Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  This whole set of allegations is so monstrous, so damaging and selective, at times so fallacious, and withal so private, that it seems astonishing today that it was ever dignified with publication. It is perfectly true that Henri Monnet, a Parisian lawyer friend whom Stravinsky asked to act as go-between in the matter of Théus’s divorce, later informed him that Kitty had “preferred independent work in Geneva to more or less servile tasks for Theodore (or rather his wife).”35 But Monnet had heard only Kitty’s side of the story, and Kitty was for much of this time (January 1967) in a distraught and even somewhat hysterical state, unable to see beyond her own passionate feelings, inaccessible to reason, and, above all, eight months pregnant. Nowhere in Craft’s account do we discover that Denise had for some time been seriously ill with arthritic tuberculosis, in constant pain, more or less unable to work, and mobile only with difficulty. Nobody would suggest that this gave her any right to treat her twenty-six-year-old daughter as a servant; but it would hardly be surprising or despicable if she had called on her for help, and had perhaps sometimes even done so too much or with too little concern for Kitty’s own welfare. Why should such domestic troubles, of the sort that anybody who has had grown-up children or sick parents is perfectly familiar with, become the subject of ruthless and inaccurate dissection in print by an adoptive family member with privileged access to private documents and a reputation as a published essayist? Inaccurate? Craft’s assertion that the reduction in Theodore’s allowance was an act of reprisal is flatly refuted by the correspondence. Stravinsky had been making exceptional payments because of Denise’s illness, but by the autumn of 1965 he was so worried about taxes that he felt unable to continue the allowance at the same level. In response, Theodore expressed only gratitude for past payments and accepted that they could not go on indefinitely. If any reprisal was intended, Stravinsky did not say so and Theodore did not notice: a curiously secretive, smiling sort of revenge, as befitted phantom hostilities.36

  Since Theodore lived in Europe, it is to some extent possible to retrace his relations with his father and stepmother through their letters. What is much harder to unravel is the relationship with Milène, who still lived nearby and, when her father was at home, came to see him almost every day. She and Vera had always been on good, chatty terms. Milène would take her father for an afternoon drive, or she would sit and talk to him or help Vera choose curtains. The situation was on the surface easy and unconstrained. Milène was not clever in the intellectual sense, did not make sharp or witty remarks, but would talk pleasantly about nothing in particular, perhaps about her artifacts or Vera’s paintings or the latest changes in the garden. But at some stage a certain tension crept into their friendship. It may have had something to do with André Marion, who still did secretarial work for Stravinsky but was once again without regular employment. Milène knew that Vera disliked André, and she had always suspected her stepmother of having undermined his position with her father because of Craft. Or it may have been something in Vera’s attitude to Milène herself. Here one enters difficult waters. As we have seen, Robert Craft adored Vera and portrays her as practically without fault in her demeanor toward others, a woman physically and socially enchanting, unfailingly generous, trusting, altogether lovable and complete. In his picture of the Stravinsky household, it is invariably Vera who stands between the children and their difficult, preoccupied, impatient, often uncaring father, she who persuades him to act well toward them, to give them money or attention, to endure their demands and inadequacies.

  Such a picture may be truthful as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. For one thing, the witness is suspect. Craft has often made exaggerated claims for Vera’s tutelage. For instance, he once told me that Vera effectively brought up Stravinsky’s children (in Paris in the twenties and thirties), a claim that is as demonstrably untrue as it is psychologically revealing, in that it suggests a need to see her as more satisfactory in all respects (including motherhood, which she never in fact essayed) than Katya Stravinsky.37 On the other hand, Stravinsky may have been preoccupied, but he was not uncaring. His voluminous correspondence with his children is simply not that of a parent bullied into worrying about them; it shows genuine love and solicitude and a remarkable, if at times hectoring, attention to detail. There certainly were times when Vera interceded. Whether or not she was responsible, as Craft suggests, for putting pressure on her husband to invite Milène and Soulima to America after the war is hard to tell.38 But if so, it must have been Vera herself who made the claim, since Craft was not yet a witness, and such letters as have surfaced are silent on the matter.

  Vera Stravinsky was indeed a charming, sociable, openhearted woman. She had the knack, when you talked to her, of making you feel the most fascinating person in the world. But in the quiet of her boudoir, as we have seen, things were somewhat different. She would reflect with a sense of boredom on much that she had to endure. She detested, as any woman would, her husband’s frequent drunkenness. She loved Bob and was terrified that he would abandon them. She often avoided their concerts, and one even wonders whether she cared all that much for her husband’s music; at least, she left few if any penetrating or appreciative remarks about it, though she liked its success and often recorded ovations in her diary. In a legal deposition after her husband’s death she admitted that she would be more interested in a diamond from Tiffany’s than in the manuscript of The Rite of Spring.39 When the two men in her life listened to gramophone records in the evening, she would make herself scarce. She liked clothes and boutiques, food and motor cars, New York and Paris. To a hostile judge these might seem the preferences of a shallow spirit; but just as possibly they were those of one who feared darkness and the abyss.

