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Igor Stravinsky 1882–1971

by Jeremy Noble

If Stravinsky had died 20, 30 even 50 years earlier than he actually did, he would still have ranked among the major composers of this century. We have had so long to become accustomed to the idea of his as a great man, so long to get our impressions of him and his music into some sort of historical perspective, that the usual obituary assessments may seem more than usually unnecessary. And yet Stravinsky’s own powers of self-renewal, based on his questing appetite for musical materials, were so phenomenal that until the very last years it was impossible to be sure that he would not strike out on some new line, open some further door, and in doing so suggest a whole new perspective from which to view his earlier works. Only now, when we know there can be no more surprises of that kind, does it seem safe to attempt a final summary of the course of that stupendous career.

He happened to be born at a seaside resort on the Gulf of Finland (‘le maître d’Oranianbaum’, as Charles-Albert Cingria chaffingly called him) but his home, in the spiritual as well as the physical sense, was St. Petersburg – the beautiful capital city that owed its very existence to imperial whim. Here, in Peter the Great’s window on the west, any sensitive young composer was bound to feel the competing claims of Europe – above all, Paris – and the vast Russian hinterland. The young Stravinsky was particularly well placed to experience both. His father was principal bass at the Imperial Opera (Shalyapin’s immediate predecessor); even though there was at first no idea of the son’s becoming a professional musician, he was able to hear a wide repertory of foreign and Russian operas and also to make the acquaintance at a very early age of Tchaikovsky’s music. But a part of each year was usually spent at the country estate of one or other of his mother’s relations; here he made contact at first-hand with the peasant music that was to have so lasting an effect on his own melody and rhythm.

In his invaluable, if occasionally self-contradictory dialogues with Robert Craft, Stravinsky has told us as much as we could possibly need to know about the various musical influences he was exposed to in these early years, both before and after Rimsky-Korsakov accepted him as a pupil and almost, one would gather, as a foster-son. About his personal history he was more reticent, but a clear enough picture emerges of a rather lonely family life, in which most of his affection was reserved for his younger brother and his nurse (both died in 1917, during his wartime residence in Switzerland). Photographs suggest he was something of an ugly duckling in a rather good-looking family, and it seems likely that the aloofness which marked many of his personal relationships, his aesthetics and sometimes his music, was developed early as a defence against this. In 1906, shortly after he finished his legal studies at St. Petersburg University, he married his first cousin, Catherine Nossenko; the summer house they built near her parents’ estate at Ustilug became Stravinsky’s preferred haven for composition until war and revolution prevented him from returning to Russia.

In Stravinsky’s earliest surviving music there is a fairly clear split between the ‘Russian’ style of the Symphony in E flat, and the more sophisticated, Paris-oriented language of the Scherzo fantastique and, still more, Fireworks. No doubt it was the latter quality that appealed most strongly to Diaghilev, who came into Stravinsky’s life, providentially it now seems, very shortly after Rimsky’s death in 1909. The really remarkable achievement of the three great ballet scores Stravinsky wrote for Diaghilev, however – Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), The Rite of Spring (1912–13) – is the way in which he manages to bring these two elements into ever closer relation with one another. The flagrant stylistic discrepancies of Firebird are the raw material from which the intensely individual language of The Rite was forged – and in only four years! The rapidity and surefootedness of Stravinsky’s development at this period is comparable only with Schoenberg’s in the middle of the preceding decade.

The enormous, and well-publicized, success of these three ballets first in Paris and then in London and elsewhere (a success which the riotous first night of The Rite of Spring did nothing to diminish) set up certain public expectations from which Stravinsky was to suffer for many years. He had met the challenge posed by working with Diaghilev and been immeasurably strengthened by it, but although their paths had coincided for a certain time, Stravinsky’s own interior development began to lead him in another direction. The Japanese Lyrics of 1913 and the last two acts of The Nightingale (1914) are exquisite, but they seem a little contrived, a little Fabergé, after The Rite. It was time for a return to grassroots – and history obliged, by producing a war and a revolution which cooped Stravinsky up in his Swiss winter-retreat at precisely the time when he was most drawn to work on Russian materials. Of course one cannot say that The Wedding would not have emerged much as it did, even if he could have composed it at Ustilug, but it seems plausible that this and the other works of the war years (Reynard, The Soldier’s Tale, and all the little vocal and choral chips that flew from the same block) owe some of their intensity to this forced exile from Russia. Unlike Petrushka, they inhabit a Russia of the mind, which might well have been compromised by a return to the real Russia.

