Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  4. Karatygin and other critics reacted more positively to Stravinsky’s symphony. See Vyacheslav Karatïgin, “Pridvornïy orkestr: 21-e orkestrovoye sobraniye ‘Muzïkal'nykh novostey’,” Stolichnaya pochta, 25 January 1908; in SPRK, 1:444. See Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:222–26.

  5. See Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:641–42.

  6. Vyacheslav Karatïgin, “Po kontsertam,” Otkliki khudozhestvennoy zhizni 4 (25 November 1910): column 158; in SPRK, 1:460.

  7. Nikolay Myaskovskiy, “Ig. Stravinskiy, ‘Zhar-ptitsa,’ skazka-balet dlya fortepiano v dve ruki,” ed. Pyotr Yurgenson,”Muzïka 45 (1911): 970–72; quoted in Nikolay Myaskovskiy, Sobraniye materialov v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1960), 2:26.

  8. Prokofiev to Nikolay Myaskovsky, 25 June 1914, in S. S. Prokof'yev i N. Ya Myaskovskiy: Perepiska, ed. Miral'da Kozlova and Nina Yatsenko (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1977), 116–17.

  9. Florestan [Vladimir Derzhanovskiy], “Igor' Stravinskiy,” Utro Rossii, 22 August 1912. The concert included Stravinsky’s Symphony in E-flat and the first Firebird Suite. See Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:227–33.

  10. Vyacheslav Karatïgin, “Vesna svyashchennaya,” Rech', 16 February 1914; in SPRK, 2: 591.

  11. Entry from 12 February 1914, St. Petersburg, in Sergey Prokof'yev, Dnevnik: Chast' pervaya 1907–1918 (Paris: sprkfv, 2002), 413. Prokofiev radically revised his opinion about the Rite in 1921; see entry for 23 May 1921, in ibid., 160–61.

  12. The concerts took place on 17 and 20 March in Leningrad and on 28 March and 11 April in Moscow. Stiedry began to perform regularly in the Soviet Union after this time, and immigrated there in 1933. He directed the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra from 1933 to 1937.

  13. Igor' Glebov, [Boris Asaf'yev], “Vesna svyashchennaya,” Krasnaya gazeta (vecherniy vïpusk), 20 March 1926; in SPRK, 3:753.

  14. Anton Uglov [Dmitriy Kashintsev], “Vesna Stravinskogo u Stidri,” Izvestiya, 31 March 1926; in SPRK, 3:754.

  15. Oskar Fried performed the Rite in 1927 and 1928 in Moscow; Ernest Ansermet performed it twice in 1928 and once in 1929 in Leningrad; and pianist Alexander Kamensky gave a concert performance of his own arrangement of it in 1928.

  16. Mikhail Druskin provided commentary on Stravinsky’s piano music in Novaya fortepiannaya muzïka (Leningrad: Triton, 1928) and a monograph on Stravinsky decades later. See Igor' Stravinskiy (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1974); translated into English by Martin Cooper as Stravinsky: His Life, Works, and Views (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  17. Stravinsky commented on these performances in his Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936; repr. 1962), 141. He noted that “a clumsy attempt to stage Renard was a failure,” and that few of his stage works were done in the Soviet Union outside of Petrushka. He concluded that “a change in regime cannot change the truth of the old adage that no man is a prophet in his own country.” On Stravinsky’s reception in this period, see Boris Schwarz, “Stravinsky in Soviet Russian Criticism,” The Musical Quarterly 48/3, Special Issue for Igor Stravinsky on His 80th Anniversary (July 1962): 340–45.

  18. See SPRK, 3:145, 149. See also Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 50. The Politburo allowed Prokofiev and Stravinsky to visit the USSR on 21 July 1925. For more details on the politics of this period, see Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012).

  19. Boris Asaf'yev, Kniga o Stravinskom (Leningrad: Triton, 1929; Leningrad: Muzïka, 1977); translated into English by Robert French, with a preface by Robert Craft as A Book about Stravinsky (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982).

  20. Vissarion Shebalin to Alissa Shebalin,15 April 1926, in Zhizn' i tvorchestvo, ed. Viktoriya Razheva (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2003), 163.

  21. Vissarion Shebalin to M. I. Nevitov, 8 July 1926, in ibid., 166.

  22. Vissarion Shebalin, fragment from his memoirs, in ibid., 157.

  23. Gavriyil Popov, Iz literaturnogo naslediya, ed. Zarui Apetovna Apetyan (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1986), 238.

  24. Dmitry Shostakovich to Lev Oborin, 18 March 1926, in Vstrechi s proshlïm, vïpusk 5 (Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1984), 256.

  25. Dmitriy Shostakovich “Anketa po psikhologii tvorcheskogo protsessa, sostavlena 2–10 sentyabrya 1927 g,” in Dmitriy Shostakovich v pis'makh i dokumentakh, ed. Irina Bobïkina (Moscow: RIF “Antikva,” 2000), 475.

