Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  It was certainly true, in any case, that Stravinsky had slowed down in recent months. Souvtchinsky, who saw him in Paris on the way to Berlin, and again on the way back, found him much changed, stiffer and less mobile, and talking more slowly and sometimes almost inaudibly. He had been aware of tensions among the travellers, he hinted to Yudina. It had plainly become very difficult for the three of them to live together. Yet Stravinsky was obsessed with his new house and kept drawing its ground-plan for Souvtchinsky and describing its reconstruction. And he insisted: “I’m not old, but ill. You all have to understand that.” Above all, his creative urge was apparently undiminished. He showed Souvtchinsky the draft score of the orchestral variations, now complete as far as the astonishingly athletic fugue-like tenth variation. Nothing could be less stiff or immobile. Yet he also talked pious nonsense about the inscriptions on Christ’s shawls, and burst into tears as he said it. “These words and the way they were spoken,” Souvtchinsky admitted, “shook me, overwhelmed me even. Who else could have said them?” But almost in the same breath, Stravinsky would be going on as usual about the iniquities of the American tax system.62

  The main problem with the variations, and no doubt at bottom the reason why they were taking so long to finish, was still that nobody had commissioned them. Earlier in the year, he had even toyed with the idea of supplying (old) music for Dino de Laurentiis’s film The Bible, and had actually signed an agreement to that effect which de Laurentiis had returned without endorsement, since it purported to transfer rights that were not Stravinsky’s to sell. But in spite of the large fee involved, he had in any case decided to turn the project down, “because,” as he told Rufina, “it will be more trouble, unpleasantness, and musical affliction than interest.”63 As ever, others wanted his old music, he was only interested in the new. Passing through New York on his way home from Berlin, he heard the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Brahms, Debussy, and Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin in Carnegie Hall and was so impressed that he instantly wired his congratulations to the orchestra’s conductor, Jean Martinon. Back in Hollywood early in October, he set to work on the third of the twelve-part variations, the one for wind instruments. Then, two or three days after completing this section on the 15th, he received a reply from Martinon, thanking him and inviting him to conduct in Chicago. The connection practically made itself. On the 26th, two days before completing the variations, Stravinsky wrote and offered Martinon the world premiere. A date in spring would be ideal, and they might combine the new work with Persephone, which he was expecting soon to record.

  DURING THEIR brief sojourn in Hollywood in the first half of September, they had at last moved into their new house. But it was only when they returned from the Berlin trip a month later that, in arriving directly at no. 1218 instead of 1260, they felt properly “at home” there. The Baroness’s house had been completely refurbished. As in all houses vacated by old ladies with a fondness for cats, the arrangements had been cluttered and inconvenient, gloomy, smelly, and somewhat the worse for wear. Now the clutter had been banished, the gloom expunged, and everything made new, modern, and, within the framework of the Stravinskys’ own cosmopolitan impedimenta, sufficiently bourgeois. Vera had a room of her own, there were spare bedrooms and bathrooms, and the master’s own studio was recreated, as nearly as possible though alas on the second floor, so that he had to negotiate an awkward staircase to get to it.64 In due course, a new swimming pool would be installed.

  For all the obvious comforts and conveniences, however, the Stravinskys were unhappy about the move. After twenty-three years, the composer had got used to the old house, and he must have felt, in his heart of hearts, that he was leaving it to die. Vera, though she loved her room, dreaded the sheer size of the new establishment; and in this she was not alone. Mrs. Gates—their dear, difficult Russian housekeeper and cook, Yevgenia Petrovna—was retiring, at least partly because she could not face the work of looking after the larger house. There would be other cooks and cleaners, a stream of factotums and helpers; but that in itself was something to fear, an element of the unknown, however kind, competent, and congenial such people might be individually. Like Parasha’s mother in Mavra, they would need “to find a maid, who’s cheap and strong and ill-paid,” in a country notoriously hostile to the class divisions and differences of status on which the whole culture of servants had always depended.

  Meanwhile, the domestic duties fell mainly on Vera. Igor was upstairs putting the finishing touches to his variations. Craft was busy writing in his flat over the old Erlanger garage behind the house. There is something slightly curious about all this writing, since you can hunt through newspapers, bibliographies, and lists of publications for those years and find almost nothing with Robert Craft’s name on it. One might have supposed him to be writing some vast work of fiction, or perhaps the brilliant, belle-lettristic diaries that would indeed one day emerge from that talented and inventive pen; and he may well have been doing just that. But what he certainly was doing was writing for immediate publication under a name other than his own, exactly as Walter Nouvel and Roland-Manuel had done before the war. And needless to say, the name in question was one and the same.

