Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky—a slight, somewhat stooped elder citizen whose deeply crevassed jowls and heavy, dark-rimmed spectacles accentuate a generally somber physiognomy—is a man with a long and distinguished past who might now be expected to play the part of the benign old master. He does nothing of the kind. Stravinsky makes no attempt to build a bridge across time to la belle époque. In his eightieth year he remains the model of a modern iconoclast.

If you ask him to reminisce, Stravinsky will gladly dredge up recollections of Imperial Russia. His memory teems with details of a world he has not seen for half a century: the clatter of droshkies on St. Petersburg's cobblestoned pavements, the cries of Tatar vendors hawking their wares outside his window, the sight of Emperor Alexander III riding past in a magnificent equipage, the scraping of horse-drawn sleighs on frozen canals. But these are memories only, not his stock in trade as a composer. No sleigh bells or troikas for him when he puts notes on paper, no evocations of brocaded elegance, no nostalgia for snow-laden onion domes. Stravinsky is ruthlessly up to date. As an artist he has journeyed a prodigious distance from the fairy-tale world of his youth.

The journey has carried him to a rare kind of fame. Stravinsky is the world's greatest living composer. One makes this seemingly incautious statement without fear of contradiction. Not since the time of Beethoven has there been such widespread acknowledgment of one man's musical pre-eminence. To be sure, Stravinsky was for long persona non grata in the cultural rulebook of the Soviet Union. But even that last bastion of resistance has fallen; the great man has tentatively accepted an official invitation to return to Russia next June after an absence of forty-eight years. Elsewhere no opposition whatever is raised. Stravinsky is, by universal agreement, tops. No creative artist of our time, with the possible exception of Pablo Picasso, has been more pampered and extolled. This distinction has come his way without benefit of public relations. Stravinsky pays scant regard to the opinions of his listeners; he has never equated success with popularity. "I hate pandering to the public," he says. "The masses demand that an artist should bring out and exhibit his inner self, and then they take it to be the noblest form of art and call it individuality and temperament." Stravinsky does not pander and seldom has been known to repeat himself. He can be said to have an accent—a uniquely Stravinskyan way of expressing himself in music—but no manner. He has rather a multitude of manners, and he progresses from one to the next with upsetting regularity. No sooner do we grow accustomed to the latest Stravinsky fashion than he decrees it old hat and moves on to another. You may call this caprice or you may call it growth, but you cannot charge Stravinsky with following a formula.

His current style is that of the twelve-tone system, the so-called serial technique of composition formulated by Arnold Schönberg. That Stravinsky in his old age should have swung over to the twelve-tone, or dodecaphonic, camp is one of the supreme ironies of musical history. Ten years ago such a realignment would have seemed inconceivable; one might just as well have suggested that Joseph Stalin would desert the Kremlin to become president of the New York Stock Exchange. A profound schism had the world of music divided into hostile sects. Two popes disputed authority: Stravinsky, upholding the sacred laws of tonality and insisting on the continuing validity of traditional musical forms, and Schönberg, exploring new frontiers of atonality and developing new forms based on the twelve-tone system. The twain did not meet. Though the two popes lived within a few miles of each other in California, they could just as well have inhabited opposite ends of the earth. Los Angeles in those days, a wit observed, was both Rome and Avignon.

Then, on July 13, 1951, Schönberg died. The rival pope was no more. Perhaps his death swept away some unconscious barrier in (continued on page 150)Stravinsky(continued from page 104) Stravinsky's psyche. Perhaps the conversion was merely a matter of historic inevitability. Whatever the reason, Stravinsky soon began to embrace the heretical notions of his former antagonist. Minor flirtations with the twelve-tone method were noticed in a cantata of 1952 and a septet of 1953. The romance blossomed in the Canticum Sacrum of 1956 and the ballet Agon of 1957, and it was consummated in 1958 with Threni, which adheres unreservedly to the latest dodecaphonic precepts.

These works are all hard nuts to crack. Stravinsky's recent music could hardly be described as ingratiating. Nevertheless, the standard critical reaction has been one of guarded enthusiasm. What other line is a prudent person to take? If he is at all mindful of history, he will know that Stravinsky has hewed out difficult paths before and persuaded his listeners to trot along behind. Indeed, the composer's whole career has been a sort of musical beacon light into the Twentieth Century, as Beethoven's was a beacon into the Nineteenth. To follow him along the route that leads from the colorful panoply of Petrouchka to the severe permutations of Threni is to follow the course of contemporary music.

