Antonietta, page 21
The soldier, at home, is rich but bored. The madam of a brothel (what could Her true name be?) comes to see him. She fishes from her basket a series of pictures of Her trollops to tempt him. Then She takes an old fiddle out of the basket. He recognizes it as his. But when he tries to play it, he can’t get a single sound out of it. He hurls it out a window and tears the magic book to shreds….
He is at a card table in a room in a palace, gambling with the court violinist (a demon of a virtuoso), who has somehow taken possession of the soldier’s fiddle. The King’s daughter is sick; the King has promised her hand to anyone who can make her well. The soldier loses and loses at cards, but he keeps filling the violinist’s wineglass until the fiddler passes out. The soldier recovers his violin….
He plays it beside the Princess’s sickbed. She rises. She dances, to his music, a tango, a waltz, and a ragtime, and then she throws herself into his arms. The Devil sneaks up behind them dressed as Himself—with pointed ears and a long tufted tail. The soldier plays such dizzying music on the violin that the Devil ties Himself up in knots, and the lovers drag Him away….
The soldier takes the Princess to his home village, but as soon as they go through the frontier post at the crossroads, a potentate in a brilliant scarlet cape (yes, it is He), who has got hold of the soldier’s fiddle again, appears and casts a spell on the soldier with it and leads him slowly away….
I showed this narration to my two partners. To my astonishment, Stravinsky—laying bare, I thought, a sentimental streak that he had kept utterly secret up till then because it was exactly the sort of thing he pretended to despise—asked if we couldn’t have a happier ending. Couldn’t we drop the final curtain when the Princess hugs the soldier after her three dances?
Federovsky hooted, and I said, “That’s not the way the Devil works, Stravinsky.”
He said, “But we could make more money with a happy ending.”
So it wasn’t softness of heart, after all; he was just being true to himself. Federovsky and I managed to talk him out of this nonsense.
STRAVINSKY
These two fellows live in the clouds. They seem to have no idea that stage productions cost money. It is left up to me to be the practical one. How can we employ actors? Pay a scene designer? Buy costumes and scenery? Hire a hall? When I heard the other day that that great patron of the arts Werner Reinhart, of Winterthur, was visiting Lausanne, I wasted no time inviting him to visit me. I told Ramuz to be on hand, and after I entertained Reinhart for an hour on the piano, Ramuz and I told him all about our wonderful novelty—a concert with narration. Ramuz, damn his tongue, stressed over and over that this was a tiny gem, a cameo, a miniature. What had to be the result of this trivialization? Reinhart could not help looking at the project through the wrong end of a pair of opera glasses: it almost disappeared from his sight, it was so small. He gave us a miserable three thousand francs.
I knew we would need much more. I made Ramuz rack his brains for the names of angels, and finally he thought of a rich woman who also happens to love music, a certain Madame Auguste Roussy, of La Tour-de-Peilz, and I signed a letter to her which Ramuz drafted, asking for fifteen thousand francs. It turned out that she did not love music nearly that much; we got zero francs from her. I then crawled like a beggar to the Infanta Beatrice of Spain, who lives not far away, and to whom I had already described our musical tale one day; nothing from her but humiliation. I lost sleep. I could not compose. Desperate, I wrote to Reinhart.
Miraculous! Today a draft for fifteen thousand came as if on the wings of a dove to the bank in Lausanne. Now I hear music in my head again.
FEDEROVSKY
We sat down today to continue work on the fifth scene.
Guima said, “I had a beautiful dream last night. I was walking along a road. I came on a woman sitting on the ground by the roadside. Her legs were crossed under a huge skirt with spangles on it. I could see that she was a gypsy. Baubles hung from her earlobes. She had curly hair; ringlets straggled down by her cheeks. She held a small child in her lap. She was sitting with a straight back, her torso turned slightly to her left, in order to be able to play a violin with her arms lifted clear of the child’s head. She had invented a haunting tune to amuse her little one. She played it over and over again, with long strokes of the bow. The child was entranced. Each time the tune ended, it would clap its tiny hands. The tune was still ringing in my head when I woke up. It still is now.”
And he proceeded to write the theme down, giving it first to the trumpet, then to the bassoon, as part of the “Little Concert” that we were just then working on—the music that announces the soldier’s now having the craft to waken the Princess, after the violinist-Devil has drunk too much and has fallen asleep.
