ALSO BY STEPHEN WALSH
Stravinsky: A Creative Spring
Russia and France, 1882–1934
The Lieder of Schumann
Bartók Chamber Music
The Music of Stravinsky
Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex
For Mary
Towards great persons use respective boldnesse.
—GEORGE HERBERT
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Entr’acte: A House Divided
1. A Gentle and a Free Spirit
2. The Poet of Montparnasse
3. Graves of Academe
4. An Enemy of Democracy
5. Death Deals …
6. … and Wins
7. To the Magic Mountain
8. The Poetics of Survival
9. A House in the Hills
10. To Earn Is Human
11. The Broad Way and the Strait Gate
12. Distant Clashes of Arms
13. Orpheus in a New Guise
14. The Eye of the Needle
15. The Progress Begins
16. A Family Happy in Its Own Way
17. Death of a Prophet
18. The Time-Traveller Comes Ashore
19. Count One, Count Two, Count Twelve
20. Brief Encounter
21. Competition of the Gods
22. An Echo Chamber by Candlelight
23. The Eternal Footman Holds His Coat
24. Talking the Book
25. He Hath Set Me in Dark Places
26. The Pilot Fish at Sea
27. A Strange Concoction
28. Largo al Factotum
29. Sinking the Ark
30. A Guest in His Own Country
31. The Sacre Papers
32. The Sacrifice of Sir Isaiah
33. Smiling for the Camera
34. Final Curtain
35. A Family Affair
36. A Fine and Private Place
37. But None Do There Embrace
Stravinsky’s Works from 1935
Notes
Bibliography
Photo Inserts
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY OF THOSE whose names figure in the acknowledgments for the first volume have been at least as important to the second. In particular I should like to repeat my thanks to the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basle and its expert staff, to the library staff of Cardiff University, and to my colleagues in the Cardiff University Music Department, without whose support—personal as well as institutional—neither volume could ever have been written. The Paul Sacher Stiftung kindly gave me permission to quote from and reproduce a large number of documents and photographs in its possession. The Cardiff Music Department helped me with research money, and I was also supported by research grants from the AHRB and the Leverhulme Trust and by a year’s sabbatical under the AHRB’s research leave scheme. Among the many other libraries and archives to which I am indebted, I should particularly mention the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Department of Special Collections at UCLA, the Butler Library of Columbia University, the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the London Library, the newspaper section of the British Library at Colindale, and the Music Division of the Library of Congress. In addition to those individuals mentioned in the introduction to volume 1, I should like to thank Petra Kupfer and Carlos Chanfón (Paul Sacher Stiftung) and Linda Ashton (HRC, Austin) for their particular and unstinting help.
I have made heavy demands on the time and patience of busy friends and colleagues. Anthony Powers, Arlene Sierra, Mark Almond, Shirley Hazzard, and Colin Slim all read the manuscript, pointed out errors or imprecisions, and suggested improvements. I am deeply grateful to them all. Others who have helped me, in a variety of often extremely substantial ways, are Gilbert Amy, the late Arthur Berger, Thomas Bösche, Pierre Boulez, Marilee Bradford, David Bray, Sally Cavender, Dorothy L. Crawford, Paolo Dal Molin, Teresa D’Arms, Valérie Dufour, Christopher Flood, Anthony Holden, Stephanie Jordan, Charles M. Joseph, Andrew Kemp, Lyudmila Kovnatskaya, William Kraft, Lourdes Lopez, Alan Maclean, John McClure, Russell McCulloh, Noëlle Mann, Belinda Matthews, David Matthews, Edward Mendelson, Carol Merrill-Mirsky, Roger Nichols, Susan Palmer, David Raksin, Nancy Reynolds, Sir Adam Ridley, Julia Rosenthal, Ann Schreffler, Stanislav Shvabrin, Nigel Simeone, the late Leonard Stein, Jonathan Stone, Irina Vershinina, Claudia Vincis, and Jerry and Helen Young. I repeat that these are merely my more recent benefactors, in addition to those already named in volume one.