While still a fledgling composer in St. Petersburg, known only to that city's musical cognoscenti, Stravinsky had the immense good fortune to cross paths with the greatest talent scout of all time. Serge Diaghilev heard one of Stravinsky's apprentice works in 1908, divined the genius that was in him, and commissioned him to compose a ballet for a forthcoming season of the Ballets Russes in Paris. The result was The Firebird, which in 1910 established Stravinsky overnight as a musical celebrity. We see it now as an excitingly orchestrated but not very original work, rather strongly beholden to Stravinsky's teacher Rim-sky-Korsakov in its reliance on exotic, neo-Oriental melodies and on pungent, atmospheric effects. Looking back from a distance of more than half a century, the composer takes a distinctly dim view of his first major effort, though he is always glad to pick up the fee for conducting it. As condensed into a concert suite, it is probably performed more often than any other of his pieces.

Petrouchka, his next ballet for Diaghilev, is also essentially post-Romantic in concept, but the rhythms are more complex and vital, the harmonies cleaner and more abrasive, the orchestration more strikingly original. The first production (Paris, 1911)—with Vaslav Nijinsky as the puppet-clown, Tamara Karsavina as the ballerina, and a young Pierre Monteux in the pit—must have been something to experience. It is now rarely given as a ballet, but the music alone has become a staple of the concert hall. No matter how often repeated, Petrouchka retains its fresh effervescence. Its evocation of the carnival spirit, its sense of exhilaration and gaiety, its robust, swirling colors, its fragile countertheme of pathos are the work of a master.

The third Stravinsky ballet for Diaghilev's company, The Rite of Spring, provoked one of the most strident musical scandals of all time. As cacophony piled upon cacophony at its first performance in 1913, the Parisian audience grew increasingly derisive; booing and whistling reached such a pitch that one of the noisiest pieces of music ever composed by man was lost in the din; and at length the police had to be called out to quell the pandemonium. The brutal, searing, furiously unsentimental music with which Stravinsky called forth a primeval sacrificial rite was denounced as the very negation of art. While outraged traditionalists cried havoc, the avant-garde sprang to the composer's defense, cheered subsequent performances, and made of The Rite an article of contemporary faith.

If any one work can be said to divide the Nineteenth from the Twentieth Century in music, it is The Rite of Spring. The piece became a measuring rod of musical hipsterism. It separated the men from the boys, the ins from the outs, the forward-lookers from the old fogies. Today The Rite barks as loudly as ever, but it no longer bites. Matinee matrons in Boston can sit through it placidly, and Walt Disney can use it as background music for belching volcanoes. But its wild discordancies, its savage, hurtling rhythm, its icy brutality, its revelation of the hidden dark regions of the soul speak as powerfully as ever. The Rite of Spring blew the lid off the comfortable world of Nineteenth Century music, and the repercussions are with us still.

Stravinsky's pre-1914 music had emerged in an atmosphere of uninhibited affluence. He could score his ballets for gigantic orchestras and allow his conceptions to follow dizzying flights of fancy. Diaghilev spared no expense. Then came Sarajevo. The Ballets Russes retreated to Italy and Spain, money became scarce, the mood of the day turned somber, and the old opulence vanished. Stravinsky suddenly had to come to terms with a wholly new set of circumstances, and in the process his music changed profoundly. Not only did he begin to write for tiny ensembles instead of oversize orchestras, but he began to tighten and desiccate his musical speech. Wit and understatement took the place of noisy intoxication.

The Soldier's Tale, written in 1918, is an engaging example of this new direction. Stravinsky, holed up in Switzerland for the duration of World War I, had become acquainted with the author C. F. Ramuz and the conductor Ernest Ansermet. All three were broke. "We often met," Stravinsky recalls, "and sought feverishly for some means of escape from this alarming situation. It was in these talks that Ramuz and I got hold of the idea of creating a sort of little traveling theater, easy to transport from place to place and to show in even small localities." Ramuz concocted a Faustlike story about a soldier who sells his violin to the Devil in exchange for wealth and power; Stravinsky wrote the accompanying music; and Ansermet conducted. The score—for an "orchestra in miniature" of only seven players—is a wry, astringent, utterly delightful mishmash of unlikely ingredients: American ragtime, Argentine tango, a Bachlike chorale and prelude, a Viennese waltz, a Spanish paso doble, all of it flavored with the bubbling, raggle-taggle rhythmic verve of the earlier ballets. Despite the vastly reduced instrumental forces, there is no impression of sonic poverty. Stravinsky's ear for original sonorities could be as inventive with seven players as with a hundred.

