113. Spanish title: “Strawinsky ‘El Yanqui,’” Revista de Revistas 31/1576 (4 August 1940). The Revista de Revistas was an illustrated entertainment magazine that included many stories about Hollywood in the early 1940s. The article is accordingly richly illustrated. The first photograph shows a full-length view from the side of Stravinsky conducting with the caption: “The world-famous composer of The Firebird has conducted the Orquesta Sinfónica de México with resounding success, without any of the ridiculous poses favored by other conductors.” The second photograph is explained fully by the caption: “Here, the brilliant Russian composer at the conductor’s podium of our symphony orchestra; in the background, the audience that attended his first concert at the Teatro del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Photos by Julio León).” This issue also includes Guadalupe Segura’s article on Stravinsky and Vera, “Strawinsky: En plena luna de miel.” When Stravinsky returned to Mexico a year later, a picture of him and Vera graced the magazine’s cover (Revista de revistas 32/1625, 20 July 1941). It is interesting that Jorge Mendoza Carrasco mockingly calls Stravinsky a “Yankee,” given an article he would publish two years later on pachucos—a subculture in Los Angeles of Hispanic men who wore zoot suits. See Jorge Mendoza Carrasco, “Los Pachucos,” Excelsior, 31 December 1942. This demonstrates how journalists in this time were negotiating the identities and class position of those who crossed borders or settled elsewhere.
114. Originally published in French in 1935, and translated into Spanish in 1936. Published in English as An Autobiography.
115. The Rite of Spring premiered as a ballet on 29 May 1913. It received its first concert performance in St. Petersburg under Serge Koussevitzky on 18 February 1914, and its second at the Casino de Paris under Pierre Monteux on 5 April 1914. Stravinsky refers here to the latter performance. Stravinsky was not from Moscow.
116. Stravinsky refers here to his Symphony in C, which was commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He conducted the premiere with that orchestra on 7 November 1940, and also conducted the piece with the Orquesta Sinfónica de México in Mexico City on 18 and 20 July 1941.
117. This is an unusual comment, and entirely false.
118. Stravinsky may have hesitated because he did not have a close relationship with Anna Pavlova, who had refused to dance The Firebird in 1910 and had been replaced by Tamara Karsavina.
119. Stravinsky became a French citizen in 1934.
120. Spanish title: “Stravinsky dice que la OSM es magnífica: El Gran Creador, habla de la música, y de los músicos,” Ultimas Noticias, 25 July 1946. This article is accompanied by a photograph in which Stravinsky is chatting with Antonio Rodríguez, and is dressed exactly as described here. The caption reads: “Stravinsky talking to Rodríguez about music and musicians is de rigueur.”
121. Prendes was an expensive, well-known, and touristy restaurant founded in 1892 and located on the south corner of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where Stravinsky was to conduct the Orquesta Sinfónica de México in two concerts that included the suite from Petrushka, Symphony in Three Movements, Apollon musagète, Scènes de ballet, Scherzo à la russe, and Circus Polka.
122. Stravinsky appears not to have known Copland’s most recent works, including Billy the Kid (1939), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), Lincoln Portrait (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944).
123. Rodríguez may be referring to the essay “Hungarian Music,” which had just appeared in Spanish translation in the first issue of the Mexican journal Nuestra música 1/1 (March 1946): 14–19. Bartók played an important role in debates about national identity in music in Mexico. See, for example, “Bartók en Mexico,” Heterofonía 15/74–75 (July–December 1981): 20–26.
124. Rodríguez must have intended to replace the word recipe with rule. Chávez frequently commented that harmony and composition textbooks were recipes only mediocre composers used.
125. Georges Braque created a lithograph with the phrase “I love the rule that corrects emotion” “J’aime la règle qui corrige l’émotion.”
126. Rodríguez is referring to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957)
127. Serge Koussevitzky strongly supported Shostakovich in the 1942 season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and especially in connection with the premiere in the United States that year of the Symphony no. 7. Koussevitzky’s original defense of Shostakovich in English reads as follows: “He is the greatest master of musical wealth; he is the master of what he desires to do; he has melody without end; his language is as rich as the world; his emotion is absolutely universal,” Syracuse Herald-American, 2 August 1942; abridged in the New York Times, 2 August 1942.
