Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The oddest feature of the initial discussions is that they apparently took place in the absence of both the designer, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, and the producer, Graff. These key figures in the visual presentation arrived some two weeks later, in time for the preliminary recording sessions at the end of March, which in fact consisted mainly of taping the music (from orchestral parts understandably littered with mistakes), together with interview material and rehearsal sequences, which Graff needed for the hour-long documentary program he planned to build round the performance itself. Graff had never expected more than twenty-five minutes of music, a length specified in his original letter of intent, but when he timed the recording and found that it lasted barely twenty-three minutes, he began to get cold feet about the amount of padding required, and he at once wrote to Stravinsky congratulating him on “composing such a vibrant, allusive and moving score” but inviting him to collaborate with Craft in lengthening it to “permit a dance presentation in excess of thirty minutes.”22 Whether Stravinsky took this suggestion seriously, or even calmly, is matter for speculation, but his joint reply with Balanchine, after their mid-April meetings, was measured but firm. No changes were needed. With a few extra pauses the work would last the full twenty-five minutes, and that was all that could be expected. Graff might (or might not) be pleased to learn that, after all the sour looks and sharp remarks whenever he had referred to the new work as a ballet, it had after all turned into … a ballet, or, to be exact, a “choreographic allegory.” Balanchine therefore was to have “full power to carry out our mutual conception.” The “chaos” prelude was neither curtain raiser nor credits music, but “already a part of the action.” So there was no longer any need to show the conductor at all (which was just as well since, though Graff had no intention of admitting it, the recorded performance had been conducted by Craft).23

  As far as anyone knows, this was Stravinsky’s final contribution to The Flood before its TV premiere on 14 June. He had done his best to produce a score that would suit this strange and imponderable medium. In the latter stages of composition he had tinkered and adjusted, checked timings with Craft’s help, thought hard about the role of the narrator and how what was heard would chime with what was seen. But he remained nervous and unsure about the result. “I hope,” he wrote to Liebermann a week after finishing the score, “The Flood will not be A Flop.”24 Too much of it seemed to be outside his control. Even the recording, which Columbia were planning to issue simultaneously with the transmission, was being touched up in his absence. The spoken passages were being dubbed in in New York, and there were even a few fragments of music that Leonard Bernstein was being hauled in to re-record because the Hollywood tape was unsatisfactory.25 None of this was being done “in the composer’s presence,” to use the formula Columbia were using for the commercial disc. In fact he took no part, and apparently not much interest, in the videotaping of the production itself in Manhattan in early June, by which time he was on the other side of the Atlantic. On the day of the transmission he was in Hamburg. If Robert Craft is to be believed, he never actually saw the program at all, but this, as we shall see, may not be quite correct.26

  After finishing the score, he had not thought it worth embarking straight away on his next work, the commission for Israel. There were the planning and recording sessions to be got through, and then he was due to conduct at the World’s Fair in Seattle in the third week of April. In any case, although he had finally settled on the Abraham story and had the Hebrew text to hand, he was still not confident enough of the pronunciation and accentuation to feel able to set the words to music.27 So instead, in the vacant week in March, he fulfilled what was probably a request from Lawrence Morton for a piece to go into the Monday Evening Concert on the 26th, an extra event being put on with raised ticket prices in the hope of earning some badly needed cash for the series.28

  There was no question of a new work. His idea was to make further arrangements of the Cinq doigts pieces, like the one he had done for Mexico, but this time for a mixed fifteen-piece ensemble including strings. Four of the eight pieces were ready in time for the concert and were duly played under Craft, though few heard them, the subscribers having apparently been frightened away by the thought of having to buy their tickets.29 The remaining four pieces were added in the first week or so of April, and Stravinsky conducted the first complete performance of the Eight Instrumental Miniatures, as they were now called, in Toronto on the 29th. As before when transcribing his own music, he had been unable to resist the temptation to amplify and complicate. The Miniatures treat the Cinq doigts much as their composer had treated Gesualdo in adding voices to his defective motets. Two of the pieces have inner parts inserted in canon with the existing melody; others have free parts added, and one or two are radically recomposed and extended.30 The whole set is a perfect model of Stravinsky’s inability to perform mechanical tasks—inability, as it were, to go to sleep artistically; and like earlier self-transcriptions—the Pastorale, the Concertino—they offer a tiny key to his whole creative method.