The second volume has had one major category of help not available to the first. Stravinsky’s own close family, who had initially preferred to distance themselves from the project, changed their minds (as I believe) when they saw that it was not simply a new painting of old pictures. In particular I should like to thank the composer’s daughter, Milène Marion, and place on record the kindness of his late daughters-in-law, Denise Strawinsky and Françoise Stravinsky, in welcoming me to their homes and talking to me at great length about him. The composer’s grandson, John Stravinsky, was no less hospitable, and also gave me a huge amount of material assistance, kept me informed about the emergence of new letters and documents, allowed me to read everything in his possession, and, as in the first volume, allowed me to quote from private letters and copyright materials. Without his support, the first volume could not have been published in its intended form, but the second volume could scarcely even have been written. I am hugely indebted to him and his wife, Dava.
Writings by Isaiah Berlin are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown on behalf of The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust (c) 2004 by The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust.
Extracts from Goodbye to Berlin, Lost Years, and Diaries by Christopher Isherwood, published by Chatto & Windus, are reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Letters of Chester Kallman are quoted by permission of the literary estate of Chester Kallman.
Writings by Lincoln Kirstein are (c) 2006 by the New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations) and are quoted by permission.
Quotations from And Music at the Close by Lillian Libman are copyright (c) 1972 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and are used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Writings by Francis Steegmuller are quoted with the kind permission of Shirley Hazzard Steegmuller.
Extracts from the writings of Dylan Thomas are reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates and Harold Ober Associates.
For permission to quote from other copyright materials, I should like to thank the following: Pierre Boulez, Martin Duberman, the Fondation Internationale Nadia et Lili Boulanger, Leopold Godowsky, Doris Halsey (for the Huxley Literary Estate), Marie Iellatchitch-Strawinsky, Nicholas Jenkins, Milène Marion, Edward Mendelson, Madeleine Milhaud, Daniel Milhaud, Dominique Nabokov, Marie-Victoire Nantet, Oliver Neighbour, Fabio Rieti, Marion Sapiro, Myriam Scherchen, and Jeff Towns.
I reiterate with sorrow my abiding debt to my Moscow colleague, Viktor Varunts, who continued to supply me with Russian-language material from the composer’s and other archives until his tragic death from a heart attack soon after his arrival in New York at the start of a Fulbright scholarship in September 2003. Varunts’s three published volumes of Stravinsky’s Russian-language correspondence are a wonderful memorial to a great scholar, a memorial edged only with the sadness that the two additional volumes that he was preparing survive—and seem likely to remain—only in draft form. I was nevertheless able to make use of the correspondence intended for these volumes, which Varunts had supplied to me before his death, alas without the commentaries and appendixes which adorn the published volumes.
My debt to my wife and family hardly needs stating but is partly and inad
equately expressed in the dedications of the two volumes. Living with somebody else’s obsession is probably even worse than living with one’s own. I can’t thank them enough, and will not try.
When the first volume, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, came out in 1999–2000, my mother was already too poor-sighted to read it. One day, a fairy godfather arrived in the person of Nigel Davis, a High Court judge who, in his not very considerable spare time, did voluntary work visiting the elderly and housebound. He struck up what seemed at the time a somewhat unlikely friendship with my mother, and since then has spent several hours on most Saturday afternoons reading her son’s book to her and (I’m slightly afraid) discussing its contents. I am moved by his kindness every time I think about it, and can only hope that he will not blench at the realization of what still remains. A creative spring: all right. But a second exile? That’s a lot more Saturday afternoons.
STEPHEN WALSH
Welsh Newton, September 2005
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
As in the first volume, I have used my own translations of all foreign-language material for which I have had access to the original texts, but I have again adopted the procedure of referencing published English translations in the endnotes. Reference to a published translation does not mean that I have quoted it in my own text.
