In spite of reservations, there were signs that the tone of Russian criticism was changing in the years before the revolution, along with Stravinsky’s music. “There is a new phenomenon—Stravinsky,” Vladimir Derzhanovsky declared after the first all-Stravinsky concert in Russia, organized by the journal Muzïka in Moscow, 22 August 1912.9 But Stravinsky’s career in Russia also started to face tremendous difficulties. If no performances of his ballets took place before the revolution, few followed directly afterward. Listeners could not always acquaint themselves with Stravinsky’s instrumental works either, and when they did, it was often years after the premieres had taken place in Western Europe. As a consequence, musical modernism—defined as it was in Europe in part by Stravinsky’s successes in these years—unfolded somewhat differently in Russia than it did elsewhere.
The story of the The Rite of Spring’s reception in Russia is a case in point. Although as a ballet it was performed in the Soviet Union for the first time in 1965, as an orchestral piece the work had found its way into Russian concert halls much earlier. The reception of the music was not continually positive, however. When Serge Koussevitzky conducted the Rite for the first time on 5 February 1914 in Moscow, responses were muted. Vyacheslav Karatygin found its “polytonal chords” and other harmonic peculiarities of the score interesting, but also noted that it contained “certain unpleasant traits”—above all, monotony: “It seems to me that its historical, symptomatic significance nevertheless exceeds its artistic significance.”10 Prokofiev’s response was equally ambivalent: “I listened to The Rite of Spring and listened with heightened attention. In any case, this work is lively and almost captivating. I was simply delighted by the ‘Dance of the Earth.’ But it is so shrill, and in some other, quieter places the music is so hopelessly false that you have to wonder if the talented and imaginative Stravinsky somehow has a screw loose. There were many listeners who applauded hard, but the majority was either at a loss or exchanged triumphantly derisive glances, as if saying, now this is the kind of filth the Futurists write.”11
But reactions were dramatically different when Fritz Stiedry conducted the Rite to sold-out audiences in Leningrad and Moscow in 1926.12 This time, The Rite of Spring met with exceptional success. Judging from the reviews, Stiedry and both Russian orchestras managed to convey the music to listeners in all its brilliance. “After the Rite the audience greeted Stiedry with unanimous ovations that were entirely deserved,” Boris Asafyev wrote of the performance in Leningrad. “The Rite of Spring is now treated as a simple lapidary work created in a single sweep.”13 The Moscow critic Anton Uglov echoed his response: “The Viennese conductor Fritz Stiedry quickly and skillfully ‘organized’ the concert. And the delivery was wonderfully successful. … This work has not lost its rich relevance and contemporariness, and and must under no circumstances fade into the background.”14
The impact of Stiedry’s Rite was tremendous. Further performances followed, and a scholarly tradition around Stravinsky began to take shape.15 All of this gave evidence of openness toward Stravinsky’s works in the Soviet Union in these years. Vsevolod Meyerhold premiered The Nightingale at the Mariinsky Theatre on 30 May 1918; Leonid Leontiev modified Fokine’s choreography for a performance of Petrushka in Petrograd in 1920; and famous tenor Ivan Yershov and pianist Mikhail Druskin—a future scholar of Stravinsky’s work—performed a piano-vocal reduction of Renard in 1926.16 One of the most talented Russian ballet masters, Fyodor Lopukhov, whose aesthetic explorations resonated with the pioneering work of another student who later attended the Petrograd Theatre School, George Balanchine, staged Firebird in October 1921, Pulcinella in May 1926, and Renard in January 1927.17 Anatoly Lunacharsky of the Ministry of Education sent Stravinsky an official invitation to conduct in Leningrad 1925, but he declined.18 Concerts continued, nonetheless. Mikhail Klimov conducted Les Noces with Maria Yudina, Dmitry Shostakovich, Alla Maslakovetz, and Isai Renzin on piano on 12 December 1926, and premiered a concert performance of Oedipus Rex in April 1928. At this time, Boris Asafyev also published his important monograph Kniga o Stravinskom (A Book About Stravinsky).19 Concert programmers and public alike also showed interest in Stravinksy’s neoclassical works: L’Histoire du soldat, a concert version of Apollon musagète, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, the Symphonies d’instruments à vent, the Octet, Piano Sonata, Serenade in A, and Ragtime were all performed in the Soviet Union in this period, among other compositions.