A further point of interest about these wartime works is the emergence of a specifically Stravinskian answer to the problems of resolving increased rhythmic and harmonic tension. In The King of the Stars (1912), dedicated to Debussy, we already find Stravinsky exploring the tensions of quiet dissonances in a static, almost congealed rhythm, and something of the same kind may perhaps have occurred in the lost Funeral Dirge for Rimsky-Korsakov of 1909, but in the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) it is significantly the final piece (‘Hymn’) that is built on these lines, acting as an elegiac point of almost-repose after the jovial and eccentric tensions of the earlier pieces. The Wedding also ends (not, like The Rite, with a bang nor, like Petrushka, with a whimper) in rhythmic stillness and an unresolved dissonance which is, in context, a resolution. But the most complete working-out of this new dynamic pattern is in the superb Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) in memory of Debussy – perhaps the finest of that long series of musical monuments with which Stravinsky commemorated his friends.

Any one who has studied the recently published sketches for The Rite of Spring must have noticed how often, in the middle of sketches for one section, an idea for the succeeding one will suddenly crop up. A similar principle seems to have been at work in Stravinsky’s over-all development. Already, in so ‘Russian’ a work as The Soldier’s Tale he had made eager use of new and quite ‘foreign’ musical elements – the pasodoble band in the Royal March, for instance, and the Tango and Ragtime in the Princess’s dance. These – like the cimbalom in Reynard, or the drunkard’s song in The Wedding – are examples of Stravinsky’s habit (vividly described by Ramuz in his memoirs of their friendship) of ‘taking possession’ of things that attracted him. With this in mind we can see that Pulcinella (1919), in which Stravinsky at Diaghilev’s invitation ‘took possession’ of Pergolesi, was not a completely new departure, let alone a desperate falling-back on ready-made material by someone who could no longer invent his own, but rather a logical outgrowth of a process that had long been inherent in the composer’s make-up. (After all, even Stravinsky’s use of Russian folk-melody, at least after Petrushka, is rather ‘taking possession’ than simple borrowing.) In any case, if Pulcinella was an ‘epiphany’, as Stravinsky has said, marking his rediscovery of the past, it was not without an advent.

The creative period ushered in by Pulcinella seems in retrospect to have lasted for just over 30 years, from 1920 to 1951, from Stravinsky’s 37th year to his 68th. It was the central plateau of his career, and the period in which, whether based in Paris or Los Angeles, he exerted the greatest influence on other composers. He had found his technique, and although there would be great landmarks and occasional lapses, new enthusiasms and brief recrudescences of earlier styles, that technique established his personality – lucid, aloof, but propelled by an energy that at times suggested a controlled violence. This period, which cannot profitably be divided on stylistic grounds, gave rise to a whole series of ballets, operas and major choral works: Mavra (1922), Oedipus Rex (1927), Apollo and The Fairy’s Kiss (both 1928), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), Perséphone (1934), Jeu de Cartes (1936), Danses Concertantes (1942), Scènes de Ballet (1944), the Mass, Orpheus (both 1947) and The Rake’s Progress (1951). It also saw a new concentration on ‘abstract’ instrumental works, often stimulated by Stravinsky’s own needs as a performer: the Wind Octet (1923), the Piano Concerto (1924), the Piano Sonata (1924) and Serenade in A (1925, the Capriccio for piano and orchestra (1928), the Violin Concerto (1931) and Duo Concertant (1932), the Concerto for two solo pianos (1935), the Dumbarton Oaks concerto (1938), the Symphonies in C (1940) and in Three Movements (1945), the two-piano Sonata (1944) and the Concerto in D for strings (1946). It is a massive achievement, particularly when one considers that it was combined with increasing public appearance, first as a pianist and later as a conductor; and that it was snapped in two by the outbreak of the Second World War and Stravinsky’s consequent uprooting and resettlement in America.

And yet one senses already that in the trough which befalls all great reputations this is the period which is going to suffer the worst. At the time, there were those who resented Stravinsky’s success as too fashionable and easily won (Schoenberg is the most illustrious example); for then his so-called neo-classicism was merely ornamental pastiche. But in hindsight this criticism is seen to be superficial – just as the ‘classical’ stylistic references (which are usually no more than such 17th- and 18th-century mannerisms as dotted rhythms) are seen to be no more than superficial aspects of the music. For Stravinsky himself, classicism meant not mannerisms but the re-establishment of the classical virtues of lucidity and order in face of the ever-present threat of formlessness and chaos – represented for him by Wagner and the expressionism to which he saw Wagner’s music-drama as inevitably leading. The aesthetics of any creative artist are bound to consist of a rationalization of his own creative prejudices, and it is in this sense that the lectures Stravinsky gave at Harvard in 1939–40, published as Poetics of Music have to be read. Their firm anti-revolutionary line, their insistence on the need for discipline, are not likely to endear them on today’s romantic young, especially in America and on the continent of Europe. It seems to me inevitable that they will, for a time at least, reject the clarity and order which the music itself embodies: indeed, some already have, in favour either of forms of order thought to be more historically ‘necessary’ (and therefore morally more respectable), or else of total spontaneity. One can only hope that Stravinsky’s music itself will eventually reclaim them, or their children.

