Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  Example 4. Stravinsky, “Apotheosis,” from Apollon musagète, two measures before rehearsal number 100 to end.

  Toward the end of the “Apotheosis” a four-note dotted figure is fractured from the Olympian theme—a shard from Lully perhaps, a frozen motive—which starts to repeat obsessively, suggesting lamenting (see Example 4). It is just one of an entirely new, layered texture of repeating figures, all moving at their own speeds, which simply keep turning in a mechanical way. The D major of apotheosis is sidestepped. The music ends on a B-minor triad, but this resolves little, since the conflicting triads of D major and G major remain implicitly in play. Whereas the mechanical in the “Sacrifical Dance” had been dehumanizing, here the mechanical repetitions become a sign of the melancholic, of distance and loss. The music is not violently ripped apart as in The Rite of Spring, but slowly attenuates and fades. The Baroque past fragments. The final standing on a B-minor triad might appear to give temporary consolation, but the memory of what has been lost is not wiped away. B minor seems, rather, to point to an absence, not a presence. Not even Apollo can bring healing. The completeness of the Greek ideal is ultimately unreachable. Stravinsky longs for a return to order but cannot attain it. In revising Apollo in 1947, he littered the score with additional markings of ben cantabile and espressivo, which surely only confirms that in retrospect even he recognized the personal voice that had emerged from behind the classical mask.

  As Kundera observed, Stravinsky bore with him the wound of his emigration. His itinerant life was etched into the continually shifting musical “homes” he occupied. His personas were carefully chosen—be they of authentic Russia, neoclassical Greece, or all manner of European music from Monteverdi to Boulez—in order to project himself into the cultures in which he found himself. This was the cosmopolitan Stravinsky, the “citizen of the world,” who was celebrated at his death. But these were just so many tokens of a world of appearances, which he could change at will, just as easily as he could discard last season’s coat for the most up-to-date fashion:

  Rings, gaiters, scarves, half-belts, ties, tiepins, wristwatches, mufflers, fetishes, pinces-nez, monocles, glasses, chain bracelets, describe him badly. Put simply, they prove on the surface that Stravinsky goes out of his way for no one. He composes, dresses himself, and speaks as he wishes.32

  What interested Kundera, however, was “the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music.” The music’s playful surface, its appropriation of values of order and objectivity, freed from emotion, masked deeper feelings. He attempted to remove himself and his own history from his music, yet the resulting sense of distance symbolized not only a general modernist alienation but also a particular life lived apart. Despite himself, Russia keeps reappearing across his music, marked by musical signs of nostalgia and mourning. This was Stravinsky’s wound.

  Stravinsky carried the “sorrow of estrangement” wherever he went. The Symphony of Psalms (1930)—impersonal, distanced, monumental—opens with a lamenting Phrygian motive in solo horn and cello marked cantabile, espressivo (four measures after rehearsal number 2). Later the choir intones collectively in Latin but in the first person, “Quoniam advena ego sum apud te” (For I am a stranger with thee; rehearsal number 10) or in the French that Stravinsky might well have known, “Car je suis un étranger chez toi.” Even the Symphony in C (1939–40), Stravinsky’s seemingly most uncompromised engagement with the heroic genre of Western tonal music in the most basic key of all, ultimately speaks otherwise. He later declared that it was written during the “most tragic” period of his life, and that without this work he would not have survived those most difficult days.33 The first movement was completed (in Europe) just a month after his first wife’s death. Its opening motto returns in the final movement (written in the U.S.) as a memory, where it forms the melody to the concluding chorale. Aside from the final string chord, it is scored only for wind and brass, and could almost have been lifted straight from the chorale at the end of the Symphonies d’instruments à vent. Can we hear the authentic Stravinsky here, far from home, mourning the loss of daughter, wife, and mother via a nostalgic recollection of Russia? It is undeniably a poignant moment. As in Apollo, the classical past fails Stravinsky; it refuses to bring him the order he so desires. The Symphony in C was written in sorrow. Though it seeks order, it discovers loss.

  We shall probably never find the real Igor Stravinsky. He thwarts access to the true and authentic at every turn. In opting to speak through Russian puppets, ancient Greek masks, Bachian counterpoint, or Mozartian elegance he was constantly searching for the means by which to distance himself from his true self and impose order on his feelings. Yet this distance itself becomes a metaphor for his situation as an émigré, speaking of alienation and apartness. A life lived in the shadow of war, death, pain, and loss leaves its mark. Without doubt, he wholeheartedly embraced the new cultures in which he found himself and made them his home. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that, in the later 1940s and early 1950s, married to Vera, free for a while from illness and enjoying the warm California weather, Stravinsky was at his happiest. Photographs even caught him smiling. But when we look behind the mask, or when, momentarily, Stravinsky himself lifts the mask, we see the wound left by estrangement. When the memories of Russia resurface, they speak both of a nostalgia and a failure: a yearning to return to a mythical home that exists only in the imagination. The Ode speaks quietly and eloquently of such nostalgia. It should, then, be clear why Stravinsky chose to present it to his fellow Russians in 1962: it speaks of exile.

