Stravinsky
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It is not the least irony of these late pieces that they were generally rejected by that avant-garde which they seemed primarily designed to please. Fortunately, this is not necessarily any reflection on their intrinsic quality.
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SMILING FOR THE CAMERA
THAT FEBRUARY OF 1965, Stravinsky had been keeping company with two old associates who were both, quite independently, hoping to film him for television documentaries. David Oppenheim, the clarinettist and former repertoire director for Columbia Masterworks, had been trying to set up a documentary for the past three years, ever since Stravinsky had agreed to give him the exclusive right to film the Soviet visit. Alas, that was another of those rights Stravinsky was fond of selling or (in this case) giving away that turned out not to be his to sell or give, and Oppenheim had not in the end been able to film in Russia. The new project was better thought out and better funded. CBS themselves were now involved and there was money on the table, including (after some fairly hard-nosed negotiations) a decent slice for Robert Craft, who, after all, would be crucially involved as adviser and participant. Oppenheim not only intended to film Stravinsky on tour, but he planned to spirit him back to places of emblematic significance in his early life. It was a characteristic project of the new age of television: history caught in the act.1
A week after Oppenheim’s visit to Wetherly Drive, Rolf Liebermann materialized with his own idea for a film of a somewhat more homely character. In certain ways it would hark back to the Graff NBC sessions in 1957, when Stravinsky’s house and life had been taken over for a week by a film crew. Liebermann wanted his team to spend four or five days a little more discreetly in the new house that March, and he then planned to film Stravinsky in September in Hamburg, rehearsing and recording his latest works, the Variations and Introitus. Quite why the composer submitted to being followed around by film technicians for the better part of half a year is hard to explain. No doubt the money was a prime factor. CBS were paying him ten thousand dollars, with a twenty-five percent supplement for a repeat showing;2 and presumably the EBU, Liebermann’s paymasters, were offering something comparable. But it is hard not to suspect that Stravinsky was to some extent flattered by the attentions of what—as he knew from bitter personal experience—was above all a popular medium. He knew that the desire to record his movements for posterity was a recognition of his iconic significance to a mass of people who cared nothing about his music, but he also knew that he himself filmed well, that he was photogenic in motion or repose, and that the medium brought out in him a certain flair for facial and gestural theatre, a talent he considered he had inherited from his father. At any rate he enjoyed enough aspects of the process to be willing to endure its tiresomenesses, not least because both producers were musicians with a genuine knowledge of his work.
Liebermann moved in with his director, Richard Leacock, and Leacock’s crew on the 16th of March, and they stayed five days, filming the composer in conversation with visitors and with Liebermann himself, using handheld cameras to obviate the old need for set-piece groupings, and achieving thereby a naturalness and intimacy that had evaded previous directors. The naturalness was, of course, to some extent spurious. Shots of Stravinsky at work on the Introitus would have been an obvious setup even if the work had not actually been finished a month before. The advantage of the technique was that, after a time, you forgot about the camera, and—perhaps with the help of a good meal and a bottle or two of wine—simply talked about the usual things in the usual way. Pierre Boulez was in Los Angeles to conduct his Eclat at a Monday Evening Concert on the 26th, and he came to lunch during the filming. Afterwards they talked about Les Noces, a score was produced, and Boulez drew attention to an oddity of the chords on the final page, where the bell-strokes occur at regular eight-beat intervals, with a single exception where what looks like a superfluous bar of silence brings the total to eleven beats. Boulez argued persuasively that the extra silent bar was a misprint and ought to be expunged, and Stravinsky—perhaps slightly the worse for drink, or else temporarily overawed by the power of logic—altered the score on camera. In a more lucid moment he might have gone to the piano and tried the passage out, as he had once done when Nadia Boulanger pointed out an inconsistency in the sequential writing in Orpheus.3 The anomaly in Les Noces is part of a general asymmetry in the way the chords punctuate the ceremonious chimes of the four pianos, and it might have reminded Boulez of Stravinsky’s remark about accidents in the Poetics of Music, to the effect that a composer “may draw profit from something unforeseen that a momentary lapse reveals to him.”4 Boulez’s own analysis of The Rite of Spring had drawn attention to variable patterns of just this type;5 but he could not reconcile himself to the glaring disruption in the simple series of eights at the end of Les Noces.6
