by Alex Ross
“That is no country for old men,” William Butler Yeats cries in “Sailing to Byzantium.” The youngest composers, the children of 1900, adapted most easily to the racing tempos of the twenties; they had the metabolism to digest fresh paradigms overnight. The older ones faced an agonizing adjustment—and to be old in that youth-mad time was to be over the age of forty. Bartók probably spoke for many when he wrote in a letter of 1926, the year of Yeats’s poem: “To be frank, recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore. All the tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal, vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal, and the rest…” Stravinsky let out a howl of disgust in a letter to Ansermet in 1922: “Here I am the head of modern music, as they say and so I believe, here I am forty years old—here I am being passed over in the grand prizes of the ‘great international congress’ in Salzburg…The committee reserved places of great importance on the program for Darius Milhaud, Ernest Blook [sic], Richard Strauss (probably Corngold [sic], Casella, Varese [sic], too)—all the musicians of ‘international’ stature…Oh, the cons.”
Ravel’s moment of crisis came when he played his new ballet score La Valse for Diaghilev in 1920. “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece, but it isn’t a ballet,” the impresario told him. “It’s a portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” Evidently, Diaghilev was saying that Ravel’s score lacked the pitiless spirit that the postwar era required.
The verdict was bizarre, for La Valse is both a dazzling incarnation of the twenties and a dazzling satire of it. It begins as a nostalgic journey in three-quarter time, Old Europe waltzing in the twilight. A stepwise intensification of dissonance and dynamics suggests the fury of the war just past, the wedding of aristocratic pride to the machinery of destruction. In the last moments, with trombones snarling and percussion rattling, the music becomes brassy, sassy, and fierce. Suddenly we seem to be in the middle of a flapper gin party—and there is no reason to feel any jolt of transition, since the Roaring Twenties were underwritten by the same fortunes that had financed the prewar balls. This is a society spinning out of control, reeling from the horrors of the recent past toward those of the near future.
Bartók’s confusion went deeper than matters of style: his personal history had been largely obliterated by the cartographic fiats of the peace treaties. The reduction of Hungarian territory after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant that Nagyszentmiklós, the composer’s birthplace, went to Romania, and that Pozsony, where his mother still lived, became Czechoslovak.
Nonetheless, Bartók remained loyal to the landscape of his dreams—that hidden empire of peasant music, which stretched as far as Turkey and North Africa. As Hungary moved toward fascism under the authoritarian government of Miklós Horthy, such multiculturalism attracted suspicion; nationalists perceived Bartók as lacking in true Hungarian spirit. At the same time, his allegiance to folklore made him a quaint, anachronistic figure on the international new-music circuit. He was too cosmopolitan at home, too nationalist abroad. He was, however, finding the balance he had always sought, between the local and the universal. Less concerned with policing the boundaries between genres, he stopped agitating against the supposed contaminations of Gypsy music; Hungarian Gypsy fiddling appears all over his two Rhapsodies for violin and his Second Violin Concerto. Occasionally, he even indulged in a bit of jazz. As Julie Brown has pointed out, Bartók responded to the rise of genocidal racism by extolling “racial impurity”—the migration of styles, the intermingling of cultures.
In the first years of the postwar period Bartók strove to establish his modernist credentials. When the Danish composer Carl Nielsen came to Budapest in 1920, Bartók asked him whether he thought his Second Quartet was “sufficiently modern.” The ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, finished the previous year, matched the polytonal violence of the Rite, with a hint of Futurism in the honking cityscape of the prelude (“‘stylized’ noise,” Bartók called it). The strutting harshness of the two violin sonatas, the Piano Sonata, the piano suite Out of Doors, the First Piano Concerto, and the Third Quartet, all composed in the early and mid-twenties, won respect from the Schoenberg camp. But Bartók’s melodies retained a folkish shape, and the harmony again stopped short of full atonality. These works use symmetrical scales that revolve around a “tonal center,” a single pitch that sounds somehow “right” whenever it appears. In the wide-ranging Fourth Quartet, written in 1928, dissonant dances frame an ethereal slow movement that glides around the key of E major without quite touching it. In the final tranquillo section, the violin plays a sweet folkish melody, akin to the “Peacock Melody” of Magyar tradition. The composer has returned to first principles.
