Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Stravinsky did not deign to reply to this tirade, but instead decorated the letter with exasperated marginalia, then put the whole matter aside. Ansermet duly conducted an abbreviated version of the ballet, cautiously billed as “Music from the Ballet Jeu de cartes,” in his Geneva concert, which was broadcast (“I shall be listening,” Stravinsky had warned him).84 Apart from a formal note from Ansermet sixteen months later, it was to be their last communication for more than a decade.

  The rift is hard to explain on rational grounds. Craft suggests that the quarrel went deeper than the issue of cuts in a single score, but if so there is scant evidence as to the true cause.85 Stravinsky, who had had a desperately anxious few months, certainly reacted jumpily to Ansermet’s request, perhaps aware that his reservations about the work’s abstract form were to some extent justified. On the other hand, Ansermet’s rambling self-defense suggests a growing and somewhat unstable egotism of which there had also been signs in his treatment of his wife and his affair with Elena Hurtado. Just at this time he was beginning to interest himself in questions of musical psychology and aesthetics, and was bringing his old training as a mathematician to bear on the idea that the validity of this or that musical language could be logically demonstrated by reference to the affective structure of the brain.86 But whatever the virtues of this kind of reasoning, it was remarkably naïve to imagine that it would weigh with a composer against the character or design of his own works. It was like trying to prove to a man in love that his feelings were logically unsound.

  Whatever its flaws, in any case, Jeu de cartes had become a good draw for concert bookings. In London Stravinsky conducted it twice that October, and took the opportunity of spending the weekend before the concerts with his old friend Lord Berners at his ancestral home at Faringdon, in Berkshire. (Vera—or Madame Sudeykina, as the eccentric but well-bred English peer insisted on calling her—was with Igor on this visit, and afterwards she sent Berners some dyes for coloring his pigeons.)87 Later that autumn he took the new work to Amsterdam, Naples, and the Baltic capitals Tallinn and Riga, with a public French radio concert in Paris in between.88 One of the many Stravinsky doctors, a certain E. Sobeysky, attended the radio concert and, from his seat, watched Anna Stravinsky, “the only person in the hall who didn’t clap but nevertheless felt very deeply the delight of the audience.”89

  Somehow in the interstices Stravinsky managed to work on the new concerto, finishing the first movement on the 24th of October, and the allegretto second movement by early January. The performance was scheduled for May, but any thoughts he may have entertained of conducting it himself were rapidly fading. Copley had simply not managed to set up a U.S. tour for early 1938, not least because Stravinsky himself had raised so many obstacles; he had refused to accept a symphony commission, and had opposed the idea of any more joint recitals with Dushkin—largely in response to Dushkin’s own grumbles at no longer being recognized in New York as an artist in his own right, but solely as the rear end of a pantomime horse called Stravinsky-Dushkin. In a moment of pure, joyful fantasy, there had been talk of an Australian tour instead. But reality soon triumphed over the mad idea of spending three months on board ship and heaven knew how many weeks on tour to pay for them, with so much sickness at home. In the end he settled for Christmas at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré in the bosom of his ailing family, including Theodore and Denise, who had spent so much money on medicine and doctors for Denise that there was now nothing left. Mika’s temperature was once more the subject of daily bulletins. Katya’s condition continued to worsen. Had his English advanced that far, Stravinsky might well have thought of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (xxix, 1–4):

  With such compelling cause to grieve

  As daily vexes household peace,

  And chains regret to his decease,

  How dare we keep our Christmas-eve …

  Yet the decease, when it came, was outside the family. Three days after Christmas, Maurice Ravel died of a progressive and agonizing brain condition known as Pick’s Disease, which had slowly incapacitated him over the past five years. The two composers had been on comparatively distant, though not unfriendly, terms since Ravel had reacted coolly to Stravinsky’s beloved Mavra fifteen years before. Even so, Stravinsky responded promptly, if in somewhat official tones, to a request from L’Intransigeant for an obituary (“France loses in him one of her great musicians, one whose prestige is recognized throughout the world”);90 he went to view the body, and he attended the funeral in Levallois. Ravel “lay on a table draped in black, with a white turban round his head (which had been shaved for trepanning), dressed in a black suit, white gloves on his hands, arms at his sides. His face was pale, with black brows but an expression of seriousness and majesty.”91 Never in his life did Stravinsky treat death with anything less than a sense of awe.

