How does Orpheus continue after the initial defeat that ends Example 5? Example 6 gives the entire movement in a format similar to that of Example 5, aligning in this case a repeating F–G–A–B melody in the first violins (see the brackets beginning in system III). In addition to parsing the movement by phrase, this alignment draws attention to the increasingly important role of the accompanying string and wind parts. Are they signs of hope, or do they complicate Orpheus’s song? Two immediate observations will help us to understand how these additional voices interact with Oedipus’s melody, both shaping and revealing his fate. Notice first (at the end of system V) that the movement ends not on a lower E, but on the problematic A, harmonized here in an unsettling dominant seventh whose doubled rumbling CG’s can only mean trouble. (Orpheus himself also ends on A, as I will discuss below.) Before the troubling end, however, notice that the majority of these lines move upward, rather than downward, by step. It seems that Orpheus’s music has had some effect. At rehearsal number 2 (the last measure given in system III) the score indicates that some friends begin to enter onstage to offer Orpheus presents and to comfort him. Although Orpheus’s music continues to descend, the upward motion of the strings continues to accumulate, both in rising stepwise lines and in a growth into the upward registers of the orchestra.
Example 6. Orpheus, ordered succession for the entire first movement to five measures after rehearsal number 3.
In other words, as upward movement in both lower and upper strings matches Orpheus’s downward movement, the movement as a whole expresses a futility tinged with hope. In their earliest ascent, in system II, the upper strings rise tentatively from E as far as A before falling back to a quasi-cadential G. In their next attempt, shown in system III, they reach as far up as B, meeting Orpheus’s original tetrachordal descent to that pitch, and winds reinforce the arrival of the B in a higher octave. But that meeting fails spectacularly: just as strings reach up to B Orpheus is not on E but on F, where he is compelled to stop. The subsequent chord in the winds reaches the end of a phrase on a grating doubling of F and B harmonized by a dissonant augmented triad from below. Although the goal pitch arrives at the end of system III, it is neither played by Orpheus nor do the pitches around it sound secure.
The fourth system begins similarly; the strings rise only to A, Oedipus stops on F, and the winds once more intervene with an uncomfortably dissonant harmony (in the first complete bar of system IV). After this second failed intervention, they take a new tack, descending from F rather than rising from it (see the second complete measure of IV). Their repetitions have an amazing effect on Orpheus: although he finally achieves the lower E for which he has been striving, he unfortunately continues even further down to D (see the exclamation mark at the end of system IV). The C-rooted chord on which this phrase ends is notably missing its third E, inflected instead by a replacement D.
System V, the last phrase in the movement, shows one final attempt to bring descending and ascending lines into some kind of synchronization. Orpheus once again returns to his original melody as the phrase starts, and manages to move through an entire uninterrupted descent in its third measure. But his success is short-lived: in the final bars of the movement he descends not from the higher E, but from C (circled in the fourth measure of the system). His final melody eventually comes to rest on a decelerated, off-the-beat descent from E to A, the pitch that first challenged his melody in the second measure of the movement. Against this brave, if useless, movement are the upper strings, which refuse to budge beyond A; the upper brackets over the upper violin melody at the start of system V identify a particularly emblematic gesture in that they sound above, and thus weaken, the B to E ascent below them. Their rising motion from B to E is clearly superseded by the newer motion of E up to A and the eventual close by Orpheus himself from E down to A. The replacement of E by A as an alternative goal forecasts the futility of Orpheus’s music.
The plaintive slowing down of all parts and the many modally inflected minor triads in system V are final signals that Orpheus’s mission is doomed. Even so, the final chord, whose dominant-seventh G has been present in previous measures, compels the music to continue onward: despite all signs thus far, Orpheus is compelled to strive to reunite with Eurydice in one more retelling of this ancient ritual, and thus the ballet moves from prologue to actual dancing. Over the course of the dancing Orpheus does not succeed in returning Eurydice to earth because he must look back; in fact, he rips a bandage from his eyes just before their journey is over, and she falls dead. In the final pas d’action (immediately preceding the apotheosis, to be discussed below), Balanchine and Stravinsky create a dance in which Orpheus’s failure leads to his hideous dismemberment by the Bacchantes, the female worshippers of the god Bacchus, who are sometimes known for representing that god’s destructive power.
