In this essay, I pierce the myths surrounding Stravinsky’s years in Los Angeles by creating a scrapbook in images and words of his travels in the Spanish-speaking world—a snapshot of the contingent and concrete material circumstances that led to his brief trips to Mexico in 1940 and 1941, on the cusp of his permanent move to Southern California. His visits to Spain, Argentina, and Mexico represent only a small fraction of his experience as a traveling musician between 1916 and 1940—a period during which he performed regularly and had close contacts in over eighteen countries—but these travels to the Spanish-speaking world are particularly neglected. The format of the scrapbook allows me to present coincidental and anecdotal evidence that challenges the transhistorical archetypes—among them “Russian national,” “émigré,” “cosmopolitan,” “serialist,” and “last great composer”—that have dominated musicological approaches to the study of Stravinsky’s LA years.16 Photographs and scrapbook memories reveal the depth of Stravinsky’s affective bonds with people, places, and things across the Spanish-speaking world; they fill the emotional gap left by the austere modernist Chroniques de ma vie he wrote with Walter Nouvel in 1936 and the stony celebrity-infatuated conversations guided by Robert Craft.17 By favoring the study of these visual and anecdotal traces of Stravinsky’s relationships over the identity politics that lead musicologists to peg him as a Russian exile composer, I come closer to understanding, in Adrianne Cavarero’s words, who he was as a person in his particular uniqueness, rather than what he universally symbolized within modernist discourse. A person cannot tell his or her own story, Cavarero argues, but rather always has it narrated to him or her by a necessary other in a relationship of desire and love.18 The self is fundamentally relational, she concludes, constituted by the other; even uniqueness is a gift from the other.19 Similarly, Stravinsky’s uniqueness as a composer unfolded in relation to his friends in the Spanish-speaking world, who exchanged stories with him and mirrored his desires, creating counter-narratives to the mythical label of modernism (which Stravinsky despised).20
The literary form of the scrapbook as travelogue also breaks down hegemonic ideas about cosmopolitan identity, forcing acknowledgment of local contexts. Without a relation to the material specificity of home or “quotidian struggle for survival,” Homi Bhabha argues, cosmopolitan communities lose the element that provides an “ethical entitlement to, and enactment of, the sense of community,” leaving philosophers who are trying to make sense of cosmopolitanism to resort to liberal assumptions about the givenness of commonalities between people around the world, or of an “empathetic self capable of creating global relations that erase local struggles.”21 Bhabha coined the term “vernacular cosmopolitanism” to describe the necessary relationship of imagined or universal global community to local, patriotic, or national interests.
Art historian A. Joan Saab has noted how modern artists’ movement between global and local contexts determined how they perceived difference, and how they situated themselves and the products they produced in terms of race, gender, nationality, and class in what she calls “vernacular modernism”—a term related to vernacular cosmopolitanism yet modified to focus on style. Saab analyses a remarkable photograph in which U.S. silver impresario William Spratling poses with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein, and the Mexican filmmaker Chano Urueta in Taxco, Mexico, where Siqueiros was under house arrest for Communist activism after having been released from prison in Mexico City in 1930 (see Figure 1). Spratling had used the commission he earned from selling a mural by Diego Rivera to resuscitate the silver industry in Taxco, Saab explains. He taught locals to create traditional jewelry, thereby transforming the town into a popular tourist and shopping destination. Saab notes that Spratling and Siqueiros wear leather sombreros popular among Mexican cowboys and revolutionaries, and Eisenstein and Urueta wear berets, a symbol of the Parisian bohemian artist. These hats give evidence of their owners’ “multiple cultural allegiances,” she argues, and of a tension between the local (“Mexican cowboys” or “Parisian bohemians”) and the global (modernism), between popular and elite. Such mass-produced material goods as hats circulated in a transnational marketplace that became a “crucial site for the dissemination of what it means to be modern at this moment in time.”22
Saab’s example highlights how easily local contexts transform into tourist attractions, and artistic products into souvenirs, when considered in the light of the circuits of vernacular modernism. It gives evidence of how U.S. industrialists artificially constructed local Mexican cultures for tourist consumption, creating desire for the romance of Mexican peasantry as a substitute for the knowledge of their exploitation of local Mexican resources (silver). Siqueiros, Eisenstein, Urueta, and Spratling used Taxco as an attractive backdrop for the photograph they took from Siqueiros’s house, which became an important cosmopolitan meeting place during the period of his house arrest there—a startling example of the convergence of local and global in this period (house arrest and modernist fame). The group’s decision to pose with Taxco as their backdrop exemplifies one of the mechanisms by which the modernist cosmopolitan community produced collective modes of perceiving difference. In Brent Hayes Edwards’s words, the “color line” shifted when framed from a “world” rather than local view.23 The hats in this image, like Stravinsky’s music when it was later performed in Mexico, cease to function as aesthetic and become exchange objects in the cosmopolitan space. Represented in translation between different cultures, the hats function as signs of national and modern difference rather than as tasteful products in and of themselves. In denial about the inequality between cosmopolitans and locals, spectators imbue these hats with a nostalgic longing that transforms them into souvenirs.