At one point he broke off his work and said to us, “I don’t often dream directly onto the score like this, but I often do useful work on my pillow. In St. Petersburg, I remember, when I was finishing up The Firebird, I had a dream of a solemn council of some dim past tribe of pagans, sitting on a circle of blocks of stone, their eyes fastened on the spectacle of a young woman dancing herself to death as a sacrifice to the god of spring. You know how I used that dream, of course. Sometimes I hear melodies, but not often. The pictures in my dreams are all in color. That gypsy last night had brilliant blue eyes.” He looked at me as he said this, and I knew that the woman in his dream was my Anya.
Later in the day, writing the tango to which the Princess dances, he used the theme again, giving it to the violin. As soon as he had put it down on paper, he wanted me to play it.
Stravinsky listened with his eyes closed, his head tilted back. His face was blissful. When I had finished, he said straight to me in a matter-of-fact way, seeming to know that I would understand, “I dream about her quite often.”
I said, “Lucky fellow.”
He said, “Yes. This time she gave me music.”
But I decided not to be angry. He is so single-minded. Most men trade caresses with the women in their dreams and wake up wet. For him, they sing or perform on an instrument!
And besides, he forgot in his dream that Anna is tone-deaf. Poor thing, she would play a violin wretchedly.
RAMUZ
We had a little contretemps today. Stravinsky, who is drawn to big sound, has not used the violin much in the past in delicate solos or in what Federovsky speaks of as “the concertante role that our playlet requires,” inasmuch as the transactions with the Devil all have to do with the fiddle; so, along the way, Stravinsky has tended to ask for help and advice about the violin from Federovsky. As we work, he is constantly asking Pavel to play solo strains, or even brief phrases, as soon as he writes them down. Then he asks Pavel what he thinks. Are certain double stops and triple stops playable? Sometimes he asks Pavel to take a piece home and try it several times and come back the next day with suggestions.
Federovsky is wonderfully tactful in his comments. He keeps saying he is amazed by the way Stravinsky exploits contrasts of the instruments one with another in his score; by the fact that they are never blended in conventional terms with each other but serve to show each other off; and by the interplay of tempos and pitches and timbres which make such a small handful of instruments sound so rich and so orchestral. Then he will shyly suggest a very slight strengthening of the violin’s voice in a particular place, for the sake of the drama. Or a tiny quickening of tempo, just here. Or a more challenging jump in pitches, of a sort a violinist can easily negotiate, in this other place.
Stravinsky never takes Federovsky’s suggestions. Never. Not once has he done so. He shouts that Pavel has missed the point! That was not what he had in mind! How could Pavel be so deaf? Sometimes he is very sharp and rude.
Until this morning, Pavel has always accepted these rebuffs with a touching good grace—the mere performer yielding to the creator who knows what he is doing.
There is a background, of course, to what happened this morning to make that sweet control crack apart for a moment. Five of us—we three and Katya and Anna—sometimes lunch together and often have tea together. For three years I have seen what happens to Stravinsky whenever he is near a beautiful woman, and Anna is certainly beautiful. The dynamic personality dissolves into gelatin. Great Igor becomes a shy gnome. His eyelids droop, as if marvels hurt his eyes. He blushes. He speaks to the beautiful one in a tightened voice that sounds like a clarinet; to everyone else he trumpets. I am so used to all this that I assume Katya must be, too. Unfortunately, the contrast between poor sick Katya’s looks and Anna’s in recent weeks has grown more and more shocking as Katya’s health has deteriorated while Anna has bloomed in the soft Swiss air. Stravinsky has taken to smirking at Anna. It is all too clear that he has utter contempt for her mind, yet he cannot help having a visible glandular response to the glow of her skin, her slightly mischievous mouth, her eyes as deep and blue as the lake under the spring sun. His flirtation, in other words, looks utterly cynical unless you know, as I do, that it means nothing. Pavel may also have come to know this, but to a devoted husband, which he obviously is, such knowledge may not be of any real use.
This morning’s was a case in which Stravinsky had again asked Federovsky to take home a passage—this one in the crucial “Little Concert”—and come back with his reactions. He made what sounded to me like a sensible minor suggestion, and he played some notes to show Stravinsky what he meant.
Stravinsky said, “Nyet, Pavlochka, that doesn’t give me an erection.”