Example 7a. Orpheus, scene 3 “Orpheus’s Apotheosis,” opening nine measures.
Example 7b. Final five measures of scene 3.
Yet, although Orpheus is dead, and his mission unaccomplished, his lyre remains. In a final poignant apotheosis movement, Apollo (Orpheus’s reputed father) wrests the lyre from Orpheus’s body, whereupon it begins to play its original mournful tune. Examples 7a and 7b reproduce the beginning and end of the final movement, bracketing the reappearance of the tune in its original incarnation from E to E. After its first statement—perhaps an homage to the life of Orpheus—Apollo transforms the melody, sending it upward, this time not in a failed journey from Hades to Earth, but from there to the heavens, where music may continue unimpeded by the fates of those constrained to live on Earth. Moreover, Apollo has inverted the scalar melody from a mournful E-Phrygian footing to a more realistic and sustainable Dorian D. In his hands, the harp melody becomes stable, in fact a near ostinato: it is no longer subject to the vagaries of incompletion found in the first movement, and in its final measures makes one final, unimpeded journey from a lower D to an upper one.
Whereas the opening movement closed on an unusually spaced A-major dominant-seventh chord, the ballet itself comes to an end on a more conventionally spaced D-major seventh suggesting that the music goes on, even if Orpheus is dead. This final movement is an apotheosis in the truest setting of the word: in this setting, it is not Orpheus who has been elevated to divine status, but his music. With human parentage, Orpheus was bound to fail; but music escapes the finite temporality of Earth to sound even in the heavens.
From the start, Stravinsky’s Orpheus struggles with two contrasting conceptions of the nature of time: he has lost his beloved to an eternity of separation, but through the use of music, which takes place through time, he wishes to restore Eurydice to his own temporality, to the world of time’s passage. Orpheus loses his battle with the time of passage, as we always knew he would. But another conception of time, one associated with infinity, fulfillment, and the world of the gods, supersedes Orpheus’s mortality. We are reminded that Greek tragedy takes its origins in ritual, whose essential function is to repeat a given narrative rather than to develop it. Orpheus’s exhortations may have been futile, but they give rise to the eternity of music.
Measuring Repetition
In the analyses above I have focused on how Stravinsky’s manipulations of repetition evoke particular interpretations of Oedipus Rex and Orpheus. As modern recapitulations of ancient stories, Stravinsky’s settings interpret the myths as ritualistic reiterations of given truths. His emphasis on the “hand of fate,” the power of the gods, and the inevitability of human strife arises from his consummate use of repetition, spanning a spectrum of exact replication to melodic and harmonic variation. Each end of the spectrum presents a particular temporal experience: whereas variation from one event to the next creates the painful passage through time of Oedipus and Orpheus, an exact repetition, such as an ostinato, reminds us of, and often reveals to them, their unchangeable fates. In my reading of these two settings, the characters are introduced to us as pawns of destiny; as they may be strivin
g for or against something, we too become pawns, able only to follow and to learn from their experiences.
Of course, not all of Stravinsky’s repetitions are symbolic of futility, grief, or the power of fate; his subject matter is not always grim. (I think here especially of the graceful dances in Apollo, and their ostinato-driven ascent to the Mount of Parnassus in the ballet’s apotheosis.) What is remarkable is that so much may be conveyed by so little. Through the interaction of unchanging ostinato and minimally varied motivic figures we may approach issues central to the human condition. Stravinsky’s repetitive techniques here testify to the Aristotelian idea that tragedy, as a form of drama, hearkens back to the structure of ritual: as modern mortal beings, we too are compelled to move through the limitations of earthly time and human limitations. Ultimately, though, as we too will lose our battle with time, Stravinsky’s music will live on.11
NOTES
1. These are the chorus’s final words in the Epilogue of the opera.
2. E. E. Cummings’s English translation of the narrator’s part as it appears in Stravinsky’s score for Oedipus Rex (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1949), x–xi.
