As always, Stravinsky experienced the conflict indirectly, from a distance, through old friends. Suvchinsky defended his honor by exploring his unique Russian typology in a long article in Contrepoints, which another old friend, André Schaeffner, sent on to the composer.18 “Friends in New York told me you think the attacks to which you were subject in Paris originated with the Soviets,” Schaeffner commented in the accompanying letter, “You know that I was never Communist, and never a supporter of any totalitarian regime. But I can assure you that to the best of my knowledge there has not been an unfavorable review of you in any of the Communist or communizing [communisants] newspapers, on the contrary. You have friends among the Communists: Désormière, Auric (!) etc.” It was the White Russians and Germanophiles who disliked Stravinsky, he explained. “And as for Messiaen, he is a Catholic, a poor dupe of the fuss they are making around him who doesn’t dare to speak out—either for or against you.” Stravinsky responded that he never thought the attacks were Soviet, and that Schaeffner must have been misinformed. “It’s interesting to hear about the White Russians’ attitude toward me. Do those anachronistic groups still exist after the liberation? How funny.”19 He thanked him for Suvchinsky’s brilliant article.
Stravinsky became personally embroiled in a major public Cold War dispute a few years later, when the Cominform organized a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, 25–27 March 1949, just ten months after the Prague Manifesto.20 Stravinsky had heard Shostakovich was invited but doubted he would be permitted to come. “The Soviets want to control everything,” he told a reporter on 3 March. “They will enslave everybody to get control—I do not think he will come to this country as announced.”21 Two weeks later, Olin Downes, music critic of the New York Times, asked Stravinsky to sign his name to a telegram welcoming Shostakovich to the United States.22 Having recently become aware of the dangers of getting involved in Cold War conflict when Hanns Eisler’s supporters had used his co-sponsorship of an Eisler concert in Los Angeles to political ends without his permission, Stravinsky was hesitant.23 He responded that he would not be able “to join welcomers of Soviet artists coming to this country. But all of my ethical and aesthetic convictions oppose such gesture [sic].” He then dutifully informed his new best friend, Robert Craft, of his actions.24
In the end Shostakovich and six other guests from the Soviet Union attended, as well as Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Paul Robeson, and other U.S. musicians.25 At the Fine Arts Panel with Copland and Shostakovich that Olin Downes chaired on 27 March, Shostakovich “gazed intently at the audience” while Paul Mann read his 5,200-word speech in English, according to reporter Herbert Kupferberg.26 “His beginnings were promising,” Irving Kolodin quoted Shostakovich as saying about Stravinsky in the New York Sun, “but having broken with the traditions of the Russian national school of music, having betrayed his native land and severed himself from his people, Stravinsky joined the camp of reactionary modernistic musicians.” A “moral barrenness reveals itself in his openly nihilistic writings,” Shostakovich’s speech continued, “Stravinsky has no fear of that gaping abyss which separates him from the spiritual life of the people.”27 After the talk was over, Stravinsky’s friend Nicolas Nabokov asked Shostakovich whether he agreed with an anonymous article in Pravda that denounced Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. According to press reports, Shostakovich agreed immediately to the first two names, but hesitated on Schoenberg. Finally, when pressed, he uttered the words “And Schoenberg too.”28 That night Shostakovich performed a piano reduction of the second movement of his Fifth Symphony to a tremendous crowd at Madison Square Garden.
Stravinsky’s name and musical brand became inextricably linked with the Cold War when Nicolas Nabokov highlighted both in L’Oeuvre du XXe siècle—a festival sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and held in Paris in May 1952. Stravinsky and Nabokov had met in the 1920s, but became close around the time of this festival; Nabokov served as an important entrepreneur for Stravinsky’s music in the last decades of his life.29 As secretary-general of the Congress, Nabokov designed the festival to solidify the organization’s anti-Soviet agenda and role as a “defender of freedom.” In the accompanying brochure, he condemned injustices in the Soviet Union by speaking of the continued ban there on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth.30 Stravinsky fit his agenda both as a friend and a victim of Soviet attack: Stravinsky’s Russian and neoclassical works became centerpieces of the festival. Audiences heard classics like The Firebird and The Rite of Spring (performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra—shipped to Paris on the CIA’s tab expressly for that purpose),31 as well as Orpheus, Oedipus Rex, and central neoclassical works such as the Symphony in C. The festival had a highly controversial reception in France.
