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 with 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

One Boston invitation he did not turn down was to dine with Sergey and Natalie Koussevitzky on the 20th of November, a week or so before he was due to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a series of concerts in Providence and Boston itself. The Koussevitzkys, of all his Russian acquaintances, were among the most sympathetic and least censorious toward his association with Vera and his plan to marry her as soon as she could divorce Sudeykin. And he now knew enough about American provincial society to know that, if she came to the States, there could be no acceptable arrangement outside marriage.

Almost since arriving in Cambridge, he had been receiving anguished letters from her about the hardships of Paris in wartime, the wretchedness of old friends like Valechka Nouvel and Fred Osten-Saken, the lack of heating, the shortages, her experiences with divorce lawyers, and above all the seeming impossibility of obtaining a U.S. visa and even a French exit permit now that emergency regulations were in force. These regulations changed all the time, but were also much embroidered by rumor. There were laws against foreigners leaving, against women leaving, against French citizens marrying non-French citizens abroad; the French would not issue return visas to America, but America routinely refused visas to anyone without a return visa; and so on. For her divorce, Vera needed her birth certificate, the only copy of which was in Georgia because she had taken Georgian citizenship on her escape from the Soviet Union in 1920; she might try to prove that Sudeykin never legally divorced his previous wife, Olga, or (more difficult) that her own marriage to him was unconsummated, but in either case it would help to have her own previous divorce papers, which (needless to say) were in the possession of her husband in New York. To get almost any documentation she needed a new identity card, as was now required of all foreigners, but issue was slow and alphabetical, so it would benefit her to change from Sudeykina to her maiden name, de Bosset, which, however, she could not do quickly without the very papers she needed for her divorce.¹²

It so happened that Natalya Koussevitzky’s much younger half sister, Tanya, and Tanya’s husband Joseph Iorgy were at the Koussevitzkys’ in Boston that evening. Iorgy had just been appointed U.S. delegate-general of the Union Féminine Française, and Stravinsky seized the opportunity to point out to him the possible benefits to the UFF in America of so well-connected a Parisienne and her even better-connected French fiancé. Iorgy had contacts with the French military authorities, and he could supply letters that would enable Vera—with a certain amount of footwork and a well-placed charitable donation—to obtain a visa swiftly and without bureaucratic interference. Igor wanted her to do all this at once and not wait until spring; the divorce could be arranged in America. As ever, his will was paramount.¹³

He had ample evidence of opposition to that will, and not only on the part of immigration officials and divorce lawyers. A few weeks after his departure from Paris, his son Theodore had come to Paris from Le Mans and, without consulting his co-signatories, transferred all but a token sum in the joint bank account to an account in his own name at a bank in Le Mans. He did this, he told Vera, because he had heard a rumor that the bank in question (the ultra-solid Crédit Commercial) was in danger of failing. But Vera, remembering the incident at Sancellemoz, saw in it the hand of Denise, who, she alleged, had organized the transfer out of a desire to exercise control. Everyone was so furious with Theodore that the money had to be returned and he went around for weeks with his tail between his legs. Meanwhile his father fired off at him a letter of such grinding, inflexible reproof that Vera refused to forward it and in due course persuaded Igor to allow her to burn it.¹⁴

That Denise was the éminence grise behind this calculated snub to Vera can hardly be doubted. For all her gentle disposition and sweet charm, she was a woman of character and spirit, not without a certain consciousness of rectitude, and inclined—like any young wife—to be touchy about her husband’s standing in family circles, not to mention in his case artistic ones. Theodore, as the eldest child, deserved better of his father than to be placed on an equal footing of financial responsibility with the woman who, for nearly eighteen years, had cuckolded his dying mother; and it did not improve matters that he had personally been on friendly terms with her, been helped by her, even been watched over by her, nor that he was still, at the age of thirty-two, financially partly dependent on his father. Vera had for some time understood that Denise resented her, and she seems to have reciprocated the dislike, as far as was in her nature. Recently, in her letters to Igor, she had been lauding Soulima to the skies, sharing his wide-eyed accounts of life in the barracks at Cosne-sur-Loire, near Nevers, whither he had been conscripted, and praising his positive, enthusiastic attitude to work that he could easily have found soul-destroying. She knew perfectly well that all this would be balm to Soulima’s father, who had been deeply agitated by his quarrel with his younger son earlier in the year. Vera had also sided with Madubo in a separate dispute, over whether the ex-governess stayed in Paris and kept the Antoine-Chantin flat warm for Soulima on his weekends off, or went to Le Mans to keep house for Denise and Theodore. Madubo—and Vera on her behalf—naturally preferred Paris, where she had fewer duties, greater independence, and more fun. Still, Denise might well reason that Madubo, in her late forties, was effectively pensioned by Stravinsky and could hardly object to a little cleaning and cooking for his childless son and daughter-in-law. To the easygoing and still somewhat bohemian Vera, this was bourgeois opportunism writ large. What Igor thought about it, nobody seems to have troubled to find out; but the money transfer left him “tormented in my soul,” and when Denise sent him condolences on the first anniversary of Mika’s death, it left him “with a heavy heart, for I do not believe her any more.”¹⁵

