After several months I finally met with Stravinsky. We were both very cautious, which showed that he suspects my opposition, and that is why, although we did not talk about anything serious, he was still glad to see me, because our meeting created at least the facade of the old friendship. The fact that there is no content behind this facade does not seem to concern him. I think he only needs these superficial relationships to neutralize and bind, and thereby paralyze any possible action against him.
He made a sad impression on me. He is pathetic, self-righteous and intolerably bourgeois. He told me about his great friendship with … Darius Milhaud. To my surprise he told me that “for tactical reasons, [he tries] to make friends now with all of [his] enemies”…!? Here are the fruits of “evolution,” of the former inflexibility and all the “audacity.”15
The widening gap between Stravinsky and Lourié may have also been related to their differing political views. Indeed, politics frequently became a cause of disagreement between fellow émigrés during the late 1930s, eventually leading to the disintegration of the Russian émigré community in France. Amid the rising political tensions in Europe some émigrés sought reconciliation with the Soviet regime, while others turned to the extreme right in the hope that fascism or Nazism would be able to defeat Communism. Having little sympathy with the revolution of the lower classes, Stravinsky moved further to the political right after emigration, and thus his aesthetic insistence on “order as a rule and as a law opposed to disorder” gained political overtones.16 In interviews he openly embraced Mussolini’s fascism, and repeatedly announced his enthusiasm for the new political order in Italy. In a 1935 interview for a Roman newspaper Stravinsky asserted: “The Voice of Rome is confused in my spirit with the voice of the Duce. I also say Duce because I feel like a fascist. Today, anyway, pretty much everybody in Europe is a fascist.”17 “I became a French citizen,” he said in another Italian interview, “but spiritually I am also a fascist, above all a fascist. Anyway, this is the way everybody thinks in France.”18 Although his sycophantic admiration of Italy’s new ruler may have been part of a strategic publicity move in preparation for future Italian performances, there is no doubt that Stravinsky nurtured antidemocratic sentiments. In a 1936 interview in La Nación he declared that he was “an anti-parliamentarian.”19
Unlike Stravinsky, Lourié strongly disliked the rising authoritarian regimes around him. Despite his Catholicism, he never renounced his Communist past, and though he defected and was a critic of Stalinist Russia, he remained unapologetic about his participation in early Bolshevik rule. Born Jewish, he was also personally threatened by the rise of Nazi power. In 1941, the year he fled occupied France, Lourié publicly denounced what he called the “new order”: “In all parts of Europe where this new order is now taking form, there may be noted the total eclipse of those values embraced in the concept of ‘Humanism.’ The mere acceptance of the coming ‘Order’ seems to free the mind of the moral and intellectual connotations of humanism, at the same time absolving it of any feeling of trespass when abusing the term.”20
Robert Craft, who took over Lourié’s old position as Stravinsky’s secretary in 1948, attributed Stravinsky’s break with Lourié to Stravinsky’s second marriage in 1940, suggesting that the breach was caused by Lourié repeating gossip about Vera Sudeikina, Stravinsky’s second wife, to the composer’s son Théodore, thus prejudicing him against his father’s second marriage.21 Vladimir Nabokov assumed that Stravinsky simply dropped Lourié, as he dropped most of his former friends who witnessed, in Suvchinsky’s words, his “gaietés parisiennes.”22 Whatever the cause, by the time they had relocated in the United States the two composers’ relationship was openly hostile: cold rejection on Stravinsky’s part, resentment mixed with hostility on Lourié’s. In a letter to Koussevitzky on 10 February 1948 Lourié gleefully reported that at a rehearsal of Stravinsky’s Symphonies d’ instruments à vent Arturo Toscanini maliciously remarked: “Too bad that it was not Stravinsky who died and Debussy who wrote a symphony in his memory.”23
Although Stravinsky gradually disappeared from Lourié’s life as a friend and confidant, he left a shadowy mark on Lourié’s work. Many of Lourié’s late works and writings continue the dialogue with Stravinsky that was broken in the late 1930s. Stravinsky’s shadow is still perceptible in Lourié’s Dionysian self-portrait from the 1940s (see Figure 2). As in Miturich’s painting, the composer is sprawled leisurely on a pillow, but instead of posing as a St. Petersburg dandy, he is dressed in classical garb and Roman sandals, crowned with laurel, an issue of the Russian-language magazine Novoye slovo (New word) spread on his lap. On the composer’s right stands a table laid with food, behind it on a hanger a jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue to remind us of the aging Lourié’s dandyish habits. The drawing thus combines elements of interwar Paris, with its Russian press and fad for neoclassicism, and Lourié’s new surroundings, the United States.24 At the composer’s feet a monkey peruses Ulysses by James Joyce, whose poems “Ecce Puer” and “Alone” Lourié set in 1941; on Lourié’s left a donkey reads Kierkegaard, whose books Lourié had started to read in English before he even mastered the language and whose philosophy he compared to that of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.25 The only musical references on the drawing are the faint outlines of a female singer behind the composer and the barely visible title of Lourié’s ill-fated Parisian opera-ballet Le Festin pendant la peste (The feast in time of plague), scribbled in the lower-right corner.26 Significantly, Lourié’s Le Festin has a Stravinskian resonance: in this opera-ballet Lourié included a dialogue by Petrarch in Charles-Albert Cingria’s translation, for which Stravinsky had also once sketched a couple of bars of music.27
Figure 2. Lourié’s drawing.
