Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  54 See Katya’s letter to Igor, 11 January 1935 (PSS).

  55 Letter of 27 February 1946 (PSS).

  56 Letter of 4 December 1941 (PSS).

  57 See his letter to Dushkin, 29 December 1941, reporting the phone conversation, in SSCII, 311, and note 63.

  58 Raksin, “Composer in Paradise,” in Carol Merrill-Mirsky (ed.), Exiles in Paradise (Los Angeles: Hollywood Bowl Museum, 1991), 93–4. Stravinsky himself made the more familiar version for symphony orchestra later that same year, completing it on 5 October 1942. The autograph fair copy of the piano score, in the Library of Congress, is dated 15 February 1942.

  59 Interview for Radio-Canada, Montreal (1945), quoted in Charles Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 20.

  60 Letter to Dushkin, 29 December 1941, op. cit.

  61 I have précised the version in Taper, Balanchine, 177–8.

  62 The Tchaikovsky reference is in figs. 5–6 (cf. Symphony no. 4, second movement, bar 118, etc.). The Schubert reference in Danses concertantes is at fig. 161. It seems, incidentally, to refute Joseph’s suggestion (Stravinsky Inside Out, 20) that the idea for the Schubert parody was Balanchine’s.

  63 George Ritchie, “Circus Opens in Gay Splendor,” New York Sun, 10 April 1942. Zorina appeared only on the opening night.

  64 George Brinton Beal, “Stravinsky and the Elephants” (Boston Symphony Orchestra Concert Bulletin, 13–15 January 1944); quoted in White, Stravinsky, 413–4.

  65 Letter of Ernest Voigt to Stravinsky, 3 June 1942. Stravinsky had sold Ringling the exclusivity, for circus performance only, for a year, and White (op. cit., 414) claims that it was in fact performed 425 times.

  66 Nadia Boulanger, who saw him at Arthur Sachs’s house in Santa Barbara that March, later recalled Stravinsky’s pleasure in working on the elephant ballet. But this was probably pleasure at having earned a large sum for writing an enjoyable piece. Her assertion that “he would himself have paid to write this ‘Circus Polka’” is pure fantasy. See Bruno Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, trans. R. Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), 40.

  67 A. Tansman, Igor Stravinsky, The Man and His Music, trans. T. and C. Bleefield (New York: Putnam, 1949), 251.

  68 Expo, 77.

  69 SPD, 371. The book also contains an excellent color reproduction of one page of the final composition draft: plate 12, facing p. 400.

  70 Composer’s statement in the program note for the first performance of the Symphony in Three Movements, New York, 24 January 1946.

  71 Dial, 52. “Supposedly” because the authenticity of much of Dial is at least suspect. For the first performance of the symphony in January 1946, Ingolf Dahl supplied a program note in which he hinted at, without specifying, a connection with the war, but two years later Stravinsky wrote to him denying that he had ever approved such an interpretation (letter of 9 February 1948, PSS).

  72 Tom Chase, “Stravinsky Plans ‘Puritan’ National Anthem for Hub,” unidentified Boston paper, 12 January 1944 (cutting in PSS).

  73 See DB, 125–8, passim; also SPD, 360.

  74 SPD, 325.

  75 “Master Mechanic,” Time, 26 July 1948, 46. The detail about the agent proves that the story is a fabrication.

  76 See Rieti’s letter to Stravinsky of 5 March 1942 (PSS). Rieti had previously mentioned the Bellini ballet in a letter of 13 August 1941. Stravinsky’s letter of 10 March to Rieti strongly implies that the idea had not been his; see Franco Carlo Ricci, Vittorio Rieti (Naples and Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987), 407–9, also SSCIII, 279–80, note 4.

  77 Letter to Ernest Voigt (AMP), 19 March 1942, in SSCIII, 279. In Stravinsky and Balanchine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 172, Charles Joseph refers to a vocal score Stravinsky had bought of Donizetti’s Linda di Chamonix. “The composer chose fifteen excerpts, each carefully marked in the score.” But the markings are those of a previous owner, cueing the part of Linda. There is no evidence of a particular intention on Stravinsky’s part.

  78 Telegram to Koussevitzky, 14 June 1942 (LoC, Koussevitzky): Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-friendship,” 799.

  79 Letter of 4 December 1941 (PSS).

  80 DB, 125.

  81 Ingolf Dahl, program note for the first performance of the Symphony in Three Movements, Boston, 24 January 1946.

  10 TO EARN IS HUMAN

  1 Letter of 25 July 1942 (PSS): in SSCIII, 283, but with the quoted passage omitted. This is the letter in which he announces the recent completion of the work (though the full score was not finished until 18 August).

