Stravinsky by Stephen Walsh

Author:Stephen Walsh
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307756213
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-08T21:00:00+00:00

ALTHOUGH out of bed for a short time each day, Stravinsky was not well enough to leave the hospital for another four weeks. He would shuffle round the hospital garden on the arm of one of the sisters, or occasionally take a turn round the block.36 He was still smoking, but much less than before. The idea that he might soon once again conduct would have struck any casual acquaintance as absurd. Berman had written to Craft imploring him to prevent the composer from fulfilling his engagement in Rome at the end of November, but the concert had not been cancelled by the time Stravinsky was discharged from hospital on the 17th of November, and a few days later he and Vera duly boarded the express for the Italian capital, where Craft would meet them from another engagement of his own in Vienna.37

When friends had told Stravinsky to his face that he should conduct less, he had been in the habit of replying that he could not afford to,38 and it was a wretched irony of this latest illness that, just when the arguments for cutting back started to look irresistible, the reasons for not doing so became unanswerable. All his life, medical charges had been a substantial item of expenditure, but now they would soar into the stratosphere; and it would no longer be a case of settling the bill with the prestige of his friendship. In every city there would be specialists, “crouched like gardeners to pay,” as Nick Shadow put it agreeably in The Rake’s Progress. As soon as he got to Rome, he was examined by a neurologist and a hematologist, who pronounced his blood pressure too high and ordered him to cancel his New York engagements in January. Then in London a week or two later there was more phlebotomy, and a consultation with the great clinical neurologist, Sir Charles Symonds, who made the gloomiest prediction thus far. It so happened that Stravinsky had woken up in his hotel that morning (7 December) feeling numb in his right side. Symonds diagnosed a basilar stenosis (a narrowing of the arteries at the base of the skull) and warned that a second stroke could well be imminent and would, in his opinion, be fatal. Poly-cythemia (a superfluity of red corpuscles over white) he considered a likely but not certain contributory cause. He actually informed Vera that her husband had only “a fair chance” of surviving more than six months, and he told the husband himself that smoking had probably brought on the thrombosis, whereupon Stravinsky at last reluctantly but definitively gave up the habit.39

Yet notwithstanding all this medical head-shaking and finger-wagging, he had managed to conduct the Canticum sacrum at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome a week before without significant mishap. He had initially been very nervous and had ducked out of his first rehearsal with the orchestra, then, on the evening of the concert, lost his nerve over the “Vom Himmel hoch” variations and asked Craft to take over in that work.

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