Blogger The New Neo has a special expertise in dance so it is a pleasure to read her thoughts on Petrouchka by Stravinsky, the second of his ballets for the Ballets Russes.
Michel Fokine’s ballet “Petrouchka,” created in 1911, is one I’ve seen many times. But perhaps I’ll never see it again, because I have a feeling it’s pretty much banned now. I’m virtually certain that one of its puppet characters, the Moor, would be considered irredeemably racist today.
The music is my favorite Stravinsky composition by far. The Fokine choreography is surpassingly strange, and the stage is full of people much of the time, with every character doing something different and creating the impression of a village fair come to life. The costumes are wonderful, with less of an ensemble quality and more like the individual costumes worn by the actors in a play. It’s a ballet, but only three characters wear pointe shoes, and two are street entertainers and one is a puppet. There are three puppets, but they periodically escape from the confines of puppitude and take on a life of their own.
You should read the whole thing. I realize that Petrouchka is by far my favorite ballet as well.
I stop to marvel, once again, at the astonishing creativity of Stravinsky who wrote the music for three extremely fine but extremely different ballets over the course of just a couple of years: The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). I'm not sure he ever matched this level of creativity. Actually, I'm not sure anyone has!
Could someone please invent a time machine so we could go back and see these premieres?
I have finally finished Taruskin's two-volume book on Stravinsky that he describes as "a biography of the works" and a spectacular project it is. I don't think that there is anything to compare to it for depth and breadth--other than the same author's Oxford History of Western Music. I would love for him to take on another big project, but after those two, we probably shouldn't expect anything more.
The last work he examines is the Requiem Canticles, written in 1966, towards the end of Stravinsky's life and his last major composition. The work uses Stravinsky's unique approach to the serial method. As requiems go it is brief, fifteen minutes long, but compelling. For some reason, before this morning, I had never listened to it. One of the things I take from my reading of the second volume of Taruskin is how much of later Stravinsky is still not widely known. Productions of his operas are not nearly as common as you would think and some works, like Les Noces, are so unusual that one suspects they have yet to find an audience. Stravinsky's early triumphs, The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, are now over a hundred years old and have become recognized as the masterpieces that they are. But the later works are still infrequently performed--excepting popular ones like the Symphony of Psalms, now ninety years old!
When you think of it, describing pieces like The Rite or the Symphony of Psalms as "contemporary music" is quite absurd. Even the moniker "modern music" is a stretch. Reminds me of a famous essay "When was Modernism?" "20th century music" is at least accurate, if uninformative. A few years ago a couple of my songs were part of a concert described as "20th Century" music, but they were actually written in 2010, so "21st Century" music in fact.
We might recognize a few odd things about recent history: even before the First World War, there were some serious dislocations in European civilization heralded by Nietzsche's writings about the death of God and "master-slave morality." The most serious musicians were already dismantling the inherited structures of tonality and rhythm and searching for alternatives. This was an even more profound dislocation than was perceived at the time. Even though, between the two wars, a neoclassical synthesis was attempted, it never quite achieved the hoped for success and the canon of classical music was still dominated by music from the 18th and 19th centuries.
It remains the case that some really important music from a hundred years ago, and I am thinking of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments from 1920, are still, not only unappreciated, but uncongenial to the whole context of music in the 21st century. Instead of a growing acceptance of this kind of repertoire, we have a general lowering of musical taste to the point that music like this is not even disliked. Instead, it is completely unknown! In essence, music now is written by and for teenagers of very limited knowledge and experience. Billie Eilish is the embodiment of our current musical taste. I wonder how she will be regarded a hundred years from now?
Coming to the end of the long journey of reading Richard Taruskin's magisterial two-volume Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions and what a wonderful education it has been. I think the only monographs that can stand alongside this one are the two-volume Johann Sebastian Bach by Philipp Spitta (three volumes in the English translation) and Thayer's Life of Beethoven, originally in two volumes, both 19th century projects. There are many, many single volume treatments of the "life and works" variety, but one senses that the truly exhaustive multi-volume efforts are now a thing of the past.
I titled this post "Stravinsky the Conservative" because of an interesting passage late in the book:
Nineteen twenty-eight was the year in which Stravinsky's openly professed anti-modernism reached its peak. In that year he allowed himself to be described in print by Lourié as the leader of the "conservative and reactionary element" in contemporary music, the "antithesis" to the Schoenbergian "thesis," who sought "to affirm unity and unalterable substance" as against the ceaseless flux and disintegration of culture that was the inevitable consequence of modernist chaos. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 1610]
In practical terms what this meant was that the next piece Stravinsky composed, the ballet Le baiser de la fée, was based almost entirely on themes from the composer of Imperial Russia, Tchaikovsky!
In the great duovir of modernism, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for some reason we often think of Schoenberg as being the "conservative," the author of all those books on composition and theory that take Beethoven as their model. While at the same time we think of Stravinsky as the more adventurous modernist with his brash innovations often inspired by primeval Russia. But it was Schoenberg that aligned himself with the worker's choruses and thought of himself as being a man of the left, while it was Stravinsky, at certain times in his career, who was the admirer of Mussolini. It has been argued that neoclassicism was a fascistic movement in music.
My sense is that we should take all this with a grain of salt. The reasons Stravinsky regressed, if that is the word, to the idiom of Tchaikovsky, were perhaps more personal than political. Similarly, it might well have been the rise of Naziism and his rediscovery of Judaism that drove Schoenberg towards the left.
The idea that music is always somehow related to its roots, and sometimes very deep roots (in some places Stravinsky goes back all the way to Glinka for inspiration), should restrain us from making too facile political associations. At the end of the day Schoenberg and Beethoven were confronted with similar compositional problems and so were Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. The context was utterly different, of course, but context isn't everything. It is not even necessarily the most important thing though it looms overly large in the "new" musicology.
Here is the Stravinsky ballet Le baiser de la fée with Ansermet conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande:
Stravinsky's piece for vocal soloists, choir, four pianos and percussion was begun in 1917 (though conceived earlier) and premiered in 1923. It is a work strongly based on Russian folklore, particularly the melodies, lyrics and traditions of the peasant wedding. In English we should probably just call it "The Wedding." The piece is the culmination of years of exhaustive study of Russian folklore that included the composition of Petrushka, the Rite of Spring, Pribaoutki and other pieces. Stravinsky's reputation as an uncompromising modernist that de-emphasizes the Russian traditions is one that Taruskin specifically set out to correct in his two-volume work on Stravinsky. Of course, Stravinsky utterly transformed the folk material, but its influence is deep and thorough. The other modern composer who owes a great deal to folklore is Bartók, but that has always been prominently acknowledged by the composer himself. With Stravinsky it is more complex as his own relationship with his Russian origins changed as he settled outside Russia, living in France, Switzerland and ultimately the US.
