Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  A few days later Paris heaved a sigh of relief as the four powers signed the Munich agreement which effectively blackmailed the Czechs into handing the Sudetenland over to Germany. Now all would be well. And for a time there was even a slight lifting of the clouds over the Stravinsky apartment. Katya’s pneumonia eased; Mika was well enough to talk on the phone to Charles-Albert.56 Igor started dining out again and spending time with Vera, walking with her in the Bois de Boulogne or going for late suppers at the Café Weber. Victoria Ocampo and her sister Angelica were in Paris, and Igor and Vera saw them often, including at one disastrous dinner at Vera’s when Victoria aroused Charles-Albert’s fury by speaking condescendingly about his musical judgments, an incident that provoked a storm of wounded indignation in his next letter to Stravinsky.57

  However, the return to social normality proved only a lull. One evening in November, Igor arrived at Weber’s in a state of terrible agitation.58 Mika had had a relapse, and meanwhile he had to leave the next evening (the 22nd) for Rome, where he had a pair of concerts before going to Turin for his E.I.A.R. booking. Perhaps he should have cancelled his trip, but sickness had for so long been a routine in his family that he might as well give up altogether if he was to change his plans every time somebody coughed blood. So off he and Soulima duly set, late on the 22nd of November. It was the wrong decision. Mika was having some good nights and some bad, but the incessant coughing was taking its toll on the rest of her body; she had become horribly thin, ate little, and had difficulty breathing, and her heart was showing the strain. Yury had moved into Soulima’s room, but he could only watch helplessly—the epitome of the loving, unpractical, bookish poet—as his wife drifted away from him. On the 29th her coughing intensified, and it was clear that such suffering could have only one conclusion. At five in the morning of the 30th it came. Igor and Soulima had arrived in Turin when Theodore’s telegram reached them, and not until late in the evening did they get back to Paris. The family was assembled; Mika was still lying on the bed where she had died. Kitty was with Madubo. One part of the long-drawn-out tragedy had ended.59

  Yury Mandelstam was bewildered by his loss. He wrote a poem in Mika’s memory and sent it to his father-in-law.60 Though moved by the poem and by the letter that accompanied it, Stravinsky would not agree to Kitty staying with her father, whom he regarded as too abstracted and unworldly to be a suitable custodian for so young a child. Not surprisingly, Yury took a different view, and there was briefly tension between them.61 But Stravinsky’s patriarchal inclinations were by no means undermined by his daughter’s death, and he would brook no argument. As he explained to Kall, who had written to him in ignorance of his bereavement, Mika had “left us her little two-year-old darling, as well as, unfortunately, her very needy husband, and I cannot refuse to take them under my wing.”62 So Yury was set up in a bedsitter, and little Kitty was dispatched with Madubo to Leysin—of all too significant memory—to live with their doctor cousin Vera Nosenko, who specialized in children’s diseases.

  Mika was buried near her aunt Milochka in the field-cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, and Katya left her bed for long enough to attend. But it was a rare adventure that would not be repeated. Theodore had persuaded his father to dismiss the Russian “healer,” whose mantra that tuberculosis was not an infectious disease was already showing catastrophic signs of being not quite correct.63 The new doctor ordered Katya to the Pyrenees for a fresh variety of mountain air, but she was already, in mid-December, too ill to travel such a distance. At the end of the month, Igor and Soulima hurried back to Turin to give their postponed concert. As for any thought of America, that was now out of the question. Igor had made a few fitful sketches for his symphony, but he was no nearer to a commission or a date for its performance. By New Year the work had not advanced at all substantially, and when Copley pressed him about a tour the following winter he hardly knew what to reply, in view of his wife’s condition.64

  The matter was resolved for him with brutal swiftness. By the end of January, Katya was perceptibly weaker, racked by a relentless and exhausting cough that now threatened to turn into influenza. All through the month of February she lay in bed in the Faubourg, nursed by her family, her mind wandering over her childhood and those happy years of her marriage before illness and grief took up residence in their house. She had been for so long the calm, steady focus of their existence, the one who molded their lives and gave direction to their being while their father excited them with his spasmodic presence, it was natural that her dying should seem no more than a perpetuation. On the 1st of March 1939, a Sunday, Igor quietly slipped away to Vera, and Katya was heard to whisper: “Today I should have liked him to understand me as he has always understood me.” It was their penultimate parting. The next day, at two in the afternoon, discreetly and without fuss as she had always lived, she groaned, leant sideways, and died on Denise’s arm. Igor had called his mother in, knowing the end was in sight. Afterwards he stood alone by the bed for long minutes, gazing at his wife, needing, it seemed, to be still and know.65