  Craft had been writing Stravinsky’s prose for him for some time, but in the fifties this had usually been in the dialogue form under both their names. There had been, as we saw, the odd “letter to the editor;” but such things were relatively short and quite possibly written to Stravinsky’s rough dictation, then tidied up. At the end of 1962, however, Craft had composed a four-thousand-word missive—an account of Stravinsky’s daily routine—supposedly for Vera to translate and send to a Moscow cousin named Vladimir Petrov. Whether this was ever sent to anyone called Petrov may be doubted; at any rate the address on the letter was a false one. More to the point, the letter appeared in print (in Musical America) so promptly that it must have been forwarded to that journal’s editor on the instant—surely the quickest publication of a private letter in the history of the free press.65

  There is something rather touching about the pretense involved here. Craft makes no attempt to disguise his prosy English style, with its huge vocabulary and its love of literary periphrasis (“rich fricatives that would greatly increase an avant-garde writer’s store of siphonic onomatopoeia”).66 Another article, allegedly by Vera, on the premiere of The Rake’s Progress in Venice, was later transferred more or less bodily to Craft’s own published diaries.67 A second letter to “Petrov,” dated February 1965, describes the new house.68 Craft says in his autobiography that he wrote both letters at Vera’s request,69 though the commission would be hard to explain if Petrov were a real person, since Vera was a gifted letter-writer in her own language, and did in fact write a longish letter in Russian on the same subject to her step-niece, Xenya, soon afterwards.70 There is no evidence or likelihood that this letter began life in Craft’s English.

  These are harmless little frauds in themselves, of course, but they began a trend that had its less innocent aspect. When the monthly music paper Listen published an acrimonious and rather spiteful article about Stravinsky by Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky) in the summer of 1964, an unremittingly vicious reply appeared in the form of a long letter bearing Stravinsky’s signature in the journal’s next issue, under the scurrilous title “A Cure for V.D.,” a title the paper was careful to attribute to the composer himself.71 But of course Stravinsky did not write the letter, and perhaps did not even know it had been written. When I asked Craft, in the course of a series of radio interviews, whether he was the author of the letter, he admitted he had sometimes written letters using Stravinsky’s name, but claimed that the Dukelsky reply was actually the work of Lawrence Morton.72 It is hard to know what to make of this claim, since one would think Morton—a byword for honesty and straightforwardness—incapable of so mean an act as to attack a fellow musician from the cover of an alias. Whoever wrote it, in any case, it did Stravinsky personal harm by showing him up as resentful and (no matter how theoretically
just his defense, since Dukelsky had attacked him ad hominem, accusing him of a mercenary and opportunistic attitude to his art) in practice vindictive.

  The attack on Menotti’s Last Savage in a slightly earlier piece called “In the Name of Jean-Jacques” is more palatable, if only because it probably represents Stravinsky’s opinion about that work, which he saw in New York in January 1964, whether or not he knew the subsequent “interview” had been written and published.73 The same might be said of the long review of the English edition of Schoenberg’s letters, a piece which first appeared under Stravinsky’s byline in the London Observer in October.74 Curiously enough, the authenticity of these and other writings seems hardly to have been questioned in print at the time, and they continue to be cited today as genuine by musicologists and others who ought by now to know better. But at least there was still then a Stravinsky—alert and working, however sickly—who might in theory have written them. This would not much longer be the case.

  With the variations finished and, it seemed, successfully placed, Stravinsky certainly had no immediate intention of giving up writing music. But he needed commissions. He lived in fear of the time—plainly not far distant—when he would no longer be able to conduct, while his already grotesque medical bills continued to mount. When Nadia Boulanger wrote in early November conveying an offer of ten thousand dollars for a chamber work to celebrate the centenary of the Princesse de Polignac in 1965, he wired back regretting that for even a short piece these days he was asking not less than twenty-five thousand—roughly the equivalent of a high annual professional salary.75 Nadia could have been forgiven for regarding this as a roundabout way of saying that he was no longer accepting commissions. But she would have been wrong. In fact, Stravinsky’s West Coast lawyer, William Montapert, was already working on a draft contract for a requiem of a different kind and for a different kind of benefactress: a certain Helen Buchanan Seeger, who had died leaving money to Princeton University, some of which her son had decided to put toward a commission for a work in her memory.76 Twenty-five thousand dollars was exactly the fee Stravinsky was demanding for this presumably not very short work; but there was another attraction, not shared by the Polignac tribute. Stanley Seeger was in no special hurry for his mother’s requiem, and he was agreeing not to press for its completion. Considering how very little time Stravinsky would have for composition in the next several months, this was an essential condition, and one which Nadia was unable to meet.

  What is clear about all this is that personal feeling either was not an issue, or was actually a negative one. Mrs. Seeger he had never met, whereas the Princesse de Polignac had been both a friend and a major patron. It has often been claimed that Stravinsky’s numerous memorial pieces prove that he was preoccupied by death;77 but in reality they suggest some kind of opposite. After his Funeral Song for Rimsky-Korsakov (1909) and possibly the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in memory of Debussy (1920), he composed hardly a single epitaph for a close friend or relation, and most of those he did write are brief and impersonal. Dylan Thomas and John F. Kennedy, though he was affected by their deaths, he had met precisely once each. As for the orchestral Variations, he seems to have decided to dedicate them to Aldous Huxley, to whom he certainly had been close, only when they were complete. The music, as he later explained to Nadia, had no connection with Huxley. “I was composing it during the months when dear Aldous was dying of throat cancer, so I naturally dedicated it to his memory. I am certain, anyway (and this doesn’t discourage me), that this music would say nothing to him (or would even displease him), since what he liked was romantic and classical music, from which my composition is quite remote.”78 This is far indeed from the conventional idea of the memorial as spiritual image or evocation.