In several masterpieces of Bartók’s last years—the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936), the Second Violin Concerto (1937–38), and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943)—the ceremony of homecoming is repeated. The final movement of each work brings a palpable feeling of release, as if the composer, who had observed peasants with shy detachment, were finally throwing away his notebook and entering the fray. Strings whip up dust clouds around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd. There are no sacrificial victims in these neoprimitive scenes, even if some walk away with bruises. The ritual of return is most poignant in the Concerto for Orchestra, which Bartók wrote in American exile. Transylvania was by then a purely mental space that he could dance across from end to end, even as his final illness immobilized him.
Bartók and Janáček met twice in the twenties. The second time, in 1927, Janáček is said to have grabbed Bartók by the shoulders and dragged him into a quiet corner. Posterity would love to have a precise record of that conversation, but the eyewitness report is frustratingly impressionistic: “fascinating exchange…a fireworks of personalities…” Did Janáček urge Bartók to be true to his national, folkish self, as Debussy had urged Stravinsky?
By now well into his seventies, the Moravian master was more bemused than intimidated by the culture of the festivals; he liked to tell the story that when he tried to find his way to the stage to take a bow at the ISCM festival of 1925, he opened the wrong door and found himself out on the street. The belated international success of Jenfa gave him the confidence to stay on the path that he had marked out before the turn of the century.
Janáček’s creative Indian summer is often attributed to his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman whom he met in 1917. Richly imagined female characters populate his last works: the “dark-skinned Gypsy girl” who seduces a farmer’s son in the song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared; Katerina, the tragic heroine of the opera Katya Kabanova, who throws herself into the Volga River to escape the tormenting rectitude of her mother-in-law; the female fox at the heart of the animal fable The Cunning Little Vixen, who finds love in the forest and then falls to the gun of a poacher; and the unlikely protagonist of The Makropoulos Affair, a 337-year-old opera singer who has achieved immortality at the price of being “cold as ice.”
Janáček’s late style is lean and strong. Melodies are whittled down but do not lose their grace. Rhythms move like a needle on a gramophone, skipping as if stuck in a rut or slowing down as if someone were fiddling with the speed. One signature sound is a raw pealing of trumpets, which ushers in both the rustic military Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass, a setting of the Old Slavonic liturgy. In the mass, liturgical phrases such as “Lord have mercy,” “Crucified for us,” “I believe,” and “Lamb of God” are linked to changing phases of rural weather: lashing rain, lightning, a clearing sky, a spell of moonlight, a pale sun the following day. Christianity and paganism are reconciled.
The
Cunning Little Vixen, at once a charming children’s tale and a profound allegory of modern life, may be Janáček’s greatest achievement. It begins innocuously, as a folksy old forester—as a child Janáček dreamed of being a forester—captures a fox cub and brings her to his home. She runs amok, slaughters the chickens, and is banished to the woods. There she finds a handsome lover and woos him to music that parodies post-Wagnerian opera, notably Strauss in his kitschier moods. In Act III, the vixen is felled by a rifle shot, and the opera takes on an altogether different tone. In the final scene the forester steps out of his folk-tale role and meditates on the passage of time. He seems to be musing about the very opera that he’s in: “Is this fairy tale or reality? Reality or fairy tale?” The forester falls asleep, and when he wakes the animals of the woods surround him. He sees fox cubs at play and realizes that they are the vixen’s children. He then catches a little frog in his hand, thinking he’s seeing the same “clammy little monster” whom he met in the first scene of the opera:
FORESTER: Where have you come from?
FROG: That wasn’t me, that was grandpa! They told me all about you.
In other words, the animals of the forest have been telling stories about the forester over the course of their brief lives, as if he were a hero from long ago. In the disjuncture between human and animal time we see him—and ourselves—across an immense space. “Good and evil turn around in life afresh,” Janáček wrote in his own synopsis.
