by Alex Ross
In later years, Stravinsky preferred to describe himself as a deracinated modernist, a dealer in abstraction, and went to some lengths to conceal his early folkish enthusiasms. As Richard Taruskin documents, in his huge and marvelous book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, the composer actively suppressed information—“lied” is not too strong a word—about the source material of the Rite, claiming that there was only one folk song in the ballet. In the same vein, he derided Bartók’s “gusto for his native folklore.” In fact, the young Stravinsky steeped himself in Russian material, striving to become a vessel of primitive energies. On one occasion he described his homeland as a force of “beautiful, healthy barbarism, big with the seed that will impregnate the thinking of the world.”
With his egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and luxurious mouth, Stravinsky had a slightly insectoid appearance. His manners were elegant, his clothes impeccable, his jokes lethal. In every way, he personified Rimbaud’s dictum “Il faut être absolument moderne.” If there was something of the dandy or aesthete about Stravinsky, he did not create an artificial impression in person. His mind was in perfect sync with his body, which he kept in trim, gymnastic condition. His friend and fellow composer Nicolas Nabokov once wrote: “His music reflects his peculiarly elastic walk, the syncopated nod of his head and shrug of his shoulders, and those abrupt stops in the middle of a conversation when, like a dancer, he suddenly freezes in a balletlike pose and punctuates his argument with a broad and sarcastic grin.”
Stravinsky was born in 1882. His ancestors were landowning aristocrats, members of the old Polish and Russian ruling classes who controlled much of western Russia. Young Igor spent many summers at his uncle’s spacious country estate in Ustyluh, close to the present Polish-Ukrainian border. There he would have heard folk songs and dances of the region, which resembled to some extent the music that attracted Bartók and Janáček. Ustyluh lies about two hundred miles from Janáček’s birthplace of Hukvaldy, and not too much farther from the Carpathian Mountains, where Bartók had his folk-music epiphany. But Stravinsky’s sensibility was shaped equally by the sophisticated atmosphere of St. Petersburg, which, at the turn of the century, was experiencing a Silver Age, its artistic productions rivaling those of fin-de-siècle Vienna and Paris in luminosity of surface and intensity of feeling.
Stravinsky’s father, Fyodor, was a noted bass-baritone at the imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Their home was comfortable, although Fyodor’s cold, strict personality cast a shadow over it. Igor drew close to his brother Gury, who provided a measure of emotional warmth that was otherwise missing from the household. Although Igor read scores and improvised at the piano from an early age, he came late to composition, and began to display real ambition only after his father’s death, in 1902. He took lessons from Rimsky starting that year, his student exercises mostly bland and imitative. The first flashes of genius came as late as 1907 and 1908, in the brief orchestral showpieces Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks, both of which blended French and Russian sounds. The works caught the attention of Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, who was on the lookout for gifted young composers. In the 1910 season, Diaghilev planned to stun his Paris public with a multimedia fantasy on the folk legend of the Firebird, and when several more illustrious names turned him down, he took a chance on the novice.
The Firebird was a magical concoction: Russian musical sorcery, overlaid with French effects, lit up by the X-factor of Stravinsky’s talent. The score is infested with references to Rimsky’s works, and it leans heavily on the master’s tone-semitone scale. But Stravinsky makes his mark in the zone of rhythm. In the climactic “Infernal Dance,” in which the minions of the evil Kashchei are put under the Firebird’s spell, the slashing Stravinsky accents make their first appearance. The timpani lays down a steady ostinato of rapid pulses. The bassoons, horns, and tuba play a jumpy theme whose accents fall between the beats. Then, at the end of the phrase, the accent shifts and now falls on the beat: the ear has been tricked into thinking that the offbeats are main beats and the main beat is a syncopation. The full orchestra sets the record straight with a whiplash triple forte. Such syncopations were not uncommon in nineteenth-century music, and Stravinsky may have heard something like them in rural Russian dances. But they also echo some of Ravel’s favorite devices, and the last few bars of the “Infernal Dance” are basically lifted from the Rapsodie espagnole.
