Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  He knows me so little, and my music interests him so little. He belongs naturally to a generation which needs biologically to be hostile to me. What to do? I can’t change it and won’t think or speak ill of him for it, but will simply regret that it’s so and that it’s useless to expect any reciprocity on his part.

  It was left to Souvtchinsky to interpret this lament in his own way. “Believe me,” he wrote, “Stockhausen truly values and understands you, but he’s a bit gauche, in a way rather uncouth. Moreover he’s now going through some drama in his relations with Boulez.… I hope that Boulez wrote his letter and it didn’t stay a draft; perhaps it’s naughty of me, but I greatly mistrust him.”10 Then some weeks later: “He’s very taken up with his conducting career.… I must say that relations with him have become extremely difficult: he talks only about himself and his plans, but I’m very much afraid that these plans are more organizational than creative. I shall be glad if I’m wrong …”11

  Back in Hollywood, Stravinsky was for a time deep in preparations for a concert performance of The Nightingale that he was conducting for the Los Angeles Festival in UCLA’s Royce Hall in the middle of June;12 then he set to work to complete the Movements, starting—for some reason—by rewriting the fifth movement. One inevitably wonders how he could pass from the Scriabinesque indulgences of the early opera to the complex serial rotations and compressed, fragmented syntax of this latest score without some tremor of self-questioning, some at least momentary feeling of stylistic vertigo. But if he felt any such anxiety, it remained unspoken. Instead he became absorbed by the technology of his rotations, working from charts that gave him melodies and chords almost as mechanically as a computer program—almost as mechanically, one might say, as a Japanese nightingale—but which nevertheless cost him, he insisted, “a gigantic effort.”13 Not surprisingly, he loathed Shostakovich’s rambling, epic Eleventh Symphony, which he heard conducted by Franz Waxman at another festival concert: “an hour of aesthetically and technically primitive junk,” he called it in a letter to Souvtchinsky.14 And when Douglas Gibson asked him to contribute to a collaborative set of piano variations on a theme by Falla to mark Chester’s centenary, he replied dustily that he was too busy and that in any case Gibson (who was naturally not expecting to pay) couldn’t afford him.15

  As usual, the problem was that his working time was threatened by his travel plans. At the end of June they were off to Santa Fe, where he was due to conduct Threni in the Catholic cathedral on 12 July; then they would be back in Hollywood for a mere six weeks before their now more or less ritual absence of several months in Europe and New York. In Santa Fe, Paul Horgan, the festival board member who had this time been instrumental in setting up the visit, had arranged for a room with a muted piano to be placed at Stravinsky’s disposal in a secluded outbuilding of the archbishop’s palace.16 But one might doubt whether much composing was done. Craft, who was due to conduct Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, had arrived a few days earlier and had managed to fall during a rehearsal and dislocate his right arm. When the Stravinskys arrived, he was in hospital with his arm in plaster. Horgan paints a touching, gently satirical picture of their reunion, with everyone close to tears not only, it transpired, because of the accident, but also because the visitors were distressed at the (by their valetudinarian standards) somewhat irregular accommodation they had been given in the house of the local poet Witter Bynner. A persuasive fixer, Horgan found them rooms in La Fonda, Santa Fe’s adobe equivalent of the Savoy; and thereafter, with Craft able to rehearse but not conduct Anna Bolena and also involved in preparing Threni and Bach’s Trauer-Ode for the cathedral concert, Horgan was much in Stravinsky’s company and able to scrutinize the more intimate sides of his personality as if he were himself the principal character in a novel about “the unexpectedly homely and affectionate Great Russian Artist.”17

  The portrait is the tenderest and most three-dimensional of the many left by writers for whom Stravinsky’s musical genius was a mystery alleviated, if not illuminated, by the colorful intensity yet vulnerability of his person. As always, there are the copious whiskies and idiosyncratic diets, the tiny, gnomelike stature, the large ears, the pantomime English, and the sudden, unforgettable smiles, emerging like the sun from behind a cloud on a windy day. But there is something more penetrating, too. “His social sense was great,” Horgan observed, “and if a passing vagary of health, or a stupid letter, say, had upset him, he strove to conceal a state of irritability.

