Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  30 The gist of this information is in Stravinsky’s letter of 10 November 1962 to Theodore (PSS). As usual with such dealings between father and son, the letter is in Russian.

  31 Letter of 19 December 1962 (PSS).

  32 Letter to Stravinsky of 7 January 1963. In this letter Souvtchinsky describes other manuscripts in Meyer’s possession, including the score of Part I of The Rite (the copy Stravinsky had sent to Myaskovsky in the hope that he would proofread the score), one of the Berceuses du chat (with a dedication to Larionov), the Petit ramusianum, and Stravinsky’s drawing of Bakst.

  33 Letter to Stravinsky of 14 July 1963 (PSS).

  34 Letter to Souvtchinsky of 25 December 1962 (PSS).

  35 Letter of 19 January 1963 (PSS).

  36 Expo, 147–8. He did not, all the same, expressly prohibit publication until early 1964, when he (or, to be exact, Craft) scribbled a marginal note on Rufina Ampenoff’s request for approval (16 January), to the effect that he did not want the sketches to come out in his lifetime (the note is presumably a draft of a telegram). This abrupt refusal may somehow have been connected with Boulez. At any rate, when Souvtchinsky tried to persuade Stravinsky to change his mind, on the grounds that the sketches might not always be available, he studiously avoided mentioning Boulez, and instead proposed Amy and another young composer, Jean-Claude Eloy, to analyze the sketches under Craft’s direction (letter of 10 February). Eventually, in October 1964, Stravinsky agreed to the publication on condition that Craft himself write the commentary and Boulez an introduction. “Why not, in the end? My own attitude to my first period has radically changed, as if it wasn’t me who wrote it: my musical interests are now completely different—so let them come out, if it gives anyone legitimate pleasure.” (Letter to Souvtchinsky of 10 October 1964; see SSCI, 398, note 1, for another translation.) All this documentation is in PSS.

  37 The ballet first saw the light at City Center on 9 April, the day after Stravinsky sailed for Europe. The composer had attended a rehearsal on the 5th.

  38 Letter of 1 April 1963 to Stravinsky (PSS).

  39 There was also a concert in Zagreb, which prompted a diatribe against Craft’s conducting by the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (4 June 1963), and one in Bergen, which Craft had to conduct on his own, Stravinsky having at the last minute refused to travel to Norway.

  40 Letter to Theodore Strawinsky, 28 May 1963 (PSS).

  41 Letter to Nicolas Nabokov, 27 May 1963 (HRC, Nabokov).

  42 Personal communication, Sir Isaiah Berlin.

  43 See the second insert in this book for a photograph of the event.

  44 Letter to Stravinsky, 26 June 1963 (PSS).

  45 Letter to Stravinsky, 30 July 1963 (PSS).

  46 Letter of Stravinsky to Souvtchinsky, 19 January 1963 (PSS).

  47 DB, 213.

  48 Letter of 13 October 1963 (HRC, Nabokov). Stravinsky’s latest scheme to reduce his tax bill was to make an annual award to various composer and musicologist friends out of his ASCAP (performance rights) earnings. The original idea was for an eightieth-birthday university scholarship, but in the end he preferred to hand the cash directly to musicians in his own circle, such as Arthur Berger, Milton Babbitt, Ingolf Dahl, David Diamond, Lawrence Morton, and Sol Babitz. See especially David Adams’s letter of 3 October 1963, and Stravinsky’s reply of 4 October (PSS).

  49 SCF (94), 281, entry for 13 January.

  50 For instance, by White, Stravinsky, 551. Stravinsky seems not to have attended the Los Angeles premiere; see Lawrence Morton’s letter to him of 2 October 1963 (PSS).

  51 This was to be Stravinsky’s last visit to Santa Fe. He routinely attributed his failure to return to problems with the altitude, but according to Paul Horgan it was rather due to a bad emotional atmosphere created, on this visit, by a youthful faction on the Santa Fe staff unsympathetic to Stravinsky and his music. See Encounters with Igor Stravinsky, 172–8.

  52 Letter to Souvtchinsky, 23 July 1963 (PSS).

  53 Letter of 21 October 1963 (LoC, Perle). Nothing came of this idea until Friedrich Cerha made his own realization, now accepted as standard, in the 1970s. However, Craft wrote to George Perle on 25 May 1964 that Stravinsky approved the idea of a Berg Society and agreed to be its president (PSS).

  54 T&C, 63; T&E, 61, note 7.

  55 Letter to Stravinsky, 24 October 1963 (PSS). Nabokov had originally made the Berlin proposal in a letter of 2 September, with many glossy details about the facilities that would be placed at Stravinsky’s disposal.

