Stravinsky
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Steegmuller, an urbane, cultivated New Yorker, had come with his young wife, the Australian writer Shirley Hazzard, who observed the household with a shrewd and attentive novelist’s eye. She was struck by the absence of prominent relics in the Stravinskys’ lives, considering the extent to which their conversation dwelt on the past. They talked with enthusiasm about Pushkin, about Russia, Diaghilev and Cocteau, Nijinsky and Ramuz. The house was comfortable but without conspicuous luxury, rather bourgeois in its furnishings, and dinner was excellent, cosmopolitan—with zakousky and endless Russian toasts, but the finest French wines, prosciutto, roast beef, first-class espresso, all enjoyed for their own sake, in no spirit of ostentation. As for their hosts, she was captivated by Vera’s now somewhat corpulent beauty, her immense, rather prominent blue eyes, her expansive mouth, “her whole face radiant with feelings and expression.” Like most people who met the composer for the first time, she was surprised, by how tiny he was and enchanted by his smile, which often seemed to burst out in childish pleasure at his own thoughts or those of his companions. He “leans forward with eyes beaming to make a point, looks [you] right in the eyes and listens, delighting in [the] interest of what he or [you] are saying.” She thought him “very frail but no invalid,” and he remarked that “my illness is thrombosis, not a heart attack, a brain attack. I ask my doctor, how long does it last? Not long, he said, but all your life.” They were sick of California, Vera especially. Almost everyone they had known there had died or gone away. So why not go back to Paris? Steegmuller asked. “My husband loves to be where his things are, likes to be at home, where he’s used to everything. When we were talking about our trip next month to Paris, I said we’ll be ten days in Paris in May, then fourteen days there in June. He said “Fourteen days! Why so long?”26
HAVING COMPLETED the Requiem Canticles by mid-August, Stravinsky could not bear to wait ten months for its performance. Almost at once he suggested to Princeton that the first performance might be arranged for December,27 and when this proved impossible he coolly proposed late September or early October, barely six weeks away.28 They would be in Louisville for a concert on 17 September in any case, and could come on directly to New York, where Craft would be able to prepare and rehearse the work with the help of Claudio Spies, who held a visiting professorship at Princeton that year. Craft had again been pressing Paterson to arrange a European tour for October, and there were firm plans with Adriana Panni for a double-bill of The Soldier’s Tale and Renard in Rome that same month, with designs by Eugene Berman and Giacomo Manzù. But Stravinsky had rejected everything, to the despair of Berman, who wrote querulously that “not since 1945 have my plans to work with you ever come off.”29 So October was clear, and Arthur Mendel (Stravinsky’s old editor at AMP, now chairman of the Princeton music faculty) swallowed hard and bravely accepted the date. The premiere was fixed for 8 October in Princeton’s McCarter Theatre.
“It will be another big flop,” Stravinsky had assured Lawrence Morton just after finishing the score.30 But he was reckoning without the circumstances and the special character of the music. It would, after all, be his first live East Coast premiere for almost seven years, and by far his most auspicious since, perhaps, the stage premiere of Agon or even the first Orpheus, nearly two decades before. For some years, moreover, his new works had in various ways been awkwardly skewed, toward their audience or their performers or both. The Flood had been a media failure, Movements had been a failure of communication in a barely adequate performance; Abraham and Isaac had aimed musically at the wrong audience, while the recent Variations and Introitus had simply been too short and too disparate to make a clear impact. Only A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer had perhaps succeeded, and that had been far away and effectively out of earshot. Critics of Stravinsky’s evolving serial method had had a field day; despite the brilliance of individual pages or movements, no single work, and certainly no group of works, had unmistakably clinched the issue of style and technique in his favor. They were an odd bunch of works, dislikable to many, to others evidence of failing powers and technical epigonism: the works of a master, no doubt, but masterworks, hardly.
