Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  It was little more than a paper disaster. On the day of the Carnegie Hall concert, Stravinsky made a ten-minute recording for television in a CBS “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic” program and earned four thousand dollars—double his net loss on the concerts—for conducting a few excerpts from The Firebird.73 On the same program, a brilliant, idiosyncratic Canadian pianist named Glenn Gould played the first movement of Bach’s D minor concerto, and the two musicians met briefly. Bernstein linked the program with some remarks about “the role of conductors, instrumentalists and soloists to freely interpret the composer’s music as the artist felt it, and to perform the music in that manner.”74 But Stravinsky had probably left the studio by then.

  28

  LARGO AL FACTOTUM

  “THERE ARE MANY who believe,” Jay Harrison had written, “that Robert Craft holds the most enviable position in the world of music. He is Igor Stravinsky’s closest friend, his confidant, amanuensis, spokesman and fellow conductor.”1 Enviable or not, Craft’s position increasingly aroused ill feeling. Lang’s review was symptomatic. Without mentioning Craft by name, he plainly suggested that Stravinsky was being manipulated and that third parties were using him to advance their own careers. Some of the composer’s oldest friends grumbled among themselves that they no longer had direct access to him but were constantly running up against this young Cerberus, who answered the phone, read all Stravinsky’s letters, and organized his diary. Darius Milhaud, who had been responsible for the joke about the Devil and Craft, had recently managed to see Igor and Vera “without Craft.” “You know,” he wrote to Poulenc, “that one is never sure if one can get near him or not these days.” But they had contrived a meeting at Jascha Heifetz’s in Pacific Palisades. They had found Stravinsky much aged, and with an “end of the road” feeling about him. “We were very sad, Mady and I, to see him in this state, but we spent an exquisite afternoon with a rediscovered Igor, and without his frightful Mentor.”2 Even Stravinsky’s own family found themselves cast as supplicants. “We learned gradually,” Soulima told Thor Wood many years later, “that things were done through Craft. Craft wanted something. He told Vera, Vera told Igor and Igor had his reaction accordingly. That was the pattern.”3

  Craft was omnipresent. Concert promoters who wanted to book Stravinsky were now routinely forced to accept the younger man as part of the deal, just as, in earlier times, they had often been put under pressure to take Soulima as soloist or (which still sometimes happened) Theodore as stage designer. Few of these promoters would have engaged Craft at that time on the strength of his own reputation or experience as a conductor; but it was no less obvious that without him Stravinsky could scarcely have persevered as a conductor at all. It was like a miniature ecosystem. The whole cycle depended on a combination of high fees, a low-paid assistant, and tax-deductible expenses. Since his stroke in 1956, Stravinsky had felt unequal to the physical and mental strain of preparing and conducting whole concerts. But part concerts were not in question; they were hopeless promotionally and unhelpful logistically. The system depended on the undiluted idea of the “Stravinsky Concert,” and the advantage of Craft was that he could be dripped into that idea—like water into strong beer—without detracting noticeably from its flavor. The fee was to all intents and purposes appearance money, so it was immaterial that Craft did the lion’s share of the rehearsing; and since audiences mostly had little idea who this young man was in any case, his presence on the rostrum was no more than a teasing distraction from the star turn. As long as they had a substantial and sufficiently thrilling view of the master himself, they were reasonably content.

  These considerations also applied, if rather differently, in the recording studio. You could not on the whole sell records of Craft conducting Stravinsky; or rather, you could not sell records described as conducted by Craft. But since the distinction between rehearsal and performance was less clear-cut in the studio than in the concert hall, and since, above all, the conductor of a recording was not on view, the role of the assistant was more fluid and in the end probably greater. By 1960, Craft was not only preparing the performances of which Stravinsky would then conduct the official takes, he was also editing final versions, often alone with a studio technician.4 There is some evidence that the recording of Petrushka, in February 1960, was produced under these conditions.5 At their disposal would be, of course, the official takes; but there would also be “rehearsal” takes, since it was normal practice to run tape for whole sessions, without regard to who was conducting; so, cutting rooms being what they were, it seems virtually certain that takes conducted by Craft would regularly have found their way onto records eventually issued as conducted by Stravinsky. No recording logs were kept, so such matters cannot now be checked. But it is hard to suppose that Craft would not have availed himself of rehearsal takes to plug inadequacies in the composer’s performances if the alternative was to issue a defective performance or else scrap an entire project.