  56 Letter of 2 September (PSS). Stravinsky did not reject the spirituals out of hand but asked Nabokov to send them (letter of 6 October, SSCII, 409). Only then did Craft inform Nika (letter of 18 October: HRC, Nabokov) that Stravinsky felt the music to be too remote from his own preoccupations.

  57 The enquiry was conveyed by Rufina Ampenoff in a telegram of 23 August 1963 (PSS).

  58 Telegram to Ampenoff, 24 August (PSS). Stravinsky’s Rome plan for the autumn had included a Vatican concert with his existing Mass on the program, but this had been fixed before the Pope’s death and at his invitation (see Adriana Panni’s letter to Stravinsky, 20 May 1963: PSS. Pope John died on 3 June). By August, however, he was refusing the Vatican concert, which it was intended to televise, and offering a studio filming of the Octet instead (see Panni to Craft, 5 August, and Stravinsky to Panni, 13 August). That same month, nevertheless, he was invested with a papal knighthood at a ceremony in Santa Fe Cathedral on the 18th, also of course on the authority of the late Pope. “Imagine my pride!” he wrote to Nadia Boulanger (see Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle, 83).

  59 Letter of 2 November 1963, SSCII, 410.

  60 SCF (94), 353.

  61 A week after the death Stravinsky told Theodore that he was refusing interviews about Cocteau. He did, however, record a short tribute for Paris radio, which was broadcast on 20 January 1964; see SSCI, 125.

  62 SCF (94), 379.

  32 THE SACRIFICE OF SIR ISAIAH

  1 DB, 213.

  2 See, for instance, Helen Carter’s letter of 7 December 1963 from New York to Nicolas Nabokov: “The Stravinskys are here.… All the friends say that he has slowed up a great deal this year, and that he seems sad” (HRC, Nabokov).

  3 Letter of 3 December 1963 (private collection); emphasis his. Only the date suggests that the “sadness” refers to Mika, the anniversary of whose death fell on 30 November. Stravinsky often replied in such terms to annual letters of condolence (most frequently from Nadia Boulanger) over the loss of his wife and daughter. Yet the present letter seems to hint also at some additional sorrow.

  4 Letter of Françoise to Stravinsky, 28 October 1963 (PSS), and Stravinsky’s reply of 3 November (private collection); emphasis his.

  5 Undated letter of November 1963 (private collection).

  6 Letter of 14 November 1963 (PSS).

  7 Letter of 10 January 1964 (PSS); emphasis his.

  8 DB, 213.

  9 DB, 214, note 2, says “fewer than ten people.” SCF (94), 391, gives the attendance as four, including the orchestra’s resident conductor, Eugene Ormandy.

  10 SCF (94), 399.

  11 Ibid., 391–3.

  12 Including, for some reason, the low E-flat clarinet, an instrument found only in military bands. Auden’s haiku is not quite strict, according to the Japanese pattern of 5-7-5 syllables. Instead he varies the distribution of the seventeen syllables between the three lines of each verse, as he does also in other haikus of this period–“Symmetries & Asymmetries,” “Ascension Day, 1964,” “Lines for Elizabeth Mayer.”

  13 T&C, 61; T&E, 58. For once, the two texts differ only marginally, but by way of compensation the fragment of music (“the heavens are silent”) is given in the wrong key in T&E, as if written for high E-flat clarinet transposing, rather than voice. I am grateful to David Matthews for drawing my attention to this peculiarity.

  14 See, for instance, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 4 March 1964. It was presumably suc
h reports that prompted William Glock to ask for the premiere of what he assumed would be a substantial choral-orchestral piece. See Rufina Ampenoff’s letter to Stravinsky, 31 March 1964 (PSS). Other newspapers apparently reported that the piece was being written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (letter of Nicolas Nabokov to Stravinsky, 10 April 1964). Nabokov was unaware that the work had by that time already been performed.

  15 Letter of 6 March 1964 (PSS). The letter included minor textual changes and noted that the original final verse (the one beginning “When a just man dies”) was mobile and could be placed at the start or in the middle. Stravinsky duly began with it, then repeated it at the end.

  16 Kirstein to Craft, letter of 5 March 1964, in SSCI, 293.

  17 Letter of 21 March, ibid.

  18 The calculation of the number of quavers at metronome 144 is so exact that Stravinsky must have worked it out consciously. The first public performance of the fanfare opened the official NYCB first night on the 24th (I am grateful to Nancy Reynolds for confirming these dates from the State Theater programs).

  19 Letter of 7 December 1963 (PSS).

  20 T&C, 34; T&E, 24–5. The texts, however, differ in many details.

  21 The published version for mezzo-soprano, with minor adjustments to the vocal line, was made after the first performance at the request of Cathy Berberian.

