SEPTEMBER 15, 2020
frequent TO MANY as the jazzy American tunesmith of such cherished requirements as "Autumn in long island," "April in Paris," and "Taking an opportunity on Love" (from the Broadway musical Cabin within the Sky), Vernon Duke had an additional facet. As Vladimir Dukelsky (his precise identify), he composed respectable "classical" ballets, symphonies, concerti, sonatas, oratorios, and chamber music. Born in Russia in 1903 and informed at the Kyiv Conservatory, Dukelsky got here to the U.S. in 1921 and spent most of his stressed, sybaritic existence in his adopted nation, with general forays to Paris, London, and Monte Carlo. In these and other trendy European watering holes, he would savor posh lodgings, dine in the best eating places, rub shoulders with the wealthy and famous, and — oh, yes — write track.
Like a different Russian émigré composer, Igor Stravinsky, whom he envied and again and again insulted, Duke spent his last years in los angeles, a metropolis he described in his chatty memoir Passport to Paris (1955) as "a watered-down Riviera on a huge scale." no longer long after he arrived from big apple in 1951, Duke wrote that he adored los angeles's "uniformly good" climate, but no longer the car culture. "A stranger with a automobile has little to do after ten however go boozing or soak up a film. A stranger and not using a vehicle is a lifeless duck! although, to understand the place is to find it irresistible." In los angeles, he joined a large and growing to be neighborhood of Russian émigré artists who, like him, had fled the hardships of the Bolshevik Revolution to birth a new existence in sunny California. a number of have been within the tune enterprise, like his lifelong buddy Nicolas Slonimsky. Many others got here to work within the motion pictu res: director Lewis Milestone, actors Akim Tamiroff, Maria Ouspenskaya, Mikhail Chekhov, and even Fyodor Chaliapin Jr., son of the well-liked Russian operatic bass, whose lengthy film career ended on a high note with a memorable cameo alongside Cher in Moonstruck (1987).
Duke's popularity has dwindled in recent years, despite the fact his songs have remained in the public ear due to some best recordings, especially the 1999 unlock morning time united states of america Sings Vernon Duke. A revered operatic soprano, united states of america has potent crossover abilities that she brings no longer best to nostalgic hits like "April in Paris" (tossed off in 1932 all over a party at a long island speakeasy attended through Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley) and "Autumn in long island" (covered within the forgotten revue Thumbs Up! in 1934), but also to lesser-everyday numbers like "phrases without track" (1936) and "ages in the past" (1957). The liner notes declare somewhat hopefully that "the song of Vernon Duke is hereby formally rediscovered and lower back in circulation."
This prediction has proved to some extent authentic, as evidenced by means of a smartly-publicized 2016 ny concert efficiency of the 1940 musical Cabin within the Sky. And these days, within the Black Lives rely era, director Vincente Minnelli's 1943 film version of Cabin in the Sky, the primary predominant Hollywood feature with an all-Black solid, is attracting renewed interest — no longer all of it fantastic, in view that that the creators of each display and movie had been all white men, with the only exception of dancer/choreographer Katherine Dunham.
The music of Vladimir Dukelsky is yet another rely, besides the fact that children. It has been basically totally forgotten, a source of endless frustration and bitterness for its creator, who later ruefully embraced the label of "the Jekyll and Hyde of song" bestowed upon him by way of journalists. notably in his previous years in Paris, Duke expended significant power being Dukelsky. He started the usage of the identify Vernon Duke for his "lowbrow" music in 1925, on the advice of his chum George Gershwin. but that very equal year, Dukelsky had perhaps his optimum success as the "serious" composer of a ballet, Zéphyr et flowers, staged in Paris with the aid of the effective impresario Serge Diaghilev and his sought after Ballets Russes.
As these two new books reveal, however, the performances of Zéphyr et flora, a narrative tailored from classical mythology choreographed by means of Léonide Massine, proved to be the high-water mark of Dukelsky's profession. As time went on, the fiscal and social success of Duke's typical track proved far more seductive. Even with the guide of influential consumers like Russian émigré Serge Koussevitzky, who carried out several of Dukelsky's compositions in his new position as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Dukelsky's profession stagnated, while Duke's prospered. As Nicolas Nabokov, Duke's exact modern and yet another Russian composer who ended up within the united states (working for the CIA) observed: "sooner or later, and continually sooner than later, the widespread, greater profitable stuff gets the higher hand." In 1939, Duke himself sealed the deal by using fitting an American citizen under his new identify.
As early as 1930, Duke's close pal and very "severe" composer Sergei Prokofiev warned "Dima" that he become endangering his classical reputation. "you can't cover the exhilaration you feel as a result of your awful list is no 1 in sales. but when I were to ask you what you have achieved within the ultimate year within the box of actual music, then other than two somewhat dry piano items you couldn't exhibit me a single element." Ten years later, Prokofiev brushed aside Duke's track in yet another letter (despatched from Stalinist Moscow, his new domestic) as nothing more than "tra-la-la." Then he twisted the knife deeper: "have you ever gotten married, or are you nevertheless on the prowl for des petites demoiselles?" A legendary playboy, Duke become ultimately married most effective in 1957, at age fifty four, to singer Kay McCracken, 31 years his junior.