Symphonies and Funeral Games
Lourié continues his dialogue with Stravinsky in Funeral Games in Honor of Chronos for three flutes, piano, and cymbals—a work of approximately ten minutes that Lourié completed in 1964.28 Unperformed in Lourié’s lifetime, Funeral Games belongs to a series of late works and essays in which Lourié nostalgically revisited his past.29 He dedicated his Funeral Games to the memory of Abbé Roger Bréchard who, like Lourié, was a member of Maritain’s circle in Meudon, a suburb southwest of Paris where Jacques and Raïssa Maritain lived from 1923 until their departure to the United States in 1940, and where they held yearly Thomist retreats with forty to three hundred participants.30
Lourié prefaces his Funeral Games with a Latin epitaph consisting of three lines from Job 28:
3. Tempus posuit tenebris, et universorum finem ipse considerat lapidem quoque caliginis et umbram mortis.
He has set a time for darkness, and the end of all things he considers, the stone that is in the dark and the shadow of death.
5. Terra de qua oriebatur panis in loco suo igne subversa est.
The land, out of which bread grew in its place, has been overturned with fire.
11. Profunda quoque fluviorum scrutatus est, et abscondita in lucem produxit.
The depth of rivers he has also searched and hidden things he has brought forth to light.
The dedication and the epitaph suggest that Lourié conceived of Funeral Games in the tradition of the seventeenth-century French tombeau, resurrected in the twentieth century in such pieces as Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–17), the six movements of which are dedicated to friends who died in World War I, or Le Tombeau de Debussy (1920), a collection of pieces published in a commemorative special issue of La Revue musicale for which Stravinsky submitted the chorale of his Symphonies d’instruments à vent.31
Like tombeaux, funeral games in ancient Greece had a commemorative function. In the Iliad Achilles honored his friend Patroclus with funeral games that enacted the heroic deeds of the deceased; even the Olympic Games originated as funeral games. Lourié’s Funeral Games, however, is not only a memorial, but also an intricate dialogue with the past, a celebration and at the same time a critique of Chronos, the mythological embod
iment of time in Orphic cosmology and the progenitor of the god Phanes, the creator of the cosmos. Significantly, Phanes is the protagonist of Lourié’s Orphic pantomime “The Birth of Eros” in his last opera, The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1948–61), a monumental journey through different historical layers of Russian culture.32
Although the dedicatee of Funeral Games is Abbé Bréchard and its honoree Chronos, Stravinsky remains its unnamed protagonist. An obvious sign of Stravinsky’s shadow in the Funeral Games is Lourié’s choice of tempi. Like Stravinsky in Symphonies d’instruments à vent, Lourié starts Funeral Games at Q = 72, a tempo that both composers soon change to Q = 108. Although less systematically octatonic, Lourié’s Funeral Games occasionally displays the same octatonic collection that Stravinsky used in his Symphonies. Lourié’s string-free sound, percussive use of the piano, frequently changing meters, insistent ostinatos with metrically different superimpositions, folklike, hiccupping embellishments, and varied repetition of short motives can be heard as distinctly Stravinskian. Neoclassicism à la Stravinsky’s Octet (another piece Lourié arranged for piano in Paris) also left a mark on the piece in the form of contrapuntal textures and large intervals, frequently producing Bachian (or Stravinskian) two-register melodies.
