thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
in 191516 and sold to the Princesse de Polignac. This, too, is based on Afanas'yev, and seems designed to recreate a type of rustic travelling theatre, with singers and dancers who take a hat round at the end, and a squeaky, clattery band of 15, again including cimbalom. In fact Renard remains the key to Stravinsky's wartime quest for an idealized folk modernism, since The Wedding was to be drastically altered in sonority, if not substance, by the time it reached the stage in 1923. Not all the wartime pieces reflect the same quest. Early on (191415), Stravinsky also wrote a set of easy piano-duet pieces based on conventional models: a march, a waltz, a polka. A little later he added another set of five (this time with an easy seconda part) based on various national stereotypes. Stravinsky went to Spain with the Ballets Russes in June 1916, and may have been inspired to write the Espanola in the Cinq pieces faciles, as well as the more disjointed Spanish parody in the study he wrote for pianola a growing enthusiasm of his the following year. But the notable feature of these miniatures is their technical resemblance to the Russian songs, even though their material and atmosphere are quite different. They showed how procedures evolved in one stylistic context could readily be adapted to another; in this sense they are prophetic beyond their own musical substance. Apart from the Polignac commission, none of these works earned Stravinsky any money, and as the war dragged on his circumstances deteriorated. The pianola study was dedicated to a rich Chilean called Eugenia Errazuriz, a patroness of Picasso whom Stravinsky had met in Spain. In 1917 he extracted from his Andersen opera a ballet to be called Pesnya solov'ya (The Song of the Nightingale) for Diaghilev. But Diaghilev was a slow payer, and though the two men struck a detailed contract that summer, which included payment for rights in the still unfinished Wedding, the problems persisted and led in 1919 to a massive and nearly terminal quarrel between them. It was also in 1917 (January) that the Paris Opera staged a ballet adaptation of the Scherzo fantastique, a production Stravinsky later claimed (mendaciously) not to have been involved in; in fact he would have conducted it had he not fallen ill just before. Soon revolution in Russia would cut him off finally from any hoped-for income from that quarter. In April, a month after the Tsar's abdication, Stravinsky was with Diaghilev's company in Rome. It was there that he met Picasso for the first time and, for the first night of the season, made his curious transcription of the Song of the Volga Boatmen to be played as a national anthem. Fireworks was staged as a light show designed by the Futurist painter, Giacomo Balla, but The Song of the Nightingale, though ready, was not done. That summer his old German nurse, Bertha Essert, died in Morges, followed swiftly to the grave by his younger brother Gury, who died of typhoid fever at the front in Romania
at the end of July. The Bolshevik revolution in October/November merely set the seal on a year of fragmentation and disintegration. Under these wretched conditions, the idea, hatched early in 1918, that he and Ramuz should write a theatre piece that could tour around and be cheap to perform, with two or three actors, a couple of musicians and a portable stage, may initially have had an economic motive. But if so, it failed dismally. When Histoire du soldat was finally staged in Lausanne in September 1918 (with eight musicians, including a conductor, Ernest Ansermet, two dancers and three speakers; see fig.8), it went ahead only thanks to substantial patronage from the Winterthur tea millionaire, Werner Reinhart, and all subsequent performances were cancelled because of the Spanish flu epidemic. Artistically, too, the piece has always had its detractors. The text after Afanas'yev (much wordier in the 1918 version), about the soldier who sells the Devil his violin in return for worldly wealth and a good marriage, has with some justice been seen as moralizing and over-literary. But for Stravinsky the work was important because it enabled him to take stock of apparently unrelated recent tendencies. His score, which could avoid direct concern with the words (since they are never sung), brings together Russian dances of extreme subtlety with modern parodies: a Lutheran chorale, a march, a waltz, a tango and a ragtime (one of several such pieces he worked on at this time). The economy and instrumental brilliance of the writing are throughout astonishing. But the absolute artistic precision which had characterized the recent Russian settings is to some extent dissipated by Ramuz's text, especially as spoken by the narrator, a homely version of an alienation device Stravinsky was to use, and regret, again. Meanwhile the war had ended, and Stravinsky's circumstances still hardly improved. His in-laws, the Belyankins, a family nearly as large as his own, descended on Morges from Russia and moved in. To try to capitalize on an existing copyright score, he made a new suite of The Firebird for reduced orchestra and sold it, illicitly as it turned out, to his new London publisher, J. & W. Chester. He again took up The Wedding and started rescoring it for a small but esoteric ensemble of harmonium, two cimbaloms, pianola and percussion. At the same time he wrote a new set of Russian songs with a piano accompaniment that at times recalls the cimbalom (an instrument that does indeed figure in an unpublished version of one of the songs). He also wrote up the Piano-Rag-Music for Artur Rubinstein, in return for a cash gift of a year before (already, of course, long since spent). Financially the situation was temporarily saved, in the summer of 1919, by a donation from a group of philanthropic New York women, and by a commission from the Flonzaley String Quartet which became the little Concertino of 1920. Artistically it was transformed by a proposal from Diaghilev which smoothly ignored both their contractual quarrel and the unfinished masterpiece that was aggravating it, and sent Stravinsky
