Music: Master Mechanic

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One of the century’s great composers makes his home in Hollywood—surrounded by the film colony, but no part of it. His presence sometimes makes film makers a little uneasy; maybe they’re missing something. Every so often the word goes out to Igor Stravinsky—an austere, fastidious and independent little man—that a movie mogul wishes to see him.

One day Producer Sam Goldwyn, who buys only the best labels, summoned Stravinsky, and asked him to write the music for a picture on Russia. The conversation went something like this:

Goldwyn: How can you write the music for this picture; you’re not a Communist?

Stravinsky: How can you produce it; you’re not a Communist?

Goldwyn: I understand it’s twenty-five thousand you want?

Stravinsky: Whatever my agent says.

Goldwyn: Well, you have to have an arranger.

Stravinsky: What’s an arranger?

Goldwyn: An arranger! Why, that’s a man who has to arrange your music, who has to fit it to the instruments.

Stravinsky: Oh.

Goldwyn: Sure, that’ll cost you $6,000. And it’ll have to come off your $20,000.

Stravinsky: I thought it was $25,000.

Goldwyn: Well, whatever it was.

At this point Igor Stravinsky stood up, stuffed his black cigarette holder in his pocket, jammed his shapeless little hat on his head, and stalked from the office. That ended the negotiations.

Another time a Hollywood studio offered Stravinsky $100,000 for three musical scores a year. Replied Stravinsky: “To turn out one worthwhile piece of music in a year is enough. To guarantee three is to make a deceit of art.”

Stravinsky likes to see movies, particularly Westerns (“Just the shooting of the guns and the simple plot”) and the “picture comique.” But he refuses to write music for them.* In a voice like a bass trombone with the slide all the way out, he says grandly: “I cannot submit myself to their rules and laws. Practical restrictions I have always welcomed; psychological restrictions, no! They say to me, ‘Create atmosphere.’ Comment? Create atmosphere! How can one? I am ashamed. I blush. I am absolutely incompetent to create atmosphere. I say to them, ‘You must create the atmosphere from what I write.’ I cannot artificate.”

A Polka for Jumbo. Yet all his life Igor Stravinsky has written music, sometimes great music, to order—for people who would hire him on his terms. The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s best ballet scores, were commissioned. He has composed a polka for elephants for the Ringling Brothers, a Scherzo á la Russe for Paul Whiteman, Ballet Scenes for Billy Rose, an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his jazzband. Scherzo á la Russe was written to fit one side of a Whiteman record (says Stravinsky: “He played it very badly. He has a very famous name but he is a very bad musician”).

Bebop to Ballet. At 66, Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky, if not the greatest living composer, is certainly the most influential. Since the violent rhythms, brutal harmonies and splashing tone colors of Firebird, Petrouchka and Rite of Spring first exploded on an astonished—and unprepared —world 35 years ago, Stravinsky has been imitated, consciously or unconsciously, by composers from bebop to ballet, from Russia to the redwoods.

U.S. composers (like Harvard’s Walter Piston) have taken pride in being told that their music was “stravinskyesque.” Aaron Copland, best of native U.S. composers, believes that Stravinsky’s continuing hold on composers “is without parallel since Wagner’s day.” Even Bebopper Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Kenton, daddy of “progressive jazz,” who think they have invented a new kind of music, concede generously that Stravinsky “uses some of the same sounds and rhythmical devices.” The fact is that Stravinsky and jazz have learned from each other.

A Capriccio for Soulima. This week, in Colorado’s magnificent outdoor Red Rocks Theater, which huddles between two giant crags, Stravinsky will conduct the Denver Symphony Orchestra in his own melodious Capriccio for piano and orchestra. To a family man like Stravinsky, this will be a special occasion. While he crouches and flaps on the podium like some grotesque little firebird about to take wing, his pianist son, Soulima, will be the soloist.

Soulima, the next to the youngest of Stravinsky’s three living children, has just flown in from Paris for his first visit with his father in nine years. In Europe, Soulima is known as the foremost interpreter of his father’s piano music—so much so that he has to beg impresarios to let him play something else. Says Soulima: “I say to them, ‘I will play Stravinsky if I can also play some Chopin, Schumann or Mozart.’ Now they let me.”

To friends who saw them together, they were almost dead ringers: Soulima’s features seem to be just an understatement of his father’s—the conical, coconut-shaped head and palm-frond ears, protruding nose, with a stubble of sandy mustache above pendulous lips. Stravinsky is shorter (about 5 ft. 4 in.).

