Figure 2. Gury Stravinsky (in foreground) with an unidentified man, Romania, 1916.
To make a living while on tour, Stravinsky frequently had to perform his “greatest hits”—the Russian ballets of his early years—in a format that could be rehearsed and performed quickly with orchestras of any caliber. He programmed most often not the “neoclassicism as style” for which he had become famous in the 1920s and for which he has found a place of honor in the history books of musical modernism, but rather commercial repertoire that included old warhorses like the Pulcinella, Firebird, and Petrushka suites and the Divertimento. These works were the products he gave international audiences in return for the souvenirs and folk entertainments his hosts always offered him on his travels. After 1931, he performed them in arrangements for violin and piano with Samuel Dushkin. Although Robert Craft felt that “all [these arrangements] together are scarcely worth the shortest original composition [by Stravinsky],” they are the compositions Stravinsky probably performed most in the 1930s.48
Figure 3. Stravinsky’s personal photograph “mit Samuel Dushkin,” n. d., ca. early 1930s
Stravinsky and Dushkin became fast friends and intimate travel partners, performing about seventy concerts together between 1931 and 1937 (see Figure 3). Stravinsky composed his Duo concertante and Violin Concerto for Dushkin and allowed him to collaborate in the composing process. “I love you, I admire you, and I am grateful to you, and I ask you not to hate me if I ask you to let the trumpets play more softly or en sourdine in spots!” Dushkin wrote in 1931 about the Violin Concerto, indicating how well he understood how to charm Stravinsky into agreeing with him.49 They performed together in France, Italy, England, Spain, and Germany, and when concerts started to dry up there after 1933, undertook extensive tours of the United States in 1935 and 1937. Reactions ranged from enthusiasm in Manchester, through disappointment in Lyon, to boredom in Los Angeles.50
A concert program from a recital Stravinsky and Dushkin gave at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid on 21 November 1933 provides insight into their usual choice and ordering of repertoire within the Spanish context, and also of the way in which popular hits from the international concert circuit infiltrated local modernist contexts.51 The Residencia was a unique educational institution that had been founded in 1910 with the goal of nurturing a specialized intellectual elite in Spain, inspired in part by the philosophy of its close associate, Ortega y Gasset. It offered selected students boarding and a comprehensive education that combined tradition and modernity within an international framework. The musicologist and resident Jesús Bal y Gay organized musical activities in the 1930s, following a cultural agenda similar to that of Adolfo Salazar (a frequent guest there). “The most intelligent of our aristocracy and the most aristocratic of our intelligentsia” were gathered in the Residencia, Jesús Bal y Gay later remembered, highlighting the exclusivity of its cultural circle.52 On 11 June 1931 the Sociedad de Cursos y Conferencias of the Residencia staged the Madrid premiere of L’Histoire du soldat. Two years later, on 21 November 1933, Stravinsky and Dushkin performed there a selection of some of Stravinsky’s most beloved tunes arranged and programmed for greatest dramatic effect (see program on facing page).53
Stravinsky and Dushkin display bravura, impeccable collaboration, and sensational showmanship on the recordings they had made of most of this repertoire in Paris earlier that year.55 The two relished performing these musical scrapbooks, the order and content of which they varied incessantly, sometimes adding excerpts from the Violin Concerto, or the Divertimento, which Stravinsky transcribed for his friend in 1932.
But the tours also became depressing. In January 1936, Stravinsky told Dushkin that the tours were no longer giving him enough “moral and material guarantees” to make them worthwhile. He also found nothing interesting in his symphonic programs, which included “always the same thing—Firebird and Petrushka!” He felt this was not good for his moral health.56 He spoke of his upcoming tour to Argentina, and of his hope that another U.S. tour with Dushkin in 1937 would be different. But when that tour ended a year and a half or so later he told Dushkin candidly that they had not made enough money and that the whole enterprise was bad for Dushkin’s career.57 Although they performed together after this date, they never toured again. At the same time, the Spanish Civil War had ended Stravinsky’s concertizing career in Spain and the activities of the Residencia: many notable former residents were killed while others went into exile in France and the United States, though most went to Argentina and Mexico.