Stravinsky’s works, and primarily the Rite, touched the hearts and minds of many young Russian composers and musicians. “Did I already write you about Stravinsky’s Spring?” the twenty-three-year-old composer Vissarion Shebalin wrote his wife, Alissa, while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory in 1926. “It was performed here twice—it captivated me utterly from start to finish and made me think about a lot of things.”20 “Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and [Rimsky-Korsakov’s] Kitezh left the strongest and most lasting impression on me. Spring captivated me in particular, with its vivid rhythms and the wittiness and brilliance of its presentation,” he wrote his former teacher Mikhail Nevitov a few months later.21 “After listening to [Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet], I realized for the first time in my life that music can provoke uncontrollable laughter: it was so funny and amusing that the entire audience roared with laughter.”22 Composer Gavriil Popov, who also played piano in performances of Les Noces, wrote in his diary in 1930: “I am reading the score of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Aside from its usefulness (technical), I am experiencing an enormous amount of pleasure that borders on sensations of happiness. Hearing and experiencing Stravinsky’s high mastery and subtlest musical intuition, I am somehow comforted and am trying to learn even the tiniest bit from the artistic treasures of this musical giant.”23 Composer Aleksey Zhivotov also let echoes of L’Histoire du soldat and Petrushka surface in his aphoristic cycle Fragments for Nonet (1929), and Vladimir Deshevov based “Barakholka,” the first scene of his 1930 opera Ice and Steel, on the model of crowd scenes in Petrushka.
One of the most important young composers to witness the impact of Stravinsky’s music in these years was Dmitry Shostakovich, who attended Stiedry’s performance of the Rite at age nineteen. “Saw the conductor Fritz Stiedry yesterday,” he wrote his friend, eighteen-year-old Lev Oborin, who would go on to become a famous pianist. “Mozart’s overture from The Magic Flute, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade [for Strings], Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. … [The latter work] is an astonishing piece. I have never heard such orchestral brilliance. A hell of a sound. The music itself is a bit rough, but as captivating as can be. The most striking thing, of course, is its sound. Stiedry is a fantastic conductor. Wonderful technique, excellent taste, temperament and all other resources needed to provide pleasure to the audience. Spring was extremely successful. A very pleasing fact. The listeners are starting to like contemporary music.”24
Shostakovich soon developed an equally intense interest in Stravinsky’s neoclassical works, and especially those performed in Leningrad in these years, including L’Histoire du soldat and Oedipus Rex. He considered Stravinsky—with Tchaikovsky—to be one of the greatest Russian composers; all others, including Sergey Prokofiev, lagged far behind.25 Shostakovich also arranged the Symphony of Psalms, which could not be heard in Russia at the time, for piano four hands and regularly played it with students in his composition class.26 This piece had an obvious impact on Shostakovich’s own work in the second half of the 1930s, because without Stravinsky’s influence, how can one explain the neo-Baroque style of Shostakovich’s Symphonies no. 5 and 6; Piano Quintet in G Minor, op. 57; or Piano Trio no. 2 in E Minor, op. 67? In spite of these connections, Shostakovich’s neoclassicism remained entirely his own.