Back to the Soviet. Stravinsky has not been back to his native Russia since 1914. He has no intention of going back and would not be welcome if he did. But he is Russian to his stubby fingertips, and so is his music. The Communists regard him as a decadent, God-loving capitalist who writes ugly music. Stravinsky’s opinion of the Communists is just as brusque: he thinks they are ruining Russian music (including that of his old friend Sergei Prokofiev). Says Stravinsky: “I hate Soviet music. Bah!”

He was born on the feast day of Saint Igor (June 18), at Oranienbaum, on the Gulf of Finland, where his family frequently spent their summers. In his autobiography, he recalls the “sharp resinous tang of fresh cut wood” and an enormous dumb peasant, feared by all the other kids, who sang a song “composed of two syllables, the only ones he could pronounce . . . From beneath [his] red shirt he extracted a succession of sounds [by putting his right hand under his left armpit, then pumping his left arm against it] which were somewhat dubious but very rhythmic … At home I set myself with zeal to imitate this music—so often and so successfully that I was forbidden to indulge in such an indecent accompaniment.” That was Stravinsky’s first brush with rhythm.

In St. Petersburg in the winter, Igor loved to prowl among the operatic scores of his father, Feodor, a famed basso who was Chaliapin’s predecessor at the Imperial Opera. Young Igor was given a “piano mistress” at nine, quickly learned to read music—and improvise. His parents did not want him to be a musician. They packed him off to the University of St. Petersburg to study law—but only after Igor got their permission to study harmony on the side. At the university, Igor made friends with Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, and showed his compositions to Vladimir’s famous father (“Alas! The way he received some of my first attempts . . .”). From Rimsky an admiring Stravinsky learned the techniques of orchestration. Stravinsky sent his scores to Rimsky for criticism, including an orchestral fantasy called Fireworks, which he had written to celebrate the marriage of Rimsky’s daughter Nadia (see cut). Fireworks came back marked “Not delivered because of the addressee’s death.”

Rimsky thus was not in the concert hall to hear the first performance of his protégé’s Fireworks. But another man was, whose presence helped change the whole course of 20th Century music.

The Promoter. Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev had also once applied to Rimsky-Korsakov for advice, and, the story goes, was told to try some other line of work. Diaghilev was a rich young fellow with an itch to dabble in the arts. Vain and hot-tempered but a man of impeccable taste, he decided that if he couldn’t be a great artist himself he could encourage and sponsor men who were. In Paris he put on a giant show of Russian art, a series of concerts of Russian music, and the first Parisian performance of Musorgsky’s great opera Boris Godunov, with Chaliapin in the title role. Then he was ready for his biggest project: Russian ballet.

Diaghilev’s “Ballet Russe” took Europe’s breath away; and kept it breathless for a generation. The Ballet’s heyday was a succession of champagne parties, command performances and brilliant triumphs; all the first-rate artists of the day were caught up in it: composers like Ravel, Richard Strauss and DeFalla; artists like Picasso, Matisse, Bakst and Rouault; dancers like Nijinsky and Karsavina; choreographers like Fokine, Massine and Balanchine.

Stravinsky was just 27, and an unknown, when Diaghilev—remembering the premiére of Fireworks—sent for him. Diaghilev told friends at rehearsals: “Mark him well. He is a man on the eve of celebrity.” Diaghilev knew what he was talking about. One of the first men to rush backstage to wring Stravinsky’s hand after the blazing first performance of the new Firebird ballet was Claude Debussy, the toast of Paris.

A Puppet Come to Life. Stravinsky already had a couple of other ballet ideas kicking around in his mind. One was “a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise … I saw … a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring . . .”

But before tackling that one, he wanted to write a piece of music in which “the piano would play the most important part … A puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet.”

Petrouchka, the story of the puppet, came first, and was a hit. Its success gave Impresario Diaghilev an idea: Why not make a choreographer out of its star dancer Vaslav Nijinsky? He gave Nijinsky the score of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Stravinsky was not very happy about it: “The poor boy knew nothing of music.”

The assignment would have been tough for a brighter man than Nijinsky. For the first time, in the score of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky had loosed all the furies of rhythm from their Pandora’s box. Pierre Monteux (then the Ballet Russe’s Conductor, now the San Francisco Symphony’s), heard Stravinsky play the score on the piano at Monte Carlo. Last winter, in a special Stravinsky issue of Dance Index, 73-year-old Monteux recalled: ‘Before he got very far I was convinced he was raving mad. Heard this way, without the color of the orchestra, which is one of its greatest distinctions, the crudity of the rhythm was emphasized, its stark primitiveness underlined. The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down to accentuate the force of the music . . . My only comment at the end was that such music would certainly cause a scandal.”

