In one obvious sense, the Moscow leg of the Soviet visit had been both the most detached and the most official. Moscow was the capital and the musical headquarters, and it was a city Stravinsky did not know. Leningrad would be the real homecoming, the more so because, for some unknown reason, Kiev (and hence any possibility of visiting Ustilug) had at the last minute been removed from the itinerary.75 In Moscow he had met the cream and the dregs of Soviet music; he had met what Craft called the “plutocrat performers,” Rostropovich, Gilels, Kogan, and Oistrakh,76 conductors like Kondrashin and Rozhdestvensky (who had penned a sympathetic article in Izvestiya, comparing Stravinsky enthusiastically with Picasso and praising his conducting),77 and of course a whole symphony of composers, the pillars of the Composers’ Union, the real and for the most part irretrievable musical victims of the system that he had very publicly despised for thirty years and more. Actual Soviet music he had so far been spared, with the exception of Prokofiev’s War and Peace at the Bolshoi. As for Shostakovich, Russia’s sole unquestioned living master had been unable to greet Stravinsky personally at Sheremetevo because (by a profound and even rather beautiful irony) he had been taking part in the centenary celebrations of the Leningrad Conservatoire, an institution in which Stravinsky had not studied. They had eventually met at a dinner organized in the Metropole Hotel by Yekaterina Furtseva, the disconcertingly handsome minister of culture, who had sat between them in order, presumably, to ensure that communication stayed on an acceptably orthodox plane.78
She need hardly have worried. Shostakovich’s independence of spirit was not of the kind that bred confidences with strangers, even (or perhaps especially) with one he so revered that, when he spoke to him, he stammered and trembled visibly. As for Stravinsky, he had once admired Shostakovich’s talent but had given up expecting work of (as he considered) high artistic caliber from him as long ago as 1935, when he had heard Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in New York. He knew about Shostakovich’s stature in the Soviet Union, of course, and may even for a time have shared Souvtchinsky’s fantasy about his political influence there, which would explain why, in Moscow, he kept asking his escort, Karen Khachaturian, “Where is Shostakovich?”79 But the Furtseva dinner must have dispelled any such notion and in general confirmed once and for all the centralized, bureaucratic (rather than artistic) nature of the command structure in Soviet music. One by one, each of the composers present rose and spoke, acknowledging his own inadequacies (in the approved Stalinist tradition of the forced confession), and proposing a toast to the return of the prodigal, though without, for the most part, mentioning his music. In due course, Stravinsky himself spoke:
A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only one country—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life. I regret that circumstances separated me from my fatherland, that I did not give birth to my works here and, above all, that I was not here to help the new Soviet Union create its new music. I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and I love it, and I do not give any foreigner that right.80
In a curious way this, too, was a kind of confession.
The Leningrad they drove into from Pulkovo airport was for most of the way unrecognizable as the St. Petersburg Stravinsky had last seen fifty years ago almost to the day. The city was like the old gentleman who had greeted him at the airport terminal and whom he had completely failed to recognize as his oldest and once upon a time greatest friend, Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov. The outskirts had changed; the center was much the same, more decrepit, in some ways modernized (Volodya now wore a hearing aid and had shaved off his beard), but to the Western eye still decidedly dingy. The Italianate beauties of Rastrelli’s Petersburg still nevertheless shone through the grayness of Soviet life, and Igor was soon recognizing buildings and streets and attaching their old names to them.