  As for Christmas that year, he kept only the Western date with his family. On Christmas Eve Old Style, 6 January 1938, he once again left Paris, this time for Rome.

  6

  … AND WINS

  THE ROMAN TRIP, for a radio concert on the 10th of January 1938, had been arranged at little more than twenty-four hours’ notice, and probably Stravinsky accepted only because of a desperate shortage of concert bookings to pay his rapidly growing doctors’ bills. He was grateful, too, that Italy still seemed unequivocally friendly to his music, whereas the German situation—rehabilitation or not—was in practice more and more confused. Strecker was constantly advising him to accept this or that engagement in order to reinforce his position against the influential voices that were speaking out against his music. So when Telefunken invited him to record Jeu de cartes with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra early in 1938, Strecker was insistent that the company’s huge prestige in Germany made the booking unrefusable.1 Stravinsky duly proceeded to Berlin in the third week of February, and on the 21st put onto disc the best but, to the morally and politically sensitive, most infuriating of all his prewar recordings. The question of whether it was or was not ethical to appear to endorse a regime that was openly violating and humiliating Jews like his own daughter’s husband seems not to have occupied him to any noticeable extent. It was more important that the thousand-mark fee would help pay for that daughter’s urgently needed medical treatment.

  Mika had suddenly become so ill in January that she had had to return to Sancellemoz, taking Kitty with her and leaving Yury to struggle on alone with his writing and editing in Paris. Then, toward the end of March, the sanatorium doctors decided that the mountain air was doing her more harm than good and sent her back to Paris, where, as her father wearily informed Strecker, “we shall look after her better and more attentively than in a sanatorium with so many sick people.”2 The atmosphere in the Faubourg had grown tenser and more wretched. “I live in terrible anguish,” he told Dagmar, a month after Mika’s return home.3 Yet, as usual with him, the music he wrote during this unhappy time was innocent of all taint of suffering or self-pity. The middle movement of the E-flat concerto, which he imagined at an appreciably sprightlier pace than is today often adopted, is a cool study in pattern variation, with what feels like a duple-time melody played off against a triple-time beat, and with plenty of internal shifts governed by the changing lengths of the phrases. The finale, though more elaborate and in places more strident, derives essentially from the same kind of thinking. It is music with two overriding attributes: on the one hand, a joyful ebullience that constantly strives to break out of the conventional framework; on the other hand, the sheer benign control that, calmly and without apparent tyranny, prevents it from doing so.

  Stravinsky was spending even more time than usual with Vera, and with those who made up her circle, like Baron Fred, now restored to his former role as courtier-in-waiting, and Arthur Lourié, who was often at lunch or dinner at Vera’s.4 Whatever the earlier difficulty between him and Igor, it evidently had been patched up. Just before Christmas, Stravinsky had sent Lourié a pneu warmly inviting him to call,5 and though the o
ld intimacy was no longer there, relations must have been good or the meetings would simply have been avoided. On the 6th of March, the two friends lunched at Vera’s, two days after Stravinsky had conducted Jeu de cartes and the Symphony of Psalms in the Salle Gaveau and a fortnight before Lourié’s Sinfonia dialectica was down for performance in the Salle Pleyel. Did they talk about each other’s music, or just Stravinsky’s, or did they simply avoid the subject? A month or so later they again dined together; but thereafter there is no recorded meeting. In September Lourié wrote, anxiously seeking information about Stravinsky’s family situation,6 and it must have been at about this time that, in some moment of bitterness or irritation, he let slip to Theodore a few salacious details about Vera’s life in St. Petersburg during the Stray Dog period, when the two of them had shared an apartment with her future husband Sergey Sudeykin and his then wife, Olga Glebova.7 As luck would have it, Igor was at that very time showing resentment at what he saw as Theodore’s excessive attentiveness toward his in-laws, and on the subject of divided loyalties Theodore also had something to say. There were angry phone conversations and on at least one occasion Igor hung up on his son.8 The coolness between them lasted for several months. But the chill that descended on Igor’s friendship with Arthur Lourié never lifted.9

