article in English about Strawinsky, shortly after the production
of _The Firebird_ in Paris. Mr. Calvocoressi is to musicians what
Mr. George Moore, who introduced Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, and
Arthur Rimbaud to English readers, has been to poets--an appreciator
of contemporaries. This is a rare trait, one not possessed by John
Runciman of the “Saturday Review” or by several other prominent
critics, whose names instantly spring to mind. The initial article
in English about the young Russian composer appeared in the London
“Musical Times” for August 1, 1911. Since then Mr. Calvocoressi has
written much on the subject, and a good deal of his information seems
to have been gleaned from headquarters, since he quotes Strawinsky
freely. (This critic is, of course, particularly interested in
Russian music. He translated Balakirew’s songs into French, and wrote
a life of Moussorgsky.) With the words of the composer as a guide,
Mr. Calvocoressi has made a most interesting discovery, that in the
lyric-drama music of this young man “working-out” plays no part. There
is no development in the music of _The Nightingale_; the music simply
expresses what the text dictates it shall express as it goes along.
(In this respect, of course, Strawinsky is but following an ukase of
the “Five” to its logical conclusion; they, in their desire to create
a national school, chose as the best means of banishing any suggestion
of Wagner, whose theories were generally being blindly accepted and
adopted by composers of music-dramas at this epoch, the banning of the
use of the _leitmotiv_. However, they repeated themes and melodies, and
Moussorgsky in _Boris_ brings back the bells that served to ring in
Boris’s coronation, in broken rhythm to ring out his life.)
In regard to this matter Strawinsky has put himself on record as
saying, “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply
to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called
‘impressionist’ methods a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a
tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things,
and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from
those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional
methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim
at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for
‘working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to
feel and to convey one’s feelings.”
This, of course, is a more elaborate version of what Moussorgsky said,
“Plain truth, however unpalatable, and nothing more. No half measures;
ornamentation is superfluity.”
In one of Mr. Calvocoressi’s recent articles about Strawinsky that
critic says, in lines which illuminate: “According to the modern
conception of the lyric drama, the chief quality of dramatic music is
terseness--a quality most uncommon in all kinds of music, and which
many will, not altogether wrongly, think almost incompatible with
the very essence of musical art. The principle of music as generally
understood appears to be amplification, repetition.
“At all events, the art of music has always consisted chiefly in that
of ‘working-out.’ And it is but of late that a number of music-makers
and music-expounders have raised an outcry against prolixity and
redundance in music: an outcry, it must be added, that for the present
does not find much echo among the majority of art judges nor of the
public.
“The first of great musicians to abjure the principle of formal,
elaborate ‘working-out’ in dramatic and lyric music was Moussorgsky.
A striking peculiarity of his best songs and of his masterpiece,
_Boris Godunow_, is the absolute lack, not only of anything resembling
tautology or amplification, per se, but of all that is not absolutely
essential to direct expression (including many devices which no other
musician of the time would have dreamt of leaving out), even if the
omission be in defiance of tonal construction and balance.
“For instance, the song, _The Orphan_, ends very dramatically on the
suspensive harmony of the dominant. _Death’s Lullaby_, which depicts a
dialogue between a horror-stricken mother and Death, who comes to take
away a child, ends abruptly on the burden of Death’s last utterance,
with which the composer’s intention is fulfilled. He never gives a
thought to the practice of bringing back the main key which would have
led him either to an inappropriate modulation or to a superfluous
addition. Similarly, _Boris Godunow_, in the authentic version, ends,
without even a cadence, on a chord that hardly leaves the impression of
the tonic.”
Mr. Calvocoressi points out the fact that there are few passages for
orchestra alone in _Boris_ outside of the _polonaise_ and the very
brief preludes to the acts, and he asks us to observe the working of
the same principle in _Pelléas et Mélisande_, in which it is evident
that Debussy was influenced by Moussorgsky. Schoenberg was the first
to apply this principle to orchestral music. However, if an opera-goer
finds much to enjoy in the dramas of Moussorgsky and Strawinsky, it
does not necessarily follow that all the value of a work like _Die
Walküre_ disappears, to his ears. The two principles of art are
different; each, perhaps, is equally valid.
