Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  17 DB, 110.

  18 Culhane, Walt Disney’s Fantasia, 22. Stravinsky seems to have made no complaint about the changes to which his score had been subjected. Contrary to his account in Expo, 145–6, he did not see the finished film on this visit.

  19 In Carnegie Hall on 6 and 7 January. The program consisted of the Second Symphony, the Nutcracker suite, and the Violin Concerto with Erica Morini as soloist. Stravinsky also conducted concerts of his own music (Apollo, Petrushka, Jeu de cartes, and Firebird) on 4 and 5 January.

  20 See Godowsky, First Person Plural, 239–40, for a colorful account of this episode.

  21 The Princess Mestchersky, now married to the American Freudian psychologist Pearce Baily. See SPD, 644, note 22.

  22 Letter of 17 January 1940 to Soulima, quoted in DB, 110–11.

  23 Quoted in ASS, 8.

  24 DB, 111.

  25 Letter of Frederick Stock to Stravinsky, 15 January 1940 (PSS).

  26 See SCS, 88. The Bedford wedding, though, was a purely civil ceremony. The couple solemnized their marriage in church seven months later, on 14 October, in Los Angeles.

  27 Unlike, that is, the Shepherd in Oedipus Rex. Stravinsky had arranged to contact Sudeykin in New York in January, but wrote to him from Pittsburgh on the 16th excusing himself for not having done so, on the (apparently false) grounds that he was ill after his New York concert (RGALI). A photograph of Stravinsky’s handwritten note of the invented facts of Vera’s divorce is in ASS, 9. See also Vera’s diary entry for 27 August 1945, in DB, 133, and the present volume, chapter 12, note 6. By publishing irrefutable evidence that Igor and Vera were never lawfully married, Craft seems unintentionally to introduce a new and interesting complication into the legal battles between himself and the composer’s children.

  28 The Boston concert was on 6 March, the Cambridge one on 8 March.

  29 DB, 112; Christian Science Monitor, 21 March 1940. But most of the material in DB is imported from some source other than the diary. See above, note 16.

  30 Christian Science Monitor, 11 April 1940.

  31 See his telegram of 17 January 1940 to Mildred Bliss (PSS). The New York program repeated that of Boston and Cambridge.

  32 The Exeter concert was on 17 March, the Boston ones on 28, 29, and 30 March.

  33 See Stravinsky’s letter of 24 March 1940 to R. W. Bliss (PSS).

  34 Letter of 23 March 1940 (PSS).

  35 Undated letter of, probably, January 1940 (UCLA, Kall: original in English, emphases hers). Stravinsky had mentioned Forbes’s good-looking daughter Betsy when he saw Dagmar in New York, which suggests an earlier rather than later meeting. Dagmar refers to this in her letter but does not mention Vera.

  36 DB, 112, entry for 17 March. Unfortunately Vera does not record the exact nature of the “scene.”

  37 Ibid., 31 March.

  38 Her letter to Kall of 25 March 1940 (UCLA, Kall) more or less claims as much, and probably truthfully.

  39 Letter of 7 May 1940 (PSS). He had written to Soulima and Milène on the 3rd (family collection). The delay in writing to Theodore seems to reflect the fact that (as Igor grumbles in his letter to the other two) Theodore, unlike them, had not written to congratulate him on his remarriage. Yury Mandelstam’s letter appears not to have survived.

  40 Golubeff (1891–1958) was an American-born, Russian-educated musician, writer, and translator (of, for example, Pushkin) who had shared Kall’s house in Los Angeles for a time and had undertaken agency work for Stravinsky on the West Coast (see Kall and Stravinsky’s joint letter of authorization to him of 21 December 1939 in PSS). He translated Renard and an essay, “Pushkin, Poetry and Music,” supposedly by Stravinsky but in all probability ghosted by Golubeff himself. See Slim, “Unknown Words and Music, 1939–44, by Stravinsky,” 310 and note 42. The Pushkin essay is translated in White, Stravinsky, 588–91.

  41 DB, 114. Much of the information in the following paragraphs is from this source, including some material (such as the phrase quoted here) apparently not to be found in the original diary.

  42 Peter Heyworth was told by Robert Craft that Klemperer met the Stravinskys at the station and “immediately insisted on taking them on a tour of the area”: Otto Klemperer, vol. 2, 105. But for various reasons this seems to me far-fetched.