  2 Letter to Nicolas Nabokov, 5 October 1943, in SSCII, 369–70. The same point was made in the program note of the first performance, in Boston, January 1944, quoting Stravinsky. See Lawrence Morton, “Stravinsky at Home,” in J. Pasler (ed.), Confronting Stravinsky (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986), 337. An early sketch in PSS is labelled “Danses norvégiennes.”

  3 Expo, 77n.

  4 Pinning down Stravinsky’s source is in fact rather more complicated than the actual music. In 1943 (letter of 5 October) he told Nabokov that he had found the collection in the library and that it was published by Hansen, whereas The Norway Music Album, which Morton (op. cit. 337–8) identifies as the only collection that contains all Stravinsky’s tunes, and of which there are copies in both the public and the composer’s libraries, was published by Oliver Ditson (Boston, 1881). Uwe Kraemer, on the other hand, found all but three of the tunes in a four-volume collection called Norges Melodier, which is a Hansen publication (Copenhagen and Leipzig, 1875–1924). Stravinsky told Craft (Mem, 99) that the collection had been picked up by Vera in a secondhand bookshop, but he did not identify it. Perhaps he borrowed the Hansen collection from the library then later found a secondhand copy of Ditson.

  5 Mem, 99.

  6 M. Bernard (ed.), Pesni russkago naroda (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1886). This source, like the Norway Music Album, was first identified by Morton (op. cit., 335–6). For an exhaustive account of Stravinsky’s borrowings, complete with music examples, see SRT, 1623–47.

  7 Letter of 15 July 1942 (PSS), emphases hers.

  8 Dial, 42. Such remarks in the later conversation books often, though, look like conclusions from an analysis of the music or sketches, an activity foreign to Stravinsky but natural to Craft. Anthony Powers, a Boulanger pupil, tells me that piano duo (four hands on two pianos) was the standard medium for play-through in Nadia’s analysis classes.

  9 The manuscript materials are in PSS.

  10 See his letter of 19 May 1941 to Nadia Boulanger (PSS). In SSCI, 239–41, the relevant text has been transposed as the second paragraph of his letter of 29 July, while two paragraphs from the 29 July letter are printed as paragraphs 2 and 4, respectively, of the letter of 19 May.

  11 The Polka was completed on the 5th, the symphony movement, as it became, on the 15th.

  12 DB, 127.

  13 Mann, Tagebücher, 1940–43 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1982), 618.

  14 Expo, 77. I am grateful to Jon Burlingame, a specialist in film-music history at the University of Southern California, for confirming from his own research in the Twentieth Century–Fox archives my hunch that the Bernadette idea was never more than a casual suggestion between friends. No evidence survives, he tells me, that Stravinsky was ever considered for the film by the studio itself.

  15 Expo, 77n. In the novel, Rochester is riding home late one January afternoon when his horse slips on the ice and he is helped by Jane. Perhaps the intrusion of a hunting scene was a veiled protest on the part of Twentieth Century–Fox.

  16 In February Aaron Copland was contracted instead and came to Hollywood. On 22 March he dined (with George Antheil) at the Stravinskys’ house (DB, 127–8). For Copland’s involvement in North Star, see Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 378–83.

  17 DB, 127.

  18 S. Bertensso
n and J. Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 374.

  19 On Diamond’s complicated relationship with Nadia, see Rosenstiel, Nadia Boulanger, 280–1.

  20 DB, 128.

  21 See SCS, 355.

  22 DB, 130, note 3.

  23 Stravinsky’s letter of acceptance, 9 April 1943, is quoted in SPD, 645, note 37, but has not come to light in either PSS or the Library of Congress.

  24 Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 105. “Considering that Koussevitzky was himself a Jew,” Slonimsky adds impishly, “born nearer to Odessa than I, the remark was fantastic in its rudeness.”

  25 T&E, 152, note 7. The remark was expunged from T&C, 228, the equivalent British edition of that text.

  26 DB, 128. It is hard to resist adding that the word “Eulogy” suggests a pun on “Eule,” the German for an owl.

  27 Letter of 9 July 1943 (LoC, Koussevitzky). Yuzefovich’s translator, Marina Kostalevsky, renders the crucial phrase “muzïka na lone prirodï” as “music at the heart of nature.” See “Chronicle of a Non-friendship,” 806–7.