  ARRIVING in New York from Toronto at the start of May, they stayed for long enough to visit the spectacular exhibition of “Stravinsky and the Dance” put on in the Wildenstein Gallery under the patronage of Graff’s wife, Marjorie, as a modest adjunct to the Flood production (which was trailed in the catalogue). They then fled to Europe. In Paris on 15 May, Isaiah Berlin called on them to discuss the Hebrew text for the work that the mayor of Jerusalem, Theodore Kollek, had with presumably intentional bathos referred to as “The Sacrifice of Sir Isaac.”31 But instead he suddenly found himself acting as agent for the whole contract with the State of Israel itself. Stravinsky no longer wanted to write a half-hour choral work, as originally mooted, but a piece for one or at most two solo voices lasting about fifteen minutes. He despaired of finishing in time for the 1963 festival and was insisting on 1964 (bullying him, Nabokov said, would not do the slightest good); and he wanted his fifteen-thousand-dollar fee to be net of all tax. Reporting this to Kollek, Berlin added that he was certain Stravinsky genuinely wanted “to do something for Israel” and was not about to double-cross the festival, as he had done Covent Garden over the Rake or Hamburg over Movements.32 It seems not to have struck him as at all odd that he, a leading Oxford philosopher, should be talking dollars and delivery dates on someone else’s behalf. The deal simply happened to combine two of his greatest passions: Israel and Stravinsky; and it offered him the chance, as he had once put it sycophantically in a letter to Craft, “to be secretly immortalised by the purely simple little piece of work that I have done with great hope and devotion.”33

  The next day Stravinsky lunched with Samuel Beckett, and discussed with him the relative pacing of words and music and the possibility of notating the tempo of a play.34 It must have been the ritual motion of Beckett’s plays, with their slow gait and long silences, that had intrigued Stravinsky for some years and led him to hint at a collaboration, through Goddard Lieberson, as long ago as 1956. Even so it is hard to believe that his supposed remark to Beckett, when they met again later in 1962, that “he would be honored to compose music for any opera that Beckett might wish to write,” was any more than polite flattery.35 That evening, Nabokov threw an advance eightieth-birthday dinner at Chez Laurent. Two days later they flew to Johannesburg.

  This first and last visit to South Africa was another of those tours that, to the distant gaze, looked utterly pointless and even, in some ways, positively damaging. The animal-loving, zoo-addicted Stravinsky told Lillian Libman that he went because “he wanted to see the impalas in Kruger Park.”36 But Libman also hints that he had tried to get out of the tour by restricting the dates and upping his fee, and that it was Craft who implored her to accept the visit as agreed.37 It was certainly a curious time for right-minded U.S. citizens to be insisting on touring South Africa, which had been the object of a unanimous United Nations censure motion for its racial policies a mere seven months before.38 Stravinsky’s hosts were, of
course, the white authorities, specifically the South African Broadcasting Corporation, who would be programming concerts for white audiences only. When he enquired what arrangements there might be for him to conduct a concert for nonwhites, he was told that it would be permitted but that his fee would have to reflect the fact that there was very little money for such events.39 This remarkable admission seems to have stung even the not instinctively humanitarian Stravinsky into a vengeful tactic. He undertook to perform for whatever the Bantu could raise and give it to a nonwhite charity. “I hope this makes them [the whites] mad,” he told Libman optimistically: “Soak the whites and give to the nonwhites, but present it not as a ‘color’ problem, but as a question of rich and poor.”40 When they started rehearsing in Johannesburg for the first all-white concert, Stravinsky is supposed to have put it to an Afrikaner member of the orchestra that the choir and orchestra might conceivably be improved by a leavening of the best nonwhite musicians, and to have received the unblinking reply that indeed the nonwhite chorus was much better than the white one.41 Such stories, if authentic, argue a change of heart by Stravinsky since the 1930s, when he seldom if ever risked a fee on a point of humanitarian (as opposed to musical) principle. Craft does claim, here and there, to have influenced him in the general direction of political liberalism. How this fits in with his own determination to go to South Africa, in the absence of what one might call strong pro-activist arguments on his part, is a little harder to fathom.

  There were certainly those among Stravinsky’s more politically engaged friends who thought he should not have gone. Isaiah Berlin, for one, was against the trip on principle; but he also had more specific grounds for anxiety. In Pretoria Stravinsky had apparently told Jewish reporters that the Israeli government had banned the performance of the Symphony of Psalms in Latin and that he had accordingly commissioned Berlin to oversee its translation into Hebrew. Now it was true, Berlin admitted, that the Israelis were inclined to make difficulties over sacred works like the Bach Passions that were openly offensive to Jews, and they were also still understandably touchy about works with German texts. But the idea that they might object to “any work not specifically offensive to Jewish national or religious sentiment” had not occurred to Berlin, and to suggest that he might himself be qualified to solve the problem merely compounded his surprise. But that, he sighed to Kollek, “is how the old boy carries on, and one might as well realize it. There is no serious harm in any of this, of course, except that I think things had better be cleared up now so that nobody is deluded or in any kind of false position on this subject.”42

