by Alex Ross
The best way to absorb a culture is to be from it. Three great “realists” in early-twentieth-century music—Janáček, Bartók, and Ravel—were born in villages or outlying towns in their respective homelands: Hukvaldy in Moravia, Nagyszentmiklós in Hungary, and Ciboure in the French Basque country. Although they were trained in the cities, and remained city dwellers for most of their lives, these composers never shook the feeling that they had come from somewhere else.
Janáček’s father served as kantor—schoolmaster and music master—of the remote hamlet of Hukvaldy. As Mirka Zemanová writes in her Janáček biography, he was hardly better off than the peasants he taught; the family lived in one room of the damp, rundown schoolhouse. At the age of eleven, Leos? received a scholarship to attend choir school in Brno, and his parents welcomed the award because they could not afford to feed all their children. He went on to study in Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna, compensating for his humble origins with a fierce work ethic. In the 1880s he founded the Brno organ school, which later became the Brno Conservatory, and began to enjoy local success as a composer in a Romantic-nationalist vein.
Then, on a trip home in 1885, Janáček experienced the street music of his village with fresh ears. In a later essay he recalled: “Flashing movements, the faces sticky with sweat; screams, whooping, the fury of fiddlers’ music: it was like a picture glued on to a limpid grey background.” Like van Gogh, he would paint the peasants as they were, not in their Sunday best.
When Janáček began collecting Czech, Moravian, and Slovakian folk songs, he wasn’t listening for raw material that could be “ennobled” in classical forms. Instead, he wanted to ennoble himself. Melody, he decided, should fit the pitches and rhythms of ordinary speech, sometimes literally. Janáček did research in cafés and other public places, transcribing on music paper the conversations he heard around him. For example, when a student says “Dobrý večer,” or “Good evening,” to his professor, he employs a falling pattern, a high note followed by three at a lower pitch. When the same student utters the same greeting to a pretty servant girl, the last note is slightly higher than the others, implying coy familiarity. Such minute differences, Janáček thought, could engender a new operatic naturalism; they could show an “entire being in a photographic instant.”
The oldest of the chief innovators of early-twentieth-century music, Janáček was almost fifty when he finished his first masterpiece, the opera Jenfa, in 1903. Like Pelléas and Salome, written in the same period, Jenfa is a direct setting of a prose text. The melodies not only imitate the rise and fall of conversational speech but also illustrate the characteristics of each personality in the drama. For example, there is a marked musical distinction between Jenfa, a village girl of pure and somewhat foolish innocence who has a baby out of wedlock with the local rake, and the Kostelnička (sextoness), her devout stepmother, who eventually murders the baby in an effort to preserve the family reputation. In the opening scene of Act II, the Kostelnička sings in abrupt, acerbic phrases, sometimes leaping over large intervals and sometimes jabbing away at a single note. Jenfa’s melodies, by contrast, follow more easygoing, ingratiating contours. Behind the individual characterizations are pinwheeling patterns that mimic the turning of the local mill wheel, the meticulous operation of social codes, or the grinding of fate. The harmonies often have a disconcerting brightness, all flashing treble and rumbling bass. The coexistence of expressive freedom and notated rigidity in the playing suggests rural life in all its complexity.
Jenfa seems destined to end in tragedy. The heroine’s baby is found beneath the ice of the local river; the villagers advance on her with vengeful intent. Then the Kostelnička confesses that she did the deed, and they redirect their rage. Jenfa is left alone with her cousin Laca, who has loved her silently while she has pursued the good-for-nothing ?
Steva.
Time stops for a luxurious instant: the orchestra wallows in elemental C major. Then, over pulsing, heavy-breathing chords, violins and soprano begin to sing a new melody in the vicinity of B-flat—a sustained note followed by a quickly shaking figure, which moves like a bird in flight, gliding, beating its wings, dipping down, and soaring again. This is Jenfa’s loving resignation as she gives Laca permission to walk away from the ugliness surrounding her. Another theme surfaces, this one coursing down the octave. It is Laca answering: “I would bear far more than that for you. What does the world matter, when we have each other?” The two sing each other’s melodies in turn, the melodies merge, and the opera ends in a tonal sunburst.
