Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  A somewhat more covert aspect of Stravinsky’s tax-avoidance regime was his numbered bank account with the Swiss Bank Corporation in Basle, which he used as a repository for European payments that he did not wish to come to the attention of the U.S. revenue service. Such accounts were of course illegal for U.S. citizens under federal law, and Montapert seems to have convinced the composer that in the event of his and Vera’s simultaneous death, the Swiss money would be difficult to repatriate or would be in some other way a legal embarrassment. In April 1962, he persuaded them to sign a transfer of the entire numbered account into the names of his three children.26 Later, his granddaughter Kitty’s name was added to this document (as Mika’s heir), and later still, at the end of 1965, the account was put into the sole name of Stravinsky’s son-in-law, André Marion. According to Robert Craft, Stravinsky was unaware of this last change, which was made under Montapert’s power of attorney. Craft points out that Montapert was an old acquaintance of André’s and that it was André who had introduced him to Wetherly Drive, and he represents the manipulations in respect of the numbered account as an attempt on the part of the two men to misappropriate all or part of the Swiss money.27 Craft’s account of these transactions is characteristically self-assured, but like much of his work it is riddled with bias, error, supposition, and falsehood, and it suffers above all from what one might suppose to be a crippling disadvantage for any fair-minded reader—namely that he was in effect a party to the dispute that he purports to describe with such meticulous objectivity.

  At the root of this developing quarrel was a simple fact to which Craft hardly ever alludes but which to many would be self-evident. Stravinsky was an extremely rich man in increasing but not yet terminal ill health, with three married children by his first wife, a second wife with no children, and an in-house surrogate son thought to exercise a strong and possibly growing influence on both him and his wife. Such situations can be entirely manageable and fair to all parties, but they breed suspicion, and as old age advances, the suspicion increases. Craft had a reputation for blocking access to Stravinsky, and by the mid-sixties this tendency, which he has never denied, was affecting the composer’s own family. As Stravinsky’s health and mobility declined, it was natural for the two dominant people in his life to make decisions about whom he should see, when, and for how long. No less understandably, his own children feared and resented this state of affairs. They came to feel that Craft was exerting control by a form of censorship, whereby Stravinsky was told only those things that it was thought desirable he should know.28 Messages were conveyed selectively, or not at all, and little by little Vera herself became perhaps unknowingly complicit in this process. Rightly, she protected her husband against intrusions on his work, well-being, or equanimity. And perhaps in the end she performed this function a shade too assiduously. Certainly her stepchildren thought so. She and Craft gradually assumed in their eyes the character of a hostile alliance cutting them off from their father. Vera was said to be putting it about that the children did not care about him, never telephoned or wrote, and hardly ever came to see him.29 Worse still, she and Craft behaved in public as if they were in league. They would walk off together at airports, leaving Stravinsky to the tender mercies of his wheelchair attendant; or they would abandon him outside restaurants in the late evening and go window-shopping while he waited for a taxi.30 Then there were the stories that they sometimes held hands and that Stravinsky had complained about it.31

  Whatever the exact truth of such rumors, their mere possibility was enough to send a shiver down the family’s collective spine. Stravinsky’s monetary wealth, in the form of royalty income, equities, and bank deposits, was not vulnerable while he was still living; but as soon as he died it would pass to Vera. Under a will drawn up by the Montaperts themselves in 1960, the property was not even entailed to the children, but would pass to Vera in absolute ownership.32 Later wills seem to have established the principle of a trust whereby the children (and Craft himself) would inherit on Vera’s death. But meanwhile there was clearly nothing to prevent her, perhaps under pressure from Craft, from gradually disposing of or spiriting away the countless objects of art, books, manuscripts, and letters that were hung or shelved or stored at 1218 North Wetherly Drive. No proper inventory existed of these items, and even if there had been one, it would have been perfectly normal and proper for Vera to dispose of them to pay her husband’s soaring medical bills. In short, Stravinsky’s children feared her controlling hand and the hand that they were afraid controlled it, now that their father was apparently no longer in full command of the situation.

  It must have been Stravinsky’s attorney, Montapert, who alerted them—through André—to the fragility of their situation as their father’s heirs, and presumably who also advised them on what steps to take. Exactly why he acted in this way is by no means obvious. That he sought his own financial advantage can hardly be doubted, but he may also—as the composer’s lawyer—have believed, or at least been prepared to argue, that in using his power of attorney to transfer funds without the client’s knowledge he was fulfilling the client’s underlying intentions in the face of risks that, for obvious reasons, could not be explained to him. Broadly, the strategy appears to have been to make systematic withdrawals from the Swiss account in Montapert’s own name and that of André Marion, under the protection of the illegality of the account and the composer’s complete trust in him as a professional adviser. To what extent Marion acted with his wife’s knowledge or that of his brothers-in-law is similarly unclear, though the fact that they never seem subsequently to have held his actions against him argues that they were broadly aware of the strategy, if not of the tactics. As for the Wetherly Drive Stravinskys, they obviously suspected nothing until a series of incidents during 1968 brought the whole matter into the open in such a way as to make a breach inevitable.