  He and Vera also went to concerts. They would sit with Marie-Laure de Noailles in her box at the Sérénade concerts of the marquise de Casa Fuerte,10 or go to the Salle Pleyel to hear Marcelle Meyer play Rieti’s latest piano concerto. They went to many plays and even more films. They heard Prokofiev play his First Piano Concerto, and dined with him afterwards—the last time, as it turned out, that the two great Russian composers, who had been friends in their violent Russian way for almost thirty years, would meet.11 But they never heard any Stravinsky. It was only a few months since Igor had been grumbling to L’Intransigeant about the neglect of his music in Paris,12 and it was still true that his stage works, especially, were largely forgotten in his home city. The Oedipus Rex in his French radio concert in December was, Boris de Schloezer thought, its first performance in Paris since Diaghilev had put it on in 1927.13 But when Jacques Rouché, the manager of the Opéra, expressed a desire to stage Jeu de cartes in a production by Lifar, Stravinsky rejected the idea out of distaste for Lifar, while tactfully explaining to interviewers that the music was “too recent” and would have to be choreographed by Balanchine.14 In the end Rouché agreed on a “Festival Stravinsky” comprising Pulcinella, The Fairy’s Kiss, and The Firebird, not that it made much difference, since, despite his promise to put these works on by June, nothing of the kind seems to have happened. So after all, the composer’s only conducting was the Salle Gaveau concert in March and his Berlin recording. Just before Berlin, he and Soulima recorded the two-piano concerto for French Columbia, but this too was not issued, and instead it sat in the Columbia archives until 1951.15

  The Washington concerto was at last finished on the 29th of March, dangerously close (considering the distance and the decision to print score and parts in advance) to the first performance, now fixed, Nadia wrote from Philadelphia, for the start of May. Since the composer would not be going to America, Nadia was in charge of all the arrangements, and she would also be conducting the performance. Strictly speaking, the premiere at Dumbarton Oaks on 8 May was a private affair, with a starchy Georgetown audience of wedding-anniversary guests, many of whom will have found the program of Stravinsky alternating with Bach rather heavy going for such a jolly occasion. There was the Duo Concertant, played by Dushkin and Webster; some Bach cantata extracts sung by Hugues Cuénod and Doda Conrad; and then finally Nadia stepped up and conducted the concerto, with Dushkin leading the fifteen-piece band: an efficient rather than invigorating performance, if one is to trust the Washington press, whose authority in the matter of Stravinsky’s latest music was admittedly a trifle suspect.

  Nadia, more demanding and certainly not prone to blow her own trumpet, told Stravinsky that “the Concerto was played honestly, well, really well—and was, I think, understood.”16 The Blisses were of course delighted, and Mildred at once fired off a beautifully ambiguous telegram to the composer: PERFORMANCE CONCERTO DUMBARTON OAKS WORTHY OF THE WORK.17 Admirable work, admirably played, Stravinsky understood; but he was baffled by the title. “It wasn’t Nadia who conducted,” he wrote distractedly to Strecker, “for reasons they don’t give me. Illness? Or was she at the last minute afraid of not knowing the work well enough? According to Mrs. Bliss’s cable it was a certain Dumbarton Oaks who conducted.”18 A few days later, the confusion was explained. Mildred had unilaterally decided that “Concerto in E-flat” was too anonymous a title for a work of hers, so what more natural than to give it the name of the house in whose gracious and lofty music-room it was first performed?19 Stravinsky was happy enough to accede to his patroness’s wishes about the title, though Strecker disliked it “since in both French and German it sounds like the noises of ducks or frogs.”20 But he was not so sure about Dushkin’s idea that he might emulate Bach by writing a whole series of “Dumbarton Oaks” concertos. “Let us not think about all the perspectives that might be opened up by a new Frederick the Great,” he wrote to Strecker, temporarily mixing up his potentates, “but content ourselves with carefully correcting the mistakes (plentiful enough) in the instrumental parts.”21

