Stravinsky and His World
Page 5
For many critics, Mavra raised the question of musical assimilation. Stravinsky wrote it during a period when he was realizing he could not return to Russia and was refashioning himself as a European composer in the Russo-Italian tradition of Glinka and Tchaikovsky. Diaghilev had suggested the idea of the opera buffa to Stravinsky while the two of them were in Seville preparing the London revival of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, two sections of which Diaghilev had reinstated and asked Stravinsky to orchestrate. In October 1921, Stravinsky had written an open letter on Tchaikovsky to the London Times, in which he had championed Tchaikovsky’s “Latin-Slav” culture.12 Just weeks before the premiere of Mavra, he had written a second open letter on Tchaikovsky in Le Figaro to coincide with the Ballets Russes premiere of Aurora’s Wedding—a one-act divertissement drawn from the unsuccessful Sleeping Beauty.13 Numerous French critics subsequently associated Mavra with Stravinsky’s press campaign to realign himself with Glinka’s and Tchaikovsky’s classical tradition of Europeanized or Latin-Russian music.14
Figure 1. Stravinsky at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna, 1930.
In order to assimilate, Stravinsky felt he had to separate himself from German traditions, and from the neo-nationalist line of Musorgsky, his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov, and the “Mighty Five.”15 He started to think of Mavra as “Italo-Russian,” and hoped it would be staged with singers wearing Russian peasant clothes but gesturing as in “old Italian opera.”16 In the program note for Mavra, drafted in 1934, that opens this selection of documents, Stravinsky expressed open disdain for the “national-ethnographic” element in music cultivated by the Mighty Five, and reiterated his lifelong belief that composers should not try to replicate music produced by the nation’s “people”—an inchoate group Stravinsky imbued with a mystic capacity for collective expression. “Stravinsky rejected Russians in blouses and boots,” the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet commented in hindsight about these events. “He wanted Russians dressed like everybody else, and embracing everybody else’s objectives and diversions but in a Russian manner.”17
Stravinsky’s fellow émigrés did not all agree with his form of musical assimilation. Boris de Schloezer’s harsh words for Stravinsky’s choices in Mavra give a small sense of the long-standing disagreement in Russia over the role of the West in the historical genesis of the Russian national soul. De Schloezer expressed concern about the class and racial origins of the Russian sentimental romance Stravinsky tried to emulate in Mavra, and deemed the work a “failure.”
Members and supporters of Les Six showed little interest in these Russian émigré internal debates. They situated Mavra within a different translation zone—that of the Parisian metropolis, where Russian music collided with European art music, music hall, jazz, French traditions, and an international public. Mavra belonged in the ambiguous geographical and stylistic space of modernity created by the Ballets Russes premiere of Erik Satie’s Parade in 1917, and Jean Cocteau’s manifesto Le Coq et l’Arlequin, in 1918. The little opera buffa appeared inherently transnational: Stravinsky had composed its overture while the Ballets Russes was performing at the Exposition coloniale in Marseilles; its vocal style had been influenced by the Russian sentimental romances sung in the Moscow touring revue Chauve-Souris, which at that time was enjoying tremendous success in Paris.18 Just months before the premiere of Mavra, the Dadaist Francis Picabia had praised Stravinsky for his effortless assimilation and for transforming “Russian milk into Isigny cream, which becomes a great dessert with a little sugar.” Picabia continued: “Don’t view this as a critique, my dear Stravinsky, I love cream, it’s the topping on milk!”19 Six months after the premiere, Boris de Schloezer too began talking about border crossing as essential to Stravinsky’s nature and to what he tentatively labeled “neoclassicism” (a term he introduced into critical discourse).20 Two years later, the Belgian journalist Joseph de Geynst described Stravinsky as “unconcerned with musical dogmas, composing according to his own inspiration and deliberately knocking down the barriers professors erect so willingly on the roads that open up for independent artists.”21
Within the translation zone of metropolitan Paris, class mattered as much as or more than national identity. Cocteau, Satie, and Tristan Tzara solidified Mavra’s class credentials by singing its praises in the high-end fashion magazine Vanity Fair.22 As a sought-after commodity with the fashion appeal of Cubist painting, Mavra fit well in the spectacle of conspicuous consumption the magazine staged for the moneyed transnational cultural elite; it appeared as chic and trendy as the Chauve-Souris, which had just taken New York City by storm.23 In the pages of Vanity Fair, Georges Auric and Cocteau celebrated Stravinsky as a role model for Les Six, and Tristan Tzara aligned Mavra with Dada.24 Tzara, like Louis Laloy before him, identified Mavra spatially with the “simultaneity” in evidence in Sonia Delaunay-Terck’s “poem dresses” and in Robert Delauney’s paintings, and with the Cubist sets Léopold Survage created for the opera’s premiere (see Figure 2).25 In this fractured aesthetic space, cultures, classes, genders, and nations collided for the pleasure of the very few.
