Stravinsky
Page 68
In Santa Fe Stravinsky at last began his Israel commission, now firmly settled as Abraham and Isaac. He may have been drunk when he made the first sketches. Horgan relates how the composer, having imbibed too freely at the vernissage for Vera’s latest exhibition, opted out of a dinner that evening, but later, when Horgan brought Vera back to the hotel, announced that “I came dronk, I slept one hour, I sent for some food, I have had supper, and then I have composed two bars!”51 Admittedly if these bars were the first two of the work, the effort will not have been great since they contain only five notes for the violas; or perhaps “two bars” was simply his lay term for the more complex process of serial planning that always preceded actual composition of his late scores. Or, finally, “dronk” may even have been a fib to get free time for composing, so as to be able to assure his Israeli hosts that, while he may not have finished the work they had originally hoped to have that very year, he had at least started it.
They flew to Tel Aviv without returning home and with their many suitcases more than usually jam-packed for the three-week trip to the Soviet Union at the end of September. Musically the nine-day Israel visit was unremarkable; there were concerts in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv itself, given in heat so intense and an atmosphere so humid that their glasses steamed up and their evening clothes stuck to their bodies like wet swimming costumes.52 But like most visitors to the Holy Land, they were struck by the conflicting images in that troubled terrain: the shocking contrast between the biblical landscape of the mind and the shattered and often commercialized reality, with its sandbagged buildings and abandoned tanks, its factories and tourist trash, its soldiers and petty officials and assorted immigrants. At one point this “rough assembly,” as Isaiah Berlin later called Israeli officialdom,53 made contact with Stravinsky’s own past, when a group of Israelis descended from families at Ustilug presented him with a history of the Jewish community in that village of so many remote summers long past.54 Not least, perhaps, because he hoped to see Ustilug again for himself soon, he was visibly moved by the gift.
THERE WERE various opinions about why Stravinsky eventually decided to visit the Soviet Union, and nearly as many on the rights and wrongs of his doing so, but his and Vera’s actual feelings as they landed at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow on the 21st of September can only be guessed at. Craft, who of course went with them, was perfectly clear that the decision to go had been the composer’s alone, motivated by curiosity and what Craft somewhat obscurely called the “desire for revenge.”55 To come across an analysis that is at once so shrewd and so profoundly uncomprehending is disconcerting to say the least. Most of us are instinctively interested in our own past, but to call that interest “curiosity” is to reduce it to the status of a book we intend to read or a new neighbor we hope to meet; it is to treat Stravinsky’s prewar refusals to return and his subsequent vilification of the Soviet Union entirely at face value, as lack of curiosity and genuine dislike, when it must have been obvious that fear, insecurity, and a passionate resentment gradually solidifying into a fixed and rigid intellectual position were really the active emotional ingredients. There was a kind of precedent that Craft knew all about. Stravinsky’s cultivated ignorance and rejection of serialism for almost three decades had been symptomatic of the same reluctance to confront dangerous situations. When forced (by Craft himself) to face that danger, he did not so much overcome it as watch it dissolve in his own creative acids. But Craft, unfortunately, held no such key to the Russian question. On the contrary, Stravinsky’s Russianness had always in a way been something outside his experience. After nearly thirteen years at Wetherly Drive he had still apparently made no serious attempt to learn the language in which Stravinsky thought his thoughts, conversed with his wife, and conducted his most intimate correspondence.56 He seems to have preferred to keep such matters at arm’s length, observing and assessing them under the spotlight of a sharp eye and mind, but not caring (or daring) to penetrate too deeply into the darkness beyond.