I am going to write more about Svadebkain future posts. One thing I notice already is that this has been a difficult work to perform and many older performances are stiff or awkward. Here is a recent one that is very convincing. This is MusicAeterna conducted by Teodor Currentzis.
In 1914, while living in the tiny village of Salvan, in the French-speaking region of Switzerland, Stravinsky composed a number of pieces based on Russian folklore. This is carefully documented in the second volume of Taruskin's monograph on Stravinsky, Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra (cf op. cit. pp 1136 passim).
I call this "radical folk" music because Stravinsky, in the process of composing these often tiny pieces (the four songs of Pribaoutki take just over four minutes to perform), radically hewed away everything that smacked of European influence. This can be seen by reviewing the compositional process in the sketchbooks.
It is only by knowing the sketches that we can see the plainness of this music for the "second simplicity" it is and appreciate the merciless repression of spontaneous "instinct" in pursuit of a higher truth. Ultimately both the received folkloric model and the unmediated personal response have been refined away, leaving behind a "small, dry thing" such as T. E. Hulme, that great prophet of modern art, foretold as the vessel of a new beauty he called Classical. [Taruskin, Stravinsky, vol. II, p. 1182]
This fills in some of the gaps that people have puzzled over between Stravinsky's early Russian compositions, including the Rite, and his later neo-classical style.
I just noticed a rather odd and surprising overlap between Stravinsky and Schoenberg. In the latter's analysis/discussion of his Four Songs with Orchestra, op. 22 [reprinted in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky] he points out numerous instances of the use of a particular little set of intervals: the minor second and minor third, in various configurations and sometimes expanded to a major second and major third in various configurations. Now notice something about the first set, the minor second and minor third. Depending on how you organize them, with the minor second within the minor third, for example, as Schoenberg often presents them, if you extend that over the octave you get, that's right, the octatonic scale, which was used extensively by Stravinsky (he got it from Rimsky-Korsakov).
I don't want to imply any influence here, but I do want to note that the octatonic scale is a symmetrical way of dividing up the octave, as opposed to the major and minor scales of common practice harmony, which are asymmetric ways of dividing up the octave. Composers like Bela Bartók were also exploring symmetrical alternatives, in his case it was often the tritone.
Unsurprisingly, I am not the first to notice this. Taruskin offers extensive quotes from Russian modernist critic Vyacheslav Karatïgin on the Rite of Spring and mentions that:
Like Myaskovky, Karatïgin professes to see a deep kinship between Stravinsky and Schoenberg--prompted in his case, no doubt, by the enthusiastic letter he had received from the Russian composer about the German. [Tarusin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, p. 1029]
Stravinsky heard Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin on 8 December, 1912 and that was the occasion for the letter to Karatïgin where he says:
I saw from your lines that you truly love and understand Schoenberg--that truly remarkable artist of our time. Therefore I thought you might be interested to learn about his very latest composition, in which the whole extraordinary essence of his creative genius is most intensely concentrated [i. e. Pierrot Lunaire]. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 824]
Another commentator on connections between Schoenberg and Stravinsky was theorist Allen Forte who said in his 1978 study of The Rite that:
...in The Rite of Spring Stravinsky employed extensively for the first time the new harmonies that first emerged in the works of Schoenberg and Webern around 1907-08 [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 1022]
In later years both Schoenberg and Stravinsky said a lot of critical, even derogatory things, about one another, which illustrates more the fact that they were career rivals.
For an envoi let's hear some of Pierrot Lunaire, one of the most unusual pieces in Schoenberg's output:
This is a followup to an item in my miscellanea yesterday. I mentioned that nowadays there is never anything in the mainstream media that requires the slightest acquaintance with music to understand--and that applies specifically to articles supposedly about music! --I know!
I'm finally getting around to reading volume 2 of Richard Taruskin's magisterial book on Stravinsky: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra. He could only have written this if he were intimately familiar not only with every piece that Stravinsky composed, but also every letter he ever wrote and every letter that was ever written to him (if it were preserved in some archive somewhere) as well as every article every written about Stravinsky in any language whatsoever. And he is not shy about offering voluminous quotes and musical examples. This two volume monograph should be the model for any future publications of this type. Sadly, I suspect that there will be virtually no future publications of this type! Who has the intellectual capacity to do it? Right now I am wishing that there were a similar book(s) on Arnold Schoenberg, because surely he deserves it. But never mind, let's just have a brief sample of the Taruskin to get my argument started.
Stravinsky was feted by the French avant-garde, especially by one Jacques Rivière in the pages of the Nouvelle revue française. This kind of magazine really doesn't exist any more. It was an aggressively nationalistic (as Taruskin describes it) literary forum and ironically it looked to the aesthetic revolution heralded by Stravinsky and the ballets russe as a model. As Taruskin describes it:
Henri Ghéon, one of the founding editors, would announce: "Our dream has been realized--and not by us." The Russians great gift to the French had been an object lesson in "two principles common to all the arts, unity of conception and respect for materials [respect de la matière]." The exemplar of exemplars had been The Firebird, which "confronts us with the most exquisite miracle of equilibrium--of sound, movement, form--that we have ever dreamed of seeing... [Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, p. 990]
Rivière was particularly eloquent about the Rite:
The great novelty of Le sacre du printemps is its renunciation of "sauce." Here is a work that is absolutely pure. Bitter and harsh, if you will; but a work in which no gravy deadens the taste, no art of cooking smooths or smears the edges. It is not a "work of art," with all the usual attendant fuss. Nothing is blurred, nothing is mitigated by shadows; no veils and no poetic sweeteners; not a trace of atmosphere. The work is whole and tough, its parts remain quite raw; they are served up without digestive aids; everything is crisp, intact, clear and crude. [Rivière, Nouvelles études, 73, italics added by Taruskin, quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 992]
There are a couple of points I am trying to make. First, that the music of Stravinsky was important to the art scene in general. Paris was a major, perhaps the major center of artistic activity and Stravinsky was at the heart of it. As such he received real criticism, not just positive as in this case, but lots of negative as well. His work was a nexus of aesthetic debate. Second, notice who Stravinsky is being contrasted with. Who was active in Paris in the early part of the century whose music could be described as atmospheric and poetic? Debussy, of course. Despite that fact that they were friends, it was necessary in terms of the aesthetic battle to see Stravinsky as being the counterpoint to Debussy. Another thing to note here is that the coming neo-classical period of Stravinsky is being hinted at with phrases like "crisp, intact, clear."
Sadly, musical discussion in the mainstream media these days is really not about any kind of aesthetic questions. It consists of puff pieces that simply advertise upcoming concerts such as the piece I mentioned in the miscellanea yesterday. This probably covers 90% of the writing. The other kind of piece revolves entirely around identity politics: why are there not more women conductors, why are there not more black composers featured and so on.
The inevitable conclusion is that, apart from being a small source of income for a few people, classical contemporary music really has very little importance in society and there is virtually nothing at stake musically!
