The fall of the Romanov dynasty was met with optimism on both Stravinsky’s and Ramuz’s part. Walking on Rue du Petit-Chêne in the heart of Lausanne soon after the provisional government took over, both men expressed their hopes that this would be the birth of a new Russia which would wake “from her winter sleep and would at long last assert her native genius.” Stravinsky wrote of a return to
the holy Russia of the Orthodox, a Russia stripped of its parasitic vegetation; its bureaucracy from Germany, a certain strain of English liberalism much in fashion with the nobility, its scientism (alas!), its “intellectuals,” their inane and bookish faith in progress; - the Russia of before Peter the Great and before Europeanism…a peasant, but above all a Christian, Russia, and truly the only Christian land in Europe, the one which laughs and cries (laughs and cries both at once without really knowing which is which) in Les Noces, the one we see awaken to herself confusedly, and magnificently full of impurities, in The Rite of Spring.
Ramuz wrote an entire long form essay called The Great Spring celebrating the Revolution as the arrival of true collectivity in the most aspirational of tones: “Not the song of a single person, but the song of all together. Not the poet-individual but the poet-nation. Not a poetry of words alone, but a poetry of all existence.” One presumes that in this new world, Stravinsky’s musical output, particularly his most recent works based on Russian folk tales, would be a key element of the artistic renewal that both men idealized.
One hundred forty miles away in Zurich, Lenin was plotting his return to Russia. Adolph Erich Senn notes that “[h]e considered a number of alternatives for returning: attempting to fly over Germany, using another émigré’s papers, and even travelling as a deaf and dumb Swedish sailor. (He dropped the last idea when Krupskaya warned him that he might fall asleep, dream of Mensheviks, and give himself away by screaming insults.)” It turned out to be much less interesting than that as he and his wife, along with thirty-two other Russians, took a sealed train through Germany bound for Helsinki Station in Russia. By the time Lenin reached the recently renamed Petrograd, there was another contestant in the Great War: The United States of America.
You wouldn’t know about any of this from the datebook of Igor Stravinsky, though. In March he received a telegram from Diaghilev: “Would you like to conduct charity concerts of Firebird and Fireworks in Rome, Naples, Milan from April 9 to 26? Italian ambassador in Bern would facilitate your passage.” On 12 April 1917, Stravinsky conducted the two works at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Like all Ballet Russes concerts, the Russian anthem was played at the outset. Given the events of the previous month, however, the Tsarist anthem no longer seemed appropriate. Diaghilev suggested that the Song of the Volga Boatmen be used instead.
There was but one problem: Song of the Volga Boatmen had never been arranged for orchestra. Strong coffee, a piano, and a spacious apartment were needed. Thankfully, just such an apartment was made available. On a prior Italian sojourn, Diaghilev had introduced Stravinsky to a man named Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson who, after being bequeathed title and property by his uncle, became the 14th Baron Berners and was thenceforth known as Lord Berners. The night before the concert Stravinsky was holed up in Lord Berners’ apartment with Ansermet creating an orchestral version of the song note by note, chord by chord.
Lord Berners was a composer, a painter, a novelist, and a pure wit, one of those real-life characters whose lives read like fiction, and not the only one in our story. He was friends with Salvador Dali, H.G. Wells, and Stravinsky. He kept a clavichord, a small practice piano, under the front seat of his Rolls Royce. The British composer William Walton dedicated his masterpiece Belshazzar’s Feast to him. He took a lover 28 years his junior named Robert Vernon Heber-Percy who was better known as “The Mad Boy” and is referred to by the Faringdon community website as “an English eccentric in the grand tradition.” He drove around his estate in a pig’s head mask. He had a sign in his house that said “Mangling Done Here.” He dyed the pigeons at his estate, Faringdon House, bright colors so they looked like gems as they flew. He had the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman’s horse over for tea. He wrote his own epitaph, which just about sums the man up in six lines.
