The Composer's Workshop1

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The Composer’s Workshop1

aturing slowly as a composer, Igor Stravinsky caught up with M the musical present of his age when he composed The Firebird at twenty-eight. One year later, with Petrushka (1911), he overtook that age and remained in the lead ever since, mapping out the future course of the art of music, both predicting its trends in his work and bringing them about by the force of his example. Several generations of music critics, puzzled by his continuous evolution, have ridiculed and deplored what they saw as the composer’s unpredictable scurrying from style to style in heedless, pointless search of novelty. Their books and articles remain as historical curios, and Stravinsky’s evolution can now be seen for what it always was: the rich, purposeful, astoundingly fruitful search for a synthesis between the musical culture of the past and the gradually emerging musical forms, both serious and popular, of the twentieth century. The vantage point of Stravinsky’s art has remained youthful: open, fresh, inquisitive. He never composed a bar of what may be termed “old man’s music.” If his recent Requiem Canticles do not seem the trail blazer that Petrushka and The Rite of Spring were sixty years ago, it is because by now we are used to Stravinsky. The same Requiem Canticles, coming from some young unknown, would have been hailed as an amazing new departure and the probable threshold of a major musical career.2

1 Review of Retrospectives and Conclusions, by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969); “The Rite of Spring”: Sketches 1911–1913; Facsimile Reproductions from the Autographs, by Igor Stravinsky (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1969); and Rannie balety Stravinskogo: “Zhar-ptitsa,” “Petrushka,” “Vesna sviashchen- naia” [Stravinsky’s early ballets: The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring], by Irina Iakovlevna Vershinina (Moscow: Nauka, 1967). Originally published in Nation, 15 June 1970, 730–33. 2 As noted earlier, we have chosen not to bring all of the text of these articles, which were written over many years, into the present. This will be especially noticeable to the reader in essays about individuals alive when SK was writing and about matters involving the former Soviet Union.—Ed.

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Stravinsky has been increasingly active as a writer in recent decades. The sixth volume of his and Robert Craft’s miscellanea (interviews, diaries, and assorted commentary) has just been published, the New York Review of Books frequently features his opinions, and at this writing he has apparently become a regular columnist for Harper’s Magazine. One recognizable impulse behind all this writing activity (there are many oth- ers) is the desire to document his own past, to point out the roots of his art in the great Russian artistic renaissance of the early twentieth century, the brilliant period whose significance is so widely misunderstood or under- estimated in the West. This documentary aspect of the Stravinsky-Craft volumes has been a great boon to musical historians and Western Stravin- sky biographers, and, indeed, the books contain vast riches of musical and historical information gleaned from an almost unprecedented six-decade span of intense artistic creativity. Not everything Stravinsky remembers should be taken as gospel, however. Lawrence Morton has demonstrated the master’s lapse of memory in enumerating his Chaikovsky sources for The Fairy’s Kiss.3 In Exposi- tions and Developments we are told about Renard: “The original title of my barnyard fable was Skaska o petuhyeh, Leesyeh, kotyeh y baranyeh, ‘Tale about the Cock, the Fox, the Cat, and the Ram.’”4 This was reverently cited in Eric Walter White’s biography of Stravinsky and on the jacket of the Columbia recording of Renard. But that is not the original Russian title of Renard, as a glance at any printed edition of that work will establish. What Stravinsky is quoting, through the haze of that absurd, three-headed transliteration system, is the original Russian title of Histoire du soldat, but with the four beasts of Renard replacing the soldier and the devil of the other work. The Russian title of Renard began with the word baika, the regional and colloquial word for “story,” and continued quite differently.5

3 Lawrence Morton, “Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky: Le baiser de la fée,” Musical Quar- terly 48, no. 3, Special Issue for Igor Stravinsky on His 80th Anniversary (July 1962): 313–26; repr. in Stravinsky: A New Appraisal of His Work, ed. Paul Henry Lang (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 47–60. 4 Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 119 in the 1981 edition. 5 To wit: Baika pro lisu, petukha, kota da barana: Veseloe predstavlenie s peniem i muzykoi [The story of the fox, the cock, the tomcat and the ram: A merry performance with singing and (instrumental) music].—Ed.

