Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  Many members of the larger international community of Stravinsky scholars contributed through their active scholarship to the genesis of this book; I regret that more of them could not have been represented here. Richard Taruskin offered invaluable advice at a very early stage in the project; Ulrich Mosch at the Paul Sacher Stiftung shared his deep knowledge of Stravinsky research in the planning stages; and Valérie Dufour showed immense generosity and patience in helping me to select the interviews to be included here, which are intended to complement her own edition of interviews in French, Confidences sur la musique: Ecrits et entretiens d’Igor Stravinksy. I am grateful to Stephen Walsh for providing through his scholarship the basis for this project although I met him only when it was very advanced, and to Tatiana Baranova Monighetti, Natalia Braginskaya, Olga Manulkina, and Svetlana Savenko for sharing ideas and experiences with me, and for welcoming me into the Russian musicological community, fulfilling my dream of bringing current Russian scholarship on Stravinsky into this collection. My greatest debt goes to Maureen Carr, who served as co-organizer of the document section included in this volume throughout the early and middle stages of the book’s preparations. I am profoundly grateful to Maureen for our very many long and fruitful conversations, her guidance on documents and sketches, the contacts she provided and friendships she forged, her patience and understanding, and her indefatigable devotion to Stravinsky. Maureen has supported many Stravinsky scholars over the years, and it is my deepest hope that she will know with this book how much she means to all of us, and how important she is to our scholarly community.

  An edited collection depends for its success on the expertise, dedication and scholarly commitment of its contributors. In this respect I could not have been more fortunate. I feel immense gratitude toward Tatiana Baranova Monighetti, Jonathan Cross, Valérie Dufour, Gretchen Horlacher, Klára Móricz, Leonora Saavedra, and Svetlana Savenko for the essays they wrote for this collection. I thank them for their patience, conscientiousness, generosity, and scholarly brilliance. For our long discussions, and for their deep commitment to language and openness to collaboration, I thank as well to our outstanding team of translators, which included Bridget Behrmann, Katya Ermolaev, Laurel Fay, Mariel Fiori, Alexandra Grabarchuk, Yasha Klots, Klára Móricz, Philipp Penka, and Boris Wolfson. Alexandra Grabarchuk went beyond the call of duty in her dedication to the many Russian translations she prepared for me behind the scenes; she became my Ukrainian “eyes” and made it possible through her stunningly sensitive attunement to language for me to work with Russian sources. I thank her, Benjamin Court, Gillian Gower, and Andrea Moore as well for jumping in at short notice through the generosity of a Faculty Research Grant from the Academic Senate at UCLA to complete such first-class work on proofreading the manuscript.

  A very last, special thank you goes to my family and to those friends who helped this project grow by being there to listen and share it with me: Byron Adams, Nancy Berman, Erin Brooks, Jerome Camal, Ryan Dohoney, and Tim Stowell. The most important thank you of all goes to René, who shares Stravinsky’s birthday and whom I married (unknowingly at the time) on the anniversary of the premiere of The Rite of Spring, but who probably never imagined he would have to share so much of his life with the great twentieth-century composer. René’s support enables the scholarly passion that made this project possible.

  A Note on Transliteration and Titles of Works

  The transliteration system used in this book is basically the system used for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) with modifications introduced by Richard Taruskin. Our principal exceptions to the system concern commonly accepted spellings of given and family names and places (Tchaikovsky rather than Chaykovskiy, Alexander instead of Aleksandr) and suffixes (-sky rather than -skiy). Also, in the case of a paired i of which one is stressed we have chosen ii over iyi in order to retain the far more common spelling of names such as the Mariinsky Theatre and Daniil Kharms. In the bibliographic citations, however, the transliteration system is respected without exception (Igor' Stravinskiy rather than Igor Stravinsky). Surname suffixes are presented intact, and hard and soft signs preserved.

