Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  During his many visits to Mexico from 1940 until the 1960s, Stravinsky became “inseparable” from Jesús Bal y Gay and Rosita. Bal y Gay remembers “infinite meals” together, attending all of Stravinsky’s rehearsals, and excursions to tourist spots like the Basilica of our Lady of Guadeloupe, where Stravinsky shocked his Spanish Catholic friends with his curious religious practice of lighting a candle, then kneeling at the altar with his arms extended to make the sign of the cross, while still holding the candle in his right hand—their alienation countering the affinity for Spanish Catholicism Stravinsky had felt over twenty years earlier and rekindled in Mexico.79 Stravinsky cherished the time alone with Bal y Gay and his wife, with whom he felt he could talk about Mexico (which he studied assiduously) and about his “picturesque” voyages to other countries. Stravinsky was also an extremely good listener, Bal y Gay later remembered, and patiently gave Bal y Gay extensive advice on his compositions.80 Conversations with Stravinsky, Bal y Gay concluded, gave him the greatest comfort he knew in what he called his “unwanted and forced Mexican exile.”81

  Musical Souvenirs: The Divertimento in Mexico, 1941

  The sonic consequences of Stravinsky’s travels in the circuits of vernacular cosmopolitanism are evident in the recording he made in Mexico of his Divertimento. About twenty-two seconds into the second movement, “Danses suisses,” a man disrupts the music by yelling loudly. It is not clear what he says or whether he is reacting to the music or to something else happening in the hall, but the timing of his protest (rehearsal number 40) suggests he is upset by the way in which the music is skipping from fragment to fragment. The Divertimento is a dance suite made up of sutured fragments of about fifteen piano works by Tchaikovsky and derived from the ballet Le Baiser de la fée, which Ida Rubinstein commissioned from Stravinsky in 1928.82 Originally, Rubinstein’s stage designer Alexandre Benois had suggested to Stravinsky the idea of composing a ballet based on Tchaikovsky’s piano works, examples of which he sent for him to consider. Stravinsky had used about half of Benois’s suggestions and other works to create a ballet in the tradition of Glazunov-Fokine’s Chopiniana, which he at first called Tchaikovskyana. The connection to Tchaikovsky was obvious when the work was performed as a ballet, but the authorship became more ambiguous when Stravinsky created a suite from it for concert performance, and then arranged that suite for violin and piano.

  Figure 8. Stravinsky in Taxco, Mexico, photo by Vera Stravinsky, summer 1940.

  Although in their studies of the work Stravinsky’s friends Robert Craft and Lawrence Morton immediately focused on identifying the fragments, the sutures between them are equally interesting in the context of vernacular cosmopolitanism. The “Danses suisses” (called “Une fête au village” in the original ballet) starts with an upbeat motive derived from the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Humoresque, no. 1, op. 10, in D major. Three measures later it launches into two recognizable bars of the main theme of Humoresque itself, arranged for brass (Example 1). Stravinsky brazenly disrupts Tchaikovsky’s original phrase structure of antecedent and consequent, however, by interrupting this main theme after two measures to return to his own opening motive, which is now reduced to one measure. He then switches back to the Humoresque theme, but disrupts it again two measures later, this time with new, distinctly Stravinskyian material that introduces an ironic-sounding AG in the horns. That AG sets up the next contrasting fragment, a modified version of the opening theme from Tchaikovsky’s Réverie du soir, no. 1, op. 19, in the strings at rehearsal number 39. This excerpt is in G minor, and in the original piece its effect is predicated on moving ambiguously to the subdominant only to return to the tonic in the consequent of the phrase that follows. But Stravinsky does not include the consequent of the original phrase; instead, he disrupts the original music with a jarring measure of 2/4 and a return to his opening motive. This leaves the ambiguity of a subdominant in G minor of the Rêverie to function like a foreign body in the D major of the already established Humoresque, especially because Stravinsky has also not changed the key signature, but let the original G-minor excerpt appear in a D-major context. The affective switch between the two fragments is as striking as their harmonic and timbral difference. Only after the abrupt disruption of the opening motive does he offer, at rehearsal number 40, a consequent to the antecedent phrase from the Rêverie du soir—but one of his own making, based harmonically and stylistically on the original. This is the moment at which the man in Mexico City cried out—his protest ruining the second attempt to record this piece in Mexico and sonically disrupting Stravinsky’s attempt at smooth technological domination of the global modern music scene.

