CHAPTER 1

Stravinsky in Exile

JONATHAN CROSS

The death in New York of Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky at 5:20 a.m. on 6 April1971 was already making broadcast headlines by the top of the next hour.The news of the passing of this "towering figure in twentieth-century music"(The Guardian), "one of the great, original creative geniuses in the entire historyof music" (Washington Post & Times Herald), was soon being wired around theworld, with commentators lining up in America, Europe, the Soviet Union, andelsewhere to offer their views on the achievements of this most celebrated ofcomposers. It was not just journalists, friends, and artists who had something tosay; politicians, too, some of whom had never even met him, were eager to havetheir voices heard, to claim Stravinsky's legacy for themselves. At his second NewYork funeral ceremony (the first had been a simple prayer service on the eveningof his death) representatives from the political centers of the opposed sides ofthe Cold War could be found: Michael Whitney Straight, spokesman for U.S.President Richard Nixon, deputy chairman of the National Endowment for theArts, and one-time KGB spy; and Anatoly Dyuzhev, cultural attaché to the SovietEmbassy in Washington. Stravinsky's widow, Vera, received letters of condolencefrom the highest authorities. From the Soviet Ministry of Culture, the formerPolitburo member Yekaterina Furtseva brushed aside earlier decades of officialSoviet hostility toward Stravinsky in expressing her sincerest sympathies. And withbarely disguised echoes of Beethoven's Ninth came a letter from the White House:"Surely, the power and force of his genius help to make all men brothers and themagnitude of his loss transcends all national boundaries."

The tone adopted by Stravinsky's obituarists certainly helped consolidate aview that persists in certain quarters today, namely that he was the last of the"great composers," that he was a figure of Beethovenian magnitude who spoke "inthe purest language of all peoples" (as Wagner wrote of Beethoven). That suchuniversalist claims were being made for Stravinsky even before his body had beeninterred should hardly surprise us. Throughout much of his life Stravinsky hadhimself been largely responsible for his representation as a cosmopolitan figure,as someone whose music could speak to all people in a kind of Esperanto thatdisregarded national boundaries and identities. His own life, indeed, had spannedcultures and continents. Born a Russian into a family of minor Polish nobility,stranded in Switzerland during the First World War, Stravinsky eventually tookFrench, then U.S. citizenship. In 1948 Time magazine reported that he liked tobe known as a "California composer," and the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians (published in 1954) defined him as an "American composer ofRussian origin." Yet, in 1962, on his first return to his homeland in almost halfa century, he famously declared at a dinner in Moscow hosted by Furtseva that"a man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only onecountry—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life." Onthis occasion one has to feel that Stravinsky was speaking from the heart. "I'vespoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself [slog]is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latentthere, a part of its hidden nature." Russia had evidently never left him.

One might wonder, then, why Stravinsky chose his brief Ode of 1943 tobe the first work he would ever conduct on Russian soil at the opening concertof his Russian tour, on 26 September 1962, in the Great Hall of the MoscowConservatory. Neither overtly Russian like The Rite of Spring, which Robert Craftconducted in the same concert after the Ode, nor self-evidently a showcaseexample of his most recent music, its sparse textures and understated languagewere not designed to make a bold impression. Orpheus (1947) formed the secondhalf of the program, a similarly subdued work of melancholic mood, framed bythe falling harp lines of the weeping Orpheus. It evidently baffled the audience.Craft reports that the performance was "attended with much reading of programnotes, coughing, and other signs of restlessness," all of which can clearly be heardon the recording, subsequently released on the Soviet Melodiya label.

The Ode was a product of Stravinsky's difficult early years in the UnitedStates. "We are living lately in a state of continuous anxiety because of the tragicnews from our poor old Europe," he wrote to Carlos Chávez in 1940, "and I askmyself if these terrible events will not ultimately have repercussions in the newworld." Stravinsky still bore the pain of the triple loss of his daughter, first wife,and mother in just seven months in 1938–39, mitigated only by the happinessof now being free to marry his longtime mistress, Vera Sudeikina. His brotherYury died in Leningrad in 1941, just before the start of the terrible blockade ofhis native city. In a fascinating volte-face for one who had been so vehementlydismissive of Soviet music, Stravinsky listened, apparently moved, on 19 July 1942,to the U.S. broadcast premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7 in C Major(Leningrad) given by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Heremained deeply concerned for the well-being of his family left behind in Europe,and followed the progress of events assiduously from afar. The vast distance thatseparated him from his loved ones served only to exaggerate his sense of anxietyand to reinforce his status as an émigré.