Let's listen to The Firebird for our envoi. This is Valery Gergiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in 2000:
Petrushka is my favorite ballet, and not only that, but sometimes I think that the music to Petrushka is my favorite music ever--of the 20th century at least. It is just so striking in so many ways: the cinematic effect of the montage, the swirling textures, the sardonic and pathetic wind writing, the humor, the joy. It seems to have just about everything. Here is a crystal clear clip of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada whom I saw conduct in Madrid a couple of years ago.
The main thing I take away from the Salonen collection, which was, on the whole, a very enjoyable listening journey, is that Igor Stravinsky really is the most important composer of the 20th century. Previously I tended to discount his later neo-classical and serial works, but I am starting to think that that is a mistake. The Symphonies of Wind Instruments was a work that always attracted me and puzzled me, but I am starting to understand what is going on there. It is really a kind of experiment with moment form, i.e. music with intentional discontinuities and lacking the traditional dramatic narrative. It doesn't look anything like moment form, but it actually fulfills a lot of the definition.
Another question of how exactly Stravinsky's neo-classical works relate to tradition and how they contradict tradition is probably one that is far from being answered.
Two years ago I did a long series of posts on how Stravinsky came to compose the Rite of Spring, mostly titled "The Road to the Rite" that started with this post. Now I see I need to do another series on his neo-classical music. The Salonen box, apart from its other virtues, is like an implicit argument for aesthetic quality. Stravinsky is rated very highly--at seven CDs, the highest of all. Also highly rated are Lutosławski, Bartók, Ligeti, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Debussy, Messiaen and Nielsen. But all these are well below Stravinsky. And the collection makes the argument very well. It is really Stravinsky that sticks in the mind. Not every piece, of course, but the Rite of Spring, Petrushka, the Symphony in Three Movements (and the Symphony of Psalms which is not in the box for some reason), the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Oedipus Rex, L'Histoire du Soldat (also not in the box) and several other pieces demonstrate that Stravinsky was the most interesting, the most capable and the most inventive composer of the century with a range of expression that no-one else quite matched.
Here is a performance of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments with the score. Salonen conducting the London Sinfonietta:
I hear more and more about really interesting and creative opera production in Toronto, who are blessed with not one, but two excellent opera companies: the Canadian Opera Company and Opera Atelier, who specialize in early music. The latter are currently offering Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria by Monteverdi, which is sold out. For the end of April and extending into May, the Canadian Opera Company is putting on a revival of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables which is a collection of shorter works by Stravinsky between 1911 and 1919, the second half consisting of his short opera The Nightingale. The Globe and Mail reports and it sounds absolutely fascinating:
The evening is full of novelty. The players of the orchestra are moved up onstage, and the orchestra pit is filled to the brim with water. Carl Fillion’s set extends over the pit, bringing a sense of excited claustrophobia to the first few rows of seats. We’re regaled with stories of rabbits, cats and foxes, all narrated by singers downstage while six acrobat/puppeteers play with light and bodies in brilliant puppet choreography by Martin Genest.
The first half, in which we hear every story except the titular fable of the Nightingale, is charged with the responsibility of introducing us to this production’s world. Our eyes and ears learn the delineation between narration and action, and our fascination is split between watching the puppets and the puppeteers themselves, their technique fully visible and a performance of its own
For the premiere a similar reversal involved putting the singers in the pit while their roles were sung and danced onstage. But filling the pit with water sounds like a brilliant idea. Here is a photo from the production showing the effect:
I would have liked to have heard more about the short items in the first half, but apart from mentioning that one of them is The Fox, there is no information. Presumably they are referring to Renard, the one act opera-ballet composed in 1916. These early, brief opera/ballets by Stravinsky were all very innovative in both musical and dramatic terms and it is wonderful to see them in production because they have been rather neglected over the years. The origin of Renard was a commission from Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who asked Stravinsky to write a piece that could be played in her salon. You get a taste of the wonderfully weird kind of theater this is from this performance by the Ensemble Intercontemporain (sorry, the subtitles are in Italian):
We're getting very near the end, as some pop lyricist said, and not many pages remain to cover in this series. Taruskin delves into the ways that Stravinsky evokes and contrasts three different modalities or "polytonalities": the octatonic collection, the whole tone collection and the diatonic collection. Out of these three he can construct simple C major chords, or strong dissonances. As Taruskin summarizes:
we now have whole-tone, octatonic, and diatonic constructs from the source melodies all running concurrently, and all intersecting on C, which pitch is thus promoted to the status of a specious tonic. [op. cit. p. 930]
I have worked with this kind of structure myself, to a limited extent, and it is both effective and curious. It seems as it you are writing, sort-of, tonal music, but always with strange twists. This is so different from the completely atonal approach of Schoenberg and his followers, where you are always wandering in a trackless (though at times very, very symmetrical!) landscape.
The "Dance of the Earth" is the section that the above discussion is about and Taruskin describes it as:
at once one of the most radical sections of The Rite--surely the most radical by far in Part I--and the dance most rigorously based on folk-derived source melodies.
He goes on to say that The Rite is Stravinsky's "Eroica," referring to the Symphony No. 3 of Beethoven which represented a similar kind of fundamental breakthrough. Nothing before (except, perhaps parts of Petrushka?) prepares you for the bewildering originality of The Rite. Taruskin's book, brilliant as it is, is not a detailed discussion of the technical aspects of the work. For that he directs us to two books: The Harmonic Organization of "The Rite of Spring" by Allen Forte and Stravinsky and "The Rite" by Pieter Van den Toorn.
The Rite resonates, not only with folklore, but with earlier Russian music for the stage such as Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada and Snegurochka. Incidentally, the Opéra Comique production of the latter opera and Stravinsky's ballet shared not only the same designer of sets and costumes, Nikolai Roerich, but nearly the same designs! The characteristic timbres of Russian folk wind instruments is another shared quality. What Stravinsky did that was truly new and original was to take two elements present in Russian music, the folkloristic and modernistic, and synthesize them in an original way.
One unifying factor in The Rite is its use of two octatonic tetrachords, a tritone apart:
A characteristic "triad" is created by taking the outer notes of the upper tetrachord, D and G, and the lowest note of the lower one, G#, or the outer notes of the lower and the top note of the upper: G#, C# and G. This kind of sonority is common enough for Taruskin to dub it The Rite chord by analogy with the Petrushka chord.
Taruksin points to an exact contemporary of Stravinsky's, Mikhail Laryonov (1881 - 1964) and his partner Natalia Goncharova (1881 - 1962), as pursuing the same synthesis between folklore and modernism in his work:
Click to enlarge
Both have transcended their sources and contexts to achieve a "pan-human" result in the phrase of Roerich. Both are about a radical formal simplification, the sacrifice of kul'tura on the altar of stikhiya. The culture rejected by The Rite was that of the German symphonic tradition. Instead, formal procedures are stripped down to what is most basic: extension through repetition, alternation and sheer accumulation. This is what gives The Rite its elemental power. Instead of harmonic progression, thematic development and smooth transitions there would be stasis and abrupt discontinuities.