Figure 2: Léopold Survage, scene design for Mavra, a detail of which was reproduced in the official program for the premiere on June 3, 1922.
Mavra’s class pretensions did not escape the attention of revolutionary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky when he visited Stravinsky with Jean Cocteau in Paris in 1922. He and Cocteau both compared Stravinsky’s creative work to capitalist production, but from different angles; Mayakovsky called Stravinsky, perhaps uncharitably, a “Parisianized Russian.” Stravinsky found himself unable to translate Mayakovsky’s words—and with them a revolutionary critique of bourgeois art—for his friend Cocteau.
The national, temporal, and class paradoxes in Mavra remained unresolved because they are inherent to the music itself. Stravinsky had composed gender, racial, and class conflicts into the music, without taking sides. Roland-Manuel correctly identified the most bitterly disputing parties in Mavra when he described it as “Russian with an American accent,” its lyrical vocal parts in conflict with the syncopated rhythms of its wind band accompaniment. Stravinsky’s practice of allowing jazz and the Russian sentimental romance to coexist as opposites aligned him conceptually with the Surrealists, as well as with a circuit of composers associated with that emerging movement.26 A survey published in Littérature weeks before Mavra’s premiere revealed that Surrealist writers identified jazz with Russian music (that is, Stravinsky) and saw both as a potential means of countering French nationalism.27 The English bandleader Jack Hylton felt the affinities and arranged sections of Mavra for his jazz band in 1931.28 Pierre Lalo remarked that the public loved such lack of coordination, and would happily combine Mozart with Cubism.29 But Boris de Schloezer deemed Stravinsky’s attempt to combine the Italo-Russian style with the “Negro-Russian” syncopations or references to jazz “impossible,” his rejection of miscegenation revealing the devastating notions of racial purity at the heart of his Russian musical nationalism. None of them could really resolve the conflict over ethnic and racial boundaries.
Mavra’s orchestration was the greatest bone of contention for the disputing parties. Critics either loved or hated it, depending on their allegiances; Erik Satie worshipped its transparency, for example, and celebrated Stravinsky as a liberator of the new generation.30 But decades later Stravinsky acknowledged that Mavra’s orchestration had prevented performances of the work.31 Mavra’s wind band sound had created a deadlock in Franco-Russian musical relations.
By the late 1920s the debate over Mavra had faded to a dull roar. After Mavra was performed with Oedipus Rex in Berlin in 1928, critics tentatively began to assume the opera was “neoclassical,” and to forget its fraught racial, class-based, and transnational past.32 This trend is evident in Arthur Lourié’s essay, which coincides with the Berlin performance, and originally included a substantial section on Oedipus Rex. In an attempt to stand up to Soviet critics who condemned Stravinsky for his Western materialism
, Lourié exaggerated the “purity” of Mavra’s Russian blood ties.33 Although he recognized the work’s “paradoxicality,” he sublimated its racial conflict by omitting any mention of jazz, and by translating the dialogue over ethnicity into a formal analysis of meter. In a slippery move for someone who had once worked for the Soviets, he blurred Mavra’s class distinction by critiquing the “Gypsy” roots of the Russian sentimental romance on which it was based, and then praising Stravinsky for reviving it authentically as musical form. Within a few decades, Pulcinella had become Mavra’s surrogate, and neoclassicism the stylistic substitute for the ideological conflicts of the 1920s.