  22 D. Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof, 215; SCF (94), 394. There had been a preliminary rehearsal on the morning of the day before. Stravinsky noted in his diary that Lawrence Morton had asked that there be no applause. The performance, he added, “was very dignifying” (not “gratifying,” as given in the published text in ASS, 174).

  23 Letter of 18 April 1964, SSCII, 412.

  24 Newsweek, 20 April 1964, 75.

  25 Letter of 13 April 1964, SSCIII, 446.

  26 Respectively: Ampenoff to Stravinsky, letter of 6 August 1963 (PSS), Stravinsky’s reply of 10 August (SSCIII, 441), and Ampenoff’s letter of 2 June 1964 (PSS), which Stravinsky returned with marginalia (printed as if it were a distinct letter in SSCIII, 448).

  27 In his diary he wrote: “That is the organization of Mrs. Lalandi’s Bach Festivals in Oxford. They did not even know that these Variations were with a chorus.” ASS, 174 (original in English, PSS).

  28 SCF (94), 394. The entry is wrongly dated 16 May (for 16 June).

  29 Letter of 2 November 1964 (UCLA, Morton).

  30 John McClure, “The Rake Again,” Gramophone, vol. 42 (March 1965), 415.

  31 In ImpLif, Craft recalls them as “four very good German singers, who had performed the opera many times in Hanover” (p. 273). But one of the four was the British soprano Heather Harper.

  32 Letter of 2 November, Neighbour to Morton.

  33 McClure, op. cit., 416.

  34 ImpLif, 273. However, Stravinsky noted in his diary for 28 June that Craft had gone on to Oxford ahead of them because “he had a rehearsal for Trauer-Ode before me.” See ASS, 175.

  35 ASS, 175, Stravinsky’s diary entry for 10 July.

  36 The exact details are unclear. Craft, in his account of the incident, allows it to appear that Johnny charged his entire bill, plus some expenses for entertaining friends, but it seems to me likely that the composer expected to meet his grandson’s room account (otherwise it is surely inconceivable that the eighteen-year-old student would have put up at a five-star hotel). According to Libman, 308, the extras were charged to the composer’s account at her suggestion. See also Craft, CherP, most recently in Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life, 148–9.

  37 Telegram to Ahron Propes, 20 July 1964; to Nabokov, 22 July (PSS).

  38 Telegram of 24 July (PSS).

  39 Undated telegram of about 23 July (PSS).

  40 Telegram of 24 July (PSS).

  41 Letter of 24 July (PSS).

  42 Telegram of 30 July 1964 (PSS).

  43 Letter of 4 August 1964 (PSS).

  44 Letter of 27 July, Boulanger to Stravinsky (PSS), and Stravinsky’s reply of 30 July, in SSCI, 260.

  45 Letter of 6 August (PSS).

  46 The regretful telegram is dated 11 August; the countermanding text is an undated handwritten note (PSS).

  47 ASS, 175.

  48 Letter of Isaiah Berlin to Nicolas Nabokov, 7 September 1964 (HRC, Nabokov).

  49 Letter of 27 May 1963 (HRC, Nabokov).

  50 Without, however, quite the right complement of instruments. The orchestra, from Tel Aviv, lacked an alto flute, and since the local Jerusalem orchestra refused to lend their instrument, the part had to be played on a clarinet.

  51 Letter of Berlin to Nabokov, 7 September.

  52 Ibid.

  53 Ibid.

  54 A reference, presumably, to the Prussian military dynasty of the Manteuffels, and an interesting corrective to Stravinsky’s remarks about Wagner.

  55 See Ernst Roth’s letter to Stravinsky of 11 February 1964 (PSS) and Stravinsky’s reply of 16 February, in SSCIII, 443.

  56 Nicole Hirsch, “Le nouveau Stravinsky,” L’Express, 6 September 1964. See also ImpLif, 275.

  57 See ImpLif, 275–6. Craft, as is his habit in this volume, vouchsafes the young lady’s name.

  58 See above, chapter 21.

  59 The photograph is in DB, 215.

  60 His letter to Stravinsky of 5 October 1964, citing the composer’s reaction, is in PSS. He also there states his intention to write to Craft, though the letter itself is not on public view.

