Stravinsky and fascism (corrected!)
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1124385036....@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Don't take Ian's blanket condemnation of Stravinsky at face value.
This is not a blanket condemnation of Stravinsky, rather a suggestion we
might think about these things when investigating anti-subjective tendencies
in some forms of early modernism.
> Better investigate for yourself before you silence Stravinsky by
> stamping the word fascist on his forehead. People are imperfect and
> multi-faceted, and their views change over time.
I see little reason to doubt that Stravinsky's world view was profoundly
authoritarian and anti-democratic in many ways. Indeed that wasn't all there
was to him and his view, but it is a current that runs through much of his
life and thought.
> Many people in Europe were taken in at first by Mussolini's fascist
> party including all of the vanguard Italian painters because Europeans
> had experienced chaos and the horrors of the bloodiest war in European
> history first hand: the fascists seemed to offer a shiny new modern
> style of law and order along with a perenially seductive "national
> pride."
This is the whole basis upon which fascist Europe and mass genocide were
made possible. I think that to be taken in by this does suggest lack of
judgement, don't you?
> Italian fascism seemed to be an emanation of the new machine
> age that was going to liberate man from poverty, hunger, and hard
> labor. A "White Russian," Stravinsky himself had a lifelong fear of
> anarchy in part because of terrorist bombings by Russian anarchists
> before the Russian revolution.
That almost sounds like an advocacy of fascism as the alternative to
'anarchy' - quite a common view amongst fascist supporters.
> The only evidence we have of Stravinsky's "fascism" is an
> enthusiastic remark he made about Mussolini in the early 30's.
The exact quote was this:
'I don't believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I. To me, he is
the *one man who counts* nowadays in the whole world. I have travelled a
great deal: I know many exalted personages, and my artist's mind does not
shrink from political and social issues. Well, after having seen so many
events and so many more or less representative men, I have an overpowering
urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the saviour of Italy and - let us
hope - Europe.'
and afterwards, in conversation with the critic Alberto Gasco:
'the mental image I had formed of this formidable man was exactly right. The
conversation I had with him has made an indelible impression on me. This
pilgrimage to Rome will remain one of the happiest events of my life.'
(A. Gasco, 'Da Cimarosa a Stravinsky', Rome: De Santis, 1939, p. 452, cited
in Harvey Sachs - 'Music in Fascist Italy', New York: Norton, 1987, p 168)
And after a meeting with Mussolini:
'Unless my ears deceive me, the voice of Rome is the voice of Il Duce. I
told him that I felt like a fascist myself. Today, fascists are everywhere
in Europe... In spite of being extremely busy, Mussolini did me the great
honour of conversing with me for three-quarters of an hour. We talked about
music, art and politics.'
(Il Piccolo, 27th May 1935, cited in Sachs, op cit, p, 168)
In a letter to Yakov Lvovich Lvov, December 5, 1935:
'It is a great pity that I cannot accept the kind invitation of the Ministry
of Propaganda for the performance of 'Oedipus' set for March 15', then he
expresses sympathy for 'the difficult position that Italy, glorious and
unique, now rejuvenated and thirsting for life, has been put in by worldwide
obscurantism..'
Note also the following which occurred in the year 1926:
'..however vague Stravinsky's information on Mussolini at that precise
moment, he was soon to learn what the Fascists were made of when he heard
from Charles-Albert Cingria how his brother, Alexandre, had been
deliberately jostled in a Milan art gallery, arrested as a pick-pocket, then
held in jail on the grounds that the blade of his pocket knife exceeded the
permitted length. The arrest was an error. Alexandre had been mistaken for
Charles-Albert, who had made no secret of his antifascist views, and who was
himself arrested in Rome later that same year and imprisoned for two months
without trail. But it would have been hard for the Stravinsky of 1935, the
time of the autobiography, to report such matters objectively, since by then
he had been received by Mussolini and had spoken admiringly about him to the
Roman press.'
