Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  If Souvtchinsky expected the composer to be shocked by these revelations, he was to be disappointed. Stravinsky admired Boulez and enjoyed his company, but he did not entirely trust him (after the “Stravinsky demeure” article), and he certainly knew better than to expect so active and successful a figure to be exempt from the normal conditions of Paris musical politics. “Forget about the ghastly Goléa and his victim, Boulez,” he advised Souvtchinsky. “Get used to the idea that for Boulez success has always depended on others: Strobel, Goléa, and tomorrow there’ll be someone else, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. The only thing to do is forget it as quickly as possible.”11 Nevertheless, his own feelings toward Boulez for a while cooled perceptibly. Craft was soon telling Nabokov that the two composers had broken over the issue,12 and it is at least true that Stravinsky did not communicate with Boulez for more than two months after Souvtchinsky’s letter. In New York he was preoccupied with the U.S. premiere of Threni, which Craft conducted in Town Hall on 4 January, and with the recording for Columbia, which he himself conducted immediately afterwards. But the New York Threni was so brilliantly successful that it seems to have reignited the composer’s irritation with Boulez over the Paris fiasco. “The ovations were never-ending,” he reported to Souvtchinsky, “and I don’t doubt that if the Parisians had heard this performance, their attitude to the work and to me would have been very different.” And he could not resist adding that “it is with no feeling of gratitude toward Boulez that I shall remember my stay in Paris. How is it that someone so clever, sensible and honest did not have the courage to admit his Baden-Baden negligence and say ‘mea culpa.’”13

  The object of this censure remained—or so it seems—blissfully unconscious of his senior Russian colleagues’ concern for his moral well-being. To Stravinsky he wrote with apparent unconcern about the “great pleasure of having seen him in Paris, despite the black shadow of those idiotic soloists, who forced us to give them lessons in elementary solfège!”14 Later, there were cheerful postcards, signed jointly with Strobel, Stockhausen. and Mme. Tézenas, from Cologne, where Boulez was conducting Renard.15 Not until almost the end of February did he at last write in a tone that indicated some awareness that the idiotic soloists might have been the cause of any more lasting injury. He had recently, he says, had his attention drawn to the Goléa book, “since there was a phrase in it that might wound you and make you altogether doubt my sincerity.” The phrase was, of course, the one about the “publicity coup.” “I beg you to believe,” Boulez was suddenly pleading, “that I never had any such intention, and that I esteem you too highly—and, by the way, myself enough also—not to play such a ridiculous Barnum and Bailey role.” His real hope, he added (thus tactfully repairing any extra damage left by Goléa’s reference to the 1945 demonstrations), had been to make “public recompense for all the misunderstandings that had previously kept us apart.”16

  Had Boulez really only just found out what was in the book? Or had he simply, and not unreasonably, failed to predict the impact of one half-flippant expression by a notoriously caustic critic on the delicate sensibilities of a proud but insecure fellow genius? Stravinsky had certainly at first assumed that Boulez and Goléa were hand in glove. But in truth the Rencontres issue was a complete red herring. Stravinsky was complaining, not about anything in the book, but about Boulez’s failure to apologize for the Threni nightmare. So who had told Boulez that Stravinsky was offended about the book? The answer, naturally, is Souvtchinsky. It was Souvtchinsky who was energetically “breaking” with his young hero, or so he told Stravinsky, though in fact he never did anything of the kind, but continued to cultivate good relations with Boulez, precisely as he was doing with Stravinsky. To Stravinsky he was careful to write that “in order to avoid getting your name mixed up in this affair, I am even prepared not to tell Boulez that I have written to you.”17 Not only did he not tell Boulez he had written, he apparently did not for some weeks so much as mention to him the imagined cause of offense. Only toward the end of February, by which time Boulez may well have been wondering about Stravinsky’s continuing silence, did Souvtchinsky confront him with the “coup de publicité” and its supposed consequences. Souvtchinsky’s own account of their meetings to Stravinsky makes bizarre reading.