In these matters, Vera was to blame only, perhaps, in failing to understand the natural currents of feeling of those who, this side of sainthood, were bound to wake up some mornings and feel that, on the whole, the world would be a more acceptable place without the likes of Madame Sudeykina. But how could she understand such a thing? Herself so devoid of bitterness, so easy in her view of the world, so generous yet so little beholden to others, she knew almost nothing of the ordinary horrors of family life. As for the extraordinary horrors of being the children of an egocentric, possessive, unfaithful genius, these she could see perfectly and help to moderate as well as she could. But she would always remain in some way outside them, in some way above them, vulnerable in their sufferers’ affections to any passing squall of unfavorable circumstance. She would be, after all, a stepmother, but of grown-up children who could act and reflect but not escape.

BY THE TIME Vera reached his headquarters, Iorgy’s military contact had been transferred, and it was only through Païchadze that she managed to trace him and make the arrangements for her visa. In spite of this delay, she suddenly had the papers she needed just after Christmas, and she made up her mind to leave at once on one of the fast but expensive Italian liners, rather than pay less for slightly more comfort on a later, slower American boat. On New Year’s evening 1940 she dined with Ira Belyankin in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, then took the night train for Genoa, sharing a couchette as far as Chambéry. Her boat ticket was two-way, but the return half was token—a third-class passage for fifty dollars—and it must have occurred to her that it would be a long time before she saw Ira, or any of the Belyankins, or her future stepchildren again. They receded from view: Milène cut off in Sancellemoz, Soulima playing at soldiers in Cosne, Theodore licking his wounds in Le Mans, Kitty—the only grandchild—sent to Switzerland while her father, whom Vera had wined and dined after the panikhida for Mika a month before, sat in a café in Montparnasse, playing cards, writing poetry, and from time to time editing the literary pages of Vozrozhdeniye. War had not yet come to France, but its effects were everywhere to be seen.¹⁶

New York was another planet. Stravinsky and Kall had arrived well before the Rex docked on the 12th of January, and the sense of freedom and a new start lasted as far as the Great Northern Hotel, where Vera and Igor checked into separate rooms and he could not visit her in hers because they were not married.¹⁷ In the Park Lane Cafeteria—another astonishing concept to a Parisienne—he could bring her up to date with his Harvard experiences and his recent trip to the West Coast, where he had conducted two concerts for Monteux in San Francisco the week before Christmas, then gone on to stay with Kall in Los Angeles, seen Balanchine—who was working in Hollywood—and visited the Disney studios with him to examine the models for Fantasia and listen to the Rite of Spring part of the soundtrack.¹⁸ Since arriving in New York he had been working on a series of concerts with the Philharmonic, including a program of unadulterated Tchaikovsky.¹⁹ The next thing now—curiously, in view of Le Mans—was an exhibition of Theodore’s pictures organized at the Perls Gallery by the indefatigable and ever-hopeful Dagmar.²⁰ Then they were all off to Pittsburgh for more concerts, before Igor went back to Harvard to be a professor once more and Vera headed south to stay with her old Paris friend Georgette in Charleston.²¹ The problem of her divorce and American social conventions still stood between them and an uncomplicated future.

At the Webster Hall Hotel in Pittsburgh, Igor tried checking them in as Mr. and Mrs. Stravinsky; but their passports betrayed them, and the embarrassment was all the keener for the fact that the Websters in question were the family of Soulima’s pianist friend Beveridge, whose brother had just met them at the station and was standing beside them as they registered. So for more than two weeks of January in what Vera thought a “sad, provincial city full of factories,”²² they kept separate rooms and a platonic façade, while Igor worked on his symphony and rehearsed Fritz Reiner’s orchestra in Apollo, Jeu de cartes, and the two early ballet suites. His Syria Mosque concerts on the 26th and 28th were his début appearances as a conductor in the smoky city, and after the first concert he made a speech to the members of the Musicians’ Club praising their orchestra and the musical life of America in general. “You see before you a happy man,” he assured them, without telling them all the reasons.²³ But a week later, back in New York, the happy man had to watch his intended steam away to South Carolina while he faced a chilly journey in the opposite direction. There had been more hotel troubles. A reporter had traced them to the Great Northern and started asking indiscreet questions about their relationship, after which they had hastily changed hotels, tempers had become frayed, and Igor had ended up having a row, on some pretext or other, with poor Woof.²⁴

