Igor Stravinsky

by NICOLAS NABOKOV

THIS was my first trip to California. I had never wanted to go. Up to the last minute I could not make up my mind whether to give in to the persuasion of a convenient neuralgia and send George Balanchine oil alone. The whole trip appeared silly and extravagant. To surrender oneself to some three night-days of boredom, restlessness, and insomnia in “through” cars, “luxury” diners (“Sorry, sir, no more roast beef”; “Sorry, sir, they forgot to put on the wine in Chicago”), and “slrato-stuffed” airliners for the pleasure of four or five days in California (unfamiliar surroundings, dubious landscape) seemed capricious indeed,

True enough, at the other end of the journey there were the two Stravinsky’s, whom I liked so much and whom 1 had come to know so well during the years of their American “retreat.” Auden had described to me how warmly they received their friends, how simple and gay Igor Fedorovitch can be in his tiny home. Then, too, I remembered the relentless fascination which he held for me as for most of the musicians of my generation. To see him in his house, to observe him at work in his studio, to talk to him for long hours and follow the trail of his penetrating, agile thought, enlivened with succulent metaphor (“Can you imagine what it means for me to conduct in the City Center, with its orchestra pit like a men’s room and no acoustics at all? It is like putting a new Rolls-Royce on Russian roads”; or about the Berkshire Festival: “It is perfectly all right, but why should coni rabasses practice outdoors under pine trees? After all, they are not herbivorous instruments”), and above all, to scrutinize his latest scores — all this seemed enticing enough to outweigh the apparent absurdity of the tedious journey.

All along the way my thoughts buzzed around Stravinsky. I thought of his extraordinary destiny, how strange, how brilliant, and how perplexing it has been. A true and earthy child of that miscarriage of history, the Russian civilization of the nineteenth century, he reflected both its creative dynamism and its refinements.

Stravinsky has been one of ihe earliest “Great Refugees” of our ungrateful modern times. He left old-fashioned, miasmic Imperial Russia, which had no real use for him, in the first decade of our century and he never returned to any of the Russias which have since appeared on the Furasian plain. He has little use for any of them, least of all for the various Red ones, even for his memories, and he is altogether free of any romantic Ulyssean longing. For Stravinsky, Russia is a language, which he uses with superb, gourmand-like dexterity; it is a few books; Glinka and Tchaikovsky. The rest either leaves him indifferent or arouses his anger, contempt, and v iolent dislike. In the years between 1908 and 1913, Stravinsky became famous in the old-world capital of Paris, where a wave of infatuation with exotics brought about the “discovery” of Russian music, painting, opera, and ballet. These were the true annees des Ballets Russes, as any Parisian old-timer will tell you; and the young man from the land of the tsars, boyars, samovars, ballerina mistresses, and vodka attracted notice as the most famous fame of Western music, the leader of its most radical movement.

Copyright 1949, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Boston 16. Mass. All rights reserved.

In 1913 he shocked the congregation of Paris balletomanes by his Rites of Spring. The scandal of the first performance of this work at the Theatre des Champs-Élysées, the yelling, whistling, and the ensuing scuffle (some fifty people got undressed to the bone and landed in the Commissariat do Police on the rue Havre Commartin), has never been surpassed, not even by the historical scandal of the first performance of Tannhäuser (that time the Jockey Club offered to its operagoing members elegant silver whistles with the inscription “pour siffler Tannhäuser”).

From here on, Stravinsky’s leadership of modern Western music became incontestable. As years went by he gained more prestige and received a greater and deeper respect, mixed at times with envy, jealousy, or limitless adulation, llis reputation spread over the world in a similar and perhaps somewhat broader way than the fame of Picasso, his close friend and collaborator. Every new work of Stravinsky’s was a major event; his Parisian adepts, the “inner circle” of his admirers, acclaimed him as the greatest composer of the time.

No sooner did the chestnuts begin to burgeon along the boulevards of Paris than the international musical intelligentsia would be seething with rumors about the new Stravinsky ballet or concert piece which was to have its first performance each year at the end of May. I remember the unique, the unforgettably pure excitement (so totally devoid of any non-musical considerations), of these first performances of Stravinsky’s music, the electric tension of the audience and the ensuing ovations.