Here lies Lord Berners
One of the learners
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning
But, Praise the Lord
He seldom was bored
Stravinsky’s trip to Italy also included his first introduction to the newest set and costume designer in the Ballet Russes, Pablo Picasso. Jean Cocteau had wanted to introduce the two men for months, writing to Stravinsky on 11 August 1916: “Picasso, tender mandolinist and fierce picador: you would like him!” It was Parade, a ballet by Erik Satie with a scenario written by Cocteau himself, that served as Picasso’s debut with the company. Stravinsky tagged along with the group as they prepared for the premiere performance in Paris the following month. The two titans hit it off immediately and became friends, taking in the sights and sounds of Naples together. Stravinsky’s reflections on the Naples experience makes reference to the “famous aquarium” and the “old Neapolitan water colors” that they encountered in “all the little shops and dealers’ establishments in the course of our frequent expeditions.” Picasso’s take on the beauty of Naples was a little more singularly focused. “Les demoiselles ont quatre bras,” which is to say, “The women have four arms.” Let us not get it twisted for a second, though. Stravinsky had his own, shall we say, entanglements with the ladies. It’s fair to say he wasn’t on Picasso’s level when it comes to recklessly adoring women, which is not surprising given that basically everyone but Wilt Chamberlain and maybe Gene Simmons is not on Picasso’s level in that department. To be crystal clear, as I am writing this in 2021…this is not a compliment.
Picasso showed his affection for his new friend by drawing the first of what would eventually be three portraits of Stravinsky. What a lovely gift! Now to carefully roll it up and place it in some luggage for the return trip home. When Stravinsky got to Chiasso, on the Swiss Border, he was detained at a military checkpoint and, upon inspection of his effects, Picasso’s portrait was found. Stravinsky was interrogated: “They asked me what it represented, and when I told them that it was my portrait, drawn by a distinguished artist, they utterly refused to believe me. ‘It is not a portrait, but a plan,’ they said. ‘Yes, the plan of my face, but of nothing else,’ I replied.” Stravinsky’s entreaties were unsuccessful, and he was not allowed passage with his portrait. I once had to play my French horn in an airport to prove it wasn’t something nefarious. In fairness to whatever the precursor to the Transportation Security Administration was, I was carrying it in a duffel bag. At any rate, Lord Berners came to the rescue, arranging for the portrait to be sent to Stravinsky’s home in a diplomatic pouch from Paris.
Stravinsky set about displaying his new portrait at home and the Ballet Russes went on to Paris for the new season. Parade’s premiere was something of a redux of the Rite of Spring’s, with controversy erupting over the music, the sets, and the costumes. While the aftermath of the Rite’s premiere soon saw Stravinsky justly lauded for his masterpiece, the aftermath of Parade’s premiere ended with Satie in jail.
The critic Jean Poueigh had approached Satie after the premiere to compliment him on the work. When it came time to actually write a review, however, Poueigh, writing under a pseudonym, called it a “ballet that outrages French taste” and that Satie showed a lack of musicality and competence. Poueigh had gotten his claws in Stravinsky’s music in 1914 with a similarly snarky take about the Three Japanese Poems. “As a rule fresh, dreamy, lively, or disturbing, these timbres only served in M. Igor Stravinsky’s songs to produce noise. Well, after all, that’s a result.” Satie responded to this hypocritical besmirchment with the 1917 equivalent of Twitter flaming, sending Poueigh a series of postcards that included scathing responses laced with pithy insults. You’re thinking that a French composer from a hundred years ago, the man who wrote the beautiful Gymnopedies no less, was using sophisticated language, clever wordplay, and devastating wit to accomplish this. You are incorrect.
Among other delightful passages, Satie addressed Poueigh as “Monsieur Fuckface…famous gourd and composer for nitwits” and referred to him as “an asshole – and an unmusical asshole at that.” Poueigh did the reasonable and unfortunately not as entertaining thing and sued Satie for libel. Satie’s character witnesses included Cocteau and the Cubist master Juan Gris, but their persuasions were ultimately unable to overcome the fact that a grown man had sent literal postcards containing scandalous invective to another grown man through the post office. Satie was jailed for a week and ordered to pay a fine and damages to Poueigh. But where would Satie find eleven hundred francs? The Princesse de Polignac, of course. Satie had been commissioned to compose Socrate, a setting of dialogues from Plato, in October 1916. Satie’s imbroglio with Poueigh seems to have been included in the price of doing business for the Princesse. Satie was released from jail under the condition that he display good conduct and receive no prison sentences for five years. As it turns out, Satie refused to pay Poueigh the damages and asked the Princesse if he could simply keep the money to use for living expenses. Apparently, she agreed.