The most striking tribute to Stravinsky comes at the end of Funeral Games. Before the last section begins at measure 161, all accidentals disappear, and the music moves slowly in diatonic, white-key purity to its end as if demonstrating the progress from the darkness (tenebrae) to light (lux) described in the epigraph. Like Stravinsky before him in the Symphonies d’instruments à vent, Lourié concludes his piece with a clearly articulated homophonic hymn (see Example 1), reminiscent of the slow and quiet Vechnaya pamyat' (Eternal remembrance), the closing part of the Panikhida, the Russian Orthodox memorial service.33 The parallel with Stravinsky’s Symphonies is not coincidental: Lourié arranged it for piano in 1926 and recognized in its final section “a chorale not of a Western type but closer to the Orthodox practice.”34 The narrow range and stepwise motion of the traditional melody for the Vechnaya pamyat' are clearly recognizable in the final hymn of the Funeral Games (see Examples 2a–c). Its three-part, falsobordone harmonization, with the melody in the middle voice and the top voice moving in parallel thirds, evokes kantï, the “old,” “monastic” or “tender” (umilitel'nïy) style of singing Orthodox chant. The parallel between Lourié’s and Stravinsky’s closing sections goes even further: the last twenty measures of Stravinsky’s Symphonies consist mainly of alterations of E-minor sevenths and D-minor ninth chords (see Example 3); when Lourié repeats his melody in two-octave parallel between the flute and the alto flute at measure 177, his sole accompaniment is an E-minor seventh chord with an added C (Example 4). Nor can it be accidental that Lourié’s melody starts with precisely the same three notes (B–C–D) with which Stravinsky’s melody ended, or that Lourié again chose the same tempo marking (Q = 72) as Stravinsky. As Examples 2a–c show, Lourié’s Vechnaya pamyat is closer to Stravinsky’s rendition of the service than to the traditional tune.
Example 1. Lourié, Funeral Games in Honor of Chronos, mm. 161–76.
Example 2a. Traditional melody for the Vechnaya pamyat' (from Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1492).
Example 2b. Lourié’s melody.
Example 2c. Stravinsky’s melody (from Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1492).
Example 3. Igor Stravinsky, Symphonies d’instruments à vent, arranged for piano by Arthur Lourié, mm. 275–99.
Despite its strong Stravinskian resonances, Lourié’s music, apart from a few sections, sounds decidedly different from Stravinsky’s. Its dissonances are less harsh, its rhythms less exuberant, its performative surface less immediately inviting. To put it in positive terms, while Stravinsky’s stylized dissonances and angular melodies create ironic distance, Lourié’s harmonies and melodies preserve their warmly expressive potential. The large intervals in Lourié’s melodies do not result in grotesque angularity, but in expressive gestures that demonstrate his belief in the power and primacy of melody over other elements of music.
Example 4. Lourié, Funeral Games, mm. 177–84.
The least Stravinskian passage in Lourié’s Funeral Games is a short, two-register melody that disrupts the previous metric regularity of the piece. In measure 90 the tempo slows to Q = 68 (see Example 5). The melody is preceded by four gong-like sonorities, the last of which is built on notes taken from octatonic Collection I, out of which the piccolo takes all but one note of its expressive melody. With this melody the piccolo assumes an individual voice, soaring above the chromatically descending flute line and the static pedal of the alto flute. Notated in alternating duple and triple meters, Lourié’s melody does not conform to a metric pattern: the piccolo’s phrase starts on the first beat, then, at its repetition, on the second beat of the bar; its climactic B falls first on the second, then on the first beat, accented by the piano’s harmony; its last note is sustained for two beats on its first appearance, and five-and-a-half beats on its second.
Example 5. The espressive melody in Lourié, Funeral Games, mm. 87–95.