met at the Chauve-Souris cabaret in February 1921. By July he and Vera were passionately in love; the following spring she abandoned her husband, and from then on the composer led a more or less openly double life apparently with his wife's complicity, though it should be said that the despotic Igor probably gave her little choice and may have led her to feel that without her acquiescence he would leave her and their young family for good. But it was in Biarritz with his family that he chiefly found the peace and security he always needed for his work. The first major new project, probably dreamt up in discussion with Diaghilev and his new secretary, a 17-year-old Russian poet by the name of Boris Kokhno, was for a short opera called Mavra, based on an ironic verse story by Pushkin about a girl in 1830s St Petersburg who tricks her mother into employing a handsome young hussar in drag as the family cook. Stravinsky had been in Spain with Diaghilev at Easter 1921, and in London with him in June, where he heard Eugene Goossens conduct The Rite of Spring brilliantly and Serge Koussevitzky conduct the world premiere of the Symphonies d'instruments a vent atrociously (both performances in the Queen's Hall). But Mavra was consciously designed as a refutation of this old neo-nationalist Russian style. They had been talking about Tchaikovsky, of whose Sleeping Beauty Diaghilev was planning a major revival for London that autumn and for which Stravinsky was to make some necessary orchestrations. And it may be that in discussing the merits of Tchaikovsky (whose music was routinely despised by thinking Parisians of the day, but adored by Diaghilev and his friends) they found themselves considering the whole question of Russian style and of what might be a musical equivalent of Pushkin's mock-banal poem, much of which is taken up with heavy sarcasm at the expense of Romantic self-consciousness about art and technique. Now Stravinsky and Kokhno conceived the idea of a work which would similarly turn the fashionable Russianism of the pre-war Ballets Russes on its head. It would reject the pallid verism and outworn folksiness of The Five, and replace it with a classical Russianism, referring to Tchaikovsky and Glinka, and cast in an old-fashioned form of set numbers and recitatives, tonal rather than modal (at least by allusion), and with standard oompah accompaniments as in the old ballads still unblushingly purveyed by emigre cabarets like the Chauve-Souris. Mavra, written the following winter (19212) and regarded from the first by Stravinsky as one of his best works, has to others often seemed barely to survive the weight of artistic polemic placed on its shoulders. In its style-consciousness, its insistence that (to paraphrase Taruskin) the telling is more interesting than the tale, it must be regarded as the start of that peculiarly Stravinskian neo-classicism in which decisions about style and language are as much a part of the argument as decisions about material and form. In his own mind, this issue was tied up with a certain kind
of formalism. Form was content; art was a question of order, and to achieve this the artist must stand back, observe his material coolly and objectively, reject the passionate self-promotion of the Romantic composer (as well as, he was soon adding, of the Romantic performer). Little of this was understood by the work's first Paris audience in June 1922, who were not helped, admittedly, by the fact that Renard, which seemed to be the sort of work Stravinsky was now discarding, had had its premiere less than three weeks before, and would later run with Mavra on the same bill. The opera's polemics, in as much as they were noticed at all, struck Parisians as hopelessly esoteric, and no doubt this was to some extent Stravinsky's intention in choosing the (to Parisians) largely unknown Pushkin and Glinka, along with the vulgar Tchaikovsky, as his models. He next embarked on an instrumental work which, because its models are more openly those of the high-classical German tradition, and because Stravinsky set out his formalist ideas about it in an article published (in English) in the Brooklyn journal The Arts (January 1924) soon after its first performance, has been more generally regarded as the start of neo-classicism in his music. With its dry wind sonorities, its highly self-conscious adoption of classical forms and procedures (sonata, variation, fugue), and its sprightly divertimento tone, the Octet readily assumed the role of Stravinsky's answer to Cocteau's demand, in Le coq et l'arlequin, for une musique sur la terre, une musique de tous les jours. And when the composer himself conducted the first performance in the unlikely surroundings of