The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (93 page)

A series of personal losses—the death of his daughter, his wife, and his mother—and the opening of World War II led him in 1939 to move to the United States—and to new experiments. His Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on poetry at Harvard became the
Poetics of Music
, where he collected his ideas on the phenomenon of music, the composition of music, and the performance of music. In 1940 he married Vera de Bosset, an artist of long acquaintance, and they went west—he said that he needed the California climate for his health. They formally reentered the United States from Mexico in the Russian quota and applied for naturalization papers, bought a house and settled in Hollywood for the next twenty-five years.

In 1938, even before coming to America, he had received a request from the Disney office for permission to use the music of
The Rite of Spring
in
Fantasia
. They explained that they did not really need his permission since
Le Sacre
had not been copyrighted in the United States, but still they offered five thousand dollars for the right to show it abroad. Stravinsky attended a showing with George Balanchine in Hollywood in 1939. “I remember someone offering me a score and, when I said I had my own, the someone saying, ‘But it is all changed.’ And it was indeed.” After settling in Hollywood, he never could agree with the moviemakers despite many invitations, including one for Orson Welles’s
Jane Eyre
and for Franz Werfel’s
Song of Bernadette
. When he was offered one hundred thousand dollars “to pad a film with music,” he refused, but was told that he would receive the same fee if he would let someone else compose in his name.

He was not averse to bizarre experiments in his own name. When George Balanchine was asked by Ringling Brothers of the Barnum and Bailey Circus to commission a ballet for
young
elephants in 1942, he passed on the request to Stravinsky. “If they are very young,” Stravinsky agreed, “I’ll do
it.” And he produced his
Circus Polka
in two versions. Stravinsky’s music for
The Firebird
had made Pavlova so uneasy in 1910 that she refused the title role. Now Stravinsky’s rhythms made the young elephants uneasy. Elephants, their trainer explained, were dignified animals who preferred waltzes and soft, dreamy tunes, but they finally gave in, and, costumed in tutus, performed Stravinsky’s
Polka
425 times. The symphonic version was performed by the Boston Symphony in 1944.

In the war years Hollywood had much to offer a lover of experiment. Thomas Mann said he found Hollywood at that time “a more intellectually stimulating and cosmopolitan city than Paris or Munich had ever been.” The Stravinskys, too, enjoyed a circle of the arts that included Nadia Boulanger, Aldous Huxley, Franz Werfel, and countless others. “The ferment of composers, writers, scientists, artists, actors, philosophers and phonies did exist,” observed Vera Stravinsky, “and we often attended the lectures, exhibitions, concerts, performances, social gatherings of these people ourselves.” In 1945, after the war had ended, Stravinsky became an American citizen.

Stravinsky’s career as a refugee from disorder through three nationalities and the turbulence of two world wars affirmed his indelible and uninterrupted citizenship in the experimental world of music. Thus he remained always at home making something new of every form. Although his early success had been in the traditional materials of his Russian nationality, his later experiments ran the gamut of musical genres and traditions. After the shocking modernism and complexity of
The Rite of Spring
, he turned in new directions, in a “neoclassical” period all his own.
The Soldier’s Tale
(
L’Histoire du Soldat
) in 1918 was a landmark departure from nineteenth-century performance styles—in its surprising mixture of instruments, in rejecting the familiar forms both of orchestra and opera. With three dancers, a narrator, and seven instrumentalists, it was designed for performance on a portable stage, and helped introduce the “group-virtuoso” or “combo”—clusters of performers who see themselves uniquely re-creating the composer’s work, each performance being a new experiment. Composed in collaboration with the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz,
The Soldier’s Tale
was an entertainment “to be read, played, and danced.” It was another new style for Stravinsky, using a small orchestra and borrowing the rhythms of jazz. A kind of simplified mini-Faust, it told of a soldier returning to his native village, being tempted by the Devil, falling in love with a princess, and finally losing his soul to the Devil. Stravinsky later explained that he had never heard a work of jazz performed, but took his knowledge from the sheet music. “I could imagine jazz sound, however, or so I like to think. Jazz meant, in any case, new sound in my music, and
l’Histoire
marks my
final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered.”

Stravinsky showed the boldness of his departure in his
Symphonies of Wind Instruments
in 1921 where by “symphony” he did not suggest the sonata form but simply meant that instruments were sounding together. “This music is not meant ‘to please’ an audience,” he later explained, “or to rouse its passions. I had hoped, however, that it would appeal to those in whom a purely musical receptivity outweighed the desire to satisfy emotional cravings.” But this had never happened “as the character of my music demanded the most delicate care to attain the ear of the public and to tame the audience to it.” Collaborating with his friend Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), he made an opera-oratorio of
Oedipus Rex
, intended as a present in honor of Diaghilev’s twentieth anniversary in the theater, first performed by the Russian Ballet in Paris in 1927.

He could also experiment in religious music, where he was hardly more at home than in jazz, but where he was no less imaginative. Living in France, in 1929 he was commissioned by Koussevitsky to write a symphonic work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary. His publisher wanted “something popular”—a work in the nineteenth-century symphony form without chorus. But Stravinsky had other ideas. He had long been thinking of a psalm symphony compounded of parts of the Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth psalms and the whole of the Hundred and fiftieth Psalm, to be sung in Latin. What emerged was his Symphony of Psalms in three parts—Prelude, Double Fugue, and Allegro symphonique—for a chorus of mixed voices and orchestra.

