Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  If the South American tour was artistically worthless and financially disappointing, the two-and-half-month European trip that followed was if anything even less productive. True, in Venice Stravinsky conducted the first performance of his Monumentum pro Gesualdo on 27 September. And Venice had a style of its own. In Mexico City he had been given a fireman’s lift up the back stairs to the stage of the Bellas Artes, but in Venice he was borne up to the Sala del Scrutinio of the Doge’s Palace in a sedan chair carried by two strong men. Yet his unsolicited seven-minute recomposition of music by a composer previously rejected by the Venice Biennale would never have justified an Atlantic crossing on its own; and otherwise there was nothing but a pair of concerts in Genoa in mid-November, one in Rome, and one in Palermo in December, which, when it came to the point, Stravinsky could not face and cancelled on the pretext of having to return to New York for blood tests.56

  It is also true that in Venice he could compose, even if, as he once remarked, it was hard to compose his “dry” music in such a humid place.57 After the Monumentum concert he worked on the “Narrative” of his Basle cantata, and by the time they left Venice at the start of November he had finished the whole movement in fair copy. He loved Venice for its own sake, even when—as on this visit—it was under water for a lot of the time, northern Italy having once again had heavy rains that autumn. They were so happy here that they started thinking of moving back to Europe for good, something they had contemplated from time to time over the past four or five years but had usually decided against for fear of European doctors. Vera had never made any bones about wanting to live in Paris again.58 There had been a moment when Igor had taken definite steps to acquire a house in Monaco.59 The latest scheme was to move to Campione, on the Swiss shore of Lake Lugano but actually an Italian enclave, a notorious tax haven that encouraged rich foreign residents. The only snags from Stravinsky’s point of view were that there were few if any houses to be bought there (so he would have to live in an apartment), and that he would probably have to give up his American citizenship to avoid U.S. taxes.60

  In the end nothing ever came of these ambitious ideas. As the composer contemplated the swollen canals of Venice, no fiscal ark floated into view. All that rose from the waters was the title of his next work: not Noah, of course, but The Flood.

  29

  SINKING THE ARK

  STRAVINSKY could not swim, and somewhere in his consciousness he feared the rising waters. In his third book of conversations, completed in draft by the autumn of 1960, he recalled the floods to which St. Petersburg—itself a canal city—was prone, and the intimations of death he had felt there in the wheeling of the seagulls. In Thomas Dekker’s prayer book Foure Birds of Noah’s Ark he found a prayer that struck a chord:

  Oh My God, if it Bee Thy Pleasure to cut me off before night, yet make me, my Gracious Shepherd, for one of Thy lambs to whom Thou wilt say “Come you blessed,” and clothe me in a white robe of righteousness, that I may be one of those singers who shall cry to Thee, Alleluia.1

  He would use this prayer, not in The Flood, but for the final part of his Basle cantata, in the spirit of a funerary intercession for St. Stephen, whose martyrdom has just been described in the “Narrative.” Meanwhile, on the ship that bore them from Le Havre to New York in the first week of December, he and Craft polished the libretto for The Flood itself, a text that says curiously little about water or rain but a good deal about boats.

  Early in 1960 Rolf Liebermann had left the North German Radio, where he had tried and failed to capture the European premiere of Movements, and taken over as administrator of the Hamburg State Opera, on whose behalf he was soon urging Stravinsky to write another opera. “If I live as long as Verdi and have his strength, I might well do it,” the seventy-eight-year-old composer had replied, forgetting that at that age Verdi had already written more than half of Falstaff, his last opera. Now Liebermann had a better idea. He would take The Flood and stage it at the Hamburg Opera, perhaps in honor of Stravinsky’s eightieth birthday in 1962. The fact that not a note of the music had yet been written seems not to have troubled him in the slightest. He had made up his mind that it would be a reasonable evening’s entertainment; Günther Rennert would direct it and he would engage Marc Chagall, with his genius for religious imagery, to do the designs. As Stravinsky was in Paris for a few days at the end of November en route from Rome to Le Havre, Liebermann arranged for him to meet Chagall for tea at Nika Nabokov’s apartment.