The forester smiles and goes back to sleep. His gun slips from his hands. The vixen’s music returns, raised to extraordinary vehemence by pealing brass and pounding timpani. A circular motif plays twice over chords of D-flat major, then modulates to E major; finally, as the harmony returns to D-flat, the melody clings to its E-major pitches, producing a rich modal sonority, a bluesy seventh chord. It recalls the ending of Jenfa, the walk into paradise. “You must play this for me when I die,” Janáček said to his producer. Which they did, in August 1928.
Stravinsky’s moment of high anxiety arrived when he performed his Piano Sonata at the 1925 ISCM festival in Venice. Janáček was there; so, too, were Diaghilev, Honegger, the Princesse de Polignac, Cole Porter, Arturo Toscanini, and Schoenberg, with his red gaze. Many questioned Stravinsky’s new neoclassical style; the rumor went around that he was no longer “serious,” that he had become a pasticheur. Schoenberg reportedly walked out. Stravinsky must have been aware of the skepticism all around; insecurity, writes his biographer Stephen Walsh, was “the demon that lurked permanently in the inner regions of Stravinsky’s consciousness.” Emotional tensions preyed on him as well. Yekaterina Stravinsky, his wife, had suffered a breakdown, the result of a tubercular condition. Yekaterina’s devotion to Russian Orthodoxy seemed a silent rebuke of her husband’s dandyish lifestyle, not to mention his ongoing affair with Vera Sudeykina.
A few days before the concert, an abscess appeared on Stravinsky’s right hand. Somewhat to his own surprise, he went to a church, got on his knees, and asked for divine aid. Just before sitting down to play, he checked under the bandage and saw that the abscess was gone. This sudden cure struck Stravinsky as a miracle, and he began to experience a religious reawakening. His official “return to sacraments” took place almost a year later, during Holy Week of 1926, when he reported to Diaghilev that he was fasting “out of extreme mental and spiritual need.” Around the same time, Stravinsky wrote a brief, pungent setting of the Lord’s Prayer in Old Slavonic. Over the next five years he wrote a trilogy of solemn-toned or explicitly sacred works: Oedipus Rex, Apollo, Symphony of Psalms. Religion was his new “reality,” his new foundation; it gave substance to his devotion to the past and, not incidentally, direction to his mildly dissolute life.
In rediscovering religion, Stravinsky was, paradoxically, following fashion. The year 1925 was one of newfound sobriety in French culture. Many were pondering a valedictory essay by the recently deceased Jacques Rivière on the “crisis of the concept of literature”; the critic had proposed that the arts were becoming too disinterested, too “inhuman,” and he listed Stravinsky’s “music of objects” among the symptoms of an ethical and spiritual decline. Cocteau, having suffered the loss of his underage lover Raymond Radiguet, fallen into opium addiction, and experienced a hallucinatory epiphany in Picasso’s elevator, returned to Catholicism in June of the same year. Cocteau’s guru was the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who believed that modern art could purify itself into an image of God’s truth, into something “well made, complete, proper, durable, honest.”
Stravinsky, too, fell under Maritain’s influence, perhaps chastened when the philosopher criticized the notion of “art for nothing, for nothing else but itself.” After considering the idea of an opera or oratorio on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, Stravinsky elected to pursue a topic from ancient tragedy, and asked Cocteau to write a French-language adaptation of the story of Oedipus. He then had Cocteau’s text translated into Latin. “The choice [of Latin],” Stravinsky later wrote, “had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead, but turned to stone and so monumentalized as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarization.” The score instructed: “Only their arms and heads move. They should give the impression of living statues.” This marked a commitment to Rivière’s project of spiritual rehabilitation, to Maritain’s philosophy of art as sacred work. Cocteau’s involvement meant that Oedipus could go only so far in the direction of solemnity. The Latin declamations were strung together with a self-consciously, satirically pompous French-language narration. Cocteau’s Speaker is so wrapped up in his literary dignity that he sometimes fails to notice what is happening onstage. “And now you will hear the famous monologue, ‘The Divine Jocasta is dead,’” he proclaims—but no monologue ensues.
