After this scene of the grand air, the comic spirit definitively dominates Mavra. The hussar’s flight, the fainting, and the young girl’s despair all produce an extremely fast-paced scene, a free-for-all. The music could have here found a new occasion for grandiloquence; certainly Richard Strauss would not have failed to fall into the trap. But Stravinsky found something unheard of, something astonishing for the climactic scene.
In the finale, as everyone, exhausted, talks at once, Stravinsky withdraws from the fray. And while confusion reigns onstage, the orchestra fades out. Instead of letting loose in curses, the orchestra begins a good-natured little fox-trot—discreetly, with a very detached air. “They’re arguing up there? Too bad for them. Me, I’m leaving … Good night.”
Mavra must be seen and heard if its extreme importance is to be understood from an intellectual standpoint. It is more difficult to talk about from a musical standpoint, because the work is not yet published, and hearing such new music only twice is not enough for me to be able to grasp all the details.
Still, after the lyric declamation, here is a return to bel canto. A temporary or a definitive return? Little matter, since the work is here and is a success. And let’s not forget that, especially for Stravinsky, a masterpiece is the end of the line. Reduced to a size appropriate for such a subject, the orchestra sings too, without interruption. Melody is solidly affirmed. This orchestra is made up almost exclusively of wind instruments, and achieves Cocteau’s ideal of a “sumptuous wind band.”62 This is not, moreover, the only point of contact with the spirit of young French artists to be found in Mavra. And perhaps it is that which so unsettles the many critics who cried foul at Parade.63 Mavra brings powerful approbation for young French people, painters, writers, and musicians.
Double basses and a few violoncellos play a sort of “basso continuo,” over which the woodwinds and strings weave a dense melodic web. It makes a very “big” orchestra, with a very new sonic balance. The thick, loud basses support the woodwinds, which become more and more mobile from the bassoons to the flutes. And way above the human voices, completely supple in their bel canto. There is a continuous progression toward lightness, as in a tree whose solid roots bear the elegant and capricious crown, swaying ceaselessly in the wind.
Stravinsky’s rhythmic frenzy is restrained in this score. The rhythm is simpler, heavier, perhaps to show the orchestra’s “big” side. However, the dryness that might have resulted is avoided, since the rhythms are for the most part syncopated and give the music a swaying effect born admirably by the vocal parts.
We should applaud without reservation Serge de Diaghilew’s Ballets Russes for their unceasing activity. For twelve years, we have owed them the brightest of our artistic joys. Let us wish them the pursuit of their magnificent labors for many years to come, along with the well-earned glory it brings them.
—Translated by Bridget Behrmann
Musikblätter des Anbruch (Vienna), November 1922
Stravinsky’s New Stage Works
Darius Milhaud
In the last few months Paris witnessed the premieres of two new stage works by Igor Stravinsky performed by Serge Diaghilew with his Russian Ballet: Renard and Mavra.64 Each work of this remarkable musician surprises by being completely different from that which came before it; the technique and orchestration are so wonderfully novel and based on a skillfulness that deviates thoroughly from the construction of the composer’s older works. In Renard the orchestra consists of about fifteen solo instruments, including a cimbalon,65 and human voices. The plot is represented onstage through pantomime while the singers in the orchestra sing the roles as if performing in a small opera, with the difference that the dancers onstage perform in their place. Some critics criticized the use of a small group of solo instruments in a hall as big as the Opéra; accustomed to the massive size of the Wagnerian orchestra, they probably did not understand how to listen carefully. Strength of sound is less a question of quantity than quality. The pure tone of a solo violin carries farther than a greater number of violins playing at the same time with each one sounding slightly off-pitch in a different way. One would never accuse a solo violinist giving a concert of having chosen a hall too large. Why not then fifteen soloists rather than the one? In a small orchestra everything is essential, harmonic parts intended as filler don’t exist and—given the means are limited to a minimum—everything conventional disappears. The music is fuller and more intense but sounds so unfamiliar that it is only natural that the conservative public hears it without grasping it.