  NOTES

  1. Edward Greenfield, “Stravinsky, the Towering Genius,” The Guardian, 7 April 1971; Paul Hume, “Igor Stravinsky, Genius in World of Music,” Washington Post & Times Herald, 7 April 1971.

  2. Letter from the White House signed by Richard M. Nixon, 6 April 1971, microfilm 249.1, Paul Sacher Stiftung.

  3. Wagner, Beethoven (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1870), 26; quoted and translated by Scott Burnham in Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 155.

  4. “Music: Master Mechanic,” Time, 26 July 1948, 29; Rollo H. Myers, “Stravinsky, Igor Feodorovich,” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Eric Blom, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1954), 5:137.

  5. Stravinsky, quoted in Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, rev. ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 328. Craft remarks that Stravinsky’s words were simultaneously translated “word for often unbelievable word” (327) for Craft by his official Soviet interpreter Alexandra Afonina, who was seated next to him at the dinner. It is highly unlikely that Craft (or, for that matter, Afonina) would have transcribed these words at the time, so Craft’s diary record is surely just an impression of what Stravinsky said. Nonetheless, there is no denying how unexpectedly moved Stravinsky was by his return to his motherland. At the end of the first concert he gave in Moscow, Stravinsky told the audience from the concert platform, “You can’t imagine how happy I am today.” Quoted in Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile. France and America, 1934–1971 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 465.

  6. “One would doubt that the octogenarian composer had any need to exhibit a feigned devotion to his roots in order to find favor with his hosts. More probably, these words were spoken with sincerity; they were not a mask worn for the occasion.” Margarita Mazo, “Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’ and Russian Village Wedding Ritual,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 43/1 (Spring 1990): 100.

  7. Stravinsky, “Lyubite muzïku!,” Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 27 September 1962, quoted in Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1:13.

  8. Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 323. See Stravinsky in Moscow 1962, Melodiya/BMG (1997).

  9. Stravinsky to Chávez, 10 June 1940, microfilm 92.1, 1013, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Original in French; translated differently in English by
Robert Craft in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 555.

  10. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 348; Stravinsky thereafter critiqued Shostakovich’s symphonies, however; see “Stravinsky says that the OSM is magnificent,” in “Stravinsky Speaks to the Spanish-Speaking World,” in this volume.

  11. Paul Griffiths, Stravinsky (New York: Schirmer, 1993), 132.

  12. The work consistently carries the subtitle “Elegiacal Chant.” See, for example, Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 415. Even today the publisher Schott Music lists it with this phrase, though the subtitle is absent from the published score itself. Concerning Jane Eyre, see Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 148. Stravinsky later tried to justify the relevance of this music to Natalia by describing it in a letter to Koussevitzky of 9 July 1943 as a concert champêtre, “music at the heart of nature, the principle which Natalia Konstantinovna defended with such passion and which you realized so brilliantly in Tanglewood.” See Victor Yuzefovich, “Chronicle of a Non-Friendship: Letters of Stravinsky and Koussevitzky,” Musical Quarterly 86/4 (Winter 2002): 806

  13. Richard Taruskin, in his reading of the Symphonies as the Panikhida, the Russian Orthodox office of the dead, aligns this music with the Vechnaya pamyat', “eternal remembrance,” a litany “delivered (according to an express rubric) ‘slowly and quietly’” (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1488). In the Ode, too, this music carries similar associations of prayerful petition well suited to a memorial work.

  14. Robert Craft writes that “Orpheus is his only score after Firebird in which the term ‘espressivo’ occurs frequently.” See Craft, The Moment of Existence: Music, Literature, and the Arts, 1990–1995 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 294. Craft appears to have overlooked the earlier Ode. Also during the 1940s, in part to circumvent copyright issues, Stravinsky was busy revising many of his scores, including that of Petrushka, to which in the 1947 version he added numerous markings of espressivo. See the discussion in Jenny Tamplin, “Melancholy, Modernism, Memory, Myth: Orpheus in the Twentieth Century,” D.Phil. diss., Oxford University, 2011, 72–76.

  15. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936; repr. 1962), 53; and Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 77.

  16. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 53.

  17. Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger describe it as “soft, distant, introverted music,” in The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 134. André Boucourechliev calls it “dignified, distanced, austerely linear,” in Stravinsky, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Gollancz, 1987), 213.

  18. Milan Kundera, “Improvisation in Homage to Stravinsky,” in Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 96–98.

  19. See Jonathan Cross, “Stravinsky’s Petrushka: Modernizing the Past, Russianizing the Future; or, How Stravinsky Learned to Be an Exile,” in Twentieth-Century Music and Politics: Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds, ed. Pauline Fairclough (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 23–35.

  20. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 8.

  21. Igor Stravinsky, “Ce que j’ai voulu exprimer dans Le Sacre du Printemps,” Montjoie 8 (29 May 1913); facsimile in François Lesure, Le Sacre du Printemps: Dossier de Presse (Geneva: Minkoff, 1980), 13.

  22. Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 4, 8–9.

  23. Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music is littered with the words order and discipline. At the outbreak of the Second World War, America offered Stravinsky the prospect of an orderly life in contrast to the chaos of mobilized Paris.

