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A

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2021

Edward Campbell
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
Peter O'Hagan
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London

Summary

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

A

Abraham and Isaac / A Sacred Ballad

for Baritone and Chamber Orchestra. Composed 2 August 1962 – 3 March 1963 (according to the sketches). First performance, 23 August 1964, Jerusalem. Conductor, Robert Craft. Published 1965, Boosey & Hawkes.

The work was composed on the text in Hebrew taken from the first Book of Moses, Chapter 22, verses 1–19. Originally titled Cantata, Stravinsky crossed this out in the first proof of the score and wrote instead: ‘Sacred Ballad / Dedicated to the people of the State of Israel’. In the printed score, there are three versions of the biblical text: in Hebrew, Roman alphabet transliteration, and English translation. Nevertheless, the work is to be performed in Hebrew only. According to Stravinsky, ‘the syllables, both as accentuation and timbre, are a precisely fixed and principal element of the music’ (SCW, 529). His discovery of Hebrew ‘as sound’ was perhaps stimulated by Schoenberg’s De profundis.

The work based on a biblical text was commissioned in January 1962 by the Israeli Government for The Israel Music Festival (see Israel). Nevertheless, all preliminary negotiations were already conducted at the end of 1961 by Sir Isaiah Berlin, a leading Oxford philosopher and one of the Festival’s advisers abroad. He proposed two subjects from the Bible: the Seven Days of the Creation and the Sacrifice of Isaac. The composer chose the story of Abraham and Isaac, which provided a symbolic account of the origin of the Israeli nation (the theological meaning being the unconditional obedience to God and codification of the rejection of human sacrifices). Sir Isaiah read to Stravinsky the passages from the Bible in Hebrew, explaining their pronunciation, supplying a literal translation, and providing Roman alphabet transliteration.

According to the 1962 version of the contract, Stravinsky should have composed a work for choir, soloists and orchestra (20–30 minutes), but the 1963 contract allowed the submission of a composition ‘at the composer’s own discretion’ (15–30 minutes) (PSS). Stravinsky’s fee was $15,000.

The work was premièred on 23 August 1964 in Jerusalem, with Ephraim Biran (baritone) and musicians from the Kol Israel Symphony Orchestra and the Haifa City Symphony Orchestra directed by Craft. The concert was repeated the next day in Caesarea. The first European performance came on 22 September 1964 at the Berliner Festwochen with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as soloist.

Theodor Kollek asked Stravinsky in his letter (30 March 1965) ‘to give the manuscript as a gift to the State of Israel’. Stravinsky replied: ‘The enclosed manuscript on transparent paper of my Abraham and Isaac full score is my answer to it’ (15 July 1965). Today the autograph is located at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whilst a copy and the sketches are in the PSS.

The work is based on a twelve-note row (F-F♯-E-D-D♯-B-A-G-G♯-A♯-C-C♯), elaborated into two hexachordal rotational arrays (ALPHA, BETA). This technique follows Krenek’s method of rotation together with transposition in his Threni. Аmong the sketches in the PSS is Stravinsky’s original serial chart (the permutations are transposed in such a way that the first pitch of the original hexachord was retained for each permutation).

Example 1 Abraham and Isaac: Stravinsky’s serial chart (PSS).

The work begins with G, the eighth note of the row. (That misled some researchers, and they erroneously considered the row G-G♯-A♯-C-C♯-A-B-D♯-D-E-F♯-F as a basic form.)

Stravinsky himself described the structure of the work: ‘There are five parts distinguished by changes of tempo and performed without interruption; and nineteen verses comprising ten musical units’ (White suggests subdividing it into seven sections – SCW, 530). Stravinsky also writes in his note: ‘my setting does not impersonate the protagonist but tells the whole story through the baritone-narrator, underlining a change of speaker by change in dynamics’. In the expressive declamatory vocal line (in the ballad spirit), partly narrative and syllabic, partly melismatic, one can observe the influence of Hebrew cantillations.

Abravanel, Maurice

(born Salonika (Thessaloniki), 6 January 1903; died Salt Lake City, 22 September 1993). Naturalised American conductor. He studied composition with Kurt Weill and they remained close. Abravanel conducted the Paris première of Weill’s Mahagonny-Songspiel in 1932 and met Stravinsky on that occasion. He moved to America in 1936, and in 1944 conducted the first performances of Scènes de ballet as part of Billy Rose’s revue The Seven Lively Arts. It was a fraught experience, with pressure from Rose for cuts and rescoring. Abravanel resisted changes to the scoring, but agreed to cuts (as did a reluctant Stravinsky). Abravanel was chief conductor of the Utah Symphony (1947–79), and with Utah forces he recorded Symphony of Psalms, Apollo, the Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra (with Tossy Spivakovsky) and Bach–Stravinsky, ‘Vom Himmel hoch’.

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

(born Frankfurt am Main, 11 September 1903; died Visp, Switzerland, 6 August 1969). German, Frankfurt-School philosopher, sociologist and musicologist. A thinker of profound originality and insight, as well as a composer of merit, who studied with Alban Berg and participated in the life of the Schoenberg circle in Vienna from 1925. His writings on music are inherently philosophical and are marked by the integration of technical knowledge and a penetrating critical analysis of the significance of modern music from a dialectical perspective.

In the early essay ‘Zur gesellschaflichten Lage der Musik’ (1932), Stravinsky’s music is given some credit as being dialectical in its relation to society and as resisting commodification in its ‘objectivism’ and ‘surrealism’. The use of Folk Music for ideological purposes by both fascist and communist regimes sustained Adorno in the conviction that the folkloric and primitivistic elements in Stravinsky’s music were symptomatic of a reactionary conservatism, concealing the true state of societal relations within modernity. He was persuaded furthermore of a connection in the 1920s and 1930s linking fascism with ‘objectivism’ in art, including neo-classicism.

While the opposition of Stravinsky and Schoenberg was already significant for Adorno by the mid-1920s, this found its strongest statement in the Philosophy of New Music (1949) where the essay ‘Stravinsky and the Restoration’ (1948) is set in dialectical opposition to the companion essay ‘Schoenberg and Progress’ (1940–1). For Adorno, all artworks, including musical compositions, contain within themselves in sedimented form truth content that is revelatory of the society in which they are produced, and this is the basis of the analysis in the Philosophy.

Adorno compares Stravinsky’s pre-World War I music unfavourably to Schoenberg’s free atonal works, which later became Adorno’s musical ideal in preference to the constraints of the German composer’s Twelve-note works. Beyond musical preference, the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg is set out as symptomatic of two powerful political oppositions, but where Adorno finds a truthfulness in Schoenbergian dodecaphony as reflective of the various totalitarianisms of the era, aspects of Stravinsky’s works are highlighted as harbouring elements of fascism, a particularly uncomfortable parallel given the Russian composer’s admiration for Mussolini.

