Igor in Oz - Stravinsky Downunder

Continuing my series on American composers, the following is a revision of an article about the Russian-American composer Stravinsky that first appeared in Symphony Australia concert programs in 1999.

Reproduced by permission of Australian Broadcasting Corporation Library Sales

‘It looks like impetigo,’ said Igor Stravinsky, the 20^th century’s most famous composer, as he flew in over the red roof tiles of Sydney in November 1961. He, his wife Vera, and assistant conductor, Robert Craft, had just flown in with Qantas from Bangkok via Darwin (‘a platter of red earth on a promontory of rivers and jungle,’ said Craft).

They arrived – for concerts in Sydney and Melbourne – in an Australia whose advertisements promoted the values of Brent de-luxe push-button cisterns and HMV ‘Princess’ Stereophonic Radiograms. The prime minister, Mr Menzies, was complaining that the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s show The Candidates would help the Communist Party in the Federal Election campaign, and vast iron ore deposits had just been discovered in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

Overseas, President Kennedy was considering asking American civilians to begin building fallout shelters in their backyards. The BBC ordered department heads to avoid programs that might panic listeners about ‘invasions from outer space’. And New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, arrived ‘downunder’ to search for his adventurer son who had gone missing in Netherlands New Guinea.

Stravinsky’s performances were to be ‘momentous’ concerts, according to ABC publicity. The negotiations had begun in September 1960 with a cable from New York, saying: ‘COMPOSER DOCTOR IGOR STRAVINSKY INTERESTED VISIT AUSTRALIA THIS YEAR IF POSSIBLE STOP’. (Actually, Stravinsky had wanted to come to Australia to conduct back in 1937, but then the ABC’s London agent had warned Sydney head office that ‘unless you want him as a famous modernist composer with a consequent limited appeal, and much strange music – I cannot see his claim as a conductor’.)

In 1960, negotiations went on and off and on again for much of the following year. The ABC backed out a couple of times over the question of fees or broadcast possibilities and the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission suggested that the ABC look at the contract they were able to get Stravinsky to accept. (There is film of Stravinsky conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in The Firebird on YouTube.) Interestingly, whenever negotiations bogged down, it was Stravinsky’s people who reopened them. He was keen to come, said his manager. In his old age, the Russian master, now living in Hollywood, loved travel! Even when there was a mix-up over the final date of the contract, Stravinsky offered to be driven overnight to Sydney from Melbourne after his final concert – ‘a distance of 572 miles’ – in time to catch an 8am flight to Tahiti. Air France saved the day when they agreed to delay their aircraft’s departure from Mascot [Sydney's airport].

Initially, Stravinsky meant to go to each of the mainland orchestras. He proposed performances of the complete Firebird – his 1910 ballet – for Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, with, say, a first half of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and Debussy’s Ibéria; music ideologically in tune with his own most-recent aesthetic.

But the negotiating process whittled the itinerary down to only two completely different all-Stravinsky programs for Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney ended up with the Pulcinella Suite, Symphony in Three Movements, Apollon musagète and the lullaby and finale from The Firebird; Melbourne was to hear the Ode – elegiacal chant in three parts, Fairy’s Kiss Divertimento, Symphonies for winds and Jeu de cartes (Card Game).

The Sydney Daily Telegraph’s critic was a little miffed that the most recent work on offer, the Ode, ‘was written 16 years ago – and Stravinsky is still an active composer’. But these were fairly rich programs for Australia in those days – almost exclusively a diet of music from Stravinsky’s neo-classical phase of the 1920s, 30s and 40s; music lacking the raw power and spectacle of the earlier Russian works for which he was still best known, but, for the most part, possessing a festive, joyful energy and joie de vivre reminiscent of Italian classicism. Stravinsky himself had stylistically moved on. At 79, he was now in his serial phase, currently composing The Flood for CBS Television, having recently finished A Sermon, A Narrative and a Prayer, and premiered Monumentum pro Gesualdo.

‘I dashed out to meet the maestro at Mascot yesterday,’ wrote The Daily Telegraph’s Ray Castle on 10 November. Castle was ‘boiling with a hundred-and-one questions’. Like, did Stravinsky really compose ‘the fabulous’ The Rite of Spring after having a vision of a girl dancing herself to death; did he think more in Russian or in French…He didn’t get to find out. Stravinsky was too tired for a press interview, but Castle did report that: ‘The maestro, in direct opposition to his iron-boned music is a fragile, bent little man…fatigued to the point of exhaustion. He arrived supporting himself on a walking stick. And he was broke. (I know…because…I saw conductor Joseph Post lend him 20 quid).’

