Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  There were other pending contributors to the Revue musicale issue who might qualify, including André Schaeffner, the author of a book on Stravinsky which, on the whole, he liked, and several other friends, including Cingria, and the music critic Alexis Roland-Manuel. Cingria, though, was unreliable and factious, and a highly idiosyncratic writer with whom Stravinsky may instinctively have felt it unwise to get professionally involved. In any case, he was not a trained musician.15 Roland-Manuel, though, was a more solid figure, a composer as well as a critic, and the author of a sympathetic and intelligent review of the Chroniques three years before. A converted Jew, like Lourié, he was similarly a friend and disciple of Maritain (his godfather), but a more humane thinker who, while sharing the formalist and artisanal attitudes of the neo-Thomists, could view them in a gently ironic light. “We shall not hesitate to point out to our intransigent Aristotelian,” he had remarked about Stravinsky’s views on expression, “that the musical work is inevitably expressive. Whether he likes it or not, it expresses its author.” But he had admired the recent music, “in which the dogged precision of the artisan reveals to us, perhaps on the boundaries of tension and calculus, the delights of spiritual delectation.”16 Stravinsky had dined with him several times in recent months, and after two of these suppers Roland-Manuel had written up tidy notes on the master’s conversation, much as Romain Rolland had done all those years ago at Vevey and on the Thünersee steamer. Only, Roland-Manuel’s record was lively without spite. He noted Stravinsky’s “appetite—his need for concrete realities:

  “If Czechoslovakia, the S.D.N., or the USSR had any substantial reality, they would have other names; France doesn’t call itself Britanno-Normando-Languedoc, etc.” He had heard a lecture by Sunerwein which told him nothing. Abstractions weighed in the balance by an impartial and tolerant man. Nothing more tedious. A plague on tolerance! A bad photo of Hitler, a gesture caught on the wing, a pose, a tic, a tone of voice, teach him more and strike him with a livelier jolt than generalities. “When someone squashes a mouse in front of me, its movements and cries affect me and move me, the idea pursues me for hours. When I read that twenty thousand Chinese have died in a flood, I’m no more moved than by a perturbation on the planet Mars.”17

  Later, they discussed the article Roland-Manuel was writing for the Revue musicale, and the critic had just written to report that he was writing the piece up when the Harvard invitation reached Sancellemoz.18

  Forbes pressed for eight lectures, but Stravinsky from the start insisted that he would be able to manage no more than six.19 After accepting the post, he quickly contacted Souvtchinsky, commissioned him to help draft the lectures, and discussed with him the question of the French text and who would write it. They must have talked on the telephone, since Souvtchinsky’s letter of 26 April is the first written document of the arrangement, by which time he had drawn up a detailed plan for eight lectures, shown it to Roland-Manuel, and fixed for him to visit Stravinsky at Sancellemoz.20 The critic arrived on the 29th, and in the next six days they elaborated and refined, and in some respects modified, Souvtchinsky’s draft, making extensive notes which, when he went back to Paris on the 5th, Roland-Manuel used as a basis for writing up each lecture in deliverable French. At the end of May, with probably four of the lectures written, and with Stravinsky back from his concerts in Milan and Florence, Roland-Manuel returned to Sancellemoz for what was meant to be a fortnight of intensive work but was interrupted by Anna’s death and her funeral on the 10th of June. The two men would sit on the balcony of Stravinsky’s room looking out toward Mont Blanc, and while the composer attempted to clarify his ideas, Roland-Manuel would annotate his own drafts and try to grasp the logical sequence of thought.21 Meanwhile Forbes, an obstinate negotiator who liked things to be done correctly, was still naming eight possible lecture dates. But on the 17th Stravinsky put an end to that particular argument by sending his definitive list of six titles. Four days later Souvtchinsky wrote to him that the lectures were finished, then two days after that corrected himself by sending notes for a revised ending to the fifth lecture, on Russian music, which he himself had composed and which Soulima had been busy translating into rough French for Roland-Manuel’s benefit.

