Stravinsky and His World
Page 17
Lourié’s ideas on the erotic potential of the creative act might have been influenced by Russian philosophers Vladimir Solovyov, Vasily Rozanov, and Nikolay Berdyaev, in whose philosophies love occupies a central place. Maritain likewise confirms the erotic aspect of creation when he describes the sensual perception of material as enabling the intellect to capture physical beauty, which “stirs desire and produces love. … Every form of beauty is loved at first for itself, even if later the too frail flesh is caught in the snare. Love in turn produces ecstasy, that is to say, renders the lover beside himself.”48 Significantly, Maritain evokes Eros when he describes what he calls Lourié’s “ontological” or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, “existential” music:
“Ontological” music is “erotic” music—here again I am speaking Danish—I mean that it owes its substance to the Eros immanent in being, to that internal weight of desire and regret which moans in all created things, and that is why such music is naturally religious, and does not entirely awaken save under a touch of the love of God.49
The erotic resonances of Lourié’s concept of melody signal that he took notice of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on music’s fundamentally sensuous nature. “Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy,” Kierkegaard wrote in his famous essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Either/Or. This immediacy, he continued, is always sensuous, “absolutely lyrical, and in music it erupts in all its lyrical impatience. That is, it is qualified by spirit and therefore is power, life, movement, continual unrest, continual succession. But this unrest, this succession, does not enrich it; it continually remains the same; it does not unfold but incessantly rushes forward as if in a single breath.”50
It would be hard to find a better way to articulate the quintessentially lyrical moment in Lourié’s Funeral Games I have discussed above. “If I were to describe this lyricism with a single predicate,” Kierkegaard writes, “I would have to say: It sounds—and with this I come back again to the elemental originality of the sensuous as that which in its immediacy manifests itself musically.”51 Or, as Lourié put it in an essay titled “The Noumenal and Phenomenal in Music”: “Revelation in art is given by momentary flashes only, in a piercing and acute sensation which is as fast and brief as a sudden glare of lightning.” To underline the erotic connotations of such a moment, Lourié uses strongly suggestive language: “Music is a mask worn by chastity. Its chaste condition veils all that cannot be expressed due to modesty and the rules of propriety, i.e.—God, love, conscience, purity, virginity, faith, happiness, heroism, etc.”52 Unlike Kierkegaard, however, Lourié sees in melody not only sensuousness and erotic potential but also moral force. In Maritain’s interpretation Lourié judges the nature of melodies according to their capacity to achieve “moral-aesthetic unity.”53
Dialogue with Stravinsky
If we read Lourié’s Funeral Games metaphorically as a display of time’s defeat and melody’s triumph, we can decipher in the composition yet another hidden conversation between Lourié and Stravinsky. Chronos, after all, was the name Stravinsky (more precisely his ghostwriter Suvchinsky) gave to musical time in his Poétique musicale.54 But musical time, Lourié argued in a 1944 essay, should be understood more broadly than the “rhythmic structure of sounding time.”55 It should include the melodic element, which, according to Lourié, was next in line to gain primacy after harmony and rhythm as developed by Scriabin and Stravinsky.
