Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Would a new, unexpected, more vivid Stravinsky emerge? That least of all. “As I read these Chroniques,” Boris de Schloezer reported,

  I seemed to be hearing one of his latest works: clean, precise, dry, and sharp-edged; here and there a little, very little, emotion expressed in carefully chosen, measured terms. In the course of this half-century covered by the two volumes of the Chroniques, there has been the war, the Russian Revolution, communism; our whole existence, our whole intellectual and moral life has been turned upside down; of these events, one catches no echo in the book, or rather, the author invokes them only incidentally insofar as they have affected his changes of abode or the rhythm of his work.32

  Most, though not all, reviewers were disconcerted by the book’s cool, almost bureaucratic account of a life which, by any normal standards, had been strikingly eventful and diverse. For the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, there did not exist “a more desiccated book than this.

  When the author speaks to us about emotion, about the distress he felt in this or that situation, for example on the death of his father, we take his word for it. But nothing of such emotions has passed into this chronicle, in which one will find only factual information together with a few instructive professions of faith.33

  Marcel speculates that Stravinsky is practically incapable of communicating with his own inner self; and he cites the composer’s remark (about The Rite of Spring) that he feels “absolutely unable, after twenty years, to recall the feelings which animated me when I wrote that score.”34

  It is clear to me [Marcel goes on], that Stravinsky tends to set up as a general rule a deficiency that is personal to him: the absence of affective memory, that affective memory which not only appears in Tolstoy or Proust, but which, I am personally convinced, is a principle of the majority of authentic musical masterpieces.

  So for the lay musician-philosopher, as for the professional critic de Schloezer, the book is a direct extension of the music. But for Marcel it merely confirms in words what he has already suspected from the notes: that Stravinsky is artistically defective, inauthentic, and—not to mince words—bankrupt.

  Had Marcel been more sympathetically disposed to Stravinsky’s music, he might have made more critically constructive use of a shrewd initial observation. A casual reader of the Chroniques could well simply have assumed that their chilly uncommunicativeness was the natural tone of the musician ill at ease with having, for once, to express himself in words, even if he might also have noted with a certain disquiet that, in what was to become the most notorious passage in the book, Stravinsky insists that music itself is “by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.…”35 After all, if Stravinsky preferred to keep his feelings (and by extension his more intimate thoughts) to himself, did that necessarily mean he was a bad composer?

  But Marcel’s point about affective memory is much more suggestive in relation to the music than he seems to have realized. When we listen to a classical symphony, memory plays much the same essential role in our understanding of the discourse as it does when we read a novel by Jane Austen or a poem by Keats. But with Stravinsky, even when he adopts so-called classical forms, one often feels that something different is taking place in relation to the passage of events. Although this is hard to describe precisely, it sometimes does seem as if the sounds and ideas are isolated incidents without a past or a future in the usual narrative sense but with an exceptionally intensified present. They are like greatly expanded instants, looked at, perhaps, in a succession of different ways, like a series of photographs of one object in changing lights, but seldom with that sense of moving toward a dimly perceived conclusion that one gets with, say, a motion picture or a story. Memory, as a tool for understanding the past and the present or predicting the future, seems to play a much reduced role. Sequence becomes more arbitrary, less rational or logical. While the music explodes like an expanding universe, time stands still.

  Stravinsky himself was to take up “time” and examine it more systematically, under the influence (especially) of contemporary French thinking, in his Harvard lectures four years later. Since then the question of time in his music has been widely and earnestly discussed, and books about musical time have ignored him at their peril. If Stravinsky’s music, as is often said, created a new sensibility, then time—past, present, and future—was the main medium through which it did so.

