Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The problem was partly one of length. Exactly how much material Eliot saw in March 1958 is hard to establish, but it was probably less than the sixty-four questions and answers that eventually appeared in Melos in 1958, or the ninety-two in the French volume Avec Stravinsky, which came out in time for the disastrous Threni concert in November. There the questions make fifty-eight pages of a book that includes a good deal of other material, some of it of a technical character unsuitable for the lay reader. There would indeed be more questions (another twenty-five or so, as it turned out). But the book was still going to be perilously thin for hard covers. One possibility was to add a selection of the letters Stravinsky still possessed from major figures like Debussy, Ravel, and Satie. Another was to include a “diary” section, ostensibly by Stravinsky, but in fact written by Craft in the composer’s persona: the so-called Venetian Journal, which figures intriguingly in the correspondence relating to the Conversations but which never came out in that original form.43 The journal nevertheless brought to a head the question of titling and attribution of the book as a whole. Craft was trying his best to stay in the background—whether out of native shyness or from a feeling that the book would do better as Stravinsky’s unaided work. He doubtless suspected that he would be accused of manipulating the answers and even of having simply written the whole text on his own. Anyone who knew Stravinsky at all well would surely know at once that this was not his English, even if the memories and opinions might be more or less safely trusted. Yet Craft’s name could hardly be left off altogether. Obviously he had asked the questions and at least edited the answers. His role had to be defined with some care.

  Stravinsky had his own views on this important matter. “The title of the book,” he wrote to Debbie Ishlon,

  is “Conversations with Igor Stravinsky by Robert Craft,” and at the end of the Venetian Diaries the words “written for Igor Stravinsky by Robert Craft” must appear.… This isn’t Bob, who is in fact at fault the other way in not wanting his name on anything. But he did write the book, it is his language, his presentation, his imagination, and his memory, and I am only protecting myself in not wanting it to appear as though I write or talk that way. It’s not a question of ghost writing but of somebody who is to a large extent creating me.44

  In some respects this goes too far. Craft admitted in a letter to his Faber editor that he had written the journal in such a way as to contrive a diary personality on Stravinsky’s behalf,45 and no doubt the language of the actual Conversations—so crisp, immaculate, and severe—is also in large measure his contrivance. It certainly has little flavor of the foreign, and no trace of the idiosyncratic basso profondo drolleries of the composer’s English-language conversation. It is too wordy, and in a sense too intellectual—not, certainly, too quick or intelligent, but too dialectically organized, at bottom too Anglo-Saxon, too sensible. On the other hand, to ascribe to Craft the element of memory in the biographical parts of the book is plainly absurd. For all the many errors of fact and distortions of viewpoint, there is too much here that Craft simply could not have known, even well enough to get them wrong. Why Stravinsky misrepresented his past (especially his Russian past) in so many small—and some larger—ways that can now be checked in letters and diaries not available in the fifties is a slightly different question, though not wholly unconnected with the depiction of a persona that, preferably, had severed its links with that past. The Stravinsky of the Conversations is a supremely up-to-date, learned, almost omniscient figure, versed in the latest tendencies of the musical avant-garde and with well-formed views on the history and aesthetics of modern music, a ready definition of his own neoclassicism (a concept he would not have given the time of day to in 1930), and an opinion on every aspect of art, old and new. For such a thinker, the Russia of Rimsky-Korsakov was a simple irrelevancy, a mere accident, no more than a landing place for the parachutist from the stars. It certainly was not convenient to exaggerate its importance as a formative influence on the composer of The Rite of Spring, to say nothing of Threni or the Movements.

