Stravinsky
Page 80
What followed imprinted itself in many different ways on the memories of those present in the Stravinsky suite that day. According to Vera Stravinsky, her husband had forgotten to give her a present for her name day, 30 September, and now remedied this oversight by presenting her with the manuscript of The Rite of Spring.57 In one sense, it was an outrageously generous present even for an Orthodox Russian, for whom a name day was a festival at least as important as a birthday; but in another sense it was no present at all, since the manuscript would presumably become hers in any case when he died. But there was a subtler point at issue here. As befitted its violent and disordered past, this particular autograph enjoyed a unique status among those manuscripts that remained in Stravinsky’s possession. It had never formed part of his archive, had never even crossed the Atlantic, and he had not set eyes on it since giving it to Diaghilev almost fifty years before. For its future owner, it was vital that it should pass out of its composer’s hands before he died, in order that it not form part of his legacy, to be argued and fought over and its cash value dissipated into the pockets of tax men and lawyers.
Alas for Vera’s present, nobody saw her husband give it to her, not even Robert Craft, though he later described the scene as if he had been there.58 On the contrary, Theodore insisted that his father had asked Rufina Ampenoff to take the manuscript back to London with her for safekeeping, and she had only not done so because she had not wanted the responsibility.59 Of course, from the family’s point of view, it was just as important that the manuscript, with its potentially huge market value, remain part of Stravinsky’s estate. But what did the composer himself care about such things? There he was in Switzerland, with the great manuscript no more than a few hours’ drive away; he would have been less than human if he had not felt some curiosity about it, some impulse of possessiveness. Perhaps he phoned; or more likely Vera did, though hardly without his approval. Perhaps she put the idea into his head, from more or less innocent motives. When Theodore arrived with the manuscript, its creator looked on it, as he might have looked on an injured child, and a sudden fury seized him. Or perhaps he was already seething at the memory of what this music had cost him and how it had been treated by its first audience. According to Theodore, he had already contemplated some kind of inscription, some outburst, some release for the years of suppressed frustration.60 But the words would no longer come. So Theodore and—reluctantly—Rufina helped him formulate his idea, first in Russian, then in French. At last he took a pen and wrote, in tidy, not at all distraught Russian, on the final page of the score: “May whoever listens to this music forever be preserved from the mockery of which I was the witness in Paris in the spring of 1913 at the premiere of the ballet production of “Le Sacre du printemps” in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Igor Stravinsky. Zurich, 11th October 1968.”61
Four days earlier, they had all—the Stravinskys, Craft, and Rufina—gone to Basle to inspect Stravinsky’s other major Swiss asset, his numbered account in the Swiss Bank Corporation. The exact motive for this visit is even harder to establish than the sequence of events surrounding the retrieval of the Rite of Spring manuscript. According to Craft, it was Stravinsky himself who expressed a wish to visit the bank.62 The composer’s children were convinced on the other hand that the impulse came from Craft, who had become uneasy about the powers of attorney held by Montapert and André Marion.63 Craft certainly suggests here and there that Stravinsky had become vaguely suspicious of Montapert’s activities. But this is contradicted by events in Basle, where he removed André’s name from the account and replaced it with Vera’s, but did not cancel Montapert’s power of attorney. Craft maintains that this was on the advice of the bank executive, whom he represents as in some unspecified way in league with Montapert. Stravinsky, he says, was so furious when he discovered that Vera did not have access to the account that he there and then tore up the agreement and demanded a new one.64 Some of this is far-fetched, and Craft once again admits that he was not present for all the events he describes. Nevertheless, it seems quite possible that Stravinsky had not previously realized that his wife’s name was not on the account, and that he was annoyed at the discovery. For him, no doubt, the point was largely symbolic, since Vera would have his money in any case.65 But for her and Craft it was material, since with a power of attorney granted by her he could have immediate access to the money in the event of her or Stravinsky’s death. This at least was what the children feared and what chiefly motivated their subsequent actions.66
In his deposition, Theodore referred to a letter that Stravinsky had supposedly signed in August 1968, in which he authorized Montapert to take steps to secure the Swiss money for the children, in the event that pressure be put on him to alter the account in Vera’s and Craft’s favor.67 Theodore had seen this letter, and he told the investigating lawyers that it had removed any scruples he might have had about certain procedures Montapert intended to take using his power of attorney. It seems clear that at this stage, for various reasons, Stravinsky’s children sincerely believed that their father was under Vera’s and Craft’s complete mental and physical control, brainwashed by them, effectively their prisoner. Unfortunately, the letter, which might show that Stravinsky himself feared this rather fantastic-sounding state of affairs, has never surfaced. The best that can be said for it (and it is quite a good best) is that it would explain many of the subsequent actions—often apparently extravagant and even paranoid—of the various dramatis personae in this closing act of the Stravinsky saga.
