30. Diverse luminaries such as Jean Cocteau, Charles du Bos; philosophers Emmanuel Mounier, Gabriel Marcel, and Nikolay Berdyaev; Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov; Italian Futurist painter Gino Severini; and Stravinsky were drawn to Maritain’s circle. About the Maritains’ Meudon years see Judith Suther, Raissa Maritain: Pilgrim, Poet, Exile (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 52–64. Lourié’s dedication in the score, in French, reads: “In memory of Lieutenant Abbé Roger Bréchard fallen in France in June 1940.”
31. See Stravinsky, “Fragment des Symphonies pour instruments à vent, à la mémoire de C. A. Debussy,” La Revue musicale 1/2 (1 December 1920), supplement.
32. About Lourié’s Blackamoor see Móricz, “Decadent Truncation,” Cambridge Opera Journal 20/2 (July 2008): 181-213; and “Retrieving What Time Destroys: The Palimpsests of Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero and Lourié’s The Blackamoor of Peter the Great,” in Móricz and Morrison, eds., Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié.
33. About the parallels between the Panikhida service and Stravinsky’s Symphonies d’instruments à vent see Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley: University of Californa Press, 1996), 2:1486–99.
34. Lur'ye, “Muzïka Stravinskogo,” 131. See Igor Stravinsky, Symphonies d’instruments à vent, à la mémoire de Claude Debussy, arranged for piano by Arthur Lourié (Paris: Edition Russe de Musique, 1926).
35. Lourié to Koussevitzky, 8 December 1929, folder 2, box 40, Koussevitzky Collection, Library of Congress.
36. Jacques Maritain, “Sur la musique d’Arthur Lourié,” in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions Saint–Paul/Freibourg: Editions Universitaires, 1982), 6:1060–66; and Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953). For an in-depth analysis of Maritain’s influence on Lourié, see Caryl Emerson, “Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourié’s Post-Petersburg Worlds,” in Móricz and Morrison, eds., Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Lourié.
37. Maritain, “Sur la musique d’Arthur Lourié,” 1065.
38. Lourié, “An Inquiry into Melody,” 4. Lourié’s emphasis.
39. “Indeed, today the artist hides all that he cannot overcome or master under the veil of irony; but then, irony is, above all, the mask of fear.” Arthur Lourié, “Oedipus-Rex,” 252.
40. Lourié, “An Inquiry into Melody,” 5–6.
41. Ibid., 9, italics original.
42. Ibid., 6.
43. Maritain, “Sur la musique d’Arthur Lourié,” 1064; and Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 253.
44. Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 66–67.
45. About the influence of Bergson’s philosophy on Russian Modernism, see Hilary L. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism 1900–1930 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). About Lourié’s and the Acmeists’ conception of time, see my “Retrieving What Time Destroys.”
46. Alexander Pushkin, The Stone Guest, in Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–42. About the literary sources of the opera’s libretto see Móricz, “Decadent Truncation.”
47. For a different interpretation of melody in the Blackamoor, see Emerson, “Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourié’s Post-Petersburg Worlds.”
48. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 26–27.
49. Jacques Maritain, “The Freedom of Song” (1935), in Art and Poetry, trans. Elva de Pue Matthews (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), 96–97.
50. Søren Kierkegaard, “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic,” in Either/Or, part 1, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 71.
51. Ibid.
52. Arthur Lourié, “The Noumenal and Phenomenal in Music,” Third Hour 8 (1961): 48–49.
53. See Maritain’s extensive quotation from the French publication of Lourié’s “De la mélodie” (La Vie intellectuelle [25 December 1936]: 491–99) in his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 253–54. For more about the Kierkegaardian resonances in Maritain and Lourié’s aesthetics, see Emerson, “Jacques Maritain and the Catholic Muse in Lourié’s Post-Petersburg Worlds.”
54. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 29. Stravinsky quotes from Pierre Souvtchinsky, “La Notion du temps et la musique: Réflexions sur la typologie de la création musicale,” Le Revue musicale 20/191 (May–June 1939): 70–80.
55. Artur Lur'ye, “Linii evolyutsii russkoy muzïki” (The evolutionary lines of Russian music), Novïy zhurnal (New review) 9 (1944): 257–75.
56. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 40–41.
57. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Neuf paragraphes (disparates): Stravinsky auprès et au loin,” in Stravinsky: Etudes et témoignages, ed. François Lesure (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1982), 26; repr. as “1975: Stravinski auprès et au loin,” in (Re)Lire Souvtchinski: Textes choisis par Eric Humbertclaude (La Bresse: Eric Humbertclaude, 1990), 194–95. Quoted and translated in Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 160.
58. Ibid., 162.
59. Maritain, “The Freedom of Song,” 72. Maritain’s “la volonté naturante,” which Elva de Pue Matthews translates as “nature-like producing will,” might be better understood as “naturing will.” The end of the quotation about “sheer craft and athleticism” does not appear in the original French version of the 1935 article.
60. Lur'ye, “Linii evolyutsii russkoy muzïki,” 313. He repeats this line exactly in “Igor Stravinski (1944),” in Profanation et sanctification du temps: Journal musical Saint Pétersbourg–Paris–New York, 1910–1960 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), 74.
61. Lourié, “Oedipus-Rex,” 252.
62. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 62.
63. Lur'ye, “Muzïka Stravinskogo,” 186. In an interview Stravinsky himself “spoke clearly against eroticism in music and on this occasion put Scriabin on trial.” “Où va la musique moderne: M. Stravinsky juge Wagner un musicien sans importance,” Comoedia, 25 March 1928, quoted in Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 362n231.
64. Pierre Souvtchinsky, “Igor Strawinsky,” Contrepoints 2 (February 1946): 24, quoted in Levitz, Modernist Mysteries, 363.
65. Lur'ye, “Muzïka Stravinskogo,” 191.
66. Maritain, “The Freedom of Song,” 102.
67. Ibid.
68. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 401; and Maritain, “The Freedom of Song,” 102.
69. Lourié, “The Noumenal and Phenomenal in Music,” 48.
70. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 401, 402–3, Lourié’s emphasis.
71. Lourié, “An Inquiry into Melody,” 6; and Maritain’s translation of Lourié’s article in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, 253.
72. Henri Davenson [Henri-Irénée Marrou], Traité de la musique selon l’esprit de Saint Augustin (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1942), 21.
Arthur Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY KLÁRA MÓRICZ
Arthur Lourié published his article “Krizis iskusstva” (The crisis of art) in two installments in the fourth and eighth issues of the weekly Eurasianist newspaper Yevraziya (Eurasia) in 1928–29. The first installment appeared with Lourié’s essay on Rachmaninoff, the second with his report on Otto Klemperer in Paris.1 Lourié was not only an occasional contributor to the newspaper. From the tenth issue (26 January 1929) his name appeared on the masthead along with such prominent Eurasianists as Lev Karsavin, Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky, and Pyotr Suvchinsky. “The Crisis of Art” is one in a series of essays Lourié published about Stravinsky between 1925 and 1930 in various periodicals, among them Vyorstï (Mileposts), another short-lived Eurasianist journal. Unlike Vyorstï, which its editors, Sviatopolk-Mirsky, Suvchinsky, and Serge
y Efron, intended as a politically independent literary “thick” journal, Yevraziya had a strong political angle, which led to a split in the Eurasianist movement.