  28 Ernest Voigt had died in the spring.

  29 T&C, 228–9. The book is credited solely to Stravinsky, while the American volume, T&E, which includes extensive excerpts from Robert Craft’s diaries, is naturally credited to both authors. As indicated elsewhere, however, both books are by Craft (though no doubt containing information supplied at various times by Stravinsky).

  30 Letter of 11 October 1943 (LoC, Koussevitsky): Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-friendship,” 813. The bars involved are the six before fig. 44, and the next six. The autograph full score is in the Library of Congress.

  31 Night letter, 9–10 October 1943 (LoC, Koussevitzky): Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-friendship,” 812.

  32 Letter of 12 October 1943 (LoC, Koussevitzky): Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-friendship,” 814. The letter of the 11th is also in LoC, with a copy in PSS. PSS also holds a slightly inaccurate handwritten draft of the 12 October letter.

  33 The note (UCLA, Kall) is undated, and hard to date even speculatively, since St. Alexis’s day is celebrated on different dates in the Eastern and Western churches (17 March and 17 July, respectively). “Song of the Bear” is the third of the Three Children’s Tales (1916–17). I am grateful to Colin Slim for drawing my attention to this item and much else in the Kall Archive.

  34 SPD, 357.

  35 DB, 128, records a Warner Brothers lunch on 26 August 1943. But nothing came of it.

  36 See Morton, op. cit., 335–6.

  37 See his letter to Koussevitzky of 11 October 1943.

  38 The AMP contract indicates that the arrangement had first been mooted, and commissioned, in 1941. See SPD, 660, note 62.

  39 Nef had tried to book Stravinsky a year before, but at the time the composer had had no plans to come east. Nef wrote again on 30 September 1943, mentioning that he had been reading the Poétique; Stravinsky’s letter of acceptance was written on the same day as his agreement to conduct The Rite in Boston, 11 October (PSS).

  40 Expo, 141.

  41 For a detailed account of the various Rite of Spring revisions, see Louis Cyr, “Le Sacre du printemps: petite histoire d’une grande partition,” in F. Lesure (ed.), Stravinsky: Etudes et témoignages (Paris: J-C. Lattès, 1982), 89–147. A revised and updated English translation of this important article exists but has never been published. Cyr eventually came down in favor of 1922 for the first publication of the orchestral score of the Rite, but he admits that his argument is tenuous. The date usually given is 1921.

  42 See Charles Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, 18–19, and Stravinsky and Balanchine, 175, for the latest perpetuations of this legend. Stravinksy Inside Out includes the well-known Boston police archive photograph of Stravinsky, taken in April 1940 when he applied for renewal of his temporary visa, with the caption: “Arrested in Boston, April 1940, for illegally arranging ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” This same canard crops up in Tony Palmer’s Stravinsky film Once at a Border …, and it still survives in Craft’s commentary to the execrable omnibus edition of the conversations (M&C, 216). For a coolheaded account of the incident, see Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900, 4th ed. (London: Cassell, 1972), 779.

  43 Letter to the Christian Science Monitor, 15 June 1944.

  44 Compare this with the French text: “Car ce n’est pas l’art qui nous tombe du ciel avec un chant d’oiseau; mais la plus simple modulation correctement conduite est déjà de l’art, sans conteste possible,” which, in the later published English text of Poet, becomes: “For it is not art that rains down upon us in the song of a bird; but the simplest modulation correctly executed is already art, without any possible doubt.”

  45 André Baltensperger, “Strawinskys ‘Chicago Lecture’ (1944),” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, no. 5 (January 1992), 19–23.

  46 DB, 130.

  11 THE BROAD WAY AND THE STRAIT GATE

  1 DB, 130.

  2 Ibid. (entry for 31 March). Compare Stravinsky’s letter of 6 April 1944 to Nadia Boulanger, telling her that he had found a copy and she need no longer look for one (BN, Boulanger).

  3 Letter of 16 February 1944 (Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia).

  4 The prelude was originally to have been composed by Hindemith, who, however, withdrew in August 1945, at which point Schoenberg was contracted. According to Craft, Schoenberg and Stravinsky asked to see each other’s contract, to make sure the fees were equal (SPD, 646, note 39). But the dates argue against this. In any case Stravinsky’s fee was $1,000, which Hugo Winter thought high, while Schoenberg, according to the copy of his contract which Shilkret sent to Aaron Sapiro, received $1,500. This, however, was a flat fee with no further rights, whereas Stravinsky retained a royalty on sales.

