Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  In fact the so-called Anthem that he wrote at New Year 1962 is neither hymn nor chorale, but an extremely tricky unaccompanied four-part motet that would suit a school assembly about as much as Threni would please a Rugby club dinner. That Stravinsky composed it at all is remarkable. He had always claimed to detest a cappella singing, yet “The dove descending” is the epitome of the kind of unaccompanied music you would not want to hear sung by any but the most expert, highly trained, small professional choir. When sung by such consorts—which of course exist and existed, especially in England—the piece can be intensely, concentratedly beautiful. When sung by anyone else, it can be simply a nightmare.55

  A few days after the Eliot dinner, they were in Oxford for lunch with Isaiah Berlin. Robert Graves was there, too, perhaps at Craft’s suggestion, and he enlivened the meal with his erudition on Alexander the Great, Plato, and, less predictably, the relative virtue of Protestants, Catholics, and Israelis as taxpayers56—though whether because, as often with Stravinsky, the subject of tax had come up, or because they had started discussing Israel, is unclear. Sir Isaiah and Nicolas Nabokov, who turned up after lunch, had recently been on a visit to that country, and they had come back with the outline of a commission from Ahron Propes, the director of the Israel Festival, linked to a proposal that Stravinsky should visit the festival in September 1962 to conduct the work. Nabokov, who knew his friend’s ways, must have realized from the start that there was no chance of a new score being ready in so short a time. Perhaps he also knew, however, that Stravinsky had already half-formed the idea of writing a work to a text in Hebrew (a language of which he was completely ignorant), stimulated “by my discovery of Hebrew as sound.”57 Five months earlier the composer had asked Roth to get him a tape recording of a recent Cologne Radio performance of Schoenberg’s marvelous setting of Psalm 130, De Profundis, an unaccompanied choral motet that not only has a biblical Hebrew text but is specifically dedicated to the then (1950) newly founded State of Israel.58 This must surely have been the catalyst for Stravinsky’s discovery. What would be more natural than to consult Berlin—a Hebraicist and, like Schoenberg, a long-standing Zionist—on suitable texts for a work with a similar object?

  According to Craft, Berlin read them passages from the Bible in Hebrew, supplying literal translations as he went along. Berlin wanted Stravinsky to choose the Creation story, but Stravinsky, who had just been setting that episode in English in The Flood, was not strongly attracted by the idea. (“The music,” he told Berlin, “would be longer than a British weekend.”) A better choice for him was the story of Abraham and Isaac, which, as well as being “a very well-told tale,” had the added advantage of being a symbolic account of the origin of the Israeli nation. Even so, no firm decision was made, and it was agreed that Berlin would provide a transliteration of the two narratives, together with a word-by-word translation, leaving Stravinsky to choose between them in due course.59

  In London, Stravinsky conducted Persephone for a BBC studio recording and a few days later for a Sunday afternoon concert in the Festival Hall. They then set off on what could reasonably be described as a world tour. After a week’s holiday in Egypt, they flew to Australia and New Zealand for three weeks of sightseeing and concert-giving, before polishing the whole circumnavigation off with a week in Tahiti at the start of December. Ten days later they were back in the air on their second trip of that year to Mexico City. At one point on the Australian flight Stravinsky told their pilot—half in jest, half in drink—“I feel like a planet.”60 Yet astonishingly this insane schedule for a man of seventy-nine, in indifferent health and with a potentially fatal blood condition, hardly seems to have troubled him beyond what could be counteracted by a day in bed and the tactical avoidance of unwanted visitors or unwelcome receptions or press conferences. Souvtchinsky later tried to explain it to Yudina. “When he’s not composing he gets terribly bored; but for him travel is not merely amusement, or diversion, but also a kind of self-expression—a ‘flight into the future.’ What is more he says that it’s more agreeable to fork out money for any kind of tour than to pay it to the American tax-man.”61 The real victim of this wanderlust was obviously Vera, who loathed provincial cities, was easily (for all her apparently effortless social grace and natural charm) bored by drab or run-of-the-mill people, and was a halfhearted sightseer. Her diaries are full of sour memos about such things, and occasionally the feeling would spill out onto postcards to close friends like Lawrence Morton, who would be disarmingly informed what hell it was being on tour with musicians.62

