Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Stravinsky had been weak and, in a general sense, sickly for so long now that he was capable of interpreting quite severe attacks as nothing worse than bad days. There must have been some such episode in mid-March. His 1967 diary has not survived, and Vera’s is silent about any specific illness but notes on 22 March that he is “better.”58 Only later, in the green room of Toronto’s Massey Hall, did he confide to Craft that he thought he had had a stroke.59 When they arrived in Toronto on 12 May, he looked so weak and ill that Libman, who met them at their hotel and went with them to rehearsals, had serious misgivings about CBC’s intention to televise the concert and even, no doubt, about the concert itself.60 Vera, too, was exhausted, and Craft was suffering from a kidney infection. But they all seemed to recover by the first rehearsal the next day, and there were grounds for hoping that all would be well for the concert itself on the 17th.

  In a sense it was. The works were performed to a packed auditorium, there were scenes of wild enthusiasm and standing ovations, and at the end of his part of the program Stravinsky was presented with a medal by the chairman of the Canada Council. But when the critic of the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that “the performance of Pulcinella fell somewhat short of perfection, but the fault did not appear to lie with the conductor,” he was being more diplomatic than candid.61 In truth the orchestra’s performance bore hardly any relation to the conductor’s arm. For the most part, the players stuck to the tempi and nuances of Craft’s rehearsing and did their best simply to ignore Stravinsky’s beat. But in places where, all the same, a beat was essential, the result was scrappy and at times chaotic. Once or twice the performance came near to collapse. For the first and last time in his life, Stravinsky conducted sitting down, yet even so he had to steady himself for much of the time, Craft noticed, by gripping the podium rail with his left hand, which made properly nuanced conducting virtually impossible.62 For a long time his beat had been unclear and erratic, his tempi unpredictable, his control a matter of presence rather than technique. But now he sat in front of the orchestra like a moving icon, a symbol of the music, no longer its master.

  It was fifty-three years and one month since a reporter in Montreux had remarked of his debut performance in the scherzo of his E-flat symphony that “the fact that M. Stravinsky himself was conducting contributed in large measure to the success of the concert.”63 As with his first concert, so with his last.

  35

  A FAMILY AFFAIR

  HOWEVER IT MAY have seemed in Toronto, Stravinsky had no immediate idea of retirement. For one thing, he still had an active recording contract. As recently as January, John McClure had sent a list of the works not yet recorded by Columbia and proposed a series of mopping-up sessions.1 That same month, in Hollywood, Stravinsky had (for the second time) recorded his 1945 Firebird suite. Meanwhile the European concert tour that Robert Paterson had been arranging for that summer was still theoretically on, although Libman noted in January that the Stravinskys were “determined to make this a vacation trip.”2 Even after Toronto, she was still signing contracts for concerts the following winter, including a series of three with the visiting French National Orchestra. There was naturally a good deal of fantasy about such plans which often involved Craft, especially, in considerable personal inconvenience and embarrassment. As late as May 1968, he himself conducted a series of four concerts at Berkeley that had been advertised and sold out as being conducted by Stravinsky, even though all concerned except the paying public knew long in advance that he would not conduct, because he could not. Finally, the myth that Stravinsky was still composing died hard, even apparently among those who were close enough to him to know that it was not the case. In January 1968, Craft noted in his diary that Stravinsky had abandoned the piano work he had been sketching as he had “a bigger piece in mind.” Six months later, Edwin Allen, a young librarian they had met in Santa Fe in 1961, who had recently been cataloguing the composer’s books and acting as their driver and general in-house factotum, told the British musicologist Oliver Neighbour that the master’s next work was going to be “for piano and instruments with a solo section.”3 By this time, Stravinsky’s only work on staved paper was the instrumentation of songs by Hugo Wolf. Souvtchinsky had visited North Wetherly Drive in October 1967 and had seen, he told Yudina, the “new piano sketches (invention, sonata, variations).” “But can he write them?” he asked skeptically.4

  The fact is that those who lived close to Stravinsky or who saw him frequently knew the true state of affairs, in whole or part, but found it desirable to prevaricate, or at least evade the issue. For one thing, his own spirits had to be kept up, in the face of creative, physical, and, in due course, mental decline. Then again, those whose lives were enmeshed with him and his work naturally had their own reluctance to stare into the abyss. Like wives in Brahmin India, they feared the collateral death, the moral suttee, that would accompany his demise. Finally, there was the question of tax deductions, so crucial to the household budget but justifiable only for as long as Stravinsky was seen to be professionally active. Thus a yawning gap opened up between the public and the private realities. In the public eye, though no longer musically visible or productive, Stravinsky remained almost until the day of his death the alert, active, sharp-witted observer of the cultural scene, the scourge of critics, the sparring partner of interviewers. In March 1971, less than five weeks before he died, the New York Times ran a sprightly, venomous riposte, allegedly by him, to Clive Barnes’s review of the Béjart Firebird at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.5 By this time, many no doubt suspected that the composer was not the author of everything printed under his name (Barnes’s article shows that he knew but did not dare to say so openly, which may be what prompted the abusive reply to a review which, after all, was highly complimentary to Stravinsky’s music).6 But there were some, even in the trade, who did not want to see the nose on their face. Writing after the composer’s death, B. H. Haggin talked about “the prose writing with which Stravinsky delighted those who found nothing to interest them in his recent music,” referred specifically to a recent New York Review of Books article “in which Stravinsky commented with his usual perception and humor on the general New York scene,” and finally described the composer’s spat with Barnes as his “last public act,” with which, he concluded, “Stravinsky earned the gratitude of his fellow artists and the admiration of us all.”7 If a specialist writer like Haggin was incapable of seeing through the deception, one should hardly expect his readers to have done so.