128. Shostakovich actually said: “I understood that music was not only a combination of sounds disposed in this or that order, but an art capable of expressing, by the proper means, the most diverse ideas or feelings.” “Autobiographie,” La Revue musicale 17/170 (December 1936): 432–33.
129. Picasso famously said: “In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing.” First cited in “Picasso Speaks: A Statement by the Artist,” The Arts 7/5 (May 1923): 315.
130. Spanish title: “Strawinsky enjuicia el momento musical de hoy,” Pro Arte 1/47 (2 June 1949). Santiago del Campo was a Chilean playwriter who cofounded the Teatro Experimental de la Universidad de Chile in 1941. He was known for plays such as California (1938) and Morir con Catalina (1948). Stravinsky first visited Chile in August 1960.
131. Stravinsky lived at 1260 North Wetherly Drive in Hollywood from 1940 to 1964.
132. The celebrity nightclub Ciro’s opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1940.
133. Earl Carroll was a U.S. theatrical producer and director of Broadway musicals who opened a famous theater on Sunset Boulevard in 1938. A 20-foot neon image of one of his famous showgirls, Beryl Wallace, graced the building’s façade and made it a landmark.
134. Don Loper was a Hollywood fashion designer who designed clothes for Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, and others.
135. The lunch counter at Schwab’s Pharmacy was a meeting point for people from the film industry. It is featured in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).
136. Avenida Providencia is one of the main boulevards in Santiago de Chile. Providencia is a green, upper-middle-class residential suburb in the city.
137. Yves Tanguy (1900–1955) was a French Surrealist painter. Stravinsky met the Catalan Surrealist Salvador Dalí in 1936 in Barcelona. See Luis Gongora’s article, “Igor Stravinsky and Surrealism,” in this section.
138. Soulima’s and Théodore’s mother, Yekaterina, died in 1939. Vera was their stepmother.
139. Del Campo is referring to Jean Cocteau’s drawing of Stravinsky and Picasso bundled in coats from 1917; repr. in White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 96.
140. Misha Auer (1905–67) was a Russian-born U.S. actor who appeared most notably in the film My Man Godfrey (1936) and You Can’t Take It With You (1938).
141. Stravinsky studied counterpoint with Vasily Kalafati (1869–1942) at the St. Petersburg Conservatory after 1902.
142. Del Campo may be referring to the Symphony in C or the Symphony of Psalms. Del Campo’s title is rarely used.
143. The Greek poiema translates as “that which is made.”
144. Eugenia Errázuriz (1860–1951) was a Chilean silver mine heiress and patron of the arts who supported Picasso and also Stravinsky after 1916. See Leonora Saavedra’s introduction.
The Poétique musicale: A Counterpoint in Three Voices
VALÉRIE DUFOUR
TRANSLATED BY BRIDGET BEHRMANN AND TAMARA LEVITZ
Igor Stravinsky’s Poétique musicale originated in a commission the composer received to give a series of lectures as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in the academic year 1939–40 and was first published in its original French in 1942 by Harvard University Press. Stravinsky, Pyotr Suvchinsky, and Roland-Manuel collaborated in writing these le
ctures in Sancellemoz, France in May and June 1939; they remain today the keystone of the composer’s thought and major point of reference for his artistic ideology. As this article will show, however, research into the genesis of the Poétique reveals something beyond the lectures’ content—namely, Stravinsky’s strategies of intellectual elaboration.