The Freedom of Melody
To explain why this melodic passage is so magical, I call Lourié as a witness, citing the very article ridiculed by Andriessen and Schönberger. As Lourié reported to Koussevitzky, the article stirred controversy even before it was published.35 After its publication Maritain became its champion, quoting from it extensively in his own writings.36 In the article Lourié argues that melody, unlike harmony and rhythm, is “always irrational in its essence” and remains inaccessible to “the logic of our conscious self.” Despite this disclaimer, Lourié does explain melody in rational terms. He sees melody as “the primary moving force and organic essence of art,” its primacy deriving from its uncanny ability to “reveal some intimate truth, the genuine psychological and spiritual substance of its maker,” or, as Maritain paraphrased it, the maker’s “ontological value.”37 “Melody,” Lourié declares, “discloses the nature of the subject, not the object.”38 And this is precisely why composers, afraid of melody’s potentially dangerous revelation, frequently hide behind stylization and irony, the primary function of which, Lourié wrote in a moment of poetic inspiration, is to mask fear.39 Lourié identified melody’s ability to disclose some otherwise inaccessible truth with a moral force—hence his evocation of the human capacity for good in relation to melody in the sentence that Andriessen and Schönberger found so absurd: “Our melodic gift is in direct relation to our capacity for good, not in the sentimental but in the religious sense. … Melody in itself is a primary good, a sort of purification through repentance.”40 Allowing melody to rule requires infinite faith and trust from the composer, and a willingness to accept the process of self-discovery, whatever it discloses.
Lourié’s concept of melody appeals not to the personal (or, as he writes, “sentimental”), but to the transcendental and religious spheres. As the above example from Funeral Games demonstrates, melody can create the illusion of suspended time. “Melody in itself is not connected with any action,” Lourié explains, “and does not lead to any action.” It “serves no purpose at all. It brings liberation,” a disruption of logic, “a sense of freedom.”41 This sense of liberation is related to melody’s power to abolish “the conditions of space and time,” and to free the spirit “from the chains of spatial and temporal limitations.” Melody’s spiritual potential is unleashed when it disrupts “the sense of [the] spatial and temporal causality of earthly life.”42 In Maritain’s explanation, melody “arises from a break in temporal connections”; it is “the pure and direct expression of poetic experience in the composer.”43
Lourié’s ideas about melody may have been inspired by Henri Bergson, whose philosophy was well known in Russia and whose anti-positivist ideas greatly influenced Maritain at the beginning of his career. As Suzanne Guerlac writes, melody, for Bergson, is a figure of duration
that “implies a certain mode of organization” and “involves a temporal synthesis of memory that knits temporal dimensions together.” Melody performs “the act of temporal synthesis … to the extent it binds past, present, and future together in a radically singular way.”44 Bergson’s proposed simultaneity of past, present, and future must have been alluring to Lourié who, despite his early Futurist credentials, absorbed much of the Bergsonian time-dissolving poetic practices of St. Petersburg’s Acmeist poets—Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, and Nikolay Gumilyov.45 Whatever the inspiration, in Lourié’s mind the liberty of melody seems to have been related to melody’s peculiar relation to time. Lourié’s Funeral Games not only honors Chronos enacting time’s heroic deeds but also shows chronos defeated, rendered powerless by melody’s irrational yet invincible liberating force.
In Lourié’s view the unrestrained nature of melody also had strong erotic connotations. Among the many quotations in the libretto for his opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, Lourié gives special emphasis to Pushkin’s famous lines from The Stone Guest: “Of all the happy pleasures life supplies, / To love alone does music yield in sweetness; / But love itself is melody.”46 In Pushkin’s play melody signals socially unconstrained love, promoted in The Blackamoor by Eros, a statue that comes to life in order to prevent the unnatural, autocratically ordered marriage between Peter the Great’s godson, the blackamoor Ibrahim, and Natasha, the young daughter of a Russian nobleman. Lourié unleashes the irrational, explosive force of Eros in the opera, letting him wreak havoc by turning the characters against social customs and authoritarian power. Not coincidentally, Lourié marks the birth of Eros with a rhythmically free-flowing, unaccompanied melody and the destruction of love with a twelve-tone passage as Peter the Great, in yet another instance of defying nature, sends the adulterous Natasha to the convent and marries her lover to the family jester.47
Stravinsky and His World Page 16