  Figure 9. Igor and Vera Stravinsky with Adolfo Salazar and Rosita Ascot, Taxco, summer 1940.

  The Frankensteinian sewing together of these musical “found objects” is formally reminiscent of the picture arrangements in Stravinsky’s photo albums, except that here it is Tchaikovsky’s music, rather than photographs, that have been pasted into an album/score. Perhaps not coincidentally, Stravinsky and Diaghilev had first hatched the idea of reviving Tchaikovsky’s music at all—the ballet Sleeping Beauty—while on a tourist excursion to Seville in 1921. By cutting Tchaikovsky’s compositions in pieces Stravinsky distances listeners from their original symbolic meaning and affect and transforms them into Russian souvenirs. Stravinsky had learned to separate music from emotions when he performed his own compositions on pianolas in the 1920s and noticed that “he was transmitting notes through the intervention of electricity that didn’t correspond at all with his immediate feeling, because there was an intermediary.” He liked this effect because, as he told Erik Satie, it “restored” rather than “reproduced” his oeuvres.83 Adolfo Salazar recognized the nostalgic character of the souvenirs in Stravinsky’s Divertimento when he heard it in Mexico City in 1940, and asked his readers to imagine Manuel de Falla writing such a Divertimento based on the multinational Madrilenian music of the zarazuela composer Federico Chueca.84 Salazar also notes that the piece’s subtitle, “Allegory,” is an accurate reflection of the work.

  The fragments of Tchaikovsky’s music in the Divertimento function like Russian souvenirs—or the cowboy hats and berets in Figure 1—not only in their objectified arrangement, but in the way they evoke nostalgic memories. Stravinsky liked to tell people that the emotions in his music were in the music itself and not expressed by him. Using fragments of music by another composer made that assertion plausible.85 The two Tchaikovsky fragments at the opening of “Danses suisses” express dramatically contrasting affects: the Humoresque is jolly, whereas the Rêverie is melancholic. Their affective content is felt immediately; they have what philosopher Walter Benjamin called “aura”—the quality of objects that carry the sentiments once invested in them, and that evoke involuntary memories. They achieve their impact precisely because of the way in which Stravinsky has cut and pasted them, forcing listeners to dwell in the moment by interrupting the music’s development. This technique enables what Benjamin calls Erlebnis within an otherwise alienated modernity.86 The auratic fragments in the Divertimento transform it into a souvenir shop—an aesthetic version of the marketplace of vernacular modernism.

  Benjamin’s notion of Erlebnis describes well the immediacy of experience Stravinsky hoped to create by performing this music himself. I want “music to be fresh and alive in the ears of the people,” he had told a British reporter in 1934. “Music ought to be like an opened window that lets in clean air, perhaps cold air, to make the head spin. Music should be desire, not habit.”87 In an interview in Paris a year later, Stravinsky clarified that he didn’t write music to please audiences, but that he did care deeply about how they received his work when he appeared before them onstage as a pianist or conductor. His goal was to connect with them honestly. “By making contact with the public, it is possible to influence one’s own success, to influence it through the feeling one has that the proposed work is good and useful, and that the way it has been presented is void of affectat
ion, artifice and complacency,” he commented. “When I am able to share with listeners the faith that is in me, I feel joy in my success.” This is why, Stravinsky explained, he had been performing his own music for the past fifteen years.88

  But in spite of the unmediated performance, the message Stravinsky communicates in the Divertimento is veiled and indirect, the fragmentation having pushed the affects underground. No single affect is ever allowed to prevail, and most are dwarfed by the overwhelming effect of the work’s jarringly disjunctive form. Stravinsky seems to want to keep the audience from knowing too much, just as he remained mum on the intensity of feeling within his intimate circle of friends—any lavish display of emotion going against what he understood to be unbreakable rules of aristocratic public modesty and decorum. His fatherly protection of affect may also reflect his strong empathy for Tchaikovsky’s maligned homosexuality—an empathy that led him as a young man to become the closest confidant of his beloved brother, Gury.89