  However, there is little of any of this in Chroniques, beyond a few hints, and a certain psychological and emotional detachment for which one of the leading French philosophers of the day hit on an explanation that happened to be provocative. In point of fact, the things supposedly remembered in the autobiography are often either commonplace or emblematic, and there is hardly any affectionate penetration into the remembered past, not because Stravinsky was incapable of such a thing, but because he had neither the time nor the inclination to get so involved in the process of writing. Similarly, the artistic revelations and descriptions of method in the book are disappointing and on the whole evasive, simply because he did not care to discuss the creative process with strangers or even, by this time, with close acquaintances. The portraits of friends and collaborators are thin and for the most part ritualistic. Nearly everybody comes well out of the book, while those like Arthur Lourié who, for personal or artistic reasons, happened to be out of favor in 1935, are mentioned either not at all or only in passing. There is an obvious reason for this. Stravinsky was a hardworking artist in a swiftly contracting market, and he could not afford to be on bad terms with those whose goodwill he needed. The most rounded portrait is of Diaghilev, who was dead; the most disparaging is of Nijinsky (as choreographer), who was safely out of circulation in a Swiss mental hospital.36 Early collaborators like Benois and Roerich found to their surprise that their part in the creative process had been conveniently forgotten or trivialized. Benois, for instance, is mentioned only as the designer of Petrushka and The Nightingale, never as (in any sense) their co-scenarist, while Ramuz and Cocteau get better recognition presumably because their contributions had been textual, published, and therefore beyond denial. Meanwhile, influential conductors like Koussevitzky and Monteux are praised, blandly or otherwise, despite past bloodlettings. Koussevitzky must have been quite relieved to find himself exonerated for the fiasco of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments: victim, like the work itself, “of circumstances in which no conductor in the world could have made good.”37

  At the time, naturally enough, these and other eccentricities were noticed for the most part only by their victims or beneficiaries, and nobody seems to have minded, either, that Chroniques was so unforthcoming about its author’s family background or his personal and domestic life. After all, he had for some time been playing down the Russian origins of his work, and repositioning himself as a cosmopolitan modern artist with the world as his oyster. These days, if anything, he wrote as a Frenchman. And it was a picture happily accepted by his readers in France and elsewhere, if only because they had got used to it, could be at ease with it, and—to be blunt—knew no better. In the words of Florent Schmitt, Stravinsky’s oldest French friend but one who rated no more (if no less) than a single mention in the book:

  Our catastrophically disordered times put nothing in its proper place. So thanks be to the incomparable musician of Petrushka, the Rite, Nightingale, and Les Noces, for coming forward in person, with all the authority bestowed by his work, to tell us in firm and measured tone the history of that work, constructed from day to day with the patience of genius and in the shadow of the varying fortunes that all life incurs, with the mystery inherent in all creation, but with the simplicity of the greatest beings confronted with that mystery which inheres in all things, which is dominant in art, and which is perhaps its most powerful lever, but not its explanation.38

  Such lofty platitudes may not have been Stravinsky’s style, but they suited his book. They impl
icitly backed up his warning that the reader should not “seek in these pages for any aesthetic doctrine, a philosophy of art, or even a romantic description of the pangs experienced by the musician in giving birth to his creations, or of his rapture when the Muse brings him inspiration.”39 Chroniques is in many ways an opinionated book: it holds forth about conductors, about the gramophone, Bayreuth, expression, interpretation, choreography, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, English musicians, and other matters. But it offers no system and no thesis, beyond that of the artist as arbiter of his own work, and here it is as coherent, as pitiless, and as movingly direct as any of Stravinsky’s musical works. “At the beginning of my career as a composer,” it concludes,

  I was a good deal spoiled by the public. Even such things as were at first received with hostility were soon afterwards acclaimed. But I have a very distinct feeling that in the course of the last fifteen years my written work has estranged me from the great mass of my listeners. They expected something different from me. Liking the music of L’Oiseau de Feu, Petroushka, Sacre, and Les Noces, and being accustomed to the language of those works, they are astonished to hear me speaking in another idiom. They cannot and will not follow me in the progress of my musical thought. What moves and delights me leaves them indifferent, and what still continues to interest them holds no further attraction for me.…

  Their attitude certainly cannot make me deviate from my path. I shall assuredly not sacrifice my predilections and my aspirations to the demands of those who, in their blindness, do not realize that they are simply asking me to go backwards.…40

  Only then, in his very final paragraph, does Stravinsky perhaps confirm Marcel’s intuition about his supposed lack of “affective memory.”

