Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  The Venetian funeral, on 15 April, was like a pageant by Carpaccio, one observer thought.86 Crowds thronged the campo in front of the Dominican church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo and beneath Verrocchio’s great equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni; many more hung from windows along the Rio dei Mendicanti and around the square, and the canal itself and the lagoon beyond swarmed with gondolas and motoscafi and launches and boats of every description. Banks of flowers lined the campo between the church and the landing stage. Inside the Gothic basilica a congregation of three thousand—family, friends, reporters, photographers and what Hofmannsthal happily called “the usual hangers-on”87—sat through a Requiem by Alessandro Scarlatti, a brief address by the mayor of Venice, some Andrea Gabrieli organ pieces, and a fairly speculative account of the master’s own Requiem Canticles conducted by Craft, then stood for more than an hour while the archimandrite of Venice chanted with exquisite refinement the Greek Orthodox liturgy for the departed, seemingly undisturbed by the television cameras and the flashbulbs, the fidgeting and shuffling of his predominantly Catholic audience, and the noise of the crowd outside, which drifted up the nave from the open west door. At the end of the liturgy the Archimandrite beckoned to the composer’s widow and the other members of his close family to come forward and kiss the coffin in farewell. Then the bier was wheeled back down the nave and through the campo to the waiting gondola that would serve as a hearse across the half-mile of open water to San Michele. From the island jetty, the pallbearers conducted the bier on its wheeled carriage through the elegant cloister of Coducci’s early Renaissance church and along the gravel paths, through the various sectors of the great marine cemetery to the distant and as yet relatively uncluttered Orthodox section in the far corner of the burial ground.

  There they buried the great composer to the sound of unaccompanied chanting such as must have rung in his ears at far-off panikhida services in the Nikolsky Cathedral of his childhood. The number of mourners was fewer now, though still considerable, and many that came without invitations were turned away—ineffectually, since the cemetery was public. After a brief ceremony, the coffin was lowered on ropes into the open grave. Vera walked unsteadily to the edge, threw in a handful of earth, and bowed to receive the Archimandrite’s blessing and to kiss his ring. One by one the members of the family stepped forward and threw earth onto the coffin lid. All around, the paths were lined with friends and casual onlookers, and on the wall above the grave the photographers clicked and flashed, anxious to miss no furtive tear or anguished gesture.

  Vera took Lillian’s arm and, with Craft at her side, walked slowly and painfully back to the jetty.

  37

  BUT NONE DO THERE EMBRACE

  THE TWIN FUNERALS of Stravinsky did not bring together the two sides of his divided family. For the New York ceremony, Theodore and Denise arrived from Geneva, Milène and André from Los Angeles, and Soulima and Françoise from Urbana, but they exchanged no words with Vera or Craft, who, perhaps partly to avoid such an encounter, had come very punctually to the funeral home and left for Florida that same evening. Theodore asked to see Vera, but she refused with the question: “Why didn’t they come to see him when he was alive?”1 apparently forgetting that Theodore, though he lived three and a half thousand miles away, had in the past two years made two separate visits to New York, been refused on another occasion, and seen his father many times in Zurich and Évian. By the time she reached Venice, she had relented sufficiently to ask Lillian to invite Theodore to a meeting; but this time he was unwilling to forget past refusals and told Lillian that “there could be no further contact ‘except through representatives.’”2 In the church, the stewards knew no better than to seat the “famigliari” in a single row, and there the cameras fixed them—Craft, Vera, Theodore, Milène, Soulima, John, Kitty, kept apart only by the benign, conciliatory figure of Nicolas Nabokov, their heads sunk in grief, a heartbreaking image of the incommunicability of sorrow and the contagiousness of anger.3