Historical Background
In order to write the Poétique musicale, Stravinsky called upon two collaborators with different cultural backgrounds—his fellow émigré and close collaborator Pyotr Suvchinsky and the French musicologist and teacher Roland Alexis Manuel Lévy, known as Roland-Manuel (1891–1966)—both of whom he paid for their work. Strangely, Stravinsky waited until the very last years of his life to admit grudgingly that he had been involved in this particular form of three-way “literary ghost-writing.”1 Despite Stravinsky’s confession, Robert Craft, in his article on the genesis of the Poétique musicale from the early 1980s, radically and arbitrarily rejected the hypothesis that Suvchinsky had been involved in the project. His desire to leave Suvchinsky out of the story seems to have been motivated by personal resentment.2
Introducing the work’s new French edition in 2000, Myriam Soumagnac laid out the problem of the authorship of the Poétique without concealing her objective to pay “homage to the memory of Roland-Manuel.”3 She relied on Roland-Manuel’s handwritten manuscripts, which her study shows correspond on the whole to the final draft of the text, excluding the fifth lesson, “The Avatars of Russian Music.” Correspondence between Stravinsky, Suvchinsky, and Roland-Manuel confirms that Suvchinsky wrote the fifth lesson on his own.4 Soumagnac also notes intuitively on the basis of this correspondence that Suvchinsky must have played a larger role in developing a general outline for the Poétique and supervising the whole. But without conclusive evidence to prove this thesis, research stalled there.5 Since that time, musicologists have felt obliged to admit the idea that Suvchinsky may have participated sporadically in the writing of the Poétique, though behind the scenes an unfortunately unverifiable rumor spread widely among Suvchinsky’s entourage that he had played an essential role in it.6
Figure 1. Pyotr Suvchinsky with Igor Stravinsky, 1930s.
The third volume of Viktor Varunts’s edition of Stravinsky’s correspondence in Russian includes letters that give evidence that Stravinsky originally planned to work with Suvchinsky alone.7 For unknown reasons, Suvchinsky suggested to Stravinsky that he entrust part of the work to Roland-Manuel:
Roland-Manuel leaves for Sancellemoz8 Saturday morning and he will be at your place in the evening; it’s better to strike the lectures while they’re hot. … In a word, everything has worked out miraculously well. I am myself very happy primarily for you: you needed to be relieved of this burden, and favorable working conditions had to be created for you. Roland-Manuel will be able to help you more than I can in regard to all of this, owing to his knowledge of French and for a whole slew of other reasons. He has welcomed the proposal with enthusiasm, and from our discussion I understand that he would like to have 1,000 Francs right away, before he leaves;9 … he will also bring all the necessary books. I sketched in broad strokes the outline and chapter headings for the lectures for him and he was quite pleased with them. I am happy for you and for Roland-Manuel. Of course I am not happy for me that a coincidence of circumstances doesn’t allow me to be in his place.10
In 2003, Eric Humbertclaude showed me a previously unknown and unpublished manuscript in Suvchinsky’s hand from the archive of Suzel Duval, one of Suvchinsky’s close collaborators from the 1940s until his death. This document furnished the proof that he was the author of the general outline of the lectures, as well as a precise, paragraph by paragraph description of the content of each one.11 When brought together with the sources discussed by Craft and Soumagnac, this manuscript solves the mystery of who wrote the Poétique: Suvchinsky conceived and generated the ideas, Stravinsky assimilated and briefly developed them, and Roland-Manuel unpacked them, gave them form, and amplified and completed them. In addition, the correspondence reveals that Roland-Manuel submitted his drafts for Suvchinsky’s approval before bringing them to Stravinsky. For example, Suvchinsky wrote Stravinsky on 23 May 1939 that “Roland-Manuel showed me the text of the first lecture. It looks very good, but in my opinion, you offer too much material right off the bat; there are certain paragraphs I would transfer to the next lecture.”12 In a second letter to Stravinsky from 26 May 1939 Suvchinsky writes: “Don’t you think that there is an element of discovery, a premonition of discovery, in the first lecture when you talk about the creative appetite? I spoke to Roland-Manuel about this and he will pass my thoughts on the matter along to you.”13 There are many other examples of Suvchinsky suggesting improvements to the text in the letters he wrote Stravinsky in May and June 1939.
Thus it is clear that in the genesis of Stravinsky’s Poétique, a “triangular collaboration” took place, whose point of departure and return was Suvchinsky. The foundational document drawn up by Suvchinsky is the true keystone of the Poétique. In the study that follows, I undertake an inventory of all the documents necessary to understanding the history of this process. This integral critical edition of the fundamental documents provides a strong basis for assessing how they are interrelated.
