thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
its power to terrify. Both Dumbarton Oaks and the symphony, along with the ballet Jeu de cartes (a curiously conventional work, for all its musical brilliance) were American commissions, as were Apollo and the Symphonie de psaumes before them. They might seem to belong in the well-upholstered concert halls and salons of that last bastion of the private patron, where the composer himself was soon to join them. His first foray of the 1930s into the USA was early in 1935, when he embarked on his second concert tour of the country, this time a coast-to-coast affair in which he either conducted or accompanied Dushkin in (among other cities) New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles (where he visited Hollywood studios), Minneapolis, Chicago, St Louis, Fort Worth, and Washington DC. The following year he paid his first visit to South America, spending seven weeks from April to June conducting in Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile he had been commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein to write a work for the American Ballet company that he and Balanchine (now working in New York) had set up in 1935. At the end of 1936 he left France on his third American tour, which began, however, in Toronto in January 1937. Again this was coast-to-coast, and again it combined orchestral concerts and duo recitals with Dushkin, ending in New York with his conducting the premiere of the Kirstein commission, Jeu de cartes, at the Metropolitan on 27 April. It was on this tour that he made the first sketches for what was to become the Symphony in C, though whether this was prompted by any hint of a commission is unclear. He also completed the short Praeludium for jazz ensemble. But his next work was not the symphony, but a direct commission from Mrs Robert Woods Bliss, of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, for a chamber orchestra piece to celebrate her 30th wedding anniversary in 1938. The Concerto in E, known as Dumbarton Oaks, was the last work Stravinsky composed wholly in Europe. Much of the first movement was written at Annemasse, at the foot of the French Alps near Geneva, where he and his family spent part of the summer of 1937 in the desperate hope that the mountain air would help Katya's lungs. But as usual Stravinsky seems to have been able to detach himself completely, while composing, from his emotional and nervous environment, and the E Concerto is one of his most poised and meticulous pieces of writing. The obvious reference to Bach at the start was evidently suggested by the commission, which stipulated a work of Brandenburg Concerto dimensions. But gradually the music departs from Baroque models and though the finale remains superficially busy, its imagery becomes fragmentary and kaleidoscopic, in which sense it looks forward to certain much later scores of the American years. It would be interesting to know whether any of this material was originally conceived for the Symphony in C which, as eventually written, is in a similar spirit; but evidence is lacking. Stravinsky returned to
(his own music being often regarded as dauntingly modern) and by the huge distances between cities. Royalties from Europe largely dried up, and were not adequately replaced by American ones, since the USA was not a signatory to the Berne copyright convention. In effect, Stravinsky was thrown into the market-place in order to survive; and the market-place was not of the kind with which he was familiar.The problem is reflected in various early brushes with the American publicity machine, but also in his own music of the time. The butchery of his Rite of Spring score in the 1940 Disney film Fantasia (at which he seems not to have protested at the time) is a famous but not isolated example of the former. Examples of the latter are the Tango for piano (1940), which was intended as a vocal work to be supplied with a commercial lyric; the Circus Polka, written at the end of 1941 for a ballet of circus elephants, and actually performed in April 1942 in a band arrangement by David Raksin; the short biblical cantata Babel (1944), part of a composite work called Genesis for which Schoenberg supplied the prelude; the Scherzo a la russe written for a broadcast by the Paul Whiteman Band in September 1944; and the Scenes de ballet, a 15-minute dance-revue composed for a Broadway show that same year, and doubtless performed there without much regard for textual rectitude (for all the well-known legend that Stravinsky refused to countenance changes). Even several of the works that have come down to us as well-dressed concert scores are supposed to have begun as film music, though documentation on this is so far lacking. Stravinsky claimed, for instance, that the second movement of the Ode, composed in 1943 as a memorial to Koussevitzky's wife Natalie, had been planned as music for the Stevenson film of Jane Eyre; that the Symphony in Three Movements, whose sketches show it to have been composed at various times between 1942 and 1945, includes music written for The Song of Bernadette; and that the Four Norwegian Moods, a work originally prompted by the Nazi invasion of Norway, was likewise aborted film music. Admittedly the aborting argues that there were strict limits to the concessions Stravinsky would make to the needs of commerce. Much of the above music suggests a new willingness to write to order; some of the works may accept audience appeal as a criterion of style in a way that would have been inconceivable for the Stravinsky of The Wedding or Mavra. But all are written to high technical and artistic standards, as if pot-boiler had been taken as simply one more typological category for the neo-classical card index. The way, for instance, in which Scenes de ballet avoids, even while it mimics, the vulgarity of the Broadway show is an intriguing illustration of the found object serving as basis for a symbolic discourse that retains its aesthetic autonomy. Taken as a whole the wartime works are an unusually mixed lot. The popular parodies stand out from the one or
