July 01, 2007

The Arbitrary and the Inevitable

“Man of 1001 styles,” “chameleonic composer,” “musical trendsetter,” “inventor of musical dishes for world cuisine” – all of these phrases were used at one time or another to describe and honor Igor Stravinsky, the greatest composer of the 20th century. June 17 was the 125th anniversary of his birth.

Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are not only widely accepted as 20th century geniuses, but are also the most famous composers of that century (excepting perhaps Lennon and McCartney). Shostakovich lived in Russia his entire life; Prokofiev lived abroad for 20 years; yet Stravinsky spent two-thirds of his long life in emigration. And so it is often justly asked, whether one can truly call Stravinsky a Russian composer – after all America and France both claim him as one of their own. Stravinsky himself gave the most definitive answer: “I have spoken Russian my entire life, I have a Russian style and it lies at the foundation of all my music.”

At the same time, Stravinsky’s forced emigration is one of the reasons that this Russian composer became one of the most multifaceted masters of the 20th century – one always ready to alter and renew his artistic voice. Prokofiev traveled a great distance, and yet his music was as sunny at the end as it was at the beginning. Shostakovich started out as an audacious avant-gardist, became a follower of Mahler, and ended his life as the singular Shostakovich – yet his 15 symphonies nonetheless form an organic whole. But with Stravinsky, if you know Petrushka and The Firebird, then listen to Oedipus Rex, or his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, you should be prepared for an aesthetic shock. It is simply inconceivable that all of these were written by one and the same composer.

But portraying Stravinsky merely as a “chameleon” simplifies understanding of his genius. At one time, it was widely felt that Stravinsky’s creative output should be grouped into three periods: Russian (1908-1923), Neoclassical (1923-1953) and Late (1953-1968). This 15+25+15 schema was elegantly simple, yet it explained little. After all, how can you explain the miraculous? Yes, his later compositions, The Flood (1962) and Agon (1957), are quite dissimilar from The Rite of Spring (1921), but the deeper you burrow into Stravinsky’s music, the more attentively you listen to his pieces one after the other, the more clearly you see how almost every new work flows out of the previous one in some way. And yet, almost every one of Stravinsky’s remarkable works is completely unlike all the others, such that this differentiation is sometimes the only way to guess at the author. There is one other abiding characteristic of his work: an elusiveness of mood. When one listens to any other music, its mood is almost immediately definable as “sad,” “happy,” “anxious,” “thoughtful,” etc. But, as a rule, such definitions are impossible with Stravinsky’s works.

The future composer was born on June 5, 1882 (June 17, new style), the son of a Mariinsky Theater soloist – the exceptional artist Fyodor Stravinsky. While he played piano from an early age, he took a serious interest in music comparatively late – when he was almost 20 years old.

Stravinsky studied instrumentation and analysis of classical works under the tutelage of Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov. Thus, his first compositions show the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov, two of the most dominant forces in Russian music at that time. Yet, for a beginning composer, Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks (Feu d’artifice) were striking works. Another exceptional creation during these early years was the three-minute-long Pastorale (1907), a vocalise for soprano and piano. The harmonies in Pastorale reveal the brilliance of the future author of Petrushka (1911; revised in 1947) and The Rake’s Progress (1951). As composer and Stravinsky expert Louis Andriessen put it: “The genius’ earliest works are in no way of inferior to his later ones. It is as if they are little Beethovenesque devils unfolding.”

Pastorale was favored with Rimsky-Korsakov’s ambiguous – and rather eloquent – praise: “An original song, but not without strange harmonies.” Without realizing it, the master had formulated what would become one of the defining characteristics of his pupil’s works: “turning surprise into norms of thought.” Many years later, the composer Alfred Schnitke wrote an article about this: “Paradoxality as a characteristic of Stravinsky’s musical logic.” Truly, Stravinsky was paradoxical even in Pastorale, and, rather soon thereafter, this essence of his music became the cause of a split between Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov’s circle. Nikolai Andreyevich himself died in 1908, one year before The Firebird, which heralded the appearance of a new, wilder Stravinsky.

As to other works of his final student, Rimsky-Korsakov approved of Scherzo Fantastique, yet he generally was quite cautious regarding new artistic trends: “all this modern, decadent, impressionistic lyricism with its wretched, empty, meaningless content and pseudo-Russian folk language is nothing but ‘gloom and fog.’” Of the music of Claude Debussy (recounted by Stravinsky), he said “It is better not to listen to him; mind you, you will get used to it and in the end, fall in love with it.” Debussy, for his part, was one of those who welcomed the success of Stravinsky, who he saw to be opening a new chapter in the history of European ballet. The triumph of The Firebird in Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons made Stravinsky’s name in the circle of European celebrities. Debussy also responded enthusiastically to Petrushka, which was in marked contrast with the heirs to Rimsky-Korsakov, who felt the organic unification of folk melodies and popular folklore was a mockery of Russian national music.

As a matter of fact, even Debussy was for a time bewildered by his younger colleague’s compositions. When Stravinsky in 1912 dedicated and presented to Debussy his cantata, Le Roi des étoiles (The King of the Stars), the latter was unable to disguise his confusion: “I do not foresee any possibility of performing this cantata for the planets, except perhaps on Sirius or Aldebaran. As concerns our more modest Earth, the performance of such a thing would be lost in a chasm.” True enough, the cantata was not performed until 1939 – it was simply too costly to gather together the massive men’s chorus and orchestra required for this, a six-minute-long piece. And then there is the complexity of the language. These challenges notwithstanding, Mariinsky Director Valery Gergiev succeeded in performing King of the Stars at his recent Easter Festival in Moscow, which was dedicated to Stravinsky.