The Stravinsky who returned to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes after the wartime hiatus was a composer of drastically altered esthetic convictions. The flag of neoclassicism had been unfurled, and he was to be seen at the head of the parade espousing music of trenchant discipline. Mother Russia had been cast aside. Stravinsky's temporary self-exile from his native land became permanent after the Communist revolution of 1917, and in his music the composer quite deliberately expunged the fierce Russianisms that had helped build his reputation. In this respect the 1919 Pulcinella is light years distant from Petrouchka.

The score is based on themes by Pergolesi, the Eighteenth Century Neapolitan composer of limpid, graceful arias, and it is all sun and light and azure clarity. Pablo Picasso designed the scenery and Leonide Massine had charge of the choreography. Stravinsky recalls their three-way collaboration with unalloyed pleasure. The music itself represents a sort of collaboration—between composers two centuries apart in time. The melodies are Pergolesi's, but their recomposition and instrumentation are inimitably Stravinskyan, and the end product is a nimble, lilting re-creation of antique commedia dell' arte in piquant contemporary style.

Throughout the 1920s every composer of note engaged in a long succession of "returns to" this and that master of the past—Ravel to Saint-Saëns, Prokofiev to Mozart, Hindemith to Bach, and so on—all of them pouring new music into old bottles. To write music in somebody else's style was extremely à la mode. But when Stravinsky let it be known in 1928 that his latest ballet owed its inspiration to the music of Tchaikovsky, eyebrows went up throughout the civilized world. Sophisticates had long since written off Tchaikovsky as hopelessly square, a dullard who vacillated between maudlin bathos and hysterical bombast. Stravinsky thought otherwise, and in The Fairy's Kiss of 1928 paid homage to the subtle elegance and radiant classicism of Tchaikovsky's finest efforts.

The piece is not wholly dependent on Tchaikovsky's melodies (as Pulcinella is on Pergolesi's), though only the most erudite listener can detect where Peter Ilich leaves off and Igor begins. (Nothing could sound more Tchaikovskyan, for example, than the elegiac theme for oboe heard at the opening of the ballet, a theme which, in fact, is strictly of Stravinsky's fabrication.) In any case, The Fairy's Kiss survives today not so much for its skillful imitation of the Tchaikovsky idiom as for its appealing restatement of the perennial romantic bromides—fairy sorceress, village rustics, handsome youth and dewy damsel, all disporting themselves in Never-Never Land. The complete ballet score has some tedious patches, but the shorter suite—entitled Divertimento—drawn from the full work is a pure delight. The rollicking, oom-pah-pah gyrations of the Swiss dances and the ingenious weavings of the pas de deux variations are out of the composer's top drawer.

But there was more in that drawer than bright, genial charm. An austere, solemn, sacerdotal side of the composer's creative personality also found expression in these middle years of his career. The two aspects emerged in baffling contiguity. Stravinsky swung back and forth from "entertainment" music to "serious" music, from blithe gaiety to thorny sobriety, from la vie en rose to la vie en noir. The Symphony of Psalms, written in 1930 on commission for the Boston Symphony's fiftieth anniversary season, is decidedly noir; it is also a masterpiece.

The work is a setting for chorus and orchestra, without violins or violas, of three of the Psalms of David (in the Latin Vulgate version). Its texture is gnarled and contrapuntal, its harmonies bleak, its layout complex. The Byzantine orientation of the music is unmistakable; its static repose recalls the glacial severity, the mystic transfiguration of a Ravenna mosaic; and the total effect is one of stark nobility and exaltation.

These two trends—Arcadian charm and dry austerity, entertainment and ritual, rose and noir—fuse together in Persephone, a longish piece for narrator, tenor, chorus and orchestra, which is one of the composer's least-known and most nearly perfect achievements. The text, by André Gide, is based on the Greek myth of the goddess Persephone's abduction to the underworld and her return to earth. Of all Stravinsky's many collaborations with celebrated contemporaries—painters, authors, dancers, musicians—this one with Gide in 1934 was by far the most fretful. Gide so heartily disliked the composer's disjointed prosody, his habit of making verbal syllables suit the music instead of making his music fit normal poetic stresses, that he boycotted the first performance. Stravinsky, for his part, thought the verse cloyingly naïve and concluded that Gide "understood nothing whatever about music." But, as the case of Gilbert and Sullivan triumphantly demonstrates, bickering collaborators can often turn out top work. There is nothing substandard about Persephone.