  Stravinsky’s nostalgia for the emotional intensity of his intimate relationships in the past—his love for Tchaikovsky and Gury—leads in the Divertimento to occasional, unexpected sentimentality—an affect characteristic of the souvenir. This sentimentality may, in fact, have sometimes embarrassed Stravinsky, who admired Tchaikovsky for “restoring the melodic line” but thought his music could also “smell like oil from the fried food at a country fair”—the stench that reminded him of the lower class.90 It also felt threatening to Lawrence Morton, who couldn’t imagine that Stravinsky could really love Tchaikovsky “in spite of his unforgiveable flaws.” Given the “sexual tragedy” of Tchaikovsky’s life and the “vulgarity of his symphonic climaxes and boring sequences,” Morton commented, Le Baiser de la fée must have been nothing more than an act of rigorous criticism on Stravinsky’s part.91 For very different reasons this sentimentality also bothered Richard Taruskin, who thought the Divertimento lacked irony and thus was not modern.92 I would argue that the presence of sentimentality and of cutoff or contained emotions in the Divertimento does not disqualify the work as “modern,” as Taruskin once claimed, but rather gives it pride of place in a history of modern music that takes into account the role of music as an exchange object between the local and global in vernacular cosmopolitanism.

  Example 1. Stravinsky, “Danses Suisses,” second movement of Divertimento, rehearsal no. 38 to two measures after 40.

  Becoming an Angeleno

  The knowledge of Stravinsky’s Spanish-speaking networks and the perspective of vernacular cosmopolitanism broaden the lens for exploring his life in Los Angeles after 1941. This knowledge gives insight into the way he lived behind the styles of the works he created, and explain why he may not have always understood himself as an “exile” after he arrived in the United States in the fall of 1939. He felt at home there, speaking French, German, and Russian, following the French and Russian news, and gathering books for his polyglot library. As a vernacular cosmopolitan, Stravinsky had already engaged with the new technologies offered by the film industry in Los Angeles in the mid-1930s, before emigrating to the United States, and although he rejected a production system that he felt limited his creative freedom and felt enraged by Disney’s Fantasia, he remained open to the technologies developed by the Los Angeles music and film industry throughout his life (see Figure 10).93

  Stravinsky also moved to Los Angeles for the weather—an aspect of a composer’s migration patterns that musicologists often mistakenly ignore—and because he on the whole loved the way of life in Southern California. “I’m finished with leaving for Europe,” he wrote Victoria Ocampo in 1941. “And anyway, everybody is coming here, which is why you can’t find an affordable place to live.”94 A year later he was “no longer homesick” and “perfectly content to make his home in Hollywood.”95 He “never wanted to return to Europe” he told a reporter in Montréal in 1945.96 Pierre Schaeffer described him in 1946 as living apart from the world, enjoying a peaceful life of sun, friends, and music—an impression he illustrated in his article with personal photographs Stravinsky had given him.97 In 1947 Stravinsky told Louise Weiss that he was living in Hollywood because of “the great climate, the peace and quiet to work, the easy way of life.”98 Other visitors noticed how much he liked to stay home tending to his beloved garden, playing Chinese checkers, doing Swedish and German gymnastics, and inviting friends for tea.99 When Albert Goldberg asked composers in a survey in the Los Angeles Times in 1950 whether they agreed with an unnamed European composer who had recently stated that working in the United States was “a little below his proper level,” Stravinsky gave an annoyed response. This was exactly the kind of argument the Soviets made against their emigrants, he wrote Goldberg, and that the history of art had proved wrong with the examples of Poussin, Handel, Gogol, Chopin, and Picasso. “I do not really think that this subject is really worthy of a column of your pen,” he told him. Schoenberg and Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco agreed that emigration to the United States in itself had not changed them.100