The second block of Harvard lectures was timetabled to begin in March, but the semester, and with it the composition seminars, was starting up again in early February and the professor was required to be in residence. So there was nothing for it but to beard the New England winter in its lair. On the 14th of February so much snow fell in Cambridge that for two or three days nothing moved and it was a relief to get away by train to Chicago on the 18th for another series of concerts, especially as a Chicago premiere for the symphony was back on the schedule for the autumn, Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Carpenter having at last found the extra money to guarantee the commission as well as the purchase of the manuscript.²⁵ Admittedly, Stravinsky still had quite a lot of the music to compose; but Harvard in the spring would be a stimulating environment, and if the weather continued bad, so much the better for indoor work, not least because he had now decided to cut the Gordian knot of American prudery and marry Vera as soon as he could get her in front of a New England justice of the peace.

After her month in the south, Vera reached Boston on the 2nd of March, and the next day she and Igor drove out fifteen miles to Bedford, Massachusetts, to file a notice of intention to marry, a drive which must for him have conjured up strange memories of a similar winter journey in an open droshky thirty-four years before.²⁶ And just as Igor and Catherine had prevaricated about their exact relationship at Novaya Derevnya in 1906, so Igor now told lies about Vera’s history of marriage and divorce. Briefly, he testified that Vera had married Sudeykin in 1918 and divorced him at Tiflis in February 1920. These fabrications were either believed or “believed” by the probate judge, who probably had little choice but to issue the desired divorce certificate. The couple were married in a civil ceremony in Bedford, in the house of a Harvard professor of Russian named Timothy Teracuzio, on 9 March, a year and a week after the death of Stravinsky’s first wife. The sole competent living witness to the truth, Vera’s husband in New York, did not in this case emerge from the shadows.²⁷

Between the lie and the act, Stravinsky directed two chamber concerts, one in Boston and one in Cambridge. The programs were the same: the Octet, Dumbarton Oaks, the Soldier’s Tale suite, and the two-piano concerto, which he played with a former piano pupil of Kall’s, Adele Marcus, and Mildred Bliss came up from Washington to hear her “house” concerto and to discuss the symphony commission with the composer.²⁸ In Cambridge, the concert on the 8th—fortunately a non-ticketed affair—had been arranged for the Paine Hall, but demand proved so great that it was moved late in the day to the larger Sanders Theater. A certain irony in this would not have been lost on Stravinsky when he strode into the New Lecture Hall for his fourth lecture on the 13th. The auditorium was less than half full, as if, faced with the choice between the composer’s music and his musicology, Boston and Harvard had decisively opted for the former. Or perhaps it was simply that the novelty of his speaking presence had worn off. Attendance remained modest for the last two lectures. The studiedly controversial fifth lecture on the 20th, with its prolonged attack on Soviet music, was preached to an already partly converted audience of expatriate Russians and academic Russianists, many of whom, nevertheless, found Stravinsky’s (or Souvtchinsky’s) thinking excessively dogmatic, while local critics were disappointed that he said so little about the Russian music they knew, including his own.²⁹ At the final lecture after the Easter break, on 10 April, he was “enthusiastically applauded by his small, though appreciative, audience, and he took curtain calls at the end in the manner of an admired performer.”³⁰ But a cheering mob of excited students would have made a more gratifying culmination.

After the wedding, Vera and Igor had moved out of the Forbes’s into the Hemenway Hotel on the Back Bay Fens in Boston, and there they stayed for the rest of their time in New England. They had been mulling over their future, and had decided that to return to Europe in May would be both pointless and fraught with practical difficulties. The war, instead of ending within weeks as everyone always seemed to think wars would, was grumbling on, and though the news from France so far was unsettling rather than catastrophic, it was clear that concert work in Europe that year would be negligible, while Igor had his own grim memories of what happened to royalty payments and hire fees at such times. Immediately after his 13 March lecture, he had caught the night train to New York to take part in a concert organized in Town Hall by the Blisses in aid of French war relief, a concert for which he was donating his services on condition that a percentage of the money was earmarked for French artists.³¹ There was not much point in his returning to Paris merely to be himself once again the beneficiary of precisely this kind of American charity. In the States he still seemed able to attract work and command decent fees. Boston itself, thanks to Koussevitzky, liked him, as both composer and performer. He and Adele Marcus played in Exeter, New Hampshire, just after their New York show, and there was a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony at the end of March.³² And if his lectures had sown any doubts about the durability of his appeal to American audiences, they were firmly dispelled by the Boston concerts, every one of which was packed to the doors for programs dominated by difficult or problematical works like Oedipus Rex and Apollo. Now he had concerts in New York, in the course of which he would be recording Petrushka and The Rite of Spring with the Philharmonic, his first-ever sessions for the Columbia parent company, which had recently been taken over by CBS, had a new policy of recording with American orchestras, and was about to turn the whole philosophy of marketing classical records on its head by literally halving the price of a twelve-inch disc from two dollars to one.

