Natasha's Dance

6

In 1962 Stravinsky accepted a Soviet invitation to visit the country of his birth. It was exactly fifty years since he had left Russia and there was a complicated tangle of emotions behind his decision to return. As an emigre he had always given the impression of violently rejecting his own Russian past. He told his close friend and musical assistant, the conductor Robert Craft, that he thought about his childhood in St Petersburg as a 'period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell'.¹³⁶ Much of this antipathy was an emigre's reaction to the Soviet regime, which had rejected his music and deprived the composer of his native land. The mere mention of the Soviet Union was enough to send him into a rage. In 1957, when a hapless German waiter came up to his table and asked if he was proud of the Russians because of the recent Sputnik breakthrough into space, Stravinsky became 'furious in equal measure with the Russians for having done it and with the Americans for not having done it'.¹³⁷

He was particularly scathing about the Soviet musical academy, where the spirit of the Rimsky-Korsakovs and Glazunovs who had howled abuse at The Rite of Spring was still alive and kicking against the modernists. 'The Soviet virtuoso has no literature beyond the nineteenth century,' Stravinsky told a German interviewer in 1957. Soviet orchestras, if asked to perform the music of Stravinsky or 'the three Viennese' (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) would be 'unable to cope with the simplest problems of rhythmic execution that we introduced to music fifty years ago'.¹³⁸ His own music had been banned from the Soviet concert repertory since the beginning of the 1930s, when Stravinsky was denounced by the Soviet musical establishment as 'an artistic ideologist of the Imperialist bourgeoisie'.¹³⁹ It was a sort of musical Cold War.

But after Stalin's death the climate changed. The Khrushchev 'thaw' had brought an end to the Zhdanovite campaign against the so-called 'formalists' and had restored Shostakovich to his rightful place at the head of the Soviet musical establishment. Young composers were emerging who took inspiration from Stravinsky's work

(Edison Denisov, Sofya Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke). A brilliant generation of Soviet musicians (Oistrakh, Richter, Rostropovich, the Beethoven Quartet) was becoming well known through recordings and tours in the West. Russia, in short, appeared to be returning to the centre of the European music world - the place it had occupied when Stravinsky had left in 1912.

Despite his own denials, Stravinsky had always regretted the circumstances of his exile from Russia. He bore the severance from his past like an open wound. The fact that he turned eighty in 1962 must have played a part in his decision to return. As he grew older, he thought more of his own childhood. He often slipped into childish Russian phrases and diminutives. He re-read the books he had read in Russia - like Gorky's Mother. 'I read it when it was first published [in 1906] and am trying again now,' he told Craft, 'probably because I want to go back into myself.'¹⁴⁰ Stravinsky told the US press that his decision to go to the Soviet Union was 'due primarily to the evidence I have received of a genuine desire or need for me by the younger generation of Russian musicians'.¹⁴¹ Perhaps there was a desire on Stravinsky's part to secure his legacy in the country of his birth. Yet, despite his claims that nostalgia played no role in his intended visit, that sentiment was surely at its heart. He wanted to see Russia before he died.

On 21 September 1962, the Stravinskys landed in a Soviet plane at Sheremetevo. Straining to catch a glimpse of the forests turning yellow, the meadows, fields and lakes as the plane came in to land, Stravinsky was choking with excitement and emotion, according to Craft, who accompanied the couple throughout their trip. When the plane came to a halt and the hatch was opened, Stravinsky emerged and, standing at the top of the landing stairs, bowed down low in the Russian tradition. It was a gesture from another age, just as Stravinsky's sunglasses, which now protected him from the television lights, symbolized another kind of life in Hollywood. As he descended, Stravinsky was surrounded by a large welcoming committee, out of which emerged Maria Yudina, a stout woman with Tatar eyes (or so it seemed to Craft) who introduced herself to the composer as his niece. Also there was the daughter of Konstantin Balmont, the poet who had introduced Stravinsky to the ancient pagan world of The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. She presented Craft with a 'birch-bark basket containing a

twig, a leaf, a blade of wheat, an acorn, some moss, and other souvenirs of the Russian earth' which the young American did 'not greatly need at that moment'. For these two women a lifelong dream was coming true. Craft compared the atmosphere to a child's birthday party: 'everyone, not least I.S. [Stravinsky] himself, is bursting with relief '.¹⁴²

