Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  After Vera’s death, the litigation dragged on, but it no longer mainly concerned apportionments under Stravinsky’s will. Its principal focus now was on the sale of the archive and the question of publication. Vera had bought back the publication rights from Boosey and Hawkes in 1977, and Craft presumably inherited these along with the rest of her estate, not to mention heavy death duties and the expensive upkeep of the apartment, which he could neither sell nor (because of house cooperative rules on inherited tenancy) occupy.21 But the rights would have to go with the archive, and since this would soon have to be rehoused and was in any case for sale on an increasingly active market, a degree of urgency had come into the equation. Craft’s actions at about this time betray a trace of panic. The publication in rapid succession of three volumes of Stravinsky’s correspondence, for instance, was undertaken with apparently scant regard for normal editorial standards of selection, organization, or textual accuracy, to say nothing of competence in translation, as long-suffering readers of the footnotes in the present biography will not need reminding.22 During the same period, Craft must also have been writing his article “Cher père, chère Vera,” an unrestrained attack on his legal opponents that, whatever may be said about its accuracy or fairmindedness, must rank high in the annals of sheer literary and documentary bad taste.23 The Stravinsky family did their best to block all of these publications, in the end without success, perhaps because they were reluctant to face the likelihood of a further-protracted lawsuit involving the public airing of uncomfortable truths and half-truths. Instead they encouraged—perhaps (as Craft thought) commissioned24—an alternative account of the composer’s life by a New York journalist by the name of John Kobler. Kobler completed his book, but when Craft, who has always been careful to see advance copies of significant texts on Stravinsky, noticed that the biography quoted extensively from the conversation books, in which it was assumed that he owned the copyright, he took legal action to block publication, and did in fact succeed in doing so, in a court judgment of August 1987. Three years later, by an irony that may or may not have struck Kobler as poetic, a quite different New York court awarded copyright in the conversation books to the composer’s children.

  In the summer of 1983 the entire Stravinsky archive was at long last sold to Paul Sacher in Basle. California and Texas had long since dropped out of the reckoning, but various New York institutions had continued to nourish the hope of raising funds to keep the papers in America. In March, when Sacher had offered three and a half million dollars, the court had given the New York Public Library, to which the archive had been moved that same month, a stay of execution to match the Swiss bid by the end of May. What now happened has been described by Sacher’s agent in the negotiations, Albi Rosenthal.25 The Stravinsky trustees at first let it be known at the beginning of June that, there having been no higher offer, they were proceeding with the sale to Basle. They then changed their minds and announced a decisive auction to be held in the presence of all interested parties on 20 June. The motive for this apparently somewhat underhand procedure seems to have been that the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York had meanwhile come forward on behalf of an anonymous private buyer with an offer of three and three-quarters million.26 Although he must have been aware of this new bid, Rosenthal decided to turn the screw on the trustees and absent himself from the auction. Instead he sat nervously in his hotel room waiting in vain for a phone call from the Stravinsky lawyers. Only the next morning did a friend inform him that, according to a radio report, the auction had after all been indecisive. The day after that the lawyers themselves contacted him with a take-it-or-leave-it demand for five-and-a-quarter million dollars. After briefly resisting what must have felt very like blackmail, Sacher yielded, and on 23 June Rosenthal signed the contract on his behalf. Whether, had he attended the auction, he might have acquired the archive for less is something about which he chose not to speculate.

  THUS, A CENTURY after their owner’s birth, the long-fought-over documents of his extraordinary life—more than a hundred boxes of letters, postcards, contracts, programs, photographs, newspaper cuttings, and assorted trivia and memorabilia, and more than two hundred drawers of music manuscripts and sketches—made their way to the country of the rue Sacre du Printemps, there to be lodged in perpetuity in a newly converted house on the cathedral square in Basle, formerly the residence of the Catholic mystic Adrienne von Speyer and her husband, the Burckhardt scholar Walter Kägi, and already in 1983 the home of the manuscript full score of the famous ballet, which Sacher had bought from Vera Stravinsky in 1973.