While Schoenberg’s music is read as ‘an intensification of the survival of the expressive Subject’, Stravinsky’s continues and exemplifies the Subject’s capitulation (Paddison 1993, 256). For Adorno, Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale illuminates his entire production while featuring a cornucopia of schizophrenic mechanisms, pace psychoanalysis, including regression, depersonalisation and alienation (Adorno 2006, 130).

In the essay ‘Strawinsky: Ein dialektisches Bild’ (1962), Adorno revised his position again, granting once more that the Russian was indeed a dialectical composer and radical on the basis of the surrealistic elements within his music, and his engagement with the music of the past was now recognised as aligning him more with Mahler than to either Wagner or Debussy. While remaining wary of the ‘detached objectivity’ of Stravinsky’s music, he nevertheless recognised within it ‘“a moment of truth” in the way in which the composer manipulates the debris of a culturally exhausted and disintegrating material’ (Paddison 1993, 269–70).

Afanasyev, Alexander (Nikolayevich)

(born Boguchar, 11 July 1826; died Moscow, 23 October 1871). Russian ethnographer, so popular that his collection of folk tales became the Russian equivalent to the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Stravinsky drew extensively on his work during his Swiss years. His Russian Folk Tales were a text source (though not always the sole one) for Pribaoutki, Berceuses du chat, Three Children’s Tales, Renard, The Soldier’s Tale and Les Noces, while there is evidence of some influence on the text of How the Mushrooms Prepared for War too. At the same time, they were among Fokine’s sources for the scenario of The Firebird. Finally, the folklore described in The Slavs’ Poetic Outlook on Nature was in all likelihood one of the main literary sources for the scenario of The Rite of Spring.

Agon,

ballet for twelve dancers. Composed 1953–7. First performance, 17 June 1957 (concert performance), Los Angeles; staged 1 December 1957, New York (choreography by George Balanchine). Published 1957, Boosey & Hawkes. ‘Dedicated to Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine’.

Following the première of Orpheus in 1948, Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder with George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet, suggested to Stravinsky that he should write a ballet that would constitute ‘a third act’ after Apollo (1927–8) and Orpheus (SSC, I, 271). Kirstein proposed various subjects, all of which Stravinsky rejected, but on 31 August 1953 he communicated an idea from Balanchine for a ‘competition before the gods’ whom ‘the dancers re-animate … by a series of historic dances’: ‘It is as if time called the tune, and the dances which began quite simply in the sixteenth century took fire in the twentieth and exploded’ (SSC, I, 287). With the same letter, Kirstein sent Stravinsky the recent edition of François de Lauze’s Apologie de la danse (1623), translated with commentary by Joan Wildeblood and additional musical examples from Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle (1636) (London, 1952).

Having decided not to have a plot, Stravinsky began the composition of the ballet in October 1953 but did not get beyond a draft for the fanfare of the Pas-de-Quatre and a few sketches for the Double Pas-de-Quatre before interrupting work on the score to compose In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (1954). Balanchine and Stravinsky established the structural plan of the ballet in July–August 1954, by which time Stravinsky chose the title Agon (‘Contest’, SSC, I, 289). The first six dances up to the First Pas-de-Trois Coda as well as the Prelude, which comprise half the music of Agon, were completed between August and December 1954, but then Stravinsky interrupted work on the ballet again, this time for over a year taken up by, among other things, the commission of Canticum sacrum (1955). He resumed work on Agon with the Bransle movements in April 1956, completing the final score on 27 April 1957.

Agon features a heterogeneous compilation of materials, ranging from the types of chromatically enriched diatonic texture familiar from Stravinsky’s earlier neo-classical works and partially or fully serial, non-dodecaphonic counterpoint similar to that in his more recent compositions, to fully twelve-note serial structures (see Table 1). This diversity of technique and style in a single work is unique in Stravinsky’s output and has fired the imagination of commentators over the years. (Luciano Berio, for instance, characterised Agon as ‘the hyper-intelligent parable of a “short history of music” that performs a lucid, but tragic autopsy on itself under the pretext of a game’: 1985, 65.) As Susannah Tucker has shown in her analysis of the sketches for Agon, the incorporation of different compositional techniques was part and parcel of the initial concept of the ballet and not a by-product of the long interruptions during its genesis. Stravinsky did not, as several authors have claimed, revise some of the earlier movements in 1956 to align them with the serial procedures in the later movements, but employed serial techniques right away in certain of the earlier dances that he completed between August and December 1954.

Table 1 Agon, Outline

SectionsMovementsPitch materialDancers
malefemale
IPas-de-Quatrediatonic/modal with some chromaticism4
Double Pas-de-Quatrechromatic, partially serial (non-dodecaphonic) in second half8
Triple Pas-de-Quatrepartially serial (non-dodecaphonic)4 + 8
IIPreludepolytonal1 + 2
First Pas-de-Trois
Saraband-Steptonal with chromaticism1
Gaillardetonal/polytonal2
Codapartially 12-note serial, first use of a 12-note row in Stravinsky’s oeuvre1 + 2
Interludepolytonal (same as Prelude with added material)2 + 1
Second Pas-de-Trois
Bransle Simplefully serial (non-dodecaphonic)2
Bransle Gayfully serial (non-dodecaphonic)1
Bransle Doublefully serial (12-note)2 + 1
Interludepolytonal (same as first Interlude with added material)1 + 1
Pas-de-Deux
Adagiobegins with a 12-note row, otherwise non-dodecaphonic serial1 + 1
Più mossonon-dodecaphonic serial1
L’istesso temponon-dodecaphonic serial1
L’istesso temponon-dodecaphonic serial1
Codanon-dodecaphonic serial1 + 1
IIIFour Duos12-note serial4 × (1 + 1)
Four Trios12-note serial4 × (1 + 2)
Codasame as opening Pas-de-Quatre with minor changes and starting with a fuller chord4 + 8

As laid out in Balanchine and Stravinsky’s original plan, the outer sections I and III engage the twelve dancers cumulatively, while each of the three sets of dances that constitute the longer central section II is for a smaller ensemble of three or two dancers respectively (see Table 1). These groups of dances in section II follow the traditional classical ballet format, with the Prelude and Interludes that precede them being choreographed for the entire trio or duo. Demonstrable influences from Stravinsky’s reading of the de Lauze / Mersenne edition include the trumpet canon in the Bransle Simple, apparently inspired by an engraving in the treatise showing two trumpeters, as well as the short-short-long-long castanet ostinato rhythm in the Bransle Gay and the complex rhythms of the Bransle Double, which were modelled on patterns described in the manual (Tucker 1992, 166–7).

The serial movements of Agon offer a synopsis of Stravinsky’s path to twelve-note composition. The Double Pas-de-Quatre and Triple Pas-de-Quatre combine non-dodecaphonic series (i.e. series with fewer than twelve different pitch classes) with non-serial material. The First Pas-de-Trois Coda features the first use of a twelve-note row in Stravinsky’s oeuvre, joined by non-serial material (mostly in the solo violin double-stop motions). On the other hand, most of the movements composed in 1956–7 are fully serial, i.e. they contain very little non-serial material, using either non-dodecaphonic or twelve-note series. At the end of Four Trios, a diatonic chord repeated in the horns emerges from the serial structure, leading back to the diatonic world of the ballet’s opening.