  43 See Stravinsky’s letter to Natalya Koussevitzky, 18 June 1940 (the composer’s fifty-eighth birthday) (LoC, Koussevitzky). English translation in Victor Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-friendship: Letters of Stravinsky and Koussevitsky,” Musical Quarterly, 86 (2002), 784–5.

  44 T&C, 51 (the point is missing from the earlier T&E, Craft presumably not having yet studied these particular sketches); also SPD, 368. The notation, curiously enough, is dated 19 October 1939.

  45 Letter of Chávez to Stravinsky, 25 January 1941. But Craft (SPD, 367) says that the problem was caused by factory noise.

  46 Expo, 72.

  47 DB, 115.

  48 Letter of 14 August 1940 (PSS). According to Soulima (Are You the Son …?), he had himself secured Rieti’s release from internment through the good offices of the local Prefet, a music lover who had befriended Soulima, lodged him in his own house, and provided him with a piano.

  49 See Vera Stravinsky’s letter of 19 August 1940 to Eleanor Schreiber, in DB, 116. Vera was asking Mrs. Schreiber, who lived in Zurich, to transmit money to Milène.

  50 Letter to Theodore of 1 September 1940 (PSS).

  51 17 August is the date on the sketch score of the symphony in PSS. However the autograph full score in the Library of Congress is dated 19 August.

  52 W. E. Oliver, “Bolm Ballet Bowl Event,” Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, 28 August 1940.

  53 Ibid. On the 20th, Mikhail Fokine, the ballet’s original choreographer and nominal author of its scenario, had written to Stravinsky protesting at the use of his scenic and choreographic ideas in a reworked form by a choreographer so well acquainted with the original that he could not fail to steal from it. Stravinsky and Bolm replied by night letter (26 August [PSS]) that they were presenting only the 1919 suite, which obviously necessitated a fresh approach; in any case the work was in the public domain. As for the question of moral rights, they added, “we are surprised you lack confidence in us.…” Had Fokine attended the performance, he would have read in the program-book a description of the staging that began with the words: “Retaining the original fairy-tale and characters, [Bolm] has simplified the story …” and he would have remembered pointing out in his letter that “it isn’t a fairytale turned into a ballet (there is no such fairytale), but a story based on the study and combination of a lot of fairytales.” But he would still have gone home empty-handed.

  54 The Nazi ban was announced by Peter Raabe, president of the Reichsmusikkammer, on 1 February 1940 (Amtliche Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer, Jahrgang 7, no. 2, 15 February 1940, 8), though since he was glossing an earlier ban (18 September 1939) on the works of living enemy—including French—nationals (ibid., J. 6, no. 19, 1 October 1939, 57), it could be argued that Stravinsky had theoretically been banned from that date. Raabe simply took time to realize that Stravinsky was French.

  55 Two days after this visit, he and Vera solemnized their marriage in a short ceremony in the Russian church on Micheltorena Street, Silverlake. See DB, 117, note 1.

  56 He was in fact by no means unequivocally hostile. When Fantasia came up in conversation with Hindemith in New York the following January, Hindemith found the whole idea “truly unedifying,” but added that “Igor appears to love it” (letter of 30 May 1941 to Willy Strecker, in Skelton, ed., Selected Letters of Paul Hindemith, 177).

  57 The first public showing was in New York on 13 November 1940.

  58 On 21 February 1941 the New York Times reported that The Firebird was one of several “new musical numbers” that Disney had in production, possibly for a second Fantasia. Renard and Petrushka were said to be “also under consideration.”

  59 Letter to Stone of 2 October 1940 (PSS). />
  60 Robert Craft has, however, suggested that the idea came from the violinist Sol Babitz, who was a jazz fan (private communication).

  61 The sketch (in PSS) is dated 1–14 October 1940. In fact the provision of a concert arrangement for solo piano was one of the conditions of the agreement Stravinsky entered into with Mercury Music Corporation three months later (2 January 1941), after AMP had decided they did not want to publish the piece. According to a letter of

  20 December 1940 from Leonard Feist, president of Mercury, to Stravinsky (PSS), he had heard about the Tango from Ernest Voigt of AMP. Mercury themselves hired an arranger and a writer, who duly produced a lyric but then decided to make himself awkward over terms. This difficulty was never resolved, and Mercury had to content themselves with publishing the piano arrangement.