Soon after Liebermann and his team left Wetherly Drive, the Stravinskys set out for Austin, Texas, where they were (all three of them) taking part in forums and discussions with students, and Craft was conducting a concert with the university orchestra. This whole event was the first of Oppenheim’s set pieces. The composer was filmed arriving by plane from Dallas and being greeted by a posse of cowboys in stetsons. Later he conducted a master class with students playing his music and a seemingly spontaneous platform question-and-answer session which, as Charles Joseph (who examined the outtakes) has shown, was actually the object of many retakes for Oppenheim’s benefit.7 The cameras were also rolling in Chicago a fortnight later, for the premieres of the Introitus and Variations, though the orchestra itself could not be filmed, nor the concert recorded, because of a dispute with the Musicians’ Union. Instead Oppenheim filmed Stravinsky with Craft in the car after a rehearsal, claiming that he had scored the Variations for the forces Chicago had told him would be available, and that he would have done it differently had he known the orchestra would have so many violas. This can only mean that he would have scored the second twelve-part variation (the one for ten violas and two double-basses) for twelve violas, since there is nothing in the viola writing otherwise to suggest self-limitation. The cameras also invaded Stravinsky’s hotel room and perused the sketches for the Variations, while their composer tried to insist that the work’s twelve-note row had come to him spontaneously as a melody and that he had only noticed its serial structure later on.8 This recalls his remark about the Epitaphium, that its serial character was a chance, and unimportant, discovery made after half the first phrase had been composed.9 Such claims would be more convincing if any of his works after Threni had had non-dodecaphonic themes, but as it is they look disconcertingly like a preemptive defense against the charge of intellectualism, and an attempt to fit these works into the serendipitous tradition of the Poetics so recently called into question by the Noces incident with Boulez.
From Chicago the CBS crew pursued him to New York, where he was recording the Ebony Concerto with Benny Goodman at the end of April; then at the start of May they sailed with him for Göteborg, in Sweden, from where they all flew via Copenhagen to Paris. There, Oppenheim filmed Stravinsky—drunk and crotchety, according to Mario Bois10—on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and in the stalls seat he had occupied on the first night of The Rite of Spring. A few days later they were in Vevey, on Lake Geneva, and two days after that, on the 17th of May, the entire outfit, including the composer and his wife, Robert Craft and Theodore Strawinsky, descended on the unsuspecting lakeside town of Clarens, looking for the very room in the very house, Les Tilleuls, in which in the winter of 1911–12 he had composed the greater part of his most famous work.11
The visit has been described in intimate detail by Craft in one of the best passages of his Chronicle of a Friendship.12 Everything had of course been prearranged by Oppenheim, who had even found an old lady who had been a tenant at the same time as the Stravinsky family, who still lived in the house, and who—to season good fortune with coincidence—was called Rambert, like the best-remembered dancer in the original Rite. The film sequences of Stravinsky fi
nding the house, mistaking the apartment, and forgetting that his tiny studio room had been on a lower floor, were thus to some extent theatre, though the composer himself had not been let in on the act, and his surprise and pleasure on reentering the studio were, according to Craft, genuine. By astonishing luck, there was a piano, and Stravinsky could sit down at it and, for the benefit of television, bash out the famous chord of the “Auguries of Spring.” “I like this chord,” he beams into the camera, and he repeats the story of Diaghilev’s enquiry at a Venice run-through, “How long will the chord last?” and his own reply, “Until it is done, my dea-rr.”13 But, as Craft rightly insists, something crucial eludes the reconstruction, something to do with the passage of more than half a century, two world wars, and the entire cultural environment in which that music was composed, in that tiny room by that same diminutive person. In some curious way the very precision and naturalness of modern film seem to limit one’s picture of that time of silent movies and long-exposure photography, when Stravinsky was not yet the beaming celebrity of later years but an austere genius in the grip of a hitherto unknown idea. Try as it might, the medium could not dissolve its own essence.