From the start it seemed that Requiem Canticles would be different. Like the Introitus, but unlike his other memorial pieces, Stravinsky wrote it in a specifically elegiac spirit, pasting into the sketchbook as he went along obituaries of friends who died during its composition—an extraordinary reversal of his habitual refusal to associate his work with current events or feelings. Admittedly, the friends in question were not intimates of long standing, but rather a motley collection of more or less occasional calling or dining acquaintances, all of them as it happened famous: Varèse, whom they saw from time to time in New York; Giacometti, whom they had seen often in Paris since Souvtchinsky introduced them in 1957 and who had made a series of portrait drawings;31 and Evelyn Waugh, whom Stravinsky admired but had met only once, in 1949. Stravinsky had certainly been upset by Giacometti’s death the previous January, and he had told Souvtchinsky that he found it hard to accept (if for no other reason than that the sculptor was twenty years his junior).32 But Waugh’s death cannot possibly have affected him in any personal sense, and this fact leaves a slightly uncomfortable feeling that the pasting-in of newspaper cuttings and the inscribing of crucifixes was a self-conscious act, a gesture to the movie cameras of posterity, rather than a spontaneous token of grief. Another, less ungenerous, explanation is that Stravinsky found the detached tone of the printed obituaries useful precisely as a corrective to any tendency to personalize his Requiem setting, particularly in view of his own age and condition. He called them a “practical commentary,” presumably for his own benefit.33 They might suggest a poet who, before writing an epitaph, visits a graveyard to get himself into the right frame of mind.
Whether or not deliberately, the Princeton concert was planned in exactly the same lapidary spirit. It opened with Stravinsky conducting his Debussy memorial, the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, at an increasingly funereal tempo; then, after the three sacred choruses in their original Slavonic versions,34 Craft conducted the Variations in memory of Huxley and two performances of the Requiem Canticles divided by the concert interval. Finally Stravinsky conducted his Mass. A note in the program requested the audience not to clap after the new work, out of respect, presumably, for its solemn, quasi-sacramental character—though applause seems to have been permitted after the other pieces, and Stravinsky was in fact given a standing ovation both at the start and the finish, led—according to Craft—by the tall figure of Robert Oppenheimer, the atom-bomb pioneer, whom the Stravinskys had met at Princeton seven years before. “Even his feet,” Stravinsky had remarked, “are intelligent.”35 And Oppenheimer proved it by leaping to them and applauding ostentatiously as the composer mounted the McCarter podium.
Columbia had slated the new work for recording in New York three days after the premiere. It was a late-afternoon and evening session, and Stravinsky had doctors’ appointments in the morning, then lunched with Isaiah Berlin, intending to arrive at the Manhattan Center in time for the first session at four o’clock. But something happened to change his mind, and Craft arrived at the studio alone and, according to some reports, evasive about the likelihood of Stravinsky’s putting in an appearance at all. The plan, in any case, was for Craft to record the Requiem Canticles and Variations, scores which the composer himself was not technically able to conduct; but Stravinsky was down to record the Mass and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and it was also important to McClure, the producer, that he be there for at least part of Craft’s sessions so that the recording could truthfully be described as “in the composer’s presence.” So at some point there were anguished phone calls between the studio and the Hotel Pierre, and in due course Stravinsky and his wife appeared, the composer “grim and silent,” Vera angry and loquacious. They stayed only for a short time; Stravinsky did not conduct, and Craft somehow got all four works onto tape by himself, for the most part in the compose
r’s absence.
To interpret these events now, after so many years, is almost impossible even with the help of eye and ear witnesses. Stravinsky was still smarting over the matter of the Entremont Capriccio recording, while, according to Craft, Vera was cross with Columbia for their condescending attitude in “allowing” him to record the new work on condition that Stravinsky direct the Mass.36 Yet Columbia hardly needed this new version of the Mass, since they already had a perfectly good recording by the composer in their catalogue. It seems at least as likely that Vera was annoyed at her husband’s being dragged to the studio as a kind of stooge, merely to authenticate Craft’s recordings. If so, she was not alone. Claudio Spies, who was present, had also taken umbrage at what he saw as the exploitation of the ailing composer, and not only in the recording studio, but on the concert circuit as well. A few weeks later he wrote to Lawrence Morton criticizing Craft’s role in these activities and railing against the impending publication of Themes and Episodes, about which Stravinsky seems to have known nothing.37 Spies had said these things to Craft’s face at the recording session, and there had been a row. To some extent, he admitted, Stravinsky was perfectly aware of what was going on and acquiesced in it as the price of continued celebrity.38 The real victim of the situation, in his opinion, was Vera; and Morton agreed, while preferring, on the whole, to distance himself from the entire argument, as if it were a family dispute and none of his business.39 Morton’s real attitude, as he claimed after Stravinsky’s death but while Vera was still alive, was that there was nothing to be said openly against Craft that would not at the same time offend and injure the Stravinskys, something that he for one would never be prepared to do. “I came,” he told Pierre Boulez, “to love these people very deeply.” One day, when Vera too was dead, he would tell all.40 But like the book on Stravinsky that he worked on for a decade or more before abandoning it in the cause of friendship and affection, this later project also was destined to remain an unfulfilled intention, the documents of which perhaps still lie buried in the vaults of the Special Collections archive of UCLA, not to be revealed until the day of judgment.
