As might have been expected, Stravinsky’s Russian origins and recent naturalization were soon being canvassed against him. Somebody dredged up a law—passed in July 1934, only a few weeks after he had become French—whereby foreign-born citizens were not permitted to hold state-paid office for ten years after their naturalization. But was an academy fauteuil an “office” in this sense? Academicians received an annual stipend of six thousand francs, but that was an honorarium and imposed no duties. For the most part, the Parisian press ridiculed what was self-evidently at best a bureaucratic expedient, at worst an organized attack on Stravinsky’s candidacy; but the question was also widely asked why an artist of Stravinsky’s originality and independence should even want to fit himself into the habit vert—the green uniform which academicians traditionally pass on to their successors—and sit alongside “colleagues the most obscure of whom once wrote [of] Les Noces: ‘Absurd ballet. Absurd music.’”
To want to chomp at the same manger as this colleague you really need a strong stomach, when your name is Stravinsky and you’ve just brought out the second volume of your Chroniques de ma vie—a work so lofty, a work so beautiful, a work as far removed from the academic spirit as it is humanly possible to get. For the fauteuil my money is all on Florent Schmitt … Florent is not academic, but he is inoculated; he didn’t die of the Prix de Rome, and he won’t die of the Institut.34
The nationality issue was quickly resolved in Stravinsky’s favor, though not before his two sponsors had let him know that, in their opinion, it would be fatal to his candidacy, and had summarily urged him to withdraw.35 Of course, this was yet another pretext. With Schmitt on the ballot paper, Stravinsky had no chance, but with Stravinsky there too, Schmitt might very well not win, and that would, for Pierné, be the worst of all possible worlds. Stravinsky was not to be persuaded into so undignified an exit; but in the end it made no difference.36
Schmitt duly won, and Stravinsky was eventually abandoned by all his supporters. In the five ballots on the 25th of January a solid core of a dozen or so academicians voted for Samuel-Rousseau, a composer of exceptional obscurity even by Academy standards, but whose composer father many of them had known. Stravinsky got five votes out of thirty-two, then four out of thirty-three, after which his support switched en bloc to Schmitt, presumably in order to thwart Samuel-Rousseau. Stravinsky was left to nurse his injured dignity in a lengthy apologia printed by Le Jour on the Monday after the ballot, a curious piece in which he takes particular umbrage at the Figaro critic, Guermantes, for having in effect doubted the Academy’s relevance to an artist of his stature. “It naturally isn’t a question,” Guermantes had written, “of despising honors. But there are some works of Stravinsky’s which themselves seem to say no to them.”37 Unfortunately, he also—gently—accused Stravinsky of betraying his youth in seeking such honors. This touched the composer on a raw spot, after the remarks of de Schloezer and others about his concerto. “I’m not ashamed of my age nor at all frightened of it,” he countered:
It’s the age at which Bach composed his best cantatas, Beethoven his last symphonies, and Wagner—whom I mention to please the Wagnerites—his Mastersingers. There’s nothing more odious than the shameful grovelling of the old before the young, their criminal flatteries, dictated above all by the fear of seeming out-of-date. Do these old folk consider the cruel deceptions they lay up for the young when, egoistically, instead of guiding them, they shower praise on them one day, only to drop them the next? There’s no merit in being young. It’s a state, and a passing one. As Goethe said, the great art in life is to survive.38
FEW CAN have doubted that Stravinsky would survive as a composer. But as a performer his prospects, in Europe at any rate, looked bleak. In the eight months of 1935 after his return from the U.S.A. he had only four orchestral concerts, compared with thirty or so in the whole of 1930. The Salle Gaveau lecture-recitals in November were his only Paris engagement. Germany was a complete blank, in spite of Strecker’s best efforts behind the scenes on his behalf. Even Italy, which was still nominally well disposed to his music, and where, at the end of May, he was again received by Mussolini (as well as by his son-in-law Count Ciano, the minister of propaganda), could offer him only one concert in Bologna and one in Rome; and even that single Roman concert was spoilt by the cancellation of Persephone because Ida Rubinstein had fallen ill, so that Stravinsky found himself conducting a program unlike any other in his entire career, with Petrushka and Firebird topped up by two of Debussy’s Nocturnes (“Nuages” and “Fêtes”) and a memorial performance of Dukas’s Apprenti sorcier.39 As for the gramophone, his six-year Columbia contract had come to an end with the London Les Noces and Paris Ragtime in July 1934, by which time falling profits had led to a merger of Columbia and HMV, and such generous deals were no longer on offer to commercially risky composers like him. Instead Polydor, the export wing of Deutsche Grammophon, booked him and Dushkin to record the Violin Concerto as a one-off project in the Salle Pleyel at the end of October 1935. This was to be almost his last Paris recording, and his last anywhere for practically another two and a half years.