  I had two conversations with him, and in all we talked for eight hours.… I always supposed that “hysterical scenes” only happened with characters in Dostoyevsky, but it turns out they’re available to French musicians too. Boulez threw a tantrum by any standards Dostoyevskian. He sobbed, screamed, banged his fists, tore his hair, grumbled, threatened. He would crush and destroy everyone; he alone knew and understood everything. It was a terrible spectacle.… But despite everything, I’m convinced it was a cold fit. Neither of us persuaded the other. He will go on as before with his electronic music, his Mallarmé, writing for Strobel, and bossing everyone around.18

  Whether or not one believes this colorful description, it is far from clear that it had anything to do with Stravinsky. Boulez had long been an obsession of Souvtchinsky’s, but recently he had become preoccupied with what he regarded as the younger man’s careerism, his ambitions as a conductor and entrepreneur, his growing involvement with Germany. Boulez, he claimed, could not bear to be opposed.19 But neither did Souvtchinsky enjoy the loss of influence all this implied for him. The Goléa affair looks like nothing so much as a bid to reassert control by fomenting trouble for Boulez in an influential quarter. And if this is true, fate chose a strategic moment to deal Souvtchinsky another useful card at precisely this juncture.

  It came in the form of a paragraph by Goléa on the Threni concert in an article on the “Paris Music Industry,” in the February issue of the German periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.20 The review, such as it was, was brief and to the point. As far as Threni was concerned, Goléa made no comment on the music, shrugged his shoulders at the poor performance (since “we have known for almost forty years that Stravinsky is no great conductor”), and merely reproached him for leaving the performers to take the blame. He then turned his guns on the composer’s hapless assistant. “In the first half of the concert,” he sneered, “Robert Craft, who for ten years has swum cheerfully in Stravinsky’s wake, ‘conducted,’ if one can call it that, the Passacaglia, op. 1, of Webern and the three string-orchestral movements from Berg’s Lyric Suite; it was a catastrophe, to the point where even the most hardened opponent of the ‘New Music’ will have been clear that it was not the music, but the ‘conductor,’ who was responsible for the works’ shipwreck.”

  Whether or not Boulez had seen this review when he wrote his letter of apology to Stravinsky (he later implied that he had not), Stravinsky this time did not need either him or Souvtchinsky to tell him about it, being himself a subscriber to the journal. Bitter as he must have felt at the attack on his own conducting, the assault on Craft’s was still more painful to him, coming as it did so soon after the triumph of the New York Threni. Craft was his conductor, his exponent, his mouthpiece. Fatherly affection aside, it was psychologically important to him that this young American who had come to him and stayed with him of his own free will should be accepted as a musician of international caliber—a kind of household talisman against the Bernsteins and the Stokowskis, the Markevitches and (nowadays) the Ansermets, whom he so much feared and, officially at least, detested. Robert Craft, he once remarked, was the best conductor of his old works, of his new works, and of the works he had yet to write.21 Reservations about the young man’s performances were not welcome at North Wetherly Drive, and Pierre Souvtchinsky had certainly not forgotten this when he told Stravinsky that “among young musicians, Boulez rates (and fears!) only Craft and Stockhausen. He spits on the rest.…”22 Doubtless it was a lie, but it was a white lie. And now here was this malicious Frenchman Goléa hitting Craft where it hurt most, at the level of simple competence. After all, what kind of modern specialist was it who could not, with a professional orchestra, get up a half-respectable performance of
a source-work like Webern’s Passacaglia, even at short notice? The master took up his pen:

  Your reviewer of the Paris concert in which I conducted my Threni … is guilty of vicious injustice. The responsibility for the fiasco of that concert is the Domaine Musical’s, and your reviewer, as the author of a vulgar book which is in part a history of that organization, is close enough to it to know the truth, which is that the Domaine Musical did not prepare the concert as it promised to do. Your reviewer’s remarks about R. Craft are also vicious and unjust since he knows perfectly well that R. Craft was obliged to sight-read Berg’s Lyric Suite and perform it only after two hasty and incomplete rehearsals, and that if the Venice performance of Threni was better than the Paris [as Goléa had observed], the reason is that R. Craft prepared it, in fact, did what the Domaine Musical did not do.