  Could the quarrel have been resolved there and then? It was probably already too late. The composer’s children had long since convinced themselves that, without deft legal footwork on their part, they could well end up without so much as a monogrammed handkerchief of their father’s. And it is hard to insist that they were wrong. Ever since the archive sale had first been mooted in 1967, at a time when it was obvious that Stravinsky’s active career was at an end, the question of ownership had assumed an importance that grew as his health deteriorated. The trouble had even begun several years earlier with Stravinsky’s will of 1960, in which he left his entire estate to Vera, if she survived him for at least thirty days, and to his children only in the event that he outlived her. In that will his two executors were Vera herself and William Montapert’s lawyer wife, Arminé, who was already handling Stravinsky’s tax affairs. The Montaperts must have warned André that if the composer died before Vera, his children would effectively be disinherited. And as we have seen, it was Montapert who, with power of attorney and for a substantial commission, transferred Stravinsky’s illegal Swiss funds to the children’s names, and who apparently later drew up a replacement will that reduced Vera’s inheritance to a lifetime interest, with the children as heirs on her death. The final will of late 1969, the work of the lawyer who replaced Montapert, Arnold Weissberger, was in essence the same. Vera would inherit on the composer’s death, but on her death the estate would be divided into nine equal parts, of which two would pass to each of his four children (including Mika’s daughter, Kitty), and one to Robert Craft. The estate was to be held in trust for Vera, and the sole trustee (Weissberger) was empowered to “invade the principal of the trust and to distribute the same absolutely to or on behalf of my said wife … for any reason whatever, even though the principal of the Trust may thereby become exhausted.” Perhaps more than anything else, it was this clause, which seemed to allow Vera to dispose of the children’s future inheritance more or less as she chose, that sustained the bitterness and perpetuated the litigation for so many years after the composer’s death.

  It does appear that North Wetherly Drive had been caught napping by Montapert’s activities. Vera was notoriously incapable of concentrating on such a thing as a legal document, and Craft, though by his own admission quarrelsome and pedantic by nature, had never involved himself in Stravinsky’s legal or financial affairs, and when he eventually did so was inclined to talk as if his own dislike of his adversaries was enough to win the legal argument. With Weissberger in control, all this changed. He was unshakably loyal to the composer and his wife, and he was methodical, clever, and professional. It was surely at his suggestion that, while Stravinsky was still alive, Vera instructed Boosey and Hawkes to make a royalty payment of thirty-five thousand dollars directly into her account; and perhaps it was also actually Weissberger who initiated the newspaper report (in early December 1970) that the composer’s archive was for sale at a price of three and a half million dollars and that the Soviet Union was a bidder.4 Whether or not the lawyer encouraged Vera to remove art objects from the Essex House, objects were almost certainly removed. The situation was self-evidently fragile. The composer was alive but largely in ignorance of practical matters outside his own needs. The archive had been inadequately inventoried and was housed in a large number of boxes in the Essex House apartment, to which, for all practical purposes, Stravinsky’s children had no access. For as long as he himself lived, his archive could in theory be plundered and sold, in whole or part, and his children were apparently powerless to prevent this. Fortunately for them, the market was stagnant, Stravinsky’s household had other things on their minds, and for the time being no serious steps were taken.

  Soon after the funeral, the children lodged a formal request that materials relating to them and their mother be removed from the archive and excluded from any sale. By August they had retained lawyers to try to force Weissberger to supply a proper inventory of the archive and a full financial accounting, and to challenge Vera
’s possession of the Rite of Spring manuscript. They had, indeed, little choice but to take some such action; and yet in doing so they committed themselves inexorably to years of expensive, wearying, morally and emotionally debilitating litigation. The New York Surrogate’s Court has many of the attributes of Dickens’s Court of Chancery, “which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, ‘Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!’”5 It is a type of court that seems openly to serve the interests of lawyers above all else. Such decisions as it occasionally makes are subject to more or less interminable appeal and counter-appeal. Even where its demands are candidly ignored, there are invariably legal reasons to be advanced by attorneys who know as well as naughty schoolboys exactly how far it is safe to stretch cautious authority. Teams of lawyers will be dispatched to the ends of the earth with first-class tickets on executive flights to interview minor players who have little or nothing to reveal and perhaps no great desire to reveal it. Major players will be subpoenaed in remote Swiss hotels and subjected to days of examination and cross-examination for purposes that, when you read the transcripts and assess the outcomes, remain obscure. In December 1979 in the case of Stravinsky versus Stravinsky, the court at last, and with due solemnity, approved what it guardedly called a Stipulation of Settlement, set out precise percentages of ownership of the estate during Vera’s lifetime and after her death, imposed new trustees from both sides, resolved a number of technical questions to do with property rights and the “invasion” of the trust, and secured for Craft a five-figure consultancy fee as musicologist to the estate. And yet in the following year, as Craft reported to Lawrence Morton, the litigation cost Vera Stravinsky two hundred thousand dollars.6

