To Stravinsky his two earlier short operas, The Nightingale (1914) and Mavra (1922), seemed strangely remote from what he had now done. “I believe ‘music drama’ and ‘opera’ to be two very, very different things,” Stravinsky observed at the first American production of The Rake’s Progress in 1953. “My life work is a devotion to the latter. The Rake’s Progress is, emphatically, an opera—an opera of arias and recitatives, choruses and ensembles.… in the line of the classical tradition.” Already, in his Norton lectures, he was gladly “provoking a quarrel with the notorious Synthesis of the Arts. I do not merely condemn it for its lack of tradition, its nouveau riche smugness.… the application of its theories has inflicted a terrible blow upon music itself … the halcyon days of Wagnerism are past and … the distance which separates us from them permits us to set matters straight again.” Opera was badly in need of renewal. “In the past one went to the opera for the diversion offered by facile musical works. Later on one returned to it in order to yawn at dramas in which music, arbitrarily paralyzed by constraints foreign to its own laws, could not help tiring out the most attentive audience in spite of the great talent displayed by Wagner. So, from music shamelessly considered as a purely sensual delight, we passed without transition to the murky inanities of the Art-Religion.”
When Auden delivered his libretto for The Rake’s Progress in 1948, he introduced Stravinsky to Robert Craft, a young man of twenty-four, a fervent admirer, who would play a crucial role in Stravinsky’s work during the next years. Craft came to Hollywood, lived in Stravinsky’s house, became his close assistant, and helped on The Rake’s Progress. “During the intermissions,” Craft reported of the first performance at La Fenice in Venice, in September 1951, “one … heard the expected comments about Stravinsky’s right to use the old operatic conventions and formulae—by people who had not yet learned the wisdom of Ezra Pound’s remark ‘Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another’—but the majority of the audience would have conceded him anything or followed him anywhere.”
And it was Craft in his mid-twenties who would lead the eminent Stravinsky nearing seventy in new directions. An enthusiast for “modern” music, Craft had directed performances of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and Bartók—and an all-Stravinsky program. Now Craft urged Stravinsky himself into a new world of serial music. Serialism, of which twelve-tone music is an example, was music constructed through permutations of elements (for example, pitch or duration) in a series. It had been tried by some medieval composers and others, but it developed in Europe after World War I. Its pioneer and most influential champion, the Austrian-born Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), had abandoned traditional concepts of consonance and dissonance. A work would not conform to the tonal family of keys declared in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and instead was constructed around a series of tones repeated and patterned in various ways. In Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method a composition was created from a row or series of twelve different tones, played consecutively or inverted. The harmonies and melodies were all drawn from the original row. Schoenberg saw this as a liberation from tonal restraints, using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale in a particular work. Others objected that it confined the composer. But with this technique Schoenberg produced his most important work, the opera Moses and Aaron (1930–32, never completed), which contrasted the visionary but inarticulate Moses (Schoenberg himself?) with his disciple the selfish and voluble Aaron. Schoenberg did not admire Stravinsky’s neoclassical style, which he rather nastily mocked in a verse that he set to music in 1926 (translated from the German by Eric Walter White):
Why, who’s coming here?
It’s little Modernsky!
He’s had his hair cut in an old-fashioned queue,
And it looks quite nice,
Like real false hair—
Like a wig—
Just like (at least little Modernsky thinks so)
Just like Father Bach!
Schoenberg and Stravinsky had met casually in Europe many years before. For eleven years the two lived near each other in Hollywood, but did not meet again. Both were sought out by pilgrims who would not tell one he was visiting the other. Schoenberg’s disciple Pierre Boulez also had attacked Stravinsky’s neoclassical style for “a sclerosis of all realms: harmonic and melodic, in which one arrives at a fake academicism.” He accused Stravinsky of being “incapable by himself of reaching the coherence of a language other than the tonal one” and so of “intellectual laziness, pleasure taken as an end in itself!”
With the death of Schoenberg in 1951, all the founders of serialism were gone, and Stravinsky may have felt that the modern world of serialism was ready for a new prophet. Now Stravinsky heard and studied the music of the serialists, whom he came increasingly to admire as “the only ones with a discipline that I respect. Whatever else serial music may be, it is certainly pure music. Only, the serialists are prisoners of the figure twelve, while I feel greater freedom with the figure seven.” And he gradually moved into the serial world, with the Canticum Sacrum (1955) and Agon (1953–57), and then he began writing in the purely serial style. He adapted this technique for his song In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954), his Threni (1958) for voices and orchestra on texts from Jeremiah, and for Movements (1959). He composed a memorial Introit for his friend T. S. Eliot in 1965, and (orchestral) variations dedicated to Aldous Huxley in 1965. Some music critics were troubled that Stravinsky had so suddenly joined the bandwagon of a fashionable modernism, while others admired his versatility in adapting serialism to his own purposes. But the large audience responded without enthusiasm. In 1962, Stravinsky remarked, when a new recording of The Firebird would sell up to fifty thousand sets in the United States, recordings of his recent serial works would seldom exceed five thousand. His early popular works were at the top of serious music played and broadcast by American symphony orchestras, but his serial works were seldom heard. Even his old friend Ansermet could not admire Stravinsky’s works as a serialist.