Agon uses a large orchestra with triple winds (four horns and four trumpets) and including harp, mandolin, piano and xylophone, which for the most part is broken down into smaller ensembles characteristic of individual dances. While no movement uses the full orchestra, larger ensembles are featured in section I, the Prelude and Interludes, and the final Coda.

Akimenko, Fyodor (Stepanovich)

(born Kharkov, 8/20 February 1876; died Paris, 3 January 1945). Ukrainian composer and pianist. A former pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov’s at the St Petersburg Conservatory, he gave Igor Stravinsky his first harmony lesson (according to Stravinsky’s account to Timofeyev) in the summer of 1901. In November, Stravinsky began regular weekly lessons with Akimenko – almost certainly following Rimsky-Korsakov’s Practical Course in Harmony – costing his father, Fyodor Stravinsky, 1 rouble 50 per session. Stravinsky remembered Akimenko as ‘a composer of some originality’ (Scriabin looked upon his music with some favour), but found his teaching ‘unsympathetic’, ceasing lessons in February. In 1903, Akimenko moved to Nice where he made a living as a pianist, making several visits to Paris where he published some music; Stravinsky, arriving in Paris for The Firebird, was ‘surprised’ by several French musicians asking about Akimenko. (Diaghilev briefly toyed with the idea of commissioning a ballet from Akimenko, but wrote to Benois: ‘On closer acquaintance we didn’t take to Akimenko – bread and milk, silly and provincial’.)

American Ballet, The.

Ballet company. The American Ballet was the earliest of the George BalanchineLincoln Kirstein precursors to the New York City Ballet. It grew out of the School of American Ballet (opened 1933), and between 1935 and 1938 was the resident company of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. In 1937, it staged a Stravinsky Festival for which Stravinsky conducted all performances; Jeu de cartes was an original commission premièred at the Festival. The company parted ways with the Met. in 1938 and disbanded, though it was briefly reformed as the hybrid American Ballet Caravan in 1941.

Ančerl, Karel

(born Tučapy, Bohemia, 11 April 1908; died Toronto, Canada, 3 July 1973). Czech conductor. Ančerl studied conducting with Václav Talich and Hermann Scherchen. In 1931, he was Scherchen’s assistant for the première of Hába’s opera The Mother in Munich and probably assisted Scherchen for Oedipus Rex the same year. On 10 May 1935, Ančerl conducted the Czech première of The Soldier’s Tale. He was imprisoned in Theresienstadt in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz in 1944, where his wife and son perished. On 7 April 1948, Ančerl conducted the Czech première of Oedipus Rex. In 1950, he became chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. Between 1962 and 1967, he recorded Petrushka, the Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra (twice, with Ida Haendel and Wolfgang Schneiderhan), The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, Oedipus Rex, Symphony of Psalms, Mass and Cantata.

Andreae, Volkmar

(born Bern, 5 July 1879; died Zurich, 18 June 1962). Swiss conductor and composer. From 1906 until 1949, Andreae was chief conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and also served as director of the Zurich Conservatory (1914–39). At the Tonhalle, he conducted the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments with Stravinsky as the soloist in November 1925, and on 14 October 1929 he conducted an all-Stravinsky programme including Capriccio (with Stravinsky as the soloist) and the first complete performance in Switzerland of The Rite of Spring.

Ansermet, Ernest

(born Vevey, 11 November 1883; died Geneva, 20 February 1969). Swiss conductor. Ansermet studied mathematics at Lausanne University and taught there until 1909. He then decided to make music his career, studying composition with Ernest Bloch and taking advice about conducting from Nikisch and Weingartner. From 1910 onwards, he conducted in Lausanne and Montreux, and first met Stravinsky in 1911 or 1912; the composer recalled: ‘his appearance – the beard – startled me: he was like an apparition of the Charlatan in Petrushka’ (T&C, 229). On 2 April 1914, Ansermet gave the first performance outside Russia of Stravinsky’s Symphony in E♭ Major with the Kursaal orchestra in Montreux, and it was on Stravinsky’s recommendation that he was appointed chief conductor of the Ballets Russes in 1915. He went on tour with the company to the United States in 1916 (making his first recordings there with the Ballets Russes orchestra) and conducted the first performance of Diaghilev’s ballet version of Fireworks at the Teatro Costanzi, Rome, on 12 April 1917. In 1918, Ansermet founded the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (OSR), serving as its chief conductor for half a century.

Between 1918 and 1930, Ansermet conducted an extraordinary series of Stravinsky premières – more than any other conductor – including The Soldier’s Tale (Lausanne, 28 September 1918, and first performance of the Concert Suite, on 20 June 1920 at the Wigmore Hall in London), The Firebird Suite (Geneva, 12 April 1919; Stravinsky dedicated it to Ansermet and the OSR), The Song of the Nightingale (Geneva, 6 December 1919), Pulcinella (Paris, 15 May 1920), the ballet version of The Song of the Nightingale (Paris, 18 May 1920, with sets by Matisse), Renard (Paris, 18 May 1922), Les Noces (Paris, 23 June 1923), the Capriccio (Paris, 6 December 1929, with Stravinsky as the soloist) and the Symphony of Psalms (Brussels, 13 December 1930, six days before Koussevitzky gave the American première of the work he had commissioned).

When Ansermet asked Stravinsky to agree to cuts in Jeu de cartes in 1937, the furious composer refused: ‘I have never said to you: take my score and do with it what you wish.’ The didactic Ansermet made matters worse by justifying himself on musical grounds, leading Stravinsky to write to Ludwig Strecker at Schott about the conductor’s ‘strange megalomania’. The result was a rift in their friendship that was to last many years, though there was a reconciliation of sorts in 1966.

In 1948 Ansermet conducted the first performance of the Mass at La Scala, Milan, but he was unsympathetic to the direction Stravinsky’s music took in the 1950s, deploring its ‘sterile formalism’. Despite this, he continued his energetic advocacy of Stravinsky’s earlier music until the end of his life, documented in the extensive series of recordings he made for Decca between 1946 and 1968, mostly with the OSR, including many of the works he had conducted at their premières.

Antheil, George

(born Trenton, New Jersey, 8 July 1900; died New York City, 12 February 1959). An American composer, known for his avant-garde music and inventions. His Ballet mécanique has a rhythmic drive and energy that brings it close to the Russian composer’s Les Noces and his earlier The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky and Antheil shared an interest in expanding the resources of the orchestra, using non-traditional ensembles and stretching the limits of instrumental capacity: for example, the challenging bassoon solo in the upper register at the beginning of Stravinsky’s Rite and Antheil’s inventions of new musical equipment.

