Music: Master of Enigma

When the S.S Rex steamed into New York harbor one evening last week reporters clambered aboard to interview a celebrated passenger. They found a nervous little man who wore spats, a bright checkered scarf and a fur-lined overcoat which, for no apparent reason, he kept putting on & taking off. Once he had located the spectacles perched on the top of his head, he gladly gave his autograph. He used Russian letters but he set them down vertically, like Chinese. Deciphered, they read: ‘”Igor Stravinsky.”

For the first time in ten years the most enigmatic of modern composers had dared the sea, which he hates, to travel to the U. S., where he knows that even people who fail to understand his music will pay to see him. In Manhattan he was given his first reception by the League of Composers, long hospitable to all his efforts. Before he returns to Europe in April Stravinsky will have conducted big orchestras in Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Boston. Other cities will hear him as a pianist when he plays transcriptions of his works with Violinist Samuel Dushkin.*

By way of the piano Stravinsky became a composer more important, his champions insist, than Richard Strauss or Jean Sibelius, the other great S’s of 20th Century music. Stravinsky’s father, a basso at the Maryinsky Theatre in Petrograd, encouraged the boy so long as he was content to remain an amateur. He went dutifully to the University to study law but his marks were consistently poor. At 20 the die of his career was cast when the great Rimsky-Korsakoff took him for a pupil.

Under Rimsky, Stravinsky wrote his first dazzling orchestrations. But it was the late Sergei Diaghilev who established the young composer throughout the world. Diaghilev and his choreographer, Fokine, heard the swirling Fireworks, which Stravinsky wrote as a wedding present for Rimsky’s daughter. Fokine told Diaghilev that it made him see flames in the sky. For a shrewd entrepreneur like Diaghilev that was sufficient. In 1910 Stravinsky was commissioned to write The Firebird.

For most critics Stravinsky was most inspired during the four Paris years that followed. His Firebird was a blaze of color, marvelously decorative in every detail. Year later came Petroitchka, with Nijinsky enacting the poor sawdust puppet who briefly had a soul. In that exuberant work woodwinds ran riot and to many they seemed altogether tuneless.

But Stravinsky was pronounced a genius and he went on to write Le Sacre du Printemps, his historic harsh-rhythmed paean to fertility in the spring. In Paris the first-night audience shouted and hissed so loudly that the dancers were unable to hear the music. The white-faced Nijinsky beat time from the wings. A Londoner was so outraged that he wrote a letter to the Times calling Le Sacre “a threat against the foundations of our tonal institutions . . . [standing for] all the unnameable horrors of revolution, murder and rapine. … It should have been dedicated to Dr. Crippen, the dentist who murdered seven wives in their baths.”**

After Le Sacre not even his friends attempted to prophesy what Stravinsky would do next. But nothing could have surprised them so much as when he suddenly turned his back on vivid picture-music, announced a “return to Bach.” Whether or not the placid Kapellmeister would have recognized Stravinsky as a colleague is a matter of grave dispute. Harsh critics say that Stravinsky changed his style because his rich ideas were spent. But modernists have continued to watch him closely, for even in his “classicism” his rules have been his own. He wrote Les Noces for percussion, pianos and chorus. For Oedipus Rex, his “operaoratorio,” the Greek story was adapted by Frenchman Jean Cocteau, then translated into Latin. When Stokowski gave it in Philadelphia the soloists were represented by 15-foot puppets (TIME, April 20, 1931).

Fortnight ago Philadelphians heard the U. S. premiere of Mavra, a Stravinsky opera Vbuffe written twelve years ago. But few in the audience were impressed by an orchestra practically denuded of strings, or by a hero who strutted the stage in petticoats, his face covered with lather and a razor in hand for shaving. Stravinsky enthusiasts point reverently to his Symphony of Psalms which most laymen find cerebral, harsh, forbidding with its predominant brasses. Stravinsky’s smaller works would seem like sketches if it were not for his sure, crafty workmanship, his uncanny gift for making each instrument behave like a soloist. In March Boston will pass verdict on his ballet Persephone, lately produced in Paris by Dancer Ida Rubenstein.

However much he is criticized Stravinsky continues to go his own strange and independent way. He makes no excuse for his frequent concert appearances. He has a family to support in France: a wife who is his cousin, an 80-year-old mother, four children—Feodor and Milena who paint, Sviatoslav, a pianist, Milka, who is not yet grown. At the mention of his children last week Stravinsky declared: “God be with them, there shall be no more!”

Laymen for whom Stravinsky’s music holds an almost pagan quality are surprised to hear that he is ardently religious, says his prayers and goes regularly to the Russian Orthodox Church. But even with his faith and fervor Stravinsky has remained a rabid hypochondriac, always worrying over his own and everyone else’s health. His nervous hope last week was that U. S. audiences would be more understanding than the customs officer who picked a package of wordless scores from his luggage and asked him in what language he had written them.

*Stravinsky-Dushkin recitals are scheduled for Minneapolis, Chicago, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Carmel, Los Angeles, Montreal, Washington

**The outraged Londoner was confused. Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen murdered one wife. He poisoned her, then cut her in pieces and hid her in the cellar.