This composer is muddled with the work he does. Clothed in it, harnessed to his oeuvre like the old one-man band, peeling off and piling up around him skins of music, he is indistinguishable from his room. To see Stravinsky in Morges, in Leysin, in Paris, at Pleyel’s where he lives, is to see the animal in its shell. Pianos, drums, metronomes, cimbaloms, tools for creating staves, American lead sharpeners, music stands, snare and bass drums are its extension. They are the pilot’s cabin, the insect’s bristling arms shown us by the filmmaker a thousand times bigger than in nature, during mating season.
Of course The Rite of Spring uproots me and Les Noces—a sports car—carries me off at an incredible speed; but even in Les Noces, where the Rite’s spirit finds its definitive orchestral formula, beauty is still pitched at the gut level. How to forget that the people sitting next to me in the theater, who acclaim it, showed indifference for Mavra, written afterward?94 Their approval irritates me. I feel like I’m watching the musician being applauded on his own cheeks.
Is there anything more admirable than this stern man, of whom the amorous public demands, “Brutalize me, hit me again,” and who offers them lace?
Such a pretty gift disconcerts. Blows are better understood.
—Translated by Bridget Behrmann and Tamara Levitz
Vyorstï (Paris), 1928
Mavra
Arthur-Vincent Lourié
1.
In its significance, Stravinsky’s second opera, Mavra, lies at the core of everything he has produced in recent years.95 It was composed and premiered in 1922, but it has yet to be appreciated and accepted. Mavra provoked the indignation of some, who heard it as a “triviality,” and the indifference of others.
For the circle of those close to Stravinsky’s music of The Rite of Spring era, Mavra was intrinsically unacceptable. The habit, even the necessity of discovering “stunning” sonorities in each of his new works had been formed. Among music lovers, what was almost a “tradition” of Stravinsky’s style had taken shape. From each of his new works they expected a continuation of the Rite, of its elemental force and rebelliousness.96
They were perplexed when this all ended, and were unforgiving. The modernists were perplexed, offended by the triviality and “cliché.” It may be the opera disappointed the same people who witnessed the first performances of the Rite and the rise in its significance. It disappointed those who had seemingly followed Stravinsky’s entire journey over the decade separating the Rite from Mavra. This explains Mavra’s failure and the enthusiasm with which Les Noces was received a year later—after the unsuccessful Mavra it demonstrated a return to the old way.
Mavra proved least comprehensible because in it Stravinsky pursued his new principles resolutely and rigorously. In fact, this new path in his music began much earlier, with L’Histoire du soldat and Pulcinella. The characteristic features of the new formal texture [faktura] that in Mavra are embodied with utmost perfection were already laid out in those works.
The one thing that separates Mavra from other works of the most recent period is its fundamental connection with Russian art and culture. In contrast to Mavra, all the remaining new works by Stravinsky are based on something like a universal style, irrespective of national differences and musical language. In this respect, Mavra is an exception. It is first and foremost a national Russian opera, like A Life for the Tsar or Eugene Onegin. At the same time, it also presents new possibilities for the rebirth of operatic form in the West—if opera is destined to be reborn at all.
2.
The decline of opera in the West is the result of the Wagnerian legacy. The so-called music drama gradually swallowed up the pure operatic forms. Degenerating into pseudo-Romanticism, post-Wagnerian theater with its rhetorical emotionalism destroyed the instrumental plasticity [plastiku] of the classical style. For Western opera Mavra may become a formal buttress. Notwithstanding Mavra’s profoundly Russian character—which fundamentally governs its musical language and lyrico-epic atmosphere—it can and should be grasped from a non-national perspective, thanks to the principles of its construction. The objective value of Mavra is in the method of its formal construction. The reason for its obscurity thus far, its “paradoxicality,” lurks within this formal method.