The quasi-mechanical possibilities within music appealed to Stravinsky; his interest, for example, in the mechanical piano which, as Cross suggests, was ‘a catalyst to many contemporaries’ (Cross, 1998, 12). Antheil’s capacity to develop repetition and ostinato by quasi-mechanical means was, nevertheless, far in excess of what Stravinsky had produced in The Rite and elsewhere, without resulting in composition of equal quality.

Travelling to Europe in 1922, Antheil gave a piano recital at the Wigmore Hall, in London, including works by Debussy and Stravinsky, and he first met Stravinsky in Berlin that same year. While Antheil declined Stravinsky’s invitation for him to move to Paris and put on a concert there, he nevertheless arrived in the French capital in 1923 and was present at the première of Les Noces. Walsh suggests that, while Antheil’s ‘Americanness’ was the primary source of his appeal to the Russian composer, Stravinsky was also impressed by his energy and knowledge of new music, but above all by his pianism, telling the young American ‘you play my music exactly as I wish it to be played’ (SCS, 359). Going beyond Antheil’s self-promotion, Walsh suggests that Stravinsky was primarily interested in using Antheil’s agent, and to this end he strove to endure his many ‘irritations’.

Antheil admired Stravinsky greatly and related to friends that the Russian composer likewise supported his work. This was reportedly the source of the rift in their brief relationship. However, as White notes (SCW), Stravinsky invited Antheil to a concert he was giving in Hollywood in 1941.

Anthem (‘The Dove Descending’).

Composed 1961–2. First performance, 19 February 1962, Los Angeles. Conductor, Robert Craft. Published 1962, Boosey & Hawkes.

This work for four-part choir, lasting just over 2 minutes, was written in January 1962 as a result of Stravinsky’s having been invited by Cambridge University Press to compose a hymn for a new English hymnal. T. S. Eliot suggested the text, which is Part IV of ‘Little Gidding’, the last of his Four Quartets, and Stravinsky dedicated the resulting setting to him. It was first performed on one of the Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles on 19 February 1962.

As the title indicates, this is not a hymn. It is also not a canon, as Roman Vlad has described it, either melodically or rhythmically. The poem is in two stanzas, each consisting of a Sicilian quintain plus a couplet (ababacc). However, Stravinsky does not divide the stanzas in this way, but rather into two sections, of four and three lines, the first for two voices, the second for all four. The second stanza is essentially a repetition of the first, though the first section (abab) is heard here as a variation or development, consisting of three rather than five rows and moving for the most part in quavers in an almost entirely syllabic setting of the text, whereas in the first stanza this section moved mostly in crotchets with some melismas. The second section is repeated exactly.

The piece is based on a Twelve-note row, of which only the untransposed prime, inversion and retrograde, and the retrograde inversion at the tritone transposition are used.

Apaches, The.

Les Apaches was an informal group of artists that formed in Paris around 1900 to discuss new music, to share new ideas and sources, and to consider how better to represent new developments in the arts, supporting première performances, and attending repeated performances of works. Loosely translated as ‘hooligans’, the name derives from the contemporary subculture of hooligan activity and street gangs that drew the attention of the press, for example Le Petit Journal (14 August 1904). Pertaining primarily to the celebrated Native American tribe, the term also signified the group’s shared aesthetic interest in new music (especially that of Debussy and Stravinsky) and other art. Indeed, the name was coined after a newspaper seller was heard shouting, ‘Attention Les Apaches!’ (Pasler 2007, 153).

The group included some of the key composers of the era, including Claude Debussy, Maurice Delage, Manuel de Falla, Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt and Igor Stravinsky, as well as the painter Paul Sordes, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, and the critics Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi and Émile Vuillermoz. As with any new collective, the group came together slowly and was primarily made up of friendship groups and of those who had studied together: Ravel, Schmitt and Vuillermoz were members of Fauré’s composition class.

The group recognised the achievements of a number of new works and artists, supporting Debussy’s new opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and its staging in the face of those critics who did not understand it or those who did not represent it clearly or favourably. They attended repeat performances, sitting in the same seats and, as Pasler notes, ‘immobilised the opposition with their enthusiasm’ (ibid., 152). Another work they supported was Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. As advocates for new music, they campaigned actively to bring attention to the music they favoured. Meeting weekly, they were able to plan strategies in advance, plotting how best to support new works and artists. Despite attending concerts together in small groups, they never met formally in public or invited non-members to attend gatherings, their modus operandi resembling that of other ‘sects’, with no organising committee or leader, while at the same time supporting mutual independence.

Beyond the music of Debussy (who never actually attended a meeting) and Ravel, Les Apaches recognised the potential of Stravinsky’s music, and he in turn joined the group in 1910. The group meetings often included performed extracts of music which individual members were writing, and it seems clear that Stravinsky presented parts of Petrushka in this context prior to its première in 1911. The group met in a private space, a small building rented by Delage and decorated in oriental style. While Delage was not a founding member, he accepted responsibility for hosting the members regularly on Saturday nights, when they shared music and discussed aesthetics. With key thinkers and critics in their midst, they no doubt discussed how these new works would be received.

The members shared a respect for one another, which is demonstrated in Ravel’s dedication of new work to particular individuals. The five movements of Miroirs for piano, for example, are dedicated to Viñes, Léon-Paul Fargue, Calvocoressi, Sordes and Delage, respectively. Despite their mutual regard and shared support for Debussy and Russian music, the group were not in agreement on all issues and their meetings undoubtedly included lively debate. Given that these meetings were private, the descriptions we have of them tell of an intimate space enabling composers, and performers such as Viñes, to share work in progress (no doubt as some of them had previously done in Fauré’s composition classes).

The members of Les Apaches were also part of a much more extensive Paris network of artists, and they engaged in a wide range of more public artistic organisations, groups and institutions. Sharing poetry and discussing visual art, they were a truly interdisciplinary group whose concerns were drawn from across the arts. As Pasler notes, ‘the Apaches help us to understand what is involved when a young generation, impassioned by the innovations of their immediate predecessors, wish to defend those innovations and explore their implications while clearing a space for their own creative experimentation’ (2007, 164).

Apollon Musagète (Apollo).

Composed 1927–8. First performance, 27 April 1928. Published 1928, Boosey & Hawkes, Washington, DC. Instrumentation: strings (8.8.6.8.4 suggested by Stravinsky).

Synopsis

  • First tableau

  • Prologue: The Birth of Apollo

  • Second tableau

  • Variation of Apollo

  • Pas d’action (Apollo and the Three Muses)

  • Variation of Calliope (the Alexandrine)

  • Variation of Polyhymnia

  • Variation of Terpsichore

  • Second Variation of Apollo

  • Pas de deux

  • Coda

  • Apotheosis

A ballet choreographed by Adolph Bolm, commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for a festival of new music to be held at the Library of Congress in 1928. Correspondence between Carl Engel, the music chief of the Library of Congress, and Gavriyil Gavrilovich Païchadze, Stravinsky’s spokesman for this project, shows that the only restrictions imposed upon Stravinsky had to do with the size of the orchestra and the number of dancers, because of limitations of space. Approximately two months after the US première in Washington DC, the European première took place in Paris on 12 June 1928 with choreography by George Balanchine. It is likely that Balanchine and Stravinsky discussed Apollo before the American première.