  62 For a brief period in the spring, he had thought of selling the symphony’s dedication to the highest bidder, until he was called to order by his agent, Paul Stoes. See Stoes’s letter of 29 March 1940 (PSS). In a letter of 14 April to the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, Stravinsky claimed that he had always meant to dedicate the symphony to the CSO, but had merely delayed confirmation until the contract was signed.

  63 Edward Barry, “Stravinsky’s New Symphony Stirs Acclaim,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 November 1940.

  64 Eugene Stinson, “Music Views,” Chicago Daily News, 8 November 1940.

  65 See SCS, 419.

  66 Edward Downes, “Igor Stravinsky: Plans and Views of a Tonal Giant,” Boston Evening Transcript, 21 October 1939. But at the first performance, the work was billed as “Symphony, C major.”

  9 A HOUSE IN THE HILLS

  1 DB, 117.

  2 Letter of 4 December 1940 (BN, Boulanger).

  3 “Stravinsky is nuts about swing: ‘I love swings, I love all kinds of swings. Now it is to the Harlem I go. It is so sympathetic to watch the negro boys and girls dancing’” (New York World Telegram, 15 January 1941). Whether or not Stravinsky still or ever spoke such English, it clearly suited interviewers to color their reports with picturesque details of the kind.

  4 See Vera’s letter to Kall, 4 January 1941 (UCLA, Kall); also DB, 117–8.

  5 From Washington he also went to Baltimore to conduct (7 January). In Expo (80), Stravinsky claims to have worked from the piano score of the Tchaikovsky, but if so his aural memory of the original (last heard, presumably, in the twenties) must have been excellent, since his version is more a practical reduction of Tchaikovsky’s score for a smaller orchestra (including piano) than a new arrangement. Only in the coda, where Tchaikovsky’s string music is rescored for wind, are the differences in any way fundamental, while harmonic and rhythmic changes, of the Pulcinella or Fairy’s Kiss variety, are entirely lacking.

  6 He also conducted the performance on the 24th, but then he went down with flu again and missed the final performance on the 26th. On the 21st he had attended the premiere of Weill’s Lady in the Dark and, according to Expo (66), went onstage at the end to shake Weill’s hand.

  7 Dial, 48.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Edwin Denby, “With the Dancers,” Modern Music (March–April 1941), 197–8.

  10 Henry Simon, “The Ballet Tangles Prettily with Stravinsky,” PM, 23 January 1941. The headline writer, as so often, had read the article carelessly.

  11 Dial, 48; see also Conv, 102.

  12 Simon, op. cit.

  13 Denby, op. cit., 198.

  14 Letter of 23 January 1941, SSCII, 296, note 17. The letter has not surfaced in the Tchelitcheff file in PSS.

  15 Taper, Balanchine, 321. Balanchine practiced what he preached; his later (1972) and presumably quite different ballet to this music was called, simply, Violin Concerto.

  16 DB, 119: entry for 25 February.

  17 See her letter to Olga Sallard, quoted without date in SPD, 644, note 24. Stravinsky’s remark is in his letter of 10 April 1941 to Victoria Ocampo, quoted in ibid.

  18 Letter to Dushkin, 29 December 1941, in SSCII, 311.

  19 Opera (San Francisco), October 1946, quoted in SPD, 359.

  20 Soulima Stravinsky, interview with Thor Wood.

  21 ImpLif, 119.

  22 Vera and Igor to Kall, 11 July 1941 (UCLA, Kall).

  23 Acosta, Here Lies the Heart (London: André Deutsch, 1960), 118.

  24 Compare DB, 123 (3 September), and Godowsky, First Person Plural, 243–4. DB calls Dagmar’s contribution “explanations,” but “to have things out” is perhaps a better rendering of the Russian verb “nagovorit’sya.” Vera’s remark that Dagmar contacted them “as if nothing had happened” indicates that she had been warned off, by either Igor or Vera herself, in New York. But the precise details are impossible to disentangle. More intriguingly, there exists an English-language “summary” of the 1941 diary in Vera’s hand that suggests that Dagmar rang to invite them to a cocktail party and only came round because Igor insisted, a curious echo of his supposed insistence that Vera and Katya Stravinsky meet in 1925. But the diary summaries are impossible to date and, therefore, to trust.