  I live neither in the past nor in the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can only know what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.41

  Whatever this may tell us about the composer’s aesthetics, it must rank as one of the most compelling assertions of artistic conscience ever made. However much of the rest of the book Valechka wrote, these final pages were surely the work of the composer himself, pen in hand.

  3

  GRAVES OF ACADEME

  A FORTNIGHT after docking at Le Havre in April 1935, Stravinsky reopened his sketchbook for the two-piano work he had started at Voreppe two and a half years before. There were several substantial fragments of an allegro movement, but little evidence of structure or continuity, and even now he could not give the music his full attention. Not only was his entire family, it seemed, either sick or lovesick, but he had somehow managed to punctuate the month of May with a trip to Copenhagen and a pair of concerts in Bologna and Rome. Not until June, after a brief visit to Katya at Sancellemoz, could he properly clear his desk and start turning the jigsaw puzzle into a piece of music,

  More than twenty years had passed since he had told Romain Rolland, at Vevey, that he disliked Beethoven, and thirteen since he had rebuffed Proust on the same topic. These days he sided firmly with the angels against “the stupidity and drivel of fools who think it up to date to giggle as they amuse themselves by running [Beethoven] down.”1 Of course, the Beethoven he had himself formerly denounced had been less a composer than an idea: at first, a symbol of the German overlord, then later a creature of the Parisian art-loving intelligentsia. And to be fair, Stravinsky was still, in 1935, at war with this tendency of intellectuals to harness the great symphonist to this or that philosophical, social, or political cause. For him, what mattered about Beethoven was the sheer quality of his musical material and the single-minded force with which he molded every ingredient into monumental structures where the purely ornamental played little or no part. This was a strictly creative obsession of Stravinsky’s. Beethoven’s was, in general terms, the kind of music he now wanted to write himself. So Beethoven piano sonatas, borrowed from Soulima’s collection, rang out through the Faubourg apartment, and when pianists like the young American Beveridge Webster came, they would have to play them too.2 A copy of the great man’s death mask was ordered from Mainz, and the Grosse Fuge spun endlessly on the gramophone.3 To combat the difficulty he had had at Voreppe testing the music for two pianos on one, he acquired a Pleyel double piano, like the ones used for Les Noces in 1923, and each day he and Soulima would sit facing each other at this instrument and try out what he had written.4

  The curious thing is that the brilliant, pulsating sonata movement that emerged from the jigsaw puzzle those few June days has only the most generalized flavor of Beethoven or any other classical composer. Stravinsky later claimed to have been studying Brahms as well.5 But here again there was no question of invoking a Brahmsian style as such. What took his eye was Brahms’s way of constructing certain types of music, especially keyboard variations like the solo-piano Handel set (op. 24) or the duo version of the so-called Haydn Variations (op. 56b), which he might equally have used as a model for two-piano writing. Brahms’s variations are severely formulaic and, even at their most complex, still follow the classical idea of a simple repeated pattern with enrichments of texture and harmony. Stravinsky liked this repetitive patterning. One day when Webster was playing Beethoven’s op. 110 piano sonata, Valechka started grumbling about its incessant A-flats. But for Igor that was what was so marvelous, the fact that Beethoven wasn’t afraid to go on and on with the same chord. He was fascinated, too, by the intricate trelliswork of shorter and shorter subdivisions in variation movements like the Arietta finale of op. 111, where the embroidery of very simple ideas generates strange, sometimes conflicting inner rhythms.6

