Stravinsky
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As for Boulez’s celebratory performance four weeks later, Stravinsky did not attend it at all, having not returned to Paris after leaving London for Dublin on 2 June. His absence was unfortunate, since the concert was one of the most spectacular ever heard in Paris, and it was one of two major events that year (the other was the Opéra production of Berg’s Wozzeck in November) that established Boulez as a star conductor rather than a composer who also conducted. The program was astonishingly bold. It included alongside the Rite two of the most radical works from Stravinsky’s early phase, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the rarely performed Zvezdoliki (which, as it happened, Stravinsky had recently recorded in Toronto), together with the recent, and difficult, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer. All this Boulez conducted, Souvtchinsky reported, like “some kind of super-Karajan (in the best sense of that ‘complicated’ term).” And Souvtchinsky added prophetically: “I’m afraid that anyone who starts conducting like that will soon stop composing.”44
These days Souvtchinsky, who had been grumbling for years about Boulez’s conducting ambitions, was gradually becoming more reconciled to the conflicts in the younger man’s nature. He would still occasionally complain about Boulez’s need—as he saw it—to be surrounded by yes-men.45 Yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that hardly any other conductor of real stature could, or would, ever have conducted a Stravinsky program of this caliber. Stravinsky’s own relations with Boulez had settled into a friendliness that was less intense, less perilous than before. They usually met when Stravinsky was in Paris, but they had not done so that year. Instead, Boulez had turned up in New York in April, and they had had a relaxed and enjoyable lunch. But Stravinsky remained wary of the Frenchman’s attitude to his music—for him always the ultimate test of a musician’s friendship. For a long time he had sensed that Boulez was quite uninterested in his latest work, and this seemed to be proved by the fact that he sometimes programmed late Stravinsky without so much as reporting the fact to its composer. He obviously conducted works like Movements and the Sermon out of a sense of duty or some feeling that it was a necessary part of his reputation to have them in his repertoire, but certainly not because he admired or liked them.46 Of course, it was hard for Stravinsky—a lifelong scourge of star conductors—to accept that the composer he had regarded as the most gifted and serious of the postwar generation was rapidly becoming one, and one, moreover, who could not be counted on indefinitely to support the cause of his, Stravinsky’s, music. But there was also another, more personal, factor, and this touched on the extent to which Boulez’s success as a conductor might seem to reflect on the hopes of another aspirant with a special interest in Stravinsky and a home barely twenty doors down his street.
THERE HAD always been an intention that Abraham and Isaac would be ready for the 1963 Israel Festival, whether or not Stravinsky himself went there to conduct, or attend, the premiere. But when March came and the work was finished, it was plain that they could not go that year and that an unsupervised performance by any other likely conductor was out of the question. So at some point the whole event was deferred until 1964, and this time there was no talk (as had happened with Movements) of mounting an earlier performance outside Israel, which would have greatly agitated touchy sensibilities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
The summer of 1963 was already, as usual, fully booked with largely unproductive activities, including a ten-day excursion from New York to Rio de Janeiro at the end of August—a flight of some twelve hours in each direction to conduct two concerts. Of course, Rio is paradise for the energetic sightseer. Nevertheless, if one sets Craft’s elaborate and somewhat prosy description of the all-night macumba ceremony in the nearby hills, or his account of their dutiful but, at bottom, inexplicable visit to the niece of the late-nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, beside Vera’s concise characterization of Rio as “a big bore” and her reference to “macumba and other boring events,” one begins to feel the absurdity of these aging White Russians constantly engaged in a courtly progress through someone else’s imaginary Who’s Who in World Culture.47 Yet another planned visit to Italy in the autumn seemed likely to fall into the same category. It was ludicrous, surely, to cross the Atlantic for the fourth time in a year merely to conduct a pair of concerts in Rome and Palermo. But when Nika questioned the trip, Craft explained that the Stravinskys now loathed Hollywood so much that almost any travel was a relief. At North Wetherly Drive Stravinsky slumped, he had few friends left, the film-star circuit had become deadly tedium, he could not drive, could barely walk, and in practice spent most of his time at home in the company of doctors and tax lawyers. Craft dreaded the day when conducting would no longer be possible for him. It would be something close to a death sentence.48
