Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  23. Stravinsky wrote Eisler on 5 October 1947 to congratulate him on Leben des Galilei, and subsequently agreed to put his name on a concert of Eisler’s music. But when his attorney Aaron Sapiro told him on 6 December 1948 that the invitations being sent out for that concert were accompanied by Martha Gellhorn’s leftist article “Cry Shame…!” (The New Republic, 6 October 1947, 20), Stravinsky wrote a letter of protest to the Los Angeles Times (subsequently not published), in which he insisted his interests were apolitical. Robert Craft misleadingly implies that Stravinsky supported Eisler in this affair, although there is no evidence to support this thesis. See Robert Craft and Vera Stravinsky, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978): 557 (hereafter SPD).

  24. See Stravinsky to Craft, 16 March 1949, in Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 1:358n71. Craft embellishes this story in ways I could not corroborate.

  25. The House Committee on Un-American Activities reviewed this conference on 19 April 1949.

  26. Herbert Kupferberg, “Shostakovich Hits Stravinsky as ‘Betrayer,’” New York Herald Tribune, 28 March 1949. See also Olin Downes, “Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on New ‘Fascists,’” New York Times, 28 March 1949.

  27. Shostakovich, quoted in Irving Kolodin, “Shostakovich vs. Stravinsky: Russian Composer Takes Modernist to Task for Betraying Native Land,” New York Sun, 28 March 1949. Olin Downes quotes Shostakovich slightly differently in “Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on New ‘Fascists.’”

  28. Kolodin, “Shostakovich vs. Stravinsky.” See Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25–36; and Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 238–39.

  29. See Robert Craft’s comments and selection of correspondence between Stravinsky and Nabokov in Stravinsky: Selected Letters, 2:364–420.

  30. On these politics, see Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, 69–86; and Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle Against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 49–56.

  31. On the CIA’s involvement in the festival, see Wellens, Music on the Frontline, 47–49. This Rite of Spring apparently cost the CIA $166,359 (page 61).

  32. Craft documents their social activities in Paris, without mentioning the politics of Nabokov’s festival, in Stravinsky: Chronicle of A Friendship (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 1994), 75–85.

  33. Stephen Walsh postulates that Stravinsky did not see Suvchinsky because he resented the latter’s friendship with Pierre Boulez, with whom Suvchinsky founded the Domaine musical a year later. See Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America, 1934–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 290, 349–53.

  34. Peter Schmelz offers an astonishing, meticulously researched account of modern and contemporary music culture behind the scenes in the Soviet Union in this period in Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  35. Boris Schwarz, “Stravinsky in Soviet Russian Criticism,” The Musical Quarterly 48/3, Special Issue for Igor Stravinsky on his 80th Anniversary (July 1962): 350–61. Schwarz claims Soviet critics took offense at Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky’s “35 Antworten auf 35 Fragen,” Melos 24/6 (June 1957): 161–76, published in English as “Answers to 34 Questions: An Interview with Igor Stravinsky,” Encounter 9/1 (July 1957): 3–7. In this interview, Stravinsky discussed serialism, expressed his love of Webern, and praised Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître. He sharply criticized the Soviet Union, speaking of “Russia’s musical isolation” of the last thirty years, the backwardness of their orchestras, and how his music and that of the Second Viennese School was not available in Russia.

  36. Viktor Varunts intended to publish the correspondence between Stravinsky and Suvchinsky in the fourth volume of his edited collection of Russian letters, SPRK. Tragically, Varunts passed away suddenly in New York City in 2003. Svetlana Savenko is now preparing the fourth volume of his edition for publication in Russian. The originals of most, but not all, of this correspondence, as well as Heidi Tagliavini’s German translations of Suvchinsky’s letters to Stravinsky, are kept at the Sammlung Paul Sacher and Stravinsky Nachlass in the PSS, though they are currently closed to the public. Alla Bretanitskaya previously edited a selection of the correspondence between Yudina and Suvchinsky in Pyotr Suvchinskiy i yego vremya (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1999), 321–83; and Anatoly Kuznetsov edited a new edition of Yudina’s letters that includes the correspondence with Maria Yudina reproduced here. See Mariia Yudina, V iskusstve radostno byt' vmeste: perepiska 1959–1961 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009); and Mariia Yudina, Dukh dïshit, gde khochet: Perepiska 1962–1963 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010). Hereafter VIR and DD respectively. The translations here have benefited from Stephen Walsh’s excellent translations of short excerpts from several of these letters in Stravinsky: The Second Exile. The organization of the letters is based on Varunts’s original selection.

  37. Robert Craft, “Stravinsky’s Return: A Russian Diary,” Encounter 117 (June 1963): 33–48; reprinted in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 224–65.

  38. Documents relating to Suvchinsky’s attempts to found a “Centre d’Etudes Igor Strawinsky” are kept in the Sammlung Paul Sacher, PSS. The story of Suvchinsky’s intended role in administering Stravinsky’s posthumous legacy remains unclear. See Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 530–63.

  39. In a letter to Suvchinsky, Yudina confessed that she was Jewish but had converted to Orthodoxy at age nineteen because she felt she “had come to live so closely with the Russian people, specifically the people …” She cautiously observed that Suvchinsky’s connection to Schoenberg and Pasternak “seemed sufficient proof of the unthinkableness of you having any antipathy toward my people. Not to mention your most high spiritual culture.” Suvchinsky replied that she didn’t have to tell him about her Jewishness. “First,” he wrote, “I really love Jews and have ever since my childhood in Kiev province; I have always had an ‘attraction’ to Jews and Jewishness.” He described hearing music in the Karlsbad Synagogue, and the Jewish orchestras in Ukraine that he thought influenced L’Histoire du soldat. “You would not be M. V. Yudina without that bloodline, as Pushkin would not be Pushkin if he did not have Abyssinian blood flowing in his veins. The historical connection of the Russian people (and the Russian Revolution) with Jewishness is a providential fact. I deeply believe that the Russian people are a second Israel, and this realization has always deeply shaken and shakes me.” Yudina responded by expressing her own doubts about Jews. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 13/16/19 March 1961; Suvchinsky to Yudina, 27 March 1961; and Yudina to Suvchinsky, 16 April 1961, in VIR, 499–512, 525.

  40. Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 90.

  41. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 16 September 1959, VIR, 111–12. On the notion of “professionalism” in Soviet musical life and the possibilities for composing and performing modern and avant-garde music, see Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 203–13.

  42. Peter Schmelz discusses the dramatic influx of scores and recordings by Western modernist composers into the Soviet Union after 1960 through both legal and illegal channels in Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 45.

  43. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 19 October 1959, VIR, 161.

  44. Arthur Berger’s “Some Conversations on Life and Work and Art,” The New York Times Book Review, 11 March 1962. This article consists of a fascinating review of Craft’s and Stravinsky’s third book of published conversations, Expositions and Developments.

  45. To indicate Yudina’s (and to a lesser extent Suvchinsky’s) faltering or uncertain speech patterns we have introduced the rather indiosyncratic use of double em-dashes here. Anatoly Kuznetsov had pla
ced three ellipsis dots when he edited Yudina’s letters for publication, but to follow him would preclude our presenting a clear distinction between uncertain speech and editorial ellipses.

  46. Stravinsky’s close friend Lawrence Morton was a pianist, composer, and impresario. He was executive director of the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles (1954–71), several times director of the Ojai Festival, and curator of the Bing Concerts at Los Angeles County Museum of Art after 1965. He met Stravinsky in 1941, but became close with him in the late 1950s.

  47. Suvchinsky voiced similar ideas in “Stravinsky as a Russian,” Tempo 81 (Summer 1967): 5. He had first begun speaking about the Russian typology of Stravinsky’s character in the 1930s; see Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone, 160–65, 324. Suvchinsky had earlier written to Yudina, “I was never a ‘nationalist,’ but can’t help being proud of the fact that [Stravinsky] is Russian. If you only knew to what extent he remained it (Russian!) How amazingly he speaks Russian.” Suvchinsky to Yudina, 28 October 1959, VIR, 166.

  48. Suvchinsky frequently quotes this passage from Gogol’s A Terrible Vengeance (1832).

  49. Morton was planning to travel to the Soviet Union to gather biographical materials about Stravinsky for a proposed monograph. Suvchinsky somewhat questioned Morton’s ability to do this research in a letter to Yudina, 14 April 1960, VIR, 284–85. Yudina and Suvchinsky frequently discussed in their correspondence Morton’s research and travel plans, which never materialized.

  50. The letter includes a carte-de-visite dated 7 May 1960 from Stravinsky to Yudina in which he thanks her for her letter and asks her to write.

  51. Stravinsky is referring to a letter from Yudina dated 29 April 1960, in which Yudina praised his music and writings in heightened and rhapsodic prose. She spoke abjectly of communicating with him only “from a place of poverty, and humility, from positions of life, the world, which are likely unknown to you.” “What can I do? Only thank Providence for the fact that you exist on earth, that I am your co-citizen and contemporary, and that I have the honor and happiness to be acquainted with you even from afar and sometimes have the opportunity to play your compositions (I would play them constantly, but this does not depend on me!)” See VIR, 295–96. In a letter from 28 November 1960, Yudina calls Stravinsky a “genius of geniuses” and suggests she ought to write him in Latin or Greek verse, given his stature, rather than in simple prose. See Yudina to Stravinsky, 28 November 1960, VIR, 388–89.

  52. Marianna Suvchinsky (1910–1993) was married to Pyotr Suvchinsky. She was the daughter of Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) and niece of the Ballets Russes dancer Tamara Karsavina (1885–1979).

  53. “Stravinsky Shakes a Stick at Red Music,” Washington Post, 24 December 1960, quoted in Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 440–41.

  54. Stravinsky to Yudina, 16 January 1961, VIR, 454.

  55. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 13–19 March 1961, VIR, 502–3.

  56. See Svetlana Savenko, “Stravinsky: The View from Russia,” in this volume. Tikhon Khrennikov (1913–2007) was secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1948 to 1991.

  57. Franz Waxman founded the Beverly Hills Music Festival in 1947, and renamed it the Los Angeles Music Festival two years later.

  58. Craft, Chronicle of a Friendship, 240.

  59. See Albert Goldberg, “Soviet Night,” Los Angeles Times, 13 June 1961.

  60. Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 440.

  61. Simon Morrison has access to the records on Stravinsky at the VOKS archive at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and promises to provide insight into the politics of this invitation in his research on this subject.

  62. Tikhon Khrennikov, “Serdechnïy privet ot Stravinskogo,” Ogonyok, August 1961, quoted in Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 441. See also “‘On umer drugom svoyey rodiny’: Beseda S. Savenko s T. N. Khrennikovym” Muzïkal'naya akademiya 4 (1992): 218.

  63. Yudina had arranged to have Konstantin Balmont’s daugther Nina Bruni-Balmont send Stravinsky a copy of the 1911 edition of Balmont’s poems which Stravinsky had used when setting “Zvezdolikiy” (“Le Roi des étoiles”). See Tatiana Baranova, “Stravinsky’s Russian Library,” in this volume. Stravinsky does not mention here and may not have known that Yudina had just given two groundbreaking concerts at the Concert Hall at the Finland Station in Leningrad and Leningrad House of Composers on 11 and 12 May 1961, in which she had performed Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta (1956–57) and his own Sonata for Two Pianos (1944), among other works.

  64. Igor Bezrodny (1930–1997) was a gifted violinist, member of the Moscow Trio, and conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra (1976–81) and Turku Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland (1986–90).

  65. Vasily Yastrebtsev was a faithful student and admirer of Rimsky-Korsakov and wrote Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, ed. and trans. by Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

  66. Savenko argues that this was indeed irrelevant in that the Union of Soviet Composers was a state organization.

  67. Savenko believes Suvchinsky, who was in general well informed about the Soviet Union, shows his apparent lack of understanding of the situation here. Khrennikov occupied a higher position in the Soviet hierarchical ladder than Shostakovich (who had incomparably more professional and moral authority).

  68. Nicolas I, who was coronated on 22 August (3 September) 1826, allowed Pushkin to return from exile in early September 1826. He was greeted with great enthusiasm.

  69. Dostoevsky spoke on 8 June 1880 as part of the lavish ceremonies accompanying the unveiling of Alexander Opekushin’s monument to Pushkin in Moscow. Stravinsky scholars and friends frequently refer to this speech in relation to Stravinsky’s exile from Russia.

  70. Suvchinsky is referring to Leo Tolstoy’s last visit to Moscow on 18–19 September 1909 and to the crowd that gathered at Bryansk Station.

  71. Stravinsky traveled to Sweden and Berlin in September; Zurich, London, and Cairo in October; and Australia and Tahiti in November–December 1961.

  72. Robert Craft.

  73. Stravinsky turned seventy-nine on 17 June 1961.

  74. Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) was a celebrated Soviet Armeniam composer.

  75. Yuri Shaporin (1887–1966) was a Soviet composer and Professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

  76. Dmitry Kabalevsky (1904–1987) was a Soviet composer and major figure in the Union of Soviet Composers, and famous for his music for children. Karen Khachaturian told Svetlana Savenko in an interview in 1992 that Kabalevsky and others in the Union of Soviet Composers had energetically opposed Stravinsky’s visit with comments like “How can it be that the leader of avant-gardism, the representative of bourgeois art, is visiting us and we are receiving him?” Shostakovich’s staunch support of Khrennikov’s invitation and of Stravinsky had proved crucial in convincing the Union to proceed with the visit. See “‘Ya bïl rozhdyon dlya muzïki’: Beseda S. Savenko s K. S. Khachaturyanom,” Muzïkal'naya akademiya 4 (1992): 221.

  77. Anatoly Kuznetsov notes that Stravinsky included his carte-de-visite, on which he had written: “To N. Bruni-Balmont, the daughter of the great poet, my heartfelt gratitude for her wonderful gift. With sincere respect, I. Stravinsky.” It is kept at the Research Division of Manuscripts at the Russian State Library in Moscow (NIOR RGB).

  78. Boris Yarustovsky (1911–1978) was a musicologist and director of the cultural division of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1948 to 1956, famous for his hounding of Shostakovich. He later published Igor´ Stravinskiy: Kratkiy ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow: Muzïka, 1963; rev. 1969).

  79. Stravinsky planned to be in Helsinki 10–14 September 1961.

  80. Through Yudina as intermediary, Stockhausen had spoken with Shostakovich and the Union of Soviet Composers about a concert tour of the Soviet Union including David Tudor and percussionist Christoph Caskell. The official invitation with Shostakovich’s signature arrived in 1963, but was later annul
led. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 6 August 1961, in VIR, 618–26.

  81. Yudina claims that Nadia Boulanger wrote the Union of Composers to tell them of her desire to conduct in the U.S.S.R. Boulanger sat on the jury for the third Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1966 and visited the Leningrad Conservatory. See Yudina to Suvchinsky, 6 August 1961, in VIR, 618–26; and Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 55.

  82. Stravinsky is referring to the photographs Yudina had sent Suvchinsky of Pasternak’s funeral on 2 June 1960, which never reached him. Pasternak played a unique role in Yudina’s avant-garde performances. See Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, 94–95.

  83. At the end of this letter, Stravinsky lists his travel plans from 25 August to 25 September 1961.

  84. In the first part of this letter, Yudina discusses a concert she will give in Moscow’s Dom uchyonïkh (House of Scholars) on 29 September 1961, in which she plans to perform Stravinsky’s Sonata, Sonata for Two Pianos, and Concerto for Two Pianos, among other works.

  85. Stravinsky conducted a concert in Mexico City on 20 December 1961, for which he prepared a wind-band arrangement of his tango from Cinq doigts (1921), and Robert Craft conducted the Scènes de ballet.

  86. A “Stravinsky Retrospective: In Honor of His Eightieth Birthday” concert took place at the Domaine musical on 8 November 1961. Boulez conducted a wide range of Stravinsky’s songs, as well as the Concertino, Symphonies d’instruments à vent, In Memorium Dylan Thomas, Three Pieces for String Quartet, and Renard.

  87. This letter included newspaper clippings with a photograph of Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) and Vladimir Semichastny (1924–2001). Molotov was Minister of Foreign Affairs (1939–49 and 1953–56) and Stalin’s closest collaborator, but Khrushchev dismissed him from the Politburo of the Central Committee in 1957. Semichastny had just been named chairman of the KGB, a position he kept from 13 November 1961 to 1967.