In fact, little or nothing was written before the end of March. First there was a brief trip to Cleveland for concerts and to record Jeu de cartes and the Ode. Then, when he got home, he found a commission waiting for him from Lincoln Kirstein for a short piece to mark the opening of the New York State Theatre in Lincoln Center the following month. It was not much: “a fanfare lasting thirty seconds to be played from the top balcony of the foyer to summon people into the Festspielhaus.”16 All the same Stravinsky’s first, almost automatic response was negative. “If only you had asked me sooner,” he wrote back.17 With another tour coming up and his elegy to write, he needed every available minute. But even as he wrote, he knew the excuse was lame. The next trip—to Ann Arbor and Toronto—was well over a month away; the fanfare could be written in a morning, and the Elegy was hardly going to eat up more than a few days, even if—as is possible—he was still thinking in terms of a choral setting of the Auden, something relatively complicated and dense, with orchestra. In any case, he changed his mind about the fanfare probably even before licking the stamp on his reply to Kirstein, and two days later he wrote the mordant little piece for two trumpets that duly became the first music to be heard in the new theatre when it opened for a private gala preview by the City Ballet on 20 April, and that lasts precisely the thirty seconds specified by Kirstein.18 Perhaps he was swayed by the fact that the opening program was to include Agon and the recent Movements ballet, which he had finally caught up with at City Center in December and had found—he told Souvtchinsky—simply “astounding.”19 Unfortunately he left no detailed account of the ballet apart from the obviously ghostwritten paragraphs in Themes and Conclusions (which falsely assert that he had not seen a public performance). But the ideas so well articulated there—of how the choreography had pointed up musical relationships, including rhythmic details and lyrical elements, of which he himself had been unaware—are no doubt broadly authentic.20
A week or so after composing the fanfare, he finally wrote the Elegy for J.F.K. It took him only two days, and having written it he somehow persuaded Lawrence Morton to include it in the Monday Evening Concert on 6 April, a program otherwise devoted entirely to piano music, songs, and unaccompanied choral music. None of the required musicians were on tap. Margery Mackay, a mezzo-soprano who was singing Schoenberg and Brahms, was a slow learner, and Stravinsky had in any case conceived the piece for baritone.21 At the last minute they managed to book Richard Robinson—a reliable tenor with a good low register—who was singing elsewhere that evening but was able to arrive at the Fiesta Hall in time for the second half of the Monday Concert. He, the three clarinettists, and Craft actually rehearsed in an adjacent building during Palestrina’s Missa brevis, then went straight on and gave what was, by all accounts, a perfectly respectable premiere, followed at once by a second performance.22 The modest two-minute work—“much different than expected,” Stravinsky told Nabokov23—was perhaps not the most spectacular tribute imaginable after so catastrophic a death, but it had at least an appropriate sense of urgency and a touching intimacy. “Ethereal music,” he called it, and added, “I will publish it as it is.”24
The orchestral variations still proceeded fitfully. He was calling them, he told Rufina Ampenoff with a certain air of defiance, “Some Variations.”25 He had three weeks on them (at least in theory) before his Toronto recordings in early May, and another three weeks when he got home, after which they had to set off yet again, this time for London, where Columbia had decided (because of the much less severe union conditions and therefore cheaper costs) to record The Rake’s Progress for the second time. Stravinsky had also agreed, in a weak moment, to conduct his Symphony of Psalms and “Vom Himmel hoch” transcription at the Oxford Bach Festival that June. Lina Lalandi, the energetic Greek harpsichordist who had founded the festival the year before, had for months been bombarding him with more or less eccentric programming ideas. She had suggested coupling the Symphony of Psalms with the Octet, and more recently had come up with the bizarre proposal that Stravinsky conduct a Bach cantata by way of encore to the Symphony.26 Stravinsky would respond to such suggestions with abusive epithets in the margins of Rufina Ampenoff’s letters. But history does not relate exactly what he said when he arrived at the first rehearsal, in London on the 27th of June, and found that Lalandi, apparently unaware that the Bach transcription involved the choir, had not arranged copies or rehearsals for them.27
