Stravinsky

by Stephen Walsh

  Throughout July and August, the composer languished at Sancellemoz with Milène, whose health slowly began to improve, and Vera, who occasionally took to her bed with this or that minor ailment or perhaps merely to avoid being conspicuous. Vera did not much like Denise, but she liked Theodore and was soon working on Igor to make up his quarrel with his elder son. At some point in late July the two of them drove to Yvoire in her car and there was a happy reconciliation.45 A few days later, Soulima reappeared at the sanatorium. The remnants of the broken family suddenly seemed to be coming together again.

  Igor had now finished his slow movement and was quietly writing up the orchestral score, while at the same time plotting the complexities of his American trip.46 His latest plan was to embark at the end of September, having accepted to conduct a concert at the Venice Biennale on the 4th of that month. Vera’s hopes of travelling with him had been dashed by the seeming impossibility of a Nansen passport holder obtaining a U.S. visa, so he would sail alone and be met by Kall on the quay at New York, exactly as he had originally suggested. Forbes, after losing the battle over the number of lectures, was being awkward about accommodation for Kall, who was prevented by some obscure Harvard regulation from sharing Stravinsky’s College House lodgings, while the alternative Eliot House was excluded because of a rule against playing the piano in the mornings, Stravinsky’s time for composing. They even briefly considered renting a flat with a housekeeper, until Igor learnt from Serge Koussevitzky that servants were a scarce and expensive commodity in the egalitarian U.S.A.—a salutary lesson for the composer of Mavra, which, as it happened, was on the program for Venice. In the end, nothing was settled. They would simply arrive at Cambridge and find accommodation on the spot. Forbes, it seemed, was washing his hands.

  It was easy in Sancellemoz to get completely wrapped up in your own concerns and forget about the world outside, and certainly easier to worry about the meaning of a Greek verb or the price of lodgings in Massachusetts than about the significance of a military victory in Spain or a territorial threat in Poland. From time to time, Stravinsky had news from Paris. Gavriyil Païchadze, who had long since stopped publishing new work but who still acted as go-between in matters of concern to the Édition Russe, had written in April that Paris was once more in a state of fear and confusion after Hitler’s annexation of what was left of Czechoslovakia the previous month.47 But Willy Strecker had more or less ceased to mention politics in his letters, which could have been construed as a bad sign by anyone more politically alert than the Stravinskys. When Strecker came to Sancellemoz in August to pick up the score of the symphony slow movement, he again either said nothing or spoke honeyed words, since two days later (by which time Hitler’s threats against Poland had made war inevitable) Stravinsky was writing to Roland-Manuel that war seemed unlikely despite the fact that Soulima had been called up as a reservist and had had to cut short his stay at the sanatorium.48 From Paris, Soulima himself wrote that “the idea is gaining ground that Mussolini will side with England and France” and that Valechka “is certain there will not be war.”49 But by now, even Igor had the wind up and had already written to Mario Corti doubting whether he could come to Venice as he had heard that the frontiers were being closed.50 Then finally a gnomic letter arrived from Roland-Manuel:

  This wind of madness blows on to a paradoxically calm world. It isn’t the panic of last year. The disquiet hides at the bottom of hearts, but it is at the bottom of hearts that we need to find the peace which passes all happiness. It is at such moments that you make the distinction between what is troubling you and the one necessary thing, and it is in the one necessary thing that are reconciled the love of God and our loves for each other insofar as they remain, these loves, of the order of charity. Brotherly love is decidedly the best of what there is on earth. This is sufficient to tell you that now more than ever my thoughts go toward you, dear friend, with all my cordial affection.51

  Two days later, on 2 September, Igor was discharged from Sancellemoz for the last time. On the 3rd, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

  OPTIMISM now had to be replaced by realism, and practical questions needed to be asked and answered. Stravinsky had booked a two-way passage on the Île de France, with the intention of returning to Paris in May. But with German U-boats already active in the Atlantic, he was seriously doubting whether he ought to sail at all. On the very first day of war the Germans sank the British liner Athenia, with the loss of more than a hundred of its fourteen hundred passengers, including a number of Americans; and while Hitler, who was terrified of breaching American neutrality, denied responsibility for the attack, few believed his “theory” that Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had ordered the sinking so as to bring the United States into the war. In the end Stravinsky decided to go all the same, influenced by his desperate need of the Harvard emolument and the fees from the concerts and recordings that Copley’s successor, Charles Drake, had set up for him in the gaps between lectures. It still remained, however, to decide when he would sail and by what ship, since regular timetables and bookings had been suspended; when and how Vera would join him; and whether they would return to France or stay for the time being in America.