But if they wanted to stay in the United States, the question of visas would rear its head once more. It turned out that Igor’s temporary visa as the holder of a French passport could routinely be renewed for six-month periods, but Vera had a Nansen passport and had come to America under a so-called “Titre d’identité et de voyage,” which could not be renewed.³³ What happened if they wanted to leave the United States and then come back in? This was no hypothetical question, because while he was in New York Stravinsky had met Carlos Chávez, the conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, who wanted him to conduct in Mexico in July. He simply did not dare leave with Vera unless he was certain they could both return. The only serious alternative was to come in permanently, under the American immigration quota system, and to file for U.S. citizenship on reentry. But Robert Bliss now terrified Stravinsky by announcing that there was a waiting list of at least eight months on the Russian quota—a waiting list one could not get on from within the United States.³⁴ For the second time in less than six months, the world’s immigration bureaucracy seemed to have them by the throat.

Anxiety over these troubles made Stravinsky irritable, and it was just at this moment that things started going wrong with Kall. Igor himself had always been able to put up with the muddles and eccentricities of his helpers if he found them personally congenial; but the cold weather seemed to have affected Kall, who was drunker and more disorganized than ever in the past, added to which Igor was no longer a grass-widower but a newly married man whose wife, however easygoing, would not like to see her husband’s affairs being run by an alcoholic. There was another, complicating factor. Dagmar had been busy in New York fixing Igor’s Columbia bookings and concert dates in return for a commission. But Dagmar liked to mix business with passion, and she was still in undiminished pursuit of her client, with Kall as go-between and confidant. “Woof, dear,” she urged, “write to me as promised right away and I shall destroy at once as promised.—Am so anxious to hear how ‘he’ is … I haven’t had one drop of alcohol since you left—I will become again beautiful. I pray your cough has left you. It seems only what one loves leaves one though.…”³⁵ At other times, Dagmar and Kall would talk on the phone, and after one of these conversations Kall made a scene of some kind with Stravinsky.³⁶ Whether or not Kall was playing Pandarus as Dagmar hoped, his ineptitude as an organizer was unlikely to help her cause. At the end of March, when he and the Stravinskys set off for New York, he left the rail tickets at the hotel and lost two suitcases and a wallet at Grand Central Station when they arrived. Igor lost his temper, and it began to look as if their happy winter together would end in tears.³⁷

Dagmar, fortunately, was a more dependable planner, and she had set up the Carnegie Hall concerts and recordings, together with all necessary press coverage, with dedicated efficiency. From the start, she had been instrumental in persuading Columbia’s classical music director, Moses Smith, to record Stravinsky, and it was probably her fixing that tied the sessions in with a concert series—the composer’s second with the New York Philharmonic that year—including his two great early ballets.³⁸ In the space of a week he conducted four concerts with what was surely America’s best orchestra and probably, therefore, the best in the world at that particular moment when Europe’s finest had been decimated by conscription and anti-Semitism. On the 4th of April, he recorded both The Rite of Spring and Petrushka (the short suite, starting with the “Tour de passe-passe”), in two heavy Carnegie Hall sessions that left him dripping and exhausted. Yet, whatever the strain of recording nearly fifty minutes of the most arduous and complicated modern music in five hours, the results set new standards for both works. Compared to the almost routine precision of postwar performances, they may lack absolute rhythmic security. On the other hand, for brilliance of sound and for sheer physical, balletic energy, they were unmatched in their day, and they still have a unique immediacy and authenticity that must have been a shattering experience to new listeners who acquired these discs in the early forties. Particularly in The Rite of Spring, there are grounds for thinking that the 1940 recording established a view of the music that effectively rendered earlier versions (including of course Stravinsky’s own) obsolete. The fact that the recordings were themselves of outstanding modern quality and could be bought very cheaply also naturally did the music’s dissemination no harm.

