Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  2 Charles Joseph’s assertion (Stravinsky Inside Out, 176) that Stravinsky was paid $15,000 is slightly misleading. His flat fee stayed at $10,000, but with a $2,500 repeat fee and a $2,500 fee for Craft. See Arnold Weissberger’s letter of 29 January 1965 to the composer (PSS).

  3 After a rehearsal for the London Festival Hall concert in May 1954 at which he was to receive the RPS Gold Medal. Personal communication from John Carewe, who was present.

  4 Poet, 55.

  5 See “Stravinsky Remains,” in Stocktakings From an Apprenticeship, 55–110.

  6 And still cannot. When I talked to him in Paris in December 2002, he again referred to the Les Noces barrings as a mistake that needed correcting. There remains something doctrinaire about this point of view. In 1980 Boulez had written to Eric Walter White, in response to a footnote in the second edition of his Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (p. 258), claiming to have checked the eight-counts in the manuscript and confirmed the error (letter of 1 February, HRC, White; I am very grateful to Jerry Young for bringing this letter to my attention). But in every autograph that I have seen, the counts are exactly as in the printed edition (that is, with the anomalous count of eleven). The relevant manuscripts are in the British Library, loan deposit 75, 42–45: the autograph full score and vocal score, and an ensemble score without voices (mainly in Catherine Stravinsky’s hand); also PSS. Boulez claims to have seen “a kind of ‘particell,’” which suggests the vocal score in the BL, with accompaniment for piano four-hands. No other autograph of which I am aware fits this description.

  7 Stravinsky Inside Out, 181–2.

  8 I am again indebted to Charles Joseph for these details, which were not included in the film as shown. See Stravinsky Inside Out, 183–5.

  9 Mem, 105.

  10 Près de Strawinsky, 136–7.

  11 The Rite of Spring was completed at the Hôtel du Châtelard, which alas by 1965 had been pulled down. Charles Joseph mistakenly calls Clarens a mountain village (Stravinsky Inside Out, 178).

  12 SCF (94), 404–6.

  13 See SCS, 184, quoting a different account of a story Stravinsky told on several occasions.

  14 They had originally planned to go first to Bucharest, but this leg of the journey had been cancelled mainly on financial grounds. See AMC, 274.

  15 Letter of Claudio Spies to Lawrence Morton, 1 May 1965 (UCLA, Morton).

  16 Ibid.

  17 DB, 216.

  18 SCF (94), 414.

  19 AMC, 200; italics and elision hers.

  20 Ibid., 200, cf. SCF (94), 421, and Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, 178, 186–7. The inserts were cleverly done, with the supposed conductor giving leads in the right places.

  21 Letter of 6 June 1965 (UCLA, Morton). Spies made this observation before the Rome concert, which had been arranged at the last minute by telephone to Warsaw. He knew (presumably from Craft) that television would be involved in Rome, but seems to have assumed it was a local station transmitting live. To confuse matters further, the CBS film represents the Rome concert as preceding the visit to Warsaw, which is made out to be the climax of the tour (and naturally of the film).

  22 According to DB, 216, the lunch was on 4 October 1964. On the 25th, Stravinsky sent Soulima and Françoise a document for Johnny to sign when he came of age, in relation to the financial settlement. The phone conversation seems to have taken place that same month.

  23 Letter of 7 June 1965 (PSS).

  24 See CherP, 149.

  25 Letter of 21 December 1964 (PSS).

  26 Undated letter of 10 June 1965. The letter is marked “jeudi” (Thursday) and begins “I wrote to you on Monday” (i.e., the 7th). Soulima wrote on the same day, and the letters were probably sent in the same envelope.

  27 The fear proved unfounded.

  28 CherP, 150.

  29 Ibid. Milène’s recollection forms part of a lengthy deposition made under oath in 1977, and now on file in the New York Surrogate Court archives.

  30 CherP, 151.

  31 Ibid., 152.

  32 Ibid., 193, note 50. Craft is apparently so anxious to belittle Stravinsky’s affection for his elder son that he throws in extra “evidence” that actually weakens his point.