Monteux was quite right. The night of May 29, 1913, in Paris’ Théâtre des Champs Elysées, the audience sat silent and expectant, for the first two minutes. Then, as the sludging, pounding beat of the “Dances of the Adolescents” started, boos and catcalls began to echo in the gallery, and spread to the lower floors. The savage primitiveness of the music seemed to make savages out of its listeners. Neighbors in the audience began hitting each other with fists and canes. Conductor Monteux, the orchestra and dancers were pelted with everything that wasn’t nailed down.

During the uproar Stravinsky was at Nijinsky’s side in the wings: “[Nijinsky] was standing on a chair, screaming sixteen, seventeen, eighteen’—they had their own method of counting time. [But] naturally the poor dancers could hear nothing … I had to hold Nijinsky by his clothes, for he was furious, and ready to dash on to the stage at any moment . . . Diaghilev kept ordering the electricians to turn the lights on or off, hoping in that way to put a stop to the noise . . .”

Before the gendarmes arrived, Stravinsky scrambled out a backstage window. At 2 in the morning he piled into a cab with Nijinsky, Diaghilev and his friend Jean Cocteau, and drove through the Bois de Boulogne. Cocteau remembers: “We were silent; the night was cool and clear. The odor of the acacias told us we had reached the first trees. Coming to the lakes, Diaghilev, bundled up in opossum, began mumbling in Russian . . . tears running down [his] cheeks.”

Dissonance & Debt. In Firebird, Stravinsky had hinted at strange rhythmic innovations—accents that lurched and stuttered. In Petrouchka, he had chords embracing chords that were not even kissing cousins. In Rite of Spring, he had gone a greater distance in dissonance, and pounded the sounds home with all the drums the pit could hold.

If Stravinsky had never put another eighth note on paper, he would still have been a greater innovator than Jean Sibelius, now 82, and Richard Strauss, 84, both of whom barely got into the century musically. Prokofiev and Shostakovich are both deep in Stravinsky’s debt. Only one other living composer seriously challenges him as a contemporary influence: dour, 73-year-old Arnold Schönberg, spiritual leader of the atonalists, whose theoretical contributions are great, though his output is small.

A Curve in the Road. Then, a few years after The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky began to change his whole style. What had been warm and violent became—from about 1920 on—cold, classical, clear, calculated. Why? Today Stravinsky shrugs: “Who knows what causes change? You never see the change when you are driving along. A little curve in the road and suddenly you are proceeding east, another and you head north. One is unaware.”

Stravinsky says that he “willed The Rite of Spring to be romantic” and that he has willed just about everything since to be severe and dry, a kind of music he regards as “more mature.” In the years since The Rite, Stravinsky has turned out some 60 works, including The Wedding which is virtually a textbook today in some music classes; a remarkable oratorio, Oedipus Rex; The Soldier’s Tale, Symphonies for Wind Instruments, Symphony in Three Movements, a Violin Concerto. All are as precisely and beautifully made as a fine watch—and, say his critics, most are about as emotional.

The man who gave 20th Century music its biggest shock seemed to have abruptly turned his back on his times, and gone back beyond Bach. “It was wrong to consider me a revolutionary,” he says. “All I did was a few inventions.”

He now thinks of himself as having “much more to do with the 18th or 17th Century than the present one. The workmanship was much better in Bach’s time than it is now. One had first to be a craftsman. Now we have only talent. We do not have the absorption in detail, the burying of oneself to be resurrected a great musician.”

Though Stravinsky went Bachwards, it is doubtful whether Johann Sebastian would recognize, or relish, the result. For Stravinsky does not write antiquarian music : he ruffles the calm of his counterpoint with eruptive rhythm and dissonance. It was not the kind of music to excite the Stravinsky cult that had cheered Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring; and it became fashionable in the ’20s to say that the fire in the Stravinsky furnace burned out before World War I. It is not so fashionable to say that now: in recent years even some hostile critics concede that Stravinsky’s fire is still burning. Says Composer Aaron Copland, who is not hostile: “All the other composers over 50 —the famous ones, I mean—are turning out more or less what is expected of them . . . Only Stravinsky [writes so] that no one can predict just where he will be taking us next.”

In the crammed but meticulously neat workroom of his modest, flower-banked home on a hill overlooking Hollywood’s famed Sunset “Strip,” Stravinsky is now writing an opera (with Poet W. H. Auden) fashioned from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, and has just finished a Mass to “appeal directly to the spirit. Therefore, I sought very cold music, absolutely cold. No women’s voices. They are by their very nature warm; they appeal to the senses.”