The Harvard semester still had a month to run, but Igor’s route back to Boston lay via Washington, where the Blisses had set up a meeting with the director of the U.S. Visa Division and a lunch at the French Embassy, with a view to smoothing over the formalities of his and Vera’s quota application. A certain added urgency may have crept into the deliberations with the news, which arrived during the embassy lunch, that the Germans had occupied Denmark and were at that moment launching an attack on Oslo. The next day, at Harvard, Stravinsky delivered his final lecture, and the day after that he started work on the finale of the symphony. He still had seminars to give, and even a few private lessons. But on 6 May the Forbeses threw a farewell party, and on the 7th the three Russians—husband, wife, and secretary—left Boston Harbor on a ship bound for New York, the first leg of a honeymoon trip that would eventually take them by a circuitous route to California. Before leaving, Igor wrote to his children describing his recent schedule and raising an issue that had been worrying him ever since he had received a letter from Yury Mandelstam announcing that he had himself remarried. “I was struck,” he told Theodore,

by the suddenness of the news of Yura Mandelstam’s remarriage, which he told me by letter. By marrying Vera, I have regularized before the world and the laws of humanity the nineteen years of our union, but with him it’s quite another matter, only a year after Mikusha’s death.³⁹

A brave son might have pointed out that Yury had at least waited for his wife to die. But above all there is a certain defiance in the composer’s statement, a claim for special status, even while its gratuitousness (since the matter had not been raised by Theodore) suggests a bad conscience. This double image of his moral position apparently had not perished with Katya but remained with him, haunting and enriching his feelings, until—decades later—he followed her to the grave.

 * * *

THEY WERE in Manhattan for a week, planning the next stage of their cruise and catching up with important people in Igor’s life: his doctor (Garbat); his New York publisher, Ernest Voigt, editor in chief of Schott’s U.S. representative, Associated Music Press; and useful local friends like the Dushkins. It should have been an agreeable time, constructive yet relaxed, but the news from Europe was such as to murder sleep. On the 10th of May, the Nazis invaded the Low Countries on the pretext of protecting their neutrality, and within five days not only had Holland surrendered, but the Wehrmacht had crossed the Meuse at Sedan, smashed the defending French army, and headed swiftly for the Channel. Seldom can a honeymoon trip have taken place under such dark shadows of anxiety. On the 15th, with no letup in the flow of frightening news, Igor and Vera embarked with Kall and a new assistant, Grigory Golubeff, on the Seminole bound for Galveston.⁴⁰ The idyll of sailing into warm blue seas in spring was regularly shattered by news of what seemed to them the destruction of the Europe they knew. On the 21st, the day they docked at Galveston, came reports that the Germans had reached Abbeville, trapping the British Expeditionary Force and a large part of the French and Belgian armies in the coastal region of Flanders. They did not have the heart to make their intended trip to the Grand Canyon, but instead took a train direct from Houston to Los Angeles, where they arrived on the 23rd “like refugees,” as Vera noted in a burst of empathy with France as she was imagining it.⁴¹

They spent their first night at Kall’s house in South Gramercy, but what had been for Igor a cozy and congenial refuge now struck his wife as mean, dirty, and uncomfortable. It had suffered greatly in its owner’s absence and with the passing years. Bills had been left unpaid, there was no electricity or gas, and the telephone had been cut off. It was all somehow symptomatic of poor Woof’s slow disintegration, and Igor, who had had almost eight months of his secretary’s company, could not resist telling him so. There was a quarrel, which was then patched up well enough for them to stay with a roof over their heads. But it was the more imperative for them to find a house or apartment of their own, if only as a temporary recourse for the two months until Mexico, after which, as properly registered immigrants, they could look for something permanent. The decision to stay in America was now irrevocable. With the Nazis in France and advancing on Paris, there could be no thought of an early return.

In the days that followed, they were driven round the more salubrious parts of Los Angeles by friends, looking for somewhere to live: by Otto Klemperer, who was entering one of his manic phases and must have made a somewhat nerve-wracking chauffeur;⁴² by a piano pupil of Kall’s named Dorothy McQuoid, whom Stravinsky had met on his December visit; and by the dancer Adolph Bolm, who had settled on the West Coast with his wife, Beata, and been appointed resident choreographer of the Hollywood Bowl. Bolm’s latest Bowl project was a stage production of The Firebird that coming August—with designs by Nicholas Remisoff, who had collaborated with Bolm on the Washington Apollo in 1928—and this he now pressed Stravinsky to agree to conduct. Stravinsky said something like: “I will conduct your Firebird if you will be my guarantor in my application for U.S. citizenship.” And so it was settled.