  The creative meeting of these two giants of Russian art entered Stravinsky legend mainly because of the reasons why it never took place. On the day in question the Stravinskys had been lunching at the Boule d’Or with Souvtchinsky and Boulez’s former flat-mate, Frangois-Michel, and they had somehow managed to dispatch (according to Craft’s reminiscence, though in the nature of the story there seems no reason to believe his statistics) two bottles of champagne, three of claret, two of vodka, and an unspecified amount of Calvados.2 The Chagall meeting had been fixed for half past five. At half past six Vera Stravinsky phoned to say that her husband was in bed in a drunken stupor. “It is impossible to wake him.” Craft was also drunk, and in the end Vera kept the appointment alone. “At two o’clock in the morning,” Liebermann’s account goes on,

  the phone rang. Stravinsky had woken up and with a terrible thirst. He wanted to booze with me. At his hotel, in his pajamas, Stravinsky was busying himself with two bottles of Dom Perignon on ice, waiting. I tried one last time to arrange matters. “Listen, Igor. Telephone Chagall or drop him a note.” “Impossible,” he snapped. “I don’t want any decors by that con.”3

  The incident reflected a hostility on Stravinsky’s part to the whole idea of staging The Flood. Liebermann was obviously thinking of it in operatic terms, while ever since his first discussions with Graff, Stravinsky had been trying to evade the stereotypes that impresarios and publicists were always trying to impose on works of uncertain or hybrid genre. He was also still resisting deadlines. Two months after the failed Paris meeting, he wrote to Liebermann from Hollywood reminding him that he had still not begun composing the music, that the work was not an opera but “a stage, theatrical work commissioned directly for television,” and that it would have “narration and ballet but not much singing.”4 This touched on the contractual problem that had aroused Roth’s fury back in the summer. Stravinsky did not have the right to assign the television rights in his music without his publisher’s permission; and just as Roth had opposed the idea of a quick-profit recording of The Rake’s Progress that would have spoilt its chances in the theatre, so he now pointed out that a twenty-year TV exclusivity for Sextant would seriously damage The Flood in live performance.5 Liebermann was already a case in point. His Hamburg production would depend on local television, which the Sextant deal as originally proposed would have blocked. Roth wanted to reduce their exclusivity to five years, reserve the stage rights, and force Sextant to permit local television deals in conjunction with theatrical performances.6 Before a note was composed and with the ink still wet on Craft’s libretto, The Flood had become a promotional battleground.

  Meanwhile the long break from serious composition at last drew to a close. After arriving in New York on 7 December, they were in Washington for a few days at the end of the year for a concert performance and recording of The Nightingale and Oedipus Rex, then back in New York for a week to record the Octet. There they also went to see Balanchine’s dance version of Monumentum at City Center, a choreography done, Craft claimed, at his suggestion, but apparently without any direct participation from the composer.7 “I never discussed this score with Balanchine,” Stravinsky wrote on a cutting of a photograph in the New York Herald Tribune, which purported to show the two men studying the work together.8 In his New York hotel, the St. Regis, he ran into Salvador Dalí, who had a suite on the same floor, and would ostentatiously emerge when the Stravinskys came along the corridor, ringing a little silver bell in order—he eventually had to explain—to attract atte
ntion to his long waxed moustaches.9 Once before, in 1952, Dalí had proposed a ballet collaboration with Stravinsky.10 Now he had an idea for what Craft mysteriously calls “a lucrative theatrical venture.” Of its character, nothing is known, but it looks as if the enthusiasm (lucre notwithstanding) was entirely on the painter’s side. Stravinsky was irritated by Dalí’s gift of a book of his work with a line drawing and inscription describing himself as “Inconditionaliste Anti Neo-Clasique” [sic] and by Dalí’s habit of whistling “Frére Jacques” loudly every time he returned to his room.11 Perhaps it was precisely Dalí’s “conditions” or lack of them that Stravinsky disliked. As for the anti-neoclassicism, that managed to be at once unshocking and rather pointedly insulting.