He quickly realized something that he admits he had not foreseen: that for both the Stravinskys, once they set foot on Russian soil, it was no longer a visit but a homecoming.57 When Balanchine arrived in Moscow with the New York City Ballet, only a fortnight later as it happened, he made it very clear that he now regarded America as his home.58 For the Stravinskys the situation, though factually the same, was for some reason psychologically more complex. Balanchine had an easy, unsentimental way of taking things as he found them. Stravinsky only pretended not to mind about the past, and his denial of Russia was plainly some kind of repression. When he landed at Sheremetevo and found himself engulfed by people speaking Russian, the waters broke through the floodgates and carried him into a region where his young American companion simply could not follow. To the latter, inevitably, there remained something distant and even threatening about these people who took possession of Stravinsky—with his seemingly absolute complicity—as if the last fifty years had been merely some unfortunate aberration. Between Craft and almost everything that was said stood his attractive, polished, omniscient, but when all was said and done official interpreter, Alexandra Alexandrovna Afonina; and between him and Stravinsky there now appeared another kind of threat, in the shape of the latter’s niece Xenya.
Even though she had had no reply to her second letter, Xenya had decided to travel from Leningrad to Moscow to greet her uncle at the airport, encouraged by a Canadian interview she had heard on the radio, in which he had referred to the niece in Leningrad he had never met but already loved and was looking forward to meeting. At Sheremetevo, she waited nervously with Yudina behind the crowds of reporters and photographers and the official welcoming party led by Khrennikov, but at last found an opportunity to introduce herself to Vera, and then was somehow pushed forward with Yudina to meet her uncle. “I’m Xenya,” she announced simply, as they kissed three times in the Russian style. Suddenly the stout Yudina, to everyone’s horror, went down heavily on one knee and kissed his hand. Stravinsky, embarrassed, kissed her hand in return and helped her to her feet.
Xenya had not intended to barge in on Stravinsky’s tour, though she certainly hoped to invite him to visit her and her family in their Kryukov apartment. Gradually, though, she found herself being drawn into the family group. After the airport press conference, she accompanied them in Khrennikov’s car to their hotel, the National, a grand former Tsarist establishment on Prospekt Marxa (just north of the Kremlin), drank vodka and Georgian champagne, and joined in the usual endless toasts, then was hauled off to the hotel restaurant with the Stravinskys, Craft, Afonina, and Hurok’s Moscow representative, Ralph Parker. The next morning she went with them to their first rehearsal with the U.S.S.R. State Symphony Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Conservatoire, was taken on to a reception at the Dom Kompozitorov (the Composers’ House), and was still in tow when they proceeded on a tour of the city, ending at the beautiful Novodevichy monastery. Craft was convinced that Afonina opposed this particular visit, and even Xenya noticed that it ran counter to their hosts’ desire to show off the New Russia rather than the Old. But Stravinsky had not been in Moscow before, except for a brief carriage ride between trains when he was seven,59 and he was determined to see the sights, from St. Basil’s Cathedral to the hill from which Napoleon had himself first glimpsed the city.
The next day, Sunday, Xenya did not appear, not wanting to be in the way. But on Monday, when she presented herself at the National at the end of lunch, Stravinsky immediately demanded: “Why weren’t you here yesterday?” “Well, I was afraid of being a nuisance.” “Don’t dare to talk like that, I want you to come every day. From now on you’re licensed.” They had been to Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi, and had kept a seat for her. So from then on, until they left Leningrad a fortnight later, Xenya was automatically included in almost everything. She sat in the Stravinskys’ box at concerts, went with them to the theatre and opera, took meals with them, and even once or twice sat with her uncle in his hotel room while he w