Apollo pays tribute to three of the nine muses: Calliope, Polyhymnia and Terpsichore. The choice of subject for this ballet was left up to Stravinsky, and it is possible that he had completed a significant portion of the ballet before he decided on the storyline.

Stravinsky noted that ‘Apollo was my largest single line step toward a long-line polyphonic style, and though it has a harmonic and melodic, above all an intervallic character of its own, it nourished many later works as well.’ The intervallic character for Apollo flourished within a diatonic framework because Stravinsky focused on tonal triads with added notes. The added notes are dependent upon the diatonic scale, but also allow the tonal triads to become strands in an octatonic web. For example, the chord usually labelled in the literature as the ‘chord accompanying the birth of Apollo’ is an octatonic sonority. However, most commentators ignore the resolution of this chord – a motion that illustrates Stravinsky’s intention to impose a distinctive intervallic character in both horizontal and linear dimensions. The ultimate resolution of this chord takes place at the end of the ballet, where Stravinsky strips away the added notes, leaving only the B minor triad.

Stravinsky also applied techniques of versification found in the alexandrine (six iambic feet) to certain musical passages of the ballet. This technique is notably reflected in his unique approach to phrase structure in the section depicting Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. There, Stravinsky uses the alexandrine as a prop just as Balanchine’s choreography has Calliope receiving a tablet as her prop, brilliantly capturing the poetic meaning of Stravinsky’s music.

Stylistically, it is possible to find links between Apollo and Oedipus Rex (1926–7) and also Orpheus (1946–7). Furthermore, an excerpt from Apollo (‘Variation d’Apollon’, Rehearsal 22) surfaces a few years later in Duo Concertant (1931–2) after the first statement of the ‘Gigue.’

Argentina.

Stravinsky’s music was probably introduced to Argentina on the Ballets Russes’ second South American tour in 1917, for which the repertoire included The Firebird and Petrushka. (None of Stravinsky’s ballets was performed during the 1913 tour.) Ansermet was the conductor for this tour, and thus began his championing of Stravinsky’s music in Buenos Aires, which was to continue through the 1920s in his role as director of the Asociación del Profesorado Orquestal (the precursor of the Argentine National Symphony Orchestra). In 1932, Boris Romanov staged The Rite of Spring at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires; Stravinsky’s plan to attend with Vera (who was to have designed the costumes) did not come to fruition.

Stravinsky’s two visits to Argentina came about through the agency of the writer Victoria Ocampo. The first of these was from 25 April to 18 May 1936, when he was accompanied not by Vera but by his son Soulima Stravinsky. Together they performed Capriccio, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, and the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos at the Teatro Colón (and the last-named work also in Rosario). In addition, Stravinsky conducted The Rite, Symphony of Psalms, Pulcinella, Apollon Musagète and ballet performances of The Firebird, Petrushka and The Fairy’s Kiss. The repertoire was completed by Perséphone, with Ocampo in the title role. Stravinsky’s presence in Buenos Aires was remarked in several polemic newspaper articles, commenting (positively or negatively, depending on editorial viewpoint) on the anti-democratic tone of statements he made on his arrival. But the critical press did not hesitate to hail the significance of his music, not least in articles by leading composers Juan José Castro, Juan Carlos Paz and Roberto García Morillo.

Among the younger Argentinian composers who declared their debt to Stravinsky were Alberto Ginastera and his pupil Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla recalled that The Rite of Spring was for many years his ‘bedside book’: a surprising source of inspiration for a tanguero. Stravinsky’s own Tango for Chamber Orchestra of 1940 was perhaps inspired by his stay in Argentina four years earlier. Stravinsky and Piazzolla became acquainted in New York in 1959, while Ginastera was among the many that he met during his second visit to Argentina the following year.

That 1960 trip was originally planned as a social visit to Ocampo, with expenses to be paid by a film festival; ultimately, the visit was undertaken as part of a wider concert tour of South America. Stravinsky arrived in Buenos Aires with Vera and Robert Craft on 25 August, and stayed until 4 September. With Craft, he conducted two concerts at the Teatro Colón. The works in question were those that the Ballets Russes had introduced to Argentina forty-three years earlier: The Firebird and Petrushka.

Artists (visual).

Like Felix Mendelssohn, Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage, Igor Stravinsky belonged to the synaesthetic class of composers who befriended visual artists, and he maintained a vivid interest in the visual arts throughout his life. In his music he constantly fed himself on different sources of inspiration, of which fine arts – painting, graphic arts, sculpture and architecture – occupied a very significant part.

As Alexandre Benois remembered, ‘Unlike most musicians who are usually quite indifferent to everything that is not within their sphere, Stravinsky was deeply interested in painting, architecture and sculpture’ (cit. in Benois 1947, 302). When Stravinsky was talking about his music, he often drew analogies with art works and art techniques. While discussing Pulcinella in an interview in 1920, he drew a parallel between the juxtaposition of instrumental timbres and the juxtaposition of the colours red and green (SCS, 312). In Conversations with Igor Stravinsky, the famous credo about the artist who ‘must avoid symmetry but may construct in parallelisms’ was illustrated by two examples – the Byzantine mosaic of the Last Judgement of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello, and Piet Mondrian’s Blue Façade, Composition 9, of 1914 (Conv, 19). A gifted portraitist himself, Stravinsky was able to make sketches and caricatures of his friends and, since he had very distinctive facial features, he was often portrayed by artists including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Jacques-Émile Blanche, René Auberjonois, Theodore Strawinsky, Alberto Giacometti, Mikhail Larionov and Jean Cocteau. Besides all that, from a young age Stravinsky was an avid art collector, a passion to which he was initiated by Benois. Even before 1914, his collection of paintings numbered several Picassos, all of which disappeared during World War I, when his summer house in Ustilug was plundered.

A son of Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, a famous Russian opera bass singer who made excellent caricatures of himself in different operatic roles, Igor Stravinsky surrounded himself with artists, starting with his immediate family. The composer was married twice, both times to women who were naturally gifted as artists. His first wife, Yekaterina Gavrilovna Stravinskaya née Nosenko (Catherine), the first cousin of the composer and the drawing and painting companion of his summer holidays in Ustilug in the 1890s, was a talented artist who continued drawing and painting en plein air while living in Switzerland and being the mother of four. His second wife, Vera Arturovna Sudeykina née de Bosset (see Vera Stravinsky) whom he met in 1921, was previously married to the Symbolist artist, a ‘Blue Rose’ member, Sergey Sudeykin (1882–1946). She was initiated into art history by Heinrich Woefflin at the University of Berlin and became interested in applied arts under the influence of her husband Sudeykin, the interior decorator of the famous Stray Dog café in St Petersburg. She was on several occasions a costume designer for the Ballets Russes, including productions of The Soldier’s Tale (1924) and The Firebird (1926). After her wedding to Stravinsky in 1940 in the United States, Vera Stravinskaya devoted herself to painting and gallery work. During the long period of uncertainty in her private life, which preceded her marriage with Igor Stravinsky, she supported herself financially by running a business in Paris selling women’s clothes, and costumes and accessories for the theatre.

