Nabokov, moreover, did not come empty-handed from such talks. Stravinsky paid him a 10 percent commission on the piano concerto fee, and Nika got a lavish production of his own recently completed opera, Rasputin’s End, in Cologne a year later.41
Stravinsky now naturally wanted to get down to composing the music, but this time his health intervened. The polycythemia diagnosed in December 1956 had been controlled by frequent and regular bloodlettings, but this had begun to produce alarming side effects, and at the end of May 1958 he was forced to spend ten days in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital having treatment for a bleeding ulcer. As ever, his medical life at this time was a social and philosophical, as well as strictly clinical, phenomenon. His current doctor, Sigfrid Knauer, was a practitioner of holistic medicine who used homeopathy and acupuncture alongside more conventional treatments, performed diagnoses with the help of a pendulum, and (according to Craft, who was also for a time treated by him) believed in “rejuvenation by the ingestion of minced fetuses.”42 Knauer had the added advantage—particularly for the holistic physicia
n to a holistic composer—that he spoke Russian. But at Cedars of Lebanon there were other doctors, who put Stravinsky on a course of blood transfusions and radioactive phosphorus injections, which, he said, would probably make him light up like a firefly.43
No sooner was he out of hospital than he had to prepare his early song cycle The Faun and the Shepherdess and a staged performance of Mavra for a concert in the Royce Hall of UCLA on 16 June. It must have been a curious feeling to confront these relics of past stylistic anxieties just when he was thinking himself into the modernism of composers not yet born when Mavra had been new and shocking. All the same, he was unwilling to concede the irrelevance of his beloved little opera, inextricably associated for him with his dawning passion for Vera. In fact the whole occasion roused him to a most uncharacteristic fit of nostalgia. Writing a few days later to Souvtchinsky on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, he related to him the story that he had recently also told Craft about Nadezhda Rimsky-Korsakov’s spiteful remark at her husband’s funeral that “we still have Glazunov,” and then proceeded to rail against the Los Angeles audience’s incomprehension of Mavra.
It’s my impression that, even with a clearcut performance of this transparent and uncomplicated music, it only gets through to the odd listener, while the rest hear nothing and merely whisper and giggle like idiots when Mavra comes on in high boots and hussar’s trousers under his skirt. All the same you and I need to have a particular talk about Mavra. I don’t think (even though I’m now busy with other problems) that its place in music is as unimportant as Boulez probably thinks or as Ravel thought.44
Whatever the importance of Mavra, it would be hard at first to trace the smallest direct connection between it and the music he was now starting to compose. By the 9th of July he had managed to write some two minutes of his new concerto—the first of five Movements, as it turned out: two minutes which became three by the simple device of adding a repeat sign to the end of the first section. Apart from a few isolated moments in Threni, he had written nothing like it before. It was not just the technique that was intricate; the music itself breathed the rarefied atmosphere of the extreme post-Webern European avant-garde. The instrumental lines floated free through an atonal ether, devoid of recognizable melody, harmony, or rhythm, their notes scattered like the random flashes on an optometrist’s screen. It was music so obviously designed to place its author in relation to a group of admired younger composers, that any cool, well-informed observer might have mistaken it, on a casual glance, for an attempt at parody that had turned by accident into a serious and extended exercise.
Stravinsky was certainly taking his usual pains to make the music as refined and precise as he could. From the very first gesture on the flute, an idea that turns into a two-note chord identical to the one that had opened Les Noces, the delicacy and individuality of the writing are beyond argument. Uncomplicated it may not be, but transparent it remains. Here and there a soft open fifth chord, like some far-off fanfare, marks off the short sentences that seem to be the septuagenarian’s way of rethinking a kind of music that, in more youthful hands, had tended toward aggression, relentlessness, and excess. In fact, the more one looks at these opening bars of Movements, the more one becomes intrigued at the manner of the theft: so shameless yet elegant, like Mozart pinching from early Wagner. Hardly less remarkable is the fact that the music betrays neither anxiety nor uncertainty. Plainly Stravinsky had lost none of that “thirst for renunciation” and “faculty for renewal” that Boris de Schloezer had detected thirty years before in Apollo.45 Issues of style and continuity, motivation, sincerity, and the rest of the baggage of popular criticism simply did not interest him. He just got on with the process of making.