Leningrad, unlike Moscow, meant revisiting his own past. On the first full day, they drove out to Oranienbaum (long since renamed Lomonosov) and tried to imagine the location of the wooden dacha in which he had been born. They were not to know that the house had been pulled down almost thirty years before, and they could not discover that fact because neither Stravinsky nor his hosts had the slightest idea where it had been. Two days later they went to tea with Xenya and her husband in their Kryukov Canal flat. It was in the same long building as, and, Xenya assured them, identical in size and layout to, the former Stravinsky flat at no. 66—a statement they might not have accepted quite so readily if they had known more about Soviet housing policy (which by that time had allocated the old flat to no fewer than four separate households).81 Outside his own staircase, two doors along the canal, Stravinsky stood and looked and said nothing, not daring to show any emotion. Nobody suggested mounting the stairs and knocking on the door of the second-floor flat. In the nearby theatre square he surveyed the Conservatoire on the one hand and the former Maryinsky Theatre—now the Kirov—on the other. Craft heard him mutter “Glazunov” as he caught sight of the one, and saw him beam with pleasure as he turned toward the other, and deduced from this that the Conservatoire had taught him to hate music as surely as the Maryinsky had taught him to love it.82 Patient readers of this chronicle will know by now how false such an antithesis was. Stravinsky had never enrolled at the Conservatoire and never studied with Glazunov, as he himself (or perhaps his alter ego) had been at pains to inform the editor of the Observer only a few months before.83 His sole connection with the Conservatoire had been through Rimsky-Korsakov, a teacher he revered, and two other Rimsky-Korsakov pupils, who probably did his own inner music no harm. As for the Maryinsky, he had certainly been much there and entirely to his musical advantage; but his entrée to the theatre had been by way of a musical influence he had never later wanted to overpraise: that of his own father.
Either Craft misheard, or Stravinsky was speaking for the microphones.
One other focus of his musical education had been the so-called Assembly of the Nobles, the elegant, pillared hall on the corner of Mikhailovsky Square (opposite the Europa Hotel, where they were now staying). Here he had attended the Ziloti, RMS, and Russian Symphony concerts, had sat with Rimsky-Korsakov in rehearsals, and had heard the first performance of his own Scherzo fantastique in January 1909. And it was to this same hall, now known as the Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonie (Filarmoniy), that he returned to conduct his two Leningrad concerts, on the 8th and 9th of October 1962. The program was such as might almost have been heard on the last occasion he had himself been in the hall, early in 1910. At that time Fireworks had just been premiered there, and The Firebird was nearing completion; it was these two works that he now conducted, apparently because the Leningrad Philharmonic—only the city’s second orchestra—was unwilling to risk anything more recent. Craft conducted The Fairy’s Kiss, more modern but, with its Tchaikovskian roots, not hugely more challenging. Yet even more than in Moscow, repertoire was of secondary importance. What mattered was the sense of homecoming and the unreserved enthusiasm of the welcome. “The first time I came to this hall,” he reminisced from the podium, “was with my mother sixty-nine years ago. We sat over there in the right-hand corner. It was a concert under Napravnik in memory of Tchaikovsky, two weeks after his death. And today I’m conducting on this platform for the first time. It’s a great occasion for me.”84 As in Moscow, this announcement was greeted with wild applause.
By contrast, the Composers’ Union, where Yudina had been busy for weeks setting up her Stravinsky exhibition, was not a building—and certainly not an institution—that he would have stepped inside in Tsarist St. Petersburg. The Dom Kompozitorov, or Composers’ House, occupied and still occupies a former mansion in Ulitsa Gertsen built in the 1840s by the architect of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Auguste Montferrand. In its Soviet incarnation, it provided a suitably melancholy headquarters for the anxious and often menial activity o
f composition in the second city of the U.S.S.R. Here, two days before his own concert, Yudina conducted Stravinsky round the exhaustive display of photographs and manuscripts that she had put together partly from family materials that he had either never seen before or had completely forgotten about. She then led him into the cramped but elegant concert hall for performances of his Octet and the Septet, a piece she had introduced to the Soviet Union in a concert the previous January—apparently Russia’s first encounter with the serial or even proto-serial Stravinsky.