  26. Shostakovich became a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1937. Igor Markevich conducted the Russian premiere of the Symphony of Psalms in Moscow on 25 May 1962.

  27. Although scholars now know much about music in the Soviet Union in this period, they have yet to explore the specific details of Stravinsky’s reception there, and the topic remains a lacuna in Stravinsky research. Within the context of this brief overview, I can only note the musicological gap, and point toward signs on the horizon that it will be filled. For more insight into the period, see these sources recommended by Tamara Levitz: Neil Edmund, The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006); Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism: From Glinka to Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Simo Mikkonen, Music and Power in the Soviet 1930s: A History of Composers’ Bureaucracy (New York: Edwin Mellon, 2009); Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press 2004); Svetlana Savenko, “Die Rezeption emigrierter Komponisten in der UdSSR,” in Musik zwischen Emigration und Stalinismus: Russische Komponisten in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren, ed. Friedrich Geiger and Eckhard John (Stuttgart: Metzger, 2004), 158–67; and Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  28. Arnol'd Al'shvang, “Ideynïy put' Stravinskogo,” Sovetskaya muzïka 5 (1933): 90–100, reprinted in Al'shvang’s Izbrannïye stat'i (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1959), and in SPRK, 3:834–49. Petrushka survived the longest in this environment and was performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky in 1946. See also Schwarz, “Stravinsky in Soviet Russian Criticism,” 346–48.

  29. Tikhon Khrennikov, “Za tvorchestvo, dostoynoye sovetskogo naroda,” Sovetskaya muzïka 1 (January–February 1948): 58–59.

  30. See Kabalevsky’s introduction to Akademik B. V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye trudï (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952), 1:15. This introduction also contains the note Asafyev had requested to be read at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in February 1948.

  31. Kiril Tomoff makes this very important point in Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953, 210.

  32. Karen Khachaturyan, “Ya bïl rozhdyon dlya muzïki,” Muzïkal'naya akademiya 4 (1992): 222.

  33. Popevka are distinctive melodic phrases or formulas used in early Russian church singing and serving as building blocks for the melodies of Znamenny chant. They are also the foundation of Russian folklore.

  34. See Asafy'ev, Kniga o Stravinskom; R. I. Birkan, “Fol'klornïye istochniki i stilevïye chertï muzïkal'no-stsenicheskikh proizvedenii I. F. Stravinskogo kontsa 1910—nachala 1920-kh godov” (PhD diss., Leningrad State University, 1971); Grigoriy Golovinskiy, Kompozitor i fol'klor (Moscow: Muzïka, 1981); Yuriy Paisov, “Russkiy fol'klor v vokal'no-khorovom tvorchestve Stravinskogo,” in I. F. Stravinskiy: Stat'i vospominaniya, ed. Galina Alfeyevskaya and Irina Vershinina (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1985); Dmitriy Pokrovskiy, “Strukturnaya stilizatsiiya v ‘Svadebke' Stravinskogo,” in Viktor Varunts, I. F. Stravinskiy: Sbornik statey (Moscow: Moscow Conservatory, 1997); Svetlana Savenko, Mir Stravinskogo (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2001).

  35. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2 vols.

  36. Yevgeniya
Linyova, Velikorusskiye pesni v narodnoy garmonizatsii: Zapisanï E. Linevoy (St. Petersburg: Imp. Akademiya nauk, 1904–9), 2 vols.

  37. Stravinsky to his mother, 10/23 February 1916, in SPRK, 2:360.

  38. Stravinsky asked Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov to send him the melodies of two highly popular art songs; see his letter from 3/16 December 1910 in SPRK, 1:250–51.

  39. Andrey Rimskiy-Korsakov, “7-y simfonicheskiy kontsert S. Kusevitskogo,” Russkaya molva 45 (25 January/7 February 1913).

  40. Andrey Rimskiy-Korsakov “Russkiye opernïye i baletnïye spektakli v Parizhe,” Russkaya molva, 27 June 1913; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1014–15. On Petrushka’s and the Rite’s reception in Russia, see Taruskin, 1:759-70, 1006-31.

  41. Cited in Svetlana Zvereva, Aleksandr Kastal'skiy (Moscow: Vuzovskaya kniga, 1999), 146–47.

  42. “Stravinsky’s Les Noces contains a few interesting attempts to approach the folk manner of choral song. But he makes excessive and unnecessary use of dissonance, apparently wishing to reproduce the singing of a wild and drunken crowd in the countryside (as though debauchery and cacophony make the wedding ceremony interesting).” Aleksandr Kastal'skiy, “Iz zapisok,” in I. F. Stravinskiy: Stat' i materialï, compiled by L. S. D'yachkova, ed. Boris Yarustovskiy (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1973), 208.