A rare case of a celebrity’s offspring who established a solid career of his own, the eldest son of Igor Stravinsky, Theodore Strawinsky (1907–89), became a prominent artist who produced some 1,000 paintings, enjoyed some fifty personal exhibitions, created book illustrations, designed theatre sets and costumes – including the ones for the Brussels production of Les Noces (1936) and the Swiss productions of Petrushka (1944) and The Soldier’s Tale (1945) – and produced stained-glass windows and mosaics for a number of Catholic churches in Switzerland, France, Italy, Holland and Belgium. His watercolour, made after the première of The Soldier’s Tale in September 1918 in Lausanne, when he was only 11, already exhibited a great talent, which flourished during the years the Stravinskys spent in France between the wars. While in France, Theodore studied in the Academy of André Lhote in Paris and took private lessons with George Braque and André Derain. In 1936, Theodore married Denise Guerzoni, the daughter of the Swiss artist Stéphanie Guerzoni. This marriage was the reason why he decided to stay in Switzerland during World War II – the decision that cost him many years of unemployment on account of strict Swiss laws relating to immigration, until 1956 when he was finally granted Swiss citizenship.

In the first half of Stravinsky’s life, there were collaborations with Russian artists from the Ballets Russes: with Mikhail Fokine, Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and Alexandre Golovine on the libretto, costumes and stage design for The Firebird (1910); with Alexandre Benois on the libretto of Petrushka (1911) and on the sets and costumes for Petrushka (1911) and The Nightingale (1914); with Nicholas Roerich on the libretto, sets and costumes for The Rite of Spring (1913); with Mikhail Larionov on sets and costumes for Renard (1922); and with Natalya Goncharova on sets and costumes for Les Noces (1923). There were collaborations with other Russian émigré artists, such as with Léopold Survage on Mavra (1922), and with Nicolas Remisoff, known as ‘Ré-Mi’, on the Washington production of Apollo (1928) and on the Hollywood Bowl production of The Firebird (1940); with Sergey Sudeykin on the Metropolitan productions of Petrushka (1925), The Nightingale (1926) and Les Noces (1929); with André Barsacq on the Paris première of Perse´phone (1934); and with Marc Chagall on the New York production of The Firebird (1945). With regard to non-Russian artists, worthy of mention are the collaborations with Giacomo Balla on the non-choreographic light show for Fireworks (1917); with Pablo Picasso on Pulcinella (1920); with Henri Matisse on the ballet The Song of the Nightingale (1920); with Ewald Dülberg on Oedipus Rex (1928); with André Bauchant and Giorgio de Chirico on Apollon Musagète (1928 and 1947, respectively); with Irene Sharaff on Jeu de cartes (1937); and with Isamu Noguchi on Orpheus (1948). Only some of these collaborations will be discussed below.

Sergey Diaghilev was the initiator of Stravinsky’s collaboration with artists – the Wagnerian spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk was unshakable in Diaghilev, a theatrical entrepreneur, a prominent art critic and the founder of the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) journal, which cultivated art nouveau aesthetics in Russia and promoted a synthesis of the arts (1898–1904). Diaghilev had a capacity for an acute aesthetic judgement in different artistic domains, a strong temperament and an extraordinary charisma, combined with a flair for networking, and he gathered around himself talented individuals who were sensitive in greater or lesser degrees to different media. The unity of music, choreography and visual arts was especially characteristic of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1909–29), for which he had engaged the talents of his World of Art collaborators including Bakst, Benois and Roerich. Despite the many difficulties in working and communicating with the great impresario, Stravinsky was indebted to Diaghilev not only for his celebrity status in France, but primarily for the fact that, by joining the Ballets Russes, he found a stream of creative energy consonant with his own, and thus was surrounded with like-minded enthusiasts who helped his creativity to flourish fully. For the audiences in Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, Geneva and the United States, it was mainly the unconventional stage design and the exotic costumes with a tint of orientalism that became the hallmark of the Ballets Russes style. However, most of Diaghilev’s artists came to the theatre from their workshops and did not study stage or costume design professionally. Moreover, like Stravinsky, who never studied at the Conservatory, neither of his co-workers and co-thinkers Benois and Bakst graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts with a diploma. Both artists played a leading role in the first seasons of the Ballets Russes in 1909 and directly contributed to their great success with the French public. For Nicholas Roerich, his collaboration with Stravinsky on The Rite of Spring (1913) began in 1910, with the discussion of the initial idea of a ballet on a Stone Age subject. The huge role of Roerich in the very conception and production of this famous ballet, his scientific interest in archaeology and Russian archaic culture, his mysticism and orientalism – all this would be only the beginning of the spiritual quest that would occupy the artist for the rest of his life, bringing him ultimately to India and the Himalayas.

Stravinsky’s collaboration with Natalya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, the couple to whom he dedicated his vocal cycle Berceuses du chat (1915), opens up an interesting question about the impact of the Russian avant-garde on the musical aesthetics of the composer. In 1915, the arrival of Larionov and Goncharova in Switzerland on a permanent contract from Diaghilev contributed to a fresh chapter in the productions of the Ballets Russes, a much-needed one following the forced inactivity of the enterprise at the beginning of World War I. The two painters, who belonged to a younger generation of Russian artists, brought with them a new atmosphere, typical of the futurist environment in Moscow in the 1910s – the atmosphere of burlesque, tomfoolery and nonsense, evident in Larionov’s sets and costumes for Renard. Goncharova’s 1915 sketches for ‘Liturgie’, Diaghilev’s unrealised project for a ballet on biblical subjects, bear the hallmarks of cubism, abstract art, neo-folklorism and neo-primitivism. Both Larionov and Goncharova took their inspiration from unrefined Russian folk art –lubok (pl. lubki, ‘popular prints’), peasant dolls, pottery, spoons, commercial signs and peasant costumes. Under Diaghilev’s supervision, and with the help of Bronislava Nijinska in the 1920s, Goncharova started to cultivate a certain minimalism in her work, which was a contrast to her designs for Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel (1914). The combination of four black pianos, brown peasant costumes and the light empty backdrop of Goncharova’s final décor for Les Noces (1923) corresponded perfectly well to Stravinsky’s final minimalist orchestration of this work (four pianos and a percussion ensemble), which also went through at least three revisions. Her backdrop for a new version of The Firebird (1926), where Russian churches are planted one on top of the other without any rules of perspective, could be seen as a visual parallel to the ‘montage’ style of the composer, which came into full maturity during his Swiss period.

