40. De Schloezer published two reviews of Mavra, this one in Russian and a very similar one in French. He framed the French review of Mavra as part of a larger overview article on recent productions by the Ballets Russes. See “La Musique: Les Ballets Russes; Trois créations: La Belle au bois dormant de Tchaikovsky, Renard et Mavra de Stravinsky; Quelques reprises: Le Sacre du printemps, Pétrouchka, Contes russes, L’Après-midi d’un faune,” La Nouvelle Revue française 9/106 (1 July 1922): 116–18. De Schloezer (1881–1969) was a Russian writer, translator, and musicologist who immigrated to Paris in 1921. In 1923 he published a seminal biography in Russian of his brother-in-law, Alexander Scriabin, and a decade later a monograph in French on Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky (Paris: Claude Aveline, 1929). Stravinsky never forgave him for his review of Mavra, and complained frequently about him to friends and family. See Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 295–316, esp. 307.
41. Alexander Alyabyev (1787–1851) and Aleksey Verstovsky (1799–1862) were early Russian composers of art song.
42. A Kuchkist is somebody who belongs to the kúchka or “little heap”—a term that comes from the phrase mogúchaya kúchka, which Vladimir Stasov first used in 1867 to describe the “New Russian School” of composers around Balakirev. This group is commonly called the Mighty Five in English.
43. Schloezer is referring to Stravinsky’s “La Belle au bois dormant: Lettre à Serge de Diaghilew,” and “Une lettre de Stravinsky sur Tchaikovsky.”
44. Renard had premiered 18 May 1922 at the Paris Opéra in a program that included Fokine’s Carnaval, Aurora’s Wedding, Renard, and the Polovtsian Dances, by that time a classic of the Ballets Russes repertoire. The proximity of its premiere to that of Mavra led many critics to compare the two works.
45. French title: “La Quinzaine musicale: “Mavra” d’Igor Stravinsky à l’Opéra—Les Ballets cambodgiens—Les Sakharoff—Concerts divers,” L’Eclair, 5 June 1922. Alexis Roland Manuel Lévy, known always as Roland-Manuel, (1891–1966) was a French composer and critic and student of Roussel and Ravel. He later became quite close to Stravinsky, and helped him to write his Poétique musicale. See Valérie Dufour’s article in this volume, “The Poétique musicale: A Counterpoint in Three Voices.”
46. French title: “Au Théâtre de l’Opéra: ‘Mavra’: Opéra-Comique en un acte d’après Pouchkine, poème de M. Boris Kokhno, musique de M. Igor Stravinsky,” Comoedia, 5 June 1922. This article includes three sections: this untitled first section by Laloy is followed by a section on the performance (“L’Interprétation”) by Charles Tenroc and one on the sets (“Le Décor”) by “R.-J.” Louis Laloy (1874–1944) was one of the most important musicologists and music critics in France in the early twentieth century. He supported Stravinsky for decades, and reviewed many performances of his works.
47. Laloy’s part of this article ends with an unfortunate typo. The second to last line is repeated by mistake in place of the line that should be there, leading to the creation of the nonsensical sentence: “D’un équilibre toujours insta-du à plusiers reprises, et le sera.”
48. French title: “La Musique: A propos de “Mavra” de Igor Strawinsky,” Feuilles libres 27 (June–July 1922): 223–24. Stravinsky and Poulenc had met in 1918 and became friends around the time of Mavra’s premiere. Stravinsky valued this review, which Poulenc sent him.
49. See Vuillermoz on “Mavra” above. Poulenc quotes the words “lacks melody” misleadingly from Vuillermoz’s original sentence: “And then one notes that Stravinsky, whose rhythmic genius is prodigious, lacks terribly in melodic invention.”
50. See Roland-Manuel’s piece above.
51. Maurice Bex, “La Musique. A l’Opéra: Chorégraphies,” Revue hebdomadaire (17 June 1922): 360–63. Bex’s review is more sympathetic to Mavra than Poulenc’s commentary reveals. Bex uses the expressions “torrent of syncopation” and “such ingeniously organized disorder” (misquoted by Poulenc) to describe Renard, not Mavra. Poulenc likewise quotes Bex’s final sentence deceivingly. In the original, Bex writes: “And yet [Mavra] contains lines and even pages of delicate tenderness mixed with sudden leaps of noisy and unbridled joy as agreeable to the ear as the sight of a puppy playing is pleasant to the eye.”
