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Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten [2016]
Autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926–1995
Stravinsky and Turmoil
Soon the time came for me to go to Rome and start the Boulevard production at the Teatro dell'Opera. I lived in Via Sistina, it was spring, Rome was wonderful, as I now had to formally admit for the first time, in defiance of all Neapolitan chauvinism. But working at the opera was hard.
The great festival "Music of the 20th Century" had begun. The American Academy was giving a reception for Stravinsky. I had to attend, tutta Roma was there, also a lot of musical and non-musical foreigners. He was sitting at the far end of the hall, I could see him from far away. Festival director Nicolas Nabokov (composer, 1903-1978) approached me and said, "Come, Stravinsky wants to meet you." For the first (and last) time in my life, I knew with certainty that I was entering the aura of a myth. I was allowed to sit down with the author of Sacre, Les Noces and the Ebony Concerto. The hand with which Le Rossignol and The Rake's Progress were written touched mine. The simplicity and directness of Stravinsky's expression, so characteristic of great personalities, did not fail to have an effect: I liked him immensely. He wanted to speak German, but I answered in English, whereupon it remained English. His German, which sounded a little Baltic, was incidentally wonderful, as I was later able to notice on other occasions. He immediately wanted to know what I thought of the serial composition. At that time, he was probably still somewhat perplexed or sceptical about it. I didn't dare ask him what he was working on, but at his explicit request I told him about my opera in progress and about the way I was dealing with twelve-tone and serial technique in it. I would have liked to tell him about my Saracen fortress and my unsociable insularity, as if he would have been the least bit interested! We arranged to meet the next evening, for the premiere of Boulevard Solitude.
Stravinsky and Vera appeared punctually at 9 pm at the main entrance. But the liverymen wouldn't let the stranger in: he wasn't wearing a dinner jacket! ( His own had smelled of moth powder.) Too bad. The incident made headlines, and the Minister for turismo e spettacolo sent a letter of apology and flowers for Madame to the Hassler. Stravinsky now went to the second performance, this time the only one in a dinner jacket, because there was no compulsion there for the reprises, so he was actually dressed wrong again. He went with our common publisher, Willy Strecker, who afterwards elicited a few praising handwritten sentences from him about my piece. What he had missed was the premiere scandal that had already erupted last night when the music, a percussion slide in pianissimo, had just begun. I sat with Jean-Pierre (Ponnelle) in the director's room at the beginning, and there we heard over the radio how voices of protest, murmurs, laughter settled over the music like a stinking dog's mat.
Only now did it occur to me that no capo della clacque had introduced himself - perhaps someone else had hired him before me! It was quite clear that there were organised troublemakers in the house, but there was also a hum in the stalls, where the most expensive seats were. I couldn't stand it, so I left the theatre and walked around the area during the whole performance, from one bar to another, from Piazza Esedra to the church of S. Maria Maggiore, but I didn't pray. I returned to the opera for the final scene, no longer greeted by the stage doorman, and found the dancers sitting on the stairs crying: They had not been able to follow the music, they had lost their rhythm, the audience had shouted too loudly. In fact, now I could hear it myself from the backdrop: There was an infernal noise out there. They terrorised the singers too, laughing at each of their high notes, each solo, until they hardly dared to open their mouths. And when it was over and I faced the raging dinner jackets hand in hand with poor Jean-Pierre in front of the curtain, some of them actually jumped up to the orchestra and threatened us with shaken fists. Some shouted: Viziati! Andate a Capocotta! (Capocotta was the place where supposedly cocaine sniffing Roman playboys recently overdosed a girl named Wilma Montesi).
The day before yesterday, after the public dress rehearsal, the whole world had been so taken with the play, the festival management had been happy and full of feelings of triumph, that an aristocrat with an Austrian name had spontaneously decided to give a big party for me to celebrate a play, its author and the grande successo of which one was generally sure. They wanted to meet on stage and then together ... - but now no princess came, only the Stuckenschmidts, with whom I then went to the Trattoria Re degli Amici. Ingeborg, with the Austrian cultural attaché at the theatre, had fainted during the performance and was just being brought home. Luchino Visconti, who had asked his neighbours in the stalls to be quiet, had been insulted and offended.
from: Hans Werner Henze: Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten, Frankfurt (S. Fischer) 1996, pp 161-163. Translated by M. Kerstan