  Igor had in any case to plan for a long absence. The Faubourg flat, which had not been lived in since Katya’s death, was paid off and vacated, and the contents put into a warehouse, except for Igor’s manuscripts, which were placed in a bank.52 He then moved into the apartment in the rue Antoine-Chantin, Theodore having by now been called up to the army at Le Mans. But already the air-raid sirens were going off every night, so after two nights of struggling down into the cellar with his bedding, Igor decamped to Nadia Boulanger’s country house at Gargenville, arriving unannounced with a carload of suitcases and still clutching his gas mask.53 From this none too convenient distance, thirty miles or so northwest of Paris, he did his best (with Vera’s help in the city) to put his financial affairs in order, while waiting for news of berths and trying not to panic every time a U-boat sank an Allied warship, which happened nineteen times in the first half of the month. His clumsy and more than somewhat insensitive idea was to set up a single bank account, with Vera, his two sons, and Madubo as signatories, which was a little like feeding the cat and the dog in the same bowl.54 At the very least he failed to allow for the perfectly natural influence of a daughter-in-law in such situations. It was to prove an unfortunate, if not quite disastrous, miscalculation.

  Gargenville was distant from Paris, but it was by no means cut off socially. For one thing, Nadia surrounded herself with pupils and ex-pupils during the summer, and not all of them had yet dispersed. Edward Forbes’s son, Elliot, had been there, and Forbes senior himself turned up to see Stravinsky and discuss Harvard plans. For another thing, the outbreak of war had had an instantly centrifugal effect on Parisian society. Paul Valéry was a neighbor, and he and Stravinsky met several times, at Gargenville and at Valéry’s house at Juziers nearby, and talked about music. The composer showed the poet his lecture texts, unashamed—or unaware—of the obvious if superficial parallel with Valéry’s own Cours de Poétique (which Valéry, however, noticed at once and hastened to point out to Gide).55 Stravinsky teased the Wagner-loving poet about The Ring, which, he insisted, he would happily sacrifice in its entirety “for the theme of the Fox Movietone News.”56 There was music-making, and an atmosphere at once cerebral and Elysian and as far removed as possible from the sirens and the blackouts and the U-boats and all the other terrors and anxieties of the phony war. “I will write again,” Nadia told Poulenc, “to tell you about Stravinsky and Valéry and those extraordinary hours in the annals of drama, luminous, messengers of the future.”57 But she apparently never did.

  Forbes had found Stravinsky still in a highly unsettled state, and he returned to Harvard half-prepared for a cancellation, with Valéry, naturally enough, as substitute.58 The composer, though, was no longer thinking of withdrawing, but was merely waiting for a boat. On the 21st of September,
after several changes of plan, he at last left Paris for Bordeaux, travelling with another pupil of Nadia’s, Katherine Woolf, who, “though not rich,” he told Theodore gratefully, “has upgraded to first class so as not to leave me alone with that crowd of unknown Americans.”59 A crowd it was, on the Manhattan, when she sailed on the 22nd. Even in first class, they were five to a cabin, and a U-boat would have reaped a heavy harvest, including Arturo Toscanini, who, according to a report in Le Jour, refused to take to his berth at night and instead paced the decks in a fury.60 But there were no U-boats, and the Manhattan slipped quietly into New York Harbor on the last day of the month, discharging her passengers to their unknown fate on the peaceful continent of North America.