Composition under these circumstances was at best a fragmented pastime, and often a purely therapeutic one. In the nine days between returning home from Europe at the end of June and setting off once again for Santa Fe, via Chicago, there seemed no point in settling down to a brandnew work, whatever it might have been, and instead Stravinsky spent a few days making an arrangement for a mixed instrumental octet of the little string “Canzonetta” from Sibelius’s incidental music to Jarnefelt’s play Kuolema (of “Valse triste” fame). Of all his various transcriptions, this is in some ways the most bizarre, not in its musical procedures—which are better behaved than usual—but in the simple choice of work, a music one would have thought utterly remote from his own kind of discourse. The same could be said, of course, of Pulcinella; but there the material was given, whereas Stravinsky chose the Sibelius piece. The “Canzonetta” had evidently remained in his ears from an occasion in Toronto early in 1962, when it was played as the theme tune to a CBC broadcast concert conducted by Craft,49 while the pretext for the arrangement seems to have been that Stravinsky had at last—two years after the first hint—been awarded the Wihuri-Sibelius Prize and wanted to make some gesture in return. The scoring (four horns, two clarinets, harp, and double bass) suggests, incidentally, that he might have envisaged performance in tandem with works like the Russian choruses, the Berceuses du chat, perhaps the Epitaphium. In fact the first performance was conducted by Craft on the 30th of September in a Monday Evening Concert that also included the Eight Instrumental Miniatures (whose scoring it hardly duplicates at all) and Schoenberg’s Suite, op. 29, among other pieces. No wonder nobody really noticed, and the premiere has ever since been given as by Finnish Radio in March 1964.50
At Ravinia Park that July, it poured as it had done the previous year, reducing Stravinsky’s audience to the three thousand or so who could sit under cover. But Santa Fe was dry and exceedingly hot, so hot and airless at that altitude, in fact, that they could hardly breathe.51 Fortunately, Stravinsky for once had no conducting duties and could instead simply enjoy watching Craft work on a new production of Berg’s incomplete Lulu, an opera that, perhaps because it used serial techniques, he now claimed to like better than Wozzeck.52 In fact, it is supposed to have interested him so much that two months later he put his name to a letter (written, no doubt, by Craft) urging the director of Universal Edition, Alfred Schlee, to agree to have the score completed by the Berg expert George Perle, and offering to intercede if necessary with the composer’s notoriously intractable widow.53 The idea of Stravinsky—no lover of the Bergian Jugendstil and a sworn enemy of tamperers—going into battle for a scholarly completion of a post-Romantic Viennese masterpiece is so implausible that one wonders how much thought he gave as he appended his signature.
His own work in Santa Fe that year might have come from a different planet. He had started sketching a set of variations for orchestra, and by the time they left New Mexico on 19 August had got as far as an extraordinary variation for twelve solo violins, remorselessly patterned according to a serial grid, but sounding—as the platonic Stravinsky later put it—“like the sprinkling of very fine broken glass.”54 Everything about the writing was esoteric and almost elliptically concise, a kind of
musical gasping for air. Yet short-breathed though it undoubtedly was, and to a considerable extent governed by mechanical processes, the music did not come easily, partly no doubt because of the lack of a supporting text. He probably made little progress with it during the few weeks they spent at Wetherly Drive that autumn. Meanwhile, as usual, rumors flew. Nabokov, who somehow knew that Stravinsky was writing an orchestral work, lobbied for it to be premiered in Berlin the following autumn during an extended stay that he was trying to set up for the composer in that beleaguered city.55 Admittedly, his first idea had been that Stravinsky might arrange a set of Negro spirituals for Leontyne Price to sing there—a fantasy that suggests he was thinking more about his festival’s theme (“Negro and Western art in the twentieth century”) than about the composer’s musical mentality.56 William Glock, of the BBC, had meanwhile heard from somewhere that Stravinsky was writing a mass to be performed in the Sistine Chapel in memory of his friend Pope John XXIII, who had died in June. Could he have the British premiere?57 Stravinsky replied curtly; there was no mass and no Vatican concert.58 Nabokov he advised not to count on his current work (for the obvious reason that he was not confident of finishing it in time). But he added that he would have to conduct at least one concert in Berlin, otherwise “my tax lawyer will not permit me to come.”59