  WHEN HE LEFT hospital at the end of November 1967, Stravinsky was weak and in poor spirits. For a long time he could neither work nor go out. When Craft was there, they would listen to music together; when he was away—for instance, conducting in New York in mid-December—the composer would grow bored and unsettled, deprived of this contact with the musical mind that he felt to be closest to his own. Then suddenly his health would seem to improve dramatically. Craft would find him talkative, and alert in memory and concentration, where previously he had been supine. Then again there would be a relapse. Toward Christmas he suffered what was probably another mild stroke, which depressed him once more, robbed him of clear speech, and left him drowsy and immobile. For the second time in as many months, his life seemed to hang by a thread.

  Yet he himself was by no means ready to give up the struggle. He still fully intended to honor his conducting engagements in Oakland in February and Berkeley in May, and he was soon practicing and marking up scores with that in mind.33 A European holiday was planned, and even a trip to Morocco to visit Ira and Ganya Belyankin, an idea originally mooted, then abandoned, a year earlier. Such projects would have struck anyone who saw Stravinsky that Christmas as pure make-believe; and indeed he did not conduct in San Francisco or anywhere else. But he did go to Oakland, sat in on rehearsals, and took a bow from the stage at the end of the concert; he was in San Francisco for the Berkeley series; and in between, he flew to Phoenix for The Rake’s Progress, in Sarah Caldwell’s latest staging—a trendy, multimedia affair very different from her Boston student production of fifteen years before. Any lingering question of flying to Switzerland in June, however, was rapidly abandoned when the maestro somehow dislocated a vertebra on his return from San Francisco and was confined to bed for a month, after which he was strapped into a corset so gross that he tore it off in a rage.34

  Above all, he never renounced his intention of returning to composition. Not until January 1968 did he finally abandon the piano work he had been sketching before his illness, and even then he persuaded himself, as we saw, that he was putting it aside in favor of something bigger.35 What this would
have been is a matter for conjecture: perhaps the work for piano and instruments that Edwin Allen mentioned to Neighbour a few months later, or perhaps even the opera that Stravinsky mentions in his diary for April, and for which he says Craft agreed to write the libretto.36 Craft himself never referred to this intention, but three days later he wrote to Igor Blazhkov that Stravinsky had again settled down to composition and was “full of projects and ideas.”37 Some of these were more modest. In his San Francisco hotel the following month, he started making arrangements for voice and ten instruments of the final two songs in the first volume, the so-called “Geistliche Lieder” (“Sacred Songs”), of the Spanisches Liederbuch by Hugo Wolf.38

  Even when no longer able to put his hand to original work of his own, he lived up to his reputation for the utterly unpredictable. If he had suddenly produced a wind instrumentation of Isolde’s “Liebestod,” it would hardly have been more out of obvious character. Yet on closer study it is not hard to see what attracted him to these somewhat morose, fin de siècle lieder, which he had fallen for a few months earlier during a listening evening with Craft.39 In the first and much shorter of the two (“Herr, was trägt der Boden hier”), the accompaniment is cleanly divided into two distinct figures that never combine, and that he therefore scores antiphonally, the one always for wind (three clarinets and a pair of horns), the other always for strings. The long second song (“Wunden trägst du, mein Geliebter”) splits less clinically; but the underlying idea is the same, of opposed colors and figures, sustained by multiple repetitions. Oddly enough, this might be a description of some piece by Stravinsky himself: the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, say, or Threni. It is as if he had taken hold of one aspect of Wolf’s music, and changed it from an introverted late Romanticism into something frozen and iconic, by emphasizing its structure over its line. But no doubt the real attraction of these songs lay in their uncompromising treatment of the subject of sin and death, which Stravinsky wanted to ponder but no longer felt equal to dealing with creatively.40

  In one other respect these arrangements share an attribute that has run through Stravinsky’s work like a vein of crystal: the quality of detachment from daily life and current affairs. While he was occupying himself with the crown of thorns and the blood of the Savior, the world seemed more than usually set on its own road to Calvary. In America, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, campus disturbances, and anti-Vietnam War riots; in France, the événements of May and June; in Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion; all these events made 1968 one of the most politically momentous years since the war. Insofar as Stravinsky’s work or correspondence reflect any view on them, it is, if anything, a liberal one. But it is the passive liberalism of an old man whose mind is turning away from the Third World and toward the Next World. Invited by Stephen Spender and Isaiah Berlin to sign a letter in support of the Litvinov-Daniel appeal against the show-trial conviction of a group of dissident writers in Moscow, he complied apparently without hesitation, but then drew up a statement of his own (with, of course, Craft’s help) which revealed a certain vagueness as to who these dissidents were and why they were important.41 A few months later, when Sol Hurok asked him to put his name to a letter in support of Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic presidential nomination, he declined on the grounds that he was supporting Eugene McCarthy—that is, the left-of-center, stop-the-Vietnam-War candidate.42 Yet when Bobby Kennedy, who was also campaigning against the war, was shot early in June, the assassination found no echo in the composer’s letters, though both Françoise and Theodore expressed concern in letters to him.43