Figure 1. William Spratling, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Sergey Eisenstein, and Chano Urueta, meeting in Taxco during Siqueiros’s house arrest, 1931.
Inserted into this context of vernacular cosmopolitanism, Stravinsky ceases to be a “great composer” and becomes a traveling celebrity musician, his music less defined by style or the score than in relation to the place where it was performed and the unique audiences that received it. The consequences of his itinerant music-making for his approach to composition become nowhere more evident than in the Divertimento—the orchestral suite drawn from Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) that Stravinsky conducted eight times in Mexico in 1940 and 1941 and that is the subject of this essay. Cosmopolitanism does not manifest as style in this work, however, as numerous scholars have tried to claim in different contexts in recent studies of modernism. If it did so, I argue, it would become naturalized, and the connection to local day-to-day struggle and minority voices would be lost.24 Rather, the Divertimento reflects the choices Stravinsky made in programming repertoire for his concerts around the world, and the subsequent transformation of his music from aesthetic object of modernist contemplation to cosmopolitan souvenir.
Although some scholars believe that cosmopolitan negotiations can lead artists to a “critical” stance toward modernism, Stravinsky did not become critical, but rather remained self-serving in his choices and oriented toward his own and others’ entertainment and pleasure.25 The very frivolousness and banality of his endeavors says more about his music’s moral value than would any projected intentions about the fundamental moral worth of modernism as a musical project per se. I offer this brief story with the metaphorical title “Igor the Angeleno” as a model for interpreting how Stravinsky’s music may have also functioned in Los Angeles in the 1940s, and as a call to arms for scholars to begin studying this period in Stravinsky’s life in detail in relation to a desegregated history of music in the local context of that city. The dynamics of vernacular cosmopolitanism may explain why Stravinsky felt so at home in Los Angeles, and why he chose to become an Angeleno.
Nationalism in the Mirror: Stravinsky in Spain
Stravinsky first established his modus operandi for negotiating his exper
ience of local Spanish customs when World War I prevented Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from touring as planned, and the company found its itinerary rerouted to Spain. King Alfonso XIII rescued Diaghilev by inviting the Ballets Russes to stage productions of Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade at the Teatro Real in Madrid from 28 May to 9 June, and to produce a Spanish-themed program that included Petrushka and an orchestral excerpt, Glinka’s Summer Night in Madrid, in San Sebastián that August.26 Diaghilev’s presentation of Russian and Spanish national culture within a modernist framework delighted and infuriated Spanish critics, themselves involved in a profound reexamination of national traditions within the context of their own burgeoning vanguard movement.27 Famous by reputation for The Rite of Spring (which would receive its Spanish premiere only in 1928), Stravinsky became the focus of their attention; reactions to his work were intense and divided. Manuel de Falla and Adolfo Salazar defended Stravinsky in seminal essays that strengthened the bonds between the international and local vanguard, and between Spain, Russia, and France.28 Salazar, a brilliant twenty-six-year-old Spanish critic and composer who championed Schoenberg, the French Impressionists, and the Russian School, excitedly sent Stravinsky two of the many reviews he wrote about him during his visit.29 In these reviews, Salazar displayed his insider knowledge of Stravinsky’s modernist circle by quoting liberally from French sources, and by describing a private dinner of intimate friends in Madrid at which Stravinsky performed in a four-hand version of the Rite.30 These exchanges and critical confrontations proved decisive: Stravinsky returned to Paris with a refreshed perspective, Spanish audiences and critics having mirrored his nationalism in a way that helped solidify his path toward a more objective musical style.