(Stephen Walsh - 'Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, Russia and France
1882-1934 (Pimlico: London, 2000), p 430)
'But at the start of 1933 the outlook was darkening rapidly. The
catastrophic situation in Germany came into menacing focus in Berlin at the
end of January, with Hindenburg's appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor
of the Reich. By a supreme irony, Stravinsky was in Wiesbaden on that day,
discussing a new stage work with Andre Gide and lunching with Rosbaud, who
was booking him to conduct 'Oedipus Rex' and the Symphony of Psalms in
Frankfurt that spring. Within weeks the invitation had been withdrawn, as
the Nazis bore down on modern art and foreign performers. Rosbaud's own
position in Frankfurt became increasingly precarious, and was, as we saw,
certainly not proof against the indiscreet booking of suspect foreign
artists. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had gone from Wiesbaden to Munich, where he
gave a recital with Dushkin in the Odeon on a February. A day or two later,
he and Vera were dining with a friend who had helped set up the Munich
concert, the photographer Eric Schaal, when three Nazi officials came into
the restaurant and began to direct loud anti-Semitic remarks at them. They
left hurriedly, but the men followed them into the street and launched a
vicious attack on Schaal, punching and kicking him, until Igor and Vera
somehow managed to bundle him into a taxi and get him away. From
Stravinsky's point of view, not the least disturbing aspect of the incident
was that the thugs seemed to identify him, too, as a Jew (while Schaal, by
Stravinsky's own account, was attacked because he protested). Luckily
Dushkin, who was Jewish both in appearance and in fact, was not with them
that evening and only heard all about it later from Schaal. The violinist
had
hastened back to Paris to be with his adoptive father, Blair Fairchild, who
was mortally ill with tuberculosis and died at his home in Fontainebleau
less than three months later.
Whether or not he was Jewish, the outlook in Nazi Germany for a musician of
such prominent modernist tendencies as Stravinsky's was bleak indeed. Willy
Strecker reported on the atmosphere two months after Hitler's accession. The
mood, he said, was excitable, and already a "Kultur Kampfbund" (Fighting
Front for Culture) had been formed "with the aim of promoting German art and
suppressing Jewish and Bolshevik art." There were lists of undesirables, and
Stravinsky's name was on the list of Jews. So Strecker asked him to send a
statement of his ancestry, to be kept on file against any future need for
"authentic, reliable proof." Stravinsky's reply is disagreeable evidence of
his willingness to acquiesce in the distinctions which made it necessary; it
provided a detailed genealogy, bristling with particles of nobility (*de*
Stravinsky, *de* Kholodovsky, *de* Nosenko), and calling down anathema on
any political and intellectual system of which the Nazis might disapprove:
"all communism, all Marxisn, the execrable Soviet monster, but every kind of
liberalism, democratism, atheism, etc." "I take this opportunity," he
concluded, apparently without irony, "to wish you and all yours a good and
Happy Easter."
(ibid., pp. 518-519)
'Stravinsky knew something about the dark side of fascism, even though
Mussolini had not yet embarked on the international adventures (startng with
Ethiopia in 1935) which revealed him starkly as a ruthless mass murderer and
dangerous political maneuverer. Over the Toscanini incident in 1926 the
composer may reasonably have felt that the issue of the "Giovinezza" was at
bottom no more than a battle of political will, rather than the moral
crusade it was later painted. But he also knew about Charles-Albert
Cingria's summary arrest and incarceration in the Regina Coeli Prison in
Rome in October of that same year on a trumped-up charge of subversion, and
he knew how badly Cingria, one of his closest friends, had been treated and
how ill served by the Italian legal system.
But Stravinsky came to his thirties politics no longer from the point of
view of social or moral equity, and certainly not from any consideration of
the normal base poltiical factores such as economics or the balance of
power. His motives were partly atavistic, party aesthetic, partly - as we
have seen - pure self-preservation. In the days when leftism had meant
siding with the intelligentsia against the decaying tyranny of the Romanovs,
he, like most of his class, had longed for democracy and freedom. But now
that leftism meant the Bolsheviks, and democracy apparently equalled
unstable world markets and rigid protectionism, he wanted none of them. In
their place he looked for order and stability, and if they could be found in
a country which still welcomed him and his music and which also happened to
be the historical focus of European art and culture, then that country could
be sure of his favor. So it was Fascist Italy, with its imagined cult of
efficiency and its apparent open-door treatment of art, including modern
art, that gave Stravinsky the comfortable feeling of ordered progress which
was, in a sense, his own spiritual world, bearing in mind that the return to
order in Maritain and Cocteau, and in his own work of the early twenties,
had been in social political terms precisely a reactionary movement,
exalting the worker, but only as long as he knew his place, kept to the
rules,
and avoided a disruptive individualism. Nazi Germany, by contrast, was not
at all a comfortable place for a Russian musician like Stravinsky to
contemplate. It was protectionist and turbulent; in principle it was hostile
to work such as his, even if in practice it sometimes admitted it; and,
perhaps worst of all, it had abandoned him as a working musician, as a
performer. Stravinsky scarcely turned against Germany in or immediately
after 1933. He seems to have been unconcerned at the Nazis' brutalization of
daily life, as he had experienced it in Munich (an incident he apparently
did not mention to Strecker), and he was hardly likely to take arms against
their anti-Semitism. But he could not be at ease with them so long as they
behaved equivocally towards him and his work.'
