People punched each other at the première of The Rite of Spring. Maybe it was the heat in the packed Théâtre des Champs Elysées on the warm, spring evening of May 29 1913. Maybe it was the primal, groin-thrusting immodesty of Nijinsky’s choreography. But the raw, rhythmic violence of Stravinsky’s score soon spilled over into the auditorium, inciting to blows the detractors and defenders of this epoch-making music.
Stravinsky’s ballet music was described by one contemporary critic as being like ”Russian vodka with French perfumes”. The description was more apt than he realised; among the baying, brawling crowd at the first performance of The Rite of Spring was Gabrielle ”Coco” Chanel.
The careers of Igor Stravinsky and Coco Chanel took parallel courses. In the first years of the 20th century, Stravinsky studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov at the same time that the orphaned Chanel developed her precocious skills as a seamstress. In 1910, the year of Stravinsky’s breakthrough ballet, The Firebird, Chanel registered as a milliner. Three years later, The Rite of Spring was launched and Coco opened her first shop. Having revolutionised the worlds of music and fashion respectively, they died within a year of each other in 1971.
The artistic missions of composer and couturière were remarkably similar. He set out to rewrite the rulebook of classical composition, she sought to democratise women’s fashion. Chanel called for clothes that women could actually move in, creating minimal designs in jersey cotton, a cheap fabric previously used only for shifts and chemises. Stravinsky liberated tonality from its traditional, harmonic corsetry, stripping Western music to its underwear.
When Stravinsky arrived in Paris, it seemed inevitable that their paths would cross. The introduction was most likely to have been made by Diaghilev, and in 1927 the two worked together on the oratorio Oedipe Roi, for which Chanel designed the costumes. But Chris Greenhalgh’s impressively realised novel seizes upon the tantalising possibilities of an earlier encounter in 1920, when the composer was invited to stay at Bel Respiro, Chanel’s villa on the outskirts of Paris.
Did Stravinsky and Chanel have an affair? In Edmonde Charles-Roux’s standard biography, Chanel insists that she and Stravinsky were lovers. Robert Craft, in his first-hand account of the composer’s life, concedes that an affair may have been the reason why Stravinsky peremptorily departed Paris for Biarritz, but later contradicts himself by stating that the journey was undertaken so that Stravinsky could be with his mistress, Vera Sudeikina — the real love of his life — whom he eventually married in 1940.
Greenhalgh makes a remarkable job of spinning this emotional footnote into a plausible fiction. He casts Chanel as a determined, impish figure, used to getting what she wants: ”a snake capable of swallowing someone twice her size”. Coco and Igor brilliantly rehearses the dynamics of a doomed relationship. It is an erotic, anxiety-ridden adulterer’s tale.
A poet, Greenhalgh writes with economy and precision. At the Rite of Spring première, he incorporates images only a poet would notice: the entrance of musicians ”thickening like knots of crotchets”, or the fans flapping in the rising heat ”like trapped birds all over the theatre”.
He also evokes the rather inelegant nature of the protagonists’ relationship. Stravinsky does not so much fall into Chanel’s arms as stagger blimpishly towards them. The critical moment occurs not at a romantic climax with violins and thunderstorms but when Chanel notices that the composer has a button missing on his shirt and kneels to sew it back on. Somehow the act acquires an almost indecent aura of intimacy and eroticism.
Stravinsky did not begin composing in earnest again until the mid-1920s, when he re-established himself in the United States. By that time, Chanel had moved on to the Duke of Westminster and the little black dress. But that, like Stravinsky’s extraordinary encounters with Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and PT Barnum’s elephants, is material for another novel altogether. — Â