Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  Whereas in “The Crisis of Art” Lourié found the solution to the crisis in Stravinsky’s music, here he implicitly offers his own work as an example of spiritual art. Proponents of Maritain’s neo-Thomist ideal, such as Henri-Irénée Marrou, a Catholic French historian and an old Parisian friend of Lourié, saw Lourié’s music as “essentially religious, spiritual, and mythical because,” Marrou writes, “it fulfills our most secret desire for a music that no longer provides earthly nourishment tending to carnal needs and thus it is no longer the voice of Satan.”20 In Maritain’s view ontological music, which Lourié identified with religious music, was best represented by Lourié’s art, which was “born in the singular roots of being,” and which, like ontology, evolved from “metaphysical knowledge … at the highest degree of abstractive intuition.”21 Maritain sensed in Lourié’s music “the great influx of the soul and inspiration which is renewing music today,” recognizing in it the same possibility of spiritual renewal he was initiating in French Catholicism. Like the anonymous editor in L’Art chrétien, Maritain singles out Lourié’s Sonate liturgique as the piece with which “the period opens in which Lourié’s art attains its plenitude and verifies in an unimpeachable way the Pauline axiom—where the spirit is, there is liberty.” According to Maritain this new liberty is also perceptible in Lourié’s Concerto spirituale, which, although it is constrained by its transcendental goal, is “free of all traditional form” and thus “rediscovers, together with its essential inspiration, an astonishing spontaneity.”22 If nowhere else, in the Christian philosopher’s mind Lourié surpassed his former idol Stravinsky.

  The Crisis of Art (1928–29)

  Arthur Lourié

  1.

  It is time to realize, finally, that art in our time, with some exceptions, has become art without art.23 The formula “art for art’s sake” (an outdated phrase to which we are nevertheless still bound somehow by anguished memories—marginally, though, and only by nerve endings) was coined by generations of people who had lost their faith in art and replaced it with aesthetic idolatry. Aesthetic experience became a surrogate for spiritual experience a long time ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a large amount of spiritual energy was devoted to this change. Aesthetics, which took the place of authentic spiritual experience, was declared a fundamental virtue. But Wagner, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wilde, Scriabin, and Vrubel were neither pranksters nor buffoons.24 They shaped new mythologies. This was the era of creating magical, artificial worlds. The power of creative and spiritual genius had gone astray and given itself up to the phantom of false self-assertion.

  We have to acknowledge these people, however misguided they may have been, because for them artifice became genuine art. They were among the last for whom art was still an expression of spiritual experience. Those who followed them and obliterated their names squandered any hope of remaining on a spiritual path. Over the past ten years art without art, which has been born of emptiness, has surreptitiously spread. It is being created by people and for people who need absolutely nothing. But as soon as art loses its connection to genuine spiritual experience, it becomes a factory of artifacts.

  Art is no longer “prophetic”—it has become “material.” And that is how things stand both in the West and in Russia. There is “art without art” both here and there, but for different reasons. Western Europe, driven by avarice, is busy manufacturing useless commodities. In Russia, where everything is now viewed from a Marxist angle, art is being compelled to serve the social process. There is no living art, neither here nor there. Whether art belongs to God (along with human life itself, from which it is inseparable) or whether it serves the social process, it is subordinate in equal measure. In either case, art is not a value in itself. But in the former case the subordination is voluntary and imperceptible. It is informed directly by one’s personal spiritual experience, and so it is dedicated to the “common cause,” that is, to the stewardship of divine grace (domostroitel'stvo) and universal concord (mirostroitel'stvo).25 In the latter case the subordination is by force, and spiritual experience, deemed obsolete, is excised.

  “In Europe there is life and death” (Blok).26 Art has lost its soul. In the aesthetics of contemporary Russia, the soul has been exiled from both life and art. It is self-evident that if art is taken to be an elemental force, it can only be an instrument of the transcendent. How this comes to pass and manifests itself is a separate matter, but no other option exists for art. Its submission must be absolutely voluntary. Any other mode of subordination constitutes abuse. When Marxists force art to serve their “common cause” (the material reconstruction of the world), they necessarily reject genuine living art. What they officially call art is merely a derivative theory or the propaganda of Marxist ideas in the guise of aesthetics.

  This may all be well and good as long as it serves the purpose of “primitive accumulation,”27 yet all of this lies well beyond the realm of art. And so, appropriated by the ruling class, art in Russia has ceased to be art.

  The only difference between the modes of artistic production in Russia and in the West is that the aesthetics of production in Russia is meant ultimately to serve the interests of the proletariat, whereas the aesthetics of production in Europe already serves the bourgeoisie. But the aesthetically untutored proletariat obviously prefers bourgeois production in art, whereas the surfeited bourgeoisie lusts after the proletarian. All this matters not so much for illuminating the individual creative processes of particular artists as for characterizing the order of things and the spirit of the times. If we want to understand what is happening in art right now, we are compelled to address such basic, fundamental matters.

