Stravinsky
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The various arguments were nowhere more lucidly deployed than by Israel Nestyev in a long review of Stravinsky’s Moscow concerts in Sovetskaya muzïka.10 Nestyev was a pillar of the Soviet cultural establishment, a senior research fellow at the Art History Institute, and the author of two quite different biographies of Prokofiev, tailored respectively to the American and Soviet markets.11 More to the point, he was a past scourge of Stravinsky—both his music and his person. He had once denounced the composer of Orpheus as “the shameless prophet of bourgeois modernism,”12 and only a few years before the 1962 visit he had launched a vicious assault on the Canticum sacrum, on its “tedious calculation and unbridled anarchy of sound.” “In the Canticum,” he had concluded, “there is literally not a single natural inflection. It is a dead desert, barren and stony.… How ravaged, how emasculated must have been the soul of the composer capable of creating such dreadful music.”13
In his 1962 review, Nestyev did not specifically retract these remarks; there being no serial music in any of the programs, the question could simply be avoided. Neither did he wholly acquit Stravinsky of past error. Instead the line now was that Stravinsky was too important a figure to be ignored, a great Russian composer whose best works were part of the “treasure-trove of world art.” There were still things to regret. Orpheus was immaculate but cold, Ode was a deadly kind of musical Esperanto. The great works here were the Rite and—more guardedly—the symphony, with the Capriccio coming a good third: a jolly, colorful parody of early-twentieth-century keyboard virtuosity, without the poisonous malice of Mavra or (surprisingly enough) the little orchestral suites. Nestyev was in general conciliatory. “It is no secret,” he admitted,
that relations between Soviet criticism and Stravinsky have taken a not wholly normal course. Here there have been the most abrupt extremes: from unrestrained delight in the twenties to complete denial in the thirties and forties. While definitely not accepting the composer’s aesthetic positions, we have not always taken the trouble to investigate his huge creative legacy, have not always managed carefully, thoughtfully to separate what was really valuable to us from all that was in decline, moribund, alien. In his turn, Stravinsky himself has more than once given cause for fair and pointed criticism, both in his work of recent years and in a number of printed remarks. In his long journey he has made many mistakes that have reflected the awkward zigzags of bourgeois art, and with many of his aesthetic aims we shall hardly ever agree …
It was not quite the ringing endorsement some might have hoped for, but it was at least, in the circumstances, a reasonably graceful compromise.
Alas, any hope that Stravinsky’s visit might prove a major watershed in the liberalization of Soviet music, and of Soviet attitudes to his music in particular, was soon dashed. Performances of previously marginal works such as The Nightingale, Les Noces, and The Soldier’s Tale did become more frequent and acceptable. But the situation remained volatile, unpredictable, and subject to the arbitrary dictates of Khrushchev’s own uneducated tastes. Early in December he visited an exhibition of abstract and semi-abstract art in the Manège exhibition hall in Moscow and promptly let fly with a string of abusive remarks that were duly splashed over the front page of Pravda.14 Suddenly once again fear was in the air. A conference was convened in the Kremlin in mid-December, guidelines were issued, tendencies denounced, individuals named. It was not that music was particularly under attack, but it was included by inference and association. Nicolas Nabokov was soon being assured by his Moscow literary connections that Khrushchev’s outburst was significant only for visual artists;15 but by late March he was hearing of purges that effectively put an end to his own intention to go to Russia, and by mid-April there were rumors that suspect musicians such as Yudina herself were being subjected to harassment and persecution.16 As for Stravinsky, he stayed in touch with Khrennikov, but the prospect of a second visit quickly faded, as Souvtchinsky predicted it would.17 Later in April, Khrennikov told Stravinsky that “your music is done here all the time now; hardly a concert goes by without something of yours.”18 But the hyperbole was transparent.