This era of hopeful, fruitful exchange came to an abrupt end with Stalin’s consolidation and exploitation of power during the 1930s and ’40s.27 Starting in the 1930s, there was a sharp drop-off in Stravinsky performances in the Soviet Uni
on. In 1933, Arnold Alshvang published a devastating critique, and in 1948 the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks forbade his works entirely.28 In that year this committee, following on Andrey Zhdanov’s remarks at the Musicians’ Conference a month earlier, issued the infamous resolution “On the Opera Velikaia Druzhba by Vano Muradeli,” in which it condemned “formalism in Soviet music.” Tikhon Khrennikov described Stravinsky’s works, and above all The Rite of Spring, as “obvious manifestations of decadence in music.” In the Rite, Khrennikov continued, “ancient folksongs are hideously distorted, exaggerated, and presented as though in a carnival mirror.”29 Asafyev had a statement read in which he renounced his previous interest in Stravinsky at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in February of that year, and when the Moscow Academy of Science began publishing Asafyev’s selected works in five volumes a few years later, Dmitry Kabalevsky wrote a critical note to explain why they omitted Asafyev’s monograph on Stravinsky.30 In spite of these measures composers continued to listen to Stravinsky in the privacy of their homes and through foreign broadcasts.31
Stravinsky’s music began to return to Soviet concert halls only in the late 1950s, in part because of Leonard Bernstein’s sensational guest performances with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Bernstein conducted The Rite of Spring, Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (with soloist Seymour Lipkin), and other works in concerts in Moscow and Leningrad in August and September 1959. Stravinsky quickly found new advocates in the Soviet Union, among them pianist Maria Yudina (an old-time supporter), conductors Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Igor Blazhkov, and, later, the pianist Aleksey Lubimov. Stravinsky’s music returned more emphatically after the eighty-year-old composer’s memorable and enormously significant visit to his homeland in October 1962. Composer Karen Khachaturian remembers Stravinsky describing the trip to young musicians during a meeting at the Leningrad Philharmonic as a kind of cultural mission. “This is not any kind of nostalgia, that is to say, gushiness,” he recorded Stravinsky as saying. “I decided to come here because it seemed to me that my trip would help your musical work. … After all, in the first half of the century, Russian art burst out to the [artistic] forefront. … My arrival is supposed to help musicians get past this impasse with greater determination. … In that I see my mission and my duty.”32
The surge of renewed interest in Stravinsky’s work in the early 1960s coincided with a “new folkloric wave” beginning to take shape in Soviet music—the belated heir to the neo-folklorism of the early twentieth century. Compositions in this style refracted folkloric idioms in innovative ways, at times even approaching the musical language of the avant-garde—that is, more or less as Stravinsky had done in his earlier Russian works. Folklore, especially archaic folklore, became a symbol of renewal. Rodion Shchedrin appeared as Stravinsky’s obvious successor in this respect, his 1963 Concerto for Orchestra no. 1 (Naughty Limericks) emblematic of the new folkloric wave. But Edison Denisov, a leader of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1960s, is just as obvious a successor. His chamber cantata Lamentations, composed to the lyrics of actual funeral laments from the Russian North (1966) is, consciously or not, clearly based on Les Noces. Both the texts and the instrumentation belie this influence. Denisov’s melodies are not archaic little popevkas, however, but rather twelve-tone thematic complexes organized according to the serial method.33 Here and there reminiscences of Les Noces still shine through, however, for example in the “sobbing” grace notes in the vocal part, which bring to mind Stravinsky’s Bride.
Stravinsky’s music gradually returned to Russia in the 1960s, and started to have significant influence again, not only in the works of the new folkloric wave but in other areas as well. Alfred Schnittke’s and others’ polystylistics originated in the neoclassical works of the master; others first heard about the serial method through Stravinsky, who had defended it passionately during his above-mentioned meeting with young composers in Leningrad in 1962. Alexander Vustin’s The Word for chamber orchestra (1975) echoes the archaic melodies and the timbral hues of the Symphonies d' instruments à vent. Leonid Desyatnikov’s song cycle Russian Seasons (2000) alludes to the Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi and Diaghilev’s famous Parisian saisons and shows the distinct influence of Les Noces. Such traces of Stravinsky’s influence have remained in Russian music to the present day.
