NY Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 13 ·
August 10,
2006
Review
All in the Family
Stravinsky: The Second
Exile: France and America, 1934–1971
by Stephen Walsh
Knopf, 709 pp., $40.00
The second volume of Stephen Walsh's exhaustive and eloquent
life of Stravinsky completes the story of the most famous
composer of the twentieth century, who has been endlessly
written about but who has remained something of a difficult case
for biographers. As Walsh points out, there are hurdles of
language—Russian as well as French and English—and for years
there was the inaccessibility of certain source materials. But
in recent years, the composer's private papers and manuscripts,
along with his father's account books, have been made available,
and Richard Taruskin's long study of Stravinsky's Russian
heritage has been published. The first volume of Walsh's work
Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France,
1882–1934, appeared in 1999. Something like a full and fresh
account was emerging.
The biggest hurdle remained the image that Stravinsky
assiduously cultivated of himself in later years, through his
remarkable factotum and collaborator, Robert Craft, who has
published a biography, a diary, three volumes of letters, two
scrapbooks of photographs and documents, various conversation
books, and many articles, and who was involved, in one way or
another, in all of Stravinsky's musical activities after the
mid-1940s. Craft, with his encyclopedic knowledge, acute musical
sensibility, and remarkable prose, came in a sense to own
Stravinsky, or seemed to wish to, and while he opened up the
study of Stravinsky in many ways, his presence also could
intimidate those who might imagine challenging him. For decades
in these pages and elsewhere, he refined a view of Stravinsky's
life, and of his own role in it, that increasingly was
questioned not least because he could be so adamant in defending
it. Walsh, in the new book, calls Craft's work "riddled with
bias, error, supposition, and falsehood." His volume ends up
being nearly as much about Craft and his relations with
Stravinsky, and with Stravinsky's family, as it is about the
composer, who became inseparable from his amanuensis.
Their association brings to mind the stories
of Henry James. A bright but inconsequential young man
insinuates himself into the life of a great artist. The artist
is no longer young and his creative life, in a new country,
despite the glamour and celebrity he enjoys, has come to seem to
him a bit stale. His career as a revolutionary is presumed to be
over. But he is restless and he is a person of exceptional
energy and cunning. He now lives with his second wife, a
vivacious, doting woman, a fellow exile, who was for years and
quite openly his mistress. As for the young man, who was drawn
to the older man's music as a boy, he is also steeped in the
music that has displaced the older man's work. He is native in
the older man's new country, a tireless cicerone, an unusually
gifted writer, and eager to stir things up in the older man's
life. Not incidentally, the young man works for nothing, or next
to it, which is ideal because the old man is in love with money.
He widens the great man's knowledge as he also benefits from
being in the great man's circle. Inherently unequal, their
relationship, however, gradually becomes not one of a sycophant
or a servant and his master but something far more complex. The
younger man is ambitious, egocentric, prickly, and he knows how
to push. He draws out of the great man a vast, rich, if often
embellished and altered account of the past, and he helps set
the composer on course for an unexpected renaissance, which
entails a kind of artistic volte-face, and which revives the
great man's fortunes. An acquaintance tells the young man, "Your
labours for, with, about the immortal figure whom you now know
better than anyone, assure you a place not merely in heaven (on
which I am a poor authority) but on earth, too."
Not incidentally, the great man's wife is enamored of this
intense, nervous, boyish-looking young man, who has spiced up
her life and reinvigorated her husband's work. They are "all in
love with each other," observes a friend about the household,
whose dynamic shifts as the older man grows even older and the
younger man's role expands—writing for the older man, taking
over for him in the recording studio, on the podium. The wife
certainly has enjoyed her husband's success, his genius,
impishness, and wit, but she also endures his drunkenness and
temper and grows increasingly terrified that the young man might
leave one day. The young man sometimes treats the older man
impatiently, even impertinently, as if the older man were a
balky child or had wronged him—and this raises many eyebrows
among people who admire the older man and who also wish to have
access to him, or once had access but no longer do except
through the young man.