  Weissberger knew all about the personal dimension to the dispute, though he never seems to have had much inkling of the children’s point of view. He felt that they were motivated by hatred of Craft, whom they regarded as an evil influence on their father. He seems genuinely not to have considered that they had any claim on Stravinsky’s estate, and he accepted without apparent question what he was told about their failure of affection toward their father and his lack of deep feeling for or interest in them.7 Just what form this image took can be gleaned from the voluminous writings of Craft on the subject. Distraught as he himself undoubtedly was after Stravinsky’s death, he chose, with almost unbelievable vulgarity, to characterize the children’s grief as superficial and short-lived, and to publish this opinion within weeks in the New York Review of Books.8 He quotes Milton: “Some natural tears they drop’d/But wip’d them soon.…”9 Moreover, he told Weissberger that Stravinsky had rarely seen Milène and André “during the half of each year that he spent in California,” which he knew perfectly well to be untrue.10 But Weissberger wanted at all costs to avoid a will dispute, and that was why he preferred the device of “invading the Trust” to what in his view was the justifiable but risky procedure of cutting the children out altogether. In fact he greatly overrated the power of the invasion device, which, the minute he tried to implement it, on Vera’s pleading, early in 1979, was successfully challenged by the opposing counsel as a breach of his trustee’s duty “of ordinary care, diligence and prudence and of absolute impartiality among the several beneficiaries.”11 The so-called settlement was a direct outcome of this particular dispute, and that—as her subsequent costs indicate—was not in the least to Vera’s liking.

  Through all these long years the precious archive sat quietly in the apartment at 920 Fifth Avenue, even though it was nominally the property of the Trapezoid corporation, half of which belonged to the estate. Tax was duly paid on its valuation, but still it could not be sold to pay its own way. Some items, it is true, were disposed of. A number of sketches for Oedipus Rex were given to the sculptor Giacomo Manzù in return for the design of Stravinsky’s gravestone. In October 1973, Vera sold a batch of seven manuscripts for two hundred thousand dollars, and two months later she at last managed to sell the Rite of Spring autograph full score, which her own lawyer told her she could not prove was hers rather than part of the archive. It was bought for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars by Stravinsky’s old friend the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, with money from his wife’s Hoffmann-La Roche fortune.12 The children promptly brought suit, a fresh accounting was ordered by the court, and a lengthy process instigated to discover assets of the estate. Allegations flew. André was accused of withdrawing money and appropriating books and documents that he had never returned. Vera was said to have secreted the repatriated Swiss money (nearly half a million dollars) and to have sold paintings against false invoices, along with other substantial depredations. Such allegations were never proved, but they did nothing to alleviate the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and recrimination. Meanwhile a court in France had supported Soulima’s claim to a huge sum in undistributed French royalties, on the grounds that, since he had retained his French alongside his U.S. citizenship, he benefited from an ancient statute that exempted French citizens from claims in foreign courts. It was pointed out that, in taking U.S. citizenship, he had undertaken to relinquish all others. Thus a new suspicion was added to the old ones. Soon the children’s lawyers were accusing Vera of misappropiating French monies, while Vera’s lawyers counter-accused them of misrepresenting certain royalties as French in order to claim them. How either of these misdemeanors could actually have been committed was never explained. All that was necessary was to answer one charge with another.