The Eurasianist movement was launched in Sofia in 1921 by the publication of Iskhod k Vostoku (Exodus to the East), a collection of ten essays by the movement’s four founders, theoretical linguist Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, the Orthodox theologian Georges Vasilyevich Florovsky, the economist and geographer Pyotr Nikolayevich Savitsky, and music critic and patron Suvchinsky. Although the movement was never ideologically coherent, its founders agreed on Russia’s special place in world history, claiming—as the anonymous preface to Exodus to the East stated—that the “Russians and those who belong to the peoples of ‘the Russian world’ are neither Europeans nor Asians.”2 The special location of Eurasia came with a special mission. According to the motto that appeared on the front page of Yevraziya, “The Russia of our time decides the fate of both Europe and Asia. Occupying a sixth of the world, Eurasia is the center and the beginning of a new world culture.”3
The debate about Yevraziya centered on the newspaper’s attitude toward the new Soviet state. Against Savitsky’s strong opposition, Suvchinsky, who was the moving force in the editorial office, published Marina Tsvetaeva’s salutation to Vladimir Mayakovsky in the first issue. Tsvetaeva recalled her last meeting with the poet before her departure from Russia in 1922 and the message he proclaimed to the West: “That truth is over here!” She also quoted her reaction to Mayakovsky’s reading his own poems in Paris in 1928: “That strength is over there [in the Soviet Union]!”4 Many interpreted Tsvetaeva’s lines as an endorsement of the Soviet system.5 Suvchinsky’s articles, which Savitsky and other Eurasianists read as apologias for Marxism and Communism, further outraged Savitsky, Trubetskoy, and their allies.6 To distance themselves from Suvchinsky and his Parisian group’s proto-Marxist views, Savitsky published a brochure titled On the Newspaper Yevraziya: The Newspaper Yevraziya Is Not an Organ of Eurasianism.7
Lourié became involved with Yevraziya through his friendship with Suvchinsky. The composer’s presence in the newspaper might have been another irritant for Savitsky, who was uncompromising in his rejection of Communist ideology and must have known that before his emigration Lourié worked for the Soviet People’s Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky. Savitsky suspected that Suvchinsky, whom he accused of having a hand in most of the articles published in Yevraziya, was behind Lourié’s use of phrases such as “common cause” and “spiritual experience” in “The Crisis of Art.”8 “Common cause” was mystic lay philosopher Nikolay Fyodorov’s phrase to describe mankind’s shared struggle against death. Savitsky considered Suvchinsky’s attempts to bring Fyodorov’s ideas into the Eurasianist discourse a deviation; seeing the term used by Lourié strengthened his belief that Suvchinsky was gaining too much control over the movement.9
To what extent Suvchinsky dictated Lourié’s “The Crisis in Art” is unclear. Based on the article, in which Lourié dismisses the art of both the West and the East (that is, the Soviet Union) as subordinate either to bourgeois values or to Marxist propaganda, Savitsky could hardly have accused Lourié of covert pro-Soviet ideology. As Lourié’s reference to Alexander Blok in the article attests, his Eurasianism was still affected by the Russian Symbolists’ Scythianism, their anti-European affirmation of Russia’s Asian identity, and their enthusiastic embrace of their country’s messianistic role in saving a declining West.10 Like the Eurasianists, Lourié saw the contrast between East and West in terms of their differing attitude toward individualism and would have agreed with Suvchinsky’s assessment that the “principle of personal freedoms and individual self-determination, promulgated by every European revolution, has in the course of time turned into a harsh social indifference.”11 The Romantic substitution of art for religion created art for art’s sake, Lourié argued, which then turned into art without art: empty, manufactured goods for the entertainment of bourgeois society. Lourié accused the West of replacing spiritual principles with material goods and substituting aesthetic for spiritual experience. Art in Soviet Russia did not fare much better in Lourié’s judgment. Subjugated to the social good, art in the new Soviet state became propaganda for the proletariat. Whereas Suvchinsky saw the Russian Revolution as a step toward the Eurasian ideal, Lourié regarded it as a missed opportunity for the creation of a new type of art. In Lourié’s opinion, under these circumstances neither the East nor the West could produce genuine, “living” art.