  Soulima Stravinsky thought that Vera included her husband’s children and their spouses among the “boring” things in life. They were conscious of being tolerated by her rather than liked. Perhaps, he reflected, she could have wished them to compliment her more: on her beauty, her clothes, her paintings, about which, in his opinion, she talked more than they strictly deserved.40 Family life, in the sense in which they understood it, was not at all her natural element; she was wearied by the homely and the routine and would not have longed for these things—unlike the soldier in Stravinsky’s Tale—if deprived of them. There is a hint of paranoia in Soulima’s remarks about Vera, but it will not do to portray them, as Lillian Libman does in effect, as the stereotyped reaction of a boy in a fairy tale to his wicked stepmother.41 After all, by 1965 Soulima had known Vera well for thirty-five years and been close to her for much of that time, including the first year of the war in Paris, when his mother was barely cold in the ground. If she had ever been going to seem like a fairy-tale stepmother, it would have been then. And if, much later, something happened to cool their relations in a more modest if eventually no less disastrous way, it would seem fair to keep an open mind, at the very least, about which of the two sides had changed and about who, if anyone, was to blame.

  “TODAY I’M 83,” Stravinsky wrote to Souvtchinsky on the 18th of June. “I don’t know myself how to regard it: to be proud of the number or ponder on the ever nearer approach of nonexistence.”42 In fact he had little leisure to do either. A week later they were off again, this time to Muncie, Indiana, where he was booked to take part in a three-day Stravinsky festival at Ball State Teachers College, talking to students and attending their productions of Oedipus Rex and The Soldier’s Tale, conducted by Craft. Yet again there was an open-air concert at Ravinia (on the 8th of July) and a pair of concerts in Vancouver on the 12th and 13th. In the latter part of August he was tied up with recording sessions in Hollywood and a concert in the Bowl, after which they were due back in Europe for filming with Liebermann in Hamburg and a concert in London.

  To the world at large there was something miraculous in this victory of the creative spirit over the visibly fragile and decaying body. In Vancouver, “he walked to the podium looking frail and bent and old, leaning on a cane. Bu
t when the rehearsal began he seemed to become a different man. His whole length straightened until he stood on the tips of his toes with the arms uplifted, seeming to hover above the orchestra. His movements were sure and energetic as he moved the orchestra through … the Firebird.”43 The transformation was, certainly, extraordinary.44 It was also to some extent a charade. Stravinsky was less and less capable of conducting music for which the orchestra seriously needed a conductor, and even in the recording studio it was becoming harder and harder to piece together whole performances from the fragmentary takes which often were the best he could manage. That August he stumbled through the Variations, but none of the takes could be used, and even Columbia never claimed that the published recording was by him. With simpler works like The Fairy’s Kiss and Pulcinella, as we saw, usable takes by Stravinsky might be spliced together with “rehearsal” takes by Craft. But this was a more intricate task than might appear. In the rehearsal sessions, Craft would adopt his own speeds, which increasingly tended to be quicker than those of Stravinsky, who would then irritably refuse to adjust his own to match his assistant’s. At the first Pulcinella session it was hot and uncomfortable and the atmosphere had been tense since Craft had kept them all waiting in the car on North Wetherly Drive and had then rehearsed the music at speeds guaranteed to boil the composer’s blood. For the recording itself, Stravinsky duly adopted even slower tempi than usual, while Craft stood beside him trying desperately to indicate a faster beat to the orchestra. Unsurprisingly there was confusion, Stravinsky exploded in fury at one of the clarinettists, then turned on a horn player who was having routine problems with his instrument’s tendency to “split,” and when Craft rebuked him he spun round and shouted, “How dare you address me in this manner!” At that, Craft turned on his heel and stalked out.45

  For a long time Craft had been sufficiently secure in his position not to hesitate to abuse Stravinsky if he felt himself slighted. He knew he was necessary to the composer, emotionally as much as practically. He records that at the end of this particular quarrel, Stravinsky sent him a note. “Dear Bob, whom I love, with my ardent longing for our former relations that gave me so much happiness. Maybe my age is spoiling everything? Excuse me this feeling never leaving my heart.”46 The note, Craft claims, made him feel “more despicable” than ever, and one can well see why. Here he was forcing out of one of the great men of his day what amounted to a confession of utter dependency. Yet what a marvelous boost to his self-confidence! And surely to publish this humiliating little missive is hardly an act of contrition. It smacks rather of condescension, even (one might feel) self-congratulation.