  The sale left the composer’s heirs richer, but perhaps not remarkably happier. Robert Craft belabored the family in print, secure in the knowledge that they would not—indeed could not—reply in kind.27 The legal squabbles continued, and for all I know continue still, though one by one the parties to the old disputes have found quieter resting places beyond the reach even of Manhattan lawyers. Theodore Strawinsky died in 1989, his brother, Soulima, in 1994; Françoise and Denise followed them to the grave, respectively, in 2002 and 2004. Kitty Yelachich, as she became after marrying her cousin Mikhail in 1978, also died in 2002. André Marion had died in 1983, but Milène, the composer’s youngest child, has lived on in a remote western suburb of Los Angeles, quietly tending her roses and the delightful butterflies and birds she crafts out of colored stones and fossilized bone, and studiously avoiding disputes and public reminiscence. Of all Stravinsky’s children, she remained closest to him, and perhaps in some ways she still resembles him, though in character more like her mother: shy, gently spoken, unassuming, but quietly self-contained. Her longevity, like his, might seem a triumph of the spirit over frail flesh, if such language were not entirely foreign to her nature, at least as it presents itself on casual acquaintance. He impressed those who knew him by his astonishing physical and mental vigor. In her, the resilience seems more passive, as if it might be possible to survive the gales of life by lifting your feet off the ground and simply floating.

  Robert Craft has continued working into his eighties, his energy apparently unabated by the years of combat with enemies partly imaginary, partly not: Sancho Panza miraculously transformed into Don Quixote. Surviving the legacy, as he himself expressed it in the final part of his autobiography, has included recycling it: recording and re-recording Stravinsky’s music, retracing and extending his travels, documenting and redocumenting his life. Like the shades in Persephone, he has often seemed to have “no other destiny than the endless rebeginning of the uncompleted gesture of life.” Yet this does him an injustice. For, whatever the futility of the interminable litigations and the recurrent agony of his editorial work and personal animosities, one single fact remains that, for those who love Stravinsky’s late music, will always outweigh those lesser frailties: that, without Robert Craft, there might have been no Agon, no Canticum sacrum, no Requiem Canticles.

  As for the music whose mortal remains were carted off to the banks of the Rhine in boxes and packing cases, its immortal essence has amply repaid the debts it incurred in its creator’s lifetime. Born of so many derivations and allusions, so many methods and traditions, it has grown into the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of twentieth-century musical thought and imagery. Composers not yet conceived when Stravinsky died cleave to his music as if it could answer every question that might present itself to the creative spirit in times as troubled as his. Conductors who never contemplate Schoenberg and his school have taken Stravinsky to their repertory, if not always to their hearts. Theorists—even in his native Russia—pore over his music, expatiate on its grammar and aesthetics, and disagree about its meaning. That which is, designedly, repellent in twentieth-century music as a whole is repellent in his, too, but the unpleasantness is something sharp and invigorating, it grows on you as the taste of beer grows on an adolescent boy, and once the taste is there you can never recapture the time when it was not. Perhaps in a
ny case Stravinsky’s life shows why it could hardly have been otherwise. For ultimately this music that supposedly expresses nothing, and always seemed studiously, impenetrably deaf to the world around it, has turned out to be the most exact echo and the best response to those terrifying years that brought it into being.

  STRAVINSKY’S WORKS FROM 1935

  Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, 1932–35. First performance: Paris, 21 November 1935. Published: Schott, 1936.

  Jeu de cartes, ballet in three deals, 1935–6. First performance: New York, 27 April 1934. Published: Schott, 1937.

  Praeludium, for jazz ensemble, 1936–7. First performance: Los Angeles, 19 October 1953. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1968.

  Petit Ramusianum harmonique, for speaking and singing voice unaccompanied (words: Charles-Albert Cingria), 1937. First (private) performance: Paris, 24 September 1938. Published: in Hommage à C.-F. Ramuz (Lausanne: Porchet, 1938); also in I. Vershinina (ed.), Igor Stravinsky: Vokal’naya Muzïka, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1982).

  Concerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks), for chamber orchestra, 1937-8. First performance: Washington, D.C., 8 May 1938. Published: Schott, 1938.