Like the Eurasianists, Lourié looked for a solution in a liminal, in-between area and found it, predictably, in Stravinsky’s “supra-individual, impersonal, and supra-emotional” art. With the ease of a professional ideologue, trained under Lunacharsky, Lourié fit Stravinsky into a Eurasianist cast. He depicted Stravinsky as an artist who “turned away from the present with a feeling of nausea” and returned to the past to retrieve from it what he found “resonant not so much with the contemporary canon as with his own personal sensibility.” In Lourié’s view Stravinsky “entered into conflict with modernity,” which Lourié identified with “disequilibrium and disorder,” and which Stravinsky, according to Lourié, replaced with an “ideal state of order” and “a durable equilibrium.” Stravinsky’s victory over chaos and his creation of order in art seem to have satisfied what Suvchinsky described as “a thirst for social stability and a quest for another way of life” among the masses, a quest for a new social order in which “the personal fate of each human being is somehow guaranteed by some objective and mandatory authority,”12 or, as Lourié put it, a quest for a new way in which “a revolutionary dynamic of extreme emancipation” has come “to the stasis of submissive contemplation.” And that is why Stravinsky, although he turned his back on the present, could write music that was “a documentary testimony to the historical events of [his] time, in all aspects, whether aesthetic, ethical, political, or social.”13
What Lourié called “submissive contemplation” gained a specifically religious meaning in his article “Le Problème de la musique religieuse moderne” (The problem of modern religious music), which appeared five years after “The Crisis of Art” in the monthly Catholic journal L’Art chrétien. Like Yevraziya, L’Art chrétien was a new publication, promising to print “only original articles,” “illustrated by the most sophisticated modern methods.” Among the specialists consulted were professors teaching at Catholic institutions, religious authorities, and curators of museums. Lourié’s article was published in the second issue along with Marie Belmon’s essay on the fresco, the second part of Dr. Adelheid Heimann’s article on the iconography of the Trinity, and Maurice Brillant’s article “Joy and Liberty of Catholic Art.”14 Lourié’s contribution was not an article but a transcription of an interview the unnamed editors had conducted with Lourié, whom he called “one of today’s most prominent young composers” with two recently completed religiously inspired works, the Sonate liturgique and the Concerto spirituale. Lourié’s essay served as an introduction to the question of modern religious music, which would be discussed further in forthcoming issues.15
Whereas “The Crisis of Art” bears Suvchinsky’s Eurasianist mark, “The Problem of Modern Religious Music” reflects the influence of Jacques Maritain, the most prominent neo-Thomist Catholic thinker of the French Renouveau catholique. Lourié met Maritain through Stravinsky in the mid-1920s. Unlike Stravinsky, whose contact with the philosopher remained sporadic, Lourié, himself a Catholic convert, became a close friend. Jacques and his Russian-Jewish wife, Raissa, had many important musicians in their circle, including, apart from Lourié and Stravinsky, Georges Auric, Roland-Manuel, Erik Satie, and Ricardo Viñes. Only Lourié and Roland-Manuel became engaged in Maritain’s rigorous studies of Thomas Aquinas’s theology. It was through Roland-Manuel, one of the ghostwriters of Stravinsky’s Poétique musicale, that Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920) became a source for Stravinsky’s aesthetics. Lourié attended the Maritains’ meetings in Meudon, kept
up a copious correspondence with them, and ended his life in Maritain’s house in Princeton, which Raissa willed to him before her death in 1960.16
In “The Problem of Modern Religious Music,” Lourié still distinguishes between bourgeois and proletarian art according to the social needs they serve, but he looks for a higher purpose not in Eurasia but in religious faith. Religious art, the neo-Thomist Lourié declares, does not depend on subject matter but on the composer’s inspiration and his willingness to subordinate his work to a transcendental cause. As opposed to what Lourié calls “objective” art that serves social goals, such art is “ontological,” for it keeps its connection with life and with “the artist’s temperament and spiritual experience.” Lourié emphasizes that despite its subordination to a “final cause,” religious art has to remain free and should obey “no specific laws, for its essence resides in musical language and material, not in style.”
The parallels between Lourié’s and Maritain’s conceptions of religious art are striking. Like Lourié, Maritain defines religious art not as “ecclesiastical art, an art specified by an object, an end, and definite rules,” but as “art bearing on the face of it the character of Christianity.” “Everything,” Maritain wrote, “sacred and profane, belongs to it.”17 What Lourié describes as art with a higher goal, Maritain asserts as art “in a state of absolute dependence upon theological wisdom.” But this “ultimate control by theology,” Maritain, like Lourié, insists, “does not impose any aesthetic genre, any style, any particular technique, on sacred art.” Since according to Maritain there is “no style peculiar to religious art, there is no religious technique,” it would be useless “to try to discover a technique, a style, a system of rules or a method of work peculiar to Christian art.”18 Christian art, Maritain would have agreed with Lourié, leaves the artist, as artist, free. Lourié’s emphasis on the role of inspiration also originates in Maritain’s philosophy. Authentic inspiration, Maritain writes, is “a special impulse of the natural order” proceeding “not from the Muses, but from the living God,” and “transcending the limits of reason.”19
Stravinsky and His World Page 18