After 1916, Diaghilev consciously cultivated a modernist image of his enterprise, and made concrete efforts to engage international avant-garde artists such as Picasso, Matisse, André Derain, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Naum Gabo, Anton Pevzner, Georgy Yakulov, Giorgio de Chirico and Georges Rouault. As a result, Bakst’s sketches for at least two productions, including Stravinsky’s Mavra (1922), were rejected by Diaghilev in favour of avant-garde artists. Picasso befriended Stravinsky in April 1917 in Rome and Naples, where the artist was a guest of Diaghilev, and a participant in the exhibition of futurist paintings. It was during this visit that Picasso met his future wife Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with the Ballets Russes, and started working on Parade (1917) with Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau and Léonide Massine. His collaboration with Stravinsky and Massine on the ballet Pulcinella (1920) – in which neo-classical music and traditional Commedia dell’arte costumes contrasted with Picasso’s simple dark-blue cubist backdrop depicting a street in Naples and Vesuvius, and Massine’s choreography, which introduced Neapolitan folk elements – proved a great success. In fact, the original idea for sets and costume designs, much more elaborate than the final one, was not accepted by Diaghilev, who stamped on Picasso’s sketches and left the room (Cooper 1967, 45; Myasin 1997, 161–2), an incident which infuriated Picasso so much that he destroyed some of his sketches for costumes (Kochno 1973, 147). After the première of the ballet, which took place on 15 May 1920 at the Grand Opéra, Stravinsky congratulated Picasso and hailed ‘the amazing theatrical flair of this extraordinary man’ (Daix 2012, 843). According to Boris Kochno (1973, 148), the violent episode between Diaghilev and Picasso proved to be an exception to the rule: the demanding impresario was usually full of admiration for the famous cubist painter who headed Diaghilev’s ‘list of ten rare personalities who [as he claimed] know how to see and understand my work’ (the other nine names were never mentioned!).

In 1919, Diaghilev proposed to Massine that he should stage a ballet version of the opera The Nightingale of 1914, entitled The Song of the Nightingale, in order to reintroduce Stravinsky’s music onto the stage of the Ballets Russes after a period of absence. It was decided to entrust the décor and costumes not to Alexandre Benois, who was in Russia at that time, and not to Fortunato Depero, who was interested in designing a Marinetti-style futurist version of the opera in 1917 (SCS, 276), but to Henri Matisse. Matisse’s love for birds and his collection of exotic birds, which included a nightingale with a singing certificate (Myasin 1997, 159–60), helped Diaghilev to obtain the consent of the 50-year-old painter with a well-established reputation as the founder of Fauvism. Although he had never worked for the theatre before, Matisse became interested in the idea of a ballet on a Chinese subject, particularly in the idea of creating two different costumes for the main character – for the real and the mechanical Nightingale. In order to be historically faithful, Matisse looked for inspiration at the Musée Guimet in Paris. The artist opted for bold simplification, rejecting what he called ‘the avalanche of colour’ in Bakst’s pre-war stage designs (Turner and Benjamin 1995, 31). The end result was very impressive from a pictorial point of view: a white backdrop contrasting with Matisse’s laconic, brightly coloured costumes, decorated with appliqués of cloud and flower motifs, stripes, circles, triangles, etc. (the technique he would later develop in his famous series of cut-outs, ‘Jazz’, of 1947). Léonide Massine’s work on Pulcinella and The Song of the Nightingale took place simultaneously; in his choreography for the latter, he imitated the reserved dance movements depicted on Chinese silk paintings and lacquer screens. Yet the overall production (Paris, 1920) was not a great success, in particular due to the unconvincing choreography, which attempted to impose on the dancers rhythms somewhat incongruous with those of the music (Kochno 1973, 138–44). Stravinsky’s music, on the other hand, pleased public and connoisseurs alike, particularly those who remembered the opera of 1914, and it displeased only conservative critics (SCS, 309–10).

Asafyev, Boris Vladimirovich,

pen name Igor Glebov (born St Petersburg, 17 (29) July 1884; died Moscow, 27 January 1949). Composer, musicologist, music critic, pedagogue, public figure and publicist. The author of works devoted to the music of Stravinsky, including the first Russian monograph, as well as various articles and reviews.

Asafyev’s Stravinsky (1929) (Asafyev 1982) was not only the first Russian monograph on the composer, but also one of the first full-length studies in any language. It is the first comprehensive musicological study of Stravinsky’s works up to that time, encompassing both those of the early period and the works of the 1920s up to Oedipus Rex, Apollon Musagète and The Fairy’s Kiss. He identified key features of Stravinsky’s style, such as the irregularity of metric accents and the principle of structural asymmetry; the predominance of laconic motifs (popevki) and heterophonic writing; originality of pitch organisation and timbral innovations. Moreover, Asafyev identifed the Russian genesis of Stravinsky’s music – specifically, its roots in archaic folklore, peasant polyphony and Russian Orthodox Church liturgy. He highly estimated the work of Stravinsky as a whole, and was convinced that some of his compositions were simply masterpieces.

By the time the monograph was published, Stravinsky already knew the works of Igor Glebov. He subsequently acquired and studied A Book about Stravinsky in detail, as evidenced by numerous marginalia in the surviving copy (PSS; Craft 1982; Baranova 2013). Most of them are of a critical nature; the composer’s protest was caused by Asafyev’s sociological and straightforward materialist interpretations of his music, which primarily concerned Les Noces. They served as an incentive for the formulation of his own definition of the work, also detailed in the margins of the book: ’Les Noces is nothing but a symphony of Russian songs and Russian poetic style.’

A Book about Stravinsky is the last major work by Asafyev on the composer. In the 1930s, Stravinsky’s music was seldom performed in the USSR, until it almost completely disappeared in the 1940s. In 1948, the composer’s work was officially condemned in his homeland as ‘bourgeois and formalistic’. Sadly, as a member of the establishment, academician Asafyev also fell in line with the official view. Stravinsky’s evaluation of Asafyev’s monograph fluctuated throughout his life: a few years after its appearance, in response to an enquiry from Prokofiev, he described Asafyev’s book as the best of those written about him (see Prokofiev’s letter to Asafyev, 6 September 1934: PRK, III, 542). Many years later, Pierre Souvtchinsky mentioned a rather less flattering evaluation of the monograph by Stravinsky: ‘Asafiev’s book […] contains many true thoughts, but, unfortunately, B.V.A. began later to write extraordinary nonsense … (I.F.S. himself hates this book by I. Glebov)’ (letter to Maria Yudina, 26 April 1960: Yudina 2009, 288).

Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh)

(born York, 21 February 1907; died Vienna, 29 September 1973). English-American poet, critic, dramatist and librettist. Auden achieved fame in the 1930s as the leading figure in a group of young English writers that also included Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. With Isherwood, Auden left England for the United States in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1946. In addition to his prolific and varied output as a poet and critic, Auden began writing librettos soon after arriving in New York, collaborating with Stravinsky as well as Benjamin Britten (Paul Bunyan), Hans Werner Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bassarids) and Nicolas Nabokov (Love’s Labour’s Lost).

