Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The performance was being given on the 23rd in the upper hall, the Sala dell’Albergo, of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, beneath the sumptuous but suitably patriarchal gaze of Tintoretto’s fantastic Old Testament ceiling and surrounded by his New Testament series on the walls, which so baffled Ruskin by its apparent haste and carelessness of execution.55 As with the Canticum sacrum, Stravinsky had conducted only the final rehearsals, and they had not gone notably well. A special run-through had been arranged that afternoon for the benefit of the press, who had been locked out of the working rehearsals; but even now there were frequent stops that demonstrated, as one Italian diarist noted, how “the good work of training and preparation by the young Craft was thrown to the winds by the still younger Stravinsky, always insecure, always in search of himself.”56 At the concert itself, Stravinsky was in sole charge. He conducted the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, and the Bach Variations, then, after the interval, Threni. An audience of five or six hundred—mainly press, the international set, local grandees, and a handful of first-nighters able and willing to pay twenty dollars for a seat—crammed into the long rectangular salon, deadening the acoustics, and exposing still more the spareness and severity of Stravinsky’s Jeremiad. According to one Italian critic, “The select audience … gave composer and performers the most enthusiastic reception, both during the concert and at the end.”57 But Peter Heyworth noticed only “a little perfunctory clapping while most of the élégants rushed for the doors. Stravinsky never appeared to take a bow, so that the remainder of us made our way disconsolately down that imposing staircase feeling that due respect had hardly been paid to the greatest of living composers, or to the impressive new work that he had just presented to the world.”58

  The fact is that, even for hardy spirits and under ideal conditions, Threni is a tough nut to crack. “I’m afraid it’s a big bore,” the composer himself had told Morton, only half-jokingly, “but it will be good to bore my enemies.”59 One can look at the score, or even listen to a recording, and sense how wonderful much of its music might sound in some imaginary performance heaven. But Stravinsky’s performance was not good; it was tentative and without pace, the vocal soloists were fairly strong, but the chorus lacked assurance, and the music plodded from section to section.60 So judgment of the work’s stature needed a certain musical acumen allied to an unfailing confidence in Stravinsky’s artistic authority. Heyworth, an old Stravinsky hand, found much to admire but also a lack of variety in the contrapuntal texture. Poulenc, who was also present, told Pierre Bernac that “Threni is austere but authentic Stravinsky. Alas he conducted it very badly. But despite everything it was very moving. The Venetian audience was indescribably coarse, getting up as soon as the last bar ended. […] Plenty of musicians. Press average. The horrible Goléa [music critic of the Paris journal Carrefour] yelled out ‘it’s not a concert, it’s a cemetery.’”61 But Poulenc, though not sympathetic to Stravinsky’s serialism, was musician enough and a large enough character to grasp the music’s unique personality breaking through the more or less servile mechanics of the twelve-note technique. It was too much to expect such discrimination from the average Italian reviewer, whose knowledge of Stravinsky’s recent music was probably not much greater than his knowledge of Webern or, for that matter, Schoenberg. The critic of the Gazettino, for instance, after excusing himself for being unable to comment on particulars without a score, ventured the general impression “that Stravinsky, having dedicated himself entirely, at least in this work, to dodecaphony, has written a radically dodecaphonic work, Webernian and Schoenbergian, and has adopted the most extreme intellectual positions, laying out a score that is as complex, difficult and calculated as it is musically and poetically devoid of value, meaning or impact.”62 With professional help of this caliber, it is perhaps not surprising that the élégants made for the exit.

  The day after the premiere, Stravinsky went by car to Lugano with his son Theodore and Ernst Roth, and from there by train to Zurich, where he was starting a brief Swiss concert tour of Threni performances, in unlikely combination with Beethoven’s Choral Symphony under Schmidt-Isserstedt. In Zurich he met Karl Weber and his pianist wife for the first time. Venice, when they returned there on the 1st of October, was under water, and they picked their way across the piazzas and along the canals on duckboards. Within days, however, they were off again, this time to Hamburg, where the Venice concert was being repeated in the circumstances for which it had originally been commissioned. Stravinsky had told Lawrence Morton that the Swiss performances had gone better than the premiere,63 but it seems likely that the Hamburg performance was the best, and it was certainly here that both the work and its composer were treated with the respect that Heyworth had missed in Venice. At the start of the concert, when Stravinsky walked to the rostrum, the whole audience in the Musikhalle rose to their feet, and at the end there was a huge ovation, in which the performers joined.