The music for Renard is extremely lively. Nothing is lost, the melodies are of a truly arithmetical precision; they proceed and interlock exactly like cogwheels in a machine. The structure of the work is simple, clear, and planned with unerring certainty. The vocal element livens up the score, giving it tone and mood.66 The clearly marked rhythm, which the percussion discreetly yet perfectly underlines, is complemented by the cimbalon. Renard justifies the attempts made lately by many young composers; these musicians are fighting for small orchestras made up of solo instruments, and now, with one of his works, they will be glad to count Stravinsky—whom they follow with admiring attentiveness—as one of their own.
Mavra is a small one-act opera buffa. I was not in Paris when it was premiered, and yet Stravinsky played it for me on the piano and let me read along with the orchestral score.67 It is a work of bel canto; a hussar sings a serenade and dresses up as a cook in order to live with his beloved. Bitter sentimentality and mourning hide behind the comic aspect of the subject matter. The harmonic writing in this work is primitive and its simplicity disappointed every admirer of Stravinsky for whom The Rite of Spring set the standard. However, with such a prolific musician one has to expect that the public that loves a certain work will feel the ground collapse under it with the next. The orchestra of Mavra is almost military music: the strings are limited to six double basses, six cellos, a solo viola, and two solo violins. Here we see realized the “rich orphéon” of winds and brass that Jean Cocteau called for in Le Coq et l’Arlequin.68 Mavra meets perfectly the goals set by the young French school since Erik Satie’s Parade; in this work their fondest wishes are fulfilled. Mavra has probably been so poorly understood and harshly criticized because it cozies up intellectually with the young Parisian musicians. A famous critic loses himself in comments about this “italo-russo-negro-american music,” a famous impressionist composer speaks maliciously of a new Le Domino noir.69 But does all this have any meaning? Mavra will blossom when the current school is recognized; a school that works hard, and yet is not believed and is looked upon askance, with eyes still dimmed from the contemplation of useless pretenses, or because they have leaned over Rimsky-Korsakov’s Handbook of Instrumentation for too long,70 rather than broadening their horizon with Gabriel Parès.71
—German by M. M. Frank, translated by Tamara Levitz
Vanity Fair (New York), November 1922
News of the Seven Arts in Europe: A New Comic Opera by Stravinsky and the Latest Fermentations of Dada
Tristan Tzara
After presenting The Marriage of Sleeping Beauty and The Fox,72 both of them ballets, Diaghilev, the director of the Russian Ballet, added to the list of novelties he has offered this year in Paris a comic opera by Igor Stravinsky, Mavra. The libretto of this, the latest work of the great Russian composer, is derived from a story by Pushkin, the Russian Victor Hugo, who died in 1837 at the age of thirty-eight. The story is titled “The Little House in Kolomna” (Kolomna is a suburb of Petrograd). The libretto was written by Boris Kokhno, a young Russian author, who made his adaptation from Pushkin under Stravinsky’s personal supervision. …73
Stravinsky’s music is young, alert, tragic and also comic. His originality is inexhaustible. This little man, his eyes and features sharpened by a subtle intelligence, is already ranked as one of the great composers. Stravinsky has told me, in speaking of his latest experiments, that he will henceforth require no literary subject for his compositions, that he d
reams of an opera without any plot.