The Ode had been commissioned by a fellow Russian émigré, the conductorSerge Koussevitzky in memory of his wife, Natalia, who had died in 1942. Acrossmany decades the Koussevitzkys had been great champions and publishersof Stravinsky's music. However, the passing of Natalia Koussevitzky did not touchStravinsky; indeed, his attitude toward the couple had always been disingenuous,bordering at times on the contemptible. The tribute to her in the form of theOde was, as Paul Griffiths writes, more professional than personal. Indeed, ina decidedly impersonal touch, one of the three movements of this "elegiacalchant," the jaunty central "Eclogue," was recycled from the aborted music for ahunting scene in the film of Jane Eyre, directed by Robert Stevenson and producedby Orson Welles. The newly composed outer movements, however, have avery different character. The "Eulogy" breathes the same air as the Symphoniesd'instruments à vent written over twenty years earlier in memoriam Claude Debussy.The brass chords that punctuate the opening of the Ode are a pared-down echoof the start of the chorale from the Symphonies: a lower neighbor-note melodicmotion in the Ode, whose attendant chords are subsets of the Symphonies chords(an exact subset in the case of the second chord of the Ode, D–G–A[??]–B); further,the excerpts given in Examples 1a and 1b have identical durational proportions.

The later moments of sparse chamber scoring seem to anticipate by a decadeanother short (serial) tribute work, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). The closingmovement, "Epitaph," also carries echoes of the Symphonies. Compare, for example,the static, turning figures for flutes that frame the Ode's "Epitaph" (mm. 1–2) withthe turning flute figure at measure 29 in the Symphonies (see Examples 2a and 2b).Note also the slow, espressivo falling lines in the "Epitaph" (mm. 2–3) that lend thismusic its lamenting temperament and can be heard to parallel a short linkingpassage in the Symphonies (mm. 21–22).

The marking espressivo had been virtually absent from Stravinsky's scoressince Firebird of 1910. That the principal thematic material of the Symphonies'outer movements carries this indication represents an extraordinary shift for acomposer who had given his imprimatur to the view that "music is, by its veryessence powerless to express anything at all," and who, just a couple of years earlierin the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, was posing the question, viahis ghostwriters Roland-Manuel and Pyotr Suvchinsky, "Do we not, in truth,ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings, to translatedramatic situations, even to imitate nature?" Of what, then, does Stravinsky'snewly rediscovered expressive voice speak? And why at this moment, in 1940sAmerica? Is it merely another mask, a simulacrum of expression, "only an illusionand not a reality," or is it possible that it might just be a momentary sounding ofthe authentic voice of Stravinsky?

And how does this subjective note sit with the music's distanced character,which has often been noted? In these questions one might start to look for cluesas to why Stravinsky decided the Ode and Orpheus were well suited to mark his returnto his motherland. In the Ode it is, among other means, the reference to AncientGreek poetic forms that achieves such distance (from the present). Stravinskyhad periodically worn the Greek mask since Oedipus Rex (1927). In that opera-oratoriohe deployed all manner of distancing effects in his desire to build amonumental kind of theater: soloists and chorus are presented in masks; the "dead"Latin language is used; a narrator is employed to reveal the plot in the vernacularbefore the actual events unfold; the music moves across a landscape of styles thatStravinsky called a Merzbild (collage). The more general allusions in the Ode to themusic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have a similar effect of keepingthe listener at arm's length.

Indeed, Stravinsky had spent much of the preceding twenty years appropriatingthe language and practices of classical Western European music, and progressivelydistancing himself from his Russian roots. One motivation might have been afear of being perceived as provincial or out of step with sophisticated postwarParisian society. (Having been hidden from view in Switzerland during the waryears, Pulcinella flamboyantly announced Stravinsky's return to the limelighton 15 May 1920 with a chic and playful modernized classicism that delightedFrench audiences.) Such borrowing can certainly be read as a concerted effort atassimilation. For the novelist, essayist, and Czech exile Milan Kundera, it was alsoa sign of Stravinsky's status as an émigré:

Without a doubt, Stravinsky, like all the others, bore with him thewound of his emigration; without a doubt, his artistic evolutionwould have taken a different path if he had been able to stay wherehe was born. In fact, the start of his journey through the history ofmusic coincides roughly with the moment when his native countryceases to exist for him; having understood that no country couldreplace it, he finds his only homeland in music; this is not just a nicelyrical conceit of mine, I think it in an absolutely concrete way: hisonly home was music, all of music by all musicians, the very historyof music; there he decided to establish himself, to take root, to live;there he ultimately found his only compatriots, his only intimates,his only neighbors, from Pérotin to Webern; it is with them that hebegan a long conversation, which ended only with his death.

