Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Writing to an old friend, Stravinsky sounded tense. Apologizing for the brevity of his letter, he said his nerves were “in a poor condition”; possibly a reference to the emotional complications developing at the villa. 2Stravinsky had fallen for Gabrielle. When she voiced concern for Stravinsky’s wife, Catherine, his “very Russian” response was: “She knows I love you. To whom else, if not her, could I confide something so important?” 3

Stravinsky took to absenting himself from Bel Respiro and visiting Gabrielle at the Ritz, where she had taken a suite while his family was staying at her house. The composer’s originality as a musician was augmented by his brilliant, intense and highly ambitious nature. He was not handsome, but his memorably strong features were an interesting contrast to his notably dandyish appearance. His aloofness added an attractive element to a complex personality. Gabrielle said, “I liked him… because he was very kind, because he often went out with me, and it’s very pleasant to learn… from people like that.” 4They went out to clubs, to parties and, once, with Misia and Sert, to the Paris fair. This is borne out by the passport-type photograph they had taken of themselves to commemorate the event.

Gabrielle had little knowledge of music, but Stravinsky set out to teach her. Unsurprisingly, she proved an able pupil. In the process, she developed a passion for Stravinsky’s compositions. He, in turn, developed a passion for Gabrielle, and it wasn’t long before they were launched into an affair. Gabrielle had been seduced once more by that Slavic cast of mind she seems to have found so irresistible — first Misia, then Diaghilev and now Igor Stravinsky.

If the composer’s nerves were strained by the management of his liaison, his stay at Bel Respiro was, at the same time, very creative. Not only did he finish the brilliant Concertino for String Quartet , he also completed Les noces villageoises, a ballet he had struggled with for several years. This was first heard, in 1923, at the magnificent town house of Winnaretta Singer, the Princess de Polignac and heiress to the vast Singer sewing-machine fortune. Winnaretta’s highly dedicated musical salon was one of the most powerful in Paris, and on that evening, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, the whole of the Ballets Russes and a number of other guests were present. The princess, who had by then become one of Gabrielle’s clients, was asked, “Why do you not ask Chanel?” and in her famously imperious manner she answered, “I don’t entertain my trades people.” 5Winnaretta Singer admired hardworking, self-made women, and her refusal to associate with Gabrielle may well have been partly out of jealousy; she was one of Stravinsky’s most important patrons.

We know little of the details, but during Stravinsky’s affair with Gabrielle, he was able to complete his memorial tribute to Claude Debussy, Symphonies d’instruments à vent, recognized as his most important work of that decade. Its spare and urbane quality has been related to the way postwar reconstruction became an important aspect of all Parisian artistic endeavor. The symphonies are seen as a new departure in Stravinsky’s music, for which no label yet existed, and which was at the heart of the modern sensibility. 6There is no doubt that this brief but intense period at Bel Respiro saw Stravinsky liberated to resolve several long-standing musical problems.

The composer and his lover may have been worlds apart, but one can appreciate the attraction this now quintessentially modern woman had for a man whose musical power had already acted as a force blasting away the last of musical romanticism. With the end of the war, the intellectual climate had been transformed by a sense of the futility, the sheer irrelevance of so much that had gone before. A fellow composer, Pierre Boulez, would say in the future that “something radically new, even foreign to Western tradition, had to be found for music to survive, and to enter our contemporary era. The glory of Stravinsky was to have belonged to this extremely gifted generation and to be one of the most creative of them all.”

Seven years after composing The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky made significant changes in preparation for its new staging. One of Stravinsky’s children recalled how the house was often filled with “the echoes of the piano,” resounding with “music so powerful that it scared us.” 7In this new version of the great ballet’s score, Stravinsky was delineating the outlines of a more urban, cosmopolitan modernism than in its earlier, more folkloric incarnation. This was exactly the atmosphere emanating from Bel Respiro, and from Gabrielle herself. Stravinsky’s artistic imagination cannot but have been stimulated by having an affair with a woman who exemplified that very sense of modernity the composer now incorporated into The Rite of Spring.

While the ballet was relaunched by Diaghilev on December 15, 1920, its scandalous reputation had gone before it. And the air of anticipation was so intense that success was almost inevitable. One admiring critic wrote that audiences had simply needed time to catch up with the modernity of the composer’s great work. Gabrielle, whose sponsorship made it possible, would later say, “I loved the Ballets Russes very much… when Diaghilev would tell me, “but it will be very expensive to put this on — I didn’t care at all.” 8Declaring that money was an “accursed thing,” and because of that “it should be squandered,” Gabrielle used her patronage to put into practice her professed belief that the only real point of wealth was its ability “to make us free.” She not only “squandered” it on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, she was to become, albeit as discreetly as possible, one of Diaghilev’s and Stravinsky’s major patrons for several years to come.

From its first night, this Rite of Spring was heralded as a classic, and Gabrielle was present at the grand supper party Diaghilev gave to celebrate the launch of the new season. Among the guests were the principal dancers, the Picassos, Stravinsky, Misia and the choreographer and principal dancer, Léonide Massine. Massine became overwrought, made himself completely drunk and apparently burned “Picasso’s hand with a cigarette (Picasso never moved).” 9Diaghilev had just discovered that Massine, his present lover, was having an affair with one of the female dancers.

Diaghilev’s fantastic possessiveness made him incapable of forgiving Massine. And although his reaction to Massine’s affair would drive Diaghilev to an emotional collapse, he was obdurate that his gifted friend would no longer work with the Ballets Russes.

While this episode was particularly dramatic, emotional dramas of one kind or another were not only constantly being played out behind the scenes in the Ballets Russes, they were integral to its existence. Somehow, Diaghilev and his troupe created an ongoing atmosphere of chaos, out of which they made their extraordinary ballets. Picasso’s own kind of creative chaos had a very different rhythm, however, and he had vowed he wouldn’t work with those mad Russians again. Diaghilev’s notoriously unscrupulous passion and conviction were nevertheless so persuasive that he had succeeded in luring back the painter, normally intractable once his mind had been made up. Even Diaghilev’s fellow Russian, Stravinsky, obviously familiar with the vagaries of the Russian temperament, once declared:

It is almost impossible to describe the perversity of Diaghilev’s entourage… I remember a rehearsal in Monaco, at which our pianist suddenly began looking very intensely beyond the music stand. I followed his gaze to a Monegasque soldier in a tricorne and then asked what the matter was. He answered “I long to surrender myself to him.” 10