“But the fact is that a new factor has appeared in the domain of
dramatic music, which is now entering a new path; and consequently
a new order of artistic pleasure may be the outcome of this stage
of evolution. The first consequence, of course, is a greater
differentiation between the style of dramatic music and the style
of instrumental music; unquestionably a progress, since it widens
the range of methods and gives greater freedom to the composer’s
imagination.”
All of this is very stimulating, and very true; still, it cannot be
said that audiences as a whole grasp Strawinsky’s intention, as it is
exploited in _The Nightingale_, so readily as they do Moussorgsky’s
as manifested in _Boris Godunow_. Rimsky-Korsakow’s emendations of
the latter work, which one critic has labeled as mutilations, may be
responsible for the greater public reaction. But the success of _Boris_
was by no means immediate. Produced in Petrograd in 1874, it was not
heard in Paris until nearly thirty years later, nor in New York until
1913. Musicians, in the meantime, had had access to the score, and had
adopted some of the Moussorgsky idiom as their own. When _Boris_ was at
last produced here it was not, therefore, the utter novelty that _The
Nightingale_ now seems. The very principle of the new music demands a
greater effort at concentration than can be expected of most audiences
when they are listening to music, as many ears catch the meaning of a
phrase only after it has been repeated a convenient number of times.
This is one of the chief reasons for the popular success of _The Ring_
dramas. It seems incredible, and impertinent, to the average audience
that a composer should have had the idea of expressing himself without
repeating himself. A catalogue of representative themes would be of
no use to a prospective auditor of _The Nightingale_. Now, there are
two advantages to this method, aside from the implied advantage of an
improvement in effect: First, it makes for a very short opera (_The
Nightingale_, in three acts, is so short that at its early performances
it was given in a bill with two ballets, one of which, _The Legend of
Joseph_, runs for over an hour); second, the audience is not called
upon to listen intellectually (nor should it be, at the performance of
an opera). The only intention of the composer is to make his listeners
_feel_ each situation he illustrates with his music. It may be said
that Wagner’s intention was the same, and thereby lies the difficulty
in training listeners to understand the new principle. Wagner’s way is
easier for them because they can get the emotional feeling _through
the intellect_. The repetition of themes would not in itself assure
an effect, but the labeling of these themes does just that, so that
whenever the Sword _motif_ or the Siegfried _motif_ occurs, the _mind_
of the listener, knowing the name of the theme, is perfectly prepared
to create the emotional reaction demanded by the composer. Strawinsky
appeals directly to the emotions. On the listener who expects a theme
to reappear again and again he makes only the impression of being a
noise-maker (in the sense of a worker in dissonance; _The Nightingale_
is most continent in sound). But on the open-minded auditor his effect
is usually astounding.
The story of the music-drama closely follows the Hans Andersen tale.
In the first act a deputation from the Chinese Emperor’s court, headed
by the kitchen-maid, seeks the nightingale in its grove. The Imperial
Chancellor, the Bonze, and a number of courtiers are included in this
strange procession, which follows the kitchen-maid, as she alone knows
the bird’s song, to request the nightingale to come to the court to
cheer up the melancholy ruler. Although loath to leave its quiet
groves, the bird agrees to go.
In the second act the nightingale’s arrival has stirred the Emperor’s
jaded senses. However, the present of a mechanical bird which
comes from Japan diverts his attention. In the meantime, the real
nightingale has disappeared. The Emperor orders the little brown
songster banished from all China, while he places the mechanical toy by
his bedside.
Death stands in the Emperor’s bedchamber in the third act. Torn by his
aching conscience, the dying ruler calls in vain for his musicians
to make him forget. But the nightingale returns and so charms Death
with its songs that he agrees to allow the Emperor his life. The
Emperor revives and offers his saviour a place at court, but the bird
refuses and returns to its woodland haunts with the promise that it
will sing each evening. Now the courtiers enter, prepared to find the
Emperor dead. They are astounded when he sits up in bed and bids them
“Good-morning!”