Editor’s Note: Although the translations in this section attempt to convey as much of the original document as possible, we have corrected mistakes and inconsistencies in punctuation, spelling, and English transliteration of proper names. At the same time, we have respected the transformation of some first names, such as the gallicized “Serge de Diaghilev,” where appropriate to their contexts. Egregious errors or typos in the original document have also been noted.
Unpublished Program Note
Mavra
Igor Stravinsky
My opera buffa Mavra was composed during the period from summer 1921 through spring 1922 and performed for the first time on 3 June 1922 at the Grand Opéra de Paris through the efforts of Serge de Diaghilev.34 This opera was staged and performed in concert, at different times and in different countries and cities: Berlin (Otto Klemperer), Paris (Ernest Ansermet), Amsterdam and Brussels (conducted by myself), etc…35
I dedicated this work, whose plot was taken from “Domik v Kolomnè” [“The Little House in Kolomna”], a short story in verse that Pushkin wrote in 1830, to the memory of the latter, as well as to the memory of Glinka and Tchaikovsky. This triple dedication will be easily understood by those who recognize the ideological differences between the group of “Five” [Balakirev, Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Cui] and Tchaikovsky, whose inspiration was—as it was, in fact, for the “Five”—Pushkin and Glinka. But whereas in their aesthetic the “Five” cultivated only the national-ethnographic element they found in this source—which is fundamentally not very far from the spirit of all those films about the old Russia of the czars and boyars—Tchaikovsky, like Dargomyzhsky and other less well-known composers, quietly continued the musical tradition established by Glinka, a tradition that, though using popular Russian melos, was not afraid to present it in a Europeanized way: Italianized in Glinka’s case, Italianized and Gallicized in Tchaikovsky’s work. Neither Glinka nor Tchaikovsky took into account ethnographic and historical accuracy. But what we see with the “Five,” as well as with the modern Spanish “folklorists,” both painters and musicians, is precisely this naïve but dangerous longing that pushes them to remake an art already created instinctively by a people’s genius. A rather sterile and wrongheaded tendency that afflicted a number of artists at the time.
I conceived the score to Mavra in opposition to this type of aesthetic, and with the intention of reviving the excellent Russian tradition established definitively by artists such as Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky; this should sufficiently explain the dedication.
Paris, 4 Dec. 1934
—Translated from the French by Bridget Behrmann
Excelsior (Paris), 12 June 1922
Mavra
Emile Vuillermoz
In what strange times are we living?36 What ironic destiny compels us to do justice to Wagner on the same day that we are obliged to deplore the current direction of Stravinsky’s genius? Why this malicious “reversal” of the time machine? As in Renard, Stravinsky wanted to entertain us. Mavra is a parody of the lyric ideal of the Second Empire, of bel canto, duets, of runs and cavatinas. The admirable author of The Rite of Spring lapses into humor. In my humble opinion he makes a mistake.
This man of genius is not gay. He has nothing of an entertainer. His character is heavy and insistent. The libretto of Mavra—in which a hussar out of a colored lithograph disguises himself as a cook to court his beloved—lacks all wit. And the music is of a weight and volume that removes any ironic charm from this “burden.”37 An interminable and monotone vag-time38 accompaniment drowns this entire cheerless score. And this dangerous wager makes apparent in the most unexpected fashion a few singularly instructive truths. One notices, first, that Italian music is not parodied as easily as one thinks. And then one notes that Stravinsky, whose rhythmic genius is prodigious, lacks terribly in melodic invention. We sensed this in his previous works, but this one does not let us doubt it anymore. This great musician should stop indulging in such useless jokes. He still has so many beautiful things to tell us! We have our clowns if we want to “laugh and entertain ourselves socially.”39 They suffice. Mavra, which is surely not the masterpiece of old Russian gaiety, is certainly not that of old French gaiety! …
—Translated by Tamara Levitz
Posledniye novosti (Paris), 22 June 1922
Mavra
Boris de Schloezer
The originality of Stravinsky is that not only doesn’t he repeat himself—which is to say little—but that he doesn’t even adapt.40 He doesn’t cultivate the treasures he discovers: he leaves subsequent development to his followers and imitators. No sooner has he merely outlined the way, laying just the first track and setting out stakes, than he immediately abandons all the work he has begun and, making a sharp turn, dashes off in a different direction.