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A few lines later, Stravinsky recollects how the music of Renard was inspired by the guzla which, as he explains, is “a kind of fine metal- stringed balalaika … strapped over the player’s head like the tray of a cigarette girl in a night club.” This is a very precise description of the instrument called gusli in Russian and psaltery in English, which is the instrument Stravinsky means. The guzla is a Balkan bowed string instrument used to accompany the recitations of south Slavic folk epics and not related to Renard in any way (Stravinsky must have been thinking of Mérimée’s collection of faked folk poems, La guzla, translated into Russian by Pushkin).6 Such memory lapses are probably unavoidable, given Stravinsky’s huge storehouse of remembered experience. Western musicologists will continue quoting them in good faith until eventually their Russian colleagues will set them right. That there is a substantial Soviet contribution to be made to our understanding of Stravinsky is startlingly evident with the publication of Irina Vershinina’s masterful study of Stravinsky’s first three ballets. Ev- erything of significance written elsewhere about The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring is right there in her book; but the author’s insight into the Russian cultural history of the period and into Russian folk song and folklore (what Western musicologist could realize that the flute and cello themes at the very beginning of Petrushka are adapted from the street vendors’ cries used to sell coal, herring, and marinated apples?) en- ables her to locate these ballets in a historical and cultural context with a knowledge and precision that are beyond the reach of most non-Russian commentators. A trained, competent musicologist, she draws on ethnography, an- thropology, the history of Western and Russian painting, and the social and political currents of the time to achieve a coherent and meaningful total picture. She is addressing a new generation of Russian readers who grew up during those three decades when the music of the greatest composer Russia ever produced could not be played in the USSR, and when he himself was persistently denounced as a traitor and a Wall Street lackey. The book is the first significant Soviet contribution to Stravinsky studies

6 Actually, the error originated with Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, the Swiss novelist, who translated the text of Renard for its first publication (Geneva: A. Henn, 1917). Ramuz, of course, might well have been thinking of Mérimée.—Ed.

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(discounting the pedestrian 1964 biography by Boris Yarustovsky) since Igor Glebov’s brilliant A Book about Stravinsky was published in 1929, only to be banned soon after and relegated to library shelves, classified “limited circulation.” It is instructive to compare Irina Vershinina’s account of the genesis and reception of The Rite of Spring to Robert Craft’s similar effort in his introduction to the elegant, if overpriced, Boosey & Hawkes facsimile edition of Stravinsky’s working sketches. Craft draws on the memories of the composer, on some of his letters, on the statements of his French colleagues, and on the record in the Western press. Vershinina uses un- published Stravinsky letters from Soviet archives, the reactions of the Russian press to the work’s premiere, and fragments from the private cor- respondence of various Russian critics and composers (e.g., Myaskovsky and Prokofiev). Craft’s is the story of the creation of The Rite of Spring as it is remembered now; Vershinina’s is the account of that creation as seen from Russia and within the context of Russian culture. Craft’s most glar- ing omission is Stravinsky’s essay (liberally quoted by Vershinina), “What I Wanted to Express in The Rite of Spring,” written by the composer im- mediately after finishing the score and published in the journal Muzyka in 1913. In the Russian text of that essay, there is a curious stylistic spillover from the ballet: Stravinsky uses the same archaic, shamanistic, bogyman style he devised for the titles of various sections of the music. The composer and Robert Craft wrestle with the problem of translating these titles into English, both in the notes to the sketchbook and in Retrospec- tives and Conclusions, and they often lose. “Igra umykaniia,” the Russian title of the section usually called “Jeu du rapt,” means “Mock Abduction of the Bride,” umykanie being the kind of bridal abduction practiced by exogamous societies to avoid intermarriage within the tribe. Stravin- sky’s new translation, “Game of Seizing the Girl,” doesn’t begin to cover the topic. Nor is “Leading-Moving” a satisfactory rendition of the wonderfully evocative “Idut-vedut” (transcribed as “Eedoot-veedoot” by Craft); liter- ally, “they are coming–they are bringing them,” where the rhyming pair of impersonal third-person plural verb forms conveys both the idea of a massive round dance and the spooky implication that some unknown en- tities are coming and bringing someone else, possibly against that some-