52. Ecoles normales are elite schools in France. Poulenc’s neologisms and comedic tone here are reminiscent of Eric Satie’s prose style.
53. Eric Satie, “Ne confondons pas,” Le Coq 3 (July–August–September, 1920): 6. Satie lists Liszt, Chopin, Schubert, Musorgsky, Debussy, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner as poets, and only Rimsky-Korsakov as a pawn.
54. This expression, sur le même plan, points toward a harmonic system that abandons the hierarchies and tensions of tonality. Robert Craft translates this passage more fancifully (and incorrectly) in Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1:158.
55. The Jockey Club and L’Epatant were elite clubs whose aristocratic members had famously attended performances at the Opéra since the nineteenth century. With “red card holders” Poulenc is referring to cards used to bet on horse races.
56. Paul Collaer met Stravinsky in 1920, and became a hugely energetic promoter of his works in Belgium. Collaer later integrated this piece on Mavra into the more comprehensive article he prepared for the premiere of the work in the Pro Arte’s all-Stravinsky concert on 14 January 1924. See “Igor Strawinsky,” Arts et lettres d’aujourd’hui 2/2 (13 January 1924): 23–37. Collaer and Stravinsky had a falling out in 1925, when Stravinsky rejected Collaer’s monograph on his life and works. See Valérie Dufour, “Paul Collaer et Igor Strawinsky: Lettres inédites au compositeur (1920–1925),” 99–116; and Stravinski et ses exégètes (1910–1940) (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2006), 200–201; as well as Paul Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermée (Liège: Mardaga, 1996); and Strawinsky (Brussels: Edition “Equilibres,” 1930).
57. Collaer uses the unusual expression “une pensée d’objectivisme.”
58. André Derain was a French fauvist painter who in 1919 designed the sets for the Ballets Russes production of La Boutique fantastique (with choreography by Léonide Massine and music by Ottorino Respighi).
59. The character’s actual name is Parasha, which means feces.
60. Collaer uses the French historical term grand air rather than the word aria.
61. Collaer uses the term pudeur, which describes a reserved behavior important in French etiquette after World War I.
62. Collaer here quotes part of Jean Cocteau’s statement: “We can expect soon an orchestra without the strings’ caress. A sumptuous wind band [un riche orphéon] of winds, brass, and percussion.” See Jean Cocteau, Le Coq et l’Arlequin: Notes autour de la musique 1918, preface by Georges Auric (Paris: Editions Stock, 1979), 65.
63. Collaer describes the critics as “attribés”—a nonexistent word that is perhaps a typo. He may have intended to use the word “attribués” to qualify the critics as having been assigned to review Parade.
64. German title: “Strawinskijs Neue Bühnenwerke,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 4/17–18 (November 1922): 260–62. M. M. Frank translated this review from Milhaud’s French original, which has not survived in his archives and was never published.
65. The German word Cymbal is used for cimbalon here.
66. In German: Kolorit und Stimmung.
67. Milhaud did hear Renard on May 18, but was on vacation horseback riding and enjoying local customs in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and missed Mavra. “So much for Mavra,” he wrote his friend Paul Collaer, “I prefer my horse and my evenings with the local people, fishermen or bull breeders, at the door of the little café where I am staying.” Milhaud to Paul Collaer, 1 June 1922, in Collaer, Correspondance avec des amis musiciens, 101.
68. Paul Collaer also mentions Jean Cocteau’s orphéon in his review of Mavra, which Milhaud perhaps read.
69. Milhaud quotes “italo-russo-negro-american music
” from Boris de Schloezer’s “La Musique: Les Ballets Russes.” In his Russian review, given above, Schloezer similarily describes a “synthesis of Italo-Russian and Negro-Russian elements” in Mavra. Ravel is the impressionist composer who allegedly referred to Mavra as the new Le Domino noir (a reference to the popular opéra-comique by Daniel Auber from 1837). Barbara Kelly claims Ravel said this in a Spanish interview with André Révész, but Ravel does not mention Mavra there (see “El gran músico Mauricio Ravel habla de su arte,” ABC, 1 May 1924). Ravel did later criticize Mavra in a 1931 interview with José Bruyr (in Le Guide du concert, 16 October 1931), and there is much evidence he did not like it. See Barbara Kelly, Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988), 15.