two works, such as Danses concertantes (a concert piece, not a ballet), or the outer movements of Ode, which broadly continue the manner of the 1930s concert pieces in a breezier spirit. But there is also a third strand, represented by the outer movements of the Symphony in Three Movements, the two Mass movements (Kyrie and Gloria) written at the end of 1944 some years before the rest of that work, and even the amiable Sonata for two pianos (completed in February 1944), which in one way or another hark back to the composer's Russian past. The symphony thrillingly revives the so-called Scythian, or Dionysian, elements which had been the most famous thing about the early ballets; it was his most Stravinskian work for almost 30 years. No less interestingly, the Mass (eventually completed in 1948) seems to have been a product of a renewed religious consciousness similar, no doubt, to the one of 18 or 19 years before itself presumably in some way related to the sense of remote exile. He suddenly wanted to write an austere liturgical work (but for the Catholic rather than the Orthodox rite, since the latter forbids musical instruments in its services). This sent him back to his own earlier ritual music, especially the Symphonies d'instruments a vent and The Wedding. But it also sent him farther back, to a much earlier church music: to plainsong, fauxbourdon, troping and antiphony. The severity of the Mass is thus by implication linked to a certain archaism of sound and technique, in which respect it looks not only backward but also forward in Stravinsky's own work. After the end of the war, he wrote two short concertos which, so to speak, sum up his main public styles of the time. The Ebony Concerto, written at the end of 1945 for the saxophonist and clarinettist Woody Herman, is to the pot-boiling aspect what the Concerto in D, written in 1946 to a commission from Paul Sacher in Basle, is to conventional neo-classicism. Even some of the material is, mutatis mutandis, the same. Nor is it at all clear that the conventional piece is superior to the pot-boiler, in its way an immaculate, stylized portrait of the balletic precision of big-band playing, with its five saxophones and five trumpets. But the real stylistic challenge came with Stravinsky's next two works (not counting the already part-composed Mass). Both were major theatre pieces, his first since before the war. And both, on the face of it, implied a kind of summa the master bowing out with classical, large-scale masterpieces in the genre he had dominated since bursting on the scene almost 40 years before. The ballet, Orpheus, was another Kirstein commission, this time for Ballet Society (the forerunner of the New York City Ballet), and it was expressly intended as a pair for Apollo, though the two were not initially produced together. In fact the subject was suggested by Balanchine, whose staging of Apollo was the touchstone for Kirstein's company. And this time composer and choreographer worked closely together, evolving the details of
has been argued that Stravinsky was too tolerant of a scenario which, while it certainly dealt with the cyclic theme of death and rebirth so dear to his theatrical heart, imported too much generic and sentimental detail, especially into the scenes with the bearded lady, Baba the Turk, and the somewhat drawn-out final scene in Bedlam. But in performance, the opera is nearly always redeemed by the sheer exuberance and variety of its invention, strongest in the parodies of popular 18th-century music: the Lanterloo chorus, the Ballad Tune, Sellem's Aria, and Ann's lullaby. In any case, the summatory aspect conceals some unexpected new directions which show up if we look at the score in the light of what Stravinsky wrote next. For instance, the intensive refrain forms in the final act clearly anticipate the crucial role played by such forms in works from the Cantata to Threni, where the refrain idea is organically linked to serial method. Not that there is any trace of serialism in The Rake's Progress (unless one counts the mocking canon in Since it is not by merit). But if we wish to argue that Stravinsky's adaptation of the method was as much a process of matching as a desperate quest for modernity, it makes sense to see the opera as at least partly a threshold, however firmly shut the door might at first seem.9. The proto-serial works, 19519.In all, The Rake's Progress took Stravinsky more than three years to compose. It was completed in April 1951, and first performed, after much lobbying and infighting, at La Fenice in Venice (in co-production with La Scala, Milan), on 11 September of that year, directed by Carl Ebert. Stravinsky went to Italy to conduct the