  On the whole these problems escaped the notice of reviewers when Conversations with Igor Stravinsky was published in early May 1959. Nearly everyone was dazzled by the wit and articulateness of a musician who could reminisce so entertainingly about figures as great and varied as Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy, Schoenberg and Diaghilev, who had seen Ibsen, met Rodin and Monet and Proust, and had amusing yet pertinent anecdotes to relate about them all. In the sections on composing and modern music, Stravinsky’s erudition and, on the other hand, his technical and aesthetic self-awareness, were all accepted with admiration and without question. “Here,” one reviewer asserted, “is a musician who knows.”46 The fact that Stravinsky had never previously known or cared much about the music of his contemporaries and had never in his life theorized about method or about art, except in the most general terms, troubled no one, even while several reviewers quoted with approval his insistence that he was “a doer, not a thinker.”47 The composer had come to terms with his past, the old musical time-traveller had simply at last come out in prose, and that was that. Here and there his revisionist enthusiasm for Webern and Schoenberg attracted comment. One writer went so far as to wonder if this was cause or effect of Craft’s own admiration for these composers, as evinced by his concerts and recordings.48 But the book’s authorship was never an issue. One reviewer is even supposed to have claimed, with no more than ritual incredulity, that the two finest modern writers of English prose were now both Russians: Vladimir Nabokov (the author, recently, of Lolita) and Igor Stravinsky.49

  Today, nearly fifty years after its publication, and at a time when the book is available only in a form that destroys its original integrity and posthumously reconstructs both its prose and its factual and intellectual substance, it is more important than ever to see the Conversations as a document of its time.50 Its opinions on modern music and art, on the act of composition, and on the crucial importance of serialism and the semi-divine status of its leading practitioners, above all reflect Stravinsky’s own creative direction and preferences at that period. Insofar as they differ from or conflict with previous (or indeed later) attitudes, it is because Stravinsky was under new and overpowering influences, but that does not alter the fact that, at that time, he thought this way. The thinking is no more invalidated by the apparent lack of intellectual independence than the music is invalidated by its seemingly craven up-to-dateness. They are both what they are, and both, curiously enough, remain entirely personal and unique. There is no serious case for arguing that at this stage Craft represented his own views as Stravinsky’s, whatever the extent of the hidden influence. The same is broadly true of the biographical parts of the book. The fact that they devote no more than six or eight pages to Stravinsky’s Russian background, but thirty or forty to the early Diaghilev years and the Russian Ballet, reflects not only the basis of his fame but also the continuing prestige of the main works from that time. The neoclassical works, which Boulez and Co. so despised, are glossed over in a tone that reads horribly like an apologia, in answer to Craft’s itemization of the works “the young avant-garde” did and did not like—this from a composer notoriously intolerant of any criticism of his music from whatever source.51 But in presenting a series of letters from Debussy, Stravinsky is careful to identify the French master as the composer to whom he and his contemporaries owed the most—which is demonstrably untrue but was guaranteed to please the young Paris avant-garde.52 After all, how could he have answered “Rimsky-Korsakov,” which, in his case, would have been more truthful, if not the whole truth?

  NICOLAS NABOKOV’S latest scheme for Stravinsky was a tour of Japan, fixed for the spring of 1959. The trip had originally been tied in with a music festival Nabokov was organizing there, but the festival had been postponed, leaving the composer stranded with a series of concert dates, which simply became paymaster for an extended tour of the Far East.

