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The Music of Innovation
As the arts of music flourished—and even as American popular music sped across the world—some of the most innovative composers became estranged from the large audience. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), often called the apostle of modernism in music, had the freedom of the self-trained amateur, and never lost his eagerness to try the new. But the works that brought him fame before he was thirty would, to his irritation, create unfulfilled popular expectations for the rest of his life. In his autobiography, written when he was forty-eight, he was already expressing his alienation from those who listened.
At the beginning of my career as a composer I was a good deal spoiled by the public. Even such things as were at first received with hostility were soon afterwards acclaimed. But I have a very distinct feeling that in the course of the last fifteen years my written work has estranged me from the great mass of my listeners. They expected something different from me. Liking the music of L’Oiseau de feu, Petroushka, Le Sacre, and Les Noces, and being accustomed to the language of those works, they are astonished to hear me speaking in another idiom. They cannot and will not follow me in the progress of my musical thought. What moves and delights me leaves them indifferent, and what still continues to interest them holds no further attraction for me.… I believe that there was seldom any real communion of spirit between us. If it happened—and it still happens—that we liked the same things, I very much doubt whether it was for the same reasons. Yet art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.
His first works, which established him as a major innovative composer, were still firmly rooted in the Russian folk tradition. The career that would take him away from “the great mass of listeners” was a voyage less of exile than of transplantation into Switzerland, France, and then into the United States.
Born near St. Petersburg, the third of four boys, as a son of the leading bass singer of the Imperial Opera, he would hear his father practicing arias. His boyhood memories of colorful St. Petersburg and visits to the nearby country estate of his uncle, and to rural summer fairs, stayed with him, as did the explosive temper of his father and the coldness of his mother. The first musical performance he recalled attending was Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty when he was only seven. At nine he was given piano lessons, but was by no means precocious. His father did secure him a pass to opera rehearsals at the nearby Maryinsky Theater, where, by the time he was sixteen, he was spending five or six nights a week. To discourage his interest in making a career in music, his parents sent him to study law at St. Petersburg University.
A desultory law student, he went on composing, still hoping to prove to his family his talent for a musical career. A fellow student was the son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), the Russian nationalist composer whose works Stravinsky much admired. One summer while staying with the Rimsky-Korsakov family, he asked advice on how to become a composer. Rimsky-Korsakov, not impressed at hearing Stravinsky play his own compositions, sympathetically advised him not to enter the conservatory where Rimsky-Korsakov was a professor but to pursue his studies of harmony and counterpoint and to seek private instruction. Rimsky-Korsakov himself was mostly self-educated. He had never taken an academic course in musical theory, but had received crucial advice and encouragement as a young man from Tchaikovsky. Now he would play a similar role for Stravinsky.
With the death of his father Stravinsky was liberated from the pursuit of the law. Now, he said, his mother’s “delight in torturing me seemed slightly less intense.” He joined the disciples who met weekly at Rimsky-Korsakov’s house to hear their compositions. Rimsky-Korsakov, now Stravinsky’s mentor, for three years gave him two composition lessons a week, including the principles of sonata form and orchestration. When Stravinsky married Catherine Nossenko in 1906 (despite the law banning marriage between first cousins), the witnesses were Rimsky-Korsakov’s two sons. Meanwhile Stravinsky was showing sketches for his compositions to his master for criticism and approval.
The death of Rimsky-Korsakov in mid-career in 1908 was a blow for Stravinsky, but a new patron would set the stage for his career. In February 1909, when two of Stravinsky’s works—the Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks—were performed in St. Petersburg, the audience included Sergei Diaghilev. His art review, Mir Isskustva, had recently ceased, and, as we have seen, Diaghilev was moving his energies to Paris. There, offering concerts of Russian music, he had just produced the first Paris performance of Boris Godunov, and was planning a season of Russian ballet. When the established composer whom he had commissioned to write a new score for the ballet on the Russian folktale of the firebird could not deliver, Diaghilev turned to the young man whose music had so impressed him. Stravinsky’s Firebird music drew on the young composer’s lessons in orchestration from Rimsky-Korsakov, revived folk melodies, and charmed by its distinctive rhythms and syncopations for the ballet. Stravinsky’s deft and lively score, distinguishing between the human and the magical elements in the story, delighted audiences and critics and brought him instant celebrity. This, the twenty-eight-year-old Stravinsky’s first composition for the stage, would remain his most popular work, though he still had six productive decades ahead.
Even before the production of The Firebird in 1910 Diaghilev saw in him “a man on the eve of celebrity.” Stravinsky joined Diaghilev’s group, whom he captivated by his enthusiasm for all the arts and his “absence of the slightest dogmatism.” The dazzling Paris galaxy of his acquaintances included Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Giacomo Puccini, Marcel Proust and Paul Claudel, and Pablo Picasso.
His next work with Diaghilev, Petrouchka, was also based on a Russian folk theme. This time it was the story of a puppet at a Russian country fair, how it is brought to life, then dies, but finally reappears as a ghost. The first performance on June 13, 1911, with Nijinsky as Petrouchka, was again acclaimed, doubly reassuring Stravinsky, who had a newly active role in planning the ballet. “It gave me the absolute conviction of my ear just as I was about to begin The Rite of Spring.”
