Stravinsky
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The mounting pressure over The Flood had a lot to do with the nature of the commission, but there was another factor that increased the general sense of urgency and the jockeying for position. In June 1962, Stravinsky was going to be eighty, and the musical institutions of the world were bracing themselves for a celebration from which few wanted to be excluded. In June 1961 he was conducting his music in the Los Angeles Festival: the Symphony of Psalms (which he had just recorded) and the Violin Concerto, which he was due to record at the end of the month.24 A few days later, on the 11th, he attended another festival concert, which included Shostakovich’s epic Eleventh Symphony and a violin concerto by another, slightly younger Soviet composer, Tikhon Khrennikov. Stravinsky went as much out of a sense of duty as from any interest in the music. In his diary, Craft reports him as having groaned and cursed throughout until, before the interval, he finally lost patience and left.25 The next day, Stravinsky described the event in somewhat different terms to his Russian confidant, Souvtchinsky. The music, he insisted, “is incredible junk, but it was impossible for me to escape, especially as the previous day all these Soviet musicians had paid me a visit, we entertained them and they invited me to celebrate my eightieth birthday next year with them in Moscow (if I’m still alive).…”26
Describing the visit to North Wetherly Drive in the Soviet journal Ogonyok two months later, the wily Khrennikov implied that they had only discovered that Stravinsky was taking part in the festival when they arrived in Los Angeles, and that the invitation was issued more or less on the spur of the moment.27 This was obviously a fiction. The propaganda value of bringing the most famous living Russian composer back to his native land in the year of his eightieth birthday was far too great to have occurred to the politically astute head of the Soviet Composers’ Union (SSK) only as he chatted to Stravinsky in the green room of the Royce Hall. It was a deep-laid plan, a shot in the Cold War, and the dim and uncomplicated U.S. cultural authorities let it happen, did nothing to publicize their own pride that “the most famous living Russian composer” was actually an American until it was much too late, and then, as we shall see, produced a damp and carelessly packed squib in lieu of a fireworks display of their own.
The fact is that Stravinsky had been sounded out, casually and through various channels, well before June 1961. Of these channels, only traces now survive. In a letter to Yudina of January 1961, he remarked that “I should so much like to get to you this year, but it won’t happen: too many commitments that I can’t fulfil.”28 Yudina had written to him the previous spring about “the possibility of your coming as our guest, to your own country.” Stravinsky annotated her letter and sent it to Souvtchinsky, who returned it and referred to it in his own next letter to the composer.29 A year later, still only in May 1961, Nika Nabokov let slip that “someone has said that you’re going to Moscow.”30 And that same month, the U.S. State Department, of all institutions, asked John Crosby whether Stravinsky—who was booked to appear with the Santa Fe Opera on a government-sponsored visit to Berlin and Warsaw in September—might be available to continue alone on a conducting tour of the Soviet Union. Stravinsky himself reported this idea to Goddard Lieberson with simple incredulity, but that was probably because of the suggestion that he go alone.31 A general idea must have somehow got about that he was thinking of a Russian trip; but nobody had any very clear view of how it might happen.
He knew that the atmosphere in Moscow was less hostile to his music than at any time since the early thirties. He knew about the partial thaw under Khrushchev, and he knew about Leonard Bernstein’s spectacular success with The Rite of Spring and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments on his Soviet tour with the New York Philharmonic in 1959. From Yudina he had gathered not only that his music was being played in the Soviet Union, but that it included relatively “difficult” pieces like the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos and the Serenade, and that there were young (and less young) enthusiasts like Blazhkov who went to hear this music and were thirsting for scores and recordings. But he knew about the dark side as well, and like most White Russians he still feared the power and ruthlessness of the Communists, so violently revealed in Budapest a mere five years ago and still evident, for example, in the growing political tensions over Berlin. “Zhutko”—“terrifying”—is how he described the whole situation to Souvtchinsky when his Russian visitors had left: “terrifying to think about it, terrifying to peer into my eightieth year, terrifying the musical goings-on in Russia, terrifying the idea that they should celebrate ‘their venerable musician’ who happens to smile when he feels like throwing up.”32 He had said something similar, if less melodramatic, to a Washington Post reporter as recently as December 1960. “They’re bad,” he snapped. “Poor Shostakovich, the most talented, is just trembling all his life. Russia is a very conservative and old country for music. It was new just before the Soviets. Under Lenin they invited me. I couldn’t go. Stalin never invited me.”33 All such remarks were reported, or misreported, in Moscow. In February, Sovetskaya Kul’tura ran a highly colored commentary that prompted Yudina to write in protest to Souvtchinsky, imploring him to tell Stravinsky not to say things that damaged his Russian admirers and impeded acceptance of his music.34 In his Ogonyok article, Khrennikov claimed that when he confronted Stravinsky with the Washington interview, the master simply disowned the entire text, insisting that “I’ve never said anything bad either about Soviet music or about Soviet musicians. All these opinions were imputed to me in the interview by unscrupulous journalists.”35 We are here in the land of Kafka’s Trial: somebody must have been telling tales about Igor S. But who, who says so, and for what reason? “What am I to do?” he asked Souvtchinsky imploringly, while the press, who had hung around North Wetherly Drive when Khrennikov went in and no doubt buttonholed him when he came out, announced the visit as signed and sealed.36