  So although the final French texts were entirely written by Roland-Manuel, the real pattern of the collaboration was much more intricate than that suggests. The influence of Souvtchinsky would be obvious even without his own original outlines, recently unearthed in Paris. For instance, the discussion of ontological and psychological time in the second lecture is heavily indebted to Bergson by way of Souvtchinsky’s Revue musicale essay, “La Notion du Temps et la Musique,”22 and in fact a lot of the terminology comes from that article. In general, the abstract thinking about music as a phenomenon and a language, and about issues of style, form, and perception, is pure Souvtchinsky, and not characteristic of Stravinsky at all. Souvtchinsky also did nearly all the background research for the lengthy denunciation of Soviet music in the fifth lecture (how else could Stravinsky have known about the operas of Deshevov and Gladkovsky?). On the other hand, the classic description of the composition process in the third lecture, many of the passing remarks on style in the fourth, and the by now familiar assault on conductors and virtuosos in the sixth, are all inimitably, unforgettably Stravinskian, and in fact were partly lifted from a radio interview he had given with Serge Moreux in Paris the previous December.23 Here the reader feels himself at once in the presence of someone for whom the creative act is completely without drudgery. “In the course of my labors,” he explains, “I suddenly stumble upon something unexpected. This unexpected element strikes me. I make a note of it. At the proper time I put it to profitable use.” And when he expands the idea, the image is so peculiar that one might almost suspect him of a deliberate tease, if one did not know from listening to his music and studying the way he wrote it that it is the exact, unvarnished, wonderfully and inspiredly shameless truth.

  One does not contrive an accident: one observes it to draw inspiration therefrom. An accident is perhaps the only thing that really inspires us. A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing about because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out. What urge of the composer is satisfied by this investigation? The rules with which, like a penitent, he is burdened? No: he is in quest of his pleasure …24

  On the philosophical level, these ideas still admittedly show the influence of Maritain. Maritain’s hero, homo faber—man the maker—is here, as is the “idea of the work to be done,” the concept of the artist as artisan that figures also in Roland-Manuel’s Revue musicale article, “Démarche de Strawinsky.”25 It is equally apparent that Stravinsky—or Souvtchinsky or Roland-Manuel—has been reading Valéry’s Poetics. Valéry, like Stravinsky, starts off with a quest for the etymology of the word “poétique,” and he too comes back to the simple act of making, which is the root meaning of the Greek word poiein. But whereas Valéry characteristically pursues this idea of art as an activity, rather than a family of objects, to its logical consequences for our thinking about value, about process and effect, and about the relationship between the artist and his public, Stravinsky soon loses interest in the theoretical aspect of what, for him, is simply a handy definition of what he himself is up to. His attitude to the public is entirely conditioned by the joy he himself derives from the creative act. So while Valéry explores in painstaking detail the inevitable chasm between the maker and the consumer (“there is no viewpoint capable of taking in both functions at once”), Stravinsky rather tetchily sees the listener as a partner in his joy, “free to accept or refuse participation in the game” but not thereby in any way entitled to act as judge and jury.26

  It is this odd mixture of pedantry, irritability, and artistic candor that gives the Poétique musicale (Poetics of Music) its unique flavor. The dogmatic tone often comes across as little more than a smoke screen for the airing of heterodox tastes of the sort calculated to enrage serio
us critical opinion in Paris, while probably merely baffling the average Harvard music student. Only the composer of The Rite of Spring and Apollo would cite reviews of Gounod’s Faust as an example of the ineptitude of music critics, or remark that “there is more substance and true invention in the aria ‘La Donna è mobile’ … than in the rhetoric and vociferations of [Wagner’s] Ring.”27 But then while the intellectual context and genre of the Poetics are clearly French, the coloring and mentality are often wayward and disaffected—in a word, émigré. There is a certain piquancy in the image of the great Russian composer (together with his Russian guru) using the Cartesian methodology of a French music critic to undermine so many of the conventional assumptions of French teaching and criticism about the nature of composition and the role of the artist. It would, though, have taken a very acute listener at the time to see in this anything beyond the instinctive eccentricity of genius.