Reviving the Russian national opera along its classic lines, as well as making a down payment on a new flowering for the classic form of opera in the West, Stravinsky takes us back to an unadulterated primary source, first and foremost to the operas of Glinka. The path from A Life for the Tsar to Ruslan and Ludmila is the entire path traversed by Glinka. In its time, Ruslan was a logical consequence of A Life for the Tsar. And what happened? A Life for the Tsar was embraced—relatively speaking—by Russian society mainly thanks to its patriotic topic. To its contemporaries, Ruslan was indigestible. They simply kissed off this opera, and for a protracted period. Glinka himself bore witness to the first performance of Ruslan and Ludmila, the opera he regarded as his supreme achievement, and which became the basis for all subsequent Russian music in its national ideal:
“When the curtain descended, they began to call for me, but the applause was very tepid and there was stubborn hissing, primarily from the stage and the orchestra. I turned to General Dubelt in the director’s box with the question: ‘They seem to be hissing. Should I go out for a curtain call?’
‘Go on,’ the General replied. ‘Christ suffered more than you.’”
During Glinka’s life, Ruslan was not understood at all. It was appreciated ultimately after Glinka’s death and became the foundation upon which the edifice of the Russian national music school was erected. Ruslan was the covenant embraced by the “Five” during the first period of the existence of the Balakirev circle. But the “Five” never had a clear understanding of the line that extended from Glinka. As a result, the fork they took led Russian music—represented chiefly by the figure of Rimsky-Korsakov—to a pseudo-Russian nationalism nurtured on German scholasticism.
For all the outward appearance of a link with Glinka, his heritage was exposed to elaboration and to apparent formal extension during that period of Russian musical culture. But it was by no means exposed to enhancement and development of the pure line it manifested. In its essence, Glinka’s line has still not been extended. Irrespective of this, the attitude of leading Russian musicians of that time was as typical for them as is our attitude to A Life for the Tsar. To us, A Life for the Tsar is closer now—for the purity of its primitive forms and its musical virgin territory. Notwithstanding the more significant role Ruslan played in the past—which we esteem as the perfect embodiment of the Russian musical empire—perhaps it is precisely thanks to its primitivism that we “need” A Life for the Tsar more. The same is true of Tchaikovsky; Eugene Onegin is closer to us than The Queen of Spades, despite the greater formal perfection of the latter. Or with Bach—the St. John Passion and not the St. Matthew Passion.
Mavra resurrects the broken link with the line of Glinka. It establishes that line on a new basis and captures reflectively the Glinka not of Ruslan, but of A Life for the Tsar. Irrespective of the role played by A Life for the Tsar in the creation of Mavra, Glinka’s opera still awaits its actual rehabilitation.
Besides Glinka, Mavra makes a return to Tchaikovsky, who in this work became the intermediate link between Glinka and Stravinsky. The genealogical line of Mavra can be delineated as follows: from A Life for the Tsar through Tchaikovsky to the contemporary canon. Stravinsky’s attitude to Glinka is a matter of the purity of national tradition and a fundamental bond. For all the dissimilarity of their temperaments and tastes, what he holds in common with Tchaikovsky is based on almost familial blood ties.
Aware of his estrangement from musical modernism, glancing back over Russian music of the past, Stravinsky was bound to align himself with Tchaikovsky. It was the natural reaction against obsolete modernism. The affinity with Tchaikovsky, which always existed, was openly revealed only in Mavra, later in the Octet. The return to Tchaikovsky, the reevaluation
of him that Stravinsky made during the period of Mavra’s creation, and the subsequent consolidation of this position, demolished conclusively the onetime and—what’s more—moribund ideology of the modernist camp.97 Several of the leading French musicians found their own Tchaikovsky in Gounod. Having noted the fact, I refrain from comparisons.
The keys to authentic realism—which has become the ideal of our days—were concealed within the music of Tchaikovsky. Stravinsky found and took possession of them. Loving Tchaikovsky, one cannot but fall in love with Mavra; it is a vivid remembrance of Tchaikovsky, miraculously resurrected by Stravinsky.
3.