Gradually, the Soviet contact died away. The Christmas and birthday greetings continued. Xenya went on writing—newsy, informative, affectionate letters—but her uncle, irresistibly warm and loving in person, was a poor correspondent these days, and would reply only with brief postcards, or by way of a letter from Vera explaining at time-consuming length that he was too busy to write.19 Yudina, curiously, did not write. At first it seemed that she felt a certain compunction over her failure to make close acquaintance with Stravinsky because of her extreme preoccupation with the Leningrad exhibition and rehearsals for the Septet.20 Then it began to emerge that she considered that she had been specifically prevented from spending time alone with the Master, a thwarted desire that arose from her sense of a very intimate relationship with his music and her feeling that he, as an artist of genius, would understand and help alleviate her feeling of isolation. The odd thing was that she apparently blamed, not Mme. Vïkhodtseva, the Composers’ Union, nor even the KGB, but Stravinsky’s own entourage.21 She had taken badly against Vera. “Forgive me,” she wrote to Souvtchinsky, “but to sincerely get to like her was and is impossible for me—we’re terribly different, and I’m not much accustomed to lying.”22 It had struck her forcibly that Mme. Stravinsky found other people superfluous and wearisome.23 As for Craft, he was simply alien to the deeply spiritual Russian pianist and, in her opinion, completely out of place in Stravinsky’s inner circle.24 She thought of him as a mere counting machine, and dubbed him “Chislo-Craft”—“number-craft.” The composer himself dwelt far above them all, in a kind of Goethesque empyrean; and yet even he had revealed frailties. Could it be, Yudina began to wonder, that his failure to communicate with her was simply due to his having no further need of her? Was this why, when she tried to telephone him in Milan, he was never available; or why, when she cabled him there, she received no reply?25
AFTER THE RETURN from Moscow, life resumed its normal exhausting pattern. There were concerts in Perugia and Rome, where the program included the old 1909 arrangement of Beethoven’s “Song of the Flea,” never previously conducted by its author; and, after New York, a pair of concerts in Caracas. Back in New York, Craft directed a semi-staged performance of The Rake’s Progress in Carnegie Hall on 21 November, and then within days they were off to Toronto for a series of recording sessions culminating in Stravinsky’s second (and final) taping of the Symphony in C—a performance so markedly different from his 1952 version with the Cleveland Orchestra as to undermine all his theories about recordings as authentic documents of the composer’s wishes. Not until 4 December did they at last get back to North Wetherly Drive, after eight months of almost continuous absence on tour.
Stravinsky had already managed to start work on Abraham and Isaac. He had made some headway with it at Santa Fe in August, and he had taken it up again during a brief stay in Venice in September, between Israel and Russia. But it was probably only now, with three clear months at his disposal, that he was able to make fluent progress on what might well have proved an awkward creative task, in view of the opacity of the language and the technical intricacies it might entail. The unexpected fact is that composition seems to have come with relative ease. By the end of January 1963 the score was half-complete, and less than five weeks after that, on 3 March, it was finished. Considering that the music was once again utterly unlike anything that he or anyone else had written before, this was good going for a twelve-minute work. Any comparison one can think of breaks down. Britten’s Abraham and Isaac, despite the weary jokes about the older composer shadowing the younger in subject after subject, is as different as can be in both style and treatment, while Schoenberg’s De Profundis, which had probably suggested the idea of a Hebrew setting, is not remotely an influence musically.26 In their various ways, both those composers had dramatized their setting of language. Stravinsky very studiously does not do so. He uses a single s
olo baritone with a spare chamber-orchestral accompaniment, and his narrative is even-paced and monotonous, ballad-like in that antique sense in which music has to carry the text as a horse carries a rider, without too much concern for route or destination and merely now and then pausing to crop a hedge or shy at a pig. This strange—and strangely affecting—idiom seems to arise directly from the (to the composer) strict incomprehensibility of the words. It owes almost nothing to the picturesque, eventful style of The Flood, with its graphic imagery and swift montage of dance movements. Whatever else it may be, Abraham and Isaac is not a dance work, and it is not graphic, one or two luminously symbolic moments notwithstanding. Its beauties are interior and esoteric, and they have to be teased out, like the number symbolisms in Bach’s third Clavierübung or a motet by Ockeghem.