70. The section of this article starting with “The music for Renard is extremely lively” and ending here was translated anonymously into English as “Milhaud on Stravinsky,” The Musical Times 64/959 (1 January 1923): 40. This excerpt omits part of the text, including Milhaud’s reference to Boris de Schloezer and Ravel, and the last line about Gabriel Parès.
71. Gabriel Parès (1830–1887) was a well-known composer and military band conductor.
72. The text reprinted here was published in Vanity Fair 19/3 (November 1922): 51, 88. It is illustrated with Henri Rousseau’s The Snake Charmer. The two ballets Tzara is referring to are Tchaikovsky’s Aurora’s Wedding and Stravinsky’s Renard, performed on 18 May 1922 at the Paris Opéra.
73. I omit here Tzara’s retelling of the story of Mavra.
74. “Louis-Philippe” describes a furniture style popular during the reign of that French king from 1830 to 1848. The style is characterized by dark wood and dressers with tulip-shaped, curved top drawers.
75. I omit here Tzara’s praise for Stefan Belina-Skupevsky’s and Oda Slobodskaya’s performances in Mavra, as well as the subsection “Modernism in Hungary,” in which Tzara reviews the Surrealist, Cubist, and Dadaist content of the Hungarian journal Ma. I also later omit his discussion of the painter Max Ernst, new “Dadaist” books, and Henri Rousseau.
76. Sonia Delaunay and Tristan Tzara began creating robes poèmes or “poem dresses” in 1921. Delaunay extended onto the human body the theory of simultanisme or “simultaneity” that she and her husband, Robert, had earlier explored in painting by juxtaposing blocks of color and words on cloth and by visualizing the dynamic rhythmic experience of modernity in women’s fashion. In 1923 Delaunay established her own printing shop, Atelier simultane (1923–34), to realize her fashions.
77. In 1917, the painter Moïse Kisling and the writer Blaise Cendrars planted the seed for the formation of a musical circle around Erik Satie in a series of organized concerts at 6 rue Huyghens, where music by Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, and Louis Durey was performed, and paintings by Picasso, Juan Gris, and others were exhibited.
78. Tzara is referring to the Congress for the Determination of the Directives and Defense of the Modern Spirit, organized by André Breton in Paris in January 1922 with the goal of rejecting reliance on the past in art in open defiance of Jean Cocteau’s “call to order” in Le Coq et l’Arlequin. This congress led to the split between Tzara and Breton, and between the Dadaists and the Surrealists.
79. Le Coeur à barbe (The bearded heart) was the only issue of a “transparent newspaper” published by Tristan Tzara in April 1922 in reply to André Breton’s attacks in “Après Dada,” Comoedia, 3 March 1922. It contains brief texts by Paul Eluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Erik Satie, Philippe Soupault, Théodore Fraenkel, Benjamin Péret, and others who critiqued André Breton and also mocked those who said Cubism was dead. The rift between Tzara and Breton led to the official launch of Surrealism with André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.
80. Erik Satie worked on the opéra-comique Paul et Virginie (libretto by Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet) between August 1920 and 1923. He did not complete the opera and it is now lost.
81. Russian title: “Parizhskiye ocherki,” Izvestiya, 29 March 1923. The Russian Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) had traveled to Paris in November 1922. I am very grateful to Maureen Carr, whose idea it was to include Mayakovsky and Cocteau in this section.
82. David Burliuk (1882–1967) was Ukrainian and a seminal figure in the Russian Futurist movement. He gave Futurist performances throughout the Soviet Union with Mayakovsky and Vasily Kamensky from December 1913 to April 1914.
83. The Assembly of Nobility was a self-governing body of the Russian aristocracy. The Moscow clubhouse of the assembly, called the House of Unions after 1917, had a concert hall with excellent acoustics, which today is called Column Hall.
84. Rachmaninoff composed the symphonic poem Isle of the Dead, op. 29, in 1908, inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting of the same name. Here Mayakovsky is being cynical about the class premises of classical music.
85. Stravinsky had been given a studio in the Pleyel piano factory in February 1921, possibly as part of his five-year contract with the company, which began in May 1920. He kept the studio until 1933.
86. Gustave Lyon (1857–1936) took over management of the Pleyel factory in 1887. He was known for his research into acoustics and inventions (including the double piano) and became a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1889.