  But then Craft was more than ever that summer casting himself as the composer’s alter ego. Not only was he conducting Stravinsky’s recordings, but he was writing his latest book for him. This fifth of the “conversation” volumes, eventually published in America as Themes and Episodes,47 probably contains nothing written by Stravinsky himself, and possibly not much that he ever actually said. Half of the book is taken up with further extracts from Craft’s diaries, and the rest consists of reprints of various letters and interviews which, for reasons already given, cannot seriously be regarded as authentic. Perhaps the short articles labelled “Contingencies” (renamed “Squibs” when they were published in revised form a few years later in England48) contain some genuine obiter dicta, like the remark about the purchase of a Renoir for $170,800 being “an example of a flagrant lack of respect for money.”49 But the program notes and book reviews are surely Craft’s from start to finish, while of the material supposedly by Vera Stravinsky he has admitted in print that he wrote the letters to her cousin and has tacitly admitted that he wrote the review of the “Prima Assoluta” of The Rake’s Progress by including it subsequently in his own Chronicles of a Friendship.50

  Whatever Craft’s motives in all this, straightforward self-promotion can hardly have been among them. After all, many of the best things in the book (and there are some very good things) were attributed to Stravinsky. And the same defense applies to the charge, frequently levelled in 1965, that the composer’s “minders” were prolonging his concert career, against every consideration of his health and well-being, for reasons of their own. The fact is that Stravinsky’s concerts did Craft’s image as a conductor far more harm than good and they let him in for many predictable embarrassments and misunderstandings. That September (the 14th) they were due in London for a Festival Hall concert with the New Philharmonia Orchestra whose promoter, Robert Paterson, was firmly under the impression that the composer would himself be conducting The Rite of Spring, as well as Pulcinella, Fireworks, and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. When Libman informed him in June that Craft would be conducting the Rite, Paterson’s first, bizarre notion was that Stravinsky might conduct the work sitting down, and then, when that was rejected, he hinted darkly that the BBC (whose involvement was crucial to his budget) would not take the concert at all if Stravinsky did not conduct the Rite.51 Weeks before the event, Paterson knew perfectly well that the Rite would be conducted by Craft, who would also (as he likewise knew) conduct the Huxley Variations in its British premiere. Yet nowhere in the publicity were these dispositions made clear, and even the program page of the printed program itself left them in doubt (they were announced at the end of each program note), so that when Craft stepped up after the opening Fireworks to conduct the famous ballet score, many in the audience were surprised not to see the composer reappear, and there were some mild expressions of disapproval. As for the Variations, even the program gave to understand that the composer would be conducting. In fact he only reemerged at the very end of the concert for the Firebird suite (Pulcinella and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments having long since been abandoned). None of this was strictly Craft’s fault, but he naturally had to bear the brunt of the general annoyance. As it happened, the Rite was very poorly done, not helped by the testing of television lights during the “Jeu du rapt.” Applause was tepid, considering the music, and there was much professional muttering at the bar during the interval. Almost as a matter of routine, Craft was blamed.

  In Hamburg the previous week, he had conducted the Introitus and Variations for Leacock’s film, and Stravinsky had himself rehearsed and conducted the Terpsichore variation from Apollo, a recording that would later be dubbed onto film of the very young Suzanne Farrell rehearsing the part with Balanchine.52 Stravinsky had tried to postpone this leg of the European trip, but Liebermann had called his bluff by half-agreeing, insisting only that Craft come as planned to conduct the Introitus, since the choir was hard at work preparing it.53 He obviously calculated that Craft would not make an extra journey to Hamburg on his own; and he was quickly proved right, for within four days Stravinsky had wired back that they were all coming after all.54 So it turned out that not only could promoters not have Stravinsky without Craft, but they could no longer have Craft without Stravinsky. What Joan Peyser subsequently christened “Stravinsky-Craft, Inc.” had at last become fully incorporated.55 This was conclusively proved a few weeks later in Cincinnati, where Stravinsky had again been booked to conduct The Rite of Spring and to give a formal lecture in the local Corbett series. Lillian Libman claims that this unlikely concatenation had come about through an office error. But the truth is that it was no longer considered politic to refuse any such arrangement when setting up a contract, for fear that the booking might fall through altogether. In due course, Cincinnati learned (what they might have realized from the start) that the Rite would be conducted by Craft, and that he would also deliver the lecture. His subject would be “The Rite of Spring: Genesis of a Masterpiece,” a major paper based on his recent study of the Meyer sketchbook in readiness for its forthcoming publication in facsimile. So seriously did he take this work that he actually flew home from New York in late September to collect the materials he needed to write it.56 But alas for the hopes, already once blighted, of the Cincinnati Stravinskians. The lecture was not ready in time, and instead the audience had to make do
with a question-and-answer session in which, after all, Stravinsky played the leading role and Craft for the most part sat on his hands.57

  The one thing that Craft seems never to have done in Stravinsky’s name is write his music, and yet the mere existence of the works of the 1950s and ’60s is beyond question his greatest justification. Since July Stravinsky had been working spasmodically on his latest commission, which, as Stanley Seeger had written in February to remind him, was supposed to be a Requiem with a big “R.”58 The point about this curious insistence is that the draft contract drawn up by Montapert had specified “an original composition in the nature of a Sinfonia da Requiem,” which seemed to imply a purely orchestral work, whereas Seeger was claiming that he had agreed to some but not all of the Requiem text being eliminated. In his reply, Stravinsky had affected not to notice this detail, and instead went on referring to a “Sinfonia da Requiem,” though that, he added, would not be its title: “heaven forbid.”59