  Their next stop was Baden-Baden and, from there, Donaueschingen, where Boulez was conducting his latest work, Poésie pour pouvoir, a technically ambitious setting for tape and live performers of an astonishingly fierce, imprecatory poem by Michaux. Curiously enough, Craft does not say in any of his various accounts of the visit whether they heard this beautiful but ultimately unsuccessful work (which Boulez afterwards withdrew), though he admits to Stockhausen’s triple-orchestral Gruppen, which Rosbaud conducted with Boulez and Stockhausen in a morning concert on the same day, 19 October.64 They had already dined with the two young composers, themselves still on friendly terms, in Baden-Baden, but seem not to have gathered anything from Boulez about the preparations for the Domaine Musical Threni in Paris the following month. They already knew that he had been unable to secure the services of any of the German radio orchestras and had had to fall back on the Lamoureux, a Paris orchestra with limited experience in modern music (though it had recently played Boulez’s own eight-minute Doubles, and was, he rather alarmingly claimed, well intentioned and hardworking).65 Stravinsky was also aware that Roth had been slow to provide orchestral materials for Paris, not wanting to print a second set before the first performance, in case of changes.66 What he may not have realized was that Boulez had been unable to honor his undertaking to handpick and prepare the singers (a promise he had made “because here one can’t trust anyone to be sufficiently strict”67), but had instead delegated the task to an agent. His own schedule had become atrociously demanding, and he had been wearing himself out “composing, writing, conducting, organizing—all in a kind of frenzy.”68 He had realized only a few weeks before that the vocal solos in Threni needed professional singers, not chorus members.69 Now soloists had been booked, but he himself had been too preoccupied with Donaueschingen to work with them.

  However little of this came out at the Baden-Baden dinner, all will have become brutally clear within minutes of the start of the composer’s first Paris rehearsal on the 9th of November. In between there had been a delightful trip to Florence, where Stravinsky had a pair of concerts at the end of October, and a disagreeable stay in Vienna (for Oedipus Rex at the Staatsoper), a city that he and Vera detested and had in fact succeeded in avoiding since 1930. Craft was ill and in discomfort from a suspected appendicitis. The omens were not propitious. In Paris, from the start, nothing went right. The young choir of the Jeunesses Musicales could not sing Threni and did not improve; the soloists were uneven and unreliable. Boulez implored Stravinsky to be more demanding with the singers, “but he was in a benign mood, and convinced me that it was not necessary to harass them.”70 It then transpired that the orchestral parts had not arrived for Schoenberg’s Variations, which Craft was down to conduct (with Webern’s Passacaglia) in the first half of the concert. The only recourse was to substitute the three string-orchestral pieces from Berg’s Lyric Suite, even though they were plainly too hard for the Lamoureux strings to master at such short notice. In despair (Craft later claimed) he, Vera, and Nadia Boulanger implored Stravinsky to
cancel.71 He refused. Boulez himself urged him to be more considerate of the players, who were frequently left to sit on their hands while the choir practiced an awkward passage, or some other section of the much-fragmented orchestra rehearsed.72 It was all in vain. Stravinsky seemed in the grip of some fatalistic demon, compelling him to a new Paris scandal like the one that had clinched his notoriety all those many years before. With Jeremiah he seemed to be saying:

  He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old …

  Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall,

  My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.

  This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.

