Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  For the American Ballet the two evenings, the 27th and 28th of April, were every bit the success Kirstein had hoped for. Stravinsky himself conducted performances which—since the orchestra consisted mainly of Philharmonic players—were probably on a reasonably high level. The Met was packed, the audience smart, the enthusiasm almost tangible, and the financial loss much smaller than might have been feared. Admittedly the press was tepid or worse: the music critics largely negative or condescending, the dance critics equivocal about Balanchine and baffled by the music. One music columnist (Julian Seaman) chose to interpret the lack of anecdote in the choreography as helplessness in the face of such sterile music—music that was “barren of ideas, bleak and meagre, and occasionally downright cheap.”48 He liked only Sharaff’s designs, described by another critic as “a green card table whose surface stretched from the proscenium floor to the upper reaches of the backdrop, defying both perspective and gravitation. Upon it, and in front of it, hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs shuffled and dealt themselves.”49 Perhaps significantly, Stravinsky continued to dislike the designs, even in their revamped form, but “greatly admired” Balanchine’s dances.50 One naturally takes this disagreement to mean that Seaman was simply unhappy with the modernisms, such as they were, in the score and the ballet. Ironically, his dance colleague on the Daily Mirror, Irving Deakin, was scathing about the picturesque, figurative elements in Alice Halicka’s settings for The Fairy’s Kiss, which was also on the program in a new production by Balanchine, even though the music obviously cries out for such treatment. Meanwhile, the music critic of the New York American, Winthrop Sargeant, rather enjoyed the new ballet (which “showed Stravinsky in his lustiest and most cleverly vaudevillian manner”), but took the opportunity to inform his readers that Apollo, the remaining work on the bill, “has always impressed this reviewer as one of the most tiresome of all Stravinsky’s scores.”51

  Success or failure, the short “Stravinsky Festival” was a mere stay of execution for the American Ballet. It showed New York what Balanchine was capable of, but it also proved that mainstream opera houses like the Met were no more ready to take ballet seriously on his terms than the Maryinsky had been to accept Diaghilev thirty-six years before. Jeu de cartes was the company’s last new ballet; within less than a year of its premiere the Met terminated their association, and a few months later the company ceased to exist.

  On the 5th of May Stravinsky sailed for Europe on the Paris. Among his fellow passengers was Nadia Boulanger, who had been in the States on a one-month lecture and concert tour, but had also, she told him, been to see a Los Angeles acquaintance of his in Washington, Mildred Bliss. For some reason, Nadia had taken it on herself to arrange a commission for her composer hero, whether because of some hint he had himself dropped or through an unprompted rush of sympathy for his difficult and deteriorating family circumstances.52 The Blisses had authorized her to convey to him a request for a new chamber-orchestral work to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary the following year, and to be performed in their Georgetown mansion, Dumbarton Oaks. The fee would be two thousand five hundred dollars.53

  Stravinsky could see at once that this was a reliable and manageable commission: neither a casual offer which depended on the caprice of some film mogul nor, on the other hand, a major commitment of the kind Katya had persuaded him against. The suggestion was for a work “of Brandenburg Concerto dimensions,” which implied a small orchestra and no more than fifteen minutes of music.54 Unfortunately, though actually now feeling much better and hardly coughing at all, he was still under strict doctors’ orders. “I’m feeling very well but very bored,” he told Dagmar. “I’m not allowed to smoke, not allowed to do any music, have to go to bed early, lie down a lot … a nice life, eh?”55 Then, scarcely was he out of bed from what he assumed to be a stomach infection at the start of June than he had to step in at short notice and conduct the Symphony of Psalms in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in place of Monteux, who was himself ill.56

  But he was growing restless, having done no serious composition for six months. Was there, he asked Nadia—who was conducting on the same program—any firm news from Washington? Another intriguing possibility had come up at a recent meeting in Paris with Leonid Massine, who was trying to raise American money for a commission for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. They had been talking about Shakespeare, and in particular the comedies; Massine favored Much Ado About Nothing. But Stravinsky now proposed an altogether richer concept which he had already, as with Jeu de cartes, “handed to a very gifted young writer to work up.”

  It has to be something like a monument to Shakespeare, a kind of choreographic action inspired by a series of his tragedies—“Shakespeariana” perhaps, with a speaker narrating to the audience the course of the action, act by act or scene by scene. I’m only a bit cross that in the phrase in your letter—“as soon as there’s something positive on this, I’ll let you know at once, and very much hope this project will come off”—I don’t sense the necessary confidence in my participation in your new and interesting affair …57

  But Massine never did find the backing he needed for this remarkable scheme, which would have combined certain aspects of Stravinsky’s past—the Cocteau narrator, the Diaghilev salad—with ceremonial elements that would surely have interested Balanchine and Kirstein. Two months later he despairingly suggested that Stravinsky might like to write the piece anyway “in his spare time,” a commodity that, alas, played little if any part in the calendar of Stravinsky’s life.58 By this time, in any case, he had begun composing his Washington concerto, and though he probably visited Massine on his private island off Positano in September, the ballet idea quietly died.59

