IN COLLABORATION WITH TAMARA LEVITZ
DOCUMENT NOTES BY TAMARA LEVITZ
The selection of interviews and profiles of Igor Stravinsky that follows, published for Spanish- and Catalan-speaking readers across and along two continents, is, naturally, but a small window into Stravinsky’s relationship to Spain and Spanish-speaking America, and into the impact, both positive and negative, that his music and personality had on that vast part of the world.1 Although Stravinsky must have understood some Spanish, he did not speak it; therefore, most of the interviews here were conducted in French and translated into Spanish or Catalan. Stravinsky gave virtually hundreds of interviews during his long career as a performing musician and conductor, but was also notoriously averse to them. The Spanish composer, critic, and musicologist Jesús Bal y Gay and his wife, the composer and pianist Rosa García Ascot, with whom Stravinsky socialized frequently in Mexico, recalled with delight in their memoirs that when a journalist came calling they often pronounced Stravinsky too sick to be interviewed. The composer would then call out from inside the apartment, “Rosita, je suis malade, malade, très malade” (Rosita, I am sick, sick, very sick), for greater effect.2
Despite this reticence, Stravinsky in these interviews is at times candid to the point of getting himself in trouble politically even without perhaps realizing it, as in his comment “I hate the poor.” He contradicts his own previously expressed views as if he thought what happened in one country stayed in that country and transnational communication did not exist. Often, however, he sticks to well-known talking points, especially those previously formulated in his Chroniques de ma vie (An Autobiography) or Poétique musicale, which he delivers in sound bites carefully calculated to provoke: “There is no modernism in music.” Then again, we also see him change his mind on such fundamental topics as, for example, the role of his religious beliefs in his creative process.
The interviews were written by intellectuals, writers, and reporters whom Stravinsky evidently delighted in provoking and even exploiting, but with whom he was not close, with the exception, perhaps, of Farran i Mayoral. His interview in Barcelona in 1928 has a more intimate tone, and took place at a bar that Stravinsky favored, the Petit Liceu. These press pieces present the public face that Stravinsky wanted to offer to the Spanish-speaking world. But we also know from his memoirs, and from his correspondence with his welcoming hosts, how much he enjoyed himself in those party-loving countries with which he felt he had so much in common. In his friends’ private homes Stravinsky relaxed and joyously and endlessly talked, played, and listened to his and others’ music, chain-smoking and drinking, and partying after a good meal. These moments form the background to the public persona we meet in the interviews.
Stravinsky gave the first interviews presented here (Madrid 1921 and 1924) in the crucial years of his volte-face, the years of Les Noces, Mavra, and his self-reinvention, when he was moving far away from his Russian works and the overt folklorism of Rimsky-Korsakov and closer to the internationalism of Tchaikovsky and Glinka. Stravinsky is explicit about this realignment and the accompanying emphasis on objectivism in his interview with André Révész in 1924. But Stravinsky’s changing, even conflicting positions with respect to folk music, especially as these relate to audience expectations of Russianism in his music, strike one as already evident, in retrospect, when comparing his first Madrid interview from March 1921 with the article he wrote for the French newspaper Comoedia a couple of months later. In Madrid he praised the improvisational elements in flamenco dancing—which set the composer free, he claimed—and candidly expressed his delight in Andalusian music and folk music in general.3 To be sure, Stravinsky carefully explained that he praised folk music not as a national tradition, but as a contemporaneous body of music that privileged the parameters with which he himself liked to work: rhythm and melody. Finally, despite his deliberate veiling of the folk sources he used in his compositions, while in Spain he plainly confessed to being a thief! Two months later, in Paris, lest the curiosity of the French audience—his regular audience—be piqued by folk music (again, as it was evident in his early compositions for the Ballets Russes), he denied the presence of improvisation in Andalusian song and dance, and wrong-headedly described it as practically a product of careful (objective) compositional work.
The absence of Manuel de Falla’s name in the French and Spanish articles from 1921 is quite astonishing and equally telling. Stravinsky’s first visit to Spain in 1916 had been with the Ballets Russes; when in March 1921 he was asked explicitly about a Spanish ballet by or in the style of the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky refused to mention the company’s premiere in London in 1919 of Falla’s El Sombrero de tres picos; moreover, he fled to Seville during its Madrid premiere a few days after the interview. When asked the same question a couple of months later in Paris, Stravinsky alluded exclusively to the Cuadro Flamenco, which the Ballets Russes had presented in Paris that month, and again did not mention Falla. Stravinsky was most probably being polite: as he told Falla personally, he did not like El Sombrero de tres picos on account of its clear basis in folk music. Knowing as well that there was some degree of national investment in the work, he passed on the opportunity to offer a public critique of it. In his Spanish interviews after 1924, Stravinsky made plenty clear which Falla he found praiseworthy, namely, the classicist Falla of El Retablo de Maese Pedro and the Harpsichord Concerto.4 During the interview in Barcelona in 1936 Stravinsky spoke of Falla’s return to the Spanish contrapuntalists of the Golden Age, finding there a parallel to his own return to Glinka and the Italians.