  In Los Angeles, Stravinsky continued to collect omnivorously from cultures all over the world by going on outings and side trips with Vera and friends, traveling compulsively, and participating avidly in the burgeoning California tourist industry and marketing of nostalgia for the state’s Hispanic past. He recognized that in the 1940s Los Angeles was a city on the move—home to vibrant jazz clubs on Central Avenue, an explosive Latin music scene, nascent Chicano rock, a large European émigré community of musicians, composers, writers, and artists, and established institutions of classical music. Stravinsky was divided by race and class from some of these cultures but acutely aware of them all through the circulation of goods (records, playbills, advertising). He also benefited from the presence in Los Angeles of many former dancers from the Ballets Russes, including his good friend Adolph Bolm, and from lavish, popular stagings of his ballets at the Hollywood Bowl. When he was living in Los Angeles, Stravinsky did not always look west toward the ocean and to the German émigrés in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades with whom musicologists always associate him, but rather south, down across Central Avenue, through Tijuana to Mexico City, and to the Spanish-speaking aristocratic culture with which he felt intimately familiar. Stravinsky’s sensitivity to this multiplicity of cultures led him to embrace his life in Los Angeles, and to feel an affinity for what it meant to be an Angeleno in the 1940s. For the next twenty-eight years, no matter where he traveled, how many borders he crossed, and how many suitcases he packed and unpacked, he always came home—in the end—to Los Angeles.

  Figure 10: George Balanchine, Stravinsky, Walt Disney, and an unidentified assistant (behind the others) examining figures from Fantasia, Los Angeles, 1939.

  NOTES

  This essay was inspired by the work of Ryan Dohoney, and profited immensely from critical exchanges with him, Paul De Angelis, Natalia Bieletto-Bueno, Jerome Camal, Tiffany Naiman, and Nina Eidsheim.

  1. The trip was subsequently delayed and ran from 20 July to 5 August 1940.

  2. See Carlos Chávez to Stravinsky, 23 and 27 February 1940; Alexis Kall (representing Stravinsky) to Chávez, 1 March; and Ricardo Ortega as manager of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México to Stravinsky, 5 April 1940, microfilm 129.1, 1466–75, Paul Sacher Stiftung (hereafter PSS).

  3. Stravinsky to Ricardo Ortega, 23 April 1940, microfilm 129.1, 1475, PSS. In this letter, Stravinsky asked for changes to the program, which had included Le Baiser de la fée and Le Chant du rossignol. He thought either the Petrushka Suite or the Divertimento would be easier to prepare with the orchestra in such a short time.

  4. See the contract between RCA Victor Mexicana, Ricardo Ortega, and Stravinsky dated 3 August 1940, microfilm 129.1, 1505–06, PSS.

  5. Chávez offered Stravinsky $1,250 for the concert and $500 for the recording. Chávez to Stravinsky, 25 January 1941, microfilm 130.1, 446–47, PSS. See also Stravinsky’s “agreement” in English, kept in the same microfilm, 454–55.

  6. Stravinsky to Chávez
, 28 January 1940, microfilm 130.1, 448, PSS; and further correspondence, 449–55.

  7. Ricardo Ortega to Stravinsky, 11 and 13 July 1940; and Stravinsky to Ortega and Chávez, 13 July 1940, microfilm 129.1, 1493–94; 1499–1500, PSS. Official notes from the Mexican Department of Immigration and Adolfo de la Huerta are included in microfilm 129.1, 1499–1501, PSS.

  8. See Vera’s diary entry for 20 July 1940 in Robert Craft and Vera Stravinsky, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 367 (hereafter SPD).

  9. See Vera’s diary entry, quoted in SPD, 368; and Stravinsky to Ortega, 4 July 1941, microfilm 130.1, 480 (in which he describes the border guard as “très méfiant”). The Immigration Act of 1924 put severe limitations on emigration to the United States from Eastern Europe. In that year the Border Patrol was established on the U.S.-Mexico border.

  10. John P. Rhodes, “Prospect of Citizenship Charms Stravinsky as He Gets Ready for Cincinnati Concerts,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 22 February 1940.

  11. Stravinsky to Ricardo Ortega, 4 June 1941, microfilm 130.1, 469, PSS.