Since 1928, when the world economy had seemed relatively secure and record companies had felt bullish about the prospects of electrical recording, a great deal had changed in the marketplace, and Stravinsky had changed with it. These days he was openly skeptical about the value of armchair listening, whether through the gramophone or the radio. He still maintained that his recordings could be treated as documents of his intentions, and he still routinely recommended them as guides to would-be performers of his music. But he made no secret of his dislike of the “on-off switch” mentality bred by mechanical transmission and reproduction. “Indeed, it is in just this incredible facility,” he wrote in the second part of his Chroniques, which was just going to press as he recorded the Violin Concerto,
this lack of necessity for any effort, that the evil of this so-called progress lies … The radio has got rid of the necessity which existed in Bach’s day for getting out of one’s armchair. Nor are listeners any longer impelled to play themselves, or to spend time on learning an instrument in order to acquire a knowledge of musical literature. The wireless and the gramophone do all that … For the majority of listeners there is every reason to fear that, far from developing a love and understanding of music, the modern methods of dissemination will have a diametrically opposite effect—that is to say, the production of indifference, inability to understand or appreciate or to undergo any worthy reaction.40
Probably as he contemplated the apparent decline in interest in his own work, and its failure to excite the old enthusiasm even among sympathetic connoisseurs, he was tempted to see himself as an early victim of the more-equals-less culture, though in his heart he knew perfectly well that the trouble lay much deeper, in circumstances beyond day-to-day commercial control. He did not yet understand (and in this he was by no means alone) that the problems were or would soon be worldwide, and it seemed only natural to direct his hopes back out over the Atlantic.
The early-1936 American tour was still theoretically on as late as mid-November, but Merovitch’s breakdown that month laid bare a hopelessly underplanned itinerary, and Stravinsky risked losing precious European dates if he delayed cancellation any longer. In any case, he now had other irons in the fire. There was talk of a South American trip in the (northern) spring of 1936; and there was also the possibility of a ballet commission for New York the following year, which might entail his presence and could be worked into a more carefully planned concert tour with a new agent. Meanwhile he could accept concerts in Italy and Spain for the coming early spring, and Strecker might even engineer some German performances of the new concerto.
In the six years since Diaghilev’s death, Stravinsky’s sole creative contact with staged ballet had been in the hybrid Persephone, a work which—even had Diaghilev lived—would hardly have done much to restore their good relations, so damaged by that earlier Rubinstein piece, The Fairy�
�s Kiss. The summer before Persephone, George Balanchine had tried unsuccessfully to reestablish himself in Paris as a star ballet master and choreographer, through a short-lived company called Les Ballets 1933, which the English millionaire-aesthete Edward James had sponsored as a vehicle—or more precisely a bait—for his unfaithful dancer wife, Tilly Losch.41 Stravinsky had attended the opening night that June, which included the first performance of Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, with Losch as bad Anna, Weill’s own estranged wife, Lotte Lenya, as good Anna, and choreography by Balanchine. What the Russian composer thought of the company as a whole is not recorded, but it hugely impressed a young American enthusiast called Lincoln Kirstein, who also, like James, happened to be rich enough to consider setting up a dance company of his own, and who—unlike him—had felt predestined to leave his mark on ballet, ever since, one day in Venice in 1929, he had stumbled across an Orthodox funeral that turned out to be that of Diaghilev himself.42 Kirstein was tall and gangly, and though he had scratched a few dance lessons from the great Fokine, it was in the cause of elementary knowledge rather than mature practice. He was to remain an intellectual of the dance, but an organizer of a determination amounting to genius, an irascible and impulsive force carried along by sheer passionate energy and love of ballet.