Within twenty-four hours of this unhappy recording session they were back in Hollywood, and five days after that Stravinsky put the finishing touches to a short song for voice and piano, which, according to one report, he had started before the Requiem Canticles but left to be completed after it “by way of insuring that the mass for the dead would not be his final work.”41 This was a good story, but not one that made a great deal of sense. Stravinsky was frail, certainly, but so he had been for some time, and there is no particular sign that he regarded the Requiem Canticles as his swan song. Two months later he was at work on the initial sketches for a new piece for orchestra.42 As for the actual song, a setting of Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” it hardly conjures up the picture of a lengthy or complicated gestation. Just as the poem pokes fun at a certain form of academic rhyming verse, so Stravinsky teases the mechanical aspects of serialism by fitting Lear’s nonsense poem to a note-row of childlike plainness, in an unbroken quaver pulse, without bar lines, and with a single-line piano accompaniment that tracks (with one exception) through the same untrans-posed forms of the row. A fortnight after it was completed, Morton added it as a surprise item to the Monday Evening Concert on 31 October. This proved an even bigger risk than he had probably expected. Ingolf Dahl played the piano part, but the intended singer, Gloria Grace Prosper, fell ill two days before the concert, and her substitute, Peggy Bonini, struggled to master the mildly awkward, angular line and breathless phraseology of the three-minute song. She and Dahl rehearsed the day before the concert in the basement music room of the Stravinskys’ house. The ailing composer sat grumpily in his pyjamas picking holes in her performance, and there were ill-tempered scenes and much brow-beating, hair-tearing, and armwaving, not at all in the beatific spirit of the song, while Arnold Newman, who had been following Stravinsky round with a camera since the Requiem Canticles rehearsals, snapped away with merry indiscretion.43 The actual premiere was adequate at best, and afterwards Stravinsky complained to Dahl, slurring his words but with all “the old strength, flash, conviction,” that “everything is always too loud, too loud for me. More delicate—it should be like threads and it is like macaroni. On my piano upstairs, it is muted, you know, I can hear it right. It is like spiderwebs. One must speak softly in order to be understood clearly.”44
Stravinsky did not take a seat in the audience, but positioned himself in the wings, not wishing, perhaps, to display his unease at the performance of his new work. From there, he listened with rapt attention as a twenty-one-year-old pianist by the name of Michael Tilson Thomas played the last, C minor, piano sonata of Beethoven. Afterwards, Thomas told Dorothy Crawford, they “sat together backstage and drank tea, while Stravinsky talked about the sonata.”45 He had loved Beethoven’s music since the thirties, when he had listened to it obsessively as the spiritual basis of his own music in abstract classical forms and had countered Nouvel’s loathing of the unchanging harmonies in the late A-flat sonata with the remark that “that’s what’s marvelous: that Beethoven didn’t shun to go on and on and on with the same chord.”46 He might certainly have said the same about the Arietta of the C minor sonata. But more than that, it seems likely that he felt a special closeness—from behind his arras in the Leo S. Bing Center—to this music, which at times seems to ignore the ordinary concerns of the sublunary music lover and, as the platonic Stravinsky had himself observed in Dialogues, to address itself “not to the great unwashed, but to a select few, … to an intimate two or three, or perhaps only to the composer himself.”47
FRAIL HE MAY have been, but Stravinsky was not yet ready to abandon the touring schedule that, one way and another, had kept him alert and in funds for the past forty years. Before the end of the year they had flown to Honolulu for a pair of concerts with the dreadful local orchestra but with another brilliant twenty-one year-old, Itzhak Perlman, as soloist in the Violin Concerto.48
Later there were concerts in Columbus, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon. That Craft was the driving force behind this ever more alarming schedule can scarcely be doubted. He it was who promised Lina Lalandi the European premiere of the Requiem Canticles in return for repeat appearances in Athens and Oxford;49 and he who announced to Igor Blazhkov that they would be back in the Soviet Union the following summer, including a visit to Kiev.50 Paterson was booking yet another hair-raising European tour, including a London concert in March, visits to Liverpool, Newcastle, and Brighton, and a gala at the Paris Opéra, and meanwhile Peter Diamand, the director of the Edinburgh Festival, had got from someone the idea that the composer might come to Scotland to conduct the Symphony of Psalms. Every one of these European projects fell through, but the mere fact that they can have been contemplated—at least partly with Stravinsky’s knowledge—is a measure of the determination to shut out the full implications of his age and condition, obvious though they increasingly were to friends, associates, and, most worryingly, potential customers.