as resting and the others had gone out. They talked about their families, and Xenya for the first time heard details of her cousins’ grown-up lives and realized “how dear his children were to him, how much love and tenderness and concern he felt for them.”60 She sensed the same kind of affection in his attitude to her as well. It was as if they had known each other all her life and had merely been separated for a long time. She had of course expected something quite different. She had been afraid, at the airport, that he would be a “celebrity,” and instead he had turned out to be, quite simply, her adored father’s brother, with the same gestures, the same way of talking, the same manner. This “family blood” was so strong that she felt a vast joy, as if she had found someone very dear whom she had thought lost. By comparison, all the hullabaloo and glitter, the vortex of noise and bustle that enveloped him and into which she had been sucked willy-nilly, was no more than an interesting spectacle that she observed, so to speak, from the side. As she sat on the carpet that day in his hotel room, she looked at this infinitely dear, lovable sleeping old man, and was happy.61
ROBERT CRAFT was observing these strange new surroundings with a more skeptical, if not unsympathetic eye—the eye, though, of a superior nomad who had eaten better food in better hotels and was no stranger to the green-glass-bead tradition of travel in primitive lands. As a reasonable, civilized American—an admirer, admittedly, of the ethnic paraphernalia of Pribaoutki and Les Noces—he had been bemused by the useless basket of rustic debris thrust into his hands at the airport as a gift of welcome by the daughter of the poet Konstantin Balmont. But he quickly noticed that the Stravinskys’ reaction to these things was by no means so rational or cosmopolitan. After barely a day in Moscow, they were starting to see things through Russian eyes, take pride in Russian achievements, believe in the supposed Soviet dream of social equality and universal happiness. Within two days the composer was slipping back into the despised Russian linguistic habit of diminutive forms for the names of objects as well as people.62 He was saying agreeable things about Moscow’s modern architecture, and even—if the newspapers were to be believed—about the Soviet press, about the Soviet Union, about Lenin himself. Perhaps he did not really tell Komsomol’skaya Pravda that “I know and love your newspaper, and often read it,” or Moskovskaya Pravda that “in the United States I have tried hard to promote the great art of Russia—Glinka, Musorgsky, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich: names as close and dear to me as the names of people I love.”63 He surely did tell the interpreter, Afonina, that “I’m so delighted by everything I’ve seen […]. How remarkable that your government, with its vast building-program for the new Moscow, still takes such care of its ancient monuments!”64 And he certainly more or less told Ida Vershinina that “I’ve seen a lot of cities, but Moscow has conquered me.”65 “All my life I’ve spoken Russian, thought in Russian,” he said, “my whole makeup is Russian. Perhaps in my music it’s not at once obvious, but it’s there in the background, in its hidden nature.”66
In fact the Russianness of his music rapidly became something of a motif of the Moscow concerts, of which there were four in all, with two different programs. At the very first rehearsal, in the Conservatoire, the visitors immediately noticed the completely different sound of the Russian orchestra in The Rite of Spring, which Craft was rehearsing and conducting in the first program.67 Though much less familiar with the work than the average Western orchestra, the players were technically well in control of their music, while displaying a quite different set of priorities from those of the virtuoso American or European bands Stravinsky had come to know best. The steely brilliance of Chicago or New York was absent; intonation was wayward and generally regarded as of secondary importance, and the sound as a whole had a dry, thudding heaviness that recaptured for the composer something of the primitive menace of his original inspiration.68 Some of these details are evident in the published recording taken from the two opening concerts on the 26th and 28th of September.69 The eerie timbre of the Russian bassoon, so much more insinuating than that of the Western instrument, naturally imprints its character on the music from the outset. The string-playing consistently bears out Craft’s implication that the players felt the music lyrically in a way that would scarcely occur to Western musicians, aware of Stravinsky’s reputation for having rejected traditional expressive values. The rhythms have a convulsive violence in some ways more thrilling than the mechanistic precision of most American performances. In general, the non-Russian listener is suddenly more aware of the true ancestry of this most profoundly Russian of all late-Romantic masterpieces.