  All this time, Stravinsky had been struggling to get on with the slow movement of his symphony. Three times he had to break off: twice for Roland-Manuel’s visits, and once for his own fortnight-long trip to Italy; but the music shows no traces—or at least no damaging traces—of interruption. At the end of May, just before the critic’s long second visit, he drafted the double-speed middle section, with its shanty-like horn and violin tune, which does have exactly the feeling of a sudden “find” in the midst of a related if qualitatively different music. But one might not describe it in this way without help from the Poetics. Later, after his mother’s death, he worked for a month, on and off, completing and refining the movement. Then he again put the score aside, having already made up his mind in April that he would compose the remaining two movements in America, by which time, presumably, he would know who would be giving the first performance.28

  Souvtchinsky had been hard at work behind the scenes writing the Russian music lecture and advising on the other five. Then suddenly he found himself entangled in a Stravinsky family crisis that, for once, had nothing to do with lungs or, for that matter, mistresses. Almost routinely, Stravinsky had invited Soulima to come with him to Italy in May, and for the first time ever, Soulima had declined. He had his reasons, he explained airily, adding with a touch of pomposity: “I assure you that it is better so, and if you disagree now, one day you will see that I was right.”29 He had confided in Souvtchinsky, who urged the composer, in his next Sancellemoz letter, to “give credit to his spirit of independence, even if it could have come out at a better moment.”30 The moment, however, was precisely the issue, for while Igor raged at Soulima for “not thinking of me at the most difficult time of my life, nor of how terribly lonely I would be in Italy,”31 Soulima’s action was clearly no less connected with his mother’s death and some pent-up revulsion at the treatment to which she had been subjected, even if it also, as Souvtchinsky began to speculate in the course of long conversations with a young man whom previously he had scarcely known, arose from an agony of self-doubt, and an almost pathological lack of confidence in his own abilities as a pianist and musician.32

  Soulima was twenty-eight and, in his father’s shadow, was starting to feel that life had passed him by. Igor remarked irritably but none too perceptively that Soulima “generally does not have to fight his own way, since actually he made it a long time ago.”33 But Souvtchinsky preferred to take a more analytical view. Soulima, he declared, was deeply immature and mentally sick, and his aggressive and suspicious behavior was due to chronic insecurity and lack of self-assurance. “I repeat, this is a kind of mental wound or injury, and to take offense or get cross with him about it makes no more sense than to be angry about a broken leg or lung disease.… I didn’t understand his condition at first; he’s very proud and reticent and good at concealing his inner perplexity.” Souvtchinsky had heard Soulima at the piano and was not impressed. “I will speak frankly: he played to me and I must honestly say that there is something ‘inadequate’ about his playing, both technically and even musically. He himself is well aware of this, of course. The whole question is—how to help him?”34

  Poor Soulima, trapped between a loving, authoritarian genius of a father and a clever amateur psychologist afraid—as he himself admitted35—of upsetting the father by too casual an attitude to the son’s problems: how could he hope to survive at all? Igor was all too ready to accept Souvtchinsky’s diagnosis, and quite unready to suppose that Soulima, after a winter of horrors, simply needed space and reassurance. He understood only that his own wishes were being challenged just when he himself felt in the greatest need of calm, unquestioning love. “Everything you write about him,” he replied to Souvtchinsky, “disturbs and unsettles me to the depths.… I have never tyrannized any of my children, and have never even had it in mind to tyrannize them, but it is from every point of view and in all circumstances absolutely unacceptable that my grown-up children, who are financially utterly dependent on me, disregard rights which belong to me and not to them.” Even so, his own wounded heart went out to his younger son, and in his anger he never failed in affection. He begged Souvtchinsky “to see Svetik and talk to him, and don’t just fob him off with good advice but also send him something nice which he needs and which he cannot get from me because of the distance which separates us and because a letter only makes up for a hundredth part of a conversation.”36

  Whatever Souvtchinsky said or did, it had a good effect, since Igor soon calmed down, Soulima wrote a friendly, newsy letter discreetly avoiding the troubles,37 and by the end of June he was visiting his father with Madubo and taking an intense interest in the new symphony. Unfortunately for family relations in general, he was not the last visitor Igor received that summer at Sancellemoz.