  But having composed this neat riposte, he began to worry about its effect, and he decided instead to submit it first to Souvtchinsky for his approval.23 Souvtchinsky did not think it the right approach. It seems that he was determined to subject Boulez to the aftershocks for as long as he could, and he accordingly advised Stravinsky to insist that Boulez write personally to the NZfM, dissociating himself from Goléa’s remarks and explaining the circumstances in detail. Goléa, he claimed, was busy ingratiating himself with the Lamoureux’s chief conductor, Igor Markevitch, and was hoping to drive a wedge between the Lamoureux and Stravinsky.24 Quite why this should have worried Stravinsky, who had already stated categorically that he would never again conduct in Paris, is not entirely clear. Nevertheless he accepted the advice, withdrew his own letter, and, having told Souvtchinsky on 9 March that he would not press Boulez to write, for fear of embittering him, in fact did so on the 10th, in a stiff and somewhat chilly letter in which he represented it as Boulez’s moral duty to challenge Goléa’s review.25

  The Machiavellian aspect of these goings-on may seem sufficiently complicated, but the whole situation becomes positively Byzantine when one includes in the equation the crucial and unquantifiable element of emotion. Souvtchinsky, it appears, was possessive of Boulez; Stravinsky was cross with him but still fascinated by him musically and intellectually, and personally fond of him. Having praised Le Marteau sans maître in print, he had now, however, come to the conclusion that Boulez was not much interested in his own recent music, and certainly not in Threni, which he had just conducted in Munich, but which he talked about purely in terms of numbers of performers and seating arrangements.26

  Meanwhile, Robert Craft was going through his own personal dark night of the soul. Shattered by his traumatic experience in the Salle Pleyel, a concert that, because of his subservient position, he had been powerless to abort, he now had to endure an attack on his competence that, if it became widely known, would be seized on by his enemies as proof of their contention that he was merely using Stravinsky as a free ride to unmerited success. What was almost worse, Stockhausen had recently been in New York at the start of a U.S. concert and lecture tour, and had been loudly abusing Craft’s recent recording of his Zeitmasse to anyone who would listen, including influential people at Columbia such as David Oppenheim and, no doubt, Goddard Lieberson. Craft badly needed the reassurance of Boulez’s oft-expressed admiration, and when the French composer lowered the barriers with his letter of apology, the waters of Craft’s anguish flowed into the empty channel. While Stravinsky’s manner remained defensive, Craft could—unofficially, so to speak—reveal his true sensibilities. They had, he told Boulez, suspected him at North Wetherly Drive of manipulating Goléa, but the NZfM review had changed their minds. Stravinsky had meant to reply to the review, but, not wanting to damage the Domaine Musical, had decided to ask Boulez to do so instead. As for Craft himself, his insecurities had now reached fever pitch; he had (he claimed) attacked Boulez in print without meaning to, had received a curt letter in reply, but now wanted his love and friendship back on an even stronger footing than before. His own “Rencontres” with the French master had been profoundly rewarding and productive, and so too had Stravinsky’s. Finally, in a near-frenzy of unguarded enthusiasm, he offered Stravinsky for a Paris concert a year hence, including “the new piano concerto,” despite the composer’s vow never to mount a rostrum in that city again.27

  Boulez’s reply was charming, generous, and sympathetic, but perhaps not impeccably sincere.28 He too had been anxious about their relationship and was relieved by Craft’s attitude. Stockhausen’s behavior he could not comprehend, and he deeply regretted any damage to Craft’s relations with Columbia, “which had yielded, among other things, the irreplaceable complete Webern.” He knew nothing about Goléa’s review, but would certainly have something to say about it, since “you are my friends, and I do not put up for long with my friends’ being attacked, least of all in a questionable manner.” On the same day he wrote to Stravinsky about the Munich Threni without referring to Goléa at all, but—prompted by the skeptical composer—he wrote again three weeks later that he had seen the article, agreed it was unacceptable, and had in fact already drafted a reply that was at that moment being translated into German. He would send it to Stravinsky as soon as it was ready; and they would meet in Copenhagen, where Stravinsky would be receiving the Sonning Prize toward the end of May.29