  24. See Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 193. Walsh provides a terrifying catalog of wartime deaths, including the murder of three of Stravinsky’s Yelachich cousins with whom he had played as a child (Zhenya, Alyosha, and Nikolay) and the death of a fourth (Ganya) from a German bomb.

  25. Steiner argues for Nabokov as we might also wish to argue for Stravinsky, namely that “by virtue of his extraterritoriality [he remains] profoundly of our time, and one of its spokesmen.” George Steiner, “Extraterritorial [1969],” in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 11.

  26. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 17.

  27. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 53, 60.

  28. Taruskin discusses this subject at length in the first volume of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions.

  29. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, 137.

  30. Griffiths, Stravinsky, 98.

  31. White, Stravinsky, 342.

  32. Jean Cocteau, “Stravinsky dernière heure,” La Revue musicale 5/2 (1 December 1923): 142–45. The translation, by Bridget Behrmann and Tamara Levitz, is taken from the article published in this volume as part of “Who Owns Mavra? A Transnational Dispute.”

  33. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 188.

  Who Owns Mavra?

  A Transnational Dispute

  INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY TAMARA LEVITZ

  Stravinsky first performed his one-act opera buffa Mavra in a version for voice and piano at a gala buffet organized by Diaghilev in the ballroom at the Hotel Continental in Paris on 29 March 1922.1 Mavra premiered a little over two months later, on June third at the Paris Opéra as part of the Ballets Russes 1922 season, in which it appeared on an all-Stravinsky program between a repeat performance of Léonide Massine’s version of The Rite of Spring and Fokine’s of Petrushka.2 The premiere was both a failure and a success, as the reviews gathered here show. The generally negative press crushed Stravinsky.3 Mavra remained dear to his heart, and he worked toward realizing performances of it for the rest of his life.

  Although Mavra played a vital role between the wars in Stravinsky’s personal development as a composer, the fraught dialogue resulting from its first unsuccessful performance led to its virtual disappearance from the concert hall, operatic stage, and secondary literature. Mavra may have vanished because of the unresolved questions it raises about nation, race, and gender, which have led it to fit uncomfortably within the framework of neoclassicism that has served for decades to define Stravinsky’s second-period style. Musicologists have favored Stravinsky’s canonic ballet Pulcinella as a much more emblematic work of neoclassicism—a broad stylistic category that describes modernist compositions that borrow techniques or styles of music from the past. And yet Richard Taruskin argues that Pulcinella’s importance has been grossly exaggerated, and that Mavra provides “the true bridge to a Russian émigré’s idea of neoclassicism.”4

  I would go a step further than Taruskin and argue that neoclassicism may be an altogether misleading word to describe Stravinsky’s music between the wars. The reviews gathered here reveal that temporal concerns about musical borrowings in Mavra are inextricably linked with questions of geographical dislocation and class and racial confrontation. Whether and how a reviewer emphasizes Mavra’s stylistic retrospectivism depends on national, racial, gender, and class allegiance; neoclassicism as style is inseparable from the historical context of transnational dispute. Mavra wreaked havoc not because it embodied a legible and stable retrospective style, but because it moved within a tension-ridden musical “translation zone” in which people and objects traveled across multiple languages and nations.5

  After Mavra’s premiere, a critical battle broke out among Russian émigrés (Boris de Schloezer), an older generation of French critics and impressionists (among them Emile Vuillermoz and Maurice Ravel), and a group of eager young composers briefly labele
d Les Six (including Milhaud, Poulenc, and their ringleader, Jean Cocteau, as well as the largely sympathetic critics Roland-Manuel, Louis Laloy, and the Belgian Paul Collaer).6 The battle expanded when Satie, Cocteau, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara brought news of Mavra to the United States through their essays in Vanity Fair.

  As the reviews below show, the juxtaposition of Mavra at its premiere with The Rite of Spring and Petrushka led critics to criticize Stravinsky’s lack of continuous development as a composer. Poulenc, Collaer, and Milhaud, eager to experience the absolute presence of modernity, rejected the notion of a composer’s organic stylistic evolution as a standard for the work; they mocked older French critics who still championed the prewar French national style of musical impressionism.7 Collaer praised the irony in Mavra as deeply contemporaneous, and associated it with a postwar need for modesty and for singing without emotion, as if joking. “Think of it!” Cocteau wrote when he heard of the debate about Mavra but before hearing the work. “Stravinsky bringing the homage of his supreme contribution to the endeavors of Satie and our young musicians. Stravinsky the traitor. Stravinsky the deserter. It would never occur to any of them to think: Stravinsky the Fountain of Jouvence.8 For no one ever gives the masters credit.”9 When jazz buff Jean Wiéner included Mavra in a more contemporary all-Stravinsky program at the end of the year—with his Symphonies d’instruments à vent, Concertino, Petrushka (for piano solo, performed by Wiéner himself), and the Pulcinella Suite—the work was an undisputed success.10 A concert performance in Brussels in an all-Stravinsky program with a similar program coordinated by Paul Collaer with the Concerts Pro Arte on 14 January 1924 solidified Stravinsky’s reputation in Belgium.11