Concert managers and producers have been told they had to
accept the young man as a conductor when they wanted the great
man for their concerts and recordings. Sometimes they don't
accept, because the fees asked are too high or because
orchestras have their own conductors, whom they prefer to the
young man. The young man resents all this, and wishes to be
recognized for his own talents, which are not inconsiderable but
which would never have landed him where he is without the older
man. He lives under constant and growing censure, most obviously
from the great man's children, whose position he has
increasingly usurped, if only by circumstance; from people who
believe that in their joint writings, he is putting words into
the mouth of the great man, which he is, more and more so; and
from those who dislike the serialism toward which the young man
has pushed the great man's music. "That's what happens when you
invite the Devil...into your home," a fellow composer says. For
the young man, the sacrifices are considerable. But the line
between sacrifice and self-interest can sometimes be difficult
to draw. It is hard to say whether the older man, who adores the
young man but who knows a thing or two about the ways of
theater, thinks he benefits from the curiosity and jealousy that
the young man provokes, a curiosity that creates for the older
man a degree of sympathy, and perhaps even gives him, by
providing a distraction, some free room to operate. In any case,
the relationship is fraught, not unlike that between father and
son.
Except that there are also real sons and a daughter, from the
great man's first marriage, and when he dies, the sordid battle
over his fortune—particularly over how much the widow and young
man get versus the children—drags on in the courts for years.
The German writer W.G. Sebald titled a novel after the rings of
Saturn, which are the detritus of some celestial
cataclysm—shards from an act of cosmic violence, drifting
endlessly across time. The great man's death leaves behind lives
that never quite escape his orbit, including that of the (no
longer) young man. He writes, in retrospect, and with what seems
like growing bitterness, that the composer to whom he gave so
much of his life was
extremely anal, exhibitionistic, narcissistic,
hypochondriacal, compulsive and deeply superstitious. He was
also quarrelsome and vindictive, which is stated not as
moral judgment but merely as description of behavior.
There is a bit of the Victorian biographer John Forster in
Robert Craft. Caustic, manipulative, an object both of envy and
derision, a confidant, a man who spent his life seeking the
company of greater artists, Forster started out running errands
for several of his heroes and ended up dictating to them, as he
did to Leigh Hunt, whose faltering career he partly
reconstructed. From Hunt to Dickens, whom he met, as Craft did
Stravinsky, at an opportune and vulnerable point in the great
man's life (in Dickens's case, just before the death of his
beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth): Forster tried to control
the flow of information about Dickens and occasionally fiddled
with the facts to suit his master and himself, to enhance his
own place in Dickens's legacy, in posterity. "He was ever
bustling about his friend, interpreting him and explaining him,"
the writer Percy Fitzgerald remembered. "As I look back, I can
never call up the image of Dickens without seeing Forster beside
him."[1] Many people said it came
to seem the same with Stravinsky and Craft.
Great artists are often ruthless in service
to their art. This is one of the many lessons in Walsh's
biography. I thought of Bonnard: although unlike Stravinsky a
man of unfailing tenderness and modesty, he was shaped in later
years by a crucial relationship. Bonnard spent decades
sequestered with and catering to a nervous, difficult, sickly
wife in what seemed to many outsiders an unhealthy isolation,
but out of which he produced the most paradisiacal art. Clearly
all relationships are unknowable from the outside. Bonnard
needed his wife and their life of isolation to produce the art
he did, just as she depended on him.
And so it seems with Stravinsky and Craft. Walsh repeats what
is often said: that, whatever else may be held against him,
Craft deserves credit for having steered Stravinsky toward a
late blossoming of creativity. Craft has said it himself. "What
requires immediate and categorical refutation," he told the
music critic Joan Peyser some years ago,
is the notion that when I met Stravinsky he was already
acquainted with the works and methods of the New Viennese
School. In fact he did not know a single measure of the
music of any member of this group.... My guilt is not in
having directed or controlled the "spiritual interests of a
composer of genius" but rather in trying to bury my tracks
for having done so.