  Craft’s role as a conductor was thus large and, in the nature of things, growing; but it was covert. The suggestion that he was engaged in some cynical scheme to advance his own conducting career simply does not bear scrutiny. On the contrary, his attachment to Stravinsky may well have served to block whatever prospects he might have had as a conductor in his own right, since it made it appear that he could only get work through that channel. Friends warned him of the danger;6 his answer was that he was well aware of it but could not abandon the Stravinskys—that he was too necessary to them. And in a sense it was true. Without Craft, Stravinsky could not have toured, could scarcely have accepted concert dates, and could have recorded only with difficulty. He might have stayed at home, composed more, worried less, and lived more frugally, except that, but for Craft, his creative life might well have ended when he was seventy. In indifferent health, deprived of any strong raison d’être, he might then and there have wasted away and died, full of years and respectable honor, but left behind by history and forgotten by the young, to whom he so desperately wanted to remain important. To those friends and colleagues who expressed astonishment at the composer’s schedule and urged him to moderate it, Craft could, and perhaps did, reply that retirement would kill Stravinsky more swiftly than any amount of work or travel. Or perhaps he claimed that the matter was not in his hands, that he was merely the agent of Stravinsky’s and Vera’s own wishes. This would surely have been no better than half true. For both—or all three—of them there was something inexorable in the situation, something none of them could alter without fatally undermining the other two.

  As far as Craft was concerned, what was taking place was something like a process of absorption into Stravinsky’s personality. Nervy, emotionally insecure, a prey to resentment and self-loathing, he was finding it possible to escape from himself only by creating a persona partly borrowed from unused fragments of Stravinsky. This persona soon assumed a fascinating life of its own. One of its favorite activities was writing letters to newspapers, something that Stravinsky himself had rarely done in the past. Its first excursion into this medium may well have been the draft letter to the NZfM that Stravinsky had shown to Souvtchinsky in March 1959 but had never actually sent to the journal itself. Early in February 1960 another, much longer, missive winged its way to the editor of the Saturday Review, “correcting” a number of errors in an earlier letter to the editor about Stravinsky’s attitude to Disney’s adaptation of The Rite of Spring for Fantasia.7 The fact that most of the corrections are either misleading or simply wrong does not, of course, prove that Stravinsky did not write the letter.8 But the corrective form itself, and the fact that its information is partly derived from an examination of old documents (in this case a contract), to say nothing of the brilliantly assured English, point strongly to the hand of that other persona. It was an idiom that Craft would later make definitively his own, but at this early stage the precise authorship is hard to establish for certain. One is only sure that Stravinsky himself did not simply sit dow
n, as most people would, and knock out a text of his own.

  A few weeks after the publication of this letter, the joint persona reappeared in the more rounded and substantial form of a second volume of conversations, under the title Memories and Commentaries. Like the first volume, the new book was a sparkling mixture of reminiscence and opinion, but with more emphasis, now, on autobiography. In particular it contains Stravinsky’s first account of his childhood, his home and family, his schooling, university, and early musical tuition, plus further reminiscences of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, the Ballets Russes, and various Russian composers he had known.9 There is also a musical section, including some mildly technical discussion (with music examples), and finally a section called “Three Operas,” with correspondence about The Nightingale (with Benois, its first designer), Persephone (with Gide), and The Rake’s Progress (with Auden, including also the draft first scenario). There is a lot here that Craft could not have known, and although Stravinsky’s memory is unreliable, selective, and sometimes downright tendentious, the biases are consistent with his known attitudes pre-Craft. For instance, his remark that “I never could love a bar of [Scriabin’s] bombastic music,” though disingenuous, repeats an opinion he had been putting about for almost forty years, while his jaundiced picture of his home life as a child is much as he had described it to Souvtchinsky when they met in Berlin in 1922.10