NOT MUCH TIME now remained before their departure for Europe and the Venice premiere of Threni, scheduled for late September. Craft was conducting in Santa Fe, but the Stravinskys were going direct to New York, meeting up with him on the way. They were in Manhattan by 23 July 1958, and six days later they sailed for Genoa on the Cristoforo Colombo, reaching Venice on the 9th. Their early arrival to some extent betokened a holiday. “This year the pederasts outnumber the pigeons,” Stravinsky remarked, like some character in E. M. Forster arriving at the usual boardinghouse.46 But it was self-mockery, of course. He had had a muted spinet installed in his room at the Bauer, and he was soon at work on the second of the Movements, music that introduces little trembling figures for harp and piano that may even have been half-suggested by the instrument on which they were being composed.47 Toward the end of the month Craft went off to Hamburg, where he had the difficult task of preparing the performers for the Venice concerts: not just the new work, but also Oedipus Rex, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and The Rite of Spring, a score he had never conducted before.48 He is soon sending back detailed bulletins, full of extravagant praise of Threni, which he now considers a masterpiece, Stravinsky’s best work since the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and—along with the Webern cantatas—the best choral music of the twentieth century, having previously described it to Nabokov as puzzling and, by virtue of its “museum” instrumentation, virtually unprogrammable. It is not hard, but arduous and, of course, completely out of place at the Venice Biennale, where there is little sympathy for the truly modern, but instead they are performing “junk by Hindemith and Bartók.” In any case, the Hamburg radio orchestra has little concept of exact rhythm and all too little experience of playing Stravinsky.49
But if he reveres the masterwork, he is not always so very gentle with the master. His letters are not quite those of an assistant, certainly not those of an employee (justly, since Stravinsky paid him no salary, and perhaps did not always even pick up his hotel bill: Craft grumbles at one point that he owes the Bauer five hundred dollars). He as good as instructs the composer to stay free on the evening of his return to Venice and not to attend other concerts, by way of revenge against the Hamburg chorus master and the orchestra’s regular conductor, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, who did not attend Craft’s rehearsals. From Brussels, where he is preparing Stravinsky’s Mass, among other things, for a concert in Huy, he grumbles furiously about the place, the people, and his cramped, uncomfortable lodgings, making it abundantly clear that he is only there at all because he has no other source of income. This tone of brusque, querulous intimacy might come as a shock to anyone expecting filial respect or a natural hierarchy to the relationship. It no longer, however, surprised Craft himself. Only a month before, he had drawn up a ruthless inventory of his own defects, describing himself as “feckless, irresolute, physically and mentally indolent, yet impulsive … [and] a scold.” With devastating self-awareness, he put forward possible titles for his books: “Collected Carpings,” “Cavils of a Curmudgeon,” “With Microscope and Tweezers.” He was promiscuous, sybaritic, fickle in argument, and above all a conflicting instance of what Walpole had intended as a distinction when he remarked that “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”50 He was capable, nevertheless, of sincere affection. Returning to Brussels to conduct Threni at the Exposition Universelle in early October, and living in the house of a banker friend whose daughter he was courting, he admitted to the Stravinskys: “How lucky I am to have been with you these ten years …”51
It was a relief for Craft to get back to Venice in mid-September, and probably a relief to have him back. The Threni premiere was only a week away, and in between Stravinsky was conducting Oedipus Rex and The Rite of Spring in the Fenice.52 Venice was momentarily the center of the intellectual universe. Nabokov had tied in the Threni premiere with a conference on “tradition and renewal” in the arts, and the city was even fuller than usual of thinkers and feelers. Auden was there, and Spender, and Virgil Thomson; Craft glimpsed A. J. Ayer and E. M. Forster on the Piazza San Marco.53 Isaiah Berlin, whom they had met briefly with Spender in London in December 1956, came to the Fenice concert on the 19th, and afterwards wrote Stravinsky a four-page letter so verbosely
and gushingly enthusiastic that he instantly regretted it and begged Nabokov to retrieve it at all costs.54 The sense of art and mind coming together was almost palpable as the Threni premiere approached.
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