STRAVINSKY AND HIS WORLD
For Brian Cherney
for introducing me to the music of Igor Stravinsky
STRAVINSKY
AND HIS WORLD
EDITED BY TAMARA LEVITZ
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
For permission information, see pages xv–xvi
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937053
ISBN: 978-0-691-15987-4 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-691-15988-1 (paperback)
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office:
Ginger Shore, Project Director
Karen Walker Spencer, Designer
Anita van de Ven, Cover Design
Text edited by Paul De Angelis and Erin Clermont
Music typeset by Don Giller
This publication has been underwritten in part by grants from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund and Helen and Roger Alcaly.
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
vii
A Note on Transliteration and Titles of Works
xiv
Credits and Permissions
xv
Stravinsky in Exile
JONATHAN CROSS
3
Who Owns Mavra? A Transnational Dispute
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY TAMARA LEVITZ
TRANSLATIONS BY BRIDGET BEHRMANN, KATYA ERMOLAEV, LAUREL E. FAY, ALEXANDRA GRABARCHUK, AND TAMARA LEVITZ
21
Stravinsky’s Russian Library
TATIANA BARANOVA MONIGHETTI
61
The Futility of Exhortation: Pleading in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Orpheus
GRETCHEN HORLACHER
79
Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism
KLÁRA MÓRICZ
105
Arthur Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY KLÁRA MÓRICZ
TRANSLATION BY BRIDGET BEHRMANN, KATYA ERMOLAEV, YASHA KLOTS, TAMARA LEVITZ, KLÁRA MÓRICZ, AND BORIS WOLFSON
127
Igor the Angeleno: The Mexican Connection
TAMARA LEVITZ
141
Stravinsky Speaks to the Spanish-Speaking World
INTRODUCTION BY LEONORA SAAVEDRA
INTERVIEWS TRANSLATED BY MARIEL FIORI
IN COLLABORATION WITH TAMARA LEVITZ
DOCUMENT NOTES BY TAMARA LEVITZ
177
The Poétique musicale: A Counterpoint in Three Voices
VALÉRIE DUFOUR
TRANSLATED BY BRIDGET BEHRMANN AND TAMARA LEVITZ
225
Stravinsky: The View from Russia
SVETLANA SAVENKO
TRANSLATED BY PHILIPP PENKA
255
Stravinsky’s Cold War: Letters About the Composer’s Return to Russia, 1960–1963
LETTERS TRANSLATED BY PHILIPP PENKA WITH ALEXANDRA GRABARCHUK
INTRODUCTION, COMMENTARY, AND NOTES BY TAMARA LEVITZ
273
“The Precision of Poetry and the Exactness of Pure Science”: The Parallel Lives of Vladimir Nabokov and Igor Stravinsky
LEON BOTSTEIN
319
Index
349
Notes on Contributors
365
Preface and Acknowledgments
Stravinsky liked to boast to journalists about his worldwide success as a composer. During a chatty interview with Rafael Moragas in Barcelona in 1925, included in this volume, he described in a bemused fashion how two thousand old ladies had honored him at an event in Philadelphia by attempting to kiss his hand. He had put a halt to the proceedings by announcing through a megaphone that he needed his precious limb to conduct future concerts, and that they would have to stop. In spite of the playful annoyance he expressed in telling the story, he clearly relished the adulation.
Fame shaped Stravinsky’s career. His ascent to international stardom began for all intents and purposes in May 1913, when Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, orchestrated a riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring—a marketing ploy that made Stravinsky an overnight sensation and that proved so successful that it continues to be used to draw audiences to performances of the work today. From the moment that Diaghilev conflated aesthetic appreciation and capitalist desire by transforming the premiere of The Rite of Spring into scandal, Stravinsky’s music stood in the shadow of his celebrity—his compositional innovations paling in comparison to the symbolic, commercial power of his brand.
Stravinsky’s celebrity was no exception in the history of modernism. On the contrary, as Jonathan Goldman argues, celebrity and modernism were mutually constitutive, both serving the goal of reaffirming the centrality of the individual in mass society in the early twentieth century. In Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity, Goldman explains how Oscar Wilde inaugurated modernist celebrity culture in the 1880s, by turning his extraordinary self-production as a psychological subject into an object or stereotype to be admired by the masses—and this shortly after the world’s first legal trademarked image, the red triangle on Bass Ale, was registered in England. Modernist writers followed suit, mobilizing the technologies of consumer culture to promote their writings and themselves in the decades that followed. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and others fetishized authorship, transforming their signatures into brands, and making style a basis for objectifying themselves as inimitable individuals. The knowledge of their complicity with celebrity culture allows Goldman and others to explode myths about the great divide between modernism and popular culture, and about the modernist artist as isolated, disinterested Romantic genius.