the Opera in October 1923, he was anticipating a new career which itself would bear all the hallmarks of an accommodation to the great tradition. Stravinsky had occasionally conducted performances of his own works (the first time ever seems to have been in one of Ansermet's concerts in Montreux in April 1914, when he conducted the scherzo from his Symphony in E), but never before a first performance and never yet a whole concert; this happened for the first time a month after the Octet premiere at a Wiener concert in the Salle des Agriculteurs. Nor had he appeared in public as a solo pianist, except in chamber concerts in Switzerland. He was now, however, writing a Piano Concerto which in the end he would not only premiere (in May 1924) but also embargo for five years thereafter. Thus the music in which Stravinsky claimed to expunge the interpreter, a music that pretended to be dry, mechanical and objective, became the basis of his own career as an interpreter. Meanwhile, The Wedding had itself at last reached the stage in Paris in May 1923 in a form which also seemed curiously to co-opt this most ethnically Russian of all his works into a neo-classical sound-world, with its four pianos (actually two double pianos in the first production) and mainly unpitched percussion, together with a constructivist choreography by Nizhinsky's sister Bronislava. This was one of several catching-up premieres of Stravinsky stage
works during these years in Paris, including also the 1922 Renard. In April 1924 the French capital for the first time saw Histoire du soldat, having previously heard only the various suites (but this production had been preceded by one in Frankfurt in June 1923, revived at the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition in August, a performance Stravinsky had attended). The continued appearance of such works as novelties hardly made it any easier for baffled audiences and critics to make sense of the new direction in his music of the 1920s, while for him it was a significant motivation for new work that it kept him several steps ahead of his chic, novelty-hunting Parisian audience. In September 1924, the Stravinsky family (now including Igor's mother, who had arrived from Petrograd in 1922) moved from Biarritz to an expensive house in Nice. By now, what was to be his lifestyle for many years had been established. He would divide his time about equally between Nice, on the one hand, and Paris and foreign tours on the other. On the latter Vera would usually accompany him, though sometimes (presumably under domestic pressure) Vera would go back to Paris and the composer would meet up, usually in Switzerland where Katya had relations, with one or more members of his family. In Paris he would mainly work on his pianola transcriptions, though some composition was also certainly done there. Life in Paris would be sociable, gregarious, rich in concert-, theatre- and cinema-going. On tour he would either conduct or play (rarely both in the same concert) nearly always his own music. His voluminous correspondence with concert agents is a whole vast sub-literature in his archive, revealing him to have been an indefatigable and often disagreeable negotiator who could command high fees for concert appearances and who, conscious of his uniqueness, feared no competition. Opinions differed as to his skill as a performer in the 1920s and 30s, but he was certainly good enough to present with reasonable clarity music which, for most conductors, offered a formidable aesthetic challenge (though recordings suggest that the trickier pieces, like The Rite of Spring and Histoire du soldat, may have been out of his reach technically at this period). On the rostrum he was incredibly vital, athletic, almost balletic, a physical embodiment of his music. In general, musicians respected him and worked well for him, even though there is evidence that his ear in rehearsal was less acute than in composition. As a pianist too he embodied his music. Critics sometimes grumbled about his dry, meccanico style. And, like a machine, he could be fallible. He himself claimed that he lacked a performer's memory. But his most famous example of forgetfulness, in the slow movement of the Piano Concerto at its first performance, may be apocryphal, since Prokofiev, who was present, told Myaskovsky (in a letter of 1 June 1924) that Stravinsky had been nervous and had the score on a stool beside him, but there were no incidents. After the concerto, he worked on two solo piano pieces, the Sonata and
the Serenade in A (a title not so much ironic as suggestive of Stravinsky's way of looking at tonality, in terms of starting-points and focuses). After completing the Sonata, in October 1924, he set off on two ground-breaking tours: to Warsaw, his first visit for ten years to territory formerly part of Tsarist Russia; and, early in 1925, to the USA, where he appeared in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and Cincinnati, and signed his first recording contract (with Brunswick). In New York he recorded two discs of his easy pieces for piano not quite his first recordings, however, since an incomplete disc had been cut of the Octet in Paris after the premiere. The Serenade, written in 1925, was intended as material for recording under this contract. But no such discs were ever issued, mainly because the acoustic techniques still used by Brunswick were about to be superseded by electrical