Stravinsky did not comment publicly on the political implications of this event, but rather used it as an opportunity to enjoy his first trip to Paris in fourteen years. He dined, visited museums, saw old friends like André Schaeffner and Charles-Albert Cingria, and collaborated with Jean Cocteau on a new staging of Oedipus Rex. Although in the know about Nicolas Nabokov’s staunch anti-Soviet agenda, he acted ignorant of it, just as he had with Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist activities decades earlier. Two other dramatic changes in his life also shaped this trip: he had heard and fallen in love with the music of Webern, and he had become more deeply attached to Robert Craft, who traveled with him and Vera.32 He was also in the midst of composing what historians consider one of his first important attempts at serialism in the “Ricercar II” of the Cantata—a work that at the age of seventy would allow him to capture the Cold War spotlight by joining in his own person the styles that haunted it ideologically: the folk exoticism of Firebird and Rite, neoclassicism, and serialism. For whatever reason, however, Stravinsky did not see Suvchinsky in Paris.33
Stravinsky’s role in the Cold War musical face-off shifted yet again when Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier in March 1958, and the Communist Party resolved on 28 May to acknowledge the unfairness of previous judgments about leading composers, paving the way for their rehabilitation.34 The Thaw had begun, but progress was slow and unsure. Leonard Bernstein’s tour of the Soviet Union with the New York Philharmonic in August and September 1959 opened up new possibilities for Stravinsky’s reception in his homeland. Bernstein performed Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (with Seymour Lipkin as soloist), and The Rite of Spring, setting the tone for the repertoire favored there for years to come. But musicologist Boris Schwarz warned U.S. audiences that appearances were deceptive: textbooks in the Soviet Union were still not discussing Stravinsky’s works after 1930, he claimed, and the composer’s serialist turn, support of Webern, and public rejection of the Soviet Union were still causing considerable controversy there.35
The selection of correspondence between Stravinsky, Suvchinsky, and Maria Yudina included here documents Stravinsky’s first tentative contact with Soviet colleagues during the Thaw, and his personal response to the invitation to visit the Soviet Union on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1962.36 Just as Suvchinsky had served as Stravinsky’s messenger when contact with the Soviet Union broke down dramatically in the 1930s, he returned now to become the mediator in establishing that contact anew. Stravinsky rekindled a deep friendship with Suvchinsky precisely in these years. But Stravinsky’s affections were divided. His friendship with Suvchinsky existed as if in a parallel universe to the one he shared with Craft, and as a consequence, the stories the two men told about him did not always correspond. Whereas Robert Craft carefully documented Stravinsky’s trip to the Soviet Union in the CIA-funded British journal Encounter and in the diaries he published upon his return, Suvchinsky’s perspective is less well known.37 The historical tension between Suvchinsky and Craft culminated in disputes over Stravinsky’s archive after he died.38
Suvchinsky provided the connection to Maria Yudina, a brilliant pianist who had studied at t
he St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1921, taught at the same institution until 1930, and then at the Moscow Conservatory from 1936 to 1951, and at the Gnesin Institute from 1944 to 1960. Stalin had famously spared Yudina despite her outspoken opinions on religion and politics (she was a Jewish convert to Russian Orthodoxy),39 because he felt emotionally moved by her playing. She had performed Les Noces with Shostakovich in 1926, and, as Peter Schmelz has noted, “served as a crucial bridge across the chasm of the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s, the ‘forgotten years’ that haunted” most young composers during the post-Stalin Thaw.40
Yudina’s first letter to Suvchinsky dates from 16 September 1959, just weeks after Leonard Bernstein’s visit to the Soviet Union and at a time when she was beginning to make emboldened choices as a performer of avant-garde music and supporter of the composer Andrey Volkonsky within Soviet professional circles.41 In this and other initial letters to Suvchinsky, Yudina requests scores not available in the Soviet Union, and plans a proposed visit to France organized by André Jolivet for winter or spring 1961, which never materialized.42 Although she shows interest in Stockhausen, Boulez, and others, she describes Stravinsky as towering above everybody else, his superiority assured by the fact that he dedicated his scores to God.43 Through Suvchinsky, Yudina came into contact with Stravinsky himself, and began sending him rhapsodic letters of praise and gifts of rare books. Her correspondence with Stravinsky began at the very time—1960—when she lost her job at the Gnesin Institute and was deprived of the possibility to teach. Stravinsky seemed largely unaware of the difficulties and complexity of her situation and the courage she displayed in disseminating his music. He usually responded to her missives with brief, polite thank-you notes, in which, most importantly, he showed interest in her and asked her to write.
This correspondence between Stravinsky, Suvchinsky, and Yudina brings together the strands of their Cold War story: Stravinsky returns home after almost half a century, accompanied on his journey emotionally by Pyotr Suvchinsky and physically by Robert Craft. As the people around him plan political spectacle, Stravinsky worries about music, books, illnesses, and himself, separating the public and private as he always had. He is aware of the political consequences of his actions and of his role as a pawn in a Cold War conflict, but keeps that knowledge at a distance, not allowing public obligation to determine fully the life choices he makes. He enjoys socializing and good conversation with acquaintances whose politics he detests. He slips damaging comments to the press, covering up for his indiscretions with lies afterward, as he had always done. And his attention focuses on Dmitry Shostakovich—the composer who had served as his greatest Soviet rival for over a quarter of a century. Stravinsky is celebrated in Russia as a twentieth-century icon—his fame far outweighing the importance of his musical compositions for most people, as Arthur Berger recognized at the time.44 But he is also ill and fragile, possibly abusing alcohol, and focused on his own comfort and musical pleasure. Fussy and obstinate, he trusts his closest and most intimate confidants, Robert Craft and Vera, but also Pyotr Suvchinsky, to serve as his human shields against a potentially hostile Cold War world.45
1. Pyotr Suvchinsky to Igor Stravinsky
Paris
22 April 1960
My dearly beloved Igor Fyodorovich!
