45 SCF (94), 72.
46 Conv, 21.
47 White, Stravinsky, 471.
48 Pace Robert Craft, “A Personal Preface,” The Score, 20 (1957), 7–13. Joseph N. Straus even goes so far as to show how Webern’s op. 22 influenced the canonic writing in “The maidens came,” which, however, was essentially composed in July 1951, before Stravinsky had heard a note of Webern or looked at any score by him. See Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22–6.
49 Luis Gongora, “Igor Strawinsky y el surrealismo,” La Noche (Barcelona), 12 March 1936; also Daily Mail, 13 February 1913.
50 See SCS, 456.
51 Quoted in SCF (94), 72.
52 See Joseph N. Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music, 11–17, for a detailed technical assessment of the similarities and differences.
53 For further detail, see SPD, 422.
54 Craft notes that he drew Stravinsky’s attention to this difficulty when he played it through on the piano on the 25th. See SCF (94), 72. Stravinsky subsequently added the two oboes of the final version, and divided the music between them and the flutes.
55 As revealed by his letters of 22 February to Betty Bean (SSCIII, 356) and Ernst Roth (also in SSCIII, but the relevant passage omitted).
56 This is my extrapolation from Craft’s moving accounts in SCF (94), 72–3, and “Influence or Assistance?,” Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life, 38–9.
57 R. Leibowitz, “Two Composers: A Letter from Hollywood,” Partisan Review (March 1948), 361–5.
58 SCF (94), 73, and “Influence or Assistance?,” 39.
59 Letter to Roth of 10 March 1952, SSCIII, 358. See also SCS, 145, 242, and 607, note 16, where, however, the dating of the later Verlaine arrangement to 1951 is incorrect.
60 Once more, SCF (94), 73, is excellent on the changes, and Craft has a higher opinion of the outcome than I.
61 SCF (94), 73, entry for 13 March, already calls the work “Cantata.” But the entry is suspect, and it was probably “corrected” for publication. There is no other evidence that Stravinsky had yet settled on either the title or the form of the finished work.
62 “Influence or Assistance?,” Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life, 49, note 2.
63 Ibid., 39; see also ASS, 39, which reproduces the page in facsimile. “Lob” is of course “love” rhymed with “Bob,” but with hints of Russian (“lyublyu” = I love) and German (“lobe” = “praise”).
19 COUNT ONE, COUNT TWO, COUNT TWELVE
1 Telegram of 15 December 1951 to Nabokov (PSS).
2 Letter of 2 January 1952. Nabokov had made a similar suggestion in a letter of 29 December (PSS).
3 Letter to Roth, 11 January 1952 (PSS).
4 Letter to Stravinsky, 6 March 1952 (PSS).
5 Letter to Stravinsky, 13 February 1952, quoted in SSCII, 383.
6 Letter of 21 March 1952 (PSS). Much of the relevant correspondence is in SSCI, 115–9, but in general so poorly and sometimes ineptly translated as to be better avoided. As for the drop curtain, it “showed an agonized Oedipus with eyes telescoping out of his head like those of a fiddler crab, gesticulating wildly in the direction of Jocasta. She, half clad, with crinkling, dangling hair and misshapen breasts grotesquely exposed, was wildly reaching toward Oedipus.” Olin Downes, New York Times, 1 June 1952, quoted in Joan Evans, Hans Rosbaud: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 55, note 134.
7 Jean Cocteau, Journal d’un inconnu (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1953), 222–3.
8 Letter of 21 March.
9 Jean Cocteau, Past Tense, trans. R. Howard (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 130.
10 Letter of 17 March 1952 (PSS).
11 Past Tense, 129.
12 Cocteau’s scenario for the seven tableaux is reprinted in Journal d’un inconnu, 225–30.
13 Past Tense, 138.
14 Ibid., 140.
15 SCF (94), 75.
16 DB, 156.
17 SCF (94), 76–7; Conv, 71–3.
18 SCF (94), 75–7.
19 Undated letter, summer 1952, in SSCIII, 197.
20 Letter of 1 August 1952, in SSCIII, 197, note 1. There is some evidence, nevertheless, that Stravinsky’s (or to be exact Souvtchinsky’s) ideas about time in the Poétique musicale had been influenced by Sartre. Souvtchinsky’s article “La Notion du Temps et la Musique,” in the Revue musicale (May–June 1939), 70/310–80/320, bears two epigraphs on the subject of time from La Nausée.