  Even so, the evidence of the surviving drafts (fewer for Mem than for Conv) is that most of the actual texts were written by Craft, sometimes with crude errors or sheer inventions that Stravinsky corrected on the typescript.11 Moreover, the discussion of musical issues increasingly reflects preoccupations of Craft’s own: the fussing over rhythmic constructivism in Stockhausen’s Gruppen, the detailed parallels between textural intricacies in Movements and the complexities of fifteenth-century polyphony, the quotations from Huizinga and the letters of Webern. Not that Stravinsky necessarily did not know or talk about such things; but the kind of suave, scholarly, organized thinking seems to belong to a more detached, professorial mind, a mind attracted by the omniscience of the academy rather than the candid prejudices of the artist’s workshop: the mind, perhaps, of that other persona. By now, one feels, Craft is beginning to cobble together the composer’s table talk, occasionally bulking it out with answers to actual questions, linking it with threads of his own devising, and enlivening it with the verbal acrobatics of the born writer. One cannot yet say that Stravinsky himself is absent or misrepresented. But the conditions are established under which he will later be able to recede into the background, and then, later still, vanish completely.

  For the time being, Craft is the one who stays in the shadows. Whether you look at the conversations or the letters, the recordings or the concerts, his presence is elusive. He is the “Robert” of Lillian Libman’s memoirs, with his “talent for dematerializing at airports, docks, and hotels.”12 But there was also a much more definite, tangible Robert. This was the real Craft, who took the day-to-day decisions on contracts and itineraries, warded off callers, dominated mealtime conversation with his seemingly boundless college-boy erudition, his quick, lateral brain, and his encyclopedic memory; the hypertense, excitable Craft who sometimes astonished colleagues and bystanders by the abrupt rudeness of his manner to orchestral players, even to Stravinsky himself, and who certainly did not meekly acquiesce, as a paid factotum might do, in the wishes or needs of his employer. There was even something disturbing in the apparent contrast between his coolly deferential way of addressing, or referring to, Igor and Vera—“Mr. Stravinsky” and “Madame”—and the sometimes abrasive closeness of his relationship with them, like that of a widowed son-in-law. The avoidance of first names seemed to draw attention to his reluctance to adopt the still more intimate forms of address that would have been appropriate. Yet some thought their mutual affection went beyond that of ordinary blood relatives. Close friends noticed that he and Vera sometimes held hands, and that Stravinsky was upset by it.13 Stephen Spender, who adored all three of them, thought that they were “all in love with each other, like the characters in a Henry James novel.”14

  This closeness certainly caused pain, and in due course it would cause trouble. Madame, whose affection for Craft had grown at least maternal and included a powerful strain of possessiveness, had to watch and endure a trail of affairs with nubile young girls, one or two of which did in fact come close to marriage. She was not invariably calm about it. The chic and beautiful Vera, now somewhat stout but with her radiant social charm apparently untarnished by her seventy years, could in private be offhand and uncommunicative if she chose. By the people they met and the life they led she was frequently bored to distraction. She loathed hotels and concert tours and detested California, and though she still loved painting and painted well, she must have known that the effortless exhibitions, the crowded vernissages and easy sales, were in honor more of her husband’s work than of her own. She can hardly have enjoyed seeing the talented, attractive, yet deeply vulnerable Craft courting and being courted by lovely girls with titled mothers or rich fathers—girls with whom she sometimes had to share long car journeys and to whom she must needs make herself agreeable.