This overstates the case. Stravinsky did know Schoenberg's
work enough to go back and forth about whether his rival was a
"chemist of music more than an artistic creator" or "one of the
greatest creative spirits of our age." That said, Craft
introduced him to Webern and immersed him in all sorts of
music—including works by Gesualdo, Byrd, Tallis, and other early
composers—that he now wished to associate himself with.
Stravinsky, who always exploited people to his advantage,
obviously saw in Craft the man he needed to get him where he
wanted to go; absent Craft, I have no doubt that he would
somehow have gotten there anyway—nor did Craft, who has said he
led Stravinsky to water, but that Stravinsky wanted to drink.
There is a story told by Lillian Libman, for a while
Stravinsky's concert agent and publicist, about a recording
session of Pulcinella, during which Craft rehearsed the
orchestra at a tempo faster than Stravinsky wished. When
Stravinsky took over, Craft stood next to him, prodding the
players to speed up. Stravinsky reprimanded a clarinetist who
faltered. Craft said something to Stravinsky in an undertone.
Then another player flubbed and when Stravinsky lost his temper
again, Craft audibly took the composer to task. Stravinsky then
whirled around. "How dare you address me in this manner!" Craft
snatched his coat and fled. The two didn't speak for days.
Importantly, it was Stravinsky, not Craft, who relented.
Craft later wrote about the incident, printing Stravinsky's note
of apology to him ("Dear Bob, whom I love, with my ardent
longing for our former relations that gave me so much
happiness..."). The note, Craft wrote, made him feel "more
despicable," for his having forced the great composer to admit
dependence; but of course in printing the letter Craft publicly
announced his indispensability, and humiliated Stravinsky a
little in return for his own humiliation.
Libman, in her memoir, written nearly thirty-five years ago,
describes the dynamic she claimed to witness in the Stravinsky
household in Los Angeles, with Craft and Vera, Stravinsky's
wife. Even the slightest sound while he worked infuriated the
composer, a man of strict habits. With a deep, masculine voice,
fine, almost translucent skin, an unobtrusive mustache, eyebrow
"feathers," as he called them, and a large, deeply lined brow,
on which, Libman writes, were often distractedly perched
different pairs of eyeglasses, Stravinsky was a curiously
unforgettable fellow, in his manner courtly and endearing when
he chose to be but also calculating. "I was to discover that the
Stravinsky smiles were as carefully catalogued as his collection
of medications." At their first lunch together, he absorbed
himself in a glass of old scotch, which he held aloft whenever
it needed refilling. "I never saw a fifth of anything disappear
so fast." She grew to know his silences, following bad news
about ticket sales or checks owed to musicians or displays of
ignorance or stupidity—silences not to be mistaken for
indifference or boredom—which occasionally Craft but more
effectively Mrs. Stravinsky could eventually defuse. On one
occasion, when the morning's work had not satisfied him,
Stravinsky pounded on the lunch table, causing a bowl of
blueberries to tumble. "His fabled days of book-throwing and
dish-breaking were long since past," Libman recalled.
Now the rare outbursts only made one wish with all one's
heart that they would return. His wife never acknowledged
these moods by so much as a raised eyebrow, but went right
on chatting gaily, eating her lunch as leisurely and
dreamily as though she were seated alone under a chestnut
tree in the middle of a large glen. After a bit, her husband
would slide his hand tentatively in her direction (although
his head remained bowed), and she might give it a
tiny pat. She was a living lesson in how to handle any
man, let alone this one.
One wonders, after reading Walsh's more
thorough and less rosy account, whether "touching" is quite the
right word to apply to Stravinsky. He emerged in the first
volume as charming and psychologically bruised, unfaithful in
both music and love, a brave modernist but also an anti-Semite
and admirer of Mussolini. The story of his later life has been
like Rashomon: everyone involved in it has told it
differently, out of clear self-interest. Walsh, a music critic
and musicologist who had no relationship with Stravinsky, by
necessity leans on oral history, a tricky secondhand business
because so many people have conflicting memories, and Walsh has
not talked to all of them; but he seems to have read everything,
and accumulated fresh testimony from surviving relatives and
others, including Craft—who not surprisingly has reacted angrily
to Walsh's work: "a splurge of mistakes," he wrote in a letter
to The New York Times, above all, Craft added, because
the second volume favors Stravinsky's children against Vera and
himself in the litigation over the estate, which it does. That
said, biographers take sides when evidence conflicts, and Walsh
conveys to readers a sense of prudence and writes, even about
Craft, with an understanding of human nature that was sometimes
obscured in the first volume by the sheer amount of detail
jammed into it.