Above all, it is the insignificance of the subject that astonishes in Mavra, its deliberate negligibility as it were. For the shortsighted, this want of scenic plot reduces the work to the level of a theatrical skit, to “trifles” of the sort that aren’t worth mentioning. But the fact of the matter is that Mavra’s subject isn’t an anecdote drawn from “The Little House in Kolomna.” Its subject matter is a purely musical, formal task. In its scenic effect, Mavra is built on an anecdote, but it traces back to the national lyrico-epic opera in its musical effect. This is the reverse of those countless operas based on the most complex of subjects—mythological, historical, symbolic, and so on—that are musically impossible to fathom. In Mavra the correlation with the poem is minimal; it is just a point of departure. The plot of Mavra is just the springboard for a vault onto a musical trapeze. In this respect it satisfies its intended purpose. With the exception of two lines, nothing remains of Pushkin’s octaves in the libretto of Stravinsky’s opera:
We need a kitchen maid. But find one—where?
Go ask our neighbor. Cheap ones are so rare!
Stravinsky didn’t illustrate “The Little House in Kolomna.” He created a work that is analogous with Pushkin’s in type and method. As it is in “The Little House in Kolomna,” so too in Mavra the center of gravity is in what is found alongside of the plot.
In terms of intimate savor, Stravinsky achieved in Mavra what he has always admired: the chiaroscuro of Russian urban melos and an idiosyncratic drawing-room ambiance [bïtovoy kolorit], sung and instrumental, that has always appealed to him. In Mavra, he expressed this more pointedly than ever before. But this is a personal moment in his creativity, about which we will not pass judgment now. What is important to us is the integrated character of the composition and the objective value that is manifested in it.
The genetic link to the sources of the origins of Russian opera, and the rejection of everything that had been accepted concerning its evolution is what, first and foremost, is important in Mavra. In every artistic epoch, what is rejected is no less representative than what is endorsed. This disavowal of whole stages of past musical history is very significant at the present moment in the work of Stravinsky. An acceptance of Mavra mandates first and foremost the elimination from the contemporary agenda of all Wagnerian theater, as well as the Wagnerian music drama as pursued by his successors, headed by Richard Strauss in Europe and Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia.
The primitivism in Mavra is intentional. The apparent poverty and deficiency is the result of creative will and artistic consciousness.
Upon closer examination of the score with an “armed eye,” and verification with discerning ears, the primitivism of Mavra turns out to be the result of a synthesis, without which the birth of the primitive is impossible. In its simplicity, Mavra harbors Stravinsky’s entire past experience and is the consequence of mature mastery.
4.
The musical text in Mavra is built on two principles: 1) the element of song, divided into purely lyrical and drawing-room inflections, and 2) an instrumental-plastic element. Meter and rhythm serve coordinating purposes and are of prime importance with regard to the architectonics. In Mavra, meter shapes the motion of the sonic fabric, a function that is predominantly conveyed by means of the instrumental accompaniment. Rhythm governs the structure and the relationship among the aural components of the sung melos. When the instrumental component ceases to accompany and becomes independent, rhythm plays the same role with respect to these very brief, purely instrumental moments.
Given its lyrical foundation, overall the opera is very dynamic. The musical current flows continuously—sometimes driving, sometimes evenly—with such clarity that we seem to see the streambed on which it runs through a transparent veil of sound.
The dynamism that was always so typical of Stravinsky is imparted in Mavra by the reinforcement of the role of meters. They are like engines and levers in the opera. Meters take on self-sufficient status; they are independent of the rhythmic construction but are brought into interaction with it. In part, they govern the instrumental color of the opera and the aspect of its purely musical motion, as opposed to the scenic motion proper. In Mavra, meters and rhythm take on a completely neutral, almost impersonal aspect. Their job is not (as in the past, in the Rite, for instance) to develop emotional energy. In Mavra, as in other recent works, meter is the force that sets the contours of the sound design in motion. It governs the shape of the motion. Rhythm is the variable that establishes the sounding relationships. It governs the shape of the structure. Tempo is the connection between them. It is the speed control. The emotional dynamic on which he built some of his previous works (the most striking example in this sense is again The Rite of Spring) is circumvented. A dynamic that is purely musical—without emotional inspiration—asserts itself. The aim thus established amounts to the attainment of an almost mechanical “detachment.” What is acquired is the precision of the driving force of metric elements, their maximal scope and stability.
