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Instead, Souvtchinsky went on, Boulez had presented him with two different versions of his letter, and Stravinsky had inevitably wondered about the motives for the change. “Not to conceal anything from you, I had the same feeling.” So, he urges, “set your Valkyries and their husbands to work organizing a Stravinsky festival, under your direction of course; but in my view you owe him an explanation. After all, I don’t know whether a real creature is more vulnerable at the start of his career, or at its apogee …”41
As an exercise in manipulation this letter must be accounted a masterpiece.
Boulez, certainly, had been slapdash over the NZ letter. He had hoped to avoid trouble with Goléa and with Strobel; he had delayed, vacillated, temporized. Yet his behavior had been essentially open. It was Souvtchinsky who had played a double game. He had known Stravinsky intimately since before Boulez was born; he shared his background and his language. He knew precisely how Stravinsky reacted to attacks on his work, and he knew what the composer expected of his friends. His analysis of Stravinsky’s feelings toward Boulez rings utterly true; and this was not something that had suddenly dawned on him—he had realized it from the moment he read Goléa’s Rencontres and saw the opportunity to drive a wedge between the two composers, a wedge which he, Pierre Souvtchinsky, could then withdraw at the moment of his own choosing. This may seem harsh, but it is the only lucid conclusion to draw from the known circumstances and the available correspondence.
Boulez duly wrote to Stravinsky early in September, expressing his relief that his decision to reinstate the original letter had restored their friendship.42 Soon afterwards Souvtchinsky wrote that he had advised a small cut, “a phrase that altered everything to Goléa’s advantage” (it was a remark about Boulez having nothing to set against Goléa’s “feelings” other than his own).43 He did not mention that a still smaller phrase had been inserted, qualifying his correction of Goléa, the words “wenn auch contre coeur”—“if indeed reluctantly.” Stravinsky, when he at last read the printed text, did not overlook this tiny adjustment, nor fail to see it in the worst possible light.44 As for Boulez, he had not quite learnt that he could not be friends both with Stravinsky and with those whom Stravinsky saw as his enemies.
STRAVINSKY’S first European concert in the autumn of 1959 was in Naples in mid-October. Nevertheless they set off from Hollywood at the end of August, and after a few days in Princeton, where they had a meeting with Graff and took part in a symposium on modern music, they flew on to London for the discussions with Eliot. Of what exactly transpired at their dinner on 6 September we know frustratingly little, Craft’s diary entry being largely taken up with table talk.45 All we know is that Eliot agreed to go on thinking about the project and to talk about it again in November.46 Meanwhile the Stravinsky party proceeded to Edinburgh, purely as guests of the festival—the first time any of them had been to Scotland. Venice, where they arrived on the 17th, was likewise unadulterated holiday, at least as far as conducting was concerned. Leonard Bernstein was there with the NYPO, and he offered Stravinsky a commission on behalf of the orchestra for the opening of the the Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center. But Stravinsky’s thoughts were not at all in that direction. Hearing Bernstein conduct his own Age of Anxiety symphony in the Fenice, Stravinsky abandoned ship after the first few minutes and returned, perhaps, to his own work, which consisted of adding missing parts to two more Gesualdo motets, this time six-part ones, “Da pacem, Domine” and “Assumpta est Maria.”47
His earlier Gesualdo completion, the seven-part “Illumina nos,” had been made essentially as a practical exercise for performance. But this time there was also a scholarly motive, at least of a secondhand kind. Three months before, Craft had been approached by Glenn Watkins, a young Gesualdo specialist at the University of North Carolina, who was co-editor of the collected edition of that composer’s music then being published in Hamburg.48 Watkins had found errors in the bass lines of Craft’s recording of Gesualdo’s Responsoria, but he was also covetous of the Sacrae cantiones material Craft had used for the same recording, and when Craft duly sent him copies of his part-books, Watkins quickly discovered that, in the defective six-part motets, not two but only one part needed realizing. He worked out the missing voice himself; but later he sent his realization to Stravinsky, with the suggestion that he make one of his own.49 It was this task, partly mechanical (because the canons, once traced, were strictly self-fulfilling), partly creative (because Stravinsky, as we saw, did not scruple to superimpose his own stylistic image onto Gesualdo’s) that occupied him during late September in Venice.50