Overnight, under the spotlight of Diaghilev’s patronage, an unknown became a phenomenon. Within days of his arrival for the Firebird premiere, Stravinsky met Proust, Gide, Saint-John Perse, Paul Claudel, Sarah Bernhardt, and all the major composers. “This goes further than Rimsky,” Ravel wrote to a colleague after hearing Firebird. “Come quickly.” Buoyed by the Paris atmosphere and by his impressive new fans, Stravinsky set to work on a second ballet, Petrushka, a tale of an animate puppet who performs at a Russian village fair. Unorthodox ideas emerged from his conversations with the intellectuals of the Ballets Russes. The choreographer Michel Fokine talked of a stage full of natural, flowing movement, the antithesis of academic ballet. Stravinsky responded with a score of exhilarating immediacy: phrases jump in from nowhere, snap in the air, stop on a dime, taper off with a languid shrug. The designer Alexander Benois had asked him to write a “symphony of the street,” a “counterpoint of twenty themes,” replete with carousels, concertinas, sleigh bells, and popular airs. Stravinsky answered with periodic explosions of dissonance and rhythmic complexity, which mimic the energy of the modern urban crowd.
The young sophisticates of Paris, for whom Debussy’s music had always been a little too murkily mystical, rejoiced. It was as if all the lights had been switched on in the Wagnerian room. Jacques Rivière, the influential editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, wrote of Petrushka: “It suppresses, it clarifies, it hits only the telling and succinct notes.” The composer had succeeded in carrying out Wagner’s “synthesis of the arts” without resorting to Wagnerian grandiloquence. Stravinsky could never be described as a humble man, yet there was something selfless in the way he made himself a collaborator among collaborators, exchanging ideas with Fokine, Benois, and Diaghilev, adapting his music to their needs. No prophet descending from the mountaintop, he was a man of the world to whom writers, dancers, and painters could relate. Ezra Pound once said, “Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job.”
One night in 1910, Stravinsky dreamed of a young girl dancing herself to death, and soon after he began to plan Vesna svyashchennaya, or Holy Spring. (The ballet’s standard Western titles, Le Sacre du printemps and The Rite of Spring, miss the “holy” element, the pagan devotion.) Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions contains the definitive account of the ballet’s gestation. For help in fleshing out the scenario, Stravinsky turned to Roerich, the painter and Slavic guru, who plotted out a sequence of historically accurate springtime rituals. Stravinsky delved into folkloric sources, drawing variously on a book of Lithuanian wedding songs, Rimsky’s folk-song arrangements, and his own memories of peasant singers and professional balladeers at Ustyluh, where he had built his own summer house in 1908. He may also have seen the impeccably prepared folk collections of Yevgeniya Linyova, notated with the help of recording cylinders. Stravinsky hardly matched Bartók in the thoroughness of his research, but he thought carefully about which songs would be most appropriate, favoring geographical areas where paganism had persisted longest and emphasizing songs on the theme of spring.
Having assembled his folk melodies, Stravinsky proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages. As in Bartók’s Bagatelles, the folk material enters the genetic code of the music, governing all aspects of the organism. Bartók was one listener who had no trouble figuring out what Stravinsky was up to. In a 1943 lecture at Harvard, he called the Rite “a kind of apotheosis of the Russian rural music” and explained how its revolutionary construction was related to the source mater
ial: “Even the origin of the rough-grained, brittle, and jerky musical structure, backed by ostinatos, which is so completely different from any structural proceeding of the past, may be sought in short-breathed Russian peasant motives.”