  In contrast to the West, Russia’s current political and social reality has put forth the issue of proletarian aesthetics. To this day the thesis of proletarian art remains vague; it is a dogmatic premise that exists only in the fog of neo-Marxist dialectics. Its antithesis —“bourgeois,” free art—no longer has any practical meaning, since art in Europe no longer issues from the sphere of spiritual experience. This is why proletarian art, lacking a thesis, is unable to arise in reaction to its antithesis. What might in mutual struggle have given rise to new authentic values, amounts only to a sterile draw. Revolutionary pathos, which could have sidestepped theses and antitheses and used its explosive force to bring the art of the proletariat into being, is nowhere to be found. I do not know how contemporary art in the West came to lose its “divine purpose”; nor do I know how the revolution failed to give birth to a revolutionary pathos in art. But there is now a kind of equivalence between these states of affairs, insofar as both here and there art is being animated solely by method. In Europe this method is formal—that is, aesthetic. In Russia the method is internal—that is, dialectical. In Europe the method is qualitative (how), while in Russia it is conceptual (what). But art animated solely by method is art without art.

  Method devours art. Art without art is the same as “art for art’s sake,” but in its newest, that is, totally barren form. Earlier, aesthetic experience became a surrogate for spiritual experience; now formal experiments are supplanting creativity. The living flesh of art, its matter and substance, is being counterfeited by aimlessly generated new forms.

  2.

  Both in Russia and in the West the art of the past decade was characterized by a commitment to generating new forms. The only real aesthetic development of that time was methodological experimentation. The dialectical method of transforming matter became both dominant and self-sufficiently hermetic; everything else was sidelined. The dialectic was also a polemic, which guaranteed its relevance. Only polemics had any resonance whatsoever; all else was irrelevant, obsolete. Works of art were not generated in the process of creating something new but almost exclusively through a critical reexamination of the past. This artistic output arose through a violent, willful fusion of the modern with phases from the past, long gone and left behind. Whatever energy could be extracted from the past was us
ed to power the contemporary sensibility of form. In effect, this was a process of elimination, provoked by the realization that the art of the modernist period found itself in a dead end. This reaction did not generate a lively and effective creative force. Its impotence forced it to return time and again to the past, overcoming it and at the same time obliterating the remains of whatever had managed to survive and could have potentially been put to creative use.

  For example, returning to Bach in music or Ingres in painting (“liking” or “not liking” them is an entirely separate matter) is at this point simply impossible in any creative endeavor. The very best works of the past decade find their ideological justification in Pascal’s words:

  Let them not tell me that I did not say anything new: it is the arrangement of the materials that is new ….

  I would prefer if they tell me I was using old words. And even if thoughts do not form another set of utterances by being arranged differently, words do form different thoughts by being arranged differently.28

  Even if the upper crust of contemporary artistic output can occasionally be justified this way, the front lines of aesthetic action witnessed a most vulgar degradation of art, which reduced creative activity to crude imitation and contraption, occasionally spiced with frivolous improvisation.

  It was primarily the painting and music of those years that found the most complete expression in the formal dialectical method. Not since the distant classical era has the dialectic of form and material been expressed with such brilliance and forcefulness as it has in the last decade, in Picasso’s art and Stravinsky’s music. In those years both Picasso’s and Stravinsky’s art was animated by the ambition to articulate the most systematic, ironclad method of dialectical construction possible. They excluded from the domain of art all that interfered with a pure, formal process, abolishing everything that threatened to destabilize it and become alien to it. Accomplishing this required both of them to obliterate their personal pasts, and that is just what they did. Picasso, however, found a way to reconcile the brown and green-gray canvases of his formal and emotional exaggerations with his new credo of equilibrium, synthesis, and impersonal texture. Stravinsky proceeded more decisively. He rejected his “Sturm und Drang” period and entered into conflict with modernity, which refuses to follow in his footsteps, demanding that he re-embrace his legacy, which he has fully exhausted and annihilated.

  Picasso, having broken down pictorial nature practically to its constituent atoms, has brought it to an organized and organic unity. Stravinsky, having laid bare the essence of music, has reined in chaos, clamping it with a steel bit. Both, having begun with ideally expressed disequilibrium and disorder, have brought their musical and painterly equipment into an ideal state of order, returning to visual and auditory material a durable equilibrium and the regularity of a new causality. Departing from a revolutionary dynamic of extreme emancipation, both have come to the stasis of submissive contemplation. Time has come full circle, and, it seems, has to begin anew with the center of artistic activity shifting toward the greatest possible disequilibrium, toward new explosions of creative energy, toward the explosion of a new dynamic that makes possible new advances in the organization of a temporal and spatial system.