Not for the first time while working on some completely new kind of work, Stravinsky was embroiled in the fate of old ones. In Paris he had recently lunched—at whose behest is not clear—with the writer Jean Genet, and a few weeks later he had received a visit at North Wetherly Drive from the film director Joseph Strick, who was making a film of Genet’s play The Balcony. A few days after that they were shown a rough cut of the film itself.27 It seems to have been Strick’s idea to invite Stravinsky to adapt his Octet and parts of The Soldier’s Tale as music for this film, though something Genet himself had said in Paris might suggest that the idea was already in the air. Genet had remarked that Stravinsky’s voice reminded him of “the sound of the percussion instruments in Histoire du Soldat.”28 That would hardly explain why Strick thought the music right for a play set in a brothel during a revolution; but in any case the idea—or the cash incentive—pleased Stravinsky enough to persuade him to make the adaptation himself (early in 1963) and, in due course, have Craft conduct the result. For all his many brushes with the industry, The Balcony was the only feature film ever made that can accurately—if guardedly—claim to have a score by Stravinsky.29
Meanwhile, as an eightieth-birthday present, Boosey had given him the manuscript full score of The Rite of Spring, inherited by them along with the rest of the Éditions Russes archive in 1946, and the very copy from which Monteux had conducted the largely inaudible premiere in 1913. Stravinsky had recently been taking advantage of a U.S. revenue concession whereby the gift of a work of art, manuscript, or other object of value to a recognized national collection attracted a tax write-off equivalent to its full value. But for the priceless Rite holograph he had no such modest plans. He wanted to sell the manuscript, but in such a way as to avoid paying U.S. tax on the proceeds altogether, and for this he again needed the cooperation of his Swiss son, Theodore.
It seems somehow fitting that this infamous score should have become the object of a cloak-and-dagger operation that would eventually help provide sustenance for a whole army of starving New York lawyers. Even the gift of the score was less innocent and openhearted than it appeared. It was in fact made at Vera’s suggestion; and Vera had suggested it because her husband had told her to. No sooner was the gift confirmed than Stravinsky instructed Boosey to send the score to Theodore, asking Theodore to explain to them that as he was short of money and his wife was sick (with a recurrence of her prewar tuberculosis), his father intended to make them a present of the manuscript to do with it whatever they chose.30 It was true that Theodore was hard up, and that both Denise and their daughter, Kitty, were seriously ill. But needless to say, there was no genuine intention to make such a sumptuous gift to the Geneva Strawinskys, however needy they might be. Theodore’s task would be to find a buyer, deposit the proceeds in his father’s numbered Basle account, take his own commission, and keep his mouth shut. Meanwhile the composer would deduct the commission from his taxes under some other heading.
This matter was still in hand when another set of Rite of Spring manuscripts suddenly turned up in France. Souvtchinsky wrote to the composer about them just before Christmas.31 It seemed that an elderly Paris collector by the name of André Meyer had recently bought a large volume of sketches for the ballet from Boris Kochno, who had presumably inherited it from Diaghilev, to whom Stravinsky had himself presented it—as recorded in an inscription on the title page—in October 1920, at the time of the Massine revival. Souvtchinsky was in seventh heaven over this incomparable document, and at once proposed that it be published in facsimile.32 Obsessed as he was with what he called the “phenomenology of the creative process … the greatest secret of human genius,” he saw instantly the unique value of such a manuscript of such a work. He wanted to have Boulez and Gilbert Amy make a full analysis of the sketches and present their findings in a critical introduction.33 Stravinsky himself was predictably much less excited by the whole idea. He had completely forgotten about the sketches, and could not remember giving them away.34 In any case, he had no time for such things.35 As usual, he found the preoccupation with his old works—even the greatest of them—irritating to the extent that it might imply he was no longer the composer he had been, or even, to the slightly less well informed, that he was actually dead. Perhaps, again, he was mildly afraid of what the sketchbook might reveal. Had he not recently informed admirers of The Rite of Spring that no system of any kind had guided the work’s composition, that “I had only my ear to help me. I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed”?36 In such a mediumistic process, one might be tempted to ask what could possibly be the role of a sketchbook.