Stravinsky, like Lourié, placed melody at the summit of the hierarchy of the elements of music, but he seemed to want to limit its power, warning against the danger of becoming “beclouded by melody to the point of losing balance” and thus forgetting that “the art of music speaks to us in many voices at once.”56 Art, Stravinsky declared in his Poétique musicale, “is contrary to chaos.” Suvchinsky believed that Stravinsky’s conception of art as order and his adherence to dogma had a paralyzing effect on the composer, preventing him from achieving the liberty that Maritain considered essential in the creative act. Stravinsky’s religious (or he could have said compositional) practice, Suvchinsky wrote in 1975, did not reflect “faith of a psychological, lyrical or moral order. For him it was about the discovery (by grace, or maybe by fear?) and the resigned acceptance of a structure, dogma, and reality established for all eternity; being and life existed the way they were; they were practiced in conditions managed by secret and strange laws.”57
As Tamara Levitz has argued, Stravinsky’s resolute devotion to compositional dogma eventually alienated Maritain, who by the mid-1930s judged his music too constrained.58 Stravinsky, Maritain wrote in 1943, “is obstinately bent on obeying jealously the figures and the operative rules of the nature-like producing will. He fears the eternal laws,” and thus his works would hardly escape “sheer craft and athleticism.”59 Lourié’s words about the revelatory power of melody and about composers’ fear of exposing themselves to it seem applicable to Stravinsky. For Stravinsky, Lourié writes disapprovingly in 1944, “music is play. He is always playing, or, more precisely, he stylizes: people, things, ideas, feelings, and even life itself.”60 Such stylization, we may recall, signaled fear for Lourié, the incapability of exposing oneself to melody’s potentially dangerous revelation.61 By the time Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry appeared in 1953, the philosopher unapologetically situated Stravinsky among the “great artists who take pleasure in describing themselves as mere engineers in the manufacturing of an artifact of words or sounds.” Stravinsky, Maritain wrote, purposefully hides the truth by grudging against the power of inspiration, which, he claims, is irrelevant to real art.62
Like Maritain, Lourié related Stravinsky’s adherence to dogma to his repression of music’s erotic potential. He thought that Stravinsky’s Petrushka was a “reaction against the erotic mysticism of Scriabin.”63 Discussing The Rite of Spring and Les Noces Suvchinsky declared that despite “the sap and erotic passion of renewal” of the topics, in these works “the sensual element is transformed, heightened and even totally absorbed by a sort of cosmic will, [which] is implacable and anonymous to such a degree that it becomes mechanical, with the consequences that every whiff, image, or allusion to anything erotic becomes excluded.” Consequently, in Suvchinsky’s views these potentially erotic works remain “coldly thought out and composed.”64 Lourié seems to have anticipated Suvchinsky’s judgment when he described Les Noces as “dynamic in a musical sense,” but emotionally “saturated with the calmness and ‘quietude’ of the icon. It is,” Lourié summed up, “lacking in ecstasy.”65
Still full of enthusiasm for Stravinsky in 1926, Lourié did not intend his remarks to be critical. Gradually, however, the sense that Stravinsky’s music lacked a certain magic became a thorn in the eyes of Lourié and Maritain. In Stravinsky’s music, according to Maritain, the spirit of the work is the composer’s dominating intellect and will. “The more he becomes himself, the further he removes himself from magic.”66 In Apollo or Capriccio “the brilliant poetry depends in its entirety on the made object.”67 In contrast, Maritain states, in Lourié’s music magic, which the philosopher defined as the Plotinian notion of grace, “rises from the shadows of the human depths” and “crosses the threshold of supernatural orison.”68 “Magic in music,” in Lourié’s own definition, “is not an artificially irrational order” but “a breach of the law of gravitation or elevation without the aid of a motor.”69 “The quality of magic,” Maritain writes, suggests “a completely free element, a kind of separate ‘grace’ superior to the poetry of the work as engaged or absorbed in the meaning and substance of the work.” Magic is a “free surplus of poetry … an inexhaustible intuitive emotion, diffuse in the composer’s entire subjectivity, which has not been ‘caught’ in the actuation of the free creativity of the spirit engendering the work through the instrumentality of art, and which, however, passes into music that has a magical quality.” This “surplus, the inexhaustible intuitive emotion” passes “through creative intuition … as a free element, a free ‘spirit,’
which overflows the creative intuition through which it passes, and immediately moves and permeates, as a grace in addition, the working activity, without the composer’s having the least awareness of it.”70
Like Lourié’s melody, Maritain’s surplus is free. It disrupts “the sense of spatial and temporal causality,” and “gives the impression of belonging to the category of the eternal.”71 Taking the lead from Lourié, Henri-Irénée Marrou, one of the composer’s Catholic admirers, argued that melody exists “solely in memory”; its existence is “completely spiritual and free of the inexorable passage of duration.”72
Lourié’s Funeral Games has many functions: it honors the dead by imitating the actions of fallen heroes, and, like the funeral games in honor of Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad, provides a farewell to previous characters. In this context Stravinsky’s actions are recalled only as actions of a fallen hero, fallen, not like Abbé Bréchard, the dedicatee of the piece, heroically, in combat against the Germans in 1940, but like someone who had turned from a friend into an enemy. The closing hymn of Lourié’s Funeral Games transcends Chronos by turning to the eternal truth of Christianity, which, in its immutability, indivisibility, and simultaneity, was for him, as for Thomas Aquinas and his promoter Maritain, the affirmation of the existence of God.