  Immediately after the settlement in December 1979, it emerged that the executors had been negotiating with UCLA for a sale of the archive under an agreement that, according to the children’s lawyer James Higginson, involved the establishment of a Stravinsky Center with appointments for Robert Craft and Edwin Allen as archivists.13 Unsurprisingly, the family objected. They had been grumbling for some time about Craft’s uninhibited use of the archives in his recent book Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents.14 Still more aggravatingly, he had recently published a candid selection of letters from Katya to Igor Stravinsky, letters that, through many intimate details, portrayed her as a sickly religious crank and a hopeless martyr to an unloving husband.15 The trouble presumably was that the family could not sue on breach of copyright, since the ownership of the rights was itself in dispute; and meanwhile the court was slow—perhaps in effect powerless—to act on the questions of access and right of publication, supposedly fixed on a basis of equality by the settlement. Throughout 1980 and 1981 the arguments over this issue became increasingly strident. George Bobrinskoy, for the children, complained that not only were the family not being given access, but the archive was not even being properly maintained or adequately insured, and he urged the court to instruct the trustees to open the collection up for scholarly inspection.16 In response, Craft wrote personally to Higginson and, calmly drawing a veil over his own recent acts of publication, begged him to support the closure of parts of the archive, on the grounds that freedom of access would reveal aspects of Stravinsky’s personality, especially his anti-Semitism (“so shocking that Goebbels might have written some of it”), which would undoubtedly lead to a boycott of his music in the United States. He noted that Catherine’s letters exposed Stravinsky’s meanness and neglect, a fact already well known to his own NYRB readers. And he added a heartrending account of the possible damage to Soulima’s marriage and the mental balance of his son if the composer’s correspondence with his daughter-in-law were to come into the public domain.17

  Despite all these arguments and counter-arguments, UCLA appeared to be winning the fight to purchase the archive. In May 1982, the Los Angeles Times reported that the New York Surrogate had awarded the collection to California in preference to a considerably higher offer by the University of Texas at Austin, apparently on the grounds of the close connection between Stravinsky and Los Angeles, though the report also
hinted at dark rumors of a UCLA faculty post for Craft. The only snag was that UCLA were highmindedly insisting that they would only accept the archive if Stravinsky’s heirs unanimously supported the sale, and since in fact the composer’s children were unanimous in preferring Austin, yet another impasse appeared to have been reached.18

  At this point the fate of so many of Dickens’s Jarndyces caught up with the principal actress in the drama. On 17 September 1982, at the age of ninety-three, Vera Stravinsky died. For almost fifteen years she had set her face against the stepchildren she had formerly loved and with whose lives her own had once been so deeply enmeshed. Yet there had always been some feeling that the quarrel was not of her making, that she had tumbled into it because of a need to take sides, and perhaps out of loyalty to the young man who stood to lose most by her husband’s death. And he had repaid her with his own love and dependability. It was true that the relationship had not been entirely untroubled. His numerous love affairs had not invariably delighted her, and one—perhaps the most serious—had almost caused a breach. An affair he had embarked on in 1968 with Stravinsky’s Danish nurse, Rita Christiansen, resumed briefly soon after the composer’s death, and in September she turned up in New York and revealed that she was expecting his child.19 Even before this, Vera had half-expected that the pair would marry, and she had told Lillian that if this happened she would throw them both out and sell up.20 Rita was equally determined to prise him away from Vera. It was a triangle, but of the kind schoolboys know as scalene—all its sides unequal. Rita had no chance. Craft duly married her in January 1972, but he no longer loved or even much liked her, and not long after giving him a son a few weeks later, she returned to Copenhagen with the baby, leaving her reluctant husband to continue his barely interrupted life with Vera in her Fifth Avenue apartment.