  Craft, to judge by what he later wrote, idealized both Vera and her marriage: “as nearly perfect a match as can be imagined.”15 His tenderness toward her leaps off the page, in his descriptions of her art, her personality, above all her closeness and importance to her husband’s music. Not once does he separate them; he drives no posthumous wedges. But that there were domestic explosions cannot be doubted, and as often as not it was Craft who exploded. On one occasion, in a rage about something, he hurled a score at Stravinsky, and when Milène, who was present, asked her father why he put up with such behavior, he merely shrugged helplessly.16 Ingolf Dahl’s wife, Etta, told Lawrence Morton about a row at a rehearsal for Les Noces in the Royce Hall in June 1960. Stravinsky had wanted to make a point to Craft, who was conducting, but “Bob just let him stand there apologetically for four minutes while he dressed down the percussion in dreadfully insulting language.”17 With all such tales, needless to say, one has to remember the possible motives of the tellers. Etta Dahl, as her letter shows, disliked Craft, whether because she felt he had displaced her husband in Stravinsky’s counsels or for some less tangible reason. Denise Strawinsky, who claims to have witnessed the score-throwing incident, had obvious grounds for resenting Craft’s influence over her father-in-law (which is not of course to say that she did resent it). A more neutral witness, nevertheless, is Morton himself. He had no evident ulterior motive and seems to have remained on good terms with Craft, who later trusted him with highly indiscreet confidences. But when Stravinsky dedicated his Eight Instrumental Miniatures to Morton in 1962, Morton rhetorically asked himself why, and surmised that it was “maybe because I am not rude to him as Craft is …”18

  Morton liked Craft personally, but became increasingly annoyed by his manner to the outside world, which he attributed to “envy of his betters.”19 Why this should have made Craft short-tempered with Stravinsky is open to question, but Stravinsky himself made up his mind that it was due to his inability to match Craft’s erudition. He even wrote himself a curious little note to this effect: “Suffering constantly from his (RC) simultaneous respect and vexation. The latter—result of my total ignorance which upsets him and me even more. If I would be able only to accept this my ignorance as a fact, to recognize it and behave accordingly, my amour propre would disappear and I will not suffer any more. What a relief! March 26/60.”20 It is difficult to decide which is more bizarre: the explanation or the act of writing it down and dating it, as if it were a message in a bottle from Odysseus on Calypso’s island. But it hardly takes a psychoanalyst to see that the real Homeric parallel is with Oedipus, and that Craft’s occasional aggressiveness is typically filial and prompted by resentment at the powerful father figure’s slowness and obstructiveness. But then, to reduce such a relationship to Freudian generalities is certainly not the
way to understand its intricacies. The fact is that, by 1960, Craft’s affection for Stravinsky was tinged with ferocity; that a number of people observed this and attached their own meaning to it; and that in due course these interpretations began to imply a certain view of the young man’s relations with Vera as well as with Igor.

  Within Stravinsky’s own family, the Craft situation had long since been accepted, even if not exactly liked. Why should the children of a first marriage be at ease with the second wife or with what amounts to an adoptive stepbrother from an utterly different social and cultural milieu? And yet relations with Vera had remained warm and contacts with Craft apparently equable. Milène, living nearby, saw her father most, probably several times a week, and when he was away on tour they corresponded in a manner that now seems completely natural and loving, invariably in French, a language with which she was these days more at home than with Russian. Her letters often mention Vera, never with the slightest hint of rancor. Sometimes she wrote to Vera, who herself wrote at least as often as her husband. Milène thanks her for sending a book of photographs from Italy: “How kind of you to send it me. You must have thought when you saw it, ‘That’s just right for Milène,’ and that’s what really pleased me most.”21 André was still working for a local travel agent, while helping with Wetherly Drive correspondence after hours. Two or three years earlier there had been a disagreeable incident over Venice hotel bookings that André was supposed to be handling through his Hollywood agency but that Stravinsky had unwittingly short-circuited by writing direct to the hotel. André had sent a sharp note of complaint, and a chill had descended on their relations, which only lifted when Milène interceded with a long and tender apologia for her husband, imploring her father not to hold his lack of finesse against him.22 In reporting such exchanges, Craft is apt to give the impression that they were recurrent and that Stravinsky regarded his children and their spouses as at best a nuisance that had to be endured.23 But that is because he for the most part ignores the voluminous evidence of Stravinsky’s actual and—when one reads the correspondence in extenso—very obvious love and concern. One might add that his accounts of such incidents (and there will be more of them) have a nasty flavor of triumphalism, of using access to print in order to damage those who, not being publishable writers, have no reasonable means of reply. Perhaps he has been fortunate that this was the case, since it is a game that more than one can play.