Stravinsky and His World

by Levitz, Tamara

  Yet with time, the question of folkloric borrowings in Stravinsky’s work became crucial and even acquired a famous urgency—though one must agree with Richard Taruskin that “an exhaustive accounting of Stravinsky’s musical sources will never be made.”44 The interest in this subject in Russia stems partly from the unfortunate situation that the live sound environment in which the composer matured has disappeared almost entirely: folk music has turned from a natural and in many ways unconscious premise for musical composition into something almost equally exotic for foreigners and Russians alike.45 As a consequence, certain sources in Stravinsky’s music are a true mystery. Thus, page 35 of the sketchbook for The Rite of Spring contains a major-third theme in a whole-tone scale, meant for the finale of the ballet’s first part—“Dance of the Earth”—where it is used in a somewhat altered version. The whole-tone scale is in fact encountered in Russian archaic folklore of the southern provinces (Kurskaya, Belgorodskaya) as well as in the Lithuanian Sutartinės, most often in the form of the Lydian tetrachord. But Russian folklorists discovered and described this type of scale only during expeditions in the 1950s, and it was not recorded earlier. Thus Stravinsky could not have taken this theme from any of the print sources he consulted.46

  Another detailed example can be found in Les Noces, in the two-part episode of the second scene, rehearsal number 50,“Boslovite, otech s materyu,” which mimics Russian Church psalmody. Its high-voice part is an adapted citation from the Octoechos, a collection of liturgical hymns of the Russian Orthodox Church. The two-part structure itself is rather reminiscent of so-called line singing (strochnoye peniye) which was used in the Russian Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and later fell out of use. Line singing was characterized by the free use of pure fourths, fifths, and dissonances (compare the parallel major seconds in the passage of Les Noces mentioned above). Certain attributes of line singing are close to folkloric heterophony, but these practices remained obscure until the decodings and publications of more recent times.47 Stravinsky could not have heard anything like this in the church services of his time. If both of these examples are the result of brilliant intuition, then perhaps that intuition could have worked in other cases? Clearly we must listen closely to the composer’s words: “If any of these pieces sounds like aboriginal folk music, it may be because my powers of fabrication were able to tap some unconscious ‘folk memory.’”48 Either way, an element of mystery remains.

  But it is also important to approach the problem of citations from a wider perspective. Stravinsky’s pioneering work in the interpretation of folklore was not just based on folklore. Many of Stravinsky’s neo-folkloric innovations resonate not only with folkloric sources but also with the new music of his time, including that of Claude Debussy. Not without reason, Stravinsky said that The Rite of Spring was indebted to Debussy more than to any other composer. He was referring not only to details such as the solo opening of the Rite, which reminded contemporary listeners of the beginning of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, but also about deeper elements, in which “Debussyisms” naturally resonated with “folklorisms.” Stravinsky favored parallel chords, for example, which accompany melodic lines of a folkloric nature (whether authentic or not is irrelevant in this case). Examples of this can be found in the most vivid moments of Stravinsky’s neo-folkloric works: “Russkaya” in Petrushka, and in the motive of the four French horns from the “Spring Rounds,” as well as the motives from the “Rituals of the Rival Tribes,” “Dance of the Earth,” and “Mystic Circles of the Young Girls” in the Rite.49 It is doubtful that the recurring chord parallelism in Les Noces was directly copied from any particular source. Most likely it represents an amalgamation of sources.50 Stravinsky’s ear did not need to differentiate between folkloric and non-folkloric material. On the contrary, it became the composer’s artistic goal, likely on a subconscious level, to combine and reconcile these various influences. In this way, refined “modernist” harmonies confronted the “accordeonic” excesses of the Russian city.

  Such a synthesis was not entirely new to Russian music. Folk and Western art music had interacted since Glinka’s time, yet without becoming reconciled. “Avant-garde” composers had focused primarily on harmonic innovation in the nineteenth century. Famously remote from folk sources, they rarely if ever used folkloric or folk-like material by itself in their operas and symphonies. Even in a work such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka, which is almost entirely submerged in the elements of folk culture, the most significant moments in the part of the heroine are excluded from this folkloric sphere as a sign of her romantic detachment from the world of ordinary people.

  Such well-known facts must be kept in mind to grasp fully Stravinsky’s role in the creation of the New Russian Style. In his first two ballets, The Firebird and Petrushka, folklore still retains its traditional role. The Rite of Spring, however, was a decisive turning point. Here folkloric material in the broad sense of the term became, first, absolute in its significance, and second, aligned with the avant-garde and transformed into a key source for it. The famous scandal during the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring presaged its future role as the beacon of a new music. At the same time, it was the recognition of the universal significance of Russian folklore.

  A Poetics of Music

  Despite Stravinsky’s “proteism” and the wide variety of musical sources he used, the individuality of his style on a fundamental aural level remains indisputable. It is enough to hear two or three measures of any of his works to be convinced of this. His musical language is stable on the one hand and breathtakingly intertextual on the other. It seems as though Stravinsky’s work absorbed the entire twentieth century. His music can be exalted and farcical, erudite and childishly naïve, frenetic and pagan or humbly restrained. It is as though Stravinsky was entranced by the rich multiplicity of life and art, and his music is just as entrancing.

