Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume One: A Biography of the Works through Mavra [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520342729

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution provided by the Director's Circle of the Associates of the University of California Press, whose members are Evelyn Hemmings Chambers June and Earl Cheit Edmund J. Corvelli, Jr. Lloyd Cotsen Robyn Darwin Susan and August Frugé Harriet and Richard Gold Florence and Leo Helzel Raymond Lifchez and Judith Ixe Stronach T. Y. Lin Ruth and David Mellinkoff Thormund A. Miller Ann and Richard C. Otter Joan Palevsky Lisa See and Richard Kendall

A CENTENNIAL

BOOK

One hundred books published between 1990 and 1995 bear this special imprint of the University of California Press. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the Press's finest publishing and bookntaking traditions as we celebrate the beginning of our second century.

UNIVERSITY

OF C A L I F O R N I A Founded in 1893

PRESS

S T R A V I N S K Y THE

R U S S I A N

AND

T R A D I T I O N S V O L U M E

I

Nikolai Roerich, Rozhok Player, costume sketch for The Rite of Spring. (Bakhrushin State Central Theatrical Museum, Moscow)

RICHARD

TARUSKIN

STRAVINSKY AND T H E R U S S I A N TRADITIONS A Biography of the Works Through Mavra VOLUME I

U N I V E R S I T Y

OF

C A L I F O R N I A Berkeley

P R E S S Los Angeles

T h e p u b l i s h e r gratefully a c k n o w l e d g e s t h e c o n t r i b u t i o n p r o v i d e d by t h e G e n e r a l E n d o w m e n t F u n d o f t h e Associates o f t h e University o f California Press. T h e p u b l i s h e r also a c k n o w l e d g e s g e n e r o u s subsidies f r o m t h e N a t i o n a l E n d o w m e n t f o r t h e H u m a n i t i e s a n d t h e A m e r i c a n Musicological Society.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California © 1996 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taruskin, Richard. Stravinsky and the Russian traditions : a biography of the works through Mavra / Richard Taruskin. p. cm. "A Centennial book"—P. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-07099-2 (alk. paper) 1. Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971—Sources. 3. Music—Russia—History and criticism. I. Title. ML410.S932T38 1996 780'.92—dc20 93-28500 CIP MN Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

FOT Boobla, Kiwi, and Roo

C O N T E N T S

V O L U M E

TO

THE

V O L U M E S

I

Contents ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xix A Note on Transliteration xxi A Note on Dates xxiii Introduction: Stravinsky and the Traditions PART

I:

A WALLED-IN

ARTIST

1.

Russia and How It Got That Way 23

2.

Birth and Breeding 77

3. Fourth-Generation Belyayevets 4•

163 307

Rivalry, Recognition, Realignment

PART 7.

21

Chernomor to Kashchey: Harmonic Sorcery 255

5. Bells, Bees, and Roman Candles 6.

i

II:

A

PERFECT

369

SYMBIOSIS

421

Rightists of the Left 423

8. Trajectories

487

9. Myths for Export (Firebird) 555 10.

Punch into Pierrot (Petrushka) 661

11.

"New Times, New Birds; New Birds, New Songs" 779

12. The Great Fusion (The Rite of Spring) 849

V O L U M E

II

Contents v PART

III:

PROGRESSIVE

13. Réclame (The Loss of Russia, I) 14.

967

969

Settling Scores (The Loss of Russia, II)

15. The Rejoicing Discovery

ABSTRACTION 103s

1119

16. A Pair of Minstrel Shows 1237 17. The Turanian Pinnacle (Svadebka) 1319 [vu]

P A R T I V : ON CLASSICISM:

T H E C U S P OF T H E N E W A HERITAGE REDEFINED

18. From Subject to Style 1443 19. Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny 1501 Epilogue: The Traditions Revisited 1605 Glossary 1677 Pronunciation Guide 1681 Bibliography 1683 Index 1719

[VIII]

CONTENTS

1441

C O N T E N T S

Preface and Acknowledgments Abbreviations

PART

I: 1.

V O L U M E

I

xi

xix

A Note on Transliteration A Note on Dates

T O

xxi

xxiii

Introduction: Stravinsky and the Traditions

i

A

21

W A L L E D - I N

ARTIST

Russia and How It Got That Way

23

The Myth—The Academy—The Guild—Perils of Safe Harbor—The Myth Mocked 2.

Birth and Breeding

77

Family Tradition—First Steps—Joining the "Korsakovian Youth"—The Probestück—Filial Piety 3.

Fourth-Generation Belyayevets

163

Lessons—Opus 1: Chronology—Sources, Models, Revisions—Reception—Opus 2—Struggles 4.

Chernomor to Kashchey: Harmonic Sorcery

255

Schubert to Glinka—Liszt to Rimsky—Melody Scales and Harmony Scales—Tritones and Tetrachcrds—Transmission 5.

Bells, Bees, and Roman Candles

307

A French Legend—A Promising Opus 3—The Apiarian Program—Style and Technique—A Belated Wedding G i f t — Night and Fog—A-oo!

[IX]

6.

Rivalry, Recognition, Realignment

369

Entrée to the Other Camp—The Upstart—Memorials— On His Own PART

II: 7.

A

PERFECT

SYMBIOSIS

Rightists of the Left

421

423

Our Young Are Old—Baiting the Patriarch—Complicated Questions—Apollonian Affinities—A Musical Miriskusnik— Cherepnin and Stravinsky—The Nightingale Begun— A Universal Solvent 8.

Trajectories

487

Synthesis—Denationalization—Neonationalism—Paris— Faubourg Kuchkism—Antiliterary Esthetics—Ballet Redux— Ballet Exported 9.

Myths for Export (Firebird )

555

Subject and Plan—Fourth (or Fifth) in Line—An Unequal Partnership—"Leit-Musique"—The Styles of Its Time— Ambiguities of Reception—Ironies of Nationalism—Reverse Irony 10.

Punch into Pierrot (Petrushka)

661

A Complete Work of Art—How It Became a Ballet—The Scenario and Its Sources—Collaboration—Shirokaya Maslenitsa: The Grand Shrovetide—The Music: Sources—Musical Neonationalism: Ideals and Backgrounds—A New Irony—The Music: Harmony and Tonality—Controversy at Home— Influence Abroad 11.

"New Times, New Birds; New Birds, New Songs"

779

Balmont and Neonationalism—Stravinsky and Scriabin—New Harmonic Interactions—Promethean Resonances—Pierrotic Gestures—Linear Perspective—Laurels and Brickbats 12.

The Great Fusion (The Rite of Spring)

849

Background to a Dream—Conception—Scenario and Earliest Sketches—Archeological Authenticity—The Musical Sources— Neonationalism in Practice—Fusion—Drobmsf, Nepodvtzhnosf, Uproshcheniye—Redemption

[x]

CONTENTS

TO

VOLUME

I

P R E F A C E

A N D

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This study has been nearly two decades in the making. I date the beginnings of my serious scholarly involvement with Stravinsky to a seminar I announced for the spring term of 1977 at Columbia University, where I had lately begun graduate teaching after earning the doctorate with a dissertation on Russian opera in the 1860s. My earliest graduate offerings were on topics related to the dissertation, beginning with a seminar on Musorgsky. It did not attract a large enrollment, for reasons (I was told, and despite my assurances) having to do with the language barrier. The next time I was invited to give a seminar, I suggested one on Chaikovsky. The topic was broached to the graduate students, and was rejected (as, I hope, it might not be today) for lack of interest. The ever-reliable grapevine carried back a comment from that meeting: "Now, if he'd do one on Stravinsky . . . " Well, why not? And why hadn't I thought of it? For one bent on nurturing the growth of Russian music studies in what was then the none-too-salubrious atmosphere of the American academy, Stravinsky was the obvious approach, the obvious ploy, the obvious sop. N o one could admit a lack of interest in him, and the literature on him in English and the required graduate-school languages was so extensive that no one could cite that barrier as a deterrent. My background in Russian music and its history enabled me to claim a unique perspective on the composer that I did not yet possess. Luckily, no one questioned my credentials. My proposal to substitute Stravinsky for Chaikovsky was accepted, and I had from summer to the new year to master the existing literature and shape a course. Know then, Ellen Lerner, that it was your passing remark at that long-forgotten meeting that gave me the nudge. I won't say that without you I would never have found my way to Stravinsky. But you were an effectual if unwitting catalyst, and you have my cordial thanks.

[XI]

I made one proviso in announcing my seminar: in keeping with my longstanding predilections and my cherished designs, the course would have to focus on the Russian Stravinsky. To judge by the turnout, this was no deterrent (the early Stravinsky is still the one most prefer), even if language problems threatened to rear their heads anew. Fortunately, there were a couple in the class who did read a litde Russian (Douglas Stumpf read more than a litde, and he is to be thanked here for his yeoman service); I could assign them to report on some exciting recent emanations from the Soviet Union (Smirnov's litde book on Stravinsky's early development, the sixty letters edited by Igor Blazhkov, etc.). The Boosey & Hawkes facsimile publication of the Rite of Spring sketchbook was splendid grist for a class project. Those with no Russian could get to work, after a litde crash course on Russian musical traditions, on the scores themselves (here Paul Schuyler Phillips, who shordy went on to write the best exposition in print of Stravinsky's serial methods, did especially fine work). But my motives were mainly ulterior, and the seminar had its desired effect—on me. My experience conducting it paralleled Rimsky-Korsakov's on being unexpectedly appointed to the faculty of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. I became the eagerest and most committed pupil in the class, and it changed my life irrevocably. Not only did I become hopelessly fascinated with the subject (for—and I should have put this first—Stravinsky had long been the Russian composer I loved best and consequendy feared most as a subject of research), but I soon perceived that the state of Stravinsky research, at least from the Russian perspective, resembled that of the Klondike before the arrival of the earliest prospectors. The ground was strewn with scholarly gold, but there was no one to pick it up. The language barrier had indeed prevented most Western scholars from gaining adequate equipment, while Russian scholars had until recendy been kept by political and cultural barriers from approaching the subject at all. N o one (as of 1977) had investigated the musical milieu out of which Stravinsky had emerged, at least with an eye toward accounting for his emergence. N o one had combed the Russian musical press of those days; no one had cast a Stravinsky-educated eye at the music of the other Rimsky-Korsakov pupils (or even at Rimsky's own); no one had attempted on the basis of primary source material to assess Stravinsky's use of folklore, his relationship to his immediate musical heritage, or the specific nature of Diaghilev's impact on his development. N o one had ever tried to place his music (or even music as such) within the broader cultural perspective of the Russian "Silver Age." No music historian had ever come adequately to grips with the Ballets Russes, and hence with the direct influence of painterly attitudes on musical ones. Perhaps above all, there was little in the way of analytical methodology for Stravinsky's music, and that litde lacked historical and cultural grounding. My rash but compelling impulse was to try and make good all these lacks at once, and to develop modes of interrelating all the various kinds of research strat-

[XII]

P R E F A C E

A N D

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

egies and methods required by the task, whether historical, theoretical, analytical, or ethnological, by tying everything to the overriding question of Stravinsky's relationship to Russian traditions—as many Russian traditions as I could think of: intellectual, artistic, cultural, social, linguistic, and of course musical, but the last on several rigorously distinguished levels. I have been working on this project ever since. I will never finish. Some of the results of my research have appeared over the past several years in a series of articles touching on different facets of the larger design. "Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite ofSpring" {Journal ofthe American Musicological Society [JAMS] 33 [1980]: 50143), a direct outgrowth of the 1977 seminar, dealt with Stravinsky's relationship to folklore and his later attempts to minimize it. "The Rite Revisited" (in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang [New York: Norton, 1984], 183202) explored the relationship of the ballet's scenario to the contemporary cultural scene in Russia, and to the pagan antiquities the scenario purported to embody. "Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky's 'Angle'" {JAMS 38 [1985]: 72-142) sought, through a survey of a certain variety of Russian harmonic practice and its antecedents, to provide a historical justification for an analytical approach to Stravinsky's Russian-period output. "From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters" (in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, Modernist [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986], 16-38), originally delivered as an address at the International Stravinsky Symposium held at the University of California, San Diego, in commemoration of the composer's centenary, attempted a definition of Stravinsky's creative attitudes toward folklore in light of his Diaghilev associations and in contrast to the attitudes instilled in him by his musical upbringing, along with a preliminary assessment of their effect on his evolving musical style. "Stravinsky's 'Rejoicing Discovery' and What It Meant" (in Stravinsky Retrospectives [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987], 162-99), originally presented at another centennial exercise at the University of Notre Dame, was a demonstration of Stravinsky's approach to text setting and an attempt to justify it in terms of his experience with Russian folklore and its linguistic idiosyncrasies. "Chez Petrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky" {19th-century Music 10, no. 3 [Spring 1987]: 265-86) applied the analytic model developed in "Chernomor to Kashchei" to a representative Russian-period score. Finally, "Stravinsky and the Traditions" {Opus 3, no. 4 [June 1987]: 10-17) set forth in outline the theses the present study purports to substantiate, and "The Traditions Revisited: Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles as 'Russian Music'" (in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], p. 525-50) suggests their applicability to the composer's full stylistic range. These essays have all been incorporated in substance into the present work. I am grateful to the original editors— Nicholas Temperley, Christopher Hatch, John W. Hill, Jann Pasler, Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson, Joseph Kerman, James Oestreich, and David Bernstein—for

PREFACE

AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

[XIII]

their assistance and suggestions, and for their permission to have the work they published reappear here in more or less radically altered guise. (Thanks, too, to Rey M. Longyear and Stephen Blum for their correspondence pursuant to "Chernomor to Kashchei," which has helped me strengthen the argument in Chapter 4.) I have assembled the mosaic as best I can, and I offer it in the form of a biography of Stravinsky's works through Mavra. Given the intricacy of the pattern, the rigorousness of the documentation, and the large amounts of background and supporting detail that in some cases (I thought) needed to be supplied in order to justify the essentials of the argument, I hope the sheer bulk of the offering may be forgiven.

My work on Stravinsky has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, thanks to which I was able to embark on systematic research in the fall of 1979, and one from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which enabled me to complete the first draft (on 27 April 1987, a date I am unlikely to forget). In the early phases of writing vital support came to me from two men whose closeness to Stravinsky made their validation of my project indispensable to my self-confidence, and to whom I therefore owe a debt of everlasting gratitude. Having completed the basic research and tentatively formulated a set of unnervingly "revisionist" theses, I wrote out a chapter outline and a version of the Introduction and sent them off to Robert Craft (mindful that the Introduction contained assertions liable to annoy him) and to the late Lawrence Morton. Both sent helpful, detailed responses; and both were more than generous in allowing that what I had to say was worth saying. Craft's welcome in particular gave me the courage of my Stravinskian convictions. Though he will doubdess disapprove of some of what follows, his magnanimous encouragement, just when I needed it most, was, more than anything, what carried me through the job of writing. Morton's wry response to the early chapters—that it was lucky for my project that I had not known Stravinsky—also kept my spirits up during the long months of gestation. Another whose early support and advice were exceptionally important was William Austin, whose work has always been an inspiration to those of us who see music studies as reaching highest fruition in the soil of "context." As one who has had to defend this position repeatedly and publicly and often unpleasantly, I would like to confess my indebtedness to Professor Austin's cheering example and to pay it tribute. By all odds the luckiest break I have ever had as a scholar came when the New York Public Library acquired temporary custodianship of the vast Stravinsky Archive during several months in 1983, when I lived a ten-minute subway ride from Lincoln Center and was just beginning a sabbatical from Columbia. I virtually

[ X I V]

P R E F A C E

A N D

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

lived in the library's Special Collections room during this blessed period, have been back often since, and came to regard its staff practically as family. Let me thank in the first place Richard Koprowski, who took pains to make sure I knew about the availability of this material. He has since gone to another place, but Susan T. Sommer, Jean Bowen, Frances Barulich, and above all John Shepard, then the archive's temporary curator, are there still; so it is still a special pleasure for me to visit the library, although I live a bit farther away these days. I have thanked them all thousands of times for thousands of individual favors. Now it is my great happiness to offer a thousand thanks in print for making this book possible. Primary source research was also carried out at the New York Public Library's Slavonic Division, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Library of Canada. Thanks are due to the staffs of all six for their courtesy, but especially to Dr. Edward Kasinec of the first-named, Dr. Stephen Willis of the lastnamed, and Dr. J. Rigbie Turner of the Morgan, who made unusual efforts on my behalf. Mr. Oliver Neighbour, in the summer of 1985 winding up his stint as superintendent of the Music Room at the British Library, went further yet: he placed at my disposal scores and manuscripts in his own personal collection and even allowed me to copy them—insisted that I do so, in fact. The late Prof. Gerald Abraham, ever my guide and inspiration, not only saw to the copying of a rare score in his possession, but on the occasion of our first meeting insisted that I carry off with me a packet of Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov letters to copy and made me the gift of a Stravinsky autograph (cited in a later chapter). Dr. Peter Hauser of B. Schorr's Söhne in Mainz was very generous with materials in his firm's possession, as was Elmer Schönberger in Amsterdam with his own collection of rare books and scores. Other liberal suppliers to my scholarly needs have been Kenneth Cooper, a dear old friend, who found some valuable Stravinskiana among the literary effects of Sylvia Marlowe, of whose estate he had become the executor; Prof. James Hepokoski; Prof. Charles Joseph; and Laurel Fay, America's foremost student of Soviet music and musical life. Ming Tcherepnin was kind enough to send me the original Russian typescript of her father-in-law's memoirs. Esther Brody supplied me serendipitously with a source for one of Petrushka's most elusive tunes. Christopher Hatch's friendly interest in my work sustained him through a reading of the whole manuscript in first draft; I thank him for much welcome advice. Most recently, Prof. Yuriy Kholopov of the Moscow Conservatory, an eminent Russian music theorist of the present day, did me the honor of a thorough last-minute critique during a visit to Berkeley in June 1991. The author of a book that poaches on so many neighboring disciplines is in great need of patient specialists to consult, and here I have been especially fortuPREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

[xv]

nate in my friendships. Prof. Simon Karlinsky, of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, kindly offered to cast his eagle eye over those chapters most relevant to his expertise and saved me from many a gaffe. He also volunteered to translate the all-but-impossible folk texts cited in Chapter 15, for which he has my awed gratitude. Prof. Margarita Mazo, the foremost living expert on the Russian peasant wedding, was equally generous in going over the immense chapter on Svadebka (Les noces), for which Prof. William E. Harkins of Columbia University had previously furnished me with indispensable materials. Specialist assistance of another kind came from Professors Claudio Spies, Milton Babbitt, and George Perle, to whom I sent the concluding part of the epilogue for technical vetting. My debt to Professor Perle goes much further. My work on Stravinsky having attracted his attention, he has become a steady source of stimulation and support, which I have found especially sustaining over a long haul of seemingly endless public debate concerning theoretical premises and methodology. Our wide-ranging conversations have been much-appreciated tonics; may they long continue. For last I have saved the nearest. During my first year of full-time Stravinsky research, toward the end of 1979,1 belatedly discovered a long article entitled "Some Characteristics of Stravinsky's Diatonic Music," which had been published in two parts by Perspectives ofNew Music (14, no. 1 [1975]: 104-38; 15, no. 2 [1977]: 58-95). The author, Pieter C. van den Toorn, was then unknown to me. As, with mounting astonishment, I devoured this piece, I experienced a shock of recognition such as must come seldom in any lifetime. The author, pursuing a totally different path from mine, had come to all the same conclusions I was coming to about Stravinsky's early compositional technique and had made infallibly correct deductions about its sources. It was the kind of mutual confirmation one dreams about, this convergence of historical and inferential methods on a single theoretical viewpoint. I immediately wrote to the author in great excitement, and this led to the most abundant scholarly exchange I have ever been privileged to share in, to say nothing of the warm personal friendship that has ensued. There is virtually nothing in this book that has not been fully discussed and debated with Van den Toorn, to its great benefit and improvement. This is not to say that discussion and debate has always ended in agreement, or that my prime interlocutor bears any responsibility for the positions I have taken; but without him the positions would not have been the same, would not have felt so strong, and would not have achieved the precision only an argued and defended case can achieve. My debt to this friend, then, is incalculable. Yet the greatest debt of all is the one I owe Piero Weiss, now of the Peabody Conservatory. Long after my last diploma was issued I received my real scholarly education from this man when we collaborated on a book of music history source [ XV I]

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

readings. Those few early chapters that I managed to draft during the last year he and I still shared an office at Columbia were the last pieces of mine to enjoy the benefit of his fearsome scrutiny. He was the ideal reader and editor, and remains an ideal friend. I offer him this book with love and dread, my fondest hope being that he will not be able to recall just where his active influence left off. R.T. El Cerrito, California 18 June 1994

PREFACE

AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

[xvil]

ABBREVIATIONS

An Autobiography

Igor Stravinsky. An Autobiography (anonymous translation of Ckroniques de ma vie). New York: W. W. Norton, 1962.

Conv

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Conversations with Igor Stravinsky. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.

D&D

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Dialogues and a Diary. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.

Dialogues

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Dialogues. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982 (consists of the first part of D&D, somewhat augmented).

E&D

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Expositions and Developments. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981.

IStrSM

L. S. Dyachkova (with B. M. Yarustovsky), ed. I. F. Stravinskiy: stafi i materiali. Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1973.

M&C

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Memories and Commentaries. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i960; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1981.

Trudi MEK

Trudi Muzikal'no-Etnograficheskoy Komissii, sostoyashchey pri etnograficheskom otdele Imperatorskago Obshchestva Lyubiteley Testestvoznaniya, Antropologii i Etnografii, sostoyashchago pri Imperatorskom Moskovskom Universitete. Vol. I: Moscow, 1906 (Izvestiya Imperatorskago Obshchestva Lyubiteley... vol. 113; Trudi Etnograficheskago Otdela, vol. 15). Vol. II: Moscow, 1911 (Izvestiya... vol. 114; Trudi Etnograficheskago Otdela, vol. 16). [XIX]

P&D

Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

RMG

Russkaya muzïkal'nayaßazeta (periodical).

R&C

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Retrospectives and, Conclusions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

SelCorr

Robert Craft, ed. Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982 (I), 1984 (II), 1985 (III).

T&C

Igor Stravinsky. Themes and Conclusions. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982 (nondiary portions o f T & E and R&C, somewhat augmented).

T&E

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Themes and Episodes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

N.B.: The University of California Press editions of Conv, M&C, and E & D are reprints of the British versions (London: Faber & Faber), which differ somewhat from the original American editions. Citations to these books are always made in double form (e.g. Conv:74/82, M&C:59-6O/6I-62), page references before the slash being to the original American edition, after the slash to the reprint. Discrepancies between the two texts are always noted.

[XX]

ABBREVIATIONS

A

N O T E

ON

T R A N S L I T E R A T I O N

After much thought and experiment, I have adopted, with modifications, the system for transliterating Russian vowels that was worked out by Gerald Abraham for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (for a complete account, see New Grove i:xvi-xvii). The chief merit of the system is its consistency, allowing adjectival endings to be rendered faithfully. The Russian letter ti, pronounced as a thick short "i," is represented by the character "I," while the Russian H, signifying iotation, is represented by "y." The palatalizing vowels H and KD are represented by "ya" and "yu." The Cyrillic e is usually transliterated by its roman cognate, "e," but in initial position and after vowels or hard/soft signs it is rendered as "ye." Where an "e" is found in such positions, it represents the Russian 3. Modifications are introduced for the sake of clarity, based on the pronunciation habits of English-speaking readers. Thus the diphthong ail (rhymes with "high" as in Nikolai) is rendered as "ai," since "ay" would suggest to English readers a rhyme with "day." When the vowels a and Hare conjoined, each receiving its full phonetic value, an accent is used, thus: Mikhail (pronounced Mi-kha-ee/). When one in a pair of H'S is stressed, the pair is represented by "-iyi-," as in "Mariyinsky Theater." When the pair occurs at the end of a plural or a genitive, with neither member stressed, "-ii" is the form adopted in transliteration. The soft sign is not rendered in names, except in transliterations of tides and extracts: thus "Asafyev" in the text, "Asaf'yev," where appropriate, in footnotes (but even in footnotes, "Asafyev" where he is merely named as author or editor). Like the New Grove, this book respects standard renderings where they have become firmly established and where a more faithful transliteration would therefore be distracting. Thus the usual spelling "-sky" is retained for the suffix -CKHH in

[XXI]

names like Rimsky or Stravinsky. Such other customary transliterations as Prokofiev and Koussevitsky are likewise respected. Many familiar spellings not sanctioned by the New Grove have also been kept, such as Balanchine, Diaghilev, Gliere, Medtner, and Rachmaninoff. Owing to a confessed quirk on the part of the author, who is possibly oversensitive to reminders of the onetime musical provincialism of the English-speaking peoples, "Tchaikovsky" is rejected in favor of the more literal "Chaikovsky," which is perfectly regular for English, though not for French or German. Words and names that English speakers are likely to stress on the wrong syllable (Musorgsky, Kamarinskaya, dvoryanin) are listed in the Glossary or the Pronunciation Guide with accents to indicate tonic stress. Accents are often given for poetry and tides in the text. In bibliographical citations, transliteration is stricdy according to the rules, letter by letter, not according to customary usage or phonetics. The character r is always "g," even in genitive endings (-oro) where Russians now pronounce it 'V' ("-ovo"). Those for whom the citations are useful are precisely the ones who would find sound-based modifications annoying in this case.

[ XX I I ]

A NOTE

ON

TRANSLITERATION

A

N O T E

O N

D A T E S

The Julian calendar (known as the "Old Style," abbreviated o.s.) was used in Russia until i February 1918, and is still the calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the nineteenth century, therefore, Russian dates were twelve days behind those of the Gregorian calendar ("New Style," or N.s.), used elsewhere in Europe and in America. Because the year 1900 was a leap year according to the Julian calendar but not the Gregorian, from 29 February 1900 to 1 February 1918 the two "styles" were thirteen days apart. Stravinsky was born on 5 June 1882, o.s.—on which day New Style calendars in the West read 17 June. From 1900 on, according to the scheme here detailed, his birthday corresponded to 18 June, N.s., and that was the date on which he celebrated it for the rest of his life. (It is thus the date on which his birth should be commemorated until the year 2100.) In this book, dates for events taking place in Russia will always be given according to the calendar in use in Russia. Whenever there is a possibility of confusion, or where Russian dates must be synchonized with Western ones, double dating will be employed, unless o.s. or N.s. is specified.

[ XX I I I ]

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Now that the twentieth century is nearing an end, it is safe to predict that Igor Stravinsky will be remembered as its most famous composer of what, in the twentieth century, has become known as "serious" music. He was by far the most played, most recorded, most interviewed, most photographed, most talked about. Alone among composers, he led a private life that was consistently a matter of public interest (and the continuing flood of published photograph albums and "scrapbooks" shows that interest has not flagged since his death). He has been the subject of book-length memoirs by nonmusicians. He commanded a five-figure fee for personal appearances, and his personal archive commanded seven. In short, as his wife once put it, he possessed "a lot of numen." 1 But if he was the most famous, he is not necessarily the best known or understood. The story of his life—and, even more so, of his musical development— teems with riddles. The biggest of them concern his musical origins and his early ("Russian") period, despite the fact that it was the period of his most famous works, and despite the voluminous Stravinsky literature, so much of it contributed by the composer himself. For as his career proceeded along its spectacular course he became increasingly embarrassed by his past and did all he could to force it down an Orwellian memory hole. He did this not only by withholding or suppressing information, but also, more subtly, by supplying it in selective superabundance. His various accounts of his early years, given at various points during his later ones, all contradict one another, and all are in greater or lesser conflict with the ascertainable facts. i. "Vera Stravinsky to a Cousin in Moscow" (T&E:82, T&C:3i3).

Whence this celebrated mendacity? It stemmed, one has to conclude, not just from a faulty memory or from indifference to factual accuracy, but from an astonishing, chronic sense of cultural inferiority that reached a besetting climax near the end of Stravinsky's career, leaving him doubtful about the validity of his work and fretful about his place in history. Stravinsky's embarrassment offers an elegant confirmation of Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy's claim, in his bitter, biting Europe and Humanity, that the enlightened cosmopolitanism of the West was really a form of chauvinism—he called it "pangermanoromanic chauvinism"—and that Russians infected by it could not help turning hostile toward Russia. 2 That Stravinsky was infected with this plague no one needs to prove by now. Its effects on him, however, have yet to be fully gauged. Robert Craft informs us that "all of his life . . . Stravinsky complained that he had been handicapped in his youth by his isolation from an intellectually stimulating environment."3 Compensation is everywhere apparent in Stravinsky's writings, with their obsessively recherché vocabulary and self-conscious (and, given the author, notably gratuitous) insistence, particularly with reference to serial pieces like Movements for Piano and Orchestra, on his "advanced" technique.4 But its most stunning manifestation was something no one could have expected before the period of the serial music and the "conversations" books: his acknowledgment of the reality and the legitimacy of the Germanic "mainstream" that he had devoted a career (and for many, very persuasively) to denying. Once Stravinsky had crossed this bridge, his whole past became useless to him. Earlier he had assumed with special vehemence and authority the archly ironic tone Russian composers had habitually adopted when speaking of German music. (Glinka himself had observed that "German counterpoint doesn't always agree with a lively imagination.") 5 In interviews of the twenties, Stravinsky spoke of the "nefarious influence in Russia of German music," and claimed that "each time that the influence of French and Italian music has been felt in Russia, the result has been an opening up, a flowering."6 In a sketchbook of 1917, Stravinsky jotted a note to himself in which he described Germans as "human caricatures."7 His 1915 Souvenir d'une marche boche may have been merely his contribution to wartime propaganda, but at the end of World War I Stravinsky was hardly alone in thinking that the era of "boche" hegemony in music had ended. By the thirties, newly a citizen of France, he proudly identified himself with French culture, both in word 2. N. S. Trubetskoy, Tevropa i chelavechestvo (Sofia: Rossiysko-Bolgarskoye Knigoizdatel'stvo, 1920). 3. P & D : 2 0 .

4. Cf. M&C:IOO-IOI/IO6-IO7. (Here and throughout, double page references are to original edition and reprint.) 5. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, "Zapiski," in Literaturnïye proizvedieniya i perepiska, vol. 1 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 197?), 226. 6. A Brussels interview of 192+, quoted in P&D:20i. 7. Robert Craft, ed., Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album (1921-1971) (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 13.

[2]

INTRODUCTION

and in musical deed.8 In Persephone, no less than in Chroniques de ma vie, Stravinsky proclaimed France his "second motherland."9 And when he wrote, in feigned commiseration, that even "a Tchaikovsky could not escape Germanic influences,"10 it was with the implication that a Stravinsky could and did. But sour grapes were ever fermenting behind this façade; for, like all Russian composers, Stravinsky envied the Germans their traditions. The mask fell when it became so terribly important for him to establish belated and retroactive connections with the New Vienna School. Typical of Stravinsky the serialist were selfpitying assertions like this one, from Dialogues and a Diary: "I am a double émigré, born to a minor musical tradition and twice transplanted to other minor ones." What astonishes here is the assessment of French music, which he went on to describe as being, at the time of his "removal" to it, "almost as eclectic as 'Russian music,' and even less 'traditional.' " n Stravinsky publicly lamented the fact that he related "only from an angle to the German stem," which he conceived as beginning with Bach and ending with Schoenberg.12 One cannot expect frankness about his origins from a man so deeply ashamed of them. All that Stravinsky would allow with respect to his relationship to "Russian music," by the time he turned to memoir-dictating on a large scale, was that he had "helped to exhaust and scuttle the limited tradition of my birthright."13 One who undoubtedly contributed heavily to Stravinsky's sense of shame was Pierre Souvtchinsky, by the period of the "conversations" the oldest and most important of Stravinsky's friends. An éminence grise behind the Poétique musicale, Souvtchinsky exerted a momentous intellectual influence on Stravinsky, the full measure of which has not yet begun to be taken. He, too, had nothing but scorn for the Russia out of which both he and Stravinsky had emerged. Deeply dialectic in his outlook on history, he believed as adamantly as any German in Zeitgeist— what he called the "general ideas" of the time. "The general ideas were Schoenberg's ideas," he told Craft in 1956. And because "it was Stravinsky, whatever he says now, who turned the younger generation against Schoenberg," Souvtchinsky had written him off in the forties; their rift could be healed only after Stravinsky's serialist conversion.14 By that time, for Souvtchinsky, the mantle of the general 8. "Stravinsky, in German, Says He's French," read a Chicago headline in 1937 (P&D:ii). 9. Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 89. 10. Ibid., 98. 11. D8cDnon./Dialo0ues:27n. At a Stravinsky centennial symposium at Notre Dame in November 1982 I recalled this passage and asked, rhetorically, whether anyone could imagine calling the French tradition "minor." I can still hear Milton Babbitt's "Oh, I can!"—interjected only half in jest. I recalled that it was Babbitt who had shown Stravinsky Schenker's lofty dismissal of the Concerto for Piano and Winds in 1962, just when Dialogues and a Diary was being put together, and wondered how many such encounters with American academic serialists lay behind Stravinsky's confession. 12. DScD:i4./Dialogues:^o. 13. D8tD:ion./Dialo£ues:27. 14. Stravinsky and Souvtchinsky had avoided each other during Stravinsky's Paris visit of 1952; see Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (1948-1971) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 61.

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ideas had fallen on Pierre Boulez—the rather frightening young Boulez of "Schoenberg est mort"—for whom, "since the Viennese discovery, every composer outside the serial experiments has been useless."15 Souvtchinsky did not actually introduce Stravinsky and Boulez (Virgil Thomson did, of all people), but he was chiefly responsible for their brief close friendship (1956-58), a friendship that flowered immediately before Stravinsky began his series of conversation books. The positive reinforcement Stravinsky received from Boulez's friendship was exceedingly important to him just then, for he had just come through the most serious crisis of his creative career.16 Souvtchinsky's motives in engineering the relationship were undoubtedly loving ones: he wanted to see his old friend returned to "usefulness" and to a creative activity worthy of his genius. (Similar motives must account for the fact that of all Stravinsky's European friends, only Souvtchinsky welcomed Craft's participation in Stravinsky's life without reservations.) As Craft has reported, the "Answers to Thirty-six Questions" that formed the "cornerstone of the 'conversations' " were in large part "written during Boulez's visit to Los Angeles [in March 1957], and under his influence."17 Thus the voice that speaks to us from the Stravinsky/Craft books—and especially the first of them, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959)—was in an indirect but important sense as much the creation of Pierre Souvtchinsky as the voice that had spoken two decades earlier out of the Poétique musicale. Comparison of the seven cursory pages allotted to "St. Petersburg" in Conversations (roughly equal to the space devoted to "Schoenberg, Berg, Webern") with the account of his early years in Chroniques de ma vie will suffice to show how squeamish Stravinsky had become about his Russian apprenticeship. In the Chroniques he had been quite candid, if apologetic, about his early acceptance of the academic views of the so-called Belyayev circle, and in particular, about his early admiration for Glazunov. I was then of an age—the age of early apprenticeship—when the critical faculty is generally lacking, and one blindly accepts truths propounded by those whose prestige is unanimously recognized, especially where this prestige is concerned with the mastery of technique and the art of savoir faire. Thus I accepted their dogmas 15. Pierre Boulez, Notes (fan Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Alfred A. Rnopf, 1968), 274. The Boulez-Stravinsky relationship has been chronicled by Craft ("Boulez in the Lemon and Limelight," in Prejudices in Disguise [New York: Alfred A. Rnopf, 1974], 207-14; see also SelCorrII:347-62). According to this account, Stravinsky did not read Relevés d'apprenti until 1966, when it became "the underlying provocation for all of Stravinsky's later criticisms of Boulez, as well as Stravinsky's final 'public withdrawal' of his earlier 'extravagant advocacy' " (209). 16. See Robert Craft, "Assisting Stravinsky: On a Misunderstood Collaboration," Atlantic Monthly, December 1982, 68-74, esp. 70-71 (reprinted in Craft, Present Perspectives [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984], under the tide "Influence or Assistance?" 246-64; the relevant passage is on 252-53). 17. Craft, Present Perspectives, 271. The "Answers to Thirty-six Questions" (minus one) were first published in German translation: "35 Antworten auf 35 Fragen," Melos 24 (June 1957): 161-76; minus another, they saw print in the original English the next month: "Answers to 34 Questions: An Interview with Igor Stravinsky," Encounter 9, no. 7 (July 1957): 3-14.

[4]

INTRODUCTION

quite spontaneously, and all the more readily because at the time I was a fervent admirer of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. I was specially drawn to the former by his melodic and harmonic inspiration, which then seemed to me full of freshness; to the latter by his feeling for symphonic form; and to both by their scholarly workmanship. I need hardly stress how much I longed to attain this ideal of perfection in which I really saw the highest degree of art; and with all the feeble means at my disposal I assiduously strove to imitate them in my attempts at composition. 18 Several pages later, with specific reference to his own Symphony in E-flat, Stravinsky even more candidly acknowledged Glazunov's influence on his early development : I composed this symphony at a time when Alexander Glazunov reigned supreme in the science of symphony. Each new production of his was received as a musical event of the first order, so greatly were the perfection of his form, the purity of his counterpoint, and the ease and assurance of his writing appreciated. At that time I shared this admiration whole-heartedly, fascinated by the astonishing mastery of this scholar. It was, therefore, quite natural that side by side with other influences (Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov) his predominated, and that in my symphony I modeled myself particularly on him. 19 One gets the impression that Stravinsky had bent over backward to praise his older colleague—possibly because Glazunov was still alive and residing, like Stravinsky, in Paris (he died on 21 March 1936, just after the second volume of the Chroniques was issued), but also because the Chroniques were written partly to further Stravinsky's ill-starred campaign for election to the Institut de France, 20 which helps to account for their at times cloyingly diplomatic tone. In Conversations, Stravinsky bent over just as far in the opposite direction: The first concert of which I have any recollection was the occasion of a première of a symphony by Glazunov. I was nine or ten years old and at this time Glazunov was the heralded new composer. He was gifted with extraordinary powers of ear and memory, but it was going too far to assume from that that he must be a new Mozart; the sixteen-year-old prodigy was already a cut and dried academician. I was not inspired by this concert. 21 The symphony would have been Glazunov's Fourth in E-flat, first performed in St. Petersburg in 1893. But Glazunov was twenty-seven at the time, not sixteen. Stravinsky confused this occasion with another, which he did not witness but was undoubtedly often told about: the première of Glazunov's First Symphony (op. 5) 18. An Autobiography, 11. 19. Ibid., 21-22. 20. He lost to Florent Schmitt; on this humiliating episode sec Robert Craft, "The Story Behind Stravinsky's Rejection by L'Institut de France," Ovation 3, no. 5 (June 1982): 12-14, 33 (reprinted in SelCorrII:482-87). 21. Conv: 37-38/37.

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in 1882, the year of Stravinsky's birth, when the composer was sixteen and was indeed heralded as a new Mozart. But these factual errors are secondary: the chief distortion here is the attribution to the ten-year-old Stravinsky of the émigré Stravinsky's esthetics and powers of judgment. (How many ten-year-olds know what an academician is?) The whole episode as related in Conversations is an ad hoc fabrication concocted for the purpose of distancing Stravinsky from his surroundings and from the formative influences he had previously acknowledged.22 The discussion of Russian music in Conversations touches on a few other matters of tradition, and again it provides a good entrée into the mind of Stravinsky the old émigré and young serialist via a willfully distorted view of the historical situation. He states that when he was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov he already "enjoyed the real freshness of Tchaikovsky's talent (and his instrumental inventiveness), especially when I compared it with the stale naturalism and amateurism of the 'Five.' " 2 3 But the radical cleavage between Chaikovsky and the Five no longer existed by the time Stravinsky was Rimsky's pupil; the dichotomy was a figment of the 1860s (perpetuated, it is true, in the writings of V. V. Stasov and, through his disciples like Rosa Newmarch, familiar in the West), though it was briefly revived by Diaghilev with Stravinsky's help in the 1920s, as part of the propaganda surrounding the Ballets Russes production of The Sleeping Beauty. (The matter is also reflected, of course, in Mavra, from the time of which the Chaikovsky/Five split remained a sacred dogma to Stravinsky.) In the 1920s, moreover, the Chaikovsky/ Five split was best viewed in the light not of Russian, but of French musical politics. By the time of Stravinsky's association with Rimsky there was no longer such a thing as "the Five." Rimsky was the titular head of another group altogether— the Belyayev Circle—and his feelings about the old circle under Balakirev were ambivalent at best. (With Balakirev himself he was by then only sporadically on speaking terms.) He looked upon Chaikovsky (dead a decade) as his greatest Russian colleague.24 "Naturalism" was the deadest horse in the Russian esthetic stable, and had been so (except, once again, in the writings of Stasov) for over thirty years. As for "amateurism," it is a strange epithet indeed to apply to Stravinsky's teacher, who by the 1880s had transformed himself, by dint of a heroic and perhaps unprecedented feat of belated self-education, into a paragon of what Stravinsky himself had called "scholarly workmanship." The most patent fib in Conversations concerns the one early Stravinsky piece that rated an extended discussion in the book. The impression seems thus inescapable that the discussion was included for the sake of the fib. Craft asked whether Stra22. In a later account of the Symphony in E-flat (M&C:57/59), all Stravinsky had to say about the model he had acknowledged in the Chroniques was this: "The only bad omen [at the first performance] was Glazunov, who came to me afterwards saying, Very nice, very nice.' " 23. Conv:43/43. 24. Stravinsky's suggestion (Conv:3/38) that Rimsky would have stayed away from a concert because a work by Chaikovsky was on the program is absurd; by the time Stravinsky knew him Rimsky had conducted all-Chaikovsky concerts. [6]

INTRODUCTION

vinsky had had Maeterlinck's La vie des abeilles in m i n d as a p r o g r a m for his Scherzo fantastique

o f 1908. H e r e is Stravinsky's reply:

No, I wrote the Scherzo as a piece of "pure" symphonic music. The bees were a choreographer's i d e a . . . . I have always been fascinated by b e e s , . . . but I have never attempted to evoke them in my work (as, indeed, what pupil of the composer of the Flight of the Bumble Bee w o u l d ? ) . . . Maeterlinck's bees nearly gave me serious trouble, however. One morning in Morges I received a startling letter from him accusing me of intent to cheat and fraud. M y Scherzo had been entided Les Abeilles—anyone's tide, after all—and made the subject of a ballet then performing at the Paris Grand Opera (1917). Les Abeilles was unauthorized by me and, of course, I had not seen it, but Maeterlinck's name was mentioned in the programme. The affair was setded and, finally, some bad literature about bees was published on the fly-leaf of my score, to satisfy my publisher, who thought a "story" would help to sell the music. 25 A n d here is an extract f r o m a letter Stravinsky sent R i m s k y - K o r s a k o v f r o m U s t i l u g o n 18 June 1907 ( o . s . ) , published in the Soviet U n i o n t w o years after Stravinsky's death: I am working a great deal. This work consists of orchestrating the Symphony and composing a fantastic Scherzo, "The Bees," about which I'll tell you m o r e . . . . As you know, I already had the idea of writing a scherzo in St. Petersburg, but as yet I had no subject for it. Then all at once here Katya [Stravinsky's wife] and I were reading "The Life of the Bees" by M. Maeterlinck, a half-philosophical, halfpoetical work that captivated me, as the saying goes, from head to toe. A t first I thought, for the sake of the fullness of the program, that I would choose some specific citations from the book, but I see now that that is impossible, since the scientific and literary language is too closely intermixed in it, and therefore I decided that I would simply allow myself to be guided in composing the piece by a definite program, but not use any citation as a heading. Simply "The Bees" (after Maeterlinck): Fantastic Scherzo. When we see each other I'll show you the spots I have taken for the program; in a letter I can't give you a complete idea. 26 T o be sure, this corrective leaves o p e n the question o f w h o authored the " b a d literature," w h i c h may still be read o n the flyleaf o f the Schott score, but it certainly fits the course and structure o f the m u s i c . 2 7 There can hardly be any question o f a 25. Conv:40-4i/40. 26. IStrSM:44i. 27. Translated from the French, it reads as follows: "Preliminary note. This piece is inspired by an episode from the life of the bees. The first part represents the life and activity of the hive; the middle part, consisting of a slow movement, depicts the sunrise and the nuptial flight of the queen, her lovestruggle with her chosen spouse and the tatter's death. In the third part, a reprise of the first, we encounter anew the harmonious activity of the hive at work. Thus the whole becomes for us humans a fantasy portrait of an eternal cycle" (Edition Schott, Studien-Partitur 3501). Nicolas Slonimsky agreeably relates the program to the music as follows: "[The Scherzo fantastique suggests] by its entomologically buzzing chromatics the intense activity of a beehive, the nuptial flight of the queen bee in the soaring piccolos, the death of her discarded mate in sonorously Wagnerian augmented triads, and the return of the cycle of life and death in tremulous diminished seventh-chord harmonies" (Music Since 1900, 4th ed. [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971], 138). STRAVINSKY

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lapse of memory in a matter so fundamental, though. Stravinsky intended, quite simply, to deceive. But the deception was anything but cynical. Indeed, it was principled: Stravinsky badly needed to dissociate himself from an artistic milieu that put such stock in program music that one could not so much as begin writing a scherzo without having some definite "subject" in mind. "Pure music," in any case, was always a sensitive point for the Parisian and American Stravinsky. "Folklore" was another—the touchiest of all, in fact, for its associations with the Red Russia Stravinsky abhorred, where an art "national in form and socialist in content" (in Stalin's words) had become a watchword.28 In Conversations, Stravinsky kept totally silent on the matter of folklore in his own work, even when his Diaghilev scores were touched upon in a section entitled "Painters of the Russian Ballet." In this particular section, moreover, the longest discussion was reserved for what was perhaps the least significant of all the Diaghilev Stravinsky productions, Giacomo Balla's "set" (as Craft put it) for Fireworks— actually just a backdrop to a light show that accompanied Stravinsky's four-minute orchestral fantasy as an entr'acte. It gave Stravinsky the opportunity for a threepage excursus on his relations with the Futurists (more than the space allotted to Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring combined). Indeed, the 1917 Fireworks spectacle had been one of the first steps the stranded Ballets Russes would take away from folklore toward the postwar cosmopolitan (read: Parisian) modernism that we now think of as the company's "second period." (Stravinsky was the only "first period" composer to survive the change.) The one overt reference to folklore in Conversations came in a startling paragraph on Bartok, where Stravinsky let it be known that "I could never share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was certainly real and touching, but I couldn't help regretting it in the great musician."29 There is no need to offer a refutation at this point; this whole book will be a refutation. Let us only recall that in the period of his first fame, from Firebird to Svadebka (Les noces), Stravinsky was universally cited as the single Russian composer of his generation to carry forward the Russian nationalism of his forebears. However much it may prove necessary to qualify that evaluation when it comes to individual works, the basic truth of it lies too close to the surface to require documentary confirmation as such. The situation with respect to Stravinsky's testimony on his Russian past, both as to fact and as to attitude, is hardly different in Memories and Commentaries, Expositions and Developments, or Dialogues and a Diary;30 if anything, the matter 28. I. V. Stalin, Voprosi Leninizma (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1931), 137. 29. Conv:74/82. 30. The last two Stravinsky/Craft books—T&E and R & C , later conflated (minus Craft's diaries) into T & C — n o longer contained direct reminiscences cast in dialogue form, and hence do not enter into consideration here. They contain many "Program Notes" on various works, but these are not explicidy attributed solely to Stravinsky (though some do use the first person).

[8]

INTRODUCTION

becomes even stickier, for we now encounter gratuitous invention alongside the already-noted distortions and suppressions. One of the best examples of this is Stravinsky's portrait-mémoire of Anton Arensky, a name that will hardly come up again in this book. Since there will be no chance to offer correctives to this portrait en passant, it merits an omnibus corrective up front to serve as a warning to all who may be tempted to rely for their information on the "conversations" books, convenient and attractive as they are, without corroboration. Stravinsky dictated as follows: Arensky was a composer of the Moscow school—in other words, a follower of Tchaikovsky. I—as a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, and for that very reason—could not know him well. And, in all that concerned Arensky, Rimsky was, I thought, unjustifiably harsh and unkind. He criticized Arensky's music captiously and unnecessarily, and a comment about it, which he allowed to be printed after Arensky's death, was cruel: "Arensky did very little, and that litde will soon be forgotten." I attended a performance of Arensky's opera Dream on the Volga with Rimsky. The music was dull indeed, and Arensky's attempt to evoke sinister atmosphere with the bass clarinet was horse-opera farce. But Rimsky's exclamation to me that "the noble bass clarinet should not be put to such ignominious use" must have been overheard several rows in front of us, and later, of course, throughout the theater. Arensky had been friendly, interested, and helpful to me, however, and in spite of Rimsky I always liked him and at least one of his works—the famous piano trio. He meant something to me also by the mere fact of his being a direct personal link with Tchaikovsky.31

Here are the facts: Arensky (b. 1861) was, like Stravinsky, a Rimsky-Korsakov pupil. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1882 with a gold medal in composition authorized by his teacher. What made him a "Muscovite" was the fact that upon graduation he was immediately employed by the Moscow Conservatory as a professor of harmony and counterpoint; there he taught alongside Taneyev. Chaikovsky had resigned from the Conservatory staff in 1878 and owing to his difficult personal life had pretty much withdrawn from the society of Moscow musicians. Arensky knew him, of course, but was never close to him. By 1895 Arensky was back in St. Petersburg, where he lived until his death in 1906. He was residing in the capital all during the period of Stravinsky's tutelage. Arensky's reputation as a "Chaikovskian" rests on the fact that his bestremembered composition is a set of variations on a Chaikovsky song. This work originally formed the slow movement of his second string quartet (1894) but is a repertory item in an arrangement for string orchestra. Its political significance should not be exaggerated. As its date suggests, it was a memorial tribute such as 31. M&C:59-6O/6I-62.

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was paid Chaikovsky by many colleagues, including such other reliable Korsakovians as Glazunov. In any case, as we have already noted, Rimsky's reputed hostility toward the deceased Chaikovsky was a fiction Stravinsky had been circulating since the 1920s. Though a notorious loner, Arensky was for a time closer to Rimsky-Korsakov than he ever was to Chaikovsky. A letter from Chaikovsky, in fact, informed Rimsky-Korsakov that "Arensky has infinite affection and respect for you." 32 Arensky dedicated his First Symphony to his former teacher and quoted The Snow Maiden in his Violin Concerto. On the occasion of the concert organized to commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of Rimsky-Korsakov's debut as a composer (17 December 1900), Arensky was among the speechmakers. In 1904 his Trio was awarded a Glinka Prize by the Executive Committee of the Belyayev firm (headed by Rimsky-Korsakov), even though Arensky never gave his music to be published by Belyayev but remained loyal to the Moscow house of Jurgenson, with whom he had concluded an agreement during his years of residence in that city. Typical of Rimsky-Korsakov's attitude toward Arensky in the period of their closest acquaintance was the remark recorded by Vasiliy Yastrebtsev, Rimsky's Boswell, on 28 February 1895: "You know, I may be wrong, but in my opinion Scriabin may be the more talented, but Arensky's music is nicer [simpatichneye] and more varied."33 The harsh remark attributed to Rimsky was made, far more in sorrow than in anger or scorn, as a response to Arensky's dissipated life-style (he was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic) and his early death. It was the drinking that came between Arensky and the punctilious Rimsky-Korsakov, who stopped inviting Arensky to his home (Yastrebtsev notes no visit after 1895). But whatever the circumstances of the remark, which Stravinsky misquoted out of context, Rimsky never had it printed. It first appears in his Chronicle of My Musical Life, the manuscript of which was discovered among his posthumous papers and published only in 1909.34 His spontaneous reaction to Arensky's death, as recorded by Yastrebtsev, was kinder: "The man burned himself out—but he did not lack talent."35 Part of the irritation with Arensky in My Musical Life may also stem from the fact that just as Rimsky was finishing his book the St. Petersburg opera house—the so-called Mariyinsky Theater—canceled its production of his Tsar Saltan in favor of Arensky's Nal and Damayanti. It was this latter opera (produced 15 January 1908), in which the bass clarinet was

32. Letter of 30 October 1887, in N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye socbineniy: literaturniye proizvedeniya i perepiska (Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1955-82), 7:54. 33. V. V. Yastrebtsev, N.A. Rimskty-Korsakov: vospominaniya 18S6-190S, edited by A. Ossovsky (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1959-60), 1:269. 34. Rimsky's judgment may be found in its full context in N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (London: Eulenberg Books, 1974), 417-18. 35. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:377.

[10]

INTRODUCTION

indeed conspicuous as leit-timbre for the demonic realm of the goddess Kali, that Rimsky and Stravinsky may have heard together. Given his disappointment, one can understand Rimsky's malicious stage-whisper. (To Yastrebtsev he complained that Arensky's work was put together out of "commonplaces from Chaikovsky, Cui, Verdi, and the rest.") 36 Dream on the Volga (Son na Volge, 1888) was Arensky's first opera. He began it in his Conservatory years—in Rimsky-Korsakov's composition class, in fact. Its one St. Petersburg production was an amateur staging in 1903, before Rimsky and Stravinsky were close enough to be going to performances together, let alone exchanging confidences.37 It was Arensky's most obviously "kuchkist" opera in style and facture, and would never have elicited Rimsky's condemnation. Quite the contrary. Yastrebtsev found Rimsky one day (in July 1903) "leafing through Dream on the Volga and sincerely admiring many pages.... 'Nowadays,' he said, 'no one writes like this any more; it smacks of something irretrievable.' " 3 8 Quite the hardest part of Stravinsky's account to credit is the claim that Arensky had shown him friendly interest and assistance. As intimated above, Arensky was not a habitué of the Wednesday evening jours fixes at Rimsky-Korsakov's home, at which Stravinsky made all his early musical contacts.39 Arensky died before a single work of Stravinsky's was performed in public. It is hard to know what kind of help he might have offered the younger composer, who was within Arensky's lifetime hardly a composer at all. Indeed, Stravinsky's recollection of Arensky as a "Moscow composer" strongly suggests that they never met. The pseudomemoir was probably thrown into Memories and Commentaries simply for the sake of another factitious "link" with Chaikovsky and with the tradition of Westernized "pure music" that the latter supposedly represented. In any case, when next we encounter Arensky's name (not until Chapter 13) it will be in the context of a reference by the composer of Petrushka to the older man's "worthless and stupid music." Maybe this is pressing the matter of Stravinsky's inaccuracies harder than necessary to our immediate purpose (the matter being difficult neither to establish nor to understand). But the conversation books continue to be cited, even by serious

36. Ibid., 465. 37. See Rosa Newmarch, The Russian Opera (New York: E. P. Dutton, [1914]), 370. The first production had been in Moscow in 1890; see V. Ye. Cheshikhin, Istoriya russkoy operi, 2d ed. (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1905), 449. 38. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:287. 39. See My Musical Life, 418. Yastrebtsev records two occasions shortly following Arensky's death in 1906 on which Stravinsky heard Arensky's music at Rimsky-Korsakov's soirées—their only confluence in the diaries (Vospominaniya 2:399, 404). On one of these occasions the performer was Sergey Taneyev, up from Moscow. This recollection may have been among the factors linking Arensky with the second city in Stravinsky's memory. If so, Taneyev must have made a strong impression on the young composer—or perhaps it was the piece he played, Arensky's "Basso Ostinato"(!), op. 5/5, which, according to Yastrebtsev, Taneyev was compelled to repeat.

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scholars, as authoritative secondary sources.40 Their attractions, to be sure, are considerable and undeniable: their language is colorful and memorable, their content provocative, their authority patent—but only as primary source material on the mind of the Stravinsky who co-authored them (that is, the Stravinsky of the serial period) and his views on many subjects, his own past among them. That Stravinsky was altogether remote from the music and the esthetic concerns of his youth. "My attitude toward my first period has changed radically," he wrote Souvtchinsky, "and it is as though someone else had composed [the early music]."41 This declaration should be taken as warning, as a disavowal of any special authority with respect to the "Russian" works. If we are to understand them we shall have to come, by dint of determined scholarly effort, much closer to them than the composer was or wished to be at the time he gave his celebrated testimony.42 So let it go henceforth without saying that Stravinsky's vast autobiographical and memoiristic legacy will be considered virtually off-limits as documentation for this book, and will be cited only for the sake of correction or amplification.

The other side of Stravinsky's deep-seated ambivalence about his past came unexpectedly (but in retrospect, of course, inevitably) to the fore during his brief eightieth-birthday-year visit to his native country in the fall of 1962. At the "deeply Dostoevskian dinner" tendered him at Moscow's Metropole Hotel by the Soviet Ministry of Culture on the evening of 1 October—an occasion unforgettably described by Robert Craft—Stravinsky blurted out with quasi-involuntary suddenness to the assembled company, including Shostakovich, Khachaturyan, and Khrennikov, that "a man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only one country—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in

40. Even Pieter van den Toorn, whose The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) is in every other respect an exemplary study, cites them uncritically and at extravagant length, accepting even the "purity" of the Scherzofimtastiqueat face value (46i-62n.2), although that matter had been previously put right in an English-language source (admittedly, a fairly inconspicuous one): Nicolas Slonimsky, "Preface," Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 6th ed. (New York: Schirmer Books 1978), xii. 41. Letter of 7 October 1964, quoted in SelCorrI:}98. This thought comes to the surface now and then in the Chroniques and the "conversations," too: "Any account I were to give today of what my feelings were [about The Rite of Spring] might prove as inexact and arbitrary as if someone else were interpreting them" (An Autobiography, 49); "But how am I to talk like a confessing author about The Firebird when my feelings towards it are purely those of a critic?" ( E & D : 150/132). 42. The question of Craft's possible contribution to the contents of the "conversations" is inescapable, so let me record my conviction that at least the first four books (through Dialogues and a Diary), which contain practically all of the "conversations" material as such, and which were produced while Stravinsky's capacities were not yet seriously impaired, quite faithfully reflect the composer's thinking. (As to the notorious matter of style, no one who has compared Stravinsky/Craft with the voluminous writing Craft has done since Stravinsky's death can have failed to note the enormous change in voice. The former is deft, epigrammatic, epiphanic; the latter prolix, involuted, laden with qualification and detail.) Craft has written that "the junior partner in [the] collaboration always regarded the senior's

[12]

INTRODUCTION

his life." 43 Four days earlier, in an interview published in Komsomolskaya pravda, he had confided that "I have spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself [styj] is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature." 44 Since Stravinsky's death the uncovering of this immanent Russianness has become a major focus of research. This has been particularly true in the Soviet Union, where a number of valuable studies of Stravinsky's music, seen as it were from the inside, and some even more valuable documentary publications have appeared in the course of the last couple of decades. But among those who have placed this issue at the head of the agenda has been Craft himself, refreshingly unencumbered by any sense of obligation to his former role as Stravinsky's interlocutor. In a lecture of 1974 he enumerated, among the "perplexing areas in Stravinsky's life and work," what he called "the gaps in our understanding of Stravinsky's musical origins, for the leap from academic anonymity into The Firebird is extraordinarily sudden." 45 More recently he has noted that "the crucial information about Stravinsky's formative years through the period of the Firebird is lacking."46 Although the information that Craft seems to regard as most crucial is the untapped family chronicle supposedly locked away in the "diary" (that is, the domestic accounts ledger) of the composer's father—material to which he would like to see psychoanalytical methods applied—and although the prime source of documentation for Stravinsky's early period is gone forever owing to the military and political vicissitudes of Ustilug, much can still be done to firm up a picture of Stravinsky's musical development by examining the early works against the background of the music that surrounded them. But to accomplish this it is necessary first to set the historical scene with the aid of a broad range of documentary material relevant to the period of Stravinsky's development: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals of the period, and particularly the work of art histo-

rccollections, with their exaggerations, distortions, and other nuances of memory, as more important than the encyclopedia facts; junior thought that 'anyone' could dig out the dates and places" ("Stravinsky: Relevance and Problems of Biography," in Prejudices in Disguise, 280). This would have been entirely satisfactory had all the Stravinsky/Craft books been presented, as frankly as the first one was, as portraits of the artist as an old man. But as the pair progressed from book to book, a mode of straight reportage imperceptibly took over from that of recollection, until, in the end, Stravinsky's memories were being presented in the form of "Program Notes," sometimes even with the suggestion of a scholarly apparatus. Nor would it have taken much digging to uncover such manifest discrepancies as the evaluation of Glazunov in the Chrontques and in Conversations (for surely Craft had read and reread the former), or even discrepancies within the Conversations, like the assertion (Conv:44/+3) that RimskyKorsakov "was no Wagnerite" followed two pages later by the recollection that "Rimsky-Korsakov kept a portrait of Wagner over his desk." 43. D & D : 2 4 6 . 44. "Lyubite muzi'ku!" Komsomolskaya pravda, 27 September 1962; quoted in I. Ya. Vershinina, Ranniye baieti Stravinskogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), 8. 45. Craft, Prejudices in Disguise, 288. 46. Robert Craft, " M y Life With Stravinsky," New York Review of Booh, 10 June 1982, 10 (reprinted as "Stravinsky: A Centenary V i e w " in Present Perspectives, 215-31; quote at 227).

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rians whose approach to what is often called the "Silver Age" of Russian culture has never been emulated up to now by historians of music. That is the task essayed in the first part of the present work. Beginning with Chapter 9, the focus of the book shifts to the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity and to a question that has especially interested the Soviet Stravinsky scholars who have emerged in the period since his death: that of "folklore and modernity," as the composer Sergey Slonimsky has phrased it. 47 For what is remarkable about the period that begins with Firebird is the fecundating influence of folklore, approached in a manner unprecedented in the work not just of Stravinsky, but of any previous Russian composer. As Craft has phrased the problem, "The major compositions of [the 'Swiss' years], Renard and Les Noces, as well as the songs and female choruses, form the summit of Russian music—except that these masterpieces of a supersophisticated primitive are unique, descending from neither the Tchaikovsky nor the Rimsky-Korsakov side of Stravinsky's heredity."48 Indeed, this assertion could be taken even further. As a young Soviet musicologist has observed, "Exceptional mastery allowed Stravinsky to maintain a specifically national quality in practically all the works of the Russian period.... The striving for national character distinguishes Stravinsky from many foreign composers of the same period, and played no small role in his quest for renewed musical resources."49 But not even this formulation goes far enough toward defining Stravinsky's somewhat paradoxical and ambiguous relationship to the folk traditions of his native land. The Russian word zarubezhniy, normally translated as "foreign" (as in the quote above), literally means "beyond the frontiers." But that, ironically enough, was where Stravinsky was located at the time of his greatest striving for national character. And while such strivings did indeed set him off from such "foreign" contemporaries as Strauss, Schoenberg, and (maybe) Debussy (though not, obviously, from Bartok), they set him no less apart from his modernist contemporaries back home. Where is the national character in Scriabin? In Myaskovsky? Even in the young Prokofiev? These ironies need to be addressed and sorted out, along with the irony implicit in the fact that Stravinsky achieved his greatest national character precisely at the point where he passed beyond the time-honored method of securing it—that is, by the actual quotation of folk music. Most attempts at dealing with these questions have been hampered by some groundless but durable assumptions. The common conception in the West of a Russian composer—and by now, to be sure, in Russia as well—is one of a musi-

47. "Ob I. Stravinskom," IStrSM:io6. 48. P&D:28. 49. L. Sergeyev, "O melodike Stravinskogo," in Voprosi teorii muziki, vol. 3, ed. T. F. Myuller (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1975), 330-31.

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INTRODUCTION

cian who imbibes folklore with his mother's milk. And most writers on Stravinsky have risen to the bait their subject scattered tendentiously in the Chroniques and in the conversations (the peasant with the musical armpit; the Yarmolintsi fair; the St. Petersburg knife grinder) and portrayed him as a natural folklorist. But Stravinsky came of age in a musical milieu that upheld a banner of "denationalization" in Russian music and scorned "gusto for native folklore" almost as much as Stravinsky would do in his remarks about Bartok. Stravinsky was converted to folklore as a musical resource by the same new friends who had rescued him from academicism—that is, the painters and esthetes of Diaghilev's "World of Art" circle—and these two facets of their influence on him were profoundly symbiotic. To find the sources of Stravinsky's folklorism, then, one must go outside the history of Russian music altogether and look to the history of Russian painting and theatrical design. That is what is attempted in the chapters of the present book devoted to the three early Diaghilev ballets, plus the chapters on the origins and development of the Diaghilev enterprise. The period following The Rite ofSpring and particularly following the outbreak of World War I, when Stravinsky became an exile from Russia no longer by choice but by force of circumstances, coincided with a preoccupation with folklore unparalleled in the history of Russian music—one that so conditioned every aspect of his work along essentially non-European lines that the word "Eurasian" comes to mind, after the quasi-Slavophile émigré movement initiated by Trubetskoy's classic tract Europe and Humanity (mentioned above with regard to "pangermanoromanic chauvinism"). Far from coincidentally, moreover, and very suggestively, one of the Eurasian movement's prime supporters and propagandists was Stravinsky's friend Pierre Souvtchinsky. Eurasianists saw Russia as a thing apart from Europe (and from Asia as well), a separate landmass (they called it "Turanian"), a separate world. In its most radical manifestations Eurasianism was wholly a product (like Stravinsky's "Swiss" music) of the postrevolutionary emigration. Thus the products of the war years, culminating in Craft's "summit," were conditioned by an idea of Russia and of Russian culture that did not and could not exist inside Russia. One of Stravinsky's more perceptive early Soviet critics caught this irony well when he wrote, "In approaching closer than any Russian composer to the presentation of the real Russian folk-life, Stravinsky did so just when that life was already becoming a legend, irretrievable, and incapable of regeneration in its original living form." 50 It was the special mission of the Eurasianists to cling fast to that legend, to (as Nicolas Nabokov once

50. Victor Belaiev, Igor Stravinsky's "Les Noces": An Outline, trans. S. W. Pring (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 2.

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put it about Les noces) "retrieve the irretrievable by re-inventing it." For them it was—it had to be—reality. 51 Even as he cultivated the façade of a sophisticated cosmopolitan, then, Stravinsky was profoundly un- and even anti-Western in his musical thinking (and much more so than any previous Russian composer had cause to be). Inevitably, the Eurasian aspects of the style worked out in his "period of exploration and discovery" marked him for life. 52 They remained with him as permanent stylistic resources, however neoclassic or neoserial his overt stylistic orientation would become, and no matter how doggedly he would strive in his late years to "angle" himself with respect to the "German stem." He was, ultimately, an outsider to all traditions of West and East alike—at first a triumphantly self-proclaimed outsider, at last a humbled and suppliant outsider, but at all times the great "zarubezhnïy" of twentiethcentury music. The sources called upon to illuminate this central phase of the present study, which reaches its climax with the chapter on Svadebka

(Les noces),

include the doc-

uments surrounding the World of Art movement and the journal Mir iskusstva itself; the work of the new breed of Russian ethnographers and musical folklorists of Stravinsky's generation (Linyova, Kastalsky, et al.); the annals of the Ballets Russes; and a broad spectrum of cultural materials relevant to the Russian "Silver Age" (poetry and belles lettres, art and art criticism). Special attention is given to Stravinsky's break with the representatives of his old St. Petersburg milieu (or rather, their break with him) and its proximate causes. Much documentation on the break, as well as musical materials that enable and justify a definition of Stravinsky's style and practice as "Eurasian," may be found in the Stravinsky Archive. When the dream of once again possessing Russia evaporated with the consolidation of Soviet power at the end of the Russian civil war, Stravinsky (like the Dia51. Nicolas Nabokov, "The Peasant Marriage (Les Noces) by Igor Stravinsky," Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 3 (1978) : 273. Precisely because this "reality" was a self-created myth, Stravinsky was able to evade the "threefold dilemma" Carl Dahlhaus has posited with respect to the creative appropriation of folklore (see Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], m-12) and create from it a style of unprecedented authenticity. First, his aim was not to restore, but to reconstitute; second, his radical methods rendered the question of modifying the original moot, since he manufactured his own "original"; third, and most important, he did not adapt elements of folklore to an established art-music style, but used them in unprecedented fashion to subvert and ultimately replace that style. For a suggestion that an adaptation of the folkloristic style epitomized in Les noces has itself lately become an established art-music style in his homeland, see Solomon Volkov, "The 'New Folkloristic Wave' in Contemporary Soviet Music as a Sociological Phenomenon," in Report of the 12th Congress [of the International MusicologUal Society], Berkeley, 1977, ed. Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel: Bàrenreiter, 1981), 49-50. Volkov speaks of a "new and heightened interest in folk performances and techniques, such as the sliding glissando, the cut-off words, the unstable structures, the improvisational style." He goes on to observe that "these—one may say—maximal characteristics of the folklore were examined in the light of contemporary compositional systems," without seeming to realize that there was a precedent of half a century's standing for everything he was describing. What is ominous about the "new folkloristic wave" (nopaya fol'klonsticheskaya volna) is that it appears to have been officially encouraged as a politically acceptable alternative avantgarde untainted by the cosmopolitanism (read: Jewishness) of Schoenbergian dodecaphony. 52. The term is Stravinsky's, for the period following The Rite (see M&C:ii7/i22).

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ghilev enterprise that sustained him) turned resolutely toward the West. The pivotal work in this connection was Mavra, the real "epiphany," as Stravinsky put it (though he had Pukinella in mind), "through which the whole of my late work became possible."53 Through Mavra Stravinsky approached the West as Russian music itself had done a century before. His stylistic renovation took the form of an accommodation between the irreducibly Eurasian elements of his style and the harmonic traditions and musical conventions of Italian opera. The result was a new Russian Italianism, modeled in some ways earnestly, in others parodistically, on the style of the Russian romances and operas of Pushkin's time. This stylistic accommodation, in which the ontogeny of Stravinsky's music recapitulated the phylogeny of the "Westernized" Russian music of the nineteenth century, was the occasion for all the clamorous switching of allegiances, the upholding of Chaikovsky over Rimsky, the self-conscious avowals of musical purity—in short, the sloganeering and pamphleteering of the "neoclassic" years and beyond. And alas, it held the seeds of the inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West that overwhelmed the composer on completing another Italianate opera three decades later, finishing off his neoclassicism and bringing on the one real creative crisis of his career. This impasse was resolved by a new and equally vociferous switching of allegiances and a new bout (the biggest) of pamphleteering, the consequences of which we have been sampling. It is evident that investigations such as that undertaken here will lead in directions of which the older Stravinsky would have strongly disapproved, both as to tendency and as to method. Although "purely" musical analysis is an indispensable tool for any stylistic study, and will be abundandy present in this one, it is no less true that justice can be done to the younger Stravinsky's exceedingly complex and at times contradictory development only by adopting an approach he would have condemned as "literary," as in his description of Jacques Rivière's writings on The Rite of Spring, which, he complained, were "inspired more by the whole spectacle than by my music."54 But how else approach any ballet, any opera, any song even? The purely musical purview, favored not only by Stravinsky but by most recent analysts of and commentators on his music, is an often blinkered one that has bequeathed many sterile studies, particularly of that most-studied of Stravinsky's works, The Rite ofSpring. For all its three-quarters of a century in the concert hall, The Rite is more than a score, and the music is much more than organized sound. Motivated and in many ways conditioned from without, that music possesses both meaning and significance—both intrinsic sense, that is, and contextual relevance—on many other levels than the "purely" musical. And such is equally the case for practically every 53. E&DH28-29/113. 54. Conv:6o/56.

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other composition from the Scherzo fantastique to Mavra and beyond. One must cast a wide net, heeding seriously Robert Craft's call for investigations into "the genesis of Stravinsky's subject matter."55 This means culling the work of anthropologists, historians, philosophers, poets, dramatists, and literary critics in search of anything that might have a bearing on the backgrounds to the masterworks of the Russian years. Where appropriate, one may also consult the writings of musicians. To finish with preliminaries, the new image of Stravinsky that will emerge in the pages to come may be anticipated in the form of five theses, as follows: That Stravinsky achieved artistic maturity and his modernist technique by deliberately playing the traditions of Russian folk music against those of the provincial, denationalized Russian art music in which he had been reared, which he had at first accepted uncritically and in toto. That he came to his knowledge of folklore, and his attitudes concerning its creative utilization, not from his musical training, but from his association with the artists of the "World of Art" circle. That he deliberately retained that which was most characteristically and exclusively Russian in his musical training and combined it with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore in a conscious effort to excrete from his style all that was "European." That the stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed him as a composer for life, whatever his professed stylistic and esthetic allegiances. That for all these reasons Stravinsky was the most completely Russian composer of art music that ever was and, if present trends continue, that ever will be. "If you had seen what he came from in Russia," Souvtchinsky declared one evening in 1967 to Robert Craft, "you would believe in genius."56 For Souvtchinsky, Stravinsky's oldest surviving friend, Stravinsky was still both a miracle and a mystery, one of the great mysteries o f world culture, and in particular of Russian culture, a mystery that will live forever, that will always be subject to fresh interpretations, and that will always be needed. His secret—which really cannot be explained—is first and foremost the secret of his genius, the mysterious unexpectedness and the marvel of his appearance in the music of Russia and the world. A s Tolstoy said:

55. P&D:288. 56. R&C:265.

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INTRODUCTION

"Genius is that which cannot be called anything but genius!" Its basic characteristics, moreover, are unpredictability and self-evidence. 57

Amen. N o book will ever "explain" the secret of Stravinsky's genius. But Souvtchinsky's declaration to Craft is a challenge to investigate Stravinsky's origins as a way of enhancing our belief in his genius and truly appreciating the marvel of his appearance. Whatever illumination this book may provide is offered in that spirit and in celebration of the beginning of Stravinsky's second century.

57. Pierre Souvtchinsky, "Stravinsky as a Russian," Tempo, no. 81 (1967): 5-

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Igor Stravinsky was born in a jubilee year for Russian music. Glinka had died a quarter of a century before, and the anniversary was observed with great selfcongratulatory fanfare by Russian artists and critics of progressive or nationalistic bent. Vladimir Stasov seized upon the occasion as one of the pretexts for a mammoth survey of Russian artistic attainment in all media, the first of its kind to have been made from a patendy nationalistic standpoint. "Twenty-five Years of Russian Art," issued in six chunky installments over the course of a full year from November 1882 to October 1883 in the pages of the Vestnik Tevropi (.European Courier), Mikhail Stasyulevich's "thick journal" of historiography and liberal opinion, was dedicated to the proposition that, over the quarter century since 1857, Russian painting, sculpture, architecture, and music (the subjects of its four constituent sections) had achieved independence from Western Europe and were now forces to be reckoned with on the world stage. In all four areas, Stasov insisted, the new vitality had been won by nationalistic upsurges against an official neoclassical academicism, most dramatically in the case of painting, where the realist school known as the "Peredvizhniki" had originated in an actual secession from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1863.1 In music, Stasov saw an equivalent to the Peredvizhniki in what he called the "New Russian School," which had begun with Glinka, continued through Dargomi'zhsky, and reached its zenith in the group around Mily Balakirev, whose unflat1. The name Peredvizhniki comes from that of the association formed by the realist painters in 1870: Tovarishcbestvo peredvizbnikh khudozhestvennikh vistavok (Association of Traveling Art Exhibits). The group is often called the "Wanderers" in English, but that gives the impression that they were nomads. From the name Peredvizhniki the abstract noun peredvizhnicbestvo is derived, to denote their principles and practices.

U3]

tering sobriquet moguchaya kuchka, "mighty little heap," had been inadvertently bestowed on them fifteen years before by Stasov himself.2 "Yes," he averred, "a Russian school has existed since Glinka's time, with unique features that distinguish it from other European schools."3 He proceeded to list those features, beginning with what, he emphasized, was by far the most important: "the absence of prejudices and blind faith." Beginning with Glinka, all the best Russian musicians have been very skeptical of book learning and have never approached it with the servility and the superstitious reverence with which it is approached to this day in many parts of Europe. It would be absurd to reject science or knowledge in any field, music included, but only the new Russian musicians, whose shoulders are not burdened with the long chain of European scholasticism . . . can boldly look learning in the eye. T h e y respect it, avail themselves of its advantages, but without exaggeration or genuflection. They deny the necessity of its arid and pedantic excesses, reject the gymnastic frolics to which thousands in Europe attach such importance, and do not believe in vegetating submissively for long years over ritualistic m y s t e r i e s . . . . Such an attitude toward "received wisdom," so esteemed by other schools, has saved the Russian school from creating pedantic or routine works—these simply do not exist in the N e w Russian School. This is one of its chief differences from earlier European schools. 4

The list continues: the New Russian School strives for national character (and finds itself singularly well equipped to achieve it thanks to the vitality of Russian folklore, unmatched in Western Europe); the Russian school is drawn to Oriental (that is, Near Eastern) themes, in both the general and the specifically musical senses of the word; the Russian school favors program music over absolute. But all these additional factors are subordinate to the first, and can only flourish in the presence of the first. The great issue for Stasov, then, was that of defending the noble tradition of Russian autodidactism against the inroads of academic professionalism—an issue that was in fact the preeminent bone of musical contention over the quartercentury that Stasov's essay commemorated.5 2. The phrase was coined in the concluding sentence of Stasov's review, "Mr. Balakirev's Slavonic Concert" ("Slavycmskiy kontsert g. Balakireva"), which appeared in the newspaper Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti on 13 May 1867. The concert was performed before the assembled delegates to a Pan-Slavist congress. The concluding sentence ran: "We close our remarks with a wish: may God grant that our Slavonic guests never forget today's concert, that they will forever preserve the memory of the poetry, feeling, talent, and sophistication that is to be found in our small but already mighty little heap of Russian musicians" (V. V. Stasov, Izbranniye sochineniya [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952], 1:173). Although the phrase was coined as it were within the kuchka, it was the group's enemies that took it up and popularized it. The word is now a neutral identifying label, from which words like kuchkism and kuchkist have been derived to denote the group's esthetics and its adherents, respectively. 3. Stasov, Izbranniye sochineniya 2:523. 4. Ibid., 525-26. 5. See Robert C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: U M I Research Press, 1981).

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But when compared with the situation in painting, the musico-political scene in Russia (which is to say, of course, in St. Petersburg) was curiously skewed. Among painters, the revolt of the young mavericks against the entrenched establishment had followed a familiar pattern. In music, however, there had been until quite recently no entrenched establishment. The autodidactism lauded by Stasov had been the status quo for Russian musicians since Western-style music first began to be imported and conspicuously consumed under the "three empresses" in the eighteenth century. Professional musicians had been, almost by definition, foreigners or serfs. The revolutionary development had been the institutionalization and professionalization of musical life at the initiative of Anton Rubinstein, who, because of his European reputation as a virtuoso and by dint of tirelessly persistent effort, had succeeded in gaining aristocratic backing for two institutions that had transformed musical life in Russia, creating the material conditions through which, he hoped, a viable musical activity might flourish indigenously. In 1859 he had founded the Russian Musical Society, which sponsored the first regular, fully professional concert orchestra in Russia, and in 1862 he founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the first Russian school of its kind. As a matter not only of esthetic ideology, but also of practical necessity, both of these institutions had been mainly staffed at the outset with Germans. What Rubinstein conceived as a progressive program for bringing Russia into the mainstream of European musical life met with a great deal of predictable resistance from nationalistic quarters. Loudest of all was Stasov, who, two decades later, remained indignant, devoting a major section of his musical survey in "Twenty-five Years of Russian Art" to vilifying Rubinstein and his Conservatory. T h e intention to elevate and develop Russian music was, of course, a generally praiseworthy one. But was it precisely this kind of development and elevation that was needed, when there had already arisen among us an independent, original school—and one profoundly national at that? In any consideration of Russian music the first question should of course have been that of defining just what our new music and our new school were, what its character and its peculiarities were, and what exactly was needed for its further growth and for the preservation of its individual peculiarities. But the people w h o thought to benefit Russia in a musical way neither understood nor wished to understand this. From the heights of European conservatorial grandeur they looked down on our fatherland as on some kind of tabula rasa, as on some wild and desolate country, where the soil was still fallow, awaiting the importation of beneficent seedlings from Europe. 6

Stasov went on to quote at length from an article he had written in 1861 for a reactionary newspaper called Severnayapehela (the Northern Bee), in an effort to fore-

6. Stasov,

Izbranniye socbineniya

2:536.

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stall what he saw as impending disaster. One passage in that article called the whole concept of "higher learning" in the arts into question.

"Higher" institutions for the arts are an altogether different matter from higher institutions in the sciences.... A university imparts nothing but knowledge; a conservatory is not content with that but meddles in the most injurious way in the creative work of an artist trained there, extending its despotic power over the style and form of his work, attempting to force it into a certain academic mold, imparting to it its own customs, and what is worst of all, sinking its claws into the artist's very mind, imposing on him its own judgment of works of art and their creators, from which it will later on be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for him to extricate himself. The peroration sounded a call to arms against foreign intrusion, and at the same time issued a dire prophecy:

It is time to call a halt to this transplanting of foreign institutions to our country and to give some thought to what will be truly useful and beneficial to our soil and the development of our nationality. The experience of Europe teaches us that to the same extent that modest schools which limit themselves to the rudiments of music are useful, higher schools, academies, and conservatories are harmful. Is this experience going to be lost on us? Are we then required to copy slavishly whatever exists in other places, so as to have the pleasure of boasting afterward nothing but an enormous quantity of teachers and classrooms, a fruidess distribution of awards and prizes, proliferating volumes of worthless compositions and legions of goodfor-nothing musicians? Now, in 1882, Stasov was claiming that it had all come true. Of the two Russian conservatories (for since 1866 there had been one in Moscow too) he vituperated:

Most deplorable of all is the fact that our conservatories have turned out to be purely foreign institutions—German ones. Within their walls no mention is made of Russian music, or of the Russian school, or of any Russian tendency, and hundreds of young men and women are trained there in superstitious veneration of everything that is venerated in the Leipzig or Berlin conservatories. Most of the "musicians"—performers, composers, and theorists—turned out by our conservatories nourish a healthy contempt for Russian a r t . . . . [As for the Russian Musical Society], either it has completely ignored the New Russian School or it has treated the school with utter condescension—just like our Academy of Arts with respect to the Russian school of painters.7 As an example of the Conservatory's baleful influence, Stasov offered an unflattering portrait of Chaikovsky. 7. Ibid., 537—38.

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His talent was very strong, but on him the inauspicious influence of his conservatory training has made itself felt. In his tastes there reigned an excessively great eclecticism and a lack of discrimination, and this has told harmfully upon his work.... The national element does not always succeed with Chaikovsky, though he has one chef d'oeuvre in this style: the finale of his C-minor symphony, on the Ukrainian folk tune "The Crane." . . . But where Chaikovsky has least ability is in the realm of vocal music.... A lack of discrimination in choice of material, an ordinariness bordering at times on banality in his themes, hurried and careless work have made [the "nationalistic" opera Vakida the Smith] just as insignificant as all the other operas by this author. But that did not prevent the Russian Musical Society from giving it a prize in a contest. The remaining operas of Chaikovsky, written indiscriminately in all different styles old and new, as well as his romances, attest to his skill in handling form and to his expert craftsmanship, but they are devoid of creative sincerity and inspiration, as a result of indiscriminate, constant, limidess overproductivity and his lack of self-criticism. They are all competent but indifferent works and, unfortunately, often trite in their melodies and in their habitual turns of phrase. In all this Chaikovsky is the comrade and disciple of his former master and teacher at the Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein.8 In contrast to this portrait is the one Stasov painted of Rimsky-Korsakov, the youngest member of the "mighty kuchka," who was of an age that would have enabled him to attend the Conservatory but who instead became Balakirev's most ardent disciple.

The nature of his musical activity resembled Balakirev's in many ways. He was selftaught in musical technique and in like manner he developed his own rich talent for orchestration to a point of rare perfection. In his earliest, most youthful period, Balakirev's advice, suggestions, and criticism had a very beneficial influence on him. Later on, both of them compiled excellent, truly exemplary collections of Russian folk songs, which have already had and continue to have an enormous influence on the New Russian School and which are surely destined to play an even larger role in developing our future musical generations. Finally, both Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov, in the course of many years, stood in succession at the helm of the Free Music School and directed its concerts. That is to say, they have stood at the head of our whole new musical movement.9 The Free Music School had been founded in 1862 by Balakirev and the choral conductor Gavriyil Lomakin as a kuchkist "answer" to the Conservatory and the Russian Musical Society at once. In its pedagogical function the school fit Stasov's description of a useful establishment—that is, a "modest school which limits itself to the rudiments of music"—while in its concert-sponsoring capacity it furnished a forum for the composers of the N e w Russian School. 8. Ibid., 563-64. 9. Ibid., 558.

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Stasov praised all sides of Rimsky-Korsakov's musical output equally (in sharp contrast to his omnibus disparagement of Chaikovsky) and reiterated emphatically that the poor reception Rimsky's music had suffered up to 1882 had been due not to any deficiency but to the conservatism of the public and the press—a conservatism to be blamed, of course, on Conservatory influence. The chronicler finished his account with a little chapter on the youngest generation of Russian composers, centering on a deliriously enthusiastic welcome to the teen-aged Glazunov, who, he ended by predicting, "will one day be the head of the Russian school." The emergence of this prodigy gave hope, and Stasov was able to conclude his fairly caustic survey of the contemporary Russian musical scene on an optimistic note: "Who knows, perhaps in a few years the ideas, tastes, and sympathies both of our public and of its representatives, the critics, will be transformed from top to bottom regarding our new school, Glinka's progeny."10 This view of nineteenth-century Russian musical politics, polarized between the Mighty Five and the forces of Westernizing reaction, is the familiar one—except that in conventional musical historiography the dividing issue is usually portrayed as nationalism tout court, while Stasov's account shows that at the time the national issue was dependent on more fundamental issues concerning institutions and professionalization. Otherwise, Stasov's view coincides by and large with that of today's music historians, both Russian and Western. But that is only because today's music historians still base themselves by and large on Stasov. In the Soviet Union his pronouncements were canonized: the editors of the standard Soviet edition of his writings asserted of "Twenty-five Years" that "without knowledge [of that work] a correct understanding of the history of nineteenth-century Russian art and music is scarcely conceivable."11 And the earliest Western writers on Russian music, like Rosa Newmarch and Michel Calvocoressi, diligendy parroted Stasov's work in their own. 12 The foundation they laid, though by now rusty and rickety, still supports "common knowledge" of the period in the West. So it may come as a surprise to the reader, as it did to the critic Alexander Ossovsky upon discovering Rimsky-Korsakov one day in the act of reading "Twentyfive Years of Russian Art," that the latter was agitated and indignant. "Nikolai Andreyevich had covered the article with a multitude of exclamation points and question marks," recalled Ossovsky. "Then, turning to me (for I was in those days involved with newspapers and magazines), he said, 'It wouldn't be a bad idea to write an article called "Fact and Fiction on the 'New Russian School.'"' " 1 3 10. Ibid., 567-68. 11. P. T. Shchipunova, "Commentary," in ibid., 2:757. 12. Newmarch put "Twenty-five Years of Russian A r t " at the top of her list of "indispensable sources of first-hand information for those who would study the question of Russian music au fond"

(The Russian Opera, 216).

13. A. V. Ossovsky, "Memoirs," ed. E. F. Bronfin, in N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov ed. Semyon L. Ginzburg (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1959), 193.

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i muzikal'noye obrazo-

For by 1882 the static Stasovian view, faithfully reflecting as it did the musical politics of the 1860s, was already seriously out of kilter with fact, and over the next couple of decades it would become utter fiction.

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To begin with what would have been most obvious and offensive to RimskyKorsakov, Stasov had deliberately withheld one important detail—one so critical, in fact, that to mention it would have brought his whole edifice tumbling down. Since 1871—that is, for over a decade—Rimsky-Korsakov, Stasov's rawboned Mr. Natural, had been a professor in Rubinstein's Conservatory. He had received the surprising invitation not from Rubinstein himself, but from the latter's successor as director, Mikhail Azanchevsky. His acceptance of the position was a turning point in his musical career and, as it turned out, a momentous event in the history of Russian music. Rimsky-Korsakov was transformed into a composer who completely belied Stasov's profile of him and of his "school." But he can speak for himself. Rimsky's account of the fateful episode in his posthumously published Chronicle of My Musical Life is a touching passage that deserves to be quoted at some length. Had I ever studied at all, had I possessed a fraction more of knowledge than I actually did, it would have been obvious to me that I could not and should not accept the proffered appointment, that it was foolish and dishonest of me to become a professor. But I, the author of Sadko, Antar, and The Maid of Pskov, compositions that were coherent and well-sounding, compositions that the public and many musicians approved, I was a dilettante and knew nothing. This I frankly confess and attest before the world. I was young and self-confident; my self-confidence was encouraged by others, and I joined the Conservatory. And yet at the time I could not decendy harmonize a chorale; not only had I not written a single counterpoint in my life, but I had hardly any notion of the structure of a fugue; nay, I did not even know the names of the augmented and diminished intervals, of chords (except the fundamental triad), of the dominant and chord of the diminished seventh, though I could sing anything at sight and distinguish chords of every sort. The terms "chord of the sixth" and chord of "six-four" were unknown to me. . . . And now Azanchevsky took it into his head to offer a professorship to a musician so ill-informed, and the musician accepted without blinking. Perhaps it will be said that all the above information which I lacked was unnecessary to the composer of Sadko and Antar; and that the very fact that Sadko and Antar existed proved that that information was unnecessary.... But it is shameful not to know such things and to learn of their existence from one's own pupils. Moreover, soon after composing The Maid of Pskov, the lack of contrapuntal and harmonic technique displayed itself in the abrupt cessation of my creative fancy, at the basis of which lay the selfsame devices that I had ridden to death; only the development of a technique that I now bent all my efforts to acquire permitted new

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living currents to flow into my creative work and untied my hands for further activity as a composer.... Thus having been undeservedly accepted at the Conservatory as a professor, I soon became one of its best and possibly its very best pupil, judging by the quantity and value of the information it gave me! 14 Among those to whom Rimsky-Korsakov turned for guidance at this critical juncture was Chaikovsky. A litde-known and very poignant letter from Rimsky to his Moscow colleague, written at the end of the summer of 1875, gives a glimpse into the travails of his belated conservatory education. I have written a great deal in the last three months, continuing my exercises in counterpoint, which you know about.... Since the middle of May, and especially in July and August, I worked a great deal. Having gone through all the species of counterpoint during the winter, as well as imitation and a bit of canon on a cantus firmus, I have gone on to fugue and canon. This summer I wrote 61 fugues (long and short, strict and free, in 2, 3, 4, and 5 voices, with and without chorales), 5 canonic variations on one chorale, 3 variations on another, and several embellished chorales. It seems to me that that is not so little. I want to know your opinion of all this, since you worked a lot while in the Conservatory and having graduated from there have always written much and quickly. Among the fugues I have written there are about 10, which I allowed myself to write freely, that is, in the Bach style, and which I want very much to show you, so that you might tell me your opinion of them and make concrete suggestions.... You will see that my style of counterpoint has changed radically, and it may very well be, as in fact I wish, that it will be so with my next composition too. I expect to continue this fall with fugues and write a few double ones, triple ones, with answers by inversion, and so on, then I think I'll write some choruses a cappella in the same style, and then little by little progress to some kind of vocal composition with orchestra or perhaps a purely instrumental piece, and by then let things take their course. 15 Chaikovsky's answer must have pleased and encouraged him: You must know that I simply bow down in reverence before your noble artistic modesty and astounding strength of character! All these innumerable counterpoints you have ground out, these 60 fugues and a wealth of other musical intricacies—all this is such a deed for a man who 8 years ago had already written Sadko, that I was seized with the wish to shout about it for all the world to hear. I am simply dumbfounded and don't know how to express my boundless respect for your artistic personality. How petty, paltry, naively self-satisfied I seem to myself by comparison with you! I am but an artisan in composition; you will be an artist, yes, an artist in the fullest meaning of the word. 16 14. My Musical Life, 116—19. 15. Letter of 5 September 1875; in P. I. Chaikovsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinertiy: literaturniye proizvedeniya iperepiska, vol. 5 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1959), 413. 16. Letter of 10 September 1875; in ibid., 412.

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From then on, Chaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were sincerely esteemed colleagues if not the closest of friends. Ten years later Chaikovsky offered to arrange Rimsky's appointment as director of the Moscow Conservatory. 17 He called the Capriccio espagnol a "colossal masterpiece of instrumentation" and assured Rimsky that "you may regard yourself as the greatest master of the present day." 18 To his diary, where there could be no question of flattery, Chaikovsky confided: "Read Korsakov's Snow Maiden admit) envious."

19

and marveled at his mastery and was even (ashamed to

Beginning in 1876, Chaikovsky became a regular visitor to the

Rimsky-Korsakov home whenever he was in St. Petersburg.20 When in 1891 he came to the capital for an extended stay, there was for a time a greater closeness between him and Rimsky than between the latter and the surviving kuchkists. Between Chaikovsky and Rimsky's prize pupils Lyadov and Glazunov there was genuine friendship. In a remarkably candid interview he gave to the magazine Peterburgskaya zhizn'

(St. Petersburg Life) in November 1892, Chaikovsky met the

conventional (Stasovian) view of Russian musical politics head on. This forgotten document is so fresh and revealing, and the tact with which Chaikovsky expressed himself so delightful, that the part of the interview relating to our present concerns demands to be cited practically in full: —In society and in the press there has been no end of talk about the so-called "mighty kuchka"; is there anything special about its aims? —At the end of the sixties and in the seventies, the word "kuchka" meant a group of musicians who were united by mutual friendship and by the similarity of their musical tastes and opinions. The musicians of this circle found solace and mutual support in their close-knit intercourse.... The enmity that sprang up willy-nilly between [Balakirev] and the rest of the Russian musical world gave rise to the notion of a struggle between two parties, of which one was the "kuchka," or—as, it seems, Mr. Cui used to call it—the "New Russian School," and the other was whatever was not the "kuchka." The latter party was for some reason called the "Conservatory" party. This division into parties represents some kind of strange confusion of ideas, some kind of colossal muddle, which it is high time we consigned to the past once and for all. As an example of the complete absurdity of such a division into parties, let me point out the following, to me very lamentable, fact. According to the notion that is so widespread among the Russian musical public, I am assigned to the party that is supposedly the enemy of the one among living Russian composers whom I love and admire above all others—N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov. He constitutes the finest adornment of the "New Russian School," while I, it seems, am assigned to the old party, the retrograde faction. But why? N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov has submitted to a greater or lesser extent to the 17. Letter of 6 April 1885; in Modeste Chaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, ed. and trans. Rosa Ncwmarch (London, 1906), 480. 18. Letter of 30 October 1886; in ibid., 521. 19. Entry of 26 March 1887; in The Diaries of Tchaikovsky, trans, and ed. Wladimir Lakond (New York: W. W. Norton, 1945), 163. 20. My Musical Life, 196.

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influences of the present day—and so have I. He has written program symphonies— and so have I. This has not prevented him from also writing symphonies in the traditional form, from willingly writing fugues and, in general, working in the polyphonic style—nor has it prevented me. It has not prevented him from putting cavatinas, arias, ensembles in the old forms into his operas—still less has it prevented me. For many years I was a professor at a conservatory—supposedly hostile to the "New Russian School"—and so is N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov! In a word, despite all the differences between our musical personalities, it seems we travel the same path. I for my part am proud to have such a companion. Yet meanwhile, even very recendy, in a serious book by Mr. [Pyotr Petrovich] Gnedich [1855—1925, art scholar] devoted to the history of Russian art, I am assigned to the party hostile to Mr. Korsakov. Here we have a strange misunderstanding, which has brought and continues to bring sad consequences. It beclouds the public's understanding of what is going on in Russian music, it gives rise to pointless hostility, it exacerbates extreme positions on all sides and, when all is said and done, compromises us musicians in the eyes of future generations. The future historian of Russian music will laugh at us, as we now laugh at the quarrels that disturbed the peace of Sumarokov and Tredyakovsky [eighteenth-century neoclassical poets]. —I confess I did not expect to hear this from you. —Well there you are! But why? For example, Lyadov and Glazunov are also listed among my musical opponents and yet I love and value their gifts very much. 2 ' By the 1890s, then, the description of Russian musical life drawn by Stasov in 1882 was nothing more than gossip. As Rimsky-Korsakov drew closer to Chaikovsky, he drew away from his erstwhile comrades, and they from him. Stasov eventually made his peace with the new Rimsky-Korsakov, but for a while he took to referring to the composer of the sixty fugues as a "renegade." 22 And so he was, if viewed strictly from the perspective of "Twenty-five Years." The older he became, the greater was the irony with which Rimsky-Korsakov looked back on his kuchkist days. What he had envied in Chaikovsky—the ability to write "much and quickly"—became for him the chief mark of craft and mastery, ultimately of talent. He prided himself on his fluency and emphasized the importance of this quality to his pupils, rating it above "mere" gifts. One of his most characteristic utterances is found in a letter to his close friend and confidant, the critic Semyon Kruglikov (1851—1910). It was written at the end of another superproductive summer like the summer of the fugues, only this time (1897) the fruits of his labor were real compositions, not exercises. And the now-deceased Chaikovsky was still a model to him! 21. "Zabi'toye interv'yu s P. I. Chaikovskim," Sovetskaya muzika, 1949, no. 7, 61. 22. E.g., to his brother Dmitri from Paris, 17/29 August 1875; in V. V. Stasov, Pis'ma k rodntm, vol. 1, pt. 2—vol. 3, pt. 2 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1954-62), 1/2:268. In a letter to Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Stasov was even harsher, following a reference to Rimsky-Korsakov's activities with "De mortuis. . ."; see A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakov: zhizn' i tvorchestvo, vols. 3-5 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1936-46), 3:15.

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Having the bad habit of composing (Pyotr Ilyich's expression), I lack the time to write to a sweet person like you. Forgive me! Still, I have to keep it short. The news that I have written 39 romances and the opera Mozart and Salieri is completely false—for I have written 40 romances, two duets, Mozart and Salieri, a cantata (Svitezyanka) for soprano, tenor, and chorus with orchestra, and besides that a trio for piano, violin, and cello, but only in sketch form, which I now plan to work up (mainly the piano part); all the rest, that is, Mozart and Salieri and Svitezyanka, is fully scored. After coming back to St. Petersburg in September I wrote a bit more—I'll tell you about it later. You are no doubt amazed? Well, there's nothing to be amazed at; that's the way it ought to be. Thirty years have passed by now since the days when Stasov would write that in eighteen-sixty-soand-so the Russian School displayed a lively activity: Lodlzhensky wrote one romance, Borodin got an idea for something, Balakirev is planning to rework something, and so on. It is time to forget all that and travel a normal artistic path.23

In an earlier, more earnest letter to Kruglikov, written at the beginning of their acquaintance, when the young future critic asked Rimsky's advice on whether he should devote himself to composition, Rimsky gave what might well stand as his artistic credo on the matter of talent versus technique: You have written me that [Pavel Ivanovich] Blaramberg [1841-1907, a Balakirev pupil and minor composer of operas] has advised you to concentrate on music, seeing ability in you. I haven't seen your latest romance, but I remember the earlier one. Your musical ability, of course, cannot be doubted. About a talent for composition, however, I can say nothing as yet. You have tried your powers too little Yes, one can study on one's own. Sometimes one needs advice, but one must study, that is, one must not disdain good technique and correct voice leading. All of us, that is, I myself and Borodin, and Balakirev, and especially Cui and Musorgsky, did disdain these things. I consider myself lucky that I bethought myself in time and forced myself to work. As for Balakirev, owing to his insufficient technique he writes litde; Borodin, with difficulty; Cui, carelessly; and Musorgsky, sloppily and often incoherendy. Blaramberg suffers from all these deficiencies to a greater or lesser extent, and this constitutes the extremely lamentable specialty of the Russian school.... D o not think, however, from my rather brusque epithets, that I have changed in the slightest my attitude toward their works. If these people had good and competent techniques, what a thing that would be! Believe me that although I consider, speaking with complete sincerity, that their talent is much greater than my own, I nevertheless do not envy them a jot—although even of myself I will say that I regret having come to my senses so late and started my studies so late. But anyhow I have managed to learn a thing or two, and I know what Blaramberg means by studying on one's own. It means writing and writing—symphonies, operas, and so 23. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A. Rimskiy-Kmakev 4:10; italics original. Nikolai Nikolayevich Lodlzhensky (1842-1916) was a prominent Russian diplomat (among other postings, he served for a time as Russian consul in New York) who dabbled in composition as a youth and was briefly associated with BalakireVs circle. His sole publication (1873) was a book of six romances.

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on, and learning as one goes. And it will all be incoherent and sloppy, awkward to perform; one's every bright thought will be lost under all the weeds that will sprout up everywhere, on every line of the score. Now just look what passions you've unleashed in me! 2 4

That Rimsky could express himself this way to a relative stranger, while every one of his kuchkist confrères was still alive, is in itself sufficient testimony to his estrangement from them, and also an indication of the kind of teacher he had become. When first Lyadov and then Glazunov appeared on the horizon, ready to carry the torch of the "New Russian School," Rimsky was ready for them. They never knew an atmosphere such as that which reigned in the Balakirev circle so enthusiastically pictured by Stasov. They may have been second-generation kuchkists in Stasov's eyes, but their training hardly differed from Chaikovsky's. An ideal of the strictest professionalism was instilled in them from the beginning. Lyadov, the older of the two, was one of Professor Rimsky-Korsakov's earliest pupils in "practical composition" and instrumentation. The story of his Conservatory career is revealing. His proverbial laziness having manifested itself early, in 1876 he was suspended from the Conservatory for class-cutting. It was the newly professionalized Rimsky-Korsakov who most stiffly resisted the young man's pleas for reinstatement. 25 But he was eventually allowed to return and earn his diploma. From Rimsky's account of the episode in his Chronicle we know that the diploma examination in composition consisted of writing a cantata to a prescribed text, which that year was the closing scene of Schiller's Bride of Messina. Thus the Conservatory was imposing on its graduates the same kind of compulsory "neoclassical" (or in this case, "neomedieval") theme as had sparked the Peredvizhnik revolt against the Academy of Arts a decade and a half before. Not only was a kuchkist now administering the examination, but when Lyadov's prizewinning cantata was performed at the Conservatory's graduation exercises, Stasov "made a great to-do about it," 26 and even praised it in "Twenty-five Years." 27 Lyadov spent the summer following his graduation in friendly contrapuntal rivalry with his former professor. He and Rimsky-Korsakov, by the tatter's recollection, amused and exercised themselves by each writing a daily fugue on the same D-minor subject. 28 Back in St. Petersburg, they began amusing themselves with a project that now stands as a curious monument to the cult of technique that seized these representatives of the "New Russian School" in its conservatory phase. This was the set of "paraphrases" on a "thème favori et obligé" known in Russia as "Tati-tati," and in America as . . . "Chopsticks." 24. Ibid., 3:21; italics original. 25. My Musical Life, 161. 26. Ibid., 203. 27. Stasov, Izbrannïye sochineniya 2:566. 28. My Musical Life, 206.

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The original idea had been Borodin's, who had concocted a polka for piano four-hands in which the primo part, meant for a child to play, consisted of nothing but reiterations of the "Chopsticks" motif, performed by a single finger of each hand in alternation. The trick consisted in inventing all kinds of harmonic and contrapuntal complications in the accompanying part, which required an experienced pianist. (Borodin's polka, for example, went through a series of modulations that touched on the keys of C, G, F, and A minor while the "Chopsticks" part, ostensibly in C, continued undisturbed.) Rimsky-Korsakov must have recognized the kinship between this idea and that of Glinka's venerable Kamarinskaya, in which a trivial folk-dance phrase is endlessly repeated over a kaleidoscopically shifting accompaniment.29 Seizing upon Borodin's novel "cantus firmus" as an opportunity to flaunt his newly won learning lighdy, he proposed to Lyadov, his chief contrapuntal crony, and to his brother kuchkists at large that they all collaborate on an album of pieces like Borodin's. Borodin naturally agreed, as did Cui, whose manner of writing favored short-winded piquanteries. Even Musorgsky tried his hand, but could not keep to the stipulated conditions, insisting rather on his right to change the cantus firmus to suit his inspiration.30 Balakirev indignandy opposed the idea; for him it signified not only an extravagant exaltation of technique but also a debasement of creative aims.31 In the end the album, published in 1879 by the firm of Rahter, consisted of a set of twenty-four variations plus finale (by Cui, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Lyadov) in the style of Kamarinskaya, followed by fourteen individual pieces by Borodin (his original polka, a marche funebre, and a requiem), Rimsky (a tarantella, menuetto, berceuse, fugue grotesque, "Fughetta B-A-C-H," and a carillon suggested by Stasov, with the contrapuntal lines layered in successive diminutions like the bells in Boris Godutwv), Cui (a valse), and Lyadov (a 3-against-2 "Valse a la Chopin," a galop, a gigue, and the concluding cortege)}2 Some of this erudite salon music was indeed diabolically clever, and the Paraphrases remain noteworthy for their anticipations of the kind of eighteenth-century "stylization" later favored by Chaikovsky and Glazunov. But Chaikovsky was among those not amused. He wrote disparagingly and at some length about the Paraphrases to Mme von Meek, concluding that "only

29. Kamarinskaya had in fact grown out of Glinka's habit of improvising accompaniments to it at the piano with a partner playing the tune, "Chopsticks"-fashion. See Stasov's memoir, quoted in David Brown, Mikhail Glinka: A Bwgraphical and Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 273. 30. My Musical Life, 204. 31. Ibid.; also Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:157. 32. In 1893 the set was reissued by Belai'eff with a few additions: a posthumous mazurka by Borodin; a supplementary set entitled "Bigarrures" by Nikolai Shcherbachov (uncle of the well-known Soviet composer), another dabbler briefly associated with the Balakirev circle; and a variation (1880) by Liszt (printed in holograph facsimile), who as late as 1884 described the album to the visiting Glazunov as a "Compendium aller theoretischer und harmonischer Kentnisse" (quoted by Stasov in a letter to Balakirev, 10 July 1884; in A. S. Lyapunova, ed., M.A. Balakirev i V. V. Stasov: perepiska, vol. 2 [Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1971], 66).

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dilettantes could think that every piquant little chord they dream up deserves publication."33 These words, when published in Modest Chaikovsky's 1903 biography of his brother, stung Rimsky-Korsakov painfully, for there was truth in them.34 The tendency to regard compositional craft as a set of guild secrets, as well as the tendency toward collective endeavors of a fairly trivial sort, came increasingly to characterize the post-kuchkist conservatory set. The impression that these traits create is far from one of technical security—more nearly the opposite. For Lyadov especially, the lighthearted but no less ostentatious display of contrapuntal virtuosity remained a favorite pastime. He published three sets of canons (of which one became a sort of Conservatory textbook) and loved to show off his ability to concoct canons and fugues in company. Lyadov began work as a theory instructor at the Conservatory during the year of the Paraphrases. He spent practically the rest of his life at this tedious job, moving up to a class in advanced counterpoint only in 1901, and at last taking over Rimsky-Korsakov's class in practical composition on thetatter'sretirement in 1906. The Conservatory was the center of his existence, and he alone among his postkuchkist confrères formed a close relationship with Anton Rubinstein. A perfect paradigm of the ambiguous situation of the "second generation" of kuchkists is LyadoVs Ballade for Piano, op. 21, subtitled "Of Olden Days" ("Pro starinu," 1889). This essay in a Balakirevesque "neo-Russian" style was composed for and dedicated to Rubinstein on his sixtieth birthday.35 LyadoVs opus 54 is a "Hymn" to the unveiling of a commemorative statue of Rubinstein in 1902, and his opus 55 is an orchestral polonaise written for the same occasion. Yet another indication of how far the second generation had strayed from the ideological position of the first is LyadoVs opus 41, two fugues for piano (1897), dedicated to Herman Laroche (1845-1904), Hanslick's Russian aposde (and translator) and the bête noire of the original kuchka—so much so that Rimsky-Korsakov could never make peace with him. As for Glazunov, his astounding precocity obviated the need for conservatory study. By the time he was finished with the gimnaziya he already possessed the equivalent of a complete conservatory education, administered in private by RimskyKorsakov (after an abortive beginning with Balakirev). Glazunov took his first lesson with Rimsky on 23 December 1879. On 17 March 1882 the boy's First Symphony in E ("Slavonic") was performed under Balakirev at a Free Music School

33. Letter of 18 November 1879; in N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: literaturnïye proizvedeniya iperepiska 7:17. 34. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:214. 35. N. V. Zaporozhets, A. K. Lyadov: zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1954), 52. Glazunov's Fourth Symphony is also dedicated to Rubinstein.

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concert. For the next seventeen years Glazunov, who as scion of a wealthy publishing family never had to work for a living, pursued a career as an independent, professional composer. His eminence assured him a place on the Conservatory faculty, which he finally accepted in 1899. After the political disruptions of 1905 he was elected director, a post he held until he left Russia in 1928 (and even after—he was officially listed as director until 1930). Despite his fc//t-kuchkist upbringing and the early circumstances of his career, centering as they did around Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the Free Music School, Glazunov amply confirmed in word and deed the mutual regard to which Chaikovsky alluded in the 1892 interview quoted earlier. In 1922, at the request of Boris Asafyev, Glazunov set down on paper an exceptionally interesting memoir of his first meeting with Chaikovsky—a document that conveys much of the flavor of the post-kuchkist eighties, when old alliances were crumbling and new ones were being formed. The meeting took place on 28 October 1884, when Glazunov was an impressionable nineteen years of age. The host was Balakirev, who still fancied himself the head of the New Russian School. He and Chaikovsky were then in their second brief period of cordiality, centering on the tatter's Manfred Symphony, which, like the earlier Romeo and Juliet overture, had been suggested by Balakirev. I must remind the reader [wrote Glazunov in 1922] that the [New Russian School] by the mid-eighties was no longer so ideologically closed and isolated as it had been earlier. Nevertheless we did not consider P. I. Chaikovsky one of our own. We valued only a few of his works, like Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Francesca [da Rimini], and the finale of his Second Symphony. The rest of his output was either unknown or alien to u s . . . . Among us, especially the younger members of the Balakirev circle, the awaited meeting with the "alien" Chaikovsky aroused a kind of enigmatic interest. We gathered at Balakirev's at the appointed hour and began to wait for Chaikovsky to arrive with great excitement, and since he was not of our camp, the question of how we should behave toward him arose—probably, we concluded, we should be very reserved. Chaikovsky's appearance immediately put an end to the somewhat tense mood that reigned among us, particularly the younger ones. Chaikovsky, with his mixture of simplicity and dignity and his refined, altogether European self-possession, made on most of us a very cordial impression. Somehow we breathed easily. Chaikovsky's conversation was a fresh breeze amid our somewhat dusty atmosphere, and he effortlessly began speaking of things about which we had kept silent partly out of deference, coupled with some fear of Balakirev's authority and that of the other members of his circle. . .. The evening passed in a very lively manner. We spoke of music, and, I seem to recall, some pieces by [Balakirev's pupil] Lyapunov and by me were played. Chaikovsky left earlier than the rest, and with his departure we felt ourselves once again in our former, somewhat humdrum surroundings. Many of the young musicians present, including Lyadov and myself, left Balakirev's apartment charmed by Chaikovsky's personality. We

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went to a tavern to sit and share our new impressions. As Lyadov put it, our acquaintance with the great composer was a real occasion. Later I became more intimately acquainted with Chaikovsky, and in the end there arose between us a close friendship that lasted until his death. 36

Remarkable in this memoir is the sense of liberation, of widening horizons, that meeting Chaikovsky seemed to impart to the young neo-kuchkists. Theirs was the tense, walled-in atmosphere, his the free, creative one. A sense of what Chaikovsky meant to Glazunov may be gained by briefly comparing the tatter's Second Symphony, on which he was at work at the time of Chaikovsky's visit (and of which he played some parts that evening), and the Third, which he completed after a long gestation in 1890—and which he then dedicated to Chaikovsky. The earlier symphony is a veritable summa of latterday kuchkism. It boasts a motto theme in the style of a folk tune or a neumatic

(znamenniy)

church chant,

"modal" harmonizations after the fashion of Balakirev's folk song anthology, typically Balakirevesque orchestrational devices (e.g., plaintive woodwind solos over rushing pizzicato strings)—all of which had become by the eighties "style russe" platitudes. 37 The introduction to the Prologue from

Boris

(and the

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famous bell-ringing chord progression from that opera), a Borodin miscellany (the Polovetsian Dances, Second Symphony, and so on), Rimsky's

Snow

Maiden,

all pass in review. Above all, echoes of Balakirev's second Overture on Russian Themes (also known as Rus') reverberate from beginning to end. The second movement is an essay in kuchkist orientalism (replete with chromatic passes in both directions between the fifth and sixth scale degrees, a la Ruslan).

In the mid-

dle section of the movement the motto theme is given the "Mosque" treatment (florid English horn solo over muttering tremolando strings). Throughout, the method of construction is episodic. Themes go through a sort of mechanized transformation mill: new harmonizations, timbres, dance rhythms, tempi, all applied in standardized sequences. The Third Symphony, by contrast, is often referred to in the secondary literature as Glazunov's "anti-kuchkist" symphony. Everything about it bespeaks a stylistic crisis of which the composer was only too conscious: "It's terribly difficult to achieve stylistic unity," he wrote to Kruglikov in 1888, adding that his "whole outlook has changed." 38 Glazunov couldn't shake his Borodinian habits completely— this is especially apparent in the Scherzo—but he was certainly trying. Echoes of

36. A. K. Glazunov, "Moyo znakomstvo s Chaikovskim," in Vospominaniya o P. I. Chaikovskom, ed. Ye. Ye. Bortnikova (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1962), 46-48. 37. The motto theme has been compared with the chant-derived Ivan the Terrible leitmotif in Rimsky's Maid of Pskov, but it also resembles the khorovod tune "Kok vo gorode tsarevna" (no. 31 in Balakirev's anthology of 1866). 38. Yu. Keldi'sh, "Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo," in Glazunov: issledovantya, materiali, publikatsiy, pis'ma, ed. M. O. Yankovsky et al. (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1959-60), 2:162.

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Chaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and, in particular, the brand-new Fifth—both in the themes and in the key relations—are as obvious here as the kuchkist overtones had been before. Also Wagner: the slow movement is full of Tristanesque chromaticism, and one of the codas in the Finale is pure Götterdämmerung (while another is a late-Beethoven fugato in 6/4 meter). The stylistic changes go beneath the surface to the nature of the thematic material, which is now inclined to be of a pliant, modulatory character and given to dynamic, perorational construction. Glazunov's orchestration, formerly a thing of bright primary hues like Glinka's, is now full of dark doublings and divisVs. Chaikovskian influence was also responsible for setting Glazunov on the course—unprecedented for a kuchkist—of writing ballets for Marius Petipa. In this sphere he was as if Chaikovsky's ordained successor. By the nineties, Chaikovsky was on tutoyer terms with Lyadov and Glazunov, to the amazement and discomfiture of the circle around Rimsky-Korsakov.39 So close did they become that Rimsky, whose retarded development left him in spite of everything secredy defensive and insecure vis-ä-vis the Moscow master, became alarmed and uncontrollably jealous. In the Chronicle, he limited himself to the dry observation that in the winter and spring of 1891, during Chaikovsky's extended stay in St. Petersburg, There began to be noticeable a considerable cooling off and even a somewhat inimical attitude toward the memory of the "mighty kuchka" of Balakirev's period. On the contrary a worship of Chaikovsky and a tendency toward eclecticism grew ever stronger. N o r could one help noticing the predilection (that sprang up then in our circle) for Franco-Italian music of the time of the wig and farthingale, music introduced by Chaikovsky in his Pique Dame and

Iolanta.40

To Kruglikov, though, he admitted his real fears: Chaikovsky has told me that he intends (maybe it's a secret) to leave Moscow and transfer his center of gravity to St. Petersburg, starting next season. This fact is very portentous. The minute he chooses St. Petersburg for his setded existence, a circle will immediately form around him, which Lyadov and Glazunov will certainly join, and after them many others. And Laroche will be there, too, clever as ever. Chaikovsky, with his inborn worldly tact, seduces everyone and surrounds himself with talented people. For Chaikovsky it's very pleasant. The new circle will border on a Rubinstein cult. Don't forget that Lyadov is already strongly under Rubinstein's influence. D o you know Chaikovsky's tastes? Laroche's? Rubinstein's tastes and convictions? And all the spaces that remain will be filled with all kinds

39. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:108. With Rimsky-Korsakov, by contrast, it seemed that everyone used the formal mode of address (as was the case among the kuchkists generally); see ibid., 2:77. 40. My Musical Life, 309.

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of worthless hangers-on and faceless adorers. And so there you are, our youth will drown (and not only our youth—look at Lyadov) in a sea of eclecticism that will rob them of their individuality.41 Another letter, even more anguished, focused on the baleful presence of Laroche in the midst of Lyadov's and Glazunov's new circle of friends: "It's disgusting to see how he's ingratiated himself with everyone. Only in my presence do they refrain from falling all over him.... Lyadov abuses the New Russian School. Right now that's fashionable around here. Glazunov does the same; the others too. They're all spitting in the well from which they used to drink. There's Laroche's influence for you." 42 Things did not turn out quite as Rimsky feared. Chaikovsky did not move to St. Petersburg (though he did happen, unexpectedly, to die there a couple of years later). But the sea of eclecticism was real enough, and Rimsky himself could occasionally be found wading in it: compare the seventh scene of his opera Christmas Eve (1895), replete with "wig and farthingale" music, with the second act of Pique dame, its obvious model. After Chaikovsky's death, which removed from the scene the one rival who inspired feelings of inferiority in him, Rimsky-Korsakov was released, at least temporarily, from all his emotional ties to the mighty kuchka, and no one could match him when it came to "cooling off." This mood came particularly to the fore during his period of work on his first, heavily cut, revision of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, which filled him at times with a revulsion he made no attempt to hide. "It's incredible that I could ever have liked this music," he confided one day in 1895 to Yastrebtsev, "and yet it seems there was such a time."43 During an informal run-through of Musorgsky's original Kromi Forest scene, Rimsky called things abrupdy to a halt: "This is simply nonsense! It's just a hodgepodge!"44 On the day he finished the task of revision, he reflected that his conscience was now clear: "All of Musorgsky has been revised by me, and that means . . . I've done what could be done and what had to be done for the sake of his works and for the sake of his memory."45 Indeed, the whole era of which Musorgsky had been a part, and of which Stasov had written—and would continue to write—in such glowing terms, was by then only a memory. By the 1880s, the noble tradition of Russian musical autodidactism had come to an end, swallowed up by the conservatories. After Borodin's death in 1887, maverick activity a la kuchka had been effectively stamped out, except in the 41. Letter of 9 May 1890; in A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakov 3:104. Chaikovsky's soon-abandoned plan to resettle in the capital was a reaction to the sudden loss of his stipend from Mme von Meek. 42. Quoted in A. A. Gozenpud, "A. K. Glazunov i P. I. Chaikovskiy," in Yankovsky et al. (eds.), Glazunov 1:366. 43. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:330. 44- Ibid., 55.

45- Ibid., 3Si-

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atavistic persons of Balakirev and Cui, by then entirely peripheral figures on the Russian musical scene. That a composer as much as a violinist was to be trained in a conservatory was a fact of Russian musical life that was simply taken for granted. All Russian composers born after 1850, whether an epigone like Lyapunov or a modernist like Scriabin, went through the same mill and thus shared a common, highly finished technical base. There was no more "Moscow," no "St. Petersburg"; all Russia, at last, was one. Moreover, by century's end, the theory and composition faculties of Rubinstein's Conservatory were entirely in the hands of representatives of the New Russian School. Viewed against the background of Stasov's predictions, there could scarcely be any greater irony. But there was another factor at work in the transformation of Russian music and musical life in the late nineteenth century, even more powerful and far-reaching than the Conservatory. This factor Stasov never foresaw and, confronted with it, never understood. THE

GUILD

A number of political and social factors conspired in Russia, from the 1840s on, to stimulate intense economic and cultural growth in a stratum of society that had traditionally been among the most static and backward. This was the kupechestvo, the merchant class, a group centered largely in Moscow and despised by aristocracy and intelligentsia alike. "Bearded, patriarchal, semi-Asiatic in dress and manner, and fully versed in the arts of haggling and swindling, the Russian merchants in the early nineteenth century not only lacked the distinctive urban ethos of the West but also clung to their obscurantist cultural traditions," writes Thomas Owen, their foremost Western historian.46 Illiterate denizens of the "dark kingdom" immortalized in the dramas of Ostrovsky, they were described by one of their own as "nothing but trading muzhiks," that is, peasants at heart.47 But with the belated—indeed, delayed—coming of the industrial revolution to Russia, capitalism on the Western model was finally born in the decades preceding the Crimean War.48 The hugely increased complexity of their operations forced the upper echelons of merchant society to begin educating their heirs. Whereas in the past it had been axiomatic that "the son should know no more than the father," 49 the rising generation of capitalist (so-called German-style) merchants acted like typical nouveaux riches: their tastes ran to balls, banquets, fine clothes, theatergoing, and art. Although at first they intended to educate their children only 46. Thomas C. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History ofthe Moscow Merchants, iSss1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1. 47. Vladimir P. Ryabushinsky, "Kupechestvo moskovskoye," quoted in ibid., 9. 48. For a description of some of the impediments to industrialization imposed by the government of Nikolai I, see Owen, Capitalism and Politics, 20-22. 49. August von Haxthausen, Studien iiber die inneren Zustande.. . Russlands (1847-52), quoted in ibid., 12.

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enough to equip them for the technicalities of factory management, the necessity for foreign business travel led to the acquisition of European manners by significant numbers of merchants and merchant sons, and eventually, in some, to a passion for European culture. As Owen points out, "while this new behavior appeared to be a direct imitation of Western bourgeois culture, in fact it represented just a further extension of the old merchant habit of aping the Russian gentry," who were long-standing consumers of Western art. (Musicians, of course, will recall Count Razumovsky and Prince Golitsi'n, Beethoven's patrons.) However much merchants of the new breed may have affected Western bourgeois manners and dress, they did so "without... abandoning their old patriotic and religious attitudes toward politics." 50 Nor did the gentry (or the government) abandon their traditional haughtiness toward the newly dressed and educated merchants, no matter how wealthy the latter became. To the gentry a merchant would never be more than a kupchishka, a "litde tradesman." In Russia, as one writer has observed, "there was no great honor attached to working hard and becoming rich"—and no political influence or social prestige accrued therefrom, either. Hence, "if a Russian millionaire wished to gain fame and prestige, he would be most likely to turn either to charitable works, to publishing, or to art patronage as acceptable outlets for money," and as a way of asserting social parity with the aristocracy.51 And that is how a class that before the Crimean War would have seemed the least likely quarter in Russia from which to expect art patronage, managed by the closing decades of the nineteenth century to rival not only the gentry but even the tsar himself in supporting artists and art institutions. Because of their Slavophilish political and cultural orientation, merchant patrons were more inclined than the aristocracy to lend their support to native talent. This was enough to win them Stasov's wild approval, whatever he may otherwise have thought of merchants and their ways. He contrasted their activity sarcastically with that of the aristocrats, who, "slaves that they were of European fashions and lordly ways, throughout the whole of the eighteenth century had considered it their duty to bring back with them from Europe thousands of books they never read, and thousands of paintings they never looked at. It was all fashion—all pretense. 'Noblesse oblige' buzzed around their ears, and they bought... ," 5 2 Stasov derided even Catherine II's Hermitage and the magnificent art collection of the Golitsin family for neglect of native artists. But now the merchants had come to the rescue. Stasov's summary of the development of merchant patronage is typically skewed, 50. Owen, Capitalism and Politics, 23, 22. Most of the foregoing paragraph is a summary of pp. 22-25 of Owen's work. 51. Stuart Grover, "Sawa Mamontov and the Mamontov Circle, 1870-1905: Art Patronage and the Rise of Nationalism in Russian Art" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 363—64. 52. V. V. Stasov, "Pavel Mikhailovich Tret'yakov i yego kartinnaya gallereya," Russkaya starina 80, no. 2 (1893): 584-

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but it perfectly mirrors the preoccupations of his gloriously one-track mind, which welcomed support of national art from any quarter, no questions asked. N o t even Stasov, though, could conceal his residual disdain for the merchants as a class: What would you expect to encounter most often among the Russian kupechestvot A man who has gotten enormously rich, amassed his hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, and then, for the rest of his days, leads a life of idleness, selfsatisfaction, and insignificance... a man who is no longer interested in anything at all, but who will sometimes, when nearing the end of his days, build a church, an almshouse, or a hospital, as if to atone for old sins. Such pathetic magnates have always been numerous in Moscow. But right there, in the very midst of the kupechestpo, there appeared, and in the course of the first half of the present century there matured, an altogether different breed, merchant families with different needs and different aspirations, people who, regardless of their wealth, have little inclination for banquets or for high living, or for any of the usual absurd dissipations, but who instead have a great need of the intellectual life, a bent for all that relates to science and art. And these people seek their constant companions and friends among the cultured, the truly educated, and the talented. They spend their time among artists and writers, they are interested in works of literature, science, and art. Some of them will accumulate rich collections of books and manuscripts; others, rich collections of paintings and works of art of all kinds; some will become writers themselves, others men of science, still others artists or musicians; another group will operate a printing press and produce whole libraries of excellent books; and some will found public galleries, where all who wish may gain access. And everywhere, in everything, what comes first with them is the common weal, concern for the benefit of all the people. 53 All this was leading up to a tribute to the textile manufacturer Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov (1832—98), foremost art patron in Russia and practically lone supporter of the Peredvizhniki, who in 1893 bequeathed his collection of over twelve hundred Russian paintings to the city of Moscow, having built for the purpose a gallery that still stands and now bears the peculiar name State Tretyakov Gallery. As a movement that was both nationalist and realist, the Peredvizhniki were a natural object of merchant support. Many of the Peredvizhnik painters, like Ivan Kramskoy (1837-87), the leader of the original secession, were themselves semieducated provincials with backgrounds not unlike that of their new patrons, who, like Tretyakov himself, tended to be home-schooled and parochial in their tastes. What the merchants responded to in Russian realist art was not the urgency of its social message so much as its autochthonous Russianness, its sympathetic and skillful portrayal of peculiar aspects of landscape, of daily life, and of character types with which they were familiar and which they loved. The more liberal-minded Peredvizhniki like Ilya Repin (1844—1930) occasionally chafed at pressure from the 53. Ibid., 591-92.

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"quagmire of merchant freaks" to place the emphasis on genre rather than social theme. But they could see which side their bread was buttered on, and in their efforts to please Tretyakov and secure the financial rewards he offered they gradually relinquished their political idealism in favor of a preoccupation with national character that increasingly resembled their patron's conservative and sentimental chauvinism. This influence, bolstered as it was by cash, was stronger than any exerted by the liberal intelligentsia, who could offer a painter nothing more than moral approbation or, at most, public praise. The general upsurge of nationalism and PanSlavism among the Russian intelligentsia at the time of the Balkan Wars of the 1870s also lessened the connection of peredvizhnichestvo with liberalism and social criticism, and strengthened the movement's tendency toward Russophilia. All of this had the effect of pulling the Peredvizhniki from their maverick position so beloved of Stasov back into the mainstream of Russian art and society.54 By the 1880s, the Peredvizhniki were firmly ensconced in that mainstream. They were the established leaders in Russian art, a position that Stasov celebrated in "Twenty-five Years" 55 and tried to relate to the position of the mighty kuchka in music (though the kuchka had no such dominance in reality, only in StasoVs imagination). The ultimate boost to Peredvizhnik fortunes came with accession in 1881 of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, the so-called bourgeois tsar, who reverted to his grandfather Nikolai's view that promoting art could be an important instrument of state policy, but whose tastes in art, like the jingoistic policies they reflected, differed litde from the tastes and attitudes of the merchants. Alexander's energetic art patronage, then, rather than representing a crushing resurgence of aristocratic values against those of the Peredvizhniki, raised the Peredvizhniki instead to new heights of prestige and personal success. They, and the artistic movement they represented, were decisively "co-opted," as we now say, by a reactionary and xenophobically nationalist cultural ideology. Alexander founded a museum for Russian art in St. Petersburg (now the State Russian Museum) that was a twin to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Stasov greeted this event with delirious joy. As a leading Western historian of the Peredvizhniki has observed, with his usual obliviousness to any other point of view, [Stasov] claimed that the move was tantamount to recognizing the oeuvre of the Peredvizhniki as the national school. As a matter of course, he assumed that they would take an active part in the museum's organization and their work would form the core of the col54. Much of the foregoing paragraph summarizes Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977), 67-^73. 55. There was an important anniversary in this connection, too: it was in 1857 that Tretyakov had decided to collect nothing but Russian paintings.

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lection. Quite prophetically, without realizing the irony of his phrase, Stasov, the defender o f free unofficial art, proclaimed that what the Peredvizhniki had battled for was now fully recognized, that "their ship had reached a safe harbor." 5 6

The safety proved fatal. "The Peredvizhniki were ensconced on the walls of an Imperial museum not as representatives of free art and critical realism but as beneficiaries of the Tsar's bountiful, prestigious and jingoistic patronage." 57 With these benefits came a stultifying embourgeoisement. "La vie de bohème" was not for them; no longer alienated and rebellious youths, the Peredvizhniki now aspired to social prestige and material comforts. Accompanying the latter were financial responsibilities. With expensive households and dachas to maintain, the Peredvizhniki willingly accepted commissions for routine society portraits and blandly fashionable genre scenes. They became jealous guardians of their own self-created traditions and only grudgingly admitted new exhibitors to their shows or younger members to their official association. Increasingly they became the conservative party in the artistic politics of the "Silver Age," hostile to stylistic experimentation and watchful extirpators of art-for-art's-sake.58 Above all, they began to wield power, which, true to form, corrupted them and their movement irrevocably. Influential Peredvizhniki became members of selection committees and occupied the post of art critic for many newspapers and magazines. They now fought "decadence" with the same vehemence they had once shown against academicism. 59 After 1894 the latter target disappeared altogether, when four Peredvizhniki became professors at the Imperial Academy of Art, the very institution from which they had seceded three decades before. For all practical purposes, the Peredvizhniki were now the academy, and so it would remain until the Revolution and beyond. This précis of the decline and fall of the Peredvizhniki provides a model by which to measure the entirely comparable history of the New Russian School of musicians from the time of Stasov's "Twenty-five Years" until the death of RimskyKorsakov roughly a quarter of a century later. For it was precisely in the year 1882 that merchant patronage finally came to music in a massive, transforming dose. Why had it taken so long? The answer to this question would seem to lie pardy in the belated organization of professional musical life in Russia, and in the profession's almost complete identification, until the ferment of the sixties, with imported foreigners and with the gentry. Glinka and Dargomi'zhsky had belonged to the landowning class themselves;

56. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 125; the quotation is from Stasov's "Nashi peredvizhniki nïnche" (1889). 57. Ibid., 127. 58. See ibid., 120-30. 59. Grover, "Sawa Mamontov," 153.

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they needed no patrons at all. Hence they made no move to organize Russian musical life. That job had to await the coming of a musician who needed an organized musical life as the instrument of his own social advancement, and that musician was Anton Rubinstein, the great virtuoso, who labored under a double stigma: he was a merchant's son, and he was a baptized Jew. Rubinstein's heroic labors on behalf of the musical profession in Russia were motivated in the first instance by his social ambition. He wished to gain for himself and for his fellows an officially recognized social status comparable to that enjoyed by graduates of the Academy of Arts since the time of Catherine II, that is, the bureaucratic rank of "free artist" (svobodniy khudozhnik). This status exempted its bearer from the poll tax and conscription and entitled him to hold positions and receive remunerations on a par with middle-grade civil servants (along with such other entidements as that of living in big cities—a crucial matter for Jews—and that of being addressed in the respectful second person plural by social superiors). The Conservatory, then, was envisioned in the first instance as an agency for the achievement of social rank. The only source for the creation of such an instrument being the Imperial Court, Rubinstein was forced to seek noble patronage at the highest level. His eventual sponsor in the formation of the Russian Musical Society and the Conservatory was the Grand Duchess Yelena Pavlovna, the aunt of Tsar Alexander II. (The fact that she was German-born did its bit to stir up frenzied but irrelevant "nationalist" opposition.) The governing boards of Rubinstein's organizations were a glittering array of princes, dukes, and counts (including such long-standing noble dilettantes of music as Count Matvey Wielhorsky, Berlioz's friend). A merchant patron could have had absolutely no role in such a venture. The earliest private musical patron of note, Chaikovsky's sponsor, was the widow of an impoverished Riga baron who had built a fortune as a railroad entrepreneur. Thus, although Mme von Meck's wealth had been acquired in a manner entirely comparable to that of the railroad tycoon Sawa Mamontov, whose art patronage will be the subject of a later chapter, her social allegiances were entirely on the side of the hereditary nobility. And so were Chaikovsky's. His opera The Oprichnik, for example, was dedicated to the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, brother of Tsar Alexander II, and during the reign of Alexander III he practically became a court composer. The immediate effect of the institutionalization of musical life under the protection of the Autocracy, then, was to foreclose the possibility of patronage from other quarters. Besides, an inclination for "art" music, requiring considerable training and exposure and having practically no indigenous tradition in Russia, seems never to have taken hold among the Moscow kupechestvo in any degree comparable to their passion for painting and theater. Music therefore remained, through the sixties and beyond, pretty much the plaything of aristocratic and bureaucratic "melomanes."