  33 Letter of 2 September 1964 (PSS), quoted in ibid., 152.

  34 SSCIII, 454, note 61, glossing Stravinsky’s letter to Rufina Ampenoff of 8 November 1965.

  35 Letter of 8 January 1967 (PSS).

  36 See Stravinsky’s letter to Theodore of 6 November 1965 and Theodore’s reply of 15 November (PSS).

  37 CwC.

  38 CherP, 142–3.

  39 Deposition, 6 March 1975 (SCNY).

  40 Are you the son …?

  41 AMC, 237.

  42 Letter of 18 June 1965 (PSS).

  43 Vancouver Sun, 12 July 1965, quoted in SPD, 481.

  44 I witnessed it myself two months later in London’s Royal Festival Hall.

  45 The story is related by Libman in AMC, 230, and vehemently contradicted in various details by Craft in SPD, 585–6. Craft maintains that the work in question was The Fairy’s Kiss, and he insists that he was absent from the Pulcinella sessions, which is important only to the extent that he himself makes much of the point and uses the “mistake” to discredit Libman. There is, however, independent evidence that Libman was right. I have by and large accepted Craft’s other factual corrections, while assuming that, since (for all his vituperative tone) he does not deny the story in essence, it must be broadly true. Ironically a brief clip from the Pulcinella session is included on the Columbia “Stravinsky in Rehearsal” disc, and shows the composer apparently in a cheerful mood. But John McClure still remembers the tempo differences between the two conductors in Pulcinella, and these are recorded in a brief exchange between him and Stravinsky on the rehearsal disc.

  46 SPD, 586.

  47 New York: Knopf, 1967.

  48 In T&C.

  49 T&E, 4; T&C, 19–20.

  50 SCF (94), 62–3, replacing a much briefer account in SCF (72), 29. The most that can be said for Stravinsky’s own contribution to the program notes is that in a few cases he gave brief written answers to factual questions put by Craft. See, for instance, the reproduction of a question-and-answer sheet on Orpheus in ASS, 123. A comparison of this page with T&E, 46–8 (T&C, 51–3), should give pause to anyone intending to quote the Orpheus program note as a sample of Stravinsky’s thinking, let alone of his prose.

  51 Libman to Paterson, 15 June 1965; Paterson to Libman, 17 June, 28 June (PSS).

  52 For further details on this and other aspects of the Liebermann film, see Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, 172–4.

  53 See Stravinsky to Liebermann, 19 July 1965, and Liebermann’s reply of 2 August (PSS). According to Craft, Stravinsky again tried to cancel Hamburg when they arrived in New York on their way to Europe at the start of September, but Liebermann telephoned and persuaded him to go. See ImpLif, 283.

  54 Telegram of 6 August (PSS).

  55 Peyser, “Stravinsky-Craft, Inc.,” American Scholar (Fall, 1983), 513–18.

  56 See Stravinsky’s letter of 24 September to Souvtchinsky (PSS).

  57 See AMC, 252–5, for these and other details. Craft eventually delivered his lecture at Ohio State University in November 1966, and a version of it was published as the introduction to the facsimile publication of the sketches: Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches 1911–1913 (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1969).

  58 Letter of 19 February 1965 (PSS).

  59 Letter of 22 February (PSS). The sardonic reference is of course to Britten’s work of that name. See also T&C, 98.

  60 Letter of 21 March 1965, in SSCII, 417 (retranslated from the Russian original in HRC, Nabokov). Nabokov had been urging Stravinsky to accept a commission from Mstislav Rostropovich for a work for cello and orchestra. See his letter of 17 March (PSS). Rostropovich, he claimed, was so desperate for a Stravinsky piece that he would “crawl on his knees” to get one. But Stravinsky confessed himself interested in neither
Rostropovich nor his cello.

  61 AMC, 202.

  62 See his letters of 8 November to Rufina Ampenoff, in SSCIII, 454. The first of the two letters is in English, not Russian.

  34 FINAL CURTAIN

  1 In ImpLif, 283, Craft alleges that the film of this exchange was “inexcusably destroyed.” But it exists and has been excerpted in various films, including János Darvas’s Igor Stravinsky: Componist (2001), from which my quotation is taken. The journalist was Edward Greenfield, music critic of The Guardian.

  2 Letter to Boulez, 18 July 1965 (PSS).

  3 Soon afterwards Kirstein asked Stravinsky to write a piece as a “surprise present” for Balanchine. But nothing seems to have come of this. See Kirstein’s letter of 26 February 1966, in SSCI, 294.

  4 His own two recordings are in English.

  5 See Stravinsky’s letter of 27 July 1965 to John McClure (PSS).

  6 ImpLif, 273, 284. Stravinsky had been ill in the night of the first (“champagne, probably”), but he seems to have recovered by the third, and was well enough to go to the theatre (DB, 219).

  7 Letter of 27 October 1966 to McClure (PSS).

  8 Lalandi had cleverly secured Stravinsky’s agreement to succeed Albert Schweitzer as president of the Oxford Bach Festival by inviting him to write a short piece in Schweitzer’s memory. Stravinsky declined to write the piece but (presumably) felt he could not also refuse the presidency. See Lalandi’s letter to him of 25 December 1965 and his reply of 7 January 1966 (PSS).