That first book recounted Stravinsky's
childhood as the least favored son of a famous operatic bass at
the Maryinsky Theater, through his tutelage under
Rimsky-Korsakov, to his succès de scandale with Firebird, The
Rite of Spring, and Petrushka, compositions that
introduced a whole universe of new sounds and ideas, a new
brightness and irony and even arrogance to music. The second
book picks up the story in 1934, when Stravinsky, at fifty-two,
was still married to the devout, sickly Catherine, and living in
France. He was a loving but autocratic father, in the dynastic,
White Russian tradition. Besides a longtime mistress, he had
affairs (with Coco Chanel, perhaps). He was a hard-working bon
vivant, occupied with many of the duties of a fashionable
dignitary: overseeing, for example, his inaccurate and posturing
autobiography, partly ghostwritten by his friend Walter Nouvel,
which dissembled about the past, tossed bouquets to former
enemies who might now be useful, played down the role of
collaborators like Alexander Benois and Nicholas Roerich and
Arthur Lourié, and even went out of its way to praise Beethoven,
whom the young Stravinsky had disparaged to Proust and Romain
Rolland. Now he lambasted "the stupidity and drivel of fools who
think it up to date to giggle as they amuse themselves by
running [Beethoven] down."
After this came another important literary diversion, the
Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1939–1940, again significantly
ghostwritten, this time by Pierre Souvtchinsky and Alexis
Roland-Manuel, leaning heavily on Valéry and Bergson, and
suggesting, among other concepts, that Stravinsky was a virtual
medium through whom inspiration flowed. His music had of course
come from Russian folk sources and from Rimsky-Korsakov and from
other predecessors, in the way that all radical art has roots.
But to be a true modernist, a cosmopolitan in the twentieth
century, it was necessary to seem to disdain nationalism, to be
perpetually, heroically novel—the more aloof, the better. "Cold
and transparent, like an 'extra dry' champagne, which gives no
sensation of sweetness, and does not enervate, like other
varieties of that drink, but burns," Stravinsky said about his
own Octet, Piano Concerto, and Piano Sonata. The description
might be applied to works by Picasso or Duchamp. The power of
the unconventional was integral to the mythology of modernist
abstraction. And Stravinsky was its exemplar.
The music he wrote in France had an Elysian eloquence: it was
insouciant, meticulous, and brilliant in a sometimes jaded way
attuned to postwar ennui. Jeu de cartes was a good
example, brash and abstract but in a safe, familiar vein.
Stravinsky in the 1920s and 1930s needed to escape from the
shadow of his early work. Perpetual revolution was the burden of
the modern revolutionary, and critics increasingly excoriated
him for no longer shocking them. "What's missing, as in all
Stravinsky's recent works," wrote one critic, "is some essential
element of mystery—mystery in that sense which is impossible to
define, what I call the gratuitous but others call chance.
Everything is 'made,' admirably made...." As a man whose
constant fear was obsolescence, Stravinsky had reason to fret.
His private life was on the verge of coming
apart. For years, Walsh writes, he had been forcing Catherine to
meet Vera at a bank in Paris to hand over Vera's weekly
allowance and make small talk. Catherine endured this
humiliation to ease Stravinsky's conscience and filled their
apartment with incense and relics, providing him with the
sanctuary he needed to compose. His mother Anna, however, lived
with them and notoriously delighted in denigrating her famous
son, and in telling him that she found his children too free and
easy. When her hair started falling out from a nervous disorder,
Walsh writes, Stravinsky balked at buying a wig, which Catherine
finally arranged that Anna pay off in weekly deductions from her
allowance.