  43. Asaf'yev, Kniga o Stravinskom, 20.

  44. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1: 893.

  45. See Stravinsky’s recollections about the sounds of old Petersburg in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), 20–21.

  46. Taruskin suggests that he used Anna Rudneva, Narodnïye pesni Kurskoy oblasti, but that collection appeared in 1957 (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:923–24).

  47. Nikolay Uspenskiy, Obraztsï drevnerusskogo pevcheskogo iskusstva (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1968).

  48. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 98.

  49. Even earlier this device is found in the finale of Firebird.

  50. Taruskin connects the origin of parallel triads in Les Noces with the publication of examples of Georgian liturgical song in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1414.

  51. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964): 1: 51.

  52. Ibid., 41.

  53. I want to emphasize that I am not interested here in making specific parallels between Stravinsky and the Acmeists but rather with understanding a certain typology.

  54. Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Conversations with Stravinsky (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 14.

  55. Aleksey Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov speak of “the word as such” in their Futurist manifesto of 1913.

  56. Osip Mandelshtam, Slovo i kul'tura (Moscow: Sovetskiy pisatel', 1987), 168.

  57. Stravinsky, quoted in Paul Sacher, “Igor Strawinsky zum Gedächtnis [1971],” in Reden und Aufsätze (Zurich: Atlantis, 1986), 105.

  58. Daniil Kharms to K. V. Pugacheva, 16 October 1933, in Novïy mir 4 (1988): 137; repr. in Polyot v nebesa, ed. A. Aleksandrov (Leningrad: Sovetskiy pisatel', 1991), 483–84.

  59. Nouvel was a regular visitor to the gatherings at the home of Vyacheslav Ivanov.

  60. Mikhail Kuzmin, “O prekrasnoy yasnosti: Zametki o proze,” Apollon 4 (January 1910): 10.

  61. Stravinsky, An Autobigraphy, 162–63.

  62. Mikhail Kuzmin, “Zametki o literature [1914],” in Stikhi i proza (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 385–86.

  63. Ibid. Compare Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 53.

  64. Suvchinsky included the French words, ordre and célébration in brackets here next to the Russian words for “order” and “confession.” He conflates confession with celebration in French.

  65. Pyotr Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 9 April 1962, microfilm 277.1, Paul Sacher Stiftung.

  Stravinsky’s Cold War: Letters About the Composer’s Return to Russia, 1960–1963

  LETTERS TRANSLATED BY PHILIPP PENKA WITH ALEXANDRA GRABARCHUK

  INTRODUCTION, COMMENTARY, AND NOTES BY TAMARA LEVITZ

  In memory of Viktor Varunts (1945–2003)

  In fall 1962, Igor Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time in forty-eight years. He had left in 1914, not knowing at the time, of course, how long the separation would last. When Lenin revoked citizenship for expatriates in 1921, Stravinsky had become stateless and could remain in Europe only with a Nansen passport, which he kept until he acquired French citizenship in 1934.1 Many observers underplayed his refugee status, and operated under the false assumption that Stravinsky had “slipped” into becoming an émigré, rather than being forced into exile. But he was in fact stateless, and in a far more unsettled situation than is commonly assumed.

  During his early years of exile, Stravinsky mostly kept a public silence about his homeland, sharing his feelings only with intimate friends. He developed a deep mistrust of reporters and critics, and evaded their questions about the Soviet Union, especially as the situation in his homeland worsened.2 “I used to say I was a ‘Westerner,’” he ventured to tell a Viennese reporter in 1926. “This should not be misinterpreted. I have been living for sixteen years away from Russia, mostly in Paris and Nice. For that reason alone I don’t have much insight into the political situation in Russia and thus can’t be for or against the Soviets. Thankfully I am not a politician but solely and exclusively a musician. And indeed as a musician Western culture means a tremendous amount to me.”3 In spite of such public statements and of his difficult relationships with Russian émigré circles, Stravinsky avidly read émigré and Soviet newspapers and books, nurtured deep friendships with select émigré friends, and after 1926, reconnected in a profound way with his religion, Russian Orthodoxy. He also never gave up Russian traditions and customs. The tense demands of his exile led him to separate dramatically the public and private spheres of his life; by the early 1930s the two had become irreconcilable.