  Ever since Lyudmila Belyankin’s final illness, Vera had behaved with typical loyalty and spontaneous warmth toward all the Belyankins and Stravinskys. Temperamentally she was as different from them all, except perhaps Ira, as it was possible to imagine. Where they were intense and insecure, emotional, devout, and in some ways enclosed and old-fashioned, she was open, confident and happy, affectionate, colorful, slightly prosaic, ready to make light of almost any difficulty. It was impossible not to love her. Yet at times her directness could show an astonishing lack of grasp or tact. There was the occasion at the Persephone premiere when she had sat openly at the back of the family box in full view of the audience, with Katya and Anna sitting at the front. Naturally she attended Katya’s funeral, and when she ushered Igor to her car at the end of the ceremony she was thinking of his comfort and convenience, and it obviously did not occur to her that she was coming between him and his family at a moment of shared grief.38 Even Vera, though, knew that she could not simply turn up at Sancellemoz two or three weeks after Katya’s death. Some decent pause was de rigueur. But who was to decide what was decent? For Igor, four months was already too long, while Vera would be easygoing on this question as on all others; but for Stravinsky’s children, with their troubled attachment to old values and their passionate devotion to their dead mother, Vera’s arrival on the 9th of July was a good deal too soon.39

  She arrived to find Igor in a terribly agitated state. Theodore and Denise had made a scene about Vera, and had either gone off in a huff or been sent away in disgrace, depending on whom you asked.40 Igor was now telling them to find somewhere to spend the summer as far as possible from Sancellemoz; but instead, to his intense annoyance, they had put up at a hotel in Yvoire on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, which he regarded as altogether too close for comfort. Meanwhile, Milène had suddenly taken a turn for the worse, had undergone a pneumothorax operation leading (almost inevitably, Dr. Tobé said) to pleurisy, and was now extremely sick with a nightly temperature of 102.41

  The composer himself was physically much better, but deeply disturbed by all these family anxieties and at the same time tending to get upset at the things he was reading about himself in the June issue of the Revue musicale. What had started out as a Stravinsky celebration had, in his opinion, turned into a polemic, and the only arti
cles he would admit to liking were Souvtchinsky’s and Schaeffner’s. The rest was “tasteless and distorted … all quite pitiful, if not always intentionally, at least in the realization. Nothing substantial, nothing really serious is said to the advantage of my art. What untalented babble by Messiaen. I’m appalled by it all and prefer not to speak or think about it any more. I can imagine Schloezer’s triumph!”42 Worst of all was a long article by Lifar, prefaced by a few pages of smooth talk about Stravinsky’s genius, but then launching into an extended denunciation of his ballets as fundamentally undanceable and even “positively anti-dance.”43 Probably it had reached Lifar’s ears that Stravinsky had blackballed him as a producer of Jeu de cartes, a work that, he now decided, was sour grapes: “an anti-dance ballet par excellence.” And he stated without reserve that “Stravinsky has always been a complete stranger to the ballet and has done everything in his power to impoverish it from the dance point of view.” There was some stirring in the Stravinsky ranks at this. Souvtchinsky and Roland-Manuel threatened to write to the Revue dissociating themselves from the whole issue of the journal, and Souvtchinsky muttered about getting something into the gossip magazine Candide. But Valechka Nouvel argued that the publicity would suit Lifar down to the ground; the musicologists failed to get the support of any other contributors, and, as usual, nothing happened.44