  8

  THE POETICS OF SURVIVAL

  KALL WAS WAITING on the quay as arranged, and they were quickly ensconced together in the Hotel Sulgrave on East 67th Street. But no sooner had the composer wired Forbes to announce that he would arrive at Harvard on the 3rd of October than he went down with flu; and no sooner was he on the mend than Kall succumbed in his turn, and what with one thing and another it was the 10th before they reached Cambridge. The first lecture was fixed for the 18th and they still had nowhere to live, so Forbes invited them to stay a few nights at Gerry’s Landing while they looked for an apartment, and then, when they predictably failed to find anything that met the composer’s stringent needs, he agreed to lodge them in his house, at an agreed rent, for a trial period during the autumn. Space was hardly a problem for the Forbeses, for Gerry’s Landing was a large, comfortable three-story house with a big garden. But the two Russian musicians cannot have been the easiest of houseguests, and the pernickety Forbes might well have been excused a twinge of relief at having agreed to the reduction from eight lectures to six, with long absences for concert tours in between.1

  The lectures themselves were to take place in the New Lecture Hall (now the Lowell), a solid, turn-of-the-century edifice on the edge of the main Harvard campus. The lecturer spoke into a microphone, from a raised platform, to an audience distributed between a conventional auditorium and a long balcony that curved round the inside of the building. These Norton lectures were no dusty academic affair, but an event in the Boston social calendar, and the Stravinsky visit attracted a particularly chic audience, at least for the opening lecture. Half an hour before the start, “early intellectuals trickled in, to be sure of a seat …

  Then followed a rush of more intellectuals—Harvard and Radcliffe esthetes all.… Next came the big names of the Harvard music department, with their wives. This kind of an audience was what we had expected—musicians and music lovers from in and around the University. But then, to our amazement, black, sleek limousines began to drive up to the New Lecture Hall, Beacon Hill dowagers, radiating white hair, evening dresses, diamonds, and dignity entered and added a ton of glamour to the affair. No sooner had we settled down to Beacon Hill than the New Lecture Hall rustled again. This time it was for Koussevitzky.… Eager, tense, the audience waited for Stravinsky.2

  In the composer swept, followed by Edward Forbes, both of them dressed as for a concert, in white tie and tails. A brief introduction by Forbes, applause, a handshake, a bow, and Stravinsky set off nervously on the first lecture—the “Prise de Contact,” or “Getting Acquainted,” as the English summary supplied to the audience more amiably put it. Behind him, Forbes sat with a second copy of the text, in case any pages got muddled. Nobody will ever know how many of that first, or indeed the subsequent five, audiences understood the master’s slow, heavily accented French. Kall himself suggested that “the large audiences … accepted [the printed synopses] out of courtesy and habit rather than of necessity,”3 but other observers were less sanguine. That most telltale sign, laughter, argued the other way. “To Stravinsky’s witticisms,” one cynic noted, “the audience reacted like a grove of aspens; a few trees quivered at first, and eventually the foliage of the whole grove was alive.”4 Press reports occasionally revealed imperfect comprehension. The Christian Science Monitor reviewer made much of Stravinsky’s attacks on Wagner, which, he maintained, “fairly tumbles down the educational set-up of Cambridge itself … [and] blows a hole, I daresay, in Harvard’s own music department.” But he misquoted the joke about endless melody in the third lecture (“the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting”), and thought that Stravinsky was praising Verdi’s Falstaff at Wagner’s expense, when in fact he was regretting the influence of Wagner on late Verdi.5

  At the end of the first lecture, though, there was wild applause, a very deep bow, another handshake, and Stravinsky “breezed out, his tails flying behind.”6 Afterwards, there was a reception attended by various university luminaries, musical and otherwise, including several former and current students of Nadia whose names Stravinsky had, for tactical reasons, jotted down on scraps of paper.7 Among them were Walter Piston, by now a Harvard associate professor in composition, and a young Russian-born composer by the name of Alexei Haieff, who had been in Nadia’s class at Gerry’s Landing the previous spring and had met Stravinsky at her house in Gargenville barely six weeks before.