It would be wrong to assume that because the countries and continents involved here are unified by a common language they are also unified by a common culture and historical experience. In fact, the urban centers of Latin America were culturally closer to France than to Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Indeed, the term “Latin America” was first coined in those decades. It—as opposed to the idea of “Iberian America”—captures precisely the political move of France to the center of latinité—a latinité Stravinsky eventually subsumed into his vision of a Latin-Slav spiritual community.)5 Thus Victoria Ocampo, Stravinsky’s host in Buenos Aires, and the Chilean Eugenia Errázuriz, a generous patroness of Stravinsky, were members of the South American landed aristocracy, spoke French with their peers, and spent long sojourns in Paris.6 Stravinsky—who was delighted with the presence of a “true king,” Alfonso XIII of Spain, at a performance of Petrushka in Madrid on 18 April 1921—felt at ease among these “aristocrats of blood and art,” and shared their love of France, as he affirmed many times in these interviews.
France was also a shared love with the Mexican writer and diplomat Alfonso Reyes, who in the 1920s attended the Ballets Russes rehearsals and Diaghilev’s dinners, and met Stravinsky in Buenos Aires in 1936 and again in Mexico in the 1940s. Reyes’s Visión de Anáhuac (1519), written in Madrid in 1915 and published in French in 1927, was instrumental in introducing a vivid new vision of Mexico to French culture—and to Stravinsky himself.7 Thus in his 1940 interviews the composer praised Visión de Anáhuac (1519) as the book that taught him the most about Mexico. And he saw in Reyes’s style a parallel to his own aesthetic and compositional method, one that consisted of rearranging or ordering materials in such a way that they became intelligible, or, rather, eloquent, by virtue of their becoming a sum of parts (Richard Taruskin’s drobnost).
Reyes and Stravinsky also shared a love of classicism and order, and the experience of exile caused by the simultaneous Russian and Mexican revolutions. Thus in his Mexican interviews, published after decades of (apparent) radical change and transformation for the composer, Stravinsky characterized revolutions as inimical to art. And earlier, in 1936 in Buenos Aires, he contested this notion of radical change by representing his own musical parcours as a constant, orderly, logical enlargement of the periphery of a circle drawn around a single point, no matter how fast the rotation around it might seem.
Whatever unrest Stravinsky’s earlier music may have caused in Buenos Aires in the early decades of the twentieth century when Ansermet first introduced it there, by 1936 the discomfort had subsided. Audiences were now well acquainted with his work; although his new, neoclassical music may have been puzzling, it was not controversial. His political views, however, were. Earlier that year, while visiting Barcelona in the midst of the Second Spanish Republic, Stravinsky had rehearsed a defense of the Catholic Church, which fiercely opposed the Republic. He had also condemned Communism (along with the bourgeoisie, naturally, aristocracy lover that he was!) shrouding his arguments in an aesthetic and spiritual opposition to the subjectivism and materialism of Surrealism. His own creative process was objective, he had claimed over and over again and, at least in 1928 and 1936, inspired by God (much later, in the 1949 interview with Santiago del Campo, for Chilean readers, he gave God a much less prominent role as co-creator). Moreover, although he was still friendly with the Surrealist sympathizer Picasso, his Christianity led him closer to another Spaniard, Manuel de Falla. A month later, in Buenos Aires, after speaking ill of Bolshevik music (“written with a doorman’s taste in mind”), Soviet Russia, and Dmitry Shostakovich, Stravinsky once again praised Falla—this time because of the latter’s refusal as a Christian to accept an honor bestowed upon him by the anti-clerical Spanish Republican government. Stravinsky pivoted from there into praising the Crusades and disparaging social revolutions, finally expressing his visceral disgust for the parliamentary system. Buenos Aires, however, was not Spain: the reaction of the political center and left was overwhelming, and an (unexpected?) controversy ensued, with critics from pro- and anti-fascist German and Italian émigré Argentine newspapers even adding their voices to the mix. Meanwhile, composers of different aesthetic credos discussed not the interview but the music, and its relevance for Argentine composition.11
Four years later, in Mexico, Stravinsky knew better. Perhaps he had gotten wind of the war between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church in the late 1920s, or perhaps he had learned that the Mexican government had officially opened Mexico’s doors to Spanish Republican intellectuals, creating an intellectual home for them in the Casa de España, which Reyes himself directed after 1939. Or maybe Stravinsky did not know about any of this, and simply became aware of it when he met exiled Spaniards Adolfo Salazar—who had earlier accepted a position in the Spanish Republican government—and the Bal y Gays on his very first day in Mexico.12 In any case, in his almost yearly visits to Mexico in the next dozen years, Stravinsky did not publicly talk about politics again. In 1946, he limited himself to launching yet another attack on Shostakovich just as his musical host, Carlos Chávez, was getting ready to conduct the composer’s Symphony no. 7, whose score, signed by Shostakovich, he had received through the Soviet Embassy in 1943. The Bal y Gays and Salazar often accompanied Stravinsky in Mexico, since Chávez was busy with conducting engagements of his own. The manager of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México (OSM) nevertheless kept Chávez appraised of Stravinsky’s needs (a doctor for Vera, for example) and predilections (a bottle of Saint-Emilion wine to refresh himself during a break in rehearsals). Chávez always went back to Mexico City in time to hear Stravinsky conduct and to fete him appropriately; and although Stravinsky most likely did not like Chávez’s music (he politely claimed not to know it), he respected him as a conductor. Their thirty-year relationship developed during Stravinsky’s many visits to Mexico, but above all during Chávez’s even more numerous visits to the United States. It is there that Stravinsky had occasion to call Chávez mon frère cadet (my little brother), and that an affectionate relationship grew between them, which we can only marginally glimpse in their business correspondence.13