  Symphony in C, for orchestra, 1938–40. First performance: Chicago, 7 November 1940. Published: Schott, 1948.

  Tango, for piano (originally planned for voice and instruments), 1940. First performance (arr. S. Dushkin for violin and piano): New York, 31 March 1941; (arr. F. Guenther for jazz orchestra): Philadelphia, 10 July 1941. Published (for piano): Mercury, 1941. Arrangement by Stravinsky for instrumental ensemble, 1953. First performance: Los Angeles, 19 October 1953. Published: Mercury, 1954.

  Danses concertantes, for chamber orchestra, 1940–2. First performance: Los Angeles, 8 February 1942. Published: AMP, 1943; Schott.

  Circus Polka, (1) for piano, 1941–2. Published: AMP, 1942. (2) arr. D. Raksin for circus band, 1942. First performance: New York, 9 April 1942. Published: AMP, 1948. (3) for orchestra, 1942. First performance: Cambridge, Mass., 13 January 1944. Published: AMP, 1944; Schott.

  Four Norwegian Moods, for orchestra, 1942. First performance: Cambridge, Mass., 13 January 1944. Published: AMP, 1944; Schott.

  Ode, elegiac chant in three parts for orchestra, 1943. First performance: Boston, 8 October 1943. Published: AMP/Schott, 1947.

  Sonata for Two Pianos, 1942–4. First performance: Madison, Wisconsin, 2 August 1944. Published: AMP/Chappell, 1945.

  Babel, cantata for narrator, male chorus, and orchestra (words: Genesis), 1944. First performance: Los Angeles, 18 November 1945. Published: Schott, 1953.

  Scherzo à la russe, (1) for jazz band, 1943–4. First performance: Blue Network Radio, 5 September 1944. Published: Chappell, 1949; Schott. (2) for 2 pianos, 1943–4. Published: AMP, 1945.(3) for orchestra, 1945. First performance: San Francisco, 22 March 1946. Published: AMP/Chappell, 1945; Schott.

  Scènes de ballet, for orchestra, 1944. First performance: Philadelphia, 27 November 1944. Published: Chappell, 1945; Boosey and Hawkes.

  Elegy, for solo viola (or violin), 1944. First performance: Washington, D.C., 26 January 1945. Published: AMP/Chappell, 1945.

  Symphony in Three Movements, for orchestra, 1942–5. First performance: New York, 24 January 1946. Published: AMP/Schott, 1946.

  Ebony Concerto, for clarinet and jazz ensemble, 1945. First performance: New York, 25 March 1946. Published: Charling, 1946; Edwin H. Morris/Boosey and Hawkes.

  Concerto in D, for string orchestra, 1946. First performance: Basle, 21 January 1947. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1947.

  Orpheus, ballet in three scenes, 1946–7. First performance: New York, 28 April 1948. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1948.

  Hommage à Nadia Boulanger (“Petit Canon pour la fête de Nadia Boulanger”), for two tenors (words: Jean de Meung), 1947. Published: Boosey and Hawkes/San Francisco Press, 1982 (in Clifford Caesar, Igor Stravinsky: A Complete Catalogue).

  Mass, for chorus and double wind quintet, 1944–8. First performance: Milan, 27 October 1948. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1948.

  The Rake’s Progress, opera in three acts (libretto: W. H. Auden and C. Kallman), 1947–51. First performance: Venice, 11 September 1951. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1951.

  Cantata, for soprano, tenor, female chorus, and five instruments (words: anon. 15th–16th-century English), 1951–2. First performance: Los Angeles, 11 November 1952. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1953.

  Septet, for clarinet, horn, bassoon, and piano quartet, 1952–3. First performance: Washington, D.C., 23 January 1954. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1953.

  Three Songs from William Shakespeare, for mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, and viola, 1953. First performance: Los Angeles, 8 March 1954. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1954.

  In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, for tenor, string quartet, and four trombones, 1954. First performance: Los Angeles, 20 September 1954. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1954.

  Greeting Prelude, for orchestra, 1955. First performance: Boston, 4 April 1955. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1956.