A real commotion occurred when, in the early twenties, Stravinsky stopped using Russian folklore as subject matter and, turning toward the Western tradition, started to write music akin in style and spirit to the baroque period, the period of Rack, Handel, and Scarlatti. Numerous people were so deeply shocked at this new monster, half jazz, half Bach; half “modern man,” half powdered wig, that they developed an intense and a prolonged heartbleed. They bled at the loss of the “Russian Stravinsky” (the Stravinsky of The Firebird): they bled at the horror of this perverse new thing which, for want of a better term (or rather, for lack of imagination), was christened “neo-classicism.” The bleeding persisted and in some cases developed into hemophilia. Traces of it can still be found, for example, in the pages of the New York Times. It manifests itself in an angry, resentful, and disillusioned denial of nearly all that Stravinsky has written since he abandoned the sacred soil of Russian subject matter.

Today, many still hate his music for many contradictory reasons. He deceived the congenital lover of Russia (not the new, but the exotic, fairytale Russia of wide spaces and dme slave), he enraged the extremists by his respect for and his return to tradition; he irritated those who saw in him the apostle of dissonance, of the percussion instruments, and of lush new tone colors.

Despite his so-called “neo-classical” twist, Stravinsky nevertheless remained the unquestionable’ leader of modern music in Paris and the West throughout the early thirties.

2

IT WAS a little past noon when George Balanchine’s wife Maria stopped the car on an incline of winding North Wetherly Drive. On our right a low white picket fence was concealed by a wall of tall evergreen shrubbery. Some two hundred and fifty feet behind the shrubbery, silhouetted against bluebrownish hills, stood a small and flat one-story house, rimmed by a narrow porch in front and a large terrace on its left-hand side.

Balanchine climbed Out of the car. “Here we are,” he said, helping me to get my bags and packages out of the back seat.

From behind the shrubbery we heard hasty footsteps and Russian voices. A minute later both Stravinskys appeared at a small side gate near the garage. They were dressed in breakfast clothes — she in an impeccably white négligé, which made her look large and stately, he in a polka-dotted burgundy bathrobe, with the striking addition of a narrow-brimmed, wilted, black felt hat. Both of them smiled and gesticulated.

This vision made me suddenly aware of their extraordinary physical disproportion. There was something both touching and amusing in it. The tall, Olympian figure of Vera Arturovna, her broad and regular Scandinavian features, her wide-open and languidly smiling blue eyes, in such contrast to her husband’s sharp facial contours, his beak-like nose and fleshy lips, and his short, totally fat less body, so surprisingly young, so agile and elastic.

I remembered that Tchelitchew called him a “prancing grasshopper” and that Cocteau used to remark, when Stravinsky conducted, that he looked like “an erect tint acting its part in a La Fontaine fable.” Yet the moment I saw him in front of his garden in California, I knew that both Tchelitchew and Cocteau were wrong. He is neither a grasshopper nor an ant; he is not an insect at all: he is much more like a bird — one of those small birds with large, sturdy beaks, like cardinals or lovebirds, whose movements are quick, electric, und nervous. Stravinsky does not permit criticism of America in his presence. He usually interrupts and changes the conversation or, in an aside, says, “As far as I am concerned, they can have their Generalissimos and Führers. Leave me Mr. Truman and I’m quite satisfied.”

“Give this to mo,” said Stravinsky picking up my bag. “Heavens, what is in it? Someone’s meat?”

“It’s only music,” I replied, “and a couple of bottles.”

“Come, come,” said Vera Arturovna, “let’s go in.”

We went through the gate and walked up to the house. The path led uphill through a patch of garden banked on one side by bushes, on the other by long-stemmed pink and cream-colored roses.

“Go to your right, through the living room,” said Vera Arturovna as we reached the small entrance hall of the house. I crossed a spacious, sunny room filled with spring flowers, modern pictures, lightcolored furniture, and several birdcages, and entered a smaller room, lined on two sides with bookcases. Across the room, turning its back to the terrace window, stood the sofa.

Vera Arturovna ordered me to take off my shoes. “The first thing we do,” she said, is to measure the prospect ive sleepers.”

“Here they are, all of them,” said Stravinsky, and he pointed to an array of marks and signatures written in pencil on different levels of the door frame. “See, this is Mrs. Holm. She was the smallest of them all. And ibis is Olson, the tallest.”

They were both relieved when my watermark did not exceed Auden’s six feet. “Oh, said Vera Arturovna in a disappointed tone, I thought you were much taller than Auden.