It was the difficult climax to a tense and exhausting month. The Rake sessions had also been marred by poor preparation and a sometimes ill-tempered atmosphere. Craft noted at the first session, in Abbey Road Studios on the 16th, that the singers had not previously sung together and the orchestra (the Royal Philharmonic) had never seen the music before.28 The mood was described in more detail by the musicologist Oliver Neighbour in a letter to Lawrence Morton. Neighbour had gathered that communication between Craft and Stravinsky had at times been close to breakdown, “so that Craft did all the rehearsing, and then Igor would stump up and do the actual recording—often quite differently so that nobody knew what to expect, and Craft sat in a corner and shrugged.”29 They and the engineer, John McClure, were weary from the five-hour time change, and after the first sessions Stravinsky caught a cold that had him snuffling and croaking on the rostrum, while his bad leg impeded him in the walks to and fro. “You know, sometimes we do not speak, this merdeux leg and I,” he confided to McClure. “He does not acknowledge my authority. He obeys someone else. I don’t know who.”30
Somehow the actual recording survived these troubles and emerged as a spirited, if not tremendously polished, document of at any rate somebody’s view of the work. But Craft’s own recording of Schoenberg’s one-act opera Von heute auf Morgen, made as usual in time left over from the Rake, was a good deal less fortunate—not much better than a run-through of a difficult and intractable work in a style completely unfamiliar to the orchestra, if not to all of the singers.31 At the end Craft was in a terrible state, and “poured out his woes at some length” to anyone who would listen.32 Stravinsky told McClure, “My dear, they were all wonderful, the singers and the orchestra, and the music too I like very much and even I still like you. But you know? Let’s never record it again. Twice is enough.”33 When they got to Oxford Town Hall on the 29th, Stravinsky’s performances of the Symphony of Psalms and the Bach transcription rose above their technical limitations and achieved a grandeur and emotional intensity few had experienced in this music before. But Craft’s opening performance of the Bach Trauer-Ode, “totally unrehearsed,” was a disaster, and at one point actually broke down.34
Although they were due in Israel in mid-August for the long-delayed premiere of Abraham and Isaac, and thereafter in Berlin for the festival, they could not stay on in Europe, if only because Stravinsky and Craft were booked to appear for the third year running at Ravinia in July, and Craft was conducting a revival of Lulu at Santa Fe. Yet the interminable flights were clearly having a bad effect. These days the composer often used a wheelchair at airports, and even sometimes at railway stations. At best he walked with difficulty, invariably using a stick and often with help; his blood problems had by no means eased, he had temperatures, and he was frequently exhausted. He was prone, as he had always been, to passing infections. No sooner was he back in Los Angeles in early July than he contracted an ear infection. This seemed to clear up;35 but in Chicago, where he and Craft arrived, without Vera, on 16 July, he was tired, in discomfort from the heat, and generally in a crotchety mood. When his grandson, Johnny, came to call on him and booked into the same hotel (the Ambassador East)—presumably at either his or Vera’s suggestion—he refused either to see the young man or to talk to him on the telephone, and when he left the next day Johnny, not perhaps without a touch of youthful mischievousness, transferred his own sundry expenses to his grandfather’s bill.36
Back in Hollywood, Stravinsky promptly wired Ahron Propes in Jerusalem and Nicolas Nabokov in Berlin to cancel both engagements, saying that