1.
Suite italienne
2.
Duo concertante
Intermission
3.
Pastorale, “Marche chinoise,” and “Chants du rossignol” from Le Rossignol, Scherzo and Berceuse from Firebird, and the “Danse russe” from Petrushka.
4.
Suite from L’Histoire du soldat (with Aurelio Fernández on clarinet)54
Dancing on the Volcano: Argentina 1936
Stravinsky’s frenetic concertizing schedule and high-class international socializing took on a morally questionable character after the Spanish Civil War started and a European war seemed imminent. His privilege caused him to appear increasingly out of touch. In April 1936, months before the civil war broke out, Stravinsky traveled to Argentina with Soulima aboard the German luxury ocean liner Cap Arcona. He documented the voyage in his photo album with a large professional photograph of Soulima and himself dining with the ship’s captain, Richard Niejahr, as well as snapshots of other boats and the stopover they made in Rio de Janeiro. Athos Palma, director of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, had invited them to perform in an impressive festival of old favorites and new works that included full ballet productions of Petrushka and The Firebird as well as Nijinska’s Le Baiser de la fée, piano concerts with Soulima, and the Argentinian premiere of Perséphone with Victoria Ocampo in the lead role. Just as King Adolfo XIII of Spain had saved the Ballets Russes by inviting them to Spain during World War I, the Argentinean cultural elite rescued Stravinsky from a dismal European season by inviting him to Buenos Aires on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. In each case, conflict forced the most active cultural agents in the European metropolis into the periphery, reversing the relationships between both.58 The tour was on the whole a success, in spite of the political scandal caused by Stravinsky’s critique of Soviet “materialism” and (indirectly) the Spanish Left in the interviews he gave upon arrival in Argentina.59
Figure 4. Stravinsky and Victoria Ocampo, from Stravinsky’s photo album, Argentina, spring 1936.
During his time in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, Stravinsky established a deep friendship with Victoria Ocampo, the remarkable Argentine intellectual and socialite he had met through Ernest Ansermet in 1932 (see Figure 4).60 Ocampo was a leading player in a transnational circle of writers invested in promoting the emerging cultures of the Americas. In 1930 she launched the literary journal Sur, in which she published numerous articles about or related to artistic circles around Stravinsky. Ocampo played a pivotal role in establishing lines of communication among intellectuals in the United States, Latin America, and Europe (especially France, where she lived for extended periods). Friendships were an article of faith for her. She considered them the antidote to the centralized power of the European metropolis, and in her autobiography spoke about the importance of love as a “passion that filled out the entire space of a life for those who were born to feel it.”61
Ocampo had ties to Stravinsky before they met up in Argentina in 1936. She had witnessed his major premieres in Paris before the war, and had seen how people whistled Firebird on the Champs d’Elysées afterward.62 She was also close to Ernest Ansermet, with whom she swapped records and exchanged listening experiences, participating vigorously in the commodity exchange characteristic of vernacular modernism.63 Whenever she had liked any of the records in Ansermet’s collection—including Gershwin’s Nashville Nightingale in 1925—Ansermet quipped excitedl
y, “Oh Igor likes that record too. Take it. I want you to have it.” “Igor, Igor, Igor came up all the time in our conversations,” Ocampo remembered.64
Figure 5. Snapshots of Victoria Ocampo with Soulima and Igor Stravinsky from Stravinsky’s photo album, Argentina, spring 1936
Ocampo invited Stravinsky and Soulima to stay with her during their visit, and did everything to make them feel “at home.”65 In this comfortable setting the composer let his guard down, and developed intimate friendships that lasted for the rest of his life (see Figure 5).66 Ocampo introduced Stravinsky to the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, a friend of Salazar’s and Bal y Gay’s and frequent visitor to the Residencia de Estudiantes; the Argentine composer Juan José Castro; and the guitarist, singer, and composer of tango José Maria Aguilar, among other friends. Stravinsky also met many visiting friends from Chile; and some of the many Spanish intellectuals residing in the city that spring.67 Ocampo arranged for Stravinsky to hear “Creole music” (musique criolla) organized by Mr. A. Rojas, “who is in contact with those people and already organized things of this kind for other celebrities passing through Buenos Aires.”68 And she helped Stravinsky buy a lovely Argentinian cowhide (peau de vache) that made Vera “ecstatic.”69 When he later asked her to give Vera another cowhide, which he had seen in her Parisian apartment, she replied that she thought it had gone missing in the war and “it’s nothing at all to have perhaps lost all of that but I think about it with nostalgia, because a whole period of my life disappeared with those things. I attach myself to things only because they remind me of people and moments in my life. Things can be replaced, the rest can’t be.”70 The emotions she invested in objects mattered more to Ocampo than their market value, and more perhaps than the pressing realities of the war. Imbuing her vast material wealth with affective memories allowed her, like other international aristocrats, to live out a kind of nostalgic capitalism, and to blur her financial privilege with the labor that enabled it.