Critic-poet Paul Valéry put his finger on Persephone's cardinal quality when he referred to its "divine detachment." This is music from Olympus, in which beguiling melodies and lustrous instrumentations are ordered into a monumental frieze. The icy calm, the celestial repose with which Stravinsky most effectively approaches the sublime is sustained from beginning to end. For that desert island, this might well be the one Stravinsky piece to take along.

For thirty years—ever since the premiere of Firebird—it had been almost axiomatic that a new Stravinsky score would get its first hearing in Paris. France had become the composer's adopted home, French his language of preference. But a combination of personal misfortune and the deteriorating international climate impelled him in 1939 to pull up roots and move on. He came to the United States to give some lectures at Harvard, applied for American citizenship ("I remember that one of the immigration officials asked me whether I wished to change my name, which was the most unexpected question I had ever heard"), and soon settled in the small, one-story house on Hollywood's North Wetherly Drive where he lives today.

The Symphony in C, written in 1940, is one of the first products of Stravinsky's American period, and as usual it took his admirers by surprise. Unlike the Symphony of Psalms (which is a symphony in name only), this one turned out to be the genuine article, a classical symphony in four movements embodying all the formal devices—first and second subjects, development, recapitulation—of the Haydn-Beethoven tradition. But it is not one of those modern symphonies that are all form and no content. Its typically concise themes are juggled, contrasted and reshaped with mercurial virtuosity, and its finest passages linger long in the ear. Of how many post-Brahms symphonies can this be said?

Stravinsky's first evening-length opera, The Rake's Progress, which made its debut in 1951, was also his last exercise in neoclassicism. Nothing could be more eclectic in its forms and its inspirations. Though the opera is modeled primarily on Mozartian lines (specifically on the dramma giocoso exemplified by Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte), the composer liberally showered snippets of Gluck and Handel, Weber and Schubert, Bellini and Verdi throughout the melodies and accompaniments. The transmutation of all these disparate gleanings into Stravinskyese is as finely accomplished as ever, but the totality is a mélange of clever workmanship rather than a sustained work of art.

The text, by W. H. Auden with an assist from Chester Kallman, rates high as poetry, average as philosophy, and low as opera libretto. The plot—about a new-rich wastrel who succumbs to a variety of temptations in Eighteenth Century London and dies in Bedlam—is peopled with the composites of some hoary operatic characters. Its central figure, Tom Rakewell, has bits of Faust and Don Giovanni and Lieut. B. F. Pinkerton in his make-up; Anne, his first and last love, recalls Beethoven's Leonore and all the other faithful-to-the-bitter-end heroines of romantic opera; and his servant, Nick Shadow, is half Mephistopheles and half Leporello. They're a shadowy crew, and you couldn't care less what happens to any of them. Of course, none of these libretto defects would matter if the music were sufficiently enchanting. In The Magic Flute the genius of Mozart serves to blot out the inanities of Schikaneder. Unfortunately, in The Rake's Progress you keep telling yourself "How well done!" when you should be exclaiming "How beautiful!"

It is understandable that the composer recognized this work as "the end of a trend" and began to break fresh ground. Seven years later he made his wholehearted plunge into the waters of dodecaphony with Threni, a setting of the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. Its mood of knotty desolation is as far removed from the crystal grace of Pulcinella as that ballet was from the barbaric incantations of The Rite of Spring, and yet Threni is recognizably Stravinskyan—particularly in its darting rhythmic eccentricities and its spiky instrumentation. Much of the canonic writing is determinedly dissonant and flagrantly ungrateful to the ear, but the swooping choral interjections on Hebrew letters that occur throughout the work provide lovely oases of assimilable Stravinsky, and the listener who perseveres to the serene closing prayer will hear one of the composer's most moving passages. In time—as our ears accustom themselves to the rigorous and austere idiom—the work as a whole will doubtless yield increasing satisfaction.

When you add to this arbitrarily limited list the other major compositions of Stravinsky—Les Noces and Oedipus Rex, the Symphony in Three Movements and the Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, the ballets Apollo Musagètes and Orpheus, the Octet and the Duo Concertante, to name a few—you have an imposing body of music. Nevertheless, by Mozartian or Schubertian standards, Stravinsky could not be termed a prolific creator. He has worked with steady deliberation, producing a major effort every year or so, and he has had the good fortune to have lived a long time and to have kept his creative powder dry. Unlike Sibelius, who literally wrote himself out thirty years before his death, or Richard Strauss, who kept repeating himself (albeit with glowing mastery) for his last thirty years, Stravinsky has continued to find new things to say and new ways to say them. His seventy-ninth birthday this year found him busily engaged on his first composition specifically conceived for television, a ballet entitled Noah and the Flood. Scheduled to be performed by the New York City Ballet, with choreography by George Balanchine, it will be shown on CBS early next year. Stravinsky himself will conduct.