Kirstein had met Balanchine during the company’s brief London run and invited him to New York, and there, at the very start of 1934, they opened the first-ever School of American Ballet—precisely so-called—in a fourth-floor studio on Madison Avenue. More than a year was spent training and refining young dancers who were utterly unused to the intense discipline of professional ballet and who were at first bemused by Balanchine’s freewheeling, highly unacademic method of impromptu choreography. But by March 1935 the American Ballet was deemed ready for its first public New York season, and a few months later the still immature company was—somewhat to its own astonishment—invited by the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Edward Johnson, to be the house’s resident ballet troupe. It must have been at about this time that Kirstein or, more likely, Balanchine conceived the idea of commissioning a completely new ballet score from Stravinsky, exactly as Diaghilev had done for the second season of the nascent Ballets Russes when it became evident that musical arrangements and potpourris were betraying the brilliant innovations in choreography, dance, and design. Early in August Nicolas Nabokov, who had been seeing a lot of Balanchine in New York, wrote to Stravinsky from his summer home in Alsace, mentioning the project and suggesting a meeting in Paris.43 As yet there was no subject and no firm contract, partly because nobody was sure where the money would come from, but mostly because the Met, having appointed the company as an opera ballet, simply had—or said it had—no room in its schedules for evenings of pure ballet.
Curiously, the delay—though not its cause—was also just as with The Firebird. With the premiere of the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos behind him, Stravinsky started sketching what would eventually become Jeu de cartes in early December 1935, before he even knew that his score would be needed.
4
AN ENEMY OF DEMOCRACY
WHILE STRAVINSKY’S past and forthcoming North American tours were to some extent commercial affairs, enabled, certainly, by the support of rich enthusiasts but largely set up by agents or orchestral managers, his first visit to South America, in 1936, was brought about entirely by the passion and energy of one woman, the Argentine writer, editor, and publisher Victoria Ocampo. They had met for the first time in Paris in 1929, through Ansermet, who knew her well from his annual Buenos Aires seasons.1 It was her first visit to Europe since 1913–14, when as a strikingly beautiful and recently married young woman of twenty-three she had sat in the front stalls at the premiere of The Rite of Spring and struggled with the four-hand reduction on the piano in her room at the Hotel Meurice.2 By July 1934, when Stravinsky again ran into her in London, she had long since shed her husband and established herself, to the dismay of her cultivated but traditional-minded family, as Argentina’s most prominent New Woman. She had openly rejected the conventional values of the Argentine governing, land-owning, conquistador class to which she belonged by birth; she had interested herself, in the teeth of provincial disapproval, in the new art and new writing of the twenties and thirties, and in 1931 had founded and edited a literary review called Sur (South) as a vehicle for this enthusiasm. She even built herself a functional, Corbusier-style house in the smart Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo Chico and invited Le Corbusier himself to visit the capital, admire her design, and even consider building more in the same vein along the banks of the River Plate; only, as she laments in her Testimonios, “I couldn’t find people who were enthusiastic enough about Le Corbusier’s projects to risk money on them.”3
In 1934, Victoria’s interest in Stravinsky was focused on two of his own current projects. When he told her about his Chroniques, she at once offered to bring the book out in Spanish at the new Sur publishing house which she had grafted onto the review the previous year; and when they talked about Persephone, she suggested that he come in person to Buenos Aires and conduct it, with her (she was, among other New Womanish things, a trained actress) speaking the title role.4 From the composer’s point of view, her passion for his music was both flattering and useful. She was a woman of formidable personality, charm, and taste; she was clever; but she also had money and influence, and she talked about Argentina as if her mere wanting to arrange things there would be enough to remove all obstacles. True to form, Stravinsky was soon harnessing her energy in his negotiations with the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and it was through her that he eventually met the director of the Colón, Athos Palma, in Paris at the end of February 1936, by which time an intensive spring tour—also involving Rio de Janeiro and the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo—was more or less tied up and Victoria booked for several Persephones. After Ida Rubinstein, Stravinsky was surely sincere when he told his Argentine hostess that he was looking forward to performing the work with her. “But,” he warned, “I shall be pitiless over the coordination of the spoken text with the musical text: aren’t you frightened?”5
Four years before, he had half-planned an Argentine trip with Vera, and there had been a second, quite well-developed project in 1933. This time Soulima would be travelling with him, to partner him in the two-piano concerto, to appear as soloist in the Piano Concerto and Capriccio, and to give recitals on his own account. It was a big opportunity, if not necessarily one to enhance Soulima’s sense of his artistic and professional independence of his father. But it would mean that Igor had a travelling companion, and it would bring vicarious comfort to Soulima’s mother, whose illness, more serious and threatening than in 1932, weighed heavily on Igor’s heart, and probably on his conscience as well.6 In the middle of January, after a four-month respite in Paris, poor Katya was summoned back to the wintry heights of Sancellemoz, like the young man in The Fairy’s Kiss borne away to the Eternal Dwellings by the Ice Maiden. As for Vera, Victoria must have made it abundantly clear that so irregular a companion would never be received by the straitlaced Argentines, and she may even have hinted that she herself already had quite enough social troubles in Buenos Aires—what with her divorce, her independent lifestyle, her notorious taste for modern art and progressive thinking—without adding to them a taint of sexual bohemianism. Vera was thrown into deep gloom by this impending separation, and it initiated the first and probably last serious test of their fifteen-year-old relationship.