The trip released a huge outpouring of emotion in Stravinsky. In the fifteen years that Robert Craft had known him he had never realized how important Russia was to the composer, or how much of it was still inside his heart. 'Only two days ago, in Paris, I would have denied that I.S… could ever be at home here again… Now I see that half a century of expatriation can be, whether or not it has been, forgotten in a night.'¹⁴³ It was not to the Soviet Union that Stravinsky had returned, but to Russia. When Khrennikov, the head of the Soviet Composers' Union, met him at the airport, Stravinsky refused to shake hands with the old Stalinist and offered him his walking stick instead.¹⁴⁴ The next day, the Stravinskys drove with Craft to the Sparrow Hills, from where Napoleon had first surveyed Moscow, and as they looked down on the city, they were, Craft thought, 'silent and more moved than I have ever seen them'.¹⁴⁵ At the Novodeviche monastery the Stravinskys were visibly 'disturbed not for any religious or political reason but simply because the Novodeviche is the Russia that they knew, the Russia that is still a part of them'. Behind the ancient walls of the monastery was an island of old Russia. In the gardens women in black kerchiefs and worn-out coats and shoes were tending the graves, and in the church a priest was leading a service where, as it seemed to Craft, the 'more fervent members [of the congregation] lie kow-tow, in the totally prostrate position that I.S. used to assume during his own devotions in the Russian Church in Hollywood'.¹⁴⁶ Despite all the turmoil that the Soviet Union had gone through, there were still some Russian customs that remained unchanged.

The same was true of the musical tradition, as Robert Craft found out when he rehearsed the Moscow National Orchestra in the Tchaikovsky Hall of the Conservatory for a performance of The Rite of Spring.

The orchestral ensemble is good, quick to adopt my alien demands of phrasing and articulation, and harder working than European orchestras in general.

The Sacre, played with an emotion I can describe only as non-Gallic and un-Teutonic, is an entirely different piece. The sound does not glitter as it does with American orchestras, and it is less loud, though still deafening in this very live room… This sobriety is very much to I.S.'s taste… Another satisfying oddity is the bass drum, which is open on one side as if sawed in two; the clear, secco articulation from the single head makes the beginning of Danse de la terre sound like the stampede I.S. says he had in mind… I.S. notes that the bassoon timbre is different than in America, and that 'The five fagiotti at the end of the Evocation des ancetres sound like the cinq vieillards I had imagined.'¹⁴⁷

Stravinsky took delight in this distinct orchestral sound. It brought his Russian ballets back to life.

He also rejoiced in his rediscovery of spoken Russian. From the moment he arrived back on Russian soil he slipped easily into modes of speech and conversation, using terms and phrases, even long-forgotten childhood expressions, he had not employed for over fifty years. When he spoke in Russian, he had always seemed to Craft 'a different person'; but now, 'speaking it with musicians who call him "Igor Fedorovich" which quickly established that family feeling peculiar to Russians - he is more buoyant than I can remember him'.¹⁴⁸ Craft was struck by the transformation in Stravinsky's character. Asked whether he believed that he was now seeing 'the true Stravinsky', the American replied that 'all I.S.s are true enough… but my picture of him is finally being given its background, which does wash out a great deal of what I had supposed to be "traits of character" or personal idiosyncrasies'.¹⁴⁹ Craft wrote that, as a result of the visit to Russia, his ear became attuned to the Russian elements of Stravinsky's music during the post-Russia years. The Russianness of Stravinsky's later compositions is not immediately obvious. But it is there - in the rhythmic energy and the chant-like melodies. From the Symphony of Psalms to the Requiem (1966) his musical language retains a Russian core.¹⁵⁰ As he himself explained to the Soviet press:

I have spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself is Russian. Perhaps it may not be noticeable in my music on a first hearing, but it is inherent in my music and part of its hidden character.¹⁵¹

There was much of Russia in Stravinsky's heart. It was made up of more than the icons in his house, the books he read, or the favourite childhood spoon from which he ate. He retained a physical sensation and memory of the land, Russian habits and customs, Russian ways of speech and social interaction, and all these feelings came flooding back to him from the moment he set foot on his native soil. A culture is more than a tradition. It cannot be contained in a library, let alone the 'eight slim volumes' which the exiles packed up in their bags. It is something visceral, emotional, instinctive, a sensibility that shapes the personality and binds that person to a people and a place. The Western public saw Stravinsky as an exile visiting the country of his birth. The Russians recognized him as a Russian coming home.

Stravinsky barely knew Moscow. He had only been there once on a short day trip sixty years or so before.¹⁵² His return to Petersburg, the city of his birth, was even more emotional. At the airport the Stravinskys were welcomed by an elderly gentleman who began to weep. Craft recalls the encounter:

It is Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov [the son of the composer], and I.S. has failed to recognize him, for the given reason that he has a moustache instead of, as when last seen (1910), a beard; but the real reason, I.S. tells me later, is that 'He said "Igor Fedorovich" instead of "Gima". He always called us, me and my brother, "Gury and Gima".'¹⁵³