While Stravinsky’s first and enduring fame was based on his use of Russian motifs, he had no sympathy for the Revolution of 1917, which had expropriated his family’s property, deprived him of his “last resources” and left him “face to face with nothing, in a foreign land and right in the middle of the war.” “Russia has ever been untrue to herself,” he observed in his Harvard lectures in 1939, “she has always sapped the foundations of her own culture and profaned the values of the phases that have gone before.” Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony had been attacked in Stalinist Russia in 1946 for showing “the unwholesome influence of Stravinsky—an artist without a fatherland and without confidence in advanced ideas.”
Still, after Stalin’s death, when Stravinsky was invited to return to the Soviet Union and conduct a concert of his own works on his eightieth birthday, he found it hard to refuse. Denying that “nostalgia” had attracted him, he said he accepted the invitation only because of the “need for me by the younger generation of Russian musicians. No artist’s name has been more abused in the Soviet Union than mine, but one cannot achieve the future we must achieve with the Russians by nursing a grudge.” There were performances of Petrouchka and The Firebird at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, and the concert he conducted of his own works was enthusiastically applauded. At the reception by the Minister of Culture attended by Shostakovich and Khachaturian, he gave a warmly sentimental speech: “The smell of the Russian earth is different.” And though he had changed his nationality twice, he insisted, “A man has only one birthplace, one fatherland, one country”—the place of birth. He regretted that he had not been there “to help the new Soviet Union create its new music.”
But Stravinsky did not need a Russian Revolution for his incentive. “I was made a revolutionary in spite of myself,” he observed in 1939. Or, more precisely, he had found revolutions in himself. And in the very years when American popular music, assisted by the phonograph, motion pictures, and radio was reaching out to the world, creating vast new aud
iences, Stravinsky’s quest for the new took him farther and farther away from the large community of listeners. From a composer who created a riot in the Paris Opéra with his rhythms and dissonances, he became a “musician’s musician.” Moving from The Rite of Spring through his versions of the neoclassical, finally as a serialist his appeal was to the community of musicians. And he became the greatest single influence on the music produced in his lifetime. The modernism of his spirit consisted in his insatiable appetite for the new and his talent for making any musical form—opera, oratorio, concerto, symphony, song—something of his own.
PART TEN
CONJURING
WITH TIME
AND SPACE
Where the light is brightest the shadows are deepest.
—WOLFGANG GOETHE (1771)
54
The Painted Moment
THE story that begins with the reach to eternity climaxes in our time with the effort to capture the elusive moment. The power of stone enticed the builders of Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and the Parthenon. But it was the power of light that produced the most modern art forms, for light, the nearly instantaneous messenger of sensation, is the speediest, the most transient. Light, after the heavens and the earth, God’s first creation in Genesis (1:3), remains the Judeo-Christian symbol of the presence of God. John the Baptist announced Jesus as light (John 1: 4ff.), affirmed by Jesus himself. Candles are lit on the Jewish Sabbath and mark holy festivals. And in modern times light has played surprising new roles for those who would re-create the world.
“Modernity,” said Baudelaire, “is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, one half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.” For this modern half, light is the vehicle and the resource. It was the Impressionists who made an art of the instantaneous, and Claude Monet (1840–1926) who showed how it could be done. To shift the artist’s focus from enduring shapes to the evanescent moments required courage. It demanded a willingness to brave the jeers of the fashionable salons, a readiness to work speedily anywhere, and an openness to the endless untamed possibilities of the visual world. Cézanne summed it up when he said, “Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!”
The son of a prosperous grocer, Monet was born in Paris in 1840 and as a child of five moved with his family to Le Havre on the north side of the Seine estuary on the Normandy coast. That city, it was said, was “born of the sea,” and so too was Monet the Impressionist. In the weather of Normandy, as generations of Channel passengers have painfully learned, the proverbially unpredictable sun, clouds, rain, and fog transform the sky and its sea reflections from moment to moment. Young Monet, impatient to flee the “prison” of school, eagerly explored beaches and cliffs. Until 1883 he was frequently refreshing his vision with visits to the French coast, north or south. Then he found in the Seine, in the Thames, and in his ponds at Giverny other water mirrors for his ever-changing world. “I should like to be always near it or on it,” he said of the sea, “and when I die, to be buried in a buoy.”
The first signs of his talent were his caricatures of teachers and other local characters in his school copybooks. By the time he was fifteen he was selling these in the shop of the local picture framer. There a chance encounter would shape Monet’s life as an artist and the future of Western painting. Eugène Boudin (1824–1898), a painter and son of a pilot, had worked on an estuary steamer before opening the picture-framing shop patronized by some of the leading artists of the age. They urged him to try his hand at landscapes. With Millet’s encouragement Boudin went to Paris, where he rebelled against the studio style of the Beaux-Arts by painting natural scenes in the open air. Back in Normandy he painted vivid seascapes.