Stravinsky felt attracted by the foreignness and familiarity of Spain, and found his “new acquaintances” there, among them the Chilean silver mining heiress Eugenia Errázuriz, “very agreeable” as he wrote years later in Chroniques de ma vie. Nevertheless, “at the [Spanish] border the smell of frying in oil already became perceptible,” he wrote, hinting at his disdain for lower-class cooking habits.31 The strangeness of Spain dissipated when he visited Toledo and the Escorial, where he experienced not the “horrors of the Inquisition or the cruelties of the days of tyranny” but rather “the profoundly religious temperament of the people and the ardent mysticism of their Catholicism, so similar in its essence to Russian religious feeling and spirit.” Although he claimed to find Spanish folk music indistinctive, he spent “whole evenings” frequenting taverns “listening indefinitely to the guitarist’s prelude-tunings and a deep-voiced singer with interminable breath unfolding her long Arab cantilena with rich fioriture.”32
Stravinsky responded to his first experience of Spain by writing pieces like “Española” (the second of his Cinq Pièces faciles, 1916–17), the Etude for Pianola (1917; published and premiered in 1921 and orchestrated as “Madrid” in his Four Etudes for Orchestra of 1930), and the “Royal March” from L’Histoire du soldat (1918; based on a paso doble). In these works he did not imitate a Spanish style but rather, in his own words, “paid tribute” to Spain as Glinka once had in Summer Night in Madrid by capturing “the comical nature of the unexpected mixtures exhibited by the mechanical pianos and clatter of out-of-tune instruments on the streets of Madrid and in the little nocturnal taverns”—in other words, the technologies of reproduction that enabled the Spanish tourist industry.33 By combining modern technology with Spanish urban street sounds in these works, Stravinsky departed radically from Glinka’s model of program music with its lush expressive orchestration, exoticized aural images, stereotypical thematic contrasts, and recognizable Spanish tropes (castanets), instead manifesting in his music the relationship between local impressions and global technology characteristic of vernacular cosmopolitanism.
Stravinsky returned to Spain six times between 1921 and 1936, traveling to Barcelona and Madrid, but leaving no impression of what he thought of the Catalan-Spanish national conflict.34 After hearing Aurelio Fernández premiere Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for Clarinet in April 1921, Salazar announced the advent of neoclassicism (nuevo clasicisme [sic])—a fiercely debated aesthetic in Spain.35 Listening to Petrushka around the same time, José Ortega y Gasset praised Stravinsky for breaking with the nineteenth-century aesthetics of feeling. “This music is something external to ourselves. It is a distinct object, perfectly located outside ourselves, and in the face of which we feel we are pure contemplators,” he wrote.36 When Stravinsky conducted his much anticipated Pulcinella Suite at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona on 16 March, and at the Teatro Real in Madrid on 25 March 1924, critics received it within the context of these intellectual debates, and perhaps even in relation to the publication in El Sol in January and February 1924 of the first installments of Ortega y Gasset’s “The Dehumanization of Art.”37 That spring Salazar confirmed Pulcinella’s importance to the Spanish vanguard by comparing it to Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro in an article for Ortega y Gasset’s recently established journal, Revista de Occidente.38 Stravinsky had been assimilated effortlessly into the Spanish cultural elite, becoming for it a symbol of European musical modernity.