  Only after King’s murder in April did he show any tremor of a creative response, in the form of “an extra instrumental prelude” intended for inclusion in a choreographed version of the Requiem Canticles that Balanchine was staging with the New York City Ballet in King’s memory. Stravinsky started writing it on the 17th, a fortnight after the assassination, but gave up when he realized that he would not finish it in time for the performance on 2 May.44 No sketches for this music survive, and Stravinsky never saw the ballet (which was danced only once), except possibly on a film that was sent to him soon after the performance.45 But he seems officially to have approved of the idea. “I am honored,” he wrote tactfully to Balanchine, “that my music is to be played in memory of a man of God, a man of the poor, a man of peace.”46 Whether this pious statement reflected his actual opinion of the choreographing of one of his religious works may be doubted. Craft, who also at most saw only the film, described it to Berman in terms that prompted him to reply that it “sounded ghastly.”47 Stravinsky himself never otherwise referred to it at all.

  As the summer advanced and Stravinsky’s vertebrae settled down, the idea of a Swiss holiday resurfaced. The composer’s health was indeed astonishingly improved. It was true, as Lillian Libman observed, that the critics who attended the “Homage to Stravinsky” concert put on by Morton in the museum on 6 September remarked generally on his gaunt and decrepit appearance. But then, she goes on, they “had no way of knowing in detail the victories he had won during the preceding weeks,” which she did know as she had been living with the Stravinskys since June.48 The composer had come to hear Craft conduct the premiere of his Wolf arrangements, sung by Christina Krooskos, together with the original and revised scores of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and Les Noces in three different versions or part-versions, including the original chamber-orchestral score on which Stravinsky had worked with Ramuz in Morges in 1917 and the curious revision for pianola, harmonium, and cimbaloms, about which Diaghilev had grumbled to Ansermet in 1919.49 What Stravinsky thought of the early versions of the ballet, which he had never previously heard, is not recorded; but he did not like the 1920 version of the Symphonies, which he had heard Craft conduct in Cincinnati in 1965, and he now took abruptly against the idea of publishing.50 It was one of a number of things he would soon have an opportunity to discuss with the directors of Boosey and Hawkes.

  Two days later they flew to New York, where as usual there was so much socializing that Stravinsky was showing signs of wear and tear by the time they boarded the plane for Zurich on the 24th.51 They were staying in the Dolder, Zurich’s grandest and best-placed hotel, set in a wooded park on the southwestern slopes of the Zurichberg, with long views of the lake and the city. “I don’t want to go back to California,” Stravinsky remarked, perhaps understandably, when he saw his suite in this luxurious establishment. And they were in fact yet again contemplating a permanent move to Switzerland, as Craft and Vera—who hated Los Angeles more than any of them did—had been at pains to inform their European friends.52 Meanwhile they were booked in for what would prove to be, in a number of ways, one of their most expensive ever months in the country.

  Although ostensibly a holiday, the Zurich trip was not without its business aspects. Above all, Stravinsky (or perhaps Craft: it becomes increasingly difficult from now on to decide who is in charge) was anxious to resolve the question of the publication of his archives. What exactly was the difficulty? From Stravinsky’s point of view, it was partly financial. Whether or not he planned to sell any or all of the archives during his lifetime, the loss of the publication rights would certainly reduce their value. But it was his heirs for whom this was the greater worry. Craft was uneasy about the agreement already struck with Souvtchinsky and felt that the composer had been bamboozled into signing it. But Craft had quite another reason for disliking Souvtchinsky’s editorship, which threatened to attenuate his own firsthand authority in the matter of Stravinsky documentation. Knowing no Russian, with limited German and no more than decent French, he could hardly present himself as sole editor of so polyglot an archive, though since Souvtchinsky had no English and quite lacked his detailed knowledge of the musical materials, Craft would obviously be involved in some editorial capacity, probably (as usual) without proper recognition. Souvtchinsky himself visited Stravinsky at the Dolder a few days after their arrival, but he
was not present when Rufina Ampenoff turned up with a new contract letter, this time appointing Souvtchinsky as archive editor at an annual stipend of three thousand pounds, payable from Stravinsky’s royalties.53 Stravinsky, Craft maintains, did not want to sign this letter and only did so under pressure from Vera as a way of helping Souvtchinsky, even though—Craft adds somewhat illogically—he no longer wanted to publish the archives (he could, after all, simply have given Souvtchinsky the money, as he had done on at least one previous occasion).54

  Theodore Strawinsky had already spent one day with his father at the Dolder and was expected again two days after the signing of the contract. He had found him, he told his cousin Xenya, “imprisoned in an armchair, waited on by nurses, but his reason intact, having to take things to make him sleepy.”55 On the day of the signing, Vera (or in some accounts Stravinsky himself) telephoned him in Geneva and asked him to bring with him the manuscript score of The Rite of Spring, which, it will be remembered, Booseys had presented to the composer in 1962 and sent to Theodore on his instructions, with a view to its sale.56 Theodore had not in fact managed to sell it, but had deposited it in the Geneva branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland. On 11 October he and Denise came to Zurich with the precious manuscript and handed it to its author in his hotel suite.