“It’s only his hair,” commented Stravinsky. “Gome here. Stretch out on ihe sofa. ^ on see, he turned to George Balanchine, “he fits perfectly: from socks to hair. Like a violin in its case.”

The Balanchines were leaving to visit Maria s family. They planned to pick us all up in the evening for dinner at the Napoli, Stravinsky s Italian Stammstube.

“I suppose you want to bathe and change,’ said Vera Arturovna.

“Why, he looks clean.” said Igor, “et il ne sent pas trop mauvais.”

“Come, come, Igor: let’s leave him alone. She dragged him by the sleeve. “When you’re ready, we’ll eat lunch.”

I had barely finished washing and changing when he returned. “Nika, if you re ready, come and have a drink. I have just received two bottles of Marc from a farmer in Brittany. Let s have some.

Stravinsky carefully extracted the cork with one of those double-decker silent French corkscrews which make one think of dental or obstetrical instruments. Having accomplished the operation, he fondly smelled the cork and, looking very earnest, said, “N-da, this is perfectly reliable Marc,” and added in English, “Not so bad!

We gulped the Marc, Stravinsky making a smacking sound with his tongue.

“Now, quickly, some proteins! Verotchka, where are the proteins?” he shouted excitedly. “Give Xabokox and me some proteins.”

“Ah, here they are,” he said as we entered the living room. He gave me a plateful of biscuits thickly smeared with Gamembert cheese.

During lunch they asked me all sorts of questions, mostly concerning the political situation. I had quite recently returned from Berlin after two years with the U.S. Military Government. This, coupled with a general interest in politics, made me in their eyes an expert analyst of any political situation. Furthermore, as I undoubtedly had acquaintance with government secrets, I surely would be able to predict the course of world events.

The main question was whether there would be another war and consequently whether it would be safe to plan a European tour for the coming summer months. There was real anxiety in the way Stravinsky asked this question several times during ihe meal. I was of course aware of his profound distaste for any form of social upheaval, be it a war, a revolution, a strike, or simply a mild political demonstration. “How can one work in disorder?” he would say.

For Stravinsky social disorder of any kind is primarily somel lung which prevents him from doing his work —that is, fulfilling his duty. He hates disorder with all ihe strength of his egocentric nature. He dislikes even the terms revolution and revolutionary, particularly when they are applied to music. He is very angry when music historians use them. “What can they possibly mean?” he says. “ Revolution is a term describing t he overthrow of an existing order by means ol violence. It is necessarilv accompanied by disorder. Music is the antithesis of violence and disorder. Music is order, measure, proportion — that is all those principles which oppose disorder. The only thing this term can mean is a cycle, a span of time, and with a didactic emphasis on each word he adds, “This is the only correct way to use it.”

Stravinsky is equally (earful and contemptuous of conditions in which the creative work of the artisi is subject to supervision or dictation (and possibly extinction) by the authorities of the state.

“Tell me, please,” he would say with intense irritation, “what can these gentlemen [the authorities] know about how to write music? I don’t try and tell them how to be a tchinovnik [bureaucrat].

Hence Stravinsky’s deep disgust for the situation of the artist in the Soviet Lnion, “where every tchinovnik can tell you what to do. Hence also his spontaneous and sincere attachment to the United States, where he can work in peace, earn a comfortable income, and feel secure and happy. “America is good for me, he often says.

“He has become softer and is less frequently angrv,” echoes his wife.

3

AFTER lunch Stravinsky said, “Nika, if you aren’t too tired, come and show me your music.”

“Perhaps I could show you rnv music some other time,” I said. “Now I would rather look at your Orpheus and at your Mass.”

“All right, come with me.” He led me to his study at the other end of the narrow corridor, where we had had a drink before lunch.

He sat down at the piano, carefully wiped his glasses with a Sight Saver, and opened the orchestra score of Orpheus. A moment later we were both absorbed in it.

I stood behind him and watched his short, nervous fingers scour ihe key board, searching and finding the correct intervals, the widely spaced chords, and the characteristically Stravinskian broad melodic leaps. His neck, his head, his whole body accentuated the ingenious rhythmical design of the music by spasmlike bobs and jerks. He grunted, he hummed, and occasionally stopped to make an aside.