In 1940, Los Angeles was already a sprawling and confusing city, and there were many immigrants looking for houses that summer.⁴³ It took them ten days to find one they liked, at 124 South Swall Drive in Beverly Hills, an unassuming single-story house in one of the gridded streets that run south off Wilshire Boulevard. So desperate were they by this time that they signed on the spot, and within three days they had moved in, with such belongings as they had with them. Thus their Californian life together stumbled into motion: two more Russians in a city created by migration and rapidly filling up with Europeans in flight from a conflict which, it was increasingly being said, spelt the end of civilization as they knew it and the beginning of a new European Dark Age. On the very day that the Stravinskys found their house, Paris was bombed by the Luftwaffe for the first time, and eleven days later, on the 14th of June, the German army took possession of the grandest and most desirable real estate even they had yet violated. The swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and, the next day, the Palace of Versailles. A week later, France fell. Of the Stravinskys scattered around the French provinces, nothing was known.

Between the news bulletins on the one hand and the peculiarly detached Hollywood social world on the other, Stravinsky could again turn to his symphony finale. For the first time there was real pressure to finish the work, now firmly scheduled for Chicago in November. But he seems in any case to have had no difficulty reentering the music’s particular world each time he took up the score, and though the symphony is diverse in character, it shows few outward signs of its disjointed manufacture. Perhaps the slightly self-conscious finale references to the main theme of the first movement (an atypical device for Stravinsky) could be seen as a symptom of anxiety, but only with inside knowledge, since musically it makes perfect sense. On the other hand, the main finale theme, with its curious suggestion of Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov, derives from an idea Stravinsky had scribbled on the back of a telegram form, then rejected, the previous autumn—an idea that eventually resurfaced in the “Pas d’Action” of the Danses concertantes.⁴⁴

Outside working hours, the Stravinskys slipped effortlessly into the round of star-studded garden parties, charity teas, and drive-in dinners that were Los Angeles’s special contribution to civilized life. They saw a good deal of Edward G. Robinson, an old but never intimate friend (to whom they remained “Mr. and Mrs. Stravinsky”); there were Marlene Dietrich, Josef von Sternberg, Erich Remarque, Cecil B. De Mille, Hedda Hopper, Max Steiner, and an ever-expanding credit sequence of Hollywood names, some of whom doubtless wondered who exactly this diminutive Russian and his large but still-beautiful wife were, while others certainly knew enough to hope that his intellectual eminence and artistic genius would rub off on them. These days they were both speaking passable English, Vera having studied assiduously in Paris the previous autumn; and their rich, sonorous accents were far from out of place in that land of the immigrant and the B-feature thriller. There is no particular evidence that, at so early a stage, they were bored by these gleamingly vapid, self-congratulatory gatherings. What is certain is that the climate suited them after Northern Europe and New England, which—Igor complained to one reporter—had only two seasons: winter and the Fourth of July. In many subtle ways, California soon began to affect their temper as well as their health. In Beverly Hills, surrounded by celluloid showbiz smiles in the unbroken sunshine, even Igor’s hitherto inscrutable camera-face started to soften and the wonderful radiance which his family and friends had always known made its belated début in photographs.

Six weeks after settling into South Swall Drive they set off for Mexico, having at last managed—through interminable meetings with lawyers—to secure quota allocations without needing to leave the country before applying. It was, all the same, no token visit. Chávez had arranged for Stravinsky to conduct no fewer than four concerts with his Orquesta Sinfónica, and he was also booked to record his Divertimento for RCA Victor. Either because of the immigration rules or because there was no air service, they had to make the seventeen-hundred-mile journey by train, via El Paso and Guadalajara, a languid four-day trek with delays for paperwork and innumerable stops at wayside halts to take on peasants with their bundles, their babies, and their guitars. Mexico City itself, with its nearby Aztec ruins and its rim of volcanic mountains, was more than worth the discomfort, and Stravinsky liked working with the excitable but disciplined Mexican musicians. The concerts went well. But when it came to the recording session, it turned out that radio interference had broken in on the tape, and it could not be used.⁴⁵

The final concert was on 4 August, and on the 5th they again boarded the train for Los Angeles, travelling this time with an immigration lawyer via Nogales on the border with Arizona. Here, on 8 August, it was necessary to leave the train and submit to medical examination and a lengthy form-filling process. One of the immigration officers asked Stravinsky if he wanted to change his name; “well, most of them do,” he drawled when Stravinsky chortled at the suggestion.⁴⁶ The inquisition lasted three hours—a long wait in the scorching early afternoon heat of the Arizona desert, but a short enough time, in all conscience, in which to change the direction of one’s life. When the U.S. consul eventually drove them to their train on the Arizona side of the border, they were not yet Americans; but they had embarked on a process that, after five years and barring accidents, would bring them to that desirable state. When they in due course got back to South Swall Drive, it felt, Vera said, like coming home.⁴⁷