Apart from this piece of creative musicology, as one might call it, the only certain musical product of the month in Venice was a tiny two-part instrumental canon of his own, sketched on the 10th of October. The little fragment looks like a brief demonstration of the automatic nature of canonic writing in serial music like Webern’s, where the imitative character of the lines is a built-in result of the technique. But Stravinsky actually had a particular commission in mind. A certain Marcelle Oury, who was in the process of editing for publication her correspondence with the painter Raoul Dufy, had written to the composer asking him, apparently quite idly, about his attitude to Dufy’s work.51 We do not know what, or if, Stravinsky replied, but we do know, from another source, that Mme. Oury wanted to commission a short piece from him to go into her book to illustrate, so to speak, Dufy’s love of music, both in itself and as a subject for painting. Having failed, it seems, to entice Stravinsky on her own account, she tried again through the new young manager of Boosey and Hawkes’s Paris office, Mario Bois, who had just met Stravinsky for the first time on his way through Paris from London to Venice. Bois does not claim that Stravinsky wrote his Double Canon “Raoul Dufy in Memoriam” at his instigation. On the contrary, he advised Mme. Oury that Stravinsky would be most unlikely to take on such a commission, and he suggested that she try Poulenc instead. Yet the fact remains that Stravinsky did write the piece, did dedicate it to the memory of Dufy (whom he had never met), and did complete it—as a piece for string quartet—late in November 1959. Poulenc’s tribute, a little Apollinaire song called “Le Puce,” was not composed until the spring of 1960, at the earliest.52
From Venice they flew to Rome, then drove on south to Naples with Berman and the photographer Robert Bright, whose presence accounts for well-known publicity photographs of the composer and Craft at Paestum and the town of Gesualdo (Vera having stayed in Venice). Their Naples concert in the Teatro San Carlo on the 18th was followed by one in Bologna four days later. But Stravinsky did not react well to this renewed activity, and in Bologna he suffered what may have been a mild stroke, though he nevertheless conducted his half of the program on the 22nd. For a day or so he could barely stand upright. For most of the trip he had been plagued by gastric troubles, which reached a climax when, having double-dosed himself against diarrhea, he had to endure a stormy crossing of the English channel followed by a train breakdown. Somewhat the worse for wear, they reached London on the evening of the 27th of October, ten hours late.
Not surprisingly they made straight for Harley Street; there were the usual blood tests, and another consultation with Sir Charles Symonds, who, in December 1956, had not expected Stravinsky to see out 1957. This time, unexpectedly, the great neurologist pronounced his health much improved, seemed unconcerned by the lameness and the stiff right arm that had persisted from the Bologna attack, and gave him permission to conduct.53 This was, of course, purely clinical advice. Stravinsky himself was less than sanguine about directing with a partly incapacitated conducting arm; yet he seems not to have seriously considered cancelling either of the two difficult BBC concerts that William Glock had lined up for him: a studio recording of Oedipus Rex and the awkward and taxing Symphony in C; and a late-evening concert performance of Oedipus Rex in the Festival Hall on 9 November, an event that had started out as a faute de mieux, since the normal concert times were all booked, but had grown into a cult occasion, a
rare chance to hear a famous work that had still never been professionally staged in London, conducted by its composer, and with Cocteau himself, these days the darling of the arty cineaste coffee-bar circuit, reading the narration.
As it turned out, Stravinsky conducted without apparent discomfort. The press noticed nothing untoward, and even Paul Horgan, who was in London and had dined with the Stravinskys and Eugene Goossens the previous evening, seems to have been unaware of any grounds for disquiet.54 “A Memorable Oedipus Rex,” the Times voted it, adding by way of footnote that “M. Cocteau undemonstratively set the various scenes,” and that “the tactful sincerity with which he delivered his last line, ‘Adieu, Oedipe; on t’aimait,’ was a concert in itself.”55 This tribute to the author’s modesty will have surprised those who knew him, and certainly it must have astonished Horgan, who had been mesmerized by Cocteau’s posturing histrionics during the performance, the way he gestured to the audience before the work started, gazed ostentatiously about him during the music, missed several cues, then leapt to his feet, ready for the applause, well before the final soft orchestral unisons had died away. Horgan felt that Stravinsky was infuriated by Cocteau’s antics, and implies that the two co-authors scarcely met outside the performance (though they must have talked long enough for Stravinsky to complain about his lameness, since Cocteau wrote to him a few days later advising him to look after his legs and recommending hot foot baths56). The composer had not yet pronounced his famous anathema on “the speaker device, that disturbing series of interruptions” or in particular dismissed the narrator’s very last phrase—precisely the “on t’aimait”—as “a journalist’s caption and a blot of sentimentality wholly alien to the manners of the work.”57 But perhaps it was this very performance—and even this very review—that prompted him to express himself in quite that way a mere two or three years later.
