And how does this subjective note sit with the music’s distanced character, which has often been noted?17 In these questions one might start to look for clues as to why Stravinsky decided the Ode and Orpheus were well suited to mark his return to his motherland. In the Ode it is, among other means, the reference to Ancient Greek poetic forms that achieves such distance (from the present). Stravinsky had periodically worn the Greek mask since Oedipus Rex (1927). In that opera-oratorio he deployed all manner of distancing effects in his desire to build a monumental kind of theater: soloists and chorus are presented in masks; the “dead” Latin language is used; a narrator is employed to reveal the plot in the vernacular before the actual events unfold; the music moves across a landscape of styles that Stravinsky called a Merzbild (collage). The more general allusions in the Ode to the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have a similar effect of keeping the listener at arm’s length.
Indeed, Stravinsky had spent much of the preceding twenty years appropriating the language and practices of classical Western European music, and progressively distancing himself from his Russian roots. One motivation might have been a fear of being perceived as provincial or out of step with sophisticated postwar Parisian society. (Having been hidden from view in Switzerland during the war years, Pulcinella flamboyantly announced Stravinsky’s return to the limelight on 15 May 1920 with a chic and playful modernized classicism that delighted French audiences.) Such borrowing can certainly be read as a concerted effort at assimilation. For the novelist, essayist, and Czech exile Milan Kundera, it was also a sign of Stravinsky’s status as an émigré:
Without a doubt, Stravinsky, like all the others, bore with him the wound of his emigration; without a doubt, his artistic evolution would have taken a different path if he had been able to stay where he was born. In fact, the start of his journey through the history of music coincides roughly with the moment when his native country ceases to exist for him; having understood that no country could replace it, he finds his only homeland in music; this is not just a nice lyrical conceit of mine, I think it in an absolutely concrete way: his only home was music, all of music by all musicians, the very history of music; there he decided to establish himself, to take root, to live; there he ultimately found his only compatriots, his only intimates, his only neighbors, from Pérotin to Webern; it is with them that he began a long conversation, which ended only with his death.
He did all he could to feel at home there: he lingered in each room of that mansion, touched every corner, stroked every piece of the furniture; he went from the music of ancient folklore to Pergolesi, who gave him Pulcinella (1919), to the other Baroque masters, without whom his Apollon musagète (1928) would be unimaginable, to Tchaikovsky, whose melodies he transcribes in Le Baiser de la fée (1928) to Bach … Pérotin and other old polyphonists … Monteverdi … Hugo Wolf … and to the twelve-tone system … in which, eventually after Schoenberg’s death (1951), he recognized yet another room in his home
His detractors, the defenders of music conceived as expression of feelings, who grew irate at his unbearably discreet “affective activity” and accused him of “poverty of heart,” didn’t have heart enough themselves to understand the wounded feelings that lay behind his vagabondage through the history of music.18
Certainly one can say that the neoclassical aspects of the Ode, as so often in Stravinsky’s music after 1920, offer a kind of defense mechanism, keeping his own feelings at a distance. It is fascinating, therefore, that the Ode should also make such clear references to music of strongly Russian (and therefore more personal) character through, among other means, its recollection of the Russian funeral service that Stravinsky used as a model for the Symphonies d’instruments à vent. Any memorial piece was likely to summon up memories of the past. Here, in the Ode, through its repetitions, the music seems to articulate a sense of nostalgia, a longing for a Russia more imagined than real that Stravinsky always carried in his itinerant life, symbolized in the icons that hung in his study or the religious pendants that hung round his neck. Feelings of alienation were now more acutely felt as he began to settle in the United States while his family remained at a great distance in war-torn Europe.