  Titles of works are usually provided in the main text in the language in which they were published or are generally known in the West (original titles of the exceptions can be found in the notes). The corresponding English title of a published composition or translation is provided parenthetically in usual title style. Literal English translations for which no published translations or editions exist are given parenthetically with neither italics nor quote marks, with only the first word and proper names capitalized.

  Permissions and Credits

  Schott Music has graciously given its permission to reprint musical excerpts from the following copyrighted work by Igor Stravinsky:

  Ode © Copyright 1947 by Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG. Copyright © renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors Company, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG. Used in Example 1a (p. 5), Example 2a (p. 6) in “Stravinsky in Exile” by Jonathan Cross.

  Boosey & Hawkes has graciously given its permission to reprint musical excerpts from the following copyrighted works by Igor Stravinsky:

  Symphonies of Wind Instruments (Symphonies d’instruments à vent) © Copyright 1948, 1952 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. U.S. copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Used in Example 1b (p. 5), Example 2b (p. 6) in “Stravinsky in Exile” by Jonathan Cross and Example 3 (p. 115) in “Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism” by Klára Móricz.

  Orpheus © Copyright 1948 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Used in Example 3a (p. 10) in “Stravinsky in Exile” by Jonathan Cross; and in Example 5 (p. 96), Example 6 (pp. 98–99), and Example 7 (p. 101–2) in “The Futility of Exhortation: Pleading in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Orpheus” by Gretchen Horlacher.

  Apollo (Apollon musagète) © Copyright 1949 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. U.S. copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Used in Example 4 (p. 14) in “Stravinsky in Exile” by Jonathan Cross.

  Mavra © Copyright [TK] by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. U.S. copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Used on pp. 48–49 of Arthur Lourié’s essay on Mavra.

  Oedipus Rex by Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Danielou © Copyright 1949, 1950 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. U.S. copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Used in Example 1 (pp. 84–87), Example 2 (pp. 89–90), Example 3 (pp. 91–92), and Example 4 (p. 93) in “The Futility of Exhortation: Pleading in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Orpheus” by Gretchen Horlacher.

  Divertimento © Copyright 1951 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. Used in Example 1 (pp. 166–69) in “Igor the Angeleno: The Mexican Connection” by Tamara Levitz.

  The music used in Examples 1 (p. 113), 4 (p. 116), and 5 (p. 117) in “Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism” by Klára Móricz is from KölnMusik, Öffentlichkeitsarbeit Archiv.

  Also, the following copyright holders have graciously granted permission to reprint or reproduce the following copyrighted material:

  The Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, for Figure 1 (p. viii) and Figure 2 (p. ix) in “Preface and Acknowledgments”; Figure 1 (p. 23) and Figure 2 (p. 26) in “Who Owns Mavra: A Transnational Dispute”; Figure 1 (p. 62), Figure 2 (p. 70), and Figure 3 (p. 72) in “Stravinsky’s Russian Library” by Tatiana Baranova Monighetti; Figure 2 (p. 106) in “Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism” by Klára Móricz; Figure 2 (p. 150), Figure 3 (p. 151), Figure 4 (p. 154), Figure 5 (pp. 155–57), Figure 6 (p. 159), Figure 7 (p. 160), Figure 8 (p. 163), and Figure 10 (p. 171) in “Igor the Angeleno: The Mexican Connection” by Tamara Levitz; Figure 1 in “Stravinsky Speaks to the Spanish-Spea
king World”; Figure 1 (p. 226) in “The Poétique musicale: A Counterpoint in Three Voices” by Valérie Dufour.

  Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York, for Figure 1 (p. 106) in “Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism” by Klára Móricz (the painting by Pytor Vassilievich Miturich, housed in the Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia).

  Modernism/modernity for the photograph used in Figure 1 (p. 145) in “Igor the Angeleno: The Mexican Connection” by Tamara Levitz, and originally published as part of “Modernist Networks: Taxco, 1931” by A. Joan Saab, in Volume 18, Number 2, April 2011, pp. 289–307.

  The Estate of Jesús Bal y Gay for the photograph taken by him and used in Figure 9 (p. 164) in “Igor the Angeleno: The Mexican Connection” by Tamara Levitz.