Stravinsky would leave home to tour South America, where he
dined with the great pianist Josef Hofmann (who announced at the
end of their meal that he loathed Stravinsky's music), and where
he outraged the left-wing press (he was sympathetic with Laval
and Franco, annoyed at the Nazis for thinking him a Jew, and
detested the Soviets, of course). In the early pages of the
second volume he is also often off with Vera—near Positano, in
cultivated debauchery, visiting an old Russian friend, the naked
sunbather Mikhail Semyonov and his mistress, while Catherine is
writing prosaic letters advising her husband to avoid the sun
"as it could be very bad for your lungs, liver and nerves."
Vera Sudeykina, a former actress and
costumière and a painter, was a chic and warmhearted bohemian
with a knack for making whomever she spoke with feel like the
most fascinating person in the world. Less severe than their
mother, she was in these early years an occasional confidante to
Stravinsky's children; it may have been to Vera that Lyudmila,
Stravinsky's eldest daughter, revealed in 1935 that she had
fallen in love with a serious young Jewish poet named Yury
Mandelstam, his Jewishness being for the Stravinskys not
something that could pass without comment.
"Herself so devoid of bitterness, so easy in her view of the
world, so generous yet so little beholden to others," writes
Walsh about Vera,
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.
In 1938–1939, Lyudmila and Catherine died of tuberculosis
within months of each other. Then Anna died. The three events
have sometimes been described almost as a cleaning of the slate,
a passage in Stravinsky's life that allowed him to begin his new
life in America, as if he were not really much of a family man
and that his true love was always Vera. Walsh sees it otherwise.
He cites a remark by Stravinsky to Alexis Kall, a fellow émigré,
who for a while served as his not altogether competent Jeeves in
America, about Catherine: "I have lost the thing that was
dearest to me in life." In Conversations, on which
Stravinsky and Craft collaborated, Stravinsky also claimed that
he and Catherine were "until her death extremely close." Walsh
thinks that nothing else in the book rings so true.
Not so, Craft has responded. According to him, Stravinsky's
friends instantly saw through the statement about Catherine as
an invention by Craft, something he put into Stravinsky's mouth
to exaggerate Stravinsky's feelings toward his first wife and
make the composer look loving and generous. He mentions this
fact in his review of the first volume to undercut Walsh's
credibility. In turn, Walsh has recalled a boast that Craft made
to him during an interview: he claimed, writes Walsh, that a
reviewer of Conversations announced, by virtue of the
book's elegance, that the two finest modern writers of English
prose were Russians: Nabokov and Stravinsky. Craft relayed this
praise, Walsh writes, "with understandable but revealing pride,"
because it linked him, the true writer, with Nabokov. Since
then, Walsh writes, "I have not succeeded in tracing the remark
in print." So, from Henry James, we move into the realm of
Borges.
Stravinsky followed the money to America,
where his patrons were. Aside from Craft, money is the leitmotif
of Walsh's second volume, which recounts innumerable contract
negotiations, recording arrangements, barnstorming tours,
publishing deals, and, finally, litigation over the estate.
America made Stravinsky rich—the immigrant who made good, except
that he arrived with a reputation already established by The
Rite's belated US première. In Making Music Modern, a
book about New York in the 1920s, Carol J. Oja repeats Edmund
Wilson's anecdote that Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald considered
it the height of fashion in 1928 to have their dinner guests
choose between listening to a recording of The Rite or
"looking at an album of photographs of horribly mutilated
soldiers."
Stravinsky and Vera settled in a secluded cottage on a twisty
lane called North Wetherly Drive in Los Angeles, not far from
Sunset Boulevard, and mingled with other émigrés and Hollywood
society. The soon-to-be-hip, Americanized icon in tortoiseshell
sunglasses, giving autographs to Frank Sinatra, watching James
Bond films, and claiming to be too busy to dine at the White
House with the Kennedys ("nice kids," he famously said after he
did), gradually began to emerge. In the early days, he went
around Beverly Hills with Orson Welles, dined with Rachmaninoff,
and sailed off to Venice, composing on the pink piano of the
cellar bar at the Bauer Grunwald Hotel.