ENTR’ACTE: A HOUSE DIVIDED
EUROPE in 1934 was like a fault line in the earth’s crust. Life went on its calm, untroubled way, in the manner of a road that traversed unseen rifts and dormant volcanoes, its course interrupted now and then by smoking crevasses beyond which the tarmac ran ahead to the gray horizon. In Germany, an aged president was succeeded by one younger and more ambitious. In France, riots flared and a foreign king was assassinated. In Vienna, in Munich and Berlin, in Moscow and Leningrad, political murder became almost a daily routine. But for the nameless multitude, life remained a drudgery of the commonplace or worse. The hungry children, one writer observed, “went sniffing to chilly schools to be taught by dispirited teachers on reduced salaries, but still the schools were not closed; the bankrupt railways and steamship lines ran diminished but punctual services; hotels stayed open not to make profits but to mitigate losses; the road traffic lost something of its newness and smartness and swiftness, but still it flowed.” Yet war “was manifestly drawing nearer, in Eastern Asia, in Eastern Europe, it loitered, it advanced, it halted, and no one displayed the vigour or capacity needed to avert its intermittent unhurrying approach.”1
In a first-class compartment of the Paris–Grenoble express one August afternoon, a short, slightly built man of fifty-two was reading with the concentrated attention of someone to whom such journeys—and that journey in particular—were no novelty. Recently come from London, he was returning to his family in Isère, where for some years they had rented a minor château in the little town of Voreppe. Had the train crossed a border, his passport would have revealed him as a Frenchman; but in neither look, dress, nor speech was he exactly French. On the contrary, some element of caricature in his features—the nose, the lips, the ears, all somehow larger and more pronounced than might have been allocated by a strictly equitable Providence—combined with a certain overdone elegance in his tailoring to hint at more remote, Eastern European, perhaps Jewish, origins. He might have been a Baltic count turned bank manager, or one of the myriad Georgian princes and generals who had descended on Paris after the Revolution and reinvented themselves as stockbrokers or impresarios. Actually he was neither Georgian nor Balt, nor had he Jewish blood—a fact of which he had been at somewhat exaggerated pains to inform those to whom such things increasingly mattered in the 1930s. He was pure Slav, a Russian from old St. Petersburg, the great-grandson of Polish castellans and Tsarist Privy Councillors, and, less respectably, a composer whom some radical spirits regarded as the most important of his generation. His latest work, a setting of a neo-Homeric melodrama by André Gide, had horrified well-spoken Frenchmen by its flagrant butchery of their language in the interests of musical character. His own spoken French emerged from somewhere deep in the caverns of the earth, saturnine and slow and by no means always correct.
As so often with exiles, Igor Stravinsky’s personality seemed to mold itself to its environment. The insecurities of his childhood he had learnt to conceal behind a severe expression and a courtly manner. But the severity could at any moment dissolve into a huge grin like a burst of sunshine on a darkened hillside, and the courtliness was no more than a veil for a sharp wit and a vivid sense of the absurd. In Paris, where he had kept a pied à terre for the past fourteen years and where he had recently taken the lease on a large apartment at the smart end of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, he was much cultivated in those circles on the fringes of high society for whom modern art was a chic and preferably not too gloomy accessory of the life of leisure. His mistress, Vera Sudeykina, a charming Russian former actress and occasional theatre costumière, moved effortlessly in this artistic-cum-intellectual milieu, even though she was entirely without means of her own and often had scarcely enough ready cash to feed the electricity meter at her flat in the sixteenth arrondissement. Her husband, long since dismissed, had been a painter and stage designer, and in the time of her fidelity she had drawn up a list of what she termed the “Duties of an Artist’s Wife”: to force him to work, “even with a stick,” to love his work, to inspire in him new ideas, to know his work and keep it in order, to greet each new work with wonder, to know how to contemplate his work, and to be herself physically perfect and “his model forever.”2 She should be, in short, his muse. Exactly how some of these duties would transfer to the art of music might seem problematical, but in essence they remained the same. As far as Paris was concerned, Igor and Vera were, in the vulgar parlance of a later age, an item, but they were also an adornment, a pair who graced the social and artistic stage on which they walked and whose frequently protracted absences from it were regretted.