Souvtchinsky did not hesitate. “Of course,” he wrote modestly, “it’s not for me to give you advice, but I think, and am convinced, that you must accept this invitation.” He mused on its significance and what he somehow saw as its inevitability; it was already a fact of historic importance that would have “for the whole of Russian culture the most enormous consequences in every sphere” and “become a symbol of the liberation of a whole generation of Russian musicians.” Souvtchinsky was in frequent touch with Yudina, and he sensed that she might have had some influence, however small, on the change of heart “in that terrible and inspired country.” What did amaze him, he confessed, was the way the invitation had come from Khrennikov, with whose “music,” he added in sardonic quotes, he was acquainted. “In Soviet Russia, with all its hierarchies,” he assured Stravinsky, “I do not think that he would dare act on his own initiative without the approval of Shostakovich, from the top musical echelons. Yet your trip, and the celebrations in your honor, will not be to his [Shostakovich’s] advantage. So clearly this is something stronger than him.…”37
The curious thing about this rather complicated and profoundly ignorant advice is that it never seriously addresses what was for Stravinsky the most important issue of all: his own emotional response—the inner battle between his abrupt longing to see his native land once again, and his eternal loathing for the system that might take him there. Historic opportunities and the liberating of whole generations had never really been his thing, at least not since the wide-eyed days of his Ustilug conversations with the Polish doctor, Plekhanov’s friend Bachnicki.38 The simple fact was that he was a Russian, body and soul, who had not been home for nearly half a century. He was not remotely interested in Souvtchinsky’s ridiculous speculations on who had to ask whom about inviting him. He wanted to go and he wanted to play his works for people who he knew wanted to hear them, but he was profoundly disturbed—as those around him quickly saw—by that collision between fear and desire that anyone will recognize who has ever had an unexpected opportunity to fulfil an ambition buried so deep that the very loss of its impossibility leaves a hole. Souvtchinsky apparent
ly failed to notice all this because he himself had no wish, deep-seated or otherwise, to go back to Russia. For him, it was a purely intellectual conundrum, with an intellectual solution. “It isn’t a question,” he wrote later, “of my being pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet, but of the fact that I don’t like to and cannot ‘go back’ to the past. The past becomes ‘another state of being’ and to go back is to my mind as forbidden as to look into the future.”39
THEIR EUROPEAN landfall in 1961 was Göteborg in Sweden, from where they went by train to Stockholm and the same day, 9 September, flew on to Helsinki. It was by far their closest approach to Russian soil since before the war, and for Igor the closest to Leningrad since he had last left St. Petersburg in October 1912. They might well have been affected by this proximity even without the looming idea of a visit. Helsinki, like Oranienbaum and (near enough) St. Petersburg itself, lay on the Baltic coast and looked out over green islands and soft, barely saline waters. In the open-air market near the harbor you could buy mushrooms and arctic berries, exactly as you once could in St. Petersburg; and already in Soviet times passenger boats plied from there to Leningrad and back, so that it was hard to be in the more westerly city without hatching plans—invariably unfulfilled—for an excursion to the more easterly. You breathed the same air in the same climate; and everywhere, in the newspapers, in conversation, was a sense of the Soviet Union just along and across the gulf, closer than any of Finland’s western neighbors. Dominating the old square was a statue of Tsar Alexander II on a horse.
So remote was Souvtchinsky from any sense of the reality of Soviet life that he had, with Stravinsky’s somewhat skeptical permission, suggested to Yudina that she take advantage of the composer’s visit to nearby Helsinki in order to meet him and discuss possible programs for the Soviet tour.40 Yudina, of course, did not appear. Instead she sent back a letter, no more than hinting at the supreme tactlessness of the whole plan, and describing it to Souvtchinsky as “a remarkable example of your purity of heart and abstractness of spirit.… So near and yet so far, dear Pyotr Petrovich! Did you really think that I could just ‘up and go’ to Helsinki??!!”41 But Pyotr Petrovich was not quite that naïve, he claimed. He had quite reasonably (in his picture of the Soviet musical hierarchies) assumed that Shostakovich would fix her a visa.42 As for money, perhaps he supposed that in the U.S.S.R. the State paid all the bills. The failure, though it probably did not surprise Stravinsky, further undermined his confidence in the rightness of any decision to visit a country that would not grant even its leading musicians the most elementary freedom of movement. “Nice people?! And this is the country those Soviet obscurantists want to invite me to! But they wouldn’t give Yudina a passport to come and see me in Helsinki. Thank you. I shall not go there.”43
From Helsinki he had somewhat reluctantly made the necessary Sibelius pilgrimage and visited the Finnish master’s wooden house at Järvenpäär, met his widow and daughter, and talked about his music, widely performed in English-speaking countries but routinely despised by modernists like Craft and, to some extent, Stravinsky himself, who nevertheless admitted to liking certain lyrical aspects of Sibelius’s music—what he called “Italian-melody-gone-north.”44 Nostalgia may still have been working on him. Sibelius’s music had been a presence in St. Petersburg before the revolution, and Stravinsky had probably heard him conduct his Third Symphony there with Rimsky-Korsakov in 1907.45 But there was also an element of diplomacy, since he had been cited for the Wihuri-Sibelius award, which, unlike his earlier Sibelius medal, carried a substantial cash prize.