  Like their Greek holiday of three years earlier, t
he Japanese trip reads like a highly organized assault course alleviated by the occasional overwhelming or unforgettable experience. At Honolulu, on the outward flight, they visited Pearl Harbor, then flew on to Manila and Hong Kong, where they drove round the New Territories and as far as the Chinese border, before finally flying to Japan on 5 April, eleven days after leaving Los Angeles. They were appalled by Tokyo. “A horrible city,” Stravinsky reported to Souvtchinsky. “No streets, only back-yards. Roads in a dreadful state. No architecture. Nine million inhabitants! They say that the orchestras are very bad and provincial. Thank you very much!”53 As for many new arrivals in Japan from the West, the first impression was of a chaotic, overheated capitalist society whose traditional culture hid behind closed doors. When the doors opened, you removed your shoes and entered a different world. For Stravinsky, this double-sided aspect of Japanese life struck home with full force when they attended a performance at the Kabuki-za Theatre and watched one of the traditional dance-plays from the Kabuki repertory, Kanjincho. For any alert Western visitor, the visual aspect of Kabuki is thrilling even if he has no notion of what is taking place, doesn’t understand the language, or cannot grasp the meaning of the intensely stylized gestural idiom. But the sound-world is almost as striking, with its astounding use of what we would call extended voice—every kind of vocal effect from free lyrical melody, through speech-song, down to groans and shrieks—accompanied by the shamisen (lute-like but twangier), with bamboo flute or transverse noh flute in attendance, and a whole range of percussion, from the wooden clappers that announce the start and finish of the performance, to the drums, bells, and gongs that punctuate it along the way. Stravinsky was riveted by particular effects like the drum glissando and by the flute, with its subtle deviations of pitch; but he was just as excited by the integration of music and gesture, by what he called the play’s “rhythmical orderliness,” and surely also by the element of ritual, which must have reminded him of works of his own—Renard, Les Noces—where ritual actions are articulated through singing, instrumental music, and dance.54 In his own diary that night he recorded the visit in two words: “Kabuki!!! Formidable!!!” and he told a journalist in Osaka that “he had been inspired by Kabuki music and indicated strongly that several musical ideas already are forming in his head.”55 By what may or may not have been coincidence, it was on the very day of this theatre visit that he wrote to Eliot about his idea for “a static stage piece” on a Greek or Christian subject done as a morality play.56 Kabuki is not exactly static, but its discourse is anti-logical, and even its “realism” is highly emblematic.

  In Osaka, by which time Nabokov had joined them, they also went to a Noh play and to the Bunraku puppet theatre. But the Noh, which had so impressed Britten three years before, was altogether too motionless for Stravinsky, at times literally static, as when the only two characters onstage stood for half an hour without moving while the chorus sang a semi-inaudible chant.57 By contrast, the Stravinskys’ complaints about Japan, after less than a fortnight in the country, were growing ever more audible. “Have seen lots of the Stravinskys and Bob Craft,” Nabokov wrote to Liebermann from Tokyo. “They hate their trip and are grumbling bitterly.”58 Craft mused half-facetiously that Igor hated it less than Vera did because the Japanese did not expect tips, and because—being himself of Japanese dimensions—he actually fitted the country better.59 Yet for him, as much as for the others, the culture was difficult and the art and architecture—apart from Kabuki, and the gagaku music they heard at the Imperial Palace toward the end of the trip—disappointing. As for his own concerts—one in Osaka at the start of May, and two in Tokyo the following week—they seem to have gone reasonably well; at least no disasters are recorded in any of their various diary reports. Klaus Pringsheim, writing in the English-language paper Mainichi, called the final Tokyo concert “a unique artistic event in the history of the Japanese capital” and noted that “the near-capacity audience accorded him a hero’s triumphant welcome.”60

  Locally, the occasion was symbolic. Less than fourteen years had passed since Hiroshima, less than three since Japan’s admission to the United Nations. But it was a symbolism that meant little to the Russian-American visitors. They flew back to California on 9 May in a mood of relief that was only intensified when an engine failed on their final stage from Seattle, and they landed with their heads in their arms, their hearts in their mouths, and their undercarriage in a sea of foam. “Fortunately usual landing,” Stravinsky noted laconically in his diary.61

  27

  A STRANGE CONCOCTION

  IN THE TEN DAYS before they were due to set off again for Copenhagen, Stravinsky let his Movements draft lie, and instead wrote another piece altogether, a miniature trio for flute, clarinet, and harp in memory of Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg, the founder and patron of the Donaueschingen Festival, who had died while the Stravinskys were in Japan.1 Igor had no very personal grounds for mourning the prince any more than countless other generous and agreeable hosts and patrons. But Boulez had asked him to contribute what he called a “frontispiece” to a memorial concert he was planning of music by Webern;2 and Stravinsky had a particular reason for wanting to oblige his French colleague at that moment, because in the same letter Boulez at last reported having seen the Goléa review in the NZfM and having written a stern but chilly reply, designed, he claimed, to settle the matter once and for all and to leave no room for those damaging polemics so beloved of French critics. The letter was being typed out, and Boulez would bring it to Copenhagen to show to Stravinsky.