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And so the New Russian School had to wait some two decades before a capitalist patron turned up for it. He did so not in Moscow, the traditional merchant stronghold, where the New Russians had no institutional standing at all, but in St. Petersburg. The immediate occasion for his materialization, however (and fittingly enough), was a concert in Moscow at which Glazunov's precocious First Symphony was performed under Rimsky-KorsakoVs baton as part of an AllRussian Exposition in the fall of 1882. "Before the rehearsal of the symphony commenced," Rimsky later recalled, I was approached by a tall and handsome man with w h o m I was not acquainted, though I had run across him in St. Petersburg. H e introduced himself as Mitrofan Petrovich Belyayev and requested permission to attend all rehearsals. M . P. Belyayev was an ardent music-lover, w h o had been completely captivated by Glazunov's symphony at its first performance at the Free Music School and w h o had come now expressly for its sake to Moscow. 6 0

The man who thus burst unexpectedly upon the Russian musical scene would change its face completely in a matter of two decades. The scion of the largest timber-manufacturing concern in Russia, Mitrofan Belyayev (1836-1903)61 was in some ways typical of his class, in others quite atypical. Like all merchants, he was a man of "simple conservative convictions," 62 blindly loyal to the tsarist autocracy and jingoistically patriotic. Even RimskyKorsakov called him "a bit of a samodur [self-made fool]," falling back on the term Alexander Ostrovsky had coined in his play "My Drink, Your Hangover" to describe Kit Kitlch, an archetypal Moscow merchant. Indeed, Belyayev's letters, with their ubiquitous proverbs and homespun philosophizing, bear the characterization out only too well. So do reports of his misogyny. He never tolerated the presence of women at his musical gatherings (excepting only his own wife and adopted daughter, and then only for the duration of the meal). When Alexander SeroVs widow, herself a composer, once tried to discuss business with him, she was treated in an unbelievably insulting manner.63 Yet Belyayev was educated in a manner quite unlike that of the Moscow merchant heirs. He was sent to the Reformatskoye uchilishche, an elite German Lutheran school in St. Petersburg, and it was here that a love of music (though, of course, not yet Russian music) was instilled in him. He studied piano and violin zealously, and his indulgent father, quite unlike the usual despotic merchant paterfamilias, encouraged his devotion to music. In the end, it was Belyayev's own decision to go into the family business and cultivate his taste for Western music as an avocation. 60. My Musical Life, 261. 61. Belyayev died on 22 December 1903 (o.s.), so Western sources sometimes give the year of his death as 1904. 62. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov 3:57. 63. Ibid., 102.

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Mitrofan Petrovich Belyayev (1836-1903)

This meant playing for recreation in the amateur orchestra of the German Club in St. Petersburg, presided over by the venerable German-bom conductor of the Alexandrinsky (dramatic) Theater orchestra, Ludwig Wilhelm Maurer (17891878). When the orchestra folded on Maurer's death, Belyayev joined the orchestra of an amateurs' club of which Borodin was president. The hired conductor was Lyadov. Now at last the timber man came into contact with the members and the music of the New Russian School. Belyayev also engaged regularly in amateur chamber music—something quite rare in Russia outside of aristocratic circles—hosting a quartet, in which he played viola, every Friday evening. Although he personally directed the family business from the time he inherited it in 1866, in 1884 he withdrew from the day-to-day operation of the firm so as to be free to devote himself to the advancement of Russian music, and especially to the cause of the young Glazunov.64 64. Material in this paragraph is abstracted from ibid., 3:56-57; and from Alexander V. Ossovsky, "M. P. Belyayev i osnovannoye im muzikal'noye delo," in Ossovsky, Muzikal'no-kriticbeskiye start (Leningrad: Muzi'ka, 1971), 344-

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Belyayev followed up on his meeting with Rimsky-Korsakov and the seventeenyear-old prodigy with a proposal to finance the publication of the tatter's symphony as well as anything else he might produce. Into Glazunov's lap thus fell a personal patron like Chaikovsky's. But unlike Mme von Meek, Belyayev did not stop there. Whereas she, true to the traditions of noblesse oblige, had insisted on anonymity, Belyayev, true to the pattern of merchant patronage, wanted to contribute conspicuously to public life. He therefore entered the publishing business on a grand scale. Displeased with the quality of the products of existing Russian music printers and, in particular, disgusted by the lack of foreign copyright on works published in Russia (a situation not rectified until the 1970s!), Belyayev decided in 1884 to form a publishing house for Russian music, with offices and printing facilities to be located in Leipzig, thus overcoming both impediments at a stroke. In this way the "Edition M. P. Belai'eff, Leipzig" was born, which by the time of the Revolution would boast a catalogue of over two thousand items, all composed by nationals of the Russian Empire. Belyayev approached this publishing venture with a sense of high mission and an enlightened sense of business efficiency. The house was wholly subsidized by his personal resources, and Belyayev could afford to pay extremely high honoraria. His editions were very lavish, beautifully printed on paper much better than the Russian average, and boasting elaborate tide pages often designed by recognized artists. An orchestra or chamber composition was always issued in a complement consisting of full score, engraved parts, and a four-hands arrangement. It is hardly to be wondered that the "Belai'eff" imprint quickly became a much-sought-after mark of professional arrival. Also in 1884, Belyayev initiated a concert series, conceived (like the publishing house) out of his personal involvement with Glazunov's career. He arranged a "public rehearsal" of the Glazunov Symphony, along with a pair of suites for orchestra (the second as yet unfinished), which were repeated at the end. The orchestra was that of the Mariyinsky Theater, conducted by Georgiy Dyutsh and Rimsky-Korsakov. Beginning with the 1885—86 season, Belyayev followed up on this semiprivate affair by inaugurating, at Rimsky's urging, a yearly concert series that presented only works by Russian composers; this also lasted until the Revolution. By 1910, a total of 165 works had been given their premieres at Belyayev's "Russian Symphony Concerts." 65 Meanwhile, the composers associated with Belyayev began to frequent his "Quartet Fridays," and the gatherings gradually turned into a meeting place for the New Russian School—sans only Balakirev, who would have nothing to do with any "circle" or situation be could not control (and also, of course, sans Mu65. For a survey of the Belyayev enterprise, full of statistics like these, see M. Montagu-Nathan, "Belaiev—Maecenas of Russian Music," Musical Quarterly 4, no. 3 (July 1918): 450-65.

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f i g . 1 . 2 . An early Belyayev "Friday" (photo by M. M. Kurbanov). Seated, the Belyayev "leviathans" (left to right)-. Lyadov, Stasov, Cui (soon to depart), RimskyKorsakov, Belyayev (the tatter's daughter stands between Rimsky and her father), Glazunov, Nikolai Sokolov (1859-1924)- Standing, the Belyayev "small fry": Sigismund Blumenfeld (1852—1920, singer, pianist, composer); Afanasiy Antipov; Alexander Kopi'lov (1854-1911, composer; Rimsky-KorsakoVs pupil, later colleague, at the Court Chapel Choir School, and one of the violinists in Belyayev's Friday quartet); Felix Blumenfeld (1863-1931, pianist; trained Vladimir Horowitz and Simon Bartre; conductor of all performances of Stravinsky's works under Belyayev auspices); Iosif Wihtol (1863—1948, later the patriarch of the Latvian national school); Nikolai Lavrov (1861-1927, pianist); Nikolai Artsi'bushev (1858—1937, de facto manager of the Belyayev enterprise after the founder's death); Porfiriy Trifonov (1844-96, critic; propagandist of epigonal neokuchkist viewpoint); Alexander Dianin (chemist and physician, close friend of Borodin); Konstantin Antipov (1858—193?, composer, Lyadov's cousin); unidentified guest; Sergey Lyapunov (1859-1924, composer and folk song collector; latterday disciple of Balakirev); and Alexey Petrov (1859-1919, composer of songs).

sorgsky, who had died in 1881).66 Borodin attended with special delight, since of all the original kuchkists he alone had been an enthusiast of chamber music (the result of a semi-aristocratic upbringing), with many youthful and unfinished works of that kind in his portfolio in addition to his two mature quartets (the second and more famous of which would be published by Belyayev in 1888). Cui, too, was a regular for a while, but soon fell out with the brusquely outspoken Belyayev and reverted to his wonted maverick stance—though by now he was a maverick on the right. 67 Stasov was always there, and Rimsky-Korsakov, who, after Borodin's sudden death, suddenly found himself the senior member of what by then was known to one and all as the "Belyayev circle." As far as Stasov was concerned, this continuity of membership was enough to legitimize the new circle as the mighty kuchka's direct dynastic heir. Thanks to Belyayev, he declared, the New Russian School, like the Peredvizhniki, had reached a safe harbor. Stasov's propaganda for the merchant's activities reached a peak of jingoism unique in the annals of Russian music. O n the Russian Symphony Concerts, for example, he wrote in 1895: Where else in Europe can you find concerts that are specifically national? Nowhere! In all [other] countries, concert programs consist of works belonging to talented composers o f various nations, sometimes presenting the most motley assortments: German, French, Italian, Swedish, English, etc., etc. But never before have there been set up (let alone maintained over many years) concerts of which the programs consist only of instrumental and vocal works belonging exclusively to the composers of only one nationality.

The self-evident virtue of Russian exclusivity is taken even more for granted in the case of the Edition Belai'eff: It's very fortunate for the public when, in the person of a publisher, energy, zeal, knowledge, and savoir faire are united with love for art and the wish truly to benefit it. Such cases are rare enough, but they do exist, and then the public esteems that publisher very highly and distinguishes him from the rest of his confrères. But how much greater and higher the esteem we owe a music publisher for whom income and profit are of no account and who is full of care for only one thing: ser-

66. Belyayev had mortally offended Balakirev in 1884 by refusing (for fear o f legal consequences) to publish the tatter's revision o f his second Overture on Russian Themes ("1000 Years") under the tide Rus'. (In the end the firm o f Bessel brought it out in 1890.) Thereafter, Balakirev never allowed Belyayev to print a single one o f his original compositions, despite many subsequent offers, although Belyayev, having b o u g h t out the original publisher, did reissue Balakirev's collection o f Russian folk songs. See S. M . Lyapunov's preface to "Perepiska M . A . Balakireva i N . A . Rimskogo-Korsakova (1868-1898)," in Muzïkal'nïy sovretnennik, no. 1 (1915) : 123-24; also V . A . Kiselyov, éd., M. A. Balakirev: perepiska s N. G. Rubinshteynom i s M. P. Belyayevïm (Moscow: M u z g i z , 1956), 65ff. 67. See Stasov's letter to Kruglikov, 11 November 1893, printed in Sovetskaya muzïka, 1949, no. 7, 79. With Cui, too, there was a precipitating incident: his name was inadvertently left o f f a poster announcing the Russian Symphony Concerts series in 1886. See Stasov's letter to Belyayev (16 September 1886) in A . V. Bïkov, ed., Iz arkhivov russkikh muzi'kantov (Moscow: M u z g i z , 1962), 8.

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vice to art and its most eminent representatives. And what art? Musical art that is exclusively Russian. What artists? Musical artists who are exclusively Russian.68

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As early as January 1888, Cesar Cui published a characteristically spiteful yet perceptive article, shrewdly entitled "Fathers and Sons" after TurgeneVs novel, in which he called in question both of Stasov's chief assumptions: first, that the composers represented on the Belyayev programs were maintaining the vitality of the kuchkist heritage; and second, that the exclusive Russianness of the enterprise was a self-evident good. In five programs, a total of forty-four works by eighteen composers had been performed. The numbers were in themselves heartening, wrote Cui, but the quality (especially among the debutants, the "sons") was far less so. Moreover, he complained, the absence of such composers as Davi'dov, Napravnik, and Rubinstein was evidence of bias against the "Conservatory" party and the aristocratic establishment. 69 This bias, Cui maintained, belied the purportedly "national" goals of the enterprise and unmasked it as coverdy sectarian. These were strange strictures to be coming from an old kuchkist. If nothing else, they show how utterly the musico-political lines had been redrawn by the late eighties. But Cui managed to make some points worth pondering alongside Stasov's jingoistic puffery. In his not wholly dispassionate evaluation, the generation of "sons" failed to measure up to that of the "fathers" for precisely the reasons that caused the myopic Stasov to tout them. "The first thing that strikes your eye," he asserted, "is that the sons are the lineal followers and heirs of the fathers, without the slightest admixture of outside blood, and at the same time it further strikes the eye that what they have followed is chiefly the fathers' faults rather than their virtues." 70 The virtues remain unspecified, but the faults are clearly spelled out, and they are quintessentially "Musorgskian" faults: preoccupation with harmonic curiosities and with programmatic details. Here is further evidence, if such is needed, of how far the surviving kuchkists now were from the cherished "realism" of their youth. Finally, Cui delivered himself of a pronouncement calculated to make the whole Belyayev cohort see red: Despite the frequent contact of all the fathers with one another, each of them preserved intact his individuality. It is enough to glance at a single page of music by

68. V. V. Stasov, "Mitrofan Petrovich Belyayev: biograficheskiy ocherk" (1895), in Stat'i 0 muzike, vols. 4—5a (Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1978-80), 5a: 125, 123. 69. Karl Davi'dov (1838—89), famous primarily as a cellist, was from 1876 to 1887 the director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory; Eduard Napravnik (1839-1916) was chief conductor at the Mariyinsky Theater. 70. Cesar Antonovich Cui, Izbranniye stat'i (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1952), 383.

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one of the fathers to say with certainty that it is the work of Borodin, Balakirev, Musorgsky, Chaikovsky, or Korsakov. The music of the sons is the music of clones. This is no reproach insofar as it is the result of their lesser talent. But it is a reproach insofar as it proceeds from a false tendency they all possess in common.71 Of malice there was more here than a trace (unsurprising, given the author), and a furious Stasov responded to "Fathers and Sons" with a blast of his own, "A Dismal Catastrophe," in which he read his former kuchkist colleague out of the company of progressive musicians, reviled him for his perfidy, and likened Cui's new article to his notoriously treacherous review of Boris Godunov some fourteen years earlier.72 Fair enough; but to what, exactly, had Cui been "perfidious" this time? To Stasov's illusions of a golden age, and little else. If we compare Cui's scathing review with the remarkably frank passage in Rimsky's Chronicle where he compares the Belyayev circle with the Balakirev circle of a generation past, we find very little to distinguish them except their tone. "But who were Sve' in the eighties?" Rimsky asked, and then proceeded to this exquisitely just, detailed, and not a little wistful answer: The connecting links between the former circle of Balakirev and the newly formed circle of Belyayev were Borodin, Lyadov and I; and after Borodin's death, Lyadov and I alone. Glazunov cannot be counted a connecting link, since his appearance in the field coincides with the time of the mighty kuchka's dissolution. Beginning with the latter half of the eighties, we, or Belyayev's circle, consisted of Glazunov, Lyadov, Dyutsh, Felix Blumenfeld [1863-1931, graduated the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1885], his brother Sigismund [1854-1920] (a talented singer, accompanist, and composer of songs), and I. Later, as they graduated from the Conservatory, there appeared N[ikolai] A[lexandrovich] Sokolov [1859-1922, graduated 1886, appointed to the faculty 1896], [Konstantin Afanasyevich] Antipov [1859-193?, graduated 1886], [Jazeps (Iosif)] Wihtol [Vitols, 1863-1948, graduated 1886, appointed immediately], and others.... The venerable V. V. Stasov always preserved the same cordial and close relations with the new circle as well, but his influence in it was no longer the same as in Balakirev's. Can Belyayev's circle be looked upon as a continuation of Balakirev's? Was there a certain modicum of similarity between one and the other and what constituted the difference, apart from the change in personnel in the course of time? The similarity . . . consisted in the advanced ideas, the progressivism, common to the two of them. But Balakirev's circle corresponded to the period of storm and stress in the evolution of Russian music; Belyayev's circle represented the period of calm onward march. Balakirev's circle was revolutionary, Belyayev's, on the other hand, was progressive.... Belyayev's circle was numerous and grew more so in the course of time. All the five members of Balakirev's circle were subsequendy recog71. Ibid., 385. 72. Stasov, "Pechal'naya katastrofa," in Stafi 0 muzike 4:49-52. Cui's renegade tendency was real enough, and motivated in part by social ambition. In the 1890s he served on the board of the aristocratic Russian Musical Society and sneered openly at the Belyayev concerts.

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nized as prominent representatives o f Russian musical creative art. The other circle was variegated in makeup: it contained prominent composers of talent, and men of lesser gifts, and men who were not composers at all, like Dyutsh, for instance, or solo performers, like [the pianist] N[ikolai] S[tepanovich] Lavrov [1861-1927]. Balakirev's circle consisted of musicians of feeble technique, amateurs almost, who were pioneering by sheer force of their creative talents, force that occasionally served them in lieu of technique and occasionally (as frequently with Musorgsky) was insufficient to conceal its shortcomings. Belyayev's circle, on the contrary, consisted of composers and musicians technically trained and educated. The origin of music that interested it was traced by Balakirev's circle no further back than to Beethoven; Belyayev's circle respected not only its musical fathers, but its grandfathers and great-grandfathers as well, going back as far as Palestrina. 73 Balakirev's circle recognized well-nigh exclusively the orchestra, the piano, the chorus, and vocal solos with orchestra, ignoring chamber music, vocal ensembles (excepting the operatic duet), the chorus a cappella, and the solo for bowed instrument; Belyayev's circle had a broader outlook on these forms. Balakirev's circle was exclusive and intolerant; Belyayev's was more indulgent and eclectic. Balakirev's circle did not want to study, but broke new paths forward, relying upon its powers, succeeding therein and learning; Belyayev's circle studied, attaching as it did great importance to technical perfection, but it also broke new paths, though more securely, even if less speedily. Balakirev's circle hated Wagner and strained to take no notice o f him; those in Belyayev's circle had their eyes and ears open with eagerness to learn and respect. 74

R i m s k y ' s list is o n e o f contrasts, w i t h a single extremely equivocal exception. H e claims that b o t h g r o u p s were "progressive" but then immediately qualifies the w o r d as applied to the Belyayev circle by contrasting it w i t h the w o r d "revolutionary," applied to the older g r o u p . H e also claims that b o t h g r o u p s m a d e breakt h r o u g h s , b u t the breakthroughs ascribed t o the Belyayev circle involve mainly the o v e r c o m i n g o f kuchkist blind spots. In place o f a D a v i d s b u n d , in fine, w e have an academy. T h e situation w a s precisely analogous to that o f the Peredvizhniki. T h e mavericks o f the 1860s w e r e b e c o m i n g the establishment o f the 1880s. A n d like an establishment they behaved. R i m s k y ' s use o f the w o r d "progressive" can only be regarded as euphemistic (for f e w artists, especially artists w i t h a " r e v o l u t i o n a r y " past, w i l l w i l l i n g l y call themselves conservative). L i k e any established g r o u p , the Russian composers o f the late nineteenth century were just as b o u r g e o i s in their o u t l o o k as the artists. In this regard, t o o , the dissolute M u s o r g s k y ' s death in 1881 m a r k e d an epoch. R i m s k y - K o r s a k o v led an exemplary Victorian family life; he prided himself o n it and (possibly frightened by M u s o r g s k y ' s example) g u a r d e d it

73. Further, in fart. Maximilian Steinberg's memoir of Glazunov describes the use, in Glazunov's score-reading class at the Conservatory, of "Karl Proske's excellent collection Musica DivincT and their enjoyment together o f works by Josquin and Lasso (Yankovsky et al. [eds.], Glazunov 2:16). 74. My Musical Life, 285—87.

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jealously. By the time of the Belyayev circle, composers who drank or gambled (like Arensky) were not welcome in his home. A similar fear ofdisorder and unconventionality closed his mind to the music of the younger Europeans, like Debussy and Strauss, both of whom, but especially the latter, could arouse in him a righteous indignation that became proverbial among his contemporaries and, especially, his pupils. Regarding Debussy, Rimsky confided his thoughts to a diary he kept sporadically from 1904 to 1907. At his sixtieth birthday party (6 March 1904), Felix Blumenfeld had regaled the guests (probably as a sort of jest) with Estampes, published the year before. Three days later, Rimsky was still fuming over the piece. The diary entry for 9 March reads: "Debussy's Estampes were played. Poor and skimpy to the nth degree; there is no technique, even less imagination. The impudent decadent—he ignores all music that has gone before him and, holding on for dear life to the second FH-GH in a B-major piece for two or three pages at a stretch, thinks he has discovered America." 75 The contemptuous reference to the seconds in "Pagodes," in conjunction with Debussy's alleged ignorance of what had gone before, must be an oblique allusion to Borodin's 1867 song "The Sleeping Princess" ("Spyashchaya knyazhna"), dedicated to Rimsky-Korsakov, in which a constant succession of soft, quasi-consonant seconds is maintained in the harmony from beginning to end. Rimsky orchestrated the song in 1904—could his consternation at Debussy have provided the motivation? As for Strauss, here is a memoir by an anonymous former pupil, printed in the Rimsky-Korsakov memorial issue of the Russkaya muzikal'naya gazeta (Russian Musical Gazette, henceforth RMG) in 1908. His pupils had been speaking enthusiastically about Salome: Nikolai Andreyevich decided to test his students' impressions for himself. H e bought the vocal score of Salome and patiendy began to go through it starting on the first page. W h e n w e came in for class, N . A. was up to the music for the "episode with the severed head." H e was banging out the sharp dissonances, meanwhile loudly singing something on top of them. "Listen, gendemen, to this music," he said, turning to us without a word o f greeting. (He was in a very bad mood.) H e went on playing for t w o minutes or so. Then he suddenly seized the score and threw it on the ground with these words: "By God, I'd be ashamed even to play that in front of my maid; she'd think I'd lost my mind." The whole class turned into an argument. Strauss's adherents tried in vain to stand up for him. "Don't even mention his name to me, gendemen . . . he has no talent. That's what I have to say to you!" A t this his expressionless eyes told us that nerve blindness had set in. That's the way it always was with him when he was very upset. 7 6

75. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye socbineniy: literaturntye proizvedeniya i perepiska 1:16. 76. RMG 15, no. 32-33 (10—17 August 1908), col. 661.

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There could be no better testimony, by the way, to embourgeoisement than the way in which Rimsky-Korsakov invoked his maid. The leaders of the Belyayev circle were also threatened by the indigenous Russian "decadence" of the Silver Age, but about that something could be done. For another difference between the Belyayev circle and the Balakirev circle—one that Rimsky did not mention but that seems in retrospect to have been the most important—was that the new circle was a seat of power. A point Rimsky makes only by implication in his Chronicle cries out to be made explicit, and that is the close tie between the Belyayev circle and the Conservatory. The circle became to all intents and purposes a guild, to which the better pupils of the circle's existing members were routinely initiated. Admission to the circle (signified by invitation to the "Fridays") practically guaranteed well-remunerated publication by Edition Belai'eff, Leipzig, and performance on the Russian Symphony Concerts programs. Since Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, and Glazunov acted in an advisory capacity to both Belyayev enterprises, they became the channelers of the Maecenas's largesse. The Belyayev enterprises thus succeeded where even Anton Rubinstein had failed in setting up an establishment that governed all aspects of musical creation, education, and performance. It provided composers willing and able to conform to its standards and ideals with virtual cradle-to-grave career insurance. This was certainly nothing to be sniffed at, and the beneficiaries were properly, if a shade defensively, grateful. Nikolai Cherepnin (1873-1945, graduated 1898), a leading "Belyayevets" of the generation following those described in Rimsky's Chronicle (and progenitor of a notable dynasty of composers that has lasted to this day), offered this paean of thanks to the Belyayev enterprises in his unfinished memoirs: A n o n c o m p o s e r w i l l never be able to appreciate to the full [the enterprises'] great significance and the possibilities they offered a fledgling artist. If y o u add to that the fact that all w o r k s accepted by Belyayev for publication w e r e obtained directly f r o m the authors, and that the size o f the stipulated honoraria was, for the time, quite h i g h , then y o u have to admit that only in a great c o u n t r y like Russia, and only at the instigation o f such m a g n a n i m o u s persons as Belyayev and his inspirers, advisers, and friends like Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Lyadov, c o u l d there be conceived, realized, and established forever such a great act o f c o m m u n i o n , by w h i c h the Russian c o m p o s e r — t i l l then for the most part a timid dilettante, unsure o f his status o r o f the intellectual w o r t h o f his l a b o r — n o w joined in a serious, professional, constructive, creative endeavor, w h i c h gave the Russian composer, besides his o w n personal fulfillment, a certain fully merited chance to justify his existence and s u p p o r t his material w e l l - b e i n g — b o t h his o w n and that o f his near o n e s — t h r o u g h his creative w o r k . 7 7 77. N. N. Cherepnin, "Pod sen'yu movey zhizni" (typescript; courtesy Ming Tcherepnin), 73. Most of this passage was cut from the Soviet edition; see N. Cherepnin, Vospominaniya muztkanta (Leningrad: Muzi'ka, 1976), 63.

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And it is only natural that composers so favored will seek to perpetuate their favored status—or at least do nothing to jeopardize it. Within the Belyayev circle a safe conformism became increasingly the rule, and mediocrity flourished, especially as the need to fill four concert programs a year with new Russian works made it necessary to dip rather deep into the pool of available Conservatorytrained talent. As a result, the Belyayev circle became known for harboring a great multiplicity of "kleinmeisters" who were often far from meisters—"clones," to use Cui's unkind but prophetic word. Their names were legion, from Alferaki to Zolotaryov. It was as easy to deride this group from without as it was difficult to rebel against it from within. A typical taunt, one that carries a certain ironic resonance in view of the story that is about to unfold, was published in Diaghilev's journal Mir iskusstva (World ofArt)

during its first year of existence. Signed with the typical "Miriskusnik"

pseudonym Silenus, after the leader of the satyrs, the article (whose title, "The Musical Artel," employed with snooty derision the then-new term for a worker's cooperative) was the work of Alfred Nurok, soon to be a founder of the concert series known as Evenings for Contemporary Music. Chiefly devoted to a review of one of Belyayev's Russian Symphony concerts, the essay contained a withering general assessment of the great patron's impact on Russian musical life: Mr. Belyayev's Maecenas activities bear a very special imprint. His undeniably lavish patronage of Russian music of the newest variety does not, unfortunately, so much facilitate the development of gifted but as yet unrecognized talents, as it encourages young people who have successfully completed their conservatory course to cultivate productivity come what may, touching little on the question of their creative abilities. Mr. Belyayev encourages industry above all, and under his aegis musical composition has assumed the character of an artel, or even a crafts industry. The music of Messrs. [Fyodor] Akimenko [1876-1945, graduated 1901], [Alexander] Kopi'lov [1854-1911], Antipov, [Nikolai] Arts'ibushev [1858—1937], and the rest of these handicraftsmen-composers all possess the same dubious virtues and manifest the same creative impotence. 78

More than a little social snobbery lurks here—once an "industrialist" always an industrialist (read: kupchishka). But the issue of conformism was real enough to cause some embarrassment even within the group. Debate over the ultimate value of Belyayev's legacy is often reminiscent of more recent controversy over Soviet musical institutions, with proponents pointing to material benefits and detractors focusing on matters of creative freedom. Cherepnin felt constrained to face this perhaps irresoluble dilemma in his memoirs, and did so at revealingly equivocal length: 78. Silcn, "Muzi'kal'naya artel'," Mir iskusstva, nos. 21-22 (1899): 74.

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Were the young Russian composers of my generation completely free in the creation of those works of theirs that were published at that time by the Belyayev firm, or was there not, within the very atmosphere of the Belyayev circle, a certain "circle mentality," a certain "neo-kuchkism," so to speak, which required of those who wished to be accepted into the catalogue some sort of greater or lesser uniformity in style and musical oudook? To this question, it seems to me, one has to answer, "Yes and no." There were no such implied constraints, of course, nor could there be, on those composers whose works immortalized the Belyayev catalogue, that is, the "Leviathans," so to speak, on whom it stands even now. There were no such implied constraints, nor could there be, on those composers who were brought into the catalogue by Belyayev or his associates, as it were from without, like Scriabin, Taneyev, and a few others, who were also "pillars" and ornaments of the catalogue. But there most certainly and most naturally were such implied constraints on composers who were accepted into the catalogue as former pupils of RimskyKorsakov, and later, as pupils of his pupils. From them it was required—if only unconsciously—that the works presented by them for publication be more or less close—in sound, in esthetic, in the character of the musical ideas and workmanship—to the works of the builders of the catalogue, and that they observe the requisite measure of artistic distinction to have the right to be included there. There arose, and was even engraved in the Belyayev Charter, a certain qualitative yardstick: " N o lower than the average item in the Belyayev catalogue," which was applied mainly to the works of this last category. This was to be interpreted as follows: "Look, we taught you to compose. Well, go ahead and compose as we have taught you, so that the general musical content of the catalogue shall be worthily augmented, continued, and developed along creative lines we have devised and marked out for you." 79 This is how one must understand the "calm onward march" that Rimsky-Korsakov called progress. When Belyayev suddenly died at the end of 1903, leaving behind a fantastic million-ruble endowment to keep his enterprise afloat in perpetuity, even more power was concentrated in the hands of Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, and Glazunov, 79. Chercpnin, "Pod sen'yu moyey zhizni," 89-90; Vospominaniya muzikanta, 74-75. The "Charter" to which Cherepnin refers was the one by which Belyavev's will was legally implemented in 1905. Scriabin's relationship to the Belyayev enterprise warrants comment. He made his contact with Belyayev through his piano teacher Vasiliy Safonov, bypassing the triumvirate of St. Petersburg Conservatory professors. Belyayev, taken with the boy even more than with his music, impulsively signed Scriabin to a lifetime contract. Thereafter, Scriabin's music, especially his later music, sat most peculiarly amid the work of the St. Petersburg nonentities who made up the bulk of the Belyayev list. One should bear in mind, though, that the tender and rather improbable friendship that flourished between the sixty-year-old merchant and the twenty-five-year-old esthete (they were on tutoyer terms from 1897) was confined to the early, derivatively Chopinesque phase of Scriabin's career. As Andrey RimskyKorsakov rather drily put it, "What this friendship would have become a few years later, when Scriabin began to think himself a prophet, is hard to say" (A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov 3:17). But by then Belyayev's executors had no choice; they were legally bound to publish all of Scriabin until Koussevitzky, to their probable relief, wooed the prophet away.

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f i g . 1 . 3 . The Belyayev Board of Trustees (popechitel'niy sovet) in 1905; left to right: Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Lyadov.

who now formed the official board of trustees {popechitel'niy sovet) of the publishing house and the Russian Symphony Concerts. The will had ordained the board with an open letter that was incorporated into the Belyayev Charter as a preamble: My dear Nikolai Andreyevich, Anatoly Konstantinovich, and Alexander Konstantinovich: I ask that you resolutely take upon yourselves the responsibility of constituting the first Board of Trustees, and invest this institution with that tendency in musical art, of which I consider you to be the finest representatives.... The aim of my institution is to encourage Russian composers on the difficult path of service to musical art by means of prizes, publication, the performance of their works, and the holding of competitions. But it is desirable that these measures not take on the character of a charitable endeavor (for which supplementary capital has been set aside), but should operate on the basis of the artistic judgment of musical compositions. In my opinion, one who has devoted himself to music, but is not in command of its technique, is as yet no musician; but by the same token one who has technique, but is not gifted by nature with the divine spark of inspiration, is no composer.... I ask you, as the finest candidates for the realization of my ideas, to form the Board and then to choose successors who will continue to lead the institution in your direction. This document, which concerned itself not only with legal and financial matters,

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but, by implication, with esthetic ones too, has been described as the constitution of the first "real school" of composers in Russia.80 To the board of trustees now fell the task of awarding the annual Glinka Prizes, announced each year, by the terms of Belyayev's will, on 27 November (o.s.), which was Belyayev's name day and by coincidence also the anniversary of the premières of both of Glinka's operas. A total of three thousand rubles had to be distributed each year, with amounts allocated to each recipient based on the dimensions of the compositions honored. In the first year (1904), one thousand rubles were awarded to Sergey Taneyev for his C-minor Symphony, op. 12; Rachmaninoff and Lyapunov were each given five hundred rubles for piano concertos (Rachmaninoff's was the Second); Arensky received the same for his D-minor Piano Trio, op. 32; and Scriabin was awarded five hundred rubles for his Third and Fourth Sonatas together (three hundred and two hundred rubles respectively).81 What is noteworthy and revealing about this list is that it consists entirely of instrumental pieces in classical forms. This fact raises further annoying questions about the effect of the Belyayev enterprise on the fate of Russian music. Stasov always paired Belyayev with Tretyakov, pointing with delight at their support of exclusively Russian talent (to borrow for the moment StasoVs reflex italicization). And it was doubtless the case that Tretyakov's activities did raise the level of nationalism in Russian art. But while Belyayev's own feelings about Russian nationhood may have been just as rabidly chauvinistic as Tretyakov's, and while both merchants would doubdess have rather supported a native hack than a foreign genius, the result of Belyayev's patronage was in an ironic way the opposite of Tretyakov's. It actually helped lower the level of nationalism in Russian music. This curious state of affairs stemmed in large part from the nature of Belyayev's own musical tastes, which had been formed at a German school, and from his enthusiastic commitment to chamber music. To Reinhold Glière, up from Moscow to visit a Belyayev Friday, the patron once declared, "Chamber music is the highest form of music! It occupies the first place among all the other arts. After it comes symphonic music, then opera, and only then romances and all that sort of thing."82 This ordering almost precisely reversed the "traditional" kuchkist priorities, with opera holding unquestioned pride of place and chamber music regarded with suspicion as "aristocratic," "German," in any case un-Russian and outmoded. When Borodin began sketching his first string quartet in 1875, Stasov and Musorgsky had been "horrified."83 The "new" order of preference, Belyayev's, was heavily reflected in his publishing activity. Edition Belaieff issued only eleven operas. (Even while serving as BeOssovsky, " M . P. Belyayev," in Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stafi, 354. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:319. R . M. Glière, "Vstrechi s belyayevskim kruzhkom," Sovetskaya muzïka, 1949, no. 8, 66. See Borodin's letter to Lyubov Karmalina, 15 April 1875, in S. A. Dianin, ed., Pis'ma A. Borodina, vols. 2-3 (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1936-49), 2:89. 80. 81. 82. 83.

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lyayev's chief adviser, Rimsky-Korsakov had to publish several of his operas elsewhere.) But by 1910 the firm had issued over six times that many chamber works. The Fridays naturally provided a huge impetus for the composition of quartets. Glazunov, for example, composed five numbered quartets in addition to a suite and a set of novelettes for the same medium, to be read through at the Quartet Fridays and then to be duly published in Leipzig. (After Belyayev's death he wrote two more.) Belyayev's guests used regularly to present their host on his name day with quartet compositions, often collectively composed sets of learned bagatelles reminiscent of the "Chopsticks" paraphrases, which thus retrospectively took on the character of a Belyayevets prototype. In 1886, the senior Belyayevts'i—Borodin, Rimsky, Lyadov, and Glazunov— teamed up on a four-movement quartet based on a motto consisting of the notes B-flat, A, and F ("B-La-F"). The idea came, of course, from Schumann's Carnaval ("Scènes mignonnes sur quatre notes"), which in 1902 was orchestrated by another Belyayevets squad. The next year the same group minus the deceased Borodin wrote a collective quartet entitied Name Day (Imeninibetter known by its-French tide, Jour de fête). In 1898 the offering was a set of variations on a Russian folk song, to which the same three contributed, together with a host of juniors: Artsi'bushev, Wihtol, Blumenfeld, Ewald, Winkler, Sokolov, even Scriabin (his one "national" composition!). Finally, in 1899, a double album was issued under the tide "Les vendredis" ("Pyatnitsï"), containing an assortment of pieces written over the years for Belyayev's Friday gatherings, including the "Polka: Les vendredis," which could be looked upon as the archetypal Belyayevets product. It is a collective work within a collective work (first theme by Sokolov, second theme by Glazunov, trio by Lyadov; of course the viola gets the main tune). Its companion pieces in the two cahiers included, among other things, a prelude and fugue and a courante by Glazunov, a fugue in the Dorian mode and a sarabande by Lyadov, a minuet by Wihtol, a canon by Sokolov, and a sonata allegro by Rimsky, along with sundry scherzos, serenades, mazurkas, and berceuses. This was artel work such as even "Silenus" never foresaw. Not that "Les vendredis" represents Belyayevets aspirations at their highest and best; but it does fairly represent Belyayevets taste. The "sea of eclecticism" had turned into an ocean, bringing with it a well-nigh total preoccupation with abstract and often "retrospective" instrumental forms (with Glazunov, who never even thought of writing an opera once past his teens, the exemplary Belyayevets composer, and with Rimsky, who in the last fifteen years of his life became almost exclusively an operatic composer, something of an anomaly within the very group he led). The emolument for chamber music production became all the greater after Belyayev's death: his will provided for an annual well-rewarded quartet competition over and above the Glinka Prize. A supplementary quartet series in conjunction with the Russian Symphony Concerts (called "Russian Quartet Evenings") PERILS

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f i g . 2 . i b . Fyodor Stravinsky in several of his roles in current repertory as of his jubilee. Top row, left to right: William the Conqueror (Napravnik, Harold), Saracini (Solovyov, Cordelia), Saint-Bris (Meyerbeer, Les Huguenots), Skula (Borodin, Prince Igor) middle row: Farlaf (Glinka, Ruslan and Lyudmila), Mstivoy (Rimsky-Korsakov, Mlada), Sparafucile (Verdi, Rigoletto); bottom row: Ivan the Terrible (G. A. Kazachenko, The Silver Prince), Old Dubrovsky (Napravnik, Dubrovsky), Pan Golova (Rimsky-Korsakov, May Night), Mephistopheles (Gounod, Faust). (Russkaya muzikal'nayagazeta, March 1898)

Something similar—and all the more impressive for its being wholly spontaneous—had happened a decade earlier, at the première of Chaikovsky's opera The Enchantress (Charodeyka, first performed 20 October 1887 at the Mariyinsky). Stravinsky was assigned the relatively small role of the deacon Mamïrov. It was the fourth Chaikovsky role he had created, after "His Highness" (Svetleyshiy) in Vakula the Smith (Kuznets Vakula, 24 November 1876), Dunois in The Maid of Orleans (Orleanskaya deva, 13 February 1881), and Orlik in Mazepa, for which part Chaikovsky had specified Stravinsky (3 February 1884). Earlier, at the outset of his career, Stravinsky had attracted Chaikovsky's notice with his performance of the role of Vyazminsky at the Kiev première of The Oprichnik. The Enchantress was received very coldly by public and press alike—except for Stravinsky, who stopped the show with his second-act monologue. He received far greater applause than the composer himself, who, owing to the illness of Nápravník, had been forced to conduct.5 Although the opera was dropped and soon forgotten, Stravinsky's rendition of the deacon's tortured line "To force me—me—to dance!" ("Menya, menya plyasat'zastavitT) in Act II became a legend.6 This triumph marked the beginning of Stravinsky's unchallenged ascendency. The second feature article in the RMG followed three years later, in conjunction with the silver anniversary of the singer's Mariyinsky debut. He was given a bénéfice on this occasion (3 January 1901) and chose as his vehicle Alexander Serov's Judith, in which his portrayal of Holofernes was famous. 7 (This was the performance, by the way, for which Igor Stravinsky many years later remembered being sent with a special invitation to César Cui.) 8 The elder Stravinsky's personal attention to the aging representatives of the New Russian School was reciprocated from that quarter in the form of a jubilee greeting from Stasov himself, published in the Novosti i birzhevayagazeta on 30 December 1900. The patriarch of the Russian nationalist school pronounced a quintessentially "kuchkist" benediction on Stravinsky, dubbing him the "realist" of the Russian operatic stage (Petrov had been the "idealist") and calling for his appearance in that epitome of Russian realist opera, Dargomïzhsky's Stone Guest, in which, Stasov averred, Stravinsky would be the ideal Leporello. The jubilee greeting closed with a glance toward the future: "In conclusion I would like, nay, I must most warmly wish—and surely many will join

5. M. I. Chaikovsky, Zhizn'P.I. Chaikovsko/fo (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1901-3), 3:185. The reference to this occasion in E&D:68/79 purports to cite a letter by Chaikovsky, but what is really cited is this page from Modest's biography (the first sentence is from the letter; the rest is the biographer's comment, somewhat garbled). 6. E. A. Stark, Peterburgskaya opera iyeyo mustera (Leningrad, 1940), 204- It was after The Enchantress that Chaikovsky presented Stravinsky with the inscribed portrait that was, in Igor Stravinsky's recollection, "the most treasured object in my father's studio" (E&D:68/79). 7. " K 25-letivu artisticheskov deyatel'nosti F. I. Stravinskogo," RMG 8, no. 1 (January 1901), cols. 13-15 (unsigned). Stark (Peterburgskaya opera, 100) makes a special point that the role of Holofernes was regarded as Stravinsky's property. 8. M&C:58/6o.

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f i g . 2 . 2 . Fyodor Stravinsky, self-caricatures as (clockwise from upper left) Yeryomka in Serov's The Power of the Fiend (see Fig. 10.5), Holofernes in Serov's Judith (his jubilee role), Gessler in Rossini's Guillaume Tell, and Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust. (Reproduced from L. M. Kutateladze and A. A. Gozenpud, eds., F. Stravinskiy: stat'i, pis'ma, vospominaniya [Leningrad: Muzïka, 1972], courtesy State Theatrical Museum, St. Petersburg.)

with me in this—that Stravinsky long, long remain the adornment, the invincible strength, and the succor of our Russian operatic stage. There will hardly be anyone soon to take his place, or compensate his loss. Real talents appear among us so rarely and with such difficulty."9 The loss, alas, was sooner than anyone could have foreseen. The third RMG feature on Stravinsky was his obituary, by the editor Nikolai Findeyzen himself. It filled six solid columns in the issue of i December 1902.10 The ultimate testimony in the RMG to the singer's exalted place in the pantheon of Russian music came six years later, in an illustrated article by Findeyzen reporting the dedication of a monument over Stravinsky's grave, which may be seen to this day at the entrance to the Alexander Nevsky Cemetery in St. Petersburg.11 Owing to its placement and its sheer size, the monument to Fyodor Stravinsky dominates the cemetery, which is also the burial place of Dostoyevsky, Zhukovsky, and Kr'ilov, not to mention Glinka, Dargomizhsky, Rubinstein, Lyadov, and Chaikovsky, plus every one of the Mighty Five, and Stasov too. 12 The posthumous literature on Fyodor Stravinsky has been equally impressive, the more so as it extended unabated into a period of Soviet musicography during which the singer's son was definitely persona non grata. In the season following the elder Stravinsky's death, the official Yearbook of the Imperial Theaters (Yezhegodnik Imperatorskikh Teatrov) published a self-contained supplement of fifty-seven pages in his memory. Its author-compiler, the theatrical historian Eduard Alexandrovich Stark (1874-1942), also published, near the end of his life, a valuable handbook entitled The St. Petersburg Opera and Its Masters, 1890-1910, in which whole chapters were devoted to only six of the twenty-seven stars given individual treatment. Of these (which included, besides Stravinsky, the two Figners, Sobinov, Yershov, and Yakovlev), Stravinsky, at thirty-seven pages, was accorded by far the most extensive coverage. The author singled him out as the unique "singing actor" of the Imperial Opera at a time when purely vocal considerations were deemed paramount.13 Nor is "singing actor" to be taken this time as a euphemism for "no voice" (despite the inevitable propensity on the part of some toward invidious comparisons with Chaliapin).14 Although he received all his training at the St. Petersburg 9. Stasov, " K yubileyu Stravinskogo," in Start 0 muztke 53:260-62. 10. RMG 9, no. 48 (1 December 1902), cols. 1199-1204. 11. RMG 15, no. 49 (6 December 1908), cols. 1122-23. A photograph of the monument in situ appears in Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 260. 12. When it was Rimsky-Korsakov's turn to be buried in the cemetery, the RMG commented that Rimsky's grave was fittingly situated "next to the tomb of one of the most glorious artists of the Russian opera, F. I. Stravinsky" (15, nos. 26-27 [29 June-6 July 1908], col. 565). 13. Stark, Peterburgskaya opera, 190-226. 14. E.g., the painter Mikhail Nesterov, who did many sets for the Moscow Private Opera, where Chaliapin had his start: "Usually we would get one of two things: either amazing vocal resources and a complete absence of acting, as with [Angelo] Masini or Patti; or else a magnificent singing actor like Stravinsky, whose acting was perfect but whose voice was not" (Grosheva [ed.], Shalyapin 2:160-61). FAMILY

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Union (Fig. 2.8). 77 The manuscript is dated 25 January 1902, near the end of Stravinsky's studies with Akimenko. While slighter in its dimensions than the piano piece, the song is in every way more interesting and mature. It is a real composition, not just an exercise, although, like the Scherzo, it was probably written to serve a didactic purpose—in this case, the application of the devices of enharmony and "false progression" treated by Rimsky-Korsakov in the last chapter of his textbook. The device of harmonic color that Stravinsky exploits so assiduously in this song—"common tone" progressions linking primary minor triads with auxiliaries at the flat submediant—is one that had its origins for Russian music in the famous opening of Rimsky's Antar (1868, revised 1875, 1897). The harmonies in Stravinsky's accompaniment, mm. 3-5, are precisely those of the "model" that informs Rimsky's sequence (Ex. 2.4). Where Rimsky took the progression through a complete circle of thirds to the starting point, producing a nonfunctional prolongation of the tonic, Stravinsky uses single oscillations between functional and auxiliary chords that have the effect of appoggiaturas—literally so in m. 10, when the E flat is enharmonically reidentified as the leading tone, and the C and G fall by half-steps to complete the dominant triad. In the modulatory middle section (mm. 23-28), the common-tone appoggiaturas are applied to tones lying along a Balakirevesque circle of successive subdominants. The retransition is cleverly handled: E minor is approached from 77. Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1982. FIRST

STEPS

h°5]

4 ACTb

Il E P B A H

TYMA ctmxh a..nyuiKHHa Parcle* d'A.POUCHKINE ~>p4HtjyickMtt nepeaoA >K. A&»maa "orsfon Iranqalie: J. David

PREMIERE LE

PARTIK

NUAGE M. ctpabhhckmH I. STRAVINSKY

25

f i g . 2.8. "Tucha" ("The Storm Cloud"), probably Stravinsky's earliest surviving work, as published in a Soviet Stravinsky centennial edition in 1982.

NNO . T O M

let

#)y

nycDKRR>: Adenau.

feuilles

.

ICH

un

ape. bal.

EXAMPLE

2.4

Rimsky-Korsakov, Antar, mm. 1 - 4

an appoggiatura chord with its root a major third above (m. 33), so that the roles of functional and applied harmony, around the common-tone pivot (in this case B, the functional dominant), are reversed. The surprising G-sharp minor color is cannily placed to coincide with the word tainstvenniy (mysterious). This satisfying coordination of technical and expressive means is what lifts "Tucha" above the category of exercise and gives evidence at last of a real creative gift. Another sensitive touch is the way the prosody is varied to avoid a deadening dactylic regularity. In the "stormy" middle section, monotony is averted by the restless alternation of duplets and tied triplets. The setting of the last stanza, which serves musically as a recapitulation, is subdy varied with respect to the opening, and the last line is unexpectedly hurried along, both to vary the declamation and to depict the cloud scudding out of sight. The fact that so many other settings of the poem exist is a reason for thinking Stravinsky's may have been assigned to him by Akimenko in conjunction with his harmony study. A comparison with Rimsky-Korsakov's very conventional, somewhat Brahmsian setting for four-part women's chorus a cappella (op. 16/5, one of the choruses he wrote in the mid-I870S as by-products of his contrapuntal selfeducation) is not wholly unfavorable to the nineteen-year-old Stravinsky's carefully crafted little piece, though of course Rimsky's is far more elaborately conceived, and executed with much greater polish. If "Tucha" was among the pieces Stravinsky showed Rimsky in the summer of 1902—and its date makes it a virtual certainty—then perhaps it is not such a mystery after all that Rimsky saw in him something more than the eager scion of a noble musical family to which he, Rimsky, owed a debt of gratitude.

JOINING

THE

" K O R S A K O V I A N

Y O U T H "

That summer meeting was the great turning point in the young Stravinsky's life. 78 According to a 1928 interview, he came to it armed with a letter of introduction 78. In E8CD:49/44 Stravinsky gave the year as 1900, but this must have been a typographical error that has for some reason eluded correction in all editions. The date is correctly given in An Autobiog-

[108]

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from his famous father, which casts a certain amount of doubt on Stravinsky's later insistence that his parent was unfeelingly discouraging of his aspirations. In any case, his real entrée to Rimsky came not through his father, but through Rimsky's sons. Stravinsky had made the acquaintance of Andrey and Vladimir RimskyKorsakov at the university, where Vladimir, a budding violinist who would later spend the better part of his career playing in Leningrad orchestras, was his classmate in the juridical faculty. Their friendship was cemented by a shared taste for all kinds of recondite nonsense. An older contemporary, Iosif Wihtol, recalled Stravinsky and the Rimsky-Korsakov boys chiefly for their private conversations in their own "langue franco russe: 'Quelle nachalité vopiyante!', 'Quelle charmante pogoda!' " 7 9 It was at Vladimir's invitation that Stravinsky, who was staying that summer at Bad Wildungen, Germany (where his father was receiving a desperate X-ray therapy), visited with the Rimsky-Korsakov family at Heidelberg, where Andrey had enrolled in the University to study philosophy. A postcard Stravinsky sent Andrey after his return to Bad Wildungen refers ecstatically to the "wonderful, happy minutes" he had spent with the great composer, and to the encouragement that this had given him.80 Lessons did not begin immediately. In various accounts tendered long after the fact, Stravinsky was vague and contradictory as to exacdy when he studied regularly with Rimsky-Korsakov, but according to his 1908 résumé—by far the most reliable evidence we have, since it was written when Rimsky-Korsakov was still alive and the lessons were still going on—they did not begin until Stravinsky completed his university course in 1905.81 This was partly because Rimsky judged him to be still in need of some basic training. (As we shall see, Stravinsky was accepted as a regular pupil only after composing a major Probestück.) But it was also pardy a matter of deference to the wishes of his parents. This condition was not an easy one for the young composer to abide. In Memories and Commentaries he recalled in passing having briefly run away from home during the period immediately following his father's death. According to that ac-

rapby, 15. In 1900 Stravinsky was still in xhcgimnaziya, and he did not meet Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, his conduit to Nikolai Andreyevich, until the university. Besides, he could never have forgotten that his reason for being in Germany was his father's terminal illness. 79. Jazep [Iosif] Vitol, Vospominaniya, stufi, pis'ma (Leningrad: Muzika, 1969), 70. "Quelle nachalité vopiyante" = "Kakoye vopiyushcheye nakhal'stvo" (What colossal gall!); "Quelle charmante pogoda" ~ "Kakaya prekrasnaya pogoda" (What lovely weather!). 80. V. Smirnov, " U istokov kompozitorskogo puti I. Stravinskogo," in Voprost teorii i estetiki muziki, vol. 8, ed. Yu. Kremlyov et al. (Leningrad: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1968), 91. 81. The encyclopedia entry (the first ever devoted to Igor Stravinsky; see n. 55 above), which Grigoriy Timofeyev prepared on the basis of the résumé, states that the composer "took the full course (all eight semesters) at the University of St. Petersburg" and that "from 1905 he took regular lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov in instrumentation and theory of composition." According to Stravinsky's transcript, which survives in the Archive, he did not actually take his final exams until April 1906. His performance was mediocre: mainly "threes," with fives only in subjects (like German) that he knew from outside the university. JOINING

THE

" K O R S A K O V I A N

Y O U T H "

[109]

count, he sought refuge with "a recently married Ielatchitch cousin." 82 Xenia Yuryevna Yakovleva (née Stravinskaya), the daughter of Igor's elder brother, has recounted the occasion in greater and more accurate detail, and revealed the reason for it. Anna Kirillovna [Stravinskaya, Igor's mother], after the death of her husband, did not wish Igor to devote himself entirely to music, but demanded that he finish the juridical faculty, for which there was at the time a "vogue," so to speak, among the intelligentsia[!].... Evidently his mother was putting a crimp on Igor's musical pursuits, for one day he showed up, extremely agitated and distraught, at the apartment of my [newly wed] parents. He stayed with them for several days, after which time Yuriy went to see his mother to smooth over the incident. I heard this story from my parents over and over again. 8 3

One has only to read any of Stravinsky's several accounts of his childhood to see that he never forgave his mother after this incident. It completed his emotional estrangement from his family, his younger brother Guriy being the only exception. By the time his regular lessons with Rimsky-Korsakov commenced, Igor Stravinsky, unhappy in his own, had for some time been a virtual member of his teacher's family. Through his university connection with Andrey and Vladimir, as well as with Stepan Mitusov and Nikolai Richter, he became a habitué of the musical jours fixes held every other Wednesday evening at the Rimsky-Korsakov apartment on Zagorodniy Prospect. These gatherings were not unlike the Belyayev Fridays—an unofficial meeting place of the latterday New Russian School. They were veritable musical orgies, usually beginning rather late in the evening and going on until three or four in the morning. Regular attenders included Stasov, Lyadov, Glazunov, and such smaller Belyayevets fry as Blumenfeld, Sokolov, and Cherepnin. Singers were very welcome, since vocal music was as much a fixture of RimskyKorsakov's Wednesdays as quartets had been at BelyayeVs Fridays. The most frequent singers in attendance were Nadezhda Zabela, the wife of the painter Mikhail Vrubel, a coloratura soprano who created a number of late Rimsky-Korsakov roles; the tenor Alexander Sandulenko; and Guriy Stravinsky, who, blessed with a voice thought by many to be even more beautiful than his father's, was preparing for an operatic career of his own. Occasional visitors included the Muscovites Sergey Taneyev and Vera Scriabina, Alexander Scriabin's abandoned wife. From the moment he joined this set, Stravinsky may be considered a fourth-generation Belyayevets. Vasiliy Yastrebtsev, Rimsky's dogged Boswell, never missed a Wednesday or a Belyayev function, and his memoirs provide an extraordinarily rich documentation 82. M&C:24/2+. 83. Stravinskaya, O I. F. Stravinskom i yego bltzkikh, 25-27.

[no]

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of Stravinsky's early experiences in the Rimsky-Korsakov coterie. Our earliest evidence of his presence there, however, comes not from Yastrebtsev but from Vladimir Stasov. In a letter to his brother Dmitriy, written on i November 1902 after a rehearsal of a Josef Hofmann concert at which the Belyayevtsï seem to have turned out in force, he reported: "I also heard some bad news at the same rehearsal. Stravinsky's son has informed me that his father has only a week or ten days to live. There is no hope for him: cancer of the spine. The poor man is living out his last days and hours! No hope at all!!!" 84 (Fyodor Stravinsky lasted another three weeks, until 21 November.) The first mention by Yastrebtsev came four months later, on the last day of February 1903, when the chronicler reported meeting "a very sweet and musical young man—Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, the son of the late celebrated artist of the Russian Opera."85 They met at a rehearsal for the last of that season's Belyayev concerts (the last such concert to take place within the founder's lifetime). The program could not have been more representative of the musical atmosphere that would henceforth surround Stravinsky like the air he breathed: an Allegro dramatique by Cherepnin, the "Night on Triglav Mountain" from Rimsky's Mlada, Chaikovsky's Capriccio italien, Scriabin's Rêverie for orchestra, and a typical Belyayevets guild production, "Variations on a Russian Theme" (chosen from the venerable Balakirev anthology) by Rimsky, Glazunov, Lyadov, Artsïbushev, Wihtol, and Sokolov. A week later, at Rimsky's fifty-ninth birthday party (6 March 1903), Igor Stravinsky presented his future teacher with a gift from his mother: a portrait of Fyodor Stravinsky as Pan Golova in May Night, which, Igor told Rimsky, his father had wished to present to the composer himself. Later in the evening, Yastrebtsev relates, "Stravinsky showed us his very sweet and witty musical jests; obviously Igor Fyodorovich is a man of undeniable talent."86 These "jests" would have been from among the "many little comic songs, chiefly to words by Kozma Prutkov," that Igor Fyodorovich was composing around this time, as he noted five years later in his résumé.87 Kozma Prutkov was a fictitious poet and playwright invented in the 1850s by one major Russian writer of the nineteenth century—Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy—and a whole family of minor ones, the brothers Alexey, Vladimir, and Alexander Zhemchuzhnikov. Their creation was a cloddish bureaucrat who fancied himself a great poet; his "works" parodied a wide range of literary genres, from the

84. Stasov, Pis'tna k rodnim 3/2:167-68. 85. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:277. A heavily abridged English translation of YastrebtseVs diary is available as V. V. Yastrebtsev, Reminiscences of Rimsky-Korsakov, ed. and trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 86. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:279. 87. IStrSM:44+.

JOINING

THE

"KORSAKOVIAN

YOUTH"

[HI]

fables of Krilov through the romantic literary criticism of Apollon Grigoryev and the pochvenniki ("men of the soil"), to the lyrics of Heine and his Russian imitators. These satires were enormously popular in their day, and remained so in Soviet Russia even after many of the targets were forgotten. The essence of the Prutkov humor was the collision of lofty poesy with towering "poshlust" (triteness), to recall the word Nabokov tried so hard to popularize. Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky had a common passion for Kozma Prutkov; it was one of the things that bound them. In the composer's family, acting out Prutkovian playlets was a favorite pastime,88 and Rimsky was fond of quoting Prutkovderived aphorisms.89 Stravinsky's clever little settings became Wednesday standbys, which probably was what stimulated him to produce them in quantity. Through them their author became a kind of family mascot; his Prutkov songs were habitually called for when the party was at its merriest and the youngsters had taken over. Here is a typical entry by Yastrebtsev (17 February 1904): "After dinner young Stravinsky played his little comic songs and Richter crooned the celebrated and profoundly nonsensical gypsy song 'Raspasha,' and even played (to the extreme horror of Nadezhda Nikolayevna [Rimskaya-Korsakova, the composer's wife]) a 'cake-walk,' whereupon Mitusov and Stravinsky showed us most amusingly how it is supposed to be danced." 90 One of Stravinsky's Prutkov songs from this time, a setting of the mock fable "The Driver and the Tarantula" ("Konduktor i tarantul"), was such a hit with Rimsky and his friends that it was still being called for years later. At Rimsky's sixtysecond birthday party (6 March 1908), "to begin the music, Igor Stravinsky played his 'Driver and Tarantula,' after which Zabela performed a series of romances by Rimsky-Korsakov... [etc.]." 91 The music has been lost, but the words will give a fair idea of what Kozma Prutkov was all about: an evocative Iberian setting (no doubt redolent in Stravinsky's music of the Spanish romances of Glinka and Dargomizhsky) and a situation fraught with romantic danger are punctured by bathos triumphant and capped with a consummately bureaucratic moral. KONDUKTOR I TARANTUL

THE DRIVER AND THE TARANTULA

BASNYA

A FABLE

V gorakh Gishpanii tyazholi'y ekipazh

In the Spanish mountains a heavy equipage

S konduktorom otpravilsya v voyazh. Gishpanka, sevshi v nyom, nemedlenno zasnula. A muzh eyo mezh tern, uvidya tarantula, Vskrichal: "Konduktor, stoy!

88. 89. 90. 91.

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Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:163. Ibid., 1:99, 145. Ibid., 2:301. Ibid., 380.

BIRTH

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W i t h a driver set out en voyage. A Spanish lady slept inside. H e r Husband, meanwhile, glimpsed a giant spider A n d cried, " O driver, wait!

Pridi skoréy! Akh, bózhe móy!"

Come quickly; it may be too late!"

Na krik kondùktor pospeshäyet

The driver hurried at the shout,

I tüt zhe vénikom skotinu v'igonyäyet,

And with a broom swept the beast out.

Primólviv: "Déneg ti za mèsto ne piatii!"

He said, "You haven't bought a ticket!"

I tótchas zhe ego pyatóyu razdavil.

And with his heel began to kick it.

Chitatel'! razochti vperyód svoi depànsi,

Reader! Calculate ahead all your expenses,

Chtob darom ne derzaf sadit'sya v dilizhàns'i,

D o not sit down in vain in diligences.

I norovóy, chtób'i otnyud' Bez déneg ne puskät'sya v püt'; N e tó sluchiYsya i s tobóy, chto s nasekómìm, Tebe znakómim. 92

But follow, please, this precedent: D o not set forth without a cent. Unless you seek the fate of that same pet Whom you have met. 93

At Rimsky's birthday party two years earlier, when the composer's age had reached a round sixty, Stravinsky had the honor of bringing the festivities to their climax, testifying to the special place he had won in the Rimsky-Korsakov ménage. As Yastrebtsev reported it: "During supper, the 'Korsakovian youth,' with Stravinsky at their head, performed the sweetest 'cantata,' written by Stravinsky especially for this day and dedicated to Nikolai Andreyevich. (The cantata, by popular request, was repeated.)"94 Very touched, Rimsky-Korsakov recalled the "cantata" in his diary: "Right after the meal, as the champagne was being poured, singing could be heard from the living room; it turned out that Igor had composed a congratulatory chorus in my honor. The chorus wasn't bad. The singers were Sonya, Nadya [Rimsky's daughters], Ossovsky, Stepan [Mitusov], [Ivan] Lapshin [18701952, a philosophy professor and family friend], and Volodya [Rimsky's son Vladimir]." 95 This was the evening at which Debussy's Estampes was offered up to general mockery. So Rimsky's "not bad" perhaps already reveals something of the direction in which young Igor's talent was being nudged.

THE

PROBESTÜCK

We can judge that direction well enough from the magnum opus of the period between Stravinsky's initial contact with Rimsky and his official adoption as a pupil. This was the Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor, his quasi-official Belyayevets Probestück, which Stravinsky completed at the very end of his Kalafati period, during the summer of 1904. The composer being still a matriculated student in the juridical faculty, most of the work on the sonata was done during summer and 92. "Koz'ma Prutkov," Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, ed. B. Ya. Bukhshtab (Moscow: Sovetskiy Pisatel', 1965), 61. 93. Barbara Heldt Monter, Koz'ma Prutkov: The Art of Parody (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 123. The original has "insect" where the English rhyme demanded "pet." 94. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:303. 95. Dnevnik, 1904—1907, in N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: literaturniye proizvedeniya iperepiska 1:241.

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mid-winter recesses, as the dates on the manuscript attest. The summers of 1903 and 1904 were spent on the Yelachich estate at Pavlovka, Samara guberniya. In 1903, Stravinsky's companion there was Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov.96 A letter from Pavlovka, presumably to his mother, is the first in which he makes reference to composing: "I play the piano, I compose, I draw and paint, but most of all I am proceeding with my musical offspring. I am in indescribable rapture, for I feel that something is going to emerge."97 When Vladimir returned to his family, vacationing that year in a town called Krapachukha, Stravinsky came along, and there he enjoyed his first extended consultation with his future teacher. On 15 August 1903 he sent a postcard home reporting that "dear Nikolay Andreyevich greeted me extremely cordially and heartily, as did everybody else. They all were very glad at my coming. I spoke a great deal with Nik. And. today—a good three hours."98 He stayed about a fortnight with the Rimsky-Korsakovs, meeting several times with the head of the family. The subject of their consultations might be easily deduced from the nature of the work on which Stravinsky had embarked, but in any case he described them in the Chroniques: "He made me compose the first part of a sonatina under his supervision after having instructed me in the principles of the allegro of a sonata. He explained these principles with a lucidity so remarkable as to show me at once what a great teacher he was."99 Thus instructed, Stravinsky returned to Pavlovka and resumed work on the first movement of his sonata, finishing it in St. Petersburg in the fall. The second movement (Scherzo) was composed in the capital in January and February 1904, and the Andante and Finale, which are run together without pause, were completed in Pavlovka during the summer of that year.100 He took the finished sonata with him on 11 August to Rimsky's summer residence (that year the town was Vechasha), where he again spent a fortnight. Rimsky approved the sonata and evidendy agreed at that time to take Stravinsky on as his private pupil, for it was then and there that he began administering the orchestration exercises that have become so celebrated to readers of the Stravinsky literature. (Regular lessons, however, would not commence for another year.) On 9 February 1905, the Sonata in F-sharp Minor was unveiled at a RimskyKorsakov Wednesday, before an audience that included Glazunov, Ossovsky, and all the "Korsakovian youth." The pianist was Nikolai Richter, to whom the sonata

96. M&C:2i/22. 97. Letter of 16 June 1903; in Smirnov, Tvorcheskoye fbrmirovaniye, 63. Smirnov does not name the addressee. 98. Ibid.; again, the recipient is not named. 99. An Autobiography, 20. 100. Information as to the dates and places (as indicated on the manuscript in the Leningrad Public Library) is given in Beletsky and Blazhkov, "Spisok," in Diaiogi, 376. The titles "Scherzo," "Andante," and "Finale" are not in the ms., but follow the monographs of Collaer and Schaeffner, who presumably got the information from Stravinsky. [114]

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was presented with an inscription that may still be read on its first page: "I dedicate [it] to my dear friend, a wonderful pianist and a rare musician. [From] the warmly loving and devoted author." 101 Yastrebtsev, present as always, recorded the performance with a trace of amazement: "A work of great talent!" 102 Stravinsky, having proved himself, was admitted to the guild. From this moment he was more than an amiable gentry dilettante, a mascot, or a friend of the children. He was now the white hope of the fourth Belyayevets generation. Looking back from a vantage point of over half a century at what was then the "lost—fortunately lost" piano sonata, 103 Stravinsky assumed that it was "an inept imitation of Beethoven." 104 But what it actually, inevitably, imitated—and not at all inepdy—was the piano sonata of its own time and place: more specifically, the "Grande Sonate," established in Russia by Rubinstein and especially by Chaikovsky with his op. 37 in G major (1878) and continued by the composers of the Belyayev circle. The immediate forerunners of Stravinsky's sonata—the works he knew and on which he modeled his own—were (besides Chaikovsky's) the Sonata, op. 1, by Wihtol (1886, a talented student work like Stravinsky's); the two Sonatas, op. 4 (1900), by Kalafati, his erstwhile mentor; and two "Sonates-fantaisies" by Akimenko, his other early teacher. Most of all, there were three works by the "aces" of the Belyayev catalogue: two sonatas—in B-flat minor, op. 74, and in E minor, op. 75 (both 1901)—by Glazunov, and Scriabin's Third Sonata in F-sharp Minor, op. 23 (1898). From this corpus Stravinsky distilled a general approach to form and medium, a repertoire of pianistic devices and textures, and a characteristic tonal-harmonic idiom. Taken together, it all stamped his work as quintessential^ and very consciously Belyayevets. Not only that: Stravinsky's sonata is a veritable potpourri of near quotations from the work of his forebears. It was his pledge of allegiance to the Rimsky-Korsakov circle, and his ticket of admission. Recalling his piano lessons with Kashperova, Stravinsky singled out as possibly influential on his development her old-fashioned pedagogical insistence that he abjure the pedals, calling it "an omen, perhaps, as I have never been a pedal composer." 105 But the piano writing in the 1904 sonata is as "pedalian" as can be, full of arpeggio figuration and wide-ranging registral deployments that would lose their effect altogether without the sonorous "fill" that only the pedal can provide. This is not merely a fussy technical observation. It means that the basic conception of musical texture and substance in this sonata is not linear but harmonic—an observation that will hold for all of Stravinsky's music up to The Firebird. And the 101. The page is reproduced in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 18:242. 102. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:328. 103. M&Q21/22. T h e Sonata was discovered by Soviet researchers in Nikolai Richter's archive at the Leningrad Public Library in the late 1960s and published by Faber (London), ed. Eric Walter White, in 1975. 104. M&C:28/28. 105. M&C:25/26. THE

PROBESTÜCK

[II5]

harmonic idiom is of the "expanded," yet firmly, indeed conservatively, tonaldiatonic variety that marked the "abstract" instrumental work of all the Belyayevtsi (and Scriabin, too, through the Fourth Sonata). There is no end of decorative "trompe Poreille." Any dominant seventh can be resolved as an augmented sixth, and vice versa. Any first inversion can be treated as a Neapolitan. Any tone can be a "common tone" for instant links between "unrelated" chords. Colorful nonfunctional bridge progressions are freely concocted by means of chromatic outer voices in contrary motion (what is often termed "intervallic expansion"). Chords are virtually never free of additives or figuration—appoggiaturas, suspensions, chromatic auxiliaries, and passing tones. But all the harmonic novelty is surface embellishment; beneath the decorator colors the functional relations are pristine, easily followed, tame. This is especially obvious in Stravinsky's sonata, in which the tonal plan is as orthodox a one as any textbook (or walking textbook) might have prescribed. As to form, Belyayevets sonatas (like Belyayevets symphonies) follow the classical models in a curiously inflated yet schematized way. "Form" and "content" are radically dichotomized. The former is the "objective" element, the latter the "subjective." Huge, finished "theme groups" and perfunctorily efficient "transitions" are baldly distinguished. Recapitulations are not perorational but scrupulous, with perorations reserved for high rhetorical codas. Such pieces provided their own formal analysis, as it were, a kind of running commentary on their own structure, reflecting the creative process that produced them (in itself a reflection of a positivistic esthetic that reduced form to a set of operating procedures). The overall plan of Stravinsky's sonata was modeled on that of Scriabin's Third, in the same key. A table reveals this relationship clearly: Scriabin

Stravinsky 1 0 6

1.

Drammatico

1

Allegro

2.

Allegretto

2

[Scherzo]

3. 4.

Andante _ Presto con fuoco

3 4

[Andante]

i \attacca J

[Finale]

J

But where Scriabin's sonata is a study in compression, Stravinsky's is all dilation. It takes over half an hour to perform (fully twice as long as Scriabin's) and in this it looks backward—to Chaikovsky, with whose Grande sonate Stravinsky's opus claims kinship from the very outset. The whole heroic posture, and the technical means by which it is established—the descending "peal of bells" in the bass, the dotted rhythms in the melody—hark back directly to the 1878 composition (Ex. 2.5).

106. Headings in brackets are not in the ms.; see n. 100 above.

[116]

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EXAMPLE

2.J

a. Chaikovsky, Grande sonate, op. 37,1, ram. 1-9 Moderato e risoluto

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original pitch, but then spliced to a transposed continuation. The joint creaks, and its creaking speaks volumes about the kind of training a fourth-generation Belyayevets received. Also revealing is the oxymoronically literal recapitulation of an impetuous-sounding reminiscence of the opening theme in the midst of the second theme (compare mm. 71-76 and mm. 253-58). A sonata form in which such a thing can occur is one conceived as a sum of discrete parts, an arrangement of tesserae. The coda (mm. 287-318) is built on a cadential ostinato derived from the opening theme. The chromatic transformation of the bass line at the beginning shows how far the shadow of Beethoven's Ninth extended, while at the climax (m. 296 with its upbeat), Chaikovsky's Fifth is invoked (Ex. 2.9). These symphonic resonances are fully in keeping with the traditions of the "Grande Sonate," a veritable symphony for piano. The best movement in Stravinsky's sonata is the second, a conventional but pleasingly featherweight scherzo-and-trio. The opening section is an effective study in phrase elisions and illusory beat patterns. The Trio is in the traditionally "Russian" alternative key of the flat submediant, a relationship that in Russian music could govern local progressions (as in Stravinsky's own "Tucba" of 1902, or the very last cadence of the present sonata) and long-range tonal contrasts alike (e.g., Glinka's Kamarinskaya).uo Once again specific models lie very close to hand: the Scherzo (third movement) of Chaikovsky's Grande sonate is the source of the rhythmic displacements and the unexpected accentuations on diminished chords, while the Allegro scherzando (last movement) of Glazunov's First Sonata supplied the syncopated, arpeggiated left hand (Ex. 2.10). Stravinsky skillfully manages the mediant and submediant relations in the Scherzo's local harmonic progressions, evincing a degree of canny strategy in the tonal plan that is lacking in the first movement. Four times a degree-transforming pivot in the bass (root becoming third) introduces surprising flat submediants that interrupt lengthy or even complete circles of fifths (Ex. 2.11). The four submediants thus introduced lie along a circle of minor thirds that symmetrically apportion the octave. Thus the last of these seeming digressions is actually a cunning return to the tonic (Ex. 2.11b). It was something Stravinsky had done before (in "Tmc^»"), and one suspects that it was a device specifically imparted to him first by Kalafati and then by Rimsky, who "knew valuable details about harmony," as his pupil admitted even in his most grudging recollections of his tutelage.111 The general character of these passages, withal, is Chaikovskian, evocative of the famous "pizzicato ostinato" in the Scherzo of the Fourth Symphony. no. On Glinka's tonal plan see R. Taruskin, "How the Acorn Took Root: A Tale of Russia," 19thcentury Music 6, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 189-212. HI. M&Q55/57. The cycle of minor thirds was a favorite Rimskian device, intimately related to the scale in Example 2.8b, as will be thoroughly explained in Chapter 4.

THE

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As to the sonata's putative structural flaws, it should be apparent that they are defects only from a certain ideological perspective. It is a point of view that most readers of this book will likely share with the later Stravinsky—that is, that organic unity, or coherence, or call it what you will, is an inherent asset, perhaps the highest of all musical excellences. But there is evidence that the scale of values in turnof-the-century St. Petersburg may have been different. The kuchkist position had always valued the piquancy and the separate integrity of the individual moment over the generalized impression, even the coherence, of the whole. Such a standpoint is the essence of "realism" in all artistic media, and can be traced, for example, in coundess dicta of Musorgsky—such as this one from a letter to RimskyKorsakov: " . . . Symphonic development in the technical sense is just like German philosophy—all worked out and systematized

When a German thinks, he rea-

sons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with the conclusion and then might amuse himself with reasoning. That's all I have to say to you about symphonic development." 114 114. Letter of 15 August 1868; in M. P. Musorgsky, Literaturrwye naslediye, ed. M. S. Pekelis and A. A. Orlova (Moscow: Muzika, 1971-72), 1:107.

THE

PROBESTÜCK

[137]

Perhaps, too, it was a measure of Chaikovsky's "Westernism" that he was so continually obsessed with "form," and with what he feared might be his inborn Russian inability to master it. It was what Russians call drobnosf, the quality of being a sum of parts, that he was quickest to decry in the work of the kuchkists. 115 Yet as we have seen, his own music—even (or particularly) the Pathétique, in which he felt he had finally licked the formal problem—can share honors for drobnosf with that of the group he despised. In any case, drobnost' of form was as much a Belyayevets hallmark as it had been a kuchkist one. In this sense the continuity of the New Russian School was real. And in this sense, Igor Stravinsky began his composing career very much a kuchkist. FILIAL

PIETY

Just how much so was dramatically confirmed by his next opus, a song for bass and piano entitled " H o w the Mushrooms Mobilized for War" ("Kak gribï na voynu sbiralis-"'). The existence of this unpublished composition became known in 1966, when Eric Walter White published the "Catalogue of Manuscripts (19041952) in Stravinsky's Possession," prepared by Robert Craft for Stravinsky's private use in 1954. 116 Stravinsky never once mentioned the song in his writings or interviews, or even to his early biographers (Schaeffner, Fleischer, Collaer), although the manuscript was in his possession throughout his Parisian and American years. It was the only piece of its vintage he kept with him, many larger and more important manuscripts having been left behind in Russia, in at least one case to perish. This combination of sentimental attachment and extreme reticence is, to say the least, intriguing. It is possible that Stravinsky never actually finished the song. The manuscript in his archive (now at the Sacher Stiftung in Basel) consists of two fair copies and a composing draft. The draft is dated on completion 26 December 1904, and the fair copies bear dedications to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, w h o had become a closer friend to Stravinsky than his brother Vladimir. Neither fair copy is complete. The cleaner of the two, which also goes a bit further, breaks off at m. 98 (of 146), and does so before the end of the page, which rules out the possibility that the manuscript is merely physically incomplete. The end of the song is easily recoverable from the draft, however; very likely a full fair copy, like that of the piano sonata, was presented to its dedicatee and survives somewhere in Russia.

115. See his critique o f Cui's William Ratcliff'm a letter to M m e von Meek (26 November/8 December 1879), in M . I. Chaikovsky, Zhizn' Chaikovskogo 2:537; or his comments on the "Chopsticks" paraphrases, cited above (Chapter 1, n. 33). 116. Appendix C in Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University o f California Press, 1966), 553.

[138]

2

•

BIRTH

AND

BREEDING

The text is that of a popular nonsense tale-song (skazochnaya pesnya) for children, found in endless variants in just about every anthology of the time that included such items. One is found in Alexander Afanasyev's monumental mid-nineteenthcentury anthology of fairy tales (skazki), on which Stravinsky would draw so heavily during his "Swiss" years. 117 No fewer than four versions of the song are included in Pavel Vasilyevich Sheyn's slighdy later collection, the first ever to contain a whole section of children's songs (it remains one of the largest ever assembled), from which Stravinsky would later adapt the text of his delightful "Tilim-bom,"118 In addition to these, a version of the "Mushroom" tale had been published with music in Maria Mamontova's 1872 collection of Russian and Ukrainian children's songs, for which Chaikovsky had helped furnish accom119

paniments. The actual text that Stravinsky set conforms to none of these, however, but to a version found in a source at once humbler and more widely disseminated by far: Gusel'ki (The Little Psalterion, as the Library of Congress cataloguer would have it), a collection of 128 songs for children with simple piano accompaniments arranged by Nikolai Khristianovich Vessel (1834-1906) and Yevgeniy Karlovich Albrecht (1842-94), "approved by a committee of professors of the St. Petersburg Conservatory for the IMPERIAL Russian Musical Society," which saw active use in the Russian schools right up to the time of the Revolution (its thirty-second edition was issued in 1915). Every Russian child knew the songs in this book, and it is likely that Stravinsky set its version of the mushrooms text from memory, which would account for certain slight textual discrepancies and the changed order of stanzas (compare the text below, which continues on p. 142, with Fig. 2.9): G R I B ( " T H E M U S H R O O M , " GUSEL'KI,

NO. 4 0 )

As adapted by Stravinsky for "How the Mushrooms Mobilized for War" ("Kak na voynu sbiralis1904). [What is unique to Gusel'ki is shown in brackets; what is unique to Stravinsky, in boldface.]

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117. See A. N . Afanasyev, Narodniye russkiye skazki, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye Izdatel'stvo Khudozhestvennoy Literaturi, 1957), 132 (no. 90). 118. See P. V. Sheyn, Russkiye narodniye pesni, pt. 1: Pesni plyasovtye i besedniye, in Chteniya v Imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostey rossiyskikh 67 (1868): 255-58; also idem, Velikoruss v svotkh pesnyakh, obryadakh, obichayakh (St. Petersburg, 1898) (an expanded reissue of the earlier collection), 283 (nos. 982-83 with variants). 119. Detskiye pesni na russkiye i malorossiyskiye napevi s akkompanimentomfirrtep'yano,sostavlenniye M. Mamontopoy pod redaktsii Prof. P. Chaikovskqgo, vol. 1 (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1872), no. 15. Chaikovsky's role in this collection was quite modest; he was hired by the publisher to edit the very functional accompaniments (and in some cases to write them). Thus it is not quite accurate to say that he set the "Mushrooms" text himself (cf. SelCorrI:42i). Subsequent arrangements of the tune published by Mamontova were made by N . M . Ladukhin (1895) and Vladimir Rebikov (1901). See G. Ivanov, Russkaya poeziya v otechestvennoy tnuzikc 1:426.

FILIAL

PIETY

[139]

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Refrain (sung before each verse): Grib borovik nad gribami polkovik pod dubom sidyuchi na gribi' glyadyuchi povelel prikazal vsem gribam na voynu itti.

The boletus, commander of all the mushrooms, sitting under an oak tree, surveying the mushrooms, commanded and directed that all the mushrooms go to war.

1 (=2). Otkazalisya opyonki, govoryat, chto nögi tönki: ne povinni mi na voynu itti.

The honey agarics refused, saying, "Our legs are too thin; we are not obliged to go to war."

2 (=4). Otkazälis' mukhomori, govoryat: mi senatöri; ne povinni mi' na voynu itti.

The fly agarics refused, saying, "We're senators; we are not obliged to go to war."

3 (=5). Otkazalisya smorchki: mi sovsem uzh starichki; ne povinni mi na voynu itti.

The morels refused: "We're little old men; we are not obliged to go to war."

4 (=3). Otkazalisya belyanki: mi" griboviye [stolbovi'ye mi] dvoryanki; ne povinni mi na voynu itti.

The spring snowflakes refused: "We're the mushroom noblewomen; we are not obliged to go to war."

5 (=6). Otkazalis' rizhiki: mi prosti'ye muzi[ch]ki; ne povinni mi na voynu itti.

The saffron milk caps refused: "We're just lowly peasants; we are not obliged to go to war."

6 (=7). Otkazalisya volnüshki, govoryat, chto [uzh] ml starüshki; ne povinni ml na voynu itti.

The woolly milk caps refused, saying, "We're little old ladies; we are not obliged to go to war."

7 (=1). Otkazalisya maslyänki: mi pridvorni'ye sluzhanki; ne povinni mi na voynu itti. 8. Otvechäli gruzdi: mi rebyäta druzhni. Na voynü poydyom, [i] vsekh gribov pob'yöm! Ura! Ura! Ura!!!

The granulated boletus refused: "We're the court chambermaids; we are not obliged to go to war." But the resin milk caps replied, "We're amiable lads. We'll go to war, we'll beat all the [other] mushrooms! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!!!"

The discrepancy in Stravinsky's fourth verse (which is the third in Gusel'ki) agrees with the version in Afanasyev, suggesting that Stravinsky, to this tiny extent, might have conflated the two. He surely knew Afanasyev's skazki even at this early date. Not only has their presence in his father's huge library been documented,120 but they were also as popular and as standard in Russia as were the tales of the Brothers Grimm in the West: without them, as Roman Jakobson puts it, "a Russian child's bookshelf is incomplete."121 120. Kutateladze and Gozenpud (eds.), F.I. Stravinsky, 28. 121. Jakobson, "On Russian Fairy Tales," commentary to [A. N. Afanasyev], Russian Fairy Tales, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 637. [>42]

2

•

BIRTH

AND

BREEDING

What probably attracted Stravinsky to this tale-song at this infant stage of his career was not so much its language or its nonsense patter (aspects of folklore that would later play a critical role in the evolution of his style), but its meaning, which could be interpreted as a veiled (or, as nineteenth-century Russians liked to put it, an "Aesopian") satire on militarism and the inequities of conscription. The RussoJapanese War was reaching its disgraceful nadir in December 1904, and would lead to widespread student demonstrations the next month (in which Stravinsky found himself inadvertendy involved). 122 Circumstances had made this innocuous old nonsense song irresistibly topical. Musical comparison of Stravinsky's song with the setting in Gusel'ki shows how far removed it is, the source of its text notwithstanding, from the world of folklore, even heavily adapted folklore. It is an elaborate, through-composed concert aria for bass, suitable for a Chaliapin (or a Guriy Stravinsky) recital. Its form matches the structure of the text only insofar as the chord progression underlying the first refrain is handled thereafter as a sort of leitmotif. The settings of the various stanzas are radically individualized and characterized; it was evidendy to secure a maximum of contrast between consecutive verses that Stravinsky rearranged their order. In style the song can appear puzzling. A self-consciously retrospective essay in "high kuchkism," it seeks its models not among the Russian composers active in 1904, but rather among their fathers (Musorgsky, Borodin) and even their grandfathers (Glinka, Serov). These musical affinities are in no way ironic; "How the Mushrooms Mobilized for War" does sincere homage to the Russian nationalist music of the "High Stasovian" period. Even in relation to his Belyayevets milieu, to say nothing of his own future development, the old-time kuchkism to which Stravinsky's song harks back was outmoded. What could have motivated such a dowdy piece after the state-of-the-Belyayevets-art piano sonata? Compared with the sonata's flashy exterior, the harmonic vocabulary of the song is quaint, relying as it does almost exclusively on plain triads and dominant sevenths. These simple chords are nevertheless linked in a fashion similar to that employed in the sonata: either by common tones or by the technique of intervallic expansion. Such devices are particularly identified with Musorgsky; and indeed, the tatter's late song "Pride" ("Spes'," 1877) opens with a progression that not only epitomizes kuchkist tonality, but actually contains most of the same chords Stravinsky employs in the opening of his song, though their order, and even the key, are different (Ex. 2.17).Stravinsky's progression, especially the part that returns at each refrain like a leitmotif, is much more orderly than Musorgsky's withal. The opening D-major triad is systematically mirrored with mediants on either side, both borrowed from the parallel minor to assure a maximum of color contrast through pitch variance. 122. M&C:27/27. FILIAL

PIETY

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A song from Musorgsky's purest "sixties" vein that is especially rich in harmonic affinities for the piece we are investigating is one entitled—it is almost too neat to be true—"Picking Mushrooms" ( " P o g r i b i 1 8 6 7 ) . Compare the "interval expansion" shown in Ex. 2.18a with mm. 63-65 in Stravinsky's "Mushrooms" (Ex. 2.18b; also compare the end of Ex. 2.18a with mm. 9—11 in Ex. 2.17a). Stravinsky's use of the E-flat triad in root position as Neapolitan to D is prefigured in the "Trepak" (1875) from Musorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, to which famous cycle Stravinsky's song inevitably owed a great deal of its general character (compare Ex. 2.19 with Ex. 2.17a, mm. 5—8). Another high-kuchkist stylistic trait was the use of "modal" harmony. This was a practice established by Balakirev in his epoch-making folk song harmonizations of 1866, 123 taken up with a will thereafter by Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin in particular. Such harmonizations can be tonally extremely elusive, reflecting the vacillating "mutable mode" (peremennïy lad) found in many Russian folk songs. The passage in Stravinsky's "Mushrooms" from m. 68 to m. 71 (Ex. 2.20a) is a case in point: it is hard to decide whether G or D is the tonic (which is to say, whether the mode is "Mixolydian" or "Dorian"). It is a question that needs no answer, really; either way the deliberate departure from the normal functional relations of major-minor tonality is plain. The exotic chord qualities are what count. Compare, for a "Mixolydian" analogy, a characteristically vacillating, Balakirevesque progression found in an 1877 folk song harmonization by Rimsky-Korsakov (Ex. 2.20b; the "minor V " here, indicated by an x, is actually a secondary dominant, embellishing the alternate tonic and producing a fascinating false relation with the fifth of the primary tonic). For a "Dorian" analogy, compare a harmonization by Balakirev himself, in what he called the "Russian minor" (Ex. 2.20c; the "major I V " is similarly indicated). Stravinsky's orotund peroration harks back to a special brand of kuchkist diatonicism in which a dominant seventh is moved from one position to another through a passing mediant triad, which acts in lieu of the avoided tonic. Borodin in particular specialized in this kind of harmony, the "modal" flavor of which resulted from a heavy emphasis on secondary functions. Compare Stravinsky's mm. 131-34 (Ex. 2.21a) with a characteristic passage from Prince Igor (Ex. 2.21b). Now that an operatic precedent has been cited, many others will follow in its train. Stravinsky's song is quite literally an aria. Not only does it carry many resonances from specific operatic numbers, but the manuscript itself suggests that an orchestra accompaniment may have been envisioned from the start. At mm. 120—22 in the composing draft, the accompaniment expands to three staves, the octave A's 123. For details on Balakirev's harmonizations and their influence on the development of Russian art music, see Taruskin, "How the Acom Took Root"; also idem, " 'Little Star': An Étude in the Folk Style," in Musorgsky: In Memoriam, 1881-1981, ed. Malcolm H. Brown (Ann Arbor: U M I Research Press, 1982), 57-84-

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tormented by sorrow, gloom, and want] E X A M P L E

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The declamatory role of Skula in Prince Igor provided Igor Stravinsky with the model for an occasional patch of naturalistic kuchkist parlante, in which the accented syllables of the text are placed on successive beats, the unaccented syllables arranging themselves evenly in between in freely varying gruppetti.125 When a phrase ends or begins with unaccented syllables, a rest on the beat is mandated, so as to avoid an incorrectly placed accent. The result is what Soviet musicologists have christened the "mute ending" (glukhoye okonchaniye): a string of unaccented small note values peremptorily cut off by a downbeat rest. There is a notable instance of this comic-naturalistic device in "The Mushrooms" (Ex. 2.27a); in fact, it is a literal quotation of a phrase that occurs repeatedly, and very prominently, in Skula's part in the final scene of Prince Igor, where Fyodor Stravinsky's histrionic success had been legendary (Ex. 2.27b). But perhaps Fyodor Ignatyevich's most historic success, as recounted at the beginning of this chapter, was in the role of the deacon Mamirov in The Enchantress. And so let us conclude our survey of "The Mushrooms" by noting that the passage leading to its peroration (Ex. 2.28a) paraphrases Mamirov's big moment in Chaikovsky's opera, the climactic forced dance by which the deacon is humiliated at the close of Act I (Ex. 2.28b). The codas of Stravinsky's song and Chaikovsky's dance are also similar in their cadential use of the flat submediant, something we have already observed as characteristically "Russian" in the coda to the Finale of Igor Stravinsky's Piano Sonata. "How the Mushrooms Mobilized for War" is no precocious masterpiece. A parade of naive stylistic clichés, it also fails to surmount the monotony inherent in the structure of its text. A more experienced composer might have harnessed the tonal plan to achieve this end; and indeed, Stravinsky's setting shows some evidence of an attempt to project the mediant relations of the refrain onto the long-range 125. For details on this declamational style, see Chapter 15; also R. Taruskin, "Handel, Shakespeare, and Musorgsky: The Sources and Limits of Russian Musical Realism," in Studies in the History ofMusic, vol. 1 (New York: Broude Bros., 1984), 247-68.

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E X A M P L E

2.28b

(continued)

mediant harmonies of the opening, and the return to the tonic at the sixth refrain is prepared through a succession of keys that corresponds with the harmony at mm. 11—13. But thereafter the song is tonally static and redundant, robbing the climax of its force. Nor is the vocal writing as effective as one might have expected. The range is timidly restricted (A to e'), and the high notes seem haphazardly placed. The last e' comes in the seventh refrain (m. 109), which leaves the concluding verse and refrain dulled by comparison. The draft reveals that Stravinsky originally put a high F on the second "Ura!" (m. 136), but canceled it in favor of middle C, apparently to smooth the approach to the ensuing B-flat. 126 The resulting drabness cannot be taken as ironic or satiric; far too many other factors conspire toward a conventionally, somewhat naively triumphant peroration. So it is not hard to understand why in later years Stravinsky hid the piece from view. But neither is it hard to understand his fondness for the work in light of its 126. Both Soulima Stravinsky, editing the song for Boosey & Hawkes (not yet published), and the editor of a 1982 Soviet edition have restored the F.

[160]

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•

BIRTH

AND

BREEDING

teeming connections with the world of his father. There is no telling, of course, how intentional or even conscious each individual stylistic resonance or nearcitation may have been. Taken as a whole, though, the song is a touching memento of the period when, by Stravinsky's own account, he spent "as many as five or six nights a week at the opera," on a pass obtained for him by Fyodor Ignatyevich, 127 absorbing impressions from all sides, no doubt, but most of all from his feared and idolized parent on stage. 1 2 8 The unremittingly negative image of his father that Stravinsky projected in his memoirs and interviews was only one side of a profound ambivalence. The other side, intense admiration and loyalty, was expressed only in private. One such expression took the form of a letter to the Soviet violinist and composer Mikhail Goldshteyn, whom Stravinsky met in Moscow in 1962. 1 2 9 Goldshteyn, who was working on an article about the elder Stravinsky, asked the famous composer to describe his father's performances. The answer he received (8 August 1964) contrasts poignandy with the memoirs: Unfortunately I cannot tell you, or rather, impart to you with certainty my present thoughts on the "peculiar characteristics" (as you put it) of my father's singing, for recollections of the impressions and judgments of a seventeen-year-old youth at the distance of seventy-five years [we] can hardly guarantee their critical validity. Having said this much I feel freer in imparting to you what I thought and knew at the time of the performing activity of my father, of his brilliant dramatic gifts as an actor and of his virtuosic singing (he was the pupil of Professor Everardi at the St. Petersburg Conservatory), of the uncommon clarity of his diction, of the exceptional beauty of his voice despite the declining powers of his vocal chords at the end of his career. I recall how I often thought, listening to him in ensembles in various operas, that the surrounding singers seemed, in spite of the fact that

127. E8cD:47/4j. 128. This alone, of course, does not suffice to account for the song's seemingly fortuitous survival in the Stravinsky Archive. The only other prc-Firebird composition represented there is the first art of The Nightingale, which Stravinsky must have brought to Western Europe in 1913 so that he could work on finishing the score. Since he never suspected that his 1914 visit to his homeland would be his last until 1962, he had no reason then to take out the score of "The Mushrooms." It must have been brought to him by his mother when she left Russia in 1922. George Antheil, who saw Stravinsky daily in Berlin during the period when the composer was awaiting his mother's arrival, wrote later that "when, finally, Stravinsky's mother did turn up in Berlin, she brought with her a great pile of Stravinsky's earliest attempts at composition" (Bad Boy of Music [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1945], 38). But if this is true, then there is another Stravinskian puzzle to solve, for nothing else from that great pile remained with the composer in America. Did the rest remain with Theodore Strawinsky in Geneva? Was there an auto da fe? If the latter, the fact that "The Mushrooms" was spared would be the best evidence of all for Stravinsky's special nostalgic attachment to it. 129. Goldshteyn (b. 1917) is best known for having in 1948 perpetrated a famous Kreisleresque hoax in the form of a symphony by a certain "Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky" which he claimed to have discovered, but which in fact he had composed. The resultant scandal led to his emigration in 1964; he now lives in Hamburg. He published his two letters from Stravinsky (German translation only) in Musik des Ostens 7 (1975): 280-83. The letter on Fyodor Stravinsky is cited here from a carbon of the Russian original in the Stravinsky Archive.

FILIAL

PIETY

[161]

sometimes their vocal powers surpassed his, to be virtual amateurs and sometimes simply "nouveaux riches" in comparison with the nobility of his interpretations. He was an aristocrat surrounded by mere mortals.

Another attestation to that admiration and that loyalty was "How the Mushrooms Mobilized for War." Admiration and loyalty, a sense of heirship—these were the marks of Stravinsky's propitious apprenticeship. Surely no composer later so famed for his innovative originality ever began his career in such utter docility, so absolutely untainted by any discernible impulse to rebel. In part, no doubt, this was the inevitable result of a late start. But the kuchkists also started late, and were nothing if not rebellious. The crucial factor in Stravinsky's case seems to have been that he was doubly an aristocrat, socially and artistically. He was the scion of one of Russia's noblest musical houses and, on the death of his father, was adopted by an even nobler one, where he was coddled and petted and made to feel as one anointed. Who would rebel against such blandishments? Stravinsky was proud to be a fourth-generation Belyayevets, and for the next few years that pride would only increase. When admiration and loyalty toward Rimsky-Korsakov and all he stood for would finally wane, it would be for reasons no one, and least of all Igor Fyodorovich, could have foreseen in 1904.

[162]

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•

BIRTH

AND

BREEDING

3

•

F O U RT H - G E N E R A T I O N B E L Y A Y E V E T S

LESSONS Rimsky-Korsakov was an indefatigable teacher. In the course of thirty-five years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory he turned out some 250 pupils in theory and composition—enough to people a whole "school" of composers—and he taught at two other institutions as well. On Balakirev's breakdown in 1874 he took up the reins at the Free Music School and remained its director until 1881. Two years later, Balakirev appointed Rimsky his assistant as director of the oldest music school in Russia, the so-called Court Chapel Choir (Pridvornaya kapella), the original function of which had been to furnish singers for the tsar's chapel, but which was now a virtual conservatory, offering training in instrumental music and theory as well as singing. Rimsky held on to this job—distasteful to him because of the school's Orthodox and Slavophile atmosphere, but offering the reward of a good pension after ten years' service—until 1894. All during the two decades between his appointment to the Conservatory and his retirement from the Chapel, Rimsky taught privately as well. His first private pupil was a young dilettante from a merchant family, Ilya Fyodorovich Tyumenev by name (1855—1927). Tyumenev took sporadic lessons from Rimsky over some half a dozen years beginning in 1875, following which he decided he was really a painter and enrolled in the Academy of Arts. Later still he became a writer of travelogues, with an emphasis on Russian antiquities, and at last rejoined the Rimsky circle in the guise of librettist. He wrote some additional scenes at Rimsky's request for the latter's opera The Tsar's Bride (1899), otherwise based strictly on a play by Lev Mey, and later furnished the entire libretto of the opera Pan Voyevoda (1903)—of which more later.

163

In this last phase Stravinsky may have known Tyumenev slightly, for the latter visited a number of Rimskianyowrc fixes. But the two—Rimsky's first private pupil and his last—were far from peers in their pedagogical relationship to their master. To Tyumenev Rimsky had taught general theoretical subjects, even as he was learning them himself. "While studying harmony and counterpoint," he wrote much later, "I found it both useful and pleasant to have a pupil in that field, to whom I imparted as systematically as possible the information and devices I had acquired through self-instruction."1 After Rimsky's "theoretical" skills began to get bruited about a bit he found himself willy-nilly besieged by wealthy dabblers, mostly referred to him by Balakirev, who confined his own private teaching in these early "post-kuchkist" days to giving piano lessons to rich lady amateurs. This host of "Balakirev stringers and hangers-on," as Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov called them,2 did contain a few who went on to make modest musical names for themselves: the nobleman and very highly placed bureaucrat Alexander Taneyev (1850—1918), a distant cousin of the Moscow contrapuntist Sergey Taneyev, who served on every board, contributed heavily to every musical institution, and so was able to get his works (even operas) performed; the minor Belyayevets Alexander Kopi'lov (1854-1911), who later taught alongside Rimsky-Korsakov at the Court Chapel; another composer, Julius Bleichmann (Yuliy Bleykhman, 1868—1910), who went from Rimsky-Korsakov to Leipzig, where he studied with Jadassohn and Reinecke and returned a Wagnerian. To these names can be added those of the singer and songwriter Sigismund Blumenfeld (brother of Felix) and the Argentine ambassador Eduardo Garcia Mansilla (1866-1930), who in other postings took lessons from Massenet, d'Indy, and SaintSaens. None of these were, strictly speaking, composition students; like Balakirev's ladies of the piano, they mainly studied general theory with Rimsky. In a class by himself, of course, was the Mozartean prodigy Glazunov, who started his private lessons in 1880 at the age of fifteen and was within a couple of years an esteemed colleague. On his pensioned retirement from the Court Chapel in 1894, when he no longer needed the extra income, Rimsky-Korsakov was only too happy to forswear all this tedious private instruction. Thereafter he went back on this resolve only three times. During the seasons 1900-1901 and 1902-3 he succumbed to the importunings of the first violist of the Mariyinsky Theater orchestra, an Italian named Ottorino Respighi, and gave him a few practical lessons in orchestration. These exercises made so little impression on Rimsky-Korsakov that he never even mentioned them to Yastrebtsev; but Respighi called himself a Rimsky-Korsakov pupil for the rest of his life.

1. My Musical Life, 167.

2. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov,

[164]

j

•

N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov

FOURTH-GENERATION

3:28.

BELYAYEVETS

In 1896 Rimsky thought he had found another Glazunov in the person of Alexander Spendiarov (1871—1928), an Armenian from the Crimea who in Soviet times was elevated to the status of "founder" of his people's "national" classical music on the model of traditional Russian orientalism. Spendiarov came to Rimsky-Korsakov at the age of twenty-six after he had already finished the law course at Moscow University. His late start precluded his enrolling in the Conservatory, but he possessed qualities that made him irresistible to Rimsky. Yastrebtsev noted in his entry for 9 May 1896: "We spoke also of a certain young and, apparently, highly talented beginning composer, Spendiarov; Nikolai Andreyevich said he would give him lessons with the greatest enjoyment (his very words), since in the work of this youth an amazing purity of voice leading, beautifully planned modulations, and even a rather clearly defined feeling for keys already peep through unmistakably."3 To Spendiarov himself Rimsky sent a visiting card the next day, on which he had written, "Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, having examined the compositions of Mr. Spendiarov, has come to the conclusion that the latter has indubitable abilities and also aspires toward correctness of style, and that study should begin forthwith." 4 Spendiarov studied with Rimsky until February 1900. The lessons progressed from "strict style" through fugue, sonata form, and rondo, until "free composition" was achieved.5 A very eager and obedient student, Spendiarov became a great favorite, not only with Rimsky, but with his teacher's surrogates Lyadov and Glazunov as well. His music was often heard at the jours fixes that Stravinsky attended, and it was always praised. On one such occasion, after a performance of some Spendiarov romances, Rimsky exclaimed: "Now that's real music, not your Wolf or your Strauss."6 It was at least pardy because he gave no sign of being a Wolf or a Strauss that Igor Stravinsky was accepted by Rimsky, who had grown morbidly sensitive to any hint either of rebellion or of condescension in the younger generation, as the sole private pupil of his declining years. The reasons Rimsky had given for taking the twenty-six-year-old Spendiarov on as a pupil apply fully to the twenty-two-yearold composer of the Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor. By the time Rimsky was ready to sacrifice uncompensated time and energy to the young man's progress, he was reasonably sure of a return on his investment—both in terms of his pupil's technical potential and in terms of his stylistic orthodoxy. Stravinsky was dependable. He would "do as it was commanded him" (to paraphrase Rimsky's remarks 3. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:385. 4- G. G. Tigranov, "N. A. Rjmskiy-Korsakov i A. A. Spendiarov," in Ginzburg (ed.), N.A. RimskiyKorsakov i muzikal'noye obrazovaniye, 171. 5. Ibid., 171-72. The history of Spendiarov's lessons was reconstructed from seven notebooks containing his assignments. 6. January 1908; in Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:462. Yastrebtsev recorded one occasion at which Stravinsky and Spendiarov were both present: the dress rehearsal of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (3 February 1907).

LESSONS

[165]

on his harmony text), believing implicitly that "it would be good." He was also by far the most technically advanced of Rimsky's private pupils, having already gone through basic training with Kalafati. Although regular weekly instruction would not begin until the fall of 1905, Rimsky initiated Stravinsky into the method of instruction that has become so celebrated in the literature—that of giving Stravinsky his own unpublished music to orchestrate—in the summer of 1904, when Stravinsky showed up in Vechasha, the town where the Rimsky-Korsakov clan was vacationing, with the completed piano sonata under his arm. He arrived on n August and stayed over two weeks. Yastrebtsev, who was also a guest in Vechasha at the time, reported (23 August) that Igor Fyodorovich was "again shut away pondering the orchestration for winds of the beginning of the Polonaise from Pan Voyevoda."7 Pan Voyevoda was Rimsky's thirteenth opera. He had begun it in 1902, was working on it when Stravinsky called on him in Heidelberg, and had just finished it in July 1903, when Stravinsky came again, to Krapachukha, for advice on the first movement of his sonata. The opera was published (by Bessel, not Belyayev) in 1904 (Rimsky was reading proof at the time of Stravinsky's third summer visit) and first performed on 3 October of that year at the St. Petersburg Conservatory by the New Opera Company, a private troupe managed by a Georgian impresario named Tsereteli. Further productions took place in Warsaw (12 May 1905) and at the Moscow Bolshoy Theater under Rachmaninoff (27 September 1905). That was all. The Mariyinsky never thought to stage the work, and no wonder. With the possible exception of Servilia (1900), Pan Voyevoda was Rimsky's weakest opera. Everything about it, from the recitatives to the orchestration, bespoke a fatigued imagination that had long since fallen back on well-practiced routine and cliché. Dedicated to the memory of Chopin, the opera was hardly more than a pretext for pretty Polish dances, hung on a conventionally absurd libretto contrived by former pupil Tyumenev out of the tritest stock elements—thwarted love, tyranny o'erthrown, poison, and revenge—much of it lifted transparently from the libretto of Rimsky's own Tsar's Bride, in which, as we have seen, Tyumenev had also had a hand. The music is similarly a patchwork of long-established and by now mechanical Russianisms—folk dances, nature painting (including a "Moonlight" intermezzo that shamelessly rehashes a similar spot in the 1880 opera May Night), spooky chromatics, and so on. As for the Polish dances, one would have thought them well worked out of Rimsky's system in the decade-old Mlada. Two harmonic procedures in particular stand out for their quality of routine (in the next chapter we shall see that they are intimately related). One is "thirds rotation" in the harmony, something that Rimsky seemed by now to set in motion 7. Ibid., 311.

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at the flick of a switch. A stale sequence from the polonaise that Stravinsky orchestrated for his lessons can serve as illustration (Ex. 3.1a). The other device is that of applying melodic appoggiaturas to an arpeggiated diminished-seventh chord, a procedure that had been wrung thoroughly dry in the operas between Mlada and Kashchey the Deathless (the opera immediately preceding Pan Voyevoda). Kashchey was an evil sorcerer; and sure enough, the embellished diminished-seventh arpeggios make their hackneyed appearance in Pan Voyevoda in the second act, where an evil sorcerer is consulted (Ex. 3.1b). This brief assessment of Pan Voyevoda, harsh though it is, should not be taken as the sort of blanket dismissal of Rimsky-Korsakov as a composer that has become so fashionable in the Stravinsky literature, licensed as it were by Stravinsky's own belitding remarks in the third chapter of Memories and Commentaries,8 Rimsky was a gready talented and original, if notably uneven, writer. The unevenness was the price he paid for his passionately emotional commitment to high standards of professionalism, such as we have investigated in the preceding chapters, and to neurotic fears that any cessation in the pace of his creative work would spell its end. 9 Rimsky, whose detached self-awareness was one of his most impressive features, was fully conscious of these traits. In his personal copy of Modest Chaikovsky's biography of his brother Pyotr, which came out in 1903 just as Rimsky was finishing Pan Voyevoda, he marked the following passage from one of Chaikovsky's letters to Mme von Meek with a "Nota bene" and, in Russian, a marginal "very interesting": There is not the slightest doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without the warmth of inspiration. The latter is the sort of guest who does not always come at the first call. But meanwhile one must always work, and a true, honorable artist cannot sit arms folded with the excuse that he is indisposed. If you await your disposition, and do not go out to meet it halfway, then you will easily fall into lethargy and apathy. One must be patient and have faith, and inspiration will infallibly appear unto him who has been able to overcome his indisposition. . . . I think you will not suspect me of boasting, if I tell you that with me such indispositions as I have mentioned above occur very rarely. I attribute this to the fact that I am gifted with patience and have taught myself never to give in to reluctance. I have learned to conquer myself. I am very happy that I have not followed in the footsteps of my Russian confreres, who, suffering from a lack of selfconfidence and an absence of tenacity, prefer at the slightest difficulty to relax and postpone. Because of this, despite their strong gifts, they write so little and so amateurishly.10

8. See, most recently and viciously, Claudio Spies, "Conundrums, Conjectures, Construals, or, 5 v. 3: The Influence of Russian Composers on Stravinsky," in Stravinsky Retrospectives, ed. Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 76-140 (see esp. 82-102). 9. See his letter to Nadezhda Zabela of 15 January 1900, in A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A. RtmskiyKorsakov 3:11. 10. Ibid., n-12. The italics correspond to passages underlined or commented on by RimskyKorsakov.

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EXAMPLE

3-1

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Pan Voyevoda was written completely according to this prescription, as Rimsky's letters to Kruglikov testify. He wrote to his friend from Heidelberg complaining of fatigue, but also of his inability to stop working on the opera. "You will say to this," he added, that when good ideas come unbidden, one can just accumulate them until one is rested enough to want to work. But I mustn't do this: my memory has gone bad; I must develop them a bit right away, jot them down, derive what I can from them then and there—or else they will be forgotten and then there is nothing you can do with them. And if you do manage to recall them and work them up, it will only be with the greatest labor, and it will come out dry in the process. I have experienced this more than o n c e . "

When the opera was finished, Rimsky's evaluation of it was hardly more indulgent than our own: "As to music," he wrote, "Voyevoda is apparendy just as pale and medium a piece (I don't want to say mediocre) as Servilia"12 The reason for dwelling on these matters, anent the work on which Stravinsky was set to cut his teeth, should be obvious: the philosophy they embody—of industry, of professionalism, of the nature of inspiration, of the necessity to put oneself in motion by formula rather than not to write at all—was imparted to the pupil along with the formulas themselves and became a permanent fixture of his own esthetic. (Anyone who doubts it has only to read the third chapter of The Poetics of Music.) It was the most important lesson Rimsky gave Stravinsky, and perhaps the only one the latter never outgrew. Stravinsky's professed attitudes toward inspiration and convention are usually touted as anti-Romantic polemics (and as they are set forth in the Poetics and the Chroniques they do invite and to an extent justify the designation). But they were formed at precisely the stage of his development with which we are now concerned, and were administered to him by his teacher. They were in every way a product of the Russian conservatory mentality (pushed further in Rimsky's case by his positivistic rationalism, of which there will be more to say below) and had only an ex post facto connection with all the French classicists, old and new, who are cited as authorities in the Poetics. Apart from this, what sort of a teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov? Stravinsky's published testimony is dangerous, much of it having been concocted to distance himself from Rimsky and his world.13 Equally suspect are the numerous unctuous encomia by former pupils that have appeared in the Soviet Union, where Rimsky has 11. Letter of 10 August 1902 (N.S.); in ibid., 5:4512. Letter to Kruglikov, 30 September 1902; in ibid., 47. 13. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov (N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakov 3:27), perhaps mistaking Stravinsky's motive in his pique, already called the account in the Chroniques a "haughty attempt to discount the role of his teacher in the creation of his original artistic profile." The discounting became more sweeping and far more explicit in Memories and Commentaries.

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[169]

been canonized. 14 What all reports seem to agree on, though, is that Rimsky's lessons always took ends for granted and concentrated in detail on technical means, no matter at what level the instruction took place. As Ossovsky recalled, "Nikolai Andreyevich would always say that in art one must know and know how [znat' i umef], and the more you know the more you know how to do, the more you can express in music. This was his deepest conviction." 15 Another Rimskian conviction seems to have been the vestigial realist notion that if the short range is properly attended to, the long range will take care of itself. One of the most intriguing recollections of Rimsky's teaching was that of Reinhold Gliére, who never studied with him (he was a Taneyev pupil from Moscow) but who did occasionally show Rimsky his work. The way he contrasted the approaches of the two masters reveals much: Recalling Taneyev as a teacher, I think he was still and all a bit too demanding toward the work of his pupils. He was especially intransigent in demanding the fulfillment of a precisely defined tonal plan in every work. I remember how he tore my first symphony to shreds: "This you have to change; remove the C-major episode from the development; transpose these themes," and so on. I was dumbfounded. From then on I avoided showing him my work in progress, but only after a work was published would I submit the score to him. There was a different attitude toward new compositions in the Belyayev circle. Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov, with whom I was especially close, never confronted young composers with such categorical demands. Their advice touched more on the substance of the music, the general content, the instrumentation. After meetings with Rimsky-Korsakov I always felt I had been given wings, spiritually refreshed. His advice was laconic and precise. 16

This contrast seems unwittingly revealing of the decisive difference between a view of music in which form and content (or "substance") were equated and one in which they were dichotomized; that is, between Muscovite "classicism" and post-kuchkist "drobnost'." It is no wonder that Gliére thought Taneyev's approach unpleasantly demanding; what student wouldn't? But while Rimsky-Korsakov may have had less exacting ideals where formal unity was concerned, his philosophy of composition was fundamentally no less formalist than Taneyev's, in ways that resonate with some of the best-known tenets of Stravinsky's "modernism." The following passage, from a memoir of Rimsky-Korsakov "as man and pedagogue" by Mikhail Gnesin, could as easily have been a description of Stravinsky:

i+. N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzikal'noye obrazovaniye, a volume devoted entirely to RimskyKorsakov as musical educator (ed. Semyon L. Ginzburg), appeared in 1959, unfortunately just a bit too early for Stravinsky, rehabilitated as a "Russian classic" in connection with his 1982 Soviet tour, to have been taken into account. 15. Ginzburg (ed.), N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzikal'noye obrazovaniye, 191. 16. Gliére, "Vstrechi s belyayevskim kruzhkom," 69.

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Underscoring the organic bond between the artistic and the technical bases of the creative process, Rimsky-Korsakov pointed out that artistic form is an indispensable "restraint": the artist must know how to limit himself. He rejected "raw" emotionality or anything improvisational in creative work, seeing in them only manifestations o f dilettantism. "Thus only amateurs compose: mood is all and form is nothing," he once remarked. 17

Once again we seem uncannily to hear the voice of the author of the Poetics of Music. The co-author of Conversations with Igor Stravinsky was also given to secret paraphrases of the views and aphorisms of his teacher, as in his response to the question, "What is theory in musical composition?" "It doesn't exist," Stravinsky asserted.18 "In art there is no such thing as theory," Rimsky had asserted half a century before.19 More valuable than any other Stravinskian testimony to Rimsky's teaching is the unique and therefore precious passage in one of the few surviving letters from Stravinsky to his master, in which the pupil warmly expressed a gratitude he later felt the need to qualify. Meanwhile, in a jocular aside, he left us an example of Rimsky's "precise, laconic" style, revealing an ideal teacher had sought to instill in pupil. "Dear Nikolai Andreyevich," Stravinsky began, I was terribly glad to get your letter and was also glad once again to be assured o f your attitude toward me and toward my labors. This awareness, that you are constandy interested in my compositions, affects me in an amazingly beneficial way, and I feel like working long and hard. Perhaps all this sounds very stilted to you and you will say, "Couldn't it be any simpler?" [Nel'zya li poproshche?], but believe me, I will never find those words o f sincerest gratitude that might express it to a sufficient degree. 2 0

OPUS

I:

C H R O N O L O G Y

Beginning in the fall of 1905, when he was twenty-three years old, Igor Stravinsky visited Rimsky-Korsakov at home every Wednesday from 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. for his lessons in practical composition and instrumentation.21 On Wednesdays when jours fixes were scheduled, Stravinsky stayed to dinner. This agenda was maintained over the next three "academic" years—that is, for the rest of Rimsky-Korsakov's 17. M. F. Gnesin, "N. A. Rjmskiy-Korsakov: pedagog i chelovek," Sovetskaya muztka, 1945, no. 3, 204. 18. Conv:i2/i6. 19. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, "O muzikaJ'nom obrazovanii," in Muzikal'niye start i zametki (18691907), ed N. N. Rimskaya-Korsakova (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. Stasyulevicha, 1911). 20. Letter of 10 July 1907; in IStrSM:44i-42. 21. The exact time is mentioned in Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov's supplementary "Chronicle" in My Musical Life, 430. In Conversations With Igor Stravinsky; the composer recalled that the lessons "usually lasted a little more than an hour and took place twice a week" (Conv:39/j9); but as he gave his period of study with Rimsky as 1903-6, we can only conclude that his memory was doubly inaccurate.

OPUS

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[171]

life. Although the lessons were private, they were in essence no different from the course of study Rimsky's Conservatory pupils followed. Stravinsky's description of his early orchestration assignments tallies precisely with Prokofiev's description of Rimsky's orchestration class at the Conservatory: the same Beethoven sonatas, Schubert marches, and all the rest. 22 A letter from Rimsky-Korsakov to the French composer and critic Alfred Bruneau, who had been sent to Russia by the French Ministry of Education and Fine Arts on a fact-finding mission and who had asked Rimsky for a description of the Conservatory composition course, gives full details. It is dated 20 January 1902: At the St. Petersburg Conservatory the study o f composition is divided into six courses (years), according to the following plan: First year—harmony. Second year—counterpoint; stria and free styles. Third year—fugue; at the same time musical analysis and the study of orchestration. (The orchestration course is led by Mr. Glazunov.) The fourth, fifth, and sixth years are devoted to practical work in composition. Sometimes the better prepared or better equipped students can shorten these three years of study into a single year. The work is distributed thus: Fourth year—practical composition in small forms, including piano sonata. Fifth year—symphony and chamber music. Sixth year—vocal music, opera, and oratorio. 23

Stravinsky, the best prepared of all Rimsky's private pupils, had already had the equivalent of the first three years of study (and more) with Akimenko and Kalafati, and then a final year in which he had written a successful piano sonata, corresponding to the assignment in which the fourth Conservatory year traditionally culminated. And so it was precisely according to plan that when he began taking his formal lessons with Rimsky, he should have embarked at once on the composition of a symphony. In a way the Symphony in E-flat Major (op. 1), Stravinsky's first "public" composition, could be regarded as his last pre-Rimskian piece, for he began sketching it immediately upon finishing (or abandoning) the "Mushrooms" song. Indeed, the earliest notations for it are found on the last outside page of the unbound fascicle that is otherwise completely devoted to the composing draft of the song, completed 26 December 1904. So it is reasonable to assume that these early sketches were made at or near the beginning of the year 1905. The next musical document relating to the symphony is a complete particell (short score), laid out generally in four staves, but often expanded to five or six. 22. Conv:39/j9; cf. Sergei Prokofiev, Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer's Memoir, ed. David. H . Appel, trans. Guy Daniels (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 182-83. 23. Ginzburg (éd.), N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakav i muztkal'noye obrazovaniye, 247-48.

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This manuscript is now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (MS. 16,333).24 The preparation of such drafts was generally the last stage of composition before orchestration. The one for Stravinsky's symphony was written out in Ustilug in the summer of 1905, immediately following his graduation from the university. The four movements are dated 18 July, 21 July, 4 August, and 24 September, respectively. These dates, incidentally, provide an answer to the question of why Stravinsky called his symphony "opus 1" and the vocal suite The Faun and the Shepherdess "opus 2," even though the suite was finished over a year earlier than the symphony. The particell reveals that opus 1 was completed in draft form before opus 2 was even begun. From the speed with which the particell was prepared, it is evident that (particularly in the case of the second movement) the dates are those of copying the score, not necessarily of composition. The particell represents a final collation of sketch work that was evidendy done over a span of as many as eight or nine months. In any event, the symphony was complete but for the orchestration, or so the composer thought, by the time he began his weekly lessons with RimskyKorsakov. But the published symphony differs greatly from the particell, showing that Rimsky not only oversaw the orchestration, but also prompted a radical revision. Comparison of the two versions of the symphony will therefore give us a glimpse of Rimsky the teacher in action. We will be able to tell just what parts or aspects of Stravinsky's score he accepted or rejected (in some instances through his own penciled indications in the particell), and also what it took to satisfy him. In some cases it will be possible to extrapolate the nature of Rimsky's advice to his pupil and the remedies he may have prescribed. The one movement that Rimsky accepted immediately and more or less in toto was the second, which, as in the 1904 piano sonata, was the Scherzo. Only two passages in the particell were fundamentally altered in the published version (one of them being the coda), and the whole was transposed down a half step from B major to B-flat when it was orchestrated, presumably for the sake of a more "classical" relationship to the key of the outer movements (and also, perhaps, to make execution easier: Rimsky had made a similar adjustment when he revised his own First Symphony in 1884, transposing it up a semitone from E-flat minor to E minor). Not only was the Scherzo the least revised, but it was also the first to be orchestrated, Rimsky evidendy having given Stravinsky an immediate green light. The numerous and detailed indications of instrumentation in the particell (there is nothing comparable for the other movements) probably reflect an early stage of 24. This manuscript has been confused (P&D:6o8) with the holograph score of the symphony, now in the Leningrad Public Library, and misidentified as a piano-duet reduction (Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and the Piano [Ann Arbor: U M I Research Press, 1983], 40). Although often on four staves, the draft is in no sense for "four hands." The doublings and distribution of materials among the staves make this clear.

OPUS

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work with Rimsky. The full autograph score of the Scherzo (now at the State Public Library, St. Petersburg, in the Rimsky-Korsakov Archive) is dated "St. Petersburg, Autumn 1906." The other three movements were heavily revised in the process of scoring them. The most extensively rewritten of all, the third (slow) movement, was the next to be orchestrated. The full autograph score is dated "St. Petersburg, Winter 1907." The outer movements were completed in full score at the Nosenko estate in Ustilug in the summer of 1907. The first movement, by a fluke, was completed on 18 July, the second anniversary of its particell.25 Among the reasons for the delay in the orchestration of the symphony were Stravinsky's marriage, the birth of his first son, and the building of his house in Ustilug. Another reason was that he interrupted work on the symphony in 1906 to compose The Faun and the Shepherdess as a wedding present to his wife. A third was Stravinsky's enthusiastic sketching of yet another work, the Scherzo fantastique (op. 3), on which he embarked in June 1907. And even in the last stages of work on the symphony Stravinsky still found it necessary to make fundamental revisions, as he wrote somewhat sheepishly to his teacher on 18 June 1907, adding that he hoped to complete the first movement within two weeks—a goal that, as we know, he failed to reach. The letter goes on to reveal that the full score of the fourth movement, which bears only the approximate date "Summer 1907," was in fact the last to be completed; as of 18 June Stravinsky had not even begun to orchestrate it. 26 Before proceeding to a detailed examination of the symphony it is necessary to clear up a further point of confusion concerning its chronology. In Memories and Commentaries Stravinsky gave the date of the symphony's first performance as 27 April 1907, adding, "I remember the date because my Uncle Ielatchitch presented me with a medal commemorating it." 27 But as we have just seen, by April 1907 only two movements of the symphony had been orchestrated. The fact is, Stravinsky did remember the date of his semiprivate orchestral debut correctly (though he gave it in the "New Style"), but he did not remember what was performed. It was The Faun and the Shepherdess. The evidence is a brief review that appeared in the newspaper Peterburgskiy listok on 15 April 1907 (o.s.), by the critic Vladimir Konstantinovich Frolov (1850-1915), an old admirer of Fyodor Stravinsky, who had been delighted, the night before, to see the singer's son make good. 28 But then again, Stravinsky's memory may not have played him entirely false. Yastrebtsev recorded (18 April 1907) that Rimsky-Korsakov "presented [Stravinsky] with the orchestral score of his 'Musical Pictures' to The Tale of Tsar Saltan on the occasion of the performance of his, that is Stravinsky's, compositions for orchestra, 14—16 [27— 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Dates on the full score are given in Beletsky and Blazhkov, "Spisok," in Dialogi, 376. For the letter, see IStrSM:440-4i. M&C:56—57/58. A photograph of the medal can be seen in SelCorrII:448. Quoted in A. Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkoy kritiki," Sovetskaya muzika, 1982, no. 6, 69.

FOURTH-GENERATION

BELYAYEVETS

29, N.S.] April 1907." 29 So it seems that more than one piece was played, on more than one date. The only possible candidates for performance on 16 (29) April were the Scherzo and, possibly, the Largo of the Symphony in E-flat—at most, then, half the symphony. SOURCES,

MODELS,

REVISIONS

Since the movements of the Symphony in E-flat were drafted in one order and revised in another, a strictly chronological account of its creative and stylistic evolution would be confusing. Therefore the survey that follows will proceed in a straightforwardly sequential way, starting with the grandly rhetorical first movement, conceived, like so many nineteenth-century symphonic allegros in E-flat, in the spirit of Beethoven's Eroica. At the very outset we encounter what was evidently the biggest stumbling block, for no other passage in the symphony was as frequently, as extensively, or as agonizingly worked over as was the opening "group." The early sketch on the back of "Mushrooms" (Fig. 3.1a; transcribed in Ex. 3.2a) shows the first theme as originally conceived—a lilting melody, full of Schumannesque hemiola syncopations (the "Rhenish" Symphony!), and so far from the final version that without the intermediary evidence of the particell it would be virtually impossible to prove, or even guess, that the one stands behind the other. The opening of the particell (Fig. 3.1b; transcribed in Ex. 3.2b) incorporates a typically Glazunovian motivic rhythm in syncopes. The model may have been the first movement of Glazunov's Sixth Symphony, for Stravinsky changed his original meter signature (4/4) to accord with Glazunov's unconventionally expressed cut time (2/2 instead of the more usual (t)- In all other essentials, particularly as regards harmonic progression and motivic sequence, the version in the particell is faithful to the "Mushrooms" draft through the thirty-third measure—and with what flat-footed result! It was a serious miscalculation to turn the neutral arpeggiations of the early sketch into so sharply profiled a rhythmic motive. Like a stutter, it deflects attention away from the underlying harmonic rhythm onto the short-breathed reiterations at the surface. Nor do the overarticulated half-cadences (mm. 5-6, 15-16) help the momentum. The whole effect has become static and labored, as Stravinsky must have realized. As late as the summer of 1907, in the last stages of work on the symphony, he was still dickering with his troublesome Ansatz, "mending what seems poor to me in the opening of the first movement," as he wrote to Rimsky on 10 July, a week before completing the final draft. 30 What he ended up with, undeniably an enormous improvement, is shown in Example 3.2c. 29. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:422; " 1 4 - 1 6 April" is the date inscribed on the medal (see n. 27 above). 30. IStrSM:442.

SOURCES,

MODELS,

REVISIONS

[175]

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the Glazunov Eighth (to jump ahead for one moment) was the final coda of the last movement. Again, it was an emergency patch to replace an unsatisfactory prior draft, one so conventional and empty there is no point in quoting it. The replacement copies Glazunov in every particular—even down to his triple meter, achieved in Stravinsky's cut-time piece by the use of full-measure triplets. Most conspicuously borrowed of all, perhaps, is the scoring. Only full-score pages, therefore, will do this particular comparison justice (Ex. 3.6). The reason Stravinsky resorted to Glazunov's Eighth only at the doctoring phase, rather than in the original process of composition, was simple. An almost exact contemporary of his own particell draft, Glazunov's score was available for plunder only at the long-delayed stage of revision and orchestration.31 Recourse to it was inevitable, perhaps even mandated: from the moment of its creation it had become Rimsky-Korsakov's favorite symphony and the model of models for his pupils. One of them recalled encountering Rimsky in September 1905 and being told, "I've just come back from [Glazunov's dacha at] Ozerki; I heard the scherzo from the Eighth Symphony. What a remarkable work, what astonishing mastery, and how new and fresh it all is!" 32 The symphony was unveiled at a RimskyKorsakov jour fixe on 14 December 1905, when Glazunov played it to an assemblage that included three Stravinskys: Igor, Guriy, and their cousin Catherine Nosenko, by then Igor's fiancée.33 The next week the work was discussed at the dinner table following Stravinsky's orchestration lesson. 34 It was played again at RimskyKorsakov's (this time in a four-hands arrangement) on 4 January 1906, at a large gathering to honor Stasov on what would be his last (eighty-second) birthday.35 The first public performance took place at a Russian Symphony (Belyayev) concert in December 1906. Stravinsky, perhaps needless to say, was present on all these occasions. He even played the symphony himself (four-hands with another RimskyKorsakov pupil) at Rimsky's request at his teacher's last birthday party (6 March 1908). 36 But Glazunov's was not the only eminent Belyayevets symphony that acted as midwife to Stravinsky's. There was also the Symphony in C Minor, op. 12, by Sergey Taneyev. Completed in 1898, the work was published in 1901 and won the Belyayev-sponsored Glinka Prize in November 1904. Its moment of greatest prestige, then, immediately preceded the drafting of Stravinsky's symphony. Stravinsky's close acquaintance with the piece is attested by Yastrebtsev, who reported 31. Glazunov's symphony was composed in the summer and early fall of 1905: the first movement was completed on 30 July and the last on 18 October. 32. L. B. Nikol'skaya, éd., "Vospominaniya M . O. Shteynberga," in Ginzburg (éd.), N.A. RimskiyKorsakov i muzïkal'noye obrazovaniye, 208-9. 33. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:368. 34. Ibid. 35. Nikol'skaya, "Vospominaniya Shteynberga," in Ginzburg (ed.), N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzïkal'noye obrazovaniye, 208. 36. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:484-

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FOURTH-GENERATION

BELYAYEVETS

that "I. Stravinsky and N. I. Richter played the First Symphony [sic: the work is now known as the Fourth] of S. Taneyev" four-hands at Rimsky-Korsakov's on 9 November 1905.37 This was after Stravinsky's symphony had been completed in particell; but any doubts as to whether Stravinsky knew Taneyev's symphony in time to gather its fruits for his own may be quelled by comparing the second themes of the two first movements (Ex. 3.7). Stravinsky's is quoted not from the published score but from the particell, which shows the resemblance more clearly, since its beat level, like Taneyev's, is the quarter note. In the published version, Stravinsky's note values were doubled—no mere notational change either, but an actual halving of the tempo. This is one of the most curious features of Stravinsky's first-movement revision: note-value alterations like this are common, and occur both as augmentations and as diminutions. Some, but by no means all, of these shifts are indicated in the particell—in both Stravinsky's and Rimsky's hands—with phrases like "vdvoye shirye" (twice as slow) and "vdvoye skoreye" (twice as fast). Sometimes Stravinsky was undecided how best to vary the excessively even pace of the movement. A case in point is the beginning of the development, in which fragments of the first and second themes are brought into juxtaposition. As Fig. 3.id shows, Stravinsky's first idea was to augment the note values of the second theme, as he had done in the exposition. He indicated half notes above the staff in the third measure shown in the figure. Rimsky-Korsakov crossed them out and replaced them with the Russian word tak (thus), equivalent in this context to "stet." On the free top staff of the page an alternate solution was found—to diminish the note values of the first theme, thus achieving the same relationship between the speeds of the first- and second-theme fragments, meanwhile doubling the general pace. (Rimsky-Korsakov always pressed for concision: three out of the four movements of Stravinsky's symphony were significantly abridged on revision.) The revised passage is given in Example 3.8a; the close resemblance of the first theme in diminution to an analogous passage in the development section of the first movement from Glazunov's Sixth is worth noting (Ex. 3.8b; for echoes of Glazunov's imitations, cf. Ex. 3.4b). But to return to Taneyev: it was his symphony that provided Stravinsky with a model for the contrapuntally saturated texture that pervades his first movement. In his C-minor Symphony, a cyclic work obviously beholden, both in general and in certain particulars, to the Franck Symphony, Taneyev provided many examples of the vertical superimposition of themes—particularly in the perorational finale, where themes from all movements come back in contrapuntal mosaics like those in Franck's or in Dvorak's New World. In the first movement of Taneyev's symphony, such contrapuntal devices form the basis of the development section, and so they do in Stravinsky's as well. The 37. Ibid., 363.

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second theme, which the two symphonies have as it were in common, is subjected by both composers to a canonic elaboration. Stravinsky's is cited both from the particell and from the published score, to show how hard he worked on "purity of voice leading" (as Rimsky would surely have insisted) in the course of revision (Ex. 3.9a-c). Elsewhere Stravinsky develops this theme by applying elementary devices of invertible counterpoint—the kind of thing Taneyev's music always featured in abundance, to say nothing of his famous textbook (Ex. 3-9d). A few pages later comes the inevitable superimposition of the first and second themes. Once again, comparison of the particell with the finished score shows considerable strides in self-concealing contrapuntal artistry. What began life as an obtrusive "gymnastic frolic" such as Stasov made a point of decrying (Ex. 3.10a), has

[19 + ]

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become an impressively smooth, natural-sounding contrivance (Ex. 3.10b). Inasmuch as the revised version of the passage makes reference to the Glazunov-derived extension of the first theme, it may also be germane to quote one of the many beautifully calculated specimens of thematic superimposition one finds in the development of the first movement of the Glazunov Eighth (Ex. 3.10c). As in the Stravinsky passage (and as in the Sixth Symphony as well), motives derived from the first and second themes are contrapuntally combined. In view of all the specific, contemporary-Russian thematic and procedural models that can be adduced for Stravinsky's first movement, we needn't dwell on miscellaneous stylistic or thematic resonances (e.g., Die Meistersinger in mm. 20-23; Chaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet in mm. 61-64; the New World 'Symphony' in mm. 226-34; and there are many others). Particularly noteworthy in this movement is Stravinsky's stylistic indebtedness to Rimsky-Korsakov himself, especially in his heavy reliance on modulatory "rotations" by thirds such as we have already observed in Pan Voyevoda. Our Example 3.1a, from the Polonaise in that opera—a piece Stravinsky orchestrated as an exercise and therefore knew as only one who has copied out every note by hand can know a piece—echoes endlessly throughout the movement. Example 3.11 shows two such harmonic sequences, one circulating by major thirds, the other by minor. Both refer in obvious ways to Rimsky's example. Example 3.11a intrudes upon the second theme in the exposition to provide a bridge to the development (since it returns in the recapitulation, one ought perhaps to call it a codetta). Example 3.11b, which introduces the "Beethovenian" (i.e., developing) coda at movement's end, is an especially pure (and tedious) instance of the rotation device, proceeding through five links in a chain of minor thirds, ultimately turning back upon its harmonic starting point. From a structural point of view it is only so much colorful clutter, drobnost' incarnate. But it is a Belyayevets badge as well, and how proudly Stravinsky wears it! Another such emblem is the passage leading to the final cadence. It embodies the original Glinka-esque use of the whole-tone scale—that is, as a descending bass line—and it had been enshrined as a model, even a rule, in Rimsky's harmony text (chap. 14, pt. 3: "False Progressions Along the Circle of Major Thirds"). It is interesting that in the particell the bass descends through two octaves in unbroken syncopation, while in the final version Stravinsky emphasizes both approaches to the tonic by "righting" the syncopation on the downbeat (Ex. 3.12). Comparison with the first movement of the piano sonata, Stravinsky's previous large-scale essay in sonata form, shows the first movement of the symphony off to best advantage. But Stravinsky was still far from a "natural" symphonist a la Glazunov. Joints still creak (especially the retransition, always the trickiest moment to bring off in a sonata movement). While there is a much greater surface unity, it is bought at a discount, achieved by harping blatantly on motivic fragments derived from the first theme's incipit. On the positive side, the second theme is no longer SOURCES,

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4 9 . Ibid., 4 4 2 (entry of 4 N o v e m b e r 1907). $0. This reference makes plain which o f the Sibelius symphonies Stravinsky heard with RimskyKorsakov (the tatter's comment, as reported in D & D : I 6 4 : " W e l l , I suppose that is also possible").