  But though his musical idiom, the fabric of his style, is important, it is clearly not all-encompassing in determining the music’s meaning. Stylistic definitions of Stravinsky’s music are famously too narrow anyway, especially because the music was so often associated with the other arts, and so inspired many hybrid analogies. Some believed Stravinsky’s music resembled fauvist paintings, for example, because of the unique saturation and brightness of its “color scheme.” Others explained his music’s similarity with Cubism through its temporal shifts and irregular accent patterns, which were seen as analogous to spatial deformations. Both analogies were made early on. In the late twentieth century, Stravinsky’s music was likened to art nouveau, because of the way it equalizes relief and background. But such stylistic terms are nothing more than metaphors or comparisons. They are inevitably tentative, because irregularity of accent and deformation of space, or the emancipation of tone quality in music and of color in painting, are very different phenomena. Nonetheless, such parallels serve to give us a sense of certain general patterns, on the basis of which we can construct ideas about concrete historical types of culture.

  I would like to suggest a more useful way of viewing Stravinsky’s music, based on the opposition of symbol and thing. In the most general sense, the symbolic type of art presupposes the existence of a kind of hidden reality to which the work of art refers. Of course, art as a general human endeavor can justifiably be treated as having symbolic character. As Ernst Cassirer argued in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, “All culture is manifested in the creation of specific image-worlds, of specific symbolic forms.”51 The creation of symbolic forms is based on the principle of the “representation of one content in and through another.”52 In essence, Cassirer’s theory represents a theoretical abstraction and universalization of the creative practices of Symbolism, an influential movement around the turn of the twentieth century. I am referring to symbolism in this historical sense when I set up the antithesis of thing and symbol. In contrast to the universal interpretation of the symbol that Cassirer suggests—of the sign as such—historic
al Symbolism elaborates a more specific understanding. Created by an act of extrasensory intuition, the symbol, as a mediating link between the transcendental world and the visible world, forms a broad spectrum of oscillating meanings. In this context, lexical units—words, sound, and color—acquire a particularly suggestive quality, an internal intensity that is only effective, however, within a given cultural tradition, an intensity engendered by that tradition through a system of conventions.

  By contrast, “thing-like” art represents an attempt to flee the captivity of “distant meanings” with their characteristic ambiguity. It concentrates on the very fabric of art—the word as such, sound as such, and color as such. In fact, “thingliness” arose historically as a reaction to Symbolism, uniting such divergent trends in literature and painting as Cubism, Acmeism, and Constructivism. No special term exists with respect to music to indicate its “thingliness” (the term Constructivism is sometimes used in the musical world; German Neue Sachlichkeit, by contrast, appeared later and is of a more local nature). We will therefore use a word from the Russian poetical lexicon: Acmeism, choosing this in particular because its etymological meaning is broad.

  The Greek word acme denotes a zenith or peak; Acmeism was a Russian poetic school that emerged around 1910 and included Osip Mandelshtam, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergey Gorodetsky, Anna Akhmatova, Georgy Ivanov, and others.53 Stravinsky shared with these poets not a style, but rather the same St. Petersburg cultural background, which meant immeasurably more to Stravinsky than is commonly assumed. Walter Nouvel, the ghostwriter of Stravinsky’s Autobiography, became the connecting link between Stravinsky and the composer’s “past that might have been”—after all, Stravinsky was not close to the newer poets and artists when he lived in St. Petersburg.

  Stravinsky’s approach to sound material was marked by an Acmeistic sense of “thingliness,” which he retained throughout his life just as he did his native musical lexicon. For him, music was essentially plastic and material. This attitude can be seen in his work as a whole and in its details; for example, in the way he combined specific—“correct,” as he put it—chords and sets of instruments in almost every new work as if they were intended to be there from the start. One sees it as well in his wonderful dream about an interval that at first he simply couldn’t get right: “I dreamed about this interval. It had become an elastic substance stretching exactly between the two notes I had composed, but underneath these notes at either end was an egg, a large testicular egg. The eggs were gelatinous to the touch (I touched them). … I woke up knowing that my interval was right.”54

  The Acmeist poets’ return to the objectivity of the material world, the precise meaning of the poetic word, and to the spontaneity of “natural” expression is typologically related to Stravinsky’s artistic breakthrough in The Rite of Spring. The ponderous and supple “Augurs of Spring” chord is a “sound as such”55 that reveals itself in all its acoustic force and implies no hidden reality; this “self-sufficient” sound is similar to the “self-sufficient word” of Futurism—another movement I consider Acmeistic in the broadest sense. In parallel, Osip Mandelshtam wrote in 1913, “To exist is the artist’s greatest pride. He desires no other paradise than existence, and when people talk to him about reality he only smiles bitterly, for he knows the infinitely more convincing reality of art. … The modest appearance of a work of art frequently misleads us concerning the monstrously condensed reality that it possesses. In poetry this reality is the word as such.”56