NERVOUS STRAIN may have been a factor in the composer’s poor health that autumn of 1959, and no doubt it was the need for rest that decided the Stravinskys to return to New York by sea rather than air. It was more than forty years since Stravinsky’s involvement in the failed promotion of The Soldier’s Tale. Craft’s experience as a concert organizer was more recent but, on the whole, scarcely more encouraging. Now they were together promoting not one but three separate professional concerts, including several difficult modern scores and a variety of complex baroque vocal works, while engaged on a complicated European tour, and with a manager they scarcely knew. Lillian Libman was expected to book a large orchestra for Movements and The Rite of Spring, and for complex, practically unknown masterpieces like Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand and Webern’s op. 6 orchestral pieces, as well as a dependable choir and soloists for Schütz, Gesualdo, and Bach; somehow timetable adequate rehearsals for these disparate and unrelated forces; and at the same time stay within a ridiculously tight budget. Admittedly Karl Weber had agreed to underwrite the Movements premiere, and since Columbia were supposed to be recording all the works, there would presumably be support, whether logistical or financial, from that quarter as well. But Columbia were proving curiously reluctant to come forward with a material contribution, even after Goddard Lieberson had happily agreed, at Libman’s suggestion, to lend the company’s name as having “The Honor to Present …” Eventually they did contribute about a tenth of the overall cost, and they made studio recordings of the major Stravinsky works except Movements, for which Mrs. Weber could not get a release from her contract with Deutsche Grammophon.58 But the negotiations were tense and at times acrimonious, and the human chemistry frothed and bubbled and hissed like a laboratory in a science fiction film.59
Lillian Libman ran a small agency from an upstairs office on Madison Avenue, and some of her business methods recall those of Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, who made money by buying eggs for seven cents each and selling them for five. Libman’s particular version of this loss-leading procedure was to use Stravinsky’s name to persuade expensive musicians to perform for hardly any fee, then to waive a large part of her own percentage while meeting many of the office costs involved in securing the reductions. As a businesswoman she was a curious though perhaps not wholly uncommon mixture of the tough and the maternal. In her brief acquaintance with Stravinsky, she had fallen under the spell of his big Russian smile and his aura of vulnerability. Craft, she soon realized, was effectively in charge of practical arrangements, had an astonishing but volatile grasp of detail, took many decisions on his own account while appearing to consult the composer’s interests, and read all Stravinsky’s mail.60
Quickly, she began to feel a personal attachment to this improbable troika. Her letters—calm, efficient, businesslike—end with endearments like “I miss you” or “deepest affection to you.”61 Letters and telephone calls flew back and forth between New York and Europe throughout October. And perhaps it was a certain possessiveness in her nature that aroused the irritation of those around her who, as she herself put it, felt “a prior claim” on the maestro. One such was certainly Deborah Ishlon, whose role as Columbia’s publicity director inevitably brought her into either collusion or collision with Stravinsky’s new agent. Debbie, Lillian clearly felt, was jealous of her, saw her as a rival, and sought control by making executive decisions in relation to the Columbia association without consulting the Libman office.62 In her memoirs, Libman is tactfully silent about the quarrel, but Craft—in a postscript to his own chronicle—draws attention to it and implicitly blames her.63 There is also a curious entry in Vera Stravinsky’s diary for December describing an incident in which Lillian and her husband turned up at the Hotel Pierre in New York late on the 31st wanting to wish them all a happy New Year, and making it clear that the visit was importunate and unwelcome. However, this is not a genuine diary entry but a gratuitous report, out of keeping with the normal character of what is typically an engagement diary with brief journal annotations. It bears suspicious features. The top half of the page for 31 December has been cut out, and the text—in English in Vera’s hand—starts below the cut, then runs back on to the 30th. Whatever has been excised must have referred to another incident that displeased her (since in the surviving text she declares herself “again unzufrieden [unhappy]”) but which the wielder of the scissors did not want preserved. Moreover, the existing entry is the only one for the whole of November and December, almost as if the diary had gone missing at the end of October, then turned up—perhaps packed and sent home in the wrong suitcase, or left in a Paris hotel and then sent on.64