I had heard Stravinsky use this offhand expression several times before when something didn’t seem any good to him. This was apparently the first time Federovsky had heard it.
Pavel’s voice was like a series of pistol cracks as he asked, “And exactly what does give you an erection?”
“You know what! You know who!” Stravinsky shouted back, infuriated by his usually docile friend’s sudden show of spirit, and as always deadly accurate in the aim of a barb.
Federovsky went white. He stood up and seemed nine feet tall.
Then I saw Stravinsky collapse back in his chair, with his arms flopped over the wings, and he groaned. Then he said, “Pavlochka! Pavlochka! You are my oldest friend in the world!”
I believe that Federovsky knew perfectly well that this was a lie, because Stravinsky had often proclaimed that his dear Katya was his oldest friend on earth. The gaunt man sat down and quietly said, “You asked for a suggestion, and I made one.”
“And it was ridiculous,” Stravinsky said.
Federovsky was silent.
I love these Russian storms. They fly through like summer squalls, and the sky is—or seems—cloudless afterward.
FEDEROVSKY
In my discomfiture—for I was embarrassed that Ramuz had had to witness such vulgarity—I suddenly felt my nose itch, and I sneezed. Instead of offering me a Gesundheit, Stravinsky threw me a hostile look, rose, nearly knocking his piano stool over, and hurried out of the room.
“What is that about?” I asked Ramuz. “What is he so touchy about?”
“That is about germs,” Ramuz said.
Then he told me of Guima’s terror of infection—his fear of anything that can rob him of energy for his work, or, far worse, interrupt it altogether. He smokes too much, and in the spring when he was working on Petrouchka, he had told Ramuz, he came down with nicotine poisoning, and he was terrified that he wouldn’t be able to finish the ballet in the ten weeks before the Paris season was scheduled to start. After the scandal of the opening night of Sacre, he came down with typhoid fever, which left him weak and musically sterile for months. In the winter two years ago, when he and Ramuz were working on Renard, he developed a horrifyingly painful neuralgia in his rib cage, and Ramuz had to suffer through aeons of the maestro’s bad temper and atrocious rudeness before they could finish.
I had noticed all the many little silver pillboxes scattered around the house; I realized that he knew exactly what remedy each one held, and I had seen him dip into this one and that one now and then, as if in little ceremonies of exorcism.
“Katya tells me,” Ramuz said, “that he thinks all water, even bottled water like Évian, carries dysentery. So he uses wine to brush his teeth with.”
“While he is at it,” I said, “he could use a bit of it to rinse out his mind.”
RAMUZ
I was summoned to the phone at the laundry. As I picked up the receiver and turned the little crank on the wooden box of the telephone to let the operator know I was listening, a hush fell; all the bare-armed naiads struck their poses to listen to scraps of what I might say—tidbits to be rehashed at once in gossip and gusts of laughter such as I often heard on my way back up the hill.
Our “triad of greatnesses,” as Federovsky had dubbed the three of us, had finished our work of making, and we had begun to think about all that had to be done to get the piece on a stage. We had reserved the modest little Théâtre Municipal in Lausanne in mid-October for the first performance; then we would go on to Geneva, Winterthur, Zurich…and who knew where else? Casting was on Stravinsky’s mind now, and we got talking about the role of the Princess.
“You don’t seem to understand, Ramuz,” Stravinsky said. “Her three dances are the heart of the piece. How can you be so casual about this role? You baffle me.”
“Who said I was casual?” I felt like teasing him. “We could get one of the girls from that whorehouse the mole trappers took us to. Don’t you remember how royally that little one wiggled her hips?”
A swift wave of something like sighs flew around the laundry.
Stravinsky exploded. “Ramuz! Be serious!”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Stravinsky’s voice now became a murmur; I had to strain to hear him. “Do you think,” he said, barely above a whisper, “do you think we could teach Anya to dance?”
“Anna Federovskaya?” I shouted.
“Sh-h-h!” he said, as if afraid I could be overheard even on his end. Was Katya in the next room? Again, a murmur: “I have thought of her as the Princess all along.”
“Have you lost your mind, Stravinsky? This is a musical performance. That woman is anti-music. She is to music what a dark cloud is to the sun.”
Now the voice was huffy. “Have you a better idea?”
