Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Whether or not he seriously intended to force Seeger’s hand on this issue is hard to decide. He had, after all, just composed a setting of the “Requiem aeternam” in the Introitus, and he may have felt that to compose another at his age might strike the angels as laboring the point. A month later he was still describing it to Nabokov as “a long-promised symphony for the orchestra of the youngsters at Princeton,”60 and when he at last got down to serious composition in mid-July (after returning home from Vancouver) he worked on and off for several weeks at the purely windinstrumental music of what eventually became the central interlude, with its exquisite chorales for quartets of flutes, horns, and kettledrums. These were the hottest weeks of the Los Angeles summer, and the domestic atmosphere was febrile, with Vera still without a regular cook, Craft working day and night to finish Themes and Episodes, and Stravinsky worried about his health and apprehensive about the coming recording sessions.61 Yet no trace of these anxieties clouds the solemn radiance of the music, which like so much of his ritual thinking since the Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Symphony of Psalms (both of which it in some aspects resembles) seems to exist outside time and beyond dull care. Only when he got back to New York after the London concert and was able to settle down at the piano he had had moved into his room in the Pierre did he begin writing for voices, leaving out the “Requiem aeternam” itself and launching straight into the “Exaudi orationem meam,” a line that had figured only covertly in the Introitus, parlando, and sotto voce. The closing “Requiem aeternam” he likewise omitted, replacing it with slow string chords.

  They were back at North Wetherly Drive by the time he completed the “Exaudi” on the 10th of November. He had interrupted it briefly to toss off yet another epitaph, but one of a much less seraphic character, in memory of Pierre Monteux, who had died in July 1964, just over a year after the Rite of Spring anniversary concert at which Stravinsky had last set eyes on him. Somewhat perversely (since Firebird was the one early stage work of his whose first performance Monteux had not conducted), the piece was a short but spectacular canon for large orchestra on the theme of the “Coronation Scene” that ends that ballet—a kind of academic joke at the expense of the multiple repetitions the tune is subjected to in the original score. Why Stravinsky chose to commemorate his oldest musical collaborator at this moment and in so apparently dismissive a way is a good question, but one’s instinct is that he wrote the piece first and only then decided to represent it as an in memoriam. As we saw, Stravinsky was not in the habit of writing epitaphs to close friends or associates. Monteux is not mentioned in the score, which simply calls the piece “Canon for Concert Introduction or Encore.” Stravinsky sent it to Boosey and Hawkes on 8 November with a letter for Monteux’s widow, saying we know not what.62 A few weeks later, on 16 December, Craft conducted the first performance at a concert in Toronto, a concert Stravinsky did not attend.

  34

  FINAL CURTAIN

  WHAT DID IT FEEL LIKE, a journalist had asked Stravinsky at his London press conference, to compose in old age? Did inspiration still come? Stravinsky’s smile was irresistible. “For you,” he teased, “I am somebody of old age. For myself, I am not of old age. I continue to live, and it is not my fault that I live eighty-three years.”1

  Inspiration still came. The Requiem Canticles was turning out to be a distillation of the austerities of the most recent serial works and the sacramental eloquence of scores as old as Les Noces and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. It showed no trace of the disconnectedness and short breath that Lawrence Morton seems to have found in the Variations.2 Its brevity was planned and coherent, concise rather than short-winded, and ideas continued to flow. By mid-December, when they again flew to New York, he had added an orchestral prelude to the “Exaudi” and the Interlude, and when they returned to Hollywood on 22 January he quickly finished the miniature “Dies irae” and “Tuba mirum” that he had been working on in his Manhattan hotel.