By New Year 1960, in any case, the first of the three concerts had taken place, and had gone off well, at least as far as Stravinsky himself was concerned. On 20 December a sold-out Town Hall heard him conduct an English-language Les Noces with four leading American composers—Foss, Barber, Sessions, and Copland—playing the four pianos, exactly as in the recording, which, as a matter of fact, was made the next day; and, by way of bizarre contrast, they also heard the little Epitaphium and the world premiere of the Dufy Double Canon played by the Galimir Quartet. The rest of the program was admittedly less notable, with Craft, who had told Lillian that he was “sick of all-Stravinsky concerts and did not wish to conduct them,” instead reverting to baroque music in the form of Monteverdi and a long, early, and not very characteristic Bach cantata (BWV 131).65 “Its performance,” in the opinion of the Tribune critic, Paul Henry Lang, “was insufferably dull, [and] I am afraid that this recherché antiquarianism is a high price to pay to hear Stravinsky.”66 Warming to his theme, Lang also noted waspishly that “since Mr. Stravinsky’s present monitors won’t permit the great composer to be exhibited in just any company, mixed programs are restricted to the three departed coryphees of Viennese dodecaphony, or to some highly respectable museum pieces.” Thus, before Stravinsky conducted The Rite of Spring at the second concert in Carnegie Hall two weeks later, Craft duly stepped up and delivered the op. 6 orchestral pieces of Berg and Webern, respectively, and Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film Scene (Die
glückliche Hand having been abandoned on grounds of cost). And when the Movements premiere came along in Town Hall on the 10th, Craft offset this strange novelty with Bach’s Trauer Ode and motets by Schütz, Monteverdi, and Gesualdo, including “Assumpta est Maria” in Stravinsky’s completion.67 Happily, Lang had himself grown sick of what he would probably have called “all-Craft” concerts, and instead sent his assistant, Jay Harrison, who had just published an interview with Craft and was more in tune with his ideas.68
Movements, like Les Noces, played to a packed but subdued house, “startled into bashfulness,” according to Libman, “so startled, in fact, that the sparse applause did not warrant a repetition of the work, as had been originally planned.”69 Even the critics admitted to not understanding the arcane music in every detail, but for the most part gave it the benefit of the doubt—a concession rarely extended by their lordly predecessors, the late Olin Downes and his colleagues. One reason for caution may well have been the presence of The Rite of Spring in the same series. “Not of course,” Harrison observed, “that the two works have the least in common, the one being innovational in its new-found uses for tonality, while the ‘Movements’ are, in its creator’s words, ‘anti-tonal.’
The fact is, however, that no music after “Le Sacre” was quite the same, and it may be that “Movements” may stand as a similar point of departure. Certainly, those involved in the development of serial methodology must now face the truth that doodling in tone will not do; before them this morning is the image of a man who has proved beyond question that atonality is the business of genius and not the preserve of those who, lacking talent for anything else, find the adoption of twelve-tone disciplines a handy way of remaining up-to-date.70
Margrit Weber had learnt her solo by heart and played it with a certain stolid precision, one note after another—as Craft reported to Mario Bois—without regard to the shape or phrasing of the music.71 Rehearsals had been tense; at one point the composer had brought his hand down hard on the score to the accompaniment of “a vocal explosion, crescendo: ‘No … NO … NO!!!.’”72 And this was a worry to the composer, because she had exclusivity in the work for another year, and had plans for further performances not involving him. Still, the modest public and critical succès d’estime at least made it slightly more bearable that, despite Libman’s best efforts, the concerts had left him several thousand dollars out of pocket, as he reported mournfully to Boulez three days after the last of them. A fourth concert, tentatively arranged for the 23rd, had long since been cancelled.