“You should be ashamed. It’s your wife, not Federovsky’s, who is ill and needs to be roused from her lethargy by beautiful music.”
“Is that your better idea? Katya!” The scorn in Stravinsky’s voice was strident and alarming.
“In the name of friendship, I will forgive you that shocking sarcasm. Your shame in having dreams of Anna caused it….Don’t apologize to me,” I said, as if he had been trying to do so. “Apologize to Katya.” I paused again, but all I heard was a kind of growl—perhaps he was clearing that foul cruelty from his throat. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do have a better idea: Natasha Panayev. She’s in Geneva, you know. You wouldn’t have to teach her to dance like a Princess.” For she had been a ballerina at St. Petersburg, occasionally prima; she was now in exile here in Switzerland with her husband, Pyotr, who had been an assistant regisseur of the Imperial Ballet. “She’s still quite lovely,” I said. “You wouldn’t have to coach her to look like a Princess, either. I remember your telling me yourself that whenever the black swan raised his wings near her, she would look as if she’d faint from the underarm odor, but then she would raise her chin and dance on—isn’t that exactly the demeanor of a Princess? What’s more,” I went on, “Pyotr could be our director—and wouldn’t be a bad Devil, come to think of it.”
There was a long silence. Then: “We will go to Geneva tomorrow.”
FEDEROVSKY
Stravinsky gave a jerk on the bellpull at the front door. An ugly little woman, evidently the Panayevs’ housekeeper, opened it. Her mouth gaped, and she involuntarily crossed herself, as if she had suddenly seen three awful Magi, or perhaps even a hellish parody of the Holy Trinity. We must in truth have made an odd sight: little Stravinsky, looking literally half my size because I was standing on the first step of the entranceway while he was still at ground level, wearing his monocle and spats and with a bizarre array of percussion instruments hanging from his belt all round; Ramuz in his Alpinist’s cap with a pheasant feather cocked out from it, carrying sheaves of sheet music and text; and I, lugging my big rectangular violin case and no doubt appearing sour as a ghoul, for on the train trip to Geneva the maestro had been saying over and over what a shame it is that my Anna is tone-deaf; had it not been for that, she would have been our Princess. Oddly, he seemed to be saying that to annoy Ramuz, not me. How boring he can be!
We were shown in, and Madame Panayev came floating across the floor with a dancer’s gliding steps. I realized at once that Anna would indeed have made a preferable Princess. I saw Stravinsky openly shudder as he looked at her. This woman gave a picture of an organization of no longer young muscles under exquisite control in every movement, a sinewy product, alas, of years of rigorous discipline. The long-stemmed neck was a set of poised cables; the cheeks and jaw worked in bunches as she spoke; strong arms, raised to coif, had drawn the black hair severely back into a bun at the rear. She was elegant, sure enough, and even regal; Stravinsky had been right about the proudly lifted chin. But could she languish, pale and sweetly enchanted, in need of Antonietta to rouse her from her couch?
Her husband came into the room after her. He was suave, dapper, silky, with black eyebrows that swooped out and up and away from the crest of his nose. Yes, a goodly Devil.
Soon the room reverberated with Stravinsky’s ebullient energy. He had Ramuz tell the story of our Tale, but he could not resist interrupting along the way to point out the charms of it all. Then, rearranging the furniture in the room so as to set up his toys of percussion within reach of the piano stool, he started us off on a skimpy run-through, with Ramuz explaining at each stage what was happening. I played the violin part and, where I could, that of the clarinet. As Stravinsky pounded the piano and banged at the drumlets, he used his voice to tootle and bumble the sounds of the trumpet and trombone and bassoon as best he could. I saw that the Panayevs looked more and more perplexed; then, dismayed; then, positively outraged. Until…until we came to the three dances, and Antonietta began to sing the tango. At that Madame Panayev floated up from her chair, almost as if from a trance on a sickbed, and, nearly but not quite dancing, she began to sway with the waves of sound from my—or the soldier’s—magical violin, subtly, smoothly, her arms becoming weightless, her torso fluent and free, and as the tango melted into waltz time and the waltz drifted into ragtime, I saw her transform herself, clothed in those understated movements, those pulsations of pleasure, into a soft, awakening, ethereal, and, finally, wildly erotic princess. Stravinsky saw this, too, and as we played on he shouted, “Brava! Brava! Brava!”