361 V. On Stravinsky one’s will. “The Evocation of the Human Ancestors,” which Craft finds “unhelpfully … specific,” is actually “Evocation of the Forefathers of Hu- mans.” Appropriately for the totemistic, prehistorical world of The Rite of Spring, the wording leaves open the question of whether these forefathers are gods, beasts, or humans (“Forefathers of Humans,” by the way, is the name of a 1911 painting by Roerich, the original set designer of the ballet, which indeed shows a group of prehistoric shamans in quasi-animal garb). Finally, Craft solemnly offers us a nonexistent Russian word, telling us that he is correcting an earlier misprint in the score. Couldn’t Irina Vershinina or somebody have been consulted? But even with all the shortcomings of the translation and commentary, the sketchbook itself is a delight. Anyone who knows and loves the work and who disregards all those music critics who every ten years or so announce that The Rite has had its day and is no longer relevant can now go to the local library and follow, with awe and fascination, the gradual taking-shape in its creator’s mind of the still-startling score which Rob- ert Craft imaginatively compares to a prize bull that has inseminated the whole modern movement. The nature of the imaginative and creative mental processes is probably ultimately not susceptible to paraphrased explanation, but study of the sketchbook does provide us with a number of interesting insights into Stravinsky’s laboratory. This same invitation to enter the composer’s creative workshop was often the subject of the first five Stravinsky-Craft volumes, and in this respect Retrospectives and Conclusions is different from its predecessors. The book is mainly about illness, death, and other men’s music. Stravinsky remains a fascinating music critic, as his passages on Gesualdo, Monte- verdi and Beethoven’s last quartets show. The gem of the book is a brief, two-page meditation on The Magic Flute—exploring the presence of death in its music and the predictions of many future musical styles that hind- sight can now discover in it. Henceforth, no collection of critical opinions on Mozart will be complete without these pages. However, to the list of works and composers (Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Ravel) that Stravinsky says are anticipated in The Magic Flute, we could add the last bars of his own Larghetto concertante from Symphony in C, recalling as it does the ending of Mozart’s first-act quintet. Stravinsky’s literary judgments, especially those on Tolstoi and Gorky, are trenchant and knowledgeable. Robert Craft narrates in his

362 The Composer’s Workshop usual witty and readable manner Stravinsky’s encounters with the Eng- lish and American literary figures who are or were his friends: Eliot, Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene. Craft’s account of the opinions of Stravinsky’s erstwhile mentor and friend, the cofounder of the Eurasian movement, Pyotr Suvchinsky, demonstrates the peculiarly Russian form of confrontation between the creative genius and the sterile theoretician. Suvchinsky’s reactions are exactly those of a typical nineteenth-century Russian literary critic faced with a masterpiece by Pushkin or Tolstoi. Recognizing the achievement, such critics would inevitably complain of the artist’s philosophical shallowness, political turpitude, and Russian provincialism. Certainly, Suvchinsky’s political slurs should be seen as a part of the Byzantine web of Parisian émigré rivalries rather than as any factual revelations. The most memorable pages in Retrospectives and Conclusions move away from the format of diaries and commentaries of the earlier volumes and enter the realm of literary confessions. The wealth of medical information, the precise accounts of Stravinsky’s various illnesses and close brushes with death, his realization of its imminence, Robert Craft’s agonies of apprehension (the two are clearly closer than most fathers and sons)—all this would make depressing reading were it not for Stravin- sky’s overriding intellectual curiosity about these new experiences and his steadfast determination to survive and to write more new music. Intensely concerned with the present, and more aware of and sympathetic to its problems than many a man half his age, Igor Stravinsky at eighty-eight remains a young and active musician with, we hope, more books like this one and more musical masterpieces like Requiem Canticles to offer to an amazed and grateful world.