Stravinsky adopted Wilde’s culture of the dandy, stylizing himself as an object of desire for the concert-going public while, behind the scenes, flaunting his conspicuous consumption and aristocratic buying habits. After 1913, he was almost always on display: posing for photographs (a medium crucial to the development of modern celebrity), marketing his work in an astonishing number of almost daily interviews in multiple languages (leading Richard Taruskin to conclude in an article in the New York Times in 2008 that Stravinsky lived “in a perpetual state of interview”), and calculating how to reproduce and disseminate his works using the most advanced technological means. Friends—among them Arthur Lourié, Pyotr Suvchinsky, Walter Nouvel, Alexis Kall, and Robert Craft—served as Stravinsky’s unofficial public relations agents, mediating his contact with the outside world and ghostwriting press releases and publications. Craft dedicated his career to consolidating Stravinsky’s celebrity during his lifetime, and to perpetuating it in publications and recordings after his death.
Figure 1. Stravinsky in Haarlem, the Netherlands, 1930.
Stravinsky designed his words, images, and sounds to sell his celebrity by manufacturing musical need. In his own words, quoted in this volume, “music should be desire, not habit.” A photograph from 1930 (see Figure 1) suggests how adept Stravinsky was at molding his own image to arouse the right response; it captures Stravinsky in a moment of jovial relaxation before the camera—a mood he
rarely conveyed in his official publicity materials. A second photograph snapped by Stravinsky’s lover Vera Sudeikina in Nice in 1924 displays the great composer as an object of desire: the unmade bed and empty bottle of wine on the bedside table reflected in the mirror suggest an erotic interlude, while the large cross revealed under the composer’s loosely unbuttoned pajamas point toward both religious passion and a faith that rendered all his pleasures guilty ones (see Figure 2). Vera’s photographs appear to offer access to Stravinsky’s intimate universe—the “man behind the mask” as Stravinsky scholars like to say. But the fact that she and Craft published so many of them in luxury editions after Stravinsky’s death—for example, in Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album, 1921–1971—suggests that, far from revealing an authentic reality about the composer, they too are designed to sell his image. Such private photographs highlight Stravinsky’s charisma, dogma, class, earthiness, passion, licentiousness, and virility—qualities the press had associated with Stravinsky and his music since The Rite of Spring. These photographs perpetuate the very traits that have enabled Stravinsky to maintain his celebrity for over a century.
Figure 2. Stravinsky in Nice, 1924.
Yet Stravinsky’s fame has sat uncomfortably with music scholars. Biographers and critics struggle to abandon deeply-held beliefs about modernist composers as exceptional individuals who express sincerely inner psychological states through word and music, and whose authentic dedication to their art allow them to escape the demands of the market. Such beliefs have led some of Stravinsky’s biographers to mistrust the trappings of his fame—whether his commercial successes or the publicity machine that has generated them—and others to adopt a Cold War hermeneutics of suspicion that has led to conspiratorial theories about the composer’s innate yet denied Russianness, or about his secret rightwing political agendas.
Stravinsky’s fame has also posed a compelling intellectual problem for the community of music theorists who have led the way in Stravinsky research for over half a century. Although many theorists hint at the aesthetics of celebrity in Stravinsky’s music by appealing to the metaphor of the “mask” in analyzing it, they shy away from experimenting with analytical approaches that address how modernist commodity culture shapes listening practices. Rather than contemplate what happens to musical meaning when compositions begin to circulate globally as products of celebrity, they omit from their analyses any reminder of such exchange.
Such repression of economic and social origin is evident in the hermeneutic tradition that has arisen around one of Stravinsky’s most iconic pieces, the Symphonies d’instruments à vent—discussed, almost as a common thread, in several essays throughout this book. In 1962 Edward T. Cone used this piece to define Stravinsky’s method of stratification in a classic article in the inaugural issue of Perspectives of New Music, initiating a prestigious subfield of scholarship preoccupied solely with interpreting how Stravinsky created compositional coherence and aural continuity in music characterized by blatant narrative discontinuity. Over three decades later, Richard Taruskin launched an alternative campaign for the Symphonies by suggesting in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions that its form resembled that of the Panikhida, or Russian Orthodox memorial service, which Stravinsky drew on to express his grief over the recently deceased Claude Debussy. The compulsiveness with which Stravinsky scholars (myself included) have cultivated these two interpretive traditions—even in articles and books that have nothing to do with the Symphonies—reflects how frantic we have been to restore to Stravinsky the expressive subjectivity of a nineteenth-century musical genius. And yet our efforts have been doomed to fail, because they ignore how drastically celebrity disrupts the classic aesthetics upon which such models of expressive subjectivity depend, and how fundamental the discontinuity of scandal is to Stravinsky’s music. Scandal accompanied both the Symphonies’s disastrous premiere under Serge Koussevitzky in London in 1921 and the extensive public relations campaign that followed, during which critics invented the infamous (and infamously ill-defined) term “neoclassicism.” In the Symphonies Stravinsky acknowledges the demands of his newfound celebrity by composing scandalous musical objects—mythologies about music in Roland Barthes’s sense—transforming the art of composition into aural spectacle.