At the end of Funeral Games the piccolo, which presented Lourié’s irresistible, free melody, all but disappears, taking with it its shadow companion, the flute. For the first iteration of the concluding hymn at measure 161 only the alto flute remains, moving, initially, in parallel octaves with the upper part of the piano left hand. At the repetition of the hymn’s third line at measure 177, the flute returns to double the alto flute an octave higher (see Example 4). The piccolo also resumes here, its role reduced now to an additional color in the piano’s bell-like punctuations. Instead of being the agent of free-flowing melody, the piccolo serves a higher purpose in the hymn, its sensuous immediacy giving way to the eternity of spirituality. It is as if Lourié, by a magician’s (or professional ideologue’s) sleight of hand exchanged Kierkegaard’s sensuous immediacy with Maritain’s religious immutability as music’s absolute subject. In his concept of melody Lourié thus combined what Kierkegaard presented as different modes of life—the aesthetic (sensuous) and the ethical—under the category of religion, which in Kierkegaard’s philosophy overturns the sensuous stage.
Lourié’s Funeral Games is religious music in which neoclassicism and its cathartic function are transformed into Christian transcendence, Stravinsky’s chronos is defeated, and sensuous immediacy is converted into the eternity of religious belief. Yet as the similarity of the ending of Lourié’s Funeral Games to the Russian funeral service, the vechnaya pamyat' (eternal memory), reminds us, on a more personal level the eternity achieved at the end of the piece remains the eternity of memory in which the past lives on, boundless and completely oblivious to the approaching end of human time. The enigma of Lourié may be solved if we listen carefully to his ephemeral yet powerful melodies, which, as Schönberger and Andriessen suggest, are incongruent with Stravinsky’s aesthetics. Not because Lourié’s ideas about melody are senseless, but because in their creative freedom, sensuous immediacy, moral revelation, and magical potential, Lourié’s melodies contradict Stravinsky’s ascetic dogma.
NOTES
1. Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 93.
2. Ibid., 92. Arthur Lourié, “An Inquiry into Melody,” Modern Music 7/1 (December–January 1929–30): 3–11.
3. Recent scholarship on the relationship between Stravinsky and Lourié includes Valérie Dufour, “Néo-gothique et néo-classique: Arthur Lourié et Jacques Maritain, aux origines idéologiques du conflit Stravinski-Schoenberg,” in Musique, art et religion dans l’entre-deux-guerres, ed. Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau (Paris: Symétrie, 2009), 31–41; Larisa Kazanskaya, “Lur'ye i Stravinskiy: ‘V teni geniya?” (Lourié and Stravinsky: In the shadow of a genius?), Muzïkal'naya akademiya 2 (2010): 102–6; Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 117–81, 290–395; and Richard Taruskin, “Turania Revisited, with Lourié as my Guide,” in Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié, ed. Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
4. Andriessen and Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork, 94.
5. Mayakovsky’s jest derives from the Russian possessive adjective duriy (from durak, fool), occurring here in the neuter singular from the fixed expression dur'yo gnezdo (a nest of fools), used to describe a blockhead or a stupid, clueless person. Mayakovsky alters the stress of Lourié’s name in Russian (Lur'YE to Lur'YO) to accommodate the rhyme. The shift in vowel from -'ye to -'yo at the end of a noun also suggests a familiar, folk, or conversational tone.
6. The poet Anna Akhmatova, Lourié’s onetime lover, recalled Miturich’s painting along with portraits of such illustrious artists as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Anna Pavlova, and Stravinsky in Zapisnïye knizhki Annï Akhmatovoy (1958–1966) (Notebooks of Anna Akhmatova, 1958–1966) (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1996), 174.
7. The Jewish Lourié converted to Catholicism on 4 June 1913 before he married his first wife, the Polish Catholic Yadviga Tsïbulskaya.
8. Kazanskaya, “Lur'ye i Stravinskiy,” 104.
9. Lourié was already connected to the Stravinsky family: from 1919 on he lived in the apartment of Stravinsky’s mother, Anna Kirillovna, and as a commissar helped her to emigrate. Ibid., 103–4.