AT LAST there was news of the family in Europe. Theodore and Milène had both written, and there was a letter from Rieti, who had left Paris just before the German takeover and was now in New York. He had seen Soulima at Nevers and found him in good heart. “But I think our France is really done for, alas,” he added.⁴⁸ Theodore had moved to the region of Toulouse, in unoccupied France, though whether voluntarily or by evacuation was not clear. His father was now worrying desperately about how they would all survive the coming winter, since Milène had written from Sancellemoz that she had no money and was unable to get access to the Paris bank account.⁴⁹ He had already sent fifty dollars via Vera’s friend Olga Sallard, but he had no idea whether it had arrived; and now he wanted to send more. He was desperate for news of Soulima and Madubo (this was before Rieti’s letter came), and anxious about Kitty in her mountain fastness at Leysin: “I suppose,” he told Theodore, “that [Aunts Vera and Olga] are offended that I didn’t send them an offical announcement of my marriage with Vera.”⁵⁰ Even in wartime, there was to be no excuse for failure to communicate.

At this nervous moment, when so little was known and outcomes were shrouded in mist, he at long last finished his Symphony in C—of all his works the one that bears covert witness to the most terrible and tragic events. Later that day, the 17th of August, he stepped onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl to rehearse his Firebird, in the form of its short 1919 suite, with Bolm’s troupe and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.⁵¹ The change of mood could hardly have been more abrupt. He had attended concerts at the Bowl and endured the queues of cars and the nightmare of parking, to say nothing of the doubtful advantages of listening in the open air, the polyphony of nature noises and distant traffic, the cool air and the rustle of fur coats, but he had never conducted there before, and he had certainly not seen the Bowl as it would be for the concert on the 27th. For the danced part of the program, Remisoff had designed a screen of brightly painted and brilliantly lit shrubbery to conceal the orchestra. At the end of The Firebird the bushes slid sideways “to reveal a fairy-tale city that reached into a rainbow” and the Firebird “mounted the topmost tower in triumph over all the monsters, kikimoras and boliboshki who had been so terrifying in their chartreuse, green, devil-red and bright blue costumes.” Even the audience was invited to contribute to this spectacular Russian son et lumière. Before The Firebird began the lights were extinguished, and the eighteen thousand patrons held lighted matches above their heads, “like a vast field of fire-flies.”⁵² In the interval the critic Deems Taylor made a speech in which he claimed that Bolm had choreographed the suite because the complete ballet score was in Paris and “he doubted the propriety of asking for it at present.”⁵³

Such events were comforting to Stravinsky’s sense of belonging in this new and remote land, but they could not disguise the fact that his future there as a working composer was at best uncertain. He had no commissions nor prospect of any. From Europe he could expect nothing. Since the spring, his music had been under a formal Nazi ban, so the more countries Hitler invaded, the fewer would perform his work.⁵⁴ In any case, the distribution of royalties (especially from Schott and Édition Russe) was bound to be curtailed, as it had been in the last war. So if he wanted to earn his living by his pen as well as his baton, he would have to adapt to the environment in which he found himself, an environment in which the serious composer was an object of prestige rather than comprehension, and in which commercial criteria held almost universal sway.

Accordingly, early in October, he again visited Paramount, toured the studios, and lunched with the new music director, Louis Lipstone. A few days later, on the 12th, he attended a screening of Fantasia at the Disney studios, an experience that sorely tested his goodwill toward what was, after all, very much the “intellectual” end of the Hollywood spectrum.⁵⁵ He knew, of course, that his score had been cut and reorganized; but he now had to confront the dinosaurs in all their animated grotesquerie, and watch the conductor, Leopold Stokowski, walk up and down a color-lit staircase and shake hands with Mickey Mouse. Yet however distasteful he may have found this whole performance,⁵⁶ he swallowed his pride and, a few days later, entered into negotiations with Disney over possible film animations of other works of his. On the 28th of October, before Fantasia had even been shown to a paying audience,⁵⁷ he signed a new contract for the exploitation of The Firebird, Renard, and Fireworks, an option for which he was paid $1,500. Had Disney ever used any of these works, there would have been more cash, but he never did.⁵⁸

Stravinsky had also discovered that it was possible to make money by allowing his works to be adapted in band arrangements, with or without voice, and a few days before the Paramount visit he had made an agreement with an arranger called Gregory Stone, under which Stone was authorized to make adaptations from various Stravinsky works, including the three early ballets and Pulcinella, in return for a fifty percent royalty and an acknowledgment of the composer’s “editorship.”⁵⁹ This might seem to conflict with Stravinsky’s supposed reluctance to allow any music he wrote for films to be adapted or orchestrated by other hands; but he appears to have felt differently about existing works, especially where the agreement was under his control and did not place him at the mercy of some large, philistine institution. It may nevertheless have been at Stone’s suggestion that he spent several days in early October writing a tango specifically with a view to commercial exploitation.⁶⁰ Although the Tango is often regarded as a piano piece, the three-line sketch is actually the short-score of a work for band or instrumental ensemble, and the object was to add words to it and turn it into a popular song.⁶¹ It is this commercial intention that accounts for the straightforward dance-hall metrical regularity of the piece, compared with the quirky stylizations of the tango in The Soldier’s Tale—a concession that shows a hitherto unheard-of readiness on Stravinsky’s part to compromise in order to break into the marketplace.