  There now began what he later described to Kall as the “terrifying summer” of 1937.60 For the first time for six years they were renting a house in the country, in the village of Monthoux, above Annemasse in the Haute-Savoie: a minor château, the former residence of the bishops of Annecy, but now run as a pension by a somewhat decrepit-looking and none-too-well-groomed Russian prince and his wife, who themselves did the cooking and—so far as it was done at all—the cleaning. The château stood peacefully in its own little park, with the village church on a low knoll behind, and to one side a dignified but less grand building which, it turned out, housed the ancient episcopal library. Here, amid the calf bindings and illuminated parchments, the composer promptly installed himself and his piano, and he was soon hard at work.61

  They were a sickly party, the Stravinskys, that summer, but with the exception of poor Milochka Belyankin they were at least complete. For Igor that was the point. He could bury himself in his composing and rage if he was disturbed. But when he emerged from his studio, he wanted to know that the whole tribe was assembled. It was the instinct of the patriarch, but it was also the natural anxiety of the husband and father who sensed that at any moment fate might start picking his family off like so many homesteaders surrounded by wolves. And this was no mere fantasy. Katya’s lungs were getting worse, despite the supposed benefits of the air at six hundred meters. His own were, perhaps, slightly improved; but instead his doctor had now found scarred ulcers in his stomach and intestine and had slapped him straight back onto a severe diet. Part of the trouble was that the Stravinskys had too many doctors specializing in too many ailments, real or imaginary. In Paris they had fallen into the clutches of a Russian “healer” who had prescribed cigarettes for the nonsmoking Anna’s giddiness and breathing exercises for Katya’s tuberculosis. At Monthoux a doctor from Annemasse cast a baleful eye on the dietary arrangements in the château kitchen, took one look at Katya, and without hesitation packed her off to Sancellemoz. Mika, however, was nowhere to be seen. When the doctor had left, Denise found her hiding in her room. She had started to cough again.62

  As the summer advanced, the composer became miserably aware of the thickening cloud that hung over his family. Reporting to Cingria on Katya’s declining health, he confessed to being “worried an
d unhappy” about it.63 “One day, two days, she is better, then three days less good,” he told Sam Dushkin, in a letter whose edgy and querulous tone reveals as much as its contents about the strain he was under.64 For him, of course, Monthoux was by no means pure holiday. He was already writing the Washington piece, while grumbling to Sam about the Blisses’ delay in paying the first installment of his fee; and he was mulling over a short homage to Ramuz for his sixtieth birthday the next year, based on a charmingly whimsical poem supplied by Cingria under the title “Petit Ramusianum harmonique.”65 Nor was all his business correspondence with or about America. He was soon also involved in an exchange with Werner Reinhart about a possible German edition of Chroniques to be brought out by Atlantis Verlag in Zurich; and there was much to-ing and fro-ing with Strecker and with agents in Frankfurt about Jeu de cartes and possible winter concerts in Germany. As before, he seemed quite blind to political realities in that country, even though at this very time he was pasting up his scrapbooks with newspaper cuttings of Nazi leaders in comic poses, which he embroidered with rude captions.66 When the Chroniques translation arrived in mid-August he instantly noticed that cuts had been made (in his satirical description of Bayreuth and in a passage praising Jewish violinists), and though he knew perfectly well why, he pretended that the problem could be solved by footnotes referring to the uncut French edition.67 No doubt, the fact of the memoirs being available in Germany at all was a sign of Stravinsky’s rehabilitation there.68 But he was still finding it hard to accept how qualified that rehabilitation would have to be.

  Meanwhile, in his episcopal library at Monthoux, he was once again “inside the whale,” mentally insulated from the quotidian world. Sitting at the piano he had had brought up from Geneva, he played Bach and gradually evolved the intricate rhythmic and contrapuntal style of the first movement of the brilliant E-flat concerto grosso that would be his response to the Bliss commission. He must still have had the Third Brandenburg Concerto, which he had conducted in Cleveland in February, buzzing round inside his head. The reference at the start of his own concerto is unmistakable, though short of actual quotation; and there are other hints later on. But in reality the music owes not much more to Bach than its starting point—the idea of a pair of melodic figures very closely worked against versions of each other and with a strong metric impulse which Stravinsky, unlike Bach, varies at the dictates of his increasingly subtle melodic alterations. The first movement is not very long, and is lightly scored for a fifteen-piece chamber orchestra only passingly related to any of Bach’s (with clarinet but no oboe and, above all, no kind of keyboard continuo). Yet the craftsmanship is so refined that it may well have taken him at least his seven weeks at Monthoux to write it. Many composers would be happy to produce in a lifetime anything as exquisite, for instance, as the little fugato halfway through the movement.

  When Katya moved to Sancellemoz at the beginning of September, Igor and Milène went with her, but stayed only a night or two before descending gloomily to their château, leaving her to the all-too-familiar sanatorium round of thermometers and injections and short, slow constitutionals. Igor was due in Venice to conduct Jeu de cartes at the Biennale on the 12th. So Monthoux came to its scheduled end, the family returned to Paris, and Igor climbed into the Turin sleeper at Geneva on the 7th. In Venice he would be meeting Vera, and afterwards they would head south for a holiday in Positano before depositing him again at Sancellemoz at the end of the month.