He did all he could to feel at home there: he lingered in eachroom of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every pieceof the furniture; he went from the music of ancient folklore toPergolesi, who gave him Pulcinella (1919), to the other Baroquemasters, without whom his Apollon musagète (1928) would beunimaginable, to Tchaikovsky, whose melodies he transcribes in LeBaiser de la fée (1928) to Bach ... Pérotin and other old polyphonists... Monteverdi ... Hugo Wolf ... and to the twelve-tone system ...in which, eventually after Schoenberg's death (1951), he recognizedyet another room in his home

His detractors, the defenders of music conceived as expressionof feelings, who grew irate at his unbearably discreet "affectiveactivity" and accused him of "poverty of heart," didn't have heartenough themselves to understand the wounded feelings that laybehind his vagabondage through the history of music.

Certainly one can say that the neoclassical aspects of the Ode, as so often inStravinsky's music after 1920, offer a kind of defense mechanism, keeping his ownfeelings at a distance. It is fascinating, therefore, that the Ode should also makesuch clear references to music of strongly Russian (and therefore more personal)character through, among other means, its recollection of the Russian funeralservice that Stravinsky used as a model for the Symphonies d'instruments à vent. Anymemorial piece was likely to summon up memories of the past. Here, in theOde, through its repetitions, the music seems to articulate a sense of nostalgia,a longing for a Russia more imagined than real that Stravinsky always carried inhis itinerant life, symbolized in the icons that hung in his study or the religiouspendants that hung round his neck. Feelings of alienation were now more acutelyfelt as he began to settle in the United States while his family remained at a greatdistance in war-torn Europe.

What is intriguing is that Stravinsky, on the occasion of his return to Russiain 1962, chose to speak through the Ode to the people of his native countryfrom whom he had been separated for so long. This work, with its echoes ofancient Russia, with its character of mourning, and with its uniquely expressivevoice, spoke of distance, loss, and sorrow. Stravinsky was delighted to be backon Russian soil, but it was a place he no longer knew. He did not try to enter hischildhood apartment at 66 Kryukov Canal in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), thoughhe did visit his niece Xenia who still lived nearby; he was officially discouragedfrom visiting his beloved summer home in Ustilug, which in any case had beenransacked and destroyed after the 1917 Revolution. Stravinsky's Russia lived ononly in his memory and imagination, in music such as the Ode. Indeed, eversince Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, Russia for Stravinsky was already a nostalgicconstruction, though deeply rooted in authentic folk traditions. The dislocatedflutes that frame the "Epitaph" of the Ode, turning in endless repetitions, suggesta melancholic, pastoral landscape; their liturgical chanting mourns the loss ofinnocence. "Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythicalreturn, for the loss of an enchanted world," observes Svetlana Boym. This surelysounds like Stravinsky's lament for the losses of family and homeland, for the lossof the enchanted world of his childhood. What better work, then, through whichto present himself to his fellow countrymen and women? (If only they had beenprepared to listen.)

The pastoral was in fact a theme running through all three works in the 1962Moscow program. An idealized pastoral is present explicitly in the bucolic horncalls of the Ode's "Eclogue." The Rite of Spring begins with the imitation on highbassoon of the sound of the reed pipes or dudki, an expression of the "sublimerising of nature as it renews itself," but, far from the idyllic rural life, progresses bymeans of an uncompromising rhythmic language toward the violent "SacrificialDance." And the subject of Orpheus, in his ability to charm beasts, trees, andeven rocks by the power of his music, stands as the exemplar of the pastoral figureacross at least three thousand years of European art. Although the pastoral inStravinsky might, at one level, be read as symbolic of the pure rural life, theenchanted Russia of the imagination, it is nonetheless inseparable from notions ofloss. In the celebrated paintings of the 1630s by Nicolas Poussin, shepherds (fromVirgil's Eclogues) gather round a tombstone bearing the inscription "Et in Arcadiaego" (I [Death] am even in Arcadia). Death is present, too, in all three Stravinskypastorals. The Ode is a memorial. The Rite ends with a dance to the death.Orpheus is pure neoclassical pastoral, yet even at the start we encounter Orpheusweeping for the loss of his lover Eurydice. We hear the falling Phrygian lines ofhis lyre (harp) in a conventional sign of lament, echoing outward into the strings,which linger mournfully over each note. Stravinsky looks back to Orpheus andthe classical past, not to repeat it but to reinvent it, turning it to his own modernpurpose. Behind the mask lie both a general sense of late-modern uncertainty anda personal sense of loss. The classical mask also betrays exile. "A writer in exile isby and large a retrospective and retroactive being," writes Joseph Brodsky. "Exileslows down one's stylistic evolution, ... it makes a writer more conservative."