After his concert in Helsinki University Hall on the 12th of September, they flew back to Stockholm, where, on the 24th, Stravinsky conducted The Rite of Spring for what was to prove the last time. At the Royal Opera House, Ingmar Bergman’s production of The Rake’s Progress was in repertory, and the composer attended like royalty, receiving a standing ovation as he arrived in his box and again at the end. Whatever he may have feared about the performance itself, having recently seen Bergman’s heavily, Nordically symbolic film The Virgin Spring, his fears were banished by the reality, which reminded this great enemy of “interpretation” that literal adherence to the text is in the end less important than an instinctive feeling for its spirit. Bergman was no apostle of Texttreue. He made significant cuts, reduced the three acts to two (with an interval after the street scene with Anne and Baba), and invented some modestly symbolic by-play of the kind that later audiences would take in their stride but which at that time could still seem high-handed and intrusive. Stravinsky nevertheless found the whole thing so moving and musicianly that he hardly seems to have noticed the retouchings.
Two days later, when he met Bergman himself at a dinner at the house of the Opera’s administrator, Set Svanholm, he found Bergman intellectually able to defend his changes. He argued convincingly that the natural turning point of the opera—musically as well as scenically—was Baba’s sarabande and the unveiling of her beard. It was almost as if he had read Stravinsky’s very first letter to Auden, which talks of a two-act opera with “a Choreographic Divertissement in the first act’s finale.”46 From this point in Bergman’s staging, Craft noted, the colors became more somber and Swedish, reflecting the natural trajectory of the drama. The whole thing was as far as possible from the fake Italianism of Venice or the hectic pantomime bustle of the Met. It worked entirely on its own terms, and above all because it referred constantly to the music as the truest guide to what was actually—as opposed to superficially—taking place.47
Their flight to Berlin at the end of September brought them into a drastically different environment. Barely six weeks before, the East German government had slung a barbed wire fence along the boundary between East and West Berlin, and a week later had swiftly, and it seemed conclusively, turned it into a concrete wall. The political tension was almost palpable, emphasized by troop and tank movements, and by lines of guards with dogs and submachine guns. The three travellers were taken to look at the wall in a car provided by the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, an outing scarcely calculated to steady Stravinsky’s nerves when he considered that this was the reality of the politics that had kept him from his native land for the past forty-four years. Perhaps he also reflected that in 1933, similarly, he had been in Germany only a few days after the political takeover that had eventually led to war.48 Now, in September 1961, there were plenty of well-informed people who were predicting a similar outcome from the border confrontations in Berlin. Nicolas Nabokov, a friend of Brandt’s, took Stravinsky on one side and did his best to talk him out of going to the Soviet Union at all, while others were suggesting he delay until the autumn and not give the Russians the benefit of his birthday publicity.49 From Berlin they went on to Belgrade (Warsaw having long since fallen by the wayside)—their first direct experience of life in a Communist state. The gray drabness, the squalor, the sheer crumbling ugliness, were finally too much for them. “They have renounced all intentions,” Craft wrote to Paul Horgan on the 10th of October, “ever to go to Russia.”50
In such an atmosphere the Santa Fe Opera performances of Oedipus Rex and Persephone might have seemed about as relevant to either city as the Attic meadows and temples in which the two works are set. In fact they were a success, thanks in part at least to Stravinsky’s insistence on changes in the cast that had played in Santa Fe in July.51 From Belgrade, they reconnected with modern civilization in Zurich, where the composer was conducting The Soldier’s Tale in a double bill with The Nightingale under the local music director, Victor Reinshagen. By the time they reached London in mid-October, Stravinsky must have felt more than ever like his soldier hero: successful, by normal standards happy, but a stranger in strange lands, tormented by the forbidden desire to return home.
These days London was the intellectual focus of many of the concepts that lay behind his creative thinking. The attempts to form a collaboration with Eliot had failed, but the idea of The Flood had in a sense been his; and now there was a new plan for a se
tting of the mystical little two-stanza poem, “The dove descending breaks the air,” that forms the entire fourth part of the last of the four quartets, Little Gidding. The original suggestion had come from a new venture called The Cambridge Hymnal, which had set itself the worthy if somewhat unrealistic task of raising the literary and musical tone of school assembly hymns.52 For some reason, Stravinsky had ignored the original letter (of December 1960), and it is far from clear that even in London on this trip—though he dined with Eliot—he gave any commitment to write the hymn. Barely a month later he was telling a New Zealand press conference that “[Eliot’s] words do not need music. I can find notes for Shakespeare because he wrote words for singing. Eliot’s are for speaking.”53 Only when he got back to Hollywood in December did he change his mind and agree to compose the Little Gidding text in the form of “the standard, four-part hymn chorale.”54