  In pursuing his creative goals neither Stravinsky nor Picasso belongs in any way to the set of values and practices that I have been calling “art without art.” In music and painting this term refers to what in contemporary official, that is, recognized, art is peripheral to these artists’ work. Insofar as genuine art necessarily expresses national or universal experience (even when it eschews an ideological connection to it and finds means of expression that sidestep it purely in formal and methodological terms), Stravinsky and Picasso have embodied every aspect of the past decade. The music of Stravinsky and the painting of Picasso are a documentary testimony to the historical events of their time, in all aspects, whether aesthetic, ethical, political, or social. Picasso’s designs were not simply a backward glance for the purposes of restoring old art. He established new sets of relationships that ran parallel to old art, without aiming to resurrect it. Picasso’s formal method served constructive goals, but at the same time established equivalence between the newly emerging and the old. Picasso’s artistic sensibility represents a particular instantiation of the contemporary situation, and, at the same time, is consonant with any genuine pictorial-constructive movement of the past, be it naive barbaric archaism or the geometrical principle in the Italian Renaissance. Stravinsky has turned away from the present with a feeling of nausea. He has, for reasons other than Picasso’s, gone back to the past, where he brings back to life that which he finds resonant not so much with the contemporary canon as with his own personal sensibility. His excursions into the past are conditioned not so much by formal-constructive principles like Picasso’s as they are by formal and ethical principles. But both of them persistently return to bygone cultures, summoning a whole set of values from the past to renewed existence under the conditions of our contemporary existence. Each accomplishes this in his own way, based on different premises. Therein lies an essential difference between these two artists, even if their names continue to merit being invoked together. Having absorbed all the individual contemporary artistic processes that found themselves, voluntarily or not, drawn into their spheres of influence, Picasso and Stravinsky have used their authority to subjugate painting and music to their experience. This is so because the positions taken by the two artists not only command a vast field of activity in the realms of contemporary art but also radiate into all areas of artistic achievement in the past that can be associated in any way with contemporary art. Of course, here we can generalize only about those particular processes that are already linked by a common thread and can be gathered under the umbrella of the currently prevailing formal-aesthetic conception of art as a formally objectified activity—that is, supra-individual, impersonal, and supra-emotional. For the moment all individualistic processes in modern art remain outside our field of vision. Next to Picasso and Stravinsky one should mention Valéry, whose aesthetic conception in effect lays bare the fundamental tendencies that became firmly established among the leading artists of this direction over the past decade. Valéry leads us into another domain—the realm of poetry and poetics. That deserves a separate discussion.

  —Translated from the Russian by Katya Ermolaev, Yasha Klots, Klára Móricz, and Boris Wolfson

  The Problem of Modern Religious Music (1934)

  Arthur Lourié

  We thought it would be interesting to ask one of today’s most prominent young composers to articulate for our readers the problem of modern religious music.29 The author of the Sonate liturgique and the Concerto spirituel [sic] was willing to let us publish these few notes gathered over the course of our conversation.

  The problem posed here from the perspective of a religious aesthetic should be followed by studies of a more technical character. This problem is thus both the introduction to and link between the different subjects Arthur Lourié discusses in greater depth here.

  —THE EDITORS

  We have been asked to attempt to address the problem of religious music as it presents itself to us from the perspective of its modern reality. Addressing such a broad question compels us to remain in the domain of generalities; otherwise we would find ourselves having to stop all the time to give extreme nuance to the judgments we make on specific cases. We will thus keep to general characteristics, situating ourselves from the start on a religious plane.

  Leaving aside the subject of religion itself, we have to look for the aesthetic principles governing the religious genre. Indeed, it is not only a matter of the artist taking on a religious subject; it is through inspiration that his music will be a work worthy of being called religious music; we need to return to this often forgotten notion.

  The first of these principles is unquestionably the work’s free subordination to a final cause. Just as the Christian’s life is essentially free
and yet ordained to its spiritual purpose, so too religious art cannot find its end in itself and yet remains essentially free.

  Thus creation manifests itself in two ways.

  On the one hand, we see works that are, so to speak, manufactured,30 because they are isolated from everything that lies outside their own operational rules and the object to be created in itself. These works can be distinguished from one another only by the criterion of quality. For this reason, and for greater ease, we will describe them with the term objective art.

  In contrast to these works we see others that are a reflection of spiritual life and whose character is essentially ontological. With these works it cannot be a question of pure music, of art for art’s sake, because they are always tightly bound up with life itself, with the artist’s temperament and spiritual experience.

  The art we have called objective may well attempt to tackle religious subjects, but it is not free to do so. Ordained to no transcendental purpose, this art puts itself at the service of social process; and it is in this sense that it is correct to say that there is such a thing as bourgeois or proletarian art. If the Russian artist is subjected to serving the new collectivity, the artist from other countries undergoes as well an alienation from his liberty that is no less real for being less conscious. The former must create an art that captures the spirit of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the latter consents to express through his art profound elements of bourgeois culture. In our opinion, the difference is not essential.