Victoria Ocampo and her exclusive circle of friends knowingly imitated elite French modernists in constructing their vanguard intellectual identity. This is evident in a drawing by an unnamed guest at a party Ocampo hosted for Stravinsky at her ranch, La Martona. This drawing is titled Project for “Liqueurs on the Grass in the manner of Manet,” in a parody of his Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and hints at an affair (see Figure 6). The woman who drew it, “M.A. de C.C.,” lies “hidden by the tree” and appears to be in intimate communication with a stick-figure Stravinsky. “I unfortunately have nothing to apologize for, I forget and my memories are erased is the silent response of a faithful woman,” she utters. This woman does not appear to be Ocampo herself, who stands elsewhere. Stravinsky, seated on the other side of the tree, responds to the unidentified woman, “I forget but I don’t forgive”—the stick figure, like the composer himself, mistrusting memories but not forgetting the feelings associated with them. The couple’s elusive flirting perfectly encapsulates the secrecy and exclusivity of their social class. The group is contained in a space shaped like a luxury perfume bottle, one that seals them off hermetically from the world around them.
When he got home, Stravinsky memorialized the very same party in his photo album (Figure 7). Rather than depict the space of the party as closed and self-contained as the woman had, Stravinsky depicted it as open and fragmented. He pasted in a double-exposure photo that reveals the shadowy contours of an expensive car, as well as a nice profile shot of Victoria, and three photographs of a boisterous group of friends engaged in drunken merriment, with Stravinsky lying on the ground and playing the party clown, all of this under the label “Estancia Martona, One of the most beautiful and richest in the province.” Through this act of documentation, Stravinsky distances himself from his personal experience of the party, and situates himself both inside and outside its intimate circle—a movement that creates the tension and desire realized in his casual affair.
Figure 6. Drawing by a party guest at Victoria Ocampo’s ranch, La Martona, spring 1936.
In Argentina, as in Spain and Russia, Stravinsky maintained his membership in his privileged aristocratic rank by stressing class over ethnic commonalities, and by consenting to the group’s rules of exclusion and traditions of perceiving difference. He knew he did not belong by nationality to the Spanish-speaking world, a fact many cartoonists and reporters drove home by relentlessly mocking his physiognomy. But he felt confident about his class and racial associations, and soon began to speak regularly to the Spanish press about being distinct from the “folk” or “people”—an amorphous spontaneous collectivity that he observed only from the outside, and whose music he as an elite composer could not replicate but only use to construct something new.71 He also developed a passionate love for capitalism—on his first trip to the United States he excitedly planned trips to the Chicago stockyards and the Ford plant in Detroit—and a hatred of Communism and materialism, the topic that got him in such hot water in Argentina.72
Years of being exposed to privately arranged performances of folkloric spectacle in Spain, Argentina, and the other countries he visited led Stravinsky to develop distinct habits of racial spectatorship. His elitism took on racial overtones, as he increasingly kept people of color at a distance by projecting onto them less sophisticated listening practices and making them the object of his tourist gaze. “[Does] the effect of music [not] depend … upon the culture of the listener’s ear?” he asked a reporter in Cleveland after returning from Argentina. “[Imagine a] room [with] an audience of four—a savage from darkest Africa, a laborer on the street, a doctor, a musician—and we play music for them, a good, sweet melody. Is it music to the savage? No. ‘That is terrible,’ he cries [since] for him music is boom! boom! boom! His ear is not cultured. To him it is abstract. So each listener calls that which is familiar to him, music.”73 He told another reporter in New York in May 1940, “Always I love to listen to the good swings [sic] orchestras, not only in this country but in Paris. Now it is to the Harlem I go. It is so sympathetic to watch the Negro boys and girls dancing and to watch them eating the long, what is it you call them, frankfurters, no—hot dogs—in the long roles [sic].”74
Figure 7. Social gathering at Victoria Ocampo’s La Martona from Stravinsky’s photo album, Argentina, spring 1936.