As for whose determination was the strongest, that was a moot point. Craft told Lillian Libman that Stravinsky dreaded the day when he would no longer be able to conduct. But it was apparent that Craft himself feared it at least as much, not for the sake of his own career (which was hardly advanced by stand-in appearances in front of audiences who had paid high ticket prices to hear Stravinsky conduct, or even by movie work like the United Airlines publicity film for which Craft conducted a series of Stravinsky excerpts that December51), but for fear of the consequences for family life in the North Wetherly Drive household.52 There were still times when the fears seemed groundless. In Chicago at the end of December, for a pair of concerts that were actually billed as his last appearances in that city, Stravinsky needed help onto the rostrum but once there managed at least to give the impression that he was fully in command. Nobody blamed him for the fact that, as one critic put it, he “did not make his exit with the kind of evening he deserv
ed.” The CSO, so brilliant in the Variations and Introitus eighteen months before, had taken a week’s Christmas holiday, and the orchestra for the Stravinsky concert was a pickup, including some CSO players but also some who seemed to have no more than a passing acquaintance with even such music as The Firebird and the Shrovetide scene from Petrushka. There was a faint echo of bad feeling from the dispute over studio payments that had prevented the recording of the Variations concert. The players pointedly failed to rise for the composer as he limped to the podium. Yet Stravinsky seems to have noticed nothing untoward, and when the Sun-Times critic, Robert C. Marsh, described the orchestra, probably rightly, as “a miserable pickup band that was struggling merely to play the notes,” Craft-Stravinsky fired off an unforgiving telegram to the paper’s editor: “Wednesday’s orchestra was a credit to Chicago. Your reviewer is a local disgrace.”53
No one was suggesting that the substitute orchestra in Chicago was in any sense a reflection of Stravinsky’s own failing powers. Yet there were distressing signs of a falling off in bookings, if not so much for that reason as because of the fear of cancellation. According to Libman, the Hollywood Bowl, where the master had conducted as recently as July, declined to engage him for 1967, and so did the Vancouver Festival.54 In Miami, where he and Craft directed a single concert (their first ever in Florida) toward the end of February, the date clashed with the local Philharmonic Ball, and only about half the orchestra were prepared to make themselves available. Three days later, Stravinsky himself took to the floor of the International Ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel and conducted the same 1945 Firebird suite and the final tableau of Petrushka for—Libman tells us—less than half his usual fee of ten thousand dollars: not that it mattered, since the fee was never paid in any case.55 Finally in March he reached what must have seemed almost the end of the road. After conducting The Soldier’s Tale at the Seattle Opera “with a vigor that belied his years,” as one reviewer put it, but in an “erratic” and “vague” manner, as Craft reported less indulgently to Libman on the telephone, he promptly cancelled until the late autumn all concerts that involved flying, on doctors’ orders.56 That finally ruled out any possibility of a European tour, but it also virtually eliminated bookings in the eastern half of the United States. In the second week of April, Craft took over an engagement in Lexington, Kentucky; concerts planned for St. Louis and Milwaukee later that month were quietly dropped; and after that there was not a single contracted booking but of course the usual optimistic clamor from distant impresarios who either did not hear the bush telegraph or preferred to ignore what they heard. Of all the various dates Stravinsky could have taken on at this moment, only one recommended itself as properly worthy of consideration, a Toronto concert in May that would involve only the physically undemanding Pulcinella suite, together with Oedipus Rex conducted by Craft, with an absolutely dependable orchestra and an organization that knew the maestro’s needs and could be relied on to make him feel welcome.57