While Satie spent the bulk of 1917 embroiled in judicial mayhem, Stravinsky spent much of the year working on the piece that would have the longest gestation period of his entire career, a description-defying piece called Swadebka in Russian and Les Noces in French. The technical translation for the Russian term is “little wedding,” but in English it’s simply referred to as The Wedding. It’s not an opera, it’s not a ballet, it’s not exactly a cantata, it’s just a four-scene depiction of a Russian peasant wedding that bears the almost impossibly generic subtitle “Russian dance scenes with song and music.”
Stravinsky began work on The Wedding all the way back in 1914. Stravinsky and Cocteau had attended a Jewish wedding in Leysin, about 15 miles southeast of Lake Geneva, an incident ascribed meaning in multiple sources even though Stravinsky himself claims that the idea for The Wedding first came to him in 1912 while he was at work on the Rite of Spring and he did not begin composing The Wedding until six months after the Leysin wedding when he and his family had moved to Clarens in the autumn of 1914. What’s up, historians? Can’t a couple guys just check out a Jewish wedding for its own sake?
Stravinsky carried on with the composition through the family’s stay at Château d’Oex that winter, in spite of some early logistical obstacles.
My family and I were quartered in a hotel, in which it was impossible for me to compose. I was anxious, therefore, to find a piano in some place I could work in peace. I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me. A music dealer of whom I made my first enquiries provided me with a sort of lumber room, full of empty Chocolat Suchard packing cases which opened on to a chicken run. It contained a little upright piano, quite new and out of tune. The cold in this room, which was devoid of any heating apparatus, was so acute that the piano strings had succumbed to it. For two days I tried to work there in overcoat, fur cap, and snow boots, with a rug over my knees. But I could not go on like that.
He eventually found himself a room “in a house belonging to lower-middle class people who were out all day,” had a piano installed, and carried on with his work.
To be filed under “Geniuses: they’re not like you and me…” Sometime in January 1915, Stravinsky had to return to the family’s residence in Clarens to discuss his responsibilities as tenant for repairs to the property. On the train from Château d’Oex to Montreux, Stravinsky heard two drunken Vaudois men belting out “an extraordinary syncopated song” which he wrote down and used in the last scene of The Wedding. As the work continued to take shape, Diaghilev came to Switzerland for a visit in March. “I played him the first two tableaux of Les Noces. He was so moved, and his enthusiasm seemed so genuine and touching, that I could not but dedicate the work to him.” Soon thereafter began the first of the many delays in bringing The Wedding to completion, in this case the shifting of resources to work on Renard. What progress was made on The Wedding took place in the proverbial background, and we find ourselves once again in 1917 before the piece moves back to the front of the line.
Stravinsky completed what is known in composer-speak as the short score, a reduction, the distillation of the music into a small number of staves or sections that generally doesn’t have any instrumentation, on 11 October 1917. The preceding months were spent moving to a new house in Morges and getting his studio in a position suitable for composing. This studio, accessed by a semi-hidden wooden staircase, was in the attic, which Stravinsky filled with a piano and all manner of percussion instruments. Stephen Walsh describes the logistics of a move for the Stravinskys, who changed residences with a frequency that bordered on suspicion-arousing, as something out of Wes Anderson.
[T]he Stravinskys had a way of transporting their environment with them, transforming their often no doubt somewhat dingy, run-down pension apartments into fragments of bourgeois Russia, with hangings and drapes, prints, ornaments, clocks, family photographs, and even small items of furniture, to say nothing of household equipment and, above all, the paraphernalia of the composer’s trade – the pens, pencils, and rubbers, the music paper, the rastra he used to draw his own stave lines, the sketchbooks, and of course the piano.”
Ramuz writes of Stravinsky’s afternoons spent composing in the attic, the sounds emanating down to the square below where ladies would be sitting on a bench knitting, expressions of bemusement on their faces as they offered the delightfully salient analysis of what they heard: “C’est le monsieur russe!” The work of Ramuz translating The Wedding into French was happening concurrently with Stravinsky’s finishing the composition of the music, a short entry in Ramuz’s Journal dated 4 June 1917 stating: “The Wedding, and the good weather lasts. Also weddings of air, earth, and sun. We make hay: rejoicing.”