“See the fugue here,” he would say, point ing to the beginning of the Epilogue. “Two horns are working it out, while a trumpet and a violin in unison sing a long, drawn-out melody, a kind of cantus firmus. Doesn’t this melody sound to you like a medieval vielle [a viol]? Listen . . .” And his fingers would start fidgeting again on the keyboard. Then, coming to a passage1 in the Epilogue where a harp solo interrupts the slow progress of the fugue, he would stop and say, “Here, you see, I cut off the fugue wit h a pair of scissors.” He clipped the air with his fingers. “I introduced this short harp phrase, like two bars of an accompaniment. Then the horns go on with their fugue as if nothing had happened. I repeat it at regular intervals, here and here again.” Stravinsky added, with his habitual grin, “You can eliminate these harp-solo interruptions, paste the parts of the fugue together, and it will be one whole piece.”

I asked him why he introduced the harp solo. He smiled maliciously, as if he were letting me in on one of his private secrets. “But didn’t you hear?” He turned the pages to the middle of the score. “It is a reminder of this — the Song of Orpheus.” And he added thoughtfully: “Here in the Epilogue it sounds like a kind of . . . compulsion, like something unable to stop. . . . Orpheus is dead, the song is gone, but the accompaniment goes on.”

Several months later, listening to the first performance of Orpheus in New York, I remembered this last remark of Stravinsky’s and understood its full implication. The Epilogue seemed to me to be one of the most effective pieces of dramatic music since the Prelude to the last act of Verdi’s Othello (to which, of course, it bears no resemblance whatsoever). Yet the musical devices of this Epilogue are as simple and even as obvious as the dramatic situation of the ballet plot.

Orpheus has just been ripped to shreds by the Thracian women; or rather, as Balanchine’s choreography and Stravinsky’s music suggest, they have completed a bloodless, inevitable, and dispassionate surgical operation on the body of hopeless Orpheus. Orpheus is no more; Orpheus is dead. The world is without song, mute and desolate. Apollo’s hymn to the memory of the dead hero and his attempt 1o play his lyre enhance the melancholy realization of Orpheus’s death. The lyre (or harp) in the hands of Apollo sounds like the forlorn accompaniment of a song which is lost forever. This translation of a simple dramatic situation inlo an equally simple musical form is executed with incredible lucidity and with the microscopic precision of the laboratory scientist.

Stravinsky’s devices are always the same: a remarkable economy of means coupled with an infallible sense of proportion, time, and form.

The ingenious instrumental combination of this Epilogue, the slow and majestic flow of its polyphonic lines, are both at the service of the dramatic situation. The very choice of the instruments which sing those expressive, sad melodies is significant; two French horns and one trumpet (the unison of the solo violin melting in the timber of the trumpet) — purposely not bowed string instruments.

Here, once again, Stravinsky revealed to me his uncanny sense of the individuality or, better, the personality of each instrument of the orchestra. It is this sense which enables him not only to find for each dramatic situation (when he is concerned with a dramatic subject) the most suitable and therefore the most expressive instrumental combination, but also each lime to discover a new and surprisingly fresh mixture of orchestral sound. All this, as I said before, is accomplished with the greatest economy of means — few polyphonic lines, a minimum of tones in chords, a minimum of instruments to each melodic line, and the most astute use of the specific qualities of each instrument. Stravinsky is, I believe, unquestionably the greatest living investigator of instruments as individuals, perhaps even the greatest since the middle of the eighteenth century.

The experimentation with instruments in the nineteenth century was primarily concerned with the extension of their range and their dynamic power. The specific expressive qualities of each individual instrument were a secondary consideration. The motive was not so much a craftsmanlike interest in the technical possibilities of each instrument as the need of finding the necessary “tone colors on the orchestral palette, in order to saggest or describe the extramusical images, expressions, ideas, or objects with which romantic music was preoccupied. Only towards the end of that century did composers show a renewed concern with instruments as individuals within the orchestral unit.

Today, in the middle of the twentieth century, the attitude of the composers towards the instruments of the orchestra, and hence to the art of orchestration, has definitely changed. Composers know that orchestration is not registration (not like pulling the stops on a huge electric organ in order to acquire impersonal and “phony” mixtures of sound), but is rather a highly complex art, in which the intuitive or imaginative faculties of the composer’s mind are combined with the logical and critical faculties. Thus, this art can be completely successful only when the composer thoroughly understands the individuality, and hence the limits (in terms of technical possibilities), of each instrument in the orchestra.

