Editor's Note: The new book Artists in Exile, written by the noted music critic and lecturer Joseph Horowitz, analyzes the ways in which émigré artists made an impact on American culture and were in turn influenced by it. In these excerpts from the chapter "How to Become an American," Horowitz, who will be guest speaker in a free public lecture March 7 (and in preconcert lectures March 8-9) at Stanford Lively Arts' "The Stravinsky Project," compares the American experiences of choreographer George Balanchine and composer Igor Stravinsky, whose artistic collaboration began at Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (with Le Chant du Rossignol in 1925) and continued at Balanchine's New York City Ballet.Joseph Horowitz
Like [George] Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky was born in St. Petersburg. As with Balanchine, the Russian Revolution had the eventual effect of expelling him to Paris. Like Balanchine’s, his association with Diaghilev was crucial both for opportunity and instruction. Diaghilev’s death condemned him, no less than Balanchine, to a period of wandering — until, like Balanchine, he washed up on American shores.
But the circumstances of this last development were much different from Lincoln Kirstein’s invitation to found an American classical ballet. In the 1930s, Stravinsky was living a double life. He was married with four children; as was well known, his truer love was Vera de Bosset. Then, in 1938 and 1939, his elder daughter, wife, and mother died in succession. His recent music had failed to achieve popularity even in France. Stalinist Russia ignored him. The Nazis dispatched him as entartete, “degenerate.” And there was the war.
Stravinsky was “perplexed and jittery,” according to his publisher Gabriel Paichadze. “He could neither eat nor sleep, he could not work ... he got angry, nervous, and irritable. All he wanted was to get out as quickly as possible, out of Paris, out of Europe, into America where life was still orderly.” Stravinsky fled with Vera to begin anew. Months after Vera arrived in the United States, they married in Massachusetts in 1940. They settled in Los Angeles and applied for naturalization.
America, for Stravinsky, was a refuge from the past. But in itself it held no obvious attractions. His elitist politics and personality remained those of a finicky Parisian or of a Russian dispossessed by Lenin.
Stravinsky's Musical Journey
His musical odyssey, too, was migratory. As a youngster, under Rimsky-Korsakov’s wing, he was a conservative traditionalist. With Le Sacre du Printemps he became an enfant terrible. After World War I, he was an Apollonian classicist, in music and public utterance a Francophile and Germanophobe. Along the way, he refashioned music by “Pergolesi” (Pulcinella) and Tchaikovsky (The Fairy’s Kiss). (It has since come to light that music once attributed to Pergolesi, and used in Pulcinella, was composed by other 18th-century Italians.)
In the United States, as in Europe, conventional wisdom condemned his post-Sacre output as hollow. As in Europe, a modernist coterie condemned conventional wisdom as philistine. Stravinsky himself was eventually victimized by self-doubt. According to a famous anecdote, he broke down upon encountering some Schoenberg and Webern in 1952; he expressed fear he could no longer compose. He now capitulated to the 12-tone method of Schoenberg — a name once never mentioned in his presence. His favorite music, in his last years, was the late Beethoven string quartets.
Though Stravinsky was often regarded as the leading composer of the 20th century, his 21st-century reputation is for the moment unsettled. His catalog of six decades is more uneven than his champions ever supposed. In retrospect, his more questionable works — the episodic Symphony in C of 1940, for example, with its stretches of ostinato chugging — are arguably inferior to the ripest, most incisive music of contemporaries his adherents held in contempt: the incurable Romantics Sibelius and Rachmaninov.
Aaron Copland, in private correspondence in 1943, surmised in Stravinsky a “psychology of exile” characterized (as in Henry James) by “exquisite perfection” and a “lack of immediacy of contact with the world around him.” Copland added, “I don’t think he’s in a very good period. He copies himself unashamedly, and therefore one rarely comes upon a really fresh page — for him, I mean.” However protean, Stravinsky was not just a happy magpie. Undeniable, as well, is the New World debacle of an Old World artist exceptionally reliant, at every stage of his journey, on inspired collaborators and attentive advocates. Does Stravinsky’s long American career reduce to a saga of sustained creative decline?