I just received 28 (!) scores, which I will start sending to Yudina. How can I thank you?!
Recently I had an endless conversation with L. Morton.46 What a wonderful, calm person he is! He suffered from some strange illness all this time; now he is feeling better.
I told him what I always think and say: the miracle of Stravinsky happened in Russia.47 After all, miracles are always “instantaneous,” they are localized in time and space. That is their “specificity.” Remember all the miracles in the Gospels, remember Gogol: “Suddenly in all directions even the ends of the earth had become visible.”48 A brilliant expression.
And then he who has “seen the light” begins a new life and if he was worthy of the miracle that happened to him (and in him), then this miracle will last his entire life. Of course, the “miracle of Stravinsky” continues to take place right in front of everyone’s eyes for many decades, but the moment of the miracle is connected with Russia and with your youth.
Don’t think that I am russophiling. I never told you about it, but I didn’t like my childhood and youth; I felt like protesting against almost everything. My relationship with my parents and with our “bourgeois” life were and remain a burdensome memory for me. But nevertheless, a feeling for language and some fundamental past have stayed with me forever; I gave birth to myself once more (we are our own parents). I’m writing all this because I was very pleased to learn that Morton is planning to go to Russia.49 Perhaps M. V. Yudina’s appearance is providential.
So let me thank you once more for being so sympathetic and attentive to her. I received an Easter letter from her that touched me very much.
I embrace you warmly.
Yours truly
P. Suvchinsky
2. Igor Stravinsky to Pyotr Suvchinsky
Hollywood
7 May 1960
Dear Pyotr Petrovich, please send this carte-de-visite of mine to M. V. Yudina with my greetings and thanks.50
After you read her letter,51 please send it back to me (you may use regular mail).
I embrace you and Marianna.52
Your I. Stravinsky
In the months following this initial contact, Stravinsky continued to critique the Soviet Union in the U.S. press, frustrating Yudina and other colleagues in Russia who were trying to fight for his rehabilitation there. In December 1960 Stravinsky gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he commented: “They’re bad. Poor Shostakovich, the most talented, is just trembling all his life. Russia is a very conservative and old country for music. It was new just before the Soviets. Under Lenin they invited me. I couldn’t go. Stalin never invited me.”53 A few weeks later he wrote Yudina that he was pleased to see that her concert programs included works of his that the Soviets had recently branded as decadent. “I should so much like to get to you this year,” he wrote her, “but it won’t happen: too many commitments that I can’t fulfill.”54 After his negative remarks were reported in Sovetskaya kul'tura in February 1961, Yudina wrote Suvchinsky urging him to tell Stravinsky to stop speaking out. “If I. F. in fact said something [negative about the Soviet Union]—then why, why?! People have slowly started writing to him and expressing their kind feelings, admiration, respect, reverence. … I don’t speak about myself, but my aim was to orient him toward us, to our quest, our difficulties, our aspiration toward Love between people, toward the best that we have and is in us. … the goal is to bring him closer, to bring our genius closer to us, his kin.”55
Stravinsky’s feelings about traveling to the Soviet Union shifted after he met Tikhon Khrennikov in Los Angeles in June 1962. A highly decorated Soviet composer and secretary of the powerful Union of Soviet Composers, Khrennikov had once denounced Stravinsky, decades earlier, at the height of Stalin’s purges.56 But times had changed, and Khrennikov had arrived in the United States in a far different mood to attend the first International Los Angeles Music Festival, which took place at Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA, 1–11 June 1961. The festival included eight concerts, as well as an International Composers’ Conference moderated by Roy Harris in Schoenberg Hall and involving Werner Egk, Lukas Foss, Blas Galindo, Iain Hamilton, Walter Piston, John Vincent, Darius Milhaud, Stravinsky, Khrennikov, and the second invited Soviet guest, Azerbaijani composer Kara Karayev, among others.57 Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand and Stravinsky conducting his Violin Concerto and Symphony of Psalms were highlights of the festival, as was a “Soviet Night” introduced by Lukas Foss on 11 June, which included the Suite from Karayev’s ballet Paths of Thunder and Khrennikov’s Symphony no. 2 and Violin Concerto, with Igor Bezrodny as soloist. The music did not go over well—Craft remembers Stravinsky squirming, fidgeting, and groaning throughout and leaving b
efore intermission.58 Critic Albert Goldberg called Karayev’s Suite “the kind of commercial music dished up in this country for Las Vegas, extravaganza and Hollywood B-movies—pseudo-Spanish, pseudo-jazz and pseudo everything else.”59 Afterward Khrennikov caught Stravinsky in the green room at UCLA and invited him to the Soviet Union.60 Although Khrennikov later remembered the invitation as spontaneous, it remains unclear whether it was.61 When Khrennikov, upon meeting Stravinsky directly, questioned him about his bad-mouthing of the Soviet Union, the composer responded brazenly, “I’ve never said anything bad either about Soviet music or about Soviet musicians. All these opinions were imputed to me in the interview by unscrupulous journalists.”62
Stravinsky and His World Page 40