The other half of Stravinsky’s life—the half toward which he was travelling that August afternoon—was very different in tone. His wife, Catherine (a first cousin whom he had known since he was eight), consciously preserved a family hearth of a specifically Russian character, a kind of dvoryan-skoye gnezdo, Turgenev’s “nest of gentle folk,” a household that included her mother-in-law, her two daughters, now in their early twenties, and two sons (when not otherwise occupied in Paris), together with the children’s old nyanya Madubo Svitalski, and assorted day servants. Here Stravinsky could find the peace and stability he needed in order to compose. Katya understood this need and dedicated her entire effort to satisfying it, notwithstanding her husband’s open infidelity and his despotic insistence that she accept it and even, in certain respects, connive at it. There was about her nothing of the muse; she made inspiration possible, but had no thought of creating it. At the same time she struggled for her children, and tried to make up for the emotional gap left by their father’s lengthy absences, of whose cause they were by now aware. For some years she had suffered intermittent attacks of tuberculosis, a disease apparently inherited from her maternal grandfather by way of her mother, both of whom had died of it. Illness and sorrow had gradually induced in her a spirit of intense piety, which found expression in a constant study of the Orthodox holy book, the Dobrotolyubiye, the frequent invocation of saints, and a growing fondness for sacred relics and images about the house. There was no resident priest at Voreppe, as there had been in the last family home, in Nice, perhaps because of the children’s open distaste there for Father Nikolay Podosenov, with his lank hair, dirty cassock, and revolting table manners, or perhaps simply because, deep in the Isère countryside, there was no Orthodox priest to be found. But you could not be in the house for ten minutes without being aware of the faint odor of sanctity, a whiff of candles and incense, some hint of spirituality in the air.
Stravinsky relished this atmosphere and found it conducive to work, though his own piety was selective and, like his behavior, somewhat irregular. Icons adorned
his piano and a crucifix hung round his neck, but he went infrequently to confession and as a matter of habit attended mass only at Christmas, at Easter, and on his birthday. Religious observance was a personal matter. But he talked much about the life of the spirit and read widely in devotional literature. His art, he considered, was a divine grace. “Why do they blame me for my gifts?” he would say. “They should blame God.” His lifestyle, on the other hand, was his own concern. Each of these different things belonged in a channel of its own, but at the end of each of them was the single thing that mattered most to him: his music. As for his children, he loved them in his own way, worried about them, and bullied them to lead their lives in a manner that suited his view of things, which was, when all was said and done, an old-fashioned, White Russian, autocratic view. It was a view Katya, in her gentle, undemonstrative way, shared, and on this, as on much else, there was little or no disagreement between them. Only on the one big thing did they part company; and for that there seemed to be no cure.
Stravinsky’s divided life was now of thirteen years’ standing and it had settled into a routine. When he was composing, he would go home, shut himself in his studio all morning, appear promptly for meals, spend part of the afternoon with his family, then work on until dinnertime. Sometimes the pattern would be broken by visits of one kind or another, and it would vary in intensity. But in its essential, calming regularity it never changed, for the good reason that he needed it so. Work would be interrupted for long conducting tours abroad or necessary trips to the capital, for concerts, recordings, meetings with publishers, or on some less compelling pretext simply to enable him to be with Vera. Then he would become a rich Parisian, live expensively, keep late hours and intellectually or artistically amusing company, and compose only spasmodically. When he toured, Vera would go as his companion; they would travel first class and put up at the best hotels. As a conductor or pianist he could command high fees because his music had made him not liked but notorious, and audiences came to peer at this unexpectedly diminutive, surprisingly normal-looking creator of musical earthquakes. Unfortunately of late a different kind of earthquake had threatened to disrupt these smooth, lucrative progresses. The political mood in Germany, hitherto the most reliable platform for the newest music, had turned against everything that was modern and foreign; economic conditions to the east had become unstable. Even in France and Italy, where politics and art were still officially on good terms, enthusiasm for the new was tempered by anxiety and the fear of risk. Financial insecurity, the terror of the exile and the torment of the artist, once again roamed the countryside like an immigration officer, demanding to see your passport and your work permit.
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