  The second and third lectures followed on the next two Wednesdays, and between them Stravinsky embarked on the twice-weekly seminars with Piston’s composition students that were the other part of his duties as Norton Professor. Like his École Normale classes of four years before, these were more like group-therapy sessions than classes in the conventional sense. He made little attempt at formal teaching and imposed no syllabus. Instead, each student in turn would present his latest opus, and Stravinsky would ooh and aah, pick out the things he liked, suggest improvements, remark on rhythmic or harmonic effects or defects, and sometimes play and talk about music of his own, usually speaking in French with Kall as interpreter. They were the kind of class in which, later, it is difficult to say exactly what has been studied. And yet, like Stravinsky’s own weekly lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov, they left the mark that comes from intimate contact with an extraordinary individual who understands the importance of discipline and taste to any serious creative work, but who does not seek to dominate or bully in the matter of style. Perhaps more surprisingly, Stravinsky enjoyed himself at least as much as did the students. “Of course, the lectures were like concerts,” he told an interviewer at the end of his professorial stint, “the performance was given and then an ‘au revoir.’ But the meetings with students in between the lectures, those were the good things which filled me with the best impression of interest.… Those young men who came to see me were so serious, not only filled with literary interest but with professional music interest as well. I was enchanted.” Harvard, he added, was “a nursery of good manners and good taste.”8 Naturally it helped that so many of these young Harvard composers, and even some of their teachers, were sympathetic to his work and above all seemed to know it well. It was a curious reminder of that day in Berlin in 1922 when George Antheil had led him to suppose that America was full of bright young composers who adored his music.9 It had taken a mere seventeen years for Antheil’s white lie to become at least a quarter true.

  Stravinsky and Kall stayed in Cambridge for exactly eight weeks before setting off on their winter travels. The composer’s schedule left him ample time for writing, but in fact work on the symphony proceeded slowly, and there is some evidence that the exact style of the continuation was causing him headaches, whether because of the six-month break in composition, the unfamiliar strain of teaching, or simply the change of environment. Whatever the cause, the four-and-a-half-minute Allegretto third movement is as intricate in its detailing as anything in the Dumbarton Oaks concerto, and inevitably more complex because of the larger forces involved. In both cases the music flies off at a tangent to the classical—or baroque—sphere in which it supposedly originated. At this time, and months later, Stravinsky was still telling interviewers that the symphony was to be classical in character and severe in form, but at Gerry’s Landing that autumn he was grappling w
ith a music that was doing its best to evade the obvious implications of a Haydn minuet or a Beethoven scherzo, and it looks as if the creative discipline this entailed was slowing him down more than he might have cared to admit.

  As relief from these labors, he would go for gentle afternoon strolls with Kall, a very different business from the brisk walks in the grounds at Ustilug or Voreppe simply because Woof was stout and unfit and not given to rapid movement: a heavy smoker and drinker, and a sufferer from various more or less debilitating ailments that were already beginning to take their toll on his physical vigor and mental alertness. Not that Stravinsky was far behind him when it came to unhealthy habits. Since Sancellemoz, he was back to forty cigarettes a day, retained his fondness for claret, and sometimes overate. At the beginning of November Dagmar drove all the way from New York to Boston for Igor’s Cambridge concert on the 4th, bearing a consignment of wine for her two favorite Russians; and probably on that occasion they all ate too much. As the by no means sylphlike ex-movie star grumbled to Woof, “I lose everything but weight and my cold;” and neither she nor Kall was in the habit of exercising in front of an open window, as the trim, wiry Stravinsky still did every morning.10 As for the Boston social circuit, that was less a relaxation than an unstated contractual obligation. There was a stiff dinner at the house of the Harvard president, James B. Conant, with a lot of professors and university dignitaries, which was perhaps the occasion on which Stravinsky turned to his escort, Walter Piston, just before they arrived and suggested: “Let’s go somewhere and have a sausage.” But he evaded the worst formalities of Back Bay society by the simple expedient of declining invitations, on the convenient—if not wholly truthful—pretext that he was too busy.11