87. These are excerpts from The Nightingale.
88. Etude for pianola.
89. Mayakovsky is referring to the period before Prokofiev left Russia in 1918.
90. French title: “Stravinsky dernière heure,” La Revue musicale 5/2 (1 December 1923): 142–45. This essay is accompanied by a drawing with the caption “Igor Stravinsky playing The Rite of Spring drawn by Jean Cocteau in 1913.”
91. Cocteau refers here to a shift in discourse in countries ravaged by crisis or revolution, when the pictorial symbolism of the rebus becomes capable of countering official speech. Tzara uses the rebus in Le Coeur à barbe.
92. Cocteau refers to the percussion instruments that surround Stravinsky in his Pleyel studio as appareils (devices or appliances), thereby drawing a connection between art music and mechanical means of production. The “thunderstorm” is the creative idea in Stravinsky’s mind that will be given shape by these instruments. “Oriental Romanticism” describes the style of works like The Rite of Spring, the exuberance of which Stravinsky reins in after World War I with neoclassical rules
93. Here Cocteau added the footnote, “Today, Francis Poulenc.”
94. Les Noces was premiered at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris on 13 June 1923. Although premiered after Mavra, it was composed earlier.
95. Russian title: “Dve Operï Stravinskogo,” Vyorstï 3 (1928): 109–26. This article originally had two sections: one, translated here, on Mavra, and the other on Oedipus Rex. Boris de Schloezer translated the part on Oedipus Rex into French as “Oedipus Rex de Strawinsky,” La Revue musicale 8/8 (August 1927): 240–53. It appeared in German to coincide with the performance at the Kroll Opera as “Oedipus Rex: Opera-Oratorium nach Sophokles von Igor Strawinsky,” Blätter der Staatsoper und der Städtischen Oper 8/19 (February 1928): 9–13.
96. Lourié does not seem fully aware that Mavra received its premiere with The Rite of Spring and Petrushka.
97. Lourié’s anti-modernism is evident in the two documents that can be found in the section in this volume titled “Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art.” His attitude toward modernism—and with it, we can assume, Les Six—differed significantly from Stravinsky’s. Lourié’s understanding of modernism was strongly influenced by Jacques Maritain, and centered on rejecting art that was divorced from human experience (and hence from religious purpose as he interpreted it). Stravinsky, in contrast, primarily disliked only the term “modernism,” which he felt unnecessarily emphasized the new and gave an inadequate frame to cultural production in his time. Here Lourié appears to reject the very composers Stravinsky remained friends with throughout the 1930s, including Fran
cis Poulenc. Richard Taruskin views this differently, however, seeing Lourié’s and Stravinsky’s relationships to modernism as basically interchangeable in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1584–91.
98. Vasily Trutovsky (1740–1810) was a Ukrainian folksong collector who published the first printed collection of Russian folksongs, Sobraniye russkikh prostïkh pesen s notami (1779).
99. Apollon Grigoryev (1822–1864) was a Russian poet and author of romances.
Stravinsky’s Russian Library
TATIANA BARANOVA MONIGHETTI
Those who knew Stravinsky well remember him as a passionate, insatiable reader. Photographs depict him reading—on trains and planes, during concert intermissions, lounging in hotels, and in bed before going to sleep. Stravinsky customarily read books with his first wife, Yekaterina, and their children; later, he continued this tradition with his second wife, Vera. He discussed book purchases in his correspondence; Vera, too, mentioned Stravinsky’s books in her diary. Stravinsky bought books regularly and in large quantities, and had done so ever since his youth in St. Petersburg. In spite of the losses that may have occurred when he moved from Europe to the United States in 1939 (the number of books he brought with him when he emigrated is unknown), his library in Los Angeles included between nine and ten thousand volumes, most of them in English, fewer in French, and even fewer in Russian. The young librarian Edwin Allen had intended to catalogue them when Stravinsky and Vera moved to a new home in September 1964, but found that because of their large number there was never time to do it.1 Robert Craft inherited Stravinsky’s library after Vera’s death in 1982, and sold part of it (approximately 700 books and 1,000 musical scores) to the Paul Sacher Stiftung in 1990.2 The notes and markings Stravinsky left on these books give lasting evidence of his habits, attitudes, affections, and prejudices.
Stravinsky and His World Page 10