Janáček, like Mahler, talked about listening to the chords of nature. While working on his cantata Amarus, he wrote: “Innumerable notes ring in my ears, in every octave; they have voices like small, faint telegraph bells.” These natural sounds are linked to the opera’s tough-natured emotional world, the hard-won love of a man and a woman in the wake of a terrible crime. No wonder audiences in Vienna and other European capitals were struck by Jenfa when it finally made its way past Czech borders in the year 1918. Following the devastation of war, Janáček had unleashed the shock of hope.
Bartók’s father, like Janáček’s, was a teacher who worked with the rural population, running an agricultural school that aimed to introduce modern farming methods to the Hungarian countryside. He died young, and Bartók’s mother supported the family by giving piano lessons in towns around Hungary. A shy and sickly child, Béla took refuge in music even before he could speak. By the age of four, apparently, he could play forty folk songs with one finger at the piano.
In 1899, at the age of eighteen, Bartók moved to Budapest to study at the Royal Academy of Music. He made his mark first as a pianist of fierce technique and fine expression; his early compositions emulated Liszt, Brahms, and Strauss, whose Ein Heldenleben he transcribed for the piano. But his musical priorities shifted when he read the stories of Maxim Gorky, in which peasants, long scorned or prettified in literature, become flesh-and-blood people. With another gifted young Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály, Bartók set about inventing a new brand of folk-based musical realism.
At first, the young Hungarians followed the established formula, collecting folk melodies and concocting handsome accompaniments for them, as if putting them in display cases. Then, after several expeditions into the countryside, Bartók acknowledged the gap between what urban listeners considered folkish—a professional Gypsy band playing a csárdás dance, for example—and what peasants were actually singing and playing. He decided that he had to get as far as possible from what he would later call the “destructive urban influence.”
In his manipulation of folk material, Bartók went rather further than Janáček, who found authenticity in city and country settings alike. There was a certain fanaticism inherent in Bartók’s philosophy; as the scholar Julie Brown observes, his diagnosis of the contaminating influence of cosmopolitan culture was only a step or two away from the noxious racial theorizing that was à la mode in Bayreuth. What saved Bartók from bigotry was his refusal to locate his musical truths in any one place; he heard them equally in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and North Africa. The mark of authenticity was not racial but economic; he paid heed mainly to the people on the social margins, those who had lived the toughest lives.
Bartók’s most intense encounter with the Folk took place in 1907, when he went to the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, in Transylvania, to gather songs from Hungarian-speaking Székely villagers. Personal upheaval added urgency to the mission; the composer had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old violinist named Stefi Geyer, who received his advances first with bemusement and then with alarm. Both the letters he wrote to Geyer that summer and his meticulous notes on Transylvanian songs give the impression that a fenced-off soul is opening itself to the chaos of the outer world.
Like Grainger in England, Bartók brought with him an Edison cylinder, and he listened as the machine listened. He observed the flexible tempo of sung phrases, how they would accelerate in
ornamental passages and taper off at the end. He saw how phrases were seldom symmetrical in shape, how a beat or two might be added or subtracted. He savored “bent” notes—shadings above or below the given note—and “wrong” notes that added flavor and bite. He understood how decorative figures could evolve into fresh themes, how common rhythms tied disparate themes together, how songs moved in circles instead of going from point A to point B. Yet he also realized that folk musicians could play in absolutely strict tempo when the occasion demanded it. He came to understand rural music as a kind of archaic avant-garde, through which he could defy all banality and convention.
Emotional rejection can have a radicalizing effect, as Schoenberg’s history in 1907 and 1908 suggests. Bartók, pining for the unavailable Stefi, swung away from Romantic tonality in those same two years. The Violin Concerto No. 1, his main work of this period, shows him still in thrall to a Richard Strauss aesthetic, with a five-note theme representing his beloved at the head of the piece. He planned but did not compose a third movement, which would have shown the “hateful” side of the unfortunate girl. Some of that negative energy spills out in the Fourteen Bagatelles for piano, written in the spring of 1908. A kind of substitution of love objects occurs: in place of Stefi’s leitmotif there are now rusty shards of folk melody, showing the impact of the Transylvanian trip and other research expeditions. The Woman becomes the Folk.