[216]

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Fifth Symphony has gone this long without comment (incredible, too, that Rimsky let it pass). The near-identity of the two prestos extends beyond the actual thematic material to encompass the bass line, the orchestration, and even the startling harmonic shift at the climax (Ex. 3.2ia-b; the harmonic shift is labeled "NB"). As already noted (see Ex. 3.6), Stravinsky replaced the continuation that had followed this passage in the particell with a second coda, lifted from Glazunov's Eighth as arrantly as the Presto had been lifted from Chaikovsky's Fifth. This latter coda is introduced with another Glazunovian augmentation/diminution counterpoint based on a Borodinesque pentatonic idea (Ex. 3.21c), and it is followed by a final appropriation from Chaikovsky for the last cadential flourish (Ex. 3.2id-e). Thus Stravinsky ended his symphony, and began his career, with arms raised in salute to the aposdes of Russian "symphonism," to borrow the Russian word for it. Attempted denials of this annoying fact, to which we have become so SOURCES,

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[219]

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accustomed in the wake of Conversations, are as idle as they are implausible. "Every writer starts off as a compendium, or revised anthology," Wilfrid Sheed put it neady in answer to similar disingenuous disclaimers on behalf of Hemingway. 51 Nor will it do to complain that, by the standards of a later time and another place, music such as Rimsky-Korsakov's or Glazunov's "may be more accurately judged a deterrent, rather than an encouragement, to emulative efforts." 52 (Sheed: "It is probably commoner than not for great writers to be influenced by nobodies, the first food they eat.") Stravinsky's Symphony in E-flat was an oath of fealty to figures who were far from nobodies where he came from, and early audiences only too happily received the work in that spirit. R E C E P T I O N

The first complete performance of the symphony was given on Tuesday evening, 22 January 1908, by the Court Orchestra ( P r i d v o r n i y orkestr), the same organization that had given a preliminary hearing to the inner movements the year before. This orchestra, supported by the Imperial Chancel (headed by Alexander Taneyev, Rimsky's pupil), had been formed in 1882 as the Court Musicians' Corps (Pridvorniy muzikantskiy kbor) to entertain Tsar Alexander III and his entourage on Sundays and holidays at the nine-hundred-room Gatchina Palace, some twenty-five miles southwest of St. Petersburg, where the tsar had set up his permanent residence in the early years of his reign. Originally staffed almost entirely by uniformed cavalry musicians, the orchestra was expanded in 1886 to full symphonic complement. In 1896 (under Nikolai II) it became a civil service rather than a military organization. Only in 1902 did the orchestra begin giving public concerts in the capital on a regular basis. This was not an ordinary concert series, such as those of the Russian Musical Society or the Belyayev organization. Public concerts, just a sideline for this purely functional body, were initiated as a kind of public service by the conductor, Hugo Wahrlich (1856-1922), a German-born violinist who had headed the Court Orchestra since 1888. The announcement of the orchestra's first season precisely pinpoints its concerts' special character: Over the twenty years of its existence, the Court Orchestra has amassed a noteworthy musical library, consisting at the present time of 6,700 items of music literature old and new, of various styles, genres, and nationalities. This library, continually accumulating novelties, contains many items that are unknown or little known in Russia. On the assumption that many in the musical world are interested in novelties of musical literature but are not able to obtain the scores, much less hear them

51. New York Review a«t»i> «riHunuvwiit: -Tpannua pvfi. ' , -Tp*«miM 8«-— I> p\f> , 'jj ( rpmiHiiM IO pvA. JUa iuIKwii> a^nwNiim vr^onui Mt> P F . I A K l| 1 «I B K O II I O I1 \ (ìrmnmeHKn Tpomiirttil rwp I. .», *«r PrtaKmifjui-wJtnmr.iM—9KHM,

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growing out of a preoccupation with common-tone progressions, were nothing new in Russian music by the 1890s. Thanks to the Coronation scene from Musorgsky's Boris Godunov (Ex. 4.28a), all the world knows that two dominant-seventh chords with roots a tritone apart have a tritone in common. And thanks to the reinforcement the lesson has received in some equally famous pieces like Sheherazade (Ex. 4.28b), the progression is often thought of as being peculiarly Russian. In fact, there were precedents for these progressions in earlier Russian compositions, including Balakirev's Overture to King Lear (1859) and—most remarkably for the way it anticipates Musorgsky's accordionlike oscillations—the Royal Hunt from Alexander Serov's Rogneda (1865; Ex. 4 29). But as was so often the case, the earliest model was Liszt, as we may observe in the opening of his 1854 symphonic poem Orpheus (Ex. 4 30). The next harmony heard in Liszt's composition, moreover, could easily be predicted. It is the dominant-seventh chord on C, which shows the tritone progression to have been, in Liszt's usage, a subset or a special case within the circle of minor thirds. 25 It is the midpoint, to be exact, not only of the thirds circle but also of the octave, the very embodiment of anticlassical, symmetrical partition. This special status as midpoint led to its particular cultivation by the late-nineteenth-century Russian fantastic harmonists, beginning with Rimsky-Korsakov and his satellites and ending with Scriabin and Stravinsky. The concept of a stable, consonant, and harmonically static diminished fifth is recognized in Russian music theory by Boleslav Yavorsky's formulation of the "diminished mode" (umenshonniy lad)-—his name for the tone-semitone or octatonic scale.26 This nomenclature, which Yavorsky justified in terms of such Lisztian works as Un sospiro and the first Mephisto Waltz, 27 seems too limited as a general theory of octatonicism, since it fails to take sufficiently into account the phenomenon of third-related root progression.28 There are, however, numerous passages in late Rimsky-Korsakov (beginning with Mlada) for which "diminished mode" is in fact a singularly apt name because of the stable way the diminished fifth functions, not only with respect to harmonic root progression, but as a melodic point of rest as well.

25. The remaining member of the circle, F-sharp, was ineligible at this point because Liszt was also concerned with retaining the common-tone G in the horns (the third of E-flat, the seventh of A, the fifth of C). This device was also taken up with a vengeance by Russian composers beginning in the 1860s (although here the model may have been Glinka, e.g., the Farlaf/Naina scene in Ruslan). 26. For an introduction to this fascinating theorist, who lived from 1877 to 1942, see Gordon D. McQuere, "Concepts of Analysis in the Theories of B. L. Yavorsky," Music Review 41 (1980): 278-88; also idem, "The Theories of Boleslav Yavorsky," in Russian Theoretical Thought in Music, ed. Gordon D. McQuere (Ann Arbor: U M I Research Press, 1983), 109-64. 27. See B. L. Yavorsky, "Neskol'ko misley v svyazi s yubileyem Frantsa Lista," Muzika, no. 45 (8 October 1911): 961. 28. For the latter Yavorsky coined a different term, "chain mode" (tsepnoy lad), which he illustrated with precisely the ladder of thirds we have traced from Liszt's Faust Symphony into Rimsky-Korsakov, and which he applied not only to the latter's music, but in particular to Scriabin. See McQuere, "Concepts of Analysis," 285-86.

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A rather primitive example comes from the end of the second scene of Sadko (Ex. 4.31), where the Sea King rises up to banish Sadko from his kingdom (his ascent, by the way, is accompanied by a quotation of the early octatonic passage in the tone poem of 1867). The voice part here, doubled by the bass line, seems to be a simple melodic projection of the diminished-seventh chord by means of a transposition of the melody scale in Example 4.23, the kind of thing analysts have trivially traced back to the eighteenth century. But the accompanying harmony consists of a circulation of half-diminished sevenths. The foreign elements thus introduced— G-sharp, B, D—belong to the octatonic harmony scale. A sense of root progression is achieved, and the three roots thus presented—A-sharp, C-sharp, E—are represented by chords with diminished rather than perfect fifths, the same fifths that are emphasized by the contour of the vocal line. No resolution of them is given or even implied. By analogy to the now familiar rotations of major and minor triads, the half-diminished sevenths are functioning here as "potential centers" in temporary equilibrium. More sophisticated examples of such stable tritones or diminished-seventh chords—"tonic tritones" we might even call them (after Yavorsky)—are encountered in Mlada and in The Legend of the Invisible City ofKitezh. The third act of the latter opera actually ends on a tritone. No less interesting are instances where per[286]

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feet fifths are applied as dissonant appoggiaturas to diminished fifths. Several sketches reveal Rimsky's apparent process of thought. In one intended for Mlada (Ex. 4.32), a simple arpeggiation of a diminished-seventh chord with appoggiaturas at the upbeats (cf. the passage from Pan Voyevoda illustrated in Ex. 3.1b) is deliberately remodeled as an explicit resolution of a perfect fifth to a tritone, by approaching the fifth as a direct leap. There is a refinement of the same idea in a sketch for Tsar Saltan (Ex. 4.33). The phrase structure has been turned into two parallel rhythmic periods. As is by now Rimsky-Korsakov's familiar habit, the upper staff is derived from the melody scale and the lower staff from the harmony scale. Thus the A-natural in the first bar is a dissonant appoggiatura, while the A-naturals in the last bar are consonant scale tones. In a sketch for the leitmotif of the Tartar invaders in Kitezh (Ex. 4.34), the whole process has become even more concrete and explicit. Now there is no need for the somewhat banal support of the diminished-seventh chord: the thinking has become more purely intervallic. Moreover, the perfect-fifth appoggiatura has been fastidiously respelled as a diminished sixth. (Outside of barbershop harmony, are there any other instances of this interval in the music of the time?) And this in turn leads to such commonly occurring Korsakovian bass lines as the one given in Example 4.35 (from Kitezh), which one writer has already compared with the mature Stravinsky.29

29. Robert Moevs, Review of The Harmonic Organization of "The Rite of Spring," by Allen Forte, Journal of Music Theory 24 (1980): 103-4.

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[Understand, beautiful bride, make sense of their prophetic speech]

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All these tritones bring Wagner to mind, of course; and the inevitable question of his influence, always problematic with respect to Russian composers, must again be raised. While Rimsky, like all the kuchkists, had been brought up by Stasov and Balakirev to despise Wagner and to worship Liszt, he underwent a conversion and the usual Wagnerian crisis about the time of Mlada, as we have seen, when he first heard the Ring complete. The Wagnerian influence on Mlada and the several operas that followed upon it in the 1890s did not affect harmony very much, except in the matter of harmonic rhythm: some passages of long, drawn-out chord se-

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quences seem indebted in obvious ways to the Rheingold prelude. The influence was mainly confined to orchestration and, so to speak, imagery—forest murmurs in Sadko, magic fire in Tsar Saltan, and the like. There is evidence, however, that at the turn of the century Rimsky had another Wagnerian seizure,30 and from the works that followed this one we may infer that he had been studying Wagner's harmony as well as his scoring. Rimsky's son published a letter from the composer to Yastrebtsev that affords us a very good lead. Writing from his summer house in Krapachukha on 15 June 1901, Rimsky confided to his disciple: Here I can't seem to get started on anything, so meanwhile I have been zealously going through the score of Siegfried, which I have bought for myself. As always after a long interval, Wagner's music has become alien to me, and I had to get used to it. Now that I'm a little used to it, I started to like it, but then I again experienced something akin to disgust. I began to grow indignant at all his blunders of the ear, and his constant crossing of the boundary of what is possible in harmony—to put it simply, the nonsense and the falseness that you find strewn about Siegfried at every s t e p . . . . Could my musical ear be better than Wagner's?... No, of course, not better; maybe even worse; but I have a musical conscience, to which I am obedient, and Wagner frittered his conscience away in his quest for grandiosity and novelty. . . . It's terribly hard to define the limits of what is possible in music; it's a much too complicated question, into which everything must be reckoned: not only harmony, but melodic and rhythmic considerations. I could not hope to solve it, but I feel that I am right. Where Wagner is peerless is in instrumentation. 31

Out of this exacerbated ambivalence we might expect a spate of tendentious Wagnerian emulations—exorcisms, really—in which Wagner's excesses would be tamed by Rimsky's conscience. And that is exactly what did ensue. The first fruit of this new Rimskian period was a work of small significance: a "prelude-cantata" on the Nausicaa episode from the Odyssey called From Homer, which the St. Petersburg wags lost no time in rechristening "From Wagner." 32 Its near-plagiarisms from the Ring (the Ride of the Valkyries in particular) are indeed so obvious as to be embarrassing. (They found echo, though, in Stravinsky's Fireworb, op. 4.) But there was another work direcdy inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov's love-hate affair with Wagner, and in particular with Siejtfried. This was one of his most important works—one, moreover, that was especially fraught with stylistic and technical harbingers of the work of his most famous pupil. Less than a month after his testy letter to Yastrebtsev, Rimsky sent another, this time cryptically triumphant: "There is still powder in the flask," he wrote, "there

30. See, for example, the remarks on the Ring reported by Yastrebtsev; cited in Chapter 3, n. 83.

31. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N. A. Rimskiy-Korsalm 5:62. 32. See Vladimir Derzhanovsky, " K ispolneniyu prelyudii-kantati 'Iz Gomera,'" Muzika, no. 28 (10 June 1911): 603.

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are still new harmonies under the sun." 33 And a bit later, to Glazunov, he reported that he had been "looking through and even studying Siegfried," and then all at once revealed: In the last few days of June I started work on another opera—archfantastic, modest in length: in two arts (four scenes). I cannot tell you its name, for I gave the librettist my word I would not.... I think that by the end of the summer it will be all sketched, or nearly so, for the material all came into my head in one fell swoop.... The form will be Wagnerian; there will be abrupt transitions and chords with incoherent voice leading.... 34 The opera was Kashcbey the Deathless, a calculated and deliberate attempt, as Rimsky put it in a letter to Semyon Kruglikov, to "take harmony to the furthest limits without crossing over into hyperharmony [sverkh-garmoniya]," a phrase that brings to mind his comments to Yastrebtsev on Wagner and the boundaries of the possible.35 It is obvious, in view of his reports of summer reading, that his jumping-off point had been Act II, scene i, of Siegfried (Alberich and Wotan at the mouth of Father's cave). This scene—itself heavily indebted to the introduction to the dungeon scene in Fidelio—was a tour de force of suspended tonality, whose "tonic" was a tritone (C and G-flat/F-sharp) and whose key signature was perpetually oscillating between those of F minor and B minor. 36 The same tritone is practically ubiquitous in Kashcbey, where it lends the same sense of stability. There are many details of melody and harmony that establish the relationship between Wagner's scene and Rimsky's opera beyond doubt. To enumerate them would deflect us unduly from our real concern, but let one be entered in evidence as perhaps in itself conclusive; the resemblance is self-evident (Ex. 4.36). The differences between Examples 4.36a and 4.36b are as significant as the manifest similarities, for they indicate how Rimsky sought to tame Wagner's extravagances. Wagner's chains of thirds are built up over the root A in a consistent filling-in and extension (to an eleventh) of the dominant ninth sounded at the outset. One or two of Wagner's thirds, however, are anomalous, particularly the Ftt-A combination, which was surely an example of what Rimsky-Korsakov thought "incoherent voice leading." Rimsky's thirds, in contrast, are consistently deployed

33. Letter of 10 July 1901; in A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakop 5:65. 34. Ibid., 64. 35. Letter of 11 April 1902; in ibid., 67. 36. Of course, these signatures define the aforementioned tritone as a kind of double dominant (altered to French-sixth quality); and this is in keeping with the general character of Wagnerian tonality, with its ever more elastically prolonged dominant functions. In the present instance, however, the tritone itself lends greater stability than any putative tonic because it recurs so often and ends the scene with a definite sense of closure, and because cadences on F and B are so rare. There is, in fact, only a single authentic, unevaded resolution to either F or B, Alberich's "Der Welt walte dann ich!" (p. 149 in the Schott/Schirmer vocal score).

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along what Yavorsky called the "chain mode," which—following Wagner's lead— he treated in Kashchey in a more purely intervallic fashion than in any other work. The chain mode, as we have seen (n. 28 above), is a special case within the octatonic (diminished) mode. And the latter, along with the whole-tone scale, was Rimsky-Korsakov's salvation, offering as it did a ready-made modus operandi for harmonizing the tritone. Kashchey became an exhaustive repository of mechanistically (Rimsky would have said "rationally") constructed derivations from the symmetrical scale formations with which he had been experimenting for over three decades, only without his former emphasis on major-minor triadic cognates. This TRITONES

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gave his music the tonally suspensive ambience that had impressed him in Wagner's scene, without casting it adrift on Wagner's "sea of harmony," to say nothing of the d'Indistic "sea of decadence." Rimsky kept close watch on his compass. His music moves at all times within narrow, clearly marked paths determined by his Lisztian symmetrical scales. Wagner, had he lived to see them, would no doubt have been as derisive of these rigid techniques as Rimsky was of Wagner's willful freedom. Stravinsky, in a characteristically impatient aside, dismissed them in his late memoirs of his teacher as "a few flimsy enharmonic devices."37 They were, however, of decisive importance to Stravinsky's development. For an example of this new intervallic octatonicism—and at the same time a demonstration of Rimsky's dependence on the Siegfried model—consider the passage given as Example 4.37, constructed entirely over Wagner's tritone. No key is adumbrated; the tritone is as stable a point of reference as it had been in the Siegfried scene. Numbering the degrees demonstrates that the music is totally referable to the octatonic collection (in its melodic form). The rising thirds move in a fashion reminiscent of the chain mode, except that major and minor thirds are intermixed. The zenith of diminished-mode construction comes at the end of the first act, when Kashchey conjures up a snowstorm with his magic self-playing zither (gusli samogudi). The zither is represented at the beginning of the scene by the harp, playing a continuous diminished-seventh arpeggio up and down through its entire range. Thereafter, as Rimsky himself observed with some pride in his autobiography, "The rather lengthy scene of the snowstorm I succeeded in plotting almost entirely on the sustained diminished chord of the seventh."38 At the height of the storm, an offstage chorus sings it a song of welcome (Ex. 4.38). In this very noteworthy passage the continuous diminished-seventh chord provides the stable point of harmonic reference, like the C/F-sharp tritone in Example 4.37. The chorus, meanwhile, sings a tune of marked folklike quality (the only such in the opera). The tune is sung twice, starting on each member of the "tonic" tritone in turn. Most remarkably, the total pitch content of the two tritone-related statements of the folk tune is the melodic version of the octatonic scale. We have here a very rare instance—for Rimsky-Korsakov—of the octatonic scale partitioned not into triads or other tertial formations but into inversionally symmetrical minor tetrachords (T-S-T). This tetrachord is the melodic basis of a great deal of Russian folk music, as Rimsky surely knew better than anyone. The melodic octatonic scale offers minor tetrachords at each of its four nodal points, but the tritone is the obvious interval of choice in the present context. With specific reference to the piece 37. M&C:j7/5938. My Musical Life, 400. Elsewhere in the same passage Rimsky refers to what Yavorsky called the "chain mode" as "false relations formed by the progression of major thirds"—a definition to keep in mind when examining Stravinsky's Nightingale and Firebird.

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at hand, it coincides with the prime structural, tonality-defining harmonic unit in the opera. More generally, the tritone transposition offers complete pitch variance, as well as complete representation of the octatonic collection. This rare octatonic partition, which provides a meeting ground between the two worlds of Russian music—the folk/diatonic and the fantastic/chromatic— always took place at the tritone when it was employed by composers of Rimsky's generation. 39 Perhaps the earliest precedent occurs in the Prologue to Borodin's Prince Igor (Ex. 4.39). The background harmony here is French sixth rather than diminished seventh (or perhaps a Musorgskian dominant-seventh axis on 39. The phenomenon described here has nothing to do with the Slavic "folk octatonicism" occasionally described in the Soviet ethnological literature (e.g., F. A. Rubtsov, Osnovt Uuiovogo stroeniyn russkoy narodrwy pesni [Leningrad: Muzika, 1964]; S. Pushkina, "Tol'ko li diatonika?" Sovetskaya muzika, 1967, no. 3, 102-4) and which has been mentioned by some writers in connection with Stravinsky (e.g., R. Birkan, "O tematizme 'Svadebki' Stravinskogo," in Iz istorii muztkiXX veka, ed. M. S. Druskin [Moscow: Muzika, 1971], 178). Also see the description of the "Istrian scale" from Croatia in Jerko Bezic, "Yugoslavia, Folk Music: Croatia," New Grove Dictionary 2:594. For composers of Rimsky-Korsakov's generation, folk music was by definition strictly diatonic.

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EXAMPLE 4.38 Rimsky-Korsakov, Kashchey the Deathless, scene ii, fig.l 381 (mm. 642-49)

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D-flat and G); Borodin did not live to see Rimsky-Korsakov develop the diminished mode. Other instances of what we may call tetrachordal octatonicism in RimskyKorsakov occur sporadically as far back as Antar and can be found more abundandy in Sadko and Mlada (Ex. 4 40). Compared with Kashchey, however, these are mere happenstances. In the first instance, the melody scale is harmonized in such a way as to emphasize its tritone axis, while in the second we have little more than a composed-out diminished-seventh chord (the middle voice), with the upper and lower voices splitting the total chromatic into two octatonic scales (semitonewhole-tone and tone-semitone, respectively) such that augmented triads occur on the offbeats. In Kashchey, for the first and practically only time, Rimsky purposefully split the octatonic melody scale into two tritonally related tetrachords held in equilibrium within the diminished mode. It was something that would go straight into Stravinsky, beginning with the "find" at the end of The Faun and the Shepherdess, to which, as we saw in the previous chapter, an early reviewer called attention. With its tetrachordal octatonicism it is a veritable chip off Kashchey (Ex. 4.41). Once Rimsky had discovered tritonal equilibrium in Kashchey, he occasionally applied the device to tetrachordal tunes with intervallic species other than T-S-T. In the passage from Kitezh given as Example 4.42, two major (T-T-S) tetrachords are so treated. But if the source of Rimsky's late tritonal experiments was a scene from Siegfried, it is no less true that Rimsky significandy (and creatively) "misread" his model, and that, like all Russian composers but Scriabin, he remained first and last TRITONES

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ways as well (as in their "modal" folk song harmonizations) tended to avoid or weaken the dominant function in their music.40 Where Wagner's pervasive tritone in Siegfried had been a prolonged double-dominant pedal (or so, at any rate, he thought, as we can tell from his key signatures), Rimsky's in Kashchey was a duplex tonic (as Yavorsky was perhaps the first to recognize), an incipient interval cycle or "tonal axis." T R A N S M I S S I O N

Reliance on tonal axes of this sort (stable tritones, circles of thirds) kept RimskyKorsakov, or so he was convinced, from contamination by the free-flowing, amorphous harmonic lava of "decadents" like his two bêtes noires, d'Indy and Strauss. But he paid such a high price for this escape from freedom that one begins to wonder if his experiments in fantastic harmony did not on occasion do his music more harm than good. They offered a ubiquitous opportunity for easy tonal rotations around the trusty axes—a line of minimal resistance to any composer. And thus they seduced Rimsky-Korsakov into a penchant for melodic/harmonic sequences that may have been unequaled in any music since the days of Corelli and Vivaldi, when composers were fascinated by tonal rotations around another then-new harmonic axis, the diatonic circle of fifths. Virtually nothing happens in a late Rimsky-Korsakov opera that is not immediately and literally restated a third or a tritone away. This pattern obtains at every level, from the measure to the period to whole sections of a piece. There can be no denying that Rimsky-Korsakov's use of 40. For more on Russian dominant-avoidance, see Taruskin, "How the Acorn Took Root," 198200; and " 'Little Star,' " 57-68.

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symmetrical modes and axes became mechanical, and his sequences trite, obsessive, and—we may as well face it—somewhat philistine. His music has sunk into such low repute with many modern writers that, as we have seen, they have attempted to discount or even deny his influence on his celebrated pupil. Rimsky cannot be so easily shrugged off, however, for his octatonicism was explicitly acknowledged, widely discussed, and openly emulated by the whole Belyayev school. It probably even gave Scriabin his first nudge in that direction. The earliest explicit mention of the tone-semitone scale in print, so far as I have been able to trace, was made by Yastrebtsev in a 1900 jubilee article celebrating Rimsky-KorsakoVs thirty-fifth year of creative activity.41 YastrebtseVs diary, however, recorded discussions of the scale as much as five years earlier. And the scale turns up in the work of Rimsky's pupils as early as 1889, for example in Lyadov's sketches for an unrealized ballet called Zoryusbka, sketches with which the notoriously dilatory Lyadov continued to tinker for the rest of his life (Ex. 4.43). 42 A thoroughly Rimskian brand of octatonicism also informs Lyadov's fantasy miniatures for orchestra, Baba-yaga (1905) and Kikimora (1910). 43 Octatonicism is rare in the work of Glazunov, who was never much drawn to the depiction of the fantastic. Nevertheless, it can be found. There is a fascinating rotation by minor thirds through four "Russian minor" (Dorian) keys in his Third Symphony (1890), dedicated to Chaikovsky (Ex. 4.44). The derivation of this rotation from Rimsky's example might be questioned insofar as it could be seen as a compression of the conspicuously novel key relationships in the first movement of the dedicatee's Fourth Symphony (1876)—first theme in F minor, second theme in A-flat minor, codetta in B major, recapitulation in D minor, coda in F minor— and was thus an act of homage to Chaikovsky, who had made his own adaptation of Liszt's modulatory habits. The passage cited in Example 4.45, however, is undeniably faithful to the Rimskian prototype. It is from the coda of the third tableau in Glazunov's ballet The Seasons. In it, a typical arpeggiation of a diminishedseventh chord is linked by passing tones in the bass, producing an explicit octatonic scale with passing reference to dominant sevenths (the last an augmented sixth) on each of the four octatonic nodes. 41. RMG 7, no. 51 (17 December 1900), col. 1269: "Rimsky-Korsakov has introduced into the art of music the utterly new, and before him unknown, artistic treatment of the augmented triad, the chords of the second, ninth, and eleventh, and the 'tone-semitone' scale." The knowing quality of the reference and the lack of a definition lead one to suspect that Yastrebtsev had written for publication about the scale before this. 42. Lyadov began work on this ballet at the same time Rimsky-Korsakov was composing Mlada. Rimsky's sketchbook for Mlada opens in fact with the notation, "conceived 15 February 1889 . . . at Anatoly's [i.e., Lyadov's] suggestion" (N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy 4[suppl.]:4o). The two must have exchanged many octatonic ideas, Lyadov acting as Rimsky's sounding board much as he had done ten years before in the very different context of the "Chopsticks" paraphrases. 43. A manuscript page containing virtually the same sketch as the one given as Example 4.43 is found among the materials intended for the ballet Leyla iAlaley, which Lyadov planned together with the novelist and fabulist Aleksey Remizov and on which he worked sporadically in 1912 and 1913. The page is reproduced in Zaporozhets, Lyadov, 175.

[298]

4

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TO

KASHCHEY:

HARMONIC

SORCERY

EXAMPLE Korsakov:

4.43

vospominamya

Lyadov, sketch for Zoryushka 1886-1908,

(after V . V . Yastrebtsev, N.A.

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EXAMPLE

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ed. A . V . Ossovsky [Leningrad, 19551-60], 1:188)

5 5

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'

i

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By the time we reach the next Belyayevets generation, that of Stravinsky's immediate seniors, octatonic scales and octatonically referable chord progressions are so legion that the prospect of selecting examples is daunting. So let us allow Yastrebtsev to make the choice for us. Describing the program of the fourth Russian Symphony (Belyayev) concert of the 1903 season (at a rehearsal for which he first made the acquaintance of "a very sweet and musical youth" named Igor Stravin-

TRANSMISSION

[ 299 ]

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sky), Yastrebtsev remarked that Nikolai Cherepnin's Fantaisie dramatique (Dmmaticheskayafantaziya), op. 17, used "the Korsakovian scale [korsakovskayagamma\: semitone-whole-tone." 44 He referred, no doubt, to the rather obvious climactic passage given in Example 4.46 from the turbulent middle of the piece. Also on the program was the orchestral fantasy that Rimsky-Korsakov had arranged from the Triglav Mountain scene in Mlada, a piece full of passages in the diminished mode that were to resurface treacherously in the "Danse infernale" from The Firebird. And no wonder. Attendance at this concert and its rehearsals constituted Stravinsky's initiation into the Belyayevets inner circle, a great event in his early musical life. It would be safe to say that everything about the occasion and the works played would have made a deep and lasting impression on him. A t any rate, it must be clear by now that the tone-semitone scale, a.k.a. the Korsakovian scale, a.k.a. the octatonic scale, had become a St. Petersburg specialty by the time Stravinsky came upon the scene, and so it would remain for a long while thereafter. Prokofiev picked it up in his turn, as can be observed in numerous passages in such works as the cantata They Are Seven (Semero ikh, 1918), the opera Love 44. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:277 (28 February 1903).

[300]

4

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EXAMPLE 4.46

Nikolai Cherepnin, Dramaticheskaya fcmtaziya, op. 17, mm. 506-30

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for Three Oranges (1919), where a very baldly displayed octatonic scale is Fata Morgana's leitmotif, and the Fifth Piano Sonata (1923).45 Stravinsky passed his years of apprenticeship in an environment in which seemingly every other new composition featured the tone-semitone scale, in which the scale was enthusiastically discussed informally (witness Yastrebtsev), and in which—thanks to Yastrebtsev and Yavorsky, among others—the scale was even recognized theoretically, in print. Its Lisztian origins were freely and reverendy acknowledged, which may be one reason why as late as 1925 Stravinsky could tell an interviewer, "Please do not think that I do not admire [Chopin],... [But] I have higher honor and admiration for the great Liszt whose immense talent in composition is often underrated,"46 a remark that might almost be adduced, in light of our present knowledge, as Stravinsky's oblique affirmation of his octatonic proclivities. His earliest exposure to the world of symmetrical third-relations probably came through Rimsky-Korsakov's harmony text, out of which Stravinsky received his earliest systematic training at the hands of Akimenko and Kalafati. The book contains a concluding section on "false progressions" (lozhniye posledovatei'nosti) that covers both the "circle of major thirds" (krug bol'shikh tertsiy, pars. 294-97) and the "circle of minor thirds" {krug malikh tertsiy, pars. 298-99). A set of models for the 45. For a discussion of Prokofiev's octatonicism, see Yu. N . Kholopov, "Diatonicheskiye ladi i tertsovi'ye khromaticheskiye sistemi' v muzi'ke Prokof'yeva," in OtLyulli do nashikh dney, ed. V. D. Konen ( M o s c o w : Muzi'ka, 1 9 6 7 ) , 2 7 7 - 7 8 .

46. £tude (January 1925), quoted in P & D : 2 0 4 . The conventionally disparaging remarks on Liszt in Stravinsky's very late New York Review of Books interviews (reprinted in part in T & C : I 8 3 ) will serve to show for the nth time how little the voluminous memoirs and interviews of Stravinsky's last period may be trusted for general biographical purposes.

[ 3 0 2 ]

4

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connections between triads on the circle of major thirds is given, with the resulting bass line labeled as the "scale by whole tones" {gamma tselimi tonami). The octatonic scale is not given as such, but a pair of exercises is given for smooth connections through the circle of minor thirds in which the bass line is an octatonic scalar progression through a tritone. The student is then assigned to "complete the example begun," and by doing so to discover the (as yet unchristened) tone-semitone scale, in both its guises, for himself. The exercises and examples in question are all set out in Example +.47. How well Stravinsky heeded these lessons we may learn by turning one more time to Yastrcbtsev's memoirs. In his account of one of his last visits to RimskyKorsakov (12 April 1908), we read the following: After dinner Maximilian Oseyevich [Steinberg, Rimsky's pupil and son-in-lawto-be] recalled at the piano some excerpts from the music of Igor Stravinsky's "Bees" [i.e., the Scherzo fantastique, op. 3]. Rimsky-Korsakov picked out an interesting harmonization of the tone-semitone scale that Glazunov had composed, and also something from Lyadov's musical suite (a curious Dies Irae a la "Kashchey"), and I played some forgotten chord progressions by Anatoly Konstantinovich [Lyadov, probably the Zoryushka music given above in Ex. 4.43]. 4 7

Obviously under discussion was the tone-semitone scale itself and its widespread use among the composers of the Belyayev school, to which discussion each participant contributed keyboard illustrations in turn. Stravinsky's Scherzo fantastique— which, as we shall see in the next chapter, is one of the most single-mindedly octatonic pieces he or anyone ever composed—had been Exhibit A. Stravinsky would never entirely shake the habits of tonal organization his training instilled in him. His tonal plans, for example, would often remain within a Rimskian or Lisztian octatonic orbit as long as he was writing tonally centered music. In the Concerto per due pianoforti soli of 1935, a piece that seems about as far removed from the concerns of Stravinsky's formative period as can be imagined, symmetrical third relations nevertheless hold sway. The first movement is centered around E and B-flat, while the second movement fills in the octatonic interstices with G and D-flat. The quattro variazioni (third movement) and the preludio e fug a employ all four of these centers in turn (Variation 1 on G, Variation 2 unstable, Variation 3 on C-sharp, Variation 4 on B-flat; the fugue ends where the concerto began, on E). Key rotations by major thirds are also to be found, of course: the Sonate for piano (1924) has three movements in C, A-flat, and E, respectively. But of course it is the music of the "Russian" period that remains most closely bound to the world of Russian "fantastic" harmony. Now that we have traced the origins and development of that harmonic style, we are prepared to take that music fully in our stride. 47. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:495.

TRANSMISSION

[303]

EXAMPLE 4.47 N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: literaturnïye protzvedeniya i pereptska, vol. 4: Uchebnik garmonii (Moscow: Muzgiz, I960), 222-24 FALSE PROGRESSIONS ALONG THE CIRCLE OF MAJOR THIRDS f 2 9 4 From tonic triads: motive I 1

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4.47

(continued)

1 2 9 6 . Correct preparation, but false resolution of dissonances: Major

-

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; esp. E & D 127-28/26. The quoted phrases come from the last-cited source. 2. Ginzburg (ed.), N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muztkal'noye obrazovaniye, 266. After leaving the Conservatory Pokrovsky worked as a music teacher at an elite primary school in St. Petersburg, where, on 7 December 1901, he led the school chorus in a performance of a little suite he had composed called "The Four Seasons" (Chetire vremeni goda). The nineteen-year-old Igor Stravinsky accompanied the performance. An announcement of the concert in the newspaper Nopoye vremya (3 December 1901) was Stravinsky's first mention in print. See Anatoliy Kuznetsov, "Muzi'ka Stravinskogo na kontsertnoy estrade Rossii (1907-1917)," Muzikal'naya akademiya, 1992, no. 4, 119. 3. B. M. Yarustovksy, Igor' Stravinskiy, 2d ed. (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1969), 17.

[ 307 ]

ries Evenings of Contemporary Music,4 but he was exaggerating.5 Pokrovsky did participate as pianist in the very first public concert sponsored by the Evenings (31 March 1902), accompanying songs both of his own and of Walter Nouvel's creation, among other things.6 That Stravinsky remembered this even in a distorted way would seem to show that he attended the Evenings from their very inception; but it must be taken into account that Nouvel ghostwrote the Chroniques and possibly contributed to them to some indeterminable degree.7 Pokrovsky composed over two dozen songs in the course of his brief career (mainly to texts by nineteenth-century poets, but also to Konstantin Balmont), of which a few were published by Jurgenson. One of them, "It's cold, it's quiet" ("Kbolodno, tikho"), was set to a poem by Stravinsky's cousin Yevgeniy Yelachich.8 Evidently an accomplished pianist, Pokrovsky appeared for the Evenings at least twice after the debut concert. Both times he performed Reger—not exacdy a Stravinsky favorite.9 Indeed, his activity on Reger's behalf somewhat belies Stravinsky's recollection of Pokrovsky as one who cultivated "a taste for everything French." 10 But by the time Stravinsky was composing seriously, and Pokrovsky half-seriously, they could no longer have been close, for there is no early Stravinsky composition dedicated to Pokrovsky, as there are to Nikolai Richter, Stepan Mitusov, and the Rimsky-Korsakov sons, the comrades of his fledgling composing years. In any case, the French music Stravinsky explored with Pokrovsky was of a pre-Impressionist vintage—the memoirs mention Gounod, Bizet, Delibes, Offenbach, Chabrier—stuff that was merely sneered at in the Belyayev world. If it had any direct impact at all on Stravinsky's early imaginings, it showed up only in his early symphony's "balletic" Scherzo. To understand why Stravinsky made so much of Pokrovsky (and especially in the Chroniques, written in Paris), one must bear in mind the lingering effects of the postwar Ballets Russes ideology, in which the musiquette of the Second Empire was taken up as a cause, pardy because Chaikovsky had admired it and pardy because it was as un-boche as music could be. Diaghilev and, following him, Stravinsky swore by it and ostentatiously claimed it as an ersatz patrimony. But all of that lay far in the future during the Pokrovsky period. So when did Stravinsky begin to respond seriously and creatively to modern 4. An Autobiography, 17. 5. The actual founding board consisted of Alfred Nurok, Walter Nouvel, Vyacheslav Karatlgin, Ivan Krizhanovsky, and Alexander Medem. See the next chapter for additional information about these men and about the Evenings of Contemporary Music. 6. RMG 11, no. 14 (6 April 1902), col. 441. More songs by Pokrovsky were performed during the 1905-6 season; Karati'gin pronounced them "well put together" ("Vechera sovremennoy muzi'ki," Vest 3, nos. 3-4 [1906]: 70). 7. See App. K ("Walter Nouvel and Chroniques cU ma pie") in Se!C0rrII:487-502. 8. See G. Ivanov, Russkaya poeziya v otecbestvennoy muzike 2:187. 9. Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Bach, op. 81 (20 February 1906); Piano Quintet, op. 64 (4 April 1906). 10. E&D:28/26.

[308]

5 • BELLS,

BEES,

AND

ROMAN

CANDLES

French music? The question is of consequence at this point, it being so often held that French influence showed up for the first time in Stravinsky's orchestral pieces of the years 1908-9 and that it played a critical part in helping him find his true composer's voice. 11 There is not a shred of evidence, whether internal or external, to support such an assumption, though Stravinsky abetted it greatly. Which is not to deny the sincerity of his many avowals to the effect that "the musicians of my generation and I myself owe the most to Debussy," as he put it in Conversations.12 By 1959 Stravinsky vasdy preferred Debussy to Rimsky-Korsakov as a creditor. But he simply knew too littie Debussy—and knew it too late—to have amassed any such debt. As far as one can gather from the available documents, Stravinsky's earliest exposure to Debussy's music probably came at the Evenings concert of 22 January 1903, when the suite "Pour le piano" was played alongside works by Franck, Rachmaninoff, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Ludwig Thuille, and Alexander Davidovich Medem (1871-1927), one of the founders of the series, whose music, forgotten today, was ubiquitous on "advanced" St. Petersburg programs in the early years of the century. Stravinsky's earliest exposure to really mature and characteristic Debussy evidendy took place at Rimsky-KorsakoVs sixtieth birthday party (6 March 1904), when we know Felix Blumenfeld played Estampes as a kind of practical joke. 13 The next month, Pelléas was played and discussed at Rimsky's as a symbol of the state of music in the West: "not progress but decay" was the Korsakovian verdict. 14 In the summer of 1904 Vincent d'Indy conducted the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (the Russian program translated the tide as "Prelude: To a Faun in the Afternoon," much to d'Indy's amusement), 15 as well as Dukas's L'apprenti sorcier, before a tiny audience in the resort town of Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg. 16 Stravinsky, working away on his piano sonata at the Yelachich estate in Pavlovka a thousand miles away, did not attend these performances (nor is there any reason to suppose that an ardent young Belyayevets would have been especially eager to hear them), but it is certain that he heard the St. Petersburg premières of both pieces, which took place the following season. L'apprenti sorcier was given under Alexander Siloti on 16 October 1904. 17 It is the one French "influence" that does show up un11. Cf. New Grave Dictionary 18:243: "[The Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks] show . . . the impact (so much deplored by Rimsky-Korsakov) o f the new French music"; Vlad, Stravinsky, 6: " T h e influence o f French impressionism on Stravinsky becomes more specific and more marked in the Scherzo fantastique, op. 3"; P & D : 6 I : "Stravinsky's debt to Debussy began while Stravinsky was still a student o f Rimsky-Korsakov." 12. Conv:5o/48. 13. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:303. 14. Ibid., 307. 15. "A. N . " [A. P. Nurok], "Vensen d'Endi v Pavlovske," Mir iskusstva, 1904, no. 6, 123-24. 16. Memoir o f Walter Nouvel, in Arnold Haskell, Diaghileff: His Artistic and Private Life ( N e w York: D a C a p o Press, 1978), 146. 17. L. M . Kutateladze, "Predisloviye," in L. M . Kutateladze and L. N . Raaben, cds.,AleksandrIl'yich Ziloti, 1863-194-5: vospominaniya i pis'tna (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1963), 32.

A

FRENCH

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[309]

equivocally in Stravinsky's p re -Nightingale oeuvre (the well-known near plagiarism of its opening "magic formula" at fig. [9] in Fireworks, op. 4, will be inspected in due course). But surely it is not insignificant that this was the one French import that earned the Rimsky-Korsakov seal of approval: "In orchestration he's run rings around us all," the old man confessed to Yastrebtsev (23 November 1905), "and amazingly enough, the music is relatively free of nonsense."18 L'après-midi d'un faune was first performed in St. Petersburg under the prestigious auspices of the Russian Musical Society by the visiting conductor Camille Chevillard in January 1905.19 Stravinsky called this première "one of the major events of my early years,"20 the other one being the Russian première of the Nocturnes for orchestra (minus "Sirènes") under Siloti on 15 December 1907. The influence of the latter composition, and in particular on the Scherzo fantastique, has been called "pervasive."21 But in point of fact the Scherzo had been sketched the previous summer, as we know from Stravinsky's letters to his teacher.22 As for Ravel, his Rapsodie espagnole, which Stravinsky recalled as the "dernier cri in harmonic subtlety and orchestral brilliance" for the young musicians of his day,23 was not heard in St. Petersburg until Siloti gave it on 3 January 1909. Stravinsky's recollection of the work's reclame was certainly accurate: the RMG, issue of 30 November 1908, gave it a fifteen-column razbor (descriptive commentary with examples) in preparation for the première, and the Rapsodie was so successful that Siloti repeated it the next season (12 December 1909).24 But knowledge of this score came too late to be of use to Stravinsky, creatively speaking, in any work prior to the first act of The Nightingale. And while there certainly are traces of Rapsodie and Nocturnes alike in Stravinsky's opera (and in his first ballet as well), they should not be evaluated without due account of a constant underlying irony. That irony consists in the fact that the French composers who interested the Russian composers of Stravinsky's generation were themselves heavily indebted to the Russian composers of Rimsky-Korsakov's generation. This is particularly evident in the case of the Rapsodie espagnole, with its numerous Rimskian affinities ranging from woodwind cadenzas à la Sheherazade or Capriccio espagnol to rushing octatonic scales à la Sadko. Some of the very features of Debussy's or Ravel's music that seem to have affected Stravinsky's most direcdy were actually Russian borrowings of this kind. It may be worth jumping ahead for a moment to The Firebird for a particularly piquant example. "I was more proud of some of the orchestration than of the music itself," wrote Stravinsky many years later, going on to specify: 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. [310]

5 •

Yastrebtsev, Vospommaniya 2:365. Yarustovsky, Stravinskiy, 38. E&D:85/59; he mistakenly recalled Siloti as the conductor. New Grave Dictionary 18:243. One of them has already been cited in the Introduction to this book (p. 7). E & D : 86/59-60. Kutateladze, "Predisloviye," in Kutateladze and Raaben (eds.), Ziloti, 33.

BELLS,

BEES,

AND

ROMAN

CANDLES

For me the most striking effect in The Firebird

was the natural-harmonic string

glissando near the beginning [i.e., at 7 before fig. [1] in the introduction; Ex. 5.1a], which the bass chord touches off like a Catherine-wheel. I was delighted to have discovered this, and I remember my excitement in demonstrating it to Rimsky's violinist and cellist sons. I remember, too, Richard Strauss's astonishment when he heard it t w o years later in Berlin. 2 5

But Stravinsky had "discovered" the effect in Rapsodie espagnole, where it appears in the viola and cello six bars into the last movement ("Feria"; Ex. 5.1b). And where had Ravel discovered it? In Rimsky-Korsakov! It appears in the suite from the opera Christmas Eve (Noch'pered rozhdestvom), in the section called "Demonic Carol" ("Besovskaya kolyadka"; Ex. 5.1c).26 This suite was heard in Paris under RimskyKorsakov's own baton, at one of the concerts put on by Diaghilev in his first year of musical impresario activity in the French capital. The concert took place on 16 May 1907. 27 Ravel, who was in the audience, finished the Rapsodie espagnole in October of that year, and completed the orchestration in February 1908. Meanwhile, the Christmas Eve suite remained popular in Paris and, by a strange coincidence, was performed by the orchestra of the Concerts Colonne on the very program that included the première of the Rapsodie espagnole (15 March 1908).28 Now, the reason why Stravinsky may have learned about the harmonic glissando from Ravel rather than direcdy from his own teacher is that Christmas Eve (1895) was an old composition by the time Stravinsky became close to Rimsky-Korsakov and (to judge by the Yastrebtsev memoirs) was rarely discussed or played in those years, while the Rapsodie espagnole was all the rage exactly when Stravinsky received the Firebird commission. Yet in the event, his glissandi were obviously modeled on Rimsky's: the cello part in the Firebird passage might almost have been copied right out of Rimsky's score. St. Petersburg gossip concerning Ravel's sources must have sent Stravinsky back to Rimsky's old opera. As for Strauss, he too was at the Paris concert in 1907; that was where he made his famous comment on the works of the Russian composers so dear to the French: "This is all very well, but unfortunately we are no longer children." 29 It hardly seems likely that Stravinsky would have surprised him five years later with the same orchestral effects, even though the glissandi are far more conspicuous in The Firebird than they were in the work of 25. E&D:i5o/i32. 26. Rimsky included the passage as example 276 in his Principles of Orchestration (Osnovi Orkestrovki), but the book was first published posthumously in 1915, too late to have furnished either Ravel or Stravinsky with the harmonics idea. It is not impossible, though, that Rimsky spoke of the device in the course of putting the book together and that Stravinsky thus picked it up directly from his teacher. Rimsky included the passage under the heading "Artificial Effects," which he defined as "operations which are based on certain defects of hearing and the faculties of perception[ !]," meaning that they employ sounds either foreign to the harmony or out of tune, the falseness of which the ear has no time to detect (Principles of Orchestration, trans. Edward Agate [New York: Dover, 1964], 116). 27. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:422-23. 28. Arbie Ornstein, Ravel: Man and Musician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 57-58.

29. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:423.

A FRENCH

LEGEND

[311]

0 H

£ u Xi

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, the composer claimed that the choreographic treatment was "unauthorized by me, 36. Sec the Introduction, pp. 7-8. 37. IStrSM:44i-43. 38. "En été 1907 je lisais beaucoup de livres sur la vie des abeilles et j'étais fort ému par maintes détails de la vie de ce monde extraordinaire. Cette vie ininterrompue d'usine (ruche) à travers des générations et ce vol nuptial de la reine des abeilles, ce meurtre du mâle, son amant, dans les hauteurs vertigineuses, cette énergie vitale et ce lyrisme féroce m'ont servi comme base, soit-disant littéraire, pour ce poème symphonique, que j'ai intitulé 'scherzo fantastique.' La partition d'orchestre de cette ouvrage était le dernier que mon maître Nicolas Rimsky-Korsakov ait connu de moi. Malheureusement il ne l'avait jamais entendu à l'orchestre étant mort quelques mois avant l'exécution de cette pièce qui eut lieu en hiver 1908 dans les concerts Ziloti (et sous sa baguette) à Saint Pétersbourg.—Igor Strawinsky" (French errors original.) 39. P&D:47—48.

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fig.

j.i.

Stravinsky entry (by Grigoriy Timofeyev) in S. Yuzhakov, ed., Bol'shaya

entsiklopediya, vol. 22 (suppl.) (St. Petersburg: Prosveshcheniye, 1909), 551. This first biographical notice on the composer reads: "Stravinsky, Igor Fyodorov[ich], composer. Son of the famous singer Fyod[or] Ign[atyevich] S., artist of the Imp[erial] Theat[er]. Born 1882. Having completed the full course (all eight semesters) at the University o f St. Petersburg, he began preparing at his parents' wishes for a pianist's career. But the composer's calling, manifested from his early years, gained the upper hand and he began studying harmony. A decisive influence on S. was his acquaintance with the family of N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1903-4 he composed a grand sonata in four movements. From 1905 he began taking regular private lessons from R.-Korsakov in orchestration and theory o f composition. In the same year he composed a symphony in E-flat (perf. 1908 by the Court Orch.). Later followed (1907): a suite 'Faun and Shepherdess' (Pushkin) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (perf. 1908 by the Court Orch. and at the 'Russ[ian] Symph[ony] Conc[erts]'), 'Spring' (Gorodetsky) for voice and piano and 'Pastorale' for voice (without words) and piano."

and, of course, I had not seen it," 40 but the letter to Maeterlinck reveals that in November 1916 he had met with Jacques Rouché, director of the Paris Opera, and with Staats to approve their plans. A letter to Gabriel Pierné (4 December 1916) announces his intention to attend the première.41 Indeed, had illness not prevented him, he would have conducted it. 42 Prior to 1931, only the composer could have been the source of any notion that the Scherzo fantastique had ever concerned bees, for the original published score (Ed. Jurgenson, 1910) does not contain the "Remarque." By the time he finished the score, which is dated 30 March 1908, Stravinsky had decided—like so many other composers before and since—to keep his program to himself, scared off, perhaps, by his teacher's excessively popular apiarian essay. In the résumé he prepared for Grigoriy Timofeyev (dated 13 March 1908), Stravinsky already suppressed all reference to Maeterlinck or to bees, stating simply that "I am now finishing a big 'Fantastic Scherzo' for orchestra." 43 Nor was there any hint of a program when the work was given its première performance under Siloti in 1909. Yet Émile Vuillermoz's article on the composer, published in Paris in 1912, contained the information that "the summer of 1907 saw the completion of the Scherzo fantastique, inspired by reading The Life of the Bee."44 This article, written long before there was any plan for a ballet, was based—to judge not only from this item but also from others that will be cited in later chapters—on an extended and exceptionally forthright interview with Stravinsky. THE

APIARIAN

PROGRAM

When all is said and done, the Scherzo fantastique makes a far better-integrated impression when its programmatic intentions are taken into account, for the literary source conditioned many of the composition's distinctive features, all the way from its orchestral sound to its sectional structure. Matching of music to program cannot be accomplished in definitive detail, since documentation is lacking. That the original programmatic concept was detailed, however, is apparent from Stravinsky's letter to Rimsky-Korsakov of 18 June 1907: "When we see each other I'll show you the spots [in Maeterlinck] I took for the program, since it won't all go into a letter."45 When one knows this much, certain passages from Maeterlinck's book fairly leap to the eye.

40. 41. 42. 43.

Conv:4i/40. SelCorrI:393. SelCorrII:i82n.3. IStrSM:445. The article, when it appeared, did not mention the piece (S. N. Yuzhakov, ed., Bol'shaya èntsiklopediya [St. Petersburg: Prosveshcheniye, 1909], 22[suppl.]:s5i). 44. Émile Vuillermoz, "Strawinsky," Revue musicale S.I Ai. 8, no. 5 (1912): 17-18. ("L'été de 1907 voit s'achever le Scherzo fantastique, que lui inspira une lecture de la Vie des Abeilles.") 45. IStrSM:44i.

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The very opening of the piece, to begin with—a four-note leitmotif given out by a muted trumpet playing forte, as thin and piercing a timbre as can be imagined— could only have been suggested by this passage from Maeterlinck's fourth chapter ("The Young Queens"): " . . . and at last she goes, and wanders from comb to comb, her unsatisfied wrath finding vent in the war-song, or angry complaint, that every bee-keeper knows; resembling somewhat the note of a distant trumpet ofsilver; so intense, in its passionate feebleness, as to be clearly audible, in the evening especially, two or three yards away from the double walls of the most carefully enclosed hive." 46 Maeterlinck goes on immediately to note the "magical effect" this song has on the worker bees, and in Stravinsky's Scherzo the opening trumpet call is followed by the first "magical" harmonies—a complete whole-tone aggregate, built up out of successive rushing entrances in the strings and ending in a pulsating tremolando: we see worker after worker coming to attention (Ex. 5.2a). The "A" section of this traditional A-B-A scherzo, in all its moto perpetuo scurry and bustle, obviously represents "The Swarm," entrancingly described by Maeterlinck in his second chapter. Passages of sequential patterning around symmetrical (octatonic or whole-tone) harmonic progressions, their elements recurring in a predictable periodicity, give an ineluctable impression of circularity (such things, in fact, are usually called harmonic "circulations" or "rotations"). What better opportunity, then, to set the magic octatonic wheels a-spinning than Maeterlinck's description of the motion of the swarm: " . . . they all seem bewitched; they fly in dense circles round and r o u n d . . . , like a living jelly stirred by an invisible hand" (Ex. 5.2b). 47 The metaphors relating Stravinsky's harmonic symmetries and interval cycles to Maeterlinck's description of the life of the bee are elaborate indeed, and specific. The poet-naturalist's discussion of the shape of honeycombs could not fail to ring a bell: "There are only . . . three possible figures of the cells," he writes, "which can make them all equal and similar, without any useless interstices. These are the equilateral triangle, the square, and the regular hexagon." 48 What young St. Petersburger studying with Rimsky-Korsakov would not have reflected that in music, too, there were equilateral triangles (the "circle of major thirds," dividing the twelve semitones by fours into three equal intervals), squares (the "circle of minor thirds," dividing them by threes into four), and regular hexagons (the "scale by whole tones," dividing them by twos into six)—all regular figures that partitioned the octave "without interstices." These figures never received a clearer or more systematic demonstration than in Stravinsky's "Bees." +6. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, trans. Alfred Sutro (London: George Allen, 1904), 209; italics added. 47. Ibid., 65. 48. Ibid., 156.

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EXAMPLE

5.2

a. Scherzo fantastique, mm. 1-5 0 |,lL

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b. Scherzo fantastique, figs,

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EXAMPLE

5.2

(continued)

c. Scherzo fantastique, figs. 120 H 22] 8va

The passages of quasi-recitative that interrupt the proceedings now and then— passages in which two instruments seem to carry on a conversation, or in which a melodic idea is transmitted in sequence through a series of solo voices in imitation—must have had their origin in the description, in Maeterlinck's third chapter ("The Foundation of the City"), of the bees' "methods of intercommunication,... the manner in which news good or bad, normal or supernatural, will at once spread in the hive."49 In the case of Stravinsky's Scherzo, the news is all supernatural, of course, these being precisely the passages in which the most recherché octatonic partitions are assayed (Ex. 5.2c). The whole middle section of the Scherzo describes the queen bee's "Nuptial Flight" (Le vol nuptial), as described in Maeterlinck's fifth chapter, which is explicitly mentioned both in the "Remarque préliminaire" to the score and in the ballet scenario of 1917. The treacly erotic music of this section is always compared with Wagner, though exactly what Wagner seems to be anyone's guess: Tannhauser, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal have all been put forth as candidates. The Wagnerian resonance was not Stravinsky's idea, however; it was a genuine artifact of the "socalled literary basis." What musician of the early twentieth century could have read the following passage and not thought of Tristan? Prodigious nuptials, these, the most fairy-like that can be conceived, azure and tragic, raised high above life by the impetus of desire; imperishable and terrible, unique and bewildering, solitary and infinite. An admirable ecstasy, wherein death, supervening in all that our sphere has of most limpid and loveliest, in virginal, limidess space, stamps the instant of happiness on the sublime transparence of the 49. Ibid., 131.

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great sky; p u r i f y i n g in that immaculate light the s o m e t h i n g o f wretchedness that always hovers around love, rendering the kiss o n e that can never be f o r g o t t e n . 5 "

Maeterlinck's description of the eventual apiarian Liebestod (the male's) must be an example of what Stravinsky had in mind when he wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov, "At first I thought that for the fullest exposition of the program I'd select definite citations from [Maeterlinck's] work, but I see that this will be impossible, since the languages of science and of literature are too closely intertwined." 51 Here is the passage in question: M o s t creatures have a v a g u e belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind o f transparent membrane, divides death f r o m love, and that the p r o f o u n d idea o f Nature demands that the giver o f life should die at the m o m e n t o f giving. H e r e this idea, w h o s e m e m o r y lingers still over the kisses o f man, is realized in its primal simplicity. N o sooner has the union been accomplished than the male's a b d o m e n opens, the organ detaches itself, d r a g g i n g w i t h it the mass o f the entrails, the w i n g s relax, and, as t h o u g h struck by lightning, the emptied b o d y turns and turns o n itself and sinks into the abyss. 5 2

These words must have been what inspired the music at fig. [47], with its vertiginous fluttertongues, its chromatic "thematic transformations," and above all its patently Wagnerian device (so labeled by Rimsky-Korsakov) of crescendo to pianissimo subito before the "real" crescendo to forte, followed by a spent subsiding. But quoting Maeterlinck's description in all its clinical detail would surely have produced a ludicrous bathos. The buzzing music at [48], marked "Con furore," and the lengthy transition to the modified reprise of A, one bar before [65], must represent "The Massacre of the Males," described in Maeterlinck's sixth chapter: "One morning the long-expected word of command goes through the hive [trumpets before [49]!]; and the peaceful workers turn into judges and executioners." 53 The literal, placid recapitulation at the coda (fig. [90]) may have been prompted by the last sentence of the chapter, which forms a transition to Maeterlinck's concluding reflections (chap. 7) on "The Progress of the Race": "the veritable sun of the real, great s p r i n g . . . gently awakens the workers, showing them that the sky once more is blue in the world, and that the uninterrupted circle that joins death to life has turned and begun afresh." 54 These are only the most obvious, incontestable correspondences between Maeterlinck's poeticized prose and Stravinsky's imaginal music. They are enough to show how thoroughly the Scherzo fantastique was shaped by its literary source: el50. Ibid., 263-64-

51. IStrSM:44i-

52. Maeterlinck, Life of the Bee, 252. 53. Ibid., 287. 54- Ibid., 294-95-

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ements from almost every chapter play a part, controlling the composition at every level. Stravinsky's music is not so much narrative or descriptive as metaphorical— which is probably why, ultimately, he felt it desirable to dispense with the program. Its publication might have spared him some complaints about the Scherzo's harmonic audacities, and certainly about its excessive length. In the end, though, he must have considered (or been convinced) that a literalistic programmatic exterior might impede penetration of the interior world of feeling, and in this he already shows some Symbolist tendency (Mallarmé: "Paint not the thing but the effect it produces"). 55 An early passage in Maeterlinck's book speaks of "a whole gamut of sounds" made by the bees, "ranging from profound delight to menace, distress and anger; they have the ode of the queen, the songs of abundance, the psalms of grief, and lastly the long and mysterious war-cries the adolescent princesses send forth during the combats and massacres that precede the nuptial flight. May this be a fortuitous music that fails to attain their inward silence?" 56 The poet believed not, and so he evidently persuaded the composer. Far better, the young Stravinsky must have thought, to stimulate sensations of profound delight, menace, distress, anger, and the rest, than merely to entertain his hearers' minds with images of bees. But that is still a far cry from "a piece of'pure' symphonic music."

STYLE

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Having said this much, we may from here on follow the composer's wishes and leave the program to one side. The Scherzo fantastique is also of interest to us as a "purely" musical manifestation of its time and place and as a measure of its young composer's progress. That he should have written a freestanding scherzo for orchestra, program or no program, was only to be expected. As a kuchkist tradition it went back half a century, to the very beginning of the New Russian School, when Musorgsky and Cui had made their debuts with orchestral scherzi composed under Balakirev's direction and performed during the very first concert season (1859—60) of the Russian Musical Society under Anton Rubinstein's baton. Rimsky-Korsakov had contributed his mite to the tradition with a scherzo in E-flat major (1866) that eventually found a home in his Third Symphony. All these New Russian scherzi featured piquant orchestral, rhythmic, and—especially—harmonic effects. That was what defined the genre and gave it a raison d'etre. The tradition continued into the succeeding kuchkist/Belyayevets generations. Lyadov's debut as a "free artist" (that is, after graduation from the Conservatory) was, true to form, an orchestral scherzo in D major (1879); his later Baba-Yaga and Kikimora were "fantastic scherzos" in all but name. Dukas's Apprenti sorcier, too, so popular in 55. "Peindre, non la chose, I'effet qu'ellc produit"; quoted in Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (New York: Harper & R o w , 1979), 75. 56. Maeterlinck, Life of the Bee, 45.

STYLE

AND

TECHNIQUE

I i 2ì}

Russia, was designated "Scherzo," and fits the academic definition of the form to a T. That must explain why Rimsky-Korsakov liked it: in form and facture it fell naturally, if fortuitously, into the traditions of the New Russian School. Stravinsky had already demonstrated an aptitude for scherzo-writing in his sonata and symphony. The Scherzo fcmtastique bears a decided familial resemblance to the symphony Scherzo, and is cast in the same B-major tonality Stravinsky had wanted for that piece before Rimsky-Korsakov made him take it down to B-flat, whether for ease of practical execution (Rimsky probably thinking ahead to the hectic conditions of a Court Orchestra reading) or for the sake of a properly classical sequence of keys as befitted a Habilitationsstiick. Now there was no need to consider key sequence, and virtuosity was no object. Comparison of the symphony Scherzo with the Scherzo fantastique testifies above all to an impressive capacity for growth in the handling of orchestral textures and colors. The new score was the work of a virtuoso in his own right. The orchestration is no longer "official," as Stravinsky would say of the symphony, but resourcefully tailored to the specific requirements of the individual piece. The orchestra itself is unique, making a sound unlike any other in the symphonic literature—the first of many such once-only Stravinskian agglomerations. Compare its roster with that of the symphony Scherzo: Symphony Scherzo

Scherzo fantastique

Piccolo

Piccolo

2 Flutes

3 Flutes (the second alternating with alto flute in G;

2 Oboes

2 Oboes

the third alternating with second piccolo) English horn 2 Clarinets in A

3 Clarinets in A (the third alternating with clarinet in

2 Bassoons

2 Bassoons

4 Horns in F

4 Horns in F

B-flat and in D ) Contrabassoon 2 Trumpets in B-flat

2 Trumpets in A Alto trumpet in F

3 Trombones Tuba Timpani Cymbals

Cymbal (suspended)

Bass drum Triangle Celesta 3 Harps Strings

Strings

The Scherzo fantastique orchestra is at once the larger of the two and the lighter. Super-rich in wind colors (some of them, like the clarinet in D and the alto trumpet, quite recondite), it completely dispenses with the heavy brass and percussion. [324]

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The absence of trombones is particularly noteworthy. More than a tour de force, it is probably a semijocular penance for the abuses that in Rimsky-Korsakov's opinion had marred the orchestration of the symphony. The one percussion instrument is a single suspended cymbal, not a crash pair, and it is never struck louder than mezzo-forte (usually it is rolled pianissimo). The preponderance of high registers and the prominence of flighty harp and celesta arpeggios, buzzy string tremolos, and the like surely had an apiarian motivation, though there is not much in the way of actual onomatopoeia. Until the stylistically incongruous Trio comes along, there is little to send the imagination off in search of a suppressed program. Of purely sensory stimulation there is a flood. Comparison of the way in which one characteristic phrase is respectively handled in the symphony Scherzo and in the Scherzo fantastique will show how Stravinsky had grown in his command of motive and texture. The first seems a kind of primitive sketch for the second, in which a typically Petersburgian variety of ersatz counterpoint based on chord tones is cannily laden with motives to enrich the sonorous surface (Ex. 5.3). The French-sixth harmony had been the exception in the earlier work; in the Scherzo fantastique it is the rule. Harmonies based on "fantastic" symmetrical scales in the Scherzo proper are contrasted, all too predictably, with diatonic relief in the Trio. This contrast, the hoariest of neo-kuchkist clichés, was a main conceptual prop for the piece: "The harmony in 'The Bees' will be fierce, like a toothache," Stravinsky had written Rimsky-Korsakov, "but all at once it should turn pleasant, like cocaine." 57 It was the toothache, naturally, that really interested the composer and his fellow Petersburgers. Whole-tone and octatonic scales, plus sundry cunning bridges between them, make up the whole harmonic substance of "The Bees." (The composer's modest technical advances along the octatonic trail, as we have already seen, were a matter of intense professional curiosity to his teacher and his generational peers.) The whole-tone and octatonic harmony provides the melodic basis of the music, too, along lines indicated in Example 5.3b, most of the tunes and motives in the Scherzo being extracted (to continue the dental analogy) from the harmonic sequences according to techniques already inferrable from the portions of RimskyKorsakov's harmony text that were presented in the previous chapter. The opening trumpet motive, for example (Ex. 5.2a), is a whole-tone derivation: its outer limits are the top and bottom of a whole-tone scale, and the arrangement into two minor sixths ( = augmented fifths) suggests a partition of the whole-tone aggregate into two mutually exclusive augmented triads. That is exactly what follows in the strings (and doubling woodwinds), as we have already observed in the same example: the two augmented triads are built up in turn and sustained, so that by the fifth measure a six-note chord is pulsating that comprises one of the two whole-tone collections in its entirety. The chord has a considerable parentage in 57. IStrSM:+42. STYLE

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[325]

EXAMPLE

5.3

a. Symphony in E-flat, Scherzo, fig. QT]

EXAMPLE

5.3b

(continued)

Rimsky-Korsakov's operas, as we have noted (see Exx. 3.27b and 3.28, from Snegurochka and Kashchey). Rimsky had two ways of resolving such whole-tone chords: either "outward" as French sixths, or "inward" to an augmented triad belonging to the other whole-tone collection. Stravinsky combines both approaches. On its first appearance (end of Ex. 5.2a) the chord resolves to the B-major tonic quite conventionally. The next time it occurs (fig. [17]), it resolves to the third B/D-sharp, which is then provided with the rest of the complementary whole-tone collection to which it belongs, creating a typically Rimskian development by parallel sequence. The periodic recurrence of the unalloyed whole-tone harmony of the beginning points up the fact that, like Rimsky in Snegurochka, Stravinsky conceived it as a leit-harmonie, probably meant in the first instance to represent the queen bee. More abstracdy, it functions in the piece as a static point of reference to introduce many major sections and all reprises. For the rest, the harmony of the Scherzo consists mainly of octatonic successions deployed with a practically unprecedented single-mindedness. All the characteristic Rimskian partitions are employed: from simple ( 0 3 6 9 ) thirds-rotations harmlessly chasing their tails (as in Ex. 5.2b); through tetrachordal partitions of the "melody scale" (cf. the Kashchey storm music shown in Ex. 4.38), including a passage that goes Rimsky one—no, two—better by placing minor tetrachords at each of the four octatonic nodes (Ex. 5.4a); all the way to elaborate sequences based on the Lisztian/Rimskian "chain mode" or "ladder of thirds" (cf. Exx. 4.25 and 4.26), including what must surely be the passage singled out for admiring discussion around Rimsky's piano, as reported by Yastrebtsev (Ex. 5.4b). In this last passage, the "chain" of thirds on the upper staff sums up the octatonic "harmony scale" as defined in the previous chapter, while the lower line in contrary motion sounds the "melody scale" on the downbeats, with intervening chromatic passing tones. The full-bar chords, meanwhile, sum up the two whole-tone collections. This diabolically clever concoction, partitioning the semitonal scale according to four different symmetrical patterns at once, must have seemed to the Rimsky-Korsakov circle the ne plus ultra of rationally justified nonfunctional chromaticism (and therefore

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[327]

EXAMPLE

5.4

a. Scherzo fantastique, 2 after 148 |

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"progressive" as against French and German "decay"). The whole thing is later repeated in a much accelerated retrograde that juxtaposes octatonic linear relations (the successive strong beats) with whole-tone verticalities in dizzying—yet always "rational" (read: sequential)—profusion (Ex. 5.4c). Stravinsky would return to the "ladder of thirds" again and again in his compositions up to The Firebird, ringing change after change upon the simple basic

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idea. In so doing, of course, he was affirming the peculiar Belyayevets faith in quasi-scientific, gradual linear progress in art (Rimsky to his pupils: "You absolutely need to know the last word in [musical] science!"). 58 Deliberately omitted from most of the examples so far have been the tunes, for in this work they are merely an epiphenomenon, a secondary outgrowth of the harmonic sequences. A few basic contour/rhythmic shapes are endlessly reversed, inverted, and otherwise permuted to accommodate the shifting successions of inexorable harmonic routines. The themes being just a surface adornment, it was not difficult to pile them up in impressive "contrapuntal" or quasi-canonic concatenations, such as the one illustrated in Example 5.3b. Just how elaborate this melodic/figurational "composing out" of Rimskian harmonic symmetries could get may be seen at fig. [56], reduced in Example 5.5a. Here, a complete whole-tone collection, expressed in terms of two permutations of the opening trumpet motive, provides a root progression, over which a sequence of diminished-seventh chords rises in parallel motion by whole steps through a complete whole-tone scale. Meanwhile, each diminished-seventh chord is complexly elaborated with passing tones in the divisi strings so as to form complete octatonic collections (at the same time contributing little motives and retrogrades of their own). The winds play a melody (Ex. 5.5b) that is similarly an octatonic embellishment of the whole tone-related diminished-seventh chords, except for the strong downbeat appoggiaturas, which are borrowed from the whole-tone collection in the bass. Again we have an ingeniously engineered, mechanistically calculated interpenetration of the two "fantastic" symmetrical scales, supporting a surface melody that is not the generator but the product of the harmony. As befits its origin—as its origin, in fact, dictates—the melody in Example 5.5b is rigidly sequential. It should be added that this whole passage unfolds in the course of an expertly executed "composed diminuendo," whereby the number of instruments playing is scaled down, by imperceptible degrees, from a near tutti at fig. [56] to a mere trio (piccolo, flute, solo violin) at [63] (Ex. 5.5c). This quiet passage was the one that made the best impression on the composer when he reencountered the Scherzo fantastique after more than three decades.59 The instruments having exchanged textural functions several times in the course of the long decrescendo, the flute and piccolo are now playing a remnant of the octatonic string divisi, and the solo violin is down to an obsessive reiteration of the whole tone—borrowed appoggiatura. If taken by itself the passage is incomprehensible and "atonal," there being no local explanation of the violin D-sharp that clashes so tinglingly, in this wispy texture, 58. R. V. Glezer, ed., M. F. Gnesin: stat'i, vospominaniya, materiali (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1961), 148.

59. Before the eightieth-birthday-year Canadian performances and recording, the last time Stravinsky seems to have conducted the Scherzo fantastique was in Bucharest in February 1930, on a strangely retrospective program that also included Fireworks and the Symphony in E-flat (see SelCorrI:2o;m.).

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[329]

EXAMPLE

5.5

a. Scherzo fantastique,figs.|56|-[59"|, reduced (compare with full score) [J • measure]

whole-tone collection

[56]'

UH © —o

(D

© •e-

©o

opening motive permuted (cf Ex. 5.2a) complementary whole-tone collection p. t.

p. t.

'MM ® *

i*J-

©

©

©

s

the same, reversed (inverted)

b. Scherzo fantastique, figs (co//. Sva throughout)

i fòri If 1

¥Ffom il

—1 —

'

Y

'

-

L- m

(Coll. Ill)

with the flute D's. In context, of course, the nature of the passage as a derivative of two simultaneously unfolding and, as it were, competing symmetrical pitch collections is clear. The symmetrical pitch collections indeed control and condition every aspect of this music. Because of the need to make quick transitions among the three octatonic fields, for instance, three harps were required (see especially figs. [13]—[15], [330]

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EXAMPLE

(continued)

5.5

c. Scherzo fantastique,fig.|63 I

1P

*

1Psï^r

V

t^É 3

fL

—

v

— i

—

i

—

1

!

MF Mf [67], [74]—[76]). Even the rhythm is affected. When major-third (whole tone/augmented) harmony (dividing the octave into three groups of four semitones) takes over from minor-third (octatonic/diminished) harmony (dividing the octave into four groups of three semitones), metrical hemiolas, embodying an analogous shift in the grouping of rhythmic pulses, are often brought into play. All in all, then, one can fairly say that Stravinsky's Scherzo fantastique represents the state of the art of symmetrically patterned harmony, vintage 1908. Rimsky-Korsakov had litde more to teach its composer either about instrumentation or about "flimsy enharmonic devices." All the more annoying, therefore, is the formal and structural naïveté the piece reveals; for this, too, was the product of Rimsky's teaching. The stylistic contrast introduced by the brief and (in the absence of the program) perfunctory-sounding Trio (figs. [37]-[48]) amounts to an incongruity. Stravinsky compared the alto flute melody, a flabby attempt at mock-Wagnerian lyricism, with the "Good Friday

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[331]

EXAM P LE

5.6

a. Scherzo fantastique,fig.| 381, flute

m b. Wagner, Die Meistersinger, Vorspiel, mm. 104-7, violin I

ffi&^i—1—— 4 .

j

5Ë ^ P —é— #

-¿r

3

—1 " - » »

e x a m p l e 5 . 7 Scherzo fantastique, figs, (compare with full score)

I

g

1

*

3

s. S»

-

—

, harmonic abstract

~

by whole tones —

3 E bVI

V (of B, orig. tonic)

Spell" in Parsifal.60 It seems at least equally beholden to Die Meistersinger, which Stravinsky had heard by 1907 in actual performance,61 at a time when Wagner's last music drama was still restricted to Bayreuth (Ex. 5.6). A stylistic lapse of such magnitude can only have been due to a literalistic adherence to the ill-fated program, coupled with the received notion that a scherzo had to have a slower, more lyrical trio. The only interesting feature of this particular Trio is the transition back into the Scherzo, where whole-tone and octatonic harmonies begin to insinuate themselves into the limp diatony of the midsection. The result is a passage that strikingly anticipates the coda to the "Ronde des princesses" in The Firebird (Ex. 5.7). The other disappointing aspect of the Scherzo fantastique is one that could not be avoided, given Stravinsky's commitment to the "rationalized" chromaticism of his 60. E&D:88n./62n. 61. See his letter to Wolfgang Wagner in R&C:ii6-I7 (T&C:2o6-7).

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teacher: he had picked up Rimsky's rigid habits of phrase construction to an appalling degree. "The phrases are all four plus four plus four, which is monotonous," Stravinsky complained after half a century; 62 but that kind of phrasing is a foregone conclusion when one's conception of chromatic harmony consists of dogged rotations around a fourfold cycle of thirds that come three to the octave. "Four plus four plus four," indeed, for the simple reason that 4 x 3 = 12 (Q.E.D.). Historians of serialism could actually make a great deal more of this piece than they have been able to make of the Scriabin who so fascinates them, though it were equally a factitious case and though the compulsively protoserial aspect of the Scherzo fantastique is at once its chief point of technical interest and its esthetic Achilles' heel.

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Awareness of the Scherzo's deficiencies seems implicit in the extreme compression of Stravinsky's next opus, the Fireworks (Feyerverk), op. 4—in all but name another "fantastic scherzo" for orchestra. The two works are so alike in harmonic and sonorous texture, yet so radically different in structural approach, that the second almost seems a revision of the first—and decidedly for the better. Where the form of the Scherzo had been dutifully schematic and its harmonic contrasts an idée reçue, the Fireworks presents a real and original interpénétration of the chromatic and the diatonic, together with a motivically integrated structure that projects a continuous development through its superficially identical scherzo-and-trio form. Stylistic and technical debts to Rimsky-Korsakov and others remain but no longer obtrude. Technical interest and esthetic appeal are in far better balance. If Fireworks was truly intended as a wedding present for Rimsky's daughter Nadya and her bridegroom, Maximilian Steinberg, Stravinsky would have had to begin composing it immediately upon finishing the orchestral score of the Scherzo. As we know, the latter is dated 30 March 1908, while Nadya's engagement had been announced on 12 February and formally celebrated on 8 March. 63 The wedding took place on 4 June in a village church near Lyubensk, the Rimsky-Korsakov summer home, only three days before Nikolai Andreyevich's sudden death. 64 In his autobiography, Stravinsky wrote that he composed the whole piece in Ustilug in the space of six weeks and sent it off to Rimsky. " A few days later," the oft-quoted passage continues, "a telegram informed me of his death, and shortly afterwards my registered packet was returned to me: 'Not delivered on account of death of addressee.' " 6 5 This story, and particularly the colorful final detail, does not ring 62. Conv:+i/4i. 63. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:474, 486-87. 64. Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, supplementary chronicle to My Musical Life, 460. 65. An Autobiography, 24.

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[ 333]

true. It seems inconceivable that the Rimsky-Korsakov household would not have accepted delivery of a packet containing Fireworks, especially as the company at Lyubensk included the bridal couple to whom the piece was dedicated. As we shall see, there is documentary evidence that Stravinsky did send a packet to RimskyKorsakov that summer; but, as will be argued in the next chapter, it contained something else. As to the rest of the story, Stravinsky does seem to have gone to the country a bit early in 1908, since his last "live appearance" in Yastrebtsev's St. Petersburg diary was on 4 April, at a Mariyinsky performance of Gôtterdammerung that he and Rimsky-Korsakov attended together.66 The work he embarked upon at Ustilug was not Fireworks, however, but a set of four concert etudes for piano (op. 7). The autograph of the first of them is signed and dated "Ustilug, 1 May 1 9 0 8 . O n l y in May, then, could Stravinsky have even started Fireworks, which would have given him only five weeks in which to compose and copy the whole score and send it off to Lyubensk before receiving word of Rimsky's death. Far more creditable is the story Stravinsky gave a London interviewer in October 1927 (several years before the Chroniques), that he "put Fireworks aside in order to compose an homage to Rimsky-Korsakov's memory," namely the now lost Pogrebal'naya pesn', op. 5, generally referred to in the West as the Chant funèbre.68 This very short composition (Myaskovsky characterized it as a "prelude-epitaph")69 was composed and entirely scored by 28 July, as Stravinsky informed his teacher's widow by letter.70 But work on Fireworks was not even then immediately resumed, in seems, for the autographs of the second and third études are dated 29 August and 8 September, respectively.71 The composition of Fireworks, a complicated score despite its brevity, must surely have occupied Stravinsky (along with the first act of The Nightingale) throughout the fall of 1908 and even into the next year. The location of the autograph is at present unknown; there is, however, no dated Stravinsky manuscript extant between that of the third étude and that of the orchestration of Musorgsky's "Song of the Flea" (21 August 1909). Fireworks could have been completed at any point during the intervening fifty weeks. That the actual date of completion came much nearer the end of that span than the beginning may be gleaned from a letter 66. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:490. A recently published letter from Stravinsky to the RimskyKorsakov sons concerning their father's illness confirms his presence in Ustilug as of 24 April ("Iz pisem k V. N. Rimskomu-Korsakovu," Muzïkal'naya akademiya, 1992, no. 4, 124). 67. A photograph of this manuscript, now at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, may be seen in Joseph, Stravinsky and the Piano, 47-50. 68. P&D:6o2. 69. Shlifshteyn (ed.), Myaskovskiy: sobraniye matenalov 2:70. 70. IStrSM:445. 71. The location of the autograph for the fourth étude, and consequently its date, are at present unknown; see J. Rigbie Turner, "Nineteenth-Century Music Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library: A Check List (II)," 19th-century Music +, no. 2 (1980); 178. Rosyanka, the second song in Stravinsky's opus 6 (settings of Gorodetsky poems), was also composed at Ustilug in the summer of 1908.

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Stravinsky sent Maximilian Steinberg from Ustilug on 12 May 1909: "Only now, that is in the last few days, have I sat down in earnest to reorchestrate Fireworks; I'll finish in a few days—there's lots to do over." 72 A reliable terminus ante quern is suggested by the correspondence between Alexander Siloti, the conductor of the première,73 and Ludwig Strecker of B. Schotts Söhne, to whom Siloti sent the score on 9 June 1909. Putting the date of Stravinsky's letter to Steinberg together with that of Siloti's letter to Strecker, it emerges that the correa date of completion for this "Fantasy for Large Orchestra" is not 1908, as given in all existing lists of Stravinsky's works (tacitly following the story in the Chroniques), but late May or early June 1909. It was a most belated wedding present. It is also an extremely brainy little piece. In Fireworks we encounter for the first time the elaborate covering of technical tracks that would become such a distinctive Stravinskian ploy. The scalar symmetries that govern the rather complicated harmonic sequences no longer lie naked on the surface of the music, as in the Scherzo fantastique, but have to be dug out through at times quite arduous analysis. Octatonic and whole-tone configurations are mixed in far subtler, more advanced ways than in the Scherzo, but just as methodically; never does Stravinsky loose his tight Rimskian grip on his harmonic compass. This composition is still worlds removed from the outwardly intuitive ways of "impressionism." The approach is still rigorously schematic, even "scientific." Despite Stravinsky's oft-remarked and (in the Chroniques) self-advertised creative habits, this is one piece that was not composed at the piano but meticulously deduced on paper. Any gifts Stravinsky may have received from his fingers on this occasion were then submitted to an exceptionally stern intellectual scrutiny.74 With a piece this short, a chronological narration of its events may be the best way to proceed. Fireworks begins with a three-note octatonic fragment tossed back and forth between two flutes, hocket-fashion, and almost immediately expanded to encompass three additional notes from the same octatonic collection. The motive (m) is then doubled back on itself, that is to say joined to its retrograde (mR), as shown in Example 5.8a. Except for grace-note slides, the first two degrees of the octatonic scale laid out in Example 5.8b are avoided at this point. The reason for avoidance is that the first thirty-eight measures are based on an opposition between this octatonic scale and 72. I S t r S M : 4 4 7 . 73. In his commentary to the Soviet edition o f sixty Stravinsky letters in I S t r S M , Igor Blazhkov makes reference to " a conservatory evening in 1909" at which Fireworks was performed in its first instrumentation, while R o b e r t C r a f t asserts ( P & D : 2 3 ) that the piece " h a d been performed three times privately before Siloti's concert o f January 22 [N.S.], 1910." Neither writer gives a source for his intelligence. 74. N o t that these were necessarily insignificant or inconsiderable; M a r t i n Just has made a strong case that many o f the melodic figures in the middle section o f the piece were shaped by the hands at the keyboard ( " T o n o r d n u n g und Thematik in Strawinskys 'Feu d'artifice,' op. 4 , " Archiv fiir Musikwissenschaft 4 0 [1983]: 61-72).

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[335]

the tonic scale specified by the key signature (E major), deployed in a kind of plagal form through an octave ambitus from B to B. In Example 5.8c that scale is laid out with its points of divergence from the octatonic collection indicated. A theme based on the tonic scale is gradually unfolded (Ex. 5.8d). From two bars after [2] until [5], the thematic content of each measure is tossed back and forth between horns and trumpet; from [5] through [6], the complete theme is exposed in canon, with a redundant entry (three horns and a trombone) on the last phrase. After a startling abruption and a slow recovery, the canonic process is resumed at [7], with a whole slew of redundant entries on the last phrase. All the while the octatonic circulations begun in the very first measure have been continuing as an accompanying ostinato. The whole modus operandi here is based on that of the orchestral prelude to Rimsky-Korsakov's cantata From Homer, op. 60 (1901). Every aspect of Stravinsky's exposition—triple meter, turbulent ostinato accompaniment, a fanfare-like theme in the brass that is full of triplets and subjected both to echo and to canonic treatment—corresponds to Rimsky's except that what took 154 measures to unfold in Rimsky is over and done with in Fireworks in under forty. Also noteworthy is the resemblance between Stravinsky's diatonic theme and the vocal melody in the second half of Rimsky's cantata, a likeness that extends not only to key and contour, but even to the use of close canonic imitation (Ex. 5.8e). Octatonic/diatonic interaction is dramatized throughout the opening section of Fireworks by opposing diatonic C-sharp to octatonic C-natural. The diatonic theme has a difficult birth: three times its first measure is stymied by the C-natural before breaking through to C-sharp and thence to B, the attainment of which frees it from the grip of octatony and allows it to continue. The already-noted abruption at fig. [6] is brought about by the unexpected reassertion of C-natural. Nothing has happened so far that could not have happened in Rimsky, or even in Liszt. 75 The octatonic collection is definitely part of the "background" here, providing a series of appoggiaturas to the same dominant-seventh of E that the main theme so conspicuously outlines. At fig. [8], however, the octatonic set comes decisively to the fore, Stravinsky working some dazzling changes on it that have precedent only in Scriabin (though precedent in this case need not imply model). Like Scriabin, Stravinsky begins to play with the octatonic collection as if it were a "key," that is, a set of stable tones to which auxiliaries can be applied as "chromaticism." It is here, and in this way, that whole-tone sonorities are at last introduced into the harmony. The passage from [8] to [9] can be most clearly understood if we reverse the usual discovery procedure, presenting first the result of the analysis and working back from it to the surface of the music. At the core of the

75. For an obvious "literary" as well as musical antecedent, see Liszt's "Feux follets" (Études d'exécution transcendante, no. 5).

[336]

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E X A M P LE

5.8

a. Fireworks, opening motives in flutes - m—ip mR-|

b. The octatonic scale of reference c. The diatonic scale of reference

•

1 1

T»

r«

$

•M-

d. The diatonic theme

M r *

3

s —

—1

•4

—

—S p m

m

0

e. Rimsky-Korsakov, From Homer, mm. 222-26, voice parts only

rf-shla na nc-bo si-yat'

dlya

bla-zhen

nikh.

1

:

z±=z

——%r d 1-

ni'kh bo - gov. [Eos came out in the sky to shine for the blessed gods and for mortals, too.]

passage lies a typical octatonic "rotation" of dominant-seventh chords with roots a minor third apart, based on the same collection as the opening woodwind figuration (Ex. 5.9a). The first stage of its elaboration is the simple arpeggiation of the bass along the ( 0 3 6 9 ) cycle (Ex. 5.9b). At the same time, a lower neighbor is applied to the third of each chord; these neighbors are not "foreign" tones but are drawn from the same scale as the rest (Ex. 5.9c). The final touch is the embellishment of the top voice by means of a chromatic scale that does introduce conventional auxiliaries ("chromatic passing tones") from without. To fill in the harmony, moreover, Stravinsky anticipates the fifth of each downbeat chord on the preceding upbeat. The result is Example s-9d. The chords on the weak beats in Example 5-9d are whole-tone formations. Those at the ends of measures are French sixths—the one harmony referable to both symmetrical modes and the trustiest bridge between them. Just as the scales that contain its tones are "modes of limited transposition," the French sixth is a chord of limited inversion: the first and third chords in Example 5.9d, likewise the second and fourth, form pairs of invariant pitch and interval content resulting from transposition by a tritone. The two pairs together exhaust the octatonic collection of reference shown in Example 5.9a. The middle chord in each measure—the one Kermanesquely marked "X"—is the one that contains the passing tone and is hence "chromatic" with reference to the source collection. Functionally it could be compared to a modal mixture (the alternate symmetrical modes in this context bearing a relationship to one another that is analogous to the alternate diatonic modes of common practice). As a sonority it is "unclassified," having no common-practice occurrences. It has historical precedents both in Le coq d'or76 and in L'apprenti sorrier;77 but Stravinsky's use of it is nonetheless unprecedented. Once it had been as it were "logically" derived according to the process analyzed in Example 5.9—and thereby given a "rational" theoretical standing (Stravinsky, after all, was still anticipating Rimsky's judgment!)—the composer felt free to use the chord as a stable harmony without resolution. This license is already implied by the melodic surface of the passage following fig. [8], consisting of chromatic transformations of the diatonic theme quoted in Example 5.8d. In the second beat of each measure the "chromatic" tone, which had been derived as a dissonant (passing) auxiliary and hitherto treated contrapuntally as one, is now treated as a consonant "chord tone" (Ex. 5.10). The chord at the very end of the example, actually played fortississimo as a brusque offbeat eighth note, belongs to none of the collections drawn upon up to now, nei-

76. See Yastrebtsev's discussion of the chord and its resolutions with Rimsky, cited in Chapter 4 (p. 272). 77. Viz., four bars after fig. [56]. There it is not a stable sonority but a dominant 4/2 with an appoggiatura to the fifth of the chord (in the viola solo) that is resolved before the harmony changes.

[338]

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EXAMPLE

5.9

Fireworks,figs.|J[]-[9], harmonic analysis

ther to " B Mixolydian" or " B octatonic" as given in Example 5.8 nor (obviously) to any whole-tone grouping. It signifies another abruption, in which a new octatonic collection is brought into play. Sounding it is tantamount to modulation from one octatonic "key" to another. The music in this contrasting octatonic key, marked "Lento," might be compared with the second theme in a sonata movement. It is here that the oftremarked allusion to L'apprenti sorrier takes place. While the homage may have been real enough, the resemblance is only skin deep. Only the contour—the "gesture," one might say—is copied; the actual harmonic content is dissimilar. Dukas's "magic spell" was a pair of old-fashioned common-tone progressions, one circling

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[ 339 ]

EXAMPLE

5.10

Fireworks, melody at

[8]

by minor thirds (Ex. 5.11a), the other by major (Ex. 5.11b). Stravinsky's progression, by contrast, is another octatonic rotation; only this time instead of dominantsevenths he uses half-diminished sevenths, and every other chord is preempted by an "X", fast on its way to taking over the harmony (see Ex. 5.12). The last "X" chord in Example 5.12c lives a life of its own from the bar before [10] through [11], alternating with whole-tone frissons in clarinet and flute that derive from its own pitch content, and with the solo oboe phrase given at the end of the example, which bridges two of the notes of the "X" chord with a neighboring A, thus producing an octatonic configuration that will be recognized as a transposition of the initial motive in its mirrored form (mR in Example 5.8). The oboe phrase inaugurates a section in which mirror-writing in both dimensions (retrogression and inversion) is pursued with a special vengeance. To understand what Stravinsky is about here one must note the way he exploits the pitch configuration (o 610)—a tritone plus a major third—as the common element linking several of the octatonic sonorities derived thus far, while its inversion (o 410)—major third plus tritone—provides a link between the symmetrical modes and the unequivocally diatonic (Ex. 5.13a). The enigmatic arpeggio figures between [11] and [13] maneuver the "X" chord to an "impeccable" tonal resolution (as Rimsky would have said) that prepares the passage of multifarious mirror-writing through a threefold chromatic ascent (Ex. 5.13b). And now comes the iridescent Piacevole, which could be likened, from either a tonal/harmonic or a motivic standpoint, to a development section. The pitch con[340]

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5 . II Dukas, L'apprenti sorcier (some spellings enharmonic) a. Mm. 2 - 3 EXAMPLE

b. Mm. 8 - 9

/ill

»• "

~

til

»

i s - ^

•J EXAMPLE

r f

-¡a!! j ^ P —

5-12

a. Model

b. Fireworks, fig. [9]

MM ÎYft S.Q -.^ff 3 x

ï

•

it

r- .. t jr 1)11

—=

1

+

f:

^

Mi

c. Harmonic reduction [top line above = Collection II (melody scale)]

— N H fòi rtfn 3

*

©

"x"

©

©

m= ©

Oboe : #

* *

EXAMPLE

5.13

Chord forms in Fireworks and their linking elements

whole-tone whole-tone octatonic octatonic

(0, 6, 10)

-

"x

0

7

Fr 6

-C

whole-tone octatonic

octatonic whole-tone (diatonic)

o

J—

(0,4,10)

Fr 6

Dom 7

b.

El +1

+3 -io-

$

tent is in a constant flux over a referentially octatonic bass (the starting notes of the harp arpeggios) that makes a threefold chromatic descent to counterbalance the ascent traced in Example 5.13, thus circulating through all three octatonic collections in turn. The main melody here consists of a line derived exclusively from mR, complemented by the original motive (as it were, the retrograde of the retrograde) in a modified form (m') that contracts the original minor third to a diminished third (consistendy and meticulously spelled that way in the second violins and violas). Motives mR and m' are initially presented as a pair, but each is individually developed as well. The slithering harmony (most concisely expressed in the horn parts) consists of a succession largely confined to the chords tabulated in Example 5.13, with little rockets in the woodwind (seemingly lifted from the Scherzo fantastique) that play with the (o 610) configuration and its inversion, configurations common to all the harmonies. This passage, so permeated with "magic harmonies" of all kinds, is the very heart of Fireworks. Like most theatrical magic, it is done with mirrors (Ex. 5.14). With the attainment of the diminished-seventh chord at the end of Example 5.14, matters are considerably simplified. For twenty measures the purest "diminishedmode" octatonicism reigns before resolving into the tonic key of E major through a dramatically articulated and prolonged authentic cadence. Its preparation consists in part of a complete retrograde of the main diatonic theme on the dominant, followed immediately by the theme in its original form, triumphandy blared out in the tonic (figs. [22] to [23]). The remainder of the piece is given over somewhat disappointingly to harmonic patterning of an obvious sort, the most noteworthy event being a garden-variety thirds-rotation through which the diatonic theme is finally "octatonicized" (Ex. 5.15).

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EXAMPLE

5-14

Octatonic reference

Coll. Ill

Coll. II

Dom 7

Dom 7

Coll. I

Dom 7

Dom 7

(continued)

(Coll. Ill)

In Fireworks, Stravinsky exploited to the very hilt the devices of harmony, texture, and orchestration he had learned from his teacher, but in no real sense did he go beyond them. True, the piece no longer sounds like Rimsky-Korsakov: the harmonies are more unremittingly complex; they are more varied; above all, the harmonic rhythm is quicker. But just as there is no actual chord in the piece that is without St. Petersburg precedent, so (and more importandy) Stravinsky's harmonic mechanisms, be they ever so recherché, are always deployed in eminendy methodical, rationally justified, and—alas—invincibly sequential patterns such as Rimsky's positivistic ear would have instandy grasped and doubdess approved. There is no real freedom of musical thought in Fireworks, and certainly no rebellion. It is still the product of a "walled-in" Belyayevets imagination for whom there could be small advances in technique and no end of recondite detail, but no true novelty of procedure. Fireworks is not "modern," merely up-to-date, and therefore [544]

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EXAMPLE

5.15

Firework,figs.1271-|29L reduced

i r Q f l J L — r - j -¡=-4 0 —

•HOI

3BÉË

0 - T—»

» 0 >

' L - l î r _l

fif L-

••

V

—

dated. It represents at its very limit the kind of petty artistic progress RimskyKorsakov stood for. It would be hard to imagine any further step along these lines. The young author's preoccupation with harmonic and motivic symmetries might seem to place him only a stone's throw from serialism, but that stone would have had to scale an impossibly high esthetic wall—one that for Stravinsky would remain impassable for another four decades and more.

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Early indications that Stravinsky chafed under the Belyayevets discipline, or that he found confining the walls of the narrow school that enclosed him, should not be sought in Fireworks, then, for all its surface dazzle, but in some vocal works of

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slightly earlier vintage. Early in the summer of 1907, when he was scoring the Symphony in E-flat and sketching the Scherzo fantastique, Stravinsky completed a song he had begun in St. Petersburg during the spring. "You remember the one," he wrote Rimsky from Ustilug on 18 June, "I played it over for you—the one with the tolling bells. I'm thinking of doing two more to words by the same author." 78 The author was Sergey Gorodetsky (1884-1967), a poet remembered today mainly as the Soviet hack who redid the libretto of A Life for the Tsar, but who just then was enjoying something of the reputation of a wild man. He had just made his debut with a small volume of "lyric and lyro-epic verses" called Tar', widely heralded as a major poetic event. Alexander Blok hailed it as "perhaps the greatest of contemporary books . . . a revelation . . . a book of revelations." 79 Since it contains a section called "Yarila" that is devoted to paganistic and shamanistic poems of a type soon to be known as "Scythian," Tar' has been cited repeatedly as part of the immediate cultural background to The Rite of Spring,80 In 1907, though, Stravinsky's Scythianism was part of an as yet undreamt-of future. For his rather ambitious romance (in his résumé of 1908 he called it a "grand aria" [bol'shaya ariya~\)sl he chose one of three poems in Tar' entitled "Spring" ("Vesna")}2 Unlike the others, which are lyric poems contrasting spring in town and country, the song Stravinsky set is subtided "A Song of the Cloister," and consists of an imitation folk song uttered as a lament by a lovelorn bell ringer's daughter at the cloister gates, framed by a pair of scene-setting stanzas in which the sound of monastery bells is evoked. "VESNÁ (MONASTÍRSKAYA)"

A SONG OF THE CLOISTER

Zvóni-stóni, perezvóní, Zvóni'-vzdókhi, zvóni'-sra, Visokí krutiye sklóni, Krutosklónl zeleni. Stén'i víbelen'i bèlo: Mat' igúmen'ya veléla. U vorót monastiryá Pláchet dóchka zvonaryá:

Tolling-moaning, tolling ever more, Tolling-sighing, tolling as in dreams, High are the steep slopes, The steep slopes are green. The walls are whitewashed white: The mother superior so ordered. At the monastery gates The young bell ringer's daughter weeps:

78. IStrSM:+4i. 79. Quoted in E. I. Prokhorov, commentary to Sergey Gorodetsky, Stikbotvoreniya i poèmi (Leningrad: Sovetskiy Pisatel', 1974), 561. 80. E.g., Smimov, Tvorcheskoye formirovaniye, 86-87; M. S. Druskin, Igor' Strarinskiy: lichnosf, tvorchestvo, vzglyadi (Leningrad: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1974), so—51; Lawrence Morton, "Footnotes to Stravinsky Studies: 'Le Sacre du printemps,'" Tempo, no. 128 (1979): 10-11. 81. IStrSM:444. 82. According to the Chronological Table at the back o f Gorodetsky's book, this poem was composed on 15 April 1906; see S. M . Gorodetsky, Tar': stikhi liricbeskiye itiro-èpicheskiye(St. Petersburg: K r u z h o k Molodi'kh, 1907), 127.

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Sergey Gorodetsky (1884-1967) in 1904..

CEPrtM rOPOAEUKih.

CTHXM AMPKWECKIC H AMPOOflHiECKic

lyoi

cnt

f i g . 5.2b. Title page of Gorcxletsky's Tar', source not only for the texts of opus 6, but perhaps a contributing source for the concept of the Rite of Spring scenario as well.

Akh, ti pólye, moyá vólya, Akh, doróga dorogá! Akh, mostók u chista pólya, Svéchka chista chetvergá!

Ah, meadow, my freedom,

Akh, moyá goréla yárko,

Ah, mine burned brighdy,

Pogasála u negó.

His went out.

Naklonílsya, dishet zhárko,

He bent down, his breath was hot,

Zhárche sérdtsa moyegó.

Hotter than my heart.

Ya otstála, ya ostálas'

Tseloválisya v ustá.

I dropped back, I remained By the high bridge. The candle flame sputtered, We kissed each other on the lips.

Gde ti, míliy, lobizániy, Gde ti, láskovi takóy! Akh, parí vesní, tumáni, Akh, moy dévichiy spokóy!

Where art thou, beloved, whom I kissed, Where art thou, my oh so tender one! Ah, the spring mists, the fog, Ah, my carefree maidenhood!

Ah, road I crave! Ah, path through open field, Holy Thursday candle!

U vi'sókogo mostá. Plámya svéchek kolebálos',

Zvóni-stóni, perezvóni, Zvóni'-vzdókhi, zvóni'-sni, Visokí krutiye sklóni, Krutosklóni zeleni. Stén'i víbeleni bélo: Mat' igúmen'ya velóla, U vorót monastiryá Ne boltát'sya zrya.

Tolling-moaning, tolling ever more, Tolling-sighing, tolling as in dreams, High are the steep slopes, The steep slopes are green. The walls are whitewashed white: The mother superior has ordered, At the monastery gates Not to chatter foolishly.

This poem had built-in attractions for an aspiring composer in the post-kuchkist orbit. 83 The setting of "artificial folk songs" was a tradition that reached back to the days of Glinka and beyond, while imitations of ringing bells had given rise to some of the most characteristic pages in all of Russian art music. As RimskyKorsakov himself had exclaimed anent the Coronation scene in Boris Godunov: "Once again the tolling of bells! How many times and in what different forms had I myself reproduced in the orchestra this invariable feature of ancient Russian life which is still preserved in our own days!" 84 Stravinsky must have felt certain that Rimsky would approve his choice of a text, and also approve his approach to setting it. He was in for a painful surprise. Stravinsky deliberately strove to place his setting of Gorodetsky's poem within the traditions outlined above. His tolling bells, with their accelerating harmonic rhythms, were in every way a chip off Musorgsky's (Ex. 5.16), and his mock folk 83. Indeed, it was the most-often-set poem in Gorodetsky's book, made into songs by at least three other composers by 1915: Vsevolod Bagadanov (1907), Vladimir Pol' (1910), and Dmitriy Zernov (1915). See G. Ivanov, Russkaya poeziya v otechestvennoy muzike 1:104. 84. My Musical Lift, 331.

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setting in the middle was just as patently modeled on such strict-diatonic prototypes as Musorgsky's "Where Art Thou, Little Star!" ("Gde ti, zvyozdochka1'), or better yet, Sadko's wistful folk song in scene ii of Rimsky's opera, which interrupts chromatic proceedings in a manner copied here by the composer's pupil (Ex. 5.17). Stravinsky's setting is eclectic: the cadential motion at the end of the maiden's first quatrain is appropriated from Grieg (cf. "Solvejg's Song"), and in the next verse Stravinsky adopts an accompaniment figure from the crowd music in the first scene of Musorgsky's Prologue to Boris. The two borrowings come together in a veritable magpie's nest (Ex. 5.18). If, as these examples tend to show, Stravinsky's "aria" after Gorodetsky was such a derivative affair, why was it precisely this work that began to raise doubts about him in the Rimsky-Korsakov circle? After Stravinsky unveiled the piece at Rimsky's, singing it to his own accompaniment at the first jour fixe of a new season (31 October 1907), Yastrebtsev noted his response in his diary: "Involuntarily the joke about the poet [Alexey Nikolayevich] Apukhtin [1840—93, a friend of Chaikovsky] came to mind. 'Mama,' asked the little child, who had just seen the incredibly corpulent figure of the poet, 'is that a gentleman, or just on purpose?' So might one ask of that opening sonic orgy, 'is it music, or just on purpose?' " 8 5 This impression of Stravinsky's bell music was not Yastrebtsev's alone. Five days later he recorded the master's reaction: "In the opinion of Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky's talent has not yet emerged with sufficient clarity, since in the fourth movement of his First Symphony he still imitates Glazunov excessively, while in his new songs (on words by S. Gorodetsky) Igor Fyodorovich has become far too zealously addicted to modernism." 86 The passages in Example 5.19 must be the ones that offended. From the standpoint of voice leading they are full of what could only have struck RimskyKorsakov as willful solecisms—chord sevenths that don't resolve by step, leading tones that are contradicted by false relations, and so on. To proceed backwards along a circle of fifths (that is, by fourths) must have particularly impressed Rimsky as "on purpose" illogic. "The middle of this romance," Rimsky allowed on another occasion, "is in many places very nice and expressive, but the very beginning is something else again—-wildly unrestrained and harmonically nonsensical."87 True enough, the passage shows the Rimsky-Korsakov stamp even yet in its dogged sequences. One is willing to bet that if the song had had a "fantastic" subject Rimsky might have muted his complaint at least about the second passage quoted in Example 5.19 (the piano retransition to the reprise of the opening refrain). It embodies the sort of progression with which Stravinsky had filled

85. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 440.

86. Ibid., 442 (4 November 1907). 87. Ibid., 456.

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[349]

"Vesna, (Monastmkaya)," mm.

5.16

EXAMPLE

1-8

Allegro alia breve (J = 60)

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EXAMPLE

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5.17

(.Monastmkaya),"

beginning of middle section

Molto sostenuto (J = 54)

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E X A M P L E

(continued) P'ùf

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[Hey there, dark forest! Part, give me a path.

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both his orchestral scherzi: a chromatic line doubled in thirds is accompanied by a bass that proceeds by fifths, producing whole-tone sonorities of varying types. Yet it is rather ineffectively cluttered, Rimsky would be sure to point out, by the triad-completing additives in the right hand part (note heads in parentheses in Ex. 5.i9d). Rimsky conceived an instantaneous dislike for Stravinsky's "Song of the Cloister," and he voiced it every time he heard the piece, which was often, since his daughter Nadya learned it and sang it at gatherings. On Christmas Day 1907, Nadya sang the Gorodetsky "aria" to the composer's accompaniment—along with the litde Pastorale Stravinsky had dedicated to her (and to which we shall return)— at a party that was attended not only by Igor Stravinsky, but by his brother Guriy and his mother as well. Rimsky-Korsakov must have embarrassed his pupil considerably with his blunt comments: "I stand by my previously stated opinion with respect to the first of these pieces, and while I'm at it, stricdy speaking, I personally don't quite understand what pleasure there can be in writing music to verses like Gorodetsky's 'zvoni-stoniperezvoni? For me all this contemporary decadentimpressionist lyricism with its squalid poverty of ideas and its pseudo-folksy Russian lingo is full of 'night and fog.' " 8 8 This tirade points up an extremely touchy esthetic gap that was widening between the generations at this moment in the history of Russian art—one that will 88. Ibid., 453-

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EXAMPLE

5.19

a. "V«»« (Monastirskaya)," mm. 9-15

b. Harmonic reduction of same

EXAMPLE

5.19

(continued)

c. "Vesna (Monastmkaya)," mm. 82-89

1 —

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iJ

1&1P

0

\>m r-

-

d. Harmonic reduction of same chromatic

^

7

~

be particularly significant for Stravinsky's development, and which will receive a fuller exposition in a later chapter. For now, let it suffice to note that to a composer of Rimsky-Korsakov's generation, folklore was an element of "content," not "style." Even in Rimsky's latest, most advanced operas, the Russian folkloristic element always had a citational aspect. It never partook of, or contributed to, Rimsky's "progressive" side, the part of his creative personality that delighted in harmonic or timbral novelties. The folkloric/diatonic and the fantastic/chromatic were strictly parallel strains for musicians in Glinka's tradition. They coexisted but never touched. Even in the snowstorm scene from Kashchey the Deathless, where, as we saw in the last chapter, a Russian folk motif was accompanied by harmony in the "diminished mode," the two elements belonged to clearly differentiated strata of the musical texture. In a word, an artist of Rimsky-Korsakov's generation sought in folklore only thematic material, which he then usually subjected to a conventional and increasingly routinized treatment, the main features of which had been more or less canonized by the end of the 1860s.89 Art that sought to base a novel, even a selfconsciously "modern," style on elements appropriated from folklore doubly aroused Rimsky-Korsakov's suspicion, for not only did such a practice seem parodistic to a member of Rimsky's generation, it also contradicted the liberal social viewpoint that the populist-realist art of the nineteenth century had embodied. To borrow artistic elements created by the people so as to create an art that was unintelligible to them seemed an implicit mockery. Gorodetsky's Tar' was a milestone in this new tendency. The author had trained at St. Petersburg University as a "Slavist," that is, a connoisseur of Slavic languages and antiquities. During the summer of 1904, on a scholarly field trip to the Pskov guberniya, where even as late as the 1930s ancient peasant rites and customs could be observed, he had an epiphanic experience. "All my free time," he later wrote, "I spent among the people, at weddings and funerals, amid khorovods and children's games. Having been an enthusiast of folklore even in the university, I now avidly imbibed the language, the syntax, and the melodies of folk songs. Out of this was born my first book, Yar'."90 From then on, as he put it once to a junior Soviet colleague, "I often thought in myths." 91 His success, in the eyes of his Symbolist contemporaries who were hungrily awaiting precisely such a manifestation, was immense. Vyacheslav Ivanov, friend and mentor of Scriabin and doyen of the neomythological movement, proclaimed:

89. For particulars see Taruskin, "How the Acorn Took Root" and " 'Little Star.'" 90. S. M. Gorodetskv, "Mov put'," in Sovetskiyepisateli: avtobiografii v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Sovetskiy Pisate!', 1959), 322. 91. Letter to D. Moldavsky; quoted in Prokhorov, commentary to Gorodetskv, Stikhotvareniya i

poemi, 562.

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All that flowed into Tar' from lyric and lyro-epic folk songs is authentic and in the highest sense poetic. . . . In his language there dwells the authentic dynamic

of folk speech, he repro-

duces nothing with historical accuracy or ethnographical authenticity, but freely creates as it has been given to him to do, for he cannot do otherwise. 9 2

All this was in the highest degree pernicious to Rimsky-Korsakov, who did not recognize the distinction between ethnographical and poetic authenticity (for all that composers of his generation had fought a similar battle under different conditions some forty years before) and saw in it only a pretext and a justification for "night and fog." The poem Stravinsky set embedded a folkloristic rhetoric in a patently subjective stream of consciousness that included many lines in which there was more "music" than literal sense. Also offensive to Rimsky's sensibilities, no doubt, was the ironical twist at the end, which punctures the mood, the point of view, and the meter with a single skittish stroke. Stravinsky's settings of Gorodetsky's verses, then, could only taint the setter in his teacher's eyes. A far more recherché composition like the Scherzo fantastique could be received by Rimsky with "great praise," as Stravinsky later recalled, 93 since it properly inhabited the world of chromatic make-believe and because its harmonic vagaries followed paths that were well marked out to those in the know. By setting Gorodetsky, however tamely, Stravinsky was flirting with disorder. Not that Stravinsky's setting actually bore comparison with Gorodetsky's poem in the ways we have been outlining. His folklorism, as we have seen, was a kuchkist hand-me-down tricked out with Scandinavian embroidery. He had imbibed nothing at the source and had no interest in doing so. Moreover, his offending modernities related not to the central stanzas that imitated folklore, but only to the opening and closing bell-ringing sequences. That was enough for Rimsky, though, for the bells were an inviolable part of his Russian "reality." A- O O !

All of these observations hold doubly true for Stravinsky's second Gorodetsky song, a setting of a poem with the untranslatable title "Rosyanka (Khlïstovskaya)," which Rimsky never knew. It was completed in Ustilug sometime during the summer of 1908, 94 dedicated to the poet, and published together with its predecessor near the end of 1910 or the beginning of 1911 by Jurgenson as Stravinsky's opus 6. 95 92. V. I. Ivanov, in Kriticheskoye obozreniye, 1907, no. 2, 49; quoted in ibid., 561. 93. C0nv:40/40. 94. The place and date are printed in the published sheet music at the end of the song, undoubtedly following the fair copy, which with Stravinsky during this period always carried such a notation. 95. The censor's approval is dated 1908; the actual date of publication is established on the basis of the earliest review, which appeared in the Moscow journal Muzïka in the issue of 29 January 1911. Jurgenson, in any case, became Stravinsky's publisher only after Firebird.

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Had Rimsky known it he would surely have loathed it, for it transgresses his esthetic much more seriously than the first song, even though—perhaps paradoxically—its music is tamer. Rosyanka is Russian for "dew." Khlistovskaya means a song of the khlisti, who were one of a number of secret quasi-Pentecostal sects that sprang up in central Russia in the seventeenth century and were persecuted fiercely by the statesupported Orthodox establishment. Gorodetsky's poem is a prime example of the kind of self-created pseudoreligious mysticism that sparked the Symbolist movement. Pseudosectarian verse was of all early modernist literary trends the one most reviled in its day by "enlightened" Russians like Rimsky as obscurantist, for the whole phenomenon of sectarianism (sektantstvo) had been a reaction to Westernized enlightenment and would remain so. James Billington has noted of the sectarian movement that "its greatest periods of growth at the grass roots level coincided with the periods of increased political ferment and ideological Westernization at the intellectual level" and cites the so-called Silver Age, during which Stravinsky cut his composer's teeth, as an example.96 Evocations of sectarianism in Silver Age art were never rehabilitated in Soviet Russia, where, according to the official line, all seas were extinct. "Rosyanka" is practically the only poem from Tar' that has not been reprinted since Stalin's death. The Russian word khlist means whip, and the khlisti have therefore become known as "the ancient Russian flagellants," as M. D. Calvocoressi put it in translating the subtitle of "Rosyanka" for publication in the West. 97 But this is incorrect, for the sect never practiced flagellation. The most widely accepted etymology for the name of the sect holds it to be a corruption of Khristi, "Christs." This does accord with the sect's beliefs. Its central idea held that Christ reincarnated himself by entering living individuals w h o thereby became "Christs"; upon their death the spirit passed on to others. Many groups were formed under the inspiration o f peasants seized by the spirits w h o would wander from village to village gathering followers. Meetings were held to the accompaniment of singing and dancing which often degenerated into mass hysterics. T h e Khlysty occasionally engaged in sexual orgies. They opposed marriage and engaged in free intercourse, which they called "Christ's love." 9 8

Just how ethnographically authentic Gorodetsky's poem really was can be seen from the fact that his "khlistovskaya" incongruously depicts a marriage divination. The poet's imaginary khlisti-devki (Khlist maidens) merely furnished him with a pretext for the same kind of richly evocative, vaguely folkloric verbal music—full 96. James Billington, The Icon and the Axe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 179. 97. Robt. Forberg, Leipzig; now Boosey & Hawkes. The anonymous German translator for the original Jurgenson edition translated khlistovskaya as "Gesang der Geissel-Bruder," despite the fact that the song is sung by girls. 98. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 258.

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of rhythmic calculation, neologisms, archaisms, and assonances—as had attracted Stravinsky's composerly appetite to Gorodetsky's bell song. "ROSYANKA

(KHLÏSTOVSKAYA)"

Zemlítsa yarováya, Smuglítsa mat' sïràya, Ni zgi v izbénke séroy. Idi, idi, poílets! Tryakhní vodítsu s krïlets! Sberyóm vodítsu s véroy. Mi zazhdális', Stoskovális', Zapletáya kós'i; Pritomílis', Umorílis', Sobiráya rósi— I nad kázhdoyu rosínkoy Prigovárivaya, Drúzhku tónkoy khvorostínkoy Priudárivaya: Zasidélis' v dévkakh dévki, Zanevéstilis'. Ekh vi', dévki odnodnévki, Chem nevéstilis'! Tem li pyátnishkom rodïmïm, Chto na spínushke, Tem li kréstikom Iyubímim Iz osinushki. V ogorózhennom dvorú, Na osínovom kolú Zapeváyet petushók. Yédut, yédut po selú. Búdet, búdet v vécheru Vsyákoy dévke Zhenishók. Sidén'ye zemlyanóye, Okóshko slyudyanóye, Ni zgi v izbénke sïroy. Prishól, prishól poílets! Temnó ot sízikh krïlets . . . Oy, drúzhki, v Bòga véruy!

D E W (A S O N G O F T H E

KHLLSTI)

O springtime earth, O dark mother moist, No light burns in the dingy hut. O come, O come thou bringer of drink! Shake water out of they wings! We will gather the water in faith. We are tired of waiting, We are pining, Plaiting our braids; We are languishing, We are worn out, Gathering the dew drops— And over each little drop of dew Chanting and repeating, With a litde switch our neighbor Gendy poking: The maidens remain with maidens, They would be a bride. Hey, you maidens for a day, How would you become a bride! With that little birth-mark spot That is on thy back, With that beloved cross Of aspen wood In the garden yard, On the aspen fence A cock begins to crow. They come, they come throughout the village, There will be, will be this evening A bridegroom for every maiden. A seat all made of earth, A window made of mica, No light burns in the dingy hut. Thou com'st, thou com'st O bringer of drink! It is dark in the shadow of thy bluish wings . . . O friends, believe in God!

Mainstream Russians tended to lump the khlïstï together with all other religious dissidents, including the so-called Old Believers or Schismatics (raskol'niki) memorably depicted in Musorgsky's Khovanshchina."

Actually, Russian sectarianism

99. Calvocoressi regarded them similarly: his French translation is subtitled "Chant mystique des Vieux-Croyants Flagellants"—wrong on t w o counts. Stravinsky himself made a mistake of the opposite

BELLS.

BEES.

AND

ROMAN

CANDLES

EXAMPLE

5.20

a. "Rosyanka (Kblistavskaya)," mm. 57-60 (voice only)

Za - si

dc

-

lis' v

dev

kakh

dev

ki,

b. Musorgsky, Khavanshchina, ed. Rimsky-Korsakov, Act I, scene iv, mm. 54-55 (voice only)

ft,?'! * J '

Tak,

tak,

y

1

knya - zhc, o - stal

-

5

sya

M

tí

1

d> d

3

ve - ren mne!

was a movement wholly outside the Orthodox church rather than a rebellion within it; far from a repository of primitive or paganistic atavisms, moreover, it seems to have been something of a modern German import akin to the Mennonite movement. That mattered litrie to Gorodetsky, who used the word khlistovskaya to conjure up a misty aura of prehistory. And it mattered just as little to Stravinsky, whose music contains so many resonances from the sinuous mezzo-soprano role ofMarfa, the Old Believer heroine in Musorgsky's opera, leavened (again!) with echoes of Grieg's Solvejg (Ex. 5.20). The greatest resemblance of all, however, is to the opening "pantheistic" scene from The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia, RimskyKorsakov's penultimate opera, completed and brought to the stage during the period of Stravinsky's closest association with his teacher. Evidence is abundant in Yastrebtsev's memoirs of Stravinsky's intimate knowledge of this opera and his love for it, indeed the special role it played in his life with Rimsky: (30 April 1905): Before tea the first three acts of Kitezh were performed, and after tea the fourth (Felix Mikhailovich [Blumenfeld] played, with Igor Stravinsky playing along at times, Ossovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov sang). (11 January 1906): I learned today that Nikolai Andreyevich gave vocal scores of

Kitezh to E. M. Petrovsky [co-librettist of Kashchey the Deathless] and to Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, who was married today and went off to Imatra ["a small Finnish Niagara, dreamily populated by newlyweds"—E&D:45/4i]. (3 February 1907): The dress rehearsal [of Kitezh] lasted from 12:03 to 5:05 P.M. Belsky [the librettist] is thinking of carrying up a wreath; the Stravinskys too.

kind when he called his concluding chorus of Old Believers for Diaghilev's 1913 Khovanshchina a work "composed by Igor Stravinsky after Musorgsky's own and authentic sectarian [ric] themes" (see SelCorrI:422).

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(7 February 1907): [At the première] Rimsky-Korsakov was called out nine times . . . and received t w o wreaths—one from us . . . and another, with a delightful embroidered silk cloth, from the Stravinskys (Igor Fyodorovich, his wife, and the rest). 1 0 0

The most noteworthy item in this assortment is the information that among the wedding presents Stravinsky received from Rimsky-Korsakov (in Expositions and Developments he failed to recall it) was a vocal score of this opera; for it was precisely the vocal score, with its piano reduction of Rimsky's orchestration, that so heavily influenced Stravinsky's setting of Gorodetsky's "Rosyanka." The resemblances—as much visual as aural—are so numerous and detailed that it would be best simply to let a few of them speak for themselves (Ex. 5.21). No direct evidence survives to support the assertion (at least none has come to light), but it seems a good bet that Igor Stravinsky had an important hand in the preparation of the Kitezh vocal score. It is the kind of chore traditionally done by pupils (especially nonpaying pupils) and disciples. (Rimsky mentioned in his autobiography that the vocal scores of his earliest operas were prepared by Nadezhda Purgold, both before and after becoming Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova.) And it might explain why Stravinsky was among those to whom Rimsky inscribed a copy when it came off the press. 101 There is another bit of curious circumstantial evidence, too. In the issue of 20 January 1913, the RMG ran a big feature article on Stravinsky (by then a world celebrity) in connection with the upcoming Russian première of Petrushka under Koussevitzky. The article was based on materials Stravinsky had furnished, by mail from Switzerland, to the editor, Nikolai Findeyzen, 102 though the actual writing was done by a staff journalist, Boris Tyuneyev. It contains the statement that Stravinsky prepared the piano-vocal score of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Pan Voyevoda.103 This was manifestly impossible, since as we know, Pan Voyevoda was finished and about to be published when Stravinsky first started to work with Rimsky. (Indeed, his early assignments consisted of the very opposite process: orchestrating sections of the opera from proofs of the piano vocal score.) But is it possible that Tyuneyev had confused matters a bit and that Stravinsky had indeed mentioned having worked on a different vocal score for Rimsky? If so, then Kitezh is the only possible candidate, for its completion coincided with the 100. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:343, 373, 411, 41a. In addition, Stravinsky (along with Lyadov, Artsibushev, Glazunov, Felix Blumenfeld, Yelizaveta Pctrenko, and others) had been among the signatories to a congratulatory telegram to "the creator of this wondrous folktale picture" (tvortsu chudnoy skazochnoy kartinki). See A. A. Orlova, Stranitsizbizni N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova, vol. 4 (Leningrad: Muzika, 1974), 153- No wonder Stravinsky had wanted so badly to see Kitezh at the Kirov (formerly the Marivinskv) Theater in October 1962 (Dialogues and a Diary, 257). 101. Another pupil to whom Rimsky gave a copy was Maximilian Steinberg, in return for services of a different kind, that is, proofreading (see "Vospominaniya M. O. Shteynberga," in Ginzburg [ed.], N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzi'kal'noye obrazovaniye, 207). 102. See Stravinsky's letter to Findeyzen, 2/15 December 1912, in IStrSM:470. 103. RMG 20, no. 3 (1913), col. 71.

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EXAMPLE

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a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Legend of the Invisible City ofKitezh and the Maiden Femmia, vocal score (arr. Stravinsky?), p. 9

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(continued)

b. "Rosyanka (Khltstovskaya)," mm. 9-14

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beginning of Stravinsky's regular lessons, and the preparation of the vocal score would have been an ongoing project at precisely that time. 104 Be all of this as it may, Stravinsky's "Rosyanka" presents an anomalous case: a poem of the very latest Russian tendency set in a decidedly retrospective style. And lest it be thought that the reason for this anomaly was the poem's pseudofolkloric cast, it should be emphasized that the conventions to which Stravinsky's setting adhered were not those of Russian folk music, nor even those of St. Petersburg "nationalism" as such, but the principles and style of the Russian art song as preached by Cui and practiced by Musorgsky. Two aspects of the text-setting in Stravinsky's opus 6 in particular show its utter removal from the world of actual folk singing. One is the very fastidious declamation: both songs contain passages of quasi-recitative and skorogovorka (parlando-style patter; in "Rosyanka" it is used for an ironic effect that greatly distorts the impersonal incantatory style of the poem). The prosody is deft: Stravinsky shows considerable skill in devising rhythms that are natural to sing and declamationally impeccable, but that nevertheless avoid the excessive regularity of stress which the strong Russian tonic accent so easily imposes on the work of unwary composers. Whatever its felicities, though, the naturalistic declamation flady contradicts the folkish ambience of the poetry. The other aspect is the use of illustrative effects, particularly in the accompaniment. The bells in "Vesna (Monastirskaya)" were altogether appropriate, since the words, too, were onomatopoetic in that poem. But when the chance mention of a cock-crow in the text of "Rosyanka" (Ex. 5.22) is similarly underscored, the effect is that of a lapse in style. Stravinsky had taken a poem that was an early landmark of what art historians now call "neonationalism"—that is, the incorporation of folk104. That it was Rimsky's habit to favor his prize pupil of the moment with this task is perhaps suggested by the fact that the piano vocal score of his next (and last) opera, Le coq d'or, was entrusted to Steinberg—of whom there will be much more to say in the next chapter.

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E X A M P L E

5.22

"Rosyanka (Khlistovskaya)mm. 80-83

loristic elements into the technique of professional art—and set it as if it were a conventional, subjective lyric. His song betrays a great stylistic confusion (Stephen Walsh aptly speaks of "an air of stylistic crisis") 105 that would surely have pained Rimsky-Korsakov, most knowing of all connoisseurs of the various genres of Russian music, had he lived to see it. It is ironic indeed to contemplate "Rosyanka" from the vantage point of our present knowledge of Stravinsky's development, for the neonationalism he so flagrantly overlooked in Gorodetsky would in a few short years become the basis of his own stylistic emancipation, and the tendency inaugurated by the poet would be brought to its magnificent peak by Stravinsky himself. What the songs of opus 6 teach us is that Stravinsky's later nationalism was no direct outgrowth of his teacher's. Its seeds and roots will have to be sought elsewhere. The opening scene of Kitezh had an influence on another Stravinsky lyric besides "Rosyanka" one that Rimsky knew very well indeed. At the height of pantheistic rapture, Fevronia calls out to her friends the forest birds and animals—"A-oo! A-oo!" And in so doing she furnished the "text" of Stravinsky's delicious little Pastorale, usually called a chant sans paroles. It is not really wordless, though. Its "A-oo" text places it in a Russian tradition of feminine nature ecstasy that includes four of Rimsky-KorsakoVs operas besides Kitezh.106

"A-oo" was also a kind of

password among the Russian Symbolist poets. Konstantin Balmont, for instance, used it as the tide of two different poems, 1 0 7 both of them postdating Stravinsky's 105. Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (London: Routledge, 1988), 12. 106. Yastrebtsev actually discussed aukmtye ("calling 'a-oo'") with Rimsky-Korsakov on the evening of 27 February 1907, but Stravinsky was absent (perhaps attending Landowska's recital; see below). See Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:415. The first appearance of "a-oo" in Rimsky-Korsakov's work was the tide character's entrance in the pantheistic Prologue to Snegurochka. Napravnik's Dubrovsky (1894, libretto by Modest Chaikovsky) begins with an elaborate women's chorus of aukaniye set in picturesque natural surroundings and consisting of nothing but the ecstatic cry. Fyodor Stravinsky created the role of Andrey Dubrovsky (the hero's father) in Napravnik's opera; the basso's son must have seen it often. 107. One of them was set by Rachmaninoff in 1916 (op. 38, no. 6).

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Pastorale, which was given its "première" at the same Rimsky-Korsakov soirée at which "Vesna (Monastirskaya)" had its fiasco. The soloist was Rimsky's daughter Nadya (Nadezhda Nikolayevna, usually called "the younger" to distinguish her from her mother, who had the same given name and patronymic), for whom it was composed only days before (the manuscript is dated St. Petersburg, 29 October 1907). Yastrebtsev was perplexed by this piece—"an original song, but not without strange harmonies." 108 Here, however, he spoke for himself only. The Pastorale became a favorite fixture of the Rimsky-Korsakov Wednesdays for the rest of the season (which, as it turned out, was the last). The litde piece was indeed "original," as Yastrebtsev said—though in Russian (as in French) the word can be barbed. It is in fact the earliest Stravinsky composition to which that word may be unequivocally applied. Alongside the Gorodetsky songs it sounds, for all its slightness, remarkably authentic and impressive. Its texture has often been described in terms of a quasi-painterly plein air. Asafyev compared it with the landscapes of the Miriskusnik painter Konstantin Somov (later a good friend of Stravinsky's), but that, of course, was with much benefit of hindsight. 109 The airiness and freshness are quite real, however, and not difficult to account for in technical terms. The piece is arranged in a layered three-part counterpoint, the parts (piano left-hand, piano right-hand, voice) at all times clearly differentiated in range and articulation. There is no sonorous "fill"; the texture is open and pervasively linear (the last chord, in fact, is an open fifth). Most striking of all is the practically ceaseless rhythm of even sixteenth notes in the piano lefthand, marked "Sempre staccato"—the kind of thing that even today we call "Stravinskian." The composer later (1925) arranged the accompaniment for a trèssec ensemble of four winds (three of them double reeds), and it comes off perfecdy. 110 Surely there is no other composition of its vintage that would fit such an echtStravinskian sonority. What is not so easy to account for is the sudden emergence of such a texture and (not counting a few octatonic zephyrs that waft gendy through the middle section) such a diatonic strictness (without benefit of folklore) in 1907, a year otherwise given over to the orchestration of the Symphony in E-flat, the sketching of the Scherzo fantastique, and the composition of the first Gorodetsky song, all works that are absolutely antithetical to the style of this impudendy naive litde piece. A clue seems to lie in the curious five-hemidemisemiquaver turn-figure that crops up so often in the piano part alongside other, conventionally signed ornaments. That, 108. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:440. 109. Glebov [Asafyev), Kniga 0 Stravinskom, 32. no. Ten years later still he arranged it for violin and piano (meanwhile extending it by means of extra sectional repetitions to nearly twice the original length), so that he could perform it with Samuel Dushkin. This arrangement he then transferred to the wind ensemble. (For details, see SelCorrII:293311.) All this arranging, expanding, and above all, self-performing testifies to an abiding affection for this piece in which, looking back, Stravinsky must have seen the roots of his maturity.

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f i g . 5.3.

Leonid Pasternak, Concert by Wanda Landowska (1907).

plus the steady accompanying staccati and the drone-fifths in the bass, prompts the notion that we are dealing with an imitation of harpsichord music—a "musette," to be exact. Was it mere coincidence, then, that 1907 was the year of Wanda Landowska's first Russian tour? This was a considerable "event"—highly publicized (indeed Mile Landowska indulged in a few rather blatant publicity stunts, like carting her harpsichord to Yasnaya Polyana and playing it for Tolstoy), greeted with sensational reviews, and commemorated by a couple of well-known paintings that suggest the high degree of interest her revelatory work aroused in moderately "advanced" artistic circles. 1 1 1 She gave two recitals in St. Petersburg (27 February and hi. These pictures are not without their documentary value as testimony to the nature of the artistic circles in which Stravinsky would soon be moving. One is a pastel portrait by Valentin Serov, the greatest of the Mir iskusstva artists and (as Stravinsky recalled him) the "conscience" of the Diaghilev circle (Conv: 108/97); see D. Sarabyanov and G. Arbuzov, eds., Valentin Serov: Paintings, Graphic Works, Stage Designs (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982), pi. 175; or Denise Restout, ed., Landowska on Music (New York: Stein & Day, 1964), frontispiece. The other is the pastel by Leonid Pasternak (the poet's father) reproduced as Figure 5.3. It shows Landowska playing in the Moscow salon of the financier Vladimir Osipovich Girshman, while the most prominent figure in the design is none other than Sergey Diaghilev, seated in the audience. Landowska's presence in a group photograph taken at the Salon Pleyel in May 1907, in connection with Diaghilev's Russian historical concerts in Paris, puts her in proximity with a whole slew of Belvayevtsi, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Felix Blumenfeld, and Nikolai Cherepnin. See Restout (ed.), Landowska on Music, pi. 4.

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22 March), of which the second was rapturously hailed as a breakthrough. It was entitled "The History of the Waltz," and like all of her programs in those days, it featured her as performer on both harpsichord and piano. Her repertoire on this occasion took her into familiar territory (Schubert, Schumann, Chopin), but from a novel historical and esthetic perspective. The reviewer for the RMG, completely enraptured, prefaced his account of Landowska's performance with a paragraph that might serve as a motto both for the burgeoning "early music" revival and for the fashionable "neoclassicism" of the then still fairly remote future, in which Stravinsky was destined—but who would have predicted it then?—to play a leading role: It is altogether possible that from a musical point of view our time will be called the beginning of a new Renaissance by the future historian of music, since after the rebellious, self-opinionated afflatus of the nineteenth century, in whose cloud of dust almost all "musical antiquities" were consigned to oblivion, our present relationship to this antiquity is undergoing a radical change. The manuscripts of composers of ages past are being sought out, the instruments for which these masters created are being reconstructed—and the public now eagerly attends to musical creations of a sort that only a few years ago it would have passed by with selfsatisfied d i s d a i n . 1 1 2

How wide this "public" was may be wondered, but that it included the twentyfive-year-old Stravinsky seems more than likely, given the fact that Landowska's "History of the Waltz" program comprised a selection of "Valses viennoises" by Lanner that included the "Styrische Tanz" (op. 165) that would surface four years later in the third tableau of Petrushka.113 In Memories and Commentaries, Stravinsky gave an unwitting hint of a special interest in the "neoclassical" revival that went hand in hand with St. Petersburg modernism in those years. Comparing the "Evenings of Contemporary Music" with the Los Angeles "Monday Evening Concerts," he said that, like the latter, the St. Petersburg outfit "tried to match the new with the o l d . . . . I heard Monteverdi there for the first time, in an arrangement by d'Indy, I think, and Couperin and Montéclair; and Bach was performed in quantity." 114 Actually, the only time Bach was performed at the Evenings was at the very first concert in 1902 (two arias from the secular cantatas), along with two organ fugues of Buxtehude. Stravinsky's mention of the fairly obscure Montéclair, however, gives his true source away, for a suite called "Les plaisirs champêtres," purportedly arranged from the dance music of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667—1737) by Henri Casadesus (1879-1947), was one of the specialties of the tatter's Société des 112. RMG 14, no. 13 (1 April 1907), col. 382. 113. Landowska recorded this suite on a Duo-Art piano roll that has been reissued from time to time on LP disc (e.g., Everest, "Archive of Piano Music," X-915). 114. M&C:28/29.

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instrumens anciens, founded in 1901 under the sponsorship of Saint-Saëns. This group was a great favorite with Russian cognoscenti; their St. Petersburg appearances (at Siloti's invitation) preceded Landowska's. 115 "Les plaisirs champêtres" made a sensation with the artists of the Mir iskusstva circle, especially Benois, who immediately conceived the idea of a ballet to its accompaniment. That work would be realized much later by Diaghilev (1924) as Les tentations de la bergère (choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, sets and costumes by Juan Gris). 1 1 6 The third movement of the Montéclair suite, "Cortège des musettes et vielles," is full of selfevident similarities to the musette-isms in Stravinsky's Pastorale. While one naturally hesitates to saddle the little Pastorale with too many heavy portents of Stravinsky's creative future, it seems both appropriate and illuminating to suppose that the revelations of Landowska and Casadesus stimulated Stravinsky's fancy in the direction of his little essay in the bucolic ("champêtre") mode— and perhaps even further. Among the items presented in Landowska's "History of the Waltz" was a group quaintly identified by the RMG reviewer as "voltes and bransles of the 18th century." The ensuing description makes it clear that this was in fact a dance suite culled from Le trésor d'Orphée: Livre de tablature de luth (1600) by Anthoine Francisque, published in 1906 in a transcription for keyboard, 117 an item that Landowska kept in her repertoire for the rest of her life. The book contains many rustic voltas with drone basses that conjure up a pastoral mood quite like that of Stravinsky's vocalise. In any case, it was the Francisque that won over the reviewer for the RMG wholeheartedly to the cause of the harpsichord (for all that the music had been composed for lute) : "It would be hard to give an idea in words of all the enchanting delights of the harpsichord, its astonishing timbre, and its unique registrations," he wrote. "Having listened to these works in Mme Landowska's renditions, one can truly begin to doubt the idea ofprogress in art." 1 1 8 From a Belyayevets standpoint this was indeed a subversive insinuation. For all its innocuous charm, then, the little Pastorale, in which Stravinsky seems to have tried to "give an idea of the enchanting delights of the harpsichord," might be looked upon as a pivotal piece on which the young composer's outlook and technique— his "zvukosozertsaniye," to use the untranslatable Russian mot juste—began its swing away from Belyayevism. Maybe that is why it was the earliest work of his that Stravinsky continued to love and "recognize" throughout his career. 115. See RMG 14, no. 11 (8 March 1907), col. 316. 116. See Alexandre Benois, Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, trans. Mary Britnieva (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1941), 349, where, however, the date of the Casadesus tour is erroneously given as 1909. 117. Anthoine Francisque, Le trésor d'Orphée, ed. Henri Quittard (Paris: Marcel Fortin, 1906). 118. RMG 14, no. 13 (1 April 1907), col. 383.