Taruskin sees two different kinds of rhythmic innovations: the immobile, hypnotic ostinato and the irregularly spaced downbeats, both features of Russian folk music. Here is an example of the latter, which Rimsky-Korsakov took down from the singing of Borodin's maid!
The barring, both in this song transcription and in The Rite, is rather arbitrary. When you combine the two different rhythmic techniques, as Stravinsky characteristically did, you obtain one of his most original textures.
And that brings us to the end of our long journey. I might offer a drive-by analysis of one or two movements in the near future, but this, I think, completes our survey of the context for The Rite of Spring. This has been just a collection of notes from Richard Taruskin's monumental work of music scholarship, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra.
So for our final envoi, here is, yet again, a performance of the work. This is the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez, which is, I think, the version I first purchased around 1970:
When I talk about the "use" of folk melodies in The Rite, do not think for a moment that this is not a wholeheartedly creative act! As you can see from the last post, the rhythmic transformations were so thorough that you might not even see the connection. Other kinds of transformation were from major to Dorian mode, inserting a profusion of leaping grace notes reminiscent of dudki, the expansion of intervals (replacing half steps with thirds) and so on. There are some instances where the relationship between a folk melody source and The Rite is only traceable through the mediating authority of Stravinsky's sketchbook, where we can witness the transformation.
Taruskin explores four different instances of these transformations which he describes as Stravinsky's use of Russian folk music as a self-emancipation from the cul-de-sac that Russian music was trapped in. Let's look at one of his examples. Here is a facsimile page from the sketchbook. At the top of the page, tidily written out, is the Semik song "Nu-ka, kumushka, mï pokumimsya" which comes from Rimsky-Korsakov's anthology. The rest of the page shows developments of the tune for the "Spring Rounds" or "Khorovodï."
From p. 907 of Taruskin, op. cit.
We are so lucky to have access to Stravinsky's sketchbook! Taruskin offers a comparative analysis showing how the tune was transformed and incorporated in The Rite:
Taruskin, p. 909
What is really remarkable here is not that he found inspiration in folk melodies, that was quite common in composers of many countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What is remarkable is that he absorbed some stylistic elements, such as the leaping grace notes, and wholly transformed the original material with great freedom.
Another example, that I won't quote (see Taruskin pp. 911 et seq.), involves the deconstruction of a wedding song by using motifs from it as tesserae in a melodic mosaic, subjected to varied juxtapositions, internal repetition, transposition and so on. There is even a folk source for the kind of dissonant counterpoint we often find in The Rite. I mentioned many posts back that Russian folk music is actually performed by groups, not soloists, and it is typically full of heterophonic polyphony, meaning a melody accompanied by variants of itself. Taruskin quotes examples from the sketchbook.
In a burst of enthusiasm, on page 36 of the sketchbook, Stravinsky scrawled a phrase that might serve as a motto for The Rite of Spring: "There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse."
And with that, let's pause for today and listen to another performance of The Rite. This is the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest of the Netherlands conducted by Jaap van Zweden. Just follow the link:
Taruskin goes into great detail about the peasant rites and the sources that document them, much of which we can skip, though I encourage you to read the account in his book. One of the primary sources for Roerich and therefore Stravinsky seems to have been the Russian Primary Chronicle which describes the rites of the Kupala festival in exactly the same order that they appear in Stravinsky's sketchbook (see Taruskin, p. 884 et. seq.) Things like the notorious bar of 11/4 might have been inspired by a passage describing an old woman beating on a linden bark drum and the opening bassoon solo by the folk instrument dudki, mentioned in Roerich's scenario.
The ethnological accuracy of the scenario and costumes (based on peasant originals) is also reflected in the music, though Stravinsky was keen to disavow this in later years. He confided in one biographer that the opening bassoon solo was taken from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, and did so largely to give the impression, later clearly stated, that this was the only instance in The Rite! As we shall see, the use of folk melodies was extensive. With few exceptions, the ones that have been discovered so far belong to the type known to ethnographers as obryadnïye pesni or ceremonial songs, specifically to the category of kalendarnïye pesni, seasonal or calendar songs. That is, ones associated with the very festivals on which Roerich based the scenario. These songs are some of the oldest and come down, largely intact, from pagan times.
Roerich recounts that when he and Stravinsky were meeting at Talashkino in the summer of 1911, another guest was the singer and gusli player Sergey Kolosov (1855 - after 1915) who was then collecting folk material. He sang for the collaborators and Stravinsky took down a number of melodies. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will ever be possible to identify all of the folk melodies in The Rite. There are about a dozen, however, that are easily identified. It is astonishing that no-one even bothered to look up any sources for folk melodies in The Rite until Lawrence Morton, in 1979, began examining the mammoth anthology of Lithuanian melodies (over 1700) that Stravinsky had used. Morton found not only the source of the opening bassoon solo, but three additional melodies he also used. Why the long delay? Prior to this, all the approaches had been strictly abstract and analytical, typified by Pierre Boulez' in the early 1950s, in which not a single mention is made of the scenic or choreographic design.
Here are all the melodies taken from the Lithuanian anthology (collected by Anton Juszkiewicz) used in The Rite:
And here is how they appear in the work (in the same order):
As you can see, the transformations are largely rhythmic.
That should give you enough to chew on for today. Let's listen to a concert performance, with score, by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yoel Levi:
"The Great Sacrifice" as the original project was called, was set, not in Spring, but in midsummer to correspond to the ancient Slavic rite of Kupala which was the one with the sacrificial aspect. After Russia was Christianized in the tenth century the festivals of the folk calendar were accommodated to those of Christianity and Kupala became associated with the feast of John the Baptist. In Russia there grew up a set of ritual folksongs known as Ivanovskiye pesni, "Songs of St. John's Eve." One of these was published in a collection in 1899 and part of the tune found its way into the middle section of Stravinsky's Danse russe from Petrushka:
This Ivanovskaya could be described as a khorovod, often translated as "round dance." But khorovodï are more than that, they are often enactments of folk rituals that contain elements of long-forgotten folk customs. One Vladimir Propp has given a description:
Unlike ... songs [that] are performed only vocally [khorovods] are accompanied by various body movements. ... The khorovod may be performed by various movements in a circle (usually to the left posodon', that is, as the sun moves), with or without stopping; there can be two circles, one inside and one outside, moving in opposite directions. While those moving in the circle sing, those standing inside the circle (a young man, or a girl, or a pair) perform and portray what is being sung. ... the chorus may form not only a circle, but also a chain, it can perform different movements in a straight line or in various line formations... [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 868]
And so on. We see all of this reflected in the scenario and choreography. The opening tune used in the Danse russe was also a khorovod and the text was associated with matchmaking. Both this and the tune quoted above refer to the ancient "ritual of abduction" a somewhat rough form of matchmaking where the youth abducts the girl. This was part of the ritual of Kupala. Recall that Stravinsky had actually started sketching "The Great Sacrifice" before he began composing Petrushka. Obviously the Danse russe was originally intended for it.