The last thing Stravinsky now wants to do is appeal to the senses. He has come to loathe most of the 19th Century romantic composers except Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, who “was such a tremendous individual.” He regards Wagner and his “heroic hardware” as “shamelessly sensual.” Stravinsky has taken up arms in a battle as old as art, between the followers of Apollo (art from order and religiously hard work) and Dionysus (art from ecstasy). Stravinsky has ranged himself on Apollo’s team.

In a series of lectures at Harvard in 1940 he tried to explain what he means: “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free . . . The Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion . . . must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it.”

A neat and tidy admirer of the neat and tidy in the past, Stravinsky considers himself an artisan, like a cobbler making shoes. He applies his dictum on writing music—”To know how to discard, as the gambler says”—to conversation, sometimes brushes off questions with a brusque growl: “Ach, I am not interested.”

In his personal habits he is as neat—and finicky—as his calligraphic scores. Friends, sipping highballs, sometimes find him methodically wiping rings left by their glasses on the table. He likes his own drink just so. His second wife Vera measures out his Scotch highball in the precise mixture he likes before handing it to him.

A hypochondriac, he is always conscious of drafts. He himself has had four serious illnesses; his first wife suffered from tuberculosis and his elder daughter died of it. His wife, his daughter and his mother all died within a year. Says he, with misty eyes: “There were three coffins in my apartment that year. It became quite impossible for me.”

Behind Two Doors. He usually eats breakfast on the sunny red-tiled loggia, practically naked (“not just in shorts, but often just wearing a handkerchief or something,” says Vera). Then he dresses, plunges into his workroom, labors at a table that resembles an architect’s and rivals Franklin Roosevelt’s for gimcracks: rows of art gum erasers, each neatly labeled, trays of pens, pencils, different colors and kinds of inks. He has two pianos in the narrow room, a grand and an upright, and still does his composing at the piano.

The walls are plastered with ballet programs, sketches for ballet scenes, drawings of himself by his friends Picasso and Cocteau, and two large oils by his eldest son Theodore, who lives in Switzerland.

There are two doors between his workroom and the light, airy, modern living room. “When both doors are closed, no one may enter,” says Vera Stravinsky. “When only the workroom door itself is closed, I may enter, but only I.” The room is soundproofed. Says Stravinsky: “I cannot work where I can be overheard.”

After lunch, Stravinsky usually tends to stacks of personal and business correspondence (in four languages: Russian, French, English, German), sees friends and sometimes visitors, whom Stravinsky likes or dislikes instantly. Says one of his intimate friends, Attorney Aaron Sapiro: “When I bring a guest to his house or a person who wishes to talk to him, Stravinsky will excuse himself after a few minutes, call me to the hallway and say either ‘take him away, he’s insincere,’ or ‘I like him, we will enjoy this.’ ”

He does not hobnob with his neighbors, but they frequently see him toiling up the hill in leather-thonged sandals, slacks and sports shirt, his arms full of groceries. With his wife Vera, he worships regularly at the Greek Orthodox Church in downtown Los Angeles. He seldom goes to parties, because, says Sapiro, “he meets so many people who think they know all about music—and particularly his music.”

Critics & Omelets. He is fussy about the way his music is played, too. Stravinsky annotates his scores with such precise directions that he feels there is no excuse for conductors to “interpret” him: “I am not literature. I don’t have to be interpreted.”

If there is anything he dislikes more than editorial conductors, it is critics. Says Stravinsky: “They must be as competent as I, to be able to criticize my aim.* They are not ripe enough to judge. I am too sure of what I am doing. I am not perfection but they cannot know.”

At 66, Stravinsky is not poor, but he is not a rich man either. Had Russia joined the International Copyright Union, he might have been. As it is, all of his early, most performed works have been pirated. He owns his Hollywood house, and recently rented another, plus a grand piano, for Soulima and family (his daughter Milene lives near by). A U.S. citizen since 1945, he likes to be known as a “California composer.” And when Soviet Russia calls him a renegade “man without a fatherland,” Stravinsky snorts: “I am an émigré from the Czars, not the Soviets.”

When asked which of his compositions he thinks will probably still be current a hundred years from now, he names Petrouchka, The Rite of Spring, The Soldier’s Tale (1918) and Apollo Musagètes (1928). But he believes that his later works will also come into popularity. Early this year, after Manhattan concertgoers heard a kind of spontaneous retrospective show of the great composer’s music (16 compositions in eleven concerts), few doubted him. Says Stravinsky: “I am not a kidder. I am not a tricky man. The music is there!”

* He did let Disney use his Rite of Spring in Fantasia, but does not approve of the result.

* Traditional critic’s rejoinder: “You don’t have to be a good cook to judge an omelet.”