What is intriguing is that Stravinsky, on the occasion of his return to Russia in 1962, chose to speak through the Ode to the people of his native country from whom he had been separated for so long. This work, with its echoes of ancient Russia, with its character of mourning, and with its uniquely expressive voice, spoke of distance, loss, and sorrow. Stravinsky was delighted to be back on Russian soil, but it was a place he no longer knew. He did not try to enter his childhood apartment at 66 Kryukov Canal in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), though he did visit his niece Xenia who still lived nearby; he was officially discouraged from visiting his beloved summer home in Ustilug, which in any case had been ransacked and destroyed after the 1917 Revolution. Stravinsky’s Russia lived on only in his memory and imagination, in music such as the Ode. Indeed, ever since Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, Russia for Stravinsky was already a nostalgic construction, though deeply rooted in authentic folk traditions.19 The dislocated flutes that frame the “Epitaph” of the Ode, turning in endless repetitions, suggest a melancholic, pastoral landscape; their liturgical chanting mourns the loss of innocence. “Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world,” observes Svetlana Boym.20 This surely sounds like Stravinsky’s lament for the losses of family and homeland, for the loss of the enchanted world of his childhood. What better work, then, through which to present himself to his fellow countrymen and women? (If only they had been prepared to listen.)
The pastoral was in fact a theme running through all three works in the 1962 Moscow program. An idealized pastoral is present explicitly in the bucolic horn calls of the Ode’s “Eclogue.” The Rite of Spring begins with the imitation on high bassoon of the sound of the reed pipes or dudki, an expression of the “sublime rising of nature as it renews itself,” but, far from the idyllic rural life, progresses by means of an uncompromising rhythmic language toward the violent “Sacrificial Dance.”21 And the subject of Orpheus, in his ability to charm beasts, trees, and even rocks by the power of his music, stands as the exemplar of the pastoral figure across at least three thousand years of European art. Although the pastoral in Stravinsky might, at one level, be read as symbolic of the pure rural life, the enchanted Russia of the imagination, it is nonetheless inseparable from notions of loss. In the celebrated paintings of the 1630s by Nicolas Poussin, shepherds (from Virgil’s Eclogues) gather round a tombstone bearing the inscription “Et in Arcadia ego” (I [Death] am even in Arcadia). Death is present, too, in all three Stravinsky pastorals. The Ode is a memorial. The Rite ends with a dance to the death. Orpheus is pure neoclassical pastoral, yet even at the start we encounter Orpheus weeping for the loss of his lover Eurydice. We hear the falling Phrygian lines of his lyre (harp) in a conventional sign of lament, echoing outward into the strings, which linger mournfully over each note. Stravinsky looks back to Orpheus and the classical past, not to repeat it but to reinvent it, turning it to his own modern purpose. Behind the mask lie both a general sense of late-modern uncertainty and a personal sense of loss. The classical mask also betrays exile. “A writer in exile is by and large a retrospective and retroactive being,” writes Joseph Brodsky. “Exile slows down one’s stylistic evolution, … it makes a writer more conservative.”22
Death stalks Orpheus. The myth offered Stravinsky a context in which he could sing laments of loss. In the “Air de Danse” Orpheus sings of the loss of Eurydice. Once again to the accompaniment of the lyre, an obligato line played on two oboes, moving for the most part in rhythmic unison, gives voice to a deeply melancholic lament, the lines intertwined in grief, echoing a Baroque aria. It is quite clearly a reconfiguration of the soprano aria that occurs toward the end of Bach’s St. John Passion, “Zerfließe, mein Herze, in Fluten der Zähren” (Dissolve, my heart, in floods
of tears), which is accompanied by obligato flute and oboe da caccia. Stravinsky uses a similar scoring, the same aria type of the siciliana (usually associated with pastoral scenes and melancholy emotions), the same time signature (predominantly 3/8), and even some of the same figurations. In looking back to Bach, Stravinsky captures something of Bach’s Affekt, he makes a plea for the idea of Bach’s order that he so craved in a turbulent world, but in the fragmentation and stasis of his own music he also highlights the distance between his age and Bach’s, articulating the uncertainty and alienation of both the modernist and of one far from home.23
Example 3a. Stravinsky, “Air de Danse (Orphée),” Orpheus, rehearsal number 80.
Example 3b. J. S. Bach, “Zerfließe, mein Herze,” St. John Passion, opening.