All the symbolism, all the undercurrents of suggestion contained
in the text are never explicitly referred to except in the brief
utterances of a minor character, the fisherman, who sings a prophecy or
an explanation at the beginning and end of each act, foretelling the
delight that will be caused by the songs of the bird, the distress that
will follow its departure, and its final victory over Death.
The book offers exceptional opportunities for excursions into imitative
music such as Richard Strauss, to name one composer, would take delight
in expanding into pages of detail, as many of the diverting incidents
of Andersen’s tale are carried over into the drama. In the first act,
for example, the courtiers mistake the croaking of frogs and the lowing
of cattle for the song of the bird; in the second act the ladies of the
court fill their mouths with water and gargle in an attempt to imitate
the nightingale’s trill. These distractions do not serve to steer
Strawinsky from his direct course. He notices them, of course, but in
the briefest and most concise manner.
The score of _The Nightingale_ calls for a large orchestra, although
for a continent use of it. The list of instruments includes wood-winds
by threes, with a piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet, and double-bassoon,
three trombones, tuba, and two cornets besides the usual two trumpets;
two harps, two glockenspiels, a celesta, a pianoforte (this part is
very important), and the whole of the usual percussion, to which are
added small antique cymbals. The parts of the nightingale and the
fisherman are also sung from the orchestra pit.
The work was begun in 1909 (this date is disputed) and completed in
1914, when it received its first hearing in Paris in May. Strawinsky
seems to have found difficulty in composing it. “I can write,” he
is reported to have said, “music to words, viz., songs; or music to
action, viz., ballets. But the coöperation of music, words, and action
is a thing that daily becomes more inadmissible to my mind. And even
should I finish _The Nightingale_, I do not think I shall ever attempt
to write another work of that kind.”
Igor Strawinsky was born June 17 (June 5, Russian style), 1882, at
Oranienbaum, near Petrograd. This date has been in dispute, and various
authors have disagreed about it. My authority is Mr. Strawinsky
himself. He was the son of a court-singer and was destined to study
law. But, working assiduously with a pupil of Rubinstein, he became a
remarkable pianist from the age of nine. He encountered Rimsky-Korsakow
at Heidelberg in 1902 (when he was 20), and that Russian composer had
a great influence on his career, although very little on his musical
style. During this period Strawinsky attended concerts, visited
museums, and delved in literature. Everything in the world of art is
said to have awakened his curiosity. In 1903 he wrote the _allegro_ of
a sonata for the piano, of which the _andante_, _scherzo_ and _finale_
were completed the following year. Rimsky-Korsakow had accepted him as
a pupil, and while the young man alarmed the older composer to some
extent, he secretly predicted great success for the only one of his
pupils who showed revolutionary tendencies. Strawinsky says that the
composer of _Sheherazade_ struggled valiantly with himself at this
period in an effort not to restrict what might be beautiful in his
pupil’s anarchic methods, at the same time wishing to preserve his
own ideals. In 1905-6 Strawinsky worked at orchestration, and during
this period, as an exercise, he orchestrated his master’s opera, _Pan
Voyevode_, from the piano score. Subsequently his work was corrected
by comparison with Rimsky-Korsakow’s own scoring, recently completed.
This might have been a dangerous exercise for a “sedulous ape,” but
Strawinsky was not that. He also orchestrated marches of Schubert
and sonatas of Beethoven. His friends at this time were the group
surrounding Rimsky-Korsakow, Chaliapine, César Cui, Glazunow, and
Blumenfeld, the _chef d’orchestre_. Strawinsky was married January 11,
1906.
Soon after his marriage he terminated his symphony in E flat (1905-7).
It was performed in 1907, and was published later by Jurgenson. A song
with orchestral accompaniment, _Le Faune et la Bergère_, dates from
this period (1906), and in 1908 he completed his _Scherzo Fantastique_,
which was inspired by a reading of Maeterlinck’s “Life of the Bee.”