  The 1937 Venice festival was the brainchild of Stravinsky’s old friend Alfredo Casella, himself a keen Fascist yet touchingly optimistic about the prospects for modern music under the Duce’s increasingly pro-Nazi dispensation.69 Casella prided himself on having eliminated from the festival “all those mediocrities who had previously infiltrated the programs,”70 and though this tactic inevitably got him into trouble with the nonentities in question, it was true that the 1937 program was strong. For instance, Stravinsky conducted his new ballet (its European premiere) plus the Divertimento in a Teatro Goldoni concert (12th September) which included Markevitch’s Flight of Icarus as well as Milhaud’s Suite provençale and Vittorio Rieti’s Second Piano Concerto (played by Marcelle Meyer), works which would soon effectively be outlawed by the anti-Semitic legislation of 1938.71 Earlier on, festival audiences (possibly including Stravinsky) had heard Bartók’s recent, masterly Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Schoenberg’s Suite, op. 29, Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé, and the Third Piano Sonata of Szymanowski, who had died of tuberculosis in March.72 Italian public life still preserved an aristocratic, royalist façade, and in the interval of his own concert Stravinsky and the other composers taking part were presented to Princess Maria of Piedmont in her box. The next day he and Vera headed south.

  The lure of the Amalfi coast, apart from its climate and scenery, was an invitation from Mikhail Semyonov, the former St. Petersburg critic who had been a member of Diaghilev’s entourage in Rome in 1917. Semyonov had bought and renovated a tumbledown mill near Positano, where he lived with his mistress and entertained visiting Russian artists and intellectuals. It was said that he was in the habit of sitting naked on his terrace soaking up sun and communing with nature, with, always to hand, “a wine-bottle of industrial dimensions—also for his health.”73 Into this world of cultivated debauchery, Igor, Vera, and Ira Belline—who had come down from Paris to join them—slipped without effort, and only fled back to Naples and Rome when the weather became inimical to sunbathing. Whether the conversation suited them as much will have depended on how far it touched on politics. “Forgive my pressing you [to invite Ira],” Stravinsky had written to Semyonov, “but I regard you more as family than as a kind, like-minded acquaintance, even though you might be considered a ‘leftist,’ which can’t be said of me, since those who know me well realize that I have no truck with that world.”74 Katya was more prosaic. “However tempting it may be to lie in the sun on the beach, I hope you won’t, as it could be very bad for your lungs, liver and nerves. Perhaps there’s a big rock where you can lie in the shade …”75 She wanted him to spend some of his Venice concert money in Rome, on a new coat, in case the weather turned cold.76

  Back in Sancellemoz, Stravinsky wrote on 29 September to ask Strecker if he had heard anything about Ansermet’s performance of Jeu de cartes in Vevey two days earlier.77 But he had the date wrong: Ansermet was conducting the work for the first time in October, with the main Geneva performance on the 27th. On the 12th he wrote to the composer suggesting that to play the ballet complete in a concert risked baffling the ordinary listener, and proposing cuts that would reduce the score by a third but give it a more comprehensible symphonic form.78 Stravinsky’s response was curt. “What particularly astonishes me,” he replied, “is that you should try to convince me personally to make cuts in it, me who have just conducted this work in Venice and have told you with what pleasure the audience greeted it … I don’t really think that your audience is less intelligent than the one in Venice.”79 Meanwhile, Ansermet had already written countermanding his request. Having played the music through at rehearsal, he said, he was convinced. Nevertheless, he still wanted to cut some fifty-eight bars of the March.80 Stravinsky, by now in London (where he had himself just conducted Jeu de cartes “without cuts” at a Courtauld-Sargent concert in the Queen’s Hall), wrote back in a fury:

  The absurd cut you ask for cripples my little march, which has its form and structural meaning in the composition as a whole … But you’re not chez vous, my dear, I had never said to you—“Here you are, have my score, do what you like with it”—I repeat, either you play Jeu de cartes as it is or you don’t play it at all.81

  This dressing down, relatively mild though it was, was more than Ansermet could endure. In an eight-page letter of circuitous and sometimes obscure philosophical reasoning—which in tone, if not tendency, somewhat anticipates his massive postwar “proof” that atonal music was an affront to human consciousness82—he attempted to justify what, on the most gener
ous view, was an untenable position. In the end he seems to have irritated himself by the impotence of his own arguments, and the letter ends with an outburst of righteous indignation which seems frankly calculated to put an end to their twenty-five-year friendship.

  Insofar as you put up with others conducting your works, they will inevitably acquire a conviction about them equal to yours, and you are in no position to treat them as mindless or imbeciles. And if I can’t discuss questions like these with you on a plane of mutual confidence, and without being received with your brutalities, it would be better to bring this conversation, as you say, to a full stop.83