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6 R E C O G N I T I O N ,

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R I V A L R Y ,

R E A L I G N M E N T

C A M P

If the Pastorale and the Gorodetsky songs give the first hint of a tug in directions other than those in which Rimsky would have led him, one wants to know how Stravinsky was exposed to such currents, and why he would have been susceptible. Substantial insights into both the how and the why may be gleaned by investigating Stravinsky's peer relationships during the years 1906—8. In their years of study, young composers not only experience the inevitable creative influence of their teachers, but to a certain extent act upon one another as well, usually showing one another their work and giving attentive ear to the critical judgments of their comrades. These judgments are seldom objective. Most often they reflect the personal inclinations of this or that individuality in the process of formation (if in fact they do not altogether second the critical approaches of the common teacher). All this characterized us, the not overly large group of Rimsky-Korsakov pupils during the last five or six years of his life. Each of us was striving for something, achieving something, but the field of composition in which each of us hoped to attain something of value and perhaps something relatively novel as well was, like the character of our gifts, different for each of us. Our mutual relations, therefore, were characterized by great amity. In the very last years of study with Rimsky-Korsakov (1906-1908), the closest relations among his students were those between M. O. Steinberg, Igor Stravinsky, and myself. 1

The author of these lines was Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin (1883—1957), best remembered as a much-honored Soviet music educator who numbered Khrennikov 1. M . F. Gnesin, "Maksimilian Shteynbcrg," Sovetskaya muzika, 1946, no. 12, 29.

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f i g . 6.1. Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov with the St. Petersburg Conservatory counterpoint class, 1904. Standing (left to right): Maximilian Steinberg (Shteynberg), Alexander Postnikov, Nikolai Malko, Mart Saar, Mikhail Gnesin, and Boris Levenson. Seated in the middle is Nikolai Yevreynov, the future stage director, who studied at the Conservatory from 1901 to 1904 and later frequently collaborated with Gnesin. Mart Saar (1882-1963) became one of the patriarchs of Soviet Estonian music. Boris Levenson (1884-1947) settled in America after the Revolution, where he primarily composed works on Jewish subjects.

f i g . 6 . 2 . The closest friends, twelve years on: Maximilian Steinberg and Mikhail Gnesin in January 1920 after the first performance of the tatter's Young Abraham, one of the many works on Jewish or biblical themes Gnesin composed in the early Soviet period. and Khachaturyan among his pupils in composition. To read Stravinsky's memoirs, one would not think they had been particularly close, since this comrade of his youth comes up only once, in response to a question from Craft about Gnesin's "Sprechgesang." 2 Still and all, Stravinsky did allow that "I knew him well," and also that "he was the liveliest and most open-minded spirit of the Rimsky group." 3 In fact, as these admissions already signal to us, Gnesin was very important to Stravinsky's development, for it was he (and not the celebrated Pokrovsky) w h o did the most to steer Stravinsky toward the more advanced artistic circles in St. Petersburg in the years preceding Rimsky's death. Gnesin was the only person among Stravinsky's acquaintances w h o could have played such a role, for he was the only one who was a genuine insider both to the Rimsky-Korsakov circle and to the very loosely defined network of artistic "decadents" normally so abhorrent to the Rimsky set. H o w he pulled off this balancing act is worth recounting. 2. Actually, this "Sprechgesang" was rhythmically notated melodrama composed, like Milhaud's, for performances of Greek tragedy (in Merezhkovsky's translations, staged by Meyerhold) that took place after Stravinsky had left Russia; for examples, see S. Bondi, " O 'muzikal'nom chtenii' M. F. Gnesina," in Glezer (ed.), Gnesin, 80-101. Stravinsky's comment on it (D&D:47; Dialogues, 99) is meaningless and shows he never knew these works of Gnesin's except by rumor. 3. D&D:46-47 (Dialogues, 99). At the same time, he gives some perfecdy ridiculous details about Gnesin, in particular that he "dressed as an Orthodox Hebrew" (Stravinsky was probably remembering Gnesin's early Soviet-period identification with the Jewish "nationality").

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In 1902, freshly arrived in St. Petersburg from his native Rostov-on-the-Don (a large town in the south of Russia near the Ukrainian border), Gnesin read a highfalutin lecture at the Conservatory entitled "On the Principle of Figurative Movement in Music" ("O plasticheskom nachale v muzikal'nom tvorchestve"). On the basis of this talk, which was attended by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and a poet named Vladimir Volkenshteyn who immediately began writing verses for Gnesin to set, the young musician fell in with the Symbolist crowd, who adopted him as a sort of musical mascot. Thus, while Stravinsky was spending his Wednesday evenings at Rimsky-Korsakov's staid jours fixes, Gnesin was privileged to attend the illustrious "Wednesdays" at Ivanovo's apartment, where he met all the radical St. Petersburg poets of the day and began to specialize in setting their work to music. In all he composed four sets of songs under the heading "From Contemporary Poetry" ("Jz sovremennoy poeziF) and many individual settings of major works by Ivanov himself, Alexander Blok, Balmont, Sologub, and others. Needless to say, the poets wanted to hear their verses set in a style that matched their own striving after I'azur, and Gnesin was encouraged to experiment. He received additional stimulation and encouragement in these directions from the group that ran the Evenings of Contemporary Music, for they, too, frequented the Ivanov Wednesdays. Gnesin's early contacts in St. Petersburg, then, were with a group that was as far removed as could be from the St. Petersburg musical establishment that claimed Stravinsky's unwavering allegiance. They regarded that establishment the way the old kuchka had viewed the Conservatory and the Russian Musical Society, the obvious difference being that in the 1850s and '60s the real musical talent was on the side of the mavericks, while in the early 1900s it was on the side of the establishment. Gnesin knew this. He strove hard for acceptance in the RimskyKorsakov fold, and managed to achieve it in the end. But that was several years in the future. For the moment, let us have a look at the maverick side of St. Petersburg musical life. The society that called itself Evenings of Contemporary Music was organized in 1901 in loose alliance with Mir iskusstva, Diaghilev's arts monthly, which, however, it considerably outlasted. The St. Petersburg concert series the society sponsored went on until 1912, while its Moscow branch, organized in 1909 under the energetic leadership of Vladimir Derzhanovsky, gave concerts from 1910 to 1915. The spiritus rector of the organization was the head of Mir iskusstva's music division and chief writer of its occasional "muzikal'naya khronika," a highly cultivated musical dilettante named Alfred Nurok (1863—1919). One of Diaghilev's early mentors, Nurok was a member of the original group of "Nevsky Pickwickians" out of whose meetings and discussions the World of Art movement grew. A baptized Jew, a bachelor, son of the author of the most widely used English grammar in latenineteenth-century Russia, Nurok was the very personification of the cosmopoli6

•

RIVALRY.

RECOGNITION.

REALIGNMENT

fig.

6.3.

Alfred Pavlovich Nurok,

spiritus rector of the "Evenings of Contemporary Music." (Lithograph by Valentin Serov, 1899)

tan intellectual "decadent" of the era. Alexander Benois, speaking on behalf of the group, called him "a man several years our senior but with a soul considerably younger," meaning that he always made sure to espouse a more radical position than any interlocutor.4 From Benois's affectionate description there emerges a sort of dabbling Russian Satie, who, though perhaps not quite to be taken seriously, presented an utter antithesis to the bourgeois world of the Belyayevtsi. T o us he stood for everything that was ultra-critical, iconoclastic, overcynical and affectedly lewd. Huysmans's A Rebours, banned by the censor, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai, Verlaine's erotic poems, the novels of Laclos, Louis de Coudray and the Marquis de Sade were his favorite literature, and some such book always peeped out of his pocket. Absurdly, naively, he w o u l d strive to mystify us, and feign fearful dissipations, while living a peaceful, respectable, and thoroughly bourgeois kind of life, w o r k i n g as an official in the Naval Ministry, and taking tender care of his old mother with w h o m he lived. Nurok would have liked it thought he smoked opium, inhaled ether, or brutalized women: his whole behavior affected mystery and had that odd bias to which we, for no particular reason, attached the "Hoffinannesque" word: Skurrilitat.

H e was the first to acquaint us

4. Quoted in Serge Lifar, Serjfe Diatjhilev: His Life, His Work, His Legend (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940), 32.

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with Beardsley's drawings, and to make propaganda in favor of Fidus, Steinlen and [T. T.] Heine, all of w h o m strongly influenced our outlook on art. 5

Nurok's chief partner in founding the Evenings was Walter Nouvel (1871—1949). Like Nurok a Sunday composer, 6 he worked by day as a procurator for the Office of the Ministry of the Court (under A. S. Taneyev, another dabbler in composition) and by night played the role of consummate musical snob, for which he achieved considerable local réclame. Looking back on him after thirty-five years, Gnesin confessed, " I don't know what to call him: neither composer nor performer nor artist nor critic . . . still, he was something more than an amateur—in modernist circles he was a recognized arbiter of taste." 7 Gnesin went on to characterize Nurok and Nouvel, together with Vyacheslav Karatïgin, who sat with them in their auditions of new music for the Evenings, as "people who had listened to a great deal of music (far more than I), who loved it fanatically, and who did a great deal to acquaint our public with Western novelties and to support our own young innovators; but they were capable of praising, alongside the work of genuinely gifted artists, all kinds of modernistic nonsense, especially if it came from the West." 8 This, of course, was the recollection of a Soviet composer. But the public programs of the Evenings bear it out. Works were selected by a committee consisting of Nurok, Nouvel, and Karatïgin, assisted by two semiprofessional musicians: Ivan Kri'zhanovsky (1867—1924), a doctor by vocation who nonetheless graduated from the Conservatory under Rimsky-Korsakov (1900) and ended up teaching the physiology of piano-playing at that institution (as well as, in Soviet times, the "biological principles of the evolution of music"); and the pianist Alexander Medem, who was introduced in the previous chapter. This group met every Thursday evening

5. Quoted in ibid., 64—65; amplified by comparison with the version of the same memoir in Benois, Reminiscences, 173-74. Much of this description of Nurok appeared originally in Benois's pamphlet Vozniknoveniye "Mira iskusstva" (Leningrad: Komitet Populyarizatsii Khodozhestvennikh Izdaniy pri Gosudarstvennov Akademii Material'noy Kul'turi, 1928), published during the liberal N E P period; it has been suppressed in the more recent two-volume variorum of Benois's memoirs issued in the Soviet Union (see Benois, Mot vospominaniya [Moscow: Nauka, 1980], 1:684-85). For another, somewhat later glimpse of Nurok, see S. S. Prokofiev, A vtobiojjrafiya, ed. M. G. Kozlova (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1973), 483—84; or, in English, Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer's Memoir, ed. David H. Appel, trans. Guy Daniels (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubledav, 1979), 243-44. 6. He never published a note, but two of his songs were performed at the inaugural Evenings of Contemporary Music concert and drew the following not-bad notice from the critic of the RMG: " A measure of refinement is to be found in the two arias by Mr. Nouvel, 'In modo antico,' on an Italian text, though in the nature of their 'antiquarianism' thev are closer to French music; the melodic writing is a bit sweet, but pleasant, nor is it without a touch of vulgarity reminiscent of the songs of [Fabio] Campana and the like; the design of the accompaniment is simple and transparent, at times elegant. These arias, since they depart somewhat from the general trend of contemporary songwriting art, attracted the attention of the public more than [the songs of Alioz, Ossovskv, Rumshisky, Kri'zhanovsky, and Pokrovskyl" ( R M G 11, no. 14 [6 April 1902], col. 441). 7. Autobiographical sketch, ca. 1940, in Glezer (ed.), Gnesin, 140. 8. Ibid., 141.

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in a room provided after hours by a piano manufacturer.9 A t the outset, the Evenings were very much a coterie affair. The organizers and their friends had an inside track, as the performances, in the early programs, of Nouvel's, Pokrovsky's, and Krizhanovsky's own compositions testify. Even the Symbolist poet Mikhail Kuzmin, Nouvel's lover and piano duet partner, 10 had some pieces performed: Legends, a setting of his own poem, sung alongside songs by Max von Schillings, Hugo Wolf, and Sibelius on 16 December 1904; and three "Alexandrian Songs," performed the next season. The debut of the public series was rather brazenly trumpeted by Nurok himself, writing under semipseudonymous initials, in Mir iskusstpa. His strategy was to characterize the Evenings by comparing them with the programs of St. Petersburg's other connoisseur-coterie concert organization, the Chamber Music Society: Between the two there is a certain parallel, but little in common. Both attract not a "public" but an "audience" of real listeners, and both exist not by virtue of the profitability of the undertaking, but by virtue of their organizer's love for their work. But that is as far as their similarity g o e s . . . . The programs of the first for the most part feature works elevated by means of cheap editions to the rank of "classics"; other authors are admitted only upon their sworn promise that they will say nothing in their works that hasn't been said before. The "Evenings of Contemporary Music," contrariwise, fill their programs with nothing but novelties. They wish to know nought else but what is new and "unheard of," and to complete their impudence they even try to seek out "the new" in the old. 1 1

Mainstream reviewers tended to view the Evenings as something useful but cranky. The RMG

greeted their maiden outing with avuncular derision:

Apart from works by Rachmaninoff [Cello Sonata in G Minor, op. 19 (1901) with the composer at the piano], Glazunov [Piano Sonata No. 2, played by Stravinsky's teacher Kashperova], and the Western authors [Saint-Saens and Brahms, plus some old masters], programmed hors de concours, a large part of the program consisted of novelties that were approved at the regular meetings of the society.... Anyone who came in hopes of hearing "what the dawning day has in store for us" in music, it goes without saying, was mistaken. There were no items from the store of the dawning day, only reports and reverberations of days past and present.... In view of the contemporary lowering of creative standards, a society like this, most likely, will only facilitate a corresponding lowering of standards of taste. If the aim of the society is to catch new talent in its net, talent which has no oudet in the

9. Prokofiev gives an entertaining account of his audition in 1908; see Avtobiografiya, 482-83; or Prokofiev by Prokofiev, 243. 10. See D&D:72 (Dialogues, 41). 11. "A. N.," " O nekotorikh muzi'kal'ni'kh novinkakh," Mir iskusstva, 1902, no. 2,51.

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present state of affairs, then it should wait for bigger fish before going public. T h e society showed a hasty readiness to content itself with m i n n o w s . 1 2 Five years later, the RMG

marked the organization's anniversary with a some-

w h a t surprised and g r u d g i n g salute to its survival. 1 3 T h e i r staying p o w e r w a s at least partly b o u g h t at the price o f moderation. Despite the reputation created in its o w n day by Nurok's publicity—-and in ours, by Stravinsky's m e m o i r s — t h e society was n o hotbed o f radicalism. D u r i n g the first half dozen years o f its existence—that is, during Stravinsky's student years—the favored composers (judging by frequency o f occurrence o n programs) were Franck, d'Indy, and especially R e g e r . 1 4 O f the younger French composers, Debussy reappeared only twice after the 1903 concert at which his suite Pour le piano w a s played, 1 5 and Ravel, w h o m N u r o k "discovered" in Paris in 1 9 0 6 , 1 6 appeared on only one program (28 October 1 9 0 7 — J e u x d'eau, Sonatine, Miroirs,

Histoires naturelles).17

(Dukas's piano sonata

12. RMG 11, no. 14 (6 April 1902), cols. 440—41. 13. "One has to grant two distinctions to the circic of young musicians who periodically organize the 'Evenings of Contemporary Music' in St. Petersburg: first, their activity has established a new type of conccrt, with programs made up exclusively of new pieces never before heard in St. Petersburg; and second—and this is more important—they have been able to hold on to a certain more or less stable core of listeners" ( R M G 16, no. 44 [1907], col. 1007). 14. Reger had an Evening to himself on 20 February 1906. Karatigin's review was ecstatic: "What can one say of this divine master, of the inexhaustible wellsprings of his creative imagination, which blanketed the packed hall in uninterrupted sonorous radiance for over two hours? How does one write into the sun's full glare? With what verbal lines can one give an idea of Reger, who stands at all times on the ramparts of 'absolute' music, music an und fur sich?... If, despite the organic wholeness of Reger's works, one submits them to 'vivisection,' the investigator will discover above all and at every turn the mighty 'mainland' layers of the classical musical Weltanschauung. This is not a school tradition, not a boring, erudite routine, but the living assimilation of the whole 'subsoil' of classicism, the vivid development of its very psyche, a new and lofty landmark on that very path—for many, already a dried up path—where Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms won their immortality" ("Vechera sovremennoy muziki," Vest 3, nos. 3-4 [1906]: 3-4, 73; mixed metaphors original!). 15. Two songs ("Colloque sentimentale" and "Le reve") and the Quartet, op. 10, were played during the 1905-6 season. Karatigin (ibid., 72) already felt that Debussy's "originality was threatening to turn into routine." 16. "I have made the acquaintance of [Deodat de] Severac and Maurice Ravel. Here they are both considered rising stars. To me they seem just like Debussy, only much more complicated" (1906 letter to an unnamed correspondent; in I. V. Nestyev, " V o obshchenii s sovremennikami," Sovetskaya muzi'ka, 1967, no. 4, 78). 17. It was at this concert that Rimsky-Korsakov made a remark that has become immortal thanks to Stravinsky's Chroniques. Gnesin's version, from his book-length memoir on Rimsky-Korsakov, is very specific as to time and place: "I recall that at one of the 'Evenings of Contemporary Music,' where some compositions of Ravel and other then young composers [i.e., Akimenko, Cherepnin, Duparc, Inghelbrecht, Ladmirault] were performed (it was during the season 1907-1908), the leaders of the 'Evenings' circle came up to Rimsky-Korsakov and began interrogating him as to how he liked what he'd heard. Nikolai Andreycvich hemmed and hawed for a while, and then said: 'As far as the principle of using dissonances with all the rights of consonances is concerned, it's not my cup of tea [mne eto ne po dushe], although,' he added half-jokinglv, 'I should hurry right home lest I get used to it and, God forbid, begin to like it'" (M. F. Gnesin, Mali i vospominaniya 0 N.A. Rimskom-Korsakove [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956], 207). In the Chroniques, Stravinsky casts himself as interlocutor, and the remark is made with reference to Debussy (An Autobiography, 18). In all likelihood, the anecdote was contributed to the Chroniques bv Nouvel, Stravinsky's ghostwriter, who was one of the leaders of the Evenings circle, and mav well have been the one who elicited the remark. Stravinsky revived the story in yet further dis-

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was also played, on 6 March 1903.) Of Russian composers, Rachmaninoff was regularly featured, alongside such Belyayevtsi' as Winkler, Cherepnin, Akimenko,18 and Zolotaryov. On the program of 6 November 1905, even the collective Belyayevets quartet albums were played, along with piano and chamber works of Glazunov. The most radical Russian composers performed were Vasilenko, Senilov, Rebikov (The Christmas Party [Tolka] after Dostoyevsky, which Stravinsky recalled having admired),19 and Georgiy Catoire (1861-1926), a Moscow Conservatory professor of Chaikovskian descent and Scriabinist bent. Of Scriabin himself, only the Third Sonata was performed, plus two shorter works ("Poeme satanique," op. 36, and "Valse," op. 38). All in all, this was not quite the modernist education Stravinsky made it out to be, nor were the low-prestige Evenings programs such as would play pied piper to a Rimsky-Korsakov favorite. Still, to the Belyayevtsi—and to Rimsky-Korsakov in particular—it was very much "the other camp." Rimsky's suspicion was perhaps as much personally as ideologically motivated, brought on by Nurok's sallies, in the pages of Mir iskusstva, against the Russian Symphony Concerts (above all, his captious ridicule of Stasov's "Toast" to Rimsky and Glazunov), plus the fact that Nurok had offered the old anti-kuchkist Herman Laroche a forum in the magazine. Whatever the motive and whatever the justification, Rimsky's antipathy toward the Evenings was profound. He gave most serious vent to it in his diary (9 March 1904): "The impudent and half-eared directors of the Evenings of Contemporary Music applaud him [i.e. Debussy, whose Estampes Rimsky had just been lambasting] and set him up in opposition to the superannuated Glazunov, RimskyKorsakov, and the others, seeing in him a refreshing current."20 Rimsky's retaliatory ironies against the Western "decadents" by whom he felt threatened were often prompted by the latest Evenings program: his remarks about his pupil Spendiarov, for instance, whose songs were "real music, not your Wolf or Strauss,"21 were brought on by the concert of 5 April 1904, when Wolf and Strauss lieder were heard in Russia for the first time. And surely his punning synonym for decadence—"d'Indism"—was motivated by Nurok-Nouvel propaganda for one who,

torted form in Conv: 39/39. Diaghilev, too, repeated it in some unpublished memoirs of 1928, in the guise of a remark made by Rimsky-Korsakov on leaving a performance of Pelleas in Paris in 1907 (see Richard Buckle, Diaghilev [New York: Atheneum, 1979], 99). It may well have been a stock RimskyKorsakov quip. 18. Akimenko's violin sonata was given on the same program as Ravel's pieces. It is likely, by the way, that his Eclogue for English hom and piano (with Stravinsky as the hired accompanist; see Chapter 2) was part of the program of 21 November 1902, at which works by Krizhanovsky and Wolf-Ferrari were also performed. A complete listing of that program has not been found. 19. D & D : 2 2 (Dialogues, 99). 20. Yankovsky et al. (eds.), Rimskiy-Korsakov 2:16. The remarks on Debussy that preceded this outburst are quoted in Chapter 1, p. 55. 21. See Chapter 3, p. 165.

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in his native France at least, was hardly what anyone would have thought to call a decadent. On first meeting the representatives of the other camp, Gnesin was nonplussed. His account pungently conveys their personal style and the sort of bluster with which the Davids of the Evenings went after the Goliaths of the Conservatory. The occasion was a Vyacheslav Ivanov Wednesday early in 1906: morya nocb'yu"] ["Vsyo mnegrezitsya tnorye"] to words of Bal-

I had been demonstrating my songs " B y the Sea at N i g h t " ["£/ and " I Dream Always of the S e a "

mont (both from my opus 1). " N i c e pieces, but they don't open any new paths," Karati'gin announced. Nouvel's opinion was the same. " Y o u take a negative view of the contemporary French composers, but Scriabin also fails to enrapture you (me neither, by the w a y ) — b u t what do you like in music?" — A s I recall, I answered rather demonstratively, " I love Rimsky-Korsakov, I love Musorgsky and Borodin." — " T h a t ' s very nice," answered Nouvel, " I also love Saltan

and

Kashchey—excellent

things. But then you have no f u t u r e . . . all this is the past, the beautiful past! I think that the sooner Rimsky-Korsakov dies, the better it will be for Russian music. His tremendous stature crushes our youth and prevents it from traveling new paths." In view of my reverence for my teacher, w h o at the time had just written

Kitezh

and was working on Le coq d'or, and w h o had helped form so many composers and such different ones, including the then beginning Stravinsky, it was simply nauseating for me to listen to Nouvel. T h e conversation was quickly terminated. 2 2

Nouvel's tactlessness was nauseating, but what he said contained some truth, and Gnesin must have sensed it, for he neither ceased his attendance at decadent gatherings—which continued to be "useful to me, urging me forward, stimulating me to experiment" 23 —nor lessened his zeal for setting decadent poetry, for which he was regarded with some bewilderment by the Belyayevtsi (Lyadov: "But don't you think Gnesin is a little bit crazy?"). 24 One reason Gnesin was eventually accepted in the circle of Rimsky's intimates was that he had a fervent admirer, somewhat unaccountably, in Yastrebtsev, who was often at pains to reassure the master of Gnesin's respect. By 26 March 1908, Rimsky, genuinely impressed by the young man's talent, expressed the wish to see Gnesin join his Wednesday evening company, but immediately had cold feet. Yastrebtsev leapt to Gnesin's defense: "When I told Rimsky-Korsakov that Gnesin loves and studies his w o r k s , . . . Rimsky-Korsakov showed great surprise, saying, 'But my compositions, except for Kashchey and a few other things, must seem to Gnesin a bit childish.' " 2 S Gnesin

12. Glezer

(ed.), Gnesin, 140-41. 23. Ibid., 142. 24. Yastrebtsev, Vospominantya 2:497. 25. Ibid., 489.

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was invited, however, and attended two jours fixes before Nouvel's wish for the future of Russian music came true. Gnesin's reputation as a wild man, and Rimsky's candidly expressed fear of him, could only have given him a special cachet in the eyes of Rimsky's more obedient pupils. One of the most revealing glimpses of Rimsky-Korsakov's relations with his most advanced pupil takes the form of an anecdote that appears, from different perspectives, both in Yastrebtsev's memoirs and in Gnesin's. It concerns Gnesin's first major orchestral score, the "symphonic fragment" From Shelley, op. 4, inspired by Prometheus Unbound. As wary of Rimsky as Rimsky was of him, Gnesin tested the piece out on Maximilian Steinberg. "Steinberg thoroughly approved of the composition," Gnesin recalled, "and expressed his confidence that Nikolai Andreyevich would like it and that he would be especially glad to see its relative harmonic simplicity (N. A. often reproached me for excessive harmonic contrivance)." Some days later Rimsky-Korsakov took Gnesin by surprise: "He turned to me with a question that seemed a bit uncharacteristic of him, even a bit venomous in tone: 'I hear you have written something especially for me?!' I became embarrassed, at which Rimsky softened, laying his hand on my shoulder, and saying: 'Well, never mind; we'll see what kind of music it is.' " 2 6 For an explanation of Rimsky's remark, we must turn to Yastrebtsev's account of a conversation that took place between Steinberg and Rimsky-Korsakov on 29 February 1908 (at which Igor Stravinsky was present and listening): The conversation then turned to M. Gnesin's new symphonic poem on the theme of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, whereupon the following rather comical dialogue took place between Nikolai Andreyevich and Steinberg: "This composition will hardly please me," said Rimsky-Korsakov. "But I was sure you'd like it," said Maximilian Oseyevich, "since he wrote it for you expressly, that is, taking your tastes into account." "What do you mean, 'for me'?" exclaimed Nikolai Andreyevich, and then, lowering his voice half in sorrow, half in jest, added, "Look what I've come to! I've fallen so far behind that nowadays they write either for themselves (complicated) or for me (simple)." 27

Indeed, that is just what "they" did. In his memoirs, Gnesin stated that by 1907 his symphonic fragment "already dissatisfied me in its simplemindedness," and yet he showed it to Rimsky-Korsakov in 1908.28 Just as Nouvel had observed in his acid way, Rimsky-Korsakov had become a brake on the development of his more imaginative pupils. Not that they consciously resented him for it. They could even

26. Gnesin, Mislt i vospominaniya, 285-86. 27. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:480. 28. Glezer (ed.), Gnesin, 142.

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praise him for it in retrospect, as when (albeit in Soviet times) Gnesin wrote of one of his more radical songs of the period, "I wanted passionately for RimskyKorsakov to approve of it, so I worked on it with special care, looking out that the writing would give him no opportunity to charge me with elementary 'mistakes.' " 2 9 This meant combing the song after finishing it for parallel fifths and comparable academic transgressions, as well as adding schoolmasterly contrapuntal effects to the accompaniment. We have observed a similar effort to conform to a scholastic code of behavior in Stravinsky's Scherzo fantastique, and even in Fireworks. Perhaps the best illustration of this braking influence on Stravinsky is his set of études for piano, op. 7, one of the last compositions he began while Rimsky was still alive. This rather insignificant work almost marks a return to the idiom of the Sonata in F-sharp Minor, so utterly beholden is it to approved models. Charles Joseph has demonstrated the unsuspected extent to which the first of Stravinsky's études actually copies Scriabin's Étude op. 42, no. 2 (fives-against-threes, a "Neapolitan" pause, a coda in octaves).30 But the derivations don't end there; they are pervasive: compare the left hand of Stravinsky's op. 7, no. 2 (the last section), with that of Scriabin's op. 8, no. 10; the left-hand melody of Stravinsky's op. 7, no. 3, with the middle section of Scriabin's op. 42, no. 5; and, most telling of all, the famous metric displacement of Stravinsky's op. 7, no. 4, with Scriabin's op. 42, no. 8. Nor should it be thought that all this Scriabinism had anything to do with "decadence." Far from it: the Études opp. 8 and 42 are early, orthodox Scriabin, composed over the decade 1894-1903, and all published by Edition Belaieff within Mitrofan Belyayev's lifetime. Meanwhile, in the years 1906-7, Scriabin had begun the modernist explorations for which he is best remembered; yet Stravinsky, writing in 1908, remained blinkered to such current Scriabin compositions as the Fifth Sonata or the piano pieces (opp. 51,52,56,57) in which the harmonic and textural innovations that had their first culmination in Le poème de l'extase were gradually developed. To compare, say, Scriabin's Poème ailé, op. 51, no 3 (a Prokofiev favorite, even then), or his Énigme, op. 52, no. 2, both written in 1906, with any of the four concert études Stravinsky composed two years later, is to appreciate to the full the constraints Stravinsky's musical environment was imposing on him. Even next to the contemporary piano music of the provincial Vilna composer Mikolajus Ciurlionis, seven years Stravinsky's senior, to say nothing of the seventeen-year-old Prokofiev,31 Stravinsky's expertly crafted études are stale, straitlaced, and shallow. Of course, there may have been mitigating factors. One recalls that a year earlier the first publisher Stravinsky had ever approached turned The Faun and the Shep29. Ibid., 147. 50. Joseph, Stravinsky and the Piano, 44—51, including a complete facsimile of the autograph. 31. E.g., the Four Pieces, op. 4 (including "Suggestion diabolique" ["Navazhdemye"j), given their première at the Evenings of Contemporary Music program of 18 December 1908—not "in the winter of 1906-7," as Stravinsky has it in M&C:64/66.

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down flat, but asked to see "any piano pieces you might have." 32 The études, viewed from this perspective, might be written off as a potboiler. But since, as long as he lived in Russia, Stravinsky was a man of independent means, the incentive could not have been merely commercial. He must also have been craving professional recognition. Nor could the études have been composed in a spirit of cynicism, for in that case Stravinsky would hardly have dedicated them in all sincerity to his close friends among the "Korsakovian youth"—Rimsky's sons Andrey and Vladimir, Nikolai Richter, and Stepan Mitusov.

herdess

Indeed, pardy because of his upbringing in a family that did not value his gifts, and partly because of insecurities that were developing in him with regard to his place within the Rimsky-Korsakov circle (presently to be explored), Stravinsky, as he began to come musically of age, was ravenous for acceptance and notoriety—so much so that he would even risk Rimsky's displeasure to gain the admiration of the peers he most respected, which in the first instance meant the redoubtable Gnesin. This, at any rate, is the best explanation one can find for Stravinsky's contradictory musical behavior—on the one hand ("for me," Rimsky might have said) composing those chaste, derivative études, and on the other ("for them") choosing to base his earliest romances on the kind of "contemporary poetry" Gnesin made a specialty of setting, poetry of which Rimsky expressed strong disapproval.33 It is a further testimony to the power of this peer influence as a counterforce to Rimsky's that Steinberg, Stravinsky, and Gnesin all appeared together as a veritable troika under the auspices of the "other camp," that is, the Evenings of Contemporary Music, on the program of 27 December 1907, each of them offering settings of Symbolist poetry. 34 This was actually the first time the wholly unknown Stravinsky's music was performed before a paying audience (his only previous exposure having been the semiprivate Court Orchestra readings the previous April), and it was also the only Stravinsky performance during Rimsky's lifetime that had not been arranged by teacher for pupil. Rimsky's attitude toward his pupils' flirtation with the "decadents" was ironical and indulgent: for a fledgling composer a performance was a performance, and he made no outward objection. But he ex32. Letter to Rimsky-Korsakov, 18 June 1907; in IStrSM:44o. The whole passage is given in Chapter 3, p. 250. 33. The sources and the documentation being as unreliable as they are, it seems advisable to put what follows in a footnote, but several sets of Soviet memoirs of Gnesin make the claim that (to quote one), "Stravinsky singled Mikhail Fabianovich out from among the many others of his own age, and acted towards him with great benevolence and respect, although such behavior was not very characteristic of him" (N. Ya. Rïzhkin, "Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin: chelovek, obshchestvennïy deyatel', uchitel'," in Glezer [ed.], Gnesin, 257). Another memoirist speaks with special relevance to the Gorodetsky songs: "[Gnesin] far surpassed both [Steinberg and Stravinsky] in his skill at musically realizing a text, at giving life to a vocal line. As the composer himself has recounted, Stravinsky used to tell him that he (Stravinsky) was incapable—with reference to Gnesin's aptitude for expressive melodic composition" (Yuliy Grigoryevich Kreyn, "M. F. Gnesin," in Glezer [ed.], Gnesin, 25). 34. The three names continued to be linked habitually by Russian critics for some time thereafter. As late as November 1912, Nikolai Myaskovsky listed the generations of contemporary Russian composers as follows: (1) Glazunov, Lyadov, Taneyev; (2) Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, Vasilenko; (3) Gnesin, Stravinsky, Steinberg ("Peterburgskiye pis'ma," Muzïka, no. 103 [10 November 1912], 93).

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pressed himself acerbically on the concert a few days later to Yastrebtsev (30 December 1907), grousing some more about Stravinsky's first Gorodetsky song, and comparing his pupil's barbarities with those of Musorgsky, whose tragic fate had been a topic of discussion earlier that evening. As he was leaving, Yastrebtsev repeated to Rimsky a witticism he had heard at the concert: "Indeed, it would be better if today's musical youth . . . would try harder to write not so much for 'contemporaries' as for posterity." He added, in his diary, that "this sally pleased Rimsky-Korsakov particularly."35 Stravinsky was represented on the Evenings program by "Vesna (Monastirskaya•)" and the Pastorale, both sung by Yelizaveta Petrenko (who sang all the early performances of The Faun and the Shepherdess, and to whom Stravinsky dedicated the Gorodetsky song), accompanied by a Serb named Mladen Iovanovich, the Evenings house pianist of the moment. 36 Gnesin was represented by "Snowflakes" ("Snezhinki," op. 2, no. 1, words by Volkenshteyn), and Steinberg by "The Gold Star" ("Zolotaya zvezda," op. 6, no. 3, words by Balmont), a song dedicated to Gnesin. Gnesin's and Steinberg's songs were performed by a "name" artist, Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel (the painter's wife), who was close to the Rimsky-Korsakovs through performances of Nikolai Andreyevich's operas at the Moscow Private Opera of Mamontov. She had encountered Steinberg's early songs (op. 1) at a Rimskian jour fixe in October 1906, and, at Rimsky's urging, performed them in February 1907, accompanied by Nikolai Richter. Through Steinberg she became familiar with Gnesin's settings "From Contemporary Poetry" and championed his work up until her early death in 1913. She sang Stravinsky only after he had become famous (Rosyanka, the second Gorodetsky song, at a Koussevitzky concert in Moscow, 13 February 1911). Zabela's failure to champion his work when he needed her must have rankled; half a century later Stravinsky went out of his way to publish some scurrilous gossip about her and Rimsky-Korsakov. 37 Setting the songs of Gnesin and Steinberg next to Stravinsky's will help fill out our picture of the context from which he was emerging, in a way that comparing his work with that of his mentors and seniors cannot. Stravinsky's "Vesna (Monastirskayay was discussed, with examples, in the preceding chapter. Now compare the openings of his comrades' songs, both composed, like his, in the middle of 1907 and performed together with his on the Evenings of Contemporary Music program of 27 December (Ex. 6.1). For all their "contemporary" leanings, both of these songs are recognizable products of the Rimskian incubator. Their harmonic novelties are completely "rationalized" and methodical—by virtue either of demonstrative sequences (in Gne35. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:456. 36. For more on him, see Prokofiev's typically amusing account in Avtobiografiya, 566-68; or Prokofiev by Prokofiev, 297—99. 37. E&D:9O/63.

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sin's case almost comically so) or of showily impeccable voice leading (recall Rimsky-Korsakov to Yastrebtsev: "I don't know what you call this chord, but this is how it resolves . . . " ) . Gnesin's song is a bit to the left of Stravinsky's, Steinberg's a bit to the right. The opening progression of "Snezhinki" is a kind of extension of the "chain mode" investigated in Chapter 4; that is, major thirds related by minor thirds (as circled) are at the core of the harmony, which is thus governed in the background by an octatonic rotation. In Gnesin's variant, the major thirds are extended to augmented triads and the bass progression sounds all the chromatic passing degrees. On the third beat of each of the opening four bars, the rhythmic motion is arrested on a four-note whole-tone chord, the very one labeled "X" in the analysis of Stravinsky's Fireworks in the last chapter. It was a chord Rimsky was just then experimenting with in Le coq d'or. Gnesin preceded Stravinsky in his appropriation and personal exploitation of it by one year. Steinberg's twinkling star music is far less adventurous; it is au fond merely a functional authentic cadence heavily doctored with chromatic degree inflections, modal mixtures (the descending tetrachords), and anticipations. Clearly, Steinberg never had to worry about Rimsky-Korsakov's reception of his work. And thereby hangs a tale that is altogether crucial to our understanding of Stravinsky's path. For if Gnesin and his avant-garde circle provided Stravinsky with the "how" we sought in the first paragraph of this chapter, it was Steinberg who, more than anyone else, supplied the "why." During the last year of Rimsky's life something began to seethe beneath the surface of Stravinsky's outwardly adoring and devoted relationship with his teacher, and with the musical environment that had nurtured and sustained him. The signs are too small to read without benefit of hindsight, but since we know that the bonds eventually snapped we are justified in looking for the first scarcely perceptible signs of fraying. These had less to do with musical style, taste, or politics than with a person, the very one who on the surface would remain Stravinsky's closest musical friend until the year of The Rite. The feelings Steinberg engendered in Stravinsky during the years of their fledgling professional activity, though utterly repressed at the time, were beyond doubt a huge contributor to the impulse that would a few short years later cause Stravinsky to sever the ties that bound him to his roots, and even—as far as he could—to deny them. THE

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Maximilian Oseyevich Steinberg (in Russian, pronounced Shteynberg) was born in 1883 in Vilna. Now the capital of Lithuania under the name of Vilnius, in the nineteenth century Vilna was one of the larger Polish cities in the Jewish pale of settlement within the Russian empire, and its main educational center. The future composer's father, Osey (Hosea) Steinberg, was a leading Hebraist, the head of the Jewish Teachers' College in Vilna (Vilenskiy yevreyskiy uchitel'skiy institut), and the [384]

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compiler of a biblical dictionary that went through many editions, as well as of an annotated translation of the Pentateuch. 38 Such a father, needless to say, would never have marked his son for a musician; and indeed, Maximilian Steinberg was sent to St. Petersburg in 1901 to pursue what we would now call a pre-med course at the university in the faculty of natural sciences. He graduated from the university in 1906 with a gold medal in biology. 39 At the same time, he entered the Conservatory, where, owing to his lack of previous theoretical training in music (all his early training, typically, had been in playing the violin), his progress was slower. He was put in Lyadov's elementary harmony class. By the fall of 1903 he was ready for Rimsky-KorsakoVs counterpoint class, and he continued with Rimsky into fugue and practical composition. It was here that he began to distinguish himself. "Our first assignments," he later recalled, were pieces of a dance character. By way of model we acquainted ourselves in class with Glazunov's [ballet] Raymonda.

Nikolai Andreyevich took great delight

in this music, as he did in Glazunov generally. His enthusiasm naturally rubbed off on us, too. Under the influence of Raymonda

I wrote a ballet suite for class:

gavotte, polka, waltz, adagio, mazurka. These pieces met with a warm reception on the part of my teachers. From then on I began to be looked upon as a pupil of serious promise. 40

That was putting it mildly. Alexander Ossovsky recalled that one Sunday in 1903 Rimsky-Korsakov came to see him "all joyful and animated: 'Ah, Alexander Vyacheslavovich, what a pupil I have in my class—talented, remarkable taste, a sense of measure, an ear, pure voice leading!' , i 4 1 This was Steinberg. As for his ballet suite, items from it were still being requested at Rimskianyo«rc fixes as late as December 1907. 42 In the fall of 1904 Steinberg went into Glazunov's orchestration class and made another conquest. He became one of the select few who were privileged to associate with their Conservatory professors outside the classroom. The following description of these extensions, as it were, of his classroom studies will bring to mind similar passages from Stravinsky's memoirs of his apprenticeship: Our teachers considered it useful and indispensable that we visit orchestral rehearsals. Nikolai Andreyevich himself was often found at them: with score in hand, in

38. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, Maksimiltan Shteynberg (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1928), 10. The last edition of the Hosea Steinberg Bible (Pyatiknizhiye Moiseyevo, s doslovntm russkim perevodom [Vilna: B. Tsionson, 1914]) was the last Hebrew scripture to be published in Russia. 39. Gnesin, "Maksimilian Shteynberg," 29. 40. "Vospominaniya M. O. Shteynberga," in Ginzburg (ed.), N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzihil'noye

obrazavaniye, 203.

41. "Iz vospominaniy A. V. Ossovskogo," in ibid., 192.

42. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:456.

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the company of t w o or three of his pupils, he attentively followed the performance, now and then inserting his comments and expressing his feelings on this or that detail of the score, almost always very expansively, whether in delight or in indignation. T h e hours I spent at these rehearsals next to my teacher I consider to have been among the most precious for me: they brought me significantly closer to Nikolai Andreyevich and played an enormous role in my development. 4 3

It was here that Steinberg and Stravinsky became acquainted. Steinberg first entered the Rimsky-Korsakov home under peculiar circumstances connected with his teacher's temporary dismissal from the faculty of the Conservatory during the 1905 revolution. So as not to miss his classes, and also as a sign of protest, Rimsky began to hold instruction in his living room. The next stage in Steinberg's elevation took place here. As he recalled: Working in domestic surroundings, naturally, could only draw us closer. A r o u n d then I wrote four romances for class, which pleased Nikolai Andreyevich. Once after the lesson, when my comrades had all chanced [!] to leave ahead of me, Nikolai Andreyevich called Nadezhda Nikolayevna into the living room and ordered me to play my romances. Nadezhda Nikolayevna heartily approved of them, and I evidently gained her favor, which was enormously flattering to me since in her critical estimates Nadezhda Nikolayevna was exceedingly severe and blunt. Then and there Nikolai Andreyevich came out with the idea that these romances were worth printing, which was accomplished before the year was out by the firm of Belyayev. Thus, I may consider 1905 to mark the beginning of my career as a composer. 4 4

That was two years ahead of Stravinsky. It was not too long before Rimsky singled Steinberg out for another signal honor: as already noted in the previous chapter, he asked his pupil to read proof for the full and vocal scores of Kitezh, which Steinberg then received as a gift in return for his services.45 Having thus distinguished himself as both pupil and assistant, Steinberg was admitted to the inner circle around Rimsky-Korsakov at the beginning of 1906, when he received his first invitation to a jour fixe. This was a special occasion, about which there will be more to say in a later chapter: the first performance in thirty-five years of Musorgsky's unpublished and then all-but-unknown setting of the opening scenes of Gogol's comedy Marriage (Zhenit'ba), which Rimsky had arranged as a birthday present for the venerable V. V. Stasov. Over thirty-five guests were invited, including Chaliapin (who participated later in the evening in 43. "Vospominaniya M. O. Shteynberga," in Ginzburg (ed.), N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzikal'noye obrazovaniye, 203. 44. Ibid., 204. 45. Ibid., 207.

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a performance of Rachmaninoff's recent setting of Pushkin's Miserly Knight) and all the Belyayevets regulars. Guriy Stravinsky (Igor's brother) was among the performers in the Musorgsky work. Steinberg was the only currently enrolled Conservatory pupil to be included in the company. From then on he never missed a Rimskian gathering, and so his relations with Rimsky-Korsakov and the other members of the inner circle can be chronicled in detail thanks to Yastrebtsev's diary. His meteoric rise makes fascinating reading. No other pupil since Glazunov had been so actively promoted by Rimsky-Korsakov, and now Glazunov was pushing Steinberg just as hard. He was the compleat Belyayevets—and why not? It was his ticket out of the ghetto. But he never could have dreamed how high he would eventually fly. Steinberg's first work for orchestra was a set of variations in G major, op. 2, which he composed in Rimsky-Korsakov's class and orchestrated in Glazunov's. So pleased were his teachers that Rimsky-Korsakov arranged immediately for a reading by the Court Orchestra, which occurred on 15 February 1906.46 Before the year was out the Variations were repeated at the second Russian Symphony concert of the 1906—7 season under Glazunov's listless but prestigious baton, on a program that also included the première of Glazunov's Eighth Symphony. Steinberg was given the honor of writing the very detailed program notes for this occasion, a fact that testified to the special relationship developing between him and Glazunov. This concord was demonstrated on stage, too, as Gnesin recalled: "As the public applauded, A. K. Glazunov brought the young composer out on stage and 'presented' him to the audience as one from whom they would be hearing a lot more." In October, Steinberg's Four Romances, op. 1, were sung, as noted above, by Zabela-Vrubel at a jour fixe. Yastrebtsev recorded Rimsky's very revealing comments on the songs at this occasion: "Very talented, and at the same time absolutely no 'lumps' [bez 'gvozdetf}, which endears him especially to me. Keep an eye on him, Vasiliy Vasil'yevich [Yastrebtsev] ; you'll be glad you did." 47 By the end of 1906 Rimsky-Korsakov was simply in love with his young pupil. At a jour fixe on 29 November, Steinberg and Stravinsky were asked to play through the former's Variations four-hands, so that Rimsky-Korsakov (and Yastrebtsev) could follow the score in preparation for the Russian Symphony Concerts performance. Then 46. Ibid., 206. 47. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:395 (n October 1906). It may be of interest to compare Rimsky's remarks with the not wholly incompatible comments of the reviewer for the RMG, when Zabela performed Steinberg's opus 1 in public, at Nikolai Richter's recital in February 1907: "The singer performed them with great expressivity, but the songs themselves gave off nothing new or especially expressive. The best of them is the first, 'The Enchanted Grotto' yZacharovanniygrotS text by Balmont], following which interest makes a decrescendo, unless one counts the successful imitation in the third song of a theme from the Fifth Symphony of Glazunov (the young composer's professor). It's an opus one—not mediocre, not banal, but more than that one cannot say" (RMG 14, no. 7 [18 February 1907], col. 221).

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the singer Casimira Berson sang Steinberg's Romances, op. i, and Rimsky had the following exchange with his Boswell: "While Berson was singing, RimskyKorsakov turned to me and whispered, 'Now that is aristocratic music.' When I whispered back in jest that it seems aristocracy exists after all and is even good for something, Nikolai Andreyevich said, 'Well of course! In art it has the very highest significance, since such aristocracy is not the result of an accident of birth, but is the consequence of a truly great artistic gift.'" Remarks like these were anything but characteristic. "In the whole time I've known Rimsky-Korsakov," Yastrebtsev could not refrain from commenting, "I have never heard from him such high praise for any new, young composer, and was therefore not only pleased but astonished." As Yastrebtsev was leaving that evening, Rimsky again turned the conversation around to Steinberg and confided, "You wouldn't believe how unspeakably happy he makes me, both as a musician and as a man." 48 The last phrase was in all likelihood a reference to the relationship that had begun to develop between Steinberg and Rimsky's daughter Nadya. When she had begun to study singing seriously and to show an interest in the theory of music, Rimsky had asked Steinberg to give her lessons in counterpoint,49 possibly intending that they lead where they did—for as we have already seen in connection with the dedication of Stravinsky's Fireworks, the two were engaged in February 1908 and married in June, a few days before Nikolai Andreyevich's death. Rimsky-Korsakov was a tactful, punctilious man. He never made any direct comparison between Steinberg and Stravinsky. But there were enough occasions recorded by Yastrebtsev to make an implicit comparison plain to the most impartial observer, or the most obtuse; and it was not one that favored Stravinsky. For example, on the evening of 31 October 1907, when Stravinsky unveiled his Pastorale and "Vesna (Monastirskayay to a decidedly mixed reception, two new Steinberg songs (including "Zolotaya zvezda") were sung by Zabela, and repeated at the company's request. Rimsky turned to Yastrebtsev and said, "What do you think—how subtle, elegant, and bold withal. Yes indeed, it's not Rachmaninoff!" Zabela put in her oar, too, praising the songs for their singability. "Not like mine," interjected Rimsky, to general merriment. 50 Another invidious comparison was implied by the respective premieres of Stravinsky's and Steinberg's first symphonies. Stravinsky's, as we know, was a practically unrehearsed run-through by the Court Orchestra in its cramped, lowceilinged rehearsal room. Steinberg's, six weeks later (18 March 1908), took place at a Belyayev concert, on a program that also included Glazunov's Dramatic Overture in D minor, op. 84, subtitled "Song of Fate" ("Pesn' sud'bt"). In honor of the occasion, Glazunov dedicated his overture to Steinberg, who reciprocated by dedi48. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:40}, 40s. 49. Gnesin, "Maksimilian Shtevnberg," 29. 50. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:441.

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eating his symphony to Glazunov. Dimitriy Stasov, Vladimir's surviving brother, by then (as the last surviving founder of the Russian Musical Society) the grand old man of Russian music, gave a flowery speech of welcome in honor of Steinberg's symphonic debut. The symphony, by the way, was not nearly as well received by the press as Stravinsky's had been. The RMG pronounced it "an extremely immature composition in which one detects above all the strong influence of Glazunov's music." 51 But that made no difference. Where Rimsky-Korsakov received Stravinsky's symphony somewhat critically after its performance, toward Steinberg he was all solicitude and protection. He was very indignant at the RMG review and, in Yastrebtsev's words, "covered his copy [of the journal] with sharp penciled polemics." 52 That evening, 18 March 1908, marked Steinberg's official investiture as heir apparent to the leadership of the New Russian School, a title to which he also, as Rimsky-Korsakov's son-in-law-elect, had a familial claim. And all this while he was still enrolled as a Conservatory student! On his graduation in May, Steinberg was appointed Glazunov's successor as professor of orchestration, thus formalizing in yet another way his status as dynastic heir (he would remain on the Conservatory faculty until his death in 1946). It seems superfluous to ask how all this made Igor Stravinsky feel. On the surface, relations with Steinberg were cordial, even fraternal, and would continue to be so in tutoyer correspondence throughout the years of Stravinsky's early successes in Paris. 53 Steinberg, for his own part, looking back on his days of intimacy with the Rimsky-Korsakov clan, would put his friendship with Stravinsky first (followed by Guriy Stravinsky, Nikolai Richter, and Stepan Mitusov). 54 Yet how could Stravinsky not have deeply resented this usurper—for with regard to Stravinsky's place within the Rimsky-Korsakov household, that is precisely what Steinberg was. Until 1906, Stravinsky had been the "head"—as Yastrebtsev described him leading his sixtieth-birthday chorus for Rimsky—"of the Korsakovian youth." And now he was displaced by an interloper not only younger than he, but a Vilna Jew. This in itself would be enough to wound the pride of any red-blooded Russian dvoryanin, however liberal his professed attitudes (and Stravinsky's were none too liberal).55 Steinberg's engagement to Nadya Rimsky-Korsakov would

51. RMG 15, no. 11 (1908), col. 331. 52. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:487. 53. Steinberg's side is excerpted in SelCorrI:43—45 (a long footnote); Stravinsky's letters to Steinberg are in IStrSM:446-47, 471, 473-74, 478-7954. "Vospominaniva M . O. Shteynberga," in Ginzburg (ed.), N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i muzikal'noye obrazovaniye, 209. 55. See App. D, "Stravinsky's Politics," in P & D , esp. 553—55; R. Taruskin, "The Dark Side of Modern Music," New Republic, 5 September 1988, 28-34; Robert Craft, "Jews and Geniuses," in Small Craft Advisories (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 274-81; R. Taruskin and R. Craft, "Jews and Geniuses: An Exchange," New York Review of Books 36, no. 10 (15 June 1989): 57-58.

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f i g . 6.4. Twenty years on. a. Maximilian Steinberg with his composition class, Leningrad Conservatory, 1925. Dmitriy Shostakovich stands at the left.

have been the final humiliation, especially when the possibility of Stravinsky's own romantic attachment to her is taken into account.56 Even without considering such personal and familial factors, there were plenty of reasons for envy. Steinberg received praise from Rimsky such as Stravinsky never heard and was the beneficiary of a far more active protection. This we have already observed in connection with performances. There was also the matter of publication. We know the difficulty Stravinsky had getting his early works issued. At the time of Rimsky's death only a single composition by Stravinsky had been accepted for publication: The Faun and the Shepherdess, acquired by Belyayev only after it had been turned down by another publisher and Stravinsky had asked Rim56. Stravinsky denied he was ever close to Nadya (M&C:54-56), but Robert Craft was impressed by the number of photographs of the two of them together, which he saw at the apartment of the widower of Stravinsky's niece Xenia in September 1981, pictures that go back to the year 1902, and that raised, in his mind, "a question about their relationship in the years before their respective marriages, since, to judge from these pictures, the young lady and budding composer were devoted to each other" ("Excerpts from a Diary," in Present Perspectives, 409).

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b. Mikhail Gnesin with composition students at his "Musical Technicum" (now the Gnesin Institute) in Moscow, 1925. Aram Khachaturyan stands directly behind him.

sky to intervene for him. Except for Fireworkspublished by Schott at Siloti's recommendation in 1909, Stravinsky would get no further until Firebird made him marketable and he signed (in 1910) a contract with the Moscow house of Jurgenson. To Steinberg, by contrast, the door to the house of Belyayev was wide open as early as 1905. His opp. 1 and 2 were in print before he graduated from the Conservatory. Opus 3, the First Symphony, was, despite its poor critical reception, given the complete Belyayev treatment: full score, engraved parts, four-hand reduction. Stravinsky's Symphony in E-flat would not be published until 1914. It was clear that as long as Steinberg was around, Stravinsky would play a poor second fiddle to him within the New Russian School, and with Rimsky's death his status sank even lower, for Belyayev power now passed entirely into the hands of Conservatory functionaries to whom Stravinsky was an outsider. This applies particularly to Glazunov, who never formed any personal relationship to speak of with Stravinsky, but who was on terms of the greatest intimacy and affection with Steinberg. A small excursus is warranted here, as Glazunov is cast in such a villain's role throughout the Stravinsky-generated literature. His attitude toward Stravinsky was skeptical for easily understood, if contradictory, reasons. First, Stravinsky had no Conservatory education, which meant he had not THE UPSTART

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gone through what Glazunov considered the essential groundwork in ear training and solfeggio. Second, Glazunov was probably a bit jealous of his own status as Rimsky-KorsakoVs preeminent private pupil and may have felt threatened by Stravinsky's duplication of the relationship Glazunov had enjoyed with their common mentor a generation earlier. This would have been a fine motive for adopting Steinberg as his protégé with a special zeal, even were it not for the fact that Steinberg shared Glazunov's predilection for the classical forms, as Stravinsky did not. As long as Rimsky was alive, Glazunov did nothing to hinder Stravinsky (it was he, one recalls, and not—as Stravinsky assumed—Lyadov who accepted The Faun and the Shepherdess for performance at the Russian Symphony Concerts on behalf of the Belyayev board of trustees). But Rimsky's death left the two of them in a state of mutual aloofness and distrust, which developed into enmity when Stravinsky began to enjoy a greater prestige abroad than those composers Glazunov thought worthier, including Glazunov himself. The worst Glazunov ever actually did to Stravinsky was to snub him in a memorial interview he gave the newspaper Russkoye slovo on the eve of RimskyKorsakov's funeral, where he listed the outstanding pupils of the deceased as follows: Arensky, Lyadov, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Cherepnin, Zolotaryov, Sokolov, and Steinberg. 57 The more overt hostility toward Stravinsky for which Glazunov is so often taken to task surfaced only after Stravinsky (and especially after both of them) had joined the emigration. But it was a mutual hostility. Much of the literature testifying to Glazunov's antagonism is based on selfperpetuating myths. In one of the "Petersburg Letters" that Nikolai Myaskovsky published as a regular feature in the Moscow journal Muzïka, the author, writing of Stravinsky (3 December 1911), recalled "the time when one of our most venerable composers categorically asserted that he was without talent." The compiler of a collected edition of Myaskovsky's writings noted that the referent here was "obviously Glazunov."58 But "venerable" (mastitïy) is not a word that anyone would have applied in 1911 to the forty-six-year-old Glazunov. Myaskovsky could only have meant the seventy-six-year-old Cui. By the time Stravinsky and Glazunov were both living in Paris, musical politics divided them irreconcilably; nothing they had to say about each other in those years should be taken at face value. Even considering the circumstances, though, Stravinsky's account of their last meeting is maliciously distorted. In Memories and Commentaries he wrote, "[Glazunov] was so consumed with animosity that when I saw him for the last time, backstage after a concert he conducted in Paris in 1935, and said, 'Greetings to you, Alexander Konstantinovich,' all he could do was to 57. Quoted in M. A. Ganina, "N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakov i A. K. Glazunov," in Ginzburg (éd.), N.A.

Rimskiy-Korsakop i muzïktd'noye obrazovaniye, 156. 58. S. I. Shlifshteyn, éd., N. Ta. Mynskovskiy: stat't, pis'ma, vospominaniya (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, i960), 2:483.

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look dour, half offer his hand, and say nothing." In a 1961 letter to the editor of The Observer, he embellished the story: " I have told elsewhere how in 1935 [the singer and mime] Maria Kuznetsova's son came to my studio in the Salle Pleyel and begged me to greet my 'old St. Petersburg colleague' during intermission of a rehearsal of his music downstairs. I accompanied Kuznetsov to Glazunov's green room, but was greeted with as little sympathy—he extended two fingers and said nothing—as I had received thirty-eight years before." 5 9 As it happens, we have Glazunov's side of this story, related soon after the event in a letter to Steinberg. The date—6 June 1929—already puts Stravinsky's memory in doubt (the occasion was the intermission of a concert, not a rehearsal). "After the first number, The Seasons, when I came into the green room, Stravinsky unexpectedly appeared and asked me whether I remembered him [Glazunov had just left Russia, where Stravinsky had not been for fifteen years]. Of course I recognized him immediately. He expressed his pleasure in the music of my ballet, and perhaps sincerely at that, since once long ago he asked me to give him the score to examine and didn't return it for a long time. [Cf. the remarks in Chapter 3 about echoes of this ballet in The Faun and the Shepherdess.] During our meeting no one else was present, and, most likely, Stravinsky left the concert immediately afterward." 6 0 There would seem to have been far more animosity in Stravinsky's recollection of this meeting than in Glazunov's. The occasion for Stravinsky's letter to The Observer was an article by Peter Heyworth in which Artur Schnabel was quoted as quoting Glazunov: " O f all the 2000 pupils I taught at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg, Stravinsky had the w o i i i ear." 61 The enraged Stravinsky was probably still smarting from this the next year when, back in Leningrad, he caught his first glimpse of the Conservatory (now the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory) and, as Craft recorded in astonishment, "as soon as he recognize[d] it, an involuntary 'Glazunov 1 comes out (after fifty years!)." 62 But the statement, so full of insulting inaccuracies, was obviously much garbled in the retelling. For an idea of what Glazunov must really have told Schnabel, compare the following extract from a letter to the pianist Konstantin Igumnov, written on 17 April 1926—that is, during the same year the conversation reported by Schnabel took place: With your remark about Stravinsky I am not in complete agreement: his earlier gifts revealed themselves mainly in outward manifestations: Rachmaninoff and I used to praise the colorful and virtuosic orchestration of his early works, on which

59. M&C:29/29; D&D:IOO (Dialogues, 132). 60. M. O. Steinberg, "A. K. Glazunov: vospominaniya o nyom i yego pis'ma," in Yankovsky et al. (eds.), Glazunov 2:41-42. 61. Cf. Artur Schnabel, My Life and Music (London: Longmans, 1961), 92; the book is a transcript of some autobiographical lectures Schnabel gave at the University of Chicago in 1945. 62. D&D:255.

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his fame rests. In this connection a good friend of mine has pointedly remarked that Stravinsky, you see, orchestrates first and composes later. But what has happened to him lately! H o w he has regressed! I never thought Stravinsky a g o o d musician. I have proof that his ear is undeveloped, as his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov (whom the pupil now disavows) used to tell m e . 6 3

Glazunov again mainly harps on Stravinsky's lack o f a traditional conservatory education, with its obligatory sight-singing and dictation courses, and on his habit o f composing at the keyboard, which Rimsky-Korsakov ratified, if not without 64

irony. Whatever w e may make o f Glazunov's motives, his attitudes were typical o f the St. Petersburg musical establishment. A s long as Stravinsky remained primarily identified as a R i m s k y - K o r s a k o v pupil he w o u l d be compared, and always invidiously, with Steinberg. T h e best possible proof o f this is a lengthy article by Karati'gin, entitled " Y o u n g Russian C o m p o s e r s , " which appeared mApollon,

ostensibly

an avant-garde arts journal, in the fall o f 1910 and which contains w h a t amounts to the most comprehensive characterization o f the prc-Firebird Stravinsky. " I do not think I will be mistaken," wrote the critic, if I begin my little list of the most significant contemporary Petersburgers with the names of Steinberg and Stravinsky. Neither of them, it is true, is as yet a mature creative artist, but they are both finished musicians in full possession of the technic of their art, willing to tackle and easily able to solve new problems of technic and color, freely and to a considerable extent originally and convincingly acting on basic issues of form, theme, harmony, counterpoint, and sonority that are of lively current interest.

Steinberg's w o r k is characterized as having begun in an atmosphere o f academicism but as having triumphed over these origins to the point o f real mastery, as shown in the Second S y m p h o n y o f 1909:

In the finale of this three-movement symphony the author has given us excellent music in the fullest sense of the word, in which the seriousness and profundity of its content makes one forget completely the interesting technical means by which the strength of the overall impression is achieved. I'll g o further: the finale of the Second Symphony positively guarantees that this author in the near future will finally develop into a great, distinctive Russian composer.

A s for Stravinsky:

6?. " A . K. Glazunov v konservatorii: dokumenti," in Yankovsky et al. (eds.), Glazunov 2:445.

64. Cf. An Autobiography, 5.

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The essential features of his style are these: an inclination toward "major" moods—brisk, cheerful, at times humorous—and also a striving to achieve a general exterior smartness and splendor in his music. Stravinsky's ideas are always natural, they flow and develop very freely, as untouched by the slightest vulgarity as they are by the dubious means so often resorted to by composers of small gifts: harmonic willfulness, artificial angularity, tendentiousness of line and color.65 Compared with Steinberg's evaluation, this is pretty faint praise. The picture that emerges from Karatïgin's description of Stravinsky is of a composer of rather shallow aspirations. And indeed, as Karatïgin continues his report he noticeably cools to his subject. About the Symphony in E-flat—to which he had given a quite favorable review two and a half years earlier, and which he could not have seen or heard again in the meantime—he now complains that "for all [its] significant musical merits, the general impression it makes is rather external." And finally, there is this perhaps deliberately administered coup de grâce: However highly we may value the musical wit of Stravinsky's latest works—the Scherzo fantastique and especially the orchestral fantasia Fireworks, a piece dedicated to Steinberg and absolutely dazzling in its immense richness of harmonic and coloristic invention—still and all one cannot deny that from the point of view of sheer musical content and profundity of musical ideas, Stravinsky's work is much inferior to Steinberg's.66 We need look no further than this assessment—which echoes and epitomizes what must have been for Stravinsky an agonizing refrain—to find at least one powerful motive for his modernist revolt, not to mention the fuming jealousy that finally broke the surface in Stravinsky's recollections of Steinberg in Expositions and Developments a full five decades later: "Rimsky was c a r e f u l . . . not to compliment me or encourage me with a loose use of the word 'talent5; in fact, the only composer I ever heard him refer to as talented was his son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg, w h o was one of these ephemeral, prize-winning, front page types, in whose eyes conceit for ever burns, like an electric light in daytime." 67

MEMORIALS But let us return now to 1908, the summer of Rimsky's death, when that modernist revolt was at most a barely conscious inclination, and jealousy of Steinberg as yet repressed. Stravinsky's bereavement is movingly expressed in a pair of letters to his teacher's widow; but more moving still is the sense these letters convey of his iso-

65. V. G. Karatïgin, "Molodïye russkiye kompozitorï," Apollon, 1910, no. 11, 36, 39. 66. Ibid., 40. 67. E&D:49/45.

MEMORIALS

[ 39 5]

lation and foreboding at his own prospects. In the first of them, dated Ustilug, 28 July 1908, he informs Mme Rimsky-Korsakov that he has composed his Chant junebre (Pogrebal'naya pesn') in memory of her husband. "Dear Nadezhda Nikolayevna, you who are so close to my heart," he began: Perhaps you are not up to receiving letters and it will irritate you that I am claiming your attention with this one, but I cannot restrain myself from writing you the following: I have written a piece on the death of our dear, never-to-be-forgotten Nikolai Andreyevich. T h e piece is already orchestrated; and so I wanted to let you and your family know about it. I don't know what will be as far as its performance is concerned. This thought worries me terribly. I will be just miserable if I can't get it performed on a single concert dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Andreyevich. I've just written a letter to Siloti, asking his advice. I will await his answer impatiendy. For really, this is my tribute to the exalted memory of Nikolai Andreyevich, the tribute of his pupil, w h o m he loved. You will, I trust, understand me, dear Nadezhda Nikolayevna, both me and my wishes! 6 8

One can't say Stravinsky had not aimed high with his tribute. Alexander Ilyich Siloti (recte Ziloti, 1863-1945) had for five seasons been leading the most prestigious concerts in St. Petersburg. Already a famous piano virtuoso at the age of twenty (he studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolai Rubinstein and, in theoretical subjects, with Chaikovsky), he had gone to Weimar for three years of finishing with Liszt (1883-86) and was thus one of the last and youngest musicians to be able to call himself an authentic Lisztian. Returning to Moscow, he married Vera Pavlovna Tretyakova, the daughter of the celebrated art patron, and thus not only became heir to a fabulous fortune but also inherited, as it were, the traditions of "merchant patronage" that were so important to the development of nineteenth-century Russian art and music. Siloti upheld these traditions admirably by establishing, and financing with Tretyakov money, his own elaborate concert series in St. Petersburg, which he inaugurated in 1903 and which lasted until just after the Revolution. "Concerts Siloti" was a multifaceted enterprise, encompassing all sides of the founder's phenomenal performing talents. He conducted symphonic programs, for which he hired St. Petersburg's best ensemble, the orchestra of the Mariyinsky Theater, and also regularly engaged stellar international guest conductors; he gave piano recitals and chamber music programs (both instrumental and vocal) as well. A typical season (the seventh, 1909-10; see Fig. 6.6) consisted of seven orchestral subscription concerts under Siloti, with appearances by Enesco, Hofmann, Sobinov, and others; four nonsubscription concerts with name attractions (Nikisch, Chaliapin, 68. IStrSM:445-

[396]

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f i g . 6.5. Alexander Ilyich Siloti (Ziloti, 1863-1945), conductor of important early Stravinsky premières and dedicatee of the Scherzo fantastique, op. 3.

Weingartner, Mottl); and three recitals—Siloti's own, and two others in which he accompanied Felia Litvinne and Eugène Ysaye, respectively. The programs were exciting not only because of the high quality of execution but also because of the amount of new music performed. Just as in the field of art patronage the scions of the big Moscow merchant dynasties (Shchukin, Morozov) were in the early twentieth century branching out into the avant-garde, both domestic and imported (mainly French), so Siloti introduced to St. Petersburg audiences exactly analogous musical sensations. He brought a taste of the musical avant-garde to a mass public, and made it fashionable. He managed to combine the popular appeal of the Russian Musical Society's conservative but star-studded programs with the heady atmosphere of exploration and discovery that had formerly been the sole province of the rather cloistered coterie that attended the Evenings of Contemporary Music. Siloti was widely credited with having awakened St. Petersburg musical life, and was highly esteemed both by the bourgeois publicat-large and by the music profession, its avant-garde wing included. Where the younger generation of Russian composers was concerned, some points made by a writer for the RMG were particularly pertinent: "Nowadays the role of 'musical exhibitor,' played in his time by the late Belyayev for composers of New Russian School lineage, has become one of the goals of A. Siloti's concerts. The activity of the 'Belyayevtsi' in particular having taken on of late a more and more conservative

MEMORIALS

[ J97 ]

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chord" (Ex. 6.5). Here we have the kernel of Stravinsky's "polytonalism," leaving no doubts, if any remained, as to its historical patrimony.82 Steinberg followed this quotation with a passage that makes the "polytonalism" explicit, and with its five- and six-note whole-tone chords it surely rivals for "decadence" anything Stravinsky's Pogrebal'naya pesn' might have contained (Ex. 6.6), even allowing for Stravinsky's recollection that his safely lost Funerary Chant had been "the best of my works before the Firebird, and the most advanced in chromatic harmony."83 Another striking passage in Steinberg's Prélude boldly links triads and seventh chords whose roots sum up a whole-tone collection. All in all, Steinberg's memorial piece to a considerable extent belies his reputation for academic timidity, even if he never went beyond it (he did end up, after all, a Soviet composer). His Prélude made a strong impression—strong enough for the critics to speak of his "emancipation from Glazunov's influence" and his achievement of a more "independent" creative profile. 84 Although Stravinsky's Pogrebal'naya pesn' seems to have made rather little impression on most reviewers ("it could have been applied to any occasion at all," sniffed one), 85 Grigoriy Timofeyev (1866-1919), the critic turned lexicographer to whom Stravinsky had recently sent his vita, thought it good enough to merit a fairly detailed account in the pages of the venerable European Courier. After introducing the young composer, whose name "has only just begun to figure on concert programs," by citing much of the information Stravinsky had sent him the previous March (and getting a good deal of it wrong, including the composer's year of birth), Timofeyev had this to say about the new piece: The "Funerary Chant" fully justifies its title. Despite its indubitable programmatic content and the presence in it of a purely descriptive element, this is subjective music, a lamentation, the moaning of a heart against the backdrop of a gloomy landscape. One seems to hear the sinister wail of a storm that casts a desolate pall, and in the midst of it here is heard, at first pianissimo, then with gradually increasing volume, a beautiful theme, quite recognizably Russian in character. In the middle section there are melodic touches reminiscent of the portrayal of Caliban in Chaikovsky's "Tempest" [shades of The Faun and Shepherdess!]. The ending of the "Chant" is beautiful, where the above-mentioned Russian theme makes a new appearance. Orchestrated with great taste, the "Chant" discloses a lively talent and a considerable technical preparation. Its only shortcoming is betrayed in the form of the work, which is not altogether clear or organic. 86

Timofeyev described Stravinsky's piece as "subjective" in contradistinction to Glazunov's Elegy, which he perceived as "objective, epic, without any lamento, any 82. 8?. 84. 85. 86.

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T h e chord appears in Firebird (Introduction, M&C,:S7/59. Karatigin, " M o l o d i v e russkiye kompozitori," Isav Knorozovskv in Teatr i iskusstvo, quoted G . N . Timofeyev, " I z muzvkal'noy khroniki,"

RIVALRY,

RECOGNITION,

m. 12) as well as

Petrushka.

38. in A . Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkoy kritiki," 69. Vestnik Tevropi, no. 5 (1909): 760.

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lyrical effusion." The RMG's report of the Belyayev concert in memory of RimskyKorsakov lefthandedly suggests—a pleasant surprise!—that Stravinsky's memorial ode, despite its flaws, pleased the audience on that occasion more than Glazunov's: O f the t w o works dedicated to Rimsky-Korsakov's memory, Mr. Stravinsky's

Pesn'

is written with temperament, but it is not well enough soldered together from a formal point of view. It sounds good and made an effect. In our evaluation of Glazunov's

Elejjy

w e depart both from the public and the press in our opinion, as far

as we can tell from the comments we have heard and read. It is a positively beautiful, substantial, and artistic thing. W e are not even talking about the instrumentation or the intended melodic and harmonic reminiscences, somehow permeated with the creative spirit of the departed artist. T h e

Elegy

is a masterly work, noble

in structure, in music, and in the feeling expressed. 8 7

ON

HIS

OWN

When Stravinsky wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov's widow for advice on placing his Pogrebal'naya pesn', he included another request: "If it's not a burden, please ask Andrey [Rimsky-Korsakov] to write me whether he has received the package (registered parcel post) about which I spoke with him when we saw each other in St. Petersburg [i.e., at Rimsky's funeral]." 88 This, on the face of it, would seem related to the familiar story of the return of the Fireworks manuscript, so often quoted from Stravinsky's autobiography. In the previous chapter, several reasons were adduced for why that story could not have been true. What, then, did the registered package contain? The best guess would seem to be that it contained a fair copy of the Scherzo fantastique, which Stravinsky had meant to present to Rimsky as a gift but now wanted back so that he could submit it to Siloti in case the latter turned down the Funerary Chant. In any case, the Scherzo was performed by Siloti on 24 January 1909 (exactly one week after the Pogrebal'nayapesn'), at the seventh concert in his sixth regular subscription series. A grateful Stravinsky dedicated the score "To the great artist Alexander Ilyich Siloti." He had ample reason to feel grateful, for this performance was his first real success. Unlike all previous Stravinsky performances, which had taken place before coteries of the right (Belyayev) and left (Evenings), this one took place under wellattended, even glamorous auspices. The rendition, by the orchestra of the Mariyinsky Theater, must have been a thrill, both for its sheer quality and well-rehearsed precision and also because Stravinsky had known these very men since his teens, when his father was the theater's leading basso and he was the orchestra's little mascot. The reviewer for the RMG had his reservations about the piece, but he honestly reported the public's enthusiastic reception: 87. RMG 16, no. 4 (25 January 1909), col. no. 88. Letter of 28 July 1908; in IStrSM:445.

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The other novelty [the first had been Elgar's Symphony No. i, of all things], an orchestral scherzo, op. 3, by I. F. Stravinsky, entitled "Fantastic" (its expressive echoes from Wagner's Venus grotto might permit calling it also "Venereal"), came off smartly, a piece written with taste and imagination, artfully orchestrated and not without a certain diabolical humor in its rhythms and sonorities. Its considerable dimensions are maintained somewhat at the expense of the intended piquancy of the material. Its length causes one to grow accustomed to the music's peculiarities of style and character; but one mustn't get used to the fantastic lest it stop being fantastic. The scherzo achieved a well-merited was called

and sincere success; the composer

out."

From that moment on, Stravinsky's local reputation was established, and he began to be sought after in other Russian centers as well. Although the relatively mild, well-behaved chromatics of the Scherzo were fully approved by RimskyKorsakov, they were enough to earn for Stravinsky the reputation of a "modernist" in the eyes of other members of his teacher's generation. The reception of the Scherzo fantastique marks the beginning of Stravinsky's transition, in the eyes of the Russian musical public, from the status of docile Belyayevets to that of brash young man. From now on, moreover, he would lead the life of a professional. A little over a week after the Scherzo"s St. Petersburg première, it was conducted in Moscow by Emil Cooper (2 February 1909, the first Stravinsky performance outside his native city) under the auspices of the Russian Music Lovers' Circle (Kruzhok lyubiteley russkoy muziki), an organization that, like the Russian Symphony Concerts, played only Russian music, with special emphasis on the mighty kuchka, and, again like the Belyayev organization, had acquired a reputation for conservatism. 90 The Moscow enterprise, which existed between 1896 and 1912, is often called the Kerzin Circle after its founders, Arkady Mikhailovich Kerzin (1857—1914), a wealthy lawyer and biographer (1906) of Musorgsky, and his wife, the pianist Maria Semyonovna Kerzina (1865-1926). Cesar Cui was extremely close to Mme Kerzina, the real leader of the organization, and, in the capacity of informal adviser to the Circle, carried on a huge correspondence with her. In connection with the impending Moscow performance of Stravinsky's Scherzo, Cui wrote to her about it no less than three times; and inasmuch as Stravinsky's memoirs of Cui contain the remark that "though I think he was present at the first performances of the Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks, I recall no hint of his reactions to

89. RMG 16, no. 5 (1 February 1909), col. 147; italics added. This, not the Fireworks première, was the occasion recalled by Pierre Souvtchinsky, quoted by Eric Walter White (Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 143): "There were cries of'Author!' after its performance, and Stravinsky appeared on stage walking very rapidly and holding his fur hat in his hand." As we shall see, the author was not called out after the Fireworks première. 90. The rest of the program on which the Scherno appeared was typical: Balakirev's First Symphony; Glière's Sirens, op. 33 (1908); Glazunov's Ouverture solennelle, op. 73 (see Z. A. Apetyan, ed., 5. V. Rakhmaninov: pis'ma [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1955], 366).

ON

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[409 ]

these pieces reaching m y e a r s , " 9 1 it may be o f interest to cite these amusing letters for the record. T h e y certainly testify to the ossification o f "kuchkism." Cui's esthetic vantage point may be gauged best from the w a y he lumps E l g a r and Stravinsky together: 25 January [1909]: . . . I was at Siloti's concert last night. H e continues to propagandize the modernists zealously. H e performed last night the terribly long Symphony (about an hour) of Elgar and the terribly long "Scherzo fantastique" by Stravinsky. It's all the same old puffed-up incompetence, absence of all music, pursuit of sheer sonority, of orchestral effect, various curious combinations of various instruments, absence of any logic, of taste, frequent discord, and all the rest. A n d as a result, the complete conformity of all the modernists with one another, the horrible monotony of their pseudomusic—[producing] either indignation or boredom, depending on one's temperament. But the gros public, afraid of the charge of being old-fashioned, listens to all this nonsense in holy silence and dares not withhold its applause. I'd be interested to know whether the public will g o on letting itself be fooled like this for long. I'm afraid it will and that I w o n ' t live to see the reaction in favor of real music that the appearance of a strong, true talent will bring about. 29 January [1909]: About Stravinsky's Scherzo, don't worry, dear Maria Semyonovna, I'm sure it will g o there with the same great success as here. There is litde music in it, but many curious sound effects, and besides it has the completely "moderne" sound, for which the Muscovites have such a weakness, at least to judge by their houses [a reference, no doubt, to the famous residences of the M o s c o w art collectors Shchukin and Morozov]. I'll even say that of the three existing works of Stravinsky [the other two being, evidendy, The Faun and the Pqgrebal'naya

pesn',

both performed at the Belyayev concerts Cui habitually attended], this one is the most bearable. It's just terribly l o n g . . . . 6 February [1909]: It's really too bad you didn't get to hear the Stravinsky Scherzo, since that leaves you completely unacquainted with musical modernism. In a small dose and on first acquaintance this exclusive pursuit of sonority is rather diverting and amusing. But in big portions it is monotonous and intolerable. These gendemen are like a man w h o has chased a g o o d woman away and has taken up with G o d knows who, all dyed and rouged, but heartless, yes, and mindless, too, if you please. 9 2 A l l the M o s c o w reviewers took the cue provided by the juxtaposition o f Stravinsky's Scherzo and BalakireVs First S y m p h o n y to reflect on the passing o f generations. M o s t favorable to Stravinsky w a s Yuliy (Joel) Engel, w h o began with the kind o f sally that w o u l d d o g Stravinsky for decades—"little 'music' but lots o f ' o r chestra' " — b u t ended with a remarkably just assessment o f its highly individual

91. M&O59/61.

92. C. A. Cui, Izbranniyepis'ma, ed. I. L. Gusin (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1955), 587—89.

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coloristic virtues, even nearly divining the hidden apiarian program: "It was strange to hear so many musicians produce so little sound. And practically all of this sound encompassed only half the range of frequencies accessible to human hearing—the upper half. From the strings, the winds, the harp, the percussion, Stravinsky draws special effects: except for the trio, everything in his scherzo chirrs, whistles, hums, buzzes, flits. A curiously brilliant, even masterly piece in its way!" 93 The review by Rimsky-Korsakov's old confidant Kruglikov, by contrast, sounded a note that chimed with Cui's scathing letters, if a bit more decorously because meant for publication: "Stravinsky's harmony went beyond the limits of refined contrivance."94 Stravinsky was in effect being disowned by the old kuchkists—but then, so, even, was Steinberg (Cui to Kerzina: "Thank God we have only a few decadents so far: Steinberg—though a former Korsakov protégé— Stravinsky, and Scriabin. The first two are nonentities, but it's too bad about Scriabin."). 95 Stravinsky's next St. Petersburg performance took place exactly one month after the Scherzo premiere—24 February 1909—when his Pastorale and the Gorodetsky songs (both of them this time) were given by the Evenings of Contemporary Music, for a total of four performances within five weeks. (The performers were Anna Zherebtsova and Mikhail Bikhter.) Testimony to his newfound cachet is implied by the mere fact of repetition, an extremely unusual occurrence at an Evenings concert, where novelty was all. Also noteworthy is the way the RMG, writing about him now for the third time in two months, went for a familiar name when confronted with a list of relative unknowns: This was a strange concert: much too motley, both from the point of view of performers and that of composers (10 performers, including a string quartet; around 1$ composers), but more uniform when it came to the character of the works performed. Without listing all the works on this long-drawn-out program, we will note that the greatest attention of the public was attracted by the quartet of Mr. Pogozhev... and the songs of Messrs. Gnesin, Senilov, and Stravinsky.96

In the wake of his success with the Scherzo fantastique, Stravinsky received his first commissions. Siloti, having done both Stravinsky and Steinberg the favor of rescuing them from the doldrums of the Russian Symphony Concerts, now put

93. Russkiye vedomosti, 7 February 1909; in Yu. D. Engel, Glazami sovremennika (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1971), 242-43. 94. Gobs Moskvï, 6 February 1909; in Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkoy kritiki," 69. 95. Cui, Izbrannïye pis'ma, 368. The editor dates the letter 21 January 1907, but the year must be wrong. Stravinsky's music had never been performed in public as of that date, and the way Cui refers to Steinberg suggests that the letter was written after Rimsky's death, most likely in 1909 or 1910. 96. RMG 16, no. 10 (8 March 1909), col. 273.

ON

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them to work on orchestrations for future concerts in his series. From Steinberg he ordered an arrangement of Bach's solo violin chaconne (it would not actually be performed until the season of 1911-12). From Stravinsky Siloti commissioned orchestrated accompaniments for the settings of Mephistopheles' "Song of the Flea" by the young Beethoven ("Aus Goethe's Faust," op. 75/3, first sketched in 1792) and of course by Musorgsky, to round out a nonsubscription concert devoted to "compositions written on the subject of'Faust'" in belated commemoration of the centenary of Part One of Goethe's poem, to be given on 28 November 1909 with Chaliapin as featured soloist.97 Stravinsky was eager to accept the assignment, but his inexperience put him in a ticklish position. He turned to Steinberg for advice in a letter posted from Ustilug on 21 May 1909. In view of Stravinsky's later legendary business acumen (what he himself would call his "ambition to earn every penny that my art would enable me to extract from the society that failed in its duty to . . . Mozart"), 98 the diffident tone of the letter takes on a particular irony: Siloti has assigned me to orchestrate " T h e S o n g of the Flea" by Musorgsky, and another one by Beethoven (!!!???). A b o u t the first task he wrote me a week or so ago, and I wrote back agreeing; now he has proposed the Beethoven. Here is where I wanted to turn to you with a certain question. Here it is. W h e n Siloti gave you the Bach to orchestrate for the coming season, did he mention any terms to you, and if so, how much? Don't worry, I w o n ' t tell anyone about it. H e made me no offer, and I don't know how to act. I myself don't want to write about it, it's awkward as hell, but he says nothing about this. D o me a favor, write me back on this right

away."

The Musorgsky was ready by the end of the summer: the manuscript is signed and dated Ustilug, 21 August 1909. 100 It is an imaginative, colorful, and boldly individual job, making typically Russian "bardic" use of a pair of harps and articulating the familiar laughing ritornello in an idiosyncratic but effective manner that wears well in its manifold repetitions (Ex. 6.7). The virtuosic woodwind writing gives a foretaste of the ballet scores that were soon to follow: Stravinsky doubles the harp's rolled chords with quick anacrustic arpeggiations in the flutes, clarinets, and bassoons—a device he would exploit to the hilt in Firebird and The Rite of Spring. The last verse is accompanied by little insect squeaks (not in the original)

97. The rest of the program consisted of two selections from Berlioz's Damnation of Faust sung by Chaliapin (yet another "Song of the Flea" and the "Serenade"), Henri Rabaud's Procession nocturne after Lenau's Faust, and Liszt's Faust-Symphonie. 98. I. F. Stravinsky, " A Cure for V. D , " Listen: A Music Monthly 1, no. 5 (September-October 196+): 2; reprinted in revised, retitled, and somewhat bowdlerized form in Themes and Episodes, 91. 99- IStrSM:446. 100. The date is given in Beletsky and Blazhkov, "Spisok," in Dialogi, 377. Igor Blazhkov had located the autograph in the Leningrad State Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography and wrote Stravinsky with the news on 27 August 1964 (Stravinsky Archive).

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6.7

E X A M P L E

a. Musorgsky, "Song of the Flea," refrain

I

f

c

j

\

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l!) «

—

* *

l

p

d

3

0 *

r - — P s ; 0 • J ^

r — f

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p

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—> w > • ¿T^jg > —

1

'

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1=

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i

b. The same in Stravinsky's version (Leningrad: Muzi'ka, 1970)

(arco)

that bring the birds and mosquitos in Lyadov's then-recent Eight Russian Folk Songs (1906) to mind. Stravinsky dragged his heels on the Beethoven orchestration; it was finished less than four weeks before the concert. The inscription over the signature at the end of the autograph score ("Orchestrated St. Petersburg, 3 November 1909") suggests that the whole job was accomplished in a single day, and the manuscript in fact has all the earmarks of a rush job. Strophic repetitions are not written out; Stravinsky penciled in a note to Siloti by way of apology for this: "I trust you will bear me no

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grudge for not copying out the same thing a second and a third time." The unisonchorus refrain is omitted (another penciled note: "The notes for the chorus I have not written out, since I doubt their rhythmic correspondence to the verses of the Russian translation"). 101 Scored (probably at Siloti's stipulation) for a "classical" orchestra (winds in pairs, two horns, and strings), the arrangement is much simpler than that of Musorgsky's song, but far from perfunctory. Its chief point of interest is Stravinsky's reuse of the little mordent figure from Beethoven's ritornello to accompany the punch line of each stanza (Ex. 6.8). The quality of his work notwithstanding, Stravinsky earned no personal success with his "Flea" orchestrations. Reviewers of the concert scarcely bothered to mention his name (if that), turning all their attention to Chaliapin. 102 The most extended comment was a single sentence by Alfred Nurok in Apollon: "The naïve humor of the Beethoven song and Musorgsky's bitter sarcasm were brought excellendy to the fore in I. Stravinsky's talented orchestrations." 103 Musorgsky's "Flea" was a milestone for Stravinsky just the same, for Chaliapin recorded it soon after the première. This was, by a very wide margin, the earliest Stravinsky recording (though of course he was given no label credit). 104 Stravinsky's Musorgsky orchestration was published by Bessel (the original publishers of the song) in 1913. Steinberg helped out there, too. In a letter written in St. Petersburg on 3 December 1912 (o.s.) to Stravinsky in Berlin, Steinberg informed him of the following "piquant tale": Bessel has proposed that I orchestrate Musorgsky's " F l e a " for him. I played innocent and said that as far as I knew, your orchestration still existed; why not publish it? Then Bessel started assuring me that he couldn't wait for an answer from you 101. Siloti had commissioned a singing translation of Beethoven's setting from Victor Pavlovich Kolomiytsev (1868-1936), a prominent music critic and specialist translator of librettos and song texts; Musorgsky had used a translation by the Russian poet Alexander Strugovshchikov (1808-1878), which had first appeared in the journal Sopremennik in 1856. Information on Stravinsky's manuscript is from A. I. Klimovitsky, "Dve 'Pesni o Blokhe'—Betkhovena i Musorgskogo—v instrumentovke Stravinskogo (k izucheniyu rukopisnogo naslediya i tvorcheskoy biografii Stravinskogo)," in the yearbook of the Academy of Sciences of the U S S R , Pamyatniki kul'turi: Novïye otkritiya for 1984 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986), 196-216. Klimovitsky, after Natan Fishman's death the Soviet Union's leading Beethoven scholar, discovered Stravinsky's Beethoven autograph in another archive in the Leningrad Institute of Theater, Music, and Cinematography and printed a complete photographic facsimile of the unpublished score along with his commentaries. 102. E.g., RMG 16, no. 49 (6 December 1909), col. 1012. 103. A. R Nurok, "Kontsertï Ziloti," Apollon, 1910, no. 4, 69. 104. In his extensive listing of Chaliapin's recordings ("Gramofonnïye zapisi F. I. Shalyapina," in

FyodorIvanovtch Shalyapin: start, vïskazïvaniya, vospominaniya [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1958], 2:584-95), Ilya Boyarsky gives the impossible date 1907 for this recording (Gigant 022096). Undoubtedly it belongs to the second series of one-sided acoustical discs Chaliapin cut for Gigant between 1910 and 1914. Chaliapin recorded Musorgsky's song in Stravinsky's orchestration twice more, in 1921 and 1926, the latter an electrical recording that transmits the sound of the orchestra well (alas, a piano is substituted for the harp). These records were circulated in the United States as Victor 6416 and 6783, respectively. Boris Christoff also recorded Stravinsky's arrangement (with the Orchestre de la Radiodiffusion française under Georges Tzipine) in his integral recording of Musorgsky songs (issued in America as Angel 3575 d/LX), still without attribution^).

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EXAMPLE

6.8

a. Beethoven, "Aus Goethe's Faust," op. 75/3, opening ritornello

éOìki

m 3

0

M? , 1

c

rese.

H •

b. The same, mm. 18-21, showing Stravinsky's addition (Stravinsky:)

ÄJSl

(he has a horror of Diaghilev, who, for reasons unknown to me, was supposed to arrange this matter), that he doesn't know your address (I kindly offered to give it to him forthwith). In the end, of course, I flady refused, for I certainly have no intention of indulging Bessel's mercenary pranks. 105

Besides the "Flea" orchestrations, Siloti gave his new protégé a really substantial première during the season of 1909-10: Fireworks. He did more than introduce the piece, in fact. He enthusiastically recommended it to B. Schotts Söhne for publication, and helped Stravinsky past another barrage of "mercenary pranks." In a let105. Stravinsky Archive. The Archive also contains correspondence between Stravinsky and the publisher, including Stravinsky's agreement (dated 9/22 October 1913) to accept an outright payment of $600 (U.S.) for both the "Song of the Flea" and his finale to Khovanshchina (about which see Chapter 14), and a receipt from Bessel (dated 18 October 1913 [o.s.]) stating that "through Guriy Fyodorovich Stravinsky we have received from A. I. Siloti the orchestral score of Musorgsky's 'Song of the Flea' in I. Stravinsky's orchestration."

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ter to Ludwig Strecker, then head of the firm, Siloti called Fireworks "a splendid and very effective piece, in its way a masterpiece of witty elegance." To this Strecker made a wily reply: "If you say it's a masterpiece we've got to believe you, although as we peruse it (hear it, of course, we cannot) it makes a fairly wild impression, a bit like having a whole swarm of wasps flying about your head." For this reason, and because the outsized orchestra required would limit performances, Strecker offered to publish the score only if Stravinsky would waive his honorarium. Siloti intervened on Stravinsky's behalf in a letter of 9 October 1909, and Schott finally tendered the composer the sum of two hundred marks for the rights to what was, after The Faun and the Shepherdess, only his second piece to see print. 106 Originally announced for performance at the second subscription concert of the season (2+ October 1909; see Fig. 6.5b), Fireworks was postponed to the fifth (9 January 1910), where it shared a very long program with Chausson's Symphony in Bflat, Debussy's Nuages and Marche écossaise, Schumann's Cello Concerto (Casals was the soloist), a "Spanish Serenade" by Glazunov, and another première, Hyrcus nocturnus, or "The Flight of Witches," after a novel by Merezhkovsky, the work of a promising young Russian of "fantasist" proclivities, the Muscovite Sergey Vasilenko (1872-1956), who came up to St. Petersburg to conduct his piece himself. According to Vasilenko's memoir of the occasion, his witches soared but Stravinsky's pyrotechnics fizzled: A t rehearsals I met the young composer I. F. Stravinsky—a very nice and highly cultured fellow and an enthusiast of orchestration like [Yuriy] Sakhnovsky [18661930, another Moscow modernist] and myself, a seeker of new paths, unexplored sonorities. His Fireworks did not succeed: there was no time to make sense of his original, at times brusque combinations. The "Flight of Witches" had a roaring success. I was called out many times. 1 0 7

Vasilenko recalled, too, that his piece was received with particular relish by the Belyayevtsï: Glazunov, Lyadov, and Cherepnin communicated eflusive felicitations and invited him (not Stravinsky) to a postconcert repast. The critique in the RMG confirms Vasilenko's account of the concert, and makes clearer what he meant by a lack of time to appreciate Stravinsky's effort:

106. Siloti: "ein prachtvolles und sehr effectvolles Stück in seiner Art als 'feines Esprit'—ein Meisterstück." Strecker: "Wenn Sie sagen, daß es ein Meisterwerk ist, so müssen wir es Ihnen ja wohl glauben, obschon uns bei der Durchsicht (hören konnten wir es ja nicht) einen etwas wilden Eindruck machte, ungefähr so, als wenn Einem ein ganzer Schwärm von Wespen um den Kopf herumflöge." Fuller texts of all cited letters may be found in the preface by Herbert Schneider to the Eulenberg pocket score of Fireworks (no. 1396, 1984). My thanks to Dr. Peter Hauser of B. Schotts Söhne for making an advance copy available to me. 107. S. N. Vasilenko, Vospaminaniya (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1979), 251.

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I. Stravinsky's Fireworks might have had a greater success—this is a capricious "fantastic scherzo" (evidently the young composer's favorite genre), not devoid of individuality, and effectively scored into the bargain. But the little piece is simply too short and insufficiently vivid, so that the public had no time to adjust to it properly. All the same it's a piece "with paprika," as Liszt used to say. As one of the movements of a suite it might make a greater effect; as it is, one might say, one's lips are greased with a tasty sauce, but the dish is not served! 108 Opinion on this particular Stravinsky opus divided along clear party lines. Nikolai Bernshteyn, the reviewer for the Peterburjjskayagazeta and later a dependable Stravinsky detractor, found "more art than imagination" in the piece, 109 which cutting remark may have been transmuted in Stravinsky's memory into the philistine dismissal ("kein Talent, nur Dissonanz") he rather improbably attributed, much later, to Glazunov (why would Glazunov have expressed himself in German?). 1 1 0 The St. Petersburg avant-garde (that is, the Evenings crowd) eagerly claimed the erstwhile Belyayevets for their own. Karatigin's critique, published in the aristocratic Yearbook ofthe Imperial Theaters, though not devoid of reservations, did rate Stravinsky's work above the immediate competition: Siloti's last three symphony concerts brought us several novelties.... Of the Russian novelties the best impression was left by the brisk and brilliant fantasia Fireworks. Of course, in the department of chic and glitter it did not evade the noticeable influences of Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy. But with what skill and finesse does it employ all the best harmonic and coloristic attainments of our musical present! Not a trace of blind imitation here, not a trace of outward onomatopoeia, so tempting in the present instance. The piece is wholly devoid of any "profundity," but on the other hand it is full of such "fiery" merriment and "flaming" temperament, "sparks" of such piquant humor are strewn at every turn through the whole range of the orchestra, that this piece has to be counted among those by young Russians of recent years that display the most talent. 111 By all odds the most significant review was Nurok's in Apollon, a brand-new journal that saw itself as successor to Mir iskusstva as forum of chic Petersburg modernity, where Nurok was now continuing the "musical chronicle" he had contributed to Diaghilev's magazine in its time. It was a review, then, from within the esthetic camp with which Stravinsky was shortly to become irrevocably identified. Nurok contrasted Fireworks with its neighbor on Siloti's program and quite archly reversed the judgment given by the audience, by the RMG,

and by the Belyayevtsi:

108. RMG 17, no. 3 (17 January 1910), col. 79. 109. Quoted in Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkoy kritiki," 69.

no. D&D:ioo (Dialogues, 132).

hi. V. G. Karati'gin, "Kontsertnoye obozreniye," Tezhegodnth imperatorskikh teatrov, no. 4 (1910):

163.

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In the persons of [Vasilenko and Stravinsky], a modernized M o s c o w joins battle with contemporary St. Petersburg. A s an old Petersburger through and through, fervently devoted to the artistic interests of my native bogs, I cannot conceal my delight at the brilliant, decisive victory of our "contemporaneity" over the eastern capital's "contemporizing" [sovremenshchina]. T o the same extent that Stravinsky's pithy little piece (it's only 2—3 minutes long), with an aim that is modest even for program music, testifies to his bright, original talent, his richly ingenious mastery, his refined and cultured sensibility, so the long-winded, garrulous composition by Vasilenko, which competes in pomposity with the text that inspired it, testifies to the ordinariness and the obsolescence of its author's creative means. . . . Stravinsky's virtuosically realized miniature is not by any means devoid of real musical substance, for, without going further than witty hints at a sonic reproduction of bursting rockets and rackets, it truly captures in its purely musical essence that singular psychic elation that pyrotechnical displays evoke. A n d such an impression can be achieved in music only through its substance, however it may be bejeweled. 1 1 2

This is a major document, for it spells out what it was that attracted the esthetes of the "World of Art" to Stravinsky: terseness of expression, absence of rhetoric, virtuosity of technique, brilliance of surface, above all the composer's failure (at least this time) to meet bourgeois expectations—a recipe, in short, for snob appeal. There were "feelings" galore in the piece, but one had to be au courant enough to catch them on the fly. But none of this was news within the circle. Nurok's review was already partisan propaganda, not the joyful welcome it was made to seem. By January 1910 the World-of-Arters had been thinking of Stravinsky as their man for almost a year. Siloti was not the only one to commission orchestrations from Stravinsky on the strength of the Scherzo fantastique and its boisterous premiere. As all the world knows, Sergey Diaghilev was also in the audience that fateful night and spotted in the composer of that brilliantly colored piece the very man he needed to provide ballet orchestrations for his upcoming season in Paris. 1 1 3 Although Diaghilev could not have known it, Stravinsky—having been shunted aside by Steinberg and released by Rimsky's death from his Belyayevets loyalties—was at loose ends just then and fretful about his prospects. Diaghilev was the very man he needed. The flattering interest and encouragement from an impresario on the brink of a great Western adventure gave back to the composer the possibility of feeling himself

112. A. P. Nurok, "Muzykal'naya khronika," Apollon, 1910, no. 4, n.p. 113. One still reads that Fireworks was "the score that captured the attention of Diaghilev" ( P & D : 2 ; ) and that the Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks were jointly premièred (e.g., White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 141, 142; Walsh, Music of Stravinsky, 299), as if these two compositions, so similar in style, mood, and even form would have done anything but hinder one another in conjunction. Not only did the two premières take place a year apart, but by the time Fireworks was heard in public, Stravinsky was already hard at work on Firebird, having received the commission before the end of 1909.

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anointed—not just independent of, but superior to the milieu that had once nurtured his talent but was now turning its back on him. Faced with a choice between Glazunov and Diaghilev, there is little wonder in the fact that Stravinsky was impelled henceforth to follow the example of Maeterlinck's bees—to "break with the past as though with an enemy" and to cast his lot with "the devouring force of the future." 114 114. Maeterlinck, Life of the Bee, 216, 175.

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It was a fateful nexus of circumstances that led Stravinsky out of the Belyayevets cage for good. His jealousy of Steinberg and the "indifference" of the Conservatory set gave him a powerful push. Rimsky's lamented yet timely death, just as the former Mir iskusstva (World of Art) group around Diaghilev was embarking on its historic adventure in the West, freed him to respond to their pull. The symbiosis was a miracle. As Myaskovsky wondered as early as 1911, "Were it not for Diaghilev, would Igor Stravinsky's incomparable talent have bloomed with such might and brilliance?"1 Yet by the same token, as Falla wrote to Stravinsky on Diaghilev's death, "Without y o u , . . . the Ballets [Russes] would not have been able to exist." 2 Diaghilev and Stravinsky marked an epoch for each other, and together they marked an epoch for the world.

OUR

YOUNG

ARE

OLD

The new peer group into which Stravinsky was drawn from 1909 had existed as a faction in St. Petersburg artistic politics for about a dozen years, but as a loose comradely association it went back yet another decade, to thegimnaziya friendship that sprang up among a trio of artistically inclined St. Petersburg teen-agers: Dmitriy Vladimirovich ("Dima") Filosofov (1872—1940), whose main preoccupation was literature; Walter Fyodorovich ("Valechka") Nouvel (1871-1949), the musical dilettante whose later activities as cofounder of the Evenings of Contempo-

1. "Peterburgskive pis'ma," Muzika, no. 53 (3 December 1911); reprinted in Shlifshteyn (cd.), Myaskimkiy: stat'i, pis'ma, vospominaniya 2:31. 2. Letter of 22 August 1929; in SelCorrII:i7i.

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rary Music we have already had occasion to observe; and Alexander Nikolayevich ("Shura") Benois (1870-1960), who would become world famous as an art historian and theatrical designer. What linked them, beyond their enthusiasm for art, was a shared attitude toward it, and this attitude was conditioned in turn by a shared social outlook. Whether by birth or by aspiration they were aristocrats— dvoryanye—and

passionately identified themselves as such. It was this concern

above all that shaped the esthetic their as yet unformed faction would embody. Filosofov's family was the genuine article—blue-blooded landed gentry with an immense ancestral country estate (Bogdanovskoye) replete, until the reform of 1861, with serfs. Dima's father, Vladimir Dmitriyevich Filosofov, had so distinguished himself as a military procurator that on retirement he was made a privy councillor (tairiiy sovetnik), the highest rank in the Russian civil service, and there had been talk of raising him to the station of count. 3 That elevation did not take place, and the Filosofovs remained untitled. Thus, as Benois recalled, "despite the ancientness of their line (it was thought that their lineage descended back to before the days of St. Vladimir and the Christianization of Russia),... they could not be inscribed among the circle of the court aristocracy." But, he continued, in a passage that is crucial to the understanding of Mir iskusstva, Still and all they were not bourgeoisie. Theirs was that very class to which all the chief figures of Russian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belonged, the class that created the delights of the characteristic Russian way of life. From this class came all the heroes and heroines in the novels of Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. This very class was the one that achieved all that was calm, worthy, durable, seemingly meant to last forever. They set the very tempo of Russian life, its self-awareness, and the system of interrelationships between the members of this extended family "clan." All the subtleties of the Russian psychology, all the twists of what is typical Russian moral sensibility arose and matured within this very m i l i e u . . . . Frequenting the Filosofov home, I gradually and imperceptibly learned its nature and in so doing came better to understand and to love the very essence of Russian l i f e . . . . In this atmosphere I discovered the muchvaunted "Russian soul." 4

Here we already find in embryo the notorious Stravinsky/Diaghilev revisionism of the 1920s, according to which (to choose its most piquant surface manifestation) Chaikovsky was exalted over the so-called Five as the "most Russian" composer. Far from a break with tradition, this seeming volte-face was absolutely in keeping with the essential roots and spirit of miriskusnichestvo (Mir

iskusstva-ism).

What of Benois's own social and family background? As his name suggests, his ancestry was Western European. On his father's side he was descended from the youngest of three sons of a French village schoolmaster, all of whom fled the rev3. Benois, Mot vospominaniya 1:500. 4. Ibid., 504-5.

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' '•;,,vu

¡1 •iiAoauH ;i».u.'.ra. '/'.• "•roairlUH li.l|MHtfllHI.tvl)

by M a i

1».

f i g . 7.6. Benois alphabet picture-book for children, 1904. Note the arap (blackamoor) front and center in the lower group.

The set begins with a piece that brings a more famous Benois project to mind: "Amp" (for the letter A), meaning not an Arab but a "Blackamoor" (Negrillon in Benois's own French translation) of the kind that used to "patter" before the curtain of a puppet theater (balagtm) in the St. Petersburg Shrovetide fairs immortalized in Petrushka (Fig. 7.6; Ex. 7.1a). "Baba-yaga>" for the letter B, is a portrait of the Russian witch known from Musorgsky's "Hut on Hen's Legs," or, to cite a more recent precedent, Lyadov's little tone poem of 1904. In it, Cherepnin introduces deft little touches of traditional Russian "fantastic" harmony (Ex. 7.1b). "Rationalized impressionism" of a distinctive Belyayevets stamp is immediately recognizable in Cherepnin's evocation of the mysterious forest—"Les" for the letter L—replete with "Claire de lune/Faune/Driades" (Ex. 7.1c). In sum, these exquisitely crafted and "painterly" litde sketches already forecast the Russian ballet ideal in embryo. Like Benois's drawings, they are meant to conjure up litde stylistic microcosms—litde "worlds of art." They do so, moreover, "objectively": harmonic idioms are invoked as pure device; technique and expression are mutually tantamount. And this was something as characteristic of a Rimsky as of a Benois or a Somov. Narcisse may be taken as a very epitome of miriskusnichestvo—even the tide was symptomatic, given the atmosphere of esthetic self-absorption that had reigned in the circle from its "Nevsky Pickwickian" days. Equally idiosyncratic was the fact that the original conception had belonged to the designer (in this case Bakst). The same had been true of Le pavilion d'Armide, and would be true to varying (debated) degrees for all three of Stravinsky's early ballets as well. Cherepnin's enthusiasm for painterly synthetic and collaborative projects like these was great: in this sense he was a true musical Miriskusnik, and quite opposed to his teacher RimskyKorsakov, for whom theatrical music was meant to be controlled by the composer from start to finish. Indeed, Rimsky's diary (29 November 1907) contains the following entry: "After Le pavilion d'Armide Cherepnin plans to write an opera. Meyerhold and Golovin [stage director and designer respectively] want to form a creative trio with him. I tried to persuade him to work independendy, without them."64 After a concert performance of Narcisse under Belyayev auspices in 1914, Myaskovsky published a review that could be applied to the work of the Mir iskusstva painters practically word for word: "in the setting forth of its ideas, in certain turns of phrase and harmony, and extremely often in its instrumental colors (in most cases, incidentally, excessively mannered, not infrequendy to the point of absurdity), one senses the aroma of a recherche artiness, so characteristic of Cherepnin's punctilious taste and just-barely piquant individuality."65 Other reviewers 64. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Dnevniki 1904-1907, in Polnoye sobraniye socbineniy: litcraturniye proizvetUmya i perepiska 1:242. 65. Shlifshteyn (ed.), Myaskovskiy: sobraniyc materialov 2:177.

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EXAMPLE 7.1 Incipits from the Benois/Cherepnin alphabet (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1926)

a. "Arap" {Négrillon) A l l e g r o risoluto

Presto

8

i

1 3 ,

sf *

3

were more severe; the work acquired a certain reputation as a locus classicus of effete estheticism in Russian music. Thus the RMG (and note, once again, the painterly analogies): Narcissi is a decorative panneau replete with effective sonority-colors, with a whole slew of earnest essays in harmonic combination—but no more than t h a t . . . . A certain splintered quality and pettiness of melodic line, a practically ceaseless, falsesounding, and at times deliberately labored underscoring of harmony.... Of course, talent claims its due and Cherepnin succeeds here and there in giving us delightful snatches, but they are only snatches, not a whole. 66

66.

nosf, [454]

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RMG 12, no. 15 (12 April

1915), col. 282. The word translated here as "splintered quality" is discussed in Chapter 2 as a hallmark of Belyayevets esthetics.

RIGHTISTS

OF

THE

LEFT

drob-

EXAMPLE

7.1

(continued)

c. «Lei" {La Foret)

The characteristic "sonority-colors" and harmonic combinations include a great deal of whole-tone chromaticism, thirds-rotation, side-slipping augmented triads, and French sixths—the kind of thing that earned for the composer, in his Ballets Russes years, the sobriquet "Debussy Ravelevich Cherepnin."67 The very opening of the ballet, with its woodwind flourishes and wordless chorus (an effect already employed in Le pavilion d'Armide), conjures up the world of Daphnis et Chloe, another "Greek" ballet designed by Bakst. Ravel's ballet, though begun in 1909, was not performed by the Ballets Russes until a year after the première of Narcisse. One

67. Donald Street, " A Forgotten Firebird," Musical Times 119 (1978): 674.

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has to wonder which ballet influenced which. One particularly recherche turn in Narcisse carries a further resonance of Rimskian octatonicism; it occurs when "Echo demands vengeance on Narcissus" (Ex. 7.2). The Cherepnin composition with the greatest relevance to our present inquiry was not a ballet—or rather, it did not end up as a ballet. The "Esquisse for Orchestra" published by Jurgenson in 1912 under the title Le royaume enchanté (The Enchanted Kingdom [Zacharovannoye tsarstvo], op. 39) contains the music Cherepnin had composed on commission for the first original ballet to be presented in Paris under the aegis of the Diaghilev enterprise—none other, of course, than The Firebird. It was only natural that this commission should have gone first to Cherepnin, the Diaghilev staff conductor and Mir iskusstva house composer of a decade's standing.68 As a matter of fact, the original title of Cherepnin's orchestral piece was "Symphonic Illustration 'To the Tale of the Firebird'" ("Simfonicheskaya kartinka 'K skazke 0 Zhare-ptitse' "), and it was under that title that it was given its first performance at a Belyayev concert on 12 March 1910, three months before the smash success of Stravinsky's ballet on the same subject consigned it to oblivion. No other work of Cherepnin's illustrates quite so well his painterly approach to musical composition—or, alternatively, what Asafyev, in an article of 1916, compared to the "jeweler's craft of a Fabergé." 69 The piece is all texture and color, laid on like an applique over a simple, harmonically unadventurous tonal progression. Cast in the key of D-flat major, it begins with twenty-five measures of tonic pedal. Above this an atmosphere of enchantment is conjured up by three flutes playing whole-tone scales in parallel augmented triads, by arpeggiated augmented triads in harp harmonics, and, above all, by aromatic whole-tone whiffs in piano and celesta (Ex. 7.3a).70 After the inevitable swing to the dominant, the ubiquitous augmented triad is articulated in the form of a root progression by major thirds, leading from A-flat through C to E, which tone, alternating with F, to which it is applied as a leading note, forms the pedal for the middle section of the piece. At one point, harmonically the boldest, both E and F are sustained as a double pedal in support of the slow harmonic oscillation shown in Example 7.3b, which forms in turn the backdrop to a big piano/celesta-gusli jangle. The whole static complex supports a solo violin crooning what is surely meant to represent the "achingly sweet melodies of the Firebird" evoked in the verses that head Cherepnin's score as 68. The storv of how this commission finally devolved upon the young Stravinsky has been told often, in many conflicting versions. An attempt to sort matters out will be made in Chapter 9. 69. B. V. Asafvev, "Etyud o Chcrcpnine," Muzika, no. 250 (19 March 1916): 179. 70. The reviews of the première performances both in the RMG (17, no. 12 [22 March 1910], col. 332) and in Novoye vremya (quoted in Street, "Forgotten Firebird," 675) describe the use of gush (the old Russian zitherlike instrument used by bards and minstrels) in Cherepnin's orchestra. There is no part forgusli in the published score, and the piano may have been its substitute. Glinka had used the combination of harp and piano as early as 1842, in the first scene of Ruslan, to evoke gusli; exactly one hundred vears later, Stravinsky used the same combination in the Symphony in Three Movements. By the end of the nineteenth century th e gusli, like the cimbalom, existed in large spinetlike "concert" models. For more on the gusli, see Chapters 16 (on Renard) and 17 (on Svadebka).

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EXAMPLE 7.2 Cherepnin, Narcisse: poème mythologique en un acte d'après l'Ovide (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1912), p. 56 ("Echo demands vengeance") 8va

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a. Typical figuration Celesta ijPJ'ik i 7 s *

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EXAMPLE

7.3

(continued)

c. Fig. \7\

an epigraph, just as the piano-harp-celesta complex must surely represent the "quiet bells carried on the dawn breezes" that are evoked at epigraph's beginning and end (Ex. 7.3c). For the rest, let it suffice to enumerate a trio of themes that sum up Cherepnin's technique of constructing melodies out of various sources: (1) the tones of the augmented triad with nonharmonic tones selected from the whole-tone scale (Ex. 7.4a); (2) the diminished-seventh chord with nonharmonic tones selected from the octatonic scale (Ex. 74b); and (3) Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade (Ex. 7.4c). Noteworthy, too, is the Rimskyishly regular harmonic sequence given in Example 7.4d, which neady combines a chromatic descent with an implied whole-tone progression. It lies at the heart of an extremely fragmented quasi-contrapuntal texture (fig. [13], sostenuto maestoso) of a type that the critic Boris Tyuneyev, writing in 1915, was already calling "pointilliste." 71

71. RMG 22, no. 15 (12 April 1915), col. 282.

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Cherepnin, Le royaume enchanté

7.4

EXAMPLE

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CHEREPNIN

AND

STRAVINSKY

There would be scant call to dwell in such detail on Cherepnin's Enchanted Kingdom if it did not provide such an excellent angle from which to consider Stravinsky. Parallels with The Firebird are only too easy to draw: consider, for one, the celesta and harp figures in the "Jardin enchante" episode of Stravinsky's ballet (Ex. 7.5) in light of Example 7.3a. Yet there was another piece of Stravinsky's that stood even closer to Cherepnin's quintessentially Miriskusnik manner and mood, and that was the first act of The Nightingale, the opera on which Stravinsky was working when he received the call from Diaghilev. It would not be too much to say that The Nightingale, Act I, reflects Cherepnin's direct influence, and that this preliminary influence was an important part of Stravinsky's preparation for his contact with the inner circle of the Miriskusniki and with Diaghilev. Without it, the transition

CHEREPNIN

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E X A M P L E

7.5

The Firebird,

1

after [7], 8 after |"21

from the machine-tooled techniques of the Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks to the poetic world of The Firebird might not have been so easily manageable. In Chroniques de ma vie, Stravinsky asserted that Mir iskusstva. (along with the Evenings of Contemporary Music) was his most important formative influence, and even claimed that his contact with it was facilitated by his "association with the Rimsky-Korsakov family," who provided him with the "highly cultured environment" and the "ever-widening circle" of friends and contacts he needed to break free of the constraints of his family upbringing. 7 2 In a memoir of Diaghilev written in Russian at the same time as the Chroniques (1935) but first published (in English) in 1953, Stravinsky maintained that by the time he met the impresario in 1909 he had, "of course, known for a long time about the magnificent results obtained by his excellent publications and his brilliant exhibitions," which had "displayed a prodigious activity in the world of art, struggling stubbornly against the prevailing state of cultural ignorance and of provincialism." 73 N o one w h o has read this far will be surprised to learn that these claims require modification, or that they in

72. An Autobiography, 17. 73. I. F. Stravinsky, "The Diaghilev I Knew," trans. Mercedes de Acosta, Atlantic Monthly, November 1953, 33. The English translation was made from a French translation of the Russian original, dated "Mars 1937." Typescripts of both the Russian and the French versions are in the Stravinsky Archive.

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all likelihood represent the wishful thinking of Walter Nouvel, Stravinsky's chief ghostwriter of the period. 74 The fact is, Stravinsky's devoted relationship to Rimsky-Korsakov and his circle effectively shielded him from exposure to Diaghilev and Mir isbusstva. As Stravinsky (Nouvel) put it, "Living in the same city, I naturally had more than one occasion to meet him, but I never sought these occasions." 75 In the Diaghilev memoir, the reason given for this avoidance was Diaghilev's reputation for being "haughty, arrogant, and snobbish"; but it was really because in the RimskyKorsakov circle Diaghilev was a long-standing figure of fun, a status that went all the way back to his grotesque first meeting with the great composer. This had taken place in the fall of 1894, at a time when Diaghilev, freshly arrived in the capital, was contemplating a musical career. As an anecdote the story of this encounter has made the rounds in the Diaghilev literature, in various stages of embroidery.76 Here is Rimsky-Korsakov's own version, as recorded by Yastrebtsev almost immediately after the fact, on 22 September 1894: Rimsky-Korsakov told us about the curious visit he received from a certain young man, Diaghilev by name, who, though he probably already considers himself a great composer, nonetheless wished to take theory lessons from Nikolai Andreyevich. His compositions turned out to be worse than nonsensical. Rimsky-Korsakov told him his opinion straight out. T h e other, it seems, took offense and, leaving, said, not without arrogance, that he still believed in himself and in his powers, that he would never forget this day, and that some day Rimsky-Korsakov's opinion would occupy a place of shame in his future biography and would make him more than once regret his rashly uttered words of long ago, but that then it would be too late. 7 7

This was the springboard, in Yastrebtsev's account, for a merry discussion of the theories of the psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, then widely accepted, which sought to explain "decadence" of all kinds, including cultural and artistic, in terms of literal genetic decay. Diaghilev was dubbed a "mattoid," to general hilarity.78 Yastrebtsev also recorded Rimsky-Korsakov's philistine ironies with respect to Diaghilev's portrait exhibition in 1905: "I'm afraid I won't understand a thing there and that it will seem boring to me. After all, I, in contradistinction to Merezhkovsky, possess not the slightest erudition, and peering into an infinite number of 7+. For evidence of Nouvel's participation in the memoir, see SelCorrI:492n.5, where a letter from Catherine Stravinsky to her husband (+ March 1935) is quoted: "Valechka [Nouvel] is writing your memoirs of Diaghilev and he has already finished about a quarter of it; at first the work went well, but now he feels that it does not contain a sufficient number of anecdotes to please the American public." 75. Stravinsky, "The Diaghilev I Knew," 33. 76. Cf. Haskell, Diaghileff, 50; Lifar, Diaghilev, 35; Buckle, Diaghilev, 27. 77. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:207. 78. "Mattoid," from motto (Italian for insane), was Lombroso's term for what other fin-de-siecle psychiatrists called " 'borderline dwellers'—that is to say, dwellers on the borderland between reason and pronounced madness," and especially "graphomaniacs," that is, "semi-insane persons who feel a strong impulse to write." See Max Nordau, Degeneration, 5th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), 18.

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unfamiliar faces is just plain depressing."79 As long as Stravinsky was part of Rimsky's circle, he, too, would have thought of Diaghilev in Rimskian, if not Stasovian, terms. He had no contact at all with any member of the Mir iskusstva faction, nor would it be reasonable to think he craved it. The exception was Cherepnin, the sole figure who, within Rimsky-Korsakov's lifetime, was at home in both worlds, though perhaps a first-class citizen of neither. Rimsky liked the innocuous music to Le pavilion d'Armide, "though there is little of [Cherepnin's] own in this Louis XV ballet." After tea one evening at a Rimskian jour fixe (5 December 1907), Cherepnin and Steinberg played the suite from the ballet in a four-hands arrangement while Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky followed along with the full score.80 Nor was the Rimsky-Korsakov clan Stravinsky's only link with Cherepnin. The two must have been acquainted since Stravinsky's childhood, for one of Cherepnin's closest friends was his gimnaziya buddy Nikolai Yelachich, the son of Igor Stravinsky's beloved uncle Alexander Yelachich, at whose Samara estate Stravinsky composed his Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor.81 As early as 1899, Stravinsky wrote to a family friend that "next year I plan to take theory lessons from Cherepnin, who, they say, Rimsky-Korsakov recommends to everyone."82 One can therefore believe Craft's statement, which must have come from the composer, that "a close relationship had existed between Stravinsky and Cherepnin, in whose St. Petersburg home the fledgling composer had often played his music,"83 even though the statement stands uncorroborated in the literature.84 One piece that must have been played there to great approbation was The Nightingale, Act I, for no other composition of the young Stravinsky was quite so Cherepninesque, and no composer could be more readily imagined in the role of godfather to it in the year following Rimsky's death than the one Belyayevets who was also a Miriskusnik. THE

NIGHTINGALE

BEGUN

There is litde to wonder at concerning Stravinsky's choice of subject from Hans Christian Andersen. Indeed, had he chosen some other kind of subject for his first opera, that would have been cause for wonder. The world of fantasy had long since achieved dominion in Russian art and music by 1908. In part this had been 79. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:347 (25 May 1905). 80. Ibid., 447, 448. 81. Cherepnin, "Pod sen'yu moyey zhizni," 7; on Stravinsky's Yelachich cousins, see the family tree in SelCorrlLjoo-soi. 82. Letter to M. E. Osten-Saken, 22 April 1899; in IStrSM: 499. He actually took his earliest lessons in theory not from Cherepnin but from Fyodor Akimenko (see Chapter 2, p. 99). 83. SelCorrII:2i9. 84. As with so many of his seniors from the early period, Stravinsky's scattered recollections of Cherepnin were uniformly unflattering: "reckless academician," "musical dullness" (anent Le pavilion

d'Armide), etc.

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Rimsky-Korsakov's legacy, but the underlying causes go beyond him. Soviet writers were always eager to attribute the "retreat into fantasy" that characterized the Silver Age to the harsh realities of life and society (and censorship) under the last two tsars. Even at the time the thought was rife. Boris Tyuneyev opened a 1915 feature article in the RMG—on Cherepnin, as it happens—with an elegant little consideration of the issue, couched in the form of a "Lord Banbury" letter to Russian musicians: With you Russians, your public life presents, indeed graphically depicts, such a broken, twisted aspect that I can easily understand both the extreme realism of a Musorgsky and the pathological subjectivism of a Chaikovsky—and, as a certain counterweight to these, the fairy-tale fantasy of Rimsky-Korsakov. But take a closer look at the nineties: were they not an uninterrupted series of disillusionments and the ruination of a whole host of social ideals?.. . A n d the beginning of the twentieth century—the horrible years 1905 and 1906? N o w , that is when art came to the aid of life, transforming life and its nightmares into something that distracted from life: a striving for the fantastic, the imaginary, the mystical seized both your poets and your m u s i c i a n s . . . . After Saltan, Kashchey, Kitezh, you saw just such a magical world, but only on canvas (Victor Vasnetsov, Nesterov the religious mystic, Bilibin), you heard the peal of ancient bells in the new and transporting verses of Balmont. D o you see what I mean? A wave, a powerful, mighty wave, swept over you; you turned your sights on an unreal world, which alone could refresh your exhausted, weary spirit. 8 5

This thirst for fantasy provided yet another meeting ground between the legacy of Rimsky-Korsakov and the world of the early-twentieth-century Russian avantgarde—between the rightists of the left and the leftists of the right. For Andersen in particular there was a veritable craze that found reflection both in the World of Art and in the world of the Belyayevtsi. Benois, who would collaborate with Stravinsky on an Andersen ballet as late as 1928, recalled fondly in his memoirs the "strange mixture of sad drama and of something radiant and magical" that drew him again and again to the Danish fabulist.86 And Andersen had no greater fan in Russia than Lyadov. "What a delight!" he wrote, "What poetry! What a poet! Let him but touch a holey old shoe—and it's gold. A very miracle worker! And how much goodness and tenderness he contains!... In three little pages he has more love of people than in volumes of Tolstoy. Andersen loved without computations and timetables; he loved the way a rose sheds its fragrance."87 Out of all of Andersen, The Nightingale was the most natural choice for an op85. RMG 22, no. 15 (12 April 1915), cols. 275-76. "Lord Banbury" (Francis Knollys, son of William Thomas Knollys, eighth earl of Banbury) was private secretary to King Edward V I I of England. His published letters went through many editions in many languages. 86. Alexandre Benois, Memoirs, trans. Moura Budberg (London: Chatto & Windus, i960), 1:88. 87. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, "Lichnost' Lyadova," 40. Stravinsky also recalled Lyadov's love for Andersen and for "tender, fantastical things" (M&C:6I/6I).

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era, since it was a veritable O r p h e u s tale, a celebration o f the power o f art, and o f music in particular. It was also a parable o f "unfettered" artistic inspiration versus learned artifice and routine, which, given the background o u t o f w h i c h Stravinsky was emerging, seems a touch ironical. 8 8 Finally, as a story o f an emperor and a bird it paralleled Rimsky-Korsakov's just-completed last opera, Le coq d'or; whose every stage o f gestation and birth Stravinsky had witnessed, and which was just beginning t o have its earliest fragmentary performances (the Introduction and C o r t è g e , for example, premièred alongside Stravinsky's Faun and the Shepherdess o n 16 February 1908) precisely when Stravinsky "became pregnant" with The

Nightingale.

T h e quoted metaphor is from a letter by the opera's librettist, Stepan Stepanovich Mitusov (1878-1942), a close companion from the Rimsky-Korsakov circle with w h o m Stravinsky had taken his lessons from Kalafati several years earlier. In later life Mitusov found his niche as a minor Leningrad chorus director and piano teacher, but in the Rimsky-Korsakov days and for a while thereafter Stravinsky regarded him as his "literary" friend. It was at Mitusov's apartment that Stravinsky, as his friend's letter testified, conceived his opera. 8 9 T h e t w o o f them immediately went t o consult Vladimir Ivanovich Belsky (1866-1946), the librettist o f three o f Rimsky-Korsakov's fantastical operas, including the last (Tsar Saltan, Kitezh,

Coq).

A t Belsky's St. Petersburg apartment, and with his help, Stravinsky and Mitusov adapted a scenario from Andersen's tale o n 9 March 1908, which the composer jotted d o w n o n the spot. This pencil draft, which is still preserved in the Stravinsky Archive (though missing the second act), 9 0 is a fascinating document both for the techniques o f adaptation it displays (in which Belsky's g u i d i n g hand is evident) and for the ways in which it differs from the final libretto. F o l l o w i n g is the draft o f the first act, the only one actually set to music at the time:

A C T

I

The forest at dawn. A fisherman is mending his net and lamenting his fate, in which his sole consolation is the singing of the Nightingale. And here is the Nightingale; it sings and comforts the Fisherman with its song. Cautious steps are heard (as if stealing up)—the Nightingale flies away. Enter, led by the junior kitchen maid to the Chinese Emperor, [a group] that includes the chief Court Bonze [chaplain] and the Emperor's chief retainer. The kitchen maid 88. For a stimulating, if possibly anachronistic, reading o f Stravinsky's opera as ironic commentary on the fairy tale's manifest content, see Daniel Albright, "The Nightingale: H o w the Music Box Killed the Nightingale," in Stravinsky: The Music Box and the Nightingale ( N e w York: G o r d o n & Breach, 1989), chap. 4 (19-24). 89. Letter o f 24 May 1925, in the Stravinsky Archive; quoted in P&D:6i5 and SelCorrII:432. For details on Mitusov's career, see Larisa Kazanskaya, "Stepan Mitusov," Sovetskaya muztka, 1990, no. 12, 80-84. 90. A full autograph libretto in both Stravinsky's and Mitusov's hands was still in the possession o f Mitusov's daughters in Leningrad as o f 1973 (see Igor Blazhkov, commentary to the letters published in IStrSM:508).

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turns to the retainer and says that in these very trees the Nightingale sings at dawn and that they will now hear it. But just then the Fisherman's cow begins to moo. Everyone is transported: RETAINER: BONZE: CHORUS:

What strength! Tsing-pe! And what power in so small a bird. We never would have thought it.

At which point the Fisherman respectfully observes that it was his cow, and in answer is given the fig. The kitchen maid confirms that it was a cow, but that the Nightingale will start singing right away. But in the meantime some frogs have begun croaking. BONZE: RETAINER CHORUS A CHAMBERMAID

Tsing-pe! How delightful, just like the silver bells in our chapel. It seems there must be silver in its throat. How delightful! But no, that's just some frogs in the marsh. The Nightingale isn't here yet.

RETAINER:

Litde Cook, I'll let you watch the Emperor eat if you find us the Nightingale.

COOK [i.e., the kitchen maid]: EVERYONE:

But there's the Nightingale now. Where? Where?

The chief retainer asks to be introduced. COOK: NIGHTINGALE:

Litde Nightingale, the chief retainer to the Emperor of China. The Emperor's wishes are my command.

The retainer lets it be known that the Emperor wants to see the Nightingale at court, hear him sing, and reward him, in the event of success, with golden slippers, lapis lazuli, etc. The Nightingale agrees and flies down onto the Cook's arm. —Exeunt omnes. The Fisherman watches them leave and says that now his sole consolation has been taken from him, that they are happy there in the palace and that's fine, but where am I to go, etc. The final libretto follows the general outline o f the scene as sketched here. Some o f the actual lines o f dialogue (Belsky's?) even survived into the finished opera. Also Belsky's was the happy idea o f turning the Fisherman into a "framing" character, functioning very much the way the Astrologer had functioned in Le coq d'or. Andersen's fisherman had just been a part o f the paysage, and was disposed o f with a characteristically ironic little twist:

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[465]

The forest stretched all the way to the sea, which was blue and so deep that even large boats could sail so close to the shore that they were shaded by the trees. Here lived a nightingale who sang so sweetly that even the fisherman, who came every night to set his nets, would stop to rest when he heard it, and say: "Blessed God, how beautifully it sings!" But he couldn't listen too long, for he had work to do, and soon he would forget the bird. Yet the next night when he heard it again, he would repeat what he had said the night before: "Blessed God, how beautifully it sings!" 9 1

Belsky contrived by means of the Fisherman to give the act a "social" theme (the poor fisherman deprived of his only joy by the nobles). Pointedly enough, Stravinsky and Mitusov later contrived to remove that theme—"pure art" answers peredvizhnichestvol

Their Nightingale was a vatic visitor from the World of Art, some-

thing on the order of Bakst's snowy eagle, and their Fisherman was the prophetbird's acolyte. H e prepares the Nightingale's arrival ("From the heavenly heights," as the bird announces on its appearance) with priestly benedictions. So important, indeed, to the concept of the opera were these incantations of the Fisherman that they were reprised also at the ends of the second and third acts (fixed in libretto form in 1908-9 but not set to music until 1913). Taken all together, the five stanzas sung by the Fisherman are a pretty mock-liturgical hymn setting forth the essence of Andersen's tale in the guise of a myth from the cosmogony of beauty: ACT 1, beginning 1. Névod brosàl nebésniy dukh, V séti svoi ri'bu lovil. V séti rib morskikh nalovil. Mnógo poymàl nebésniy dukh.

He flung his net, the breath of God, and with his nets he fished. And with his nets he fished for the deep sea fish. Many caught he, the breath of God.

2. V nébo unyós nebésniy dukh: V mórye svoyó ribu pustil. Ptitsami on sdélal ikh vsékh, Gólos im dal nebésniy dukh.

To the heavens he took them, the breath of God, And set the fish free in his sea. Birds he made from all of them, Gave them voice, did the breath of God.

ACT 1,

end

3. Gólos im dal nebésniy dukh. Gólos plenil zemli vladik. Slyózi ikh glàz mùdrikh tekli. A slyózi té zvyózdi nebés. ACT 1 1 ,

Gave them voice, did the breath of God. Their voice did charm the lords of earth. Tears flowed from their wise old eyes. And the tears became the stars in the sky.

end

4. Tuchami vsé zvyózdi sokriv, Khólod i t'mu smért' prinesla.

Having hidden all the stars with clouds, Death brought cold and darkness here.

91. Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. Erik Christian Haugaard (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 203.

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Smert' samuyu golosom ptits,

Death itself, by the voice of birds,

Smert' pobedil nebesniy dukh.

Conquer death itself did the breath of G o d .

A C T i n , end

5. Sólntse vzoshló, kónchilas' nóch'.

The sun is risen, night is over.

G r ó m k o poyut ptits'i v lesàkh.

T h e birdsong loudly fills the woods.

Slushaite ikh: gólosom ptits

Listen to them: in the voice of birds

Sam govorit nebésni'y dukh.

Is the very speech of the breath of G o d . 9 2

T o s h o w just h o w deliberately Stravinsky and Mitusov excised the "social" theme, w e can trace the evolution o f the text o f the little recitative that comes between the first and second stanzas o f the Fisherman's song. In the earliest draft libretto, where the t w o stanzas are consecutive, there is a note in Stravinsky's hand that some expository material needed to be inserted. This w o u l d eventually become the passage from fig. [11] to fig. [13] in the score. A n o t h e r sheet contains four early drafts o f this recitative, in Mitusov's hand. T h e first couplet, which is not repeated in the f o l l o w i n g drafts but which is a part o f the final text, was evidently meant to begin each o f them; it is set below as a kind o f preface: Rassvet uzh blizitsya,

T h e dawn approaches,

A solov'ya vsyo net.

but still no nightingale.

a. U z h v èto vremya kazhdiy den'

While every day around this time

On priletal i pel. Zabi'v

it would come and sing. Forgetting

0 nevode svoyom ya dolgo

my net I would long

Slushal yego pesnyu.

listen to its song.

b. U z h v èto vremya kazhdiy den' On priletal i pel.

While every day around this time it would come and sing.

Zabi'v o nevode svoyom,

Forgetting about my net,

Ostaviv zhalobi' svoi,

leaving off my plaints,

Ya dolgo slushal yego peniye

I'd listen long to its singing

1 zabival svoi zaboti

and I'd forget my cares

I tyazhkuyu sud'bu svoyu.

and my bitter fate.

c. Uzh v èto vremya kazhdiy den' On priletal i pel, tak

While every day around this time it would come and sing, so

Y e g o chudniy golos zvonko

loudly would its wondrous voice resound,

Zvuchal v tishi prokhladnoy.

sounding forth in the cool silence.