  But still there was no letup in his performing schedule. There were recording sessions in late October and late November, and the New York trip, which took another six weeks out of his home life, was at least nominally for recording purposes, though in fact Stravinsky did not lift a baton while he was there. Instead he saw a good deal of Nabokov and of Soulima and Françoise, lunched with Kirstein, and met Balanchine to discuss his plans to choreograph the Variations.3 Stravinsky had found a sponsor—a certain Jack Bomer—for a Russian-language recording of Les Noces, something he had never previously attempted, despite his repeated insistence that the work should only be sung in its original language.4 But there had never been any intention that he should personally conduct the sessions. One idea had been for Craft to record them with Russian performers in Moscow.5 In the end they were done under Craft in New York, in the composer’s presence. Stravinsky’s other New York recording that winter was made, by contrast, in his absence. He had been booked to record the Capriccio with the French pianist Philippe Entremont at the start of January. Then he suddenly remembered that when he and Entremont had recorded the Piano Concerto in New York eighteen months before, the sessions had been marked by aggravation and ill feeling; so this time he simply stayed away, and left Craft to conduct in his stead.6 This presented Columbia with a problem which, not altogether surprisingly, they decided to get round by simply ignoring it and crediting Stravinsky in any case. But the composer would have none of it, “not only because it is extremely dangerous to pretend that I conducted the Capriccio but also because I don’t want it.”7 He even objected to a photograph of himself with Entremont being used on the record sleeve, as if, he added, the two of them had ever made much music together. “The photograph with [Isaac] Stern was bad enough, as he never played the [Violin] Concerto before or since recording it and he had hardly done me the respect of learning it then.” But at least he and the great violinist had “made music” together.

  As for concerts, Vera had implored Lillian Libman not to pile up her husband’s bookings in 1966, but Craft had been encouraging Paterson to arrange another European tour, and meanwhile they had concerts in a string of American cities—Minneapolis, Los Angeles, St. Louis, San Francisco, Rochester (at the Eastman School)—before again taking off for Europe in the second week of May. Paterson, for his part, was proposing dates in such exotic locales as Newcastle, East Berlin, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. And to crown the whole trip, Stravinsky had agreed to conduct Oedipus Rex for Lina Lalandi, not just in Oxford, but also in the Athens Festival, with a performance in Lisbon to round things off.8 The only consolation in the face of so daunting and apparently unnecessary a program was, as Vera confidently assured Lillian, that they would cancel everything anyway.9 Stravinsky was looking frailer than ever, and what was in some ways worse, Craft was ill as well. In San Francisco in February he had conducted The Rite of Spring and the Variations in three consecutive concerts under sedation for a severe attack of flu, and by the time they reached New York in May he looked, Libman thought, like “someone who had spent several days in the company of a vampire.”10

  Nevertheless they duly got to Paris on the 12th of May, and ten days later they flew on to Athens, where, on the 26th, Stravinsky conducted Oedipus Rex with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Odeum of Herodes Atticus. The Lisbon performance followed on 1 June, and in the interval of the concert Stravinsky was presented with the Order of Santiago to add to the Doctorate of Humane Letters, which he had been unable to refuse at Rochester since it was handed to him without warning on the concert platform.11

  But Vera proved right about the remaining concerts. What was left of the Paterson tour, the concerts in Luxembourg and Strasbourg, were abandoned, ostensibly because Stravinsky had a cold, but in reality because they had decided as soon as they arrived in Paris from Lisbon that they could not face any more side trips. The Oxford Festival Oedipus went the same way. Instead they stayed in Paris, and Vera spent many hours in conversation with Kitty’s lover, Théus, and with Kitty herself, now revealed to be
pregnant. Milène, who knew all about the Strasbourg cancellation at least ten days before it “happened” (presumably because André had been instructed to unbook the hotel), was touched by Vera’s devotion to “ce pauvre Théus,” who had written her a tear-stained letter praising Vera’s goodness of heart and her willingness to waste so much of her free time on their problems.12

