Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

49 Craft’s letters of September 1958 from Hamburg and Brussels are in PSS.

  50 SCF (94), 176. Walpole’s remark is in a letter of 15/16 August 1776 to the Countess of Upper Ossory: see W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. 32 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 315.

  51 Letter of 5 October 1958, quoted in DB, 193, note 3.

  52 Oedipus Rex was performed without a speaker, apparently because of a mixup resulting from the death of Piovesan. The Rite of Spring was with the 1943 revision of the “Danse sacrale.”

  53 SCF (94), 180–1. An account of part of the conference is in Eugenio Montale, Il Secondo mestiere: Arte, musica—società, ed. G. Zampa (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1996), 389–92.

  54 The letter is dated 21 September. Nabokov managed to get it back but, instead of destroying it, as Berlin presumably supposed, he kept it. It is now among his papers at UT Austin (HRC, Nabokov).

  55 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (8th ed., London: George Allen, 1897), vol. 2, 303–22.

  56 Montale, Il Secondo mestiere, 468, quoted also in ASS, 72–3. Montale’s first trade (“mestiere”) was, of course, that of one of Italy’s leading poets.

  57 Giuseppe Pugliese, “Le ‘Lamentazioni’ di Strawinsky,” Il Gazettino, 24 September 1958.

  58 “‘Threni’ in Venice,” Observer, 28 September 1958.

  59 Undated note in UCLA, Morton.

  60 Recordings were made of all the items in both of Stravinsky’s 1958 Venice concerts, and released on Arkadia, 1CD 0062731.

  61 Letter of 4 October 1958, in Chimènes (ed.), Francis Poulenc: Correspondance, 900.

  62 Pugliese, op. cit.

  63 Postcard of 2 October 1958 (UCLA, Morton).

  64 See for instance ImpLif, 207. DB, 193, merely refers vaguely to “Boulez’s concert.”

  65 Letter of 10 April 1958, Boulez to Stravinsky (PSS).

  66 See for instance Roth’s letter of 27 June (PSS).

  67 Letter of 10 April.

  68 The description is Souvtchinsky’s, in his letter to Stravinsky of 17 June 1958 (PSS).

  69 See Boulez’s letter to Craft, 12 September 1958. Boulez had noticed that proper soloists were being rehearsed for the Venice premiere.

  70 Private communication, December 2002.

  71 ImpLif, 208.

  72 Private communication from Boulez.

  73 Clarendon (Bernard Gavoty), “Strawinsky a présenté ses ‘Threni,’” Le Figaro, 17 November 1958.

  74 This anecdote, and certain other elements of my description of the concert, are taken from an unsigned and undated contemporary account, “Tout ne s’est pas bien passé pour Stravinsky à Paris. Voici pourquoi;” in an unidentified periodical (cutting in PSS). The assumption that the Russian lady in question was Sonya Botkine is, however, mine, derived from the fact that she attended the concert and wrote to Stravinsky the following day regretting that she had tried but failed to speak to him (see SPD, 70–1). Most independent accounts of the concert agree that the audience reaction was friendly until Stravinsky declined to take a bow, though Craft implies in SSCII, 353, that Stravinsky refused to reappear because the audience had jeered his music. The fact that most newspaper reviews mention only the positive reaction tends to support the independent view, since in general newspaper critics do not wait to study the audience’s behavior at the end of concerts they are having to review.

  26 THE PILOT FISH AT SEA

  1 Letter of 14 November 1958 (PSS).

  2 Letter of 16 September 1956 to Henri Hell, in Chimènes (ed.), Francis Poulenc: Correspondance, 852–3.

  3 Letter of 15 November 1958, in R. Wangermée (ed.), Paul Collaer: Correspondance avec des amis musiciens (Sprimont: Mardaga, 1996), 436–7. Milhaud, in California, had not attended the Paris Threni, but he was plainly aware that it was taking place.

  4 Avec Stravinsky (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1958), 28, 18. For convenience, I quote the English text of this remark in Conv, 131.

  5 Boulez, “D’une conjonction—en trois éclats,” in Avec Stravinsky, 97–9. I have tried to improve my own translation (see Stocktakings, 219) for greater clarity in the present context.

  6 See Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris: Julliard, 1958), 10. It should perhaps be mentioned that no such browsing would actually have been possible, as the pages of a new copy of this volume were uncut. Avec Stravinsky, by contrast, had ready-cut pages.

  7 See Souvtchinsky’s letter of 19 December 1958 (PSS).

  8 Letter of 25 November 1958 (PSS); English translation in SSCII, 354. The Rome concert included Les Noces, the Symphony in Three Movements, and Scènes de ballet.