AFTER A MONTH in Zurich, they made up their minds against a permanent move to Switzerland, and instead, on 23 October, they flew to Paris. Three weeks later, having decided not to settle in France, either, they returned to New York. Craft kept Eugene Berman abreast of their thinking. The painter had favored Switzerland, was surprised by the switch to Paris, and astonished by the return to America, to the desert of Hollywood, with its “medical mediocrity,” or still worse New York, with its atrocious climate. “All of a sudden,” he wrote in November, “you all seem footloose and lost.”68 Vera, however, told Xenya that the idea of a Swiss move was a fantasy of Nabokov’s; Switzerland was a “boring” country, and as for Paris, this had been a serious possibility, but her husband had eventually found that he could no longer enjoy the French capital. “Too many doctors,” she explained enigmatically.69
But perhaps it was memories of The Rite of Spring as much as fear of French doctors that eventually told against Paris. Stravinsky had at last, reluctantly, gone to the Opéra to see Béjart’s nine-year-old and by now famous staging of the ballet, with its notorious simulation of the sex act in the “Danse sacrale,” and though he said little or nothing against the choreography, it is clear that the evening aroused disturbing memories. He had seen the work staged no more than once or twice since 1920. Yet “in the end,” he said after the performance, “the embarrassing thing about this ballet is the music.”70
Soon, in spite of everything, they were back at North Wetherly Drive, with little to show for their European excursion except a new Danish nurse, taken on in Paris, and a certain unease in family relations due to the changes to the Swiss signatories. Craft describes an agitated phone call from Montapert, and Vera refers to—without detailing—what she calls a “disagreeable conversation” with Soulima.71 Even so, any deterioration in the family atmosphere seems to have been mild and purely temporary and probably did not reach Igor. Milène called in to see him often, sitting with him, talking in the relaxed, desultory way of routine sickbed visits, sometimes bringing food he liked. Soulima came down from Urbana for a few days. Theodore wrote from Geneva on the thirtieth anniversary of his mother’s death, and received in return a brief but loving reply: “Deeply touched by your wish to be with me in feeling on this sad day. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”72 In April 1969, his paternal feelings were firmly at the helm, and early that month he signed a deed transferring ownership of the citrus grove at Yuma to Milène and André, as trustees for his
two sons and their wives.
Life at North Wetherly Drive returned in certain outward aspects to its old pattern. Morton, or Isherwood and Don Bachardy, would come to dinner. There would be visitors from farther afield: Alexei Haieff turned up from Salt Lake City, Goddard Lieberson from New York, Donald Mitchell, of Faber, from London. If there were no visitors, Stravinsky and Craft would often listen to music. But Stravinsky himself went out less and less, and there were constant health crises. One evening he felt ill at dinner, then fainted in the lavatory.73 He slept for much of the day, attended by a rota of no fewer than four nurses. He was increasingly awkward and ill-tempered with the nurses; he threw pillows at them, and not in fun. Craft must have described these scenes in detail to Berman, who wrote back: “how dreadful to witness the continuous breakdown and disintegration of a loved person.”74 Xenya had hoped to come to Hollywood, but in March, at Vera’s request, Milène wrote a discouraging letter.