  Meanwhile Stravinsky was writing his frontispiece, or Epitaphium as he called it, using three of the instruments Boulez would have on tap for his program of middle-period Webern. The music—composed between the 14th and 16th of May 1959—could almost have come from unused fragments of the Movements; it has the same scattered appearance and disjointed texture, and the sonorities are ones favored also in the piano work: for instance, the bass register of the harp, which Stravinsky had begun to hear as specifically funereal, like a muffled drum.3 He also said that the flute-clarinet duet started out as a flute duet, for which there are several precedents in Movements. There is no sign of this change in the Basle sketch, but it does confirm his remark that the idea of a bass-treble dialogue (or “funeral responses”) between harp and wind only occurred to him after he had written the first fragment for flute and clarinet. In fact the harp music looks as if it was drafted as a whole quite separately from the wind music, the two types then being dismembered and interleaved to make the dialogue. Looking at the score of Epitaphium, with its little boxes of music27 laid out apparently at random on a single page, it is hard to resist the feeling that Stravinsky was mimicking the appearance of aleatoric (chance) works like Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata or Stockhausen’s Piano Piece XI, where the sequence of such boxes is partly at the performer’s discretion. But it hardly needs adding that, in Stravinsky, there is no such discretion and the order is fixed.

  A few days later he flew to Copenhagen, a return journey of more than twenty-four hours for less than a six-day stay. On the face of things, this might seem a more than usually dotty expedition for a man in his late seventies and in indifferent health, but then the Léonie Sonning Music Prize was a more than usually prestigious endowment. Stravinsky was to be its first recipient, and it will not have escaped his notice that the first recipient of the parent award—the Sonning Prize endowed a few years earlier by Léonie’s late husband, the Danish writer Carl Johann Sonning—had been Winston Churchill. No doubt he was also influenced by the fifty thousand Danish crowns of the award itself.4 In any case he duly accepted the prize and conducted a concert in the Tivoli Gardens on 25 May. But the visit was useful and important in other ways, too. Rolf Liebermann made the short journey from north Germany to persuade Stravinsky to give the first performances of Movements to Hamburg and Cologne the following June; and on the last day in the Danish capital the Webers appeared and several hours were spent correcting mistakes in the m
anuscript.

  Most important of all, Boulez turned up with a draft of his letter to the NZfM. From Stravinsky’s point of view it was a reasonably satisfactory text.5 It drew attention to the poor quality of the Jeunesse Musicale chorus and the unprofessionalism of the soloists; it at least half-exonerated Craft for the Berg and Webern disasters (referring to the insufficient rehearsal “for which it would be unjust to blame Robert Craft alone”). It stopped short of a personal attack on Goléa of the kind Stravinsky had launched in his own aborted letter; but then Stravinsky recognized—if not without bitterness—that Boulez could not risk offending the powerful French critic or being cast as a troublemaker in the highly politicized German new-music world.6 Indiscretions there rarely went unpunished. Only recently, Boulez had been quoted in Melos as having suggested, in an introductory talk before his Munich Threni, that Stravinsky had been shamed into composing such music by the monastic character of Webern, a “pretty bon mot,” as the German critic called it, though Boulez naturally denied it (“If I utter bons mots,” he assured Stravinsky, “I hope they are prettier than that”).7

  In his by now chronic cynicism about the real feelings of the European avant-garde toward his music, Stravinsky seems to have been happy to keep his personal friendship with Boulez separate from the more complex question of professional loyalty. “What a joy to see you in Copenhagen,” he told him when he next wrote;8 and to Souvtchinsky he sighed: “Poor Boulez, it’s not very jolly to be surrounded by such people.”9 But the indulgent words concealed a question mark, since Stravinsky went on to talk about Stockhausen in a tone of resigned reproach that implicitly included Boulez.