  9 AMC, 262.

  10 Ibid.

  11 ImpLif, 285.

  12 Letter of 24 May 1966 (PSS).

  13 Bois, Près de Strawinsky, 43.

  14 Dialogues and a Diary (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 47.

  15 Letter of 27 December 1963 (PSS).

  16 Stravinsky to Souvtchinsky, letter of 10 September 1966 (PSS).

  17 The accounts of this incident in AMC, 268, and SCF (94), 436, do not tally.

  18 Ansermet, Les Fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine, 502.

  19 Ibid., 504.

  20 Letter of 13 July 1966, in CASIII, 129. However, if Libman’s account is correct, it was not the case that Stravinsky had proposed Ansermet. See AMC, 266–7, which suggests that Stravinsky would have vetoed the Swiss conductor if it had been within his power. Ansermet, on the other hand, waspishly told an interviewer that Stravinsky had deliberately programmed him to conduct Persephone, knowing him to have always avoided that work on principle because of its treatment of Gide’s text. See Raymond Ericson, “At Odds in Their Eighties,” New York Times, 3 July 1966. A cutting of this article (which also takes a stab at Stravinsky’s conducting technique) is in PSS, but it seems unlikely that he read it at the time, in view of his amiable response to Ansermet’s letter.

  21 Letter of 15 July, in ibid., 132.

  22 The composer’s own phrase, in R&C, 43; T&C, 106. The interview as a whole—all clever wordsmithery and backstabbing—is patently the work of Craft, but the musical details were presumably given him by Stravinsky since he himself was not present. A few days later Cage visited Stravinsky at the Hotel Pierre in quest of a page of manuscript for a charity auction.

  23 Sunday Oregonian, 19 February 1967, quoted in SPD, 476.

  24 Once again it is impossible to reconcile the various timings of these events as related by Libman (AMC, 270–1) and Craft himself (SCF [94], 437–9, and ImpLif, 286). One would normally favor the protagonist in such cases, but since Craft gets the date of the concert wrong (in the autobiography, not in the diary), this seems even riskier than usual.

  25 Encounters with Stravinsky, 181–2.

  26 Shirley Hazzard’s notes on the visit are in Columbia, Steegmuller.

  27 See his letter of 16 August 1966 to Rufina Ampenoff, in SSCIII, 455–6.

  28 See Arminé Montapert’s letter of 27 August to the Princeton lawyers (PSS).

  29 Letter of 16 August 1966 (PSS).

  30 See Morton’s letter of 20 August to Boulez (PSS).

  31 See James Lord, “Stravinsky and Giacometti,” in SNB, 376–81, with several reproductions.

  32 Letter to Souvtchinsky of 24 January 1966 (PSS).

  33 See Robert Craft’s text introducing Arnold Newman’s photographs of the Requiem Canticles sketchbook, in Bravo Stravinsky (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1967), 48. Mysteriously, the obituary of Evelyn Waugh, though reproduced in Newman’s book, is now missing from the sketchbook in PSS. I am grateful to David Smyth for pointing this out to me.

  34 The Credo was given in a nominally revised version (1964), and billed as a first performance.

  35 ImpLif, 216.

  36 Ibid., 287; also SCF (94), 446–7.

  37 See Spies’s letter of 7 November 1966 to Lawrence Morton. Morton, however, seems to have distrusted Spies and regarded him as a troublemaker; see his letter of 14 June 1967 to Oliver Neighbour (UCLA, Morton).

  38 Letter of 14 November to Morton (UCLA, Morton).

  39 Letter to Spies, 11 November 1966 (UCLA, Morton).

  40 Letter to Pierre Boulez, 11 August 1971 (PSS).

  41 Walter Arlen, “Stravinsky Work Premiered,” Los Angeles Times, 2 November 1966.

  42 See the sketches reproduced in SPD, 484–5, and Arnold Newman’s candid camera shots in Bravo Stravinsky, 13–21.

  43 See Bravo Stravinsky, 62–7 (including a facsimile of the fair-copy autograph of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”).

  44 Quoted in Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof, 228.

  45 Ibid., 228. Newman’s photograph in silhouette of Stravinsky listening to the concert from behind a curtain (Bravo Stravinsky, 69) must have been taken during the Beethoven sonata. The piano lid is fully raised, which it would hardly have been for “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.”

  46 Soulima Stravinsky, interview with Thor Wood.

  47 Dial, 113.

  48 The concerto was conducted by Craft, and Stravinsky conducted only the Firebird (apparently the 1919 suite, though printed programs are rarely dependable on such matters), and also apparently Fireworks. Vera noted that the orchestra was the worst they had had: see DB, 222.