As George Harwood Phillips makes clear in Taking a chance on Love: The lifestyles and tune of Vernon Duke, the first serious biographical examine of Duke/Dukelsky, he become now not a straightforward man to love. His personality become dichotomous in many techniques: "[T]he unstable Russian and the self-possessed American, the youthful Dukelsky and the elder Duke, the daring Dukelsky and the useful Duke, and the edgy New Yorker and the mellow Californian." "unless one knew him, nobody could believe that both had been the same adult," mentioned Anton Dolin, who danced the role of Zéphyr.
possibly as a result of he felt he not ever acquired the respect he deserved, Duke developed a nasty tendency to argue with friends and collaborators, insisting on speakme his intellect when prudence would have called for silence — or as a minimum a little bit of tact. The large chip he carried on his shoulder grew from his outsider repute: as an émigré pressured from Russia and later from Paris, as a latecomer to the effective circle that formed round Diaghilev in Paris before World struggle I, and as an apolitical man compelled to opt for facets in the fierce ideological war of words between the Soviet Union and the West. In generic song, Duke became considered with a undeniable suspicion as a classical "longhair," and in classical tune, as a light-weight panderer to mass taste.
The fundamental villain in Duke's lifestyles, as a minimum as he saw it, became Igor Stravinsky. This a lot is apparent from Klára Móricz's In Stravinsky's Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris, an insightful and meticulously researched study of the area of Russian émigré track and lifestyle in Paris within the Nineteen Twenties. Stravinsky and his song so dominated this scene that every one others — Prokofiev, Dukelsky, Nabokov, Arthur Lourié — have been shoved apart. It helped, of direction, that Stravinsky obtained there first, together with his spectacularly a hit ballets produced in rapid succession by the Ballets Russes on the eve of struggle: The Firebird (L'Oiseau de feu, 1910), Petrushka (1911), and The ceremony of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps, 1913). later on, Stravinsky had Diaghilev's ear on musical concerns, and the energy to make or wreck a rival's options with a number of neatly-chosen words. And Stravinsky chose his phrases — and hi s musical path — very carefully, guarding his personal privileged position with smart calculation and a nearly infallible inventive instinct. within the tremendously competitive Parisian musical market, flooded with Russian émigrés of various political and inventive stripes, Stravinsky turned into at all times one step ahead. Phoenix-like, he become continually reinventing himself, from the pagan primitivism of The ceremony of Spring in the course of the cool neoclassicism of Apollon musagète (1928) to the particularly cerebral track of his ultimate, 12-tone duration in los angeles, the place he lived from the early '40s unless 1969.
possibly Stravinsky's most serious rival for Diaghilev's affections — and for the role of main Russian composer — became Prokofiev. When he met Diaghilev in London in 1914, Prokofiev changed into a cocky 23-12 months-old lately graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and extensively perceived as an important new voice in Russian music. Diaghilev immediately commissioned a brand new ballet from him, however, as so often happened in Prokofiev's lifestyles, momentous world events — this time World battle I — received in the way. Chout (The Buffoon), staged in 1921 after repeated delays, carried out handiest reasonable success. meanwhile, Stravinsky had further solidified his position as Diaghilev's "first son." Prokofiev had to settle for "2nd son."
Móricz devotes a chapter to Prokofiev's subsequent, also sick-fated ballet for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: Le pas d'acier (translated clumsily because the metal Step). When Parisian audiences at last saw this again and again revised modernist get together of machinery and Soviet life in 1927, Prokofiev had simply back from a effective tour to the Soviet Union, his first given that leaving in 1918. at the same time, Diaghilev, like all Russian émigré creative artists in Paris, turned into attempting to barter his own relationship with Soviet lifestyle. Le pas d'acier, he concept, can be a easy car to profit on the colossal pastime within the great communist scan.
within the end, despite the fact, Le pas d'acier didn't fulfill the hopes of both impresario or composer, above all on account of its at a loss for words political stance. As Móricz writes, "political neutrality became no longer an option for Russians in interwar Paris." The ballet offended both the anti-communist "White" Russians in Paris, and pro-communist French intellectuals. Jean Cocteau, a devoted Ballets Russes follower, denounced the frivolity of turning "something as great because the Russian Revolution into a cotillion-like spectacle in the highbrow hold close of women who pay six thousand francs for a field."
Prokofiev wrote one other ballet for Diaghilev, Prodigal Son (Le Fils prodigue, 1929), but Le pas d'acier's failure cast him extra out of the impresario's internal circle. And when Diaghilev died in 1929, not long after Prokofiev's different foremost supporter, conductor Serge Koussevitzky, left Paris for Boston, he confronted a bleak future in the city of light, fading in Stravinsky's big shadow. So Prokofiev made the fateful determination to return to the Soviet Union, the place he expected brighter potentialities. His existence there during World warfare II and the worst years of Stalinist terror grew to become out to be a ways worse than he might have imagined, although.