21 For Cocteau’s account of this reunion, see Past Tense, 145–6.
22 Ibid., 147.
23 SCF (94), 77.
24 J.-J. Nattiez and R. Piencikowski (eds.), Pierre Boulez–John Cage: Correspondance et Documents (Mainz: Schott, 2002), 210, letter of May 1952. Boulez told Jesús Aguilar that “Stravinsky did not attend the performance of Structures 1a in 1952. He was in Paris at the same moment, that’s all” (see Le Domaine Musical: Pierre Boulez et vingt ans de création contemporaine [Paris: Fayard, 1992], 183–4 note). But this is merely to say that the two composers did not meet on that occasion.
25 SCF (94), 82. See also Stravinsky’s letter to Nabokov, 9 February 1952, and Nabokov’s reply of 15 February (PSS).
26 Dial, 107.
27 SCF (94), 82. A recording of Stravinsky’s performance is available on CD, but no titters are audible.
28 Past Tense, 149.
29 SCF (94), 82. As an example of Craft’s editorial technique, the account of this performance is worth examining. It first appeared in SPD, 419, credited as “from V.A.S.’s [Vera Arturovna Stravinsky’s] diary,” having been omitted from Craft’s diary excerpts in Dial, R&C, and SCF (72), but then resurfaced as his in SCF (94). With touching naïveté, the latter text was modified from the former but not essentially changed.
30 SSCIII, 131, note 40.
31 SCF (94), 83.
32 Quoted in SSCII, 349–50, note 7. The program included another piece by Boulez, the Étude à un son.
33 Letter of 22 December 1946 (PSS).
34 Souvtchinsky sent him a note on the 14th of May: “I can’t fail to be aware that you have something against me. Let our meeting depend entirely on your wishes.” (PSS) But Stravinsky seems not to have replied.
35 SCF (94), 85. Other details of their itinerary are in DB, 156.
36 SCF (94), 86. The Canadian excursion may originally have been meant to extend as far as Vancouver, where Stravinsky had made a plan to visit the University of British Columbia to discuss his concert there in the autumn. See Slim, “Introduction” to Annotated Catalogue of the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2002), 6–8, for an account of the autumn visit.
37 Morton, “In praise of Stravinsky’s new work,” Frontier, November 1952, 21–2. Stravinsky found the “Lyke-wake Dirge,” like all the other Cantata poems, in the Auden anthology. Craft told me in 1995 that he introduced Stravinsky to Britten’s Serenade, but he did not say when.
38 Letter of 28 August 1952 to David Adams: SSCIII, 366.
39 Mem, 110.
40 Stravinsky’s notation of the sixteen-note series is beautifully reproduced in SPD, plate 14.
41 Ibid., 422.
42 SCF (94), 74.
43 Richard Buckle and John Taras, George Balanchine: Ballet Master (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), 191–4.
44 See his letter of 11 November 1952 to Roth (PSS); also CwC.
45 See especially Adams’s letter to Stravinsky of 19 September 1952 (PSS). Adams told me that Bean was fired at the instigation of Ralph Hawkes’s brother, Geoffrey, who disliked her personally.
46 See his letter to Cuénod of 5 September 1952 (PSS), offering to pay an additional $100 out of his own pocket.
47 Mildred Norton, “All-Stravinsky concert,” Los Angeles Daily News, 12 November 1952.
48 Goldberg, “Stravinsky Cantata Novel Experiment,” Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1952.
49 Letter of 31 October 1952 (PSS).
50 Jay S. Harrison, “Talk With Stra
vinsky: Composer Discusses His Music,” New York Herald Tribune, 21 December 1952.
51 Harrison, op. cit.
52 Norton, Los Angeles Daily News, 12 November 1952.
53 Roman text mine.
54 Telegram of 16 November 1952 (PSS).
55 Letter from Jakob Gimpel, Los Angeles Daily News, 24 November 1952.
56 Peter Yates on “Music,” in Arts and Architecture (Los Angeles, February 1953).
57 “Lyrics of Hate,” Congress Weekly, 19 January 1953.
58 Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 459.
59 Letter of 3 December 1952 (PSS).
60 Letter of 10 December 1952, Igor to Vera Stravinsky, in DB, 160.
61 New York Herald Tribune, 22 December 1952.
62 “Stravinsky’s Cantata Considered One of His Grander Vocal Works,” New York Herald Tribune, 28 December 1952.
63 Joan Peyser, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (London: Cassell, 1976), 97.
64 Specifically: “Trajectoires: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schönberg,” Contrepoints, 6 (1949), 122–42; “Moment de J.-S. Bach,” Contrepoints, 7 (1951), 72–86.