Akh, dolgo slushal ya yego

A h , long would I listen to it,

Zabi'v prò nevod svoy

forgetting my net

I prò svoi nevzgodi'.

and all my adversities.

d. I zabival vsyo na svetye

And I'd forget everything on earth

I tyazhkuyu sud'bu svoyu

and my bitter fate as well,

Tak divniye bili pesni èti

so wonderful were those songs;

92. Translation adapted from William W. Austin, Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 246-49.

THE

NIGHTINGALE

BEGUN

[467]

I v pesnyakh tekh neob'ichainikh V nikh uteshen'yc nakhodil. Gde tii, solovushka, otkliknis' I pesney chudnoyu svoycy Razbey kruchinu starika.

and in those extraordinary songs, in them I'd find comfort. Where art thou, litde nightingale, give answer, and with thy wondrous song dispel an old man's sorrow.

Except for the very brief first version, all of these variants make some reference to the Fisherman's unhappy lot (tyazhkaya sud'ba, nevzgodi, kruchina), as in the Belsky-supervised scenario. On a separate sheet we find the final draft, very close to the text as published. It is Mitusov's hand except for two notations by Stravinsky: he wrote "bene!" in the margin and carefully crossed out the penultimate line, thus eliminating once and for all what he no doubt thought a banal, bourgeois sentiment: RECHITATIV

Rassvet uzh blizitsya i solov'ya vsyo net. Uzh v èto vremya kazhdi'y den' on priletal i pel tak zvonko pesn' yego v tishi prokhladnoy razdavalas'. Akh dolgo slushal ya ego zab'iv pro nevod svoy pro tyazhkuyu sud'bu i pro svoi zaboti.

The dawn approaches, but still no nightingale. While every day around this time it would come and sing so loudly would its song resound in the cool silence. Ah, long would I listen to it, forgetting about my net, about my bitter fate and about my cares.

Despite this touch of aristocratic elitism that would have displeased the bourgeois liberal in Rimsky-Korsakov, many traces of Rimsky's manner may still be found in the opera (including, at fig. [10], a passage for the strings that Stravinsky himself, in a letter to Mitusov, blushingly characterized as "pizzicato i la Sheherazade")93, though serious work on it began only after Rimsky's death. (An early draft is signed and dated thus: "Begun 16 November 1908, St. Petersburg.") Some of the Korsakovian echoes are homages to the recendy deceased, all the more understandable in that both composer and librettist had been members of Rimsky's intimate circle. Thus the Nightingale, on its appearance, answers the Fisherman with a song about roses and dew, echoing Rimsky-Korsakov's early setting of Alexey KoltsoVs lyric "The Nightingale, Captured by the Rose" ("Plenivshis' rozoy, solovey" op. 2, no. 2) in which there had appeared for the first time in Rimsky's work the languorous "Oriental" melismaticism that descended from the role of Ratmir in Glinka's Ruslnn. For composers of Rimsky's generation, the Oriental

93. Ustilug, 7 June 1909; see Victor Varunts (ed.), "Iz pisem k S. S. Mitusow," Muzikal'naya akaderniya, 1992, no. 4, 146.

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vein had evoked voluptuous enchantment and nega—an untranslatable Russian word at once connoting drowsy bliss, creature comfort, and sexual allure. The ultimate embodiment of Oriental nega in Rimsky-Korsakov's music was the role of the Shemakhanskaya Tsaritsa, the femme fatale in Le coq d'or; and she it was who provided the model for the coloratura that suffused the song of Stravinsky's Nightingale (Ex. 7.6). These affinities become even closer in the second and third acts, composed a few years later. (There is no reason to cite the author of Lakme, on whom many commentators, including the later Stravinsky, have fastened in their eagerness to establish a link with Delibes, one of Chaikovsky's acknowledged models.)94 There are echoes, too, of Sadko, not all of them terribly subtle. The Sea Princess, another famous Rimskian coloratura role (like the Shemakhanskaya Tsaritsa, it was written for Nadezhda Zabela), also haunts the part of the Nightingale.95 The Fisherman's song owes a no less conspicuous something to Rimsky's "Song of the Hindu Trader" (popularly known as "A Song of India") in the fourth scene of Sadko96—compare the saccharine final cadence the two songs have, as it were, in common (Ex. 7.7). The debt to Rimsky-Korsakov goes far beyond these superficial citations, however; it reaches deep into the structure of the music. This is something that can be gauged in The Nightingale to a much surer degree than in any other prc-Sacre composition, because, owing to the interruption in Stravinsky's work on it, he was obliged to bring his sketches out of Russia in 1913 so that he could finish the opera in Switzerland. He kept the Nightingale sketches with him thereafter to the end of his life. Therefore, sketch material for Act I survives in the Stravinsky Archive in a quantity unique for works of its period. The earliest musical notations for the opera can be found as penciled marginalia in the draft libretto for Act I, prepared by Mitusov in the summer of 1908. They are all in the nature of leitmotifs. The ones that went with least change into the score as we know it were the ones for the courtiers in the middle scene, which Stravinsky initially worked out as settings of specific repliques. The Chamberlain (the character referred to in the original draft libretto as the Chief Retainer) has the pair of notations given in Examples 7.8a and 8b, while the Bonze has 7.8c. Unsurprisingly, these grotesque melodies are carved out of "tone-semitone" scales; in the case of the Bonze leitmotif, the melody exhausts Collection I (in

94. Cf. M&C:i2j/i3i. 95. Cf. the decorative roulades that accompany the mermaids' chorus in the second scene of Sadko; also compare the Sea Princess's "Far, far away" ("Dalyoko, dalyoko," fig. [ 107]) with the end of the Nightingale's song in Stravinsky's first act (fig. [24]). 96. Stravinsky's "recollection," reported by Craft, that he "remembered the day Rimsky composed that piece" ( D & D : i 4 4 ) is mistaken. Sadko was completed in 1896, years before Stravinsky met the composer. The " S o n g of India" was itself a near-plagiarism from the eunuch Vagao's "Indian S o n g " in the fourth act of Alexander Serov's Judith (186J).

THE

NIGHTINGALE

BEGUN

[469]

EXAMPLE

7-6

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Le coq d'or, Act II, mm. 86-88 (Shemakhanskaya Tsaritsa)

tos

-

ku - yu od - na

na _ torn ost

-

ro - ve

gryoz,

[I pine alone on that isle of dreams,]

b. The Nightingale, Act I, i after 1221

Akh,

EXAMPLE

ro - zi,

go - los .

moy vi sli shi-te 1' v no- chi? _

7-7

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sadko, scene iv, "Song of the Hindu Trader," end

EXAMPLE

(continued)

7.7

b. The Nightingale, Act I, 4 after |49|

EXAMPLE

The Nightingale, musical marginalia in typescript libretto

7.8

'"mi* P^

Jl

T i s so - lo - v'yom vpe-ryod i - di!

ne

to

bi

plo-kho nam pri - shlos' Ye-shchobi!

'

Tsing-pè! N u sla va

B o - g u so - lo - v'ya na-shli mi

_ Bonze's scale

Pieter van den Toorn's numbering).97 The partitions are novel, as is the idea of confining the two characters respectively to separate octatonic collections, so that when they exchange repliques an octatonic "modulation" is always involved. What accompanies their repliques in the orchestra is always based on the four tones the two collections have in common (G, Bl>, CH, E), usually boiled down to a single tritone acting as an ostinato pivot (e.g., the exchange right after fig. [30] in the score). It is a purely intervallic approach to tone-semitone writing, implying no triadic affinity. It is thus the most forward-looking music in the first act; specifically, the spot where the Chamberlain addresses the invitation to the Nightingale (fig. [+4]), his leitmotif sounding both in the voice part and in an obbligato trumpet against an unharmonized F-sharp pedal (second violin), is the passage that sounds the most like the music of the acts that would follow in 1913. While the passage no longer sounds anything like Rimsky-Korsakov, it is based, like so much early Stravinsky, on dire a extension of Rimskian (in this case, "Kashcheyan") techniques. One of the early marginal notations provided the Head Retainer with a "Leitharmonie," as Stravinsky expressly labeled it (Fig. 7.7). The term had been employed (coined?) by Rimsky-Korsakov in his exhaustive analytical commentary (1905) to his own Snegurochka, with which Stravinsky had to have been familiar, since it was written at the time of his greatest closeness to his teacher. In that essay, Rimsky applied the term Leitharmonie to the chords associated with the Wood Sprite (Leshiy), which make up what Rimsky called "a motive that is exclusively rhythmic/harmonic."98 The same is true of Stravinsky's motive; like the Wood Sprite Leitharmonie, it is a whole-tone chord preceded by an appoggiatura, an essentially rhythmic effect (Ex. 7.9).99 In the end this French-sixth Leitharmonie does not seem to have been used as such, but it did contribute to the beginning of the Introduction as originally written (Ex. 7.10a), which but for its scoring bears little resemblance to the music we know. The earliest recognizable sketch for the Introduction exists only in the form of a piano reduction (Ex. 7.10b). Whether this opening actually derived from that of Debussy's Nuages has been much debated. It was Constant Lambert who first suggested that Debussy may have unwittingly transcribed a song from Musorgsky's 97. See Van den Toorn, Music of Igor Stravinsky; 50-51. In Van den Toorn's nomenclature the octatonic scale that contains E and F represents "Collection I," that containing F and F-sharp represents "Collection II," and that containing F-sharp and G represents "Collection III." 98. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, "Razbor 'Snegurochki,'" in Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy: literaturniye proizvedeniya i perepiska 4:405. 99. There is one more marginal notation for The Nightingale, perhaps the earliest of all. It is meant for the Fisherman, but resembles none of his music in the finished opera:

trtfftr

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fat-

dfctjtfa&i

/Oy

rt* \

/ A ¿a-.-**/'* - • •' , vv£ / /

-

= ]

J.

-J

Tenor (ribak [fisherman])

n

r j _ r

t

-

t

f

t

m

tillism." The earliest notation for the song is given in Example 7.11a. The rather forced counterpoint was quickly pruned away. What remained was then considerably elaborated both as to melodic floridity and as to textural figuration. Stravinsky also decided, finally, that the key was C rather than G, and varied the harmony with a concluding plagal cadence (Ex. 7.11b). 101 There is nothing in these sketches to prepare the reader for either the look or the sound of the orchestral score as it finally took shape. Harmonically even more static than the sketches, its whirring, twittering texture, overflowing with what Mahler would have called Naturlciute,

piling pedal upon pedal, gruppetto upon

gruppetto, is a masterpiece o f "pointillism" of a specifically Russian kind that achieves a reconditeness to match the French, but does so virtually on the white keys alone. Can it have been a coincidence, moreover, given the mock-theurgic treatment of the title character in the libretto, that the woodwind motif saturating the Fisherman's song should have been such a close relative of the germinating motif in Schumann's "Vogel als Prophet" (Ex. 7.12)? A different kind of appliqué technique, involving not texture and rhythm but layer upon layer of chromatic figuration tones, is exemplified by the Nightingale's song in the first act of the opera. Between figs. [19] and [22], the underlying root progression could hardly be more "primary," yet the dazzling surface hides the fact as slyly as anything in Ravel. Surely a circle of fifths has rarely been given such a bath of perfume as the one at fig. [21], ending off with a pedigreed "Boris"—or is it a "Sheherazade"?—progression (Ex. 7.13).

101. The beginning of this sketch is shown in facsimile in SelCorrII:433.

[476 ]

7

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e x a m p l e

7.ii

(continued)

b. Song of the Fisherman (Pesnyaribakd),draft Pesnya ribaka [ S o n g of the Fisherman]

ne - bes - ni'y ri - bok mor ne - bes - niy sde lal ikh

dukh v se - ti skikh mno-go dukh vmor-ye vsekh G o - l o s

svo-i poy-mal svo-yo im dal

vil dukh stil dukh

Ble - den tus-kli'y svet lu ni m€ syats z w o zdi i—4«—•—na-

That opulent octatonic whirligigs a la Rimsky continue their pirouette through the pages of The Nightingale could go without saying. Still, one or two passages where Stravinsky managed a particularly neat "advance" over the usages of his teacher ought to be noted. At fig. [43], Collection I is partitioned into its two constituent diminished-seventh chords. One of them (B-D-F-Ab) is sustained flautcmdo e tremolando in the violins and violas divisi, while its complement (G-BI>Db-E) is slowly arpeggiated by the bass instruments (two harps and bass clarinet)

THE

NIGHTINGALE

BEGUN

[477 ]

EXAMPLE

7.12

a. Schumann, Waldscenen, op. 82, no. 7 ("Vogel als Prophet"), beginning Langsam, sehr zart • 0 7 jl .•> th

- s ^ n j a * . i»TTl

fm. |»H—V „ t—!

L

PP 953r # y j ) — l i-

/ —ftJ »

J ' .r t . . ¡ J — 1 ^ „„

= # = = = *

^

f bp.

«T A ^b1' i

-- —

*

=1

^—'—

b. The Nightingale, woodwind figurations in the Fisherman's song

T

713

E X A M P L E

The Nightingale, vocal score, figs. 1211 - 122 L with harmonic reduction

Nightingale ^

F ro

-

z'l, _ chto

ras

-

1 v sa

tut

&

1

u 3 b 11(7)

VI (V/ii)

I

du

¿fe

vo - krug

dvor -

(V/V)

tsa.

Fisherman

kak

Akh Gos - po - di,

V . i y n i

i - f c

p. t. V

7

1(7

8)

[". . . the roses that grow in the palace garden." "Lord, how [beautiful]."]

EXAMPLE

7.14

The Nightingale,

fig. 143 1, piano-vocal score

with you!"]

on the downbeats, each successive tone forming the next factitious root in a series of "dominant ninth" chords in a typically decorative ("nonfunctional") thirds rotation. Although in the full score the spelling of the notes of the tremolo is held constant throughout the passage, the composer fastidiously adjusted the enharmonic spelling of the sustained pitches in the piano-vocal score to reflect the appropriate degrees of each respective the ninth chord (Ex. 7 . 1 4 ) . It is easy enough to shrug such harmony off as so much gaudy overdressing, but it epitomizes for music all that the term Silver Age connotes. Though written extra muros, the first act of The Nightingale exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of Mir iskusstva as vividly as anything produced within the group. Above all, one senses that despite its evident models and occasionally blatant derivations, it was the work in which young dvoryanin Stravinsky came esthetically and technically into his own. He would remain a composer for what Lenin, in his most famous sermon on the arts, derided as "the bored upper ten thousand, suffering from fatty

[480]

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degeneration." 102 He would always cherish the social and cultural "élite" (never distinguishing between the two), whose existence provided "advance assurance in matters of social relations" and—it goes without saying—in the judgment of art. 103 A UNIVERSAL

SOLVENT

As a postscript to this brief consideration of the first act of The Nightingale, let us steal a glance at what is surely the most interesting set of sketches for it, though its contents were hardly used in the opera. A serendipitous breakthrough, this exercise took Stravinsky as it were ahead of schedule into his next work, the worldfamous Firebird, providing an excellent illustration of the methodical technical continuity that led Stravinsky on his "calm onward march" from work to work throughout his early period. When it came time to sketch the recitative between the first two verses of the Fisherman's song, Stravinsky came up with a happy trouvaille (Ex. 7.15a)—happy because it led smoothly into a reprise of an early version of the opening of the Introduction, against which the recitative was originally to have been sung. It was an extension of the Lisztian/Rimskian "ladder of thirds" described in Chapter 4, by which a series of four major thirds spaced a minor third apart summed up the contents of a tone-semitone scale. Another way of describing such a ladder would be as a series of thirds in which the lower note of each successive member stood a semitone below the upper note of its predecessor. This is how Stravinsky evidently conceptualized the device; for instead of constructing the ladder out of major thirds alone, he now alternated minor and major thirds. This changed the resultant pattern in a spectacular and possibly unforeseen way. Alternate thirds—that is, all the major thirds versus all the minor thirds—now lay a perfect fourth (rather than a tritone) apart. That is to say, they now lay along the diatonic circle of fifths. What this meant was that before any one of them recurred there would have to be twelve progressions; and taking the whole complex of interlocking major and minor thirds into account, it meant that before any member of the cycle recurred, an exhaustive twenty-four progressions would have to intervene. The series thus became a kind of universal harmonic solvent: any modulation at all could be brought about along its course. The first step Stravinsky took, after discovering what we might choose to call the universal cycle of thirds, was immediately to disguise it. (And what could be more characteristic?) He rewrote the passage shown in Example 7.15a for two clar102. V. I. Lenin, "Party Organization and Party Literature" (1905), in Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 151. 103.1. F. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form if Six Lessons, bilingual edition, English trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 179-

A UNIVERSAL

SOLVENT

[481]

inets in such a fashion that each instrument alternately plays the higher and the lower component of successive thirds (Ex. 7.15b). The next step was to treat the cycle in good Rimsky-Korsakov fashion as a background model for melodic sequences; this Stravinsky did in a sketch that was eventually elaborated into a passage that did find a place in The Nightingale, though not the place originally intended. Compare Examples 7-isc-d (the sketch) with the music at fig. [5] in the Introduction (Ex. 7.15e). In the finished music the cycle of thirds (in the "tenor") is treated as a melodic, rather than a harmonic, sequence. But Stravinsky was only beginning to mine this harmonic discovery. Example 7.16 presents, without further comment, several more ladder-of-thirds sketches that explore the sequential possibilities of the phenomenon. By the time he wrote Example 7.i6d Stravinsky was experimenting extravagantly with concurrent interval cycles, combining the peculiar scale formed by the top notes of the ladder (in quarter notes) with a perpetually modulating diatonic scale (in quarter triplets), all over a pedal and with simultaneously unfolding chromatic embellishments of the circle of fifths (descending) and the (0369) circle of minor thirds (ascending). These opulent sketches were devoid of issue in The Nightingale as we now know it, though at the time of writing Stravinsky may well have intended to hold them in reserve for the court splendors of Act II. But he dropped The Nightingale—forever, he thought—after Act I, and so the eventual destination of these harmonic ideas was The Firebird. The stupefyingly proliferous way in which the alternation of major and minor thirds in ladder formation generates harmonic and thematic material in that luxuriant score will be something to describe in a later chapter. But one extended passage from Firebird demands quotation here: the entr'acte connecting the "profondes ténèbres" following the death of Kashchey at fig. [193] with the Finale. It is, in fact, a "dawn," just like the passage in The Nightingale that gave rise to the discovery of the universal cycle. The cycle is put through a mammoth sequence of sixteen progressions, the lengthiest one Stravinsky ever wrote, and harmonized with an endless, unpredictable variety of triads and seventh chords (Ex. 7.17). This harmonic progression could seem frivolously wayward if viewed simply as a root progression, without knowledge of its history. This is not necessarily to condemn waywardness. But Stravinsky was brought up in a musical environment that did condemn it, that valued technical innovation only insofar as it was the logical extension of accepted practice. The Nightingale sketches give us an unexpected and powerful tool for diagnosing the extent to which Stravinsky's harmonic and motivic explorations in The Firebird satisfied this requirement. In investigating his stylistic and technical development we shall rarely encounter a contrary case.

[482]

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E X A M P L E

7.15

The Nightingale sketches

b. "Instrumentovaf tak" ("Score it thus") k— - j

-4—iCL A \ t) J —

J J

c. Variant of the foregoing

y

V

» P[>i»

E X A M P L E

(continued)

7.15

d. The first ladder-of-thirds entry r fa F W-9 1

f 1

f

r r f

'1

"1 !

Ml

—1 J

\

">:

1»

r

-a 1— J

1»

kp

J

e. The Nightingale, fig. [5]

tif I f tìir

f j

If

—F -1

^rJ

1 J = =

J^

sf—

EXAMPLE 7.16 Dawn (Rassvet)

The Nightingale, various ladder-of-thirds sketches for the

b.

Jt\,

i f * * *-gjf ; V n t

I«

4 =

—

w

f

p

¥1

r

*r i-

*

r fr "i — l i i p j —

tip %0—U

U-

—1 f 7

-

»

—

M

/

fa.

=—ii—

j 7

7

7 M

4T

^

-

r

r

- f —

3

^ p

EXAMPLE 7-17 The Firebird, figs. 1195 |-[~197~| (Rassvet), reduced to demonstrate derivation from the ladder of thirds

8 ' T R A J E C T O R I E S

To understand how the creative energies of Mir iskusstva were eventually channeled in the ballet enterprise through which Stravinsky met his destiny, we must consider two all-important aspects of its creative ideal that have been withheld from discussion up to now. The first of these, known in its day as "synthesism," was a striving to unite the various artistic media in all-embracing theatrical manifestations. The second, a trend that today's art historians call "neonationalism," sought stylistic renewal in the professional assimilation of motifs derived from folk and peasant arts and handicrafts. These two tendencies, as they developed in Russia, were intimately related. Their symbiosis led ultimately, in Mir iskusstva thinking, to an epochal reassessment and revival of ballet. Finally, we shall have to consider the conditions that led Diaghilev to concentrate his activities in Paris, as well as those that eventually led to his commissioning from Stravinsky what was in fart the first Russian "nationalist" ballet. The resultant work, long established as a world classic, is very hard by now to see for the anomaly it was. Yet The Firebird represented the explosive and improbable confluence of a bewildering array of volatile artistic and esthetic trajectories. These must now be enumerated and explained. SYNTHESIS In conversation with his biographer von Riesemann, Sergey Rachmaninoff recalled a strange discussion he had with Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov in a Paris cafe in the spring of 1907. (The three musicians had been brought to Paris, as it happened, by Diaghilev; but let that story wait for now.) Scriabin had been holding forth about synesthetic correspondences between musical tonalities and [487]

colors and how he planned to exploit them in Prométhée. Rachmaninoff listened patiently and without much interest to Scriabin's description of his latest eccentricity. But then: To my astonishment Rimsky-Korsakov agreed on principle about this connection between musical keys and color. I, who do not feel the similarity, contradicted them heatedly. The fact that Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin differed over the points of contact between the sound- and color-scale seemed to prove that I was r i g h t . . . . In other keys, it is true, they agreed, as, for example, in D major (golden-brown). "Look here!" suddenly exclaimed Rimsky-Korsakov, turning to me, "I will prove to you that we are right by quoting your own work. Take for instance the passage in The Miserly Knight [Rachmaninoff's opera on a text by Pushkin, premiered the year before] where the old Baron opens his boxes and chests and gold and jewelry flash and glitter in the light of the torch . . . well!" I had to admit that the passage was written in D major. "You see," said Scriabin, "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried in vain to deny." I had a much simpler explanation for this fact. While composing this particular passage I must unconsciously have borne in mind the scene in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko, where the people, at Sadko's command, draw the great catch of goldfish out of the lake limen and break into the jubilant shout, "Gold! Gold!" This shout is written in D major. But I could not prevent my two colleagues from leaving the café with the air of conquerors who were convinced that they had thoroughly refuted my opinion. 1 This anecdote shows how widespread notions of synesthesia had become among Russian musicians in the early twentieth century, whether or not they moved in artistic circles that could be considered avant-garde. In particular, it suggests that it is high time to stop ascribing to Wagner's influence every turn-of-the-century manifestation of the tendency to mix artistic media or see union as their highest aim. Which is not, of course, to deny that Wagner's music dramas—not to mention the tons of theorizing that surrounded them—had played a major role in shaping the Aeschylean ideal of a "collective work of art" (Gesammtkunstwerk, as Wagner spelled it) 2 that inspired the Russian theurgic Symbolists and Scriabin toward their vision of a transcendent art-religion whose temple would be a musical theater. In Wagner's original meaning, and as he was correctly understood by the Symbolists, the Gesammtkunstwerk was not a single work by a single creator that 1. Rachmaninoff's Recollections as Told to Oskar von Riesemann, trans. Dolly Rutherford (New York: Macmillan, 1934; rpt. New York: Books for Libraries, 1979), 146-47- While it is true that Rachmaninoff made a show of disavowing this book (see Geoffrey Norris, Rakhmaninov [London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1976], 67), what occasioned his disapproval were factual inaccuracies in matters relating to his biography and von Riesemann's somewhat impertinent critical evaluations, not the anecdotal content, which was the product of conversation with the author. 2. Cf. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 3 (Leipzig, 1871), 29.

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united all the artistic media, but a work that would be, like the Greek drama (or the Oberammergau Passion Play), the product of a Gemeinschaft, a community, and would further a sense of religious brotherhood—what the Russian Symbolists called sobornost'—among its participants. It would be not "the voluntary act of an individual," Wagner wrote, but "the necessary joint work of the men of the future." 3 The idea that artistic genres are mutually bolstered in combination hardly originated with Wagner. It was part and parcel of the original conception of opera, and Wagner himself had more or less consciously educed his ideas on the matter from French and German prototypes, both philosophical and practical.4 In its most general terms the idea is implicit in Romanticism. According to one of Schumann's most characteristic dicta, "the aesthetics of one art is that of the others, too; only the materials differ." 5 Wagner's specific contribution to the esthetic of synthesis was the notion that the individual arts, having lost the unity of purpose they enjoyed in the period of the Greek Gesammtkunstwerk—which loss reflected society's loss of a true Gemeinschaft—were in a state of decline that could be reversed only by reuniting them in the "artwork of the future." It was a challenge to the "enlightened" or Darwinist notion that the increasing diversification and "absoluteness" of the various artistic media testified to their increasing maturity. Although Benois could call the Gesamtkunstwerk (to revert to its more common spelling) "the idea for which our circle was ready to give its soul," 6 he used the convenient Wagnerian catchword in a loose sense that was not particularly Wagnerian. By the turn of the century Wagnerism was a vague cult that had long since lost touch with its ostensible originator. It was cultural folklore of the most malleable kind. The prime Wagnerian text for the Miriskusniki was not a work of Wagner's but Henri Lichtenberger's Richard Wagner: Poete etpenseur (Paris, 1898), a book that belongs, properly speaking, to the history of Symbolism. Upon its partial serialization in Mir iskusstva, under the title "Wagner's Views on Art," the text was acclaimed by theurgic thinkers like Beli'y and Ivanov not because it had "influenced" them, but because it confirmed their existing convictions as to the mythic basis of art and its furtherance of religious collectivity.7 For Benois and Diaghilev artistic synthesism had no such grandiose aim; rather, it was a means of 3. Ibid., 60. 4. Sec Jack M. Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, i960), chaps. 7 and 8; also Robert T. Laudon, The Sources of the Wagnerian Synthesis (Munich: Katzbichler Verlag, 1978). 5. Quoted from Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften iiberMusik undMusiker (Leipzig, 1854); in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin (eds.), Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), 361. 6. Benois, Reminiscences, 371. 7. G. Likhtenberger, "Vzglyadi Vagnera na iskusstve," Mir iskusstva, 1899, nos. 7-8, 195-206. Also published in Mir iskusstva (1900) was a translation of Nietzsche's "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth" by Alexander Koptyayev (1868-1941), a composer and Wagnerian propagandist who had previously published excerpts from Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft in the RMG (1897-99).

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enhancing esthetic experience in a thoroughly "heathen and hedonist" fashion, to borrow an epithet that had been hurled at Diaghilev from the theurgist camp.8 Their synthesist appetite could be satisfied by juxtapositions—"counterpoints" of media—as well as by actual fusions. A good case in point was the striking and controversial layout of the first issue of Mir iskusstva, in which reproductions of paintings by Victor Vasnetsov were strewn as if at random among articles on a variety of subjects to which they served not as illustration but as a sort of implicit evocative commentary of one "absolute" artistic manifestation on others. In any case, the history of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Russia as a programmatic ideal extends back much further than either Mir iskusstva or even Russian Wagnerism itself. Exposure in Russia to Wagner's mature music dramas was relatively late, becoming possible only in March 1889, when Angelo Neumann's troupe first brought The Ring of the Nibelung to St. Petersburg. By then an indigenous Russian movement combining the equally valued efforts of front-rank painters and musicians had been in active existence for close to a decade. In 1882 the state monopoly on theaters in Russia was rescinded. It was now possible for private impresarios and patrons to present dramatic performances, and a new chapter in Russian theatrical history began. Indeed, a theatrical patron/impresario quickly materialized within the Moscow merchant class: the railroad tycoon Sawa Ivanovich Mamontov (1841-1918), whose contribution to the development of Russian art and theater would be even more fundamental than Tretyakov's had been a generation earlier. Mamontov was not just a collector, but an active instigator and participant in artistic enterprises. His gravitation to opera was natural: in his youth he had studied singing in Milan with an eye toward a career on the operatic stage; earlier he had taken part in performances of Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm (Groza), under the playwright's own direction; he wrote plays himself and had penned some seven opera librettos; and he was acknowledged by figures as distinguished as Chaliapin (whom he discovered) and Stanislavsky (another gifted scion of the merchant class who saw in Mamontov an eminent role model) as a theatrical director of great talent.9 Together with his wife, Mamontov had founded an arts colony on their country estate (Abramtsevo, some forty miles outside Moscow), where theatrical decoration was raised to new heights of accomplishment. As a result of this manysided activity, Mamontov conceived—quite without benefit of Wagner—the "idea that all forms of art are compatible and should be unified for the highest possible 8. That is, by Merezhkovsky's wife, the poet Zinaida Gippius; see John E. Bowlt, "Synthesism and Symbolism: The Russian World ofArt Movement," in Literature and the Plastic Arts, ed. Ian Higgins (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973), 399. Both Chaliapin and Stanislavsky devoted whole chapters in their respective autobiographies to Mamontov; see Chaliapin: An Autobiography as Told to Maxim Gorky, trans, and ed. Nina Froud and James Hanley (New York: Stein & Day, 1967), chaps. 7 and 8; Constantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, trans. J. J. Robbins (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), chap. XIV.

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f i g . 8.2.

Victor Vasnetsov, set for Snegurochka (produced at Abramtsevo, 1881).

level of expression" and that such a level of expression could be reached only by a wholly "organic" conception of operatic production. Mamontov insisted, in the words of his leading Western student, that operatic productions "could not be successful if they contained only excellent singing and musicianship. They had to unite music with acting and art, and the sets, properties, and dramatic aspects were as important as an accurate and sensitive rendering of the music." 1 0 More important, perhaps. Many witnesses agree that the visual aspects of the early Mamontov productions, the work of famous artists, had been outstanding, while the musical rendition was often amateurish, far from accurate or sensitive. Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden (Snegurocbka), for example, the big success of the Mamontov-owned Russian Private Opera's first season in the fall of 1885, was performed in a manner that horrified the critic Semyon Kruglikov, w h o both reviewed the production and corresponded with the composer about it. (RimskyKorsakov, forewarned, stayed away.) 1 1 All the same, Victor Vasnetsov's sets (such

10. Grover, "Sawa Mamontov and the Mamontov Circle," xx. 11. See A. A. Orlova and V. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, Stranitsizhizni N.A. Rimskogo-Korsakova, vol. 2 (Leningrad: Muzika, 1971), 239-40. Kruglikov's word for the production (letter of 10 November 1885) was podlo (base, vile, disgusting). Rimsky-Korsakov had given the untried Mamontov permission to perform the opera out of exasperation with the cuts the imperious Napravnik was insisting upon at the Marivinsky (see My Musical Life, 254). He was quickly disillusioned with the Mamontov production, writing to Kruglikov as early as 5 September, "I am altogether sure that Snegurochka will be a disaster, but I have no intention of stopping the production" (Orlova and Rimsky-Korsakov, Stranitsi zhizni, 2:238).

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as the one shown in Fig. 8.2) marked an epoch. They had actually been created some years before, at Christmas 1881, for a Mamontov family performance of the Ostrovsky play on which Rimsky's opera was based. (Vasnetsov himself, a Mamontov intimate, had taken the part of Grandfather Frost.) Large paintings, in essence, they were executed in a broad, primary-hued idiom that consciously copied the style and motifs of north Russian peasant handicrafts and woodcuts (lubki). The history of neonationalist stage design, which was brought to its peak by the Ballets Russes (though not, of course, in Russia) begins right here, at Mamontov's 1881 Christmas party. When, four years later, the sets were refurbished for Rimsky's opera and supplemented with additional decorations by the young Konstantin Korovin, another artist close to the Mamontov circle at Abramtsevo, the effect, not only on the public but also on the participants themselves, was colossal. Vasiliy Shkafer (1867-after 1937), who rose from the ranks of singers to become a régisseur for Mamontov's Private Opera, recalled these sets above all when recalling the Mamontov Snegurochka half a century later: It was all so poetic, so unexpectedly and deeply touching and exciting. I all but cried out from the wondrously joyful feeling that swept over me. I was in ecstasy! N o t from the singers, nor from the music, nor from the arias and choruses, which were as they always were, but from the scenery, from everything on the stage that passed before my eyes, before my astonished gaze. I saw artistic truth on stage, especially the forest and the luxurious palace of the Berendeys, with its intricate carvings on the walls and gates (so ingeniously painted!) and the richness of its color. 1 2

"Artistic truth" (khudozhestvennaya pmvda) was a time-honored Russian catchphrase. It was meant to be understood as an alternative to the literal truth of realism. It signaled the fact that Vasnetsov's neonationalism, called into being by a production of the virtual progenitor of the late-nineteenth-century fairy-tale opera, was the first major postrealist, post-Peredvizhnik departure in Russian painting. "Under Vasnetsov's brush," wrote his biographer, a "wonderful forgotten world . . . sprang to life again, sparkled anew with its iridescent, enthralling colors, its surprising poetry." 1 3 Looking back on the history of Russian modernism, Sergey Makovsky, the editor and publisher of Apollon, would declare that "the conflagration began with Vasnetsov." 14 Snegurochka was an isolated moment during the first period (1885-92) of Mamontov's Russian Private Opera. During those years the level of musical execution

12. Vasiliy Shkafer, Sorok let na stsene russkoy open(Leningrad, 1936), 132-33; quoted in Grover, " S a w a Mamontov and the Mamontov Circle," 183-84. 13. V. M . Lobanov, Viktor Vasnetsov v Abramtseve (Moscow, 1929), 30; quoted in ibid., 130-31. 14. Quoted in Bowlt, Stiver Age, 72.

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remained lamentable and the company's reputation remained that of a rich man's folly. In order to keep the operation afloat Mamontov was forced to showcase Western European stars, which precluded the mounting of other Russian operas. This situation could hardly satisfy the civic ambitions of a Moscow merchant patron, and so Mamontov finally let his operatic activity lapse while he devoted his energies to his arts colony and workshop. The Private Opera was reborn in 1896 on the crest of the neonationalist wave that Abramtsevo had set in motion, and this time it really made its mark, due in large measure to the participation of the young Chaliapin, who had signed with Mamontov out of frustration at his slow advance at the Mariyinsky (where Fyodor Stravinsky, among other seniors, stood in his way). The revival of the troupe took place, fittingly enough, at the summerlong All-Russian Exhibition of Arts and Industries in Nizhniy-Novgorod. The troupe then settled into its official home, the brand-new Solodovnikov Theater in Moscow, the largest and most up-todate house in the old Russian capital (in Soviet times it became the State Operetta Theater). Chaliapin's sensational success as Ivan the Terrible in Rimsky-Korsakov's Maid of Pskov (Pskovityanka) during the 1896-97 season solidified both the Private Opera's financial footing and its identification with the New Russian School. This production again attracted Rimsky-Korsakov's attention and redeemed the musical fiasco of the 1885 Snegurochka. It marked a turning point in the history of Russian music and decorative art alike, for henceforth Rimsky-Korsakov's whole late operatic period would be intimately bound up with MamontoVs Russian Private Opera and its neonationalist designers. In the course of five seasons (1897 to 1902), no fewer than six Korsakovian operas were given their premières by the company (during the same period, by contrast, only one opera of Rimsky's, the insignificant Servilia, was produced at the Mariyinsky). This creative partnership provided an indispensable precedent for the kind of close collaboration among artists and musicians that would be the hallmark of the Diaghilev enterprises in the West. Rimsky stood in need of Mamontov right at this juncture, for the Mariyinsky had turned down his latest opera, Sadko, at the express command of Tsar Nikolai I I . 1 5 The composer consulted with his friend the Moscow critic Kruglikov about possibilities in the second capital. Kruglikov warned him that Mamontov's

15. Yastrebtsev's account of this sorry episode purports to transmit the story as told by RjmskyKorsakov, who was himself quoting Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the intendant of the Imperial Theaters. The latter had met with the tsar to have his plans for the next season approved: "Since the sovereign did not recall the legend of Sadko in detail, I had to set out in brief the content of the opera . .. and the fart that this was the only new opera we were planning by a famous Russian composer, which fart alone demanded that it be given on the Mariyinsky stage. To the tsar's question as to what the opera's music would be like, I told him that it was somewhat reminiscent of [Rimsky's] Mlada and Christmas Eve; whereupon the sovereign took his pen and crossed it off the list with the observation, 'In that case, never mind staging Sadko, but instead have the Directorate find something a bit merrier' " (Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:434). [494]

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orchestra was small and that "the musical aspect is done hurriedly and can seem almost incidental, for in the Mamontov Opera the sets, props, and costumes are done not by artisans, but by such artists as Vasnetsov, [Vasiliy] Polenov, and [Valentin] Serov." 16 Despite this "flaw," Kruglikov was able to assure Rimsky, in a later letter, that the experience of the past year has shown that this enterprise docs best both artistically and materially when it produces Russian operas. This autumn it will not only renew its efforts, but wishes to base them even more than before on Russian works. Mamontov is pinning his hopes on you, Borodin, and M u s o r g s k y . . . . You will not g o wrong if you trust in the Mamontov Opera and in Mamontov himself; they are worthy of it. They are committed to good music—good, that is, in the sense that we understand i t . 1 7

The production of Sadko enlisted the talents of leading painters in the service of Russian music on a scale until then unprecedented. The sets and costumes were executed by Korovin and Sergey Malyutin after consultation with Serov and with Mikhail Vrubel, the greatest Russian painter of the day, whose wife, Nadezhda Zabela (later a Rimsky familiar), was to sing the role of the Sea Princess. Vrubel designed her costume himself. 18 The Russian Private Opera toured St. Petersburg during the 1897—98 season and presented no fewer than four Rimsky-Korsakov operas to the capital: Sadko, Snegurochka, May Night (with the twenty-four-year-old Rachmaninoff conducting), and Pskovityanka, in which Chaliapin repeated his wild success as Ivan the Terrible. Rimsky oversaw the musical preparation of these performances and was pleased with the result this time, after which he had no hesitation in casting his lot with the merchant impresario. The other Rimsky-Korsakov productions given by Mamontov's company included Mozart and Salieri, with Shkafer and Chaliapin in the title roles (25 November 1898); Boyarinya Vera Sheloga, a one-act "prologue" to Pskovityanka (15 December 1898); The Tsar's Bride (22 October 1899); Tsar Saltan (22 October 1900); and Kashchey the Deathless (13 December 1902). The sets and costumes for the last were by Malyutin; Vrubel designed all the rest. In addition, and hardly less important, Mamontov produced Rimsky's redactions of Musorgsky's operas: Khovanshchina (12 November 1897; sets and costumes designed by Apollinariy Vasnetsov, executed by Korovin and Malyutin), with Chaliapin in the role of Dosifey; and Boris Godunov (7 December 1898; sets and costumes by Korovin and the architect Ilya Bondarenko), with Chaliapin (coached by Rachmaninoff) appearing for the first time in the role with which he would be more closely identified, both in Russia and in the West, than any other. 16. Letter of 18 January 1897; in A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N. A. Rimskiy-Korsakop 4:80—81. 17. Letter of 30 June 1897; in ibid., 82-83. 18. Grover, "Sawa Mamontov and the Mamontov Circle," 312. The musical rendition was still far from ideal. Rimsky-Korsakov described it harshly in My Musical Life, 370-71. SYNTHESIS

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It would be hard to overestimate the importance of these productions and the multiple examples they set: first, for a particular brand of Russian Gesamtkunstwerk that placed a heavier emphasis on the visual aspect of theatrical presentations than had any previous artistic "synthesis"; second, for a new approach to the handling of Russian national material; and third, for an esthetic of "artistic truth" that transcended realism at last. The earliest impact these productions had was on RimskyKorsakov himself. Although it would be stretching a point to call him a neonationalist, he found the Mamontov productions enormously stimulating. They did much to nudge him in his last years toward that atmosphere of folk pageantry and ritual that is in retrospect so close to the ambience of the early Parisian Stravinsky. Rimsky's prc-Kitezh correspondence with his would-be librettist Petrovsky on the idea of "liturgical opera" is already revealing. Petrovsky defined the genre as follows: "An opera emancipated from the realistic demands of the dramatic theater,... an opera that would dare a beautiful stylization, a shapely, harmonious sense of design,... which would depict events in a symbolic way that might approach the symbolism of the church service." 19 Rimsky answered that "some concession to realism there will always have to be," 20 and in the end it is no wonder that he turned to the more conservative Belsky for the Kitezb libretto. But the Petrovsky letter, which Rimsky-Korsakov took very seriously, prefigures with an astounding prescience some of the principal tenets of Stravinsky's post-Soar theatrical output (most obviously and particularly the projected and partially composed Liturgiya ballet of 1915)- Indeed, without the Mamontov precedents, neither the Diaghilev enterprise nor the works of Stravinsky's early maturity could have turned out as they did. The St. Petersburg tour of 1898 brought the Mamontov company's achievements to the attention of the nascent Miriskusniki, who found them inspiring—particularly the work of Korovin, who as an easel painter of the latterday Peredvizhnik school had already attracted the interest of Diaghilev and Benois. "Korovin's decors amazed us by their daring," wrote Benois, "and, above all, by their high artistic value—the very quality which was so often missing in the elaborate productions of the Imperial stage. It was obvious that the path Korovin had chosen [or that Mamontov had staked out for him] was the right one and needed only to be developed and improved."21 Benois himself would play a major role in that development. The achievements of the Mamontov company did not go unnoticed by the directorate of the Imperial Theaters. Vladimir Telyakovsky, then the director of the

19. A. A. Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr mezhdu dvukh revolyutsiy (Leningrad: Muzika, 1975), 16465. Petrovsky cited the fifth scene of Sadko as an example of drama carried by "ceremonial songs." 20. N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, "Pis'ma k Ye. Petrovskomu," Sovetskaya muzika, 1952, no. 12, 71. 21. Benois, Reminiscences, 197 •

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Moscow Theaters, engaged Korovin for the Bolshoy, along with another Abramtsevo artist, Alexander Golovin. Both of them, having made their reputations as theatrical designers in Moscow, were then summoned to St. Petersburg to work at the Mariyinsky. Inevitably they fell in with the Mir iskusstva circle that admired them so much. Korovin and Golovin became important links between Abramtsevo and Mir iskusstva—the first of many. Benois too, having made a reputation as a theatrically inclined artist in the pages of Mir iskusstva and by virtue of multifarious historical writings, found himself briefly "co-opted" by the St. Petersburg theatrical establishment when he was engaged to design the sets for the Mariyinsky Götterdämmerung in the 1902-3 season (the very production Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov would attend together a few years later). With this project the whole idea of Gesamtkunstwerk in Russia came curiously full circle. Yet the Mamontov theatrical synthesis is best viewed as one conspicuous manifestation of a larger movement in which Mamontov and his arts colony at Abramtsevo again played the leading role. Another trajectory must now be traced.

DENATIONALIZATION "National character" was a prime nineteenth-century artistic value in all countries, though one conventionally looks for it mainly in countries whose national character was more or less exotic from the standpoint of what Prince Trubetskoy would have called the pangermanoromanic "mainstream." 22 Both peredvizhnichestvo and kuchkism had originated, as we know, as nationalistic upsurges against neoclassical academicism. When, by century's end, these movements had themselves become academic styles every bit as rigid as those against which they had originally rebelled, a huge amount of lip service was still paid to national character, especially by Stasov, the great kuchkist and Peredvizhnik tribune. This national character, however, had far less to do with style than with subject matter and what might be described as "ethos," that is, the proper attitude of sympathy toward that subject matter. Folklore as such held little interest for latterday kuchkists and Peredvizhniki, and folk art was positively scorned. You could hardly pay a Peredvizhnik a greater insult than to call his work lubochnty; to liken his work to a peasant woodcut was, in essence, to call it technically inept and esthetically crude. 23 Similarly, when Russian composers of the Belyayev circle affected a folkloristic idiom, they imitated the cultivated "Russian" style of Rimsky-Korsakov (itself, as Kruglikov astutely put it, 22. On this point cf. Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 88-89; also R. Taruskin, "Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music," Journal ofMusicology 3 (1984): 329-30. 23. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 122.

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a matter of "Russian song viewed through the prism of Balakirev's anthology"), 24 not the original model. No less proud than the Peredvizhniki of their academic mastery, the Belyayevtsi "perpetuated," as Lazare Saminsky put it, "the 'crime' of their forerunner, the 'Mighty Handful,' in applying without restraint all the set and trite proceedings of Western form building, development, figuration, to the Russian folk-themes, and even to purely Eastern folksongs, so unamenable to forced 'civilized' ornamentation." 25 By 1880 Rimsky-Korsakov was so alienated from undoctored folk music that he was among those most hostile to the efforts of Yuliy Melgunov (1846—93), the Moscow ethnographer who made the first attempts to transcribe "Russian Songs Directly from the Voices of the People," to quote the title of his first publication.26 "Barbaric," sniffed Rimsky on seeing these primitive heterophonic harmonizations, unwittingly echoing the judgment of Balakirev's anthology rendered only about a dozen years earlier by an unnamed German pedagogue in Prague on being shown the great kuchkist article of faith: "Ganz falsch!" 27 The youngest generation of urban nineteenth-century "national" composers was most curmudgeonly of all toward the unmediated music of the countryside. The thirty-four-year-old Vasiliy Kalinnikov had this to say about it in a letter written in 1900: Folk music, it seems to me, is beautiful only when it is idealized (but in folk style, of course). Think how disgustingly village peasant women sing what are really often beautiful songs. Remember those wild screams and roars which accompany the best of melodies and the untrained voices which howl them. Such singing might perhaps please Lev Tolstoy, but he can't lay down the law for us. Imagine making everything on stage "just like in a village!" . . . Such unrestrained realism in art, in music especially, I do not like and d o not recognize. It lowers the art, pulling it down from those lofty regions where the human soul dwells to the level of physiological necessities, gymnastics, massage, etc. 2 8

Boris Asafyev summed up the situation very neatly with respect to music in his Book About Stravinsky, when he observed that, however much Russian composers may have loved folk music, they did not trust it. They would not see in it a strong and independent culture and a system of organizing sound. They took the formal principles created over the course of the centuries in peasant art for a ran24. Review of the Mamontov Snegurochka in Muzikal'noye obozreniye, no. 8 (1885); in Orlova and Rimsky-Korsakov, Stranitsi zhizni 2:240. For details on the style of Balakirev's anthology and its influence on the New Russian School, see Taruskin, "How the Acorn Took Root" and " 'Little Star.'" 25. Lazare Saminsky, Music of Our Day, 2d ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1939), 242. 26. Yu. N. Melgunov, Russkiye pesni neprosredstvenno s golosov naroiia i s ob"yasneniyami izdanniye (Moscow: Tip. E. Lissner & Yu. Roman, 1879). 27. Cf. Alfred J. Swan, Russian Music and Its Sources in Chant and Folk Song (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 136; also Edward Garden, Balakirev (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), 57-58. 28. To Alexander Grechaninov, 19 July 1900; in Gertrude Norman and Miriam Lubell Shrifte, Letters of Composers (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d.), 326-27.

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dom thing in comparison with the precepts of artistic beauty represented by strict counterpoint, the principles of voice-leading governing harmony, etc. Deluded in this way, they mistrusted folk music and were more inclined merely to plunder it for themes to be used in variations, symphonies, and the l i k e . . . than they were to study it for new ways o f handling melodic material—ways that were far firmer, more ancient, more natural, and more logical than anything one could gain from "elementary t h e o r y " or courses in harmony. 2 9

Asafyev's thesis was that Stravinsky was the first Russian composer to approach folklore in the new and better way he described. And so, of course, he would be. But at the point to which we have traced his career thus far, Stravinsky was heir to all the attitudes and prejudices Asafyev decried. Of his pre-Fire bird compositions, only the Symphony in E-flat incorporated folk material, in two stereotypically conventional places: the Trio of the Scherzo and the Finale, where the allusion to the "Jackdaw" song ("Chicher-Yacher") was hardly more than an in-joke. Even in the Gorodetsky songs of 1907—8, the texts of which were imitation folk poems, Stravinsky's music had kept a safe distance from the soil, getting no closer than Musorgskian tintinnabulations out of Boris Godunov—a Russian art-music cliché if ever there was one. Where Stravinsky had aimed at a folklike lyricism in these songs, the music came out sounding like Grieg. Clearly the young Stravinsky was a composer who knew little native folklore and may have wished to know even less. His attitudes mirrored precisely those of his peer group and of the historical moment in Russian music. That moment was well characterized by Karati'gin in his obituary for Balakirev, whose death in 1910 effectively finished off the "heroic generation of Russian composers" and all that it had stood for. (The fact that Cesar Cui survived, and would hang on, a walking anachronism, past the Revolution, hardly changed matters.) Writing in Apollon, Karati'gin came eagerly to bury Balakirev, sounding meanwhile a sententious death knell for Russian musical nationalism as a "school." Before our eyes there has occurred, or rather there is occurring, a new revolution in Russian music. A certain denationalization o f it is taking place, alongside a noticeable invasion o f it by elements of Western European "impressionism." Debussy and Ravel, Reger and Strauss have taken the place of Schumann and Berlioz in our musical history.. . . But in order for a new fertilization o f Russian musical thought with the aid of Western European creative achievements to take place painlessly and without the eventual loss of our musical physiognomy, it w a s necessary that in preparation that physiognomy be shown fully. A n d this was the task accomplished by the members o f the " N e w Russian S c h o o l . " 1 0

Seen this way, the kuchkist period had been a kind of adolescence that Russian 29. Glcbov, Kniga 0 Stravinskom, 87. 30. V. Karatigin, " M . A. Balakire\\" Apollon, 1910, no. 10, 54.

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music was now happily on the point of outgrowing. As early as 1904, in fact, Nurok had made a similar point in the pages of Mir iskusstva: "Isn't it high time by now that the best representatives of contemporary Russian music came to their senses and acknowledged that the so-called 'national' tendency has long since become a fiction, that for Russian composers like Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov and the whole talented group of deceased warriors for once-new truths in music there is no longer any reason at the present time to stand apart [from the mainstream]?" 31 Indeed, a revisionist view of the kuchkist past now became fashionable, according to which it was narrow and passé even to regard the "heroic generation" from a nationalist perspective. Thus Vladimir Derzhanovsky could write of Rimsky-Korsakov that "only recently has the image of the late composer begun to assume in the popular imagination its true and great universal significance, liberated from the narrowly national definition of his work that had been fostered by vulgar criticism," and that "it was not the national color that was the deepest and the most treasurable aspect of Rimsky-Korsakov's art." 32 Who were the deliberate "denationalizes"? Scriabin, obviously and above all, but also the "young Russian composers" to whom Karat'igin devoted an admiring essay in the very next issue of Apollon. (We have already noted its assessment of Steinberg's preeminent status among them.) Besides Steinberg, Karat'igin listed several other outstanding representatives of the youngest generation of thoroughly denationalized native talent: Senilov, Gnesin, and Stravinsky.33 This view accords perfectly with the one presented by Grigoriy Timofeyev, the St. Petersburg critic to whom Stravinsky had sent his vita in 1908. Timofeyev wrote an account of some "Novelties of Russian Music" for the Bulletin français de la S.I.M. in July 1909. The article concentrated mainly on the recently deceased Rimsky-Korsakov's swan song, Le coq d'or, in comparison with which "all the other novelties . . . have paled." But three of Rimsky's pupils are singled out as especially promising: Senilov, Steinberg, and "J.-Th. Stravinski," for whom this was the very first press notice abroad. "These," the critic wrote, "are the names of young authors who have barely started their musical careers, but who have already managed to attract attention to themselves." The works discussed had all been performed during the 1908 season by the Russian Symphony (Belyayev) Concerts, which meant that Stravinsky was being introduced to Western European readers as the author of "La bergère et le faune." Timofeyev's faint praise could hardly have aroused much curiosity among the French: A pastoral character would perhaps have suited these verses best. T h e three parts of the suite, " T h e Shepherdess," " T h e Faun," and " T h e River," develop without ji. " P o kontsertam," Mir iskusstva, 1904, no. n, 70. With his usual tact, Nurok had written these lines as part of a review of the memorial concert for Belyayev. 32. Derzhanovsky, " K ispolneniyu prelvudii-kantati' i z Cornera,' " 602. 33. Karatïgin, "Molodïye russkive kompozitorï," 33-34I 500]

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undue lingering all the details of the text. It is the orchestra that flexibly and amenably sees to this. Taste is in evidence. The harmony is interesting. The voice part is impeccably written from the standpoint of declamation: prosody, pauses, melodic contour, dynamics, all conform completely to the text's demands. But even so the voice part lacks profile. It is written in the middle range and does not show the singer off to good advantage. All in all, the suite does not lack interesting pages; it has brought notice to its young author, whose talent has yet to achieve to its full potential.

Neither, in view of what the French tended to value in Russian music, would Timofeyev's conclusion have quickened French interest in Stravinsky and his confrères. It did, however, testify to the truth of Karatïgin's observations. "These three composers," Timofeyev emphasized in closing, "have this in common, that their product does not belong to the Russian national school, even though RimskyKorsakov's imprint is evident. I do not wish by this to define their character, which may yet change greatly, as cannot be doubted if their talents are real."34 The French would have a chance to judge Stravinsky at first hand less than a year later, and anyone who happened to remember Timofeyev's article would have been astonished to contemplate the composer of The Firebird. That ballet was, in all its dimensions, a display of national character writ larger than ever. In part, and especially in its gaudier aspects, it was a nationalism calculated to seduce the French public. But it also represented the fruit of a forty-year-old tendency in Russian art that had slowly gained on and finally swallowed up the moribund Peredvizhnik traditions and was at last making contact with Russian music through Stravinsky, the first (and, arguably, the only) Russian composer to cast his lot with the neonationalist movement without reservation. For a preliminary assessment of what neonationalism was all about we may look to the very same issue of Apollon that contained Karatïgin's obituary for Balakirev. There we find a review by the outstanding art critic Yakov Tugenhold (1872-1928) of Diaghilev's 1910 Saison russe in Paris, which had included the première of The Firebird (as yet unheard in Russia). Tugenhold's enthusiastic description of the ballet—and luckily, since he was an art critic, he describes much more than the 34. Gregoire Timoféev, "Les nouveautés de la musique russe," Revue musicale S.I.M. 5 (1909): 69697; italics added. The original text of the last two citations: "Le caractère pastoral aurait peut-être mieux convenu à ces verses. Les trois parties de la suite, la Bergère, le Faune, et la Rivière, ont développé sans longueur tous les détails du texte. C'est l'orchestre, flexible et obéissant, qui dessine tout cela. Il y a du goût. L'harmonie est intéressante. Pour la partie vocale, elle est écrite d'une façon irréprochable au point de vue de la déclamation: la prosodie du vers, les pauses, le mouvement de la mélodie montant et descendant, les crescendo et diminuendo, répondent tout à fait au texte. Mas quand même la partie vocale manque de relief. Elle est écrite dans le médium de la voix et n'est pas avantageuse pour la chanteuse. Dans l'ensemble, la suite ne manque pas de pages intéressantes; elle fait remarquer son jeune auteur, dont le talent va encore se développer davantage.... Ces trois compositeurs ont ceci de commun, que leur création ne se rattache à l'école nationale russe, quoique l'empreinte de Rimski-Korsakov se manifeste. Je ne veux pas par là déterminer le caractère de leur production, qui peut changer encore beaucoup, et cela est hors de doute, si leurs talents sont vivant." DENATIONALIZATION

[501]

music—gives a strong sense of the new attitude toward folklore and the role it was playing in the renovation of the visual arts in Russia. Despite all the cosmopolitanism of our art, one already sees the beginnings of a new and long-hoped-for style in Russian archaism. The folk, formerly the object of the artist's pity, is becoming increasingly the source of artistic style. To its inexhaustible living mine music has returned, and now art is returning along with choreography. The Firebird,

this ballet based on Slavonic myth, these ballet numbers

[tantsi\ transformed into folk dance [plyas], this music, suffused with folk melodies, this painting by Golovin, brocaded with antique patterns (even to the point of being too patterned and honey-caked)—is this not the very latest attainment of our art? Here we no longer behold official Stasovian cockerels, nor even a showpiece ballet divertissement like Le festin; this is no patriotic display of our "national countenance," but a serious longing for the unfettered milieu of folk mythology. 35

Powerfully though it contributed to the ballet's success, Stravinsky's music was less deserving of these specific accolades than the visual aspects of the work. Conventional and derivative in its use of folklore, the score harked back in this, as in many other ways, to the immediate precedent set by Rimsky-Korsakov and the remoter example of Glinka. But the esthetic tendency represented by The Firebird as a whole—the direction in which the ballet launched Stravinsky and in which he would ultimately go further than anyone else—is captured to perfection in Tugenhold's description, particularly in his marvelously succinct sentence about the artist's pity versus artistic style. It sums up a whole generation of controversy between those who, like Benois, looked back on the Russian artists of the older generation as Philistines whose work was "one big slap in the face of Apollo," and those who, like Stasov, regarded the younger generation as "spiritual beggars." How ironic, then, that if we should attempt to locate the source of the new attitude toward folk art as the stylistic inspirer of modern art, we shall be led straight to the work of Stasov himself, the very apostle of kuchkism and peredvizhnichestvo.

N E O N A T I O N A L I S M

At the invitation of the Petersburg-based Society for the Advancement of Art, Stasov prepared a substantial essay, the first of its kind in Russia, entitled "Russian Folk Ornament." It was published in 1872 in a lavish edition incorporating 215 illustrations on seventy-five plates,36 and comprised an ambitious gallery of ornamental motifs systematically culled from embroidery, lace, wood and bone carv35. "Russkiv sezon' v Parizhe," Apollon, 1910, no. 10, 21. On Le festin, see below. 36. V. V. Stasov, Russkiy narodniy ornament (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvo Pooshreniya Khudozhestv, 1872). It had been anticipated by the work of a German scholar (Felix Lay, Siidslavische Ornament [Vienna, 1871]), which, however, dealt not with Russian but with Balkan artifacts. In 1887 Stasov reworked and expanded the essay into a "famous and unequalled" monograph entitled Slav and Eastern Ornament (John E. Bowlt, Russian Art, 1S7S-WS [New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976], 23).

[502]

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ings, and handicrafts in metal, ceramic, enamel, and glass. Special attention was paid to initials in old manuscripts (especially valuable from the archeological point of view in that they were often datable), where many of the same motifs were encountered as in the peasant handicrafts. 37 Stasov sorted these motifs into four categories: (i) geometrical figures (stars, crosses, intersecting lines); (2) flora (stylized floral patterns, garlands, branches, trees); (3) fauna (birds and beasts, often mythological, fantastic, two-headed, etc.); and (+) human figures. All, even the last, were often stylized to the point of abstraction. Much space was devoted, as was typical of Stasov, to the question of ethnic purity. As was also typical of him, he was quick to conclude that many if not most Russian ornamental patterns were borrowed from the East. Although the impetus that had motivated the Society for the Advancement of Art to commission this treatise was its fear (a fear Stasov shared) that industrialization threatened peasant handicrafts with extinction, Stasov's viewpoint on the material he was assembling was not limited to archeological or documentary values. From our present perspective, the most prescient aspect of the book was the call it embodied toward the creative utilization of its contents. "If one looks upon Russian folk designs from the purely artistic, esthetic point of view," wrote Stasov (somewhat uncharacteristically, be it noted, for one who normally opposed the "purely esthetic"), "one cannot help but find here intriguing and very tasteful models of such a play of lines, such a masterly deployment of the patterns themselves and of their interstitial backgrounds, as must testify to a highly developed artistic sensibility and proficiency, and must prove a precious guide and counsel to our contemporary artist, when he shall wish to create in the area and in the character of our national art." 3 8 Stasov probably had nothing more in mind than authenticity of decorative detail, and certainly had no inkling of the huge development of neonationalist art that was to take place almost before his ink was dry. It is undeniable, though, that his work provided an early and powerful nudge in that direction. The first area in which the neonationalist, or "neo-Russian," esthetic would be heavily manifested was architecture. There the movement accorded well with, and was avidly fostered by, the Moscow merchant ideology with its mixture of Orthodoxy and reactionary Slavophilism and its zeal for resurrecting the pre-Petrine past. As Thomas Owen writes, "Even the most cosmopolitan capitalist merchants," among whom he lists the Tretyakovs and the Mamontovs, "remained

'kvas

patri-

37. Book designers and illustrators were quick to appropriate these capitals. One example of their use is particularly telling for us: the frontispiece of the Belyavev edition (1897) of Rimskv-Korsakov's Sadko (first performed by Mamontov) featured a title spelled out in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Novgorod initials reproduced by Stasov in his monograph from old psalters in which the usual motif of David's harp was replaced by the indigenous gusli. This was particularly appropriate since Sadko himself was a jjuslyar'—a gusli-plaving minstrel. See Figs. 7.4b and 16.ia. 38. Sobraniye sochineniy V. V. Stasova, 1&47-1886 (St. Petersburg, 1894—1906), i:col. 187.

NEONATIONALISM

[503]

ots,' " citing the epithet (from kvas, the native malt liquor only a Russian can love) that Russian liberals traditionally applied to those who blindly and narrowmindedly worshiped all things native. 39 Thus, in the very year that Stasov's essay on folk ornament appeared, Pavel Tretyakov built his first gallery, as an addition to his Moscow home. This building, in a deliberately and fancifully archaic Muscovite style, contrasted strangely with the realist paintings it was built to house. The 1905 renovation of the façade by Victor Vasnetsov turned the Tretyakov Gallery into one of the enduring monuments of neonationalist architecture, today one of the top tourist attractions of the Russian capital (Fig. 8.3a). Even the Moscow villa of Pyotr Shchukin, which housed the most magnificent agglomeration of French paintings, from Impressionist to cubist, ever assembled by a private collector, was a neo-Russian extravaganza, executed after authentic models of seventeenthcentury wood architecture studied in situ, in Yaroslavl and Kolomenskoye, by Shchukin himself together with his architect, Boris Friedenburg. This building contrasted even more weirdly with its contents. 40 So great did the craze for old Russian architecture become among the Russian capitalists that when the "bourgeois tsar" himself, Alexander III, erected a church to commemorate his father, Alexander II, on the spot where the latter was assassinated in 1881 (the Griboyedov Canal ofFNevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg), he chose (after a contest) a candycolored rival to St. Basil's in Moscow's Red Square. The riotous Church of the Resurrection (Fig. 8.3b), finally completed in 1907, could scarcely have clashed more incongruously with the rest of Tsar Peter's northern capital, executed by Italian architects along equally self-conscious neoclassical lines. The hub of the neonationalist movement was Abramtsevo, MamontoVs country estate, which was dominated by a great wooden house the railway tycoon purchased in 1870 from the descendents of the great Slavophile writer Sergey Aksakov (1791—1859). The arts colony and folk school that Mamontov and his wife founded there was partly the result of bad conscience—that is, the realization that it was precisely the rapid expansion of commerce and communications which Mamontov's own enterprises were fostering that posed the greatest threat to the survival of the traditional Russian peasant crafts. In its aims and methods the colony at Abramtsevo followed the example of William Morris and the English arts and crafts movement, a reaction against the factory system, in stressing "respect for the nature of materials and the dignity of the individual craftsman." 4 1 One of the first acts of self-conscious neo-Russian revivalism at Abramtsevo was the engagement of the artist Victor Gartman (1834—73) to design the workshop and also a peasant infirmary (lechebnitsa) in the neonationalist style. 39. Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia, 208. 40. Kean, All the Empty Palaces, i?o. 41. Elizabeth Aslin, The Aesthetic Movement: Prelude to Art Nouveau (New York: Excalibur Books, 1981), 151.

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FIG.

8.3a

Victor Vasnetsov, facade for Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow).

f i g . 8.3b. Church of the Resurrection (Khram Voskreseniya Kbristova), St. Petersburg, on the site of the assassination of Alexander II (built 1883-1907). Note contrast with the more typical neoclassical architecture at rear.

Gartman (or Hartmann), immortalized as the artist of Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, was a friend and protégé of Stasov's and one of the earliest Russian professional artists regularly to employ authentic Slavic ornament in his architectural designs and handicrafts.42 His mixture of media could be naïvely indiscriminate, as in his most famous design, for the Kiev city gate (Fig. 8.4b), in which the dominant motifs were adapted from masculine and feminine headdresses, thus well meriting the sally directed at early "neo-Russian" architecture that it was a matter of "marble towels and brick embroideries."43 But Gartman was perhaps the first Russian artist on whom folk art exerted the kind of direct stylistic influence presaged by Stasov, and in fact his work was very likely foremost in Stasov's mind when the prediction was made. Gartman died suddenly the same year he was engaged by the Mamontovs and was succeeded by the brothers Vasnetsov, the three Polenovs (sister, brother, and the latte^s wife, Maria Yakunchikova, herself the daughter of a Moscow tycoon), and Valentin Serov, the composer's son—later (in Stravinsky's words) the "conscience" of the World of Art and the Ballets Russes44—who literally grew up at Abramtsevo. The arts colony thus established became, by common consent among art historians, the "cradle of modern art in Russia."45 The first collective enterprise carried out by this group at Abramtsevo was the building and decorating of the "Church of the Savior Not Made By Hands," after a design by Apollinariy Vasnetsov "according to the highest principles of ancient Novgorodian architecture."46 Through this venture, and others like it (such as the bathhouse, shown in Fig. 8.5), Mamontov became for neonationalist art what Tretyakov had been for the Peredvizhniki. The early Abramtsevo artists, in point of fact, were Peredvizhniki. These latterday members of the venerable school "sympathized with the endeavor to make applied art as 'sacred' as easel art, [and] to propagate the indigenous traditions of Russian culture." They were a transitional generation who, "beginning their careers within the Wanderers movement,... reached their creative apogee as Decorativists, as Neo-Nationalists and, in some cases, as associates of the World of Art." 47 It was the Mamontov enterprise that played midwife to this transition. The 42. Examples of Gartman's neonationalist work may be seen in the illustrations to Alfred Frankenstein, "Victor Hartmann and Modeste Musorgsky," Musical Quarterly 25 (1939): 268—91; and in the International Music Company edition of Pictures at an Exhibition (New York, 1952). The lavish facsimile edition of Musorgsky's manuscript published in the Soviet Union on the work's centenary (Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1975) contains a portfolio of color reproductions of several of Gartman's most characteristic pieces. 43. N. Sultanov, "Vozrozhdeniye russkogo iskusstva," Zodchiy, 1881, no. 2,11; quoted in Bowlt, Russian Art, 26. 44. Conv:io8/97; E8cD:27/25. 45. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1962), 946. John E. Bowlt, Russian Stage Design: Scenic Innovation, 1900-1930 (Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1982), 19. 47. Bowlt, Silver Age, 25.

NEON ATIONALISM

[507]

f i g . 8 . 4 . The first neonationalist. a. Victor Gartman, "Sketch in Fourteenth-Century Style": clock in the guise of a Baba-yaga's hut on hen's feet.

b. Gartman, design for the Kiev city gate. The bell tower is in the form of a warrior's helmet; the central arch is in that o f a kokoshnik, the traditional Old Russian feminine headdress.

fig.

8.5.

Bathhouse at Abramtsevo.

many workshops established there—embroidery, furniture, ceramics—exerted an enormous fascination on the easel painters. A milestone was reached in the summer of 1881, when Vasiliy Polenov and Repin, who was loosely associated with the colony, brought back to the Abramtsevo house a carved wooden frieze they had seen on a walk through one of the surrounding villages. Later that year Polenov brought back from his own estate three carved wooden threshing flails and presented them to the Mamontovs. These artifacts were the core around which a huge museum of Russian folk art was to grow up, tended in its initial phases by Yelizaveta Mamontova. This museum was a crucial factor in inspiring interest in ancient Russia among professional artists. 48 Among the earliest fruits of this inspiration were Yelena Polenova's magnificent illustrations to Russian folk tales (skazki) in neonationalist style. The very first tale she chose to illustrate was " H o w the Mushrooms Mobilized for War," which Stravinsky would set to music in 1904. Later she turned her hand to the legend of the Firebird. Another milestone, as we have seen, was Victor Vasnetsov's series of decors for Snegurochka, as much a neonationalist as a "synthesist" watershed, and for as many reasons: for the dazzling success with which folk ornamental motifs and color harmonies were assimilated into the designs, for the integration of the whole production into a deliberate Slavonic Gesamtkunstwerk, and in particular for establishing the musical stage as the main "theater of operations," so to speak, of

48. Ibid., 34.

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the neonationalist movement. One hardly needs to stress again what a powerful precedent and stimulus was thus provided for the later Diaghilev enterprises. The products of Abramtsevo, exhibited at crafts fairs throughout Russia—notably the All-Russian Exhibition of Printing at St. Petersburg in 1895, when the ancient peasant art of the lubok was given a striking modern revival, or the AllRussian Exhibition at Nizhniy-Novgorod a year later, when the Private Opera Company staged its spectacular comeback—attracted enormous attention to "vanishing Russia" on the part of the educated public and eventually led to widespread emulation. Mamontov's patronage of neonationalist art and artists was soon surpassed by the activities and largesse of Princess Maria Klavdiyevna Tenisheva (1867-1928), "creatrix and collectrix extraordinary," in the words of her close friend Nikolai Roerich. 4 9 In the course of the 1890s Tenisheva set up a complex of folk schools and workshops plus a museum on her estate, called Talashkino, near Smolensk in central Russia, with the avowed purpose of doing better than Abramtsevo, whose products she viewed as "monotonous and lacking in imagination." 50 Personal animus motivated her in part: as a young aspiring opera singer Tenisheva had in 1885 auditioned unsuccessfully for Mamontov's opera troupe; she retained a personal distaste for the merchant patron to the end of her days, 51 along with the traditional disdain of her class for a Moscow "kupchisbka," a glorified tradesman. Tenisheva's upbringing was aristocratic, her tastes self-consciously highbrow. Her love of peasant antiquities was more purely "esthetic" than Mamontov's, although her motivation in founding her peasant school at Talashkino, plus an art school in St. Petersburg, was no less civic-minded. In her case the stimulus was a passion for "enlightenment" and popular education as a way of bettering the lot of the peasantry. Tenisheva being a trained musician, it was natural that she alone among the neonationalist patrons fostered the development of folk music-making. She engaged two music masters for her folk school: the balalaika virtuoso Vasiliy Lidin, who established a balalaika orchestra at Talashkino, 52 and the singer and gusli player Sergey Kolosov, who formed a chorus. 5 3 She also supported for a while the then-famous professional balalaika orchestra of Vasiliy Andreyev (1861—

49. N. K. Rerikh, "Pamyati M. K. Tenishevoy," in M. K. Tenisheva, Emcd' i inkrustatsiya (Prague, 1930); quoted in L. S. Zhuravleva, " K stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya M. K. Tenishevoy (istorikobiograficheskiy ochcrk)," Materialipo izucheniyu Smolenskoy oblasti 7 (1970): 374. 50. M. K. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniya moyey zhizni (Paris: Russkoye Istoriko-genealogicheskoye Obshchestvo vo Frantsii, 1933), 358. 51. "There are a host of people," she wrote in her memoirs, "who perpetually sing Mamontov's praises on account of his opera company, who place him on a pedestal. I also think his contribution great, of course, but still one ought to take a closer look at precisely what it was that drew Mamontov into this activity. In Moscow it was no secret what went on behind the scenes at his opera.. . . Of course, that's no affair of mine, it was only his family that suffered . . ." (ibid., 266). Earlier she had recorded that it was only the fact that her voice was similar in range and quality to that of Mamontov's mistress that kept her from being hired in 1885 (95-96). 52. Ibid., 245. 53. Ibid., 86.

NEONATION ALISM

[511]

f i g . 8.6. Portrait of Princess Tenisheva, by Valentin Serov (1898). The princess had rather a lot to say about this portrait in her memoirs: "At the time when Mir iskusstva was just coming into being, I posed for a portrait in oils by Serov. Serov grasped my character, gave me a natural pose that suited me well, and all, it seemed, boded well. One day, however, Diaghilev came flying in during a sitting and immediately went after Serov, mocking him for painting a lady décolletée in daylight. This was so abrupt and brazen that Serov was embarrassed and gave in. He lit an electric lamp with a yellow shade. This gave me a yellow pallor and completely destroyed the effect of the painting" (M. K. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniya moyey zhizni [Paris: Russkoye Istoriko-genealogicheskoye Obshchestvo vo Frantsii, 1933], 280—81).

IÇI8), but became disenchanted with him when he began broadening his repertoire to include selections from Carmen, the Peer Gynt Suite, and other concert favorites. 54 The artists Tenisheva attracted to Talashkino had fewer connections than those at Abramtsevo with peredvizbnichestvo, toward which her attitude was uncompromisingly haughty.55 Her circle was inclined toward the Art Nouveau trends in the West, even as it continued to nurture an intense interest in, and derive inspiration from, the same Russian crafts and antiquities as were cultivated at Abramtsevo. The connection between neonationalism and modernism was drawn explicitly and snobbishly. Thus Sergey Makovsky's introductory article to a souvenir booklet on Talashkino, published in 1906, locates the beginnings of the movement there quite explicitly among the English ("le style nouveau") and defines the estheticism of the new century in terms of the eclecticism, formal freedom, and "intimacy" of applied arts at their best: A t the end of the century just past, the peoples of Europe felt the awakening in them of a wish for style. Previous generations had known various styles, but not "style." . . . Thus the pitiful decor of bourgeois homes, adapted to the life of a working class but affecting the exterior of noble p a l a c e s . . . . A t this time of unprecedented esthetic degeneration, the art most intimately allied with daily life not only failed to adapt to that life, but disappeared from it altogether.... Technical progress evolved apart from b e a u t y . . . . A n art that came out of luxury gone bad not only perverted taste, not only banished beauty from daily life, but also taught the public to despise the creative aspirations of their contemporaries. 5 6

Talashkino sought to turn this situation around. The artists there—Vrubel, Golovin, Korovin, Zinaida Serebryakova, and in particular Sergey Malyutin (who directed the peasant workshops, having designed the buildings that housed them as well as the main residence, shown in Fig. 8.7a—b) and Nikolai Roerich (who designed and executed a neo-Russian church on Tenisheva's estate comparable to Vasnetsov's at Abramtsevo but more stylized)—formed, along with Benois and Bakst (whom Princess Tenisheva knew mainly from chance meetings in Paris), the nucleus of the soon-to-be-born World of Art. They were the creators of an authentic Russian Jugendstil, and their patroness became known as the "mother of decadence" in Russia. 57 With the founding of Diaghilev's Mir iskusstva in 1898, at first under the uneasy 54. Ibid., 294. Andreyev was the actual inventor of the modern "concert" balalaika popular in Russia today, having standardized its form (in six sizes) and its tuning in collaboration with the luthier Fyodor Paserbsky, ca. 1890. See Sybil Marcuse, A Survey of Musical Instruments (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 430; also A. Dorozhkin, Samouchitel' tffri na balalaike (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1958), 3. 55. Vpechatleniya, 265. 56. Sergey Makovskv, "L'art décoratif des ateliers de la princesse Tenichef," in Talachkino, trans. N. Izerguine (St. Petersburg: Sodruzhestvo, 1906), 25-29, condensed. 57. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniya, 276.

NEONATIONALISM

[513]

f i g . 8.7a. Talashkino, facade of the teremok (main residence) in neo-Russian style, designed by Sergey Malyutin.

fig.

8.7c.

Applied arts in the neonationalist style at the second Mir

iskusstva

exhibition (1900): décorative panneau with d o o r by G o l o v i n , cupboard by Vasnetsov.

joint patronage of Mamontov and Tenishcva, neonationalism—now irrevocably allied with "decadence" à la Beardsley—achieved a position of great prominence in the world of Russian art. 5 8 In its pages folk art, both antique and as fabricated at Abramtsevo and Talashkino, were featured alongside modern art both Western and native. Photographs of peasant shoes, furniture, and embroidery vied for pride of place with reproductions of Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau. Malyutin's work was the subject of a rapturous editorial by Diaghilev himself, in which the titular head of the World of Art affected to discern in the painter's activities at Talashkino "early signs of a new northern renaissance," inasmuch as it was only "from the union of an artist with the most precious features of his homeland" that a "mighty art of a second rinascimento" could arise. 59 In a similar spirit, peasant art was celebrated from an explicitly modernist perspective in articles by leading painters and sculptors who dabbled (some quite competently) in archeology. The two greatest such connoisseurs were Roerich and Ivan Bilibin, best remembered today as an illustrator of skazki. In one of the last issues of Mir iskusstva, Bilibin contributed a lively article entitled "The Folk Art of the Russian North," a topic on which he was a recognized expert. The exordium and the peroration to this survey are a perfect passionate summation of neonationalist ideals. He begins:

Only very recently, like an America, have w e discovered the ancient R u s ' o f art, maimed by vandals, covered with dust and mold. But even under the dust she was beautiful, so beautiful that one can easily understand the first sudden rush that seized the discoverers: C o m e back, come back! . . . S o n o w nationalist artists are faced with a task o f colossal difficulty: using this rich and ancient heritage, they must create something new and serious that logically follows from w h a t has survived. . . . W e will await this and, losing no time, w e will collect and collect everything that still remains o f old in our peasants' huts, and w e will study it and study it. W e shall try to let nothing slip from our attention. A n d perhaps, under the inuence o f this passion for bygone beauty, there may even be created, at last, a new, completely individual Russian style with nothing o f tawdriness about it. 58. On the eve of the journal's launching, Mamontov, Diaghilev, and a "young artist" thought to be Bakst gave a collective interview to a staff writer for the Peterburgskayagazeta. The piece was headed by a preface that greeted "the new specialized arts journal, which will be devoted . . . in particular to the reconciliation of art and craftsmanship." The "young artist" promised that much space would be allotted to the theatrical arts, and would pursue the aim of "seeking artistic beauty in all its manifestations, . . . developing and utilizing national motifs in ornament." Mamontov added that "special attention will be paid to ceramics, majolica, fer forgé, . .. and particularly to f u r n i t u r e . . . . All this will certainly raise the level of mass taste" (Passepartout, Peterburqskayagazeta, no. 141 [25 May 1898]). An insulted Stasov reacted to the interview in a letter to the sculptor Mark Antokolsky (16/28 June 1898), vowing to make "war, battle, and skirmish without end" against the new venture of Mamontov and Princess Tenisheva (in Zilbershtevn and Samkov [eds.], Dyagilev 1:301-2). 59. S. P. Diaghilev, "Neskol'ko slov o S. V. Malvutine," Mir iskusstva, 1903, no. 4, 160. The conclusion of the article, Diaghilev's most overtly neonationalist utterance, was that Malyutin's work "marks out a true path, perhaps a long one, but one that will doubtless lead to the finding of a new esthetic, to a new Florence, which will be just as far from the flourishing city of the Medici as the sullen shores of the Gulf of Finland are from the tenderly lapping blue Adriatic."

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f i g . 8.8a. Ivan Bilibin, title illustration for "Folk Art of the Russian North" (Mir iskusstva, 1904, no. 11).

f i g . 8.8b. Mir iskusstva logo, designed by Leon Bakst (1898). It appeared on Diaghilev's letterhead as well as in the journal.

In concluding his article, Bilibin removed all doubt as to the kind of art he was envisioning, and what the real esthetic significance of Russian peasant antiquities was to him and his confrères: And so, let us then rummage about amid old rags on which decaying threads trace ancient patterns, amid half-rotted inlaid boards, amid all that is old, turned to dust and ashes, and let us try to believe that from these ashes there will fly up a risen phoenix. 60

Bilibin had ended, as we now say, with a buzzword. The image of the risen bird was the prime symbol of l'art pour l'art in the Russia of the Silver Age, whether the Firebird herself (and who can fail to see what a programmatic choice of subject that was for the first wholly original ballet to be created under DiaghileVs auspices?), or the "light-winged, benevolent, free bird" that symbolized poetic inspiration for Alexander Blok, 61 or, closest to home, Bakst's woodcut logo for Mir iskusstva itself (Fig. 8.8b). This program and this ideology lay behind Mir iskusstva's recognition of its kinship with folk art and its enthusiastic espousal of neonationalism. For the applied and decorative arts practiced by peasant architects and embroiderers, and first systematically described a generation earlier by Stasov, were arts devoid of any "subject" beyond their intrinsic beauty. Approached simply for itself (rather than as an expression of "the people's spirit") and apprehended directly (rather than metaphorically, as evidence of "the people's condition"), folk art was seen as an esthetically autonomous World of Art that shared and in large part inspired the new movement's qualities of exuberant fantasy, its transcendence of sensory reality, and, perhaps above all, its cool, rarefied (shall we call it "classical"?) impersonalism. This was the "real art" of Russia, as Diaghilev put it a dozen years later in an interview with Olin Downes during his one visit to America. Asked to explain where the esthetic innovations of the Ballets Russes had originated, he replied: "In objects of utility (domestic implements in the country districts), in the painting on sleds, in the designs and the colors of peasant dresses, or the carving around a window frame, we found our motives, and on this foundation we built." 62 PARIS

As a statement of Mir iskusstva ideals, this late assertion of Diaghilev's would have been more than a little one-sided. But the products of the Ballets Russes were 60. I. Y. Bilibin, "Narodnoye tvorchestvo russkogo severa," Mir iskusstva, 1904, no. 11, 317, 318. Other explicitly neonationalist articles in Mir iskusstva included appreciations of Yelena Polenova (1899, nos. 1-4) and Maria Yakunchikova (1904, no. 3), and a very big illustrated spread on Talashkino (1903, no. 4)61. Cf. Mirsky, History cf Russian Literature, 457. 62. New Tork Times, 19 January 1916; quoted in Buckle, Diaghilev, 300.

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made expressly for foreign consumption, a circumstance that had led naturally to an emphasis on those aspects o f Russian national art that were exotic to Western audiences. W i t h i n Russia, debate continued as to whether the "real art o f Russia" consisted o f peasant antiquities or the Europeanized eighteenth-century styles Diaghilev himself had successfully revived and propagated up t o the time o f this portrait exhibition in 1905. A s the neonationalist tide rose, the latter view went somewhat o n the defensive. Its main proponent, as ever, was Benois. " W e believe," he wrote, that those forms which once upon a time grew naturally from the Russian soil are closer to the Russian heart. We believe that the Russian artist, in finding inspiration in them, will find himself, will find the expression of his own, still obscure, ideal. Better he do that than examine foreign models of art and imitate them. However, the reform of Peter the Great did not pass completely without a trace even for • art. To cease being European now, to take shelter from the West behind a wall, would be very strange, even absurd. . . . That is why, alongside works of our own national art we will not be afraid to present everything foreign and European that is preserved within the borders of Russia. That is why we focus equal attention on what was created both before and after Peter.63 It was for statements like this that Princess Tenisheva sought to take revenge against Benois. "I could not abide," she wrote, with some exaggeration, "this constant inflation o f the 'Empire' style, this endless praise o f everything foreign and d o w n r i g h t hostility toward Russian a n t i q u i t y — a n d this in our one and only Russian arts journal!" 6 4 She therefore made it a condition o f her continued involvement with Diaghilev's venture that he replace Benois o n the magazine's editorial staff w i t h Roerich, the St. Petersburg neonationalist par excellence. W h e n Diaghilev r e f u s e d — o r rather, w h e n in characteristic fashion he agreed t o her demand and then proceeded to ignore i t — s h e cut off her support. This was one o f the t w o major factors leading to the magazine's demise at the end o f 1904, the other being the cessation o f the c r o w n stipend Diaghilev had secured with the help o f Valentin Serov ( w h o had painted a famous and very flattering portrait o f Nikolai II), a measure taken in response to the strain the prosecution o f the Russo-Japanese W a r had put on the royal treasury. A vindictive Princess Tenisheva could count this a personal victory, but w h a t really vouchsafed the triumph o f neonationalism over Europeanism in the early decades o f the twentieth century was the market it began to find a b r o a d — p a r t i c u larly in Paris, then the undisputed artistic capital o f the w o r l d . T h a t Russian art w o u l d find such an outlet in the early twentieth century no one 63. Alexandre Benois, Khudozhestven n i'ye sokrovishcha Rossii (1901); quoted in Bowlt, Silver Age, 186; italics original.

64. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniya, 279.

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f i g . 8.9. "Old Judge," Idyll: The Cow Is Milked by Various Cads (originally published in Shut, no. 13 [19 March 1899]). This famous caricature, in which Diaghilev is shown milking a bovine Princess Tenisheva, with Mamontov (the mastodon—mamont in Russian—at the rear) looking on, was the pretext for his indignant patroness's withdrawal of support. Also shown are Bakst (as a rooster), Filosofov, and the World of Art painters Mikhail Nesterov (wearing a babushka) and Ilya Repin. A delighted Stasov wrote the artist: "This caricature is a hundred times more important than any articles against the decadents."

would have predicted in the nineteenth. Since the days of the post-Napoleonic "holy alliance" Russia had been more or less continuously united with the German-speaking countries against France. Relations with Austria foundered first in the Crimean War, then more seriously in the Balkan Wars of the 1870s, but the so-called Dreikaiserbund

lasted until 1887, while alliance with Germany lasted as

long as Bismarck did, that is, until 1890. Thereafter, a variety of political and economic factors ruptured Russia's long-standing ties with the Teutonic powers and led her into an initially uneasy alliance with France, which, when formalized by a military convention in January 1894, produced the diplomatic configuration that remained in place until World War I: France and Russia united against the triple alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was some time before this unaccustomed political alignment took hold in other areas of national life. At the turn of the century high awareness of things German and indifference toward things French remained very much the norm in

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Russian cultural attitudes, and modernists tended to behave much as did their more traditionalist brethren. Thus for example, St. Petersburg's leading forum of musical modernism, the Evenings of Contemporary Music, began its existence, as we have seen, by glorifying the works of Max Reger, only gradually discovering the younger French composers who came ultimately to dominate its programs. Rimsky-Korsakov's bete noire in the years of Stravinsky's apprenticeship was Strauss (and Stravinsky inherited the prejudice); only gradually did Debussy begin to share the honors. The early issues of Mir iskusstva were full of reports on the Munich Secession and reproductions of Scandinavian paintings; only in the last year of its existence did the magazine turn its attention to the French Impressionists and Gauguin, artists who by 1904 could hardly be said to represent the last word in French painting or taste. The first foreign show Diaghilev arranged had been a small detachment of Russian and Finnish paintings displayed at the annual Munich Secession exhibition in 1898, right before Mir iskusstva was launched. The close cultural ties between Russia and Germany were even reflected in Igor Stravinsky's upbringing: he was taken along on regular family vacations at German spas, and his childhood nanny was a German woman from whom he learned to speak her language perfectly. His French was learned much later and, like his English, was far from perfect. It seems only fitting that the real Russian discovery of French art was made in Moscow, the merchant capital. It was first manifested in the pages of Nikolai Ryabushinsky's arts journal Zolotoye runo (Golden Fleece) and by the private collections of Ivan Morozov and Sergey Shchukin. Ryabushinsky, Morozov, and Shchukin were all scions of merchant houses that were heavily involved in international commerce and finance. Their French connections were primarily commercial and filtered down from there into the artistic domain. Shchukin, for example, had been sent by his family to Lyon for his business education, and like most Russian capitalists made regular business trips to Paris throughout his career.65 These contacts worked the other way as well, playing directly into the burgeoning neonationalist movement. In 1900, Princess Tenisheva's husband, Prince Vyacheslav Tenishev (1843-1903), an outstanding communications engineer and spare-time ethnographer, was appointed general manager (commissar) of the Russian section of the International Exposition in Paris, at which the Russian empire wanted to make an especially strong showing. Naturally, he "subcontracted" the artistic side of the Russian exhibit to his wife. She, in turn, commissioned a pavilion in the form of a "village russe," replete with Kremlin, from Korovin and Golovin. For their work they received gold medals in the category of applied art; other medals went to Vrubel, Yakunchikova, and Valentin Serov (who won the Grand Prix for portraiture)—neonationalists all. An editorial in Mir iskusstva ex65. Kean, All the Empty Palaces, 153-5+-

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ulted that for the first time Russian artists "were placed on a level with the finest European masters" by an international jury.66 Recalling the Russian fiasco at the last Paris Exposition (1889), Benois concurred: "This time we Russians were not trampled in the mud."67 The exhibit closest to Princess Tenisheva's heart was a group of balalaikas manufactured at Talashkino, their bellies adorned with painted designs by Vrubel, Korovin, Golovin, Malyutin, and the princess herself, who was acquiring considerable expertise in the handicrafts taught at her own school. At the same time, the exposition gave Princess Tenisheva the opportunity to survey the latest Western European fashions in applied and decorative arts, particularly the French, and what she saw greatly encouraged her. It was all either a tired rehash of Louis XVI or else an unimaginative japonisme. The Russians, thanks largely to the neonationalist revival, were now in the lead. It was time for them to revise and rectify their artistic "balance of trade," in her opinion—to turn, vis-a-vis the West, from importer of artistic innovation to exporter, from debtor to creditor.68 This was Diaghilev's feeling too. From 1900 on he nursed a not-so-secret ambition to sponsor an artistic conquest of Paris; by 1906 he felt ready to begin what Benois christened his "export campaign."69 He was riding the crest of his triumphant portrait exhibition; with the loss of his journal he was free of encumbrances and obligations; and, in ways that shall be recounted presently, he had burned some important bridges with the Russian artistic establishment, thus limiting his field of activity at home. The export campaign began precisely where Diaghilev's activity within Russia had left off: with a grandiose exhibition of Russian paintings. The Exposition de l'Art Russe that filled the Salon d'Automne in Paris for five weeks in the fall of 1906 was a tendentious affair. The 750 works exhibited fell mainly into three categories: medieval icons, paintings and sculptures of the neoclassical period (eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), and artists of the Mir iskusstva circle. It was an aristocratic retrospective in every way. Diaghilev's preface to the catalogue pointedly called attention, by means of a sly half-apology, to the conspicuous omissions: The aim of this exhibition is not a complete and scrupulously systematic presentation of the whole of Russian art in all the various stages of its development. T o accomplish such a task would have presented insuperable obstacles and would have been in any case of doubtful value. Many once-famous names have lost their luster for the present: some temporarily, others forever. N o t a few masters, overrated by their contemporaries, are without value today and have had no influence on con66. Mir iskusstva, 1900, nos. 11-12, 245; quoted in Zilbershteyn and Samkov (eds.), Dyagilev 1:328. 67. Benois, Mm vospominaniya 2:318. 68. Tenisheva, Vpechatleniya, 286-87. 69. Alexandre Benois, "The Origins of the Ballets Russes" (1944), in Boris Kochno, Dtaghilev and the Ballets Russes (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 2.

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temporary art. This will explain the deliberate exclusion o f the work o f many artists who for a long time were considered in the West to be artistic Russia's sole representatives, and who have for all too long been distorting the authentic character and true significance o f our national art in the eyes o f Europe. The present exhibit offers a brief survey o f the development o f our art, assembled from a contemporary vantage point. All the elements that have had a direct impact on the present character o f our country have been included in it. This is a faithful image o f artistic Russia as it is today, o f what sincerely animates it, o f its reverent admiration for its past and its fervent belief in its future. 7 0

This arrogant dismissal of the Peredvizhniki elicited a predictable backlash at home. One reviewer grumbled that Diaghilev was playing kowtow to Europe by deliberately "overshadowing everything in our art that is least derivative of Western art." 71 And indeed, in addition to peredvizhnichestvo Diaghilev seemed deliberately to have soft-pedaled the modern neonationalist revival. But then, this was an exhibition of easel painting and sculpture, precisely the areas in which Russian art was most "European." Decorative and applied arts were relegated to an auxiliary role, for the most part actually functioning as decor (the work of Bakst and Golovin in this department was often singled out by reviewers for praise). The French critics unanimously dubbed the show a revelation, and many of them gave evidence of a friendly disposition toward their country's new political and military ally, an attitude on which Diaghilev had surely been counting. The conservative paper Novoye vremya—normally no friend to Diaghilev—observed with satisfaction that "there is more than just a nation amie et alliée, but a Russian art as well, not very ancient, but with an already instructive history, a richly varied present, full of determination to seek new ways, and which even at its most imitative bears the stamp of national genius."72 Diaghilev's fame, and his authority as spokesman for Russian art both at home and abroad, grew enormously as a result of this venture. Princess Tenisheva, who distrusted him profoundly after her unsuccessful attempts at controlling him, wrote to Roerich from Paris that "Diaghilev is now whirling amid the highest society, he is received with honor at our embassies and is bruited everywhere along with his two satellites Bakst and Benois.... Yes, Diaghilev & Co. have concentrated enormous power, and I know of no weapons that could take them on." 73 What particularly worried the princess was that Diaghilev, left to his own devices (and especially if left to the counsels of Benois), would turn against the neo70. Salon d'automne, Exposition de l'art russe (Paris, 1906), 7; in Zilbershteyn and Samkov (eds.), Dyagilev 1:204. 71. Sergey Makovsky, "Russkaya vïstavka v Berline," Russkoye slow, no. 310 (22 December 1906); quoted in ibid., 405. (On its way back from Paris, Diaghilev's exhibition made a stop for a brief showing in Berlin, where Makovsky caught it.) 72. Novoye vremya, no. 10999 (26 October 1906); in ibid., 406. 73. From Paris, 28 October/8 November 1906; in ibid., 408.

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nationalist revival and invest his huge influence in the Europeanist cause. She needn't have worried; but then, she could not have foreseen any better than Diaghilev himself that his activities from now on would be carried on only abroad. It was that fact, paradoxically enough, that made a committed neonationalist out of him, at least for a time. FAUBOURG

KUCHKISM

For the next few years after his triumphant art retrospective, each new season saw Diaghilev back in Paris with some new propaganda for the art of France's nation amie et alliée, each more ambitious than the last. In May 1907 he presented a musical retrospective, which took the form of a series of five "incredibly lavish 'historical concerts' at the Grand Opéra... colossal expenditures . . . the most celebrated Russian singers and virtuosi...," in the excited words of Bakst.74 Colossal was indeed the word. Pianists included Rachmaninoff in his own Second Concerto and Josef Hofmann playing the early Concerto in F-sharp Minor of Scriabin. Singers included Yelizaveta Petrenko (who would sing all of Stravinsky's early vocal premières), Felia Litvinne, Leonid Sobinov, and Chaliapin, who produced his customary sensation in this, his first appearance in the French capital, singing the music of Musorgsky and Borodin in Rimsky-Korsakov's arrangements. Conductors included Nikisch, Chevillard, Felix Blumenfeld, and three of Russia's most famous composers leading their own works: Rachmaninoff, Glazunov, and RimskyKorsakov. That Diaghilev managed to secure the participation of the last named bears special witness to his powers of persuasion. First of all he had to overcome the old kuchkist's distrust of "decadents," namely Diaghilev himself and the modern composers of France, with whom Rimsky had no wish to hobnob. Diaghilev recalled that "Rimsky often came to see me in the Europa Hotel in St. Petersburg to discuss this question of whether to go or not, looming up before me in a huge fur coat, his spectacles frosted over, already bursting with indignation, wagging a long admonitory finger in the air and railing against French music."75 Second, Diaghilev had to "dislodge" Rimsky, as Buckle aptly puts it, from his daily routine of creative and academic work and from the serenity of his domestic and collégial life.76 Perhaps most difficult of all, though, he had to erase Rimsky's distasteful memories of the Paris Exposition of 1889, when Russian musicians, as well as the Russian artists recalled by Benois, had been "trampled in the mud." Belyayev had engaged Rimsky-Korsakov to conduct two concerts of Russian music at the Palais du Trocadéro. It was a humiliating fiasco that, when Rimsky came to describing it in his memoirs a dozen or more years later, still caused his blood to seethe: 74. Letter to his wife from Paris, 25 November/6 December 1906; in ibid., 409. 75. Diaghilev, memoirs, cited in Buckle, Diaghilev, 96. 76. Ibid., 95. [524]

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T h e audience was not large, in spite of the Exposition and the enormous throng of visitors. T h e immediate cause of this is to be sought in our inadequate advertising. Europe is fond of advertising and needs it, whereas Belyayev was an enemy of all publicity-seeking.. . . His reasoning was as follows. Whoever is interested will find out and come, and he w h o does not find out is ipso facto not interested; while those w h o come because they have nothing else to do are not wanted at a l l ! . . . Back of this immediate cause . . . there lay another radical reason: Audiences are incapable of becoming acquainted with the unfamiliar; they welcome only what is known, familiar, and fashionable—that is, again, what is known. A r t is released from this magic circle by t w o things: tempting advertisements and popular performers. Neither of these t w o things was on hand this time. 7 7

But of course Diaghilev understood all this better than anyone else and took the appropriate steps to insure the success of his Paris concerts, as a result of which Rimsky-Korsakov was feted as never before in his career. "The greatest honor," in the words of the venerable Moscow critic Nikolai Kashkin (1839-1920), who had come to Paris for the occasion, "fell to Rimsky-Korsakov, whom the Parisians received every time with extraordinary delight. All his works enjoyed a brilliant success, and he was to all intents and purposes the main hero of all these concerts." 78 All this glory, however, did not prevent Rimsky-Korsakov from fleeing homeward as soon as his contracted stint was up; he did not stay to hear the last two concerts, even though his works were on the programs. Nor was his discomfort with the proceedings without significance, as we shall see. The huge financial risk incurred in mounting these programs led Diaghilev to exercise a certain unwonted caution that contrasted markedly with the bumptious tone of the art exhibition the year before. Where that venture had reflected in direct and partisan fashion the turbulent world of St. Petersburg artistic politics, the musical programs reflected in larger measure the tastes of the Paris audience as Diaghilev was given to understand it. As we have already had ample opportunity to note, the Miriskusniki regarded the music of the mighty kuchka, especially in its Belyayev phase, as the esthetic equivalent of the painting of the Peredvizhniki, and just as passe. And yet the programs Diaghilev presented in 1907 differed litde, except in scale, from those given by Belyayev himself in 1889.79 Every one of the Five was represented, along with not only Lyadov and Glazunov, but also such arrant epigones as Balakirev's latterday disciple Lyapunov, whose piano concerto was performed by Hofmann, and even Rimsky's far from distinguished dilettante pupil Alexander Taneyev. 80 77. My Musical Life, 302. 78. Russkoye slovo, no. 118 (24 May 1907); quoted in Zilbershteyn and Samkov (eds.), Dyagilev 1:413. The Rimsky-Korsakov component of Diaghilev's "historical concerts" consisted of vocal and orchestral excerpts from five operas: Snejfurochka, Sadko (the whole fifth—"underwater"—scene), Christmas Eve, Mlada (the "Night on Triglav Mountain"), and The Tale of Tsar Saltan. 79. The programs of Belyayev's Concerts russes are given in My Musical Life as App. 5 (472-73). 80. A. S. Taneyev's Second Symphony (not Sergey Taneyev's, as in most accounts) was included so as to secure the cooperation of the composer, an extremely powerful bureaucrat, in obtaining the necessary releases that would enable the artists of the Mariyinsky Theater to sing abroad. FAUBOURG

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True, Rachmaninoff was included, but he was a "popular performer." Chaikovsky, whose music, of any nineteenth-century master's, was most representative of the kind of Europeanized Russia that the 1906 art exhibit had so zealously, even polemically, promoted, was represented only by Francesca da Rimini and his fairly uncharacteristic Second Symphony (later to become Stravinsky's podium warhorse), with its folkloristic, quasi-kuchkist finale. The reason for this anomalous situation, in which the programs seemed almost as if deliberately skewed against Diaghilev's own tastes, is suggested by Walter Nouvel's account of his meeting in Paris, circa 1906, with Dukas and d'Indy: The principal theme of our conversation was Tchaikovsky. At this period French musicians were enthusiastic about Russian music, but only for that of the famous "Five," the so-called "kuchka" and its adepts. Tchaikovsky was loathed. They found him trivial and vulgar, and refused to see in him any Russian characteristics. It was in vain that I told them that we considered him to be the most national of our composers, that he alone knew how to render the soul of the Russian nineteenth century and find a spontaneous and sincere echo in the people, while the music of the "Five" was a somewhat artificial reconstruction of popular melodies, strongly Germanized by the influence of Liszt and Wagner. All my eloquence was in vain, and what amazed me still more was the fact that they were unwilling to admit even his purely musical gifts, his technique, his sense of rhythm, and the mastery of his orchestration.81 Now obviously, this ex post facto account by Nouvel is already strongly tinged, in its critical stance, with the 1920s revisionist propaganda that the Diaghilev enterprise (with Stravinsky its loudest spokesmen) was putting out on behalf of Chaikovsky. But the essential points—that in France Chaikovsky was box-office poison and that the French valued Russian music above all for its exoticism—are manifestly true and easily corroborated. In 1902, to cite one example, the critic Jean Marnold had unleashed a scathing attack on Chaikovsky in the Mercure de France, calling him a composer without a personal style and making a special issue of denigrating "that most insignificant of works," the Symphonie pathétique.*2 The source of French antipathy to Chaikovsky probably lay in César Cui's extremely partisan survey La musique en Russie, a book-form reissue of a series of articles originally published in 1878 in the Revue et gazette musicale, which furnished a whole generation of French critics and writers on music with practically their sole source of information on Russian music. Cui had dismissed Chaikovsky as "a musician of extraordinary talent, except that he abuses his technical facility," and as being "far from a partisan of the New Russian School; he is more nearly its

81. Quoted in Haskell, Diaghileff, 147 • 82. The article so outraged Nurok that he devoted a column in Mir iskusstva to rebutting it: "A. N.," "Frantsuzskiy kritik o russkoy muzi'ke," Mir iskusstva, 1902, no. 4, 79.

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antagonist." 83 Although this last assertion was no truer than Cui's notion of a monolithic " N e w Russian school," it irrevocably formed French opinion on the matter. B y 1903, Alfred Bruneau—whose Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France derived uncritically from Cui's old kuchkist propaganda despite the fact that the author had made a personal goodwill tour of Russia as the quasi-official emissary of the French government in 1901-2—embroidered on Cui's account of Chaikovsky with astonishing animus: One must acknowledge that the public, in Russia, remains obstinately faithful to the least "national" and least "advanced" composers I know: Anton Rubinstein and Chaikovsky, ardent enemies of the Five. One can see that the devotion maintained toward Rubinstein's memory and his legacy is mainly a tribute to his pianistic talent. As for Chaikovsky, one cannot hope to explain the fetishism of which he continues to be the object after his death.... Devoid of the Russian character that pleases and attracts us in the music of the New Slavic school, excessively developed in a hollow and empty way, and in a bloated and faceless style, his works astonish without overly interesting u s . . . . Despite his qualities of inexhaustible abundance, brilliant facility, and at times rather touching eloquence, which give him a certain value even yet, he seems destined to disappear quickly, as the future is opening up at last to an art of progress and truth.84 As Bruneau's diatribe implies, this viewpoint represented in France (and remains) the critical consensus, as further confirmed by Calvocoressi, among others. 85 N o t that this would have mattered much to Diaghilev, were it not for an additional, crucial factor. The French aristocracy and the beau monde, on which the impresario so depended for support and whom he so assiduously and skillfully cultivated, shared in this instance the taste of the musical cognoscenti—precisely the opposite of the condition that obtained in Russia, where the music of the kuchka and its epigones was promoted by kupchishki and aristocratic taste traditionally sided with the Rubinstein/Chaikovsky line. This rule applied even to Princess Tenisheva, the greatest patron of neonationalist art, whose musical tastes, 83. C. A. Cui, La musique en Russie (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880), 132: "un musicien d'un talent hors ligue, mais qu'il abuse de sa facilité technique"; 119: "loin d'être partisan de la nouvelle école russe; il est bien plutôt son antagoniste." 84. Alfred Bruneau, Musiques de Russie et musiciens de France (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1903), 27-28: "Il faut avouer que le public, en Russie, reste obstinément fidèle aux compositeurs les moins 'nationaux' et les moins 'avancés' que je sache: Antoine Rubinstein et Tschaïkowsky, adversaires acharnés des 'cinq.' Pour Rubinstein, on reconnaît que la dévotion gardée à sa mémoire et à ce qu'il laissa est surtout au talent du pianiste. Quant à Tschaïkowsky, on ne tente même pas d'expliquer le fétichisme dont il continue à être l'objet après sa mort.... Dépourvus du caractère russe qui nous plaît, nous séduit tant dans la musique de la nouvelle école slave, développés à l'excès souvent creux et vides, en l'enflure de leur style impersonnel, [ses oeuvres] nous étonnèrent sans nous intéresser très vivement. . . . Malgré les qualités d'inépuisable abondance, de brillant facilité et parfois d'assez pathétique éloquence qui lui donnent encore une certaine valeur, il me semble destiné à disparaître vite, car l'avenir s'ouvre enfin devant l'art de progrès et de vérité." 85. Cf. Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 168-69,24243-

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reflecting her social station, ran toward unmediated folk song on the one hand and Rubinstein/Chaikovsky on the other, a devotion reinforced by personal acquaintanceship. 86 The mighty kuchka, falling like the Peredvizhniki between these two stools, was devoid of snob appeal. Tenisheva's attitude toward DiaghileVs Paris concerts was predictably snooty: "Thank God these misbegotten concerts of ours are over," she wrote to Roerich from Paris in June 1907. "I couldn't begin to describe what a chaotic chicanery it was! There was nothing historical about them at all!" 8 7 In Paris, though, the Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses Greffulhe, d'Uzes, Polignac, Rothschild, et telles, were all avid kuchkists and found Chaikovsky "bourgeois." Diaghilev, who took enormous pride in the fact that at his concerts "literally the whole 'Faubourg' could be found in the loges of the belle etage,"HH had to take faubourg prejudices fundamentally into account, as indeed he would do for the next twenty-two years. But he must have savored the irony of the occasion when, at the last concert of the series (30 May), this bejeweled and bemedaled audience rose to its feet to acclaim Sadko, the merchant's opera par excellence (concerning as it did the adventures of a powerful seafaring tradesman of medieval Novgorod), whose rebuff by Nikolai II ("find me something merrier") had sent Rimsky-Korsakov into the arms of Mamontov.

A N T I L I T E R ARY

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One of Mamontov's dreams had been to present his Russian opera troupe abroad. He was ready to go in with Belyayev in 1889 and send his production of Snegurochka to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He was dissuaded by RimskyKorsakov, who warned him that because the French were used to opera on a grand scale, a visiting Russian production "must be even grander, or else no one will come to the theater while something like the Exposition is going on." 8 9 Nineteen years later Diaghilev was ready to realize the old Moscow merchant's dreams on a scale that far surpassed the wildest of them. In February 1908 he mounted a "russkiy spektakl'" on the stage of the Palais Gamier the likes of which had never been seen in Russia. This was the moment for which his whole prior career, and particularly the Parisian shows of the two preceding seasons, had been the prologue. A synthesis of art and music over which he exercised total control, Diaghilev's Boris Godunov was the precise locus of confluence of the neonationalist and

86. See Tenisheva, Vpechatleniya, 50-55 (on Rubinstein), 217-19 (on Chaikovsky). 87. Quoted in Zilbershteyn and Samkov (eds.), Dyagilev 1:411. 88. " R . " [M. Rakovsky], "Uspekhi russkoy muzi'ki," interview in Peterburgskayagazeta, no. 180 (4 June 1907); in ibid., 205. 89. Stasov to Mamontov, 12 September 1888, reporting on a conversation with Rimsky-Korsakov; quoted in A. A. Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr i Shalyapin, 1890-1904 (Leningrad: Muzi'ka, 1974), 121.

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synthesist currents stemming from the Mamontov enterprises, on the one hand, and the estheticizing tendencies of Mir iskusstva, on the other. It was also, and for these very reasons, a Boris that its author might scarcely have recognized, for Musorgsky was the most "Peredvizhnik" of all Russian composers. But he was the darling of the Paris tastemakers as well, and Boris Godunov had been a cult object in the French capital ever since Saint-Saens had brought the vocal score from Russia in 1875 and started showing it around. Rimsky-Korsakov did not need Diaghilev's propaganda services in 1908, it might be added, since, as the direct result of the 1907 concerts, the Opera Comique had already scheduled Snegurocbka for the spring of the next season.90 Rimsky's opera and Musorgsky's actually ran side by side for a week in May 1908, to the great delight of the visiting Russians.91 The clinching reason for choosing Boris, of course, was Chaliapin, already a legend in the tide role at home. After 1908 he—and it—would be legends around the world. Right after the 1907 concerts Diaghilev let it be known through a press interview that the concerts had been only a stage in his successful strategy to produce Russian opera at the Palais Gamier, an achievement he viewed in historic terms. "Up to now it's been impossible," he told the reporter from the Peterburgskaya gazeta. "To land at the Grand Opera was Chaikovsky's lifelong dream . . . and how Rubinstein tried to get his Nero produced there, not to mention Serov's Juditbl... But the French wouldn't hear of Russian composers then.... Now, however, they've come to me themselves for advice on what to stage and how."92 The original plan was to produce Boris in May with a Russian cast and Sadko the next October with a French cast but under Russian direction and with sets and costumes by Russian artists.93 The latter production was canceled because RimskyKorsakov would not agree to the cuts Diaghilev insisted on making.94 Musorgsky, dead over a quarter of a century, was in no position to object to the even greater adaptations Diaghilev made in his work so as to achieve what Benois described as "the most perfected scenic and dramatic realization," a display of "all the potential magnificence an operatic spectacle could provide."95 90. Letters to Rimsky-Korsakov from Nikolai Cherepnin, who was engaged to conduct the production, are reproduced in the appendix to My Musical Life, 453-56. 91. "A pity Stasov is gone!" Felix Blumenfeld, Diaghilev's conductor, wrote back to RimskyKorsakov. "There is the one who would have gotten the most out of this!!! The old man did not live to see this day, but indeed he had laid many a stone at the foundation of this monument to Russian music" (My Musical Lift, +58). 92. Zilbershteyn and Samkov (eds.), Dyagikv 1:206. 93. Ibid., 207. 94. See Rimsky-Korsakov to Diaghilev, ca. 26 August 1907; in ibid., 2:106. These negotiations began even before the Paris concerts in 1907, which means Diaghilev was already negotiating with the Opera for 1908. See his letter to Rimsky-Korsakov of 19 April 1907, touching upon both Boris and Sadko; in ibid., 99-100. 95. Benois, "Zhizn' khudozhnika" (unpublished memoir); cited in Gozenpud, Russkiy operniy teatr mezhdu ivukb revolyutsiy, 205.

ANTILITERARY

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) to form a diminished-seventh chord, again as in many other Kashcheyan passages. This chord is then treated as the stable tonic of the "diminished mode," while melodies are constructed out of sequences of appoggiaturas and neighbors to the chord's various constituent tones (Ex. 9.28). These finally coalesce into a flowing passage at [103] in which one recognizes the essence from which the theme of the famous Danse Infernale will be [612]

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extracted.92 In its preliminary appearance, the tune is given in a sort of thirdspecies mensuration canon with dissonances falling freely as they may. For its day a remarkably linear bit of writing, it is one of The Firebird's most imaginative, if mechanistic, bits.93 The trouble was that this time Stravinsky's imagination was his memory in disguise—unless this was one more conscious tribute to Rimsky, who had written almost the very same music for Kashchey, Chernobog, & Co. in the exactly analogous "Hellish Kolo" for the Triglav Mountain scene from Mlada, some twenty years before (Ex. 9.29). T H E

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To turn from the mad, fantastic "recitatives" in The Firebird to the "arias"—that is, the dance numbers familiar from the suites—is to turn from music that may be structurally trivial (read: improvisational) yet radical, to music that is highly, if conventionally, structured, and rather tame. With reference to the suite numbers one can readily concur with Stravinsky's later write-off of his first ballet as "belonging to the styles of its time."94 One concurs, that is, with two provisos. The first is that the styles in question are all Russian; French influence, despite what has usually been said about The Firebird from the time of the premiere up to the present day, is still a negligible factor, confined to details of scoring (like the orchestral glissando at the end of the Danse Infernale, rather brazenly cribbed from 92. Actually, as Charles Joseph has shown, this passage was composed as part of the "Danse infernale" and was later transferred to its present position (Stravinsky and the Piano, 267-69). The discovery does not affect the point here, since both the main theme and the passage at fig. [103] are based on the idea first presented at fig. [101], indubitably conceived as part of the "recitative," rather than as part of the "aria." Joseph discusses some other minor revisions taken between the completion of the piano score and the preparation of the full score (261-66). 93. Stravinsky evidently forgot about it when he complained that the "few scraps of counterpoint in The Firebird are derived from chord notes, and this is not real counterpoint" (E&D:IJI/I32). 94. E&D:i49/i3i.

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the ending of the Rapsodie espagnole). And second, the stylistic resonances in the Firebird dances are still mosdy specific reflections of specific models. They are extremely diverse. The fact that Stravinsky could assimilate them all without falling into a fatal eclecticism is ample testimony to his taste and craftsmanship, both of which operated at a level high enough to warrant the use of the word genius, were that word not fatally wed in ordinary parlance to the criterion of originality, a criterion that, apart from the music of some of the mime recitatives, The Firebird hardly meets. The successful assimilation of so many contemporary Russian idioms was facilitated, of course, by the stringent stylistic dichotomy. As Rimsky-Korsakov had put it of his own Tsar Saltan ten years earlier, The Firebird "was composed in a mixed manner which I shall call instrumental-vocal; its entire fantastic part belonged rather to the first manner, the realistic part to the second manner." 95 This approach Stravinsky inherited direcdy from his teacher. Rimsky's definition of styles is entirely appropriate to this particular ballet, despite the lack of actual singing, since The Firebird was written completely in the tradition of the Russian operas it was meant to replace in the Diaghilev programs and had litde to do with the traditions of the Russian classical ballet. So it will not surprise us to find specific resonances of that operatic tradition at every turn. But neither are the stylistic resonances in The Firebird limited to that tradition. If we take up the dance numbers in the order of the score, we first encounter the 95. My Musical Lift, 380.

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Firebird's Dance, which begins at fig. [14]. This was always Stravinsky's favorite number in the ballet. He exempted it from his general strictures in Expositions and Developments, and in his pianola program notes he bragged about the ingenuity of its harmonic and rhythmic facture: "This dance of the Firebird contains no melody, but consists above all in a flourish of harmonic progression, based always on the thirds-turned-to-sixths, and fourths-turned-to-fifths, with chromatic and diatonic passing tones, fitted to a brisk, pecking rhythm, a rhythm determined by the notes of the bass, falling pizzicato."96 Indeed, the dance has been compared with the traditional "Allegro pizzicato" of the Franco-Russian ballet.97 To hark back to Rimsky's stylistic delineation, there could hardly be music more "instrumental" than this. Of melody there is, as Stravinsky says, hardly a trace—just a few Firebird leitmotifs subtly insinuated by the celesta, practically hidden in a thicket of woodwind arabesques (Ex. 9.30). The "thirds turned into sixths" are of the type illustrated above in Examples 9.17 and 9.27, so characteristic of the Firebird's music. The fourths and fifths to which Stravinsky refers are augmented and diminished, respectively. Thus, the harmonies in the Firebird's Dance are of a type associated with Scriabin: French sixths with added ninths and appoggiaturas. And again like Scriabin, Stravinsky plays with the self-invertibility and the tritone-invariance of the French-sixth chord (that is what he means by "fourths-turned-to-fifths"). Between the first and second chords in Example 9.31 the only notes that differ are the added ninths, which factitiously identify the "roots" on C-sharp and G respectively. The pitch at which the leitmotif joins the second chord completes the whole-tone collection. The resultant chord— a complete whole-tone collection arising from additives to the French sixth—is a particularly characteristic Scriabin harmony.98 To choose precisely the pitch that completes this chord as the one on which to initiate the Firebird leitmotif seems an act of deliberate emulation (see Ex. 9-3i)The specific passage in Scriabin that gave rise to the Firebird's Dance can be easily identified once we have been put on the scent, and it shows once more how strikingly prone the young Stravinsky was to musico-literary parallelisms. It is the thrice-recurring passage in the Poème de l'extase (1908) marked "Allegro volando." The bracketed bars in Example 9.32a, an extract from this "flying" music, are the self-evident source—down to exact pitch content and even details of orchestration—not only for the beginning of the Firebird's Dance (the pizzicati mentioned by Stravinsky in his program note) but even for the thrice-recurring leitmotif (figs. 96. "Cette danse de l'Oiseau de Feu ne comporte pas de mélodie, mais consiste plutôt en un élan de passage harmonique, basé toujours sur les tierces retournées en sixtes, et des quartes en quintes, avec des notes de passage chromatiques et diatoniques, taillé dans un rythme net et becquetant. En voici le rythme, qui est déterminé par les notes de la basse, tombant en pizzicato" (Typescript, 12, followed by the first four measures of the Firebird's Dance in piano reduction). 97. Smirnov, Tvorcheskoye jormirovaniye, 125. 98. See, inter alia, Roy A. Guenther, "Varvara Dernova's System of Analysis of the Music of Skrvabin," in McQuere (ed.), Russian Theoretical Thought in Music, i83ff.

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Firebird's D a n c e (3 after 1 1 4 L celesta and w o o d w i n d ) Clarinetto piccolo

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[4], [41], and [118]) of the Firebird's flight, on which Stravinsky based the harmonic progressions in the Dance (Ex. 9-32b-c; also compare Ex. 32d, from Scriabin's Fifth Sonata, the immediate chronological predecessor of the Poème, and its programmatic mate).99 Of all the myriad Russian-school resonances in the Firebird dances, the ones in the tide character's solo variation were without doubt the freshest. Their model was only about a year old at the time of writing, and the canny changes Stravinsky managed to ring within the domain of whole-tone harmony were something of which he could be jusdy proud. Resonances of a very different (much staler) kind inform the next dance, the Adagio (pas de deux) entided "Supplications de l'Oiseau de feu," and thereby hangs an intriguing tale. The pas de deux is "Oriental" in the peculiar nineteenth-century Russian sense of that word, meaning that it is shot through with languorous "Arabian" and "Central Asian" melismas that Russian music of the kuchkist period had so eagerly 99. This is not the only near-citation of the then-recent and much-discussed Poème de l'extase in The Firebird. Compare the orchestral texture of Stravinsky's "Carillon féerique" (figs. [99]-[IOI]) with figs. [28] and [39] in Scriabin's score.

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EXAMPLE

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a. Scriabin, Poeme de I'extasc, 16 after |22| (Allegro volando)

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appropriated from Glinka's Ruslan. Again the immediate source would seem to lie quite close at hand in Le coq d'or, just as that opera had furnished a model for the tide character's florid songs in The Nightingale. Compare a representative flute roulade from the pas de deux in The Firebird and one of the Shemakhanskaya Tsaritsa's typical coloraturas in Rimsky's opera (Ex. 9.33). The question is why Stravinsky should have endowed his magic bird with these Eastern features. It suggests that he and Fokine were familiar with the now discredited theory that the Firebird had flown into Russian folklore from the Persian or the Hindu. 100 Stasov was an especially enthusiastic adherent of this view. In his huge essay "The Origins of the Russian Epics," he had stated flat out that "our Firebird, or Golden Bird, is none other than the bird Zolotel of the Indian tales." 101 Despite the near concordance in the Grimm collection to the legend of the Firebird and the Grey Wolf, Stasov insisted that a rather loosely congruent Indian legend had to be parent to them both. 102

100. Cf. George Vernadsky, The Origins of Russia (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 124. 101. Stasov, "Proiskhozhdeniye russkikh bi'lin," 218. The connection is drawn on the basis of a very facile etymology: zoloto is Russian for gold. 102. StasoVs theory is actually a vulgarization of what was in the 1860s a widespread scholarly viewpoint, traceable to the work of the German philologist Theodor Benfey (1809-81). In the preface to his edition (1859) of the Panchatantra, a third-century collection of Hindu tales, Benfey traced the history of the work's transmission and migrations and demonstrated the concordances between the Indian tales

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It was Stasov, moreover, who had persuaded Balakirev to compose a Firebird opera in the 1860s, an opera that was to have been a study in early-kuchkist orientalism a la Ruslan. A single number intended for that unrealized opera survives in written form. It is a Georgian folk song that Balakirev had copied down in the Caucasus "from life," for which he began sketching an accompaniment in the pure-

and those of Europe. The theory of cultural borrowing thus propounded was a direct assault on the mystically Romantic attitudes toward folklore as embodiment of a unique national spirit, such as were previously entertained by Schelling, Herder, and the brothers Grimm in Germany, or by Slavophile folklorists like the Kireyevsky brothers in Russia. Afanasyev, though he is often placed in the Romantic mythological camp, notes connections between the Firebird and the fabulous golden-winged bird Garudha of Indian lore (Poeticheskiye vozzrmiya 1:512). For more on the Benfeyist controversies in Russia, see Yu. Sokolov, Russkiy jbl'klor (Moscow, 1938) (or the English version, Russian Folklore, trans. Catherine Ruth Smith [Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1966]), chap. 2.

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diatonic style of his Russian folk song anthology.

' Some of the woodwind me-

lismata in Stravinsky's pas de deux, especially at the passage where (according to annotations on the 1929 pianola roll) the captured Firebird attempts to cajole IvanTsarevich with "visions of the fantastic Orient," seem almost to have been modeled on the opening bars of Balakirev's accompaniment (Ex. 9.34). It is quite plausible that Balakirev's then all but unknown notations should have been familiar to a pupil of Rimskv-Korsakov, who had inherited all of Balakirev's Firebird material from his erstwhile mentor (who wanted him to complete the project). Andrey Rimskv-Korsakov, the musical executor of his father's estate, certainly knew this manuscript, and one can hardly imagine that he would have omitted to show it to his friend when the latter embarked on a Firebird project of his own. 1 0 4 The two numbers danced by the Princesses are the most traditional in the ballet, and the ones most directly indebted to the work of Stravinsky's Belyayevets seniors. Stravinsky called the "Jeu des princesses avec les pommes d'or" a "Mendelssohnian-Tchaikovskian Scherzo," 1 0 5 but it is really an imitation of Glazunov's salonish and academic ballet style, much as the scherzo movement from the Symphony in E-flat had been. T w o specific models suggest themselves: the Third Variation ("Hail") from the opening tableau (Winter) of The Seasons, op. 67—which we know Stravinsky had borrowed from Glazunov to study—and the "Scherzino" (no. 4) from Glazunov's Scenes de Ballet, op. 52. Both belong to the tradition of balletic scherzi in 2/4 that move in sixteenth notes, moto perpetuo stvle. The tempo of the Seasons variation is marked at 84 to the quarter note, precisely the same as in Stravinsky's dance. The two pieces are closest at their respective endings (Ex. 9.35). The "Ronde des princesses (Khorovod)," where the Tsarevich joins the enchanted maidens, is one of the two numbers in which Stravinsky incorporated authentic folk tunes. It is at once a deliberate throwback to the early-Belyayevets,

10?. The whole autograph sketch is published in photographic facsimile with annotations bv Boris Dobrovolskv as an appendix to Abram Gozenpud's essay on Balakirev's unrealized opera, in E. L. Frid, Yu. A. Krcmlvov, and A. S. Lvapunova, eds., Miliy Alekseyench Balakirev: issledovaniva i stat'i (Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1961), 383-87. In his autobiography, Rimskv-Korsakov noted down from memory an additional theme that was to have gone into Balakircv's Firebird—a fire worshippers' chorus—which he recalled Balakirev often plaving on the piano (My Musical Life, 64). 104. See Gozcnpud, "Neosushchestvenni'v opcrni'y zamisel," in Frid, Krcmlvov, and Lvapunova (eds.), Balakirev, 381-82. The vcrv first Firebird to grace the Russian musical stage also had a conspicuous Oriental patrinionv. This was Zhar-ptitsa; or. The Adventures of Levsil-Tsarevieh, an opera "with choruses, ballets, combat, military games, aerial flights, magical transformations, and magnificent spectacle," staged at the St. Petersburg Bolshov Theater in 1823, with music by Catterino Cavos and Ferdinando Antonolini. There is no reason to assume Stravinsky knew this antiquated, never-published piece, but he certainly knew about it, if for no other reason than because Cavos was Benois's great-greatgrandfather. Benois mav have described to Stravinsky or Fokinc the opera's plot, which revolved around the love of the Slavonic prince Lcvsil ("Lion's Strength") for the Arabian princess Zoraida. See Gozcnpud, "NcosushchcstvcnnYv operniy zamisel," 367; also Scmvon L. Ginzburg, Istoriya russkoy muziki i' notriikh obraztsakh (Moscow: Muzika, 1969), 2:469. An aria of Lcvsil is printed by Ginzburg 011 pp. 144-46. 105. E & D : 150/132.

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post-kuchkist style of the 1880s, and doubly a tribute, quite consciously paid, to the memory of his teacher. The tune itself was drawn from Rimsky-Korsakov's anthology of 1877 and had already been used by Rimsky as the main theme for the slow movement of his Sinfonietta on Russian Themes, op. 31, an adaptation of an unpublished string quartet (1880) that was issued by Edition Belaieff in 1887.106 Stravinsky's treatment of the borrowed tune is freer than his teacher's had been, and at the same time gives evidence of the pupil's neonationalist interest in a more authentic folk harmony than the teacher had seen fit to apply. In Example 9.36, the original harmonization from the folk song anthology (which Rimsky's initial full statement in the Sinfonietta—first by four horns, then by the strings—reproduced quite literally) is followed by Stravinsky's adaptation. The second phrase in Stravinsky's version is altered to end on the dominant, which is then sustained as a pedal to support a group of podgoloski variants—that is, the traditional heterophonic "undervoices" of improvised folk polyphony. The last of these phrases, in the bassoon, gives the last phrase of Rimsky's tune, harmonized so that its last note is surprisingly turned into a tonic, recalling the so-called peretnenriiy lad (mutable mode) of Russian folk singing, akin to a tonus peregrinus (cf. the discussion of the Tsarevich leitmotif above, p. 606). The choice of this particular tune from Rimsky's wares reflected more than a musical preference. It was singularly appropriate to the ballet action, this by virtue of its unsung text and its ritual function. The tune, which had been imparted to Rimsky-Korsakov by the Ukrainian folklorist and choral conductor Alexander Rubets (1838-1913), his colleague at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, is not really a khorovod but rather a wedding song—more specifically, a song to be sung at a devichnik, the wedding eve bridal shower at which the bride's girlfriends plait her hair (as in the opening tableau of Stravinsky's Svadebka). And so it is classified in the anthology where Stravinsky found it. The text, moreover, begins by setting a scene entirely congruent with Ivan-Tsarevich's situation on stage: Kak po sadiku Po zelyonomu vinogradnichku Zdes' khodil-gulyal dobri'y molodets...

Around the garden, Around the vineyard green, A fine youth went walking...

In Memories and Commentaries, Stravinsky confided that the other khorovod tune, which makes its first appearance at fig. [77] and is developed to a climax from 106. Apparently Stravinsky kept this prior use of the theme by his teacher a secret from Diaghilev and the rest of the company. Eric Walter White, in his early book on Stravinsky, has recorded a story told him by Edwin Evans, who discovered the tune in Rimsky's Sinfonietta and slyly invited Diaghilev to play the work with him four-hands: "[Diaghilev] liked the first movement, but was rather mystified by Evans's eagerness to draw his attention to the work. When, however, he reached the tune in the second movement, he jumped up from the piano and exclaimed, 'Non, ce n'estpas vrai!'" (Stravinsky's Sacrifice to Apollo [London: Hogarth Press, 1930], 27).

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a. Rimsky-Korsakov, 100 Russian Folk Songs, no. 79 Moderato

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[Around the little garden, around the vineyard green.]

b. The Firebird, fig. | 761

vi-no-grad-nich-ku.

1

[82] to [87], was also an authentic folk melody. 107 It is not found in any of the collections he recalled having used, however, and it is probably no new melody, but a variation on the last phrase of the Rimsky-Korsakov tune in Example 9.36a. Whatever its origin, its harmonization, full of pedals and chromatic passes in the inner voices, is distincdy Borodinesque; many specific details point to a kinship with the beginning of the Polovetsian Dance at the end of the second act of Prince Igor (the familiar "Chorus of the Women Prisoners"), the great hit of the 1909 saison russe. These details include the introductory measures, in which woodwind instruments trade off their little solos against a sustained background of horns, and particularly the enunciation of the main theme by an oboe accompanied by block chords rolled rapidly on the harp. The main theme of the Danse Infernale (Ex. 9.37a), so often cited as a particularly, even presciendy, Stravinskian item, is actually a neat conflation of Rimskian and (for once!) Chaikovskian balletic models. As noted earlier in conjunction with the Kashchey music at fig. [101], the melody was derived in part from the "Hellish Kolo" in the Triglav Mountain scene from Mlada, where Kashchey actually puts in a brief appearance (Ex. 9.37b), leading a train of kikimoras. (His part is sung by twelve to sixteen tenors in unison, through megaphones.) The congruence between the Firebird dance and this moment in Rimsky's opera surely accounts for Stravinsky's choice of a "diminished mode" on A as his Kashcheyan tonality. But just as logical an antecedent is the "Pas diabolique des poupées à ressort" ("Devilish dance of spring-operated dolls") from The Nutcracker, Act I (Ex. 9.37c), which has the same characteristic syncopations. In any event, the Chaikovskian resonance is just a passing nod in a context saturated through and through with Rimsky. As already noted (Chapter 4, p. 300), the Musorgskyish orchestral fantasy that Rimsky-Korsakov adapted from the Triglav scene ("A Night on Triglav Mountain") had its first performance at a Belyayev concert in 1903, at the rehearsals for which Stravinsky had been formally introduced to the circle of musicians that surrounded his worshiped mentor. For him the Triglav music must have had special, and very precious, associations. And not only for him: Rimsky's score was widely taken for a locus classicus of "musical devilry," as one critic (probably Vladimir Derzhanovsky) noted in the pages of Muzïka. Its devices, he wrote, "have become the common currency of all succeeding composers to such an extent that by now it is inconceivable to try and depict all these mythical personages of ancient Slavic epos without imitating RimskyKorsakov—otherwise it would turn out a bad likeness."108 Just how good a likeness Stravinsky achieved, and how closely he must have studied that Triglav music, will be evident from a glance at a pair of representative score pages (Ex. 9.38). 107. M&C:92/98. 108. Muzïka, no. 56 (2+ December 1911).

THE

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As for Stravinsky's Berceuse, it had a couple of obvious precedents in the work of Lyadov: the tiny Berceuse for strings alone in his Eight Russian Folk Songs for orchestra, op. 58 (1906), and the one in the introduction to Kikimora, given its première by Siloti on 12 December 1909, just as Stravinsky was beginning work on the ballet he had "inherited" from the older composer (Ex. 9.39). (Stravinsky's ears were wide open that night: besides the new Lyadov work, the concert featured the Russian première of the Rapsodie espagnole.) The special tour de force in Stravinsky's Berceuse is the way he managed, in the second half of the dance, to combine in counterpoint the four-note Firebird leitmotif—"arch-chromatic," as Rimsky would have said—with the diatonic bassoon melody of the opening. 109 The resultant texture is so close to that of Tsar Berendey's cavatina in the second act of Snegurochka that it too must be added to the list of models (Ex. 9.40). The Finale, as it is known in concert guise (in the ballet it is the second tableau), is based on song no. 21 from Rimsky-Korsakov's collection, a khorovod (Rimsky mistakenly classified it as a "lyrical song") entided "By the Gate a Pine Tree Was Swaying To and Fro" ("£/ vorot sosna raskachalasya"), one of several songs Rimsky had appropriated from Konstantin Villebois's anthology of i860, which had consisted of harmonizations of melodies collected by the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky on a Volga steamer in 1856. 110 The tune is a stately one; its text tells of a young girl (Dunyushka) who is desired by a noble youth. That is what recommended 109. It has been claimed that this melody was a popular tune "typical of Volhynian folk music," i.e., of the district that included Ustilug (G. Stempowski in Du, December 1950; quoted in P&D:39). The resemblance to Lyadov may place this assertion in doubt. no. K. I. Villebois (Vil'boa), Sto russkikh narodnikb pesen (St. Petersburg: Stellovsky, i860), no. 61.

[652]

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EXAMPLE

9.38

a. The Firebird, fig. |149|

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9.38

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RECEPTION

The Firebird's smashing success on its première at the Paris Opera, 25 June 1910, catapulted Stravinsky into a world celebrity he would enjoy for the next six decades. Everyone associated even collaterally with the production had smelled a clou in the works, and excitement mounted as the fateful day approached. The Miriskusniki were in ecstasy. Stelletsky wrote to Golovin, "I'm staying till Sunday; I must see The Firebird. I have seen your dazzling drawings and costumes. I like Stravinsky's music in the orchestra and the dances tremendously. I think the whole thing together with your sets will look spectacular. Serov has also put off his departure because of this ballet." 1 1 2 Audiences were wild. "With every performance," Tamara 112. Letter of 3/16 June 1910; in Zilbershteyn and Samkov (eds.), Dyagilev 1:428.