When Prokofiev met Dukelsky for the primary time in long island in 1921, he described him as "a reasonably detestable young man, and that i purposely paid him no consideration." but over the next few years his perspective modified, and that they at last grew to be shut pals. both Phillips and Móricz draw heavily upon their colourful and revealing correspondence.
After Diaghilev's loss of life, Dukelsky placed his hopes for solidifying his position as a major composer on an formidable work, The conclusion of St. Petersburg. Klára Móricz, a musicologist, devotes an entire chapter of In Stravinsky's Orbit to an incisive analysis of this curious oratorio, complete with copious musical examples that might show challenging for people that can not examine a rating. apparently inspired by way of Soviet director Vsevolod Pudovkin's seminal 1927 movie of the identical name, Dukelsky created a huge, dissonant polyphonic vision of St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad, drawing on a hodgepodge of poetic texts via a disparate community of poets whose work is strongly associated with the metropolis: Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok. a big refrain proclaims the phrases of the leading poet of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, in a successful finale.
Dukelsky spent 5 years laboring over The conclusion of St. Petersburg, however to his bitter disappointment, Koussevitzky chose not to take it on. at last the manhattan Philharmonic and the Schola Cantorum, conducted by way of Hugh Ross, gave the most beneficial at Carnegie hall on January 12, 1938. It failed to provoke most critics. "Mr. Dukelsky's alter ego, referred to as Vernon Duke, is tons extra professional in atmosphere phrases to tune," wrote Samuel Chotzinoff. Prokofiev became extra damning. "but what sort of decadent theory is it to write a monumental piece about death Petersburg! There i will see the influence of your fraternizing with the fading emigration, this department ripped from its trunk, which goals in its decline about the lush springtime of the previous."
This changed into one among Prokofiev's last letters to Duke. Their final assembly came throughout Prokofiev's 1938 u.s. tour. In big apple, they went browsing together at Macy's. World war II — and the transforming into isolation of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union — would make such commute not possible sooner or later. Weirdly, Prokofiev, having turn into a goal of reputable Soviet criticism because of his émigré previous, would die on the identical day as Stalin: March 5, 1953.
Even after the disappointing failure of The end of St. Petersburg, Duke persisted to compose critical classical works. His 1941 violin concerto and the 1946 cello concerto are among his most appealing efforts. but they won nothing approaching the everyday success of amusing entertainments like the musicals Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 and, of course, Cabin within the Sky. participating with veteran lyricist John Latouche, Duke wrote the track for the titular music, "Honey in the Honeycomb," and, of route, the suave "Taking a chance on Love." As Phillips notes, that quantity changed into introduced on the insistence of the reveal's superstar, Ethel Waters, who desired "a track to uplift the spirits of the character she turned into playing," the long-struggling and creative spouse of a compulsive gambler in danger of dropping his soul to the devil.
regardless of the musical's narrative and atmosphere in a Black American neighborhood, the stage production of Cabin within the Sky turned into in the main created by way of three Russian émigrés: composer Duke, choreographer George Balanchine, and dressmaker Boris Aronson. To his credit, Balanchine did employ inventive Black dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham and her troupe. just a few years earlier, Duke's pal George Gershwin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants to the U.S., had accomplished Porgy and Bess (1935).
That white men of Russian history delivered to the stage the primary foremost musical representations of Black the usa has encouraged considerable and, specifically these days, heated debate. George Harwood Phillips does not challenge into that elaborate discussion. His helpful, clearly written Taking a chance on Love: The lifestyles and tune of Vernon Duke describes more than it analyzes, leaning heavily on citations from reports and interviews. Oddly, Phillips fails to include a catalog of works for Duke and Dukelsky, which would were a useful resource.
Vernon Duke's particular case as a composer who crosses boundaries between established and "serious classical" track additionally raises questions neither of those authors tries to address. where is that this boundary, precisely, and how can we define it? since the career of yet another Russian émigré, Sergei Rachmaninoff, who left Bolshevik Russia in 1917 and went on to achieve extra special "accepted" success as a virtuoso and composer in the united states, may had been a superb place to delivery. Like Duke and Stravinsky, he also selected to spend his remaining years in l. a., far-off from Paris and St. Petersburg. while a little bit cynical concerning the united states — the nation he dubbed "the dollar princess" in such works as Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) and Symphonic Dances (1940) — Rachmaninoff managed to bridge two musical worlds with relative ease and apparent pride, discovering a productive center floor between the populist Duke and the elitist Stravinsky.
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Harlow Robinson is professor emeritus of history at Northeastern institution, creator of Lewis Milestone: lifestyles and films (2019) Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (1987), and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood's Russians (2007), and editor/translator of selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev (1998).
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