  I rarely saw him in an abstracted or absent mood—until the end. […] With waiters as well as importunate hunters, he showed the same royal sort of courtesy, and I thought this politeness was the other side of his medal of personality—that caustic brilliance and sarcasm which could operate when there was anything worthy of calling it forth. […] His general style […] was concentrated, impacted, densified, to the greatest degree. In all its expressions, from the idlest personal in conversation to the utmost significant in composition and performance, there was a total absence of vulgarity. To be with him was to be conscious that one was within the field of energy of genius, even during its lapses into restful triviality. […] Even with the growing familiarity of years, I never lost something of awed restraint; but it was one of his powers that he never needed explanations—he could feel what one felt, and if there was something genuine behind it, he was aware of that, too, and accepted what could not easily find expression when he knew it to be compact of both respect and love, with a pinch of intelligence thrown in.18

  After the performance of Threni, Horgan went with Stravinsky to his dressing room. The composer was edgy and, it seemed, angry about something, but then Horgan noticed that it was more like “mortal disappointment.” “It is never good enough!” the composer muttered as he struggled with his cufflinks. “But I thought it wonderfully beautiful!” the novelist insisted. “Oh my God, the mistakes you did not hear!” In the end, Horgan explains this bitterness as a kind of postcoital emotional detumescence. “A surge of compassion beyond presumption went through me but I knew of no way to reassure him.” Yet when Stravinsky arrived at the reception Horgan had laid on, “I saw a master of transformation […] he was smiling widely, not quite bowing but inclining himself forward, taking in the whole room. He looked fifteen years younger.” Mirandi Masocco embraced him: “I loved it, it’s so catchy. I hummed it all the way over here,” and Stravinsky was delighted by her not-quite-mock philistine directness.19

  The performance was certainly not alone among early (or even later) Threnis in its wrong notes. Craft’s New York premiere had been perhaps the least inaccurate, though its great success with the audience is by no means proof of that. Barely a month before Santa Fe, William Steinberg’s London premiere had been described by the reliable David Drew as “brave but imperfect.”20 But Santa Fe had one big thing in its favor: unlike all previous performances, it was given in a church. The city’s curious nineteenth-century, neo-Romanesque cathedral—part adobe, part sandstone—was a far cry, as Horgan admitted, from St. Mark’s, but it provided the right devotional atmosphere and nearly ideal acoustics, with just enough wash in the sound to moisten the edges of Stravinsky’s desiccated vocal lines and severe, unyielding instrumentation. The liturgical flavor was enhanced by the decorum of a church performance, with no applause.21 The composer was led to the rostrum in silence, “like a bride being conducted to the altar in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony.”22 The archbishop was present, and he introduced himself to Vera, though hardly knowing what to say to her. “Do you know,” she remarked, to mask his awkwardness, “that this is Schiaparelli ‘shocking Pink’ you are wearing?” “Oh? Indeed? How interesting. Yes.” “You see?” she added, “We match exactly.”23

  Stravinsky did manage to complete Movements during the subsequent six weeks in Hollywood. In fact, by the end of July he had finished the fourth movement, and on the same day he dated the whole work on the draft.24 Two days later, however, Craft wrote to Glenn Watkins that Stravinsky was “adding” a fifth
movement: that is, presumably, the second rewrite that Stravinsky refers to in Memories and Commentaries.25 Then, having made this revision, he decided to add four short linking interludes to suture the five movements together. By 15 August the whole work was at last complete, and it was at this point that the composer stood back from the strange concoction—so utterly unlike anything he had ever written before—and decided that he could not bear to wait until the following June to find out whether it would make sense in performance. So he at once informed Margrit Weber that he had decided to bring the premiere forward and give it in New York in December, since “I do not want this very concentrated and fine work to be flanked by ‘modern music’ I know nothing about; and I think it absolutely imperative that the work be repeated immediately after it is played the first time.”26 At the same time he wrote to Liebermann, who was predictably furious at the loss of his premiere: “Why New York, of all places?” he sulked.27 Well, there were various excuses: the Webers’ convenience, the composer’s timetable and health, and so forth. What Stravinsky did not mention was that, since no New York orchestra would want the new concerto at such short notice, he would have to promote the concert and take the financial risk himself. For this task he would need a dependable manager. At Santa Fe he had met and liked the Opera’s publicity officer, Lillian Libman. She seemed to know her job. Accordingly, Craft now wrote to her inviting her to manage and promote not one, but three Stravinsky concerts in Manhattan that coming December and January.28