  During his neoclassical period, Stravinsky reevaluated the idea of Acmeistic “thingliness.” He did not want to invent, but to build on a firm foundation of archetypal forms and genres. In a programmatic article, he called his Octet a “musical object” and said of Perséphone that “there is nothing to discuss and nothing to critique here …. a nose was not created, it just exists. The same goes for my art.”57 At the very same time, Daniil Kharms, a poet unknown to Stravinsky but living in his hometown, wrote the following words: “These are no longer just words and thoughts printed on paper. They are a thing, just as real as the crystal ink bottle standing on the table in front of me. … It seems as though one could pick up from the page these poems that have become things and throw them at the window, and the window would break. That’s what poetry can do!”58 This attitude was crystalized in Stravinsky’s Autobiography, which shows marked affinities with the writings of Mikhail Kuzmin. Its francophile spirit (it was written for French readers) would have pleased Kuzmin, as would its anti-Wagnerian attitude, especially given the adoration of Wagner in Symbolist and Mir iskusstva circles. But it is the affinity of their ideas that is most striking. Stravinsky uses the Nietzschean categories of Apollonian and Dionysian—which can be traced back to the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin.59 He also echoes Kuzmin’s notion of “beautiful clarity,” written in 1910: “Be logical … be skillful architects … be economical and sparing in your words, precise and authentic.”60 Both see the artwork as a self-sufficient reality. “People always want to find in music something it is not,” Stravinsky writes. “The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses, and what the author had in mind when he composed it. They never seem to understand that music is a thing in itself apart from anything that it may suggest to them.”61 In comparison, Kuzmin writes, “The work of art cannot be grasped based on its fruits, because it is itself already a fruit. … There still seem to be those who approach a work of art with demands of a social, moral, and political character.”62 Even Stravinsky’s opinion that music is “powerless to express anything whatsoever—a feeling, attitude, psychological state, natural phenomenon, etc.,” which greatly astounded the readers of Autobiography, is echoed in an aphorism by Kuzmin: “The best test of talent is to write about nothing.” And finally, Stravinsky’s crowning thought in a lengthy passage about “ideas” and “sound content” in Beethoven’s music—“How immaterial it is whether the Third Symphony was inspired by the figure of the Republican Bonaparte or the Emperor Napoleon!”—could almost be a quote from Kuzmin: “Auber’s opera The Mute Girl of Portici inspired the masses to revolt, but it still remains an ordinary comic opera, neither bad nor good, just like the majority of this composer’s works.”63 Of course, similar thoughts were in the air and by the 1930s had become commonplace. But considered as a whole, they suggest not only a certain cohesiveness in the relationship between Stravinsky and the Acmeists, but a powerful typology of creativity.

  The historical significance of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, so apparent today, was not immediately understood. Equally unclear was the composer’s role in the evolution of Russian music, onto which Stravinsky grafted European forms, just as Pushkin had deliberately grafted borrowed story lines and genres onto the tree of Russian literature. One way or another, by the end of the century it became clear that Stravinsky’s evolution could serve as an ideal model for the history of Russian music in the twentieth century. As one of the most astute connoisseurs of Stravinsky’s work, Pyotr Suvchinsky said to Stravinsky in 1962, “It is now more important and more interesting to talk about the all-encompassing unity of your work. … The internal most essential ritus of all of your music is one and the same. … [This music] is ritual by its very nature. … Rituality is the combination of order and confession.64 But there is another word for it in Russian: celebration. The highest and rarest form of confession is the celebratory sensation and realization of the lawfulness of life and being.”65

  NOTES

  Many parts of this essay owe a significant debt to Tamara Levitz, who contributed especially to the first part in order to clarify for a Western audience aspects of Stravinsky’s reception in the U.S.S.R. that might be taken for granted by a Russian reader. In more ways than one this essay is as much of a collaboration as it is a work of my own.

  1. Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 1:163. Taruskin coined the term “fourth-generation Belyayevets” to describe composers t
rained in the tradition and receiving the privileged patronage of the “Belyayev circle”—a society of Russian musicians named after the timber merchant and music patron Mitrofan Belyayev, and active in St. Petersburg from 1885 to 1908. This group included composers Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov, and initially had close ties to Tchaikovsky.

  2. On this topic, see also Svetlana Savenko, “Stravinskiy in ruska glasba 20. stoletja,” Muzikolǒski zbornik 43/2 (2007): 93–98; and Anatoliy Kuznetsov, “Muzïka Stravinskogo na kontsertnoy estrade Rossii,” Muzïkal'naya akademiya 4 (1992): 119–27.

  3. “Kontsert ‘Muzïkal'nïkh novostey,’” Sankt-Peterburgskiye vedomosti, 24 January 1908; in Igor' Stravinskiy: Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialï k biografii, ed. Viktor Varunts (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1998), 1:443. (Hereafter SPRK.)