  The Athens and Lisbon concerts, like the London one the previous September, survived in the itinerary because the fees were too good to forgo. The cities themselves no longer attracted as tourist sites, as they once had done. These days, Stravinsky preferred to keep to his hotel, or make only short excursions, while Vera and Bob would take the occasional day trip without him—to Chartres from Paris, or to Corinth from Athens. There were those who noticed this tendency to abandon the ailing master, and drew sinister conclusions from it. Sometimes Stravinsky himself complained. “They leave me alone,” he would grumble to Souvtchinsky, “they don’t bother about me.” But Souvtchinsky had his own way of explaining the situation. “Listen,” he would say to Mario Bois of Craft, “this boy is insufferable but he’s very interesting. They’re lucky to have him.… He’s young, intelligent, he distracts them, stimulates them, keeps them informed.… Look at old Igor, rebuffed, humiliated—it upsets me. But you know, I think he likes it. He’s medieval man, and he’s fond of the Devil …” And Bois had the wit to add that Craft had at least as much to endure with Stravinsky’s foibles and tyrannies, day in, day out. One could almost say they needed and deserved one another. They were symbiotic. Even their humor was complementary, Craft’s “redoubtable, biting, caustic … Stravinsky’s clownish, Buster Keatonish, or else false-bottomed, subterranean, always unexpected, brief, with few words and much facial play.”13

  At the end of June they were due in New York for a Stravinsky Festival at the Lincoln Center organized by the composer Lukas Foss. Relations with Foss had improved in the three years since the publication of the American edition of Dialogues and a Diary, into which the platonic Stravinsky had slipped the inimitably lethal opinion that Foss’s Time Cycle did not “require such strong criticism as that of the English newspaper that described it as ‘appealing to teen-age taste’ and called it ‘an undergraduate parody of modern music from B to X (Boulez to Xenakis).’”14 Foss wrote a pained letter, and the remark was expunged from all subsequent editions of the book.15 But whatever his gifts as a composer, Foss turned out to be a brilliant organizer.16 He had set up a superb festival of Stravinsky’s music in its historical and contemporary contexts, with a dazzling team of conductors—Bernstein, Kondrashin, Ansermet, and, in the final concert, Stravinsky himself. And he had even put up a thousand dollars as an honorarium for Stravinsky’s attendance at the opening concert on 30 June, which made it extremely hard for him to resist—as he conceivably might otherwise have done—the pleasure of hearing Bernstein conduct The Rite of Spring alongside a series of American works (including Copland’s Dance Symphony and Revueltas’s Sensemayá) supposedly showing its influence.

  Stravinsky broadly approved of Bernstein’s way with the Rite, though he did not much like his perspiring rostrum persona or some of the rhythmic mannerisms that went with it. In his box after the performance, he embraced Bernstein and remonstrated with him, good-humoredly, almost in a single gesture.17 But he was much less anxious to hear Ansermet conduct Persephone in a pair of concerts entitled “Stravinsky and French Music” the following week. For all their apparent rapprochement in the late forties, he had never truly forgiven Ansermet for the Jeu de cartes affair before the war, and in particular he found it hard to overlook the conductor’s remarks about his serial works in his recent, magisterial Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine, which purported to prove scientifically that atonality and serialism were contrary to the aesthetic laws under which the human brain perceives music. Ansermet had discussed in some detail the “bransle gai” in Agon as an example of “the absurdities [to which] the taste for learned and esoteric writing can lead.”18 Such defects appear, he had added,

  in most of the works Stravinsky has written since embarking squarely on a “learned” type of music, since passing from a music that was already learned but which responded to his sense of structural possibilities, to a music entirely thought out and “fabricated” on paper or at the piano by way of subtle combinations which belong in the domain of probability theory or the game of chess.19

  The thought of this kind of criticism was quite enough to remind Stravinsky not only that he was conducting in the Hollywood Bowl on the 5th of July, but that it would obviously be quite impossible for him to get back to New York in time to attend Ansermet’s second concert in Lincoln Center a week later. The day after the concert on the 12th, Ansermet wrote:

  Lukas Foss told me that it was your wish that I should conduct these two concerts in your festival, which is why I accepted. I had hoped that it would be a chance to see you again. I’m very sad that this wasn’t the case and that I have to leave for Geneva today.

