Shostakovich and Stravinsky met at last in Moscow, at the Metro-pole Hotel, where a banquet for Stravinsky was being laid on by the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva (whom Shostakovich called 'Catherine the Third'). The meeting was neither a reunion nor a reconciliation of the two Russias that had gone their separate ways in 1917. But it was a symbol of a cultural unity which in the end would triumph over politics. The two composers lived in separate worlds but their music kept a single Russian beat. 'It was a very tense meeting', Khachaturian recalls:
They were placed next to each other and sat in complete silence. I sat opposite them. Finally Shostakovich plucked up the courage and opened the conversation:
'What do you think of Puccini?'
'I can't stand him,' Stravinsky replied.
'Oh, and neither can I, neither can I,' said Shostakovich.160
That was virtually all the two men said. But at a second banquet at the Metropole, the evening before Stravinsky left, they resumed their conversation and a dialogue of sorts was established. It was a
memorable occasion - one or those quintessentially Russian events which are punctuated by a regular succession of increasingly expansive vodka toasts - and soon, as Craft recalled, the room was turned into a 'Finnish bath, in whose vapours everyone, proclaiming and acclaiming each other's Russianness, says almost the same thing… Again and again, each one abases himself before the mystery of their Russianness, and so, I realize with a shock, does I.S., whose replies are soon overtaking the toasts.' In a perfectly sober speech - he was the least alcoholically elevated of anyone in the room - Stravinsky proclaimed:
'The smell of the Russian earth is different, and such things are impossible to forget… A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country - he can have only one country - and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life. I regret that circumstances separated me from my fatherland, that I did not give birth to my works here and, above all, that I was not here to help the new Soviet Union create its new music. I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigner that right.'161
He meant every word.
THE END
(Notes n stuff not scanned)