  9 See Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez, 195–6.

  10 Letter of 19 December 1958 (PSS).

  11 Letter of 26 December (PSS).

  12 Letter of 30 December 1958 (HRC, Nabokov).

  13 Letter of 25 January 1959 (PSS).

  14 Letter of 8 January (PSS).

  15 30 January and 1 February, respectively (PSS).

  16 Letter of 26 February 1959 (PSS). Boulez told me that “Goléa could not accept the evolution of Stravinsky, and still less the fact that we were (Stravinsky and I) on friendly terms. He acted like a veteran of 45–46. And the veteran’s mentality has never been particularly mine” (private communication, 9 November 2004).

  17 Letter of 19 December.

  18 Letter of 4 March 1959 (PSS).

  19 Ibid.

  20 A. Goléa, “Pariser Musikindustrie,” NZfM (February 1959), 79–80.

  21 As told to a press conference in Tokyo in April 1959. See SCF (94), 199.

  22 Letter of 7 March 1959 (PSS).

  23 Letter of, probably, 3 March 1959. The draft letter to the NZfM is dated 2 March, but the covering note, on a typed extract from the Goléa review, is undated (PSS).

  24 Letter of 7 March.

  25 Letters to Souvtchinsky of 9 March, and to Boulez of 10 March, in SSCII, 355–6.

  26 See his letter to Souvtchinsky of 9 March.

  27 Letter to Boulez of 6 March 1959 (PSS). The Stockhausen allegation is slightly mysterious, since Craft had been preparing a performance of Zeitmasse for its composer to conduct at a Monday Evening Concert the previous December (though the performance was cancelled as the flautist was ill). But Stravinsky had heard that Stockhausen had been talking in a similar vein about his music. See his letter of 9 March 1959 to Souvtchinsky. I have been unable to trace the attack on Boulez.

  28 Letter of 19 March (PSS).

  29 Letters of 19 March and 10 April, Boulez to Stravinsky. Stravinsky’s prompt is dated 23 March (PSS).

  30 I say this with all humility, toward the end of a half-million-word biography.

  31 Letter of 23 February 1959 (PSS).

  32 Letter of 23 March (PSS).

  33 Letter of 1 April 1959 (PSS).

  34 Crosby was communicating through Stravinsky’s lawyer Arnold Weissberger. Weissberger’s letter to Stravinsky with the offer of $20,000 is dated 27 February 1959 (PSS). Eliot wrote to the composer on 19 March referring to his own commission. See Craft, ImpLif, 211–12.

  35 Letter of 19 March.

  36 Letter of 8 April 1959 (PSS), quoted with some excisions in ImpLif, 212.

  37 Letter of 21 May 1959, in ibid., 213.

  38 See his letter to Eliot of 30 January 1958 (PSS).

  39 Craft’s “diary” note that Avec Stravinsky was published on the day of the Agon concert is another of those mistakes that support the view that the diary entries were often concocted at a later date. The first and only edition of Avec Stravinsky indicates on the final page—as usual with French publications—“Achevé d’imprimer … en Octobre MCMLVIII … Mise en vente: Novembre 1958.” Some version of the conversation texts was nevertheless on sale at the October 1957 concert, but I have not been able to trace a copy. The German omnibus edition is Igor Strawinsky—Leben und Werk—von ihm selbst (Zurich/Mainz: Atlantis/Schott, 1957).

  40 See “Dialoge: Igor Strawinsky—Robert Craft,
” Melos, 25 (February 1958), 49–59. A second instalment appeared (as “Neue Dialoge”) in the September issue, 261–93.

  41 The idea of updating Chron and adding the questions had been suggested by Herbert Weinstock of Alfred A. Knopf as early as March 1957 (letter of 21 March); the idea of a new book based on conversations was put forward by Ken McCormick, of Doubleday, in August 1957, in a letter to Stravinsky’s lawyer-agent, Arnold Weissberger (see Weissberger’s letter to Stravinsky of 30 August, in PSS).

  42 The agreement with Doubleday is dated 31 March 1958. See also Eliot’s letter to Stravinsky of 19 March 1958, quoted in part in ImpLif, 199.

  43 See, for instance, Souvtchinsky’s letter to Stravinsky of 22 February 1958 (PSS), and Peter du Sautoy’s to Stravinsky of 11 April 1958 (PSS). The admission that Craft had written the journal for publication under Stravinsky’s name is in his letter to Richard de la Mare (of Faber) of 9 June 1958. The composer, on the other hand, according to this letter, wanted Craft to change the person of the diarist and publish it under his own name (PSS).