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Karsavina, who danced the title role, told an interviewer, "success went crescendo."11* Yet French and Russian estimations of the ballet show a curious and telling divergence. For the French, the ballet as a whole was a revelation of what could be accomplished in the name of "synthesism." Thus Henri Ghéon: The Firebird, being the result of an intimate collaboration between choreography, music, and painting, presents us with the most exquisite miracle of harmony imaginable, of sound and form and movement. The old-gold vermiculation of the fantastic back-cloth seems to have been invented to a formula identical with that of the shimmering web of the orchestra. And as one listens, there issues forth the very sound of the wizard shrieking, of swarming sorcerers and gnomes running amok. When the bird passes, it is truly the music that bears it aloft. Stravinsky, Fokine, Golovine, in my eyes are but one name. 1 1 4

This review set the tone for a whole tradition of highfalutin French nonsense about the tribal communalism of the âme slave and its creations that would surround the Ballets Russes till the end of its days. As to native reactions, except for Yakov Tugenhold, whose appreciation of the ballet's neonationalist achievement was cited in the previous chapter, no Russians except its participants have left us an eyewitness account or evaluation of the production. By far the most revealing of these is the one we began with, Benois's, and it shows him far from satisfied. For him The Firebird had failed both as a Gesamtkunstwerk and as an embodiment of the "liturgichnost' " that was the special and signal potentiality of ballet. "It is just another children's fairy tale," he wrote in frustration, "not a tale for grownups." Nor had it done justice to the symbolism inherent in its title character, for it had viewed its own ingredients as colorful exotica; that is, it had viewed them cynically from the traditional standpoint of its intended audience. Cynical, too, had been the comic treatment of Kashchey and his "bellyboshkies," which had stripped them of mythic power. Inconsistently, perhaps, but no less sincerely, Benois made one exception from his strictures, forgetting for the moment that to separate one artistic medium from the rest was to deny the very foundation of his artistic credo. "If in other ways The Firebird was not all that we had dreamed of," he wrote, "in its music it achieved complete perfection. Music more poetic, music more expressive of every moment and shading, music more beautiful-sounding and phantasmagoric could not be imagined." And Benois became the first of innumerable writers to pay tribute to Diaghilev's prescience in spotting Stravinsky: "One must admit that Diaghilev's daring guesswork in assigning such a risky matter to an artist with nothing serious as yet to his credit turned out to be lucky in the highest degree."115 But even with respect to the music a split opens between Parisian and Russian 113. "Teatral," "U T. P. Karsavinoy," Peterbunjskayagazeta, no. 197 (21 July 1910). 114. Henri Ghéon, in Nouvelle revue française (1910); quoted in Lifar, Diaghilev, 176. 115. Benois, "Khudozhestvenni'ye pis'ma: 'Zhar-ptitsa.'"

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reactions as soon as we begin examining professional opinion. Calvocoressi, whose negative appraisal of the music performed in 1909 had acted as a spur toward the creation of the new ballet, received it ecstatically. "When last year," he wrote in an article for the Russian musical press, "Stravinsky's Firebird was staged, all who took an interest in Russian music and saw its future in terms of the strength and richness of its first flowering experienced a great j o y . . . . In The Firebird, the wonderful school to which we owe Boris Godunov, Thamar,

and Antar

was brought

back to active life." 1 1 6 Calvocoressi cast himself immediately in the role of Stravinsky's Western propagandist, and wrote what stands today as a milestone: the first critical article devoted entirely to the new composer to be published anywhere. Both its primacy and its particular tendentious viewpoint entitle " A Russian Composer of To-Day," which appeared in the Musical Times of 1 August 1911, to an extensive citation. Igor Stravinsky is one of the youngest, but also the best, representatives of the actual Russian School whose vicissitudes have of late been so many and so confusing. As soon as one studies the evolution of Russian music, one cannot help being struck by the fact that after a period of rapid progress—during which a few masters like Glinka, Borodin, Moussorgsky, Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov displayed surprising originality and, creating a style entirely their own, endowed musical art with new resources, new objects, and new vitality—came a period of reaction, due mosdy to foreign influences; so that for a time it seemed that the School was fated to enjoy only the brief period of splendour for which it stood indebted to the few masters named (and accessorily to a few minor artists who more or less followed their lead), and thenceforth to compromise, according to Mr. Cesar Cui's nice distinction, "not properly Russian composers, but composers who were Russian." Without opening the vexed question of nationalism versus universalism in music, one may briefly aver that such a reaction was ominous, for the simple reason that the nationalist composers alone had created beautiful works and opened new paths; and it appeared deplorable to all lovers of Russian music that the younger men should have been led astray by a sort of self-consciousness and the false shame of remaining true Russians instead of adhering to the tenets of western (and in the particular case mosdy German) conventions. Mr. Stravinsky's chief merit is that he remains free from this dangerous prejudice. Russian born and Russian in spirit, he 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, exactly as they had done, and to a great extent by the same means. He has undergone no foreign influence, except perhaps to a slight extent that of the modern French "impressionist" School—itself much influenced by the more progressive Russian musicians, like Borodin and Moussorgsky. I would not venture to say that he is at present the only young Russian composer who shows himself not an imitator, but a continuator of the chiefs of the nationally. Calvocoressi, in Muzika, 1911, 688, 690; quoted in Smimov, Tvorcbeskoye jbrmiromniye, 9.

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ist School; but assuredly he stands apart among his colleagues for the abundance, boldness and vigour of his imagination as well as for his command of craftsmanship; his originality is greater and at the same time more typical: he is the only one who has achieved more than mere attempts to promote Russia's true musical spirit and style. Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky... studied composition as a private pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, but almost from the beginning showed himself far less conservatively minded than his master, who always was at great pains to reconcile freedom of fancy with sedulous discipline in diction, and thereby diverged more and more from the uncompromising leaders, Moussorgsky and Borodin. As far as brilliancy and love of the picturesque is concerned, Stravinsky remains the true disciple of Rimsky-Korsakov; but the details of his style show how deeply he has been impressed by works like Moussorgsky's songs and "Boris Godunov" or Borodin's symphonies. Rimsky-Korsakov appears to have found his young pupil's independence and daring rather starding, but not repellent; and when he heard for the first time the music of "The Bird of fire" he is said to have tersely given vent to his feelings in this sentence; "Look here, stop playing this horrid thing, otherwise I might begin to enjoy i t . " . . . "The Bird of fire" . . . remains mosdy picturesque, as befits the musical setting of a mere fairy tale; but under its brilliant display of fancy, is informed with a deep and poetic feeling that appeals not only to our taste for the weird and to our sense of physical pleasure, but also to our higher emotional faculties. One might compare it, in that respect, to Rimsky-Korsakov's last fantastic works, like "Mlada." 117 This tirade is really less a musical critique than a sort of political tract, aimed on behalf of the French admirers of the mighty kuchka against an unnamed Chaikovsky, and directed at an English public that had recently acclaimed a production of Swan Lake, imported from Russia by Olga Preobrazhenskaya (a production Diaghilev regarded as a threat), but a public that would not be given a chance to see "The Bird of fire" until the Diaghilev company's third London visit (June 1912), by which time the impresario felt potential audiences to have been sufficiently primed by advance publicity like Calvocoressi's.118 There is little point in refuting the critic's deeply distorted historical premises—the merest recollection of the opening chapter of this book should suffice for that—except to note the ironic contrast between the portrait he paints of the young Stravinsky and the composer his compatriots had been getting to know for the past couple of years, especially as he had been described in print by Timofeyev and Karati'gin, both of whom emphasized Stravinsky's place within a "denationalized" musical scene, of which they heartily approved.119 French critics would continue to regard Stravin117. Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi, " A Russian Composer of To-Day: Igor Stravinsky," Musical Times 52 (1911): 511-12. 118. See Nesta Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States, 1911-1929 (New York and London: Dance Horizons and Dance Books, 1975), 22, 64. 119. Calvocoressi's portrait of Rimsky-Korsakov, it will be noticed, already contains the seeds of the controversy that would be unleashed some years later over his redactions of Boris Godunov. Fairly hi-

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sky as the "heir presumptive" (as Calvocoressi dubbed him) 120 to the mande of high kuchkism, until he betrayed them all with Mavra in 1922. In contrast to the French, Russian critics tended to greet The Firebird with considerable reserve, though all had to acknowledge the composer's extraordinary skill and coloristic imagination. The very first Russian account of the music as such had been published even before the Paris première. It was a report of a soirée at the editorial headquarters of the journal Apollon, where Alfred Nurok covered music, on the evening of 10 April 1910, less than three weeks after Stravinsky had completed the piano score (signed and dated St. Petersburg, 21 March 1910). 121 On this occasion, the composer played a few sections of the ballet to an assemblage representing a cross-section of the St. Petersburg intellectual and artistic avant-garde. (He also accompanied Petrenko in the two Gorodetsky songs.) Nurok was there, of course, and it was he who gave the first verbal glimpse of The Firebird to Russian readers, calling attention to its "attractive sonority in the composer's rendition" and "the utter sonic representationalism of these picturesque excerpts."122 He may actually have been a bit disappointed at what he heard, compared with Fireworks, about which he had written so ecstatically two months earlier (see Chapter 6). In any case, he betrayed no inkling that he had witnessed the birth of a classic; he gave the Firebird excerpts uncharacteristically short shrift and turned his attention to other items on the program. The contrast between his laconic reaction and the enthusiastic, oft-quoted remarks of the French critic Robert Brussel, who heard Stravinsky run through the ballet at Diaghilev^ apartment around the same time, 123 can be taken as a sort of paradigm. The first public hearing in Russia of Firebird music came in the form of a performance by Siloti (23 October 1910) of the so-called first suite from the ballet. This collation of all the actual dances in the ballet up to the Danse Infernale was published by Jurgenson in 1912 (and kept in print after the Revolution by the State Music Publishers of the USSR). Its five numbers were these: 1.

Introduction and Dance of the Firebird (essentially this was the ballet score through fig. [21], minus the music between [3] and [7])

2.

Pas de deux (figs. [29]-[4i])

3. Scherzo (figs. [55]-[7i]) larious is Calvocoressi's garbling of an anecdote, evidently a mainstay of Diaghilev-circle gossip, that is already familiar to readers of this book (see Chapter 6, n. 17), which the critic must have heard countless times in innumerable suspicious variants from his Russian friends. 120. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery, 221. 121. A photograph of the final page of the autograph piano score (now at the Morgan Library in New York) is given in Joseph, Stravinsky and the Piano, 257. 122. "A. N.," "Muzi'kal'nìy vecher v 'Apollone,' " Apollon, 1910, no. 7,55. 125. Robert Brussel, "Avant la féerie," Revue musicale 11, no. no (December 1930): 40; quoted in Lifar, Diaghilev, 168; White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 146; etc.

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4-

Khorovod (figs. [75]—[89])

5. Infernal Dance (figs. [133]—[182]) This was what all the early Russian critics heard.124 One of the most interesting reviews was that of Timofeyev, summarizing the 1910—11 St. Petersburg musical season for readers of the Moscow journal Russkaya misV. Two years earlier he had written about Stravinsky in the same pages, in a review of the Belyayev season that had been expanded and translated into French for the Bulletin français de la S.I.M. (quoted in part in Chapter 8). In the Russian version of the review, Timofeyev made the same large point as in the French article, namely that "the work of all three composers [Senilov, Steinberg, Stravinsky] is devoid of that special Russian character that was so vividly expressed in the works of their teacher." But he immediately added something that did not appear in the translation, and for which he deserves high marks for foresight: "But it seems to me that from I. F. Stravinsky, sooner than from the other two, one may anticipate compositions of a national-Russian cast." 125 Now, with the arrival of the Firebird suite, Timofeyev might have claimed vindication. Instead, and in striking contrast to Calvocoressi, Timofeyev stresses the ostensible French sources of Stravinsky's inspiration and complains of a general lack of individual creative profile. The kuchkist continuity—all-important to the French critic—is taken for granted by the Russian, who actually passes in silence over the music of the pas de deux, with its echoes of Balakirev's Orient. From the French modernists [Timofeyev had just been discussing a Siloti program of works by Ravel, Debussy, and Fauré] it is a small step to many a young Russian composer. T h e mutual influence of the French and Russian schools has been vividly underscored in recent years, especially since Diaghilev's propaganda for Russian music in Paris. If in Debussy's opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" one sees the influence of Musorgsky, and in the string quartet of Maurice Ravel that was recendy performed at an "Evening of Contemporary M u s i c " one feels the strong influence 124. Somewhat later the Berceuse was separately published by Jurgenson (1912) and quickly became a concert favorite, both by itself and in tandem with the Finale. These two were later the numbers Stravinsky arranged for reduced orchestra, so that "excerpts from The Firebird will be accessible to orchestras that do not have the necessary instruments to present the work in full" (Stravinsky to B. P. Jurgenson, 24 July 1914; in SelCorrII:22j). This arrangement of the Berceuse was made late in 1913 (see Stravinsky to Florent Schmitt, 14 December 1913; in SelCorrII:no) and first performed under the composer's baton in Bordeaux, 8 February 1914 (program in the Stravinsky Archive). On at least one occasion (Rome, Accademia Santa Cecilia, fall 1916) Stravinsky conducted all the Firebird dances in one sequence, that is, tacking the Berceuse and Finale onto the 1910 concert suite (letter to Gerald Tyrrwhit [Lord Berners], 13 October 1916; in SelCorrII:i38), thus producing what, with the addition of a few connecting "pantomimes," would become the "Ballet Suite" of 1945. For further details on the suites and on Stravinsky's transcriptions and arrangements from The Firebird, see White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 151-54. 125. G. N. Timofeyev, "Muzïkal'nïy obzor: Peterburgskaya muzïkal'naya zhizn' v 1908 g.," Russkaya misl' 30, no. 2 (February 1909): 160.

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of Borodin, then on the voung Russian composer I. F. Stravinsky, a pupil of Rimskv-Korsakov, there tells the strong influence of French modernism. In striking proof of this there is his ballet "The Firebird," written on commission from Diaghilev and given last year with brilliant success in Paris, in a delightful production by Fokinc. The suite from the ballet performed at Siloti's concert combines in one package five separate epistxles from the ballet. From the very beginning, when the composer sketches in the features (akin to the Introduction to RimskvKorsakov's Sadko) of Kashchey's garden, a fairy-tale mood envelops the listener. The Firebird's dance is full of character; the woodwinds play a major role in the evocation of this original image. Especially pretty and elegant is the delightful Khorovod, in which a Russian theme (woodwind) is echoed prettily by the cello. The music of the Khorovod is also distinguished by its warmth of atmosphere. Very vivid and colorful is the concluding episode, the Infernal Dance of the Kashchevan Kingdom, with its capricious syncopated rhythm. Here again the influence of Rimskv-Korsakov shows through. But the even larger influence of French modernism, in the persons of Debussy, Dukas, and Ravel, has also affected the author. The same mannerisms of vagueness, of disjuncture in the melodic design, spicy and recondite harmonies, diffuseness of form. But all is redeemed by the rich imagination of a subtle orchcstrator. From beginning to end, the instrumental color never ceases to charm and astonish. All the same, one cannot help wishing that the talented author would throw over all influences and find himself; for his own phvsiognomv, and with it a truly Russian style, docs show through from time to time in his music. 1 2 6

The exaggeration of the French influence, and the cliched terms in which it is described, both testify to the critic's provincialism. That provincialism emerges even more vividly from Karatigin's description, in the snobbish pages

ot'Apollon,

of the behavior of Siloti's audience at the premiere: The loyalist faction of our public was offended by the last number on the program. [The rest had consisted of Schumann's D-minor Symphony and piano concertos by Schumann and Saint-Saens (the Second) performed by Yvonne Arnaud.] Many deserted the Hall of Nobles during the performance of this suite. I doubt whether this in itself will be a sufficient argument in favor of Stravinsky's music for those who have not yet heard it, but I have no other means, even the most approximate, to give a "pen portrait" of The Firebird. This could be done only by "telling the tale" itself. Such sonorities, such wonderful coloristic legerdemain, such modulations, such tin\r, evanescent little themes, constantly playing off one another's iridescent surfaces—such an entrancing musical sorcery is possible only in a fairv tale. And one has to hear this astonishing Firebird for oneself to appreciate all the beauty of its rainbowed fairy-tale hues, or to understand why no other voung Russian composer than Strav insky could write such music now, saturated through and

126. G. N. Timotcyev, "Iz pcterburgskoy niuzikarnoy zhizni," Ruiskaya misl' u, no. 2 (February 1911): 2+2-43.

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through by fairy tales, and why in this sense Stravinsky is one of the worthiest pupils of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. 127

It may be hard to hear The Firebird as "modern music" now, and so reports like Karatlgin's are helpful reminders that the ballet was, for its earliest audiences, "a taste of the avant-garde." The phrase was Ravel's, 128 and was heavily barbed—his way of accounting for the ballet's enormous success with the Paris snobs. Russian audiences were actually put off for a while by the work's "ultra-eccentric orchestral sonorities," its "sharp, modey, sometimes piercing sonic colors," and its "broad deployment of dissonance in modo cacofvnico."129 The critic who penned these epithets was not so obtuse as he sounds, though, for he alone among Russian reviewers, discerning the kinship between Stravinsky's orchestral fairy tale and the "decorative canvas of a Bilibin," made the crucial neonationalist connection. The most judicious response to the Firebird suite on its first Russian outing was Karatlgin's, in a different review from the one cited above, composed later and with benefit of reflection as part of an end-of-season roundup. He used the occasion as a pretext to modify and to a certain extent rescind his earlier general assessment of Stravinsky's talent, made in comparison with Steinberg and reported in Chapter 6: So be it, suppose [Stravinsky's] music is a bit superficial for all its brilliance; but having heard The Firebird, wouldn't you rather say the opposite: how brilliant this music is despite a certain superficiality! H o w luxuriant and ravishing its colors; how much life and action there are in these sonic phantasmagories; how eagerly one forgets the many and, perhaps, the great shortcomings of the suite in the moment of rapture at the even greater merits of its best parts! 130

The earliest Russian critic to deal with the ballet as a whole was Nikolai Myaskovsky, reviewing the piano reduction for Derzhanovsky's Muzika in October 1911. Having had unprecedented leisure to examine the music visually as well as aurally, Myaskovsky makes a number of telling technical points. He succeeded in descrying the harmonic basis of the Kashchey music—"a tiny theme made up of a succession of a major third and a minor third at a mutual distance of a tone and a half," is how he put it. He recognized in the Firebird's Dance "an elegant scherzo that harmonically almost approaches the latest achievements of Scriabin." He understood the tour de force of the "Carillon" as consisting in "the realization of orchestral and technical schemes out of the most insignificant raw material." He 127. V. G. Karatigin, "Muzika v Pcterburge," Apollon, 1910, no. 12; quoted in Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkoy kritiki," 70. 128. E&D:i49/i3i. 129. B[oris] T[yuneyev], "S.-Peterburgskiye kontserti'," RMG 17, no. 44 (31 October 1910), col. 974-

130. Otkliki khttdozhestvennoy zhizni, 1910, no. 4; reprinted in V. G. Karatigin, Izbranntye start (Mos-

cow: Muzika, 1965), 48.

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sensed in the "bracing freshness" of orchestral color and harmony the "hovering aspect of the genius who created Snegurochka, Kashchey, and Kitezh." And, mirabile dictu, he never mentioned a French name in the course of his discussion. "What can one say," he concludes, "after following the whole ballet through, scene by scene? —What a wealth of invention, how much intelligence, temperament, talent, what a remarkable, what a rare piece of work this is." And yet, despite his subde, nuanced appreciation of the score—or perhaps, rather, because of it—Myaskovsky held back the ultimate accolade. Despite our burning wish to do so, we cannot agree after all with Alexander Benois's assertion that this music is a work of genius. Something is lacking. And the answer comes unbidden: what is lacking is originality. The pointedness, the spiritedness, the cheerfulness (so rare in a contemporary musician) that set Stravinsky apart from the ranks of his extraordinarily talented peers, give him the right to claim the tide o f heir apparent to Rimsky-Korsakov and, taken in conjunction with his other qualities, guarantees an even greater flourishing o f his astounding talent. But the essence o f his musical material does not yet bear the imprint of a vividly expressed individuality. But it is hardly a small thing to be the heir apparent and the successor to the greatest luminary in Russian music! 1 3 1

What emerges most clearly from all the Russian critiques is that although reviewers recognized in Stravinsky's ballet "a wonder"—to quote a letter from Myaskovsky to Prokofiev, where there can be no questioning his sincerity132—and although they may in some cases have even regarded his style as repellendy modernistic, still, without exception they perceived the work as being esthetically old hat. "Insofar as the world of the Russian skazka is dear and precious to us, and reproduced so beautifully by Stravinsky, we cannot but love his Firebirdj" wrote a Moscow critic reviewing the first orchestral concert anywhere to be devoted exclusively to Stravinsky's work. But without the saving poetic framework of the skazka, Stravinsky's creative profile (as revealed, say, in Fireworks, also on the program) was "musically empty and worthless."133 When it came to his reception at home, Stravinsky was in a predicament. 131. All quotes from Myaskovsky's review follow Shlifshteyn (ed.), Myaskovskiy: start, pis'ma, vospominaniya 2:21-24. 132. Letter of 23 June 1911; in M. G. Kozlova and N. R. Yatsenko, S. S. Prokof'yev i N. TA. Myaskovskiy: perepiska (Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1977), 93. 133. G. P. Prokofiev, "Teatr i muzi'ka," Russkiye vedomosti, 24 August 1912,4. The same Moscow concert (described in detail in Chapter 3 in connection with the Symphony in E-flat) gave Leonid Sabaneyev (1881-1968), Stravinsky's most persistendy hostile Russian critic, his earliest pretext for an attack: "Stravinsky is a typical figure on the contemporary musical horizon. If one were to characterize him in a few words, one might call him a composer of the fashionable marketplace, a composer who promotes a music for which there is at present no demand among the broad masses, but only in the circles of fashionable esthetes, in that company which chases after recherché but essentially shallow impressions, after raffiné harlequinism, an evocative exterior, unheard of instrumental effects—in general, a whole arsenal of external means unrelated to content" ("Kontsert iz proizvedeniy Stravinskogo").

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A letter from Stravinsky to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, written from Paris on 26 November 1910, shows his awareness of the predicament—one shared by virtually everyone connected with the Diaghilev ballet 134 —and how it perplexed and distressed him to be valued so much more highly abroad than at home. All Paris was going wild over Russian music and giving it frequent performances of unprecedented quality. Meanwhile, Stravinsky had just caught up with the reviews of Siloti's performance of the Firebird suite back home—not Myaskovsky's or Karatigin's, but those of the hacks who wrote for the daily press. I have just returned from a rehearsal for tomorrow's concert at which [Louis] Hasselmans [1878-1957, then conductor at the Opera Comique] will play my Fireworks. Unfortunately, I cannot stay in Paris until tomorrow, since the tickets are bought and I must go back to Beaulieu. I showed up at the rehearsal accompanied by one of my Paris friends [probably Calvocoressi] and listened to Fireworks "incognito." At the end, though, I did want to meet Hasselmans and thank him very much for the wonderful performance. For the first time I was hearing the thing in a really beautiful performance. All the difficulties were overcome, all my intentions were realized. The whole thing sounded positively golden. I was touched. When I approached Hasselmans to introduce myself, he was so taken by surprise and embarrassed that he lost his wits altogether. I, as I said, thanked him heartily and showed him one place that should have gone a litde differendy. He went over it immediately, and when they finished playing, the orchestra rapped their sticks for me enthusiastically. They also did Musorgsky's superb "Commander" [the final song in the cycle Songs and Dances ofDeath]. In Nikolai Andreyevich's orchestration it came off exquisitely. Not one concert goes by in Paris nowadays without Russian music. This week they are playing Balakirev's Second Symphony, Lyadov's Baba-yoga, and my Fireworks. Last week they did Sheherazade, Capriccio espagnol, Thamar, Borodin's Second Symphony—and all of it (well, of course I don't know yet about Fireworks) meets with enormous success. Besides all this, my Fireworks is going to be played in the "Concerts Colonne" by [Gabriel] Pierné [1863-1937, conductor of the Firebird première]. All here are astounded at the way, judging by the papers, my Suite was received [in St. Petersburg] and are full of indignation. 135 134. The best example was Nijinsky, who, fresh from his Paris triumph in Carnaval, Sheherazade, and Giselle, displeased the empress with his revealing costume at a performance of the last-named at the Mariyinsky, and was summarily dismissed from the imperial ballet company. It was a great break for Diaghilev, who was able to sign Nijinsky to an exclusive contract for the Ballets Russes, then (early 1911) in the process of formation. 135. IStrSM:45i. According to a letter from Stravinsky to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, written from Beaulieu a week before (IStrSM:45o), Siloti had wished to omit the Ronde des Princesses from his performance of the suite, but had given in to Steinberg's insistence that it be included. Steinberg had informed Stravinsky of this bit of news, which embittered Stravinsky about Siloti's role as propagandist for young Russian composers. In a third letter to Rimsky-Korsakov (Beaulieu, 22 February/7 March 1911), he wrote, with respect to a recent Steinberg première: "Tell Max that I . . . completely empathize with the failure of his Dramatic Fantasy at the hands of Siloti. It seems Siloti intends to specialize in the failure of our compositions" (IStrSM:457). [646]

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These ambiguities of reception reflect the considerable irony of the position to which The Firebird brought its young composer both within the "horizontal" spectrum of contemporary music, vintage 1910, and the "vertical" spectrum of Russian music and its historical traditions. But this irony only reflected that of The Firebird itself, this eminently, self-consciously Russian work that was called into existence by an export campaign, and which would never have been created for a Russian audience. Its intended recipients hailed it as a natural and welcome continuation of the traditions of the mighty kuchka, while in Russia the score was looked upon as a derivative compound of elements either artificially revived or imported from France. Stravinsky's music, according to this view, was a "synthesis of that branch of Russian musical art that had flowered luxuriantly in the . . . Russian national music of a generation ago and the rich achievements of the modern French school with its harmonic spiceries."136 Without exception, the important Russian critics saw Stravinsky in a stylistic cul-de-sac, whatever their opinion of The Firebird. And right they were, despite their parochial overstatement of the French debt. It was only after the Firebird première, when Stravinsky found himself willy-nilly lionized by the French social and musical elites, that any real Frenchification of his style took place. But for its orchestration, The Firebird is as insularly Russian a composition as any product of the Belyayev hothouse. More so, in fact, since it dug back deliberately to an earlier Russian style that even the Belyayevtsi had discarded. The central irony for Stravinsky was that the intensified Russian identity of his music had been part of Diaghilev's formula for conquering Paris. There is no reason to think that Stravinsky would have come to folklorism by himself; at the time he received the Firebird commission he was immersed in The Nightingale, as far from the ways and means of the mighty kuchka as can be imagined. In The Firebird, the folkloristic episodes are precisely the ones least personal and stylistically most derivative. They are altogether uninteresting today. That Stravinsky continued to mine this lode at all was solely the result of his continued association with Diaghilev's saison russe. It is significant, then, that between 1910 and 1913 Stravinsky wrote three highly folkloristic "kuchkist" ballets for the Paris public—the works that made his enduring reputation—and four smaller works "for himself." These latter pieces—the Verlaine songs (1910), the Balmont songs (1911), Zvezdolikiy (1911—12), and the Japanese Lyrics (1912-13)—had nothing to do with Russian folklore and everything to do with assimilating the international Parisian modernism in which he found himself suddenly prominent. It was in the course of work on The Rite of Spring that Stravinsky finally managed a complete fusion of the modernistic and the folkloristic. It was, not only for him, the neonationalist peak, as well as the great watershed in his personal creative development. Such a fusion cannot be foreseen in The Firebird. 136. G. Prokofiev, "Teatr i muzi'ka," 24 August 1912.

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What impelled Stravinsky toward this watershed was the radical change in his peer group. The latterdav Miriskusniki among whom Stravinsky now moved, and who after The Firebird were hailing him as a genius, were a group that consisted in the main of artists, not musicians. They took a dim view of the ossified traditions in which Stravinsky had been reared, and which he had accepted, up to Rimsky's death, with unquestioning docility. They scorned particularly the bourgeois values of the Belyavevtsi and the tepid respectability so prized within the walls of the Conservatory—walls that, by extension, enclosed the Rimsky-Korsakov home where Stravinsky had taken his instruction in the Belyayevets faith. And they prized an aristocratic liberality of spirit totally unlike the atmosphere of the Stravinsky or the Rimsky-Korsakov home. The young Stravinsky, increasingly constrained and isolated within his provincial artistic and domestic milieux, found these attitudes utterly irresistible. His new circle made him identify, in a way he had never dared identify before, with the values of the social class to which he had been born. This was certainly among the topics Diaghilev broached with the young composer as soon as they began to have "serious talks about my 'future.' " 1 3 7 Stravinsky's memoir of Diaghilev is a fine document of this spiritual transformation. True, it contains the usual multitude of factual inaccuracies; and true, too, it was ghostwritten by Walter Nouvel, who also wrote the contemporaneous Chroniques de ma vie. The latter circumstance, however, only enhances the value of the document, for Nouvel was an insider to the aristocratic and elitist attitudes to which Stravinsky was converted in 1909 and 1910. More than any other testimony Stravinsky or any other party would ever give, this little-known, never reprinted piece reveals just what Diaghilev meant to Stravinsky. T o tell the truth, I found, after I met [Diaghilev], that the reputation people had given him [for haughtiness, arrogance, and snobbery] was not entirely without foundation.

H e had many unsympathetic traits—which, however, were not the

essence of his nature. They were simply a defense that he felt was useful in order to protect himself from the stupidity of people and to keep them at a distance. But I never saw him rude to anyone. N o matter with what class of people he chanced to meet, he was always verv well bred. T o use a Russian term, he behaved like a barin, which means 3. grand seigneur. I think the expression "Russian barin" characterizes Diaghilev's nature and explains his amazing activity. . . . It is only by understanding the nature of a cultured barin such as used to exist in Russia (a nature generous, strong, and capricious; with intense will, a rich sense of contrasts, and deep ancestral roots) that we can explain the character and originality of Diaghilev's creations, so different from the average artistic enterprises. . . . Diaghilev was a worthy descendent of a long line of Russian barins w h o did not 1.17. E&D:JJ/JI.

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know the meaning of the word

economy,

and who, in order to satisfy their slightest

whims, went into debt with nonchalance and inconceivable unconcern. H e inherited their same generous nature, only his fancies led him into the realm of art and culture. Had he been a millionaire he would certainly have ruined himself, but no doubt he would have enriched our artistic inheritance with accomplishments still more beautiful and grandiose than those he was permitted to produce. 1 "' 8

We have circled right back to Benois's description of the household of the Filosofov clan—Diaghilev's kin—with which we identified the roots of Mir iskusstva a generation before. But for a better view than any words can give of Stravinsky's spiritual and moral transformation at the hands of the Miriskusniki, compare two photographs (Fig. 9.5). The first shows Rimsky-Korsakov "amid the palms and yuccas" at Riva, a spa on the Lago di Garda in northern Italy (then Austria), where he went with his family on vacation in the summer of 1906. 139 The second shows Stravinsky at Ustilug during the summer of 1912, in a photograph he sent to Florent Schmitt, Maurice Delage, and other French friends of the "Apâche" persuasion. 140 The pictures were taken only six years apart, but their subjects clearly inhabited different mental and spiritual universes. Between the punctilious vested suit of the one and the insouciant nudity of the other lay a chasm Stravinsky could never have bridged without the contact with Russian bavins and Parisian bohemians that The Firebird had miraculously vouchsafed him. As he put it much later, St. Petersburg—until 1910 the center of his world—began to look "sadly small and provincial" after the success of his Paris ballet. 141 Nor did St. Petersburg, for its part, fail to notice the change in Stravinsky. Mme Siloti, née Tretyakova, who saw him during his first post-Firebird visit to his native city, wrote to her sister that "his head has swelled; he goes around like a genius putting on airs of modesty." 142 There would be no keeping this former protégé down on the farm, that was clear; from now on Stravinsky would operate on the world stage. And for a while, the more cosmopolitan the career, the more Russian the music, as Stravinsky came to terms with the radically new, neonationalist attitude toward the folk heritage that his new circle of friends and mentors espoused. If Tugenhold, in the inspired review of The Firebird (gaoled in the last chapter, had captured to perfection the esthetic tendency the ballet had represented as a whole, Stravinsky's music was still from that most important point of view the laggard element. 138. Stravinsky, "The Diaghilev I Knew," ;6. 139. Photo inscribed to Dmitriv Stasov, reproduced in N. A. Rimskv-Korsakov, Polnove sobraniye sochineniv: literaturnm proizrccicmyn i pcrcpiska, facing 5:465. 140. Robert Craft, éd., Igor and Vera Strannsky: A Photograph Album (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 69. On Stravinsky's relations with the musicians of the Parisian avant-garde who had referred to themselves somewhat earlier as "Apaches," see Pasler, "Stravinsky and the Apaches,"

403-5.

141. E&D:i54/n5. 142. Vera Siloti to Alexandra Tretvakova-Botkin, 28 December 1910; in Kutateladze and Raaben (eds.), Ziloti, 580.

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f i g . 9.5a. Rimsky-Korsakov "amid the palms and yuccas" on vacation at Riva in the southern Tvrol, 1906.

Yet as Debussy is said to have remarked to the composer, "What do vou want, vou have to start somewhere." 1 4 3 The really creative use of folklore would come later. Soon enough, Stravinsky, neonationalist bit between his teeth, would be far out in front.

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Now, the central irony—that as Stravinsky's career became more European, his music became more Russian—had a reverse side. The Firebird, with the single possible exception of the Balmont songs, was the last Stravinsky composition to be 145. K&D:i4y/ni. I65 o ]

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Igor Stravinsky at Ustilug, summer of 1912.

written wholly in Russia, and it was the first original work of his to have its première performance abroad. Conversely, his next composition, the Deux poèmes de Verlainc, op. 9 (the last Stravinsky work to bear an opus number), was the first to be composed abroad (at La Baule in Brittany in July 1 9 1 0 ) 1 4 4 and the last ever to have its première performance in Russia. T h e songs were sung bv Gualter B o s s é — a Riga-born, Italian-trained basso w h o had followed in the footsteps of Fvodor Stravinsky from the Kiev Opera to the Mariyinskv—at an Evenings of Contemporary Music concert at the St. Petersburg Lutheran School (the Reformatskoye nchilishche, Mitrofan Belyavev's alma mater) on 13 January 1911. They shared the

144. In a letter w r i t t e n at La Baule 011 27 Julv 1910, Stravinsky i n f o r m e d Nicolas Roerieh that the songs had been c o m p o s e d (see Inna Vershinina, ed., "Pis'ma 1. S t r a v i n s k o g o N. RcrikJiu," Sovetskava

muzika, 1966, no. 8, 59).

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program with works by Franz Schrcker (Der Geburtstag der Infant in), Max von Schillings, and a number of Russians, some even younger than Stravinsky. The reviewer for the RMG found Stravinsky's Verlaine settings "excellent," but not so good as the romance by Cherepnin performed alongside them by Bossé. 145 For a last ironic twist, just as the ballet premiered in Paris was the first Stravinsky opus in which the presence of authentic Russian folklore can be detected, so the songs premiered in St. Petersburg were the first Stravinsky pieces in which the stylistic inspiration was authentically, not just apparently, French. These tiny, strangely somber and ascetic songs, both of them in B-flat minor and together lasting under five minutes, were set to well-known poems, each of which already had a tradition in French music by the time Stravinsky came to them. 146 Innocuous though they appear in the context of Stravinsky's total output, the Poèmes de Verlaine have received a disproportionate share of unfavorable comment, from both the French side of the aisle and the Russian. 147 The native incomprehension was predictable. Karatïgin found them "exceedingly curious . . . in a definitely 'impressionist' style." 148 The normally worshipful Asafyev went further. He dismissed the songs as having been "written for Paris by a bashful pupil.... One felt that this was the wrong track." 149 But he was wrong in his assumption. The Poèmes de Verlaine were composed not for Paris but for Russia—and for a specific Russian. They were intended expressly for the concert repertoire of their dedicatee, the composer's brother Guriy Stravinsky, who was embarking, like his father before him, on a career as an operatic bass-baritone. As far as can be ascertained from surviving documents, Stravinsky never even showed these songs to Debussy or his other French friends, nor can prewar performances in Paris be traced. In Memories and Commentaries, Stravinsky "grieved" that Guriy, who was conscripted in the war of 1914 and died on the Romanian front three years later, "did 145. RMG 18, 110. 5 (1911), col. 137146. " U n grand sommeil noir" (from Sagesse, 1880), the first of them (though printed and now usually performed second in the orchestral version Stravinsky made in 1951), had been set by Ravel in 1895, while " L a lune blanche," as part of La bonne chanson, had been set by Fauré in his famous cycle (1894), and also bv Revnaldo Hahn (190;). " L a lune blanche" was set by Delius the same vear as it was set by Stravinsky. 1+7. The onlv unreservedly favorable rev iew these songs have ever obtained came from the dependable Mvaskovskv, who somewhat curiouslv saw in them the fulfillment of his wish that Stravinsky show a more personal creative profile. The entire short notice, which appeared in Muzika in issue 110. 65 (25 February 1912), 224, runs as follows: "Both pieces are written for bass-baritone and are full of temperament and color. 'Dushu skovali' (Ungrand sommeil noir) is a darkly meditative monologue of loneliness with poignant moments; 'Gde v lunnom svete' (La lune blanche) is an amorously contemplative sigh of practically unrestrained dreaming. The music is flexible, subtle, aromatic, responsive to the slightest spiritual vibration, and at the same time not devoid of outward descriptive character, executed with light, elusive strokes. The harmonies are most enchanting, and at the same time distinctive, very personal. The vocal parts, especially in the second piece, are fairlv difficult from the standpoint of intonation. The piano accompaniment is simple though not always grateful (again mainlv in no. 2). But the overcoming of these obstacles will be rewarded a hundredfold, tor these are pearls such as one rarelv encounters these days" (quoted in Shlifshtevn [ed.|, Myaskovskiy: stat'i, pis'ma, vospominaniya 2:50). 148. Apollon, 1910, no. 12, 4+n. 149. Glebov, Knicfa 0 Strannskom, 33.

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Igor and Guriy Stravinsky at Ustilug, 1908 or 1909.

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Nikolai Malko (1883-1961),

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not live to sing [the Poemes de Verlaine] professionally." 150 But Guriy did sing them, at least twice. In the Stravinsky Archive there survives a program for a concert put on by the Moscow branch of the Evenings of Contemporary Music (7 February 1914) at which Guriy sang the Verlaine songs, along with Gnesin's setting of Pushkin's "Sleeplessness" ("BessonitscC); also on the program were three of the four Stravinsky etudes, op. 7, and pieces by the Evenings stalwarts Medem, Karatigin, Senilov, and Mvaskovsky. The accompanist is not named. On 4 July 1914, Guriy sang the songs again, this time on an all-Stravinsky orchestral concert put on by the Moscow Municipal Gymnastic Association (Gorodskoy sokol'nicheskiy krujj) under the direction of Nikolai Malko. (The program also included the Symphony in E-flat, the Khorovod and Berceuse from The Firebird, and some excerpts from Petrushka.) Grigorv Prokofiev's review raises a point of prosody—one that would continue to bedevil Stravinsky for the rest of his career. T h e composer's brother sang t w o romances by Stravinsky. Devoid of the slightest hint of sensual melodic beaut}', these romances are quite unlike the usual w o r k s in this genre. In the melodic curves all is extravagant and unusual, even unnatural. But then, as an encore, Mr. Stravinsky sang one o f the romances he had just performed in its original language, French. W h a t a transformation! Extravagance and unnaturalness evaporated without a trace, leaving in their stead an astonishingly

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subtle g r a s p o f the poem's m o o d and a sort o f secret l y r i c i s m . . . . N o , Stravinsky's m u s i c h i d e s w i t h i n it s o m e g r e a t p o t e n t i a l i t i e s ! 1 5 1

French critics have hardly concurred with this judgment. Paul Collaer has called the Poèmes de Verlaine downright "upsetting" to a French audience; 152 and in the words of Robert Siohan, "These two songs are not in the spirit of Verlaine;... in order to appreciate [their musical idiom] properly it is best to listen to them without the French text (or in Russian translation, provided one is ignorant of that language)." 153 In fact it is obvious, not only from the fact that Guriy Fyodorovich sang the songs first in Russian and that they were published (1911) by Jurgenson with the Russian text set above the French, but also from strong internal evidence, that Stravinsky set his music not to Verlaine's French at all, but to a Russian syllabic paraphrase by his friend Stepan Mitusov, librettist of The Nightingale.154 One need only compare the opening of "Un grand sommeil noir" in its French and Russian versions to be convinced of this: the former glaringly transgresses French syllabic declamation in every way (see especially the title phrase, and also "je perds la mémoire" at the end of Example 9.43a), while the Russian faithfully and naturally renders the tonic stress of Stravinsky's native tongue (Ex. 9.43b). 155 In every other way, however, these songs are a chip off Debussy—no doubt Stravinsky's immediate response to what must have been a thrilling evening for him, when he attended a performance of Pelléas et Mélisande as the composer's guest. In later life Stravinsky professed to have found Pelléas "a great bore on the whole," 156 but in 1910 he paid it the sincerest form of flattery. "La lune blanche," in particular, seems a veritable mosaic of shards from Debussy's opera. It opens with what could have been one of any number of anhemitonic unison melodies in Pelléas, followed immediately by a phrase of mirror writing in thirds over a pedal (Ex. 9.44). Thereafter Stravinsky indulges in a whole panoply of "impressionist" devices: parallel doubling at various intervals including fifths, sevenths, and ninths; semitonal side-slips; static harmonic ostinati. What makes all this "French" instead of "Russian" is the freedom of texture and part-writing, and the avoidance of St. Petersburg's narrowly symmetrical harmonic treadmills. The harmonies are 151. G . P. Prokofiev, " T e a t r i muzi'ka," Russkiye vedomosti, 6 July 1914. 152. Paul Collaer, Strawinsky (Brussels: Éditions "Équilibres," 1930), 42. 153. R o b e r t Siohan, Stravinsky, trans. Eric Walter White ( L o n d o n : Calder & Boyars, 1965), 32. 154. It is interesting to compare Mitusov's rendering o f " U n grand sommeil noir" with Valeriy Bryusov's more literal translation, which conserves Verlaine's rhyme but sacrifices his syllabification. By a curious coincidence, Bryusov's version was published in Muzïka in the regular feature "Texts for M u sic" only six weeks before the issue in which Stravinsky's newly published setting was announced (cf. the issues o f 23 April 1911 [no. 24], 4 7 4 ; 10 June 1911 [no. 28], 611). T h e announcement specifically states that Stravinsky's songs were set to Mitusov's translations. 155. This was recognized by Georgiv Ivanov, the compiler o f the standard bibliography o f settings o f Russian poetry (Russkaya poèziya v otechestvennoy muzike 2:234), where these songs are counted as Russian and the texts attributed to Mitusov. 156. E & D : i 4 9 / i 3 i -

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IRONY

[655]

EXAMPLE

9-43

" U n g r a n d s o m m e i l n o i r , " m m . 1 - 5 as set t o French and

R u s s i a n texts

p p1p U n grand som-meil noir

mez,

tout

Je ne vois plus rien.

en - vie!

v

rEh •M•—p— ? 1 r r

zv

Dû - shu sko va

r sni

li

p

te

zhe - la

-

m— m—

U - sni - te, mech-tï,

ffî

n'ya

prp"7

Slab-net pa - myat',

++

" L a lune blanche," b e g i n n i n g

Tranquillo assai i f t i a ,

0

- — - r T

VP î

d—'

'

m

T

\

f

—

i

t

1

-

»

poco rit.

I p g ^ f

i

m

TT-

2

•t

—

*

1

U

M

[ G l o o m y d r e a m s h a v e o p p r e s s e d m y soul: sleep, h o p e s ; sleep, desires. M y m e m o r y

9

t—

N i - c h e - v o ne vi-zhu

grows weak; I c a n n o t see.]

EXAMPLE

Dor-

Je perds la mé-moi-re

rM M^r PM 1 '

m

mrâch - ni - ye snï:

p p % fr -

m

m

Tom-be sur ma vi - e: Dor mez tout es-poir,

:

-

EXAMPLE

9 -45

" L a lune blanche," m. 16

voiced without concern for melodic progressions, nor are traditional doublings observed, whereas both of these criteria of conventional school style had been studiously met in The Firebird. Compared with his fastidious model, Stravinsky's writing is slapdash. Seated happily at the keyboard, he was reveling in the illicit joys of "d'Indisme" for the first and practically the only time in his life. Still, it goes several steps too far to describe the music as "polytonal," as several writers have done, even where "a sequence of minor common chords whose roots descend by whole-tone intervals in the right hand is accompanied by a sequence of chords of the minor seventh whose roots rise by major thirds in the left." 157 Both the whole-tone scale and the circle of major thirds are symmetrical octave divisions—as any pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov knew only too well—related to each other precisely as third species counterpoint relates to second. The passage in question, from "La lune blanche," is really just a cerebrally conceived rotation a la Rimsky of ninth chords around a pedal—the kind of thing we have been encountering in Stravinsky since Fireworks, and therefore (for him) one of the more conventional moments in the song (Ex. 9.45). Of all the works of his early maturity, it is only in this insignificant opuscule that Stravinsky really appears to be " i n . . . revolt against poor Rimsky," 158 the result, one assumes, of all the attention that was being paid him by composers the Rimskian circle had long detested and feared from afar. Writing the Verlaine songs seems to have worked the revolt pretty well out of his system. In so doing, though, Stravinsky managed to produce a composition that seems fully at home neither on French nor on Russian soil. A certain mystery, moreover, surrounds the question of the work's intended medium. The version of the songs published in 1911 is evidently a clumsy piano reduction of an unpublished orchestral score. Little attempt can be discerned toward achieving a suitably pianistic realization; indeed, there are actually unplayable pas-

157. White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, 155. 158. E&D:i46/i28.

REVERSE

IRONY

[657]

sages, especially toward the end of "La lune blanche." Stravinsky has recorded the fact that the songs were "partially orchestrated" at the time and place of composition. 159 But the orchestration must have been completed by the summer of 1914, for the concert at which Guriy sang them in July of that year was an orchestral one. The version performed at this concert has vanished, however, along with the Pogrebal'nayapesn' and the rest of Stravinsky's papers and effects in Ustilug. An instrumentation of "Un grand sommeil noir" for a chamber orchestra (woodwinds in pairs, four horns, strings) survives in the Stravinsky Archive (Fig. 9.7). 160 It must represent a second attempt, though, for it is signed and dated with an inscription, "Instrumenté à Salvan (Valois) 27/VII1914"—that is, ten days later (adjusting for dates in Old and New styles) than the Moscow concert at which Guriy had performed the set. The second attempt must have failed, like the first, to satisfy the composer; for when he orchestrated the set for publication by Boosey & Hawkes thirty-seven years later, he appears not even to have looked at the 1914 score, so utterly different is the newer one. 1 6 1

Stravinsky's future development, in any case, was unaffected by the Deuxpoemes de Verlaine. By the time he wrote them he had already had his fateful "vision" of maiden sacrifice to Yarilo and was thinking ahead to what would become The Rite of Spring. Benois, to whom Stravinsky had no doubt long since confided the content of the new project, was also thinking ahead, as we may read in the closing paragraphs of his Firebird essay: My comments on the production may seem too severe or even unfair. However that may be, I have purposely not spared the darkest colors, for the most dangerous thing right now would be to believe the success we have made in Paris. I repeat, this ballet is the first in that series, which I would like to see develop forever and ever and reach the highest level of perfection. To be satisfied and contented at this point would be a real "crime before Apollo." For a beginning this is all good and wonderful, but it is absolutely necessary that we acknowledge in full all our errors, so as to go further. W h o will carry out this further development? W h o will participate in it? The majority of those who were involved in this first realization must remain in the 159. E & D : 152/134. 160. The score carries only the French text, but it is a palimpsest, the Russian having been "whited out" beneath it. This is further evidence that the Russian text was the one to which the music was actually composed. 161. In the 1951 score the orchestral ensemble is even smaller: the oboes, the bassoons, and two of the horns have been dropped. Stravinsky's concept of orchestration had become thoroughly linearized by 1951, so much so that the new score creates an impression of counterpoint (sometimes by actually adding imitations) to replace thefreistimmigehomophony of the original: see, for example, the clarinet and first h o m in the first four bars of "Un grand sommeil noir." The edition of that song for voice and piano published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1954 is actually a piano reduction (by Erwin Stein) of the newer, sparer 1951 orchestration.

[658]

9

•

MYTHS

FOR

EXPORT

f i g . 9.7. " U n grand sommeil noir," from manuscript signed and dated "Igor Strawinsky. Instrumenté à Salvan (Valois) 27/VII/1914" and dedicated "à mon frère Goury Strawinsky." The scoring is altogether different from the one published in 1953 for an ensemble consisting of two flutes, two clarinets, two horns, and strings. (Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel)

future, but one would like to see added to their number a few others as well— Roerich, Steblitsky [recte Stelletsky?], Bilibin. But most of all one would like to see planned work, genuine discipline, and strict control. All these wishes could be summed up best in a single wish: to have one's own theater, in which one could give oneself over fully to one's dreams, to that which entices one and forces one to work. One would like to have for ballet something like what the Moscow Art Theater has created for Russian drama. Just think what an artistic joy that would be for creators and spectators alike!162 The theater of Benois's dreams would shortly become a reality—though not quite the way he envisioned it—when the Ballets Russes were incorporated as an independent and permanent enterprise. This happened in 1911. The names Benois mentioned as the most desirable additions to the roster of artists were a veritable roll call of leading neonationalists, and Roerich headed the list, no doubt, because he and Stravinsky were already consulting about The Rite, a ballet through which the neonationalist impulse would reach an unprecedented, though clearly not undreamed-of, peak. The only thing Benois failed to predict was that which concerned him most directly. Within a couple of months he and Stravinsky would be hard at work on a ballet of which there had been no thought at the time of his writing. And through that unforeseen ballet, Igor Stravinsky would take a breathtaking, indeed Nijinskian, leap toward finding his unique composer's voice. 162. Benois, "Khudozhestvenni'ye pis'ma: 'Zhar-ptitsa.'"

[660]

9

•

MYTHS

FOR

EXPORT

IO

A

C O M P L E T E

• P U N C H

W O R K

OF

INTO

P I E R R O T

A R T

There may be other contenders for consideration as the greatest artwork Diaghilev ever catalyzed, but none rivaled Petrushka as a realization of Miriskusnik ideals. "It is, of course, the greatest achievement of the Ballets-Russes, their admitted masterpiece," wrote Benois's close friend Prince Peter Lieven, who went on to explain why in patendy Benoisian terms: "I cannot imagine any spectator who does not feel after experiencing Petrushka that mood of exalted satisfaction which can be given only by a great complete work of art." 1 "Complete work of art"—what is this but Gesamtkunstwerk, the ideal "for which we were ready to give our souls," in Benois's long since quoted phrase? By this yardstick Petrushka was peerless indeed. "It is difficult to believe from seeing and hearing Petrushka that this ballet was the result of a collective creative impulse," wrote Lieven. "Rather does it seem as if a single super-genius, equally gifted in music, art, painting and choreography, had conceived, devised, and staged this ballet."2 As for Benois himself, Petrushka was the work that finally justified his many years of propaganda on behalf of ballet and its potential as a major art form. "I know of no work of art that flows in such an unbroken stream (or rather, in such unbroken cascades, gushers, and floods).... The success of Petrushka as a ballet is all the more remarkable in that it proves that by balletic means one can convey dramatic situations and sensations that are absolutely impossible in drama or opera."3 1. Lieven, Birth of the Ballets-Russes, IJI. 2. Ibid. 3. Benois, "Khudozhestvenni'ye pis'ma," Rech', 4 August 1911; cited from Muzika, no. 39 (27 August 1911), 801.

[661]

These are assessments that few who have seen Petrushka will dispute. Hardly any other ballet or opera so richly deserves the reverence with which this one is so often handled in revival, with Benois's sets and costumes and Fokine's choreography preserved intact together with Stravinsky's music, with which they indeed seem wedded indissolubly. So high, in fact, are the artistic, esthetic, and even ethical virtues claimed for this work, that it is fairly confounding to recall the paradoxical circumstances of its genesis. The original conception of the music that would become Petrushka was unrelated to that or any ballet. Far from a "collective creative impulse," the ballet took shape in a disorderly and contrary fashion. In the second tableau, to cite the most extreme case—where Nijinsky's legendary performance in the title role further cemented the impression of "organicism" and added yet another "indissolubly wedded" factor to the whole—the scenario was applied ex post facto to a piece of preexistent (if not quite "abstract") instrumental music, and the choreography, reversing the traditional order still observed in The Firebird, was applied last of all. Where The Firebird had been a ballet ruled by the choreographer, Petrushka represented the first time that Stravinsky, in Lincoln Kirstein's memorable phrase, "made music, not to serve dance, but to control it." 4 This radical, indeed subversive departure transformed ballet forever. Yet the music that accomplished this feat was initially conceived without any premonition of such a role. The music of Petrushka accomplished another feat as well. Through it, Stravinsky at last became Stravinsky. To study the creative history of this great ballet, then, will be in large measure to witness Stravinsky's process of self-discovery. The proper evaluation of Alexander Benois's role in facilitating that process, so scandalously slighted in Stravinsky's memoirs and in the immense parasitic literature his memoirs have spawned, will be one of the missions of this chapter. HOW

IT

BECAME

A

BALLET

With the smashing success of The Firebird, Stravinsky's position within the Diaghilev enterprise, and within the Parisian musical world, was secured. There was immediate talk of sequels. In a letter to his wife of 27 July 1910, Leon Bakst mentions a ballet "on a subject from Edgar Poe" that Diaghilev "wants to assign to Stravinsky." 5 When Diaghilev broached the matter to Stravinsky, however, the latter was forced to admit that he was already working on a new project. He described the scene to Nikolai Roerich, his collaborator on what was then known 4. Lincoln Kirstcin, Movement and Metaphor: Four Centuries of Ballet (New York: Praeger, 1970), 19+. 5. Vershinina (cd.), "PisYna Stravinskogo Rerikhu," 62. In the end this assignment went to Chercpnin. His Maska krasnoy smcrti (The Mask of the Red Death), op. 42, subtitled "Choreodrama in One Act After Edgar Poe" (Moscow: Jurgcnson, 1915), was not produced by Diaghilev, although it was announced for the 191? season alongside Jeux and Le sacre du printemps (see "Plani S. P. Dyagileva," an interview in Petcrlmrqskava qazeta, 1 October 1912; in Zilbcrshteyn and Samkov [eds.], Dvajjilev 1:229).

I 66 2 ]

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as "The Great Sacrifice," in a letter written exactly one week after the Firebird première: I hadn't w a n t e d to tell h i m about it before, I said. A t this D i a g h i l e v b l e w up! " W h a t , " he said, " a secret f r o m me? F r o m m e , " he said, " e v e r y o n e is keeping sec r e t s — F o k i n e , y o u (that is, m e ) — h a v e n ' t I bent over backwards f o r v o u ? " etc. etc. etc. T h e r e w a s nothing f o r it, I saw. I couldn't g e t o u t o f this one. I asked only that they not give it away and I told them that R o e r i c h and I had c o m e up w i t h s o m e t h i n g . H e ( D i a g h i l e v ) and Bakst w e r e delighted. Bakst said it w a s very noble o f me! (?) W h a t I think is that they w e r e afraid o f B e n o i s , that is, o f m y secret dealings w i t h him, w h i c h had been D i a g h i l e v ' s immediate a s s u m p t i o n and at w h i c h he w o u l d have taken great o f f e n s e . 6

Benois and Diaghilev had fallen out over the attribution to Bakst (and not Benois) of the scenario for Fokine's ballet to Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade (the other big hit of the 1910 saison russe) in the printed program books. Benois went off to Lugano for the summer and wrote to Diaghilev that he would have nothing more to do with the latter's enterprises. 7 Diaghilev feared Benois's hold over Stravinsky, for a collaboration between them—or so Diaghilev thought—would have to be produced under other auspices than his. In light of the story that is about to unfold, nothing could have been more ironic. Stravinsky began his letter to Roerich in Ustilug, whither he had gone in a great hurry. In view of the reception The Firebird and Sheherazade had won, and in view of the forced cancellation of his London plans because of the death of King Edward V I I , Diaghilev had decided to extend the Paris season. After an excursion by the company to Brussels, there would be a pair of supplémentaires for The Firebird, on 5 and 7 July. Stravinsky had dashed back to Ustilug to collect his wife (plus their three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter) so that she could catch the last presentation. (Nikolai Richter and Andrev Rimskv-Korsakov also came to Paris for this performance.) 8 Mme Stravinsky was pregnant at the time, and it was decided to remain in Western Europe, where she would have a safer and more comfortable confinement than in Ustilug. Stravinsky proudly announced to Roerich: I must initiate you into o u r grandiose plans, a b o u t w h i c h vou k n o w n o t h i n g as yet. It seems that w e are g o i n g to spend the w h o l e year, till next s p r i n g , abroad. First w e are g o i n g to Brittany; . . . there w e will stay till fall. In the fall w e are g o Thc reason tor the failure to product seems to have been the absence of a suitable artistic designer. See Benois's letter to Diaghilev, written carlv in 1913, in w hich he declines the impresario's urgent request that lie take 011 the assignment (ibid., 2:121). 6. Vershinina (ecf), "Pis'ma Stravinskogo Rcriklui," 58 (letter of 19 June |2 Julv| 1910). 7. The whole storv is laid out from Benois's side in Rcmiiiiscmccs, 309-11. 8. Continuation of the letter to Roerich, dated 12 Julv 1910 at La Baule, Brittanv. In this part of the letter Stravinsky expresses dissatisfaction (which he attributes also to Andrev Rimskv-Korsakov) with the Firebird production, particularly Golovin's contribution. He might have been mcrclv buttering up one artist-collaborator bv putting down another.

HOW

IT

BECAME

A B A I. L E T

[66?]

ing to L a u s a n n e , w h e r e w e w i l l stay until the first o f N o v e m b e r ( N e w Style). F r o m N o v e m b e r till i A p r i l w e w i l l be living in Beaulieu near N i c e . T h e r e y o u have o u r plans. N o t bad, e h ? y

Stravinsky had to give Roerich this information because he expected to be collaborating with the painter all year on their new ballet. He had even written to Roerich from La Baule (Brittany), on 27 July 1910, that he had "begun to sketch a little something for 'The Great Sacrifice.'" 1 0 But then the unexpected intervened. According to Stravinsky's oft-quoted account in Chroniques de ma vie, "Before tackling the Sacre du Printemps, which would be a long and difficult task, I wanted to refresh myself by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part—a sort of Konzertstück"

He went on to state that "in

composing the music, I had in my mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios." 1 1 In an interview published in Les nouvelles littéraires more than seven years before the Chroniques appeared, Stravinsky had indicated a somewhat different program for this "combat between the piano and the orchestra": "In my initial conception, I saw a man in evening dress, wearing his hair long: the musician or the poet of Romantic tradition. He sat himself at the piano and rolled incongruous objects [des objets hétéroclites] on the keyboard, while the orchestra burst out with vehement protests, with sonic

fisticuffs."12

Stravinsky originally intended to call this bizarre spoof simply "Pièce burlesque," but he was not satisfied with such a neutral title. He meditated on the subject of the piece, "the droll, ugly, sentimental, shifting personage who was always in an explosion of revolt," and this is what put him in mind of the "guignol called . . . Petrushka in Russia." 1 3 Indeed, the impudent and obnoxious behavior of the piano in the Konzertstück, as described in these earliest accounts, goes very well with the image of Petrushka, the main character of the Russian folk puppet theater, who had given his name to the genre itself: in Russian, petrushka is used as a common noun to refer to the puppet theater and the skits presented therein. The petrushka was a staple of nineteenth-century Russian popular culture, a treasured part of every Russian's childhood experience—for instance, "Shura" Benois's: I had very early been enchanted by the Petrushka s h o w s , t h o u g h I cannot remember w h e n I saw the very first o n e , f o r I had the g o o d f o r t u n e as a small child to 9. Vershinina (ed.), "Pis'ma I. Stravinskogo N. Rcrikhu," 58. 10. Ibid., 59. 11. Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 31. 12. Florent Fels, "U11 entretien avec Igor Str.1v1n.skv à propos de l'enregistrement au phonographe de PétrouehkaNouvelles littéraires, 8 December 1928; in François Lesure, ed., Stravinsky: études et témoignages (Paris: Éditions Jean Claude Lattes, 1982), 248. 13. Program notes (London, 1927) tor Aeolian pianola rolls; typescript in the Stravinsky Archive; quoted here from the translation in P&D:67.

I 664 I

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see so many in such different places.... The coloured print screens go up, the musician places his instrument on a folding sack, his nasal, plaintive notes create the right atmosphere to stimulate your curiosity—and suddenly above the screens appears a tiny, hideous manikin. He has a huge nose, a broad smile that never leaves his lips, and on his head is a red-crowned hat shaped like a comet. He is astonishingly nimble and quick in his movements, with tiny hands which he uses effectively to express his feelings and thin little legs hanging over the top of the screen. Petrushka immediately assails the musician with silly, impudent questions to which the latter replies gloomily.... [Petrushka] continues to gesticulate, entering into a rude conversation with the musician; he insults him, squeals and giggles.... Sometimes the crowd around the screen roared with the kind of laughter produced by dirty jokes, and on such occasions my brothers threw conspiratorial glances at each other and Mamma looked anxious, hoping that Shourenka would not hear "ces choses indécentes." But Shourenka, even had he heard, would not have understood. In any case he was not interested in the text; he was merely excited by the actions and squeals of Petrushka.14

References to the petrushka have been traced as far back as the Kormchnaya kniga ryazanskaya, a codex of ecclesiastical law drawn up in 1284, and its roots have been speculatively identified with the cults of pre-Christian Russia, as practiced by the shamans who were the ancestors of what in the Christian era were known as skomorokhi, a term loosely and inadequately rendered into English as "minstrels" or "buffoons." 1 5 A connection between the modern petrushka and the cults of ancient Rus' survived in the fact that puppet showbooths (balaganï) flourished especially at the traditional Russian Shrovetide fair (maslenitsa), which embodied a great number of atavisms from the ancient Slavic seasonal festivals. The earliest account of what is arguably a petrushka play is found in a book published in 1636 by Adam Olearius, the Dutch ambassador to the Russian court, who gives both a written description and a drawing of a puppet performance. The drawing is reproduced in Figure 10.1; note, besides the one-man puppet show, the musicians accompanying it on the gusli (psaltery) and ¿¡udok (fiddle), and the trainer with his dancing bear in the background. Olearius's description is of a "chose indécente": "Those who lead Bears about, Juglers and Puppet-players, who erect a stage in a moment, by the means of a coverlet, which being ty'd about their waist, is brought over their heads, and within it show their Puppets, representing their brutalities and sodomies, make sport to the children, who are thereby induc'd to quit all sentiments of shame and honesty." 16 By the nineteenth century, the indigenous Russian tradition had commingled 14. Benois, Memoirs, 1:113-14. 15. Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 114-17. 16. Adam Olearius, The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors Sent by Frederick Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke cfMuscovy, and the King • » » :

» »

•

\t H

$

I

*

c. Trudi MEK, 1,512 (no. 43: Tambov, charcoal vendor), 510 (no. 27: Moscow, apple vendor) 3E3? U gley, 11 gley!

I

ftV Vft 1i r ^K K K 1

f"

t

1

U-gol'-kyov,

*

u-gol'-kyov

- i »

t — H — B Ya-blo-ki, ya bio ki, ya-blo-ki!

Ya bio ki,

ya blo-ki, va bio ki!

EXAMPLE

io.I

(continued)

d. Serov, The Power of the Fiend, Act IV, pryanichnik's cries 4 Ko-mu prya-ni-kov me do-vïkh,

ko mu pa-toch-nïkh de-sho-vïkh!

Par ni, par ni, po ku pai te!

Kras nïkh de vok u go-shchai te!

[Who'll have some pryaniki with honey, who'll have cheap ones with molasses! Buy them up, boys, give them to the pretty girls!]

THE

MUSIC:

SOURCES

The music with which Stravinsky clothed the outer acts of Petrushka reflects a concern for authenticity of genre detail to match Benois's, alongside a maximalistic impulse that is far more than a match for Serov's. So overdy and conspicuously does the score rely on folk and popular tunes of the most familiar sort, and so gaudily are these artifacts of everyday life displayed on the bright surface of the music, that discussion of the ballet's musical texture can easily degenerate into list making. A list is, nevertheless, a useful starting point for such a discussion, and dramatizes the extent to which Stravinsky resorted to citation. Pardy with the aid of recent Soviet research, moreover, it is possible to expand the list of borrowings well beyond anything hitherto available in any language. 96 The third column in Table i is tided "Documentation" rather than "Sources," since much of the music cited was in widespread oral dissemination and undoubtedly came to Stravinsky, as it did to millions of his countrymen, as part of his immediate life experience, without benefit of script or print. The fact that a given song can be documented in written form in no way implies that a source has been identified (with exceptions to be noted in the course of discussion). Conversely, the nature of the material that has been identified strongly suggests that a great deal of unidentified folk and popular material still lurks within the score. A case in point is the first item in the table. There is no reason to think that Stravinsky would have needed to consult a scholarly tome to obtain appropriate vendors' cries for setting the fairgrounds scene at the opening of the first tableau. Yet the cries notated by Listopadov (along with Grechaninov, Arakchiyev, and

96. Among the sources consulted in the course of drawing up the table were F. W. Sternfeld, " S o m e Russian Folk Songs in Stravinsky's Petrouchka," Music Library Association Notes 2 [1945]: 98-104 (reprinted in H a m m [ed.], Petrushka, 203-15); Igor Blazhkov, comp. and ed., "Pis'ma I. F. Stravinskogo," in IStrSM; Vershinina, Ranniye baleti Stravinskogo; Bachinskaya, Narodniye pesni. All information received from these sources has been subjected to an independent review, supplemented, amplified, and in many instances corrected.

THE

MUSIC:

SOURCES

[ 6 95]

T A B L E

I

Folk and Popular Tunes in Petrushka First Appearance First Tableau Opening

Identification Street vendors' cries (coal, apples, etc.)

Fig- [2]

"Song of the Volochobniki" ("Dalalïn, dalalïn" )

Fig. [12]

"Toward Evening, in Rainy Autumn" ("Pod vecher, osen'yu nenastnoy")

Fig. [13]

Émile-Alexis-Xavier Spencer ( 1 8 5 9 1921), chansonnette, "La jambe en Bois" (Paris: G. Siever, 1909) "A Wondrous Moon Plays upon the River" ("Chudnïy mesyats plïvyot nad rekoyu" )

Fig. [15]

Fig. [33] 2 after [34]

Third Tableau 5 after [71]

Fig. [72]

"A Linden Tree Is in the Field" (Viz, vo polye lipin'ka") "Song for St. John's Eve" (Ivanovskaya) ("Or da ya bezhu, bezhu po pozhenke")

Joseph Lanner, Steyerische Tdnze, op. 165 (1840) Lanner, Die Schonbrunncr, op. 200 (1842)

Documentation Alexander Mikhailovich Listopadov, "Vikriki raznoschikov" (Peddlers' cries), in TrudiMEK I (Moscow, 1906), pp. 510, 512 Rimsky-Korsakov, Sto russkikh narodnikh pesen (St. Petersburg: Bessel, 1877), no. 47 Stravinsky to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, 3/16 December 1910 ( I S t r S M : 4 5 1 52); Tamara Popova, Russkoye narodnoye muzikal'noye tvorchestvo, vol. 2 (Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1964), p. 169 (to the words, "Ne slishno shumu gorodskogo") Aeolian piano rolls program notes (Typescript dated London, 1927); also M&C:90/96 E. L. Zvcrkov (Swerkoff ), Sbornik populyarneyshikh russkikh narodnikh pesen (Leipzig: Jul. Heinr. Zimmermann, 1921), no. 32 (p. 38) Rimsky-Korsakov, Sto russkikh narodnikh pesen, no. 54 Fvodor Istomin and Sergey Lyapunov, Pesili russkofjo naroda, sobrani v ßuberniyakh Volqgodskoy, Vyatskoy i Kostromskoy v 1893 £fodu (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskoye Geograficheskoye Obshchestvo, 1899), no. 20 (p. 167) Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Oesterreich, vol. 65 (Vienna: Universal, 1926), p. 78 Ibid., p. 107

table First Appearance

i

Identification

(continued)

Documentation

Fourth Tableau P. I. Chaikovsky, 50 narodnikh russkikh 4 after [90] "Along the Road to Piter" CVdol'po pesen, obrabotka dlya fortep'yano v 4 ruki piterskof'), a.k.a. "I Was out at a Party (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1869); or Tertiy Early Last Night" ("Ta vechorrnladavo Filippov, 40 narodnikh pesen s soprovopiru bila") zhdeniyem fortepiano garmonizovannikh N. Rimskim-Korsakovim (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1882) Zverkov, Sbornikb populyarneyshikh Fig. [96] "Ah, Doorstep, Doorstep Mine" ("Akb Fig. [100]

Fig. [102]

russkikh narodnikh pesen, no. 10 (p. 14) Konstantin Vertkov, ed., Atlas muzikal'nikh instrumentov narodov SSSR (Moscow, 1963), pp. 2 3 - 2 4 ; also Trudi MEK II (Moscow, 1911), p. 2 4 6 Nikolai Afanas'yev, 64 russkiye narodniye "A Young Girl Walked Along the Carriage Road" ("Po ulitse mostovoy shla pesni, sostavlenniye na 4, na 3 Hi na 6 ßolosov (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1866) devitsa") vi', sent, mot seni") ("The Peasant Plays on a dudka")

Fig. [109]

"The Snow Thaws" ("A sneg

Fig. [121]

"We Await the Shrovetide" ("A mi maslenu dozhidayem")

tayef)

Vasiliy Prokunin and P. I. Chaikovsky, 65 russkikh narodnikh pesen dlya odmgo golosa s fortep'yano (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1881), no. 4 6 (p. 61) Rimsky-Korsakov, Sto russkikh narodnikh pesen, no. 4 6

other folklorists and composers) in the first volume of "Materials and Research on Folk Song and Instrumental Music" issued by the Musico-Ethnographic Commission of the Imperial Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography (the so-called M E K ) in 1906, are what we need to authenticate Stravinsky's reproductions (see Ex. 10.1c). 97 As to why Stravinsky thought to begin the tableau in this way, we need only return to the maslenitsa scene in Serov's Power of the Fiend, with its similar assortment of cries, including that of the pryaniki vendor hawking his pastries (Ex. io.id). 98 On the other hand, the second item in Table 1, the so-called Song of the Volochobniki, was definitely something Stravinsky found in a book—the same book he had drawn upon for the folk songs in The Firebird: his teacher's anthology of 1877. This song is not an urban one such as Stravinsky might have heard in situ. It is an 97. They also verify the accuracy of Stravinsky's quotation of the knife grinder's cry in E&D:j2/30. Cf. Grechaninov et al., " Vi'kriki raznoschikov," Trudi MEK 507 (no. +): allowing for matters of dialect, the words are just as Stravinsky recalled them. 98. Stravinsky recalled the pryanichniki, sellers of "cookies of the kind the Germans call Pfeffer-

kuchen," in E&D:3i/29.

THE

MUSIC:

SOURCES

[697]

Easter carol of Byelorussian provenance, found as far east as the province of Smolensk, where Rimsky's version was collected (Ex. 10.2a). It is traditionally sung by peasant carolers who go from town to town during Easter week serenading the homeowners and receiving eggs and beer in return." Stravinsky's use of this song, of which the first big tutti statement coincides with the appearance onstage of "a small band of tipsy revelers, prancing" (fig. [5]), has been cited as an instance of rather arcane humor and a "very small example" of "how familiarity with the Russian cultural background can enhance our understanding of Stravinsky's music." 100 The kind of familiarity called for in this case, however, is rather specialized and scholarly, and Stravinsky, far from counting on his (Parisian!) audience possessing such knowledge, probably lacked it himself. There is a simpler explanation. "Dcilalin\ dedcdin'" had been previously used (just as "incorrectly") by Rimsky-Korsakov himself in his opera Snegurochka (1880-81), where it serves as one of the themes in the chorus, "Seeing out the Shrovetide" (Ex. 10.2b). Thus Rimsky-Korsakov not only provided a precedent for the use of the melody, he even provided one for its association with the maslenitsa. Stravinsky's use of the tune, like his use of the khorovod melodies in The Firebird, stands revealed as yet another deliberate tribute to his teacher's memory. Also indebted to Rimsky is the scoring and voicing of the passage in which the Volochobniki theme makes its first appearance. It is sounded in the lower strings, bassoons, and contrabassoon in a characteristic heavy-gaited style of which the most distinctive feature is the odd doubling of the lower note of an octave at the third in apparent defiance of the laws of acoustics (Ex. 10.2c). The nearest precedent for such a texture can be found in Rimsky's Kitezh, in the choral prayer of Act III (Ex. io.2d). As Andriessen and Schönberger have shown, this effect became a permanent fixture of Stravinsky's style. They cite instances from The Rite of Spring, the Symphonies d}instruments a vent, the orchestration of the "Volga Boatmen's Song" as ersatz Russian anthem (1917), the Canticum sacrum, and other works. 1 0 1 They trace the origin of the device to the bear-trainer music in the fourth tableau of Petrushka rather than the Volochobniki in the first, and characterize its persistence in Stravinsky's music as "The Metamorphoses of Misha"—Misha being the traditional nickname of the bear (medved') in Russian folklore. As their own examples should 99. Remark by P. V. Sheyn, author of what was in Rimsky's day the standard work on Russian folk song, Russkiye narodniye pesni (St. Petersburg, 1870); quoted in N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sbornik russkikh narodnikhpesen (Paris: Bessel, n.d.), 96n. 100. Simon Karlinsky, "Stravinsky and Russian Pre-literate Theater," 19th-century Music 6, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 232: "The passing carousers have to be out-of-towners because the custom of Easter caroling existed only in Belorussia, in areas bordering on Poland, and was unknown in St. Petersburg where the action of Petrushka takes place. In their drunken state they are disoriented both geographically, thinking they are in their native village, and chronologically, confusing the Pre-Lenten Carnival with the Monday after Easter Sunday, still six weeks away, on which their announcement that Christ has arisen and request for Easter eggs would be customary and appropriate." 101. Andriessen and Schönberger, Apollonian Clockwork, 225-27.

[698]

10

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EXAMPLE

10.2

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, 100 Russian Folk Songs, no. 47 Vivace

i/

o

Da

la

~ t n T m

'

kres

Si

A

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Ü Ü l'in,

da

la

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n • fcd

a

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: 1 • —J

3 4 na

lin!

h•

mW ,

1» 14

N

ya,_

si

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ku,

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stos

hA1

na B o z h '

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1

ya!

[Dingaling, dingaling! Give us each an egg, Christ has risen, the Son of G o d ! ]

b. Rimsky-Korsakov, Snegurochka, Prologue, "Khar provodi maslenitsi" mm. +0-46 S o p r a n o and Alto

Ù

?

-V

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K h J KF W3W È ;t— d ' -teE i t I p p

shchai, pro

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V

shchai, pro shchai, Mas

le

V

le

ni

ij

=t

1

ni

+ -

r J

J

i

tsa;

pro

;

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[Farewell, S h r o v e t i d e ! ]

c. Petrushka, fig. Qj], cello, bass, bassoon, contrabassoon

t ^L: ¿): J

9

J

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d. Rimsky-Korsakov, Legend of the Invisible City qfKitezh, Act III, scene i, fig. 11671 Violin

n ^ H r — r — rf f — L p— Kin ssssd T e n o r and Bass

g

p

p

p

^ » W -« X *

c h u d - na

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1

iWaa&övK Queen of Heaven]

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have suggested, however, the effect had its origin in the imitation, by Rimsky and others, of traditional church singing, and conveys associations chiefly to ritual and liturgy. The episode with the organ grinder, the music box, and the two street dancers— beginning in earnest at fig. [12] after a preliminary whiff at [9]—was an afterthought, inserted by Stravinsky in December 1910 or January 1911, a month after he had reported to Benois (3 November) that he had completed the maslenitsa in the first tableau "up to the magic trick." 102 On 3/16 December he wrote from Beaulieu to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg: Friend, I beg of you, send me immediately two street (or is it factory?) songs, that is, rather, simply jot down on a scrap of paper the following two songs. One begins like this:

J

!

E

The other like this:

m

IS I can't vouch Sir the accuracy [of what I've written], I don't remember these songs, but I remember that you and Volodya used to sing them as a curiosity.103 The first begins on the words (or so it seems) " 'Twas on a night in rainy autumn." If you do this for me you'll be a real friend and I will pray to God for you always.... I need this stuff right away! For God's sake! And keep it a secret.104 Much later, Stravinsky recalled that Andrey "did send the music, but with words of his own fitted to it, facetious in intent, but in fact questioning my right to use such 'trash.' " 1 0 S Well might he have done, for these tunes were street songs of the cheapest sort—just like "La jambe en bois," fimile Spencer's "polka populaire" about Sarah Bernhardt and her wooden leg, which Stravinsky heard on a barrel organ outside his window in Beaulieu (Ex. 10.3a; Fig. 10.6a), and had already incorporated into the ballet by the time he requested its companions from 102. IStrSM:449, quoted above.

103. Radi kur'yoza, as given by Vershinina, Ranniye baleti Stravinskogo, 74; in IStrSM:452, as noted

above, the phrase reads "radi Guricha," "for the sake of Gurich." If this is not garbled, it may refer to Yakov Grigoryevich Gurevich, the headmaster of the jjimnaziya where Stravinsky had been a student, and where Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov in 1910 was teaching logic, philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy (see G. B. Bernandt and I. M. Yampolsky, Ktopisal 0 muzike [Moscow: Sovetskiy Kompozitor, 1971-89], 3:21). 104. IStrSM:45i-52. 105. E&D:i54/i35.

[700]

10

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Andrey, 106 only later discovering, to his dismay, that it was protected by copyright. 107 In a brief, nontechnical razbor he wrote for the Aeolian Company in 1927 to accompany his pianola roll of Petrushka (the typescript is in the Stravinsky Archive), the composer gave the words of the refrain as he recalled them being sung on the streets of Beaulieu (the accuracy of his memory can be gauged by comparison with Ex. 10.3a): Elle avait un' jambe en bois, Et afin qu'ga n's'voit pas, Elle s'Psait metti par en d'ssous Des rondelles en caoutchouc.

She had a wooden leg, and so that it should not be seen she had it fitted from beneath with rubber washers.

The use of such material did not altogether lack precedents in Russian music for the stage. The Power of the Fiend, once again, is the most germane, but RimskyKorsakov's use of what is surely the most trivial street song of them all—"Chizhik, chizhik,gde ti bil?" ("Birdy, birdy, where've you been?")—to characterize the idiotic Tsar Dodon in Le coq d'or was, one would think, the most legitimating for a Belyayevets. Stravinsky evidentiy did not know it, but "'Twas on a night in rainy autumn" was (approximately) the first line of a poem by the fifteen-year-old Pushkin, entided "Romance," that had long since passed into the oral tradition. It concerned an unwed mother and her child, and its opening quatrain ran as follows: Pod vecher, osen'yu nenastnoy, V pusti'nn'ikh deva shla mestakh, I tainoy plod lyubvi neschastnoy Derzhala v trepetni'kh rukakh.

Toward evening in rainy autumn, a girl was wandering in deserted parts, and the secret fruit of an unhappy love she held in her trembling arms.

The poem was first published in 1827 and was set almost immediately by two leading contemporary purveyors of sentimental romances, Nikolai De Witte (1811— 44) and Nikolai Alexeyevich Titov (1800-1875), both of whose versions appeared in 1829, almost precisely at the time of Petrushka's action. The tune by which Stravinsky knew the "Romance," however, was neither De Witte's nor Titov's, but a melody that circulated in Russia from mouth to mouth in a million guises, best known, perhaps, as a song of the post-Decembrist period, with words by Fyodor Glinka (the composer's cousin): "No city noise is heard" ("Ne slishno shumu gorodskogo"\ see Ex. 10.3b). This song was particularly widespread around the time of the Russo-Japanese War and the political disturbances of 1905, when it became the vehicle for endless satirical and seditious parodies. It was a tune any turn-of-the106. See his letter to Benois, 2/15 January 1911, in IStrSM.452. 107. M&C:9O/96.

THE

MUSIC:

SOURCES

[701]

f i g . i o . 6 . Sources of the organ-grinder tunes, a. Émile Spencer, La jambe en bois (Paris: Siever, 1909).

m r n off»».* m u n w i ¡f» « A « » ™ o«..VU»T.t ]\>. irrTUHUi» A»»* UM* »««•»>( Mn» CTWA.T. n«m» >••• »1 t a « » w ' l . .«»«MI memrmi, > » 0 » »m«ATrjk»M» n-mrw Ho.VlMA «"fc IWM»» . H » Hf'tHHMf-M-V Itr*» T » F « « . B»A*»*»*'» «Ti",ul Tn tawm AJ"« x«» n » w w »1. i i w B m T » »«•*» Uriwn ow » T»»*»» u, u u v i i i v «* >nA> MPCH Hf trTrtiuiv a»»Tr* « v . » ' « K ( . w n H nAT«f« r u n !.

n m u ^v MotA«» ! MH.TMa r*Kii irJUCakiA. ~*»TA me 0 T**f* A 1M HrftNVMaR PAAOtT* Cnn -iM.iKm rortkt* utu-i-uia HE ri'onrTT. ,V»TOT»I T»x**'k ,\i>i: M* a a f t t . i« !-aM.ew d m i u i B*fo n*4|IMI tX ***«*" 1HA I") ..11kA.IIA. TTtUHUUi. ».. » U U A • r n c . u m . u c i i SKA CiuoauArk "v »xo n»-»*ii ia >1.1A .*.»* HU.A HI. XIKIII« 1KAUR, Co CTTAXOMT. OH« « T i f A T M i H (XChMACl H TIMWTk MBiau

b. "Romance," by Pushkin ("'Twas on a night in rainy autumn"), illustrated by a Moscow broadside (printed 1854). This poem about an unhappy girl who abandons her child outside a stranger's house was a favorite lubok subject and, sung to a variety of tunes (including the one Stravinsky recalled in Petrushka), quickly passed into St. Petersburg street folklore.

EXAMPLE

10-3

a. Émile Spencer, " L a jambe en bois," refrain

y

0

§ * ù

i:

m

—

m

c; r

m :

m

*

F q

¿ = 1 Elle a

• i J M -

j. m

vait un' jambe en bois, s

i

m rJ

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0

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Et pour que ça n'se voit

^ f h t - ~ thi.-iT

T

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a.

f

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m

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1

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Ah!

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pas

1

sait mettr' par en d'ssous Des ron dell's en ca out chouc,

i•

M

M

H Pi

, ]

F

vait un' jambe en bois Mais comme cil' por tait des bas, Ceux qui n'I'a vaient pas tâ— i r

* 1

•

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»

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W

-

F '

tée Ne s'en s'raient ja mais dou té.

•fi

.

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0


r

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11}

, recited pribautki, called rayoshniy stikh (pccpshow verse). 125. Lcvfert, Balaflani, 65. 126. Karlinskv, "Stravinskv and Russian Prc-litcratc Theater," 217.

THE

MUSIC:

SOURCES

[713]

EXAMPLE a. Petrushka,

1 0 . 1 0 3 after [ 3 ]

Flute and Oboe

t vsnrf ffi " f t

fEfffrffi

r? r r1 f l i r t i

7 1—

...

;

7 L-J

- = -

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m.

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u

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F •

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EXAMPLE

«

W C

4 J 4 J 4 J 4 * 4- «• 4 • * ! 0 n» 2—p m y * g — ^ - f — c — 1

~m t

10.13

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian Easter Overture, 9 after [k] M

1 i i 1 j • 1

£

! -

} 1

f

-i

1 jt0 0* 0 * 0 :

1

£

* ..

b. Petrushka, 2 after 1118 |

r

1 1 « j—•—0

*

-

r

£

£

t i *—

— 0 — [ — 0 —

EXAMPLE

10.14

a. Chaikovsky, The Nutcracker, Act III, 2 after | 2 4 0 h a r p s and celesta

É

—

2 Harps and Celesta (8va aha)

hpf r r&— 1 — *

r T — • r j—

>

r

——* r

—i

» r

—!—»

b. Petrushka, fig. |27|, harps and celesta 2 Harps (a 2) " » . *

»

, ' » . * # . ' » .# • . * « . ' .

* w [

t r

[ » f

i

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0 1*

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Celesta (a 2 m.)

7F¥= 0 —-0

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might have guided Stravinsky in the neonationalist renovation of his style? Karasyov suggests the answer in closing his rather melancholy account of the decline of Russian musical nationalism in the post-Rimskian period. After the gloomy prognosis already quoted, he injects a fairly forced and desperate note of hope: The musical resources of folk song are not exhausted; the laws of its construction have not yet been established. This is proved by the latest recordings of it, especially the phonographic ones, which give us much that is new and unusual in the area of rhythm and counterpoint. Those original rhythms of 11/4, 7/4, 9/8 asymmetrically divided, and others, with which Rimsky-Korsakov delights us in Sadko, Saltan, Kitezb—are only a start toward applying those lessons in rhythm that folk song gives. It will yet show us many possibilities, and the path in its direction has as yet been far from traveled to the end. 133 Wittingly or not, Karasyov had hit the nail o n the head. The seeds of a true neo-

near the end of the first tableau of Raymonda (the harp solo a little later in Glazunov's score is even closer, in fact, to the Petrushka tune); see his study "The Tribulations of Nationalist Composers: A

Speculation Concerning Borrowed Music in Khovanshcbina," in Musorgsky: In Memoriam, 1881-19S1,

ed. Malcolm H. Brown (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), i72n.8. The resemblance seems real enough, but, given the deliberate banality of the Magician's music, it also seems barbed, whereas the Rimsky-Korsakov borrowings are undeniably sincere tributes. 133. Karasyov, "Narodnoye tvorchestvo i Rimskiy-Korsakov," 377.

[722]

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f i g . 10.8. Yuliy Nikolayevich Melgunov (1846-93), an early connoisseur of Russian folk polyphony.

Russian renaissance in music, seeds which finally bore fruit in Stravinsky's music beginning with Petrushka, were to be found not in the work of composers, but in the work of a new school of musical ethnographers. The movement had its start in the work of Yuliy Nikolayevich Melgunov (184693), a Moscow pianist who became a disciple of the German philologist Rudolf Westphal (1826-92) during the tatter's tenure at the Katkov Lycee in Moscow (1875-79). Westphal was convinced that Russian folk song, by reason of its antiquity, its richness, and its remarkable state of preservation, "occupies one of the foremost places in Indo-European literature" and, indeed, "absolutely the first place among the folk song heritages of the peoples of the world." 1 3 4 Westphal set Melgunov to the task of studying the metrics of Russian song according to the principles of Aristoxenus, of whom Westphal was the leading nineteenth-century interpreter.135 In keeping with the unyielding precepts of Teutonic philology his mentor had instilled in him, Melgunov rejected all existing anthologies of folk song as unscientific and did his own empirical field research in a town called Tishinino in the Kaluga guberniya of central Russia, to the south and west of Mos134. R. Westphal, "O russkoy narodnoy pesne," Russkiy vestnik 143, no. 9 (1879); in P. A. Vulfius, ed., Russkaya mist' 0 muztkal'nom fol'klorye (Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1979), 173. 135. Westphal's own research along these lines in German classical music found its ultimate expression in his Allgemetne Theorie der musikalischen Rhythmik seit J. S. Bach auf Grundlage der Antiken (Leipzig, 1880).

MUSICAL

NEONATIONALISM

[723]

cow. And it was there that he made his great discovery, one that completely eclipsed the study of metrics that had been his original assignment. This was the realization, up to that point all but unreflected and unremarked in the scholarly literature (except, ironically enough, in the eighteenth-century anthology by Lvov and Pratsch), that Russian folk singing was by nature polyphonic. 136 In his epoch-making publication Russian Songs Transcribed Directly from the Voices of the People (Russkiye pesni, neposredstvenno s golosov naroda zapisanniye [Moscow, 1879]), Melgunov for the first time named and attempted to transcribe without prejudice the so-called podgoloski (literally, "undervoicelets") of Russian song—that is, to notate not only the main tune of a given song, but also the heterophonic aspects of its performance practice. Where, with a few negligible exceptions, previous Russian field transcribers (including Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov) had collected songs from individual informants, Melgunov and, following him, Nikolai Yevgrafovich Palchikov (1838-88), a rural justice of the peace and amateur ethnographer, took them down from groups of singers, that is, as they were actually sung by the peasants. Palchikov's account of his tribulations in transcribing the songs sung by the peasants in his own village of Nikolayevka (Ufa guberniya) in the Urals is vivid, if idiosyncratic: From my conversations during transcription sessions it became clear to me that the Nikolayevka singers made no distinction between single-voiced singing (that is, a song sung by one singer) and choral singing. They told me straight out: "this

["mi etogo ne razbirayem"], " w e sing all songs in [soobshche]," "all songs can be sung all together [vmeste]." All these "in

doesn't mean anything to us" common

commons" and "togethers" indicate that a fully realized performance of a song in Nikolayevka can be given only by a chorus, and individual singers can sing only elements or parts, so to speak, of the song—the tunes out of which the whole song is assembled by the chorus. In the course of further work it came to me that the chorus of Nikolayevka peasants had its own peculiarities, namely, that none of the voices

merely accompanies a given motive. Each voice reproduces the tune (mel-

ody) in its own way, and it is the sum of these tunes that constitutes that which can fairly be called "the song," since it reproduces everything, with all the nuances that one encounters exclusively in the peasant chorus and not in any one individual performance.... All songs therefore are presented in my anthology in several variants (from six to ten and even more), and if all these variants are sung at once or

136. Even Pyotr Sokalsky (1832-87), often counted the first of the "modern" Russian musical folklorists in the sense that he stressed (in the title of his fundamental book on the subject) the "distinction" of the melodic and rhythmic traits of Russian folk music "from the principles of contemporary harmonic music," stated it as axiomatic that it was "completely devoid of harmony" and in this sense corresponded to the primeval stage of musical-historical development, conceptualized in terms of progress from "monophonic" to "polyphonic" to "harmonic" (Russkaya narodnaya muzika,

velikorusskaya i malorusskaya, vyeyo stroyenii melodicheskom tritmicheskomi otlicbiyayeyo ot osnov sovremen monicheskcy muziki [Kharkov, 1888]; in Vulfius [ed.], Russkaya misl' 0 muzikal'nom fol'klorye, 142). Nev-

ertheless, certain transcriptions of Balakirev (1866) and Rimsky-Korsakov (1877) had shown awareness of what were known as podgoloski—the improvised "undervoicelets" of peasant singing (indeed, even such eighteenth-century Russian composers as Fomin reflected them in their singspiel choruses). Dis-

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else performed on any kind of similar instrument with sustained tone, then what results will be an almost complete representation of the kind of choral performance that the people themselves give the song, and of the manner in which one and the same tune is developed by the p e o p l e . 1 3 7

Palchikov goes on to warn the reader that the results are dissonant and deviant by the standards of European common practice. He "excuses" them by noting that "individuals who have no reputation [as musicians], but who are participating in choruses and in khorovods together, sing the song as it had once 'hardened' for them; they do not accommodate one another but sing as they are accustomed." 138 The more "scientific" Melgunov, in contrast, promoted an aggressive, radical acceptance of Russian podgoloski harmony, setting it up as an authentic and exciting alternative to the common practice: "The properties of this counterpoint, of course, differ from the ordinary kind worked out by music theory. It could be that many connoisseurs might even be horrified by the forbidden parallel fifths, but these fifths are in no way any more terrible than the parallel fourths musicians do admit." 139 With manifest bravado, Melgunov lists additional offenses against conventional musical propriety: "appoggiaturas to notes already sounding in other voices," the final occursus to a unison in place of the usual cadence ("creating an impression that fully satisfies the listener; to replace such a unison with a major or minor triad would be incomparably less beautiful"), and so on. Nor did his stark heterophonic harmonizations fail to horrify the connoisseurs, among them Rimsky-Korsakov, who recorded his verdict on Melgunov ("a dry theoretician") and the latter's collection ("barbarous") in his autobiography.140 Melgunov's collection had been brought to Rimsky's attention by his friend the neo-kuchkist critic Kruglikov, who wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov (9 October 1879) of the impression the book had made on him: All I can say is that the experiments in harmonizing Russian folk songs which Melgunov shows us in his collection are for me very unsuccessful. Naturally I am

cussing the matter of podgoloski one day with Yastrebtsev (4 April 1894), Rimsky-Korsakov expressed his impatience with the pedantic theories of the folklorists thus: "You know what irritates me most of all about this whole business? It is that none of those who were shouting for and against Melgunov took the trouble to look into the score of [Rimsky-Korsakov's opera] May Night [1878], where in the Trinity song (Act I), before Melgunov's anthology came out, I was already using, and very artistically, mind you, those so-called podgoloski he is supposed to have discovered" (Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:166). Rimsky's "podgoloski," it hardly needs to be added, follow conservatory rules of voice leading. That, of course, is what he meant by "very artistically, mind you." 137. N. Ye. Palchikov, Kresfyanskiye pesni, zapisanniye v sele Nikolayevke Menzelimkogo uyezda Ufimskoy gubernii (St. Petersburg: A. Ye. Palchikov, 1888); in Vulfius (ed.), Russkaya misl' 0 muzikal'nom fol'klorye, 210. 138. Ibid., 211. 139. Melgunov, preface to Russkiye pesni; in Vulfius (ed.), Russkaya misl' 0 muztkal'nom fol'klorye, 181. 140. My Musical Life, 257. MUSICAL

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judging them only on the basis of my own taste, but it seems to me that all his harmonizations, with very minor exceptions, arc very unattractive, and the parallel fifths one sometimes encounters in them, though they are specifically dealt with in the preface, are simply ugly. It could very well be that all the unattractiveness and ponderousness of his harmonizations arc not even the result of the incorrectness of his theoretical views on the matter—maybe his theory is even right in many ways. In that case I dare surmise that Melgunov is simply an ill-informed musician, and one, moreover, without much taste. 1 4 1 In his next m a j o r essay o n the subject o f R u s s i a n f o l k music, M e l g u n o v resumed the offensive against his critics. H i s f o r m e r tone o f polite irony gave w a y t o a veritable blast at the academicism o f the " R u s s i a n S c h o o l . " A f t e r a w i t h e r i n g critique, n o t o n l y o f the w o r k o f previous folk s o n g harmonizers (not s p a r i n g the kuchkists a m o n g t h e m ) , b u t also o f the w a y R u s s i a n c o m p o s e r s past and present (including Dargomi'zhsky and R i m s k y - K o r s a k o v ) h a r m o n i z e d f o l k s o n g s in their o r i g i n a l c o m p o s i t i o n s , w e find a passage o f positively Ivesian bluster: Let five or six muzhiks get together, one will strike up a tune, the others will join in with their podjjoloski, and it will all come out amazingly well. N o w invite a few patented professors of music, grown wise in contrapuntal lore, ask them to strike up a Russian song, and see what happens. Not one professor could join his voice to a peasant chorus without spoiling it. Could it be that musical training must inevitably lead to the destruction in any person of that natural gift which is so obviously apparent in peasant singing?. . . Small wonder that to a conventional musician so much folk music seems wild and incoherent. 1 4 2 M e l g u n o v then lists " t h e chief deficiencies o f c o n t e m p o r a r y musical e d u c a t i o n , w h i c h are h o l d i n g back the f u r t h e r d e v e l o p m e n t o f R u s s i a n m u s i c . " F i r s t and forem o s t is the lack o f training in r h y t h m , leading to " t h e inability to w r i t e in a R u s sian m e t e r . " 1 4 3 T h e end o f the essay is a veritable jeremiad: N o true lover of beauty can escape being overcome with despair at the icy indifference of the Russian musical intelligentsia toward the dying out of Russian folk song. Little hope remains of saving the remnants of this heritage of folk creative genius, disappearing now with astounding rapidity... . The coming generation will of course lose it all, since favorable conditions for the development of Russian song have significantly d e c l i n e d . . . . Is it not the sacred obligation of our musical institutions to undertake immediately the collection of what remains of folk poesy in all corners of Russia, in order to save it from the all-devouring ravages of time? 1 4 4 141. N . A . R i m s k v - K o r s a k o v , Polnoye sobraniye socbtnenii: literaturniyeproizvedeniya

iperepiska 8a:27.

142. Y. N. Melgunov, "O ritmc i garmonii russkikh pesen: iz posmertnikh bumag Yu. N. Melgunova" Trudi MEK 1:394—95143. Ibid., 395—96. 144. Ibid., 398. [726]

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This magnificent burst of musical Slavophilia was written in 1884, but it was not published until 1906; and it appeared in a source we have good reason to believe Stravinsky knew and treasured, one that also contained the work of the one neonationalist ethnographer whose activity seems to have had a direct and demonstrable impact on his artistic development. And who was that? First, a litde more background. In their attempts to discover, as Bilibin might have said, a musical America in the Russia of old, the early collectors of podgoloski, likewise their informants, were faced with well-nigh insuperable problems. When asked by a Melgunov or a Palchikov to perform each podgolosok in turn for the transcriber, "the singers, unaccustomed to singing separately, complied with difficulty" and with many distortions. 145 These early attempts at polyphonic transcription, reviled as they were by Kruglikov and Rimsky-Korsakov, were indeed far from an unqualified success, whether scientific or artistic. The problems were solved with the advent of the phonograph. The first collector in Russia to make use of this revolutionary tool was Yevgeniya Eduardovna Linyova (1853-1919), who began her ethnographic activities in 1897 and who published three sensational sets of polyphonic song transcriptions, totaling sixty-five in all, between 1904 and 1909. Unlike Melgunov and Palchikov, Linyova was regarded by no one as a crank. Indeed, her work was considered so important that it was even published—in Russia—in English translation. 146 Her first publication—an account of an expedition to the Novgorod guberniya, where she collected the songs that would be published the next year in the first volume of her Peasant Songs of Great Russia—appeared in the journal Etnograficheskoye obozreniye (Ethnographic Review) at the beginning of 1903. She ended the article with a word on behalf of her phonographic method, which she was among the very first Europeans to adopt. 147 "I look upon the phonograph," she wrote, as an astonishingly useful notebook, which, of course, is understood best by the one who has taken the notes. I personally could never notate all the voices during performance: I notate too slowly. A song successfully recorded on the phonograph 145. Swan, Russian Music and Its Sources, 26. Alfred Swan (1890-1970), an English musicologist w h o spent much o f his career in the United States, was born in St. Petersburg and studied in the conservatory there under Kalafati, Stravinsky's early teacher. H e was one o f the very few non-Russians to have personally engaged in field collecting o f Russian polyphonic folk song from the singing o f peasant choirs, and his comment is made from personal professional experience. His transcriptions were made in the Russian-speaking part o f then-independent Estonia in 1936 and published just before the war (St* Russian Folksongs from Gorodisbche, Pechorsky District, Estonia [Leipzig: Belai'eff, 1939]). 146. Linyova's publications with music are as follows: "Opi't zapisi fonografom ukrainskikh narodni'kh pesen," Trudi MEK 1:221-66; Velikorussktye pesni v narodnoy garmonizatsii, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaya Akademiya Nauk, 1904-9) (English trans.: The Peasant Songs tf Great Russia as They Are in the Folk's Harmonization: Collected and Transcribed from Phonograms by Eugenie Lineff [St. Petersburg, 1905-12]). 147. Barbara Krader, "Ethnomusicology," in New Grope Dictionary 6:276. According to Krader, Linyova (1897) was the second, after Béla Vikàr in Hungary (1896; Bartók began using the phonograph ten years later). Linyova, whose husband was a political exile from Russia from 1891 to 1896, had discovered the phonograph at its birth site, the United States, where it had been used to record American Indian folk music as early as 1890.

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f i g . 10.9a. Yevgeniva Eduardovna Linyova (1853-1919), pioneering phonographic folk song collector. retains all aspects of its rhythmic and harmonic character. Every song, if given the chance to take written shape in exactly the form imparted to it by the singers— improvisers who subordinate the tune to the words—every song, I repeat, assumes a particular and musically interesting character.148 By the time she published her third and last major collection in 1909, Linyova was making stronger claims for the phonograph and its cultural significance. Its value, she now contended, went far beyond its usefulness as an aide-memoire or as a documentational device. Linyova's mature position is in fact a fully formed neonationalist program; apart from a tew indirect hints by the curmudgeonly Melgunov, she was the only musician in Russia up to that time to put forth such ideas: With the principle of studying folk song from authentic materials—and I especially insist on the use in practice of only the most utterly authentic materials, obtained directly from singers in the field and recorded with the aid of the phonograph, the best possible notebook for a collector—and with the application of the comparative

148. Y. E. Linvova, "Dcrcvcnskivc pesni i pevtsi," in Vulfius (ed.), Russkava misl'0 muzi'kal'nom fol'klorve, 252.

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THE

PEASANT SONGS OF

GREAT RUSSIA AS T H E Y A R E IN T H E F O L K ' S HARMONIZATION.

COLLECTED

AND

TRANSCRIBED

FROM

PHONOGRAMS

BY

EUGENIE LINEFF ii

MEMBER OF THR COUNCIL AND S E C R E T A R Y T O T H E MUSICAL COMMISSION OF T E E SOCIETY

OF N A T U R A L

PHYLOSOPHY, IMPERIAL

PUBLISHED

BY

THE

ANTHROPOLOGY

AND

ETHNOGRAPHY,

GEOGRAPHICAL S O C I E T Y ,

I M P E R I A L

IMPERIAL

MEMBER

OF

THE

ETC.

ACADEMY

OF

SCIENCE.

T H E FIRST SERIES.

ST. PETERSBURG. Sold

by

David

Nutt,

Long

Acre,

London,

for

England

and

America,

f i g . 10.9b. Title page (in its English-language version) of Linvova's seminal work Velikorusskiye pesni v narodnoygarmonizatsii.

method, the artistic significance of folk song is vastly increased, since the possibility presents itself of gaining a closer acquaintance with the musical form of folk songs of various nationalities, which must have a great influence on the work of composers and, generally, on the future development of music. 1 4 9 Thanks to the phonograph, then, it was for the first time possible to preserve and assimilate a musical artifact in the way a visual artifact is preserved and assimilated. Only now, Linyova implies, can musicians even aspire to a neonationalist style. She goes on to make quite a prophecy in this regard—one that will remind us o f Bilibin's passionate harangue published in Miriskusstva

five

years earlier, and

one that the young Stravinsky may have found inspiring:

It is probable that in spite of many unfavorable conditions, folk song, in the process of disappearing in the countryside, will be reborn, transformed, in the works of our composers. It will be reborn not only in the sense of borrowing melodies from the folk—that is the easiest and least gratifying means of using it; no, it will be reborn in the sense of style: free, broad, and lyric; in the sense of bold and complex voice leadings, the voices interlacing and separating, at times fused with the main melody, at times departing radically from it. A rebirth of this k i n d . . . we await in bold and interesting compositions by musical innovators, both at home and abroad. 1 5 0

W e may obtain a better focus on the neonationalist implications o f Linyova's remarks by comparing them with the reactions o f the eighty-year-old Stasov. L i n yova sent this great and venerable figure a complimentary copy of her 1904 publication and received a typically garrulous, deliriously enthusiastic

response,

which, just as typically, missed the point by miles:

In my opinion, right here, in these works of yours, the dawn is beginning of some sort of powerful musical revolution in music [«c] (above all, in Russian music). Particularly in choruses. Dargomi'zhsky, Musorgsky took huge steps forward in the area of a new, and the only proper, form of singing and expression in opera (Russian, that is). Their comrades, men of talent and genius, seized upon and mightily continued the revolution begun by them. But choruses remained in their former, backward, false state of artificiality, convention, and complete implausibility (in spite of all the beauty and originality they often contained). But now things are stirring even here, and even with choruses there is bound to take place a complete revolution and upheaval in opera. And, evidently, this revolution is reserved for Russia, for the Russian musical school. Convention and implausibility must disappear; truth and naturalness are approaching even in choruses. They will stop being sung nicely and conventionally; they will begin to be performed with all the truth, caprice, irregularity one finds on the lips of the people, with all the changes 149. Linvova, Velikorusskiye pesni 2:lxxii, including an author's footnote. 150. Ibid., lxxv.

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in the quantity of the singing personnel, from among whom some enter and join in, others fall silent for a few seconds and start up again when they're good and ready, still others keep the music rolling along straight through without stopping; and also with all kinds of shifts in rhythm, tempo, and even mood, such as characterize real people, feeling and creating something "all their own" in the chorus, quite oblivious of any commanding, considering, or devising author. Such will be, in mv view, the operatic choruses of the future. It is long since time, long since time that the old, stiff, frozen choral forms were smashed to smithereens. How long have I been dreaming of something like this. How long ago have I spoken of this revolution—with Musorgsky. He agreed with me, intended to make a start, to try his hand at something of the sort—but he didn't make it for he died too early. All the same, a few attempts by him do exist in the Prologue or Introduction to Boris Godunov: "The people on the Kremlin Square.'" 51 Such a letter from such a patriarch would be a coup in anyone's book, so of course Linyova published it in hers. But this last gasp of kuchkism had little or nothing to do with her esthetic concerns. Stasov was still shadowboxing with specters from the 1860s—still insisting on his peculiar rosy meliorism, still defending realism against Italianate and academic convention, still sounding a clarion call to Russian messianism, all the while oblivious that realism had become the academic style of the moment or that conventional Russianisms had become a cliche. The extent of the esthetic gulf that separated Stasov from the true import of Linyova's publication can best be measured where he speaks of individualizing every member of the chorus. This was the great watchword of sixties art criticism: the individualized crowd, whether portrayed in sounds by a Musorgsky or in paints by a Perov, 1 5 2 and it was still kicking around at the Moscow A r t Theater and in other pockets of unregenerate realism. Folk song had been defined by Chernishevsky, the archdeacon of Russian realist theory, as "natural singing," in its origins the spontaneous outpouring of individually experienced joy or sorrow. 1 5 3 Real ethnographers like Linyova knew better, and their writings gave considerable aid and comfort to the theorists of early modernism. For Linyova, the folk singer was not a person at all while engaged in singing, but a vessel. In her prefaces she included many vivid excerpts from the diaries she kept in the course of her fieldwork, which testify to the essentially emotionless quality of folk performance, the "profound gravity and cool inevitable intention" noted by many twentieth-

151. Ibid., lxxiv. 152. These names have not been selected at random. Cf. Stasov, "Perov i Musorgskiv" (1885), in Izhranntye sochineniya 2:113—52. 153. See N. G. Chcrni'shevskv, The Esthetic Relations of Art to Reality, in Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 346-47. This conception of folk song had influenced not onlv the composers of the mighty kuchka, but also the playwright Ostrovskv; cf. R. Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s (Ann Arbor: U M I Research Press), 169-70.

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century ethnographers. 154 That Linvova calls this quality "classical" will certainly ring a Stravinskian bell for us, but it was a common idea among the artists in whose company Stravinsky came to his artistic maturity. 155 In the extract that follows, Linvova describes a particularly memorable field experience involving a peasant woman to whom she refers only as Mitrevna ("Dmitriy's daughter"), the patronymic form of address used by peasants with their peers: She started singing my favorite song, "Luchinushka" ["Little Torch"], which I had been looking for everywhere but had never succeeded in recording. Mitrevna took the main melody. She sang the zapevala [solo intonation] in a deep sonorous voice, surprisingly fresh for a woman so old. In her singing there were absolutely no sentimental emphases or howlings. What struck me was its elegant simplicity. The song flowed evenly and clearly, not a single word was lost. Despite the length of the melody and the slowness of the tempo, the expression with which she invested the words of the song was so great that she seemed at once to be singing and speaking the song. I was amazed at this pure, classical strictness of style, which went so well with her serious f a c e . 1 5 6

Linyova strewed through her account many quotations from what was said at her recording sessions. One that she emphasized particularly was the oft-heard condemnation of what the peasant singers called vertikuli, and which we might as well translate as "verticules," that is, purely spontaneous, self-expressive embellishments. "Oh, that's terrible the way your voice is wagging," a singer would complain if one of her partners began expressing herself. "Get rid of those verticules, just say the song straight." 157 A singer whom Linyova particularly admired sang a song that had relevance to recent, intense personal tragedy, but nonetheless, "from the external standpoint the song was simple, strictly rhythmical, and not for a minute did it exceed the limits of artistic truth." 158 "Could it be," wondered Linyova, "that the unselfconscious art of the people, in its purely classical simplicity of performance, surpasses even the highest level of training worked out by professional artists? Precisely because the folk singer makes the song himself, it flows as if involuntarily and artlessly." 159 How close this is to notions of depersonalization and dehumanization, so central to the theory of modern art, 160 not to mention the esthetic distancing and abstraction we find in all of Stravinsky after Petrushka. 154. Jeffrey Mark, "The Fundamental Qualities of Folk Music," Music and Letters 10 (1929): 288. 155. See, for example, Bakst's essay "Puti klassitsizma v isskustve," Apollon, 1909, nos. 2-3, in which the primitivism of Gauguin is seen as a clcansing and classicizing force. 156. Linvova, Velikorusskiyepesni 2:xxv-xxvi. 157. Ibid., xxiv (n.). 158. Ibid., xxvi. 159. Ibid., xxiv—xxv. 160. The terms are borrowed, respectively, from T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), in Selected Prose ofT. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975), 37-44; and José Ortega v Gasset, "The Dehumanization of Art" (1925), in The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, trans. H. Weil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 3-56.

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We know that Stravinsky knew and valued Linvova's publications, because he once asked his mother to send him "folk songs of the Caucasian peoples that have been phonographically transcribed (others, nonphonographic, you needn't pick up); and while you're at it, if Jurgenson has any other phonographically transcribed folk songs, get them as well." And he reminded her: " I already have the first volume of 'Great Russian Songs in Folk Harmonization' (as transcribed phonographically by Linvova)." 1 6 1 It is true that this letter was written in 1916, well into the period of Baika (Renard) and Svadebka (Les noces), and that it contains no hint of when, precisely, during the previous twelve years Stravinsky had actually discovered Linyova's phonographic transcriptions or realized their neonationalist implications. We can guess, though. The first volume of the Trudi'MEK,

issued in 1906, contained several items that

have already figured in our discussion of Stravinsky's neonationalism. One was the collection of street cries notated by Listopadov et al. that bore comparison with the very opening of Petrushka; another was Melgunov's posthumously published essay on the rhythm and harmony of Russian song, which contained his antiacademic diatribe, so close in spirit to the neonationalist, anti-Peredvizhnik painters of the Mir iskusstva persuasion; a third was Linyova's "Experiment in Phonographic Recording of Ukrainian Folk Songs," which contained the fruit of her very first phonographically assisted expedition, to the Poltava guberniya, in 1903. As shown by the membership list of the Moscow-based M E K , printed at the back of the book, Rimsky-Korsakov was an honorary member, along with three other St. Petersburgers (the Belyayevets Wihtol, the conductor and folklorist—and erstwhile collaborator of Melgunov—Nikolai Klenovsky, and the priest and liturgiologist Stepan Smolensky). It is certain, therefore, that Rimsky-Korsakov received the book straight off the press, and it is also virtually certain that Stravinsky would have seen it, for 1906 was precisely the year of Stravinsky's closest, quasi-filial association with Rimsky. Better than establishing "access" and (somewhat later) "motive" we cannot do, perhaps, but these conditions suffice to suggest that the new trend in musical folkloristics was part of what impelled—and what helps us to understand—the remarkable departure represented first by the "Russkaya" in the Konzertstück of 1910, then by the portrayal of the balaganniy ded in the first tableau of Petrushka. As Linyova put it in her obituary for Melgunov, "For musicians the consequences of Melgunov's ideas on the elaboration of a basic tune by means of podgoloski are incalculable, for they have uncovered a rich domain of new musical combinations in the realm of folk counterpoint." 1 6 2 Stravinsky was heir to these discoveries; it was an influence that would grow steadily in the course of the next decade. 161. IStrSM:448. 162. Yc. E. Linvova, " Y u . N. Mcl'gunov kak novator-isslcdovatel' narodnov pcsni,"iLMG 10, no. 23— 24 (8-15 June 1903), col. 563.

MUSICAL NEONATIONALISM

[733]

The technical "falsity" of this new folklorism in Petrushka was not the only thing that affronted the epigones of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and the RimskyKorsakov circle. There was also the matter of stylistic provenance. Here, indeed, was an implied affront even to the Melgunovs and the Linyovas. It was an article both of kuchkist and of Slavophile faith that peasant song was the "real" folk music of Russia whereas the urban variety was an adulterated, degenerate, and deracinated form, unworthy of scholarly attention, still less of enshrinement in works of art. This view had been enunciated with special vehemence by the compiler of the anthology from which Stravinsky took the St. John's Eve song for his "Russkaya." Sergey Lyapunov (1859-1924), a fervent latter-day disciple of Balakirev, in his report to the Imperial Geographical Society that had sponsored his collecting trip, justified his work by means of a sententious homily on the encroachment of town on countryside: The urban clement, expressed in songs of factory or tavern provenience, introduces into the very melodic basis of song a character of banality and triviality. By imperceptible degrees, acting as it were obliquely on the esthetic sensibilities of the popular masses, it wins for itself, step by step, an ever wider dissemination, and its movement is all the more rapid in that it goes hand in hand with the military marchlikc element. In the end result both of these influences come together: a banal melodv is always crudely rhythmic, as, conversely, an excessive preference for a uniform rhythm leads to banality.... The decline in popular musical taste and creativity can be seen also in the extraordinarily widespread use of that most antimusical instrument—the concertina [jjarmoshka]. With its doubtful intonation and its poverty of chord combinations, consisting exclusively of successions of major tonics and dominants, this instrument can deal without strain only with uncomplicated melodies of the latest fabrication. They are as it were made for this instrument, while [true] folk songs, if they should chance sometimes to be performed on the concertina, are inevitably distorted in the process. The instrument is unsuited to reproduce all the peculiarities of their melodic design, to say nothing of the fact that its incongruous succession of tonics and dominants completely betrays the character of the melody, giving it, as it were, the wrong meaning. In view of the complete disappearance of [folk] musical instruments, such a propagation of the concertina becomes all the more sorrowful a sight, since its influence meets no resistance. 163

Just what did Lyapunov make, one has to wonder, of the crowd scenes in Petrushka, where the whole orchestra becomes a cosmic concertina? O r of the coachmen's dance, with its "uniform rhythm" and its calculated impoverishment of harmony? Even Serov had trouble in his day with ethnic purists. Cui reviled The Power of the Fiend, in which the Shrovetide scenes provided an evident model for 163. S. M. Lyapunov, "Otchot ob ckspeditsii diva sobiraniva russkikh narodni'kh pesen s napevami v 1893 godu," Izvestiva russkojfogeqqraficbeskoqo obshchestva 30, no. 3 (1894): 347-54; in Vulfius (ed.), Russkaya misl' 0 muzikal'nom fol'klorye, 232-33.

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Petrushka, for its "series of little songs and choruses, paltry in form," and for the portrayal of one of the main characters, Yervomka (Fvodor Stravinsky's great vehicle), through "filthy and inartistic" balalaika tunes. 164 The same could be said of Petrushka, and was indeed said—first, perhaps, by Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov in the letter accompanying the music-box and barrel-organ tunes Stravinsky had so urgently requested of him. A

N E W

I R O N Y

The remarkable thing about Petrushka, however, is that despite the massive infusion of natural artifacts in the form of folk and street music, the impression the ballet makes is anything but naturalistic. We never feel that we are observing an evocation of the real world; rather, we confront a "created reality" after the romantic Mir iskusstva ideal. This distinction goes right to the heart of the ballet's concept— a teasing, disquieting tug-of-war between inner and outer reality. Just as we humans are magically privy to the secret world in which the puppets live, so the framing scenes of human life are viewed as if through the puppets' eyes. Stravinsky has written that he wished to make this perspective literal in the fourth tableau by having Petrushka "watch the dances... from a hole in his cell [so] that we, the audience, should see them, too, from the perspective of his cell." 165 This puppets' perspective, we are made to understand, is—like the incarnation of the Firebird— a metaphor of the creative imagination. The world of the puppets—the "World of Art"—is, it becomes ever clearer, much more "real" than the world of the humans, which it perpetually mocks: quite literally and explicitly when the ghost of Petrushka rears up at the very end and thumbs his nose at the Magician, the puppet's ostensible creator, and the audience. The puppet/people opposition in Petrushka might be viewed as merely the traditional Ruslanesque (or Firebirdish) fantastic/realistic opposition in a new guise. Once again the human element is represented by diatonic folklore and the nonhuman by typically "symmetrical" Russian chromaticism. But the musical contrast, like the poetic contrast it reflects, is treated with a wily irony: the "people" in Petrushka, with negligible exceptions, are represented facelessly by the corps de ballet. Only the puppets have "real" personalities and emotions. The people in Petrushka act and move mechanically, like toys. Only the puppets act spontaneously, impulsively—in a word, humanly. Although based on musical echoes of everyday life, the "human" scenes in Petrushka are transformed into something far removed from everyday reality by Stravinsky's magical orchestration, from that all-envelopinggarmoshka evoked in the very opening bars and succeeded in the "Russkaya" by a cosmic balalaika. 164. See Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia, 233. 165. M&C: 33/34.

A NEW

IRONY

[7J5 1

However varied and inventive, the orchestration of the outer tableaux is rarely without some overlay suggestive of street music. Add to that the extraordinary and unrelieved simplicity of much of the crowd music—quite the boldest and most subversive stroke of all, given the musical climate in the decade preceding the First World War, and the biggest departure for Stravinsky after the recondite harmonies of The Firebird. (The latter make one appearance only in Petrushka, and an eminently fitting one: at the Magic Trick ["Tour de Passe-passe"] in the first tableau.) For pages at a time the music proceeds with an absolutely unvarying pulse, with absolutely flat dynamics, and (almost unbelievably) without a single sharp or flat. To achieve such freshness with such simplified means, and with no hint either of monotony or of unsophistication—this was surely Stravinsky's most startling achievement, and the first real earnest of his neonationalizing genius. 166 All these features of the crowd scenes—the music-box timbres, the rigidly unyielding rhythmic flow, the unvaried dynamics, the absolute diatonicism—are, like the tunes themselves (and pace Liapunov!) authentically "folklike," and yet, applied in such a heavy dose, they are unnatural, inexpressive, toylike, and so they characterize the human crowd. And so, too, they characterize the puppets when, in the first tableau, they dance before the people. But now contrast the music of the puppets' secret world. The second tableau is the only one virtually devoid of allusion to folk or popular music of any kind. The sole hint of it comes three measures before the end, in the wheezing, concertinalike chords in the muted horns and bassoon, marked "très lointain"—a distant echo from the street. Petrushka's music moves fitfully, impetuously: in no bars of music there are no fewer than sixteen changes of tempo. The volume is in constant flux. The harmony is intensely chromatic and dissonant, with its famously novel and weird combinations. In short, this puppet's music is "expressive"—that is, human—with a vengeance. In its ceaseless ebb and flow, its waxing and waning, it analogizes the inner world, the world of passions and feelings. 167 Although the folk and popular elements in Petrushka are abundant, chosen shrewdly and lovingly, and handled with a novel resourcefulness and skill worthy of the best in Russian music, they are so obviously a part of the "outer world," so much a part of what is questioned and derided in this profoundly antirealistic ballet, that there is no cause for wonder that certain epigones of the older traditions of Russian musical nationalism took offense at the work and its creator. With Petrushka, the process was set in motion that ended with Stravinsky's being read 166. Even this, though, was not altogether without significant precedent in Russian music. Fresh diatonic usages (often "modal") were an old Russian specialty. As early as 1868 Prince Odoyevsky had praised the "pure diatonicism" in The Power of the Fiend, contrasting Serov's music with the degeneracy of "the West, [where] a character can't even ask for a glass of water without half a dozen sharps or flats" (V. F. Odovevskv, Muzïkal'no-literaturnoye nasledive, ed. G. Bernandt [Moscow: Muzgiz, 1956], 634)167. These qualities of Petrushka, which appealed very much to Symbolist writers, were caught extremely well bv Edith Sitwcll; see her appreciation in The Russian Ballet Gift Book (London, 1921), 7-14; reprinted in Hamm (ed.), Petrushka, 187-89.

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out of the inner circle of Rimskv's heirs; and although the estrangement may seem inevitable to us, and although in later years Stravinsky boasted of it and tried to make it look as though he had been the initiator, it was a painful loss to him at the time. There was more here than traditional kuchkist rectitude in the face of "degenerate" or "impure" urban folklore. The lines were drawn over the issue of the hallowed canons of Russian realism versus the World of Art.

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A word now about those "famously novel and weird combinations" that have made Petrushka a household (or at least a classroom) name among musicians for three generations. By now it will hardly come as a shock that Stravinsky's harmonic innovations consist in the main of further applications and extensions of models that have been described and historically traced in earlier chapters of this book, and that hence they bear the firm imprint of the special St. Petersburg incubator in which the composer's talent had been nurtured. None of them individually lacks precedent among the products of the walled-in Belyayev guild, not even the notorious "bitonalism" that now bears the name of Stravinsky's puppet hero (see Ex. 6.5, with attendant discussion). And as already intimated, the music of Petrushka., even in its seemingly most radical passages, is rife with echoes from Rimsky-Korsakov's works, not all of them among his most esoteric or— nowadays—esteemed. Yet there is a difference, one that will justify a long, close look at that independently conceived Konzertstück that ended up as the second tableau ("Chez Petrouchka") of Stravinsky's second ballet. For no composition, whether by Stravinsky or by anyone else, had ever been so thoroughgoingly octatonic in its structural conception. In it, the complex of octatonically derived harmonic and melodic materials displayed and analyzed from a historical and theoretical standpoint in Chapter 4 (see especially Exx. 4.17 and 4.23), and conspicuous in Stravinsky from the time of the Scherzo fantastique, is maintained as a stable point of reference governing the whole span of the composition, whatever the tonal vagaries or digressions along the way. The octatonic collection is thus raised structurally to the level of a "key" in ordinary parlance, governing a hierarchy of pitches and functioning as a tonal center. It provides not only a referential vocabulary of pitch classes, but also a set of stable structural functions. Hence departures from it and returns to it—on various levels, from that of local "chromaticism" to that of "modulation"—are possible without compromising its referential integrity. The octatonic complex is in fact a much more stable referent within "Chez Petrouchka" than any of the transient diatonic tonalities with which it interacts as the piece unfolds. The composition is thus a significant one within Stravinsky's stylistic evolution, different not merely in degree but in kind from its Belyayevets precursors.

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[7 3 7]

To justify these claims, a close technical analysis is required, 168 one that will assume familiarity on the reader's part with the method, first used in the analysis of serial music, of representing the degrees of the chromatic scale as numbers, with an arbitrary starting point at zero: o

i

2

3

4

$

6

7

8

9

IO

II.

This method, adumbrated in a few earlier discussions in this book (e.g., of [o 3 6 9] octatonic symmetry), has the advantage of enabling the ideal or abstract conceptualization of intervals without their embodiment in actual pitch classes or registers. Thus the major scale, abstractly conceived, is o 2 4 5 7 9 11; the octatonic scale is o 2 3 5 6 8 9 n or o 13 4 6 7 9 10; the major triad is o 4 7; the minor triad is o 3 7; a tritone is o 6; and so on. It was Arthur Berger who made the first analysis of the illustrious "Petrushka chord" that "subsumed [it] under a single collection with a single referential order, i.e. the octatonic scale, [so that] the dubious concept of 'polytonality' need no longer be invoked" 169 —although he cautiously held back from positing the scale as an a priori concept for Stravinsky, granting it, in advance of any historical corroboration, no more than an inferential, hence provisional, analytical status. Pieter van den Toorn went some distance toward demonstrating Stravinsky's "in-the-act awareness" of the collection and its "referential implications" when he noted that when the Petrushka chord reappears, along with Petrushka himself, at the end of the third tableau (fig. [77]), it "features the (o 6) tritone-related (o 4 7) triadic subcomplexes not at C and F-sharp but at the remaining two ( 0 3 6 9 ) symmetrically defined partitioning elements of Collection III [according to Van den Toorn's numbering of the three possible transpositions of the octatonic scale, followed in this book], E-flat and A," thus exhausting the collection of reference and suggesting that it did possess for Stravinsky an a priori conceptual status (see Ex. 10.15). 170 By now we know that even Rimsky-Korsakov had possessed the kind of "in-theact awareness" of the referential properties of the octatonic collection that Van den Toorn was able to affirm for Stravinsky; and we know it from precisely the same kind of evidence. Rimsky's reference, in the sketch for Heaven and Earth quoted in Example 6.5a, to the "interstices" (promezhutki) on G-sharp and D provides the conclusive octatonic "background theory" for the Stravinsky usage demonstrated 168. For a fuller account of the technical workings of the music of "Chez Petrouchka," together with a more explicit discussion of the attendant analytical issues, see R. Taruskin, "Chez Petrouchka: Harmonv and Tonality chez Stravinsky," 19th-century Music 10, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 265—86; reprinted in Music at the Turn of Century, ed. Joseph Kerman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 71—92. 169. Arthur Berger, "Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky," in Perspectives on Schoenberjf and Stravinsky; ed. Edward T. Cone and Benjamin Boretz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 134-35. 170. Van den Toorn, Music of Igor Stravinsky, 46311.5.

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EXAMPLE

IO.I5

a. Petrushka, second tableau, piano at 1 after 1601 (left) b. Petrushka, third tableau, violin II and viola at I 771 (right)

c. Octatonic derivation/exhaustion

®

©

©

®

Collection III

here. Thus it would appear that by the time he died, Rimsky-Korsakov had traveled much further along the octatonic path than even the discussion in Chapter 4 may have revealed, and that the congruence between his octatonic "routines" and those of his most famous pupil extends at least as far as the second tableau of Petrushka. The theoretical models expounded in Chapter 4 were derived in the first instance from analyses of the Underwater act of Sadko (in the case of "triadic" octatonicism and "melody scale/harmony scale interaction") and of Kashchey the Deathless (in the case of "tetrachordal" octatonicism). These compositions were chosen for analysis in that chapter because Rimsky had discussed them theoretically to some limited degree (with Yastrebtsev and in his autobiography) and because Stravinsky was well acquainted with them both. The Underwater act from Sadko was actually performed by Diaghilev's company during the same Paris season that saw the première of Petrushka. But if an immediate and historically demonstrable forebear to "Chez Pétrouchka" is required, it can easily be found in another of the many Rimsky-Korsakov compositions that embody these procedural norms: the symphonic suite Sheherazade, op. 35. Now, why should this chestnut, which dates back to 1888, have been a more direct stimulus on the imagination that produced Petrushka than the opera Sadko of 1897, not to mention any of the later fantastic operas, from Kashchey to Le coq d'or, that were composed or revised during the period of Stravinsky's close association with their author? The reason is that Sheherazade, choreographed by Fokine to a murder-in-the-harem scenario by Benois and with sensational sets and costumes

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[ 73 9 ]

by Bakst, had been, along with The Firebird, the other succès fou of the Diaghilev saison russe of 1910. The two works frequently shared the boards, and Stravinsky still had vivid memories of the ballet as late as 1958, when he described it to Robert Craft—at least with respect to Bakst's contribution—as a masterpiece. 171 He heard Rimsky's score any number of times, then, in June and July of 1910, and he began work on the Konzertstück that became "Chez Pétrouchka" in late August or September. There can be little doubt that it was Sheherazade that got Stravinsky thinking again in terms of strict ( 0 3 6 9 ) octatonic symmetry, something of which there is actually rather little in The Firebird. The example of Sheherazade reminded Stravinsky, to paraphrase Schoenberg, that there was "still a great deal to be said in C major"—or, to be precise, in octatonic Collection III with a strong initial orientation on C and a good deal of diatonic and whole-tone contamination. Sheherazade contains a number of striking passages in which the (o 6) octavebisecting tritone relationship is strongly asserted. The very opening is a case in point. The successive downbeats of Sultan Shahriar's four-bar leitmotif sound a descending whole-tone scale through the fourth degree, that is, the midpoint (Ex. 10.16). In the middle of the first movement of the suite, the first three notes of the theme are broken off from the rest and treated in a typically Rimskian sequential progression that covers the same distance, but in an octatonic (Collection III) progression. In Example 10.17a, all tones foreign to Collection III are circled. They will be seen to be conventional appoggiaturas, an important precedent to recall in connection with "Chez Pétrouchka." In the middle of the second movement, the Shahriar motive in its full fourmeasure form is linked with a passage that seems to stand midway between the famous tintinnabulations in Boris Godunov, with their tritone-related dominantseventh chords (Ex. 4.28a), and the cries of Petrushka. In Example 10.18a, the (o 6) limits of the Shahriar theme are filtered out and held as a pedal while the trumpet and trombone play their antiphonal fanfares. The latter are derived from the third measure of the theme. Their starting notes, heard pretty ineluctably as roots of dominant sevenths à la Musorgsky, are pitched a tritone apart, following the implied harmony of the lietmotif's third and fourth measures (cf. Ex. 10.16b). These fanfares show Rimsky-Korsakov thinking as early as 1888 in terms of an embryonic octatonically referable "polytonalism," for the fanfares outline minor triads, the thirds of which contradict that pedal tritone (F-flat in the trombone against the F; B-flat in the trumpet against the B). The clashing pitches, no less than the invariant ones, are full-fledged members of the Collection III complex (see Ex. 4.17). Rimsky's particular harmonic filtering of that complex—the "common tritone" pedal plus the emphasized fourths in the brass fanfares—yield the contents of the Petrushka chord. It is plausible, moreover, that Rimsky's fanfare figures provided 171. Conv: 109/97.

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a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Shéhérazade, Shahriar's motive and its whole-tone background

b. A typical harmonization (9 before [e])

f

r

-

S

a

p i f

• U

06 cf. Petrushka chord and Ex. 1 0 . 2 3 , below

a model for the opening phrases of "Chez Petrouchka": Rimsky's opening fourth is inverted to a fifth, and there is the same use of triplet upbeats containing passing tones, which, though foreign to the octatonic collection in force, are prepared and resolved in a fully conventional, hence comprehensible, way (Ex. 10.18c). Rimsky's passage (Ex. 10.18a) continues. The "common tritone" is resolved in one of the two ways possible: "inward," to C (the "outward" resolution would have been to the tritone reciprocal, F-sharp). The F-sharp is quickly provided through a sequencing of the triplet figure from the brass fanfares, and the new tritone, C/FK, replaces the old as a pedal for a sequential repetition of the whole passage described in the last paragraph. This time the antiphonal-fanfares idea is developed through fragmentation and an accelerated harmonic rhythm (shades, again, of those Boris bells), until it is time for the inevitable contrapuntal combination of the Shahriar theme and the fanfare theme. Rimsky achieves this through a common-tone progression in which the fanfare passage, centered on A, is repeated endlessly, with the A progressively redefined as root, third, seventh, and fifth. This passage needs quoting (Ex. 10.19), since in it Rimsky hammers away at the phrase that seems to have been echoing in Stravinsky's ear (and no wonder) as he began writing his Konzertstiict> in 1910. And the passage it leads to at the end of Example 10.19a also reverberates in Petrushka: the three clarinet cadenzas over static harmonies provided the model for the big cadenza bar (1 before [59]) in "Chez Petrouchka," where the same clarinet, immediately aped by the piano, holds

THE

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[74l]

EXAMPLE

IO.I7

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade, I, 7 after [ § ]

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b. Harmonic reduction sequence continuation

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terminating — 1 convenience" I

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EXAMPLE

10.17

(continued)

c. Neighbor relationships condensed

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a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade, II, 9 after | D1

Allegro molto o •

T b. Reduction and analysis

whole-tone

J W

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E X A M P L E

(continued)

10.18

c. Rimsky's theme compared with Stravinsky's 0 10

E X A M P L E

11

-

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I O . I 9

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade, II, 6 before [ f ] 0-3-0. »

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10.19

(continued)

b. Reduction and analysis

m forth in virtuosic cascades over a sustained harmony in the cellos. Rimsky's cadenza passage after [F], moreover, is exclusively and exhaustively octatonic, referable to Collection III. The harmonies of the second and third bars, in fact, sum up the exact contents of the Petrushka chord. As a progression they adumbrate what might be called (with apologies to Siegmund Levarie) the "tonal flow" of "Chez Petrouchka," which begins with a passage centered on C and ends with a cadence on F-sharp. 1 7 2 This observation is the first step toward an understanding of Petrushkian tonality. The (o 6) C/FK tritone polarity exists not only in the local vertical conjunction that has become so famous, but is extended in the temporal dimension to govern the overall tonal coherence of the music. And (shades of Sheherazade) the (o 6) polarity exists in an important tonal sense as a subset both of the octatonic and of the whole-tone collections, between which it represents the point of intersection. As an expression of the midpoint of the whole-tone scale it provides a frame for the modulatory plan of the movement, which, though rather rigorously octatonic in its referential ordering through fig. [52], is nonetheless centered through the fortysecond bar on C, as will be demonstrated below. The Adagietto at [52] is centered on D and carries a signature of two sharps, while the music from [54] to [58] has E as its center (from [54] to [56] the key signature of E minor is explicit). As noted above, the final cadence is on F-sharp. Thus the sequence of tonal centers forms an ascending octave-bisecting whole-tone progression C—D-E—FN that mirrors the descending progression so suggestively embodied in the Shahriar leitmotif from Sheherazade (Ex. 10.20).

