Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  One of Craft’s favorite targets has been the fact that the children received frequent cash subsidies from their father, some volunteered, some solicited. It would certainly have been bizarre if the composer, who by 1960 had a six-figure income, had not made gifts to his children, two of whom were in America at his behest, while the other was a struggling artist with a wife and adopted daughter, both of whom enjoyed indifferent health. This son, moreover, often did concert-agency work for his father in Europe, which meant that payments to him were tax deductible. If sons’ requests for money from their rich parents were routinely to become the subject of disapproving footnotes in learned publications, the world would certainly grind rapidly to a halt on its axis. In any case, the issue was more complicated than that. Stravinsky was also using Theodore as agent for the sale of certain of his manuscripts to European buyers, transactions that he was anxious to avoid attracting the attention of the U.S. revenue service. Possibly Craft was unaware of the details of these sales, since Stravinsky instructed Theodore always to write to him in Russian where bank transactions were in question,24 and it may even be that this circumstance induced mild feelings of paranoia in a man who had become so used to sifting and filtering the composer’s correspondence, yet who, remarkably enough, seems never to have made the slightest effort to learn his language. Stravinsky could be a fierce taskmaster over such commissions, and harsh words sometimes flew back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean because in the father’s opinion the son had misconstrued his instructions, or had acted on his own authority or in a highhanded manner. He remained touchy on money questions, perhaps because he was nervous about the doubtful legality of his proceedings, or because he remembered Theodore’s subterfuge over the family money just before the war.25 Nevertheless he duly paid Theodore a fair commission for anything he sold; and he duly deducted that sum from his taxes under some other guise.

  STRAVINSKY had at last told Sacher in November 1959 that he would be starting the long-promised commission that coming February, by which time he would be back in Hollywood after the New York concerts; but he was as yet unable to say what kind of work it would be. For the Eliot project he was still thinking of Noah and had started leafing through the York Miracle Plays. But there was no question of this for Sacher, and meanwhile the Graff project hung fire presumably because of Eliot’s continuing reluctance to commit himself. Stravinsky had even had other biblical ideas. As an alternative to Noah, he had as we saw been thinking about Tobias and the Angel, the very subject that, twenty years before, Claudel had wanted and he had not.26 He had also recently been approached by an organization called the Festival of Faith and Freedom for an hour-long “oratorio-symphony” on a New Testament subject, and he had counter-proposed a thirty-minute setting of the Seven Last Words.27 Nothing had come of that particular commission, but the general idea lingered, and by the time they got back to Los Angeles at the end of January, a rather different New Testament subject was taking shape in his mind, based on the martyrdom of St. Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles. On the 29th he announced it to Sacher as a twenty-minute cantata and demanded the impressive sum of twenty thousand dollars “in view of punitive taxes.”28

  This seemingly unmotivated piece of blackmail was in fact intimately linked to the television project. Nothing was yet signed with Graff, but Stravinsky knew that he would be able to ask a big fee for such a high-profile work, and since Graff was now talking about a production date in March 1961, the composer needed to make up his mind quickly which of the two commissions should take precedence. He accordingly made encouraging but noncommittal noises to Graff while waiting on Sacher; then, when Sacher replied in mid-February raising no difficulty about the fee, he let Graff know that the TV commission would have to wait a year.29 This was inconvenient for Graff, who had just left NBC to take up the presidency of an independent production company called Sextant, and who wanted to sell an option in the new work to CBS. Soon he and Lillian Libman, acting for the composer, were locked in heady negotiations about the whole character of the work, the time scale, the involvement of Balanchine and Craft, and naturally the vexed question of rights, for which there were few if any precedents with a composer of Stravinsky’s standing. Graff showed his impatience. At one point in April he issued a press release calling the work a ballet and announcing a recording date in the summer of 1961. Stravinsky reacted with irritation on both counts. He had always refused to compose a ballet, he reminded Libman, and repeated what he had long since told Graff, that the concept was hybrid, like Persephone, with dancing only in certain episodes such as the scene of Noah’s drunkenness—a new idea taken from the famous sculpture on the southeast angle of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. As for the completion date, Stravinsky spelled out how little time his schedule allowed him. In the whole of 1960 he had only eight weeks left for composition. To write on a large scale was barely possible for him any longer, to write to a tight deadline still less so. He refused, in a word, to sign to any delivery date before 1962.30 Somehow Libman got round these difficulties. The contract, that May, still effectively specified late summer 1961 (in that the work had to be “staged, choreographed, rehearsed and videotaped” by the 1st of January 1962), though Stravinsky knew he could not meet such a deadline; it gave him twenty-five thousand dollars and Craft two and a half thousand plus another two if he ended up conducting; and all this for twenty-five minutes’ music and a “documentary” appearance in an introductory film about the work. Craft, for one, was already earning his share. In New York in early May he had a series of meetings with Graff in which he explained in some detail the character and design of the work Stravinsky envisaged, the ideas behind it, and how it would adapt to the needs of television.31 In return, Sextant got generous exclusivities: so generous, in fact, that when Ernst Roth saw the agreement he nearly had apoplexy. “Sign nothing till I see you in Venice,” the publisher wrote anxiously at the beginning of July.32 Not for the first time in his long life, Stravinsky had been selling somebody else’s property.