The first Bagatelle begins with a radical harmonic break: the right hand plays roughly in C-sharp minor while the left plays in something like the key of C (in the Phrygian mode). This is “polytonality” or “poly-modality,” the juxtaposition of two or more key-areas, and it will play a significant role in early-and mid-twentieth-century music. Bartók probably derived the practice from Strauss and Debussy, but he also liked to attribute it to folk players, who periodically wandered free from their accompanying harmonies.
The Bagatelles, together with subsequent works such as the Two Elegies, Allegro barbaro, the First String Quartet, and the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, veer close to atonality. They make frequent use of Schoenberg’s searing motto chord of two fourths separated by a tritone. But Bartók’s ardor for folk melodies prevented him from going over the brink. As the musicologist Judit Frigyesi observes, Hungarian modernists were not prone to annihilating rage of the Viennese type; instead, they sought higher unities, transcendent reconciliations. The philosopher and critic Georg Lukács put it this way: “The essence of art is form: it is to defeat oppositions, to conquer opposing forces, to create coherence from every centrifugal force, from all things that have been deeply and eternally alien to one another before and outside this form. The creation of form is the last judgment over things, a last judgment that redeems all that could be redeemed, that enforces salvation on all things with divine force.” Bartók, likewise, talked about the “highest emotions,” a “great reality.” The artist in his loneliness need not bring about Vienna-style antagonism and scandal; instead, Frigyesi writes, he can stand in for all humanity, becoming a “metaphor for wholeness.”
Bartók’s quest led him both onward and inward. In the first days of June 1913, he boarded a steamer in Marseille, bound for Algeria. His ultimate destination was Biskra, on the northern edge of the Sahara, where, seven years before, Henri Matisse had found the inspiration for his raw, sensual Blue Nude. The trip lasted only two weeks: the composer fell ill with fever and had to retreat to Algiers. He hoped to return the following summer, and researched diets that would have allowed him to stay healthy. But the onset of the First World War put a stop to his plans. His wax-cylinder recordings of North African music remained a prize possession and led to a landmark ethnomusicological essay. They also furnished new compositional ideas, particularly in the area of rhythm. Bartók wrote from Algeria: “The Arabs accompany almost all their songs with percussion instruments; sometimes in a very complicated rhythm (it is chiefly varying accentuations of equal bar lengths that produce the different rhythmic patterns).” This could serve as a description of “The Augurs of Spring” in Stravinsky’s Rite, whose first production was still playing to giddy Paris crowds as Bartók set out for Africa.
Maurice Ravel is a special case among turn-of-the-century “realists.” He was a man both urban and urbane, disinclined to go wandering up a mountainside with an Edison cylinder on his back. Yet, during his brief and brilliant career, he drew on a sizable library of folk material—variously, Spanish, Basque, Corsican, Greek, Hebrew, Javanese, and Japanese. He, too, was a phonographic listener, sensitive to microscopic details of phrasing, texture, and pulse. A gentleman flaneur with unusual powers of empathy, Ravel could spend his day as a man of the crowd, then reconstruct the experience in the privacy of his garret.
Commonly considered the most purely French of composers, Ravel was in fact something of a cultural mutt, part Basque and part Swiss. Although he was taken to Paris when he was four months old, his Basque origins held sway over his imagination, the connection maintained in the songs his mother sang for him. Manuel de Falla judged Ravel’s Spanish-themed works “subtly authentic,” which is a good general description of the composer’s music as a whole. Ravel’s father was a Swiss engineer who helped to pioneer, in unsung ways, the automobile; the Ravel prototype of a gas-powered car perished during the German bombardment of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. In a sense, Ravel’s music split the difference between his parents’ worlds—his mother’s memories of a folkish past, his father’s dreams of a mechanized future.