  Nevertheless, within a few weeks he was prompted into something much closer to an elegiac tribute to, if not an intimate friend like Huxley, at least a good one and a sort of phantom collaborator (which Huxley never was), in the person of T. S. Eliot, who died in London on the 4th of January 1965. Stravinsky had gone to New York in December for the U.S. premiere of Abraham and Isaac on the 6th (conducted by Craft) and to record the Elegy for J.F.K and a batch of his early Russian songs. But he decided almost instantly on a memorial to the poet of “The Dove Descending” and Sweeney Agonistes, once floated by Kirstein as a possible ballet subject; and within barely a month of his return to Los Angeles on 11 January he had composed the four-minute Introitus, a doleful “Requiem aeternam” for tenors and basses with piano, harp, gongs, low strings, and a gently insistent tocsin of muffled drums.79 The curious thing about this moving little work is the way it seems to have been suggested by other projects—for instance, by the original idea of the Elegy for J.F.K, which was to have been a low-lying piece for male chorus, or by the Princeton Requiem commission, which Seeger wanted to be a vocal work but Stravinsky, initially, did not. Like the Elegy, and also like Abraham and Isaac, it is essentially a single-line vocal setting—a monody—though it splits into two parts near the end. Musically it bears no resemblance at all to the spiky and mercurial Variations, which, from the singers’ point of view, is probably just as well.

  Having completed the Introitus, Stravinsky quickly decided to include it alongside the Variations in his Chicago concert on 17 April. So Martinon and his orchestra, thanks above all (presumably) to their brilliant Bartók in New York, were the unexpected recipients of two major Stravinsky premieres on the one program in the Windy City’s picturesquely named Orchestra Hall. Craft conducted both works, the highly condensed Variations twice; the composer himself tottered to the rostrum only to direct the final item, the complete Pulcinella, looking, one reporter observed, “frighteningly frail.”80 In the past, when Renard and Mavra would appear on the same bill or the premiere of Les Noces would be swiftly followed by that of the Octet, critics had often reacted as if changes of style or simple muddles of chronology were smoke screens purposely devised by the composer to disrupt honest opinion of his work. But in sixties Chicago, it was more as if nobody even noticed the hardly less startling differences between these two latest products of his genius for renewal. One critic described them knowingly as “a logical, and fully artistic, development of the Stravinsky we have known for years, the natural—even inevitable—successors to the Symphony in three movements or his setting of the Mass,” and went on to venture that “on the basis of three hearings of the ‘Variations’ [he had also attended a rehearsal], I am confident they will be in the repertory from now on.”81 Another admittedly liked the “Variations” (“brilliant [sic] alive in its acutely magnetic field of action”), but grumbled about the Introitus. “Either the music eluded me,” she confided, “or the dull performance hid it,” whereas the “Variations” were immaculately played, “in line with the composer’s ‘My music must be executed like a notary’s certificate.’”82

  Stravinsky seems to have felt such compliments to be not worth a great deal more than the invective his music had often attracted in the past. After his recent New York concerts, he had complained to Rufina Ampenoff about the abusive New York press for Abraham and Isaac, adding that “I really tried! Well, what can you do, it’s not for everybody to have Benjamin Britten’s success with the critics.”83 Yet the “abusive” New York press had included a perceptive and highly appreciative piece by Alan Rich in the Herald Tribune, linking the music’s basically linear, melodic style in some detail to the folk-song elements of much older work such as Les Noces, while shrewdly observing the way in which Stravinsky had blended what Rich called “the constant angularity which is one of the earmarks of this style” with “the free rhapsodic coloratura of ancient Hebrew intonation, which in turn has cast its shadow on a great deal of the folk music of Eastern Europe.”84

  The fact is that Stravinsky was lucky to get such a positive, intelligent response to these arcane and alarmingly disparate little masterpieces. Few among his usual adherents received them with genuine—as opposed to ritual—affection. Isaiah Berlin had priv
ately admitted to finding Abraham and Isaac “a kind of cuneiform,”85 while Morton told Boulez that, having heard the Variations six times, he detected in them “many of the problems of an eighty-three-year-old master.”86 Boulez thought them “less aggravating than Abraham and Isaac, a biblical story I’ve always found profoundly repugnant and widerlich [repellent] […] But there’s nothing to get very worked up about in these variations; always canons and more canons and still more canons … and in between, Messiaen’s Chronochromie with its epode and its eighteen strings in real parts: here the eighteen have come down to the sacred number twelve, and [Messiaen’s] birds have disappeared, transformed—by whatever mythology—into canons. All this between ourselves! But when it comes to canon, I prefer Webern.”87