(ibid, pp.521-522)
(the last sentence tells us a lot about Stravinsky's priorities).
Note also the following, from the 1950s:
Robert Craft: Do you recall the circumstances in which you performed
Debussy's 'Nuages' and 'Fetes' in Rome?
Igor Stravinsky: That was on 23 February 1933. The host organization asked
me to play 'something French', which, of course, could only mean Debussy.
What I remember most clearly about the visit was that Mussolini sent ofr me
and that I had to go to him. I was taken to his office in the Palazzo
Venezia, a long hall with a single large desk flanked by ugly modern lamps.
A square-built, bald man stood in attendance. As I approached, Mussolini
looked up and said, 'Bonjour, Stravinsky, aswye-ez vous [*asseyez-vous*]' -
the words of his French were correct, but the accent was Italian. He was
wearing a dark business suit. We chatted briefly about music, and he said
that he played the violin. He was quiet and sober, but not very polite. His
last remark was: 'You will come and see me the next time you are in Rome,
*and I will receive you*.' Afterwards I remembered that he had cruel eyes.
In fact, I avoided Rome again for that very reason - until 1936. In that
year I was rehearsing at the Santa Cecilia when Count Ciano appeared and
invited me to visit his father-in-law. I remember talking to Ciano about an
exhibition of Italian masterpieces then in Paris, and expressing concern for
their safety during travels abroad. Ciano grunted at this and said, 'Oh, we
have kilometers of such things.' Mussolini was surrounded by absurd grandeur
this time. He was in uniform, and a path of military presonages came and
went the whole time. He was gayer and bouncier than on my first visit, and
his gestures were even more ridiculously theatrical. He had read, and
mumbled something about, my autobiography. He promised to come to my
concert, too, but mercifully did not.
(Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft - 'Memories and Commentaries (one-volume
edition) (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), pp. 184-185)
A few rather mocking comments about Mussolini here, but no mention of his
previous admiration, let alone an attempt to recant for it.
Craft also comments in a footnote to the first volume of the selected
correspondence (1982) that 'the full story of Stravinsky and fascist Italy
has yet to be written'. Some more research has of course been done into this
subject since that volume appeared.
> Later
> Stravinsky fled Europe when he saw first hand what was happening in
> Germany. He even experienced a terrifying moment in a German café
> when Nazi thugs who came in to vandalize the place mistook him for a
> Jew.
See above. Anyhow, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, while allied, were not
identical in nature, not least in an aesthetic sense (which would have been
the thing that mattered to Stravinsky). By and large, the aesthetics of Nazi
Germany were hostile to the sort of modernism that Stravinsky espoused,
unlike Fascist Italy, with its cults of futurism and the like. Goebbels was
an exception in Nazi Germany - his own thinking was perhaps closer to that
of Mussolini - seeing as he did the possibilities of modernist techniques
for communicating a primal message (which after all is very fundamental to
Stravinsky as well). But Hitler and most of the other leading Nazis were
sentimental romantics in an aesthetic sense, unlike the cold, calculating
Goebbels (see Frederic Spott - 'Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics' for a
fascinating treatment of this subject).
> With its brutal programmatic depiction of goose-stepping
> soldiers, the Symphony in Three Movements, written in the United States
> in the mid-40's, was a kind of anti-fascist and anti-war manifesto,
> and anti-war not in the sense of a general philosophical pacifism but
> in the sense of "opposed to fascist-style war mongering."
What is the source of this last statement? Did Stravinsky comment at all on
his earlier support for Mussolini in this context? Or was he simply seeking
to say the right things for his American hosts to hear?
I would like to see a clear repudiation of Stravinsky's earlier feelings
towards Mussolini, if such a thing exists.
Ian
Paul Ilechko
> Posted this before proofing it - here's a rather better-looking version.
Which recording are we discussing here?
Matthew B. Tepper
the following letters to be typed in news:3mkbgvF...@individual.net:
> Ian Pace wrote:
>
>> Posted this before proofing it - here's a rather better-looking version.
>
> Which recording are we discussing here?
The one on the "let's see just how far off-topic we can get" label.
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
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Steven Sullivan
(What Would Taruskin Say?)
--
-S
"God is an asshole!" -- Ruth Fisher, 'Six Feet Under'
Ian Pace
"Steven Sullivan" <ssu...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:de5f37$7no$3...@reader2.panix.com...
> WWTS?
>
> (What Would Taruskin Say?)
>
big book, but not read it in great detail), but from what I know, he's much
harsher on Stravinsky for his fascist tendencies and alleged anti-semitism
than I would be. But Taruskin has a particular anti-modernist and also
Zionist agenda which makes me sceptical of much of what he says.
Ian