  Vera was at least good at seeking oblivion when necessary. She would sleep on the interminable flights, while Craft fussed nervously with books and newspapers.63 Stravinsky, who was a calm traveller these days as long as things went reasonably smoothly, had taken to working on minor compositional tasks while airborne. On the flight to Mexico just before Christmas, he completed a wind-band arrangement of the tango-like last piece of the Cinq doigts piano suite, and proceeded to conduct it in his concert in the Bellas Artes hall on the 20th of December, to a half-empty auditorium and a generally tepid reception.64

  It was a depressing prelude to his celebratory year, but at least the negative feelings about Russia had for the time being dissipated. The official invitation had arrived in October. Craft had written to Libman from Melbourne the following month telling her to instruct Sol Hurok that he could now proceed to negotiate the “return,” but for the autumn, rather than June.65 Stravinsky’s outburst a fortnight later over the Yudina visa looked like a passing squall, and moreover the United States had at last come up with its own piece of “official recognition” in the form of an invitation from President Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, to “a dinner in your honor on or around your 80th birthday next June 5th.”66 At first Stravinsky actually declined this undeclinable invitation on the grounds of prior concert engagements.67 But they were no more than a pretext. He had not yet agreed to Liebermann’s proposal that he conduct his three “Greek” ballets (Apollo, Orpheus, Agon), in place of The Flood (to which he had never agreed), in Hamburg in June;68 the South African trip in May would not interfere with a Washington dinner on June 18, his actual New Style birthday. He had simply taken against the whole empty charade, as he chose to regard it. “I don’t see anything wrong with my telegram to Mrs. Kennedy,” he told Nabokov;

  Am I a man of almost 80 years to fly all alone (notice, she did not invite my wife) to Washington on the one day I would like to be with my family and friends. I want to add, too, that the Casals business there nauseated me—all publicity seeking and social climbing on the part of you know which American composers and conductors and violinists and … No one in Washington has any real regard for my music—it is all for my name.69

  It seems more likely that Nabokov had himself dropped a hint to Kennedy’s personal assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, that Stravinsky’s birthday ought not to be ignored especially since the Russians were ostentatiously honoring it.70 At any rate, it was Schlesinger who now intervened with Nabokov, pointing out the awkwardness of Stravinsky’s response and suggesting that he propose some more convenient date.71 The dinner was duly fixed for the 18th of January, and Vera, Craft, and Nika were all invited, too.

  30

  A GUEST IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

  JUST WHEN STRAVINSKY was telling Souvtchinsky that he refused to go to a country that denied its musicians visas, and Craft was telling Libman that he must at all costs go,1 and Souvtchinsky was assuring the composer that he at least would never go,2 a fifty-five-year-old woman whom none of them had ever met or even corresponded with picked up her pen in an apartment house on the Kryukov Canal in Leningrad.

  Dear Uncle Igor, I was very happy to learn that you intend to come to us in Russia next summer and celebrate your eightieth birthday here. So I made up my mind to write and tell you that not only your numerous admirers, but also your own flesh and blood, are looking forward to seeing you.3

  The flesh and blood were, alas, no longer so nume
rous. Xenya Stravinsky had lost both her parents many years ago: her father, Yury—Igor’s older brother—in 1941; her mother, Yelena, in 1948. Her older sister, Tanya, who had spent almost a year at her uncle’s house in Nice in 1925, had died of cancer five years earlier, aged only fifty-two and already widowed, leaving a son named Roman. Xenya, too, had lost her husband, the father of her daughter, Yelena, but had remarried, and they all—she, her architect second husband, and Yelena and her husband together with their son, Igor—lived in a flat on the Kryukov Canal, not the old Stravinsky flat but a smaller one a few yards along the street. It was a melancholy little nucleus, but one all too typical of postwar Leningrad, heir to so much hardship and anxiety and forty years of moral and physical deprivation. Yet Xenya, excited by the thought of meeting the brilliant uncle about whom she had heard so much but whose existence might have been pursued on the planet Mars for all it ever had to do with her, uttered not a single word of complaint, merely adding laconically: “These are the sad facts of our life.”