The setting of Mavra is the work of a talented Russian painter, Léopold Survage, who for many years has been living in France. His decor, in spite of the Cubist element in it, is clearly founded on the style of Louis-Philippe.74 He has built up a charming picture about a table with a samovar on it and a cat. The armchairs are painted on the wall in frescoed relief; through the window one sees the onion bulb of a Russian church tower. …75
A New Fashion
The performances of the Russian Ballet are feminine triumphs in the sense that the fair occupants of the boxes and orchestra seats rival each other in wearing the very latest inventions of the great dressmakers. At the first night of Mavra the foyer of the Opera House was agog at the dress worn by Madame Sonia Delaunay-Terck, the wife of the Parisian painter Robert Delaunay. The new fashion initiated by Madame Delaunay was a “robe à poème.” On the panels of her gown, she had had embroidered in bright colors these verses, signed Tzara:76
L’ange a glissé sa main
dans la corbeille l’oeil des fruits
il arrête les roues des autos
et le gyroscope vertigineux du coeur humain
The angel has slipped his hand
in the basket the eye of the fruits
he halts the wheels of the motors
and the vertiginous gyroscope of the human heart
This amusing idea will certainly find imitators. Among other advantages, it provides one which will decide more than one pretty woman to adopt it. When a young man is presented to her he will not have to founder about among the commonplaces which usually follow an introduction: he can con over [sic] the poem inscribed on her dress and open a discussion on the subject, which is sure to contain an element of the unexpected. …
The Modern Art Convention
Erik Satie, that great modern French composer, that kind friend with subtle smile and twinkling eyes, most gay and amusing of men, younger than the youngest despite his years, has been faithful in his affection for the Montparnasse quarter which he once knew as the artistic center of Paris. In truth, many important contributions have come to us from it. There Cubism was born, and there four years ago in a studio in the rue Huyghens, where the Polish painter Kisling gathered his friends about him for artistic evenings, Satie discovered the group of composers now known as “The Six.”77 Satie has still and always gives us in his music that careful irony, that frankness and liberty of manners, and that soft atmosphere which lend Montparnasse its peculiar charm.
A storm, memorable in the annals of modern art, has lately disturbed our life in Paris. A group of artists decided to hold a sort of convention in defense of modern art; unfortunately they at once proved themselves dogmatists of the narrowest kind, with a straitness of view which could not leave us cold.78 Satie and I organized a meeting of protest which buried the Convention and discredited its members. We issued a little pamphlet, Le Coeur à barbe. Contributors: Satie, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Eluard, Péret, Soupault, Fraenkel, and I.79 The paper on which it was printed was of a vulgar pink: a housewife would not hesitate to wrap a camembert in Le Coeur à barbe. The cover looked like a rebus, but was only a haphazard mixture of pictures from catalogues of thirty years ago.
The irony of Satie is biting: he has a power, malicious and almost magic of showing the ridiculous in those who he satirizes.
We await with great interest the appearance of his comic opera Paul et Virginie.80 Derain, who is preparing the scenery, has sought inspiration in the crude decorations of the circus and street fair. It is to be produced in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, with all the lavishness and care for which this playhouse is famous.
Izvestia (Moscow), 29 March 1923
Parisian Sketches
Music
Vladimir Mayakovsky
There is an ancient feud between me and music.81 Burliuk82 and I became Futurists out of despair: we spent the entire evening at Rachmaninoff’s concert at the Assembly of the Nobility83 and ran off after Isle of the Dead, resenting the whole classical carrion.84
Rightfully, I expected the same in Paris, and they could drag me to pianistic ravings only by force.
We are going to Stravinsky’s. What struck me most was where he lives. It is the Pleyel pianola factory.85 This perfected pianola is pushing the musician and the piano more and more out of the world market. Interestingly, the first thing one encounters in this factory is not “divine sounds” but real musical creation, including everything from the musicians to the delivery trucks. The courtyard is the body of the factory. It is full of enormous trucks loaded with pianolas ready for dispatch. Further on—a howling, singing, and rumbling three-story building. On the first floor is an enormous hall, glistening with the backs of the pianolas. In odd corners, there are virtuous Parisian couples listening to all sorts of musical trifles played to try out the instruments. The second floor is Paris’s most beloved concert hall. It is not only impossible to play there during the workday, but even just to sit there. The heartrending wails of pianolas being tested carry even through closed doors. Here, sometimes bustling and sometimes exuding dignity, is the factory owner, Monsieur Lyon, sporting his order of the Legion d’honneur.86 And finally, upstairs—the tiny room of the musician, cluttered with pianos and pianolas. It is here he creates his symphonies, hands them in to the factory, and finally, corrects the musical proofs on the pianola. He says enthusiastically of the pianola: “Write, if you please, for eight, sixteen, twenty-two hands!”