  44 Letter of 15 March 1958 (PSS).

  45 Letter of 23 May. See note 43, above.

  46 Joseph Bloch, in an unidentified 1959 journal (cutting in PSS).

  47 Conv, 16. Strictly the remark is Craft’s, but attributed to Stravinsky, who echoes it on page 18.

  48 Alfred Frankenstein, “When Stravinsky Talks He Is Always Worth Hearing,” San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, 19 July 1959.

  49 Craft told me this himself, with understandable but revealing pride. I have not succeeeded in tracing the remark in print.

  50 Cf. M&C. Even the title of this edition (Memories and Commentaries: that of the completely different second volume of the original series) seems designed to throw a smoke screen over the past.

  51 Conv, 125–6.

  52 Conv, 48. The book also prints letters from Ravel, Dylan Thomas, and Jacques Rivière; but letters from Satie were excluded because of defamatory remarks they contained about Florent Schmitt, who was still alive during the editing process, though he died in August 1958, before publication.

  53 Letter of 10 April 1959 (PSS). The final phrase is in English in the original.

  54 Craft’s latest account of the impression made by Kabuki is in SCF (94), 198–9. However, the equivalent text in Dial, 190–1, is significantly different and attributes the reaction more specifically to Stravinsky himself (rather than the collective “we”).

  55 ASS, 164. The interview, from the English-language paper The Mainichi, is quoted in SCF (94), 202.

  56 Letter of 8 April; see ImpLif, 212.

  57 See SCF (94), 204–6, for a detailed and highly amusing account of the Noh experience.

  58 Letter of 24 April 1959 (HRC, Nabokov).

  59 SCF (94), 200.

  60 “Stravinsky Concert Topping Festival Season Events,” The Mainichi, 10 May 1959.

  61 ASS, 164. See also SCF (94), 209.

  27 A STRANGE CONCOCTION

  1 On 6 April 1959.

  2 Letter of 10 April (PSS).

  3 Mem, 105–6.

  4 Equivalent to just over $7,000 in the values of the day.

  5 The French text remains unpublished. Stravinsky sent it to Souvtchinsky on 29 May, and a copy of this is in PSS.

  6 See Stravinsky’s letter to Souvtchinsky of 29 May 1959, actually a lengthy marginal gloss on a typed copy of the French text of Boulez’s draft (PSS).

  7 See Helmut Schmidt-Garre, “Scherchen und Boulez dirigieren in der Münchner Musica viva,” Melos, 26 (April 1959), 116–17. The performance was on 6 March, the talk on the 5th. Boulez himself, forewarned now about Stravinsky’s touchiness, brought the review to his attention in his letter of 9 May.

  8 Letter of 6 June, quoted (in a different translation) in SSCII, 357.

  9 Letter of 29 May.

  10 Letter of 6 June 1959 (PSS).

  11 Letter of 26 June (PSS).

  12 On the 15th. The remainder of the concert (Bach’s third orchestral suite, Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film Scene, and Mozart’s Symphony in A major, K. 201) was conducted by Craft.

  13 His slightly confusing account of the process is in Mem, 106–7.

  14 Letter of 11 June 1959 (PSS). The concert was on the 8th.

  15 See Gibson’s letter of 8 June and Stravinsky’s reply of the 10th (PSS).

  16 Encounters with Stravinsky, 92.

  17 For Horgan’s full account of this episode, see ibid., 86–110.

  18 Ibid., 97–8.

  19 Ibid., 106–8.

  20 “London Hears Threni,” New Statesman, 13 June 1959, 824.

  21 Encounters with Stravinsky, 93, 88.

  22 AMC, 61.

  23 Encounters with Stravinsky, 105.

  24 30 July 1959.

  25 Letter of Robert Craft to Glenn Watkins, 1 August 1959. See Watkins, “The Canon and Stravinsky’s Late Style,” in Pasler (ed.), Confronting Stravinsky, 234; also Mem, 106.

  26 Letter of 15 August (PSS).

  27 See Stravinsky’s letters of 15 August and 8 September, also Liebermann’s reply of 16 September (PSS).

  28 Letter of 18 August, discussed in AMC, 53, 61–2. Libman thought that she owed the contact to Deborah Ishlon, or Bliss Hebert, the director of the Santa Fe Anna Bolena.

  29 Letter to Graff of 2 August 1959 (PSS).

  30 Letter of 6 August (PSS).

  31 Letter of 16 August (PSS). The “new play” may have been a white lie. After The Elder Statesman, Eliot seems to have neither written nor projected anything for the stage.

  32 See for instance his letter of 22 July to Souvtchinsky (PSS).

  33 Letter of 11 August (PSS). The abbreviated letter to the NZfM is dated 4 August. Boulez explained to me that “Strobel was not interested in a polemical article about an event which took place in Paris, not in Germany, and many months before. There was already a row over a remark Stravinsky had made about German orchestras, which he had described as unable to play rhythmically, just as the Japanese could not distinguish between the consonants ‘l’ and ‘r’, and Strobel didn’t want another polemic of this kind. So when he did the translation, he shortened and softened my text. And I agreed with him” (private communication, 9 November 2004).

