Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Probably no such actual thoughts crossed his mind. Perhaps even, as Libman—who was with them for the first two or three weeks—suggests, he mostly neither knew nor cared where he was.44 She relates how for the first few days he lay in bed, almost too weak to move, barely recognizing those around him. Theodore came from Geneva with Denise, but he found his father remote and uncommunicative. Craft, on the other hand, depicts the composer in top form, visiting the nearby church at Neuvecelle with them on the second day, crossing himself with holy water, then smoothing his hair with it.45 Kitty arrives with her little daughter, and Rufina Ampenoff comes from London. As before, Stravinsky is the still center of all this coming-and-going, but at times he is well enough to participate. When Souvtchinsky comes from Paris for a few days, they all go for a drive round the lake to Montreux and Clarens, though even Craft admits that the composer takes little or no interest in Les Tilleuls and the rue Sacre du Printemps, and Souvtchinsky afterwards describes the whole atmosphere to Lawrence Morton as “sad and sinister.”46 His eighty-eighth birthday he celebrates by demanding to see his old nyanya, Berthe Essert, then with a celebratory lunch attended also by Theodore and Denise, at which he downs two large helpings of caviar and a cocktail of medicines topped off with vodka and champagne.47

  The truth no doubt is that, while he was physically frailer than ever, his mood and spirits varied from day to day, to some extent according to whom he was with. Theodore came every few days, and he often found his father silent or disagreeable—the perennial lot of close family in the presence of the old and ill.48 Soulima, though he spent at least part of the summer at Françoise’s family home at Menet in the Auvergne, did not come, deterred perhaps by the difficulty of the journey and his troubled relations with Vera.49 Finally, Xenya arrived from Leningrad via Paris and was shocked by what she saw. Vera had aged but was still modishly turned out: fashionable hairdo, white dress, huge red earrings, sky-blue eyelids. Uncle Igor sat slumped in an armchair near the French windows onto his balcony, incorporeal, vacant-eyed, like some creature from another planet. “He sat with us, but it was as if he wasn’t there. When you spoke to him, his look would revive with an agonizing intensity, then after a brief reply in the softest of voices, would dissolve again and depart to some place of not-being.”50

  Xenya came with an invitation from the Soviet authorities. Stravinsky was known to be thinking of moving back to Europe. He should come and live in Russia, where he would be treated like a hero, permitted to live where he liked, and given the best medical treatment. Xenya knew, of course, that her uncle was no longer well enough to make such a decision, and she also knew that Craft would never agree to the move.51 She hesitated to speak. But then Vera unexpectedly raised the issue with her. Where should they go next? France? No, Paris was too noisy and the doctors wouldn’t make house visits out of town. Why not Russia? The question hung in the air without reply. And then … where should we bury him? “In Russia! He’s Russian, and they wanted to ask him to go back for good. But if he’s now too old to go, then let him return to the Russian soil.” Vera had never even thought of it, but she was not averse to Xenya pursuing the matter with Moscow. Above all, she detested the idea of her Igor being buried in America, in particular Los Angeles, a city that had not even remembered his eighty-eighth birthday. “I thought of Venice,” she went on. “Igor loved Venice so much, so many of his works were first played there, and Diaghilev is buried there.”52 A plot lay vacant at Ste. Geneviève-des-Bois, but Vera did not mention it.

  IN SPITE of everything, at the end of the Évian season they went straight back to New York, as Vera had told Xenya they would.53 They had again looked at houses in Switzerland, but they found nothing remotely suitable, and the Essex House lease still had more than a year to run. Their expenses, though, were enormous. Quite apart from the rent, they had annual medical costs (Craft reported) in the region of a hundred thousand dollars, and their sole income was royalties plus whatever they could raise from the sale of Stravinsky’s manuscripts.54 So Vera yet again set off in search of a cheaper apartment; and meanwhile the question of the archives—who might buy them, and how best to use them until they were sold—once more became an issue. At some time in October, Vera gave Francis Steegmuller, whose biography of Cocteau had just come out, authorization to research a life of her husband, making use of the archive materials in the Essex House.55 Soon afterwards, on 2 December, the New York Times reported that the Stravinsky papers and manuscripts were being put on the market at an asking price of $3.5 million, and it hinted that both the Library of Congress and the Soviet Union were among those who had expressed interest.56 On the very same day, Vera Stravinsky signed the escrow on an apartment at 920 Fifth Avenue at a price of twenty-seven thousand dollars.