The climax of this sudden enthusiasm for The Rite of Spring came a few months later, when various performances were put on to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere on the 29th of May 1913. Stravinsky had arrived in Hamburg by sea in mid-April after recording the Symphony of Psalms in Toronto at the end of March, and working briefly with Balanchine on his dance version of Movements in New York in the first week of April.37 After a fortnight preparing Günther Rennert’s stage production of The Flood at the Staatsoper, they had flown to Budapest, and it was there, in the elegant Opera House where, half a century before, Monteux had conducted a Firebird so badly played that the composer had written him an insulting note, that they now witnessed a well-prepared, well-played and -staged production of the Rite. By the middle of May Stravinsky was in Paris, exactly as he had been in 1913. But this time he stayed only a few days before proceeding to London, where the eighty-eight-year-old Monteux himself was conducting The Rite of Spring in an Albert Hall concert on the actual anniversary, the 29th. Boulez’s Paris commemoration, in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, was not until the 18th of June.
There can be no better illustration of the futility of much of Stravinsky’s latter-day travel than this particular twelve-week excursion, which eventually took him to Dublin (where the radio choir and orchestra were so weak that Rufina had warned him the Symphony of Psalms might be beyond them38), back to Hamburg for a staging of Oedipus Rex, then on to Milan via Stockholm—a journey that recalls nothing so much as Chesterton’s rolling English road.39 As ever, the artistic interest was variable. Stravinsky had never reconciled himself to Liebermann’s idea of staging The Flood as an opera, and he disliked it in the event, finding the orchestral playing (under Craft) mediocre and what he called Rennert’s “twenties Brechtian style” much too portentous for the music.40 When they got to London, there was the by now familiar socio-intellectual program, including lunch at Saltwood Castle with Kenneth Clark, dinner with Spender and Henry Moore at the Garrick Club, a trip to Harrow (in northwest London) to call on the painter-novelist David Jones, and a lunch at Isaiah Berlin’s in Headington, Oxford, at which their main fellow guest was the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. As usual this looks much more like a Craft wish list than a Stravinsky one. Berlin, at any rate, realized that it was Craft rather than Stravinsky who wanted to meet the bluff, brilliant Ryle, and he had even doubted whether the Stravinskys would hit it off with him at all. He had, he told Nabokov, “acted with a kind of literary malice, and since a telegram was signed by Stravinsky and demanded the presence of Ryle, I first se
nt a telegram saying ‘Why Ryle?’ and then invited him: if they suffer, it will be no fault of mine.”41
One thing the composer decidedly did not want to do was attend Monteux’s Rite of Spring celebration on the 29th. Berlin had been asked—somewhat to his surprise—by Craft to get tickets for the Royal gala performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden that evening, and there they all duly took their seats at the late starting time of eight-fifteen, by which time Monteux and Van Cliburn must have been well into Brahms’s second piano concerto at the Albert Hall. Mozart’s first act ended at about nine, Act 2 following, however, without an interval. At this point, Vera’s probably less than wholly silent admonitions that they could not simply absent themselves from Monteux’s Rite at last won the day, and all five of the distinguished party pushed their way out of their seats and past a protesting usherette—her protests dampened, probably, by Stravinsky’s stage-whispered “We all have diarrhea.”42 Their taxi put them down at the Albert Hall at nine-thirty, just in time to catch the “Dance of the Earth,” exactly halfway through the ballet. At the end, the composer was seen to be applauding ostentatiously from the front of his box, for all the world like Macavity, the Mystery Cat, establishing an alibi.43 Sharp-eyed observers will not have failed to note that after the concert the Stravinskys took supper with Macavity’s alter ego, Mr. T. S. Eliot.