  49 Or so Lalandi told Rufina Ampenoff. See Ampenoff’s letter of 28 November 1966 to Stravinsky (PSS).

  50 See Xenya’s letter to her uncle of 22 November, in SB, 190. Blazhkov had just phoned her with the news.

  51 AMC, 176–7; SCF (94), 444–5.

  52 AMC, 316–7.

  53 Quoted in AMC, 310. See also Marsh, “Pick-Up Band Mars Stravinsky Concert,” Chicago Sun-Times, 30 December 1966.

  54 AMC, 317.

  55 Ibid., 296.

  56 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 2 March 1967, quoted in SPD, 483; AMC, 315; letter of Craft to Ampenoff, 6 March 1967 (PSS).

  57 AMC, 316–17.

  58 DB, 223.

  59 SCF (94), 452.

  60 AMC, 317–18.

  61 John Kraglund, “Stravinsky’s Medal Is Icing on His Cake,” The Globe and Mail, 18 May 1967.

  62 SCF (94), 452.

  63 Messager de Montreux, 17 April 1914. See SCS, 233, and 606, n. 103.

  35 A FAMILY AFFAIR

  1 Letter of 12 January 1967 (PSS). The works were: Danses concertantes, the Firebird suite (1945), the Petrushka suite, The Song of the Nightingale, Abraham and Isaac, Gorodetsky and Balmont songs, Three Japanese Lyrics, Agon, and Song of the Volga Boatmen.

  2 Annotation on a letter from Rufina Ampenoff to Stravinsky, 31 January 1967.

  3 SCF (94), 477 (entry for 24 January); Allen’s remark is quoted by Neighbour in a letter of 7 July 1968 to Lawrence Morton (UCLA, Morton).

  4 Letter of 8 April 1968, in Bretanitskaya (ed.), Pyotr Suvchinsky i ego vremya, 382–3. It confirms the reference in “Side Effects I” to “a set of pieces provisionally titled Etudes, Inventions, and a Sonata.” See R&C, 54, T&C, 115; the article, dated October 1967, first appeared as “On Manners, Music, and Morality” in Harper’s Magazine, February 1968.

  5 Clive Barnes, “This Firebird Is for B
urning,” New York Times, 21 February 1971; Stravinsky’s reply, dated 3 March, appeared in the NYT, 21 March, and was reprinted in T&C, 219–20. Curiously enough, the so-called Author’s Foreword to T&C, which similarly carries Stravinsky’s name, is dated 1 March 1971, two days earlier than the letter. But it could hardly, without mediumistic intervention, have been much later.

  6 Barnes starts by talking about the impression left by Stravinsky’s writing, “and that of his oddly literary alter ego, Robert Craft,” as being that “of a querulous old man.” The apparent solecism is surely deliberate. Barnes knew Craft to be in his forties.

  7 B. H. Haggin, A Decade of Music (New York: Horizon Press, 1973), 206–7. See also Igor Stravinsky, “Rap Session,” New York Review of Books (11 February 1971), 18–20, reprinted in T&C, 170–77. Incidentally, the last-dated interview in T&C, one of the so-called Borborygms (pp. 181–2), is supposed to have been conducted on the 1st and 2nd of April, by which time Stravinsky could speak only in whispers, could not concentrate on a conversation, or move without help. A borborygm is a tummy rumble.

  8 ImpLif, 288.

  9 Letter of 13 June 1967 to Boulez (PSS); also Morton to Neighbour, 14 June 1967 (UCLA, Morton).

  10 SCF (94), 459.

  11 Ibid., 452, 454.

  12 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, i, 59.

  13 For many details on the illness of autumn 1967, see SCF (94), 459–75, and DB, 223–5. Stravinsky’s own diary for 1967, if he kept one, has not surfaced.

  14 ImpLif, 127–8. See also DB, 225. A letter from Berman to Craft (31 January 1968) expresses relief at Edel’s dismissal (PSS).

  15 The performance took place in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 14 November 1967. This was a particularly complicated moment in Parisian musical politics. Boulez had recently attacked Malraux for separating the state administration of music from that of the theatre and broadcasting and for handing music over to be run by the composer Marcel Landowski, whom Boulez considered a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Boulez was now carrying out his threat to withdraw from active participation in French musical life, and had recently relinquished the directorship of the Domaine Musical to Amy. Stravinsky was hostile to Malraux, who had made it clear that he regarded music as an inferior art form and who moreover had not written to congratulate Stravinsky on his eighty-fifth birthday; but he seems to have felt unable (or so he told Souvtchinsky: letter of 20 July 1967 [PSS]) to oppose a request from so official a source. Amy had to content himself with a follow-up performance.