  Lebrecht Music & Arts. U.K. for Figure 1 (p. 305) in “Stravinsky’s Cold War: Letters About the Composer’s Return to Russia, 1960–1963.”

  Rosspen Publishers, Moscow, selected letters of Maria Yudina that appear in “Stravinsky’s Cold War: Letters About the Composer’s Return to Russia, 1960–1963”; John Stravinsky, for the letters of Pyotr Suvchinsky that appear in the same section.

  Cover Caption and Credit: Photograph of Igor Stravinsky, 1913, Foto Gershel, Paris/Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.

  The author and publishers have made every effort to trace holders of copyright. They much regret if any inadvertent omissions have been made.

  Stravinsky and His World

  Stravinsky in Exile

  JONATHAN CROSS

  The death in New York of Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky at 5:20 a.m. on 6 April 1971 was already making broadcast headlines by the top of the next hour. The news of the passing of this “towering figure in twentieth-century music” (The Guardian), “one of the great, original creative geniuses in the entire history of music” (Washington Post & Times Herald), was soon being wired around the world, with commentators lining up in America, Europe, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere to offer their views on the achievements of this most celebrated of composers.1 It was not just journalists, friends, and artists who had something to say; politicians, too, some of whom had never even met him, were eager to have their voices heard, to claim Stravinsky’s legacy for themselves. At his second New York funeral ceremony (the first had been a simple prayer service on the evening of his death) representatives from the political centers of the opposed sides of the Cold War could be found: Michael Whitney Straight, spokesman for U.S. President Richard Nixon, deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and one-time KGB spy; and Anatoly Dyuzhev, cultural attaché to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Stravinsky’s widow, Vera, received letters of condolence from the highest authorities. From the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the former Politburo member Yekaterina Furtseva brushed aside earlier decades of official Soviet hostility toward Stravinsky in expressing her sincerest sympathies. And with barely disguised echoes of Beethoven’s Ninth came a letter from the White House: “Surely, the power and force of his genius help to make all men brothers and the magnitude of his loss transcends all national boundaries.”2

  The tone adopted by Stravinsky’s obituarists certainly helped consolidate a view that persists in certain quarters today, namely that he was the last of the “great composers,” that he was a figure of Beethovenian magnitude who spoke “in the purest language of all peoples” (as Wagner wrote of Beethoven).3 That such universalist claims were being made for Stravinsky even before his body had been interred should hardly surprise us. Throughout much of his life Stravinsky had himself been largely responsible for his representation as a cosmopolitan figure, as someone whose music could speak to all people in a kind of Esperanto that disregarded national boundaries and identities. His own life, indeed, had spanned cultures and continents. Born a Russian into a family of minor Polish nobility, stranded in Switzerland during the First World War, Stravinsky eventually took French, then U.S. citizenship. In 1948 Time magazine reported that he liked to be known as a “California composer,” and the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (published in 1954) defined him as an “American composer of Russian origin.”4 Yet, in 1962, on his first return to his homeland in almost half a century, he famously declared at a dinner in Moscow hosted by Furtseva that “a man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only one country—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life.”5 On this occasion one has to feel that Stravinsky was speaking from the heart.6 “I’ve spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself [slog] is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature.”7 Russia had evidently never left him.

  One might wonder, then, why Stravinsky chose his brief Ode of 1943 to be the first work he would ever conduct on Russian soil at the opening concert of his Russian tour, on 26 September 1962, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Neither overtly Russian like The Rite of Spring, which Robert Craft conducted in the same concert after the Ode, nor self-evidently a showcase example of his most recent music, its sparse textures and understated language were not designed to make a bold impression. Orpheus (1947) formed the second half of the program, a similarly subdued work of melancholic mood, framed by the falling harp lines of the weeping Orpheus. It evidently baffled the audience. Craft reports that the performance was “attended with much reading of program notes, coughing, and other signs of restlessness,” all of which can clearly be heard on the recording, subsequently released on the Soviet Melodiya label.8