65 Peyser, op. cit., 97.
66 Virgil Thomson by Virgil Thomson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 402–3.
67 Letter to Cage, after 28 November 1951, in Nattiez and Piencikowski (eds.), Pierre Boulez—John Cage: Correspondance et Documents, 200.
68 SCF (94), 91. As we have seen, however, Craft’s diaries cannot be trusted as wholly contemporary.
69 “Note to Tonight’s Concert: Webern’s Work Analyzed,” New York Herald Tribune, 28 December 1952. Revised reprint as “Incipit” in Pierre Boulez, Relevés d’apprenti (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 273–4; English retranslation by Stephen Walsh in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 215–16. For the various other transmogrifications of this short article, see ibid., 215, note.
70 Peyser, op. cit., 84; also 99.
71 Ibid., 97.
72 SCF (94), 89–90.
73 The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, 93.
74 SCF (94), 93.
75 Philip Hart, Fritz Reiner (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 147.
76 A photograph in Hart, op. cit., seems to illustrate this particular relationship.
77 Mayer’s article (in Esquire, December 1953, 145, 209–13) is substantially excerpted in SPD, 416–18. Stravinsky’s reply appeared in the February 1954 issue of the magazine, p. 14.
78 Elliott Carter told me that, after the second performance, Vera Stravinsky was overheard to remark to her husband, “I heard a lot of yawns tonight.”
79 Olin Downes, “Rake’s Progress Has U.S. Premiere,” New York Times, 15 February 1953.
80 SCF (94), 97–8.
81 See the account in ibid., 98–9. It seems possible, however, that the dinner was engineered by Craft, who was attracted by Nuria Schoenberg.
82 Ibid., 99.
20 BRIEF ENCOUNTER
1 See Craft, “Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas,” in Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life, 52–60, for a useful, though not wholly reliable, memoir of the association.
2 Letter of 5 January 1953, Powell to Stravinsky (PSS).
3 See his letter of 16 January to Roth, SSCIII, 373–4.
4 “Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas,” 54.
5 Vera had not made the Boston trip, but remained in Los Angeles.
6 SCF (94), 100. I have drawn on various versions of Craft’s account, including SCF (72), 43; “Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas,” and Conv, 77–8 (treating this as at least partly Craft’s work). But see below in the main text.
7 J. M. Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America (Readers Union edition, London: Dent, 1957), 180.
8 Notwithstanding Brinnin’s suggestion, in ibid., 180–1, that Thomas did expect something of the kind.
9 Ibid., 181.
10 Letter of about 23 May 1953, in P. Ferris (ed.), The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas (London: Dent, 1985), 888–9.
11 “Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas,” 55.
12 Ibid.
13 SCF (72), 43; also SCF (94), 100.
14 For a very detailed, professional investigation of the cause of Thomas’s death, see James Nashold and George Tremlett, The Death of Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing, 1997).
15 Telegram of 27 May 1953, Denis de Rougemont and Nicolas Nabokov to Stravinsky; André Marion to Nabokov, 29 May; Nabokov to Marion, 1 June (PSS).
16 Letter of 4 August 1953 (PSS). Balanchine’s ex-wife was now married to the Columbia director.
17 Letter of 26 January 1954 (PSS). For a very fine, detailed account of this whole episode, see Doris Meyer, Victoria Ocampo: Against the Wind and the Tide, 152–69.
18 Letter to Stravinsky of 16 June 1953, in Conv, 79.
19 Letter of 22 June 1953 (HRC, Thomas).
20 Letter of 30 June to Robert Choate (dean of the Boston University College of Music), copy in HRC, Thomas.
21 SCF (94), 101. They first played the Septet reduction on the 28th June. See also Stravinsky’s letter to Boosey and Hawkes, 21 July 1953, in SSCIII, 374–5.
22 See ASS, 40; also letter of 21 July to Boosey and Hawkes.
23 SCF (94), 106.
24 See the correspondence between Stravinsky and Acosta in PSS and the Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia.
25 28 July 1953 (PSS).
26 Letter of 9 August 1953 (PSS).
27 Telegram of 10 August 1953 (PSS).
28 See his letters of 17 December 1953 to Acosta, and 19 February 1954 to Acosta’s agent, Margot Johnson, respectively (PSS). “The Diaghilev I Knew” is in Atlantic Monthly (November 1953), 33–6; “Le Diaghilev que j’ai connu” in Le Figaro littéraire, 21 November 1953.