  Her uncle replied promptly, but with that curious lack of effusiveness that typified his letters to all but his very closest friends and family—and30 even to them when he felt preoccupied by work or had nothing urgently personal to say. He was touched by everything Xenya had told him, he said, had no time to write at any length for the moment, but would do so soon. He was unable to come in the summer, but would possibly come later. Meanwhile he was sending photographs, and ordering copies of his conversation books for her from London.4 This curious guardedness toward a niece who had withheld nothing and demanded nothing might easily have affected her like a rejection, especially as the promised longer letter never materialized. Fortunately she had the good sense to understand that such a reply reflected a much wider ambivalence toward Russia, and also that the true way to his affections lay through his music, which—though she may not have known or analyzed it consciously—was the touchstone of his attitude to his native land. Like her mother, she herself was artistically more visual than musical, but she went to hear his music whenever she could, and the next time she wrote she reported on what she had heard.5 Still no second letter came back; but she did not reproach him, and did not lose hope that he would at last respond in kind.

  STRAVINSKY’S travels in the first month of 1962 were a tiny microcosm of the hectic schedule that he faced later in the year. On the 6th he conducted The Soldier’s Tale suite in the Wilshire-Ebell Theater in a concert otherwise directed entirely by Craft. The next morning they flew to Toronto for a series of recordings for CBC,6 then on the 13th drove to Buffalo, from where they flew to Washington for three concert performances of Oedipus Rex and Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole (conducted by Craft), and a recording of Oedipus.7 At the end of the month they were in New York to record Renard and Ragtime, done without the cimbalom parts because no adequate player could be found.8 It was on account of his Washington engagements that Stravinsky had accepted the invitation to dine with the President on the 18th, as if fitting in a lunchtime drink with a persistent concert agent. And one can almost sympathize with his cynical view of the proceedings, since it was transparently obvious that the invitation had been prompted by political considerations and had little to do with any celebratory attitude to him or his music. In general, the United States took little serious interest in her greatest composer citizen. Not a single American orchestra had proposed a full-scale birthday tribute, and indeed it was several years since he had been booked by any of the leading orchestras for a subscription concert. The attitude to him and his music in his adoptive country was nearly as benighted as it had for so long been in the Soviet Union, and in a way that was still more wounding, since it was a matter of pure aesthetic and commercial preference, backed up by no official doctrine or legal force.

  The dinner itself illustrated perfectly the difficulty even relatively sophisticated politicians have in honoring great artists in a manner beyond the merely dutiful. Craft noted with a touch of scorn the political and in-house leavening among their fellow guests, who included Mrs. Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, Helen Chavchavadze, and the Schlesingers, with only Nabokov, the Liebersons, and the Leonard Bernsteins to make the Stravinskys feel remotely at home.9 A well-thought-out evening would have run to at least a short concert of Stravinsky’s music, but this dinner had been cooked up at the last minute with whatever came to hand. The composer himself thought the guests poorly chosen, and since there was a lot to drink and not much to do except drink it, he duly got drunk. But he could still observe his hosts. “She,” he reported to Souvtchinsky, “is very striking and charming, he very quick on the uptake, but they both have very little connection with art, and I think that they invited me less for my music than for my age, and to steal a march on the Russians, to whom,” he added mischievously, “I shall not go.”10 The Kennedys were at their best as they stood with their guests of honor in the porch, waiting for the car to take them back to their hotel. They chatted easily and naturally for a quarter of an hour, the driver not having expected so early a departure. “Nice kids,” Stravinsky remarked incongruously as they at last drove away.11

  As for Russia, his latest reaction was obviously mere pique at being treated as Cold War fodder by those who had hitherto either abused his work or ignored it. Practically speaking, he was committed to going, provided that Hurok could extract satisfactory terms from the SSK. There was evidence of a more open attitude to his music in Moscow and Leningrad. Yudina had described in detail a concert of his chamber works at the Leningrad Composers’ House in early January including the Serenade, Septet, Octet, Duo Concertant, the viola Elegy, and various songs; the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky had made a twenty-minute speech, and the influx of people had been so great that the small concert hall of the Composers’ House had nearly come apart at the seams.12 Admittedly Souvtchinsky had suddenly turned against the whole idea of the visit. He related a horror story told him by the novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who had been invited to Russia to lecture “in front of huge auditoria of five hundred people,” had in fact found herself speaking to audiences of eight or nine, and had suddenly been assailed by feelings of terror at the alien and incomprehensible environment. Was it worth the risk, he asked, for Stravinsky to get mixed up in that world of obscurantists and imbeciles? At least put the trip off until 1963, when the ground would be prepared and the birthday celebrations over.13 But when Stravinsky replied in mid-March that it was now too late to back out, Souvtchinsky swung round behind him again and gave the visit his imprimatur.14 Craft meanwhile reported to Nabokov that the Master was still changing his mind twice a day,15 and there was a moment of sheer panic when a “hysterical” twenty-five-page letter arrived from Yudina in mid-April and Stravinsky confessed to Souvtchinsky that he could scarcely endure the mixture of blind adoration, provincialism, and what Le Monde had called “the jargon of cultural exchange,” and that the whole trip was turning into a nightmare for him.16 But this seems to have been his last significant wobble, and by the time they sailed for Le Havre en route for South Africa on the 8th of May nobody any longer seriously doubted that the visit would take place.