  Back in Hollywood, in the second week of January, Stravinsky was soon immersed in more recordings, not all of them particularly to his liking. Having just done The Nightingale, he was now faced with the complete Firebird, which Columbia wanted as a flagship recording for their record-club subscription sales, but which to him was a mere pointless irrelevancy while he was trying to compose the last movement of his Basle cantata.12 And how, he asked Souvtchinsky despairingly, “can one allow the composer of Canticum sacrum, Agon, Threni, and Movements to be fêted with Firebird and Petrushka?”13 Here he was, juggling serial rotations for a funeral setting of a seventeenth-century prayer, while the great American public steeled itself to the “modernism” of the golden apples and Kashchey’s magic garden; and then it would be the Symphony in Three Movements, The Soldier’s Tale, the Violin Concerto, and only the re-recording of Movements with the youthful Charles Rosen—Margrit Weber having finally been abandoned—to indicate that Stravinsky the composer had not been completely ousted by Stravinsky the conductor and raconteur.

  In spite of these distractions, the cantata was at last finished by the end of January, eight months earlier than he had promised Sacher as recently as the previous June. This would be a relief to the Swiss conductor, who had begun to get cold feet about the likely difficulty of the choral parts after hearing Movements, or at least hearing about it from Boulez. But Stravinsky himself had always really foreseen completion early in 1961, which was when he had told Libman he would be able to start thinking about The Flood. The “Prayer,” unlike the “Narrative,” was an essentially compact concept, sixty bars of slow vocal melody and polyphony supported by a tocsin of gongs, harp, piano, and double-bass, with comparatively little variation in texture. Behind it lay the idea of a devout epitaph for the fallen martyr, but Stravinsky probably also had in mind two dear friends who had died in December: their near neighbor the eccentric and of late somewhat decrepit Baroness d’Erlanger, and the art-loving Episcopalian minister, James McLane, whom Stravinsky had first met in Denver in 1935, and with whom in recent years he and Vera had been on regular dining terms. McLane had read out the Dekker prayer, in his notoriously loud preacher’s voice, one evening at North Wetherly Drive. So it was the most natural thing in the world for Stravinsky to compose the music in part as a tribute to him, and then to dedicate the movement to his memory.

  Within days of completing A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, he had begun sketching The Flood. Craft had made a skilful, subeditorial conflation of different components of the Chester and York plays, with elements of Genesis thrown in. At the start, God would be praised in a Latin Te Deum; a narrator would briefly remind the audience of the story of the Creation, after which the myth of the Fall would be related in the words of the mystery plays. Only then would the actual Flood be enacted. It was a radically different conception from Britten’s children’s opera Noye’s Fludde (first staged at Aldeburgh in 1958), which was a straightforward and rather homely setting of the Noah story in the Chester play. Craft’s text was much less a story than a kind of homily. Noah, as Stravinsky had suggested to Eliot, was both a second Adam and a prefiguring of Christ, at once Fall and Redemption, and the Flood itself was “also The Bomb.” Craft himself had already discussed some of these issues with Graff several months before; now, while Stravinsky worked on the setting of the Te Deum and the Creation narrative, Craft added a substantial section on the work to the new set of conversations, Expositions and Developments, the draft of which he had already announced as complete in October.

  The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that not just the text, but the whole shape and even certain aspects of the character and timing of the eventual score were Craft’s own work. His notes on his meeting with Graff, in New York in early May 1960, already go into detail on the subject and its treatment, and at some later stage he made additional notes including section timings, ideas for decor and camera shots, and even suggestions for orchestration and style models.14 Of course, the mere fact that a document is in Craft’s hand does not prove that he was its author. In mid-April 1960, when Stravinsky was briefing Libman for a contractual meeting with Graff (no doubt with Craft’s help), he was still refusing to commit himself on the work’s exact genre or even its subject matter, despite Sextant’s having just announced in a press release that it would be Noah.15 But he was clear that the form would be hybrid, with “narration, chorus, soloists, incidental choreographic movement.” “The difficulty is,” he went on, “that I now see the necessity of re-studying the various texts and of compiling something different than I had thought of before […]. I will try to work with Robert Craft on the libretto […] during our travels.” So it looks as if Craft’s meetings with Graff a fortnight later were the direct outcome of discussions with Stravinsky; and probably the later document is similarly in the nature of minutes of conversations with the composer. As for the account in Expo, this plainly reflects the collaborative nature of the work-in-progress.16 The intensity of Craft’s involvement explains his willingness, not to say his ability, to write in detail about a work at such an early stage of its composition, something Stravinsky had never permitted in the past—not even with Threni or Movements.