  Our old friendship carries more weight than any circumstance and we are both too near the end of our lives to forget it. I remain, with every wish for your health and happiness, your old Ansermet.20

  Stravinsky did not reject the olive branch. “Your letter touched me,” he replied.

  We are both too old not to be thinking of the end of our days; and I wouldn’t want to end those days weighed down by a painful enmity. Your letter relieves me of it completely [and] I am grateful to you.21

  In the end, Igor and Vera returned to New York on the 14th, without Craft, who was in Santa Fe preparing Berg’s Wozzeck. On the 15th they heard Foss conduct The Soldier’s Tale, with Aaron Copland as Narrator, Elliott Carter as the Soldier, and John Cage as an “opéra-bouffe” Devil,22 and a few days later they endured Larry Rivers’s production of Oedipus Rex, which cast the hero as a heavyweight champion in a boxing ring. According to one newspaper account, Vera “stood up and booed,” and she told the reporter: “It was a mishmash! But later, backstage, Larry Rivers asked me what I thought. I don’t like to lie: I do it only to make somebody happy. So I said, ‘Oh, I’m an old lady and very old-fashioned. Don’t ask me.’”23

  For Stravinsky’s own concert on the 23rd, Craft reappeared as if by magic, having somehow evaded an airline strike and flown overnight from El Paso, arriving on the morning of the 22nd in time to rehearse The Flood and the Symphony in Three Movements, conduct the two works in the concert, then fly back to Santa Fe the next day.24 The composer himself, helped to the rostrum by the pianist Paul Jacobs, conducted the Symphony of Psalms. It was a work that always made a profound effect when he directed it, even now that he was no longer able to command the performance in the fullest technical respect. Many—perhaps most—of the audience must have sensed that it would be his last appearance as a conductor in New York. It was a fitting end: “Alleluya. Laudate Dominum,” in C major. Paul Horgan, who was convalescing after an operation and arrived at Philharmonic Hall in time for this one work, found the whole experience almost unbearably moving.

  I was perhaps more than ordinarily susceptible in my weakened state; but it remains my conviction that that performance of The Symphony of Psalms … remains the summit of all musical performance which I have ever heard. His extraordinary vigour, his orchestral and auditory conception more acute than I had ever found it, and the glory of the writing itself—all brought me such exaltation as I had never known before in the concert room. This was not merely the gratification of the sensual pleasure one has in splendours of sound, or of the satisfaction for the intellectual faculty of detecting to the extent of one’s ability the structure of such an abstraction as a masterpiece of music. It was rather to a communion of spirit wholly achieved by means of tonal art that one was lifted.25

  One day in New York they dined at the Côte Basque with Elliott and Helen Carter. A man came up to their table, discreetly asked the composer for his autograph, then quietly returned to his own table. Stravinsky had not recognized him,
though they had met before. It was Frank Sinatra.

  STRAVINSKY had left for Europe in May with the Requiem Canticles almost but not quite complete. Since the Rochester trip in March he had written the “Rex tremendae,” and when Francis Steegmuller arrived after Easter to interview him in connection with the Cocteau biography he was writing, the composer was hard at work on the “Lacrimosa,” with its tearful, melismatic contralto solo. This particular piece is end-dated 27 April, but since the concluding sketch is written on a Hotel Pierre note-sheet, it seems possible that it was actually finished in May in New York: possible also that the “Libera me,” which is undated but likewise sketched on a Pierre letterhead, was partly composed in Manhattan, though completed at the end of the month in Lisbon. There was no particular hurry, since Seeger had always agreed not to press for completion, and nobody seems to have envisaged a performance much before Stravinsky’s eighty-fifth birthday in June 1967. Nevertheless, as soon as they got home on 25 July, he took up the instrumental postlude, with its clangor of bell chords so redolent, in their way, of the ceremonious chimes that conclude Les Noces, and within a fortnight or so he had completed the entire work. The final page of the Requiem Canticles is dated 13 August 1966.