  Craft later maintained that the entire Times report was false, but had been planted by the sales agent, Lew Feldman, in order to excite market interest in the archive.57 He added that on the day of the report he wrote to Theodore to explain this tactic, but that unfortunately Rufina Ampenoff had already seen the article and telephoned Geneva. As a result of this phone call, and before he received Craft’s letter, Theodore wrote a letter of strong protest to his stepmother, while at the same time supposedly retaining a lawyer, a step that would of course effectively have ended direct personal relations between them.58 To be exact, Theodore seems to have consulted a lawyer—not quite the same thing as retaining one—and he told Vera that he had done so.59 Moreover, it is hard to see what difference Craft’s letter could have made. Even if the Times article was an invention, it clearly indicated an intention to sell. Vera’s reply to Theodore, which Craft publishes in extenso (and which he probably wrote), shows little willingness to understand the anxieties of the composer’s heirs in such a situation. It treats the sale as inevitable and makes the fatuous insinuation that André Marion, in refusing to release the manuscripts, must also have meant to sell them. It complains of the children’s neglect of their father and their financial reliance on him, and suggests, unbelievably in the circumstances, that it would be more normal for aging parents to be supported by than to support their middle-aged children.60 Finally, it accuses Theodore of being more concerned about his own financial prospects than his father’s health, though it also manages to upbraid him for thanking Vera for looking after the father so well, which rather suggests that any direct enquiry about Stravinsky’s health would have been met with sarcasm.61

  The exchange reveals something of the paranoia that had incurably infected the attitudes of both parties to the quarrel. At Christmas, Robert Craft sent Souvtchinsky a bulletin that mixed abuse of the children with a certain grim satisfaction at the likely impoverishment of all Stravinsky’s heirs once doctors, lawyers, agents, and tax collectors had taken their cuts from any sale of the archive.62 Soon afterwards Vera cancelled the monthly payments to Theodore and Denise, and in March 1971 she also cancelled Kitty’s allowance. Meanwhile the children were briefing lawyers on their own account, apparently on the assumption that Vera was or would soon be misappropriating royalties, the Swiss money, the Rite of Spring autograph, Trapezoid shares, and assorted paintings and sculptures.63

  Amid all these accusations and counter-accusations, the composer’s vitality waxed and waned much as it had done for the past year. For obvious reasons, he was kept in ignorance of business matters and family squabbles, and actions in his name were almost certainly performed without his knowledge. His life moved from the bedroom to the dining room and back, with ever more infrequent excursions outside the apartment. Visitors came, and usually he received them or else lacked the force to refuse them. Elliott Carter dined at the Essex House one evening in December and they listened to The Magic Flute, “which [Stravinsky] particularly enjoyed, shaking his head and pointing out special beauties on the page.”64 Carlos Chávez came at the end of January and at one point in their conversation suddenly dropped to his knees in front of Stravinsky and almost wept, to Stravinsky’s visible disquiet.65 Nabokov called in regularly,
and they listened to Beethoven string quartets together. At one point Stravinsky whispered: “This music is now so close to me, Nika … ah … so very close …” On another visit, when Nabokov and his young wife were leaving to dine with Vera and Craft, Stravinsky took his hand and said, “Nika, don’t go away. Stay with me. Don’t leave me avec les femmes de chambres.”66 But when Nika asked routinely how he was, he suddenly turned on his old friend and snapped angrily: “You can see how I am, miserable.”67