  Nothing more seems to have been said about the Santa Fe commission, and by early August Stravinsky was beginning to evolve other plans for his collaboration with Eliot. The main catalyst for the change was Robert Graff, who had directed the NBC film of Stravinsky at home on his seventy-fifth birthday. The composer had lunched with Graff in New York in January and discussed the possibility of working with Balanchine on a new “story” ballet devised specially for television. Now Balanchine was in Los Angeles, and the two of them had begun to examine this idea in more detail. Neither was much interested in anything Graff would regard as a “story” ballet. “In fact,” Stravinsky told the director, “even another abstract ballet (like Agon) is not in the line of my present thought.

  However I do have in the mind a theatrical work with scenic and choreographic elements and with a story or myth subject, ancient and known to everyone. I do not yet see the exact form of this work, whether it will employ a chorus, what kind of instrumentation, whether or not a narrator, but I do think it might be theatrically, if not musically, closer to my Oedipus Rex and Persephone than to any other works of mine.29

  He expected Eliot to be the librettist, and was actually planning to start work with him in London that very September. A few days later he wrote to Eliot himself in somewhat different terms.

  All commissioners have in mind a work of one’s past they want repeated, but the very reference to a past work helps one to realize how unrepeatable it is. I have been considering the story of Noah. I can imagine a dramatic work in it involving narration (as in my Oedipus Rex), singing—a chorus, the voices of Noah and his sons and perhaps of an angel—and scenic and choreographic elements. It might follow the form of a medieval morality play, for example, with narration used to connect [a] sequence of “set” pieces, instrumental and vocal numbers, pure, i.e. spoken, verse (what delightful animal rhymes you could do, for example), dance. And the morality play appeals to me not only because it would permit this kind of diversity but also because it suggests a stylization and a symbolism. We cannot put Christ on the stage, but Noah, the second Adam, has also been Christ to the Christian mind, and the drunkenness of Noah, Christ’s Passion. Here anyway is a subject I hope you will consider.30

  Leaving aside the unorthodox theology (which resuscitates a specifically late medieval idea about Noah), it is noticeable that, while expressly rejecting self-repetition in his own case, Stravinsky assumes it without question in Eliot’s. This may be one reason why Eliot wrote back in mainly negative terms, though without quite dismissing the collaboration out of hand. He had “done” Old Possum and Murder in the Cathedral (though he refrained from saying so). He was now engrossed in a new play of his own.31

  Stravinsky had not lost sight of the Boulez letter. Each month he checked his copy of the NZfM, and by August the letter had still not appeared.32 Instead, in the middle of the month, a letter from Boulez arrived at North Wetherly Drive, enclosing a new and much shorter version of the NZ text, now translated into German. Boulez’s covering letter excused the delay, explained that he had made the translation with Strobel and sent it to the NZ, but said not a word about the abbreviation.33 Stravinsky was furious. “You know German well enough,” he replied, “to realize that this isn’t a translation of the article you handed me in Copenhagen. It’s a German version, shortened (to a third of the French), smoothed out and toned down beyond recognition … I’m surprised by all this, for I expected a very different attitude on your part given our friendly and cordial relations. That is why I sign this letter with much bitterness and disillusion.”34 Had Boulez expected any other reaction? From the swiftness of his recantation, it seems that he had. He protested that he had merely followed Strobel’s advice to keep the letter neutral and avoid controversy; but he now saw his miscalculation and was sending the NZ a translation of the full text. He implored Stravinsky, in the Gallic manner, to believe in the “undeniable fidelity” of his feelings, “and—less solemnly—in everything, in life and work, that unfailingly binds us.”35 Stravinsky was reassured and told Boulez so.36 The letter went off and duly appeared, with only slight modifications, in the October NZ, though Stravinsky curiously enough failed to notice it and was still, in late January, grumbling to Souvtchinsky that it had not yet been printed.37