  The Lord came not to his rescue, and the concert, in the Salle Pleyel on 14 November, was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. The orchestra was more or less at sea throughout the first half, and it did not help—in the opinion of at least one critic—that Craft conducted the Webern and Berg items without the clarity that the underprepared players needed.73 But at least the music remained roughly intact. Threni was not so fortunate. It actually broke down on more than one occasion, despite Boulez’s having concealed himself among the chorus in order to cue their entries, and several of the unaccompanied vocal ensembles dissolved into chaos. Stravinsky himself got more and more nervous, his beat increasingly vague. Somehow the performance staggered to a conclusion, and the audience, who must all have realized that the cacophony to which they had just been subjected was not deliberate, prepared to acknowledge the composer in a manner appropriate to his artistic stature rather than to the monstrosity they had just witnessed. As the applause began, Stravinsky nodded perfunctorily in the general direction of the auditorium, then retreated to the wings and shut himself in his dressing-room, refusing all entreaties, from Boulez and others, to return to the rostrum and take a bow. At this point the mood in the audience turned less friendly. The shouts of “Vive Stravinsky!” increasingly mixed with jeers and hisses as the poor musicians were left, in effect, to take full responsibility for the debacle. Backstage, Stravinsky yelled at Boulez that he would not go out and that he would never again agree to conduct in Paris. At last he emerged from the dressing room, ignored the inevitable cluster of admirers, and left the hall alone.

  Outside, two elderly Russians approached him, one of them Sonya Botkine, only surviving daughter of Nicholas II’s last doctor, niece of Bakst, and a close friend from the early Diaghilev years. “Master, you remember …?” she prompted in Russian. “Nichevo ne pomnyu: I remember nothing,” he snapped, as he sank into his car.74

  26

  THE PILOT FISH AT SEA

  FOR THREE consecutive years now, the Domaine Musical had provided a platform for Stravinsky’s newest work, and while the ultimate effect on the composer was to confirm him in his hatred of Parisian musical life, Paris itself nourished a profound ambivalence toward its most famous living excitizen. On the very night of the Threni concert, and almost as if he had not noticed the ghastliness of the performance, the scourge of the Symphony of Psalms, Boris de Schloezer, wrote to Stravinsky praising “the grandeur of this score, its formal unity, its austerity, its beauty in the refusal of all compromise, all effect, all sensual seduction, all personal effusion.”1 But for Stravinsky’s oldest Paris friends the picture was a lot more complicated. Poulenc had summed up their confusion after hearing the double Venice Canticum sacrum on the radio. After the first performance, he had asked himself whether, “if this wasn’t signed Stravinsky, they would be crying masterpiece,” but after the second he had decided that “nobody else could write like that.” He concluded, nevertheless, that serialism had given Stravinsky nothing, and put it all down to the “bad influence of Craft.”2 Darius Milhaud now went much farther. “Igor’s dodecaphony,” he told Paul Collaer, “reminds me of Ravel’s polytonality … The coquetry of great men wanting to show that they’re on the latest boat. It does take a certain courage. What’s sinister in Igor’s case is that the Domaine Musical make use of him but don’t trust him. Too bad. That’s what happens when you invite the Devil (Robert Craft) into your home.”3

  Craft’s influence was no less manifest on the Pleyel book-stall, which gave prominent display to the volume of articles and conversations that he and Souvtchinsky had been assembling for almost two years, and which Rocher had at last brought out a week or so earlier under the title Avec Stravinsky. Nobody flicking through this book, with its articles by Boulez and Stockhausen, its “Entretiens d’Igor Stravinsky avec Robert Craft” (expanded, now, from thirty-six to ninety-two questions and answers), and its array of analytical texts—notably on the most recent scores—by Craft himself, could have failed to notice that a certain image was being cultivated, the image of a great master lending the full weight of his work and artistic authority to the “mainstream” European avant-garde. The book, so to speak, was of one mind with the music. Of other composers, the most frequently invoked was Webern, of whose music Stravinsky had literally known nothing before the advent of Craft. Serialism was now confidently assumed to be the one true path. “Masterpieces aside,” Stravinsky remarked at one point, “it seems to me the new music will be serial,” and when asked to name the most interesting work by a young composer, he inevitably chose Boulez’s Marteau sans maître.4