172. Cf. Siegmund Levarie, "Tonal Relations in Verdi's Un hallo in maschera," 19th-century Music 2 (1978): I+3-+7-

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[ 745 ]

EXAMPLE 1 0 . 2 0 beginning

[52I

[54l

"Chez Petrouchka," overall tonal flow end

« fc*

#

(0 6)

EXAMPLE

10.21

"Chez Pétrouchka," mm. 1-8

The C of the opening section is not a conventionally established tonic, to be sure, but a primus inter pares: the favored member of the fourfold array of potential centers implicit in the Collection III complex. Berger accounted for its dominance by citing the "liaison" of the opening phrase with the end of the first tableau, a clear and almost conventional authentic cadence in C major. Thus the G is heard as the "supporting fifth" of the C . 1 7 3 Even without reference to the first tableau (which, of course, did not exist when the beginning of the 1910 Konzertstück was composed), it is possible to justify the ear's assignment of unmistakable priority to C by virtue of the quasi-cadential approach to it at m. 6, for which purpose the downbeat B-natural, not endemic to Collection III, functions as an imported leading tone (as it might, say, in C minor). Although its resolution to C is indirect, since its position in a chromatic stepwise descent is alone what justifies its intrusion within an octatonic context, it surely reinforces the contributions of the other half-step resolutions (F»-G, Dli-E) to what is in weak but sufficient effect a tonicization of the C-major triad, despite presentation of the latter in inversion, both in m. 6 and one measure later. In m. 7, the tonicized role of C is reinforced 173. Berger, "Problems of Pitch Organization," 135.

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by the way the E-flat harmony (a potential rival as an octatonically referable center) is applied to it as an acciaccatura, restating on a more structural plane the local resolution Dlt-E in m. 6. The whole passage is given in Example 10.21, with tones foreign to Collection III circled, as in Example 10.17a from Sheherazade, and as in the Sadko excerpt analyzed in Example 4.19. As in Rimsky's compositions, all the foreign pitches are applied to Collection III pitches by means of the most ordinary techniques for handling "nonharmonic" tones—either as passing tones or, in the case of the chord preceding the French sixth in m. 4, as neighbors, complete (D-Et) or incomplete (G-A, B-C#). When the Petrusbka chord is first sounded by the clarinet arpeggios in m. 9 (fig. [49]), the C-major component retains its dominance because it is placed on top, which gives it greater salience, and also (as Berger noted) because it is in the same stable form as it had assumed at the beginning—to which we associate it on rehearing—while the F-sharp arpeggio, previously unheard as a discrete harmony, is voiced in its six-three position, making it more difficult to identify aurally than its companion. As Berger also pointed out, the "principal defining agency of the total configuration" produced by the pair of clarinet arpeggios is the dyad Att/C,174 both because it is the high point and because it is prolonged in notes lasting as much as two measures and more (mm. 10-11, 13-15). Stravinsky capitalizes on this dyad's property of belonging to both the octatonic and the whole-tone collections that share C/Ftt as their defining (o 6) nodes of bisection, by introducing a figure in the bassoon that completes the whole-tone tetrachord from C to F-sharp. The foreign tone thus introduced, G-sharp, is a borrowing such as Rimsky-Korsakov himself might have made from the octatonic "melody scale": literally a "nonharmonic" tone. It is immediately contradicted by the first clarinet's "harmonic" G-natural in m. 12, and then (m. 16) resolved indirectly—that is, through a diminished-seventh arpeggio consisting of all the potential centers of Collection III—to A, the one Collection III nodal point that has not been heard up to now, however transiendy, as a chord root. The A is sounded in m. 16 only as a sixty-fourth note, but it is a nonetheless functional root, for it immediately picks up a third and a seventh, Ci/G, the latter pitch introduced by the bassoon's G-sharp, now given to the muted trumpet, as appoggiatura. The melody scale gives way to the harmony scale through the resolution of an unstable perfect fifth to a stable tritone, for which there are endless precedents in Rimsky-Korsakov (see Exx. 4.32-35). The Ci/G tritone now fleetingly assumes the status of focal point. It is a far weaker one than C/FN had been, since its constituent pitches are not available as triadic roots within the Collection III complex. Its main function is to provide a pair of thirds—or, in Rimskian 174. Ibid., 136.

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terms, a "common tritone"—for the roots Et(Dlt)/A, which fill in the interstices between the C and Fl of Collection III. This happens in mm. 21 and 22. The cascades in the piano part are a kind of composed-out Petrushka chord, reminiscent of the complex arpeggio figuration in Stravinsky's Fireworks, op. 4, and, indeed, constructed according to methods Stravinsky had worked out in composing that piece. There, a complex whole tone—derived chord (one that appears prominendy in Le coq d'or) had been slyly resolved as a sort of inverted augmentedsixth chord to a more stable dominant-seventh harmony, as shown in Example 10.22. The same kind of multiple voicings and resolutions operate in the Petrushka cascade. The precedent set in Fireworks, reinforced by the clarinet's independent repetition of half the cascade in m. 22, suggests that the ten-note cascade is to be heard as two groups of five. The first of these exhibits a very clear neighbor progression to the dominant seventh on D»/El> (Ex. 10.23a); the second is a more abstruse progression that relies, for its interpretation, on the precedent set in mm. 3-4 (Ex. 10.23b). The basic harmony is a fifthless dominant seventh on A, which together with the D-sharp harmony yields the content of the Petrushka chord. The extraordinary passage adumbrated in m. 19, and developed fully beginning in m. 23, shows that despite the octatonic interpretation of its genesis, there may be some validity after all in regarding the Petrushka chord as a polytonalism. In m. 19, the O/G tritone generates another burst of arpeggios, in which the piano joins (or rather, opposes) the clarinets. The latter confine themselves to the C-major and F-sharp-major triads as before (the G and C-sharp of the generating tritone assuming the identity of chordal fifths). The piano right hand, however, builds a triad from the root G to clash against the F-sharp arpeggio in the left hand. This G-major arpeggio, which imports two tones from outside Collection III, could be looked upon as an appoggiatura to the F-sharp arpeggio, following the many neighbor-note precedents already established in "Chez Petrouchka." Another way of looking at the chord, and in some important ways a preferable one, would be simply to regard it as the dominant of the first clarinet's C-major arpeggio. This has the "dramaturgical" advantage of casting the opposition of piano and orchestra, which we know to have been at the core of the programmatic idea that motivated the Konzertstück, into higher relief. It further enhances our sense that C enjoys priority within Collection III, for it alone is licensed to import auxiliary harmonies from outside the octatonic field. At any rate, the apparent application to C of its conventional diatonic dominant (foreshadowed, one recalls, by the accented B-natural in m. 6) suggests that Stravinsky regarded the two triadic subsets of the Petrushka chord as potentially independent functional agents. This interpretation is corroborated by many passages later on in the piece (to be noted on their occurrence). During the passage at m. 19—and the one following (mm. 23-26), in which the piano and first clarinet exchange harmonies (the latter taking over the G-major arpeggio, while the piano reverts to C)—it seems proper to speak of

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EXAMPLE

10.22

a. Fireworks, I after | 1 1 1 Flute and

, vii 7 / v

EXAMPLE

V)

10.23

" C h e z Pétrouchka," m. 22

-É g É - i f i cf. Fireworks

cf. mm.3—4

"music in two keys," as Stravinsky continued to do throughout his life, 1 7 5 so long as it is borne in mind that the keys in question were chosen not simply ad libitum but from among the circumscribed and historically sanctioned wares of the octatonic complex. The ensuing passage for the piano—the first of several cadenzas in which, according to what we know of the original (pre-Petrushka) conception of the Konzertstück, the soloist was envisioned as a mad genius in a frac, rolling "objets hétéroclites" up and down the keyboard—combines both G and C chords in the right hand against the F-sharp arpeggio in the left, which by now has taken on the character of a pedal. The white key/black key opposition, which plays a role of everincreasing prominence in the piano's rhetoric, is nothing if not "heteroclite." By

175. E.g., E&D:i56/i36.

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EXAMPLE

IO.24

a. "Chez Pétrouchka," m. 29, second beat

implied +common ; X.

tritone:

[_

b. "Chez Pétrouchka," mm. 31-32

EXAMPLE 10.25 "Chez Pétrouchka" 1

9

18

Double-neighbor relation governing first section of

29

34

42

the third measure, however, the figuration has been modified so as to conform to the Fireworks-like "cascade" figure heard shordy before (compare m. 29 with m. 21). Two more white notes—C and F—are added to the pitch repertoire of the piano's right hand; but more important, the new pitch configuration demands a reinterpretation of the relationship between F-sharp and G. The former, so far a stable element, is now heard as an appoggiatura to the latter, so far a mere epiphenomenon. In other words, a modulation has been effected, implying a new governing tritone: B/F (see Ex. 10.24a). Sure enough, these very tones are filtered out and conspicuously prolonged in mm. 31 and 32 (Ex. 10.24b). This momentary departure prepares the climactic return of the original, uncontaminated Collection I I I complex at fig. [51], the "Maledictions de Petrouchka." Once again C is asserted as the pitch of priority, if for no other reason than because the curse itself, blared out by four muted trumpets in unison, fortississimo, is confined for the first five bars to the notes of the C-major triad, and thereafter the notes of the F-sharp subset behave, both rhythmically and in terms of implied voice leading, as ornamental tones. This concludes the first major section of "Chez

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Pétrouchka," if by section we mean a closed tonal span. The essential tonal motion it encloses consists of a double-neighbor relation to the governing (or common) tritone, which could be represented graphically as in Example 10.25. The tonalitydefining progression F/B-Fi/C, which in the present contexts acts like a dominant proceeding to the tonic, was encountered, one recalls, in exactly this form in Shéhérazade (cf. Exx. 10.18 and 19).

The second section begins with the surprising resolution of the Petrushka chord, two bars before fig. [52], to a strongly voiced D-major triad. This is actually the first complete and uncontaminated triad, in block form and in root position, to be sounded thus far in the course of "Chez Pétrouchka," so it seems to presage, not another octatonic complex, but, purely and simply, the key of D. And such seems to be the case—with one telling exception: the "D major" of the Adagietto at fig. [52] is consistendy contaminated by a G-sharp in place of the normal fourth degree. This pitch, persistently sounded against the tonic triad, maintains the level of tritone saturation we have by now come to regard as normal for this piece. It would make little sense, though, to try to explain it away by invoking the "Lydian mode." Nor does this particular "raised fourth" behave the way an altered degree is supposed to do. With one apparent exception to be dealt with later, it is never applied to the fifth degree, but consistendy falls back onto the third, both within the main tune and in the piano cascade that interrupts it in m. 48 (Ex. 10.26). Indeed, the note A (the fifth degree) is the one pitch that has been suppressed from the cascade. In short, what we have here is a composing-out of the bassoon's G#—F# "lamentoso" motive from mm. 11-15, providing a thematic and an affective link between the sections. The apparent exception to this generalization as to the behavior of the G-sharp comes in m. 49, when it is used to initiate a piano cascade like the ones already heard in mm. 21 and 29 (Ex. 10.27). The meaning of this cascade, though, has litde to do with the behavior of the previous G-sharps. Instead, it reidentifies the last G-sharp as a center in a Petrushka chord-like deadlock with D, and only enhances the structural importance of the "borrowed" tritone. Moreover, the implied fulcrum of the progression, the "common tritone" that links the D and G-sharp components of the cascade, is the original "tonic" tritone, C/FH. This is very much like what Rimsky-Korsakov had in mind when he wrote of his care to govern the tonal relations within his "fantastic" music so that no matter how chromatic and recherché the local context, all is ruled by "the invisible presence of the tonic at all times," lest the music degenerate into "artistic thoughdessness and caprice."176 It is evident that Stravinsky inherited this concern. 176. Letter to E. M. Petrovsky, 11 January 1903; in Sovetskaya ntuzïka, 1952, no. 12, 69.

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EXAMPLE

10.26

a. "Chez Pétrouchka," fig. I U I

y -

—0

m .1 : «

1—.j

' "1

I

B

b. "Chez Pétrouchka," m. 48

EXAMPLE

10.27

"Chez Pétrouchka," m. 49

/ISf implied common tritone:

W3T-

Ta

The piano cascade is immediately echoed in m. 49 by the original perpetrators of the G-sharp (the English horn standing in for the bassoon, since, in this preSacre composition, the passage must have seemed to Stravinsky to lie too high for the instrument of his original choice). They repeat the second quintolet a step higher, so that it actually ends on G-sharp, providing a pivot back to the opening tune (fig. [53], Andantino). Here the flute joins in and contradicts the G-sharp (m. 53) with a G-natural—the piano meanwhile abandoning all G's in its figuration, sharp or natural—in preparation for the modulation to E minor at fig. [54]. Both the preparation of this new key and its initial presentation are saturated with double neighbors. These diatonic neighbors reflect, on the surface level, the chromatic structural progression we uncovered in the background to the first section of "Chez Petrouchka." The new tonality is, if not entirely conventional, at least entirely diatonic as far as fig. [55], when some very characteristic Russian chromaticism is applied to it. This again involves the use of ornamental double neighbors (see the piano part, mm. 65-67, where chromatic double neighbors decorate the descending Phrygian line from B to E) and also a variety of passing chromaticism such as one finds very often in the work of Glinka and the Five, especially when they were writing in an

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"Oriental" vein. Borodin's "Arabian Melody" (1881) has a turn of phrase so like the end of the Petrushka passage as almost to suggest itself as a model (Ex. 10.28). The frenzied passage beginning at fig. [56] is a difficult one to decipher harmonically. It starts with a C-major triad, and students of the score may be encouraged to think of that chord as tonic, since the F-sharp is removed at this point from the key signature. But the F-sharp, now specifically signed on each occurrence, persists; the melody continues to center quite obsessively on E (in fact, it is a variant of the tune quoted in Example 10.28a); and there are no chord progressions in the vicinity to assert any of the primary functions of C major. The upper-voice E, then, is best construed as a continuing tone center, even though it is not used as a local harmonic root. The pitches that are so used most frequently, rather, are the very ones that had figured in the Borodinesque bass line that accompanied the repeated E's of the melody in Example 10.28a. They have been promoted from linear, ornamental status to that of a series of ersatz roots, but their functional status with respect to the static tonic E is unchanged. A reduction of the passage such as the one in Example 10.29, so similar in appearance to the actual surface of the music in Example 10.28a, will make this clear.

I

At fig. [58], the F-sharp is finally canceled and the harmony begins to pile up diatonic thirds in a fashion that in the context of the complete ballet recalls the end of the "Russkaya" in the first tableau (though the actual order of composition was the reverse). The largest of these pile-ups actually incorporates the whole whitekey collection, in final summary before octatonicism reasserts itself (and with a vengeance) through a D/F pivot (Ex. 10.30). The cadenza bars are based on the octatonic Collection I (in Van den Toorn's numbering), the collection that is missing precisely the C—Et—Ftt—A "tonic matrix" of the opening section. It is partitioned, somewhat Scriabinesquely, into two diminished-seventh chords. There can be no doubt that Stravinsky knew exactly what he was doing here, and that the harmony sustained by the trumpets and then the solo cellos consists precisely of the collection of those pitches that are foreign to the collection on which the piece commenced, and to which it will return. A position of maximum distance from the tonic matrix has been deliberately assumed. Just as in the case of the two triads that add up to the Petrushka chord, the two diminished sevenths here are obsessively and grotesquely made to clash as a polychord. The ad libitum cadenza cascades in clarinet and piano treat the diminishedseventh complex B t - G - E - O as a vast appoggiatura to the sustained harmony. The lowest pitch in the cascade is B-natural, part of the sustained harmony (i.e., a "chord tone"), to which the clarinet descends from its high Bl> in a rush, and which it then sustains for whole beats at a time, leaving no doubt that it is the "structural" pitch. Repeatedly the clarinet takes flight into the appoggiatura region, only to be dragged back to the B-natural. The last ascent breaks free at last of the cellos' gravitational field, and the clarinet concludes with the very striking sigh figures,

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EXAMPLE

IO.28

a. "Chez Pétrouchka," mm. 6 9 - 7 0

b. Borodin, Arabian Melody, mm. 3 3 - 4 0 Andante amoroso

—

'vf vi

dish',

ya

gib

rr r m

nu

¥

ot.

te

-

bya,

m

ff

[ O take pity o n m e , y o u see t h a t I perish o n y o u r a c c o u n t . ]

EXAMPLE

10.29

melodic center

local h a r m o n i c roots

"Chez Petrouchka," figs.

, abstract

EXAMPLE

m.86

10.30

"Chez Pétrouchka," diatonic-octatonic transition

m. 87

all-diatonic—»octatonic (Collection I)

EXAMPLE

10.31

"Chez Pétrouchka," mm. 8 9 - 9 0

>

~ — j*

r

'

=

;»:•>

on E and C-sharp, which Stravinsky marks "lamentoso assai." This is the one really atonal-sounding moment in the composition, since the octatonic collection has been split into mutually exclusive constituents, neither of which can function as a tonic sonority in common practice. The piano immediately tries to duplicate the clarinet's feat; it makes it as far as the high C-sharp, which it pounds seven times in a vain effort to break through to the E. Failing to accomplish this, it comes plummeting down to the B-natural whence it had started out. The B is taken up by the English horn in seeming mockery of the piano's efforts, and maintained thereafter as a kind of pedal-pivot against the piano's antics, through which a return to the tonic matrix (Collection III) will eventually be vouchsafed. As soon as the English horn has entered, the piano repeats and extends the cascade illustrated as far back as Example 10.24. The extension consists of an extra quintolet inserted between the two original members of the cascade, which recapitulates the harmonic content of the Adagietto at fig. [52]. The effect of the middle quintolet is to add D and A to the B/F tritone that underlies the cascade to create a complex of tones that will eventually resolve to the tonic matrix (Ex. 10.31). The biggest "heteroclite" white key/black key roulade now begins, this time rather consistendy accompanied by other instruments that ferret out its structural pitches. The harp in the measure before fig. [60] does the best job of this, picking out all the B's and F's, the right hand of the piano filling out the white-key component with the aforementioned D's and A's to form a half-diminished chord that cries out for resolution to the C of Collection III. When resolution comes, though, it is clouded by a suspension. The three notes from the white-key component of the roulade that make up the D-minor triad (filtered out and obsessively arpeggiated no fewer than nine times in succession in mm. 94-98) are filtered out again from the half-diminished chord in the last descending cascade and applied as an appoggiatura to the C-major component of the Petrushka chord at fig. [60]. The trumpets, blaring their fanfare of Petrushka's despair just as they did in the first

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EXAMPLE

10.32

"Chez Petrouchka," fig.

1601

ff., abstract

section (fig. [51]), now reinforce the appoggiatura progression with arpeggios on both the D-minor and C-major triads. At fig. [61] the complete half-diminished chord is applied to the C-major triad in the pianist's right hand, doubled by the cornets and trumpets, fortississimo. The F-sharp triad, confined to the piano left hand and the string tremolo that mixes the two triads, can hardly be called the equal partner of the C triad any longer. When the last progression (halfdiminished seventh to C major) is repeated by the horns in the next measure (m. 108), the F-sharp component of the Petrushka chord is dropped altogether, replaced in the accompanying bassoon by a G, which completes a dominant ninth whose resolution to C (albeit in six-four position) suggests that the F-sharp triad has been vanquished by the C, or that the diatonic collection has vanquished the octatonic. Or—to put it in terms of the 1910 Konzertstück as Stravinsky described its scenario years later—that the orchestra has vanquished the obstreperous "heteroclite" at the keyboard. The whole passage is summarized in Example 10.32. The triumph, however, is fleeting. Like the eventual ghost of Petrushka himself, the Petrushka chord suddenly "comes to" in the same pair of clarinets that gave it birth (mm. 108-11)—up an octave in fact, alive and kicking. The F-sharp, seizing its chance, dragoons its old associate G-sharp (recall the original Petrushka chord passage at fig. [49]) into providing it with a preparation. The G-sharp arrives with the rest of "its" triad in tow, the formerly triumphant C now transformed into a subservient, enharmonic B-sharp. F-sharp gains the upper hand to end the piece with a cadence—or, if not a cadence, at least what Van den Toorn would call a suitable "terminating convenience"—that effectively tonicizes the note seemingly left for dead only a few measures back.

This description of the final pages of "Chez Petrouchka" is cast in blatantly anthropomorphic and academically disreputable terms because something of the sort was obviously very much on Stravinsky's mind when he wrote his Konzertstück. His harmony is animistic; the Petrushka chord is conceived, nay motivated, by a sense of struggle, an antagonism of order and chaos reflecting the roles of pianist versus orchestra. Again it transpires that there is practical and poetical—if not "theoretical"—validity in the "polytonal" idea. We are meant to hear C and F-sharp in terms of an active, not a static, polarity—as competing centers, not

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merely as docile constituents of a single, static, octatonically referable "hyperharmony," to borrow an apt term from Rimsky-Korsakov's vocabulary. 177 When it came, moreover, to synthesizing the "Chez Pétrouchka" harmonies with the street music of the outer tableaux in the coda to the ballet (composed in Rome in the weeks immediately preceding the premiere), Stravinsky projected that animistic opposition more starkly than ever, in what is surely the most inspired stroke in the whole extraordinary score. More than once Stravinsky confessed his pride in having authored this music, 178 which takes the interpénétration of the octatonic and diatonic collections to a new structural level, unprecedented both within the ballet and within the traditions that fed it. The whole twenty-eight-bar passage, from the Lento after fig. [130] to the end, consists of a magnificent composing-out of the II—I progression that formed the final cadence to "Chez Pétrouchka," now very explicitly associated with the folkish ¿¡armoshka harmonies of the crowd scenes. At first the D-minor chord is just an appendage to the C-major triad that emerges from a Petrushka chord, as in the second tableau at fig. [60]. At [131], the C - D oscillation takes on a new dimension. The C chord is given simultaneous upper and lower triadic neighbors, a direct reminiscence of the opening of the fourth tableau (and the end of the second, too: the ii and the vii add up to the halfdiminished vii7 at fig. [61]). Surprisingly, the whole complex is then jacked up a whole step, as if to tonicize the D. (This had been the tonality at the opening of the tableau, and thus the allusion may have a recapitulatory aspect.) After the two major triads on D and C have gone through another oscillation, each accompanied by its own set of double neighbors, the D complex is sustained. And all at once Petrushka's ghost appears—in a piercing trumpet arpeggio on the notes of the F-minor triad. Now, F minor is part of the same octatonic complex as D major (i.e., Van den Toorn's Collection II), and this puts the final stamp of certainty (if any is still needed) on Stravinsky's consciousness of the octatonic complex as a referential set. Only by conceptualizing the collection in its typically Rimskian ( 0 3 6 9 ) triadic partition would the minor-third relationship have occurred to Stravinsky as a viable substitute for the tritone of the original Petrushka chord complex. The ascending F-minor trumpet arpeggio is answered by a descending arpeggio on the notes of the E-flat—major triad, the accompanying garmoshka harmony simultaneously slipping down to the original C major/D minor oscillation. As summarized in Example 10.33, the whole "apparition" is a muted, varied, and harmonically enriched reprise of the "Despair" music at fig. [60] in the second tableau, 177. Letter to Semyon Kruglikov, 11 April 1902; in A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov, N.A. Rimskiy-Korsakov 2:67. 178. E&D:i56/i37; M&C:65/67: "It is obvious to any perceptive musician that the best pages in Petroushka are the last."

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EXAMPLE 10.33

Petrushka, fourth tableau, fig. 11311 ff., abstract

Coll. II

where the trumpets and cornets had blared their woe in D-minor (ascending) and C-major (descending) arpeggios, while in the accompanying harmony D minor had been applied as an appoggiatura to the C major of the Petrushka chord, the constant F-sharp triad acting as the harmonic glue. In the reprise, we now have an oscillation of two different octatonic complexes—Collection II, which contains the D-major and F-minor triads, acting as cadential supertonic to Collection III, the old tonic matrix of "Chez Petrouchka." And both collections are made to accommodate diatonic double appoggiaturas (the garmoshka effect) such as was represented by the D-minor triad alone in the second tableau: E minor/Ctt diminished to D in the Collection II complex, and D minor/B diminished to C in Collection III. In the orchestral score the arpeggios, played on transposing instruments, are spelled conventionally within the keys of the transposition. In the piano fourhands reduction, however, Stravinsky's spelling of the arpeggios at fig. [132] amounts to an analysis. They are spelled F-GH-C and D#—G-EH respectively, in fastidious reflection of their place within their respective octatonic scales. The spelling tips us off that these are embellishing harmonies, to be heard as subordinate to the chords that are provided with diatonic, quasi-cadential neighbors—that is, D and C, with C enjoying priority by analogy with the second tableau at [60], as the center of the complex to which the descending arpeggio is applied. And then, just as in "Chez Petrouchka," the hegemony of C is challenged at the last minute by its octatonic antipode, F-sharp. This is very adroidy signaled in the four-hands arrangement by peremptorily respelling the C as B-sharp the moment the original Petrushka chord is heard for the last time (six bars before the end). After one last attempt at resurgence (again accompanied by its attendant supertonic in the three horns), the C is finally dislodged by the F-sharp in the final, famously enigmatic pizzicati. The approach to F-sharp by a direct tritone leap down from C, moreover, mirrors the pizzicato descent from F-sharp by which C had been confirmed as tonic at the very beginning of the "apparition" coda (3 before fig. [131]).

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Far from the "criticism of the Russian ' F i v e ' " that Stravinsky would, much later, disingenuously claim to have written, 1 7 9 his touching synthesis of octatonicism and folklorism at the end of Petrushka

represented the unexpected—and unappre-

ciated—pinnacle of their tendency.

C O N T R O V E R S Y

AT

HOME

The Russian reception of Petrushka

developed slowly. There would be no staged

performances until after the Revolution, 1 8 0 so the public at home could judge the ballet as such only by hearsay—chiefly reports from Paris by various interested parties, but also by the much-respected and disinterested Tugenhold, who was even more enthusiastic about Petrushka

than he had been about The Firebird.

general review of the 1911 Diaghilev season, after brief reports on

In a

Sheherazade

(mosdy centering on Valentin Serov's new curtain for it—Tugenhold, after all, was an art critic), Sadko, Le spectre de la rose, and the Bakst-Cherepnin Narcisse,

he

concluded: But the authentic masterpiece of the whole Russian season was the BenoisStravinsky Petrushka. One might cavil that the set of the [Admiralty] Square is not sufficiendy lubok-\ike and thus does not comport completely with the marvelous and archaic curtain with the yellow figure of the Magician in the skies; one might object to the excessive psychologism of the last moment (the resurrection of the slain Petrushka, a hint at the existence of a Doppelgänger)—but these are petty concerns compared with the amazing wholeness of the production. And I mean exacdy that—"wholeness"; for despite the barbaric discords in the orchestra, the riotous modey of the costumes, the seeming disjuncture of the intimate "Blok-ish" drama of the puppets vis-ä-vis the coarse background of the drunken Shrovetide,— one senses here some sort of infinitely near-and-dear profoundly Russian harmony, some kind of mixture of naive barbarism and ultra-sophistication peculiar to us [Russians] alone. "C'est tres ä la Dostoevsky," some Frenchman said who obviously didn't know what to say—and he made no mistake! Yes, they're all there— Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Blok—but Petrushka is not literature, but painting, music, and movement above all. Alexander Benois has performed his task with great subdety (the Blackamoor's "exotic" litde closet and the Ballerina's toylike costume are priceless!); the performers (Nijinsky, Orlov, and Karsavina) have so infused this puppet drama with seriousness that the spectator is not only amused by their curious "cardboard" rhythms, but is made to empathize with the love-tragedy of Petrushka-Pierrot. And Stravinsky's music? To create music of such unheard-of daring, such dazzling liveliness, such dash and multifariousness, now tenderly lyrical, now blaring

179. See E & D : 156/137. 180. Diaghilev had booked a season in St. Petersburg for the summer of 1914 that was to have included Petrushka (with an English orchestra under Thomas Beecham), but the theater (Narodniy Dom) burned down in January 1912, and before a postponement could be planned war and revolution intervened; see Macdonald, Diaghilev Observed, 77-78; also Buckle, Diaghilev, 214. CONTROVERSY

AT

HOME

[ 7 59 ]

forth in freewheeling Russian tunes, one must be more than a talented pupil o f Debussy. One must recreate within oneself the collective soul of the Russian people—that folk whose eternal "heartfelt sorrow" will never stamp out its "wild abandon.'" 8 1

What is most remarkable about this review is what it takes for granted. The whole neonationalist "lubok" ideal, and the whole Miriskusnik "antiliterary" stance have been swallowed whole by this reviewer, who sees them conjoindy realized to perfection in a single work. This was the real "harmony," the "wholeness" of Petrushka, and what it stood for. As Benois exulted in print after the premiere, Petrushka was the highest realization of what he had always seen as the aim of art itself. He expressed himself in terms borrowed almost word for word from the creed he had expounded three years earlier in his "Colloquy on Ballet." Defending his idealization of the balagani he had loved as a child, he now wrote: They will tell me: all of that is just a childhood memory, and in reality there was nothing good about it: just a lot of mud, debauchery, and depravity. But why then did my father, an old man, an artist to his fingertips, love to go with me precisely to those btdagani)

And well do I remember his delight in all he saw there, and I

remember his happy smile—the

kind of smile you simply won't find today! And all

of you who can boast of having been to see the balagani,

recall all the "smiles from

ear to ear" that you saw there, the real happiness of those carousers. Oh, I know it was hardly an idyllic happiness, nothing like the sweedy stinging virtuous ideal toward which those Quakers o f ours, the temperance societies, aspire. . . . But is drunkenness such a bad thing? That wide bibulous sea of popular inebriation that celebrates the turn toward spring, that greets our ancient, eternal Y a r i l o ? . . . In [Stravinsky's] music there resounds a wondrous echo of that intoxicated, inebriated merriment, and at the same time it is filled with a certain tender sentimentalism that laments the irrevocable perishing of a beloved past. 1 8 2

For Benois, Petrushka was far more than a sentimental evocation of the Russian Shrovetide or a poignant Pierrot play; it was a recovery of the "esthetic smile" that high art had lost in the nineteenth century, but which had lived underground, as it were, in the popular arts and crafts, and in the showbooths. Bringing that smile back into high art was his lifelong mission. In this regard The Firebird had been a misfire, but Petrushka had hit the bull's eye. Valentin Serov, the great painter (whose father had composed The Power of the Fiend) agreed. He had been in Rome at the time when Stravinsky was putting the finishing touches on the score, and the Benois, Serov, and Stravinsky couples briefly became inseparable friends, 183 sometimes joined by Tamara Karsavina and her brother Lev, then professor of philos181. Ya. Tugenhold, "Itogi sezona (pis'mo iz Parizha)," Apollon, 1911, no. 6, 74. 182. Benois, "Khudozhestvennive pis'ma," 800 (Muzika); italics added. 18?. Briefly, because Serov died very shortly afterward (22 November/5 December 1911).

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ophy at the University of St. Petersburg.184 After the London performances of Petrushka Serov wrote to Ilya Ostroukhov about the ballet and his great admiration for Stravinsky: To say that the Diaghilev ballets were enormously successful is a joke by now. Just look how many years he's been ravishing the Parisians. This time the best thing was Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka. It is a real contribution to contemporary Russian music. Very sharp and fresh—there is nothing in it of Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, etc. It's a completely independent, original thing—witty, mocking, touching withal. It's strange—I don't feel like going to see the opera-derived ballets (Igor, Sadko)—they're

hopelessly boring. Something is happening with operas in gen-

eral. . . . O f course, ballet is on its way out, too, but it is hanging on, and will continue to hang on for a while if Diaghilev can manage to reform it. 1 8 5

It seems at first extraordinary that the painter Serov should have accorded such primacy to Stravinsky's music—but that merely echoes Benois's own pronouncement about the work, and points to the feature that represented its most significant aspect of "reform." The music in Petrushka was the controlling force, not the "accompaniment," as the music had been in virtually all prior ballets, even the ones (like Lessylphides or Carnaval) that Fokine had adapted to preexisting scores. It is really small wonder that Petrushka was the last Fokine/Stravinsky collaboration, or that Fokine should have devoted so much space in his memoirs to carping at the music of Petrushka for its lack of "danceability" (tantseval , nost y ). ls6 Many dancers and critics have echoed Fokine's strictures. Andrey Levinson recognized that Petrushka was an "artistic victory," but hastened to add that it was "first of all a victory for the composer," and even went so far as to suggest that "Petrushka, a wonderful example of musical representationalism, renders the ballet itself superfluous."187 Serge Lifar, though he calls Petrushka "one of the peak-points, if not the peak, of the [Diaghilev] Ballet's first epoch," complains of the way the music captured the attention of all the critics. Having cited enthusiastic reviews by Veuillemin, Chantavoine, and others, he adds testily, "Interesting and enthusiastic as such articles may be, one cannot help wondering what it all has to do with dancing." 188 Which is not to say, after all, that the music is in any way "absolute" or "symphonic." Indeed, the very specificity of its content created problems for it when it 184. Cf. Benois to Ilva Zilbershtevn, 9 March 1959, in Zilbershtevn and Samkov (eds.), Valentin Serov v vospominanivakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, i960), 431. All the parties to this "amazing time, when we all lived in the same hotel and almost never parted" (Benois) left tender memoirs of it, including Stravinsky (An Autobiography, 33; E&D:27/25-26). 185. V A. Serov, Perepiska, 1884-1911 (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1937), 265. The letter is dated "London, June 1911"; according to Zilbershtevn and Samkov (Serov, 45m.18), it was written on 13/26 June. 186. Fokine, Memoirs of a Balletmaster, 188-90. 187. Levinson, Ballet Old and Nnv, 20, 74188. Lifar, Diaghilev, 183.

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f i g . io.io.

Benois and Stravinsky in Tivoli, near Rome, May 1911.

was first performed before Stravinsky's compatriots, and even earlier than that. This we may deduce from scattered comments like that of Telyakovsky, the intendant of the Imperial Theaters, who pronounced the ballet "inartistic." Obviously the discountable comment of a jealous competitor of Diaghilev's, this—or was it? Consider the faithful Myaskovsky's review, which appeared in Muzika in January 1912, a year before a note of Petrushka would be heard in Russia. It was based on an examination of the full score, just published by Koussevitsky. Myaskovsky took as his point of departure what was evidently a widespread whispering campaign engineered by the neo-kuchkist old guard. The critic sought to defend Petrushka's integrity with a good, defdy ironic, offense: Is Stravinsky's Petrushka a work of art? In posing this question I can already see irate, indignant looks directed at me, I can already feel cries of barely contained outrage forming on many tongues, so that I am already preparing, come what may, an affirmative reply. Still, I check myself and say, "I don't know." Yes, I don't know. Can one call life a work of art? That very life that roars all around us, that calls forth our wrath and our joy, that weeps, that rages, that flows in a swift, broad current? For 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 Shrovetide aglitter with sun and snow, in the full ardor of your fresh young blood, once mingled in the merry, rollicking holiday crowd and flowed with it in an indivisible exultant whole. Yes, it is life itself, and in view of this, all our pitiful, mundane measures of artisticness, good taste, and so forth, seem so superfluous, so limp and bloodless, [762]

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that one flees from this quagmire as from a pestilence and throws oneself headlong into the joyous vortex of real life, of this—to speak in a Wildean paradox—true art. The music of this extraordinary ballet has such integrity, it is suffused from first note to last with such an all-absorbing energy and such inexhaustible humor that one positively loses all desire to attempt a more detailed analysis—it would be tantamount to vivisection.

Myaskovsky performs the vivisection nonetheless, and in great detail, setting before his readers the virtual prose equivalent of a performance. The performance over—and it is highly evocative, the emphasis at all times on the deliberate commonplaces and the harmonic audacities that were most likely to offend conservative tastes—Myaskovsky returns to the attack, hoping by a tactical maneuver to defuse opposition to the score in advance: "It seems to me that if Rimsky-Korsakov, that exceptional aristocrat of the kingdom of sound, were alive, he would without a moment's hesitation come down on the side of this composition. He could not help but acknowledge, or at least feel, that the exceptional, radiant talent of Stravinsky is flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood." 189 What Rimsky-Korsakov might have thought of Petrushka is of course anyone's guess—though an educated one would take into account his approval of the Shrovetide scene in The Power of the Fiend, despite the legendary enmity Serov had borne the group in which Rimsky had started his career, 190 and "despite a whole pile of purely musical and technical failings," as he put it one day to Yastrebtsev.191 His heirs, of course, were another matter. Their spokesman was Andrey RimskyKorsakov, the very one to whom The Firebird had been dedicated and one of Stravinsky's trusted confidants (as we have seen) even during the composition of Petrushka. The recently appointed music critic for a very short-lived liberal newspaper called Russkaya molva {Russian Intelligencer), Andrey used his position to mount an attack on his erstwhile friend, whom he now regarded as an apostate. His review of the Russian première of three fragments from Petrushka192 under 189. N. Y. Myaskovsky, " 'Petrushka,' balet Ig. Stravinskogo," Muzïka, no. 59 (14 January 1912); reprinted in Shlifshteyn (ed.), Myaskovskiy: sobraniye materials 2:41, 44. 190. See R. Taruskin, "Serov and Musorgsky," in Slavonic and Western Music: EssaysfirrGerald Abraham, ed. Malcolm H. Brown and R. John Wiley (Ann Arbor/Oxford: U M I Research Press/Oxford University Press, 1985), 139-62. 191. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 1:100. 192. I.e., the "Russkaya" from the first tableau, the entire second tableau, and the dances from the fourth tableau, fitted out with a concert ending based on the Petrushka chord—in other words, the exact contents of the "Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka" Stravinsky transcribed for Artur Rubinstein in 1921—a more than appropriate selection, since it contained all the music originally composed for the piano Konzertstück in 1910. The concert ending was only published in orchestral score in 1947, in conjunction with the reorchestrated version of the ballet. It had been available on rental from Edition Russe de Musique, however, from the beginning (indeed, it had been composed at Koussevitzky's request). The original autograph full score of the concert ending was prepared in 1911 as Stravinsky was correcting proof of the first edition. It is now at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (Mus. Rés. Vma 229), donated by the heirs of Maurice Delage, who had received it from Stravinsky as a gift. Stravinsky's own pre-LP recordings of 1928 and 1940 use the concert ending, despite his belief that the last pages of the ballet were the best. See David Hamilton, "Igor Stravinsky: A Discography of the Composer's Performances," Perspectives of New Music 9, no. 2/10, no. 1 (1971): 166. CONTROVERSY

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Koussevitsky on 23 January 1913 (Pierre Luboschutz was the pianist; the program also featured Fritz Kreisler in the Russian première of Elgar's Violin Concerto) terminated their friendship and so wounded Stravinsky that nearly half a century later he recalled it with bitterness.193 This is what the son of Stravinsky's beloved teacher had to say about this most explicitly Russian of Stravinsky's works: Petrushka—amusing Shrovetide scenes of the 1830s—is a piece that is in many ways remarkable, and in a certain sense even frightening. With this piece the historic evolution of Russian music has come to a halt. It is vainly maintained that Stravinsky is a "representative of that tendency, the ideals of which are the legacy of Rimsky-Korsakov" (from the program note). Instead of authentic national character, we have here a deliberate and cultivated pseudo-nationalism ("faux russe"); instead of the kind of artistic synthesis in which music has hegemony, intensifying and spiritualizing the elements of the spectacle, here everything is visual from first to last. The music here has become virtually visible and tactile. In place of a fantasy that sends out roots into the folk's poetic outlook on nature [a reference to the tide of AfanasyeVs great compendium of Slavic folklore, the Rimsky-Korsakov Bible], here we have a purely theatrical fantasy, a fantasy of puppets, and, if one may put it so, a paper fantasy. Petrushka is the fruit of our present-day infatuation with the 1830s. It would be vain, however, to seek in these "amusing scenes" a historically faithful portrayal of the Shrovetide revelry of the thirties. For this purpose our raw Russian homebrew (sivukha) has been too obviously larded with French perfume. Of course there is no end of talent in this piece. The orchestral colors (in the Russkaya, in the scene of popular revelry, in the "Coachmen's Dance," etc.) are uncommonly intense, saturating, and novel. True, the endless stunts, the constant tricksterism, are apt to pall rather quickly. It is, after all, not so much the "monotony of luxury" as a sort of monotony of frantic measures. Surfeited with all these orchestral spiceries one begins to dream of a crust of black bread—of a simple orchestral tutti or a string quartet—as if it were manna from heaven. Petrushka glitters with an artificial assortment of bright rags and patches and clatters with ringing ratdes. Were it not for the big talents of Benois and Stravinsky, this piece, with its vulgar tunes, would have been a monstrous crime. But then, who knows—might not Petrushka be the prelude to some sort of musical futurism? If so, then perhaps 'twere better it had never been born. 194

Stravinsky maintained in later life that this venom "was musical not personal," motivated simply by the fact that his music was "too 'advanced' for them: Glazunov was their darling." 195 But the personal spite is right on the surface—"rags and patches," "ringing ratdes"—and has at least in part a personal explanation involving some "monstrous crimes" of Diaghilev and the Rimsky-Korsakov clan's resentment at Stravinsky's acquiescence, indeed his complicity in them. 193- M&C:53—54/55. 194. A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov,

(25 January-7 February 1913).

"7-y simfonicheskiy kontsert S. Kusevitskogo," Russkaya molva, no. 45

195- M&C:S3—54/55.

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But the crimes and the resentment are a subject for a later chapter. For now let us confine ourselves to the musical issues, which were real enough if not in themselves sufficient. What an irony it is to read Andrev Rimsky-Korsakov's cavils against Stravinsky's way out of the creative impasse Nikolai Rimskv-Korsakov had lately acknowledged and lamented—namely, the drying up of the Russian national style. Stravinsky's way out was so at variance with the original ends and means of "kuchkism," that for Andrey it spelled curtains for the Russian music of his father's time, kept marginally alive by Glazunov's unabated productivity and by the Belvayev artificial life-support system. What Petrushka did was to expose the artistic sclerosis that had taken hold among the heirs of the mighty kuchka, and in this sense it was indeed a "criticism" of conventional style russe platitudes—though surely not of "the Russian 'Five' " themselves. 196 Rather, it was a rebuke to the "Russian Five Hundred," the faceless mob of Belyayevtsi, headed by that other great friend of Stravinsky's prentice years, Maximilian Steinberg. And what did Steinberg think of Petrushka? A postcard survives in the Stravinsky Archive, dated 28 January 1913, containing Steinberg's report of the Russian première. "Petrushka went off successfully here; I am completely delighted by its sonority," he wrote, but added: " I find that the piece ought not be performed away from the stage (I hope you won't take offense at my frankness)." 197 Others put this thought more damagingly, in public print. Alexander Koptyayev (1868—1941), a St. Petersburg composer who was close to Cesar Cui, dismissed the suite out of hand as a viable concert piece for the reason that "Mr. Stravinsky despises pure music and allots it only an insignificant place in the general impression" produced by the ballet. 198 This pronouncement jars not only with the later Stravinsky we know so well, but also with the way Petrushka was seen and valued by the Miriskusniki. The lines were pretty well drawn. In December 1913, Koussevitsky repeated the Petrushka suite, and Koptyayev reviewed it again, this time in far greater detail. On this occasion the Petrushka fragments shared the program with Glazunov's Seventh Symphony, and this gave Koptyayev the text on which to base a sermon: "Glazunov and Stravinsky are antipodes. The former is guided completely by strict symphonic forms; the latter's laws of form are dictated by the Russian hoi polloi [prostonarod'ye]. The former develops ideas; the latter plays with color like a child with a ball." And so on. Yet Koptyayev, Russian traditionalist that he was, did catch certain resonances other critics missed, and is for that reason a valuable witness after all to the backgrounds of the ballet:

196. E&D:H6/I}7. [97. Stravinsky Archive, Scrapbook 1912-1914. Steinberg also reports that Koussevitskv took the nursemaid's dance too fast ("for my taste") and that the tuba player at the appearance of the dancing bear plaved his part an octave too low. 198. A. P. Koptvavev, Review of Petrushka, Vechernyaya birzhcvaya gazeta, 24 January 191?.

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Listening to the "carousal" [gulyaniye; i.e., the dances of the fourth tableau], the following associations occurred to me: I recalled the composer's father—the celebrated basso—in one of his crowning roles: Yervomka in The Power of the Fiend. And this sweet Yervomka had also appeared at a popular Shrovetide carousal, and had been magnificent. I wish to say that the young composer, creating a scene of popular merriment, perhaps recalled his father, too. And this association is all the more plausible since Stravinsky reminds one a bit of Scrov, with the diiference that this Serov is more complicated, more splendiferous in harmony and instrumental garb. But both are alfrescoartists of strong and even coarse sonic blotches, both, in fine, are adherents not so much of the folk [ narodnogo ] as of the commonfolk [prostonarodnogo] style. 199

Even more vienxjeu is the report of an anonymous St. Petersburger who accused Stravinsky of "originalizing" (oriqinal'nichaniye)—a word that had had an exhaustive workout with respect to Musorgsky a generation or two earlier—and of "photographing a drunken debauch," which was just what the prissier critics had said of The Power of the Fiend.200 There were a few welcoming voices. One came from an unlikely source—the German-trained, antimodernist critic Nikolai Bernstein (1876-1938), about whom Stravinsky would have ample cause for complaint a little later. Bernstein saw Stravinsky as a rightful heir to the nationalist mantle. The conclusion of his review makes an ironic contrast with that of Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov: It goes without saying that to our prim public the score will seem to be "musique pour les cochers." But just the same was said with regard to our first national opera, A Life for the Tsar. Who knows—perhaps this work of Stravinsky's is destined to become our first national ballet. What is "vulgar," "popular," in this score is precisely what constitutes its chief worth. In a word: this is a composition that one can only wish to see staged here as soon as possible. 201

The remaining friendly responses came from the other side of the aisle, from Vyacheslav Karati'gin and Vladimir Derzhanovsky, the "official modernists" of St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively. Karati'gin, who had been covering Stravinsky for five years, ever since his debut with the Symphony in E-flat, was filled with "the keenest artistic joy" on meeting Petrushka. "This joy comes first of all from the fact that in Petrushka one senses the presence of an enormous and extraordinarily vivid talent, so all-conquering that not even Stravinsky's bitterest enemies can deny it." Karati'gin understood Stravinsky's use of street music better than any contemporary: "One delights in the masterly elaboration of trivial barrel-organ 199. A. P. Koptvavev, Review o(Petrushka, Birzheviye vedomosti, 12-25 December 1915. 200. "Kontserti S. Kusevitskogo," Vecherneye vremya, 24 January 1913; quoted in A. Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkov kritiki," 71. 201. N. D. Bernshtcvn, Review of Petrushka, Sankt-peterburjfskive vedomosti, 25 January 1913.

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and concertina melodies (among them Akb vi, seni'' on an effective pedal with chromatics) in the Shrovetide scene, and one marvels at the art whereby the author succeeded in fashioning from motley echoes of street noise and Shrovetide inebriation a delightful art-music 7ubok.' " The critic recalled that this particular genre had a notable recent precedent in Le coq d'or with its "soldiers' songs and 'Birdie,' " but nonetheless wondered (pace Myaskovskv) whether "Rimsky-Korsakov, were he alive, would have approved of many of Stravinsky's 'extremisms.' " 2 0 2 Derzhanovskv, who caught the Moscow première a week later (30 January 1913), was captivated above all by the puppet music of the second tableau, even though he held back from granting it full rights to exist apart from the staged ballet. His rather extreme "Symbolist" interpretation was typical of the time and place: "With an almost palpable horror there passes before the listener this astonishing tragedy of animated marionettes, so alive and so cut off from the world of reality. Listening to this music, which is so 'visual' it really demands the stage, you begin to dream of nightmarish images and situations out of Edgar Poe—they are just as unreal and at the same time just as full of vitality, logic, and truth." 2 0 3 The complete ballet score was finally given its Russian première two years later, in Moscow, at a subscription concert of the august Russian Musical Society under the baton of Emil Cooper (1877-1960), an old Diaghilev hand (he had conducted some of the performances in the first Parisian saison russe in 1909). The date was 17 January 1915. The war was already on, and Stravinsky had become (though he did not yet know it) a lifelong expatriate. Still, it was a historic occasion because of the review it elicited from the patriarch of Russian music criticism, Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kashkin (1839-1920), whose position in the forefront of the Moscow musical establishment went back to the days of Nikolai Rubinstein (Kashkin had been a founding member of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society and a member of the original faculty of the Moscow Conservatory) and Chaikovsky (one of the composer's closest friends and musical associates, Kashkin had, among other things, prepared the piano reduction of Swan Lake). His career as critic went back to 1862, which meant that he had followed at close hand the whole development of the "classical" Russian music of the nineteenth century. Writing in Russkoye slovo, the leading Moscow daily, Kashkin gave Petrushka a virtually unqualified rave. 204 The authority of this review was enormous; Asafyev was still citing it in his Book About Stravinsky, published in 1929. At a stroke, Stravinsky's legitimacy as a "Russian" composer and heir to his teacher's mantle was vouchsafed by the Russian musician most singularly empowered to grant it. Not only that: Kashkin came down decisively in favor of the independent merits 202. V. G . Karatigin, "Sed'moy kontsert Kusevitskogo," Recti', 25 January 191?; quoted in Karatigin, Izbranntye stat'i, 66. 203. V. V. Derzhanovskv, " 'Petrushka' u Kusevitskogo," Utro Rossii, 1 February 1913; quoted in A. Kuznetsov, " V zerkale russkov kritiki," 71. 204. N. D. Kashkin, "Teatr i muzika," Russkoye slovo, 20 January 1915.

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and value of Stravinsky's music and its unique function as organizer, rather than mere accompaniment, of the spectacle. Kashkin put the stiff-necked raillery of the Rimsky clan to shame; the seventy-six-year-old veteran was younger than all of them. What follows is an abridgment of this momentous and very extended critique. PETRUSHKA —Amusing scenes in 4 tableaux by Igor Stravinsky and Alexander Benois— Thus the heading of the remarkable work that was performed on 17 January at the sixth symphony concert of the Russian Musical Society.... According to the usual nomenclature, Mr. Stravinsky's work would have to be called a ballet, but in fact there are no ballet dances in it, rather there are folk dances and puppet dances. There is also a mimed drama, but this, too, is played by puppets. In ballet, the chief thing is what happens onstage, while in Mr. Stravinsky's work, the center of gravity lies in the music, and the main element in its performance is an enormous symphony orchestra with a full-fledged conductor at the helm. The stage serves merely as a supplementary explication to the music, in which the whole outer and inner content of the plot is depicted in detail. In that plot, besides the crowd of holiday merrymakers in the forefront, the main hero is Petrushka, who with Mr. Stravinsky has the character of an oppressed martyr who arouses sympathy and commiseration, which is not at all like "Petrushka" of the Russian balagani, who is always an impudent rascal, a braggart, and a regular rogue. On the other hand, in Mr. Stravinsky's music both the holiday crowd and the unhappy hero are suffused with Russian character to the very marrow. In this connection the author of Petrushka is the direct continuer both of his teacher N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov and of Musorgsky. By the shape of its music, Petrushka represents an uninterrupted symphonic whole with a definite subject, which it transmits with uncommon vividness and salience. In the musical texture itself there is much that is daring, startling, perhaps even questionable from the point of view of easy receptivity. But all is suffused with the sincerity of a genuine talent, and nowhere does one sense contrivance. Mr. Stravinsky is one of our most ardent modernists, but at the same time he never loses his close ties with the past, which constitutes one of his distinguishing virtues among the Russian composers of the latest mintage. In music, as in the other arts, various tendencies have lately formed, all striving to open new paths. In order to make tangible the nature of this movement, let us make recourse to a comparison with poetry. To express new ideas in poetry it is sometimes necessary to introduce new words into the language, or else new combinations of existing words (which happens more frequendy). But there is a tendency that travels a different path; it strives to create not new ideas but a new language, sometimes wholly incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Music is a language of sorts, which has been determined historically according to laws approximately analogous to the laws of verbal discourse. In the latest trends in music some are content to broaden the domain of historically determined musical discourse and enrich it with new combinations, while others, as in poetry, have broken outright with the past and have created an altogether new language. Realist artists are con-

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tent ordinarily with the former, and various other sorts of "ists" belonging to the latter group are creating a mystical art, the true meaning and significance of which is accessible only to initiates. Mr. Stravinsky is a merciless realist and for all his bold departures he follows the path of logical development of the foundations laid by the whole preceding historical development of music. Mr. Stravinsky's innovations, bold at times to the point of audacity, pertain for the most part to the harmonic domain, and, despite all the wit and talent these experiments display, we cannot allow that they are at all times completely successful. As regards parallel voice leadings, although the ear gets used to them rather quickly, they are not really all that interesting from a harmonic point of view, lending merely a certain sonorous coloration to a musical line. As for the brusqueness of certain sound combinations, Mr. Stravinsky's enormous mastery in the application of orchestral colors actually lends these combinations a certain prettiness, and at the same time gives him a means of expression that is in its own way extremely characteristic. We won't expatiate any further on the peculiarities of Mr. Stravinsky's harmonic constructions, for to do so we would have to make recourse to a technical terminology that would be altogether out of place in the pages of a newspaper that is predominantly political. We cannot omit to mention, though, that in the domain of tone color Mr. Stravinsky is an authentic master, with a virtuoso's command of all the resources of the modern symphony orchestra. In this regard he is in immediate contact with N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, having inherited from the latter the unbelievable smartness and trimness of his orchestra and, if anything, an even greater command than his teacher's of sonic power where it is demanded. The flexibility, variety, and novelty of the sonic shades in this young composer's orchestra is simply astonishing, and withal one never feels a sonic overload, something from which even the best composers of our time often suffer. Kashkin's detailed descriptive commentary focuses, in the first tableau, o n Stravinsky's "extraordinary aural observation." H i s favorite episode is the o n e with the street dancers and their accompanying instruments (being heard, recall, for the first time in Russia). H e catches Stravinsky's irony t o perfection: "The depiction o f the hopeless ungainliness o f this music is comic in the highest degree." In the second tableau, he praises the "lively pictorialism" o f Stravinsky's music, and its evident sincerity: "The composer, it is clear, was profoundly inspired by his subject, and amid all the funny angularities o n e can hear his heartfelt concern for Petrushka's bitter fate." It is again the great specificity o f characterization that w i n s the critic's praise in the third tableau (also receiving its Russian première). S o precise is Stravinsky's depiction as to be indescribable: "In the present instance words could hardly compete with the music" in conveying the composer's portrayal o f the Blackamoor's "impenetrable obtuseness" or the Ballerina's "senseless frivolity." In the fourth tableau "the Shrovetide debauch and its musical depiction reach their apogee: here, in the dances o f the c o m m o n f o l k and in the depiction o f certain figures—e.g., the 'dapper merchant'—the themes o f folk songs have been employed to excellent advantage, sometimes in conjunction, or in the case o f one o f them,

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even in canon." The end of the ballet is "of an unfeigned pathos; even in the dying out of the sounds of the ubiquitous concertina one senses a sorrowful mood." In summation, Kashkin—knowingly, of course—raises certain points on which Stravinsky had received particularly bad marks from the neo-kuchkists: "The milieu of ideas amid which the music of Petrushka revolves is not a particularly elevated one, nor is it a broad one, but it is portrayed with wit and talent." Stravinsky's kinship with Rimsky-Korsakov is evident not only in the orchestration, but also in "the manner of the writing, which is founded not so much on thematic work, i.e., on thematic development, as on varied repetitions, fashioned with great artistry." And thus the envoi: 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.

Amen. Never let it be said that no one in Russia understood Stravinsky's music. Yet it is truly something to ponder that it received its greatest welcome from Russia's oldest critic. A man five years the elder Rimsky-Korsakov's senior could see in Petrushka the seeds of a glorious future, while the younger Rimsky-Korsakov could only bleat on and on about the end of the great tradition. Kashkin saw the work perhaps too completely in terms of that tradition; he was not as sensitive, say, as Karatigin to the neonationalist tenor of the folkish writing and the difference thereby implied from the nationalism of Kashkin's own contemporaries, the ones who gave the tradition its start. But on one point Kashkin was right on target. In seeing the young Stravinsky resolutely as a "rightist of the left," in contradistinction to an unnamed but unmistakably adumbrated Scriabin, Kashkin with an amazing shrewdness characterized not only Stravinsky but also the milieu in which his talent was flowering. The Miriskusniki would not readily have characterized themselves as "realists," to be sure; for them that word meant "Peredvizhnik." But in their concentration on the representation of the details of external "material" beauty, and in contrast to those whose preoccupation was entirely on what lay behind or beyond, "realists" they willy-nilly were. For Stravinsky to become transformed (temporarily) into a real musical radical, a brush with the "mystical" side of the Russian avant-garde would be needed. Such a brush was coming—or rather, by 1915, had come—but of that Kashkin could have no inkling.

I N F L U E N C E

A B R O A D

Another bugbear about which Kashkin kept refreshingly silent was the eternally sensitive matter of French influence. Most Russian critics, whether (like Tugenhold) they admired Petrushka or (like Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov) they detested it,

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tended to assume that since it was written in France and first performed there, it was a "French" piece on a Russian theme. And yet none of them ever identified Stravinsky's models beyond dropping some conveniently prominent names, or even specified what it was in Petrushka that sounded French to them. But that is not surprising. As our examination of "Chez Pétrouchka" has shown, the really innovative aspects of Stravinsky's music emerged out of what was by 1910 a wellestablished Russian common practice and can be characterized most meaningfully against that background, not a French one, for all that there may be factitious "Petrushka chords" in Ravel's Jeux d'eau, composed as early as 1901 (see Example 10.34 for an abstract). 205 The matter of "French influence" becomes ironic precisely with Petrushka, because with that ballet Stravinsky actually began exerting a pull of his own, particularly on the most eminent French musician of them all. Perhaps the passages in Example 10.35, from Debussy's "Toy Box" ballet (La boîte à joujoux, conceived in 1913 but left unorchestrated at Debussy's death), so close in plot line to Stravinsky's puppet show (but perhaps more directly linked with Bayer's perennially popular Puppenfee), can be written off as affectionate allusions to the one Stravinsky composition Debussy seems to have liked without reservation. 206 Yet a glance at the second book of Préludes for piano (1913) will show to what extent the second tableau of Stravinsky's ballet, and particularly the piano writing in it, had gotten under Debussy's skin. "Brouillards" is a veritable study in Petrushka-csque "bitonality," one hand on the white keys, the other on the black (Ex. 10.36a). The second piece in the set, "Feuilles mortes," begins with two modified Petrushka chords in

205. To amplify: Although certain aspccts of Ravel's harmonic practice in Jeux d'eau, the Quartet, and a few other works from around the turn of the centurv bear a superficial resemblance to the Stravinskian practice that culminates in Petrushka (owing to a common patrimony in Liszt and, secondarily, in Rimskv-Korsakov), at a deeper level the resemblance disappears. Ravel's circles of thirds, his wholetone sequences, and his "bitonal" chords are all surface embellishments of "classical," not to sav academically conventional, structural functions such as one can hardly find in even the earliest Stravinsky, articulated, moreover, with voice leading so crystalline that Rimskv himself might have envied it. In the present instance, the Petrushka chord is a derivation from a French-sixth chord on F-sharp that contributes to an extremely elaborate prolongation of the pre dominant supertonic within a perfect authentic cadence in E major that forms the structural backbone o f J e u x d'eau s recapitulation. Each of the constituent tritone-related thirds in the chord has sprouted a fifth—a procedure not unlike one traced in the Introduction to The Firebird (cf. Ex. 9.9a). But Ravel's progression cannot really be compared with Stravinsky's, since there is never a doubt that F-sharp is the functional root of Ravel's Petrushka chord, whereas the whole point of Stravinsky's usage is that the two constituent triads of the chord arcin a sort of stalemate, referable not to a single tonic, but to the fourfold octatonic axis of potential centers. As is so often the case with Ravel, the actual time spans during which the local harmonies (schematized in Example 10.3+) are in force have little to do with their functional weight within the cadence. This is one of the fascinations of Ravellian chromaticism (but then, a similar point was made about Schubert in Chapter 4). The Petrushka chord itself is the best example of this peculiarity. Functionally speaking it is just a transient pivot, but it is teased up into a cadenza in the actual writing. If the passage had a direct issue, it was not Petrushka but a similar (though less prolonged) "cadenza" in "Poissons d'or," one of the second series of Images by Debussy (1907). 206. See the letter from Debussy to Stravinsky printed in Conv:5i-52/48-49 (where it is misdated) and in François Lesure and Roger Nichols, ed., Debussy Letters, trans. R. Nichols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 256-58.

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EXAMPLE 1 0 . 3 4

Ravel, Jeux d'eau, recapitulation (mm. 62ff.), abstract

_ , "PetrushkaF r 6 chord"

9

whole-tone

EXAMPLE 10.35

Debussy, La boîte à joujoux, piano score (Paris: Durand, 1913)

a. P. 29 (Polichinelle revient avec d'autres polichinelles, des artilleurs et des canons.)

Bataille.

EXAMPLE

10.35

(continued)

b. P. 35 (Polichinelle, poupée, soldat)—cf. Petrusbka, interlude preceding second tableau

g

p très égal

3ÈÉS m

tP—i-—•

—Vm—^—fr '

fl

7

1

parallel (Ex. 10.36b) and reaches its climax with another passage of alternating hands (Ex. 10.36c). "La puerta del vino" is built on a tritone axis, Di>/G, with a passage in the middle that superimposes the two chords in an explicitiy "bitonal" fashion (Ex. io.36d); and the very same axis dominates the whole last section of the fifth prelude, "Les fées sont d'exquisses danseuses." As for the eleventh prelude in the set, "Les tierces alternées," it is from beginning to end a study in Petrushka textures—a veritable exorcism. With the completion of the Préludes, Debussy seems to have worked through his Petrushka obsession. In later pieces, Stravinskian echoes are attenuated and ambiguous, hard to pinpoint or to prove. Nevertheless, vague resonances from all three of Stravinsky's early ballets haunt the late work of the French master, adding a poignant little chapter to the history of Franco-Russian musical exchange. At the very least, they redeemed the debt Stravinsky had assumed in his Poèmes de Verlaine or the Introduction to The Nightingale. One score in which such resonances surely lurk is Jeux, Debussy's own Diaghilev ballet. Stravinsky later claimed that "Debussy was in close contact with me during the composition of Jeux and he frequently consulted me about problems of orchestration."207 But Jeux was apparently composed in a great sudden burst within the first three weeks of August 1912,208 while Stravinsky was back in Ustilug at work on The Rite ofSpring. A letter from Debussy to Stravinsky (by then in Clarens) dated 8 November 1912 implies that Jeux was already at the printers'.209 So it is hard to see where the two composers could have fit in their consultations. Perhaps what Stravinsky recalled was no more than casual shoptalk at the orchestral rehearsals of the ballet in the spring, which he did attend. 210 But even if we assume that Stravinsky was not present at the creation, there is still plenty of Stravinsky in Jeux. The music at fig. [43] both sounds and looks like

207. 208. 209. 210.

Conv:53n/5on. Lockspeiser, Debussy 2:174. "As soon as I have a good proof copy of Jeux I will send it to you . . . " (Convijj/jo). P&D:99.

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E X A M P L E

Petrushka in Debussy

10.36

a. "Brouillards" (Préludes, Book II, no. 1), mm. 13-14

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b. "Feuilles mortes" (Préludes, Book II, no. 2), mm. 1-2

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c. "Feuilles mortes," mm.

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d. "La puerta del vino" (Préludes, Book II, no.

CT

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EXAMPLE

10.36

(continued)

e. Jeux, i after 143 | o

a

m

[3]

6

[9]

0

. (Iflo

f. Six épigraphes antiques, II, characteristic harmony

Î V •>: ¡ s s „ i > ;> j, ¡STT

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=

g. En blanc et noir, III, mm. 125-26 (with Firebird khorovod theme for comparison)

Üfe

jr—f

f-

the "Tour dc Passe-passe" that, according to the letter cited in n. 205, so entranced Debussy in Petrushka. The tremolando harmony in the second bar of the passage is a virtual double Petrushka chord that almost exhausts the (o 3 6 9) partition of Collection III—an emulation in the strictest sense (Ex. io.36e). The Firebird seems to beat her wings over the closing pages, especially at figs. [72] (compare the "Capture of the Firebird" in Stravinsky's score) and [80]. The "murmurando" in the strings at fig. [81] has its prototype in Stravinsky's mummers (Petrushka, figs. [ii7]ff.); and Jeux ends, like Petrushka, "with a question" in the strings, pizzicato. There is a moment of pure Petrushka in the sixth o f Debussy's Études for piano of 1915 (mm. 31-32; cf. Petrushka and the Blackamoor in the third tableau). The twelfth etude, "Pour les accords"—a veritable Amazon's dance that bears the uncharacteristic heading (for Debussy) "Decide, rythmé"—surely owes some o f its afflatus, as well as its register leaps and its opposition of thick chords and single pitches, to the "Danse sacrale" from The Rite. Also redolent o f Stravinsky's third ballet is the harmony in the middle section of the second of the Six épigraphes an-

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[775]

tiques, one of the few passages in that work not derived from the unfinished Chansons de Bilitis score of 1900-1901. It seems to invert the famous ostinato chord from the "Augures printanières" (Ex. io.3ôf). Finally, En blanc et noir, for two pianos (1915). It has been observed that Debussy seems to hint, in the third movement (dedicated to Stravinsky), at the khorovod theme with which The Firebird reached culmination (Ex. 10.36g). 211 Yet perhaps more significant than this fairly overt and light-hearted compliment are the more subde Stravinskianisms in the second movement of the suite. A dirge for a fallen friend, it is the most serious of the three. The Petrushka chord, treated as a stable harmony to be moved, like any Debussyan consonance, in parallel, provides the harmonic substance of the exordium, while the caricature of "Ein' feste Burg" that represents the invading "boches" in the central episode is accompanied in a fashion strongly evocative of the "Action rituelle des ancêtres" in The Rite. While the foregoing catalogue may not add up to an "influence," it gives evidence of a genuine artistic, as well as a personal, exchange between the young Russian and the legendary musician whose opinion of his work must surely have mattered to him above all others. For his part, Debussy's attitude toward Stravinsky was certainly tinged with envy and even a touch of fear, for he saw in the young author of Petrushka, and then The Rite, the one musician who could supplant him as the idol of the younger French generation. He was certainly correct in this perception. The status of The Rite of Spring as the greatest single "influence" in early-twentieth-century music requires no defense at this point; Robert Craft was both witty and accurate when he dubbed Stravinsky's third ballet the "prize bull" that "inseminated the whole modern movement." 212 There is no need, either here or in the chapter of this book that will be devoted to The Rite, to add any documentation or make any new interpretation to support its historical reputation. The case of Petrushka is different. Its historical significance has been overshadowed by that of its successor; and yet it was hardly less great. The most influential aspect of Petrushka was the one, it would seem, that affected or impressed Debussy the least. And not at all coincidentally, it was the aspect that played the greatest role in eclipsing Debussy's hitherto unassailable authority and in spawning the "anti-Debussyste" reaction that would reach a peak between the wars. This was the gaudy interpolation of street music—not the specifically Russian examples, but the international musiquette as represented by the Spencer tune in the first tableau and by practically the whole of the third. The Parisian esthetic of the twenties, of "choses en soi" and "musique de tous les jours,"

211. Jeremy Noble, "Debussy and Stravinsky," Musical Times 108 (1967), 24. 212. Robert Craft, " 'The Rite of Spring^ Genesis of a Masterpiece," introduction to Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring: Sketches, 1911-1913 (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1969), xv.

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codified in Cocteau's Le coq et l'arlequin and embodied in the music of Les Six, is already prefigured here in full. When we hear Lanner's waltz crooned by the Ballerina's cornet and accompanied by the grunts of a solo bassoon, we are already hearing the work of the youthful Auric and Poulenc in embryo. It was a style that would actually come to dominate the postwar production of the Ballets Russes, beginning with the Cocteau/Satie Parade of 1917, a work that was in fact inspired by Cocteau's memories of Petrushka.213 By then Stravinsky, too, was cultivating this garden assiduously in Histoire du soldat, with its little dance suite (Tango-Waltz-Ragtime) that apotheosized the daily life of the present as Petrushka had done that of the past. Cocteau rashly asserted that here was evidence that Stravinsky "had fallen in with our methods, and... the influence of Erik Satie had . . . made itself felt, mysteriously, in his work." 214 But Cocteau had forgotten the source of his own inspiration. Petrushka predated whatever influence Satie may have had, whether on Stravinsky himself or on the younger French generation; it was two years older than Satie's Piège de Méduse, with which the "era of the music hall" is usually said to have commenced.215 Stravinsky did not need Satie's guidance to find his way to the style of his Histoire; it was already implicit in the neonationalism of Petrushka. His guide had been Benois. We are thus led back to our starting point, and it seems fitting to close this chapter with a tribute to the author of Petrushka's "book" and a reassessment of his role—fully acknowledged at the time—in the maturation of Stravinsky's genius. "I once christened Petrushka a street ballet," Benois wrote shordy after the première, "and truly, its meaning . . . consists precisely in the celebration of the street." He went on to muse: Why was this necessary? And why bring it to Paris? What did the Parisians care about our drunks, our accordions, the whole ambience of the Russian Shrovetide? To this there is only one answer: works of art arise at the will of, or rather in agreement with, the inspiration of the authors, and the inspiration of Petrushka is so plain that Paris, sensitive to all that is authentic, simply accepted these "amusing scenes" because not to accept something so vivid and lively was simply not its habit. It is true that many were taken aback at first, but their hesitation was transformed into enthusiasm—on this word I do insist. 216

This enthusiasm helped spawn a movement the creators of Petrushka hardly foresaw. Their Russian street fed unexpectedly into one of the major thoroughfares of

213. James Harding, Erik Satie (New York: Praeger, 1975), 154. 214. Quoted in Richard Shead, Music in the 1920s (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976), 10. 215. Satie's Jack-in-the-Box, a music hall-inspired "pantomime" dating from as early as 1899, was thought at the time to be lost. The piano score was discovered behind Satie's upright piano after his death in 1925 and premièred the next year by Diaghilev, in Milhaud's orchestration, as a memorial. It had no direct influence on the trend under discussion. 216. Benois, "Khudozhestvenni'ye pis'ma" (Muzika), 800.

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modern art. Was Benois just a retrospectivist, a curator? Far from it. He was a leader in the "transfiguration of the commonplace" that is, according to some, the very essence of art. And by helping to put Igor Stravinsky in touch with the musical side of that movement, within the more circumscribed world of Russian "fol'kloristika" and neonationalism, he helped unleash the greatest musical imagination his country ever brought forth into the world.

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' " N E W

T I M E S ,

N E W

B I R D S ;

N E W

B I R D S ,

N E W

S O N G S "

Stravinsky did not quite manage to keep his promise to Roerich that as soon as Petrushka was finished he would get right back to "The Great Sacrifice." On returning from Paris to Ustilug in July 1911 he felt he could not get properly started again until he and Roerich had met in person, but the artist was then off at Princess Tenisheva's estate at Talashkino.1 While their meeting was being arranged, the composer amused himself by setting a couple of lyrics by Konstantin Balmont for voice and piano as presents for his mother and his sister-in-law Lyudmila Belyankina. And then, all at once carried away with Balmont, he found himself embarked on a grandiose setting of a third poem for male chorus accompanied by a huge symphony orchestra. (This one he did not finish until the middle of 1912 or later, stealing time for it from the new ballet project.) Finally, before the ballet was finished, Stravinsky would be diverted yet again into a vocal composition, this time based cm translations of Japanese lyric poetry. All these brief but very intense and demonstratively modernistic settings testify to Stravinsky's reaction to his new, strangely ambiguous position in the world of music, and to his need to reidentify himself, in the wake of his Paris triumphs, with respect both to his new cosmopolitan environment and to his old Russian one. His stylistic path was sure; he forged his new idiom on the firm basis of his St. Petersburg heritage, albeit in ways his erstwhile associates could not, at the time, perceive. Z v e z d o t i k t y , the choral setting, usually thought to be an especially enigmatic 1. See Stravinsky's letter to Roerich of 2/15 July 1911, in Sovetskaya

muzika,

no. 8 (1966), 60.

[ 77

9 ]

knot in the skein of Stravinsky's stylistic development,2 was especially on track. It provides a direct and necessary technical link between Petrushka and what finally became The Rite of Spring. Indeed, without its mediation it is difficult to see how the third and greatest of Stravinsky's Diaghilev ballet scores could have been achieved.

BALMONT

AND

NEO NATIONA LISM

Stravinsky's attraction to Balmont is often taken as a sign of his involvement after all in the theurgic strain of Russian Symbolism, or at least as a symptom of the ineluctable force of the local Zeitgeist on his creative development.3 In an age when "Gesamtkunstwerk" remained a rallying cry in Russia as nowhere else, when poets such as Balmont proclaimed themselves makers of "inner music," 4 and when composers like Scriabin tried their hand at poetry to boost the communication of their musical meanings, 5 one tends to assume that poets, artists, and composers traveled one path, arms linked, all fully conscious of each other's activity and joyously abetting it. The spiritual kinship felt and confessed by Sunday philosopher Kandinsky and Sunday painter Schoenberg would seem to broaden the purview of this particular Zeitgeist well beyond the confines of Russia.6 A closer look does not support this easy view. Russia's poets and musicians did not as a rule know or understand one another particularly well. The media gulf turns out to have been surprisingly wide. Among musicians, only Scriabin and Gnesin made real efforts to navigate it. But Scriabin never actually set any Symbolist poetry to music—not even his own—and Gnesin was not a composer of trend-setting significance. Among poets, although Balmont reciprocated Scriabin's interest to the extent of writing an essay on the tatter's Prometheus, op. 60, 7 the essay, and the musical theories of the Russian Symbolists generally, amply con-

2. Robert Craft, who at the time certainly knew Zvezdolikiy better than anyone else, having conducted it in 1949 when the work was still a bibliographical rarity, went so far as to assert that it could only with difficulty be recognized as the work of Stravinsky ("Deux morceaux pour Debussy," in Avec Stravinsky [Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1958], 103). 3. E.g., Heinrich Lindlar, Igor Stramnskys sakraler Gesang (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1957), 15; Vlad, Stravinsky, 24. Druskin, eager to write the songs off, says merely that besides starting work on The Rite of Spring in the summer of 1911, "Stravinsky also paid tribute to the fashionable poetry of K. Balmont" (Stravinskiy; 52). 4. K. D. Balmont, Poèziya kak volsbebstvo (Moscow: Skorpion, 1916), 19. 5. See Ye. L. Krzhimovskaya, "Skryabin i russkiy simvolizm," Sovetskaya muzi'ka, 1985, no. 2, for an interesting account of Scriabin's experiments, under Vyacheslav IvanoVs and Jurgis Baltrushaitis's supervision, in writing poetry. Scriabin's music/color associations, of course, are well known. His poetic output is collected in Mikhail Gershenzon (ed.), Russkiye propilei, vol. 6 (Moscow: M. and S. Sabashnikov, 1919), 97-247. 6. See Jelena Hahl-Koch, ed., Arnold Schoenberg/Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). 7. K. D . Balmont, Svetozvuk v prirode i svetovaya simjbniya Skryabina (Moscow: Rossiyskoye Muzi'kal'noye Izdatel'stvo, 1917).

[780]

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NEW

TIMES,

NEW

BIRDS;

NEW

BIRDS,

NEW

SONGS

firm Aaron Copland's remark that when "the literary man . . . puts two words together to characterize a musical experience, one of them is almost certain to be wrong." 8 This charge would seem to apply with special force to the Russian Symbolists, for whom "music" really meant something other than sounds heard in a concert hall. It had become one of the cliché metaphors for their conception of theurgy, to the point, as one recent student of the movement has observed, where "as soon as the Russian symbolists touch upon the theme of religion in art, they immediately get onto music, and vice versa, when speaking of music, they cannot refrain from broaching the subject of religion." 9 And yet Alexander Blok, the greatest Russian poet of the day, who continually waxed Boethian on the "cosmic significance" of music, confessed that when it came to ordinary musica instrumentalis he was "hopelessly i g n o r a n t , . . . deprived of any trace of an ear . . . , so that I cannot talk of music, as I can of art, from any angle whatever." 10 The case of Andrey Belïy, who alone among the Russian Symbolists had some technical knowledge of music, is especially instructive. Because of his intense musical interest and his tendency—as in his four "Symphonies"—to cast himself in the role of "verbal composer," Belïy is often looked upon as Scriabin's nearest poetic counterpart. Yet Belïy actively deprecated Scriabin and his music, and in his famous essay "Forms of A r t " described music in absolutist terms that would have gratified Hanslick (whom, as it happens, Belïy cites with approval and recommends to his readers). 11 The reason for this paradoxical state of affairs lay in Belly's personal relationship with the brothers Medtner, the literary critic Emiliy and the composer Nikolai, who were among the most conservative musical thinkers of the day, who in fact insisted on the hegemony of the Germanic classical tradition, and who were extremely influential among the literati of Moscow, especially during the period when Scriabin was living abroad. Belïy took Nikolai Medtner as his unquestioned mentor in matters musical, and through Medtner he became a regular at the musical soirées of Sergey Taneyev, the paragon of the Moscow Conservatory. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, Belïy made Medtner's music the improbable focus of his most programmatic pronouncement on artistic theurgy. 12 There is even an article (written in 1906, reissued in 1911) in which Belïy compares

8. Aaron Copland, Copland on Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 152. 9. Ada Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 21. 10. Quoted by Andrey Beliy in Masterstvo Goqoiya (Moscow, 1934); Steinberg, Word and Music, 23. 11. For Beliy's mocking account of his introduction to Scriabin, see his Mezhdu dvukh revolyutsiy (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Pisatelev, 1934; rpt. Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1966), 348-49; for Beliy's formalist views on music, see "Formi iskusstva," in Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910; rpt. [as Slavische Propyläen, no. 62] Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 147-74, esp. 165-67. 12. Bcli'y, " O teurgii," Noviy put' (1903), 100-123.

BALMONT

AND

N EO NAT IO NA L ISM

[781]

Medtner and Scriabin directly, entirely to the former's advantage. 13 It is meanwhile noteworthy in itself that Beliy's discussion betrays his complete ignorance of musical developments in St. Petersburg. He recognizes as important contemporary musicians only the Muscovites Medtner, Scriabin, and Rachmaninoff. So much for the idea that the spirit of the times cut across all media, or that kindred theurgic spirits inevitably recognized one another. Besides, the conventional viewpoint fails to take note of all the factional splits within the artistic movements that collectively defined the so-easily-invoked Zeitgeist. Stravinsky himself was located in a wing of the Russian avant-garde that explicitly rejected theurgic ideals—a rejection that had a firm historical basis in the split that had taken place within the editorial staff of Mir iskusstva in 1903. We have already had occasion to characterize Stravinsky's artistic milieu as antiliterary, and we have the composer's corroborating testimony that he was aloof from all the literary movements of the day as long as he was even nominally living in Russia. His attraction to Balmont thus cannot be explained by any simple Zeitgeist theory. Indeed, had Stravinsky been interested in forging a link with the contemporary literary avant-garde, or if he were under their influence, then Balmont would have been the last poet he would have chosen to set. By 1911, Balmont was altogether démodé. As early as 1906 Beliy had sought to denigrate Scriabin vis-à-vis Medtner by comparing the latter with Bryusov, the former with Balmont. 14 Balmont's apocalyptic pretensions, antedating and unrelated to the religious writings of Vladimir Solovyov, the true fount of theurgic doctrine, 15 had long since been put down to braggadocio. His views on synesthesia and the correspondence of music and poetry were dismissed as primitive. Vyacheslav Ivanov did not include Balmont among the Symbolists at all, regarding him as a holdover from the estheticism and the decadence of the 1890s. 16 Blok, writing in 1909, went after Balmont's reputation hammer and tongs, lumping all of the poet's recent work (including all the poems Stravinsky set) together as "absurd nonsense, simply gibberish—no other word will do." As for the author, "it was not the poet Balmont who wrote this [stuff], but some impudent decadent scribbler." 17 Pace Druskin (see n. 3), there was nothing "fashionable" about Balmont in 1911.

13. "Scriabin's creative domain consists of very refined, not always profound but always complicated themes, invested in original forms that always demand thoughtful contemplation. Medtner, commanding all technical complexities, is marvelously simple in his basic themes. And it is this robust, wholesome simplicity—simplicity through complexity—that allies his work wholly with the main stream of music, as represented by geniuses on the order of Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner. . . . In him pure music is reborn" (Andrev Beiïy, Arabeskt [Moscow, 1911; rpt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969], 373-74)14. Ibid., 374. 15. On Solovvov and his influence, see Renato Poggioli, Poets of Russia, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i960), 116-28. 16. Steinberg, Word and Music, 23. 17. Blok, "BaPmont," Rech', 2 March 1909; in Alexander Blok, Sobraniye sochineniy, vol. 5 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennove Izdatel'stvo Khudozhestvennoy Literaturi, 1962), 374.

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Yet musicians loved the verses of this most zvuchniy (sonorous) of poets, who "for the sake of melody.. . sacrificed thought, content, and artistic restraint,"18 and continued to set his verses up to the time of the Revolution and even beyond. The fantastically prolific Balmont was, quite simply, the most-musicked poet in all of Russian literature, exceeding even Pushkin in the sheer number of his verses that were set by his composing countrymen, thus oddly confirming the poet's notorious boast, "Who is like unto me in power of song? No one!" 1 9 The roster of Balmont-setting composers begins with the generation of Arensky, Taneyev, Ippolitov-Ivanov, and Grechaninov, and continues through virtually all the younger Belyayevtsi (with Cherepnin and Gnesin out in front). Rachmaninoff, too, made a specialty of setting the poet, his Balmont output ranging all the way from the tiniest of lyrics to the mammoth choral symphony The Bells (Kolokola) after Balmont's garishly resounding translation of Poe. Nor should we forget Prokofiev's cantata They Are Seven (Semero ikh), a "Scythian" echo of Zvezdolikiy, set similarly for male chorus and orchestra, which has for a text a typically thunderous "translation" of an Akkadian spell and which sought to reflect the turmoil of the year 1917. Balmont, who used to brag that he alone "had shown what a poet who loves music can do with the Russian verse" and that he had single-handedly discovered "rhythms and resonances,"20 was the musician's poet par excellence— as Stravinsky himself suggested when, in a somewhat shamefaced memoir of Balmont some fifty years after the fact, he accounted for his choice of Zvezdolikiy as a text for setting by saying that "its words were good, and words were what I needed, not meanings." 21 But to let it go at that would be an even more facile explanation of what impelled Stravinsky to set the poem than appeals to Herr Zeitgeist. Why did he need those words, if not those meanings? Although Zvezdolikiy may have been "obscure as poetry and as mysticism," its quality as mysticism of the most extreme kind could not have been more patent. We have gotten nowhere toward an understanding of Stravinsky's puzzling choice; for although countless settings were made of Balmont's lyrics, only Stravinsky ever set one of his "difficult" religious poems. To understand the choice one must know some more about the specific circumstances. All three of the poems Stravinsky set were from a single collection,

18. Oleg A. Maslenikov, The Frenzied Poets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), 24. "Sonorous" was an adjective Balmont took as his own bumptious trademark: " I am calmly certain that before me, on the whole, no one in Russia knew how to write sonorous verse" (quoted in Markov, "Balmont," 261). 19. Mirsky, History of Russian Literature, 434. Pushkin, many of whose famous poems were set dozens of times, still leads the field in terms of the total number of songs generated. See Georgiy Ivanov's catalogue Russkaya poeziya i> otechestvennoy muzike, vol. 1. 20. Introduction (1890) to the second volume of Balmont's complete works, quoted in Georgette Dvonchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry; Slavistische drukken en herdrukken, no. 19 (The Hague: Mouton, 19^8), 108. 21. M&C:78/83.

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[783]

fig.

11. i a . Konstantin Balmont (1917)-

Zelyoniy vertograd (usually translated^ Green Garden), published in St. Petersburg in 1909. All three, moreover, were among the twenty-one items from that book (out of nearly two hundred) that had been published in September 1907 in the arts journal Vesi, then the chief organ of the Russian Symbolist press. This suggests strongly that the journal, not the book, was where Stravinsky discovered the poems he would set a few years later. In the summer of 1907 Stravinsky began work on his settings from Gorodetsky's Tar'. The second of these settings, we may recall, had been a "khlistovskayaan imitation of the singing of the Russian mystical evangelical sect known as the khlisti, sometimes (incorrectly) referred to in English asflagellants.The set of twenty-one poems from the future Zelyoniy vertograd were published in Vesi under the tide "Ecstasies of the White Doves" ("Raden'ya belikh golubef), which clearly identified them, too, as parodies of sectarian verse. Radeniye, or "spiritual inebriation," was the name given by the khlisti and the other sects to their spontaneous, quasi-pentecostal worship services, which usually ended in a whirling ritual dance. "White doves" was the name by which sectarians referred to one another, and especially the way they were addressed as a congregation by their prophet-evangelists.22 When published in book form, Balmont's collection bore further clues as to the 22. Konstantin Kutepov, Sekti khlistov i skoptsov, 2d ed. (Stavropol, 1900), 319.

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H* -hyl* h llf^M,. idtl.S&najttpj,.

'haft

M s ^ ^ u i M n o G H M W h "

c r i B-

1 9 0 9

f i g . 1 1 . i b . Title page (designed by Ivan Bilibin) of Balmonr's Zelyoniy vertograd: slova potseluyniye (.A Green Garden: Kissing Words), from which Stravinsky set three poems, including Zvezdolikiy.

source of its inspiration. The title itself was a clue, for the word vertograd was not only an archaic poet's word for garden {sad in ordinary Russian), it was also what the "white doves" called the circle in which they whirled as the radeniye came to its climax (from vertet', to whirl). 23 The poems in Zelyoniy vertograd are prefaced with an epigraph labeled "murmur of white doves" (zhurchaniye belikh ¿¡olubey), which turns out to be an actual khlist song about King David, worth quoting here for its 23. V. V. Rozanov, Apokalipsicbeskaya sekta (khltstt i skoptst) (St. Petersburg: Vaisberg & Gershunin,

1914), 12. The title page of Stravinsky's autograph vocal score of Zvezdolikiy (published in facsimile in

Muzikal'naya akademiya, 1992, no. 4,136) gives "Radeniye belikh ¿olubey" as a subtitle, virtually clinching the Vest subcollection as source for the text.

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[785]

invocation of the gusli, or psaltery (the Russian-sectarian organologica! equivalent of the Psalmist's harp), an instrument with which Stravinsky would become obsessed during the early years of his exile from Russia. O n po sadiku gulyal, vo svoi gusli igral.

H e walked around the garden playing on his harp.

Ya lyublyu! Ya lyublyu!

I love! I love!

Zvonko v gusli igral, tsarski

Loudly on his harp he played, singing his

pesni raspeval.

songs with kingly voice.

Ya lyublyu! Ya lyublyu! 2 4

I love! I love!

Thus, no less than in the case of Zhar-ptitsa (The Firebird, 1907)—of which it has been observed, "It is obvious that Balmont worked with collections of Russian 25 bilini (epics) and dukhovniye stikhi (spiritual verses) open before him" —Zelyoniy vertograd consists of stylizations of Russian spiritual folklore. It is, in effect, a neonationalist work, and as such it falls quite logically within Stravinsky's specific range of stylistic affinities, even more so as of 1911 than in 1907 when he first encountered the poems (and possibly had them explained to him by Gorodetsky). Balmont's models are in many cases quite specific and traceable, and his imitations far more authentic than Gorodetsky's. "The Dove" ("Go/k^'), one of the poems Stravinsky set, was modeled directly on one of the khlist songs published by Kelsiyev in 1862, in the same anthology from which Balmont took his epigraph: Kelsiyev, IV, 34.:

Balmont:

Uzh ti beli'y golubok,—v

Golub k teremu pripal,

M o y sizen'koy v o r k u n o k A

Kto tam, chto tam, podsmotrel,

Po sadu letish', v o r k u y e s h ' , V ^ " V x —

Golub telom nezhnobel,

Pripal k teremu, p o s l u s h a l . ' ^ ^ ' ^ « ^ ^ ^ Chto v tereme govoryat?

x

N a okontse zh tsvetik al.

\

Volyu Bozhiyu tvoryat.

Belly golub vorkoval, \

^

Da podi, bratets, poradey,

O n tsvetochkom zavladel, O n ego zacharoval,

Zhivim bogom zavladey!

Nasladilsya, uletel.

Da poshol bratets, poradcl, . — Zhivim bogom zavladel.—

\

Akh ti, beli'y golubok, V

(Etc.)26

Pozabi'l ti al tsvetok! Akh ti, beli'y golubok, Vorotis' khot' na chasok! 2 7

24. K. D. Balmont, Zelyoniy vertograd (St. Petersburg, 1909), 7. The song is found in the standard anthology of sectarian lore, V. I. Kelsiyev's Sborntk pravitel'stvennïkh svtdeniy 0 raskol'nikakb (London: Trubner, 1862), 4:74 (no. 38), where it is printed as transcribed from the singing of the St. Petersburg sectarian leader Pavel Fyodorov. 25. Markov, "Balmont," 237. 26. In English: "Ah, you little white dove,/ My little grey-blue cooing bird,/You fly around the garden cooing,/You flew up against our sanctum, listened./ What were they saying there?/ They were doing God's will./ Come, brother, let's be glad,/ Take possession of the living God!/ Our brother went, was glad,/ Took possession of the living God." 27. In English: "The dove flew up to the tower,/ Who, what did it observe there?/ The dove, so

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Balmont removed most of the overt religious content from the poem; 28 thus Stravinsky could treat it as a simple, pretty lyric in the tradition of Koltsov's famous "Rose and Nightingale" ("Plenivshis' rozoy, solovey"), set by his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov in 1866. The poem's relative "neutrality" was the result of its early appearance in Balmont's book, which, like the radeniye itself, gradually gathered momentum toward a blazing "vision of the end of the world and eternal glory." 29 That is where Zvezdolikiy came in: it is the fourth poem from the end of Zelyoniy vertograd, and its undeniable climax (it had been the last in the group published in Vest in 1907). The poem produced a sensation on those not altogether prejudiced by then against Balmont, and made for a brief rehabilitation of his reputation. By the time Stravinsky set Zvezdolikiy to music it was a veritable cause célèbre. Here, for example, is how the young Nikolai Gumilyov greeted it in the pages of Apollon: Konstantin Balmont is an eternal, alarming enigma for us. H e will go and write one book, then another, then a third, in which there is not one intelligible image, not one page of authentic poetry, just a wild bacchanalia of "tintinnabulations" and "immolations" and all the rest of the Balmontian baggage. The critics pick up their pens to announce the "end of Balmont"—they love dealing coups de grace. And all at once he ups and prints a poem that is not only beautiful but astounding, one that resounds in the ear for weeks—in the theater, in the hansom cab, and then at night before sleeping.... In Zelyoniy vertograd there is one such astounding and beautiful poem: Zvezdolikiy.30

This masterpiece of eschatological imagery was inspired by and patterned on the apocalyptic songs of a subsect that had split off from the kblisti in the late eighteenth century, known as skoptsi after their custom of ritual castration (cf. skopets, eunuch). The skoptsi were followers of a peasant prophet named Kondratiy Selivanov (d. 1832), whom they believed to be the son of the virgin Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great, by the Holy Ghost, and whom they consequendy worshiped as a god. They further believed that their prophet would come again in glory, the risen Tsar Peter III at the head of a huge army of the castrated. "The ringing of the bell," so the legend went, "in the Cathedral of the Assumption (Uspensky Sobor) in the Moscow Kremlin would signal the assembling

tender white in body,/ The flower on the window sill bloomed scarlet./ The white dove cooed,/ Possessed the little flower,/ Charmed it,/ Took its pleasure, flew away./ Ah, you little white dove,/ You have forgotten your little flower!/ Ah, little white dove,/ Come back, even for an hour!" 28. The original is an allegory of prophethood, describing the stages through which the soul passes on its way from onlooker (the dove at the window) to "possession of the living God." For a detailed interpretation, see I. Dobrotvorsky, Lyudi bozhii: russkaya sekta tak nazivayemtkh dukhomtkh khristian (Kazan: University Press, 1869), 166. 29. Markov, "Balmont," 242. 30. N. S. Gumilyov, "Pis'ma o russkoy poezii," Apollon, 1912, no. 1, 71.

BALMONT

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[787]

f i g . 11.2a.

The mdeniye (climactic whirling dance in sectarian rite).

FIG. 1 1 . 2 b .

Ritual castration among the skopts'i.

of'millions and billions' for the judgment. Peter would ascend the throne, and the kings of all lands would pay him homage. The Castrate missionaries would then go out into the world and cleanse the whole human race through castration." 31 This is the moment portrayed in Zvezdolikiy, the "harvest" for which the faithful are commanded to prepare their scythes. So much for the esoteric subtext. It was hardly something the average admirer of Zvezdolikiy would have needed to know—or even such exceptional readers as Gumilyov or Valeriy Bryusov, who had also waxed enthusiastic over Zelyoniy vertograd in print. 32 The poem's great appeal lay in the way it managed to fuse this lurid sectarian vision with the long-standing tradition of Promethean "fire poetry" that had always been a hallmark of Russian Symbolism. "We do not argue," wrote Valerian Chudnovsky, "if they tell us 'There is only one God': we will reply, 'Yes, but for art His name is Sun.' " 3 3 Balmont was particularly known for such affinities, as one may readily gather from the titles of his earlier collections, Let Us Be Like the Sun (Budem kak solntse, 1903), Burning Buildings (Goryashchiye zdaniya, 1900), and The Fire Bird (Zhar-Ptitsa, 1907). The fire poetry in Zelyoniy vertograd, linked as it was to evocations of risen gods, was tied directly with the Scriabin of Promethee: Le poeme de feu, composed in 1909-10 at least partly in response to the work of his poet friends Balmont, Baltrushaitis, and Ivanov. Scriabin's two most treasured books (alongside Mme Blavatskaya's Clef de la theosophie) were Ivanov's Cor ardens—which contained poems with titles like "Praise the Sun," "Solar Psalm," and "Firebearers"—and Zelyoniy vertograd. Later he would model the poetic text of the "Prefatory Action" ("Predvaritel'noye deystviye") to the great Mysterium directly and assiduously on the poems in these two books. 34 It is hard to look at the unforgettable cover of Prometheus (Fig. 11.3), which Scriabin commissioned from his Belgian painter-cum-theosophist friend Jean Delville, and not recall the opening line of Zvezdolikiy: Litso ego bilo kak Solntse— vo tot chas kogda Solntse v zenite . . .

His face was like unto the Sun— at that hour when the Sun is at its h e i g h t . . .

We are looking plain upon the star-faced god of Balmont's poem and Stravinsky's cantata. And to anyone who knew Russian mythology—as Stravinsky, 31. Paul Call, Vastly L. Kelsiev.An Encounter Between the Russian Revolutionaries and the Old Believers (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1979), 74. Actual examples of skoptsi prophecies, both in prose and in verse (song), are given in Kelsiyev, Sbornik pravitel'stvennikh svedeniy 0 raskol'nikakh 4:87-88; and Dobrotvorsky, Lyudi bozhii, 128-62. These were Balmont's evident models. 32. V. Ya. Bryusov, "Noviye sborniki stikhov," Vest's, no. 12 (1908): 57-58. 33. Quoted in Denis Mickiewicz, "Apollo and Modernist Poetics," 350-73 in Proffer and Proffer (eds.), Silver Age of Russian Culture, 368. 34. See Boris de Schloezer, "Zapiski B. F. Shletsera o Predvaritel'nom Deystvii," in Russkiye propilei, vol. 6, 113.

BALMONT

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[789]

fCPHBSKHHR I A* S K R J A B I I f M > M

föTF.II"

ciwfiOof' , P P O M

17 E H I I

' S

*i£lSäL

fig.

ii.j.

Jean Delville's design for the front cover o f Scriabin's Promethee

(Russischer Musikverlag, 1911). Was this Stravinsky's "Starry-Face"?

guided by Roerich, was coming to know it at the outset of his work on "The Great Sacrifice"—Scriabin's and Balmont's fire gods were avatars of Yarilo, the Slavic sun deity to whom the Great Sacrifice was to be offered.

STRAVINSKY

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SCRIABIN

Thus it was a complex of very specific associations and resonances—with neonationalism, with the khlisti, with his new ballet project, and with the Scriabin of Prometheus—that drew Stravinsky to Zelyoniy vertograd, and in particular to Zvezdolikiy. Three of these attractions seem altogether natural and fitting, given what we know of Stravinsky's background. The fourth—to Scriabin—is the one that must be bolstered. There is virtually nothing in Stravinsky's biography that is in greater need of study with an eye toward revision than his relations with Scriabin. Every word Stravinsky ever published on the subject is false and biased and must be dismissed from consideration, beginning with the statement that he and Scriabin "often encountered each other [in Rimsky-Korsakov's house] during my years of tutelage." This is followed by a harsh judgment of Scriabin's character, including the statement that "his way of treating me and Rimsky's other pupils von oben nach unten was so detestable that I never wished to cultivate his company." 35 Indeed, he lacked any opportunity to do so. From 1904 until early 1909—a span that completely circumscribes Stravinsky's period of study with Rimsky-Korsakov—Scriabin was in continuous residence abroad (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy), having been the lucky recipient of a stipend like Chaikovsky's from a wealthy merchant-class admirer. His last visit to Rimsky-Korsakov, as chronicled by Yastrebtsev, took place in 1901, before Stravinsky was personally acquainted with his future teacher or even with the tatter's sons. During Stravinsky's period of intimacy with the Rimsky-Korsakov household, the far-off Scriabin was a fairly frequent topic of conversation and must have appeared to Rimsky's pupil a glamorous, somewhat legendary figure. RimskyKorsakov typically complained that Scriabin was "a man of 1/2 moods . . . always somehow painful and rumpled," but withal, possessed of "a great talent." "Despite his uncommon pungency," Rimsky once remarked, Scriabin was "impeccable as a harmonist, not a trifler like Reger or Strauss." It was only a pity that he had "wandered off on a tangent and will never extricate himself." Yastrebtsev recorded one occasion when, Rimsky having expressed himself in this vein, both his wife and his son Andrey had leapt to Scriabin's defense, and "in consequence Nikolai Andreyevich partly took it back." 36 35. M&C:62/64. 36. Yastrebtsev, Vospominaniya 2:309, 365, 392.

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When Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov returned from DiaghileVs Paris concerts in the spring of 1907, they brought with them awesome, if somewhat grudging, stories of Scriabin's latest achievements and aspirations, stories that must have made him a particularly luminous figure in the young Stravinsky's imagination. "But isn't he going out of his mind with this religious-erotic craze of his?" Rimsky exclaimed, and then repeated what Scriabin had told him in Paris about "the physical and spiritual union with the deity" and "his idea of founding a temple of art right in India on the very banks of the sacred Ganges!—He's getting near the crazy house, wouldn't you say?" Then he went on to describe the Poème de l'extase, which Scriabin had played him on the piano—"actually you might even say it's very strong," was the verdict, "but all the same it's some kind of musical !" 3 7 Glazunov, fount of all musical wisdom, confessed that when he heard the piece, which he could not decipher at all away from the piano, he felt like "an insignificant Ladinsky," naming a hapless Conservatory pupil whose ineptitude had become proverbial.38 One can well imagine the effect these stories must have had on Rimsky's impressionable pupil. The only meeting between Stravinsky and a Scriabin that took place during Rimsky-Korsakov's lifetime was at Rimsky's last birthday party, 6 March 1908, at which one of the guests was Scriabin's abandoned first wife Vera Ivanovna (née Isakovich), herself a distinguished pianist, who played three of her husband's études and may, in the process, have given Stravinsky a nudge toward his own opus 7, the set of Scriabinesque piano studies he began composing almost immediately afterward. 39 Stravinsky further recalled that "Scriabin's vogue in St. Petersburg began about 1905. I attributed it more to his phenomenal abilities as a pianist than to whatever new qualities there were in his music, but no matter the reasons, there was a sudden and very considerable interest in him, and he was hailed, at least in avantgarde circles, as an 'original.'" 40 This statement, too, requires correction. The great explosion of interest in Scriabin among musicians in the Russian capital took place not in 1905 but in January 1909, when Scriabin finally returned from abroad and came to St. Petersburg to supervise the Russian première—at a Belyayev concert conducted by Blumenfeld—of the Poème de l'extase (31 January 1909). There had already been a reading of the piece (19 January) by the Court Orchestra under Wahrlich, which Stravinsky must surely have attended along with every other upto-date St. Petersburg musician. Not only had the work had a huge advance pub-

37. Ibid., 42438. Ibid., 480. 39. Ibid., 486. The fair copy of the first of Stravinsky's etudes, the one that copies Scriabin most obviously, is dated Ustilug, 1 May 1908. 40. M & C : 6 3 /65.

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licity by word of mouth; 41 its première had been originally scheduled to coincide with that of Stravinsky's own Faun and Shepherdess the year before, and he must have been simply burning with curiosity to hear it. The earliest securely documented meeting between Scriabin and Stravinsky took place in direct conjunction with this momentous première. At his mother's behest, Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov invited Scriabin to his late father's house expressly for the purpose of acquainting the newly returned Moscow modernist with the work of the last generation of Rimsky-Korsakov pupils. Mikhail Gnesin recalled the meeting as having taken place at a "Wednesday" (for these gatherings did continue for a while after Nikolai Andreyevich's death), which means the date must have been 28 January 1909, the only Wednesday to fall within the nine days (26 January to 3 February) Scriabin spent in the capital, together with Tatyana Schloezer, his "second" (common-law) wife, before returning home to Moscow. Gnesin's description of the meeting is vivid: The Scriabins appeared. Nadezhda Nikolayevna [the widow Rimsky-Korsakov], in a hospitable mood, came out to greet them. But Alexander Nikolayevich, extremely nervous and wearied by something or other [undoubtedly the strenuous preparations for the Ecstasy première], immediately asked to be allowed to rest for half an hour before entering the living room. Tatyana Fyodorovna seconded his request, but she herself did join us. Within ten minutes, though, Scriabin showed up, completely refreshed and animated, and made immediately for the piano. It seems we all showed him nothing but vocal music. Scriabin praised everyone, and seemingly with sincerity (although, of course, also with condescension [cf. Stravinsky's 'Von oben nach unten"—this must have been the meeting he described to Craft]). These, as I recall, were his words: "All the authors do please me much!" ["Vse avtori ochen' nravyatsya! "]. Ali three of us were still young, and the compositions we showed were essentially still fledgling work and overflowing with our interest in harmony. Stravinsky showed his suite The Faun and the Shepherdess on Pushkin's text. [ . . . ] Steinberg showed two elegant and expressive romances to words by Balmont. I performed "Snowflakes" and "Sleeplessness." In the latter the piano part was probably taken by Steinberg (though in those days I was brave and used to play even my hardest

41. Here, for example, is how Yuliy Engel recalled the atmosphere surrounding the somewhat later Moscow première: " T h e closer the concert drew, the more intense grew the mood of those attending the rehearsals, whose numbers grew noticeably with each one (for the preparation of this concert six rehearsals were required instead of the usual two or three). One could see there practically every musician in Moscow (many of them with scores), but also quite a few individuals who as a rule never went to rehearsals—such was the all-embracing, feverish interest Scriabin's music aroused even before it was 'officially' performed. It is hard to describe the excitement that reigned at these rehearsals. Total strangers would start talking, arguing heatedly or else simply shaking hands in their elation. There were also far more extreme manifestations of agitation and enthusiasm." As for the performance itself, Engel wrote: "One thing was clear to all—that this composer's talent had undergone a grandiose development during his absence, that to him were being revealed untold vastitudes, new worlds where no one had set foot before him" (Glazami sowetnennika, 243-44).

STRAVINSKY

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things). I recall that Scriabin praised both pieces, and later on even repeated a bit of "Sleeplessness" at the piano himself, adding, "This pleases me especially!" His own compositions Scriabin did not play that evening, nor it seems at the following meetings at the Korsakovs', of which there were several. 42

It is a little odd that Stravinsky should have chosen the staid old Faun and Shepherdess, already two and a half years old, to represent him before the acknowledged leader of the modernist faction in Russia. It is possible that Gnesin confused The Faun with the more up-to-date Gorodetsky songs, which better fit the description of "overflowing harmonic interest," and which after all had been performed alongside Steinberg's Balmont settings and Gnesin's "Snowflakes" at an Evening of Contemporary Music a year earlier. Perhaps, though, it was the indomitable Nadezhda Nikolayevna who had done the choosing according to her husband's taste, and possibly to Stravinsky's discomfiture. That would go a long way toward explaining why Igor Fyodorovich recalled this meeting so many years later with "distaste" and even repressed the actual circumstances. Be that as it may, distaste at this point was definitely not directed at Scriabin— which brings us to the last of Stravinsky's oft-cited remarks on his relationship to his older contemporary: "One is influenced by what one loves, and I never could love a bar of [Scriabin's] bombastic music."43 As to influence, the statement has already been at least thrice belied by evidence adduced in this book: recall the discussions of the early piano sonata, the Études, op. 7, and The Firebird. Now it is time to belie the part about love as well. Stravinsky's intense admiration for Scriabin's music, and his desire for Scriabin's friendship and approval, reached a peak precisely around the time of Zvezdolikiy and The Rite cf Spring. A postcard Stravinsky sent Florent Schmitt from Ustilug on 20 July 1911 links his Balmont cantata and his interest in Scriabin quite directly: "I have begun another thing (for chorus and orchestra) which must come out well or not at all—I've got to finish it, otherwise I do nothing but play French music, yours, Debussy, Ravel—that does me good, you know—a great consolation in our Russian desert. Only Scriabin attracts my attention. Try and get to know him." 44 The Scriabin music to which Stravinsky refers here must have been Prometheus, which had just been issued (by Stravinsky's publisher, Koussevitzky) in both score and keyboard reduction, starry-faced frontispiece and all. Except for an insignifi42. Mikhail Gnesin, "Vospominaniya o Skryabine" (Typescript, at the Central State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow), 95-96; quoted in Margarita Pryashnikova and Olga Tompakova, eds., Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva A. N. Skryabina (Moscow: Muzïka, 1985), 167-68. The tantalizing ellipsis in the citation follows the Soviet publication. 43. M&C:63/65. 44. "J'ai commencé un truc (pour choeur et orchestre) qui doit être fort ou rien—il faut le finir, d'ailleurs je ne joue que la musique française, la vôtre, Debussy, Ravel—ça fait bien, vous savez—une grande consolation dans notre désert russe. Seul Scriabine attire mon attention. Tâchez le connaître" (in Lesure [éd.], Stravinsky: études et témoignages, 231).

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cant Feuillet d'album, it was the only composition of Scriabin to have been published since the Poème de l'extase (BelaïefF, 1908), and nothing else by Scriabin would appear until 1912. Analysis will reveal how closely Stravinsky studied this composition, and how direct its impact was not only on Zvezdolikiy\ but possibly on the last pages of Petrushka too. For the moment, however, let us pursue the external documentation of the Stravinsky-Scriabin relationship to the end—that is, to the older composer's premature demise. Their next meeting probably took place on 9/22 September 1913, when chance brought them together in the Warsaw railway station, where both were catching the train to Switzerland. Stravinsky, together with his wife and children, was on his way back to Clarens from a brief late-summer vacation in Ustilug (it would be his last visit there). He had stopped in Warsaw to consult Stepan Mitusov about completing The Nightingale. Scriabin was traveling from Moscow to Lausanne to see his father, the Russian consul there, and to visit his mother's grave.45 Stravinsky, delighted with the meeting, invited Scriabin to pay him a call in Clarens, and eagerly followed up the oral invitation with a letter, dated 17/30 September. It makes revealing reading: Dearest Alexander Nikolayevich, Let me remind you again that the train from Lausanne leaves at 1 0 : 4 0 — a t 11:30 you are in Clarens. I firmly shake your hand—hearty greetings to your family. Yours, Igor Stravinsky P.S. Yesterday I played your Seventh Sonata and my opinion has not changed. I await your arrival impatiendy, so that I may show you and tell you what is especially dear to me in it. 4 6

It is practically a fan letter.47 And it will not be difficult to guess what was "especially dear" to Stravinsky in this sonata. Scriabin replied by telegram that he would not be able to make the trip but that Stravinsky was welcome to come see him in Lausanne. 48 This Stravinsky did. He arrived at noon on Monday, 6 Octo-

45. The date of the meeting is extrapolated from a letter Scriabin sent his mistress, Tatyana Schloezer, from the train, in which he lists the stops he is making; see A. N. Scriabin, Pis'ma, ed. A. V. Kholopov (Moscow: Muzïka, 1965), 605-6. Scriabin does not mention Stravinsky in the letter, but Stravinsky wrote to Steinberg from Clarens (29 September/12 October) that he had ridden all the way from Russia to Switzerland with Scriabin (IStrSM:479). 46. Scriabin, Pis'ma, 610. 47. Almost half a century later, in the midst of a typical, tiresome diatribe against Scriabin and the "musical emphysema of his symphonies," Stravinsky was still moved to make a partial exception for "the more interesting Seventh Sonata" (E&D:86/6o). Some vague inkling of his old intense enthusiasm for the piece must have stirred within him. 48. "Cause imprévue impossible venir regrette infiniment. Pourriez vous me faire plaisir venir me voir Lausanne. Hommages à Madame. Salutations cordiales" (Scriabin, Pis'ma, 610).

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[795]

ber 1913 (n.s.), and stayed until 7 p.m.49 Scriabin played over parts of his Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Sonatas, which pleased Stravinsky immensely.50 This meeting, obviously, marked the apex of the Stravinsky/Scriabin relationship. Stravinsky's description of it to his friends contradicts his account of it in Memories and Commentaries. For publication, Stravinsky attributed to Scriabin some nauseatingly obtuse remarks about Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky's own early ballets. In his letter to Steinberg immediately after the event, he says only that "we talked over many interesting things." 51 Admiration for Scriabin the composer, though, was tempered by a mounting distaste for Scriabin the "thinker" and irritation at the way Scriabin's philosophical pretensions tended—illegitimately, Stravinsky thought—to bolster his musical reputation. On 10 April 1915 (n.s.), Stravinsky sent Benois a clipping from the newspaper Utro Rossii (18 February 1915 [o.s.]) entitled "Scriabin's Mysterium the contents of which Stravinsky characterized, in the accompanying note, as "the mystic revelations of a provincial ham, Scriabin (this pretender, épater-ing the whole Petersburg bog with his quasi-authentic false hysterics—while in essence he's no more than an Anton Rubinstein." 52 Then again, news of Scriabin's death, scarcely a month later, completely undid him. To Prokofiev he wrote (12 May 1915): "What a horror, Scriabin's death! I simply can't get over it! I wanted to read in the papers . . . some details about this terrible death, but instead of what interested me I came across a sea of the usual journalistic stupidity and banality." He singled out an article by Karatïgin entitied "In Memory of Scriabin" ("Pamyati Skryabina"), which was devoted mainly to a technical discussion of Scriabin's use of the oddnumbered overtones. "I swear," Stravinsky fulminated, "that with all my severest criticism of Scriabin, I showed him more respect than Karatïgin with his overtones." 53 Stravinsky certainly knew whereof he spoke, for (as we shall see) he had an excellent grasp of Scriabin's methods, which had their basis not in "odd-numbered overtones" (a widespread canard of the day) but in the same Russian common practices as Stravinsky's own. His disdain for the "stupidity and banality" of Karatïgin and the rest did not stop him, however, from carefully clipping every obituary, memorial piece, and reminiscence he could find—along with the special Scriabin issues of Muzïka and the RMG—and collecting them in a folder for 49. Scriabin to Tatyana Schloezer, 7 October 1913; in Scriabin, Pis'ma, 612. 50. Stravinsky to Steinberg, 29 September/12 October 1913; in IStrSM:479. He adds, "I have to take a look at them in their entirety." To Vladimir Derzhanovsky he remarked, "He played over his latest sonatas for me, which I liked incomparably better than the opuses that came immediately after Promethee" (IStrSM:5io). The latter would have included the Poème-nocturne, op. 61; the Sixth Sonata, op. 62; and the Deux poèmes ("Masque," "Étrangeté"), op. 63—all published in 1912. 51. IStrSM:479; cf. M&C:63/65. 52. IStrSM:sio; I. V. Nestyev, "Skryabin i yego russkiye 'antipodi',' " in Muzïka i sovremennost', vol. 10 (Moscow: Muzïka, 1976), 96. In Memories and Commentaries (63/65), interestingly enough, Stravinsky attributes the comparison with Rubinstein to Rimsky-Korsakov. 53. IStrSM:487—88.

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which he designed and executed a calligraphic cover graced by an Orthodox cross (Fig. 11.4). 5 4 But although Stravinsky's respect and admiration for Scriabin were very great, they were entirely unrequited—and this is what turned him so bitterly against Scriabin in later years. Scriabin must have been cordial enough to Stravinsky that October day in 1913, though a letter to his mistress suggests that the younger composer had outstayed his welcome. 55 Stravinsky, for his part, left with a slightly sour taste in his mouth, despite his pleasure in Scriabin's company and in the music he had heard. He wrote to Derzhanovsky: "It rather startled me that [Scriabin] knows nothing about my compositions and speaks of them from hearsay. He says he's amazed at all the Paris noise about Le sacre, since someone told him that I in fact am just doing the same old thing." 5 6 Derzhanovsky replied: "What you tell me about Scriabin and your compositions does not surprise me at all, because in general Scriabin doesn't know anyone else's music. Perhaps this is not due to any particular reluctance on his part as much as to the tenor of life that had developed at home under his wife's influence, and outside the house, under the influence of flatterers and obsequious types." 5 7 This experience must have strengthened Stravinsky's impression that Scriabin looked on him von oben nach unten; what must have especially rankled was the idea that Scriabin still regarded him as a post-kuchkist or a Belyayevets ("doing the same old thing"), while he with all his heart wished to be regarded by Russia's great avant-gardist as a peer. Yet he did not know the half of it. Among the "flatterers and obsequious types" surrounding Scriabin, Derzhanovsky must have had Leonid Sabaneyev foremost in mind. A composer trained by Taneyev and a pianist trained by Pavel Yulyevich Schloezer (1848—98), teacher of Scriabin's wife and uncle of his mistress, Sabaneyev (1881—1968) attached himself to Scriabin around 1910 in a capacity not unlike that of Yastrebtsev to Rimsky-Korsakov. The literary result of this Boswell activity, besides a conventional biography that appeared in 1916, was a volume entitled Reminiscences of Scriabin,** published on the tenth anniversary of the composer's death. Sabaneyev had made a point of soliciting Scriabin's opinions for posterity on a wide variety of subjects—strikingly anticipating the way Robert Craft would later solicit Stravinsky's opinions—with special emphasis on the music of Scriabin's contemporaries. Scriabin knew little of it and cared less about it, absorbed as he 54. The folder, now at the Sacher Stiftung, Basel, also contains the RMG memorial issue for Taneyev, who died about six weeks later. 55. "Tusiki, I stand guilty before you! It's been three days since I've written you! Yesterday what prevented me from communing with my darling was Stravinsky (a composer), who is staying here in Switzerland. He came at 12 and sat till 7" (Scriabin, Pis'ma, 612). 56. IStrSM:5io. 57. SelCorrI:6o. 58. L. L. Sabaneyev, Vospominaniya 0 Skryabine (Moscow: Muzi'kal'ni'y Sektor Gosudarstvennogo Izdatel'stva, 1925).

STRAVINSKY

AND

SCRIABIN

[7 97 ]

f i g . 1 1 . 4 . Cover of Stravinsky's obituary folder for Scriabin. (Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel)

was in his own muse. So Sabaneyev would routinely submit scores to Scriabin and record his snap judgments, unfailingly negative or condescending. This was how Scriabin, in the winter of 1913-14, finally came to know Stravinsky's work along with that of the young Prokofiev, Artur Lourie, Rachmaninoff, Medtner, and even Schoenberg. Favorable comment was passed on Akimenko (a poor man's Scriabin) alone. As for Petrushka, these were the remarks Sabaneyev provoked: "Well now, here we have the usual Rimsky-Korsakoffery," he said of Stravinsky, "only a bit more ingenious, less naive."... "Very entertaining, very nice!" he would say of certain episodes, "only all this—it's just a bunch of toys." The coachmen's dance delighted him with the "boorishness" it captured so well. "It's really remarkable . . . you can just see these coachmen—'Hey there, say there, hey there, say there!'" ['Akb ti, chto-t'i, chto-ti, chto-tif]... and Alexander Nikolayevich would

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hum something rhythmically "energetic," arms akimbo, dancing slightly. "What a load of cheek there is in this music!"

But Scriabin had nothing good to say about The Rite of Spring: "All this appears to me to be cerebral, mentalistic in the highest degree.... It's minimum creativity."59 One can only imagine how these words, when published, must have wounded and angered Stravinsky, who had courted Scriabin in the years of his early fame as he had courted no other countryman. It is safe to assume that the rage and hatred that seethe in Stravinsky's published memoirs of Scriabin were given their biggest boost by these posthumous pronouncements so eagerly shepherded into print by Sabaneyev, by then Stravinsky's archenemy among critics. His rage reflects resentment not only at Scriabin's failure to take him seriously as a composer, but also at that sizable faction of the Russian musical establishment that venerated Scriabin (especially after his early death) and persisted in regarding Stravinsky as an upstart. Scriabin eventually came to represent for Stravinsky every feeling of inferiority that plagued him, feelings that would not die completely until he belatedly experienced a Russian triumph of his own in 1962.60 Scriabin's comments about Petrushka, even the ostensibly favorable ones, must have been particularly wounding. Stravinsky had surely sensed from the first that The Firebird and Petrushka, "toys" that they were, would never entide him to a seat at the grownups' table at home. This unease about his reputation must have been the strongest spur of all toward composing Zvezdolikiy. It was in its own way a bid to "épater the whole Petersburg bog" that was paying tribute to Scriabin, and to dissociate himself from "Rimsky-Korsakoffery" once and for all. NEW

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I N T E R A C T I O N S

The "Two Poems of Balmont," composed in July 1911 as if in preparation for Zvezdolikiy, conform to the neonationalist pattern established in Petrushka: in both 59. Ibid., 248. The last comment ("¿to minimum tvorchestva") was a catch-phrase of Scriabin's applied to all and sundry. 60. Stravinsky's bitter familial resentments no doubt fanned his Scriabin phobia. Robert Craft has written (P&D:322) that Stravinsky "did not deny the truth" of George Antheil's account of an incident he witnessed in Berlin in 1922, when Stravinsky's mother arrived from Soviet Russia to live with her son in the West. Mme Stravinsky, according to Antheil, "brought with her a faint but typical Soviet Russian contempt for [her son's] present 'mercurial' (as she considered it) reputation in Paris. Her idea, then, of a really important modern composer was Scriabine, to whose music she was apparentiy devoted—possibly because, at this period of Soviet Russia's musical development, Scriabine was practically the official Russian Soviet composer.... One evening, while I was sitting with both of them, I heard Mrs. Stravinsky and her son break into a heated prolonged argument. She would not give in, and finally Stravinsky almost broke into tears, so wrathful did he become. At last he turned to me and translated: he, Stravinsky, no longer able to stand his mother's inordinate admiration for Scriabine,... admonished her, criticizing her taste, and finally admitting to hating Scriabine. Whereupon she had answered: 'Now, now, Igor! You have not changed in all these years. You were always like that—always contemptuous of your betters!' " (Bad Boy of Music, 38-39).

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[ 79 9 ]

EXAMPLE I I . I a. "The Dove," fig. [D]

b. "Chez Pétrouchka," fig. [ 1 ] , piano omitted

songs, chromatically (that is, octatonically) conceived passages contrast and interact with folkishly diatonic ones. In the second one, "The Dove" ("Go/w¿"), the resemblance to the "E-minor" middle section of "Chez Pétrouchka" amounts to a virtual quotation (Ex. ii.i). The orderly way in which pitch collections succeed one another from quatrain to quatrain of its twelve-line text makes "The Dove" especially useful for studying Stravinsky's octatonic/diatonic techniques. The middle quatrain (letter [C]) is entirely restricted to the pitches of Collection III, with a characteristic (even oldfashioned) sequential third-rotation corresponding to the line-by-line scansion of the poem (Ex. 11.2). It is pure "Rimsky-Korsakoffery," occluded only slightly by the double-inflected sevenths on the strong beats (E/EH; G/G#). The harmonic structure of the first quatrain is the most interesting. With a single exception (the C-sharp at the very beginning of the song, which immediately falls back as an appoggiatura to C-natural), its pitches are rigorously confined to octatonic Collection II, except that A-sharp consistently substitutes for A. This substitution is related to a device previously noted in Rimsky-Korsakov (cf. Ex. 4.42): viz., the asymmetrical variation, shown schematically in Example 11.3a, of the tetrachordal structure of the octatonic "melody scale." In the present case, the extraneous pitch, combined with the sustained D/F# in the piano left hand, enabled Stravinsky to begin the song with a whiff of whole-tone harmony in the form of a "tonic" augmented triad repeatedly approached by appoggiaturas (Ex. 11.3b). This technique of importing whole-tone color by inflecting a single member of the octatonic scale has been identified as a favorite device of Scriabin's, 61 and Stravinsky's usage may well have been a derivation from Prometheus. Resolution of the A-sharp to A-natural in the first measure after letter [B], preceded by a reiteration of the C-sharp (functioning now as a stable scale tone), signals the change from the modified Collection I to Collection III. The little transitional phrase in the piano, full of chromatic passing tones and semitonal clusters, foreshadows the text by representing the dove's cooing (cf. the first line of the middle quatrain: "Beliy¿¡olub vorkoval").62 The other transitional phrase (accompanying "Nasladilsya, uletel," the last line of the quatrain) consists of a pair of quasi-cadential approaches to octatonically conceived chords belonging in turn to each of the two collections not used in the setting of the middle quatrain. Thus it is in the most literal sense a modulatory bridge. The chords in question are in fact incomplete and enharmonically concealed Petrushka chords. Their preparations include tones that are foreign to the octatonic collection of the cadence but have precedents within the song (or within common 61. See George Perle, "Scriabin's Self-Analyses," Music Analysis 3 (1984), I04ÍF-, where the technique is described as it operates in the Seventh Sonata. 62. In the orchestrated version of the song (1954), scored for the same ensemble as the Japanese Lyrics, the word painting is intensified by the instrumentation (two clarinets and a flute in its lowest register) to the point of onomatopoeia.

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example

li.2

EXAMPLE

"The Dove," fig.

I I .3

a. Referential scales for "The Dove," tetrachordal analysis Collection II

Modified scale

• î - I* • V V V T

S

* T

:

;—¡j—In " V V V T

be. P

" " V V

S T

T

T

V

V

V

V

S

T

S

T

b. "The Dove," first quatrain, harmonic sketches

«

mr first vocal phrase

accompaniment

figure

second vocal phrase

practice) as "nonharmonic" tones. The first of them (B-sharp) is an inflected chord seventh, a typical harmony for this song. The second (C-sharp) is an ordinary chromatic passing tone. The example shows a hypothetical continuation of the implied sequence of descending whole steps, which would have led the harmony back to Collection III. The sequence is interrupted in the actual setting by the Petrushka-like cascade in the piano part, illustrating the next word of the text: "[the dove] flew away." The illustration is not merely gestural but harmonic: octatonic reference "flies away" here, dissipated by a massive infusion of chromatic tones that render moot any question of harmonic distinction. At letter [D], as we have already seen (Ex. n.ia), the harmony is restructured along stricdy diatonic lines. The interrupted modulatory sequence is nonetheless completed at the very end of the song, precisely where the text calls upon the dove to return. The final chord is in fact the hypothetical sequence-completing chord of Example 11.4. The whole harmonic texture, in effect, has "returned" to Collection III for the setting of the last line, in which the piano part is entirely based on the Petrushka-chord relationship: the offbeat harmony in m. 18 is identical to that of the last chord, transposed by a tritone. Taken together, the two harmonies complete the Petrushka chord; each is thus a symmetrically partitioned subset of the chord. And what is most remarkable, this very subset, in precisely this voicing, will become one of the defining harmonic components of The Rite of Spring (Ex. 11.5). To recapitulate: the tonal-harmonic progress of this brief but very sensitive and concentrated song illustrates Stravinsky's preoccupation with whole-tone/octatonic/ diatonic interactions. Each successive quatrain illustrates one aspect of this troika. The first is based on a contaminated octatonic set that (ambiguously in this context) emphasizes a characteristic whole-tone harmony; the second is based on a straightforwardly presented octatonic collection, treated according to what were, for a Russian composer writing in 1911, standard operating procedures; the third is based on a diatonic scale that shares a tetrachord with each of the previously employed octatonic collections. Thus there is a sense of progressive tonal clarification as the song unfolds—a device that would reach a climax a decade later with the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (see Chapter 18). Furthermore, the various harmonic collections are used symbolically to illustrate the meaning of the text. The dove approaches through a whole-tone mist; its presence, and its ecstatic union with the flower, are accompanied by the unimpeded octatonic music; its departure is lamented in a diatonic threnody; and its return is evoked by a resumption of the octatonic ambience. These relations are summarized in Example 11.6.63 63. Of coursc Stravinsky was not the only composer of his generation to be fruitfully concerned with such interactions; they are, for example, fundamental to the techniques Bartok was evolving at the same time and even earlier. See Elliott Antokoletz, The Music ofBela Bartok (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 7.

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ii.4 "The Dove," m. showing sequence continuation E X A M P L E

Na

13,

with harmonic sketch

sia - dil - sya

h

Coll. I

E X A M P L E

11.5

Coll. II

"The Dove," end

All pitches referable to Collection III unless circled

Double inflection (cf. j k ^ ^

Summary of harmony: Collection III Petrushka -chord (cf. sequence continuation in Ex. 11.4)

ii.6 referential scales E X A M P L E

— in Ex. 11.2)

I , Q G JT G FL/J

"The Dove," summary of tonal relations via

2 n d quatrain (Coll. I I I ) -

»

l s t quatrain (modified Coll. II) -

3rd quatrain (e minor)

Interactions of a far subtler, more elusive kind inform the attenuated textures of "Forget-Me-Not" ("Nezabudochka-tsvetochek"), the first of the Balmont settings. The tonic of this masterly little song is B, but it is never established in a conventional tonal way. In the outer sections of a minuscule da capo structure, the B is introduced by the Phrygian resolution of a C that is uniformly associated with an octatonic entourage drawn from Collection I I I (Ex. 11.7). In Stravinsky's notation the C is always spelled B-sharp out of deference to the accompanying trilled fifth on G-sharp and D-sharp. This locates the B and the C within a competing octatonic frame of reference (Collection II). The slyly placed accompanying harmony disguises the essential tonal motion of the melody as a simple major/minor interplay over a G-sharp root. The two octatonic fields converging on C can be represented as a Rimskian melody/harmony complex (Ex. 11.8; cf. Ex. 4.23). This whole complex functions as a Phrygian auxiliary to the tonic B, as in the closing pages of Petrushka two octatonic collections had expressed a fall to the tonic from the second degree. The note B finally emerges unclouded at letter [A] (mm. 4-5). The melody here is in the purest B minor, the G-sharp that had formerly masqueraded as an ersatz root having been absorbed into a melodic-minor approach to B. Once the tonic is achieved, the melodic line reverts to the natural minor, making its final, folksy-modal cadence through an A-natural (Ex. 11.9). But once again the accompaniment insinuates a whiff of octotony into the proceedings: the dominant is suppressed and replaced with an augmented fourth. If the E-sharp of the accompaniment is taken into account, the whole texture in mm. 4 - 6 , excepting only the modal-cadential A , could be referred to octatonic Collection I (Ex. 11.10). There is little point in attempting to decide whether the music at [A] is octatonic except for the A-natural, or diatonic except for the E-sharp. The two collections have interpenetrated each other inextricably—or rather, they have intersected on B, and in this way the harmonic center of the song is finally established. At the concluding reprise of the opening section, Stravinsky at first quotes it literally: mm. 16-18 is a note-for-note playback of mm. 1-3 except for a differing placement of the bars (the first two notes are now notated as a pickup to the first beat rather than the third). Unlike Stravinsky's notorious later rebarrings, this one does not affect the stress patterns in any way; the difference is purely visual. Thereafter, the composer elegantly sorts out the pitch collections he had intermixed the first time around. The reprise of the second phrase is transposed in such a way that all of its pitches are now referable to Collection I I without diatonic contamination. The last (unaccompanied) phrase of the song, approached through a common tone (C-sharp), makes a final Phrygian-octatonic gesture toward B. In the absence of the accompanying G-sharp, Stravinsky finally felt free to spell the note hitherto designated B-sharp as an unambiguous C, which clarifies its relationship as Phrygian supertonic to B and validates our interpretation of the opening passage (Ex. 11.11). In this incomparably deft close, Stravinsky encapsulates the whole

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[805]

EXAMPLE

ii.7

"Forget-Me-Not," mm. 1-3

i p p i p p i p p v 1 pi'>p»p p ^ m f

p

,

,

,

,

Ne-za bu-doch ka tsve -

1

4>

> .

5

— V -

EXAMPLE

11.8 1

(#»)

^ h

,

to chek

1

o chen'

la sko-vo

t

-

* — ^

Melody (Coll. II)

i

, r

tsve-tyot,

isqrij

C—- * .nil. Ill tetrachord —i —

^

Octatonic melody/harmony scale complex on C h

1

1 -

1

!i

h

1

'/2 1

1

1

Harmony (Coll. I l l )

EXAMPLE

11.9

"Forget-Me-Not," melody at mm. 4 - 5

Iiteiii p "p HirfVP HiF»*^ Dlya

te

bya rnoy drug dru zho-chek,

EXAMPLE

$

11.10

nad

vo

di

tse

yu

ros-tyot.

"Forget-Me-Not," derivation of melody and harmony from Collection I

Collection I, by tetrachords

"b minor"

(x.) (melodic minor cadence)

EXAMPLE

Vsyo

zo

11.11

"Forget-Me-Not," mm. i9(bis)-end

vvot te

r

bya d m zho - chek

>

^J

Sli-shish' ton-kiy g o - l o

v

7

Phrygian progression

harmonic structure of Petrushka1s concluding pages in fewer than three dozen notes. His subtle virtuosity in the handling of his Rimskian legacy has taken him far beyond the "Rimsky-Korsakoffery" of Petrushka into a realm of concentration and technical refinement neither his teacher nor his peers ever achieved. PROMETHEAN

RESONANCES

Unquestionably, Scriabin helped him get there. Both in its particular chord colors and in its technique of circulating freely among the octatonic collections to achieve a sense of harmonic progression and modulation, "Forget-Me-Not," like the close of Petrushka which it recalls, bears traces of contact with Prometheus. Dates amply support this surmise. Prometheus, completed in the spring of 1910, was published (by Koussevitzky, Stravinsky's new publisher) in time for the première performance, 2 March 1911. Stravinsky composed the closing pages of Petrushka, as we may recall, in May of the same year. As we may also recall, the close of Petrushka rings novel changes on the Petrushka chord idea: triadic and dominant-seventh sonorities are combined in octatonically referable polychords of which the constituent roots lay not a tritone but a minor third apart. These constructions are foreshadowed in Prometheus (Ex. 11.12). Scriabin's Eb-C polychord is referable to octatonic Collection III. Ten measures later the passage it initiates is restated a whole step higher, so that the polychord refers to Collection II. The effect is quite similar to the transposition effect Stravinsky obtained by using the same octatonic complexes, one functioning as a supertonic auxiliary to the other (see Ex. 10.33). The same Prometheus chord, or rather its extremities, leads us into the world of Zvezdolikiy, whose oft-quoted motto begins with a major/minor superimposition on C, the tenors' E-flat clashing against the E-natural of the basses (Ex. 11.13). This particular octatonic derivation, later to figure so prominently in Stravinsky's work (especially his "neoclassical" work), had been anticipated by Scriabin in several pieces, and reached a normative status in his music by the time of the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas, generally viewed as the works that ushered in the composer's last creative period. This final phase includes a number of pieces that are as rigorously octatonic as anything in Rimsky-Korsakov or Stravinsky. Scriabin, however, resolutely avoided the routines of triadic octatonicism described in Chapter 4. With him, the tone-semitone collection tends not to interact with diatonic harmony or to emphasize simple major/minor triadic cognates. Rather, the three octatonic sets act as autonomous referential collections, functionally equivalent (like Collection III in "Chez Pétrouchka") to keys. While a given set is in force, it furnishes the entire pitch content for as many as seventy measures at a stretch. In the Sixth Sonata, for example, large sections (mm. 64—127, mm. 166-235, and mm. 252— 319) are respectively referable to each of the three octatonic collections in turn, allowing for a modicum of ornamental chromaticism—passing tones, appoggiatuPROMETHEAN

RESONANCES

[807]

Scriabin, Prometheus,fig.| 35 |

ii.12

EXAMPLE tr tr

l, a-

—

m

=

i

-d

L J

3 r

4 4

i i r

/ • w-

II.14 Scriabin, Seventh Sonata, source chord compared with "Mystic Chord" and with Collection III EXAMPLE

ffJP \

1

||

0

O-^j Fr6 j

Fr6 j a

?« f

.

Fr6

. , TjbtQ-4-

"Mystic Chord" Seventh Sonata (Prometheus) source chord

Coll. Ill, complete

W

jr

J~
sul poni. if ' ti f i tu/ poni

£ T J HÌr—--pr— I ' 1 'EÉEE- I * i

p:

=

•t m

r

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-

InÈi

»

^ :

r

*

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f

f

Ì

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di

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V

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5 1

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i l i i, r i 4f=5==i Va. K * pi«. ? { Ve,

. i

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t

i

1 y = 4 = -1 -r

= -'4=—

JP pi/7.

' div. a

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r

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JZ

*

| - - 4 1- --> , 1 li-

—T -1

1

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-/ = 1

f - 4

T

v

EXAMPLE

11.26

(continued.)

b. Collection I I I in d o u b l e diminished-seventh partition

© ©

®

© ©

©

F i g . [ 2 ] , reduction (minus " z e r o " pedal) doubling ©

chromatic w.t. 9

::

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.