In a resonant phrase, Taruskin calls the Rite a “great fusion” of national and modern sounds. Its folkish and avant-garde traits reinforce each other. Consider that percussive, pungent chord in “The Augurs of Spring,” the one that fuses a major triad with an adjacent dominant seventh. It is not unprecedented: something like it appears in Salome, at the line “You are truly your mother’s child.” But the aim of the gesture is not to outdo the Germans in the race toward total dissonance. Instead, it points up relationships among the simple folkish patterns that surround it. Immediately before the chords begin their stomp, the violins play a little figure that spells out the E-flat portion of the harmony. The winds resume that figure a little later. After several such back-and-forths, the ear can easily pick out the tonal components within any dissonance.
If other composers went further in revolutionizing harmony, none rivaled Stravinsky in the realm of rhythm. Off-the-beat accents had welled up in Firebird and Petrushka, although there the syncopations usually followed a set pattern. In “The Augurs of Spring,” there is no way to predict where the accents will land next. As the composer-critic Virgil Thomson once explained, the body tends to move up and down in syncopated or polyrhythmic music because it wants to emphasize the main beat that the stray accents threaten to wipe out. “A silent accent is the strongest of all accents,” he wrote. “It forces the body to replace it with a motion.” (Think of Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley,” with its “bomp ba-bomp bomp [oomph!] bomp bomp.”) In “Augurs” the positioning of the “bomps” and the “oomphs” changes almost from bar to bar, so that the main beat nearly disappears and the syncopations have the field to themselves.
In “Procession of the Sage,” Stravinsky takes a different tack: in the climactic eight-bar section, each instrument plays a regular pattern, but almost every pattern is distinct. Tubas play a sixteen-beat figure three times; horns play an eight-beat phrase six times; a guiro plays eight pulses to the bar; the timpani play twelve pulses to the bar; and so on. This is Rapsodie espagnole raised to the nth degree, and it rivals the most intricate structures of West African drumming. As in much African music, asymmetrical “time-line” patterns jostle against a hidden master pulse.
“Une musique nègre,” Debussy called the Rite. There is no evidence that Stravinsky knew African music, although a few early ethnographic studies of that largely unknown realm, such as Henri-Alexandre Junod’s Les Chants et les contes des Ba-Ronga, had circulated. Taruskin points out that irregular rhythms were also a long-standing feature of Russian folk music. But his notion of a “great fusion” in the Rite might ultimately be widened to mean something more than a thoroughgoing assimilation of folk motifs into modern music. These rhythms are global in reach, and at the time they were global in their impact. Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing: he was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on “Salt Peanuts.” Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into “Koko,” causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.
The first part of the Rite, which ends with the sweat-inducing crescendo of “Dance of the Earth,” is viscerally exciting, even celebratory. Part II is grittier, swaying between languor and violence. Debussy’s influence is palpable at the outset: the crawling sextuplet figures in the winds and the ghoulishly bouncing string figures in the Introduction come from Debussy’s Nocturnes, as does the snaking flute melody in “Ritual Action of the Ancestors.” But Stravinsky has hardly run out of original ideas. At the end of the latter section the bass clarinet plays a soft, quick, spooky solo—the lower winds periodically show up in the score like black-clad cabaret hosts, ushering the next scandal onstage—and the final “Danse sacrale” begins. Another means of forward propulsion kicks in: in place of regular pulses in simultaneous layers there are variable rhythmic “cells” that expand or contract. As Bartók observed, these features are also ethnographically precise; severe rhythmic and metric asymmetries are common in Russian and Eastern European folk music. The cumulative effect is of exhaustion, not of intensification. The every-which-way pulsation leads to a feeling of stasis. The earth seems to be tiring itself out, just as the young girl is dancing herself to death. At the end comes a morbid spasm.
The notion of a female sacrifice was Stravinsky’s special contribution. As Lynn Garafola points out, no pagan people except for the Aztecs demanded the sacrifice of young girls. Stravinsky was giving voice not to ancient instincts but to the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary West. At the turn of the century, purportedly civilized societies were singling out scapegoats on whom the ills of modernity could be blamed: Russian townspeople were enacting pogroms of Jews, white Americans were lynching young black men, and, closer to home, the denizens of the sixteenth arrondissement had cheered on the anti-Semitic campaign against the Jewish patriot Alfred Dreyfus. Against that backdrop, the urban noises in Stravinsky’s score—sounds like pistons pumping, whistles screeching, crowds stamping—suggest a sophisticated city undergoing an atavistic regression.