10. Lourié never completed the book. The articles, in chronological order, are: “La Sonate pour piano de Strawinsky,” La Revue musicale 6/10 (1 August 1925): 100–104; “Muzïka Stravinskogo,” Vyorstï 1 (1926): 119–35; “Oedipus-Rex,” La Revue musicale 8/8 (1 June 1927): 240–53; “A propos de l’Apollon d’Igor Strawinsky,” Musique 1 (1928): 117–19; “Dve operï Stravinskogo,” Vyorstï 3 (1928): 225–27; “Neogothic and Neoclassic,” Modern Music 5/3 (March–April 1928): 3–8; “Krizis iskusstva,” Yevraziya 4 (1928): 8, and Yevraziya 8 (12 January 1929): 8; “Strawinsky à Bruxelles,” Cahiers de Belgique 3 (December 1930): 330–32; and “Le Capriccio de Strawinsky,” La Revue musicale 11/103 (April 1930): 353–55.
11. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 166; Suvchinsky quoted in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 194; and Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 384.
12. Lourié to Ernest Ansermet, 25 December 1929 (Fonds Ansermet, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève, Msmus 184), quoted in Katerina Levidou, “The Encounter of Neoclassicism with Eurasianism in Interwar Paris,” D. Phil. diss., Oxford University, 2008, 156–57. Translation after Levidou.
13. Lourié to Stravinsky, 5 September 1935, in Igor' Stravinskiy: Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialï k biografii (Russian correspondence: Materials for a biography), ed. Viktor Varunts (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2003), 3:584.
14. On the negative reviews, see Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 307.
15. Lourié to Boris de Schloezer, 13 October 1934, Collection Boris de Schloezer, Bibliothèque Louis Notari, Monaco.
16. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 17.
17. “Un musicista interpretato da se stesso: Igor Strawinsky e la sua estetica,” Il Piccolo, 27 May 1935, quoted in Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 335.
18. Renzo Giacomelli, “Cronaca teatrale: Intervista con Igor Strawinski,” Il Resto del carlino, 22 May 1935, quoted in ibid., 335.
19. “I am an anti-parliamentarian. I can’t stand it like a horse can’t put up with the camel.” From “Igor Strawinski nos habla de las orientacones futuras de la música y de su arte,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), 25 April 1936, quoted in Levitz, Modernist Myst
eries, 337.
20. Lourié, “Notes on the ‘New Order,’” Modern Music 19/1 (November–December 1941): 3.
21. Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Glimpses of a Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 136.
22. Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Mstislav Dobuzhinskiy, in Zvezda 10 (1998), quoted in Kazanskaya, “Lur' ye i Stravinskiy,” 106. For Suvchinsky’s remark see Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions, 193.
23. Lourié to Koussevitzky, 10 February 1948, folder 2, box 40, Koussevitzky Collection, Library of Congress.
24. For Stravinsky’s preoccupation with Greek topics see Maureen Carr, Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Worlds on Greek Subjects (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
25. Lourié’s diary entries, 25 November 1945 and 15 August 1951, file 8, Lourié Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland. Special thanks to Olesya Bobrik, editor of the 4-volume collected writings of Lourié, for sharing these entries with me.
26. Details of the aborted performance are documented in an unsigned and undated document and the 1938–39 correspondence between Jacques Rouché, director of the Opéra, and Lourié in the archives of the Bibliothèque Musée de l’Opéra, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
27. See Carr, Multiple Masks, 194 and 339n87.
28. On 28 February 1964, Lourié reported the completion of Funeral Games to Maritain. Lourié to Maritain, 28 February 1964, Centre d’Archives of the Cercle d’Etudes Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, Kolbsheim, France.
29. These writings include “Cheshuya v nevode (Pamyati M. A. Kuzmina)” (Scales in the Seine [In memory of M. A. Kuzmin]), Vozdushnïye puti (Arial ways) 2 (1961): 186–214; “Detskiy ray” (Children’s paradise), Vozdushnïye puti 3 (1963): 161–72; and “Ol'ga Afanas'yeva Glebova-Sudeykina,” Vozdushnïye puti 5 (1967): 139–45. Lourié conceived of his opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great as “a monument of Russian culture, the Russian people and Russian history.” See Lourié to Anna Akhmatova, 25 March 1963, quoted and translated in Caryl Emerson, “Arthur Vincent Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great: Pushkin’s Exotic Ancestor as Twentieth–Century Opera,” in Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, ed. Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 332.