  34 Letter of 15 August, in SSCII, 358, but here retranslated.

  35 Letter of 20 August (PSS).

  36 Letter of 24 August, in SSCII, 358.

  37 “Ein Brief von Pierre Boulez,” NZfM, October 1959, 526. Craft’s remark in SSCII, 358, that “the Copenhagen version was never published” is true only in the literal sense that it was published with relatively minor changes and of course in German (see below in the main text). In any normal sense of the words it is simply untrue, or at best grossly misleading.

  38 Letters of 6 June, 26 June, 28 July (PSS).

  39 Letter of 22 August (PSS).

  40 Letter of 7 March 1959.

  41 Letter of 23 August (PSS). The “Valkyries” were the female admirers who, according to Souvtchinsky, followed Boulez around.

  42 Letter of 5 September (PSS).

  43 Letter of 10 October, Souvtchinsky to Stravinsky (PSS).

  44 See his letter of 23 February 1960 to Souvtchinsky, quoted in SSCII, 359, albeit in a confusingly edited text. Stravinsky was still in a rage with Goléa, and was simply incapable of understanding why the rest of the world was not in the same frame of mind.

  45 SCF (94), 210–11.

  46 See his letter to Stravinsky of 7 September (PSS).

  47 For the Bernstein encounters, see ASS, 165 and note 21; DB, 194 and note 2.

  48 See Craft’s letter to Watkins of 19 June 1959, in “The Canon and Stravinsky’s Late Style,” 234. I am also indebted to Professor Watkins for his personal memories of this episode.

  49 See his letter of 11 September 1959 (PSS). Watkins had previously sent his own realizations, which, moreover, Stravinsky had approved and declined to alter. It seems to have been Craft who persuaded the composer after all to make his own versions. See his letter
to Watkins of 16 August 1959 (PSS).

  50 Craft reported to Watkins on the 27th that the realizations were complete (PSS), and on the 29th Stravinsky announced them to Ernst Roth (SSCIII, 422).

  51 Letter of 17 June 1959 (PSS). See also Marcelle Oury, Lettres à mon peintre (Paris: Perrin, 1965).

  52 The draft of the full four-part double canon is dated 24 November 1959. Poulenc, on the other hand, wrote to Bois on 12 April 1960 that “I am quite inclined to set to music a new quatrain from the Bestiaire, for dear Dufy’s memorial …” (see Chimènes [ed.], Francis Poulenc: Correspondance, 946). Bois’s own account of the whole episode is in any case chronologically problematical. He says that Mme. Oury approached him because he was “close to Igor Strawinsky.” Yet he himself had only met Stravinsky for the first time in mid-September. Moreover, he has Poulenc’s song arrive well before Stravinsky’s canon, even though Stravinsky’s two-part October draft already refers to Dufy. See Mario Bois, Près de Strawinsky (Paris: Marval, 1996), 81–2.

  53 Most of these details are in Stravinsky’s letter of 1 November 1959 to Souvtchinsky (PSS). Curiously, this London visit is passed over in silence by Craft (except, briefly, in ImpLif), and it is a blank in Vera’s diary (DB) and (apart from the actual dates) in Stravinsky’s medical diaries (ASS).

  54 Horgan’s account is in Encounters with Stravinsky, 110–18.

  55 Times, 10 November 1959. The anonymous review was by William Mann.

  56 Letter of 19 November 1959. The body of the letter is in SSCI, 124, but the advice about foot baths is in a postscript that SSC omits.

  57 Dial, 29–30.

  58 Libman’s assertion that Movements was recorded two days after the concert seems to be a mistake (AMC, 81). In a letter to Boulez of 13 January 1960 Stravinsky refers to a possible recording with Mrs. Weber in June, but there is no other evidence for this plan and John McClure told me that there was never a studio recording with her and Stravinsky. Instead she recorded the work with Ferenc Fricsay, whose idea the commission had been in the first place. Stravinsky recorded it in 1961 with Charles Rosen (see below, chapter 29).

  59 Libman’s own account, based on and therefore supported by her correspondence with Stravinsky and Craft in PSS, is in AMC, 61–85. Regrettably, this fascinating but—in matters of musical detail—error-prone memoir has always to be read in conjunction with Craft’s vitriolic “review” of it in SPD, 569–93, a text that tells the reader more about its author than about the essential facts of the matter but which by that very token cannot be ignored as a psychological document in its own right.