As in Buenos Aires, the public in 1940s Mexico was well acquainted with Stravinsky’s music, which Ansermet had conducted in Mexico City in the mid-1930s, Silvestre Revueltas had conducted between 1930 and 1935, and Chávez himself had performed throughout this period. Chávez, who was conductor and artistic director of OSM from its foundation in 1928 to 1948, programmed Stravinsky’s music almost yearly after 1930 for an audience of wealthy people as bejeweled as the porteños (Friday evenings), regular folks (Sunday matinées), and in special performances for children and workers (who loved Stravinsky). OSM’s Mexican premieres of Stravinsky’s orchestral music in the early 1930s had been part of a profound controversy over the explosive arrival on the Mexican musical scene of Mexican and foreign modern music—an eruption caused by Chávez and his comrade-in-arms Revueltas. The ensuing public discussion of modern music and its relation to national music took place in the press—where critics praised the already internationally consecrated Stravinsky while lashing out against Chávez and Revueltas—as well as in public inquiries conducted by newspapers, conversations in theater hallways, and in Chávez’s cleverly conducted surveys of Mexican audiences. By the 1940s, interviewers delighted in prompting Stravinsky to pronounce himself against modernism and nationalism (“not a profession for music”), without, however, expecting to stir the waters any more. The true political issue in the 1940s was Chávez’s iron-handed control of Mexico’s musical scene and the OSM—a control that repeatedly threatened to slip away from him. In 1946, Stravinsky stood behind Chávez and expanded upon the praise he had given six years earlier of the OSM and Chávez’s firm directorship of it.
Most of the pieces first programmed by Chávez in the 1930s, with the exception of Apollon musagète and the Capriccio, were from Stravinsky’s “Russian” period. Naturally, Stravinsky himself introduced works such as Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss), Jeu de cartes, Symphony in Three Movements, and his Symphony in C.14 In his first concert in Mexico in 1940 he conducted Le Baiser de la fée within the context of Cherubini’s Anacreonte Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 2, making audible his classicism, the relation between his piece and Tchaikovsky’s, and the genera
l reinvention of his lineage. His concerts in Mexico were routinely reviewed in all the major and minor newspapers, by critics—including Salazar and Bal y Gay—whose reviews were often informed by their reading of Stravinsky’s Chroniques de ma vie and the French edition of his Poétique musicale.15 Salazar, in particular, had a conflicted relationship not with Stravinsky the man, but with his persona, in whose shadow Salazar’s beloved teacher Manuel de Falla often labored. He also struggled with the music, about which he expressed skepticism as early as 1916.16 Thus, his reviews of Stravinsky’s concerts of 1940—especially the “Tchaikovsky concert,” which he wrote entirely from a Spaniard’s point of view—are indicative of his difficulty in conceptualizing Stravinsky as a model for Falla, who, naturally, had to remain the model for Spain.
Stravinsky was most certainly aware of the immediate effect of his presence on his Spanish-speaking audiences, since he himself performed, conducted, and spoke to and in the Spanish-speaking world. Was he ever cognizant of the short and long-range impact of his music there? Despite reports that he gladly examined, played, and commented upon his hosts’ music when he felt at ease, he claimed not to know Latin American music, and to know very little about Spanish music as well. And yet his music became a fundamental part of local discussions on the nature of national music, in decades when this issue was of paramount importance. Indeed, if the Soviet Union had no use for Stravinsky’s music, Spaniards and Latin Americans did; and Stravinsky’s subsequent aesthetic changes became an important part of their continuing conversation on nationalism and modernism. This story, which we hardly glimpse in these interviews, has yet to be written.
La Voz (Madrid), 21 March 1921
A Conversation with Stravinsky
P. Victory
Igor Stravinsky conducts his Petrushka at the Real, marking the rhythm with his baton, with extraordinary energy, as if he were saying: “Here, my dear musicians, here, in this rhythm, is the foundation of future music …” and without a pause, with particular satisfaction, he makes the drum and the bass drum roll during the modulations [mutaciones].17 People look at each other perplexed. A man exclaims, so that everyone can hear him: “I have the good taste not to like this music.” Children are extraordinarily interested in the prolonged drum roll; and the female students from the Conservatorio18 regret that the composer neither wears a wig, like Bach, nor is pockmarked like Beethoven. No wild head of hair for that matter. Could the great composer be a man like all others?
Stravinsky and His World Page 25