The musical language of Mavra is utterly simple and straightforward. It is governed primarily by the character of its melody. The basis is a tonal (more rarely a modal) diatonic design. There is frequent use of alternating parallel major and minor, and of the juxtaposition of artificial and natural modes. Everything is transformed into purely singing lines, even into drawing-room inflections. Recitative is nowhere to be found. The integrality of the song forms is one of the greatest virtues of this opera. In terms of the technical mastery of its design, the opera is constructed flawlessly.
Without interrupting the flow, the proportions of the sections and musical periods are arranged so that they fit together seamlessly, without any transitional links. Like Chinese lacquer boxes nested one inside another. The spacing between the individual sections is so exact and true that you feel the air passing between them as between two adjacent objects. This is achieved by the skill of producing broad synthetic amalgamations of sound masses and lines and by the ruthless elimination of everything unnecessary for the flow and development of these lines.
In the transitions from one episode to the next in Mavra, cadences and final codas are eliminated and replaced by what could be called a system of musical “automatic doors” leading one episode directly into the next. In these moments—sometimes it is an octave, sometimes a third or a seventh—hidden amalgamations occur that resolve traditional musical formulas into the simplest relationship; in the past they dissipated the overall dynamic of the whole with their ornament and flourish. Stravinsky uses this technique to attach consecutive episodes one to another, creating a seamless equilibrium on this transfer circuit.
A mosaic of consecutive musical sections existed in classical opera. In Romantic drama they were more or less fluid. Stravinsky creates a synthetic construct of the whole.
Thanks to the mastery of amalgamation, the texture of the work is perfectly smooth, without disruptions and disparities in sound intensity. The formal method behind it regulates the whole work and controls its temperature precisely. Spontaneous inspiration and vibrant energy are distributed uniformly, like proper blood circulation throughout the body. For all the thoroughgoing severity of its execution, however, the formal method is hidden and, as a whole, the opera registers emotionally without raising the question of how that is accomplished.
5.
In terms of i
ts orchestral color, Mavra isn’t endowed with independent significance. Its orchestra is the logical extension of instrumental principles common to all Stravinsky’s recent compositions. Here we have the same assemblage of timbres and volumes for which the basis is not the sonic coloration (the “savor”), but the weight, density, and permeability of the sonic volumes as well as the caliber of sonic temperatures. An altogether singular charm of instrumental color is created by the female voices “encased” by the brass.
As a Russian opera, Mavra showed the West a side of Russian music with which European art had not yet come into contact. Meanwhile, Mavra was just a new manifestation of this age-old style. It is the culture of the Russian urban—predominantly Petersburgian—romance. This line, stretching from Glinka and the musicians of his circle, is virtually unknown in the West, as opposed to the line that stretches from Musorgsky. Dargomyzhsky was descended directly from Glinka. He still carried the legacy of that epoch, but it was he who laid the foundation for dramatic music later validated decisively by Musorgsky, who created the dramatic epos on the foundation of folksong creativity. Glinka’s domain was the romance and the lyrical song. Both these lines are equally significant for Russian art and it is impossible to understand Russian music while rejecting one of them. Meanwhile, only the work of Musorgsky was introduced to the West and influenced European music. The attitude to Russian music was an enthusiasm for elemental force and, above all, for the new exotic. The more saturated a work was with folk character, the more it impressed. The attitude to Stravinsky did not escape this; he was considered almost Musorgsky’s direct successor. If there were grounds for this in his first period (from the Rite to Les Noces), with Mavra Stravinsky introduces a species of Russian music that is utterly new to the West.
As the indispensable basis for a musical composition, folklore is absent in Mavra. In its stead, the style of the urban romance is adopted. After Tchaikovsky this style was held in contempt by Russian musicians, who considered it unworthy of “high” art. It was demoted from the artistic foreground to musical works of the second and third ranks.
Stravinsky and His World Page 8