  The private reality was that, for the final four years of his life, Stravinsky was physically decrepit, under constant medical supervision, increasingly in need of nursing, and on two or three occasions so terribly ill that his life was despaired of. Mentally, however, things were somewhat different. For a long time he remained sharp and aware; able to observe his own condition and treatment with dry, detached wit; lucid in reminiscence; voracious in reading and (with Craft) in listening to music, which, as the other faculties began gradually to fade, survived the longest of all his socio-intellectual pleasures. But his stamina and attention span were together shrinking. Though his reading (“still with a pack of dictionaries at hand,” Lawrence Morton reported) was mainly in English, he was finding it more and more difficult to follow conversations in that language, especially on intellectual topics, and Vera would often have to translate into Russian for his benefit.8 Socially, too, he had become short-winded, and more susceptible to the effects of drink. Dining at Wetherly Drive one evening that June, a few days before Stravinsky’s eighty-fifth birthday, Morton found him well and in fine form for about an hour, but observed that “after 3 scotches and a glass of Haut-Brion he [fell] into a stupor.”9 The atmosphere had become afflicted and oppressive, as so often in houses where age and infirmity have taken up residence. Vera, with her high blood pressure, struggled to keep house in the frequent absence of good professional help. Returning to Hollywood from Santa Fe, where he was conducting Hindemith’s Cardillac that su
mmer, Craft was overwhelmed by the sense of their loneliness and fragility, and their utter dependence on him.10

  Meanwhile the phlebotomies, electroencephalograms, and Roentgen treatments pursued their course, like the culmination of a thematic process that had begun with the fermented mare’s milk of Igor’s Pavlovka holidays six and a half decades before. And just as the youthful valetudinarian had reported with self-satisfaction on his intake of koumiss, so the octogenarian Stravinsky was rather pleased with his more scientific clinical data. “My blood is like purée,” he announced matter-of-factly in the Toronto green room, and as for his brain, he was fascinated by the encephalogram, which reminded him of some “electronic score with unreadable avant-garde notation,” and proud of the doctor’s assurance that “no impairment whatever to your mental faculties has occurred.”11 Then abruptly in late August the long-running soap opera of his health turned into looming tragedy. On the 21st he was rushed to Cedars of Lebanon hospital with severe hemorrhaging from a stomach ulcer, and by the time Craft flew back from New York, where he had been recording Gesualdo and Stravinsky’s The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, the composer had lost a huge quantity of blood and was suffering from an improbable syndrome of polycythemia and anemia, a combination of opposites like Theseus’s “hot ice and wonderous strange snow.”12 But there was worse to come. For two months after his return home he suffered agonizing pain from what appeared to be gout in his left hand, aggravated by a recurrence of the ulcer, high temperatures, and an alarming tendency toward pneumonia. For the first time, those around him feared the worst. The barrage of medications, injections, X-rays, and solemn professional examinations and pronouncements began increasingly to resemble the comings and goings round the deathbed of a medieval emperor. Then on 2 November his left hand unexpectedly went black, and it was quickly realized that it had suffered a thrombosis, a straightforward side effect of the polycythemia. His gout, like Dylan Thomas’s, had turned out to be a mirage—and a dangerous one at that, since (as with Thomas) the treatment for the condition was poisonous to his other, more threatening ailments.13

  Gradually, through the month of November in the hospital and the month of December at home, Stravinsky returned to something resembling his normal shaky health. The ulcer healed and the thrombosis dispersed; but the doctor who had mistaken the blood condition for a pain in the joints, and had thereby come close to killing him, was not forgiven. All his life, Stravinsky had favored professional advisers who loved his music and waived their charges, and his health, his lawsuits, and, ironically, his finances had sometimes suffered accordingly. But never before had he turned on an adviser as he and Vera now turned on the unfortunate Max Edel, the Viennese Jew who had been their Hollywood physician since 1946. Edel was a classic example of the old-fashioned cultivated doctor with a personal touch and a beautiful bedside manner, a profound love of art and ideas, but a certain distaste for the technological intricacies of modern medicine. There is a hint of obstinacy in his gout diagnosis in the face of the hand’s failure to respond to treatment; and when Vera consulted other doctors, he took umbrage and was promptly discharged. Robert Craft, who was fond of Edel, paints an affectionate portrait of him in his memoirs, but does not acquit him of the charge of medical incompetence.14