Stravinsky’s triumph with his music for Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring, first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913, as we have seen, created a scandale in the musical community, but confirmed his role as the leading modernist composer. At the end of the tumultuous evening Diaghilev had commented, “Exactly what I wanted!” Stravinsky reported himself and Nijinsky to be “excited, angry, disgusted and happy.” The shocking originality of his music for The Rite was Stravinsky’s unmistakable victory over his parents’ efforts to stifle his talents in an uncreative conventional life. And it was no accident that he chose the rite of spring, the season that Stravinsky himself remembered from his childhood on the Russian countryside as a time of sudden rebirth “that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole world cracking.”
At the age of thirty-one, Stravinsky had achieved a reputation as the musical prodigy of the twentieth century and created works that would continue to please large audiences. His next sixty years produced an encyclopedia of sometimes contradictory musical experiments. During his long and restless life he would divide himself among three nationalities. When World War I broke out he was a European celebrity in the world of music, and for the past four years had been living in a Swiss mountain chalet, returning to Russia only for the summers. Exempted from Russian military service for reasons of health, he preferred the peace of neutral Switzerland to a nation threatened by revolution and disrupted by war. But he did not feel exiled from what interested him most—music and the arts. He kept in touch with Diaghilev, and during visits to Rome he found an affinity of spirit with Picasso. He came to know André Gide and was asked to write incidental music for Gide’s translation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. “When I suggested that the production be in modern dress,” according to Stravinsky, “he was shocked—and deaf to my arguments that we would be nearer Shakespear
e in inventing something new.” In 1920, restless and ready to leave Switzerland, he first thought of moving to Italy, but decided instead to settle in France, the country of his epochal successes. There he would remain for the next twenty years, becoming a French citizen in 1934.
A series of personal losses—the death of his daughter, his wife, and his mother—and the opening of World War II led him in 1939 to move to the United States—and to new experiments. His Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on poetry at Harvard became the Poetics of Music, where he collected his ideas on the phenomenon of music, the composition of music, and the performance of music. In 1940 he married Vera de Bosset, an artist of long acquaintance, and they went west—he said that he needed the California climate for his health. They formally reentered the United States from Mexico in the Russian quota and applied for naturalization papers, bought a house and settled in Hollywood for the next twenty-five years.
In 1938, even before coming to America, he had received a request from the Disney office for permission to use the music of The Rite of Spring in Fantasia. They explained that they did not really need his permission since Le Sacre had not been copyrighted in the United States, but still they offered five thousand dollars for the right to show it abroad. Stravinsky attended a showing with George Balanchine in Hollywood in 1939. “I remember someone offering me a score and, when I said I had my own, the someone saying, ‘But it is all changed.’ And it was indeed.” After settling in Hollywood, he never could agree with the moviemakers despite many invitations, including one for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre and for Franz Werfel’s Song of Bernadette. When he was offered one hundred thousand dollars “to pad a film with music,” he refused, but was told that he would receive the same fee if he would let someone else compose in his name.
He was not averse to bizarre experiments in his own name. When George Balanchine was asked by Ringling Brothers of the Barnum and Bailey Circus to commission a ballet for young elephants in 1942, he passed on the request to Stravinsky. “If they are very young,” Stravinsky agreed, “I’ll do it.” And he produced his Circus Polka in two versions. Stravinsky’s music for The Firebird had made Pavlova so uneasy in 1910 that she refused the title role. Now Stravinsky’s rhythms made the young elephants uneasy. Elephants, their trainer explained, were dignified animals who preferred waltzes and soft, dreamy tunes, but they finally gave in, and, costumed in tutus, performed Stravinsky’s Polka 425 times. The symphonic version was performed by the Boston Symphony in 1944.
In the war years Hollywood had much to offer a lover of experiment. Thomas Mann said he found Hollywood at that time “a more intellectually stimulating and cosmopolitan city than Paris or Munich had ever been.” The Stravinskys, too, enjoyed a circle of the arts that included Nadia Boulanger, Aldous Huxley, Franz Werfel, and countless others. “The ferment of composers, writers, scientists, artists, actors, philosophers and phonies did exist,” observed Vera Stravinsky, “and we often attended the lectures, exhibitions, concerts, performances, social gatherings of these people ourselves.” In 1945, after the war had ended, Stravinsky became an American citizen.