The scenario was finalized towards the end of July 1911 in a visit Stravinsky paid to Roerich in Talashkino where the latter was designing and supervising the creation of murals and mosaics for Princess Tenisheva's private church, one of the landmarks of the neonationalist movement. At this time the scenario was divided into two parts instead of one and the name was changed to Prazdnik vesni or "The Festival of Spring." Later the Russian name would become "Vesna svyashchennaya" or "The Consecrated Spring." Stravinsky's sketchbook, which has survived, contains the titles for the individual dances, worked out in this meeting. Here they are, together with the equivalents in the published score:
The most significant change from this to the final arrangement is the movement of the "Jeu de rapt" from its penultimate position in Part I to much earlier, just after "Les augures printanières." The earliest surviving synopsis of the action is in a letter of Stravinsky dated December 1912:
The first part, which bears the name "The Kiss of the Earth," is made up of ancient Slavonic rituals--the joy of spring. The orchestral introduction is a swarm of spring pipes [dudki]; later, after the curtain goes up, there are auguries, khorovod rituals, a game of abduction, a khorovod game of cities, and all of this is interrupted by the procession of the "Oldest-and-Wisest." the elder who bestows a kiss upon the earth. A wild stomping dance upon the earth, the people drunk with spring, brings the first part to its conclusion.
In the second part the maidens at night perform their secret rituals upon a sacred hillock. One of the the maidens is doomed by fate to be sacrificed. She wanders into a stone labyrinth from which there is no exit, whereupon all the remaining maidens glorify the Chosen One in a boisterous martial dance. Then the elders enter. The doomed one, left alone face to face with the elders, dances her last "Holy Dance"--the Great Sacrifice. These last words are in fact the name of the second part. The elders are witness to her last dance, which ends in the death of the doomed one.
Throughout the whole composition I give the listener a sense of the closeness of the people to the earth of the commonality of their lives with the earth, by means of lapidary rhythms. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 874]
A number of other synopses are extant, some were published around the time of the premiere. Stravinsky went to great lengths to disavow some of these later in life.
The ultimate source for the folk rituals was likely the three volume compendium by Alexander Afanasyev published 1866-69 titled, in English, The Slavs's Poetic Attitudes Toward Nature. Rimsky-Korsakov had drawn heavily on Afanasyev for a number of his operas. The book was a kind of bible for the Russian Symbolists and World of Art circle.
The original choreographer was going to be Fokine, but he left the Ballets russes and the job was given to Nijinsky who began work in November 1912.
Let's stop here for today and listen to a performance of the Danse russe from Petrushka. The conductor is Valeria Martinelli at the INTERNATIONAL BARTÓK SEMINAR AND FESTIVAL 2014:
The 1912 Ballets Russes season did not have a Stravinsky premiere--he was hard at work on The Rite already. He also took time to write Three Japanese Lyrics and make the acquaintance of Schoenberg, with whom he was quite impressed at the time (later on their rivalry came to the fore). Stravinsky heard Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire at a concert in Berlin's Choralion Saal on 8 December 1912. Just a few days before, Schoenberg had been Stravinsky's guest at a performance of Petrushka.
Taruskin discerns some influence by Schoenberg on Stravinsky around this time in a tendency towards a spare linearity. Stravinsky was also impressed with Schoenberg's virtuoso writing for instruments.
The Three Japanese Lyrics were received positively in France, but performances in Russia were greeted with the most vicious invective (see Taruskin, pp. 844-5). It is not surprising that more and more Stravinsky turned away from Russia and to the West. Ironically, The Rite itself, while usually viewed as being a powerful break with tradition is in reality profoundly linked to tradition, which gave Stravinsky a unique approach, different from most composers of the day. Taruskin writes:
The usual accounts of the work place almost exclusive emphasis on the putative rupture with tradition; and despite all his subsequent disclaimers, that is the view the composer chose to abet, increasingly alienated as he was from the cultural milieu in which the ballet was conceived. It was, however, precisely because The Rite was so profoundly traditional, both as to cultural outlook and as to musical technique, that Stravinsky was able to find through it a voice that would serve him through the next difficult phase of his career.
Precisely because The Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magnificent extension, it revealed to Stravinsky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavals brought on by events far beyond his control. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 847 ]
The cultural context in Russia in the early part of the 20th century was characterized by a "relentless sense of catastrophe" in the words of the poet Alexander Blok. The tragedy of modern man lay in his estrangement from the earth and the business of humanity was to heal this rift, to recover the stikhiya or elemental spontaneity of the people. Artists must renounce kul'tura (culture of the intelligentsia) and become elemental people, indivisible from the earth. The model for all this was the life of the peasant, who still practices the ancient religion of the earth. One of the artists who followed this project was Nikolai Roerich (1874 - 1947), then (early 1909) head of the revived World of Art organization. Benois recalled him as:
utterly absorbed in dreams of prehistoric, patriarchal and religious life--of the days when the vast, limitless plains of Russia and the shores of her lakes and rivers were peopled with the forefathers of the present inhabitants. Roerich's mystic, spiritual experiences make him strangely susceptible to the charm of the ancient world
Apart from being a masterly essayist, Roerich was the creator of a series of archaistic paintings that depict this kind of ancient life, one of which, Idols, Taruskin reproduces in his book. Unfortunately, all the photos in the book are black and white and extremely muddy! Shame on you, University of California Press. Luckily, the Internet can provide us with much better.
Nikolai Roerich, Idols. Click to enlarge
Roerich was catapulted to fame when Diaghilev chose him to provide the curtain, decor and costumes for the second act of Borodin's Prince Igor, presented in the opening program of the first saison russe in Paris, May 18, 1909. The Parisian audiences felt as if transported to the ends of the earth.
A while back we mentioned the trend called "Scythianism" which was just one manifestation of a longing for a primitive wholeness that influenced writers, poets, painters and composers. The only source of information about the ancient Scyths is found in Herodotus, The Persian Wars, Bk. IV where they sound a lot like the Reavers from Firefly, using the skulls of their enemies as drinking bowls. The most Scythian composer was the young Prokofiev even before he wrote his Scythian Suite in 1915. The one thing we know for sure is that the conception of The Rite of Spring arose out of a whole complex of ideas and trends that were very much "in the air." After Stravinsky had a dream of pagan sacrifice, he wrote to Roerich in early December 1912, who had a similar dream of his own. Stravinsky described his dream in his autobiography in these words:
One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de feu in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 862]
In other accounts, Stravinsky describes it as an actual dream and later on he demoted Roerich's role to being one of mere designer. Other accounts from the time actually credit Roerich with the original idea (Taruskin cites a number of sources on p. 863). The truth is likely that they were both equally responsible for the idea and its fleshing out into a ballet scenario. "The Great Sacrifice," to use the original working title, would be all stikhiya, all primitive immediacy, with choreographic action devoid of a conventional plot. The ballet would not "tell the story" of a primitive ritual, it would be that ritual. The balletic equivalent of recitative, the mime that was so prevalent in The Firebird, would be eliminated entirely in favor of dance.