3. The English translations of the libretto used here are from Stephen Walsh’s Cambridge Music Handbook for Oedipus Rex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79–91.
4. Ordered succession is a way of representing the formal consequences of Stravinsky’s repetitions by vertically aligning key motivic figures. For more information on this analytical method, see my Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in Stravinsky’s Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
5. Bass ostinatos composed of leaping thirds or fourths are often associated with seriousness of purpose or even grief and disaster in Stravinsky’s music. Examples include the thirds bass line in the Rite’s “Sacrificial Dance,” and the leaping fourths in the opening music of Symphony of Psalms and at the end of its last movement.
6. Walsh gives a similar (if not as technical) reading of this passage in the Cambridge Music Handbook for Oedipus Rex, 32–33, 36.
7. Walsh suggests that much of Oedipus Rex has the quality of an oratorio by Handel, citing a commentary made by Stravinsky’s contemporary Arthur Lourié around the time of its first performance. See ibid., 28–30; and Arthur Lourié, “Oedipus Rex de Stravinsky,” La Revue musicale 8/8 (1927): 240–53.
8. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Conclusions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 52.
9. See Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 240.
10. John Martin, “Stravinsky Work in World Premiere,” New York Times, 29 April 1948.
11. Daniel Albright describes the Cocteau-Stravinsky setting of Oedipus even more bluntly, noting that “Sophocles has Jocasta hang herself; but Stravinsky, a more flagrant sort of mass murderer, kills off the language, the music, even the concept of drama itself. … Oedipus Rex is indeed a post-mortem opera, a sort of autopsy of a Greek tragedy.” See Albright, “Truth and Lies in the Stravinskyan Sense,” Modernist Cultures 3/1 (Winter 2007): 26.
Symphonies and Funeral Games: Lourié’s Critique of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism
KLÁRA MÓRICZ
In their 1989 monograph The Apollonian Clockwork, Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger express bewilderment at Stravinsky’s high esteem for an obscure figure in music history, the Russian composer Arthur Vincent Lourié:
Up till now, readers of biographies of Stravinsky have been faced with a fait accompli by the presence of Lourié, like a new character that enters out of nowhere half-way through a play. Now that Lourié has received a past—thanks to recent research on the eclipsed Russian musical avant-garde of 1910–30—the sudden entrance and sudden shining role of Lourié in Stravinsky’s life becomes, strangely enough, even more of a mystery.1
To show the illogicality of such a strong tie between the successful, brilliant Stravinsky, and the forgotten, lackluster Lourié, the authors quote Lourié’s seemingly bizarre statement that “our melodic capacity is directly proportional to our capacity for goodness and love” from his 1929 article “An Inquiry into Melody.”2
Even in recent scholarship, puzzles remain regarding Stravinsky and Lourié’s relationship.3 In this essay I explore Lourié’s thoughts on melody, which, I argue, are not only not senseless, as Andriessen and Schönberger suggest, but show him at his most original and thus can help us differentiate between Lourié’s and Stravinsky’s ideas on music, aesthetics, politics, and ethics. As the date of “An Inquiry into Melody” indicates, the seeds of disagreement were already planted in the late 1920s, when Lourié was still actively promoting Stravinsky’s work. The article’s implied criticism of Stravinsky reveals not only Lourié’s gradual distancing from Stravinsky, but also his close ties to Jacques Maritain, the French neo-Thomist philosopher who had a profound influence on Lourié during his years in exile. I demonstrate Lourié’s original approach to melody through a close reading of his Funeral Games in Honor of Chronos (1964), a work heavy with references to Stravinsky and thus illustrative of both the similarities and the differences between the composers’ views. Analyzing Lourié’s Funeral Games in the context of his thoughts on melody helps us understand how Lourié, who was for years Stravinsky’s right-hand man and who, as Maritain’s close friend, played a crucial role in shaping Stravinsky’s homo faber philosophy, became a critic of the very ideas he had once espoused.4
Figure 1. Pyotr Miturich, Portrait of the Composer Arthur Lourié, 1915.