premiere, his first visit to Europe since 1939. After Italy, he conducted in Germany, and heard tapes of new or newish music in Cologne and Baden-Baden, including Webern's Variations op.30, and works by Schoenberg, who had died in July. Craft has described how disturbed Stravinsky was at discovering that his recent music did not interest the young European composers. Back in California, he wrote nothing for six months; then, in July 1952 (after a second European trip in May to conduct Oedipus rex in Paris), he quickly completed the Cantata, stereotyping its form because he was in a hurry to write his Septet. These two works are usually taken as the starting-point for the serial method which informs everything Stravinsky wrote subsequently. The catalyst for the Septet seems to have been a series of Schoenberg concerts which Craft himself conducted in Los Angeles in the autumn of 1952. Stravinsky attended the rehearsals as well as the concerts, and was fascinated by the music, especially (improbable as it may seem) the Wind Quintet, the Serenade op.24, and Suite op.29. The Gigue finale of his own Septet (which like op.29 uses a piano as linch-pin between string and wind trios) plainly betrays the influence of Schoenberg's finale. In the Cantata, settings of old English lyrics which connect stylistically with The Rake's Progress, there is much pitch-only canon
1955), bulked out with a transcription of Bach's Chorale Variations on Vom Himmel hoch (March 1956) for the same Venice concert in September 1956, did he return to Agon and complete it in April 1957. Agon and the Canticum sacrum are often thought of together because both make partial use of 12-note rows, the first Stravinsky works to do so. But only a narrow-minded obsession with the mechanics of serialism could obscure the profound differences between these two works, which are sure evidence, incidentally, that the Stravinsky of Pulcinella and the Symphonies d'instruments a vent was still alive and kicking hard in his mid-seventies. Agon, surely, is an astonishing work for a composer who, not three years before starting it, had supposedly been in the grip of a creative aphasia brought on by a terror of stylistic inadequacy. For this score is nothing if not stylistically fearless. It combines Renaissance dances, recognizable yet utterly rethought in movement, tonality and sonority, with a high-speed stream-of-consciousness chromaticism apparently indebted in manner, though hardly method, to the Boulez of Structures. It has a galliard in C major built round a strict canon between harp and mandolin with high flutes and double-bass harmonics, propped up by a thick C major chord for solo viola and cellos which breaks every known rule of instrumental voicing. It has an atonal Bransle simple which opens with a rapid canon for two trumpets, and a nearly atonal Bransle gay with a castanet ostinato. It starts and ends in a Stravinskian C major, and its four sections or sequences are linked by tonally fixed interludes which tick over like a car engine while the dancers take up their new positions. But the dances themselves gradually take fire in the twentieth century and explode (notably in the coda to the Pas de deux and the following duos and trios), to the extent that it was long thought that the stylistic discrepancies were due to the break in composition. We can now see that the changes are a reflection of the original subject idea (not clearly retained in Balanchine's highly abstract choreography), and are perfectly deliberate. In fact this is proved by the smooth jointure between the chromatic trios and the final coda, which reprises the opening Pas de quatre with no sense of disruption or incongruity.The Canticum sacrum is no less eclectic in idiom, and hardly less coherent in effect. But in this case the linking concept is not dramatic but ecclesiastical. Stravinsky hoped the work could be performed in St Mark's, Venice (as in fact happened, after a formal approach to Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, a month before the premiere). Whether or not Craft's hint that the five main movements are in some sense analogous to the five domes of the basilica is to be taken literally, there is no mistaking the architectural feel to the design in general. The fifth movement is a nearly exact retrograde of the first, the solo tenor's Surge, aquilo is balanced by the Brevis motus cantilenae, and the exhortations to the three
virtues Charity, Hope and Faith themselves form a central arch or dome for the whole structure. Many incidental details show that Stravinsky was thinking historically about Venice, and acoustically about a large reverberant church (though whether he allowed adequately for the profound and interminable echo of St Mark's itself is a question only those who attended the first performance can answer). The Euntes in mundum and its retrograde have an unmistakably Venetian ring, with their organ versets and their stile concitato note-repetitions for quartets of trumpets and trombones. The versets, soft and slow, allow the ensemble echoes to clear between sections. By contrast the central movements, with their chromatic, sometimes canonic, lines, have a more intimate quality, and the versets suggest a dialogue, or verse and response form. The Canticum shares one other new quality with Agon, its extreme, even abrupt concision, which (except in the stile concitato episodes) largely