The primary importance the art of orchestration holds in contemporary music is largely due to the influence of Stravinsky. If we consider that at least two thirds of the quality of an instrumental piece is in its adequate orchestration, we must give credit to Stravinsky’s approach to and his discoveries in the instrumental field.

His approach is based essentially on his know ledgt of the technical limits of each instrument. Hence his imaginative and extremely skillful exploitation of these limits. In other words, Stravinsky treats every orchestra musician as an accomplished performer, a master craftsman of his instrument. He requires of him the ability to play at extreme velocity and at the same time to be at ease in the most complicated rhythmical design; he must be able to intone with mathematical precision in all the ranges of his instrument and at all possible dynamic conditions of the music (from very soft to very loud); and finally, he must strive to extend the high ranges of his instrument beyond the conventionally accepted limits.

This is why most orchestra musicians, despite its difficulty, like to play Stravinsky’s music. When we ask a modern-minded orchestra musician if he likes Stravinsky’s music, he usually replies that he does, because it is interestingly written for his inst rument.

4

STRAVINSKY and I spent most of the afternoon looking at the score of Orpheus and at the two parts of the Latin Mass he was writing at the time.

After a while I grew tired of standing, and flopped down on a soft, narrow couch that stood behind the piano in his study, By then he had entirely forgotten my presence and was absorbed in one of the pages of his Mass, lie was playing the same passage over and over again. It looked as if he were testing the quality of what he had written, lie was remeasuring the interval relations and recalculating the rhythmical patterns. His head and body jerked and bobbed and he was quite distinctly humming the words of the Mass.

I suddenly caught myself following his movements with a special kind of interest. Often before, I had been captivated by the movements of his body. They are always so personal and profoundly revealing of his personality and of his music. Frequently, in fact, while listening to his music, I have closed my eyes and seen in front of me a characteristic Stravinskian gesture. At other times, when seeing him pace the floor on tiptoe in the middle of a discussion, his upper body bent forward like that of a frog-fishing stork, his arms akimbo, I would be struck by the parallel between his physical gesture and the inner gesture of his music. His music reflects his peculiarly elastic walk, the syncopated nod of his head and slung of his shoulders, and those abrupt stops in the middle of a conversation when, like a dancer, lie suddenly freezes in a ballet-like pose and punctuates his argument with a broad and sarcastic grin.

Not only does Stravinsky’s music reflect his bodily movements and characteristic gestures; it also reflects succinctly and convincingly his whole mode of life—his attitude towards his environment, towards people, nature, and objects. Above all, it reflects his love for order and his met iculously stern work discipline, so totally devoid of self-indulgence and self-pity. It reflects his penchant for all sorts of mechanical gadgets, from thumbtacks to stop watches and pocket metronomes, his passion for hardware stores and the pleasure he derives from fitting a message into the prescribed twenty-five words of an overnight cable. It reflects his attitude towards money, for which, as everybody knows, he has a “profound respect,” which some people mistake for avarice.

But perhaps, in an even stronger way, his music reflects his nervous and acid hates; his hate of all kinds of stupidity (stupid people, stupid art, stupid letters), his hate of stuffy rooms, of dirt or disorder, of dusty furniture and bad odors. The wittiness of his caustic remarks about people and, chiefly, about bad music is the same kind of wit one finds in some of his scores - in, for example, his ballet Jeux de Cartes or the dances from his Histoire du Soldat, or his ballet Renard. It is a scathing, pitiless kind of humor which knows no compassion.

In general, Stravinsky likes precise, picturesque, or onomatopoeic remarks. His talk as well as his letters is full of them. Once in New York a cold bothered him. He complained: “J’ai un portemonnaie dans ma nossoglotka — I have a change purse in my larynx.” Another time we were discussing his new opera, The Rake’s Progress. He was explaining how he intended to treat Auden’s libretto: “I will lace each aria into a tight corset.” Stravinsky’s love for clear terms, for laconic definitions and adequate translation, manifests itself in his enthusiasm for dictionaries, with which his study is filled. Of all of them he prefers the French “Grand Larousse.”

His own remarks generally have a Laroussian precision as well as wit and imagination. When, for example, someone is in a hurry, he will say, “ Why do you hurry? I have no time to harry” But particularly sharp and picturesque are his remarks about people. An overemotional conductor, w ho bristles with exuberant gestures, reminds him of a “danse du ventre vue par derrière an Oriental belly dancer seen from behind,” while his arms are a pair of “egg beaters.”