He finished his Symphony in C, the key of fresh starts, in
1940, and the great Symphony in Three Movements, but he
was still searching for his musical bearings in America, taking
on projects like the Circus Polka, for Balanchine's
ballet of elephants, and the Ebony Concerto for Woody
Herman. In Paris a new, postwar generation that revered
serialism, Boulez, and Messiaen now booed him; Adorno attacked
his "unrelenting cheerfulness" and wrote, "The will to style
replaces style itself and therewith sabotages it." In
Partisan Review, the French critic and composer René
Liebowitz echoed Adorno, contrasting Stravinsky's "ever
increasing mastery" of "less and less significant musical
problems" with Schoenberg's music, which was "full of renewal,
dominated by passion, boldness and risk."
"Much of what Adorno says about Stravinsky strikes one as
true," Walsh writes, in that "fear and insecurity lay behind
many of his aesthetic (and indeed social) attitudes." The
pianist Glenn Gould during the 1960s would go so far as to call
Stravinsky "a wide-eyed tourist in the world of music" who was
never
able to find, apart from this constant transition of
fleeting identifications, the real personality of Igor
Stravinsky. This, of course, is tragic.... What are the
adoptions and renouncements of vows from one decade to
another...if not the ultimate embarrassment of the man who
recognizes that his enormous capacity and technique and
perception are not enough, who recognizes that he is not
made to play the part of one of the great men of history?
Gould was being perverse, as usual. But Stravinsky always did
keep his finger to the wind, and felt strangely vulnerable. When
he received a letter in 1963 from the editor of Musical
America saying that "our annual poll of critics voted almost
unanimously for Igor Stravinsky as 'Musician of the Year,'" he
underlined the word "almost."[2]
Then there was the moment in the Mojave Desert in 1952, after he
wrote Rake's Progress, when he broke down in tears and
said he was finished.
Fortunately, Robert Craft had come into his
life and within a decade would turn Stravinsky around. As a
twenty-two-year-old Juilliard student, he courted Stravinsky and
by 1948 was his assistant, his Anglophilia an asset in preparing
the Rake and his fluency with Schoenberg, Webern, and the
serial technique a resource that Stravinsky could exploit.
Conveniently, Schoenberg had lately died, so he could not
witness his rival's capitulation.
Craft's "on the spot attention of an efficient and loving
slave," as Walsh puts it, contrasted with the increasing
distance between Stravinsky and his children; "in view of
Stravinsky's deep self-centeredness, this contrast," Walsh
writes,
is quite enough to explain the difficult family situation
that gradually began to develop—a situation which Stravinsky
should have foreseen but certainly did not will, and which
eventually came close to destroying all but the central
character of the drama himself.
Walsh also reprints an extraordinary note that Stravinsky
wrote to himself about Craft in 1960:
Suffering constantly from his (RC) simultaneous respect and
vexation. The latter—result of my total ignorance which
upsets him and me even more. If I would be able only to
accept this my ignorance as a fact, to recognize it and
behave accordingly, my amour propre would disappear and I
will not suffer any more.
Suffering his slave, Stravinsky gradually
remade serialism into compositions that were fresh amalgams of
newly severe, distinctly Stravinsky-like lyricism. Three
Songs from William Shakespeare led to Canticum sacrum
and Threni, sacred pieces; Agon, the dance score
he composed for Lincoln Kirstein and Balanchine's New York City
Ballet; The Flood, written for television, on which Craft
did much work, and which ended up as something of a noble fiasco
in a new medium. And Requiem Canticles, composed in the
wake of Stravinsky's tour of the Soviet Union in 1962, which
mixed serial austerities with a kind of sacramental eloquence
reminiscent of Les Noces to hark back, as Richard
Taruskin has written, to Stravinsky's Russian days.
Craft was now behind the ornate language that adorned
Stravinsky's copious publications. The composer's true speaking
voice was idiosyncratic. "Accustomcy to music is a fact with
which we have to count," was a phrase directly recorded by his
publicity director Deborah Ishlon. Through Craft, he became
hyperrefined and intellectual. The candor was his own, and so
were the ideas, particularly at first. But gradually, feeling he
knew and understood him as well as anyone, Craft assumed the
role of alter ego, going so far as to conduct the music on
albums marketed as Stravinsky's when Stravinsky had become too
busy or fragile. He came to act as if he were Stravinsky. There
were many reasons —partly to preserve the illusion that the
aging artist was still a thriving professional, for his own sake
and for Craft's too, since he didn't want to lose Stravinsky,
and partly because it made Stravinsky's expenses tax-deductible.