Ramuz’s own work was in something of a holding pattern. In a letter to Stravinsky on 26 July 1917, Ramuz tells the composer, “I am happy to know that you are working; so am I. Specifically, I am undoing everything I did in order to do it again, but all in good humor and quite peacefully.” He had begun work on The Curing of Illnesses (La guérison des maladies in French) in 1915, finishing the draft in early 1916. By the end of February, he wrote in his Journal that “I reread La guérison, I indicate some corrections, but above all, I think of the whole.” Less than a month later…square one: “I think I'm going to have all this La guérison to rewrite. Not just a sentence here and there, a paragraph, or a chapter, but the whole from start to finish.” It wasn’t until 1917 came to a close that the work was finally published, a Journal entry from 21 December stating succinctly, “La guérison appears.” As Ramuz completed La guerison, the Bolsheviks completed their takeover of Russia.
The October Revolution took place in November, the Bolsheviks abandoning the Julian Calendar within months of taking over the government. For the sake of avoiding confusion, I’ll stick with Gregorian dates, though you’re right to think something like “you’ve done absolutely nothing but create confusion to this point.” Nevertheless! On the night of 6 November 1917, a shot rang out from the cruiser Aurora, moored in the Neva River, that signaled the commencement of the final assault on the provisional government, nearly all of whose members were inside the Winter Palace. Their only protection was a group of military school students and a women’s battalion, no match for the Red Guard forces marshalled outside the building. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, the freshly appointed Secretary of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, quite literally snuck in through the back door, breaching a gate as much as it’s possible to breach something that had been left open and unguarded, which probably tells us all we need to know about Alexander Kerensky and company. After wandering the halls for a bit, Antonov-Ovseyenko found nearly all the cabinet ministers in a single room (also unguarded) holding a meeting. They were all arrested…and that was it. It would take no less a genius than Sergei Eisenstein to make this all seem heroic. His propaganda film October, which included Antonov-Ovseyenko playing himself, was released to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. In that ten years, the Soviet Union that we recognize from our 11th grade World History class had emerged, evidenced by Eisenstein’s film being accused of the dreaded “formalism” and his being forced to edit Leon Trotsky out of the film after the famed revolutionary was purged from the Central Committee.
Within two days of the storming of the Winter Palace came the Decree on the Land, issued by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Decree used as its framework a previously compiled “Peasant Mandate on the Land” and was stark in its simplicity:
The land question in its full scope can be settled only by the popular Constituent Assembly.
The most equitable settlement of the land question is to be as follows:
1. Private ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated.
All land, whether state, appanage, crown, monastery, church, factory, primogeniture, private, public, peasant, etc., shall be alienated without compensation and become the property of the whole people, and pass into the use of all those who cultivate it.
Persons who suffer by this property revolution shall be deemed to be entitled to public support only for the period necessary for adaptation to the new conditions of life.
Seven additional items round out the purest redistribution of property any of us will ever know.
As far back as 1906, with Russia shaken by general strikes and still coming to terms with the events of Bloody Sunday the year prior, Stravinsky had expressed something resembling optimism about the prospect of revolution, the naïve idealism of a 24-year old saturating every word.
The tremendous revolution that is inevitably coming frightens me not at all, since I feel with all the strength of my soul that the money on which we privileged classes all live is not ours, particularly not mine, since I have so far produced not a single thing of value for public consumption. I shall be happy the day I can say I am living on money I have produced myself.
When revolution actually came, Stravinsky the landowner was directly impacted by these reforms. As the Bolsheviks began seizing land and property, emboldened peasants began looting. According to a 1942 article written by Paul Budry, Stravinsky, prior to World War I, “possessed vast lands in Poland, on which he had a distillery producing enough vodka to intoxicate an entire province. One day he announced to us, nonchalantly, that the Bolsheviks – whom he loathed – had redistributed these lands and emptied the vodka reserves, flooding the village and drowning several children.” A September 1915 article in Russkaya muzikal’naya gazeta reported that “the Ustilug estate of the composer Igor Stravinsky was devastated at the time of the Austro-German August offensive,” though the owner himself could only guess as to the extent of the damage. It would be decades before he would be presented evidence of the destruction. The conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, shopping for books in Moscow in the 1950s, discovered an artifact from Ustyluh, the title page of Claude Debussy’s Preludes inscribed by its composer: “To entertain my friend Igor Stravinsky.” The destruction of Stravinsky’s property was one of several harsh economic realities to be thrust upon him during the war years.