Fortunately for Soulima, his father’s touring schedule in the early spring provided several opportunities to polish up his South American repertoire. There were concerts in Italy and Spain and even a trip to the English seaside resort of Bournemouth. Better still, the situation in Germany was looking more hopeful. Strecker had secured an invitation for them to play the two-piano concerto at the “alternative” Nazi ISCM Festival at Baden-Baden in early April, and there was talk of concerts in Frankfurt, where Rosbaud was taking advantage of what the Germa
n press was beginning to call Stravinsky’s “rehabilitation” to arrange a broadcast performance of the concerto complete with introductory talk.7 Strecker took this rehabilitation very seriously—so seriously, in fact, that at his persuasion the composer accepted a thirty-six percent cut in his proposed fee for Baden-Baden, being, as he told Strecker, “very touched by the part you are playing in my reappearance in Germany, this Germany that was always so attentive to my music.”8 Alas for such sentiments, Rosbaud soon found himself under attack from local Nazi elements and was forced to withdraw the Frankfurt invitation. The Baden-Baden performance, on the 4th of April, survived, presumably because of the Nazis’ desire to maintain the international credentials—such as they were—of their alternative festival, a mere four weeks after Hitler’s Wehrmacht had marched back into the officially demilitarized Rhineland. But it was the last time Stravinsky would perform in public in Germany for a small matter of fifteen and a half years.
Frankfurt was not the only casualty of political conditions among his and Soulima’s concerts during these months. After playing the two-piano concerto in Milan in February and in Rome a fortnight later, they were forced to forgo a third concert in Genoa because of what Katya called an “unpleasant occurrence”;9 and then, lo and behold, something similar happened in Madrid a few days later. One can only speculate what these occurrences may have been, but they were probably of a political nature. Spain had gone to the polls on 16 February, and the victory of the Popular Front was followed by violent incidents, in Madrid and elsewhere, provoked almost equally by the defeated right-wing Falange and by various amnestied political prisoners of the Left. In fact, such was the popular turmoil in Spain—and not least in Catalonia, whose nationalist leader, Luis Companys, was among those amnestied—that it may seem surprising that the Stravinskys’ two Barcelona concerts went ahead as planned on 12 and 15 March. But the atmosphere as Igor experienced it—or at least as he reported it—was calm, despite Katya’s fears to the contrary.10 “As always,” he assured Charles-Albert Cingria in a Paris radio interview a week later, “in a country where something is happening, one notices absolutely nothing. Appearances in the street were completely normal.”11 Cingria, who had been summarily arrested and imprisoned without trial by Mussolini’s police in Rome ten years earlier, might well have muttered something under his breath about his friend’s powers of observation.12 But Stravinsky was in any case probably not being altogether candid. He must himself have witnessed, or at least been aware of, the huge popular demonstration in Rome that greeted the Italian victory at Mount Alaji in Ethiopia at the end of February. Katya had seen a picture of the celebrations in Paris-Soir and was sufficiently struck by the spectacle to mention it in a letter to her two travellers.13 But Igor’s instinctive reaction to such manifestations was to will them out of existence, surely realizing that they boded no good for the general peace and quiet he so valued. He still admired Mussolini enough to present him with an inscribed copy of the second volume of Chroniques together with “a small gold medal representing Napoleon and Marie Louise,” but he nowadays knew better than to advertise such gifts, and perhaps it even occurred to him that the Duce’s African adventure was unlikely to benefit the good order of Italian civic life.14 One thing that clearly did not much trouble him—incomprehensible though this may seem to us today—was that unarmed Ethiopian peasants were being slaughtered.
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