Music historians have ranked this high among his works. But Stravinsky was dismayed that the work was not properly appreciated at the time, and he explained in his
Autobiography:

There was ample reason for puzzlement in the audience hearing a symphony of religious texts whose composer warned against seeking any religious meaning. Before this work he had been a communicant of the Orthodox Church for some four years. His Swiss friend and a favorite conductor of his works, Ernest Ansermet, observed that “as Stravinsky, in response to some form of inner compulsion, does not make of music an act of self-expression, his religious music can reveal only a kind of ‘made-up’ religiosity. The
Symphony of Psalms
, for instance, expresses the religiosity of others—of the imaginary choir of which the actual singing choir is an
analogon:
but it must be agreed that the expression of this religiosity is itself absolutely authentic.”

The quarter century of Stravinsky’s American reincarnation offered example after example of new experiments. In 1947 a Chicago exhibition of eight paintings by William Hogarth (1697–1764),
The Rake’s Progress
(1732–33), seemed to provide a “succession of operatic scenes” for the opera around English themes and with “music originated in the English prosody” that he had long thought of composing. His Hollywood neighbor Aldous Huxley suggested W. H. Auden as the librettist, and Stravinsky brought Auden, who considered this assignment the “greatest honor” of his life, to Hollywood. There they laid out the plot, action, scene, and characters. In 1948 Auden delivered the brilliant libretto, written with his friend Chester Kallman, and Stravinsky spent three years composing the music. He aimed to create an opera in the “Italian-Mozartian” style. The story followed the themes of Hogarth’s series from the inheritance of a fortune by Tom Rakewell through his exploits, his drunken orgy with whores, his arrest for debt, his rescue from prison by the lovely Sarah Young, whom he had seduced and who had borne him a child, his marriage to a rich old lady, gambling away his second fortune, then being imprisoned for debt, and ending life in a madhouse. The Hogarth themes are enriched and embellished by witty Auden touches—hints of Dr. Faustus and a new character who offers Faustian temptations to the hero. In Auden’s fantastic epilogue the devil fails in his gamble for Tom Rakewell’s soul, but succeeds in condemning him to Bedlam, where Tom believes he is Adonis awaiting his Venus, before his death and the end in a morality-play message.

To Stravinsky his two earlier short operas,
The Nightingale
(1914) and
Mavra
(1922), seemed strangely remote from what he had now done. “I believe ‘music drama’ and ‘opera’ to be two very, very different things,” Stravinsky observed at the first American production of
The Rake’s Progress
in 1953. “My life work is a devotion to the latter.
The Rake’s Progress
is, emphatically, an opera—an opera of arias and recitatives, choruses and ensembles.… in the line of the classical tradition.” Already, in his Norton lectures, he was gladly “provoking a quarrel with the notorious Synthesis of the Arts. I do not merely condemn it for its lack of tradition, its
nouveau riche
smugness.… the application of its theories has inflicted a terrible blow upon music itself … the halcyon days of Wagnerism are past and … the distance which separates us from them permits us to set matters straight again.” Opera was badly in need of renewal. “In the past one went to the opera for the diversion offered by facile musical works. Later on one returned to it in order to yawn at dramas in which music, arbitrarily paralyzed by constraints foreign to its own laws, could not help tiring out the most attentive audience in spite of the great talent displayed by Wagner. So, from music shamelessly considered as a purely sensual delight, we passed without transition to the murky inanities of the Art-Religion.”

When Auden delivered his libretto for
The Rake’s Progress
in 1948, he introduced Stravinsky to Robert Craft, a young man of twenty-four, a fervent admirer, who would play a crucial role in Stravinsky’s work during the next years. Craft came to Hollywood, lived in Stravinsky’s house, became his close assistant, and helped on
The Rake’s Progress
. “During the intermissions,” Craft reported of the first performance at La Fenice in Venice, in September 1951, “one … heard the expected comments about Stravinsky’s right to use the old operatic conventions and formulae—by people who had not yet learned the wisdom of Ezra Pound’s remark ‘Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another’—but the majority of the audience would have conceded him anything or followed him anywhere.”

And it was Craft in his mid-twenties who would lead the eminent Stravinsky nearing seventy in new directions. An enthusiast for “modern” music, Craft had directed performances of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and Bartók—and an all-Stravinsky program. Now Craft urged Stravinsky himself into a new world of serial music. Serialism, of which twelve-tone music is an example, was music constructed through permutations of elements (for example, pitch or duration) in a series. It had been tried by some medieval composers and others, but it developed in Europe after World War I. Its pioneer and most influential champion, the Austrian-born Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), had abandoned traditional concepts of consonance and dissonance. A work would not conform to the tonal family of keys declared in Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
and instead was constructed around a series of tones repeated and patterned in various ways. In Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method a composition was created from a row or series of twelve different tones, played consecutively or inverted. The harmonies and melodies were all drawn from the original row. Schoenberg saw this as
a liberation from tonal restraints, using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale in a particular work. Others objected that it confined the composer. But with this technique Schoenberg produced his most important work, the opera
Moses and Aaron
(1930–32, never completed), which contrasted the visionary but inarticulate Moses (Schoenberg himself?) with his disciple the selfish and voluble Aaron. Schoenberg did not admire Stravinsky’s neoclassical style, which he rather nastily mocked in a verse that he set to music in 1926 (translated from the German by Eric Walter White):