By the mid-1920s, Stravinsky was beginning to feel a genuine attachment to the city of Barcelona. In 1924 he established a successful working relationship with Juan Mestres Calvet, director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, and consolidated his decision to devote his career to performing his own music. Calvet arranged Stravinsky concerts and festivals in Barcelona in 1924, 1925, 1928, and 1936, programming new works each year, and becoming more daring as time went on.39 Through these repeated visits, Stravinsky established lasting relationships with Catalan friends, who introduced him to folk traditions being reinvented in Barcelona at that time. The psychiatrist Jeroni de Moragas remembered with pride how the Ateneu Barcelonès invited Stravinsky to hear the Cobla Barcelona play sardanas—a Catalan round dance—in 1924.40 “Stravinsky scrutinized the movements of the cobla through his monocle, listened attentively for the new sounds, and every now and then gasped in surprise. … He looked at the instruments and wanted to understand how everything worked. … When I return to Paris,” he told his Spanish hosts, “send me some sardanas to study, and send me some popular melodies as well. Then I’ll send you the sardanas I write.”41 Rafael Moragas likewise describes an evening in Madrid in 1925, when Stravinsky joined Joaquín Turina, Falla, Picasso, and others for a concert given by Ricardo Viñes, after which they retired to a buñoleria, or doughnut store, where Turina “succumbed to the canto jondo,” and Falla went on what was for him a “binge” by drinking two bottles of Mondariz, a Spanish bottled water that was a luxury item. Falla feared he would anger Stravinsky if he went to bed early, but Stravinsky was too drunk to notice.42
Musical Scrapbooks
During his travels to Spain and other countries, Stravinsky began to take many photographs, and upon his return home he organized these meticulously into photo albums. Early albums from the war years document family vacations with Yekaterina and their four children. A later album belonging to Vera Sudeikina provides fond memories of her many trips with him, whereas a stately album from the 1930s presents impressions of Stravinsky’s concert tours with his son Soulima and others.43 The photographs Stravinsky so carefully pasted into these scrapbooks give evidence of his affluence, and of how he saw the world as a traveler, and the types of tourist attractions he cared about. He photographed friends and family but also countless zoos, and sometimes peasants—for example, in Bucharest in 1930. Yet he and Vera most often photographed means of transportation. As if celebrating the technology that enabled their mobility, they pasted into their albums picture after picture of trains and boats; frequently Stravinsky stands beaming next to an expensive car. These photographs reveal Stravinsky’s passion for collecting and arranging material manifestations of his experience as a means of keeping memories present: as voraciously as he snapped photographs, he purchased souven
irs in all the places he visited.
Stravinsky’s photo albums capture not only material memory but also the affective content of past experience. From his early years touring with Diaghilev, Stravinsky understood music making as an expression of intimate friendship—a way of coping he invented when as a lonely child alienated from his parents he bonded with his gay younger brother Gury, who died of typhoid fever on military service in Romania in 1916 (see Figure 2). His albums document his intimate relationship to Gury, his love affair with Vera, and the intense camaraderie and male bonding with travel companions from Picasso to Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. They are striking for their intensity of affect. As Stravinsky got older, it became ever more important to him to tour with close companions, whether the Russian-American Jewish violinist and student of Fritz Kreisler, Samuel Dushkin, or his son Soulima.44 In later life, he traveled always in the company of Robert Craft. He appeared to choose these companions not for their musical talent per se, but for their trustworthiness and degree of intimate connection to him. They gave him a sense of permanence and home amidst the whirlwind of his world travels.
Stravinsky’s photo albums and itineraries reveal that he was almost always either on tour, commuting between his family home in Southern France and his mistress Vera in Paris, or vacationing with one or the other; his schedule left little time to establish roots. His state of exile and the closing of the Russian border had led to a loss of financial security, and he needed to tour incessantly to make ends meet. This compulsive traveling affected how he understood nations and musical nationalisms, which he came to see as somewhat interchangeable. By the 1930s he considered himself neither Russian nor cosmopolitan, but as “global” or, simply, “Stravinsky”—composer of the “Chinese March” in Le Chant du rossignol, the Spanish-inflected Etude for Pianola, Pulcinella, and later, Four Norwegian Moods.45 He saw these works as qualitatively distinct from the “picturesque in music” that he associated with Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Villa-Lobos, and others, and defined his own musical brand as beyond local definition.46 Music was not national but universal, as he later told a reporter in Caracas. It was “just music, plain and simple.”47 His aristocratic privilege had given him access to a global range of musical practices, and it all belonged to him.
Stravinsky and His World Page 21