  After the funeral service in the alternative Russian church in the rue Boileau and the now-familiar trek to Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Vera Nosenko lined up the whole surviving family in the Faubourg apartment and inspected them one by one with her stethoscope. The diagnosis was shattering. Milène: badly infected—off to Sancellemoz. Igor: badly infected—off to Sancellemoz. Denise: badly infected—off to Sancellemoz. Theodore and Soulima: not so bad. Theodore would naturally go with his wife to the sanatorium, but Soulima was allowed to stay in Paris with Madubo and Baba Anna. They would move into Denise’s mother’s apartment in the rue Antoine Chantin (where Theodore and Denise had been living), while the Faubourg apartment was being disinfected. So, a mere ten days after Katya’s death, Stravinsky drew the shutters and locked the door of his most luxurious but ill-fated home, and set off for the last time to the chilly heights and gloomy balconies of the Plateau d’Assy.66

  ANNA STRAVINSKY had grieved for so many of her family that death no longer affected the severe set of her expression or the perpetual mourning of her dress. She had buried a husband and two sons, a granddaughter and two nieces, one of them her beloved daughter-in-law. She had left another son in Russia. In more than sixteen years in France, she had preserved the dignity and distance appropriate to the granddaughter of a Privy Councillor of Tsar Nicholas I. She had looked on her celebrated musician son and, on the whole, found him wanting. She did not much like his music, and still felt, perhaps, that the law would have been a more civilized as well as more useful vocation. She was somewhat mystified, to say the least, by his social activities, and disapproving of the free and easy ways of his children. Now the world seemed to be preparing to blow itself to pieces. It was time for her to leave. Always the healthiest of the Stravinsky family, she did not deign even now to fall seriously ill as they had done. Instead, with just enough pneumonia to satisfy the registrar of births and deaths, she collected up her frailties, and on the 7th of June, two months short of her eighty-fifth birthday, stoically died.67 It was the last, and doubtless the least, of Igor’s three great sorrows.

  7

  TO THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

  IN ACCOUNTS OF Stravinsky’s life, the tragedies of the nine months that preceded the outbreak of war are passed over in a curiously detached way, like preordained events, a regrettable but necessary condition of his final emancipation from the stifling restrictions of his bourgeois Russian background.

  It seems doubtful that he himself understood things in quite that way, then or for a long time afterwards. This past of his, this home that seemed not quite a home: they were still the focus of his consciousness. When Katya died, he was so distraught that his children heard him sobbing at night, and for the brief time that remained at the Faubourg they took it in turns to share his bedroom and keep him company.1 After his mother’s death, he wrote without false pathos to René Auberjonois from Sancellemoz. “My house, my family is destroyed—I no longer have
anything to do in Paris.…”2 So much for France, for Soulima, even for Vera. Life had for the second time in a quarter century taken its secateurs and snipped him off at the stem; and when a growing plant is cut, it bleeds.

  Somehow, amid all the sickening and dying, amid the fear and tension and the confused alarms of struggle and flight, he again had to concentrate on work.3 As 1939 dawned, he had no musical projects except the symphony, and no commission even for that. European concert bookings had all but dried up. America he could plan only for next winter. Then in late February, with Katya also nearing her end, his New York agent, Richard Copley, died suddenly, leaving his affairs in the inexperienced hands of his daughter. And just then, at the lowest point, the tide began slowly to turn.

  Nothing had been heard from Disney for months, but at some time in the autumn of 1938 there came word that he wanted to use, not The Firebird, but The Rite of Spring for a sequence about prehistoric animals in a full-length animated cartoon film. Somebody had brought a recording of The Rite to one of Disney’s Hollywood planning meetings in September, and he had got very excited and begun, as was his wont, to visualize the setting, with “dinosaurs, flying lizards, and prehistoric monsters.” “Fantasia was made at a time,” he later recalled, “when we had the feeling that we had to open the doors here, … that we could do some very exciting, entertaining, and beautiful things with music and pictures and color:”4 the time, he might have added, when Snow White was making him so much money at the box office that he felt able to test the market for somewhat more esoteric fare. In this ambition, as we have seen, he was not alone. Stravinsky’s agreement with Morros had been founded on a similarly optimistic view of the potential for cinema as an integrated art form, which is why, when he was originally approached by Disney’s agent, his first idea had been to compose music specially for use with the animations.5 He certainly had no real artistic interest in the use of an existing score; in these circumstances his concern was purely financial.