  He had meanwhile started sketching his Basle cantata in early February; but there had then come an unexpected, apparently unplanned interruption. Possibly because he was having difficulty imagining himself back into a feasible vocal idiom from the abstractions of Movements, he started making an instrumental transcription of a set of three madrigals by Gesualdo. No doubt the immediate trigger for this self-imposed task was the recent issue of a selection of the madrigals conducted by Craft himself. But Craft seems not to have been responsible for the idea of the arrangements, for all Stravinsky’s dedication in the score: “To Bob, who forced me to do it, and I did it.” On the contrary, Craft told Glenn Watkins, Stravinsky had done the work without his knowledge. What was more, he had found it one of the hardest things he had ever attempted, “a definition of what is vocal and what instrumental.”33 It turned out that what could seem radical and challenging when sung tended to sound pallid when transferred to instruments. So Stravinsky had found himself spicing up the counterpoint, switching parts, adding dissonances, and eventually even to an appreciable extent recomposing the originals. Having completed the exercise in mid-March, and noticing that 1960 was the four-hundredth anniversary of Gesualdo’s birth, he promptly labelled it ceremoniously Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD annum, then turned once again to his Sacher cantata.34

  Whether or not Stravinsky saw his Gesualdo arrangement as a study for the cantata, there is little or nothing in the cantata itself to suggest a connection. The instrumental introduction to the first movement is in the same style as Movements—it even has a spiky little flute solo early on—and when the six-part choir enters, singing Pauline texts about faith and hope selected by Craft35 from Romans and Hebrews, its music is not much less angular melodically, just rhythmically less intricate. What is not clear is how far, at this stage, Stravinsky had mapped out the whole work. The “Sermon,” as he called the first movement, was probably finished by early May, after which he embarked fairly promptly on the longer second
movement, a quasi-dramatic account of the stoning of St. Stephen, from The Acts of the Apostles. It was the first time he had set English words since In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, and he seems not to have found it all that easy to reconcile a straightforward narrative with the “anti-tonalism” (as he liked to call it) of his latest idiom. At least half the words are declaimed by a speaker, somewhat in the manner of his miniature wartime cantata, Babel, and a device which, barely a year earlier, he had denounced in print.36 Nevertheless by the end of June he was able to report to Ernst Roth that he had written much of the “Narrative,” but had not yet orchestrated it.37 The problem, as ever, was that the second half of the year was going to be the nomadic half, and this year they would literally be away for six months, in various parts of the northern and southern hemispheres. He now knew the work’s title: A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer; but he also knew that, having composed nearly half of it, he had no hope of finishing the other half until 1961.38

  Just as he was grappling with the vocal implications of this new advanced style of his, he “felt the air,” in Stefan Georg’s phrase, “of other planets.”39 A letter arrived from a twenty-two-year-old conductor in Kiev by the name of Igor Blazhkov, begging him to send copies of his works, most of which were still unobtainable in the Soviet Union. Blazhkov described the dismal situation in Soviet music, dominated by apparatchiks from Stalinist times who were scared of anything new and still expended much of their energy blackening the names of composers like Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky himself. It grieved him, he said, to have to write in this way; but he was not without hope “that in some ten or fifteen years all this will be a distant memory. And we will achieve this—we, the young! Oh! We have marvelous young people!”40

  By an odd coincidence, this was the second such approach Stravinsky had had from the U.S.S.R. within a matter of months. Back in September, just when Blazhkov was posting his letter in Kiev, Souvtchinsky had passed on a similar request from the Moscow pianist Mariya Yudina.41 Now, Yudina was a personage very different from Blazhkov. Though unknown in the West, she was a prominent musician and a notorious figure in the Soviet Union, sixty years old, and with a long history of speaking out in favor of precisely the kind of music that Blazhkov was longing to advocate on behalf of young Kiev. She had continued to play and defend modern piano music, including Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s, and in the early days had even, according to Souvtchinsky, broken with Max Steinberg, her composition teacher and Stravinsky’s estranged fellow Rimsky-Korsakov pupil, over this very issue. The Soviet authorities had adopted the tactic of treating her as not quite right in the head. She was a kind of yurodivy—a holy fool—in an age when any show of religiosity was officially forbidden. It was even said that she would sometimes kneel down and pray in the street. But to Souvtchinsky her importance was more practical. While nominally professor of chamber music at the Moscow Conservatoire, she used her position to promote modern music and had at her disposal “fine instrumentalists and many young composers, thirsting to get to know and study the ‘new’ music.” She was just the kind of disadvantaged musician Stravinsky should be trying to encourage.