  In the midst of all this agony, Stravinsky’s latest completed work, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, quietly had its premiere in distant Basle on 23 February (preceded by a public dress rehearsal on the 22nd). After all Sacher’s anxieties—about the choir, the soloists’ English,17 the idiom in general—everything went smoothly, and the curious, unclassifiable score enjoyed something close to a triumph; in fact, the entire fifteen-minute work was encored. As for the press, it was almost the first opportunity European critics had had since before the war to give serious, concentrated attention to a major Stravinsky premiere without the intervention of the kind of distracting or even downright disruptive conditions that usually prevailed in Venice. The fat bundle of reviews that in due course landed on the North Wetherly Drive doormat might have been as much the product of Swiss tidiness and efficiency as the concert itself.

  Ther
e were good reasons for this sudden wave of gravitas and sympathy. The fact, for instance, that several London newspapers sent critics to Basle instead of waiting for the British premiere in May simply reflected the appearance on the scene of a number of youngish writers with a genuine enthusiasm for and knowledge of new music, something frankly almost unknown in the British or American press before 1960.18 Then again, in German-speaking Basle, the nearby German and Swiss critics naturally turned out in force and, as ever, engaged earnestly, if not always with flashing wit, with the loftiness of Stravinsky’s intentions and thought. The reviews proclaim that the “thinking” musical world has at last got over its astonishment and—not to mince words—resentment at the serialization of the great master’s technique. They mention it, but largely discount it as an aesthetic factor. The work is thought one of Stravinsky’s most penetrable, most coherent, even most melodious. The debt to Webern is noticed but felt to have been fully absorbed, unlike the old stylistic references of neoclassicism. Above all, the spiritual message comes across as something intimate, direct, and personal, after the cool Latin rituals of the Canticum sacrum and Threni and the abstractions of Movements. People are touched by the beauty of the Dekker “Prayer” where they may have been merely impressed by that of the “Sensus spe” or the “Quomodo sedens.” As he approaches eighty, it seems, the great composer is close to beatification. Only one (of course French) review attracts his wrathful marginalia for comparing his Sermon unfavorably, in intensity and grandeur, with Dallapiccola’s Canti di Prigionia.19 The rest is contented silence.

  Less than three weeks after the premiere, Stravinsky put the finishing touches to The Flood and at once turned to the question of how the twenty-five-minute drama, with its odd mixture of speech, singing, and tone poem, might be rendered into visual language for the small screen. On the day that he completed the full score, the 14th of March, Balanchine arrived in Hollywood to discuss the production and choreography. They met on three consecutive days, and then again for two days a month later, and Craft took detailed notes, which he eventually published under the businesslike title: “Working Notes for ‘The Flood.’”20 In one sense these meetings were no different from the kinds of discussion they had had before Orpheus and Agon; in another sense they were utterly different, because at their core was a medium for which neither of the two artists had much sympathy or even a great deal of understanding. Balanchine had worked for television, but mainly on popular classics like Coppelia, The Nutcracker, and The Magic Flute, where the idiom was that of more or less conventional adaptation. Stravinsky had watched television but had never been near a studio except occasionally as conductor or interviewee. They seem to have approached the whole thing in much the way that an art-loving family might think about their next fancy-dress party. Ideas flowed, unchecked by any technical discipline or even any very coherent visual concept. When God says, “Let the dry earth appear,” Stravinsky suggests showing photos of the moon, the sea, or the desert. Balanchine’s idea for the Flood involves shiny black bituminous plastic made to wave and heave by the male dancers bobbing up and down on their knees underneath it, while the female dancers wallow on top like people drowning. In the Covenant, the dancers form the rainbow, “like an advertisement for Radio City.”21 All these inspirations have in common the fact that they would actually work well on a stage, where crudity of detail can be masked by lighting and distance. The idea that they might be televisual presumably comes from some vague notion that in the studio all things are possible and abstraction or surrealism are therefore appropriate genres. But this was to prove both technically and aesthetically a mistake.