Conductors in general readily incur Stravinsky’s wrath and his most scat lying remarks. In a filing cabinet under his piano, in a separate folder, are collected some choice pictures of conductors in highly contorted poses. Most of these pictures are taken from publicity releases or newspapers.

“Look at him!” says Stravinsky, pulling a conduetorial exl ravagaiiza out of the folder. “Look at the dandy! Look at his idiotic expression, his frothv gestures. Is all this nonsense necessary to conduct an orchestra?”

His workroom is another example of the precision which orders his music and his language. An extraordinary room, perhaps the best planned and organized workroom I have seen in my life. In a space which is not larger than some twenty-five bv forty feet stand two pianos (one grand, one upright ) and two desks (a small, elegant writing desk and a draftsman’s table). In two cupboards with glass shelves are books, scores, and sheet music, arranged according to alphabetical order. Hot ween the two pianos, the cupboards and desks, are scattered a few small tables (one of which is a kind of “smoker’s delight it exhibits all sorts of cigarette boxes, lighters, holders, fluids, flints, and pipe cleaners), five or six comfortable chairs, and the couch Stravinsky uses for his afternoon naps. (I saw him on it the next day, lying on his back, with an expression of contained anger on his face, snoring gently and met hodicallv.)

Besides the pianos and the furniture, there are hundreds of gadgets, photographs, trinkets, and implements of every kind in and on the desks and tables and tacked on the back of the cupboards. I believe Stravinsky has in his study all the instruments needed for writing, copying, drawing, pasting, cutting, clipping, filing, sharpening, and gluing that the combined effects of a stationery and hardware store can furnish (and yet he is always after new ones). A touch of nature in the midst of all this man-made gadgetry is provided by a bunch of fresh roses in a white china vase which stands on his desk. His wife cuts them for him every morning from his special rosebushes.

Yet despite this mass of objects and clusler of furniture, Stravinsky’s study is so well organized and so functional that it gives one a sense of spaciousness and peaceful comfort. One feels as if one were surveying a chessboard, with its black and white figures arranged in exact relation to each other, ready for a long musical game.

5

WHILE I was still sitting on the couch and Stravinsky was puttering at the piano, Vera Arturovna appeared in the entrance to the study and announced that the Balanchines had arrived.

“George and Maria are here,” she said, “and Genia Herman is waiting for us with vodka and zakousska [hors d’oeuvres]. It is time to go, Igor. Come, Nika.”

“Seytehas, seytehas,” answered Stravinsky.

I got up to join her while Stravinsky, without changing his position at the piano, said to me, “Nika, please go and tell them that I’ll be out in five minutes.” And he went on playing.

Half an hour later we were driving down to Eugene Herman’s apartment. On the front seat of the car, squeezed in between Vera Arturovna and myself, was Stravinsky’s liny figure, dressed in a pea jacket and a yachtsman’s hat. (He bought the pea jacket at a Navy surplus sale and is both proud and fond of it.) The Balanchines followed us closely in their own car.

Eugene Berman, the painter, is one of the few members of Stravinsky’s Hollywood “familv circle. A gentle, soft-spoken, and somewhat melancholic man with a wistful sense of humor, Berman is devoted to the Stravinskys and they in turn to him. While I was in Hollywood, Berman came nearly every afternoon to the Stravinskys’, stayed for meals and long into the night. One felt that Vera Arturovna and Igor Fedorovitch, with their warm and attentive friendship, had made their house a home for Berman.

The dinner at the Napoli was gay and happy, like one of those dinners of the twenties when we used to get together with Diaghilev, Prokofiev, Picasso, Derain, Balanchine, and other collaborators of the Ballet Husse at Giardino’s restaurant on the top of the hill in Monte Carlo. Stravinsky was in wonderful form — voluble, witty, and at the same time extremely attentive to all of us. As usual, he ordered the best food and, especially, the best wines, and he had the waiter play funny, sobbing old Caruso records on the juke box.

Gay and happy as the occasion was, both Balanchine and I couldn’t keep from yawning — so much so that Vera Arturovna and her husband (who usually can sit it out till the early hours of the morning, provided he is with close friends and there is Scolch around) started to urge us all to go to bed as soon as we had finished coffee.