  The Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, as the new piece was called, explores these devices in a completely individual way, and with no trace of pastiche and certainly no musical borrowing. Discreetly, it initiates a new phase in Stravinsky’s work, in which questions of style are more and more subordinated to the overriding force of the musical idea, and any “classicism” in the writing is confined to general concepts of form, the rigorous treatment of thematic material, and an overall severity of manner. It was all a matter of discourse, as the composer tried—with somewhat limited success—to explain to the audience at the first performance a few months later. In a concerto with two equal soloists and no accompaniment, the natural medium for the debate or contest implied by the title was counterpoint—by which he simply meant the close interweaving of themes, without any of the empty pyrotechnics of the typical romantic concerto. Of course, that might mean “no contest,” since counterpoint is an integrative, not confrontational, procedure—which is why fugue, the ultimate expression of contrapuntal thinking, is so rarely found in classical or romantic concertos.7 But the real point was that Stravinsky’s title was simply a convenience, adopted because of a certain “public” quality in the music’s tone that ruled out the other obvious title, “Sonata.” The counterpoint, on the other hand, was an essential part of the conception.8

  After completing the first movement in June, he worked for a full month on the more relaxed and decorative Notturno second movement, then again put the score aside in order to finish off the second volume of Chroniques. Only at the start of August did he get down to the most challenging part of the concerto, a set of variations culminating in a full-blown fugue like the ones at the end of Beethoven’s op. 110 and Brahms’s Handel variations. But whether because writing a fugue for two pianos presented special difficulties or because he was undecided about the shape of the ending, or even possibly because he had not planned a separate variation movement at all, he wrote the fugue first, then the slow Preludio which introduces it, and finally the four preceding variations. He may simply have meant to insert a variation episode between the fugue and its inversion, like the Arioso episode in op. 110, then found that the break in mood was too abrupt—Beethoven’s fugue is broad and reflective, but Stravinsky’s is thrusting and, by nature, unstoppable. At all events, in attaching his variations to the front of the prelude and f
ugue, he “forgot,” creatively speaking, to present the theme, which crystalizes gradually as the variations gather pace and only emerges decisively as a theme in the fugue itself. There is something faintly artificial about this procedure, as if a series of notes were being worked into preexisting music. In places it even suggests Schoenberg and his linear patterns. Nevertheless, the effect of the theme at the start of the fugue is so powerful that one immediately understands what Stravinsky meant when he told Soulima that “it’s much better to wait for the theme.”9

  All this time, Katya was confined to Sancellemoz, and when Igor visited her for his birthday on the 18th of June, Mika went with him and was herself promptly admitted as a patient. Within days, her tuberculosis, too, had been confirmed. So there they were, mother and daughter, caught in that strange upper world so hauntingly described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain. The huge modern hospital occupied its own slope looking away from the plateau toward the low, wooded mountain known as the Prarion and, beyond, the massif of Mont Blanc. From that side it was like Mann’s Sanatorium Berghof, “with so many balconies that from a distance it looked porous, like a sponge.”10 Already it was one of several similar establishments dotted around the wooded slopes on the northwestern side of the Arve Valley, each with its own specialisms, but each depending on the virtues of pure mountain air and water; clear, direct sunlight; clinical hygiene; and a remote, monotonous regime to alleviate the various symptoms of infected lungs, strained nerves, arthritic joints, and other perils of modern and not-quite-so-modern urban civilization. You could sit on your balcony or walk in the woods that ran right up to the hospital grounds; you could sleep or read or write letters. You could even at a pinch be allowed out for the night. But in practice, patients—then as now—were expected to obey doctors’ orders, lead a quiet life, and adhere to strict rules. In the sanatorium the doctor was god, and his edicts and diagnoses were spoken of with the awed gratitude of doomed acolytes. The residents resigned themselves to indefinite stays relieved by frequent assurances of eventual cure. As Mann’s Joachim Ziemmsen warns his cousin: “Wait a bit. You’ve only just come. Three weeks are nothing at all, to us up here—they look like a lot of time to you, because you are only up here on a visit, and three weeks is all you have. Get acclimatized first—it isn’t so easy, you’ll see.”11 At Sancellemoz, time stood still, and so, it sometimes seemed, did the condition of its inmates.