* * *

Exceptional interest attaches to SK’s writings on Stravinsky, because, ap- pearing when they did, they document the confluence of two streams, or rather the abutment of two eras: the era in which Stravinsky himself was the dominant—or rather dominating—source of information about his life and work, and the subsequent era of proper documentary and archival research. SK was the only Western scholar then writing who possessed both intimate

363 V. On Stravinsky knowledge of Stravinsky and his work, on the one hand, and vast erudition within the world of Russian culture, on the other. He was acutely aware of the disjunction between Stravinsky, an émigré since 1910, in whom there was massive interest among musicians in the West (and, increasingly, within the Soviet domain), and the deficient cultural purview from which he was approached by, for the most part, subscholarly investigators. His writings on Stravinsky amounted to the first sustained effort to bridge that gap. In his earliest piece on the composer, a review essay titled “Igor Stravin- skii—East and West,” SK took note of the problem:

The roots of Stravinsky’s art are deeply Russian. The point of departure, the selection of subject matter, the entire aesthetic approach of his earlier successful works can be best understood within the framework of the marvelous Russian cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century. The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Nightingale are musical parallels and counterparts of the poetry of Balmont and Kuzmin, the early prose of Bely and Remizov, and the painting of Roerich and Goncharova. An understanding of the Russian cultural context is indispensable in order to have a thorough grasp of almost all of Stravinsky’s work up to and including The Fairy’s Kiss (1928). Since much of his later output is either a reaction against his Russian musical origins or an occasional sentimental return to them (Danses concertantes, 1942; Scherzo à la russe, 1944), a critic or musical historian writing of Stravinsky’s later work should also be able to understand just what Stravinsky is abandoning or returning to. Under normal conditions there would be a large body of informed scholarship and criticism written in Russian about this Russian, whose work has been the central phenomenon of Western music for the past six decades. But the conditions governing Russian musical scholarship and criticism during the greater part of Stravinsky’s career have, of course, been anything but normal.7

In that early piece, SK recognized only one worthy Russian contribution to Stravinsky scholarship or criticism: Kniga o Stravinskom (A book about Stravin- sky) by Boris Asafiev, writing under his pen name of Igor Glebov, also men-

7 “Igor Stravinskii—East and West,” review of Themes and Episodes, by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, by Eric Walter White, and Stravinsky, by Roman Vlad, Slavic Review 27 (1968): 453.

364 The Composer’s Workshop tioned in the article to which this note is appended. For the rest, there was only incomprehension and hostility, leading to an informational vacuum that Western scholarship, still linguistically ill-equipped and burdened with its own ideological prejudices, was incapable of repairing. Indignation modulates into sorrow when SK confronts, and is forced to dismiss, the first monograph on Stravinsky to appear in Russia since Asafiev’s after a hiatus of thirty-five years.8 This book, and also a heavily bowdlerized, “rather lame” translation of Stravin- sky’s 1936 autobiography that appeared in 1963 on the heels of Stravinsky’s official visit to the Soviet Union the year before, indicate that “Soviet literature on Stravinsky has been somewhat schizophrenic in recent years: interest in his work and pride in his achievement as a Russian constantly clash with the continual need to reassert the conservatism of Socialist Realism in music (a concept obviously incompatible with everything Stravinsky stands for) and the need to apologize for, or attack, his expressed views on musical aesthetics and his status as an émigré.”9 The article proceeds to a melancholy conclusion, enumerating the inadequacies of two Western monographs and welcoming the latest volume of memoirs and diaries jointly authored by Stravinsky and his assistant Robert Craft, which, although “every bit as rewarding and significant as the other books in the series,”10 pertains entirely to the “Western” sector of Stravinsky’s bifurcated life. The above essay is much more hopeful, thanks to the appearance, in 1967, of the first really solid piece of late-Soviet Stravinsky scholarship: Irina Vershinina’s monograph on the three early ballets. That encouraging phenomenon, with its implied promise of more to come, gave SK the nerve, as it were, to suggest at last (and it was high time) that the Stravinsky-Craft volumes were not the impeccable sources they appeared to be. For the first time their errors and insufficiencies were exposed alongside those of the other books under review—and that provoked (surely to the great delight of the Nation’s editors) a huffy reply from “Igor Stravinsky.”11 The name must go between scare quotes, because by 1970, and for at least two years before that, all writing signed “Stravinsky” was the single- handed work of Robert Craft (as were the final volume of memoirs, the New