does away with the varied ostinato repetitions so characteristic of Stravinsky's earlier manners. In Berlin in early October, three weeks after the Canticum sacrum premiere, Stravinsky suffered a stroke while conducting the Symphony in C. Curiously enough, though alarming at the time, it seems not to have demanded any serious reduction in his work-rate, which actually increased thereafter, at least in the sense that his schedule of conducting tours continued to grow for another five or six years (though he conducted less in each concert, while Craft conducted more). Soon after the stroke, he was diagnosed with polycythemia. For the remaining 15 years of his life, health and health-care were to be his main preoccupation outside music, as well as the greatest strain on his exchequer, which explains why he continued to tour and conduct all over the world for long after it can have been medically (to say nothing of artistically) sensible to do so. He simply could not afford to stop. Not until after his concert in Toronto in May 1967, at which he conducted (sitting down, Craft says, for the first time ever) the suite from Pulcinella, did he at last decide that the time had come to call a halt. After the concert premiere of Agon, conducted by Craft in Los Angeles in June 1957 (the stage premiere followed in New York in early December), Stravinsky returned to Venice; and there in August, in the cellar club of the Hotel Bauer Grunwald, he started work on another sacred work with covert Venetian connections, a setting of texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Threni, which he completed the following March and conducted in the upper chamber of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco on 23 September 1958, is famous in the Stravinsky literature as his first score entirely based on a 12-note row. It remains, nevertheless, one of his least known works, seldom performed and little recorded, no doubt mainly because of intonational difficulties for the chorus and (especially) the vocal soloists, who sing for much of the time unaccompanied. Though not consistently atonal in the Schoenbergian sense, since Stravinsky seeks out quasi-tonal areas of agreement and consonance between
his music if anything increased. Movements for piano and orchestra, commissioned by a Swiss industrialist called Karl Weber for his pianist wife in March 1958, may be less severe than Threni in the hieratic sense, but it is a great deal more hermetic in point of style and technique. Here Stravinsky converts the seemingly inconsequential row rotations of the earlier work into a complex note-generating programme, which involves reading off chords and melodies from a grid made out of rotated row forms stacked on top of one another (a technique partly derived, it seems, from his friend Ernst Krenek's own setting of Lamentations). To some extent this method may appear no more than a useful way of spinning notes which can then be processed rhythmically, texturally and in other ways. But that may be to underrate the possible symbolism of such schemes for a mind like Stravinsky's. Nearly all his subsequent works are religious, and nearly all use rotation grids in some more or less esoteric combination with sacred texts. The obvious major exception is the Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa, a free recomposition of a trio of Gesualdo madrigals for a small mixed ensemble of instruments, made in March 1960 two months after the premiere in New York of Movements. Stravinsky had already made completions of three Gesualdo motets, versions which, despite their somewhat speculative nature, were included by Glenn Watkins in his and Weismann's Gesualdo edition (Hamburg, 195767). Vocal music of the Renaissance and pre-Renaissance was another enthusiasm of Craft's whose influence can be detected in Stravinsky's later works. The Venetian works of the 1950s were written in the shadow of various performances by Craft of Monteverdi (including the Vespers), Schutz, the Gabrielis and others; and Threni, additionally, after hearing Craft conduct Tallis's Lamentations at the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles. Isaac, Josquin, Machaut and Ockeghem also figured in these concerts. It seems obvious that both the sound of such music and its often intricate canonic and isorhythmic structures were in Stravinsky's mind as he turned to the composition of his last few sacred vocal and choral works. An example is the Prayer movement of A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, completed in January 1961, and first performed in Basle just over a year later under Paul Sacher, who had commissioned it. The setting of Thomas Dekker's Oh My God, if it Bee Thy Pleasure for choir and solo voices accompanied by a tocsin-like combination of gongs, piano, harp and double-bass, has an intensity of feeling which arises audibly from the concentrated polyphony of the writing, but surely also (not so audibly) from the fact that all the actual notes come from a hexachordal rotation grid. The grid operates throughout the work, indeed, providing schematic support (not, one hopes, in any ironical spirit) for St Paul's We are saved by hope in the Sermon, and for the account part-spoken, part-sung of St Stephen's martyrdom at Paul's hands in the central Narrative. Stravinsky had by this time already conceived the idea for The Flood, and may consciously have used