The fifteen-year-old Monet later recalled that when he first saw Boudin’s seascapes he disliked them so much—they were not at all in the “arbitrary color and fantastical arrangements of the painters then in vogue”—that he did not want to meet the man who painted them. But one day in the shop, about 1856, Monet ran into Boudin, who praised the young man’s caricatures. “You are gifted; one can see that at a glance,” he said, “But I hope you are not going to stop there … soon you will have had enough of caricaturing. Study, learn to see and to paint, draw, make landscapes. The sea, the sky, the animals, the people, and the trees are so beautiful, just as nature made them, with their character, their genuineness, in the light, in the air, just as they are.” Painting outdoors was still unusual for artists when Boudin took it up. Constable and Corot had done outdoor sketches, but painting had been an art of the studio, where the artist could control the subject and the light. The introduction of metal-tubed pigments in the 1840s in place of the laborious studio process of mixing colors had made outdoor painting practical.
“The exhortations of Boudin,” Monet recalled, “had no effect … and when he offered to take me with him to sketch in the fields, I always found a pretext to decline politely. Summer came—my time was my own—I could make no valid excuse; weary of resisting, I gave in at last, and Boudin, with untiring kindness, undertook my education. My eyes were finally opened and I really understood nature; I learned at the same time to love it.” That summer Monet went on an outdoor excursion with Boudin to Rouelles, near Le Havre. “Suddenly, a veil was torn away. I had understood—I had realized what painting could be. By the single example of this painter devoted to his art with such independence, my destiny as a painter opened out to me.” Boudin preached the need to preserve “one’s first impression.” “Everything that is painted directly on the spot,” he insisted, “has always a strength, a power, a vividness of touch that one doesn’t find again in the studio.” Boudin was urging him to capture the moment of light.
The artist’s move out of doors was not only a change of place. As Monet would show, it changed the “subject” of his painting and the pace of his work, leaving a predictable studio world of walls and windows and artificial light for scenes of evanescent light. Monet would create new ways of capturing that light and that evanescence.
At the age of eighteen, encouraged by Boudin, Monet applied to the Municipal Council of Le Havre for a grant to study art in Paris. The council turned him down on the grounds that “natural inclinations” for caricature might “keep the young artist away from the more serious but less rewarding studies which alone deserve municipal generosity.” Still his father sent him to Paris for advice from established artists and a tour of the salons where artists’ reputations were made. Originally sent for only a month or two, he was quickly seduced by the city and decided to remain indefinitely. He was fascinated by the artists’ café world, by the debates between the romantic “nature painters” and the “realists” known for their still lifes and workers’ scenes.
The headstrong young Monet refused to enroll in the École des Beaux-Arts, citadel of the establishment, though it would have pleased his father and assured a parental allowance. Instead he joined the offbeat Académie Suisse, where there were no examinations and no tuition. For a small fee artists could work from a living model. The “academy” had been started by a former model in a decrepit building where a dentist had once pulled teeth for one franc each. The free atmosphere and low cost had attracted some great talents. Courbet and Manet had worked there. Pissarro still stopped in occasionally to paint or to meet friends, and Monet found him a kindred spirit. Perhaps the most intellectual and self-conscious of the Impressionist circle, Pissarro (1830–1903), introduced Monet to the scientific rationale for their new approach to painting.
Monet’s parents in Le Havre were alarmed at the rumors of his bohemian life in Paris, and in 1860, when young Monet was unlucky enough to have his number called for the obligatory seven years of military service, they thought they had him cornered. Monet’s father offered to “buy” a substitute if Monet would commit himself to the career of a respectable artist. But they had misjudged their son.
The seven years of service that appalled so many were full of attraction to me. A friend, who was in a regiment
of the Chasseurs d’Afrique and who adored military life, had communicated to me his enthusiasm and inspired me with his love for adventure. Nothing attracted me so much as the endless cavalcades under the burning sun, the razzias [raids], the crackling of gunpowder, the sabre thrusts, the nights in the desert under a tent, and I replied to my father’s ultimatum with a superb gesture of indifference.… I succeeded, by personal insistence, in being drafted into an African regiment. In Algeria I spent two really charming years. I incessantly saw something new; in my moments of leisure I attempted to render what I saw. You cannot imagine to what an extent I increased my knowledge, and how much my vision gained thereby. I did not quite realize it at first. The impressions of light and color that I received there were not to classify themselves until later; they contained the germ of my future researches.
He had long admired Delacroix’s paintings of Algeria, which had first awakened him to the wonders of the North African sun.
When he fell ill with anemia and was granted sick leave, his parents bought him out of the Chasseurs. And in the summer of 1862 he had another lucky encounter, this time with a half-mad Dutch painter, Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819–1891), who would inspire Monet’s later work by his bold outdoor sketches and watercolors not so much of the ships and windmills but of the changing atmosphere. “He asked to see my sketches, invited me to come and work with him, explained to me the why and wherefore of his manner and thereby completed the teaching I had already received from Boudin. From that time he was my real master; it was to him that I owe the final education of my eye.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 72