his doctors were forbidding him to fly because of his ear infection.37 This may or may not have been a prevarication. It would hardly have been unreasonable for his doctors to keep him at home simply on grounds of general exhaustion. But it would have made little difference. Propes responded at once with a masterfully self-contradictory cable, insisting that Stravinsky’s health was the most important consideration but imploring him to come all the same, since the entire festival had been built round him, the orchestras had cancelled other dates for his benefit, prominent Jews from all over the world had been invited to Israel, etc., etc.38 Nabokov grumpily pointed out that, while Israel had organized its festival around Stravinsky’s personality, Berlin was basing itself on his music, conducted by him. “But I won’t insist,” Nika added disingenuously, “I love you too much.”39
Stravinsky was genuinely touched by Propes’s concern, and he wired back that after all he would come, a few days late, “because I feel how unhappy you are.”40 But he held out against Berlin, telling Nabokov that they could perfectly well do Abraham and Isaac and all the other works without him, so long as they booked Craft.41 A few days later, he cabled the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, declining the city’s invitation.42 By this time, as had now become usual in such cases, the press, having heard that Stravinsky was cancelling prominent engagements on grounds of health, were reporting his condition as more or less terminal. Souvtchinsky told the composer that he held Nabokov responsible for provoking the exaggerated reporting: “it’s his style,” he remarked.43 Nadia Boulanger wrote so anxiously that Stravinsky felt constrained to reassure her by explaining that his doctors had simply advised him not to fly “too often,” a nuance that he had for some reason withheld from Nika.44 Greatly relieved, Nadia herself now urged him to go to Berlin after all, “for Nicolas’s sake.”45 Meanwhile Brandt wired very belated regrets at the composer’s refusal, but he soon afterwards wired again his pleasure at the composer’s acceptance.46 The brinkmanship had kept them all on the edge and had ensured that a massively abbreviated visit (Nabokov having originally wanted him for a month or two) would be taken as a concession on his, Stravinsky’s, part. Yet at the end of it all, they not only flew to Israel in the third week of August, but they flew back to New York just over a week later, flew home a week after that, then after another fortnight yet again swooped across the ocean to Berlin, stayed ten days, then swooped back again. In the middle of all this, the master consulted one of his various West Coast medicos, who found his ears in perfectly good order.47
At Lod airport, Tel Aviv, they were greeted by a welcoming committee of Ruritanian impressiveness. The festival president, Jacob Tsur, made a long and slightly pompous speech and handed Vera an enormous bunch of flowers, which she swiftly passed on to Isaiah Berlin, who had himself flown in a day or two earlier. A children’s orchestra played irrelevantly and almost inaudibly from a nearby balcony, but “the Stravinskys fortunately realized that this was in their honor, and waved graciously.” After the composer’s car had set off for Jerusalem, it was discovered that, instead of fourteen pieces of luggage, only thirteen had arrived, and the missing piece was naturally the one with all the scores and Vera’s furs and jewelry. “Frantic calls to Paris, general perepolokh [commotion] until we all arrived in Jerusalem and it was discovered that nothing was missing as they had thirteen pieces of luggage in any case and not fourteen.”48
They were to give two identical concerts, one in Jerusalem on the 23rd of August, the other in Caesarea the next day. The programming had been attended by all kinds of intricacies of a post-Holocaustian variety. The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who was to sing Abraham and Isaac in Berlin, had been ruled out of the Jerusalem premiere on racial grounds, even though, as Sir Isaiah had assured Nabokov, “his record is spotless.”49 “Vom Himmel hoch” was being sung in Hebrew, and even the Latin of the Symphony of Psalms was, as threatened, being replaced by its Old Testament original out of consideration for local sensibilities. As for Abraham and Isaac itself, there was of course no difficulty with the text, and the music, in some ways Stravinsky’s most hermetic so far, had troubled the substitute baritone, Ephraim Biran, more than it had the orchestra, who (under Craft’s direction) took it in their stride.50 For the audience, needless to say, it was quite another matter. “You should have seen the expression on the face of the minister of education,” Isaiah Berlin told Nabokov, “when the first notes of Abraham and Isaac sounded.”