29 See his letter to Boosey of 21 July (SSCIII, 374), and Boosey’s reply, sending the score, of the 30th (PSS). “Never let the first performance of one of your operas be on the occasion of a diplomatic gala,” Boosey advised, referring to the failure of Gloriana at its Covent Garden premiere the previous month.
30 SCF (94), 103–4.
31 Letter of 11 August 1953, SSCIII, 376.
32 Letter of 26 August 1953 (HRC, Thomas).
33 Letter of 26 August 1953, in SSCI, 285, but wrongly dated the 27th.
34 Letter of 27 August, in SSCI, 286, wrongly dated the 28th.
35 Letter of 28 August, partly in SSCI, 286, wrongly dated the 29th. The full text is in PSS.
36 Letter of 26 August, Stravinsky to Thomas (HRC, Thomas).
37 Letter to Stravinsky, 31 August 1953, in SSCI, 286–7.
38 F. de Lauze, Apologie de la danse (1623) (ed. Joan Wildeblood) (London: Frederic Muller, 1952).
39 Letter to Kirstein, 9 September 1953, in SSCI, 287. He later described it to David Adams as “a kind of symphony to be danced, without any blueprint for a plot” (letter of 25 September 1953, PSS, partly in SSCIII, 377).
40 Letter of 22 September 1953, in Conv, 79–81: italics his.
41 Letter of 26 September 1953 (HRC, Thomas).
42 Letter of 27 October 1953; Annotated Catalogue of the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection, 279. This is the letter mentioned in Conv, 78, and wrongly dated 25 October, but not quoted.
43 For these and other details, see Nashold and Tremlett, The Death of Dylan Thomas, 138–83. It should be added that Thomas’s biographer Paul Ferris is skeptical about the diabetes theory and argues that Thomas died of hypoxia induced by an excessive dose of morphine. All agree, in any case, that while alcohol was part of the poet’s trouble, it was not the direct cause of his death. See Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Biography, new ed. (London: Dent, 1999), 299, 323–4.
44 Letter to Stravinsky, 22 September 1953, in Conv, 81.
45 Craft, “Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas,” 57. Craft reports that the telegram arrived at nine a.m., but since Thomas died just after midday in New York (just after nine in Los Angeles), the news must have come later.
46 As w
e saw in chapter 5, the information in the published score that the string parts were added in 1953 is incorrect.
47 A facsimile fair copy of this sketch, dated December 1953, is in ASS, 42.
48 Richard RePass, Musical Times, 95 (1954), 205.
49 Soulima Stravinsky, interview with Thor Wood; also Soulima’s memoirs, Are you the Son …?
50 Letter of 11 October 1952 (PSS).
51 Letter of 17 November 1952 (PSS).
52 CwC.
53 For instance, he routinely and for the most part successfully recommended Theodore as cover designer for his scores.
54 According to Craft, Stravinsky wanted him to conduct the premiere of the Septet, and he would have done so had Thacher agreed (CwC).
55 Ibid.
56 SCF (94), 107, entry for 2 January. Stravinsky got back to Los Angeles on 3 February.
57 Letter of 15 March 1954 (PSS).
21 COMPETITION OF THE GODS
1 Letter of 25 November 1952, Nabokov to Stravinsky (PSS).
2 Letter of 3 December 1952, SSCII, 386.
3 See his letter of 25 November. He remarried on 7 May 1953.
4 See Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 129–30, for a vivid account of the actual performance and one of several published accounts of the incident at the door. Other versions of the incident are in SCF (94), 108, and ASS, 44. See also Michael Steinberg’s report in the New York Times, 9 April 1954.
5 Bohemian Fifths, 129.
6 SCF (94), 108.
7 SPD, 445, where, however, the work is given as a concerto by Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Spender told me in 1992 that it was the piece by Fricker.
8 DB, 172; SCF (94), 111.
9 SCF (94), 111–12.
10 Ibid., 108–12. More precise information is in DB, 172 (admittedly a volume edited by Craft), and here and there in contemporary correspondence.
11 Letter of 18 May 1954, in DB, 174.
12 As is confirmed by Igor’s postcard of 1 June from Lisbon to Soulima. His letter of the previous day to Vera, in DB, 174, suggests that Milène went with him to London and that they were visited there by Theodore and Madubo, but this makes no sense (since Madubo was now living her own life in Switzerland), and I suspect a confused translation (the original is unavailable).
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