I was at first delighted … that you might take up Papa’s and Vera’s invitation to come to Los Angeles, but now I don’t know when and how this will be possible as Papa is so ill. He was very sick after they got back from Paris, and now it’s not even certain that they’ll stay here. In December he had shingles, [which] lasted several weeks and has utterly defeated him.… He hardly eats, needs a huge amount of care.… There have been days when he hasn’t spoken a single word. He can’t walk and practically has to be carried.… Vera is exhausted.…75
In spite of all this, they were planning to return to Europe, since “all his friends are there, and here there’s hardly anyone of interest to him.” No wonder these friends expressed bewilderment. “What to think?” Souvtchinsky wrote to Morton. “Vera sends me a distress signal, but on the same day Bob tells Ampenoff that they’ll be in Paris in May.”76
Stravinsky still sometimes sat at the piano; and he was still writing notes on music paper. In Zurich he had drafted a partial and somewhat halfhearted three-voice setting of the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps his last attempt at original composition.77 And now, in April 1969, he settled down to transcribe the E minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Klavier for string orchestra, and the two-part Fugue for clarinet-and-bassoon duet. Soon afterwards he made a similar transcription for strings of the C-sharp-minor Prelude from the same volume. That was on the 18th of April. Two days later, incredibly, they flew yet again to New York, and there, in his suite in the Hotel Pierre, he arranged the C-sharp minor Fugue for a quintet of clarinets and bassoons, and the B minor Prelude and Fugue, also from Book I, for strings. Admittedly these arrangements were more in the nature of occupational therapy than practical work. Most sources do not list them among Stravinsky’s transcriptions of other composers’ music, they remain unpublished, and when Craft programmed them six months later in a Berlin Festival concert, he and Nabokov agreed that they were not per-formable as they stood, and withdrew them.78
Nevertheless the mere existence of these arrangements, with all their vagaries and confusions, is astonishing testimony to the resilience of the creative spirit. When incapable of almost any normal quotidian activity without help, he could still contemplate the intricate and solitary task of transferring music from one medium to another, and achieve it in a manner that was at least broadly coherent. On the 27th of April he attended a “Homage to Stravinsky” concert conducted by Craft at New York State University, Stony Brook. It was the last time he appeared in public. On 1 May he was photographed in his room at the Pierre working on Bach’s B minor Fugue.79 The following day he was taken into hospital with an embolism of the left leg, and during the next two days, in his already parlous physical condition, he underwent two major operations for the removal of enormous blood clots from the leg. Against all prognostications he survived, then promptly went down with pneumonia and was so weakened that Craft telephoned Milène in Los Angeles and told her to expect the worst.80 It seemed impossible that he would reach his birthday in a month’s time. Then just as suddenly, on the 26th of May, like the Emperor in The Nightingale, he sat up in bed, bid everyone a bright good morning, and demanded to be lifted out to continue work on the B minor Fugue.81
On 18 June 1969, his 87th birthday, he left hospital, and exactly three weeks later he was helped for the last time into a plane bound for Los Angeles.
36
A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE
IT WAS NOT a happy gathering at 1218 North Wetherly Drive. Eugene Berman had heard from someone that life at the Hotel Pierre had reached “an apex of intolerable confusion and hysteria.”1 Now Vera was exhausted and depressed, hated Hollywood more than ever, and disliked the house as much as before. She still had no cook and no regular home help, and the stairs were too much for her. Craft was himself in a nervous and edgy state, and he was in any case thoroughly undomesticated and not at all disposed to skim round with a feather duster or a vacuum cleaner, or take a turn in the kitchen. Marilyn Stalvey, the regular secretary, was fully employed by him in that and related capacities; Edwin Allen, who had taken a sabbatical from his job as a college librarian and was living for the time being in the house, was more in the nature of a driver and factotum.2
Stravinsky, though out of hospital and just about well enough to travel, was still distressingly frail, unable to walk without support, and often too weak to talk above a whisper.3 At times he scarcely recognized anyone except Vera and Craft. He could no longer work even on Bach arrangements, and his sole musical activity—almost his sole activity of any kind—was listening to the gramophone (particularly to late Haydn string quartets) with Craft. Twice during their first week in Hollywood he had to be taken back into hospital with respiratory troubles, and though a lung scan revealed no infection, Vera became unalterably convinced that his tuberculosis had resurfaced after lying dormant for thirty years. Stravinsky himself was skeptical. “The sickness,” he whispered, “is in my soul.”4 But the subsequent medical records tended to confirm her fears.5
Milène came as before.6 But the atmosphere had changed since the time when she could sit calmly with her father or chat easily with Vera. Vera’s manner had for some reason become cool and unwelcoming, and her comportment more protective, as if her stepchildren were casual visitors whose appearance in the house was a nuisance that had to be endured. One day in August, Soulima called with Françoise to see his father and was shocked not only by the old man’s condition but by the manner of their reception.