  Boulez, for his part, was prepared to acknowledge Stravinsky’s patriarchal status in conjunction with the sainted Webern, but only insofar as he disowned his old following. “After an encounter with the dead,” Boulez wrote in his own brief but trenchant contribution, “the living reflect and change course; and in so doing they smash out the mythology that collects like dirt in the cracks of inferior minds.”5 The sense of what the French call a “cénacle,” a closely knit artistic circle, was almost tangible. But the full hidden force of the situation would only have become clear if you had picked up another new book on the Pleyel stall, Goléa’s Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez, and read on its second page about Boulez’s participation in the demonstrations against the neoclassical Stravinsky in the postliberation concerts of 1945.6 It was a measure of the extent to which Stravinsky had “changed course” that he was now on the march precisely with his former assailants. And it was a measure of the way he had been maneuvered into that position that he seems for the moment to have been no more than dimly aware of that fact. Of Goléa’s book—or at any rate of its contents—he remained blissfully ignorant until, as friends sometimes do, Souvtchinsky in the same breath revealed and denounced it to him.7

  After his initial rage, he evidently bore Boulez no particular grudge for the Threni debacle. From Rome, where he was conducting a fortnight after the Pleyel concert, he wrote his young colleague a perfectly amiable letter, pressing for rapid payment of his fee (for tax reasons) and ending with “mille amitiés de nous tous et à bientôt.”8 Then, in London to conduct the British premiere of Agon in a BBC concert in the Festival Hall on the 10th of December, he was able to drown his injuries in the unqualified homage that he could count on these days from the English capital. There was a cocktail party at Faber and Faber, who were about to publish the British edition of the Conversations, and the Observer threw a lunch at the Connaught at which Stravinsky—possibly to his surprise (since the guest list was controlled by Craft)—found himself opposite Harold Nicolson, and not far from the novelist Henry Green and the newspaper’s editor, David Astor, a man not famous for his interest in modern music. Isaiah Berlin was at the Connaught lunch as well, and the next day they all proceeded to Oxford and lunched at Berlin’s Headington house among a party of academic grandees that included the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, Lord David Cecil, and the historian Maurice Bowra. Such parties no doubt tended to reflect Craft’s enthusiasms as much as Stravinsky’s; or rather, insofar as the enthusiasms were Stravinsky’s, they were ones he had acquired from Craft. But his acquisitive mind was more than ready to adapt to what might have seemed random intellectual situations; and his creative mind rarely if ever slept.
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br />   This sociable mood was rudely disturbed at Christmas—by which time the Stravinskys were back in New York—by a long letter from Souvtchinsky. He had already tried several times, he said, to put pen to paper, but had been unable to bring himself to remind Stravinsky of what he knew had been a very unhappy time in Paris. He now, however, felt obliged to inform him of “an extremely painful and disagreeable matter” to do with Boulez, Threni, and Goléa’s Rencontres. “When I mentioned Goléa’s book to Boulez, in your presence, I hadn’t read it,” he continued. “Now I have, and one thing is clear. This book was written with Boulez’s consent and with his closest involvement.” What had caught Souvtchinsky’s eye was not the account of the 1945 protests, but a passage much later in the book where Goléa alleges that, in engaging Stravinsky to conduct Agon at the Domaine Musical in 1957, Boulez had been motivated primarily by the desire for publicity.9 “Can this mean,” Souvtchinsky demanded, “that Boulez actually made use of your name for his own self-promotion? And is this why he did none of the things he should have done for the performance of Threni?” Why he never stirred from Baden to choose the singers or to see that they were in a fit state to sing the music? Why he was now refusing to publish any kind of a rebuttal? “Dear Igor Fyodorovich, you may take an indulgent view of all this if you wish. I cannot, since for me you represent a value that is sacred, in the plainest and highest sense of the word.” Souvtchinsky insisted that he was not seeking in the slightest to influence Stravinsky’s feelings toward Boulez. “Indeed, I hope they won’t change. But as for me, I’ve communicated to him that my friendly relations with him are now broken off.” “What’s very sad,” he concluded, “is that his moral condition coincides with his music: his conflict with Strobel, his latest works, his rivalry with Stockhausen—it all shows that on this level something has happened, something that bodes no good.”10