The New Russian Style
The folkloric basis of Stravinsky’s works from Firebird to Les Noces was evident both to its first listeners and first reviewers. Eventually, folklore came to be viewed as the source of Stravinsky’s innovation and as the most important component of his style as a whole, a view that has become firmly established, especially in the composer’s homeland. That Stravinsky was above all a Russian composer always sounded like a truism to his compatriots, although it did not imply a lack of scholarly interest in the question.34 Beyond Russia, the situation was somewhat different: to prove this thesis to the Western musical establishment, Richard Taruskin needed to write an enormous book.35
However, even in Stravinsky’s homeland the question was not resolved without debate. This had to do with the nature of Stravinsky’s borrowings. In Stravinsky’s youth, composers routinely used folklore that had been published in numerous collections, many of which Stravinsky later spoke about, including the collections of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Anatoly Lyadov, and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. He showed particular interest in publications of the Music Ethnography Commission, and particularly the collection of Yevgeniya Linyova, who used a phonograph for her documentation.36 “Don’t take others, which aren’t recorded by phonographs,” Stravinsky wrote his mother in reference to Linyova’s collections in 1916, confirming a belief shared by many leading researchers in his time in authentic, unedited folklore.37 This same interest led Stravinsky to copy from his friends the urban “street” themes of Petrushka,38 and the “factory” melody of Les Noces (which is really an old peasant song).
Stravinsky’s more or less direct quotations of authentic material rather quickly gave way to compositional elaboration, leading to the crystallization of his characteristic melodic forms. The distinct line between citation and non-citation disappeared. This was just as new for Russian music as Stravinsky’s unusual, “deforming” approach to working with folklore, which included varying accents and motives, and dissonant “shading” (a famous example being the melody “Oh you, front porch, my front porch” (Akh vï, seni moi, seni) in Petrushka, which is doubled at the tritone). The “false” consonances of The Rite of Spring are the result of the superimposition of nonharmonic countermelodies onto the basic melody, a characteristic device of Russian folk polyphony.
Stravinsky’s new Russian style, clearly indicated in Petrushka and developed in the following works, was sharply rejected by many. Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov and other members of his father’s circle, did not accept it. Andrey called Petrushka “a mixture of Russian homebrew” (the “folk scenes”) with French perfume (“the puppet comedy”).39 In The Rite of Spring he claimed only to hear “pathetic hints of a melodic pattern”—apparently in place of the national themes he had expected.40 The composer Nikolay Myaskovsky, in contrast, considered Petrushka an absolute masterpiece precisely on account of its Russianness and viewed the ballet’s author as an authentic successor to his teacher, the senior Rimsky-Korsakov. The sharpness of these polemics was compounded by the efforts on the part of many Russian composers at this time toward creating a new national music. Alexander Kastalsky, for instance, the master of Russian Church music and an expert in folklore, had begun working on the cycle Scenes from Peasant Merrymaking in Rus, which was to include, among other things, a representation of a Russian folk wedding. Curiously, Stravinsky’s name surfaced in discussions about the cycle (in the context of its suitability for publication) between Kastalsky and Sergey Rachmaninoff. “I came to convince you to undertake this work,” Rachmaninoff said to Kastalsky, “After all, anyone would give you as much as you want to give it up. Take Stravinsky
– this is simply a treasure trove for him! He’ll give you 100,000 for it!”41 Indeed, Stravinsky was planning Les Noces at the same time, which Rachmaninoff could not have known, of course. But Kastalsky’s taste was completely different than Stravinsky’s: he created ethnographic restorations based on precise adaptations of folkloric material, and did not entirely accept Stravinsky’s new Russian style.42
Boris Asafyev explained Stravinsky’s relationship to folklore for Soviet readers in his monograph of 1928: “Stravinsky adopted Russian folk art not as a deft stylist capable of hiding citations, and not as a populist ethnographer unable to assimilate the material and transform it on an artistic level, but as a master of his native language. In this regard Stravinsky became the Pushkin of Russian music.”43 The comparison with Pushkin, the great poet and pioneer of the modern Russian language, becomes particularly significant when one considers that it is still impossible to tell which songs from Pyotr Kireyevsky’s collection (from which Stravinsky extracted the texts for Les Noces) were written by Pushkin as imitations of folksongs, and which are authentic folksongs. In the same way, it has proven impossible to identify all the sources in the Rite and Les Noces. It is no coincidence that Stravinsky gradually forgot about these citations, and in his conversations with Robert Craft the only quotations he referred to were the introductory melody of The Rite of Spring and a single song in Les Noces. Stravinsky, “the master of folk speech,” had “appropriated” the other cited material, apparently by virtue of its indistinguishability from his own. The composer “had the right”—so to speak—to forget.
Stravinsky and His World Page 37