  It was typical of Stravinsky that he could seem completely taken up with a painful dispute of this kind, yet continue working as if nothing had happened. Back from New York in mid-January, he at once returned to work on the new piano concerto, Movements, taking it up where he had left off in Venice, at the start of the third movement. For all the music’s abstract spareness, it did not come quickly, and it took him most of a month to complete these eighteen bars of music—a working rate (if one thinks only in terms of what was kept) of a mere handful of notes a day. In music, as in all utterance, significant compression is one of the hardest things to achieve.30 Drafting the remaining two movements took much of the next five weeks. But as he composed, he began to have doubts—not about the music itself (his creative certainty seems not to have wavered)—but about how it would be received by the Webers, who had committed a large sum of money on the assumption, presumably, that a Stravinsky concerto would sound like The Rake’s Progress, or at worst the more presentable bits of Agon. After finishing the third movement he sent Frau Weber part of the short score so that she could familiarize herself with the strange idiom.31 Now, with the work almost fully drafted, he actually offered to release her from the commission and return the advance “if the style and technique are alien to you.”32 This was perhaps a less dangerous offer than it sounded, since Liebermann had started taking an interest in the new work as a possible showpiece for the well-to-do Berlin Festival in September or for the ISCM Festival in Cologne the following June, and there was still also, of course, Sacher waiting in the wings for whatever Stravinsky might choose to offer him. In any case there was no need to worry. Margrit Weber soon replied that she had no desire to withdraw. She was convinced that the concerto was a masterpiece, even while admitting that it presented rhythmic difficulties of a kind she had not previously encountered, “having never played such a work before.”33

  Apart from the still-undecided Sacher project, there remained a hope that Santa Fe would commission an opera. Their Mycenas of the year before, an oil tycoon by the name of Senutovitch, had proved a broken, or at least slightly bent, reed. But John Crosby was optimistic about foundation money—Ford or Rockefeller—and by March he was talking in serious contractual terms, offering twenty thousand dollars to the composer, and the same sum to his librettist, who was to be none other than T. S. Eliot.34 This suggestion must have come from Stravinsky himself, but Eliot, whose own verse is so rich in musical allusion, was evasive when it came to working with musicians, and he was soon assuring Stravinsky that he was unqualified for such a task, could not read music, had no operatic ideas, and was frankly wary of treading where Auden—a more musical person, in his opinion—had supposedly failed with The Rake.35 With Movements now nearing
completion, Stravinsky replied in April that he, too, had no intention of writing another opera like The Rake, and certainly not for twenty thousand dollars. He was thinking more along the lines of “a cantata, or static stage piece (genre my Oedipus Rex), a shorter work than an opera and one more suitable to my present non-operatic musical thought. Perhaps a Greek-subject piece in a contemporary reinterpretation—a Christian morality play.”36 In due course, Eliot responded politely but still without great enthusiasm to this new idea: “If and when the subject comes to you and in any case when you have further thoughts about the subject, I should be delighted to hear from you again on this matter.”37 But it was obviously going to be an uphill struggle.

  Eliot had shown a more spontaneous interest (with his Faber hat on) in the conversation-book idea, which the composer had mentioned to him more than a year before, on the pretext of seeking his advice about the contents and organization of the manuscript.38 At that stage—January 1958—the questions and answers had already appeared, in one or another compact version, in magazines like Atlantic Monthly and Encounter, in German as a supplement to an omnibus edition of the Chroniques and Poetics, and in French as a pamphlet sold on the Pleyel book-stall at the Agon concert.39 The first installment of a somewhat larger series was about to appear in the German music journal Melos.40 And now various New York publishers were pressing Stravinsky to expand the conversations into a book of reminiscences, perhaps in the form of an updated edition of the Chroniques.41 By early 1958 his own objections to this idea (which he saw as a nuisance to his composing schedule) had been overcome, probably by some kind of pincer movement on the part of Craft himself and Deborah Ishlon, who was almost certainly responsible for whipping up rival enthusiasms among publishers in New York for the entirely new kind of publication a book of conversations would represent, and when Eliot saw an initial manuscript in March and pleaded for it to be given to Faber, publication in America by Doubleday was practically a settled intention.42 Only the precise form of the book remained to be teased out of the disparate material that had gradually evolved around the original set of questions.