  Stravinsky’s public silence on his private attachment to Russia led him to feel an affinity for two fellow Russian émigrés who felt a similar need to keep secrets: Arthur Lourié and Pyotr Suvchinsky. Stravinsky first met Suvchinsky in 1922, and became his close friend in the 1930s.4 Suvchinsky was descended from Polish nobility and had spent his childhood and youth at the family estate south of Poltava in Ukraine. He actively promoted modern music before leaving Russia by publishing the St. Petersburg almanac Muzïkal'nïy sovremennik with Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov in 1914–15; in 1917 he cofounded the Russian journal Melos. In the 1920s, Suvchinsky became deeply involved in the leadership of the Eurasianist movement in exile.5 Stravinsky left no evidence that he was at all aware of his friend’s covert political activities; he cherished Suvchinsky as an intellectual partner, musician, fellow émigré, and sympathetic listener. In 1939 they collaborated on Stravinsky’s Poétique musicale.6

  Stravinsky became increasingly hostile toward the Soviet Union, and Communism, as Stalin consolidated his power in the 1930s. He relied on Suvchinsky to keep him informed, and trusted him so deeply on the subject of the Soviet Union that he even allowed him to write about it in the fifth chapter of his own Poétique musicale. Stravinsky and Suvchinsky also discussed Dmitry Shostakovich, whose Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District Stravinsky heard Artur Rodzinski conduct in New York on 4 February 1935. Stravinsky described Lady Macbeth to Ernest Ansermet immediately after the performance as “a work of lamentable provincialism, in which the music plays the miserable role of illustrating in a very embarrassing realist style. … [Shostakovich] has profoundly disappointed me both in his mentality and musical value. … Lady Macbeth is not the work of a musician but it is surely the product of the total indifference for music in the land of the Soviets. What a relief I am not going there!”7 When Suvchinsky sent Stravinsky the devastating anonymous article from Pravda denouncing Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth about a year later, Stravinsky ignored its political impl
ications and used it instead to confirm his own fixed aesthetic judgment. He underlined sentences and made notes in the margins, and in one spot explicitly called Shostakovich’s opera “rubbish.”8 Interpreting Shostakovich as a representative rather than a victim of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Stravinsky made a point of emphasizing again how much he detested Shostakovich’s opera in an interview he gave in Argentina a few months later.9

  Stravinsky’s public political persona and relationship to Suvchinsky and Shostakovich changed when he immigrated to the United States in 1939. Separated from friends and family, and immersed in new relationships, he began to promote himself in the U.S. press as an American patriot and foe of the Nazis and Soviet Union.10 In December 1940 he told a reporter in Minneapolis that “America has always been good to me, so why shouldn’t I [become a citizen]? I like the free American spirit, and it fits my own temperament.”11 Soon, he was commenting that Shostakovich “is a very clever young man, but I have not heard his later symphonies, the fifth and the sixth.”12 And very quickly, he accompanied his newfound U.S. patriotism with a critique of the Soviet Union: “Russian music is still in a state of transition,” he told a reporter in Rochester in February 1945. “Music reaches its highest development in times of peace rather than in periods of upheaval.”13 “The Russians have not yet ended their revolution,” he elaborated to Jean-Louis Roux in Montréal a month later. “They have too much work to do in the political domain before they can really concern themselves with art. They don’t have time at the moment.”14 By 1946, he had crystalized these thoughts into a convincing political sound bite: “Art cannot flourish under dictatorships. No artist can develop when creating according to prescription rather than through freedom of choice.”15

  When the war ended, Stravinsky, at age sixty-three, emerged on the international contemporary music scene as both the “elder statesman” of modern music and catalyst for its deepest controversies. In the period of relatively open dialogue over the future of music immediately after the war, young composers began to map ideological categories onto stylistic ones, and to define Stravinsky’s usefulness to their political agendas based on their allegiance to either his early Russian or neoclassical works. Old European debates over the value of his compositional style—painfully fought out in France at the premiere of his Concerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks) in 1938—came back to haunt Stravinsky in 1945 when Manuel Rosenthal and the Orchestre national de France staged a “homecoming” for him in Paris in a January to July series of seven concerts of his music.16 Rosenthal’s series included Stravinsky’s popular Russian favorites, the Rite and Petrushka; neoclassical standards like the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments; rarely performed works like Mavra and Perséphone; and a new work Stravinsky had composed during the war: Four Norwegian Moods. Just before the festivities really began to unfold, however, representatives of the older generation, including Georges Auric and Francis Poulenc, had responded effusively to Roger Désormière’s performance of Stravinsky’s Danses concertantes (1940–42) at a concert of the Société privée de musique de chambre on 27 February 1945. The older generation’s smug mutual support of one another and of this work irked Olivier Messiaen’s students, who expressed their dissatisfaction at a protest during a performance of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods at Rosenthal’s festival on 15 March.17 Serge Nigg and other students found Stravinsky’s neoclassicism retrospective, though they did not oppose it in principle. They were more concerned about whether Stravinsky represented the right direction for French composers in a time of great uncertainty. It did not help that their elders immediately scolded them for their insolence. By the end of the debates, the Polish-born French composer René Leibowitz had entered the fray, rejecting Stravinsky’s neoclassicism in favor of Schoenberg’s serialism. The stage was set for a Cold War musical battle of epic proportions.