  5 Tansman, Igor Stravinsky, 130.

  6 Ibid., 131.

  7 Telegram and letter of 11 April 1944, Winter to Stravinsky (PSS).

  8 Whiteman had in fact supposedly tried to commission Stravinsky in 1925, the year after Rhapsody in Blue, but the composer had declined. See SPD, 373.

  9 Letter of 17 April, Stravinsky to Winter (PSS).

  10 Mem, 108.

  11 Ibid.

  12 For much detail on the sketches and composition sequence of the Scherzo à la russe, see H. Colin Slim, “Stravinsky’s Scherzo … à la russe and its two-piano origins,” in B. Haggh (ed.), Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman (Paris: Minerve, 2001), 518–37 (the ellipsis in the work title is a misprint). See also Christoph Flamm, preface to the Eulenburg edition of the two orchestral versions of the score (Mainz: Eulenburg, 1996). Curiously enough, amid much other information, Flamm does not identify the folk source of the music.

  13 Dial, 53.

  14 Letter of 17 February 1945 to Poulenc; in M. Chimènes (ed.), Francis Poulenc: Correspondance, 582.

  15 See Stravinsky’s letter of 4 June 1944 to Winter, and Rose’s telegram of 8 June to Stravinsky (PSS).

  16 Telegram, Winter to Stravinsky, 14 June 1944.

  17 For details about Rose and his plans for The Seven Lively Arts, see John Schuster-Craig, “Stravinsky’s Scènes de Ballet and Billy Rose’s The Seven Lively Arts. The Abravanel Account,” in S. Parisi (ed.), Music in the Theater, Church, and Villa: Essays in Honor of Robert Lamar Weaver and Norma Wright Weaver (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park, 2000). See also Stravinsky’s correspondence with Winter in PSS, only patchily included in SSCIII, 296–9.

  18 See David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (London and Boston: Faber, 1987), 416 and note. For the Giselle stipulation, see Alicia Markova, Giselle and I (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960), 103.

  19 Letter of 27 June 1944, in SSCIII, 296. The new title had still not been found, however, by the time Stravinsky completed the work at the end of August. See his letter to Gretl Urban, 31 August 1944, in SSCIII, 298.

  20 DB, 131.

  21 See Winter to Stravinsky, 25 May 1944 (PSS).

&nbs
p; 22 Stravinsky to Winter, 4 June 1944, SSCIII, 294–5.

  23 Edwin Denby, “Balanchine’s ‘Danses Concertantes,’” New York Herald Tribune, 17 September 1944.

  24 DB, 131. The concert was on the 26th of August, and the two musicians were apparently meeting for the first time.

  25 Mandelstam had been transferred for a time from Drancy to a camp in the vicinity of Orleans, where he was visited by Soulima. The news of his death came eventually in a report from the Red Cross. See Weeda (ed.), Yuriy Mandel’shtam: Sobraniye stikhotvoreniy, xxi.

  26 Dial, 50.

  27 Schuster-Craig, op. cit., 289.

  28 Letter to Stravinsky, 28 July 1944 (PSS).

  29 See SCS, 363, 383. Arthur Prévost, the conductor and co-founder of the Brussels Pro Arte concerts, was Germain’s brother.

  30 Letter of 21 August 1944, which conveys Prévost’s request (PSS).

  31 DB, 131–2. But the published text glosses the original with a nonexistent “supposedly” (in case we miss the point of Vera’s quotation marks) and omits the crucial “and,” which tells us that the professors and their wives were not even “supposedly” included among the most interesting people.

  32 SPD, 645, note 30. According to Craft (“Pluralistic Stravinsky,” Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life, 306), Bukofzer had sent Stravinsky a copy of his Speculum article, “Speculative Thinking in Medieval Music,” two years earlier, the effect of which Craft compares to that of Cingria and Handschin in the thirties. But there is not much evidence for this in Stravinsky’s music in 1942, and since Craft was not yet on the scene, one wonders how he knows. Perhaps this is an example of speculative thinking in modern music.

  33 Prévost gave the first performance of the Elegy in the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress (the theatre for which Apollo had been composed) in a concert in memory of Onnou on 26 January 1945. His unpublished recording of the piece, made four days later, reveals that he made an unmarked repeat of the first section, and also that the whole work stretched his technical resources (copy in the Library of Congress). Craft’s attempt to redate the Elegy to the time of the Danses concertantes on graphological evidence (SPD, 372) is unfortunately at odds with all the other evidence including that of common sense.