©

^

kM * ± *

© ©

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EXAMPLE

11.27

a. Schema S ft

°

"

=

C h r o m a t i c transformation o f m o t t o

b. Measures 1 - 2 w f l1 -

( b p ^ PI

s

*r

c. M e a s u r e 33 1 *

(ro

pgZ

*

II

&

the burgeoning celebrity might have chosen the dedicatee that would do his reputation the most good), that of the Three Japanese Lyrics (Tri stikhotvorenii izyaponskoy liriki, 1912-13) could not have been more authentic. This set of songs was conceived in the society of the avant-garde coterie known as "les Apaches," a group of young Parisian artists, poets, and musicians who lionized Stravinsky in the wake of The Firebird and Petrushka76 76. The red-Indian sobriquet came from an incident that took place after a concert in 1902. Ravel and the pianist Ricardo Vines, on their way to the home of the painter and set designer Paul Sordes, jostled a newsdealer who shouted after them, "Attention les Apaches!" (Watch out, rowdies!) As Maurice Delage later recalled, "the word enchanted Vines, who that day launched Apachism into eternity" ("Les premiers amis de Ravel," in Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de ses famtliers, ed. Roger Wild [Paris: Editions du Tambourinaire, 1939], 99). For more on the group and Stravinsky's relations with them, see Pasler, "Stravinsky and the Apaches," 403; also Elaine Brody, "Vines in Paris: New Light on Twentieth-Century Performance Practice," in A Musical Offering: Essays in Honor of Martin Bernstein, ed. Edward H. CUnkscale and Claire Brook (New York: Pendragon Press, 1977), 47-48.

[822]

II

•

NEW

TIMES,

NEW

BIRDS;

NEW

BIRDS,

NEW

SONGS

Stravinsky's specific conduit into the group was Calvocoressi, a charter member who was at the time on Diaghilev's payroll. The composer of The Firebird was "welcomed as the heir presumptive of the great Russians whom we loved so well." 77 Besides Ravel, the musical regulars at the time of Stravinsky's advent included Florent Schmitt (1870-1958) and Maurice Delage (1879-1961). It was at the latter's dwelling on the outskirts of Paris that the group was having its meetings then, and it was with Delage, who frequently played host to Stravinsky during the Diaghilev seasons, that the newcomer formed a special attachment. Their friendship reached its peak during the saison russe of late spring 1912, when Stravinsky had no premiere to attend to and was free to spend what was evidently a memorable fortnight with Delage at his bungalow, 3 rue de Civry, "far from the brouhaha of the high season of the Ballets Russes, calm and intimate in that little pavilion with its little rooms which I so wish to see again." 78 These were the rooms Delage—whose family business frequently took him to the Orient—had got up in Japanese style, then so fashionable in Paris. 79 Stravinsky called Delage's house the "little museum" and, infected with the craze himself, began to decorate a room at his Ustilug estate with Japanese prints (some of them gifts from Delage) and artifacts.80 Small wonder that in surroundings like these Stravinsky should have turned, upon finishing Zvezdolikiy, to setting some poems from the Japanese as a refreshment amid the travails of orchestrating The Rite of Spring. The three eventual settings were dedicated, respectively, to three musical Apaches: Delage, Schmitt, and Ravel. Stravinsky's settings are named for the poets of the lyrics he used. The first of them, "Akahito," was composed in the Japanese room at Ustilug; the piano-vocal score is dated 19 October 1912. A surviving page of sketches shows that an accompanying instrumental ensemble was envisioned from the start. 81 The music is based on an unremitting ostinato figure, given in Example 11.28a first as Stravinsky originally spelled it, then as it appears in the fair copy and the published score. It is surprising that notation in terms of A-flat major, in which key the ostinato seems to express such a basic tonal progression, should have been arrived at only after the 77. Calvocoressi, Musicians Gallery; 221. 78. Letter to Delage from Ustilug, 14 October 1912; in SelCorrI:23. For Stravinsky this letter is a real gusher: another part of it reads (in Pasler's translation, "Stravinsky and the Apaches," 403), "There are two Parises, one that gives me fame and money and whose temptations eat away at my vitals almost without my being aware of it. The other is Maurice—'3 rue de Civrv'—who, without realizing it, scrapes away all the dirty business of the Great Season of the Ballets Russes." 79. Indeed, by 1912 comparison of French music and Japanese painting was a hoary critical commonplace. Cf. Karati'gin, writing in Vest six years earlier (about Debussy's Quartet, of all innocuous pieces): "Without any [harmonic] fulcrum, with neither foundations nor cement Debussy has created a sort of'Japanese' perspectiveless style in music. He has the same simplification, the same ethereality, the same 'fantastic realism' as Hokusai or Hiroshige" ("Vechera sovremennoy muzi'ki," Vest 3, nos. 3-4 [1906]: 72). 80. A picture of Stravinsky sitting in this room in the summer of 1912 can be seen in T. Strawinsky, Catherine and Ijjor Stravinsky, n.p. 81. It is printed in facsimile in P&D:IO7-

riERROTIC

GESTURES

[823]

first draft was fully sketched. With its use of leaping grace notes, the ostinato tune seems a spinoff from The Rite, then still in progress; and some of the sketch harmonizations confirm this impression, especially one that accompanies the ostinato with the parallel, chromatically sideslipping triads familiar from the later sections of the exactly contemporaneous "Danse sacrale" (Ex. n.28b-c). 8 2 A fully worked out score of "Akahito" was not made until the second song, "Mazatsumi," had been both composed and scored. The ensemble established for "Mazatsumi"—two flutes (second alternating piccolo), two clarinets, string quartet, and piano—is conspicuously close to that of Pierrot lunaire, if a shade more opulent, and the much-debated question of the impact on Stravinsky's songs of Schoenberg's "thrice seven melodramas" must be raised. 83 Stravinsky heard Schoenberg's "instrumental masterpiece," as he would later characterize it, at a Sunday matinee in Berlin's Choralion Saal on 8 December 1912 (N.S.) while on a Ballets Russes tour in Berlin. 84 (Four days earlier Schoenberg had been Stravinsky's guest at a performance of Petrushka.)

Deeply impressed, Stravinsky became for a time

Schoenberg's unpaid propagandist with musicians both in France and at home in Russia. As Schoenberg must have told Stravinsky at the time of their meeting, he was then practically on his way to St. Petersburg, where in less than two weeks (8/21 December) he would conduct Siloti's orchestra (that is, the orchestra of the Mariyinsky Theater) in his Pelleas andMelisande,

op. 5. Five days later, upon read-

ing Karatigin's review of this performance in the newspaper

RechStravinsky

wrote the critic (who was one of the directors of the Evenings of Contemporary Music) a letter that must be quoted here in full, if for no other reason than to put in perspective his various later accounts of his brush with Schoenberg:

Clarens, 26/13 XII1912 Dear Vyacheslav Gavrilovich! I have just read your review of the Siloti concert at which Schònberg conducted his "Pelléas." I saw from your lines that you truly love and understand Schònberg—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 am speaking of

82. André Schaefìher has compared "Akahito" with the "Rondes printanières" ("Variations Schoenberg," Contrepoints 7 [1950]: 127), but the resemblance is confined to a detail of instrumentation—the doubling of flute and clarinet at two octaves. 83. The question became controversial with Pierre Boulez's typically bellicose characterization of the Japanese Lyrics as a "stupid misconstruction" of Schoenberg's innovations ("Trajectoires: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schònberg," Contrepoints 6 [1949]: 122-42). The dates on which he based his argument were incorrect. According to Robert Craft, the October 1912 sketch for "Akahito" specifies an ensemble similar but not identical to the one finally chosen, and less similar to that of Pierrot: two violins, two violas, piano, piccolo, and flute (P&D:IO7). 84. Conv:76/69. He kept his ticket stub (Saal links, Reihe 5, Platz 5) all his life; a photograph of it may be seen in Avec Stravinsky, third plate in the unpaginated photo insert.

[ 8 2 4 ]

II

•

N E W

T I M E S ,

N E W

B I R D S ;

N E W

B I R D S ,

N E W

S O N G S

EXAMPLE

11.28

a. "Akahito," ostinato as sketched and in final form

0 A—w

fjr^'if \$f U V f k V f Ë

ffi-[

r E

£ ti f

¡ r ^ i f p vtr.-s : :^fed

A

f^é -

jD b

¿IEEE1 m

Ä

firn.

m

=fc= - t

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c. The Rite of Spring, excerpt from "Danse sacrale" 0

p

a

teli*

f I

r

:

—

—

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I

h t r -T-fc^i

-4— M—

4 8

J

r f - f n — J — -7-T

T ""— ~ t = r

: + -tH -

L- . 4— g

his "Dreimal Sieben Gedichte" aus Albert Girauds "Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire" für eine Sprechstimme, Klavier, Flöte (auch Piccolo), Klarinette (auch Bassel.), Violine (auch Alto) und Violoncell—(Melodramen) op. 21, which I heard recendy in Berlin (Konzert-Bureau Emil Gutmann—Berlin W. 35). That's what you "Contemporaries" ought to be performing! But perhaps you and he have already met and he has told you about it as he did me? Sincerely yours, Igor Stravinsky85 85. Printed in A. N. Rimsky-Korsakov et al., eds., V. G. Karattgin: zhizn', deyatel'nost, start i materiali (Leningrad: Academia, 1927), 282. In his Pelkas review, referring to the rather calm, even polite reception accorded Schoenberg by the Siloti audience, Karati'gin had cited the spadework that preceded the German master's success in St. Petersburg: "Last night no one whistled, in fact there was no little applause. This, of course, is because St. Petersburg is getting acquainted with Schoenberg in reverse order. A year ago there was Homeric chuckling in the hall when the 'Evenings of Contemporary Music' first revealed to Petersburgers Schoenberg's piano piece, op. 11 [the pianist had been Sergey Prokofiev]. Recently at Sandra Belting's recital the wonderful Quartet op. 10 was performed, and was already received with a more benign 'obstruction.' Last night we heard op. 5, far more restrained by comparison with the quartet. It was not surprising that many actually liked it, nor was it surprising that I, who

PIERROTIC

GESTURES

[825]

Another musician to whom Stravinsky spoke with infectious enthusiasm about Pierrot was Ravel, who encountered the manuscript of the Japanese Lyrics in Stravinsky's Clarens apartment while the two of them were collaborating on the Diaghilev-commissioned revision of Khovanshchina in March 1913. By 2 April, Ravel had finished his setting of Mallarmé's "Soupir" for the same combination of voice and instruments and dedicated it to Stravinsky.86 On the same day he wrote with excitement to Hélène Casella, coordinator of concerts for the Société de musique indépendante (S.M.I.), with a "wonderful project for a scandalous concert: Pieces for (a) recitation, (b) and (c) voice and piano, string quartet, 2 flutes, and 2 clarinets, (a) Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg (21 pieces, 40 minutes) (b) Mélodies japonaises, Strawinsky (4 [sic] pieces, 10 minutes) (c) Two [sic] poems by S. Mallarmé, Maurice Ravel."87 As he put it to Mme Casella, Ravel knew Pierrot, which would not see print until 1914, only "by hearsay—i.e., from Stravinsky."88 The letter is for this very reason sufficient testimony that Stravinsky conceived of his Japanese Lyrics, in their instrumental guise, as an emulation of Schoenberg's work, and that he so described them to Ravel. But there is direct internal evidence as well, particularly in "Mazatsumi," the second song in Stravinsky's set, which he sketched in Clarens on 5/18 December, ten days after hearing Pierrot in Berlin, and finished in score three days later. In considering the extent to which the Japanese Lyrics reflect contact with Schoenberg's art, one must keep in mind the nature and extent of Stravinsky's acquaintance with it. He had only the memory of the one performance he had attended, plus at best a glance into Schoenberg's autograph score, to go on. Thus it could only have been a generalized "gestural" impression he retained and reacted to, rather than any concrete configuration of pitches or rhythms. Surely the most conspicuous Pierrotic gestures are the darting, quicksilver arpeggios and runs in which the piano interacts so effectively with the wind instruments, and the dissonant staccato punctuating chords. The lengthy—indeed disproportionate—

know the quartet, discerned not a few weak spots in Pelleas" ("Kontsert A. Ziloti," Red?, 10 December 1912). Stravinsky's various memoirs of his isolated encounter with Schoenberg in 1912 are a good index of his own esthetic trajectory. In Chroniques de ma vie (1935) he took care to emphasize that " I did not feel the slightest enthusiasm about the esthetics of the work which appeared to me to be a retrogression to the out-of-date Beardsley cult," but even there he owned that "the merits of the instrumentation are beyond dispute" (An Autobiography, 4 3 - 4 4 ) . In this account, Stravinsky did not connect his Schoenberg visit directly with the Japanese Lyrics. By the time of Expositions and Developments, the performance of Pierrot lunaire had become "the great event of my life then" (E&D:78/67—68). 86. The remaining songs in the set Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé were completed later in Paris and St-Jean-de-Luz, respectively: "Placet futile" (dedicated to Schmitt) in May, and "Surgi de la croupe et du bond" (dedicated to Satie) in August. Presumably Ravel omitted a dedication to Delage (which would have completed the parallel with Stravinsky's set of songs) because he had already dedicated " L a vallée des cloches" from Miroirs to his pupil and protégé. 87. In Vladimir Jankelevitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 17588. Omstein, Ravel, 66.

[826]

11

•

NEW

TIMES,

NEW

BIRDS;

NEW

BIRDS,

NEW

SONGS

instrumental prelude to "Mazatsumi," the first music Stravinsky composed after hearing Pierrot, is a veritable study in darting arpeggios and staccato punctuations. It is hard to imagine what motivated this quite gratuitously extended instrumental episode if not the obsessive reverberations of Schoenberg's "instrumental masterpiece" in Stravinsky's inner ear. Compare the opening of "Mazatsumi" with no. 10 ("Raub"), no. n ("Rote Messe"), or no. 17 ("Parodie") from Pierrot (Ex. 11.29). Immediately after finishing "Mazatsumi," Stravinsky returned to his first Japanese setting and, on 16/29 December 1912, orchestrated it for the same Pierrotic instrumental ensemble. The very last page of the Rite ofSpring facsimile sketchbook contains the composing score of the last six bars for the orchestrated accompaniment to "Akahito." Once we turn from the Schoenbergian instrumental gestures and the sound surface and look into the actual pitch content of these songs, we reencounter old Stravinskian acquaintances. In "Mazatsumi," for instance, the opening staccato chord consists of the practically complete octatonic Collection III—the "tonic" of "Chez Petrouchka" and Zvezdolikiy—partitioned rather Scriabinesquely into two mutually exclusive French sixths. Only the D-sharp has been withheld (it would have fit neady into the middle of the left-hand chord to produce a completely symmetrical display of the pitches in the collection). Sure enough, the missing D-sharp arrives on the downbeat of m. 3 to serve as a pedal for practically the whole instrumental preamble. At the end of the song, the original chord comes back as anacrusis to its own transposition along the octatonic circle of thirds, which exhausts the tonic collection and so produces the final cadence (Ex. 11.30). Between these points of stable octatonic reference, eight-tone and seven-tone scales are pitted ear-tinglingly one against the other, most conspicuously when, against the long-held D-sharp, the clarinet, occasionally abetted by the piano, plays diatonic runs that seem by their metrical placement to center on a Dorian A, at the opposite end of the tritone axis from the pedal (Ex. 11.31). The use of what was called "chromaticism" in connection with "Chez Petrouchka"—that is, the controlled use of pitches outside the octatonic collection of primary reference—is far more extensive and conspicuous here than in the earlier piece, but the tones in question (chiefly G-sharp and D) are no less clearly treated as unstable. There are some long G-sharps in the latter part of "Mazatsumi" that almost seem to take over the function of the pedal D-sharp in the instrumental prelude. Yet besides being resolved to G-naturals, they are always trilled, which is of course a standard way of signaling a harmonic "tendency tone." The use of D-natural as a novel sort of infixed appoggiatura, bifurcating into an octatonically stable pair, C-sharp cum D-sharp, is well illustrated by the pair of progressions shown in Example 11.32: in all, this relationship is reiterated some half-dozen times in the course of the song. A more elaborate case is the low sustained D-natural, placed strategically before the final chords. It has the same double-appoggiatura

PIERROTIC

GESTURES

[827]

EXAM P LE

11.29

a. Pierrot lunaire, no. 17, mm. 10-11, compared with "Mazatsumi," mm. 1-2 (opposite)

b. Pierrot, no. 11, mm. 12-13, compared with "Mazatsumi," mm. 6, 9-10 (opposite)

EXAMPLE

1 1 . 2 9 a

(continued)

Vivo, M.M.J =80

E X A M P L E

1 1 . 2 9 b

(continued)

EXAMPLE

11.29

(continued)

c. Pierrot, no. 10, m. 18, compared with "Mazatsumi," m. 16 (opposite)

Kl. ( A )

te,

EXAMPLE

m.

1

11.30

li

elle

Ru

bi

"Mazatsumi," beginning and ending harmonies

8 m

S\u m . 3 3

"TU f © S {N

fc

lùrst

Coll. 6

WP

©

Ill ©

©

0

©

©

©

EXAMPLE

11.29c

(continued)

VLN. I

EXAMPLE

11.32

"Mazatsumi," mm. 14-15

relationship to the CH/DH dyad in the last chord of the piece, and contributes tellingly to the chord's cadential quality. It is quite revealing to compare the continuity draft of "Mazatsumi" that appears in the Rite ofSpring facsimile sketchbook (pp. 135-38) with the published piano reduction and observe how many of the pitch discrepancies between the two involve the substitution of "foreign" tones for tones referable to Collection III. It is as if Stravinsky were deliberately covering his octatonic tracks so as to "atonalize" his original—for him traditional—conception (Ex. 11.33). These tiny arbitrary changes camouflage what are in the sketch extremely orderly techniques of sequence and modulation. The second cascade in Example 11.33 is twice transposed down a semitone, immediately before the vocal entrance, so as to effect a smooth transition into Collection II. In the final version these sequential transpositions are only approximate, the model being arbitrarily altered (Ex. 11.34). Having seen how far Stravinsky went out of his way to conceal his octatonic PIERROTIC

GESTURES

[831]

EXAMPLE

11.33

"Mazatsumi," m. 2, draft and published score compared

EXAMPLE

11.34

"Mazatsumi" (sketch), semitonal transpositions

(notes in parentheses are those o f the final version) ( - D

rjjfi ^r

7. fFj*

m—^

J

\ (m.18)

L

JI

* -J> I

h

h

h

Vsya o - na

h

m

u - bra - na

ki - se - li

vcn-chal'-noy

The second is a melody that has all the earmarks—key signature, brackets, lack of beams (showing the traces of a missing text), correction of barring—of having been copied out of a folksong anthology: ^ ^ n r i r r f f l

h i. » i ß

* . J 1 i p ß * J

i J iJ

i) l^H J j h i J ' J

Finally, there is a staffless but heighted jotting that evidently seeks to reconcile the first two notations: 7

J,

J)j>j>.rvV flj>

Vsya o - na

u - bra - na

That is all. On the verso of the next opening of the sketchbook there is a jotting for the "Danse sacrale," the only sketch for The Rite remaining in Stravinsky's collection at the time of his death (it is reproduced in Stravinsky: sein Nachlass, sein BUd, 45; also in Pieter van den Toorn, Stravinsky and "The Rite of Spring": The Beginnings of a Musical Language [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987], 33). Facing this sketch are some complex chord progressions (reproduced in facsimile by Robert Craft in his review of Forte's Harmonic Structure of "The Rite of Spring," Musical Quarterly 64 [1978]: 534; and by Van den Toorn in Stravinsky and "The Rite," 195; they also appear, though not in facsimile, in P&D:599). These turn out to be preparatory sketches for a progression entered on p. 104 of the published facsimile Rite of Spring sketchbook (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1969), which relates to the Introduction to Part II of the ballet. The chords are quite similar in structure to those in certain passages from Zvezdolikiy that were analyzed in the last chapter, and they can shed a certain retrospective light on the compositional process of that work and its relationship to Scriabin's methods. The evolution of the progression through its three versions (two in Sketchbook I, the third in the Rite sketchbook) shows a progressively increasing level of octatonic "referability," suggesting that Stravinsky first improvised his "polyharmonies" at the keyboard and then revised them in light of "theory." The note-spelling, moreover, is progressively more

[858]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

Tar' was a locus classicus in its day for that "self-involved, quasi-Russian mythology" that flourished in the literature of the Silver Age. The description is that of Prince Mirsky, who called Tar' "the most interesting monument of its time, when mystical anarchism was in the air, when Vyacheslav Ivanov believed in the possibility of a new mythological age, and when the belief was abroad that the vital forces of man's elemental nature [i.e., stikhiya] were to burst the fetters of civilization and of the world order [i.e., kul'tura]."27 The book's title is untranslatable. It has been variously rendered in English as "vital sap" or "spring corn," but actually it is a pseudo—«r-Slavic root meaning fire (compare the Russian yarkiy [bright], yariy [ardent], yarosf [rage], and so on). The book is divided into two halves—Tar' (bright) and Tern' (dark)—the halves reflecting the primal myth of the solar cycle and, in more modern, Blokish, terms, the opposition of unspoiled, primeval human nature to the oppression of urban life. The root yar' is also asso-

rigorous in terms of the Scriabinesque "double diminished-seventh" conceptualization of the octatonic scale, as set forth in the last chapter. Despite the linear bass and treble lines in contrary motion, it is clear that Stravinsky conceived his harmony, both here and in Zvezdolikiy, in terms offreistimmige block aggregates; any attempt to account for the inner part-writing in contrapuntal terms is futile. Following is the third and final version of the progression (from the published sketchbook), analyzed along lines established in the last chapter for Zvezdolikiy: h - r t -

'1*1

t

Village khorovod in celebration of Semik. (Anonymous lubok, 1857)

Unlike . . . songs [that] are performed only vocally, [khorovods] are accompanied by various body movements.... They do not make up a single whole because of the different ways they are performed. Khorovods and games in the open air are extremely varied. The khorovod may be performed by various movements in a circle (usually to the left, posolon', 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. Songs accompanying these movements are called circlelike (krugovaya). But 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.... The players may stand in pairs, move in a chain, along an axis, in columns, or in a spiral; they may step in and step out. They may perform movements with their hands (clapping), with their feet (stamping), with their whole body; all this is in time to the s o n g . . . . In a game, the khorovod is often called a gorod (city). One of the players stands inside or outside the "city" and must find the gate or break the wall, that is, break through.... In several provinces, the khorovod is "gathered." Passing along the streets, the participants of the khorovod being gathered summon girls and young men who are in their houses to come join them, and they call them out with special songs.... A girl would call out a young man, a young man would call out a girl. They would take each other by the arm. In this way a chain was formed that

[ 86 8]

12

• THE

GREAT

FUSION

t*AA* Rftfcffc: I** ' -1 »

Ima

ri

Mi'itm -

}•]*

no-vits

tsya - ti

yet

.

- — 4 H — - K d * - J '"

_ J ' J

ni

zha

\

tsya - ti.

ro-mets da

sin

I

*

r ^ H

b. Istomin/Lyapunov, Pesni russkogo naroda, p. 163 (Troitskaya)

V o t s po lu

gu,

lu

gu

roz

li

va

la

sya vo da.

c. Istomin/Lyapunov, Pesni russkogo naroda, p. 258

Soln-tsezaka

ti

-

-

l o s ' z a tyom-ni - ye

le

sa,

melodies in question are not displayed in the finished product but are so thoroughly absorbed into Stravinsky's musical fabric that without the sketchbook their presence could never be deduced. The sketchbook thus allows us to witness Stravinsky's abstraction of stylistic elements from folk music—at once the most extensive application to date of neonationalist principles to musical composition and the greatest watershed in Igor Stravinsky's development as a composer. The four case studies that follow show in detail how, at the onset of full maturity, Stravinsky used Russian folk music as an instrument of self-emancipation from the constricting traditions of Russian art music; and how by playing, as it were, one tradition against the other—but ultimately fusing them in an unprecedentedly coordinated fashion—he found a way out of the cul-de-sac in which the Russian music of his day was foundering. It was a cul-de-sac of which RimskyKorsakov, in his day, had already been painfully aware. For a variety of reasons, however (reasons to be explored in the next chapter), none of Rimsky's other heirs

THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[905]

was prepared to follow the path Stravinsky pointed out in The Rite. On the contrary, they resented his methods and resisted them. And—as Asafyev would maintain as early as 1926—this was the historical tragedy of Russian music in the twentieth century. It needs to be emphasized one last time, before embarking on our survey of the Rite sketches, that Stravinsky made his great stylistic and esthetic leap very much from within the traditions of his musical upbringing. The Rite sketches show more powerfully than any other source just how committed a neonationalist Stravinsky was, how determined he was to anchor his maximalizing innovations in a folkloristic reality that would justify and validate them. The sincerity of the attempt can best be judged not only from Stravinsky's sketches but from his letters too. He fully expected his new ballet to be received at home with joy. It was a naive hope: the brash author of The Rite was in for the greatest rebuff of his career, one that would not be redeemed until half a century had elapsed. The first of the "unfamiliar" sketchbook entries pertains to the Spring Khorovods: a melody entered on the page immediately following the one on which Stravinsky had fashioned his "khorovod incantation" by conflating two tunes from Juszkiewicz. The very appearance of the notation is enough to set this entry apart: in contrast to practically every other entry in the sketchbook, it is closed off with a double bar and even a repeat sign, and it is written in an unusually neat, unhurried hand (Fig. 12.10a). It has all the earmarks, in other words, of having been copied out of a book, and upon investigation the book turns out to have been the very one on which Stravinsky had relied most extensively for folk songs in the past. The tune, entitled "Nu-ka, kumushka, mi pokumimsya,'" is no. 50 in Rimsky-Korsakov's collection of 1877—in the eyes of the compiler's still-loyal former pupil, the mother lode itself (Fig. 12.10b). Nor was "Nu-ka, kumushka" a fortuitous choice from among Rimsky's wares. As we have already seen, the action of the Spring Khorovods is based on the rituals and games of the festival known as Semik, and sure enough, "Nu-ka, kumushka" is a semitskaya. In traditional folk use it accompanied the kumleniye ceremony, a vestige of the ancient Slavic custom of blood brotherhood (or, in this case, sisterhood), the ritual of kissing through wreaths or bent birch branches described in Propp's summary, quoted above, of the Semik celebration. Another Soviet authority, Tatyana Popova, amplifies the description of kumleniye a bit: "The custom of kumleniye was carried out by two girls (more rarely, by two boys or a boy and a girl) who kissed each other through a wreath of birch branches, while a special song was sung about kumovstvo [i.e., being one another's kuma, 'adopted sister']." 117 117. T. V. Popova, [906]

12

•

THE

Russkoye narodnoye muzikal'noye tvorchestvo (Moscow: Muzgiz,

GREAT

FUSION

1955—58), 1:73.

f i g . i 2 . i o a . Rite sketchbook, p. 8. At the top is the Semik song "Nu-ka, kumushka, mipokumimsya." The rest of the page (and most of Fig. 12.8 as well) shows developments of the tune for the "Spring Rounds" ("Kborwodi").

102

50. Hyita, KyMyniKa, m h

noKyMHMCH*

Hört, Gevatterin, laßt uns Viens, commère, viens, nous Gevatterinnen sein. bavarderons bien. Come oh crony mine, let us have a good time Allegretto.

Canto. H y .

Ka,

Ry

.

Mym

mè

.

re,_

Hört, Ge _ vati' _ rin,

Viens, com .

Come oh

cro -

.

»a,

CiP

mm

üo

\

.

f

Ky

)

.

i^US-

mmm

.

ca,

A h _

hißt uns Ge _ vatt'-rin.nen sein, Ei

viens, nous ba - v a r . de.rons

_ ny— mine, let

us

bien, Tra

JIJO

lju .

de .

have a good time, Loi _ Ii,

Piano.

f i g . i 2 . i o b . Rimsky-Korsakov, Sbornik russkikb narodnïkh pesett, no. 50: "Nu-ka-, kumushka, mi pokumitnsya" (semitskaya)

"Nu-kakumushka"

was just such a song. Its words can be paraphrased thus:

"Well, dear kuma, we are becoming kumas. Let us kiss, let us eat Href together." 118 As one of the very few semitskiye to have been published in the nineteenth century in both words and music, its selection by Stravinsky here was pretty much foreordained. Again, Roerich may have led him to it, for he must have known better than anyone else in Russia that precisely this song would have accompanied, in "real life," the action of the Semik khorovod being enacted at that precise moment on stage, just as he must have led Stravinsky to the Ivarwvskaya that was to have furnished the thematic material for the Game of Abduction until it was co-opted for Petrushka. A t least two important motives for the Spring Khorovods were extracted from the semitskaya tune. The first is the phrase played by the oboe and bassoon (typically decorated with dudki graces) first at the fourth bar after fig. [49] and then, in 118. Adapted from the translation by Roberta Reeder in a sour fruit preserve. [908]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

Dmn Along the Mother Volga,

130.

Kisel' is

EXAMPLE

12.6

a. The source melody (Sketchbook, p. 8) B |J)W i s - ñJWZQ1 -hi Jd

>v g

""'""iTTtr

s .ft i r s1 hf^ "J jJ T mw jl *B iJT* * * I J hJM^"

b. 77/é Rite, 7 after

m c. The Rite, fig. | 51|, transposed G t

a

i 00

*

«

'—hJ

01—0

—

m\

-J4«L-L-|

d. The Rite, i after | 541 (Vivo), transposed

more extended form, three measures later, to introduce the main khorovod theme. As Example 12.6 shows, the main khorovod theme might itself have been a derivation from "Nu-ka, kumushka," even though it makes a preliminary appearance in the Divination (Gadaniya), and in the sketches for that dance, before the RimskyKorsakov tune is entered in the sketchbook. At 4 after [49], and again three bars later, the seventh degree is substituted for the lower fifth,119 several of the source melody's internal repetitions are pruned away, and an upper neighbor is inserted that seems to have had its origin in Stravinsky's characteristic grace notes; nevertheless, the relationship between source and derivative is clear. Clinching is the fact that the sketchbook entry, though it conforms in every notational detail to the version in Rimsky-Korsakov's collection, has been transposed to the pitch of Stravinsky's khorovod. It is possible that the composer intended at first to use the tune more or less as he found it. The intervallic content of the fourth measure of "Nu-ka, kumushka" (repeated at the end) seems to have been the jumping-off point for the section marked "Vivo" from one measure after [54] to [56]. Here the last three notes of the folk tune are extracted and mirrored by a retrograde starting from the upper octave (Ex. i2.6d).

119. A similar alteration can be seen in comparing the opening bassoon melody with its source in Juszkiewicz, no. 157 (Ex. 12.3).

THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[909]

EXAMPLE

jj^

12.7

ß m 1 * »x

''

^r-

_

Sketchbook, p. 10

f

f

/

1

J*P, I -

r Ol

ffiJ^ J"

°ffi sffi

. P 1»

JiTT"

Jf *

p |

EXAMPLE 1 2 . 8

j % «f

m

• >

*>

0 «

;

-

\0

-

| jT J

The Rite, 1 after 147 L second violin

There is an entry on page 10 of the sketchbook that seems to confirm this interpretation (Ex. 12.7). When Stravinsky first sketched the upper-voice counterpoint in diminution, he began by immediately repeating the three notes putatively derived from the source melody, and then repeating the retrograde. The addition of the "8va," turning the passage into a two-octave arc, seems to have been a second thought: on most subsequent appearances—including the one that immediately follows in Example 12.7—the notes are written out at their actual pitch despite the necessity of ruling leger lines. It might be objected that the vivo is actually a development of the Abduction theme, derived from Juszkiewicz no. 142 (see Ex. 12.3). And indeed, the passage cited in Example i2.6d seems to be literally prefigured by that beginning one bar after [47] (Ex. 12.8). But as was already observed, the Game of Abduction was composed not only after the khorovod, but also after yet another major section, the Game of "Cities," had been completed, its original placement corresponding to that of Nestor's description of pagan Slavic rites in the Primary Chronicle. It was transferred to its present position, much earlier in the score, at a later stage of composition. The sketches for the passage cited in Example 12.8 appear in the sketchbook only on page 30, some twenty pages later than the sketches for the passage they seem to prefigure (see Ex. 12.9). When one notices that these sketches include theflutetrills that introduce the khorovod, not to mention the scribbled note "and the incantfation]" (i zapev), referring back to the sketches on page 7 of the sketchbook, one is led to conclude that the connection between the two sections of the ballet, along perhaps with the decision to place the Game of Abduction in its present position, probably occurred to Stravinsky when he himself noticed, on page 30 of his sketchbook, the similarity between the Juszkiewicz-derived tune and the one received via Rimsky-Korsakov. The identification of the semitskaya at the heart of the Spring Khorovods shows [910]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

EXAMPLE

12.9

Sketchbook, p. 30

*

r rb»

- V:*

-IM m J aJ « F-J : • V* ' JW Ir -

tre3,4 8+8

Doppio Valore

jllJ

J T ]

^

«

1 zapev

p

,

Stravinsky at this point behaving like a veritable "kuchkist," on the lookout for ethnologically apposite source melodies—for natural objects, one might say—to give his music authenticity. Most un-kuchkist, though, is the license with which he treated the borrowed tune, a license that nicely defines the difference between kuchkist and neonationalist. "Nu-ka, kumushka" is not recognizable as such in its new contexts; moreover, its intervals (especially in the vivo passage) not only are abstracted as a melodic trouvaille, but generate the modernistic quartal-secundal harmony as well.

Another "naked" source melody appears in the Rite sketchbook at the bottom of page 53. It is the obvious source for the melody that is played in turn by the alto flute, by two clarinets at the major seventh, by oboe and bassoon at the octave, and finally by the strings, beginning at fig. [93] in the Mystic Circles (Tainiye igri devusbek: kbozhdeniye po krugam), another khorovod near the beginning of Part II. (According to the original choreography, the passage in question was to have been executed by two solo dancers; hence, no doubt, all the pairing of instruments.) Example 12.10 details the relationship of source to derivation. This tune has not yet been traced to the anthology where Stravinsky found it, but the fact that it is an authentic Russian folk song is beyond doubt. It belongs to a family of folk songs—a very definite and specific family—many other members of which have been transcribed and published, and used by other Russian composers. A sampling is given in Example 12.11. These are all wedding songs—or to be more precise, they are devichnik songs that are sung either at the wedding-eve bridal shower (devichnik) at which the bride's hair is plaited or on the wedding morn as she is being made ready to be led to the altar (k ventsu in Russian, venets [altar] literally meaning "wreath," a word THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[911]

E X A M P L E

12.10

a. The source melody (Sketchbook, p. 53), measures numbered for comparison

«J

Wj [1.

2.

I I '] T~

3.

b. The Rite, 4 after m

4.

E X A M P L E

. T* —W

12.

| 6.

7.]

et seq.

Alto flute

HM» •

5.

«

a 1 •

« Ä

«

II

(modal paradigm)

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, 100 Russian Folk Songs, no. 88: "Na morye utushka kupalasya" ("On the sea there swam a little duck")

¥-

1 n r— p« - » — p

J Namor-ye

u- tush - ka ku

p i .

n —

se

ra

v

? ya

; ;. : '.

pa

c\

r-ñ—

- Y -

po

lo

ska

5=\:=

B

-

—4

la sya.

la - sya

m—f

i-

Na _ mor ye

f

example

12.ii

(continued)

b. Rimsky-Korsakov, no. 89 (variant of same)

m

jTT

1—*—I*—^—* Na mor-ye

se

u - tush

ra-ya

f

9

ka

r

=_ 5

¿±1

ku - pa

po lo-ska

la

-

«

t— ./ - _ •

la sya,

5

Na mor-ye

sya.

c. Rimsky-Korsakov, no. 72: "Zvon kolokol v Tevlasheve selye" ("The chiming bell at Yevlashev village") A ¿""n

14

Nip

p

f

zvon

kol _

kol,

vo Yev

-

la

she

ve sel - le.

ko

Zvon

lo

ko - lo

-fT^rTTff-pfpgf

zvon

ko

lo

kol

vo Yev

la

she

ve

sel

ye,

d. N. Ye. Palchikov, Krest'yanskiye pesni, zapistmniye v sele Nikolayevke Menzelinskogo uyezda XJfimskoygubernii (St. Petersburg, 1888), no. 78: "Ne b'ilo vetru" ("There was no wind"

"FP —

n

\ -

Ai,

*

ne

•

S-J

r - H0 H

—

b'f lo ve

-

tru,

-

» ^»— : —p. — H

akh,

ne

zaa

ve

ya

lo,

da

bi'-lo

ve - tru,

tr r r r

*

da

¡F=H N

za

ve

ya

lo.

e. T. V. Popova, Osnovi russkoy narodnoy muziki (Moscow, 1977), 77: "A trubili trubushki" ("The trumpets sounded")

r c/r r ir r ^ gm r r r p p >r A

tru - bi - li

ra - no

po

tru - bush-ki

za - re.

ra - no _ po

za

-

re,

full ofiliie-ish overtones). There will be more to say about the devichnik ceremony when it comes time to discuss the first tableau of Svadebka. For now, let it suffice to observe that devichnik songs are metaphorically congruent with the action of the Mystic Circles, where the "Bride of Yarilo" is magically selected and prepared. Rimsky-Korsakov's no. 89 (Ex. 12.nb), a particularly famous song, was also published in an earlier arrangement by Chaikovsky, 120 who used it almost without alteration in a well-known chorus of young girls from his opera The Oprichnik (1872). 121 Rimsky-Korsakov used the song, too, in Tsar Saltan (1900). These devichnik songs all share a distinctive modal structure: built for the most part on a minor or a Phrygian tetrachord, they descend "plagally" once or twice to the lower third. Stravinsky's source melody, and the alto flute melody he derived from it, fall distinctly within these specifications, and can therefore be identified with precision as a devichnik song of the "UtushkcC type. The identification of this source melody as an authentic folk song puts a new complexion on Stravinsky's manipulations of the theme. 122 It is apparent that Stravinsky created the final version of the Mystic Circles melody in "mosaic" fashion: individual melodic turns from the source tune are treated as tesserae, subject to the most varied juxtaposition, internal repetition, and, in the case of the clarinets at fig. [94], of independent transposition. Such procedures are common in the development and extension of melodies within the finished score (such as the main tune of the Spring Khorovods, from [53] to [54], or, most famously, the individual rhythmic "cells" of the Sacrificial Dance). It is most instructive, as to Stravinsky's neonationalist methods, to see the same process at work at the sketch stage.

An even more revealing story, if not quite so neat as the two preceding ones, is told by the sketches for the Ritual Action of the Elders (Deystvo startsev) in Part II, the section that immediately precedes the Sacrificial Dance. The passage at fig. [132] in the published score (recapitulated almost immediately in the massive tuttis at [134] and [138]—one of the loudest outbursts in The Rite) went through an unusual number of preliminary drafts in the sketchbook, almost as many as the record-holding Mystic Circles khorovod just discussed. The very first notation for the Ritual Action is entered on page 66, nine pages 120. P. I. Chaikovsky, so russkikh narodntkh pesen, obrabotka dlya fortep'yano v 4 ruki (Moscow: Jurgenson, 1869), no. 23. The source for both Chaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov was apparently Konstantin Villebois's collection of one hundred songs published in i860. 121. Act I, no. 3: "Na morye utushka kupalasya." This was one of the numbers incorporated whole from Chaikovsky's first (and during his lifetime suppressed) opera, The Voyevoda, to a libretto by Ostrovsky, who had specified the song's insertion. It therefore also found its way into Arensky's Son na Volge (A Volga Dream, 1890), which was written to the Voyevoda libretto. 122. In Taruskin, "Russian Folk Melodies," 522-25, sixteen variants of the tune, taken in order from sketchbook entries dated 1-5 March 1912, are compared, and some conclusions are drawn concerning the evolution of the rhythm of the alto flute melody, the derivation of the transitional flute music at fig. [98], and the harmonization in parallel sevenths at fig. [94].

[914]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

ahead of the rest. Like the other "naked" source tunes, it has a key signature and is closed off by a double bar (Ex. 12.12a). This fact gives rise immediately to the suspicion that here, too, a folk song model may have been adapted from a written source, though it has yet to be identified. Nonetheless, a putative source for the melody may be readily extrapolated. The first entry in the portion of the sketchbook given over to the Ritual Action that relates direcdy to the tune in Example 12.12a is for solo oboe accompanied by two bassoons (one of them apparendy a contrabassoon). In Example i2.i2b-c this sketch is given along with the melody as it appears at fig. [132]. The oboe melody is made up of the same notes as the melody played by the three muted trumpets in the final version, but with considerable difference in the order of the notes and their rhythm. In the next sketch on page 78, the three essential elements of the finished texture—main melody, undulating countermelody, eighth-note vamp—have been brought into successful conjunction, though the registers differ greatly from those in the final version. The oboe melody—transposed, oddly enough, from an octave higher than its ultimate registral destination to an octave lower—has been assigned to the trombones and has been simplified and rhythmically augmented so that it is closer to the version we know (Ex. 12.13a). Two sketches later the registers as well as the pitches of the vamp in the final version have been found and the theme is extended (Ex. 12.13b). The harmony, too, has begun to take on a hue we can recognize from the final score—but more on that later. Stravinsky stayed with the theme in this form for a long while, sketching both the passage at fig. [132] and the one at [134] with it, rather than with the theme's final form, which makes its debut (its single appearance in the sketches, actually) three pages later. 123 One particularly interesting sketch, shown in Example 12.14, seems to disclose the derivation of the trumpet-trombone counterpoint at fig. [134] from this preliminary version of the theme: the initial rising fourth (which did not survive into the finished score) is reversed and then applied sequentially in the bass to the ensuing descending steps of the melody. The procedure, evinced here, of accompanying the melody with a variant or development of itself is obviously related to the heterophonic practices described and illustrated in the publications of Linyova, Melgunov, and others, and again suggests a linear source for some of The Rite's dissonant harmony. If the melody under discussion could be identified as a folk song, we would have a striking measure indeed of the depth to which the neonationalist influence reached in the formation of Stravinsky's modernistic musical idiom. 123. This sketch is followed by another that continues to use the older version of the tune, which casts some doubt on the assumption shared by most commentators on the Rite sketchbook that Stravinsky filled up the pages in an orderly left-to-right, top-to-bottom fashion. As additional evidence against this view we may cite, for example, pp. 46, 75, and 116 of the sketchbook, on each of which there is a single entry, located in some other position than the upper left.

THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[915]

E X A M P L E

12.12

a. First entry of the "Ritual Action" theme (Sketchbook, p. 66) 4 d

4

EEr *

M

» —0

1

•

*

•

""" 0

m

b. Sketchbook, p. 78

2 Fag* c. The Rite, fig. 1132 L three trumpets in unison (con sordini)

E X A M P L E

12.13

a. Sketchbook, p. 78

f

C-fag

2 Tr.boni

EXAMPLE

12.13

(continued)

b. Same page, sketch running up the side

EXAMPLE

12.14

S k e t c h b o o k , p. 79

, R

^

R

, R

^

m

b

,

- — ' —1

¥-—ttr)

The evidence in favor of such a conclusion is overwhelming, and once again points not merely to general folkloric authenticity but to precise ethnological congruence between source and scenario. The tetrachordal structure of Stravinsky's putative source tune is extremely common in Slavic folk music. In Example 12.14, the two phrases of the melody are labeled a and b. Juszkiewicz's anthology, on which we now know Stravinsky to have relied extensively, contains tunes beginning with each of these phrases (Ex. 12.15). One might be inclined therefore to regard the preliminary form of the Ritual Action theme as a composite of two tunes from Juszkiewicz, like the Incantation preceding the Spring Khorovods. But we can do better. These Juszkiewicz tunes are not confined to the notes of a single tetrachord, like Stravinsky's theme; they only begin that way. Besides, as we have already observed, Stravinsky seems to have had Juszkiewicz at hand only as long as he was in Ustilug, where only the earliest sketches were made. By the spring of 1912, when he composed the Ritual Action of the Elders, he was no longer using the Lithuanian collection. Melodies that are limited in their compass to a single tetrachord are especially abundant among the "seasonal songs" (kalendarniye pesni), the very repertoire that, as we know, has the greatest relevance to the subject and scenario of The Rite of Spring. The use of the particular tetrachord we find in Stravinsky's theme (T-S-T) is particularly endemic to two types: the kolyadka and, most especially, the vesnyanka. Kolyadki are often thought of as Christmas carols, since they are THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[917]

E X A M P L E

12.15

a. Juszkiewicz, Melodje ludowe litewskie, no. 834 1

a

Kad

Se

mil

-

1

dvi

ju

au

va

guv,

ru

mu

dvi

te - les

dvi

nau

jam

se

dar

-

se

zu -

- li.

zy.

b. Juszkiewicz, Melodje ludowe litewskie, no. 1553

JJb_4

T

1 As

viens

-

m.

ber - nu

- m — P — h » — f t — 1 ' "" ! rf r — ¿is,

as

varg

i

de

nu

a zis; 1

(b) -

1 Ker

aS

at -

ra

siu

sa -

vu

mer

gu

I

ze?

frequently sung by groups of boys or girls (they do not mix except in RimskyKorsakoVs eponymous opera) on Christmas E v e . 1 2 4 T h e name actually goes back to Koleda, the ancient Slavonic holiday of the N e w Year, when the sun g o d was reborn after the winter solstice. A n d what are vesnyanki? They are springtime songs, and therefore more relevant than anything else could be to the action of the Stravinsky-Roerich ballet. They were traditionally sung immediately after the conclusion of Lent, continuing for seven weeks—that is, right up to the semitskaya nedelya, or Semik (Green) W e e k . 1 2 5 Here is h o w vesnyanki are described by an eminent Soviet folklorist: In Russian scholarly writing the term vesnyanka has taken on generic status: it is used in the narrow sense of an "invocation" to spring, and in the broad sense to cover the whole complex of springtime songs, games, and khorovods.... [Various accounts] bear witness to the magic function of the movements, the incessant movements, of the springtime songs, whose purpose was to facilitate the quick awakening of nature—the growth of grass, the opening up of the rivers, the flight of birds, and so o n . . . . These descriptions make clear the connection between the performance of the spring invocations and somejbrm of action: they are never declaimed in a stationary manner.... Vesnyanki were performed chorally (or, often, with choral responses), very loudly, from high places (so that their call carried the better). They See My Musical Life, 343-44. 125. Popova, Russkoye narodnoye muzikal'noye tvorchestvo 1:61.

124.

[918]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

took the form of short little phrases, usually repeated several times in a row, like melodic formulas.... Eyewitnesses report as follows, setting a poetic atmosphere for the old-time performance of vesnyanki: young girls on the rooftops "sing a series of vesnyanki, concluding every verse with the call ' G u ! ' " Such a manner of singing vesnyanki went among them by the name vesnu gukati spring"]

The primordial meaning oigukaniye

["calling 'gu' to the

was, apparently,... that it ful-

filled the function of a collective conjuration, a magical influence on the forces of nature. Such gukaniye is justifiably treated in the scholarly literature [not as musical but] as ritual exclamation. 126

From these descriptions it becomes clear that vesnyanki are in fact a "ritual action" of ancestral times, and that the object of the action was to accomplish the same influence on nature as that of the "Great Sacrifice" itself. No less noteworthy is the fact, as Zemtsovsky puts it, that "vesnyanka invocations took hold in Russia by no means everywhere: there emerge two main regions of their existence—West Russian areas (Smolensk and Bryansk and their environs) and Central Russia." 127 The Smolensk and Bryansk guberniyas bordered on Byelorussia and the Ukraine respectively; and as Popova points out, the Russian vesnyanki had and still have direct connections with the musical rituals of more westerly Slavic groups, extending westward as far as the eastern Polish region known as Volhynia, part of the area that was Russian until 1917, Polish until the Nazi-Soviet pact, and "Ukrainian" since. This is where Ustilug was located. It is not unlikely that Stravinsky heard peasants calling "Gu" to the spring with his own ears, even though his vacations on his family estate usually began somewhat later than Semik week. Example 12.16 gives an assortment of vesnyanki, beginning with three quoted by Zemtsovsky, followed by a melody, recendy published in an anthology of Byelorussian springtime songs, that is quite uncannily close to the first Stravinsky jotting for the Ritual Action of the Elders (compare Exx. i2.i6e and 12.12a). The sampling concludes with a pair of Byelorussian melodies of related types (a kolyadka and a maslenichnaya, a Shrovetide song) as published in a study by Victor Yelatov, who supervised their collection in an area crosscutting the boundaries of western Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine. All these tunes share precisely the modal structure of the Ritual Action sketches. Provided with suitable words, Stravinsky's tunes could be appended to the series in Example 12.16 and no one would be the wiser. Of course, we don't have to imagine Stravinsky collecting the Ritual Action tune 126.1.1. Zemtsovsky, Melodika kalendarnikhpesen (Leningrad: Muzi'ka, 1975), 78-81, condensed. The source from which Zemtsovsky quotes in the passage cited is Ye. Romanov, Belorusskiye narodniye melodii (Vilna, 1912), a book precisely contemporaneous with the Rite sketches. On the matter of the status of vesnyanki as "ritual" rather than "music," cf. the reply made by a peasant singer to a Soviet ethnomusicologist who asked what he was singing, as related by Gerald Seaman in his History of Russian Music, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 1967), 238: "Singing? We aren't singing!... We're calling in the spring. That isn't singing!" 127. Zemtsovsky, Melodika kalendarnikh pesen, 78-79.

THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[919]

E X A M P L E

1 2 . 1 6

a. Modal tetrachord (N.B.: The following melodies have been transposed to these pitches to facilitate comparison with Stravinsky's sketches)

b. Izaliy Zemtsovsky, Melodika kalendarnikb pesen (Leningrad, 1975), p. 82

{ W - f r - J f j ^ p J 'IT [•• -h-r'r!P

l

f

Bla g o slo

F

"I —

vi

Bo zhe,

v—1

oy le

m— H — - * n V li,

ves-nu

. s ... , - . . 4 V - U .- f - r -

—

le li,

ves-nu

gu

gu

_

-

-

ka - ti,

S N I -ULL] ka-ti!

c. Zemtsovsky, Melodika kalendarnïkh pesen, p. 82

i¡¡í

/ A ne ve

grey soin- tse,

S

grey

soin - tse,

grey soin tse!

d. Zemtsovsky, Melodika kalendarnïkh pesen, p. 86

N a gor-ke dev

ki

gu-lya

újs^g^

gu - lya-li, _ lyu li,

m

gu lya

e. K. P. Kabashnikau, éd., Vesnavyia pesni (Minsk, 1979), p. 127

(è)-Vias - na,

u-zho-zh(y)vias

vias

na

na_

k nam

k nam

pry shla,

m

pry...(shla). A shto ty, vias

example

i 2 . i 6 e (continued)

ÊEtSi

Ì

IT*"

— ^ Y S« nam pry-nes la,

nes...(la)?

a shtoty, via. . . sna, nam

f. Victor Yelatov, Pesni vostochno-slavyanskoy obshchnosti (Minsk, 1977), p. 85 Û y

. — y - — — A ra na, ra na

t

r

=

¥

=

s

—-jr 0 V

r —

ku ri za-pe li:

N

0

svya ti ve

char

3E a

do brim lyu dyam.

g. Yelatov, Pesni vostochno-slavyanskoy obshchnosti, p. 104

By

la

na

E i r f H jS j N; j N; j N1 jj a

sma

lo sia

. ..

shai mas - len - ka,

mas

fi

:

len

ki

seni' nia-dzel',

+7- w -f a

sem'

-

dzin dzen',

a

nia-dzel',

»

1 1

dzindzen'.

directly from the lips of the Volhynian "moujiks" (as he is depicted doing in the photograph published by his son Theodore—though lirniki never sang vesnyanki), or from Kolosov at Talashkino near Smolensk (another center of vesnyanka singing, as Popova and Zemtsovsky relate). There were plenty of examples available to him in the published anthologies to which he had access, including at least three books that we know he used. One such song, from Rimsky-Korsakov, had in fact already gone into Petrushka (see Ex. io.9a-b). A variant of it comes, as promised, from Istomin/Lyapunov (Ex. 12.17a). It fits the modal type to perfection and, moreover, begins with the rising fourth of Stravinsky's sketch melody. Although the song is not, stricdy speaking, a vesnyanka (it is a rekrutskaya, a lament for a military conscript), the text does start off by setting a vernal scene. The remaining source is Linyova's Ukrainian collection, published in the massive first volume of the Trudi MEK

(1906), which contains

two songs collected in the town of Litvyaka near Lyubensk, the Rimsky-Korsakov summer place. Both songs (Ex. i2.i7b-c) fall into the modal stereotype reflected in Stravinsky's sketch melody, and they are of impeccable ethnographic pedigree. The first of the pair is labeled (in Ukrainian) "Petrivka," identifying it with the St. Peter's fast (Petrovskiy post) that precedes Kupala. In her commentary, Linyova explicidy associates petrivki with vesnyanki "both in content and in melody." She also notes that the girls and boys who sing vesnyanki and petrivki also play the svirel\ a two-holed end-blown flute (Fig. 12.11), which must surely be the inspiration for the snaking ostinato that accompanies the Ritual Action theme, rising up

THE

MUSICAL

SOURCES

[921]

EXAMPLE

12.17

(Melodies transposed as before)

a. Istomin/Lyapunov, Pestti russko£[o naroda, p. 252

ka

mi.

tov

kust.

b. Linyova, "Opït zapisi fonografom Ukrainskikh narodni'kh pesen," no. 5

(Trudï MEK 1: 253) zapev

P- Wi Ta

ma

la

ya

nich

ka

r* tri

Pc

voch - k a , .

c. Linyova, no. 6 (Trudï MEK 1: 254)

Po nad ter-nom ste

zhech-ka,

Po nad tcr-nom by

1 1 By ta-yabu

ia,

By-tayabu

la.

i1

Shchov div-chy-ny bri

taya,

von'-ky,

from the alto flute through the flautigrandi and ultimately erupting in sharp piccolo bursts during the tutti explosion at fig. [134]. 128 Linyova also emphasizes the fact that "besides their artistic beauty, the old vesnyanki and petrivki have an important significance for musical ethnography, as songs of unquestionably ancient provenience." 129 She could not have predicted, when she recorded the songs in 1903, that a composer of art music would have been drawn to them for the same reason, but they are precisely what Stravinsky needed to symbolize, epitomize, and in neonationalist terms validate the "Ritual Action" of his Elders. The strident tuttis at figs. [134] and [138] are the "choral responses" shouted from the rooftops and 128. See Linyova, "Opi't zapisi fonografom," 226-27. 129. Ibid., 230.

[922]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

f i g . i 2 . 1 1 . Playing the svirel' to accompany vesnyanki and petrivki. (Illustration to Linyova's Ukrainian field collection of 1903, published in

TrudiMEK I [1906]).

the hills in the traditional ritual ofgukaniye as Zemtsovsky describes it. They are a conjuration, a zaklinaniye, the very form of poetic utterance pointed to with such emphasis by Blok in the essay that furnished the point of departure for this whole investigation into the backgrounds and sources of The Rite of Spring. NEONATIONALISM

IN

PRACTICE

Perhaps the most interesting group of pages in the whole Rite sketchbook is the one that shows the evolution of the concluding number from the first part of the ballet, the Dance of the Earth. These begin on page 35 with the heading "Viplyasivaniye zemli,\ immediately beneath we find the entry shown in Example 12.18. This fragment seems to belong to the genre of dance songs (plyasoriye) and dance-until-you-drop instrumental ostinato dance tunes (naigrishi) of the type most famously represented in art music by Glinka's Kamarinskaya. The upper voice of the sketch, with its whole-tone chromaticism, seems at first blush to be unrelated to folk practices. But in fact there are a significant number of kalendarniye pesni that conform to the whole-tone tetrachord; and, as observed in a preNEONATIONALISM

IN

PRACTICE

[923]

e x a m p l e 12.18 Sketchbook, p. numbered for comparison

t

f

f l

—

[

-4—g

s

*

#

35:

J r t= s t

"V'iplyasivaniye zemli," measures

{

t--* t

^

1.

2.

i f

5.

-

3.

&T^l tzt— 6.

t

.if

,F

S

f

4.

* I4P f M " - • b ^ 47. ]

vious chapter, there are even Russian folk instruments that are tuned to the wholetone scale.130 Plyasoriye and naigrisln are often improvised in thirds, as in Stravinsky's sketch. Parallel doubling of this sort can be found in many parts of The Rite, notably the Game of "Cities," in which two themes clearly resemble the Dance of the Earth sketch. Early sketches for each of them, as shown in Example 12.19, make the affinity especially clear. If we take the lower, diatonic voice in Example 12.18 to be the "original" tune—the vox principalis, so to speak—we shall have a melody that is quite similar to the well-known wedding dance-tune "The dove flew cooing" ("Letalgolub vorkovcd"). In Example 12.20a—b, Stravinsky's lower voice is set above a transcription from a field recording of "Letalgolub," in which the parallel thirds of authentic folk practice are present. The resemblance is striking; and while Stravinsky obviously never saw Example 12.20b, he surely knew "Letal ¿¡olub," for it had been incorporated, thirds and all, into the granddaddy of all Russian "national" operas, Vasiliy Pashkevich's singspiel St. Petersburg Bazaar (Sanktpeterburgskiy gostinniy dvor) of 1782 (Ex. 12.20c). Indeed, the incorporation of dance tunes in thirds into art music had a considerable pre-Glinka tradition in Russia. Example i2.2od shows a tune of this type as it is found in the opera Fedul and His Children (Fedul s defmi), a work jointly composed in 1791 by Pashkevich and Vicente Martin y Soler, the Spanish-born purveyor of Italian opera to the Russian court, to a libretto by Catherine the Great. The last item in Example 12.20 is a devichnik tune from Istomin/Lyapunov, which brings the oral tradition into a written source with which Stravinsky is known to have had contact. Also on page 35 of the sketchbook is another ostensible source melody, given in Example 12.21a. These three versions of a single motive bear a distinct resemblance to the demonstrably folk-derived Game of Abduction theme (see Ex. 12.3). An even closer possible forebear has been suggested by Boris Yarustovsky,131 one with which Stravinsky was familiar beyond doubt: the cries of the bear trainer at the be130. See Anna Rudneva, Narodntye pcsniKurskoy Frishman for bringing this source to my attention. 131. IStrSM:i88.

[924]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

oblasti (Moscow, 1957). I am grateful to Mr.

Dmitry

EXAMPLE

a.

r f t

"Ijjra v ¿joroda" I * i 4-T

;-U-

J

ê

b.

12.19

f t

«

1

("Game of'Cities'"), Sketchbook, p. 20

1

Y

f

"Ijjra vgoroda," * tj f it

EXAMPLE

f

t tt

: f p

f

^

Y

T

T

w

Sketchbook, p. 12

* I i%i% e * tjj

i*

I2.20

a. Lower line of source sketch (cf. Ex. 12.18)

ß ß 1 mZpßf fi» 1 aF b. N. Bachinskaya, Narodniye pesni v tvorchestve 109a: "Letalßolub vorkovaT ("The dove flew cooing")

_ Le-tal

go-lub

vor - ko

c. Vasiliy Pashkevich,

K h .hP J . J j j I tf ftp 1 r U p \J p U II PV PV \ I i pP

J

val, _

le-tal

go-lub

jt*

S

i) i

(1782; Moscow, 1980), no. 15 (p. 209)

* *

S**S

mm

w

•y p ' P p t vor • ko-val, vor-ko-val.

vor-ko-val,

St. Petersburg Bazaar

d t*t

^X j)

russkikh k

it* +r—ß

\d

-

d. Vicente Martin y Soler/Pashkevich, Fedul and His Children (1791), Act I, no. 5 (the orchestra) (from Bachinskaya, Narodniye pesni, no. 92) -1

-p-,

j

i

M

1

j? ..J... Q—t ^ l ' Ï J

M

u

t

jt H E S ELIJJ

P=

F1

*t S

j "

12.20

EXAMPLE

(continued)

e. Istomin/Lyapunov, Pesni russkogo naroda, p. 109

1

f

J

13

—t

or-yol, le-bed'

EXAMPLE

s

K-

1 3

be - la - ya,

9

le - tei

Nil s -iL j

or-yol, le-bed'

J

i=i=A

be - la - ya.

12.21

a. Sketchbook, p. 35

3

S

E

f n F

b. Rimsky-Korsakov, Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh,

A c t I I , 2 after | 6 7 |

in tempo

a piacere

3=3 Po-ka-zhi

Mi-kha lush-ka,

po-ka-zhi du - rach-li - vi'y!

ginning of the second act of Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend ofthe Invisible City ofKitezh (Ex. 12.21b). Rimsky's recitative-like setting already has Stravinsky's freely alternating groups of two and three eighths, and Yarustovsky's suggestion is all the more plausible because Stravinsky's entry is at Rimsky's pitch, although the ultimate destination of the motive, as we shall see, was a semitone higher. The two source melodies on page 35 (henceforth no. 1 and no. 2, respectively) provided Stravinsky with literally all the material out of which he constructed the Dance of the Earth. The seven sketch pages devoted to the dance are a perfect paradigm of his usual practice in the sketchbook: a leaf of jottings and a preliminary continuity draft (pp. 35-36) and a particell that differs from the final version only in details (pp. 37-39, 47, 49) 1 3 2 In a burst of enthusiasm generated by his own ostinati, Stravinsky scrawled (p. 36; see Fig. 12.12) what might well serve as a 132. Between pp. 39 and 47, some sketches for The Nightingale tion to Part II of The Rite intervene.

[926]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

and a single entry for the Introduc-

general motto for The Rite of Spring: "There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse." On page 35, the composer worked several telling transformations on source melody no. 1. Immediately below and to the left we find a chromaticized derivation from the second measure of its diatonic lower line that will surface as an ostinato in the second violins four measures before fig. [76] in the published score (Ex. 12.22a). To the right of this jotting, by alternating the tonic C with the chromatic notes of the upper voice, Stravinsky derives the whole-tone ostinato that will run through the whole movement in the low strings and woodwinds (Ex. 12.22b). Note that this is done in two stages. In the first phrase Stravinsky goes only as far as G-sharp, the highest note reached in the source sketch (cf. Ex. 12.18). By adding the B-flat (thereafter often respelled A-sharp), he arrives at a complete whole-tone scale bisected by implication into two trichords, one beginning on C and the other on F-sharp. It will be immediately apparent that the two jottings in Example 12.22 are referable to octatonic and whole-tone scales, respectively, with a common tritone fulcrum C/FH, reminiscent of "Chez Petrouchka." This fundamental bipolar tonality is exploited throughout the movement with increasing insistence. It is expressed first in the opposition of the ketdedrum's jackhammer F-sharps against the ostinato bass note C, an opposition already present (though as yet without any indication of instrumentation) in the rough continuity draft at the bottom of page 35 (Ex. 12.23). The play of G- and A-naturals in the top voice of this sketch is also significant. These pitches have the same relationship to the whole-tone trichord FHGH-AH running beneath as the Eb and Dt of Ex. 12.22 have to the complementary whole-tone trichord C-D-E; that is, they fill in the octatonic tetrachord that falls between the same outer limits as the whole-tone trichord. Stravinsky is exploiting in his turn the same modal ambiguity we have already observed in a passage from Rimsky-KorsakoVs Sadko (cf. Ex. 4.27), only he does it in such a way as to emphasize, rather than minimize, the clashes between the octatonic and the whole-tone collections. The ear perceives the two scales as polarized; the effect is that of "polytonality." In Figure 12.12 (p. 36 of the sketchbook) all of this is made even more explicit and maximalistic. By now, Stravinsky has had the idea of extending the ostinato so as to express completely the division of the whole-tone scale into two trichords. Whole-tone trichords on F-sharp and on C, alternating with the bass note C, now occupy successive measures. That Stravinsky conceived of the resultant whole-tone scale not as a unit but as a composite of trichords is shown by an interesting correction he made toward the end of the sketch. He plays against the regularity of the alternation of the two trichords by withholding one of the scheduled appearances of the C-D-E trichord—an imposed irregularity that contributes a telling jolt to the dance's mounting tension. Meanwhile, source melody no. 2 has been NEONATIONALISM

IN

PRACTICE

[927]

EXAMPLE

Derivations from source melody no.

12.22

I

(Sketchbook, p. 35) a.

3*

i P

b.

EXAMPLE

Sketchbook, p.

12.23

m m MM

35

J = 138

i

3E

1

J

* 1 * un—e *):

S

f

t

«g1

ie v

..-

f1

1

1 r 1- r 1 - !1 - 1 ^ .

#

I X

*fr s S d

r

r

"

t

! %

r —

i

f^Ifti.

¿W'/-?

uifo&'-t&t-t

r

y

UpLMfl.

i

, 7

b m f i

w - -

)

V -L

1

I

ffig ME

r ; h f r ' i -jr.

N!vi»TU

SI

Cl

vT

"5 EsaSt-

Wi • i

''UliUW u g .

i 2 . i 2 .

Rite

sketchbook, p. 36: sketches for the Dance of the Earth.

turned into an ostinato that runs concurrently with the whole-tone derivation from source melody no. i, and it is transposed up a semitone so that its pitches are referable to octatonic Collection III, making an explicit bimodal clash with the C-D-E trichord, just as the G and A had formerly clashed explicitly with the complementary trichord (FK-GH-AK) when it was the only trichord in play. The whole operation is summarized and related to the finished score in Example 12.24. The punctuating chord that runs through the dance is also derived from source melody no. 1. The continuity draft at the bottom of page 35 shows, in its division into two staves, how Stravinsky evidently conceived of it (see Ex. 12.23). The lower staff shows the opening third of the source melody combined with the first chromatic tone of the upper voice. The sketch for the voicing of the chord in the strings, entered in the left margin presumably after the continuity draft was begun, disguises the derivation of the chord by distributing the three notes of the lower staff among the two violins and the viola (Ex. 12.25). Each of these notes is associated independendy with the octatonic G-natural, which combines with the C and E of the source melody to form a specious " C major" that adds yet another level of polymodality to the proceedings: we now have whole-tone, octatonic, and diatonic constructs from the source melodies all running concurrendy, and all intersecting on C, which pitch is thus promoted to the status of a specious tonic. The continuity draft on page 35 also contains a characteristic rhythmic and noteorder transformation of the source melody (Ex. 12.26) which found its way with only slight modifications into the finished score ([76] + 6 to [74]-2). The measure numbers in the example indicate the relationship of this version to the source melody in Ex. 12.18. The latter never appears as such in the finished ballet, though Stravinsky did make a single attempt to work it into a sketch (see Fig. 12.12). The next ostinato to enter the fray is the one derived from the lower line of the source sketch (Ex. 12.22a). Stravinsky transposes it so that its opening pitch (F-natural) is foreign to both the collections in play, whole-tone and octatonic alike. This result cannot be anything but calculated, since only two pitches could have accomplished this (the other being the tritone reciprocal, B-natural). The F, then, sounds forth as an unstable nonharmonic tone, an appoggiatura, resolved quite conventionally to the E with which the ostinato phrase concludes. When this phrase makes its appearance in the finished score (4 before [76]), it is spelled, for ease of reading, in a specious "F minor." In the sketchbook draft, however, Stravinsky's spelling is analytically significant. The A-flat of the published score is consistendy spelled G-sharp (see Ex. 12.27). Stravinsky, in effect, has gone out of his way to spell the motive in terms of the clashing octatonic and whole-tone collections. The G-sharp and B-flat come from the ostinato running beneath, the G-natural from the punctuating chord. Spelled this way, the concluding E does not look like the unstable leading tone of F minor, but like the stable tone of resolution that it (perceptually) is.

[930]

12

• THE

GREAT

FUSION

E X A M P L E

m

1 2 . 2 4

Cross-collectional interference

punctuating chords

octatonic

EB

J

sourcc melody no. 2, ostinato

O whole-ton e

m J

E X A M P L E

m m 1 *

12.25

Sketchbook, p.

35

Sketchbook, p.

35

0 : t *

E X A M P L E

6 - 7

E X A M P L E

f

« 1 2 . 2 6

/

1 2 . 2 7

a. The Rite, 4 before | 761

p.- $

5 - 6

(measure numbers refer to Ex.

12.18)

At this point Stravinsky piles on the sound by doubling ostinati already in play at the fifth and the octave—a device we have seen him employ in Zvezdolikiy. He now has all his material in hand. The ending is sketched on pages 47 and 49 (48 is blank). Now altogether sure of himself, Stravinsky reverts to a practical shorthand. Of the four components of the texture, only the ostinato from source melody no. 2 and the one derived from the upper line of source melody no. 1 are written out in full. The main ostinato, derived from the upper line of no. 1, is first reduced to black note-heads, then to mere letter names, while the punctuating chord is represented by vertical arrows. On the last page of sketching (Fig. 12.13), two very interesting phenomena may be observed. First, we learn that Stravinsky had meant to end the Dance of the Earth with a sustained version of the punctuating chord in the full brass, crescendo al possibile. Why did he cancel such a striking idea? For one thing, it would have made too obvious an ending to a section of the ballet whose whole character is one of ceaseless and essentially undifferentiated activity. The blunter ending finally decided upon, just an abrupt and shocking halt, emphasizes in retrospect that very ceaselessness. For another—perhaps more important—thing, the bass note of the sustained chord, an octave G in the tubas, confuses the very clear bipolar tonality of the dance based on oscillation between C and F-sharp, as derived from the source sketch, into which the concurrent whole-tone and octatonic melodic formations fit equally well. Of even greater interest in this connection is the second observation, that the measured timpani roll on this page is explicitly altered from a continuous F-sharp, as it had been throughout the dance, to alternations of F-sharp and C, ending with the latter, the "specious tonic." In the music as published, this alternation is pushed back as far as the section beginning at fig. [75] (corresponding to the sketch in Fig. 12.12), where the explicit alternation of trichords derived from an extension of source melody no. 1 begins. The effect is that of reinforcing the tonal implication and the coordinating function of the tritone alternations. What seems finally of greatest moment in this analysis of the sketches for the Dance of the Earth is that such a basic structural factor as the underlying tonal progression—to say nothing of the form-generating ostinati—has been derived from a source melody that is all but certainly a genuine folk artifact: possibly even one taken down directly "from life"; for every Russian town, including Ustilug to be sure, had its village wedding band that could improvise naigrishi by the hour. 133 When we take additionally into account the novel harmonies obtained either by verticalizing pitches presented successively in the source melodies or by juxtaposing 133. A striking field recording of a wedding band extemporizing at full tilt on a nnigrish called "Timon'ya" (a close relative of Glinka's Kamarinskaya tune) may be heard in the set Muzikal'niy fol'klor narodov SSSR, issued in conjuction with the Seventh International Music Congress in Moscow, 1971 (Melodiya D-030833/36).

[932]

12

•

THE

GREAT

FUSION

fig.

12.13.

Rite sketchbook, p.

49:

conclusion of the Dance of the Earth.

the melodies at unusual transpositions-—not to mention the derivation of new melodic motives by reordering the constituent notes of the source tunes (a process that has an obvious analogy much later in Stravinsky's cyclic permutation of serial hexachords)—we begin to see how profoundly the composer's musical imagination was stirred by the manipulation of elements abstracted from folk songs, and how thoroughly many of the most pregnantly original of The Rite's technical innovations had their origins in this new and radical approach to received material. The Dance of the Earth is 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 folkderived source melodies. NEON ATIONALISM

IN

PRACTICE

[ 9 33]

FUSION The Rite was Stravinsky's "Eroica." It compels the same sort of wonder; for, precisely as Kerman has observed about Beethoven's Third Symphony, "however carefully one studies [the composer's] evolving style" up to the date of its creation, "nothing prepares one for the scope, the almost bewildering originality and the technical certainty manifested" in Stravinsky's third ballet. And also as in the case of the "Eroica," an abundance of surviving and available sketch materials "show[s] a minimum of false starts and detours: the most radical ideas were present from the start, if in cruder form, and the work seems to have proceeded with great assurance" 134 —an assurance that is certainly apparent from the accounts of Stravinsky's sketching given thus far. Comprehensive discussion of the music of The Rite in all its technical aspects is, of course, a subject for a book in itself. 135 Here we must resolutely take our bearings from our theme and discuss the music in its Russian context, more mindful than ever of the potential reductionism that lurks in any contextual study, viz., the danger of treating complex and unique texts merely as signs of their times. What makes the great work great is that it has managed in some sense to leave its immediate cultural context behind. Hence, our mission cannot be thought accomplished with respect to The Rite until an attempt has been made to account for its transcendence. That said, let us take note that the music of The Rite ofSpring resonates not only with folkloric echoes but also—inevitably—with manifold reverberations of earlier Russian music for the stage. The second act of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada had been a veritable pageant of wr-Slavic ritual. The sound of dudki, which permeates The Rite the way the sound of barrel organs and concertinas had permeated Petrushka, conjures up the shade of Snegurochka, Rimsky-Korsakov's "springtime fable" (vesennyaya skazka) after Ostrovsky, whose orchestra was no less dominated by woodwind colors, some of them veritable leit-timbres. As Rimsky tells us in his autobiography, he employed a stage band in the Act IV cortège "to represent the peasants' horns (rozhki) and reed pipes (dudki)."136 Rimsky even prefaced his opera with an Introduction that depicts the awakening spring. Its process of formal growth by the progressive accrual of timbrally contrasting motifs, until VesnaKrasna (Bonny Spring) arrives, drawn by cranes, geese, and swans, must have been in the back of Stravinsky's mind as he composed the Introduction to Part I of his ballet. 134. New Grove Dictionary, s.v. "Beethoven" (2:381). 135. There have been two such books thus far: Allen Forte, The Harmonic Organization of "The Rite of Spring" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); and Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and "The Rite." The latter is an amplification of an analytical viewpoint first given comprehensive exposition in Van den Toorn's earlier monograph. The Music of Igor Stravinsky, and as such makes a fine complement to the present historical study. For a useful survey of analytical approaches to the score, see Arnold Whittall, "Music Analysis as Human Science? Le Sacre du Printemps," Music Analysis 1 (1982): 33-53. 136. My Musical Life, 242.

[934]

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f i g . 12.14. Rocrich's design for the Chicago Snegurochka (1919)—practically indistinguishable from that of The Rite. (Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York)

Indeed, it may have been Roerich who put the recollection there. In 1908 the artist had designed Snegurochka for the Opera Comique in Paris (in 1921 he would do another production for the Chicago Lyric Opera). His sets and costumes for Rimsky's opera are virtually interchangeable with the ones he did for Stravinsky's ballet (Fig. 12.14). Particularly intriguing is his costume sketch for the scene between Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, and the shepherd Lei, who is shown in the act of piping on a svirel'. Lei's songs, in the first and third acts of Rimsky's opera, have definite affinities with the music of The Rite. The accompaniment of the first is scored for two flutes, two cellos, two contrabasses, and a concertante English horn taking the role of Lei's rozhok (capped-reed pipe). Its ritornello (developed into a veritable cadenza after the second song) was an authentic pastoral naigrish imparted to Rimsky-Korsakov by Lyadov. Its reprise in the Act IV procession is clearly reflected in the piccolo countermelody to Stravinsky's Spring Khorovods (Ex. 12.28). Closer yet to the sound of Stravinsky's dudki is the naigrish played by the bassoon to accompany "The Peasant Lad's Dumka" ("Dumka parubka") in Musorgsky's unfinished opera The Fair at Sorochintsi. Here we may be dealing with an actual, if perhaps unconscious, quotation, despite the fact that the opening bassoon melody of The Rite can be traced to a tune in Juszkiewicz's anthology. What, after all, attracted Stravinsky's eye to that particular tune out of the 1,785 melodies FUSION

[935]

EXAMPLE

12.28

a. Rimsky-Korsakov, Snegurochka, Lei's naigrish

b. Rimsky-Korsakov, Snegurochka, Act IV, Procession, m. 87, flute and piccolo

c. The Rite, fig. | 511, piccolo

EXAMPLE

12.29

a. Musorgsky, The Fair at Soróchintsi, "Dumka Parobka" (Complete Works, ed. Lamm, 6:89), bassoon solo (dudka)

4 rhythm

b. The Rite, opening bassoon solo melody

uà

.-

^

rhythm

« /Pi

s-

in his source? His rhythmic transformation of the received melody, in any case, is so radical as to admit the possibility of a second model. Example 12.29a may have been that model. It would not do to overdraw the significance of these echoes. Stylistically, it scarcely needs to be emphasized, The Rite is hardly retrospective. All the same, the echoes are a reminder that the ballet was written out of—not against—a tradition, and that its stylistic innovations relate to and extend that tradition. Or rather, those traditions: for Stravinsky's signal achievement in The Rite ofSpring was a brilliantly original and thorough synthesis of the folkloristic and modernistic traditions of Russian art music—two strains that ever since Glinka had been cultivated in parallel, always coexisting but, with negligible exceptions, making no contact. We have encountered this dichotomy before: the Ruslanesque stereotype, according to which human characters are differentiated from supernatural ones by means of contrasting folk/diatonic and symmetric/chromatic musical idioms. Nowhere had the cliche been more obediently invoked than in The Firebird; and Stravinsky was still observing it quite fastidiously, if with a redeeming irony, in Petrushka. But now, faced with a subject that epitomized the depersonalized Russian archaism so beloved of the neonationalists, and in fact supplied at least in part—in very large part—by one of that movement's leaders, Stravinsky sought a new approach. Having drawn much of his thematic material from the most archaic stratum of surviving Slavic folk music—that of ceremonial and "calendar" songs—and having therefore adopted or invented a fund of themes and motives that were more or less restricted in their melodic compass to the tones of the minor tetrachord (T-S-T), Stravinsky was led to base the harmonic idiom of the ballet with remarkable consistency on the hitherto very rare partition of the octatonic collection into two such tetrachords pitched a tritone apart. Needless to say, The Rite still contains plenty of straightforward, "traditional" octatonicism based on the old complexe sonore of minor-third relations—the kind that led out of Rimsky-Korsakov and that in its most radical phase had led to the bitonalisms of Petrushka. Arthur Berger has described the Game of Abduction, for example, as "a veritable primer of the ways the octatonic scale may be arranged into four major triads or seventh chords," and Van den Toorn has gone ahead and catalogued the ways in detail. 137 More extensive patterns of third cycles—often enriched (as in the Introduction to Part II) by skillful crosscutting a la Zvezdolikiy between octatonic collections 138 —occur in the second part of the ballet, culminating in a really massive pile-up as the Sacrificial Dance approaches its climax (see Ex. 12.30: F, the Scriabinesque "ninth" pitch here, represents a simple tertial extension of the complexe sonore; it belongs consistently to a B-flat minor triad that shares its 157. Berger, "Problems of Pitch Organization," 139; Van den Toorn, Music of Iyor Stravinsky, 110-19. 138. See Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and "The Rite," I92fi.

FUSION

[937]

E X A M P L E

The Rite, fig. 11981 (Sacrificial Dance)

12.30

§ bass

other two pitches with the F-sharp—major member of the complexe). Actual octatonic scales are few, but characteristic. They most commonly occur in the form of anacrustic "flute slides" (as Allen Forte calls them). 139 The tetrachordal partition is not entirely new to us; we have seen it sporadically employed by Rimsky-Korsakov and even Borodin (cf. Exx. 4.38 and 4.39), and by Stravinsky himself in such early works as The Faun and the Shepherdess (Ex. 4.41) and the Scherzo fantastique (Ex. 5.4a). But what had hitherto been a very special 139. This applies even to the flute slides at the very end of the Sacrificial Dance, which have occasionally baffled analysts (Forte, who forgot to transpose the alto flute part, calls them "gestural" rather than "significant"; see Harmonic Organization, 130). The first flute's slide consists of two disjunct octatonic pentachords (or a pentachord overlapping with a hexachord) belonging to two different collections. The same is true of the alto flute slide, except that G-sharp stands in for G. Possibly, given that it comes right before the bar, the G-sharp is meant as an implied leading tone to the structurally prominent A (note that A, C, and E are doubled at the octave by the two flutes during their "slides"). In any case, the music here seems to be a sequential extension of the prominent—indeed, thematic—flute slide in the Glorification. The association is probably meant as symbolic, occurring as it does at the Chosen One's transcendent moment of glory: a. Ritual of Abduction at [43]

b. Glorification at [ 2 H., Picc. — S * B '

(CoU. Ill)

-

(Coll. Ill)

c. Sacrificial Dance at 1 after f Analysis:

Alto Fl.

[938]

12

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FUSION

CoU. Ill

Coll. I

CoU. II

Coll. Ill

effect becomes a veritable Grundgestalt in The Rite. And like the Petrushka chord, it now frequendy involves the vertical ("polytonal") superimposition of what in earlier works had been characteristic successions. One of the clearest manifestations of this kind occurs when the Procession of the Oldest-and-Wisest ("Cortège du sage") overtakes the Game of "Cities" near the end of Part I (Ex. 12.31b).140 Another is the harmonization of the main theme of the Ritual Action of the Elders, particularly significant since the theme in question has been identified as a vesnyanka, an authentic folk invocation to spring (Ex. 12.31c). The harmonic implications of the new partition had actually been prefigured in the first tableau of Petrushka, where the utterances of the bcdagannïy ded were given a striking harmonization: one of the T-S-T tetrachords of this unique octatonic partition was accompanied pedal-fashion by the lowest note of the other (Ex. 12.32). If we take this Petrushka configuration as a harbinger or embryo of Stravinsky's new-style octatonicism, we may posit a three-note harmonic "source chord" consisting of the outer notes of the upper tetrachord plus the lowest note of the lower one: (o 611); or, reciprocally, the outer notes of the lower plus the topmost note of the higher: (o 511), the inversion. This harmonic cell functions in The Rite as another veritable Grundyestalt. It is in fact the closest thing one can nominate to a global unifier of this tonally enigmatic score. And such a nominee is indeed an analytical necessity; for while no obvious surface harmony, no theme, no progression, no key can be said to unify The Rite over its entire span, 141 its tonal coherence and integrity are impressively evident to the naïvest ear. 140. Lest stubborn doubts persist as to Stravinsky's awareness of "octatonicism" as a resource or

Besides the immediately arresting differences between the sketch and the finished music—the doubletime rate of the Procession theme, the ponderous accompaniment whose two tritones sum up the ( 0 3 6 9 ) nodes of the octatonic collection in force (meanwhile supplying the collection-completing B-natural that is lacking in the Procession theme)—there is the matter of spelling, maintained in all subsequent sketches for the passage on pp. 16 and 19. The "Rival Tribes" theme is always notated with an A-sharp, despite the obvious (to us) sense of the passage, viz., parallel doubling at the third. The spelling betokens Stravinsky's fastidious recognition of the pitch in question as belonging to the "other" tetrachord, and shows how fundamental the octatonic bias was to his conceptualization of the passage in the act of composing it. 141. Moevs (Review of Forte, 103) proposes that "the Rite of Spring has a basic tonality: D minor." He has not published his reasoning in support of this claim, but it is probably focused primarily on

FUSION

[ 9 3 9 ]

The outer limits of the (o 511/0 6 11) "source chord" are already implicit in the very first harmony we hear in the ballet: the French horn's C-sharp against the bassoon's cadential A, contradicting the initial C of the opening melody and implying a diminished octave (o n). In its three-note entirety, the source chord can be found as a constituent of all the seven- and eight-element "main harmonies" Forte has tabulated in his statistical survey of The Rite's harmonic vocabulary, and it figures in most of the four- andfive-elementsets as well. On the analogy of the Petrushka chord, one might justifiably dub the (o 511/0 611) configuration the "Rite chord," as it so concisely summarizes and encapsulates what Forte has called the "very special relations" that govern the harmony of The Rite of Spring.142 The Rite chord is most baldly displayed on the surface of the music in the "Amazonian" Glorification of the Chosen One. Not only is it a primary harmony in its own right, but it also functions quite literally as parent of all the larger harPart II, which in the version of 1921 begins with a sustained D-minor triad in the horns (later taken up by the full orchestra at fig. [80]) and ends with a chord containing D and A as an apparent root/fifth combination in the bass. Along the way various ostinato basses on A (Glorification) and D (Ritual Action) might be said to reinforce the tonality; but it is, from a functional/harmonic point of view, pretty weakly articulated. At the very least a tonality needs a cadence in order to get established, yet cadences to D are entirely lacking. But even if the claim is granted, it accounts only for Part II. In Part I—from a harmonic point of view actually the simpler of the two—all one can fairly posit are tonal links between the dances in the form of persisting common tones or chords. The most conspicuous of these is the "dominant six-five on E-flat" that is both the "right-hand" part of the ostinato polychord in the Auguries, and a part of the octatonically referable polychord that abrupdy succeeds the Auguries ostinato at the outset of the Game of Abduction. For the sake of argument one could include the Spring Khorovods in the scheme, since the dance begins with a long sustained E-flat trill and thereafter rests for a while on an E-flat (specious) tonic. Thus a configuration emerges that could be summarized as follows:

To go much beyond that would seem to put a strain on the evidence. For an attempt at a "global" interpretation of The Rite's tonal scheme, based in part on the so-called obikhodniy zvukoryad, the old Russian liturgical scale, see S. S. Skrebkov, "K voprosu o stile sovremennoy muzi'ki ('Vesna svyashchennaya' Stravinskogo)," in Muzi'ka i sovremennost', vol. 6, ed. V. Konen (Moscow: Muzi'ka, 1969), esp. 41. 142. Forte, Harmonic Organization, 148 (see 132® for a tabulation of the "main harmonies"). Van den Toorn has also isolated and written incisively about the pitch configuration under discussion here. He cites in particlar the symmetrical composite (chord plus inversion: [05611]) that in his view represents "a kind of basic sonority in The Rite, the shell of its octatonic contení" (Stravinsky and "The Rite," 145—46). He further notes the congruence of this cell with pitch structures that have been identified (by Leo Treitler and Elliott Antokoletz) as basic in the music of Bartók. Indeed, it may be found as a prominent harmony in the atonal works of Schoenberg as well (see, for example, the opening measures of Erwartung, and thereafter passim). In the present historical discussion, which is concerned more with matters of emergent style than with comprehensive analytical strategies, it was deemed preferable not to combine the "Rite Chord" with its inversion to produce a hypothetical symmetrical source chord, but to stay with the actual surface harmonies of the music where possible. In this way—and in keeping with the theme of the present work—the relevance of the "source chord" to Stravinsky's immediate Russian backgrounds will emerge with greater clarity. This is not necessarily to deny or minimize the points of congruence other analysts have discovered with the work of Stravinsky's nonRussian contemporaries; it is meant only to help delineate the particular path by which Stravinsky found his way from the common practice he had learned to his new harmonic idiom.

[940]

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E X A M

P LE

1 2 . 3 1

a. The tetrachordal partition (Collection I)

b. The Rite, 3 before 165 I (adapted from the four-hand arrangement) Games:

c. The Rite, fig. 1135 I (adapted from the four-hand arrangement)

E X A M P L E

1 2 . 3 2

Petrushka,firsttableau,

fig.

[7]

"source c h o r d "

monic constructs, which with few exceptions can be analyzed as combinations and mixtures of Rite chords. In the chromatic glissandi that introduce the dance and return three times in the course of its progress (figs. [103], [106], [107], and [117]), the Rite chord acts as a stable unit of parallel doubling. This may be seen most clearly in Stravinsky's particell (p. 51, showing fig. [117]), which appears both on the cover and on page 47 of Strawinsky: sein Nacblass, sein Bild. Example 12.33a shows the flute parts as they look in that manuscript, all on one staff. The first of these glissandi leads into the famous prefatory 11/4 measure, whose single harmony consists of a Rite chord and its inversion (nicely analyzed for us by the composer's note-spelling and staff distribution in the sketchbook), which together yield six of the eight tones in octatonic Collection II (Ex. 12.33b). The same harmony resurfaces, though without the maximalistic repetitions, after the other glissandi, and in many other places in the dance (e.g., the measure before fig. [109]). The parenthetical bottom note of the source scale in Example 12.33b acts as the specious tonic in this dance, constandy reiterated as a bass note by the tubas and timpani. At fig. [104], the beginning of the dance proper, the referential collection "pivots" to Collection III (the other octatonic collection containing the note A), and the harmony underlying the theme again consists of the Rite chord plus its inversion, the two being presented this time in succession rather than superimposed. The G-sharp, foreign to Collection III, is always resolved as an appoggiatura (Ex. 12.34a). The source chord and its inversion are also frequendy alternated in parallel progressions, as shown in Example 12.34b. Stravinsky's evident consciousness of the chord as a stable harmonic referent may owe something to Scriabin, who had furiously exploited its compound inversion in his Fifth Sonata of 1907 (Ex. 12.35). Stravinsky used the chord in this spacing, too (cf. the bottom staff of Ex. 12.31c). Elsewhere in The Rite, the source chord is filled out in a number of ways, [942]

12

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EXAMPLE

12.33

a. The Rite, particeli, p. 51 (second measure, flutes only)

b. The Rite, 1 before 1104 L spelling according to Sketchbook (p. 67) compared with spelling in four-hand arrangement inversion (0, 6, 11 reading down)

si

Collection II x

cf. spelling in piano four-hand score

source chord (0, 6, 11 reading up ) (cf. Ex. 12.32)

EXAMPLE

12.34

a. The Rite, fig. 11041 (spelling simplified)

b. The Rite, figs. 1109 L 1 before 11101

EXAMPLE

12.35

Scriabin, Fifth Sonata, mm. 9-11 (= m. 453-cnd) 1- A

Presto

Sva

m=sM

» T g

r\ 1— 0

ri

;; — —

- -

«

-

*s

-

"Äife-chord"

some of them quite notorious. One way is to insert a fourth note that bisects the tritone component, creating a diminished triad plus a diminished octave—a harmony that, having originated within classical practice as an appoggiatura to the diminished-seventh chord, was current in late- and post-Romantic music as an especially tense dissonance whose resolution could be delayed for especially powerful expressive effects. Used, like all stable harmonies in The Rite, as a hypostatized, nonresolving sonority, the chord, moving in a clashing parallel line of its own, lent an aspect of sublime terror to the climactic statement of the Spring Khorovods melody (Ex. 12.36a). The static punctuating chord in the vivo midsection of the same dance consists of a Rite chord of this type, combined with a C-minor triad, its octatonic relative, whose root and fifth the Rite chord subsumes (Ex. 12.36b). Another way of filling out the Rite chord is to supply it with an ersatz root, turning it into the perceptual equivalent of a dominant-seventh chord with either the third or the seventh double-inflected. In a passage from the Mystic Circles that was actually the very last music in The Rite to be composed,143 the spell-casting motif of the trumpets is accompanied by the Rite chord and a bass line that supplies each of the two possible ersatz roots, as described above, in turn. They lie, of course, a Korsakovian tritone apart; the passage is vibrant with echoes of two generations of Russian "magic" harmony (Ex. 12.37). 143- The eleven measures from [86] to [87] were inserted by Stravinsky into the full score on 29 March 1913. (The score is inscribed "Clarens, February 23/8 March 1913," at the end of the Sacrificial Dance—see E. Lichtenhahn and T. Seebass, eds., Musikhandschriften aits der Sammlung Paul [Basel: F. Hoffmann-La Roche, 1976], for a facsimile.) On the insertion, see Schaeffner, "Au fil des esquisses," 185.

[944]

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Sacher

E X A M P L E

12.36

a. The Rite,

[53]

fig.

S vu-

*

;

*

F r r

r

E-

m

* f

p - f

*

Embellished Rife-chords (coll'ottava):

Ti

f f i j - 9 S

l

, V

J -

5

f

'

—

f

$

!

f

*• »J — 1 e

—

, i

t ) : , |, L 5

•

;

#

I

Middle line, reduced to essential nnc ^

m I T "

b . The Rite,

f

r

2—

n S t î )

1 after >»

4— • • è -

\

—

Rite-chords:

«

LJ I f *

•

ì

1 Rite-chc rd f-f-

m

'

-Pi*

H

r

H

P

- ! n vJ u

= t

e x a m p l e

12.37

The Rite,

4 after

[86]

*

EXAMPLE 1 2 . 3 8

Derivations from the Rife-chord

Coll. Ill

EXAMPLE 1 2 . 3 9 Pair of early sketches (transcribed by Robert Craft, in review of Forte's monograph on The Rite [Musical Quarterly 64, no. 4 (October 1978): 530])

ir —

J

—

»

—

m

Wig

fr"

b.

$

Coll. I (cf. m. 1)

Coll. II (cf. m. 2)

4»=

E

1—7 —

1 «

*

1

Finally, and most memorably, Stravinsky turns the bass note of the source chord into a triadic root. This technique, which might be described as the acoustic doubling of the "x"-tetrachord's representative (following the terminology of Example 12.31), is responsible for many of the most celebrated "polychords" in the score (Ex. 12.38). The Rite chord's status as putative harmonic source is much enhanced if Craft was correct in stating that the pair of sketches shown in Example 12.39, which he reproduced to accompany his review of Forte's study of the ballet, is in fact "the earliest known notation for The Rite."144 Craft remarked that these sketches "contain the motto chord of the entire work," meaning the chord from the Divination ostinato (Ex. 12.38a), which is the sum of the first two chords of the treble part in Example 12.39a. This chord is indeed the most famous harmony in The Rite.145 But since it never recurs, it cannot properly be called a motto. But now look at the first measure of Example 12.39b. The lower staff has a Rite chord, and the upper staff has the inversion. With the bottom notes of the configurations standing a minor third apart, it will be easily seen that, like the similarly constructed chord preceding the Glorification (Ex. 12.33b), this chord is entirely referable to the octatonic scale given for comparison at the end of Example 12.39b. This is the chord, then, that truly qualifies for the distinction of being the "motto chord of the entire work"—or rather, the sum of two motto chords in mirror reflection. The second chord in the lower staff of the second measure in Example 12.39b is also a Rite chord, expressed in compound inversion (cf. Ex. 12.31c), and— as the reader's practiced eye will have caught by now—all the triads in the second measure (on F and on A-flat in the right hand, on D in the left) are referable to

144. Robert Craft, Review o f Forte's Harmonic Organization, Musical Quarterly 64 (1978): 529-30. 145. According to Stravinsky, it was the first notation he made for The Rite; and indeed, it appears on the first page of the facsimile sketchbook (though this is proof of nothing, since one cannot tell when the material unrepresented in the sketchbook—viz., the Introduction to Part I—was composed). Assuming that it was the first, the following anecdote, related by Yastrebtsev in a curious article entitled "On Delusions of the E a r " ("O slukhovi'kh zabluzhdeniyakh," RMG 16, nos. 22—23 [20 M a y - 6 June 1909], col. 551), is relevant to the creative history of The Rite of Spring: On 7 August of the same year (1899), when I was at Rimsky-Korsakov's [summer place] in Vechasha, Nikolai Andreyevich, striking on the piano the dominant ninth of B-flat major and the E-major chord of the sixth at the same time, i.e., a harmony like this:

asked me whether I thought such a combination of pitches could exist in music, and whether it was beautiful. Or was it something out of R . Strauss? I agreed with the latter [alternative], whereupon Nikolai Andreyevich remarked, 'But nonetheless I will acquaint you with this har-

FUSION

(947]

another octatonic collection. Such, then, were Stravinsky's "very special relations." Just how special, of course, one can appreciate only within the relevant cultural context. Every one of the practices and devices we have been tracing have a common objective: namely, to express the harmonic content of the fantastic/chromatic genus of Russian music in terms of melodic configurations endemic to the folkloric/diatonic genus. This interpénétration gave the latter genus an unexpected new lease on life precisely when it seemed most moribund to advanced musical minds in Russia. By means of this unprecedented fusion The Rite miraculously transcended the time-honored dualism, meanwhile, in good dialectical fashion, fundamentally transforming both its members. For just as many of the folk melodies in the score are distorted and hidden—absorbed into the musical texture so thoroughly that without the evidence of the sketchbook their presence could only be "felt," never proved—so, too, the octatonic basis of much of the harmony is quite effectively masked (as in a number of the foregoing examples) by diatonic parallel doublings or additives, or else by partitions that emphasize diatonically intersecting constituents, or yet again by the concurrent deployment, as in the Dance of the Earth, of other symmetrical modes—all of which has until recendy led to the prevailing assumption (eagerly abetted by Stravinsky) that an arbitrarily inspirational polytonalism had been his sole guide in constructing the harmonic idiom of his great neoprimitivist ballet. Whence this rage to cover tracks? But of course it is fundamental: the impulse to transform subject matter into style lay from the outset at the very heart of the neo-

mony today, only there (in my romance, "The Poet," on words by Pushkin) it will be cunningly prepared and resolved, and therefore you will surely like it.' And so it came about:

Transpose the chord Rimsky played to Yastrebtsev down a semitone, and, but for minor adjustments, the Auguries ostinato chord is the result:

Not only would Stravinsky have certainly read Yastrebtsev's article; it is also very likely that Rimsky tried out his little parlor trick in his presence, probably more than once. Having noticed the octatonic frame of the rogue harmony, might Stravinsky not have been impudently saving it—sans preparation and sans resolution—for a rainy day?

[ 948 ]

12

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nationalist enterprise. Stravinsky was now carrying that transformation much further than anything dreamt of by the Belyayevtsi or the Miriskusniki, into "those basic matters of form, thematic content, harmony, polyphony, and sonority that are of lively current interest," to recall Karatigin's essay "Young Russian Composers," in which the author of Fireworks and the Scherzo fantastique had received such mediocre marks. Elements that had played gaudily on the surface of Stravinsky's music as recently as Petrushka were now ruthlessly submerged to work their influence at the deepest strata of structure and style. The deeper they went—the more they thus, as it were, receded from view—the more pervasive and determinant their influence became. One can easily separate the "folk-derived" from the "original" elements in Petrushka. This is no longer possible in The Rite. However firmly rooted in the precepts and traditions of neonationalism, though, Stravinsky's maximalistic advances in The Rite left the dreamy pastoral visions of Roerich and the rest far behind. Instead, they curiously paralleled advances that were being made in painting by members of a school known, almost too neatly for comfort, as "neoprimitivist." Two artists in particular stand out as kindred spirits to the author of The Rite of Spring: Mikhail Laryonov and his wife, Nataliya Goncharova, both born in 1881 and hence the composer's practically exact contemporaries. Like the Stravinsky of The Rite and beyond, the neoprimitives shared the ideals and the cultural allegiances of neonationalism but went much further toward an abstract realization. In Laryonov especially one can trace the progressive absorption of motifs from folk art, the lubok first and foremost, to the point where nothing of the subject remained visible, but the stylistic influence— the color sense, the perspective, the painterly surface—was absolutely pervasive. 146 The works of Laryonov and Goncharova "not only reach back in their brilliant color and formal motifs to the revival of folk art by the Abramtsevo artists, but forward to the Futurist movement in painting, of which they were the pioneers.'" 47 The words used to describe the neoprimitive paintings exhibited at the epochal "Knave of Diamonds" show of 1912—"brilliant sated color, intense surface patterning based on folk motifs, and a radical simplification of form" 148 —also describe the exactly contemporaneous Rite of Spring to perfection. 149 These traits, certainly, were uppermost in Stravinsky's mind—along with the

146. Sec Bowlt, Russian Art, 98ff. 147. Gray, Russian Experiment in Art, 56. 148. Ibid., 123. 149. We shall be returning in later chapters to Laryonov and Goncharova, since they were among Stravinsky's closest friends during his Swiss and Parisian years, and among the very few with whom he used the familiar mode of address (P&D:6o?). He dedicated the Berceuses du chat to them. They designed the productions of some of his most characteristic "neoprimitivist" work: Laryonov did Baika in 1922, and Svadebka the next year was Goncharova's. The latter collaboration, in fart, had been in the works since 1915. Yet there is no known evidence of contact between Stravinsky and these future friends until they had all left Russia for good (that is, until 1914)- That thev were unacquainted in their native

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maximalist harmonic and rhythmic approach for which The Rite remains famous and ever n e w — w h e n he exclaimed in a letter to Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov (7 March 1912): " I t seems that twenty years, not two, have passed since The Firebird."150

He

had carried to an extreme Tugenhold's memorable dictum that "the folk, formerly the object of the artist's pity, [has become] increasingly the source of artistic s t y l e . " 1 5 1 The Rite of Spring, famous for its total lack of pity, indeed of all "psychology," was a quantum leap along that path, a path that led eventually to the hardnosed esthetic modernism of the "neoclassical" p e r i o d . 1 5 2 For this change to have taken place, for the desired level of abstraction to have been achieved, it was necessary that the sources, both musical and ethnological, be "cachées," not displayed proudly as had been done in the Russian music of an earlier time. T h e result was that The Rite of Spring brought some of the finest fruits of the Russian Silver A g e — t h e W o r l d of A r t , neonationalism, Scythianism—into the international current of Western music and, in so doing, utterly transcended the movements and sources from which it had sprung. T h e w o r k achieved a cultural universality within the world of postromantic modernism that ultimately rendered its subject superfluous. As Roerich himself was moved to insist, " W e cannot consider 'Sacre' as Russian, nor even Slavic—it is more ancient and pan-human." 1 5 3 This was Stravinsky's achievement, not Roerich's, and it is his score, minus choreography and decor, that has become an indispensable pillar of the tradition it at first appeared to subvert.

country seems altogether likely, in fact, since Laryonov and Goncharova lived and exhibited in Moscow, not St. Petersburg. But Diaghilev, who shuttled back and forth between the two capitals, knew Laryonov as early as 1906 (Haskell, Diaghileff, 269) and may have provided a link. 150. IStrSM:467. 151. Tugenhold, "Russkiy sezon' v Parizhe," 21. 152. How incredibly obtuse were those Soviet critics who used to chide Stravinsky for his "lack of sympathy" for the Chosen One. Take, for example, Yarustovsky: "We never find any reflection of interest in individual personalities, even toward the few soloists that emerge out of the collectively portrayed dramatis personae—toward the tragic[!] fate of the Chosen One or the epic figure of the Oldestand-Wisest.... The death of the Chosen One, this young creature, leaves the composer unmoved, and he does not make it his aim to have the spectator or hearer empathize or become moved on account of her fate" ("I. Stravinskiy: eskiznaya tetrad' (1911-1913 gg.): nekotoriye nablyudeniya i razmi'shleniya," in IStrSM:203). The Bolshoy Theater produced The Rite in the early 1970s, at the height of the brief Stravinskian "thaw." In Yuriy Grigorovich's choreography, a young Soviet man leaps out of the corps de ballet and saves the Chosen One at the end of the Sacrificial Dance, meanwhile plunging a dagger into the idol of Yarilo. 153. Roerich, "'Sacre,'" in Realm of Light, 188. The more perceptive reviewers of the original production immediately noticed an unproductive tension between the "Slavic" and the "pan-human" aspects of the ballet. After praising the "cubist icon-painting" (ikonopisniy kubizm) of Nijinsky's archaistically angular choreography, "unfolding before us 'to the pipes of a Slavonic Pan,'" Sergey Volkonsky went on to complain that "the hieratic quality of the dancing was somewhat diluted by the ethnography of Roerich's costumes—one had too great a sense of'guberniya' behind all this Slavonic prehistory" (Otkliki teatra [Petrograd: Sirius, 1914], 49). Indeed, it must have been precisely this wariness of ethnographic accuracy as potential limiter of The Rite's full significance that to a large extent impelled Stravinsky's later disavowals of the work's ethnographic content.

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That apparent subversion had only partly to do with the high dissonance level and crashing orchestration that were so widely deplored by the ballet's early critics (and so widely imitated by every composer within earshot). In far more fundamental and insidious ways than these, Stravinsky's ballet merited the Scythian label. For it already answered the as yet only half-articulate call of its time for the "great sacrifice" of kul'tura on the altar of stikhiya. Like the art of the neoprimitives, his contemporaries, Stravinsky's was an art of radical formal simplification; and it was very much a matter for debate whether his achievement—to recall the IvanovGershenzon corner-to-corner dispute—was an uproshcheniye, a breakthrough to the simplicity of a higher truth, or merely an oproshcheniye, the reductive renunciation of all refinement of thought and feeling in favor of the crude simplicity of the barbarian. The kul'tura that The Rite so roundly rejected was that of the German symphonic tradition, which, by the time of Chaikovsky and Glazunov—to say nothing of The Firebird—had invaded the precincts even of ballet, as earlier it had conquered opera at the hands of Wagner. When in later years Stravinsky would halfdismiss and half-apologize for The Firebird with the remark that in it he still observed the principles of the music drama, it was not only the representational use of leitmotifs he had in mind, but also the conventional narrative form one achieved through such devices of thematic unity and development. This technique of construction was carried to an extreme in Stravinsky's first ballet, wherein thematic unity was veritably fetishized through the extremely skillful, but also exceedingly obvious, derivation of all the "fantastic" music from a pair of thirds and its Rimskian sequential extensions. When in 1920 Stravinsky declared to an interviewer that The Rite was "une oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique," he was—how ingenuously one cannot tell—creating a false dichotomy. The Firebird had been both architectonique and anecdotique. The Rite was neither. Therein lay its glory, and its threat. It became less and less architectonic as work progressed. Given the evidence of the sketchbook, Stravinsky's antisymphonic intentions cannot be mistaken. In its initial conception, the central action of Part I, conflated from the writings of Herodotus and Nestor the Chronicler, had been set forth in a quartet of dances: Gadaniya, Khorovodi, Igra v goroda (with Idut-vedut in counterpoint), and Igra umikaniya. These break down further into two thematically linked pairs. The main theme of the Khorovodi (fig. [50] in the published score) had been impressively prefigured, according to the original plan, at the end of the Gadaniya ([28]+4). Drafts for the two statements of the theme faced each other in the sketchbook (pp. 6 and 7). Similarly, the two Igri (goroda and umikaniya) were constructed out DROBNOST',

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[9.Si]

of a sizable fund of shared material. The passage at fig. [43] in the umikaniya (first notated on p. 31 of the sketchbook) is a rhythmic transformation of the main theme of thegoroda ([57] + 2; first sketched on p. 12), as may be seen in Example 12.40. Another unifying idea was the timpani figure, first sketched on page 20 as part of goroda (where it may still be heard starting at fig. [57]), and reappearing on page 29 of the sketchbook as part of the umikaniya (cf. the published score at [38], etc.). This is shown in Example 12.41. These close correspondences testify to Stravinsky's having initially forged thegoroda and the umikaniya as a unit corresponding to the passage by Nestor about the customs of the "Radimichi, Vyatichi, and Severi." But when he transferred the Igra umikaniya to its present position, between the Gadaniya

and the Khorovodi, every one of these meticulous relationships was ob-

scured. The correspondence between goroda and umikaniya was severed by the removal of the latter, and the one between the Gadaniya

and the Khorovodi was sev-

ered by the intrusion of a foreign element between them. 1 5 4 (The transfer also shows, of course, how little the scenario's ethnographic base constrained the composer as he strove to give the work its optimal artistic form—a courageous and instructive ordering of priorities!) The relationship shown in Example 12.40, the subtlest of them, was virtually obliterated by the change in the order of the dances, since the complex transformation now preceded the simple initial statements of the theme by some dozen pages in the final score. Even musicians who know The Rite by heart are often surprised to have the relationship pointed out to them, whereas in the sketchbook the last notation of the goroda theme precedes the

umikaniya

transformation by three pages, and the relationship fairly leaps to the eye. The second half of the ballet is virtually devoid of thematic recurrences, save for a single one that is clearly a "reminiscence" motivated by the action. The two-trumpet "zagovor" (charm) music first heard in the fourth bar after [54] (it was originally to have been the curtain music for Part II) returns at the third bar after [133] in the Ritual Action, as the Elders encircle the entranced maiden in

154. That the Khorovodi were to have preceded the segue out of the "Gadaniya" in the original conception of the scenario, with the thematic relationship between them thus emphasized, is corroborated by the fact that, according to the sketchbook, the two dances were to have gone at roughly the same tempo. (Stravinsky to Roerich [6 March 1912] : "All the tempi [in Part I] are furious [beshenniye\n) The "GadaniytC is marked J = s6 ( J = 112) in the 191? four-hands score. In the sketchbook (p. 9), the Khorovodi are marked J = 108, with the preliminary "incantation" set at J = 144. In the published score, it is the incantation that is marked J = 108, and the Khorovodi have been slowed down to a stately J = 80. This must have been in order to set the dances off from the Abduction ( J = 132), on one side, and the "Cities" ( J = 168), on the other. It is very much worth noting, though, that in Stravinsky's first recording of the ballet (1928), he took the Khorovodi at the speed marked in the sketchbook. It is of course difficult to decide whether it was because he still felt it as the right tempo, or because he had to rush to accommodate the time available on a 78 r.p.m. side; but if the tempo reflected his preference rather than a compromise, it ties in neatly with a story Marie Rambert has related (Quicksilver; 59) of how Stravinsky came to a rehearsal of the women's corps, "blazed up, pushed aside the fat German pianist, nicknamed 'Kolossal' by Diaghilev, and proceeded to play twice as fast as we had been doing it, and twice as fast as we could possibly dance." The tempo marking in the published score may have been the result of a compromise with Nijinskv.

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preparation for her Sacrificial Dance. 1 5 5 Clearly, Stravinsky was now prepared to sacrifice without qualms the thematic/motivic consistency he had prized so highly in The Firebird—in the interests, though, o f what? In the interests o f projecting highly individualized static blocks in striking juxtapositions. It is something that might be said o f Petrushka, too, but in the earlier ballet there had been a couple o f mitigating factors. That ballet, after all, was nothing if not anecdotique. The blocks, moreover, were juxtaposed at short range and in rather standard patterns—rondo in the first tableau (up to the Magician's appearance), variations in the last. There are still vestiges o f received formats in The Rite, to be sure: da capo (Spring Khorovods, Glorification), rondo (Sacrificial Dance), and so on. But more often, formal procedures are stripped down to what is most basic—that is, "elemental" (stikhiyniy): extension through repetition, alternation, and—above all—sheer inertial accumulation. In Russia, as we shall see in the next chapter, friend and foe alike reacted strongly to what was termed the "immobility" (nepodvizhnosf) o f Stravinsky's music. 1 5 6 Though his work seemed to strike at the root o f all musical kul'tura, it was nonetheless profoundly rooted in Russian traditions o f all kinds—and not only folk traditions, though the relationship between Stravinsky's ostinati and the endless reiterations o f naigrishi, khorovods, bilini, and calendar songs is selfevident. 1 5 7 A special subgenre o f gimmicky nineteenth-century Russian orchestral

155. It comes, incidentally, as no small surprise to learn from the sketchbook that this charm motif, which always appears in the ballet as a syncopated duet of two fairly conjunct lines, was conceived originally (Sketchbook, 41) as a one-voice leaping melody: i

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—Vm

— »

~Mm 4"

Sketchbook, p. 4 1

In later sketches it was refined, thus:

Skctchbook, p. 6 2

In the ballet the first sketchbook version was reinstated and registrally divided: 2 Trumpets

fep1

1

1

J

156. E.g., A. S. Ilyashenko, "O 'Vesne svyashchennoy' I. Stravinskogo," KMC 21, no. 6 (9 February 1914), col. 155157. This is something that can be fully appreciated only in performance (or on a recording), since as a rule printed anthologies of such songs give only model stanzas. The wedding-band "Timon'ya" nat-

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music had been based on these folk ostinato genres. The piece that established the type had been Glinka's Kamarinskaya (18+8), in which the endless reiterations are made the pretext for virtuoso exercises in harmonization and orchestration. A more recent example was Glazunov's "Finnish Fantasy," op. 88 (1909), in which a Kalevala recitation formula was adopted as the immutable "given" for subjection to what in the anglophone literature has become known as the "changing background" technique. But these were not Stravinsky's precedents. The genre they belonged to was an essentially frivolous one: just recall how quickly it had degenerated into the fun and games of the Belyayevets "Chopsticks" paraphrases. More serious works in the genre tended to spurn the implications of the folk prototype, defeating the nepodvizhnost' of the model by investing the changing backgrounds with some semblance of conventional "symphonic" form. In works like Balakirev's First Overture on Russian Themes (1858) or the Finale of Chaikovsky's Second Symphony (so often, and so wrongly, touted as his "most fully Russian w o r k " ) , 1 5 8 the use of folk ostinati is only one element among many—a decorative surface feature, unrelated to the real structural principles of the music, which are entirely "Western," that is, Germanic. Stravinsky was the first Russian composer to take the structural principle of Russian folk ostinati seriously for art music, and the result was received by the Russian musical establishment, who knew better than the French what this composer was about, as the most blatant sort of oproshcheniye. Nevertheless, Stravinsky's antisymphonic agenda had distinguished antecedents. In an 1868 letter to Rimsky-Korsakov, already quoted in part (see Chapter 2, n. 114), Musorgsky had insisted that the German symphonic style was no more accessible to Russians than German cuisine, since German logic was alien (he said) to the Russian mind. Despite three generations of conservatory training, by Stravinsky's day the situation had not really changed. For all the technical "Gebrauchs- formulas" of the St. Petersburg school, Russian composers (as Musorgsky had so keenly observed) still started with their conclusions and only reasoned ex post facto—that is, if strings of sequences count as reasoning. It is what was christened drobnosf—the quality of being a sum-of-parts—in evaluating Stravinsky's earliest compositions and their models, and it was something Russian composers who aspired to real mastery of German techniques found themselves per-

jfrish has been mentioned (n. 133 above). A l s o directly relevant to an understanding of The Rite's structure is a virtually endless recording of a vesnyanka called "Oy fir, vir kolodez" by a well-known and muchrecorded Smolensk peasant singer named Agrafena Glinkina (the same one w h o furnished to Tatyana Popova the tune given above in Ex. I2.ne), included in the disk anthology " P o y u t narodni'ye ispolniteli" (Melodiya D-24901, band 1). Glinkina's rendition may be compared with the model stanza given by Popova in Osnovi russkoy narodtm muziki ( M o s c o w : Muzi'ka, 1977), 34; or in Taruskin, " R u s s i a n Folk Melodies," 533. T h e tune fits the modal prototype o f Stravinsky's Ritual Action theme, described above, to perfection. 158. New Grove Dictionary, s.v. " T c h a i k o v s k y " (18:611).

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petually battling and bewailing. Thus Chaikovsky: "All my life I have been much troubled by my inability to grasp and manipulate form in music. I fought hard against this defect and can say with pride that I achieved some progress, but I shall end my days without ever having written anything that is perfect in form. What I write has always a mountain of padding: an experienced eye can detect the thread in my seams and I can do nothing about it." 1 5 9 In our consideration of drobnost' several chapters back, it was suggested that the quality was a defect only from a certain ideological standpoint. Chaikovsky, alumnus of the first Russian conservatory's first graduating class and proud of the fact, was hopelessly enthralled by the Germanic ideology. He equated perfection in form with mastery of "forms" and of the techniques of transition (that is, "padding") required to achieve shapeliness and a sense of direction. Stravinsky, motivated by his neonationalist convictions and much bolstered by his close friendship with the representatives of the most anti-boche faction in French music, was at last going off the defensive vis-à-vis the Teutonic standard, which he now took great pleasure in attacking. He expressed himself forcefully on these points in a letter to his mother—of all dubious recipients!—written at the very height of his work on The Rite: Musechka! Today we received your letter, in which you write, among other things, that you do not agree with my negative attitude toward the activity of Glazunov and the other pillars of academicism. Truly I do deny t h e m . . . . As far as academicism as a negative phenomenon is concerned, I find that I can do no better than to shout constantly at the top of my voice that it is a necessary evil, given, or rather sent down, from above, so that the good shall shine forth the more distinctly. But submit to it or see something precious in it I will not. 1 6 0

He was getting rid of cultured "padding" sans regret. From now on he would revel in the drobnost' that, according to Musorgsky, came naturally to a Russian composer, and he would turn it into a high esthetic principle. Guided by this principle, he made determined efforts—efforts that may be traced in the Rite sketchbook in engrossing detail—to scotch the symphonic, the developmental, the transitional, wherever they might chance to raise their heads. Thus was born the famous "Method," whose progress was traced by Edward Cone in his classic article of 1962 and whose origins, according to Cone, were to be found precisely in The Rite.161 Henceforth Stravinsky's music would no longer

159. Letter to the Grand Duke Konstantin, 3 October 1888; quoted in Gerald Abraham, ed., The Music of Tchaikovsky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 26. 160. Letter of 16/29 March 1912; in IStrSM:507-8. 161. Edward T. Cone, "Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method," in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 156-64.

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meet the normative criteria traditionally deemed essential to coherent musical discourse. There would be no harmonic progression, no thematic or motivic development, no smoothly executed transitions. His would be a music not of process but of state, deriving its coherence and its momentum from the calculated interplay of "immobile" uniformities and abrupt discontinuities. The only process that remained would be that of accumulation, The Rite's governing principle par excellence. The ballet as a whole is structured on it, each of its two parts beginning quietly and slowly and building to a concluding frenzy. On more local levels, too, accumulation is potent: prime movers in The Rite are the mounting tension caused by the expectation of imminent change after prolonged unmodified activity and the sonic crescendo resulting from the gradual piling-up of individually unaffected elements. In all other ways state, not process, would be the norm. A chord that in RimskyKorsakov could justify its existence only by "cunning preparation and resolution," by the processes of its becoming and its proceeding, could now simply be. A motif that could justify its myriad repetitions in Chaikovsky or Glazunov by the cleverly shifting harmonic and coloristic environments the composer was able to devise for it now simply added its voice to the chorus of similarly static ingredients. To an extent previously unthinkable in "cultured" music, chord and motif were hypostatized, turned into stone, timbrally and registrally so fixed that even transposition— let alone transformation or transition—were inconceivable. Examples can be adduced from the individual dances in The Rite practically at random. The Dance of the Earth, already closely examined from other perspectives, may be taken as a paradigm of "sonic accumulation." The whole piece is a crescendo brought about by the seriatim addition to the texture of highly individualized separate ostinati, each of them derived in its own way from the source melodies discovered in the sketchbook, each contrasting boldly with all the others in its modal affinities, each rigidly and immutably maintained from its point of entry to the end. The dance exemplifies maximalistic simplification in another way, too, if we compare it with an earlier Stravinsky composition such as the Fireworks, op. 4. The discussion of that piece in Chapter 5 took note of the subtle and ingenious ways in which Stravinsky played the octatonic off against the diatonic and the whole-tone, of how the collections interacted and interpenetrated, and of the recondite harmonies to which these elaborate strategies gave rise. In the Dance of the Earth, the same collections coexist in their separate strata without interacting, producing harmonies—"polyharmonies"—much more radical than those in Fireworks, but at the same time much simpler in conception and far less artful as to the technical means by which they are generated. Uproshcheniye or oproshcheniye? The Glorification of the Chosen One presents an ideal model of "hypostatization." The opening 5/8 measure constitutes the "theme" in the outer sections of the

DROBNOST',

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dance. Each of its twenty subsequent appearances is identical to the first. What is not uniform is grouping—that is, the number of identical repetitions that make up each successive statement of the theme (anywhere from one to four)—and also the number of eighth-note beats that elapse between the statements (anywhere from two to thirty-eight). These intervening beats are "marked" by a vamp consisting of static repetitions of Rite chords. The number of these beats being unpredictable, each return to the theme is perceived as a disjuncture, a disruption of an "immobile uniformity." Momentum is maintained by exploiting this interplay of utter fixity and its opposite, utter mutability. But even the mutable element is mutable only with respect to its temporal unfolding; in terms of pitch and harmony it is just as hypostatized as the theme. The listener is involved, as it were, in a guessing game: When will vamp give way to theme? How many reiterations will a given statement of the theme contain? The middle section of the dance (figs, [HI]—[117]), distinguished from the surrounding sections in the 1913 four-hands reduction by a key signature of five flats, shifts over to another set of hypostatized elements. Three new static ideas, radically differentiated in instrumentation, are intercut. As before, the only variable elements are temporal, "quantitative." But whatever is variable gets varied to the hilt! Stravinsky's rhythmic innovations in The Rite, hardly less conspicuous than his harmonic ones, are, if anything, even more of a twentieth-century legend. Yet no less conspicuously were these innovations the product of Russian traditions and a response to the Russian cultural atmosphere at the moment of The Rite's creation. "Rhythm," wrote Blok in his study of charms and spells, "is what hypnotizes, inspires, compels." And, quoting Anichkov, he added, "In rhythm is rooted that invincible and elemental force of man that makes him the most mighty and powerful of all the animals." 162 The force of rhythm is the elemental force, the "Scythian" force of stikhiya that Stravinsky was not alone in attempting to unleash. Not alone in the attempt, but all alone in the realization: for the better part of a century now his ballet has been hypnotizing, inspiring, and compelling all who have come in contact with it. The rhythmic novelties in The Rite are of two distinct types. One is the hypnotic type: the "immobile" ostinato, sometimes quite literally hypnotic, as when the Elders charm the Chosen One to perform her dance of death. That is what their Ritual Action is all about, and that is why, except for a brief middle section (figs. [135]—[138]) the beat-rhythm of this dance is the most rigid and relentless, and the most undifferentiated as to stress, of any number in the ballet save what eventually became known as the "Dances of the Painted Girls" (Plyaski shchegolikh: the French "Danses des adolescentes" hardly does the title justice) in the Spring Auguries,

162. Blok, "Poeziya zagovorov," in Sobraniye sochineniy v shesti tomakh 5:47.

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where the nepodvizhnosf of the ostinato chords is after all somewhat compromised by the famous syncopated accents.163 The other is the "invincible and elemental" kind, and it was truly an innovation—for Western art music, that is; in Russian folklore it had been a fixture from time immemorial. This is the rhythm of irregularly spaced downbeats, requiring a correspondingly variable metric barring in the notation. There had been such a thing in Russian art music before Stravinsky, and even in Stravinsky's own earlier music. But in The Rite Stravinsky took the device to unprecedented heights, both in terms of the complexity of the patterns involved and in terms of the violence with which he articulated the variable metric stresses. To demonstrate that the device has its precedents in Russian folk song it will suffice to recall a couple of examples already given in other contexts. The wedding song "Ziwz kolokol v Tevlasheve selye" (Ex. 12.11c) was originally transcribed by Rimsky-Korsakov from the singing of Borodin's maid. "I struggled till late at night trying to reproduce [the] song," Rimsky reported in his memoirs. "Rhythmically it was unusually freakish, though it flowed naturally from the mouth o f . . . Dunyasha Vinogradova, a native of one of the governments along the Volga." 164 In the end, the meter shifts he adopted have a decidedly Stravinskian appearance, as a glance at Stravinsky's Appeal to the Ancestors will confirm (Ex. 12.42a, from the sketchbook). Rimsky's barrings and Stravinsky's are equally arbitrary. Rimsky was clearly trying to get the tonic accents to fall on downbeats, but was thrown by the long melisma on -kol. One can easily imagine Stravinsky consolidating the two successive 4/8 bars in Rimsky's transcription into a single 8/8, perhaps with a characteristic dotted bar in the middle. For his part, Stravinsky was never satisfied with the barring of his Appeal. The bassoons here representing "five old men," as the composer told Robert Craft one day, he must have thought of the bars as marking the tonic accents of their "speech." 165 Nevertheless, he seems to have taken pains from the first to conceal one of the recurrences of the initial 7/4 group (bracketed in Example 12.42a). Both in the 1913 score (published in that year for piano four-hands and in 1921 for orchestra) and in a 1929 revision, Stravinsky broke the long measures down as Rimsky had done (see Ex. 12.42b—c). "The smaller bars proved

165. It is often claimed that the accented chords at [13] and analogous spots are not syncopated because the rhythmic background is too undifferentiated to establish a metrical regularity against which syncopation could be perceived. But to make this argument is to forget that the four-note ostinato pattern that defines the metrical unit at [1+] had been prefigured in the passage between [12] and [13], so that when the repeated chords come, the ear has been conditioned to construe the measure just as Stravinsky has barred it. 164. My Musical Life, 165. 165. D&D:228.

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12.42 "Appeal to the Forefathers of Humankind" ("Évocation des ancêtres"), fig. 1121 (pedal tone omitted)

EXAMPLE

a. Sketchbook, p. 74

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more manageable for both conductor and orchestra, and they greatly simplified the scansion of the music," he wrote in i960. 166 This result is accomplished straightforwardly enough in the 1913 score. The 1929 revision can hardly be said to have simplified the scansion, though. Stravinsky's new enjambement (the 3/2 bar) may have been motivated by a wish to give more emphasis to the high E-flat, but it conceals yet another recurrence of the initial 7/4 group. What is variable gets varied indeed; endlessly varied, with no chance of a definitive formulation. 167 A more familiar situation, both as regards folk music and as regards Stravinsky, is illustrated by the bilina melody cited in Example 12.5a. The melodic recurrence is what determines the placement of the bar. With only two easily accounted-for exceptions, the measures all begin alike but are variously extended. Compare the Mystic Circles, where pairs of measures are related in precisely this way (Ex. 12.43). Particularly fascinating and innovative is the way the two rhythmic/metric situations—the "passive" ostinato and the active shifting stress—are often vertically aligned, creating one of Stravinsky's most original textures and one that over the next decade would become a veritable trademark. The melody in Example 12.43 is accompanied in the lower strings by an ostinato of an unvarying four-eighths duration, which shifts in and out of phase with the variable downbeats of the main tune. Neither textural element is in syncopation with respect to the other, nor can either be said to dominate. Fixity and mutability here coexist in concurrent, independent strata. Another instance is the middle section of the Glorification. Beneath a variable-downbeat pattern in the violins and violas pizzicati, the lower strings, lower winds, and percussion play a rigid figure of (once again) four-eighths duration. Again the parts go in and out of phase, neither possessing what could be called the defining or dominant rhythm against which the other could be construed as syncopated (Ex. 12.44). Even this device of Stravinsky's is congruent with the practices of folk performers, particularly those who accompany themselves on strumming or striking instruments like the balalaika or (recall Kolosov) the gusli: their accompaniment patterns rarely change to accommodate the shifting stresses and melodic variations of the tune, leading at times to virtual "polymeter." The most radical form of the variable-downbeat technique is one in which the shifting meters are coordinated on the "subtactile" level—that is, by an equalized value that is less than the duration of a felt beat, or tactus. 168 There was no direct

166. E & D : 168/147. 167. For a detailed and stimulating, if ultimately inconclusive, discussion of the barring of the Appeal to the Ancestors and its vicissitudes, see Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and "The Rite," 44—si. 168. For a useful discussion of "tactus," not in the restricted context of late-medieval or Renaissance music theory but in general terms as the "perceptually prominent level of metrical structure," see Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1983), 7iff The most cogent general discussion of Stravinskian metrics in print is chapter 3 ("Stravinsky Rebarred") in Van den Toorn, Stravinsky and "The Rite."

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EXAMPLE

12.43

The Rite, fig. [ 9 1 ] , violin I

EXAMPLE parts only

12.44

"Glorification," figs. 1 1 1 4 1 - | 1151, violin and cello

precedent for this technique in earlier Russian art music; Stravinsky "discovered" it on page 31 of his sketchbook—the passage (already quoted and discussed) in which the main theme of the Game of "Cities" is transformed for the Abduction (Ex. 12.40c). It was a momentous discovery, one that ultimately paved the way for the ragtime parodies of the late Swiss years and, from there, the "Bachianisms" of the Sonate and the Concerto for Piano, all based on the rapidly shifting, "subtactile" eighth-note pulse used for the first time as a rhythmic coordinator in the Abduction sketch. The Abduction having been transferred back, as we know, to a position much earlier in the score than that to which it was assigned in the original scenario (still observed in the sketchbook), the device in question makes a deceptively early appearance in the ballet. It is the only such appearance in the first tableau. In Part II it is very conspicuous, reaching its apogee, in terms both of complexity and of fractionated counting value (sixteenths rather than eighths) in the vertiginous Sacrificial Dance—the dance "which I could play," as Stravinsky tells us in a memoir, "but did not, at first, know how to write." 1 6 9 One can believe this. There was no precedent for rhythms like these in any written tradition save the recent tradition of "scientific" folk song collecting. Also reaching its apogee in the Sacrificial Dance was the technique of hypostatization—extreme fixity of musical "objects"—examined most closely above in 169. E&D: 161-62/141.

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connection with the Glorification. More than in any earlier number, the metric processes in the Sacrificial Dance are "mosaic," concretized in specific, discrete, and above all minuscule musical "tesserae," the variations in the ostensible "metric" patterns actually reflecting permutations of the order in which these tiny fixed elements are juxtaposed. This is drobnosf raised to the highest power: a wholly new constructive principle, not merely a rhythmic innovation. Its influence on receptive musicians (Varese, to pick an obvious example) was far more profound than that of The Rite's more superficially arresting maximalisms on the likes of Prokofiev (the Scythian Suite) or the "Futurists" of the early Soviet period with their Rails (Deshevov), their Dnepr Dams (Meytus) or their Foundries (Mosolov). The literalness of the analogy with tesserae (or "cells," as they are customarily called now, after Messiaen and Boulez) is breathtakingly disclosed in the sketchbook, when Stravinsky suddenly takes to representing his fixed musical objects with letters, arranging and rearranging them at will (Fig. 12.15). In the Sacrificial Dance, the primary articulation of the irregularly spaced downbeats is accomplished not by varying durations (as it is in the Appeal to the Ancestors; see Ex. 12.42) or by recurring melodic configurations (as in the Glorification)—though these elements remain present—but in a far more elemental, stikhiyniy fashion: by violent stresses in the bass instruments and percussion. There can be no mistaking these tumultuous downbeats, and the barring follows them rigorously.170 Stravinsky had achieved the oxymoronic impossible: nonperiodic meter. But without periodicity there can be no sense of arrival. And without a sense of arrival, there can be no sense of an ending. Once set in motion, the typical Stravinsky dance is an inertial entity that, as Irina Vershinina observes, "can only be stopped, interrupted, broken off by outside interference."171 In most cases it is the next dance that does the interrupting. The endings of the two tableaux, however, were a problem. As we have seen, Stravinsky solved the problem of an ending with characteristically brilliant simplicity at the conclusion of Part I. Yet the sudden jarring halt that "interferes" with the Dance of the Earth would hardly have worked again at the end of the second 170. In the version of 1913, anyway (observe the left hand of the secondo in the four-hands arrangement). In the 1922 revision, as a result of breaking the 5/16 measures down into 2's and 3's (cf. the similar modifications in the Evocation), Stravinsky created a few anomalies (e.g., the measure at fig. [148]). There are many more of these in the 1943 revision, Stravinsky having apparently decided that the conductor's job needed easing, even if it meant the loss of that very clarity in the "scansion of the music" he had previously sought to preserve. Moreover, the last dance is the one section of The Rite in which the "other" type of rhythm—immobile regularity—is altogether suppressed, routed (as it were) by the dynamic shifting stress. "Without the convenience of a basso ostinato," Van den Toorn shrewdly observes, all sense of "periodicity [is] lost to the modification and reshuffling of the metrically fixed elements" (Stravinsky and "The Rite," 96). 171. Vershinina, Ranniye baleti Stravinskqgo, 180.

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f i g . 12.15. Rite sketchbook, p. 88: sketches for the Sacrificial Dance, showing use of alphabet letters to represent motivic "tesserae."

tableau. Nor can one say that the solution Stravinsky finally came up with—he frankly called it a "noise" in his i960 memoir—was entirely satisfactory. Alexander Benois, who confessed himself "bewildered" by The Rite after hearing Koussevitzky conduct both Russian premières (Moscow and St. Petersburg) in February 1914, permitted himself the remark (his only specific comment) that "the ending [was] perhaps too abrupt—lacking in the feeling of finality."172 Stravinsky did not suffer the problem alone, of course; it was a perennial dilemma for Russian ostinato composers, at least since the time when all Musorgsky could do to end the peal of Kremlin bells in the Boris Prologue was to smother it with the tam-tam. REDEMPTION Given the static, nonprogressive harmony of The Rite, the makeshift ending was a small blemish to set beside the colossal authenticity of the whole. Stravinsky set free a stikhiya that had always been latent in Russian art music, ever contending with the requirements of European kul'tura. So magnificently realized was The Rite that it turned the tables on the historical struggle. It convinced many Western musicians that Russian drobnost' was a viable alternative, not merely an anarchic or incompetent deviation. Its methods of construction and continuity-by-meansof-discontinuity were to become normal and normative to generations of younger musicians, who regarded the author of this ballet, which violated and negated every accepted structural principle of its day, as "first of all a master of form." 1 7 3 Now kul'tura would be on the defensive. The Rite, Russian as no music before it had ever been, made the Russian universal—which is to say, it Russianized the musical universe—and thus transcended the Russian. It had fallen to Stravinsky to redeem with interest the debt Rubinstein had incurred to the West on Russia's behalf when, half a century before, he summoned a German staff to man his country's first conservatory. The huge, wrenching irony of it all is that with and through The Rite, urRussian though it was in every way, Stravinsky left Russia for good—or, to put it the way he was wont to do in later years, "lost" Russia for good. For him it had been a great fusion, this miraculous union of the "national" with the "modern," and it made possible the work of the next decade, at once more national and more modern than that of any Russian composer before or since. But it marked a great rupture, too, for there was no place for such a composer in the denationalized, antimodernist musical community where Stravinsky had come of age. His spiritual

172. Letter of 14-17 February 1914; in M & C : 132/140-41. 173. Charles Wuorinen, Untitled tribute, Perspectives of New Music 9, no. 2 - 1 0 , no. 1 (1971): 128.

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emigration thus began with a work more firmly rooted in his native soil than any he—or anyone—had yet composed. Physical and political emigration followed. It was no simple matter of rejection by a conservative and uncomprehending musical establishment. The rejection was mutual. Perhaps sensing its inevitability, Stravinsky provoked it—not in any abstract metaphorical sense by merely composing The Rite, but in very concrete words and deeds over the next few years, until the Revolution finally burned all bridges behind him. Even before they burned, though, the bridges were down.

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