Letter to a Cousin in Moscow

By Vera Stravinsky

Dear Valodya,
In answer to your request for a description of Igor’s home life, I had best begin with a few words about the house. It is small and low-ceilinged, as though specially designed for Igor, and as it has but one bedroom it should really be called a cottage or dacha. Twenty years ago we enjoyed a panorama of Hollywood from its front terrace but the view is now blocked by newer houses and taller trees:

Visitors say that it is a gay house, and I think it is bright and cozy, though terribly crammed. We have several thousand books, ranging from the standard literary classics to tomes, new and old, on hundreds of subjects. The library spreads to every room and is divided both by language—English, Russian, French, German—and category. Art books form the largest category, and I would guess that dictionaries come second and books of poetry third. We also have an extensive Shakespeare section, a rare run of old Baedekers, a good philosophy shelf. Igor is a steady reader, and. Though he is apt to pursue one subject for a long time, his reading is extremely catholic. He is currently engrossed in the journals of Ibn Battuta for our forthcoming trip to Persia—but since his Russian reawakening last fall he has been reading Pushkin again, as well as Blok and other younger Russian poets. (I think I told you in my last letter that he has talked recently about orchestrating Moussorgsky’s “Sans Solei!,” which, of course is another result of his visit.)

The house also bulges with art. One sees first the doors covered with posters announcing performances of “Oedipus” and “Persephone” at the Warsaw Opera. And every table is crowded with objets: glass obelisks and paperweights from Venice; pre-Columbian idols; santos from New Mexico· Russian cups, spoons, samovars; Inca and Coptic textiles (Igor adores Coptic art); globes, early-American antiques (especially a pair of 18th-century wooden ducks); cases of preserved entomological specimens (horrible things, but they fascinate Igor); pieces of coral, lapis lazuli, driftwood. The walls are covered with paintings, old maps, old cartoons (especially one of Rossini lighting a giant firecracker), photographs of friends and of people Igor admires, like Lincoln, and, in our bedroom and in Igor’s studio, a sizable number of icons. Our pictures are all contemporary, except for a Turrner pastel, an ink drawing by Watteau and another by Tiepolo, and a curious Monsu Desiderio painted on marble, and nearly everything we have was a gift of the artist. This includes a dozen Picassos, among which is the famous full-face drawing of Igor, several Giacomettis, many Bermans, charming small things by Miro, Kandinsky, Klee, and so on. In fact, we only purchase pictures by young painters whose work we like and whom we wish to encourage. This is how we have acquired the pictures by Sartoris, Bacci, Bill Congdon, Jimmy Leong, Francis Bott. But for a complete catalogue I would have to mention my own paintings of which there are more than a score about the house. ‘

Igor’s day is highly routined. It begins with a headache or some other malaise dispelled or forgotten in the shower. (His bathroom incidentally, looks like the prescription department in a pharmacy. There are hundreds of containers, counteragents for every ill, all neatly labeled in Russian by Igor himself.) Breakfast coincides with the arrival of the post, and by this time I try to be out of the house. The humors of the day are determined by the contents of the mail, which is generally large enough—packages of books music, letters—to fill a laundry basket. The bulk of the letters are from autograph hunters of the sort, “Dear Sir, I already have Schweitzer and Mitch Miller, and would you please” . . . . ” These are destined for a special dining-room wastebasket. My husband feels compelled to answer letters immediately and file them away, and I should add that his rooms contain as many filing cabinets as the record offices of a small city; he has kept every program and article concerning his music since 1906. This mail trauma leaves him only one or two hours of composing time before lunch, but he sets aside another three hours in late afternoon, and three more at night.

I can tell you nothing about what happens during his composition, of course, and little enough, I fear, about the habits that govern those hours. Igor is now completing a cantata, “Abraham and Isaac,” for baritone solo and orchestra, the Biblical text sung in Hebrew. He claims that his musical enzymes’ have been charged by his discovery of certain musical potentialities of that language, and they must be highly charged, judging by the ardor with which he has worked these past weeks. He begins each day by playing over—testing, he calls it—the composition of the previous day. He complains of his slow pace, but each new opus seems to be written with the same celerity that has marked his production all his life.

He works at a small upright piano muted or dampened with felt. Nevertheless, and though the room is soundproofed and the door always tightly dosed, little noises like mice on the keyboard penetrate to the next room. He has fixed a plywood drawing board above the keyboard and clipped to it quarto-size strips of manila paper. This is used for the pencil-sketch manuscript. Several smaller papers are thumbtacked around this central work sheet. They are the charts of serial orders, calculations of permutations, and transposition tables—“Here the 12th note becomes the second note” . . .” etc.—but probably you understand as little of all that as I do. To the side of the piano is a kind of surgeon’s instrument table, with tools such as colored pencils, gums, an electric pencil sharpener that sounds unpleasantly like a lawnmower, the stylus with which Igor draws the staves and of which he is the patented inventor.

Igor’s longest uninterrupted spell of actual composing is about two hours. There are regular, established interruptions, of course, such as the trips to the doctor and the late-afternoon visits of André Morion, Igor’s son-in-law and secretary for extra-musical matters. Another regular visitor is Robert Craft, who comes to help my husband with musical business and, incidentally—though not entirely incidentally—to eat with us. Our meals are prepared sometimes by myself and sometimes by Eugenia Petrovna, whose last name, Mrs. Gate, is used according to whether we are being Russians or Americans. They are often Russian—caviar blini, borscht, which Igor eats with the same small silver ladle he used as a child, stroganoff, kasha, kissel—but ordinarily French.

Igor finds repose from his work by playing solitaire, by walking in the back patio, by talking to our Russian gardeners or to Celeste, our pusspartout cat, or by listening to recordings (though never of his own music). Afternoon tea is another relaxation. It comes between siesta time and composing time and is served Russian style in a glass, laced with, or preceded by, two tumblers of liquids more potent than tea.

We do not have much social life in Hollywood, but this was not always so. Thomas Mann wrote in his companion book to “Dr. Faustus” that Hollywood during the war was a more cosmopolitan and intellectually exciting city than Paris or Munich had ever been, and improbable as that sounds now, I think it was true. The ferment of musicians, writers, scientists, artists, actors, philosophers and phonies did exist, and we often attended the lectures, exhibitions, concerts, performances, personal gatherings of these people ourselves. To name only one event, I remember the brilliant “Galilee” collaboration of Brecht, Eister, Charles Laughton, and the inconceivably remote prospects of such a performance today. During the political specters of the postwar years, culture decamped, like Cambyses’ army in the desert—culture as we knew it, I should add, for Hollywood goes on growing unmindful of the phase I am trying to distinguish.

But I must stop rambling now. Please remember me to Caterina. Igor joins in sending love. VERA

Igor Stravinsky, who celebrated his 80th birthday last June, was voted Musician of the Year in MUSICAL AMERICA’s annual poll of United States music critics and editors. Above is a recent letter from his wife, Vera, to a cousin in Russia. The letter gives a warm and friendly picture of the composer’s home and how he works. On pages 12 and 13 is a picture story portraying some important moments in the composer’s long and rich professional life.