It certainly would not have been surprising if memorial works had been brewing in Stravinsky’s mind as 1963 drew toward its close. He had arrived at an age when telegrams announced deaths more often than births. Only a year before, Natalya Goncharova, the original designer of Les Noces, had died in a state of indigence in Paris, and soon afterwards Hans Rosbaud had succumbed to the cancer that had been killing him for four years. Then in October 1963, Jean Cocteau had died after a series of heart attacks. In sickness, as in health, Stravinsky had often been irritated by the master showman. In May, on first hearing of Cocteau’s illness from a reporter in search of a get-well message, he had complained to the lunch table that “Cocteau can’t even die without making a show of it.”60 The reality, though, upset him deeply and perhaps in too complex and personal a way for it to inspire anything in the way of a musical tribute.61
In the end they did go to Italy, for a pair of concerts in Sicily, and the original one in Rome, now transferred to the Gothic church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In Palermo, they witnessed an evil omen. An old woman stepped into the path of a bus and was horribly crushed to death.62 The day after their concert there, Igor and Vera went by train to Catania, while Craft and Eugene Berman followed by car. While they were on the road, a series of rifle shots in Dallas, Texas, changed the course of American history. Only when they reached Catania did they hear the news of Kennedy’s assassination; and only as the Rome train passed through Naples two days later did they learn from a newspaper billboard that Aldous Huxley had died on the same day, with news footage from Dallas still flickering on his television screen.
So in Rome, in a state of misery and extreme agitation, Stravinsky conducted a memorial mass after all: his own setting, dedicated to the memory of the young president, who was being buried at that very moment in Washington.
32
THE SACRIFICE OF SIR ISAIAH
IN THE WHOLE OF 1963 the Stravinskys had spent less than five months at home in Hollywood, and in fact they did not return there in 1964 until early February. Whatever Craft might say about the depressive effect of West Coast life and Stravinsky’s preference for travel, it was obvious that the incessant coming and going was bad for his health. Doctors who examined him after the Rio trip in September had found his polycythemia dangerously aggravated.1 Friends in New York, where they as usual spent Christmas, were beginning to notice how much slower he had become, in both movement and speech, and there was a slightly melancholy air about him, as if he knew that his life was wrongly ordered but felt powerless to change it.2 Death must have been on his mind: the deaths of close friends like Huxley and Cocteau, the very public death of Kennedy, and—year in year out—the annual death of his first wife and their beloved daughter, Mika. Françoise had written to him on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Mika’s death. Exactly what she said we do not know because her letter has vanished from the composer’s papers, but his reply indicates its flavor while guarding a certain ambiguity of its own. “Dearest Françoise,” it says, “thank you, thank you, for your letter. A dreadful sadness never leaves me. I entirely share your sentiments. That’s all I wanted to tell you today. I embrace you with all my heart.”3
In recent months his relations with Françoise had grown perceptibly more affectionate, partly because, whereas Soulima was a poor correspondent (to some extent like his father), she wrote long, intelligent, and affectionate letters, addressing them to both Stravinskys and recommending books to Vera. After Cocteau’s death in October, she had written her father-in-law an appreciation that was so moving and perceptive that he had filed it with a note on the envelope: “Remarkable letter from Françoise what she writes about Jean Cocteau!” and had written back that “I quite agree and admire your sagacity. Why do we see so little of each other!?!?!?”4 He on his side had pleased Soulima and Françoise by giving their son, Johnny, a special eighteenth-birthday present that November, a ring with the Stravinsky32 coat of arms, “to be worn from now on. Bless you, dear. Love and kisses from your Grandfather.”5 And the young man had replied with a charming and natural thank-you, a letter that cannot have failed to please, not least because it unaffectedly included Bob Craft in its greetings, something Stravinsky’s children by no means invariably did.6 The composer probably in any case felt particularly warm toward the Urbana branch of his dynasty at this moment because from the Geneva branch there was little but depressing news. Denise’s tuberculosis had responded slowly to treatment and had left her lame and weak, and meanwhile the twenty-six-year-old Kitty—perhaps in a bid for freedom from her adoptive home—had fallen into a relationship with a married man in Paris and had apparently severed all links with her family. Her grandfather’s advice was sincere, to the point, and useless. “I must tell you,” he wrote, “what is at the bottom of my heart: the urgent and absolute necessity for you to dominate your passions and not let yourself be dominated by them.”7