8 Boris Iarustovskii, Igor’ Stravinskii: Kratkii ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow: Muzyka, 1964). 9 “Stravinskii—East and West,” 454. 10 Ibid., 457. 11 Nation, letter to the editor, 3 August 1970, 66, 83.

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York Review interviews, and the Harper’s reviews mentioned at the beginning of the present article).12 “Prof. Simon Karlinsky’s review,” the letter begins, “of some recent books concerning my music … is so generous to me that I feel ungrateful taking issue, as I shall, with some points both of fact and of empha- sis.” The first issue discussed is the quality of Glebov’s/Asafiev’s Book about Stravinsky, which Stravinsky did not like (as Craft had evidently discovered by looking at “the rubrics with which I [sic] decorated it at the time,” and as will surprise no one who has read the book). The first substantial issue concerns the authorship of “What I Wanted to Express in The Rite of Spring,” the article whose absence from Craft’s account of the ballet in the facsimile sketchbook SK had complained about. Not for the first time (or the tenth), “Stravinsky” here disavows authorship of this essay, claiming on this occasion that “it was concocted by a French journalist, and the Russian version is a translation.” The journalist in question was Ricciotto Canudo, the Italian-born editor of an arts magazine called Montjoie! The article, titled “Ce que j’ai voulu exprimer dans Le sacre du printemps,” appeared in the magazine on the day of the fabled premiere performance, 29 May 1913. Like almost all Stravinsky’s public writings, then, this one was the work of a ghostwriter. But, like all those other writings, it enjoyed Stravinsky’s input and approval. Stravinsky himself sent the piece to the Moscow journal Muzyka as his own work, and when it appeared, tried to get the editor, Vladimir Derzhanovsky, to republish it with his own correc- tions to the translation. It is as much his work as were his Chroniques de ma vie (ghostwritten by Walter Nouvel), or his Poétique musicale (ghostwritten by Pyotr Suvchinsky and Alexis Roland-Manuel), and rather more than his letter to the Nation.

12 Craft has acknowledged this, though inconspicuously and somewhat deviously. In an obviously ghost-written “Author’s Foreword” in Themes and Conclusions (Lon- don: Faber and Faber, 1972; repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), a conflated British reissue credited to Stravinsky alone and consisting more or less of the nondiary portions of the last two Stravinsky-Craft volumes (Themes and Episodes and Retrospectives and Conclusions), we read that “I can now confess to the partly mercenary motive behind some of my prefaces, reviews, interviews. Bluntly, then—or is it an open secret?—the balance between my income and my needs has, for a decade or more, rested on the ‘deductibility’ of the latter; and my deductibility ‘status’ has depended, in turn, on the production, if not of music, then, faute de mieux, of words. For to write, in America, is to ‘write-off’” (p. 15). There is, as well, a note not expressly attributed to “Stravinsky,” added for the UC Press reprint edition, stating that “Mr. Robert Craft … conducted the interviews on behalf of the journals and institutions represented” as themselves throughout the volume (p. 8).