A week after this voyage into the Swiss corner of his remote past, the Stravinskys flew from Paris to Warsaw, preceded by the CBS crew, who once again filmed their arrival at the airport.14 Oppenheim had hoped for a visit to Ustilug, just across the River Bug, which these days formed Poland’s border with the Soviet Union. But just as the Soviet authorities had been evasive about such a visit in 1962, so they refused—or at least withheld—permission in 1965, for reasons which might easily have been foreseen. In general, they did not allow foreigners to visit provincial areas, especially run-down, non-Russian ones, and they were of course jittery about border regions, whether or not of special strategic importance. The fact that Stravinsky would be coming with an American film crew would merely have compounded the impossibility in Soviet eyes. So his last chance of ever revisiting the happiest home of his early years, and the actual birthplace of the work that interested Oppenheim above all others, vanished in the fog of the Cold War.
The disappointment may not, in any case, have been too great. For Stravinsky nostalgia had always been tempered by fear, and the Ustilug of the sixties would, he knew perfectly well, be a very different place from the remote village of the Nosenkos and the Belyankins. “It’s a tomb,” he is supposed to have told Oppenheim, referring presumably to some country of his mind rather than whatever Ustilug may actually have become.15 That the reality would have depressed him can hardly be doubted. Claudio Spies, with no knowledge of the place but a good knowledge of the man, thought that the whole experience would be too painful “and not really worth the risk of such strong emotion. But TV knows no risks.”16 Perhaps it was just as well that, for once, television did not call the shots.
Warsaw itself he had not seen since 1924, and though he had then arrived in late October and it was now late May, the gloom of Gomulka’s Poland far outstripped the chill of those autumn days in the still-young republic. It was cold and rainy, the food was disgusting, and the shops were almost empty. In their hotel, the hot-water system was out of order.17 The vaunted composers of the Polish avant-garde—Penderecki, Gorecki, Lutoslawski, and the rest—were all said to be at a festival in Germany, and at the reception at the Composers’ Union the visitors met only friendly nonentities, officials, academics.18 As for the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, its work displayed the same rawness of tone and phrasing, and the same easygoing attitude to intonation, that they had encountered with the orchestras in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This did not prevent it, any more than it had prevented them, from attacking The Rite of Spring with due vigor and a certain primitive energy in their concerts on the 28th and 29th. Moreover, they acquitted themselves at least adequately in what was, as a matter of fact, the European premiere of the Huxley Variations. Both these works were conducted, of course, by Robert Craft. Stravinsky managed the Symphony of Psalms and, as usual, The Firebird; but the effort this cost him was all too apparent. Craft reported to Lillian Libman that his conducting had been “very vague,” and Stravinsky himself told her that “I did not conduct well in Warsaw. I did not feel well.… I do not see well.”19 His left leg was more and more troublesome. Above all he felt weak and tired. When he attempted to conduct a fragment of the Rite with the Warsaw orchestra for the CBS cameras (the intention being to dub the takes onto footage of a production by the Warsaw ballet), he found it so difficult that in the end no take longer than a few bars could be filmed, and Oppenheim had to do the best he could with these brief cutaways.20
Their last port of call was Rome, where, on the 12th of June, Stravinsky received a papal decoration from Paul VI and sat near him, somewhat nervously, during a performance of the Symphony of Psalms. All the while, the cameras rolled. But the ordeal by celluloid was nearing its end, and by the time they flew into Kennedy Airport on the 14th the filming, as Spies reported to Lawrence Morton, was “mercifully finished.”21
THEY GOT BACK to Hollywood on Stravinsky’s eighty-third birthday, the 18th of June, to be greeted as ever by a pile of letters, among them a distressing one from his daughter-in-law Françoise. Something had happened to cloud their mutual affection in the year since the incident of young Johnny and the Chicago hotel bill. The composer had been irritated, no doubt, by that trifling matter. But what had chiefly agitated his old, White Russian heart was the spectacle of this eighteen-year-old grandson behaving like a 1960s campus dropout, unkempt and bejeaned, with no obvious goal in life, more preoccupied with university counselling than with university lectures, and by all accounts making things difficult for his parents at home. Stravinsky wanted to settle money on both his grandchildren, but he not unnaturally felt that in doing so he was entitled to let the boy’s mother know what he thought of his manners. He had treated Johnny to lunch in New York that October, then telephoned Françoise and favored her with his general opinion of her son.22