  The new apartment was far from ready for human habitation. The elderly widow from whom they were buying it was slow to vacate and, when she did so, she left it in a dirty and decrepit condition.68 Lillian Libman, who was taken on as a full-time factotum early in February, spent a good part of every day there, “smothered in rubble, plaster, paint—pleading with twenty or more workmen to rush their reconstruction of the apartment with which Mrs. Stravinsky had fallen in love after a five-minute tour because its three bedrooms provided a beautiful view of Central Park.”69 It promised, nevertheless, to suit them well, it would be cheaper to live in and a proper home, furnished with their own belongings out of storage in Kingston. What was more, as February turned into March, Stravinsky suddenly took a turn for the better. On the 3rd he was actually composing, seated at the piano and intensely engaged. At the Essex House a year before, Lillian had caught sight of him through the open bedroom door, with a score of Bach’s 48 and a sheet of music paper on the piano desk. “He stared and stared at the paper for fully five minutes without moving a muscle or uttering a sound. Then he placed on the piano ledge a pencil he had been holding, took the paper and carefully tore it in half; and then he placed the two pieces together and tore them again in half, dropping the pieces on the floor.”70 But on this occasion he seemed to make progress. He announced that he had “had an idea beginning with a combination of tierces [thirds].” The next day he composed some more.71

  Craft’s account then peters out and we do not know what, if anything, was the outcome. But for a fortnight Stravinsky seems to have perked up and become more aware of his surroundings. Craft might once have claimed that the so-called Borborygms (“fragments of an interview”) dated early March in Themes and Conclusions took advantage of this improvement, though he subsequently admitted to having written everything in the book himself, including these bizarre—some would say distasteful—discussions of the virtues of euthanasia and the latest treatments for blood deficiency and heart failure.72 The real improvement was toward a greater cheerfulness and responsiveness. On the 15th they listened to Liszt symphonic poems and Stravinsky chuckled at the—as he seems to have felt—banality of much of the music (an occasion that became the subject of another Borborygm).73

  On the 16th he was photographed smiling at Vera and listening to her, their fingers touching. On the 17th he supposedly favored the New York Review of Books with his opinion on “the recent Warhol retrospective at the Tate.”74

  The next day, he was taken to hospital with pulmonary edema (water on the lungs), which was provoking dangerous bouts of coughing and unsettling his pulse. Nobody wanted him to go, and Libman protested.75 But the doctor was adamant. For ten days the sick master lay in Lenox Hill Hospital with wires and tubes into and out of most of the usual apertures and some created for the purpose. Still he refused to give in. His wit retained a residual acuteness. When Vera complained about his constant rapping on the bed rails to attract her attention, he replied, “I want to be sure that I still exist.” And when Rita, the nurse, tried to persuade him to swallow water with the argument that he was dehydrated, he complied with “Well, no one told me.”76 But sometimes his mind drifted into the past. He asked after his first wife, Katya, and when the nurse enquired how many children he had, he answered “four.”77

  Meanwhile the new apartment was emerging from its own brand of intensive care. Like its new occupant it had been plumbed and wired, unlike him it was being freshly repainted and newly furnished. On 29 March, when he was at last relieved of his fetters and taken home, it was to the Fifth Avenue flat that he went. He slowly toured the rooms, admired the new canary, expressed astonishment that he had suddenly become the owner of so seemingly luxurious an establishment.78 It was his first city apartment since leaving Paris in 1939, and he must have known, in his heart, that the associations would be the same. For nearly a week he was well enough to enjoy the new surroundings. Then on the morning of 4 April something changed. At first they had difficulty waking him, then he awoke with renewed symptoms of edema. Again the doctor advised hospital, but this time Vera insisted that the necessary equipment be installed in the apartment.79 Soon Stravinsky’s bedroom had been converted into an intensive-care unit. But this time there was to be no wit and no regression. He lay as if suspended between life and death, neither eating nor drinking, breathing more and more faintly, a dead man kept alive by the overpowering desire of those around him that his astonishing life should not end. So great indeed was this desire that it turned to belief. On the 5th, Ed Allen went back to Middletown, Connecticut. Late that evening, Vera went to bed and slept; Rita Christiansen returned to the room she still kept at the Essex House. Robert Craft, after prowling around uncertainly for an hour or two, went back to his room at two o’clock and fell into a shallow sleep.80