Pleased with his rehearsals, Stravinsky had reasonable hopes for the triple bill of his ballets—Orpheus, Petrushka, and The Firebird—which had been imported into Moscow’s super-modern Palace of Congresses from the Leningrad Maly Theatre and which he was seeing on the 25th. He was blissfully unaware that, earlier that day, Yudina had telephoned Xenya from Leningrad, where she was putting together a Stravinsky exhibition, to warn her that the Orpheus was substandard and advising her to ensure that the composer got to the theatre too late to see it. Stravinsky was accordingly put to rest without an alarm clock; but when Xenya arrived at the hotel he had already left, and she herself barely reached the theatre in time for the start. She sat next to him and watched him in profile. To her relief, at the end of Orpheus he simply shrugged his shoulders and said he realized that the work (which was also in his own program the following evening) was quite unknown in Russia. But then as she glanced sidelong at him during Petrushka, she saw his brow darken and his mood change. She realized that what had looked good on the intimate stage of the Maly Theatre almost vanished in the huge spaces of the Kremlin palace. The crowd scenes were feeble and disorganized, the soloists barely visible. This time the composer was much less sympathetic. “They should be ashamed,” he muttered. “Why couldn’t they work it up properly? Orpheus I can understand—a new ballet—but this has been around for fifty years!” There was worse to come. Just before Firebird, Nikita Khrushchev entered the box opposite and, with the music already begun, there were shouts of “Viva Khrushchev” and some rhythmic chanting. Onstage, the Firebird (Safronova) appeared from above like a tiny dragonfly, and the whole production, supposedly based on the original dances and designs by Fokine and Golovine, looked tacky and unmagical. The music was almost unrecognizable. The last chord had barely died away when Stravinsky was on his feet. “Let me out, quick, quick … let’s go!” he insisted, and hurried away without a thought for the dancers, musicians, and stagehands, all gathered in the wings, waiting hopefully for a word of thanks and a smile of reassurance from the great composer.70
His own concert in the Great Hall of the Conservatoire the next evening was a very different affair. The hall was of course packed, not just with politicians, diplomats, and the usual grandees, but with musicians of every stamp, young and old, from Shostakovich and Khachaturian down (or up) to the humblest and brightest students in the galleries. The atmosphere was tense with excitement. In some ways the program was curiously chosen: The Rite of Spring, conducted not by the composer but by his apparently inexplicable American assistant, while Stravinsky himself directed only Orpheus and Ode, works completely unknown in the Soviet Union and by all accounts of secondary importance. The first sounds of his own that Stravinsky had ever presented in person to a Russian audience were the soft, enigmatic brass chords that open the Ode in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky, while the second half of the program consisted entirely of Orpheus, a work that starts and ends very quietly and remains subdued for much of its half-hour duration. Even the Song of the Volga Boatmen, which Stravinsky added by way of encore, scarcely relieved the strangeness, with its harsh, brassy orchestration—an awkward modernization of a Tsarist image.
Yet it scarcely mattered. The audience had come to witness a living legend, not to cavil over this or that work or to notice the quality of what were, in fact, distinctive and in their way memorable performances. Everything was received w
ith loud applause, and at the end they stood and cheered, and when, after numerous curtain calls, Stravinsky appeared in his overcoat, held up his hand, and told them, “You can’t imagine how happy I am today,” they clapped even louder.71
The second concert, two days later, went if anything even better, despite the fact that Stravinsky had felt unwell for much of the day and had taken opium washed down with whisky just before the concert, “to avoid any unpleasantness,” as Xenya delicately put it. He was taken ill again in the interval, and she supposed that Craft would have to conduct Orpheus in the second half. “You don’t know him,” came the reply. “He’s very tough. He’ll be fine.” And sure enough, after an extended interval lubricated by cups of coffee and slugs of cognac, Stravinsky duly stepped up and conducted Orpheus with greater confidence than in the first concert, but without the encore and without the little speech.72
For the second pair of concerts, on the 2nd and 3rd of October, the orchestra was the Moscow Philharmonic, a generally younger and, Craft considered, better-drilled, brighter-sounding body of players;73 and the program was more balanced, with Petrushka and the early Fireworks offset by the Symphony in Three Movements and the Capriccio for piano and orchestra (with Tatyana Nikolayevna as soloist). Admittedly, Stravinsky conducted only about twenty-two minutes of this music, by dint of reducing Petrushka to the old suite (starting with the “Tour de passe-passe”), and leaving the symphony and Capriccio to Craft. But once again nothing could puncture the Muscovites’ enthusiasm for their lost master, whatever they may have thought about some of his music; once again they stood and cheered and threw flowers. It was, Xenya thought, to all intents and purposes a “farewell forever” from Moscow.74 The next day they all flew to Leningrad.