  AT THE END of October, when the pain was at its height and before the correction to the diagnosis, Pierre Souvtchinsky had arrived at North Wetherly Drive on a short visit. It was his first trip to America, and the first time he had ever ventured onto an aeroplane. The two old friends had corresponded regularly throughout 1967, Stravinsky’s contribution being almost his only late writings (apart from family letters) that can confidently be treated as authentic. Souvtchinsky had recently been involving himself in a minor squabble between Gilbert Amy, the new young musical director of the Domaine Musicale, and André Malraux, the French Minister of Culture, over who should mount the first Paris performance of the Requiem Canticles, a dispute eventually resolved by Stravinsky in Malraux’s favor (despite a promise to Amy), probably because of the prestige of the actual event: the inaugural concert of the new Orchestre de Paris.15

  Now another issue had arisen, this time one that would involve Souvtchinsky more directly. The facsimile publication of the Rite of Spring sketchbook, which had been his idea, was still going slowly ahead, delayed partly by indecision over the exact contents of the supplementary text.16 But meanwhile a far larger and more ambitious project was being mooted: that of the systematic publication of Stravinsky’s entire archive, insofar as it was publishable and of general interest. The idea for this project seems also to have originated with Souvtchinsky, and it was probably first discussed when Rufina came to see the composer in Paris in June 1966. That autumn, Libman was set to tidying up and reorganizing the hundred or more cardboard boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, contracts, newspaper cuttings, articles, concert programs, and assorted documents and scrapbooks that Stravinsky, an instinctive hoarder since childhood, had accumulated in more than half a century of exile.17 No formal agreement had yet been struck, however, and it was only when Souvtchinsky himself put in his Hollywood appearance at the end of October 1967 that a contract was signed transferring publication rights to Boosey and Hawkes, and plans laid for the microfilming of the archive as the first step toward such publication.

  Why did Souvtchinsky make this strenuous and, for him, somewhat frightening journey? It might seem a sufficient explanation that Stravinsky had been seriously, even dangerously, ill and might well not be able to travel to Europe again. Recently, he had made gifts of money to his oldest friend, whose wife, Marianna, had herself fallen ill two years before and had ever since been unable to work.18 But perhaps all the same there was more to the visit than met the eye. Libman reported that Souvtchinsky’s trip had been engineered by Craft to help boost the composer’s morale.19 Yet curiously enough Craft later alleged that Souvtchinsky only came to Hollywood, having refused all previous invitations, because he had been suborned by Rufina with the offer of a contract to edit the archives himself in return for obtaining Stravinsky’s signed agreement to the publication.20 The allegation goes still further. It hints that Stravinsky’s condition was in some sense aggravated by Souvtchinsky’s visit, that he signed the contract against his will, and that, having achieved his object, Souvtchinsky “promptly” (that is, too promptly) left Hollywood. As usual, Craft gives no source for this information, which can in fact only be understood in the light of subsequent disputes over the editorship of the archive. The idea that Boosey and Hawkes tricked Stravinsky into signing away his own publication rights without reimbursement by sending an old friend to work on him while he was at death’s door is as ludicrous as it is revolting. But it requires only a moment’s thought to realize that Craft could not have known about any such plot, even had it existed. Did Ampenoff tell him? Did Souvtchinsky? Craft later, he claims, told Ampenoff that Stravinsky’s signature “would not hold up in court,” since he could be shown to have been under sedation for the whole of Souvtchinsky’s visit.21 Ampenoff thereupon prepared a new contract and took it herself to New York, where Stravinsky duly signed it in October 1969. So why the Souvtchinsky “plot,” and why the problem of sedation?

  The row brewing over the archives was not the only dispute gathering about Stravinsky’s bed of pain, nor was it by any means the most serious. A situation had arisen within and around the family that contained the seeds of a conflict that would long outlive its immediate cause. The material side of the problem had begun in all innocence early in 1962, at a time when Stravinsky’s lawyers, William Montapert and his wife, Arminé, had been examining various methods of reducing his tax liability. It was the Montaperts who had explained to him that by donating autograph manuscripts to the Library of Congress (among other public archives) he could deduct for tax the full market value of the donation, and they who saved him, at the end of 1963, from a looming fiscal disaster brought about by an unexpectedly early ASCAP royalty payment of forty thousand dollars.22 Stra
vinsky’s loathing of the Internal Revenue Service was therefore not surprisingly equalled by his gratitude to the Montaperts. “The qualities of your service can be explained,” he wrote to them in April 1963, “not only by your friendly feelings towards Vera and myself but also by [the] very exceptional skill in your work as my lawyers. You are artists in your field, devoted and creative artists.”23 The Montaperts had just crowned their artistry, in Stravinsky’s opinion, by setting up a mining company in his and Vera’s names, with the neat portmanteau title Verigor International and a stakeholding near Yuma, on the Arizona-California border.24 Verigor held regular meetings and business dinners; but its mining activities were largely notional. The point was, as Stravinsky explained to his Paris publisher, that investments were not subject to tax, while income of course was. “You understand that, in America, if you extract minerals from the ground, they subsidize you, but if you extract music from your head, they tax you.”25 Perhaps there were minerals at Yuma and perhaps there weren’t. Meanwhile, they had marked out the four corners of the holding and were planting a citrus grove.