This has been played in Paris. Edward Burlingham Hill says of it: “In
its long passages for staccato strings, divided into melodic phrases
for wood-wind instruments and in fanciful figures for wind instruments,
celesta, and harps, one can imagine the sinuous and yielding swaying
of bees, iridescent with color, and pulsing with life.” I do not think
this work has been played in America. New York has not heard it. He
set two poems of Gorodetzki to music in 1908. When Rimsky-Korsakow’s
daughter married Maximilien Steinberg in 1908, Strawinsky sent
_Fireworks_ as a wedding present, but before the post had delivered the
gift the older composer was dead. As a tribute to his master’s memory
Strawinsky composed the _Chant Funèbre_, performed at the Belaïeff
concerts. _Fireworks_ has been played in New York both by the Russian
and the New York Philharmonic Societies. Four piano études, written
in the summer of 1908, have stood on my piano for some time. They are
interesting. Vuillermoz says that Strawinsky began _The Nightingale_
in this year; Calvocoressi’s date is 1910; the programme at the first
performance gave the date as 1909.
About this time an incident occurred which considerably changed the
young composer’s outlook, and which brought him to the attention of
a larger world. He was “discovered” by the director of the Russian
Ballet, Serge de Diaghilew, and commissioned to write a ballet on a
Russian folk-story scenario fashioned by Michel Fokine. Leon Bakst and
Golovine, the painters, completed the collaboration. The work, _The
Firebird_, was terminated May 18, 1910, and produced three weeks later.
The first sketches for this ballet must have been written before the
death of Rimsky-Korsakow, if we are to believe a very delightful story
told somewhere by Calvocoressi. On hearing Strawinsky play some bars
of _The Firebird_, the older composer is quoted as saying: “Look here,
stop playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it!”
The production of _The Firebird_ established the composer’s reputation
in Paris, and the very impressionists whose methods he has dubbed
“hypocritical” were among the first to sign themselves his admirers.
Of these Maurice Ravel was the leader. _Petrouchka_ was completed just
a year later (May 26, 1911), and its production by the Russian Ballet
gave his fame a firm hold with the public. His third choreographic
drama, _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, followed in 1913, and his
opera, _The Nightingale_, in 1914. Several songs, including _Le petit
Myosotis_ and _Le Pigeon_, are other products of recent years.[A]
It is astonishing to learn that _The Nightingale_ was begun so
early in the composer’s career, but it is still more astonishing to
discover that the first sketches of _The Sacrifice to the Spring_
were written before _Petrouchka_ was conceived. That ballet, which
achieved the great honor of being hissed in Paris (I have described
the incident earlier in this article), is the work on which, with _The
Nightingale_, rests his chief claim to being a composer with something
new to say. The work differs from most of the mimed dramas given by
the Russians in that it is practically without a fable. The scenes
take place in barbaric Russia, long before the Christian era, and we
are introduced to rites connected with the worship of the soil and
the springtide; after a series of ritual dances, one of the younger
maidens is chosen as a sacrifice to the spring, whereupon she spares
her friends the trouble of killing her by dancing herself to death.
This exceedingly angular dance, the expression of religious hysteria,
marvelously conceived by Nijinsky and thrice marvelously carried out
by Mlle. Piltz, was one of the causes for the outbreaks at the early
performances of the ballet.
The lack of a fable, the early and uncertain setting of the action,
offered Strawinsky an opportunity which he seized with avidity. The
music is not descriptive, it is rhythmical. All rhythms are beaten into
the ears, one after another, and sometimes with complexities which seem
decidedly unrhythmic on paper, but when carried out in performance
assume a regularity of beat which a simple four-four time could not
equal. H. E. Krehbiel, in his valuable book, “Afro-American Folksongs,”
describes the tremendous effect made on him by the intricate rhythms
(which he tried in vain to note down) of the musicians of African
tribes at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The rhythmic effect of _The
Sacrifice to the Spring_ is as powerful and complex. It is interesting
to remember, in this connection, that the ancient Greeks accorded
rhythm a higher place than either melody or harmony. Strawinsky
describes the dawn of a spring morning in a few measures at the
beginning of the prelude (here, it must be admitted, there is a
startling reminder of _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_), and then he settles
down to the business, and art, of providing material for dances. This
he has done with consummate effect. In many cases his chord-formations
could not be described in academic terms; the instruments employed add
to the strangeness of the sounds. I remember one passage in which the
entire corps of dancers is engaged in shivering, trembling from head
to toe, to music which trembles also. It makes my flesh creep even
to think of it again. At the beginning of the ballet the adolescents
pound the earth with their feet, while a little old woman runs in and
out between their legs, to the reiterated beat of a chord of F flat,
A flat, C flat, F flat; G, B flat, D flat, and E flat, all in the
bass (begin from below and read in order), while an occasional flute
or a piccolo screams its way in high treble. Try this on your piano.