But by the time we came home and I fitted myself comfortably on the three cushions of the famous sofa, my tiredness was gone and I felt just as wideawake as when I had arrived that morning at the Los Angeles station. I looked around for books and found a few rare Russian editions on a shelf that contained a pell-mell assortment of French novels, Russian classics, murder stories, and biographies. I took down a volume of Rozanov and tried to read, but discovered that I could not concentrate and that my eyes were wandering senselessly over and over the same sentences. I was still too much under the influence of my afternoon with Stravinsky in his study, and all my thoughts were concerned with his work. Somehow 1 felt that 1 had to find answers all over again to essential questions about his art.

What, after all, does his art mean to us contemporary musicians of the younger generationt What is its value in the general evolution of music history? What are his essential discoveries.''

Lying on his sofa in bis house, surrounded by his warm friendliness, I felt overcome by an enormous sense of gratefulness for his art the kind of gratefulness an apprentice feels towards his master craftsman. I felt that I owed Stravinsky much of my understanding of how to use t he materials of music-intervals, rhythms, melodic outlines. I felt that it was his art that opened my eyes to the decay of impressionist harmony and the corruption or the emotive paroxysms of late Romanticism. Above all, I felt that it was his example that had brought me to admire the continuity of the classical tradition, the beauty of polyphonic technique, and 1o understand the necessity for a clear-cut, welldefined formal structure.

At the same time it was Stravinsky’s art, I believe, which showed the musicians of my generation new horizons in the domain of rhythm, new possibilities in the use of musical instruments, and a new concept of harmony, fuller, broader, and nobler than 1 he sterile harmonic concepts of the late nineteenth century. Yet to me the most important discoveries of Stravinsky lie in his artful perception and measurement of the flow of time by means of the most complex and beautiful rhythmic patterns.

Who else, I thought, among contemporary composers can exhibit such a continuity and such a variety of admirable works of art (or should I say solutions of “problems”)? Who else has successfull a used all forms, all styles, all techniques, and integrated them in an unmistakably personal art of his own? Who else in our time has written pieces so easily understood and of such immense popular appeal to the layman as The Firebird, Petroushka, Histoire du Soldat (in the twenties in Central Europe thousands of schools performed this piece to the general delight of teen-agers; my own son, when he was about seven, loved this piece more than anything else and always wanted me to play the records of it over and over again), Symphony ofPsalms, and Apollo, and at the same time has produced such hermetic masterpieces as the Symphony and Octet for Wind Instruments, or the Serenade for piano solo (which is the joy of a skilled music-lover)? And finally how few, how very few, composers of our time can produce a record of such total devotion to his craft, so completely devoid of any concession or compromise, so intransigent and conscientious.

When . . .

I was suddenly interrupted in the middle of my thoughts by soft footsteps in the living room. ’The door opened and Stravinsky appeared, in his bathrobe.

“ Why aren’t you sleeping? Put the light out. It’s late,” he said reproachfully. He walked over to the window. “Don’t open it so wide — especially with your neuralgia. Our California nights aren’t warm at all.” And having shut the window to a small crack, he left.

The days in California went by much faster than I would have wished. They were filled with music, talk, enjoyment, and gaiety. I had rarely seen Stravinsky so gay and so full of fun. But at last my time was up and I had to go back to New York.

We drove to the airport through the darkening hours of the evening, long in advance of take-ofl time (an old Russian custom). We sat in the waiting room unnoticed by anyone. A fat man passed by and went to the traffic counter.

“You know who that is?” said Vera Arturovna. “It’s Alfred Hitchcock.”

“And there,” added Stravinsky, “is Henry Fonda. It looks as if you’re going to have lots of famous men on the plane with you.

Finally the plane was called and we started moving towards Gate No. 2. A man in an overlong and broad polo coat turned to me and said, “I think we have met in Vienna. Aren’t you Nicolas Nabokov? My name is Helmut Dantine.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “How are you?” (“One more famous man,” whispered Stravinsky.)

We parted at the gate and I walked with the crowd of passengers through a tunnel to the plane, leaving the two Stravinsky’s on the platform in front of the terminal. As I was going up the steps of the gangplank, I looked back. 1 here in the bright California moonlight I saw a small figure frantically waving his hat. I waved back and entered the plane.

Helmut Dantine approached me and asked in a quaint Viennese accent, “Excuse me, who was that man with whom you came to the airport; His face looks so familiar. ‘

I explained.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Rut what is he doing in Hollywood? Oh, yes, on second t bought I heard that he was here. Is he doing a picture?”

I answered that he was not.