  Canticum sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci Nominis, for tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra (words: Deuteronomy, Psalms, Song of Solomon, St. Mark’s Gospel, and the First Epistle of St. John, Vulgate texts), 1955. First performance: Venice, 13 September 1956. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1956.

  Agon, ballet for twelve dancers, 1953–7. First performance: Los Angeles (concert), 17 June 1957; New York (stage), 1 December 1957 (preceded by a private charity performance on 27 November). Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1957.

  Threni: id est Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae, for six soloists, chorus, and orchestra (words: Lamentations, Vulgate text), 1957–8. First performance: Venice, 23 September 1958. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1958.

  Movements, for piano and orchestra, 1958–9. First performance: New York, 10 January 1960. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1960.

  Epitaphium, for flute, clarinet, and harp, 1959. First performance: Donaueschingen, 17 October 1959. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1959.

  Double Canon, for string quartet, 1959. First performance: New York, 20 December 1959. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1960.

  Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa (ad CD Annum), three Gesualdo motets recomposed for instruments, 1960. First performance: Venice, 27 September 1960. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1960.

  A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, cantata for alto and tenor, speaker, chorus and orchestra (words: the Epistles of St. Paul and Acts of the Apostles [Authorized version], and Thomas Dekker), 1960–1. First performance: Basle, 23 February 1962. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1961.

  The Flood, musical play for solo speakers and singers, chorus, and orchestra (words: Robert Craft, from Genesis [authorized version] and the York and Chester Miracle Plays), 1961–2. First performance: CBS TV (USA), 14 June 1962; first public performance: Santa Fe, 21 August 1962. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1963.

  Anthem (“The dove descending breaks the air”), for chorus unaccompanied (words: T. S. Eliot), 1961–2. First performance: Los Angeles, 19 February 1962. Published: Faber and Faber (in Expo), 1962; Boosey and Hawkes.

  Abraham and Isaac, sacred ballad for baritone and chamber orchestra (words: Genesis, Hebrew text), 1962–3. First performance: Jerusalem, 23 August 1964. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1965.

  Elegy for J.F.K., for medium voice and three clarinets (words: W. H. Auden), 1964. First performance: Los Angeles, 6 April 1964. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1964.

  Fanfare for a New Theatre, for two trumpets, 1964. First performance: New York, 20 April 1964 (private gala); first public performance: New York, 24 April 1964. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1968.

  Variations Aldous Huxley in Memoriam, for orchestra, 1963–4. First performance: Chicago, 17 April 1965. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1965.

  Introitus T. S. Eliot in Memoriam, for male chorus and chamber ensemble (words: from the “Requiem aeternam”), 1965. First performance: Chicago, 17 April 1965. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1965.

  Can
on for concert introduction or encore, for orchestra, 1965. First performance: Toronto, 16 December 1965. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1973.

  Requiem Canticles, for contralto and bass, chorus, and orchestra (words: from the Missa pro defundis), 1965–6. First performance: Princeton University, 8 October 1966. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1967.

  The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, for soprano and piano (words: Edward Lear), 1966. First performance: Los Angeles, 31 October 1966. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1967.

  ARRANGEMENTS

  TCHAIKOVSKY

  Bluebird Pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty (Act 3), arranged for small orchestra, 1941. First performance: New York, February 1941. Published: Schott, 1953.

  J. S. SMITH

  The Star-Spangled Banner, arranged for chorus and orchestra (various combinations), 1941. First performance: Los Angeles, 18 October 1941. Published: Mercury, 1941.

  BACH

  Chorale-Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch,” arranged for chorus and orchestra, 1955–6. First performance: Ojai, California, 27 May 1956. Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1956.

  GESUALDO

  Tres Sacrae Cantiones (“Da pacem Domine,” “Assumpta est Maria,” “Illumina nos”), completed for six, six, and seven voices, respectively, 1957–9. First performance: New York, 10 January 1960 (“Assumpta est Maria” only). Published: Boosey and Hawkes, 1957 (“Illumina nos”) and 1960 (complete).

  SIBELIUS

  Canzonetta, op. 62a, arranged for eight instruments, 1963. First performance: Los Angeles, 30 September 1963. Published: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1964.