  The contract that his New York lawyer, Maurice Speiser, signed with Disney early in January 1939 reflected, as much as anything, his desperate family situation at the time. For a consideration of six thousand dollars, it surrendered every vestige of control over the use to which his music could be put. It allowed Disney to use the score in whole or in part, and to adapt, change, add to, or subtract from it “all as shall appear desirable to the Purchaser in its uncontrolled discretion.”6 Disney could put what images he liked to the music and he could call the resulting film what he liked. In other words, he could do exactly what Warner Bros. had been taken to court for doing, but he had Stravinsky’s permission, which in any case he only needed for worldwide distribution, since in the U.S.A. the music was in the public domain.7 Disney and his conductor, Leopold Stokowski, made the most of these concessions. They cut the score by a third, and they completely reorganized what was left to fit the scenario of dinosaurs roaming the primal Earth, culminating in a tremendous battle between the stegosaurus and the tyrannosaurus, accompanied not by the Sacrificial Dance that concludes Stravinsky’s score, but by the more remorseless (and much shorter) Dance of the Earth that ends the first part. Stravinsky was consulted on none of these changes, of course, and they came as a surprise to him when he saw the finished film eighteen months or so later.

  He himself had somehow managed, during Katya’s last illness, to get down to serious work on his symphony, even though there was still no sign of a commission or a first performance. In fact, the only premiere in sight was a curious echo from the past in Brussels, where a score of the still unperformed Zvezdoliki had turned up after being bought at a London auction by the Conservatoire. The piece received its very first performance, twenty-seven years late, at a public concert of the national radio on the 19th of April, 1939.8 Two days before, at Sancellemoz, the long first movement of the symphony was completed in short (compressed) score. By the end of the month Stravinsky was composing the “Larghette concertante” slow movement. And while Bach had supplied him with the starting point for the Dumbarton Oaks concerto, he was now again deeply immersed in the classical models that had been his inspiration for the two-piano concerto. When Soulima arrived at Sancellemoz at the end of June, he found his father installed in a two-room suite with a piano, well away from the other inmates. He was bubbling over with enthusiasm for certain passages in the late symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. He was in ecstasies over the “incredible freedom of harmony and voice-leading” in one phrase of the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony, and the unequal phrase lengths here and there in the Andante of Haydn’s London Symphony; and while neither these nor any other classical works are directly quoted in his own symphony, the sense of breaking out from strict conventions certainly is an important, if rather unpredictable, element of the Symphony in C, as Stravinsky eventually called his work.9

  As usual, his unpaid agents were working vigorously on his behalf. Nadia Boulanger and Sam Dushkin had both sailed (separately) for New York in January, and they were soon colluding on a plan whereby the manuscript of the new symphony would be bought for the Library of Congress with money provided by Mrs. Bliss and others. In Chicago, Nadia discussed this question with John Alden Carpenter’s second wife, Ellen Borden, and in March she wrote to say that Mrs. Carpenter and Mrs. Bliss were prepared jointly to guarantee a commission by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.10 This was the state of affairs when, at the end of March, there came a quite different proposal that once again pushed the symphony into the background and even for a time threatened its American prospects altogether.