King of the Stars is one of just a few Stravinsky compositions which had a long wait before their premieres. The composer normally worked on commission, from which even his major opuses emerged. He emphasized several times that he loved to compose within pre-established boundaries, guides which he himself had laid down: “The magic is in the choice of commissions. Compose what you like, and then accept commissions that fit what you have written.” If Stravinsky is to be believed, this is exactly what happened with The Firebird: “I remember the day when Diaghilev called me up to ask if I would take on the job, and I remember his surprise when I said that I had already finished it.”

Whatever the truth may be, Stravinsky was his own most demanding client. Every time he began a new composition, it was as if he started from zero, choosing both the genre (be it opera, ballet, a symphony or a concerto for soloist and orchestra) and the instrumentation, then moving on to his composing.

Many of Stravinsky’s works were the first of their kind in terms of their defined genre: “Cheerful performance of song and music,” “Fairytale read, acted and danced,” or “Symphony of Psalms.” For the most part, Stravinsky was an innovator, creating his ballets, which were really ballets of a new type – musical dramas. The balletmeister of the Diaghilev troupe, Serge Lifar, caustically but accurately called the composer the “evil genius of ballet,” saying, “His music kills dance, it fetters and does not enrich it. It is so good in its own right, that it doesn’t need dance.” It is no accident that the ballet, Rite of Spring, which had such a scandalous premier in 1913, was rapturously received a year later, when it was performed in a concert venue. Spring to this day is one of the most popular and most frequently performed of Stravinsky’s works, something that would make the composer less than glad.

Over the years, Stravinsky repeatedly said that the popularity of his early ballets kept getting in the way of the success of his later works; the public was always expecting a new Petrushka from him. This is unfortunately true with his neoclassical opuses and his wonderful shorter works, such as Ragtime or Tango, and especially with his later compositions, in which the composer gave a nod to the New Viennese school.

While Stravinsky’s bitterness toward the “fatal” role of his early masterpieces may have been sincere, there is greater doubt about some of his other statements, for example, “I was born late. In temperament and inclinations, I needed, like Bach, to live in anonymity and to create for an institution or for God.” Even were there no slyness in these words, the fact is that Stravinsky’s creative biography could not but have unfolded in the 20th century – the century of airplanes, steamships and recordings. Only in the 20th century could a composer – not changing himself one iota, and staying within the bounds of his own style – be a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, compose old fashioned oratoria in Latin, write ragtime and concerts with Bachian passages, use elements of jazz and dodecaphony, take on opera in a two-centuries-old style, and finish with a Requiem that included a comic element from Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon

As a 20th century musician, Stravinsky expressed himself thus on the question of recordings: if this necessary evil of “canned music” had to exist, he said, the artist should turn it to his benefit. This from Stravinsky, perhaps the first composer in history to have the overwhelming majority of his works recorded. True, his expressed intent, “to create with these recordings some kind of permanent documentation, to fix the correlation of tempos once and for all,” was not completely fulfilled. If we compare two versions of The Rite of Spring which Stravinsky recorded at different times, then it is clear that their tempos are not at all similar. Thus, the striving for the ideal recording turned out to be a myth, even in the case of a such a genius as Stravinsky. However, as he was not a virtuoso conductor, he knew like no other where all the hidden reefs were in his scores and could not express himself less from the conductor’s rostrum than any other celebrated maestro might.

This is something that was said by those who witnessed Stravinsky’s triumphal trip to the USSR in 1962: while not a professional conductor, the very fact that the great composer was on the rostrum had a colossal influence on orchestra players in both capitals – where a total of six concerts were held. Returning to his homeland after nearly a half century’s absence excited Stravinsky, yet he expressed only bitterness: “we can only be guests in this ‘homeland.’”

Stravinsky did not return to Russia again, yet he continued to give concerts over the next five years, up until just before he was 85. A year later, he finished his final composition. Soon thereafter, his health declined and, while his mind remained sharp, he gradually lost the ability to work. On April 6, 1971, the composer died. He was buried on the cemetery island of San Michele, in Venice, Italy, near his early collaborator, Sergei Diaghilev.

“Stravinsky’s music,” wrote Dutch composer Elmer Schönberger, “bestows on the listener an unnerving combination of the feelings of arbitrariness and inevitability, simultaneously.” Stravinsky is far from the only composer whose music can be characterized in this way. This could also apply, for example, to Bach. Yet, in the 20th century, Stravinsky is unquestionably first among those whose music constantly surprises us... then, a moment later, we realize it could not be any other way. RL

Additional Reading

The Apollonian Clockwork, by Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger. Music historian Richard Taruskin has called this biography, “The one book about Stravinsky Stravinsky would have liked.”

Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, by Stephen Walsh (Knopf, 1999). This is just the first half of a two-part biography by one of the world’s leading experts on Stravinsky. Eminently readable, it is as much a biography of the age as it is of this amazing personality.

July 01, 2007

The Arbitrary and the Inevitable

See Also

The Rite of Spring

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