There are composers whose path of development appears to us overall as a single, uninterrupted, nearly straight line. It is comparatively easy for us to discern in their activities a certain logic or consistency. One moment seems to follow naturally from another, like effect from cause. Bach, Wagner, and Scriabin were like this. Stravinsky belongs to a different type. His path appears as a sharply jagged line. Consistency—psychological and aesthetic—can undoubtedly be found here, but its internal logic hasn’t been detected yet.
The Rite of Spring inaugurated a new epoch in music all by itself; here everything was new. So we waited, of course, for the composer to go even further in the direction he had revealed and begin to exploit his riches systematically. Instead of that we had The Nightingale, little pieces for piano, and for clarinet, L’Histoire du soldat, Renard, and now, Mavra. Essentially, almost every one of these pieces is an experiment, a quest, a challenge and a breakthrough at the same time. Heretofore, the composer’s pursuits and endeavors have always been crowned with success (we’re not talking here about external success). Fortune was always with him.
Stravinsky’s original method of composition quite naturally engendered a certain amount of irritation among the public and critics. With each new work by the composer, the listener is obliged to relearn from scratch. One’s expectations are always frustrated; there is no preparation at all. One must make a sharp turn and plunge after the artist into the unknown. Great courage and a passion for adventure are required—qualities rarely found.
Mavra induces a similar sense of wonder and anxiety, mixed with irritation. In my opinion, however, Mavra is a failure, Stravinsky’s first failure. A bold and interesting endeavor can likewise be discerned here, but he chose his goal inauspiciously; to achieve it was altogether impossible.
As the composer himself explained in advance, he wants to return to the roots of Russian music. Not to folk music, however, which so many have exploited — Stravinsky among them—but to the sentimental romance of Alyabyev, Verstovsky,41 Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, the so-called dilettantes. This art of towns and of country estates is a curious deformation of Italian song, filtered through Russian tastes, through Russian thinking. The influence of Gypsy song [tsyganskoy pesni] also made its mark here. A special Russo-Italian style, integral and viable, was created. To a greater or lesser extent it influenced almost all Russian composers, even those who, like Musorgsky, believe that they draw upon national folk resources exclusively. One of the last and most prominent representatives of this trend was Tchaikovsky.
U
ntil now, Stravinsky seemed a complete stranger to this melodic style (judging by his compositions). At first he trod the path of Rimsky-Korsakov. When, after Firebird, he broke with Korsakovian aesthetics, it was only in order to subject Russian folksong and folk dance motives to an entirely distinctive recasting. He emphasized particularly their complex, rich rhythms, renouncing a host of textbook methods and formulas—thematic development, for example—which Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Balakirev had used to compose their symphonies, overtures, and fantasies on Russian themes. In place of the Italo-Russian style (Verstovsky—Glinka—Tchaikovsky) and the Germano-Russian style (Glinka—the Kuchkists42—to some extent the very same Tchaikovsky), a third Russian style emerged, the Stravinsky style, which I will call the Negro-Russian [negro-russkim], for there is no doubt that music of the so-called primeval races, with their syncopated rhythms, brutal harmonies, and abundance of all kinds of percussion, influenced its creation. But now Stravinsky has tried to revive the Italo-Russian style that had completely degenerated in the hands of Tchaikovsky’s epigones.
Let’s set aside for now the explanations Stravinsky has given in print.43 A work of art speaks for itself, and so far we are reckoning only with Mavra and can judge by it alone. It seems to us that this synthesis of Italo-Russian and Negro-Russian elements that Stravinsky has attempted to carry out is impossible, but perhaps we are mistaken and Mavra is just a chance failure. Until the composer proves the contrary, however, we may question the merits and viability of a style where the sounds and rhythms of the jazz band are combined with Russian and Gypsy romances. Stravinsky did not achieve unity; the constituent elements of his work feud and fight among themselves. The listener’s attention bifurcates; one taken with the melodic writing peevishly shrugs off the annoying orchestration—unequivocally dominated by the brass—while one struck by the piquant rhythms and the clumsy yet interesting sonorities seeks in vain an escape from the sentimental singing.