  Stravinsky was not due in Israel until the end of August, and in between there was his actual eightieth birthday on the 18th of June to survive. He spent it in Hamburg, where he was conducting Apollo in the triple bill of his “Greek” ballets being given by the New York City Ballet a week after the birthday. The travellers arrived from Rome on the 17th to be greeted at the airport by a crowd of friends and photographers, and when Stephen Spender asked the composer if he was tired, he replied: “Not tired, just drunk.” “The last time he was sober,” Craft added, “was in Paris on March 17th.”43

  Meanwhile for the second time that year he missed a world premiere of one of his major works. The Flood was transmitted across the United States on 14 June, and millions of Americans tuned in in the hope of illumination or uplift or whatever it is that inspires people to watch television art shows who would never in their lives go to a concert, an opera, or an art gallery. Those that stayed tuned witnessed a curious mishmash of a presentation. The actual “dance drama” was prefaced by a disquisition, spoken in suitably orotund tones by the actor Laurence Harvey, on the flood myth in various cultures and on its symbolism for modern man, confronted as he was by the imminent threat of extinction by The Bomb. This was followed by a brief clip of the composer himself announcing in his idiosyncratic English that “I don’t want to speak you more, I want to play you more,” after which came the work itself. Then, once the music had finished, there was more documentary film, rehearsal sequences (including Stravinsky conducting), and biographical stills. As always on American TV, the bizarrely organized program was interrupted every ten minutes or so by advertisements from the program’s adorably apt sponsors, Breck shampoo, whose music—naturally enough—was not close in style to Stravinsky’s.

  The show, which went by the title Noah and the Flood, was very widely reviewed throughout the States, and on the whole negatively, though many reviewers gave credit to CBS for backing even a failed attempt to bring culture to the philistine masses. There were plenty prepared to regard Stravinsky’s work as a masterpiece ruined by the crudities of the medium. Others, especially among the professional TV critics, found the whole thing a tacky and patronizing shambles and simply admitted they could make nothing of the music. Some praised the brilliant visual inventiveness of Balanchine’s and Ter-Arutunian’s work on The Flood itself; others found it silly and stilted and made fun of the black plastic water, the invisible Ark, the for some reason rather morose lighting, and the camera work, which one reviewer thought “the worst since ‘The Great Train Robbery.’”44 Stravinsky may have been out of the country, but he read and kept the reviews, in at least one case apparently while still abroad. In reply to some mildly negative remarks by the Tribune critic, Paul Henry Lang, he exploded in a superbly malevolent telegram to that paper’s editor, composed as usual, no doubt, with the help of his alter ego. “The only blight on my eightieth birthday,” he raged, “is the realization my age will probably keep me from celebrating the funeral of your senile music columnist.”45 In this there was no small element of revenge. Lang it was who had attacked Craft’s conducting and implicitly also his motives in his review of Stravinsky’s New York concerts in January 1960.46

  Today the Flood film (which has never been commercially released) seems an extremely archaic specimen, but the experiment it embodied is by no means to be despised, if only because it spawned one of the few genuinely entertaining works ever written in the angular, so-called serial style that so many composers thought compulsory in the sixties but few ever made their own. It also remains one of only a handful of musical works written for television that have survived either on or off the little box. It stands as a monument to the laudable but irrational and probably vain desire that from time to time afflicts the apostles of the mass media, to make the common man like difficult and uncongenial artifacts.

  Stravinsky flew into New York from Hamburg a fortnight after the transmission, and immediately Graff set up a private showing of the film. For some unknown reason, it was cancelled at the last minute, but Graff rearranged it for a few days later, and it seems likely that Stravinsky attended.47 It is true that he never expressed any opinion about the film publicly, and Craft has always maintained that he never saw it. But given the opportunities he certainly had, this seems frankly incredible, and it is much more probable that he saw it, hated it, but preferred not to denounce a production in which he could not deny involvement.

  In the ensuing weeks, Stravinsky conducted a succession of open-air concerts, mainly of his popular early works—the nearest the main cities of the U.S.A. came to anything even faintly resembling a birthday celebration. Despite rain or the threat of rain, an audience of eleven thousand heard his Lewisohn Stadium concert in New York on the 12th of July, and five thousand his concert at Ravinia Park, Chicago, on the 21st. A few days later he conducted in the Hollywood Bowl. On all these occasions his own major contribution was the Firebird suite,48 while Craft took charge of The Rite of Spring. At Santa Fe in August, also under the open skies, programs were naturally more adventurous and there was a systematic attempt at a Stravinsky Festival, with a whole series of talks about his music and staged performances of all his operas, including such marginal cases as Mavra, Renard, and Persephone, topped off with the concert premiere of The Flood, conducted by Craft in the auditorium of the city museum.49 Alas, in the nature of things the only reports of this important premiere
are by local journalists and “friendly” participants like Paul Horgan, whose whole account of the 1962 festival bubbles over with semi-official pride and loving complaisance.50 As for balanced judgment, the work still at this stage eludes us.