“He has had recourse,” writes Edward Burlingham Hill, “to a violently
revolutionary style which is difficult to reduce to a systematic
analysis. Chords employing minor and major triads simultaneously in
different octaves, figures in double thirds, strange aggregations
of notes that can hardly be described as chords, even with critical
license, are the ingredients of this unusual style.” M. Montagu-Nathan,
in his “Short History of Russian Music,” says: “In criticising the
work, the mistake was made of suggesting that Strawinsky’s music
had gone back to an elemental stage in an endeavor to provide an
appropriate setting for the pre-historic. In reality, of course, the
movement was forward, in that music was used in a sphere to which it
had hitherto been strange. That is progress. A composer who sets ‘The
Creation’ to living music is just as progressive as another who takes
‘The Last Judgment’ as his theme.”
Strawinsky seems to meet his problems according to their nature with an
inevitable sense of the fitness of things. He has set, in _Petrouchka_,
a story of the Russian fair; the leading characters are puppets;
the period, 1830. The music is realistic in tone, in some instances
intentionally vulgar. It has been pointed out that the themes of
the nurses’ dance, the dance of the _cochers_, and the Russian dance
in the first scene, are founded on Russian folk-tunes. There is all
through the piece an implied tone of a village carnival; the accordion
and hurdy-gurdy are never very far away, in suggestion at least. The
dancer, personified by Mme. Karsavina, trips her lightest measures
to the fanfare of a cornet, and Petrouchka sobs out his heart to the
empty sky to the screaming of a piccolo. There are tunes, real tunes,
the piece abounds in them, and the whole is wrapped in an atmosphere
of realism and truth which gives music the tone of originality.
Incidentally, there is a triangle solo in the score.
M. Montagu-Nathan says: “The carnival music is a sheer joy, and the
incidents making a demand upon music as a descriptive medium have been
treated not merely with marvelous skill but with unfailing instinct
for the true satiric touch. _Petrouchka_ is, in fact, the musical
presentment of Russian fantastic humor in the second generation.
There is none of the heavy scoring once thought necessary to reveal
the humorous possibilities of some particular situation; Strawinsky
lives in a world which has learned to take things for granted, and
his method is elliptical. This perception of proportion in humor is
one of the surest indications of refinement, and _Petrouchka_ not only
testifies to the composer’s possession of this quality, but provides
an assurance that he has a technical equipment which can hardly betray
him.”
The fable is one of love and hate in that fanciful domain in which we
become aware of the existence of a soul hitherto considered absent from
such a corporeal habitation. Among the mingled crowd of merry-makers
and mountebanks at the carnival is a showman, practiced in the black
arts. In his booth he exposes his animated dolls: the dancer, flanked
by Petrouchka, the simple fool, and the fierce Moor. The three enact a
tragedy of jealousy which terminates in the “shedding of Petrouchka’s
vital sawdust.”
_The Firebird_ stirred another cell in the imagination of this young
Russian giant. Again he is dealing with a Russian folk-tale, but it is
a fairy story this time, not a vulgar story of country life; he has
manipulated his orchestra into a thousand gorgeous colors to illustrate
it. The instruments revolve their tones kaleidoscopically, reflecting
the myriad hues with which Golovine and Bakst have invested the scene.
The rhythms are exotic; the harmonies and the melodies of the utmost
brilliancy. One of the dances of the Firebird has a haunting melancholy
about it which seems to have been wafted from the steppes.