With the onset of war, Stravinsky’s income from Russia effectively ceased. Beginning with Petrushka in 1912, Stravinsky’s works had been published by Russischer Musikverlag, founded by conductor and greatest champion of new music in the history of the world, Serge Koussevitsky. The company was founded in Berlin, where Koussevitsky was living with his fantastically wealthy wife and studying conducting in his own home with a student orchestra. Koussevitsky’s professional conducting debut came in 1908 when he hired the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted an all-Russian program featuring the Piano Concerto no. 2 of Sergei Rachmaninov with the composer himself at the piano. As I look back on my own career as a musician, it occurs to me that I should have tried to marry the daughter of whatever the 2006 equivalent of 1905’s tea merchant was. That’s my bad. The following year, Koussevitsky founded Russischer Musikverlag and subsequently opened satellite offices in Leipzig, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London and New York. Negotiating payments with a company that existed within quite literally every side of a global conflict proved impossible.
These were tough times for Stravinsky. His childhood nanny, Bertha, who had been residing with his family in Morges, died earlier in 1917 along with his older brother, Gury, who contracted typhus while serving in the Russian Army in Romania. As the Bolsheviks took over, Stravinsky cried poverty.
The period, the end of 1917, was one of the hardest I ever experienced. Overwhelmed by the successive bereavements that I had suffered, I was now also in a position of the utmost pecuniary difficulty. The Communist Revolution, which had just triumphed in Russia, deprived me of the last resources which had still from time to time been reaching me from my country, and I found myself, so to speak, face to face with nothing, in a foreign land, and right in the middle of the war.
To make matters worse, the Ballet Russes, the one seemingly reliable source of performance he had, was essentially on hiatus, stranded in Portugal with no future performance dates on the books. Their greatest dancer, Nijinsky, danced his final performance in Buenos Aires on 26 September 1917. He would be diagnosed with schizophrenia and spend the rest of his 30-plus years in and out of mental institutions.
These claims of financial distress are not exactly supported by reality (though anxiety is a unique brand of scourge). They do, however, illustrate Stravinsky’s, shall we say, entertaining relationship with money. Robert Craft contends that “Stravinsky’s fears concerning money were probably inherited from his parents” and developed into “a powerful neurosis.” Stephen Walsh provides a much kinder contextualization:
[F]ew have taken the trouble to understand his actual circumstances, or the full extent of his vulnerability – and particularly his sense of vulnerability – in Europe of his day. A Russian artist, it seemed, had no rights, no protection, effectively did not exist except as a producer of glittering objects for the delectation and profit of others.
The Berne Convention, which had been on the books for 30 years, was useful for performances in the musical centers of Europe as France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland were all signatories to the original treaty. Notably absent from that list is the United States, where Stravinsky’s music was literally in the public domain and therefore available to performers for free. As a resident of the United States afraid to make a reference to Mickey Mouse in polite company for fear of Disney suing me into oblivion, this boggles the mind.
The volumes of Stravinsky’s correspondence certainly run counter to the caricature of the artist as some sort of head-in-clouds figure of artistic integrity and noble poverty. There is perhaps no better illustration of this point than this, from Volume Two of the correspondence edited by Craft: “After finishing Le Sacre du Printemps on a November morning in 1912, he apparently spent the afternoon writing letters about investment properties.” This was not the only tangential connection to financial matters intertwined with Stravinsky’s greatest masterpiece.
Among the crowd at the riotous premiere performance was Maurice Fanet, a Parisian lawyer whom Stravinsky retained as part of a lawsuit against two Monsieurs (father and son) and one Madame Miquel Alzieu for failing to repay a loan. The matter dragged on in the courts and encountered multiple delays. The cost to Stravinsky was payment to Fanet in the form of 350 francs and two tickets to the Rite premiere. A letter dated 5 May 1913 from Maurice Ravel celebrates victory and offers a glimpse into either Stravinsky’s station in life or Ravel’s boundless sarcasm, depending on the exchange rates. “I heard the good news about the ruling that Monsieur and Madame Miquel Alzieu must pay you the 10,000 francs. You will finally be able to have the car and the yacht that you want.”
Without question, Stravinsky received all manner of income during the war. His works were performed throughout Europe and until 1918 the Ballet Russes continued to perform his music with astonishing frequency and pay the performance rights that came with doing so, even when Stravinsky had to wrangle the money from Diaghilev through manipulation, flattery, and the occasional confrontation. He conducted his music on several occasions and was justly compensated. He received various royalties and advances and sold manuscripts. He received commissions for new works, including Renard, which, it’s worth noting, was ultimately never performed in the Princesse de Polignac’s salon. Beyond his income from, you know, actual work, he received numerous financial gifts from wealthy friends and patrons.
Acclaimed conductor, laxative heir, and purveyor of bons mots, Thomas Beecham was one such patron. Beecham’s family fortune came from a company whose pills pledged to “Dislodge Bile, Stir up the Liver, Cure Sick-Headache, Female Ailments, Remove Disease and Promote Good Health.” Advertisements insisted that customers “Ask for Beecham’s and take no others,” which they did with enough enthusiasm to finance three decades worth of glitzy and star-studded opera productions helmed by the family Maestro at the finest opera houses in England. It would certainly be a juicy bit of anti-capitalist schadenfreude if Beecham were simply a hack who financed his hobby and was resigned to the proverbial dustbin of history, but he is, in fact, one of the greatest conductors who ever lived. I have to say, “acquire wealth through a family relationship of some kind” never came up in my musical training. It seems like it should be lesson one in Careers in Music 101.
What Beecham was to conducting, Princess Violette Murat was to partying. Berenice Abbott, who photographed Princess Murat in 1929, describes her vividly: “A very high liver. Oh, all kinds of wonderful tales are told about her. She…knew how to make an art out of living and that’s something stupendous. Anything she did became a vibrant, extraordinary event. I can remember seeing her go into a ten-cent store and buy the place out and have a fling doing it.” A direct descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte and a spiritual ancestor of equal parts Andy Warhol and Fran Lebowitz, Princess Murat is one of those historical figures who pops up in all sorts of interesting places, livening up the proceedings with drugs, sex, and an aggressively ill temper, probably the only person referenced in this book who could give Lord Berners a run for his money for eccentricity.
Here she is converting Augustus John to taking marijuana by adding it to a fruit compote at a dinner party hosted by Curtis Moffatt! Here she is buying opium on the French Riviera and renting a submarine so she can smoke it by herself! Here she is storming out of a party at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris at which the guest list included Stravinsky, Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust because she hates Proust for possibly basing a nasty character from In Search of Lost Time on her! Here she is contributing to the suicide of young artist Christopher Wood! Here she is in Harlem with Tallulah Bankhead and Marilyn Miller picking up women at the Clam House on 133rd Street, which Vanity Fair described as "a popular house for revelers but not for the innocent young." Second most importantly for our story, in a slightly astonishing coincidence, here is her cousin, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat, marrying Rene Auberjonois’ son, Fernand, in 1939. Most importantly for our story, here she is giving Stravinsky money during the war.
However complex Stravinsky’s finances were at this time, there is no question that Ramuz was poor. His correspondence of the period is filled with reminders to himself and his friends that he had no money. By the 1990s Ramuz was one of several Swiss luminaries, including Arthur Honegger and Alberto Giacometti, whose visages were printed on the country’s banknotes. In my finest The Dad From Coming To America voice: “He’s got his own money. And baby, when I say he’s got his own money, I mean THE BOY HAS GOT HIS OWN MONEY!”
The journey from provincial author of no particular significance to having his face on literal money began with a simple discussion amongst Ramuz, Stravinsky, and Ansermet, the essence of which is best distilled by another trio, Detroit hip-hop group Slum Village, shouts to J Dilla may he rest in peace:
If they say, “what you gonna do today?”
Just say, “hey, I wanna get paid!”
Every day, every day pay day…
The work that emerged from this desire to cash them checks, L’Histoire du Soldat or The Soldier’s Tale, would prove to be one of Stravinsky’s greatest achievements and one of Ramuz’s greatest what-ifs.
I'm sorry to read that Satie was such a low-class slob. I like his music but think less of him as a man.
Good G-d man, this is insanely, beautifully written even by your lofty standards. The number of enormous artistic personalities and ominous events shaking the planet at this period of time is truly remarkable. I’d forgotten just how quickly the Bolsheviks acted to confiscate everyone’s property, practically in the blink of an eye. I also never knew Stravinsky was a distillery owner; perhaps it explains a bit of his fondness for Scotch whisky later in life.