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