More than a few people left the premiere both thrilled and chilled by the experience. Jacques Rivière, who took such joy from Petrushka, spoke no less rapturously of the Rite, but in the end he found himself falling into a despondent mood. “There are works that overflow with accusations, hopes, encouragements,” Rivière wrote. “You suffer, regret, take confidence with them; they contain all the beautiful perturbations of the spirit; you give yourself to them as to the counsel of a friend; they have a moral quality and always partake of pity.” The Rite, he admitted, was not among them.
War
When the guns began firing in August 1914, French, Russian, and English composers were swept away by the same patriotic fervor that had overcome their Austro-German counterparts. The long-standing resentment of Teutonic hegemony in the classical repertory blossomed into hate. In London, Strauss’s Don Juan was taken off a Proms concert. The League for the Defense of French Music sought to ban “infiltrations funèstes,” or fatal infiltrations, of enemy composers. Manuel de Falla urged colleagues to reject any “universal formula,” by which he presumably meant, as his biographer Carol Hess says, the “purely musical” ethos of the German canon. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Wagner disappeared from the Metropolitan Opera stage and Beethoven symphonies from programs in Pittsburgh. Karl Muck, the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, was thrown in prison on the spurious grounds that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Stories circulated that Muck had been communicating with U-boats from his cottage in Seal Harbor, Maine.
Absurd as this musical paranoia now seems, it was activated by deep shock at Germany’s campaign of total war. Several significant composers lost their lives in ways that underlined the changing definition of combat. Albéric Magnard, composer of four eloquent Franckish symphonies, was burned alive along with a number of his works after he fired on marauding German soldiers from a window of his home. The refined Catalan composer Enrique Granados drowned in the middle of the Atlantic after a passenger vessel he was traveling on was torpedoed by a German submarine. England mourned the loss of George Butterworth, who worked alongside folkish composers such as Grainger, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Butterworth’s specialty was morris dancing, and on his expeditions into the countryside he made meticulous notes such as these:
Both hands touch lower chest
" " " upper "
clap
slap with opposite
Then Hey
He was killed in August 1916, aged thirty-one, during an early-morning assaul
t on a German trench in the Battle of Pozières Ridge.
Maurice Ravel nearly died at around the same time. The tiny-framed composer should have been barred from military service, but, enraged by the bombing of Reims, he enlisted as a truck driver. By the spring of 1916 Ravel was deployed just behind the front lines, and witnessed the ghastly aftermath of the Battle of Verdun. He often had to weave back and forth on pockmarked roads as shells fell all around him. Once he found himself in an abandoned town on a sunny day, walking through the empty, silent streets. “I don’t believe I will ever experience a more profound and stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror,” he wrote. Another time he entered an abandoned château, found a fine Erard piano, and sat down to play some Chopin.
Such unreal experiences provide clues to the piano cycle Le Tombeau de Couperin, Ravel’s principal work of the war years. In the context of its time, Le Tombeau may seem a little precious, as if it were averting its gaze from the carnage. Not only the title but also the names of the movements—Prélude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet, and Toccata—look back to the French Baroque, paying homage to the harpsichord suites of Couperin and Rameau. But, as ever with Ravel, emotion smolders under the exquisite surface. Each piece is dedicated to a friend who died in battle; the old styles pass by like a procession of ghosts. There are also hints of muscle, glints of steel. Glenn Watkins, in his study of music during the Great War, argues that the metallic stream of tone in the Toccata is meant to suggest the twisting motion of a fighter plane. Ravel dreamed of being an aviator, a solitary hero in the sky.