Such self-conscious gestures might have turned Oedipus into another panoply of camp. But Stravinsky was in earnest. “Kaedit nos pestis”—“Plague is upon us”—the chorus chants at the opening, over five booming chords in the key of B-flat minor. On its own, the core progression would sound a bit creaky and clichéd. What adds drama is the bass line, which sticks to the notes of the B-flat-minor triad but gnashes against the changing chords above. The impression, here and throughout the work, is of damaged, decaying grandeur—like acid streaks on cathedral marble. Yet Oedipus is a living statue, as the score instructs. Stravinsky’s alertness to the rhythm of words puts bounce and thrust into the archaic Latin text. The word “moritur,” coming at the end of the three opening gestures, sets in motion a purring triplet figure that propels the work to the end.
The ballet Apollon musagète, the second panel in Stravinsky’s sacred triptych, is a serene spectacle of art in contemplation of itself: the young god Apollo matures and achieves mastery in the company of the muses Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore. The scoring, for strings alone, reverses the post-Rite trend toward hard sonorities of winds and brass, which, in a typical feat of chutzpah, Stravinsky now chided his contemporaries for overexploiting. (“The swing of the pendulum was too violent,” he wrote in his Autobiography, as if someone else had set the pendulum in motion.) Apollo floats by on straightforward major-key harmonies and draws on a vein of tender melody; collage-like cutting and layering give way to a smooth, unbroken surface.
In a prior Ballets Russes season, the airy conception of a “white ballet” might have been realized in an annoyingly precious way. With the arrival of George Balanchine, though, Stravinsky found his creative other half. Balanchine’s project of recapturing the equipoise of classical dance through modern choreography—sometimes athletic, sometimes abstract—was the mirror image of Stravinsky’s new style. The union of dance and music suggested a higher union of body and spirit. Boris de Schloezer, who earlier in the decade had attacked the composer for perpetrating musical jokes, grasped the new Stravinsky when he wrote, “Logically, after Apollo, he ought to give us a Mass.”
This Stravinsky more or less did, in an attitude of grief. In August 1929 the composer was stunned b
y the sudden death of Diaghilev, his discoverer, protector, and substitute father, and his distress was intensified by the fact that he had not had the chance to make proper farewells; the two men had lately bickered and fallen out. Meanwhile, Yekaterina grew sicker and more devout. Icons and candles filled the Stravinsky home, and there was talk of building a private chapel. Out of this fervid atmosphere arose the Symphony of Psalms.
The texts come from the Latin vulgate versions of Psalms 38, 39, and 150, but the music has something intangible in common with Russian Orthodoxy. For the American critic Paul Rosenfeld, it “called to our mind the mosaic-gilded interior of one of the Byzantine domes…from whose vaulting the Christ and his Mother gaze pitilessly down upon the accursed human race.” The first chord fulfills Rosenfeld’s cathedral metaphor: E-minor triads in the bass and treble are arranged around columnar Gs in the middle registers. Throughout, the habitually economical composer enlarges his sense of space. The setting of Psalm 150 (“Praise God in his holy place, praise him in the heavenly vault of his power”) goes on for a relative eternity of twelve minutes.
The Symphony is not all frozen architecture. Stravinsky’s trademark rhythms make subtle appearances. At one point in Psalm 150, the chorus lightly syncopates the phrase “Lau-da-te do-mi-nuumm,” with the “do” falling between the second and the third beats and the last syllable prolonged to fill out the bar—almost like the Charleston. And in the raptly contemplative coda, the timpani repeat a four-note pattern over forty-two bars, the quasi-minimalist ostinato creating an almost imperceptible tension with the prevailing meter of three beats to a bar—a bounce of an ethereal, incorporeal kind.
Almost from the beginning, listeners worried that Stravinsky’s wizardly creations were marred by an inner coldness. Ned Rorem, an American composer firmly committed to the “French” rather than the “German” politics of style, has asked himself: “Do I adore Stravinsky as I adore others who are perhaps less overwhelming—Ravel, for example, or Poulenc? I am dazzled by his intelligence and scared by his force, but my heart is not melted.” If anything by Stravinsky can melt the heart, it is the Symphony of Psalms. The great nonexpresser and maker of objects lets down his guard, giving us a glimpse of his terrors and longings. Notice a telltale repetition of words in the first two psalms that Stravinsky chose to set: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry…I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that a condition of desperate mental flailing is often the prelude to spiritual renewal: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!”