  25 DB, 123, passim.

  26 Letter of 11 March 1941 (PSS). Stravinsky had just supported Rieti’s application for a post at the Curtis Institute.

  27 Janssen’s commission letter is dated 30 September 1941. Stravinsky was paid an immediate advance of $500 on a total fee of $1,500.

  28 See Nadia’s letter to him of 17 March 1941 (PSS).

  29 See his letter of 10 April 1941 to Victoria Ocampo (PSS).

  30 See Strecker’s letter to Hans Gebhardt, 17 April 1941 (copy in PSS). Soulima became a French citizen only in 1947.

  31 See Igor Stravinsky’s letter of 29 July 1941 to Nadia Boulanger (BN, Boulanger); also Sfam, 150.

  32 Letter of 20 June 1941 (PSS).

  33 Undated letter (December 1941), Milhaud to Stravinsky (PSS).

  34 Letter of Stravinsky to Milhaud, 27 September 1942 (PSS).

  35 Letter of Milhaud to Stravinsky, 25 August 1943 (PSS).

  36 See Milhaud’s letters to Stravinsky of 21 January 1944 and 12 September 1944, respectively (PSS). Money and food parcels were also sent on Stravinsky’s account by Vittorio and Elsie Rieti. See Igor Stravinsky’s letter to Theodore, 20 June 1941; also Rieti to Stravinsky, 13 August 1941 (PSS).

  37 Letter of 16 July 1941 (PSS). The performance was on the 10th. The orchestral arrangement was by a certain Felix Guenther, and it presumably differed from the later (1953) version published under the composer’s own name. The violin arrangement was by Dushkin himself, done no doubt in collaboration with Stravinsky in New York early in the year, notwithstanding Robert Craft’s claim that it was by Sol Babitz (see ImpLif, 128). The evidence that it was Dushkin’s work is in Feist’s letter to Stravinsky, 3 June 1941 (PSS). Babitz certainly did work with Stravinsky (on the Violin Concerto) in the fortnight or so between the composition of the Tango and Stravinsky’s departure for the East Coast, and he may of course have drafted an arrangement at that time. But there is apparently no actual evidence that he did. Dushkin’s recital was on 31 March 1941.

  38 Howard Taubman, “Dushkin Presents Stravinsky Work,” New York Times, 1 April 1941.

  39 Letter to Koussevitzky, 25 December 1941 (LoC, Koussevitzky). English translation in Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-friendship,” 790–1. After the U.S.A.’s declaration of war on Germany earlier that month it became harder for AMP to circumvent the blocking of their Schott account. Voigt managed this, in the end, by simply retaining Schott monies in an internal clients’ account and releasing percentages to the various composers concerned, including Stravinsky.

  40 Telegram of 11 August 1941 (PSS).

  41 Mem, 99. The “information” in the new edition of the conversations (MRC, 234) that the arrangement was made in 1940 and conducted that August in the Hollywood Bowl is completely fictitious. Similarly, the theory in SPD, 368, that the idea came from Stravinsky’s lawyer Aaron Sapiro does not hold water, as Sapiro only came on the scene in 1942. I a
m grateful to Colin Slim for confirming that the idea was Andersson’s.

  42 Letter to Leonard Feist, 14 August 1941 (PSS). Stravinsky had made his own copy of the first violin part, presumably as an aide-memoire, for his Hollywood Bowl concert in August 1940 (it is reproduced in facsimile in ASS, 13). But one cannot deduce from this that he had already at that time thought of rearranging the anthem.

  43 Feist to Stravinsky, 19 August 1941 (PSS).

  44 Letter of 19 September 1941 (PSS).

  45 Isabel Morse Jones, Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1941.

  46 See below, chapter 10.

  47 DB, 125.

  48 See Stravinsky’s letter to Nadia Boulanger, 24 March 1942 (BN, Boulanger).

  49 Quoted in Alfred Frankenstein, “Stravinsky in Beverly Hills,” Modern Music, vol. 19, no. 3 (March–April 1942), 179; reprinted in Stravinsky in Modern Music, 69–71.

  50 Ibid, 180.

  51 “Stravinsky’s Latest Work Introduced,” Los Angeles Times, 9 February 1942.

  52 “The Dance Element in Stravinsky’s Music,” in Minna Lederman (ed.), Stravinsky in the Theatre, 84; see also Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (London: Routledge, 1988), 184–5.

  53 Letter of 4 November 1941 (PSS).