Posterity, however, can be left to its own devices. What is more important is to combat the prejudices of here and now. Of these, the most current among my own generation still seems to be that Stravinsky’s music is in some sense ‘cold’, and that this is proved by his willingness to ‘change styles’ – the most flagrant example of such style-changes being, of course, a professed conversion to serialism in the mid 1950s. This seems to me an almost complete reversal of the true state of affairs. Stravinsky’s relationship to his musical materials – proclaimed by himself and confirmed by the evidence of those who knew him – was always first and foremost a physical one, a matter of almost uncontrollable appetite.

All creation presupposes at its origin a sort of appetite that is brought on by the foretaste of discovery … The very act of putting my work on paper, or, as we say, kneading the dough, is for me inseparable from the pleasure of creation … (Poetics of Music)

Each note, each combination of sounds, had to be tried out in slow motion at the piano as a physical sensation. Each musical gesture had a physical correlate – as is proved by the extraordinary success with which Balanchine can choreograph a score like Movements, which might at first hearing appear almost undanceable. So far from changing it, Stravinsky throughout the central period of his career retained a remarkable constancy of style, but eagerly subjected new musical materials to it.

It is in this spirit surely, and not in that of conversion to or from any system of ideas, that we have to understand the gradual, but steadily increasing, preoccupation that Stravinsky began to show with various forms of serial technique (not at first 12-note) after 1951. He had just completed his longest work – in his late 60s – and may well have felt the need to annex new territory. His young American assistant Robert Craft, much more knowledgeable than he about the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, was at hand to provide encouragement and, one suspects, a challenge, but this would hardly have been met if Stravinsky’s own music just before The Rake’s Progress, notably Orpheus, had not already begun turning in a new direction. It could be maintained that the profoundest change that took place in his music in the early 1950s was not the espousal of serialism at all, but an increasing preoccupation with counterpoint, first of all lines – in such works as the Cantata (1952), the Septet (1953), the Dylan Thomas Elegy (1954) – and then of notes – in parts of Agon (1957), Threni (1958) and above all Movements (1959).

Those who felt betrayed by his ‘abandonment of tonality’ showed only that they had mistaken his relationship to it, for Stravinsky had never accepted or used tonality as an autonomous language, but rather as a pre-existent system whose capacity for arousing expectations had to be taken into account but could be satisfied or ignored as each individual case might seem to warrant. In other words, his attitude to tonality had been completely empirical. For the coherence of his discourse he relied not on blocks of asserted tonalities (hence the importance in his music of every form of ostinato), on temporal spacing, on the intuitive limitation of his language within each individual piece.

And just as Stravinsky was never really a tonal composer, so too he never really became a serialist, at least in the classical Schoenbergian sense. Whereas for Schoenberg the use of the note-row grew naturally out of a desire to control the total chromatic flux of harmony and melody, to achieve new freedom by abolishing a sense of tonal gravitation, for Stravinsky one suspects that it was no more than a new toy – in the most serious sense that those words can possibly be made to bear. Certainly he was still prepared to set up gravitational fields (as in Threni and the Requiem Canticles), very much as he had always done. But the sense of a new liberation can be felt particularly in the rhythm of these late works: the gestures are still unmistakably Stravinskian, but they have taken on a new freshness and vitality from the compression of the time-scheme and the richer vocabulary of intervals. As for the works of the very last decade, ill-health had by then begun to take its toll, so that the quantity of major works is not large: A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer (1961), The Flood (1962), Abraham and Isaac (1963), the Huxley Variations (1964) and the Requiem Canticles (1966). Of these at least three seem to me to show as much of the old questing appetite as ever. Serialism may have been no more for Stravinsky than a grand rejuvenator, but who can complain when it proved so effective?

For Stravinsky, the composer’s function was not to discharge his individual emotional overflow on to the public (or, in politer terms, to communicate his feelings to them), but to create a beautiful object, above and beyond pathos, and as capable as a funeral stele of resisting time and decay. His music demands to be approached both with sensuous awareness and with intelligence; ideally, too, it presupposes a musically literate listener who can catch allusions in much the same way as the reader of Eliot or Joyce can catch a literary one (and for much the same reason). perhaps the day may come when these demands seem unreasonable, but while they can be met it is hard to imagine that Stravinsky’s music will lack admirers. Paradoxically they will recognize, through its cultivated impersonality of tone, one of the most assured musical personalities of our time, whose appeal was always to his own intuition, never to any preconceived notion of his historical position – let alone mission.

Musical Times, June 1971