Igor Stravinsky
The soul of this business, or at least one of the souls, is the Parisianized Russian, Igor Stravinsky. Musical Russia knows him very well from Petrushka, The Nightingale, and other works. Paris likewise knows him very well from the productions of S. P. Diaghilev. You see, the pillars of European art are the Spaniard Picasso in painting, and the Russian Stravinsky in music. I did not go to Stravinsky’s concert. He played for us at Lyon’s. He played “The Nightingale,” “The March,” “Two Nightingales,” “The Nightingale and the Chinese Emperor,”87 and also his latest works: “The Spanish Etude” for the pianola,88 Les Noces—a ballet with chorus, which will be playing in the spring with Diaghilev—and excerpts from the opera Mavra.
I don’t dare to judge. This does not make an impression on me. He is considered simultaneously an innovator and a reviver of the Baroque! Nearer to my heart is Prokofiev—from his pre-abroad period;89 the Prokofiev of impetuous, rough marches.
—Translated from the Russian by Katya Ermolaev and Alexandra Grabarchuk
La Revue musicale (Paris), 1 December 1923
The Latest Stravinsky
Jean Cocteau
During a recent interview the Russian poet Mayakovsky and I had, our interpreter was Stravinsky.90
The conversation took an unfortunate turn. Not only did we have to run from one language to another, but indeed from one universe to another.
In a country turned completely upside down, literature gets muddled with the rest. Ideas predominate; poets become politicians.
After such a crisis here at home, we must use the rebus in reacting against speech.91 Over time the rebus disappears, and the struggle turns on points of extreme delicacy, which people who are absent-minded or foreign do not perceive.
This economy, this dynamic reserve, resembles certain machines that retouch zinc plates: a complex monster that operates a tiny milling cutter.
This is why the power of our greatest epochs leaves strangers with an impression of smallness. Imagine the glance thrown by the colossus Mayakovsky at my slingshot!
Stravinsky was still translating. Mayakovsky’s face had nothing to teach me; it was the face of a tremendous infant. The real spectacle was our interpreter; he performed a strange task of contraband, trading single idiom for idiom, passing along only what he wanted.
Here the Stravinsky of today lets himself be seen. Fruitlessly he tried to tie together Russian remarks and untie my own; after Mayakovsky left, we found ourselves among compatriots again
.
Because for the first time I witness this miracle: a thunderstorm worried only about the devices that will give it shape. Oriental Romanticism (uneasiness, savage jolts) in the service of Latin order.92
Genius is no better analyzed than electricity. One has it or one does not. Stravinsky has it; thus he never thinks about it. He never hypnotizes himself with it. He never makes himself dizzy with it. He does not surrender to the danger of stirring his own emotions, of gilding himself or making himself ugly. He channels a brute power and handles it carefully, so that it serves a use in devices ranging from the factory to the flashlight.
Improving, varying the devices must replace the ancient problem of inspiration, of voluntary sublimity, of head-in-your-hands mysticism.
Here is Stravinsky seen head on, in 1923. Let us observe him in profile.
Charm requires perfect tact. One must stand on the edge of the abyss. Almost all graceful artists fall in. Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Weber, Gounod, Chabrier,93 lean but don’t fall. Their deep-rootedness allows them to lean very far.
Mavra performs a balancing act on the edge of the abyss. We think about those clowns who play mandolin on top of a pile of chairs. The pile rocks. It teeters a long time on its tipping point.
How to depict Stravinsky without following this last step? Rings, gaiters, scarves, half-belts, ties, tiepins, wristwatches, mufflers, fetishes, pinces-nez, monocles, glasses, chain bracelets, describe him badly. Put simply, they prove on the surface that Stravinsky goes out of his way for no one. He composes, dresses himself, and speaks as he wishes. When playing the piano, he and the piano adjust into a single unit; when conducting the Octet, he turns his astronomer’s back on us to solve this magnificent instrumental calculus made of silver numbers.
From N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov Stravinsky takes methods of order and bends them to his needs. On Rimsky’s table, ink bottles, penholders, rulers would betray the bureaucrat. The order at Stravinsky’s is alarming. It is the surgeon’s instrument case.
Stravinsky and His World Page 7