  When a friend divorces for the second or third time, one inevitably suspects—if only in private—that the friend is in some way to blame. Yet if one examines the many “breaks” in Stravinsky’s long career—with the Rimsky-Korsakovs, with Bakst, Benois, Diaghilev, Ansermet, Lourié—one often feels that the great composer was more sinned against than sinning. He suffered, no doubt, from an incorrigible expectation that his closest associates would put loyalty to him above all other considerations. In this he was perhaps naïve, perhaps tyrannous, and the speed and absoluteness of his vengeance when the expectation was dashed tended to reflect those qualities. With Boulez, though, matters were less simple. For one thing, the break was temporary, and cordial relations were soon resumed, even if they never returned to quite the unguarded warmth of their pre-Threni state. For another thing, the puzzling behavior of Pierre Souvtchinsky has to be taken into account.

  Souvtchinsky, as we saw, had given Stravinsky a distorted account of his relations with Boulez earlier in the year. By August, this duplicity had assumed Iago-esque dimensions. Throughout the summer he had written negatively about Boulez in letters to Stravinsky.38 Now, when Stravinsky sent him the abbreviated NZ text, Souvtchinsky felt free to elaborate. He was, he said, not surprised. Strobel could not let Boulez damage him with the German musical press, and Boulez, for his part, was protecting his relations with Goléa. In his—Souvtchinsky’s—opinion, Boulez had written two letters, one for Stravinsky’s eyes, the other for the journal (this was a curious allegation, since Stravinsky had just reported to him the contrary). In any case he was thoroughly disillusioned with his young friend and had told him so in no uncertain terms. “So far,” he added, “I’ve had no reply to this letter and don’t expect one.

  But I don’t trust him any more and I’m sure that, having embarked on a course of the most banal careerism, he will go on climbing regardless of the consequences and without remorse. But what I find inexpressibly painful is that he has not been ashamed to display to you his new rules of life. When I see you I’ll tell you a lot else about this “metamorphosis.” Just don’t trust him!39

  That was on 22 August. On the 23rd Souvtchinsky wrote to the “careerist” in person.

  Thank you for your l
etter, to which the word “magnificent” applies a thousand times more than to mine. I thank you for it with all my heart, for it’s true: there was “something” of a break between us which is repaired, for me at any rate, in the friendship and admiration that I have for you and which will remain one of the “essential” bases for what I call my “existence.” That is how it is, and it cannot be otherwise, in spite of all the traps life may yet reserve for us.

  On the subject of Stravinsky, Souvtchinsky offered some words of fatherly wisdom. He had advised Boulez not to get mixed up in the Goléa affair (even though, as we saw, he had urged Stravinsky to insist that Boulez reply in person to the NZfM40), but now that that had happened, he felt it necessary to explain Stravinsky’s reaction.

  You are one of the most intelligent men I know, and this being so, allow me to say one thing: you lack psychology. Stravinsky’s relationship with you is a passionate one; and there is also an issue of conscience. I know (because I’m a bit au courant in this affair) that he has for you a sort of adoration. This adoration now seems to him betrayed and even abused. You are also for him the Webern of our time, that Webern of whom he was ignorant in the past and towards whom he now feels like a repentant sinner. He wants you to love him, as he would have wanted Webern to love him.… Obviously [he] wanted the Threni business cleared up, but believe me, above all he expected from you a demonstration of friendship which would have “obliterated” the hateful attack by Goléa.