Prepared as we were by Milène, we did not expect the sight which faced us when we were admitted to his bedroom. He had lost so much weight that he seemed transparent. Vera and his nurse stayed by the sides of his bed all the time. I was allowed no more than ten minutes, in which I tried to express affection and concern. He looked like a ghost, his eyes so deeply sunk in a face which was but skin stretched on bones. Still he found the strength to bless me in Russian with a sign of the cross over my chest. We left in a state of utter desolation. To find him in such a condition was dreadful enough, but to find Vera so unsympathetic and unfriendly in times like this only added to our grief.7
Soulima does not ponder the reasons for this change, but one possible explanation must have crossed his mind. The day before their visit to Wetherly Drive, he and Françoise had met Milène and André at a motel in Cambria, a small coastal town halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and had come to an agreement over tactics in the affair of Montapert and the Swiss account. They knew, of course, that André’s power of attorney was being terminated and sensed that Montapert’s position was also in doubt.8 Vera had recently been grumbling to Milène about the lawyer’s uncommunicativeness, and perhaps she had dropped some hint about his power of attorney and the question of access to the Swiss money. It appears that at Cambria an agreement was made to instruct Montapert to use his power to remove a substantial sum from the Swiss account, in order to place it beyond Vera’s and Craft’s reach.9 Small wonder that, at Wetherly Drive the next day, Soulima felt ill at ease, troubled by his own scruples. The mutual suspicion had begu
n to verge on paranoia. Soulima looked around him and noticed that “the place was already empty of pictures and it was obvious that the move my father had opposed for so long, the final move to New York, was going to take place soon.”10 Craft speculates cynically that the object of the visit was to ascertain “how long [the composer] might last,” and he claims, somewhat improbably in the circumstances, that Stravinsky feigned illness and stayed in bed, purely in order to curtail it. Warming to his theme, he adds that the visitors went past Vera’s door “without speaking to her or even enquiring about her.”11
By this time, if Craft is to be believed, Montapert’s position as the Stravinskys’ lawyer was already somewhat worse than precarious. In fact they had firmly made up their minds to discharge him. In his diary, Craft says that the immediate ground for Montapert’s dismissal was his evasiveness over the rendering of financial accounts.12 But in “Cher père” it turns out that he was fired because he was caught tapping the Stravinskys’ phone. A friend of theirs, Laure Lourié, warned them that Montapert was tapping her phone and arranged to set him a trap by telephoning Vera, whereupon he obligingly gave himself away by repeating the contents of the call back to her.13 The story is, of course, incredible as it stands. Vera herself later recalled that Montapert had voluntarily resigned both his brief and his power of attorney at a meeting with Craft in October 1969.14 Sometime in September, he had gone to Basle and removed money from the composer’s account, using his as-yet-uncancelled power. It seems reasonably clear that the intention was not the (obviously criminal) one of robbing the composer, but that of placing the money for the time being outside Vera’s (and a fortiori Craft’s) control. There is, as we have seen, circumstantial evidence that Montapert was acting with Stravinsky’s at least partial knowledge.15 Nevertheless, he was soon advised by independent lawyers that he was risking a charge of embezzlement, and he accordingly hastened to put the money back into the Swiss account. It was a race against time worthy of Hitchcock. Craft was conducting in Berlin early in October, and from there flew straight to Basle, where he was to meet Montapert on the 3rd and sign the audited accounts on behalf of Igor and Vera. Montapert had barely had time to reinstate the funds, while Craft, for his part, later claimed that he signed the papers without being given a chance to read them, which may have been a necessary fiction in the context of subsequent litigation, since his signature presumably amounted to an agreement that no irregularity had taken place, though he must surely have been aware that one had.16