In a series of piano works in the first decade of the new century, Ravel carried out a kind of velvet revolution, renewing the language of music without disturbing the peace. In Jeux d’eau, melody and accompaniment dematerialize into splashing, skittering lines, imitating the movement of water in a fountain. In “Valley of the Bells,” from the cycle Miroirs, novel notation is used to enhance the impression of bell tones resonating in space: the music is spread over three rather than two staves, each line moving at an independent tempo. In “Le Gibet,” from Gaspard de la nuit, ghostly figures rise and fall around a continuously tolling B-flat—a structure that was in itself a new kind of musical narrative, one of proto-minimalist repetition. Falla, in his writings on flamenco, points out that melodies of the “deep song” type often rotate around an obsessively repeated note, and pieces such as “Le Gibet” may allude to the great Andalusian dance, although the one-note pattern could just as well have come from Gregorian chant. Some years later, in the 1928 showpiece Bolero, Ravel would take the aesthetic of repetition to the extreme: for fifteen minutes the orchestra hammers away at a theme in the key of C.
Ravel put his Spanish-Basque heritage proudly on display in the orchestral suite Rapsodie espagnole, first heard in 1908. The Rapsodie calls to mind the explosive colors of Fauvist painting, especially the early work of Matisse. Again, harmonic movement freezes on static sonorities; the narrative is driven by transformations of texture and rhythm. At the climax of “Feria,” the festival finale of the Rapsodie, Ravel creates a dynamic effect of rhythmic layering, superimposing five separate pulses: two against three against four against six against twelve.
In the penultimate bar, in the midst of a quick rush of sound across the entire orchestra, the trombones make a gloriously rude noise—a glissando, a slide from one note to another. This effect was first popularized by Arthur Pryor, the virtuoso slide trombonist in John Philip Sousa’s band, who featured it in such numbers as “Coon Band Contest” (1900) and “Trombone Sneeze” (1902). As it happens, the Sousa band toured all over Europe in 1900 and 1901, just before glissando effects spread through classical composition. Schoenberg and his brother-in-law Zemlinsky were the first to notate true trombone glissandos in orchestral works, in their symphonic poems Pelleas und Melisande and Die See-jungfrau, both from 1902–3.
In Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra the glissando is an expressionistic moan, a noise from the beyond. Ravel manages to have it both ways; his glissando in the Rapsodie has the exuberance of jazz to come, but
it harbors a dangerous, drunken energy, as if the orchestra were about to be invaded by foreign hordes.
Stravinsky and the Rite
In the summer of 1891 French ships sailed into the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, to be greeted not by hostile fire but by ceremonial salutes. Tsar Alexander III, whose great-uncle had withstood the Napoleonic invasion, made a show of toasting the French sailors and listening to “La Marseillaise.” These were the first public signs of the secret military convention between France and Russia, which was ratified the following year. The pact was kept hidden, but the friendliness between the two countries played out in the public eye. When Diaghilev began presenting concerts of Russian music, in 1907, his performances were quasi-official occasions, underwritten by money from the Romanov dynasty. By 1909, Diaghilev’s relationship with the tsar’s circle had deteriorated, but by then his Paris operation—now expanded to include ballet—had won an avid following in France. Nightly attendance at the Ballets Russes replaced pilgrimages to Bayreuth as the obligatory fad among the French aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie.
When the French ships arrived in Kronstadt, one German observer skeptically wrote that the civilized French would find “few points of sympathy with barbaric Russia.” In fact, the sympathy already existed, and composers played a role in developing it. Debussy had visited Russia as early as 1881, in order to teach music to the children of the Russian music patron Nadezhda von Meck. It may have been on that trip that he first encountered the whole-tone scale, by way of the works of Mikhail Glinka. Eight years later, at a concert at the Paris Universal Exposition, Debussy fell under the spell of Rimsky-Korsakov, who was working with another novel mode, the octatonic scale of alternating semitones and whole tones. The speech-like vocal lines of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov influenced Debussy’s word setting in Pelléas. In the first decade of the new century, the latest French works began traveling east. Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, which owed much to Rimsky’s Capriccio espagnol, became a cult object among Rimsky’s students, one of whom was the young Stravinsky. Then Stravinsky came west with his Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite, and the French were bewitched by the Russians once again.