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One rather trivial issue raised by “Stravinsky” gives certain proof that he was not the author of the letter. It concerns the “‘nonexistent Russian word’ which Karlinsky objects to, but which, perhaps only because I coined it, I still like.” There is a word among the titles of the dances in The Rite of Spring that Stravinsky is well known to have coined: vypliasyvanie, the first noun in the title of the concluding dance from part 1, “Vypliasyvanie zemli,” known in French as “Danse de la terre” and in English as “The Dance of the Earth.” The word is derived from the Russian verb pliasat’, which means to do a (folk) dance. (Ballroom or theatrical dancing has a different verb in Russian.) Since it is Stravinsky’s ad hoc coinage, it cannot be translated with any certainty; but its prefix, often rendered “out” in English, suggests something violent, an attempted breakthrough (and the scenario and music certainly support that suggestion): hence, perhaps, as Craft himself suggested, “The Dancing Out of the Earth,” or “The Dance Overcoming the Earth.”13 But that was not the word about which SK was complaining when he noted in exasperation that “Craft solemnly offers us a nonexistent Russian word, telling us that he is correcting an earlier misprint in the score.” An early edition of the score, now the most widely available one thanks to its being pirated (owing to the lack of copyright on Russian works before the 1970s) by the American publisher Edwin F. Kalmus and later by Belwin Mills, has an obvious misprint in the Russian title of the “Jeux des cités rivales” (or “The Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes,” to give its inaccurate but standard English version): “Игра двухъ горо довъ” (“Igra dvukh” goro dov””) in prerevolutionary orthography. It is an error of registration: an extra space has been interpolated into городовъ (gorodov”, cities or tribes). Craft remembered this, probably because Stravinsky had pointed it out to him one day, but forgot to which word it applied. His solemn footnote reads: “A misprint in the Russian has been car- ried over to the 1965 edition: dvukhgoro is one word, not two.” Alas, among those who might have been consulted in 1969, Igor Stravinsky, suffering in the last years of his life from progressive dementia, was not available. SK had the courtesy, of course, to avoid peremptory correction of this or any other of “Stravinsky’s” vagaries. It was surely as obvious to him as it is to us in retrospect that the chief purpose of the letter to the Nation was to uphold one of the lies that he had exposed, the one about Canudo and Montjoie! At that time it was just the word of the reviewer against the word

13 Stravinsky, “The Rite of Spring”: Sketches, xxi.

367 V. On Stravinsky of the composer’s ventriloquist, and in responding, SK did not insist, but his correctives have since been vindicated many times over.14 On one point, however, his judgment needs revision in the light of subsequent research, and that is the matter of Suvchinsky’s “slurs,” as reported by Craft in Retro- spectives and Conclusions. It must have been painful at the time to read, “If Stravinsky had not gone to America in 1939 … he might have compromised himself politically,” followed by a random harvest of details about Stravinsky’s interwar flirtation with Fascism.15 It was reasonable to suppose that this wasp- ish narrative, delivered (if Craft’s translation of Suvchinsky’s French is to be trusted) with crude and venomous aplomb, “should be seen as a part of the Byzantine web of Parisian émigré rivalries,” about which SK was far better informed than was Craft (or anybody else writing at the time about Stravinsky), “rather than as any factual revelations.” But the evidence has been mounting since Stravinsky’s death and the opening of his archives, both in Russia and in the West, and there can be no gainsaying that this distasteful material is not just the revenge of the sterile theoretician on the creative genius but a part of the factual record of Stravinsky’s life—ripe (like the record of Chaikovsky’s sexual proclivities) for sensationalist abuse, to be sure, but also for legitimate scholarly use.

14 On the matter of Montjoie!, see Philippe Rodriguez, L’affaire Montjoie!: Canudo et Stravinsky (Fasano: Schena; Paris: Didier Érudition, 2000). 15 Retrospectives and Conclusions, 195ff.

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