Nothing of the kind leapt to the ear when he conducted the premiere of the Symphony in C, “composed to the glory of God [and] dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary,” in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall on the 7th of November.⁶² To some, a half-hour symphonic work by Stravinsky was still too baffling a phenomenon to call forth more than bemused admiration. A few were struck by the ease with which the new work kept company with popular old scores like The Firebird and Petrushka, but that was more the case with the first two movements than the last two. “The symphony’s immediate appeal,” one critic found, “undoubtedly lessens as it goes on, for the fugue in the third movement plumbs depths which are not easy for a listener to reach on his first try. The fourth movement, too, is a great deal more recondite than the two which open the work.”⁶³ Others were content merely to enjoy the feeling that, for a few short hours, their city was the center of the musical universe, “a privilege,” one wrote, “which Chicago will not cease to value.”⁶⁴

It was too much to expect the Chicago press to notice the most remarkable fact about the symphony: that it was the first concert work for orchestra without soloist or voices, not counting arrangements or suites, that Stravinsky had written since Fireworks (which happened to be on the program with it). In this simple and obvious sense, it marked a return to something he was conventionally regarded as having rejected. Once before, in 1925, he had thought of writing a symphony, but had dropped the idea in favor of Oedipus Rex, an opera that had nevertheless reinstated the symphony orchestra in his work after years of wind bands and small mixed ensembles.⁶⁵

This time the idea had not been dropped, though it might well have been if Stravinsky and Claudel had not fallen out over their Ida Rubinstein commission. But the two symphony projects had one other significant thing in common; both, so far as one can judge, were conceived in America, and with American concert life in the foreground of Stravinsky’s field of musical vision. What this would have meant to the 1925 symphony can only be guessed at. What it meant to the Symphony in C is writ large in the music.

Conducting symphony concerts all over provincial America, Stravinsky had become conscious of the intensely conservative world he was invading, and what an incongruous figure he cut in it. He entered it as a tiger might enter a cat’s home: a creature not wholly out of place, yet for all that rather frightening and not ideally to be admitted too often. What sort of work might he himself contribute to such a culture? The obvious answer was a symphony: a symphony in C, of course—like Beethoven’s first and Mozart’s last, the purest, most archetypal, most classical, above all least frightening kind of orchestral concert work. When questioned about the new piece by nosy Boston reporters, he had concocted a technical explanation of the title: it was neither in C major nor in C minor but simply in C, and “instead of all chords gravitating towards one final tonic chord, all notes [would] gravitate towards a single note.”⁶⁶ Leaving aside the accuracy of this description (it was not accurate), it studiously missed the point. This was a work that would start out from the image of the symphony—something rooted in the consciousness of anyone who had ever attended what was still called a “symphony” concert. Like the post-Brandenburg Dumbarton Oaks concerto, it would pay ritual homage to the various forms and procedures locked up in that basic image: it would employ a Beethoven-sized orchestra and have four movements, sonata forms, first and second subjects, recognizable key sequences, and all the rest of the baggage of the symphonic program-note. But behind all that, and eventually in front of it, it would be doing something essentially different. It would be pursuing Stravinskian methods through the prism of the symbolic idea, just as earlier works like the Piano Sonata or even Oedipus Rex had done. Like all his so-called neoclassical works, in other words, it was an exercise in modelling—in taking some strong idea as the starting point for a personal creative journey like any other. Hence the apparent change of focus as the work proceeded, a change actually no greater, allowing for the difference in scale, than in Dumbarton Oaks; and hence the greater difficulty—greater modernity perhaps—that sensitive critics experienced in the last two movements.

The symphony included the last music Stravinsky conceived and composed in Europe, and for all its American affiliations, it was a fitting climax to his life as a European, just as the Harvard lectures had embodied certain academic and polemical aspects of French thought. And just as the wellbred Gallic framework of the lectures concealed an individuality of a distinctly un-Cartesian type, so the symphony was in reality a most curious and unclassical addition to the classical repertoire it smilingly and reassuringly claimed to represent. The one thing one could safely say about it was that it knew where it stood in relation to that repertoire. From the outposts of the West, that certainty would for a long time be hard to recapture.