  The main Expo text talks about The Flood somewhat evasively as if it were a work for the theatre. “Remember,” it has Stravinsky say, “that I am planning the preliminaries of a theatre piece, and speaking purely in theatrical terms!” But later a rather coy footnote admits that the work is for television and so has to be kept “very simple as music.”17 Stravinsky had watched quite enough television to know that, when it came to musical style, nothing he would be capable of writing could conceivably be simple enough for that particular audience; but some concession had to be made, and the best way to make it was by stripping down the scenario to its simplest elements, emphasizing the “child’s Bible” imagery, and drawing attention to the contemporary “relevance” of the story. These were questions that had come up in Craft’s early conversations with Graff. Craft’s own solution to the problem, which was to simplify by compression within a rapid montage of scenes, might suggest that he had as little idea about popular taste as his master. Had he made the story into a genuine pantomime, with a proper menagerie of animal costumes, comic turns, and popular songs or hymns slipped into the action; or had he, alternatively, turned the Noah plot into a miniature sitcom or a sentimental verismo melodrama along the lines of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors (almost the only successful television opera ever written), there might have been some hope of success, even with a modern musical idiom. Menotti’s music, after all, is modern, if not quite in Stravinsky’s sense. But the real reason for the libretto taking the form it did in any case had nothing, at bottom, to do with such considerations. Rather, it was a way of accommodating the needs of the commission to the aging composer’s growing tendency toward the reductive and the short-winded. Graff had wanted an hour-long ballet. Stravinsky, as we know from his dealings with the Festival of Faith and Freedom, thought he might manage half that length on the Seven Last Words—at, presumably, four minutes per “Word.”18 Craft’s Flood text, similarly, is a four-minutes-per-Word sort of compilation, and in the end Graff had to resign himself to a less-than-half-hour score padded out into a one-hour program with do
cumentary material and sponsors’ ads.

  Stravinsky at last started on the composition in early February, after recording the Symphony in Three Movements. Within a month he had written the short introduction, described in Expo, but not the score, as “Representation of Chaos” (as in Haydn’s Creation); the Te Deum, with its curious serial plainchant, a device Stravinsky had used before, in Threni; and the much-compressed Creation story itself—part narrated, part sung by a pair of basses as the Voice of God—up to the naming of Adam and Eve: not quite four minutes of rapid-transit modernism rendered more palatable, if not more gripping, by the chunks of unmediated speech. By an odd coincidence, at this very moment Stravinsky was recording the most famous of all his narrated works, The Soldier’s Tale, as well as the most recent of his modernistic ones, Movements, with Rosen. To judge from the result, the Movements sessions went smoothly; but there must have been some tremors on the way, since Vera noted enigmatically in her diary: “recording: bad, bad,” and the pianist himself wrote self-deprecatingly a week or two later, regretting “that it was not possible to realize the performance that I had hoped.”19

  Stravinsky continued to make steady progress with The Flood, interrupted only by a ten-day visit to Mexico at the start of April, a trip made memorable as much by the all-night Good Friday vigil at the convent at Taxco as by the two performances he conducted of The Rite of Spring—a work he seldom risked these days.20 By early May he had composed the brilliant episode of the fall of Lucifer from the York cycle, together with the ensuing melodrama, a mere fragment on the temptation of Eve, cutting abruptly to the Chester version of God’s resolve to destroy mankind and his injunction to Noah to build an ark. He was still having to ward off the anxious optimism of his various entrepreneurs. Liebermann had it firmly in his head that The Flood was to be a full-length stage work, and he was soon, to Stravinsky’s fury, advertising it as such in the Hamburg schedule for 1961–2, despite the composer’s disclaimers about its length and his refusal to admit that it would be ready in time.21 Graff, meanwhile, was innocently proposing a recording date in September, by which time Stravinsky would be in Europe at the start of his usual manic autumn touring schedule, and with the new work no more than two-thirds finished.22 Even to get that far would involve composing the “Catalogue of the Animals” in Santa Fe, where they would be spending most of July, and much of the “Comedy” between Noah and his wife—ironically enough (since it concerns her refusal to come aboard)—on the boat to Stockholm at the start of September. None of this prevented Graff from continuing to hope that some parts of the score might be available for choreographing in August, to which Stravinsky tetchily instructed Libman to reply that “he now hoped to finish by January 1973.”23