That sets the scene for the composition of the ballet, which we will get to in subsequent posts. For now, let's look and listen to a revival of the original production with Roerich's costumes and sets and Fokine's choreography. UPDATE: Correction, the choreographer was Nijinsky, not Fokine, who had already left the Ballets russes.
My reference is, of course, to the famous quote by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
--Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979]
The more I study Stravinsky, the more I see that he is so central to the course of music in the 20th century that it could be seen as a series of footnotes to his music. A few random examples:
his use of folklore, not only in the use of folksongs integrated into modernist works such as the Rite of Spring, but also the structural use of the techniques of folk music such as the march that begins Renard, precedes the use of folk music by Bartók by a couple of decades
his neo-classicist phase was a tribute to the past and was a forerunner of the Early Music movement of the 70s and 80s
he was perhaps the first 20th century composer to use popular genres in his music as we see in his Ragtime written in 1918, this was many decades before composers started integrating popular genres in their music
his compulsive use of motoric rhythms and ostinati resonates with the minimalists of the 1970s
his interest in theatre and invention of new theatrical genres such as in Oedipus Rex and, again, Renard, precedes similar theatrical experiments of the 60s and 70s
The Standard Narrative on 20th century music is that it was launched by Claude Debussy and this is partly true, but Debussy himself in his second book of Preludes for piano, dating from 1913, was influenced by Petrushka, his favorite piece by Stravinsky. Taruskin refers to the Prelude 11, "Les tierces alternées" as "from beginning to end a study in Petrushka textures." [op. cit. p. 773]
Music historians, a bit stumped as to how to categorize Stravinsky, took as their conceptual model of progressivism in music the technical innovations in terms of dissonance and harmony of the Schoenberg school (followed by Boulez and Stockhausen) and in so doing managed to get the history of 20th century music rather muddled. The Standard Narrative as it has been taught reads rather like Deuteronomy: And in the beginning there was Debussy who discovered new colors and textures, but the real foundations were laid by Schoenberg who had as disciples Berg and Webern and they begat Boulez and Stockhausen and there were others in that place, though lesser: Bartók and Ligeti and others of their tribe. There was also Stravinsky, but he did not follow the Commandments, so who knows what he was up to!
This Standard Narrative, which really deserves a doctoral dissertation or two, was the product of the first wave of the European avant-garde who were essentially conducting a revolution in music in terms of atonality, serialism and, most important, a complete break with the past. This has echoes of the Russian Revolution with its starting history over again at zero with the new Soviet man. Stravinsky was, in those terms, a reactionary, a member of the old Russian aristocracy and whose music was full of references to previous music. One of the basic books of the Standard Narrative was René Leibowitz' Schoenberg and His School, first published in 1949.
If I get a chance, I should do a post on the Leibowitz book as I am sure an examination of its biases and assumptions would be fascinating. I read it sometime in the 70s and lost my copy years ago. Luckily it is available on Kindle.
For our envoi, let's listen to one of the pieces that are at the core of the Standard Narrative. The Quartet op. 28 by Anton Webern was the subject of innumerable classes in 20th century analysis but in the larger scheme of things is not of much lasting significance. The performers are the Emerson String Quartet:
Now it is finally time to take up Le Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring, but before doing that, I want to just mention a couple of things regarding influence. So many who wrote about Petrushka assumed that, since it was written in France and premiered there, that it was somehow a "French" piece on Russian themes. Just how this is the case is never specified. Taruskin points out that composers like Ravel, who might use sonorities resembling the Petrushka chord, do so in a quite different way, as a decorative surface to an underlying classical structure. Whereas in Stravinsky, his usages come out of a long Russian octatonic tradition and are quite structural. In the case of Debussy, on the other hand, it seems to be the case that it was Debussy in his second book of Preludes for piano, dating from 1913, who was influenced by Petrushka, his favorite piece by Stravinsky. Taruskin refers to the Prelude 11, "Les tierces alternées" as "from beginning to end a study in Petrushka textures." [op. cit. p. 773]
The influence of Petrushka was particularly strong on the Parisian aesthetic of the 1920s, on composers like Les Six, particularly Auric and Poulenc. But enough of the "street ballet" Petrushka. On to the Rite.
The original conception of "The Great Sacrifice" actually predates Petrushka and Stravinsky promised his collaborator Roerich that he would get back to it as soon as the earlier ballet was finished. But before he did, he did some vocal settings, one of which provided a path to the latter ballet. Konstantin Balmont, while not the most fashionable poet, was, due to the sonorousness of his verse, immensely popular with composers. The anthology Zelyonïy vertograd (A Green Garden) from which the poem Zvezdolikiy was taken, consists of stylizations of Russian spiritual folklore. The inspiration was a sect, the skoptsï, known for their ritual castration, that were a breakaway from the khlïstï, known for their ritual, whirling dances. These late 18th century sects, with their evocation of a huge army of the castrated rather remind one of the Unsullied from Game of Thrones! This is the esoteric subtext to the poem Stravinsky set.
A musical influence around this time on Stravinsky, despite his later denials, appears to have been Scriabin whose Prometheus was published in early 1911. Incidentally, one of the chords from the "motto" of the Stravinsky song Zvezdolikiy is a C minor chord superimposed on a C major chord:
"Coll. III" refers to one of the three possible octatonic scales
This is almost identical to the chord used by Jimi Hendrix that appears in "Purple Haze" though I wouldn't claim any influence. Others who used this sonority include Scriabin. As Hendrix used it, the root is doubled, the fifth omitted and a seventh added, (likely due to the way it lies on the guitar fingerboard) but the fundamental idea of having both the major and the minor thirds is shared with the Russians:
"Hendrix" chord
The melodic line found in the Zvezdolikiy motto also connects to perhaps the most memorable melodic motif from the Rite, the ostinato found in the pizzicato strings in "Augures printaniers":
Zvezdolikiy, dedicated to Debussy, is also known under its French title Le roi des étoiles:
Debussy, among others, regarded this little "cantata" as being unperformable due to intonation problems for the choir and it was not premiered until 1939! The importance of the song is due to its development of the intersections between the octatonic collections and the diatonic and whole-tone ones, techniques that will prove to be of great importance in the composition of the Rite.