Wartime Shopping in Mexico
Stravinsky traveled to Mexico just months after Germany invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. When he arrived there, he encountered many of his aristocratic contacts from Barcelona and Buenos Aires, his cosmopolitanism collapsing into the local pleasure of reconnecting with familiar contexts and old friends. The Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas had recognized the government of the Spanish Republic in exile and opened its arms to intellectuals, creating several institutions to support them, including La Casa de España in 1938 (which became El Colegio de México two years later). The Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes became its director, and Spanish exile Jesús Bal y Gay became his colleague in 1938, with Adolfo Salazar joining in 1939.75 Carlos Chávez welcomed all of them into the musical community. Salazar and Bal y Gay reinvented the critical tradition around Stravinsky that they had both contributed to in Spain (Salazar much more so), helping out with newly established journals like Nuestra Musica, and writing reviews whenever Stravinsky came to town that invariably welcomed the composer as a conquering hero.
Reports of Stravinsky’s trips to Mexico emphasize elaborate socializing, and his desire to entertain and be entertained at a time of war. Stravinsky and his old acquaintances all seemed delighted to see one another. A reporter from the Revista de Revistas described a scene in which Stravinsky, with his typical compulsive flair, ordered an elaborate breakfast for his Mexican friends, among them the composers Manuel Ponce, Carlo Chávez, and Eduardo Hernández Moncada. Salazar translated because Stravinsky spoke only French. “There was Salazar, standing at the car door, talking to a friend,” the reporter observed. “Then suddenly Stravinsky emerged from his house running. And runnin
g right behind him, trying to catch every word, Salazar.”76 Alfonso Reyes wrote Ocampo of a wonderful evening with Stravinsky in Mexico in June 1940. “He was as charming as usual, and so enjoyed talking about theology. It is a delight to see him lose his temper over snobby reporters who ask him inane questions.”77
One of the first items on the agenda when Stravinsky reunited with Salazar, Bal y Gay and his wife, Rosita Ascot—a pianist who had studied with Manuel de Falla and performed often at the Residencia—was for all of them to take a shopping trip to Taxco, where they posed for several photographs (Figures 8 and 9). These snapshots look quite different from the one Eisenstein and his friends posed for in 1931 (Figure 1). Stravinsky still wears a Parisian beret, as had Eisenstein and Urueta, but his clothes distinguish him more dramatically from the people milling about him. He is awkward and ill at ease in his surroundings rather than proud of them, as Eisenstein and his leftist friends had once been. In a second photo with Salazar, Rosita Ascot, and Vera, the group appears closed in on itself, laughing playfully at an inside joke or staring into Jesús Bal y Gay’s camera and oblivious of the people around them. They revel in the amusement of spending an afternoon buying souvenirs, which they will transport home with the help of many local laborers. On a second outing to the Church of San Francisco Javier in Tepotzotlán—which Stravinsky later described to Robert Craft as “the most moving Christian building in the world”—Stravinsky solidified his Mexican tourist experience, as he had done in Spain in 1916 and 1921, with a selfless moment of intense Christian communion that erased ethnic, national, and class differences.78
Stravinsky and His World Page 22