It is not surprising that Stravinsky should be attracted to television, for he has always had a high regard for the Twentieth Century's instruments of communication. (Indeed, he relishes mechanical equipment of all kinds; his California study, as a visitor once observed, has "all the instruments needed for writing, copying, drawing, pasting, cutting, clipping, filing, sharpening and gluing that the combined effects of a stationery and hardware store can furnish.") The Stravinsky apartment in St. Petersburg was one of the first in that city to be equipped with a telephone. For more than forty years the composer has been an avid record collector (in the early days he took particular delight in records of American popular music), and in 1925 he composed a serenade for solo piano specifically with discs in mind—each of its four movements having been timed to fill one 78-rpm side. Today Stravinsky is much intrigued with the potentialities of stereo sound. Far from inveighing against "canned music," he believes that certain kinds of music are heard to better effect on a good stereo system than in our often acoustically inadequate concert halls. Stravinsky's own long activity in the recording studio is too well known to require comment; he insists that records are as important as printed scores in conveying a composer's precise intentions, and he has documented all his major works on discs. In virtually every case, his rendering of one of his own compositions is the best available.

Although he suffers from colossal hypochondria (his small talk with contemporaries and near-contemporaries invariably fastens on a thorough discussion of the latest pills, treatments and doctors), Stravinsky has remained in reasonably good health considering his advanced age and his intermittent history of tuberculosis. His wife Vera (whom he married in 1940, a year after the death of his first wife) resolutely shields him from importunate visitors, and a young American disciple, Robert Craft, has assumed much of the taxing musical and literary spadework that would otherwise sap his energy. Craft, an accomplished musician and journalist, takes charge of the early rehearsals for Stravinsky-led performances and recordings; he also ghosts most of Stravinsky's written pronouncements, prepares quasi-official commentaries on his works, carries on negotiations with publishers and impresarios, and in general acts as the composer's alter ego.

Despite his sometimes stern countenance and his caustic contempt for what he considers inferior accomplishment, Stravinsky is not an essentially dour type. To his close friends he is warm and generous, to his working acquaintances, polite and genial. Though separated by a vast chasm of time from his native land, he is still a Russian and exhibits much of the vibrant expansiveness that is typical of his countrymen. He speaks English with a strong Russian accent but with great precision and wit, and he delights in embellishing his thoughts with pungent metaphors ("Can you imagine what it means for me to conduct in the City Center, with its orchestra pit like a men's room and no acoustics at all? It is like putting a new Rolls-Royce on Russian roads."). His written prose, though somewhat less jocund, is equally concise in expression and rich in picturesque detail.

Both his conversation and his writing reveal a man of impressive intellectual attainments. He has read widely in all the chief European languages, steers his way securely through the artistic cross-currents of the past and present, and shows a marked predisposition for the involutions of philosophical discourse. He has made it his business to know—and often to collaborate with—almost every significant creative artist of his time. Bach and Beethoven may have understood intuitively the determining intellectual and artistic forces of their day, but no other leading composer—with the possible exception of Richard Wagner—has gone about acquiring knowledge with anything like Stravinsky's voracity. This omnivorous thirst, in alliance with his remarkably responsive creative drive, has helped make him the reigning musician of our time.

Stravinsky's ultimate place in the musical pantheon is something for posterity to assign. My own guess is that he will be ranked on the same level as Haydn—that is, as a composer of the first category, just below the transcendent supremacy of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Like every great creative personality, Stravinsky has reflected, as well as partially created, the chronicles of his time. Despite his contention that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all," Stravinsky's lifework will tell posterity a good deal about the ambiance and aspirations of the Twentieth Century. The "dynamic calm" which he has sought to achieve in his music will probably be accounted his most precious quality. It produces in us, his listeners, that feeling of euphoria and exaltation which is the pre-eminent endowment of all great music. What one misses in his work is a sense of compassion. Stravinsky holds himself aloof and in reserve. You will not find in his music the cosmic forgiveness that transfigures the last act of Mozart's Figaro or the enkindled benediction of the Arietta from Beethoven's Opus 111 Sonata. But it is foolish to fault Stravinsky for what he is not. That he is a genius without qualification and that we are immensely privileged to have him with us are verities beyond dispute.