A Forgotten Composer
Lourié’s obscurity in emigration marked a sad ending to a career with a promising start. In the 1910s Lourié was associated with St. Petersburg’s most cutting-edge artists; as Vladimir Mayakovsky jested: “Tot dur'yo, kto ne znaet Lur'yo” (’Tis a blockhead who doesn’t know Lourié).5 Portraits of the dandyish composer by prominent artists, the most famous one by Pyotr Miturich, testify to his high standing in St. Petersburg’s avant-garde circles (see Figure 1).6 A musician frequently featured in the avant-garde nightclub The Stray Dog, Lourié earned his reputation as a daring musical futurist by experimenting with atonality and quarter tones. His progressive credentials led Anatoly Lunacharsky to appoint him head of the Music Division of the Commissariat for Popular Enlightenment (Narkompros) in the early post-revolutionary years. Like many other intellectuals, in 1922 Lourié left Russia for good. In Paris he befriended Maritain, who inspired his ardent Catholicism and whose conception of art as craftsmanship influenced his and Stravinsky’s neoclassical aesthetics.7 After the composer fled to the United States in 1941, he never regained the momentum lost in Paris. In his last years he found refuge in the Princeton home of his faithful friend Maritain, who did not stop believing that Lourié provided the greatest example of creative inspiration in contemporary music.
In Stravinsky’s Shadow
Lourié met Stravinsky on 18 January 1924 in Brussels.8 They were introduced by Stravinsky’s lover and future wife, Vera Sudeikina, who knew Lourié well from their years in St. Petersburg where the two lived together in the early 1920s in a sort of ménage à quatre with Sergey Sudeikin and his wife, Olga (at this time Sudeikin and Vera began a relationship that led to their marriage).9 Shortly after the two composers met, Lourié started to write a book on Stravinsky, for which he produced a series of influential essays that shaped the reception of Stravinsky’s music and aesthetics.10 These articles and the editorial commissions he received on Stravinsky’s recommendation provided Lourié with much needed income during his time in Paris. Yet Lourié’s friendship with Stravinsky also adversely affected his compositional career. His secretarial role inevitably put him in a subservient position, earning him such dismissive epithets as “Stravinsky’s shadow” (composer Nicolas Nabokov), “Stravinsky’s valet de chambre” (cultural entrepreneur Pyotr Suvchinsky), and “Stravinsky’s office boy” (Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh).11
In 1929 S
travinsky seems to have finally begun to take a serious interest in Lourié’s music. Lourié reported the change to Ernest Ansermet on 25 December 1929:
Something surprising came about after your departure. Igor’s attitude toward me has completely changed, by which I mean his attitude regarding my music. He asked me to show him the concerto [Concerto spirituale] and approved of it. The change was such that I rubbed my eyes to make sure that it was not a miracle that had come about. He is very sympathetic to the direction I have taken; I see the same problems as he does, and what I write interests him to such an extent that he remains at the piano for hours examining the manuscript. … Vera says that this behavior is entirely exceptional for him and that I can now consider myself his only pupil. Before he left he even “ordered” me to write a symphony. … Igor now insists on 100 percent technique from me and he shows himself to be more pedantic than all the professors at the conservatory.12
It is conceivable that Stravinsky’s recognition that Lourié was capable of far more than being a publicist contributed to his gradual distancing himself from his assistant. No documentary evidence provides a full explanation for why Lourié’s relationship with Stravinsky soured. They exchanged only a few letters in the 1930s; in one, from 5 September 1935, Lourié complained to Stravinsky that he “has to make arrangements through others” if he wants to see him.13 By 1934 Lourié was clearly showing signs of disillusionment with Stravinsky. In a letter to Boris de Schloezer, whom Stravinsky resented because of his negative reviews, Lourié gave vent to his frustration.14 Since it was a rare occasion that Lourié wrote unguardedly, I quote the letter at length:
Stravinsky and His World Page 15