The accented melodic decorations in Stravinsky certainly have their origins in Bach, but also in Russian folk music—heard previously in, say, the dudki grace notes of The Rite of Spring and Les Noces. But now they are transformed into poignant expressive gestures. (It is instructive to compare the melody of Example 3a with Example 2a). Such gestures can also be heard in the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s next major work, The Rake’s Progress. It has often been commented that it seemed strange for Stravinsky to have been writing The Rake immediately after the Second World War, a work so apparently disengaged from world events. Yet, like Orpheus, far from escaping into ancient Greek mythology or eighteenth-century comedy, the opera’s (pastoral) subject matter and its musical treatment engage allegorically with personal and collective loss, and articulate a melancholic sense of modernist alienation. It is striking that at the very end of Tom’s life in The Rake, in his madness, alienated from himself, and believing himself to be Adonis, he invokes Orpheus with a suitably decorated melodic line: “My heart breaks. I feel the chill of death’s approaching wing. Orpheus, strike from thy lyre a swanlike music.” Et in Arcadia ego.
The deaths of the youthful Orpheus and Eurydice took on particular resonance in the violent twentieth century. So many creative artists turned to myth as a way of coming to terms with events that were, literally, unspeakable. One such was Jean Cocteau, who had completed his tragicomic play Orphée in 1925, which he read to Stravinsky in September in Nice, and which became the catalyst for their collaboration on Oedipus Rex. In 1949, not long after Stravinsky had completed Orpheus, Cocteau returned to Orphée, reworking it as a much darker film in which Orpheus is a celebrated yet despised poet in post–Second World War Paris. Vivid reminders of the Nazi Occupation are everywhere. Painful memories of recent events are mediated through the ancient story. Stravinsky had begun work on his Orpheus within a year of the end of the war. Though the idea for the subject came from another Russian émigré, the choreographer George Balanchine, it would have struck a chord with Stravinsky at that particular time. He was “desperately anxious” to see his children and grandchildren, still at a great distance in Europe, and had understandably been affected by news of the dislocation and deaths of many of his cousins during the war.24 As in the Ode, it is a sense of distance and restraint that in general characterizes the apparently timeless Orpheus. The turning away from violence in this work should not, however, be read as a sign of retreat from the horror of war. In the face of such slaughter, another barbaric Rite of Spring would hardly have been possible. The Rite, premiered on the eve of the First World War, had glorified the primitive, the erotic, and the violent. Prescient it may have been, but the reality of the two world wars left artists searching for a new order, and the classical past offered an appropriate framework. In Orpheus we hear Stravinsky not reveling triumphally in death but reflecting mournfully on it. Even in the second pas d’action, in which the “Bacchantes attack Orpheus, seize him and tear him to pieces,” the music is disciplined. The mechanical repetitions, ostinatos, and rhythmic energy of the Rite are still present, but the violence is now heard with a sense of detachment and stuttering uncertainty, as if trying to make sense of awful events beyond comprehension.
Thus, from behind the Greek masks of two works from his early years in America, it is possible to hear Stravinsky speaking as an émigré. That the Ode and Orpheus were presented to his compatriots in 1962 serves to reinforce the sense that Stravinsky wanted to reveal (consciously or otherwise) both how he imagined Russia to be and how he felt about losing it. He may have pretended to the rest of the world, and perhaps even to himself, that he had left “scenes of pagan Russia” behind, but these ostensibly classical works seem to speak otherwise. Their “eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely” character—to appropriate the words of George Steiner on the émigré Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov—distinguish them as the work of an “extraterritorial.”25 In a general sense, it might be said that these characteristics are signs of Stravinsky’s modernism. The “deliberate untimeliness” (the “lateness”) of the neoclassical works that continually glance backwards to earlier music and the art of antiquity is, in another sense, utterly timely: these works articulate a sense of distance and alienation that resonates with the tragic, late-modern era. A late style, Edward Said argues after Adorno, is variously characterized by apartness, exile, anachronism, alienation, a melancholic world-weariness, intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.26 Stravinsky’s lateness, symbolized both in the adoption of classical forms and subject matter, and in the musical representations of distance, lament, and loss, is certainly a response to his age; but the seemingly contradictory espressivo of his works of second emigration can also be understood as an allegorical response to his own, personal losses.