The atmosphere was very different from anything Stravinsky had encountered in his orchestral concerts. The audience consisted largely of musicians, not all of whom were necessarily sympathetic to the modernisms of the Septet especially, and some of whom undoubtedly felt at least a vestigial resentment against this colleague who had done so well by—as they might have put it—abandoning his native city. In the fourth row of the jam-packed and stuffy little hall Stravinsky felt hemmed in and soon retreated with his retinue to the back row, next to the exit, so that for a moment some of the audience thought he had simply left. After the concert, the director of the Composers’ Union, Yevgeniya Vïkhodtseva, ushered him back into the exhibition room and mounted guard on the doorway, only permitting a select few to pass through to meet him. Many saw in all this a desire on his part to avoid contact with his Russian fellow musicians; yet it seems he had no such wish, knew nothing of Vïkhodtseva’s activities, and had no idea that he was giving offense by seeming to distance himself from his less fortunate colleagues.85
As for the brief concert itself, it showed once more how hard it was for Soviet musicians, no matter how able, to come to terms with a complex music about whose background and discourse they knew nothing. The Octet, agilely performed by students, was almost entirely at the wrong speeds and kept pausing—Craft thought—at what had been changeover points on somebody’s 78 recording.86 Yudina tackled the difficult piano part in the Septet with great aplomb but little grasp of the music, which, Craft observed, sounded more or less incoherent. Yet she had for years been carrying on a lone fight in defense of Stravinsky’s music, and she was that very night off to Moscow to play the Piano Concerto, before flying back to Petersburg for another performance of the Septet.87
THE STRAVINSKYS’ own route back to the West was likewise by way of Moscow. They left Leningrad by train at midnight on the 9th of October 1962, and Xenya was at the Moscow Station, along with many others, to see them off. Inevitably they left behind them a trail of regrets. Letters had arrived at the Europa from family friends who remembered young Gima from St. Petersburg days and longed for some word from him, some assurance that he, too, remembered or at least acknowledged their part in his early life. Whether he replied to such communications we do not know, but perhaps at any rate he wrote to his cousin Inna Apollonskaya, the daughter of his father’s brother Alexander and now eighty-eight years old, who remembered him as a child sitting at the piano in her father’s house and playing his very first compositions, as she called them: “My frozen sweet” and “In the yard there stands a mop.”88 It was probably Inna who, according to Craft, had missed by one place the ballot for tickets for the Philharmonie concerts, but was found a seat at the last minute by Hurok’s representative, Parker.89
There was also a short letter from Volodya Rimsky-Korsakov, regretting that they had had no chance of an intimate conversation, and enclosing a copy of a book he had written “as proof that I have done in my life as much as circumstances permitted.”90 In fact they had sat together at a dinner in the Composers’ Union the day after Stravinsky’s arrival; but to a Soviet citizen such occasions were not intimate and could not be treated as an opportunity to speak freely about the past or about any issue of a more than conventional or superficial character.91 What, in any case, would Volodya have wanted to say? Would he have regretted the rift between them over Diaghilev and the Khovanshchina completion, or expressed remorse at his family’s hostile attitude to Stravinsky’s ballets at their first performances in St. Petersburg? It seems highly unlikely, in view of Stravinsky’s recently published attack on Volodya’s brother-in-law, Max Steinberg, of which the family can surely not have been wholly unaware.92 Volodya’s sister Nadezhda Steinberg certainly had not forgotten Stravinsky’s ill-mannered treatment of her husband in Paris in 1925, which was quite sufficient grounds for her to refuse his invitation to the Philharmonie concert on 8 October.93 It would have been nice to think that, through the Rimsky-Korsakovs, fifty years of silence and separation could be obliterated, friendship resumed, the thread of history retied. But to expect it would have been wishful thinking. Stravinsky, it seems, neither expected nor wished it.
In Moscow there was yet another dinner at the Metropole, at which Stravinsky and Shostakovich sat next to each other and talked—very edgily—about music. Shostakovich confessed his admiration for the Symphony of Psalms, and they discussed Mahler and Puccini, but trivially and without touching on each other’s deeper attitudes.94 The next day, they were summoned to the Kremlin to meet Khrushchev, just returned from a tour of irrigation works and hydroelectric installations in the Central Asian republics. It was a curious reminder of a not dissimilar meeting almost exactly thirty years before in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. And just as in February 1933 Mussolini had impressed Stravinsky as a strong political leader, so Khrushchev now struck him not as a ruthless tyrant but as a man of extraordinary vision and organizational skill, with whom he could converse “as with a great artist, on questions of common concern.”95 “He is like a composer,” the real composer confided to Craft as they drove to the airport, “showing you the score on which he is working, and of which he is very full and very proud.”96
The most important score of all they did not discuss, but a mere ten days later it was revealed, unexpectedly, by the President of the United States. The Russians, he announced, had been constructing ballistic-missile launching pads and bomber bases in Cuba, within striking distance of “most of the major cities in the Western hemisphere.” The U.S. navy was blockading Cuba. A convoy of Soviet supply ships was steaming westward and approaching the Caribbean. On the very day that Kennedy ordered the ships to be intercepted, Stravinsky flew from Rome to New York, and he was again in a plane, flying across the Caribbean to Caracas, when the crisis ended on the 28th of October. Thus, like a magus, the eighty-year-old composer spanned the troubled world; and, as he flew, he contemplated his latest work—the Hebrew story of the sacrifice of Isaac, prevented as the knife rose by the intervention of an angel.