We are not yet done with Petrushka, I'm afraid. What we are getting from Taruskin, via my summaries in these posts, is even more than you would get in a graduate seminar on Stravinsky. I know, as I have done one! In doctoral seminars it often seems there is not enough time to really get into the details, everything is rather rushed. But here we can take the time to go through Taruskin's exhaustive book on Stravinsky (just volume one, mind you) that he spent decades researching. As one of my musicology professors remarked in a seminar on DuFay, "it is the details that we are interested in."
A couple of interesting details are the discovery by Russian musicologists that, contrary to long-standing opinion, Russian folk music is actually polyphonic! Yuliy Nikolayevich Melgunov (1846 - 93) was the first to assert this and notate in his 1879 collection the "undervoicelets" or little heterophonic elements typically found in performance. Prior to this, the collectors of folksong tended to sit down with individual informants to notate what they sang. But Russian folksong is nearly always performed by a group. Until the advent of the use of the phonograph to record these performances, it was nearly impossible to notate what was going on. The first musicologist to go into the field and record these performances was Yevgenia Eduardovna Linyova (1853 - 1919). Her first expedition using the phonograph was in 1903 and the third and last collection of folksongs transcribed from recordings was published in 1909. It was her view that only now was a true neonationalist program in music possible because only now was the true nature of Russian folksong revealed. Was Stravinsky even aware of this research? You bet! Taruskin's exhaustive research into the archives turned up a letter from Stravinsky to his mother asking her to send him:
folk songs of the Caucasian peoples that have been phonographically transcribed ... I already have the first volume of "Great Russian Songs in Folk Harmonization" (as transcribed phonographically by Linyova). [op. cit. p. 733]
Taruskin points out some interesting ironies: despite the authenticity that underlies the depiction of the Shrovetide festivities, the impression is not naturalistic. The street scenes are a magical invocation, but viewed through the eyes of the puppets, who are the only real "characters" with individuality. The world of the puppets is more "real" than the world of the humans, danced by the corps de ballet.
Taruskin traces some hints of the "Petrushka chord" polytonality in previous music by Rimsky-Korsakov, in Scheherezade, where a great deal of the music is exhaustively octatonic. You might recall that the "Petrushka chord," much-loved by theorists, is a superimposition of a C major chord and an F# major chord, something not possible in common practice harmony, but very feasible in an octatonic context as both chords are derivable from an octatonic scale. Here are the two possibilities starting on C. The upper one consists of a tone/semitone sequence and the lower is the semitone/tone version:
If you look at the lower version of the scale you will see that it contains the three notes of a C major triad: C E G and also the three notes of an F# major triad, though they are spelled as a G flat major triad: G flat, B flat and D flat. In Petrushka we have not only a vertical conjunction of the two chords, but also their extension in time as a structural device. The second tableau, Petrushka's Room, for example, begins with a passage on C and ends with a cadence on F#. I'm not going to discuss all of Taruskin's analysis here, fascinating though it is. If you are interested, please go directly to the book yourself.
The idea of two competing tonal centers a tritone apart fits well with Stravinsky's original vision in his Konzerstück for piano and orchestra, sketches for which precede the ballet. The idea was that of a conflict between order and chaos that became mapped onto the ballet scenario. In the ballet, the polarity is between the human world and the puppet world, reflected in the "white key" versus "black key" music of the C major/F# major opposition.
What of the reception of Petrushka? It was an enormous hit with the Parisians and while Russians would not hear a performance in Russia until years later, there were certainly commentators who had either seen a performance in Paris or at least studied the score, published in 1911. Myaskovsky wrote:
Petrushka is life itself. All the music in it is full of such energy, such freshness and wit, such healthy, incorruptible merriment, such reckless abandon, that all its deliberate banalities and trivialities, its constant background of concertinas, not only fail to repel, but, quite the contrary, carry us away all the more, just as you yourself, on a Shrovetime aglitter with sun and snow, in the full ardor of your fresh young blood, once mingled in the merry, rolicking holiday crowd and flowed with it in an indivisible exultant whole. [op. cit. p. 762]
There were others who now regarded Stravinsky as an apostate, among them his erstwhile friend, Rimsky-Korsakov's son Andrey. He wrote, regarding a performance of three fragments from the work:
Petrushka glitters with an artificial assortment of bright rags and patches and clatters with ringing rattles. Were it not for the big talents of Benois and Stravinsky, this piece, with its vulgar tunes, would have been a monstrous crime.
Even fifty years later Stravinsky was still so wounded by this that he recalled it with bitterness. In other reviews Stravinsky's music was compared unfavorably with his conservative antipode, Glazunov. Possibly the most thorough and penetrating review came, unexpectedly, from the patriarch of Russian music criticism, the seventy-six year old Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kashkin who ended his lengthy commentary by saying:
The main thing to be said in conclusion is that Petrushka is the work of a real talent, from whom we may expect a very great deal in the future.
Right he was!
One thing that is immediately noticeable, to me at least, is how Petrushka is a kind of antithesis to The Firebird. Their structures are kind of mirror-images. The Firebird begins in mystery while Petrushka ends in mysterious pizzicati. The Firebird builds to a magnificent, blaring climax while Petrushka begins with the magnificent tapestry of the Shrovetide fair. The Firebird looks back in homage to Rimsky-Korsakov while Petrushka absorbs authentic folklore and fuses it with an incipient modernism. With Petrushka Stravinsky finally becomes Stravinsky.
Let's end with two more performances of the ballet. The first, with the score, is Pierre Boulez conducting the New York Philharmonic:
This is a restaging of the ballet by Nicolas Beriosov for the Paris Opera, based on the original sets. The audio in this clip is pretty iffy, but it is interesting to see a different production:
Some of the most remarkable aspects of Petrushka are the numerous authentic details of the vanished world of the St. Petersburg Shrovetide fair. These largely came from Benois, the acknowledged expert in these matters. This is confirmed, not only by Benois' own memoirs, as one would expect, but by other accounts by journalists from earlier days who write of the cries of vendors, the sounds of barrel organs, the squeak of Petrushka (remember his high squeaky voice is part of the character), the soldier's uniforms, costumes of the nannies, the live bear, and so on. All this, the action of the first tableau of Petrushka, is reflected directly in Stravinsky's music in a montage, a sort of rondo.
Here is a translation of part of Benois' original scenario:
During the Shrovetide revelries an old Magician of the Oriental type exhibits his animated puppets--Petrushka, the Ballerina and the Blackamoor--who perform a wild dance amid the astonished crowd.
The Magician's magic has imparted to the puppets all the feelings and passions of real people. The most richly endowed with these is Petrushka, and he suffers more than the Ballerina or the Blackamoor. He bitterly senses the cruelty of the Magician, his own bondage, his isolation from the rest of the world, his deformed and ridiculous appearance. He seeks consolation in the Ballerina's love and it seems to him that he has found a response in her heart, but in reality she only fears his strange ways and shuns him.