Just as in his early years in the United States, Stravinsky’s years first stranded (in 1914) then exiled (after the 1917 Revolution) in Switzerland, were marked by war, separation from what he held dear, and devastating personal loss:
My profound emotion on reading the news of war, which aroused patriotic feelings and a sense of sadness at being so distant from my country, found some alleviation in the delight with which I steeped myself in Russian folk poems. … Overwhelmed by the successive bereavements I had suffered [his beloved nyanya Bertha and his brother Gury], I was now also in a position of the utmost pecuniary difficulty. The communist revolution, which had just triumphed in Russia, deprived me of the last resources which had still from time to time been reaching me from the country, and I found myself, so to speak, face to face with nothing, in a foreign land and right in the middle of the war.27
As has been widely discussed, some of his most characteristically Russian music was the product of his first exile, in Switzerland, including Les Noces, perhaps Stravinsky’s most glorious celebration of Russia, the first ideas for which dated back as far as 1912, but whose final pared-down, stylized ritual (completed in 1923) represented a Russia imagined and reinvented at a great distance.28
At the same time Stravinsky was also producing a number of deceptively simple piano pieces, which appeared to have little to do with Russia and far more to do with the francophone culture in which he found himself: the Valse des fleurs (1914), for example, or the Trois Pièces faciles and Cinq Pièces faciles (both 1917). This is a music dépouillé, stripped of the complexity and exoticism of the prewar Ballets Russes scores. Many of the movements use parody and humor as a distancing strategy. Sometimes, as in the first of the Cinq Pièces, this also results in a sorrowful music. If anything, the music’s childlike simplicity exaggerates its mournfulness; its fixed repetitions suggest that the sorrow cannot be overcome. Said has written of the “crippling sorrow of estrangement.” “Exile,” he observes, is characterized by an “essential sadness [that] can never be surmounted.”29
In the interwar years Stravinsky moved progressively further away from Russian and toward Western European models—a deliberate act of distancing. Then, toward the end of the 1920s, he turned for the first time to Ancient Greek material. Myth gave order, distanced, and helped to hide the pain of loss. Apollo, above all others, symbolized such order: the ideal Greek youth, variously god of light, truth, healing, music
, and poetry. In the wake of the First World War, Olympian order offered solace. What better subject matter, then, for a ballet concerned with purity, poetry, and order than Apollon musagète, Apollo leader of the Muses?
Apollon musagète of 1928 (or Apollo, as Diaghilev renamed the work) is stripped of any meaningful narrative and expressive content. What is left is a kind of abstract meditation on classical themes, figures, and dances. Music and dance are unified in the expression of pure, classical beauty. Stravinsky himself designated Apollo a ballet blanc, a term applied in the nineteenth century to scenes in classical ballet where the principal ballerina wore pure white. The music eschews contrast, pares down the scoring to strings, and employs principally diatonic harmony representative of a kind of white-note Hellenism. Griffiths quips that the “Gallic spirit of Apollo is a complex superimposition of Lully and Delibes, Daphnis and the Ritz.”30 In keeping with the prevailing spirit of Parisian Art Deco, Stravinsky and his choreographer Balanchine turn a Greek god into French chic.
At least, that is what sits on the surface. But the final “Apotheosis” opens a window onto something beyond the merely playful and decorative. At one level, an apotheosis at the end of a classical ballet is entirely to be expected, and there are certainly echoes here of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. In keeping with Apollo’s scenario, apotheosis suggests the process of transformation into a god, the release from the earthly toward the divine. This is signaled by the heroic key of D major and the Baroque fanfare character of what Eric Walter White has dubbed the Olympian theme.31 Yet, below these conventional signs of triumph and closure, the music pulls in a different direction. Its D major is less certain than it might at first seem, as triads of G major and B minor also circulate freely and simultaneously. The music cannot easily move forward. And, in unexpectedly expressive appoggiaturas, a personal voice begins to emerge from behind the Baroque mask. All this makes the Olympian theme take on a regretful character, as if it is not what it should be, as if something has been lost. Over an unchanging D-pedal, it is a hollow gesture of triumph, soft, at a distance.
Stravinsky and His World Page 3