Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [88]
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.”5 Winnaretta 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.6 There 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.”7 In 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