  Once again, Nadia was the catalyst. During the first half of March she was conducting in Boston and teaching Harvard students at Gerry’s Landing, the Cambridge home of the university’s professor of fine arts, Edward Forbes. Forbes was ex officio chairman of the committee for the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry, an endowed post that was filled each year by some—usually literary—star who was invited to give a series of formal public lectures backed up by private classes or seminars for postgraduate students in the relevant subject. In the fourteen years since the endowment of the chair, it had never been occupied by a musician, though music was expressly mentioned in the terms of the bequest as an eligible case of “poetic expression in language.” It therefore seems highly possible that the final decision to invite Stravinsky came out of Forbes’s conversations that March with Nadia, mostly—it is true—conducted in the small hours or during the brief moments when Nadia, who often taught from breakfast-time until after midnight, paused to gulp down a cup of coffee or a cheese sandwich.11 On the 21st of March Forbes told the Harvard president that Stravinsky had been “selected.” Six days later the choice was approved, and Forbes wrote to the composer formally proposing that he take up the chair, at a salary of nine thousand dollars for six or eight lectures and the associated classes.12

  Though his doctors were pleased with him and he was putting on weight, and though he was technically an outpatient at the sanatorium, Stravinsky still had to ask their clinical permission before he could accept. Dr. Tobé, the director, could be a stern taskmaster, especially in view of the somewhat less than satisfactory recent statistics involving the Stravinsky family and lung disease. But after a few days’ consideration, aided no doubt by much studying of temperature charts, X-rays, and pulse counts, the composer was allowed to accept the Harvard post, in addition to some concerts in Italy in May and September to which he was already committed. He duly wired Forbes his provisional agreement on 11 April, and ten days later he wrote a long letter to Alexis Kall in Los Angeles:

  You probably don’t know what has happened to me since my terrible loss, which I told you about and to which you responded with a kind letter. Three months after the death of my daughter Lyudmila, my wife also died of the same frightful consumption as my daughter. It is hard for me to write to you about this new and dreadful blow which has struck me—I have lost the thing that was dearest to me in life.

  After explaining about the Harvard post, he we
nt on:

  You told me last time that I could count on your help, that you would go with me and fuss over me like a faithful friend. So I turn to you with this request. I shall arrive in New York at the end of September alone—you will meet me on the jetty, and we will go to live in Cambridge together (for seven months). I will go off to my concerts from there and you will always go with me to help me and comfort me. Agreed? … I have to tell you frankly that the thought of spending this winter with you in my painful loneliness of spirit is very appealing to me; and I would be exceptionally happy if, your health permitting, you found it possible to satisfy my request.13

  At the best of times, Stravinsky did not like public speaking. However sharp and amusing in conversation, however fascinated by language, he was not particularly gifted with words in the systematic form of lecturing or writing, and he was ill and in deep mourning. The thought of a lecture series in the northern states in winter must have depressed him almost beyond measure, yet he simply could not afford to turn down such a lucrative post, with all the possibilities it offered for concert bookings in the interstices of his professorial duties. Even when it transpired, some months later, that the philanthropic ladies who had been putting up money for the Chicago commission had backed out when they heard about his well-paid Norton chair, he felt no special regrets.14 The symphony might, as Strecker hoped, be commissioned instead by the BBC, or by some other American orchestra. The Harvard chair might never come up again; and meanwhile, not for the first time, dear old Woof would be there to make life bearable.

  The only questions were, what should the lectures be about, what language should they be in, and how was he to get them written? Stravinsky was by no means averse to the elaboration of musical or even philosophical concepts, as many pages of his Chroniques had shown. But as a notoriously volatile creative musician, he had never reconciled himself to structured thought, nor been prepared to shape his work according to a preconceived aesthetics. In the twenties, while Arthur Lourié had been doing his best to locate his music in relation to certain more or less precise tendencies, Stravinsky had contradicted himself almost daily in press interviews and, in his music, had skipped from style to style and from one technique to another, with infuriating disregard for what ordinary human beings understood as artistic or intellectual consistency. For a series of linked papers, then, what he needed was a collaborator like Nouvel, a sympathetic thinker who, on the basis of an agreed plan, could assemble his ideas into a coherent text with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which he could then read out, in his picturesque, deeply accented basso French (since English, in so public an arena, was still beyond him) to the Harvard audience. As it happened, he had been seeing a good deal in recent months of his old friend Pierre Souvtchinsky, a highly literate and well-read musical egghead who, by a convenient coincidence, had just written and was about to publish an article on the subject of Music and Time in a special Stravinsky edition of the Revue musicale. The trouble with Souvtchinsky was that, like Stravinsky himself, he was Russian, whereas what was needed was a text in refined, idiomatic French. Of course, Souvtchinsky might draft the lectures and then have them revised by some French writer; or the French writer might himself establish a text, perhaps with background help from Souvtchinsky.