  Exactly how and at what moment Stravinsky died will never be known. Lillian Libman sat with him and the night nurse for a short time at about half past three. He was still breathing, but unevenly and barely audibly. She touched his legs and found them cold. She thought of calling Vera, but allowed the nurse to persuade her, somewhat irritably, that his condition was stable, and instead went back to her own bed, intending to read. It was a quarter past five when the nurse’s young assistant came in and shook her out of her doze. She hurried to the bedroom, but Stravinsky was already dead. “What happened?” “He simply stopped breathing.” “When?” “Just now.” The intern, Dr. Berger, who had also been asleep in the next room, was already making tests and wanted Lillian present. Before leaving the room, Lillian closed Stravinsky’s eyes. Then within minutes she was gently waking Vera, who understood instantly and sent her to tell Craft.81

  Craft relates the story differently.82 Lillian did, he acknowledges, wake him, but Stravinsky was still alive when he reached the bedroom, and Craft saw him die, “a simple cessation, without struggle.” His eyes were still open and there was life in them, and a flicker of recognition. Lillian had not yet woken Vera, and Craft performed that office, haltingly and with a degree of pantomime: “He is very bad … dying … I think … No … he is dead.” Together they sat holding his hands and kissing his cheeks and forehead. Then Vera ordered the mirrors to be covered, and left the room. Soon afterwards Rita arrived, closed the eyes, and embarked on the routine procedures that to the bereaved seem such an offense but that both symbolize and ensure the safe and unbroken continuity of life.

  In the office, Lillian Libman was already steeling herself for the world’s media. Craft went quietly to his room and began to write.

  ACCORDING to the death certificate, Igor Stravinsky died of heart failure at twenty past five in the morning of 6 April 1971. No priest came, though it was the Tuesday in Holy Week, the kind of date that in life he would have recorded as suitable for the completion of some notable work. It was on a Tuesday in Russian Holy Week on precisely the same date forty-five years before that he had written to Diaghilev, asking forgiveness for past transgressions as a mark of his return to the Orthodox communion “out of extreme mental and spiritual need.”83 Such sentiments, however, were not Vera’s, and they were certainly not Robert Craft’s. The barbaric (as he thought) Orthodox funeral custom of an open coffin with an icon on the chest of the dead body and a prayer on its forehead was quietly ignored in favor of a sealed coffin, “for V’s sake.”84 That evening in Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue, the bishop conducted a prayer service that Craft records merely as long and over-incensed. He was impressed, though, by the snowstorm that blew up as they set out for the se
rvice and by the rumbles of thunder that greeted the bishop’s pronouncement of the name of the deceased.85

  The funeral itself was set for Good Friday, the 9th, in the large funeral-home chapel. But it was even more than usually a rite of passage, for Stravinsky was not to be buried in New York, nor anywhere else in America, nor at Ste. Geneviève-des-Bois near his first wife and daughter, nor even in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery in Leningrad beside his father and younger brother. Instead he was to be flown to Venice and interred in the Russian corner of the island cemetery of San Michele, not far from the grave of Diaghilev, who had admittedly died in that city. Many asked: why Venice? Had he ever expressed a wish to be buried there? No, but it was a city he loved and the one in which he had stayed the longest and worked the best of any in Europe since the war. No fewer than five works of his had had their first performances there. The negative reasons probably remained unspoken. Neither Vera nor Craft would want to lay flowers on a grave in Los Angeles, or pick their way among the exiled princes and dispossessed Russian gentry of Ste. Geneviève-des-Bois to a sad group of consumptive Stravinskys. Leningrad was far out of reach, New York had meant nothing to the composer but hotels. Venice was beautiful, peaceful, and unspoilt, and Vera had been with him there through their happiest times. In due course she would lie there beside him. It was the choice of the living rather than the dead, and perhaps none the worse for that.