In the few days since arriving in Russia Stravinsky had stepped back some fifty years. His face rippled with pleasure on recognizing the Marinsky Theatre (at that time renamed the Kirov) where, as a boy, he had sat in his father's box and watched the ballet. He remembered the winged cupids in the box, the ornate blue and gold decoration of the auditorium, the glittering chandeliers, the richly perfumed audience, and on one occasion, in 1892, as he had stepped out of the box into the foyer at a gala performance of Glinka's Ruslan and Liudmila (in which his father had sung the role of Farlaf), catching sight of Tchaikovsky, all white-haired at the age of fifty-two.¹⁵⁴ Stravinsky had practically grown up in the Marinsky Theatre. It was only a few yards from his family's apartment on the Kryukov Canal. When they went to see the house where he had lived for the first twenty-four years of

his life, Stravinsky displayed no emotion. But, as he explained to Craft, it was only because 'I could not let myself'.¹⁵⁵ Every building was 'chudno' (magical) or 'krasivo' (beautiful). The queue for the concert in Stravinsky's honour at the Great Hall of the Philharmonia was a living monument to the role of art in Russia and his own place in that sacred tradition: the queue had begun a year before and had developed as a complex social system, with people taking turns to stand in the line for a large block of seats. An 84-year-old cousin of Stravinsky was forced to watch the concert on the television because her number in the queue was 5001.¹⁵⁶

'Where is Shostakovich?' Stravinsky kept asking from the moment he arrived. While Stravinsky was in Moscow, Shostakovich was in Leningrad; and just as Stravinsky went to Leningrad, Shostakovich returned to Moscow. 'What is the matter with this Shostakovich?' Stravinsky asked Khachaturian. 'Why does he keep running away from me?'¹⁵⁷ As an artist Shostakovich worshipped Stravinsky. He was his secret muse. Underneath the glass of his working desk Shostakovich kept two photographs: one of himself with the Beethoven Quartet; the other, a large portrait of Stravinsky.¹⁵⁸ Although he never expressed any public sympathy for Stravinsky's music, its influence is clear on many of his works (such as the Petrushka motif in the Tenth Symphony, or the adagio of the Seventh Symphony, which is clearly reminiscent of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms).

The Khrushchev thaw was a huge release for Shostakovich. It enabled him to re-establish links with the classical tradition of St Petersburg where he and Stravinsky had been born. Not that his life was entirely trouble-free. The Thirteenth Symphony (1962), based on Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poem Babi Yar (1961), was attacked by the Party (which tried to prevent its first performance) for supposedly belittling the suffering of the Russians in the war by focusing attention on the Nazi massacre of the Jews in Kiev. But otherwise the thaw was a creative spring for Shostakovich. He returned to his teaching post at the Leningrad Conservatory. His music was widely performed. He was honoured with official prizes and allowed to travel abroad extensively. Some of his most sublime music was composed in the last years of his life - the last three string quartets and the Viola Sonata, a personal requiem and artistic summing-up of his own life which was completed

a month before his death on 9 August 1975. He even managed to find time to write two film scores - Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971) -commissioned by his old friend, the film director Grigory Kozintsev, for whom Shostakovich had written his first film score in 1929. Much of the music he composed in these years found its inspiration in the European heritage of Petersburg which had been lost in 1917. In his private world Shostakovich lived in literature. His conversation was full of literary allusions and expressions from the classic Russian novels of the nineteenth century. He loved the satires of Gogol and the stories of Chekhov. He felt a particularly close affinity for Dostoevsky which he was careful to conceal - until the final years, when he composed a song cycle based on the 'Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin' from The Devils. Shostakovich once confessed that he had always dreamed of composing work on Dostoevsky's themes, but that he had always been 'too frightened' to do so. 'I love him and admire him as a great artist', Shostakovich wrote. 'I admire his love for the Russian people, for the humiliated and the wretched.'¹⁵⁹

Shostakovich and Stravinsky met at last in Moscow, at the Metro-pole Hotel, where a banquet for Stravinsky was being laid on by the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva (whom Shostakovich called 'Catherine the Third'). The meeting was neither a reunion nor a reconciliation of the two Russias that had gone their separate ways in 1917. But it was a symbol of a cultural unity which in the end would triumph over politics. The two composers lived in separate worlds but their music kept a single Russian beat. 'It was a very tense meeting', Khachaturian recalls:

They were placed next to each other and sat in complete silence. I sat opposite them. Finally Shostakovich plucked up the courage and opened the conversation:

'What do you think of Puccini?'

'I can't stand him,' Stravinsky replied.

'Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,' said Shostakovich.¹⁶⁰

That was virtually all the two men said. But at a second banquet at the Metropole, the evening before Stravinsky left, they resumed their conversation and a dialogue of sorts was established. It was a

memorable occasion - one or those quintessentially Russian events which are punctuated by a regular succession of increasingly expansive vodka toasts - and soon, as Craft recalled, the room was turned into a 'Finnish bath, in whose vapours everyone, proclaiming and acclaiming each other's Russianness, says almost the same thing… Again and again, each one abases himself before the mystery of their Russianness, and so, I realize with a shock, does I.S., whose replies are soon overtaking the toasts.' In a perfectly sober speech - he was the least alcoholically elevated of anyone in the room - Stravinsky proclaimed:

'The smell of the Russian earth is different, and such things are impossible to forget… A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country - he can have only one country - and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life. I regret that circumstances separated me from my fatherland, that I did not give birth to my works here and, above all, that I was not here to help the new Soviet Union create its new music. I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigner that right.'¹⁶¹

He meant every word.