  Stravinsky may not have realized the fact, but Blazhkov and Yudina were alike, in their different ways, a symptom of a gradual change in the artistic climate in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death in 1953. Ten years earlier a letter like Blazhkov’s would have been unpostable; it would have been stopped, opened, and read, and the consequences for its writer might well have been fatal. The mere fact of receiving such a letter with such contents was evidence of a significant cultural shift, however depressing the situation it described. Unfortunately the most recent news about the Soviet art scene had been dominated by the aftermath of the award of the Nobel Prize to Boris Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago in 1958. In fact it was on Pasternak’s recommendation that Yudina had written to Souvtchinsky. But pressure had been exerted on Pasternak to refuse the award, and now he was being charged with treason, as Nika Nabokov had informed Stravinsky in September.42 Stravinsky himself disliked Zhivago: “pure peredvizhnichestvo [nineteenth-century realism],” he called it, adding that it was “strange to read this in the century of James Joyce.”43 If such a novel was regarded as subversive—albeit for its contents rather than its style—what hope was there for his music (old or new), which satisfied hardly any of the criteria apparently thought desirable by the Soviet cultural trendsetters? He did send scores to both Yudina and Blazhkov, and continued to do so; but it was more out of generosity to struggling admirers than in any serious hope that it would do him or his music much good in the long run.

  SANTA FE in July 1960 focused on a new production of Oedipus Rex directed by Hans Busch, with Stravinsky conducting, and again there was a “free” cathedral concert, this time with the Symphony of Psalms.44 But all this was little more than a prelude to an extended and, in the view of many of his friends, pointless trip to Mexico and South America in the late (northern) summer. Roth declared himself “stupefied” by the thought of the tour;45 when it was over Souvtchinsky asked Vera how she could survive “this brutal touring schedule.”46 In fact the idea of the trip had started as a holiday in Argentina at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo. Stravinsky was supposed to be the guest of a film festival in Buenos Aires, which would pay his travel costs but impose no duties and require no public appearances. At some point in January, he started having doubts; on the 27th he wrote to Ocampo that he might have to cancel on doctors’ orders, and on the same day he told Souvtchinsky that the trip was off.47 Yet a month later he again wrote to Souvtchinsky that they had been invited for a six-week concert tour and were going. Craft maintained afterwards that the true motive for the trip was to see Ocampo and other friends in Argentina and Chile and for Vera to visit her stepmother in Buenos Aires.48 But when Isherwood dined with them in late March he found that Vera was dreading the tour; Craft had hepatitis, and claimed he did not want to go and that only Stravinsky himself was wedded to the idea.49 Vera’s own diagnosis was that Igor was “so accustomed to being a great celebrity that he feels he has to keep making public appearances.”50 Meanwhile, Mirandi Masocco had told Isherwood that Craft “is the one who’s determined that it shall go through!”51

  The real reason for the sudden volte face in February and the subsequent reluctance to withdraw was almost certainly once again financial. Within weeks of the cancellation of the Argentine holiday, Lillian Libman had negotiated an extremely lucrative contract with a Lima-based concert agent called Oscar Alcazar for a seven-week tour, which, if carried out to the letter, would have earned Stravinsky more than forty thousand dollars.52 It was in every sense a celebrity affair. Libman was good at organizing the VIP aspects of airport lounges and hotel check-ins and at dealing with awkward agents and obstructive bureaucrats. At every airport they were greeted by cheering crowds, reporters, photographers. At their first port of call, Mexico City, a posse of government ministers and embassy officials, delegations of musicians and orchestra representatives “marched onto the airfield followed by a huge crowd of fans who broke through the tapes and, waving American and Mexican flags, shouted ‘Viva Stravinsky!’ Above this roar of welcome, a high-school band, stationed at the head of the lane that led to the terminal building, rendered a fortissimo version of excerpts from Petrushka.”53 Stravinsky adored these demonstrations and played along with them like a ham actor, saluting the crowd, posing for the cameras, and saying quotable things in praise of his hosts. But behind the scenes, what was said was often less quotable. When it came to payment, Alcazar sometimes proved awkward, and there were rows.54 The altitude in Mexico and, especially, Bogotá (nearly nine thousand feet above sea level) was troublesome, and the orchestras were mediocre or worse. Craft, who conducted all the rehearsals on the tour, thought the Lima orchestra the worst ever.55 In Santiago, the horn player came in on a glaringly wrong note in his solo at the start of the finale of The Firebird, and in Buenos Aires the final tableau of Petrushka broke down and h
ad to be restarted. At least in the Argentine capital the political rows of 1936 were quite forgotten, and the government invested Stravinsky with the Order of Maya (omitting, regrettably, to invite his wife to the ceremony). Nevertheless by the time they reached Rio de Janeiro on 4 September they had had enough of hotels, orchestras, braided officials, and quarrelsome agents, and they decided to abort the rest of the tour and fly straight to New York, abandoning their concerts in Rio and Caracas.