The mere appearance of this rough assembly, with a few absurd-looking German Gelehrte [intellectuals] sticking out from a rough forest of white and blue shirts and mops of rough white hair—like the editors of the Readers Digest—the whole “frontier” public: enter this extremely delicately constructed little porcelain figure, very slowly limping along towards the podium, pale, refined and sophisticated with no suspicion of any “narodnik” [populist] quality, in an audience soaked in it; with a lot of bewildered persons who had no idea what the sounds were meant to convey—and then, after he said “Shalom” loudly, applauding still more madly: it was touching, ridiculous, and very sweet …51
The multiple ironies of the situation were perhaps clearer to Berlin than to anyone there that night except Robert Craft. Craft had emerged from the plane at Lod with a wry smile that Berlin thought “the only genuine reaction seen on the airfield that afternoon.”52 It was not just the piquancy of so utterly esoteric a work being offered to a state so unsure of its place in modern culture; it was the delicious absurdity of its being offered by an ultra-civilized White Russian with (as Berlin knew perfectly well) anti-Semitism in his blood and an instinctive loathing for the petit-bourgeois mentality which, in the nature of things, still predominated in the young Israel. When Tsur pointed out at a press conference in the King David Hotel that the hotel was built on the site of Abraham’s abortive sacrifice, it summed up, if only half-seriously, the banality of the idea of a biblical society in an age of international air travel. Invited to approve Israel’s ban on the performance of Wagner, Stravinsky shrewdly dodged the reason for the ban while endorsing its effects: “In not playing Wagner, you are avoiding many very disagreeable things.”53 In the hotel restaurant after the concert, he kept handing Berlin (of all people) “drunken sheets with scrawls of note-like entities on them, meant to be half tango, half waltz, signed Igor Manteuffel.”54 “I shall always bear with me,” Berlin concluded, “the image of I[gor] F[yodorovich]’s molten condition, liquid, vague, totally happy, tipsy, very different from anything in New York—he was much happier in Jerusalem, I thought.” “Perhaps,” he added optimistically, “he is all right in Hollywood.”
That the next concert after Caesarea should have been in Berlin merely compounded these ironies. Fischer-Dieskau, for his part, had wanted to sing Abraham and Isaac in German, not of course for any political reason but on practical grounds. But that Stravinsky would not permit.55 So the great baritone had to set himself to learn the Hebrew words phonetically, which he seems to have done without complaint and with fair accuracy, though he never did master the angular vocal line, with its awkward chromatic ornaments, which Stravinsky told a Paris interviewer he had composed in imitation of Arab chant.56
Despite the success of the one Berlin concert in which Stravinsky himself appeared (conducting Renard and the Capriccio, with Nikita Magaloff), his one-week stay was a mere torso of the extended residency that Nabokov had originally planned and that had been intended to bring prestige to the walled-off city and its festival while giving the over-travelled master the kind of rest Nika had constantly been urging him to take. Nabokov himself must have been tired out from the exertion and responsibility of organizing a festival with such complex political ramifications; and perhaps this partly explains a curious incident that marred the last day of Stravinsky’s visit. Nika had a pretty young German secretary, who it seems may for some time have been also something more than a secretary, but who by now had tired of him in that less official role and, during the Stravinskys’ Berlin stay, had attached he
rself to Craft. Craft himself gives various more or less self-congratulatory details about this brief affair;57 but in any case its comic violent climax is not in question. At two o’clock in the morning after the Abraham and Isaac premiere, Nabokov rang Craft’s hotel room and found himself speaking to his secretary. The next morning in the hotel lobby, he set about her with a bundle of rolled-up newspapers and had to be physically restrained by the hotel porters. Gasping as if from a mild heart seizure, he retreated to the Stravinskys’ suite, from which he emerged some time later, with his dignity restored, to escort them to the airport for their flight to Paris.
The whole episode was a disconcerting reminder of Nabokov’s behavior ten years earlier in Rome, when he had punched a doorman who refused to let Craft into Henze’s Boulevard Solitude because he was incorrectly dressed.58 To complete the coincidence, Henze was himself present at the Berlin premiere of Abraham and Isaac, and was actually photographed at a rehearsal, sharing a score with Nabokov.59 The essential difference, of course, was that Nika had this time involved Stravinsky in a violent fracas that did not concern him in any way. Stravinsky had told him he had acted stupidly, and he freely admitted it, writing both to the composer and to Craft in abject apology.60 Yet he spoke negatively to others about the composer’s time in Berlin, and specifically about his conducting, not thinking, perhaps, that they in turn would transmit his comments to their subject. “I have just learnt,” Stravinsky wrote to his Rome agent, Adriana Panni, a few weeks later, “of the very disagreeable things Nicolas Nabokov had told you about my last appearance for him in Berlin conducting Renard and the Capriccio. This is moreover not the first time (I’m told) that he has talked behind people’s backs in such a way. But this time it greatly astonishes me, since everyone knows that I conduct my works better, much better, than plenty of other conductors.”61 One should at the same time perhaps not overpraise the motives of people who report such remarks back to their victims.
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