By Themes and Conclusions, Craft was effectively
channeling Stravinsky on the virtues of euthanasia and Andy
Warhol, writing every word.
The children learned, said Stravinsky's embittered son,
Soulima, "that things were done through Craft. Craft wanted
something. He told Vera, Vera told Igor and Igor had his
reaction accordingly." The family began to jockey for access and
for his fortune. Walsh's last chapters describe medical horrors,
legal maneuverings, and public recriminations. Treatments for
Stravinsky's ailments "began increasingly to resemble the
comings and goings round the deathbed of a medieval emperor," he
writes. Stravinsky, enfeebled in a New York hotel apartment, at
one point begged Nicolas Nabokov, after they had listened to
recordings of Beethoven string quartets: "Nika, don't go away.
Stay with me. Don't leave me avec les femmes de chambres."
When Nabokov asked how he was, Stravinsky snapped: "You can see
how I am, miserable."
About his death, Craft claims to have witnessed Stravinsky
dying and fetched Vera to kiss his hands and hold his cheeks.
Libman, who was there, in her memoir writes that Stravinsky was
dead when the nurse's assistant woke her. She closed his eyes,
then alerted Vera and Craft.
Stewards sat the entire family in a row at the funeral in
Venice, Craft and Vera with the children and grandchildren,
Theodore, Milène, Soulima, John, and Kitty—united in sorrow and
fury. The estate would eventually be split among the relatives
and Craft, to whom Vera, who died at ninety-three in 1982,
remained devoted—as Walsh puts it, having turned her face
against the stepchildren she once loved and finding herself
caught in a quarrel not of her making. Craft unburdened himself
of an essay discussing the children: "an unrestrained attack on
his legal opponents that, whatever may be said about its
accuracy or fairmindedness," Walsh writes, "must rank high in
the annals of sheer literary and documentary bad taste." Perhaps
it is enough to speak of it as sibling rivalry.
What seems incontestable is that the core of
Craft's relationship with Stravinsky was their shared analytical
passion for music. Libman writes that Stravinsky's greatest
pleasure near the end of his life came to be listening with
Craft to records in the evening. He would wait anxiously all day
wondering what Craft had in mind. And if Craft was too busy,
Stravinsky would become petulant. They would usually spend an
hour or two, sitting rapt together, Craft rising to change sides
of the disc, a ritual of devotion to Stravinsky and to music
which bound them in intimate ways necessarily beyond the
knowledge of Walsh or any biographer. Stravinsky most enjoyed
the Beethoven quartets, and reading his 1968 review of a book
about them, it is hard to imagine that the thoughts were not his
even if the words are Craft's; or rather, it is natural to
presume that the thoughts are theirs, the product of so many
hours before the turntable.[3]
As for Stravinsky's later works, they have failed to gain
prominence in the repertory, unlike the early- and middle-period
compositions. But, Walsh concludes, their "unpleasantness is
something sharp and invigorating, it grows on you as the taste
of beer grows on an adolescent boy." This applies to the whole
of Stravinsky's output, and perhaps even to the erratic
character that emerges in Walsh's book, whose music
reinvigorated the century. The composer George Perle observed
when Stravinsky died that the world was without a great composer
for the first time in six hundred years. It still is.
Notes
[1] Ian Hamilton, Keepers
of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography from
Shakespeare to Plath (Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 153.
[2] Charles M. Joseph,
Stravinsky Inside Out (Yale University Press, 2001), pp.
12–13.
[3] See "A Realm of Truth,"
The New York Review, September 26, 1968.
Letters
October 5, 2006: The Editors,
CORRECTION
September 21, 2006: Robert Craft,
'STRAVINSKY: THE
SECOND EXILE'