The music Stravinsky provided is equally rife with authentic genre detail, some of the sources of which can be identified. For many others, such as the cries of the vendors heard at the opening, even though these are notated in the Russian musicological literature by Alexander Mikhailovich Listopadov in a 1906 article, Stravinsky would have encountered these not only in his daily life, but also in at least one of his favorite operas when he was young, Power of the Fiend, by Alexander Serov, where a similar assortment of cries appears. Other materials come from Rimsky-Korsakov's own anthology of folk songs dating from 1877, which Stravinsky had previously used for some folk songs in The Firebird. On pages 696-7 in the Taruskin book he provides an extensive list of the songs and sources used in Petrushka.
One interesting example is the use of a Bylorussian carol collected in the Korsakov anthology that Rimsky himself used in the opera Snegurochka in an unusual voicing that Stravinsky used in a similar low-voiced texture. Taruskin quotes the three:
Another example of Stravinsky's mining of folk and popular song comes in a letter he wrote in early December 1910 to his friend Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov (son of the composer), begging him for two songs:
Taruskin, op. cit. p. 700
You have to look rather carefully at the score to identify some of these tunes because Stravinsky, rather ingeniously, combines different tunes in different meters that does not show in the notation.
Stravinsky creates remarkable montages of different kinds of music to depict the riotous crowd, something a Futurist might have called a "Street Symphony." One element of this is the way Stravinsky portrays a barrel organ with a group of clarinets and flutes:
Petrushka, just before figure 10
We could go on and on as, apart from the second tableau, which uses no folk material, the whole ballet is permeated with this kind of "authentic detail." There are specific tunes, borrowing from folkloric and popular material, used to depict specific moments in the ballet such as the dapper merchant who bursts in with a gypsy girl on either arm, the flinging of banknotes into the crowd by another, the tune for the bear trainer modeled on the tuning of the traditional instrument used, the dudka which was tuned to a whole tone scale (!) and so on.
An example of the intersection of the folkloric and modernist comes with Stravinsky's portrayal of the hurried nonsense jingles of the carnival barker, who jams wildly disproportionate syllables into his patter. This seems to be reflected in the music when Stravinsky has the oboes play a septuplet as we can see in the example I just put above. This is a genuine Stravinskian original, not previously appearing in Russian art music, what Taruskin describes as "static, additive, nondeveloping ostinati of variable length that continually break off and start up again" becomes a trademark of Stravinsky's style though its origins are perhaps an attempt to faithfully render an aspect of folk reality. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 713] Here are some examples he offers:
That should give you enough to chew on for today! Let's end with a concert performance of Petrushka so we can just concentrate on the music. I recommend downloading the score from IMSLP which you can do here.
As odd as it might seem from our historical perspective, Stravinsky was not the first choice of composer for The Firebird! The team of Benois, Fokine and Cherepnin had created the first original and fairly successful ballet the season before, Le pavillon d'Armide, so they were the first choice for The Firebird. Indeed, Cherepnin had already written some music for this purpose. The reasons are unclear, perhaps it was due to a personality conflict with the choreographer Folkine, but Cherepnin ultimately withdrew from the project. The summons next went to Anatoliy Lyadov, a composer with a firmly established reputation in Russia, but not elsewhere. As he had become known as a composer with a gift for the folkloristic/fantastic, he was a logical choice. Consequently, Diaghilev wrote to Lyadov from Venice in September 1909. Alas, Lyadov seems to have "pocket-vetoed" the proposal by simply doing nothing. Russia's leading ballet composer at the time, Glazunov, might also have been approached.
Diaghilev already knew Stravinsky's work, in fact he had already commissioned orchestrations from him for the Les sylphides suite, so finally the attention turned his way. He began composition in October or November 1909, even before he received the official commission in December. Stravinsky's first sessions with Fokine consisted of the latter laying out his requirements for the various sections of the ballet--the choreographer was at the helm creatively. This was a bit of a throwback to the early days of ballet when the music was arranged to fit the dancing and not vice-versa. The one area in which Stravinsky prevailed was over Fokine's original idea for the apotheosis or finale in which banal "gay processional dances" were proposed.
The only technical description we have from Stravinsky of how he composed is regarding a core element of The Firebird, the element that is used to suggest all the fantastic elements relating to Kashchey:
[quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 589]
This idea actually comes from an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov: Kaschey the Deathless!
(If you are familiar with Stravinsky's recollections published much later in his conversation books, you will notice that he had quite a different perspective on these events and his debts to Rimsky-Korsakov and others--in this respect I am going to go with Taruskin's account, supported with a plethora of evidence.)
Here is another example from Taruskin showing two "ladders of thirds," the one from Rimsky-Korsakov and the other from Stravinsky:
[op. cit. p. 593]
Stravinsky does develop the idea in various ways such as presenting two ladders a tritone apart, or alternating French sixths and diminished sevenths (one interesting thing about composing using the octatonic scale is that the only chords available are diminished!). Another interesting technique occurs in the "Dialogue de Kastchei avec Ivan-Tsarévich" where a pair of horns and a pair of trumpets each present a pentatonic scale, one "white keys" and one "black keys"--an early example of Stravinskian "polytonalism."
The motif heard in the basses at the very beginning of the ballet is actually an arpeggiation of the Kashchey ladder:
Taruskin has a lot more about the use of whole-tone chords, the appearance of the "Petruschka" chord, how the human characters are associated with diatonic harmony and the supernatural ones with chromatic harmony, the use of genuine folk tunes in the khorovod of the Princesses, the influence of Scriabin on the Firebird's Dance and the orientalisms of the Firebird's supplications. But I don't want to go over all that here as I want to finish with The Firebird so we can move on to Petrushka!
The Firebird achieved a smashing success at its première at the Paris Opera on 25 June, 1910. The French particularly admired the work's synthesism, its brilliant fusing of painting, dance and music. Stravinsky was particularly honored with the first article devoted to his music published in the international press. The author was Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi and it appeared in the Musical Times of 1 August 1911:
Russian born and Russian in spirit [Stravinsky] has no ambition but to assert his personality in the fullest and most independent way. He has eagerly drunk in the often misunderstood or forgotten message of Russia's greatest masters, and thereby learned to stand his own ground ... he stands apart among his colleagues for the abundance, boldness and vigour of his imagination as well as for his command of craftsmanship
Reading Taruskin, who works very hard to uncover all the historical context and forerunners of Stravinsky's music, one can lose sight of just how spectacular his development was. Yes, based on music of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, but displaying a new energy and ingenuity that we will see expanded on in the next two ballets: Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.
Let's end with one final version of The Firebird. This is the Royal Danish Ballet, choreography Glen Tetley, Royal Danish Orchestra, conductor Poul Jorgensen:
