Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  2. See Stephen Walsh’s account of Craft’s role. Although it contradicts Craft, it seems both balanced and persuasive, given Stravinsky’s past practices in the publication of opinions and books. See Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America, 1934–1971 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 398–99.

  3. Ibid., 399.

  4. See Sergei Davydov on poshlost' in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York: Routledge, 1995), 628–32.

  5. See Valérie Dufour, Stravinsky et ses exégètes (1910–1940) (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2006), 51–79; and Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile, 397–98.

  6. See Valérie Dufour, “The Poétique musicale: A Counterpoint in Three Voices,” in this volume.

  7. For Nabokov on music see, for example, Strong Opinions, 35. See also Charles Nicol, “Music in the Theater of the Mind: Opera and Vladimir Nabokov,” and Nassim W. Balestrini, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading and Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka,” in Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries, ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Garland, 1999), 21–42 and 87–110, respectively.

  8. Nabokov, “Playboy (1964),” in Strong Opinions, 35.

  9. Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 35; and Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 151.

  10. Nabokov approved of Appel’s The New Repubic review of Speak, Memory. See “Nabokov’s Puppet Show: Parts I and II,” The New Republic, 14 January 1967 and 21 January 1967.

  11. Boyd, Nabokov: The Russian Years and Nabokov: The American Years, passim.

  12. See Tamara Levitz, “Igor the Angeleno: The Mexican Connection,” in this volume.

  13. Vincent Giroux, unpublished drafts of a forthcoming biography of Nicolas Nabokov; Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1951), 190–204, 209–11; Nicolas Nabokov, Zwei rechte Schuhe im Gepäck: Erinnerungen eines russischen Weltbürgers (Munich: Piper, 1975), 208–27, 357.

  14. See Boyd, Nabokov: The Russian Years; and Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 1:77–162.

  15. Boyd, Nabokov: The Russian Years, passim; and Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 71.

  16. Boyd, Nabokov: The Russian Years, 40; and Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 171.

  17. See the discussion of Stravinsky’s engagement with Tchaikovsky’s work in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:2–5, 2:1529–1618.

  18. This was a favorite term of Nabokov’s. It means “corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature.” Strong Opinions, 101.

  19. See Robert Craft, “Jews and Geniuses” The New York Review of Books, 16 February 1989, and Richard Taruskin and Robert Craft, “Jews and Geniuses: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, 15 June 1989. On Stravinsky’s eagerness to curry favor with the Nazis, see the letters to Willi Strecker in Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 3:235, 236, 243, 244, 251, 265–66.

  20. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 61.

  21. Ibid., 157.

  22. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 343.

  23. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 71–72, 85–86.

  24. See Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

  25. See Will Norman’s discussion in his book Nabokov, History, and Texture of Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), 104–29.

  26. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 302.

  27. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 49.

  28. This essay is indebted to Richard Taruskin’s brilliant and detailed analysis of Stravinsky, especially in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. His portrait of the history, his analytical accounts of the music and the biographical claims form an indispensable basis for anyone writing on Stravinsky.

  29. In addition to Taruskin, see Pieter C. van den Toorn, “Octatonic Pitch Structure in Stravinsky,” in Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 154–56.

  30. This comment uses realism as a general term from literary history. It is not being used in the specific sense in which Carl Dahlhaus and others speak of musical realism. For example, I am not referring to the analysis of Musorgsky as a model of musical realism. The idea here is more general, in that the relationship of the audience to the musical experience—the fundamental sense of syntax, continuity, shape, and the rhetorical parallels to emotion and illustration—ran in tandem with the expectations and tastes of readers at the end of the nineteenth century. The point in this sense is not a technical one within a scholarly debate about a category in music history. The other analogy would be between musical practice and genre and historical painting, and with the pictorial illusions of realism at the end of the nineteenth century, as argued in my essay, “Music as Language of Psychological Realism: Tchaikovsky and Russian Art,” in Tchaikovsky and his World, ed. Leslie Kearney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 99–144. See also D. S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881–1925 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926).

  31. See Allen Forte, “Harmonic Syntax and Voice Leading in Stravinsky’s Early Music,” in Pasler, ed., Confronting Stravinsky, 129.

  32. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:950.

  33. See the two-volume set Nicholas Roerich, ed. Yevgeny Matochkin and Lisa Korshunova (Samara: Agni, 2011); and Richard Taruskin, “From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters,” in Pasler, ed., Confronting Stravinsky, 16–38.

  34. See Pierre Souvtchinsky, “La Notion du temps et la musique (Réflexions sur la typologie de la création musicale),” La Revue musicale 20/191 (May–June 1939): 70–81; repr. in Souvtchinsky, Un Siècle de musique russe, 1830–1930, ed. Frank Langlois (Paris: Actes Sud, 2004), 239–52.

  35. Nabokov, The Gift, 71.

  36. Ibid., 342.

  37. Edward T. Cone, “Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method,” in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 156.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinksy, trans. Jeff Hamburg (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 160–64.

  40. On drobnost', see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:951–65 and 2:1677.

  41. Nabokov, The Eye (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), introduction (n.p.).

  42. See the analysis in Michael Wood’s brilliant study of Nabokov, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

  43. See, for example, Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks: Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism in His Dramatic Works in Greek Studies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

  44. Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 10.

  45. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 95.

  46. Ibid., 34.

  47. On Čiurlonis and synesthesia, see Dorothee Eberlein, “Čiurlonis, Skrjabin und der osteuropäische Symbolismus,” in Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karin v. Maur (Munich: Prestel, 1985), 340–45.

  48. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 21.

  49. Ibid., passim.

  50. Nabokov, Pale Fire, 194, 226.

  51. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 93.

  52. In Pale Fire, for example, the use of musical metaphors, references, and analogies abound. See esp. 10, 12, 13, 20, 21, 86–88, 100, 103, 105, 150–51, 153–55, 159, 165, 172, 188, 204, 219–20, and 226.

  53. Vladimir Nabokov, “Music,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 332–37.

  54.
Nabokov, Pale Fire, 13.

  55. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 54.

  56. Robert Craft, Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948–1971 (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 10.

  57. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1125–26; Dufour, Stravinski et ses exégètes, 52–86 (Suvchinsky), 119, 138 (Valéry). See also Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  58. Leona Toker, “Nabokov and Bergson,” in Alexandrov, Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, 367–74.

  59. Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 543–44. These are the words of Van Veen, whom I do not assume to be Nabokov.

  60. Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor, 548, 550.

  61. See Natalie Reitano, “Our Marvelous Mortality: Finitude in Ada, or Ardor,” Criticism 49/3 (2007): 377–403.

  62. See Vladimir E. Alexandrov, “Nabokov and Bely,” in Alexandrov, Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, 358–66; on Bely, see Ada Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Roger Keys, “Bely’s Symphonies,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 19–59; Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and John E. Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900–1920: Art and Culture (New York: Vendome Press, 2008), 89–91, 208–13.

  63. Andrey Bely, “The Art of the Future (1907),” in The Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, ed. and trans. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 198–202.

  64. Ibid., 202. Two Years later, in “The Magic of Words,” Bely wrote “either life must be transformed into art or art must be made living.” In Cassedy, Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, 100.

  65. Bely, “The Magic of Words,” 93–96.

  66. Ibid., 100. On art and science in Nabokov, see Leland de la Durantaye, “Artistic Selection: Science and Art in Vladimir Nabokov,” in Transitional Nabokov, ed. Duncan White and Will Norman (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 55–66.

  67. Bely, “The Magic of Words,” 103.

  68. Ibid., 110.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Bely, “The Principle of Form in Aesthetics (1906),” in Cassedy, Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, 205.

  71. Ibid., 208.

  72. Ibid., 208–9.

  73. Ibid., 209–10. Bely’s writing on Pushkin and on rhythm in Pushkin’s poetry appear to have been influential. See “Lyric Poetry and Experiment (1909), in Cassedy, Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, 222–73; and Bely, Ritm kak dialektika i “Mednïy vsadnik” (Moscow, 1929)—this book makes a cameo appearance in The Gift.

  74. There are parallels between Bely and Bergson’s notion of “vital” creative moment and both men’s engagement with science. Bely, “Lyric Poetry and Experiment,” 225. A telling example of Nabokov’s obsession with the precision of language and its parallels in the conduct of science is the episode about Fyodor’s father in chapter 2 of The Gift. Nabokov writes there of the dangers of “secondary poetization which keeps departing from that real poetry with which the live experience of these receptive, knowledgeable and chaste naturalists endowed their research” (139).

  75. Ibid., 232.

  76. Ibid.

  77. Andrei Bely, “The Forms of Art,” in The Dramatic Symphony, a Novel, with an Essay: The Forms of Art (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 175. Dramatic Symphony is translated by Roger and Angela Keys, the essay by John Elsworth.

  78. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 44.

  79. Bely, “The Forms of Art,” 178.

  80. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 53.

  81. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 78.

  82. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 53–54.

  83. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 45.

  84. See the discussion in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:820–48. See also Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to Stravinsky and Beyond (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 119–46.

  85. In Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London: Faber & Faber, 1975).

  86. D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900, ed. Francis J. Whitfield (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 102; see also Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature.

  87. There are many sources for Nabokov’s veneration of Pushkin; see for example, in The Gift, 148–49. See also Sergei Davydov, “Nabokov and Pushkin,” in Alexandrov, Garland Companion to Nabokov, 482–95. It should be noted that Nicolas Nabokov’s elegy in three movements for high voice and orchestra of 1964, The Return of Pushkin, used poems translated by Vladimir Nabokov. See Nicolas Nabokov, The Return of Pushkin (Bonn: M. P. Belaieff, 1966). The texts are given in Russian, German, and English. The presumption is that both the German and the English versions are credited to Vladimir Nabokov.

  88. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 97. See also Jonathan Cross’s essay in this volume.

  89. See Simon Karlinsky, “Igor Stravinsky and Russian Preliterate Theater,” in Pasler, ed., Confronting Stravinsky, 5; Martha Hyde, “Stravinsky’s Neoclassic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 107–9; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:1549–585.

  90. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 98. See also Stravinsky’s unpublished program note about Mavra in “Who Owns Mavra? A Transnational Dispute,” in this volume.

  91. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 266.

  92. See Bely, “Lyric Poetry and Experiment.”

  93. See Yuri Leving, “Singing The Bells and The Covetous Knight: Nabokov and Rachmaninoff’s Operatic Translations of Poe and Pushkin,” in White and Norman, Transitional Nabokov, 205–25.

  94. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 97.

  95. Ibid.

  96. Karlinsky, “Igor Stravinsky and Russian Preliterate Theater,” 15.

  97. Boyd construes John Shade’s poem in Pale Fire as “a deliberate challenge to Pound and Eliot.” Boyd, Nabokov: The American Years, 439, and Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 43. See also Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber, 1968), 58–59, 69; Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 127–30; Stravinsky, Themes and Conclusions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 30–31, 109. See also Walsh’s discussion of Stravinsky’s relationship to Boulez in his Stravinsky: The Second Exile, passim.

  98. Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music, 37.

  99. See the interview “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” available on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3fsSL4Bw9w.

  100. See the nostalgic aside in Pale Fire, 188.

  101. See Norman, Nabokov, History, and Texture of Time, esp. 118–29.

  102. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 19.

  103. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, lecture at the University of Zurich. See Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Dem Tod ins Gesicht sehen, a film by Sefan Haupt, Edition Salzgeber DVD D256.

  104. As the Stravinsky letters reveal, he wanted his works performed in Germany until 1940, after the invasion of France. He, like Richard Strauss, thought of himself as better than any regime, and all he appeared to care about was getting his works performed and earning money from them. Stravinsky apparently reacted to America’s entry into the war in 1941 by thinking only about himself and where else he might be able to move. See comment in Tony Palmer’s film Stravinsky: Once, at a Border …, TP-DVD126, Voiceprint Records, 2008.

  Index

  Page numbers followed by n indicate notes; italicized page numbers indicate material in tables, figures, or musical examples.

  Index to Igor Stravinsky’s Works

  Agon, 285

  Apollon musagète (Apollo), 8, 13–16, 14–15, 94, 104, 121, 141, 182, 194, 199, 212, 218n71, n72, 220n94, 258

  Babel, 342

  Baiser de la fée, Le, see The Fairy’s Kiss

/>   Berceuses du chat, 55n27, 64, 212

  Biblical Symphony, 212, 213, 223n142

  Cantata, 277

  Canticum Sacrum, 285, 342

  Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, 121, 141, 182, 199, 218n64, 298

  Chant du rossignol, Le, 29, 31, 35, 42, 149, 189, 172n3, 216n45, 217n54, 234

  Chroniques de ma vie (An Autobiography), 66, 68, 71, 75n45, 143, 147, 177, 180, 182, 196, 199, 205, 206, 215n15, 219n81, 221n114, 265–67, 269n17, 303, 316n162, 319

  Cinq Doigts, Les, 199, 217n52, 313n85

  Cinq Pièces faciles (Five Easy Pieces), 13, 147, 212

  Concertino for String Quartet, 22, 53n11, 188, 313n86

  Concerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks), 212, 275

  Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, 195, 199, 217n48, n51, n53, 218n72, 219n83, 221n109, 258, 259, 275, 277, 313n89, 314n104, n105, 341

  Concerto for Two Pianos, 196, 199, 200, 219n88, 220n92, 288, 296, 313n84

  Danses concertantes, 275

  Divertimento (suite from The Fairy’s Kiss), 141, 145, 152, 162–69, 166–69, 176n89, 195, 215n14, 218n72, 220n94

  Duo concertante, 152, 288

  Etude for Pianola, 42, 147, 149, 214n6

  Four Etudes for Orchestra, 147

  Fairy’s Kiss, The, 8, 145, 153–54, 162, 169, 172n3, 182, 199, 215n14, 220n94, 301

  Faun and the Shepherdess, The, 67, 212, 216n45, 255

  Feu d’artifice, 199, 216n45, 217n55, n56, 256, 298, 326

  Firebird, The, 6, 19n14, 29, 31, 35, 65, 69, 141, 151, 153, 155–56, 188, 195, 199, 205, 212, 216n32, 217n55, n56, 218n72, 220n94, n97, 221n111, n113, 222n118, 256, 257, 260, 264, 268n9, 277, 278, 285, 298, 301, 316n147, 326

  Four Norwegian Moods, 149, 275

  Four Russian Peasant Songs (Podblyudnïe), 63

  Histoire du soldat, L’, 29, 45, 147, 152, 153, 189, 212, 217n48, 258, 259, 286, 293, 310n39

  In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, 5, 288, 313n86

  Jeu de cartes, 141, 182, 212, 220n94

  Mass, 212, 213, 305