And the Stravinsky story is shadowed by concomitant issues of personal identity. Balanchine, who took four wives and permitted no offspring, was a transatlantic explorer whose psychological rudder was at all times improbably steady. There are few stories of Balanchine aroused to anger. Alexandra Danilova, who knew him from their student days, once reflected that his early separation from his family, and the further ordeal of self-reliance imposed by the Russian Revolution, left its mark on Balanchine’s way of “burying his feelings.”
But Stravinsky’s lesions showed. In France, the strain of his two households — with Vera; with his wife and children — contributed to his decision to leave; according to his son Soulina, “he couldn’t cope.” In later life, his estrangement from his children became embarrassingly public. His elusive nationality signified both adaptability and ambiguity. He became a French citizen in 1934 and two years later called France his “second motherland.” Through 1933, he regularly visited Germany, where his appeal was great and his champions included Otto Klemperer; “Stravinsky in Permanenz?” asked a 1928 Berlin headline. A Chicago paper reported in 1937: “Stravinsky, in German, Says He’s French.”
As a World War II American patriot, he registered for defense work, participated in gas rationing, joined in a broadcast for the U.S. War Department, and made an arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner (which proved illegal). He took United States citizenship in 1945. Nicolas Nabokov, who knew him forever, found Stravinsky a self-contradictory personality, half hedonist — “he loved to eat, loved good wine and women” — and half “a rigorously religious and ritualistic person, like ancient people are.”
Like Balanchine, Stravinsky was considered famously hard really to know; unlike Balanchine, he labored to explain himself. His notorious aversion to “interpretations” of his music, any and all of which distorted its meaning, paralleled larger areas of purported misunderstanding. To better explain himself, he would write lengthy letters to established scholars or obscure students. ...
Life in Los Angeles
... Stravinsky and Vera settled in Los Angeles in spring 1941, about two years after Stravinsky arrived in Cambridge, where he delivered (in French) his Poetics of Music at Harvard University. Southern California was chosen for its climate. The Stravinskys were happy at 1260 North Wetherly Drive. Stravinsky “did not permit criticism of America in his presence,” Nicolas Nabokov recorded; of Europe, he would say, “As far as I am concerned, they can have their generalissimos and Führers. Leave me Mr. Truman and I’m quite satisfied.” And Stravinsky was not immune to the frisson of Hollywood glamour; his acquaintances included Harpo Marx and Orson Welles. ...
Vera and Igor Stravinsky at the White House with the Kennedys
Stravinsky was at the same time a frustrated outsider. His ambivalent, abortive relationship to the film industry was a microcosm of the whole. He denounced as “execrable” Disney’s appropriation, truncated and rearranged to fit a scenario of dinosaurs and drought, of The Rite of Spring in Fantasia — and yet agreed to option to Disney The Firebird and Renard. He rejected outright a $100,000 offer to “pad a film with music.” A series of collapsed collaborations fed Four Norwegian Moods, Scherzo à la Russe, Ode, and Symphony in Three Movements, all containing music originally conceived for sound tracks.
The failure of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to acknowledge Stravinsky’s 85th birthday, in 1967, was a watershed in his alienation from the city in which he had established residence nearly three decades before. His singular association with the Boston Symphony, which he guest-conducted 19 times, ended with the death of Serge Koussevitzky in 1951. Only in 1967 did an American orchestra — the New York Philharmonic — mount anything like a Stravinsky festival sympathetic to the range and scope of his achievement. He came to view Europe as more receptive. Meanwhile, the Hollywood expatriates died or dispersed. Never at home speaking English, he grew isolated in California. As early as 1957, he and Vera thought of resettling in England. Paris was also considered. ...
Joseph Horowitz is an artistic consultant, teacher, and author. As an orchestral administrator and advisor, he has been a pioneering force in the development of thematic programming and new concert formats. He has written such books as Classical Music in the United States, Understanding Toscanini, Dvořák and America, Wagner Nights, and The Post-Classical Predicament.