Not all the reaction was as breathless as Castle’s. The Sun-Herald’s music and drama critics instructed readers on how to enjoy the ‘multisonorous euphony’ and ‘sustained psalmody’ of Apollon musagètes…The same column wondered about the future of Patrick White as a playwright after the ‘powerful impact…in Adelaide last week’ of The Ham Funeral. Over oysters at Lady Lloyd-Jones’, the Stravinskys themselves were to meet the novelist White – ‘the only nonbuoyant Australian so far,’ wrote Craft in Chronicles of a Friendship.

Rehearsal routine in Stravinsky’s last years usually saw Craft do most of the rehearsing, with Stravinsky conducting only part of each concert and the relevant part of the final rehearsal. The 23rd November edition of Sydney’s Sun-Herald gives an interesting insight into Stravinsky’s rehearsals. He ‘sat for most of the time with hands passive, folded over a walking stick’ while Craft ‘took the orchestra through some of the most important music of the century.’ Every now and then he’d confer with Craft, in French, or occasionally with an orchestral player. Craft was not afraid to disagree with his boss:

At one stage in the rehearsal, he gave the orchestra untypical advice: ‘Don’t watch me, just count.’ He explained later: ‘Mr Stravinsky will be conducting the music tomorrow night. We don’t agree about it; and I didn’t want to superimpose my interpretation of how it should sound’.

This supports SSO cellist Lois Simpson’s recollection that Craft could be quite abrupt with Stravinsky, but more significantly it indicates a fairly high-level disagreement in the camp of a composer who had tried to make much of his middle-period music interpretation-proof.

Simpson remembers the gruelling rehearsal process under Craft. ‘On the last day, Stravinsky got up and conducted and everything fell into place.’ Australian composer Nigel Butterley crept into the control booth to watch the Sydney final rehearsal: ‘When Stravinsky picked up the baton, suddenly he was transformed, and instead of this little shrivelled-up old man, was the Stravinsky of the drawings of Cocteau and Picasso…As soon as the performance finished, suddenly he shrivelled down again and became this little old man.’

Roger Covell, reviewing the Sydney concert for the Sun-Herald, recalls that Stravinsky ‘held his arms rather high and wide, so that the movement of his elbows appeared to reinforce the beat expressed in the surprisingly free sweep and flap of his arms. He used no baton…’ Composer George Dreyfus, at that time Principal Bassoon with the then-Victorian (later Melbourne) Symphony Orchestra remembers Stravinsky’s beat as ‘neat: what I always thought [conducting] should be, not this windmill stuff’.

The Sydney concert took place at the Sydney Town Hall on 23rd November. Craft began the program. Roger Covell thought that Pulcinella, ‘was an all-too revealing opening choice to impose on a group of instrumentalists obviously suffering to some extent from nervous tension.’ He went on: ‘Nor was this tension entirely absent when the full orchestra tackled…the “Symphony in Three Movements”, which contains a pawing impatience of gesture that is first cousin to “The Rite”’

The Melbourne Age’s Dorian Le Gallienne wrote of the 28^th November concert at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre, that ‘the clarity of Mr. Craft’s conducting and the transparency of Stravinsky’s orchestration set the players a hard task in the Ode, and the performance was not without untidy entries and inaccuracies. The Symphonies for Wind Instruments went much better…’. But, in a review headed ‘“Musically Dull City” Left Empty Seats’, he reserved his strongest criticism for Melbourne audiences, as did Herald critic John Sinclair, who wrote that: ‘The number of empty seats in the dress circle was something for which Melbourne should feel deeply ashamed.’

On November 25^th, Stravinsky, Vera and Craft – the two Russian dvoryanye (landed gentry) and the American intellectual – went out to Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges, 20 miles east of Melbourne. 

Eucalyptus regnans, Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria. Patche99z. Public domain

They wandered through a charred forest to a grove of ferns ‘like an illustration in Humboldt’ and Vera commented that every tree was an individual. But Craft wrote that ‘the deeper I wander among the tall eucalyptus, the more I feel the absence of individuality in the loneliness of Australia and in the silence of the wilderness defined by the cry of a bird’. Stravinsky seems to have responded differently. Travelling home with three recordings of lyrebirds in his luggage, he was asked by a reporter if he had enjoyed Australia. He took the reporter’s notebook and wrote, in English which perhaps is more authentic than that found in the books he co-authored with Craft: ‘Why not? Of course I love very much your beautiful Australia, its people, its landscapes, its orchestras (Sydney and Melbourne) and its animals.’

But the pleasure was also ours. As Nigel Butterley said of Stravinsky in rehearsal: ‘There, suddenly, was the whole history of 20^th century music encapsulated in this marvellous figure.’ A composer who had grown up in Tsarist St. Petersburg; whose career had been launched by successes with Diaghilev’s company in Paris in the 1910s; who had had Tchaikovsky pointed out to him in the foyer of the Mariinsky Theater, who had twice been to see Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and was still the premier composer of the age…had come all the way to Australia.

G.K. Williams

Symphony Australia © 1999/2001

Reproduced by kind permission.

If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012