  61 Letter of 13 January 1965, partially quoted (and misdated to the 11th) in SSCII, 416, note 81.

  62 Letter of 19 October 1964 to Marya Yudina, in Bretanitskaya (ed.), Pyotr Suvchinsky i ego vremya, 376–8.

  63 Letter of 8 August 1964, in SSCIII, 449, but here retranslated from the Russian. In refuting Libman’s claim to have been involved in the negotiations, Craft states that de Laurentiis was “astonished” to receive Stravinsky’s signed contract, “since he had never made any proposal at all” (SPD, 591, also quoting AMC, 177–8). The correspondence with Rufina Ampenoff makes it clear that de Laurentiis was and continued to be enthusiastic about the idea of Stravinsky’s participation, and was still pestering her about it as late as November 1964 (see especially Ampenoff’s letter to Stravinsky of 12 November: PSS). According to Libman, the fee would have been a million dollars subject to tax; Craft mentions no fee but denies that tax would have been payable (presumably because the project was based in Rome). Lawrence Morton told Oliver Neighbour in January 1965 that the fee would have been $250,000, and that Craft had talked Stravinsky out of accepting for the good of his health (letter of 15 January: UCLA, Morton). A copy of Stravinsky’s signed letter of agreement with his agent for the project, Paul Kohner, is in the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection, now in the Library of the University of British Columbia. See Annotated Catalogue of the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection, 329–32.

  64 In Britain this would be the first floor—the one above ground level.

  65 “Stravinsky at Home,” Musical America (January 1963), 10–11, reprinted in T&E, 64–75; T&C, 298–307. Libman refers to a row between Stravinsky and Craft supposedly provoked by Craft’s release of “this private letter” to Musical America (AMC, 231). But she seems unaware of any actual issue of authorship.

  66 T&E, 73. The text was significantly altered for the British reprint in T&C, 306.

  67 Vera Stravinsky, “The Rake’s Progress: ‘La Prima Assoluta,’” in T&E, 51–4; T&C, 55–7. Compare SCF (94), 62–3.

  68 T&E, 76–82; T&C, 308–13.

  69 ImpLif, 260, 277, also reprinting both texts, but without the dates or address headings.

  70 Letter of June 1965, in SB, 183–4.

  71 Vernon Duke, “The Deification of Stravinsky,” Listen, May-June 1964, 1–5; Stravinsky, “A Cure for V.D.,” Listen, September-October 1964, 1–2.

  72 CwC.

  73 “Music: A Dialogue,” Show, April 1964. Reprinted as “In the Name of Jean-Jacques!,” in T&E, 97–101; and (edited) in T&C, 78–9.

  74 “Schoenber
g Speaks His Mind,” The Observer, 18 October 1964, reprinted as “Schoenberg’s Letters,” in T&E, 132–8, and (much rewritten) T&C, 248–53. Morton told Oliver Neighbour that the review “is of course Craft’s work, though it does represent the master’s feelings (Craft-induced)” (letter of 30 October 1964, UCLA Morton).

  75 Nadia’s first approach was in a letter of 7 November; when Stravinsky expressed interest but concern about the timetable (12 November); Nadia wrote again (14 November) offering $10,000 but little extra time. Stravinsky’s ultimatum about money was wired on the 17th (PSS).

  76 Seeger’s original letter of commission is not in PSS, but Stravinsky’s reply of 9 November 1964 (actually a reply to a reply) refers to Seeger’s willingness to be patient and adds: “I can only work in my own tempo and under my own pressures” (PSS).

  77 The most grotesque example is Heinz-Klaus Metzger’s “Strawinsky und die Nekrophilie,” in Igor Strawinsky: Musik-Konzepte, nos 34–5 (January, 1984), 99–106.

  78 Letter postmarked 9 December 1966, in SSCI, 261, but there wrongly dated December 1964. The letter is a reply to a request in Nadia’s of 4 December 1966, relayed from André Malraux, that he conduct a concert in Paris in honor of the Baudelaire centenary in 1967.

  79 The work was completed on 17 February.

  80 Claudia Cassidy, “On the Aisle,” Chicago Tribune, 18 April 1965.

  81 Robert C. Marsh, “2 Major Stravinsky Works Get World Premieres Here,” Chicago Sun-Times, 18 April 1965.

  82 Cassidy, op. cit.

  83 Letter of 12 December 1964, SSCIII, 450–1.

  84 Rich, “Stravinsky & Strauss?—It’s Like Brando Reading Edgar Guest,” New York Herald Tribune, 7 December 1964. One has always to remember that newspaper headlines are normally the work of harassed sub-editors.

  85 Letter of 7 September 1964 to Nicolas Nabokov (HRC, Nabokov).

  86 Morton to Boulez, 18 July 1965 (PSS).

  87 Boulez to Morton, undated reply to the foregoing (probably October 1965) (PSS).

  33 SMILING FOR THE CAMERA

  1 Oppenheim told Charles Joseph that the idea of reviving the film project came not from him but from Stravinsky himself, after seeing a CBS documentary about Casals. See Stravinsky Inside Out, 177.