This had come at a bad moment for him. He had not been home for more than two months, and was now, in mid-January, in the middle of a series of concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra, four of them in Philadelphia itself, with a fifth to follow at the Lincoln Center in New York, the first time he had conducted in the new Philharmonic Hall. To make matters worse, Vera had stayed in her beloved New York, in their “marvelous apartment” in the Hotel Pierre,8 so was not on hand to salve his irritations. Twice he, Craft, and Lillian Libman drove the hundred and twenty miles to Manhattan and back, the second time returning in a blizzard so severe that they barely arrived in time for the concert, which in any case was played, for the same reason, to an audience in single figures.9 He was in no mood to reflect on the emotional troubles of a wayward granddaughter three thousand miles away. He had domestic worries of his own. For a long time it had been apparent that their little house in North Wetherly Drive was unsuitable for an ailing octogenarian who was becoming unsteady on his feet. The front door was reached by a steep, winding path with steps, and what you entered when you got to the top was still a one-bedroom house, despite the various bits that had been added on. In everyone’s mind was the thought that, if Stravinsky ever needed a night nurse, there would be nowhere for her to sleep.10 But there was a solution, and by January 1964 it was close to realization. The late Baroness’s considerably larger house at no. 1218, a few yards down the hill, was for sale, and though it had unsuitable aspects of its own, it answered the immediate need: it had space, and you came to it at street level.
The trouble was that Stravinsky did not want to move into it. He liked no. 1260 more than any of the innumerable houses and apartments he had occupied during his long life, and in any case both he and Vera now found Hollywood itself so tedious that there hard
ly seemed much point in moving house without moving city. From distant Manhattan the whole idea must have appeared disheartening in the extreme. There was little comfort in the thought of going home, and yet, on all practical grounds, no serious alternative. So as soon as they were back in Hollywood in February, they proceeded with the purchase of the new house, signing contracts and putting down a deposit of five thousand dollars. Then on the actual day of the signing, the 3rd of March, Stravinsky received another kind of document altogether, a text from Auden for a new work he had decided to write in memory of the assassinated president.
In New York Stravinsky had worked, if spasmodically, on the set of orchestral variations he had started at Santa Fe. He had spent a good deal of time writing, then rewriting, the intricate music for woodwind that follows the second twelve-part variation (the one for violas and double-basses). But it could not be said that this patchwork of a score, begun on an impulse and with no sign of a commission, was going smoothly or with a clear sense of direction. One evening in January he had dined with Auden and, in the course of a bacchanalia exceptional even by their standards, had suggested the idea of a choral elegy in Kennedy’s memory, probably for male voices, either unaccompanied or with mainly low-lying instruments. He even specified the kind of poem he wanted: “either six or nine stanzas of two long lines and one short.” “I’m an old hand at this kind of thing,” Auden said.11 When it came, however, the poem turned out to be a haiku, a series of three-line stanzas of seventeen syllables each, and Stravinsky decided that it would go better with a solo voice accompanied by a trio of clarinets.12 He (or, to be exact, the author of Themes and Conclusions) claimed later that he set the text first, and only then decided, on the basis of the contrapuntal patterns suggested by the vocal part, what kind of accompaniment to write.13 Meanwhile, news of the Elegy had reached the press, still in the guise of a choral work that would, in a sense, be dedicated to the memory of all the various friends Stravinsky had recently lost.14 “Journalists must listen under beds,” his notoriously talkative poet wrote, knowing how the composer loathed publicity about work in progress.15