ones. Stravinsky's own first electrical recordings three years later (of excerpts from Petrushka, The Firebird and Pulcinella) would be with Columbia, in London and Paris.6. Return to the theatre, 192534.After playing his Sonata for the first time in public at the ISCM Festival in Venice in September 1925 (two months after the public premiere by Felix Petyrek at Donaueschingen), Stravinsky embarked on what was to prove his biggest new work since The Firebird. In hindsight, we can sense something doctrinaire about the series of instrumental pieces he had composed after Mavra, some need to demonstrate how cool, objective and style-conscious he could be. Boris Asaf'yev, the Soviet author of one of the first and best studies of Stravinsky's music, called this the synthetic instrumental style of contemporary urbanism. But Oedipus rex, though it shares the style-centred approach of its immediate predecessors, is essentially red-blooded, a theatrical masterpiece by one of the greatest stage composers of his day. There is contemporary evidence for Stravinsky's later assertion that its impulse was partly religious. He had recently been on exceptionally good terms with Cocteau, who had himself been undergoing a somewhat confused religious reconversion through the agency of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain; Stravinsky himself did not meet Maritain until June 1926, but he had read his Art et scolastique (1920), with its neo-Thomist plea for order as an aesthetic goal and for artists to return to the medieval ideals of humble, anonymous artisanship. Back in Nice in September 1925, Stravinsky was telling everyone about a miracle in Venice, when an abscess on his right index finger had inexplicably vanished just as he was sitting down to play the Sonata. A few months later, at Easter 1926, he returned formally to the Orthodox communion, to which his parents had always paid lip-service but without any particular commitment or regularity. Stravinsky told Cocteau (letter of 11 October 1925) that he had wanted for some time to write an opera in Latin on the subject of a tragedy of the ancient world, with which everyone would be familiar. The idea was for a monumental, lapidary work of profound seriousness, but in some sense distanced from
the audience in much the same way as an austere sacred ritual. Cocteau had some experience of this genre. He had made a modernized French version of Sophocles's Antigone; and more recently he had written Orphee, a modish, witty predecessor to his famous film of that name. Orphee unmistakably lies behind Cocteau's scenic ideas for Oedipus rex, as can be seen from a comparison of the prefaces and design sketches in the two publications. But the play's boulevardier witticisms were emphatically not required. For Stravinsky, stylistic ambivalence was not a joke but a way of thinking and feeling. Oedipus rex would refer to the past, just as Mavra had done, but its models would be of the profoundest and weightiest: Handel, Gluck, Verdi. Sophocles would be glimpsed through the prism of opera since 1600, but he would not be crudely operatized. The characters would mostly be like statues, masked, immobile except for their heads and arms, helpless playthings of the gods, their plight intensified by a kind of music associated with a theatre whose dramatis personae are all too mobile, and whose disasters are nothing if not self-motivated. Stravinsky divided the action into a series of self-contained scenas, linked by narrations for a speaker in evening dress, a kind of self-important museum-guide whose task is to remind the audience of the story as they go along (the device is pure Cocteau, but Stravinsky, who later denounced it, seems to have accepted it without demur at the time). Within these scenas are arias, ensembles and choruses, planned semi-formally, as in the scenes of a Verdi opera. Apart from Oedipus himself and, peripherally, the Messenger, no character appears in more than one scene; but Oedipus's own downfall is superbly charted, from the self-confident embellishments of his vocal lines early on to the stark, unadorned B minor arpeggio of his final phrase Lux facta est. Throughout, the work shows astonishing control of resources, and everywhere there is meticulous planning; yet on many levels, things are other than they seem. For instance, the work sees Stravinsky returning to the standard symphony orchestra for the first time (in a new composition) since completing The Nightingale; but the strings are very sparingly used, and for whole pages the wind are dominant. The music seems tonally and rhythmically plain by his standards. But the tonality is ambiguous and referential, rather than clearcut, and the metrics are subject to hidden controls; in the scene where the Shepherd and Messenger reveal Oedipus's history, the tempos are entirely governed by a single metronomic unit (a point hardly ever observed in performance). These and other procedures may be seen as equivalents to the Sophoclean concept of dramatic irony. But they are also aspects of Stravinsky's own classicism: modern formalisms that constantly interrogate the conventional forms on which the music appears to be based. From early on, Oedipus rex had been planned as a surprise for Diaghilev in his 20th anniversary season. But the idea foundered on the problem that only Diaghilev could efficiently plan a performance by his own company. Cocteau fluttered enthusiastically