  Just over a month later, on the 16th of June, Stravinsky himself conducted the European—as well as public—premiere at a Sérénade concert in the Salle Gaveau. Predictably enough, the reaction was very different from the polite but guarded enthusiasm of Washington. On the one hand, a full house of the type that was becoming commonplace for high-profile new music concerts—a mixture of socialites, professional musicians, fellow composers, and progressive, thinking art-lovers—cheered the concerto (played twice) to the rafters. On the other hand, the critics generally excoriated it. Like de Schloezer reflecting on the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, they could not endure the spectacle of a composer whose music had once started riots composing such a lucid, classical, un-shocking piece. “Why does Stravinsky go on writing,” enquired one, “if he no longer wants to say anything?”22 “To see a hall in delirium,” said another, “and to remain insensible to its cause; to understand a perfectly clear work but not to understand the enthusiasm it provokes, is a melancholy and acidulated pleasure.”23 Yet the problem was often one of expectation rather than perception. A fortnight or so earlier, Manuel Rosenthal had conducted a twenty-fifth-anniversary performance of The Rite of Spring, and both the impact and the historic significance of that work were fresh in everyone’s mind.24 How could Stravinsky, of all people, not want to renew his language, preferably with violence, every time he put pen to paper? The disturbing thing about the Concerto in E-flat was precisely that “one hasn’t at all the impression of any question of failure:

  on the contrary, it’s a question of a deliberate limitation, of a quite decided will to abandon all his riches. While keeping a sense of proportion, one thinks of those Brahmans who, on some internal prompting, renounce everything that constitutes the richness of their life and go off, their hands empty, dressed only in an old tunic inherited from a grandfather, along desert paths. This is moving when it simply concerns a human being. But when it’s a matter of creating a musical work, it’s penury taking control.25

  Though damning in intention, this is in itself a not inaccurate account of Stravinsky’s creative aims at this period, and it raises specific questions that he would soon have occasion to elaborate in a nonmusical form.

  The most strident polemics, though, came from Boris de Schloezer himself, who, while claiming that “I would willingly have forgone talking about this Concerto for small orchestra,” in fact reviewed it at some length in three different places.26 Not since the early thirties had de Schloezer bothered to discuss Stravinsky’s new music as such. Instead he aired theories about it. In his Vendredi review of the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, for instance, he had suggested that Stravinsky was these days
content to manufacture his works on the basis of his own expertise and intelligence alone, and no longer had any truck with inspiration, with anything “given.”

  I may be wrong, but I imagine that if Stravinsky were to receive a gift of this kind, he would examine it and check it, so much and so well that he would end up letting it slip. At bottom, on the evidence of his music, he has confidence only in himself and in his prodigious technique, and thus realises in the aesthetic domain a sort of “pelagianism.”27

  Now of the Dumbarton Oaks concerto he wrote that

  Stravinsky has always been a “composer” …; but in the past, in “composing,” he deployed a fantasy, an audacity, a subtlety which, I freely admit, dazzled us. Now he has arrived at the most dismal, the flattest academicism. Yet Stravinsky is playing his role; he remains true, cannot but remain true, to himself, he must obey the diabolical dialectic of his evolution.28

  If such attacks proved anything, it was how right Stravinsky had always been to try to escape from the shadow of his own early works: from the concept of perpetual revolution and the dependably disagreeable which it sometimes seemed they imposed. If transparent, brilliantly made works like Jeu de cartes and the Concerto in E-flat were going to be torn to shreds simply because their lucidity made it appear that they contained nothing new, then the composer would never again be in the position to build on his own mature achievements. Yet it was in many cases precisely the most intelligent and sympathetic musical minds that were thinking this way. Ansermet, having been guardedly critical of Jeu de cartes, was candidly horrified by its successor. “If you insist that I play Stravinsky’s ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ concerto,” he wrote to Reinhart,