Stravinsky’s career as a refugee from disorder through three nationalities and the turbulence of two world wars affirmed his indelible and uninterrupted citizenship in the experimental world of music. Thus he remained always at home making something new of every form. Although his early success had been in the traditional materials of his Russian nationality, his later experiments ran the gamut of musical genres and traditions. After the shocking modernism and complexity of The Rite of Spring, he turned in new directions, in a “neoclassical” period all his own. The Soldier’s Tale (L’Histoire du Soldat) in 1918 was a landmark departure from nineteenth-century performance styles—in its surprising mixture of instruments, in rejecting the familiar forms both of orchestra and opera. With three dancers, a narrator, and seven instrumentalists, it was designed for performance on a portable stage, and helped introduce the “group-virtuoso” or “combo”—clusters of performers who see themselves uniquely re-creating the composer’s work, each performance being a new experiment. Composed in collaboration with the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz, The Soldier’s Tale was an entertainment “to be read, played, and danced.” It was another new style for Stravinsky, using a small orchestra and borrowing the rhythms of jazz. A kind of simplified mini-Faust, it told of a soldier returning to his native village, being tempted by the Devil, falling in love with a princess, and finally losing his soul to the Devil. Stravinsky later explained that he had never heard a work of jazz performed, but took his knowledge from the sheet music. “I could imagine jazz sound, however, or so I like to think. Jazz meant, in any case, new sound in my music, and l’Histoire marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered.”
Stravinsky showed the boldness of his departure in his Symphonies of Wind Instruments in 1921 where by “symphony” he did not suggest the sonata form but simply meant that instruments were sounding together. “This music is not meant ‘to please’ an audience,” he later explained, “or to rouse its passions. I had hoped, however, that it would appeal to those in whom a purely musical receptivity outweighed the desire to satisfy emotional cravings.” But this had never happened “as the character of my music demanded the most delicate care to attain the ear of the public and to tame the audience to it.” Collaborating with his friend Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), he made an opera-oratorio of Oedipus Rex, intended as a present in honor of Diaghilev’s twentieth anniversary in the theater, first performed by the Russian Ballet in Paris in 1927.
He could also experiment in religious music, where he was hardly more at home than in jazz, but where he was no less imaginative. Living in France, in 1929 he was commissioned by Koussevitsky to write a symphonic work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s fiftieth anniversary. His publisher wanted “something popular”—a work in the nineteenth-century symphony form without chorus. But Stravinsky had other ideas. He had long been thinking of a psalm symphony compounded of parts of the Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth psalms and the whole of the Hundred and fiftieth Psalm, to be sung in Latin. What emerged was his Symphony of Psalms in three parts—Prelude, Double Fugue, and Allegro symphonique—for a chorus of mixed voices and orchestra.
Music historians have ranked this high among his works. But Stravinsky was dismayed that the work was not properly appreciated at the time, and he explained in his Autobiography:
Most people like music because it gives them certain emotions, such as joy, grief, sadness, an image of nature, a subject for daydreams, or—still better—oblivion from “everyday life.” They want a drug—“dope.” It matters little whether this way of thinking of music is expressed directly or is wrapped up in a veil of artificial circumlocutions. Music would not be worth much if it were reduced to such an end. When people have learned to love music for itself, when they listen with other ears, their enjoyment will be of a far higher and more potent order, and they will be able to judge it on a higher plane and realize its intrinsic value.…
All these considerations were evoked by my Symphonie des Psaumes because, both by the public and the press, the attitude I have just described was specially manifested in regard to that work. Notwithstanding the interest aroused by the composition, I noticed a certain perplexity caused, not by the music as such, but by the inability of listeners to understand the reason which had led me to compose a symphony in a spirit which found no echo in their mentality.
There was ample reason for puzzlement in the audience hearing a symphony of religious texts whose composer warned against seeking any religious meaning. Before this work he had been a communicant of the Orthodox Church for some four years. His Swiss friend and a favorite conductor of his works, Ernest Ansermet, observed that “as Stravinsky, in response to some form of inner compulsion, does not make of music an act of self-expression, his religious music can reveal only a kind of ‘made-up’ religiosity. The Symphony of Psalms, for instance, expresses the religiosity o
f others—of the imaginary choir of which the actual singing choir is an analogon: but it must be agreed that the expression of this religiosity is itself absolutely authentic.”
The quarter century of Stravinsky’s American reincarnation offered example after example of new experiments. In 1947 a Chicago exhibition of eight paintings by William Hogarth (1697–1764), The Rake’s Progress (1732–33), seemed to provide a “succession of operatic scenes” for the opera around English themes and with “music originated in the English prosody” that he had long thought of composing. His Hollywood neighbor Aldous Huxley suggested W. H. Auden as the librettist, and Stravinsky brought Auden, who considered this assignment the “greatest honor” of his life, to Hollywood. There they laid out the plot, action, scene, and characters. In 1948 Auden delivered the brilliant libretto, written with his friend Chester Kallman, and Stravinsky spent three years composing the music. He aimed to create an opera in the “Italian-Mozartian” style. The story followed the themes of Hogarth’s series from the inheritance of a fortune by Tom Rakewell through his exploits, his drunken orgy with whores, his arrest for debt, his rescue from prison by the lovely Sarah Young, whom he had seduced and who had borne him a child, his marriage to a rich old lady, gambling away his second fortune, then being imprisoned for debt, and ending life in a madhouse. The Hogarth themes are enriched and embellished by witty Auden touches—hints of Dr. Faustus and a new character who offers Faustian temptations to the hero. In Auden’s fantastic epilogue the devil fails in his gamble for Tom Rakewell’s soul, but succeeds in condemning him to Bedlam, where Tom believes he is Adonis awaiting his Venus, before his death and the end in a morality-play message.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 71