31
THE SACRE PAPERS
STRAVINSKY LEFT the Soviet Union with every intention, it seems, of returning. Khrushchev, he told the Paris reporters at Orly, had invited him to spend time resting and working in the Crimea or the Caucasus. Craft was enthusiastic. Russia had made a bigger impression on him than any country he had visited, and he was eager to go back to teach, conduct, and generally spread the word about modern music in the West. It was obvious that the Stravinskys had both been profoundly moved by the visit. Aspects of their personalities that had lain buried under almost half a century of exile had welled to the surface, forced up by the recognition of a shared cultural, topographical, and linguistic heritage which all the grayness, deprivation, and falsehood of Soviet life were powerless to conceal. It no longer seemed so important that—as he had felt in 1949—“there is no discussion possible with people who are not free.”1 Face-to-face with individuals, he could form bonds even with those—like Khrennikov and Furtseva—part of whose job was to perpetuate that unfreedom, and could overlook the extent to which other contacts were inhibited by a fear that remained in large measure hidden and intangible.
Back in France, however, the shared Russianness seemed suddenly far off and perhaps even faintly absurd. In the Paris interviews—even as printed in the Russian-language press—he alluded to it in only a stereotyped way and talked much about the beauties of Moscow and Leningrad as if he were a space traveller just back from the moon. “I s
aw unforgettable things,” he assured reporters, thereby studiously misrepresenting the place of memory in an event whose issue was not what could be, but what had been, forgotten or otherwise;2 and when asked about the city of his childhood he confessed he had been happy to see it again but happiest of all to meet his niece and her family.3 Questions about Soviet music and musicians were carefully avoided. In only a single rather longer interview, with the music critic Claude Samuel, did he risk what he plainly intended as an off-the-record remark about Khrennikov himself—“a good sort, but a servant of the old regime from the time of Stalin”—which unfortunately Samuel included in the printed article and which soon inevitably came to its subject’s attention.4 Having obviously failed to alert Samuel (himself the author of a well-informed book on Prokofiev) to his personal friendship with his erstwhile host, he was reduced to a squirming apology in which he pretended that Samuel was so ignorant and stupid as to have confused Khrennikov with Glazunov.5 It seems unlikely that the clever union secretary was deceived, but, being professionally at ease with façades, he accepted this one at its face value, and friendly relations were quickly resumed with barely a tremor.
Such contradictions and misunderstandings were, of course, in the nature of the situation, and they were no less severe for Soviet critics, who had somehow to reconcile their past denigration of Stravinsky with the new atmosphere of brotherly love and cordial artistic welcome. Musically, their difficulties were genuine enough. For thirty years before the late fifties, Stravinsky’s music since Petrushka had gone largely unheard at least in the main Soviet concert halls and theatres; and when one recalls the panic-stricken reaction of French critics in the twenties and American critics in the thirties to what de Schloezer had called his “zigzag” evolution,6 it is scarcely surprising that post-thaw criticism in Moscow found itself at sea with works like Orpheus and Ode which, in their experience, were completely without context. The Rite of Spring they felt able to understand, for all its primitive, discordant violence—so loathsome to Stalinist taste—because its Russianism was patent and to some extent familiar, and the music could easily be heard as “a premonition of terrifying social cataclysms and the catastrophes of war.”7 If anything they wanted the violence sensationalized, even sensualized, and they found Craft cold and too rational after Bernstein and Igor Markevitch, the only recent conductors of this work in Moscow.8 By the same token they found the Symphony in Three Movements easier to grasp than Orpheus. Its outer movements were “Russian” in the same sense as The Rite; and had not the composer himself admitted that the troubled times had left their mark on the music?9 Orpheus, by comparison, was coldblooded and impassive, a masterly stylization, beautiful in places, but devoid of the violent tension and fury that went with the idea of ancient myth relived in the modern world.
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