The essays in this collection build on the rich international traditions of Stravinsky research and analysis, yet also push those traditions in new directions by addressing some of the issues about biography and analysis raised above. Gretchen Horlacher invites readers to hear Stravinsky’s music in new ways by inventing a compelling analytical approach to explore change within sameness as it relates to existential states. Viewing Stravinsky’s life from the perspective of his celebrity led me to reevaluate the term “neoclassicism,” and to reassess the historic relevance of the many interviews he gave throughout his life. I decided to include here a small collection of interviews from Spanish-speaking newspapers. Whereas Robert Craft and others have tended to isolate statements from these interviews with the goal of proving Stravinsky’s essential beliefs as a transhistorical subject, Leonora Saavedra and I present the interviews here in their entirety, accompanied by a scholarly apparatus that links them to their contingent historical circumstances and highlights their temporal specificity. Tatiana Baranova Monighetti valorizes a new kind of evidence—the surface traces Stravinsky left on his Russian library. And Valérie Dufour sheds light on how to interpret ghostwriting—the type of public relations communication most closely associated with Stravinsky’s celebrity—in an essay on the genesis of the Poétique musicale. Her essay and others in this collection give evidence that some of Stravinsky’s publicity agents, and especially Robert Craft, inadvertently misrepresented Stravinsky by mistranslating sources, publishing incomplete and erroneous editions, and by misconstruing historical evidence. Finally, Klára Móricz explores Stravinsky’s relationship to Arthur Lourié—an important friend and one-time promoter who expressed in his music a sincere subjectivity at odds with that constituted by Stravinsky in his.
In his study of modernist celebrity, Jonathan Goldman remarks that Oscar Wilde first developed his version of celebrity while on tour in the United States in 1882; fame, he suggests, can result from acknowledgment in unfamiliar contexts. One of the main themes of this book concerns the ways in which Stravinsky, after 1917, represented himself and was represented as a Russian exile. The authors in this volume express very different, even opposing, opinions on this subject, their views depending on their geographical location and own relation to home. The richness of perspectives provided by this international roster of scholars allows the reader to view exile from multiple perspectives, as if refracted through a prism. Jonathan Cross explores how Stravinsky expressed his feelings about exile in the music he performed when he returned to Russia in 1962, while the collection of letters exchanged by Stravinsky, Maria Yudina, and Pyotr Suvchinsky that are included in this volume document the same trip from a more ambivalent and hardened perspective. Leon Botstein explores exile as style in a highly original comparison of Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov; Svetlana Savenko offers an insider view on Stravinsky’s lasting connection to Russia; and I thematize the composer’s strong sense of belonging in Los Angeles, using photographs as documentary evidence. Finally, a collection of documents on Mavra details the national conflict that arose when Stravinsky began to assimilate in France after 1920, and the struggle over representation that resulted.
In editing this volume, I have often looked back for inspiration to two of the essay collections on Stravinsky in English I find most beautiful: Jann Pasler’s Confronting Stravinsky from 1986 and Jonathan Cross’s Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky from 2003. Stravinsky and His World gives evidence of the road travelled in Stravinsky scholarship since these volumes appeared, of shifting priorities in the scholarly community, and of the timeliness of formulating new questions about his life and works.
* * *
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to
Leon Botstein for the opportunity to serve as scholar in residence for the Bard Festival 2013, and as the editor of this collection. My involvement in the Bard Festival has proven to be one of the most gratifying intellectual and musical experiences of my life, and I attribute my happiness to Botstein’s visionary leadership, the dialogical culture at Bard, and the brilliant production team and board of directors who organize the festival. Christopher Gibbs’s unique psychological insight and rare capacity to conceptualize a project and guide it to completion were key to the success of this volume; I am grateful to him beyond words for his support and advice. I owe as well a tremendous debt to Paul De Angelis, the editorial genius behind the Bard series. Most scholars can only dream of ever working with such a supremely talented editor; I thank him for that great honor, and for being my editorial Rock of Gibraltar during the production process. The team at Bard showed me what can be achieved when experts working at the top of their game collaborate toward a common goal; I have deeply valued the chance to work with each of them. I owe a very special thank you to Project Director Ginger Shore, whose artistic talent and expertise made possible the exquisite aesthetic in evidence in this book. I felt very fortunate to have been able to discuss every aspect of the illustrations and photographs with her, and I will carry her words and advice with me for the rest of my life. Irene Zedlacher, the executive director of the Bard Music Festival, worked miracles behind the scenes, recognizing and solving every problem that came our way before it could even materialize; I am deeply grateful to her for her kindness and support. I thank Erin Clermont for impeccable copyediting, Karen Spencer for her beautiful design and composition, and Don Giller for his patience, humor, and talent in setting the musical examples. Finally, it has been a special privilege to benefit from the musical and historical wisdom of artistic codirector Robert Martin, and of members of the festival program committee Byron Adams and Richard Wilson.
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