Inventory of Manuscripts Related to the Genesis of Poétique musicale
The manuscripts known to date and taken into account here to explain the genesis of the Poétique musicale include: 1) Suvchinsky’s handwritten manuscript in French (with several annotations in Russian), consisting of an outline of the lectures in eight lessons;14 2) Stravinsky’s handwritten manuscript in French and Russian, consisting of notes for the lectures in six lessons;15 3) Roland-Manuel’s notebook and handwritten manuscripts in French consisting of rough drafts of the lectures;16 4) Suvchinsky’s typed manuscript in Russian of the majority of the fifth lesson, “The Avatars of Russian Music”;17 and 5) Soulima Stravinsky’s handwritten manuscript in French, consisting of a translation of Suvchinsky’s Russian text for the fifth lesson, reworked by Roland-Manuel (Suvchinsky asked Soulima, Stravinsky’s youngest son, to translate his Russian text for lesson 5).18 The Paul Sacher Stiftung also owns two clean, typed copies of the entire work, both of which contain handwritten corrections by Stravinsky and Roland-Manuel.19 The second typed version, which represents the final draft, includes a short summary of each paragraph in the margins, intended for the composer’s use in oral presentation.20 This version corresponds to the first edition of the complete text published in French by Harvard University Press in 1942.21
English Translation of a Diplomatic Edition of Suvchinsky’s Manuscript
Suvchinsky’s handwritten manuscript is four pages long and titled “Theses for an Explication of Music in the form of 8 Lessons.”22 It is written in French (with occasional phonetic spelling), in black ink, and includes scattered annotations in black pencil in Russian and sometimes French. The document was clearly written in two distinct phases, beginning with the neat and conscientiously articulated presentation, and followed by the annotations. A comparison with Stravinsky’s handwritten document, which I will discuss later, suggests that the annotations were probably penciled in following a conversation with the composer.
Suvchinsky appended to his four-page manuscript a single page with writing on both sides in Russian.23 On this extra sheet, he succinctly summarizes Clement of Alexandria’s composite work, the Stromata, which is about the relationship between faith and knowledge.24 Given that neither this material, nor the name of Clement of Alexandria appears in the Poétique musicale, the connection between this appended page and the book is unclear. There is the material connection of the paper clip that connects this page to his general outline, but it provides little evidence that the two necessarily have anything to do with each other. Although I cannot reject out of hand the hypothesis that Suvchinsky or somebody else mistook the date of this two-page document and attached it erroneously here, I lean toward the idea that this loose page
consists of a digression Suvchinsky originally planned in connection with what he once called—in reference to Stravinsky—the contradictory notion of “mystic rationalism.”25
In the following English translation of the “diplomatic edition” of Suvchinsky’s manuscript (as in those that follow) the translators and I attempt to indicate as much as is feasible of the state of the original manuscript. To do this, punctuation, underlining, and layout follow the original (with some allowances for North American conventions of style). Words in square brackets indicate Suvchinsky’s annotations, added in black pencil to the original text, which is in black ink. An exception are words in italics in square brackets, which represent my own additional commentary. The translators have indicated in their own marked footnotes where misspellings and grammatical problems exist in the French.
I [recto of first sheet]I
Theses for an Explication of Music
in the form of 8 lessons.
[words added in pencil around this title in clockwise direction from left to right: reactive;II Sauguet;III relationship]
1st Lesson. The Phenomenon of MusicIV
What is not, to my mind, music.*V True musical experience. The notion of time and music. The “Khronos.”VI
II The sonorous instant. Musical duration; the flow of musical Time. The problem of “Lento” and “Scherzo.” [(Coda)]
“The higher mathematics” of music. Musical speculation. The dialectic of the creative process in music. “Coincidentia oppositorum.”VII The principle of contrast and similitude in musical creation. Meditation. Musical emotion. The limits of the art of music. The crisis of the unity of conscience and concepts.
2nd Lesson The Musical work. (Elements and morphology [Structure]VIII)
Melos, themeIX [melody difference 1) [illegible] or of melosX/motif].
Harmony, interval. [chord]. Modes. Polyphony, modulation, movement, meter, rhythm, Tempo, sonority; registers and timbres: phrase, word, spoken word,XI syllable, intonation. Developments. Form (the choral, fugue, sonata, symphony, poem, prelude, dance, cantata, opera.)XII Form. True and false duration.
Stravinsky and His World Page 32