Françoise had not responded for several months, but then some chance remark triggered a fiercely maternal reaction. Someone had reported to her that her father-in-law was putting it about that her son only wanted to see him in order to cadge money off him. She was furious. Would he care to know what Johnny had told her about him? The young man had gone to Chicago hoping to see his grandfather, and what a depressing experience! He couldn’t get through on the phone and wasn’t allowed to see him. “My grandfather won’t even put himself out to see his only grandson. I was to phone him the next day, but I lost my nerve. What an incredible family relationship! I’m shattered by it.” Stravinsky’s thoughts on the depravity of the young merely showed how out of touch he was. Either her son’s problems were clinical or (more likely) they were fairly commonplace, and in neither case was the grandfather’s intervention exactly helpful. As for the Soulima household, their affections were all firmly in place, thank you kindly. Like most mothers of only sons, Françoise was tormented by his every misery, his every insecurity, and she had suffered agonies of fear and anxiety on his account for the past two years. And as for the money, she enclosed a check for a hundred dollars and hoped to hear no more about it.23
So intimate an exchange would hardly count as material in an artist’s life had it not already been aired—and in no very friendly context—by Robert Craft, who for some extraordinary reason calls Françoise’s letter a “crucial document in the composer’s biography.”24 Crucial it may be, but more as an example of Craft’s own biographical methods than of anything out of the way in Stravinsky’s behavior or his daughter-in-law’s reaction. For Craft, the importance of the episode (which he misreports in a number of trivial but significant ways) lies in the lack of sympathy it reveals between the composer and his blood relations. But of course it actually reveals quite the opposite. It illustrates the pain of family ties that are close and highly strung; it shows, in case one had not realized, that an attachment existed between the two participants which these passing events were i
n some way felt to have disrupted. Milène had warned Vera not to raise the matter with Françoise, who was understandably rather touchy about it.25 But by then it was too late; the composer had spoken and the damage was done.
In the cold light of day, Françoise realized she had gone too far. Three days later she wrote again, in a chastened tone. “I now tell myself that I risked giving you pain and this is an unbearable thought. Please bear in mind that I have been going through great anguish for long months. I embrace you very tenderly.”26 Quite apart from her anxieties about Johnny, she was tortured by the fear that Soulima, who had recently been experiencing blackouts during recital performances, was suffering from a brain tumor.27 Craft, as usual, tries to give Vera the credit for explaining to Françoise the finer points of the composer’s feelings; but he can only do this by ignoring Françoise’s second letter and pretending that another one of a fortnight later was the relevant apology.28 At the same time he maintains brusquely that the episode “effectively ended the relationship,” a judgment frankly absurd in the face of Françoise’s profoundly affectionate letters of the next two or three years to her father-in-law. If after that the relationship did, in a sense, come to an end, it was for other reasons and in other circumstances which will, in due course, be related. It is to these circumstances that Milène’s much later testimony about Stravinsky having described Françoise speculatively as “a very unsympathetic person” truly refers.29 The implication that he had previously, and lucidly, thought this is not the least of Craft’s many and varied distortions in his account of Stravinsky’s relations with his family.
Another, no less striking, concerns the affairs of the Geneva Strawinskys at this same period. In August 1964, according to Craft himself, Kitty had written to her adoptive parents accusing them of breach of confidence over her married lover, Pierre Théus, and had sent copies of the letter to her grandfather and to her aunt Milène and uncle Soulima.30 Craft adds that Stravinsky was so angry with Theodore that he instructed him to stop interfering with Kitty and pointedly avoided telling him about “his next trip to Europe.”31 No trace of any such instruction has survived, and as for the secrecy about the trip, there was nothing particularly unusual about that, as Craft himself admits,32 especially since they were in Paris for only two days on the way to Israel (a trip rearranged at short notice) and for only another three days on either side of Berlin, a trip that Stravinsky had intended to cancel. Craft then strongly implies that certain financial dispositions the composer made in Kitty’s favor in September 1964 (parallel to the arrangements for Johnny referred to above) were in revenge for Theodore’s supposed behavior, even though the relevant letter (which Craft quotes) expressly denies that the action has any connection with “the painful development in relations between Kitty and yourself,” a wording that, moreover, carefully avoids apportioning blame.33 Elsewhere Craft asserts that Stravinsky reduced Theodore’s monthly allowance in the autumn of 1965, similarly, “as an act of reprisal for his and his wife’s alleged harsh treatment” of Kitty (the “alleged” being, of course, a legal precaution, not an indication of any desire to imply doubt in the writer’s mind).34