  The Ode was a product of Stravinsky’s difficult early years in the United States. “We are living lately in a state of continuous anxiety because of the tragic news from our poor old Europe,” he wrote to Carlos Chávez in 1940, “and I ask myself if these terrible events will not ultimately have repercussions in the new world.”9 Stravinsky still bore the pain of the triple loss of his daughter, first wife, and mother in just seven months in 1938–39, mitigated only by the happiness of now being free to marry his longtime mistress, Vera Sudeikina. His brother Yury died in Leningrad in 1941, just before the start of the terrible blockade of his native city. In a fascinating volte-face for one who had been so vehemently dismissive of Soviet music, Stravinsky listened, apparently moved, on 19 July 1942, to the U.S. broadcast premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 in C Major (Leningrad) given by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.10 He remained deeply concerned for the well-being of his family left behind in Europe, and followed the progress of events assiduously from afar. The vast distance that separated him from his loved ones served only to exaggerate his sense of anxiety and to reinforce his status as an émigré.

  The Ode had been commissioned by a fellow Russian émigré, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky in memory of his wife, Natalia, who had died in 1942. Across many decades the Koussevitzkys had been great champions and publishers of Stravinsky’s music. However, the passing of Natalia Koussevitzky did not touch Stravinsky; indeed, his attitude toward the couple had always been disingenuous, bordering at times on the contemptible. The tribute to her in the form of the Ode was, as Paul Griffiths writes, more professional than personal.11 Indeed, in a decidedly impersonal touch, one of the three movements of this “elegiacal chant,” the jaunty central “Eclogue,” was recycled from the aborted music for a hunting scene in the film of Jane Eyre, directed by Robert Stevenson and produced by Orson Welles.12 The newly composed outer movements, however, have a very different character. The “Eulogy” breathes the same air as the Symphonies d’instruments à vent written over twenty years earlier in memoriam Claude Debussy. The brass chords that punctuate the opening of the Ode are a pared-down echo of the start of the chorale from the Symphonies: a lower neighbor-note melodic motion in the Ode, whose attendant chords are subsets of the Symphonies chords (an exact subset in the case of the second chord of the Ode, D–G–AH–B); further, the excerpts given in Examples 1a and 1b have identical durational proportions
.13

  Example 1a. Stravinsky, “Eulogy,” Ode, measure 6.

  Example 1b. Symphonies d’instruments à vent, 1920 version, rehearsal number 39.

  The later moments of sparse chamber scoring seem to anticipate by a decade another short (serial) tribute work, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). The closing movement, “Epitaph,” also carries echoes of the Symphonies. Compare, for example, the static, turning figures for flutes that frame the Ode’s “Epitaph” (mm. 1–2) with the turning flute figure at measure 29 in the Symphonies (see Examples 2a and 2b). Note also the slow, espressivo falling lines in the “Epitaph” (mm. 2–3) that lend this music its lamenting temperament and can be heard to parallel a short linking passage in the Symphonies (mm. 21–22).

  Example 2a. Stravinsky, Ode, “Epitaph,” opening 3 measures with upbeat.

  Example 2b. Stravinsky, Symphonies d’instruments à vent, mm. 29–32.

  The marking espressivo had been virtually absent from Stravinsky’s scores since Firebird of 1910.14 That the principal thematic material of the Symphonies’ outer movements carries this indication represents an extraordinary shift for a composer who had given his imprimatur to the view that “music is, by its very essence powerless to express anything at all,” and who, just a couple of years earlier in the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, was posing the question, via his ghostwriters Roland-Manuel and Pyotr Suvchinsky, “Do we not, in truth, ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings, to translate dramatic situations, even to imitate nature?”15 Of what, then, does Stravinsky’s newly rediscovered expressive voice speak? And why at this moment, in 1940s America? Is it merely another mask, a simulacrum of expression, “only an illusion and not a reality,” or is it possible that it might just be a momentary sounding of the authentic voice of Stravinsky?16