In September 1947, at the suggestion of Aldous Huxley, Stravinsky invited Auden to write the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, which became Auden’s best-known operatic text. Although the libretto was co-written with Chester Kallman as were all of his subsequent operatic works – The Rake’s Progress is permeated throughout with Auden’s philosophical, theological and aesthetic ideas. Auden and Kallman proposed further projects to Stravinsky, including a masque-like opera called Delia, but these did not come to fruition. Auden did, however, provide the text for Elegy for J. F. K. (1964), and the two men remained close friends. Long after The Rake’s Progress, the composer continued to speak highly of Auden’s artistry: ‘we shared the same views not only about opera, but also on the nature of the Beautiful and the Good. Thus, our opera is indeed, and in the highest sense, a collaboration’ (T&E 97).

Audio Recordings.

Igor Stravinsky is prominent amongst the first generation of composers whose music is widely recorded (much of it under his own baton) over a conducting career spanning nearly forty years. Although he was approaching middle age by the time of his first major recordings, the comparison between these and his later conducting output reveals a stark contrast between the less experienced conductor (compared with Pierre Monteux or Leopold Stokowski, the former having conducted the première of The Rite of Spring in 1913 and the latter the first US performance in 1922) and the more confident architect of his later years. Famously, Stravinsky railed against ‘interpretation’ of the score, exhorting others to ‘execute’ the music faithfully (Philip 2004, 149). Recording sessions meant that the deputy system that beset French orchestral performances at the time could be circumvented, ensuring continuity on a project for one committed to documenting his pieces ‘to serve as guides to all executants of my music’ (Philip 2004, 150). Nonetheless, it remains a paradox of Stravinsky’s career that his pronouncements and performances should be so at odds: his recordings rarely follow his prescribed tempi and his characteristic rhythmic complexity can (in the earliest recordings) sound slapdash, especially where tempi are notably faster than those in the score. Very late in life, Stravinsky conceded that ‘one performance represents only one set of circumstances’ (Hill 2000, 137), but this belated reflection must be weighed against a lifetime of exhorting conductors to treat the score (and recordings) as a set of instructions rather than assume primary responsibility for the performance experience. Peter Hill identifies, as the consequence of Stravinsky’s dictates, ‘a marked loss of character’ over time in many recorded performances since (Hill 2000, 138).

There are many potential reasons for this ‘loss of character’: for one, the increasingly crowded marketplace for new recordings, and simultaneously the greater availability and ‘consumption’ of recorded exemplars in numerous portable formats, propagating familiarity with the repertoire; a greater number of musicians with experience of Stravinsky’s music and that of his peers and successors; standardisation of orchestral instruments; increased international travel and thus the internationalisation of previously national (or even regional) performance styles and preferences; and the opportunities presented by recording technology to edit errors, omissions or simply aspects of performance that are considered worth improving. These are by no means the only reasons, but although Stravinsky praised the opportunity to retake sections of the work in the recording studio, Robert Philip has shown that early recordings of whole pieces comprised as little as two takes, where today a conductor would seize the opportunity to address chaotic ensemble (Philip 2004, 40). Alleging Stravinsky’s inexperience is inappropriate here, since the earliest recordings of the Rite by Monteux and Stokowski – both greatly more experienced conductors than Stravinsky at the time – evince the same ‘out of control’ passages as the composer’s own, chiefly the result of too-rapid tempi. Notwithstanding Stravinsky’s statements about recordings as ‘documents’, the inadvertent setting in stone of instrumentalists’ struggles bears witness to an immediacy lacking in many recordings today.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the gap between score and performance narrowed: questions of fidelity to the notation superseded and even vitiated the earlier tradition of Romantic ‘vitalist’ readings. This parallels the increasing rationalisation of compositional techniques, leading to the short-lived but influential experiments with so-called total determination in the early 1950s, and their legacy in subsequent decades. Accustomed as we have become to the blended sound of the present day (to say nothing of enhanced recording techniques), the rawness of early twentieth-century performances is uncomfortable and sonically precarious. The increasing preference for vibrato in strings and winds from the 1930s onwards contrasts with the balder approach in the earliest recordings of works for both large and small ensembles. Furthermore, Philip has shown that it was not untypical for early twentieth-century performers and conductors to subject notated rhythms to localised accelerandos, dotting evenly notated patterns, or curtailing notes at the ends of bars or phrases, or for string players to make audible their position changes as un-notated portamenti, even seeking out opportunities to do so for rhetorical effect (Philip 2004). Such widespread practices, all applied in the name of expression, underlined generally well-understood differences between notated score and performance expression. Their presence in these early recordings (and not all of them early, as Robert Fink shows) can come as a shock, so predisposed are we to think of the Rite as clean cut, and energised by incisive – and accurate! – rhythms (Philip 2004, 137). Fink goes so far as to refer to the ‘grimly geometric Rite embalmed in the composer’s 1960 Columbia recording’ (Fink 1999, 313).

Until World War II, the existence of different European performance traditions could result in significant variation between orchestras’ sounds. Philip notes the straight-toned brightness of the metal flute used in pre-war Paris, comparing it with the Berliners’ ‘organ-like’ wooden flute (Philip 2004, 152). At first, both of these European exemplars contrasted in their turn with the North American preference for smoother-toned, blended timbre, but, over time, the latter became the standard more generally. The temptation is great to reflect only on the perceived deficiencies of older recordings, because typically – and notwithstanding their technological shortcomings – they bring to the fore a pungency that modern technologies (reinforced by familiarity with works and the expectations of conductors and ensembles) are assumed to have overcome.

Even accounting for the disappearance of crackles in early recordings and the prevalence of more sophisticated stereo and digital techniques, their legacy is in the intimacy of performance – not a quality readily associated with the Stravinskian repertoire today.

Auric, Georges

(born Lodève, Hérault, France, 15 February 1899; died Paris, 23 July 1983). French composer. Auric became involved in Parisian musical and artistic circles from the age of 14, writing his first articles on contemporary music and aesthetics from 1913. He was part of Satie’s and Cocteau’s circles and advised the latter in the so-called manifesto of the future Les Six: Le Coq et l’arlequin (1918). Auric described the effect of hearing The Rite of Spring, conducted by Pierre Monteux in 1914 at the Casino de Paris, as a punch in the face and heart. He was particularly struck by the challenge the work posed for the performers, who were forced to develop new techniques to achieve the difficult registers Stravinsky demanded. Auric became and remained a supporter throughout all of Stravinsky’s stylistic and aesthetic phases. He wrote several articles on the composer, most importantly concerning Mavra and Les Noces for Les Nouvelles littéraires (6 January and 16 June 1923). For Auric, Mavra represented the start of Stravinsky’s new direction, rather than a trivial failure, describing his pride at being one of the few to have supported this work, alongside Satie and the young French school. He was more closely involved with Les Noces as one of the four pianists in the première and was struck by the novel instrumental combinations of pianos, percussion and voices. Auric regarded Stravinsky’s failure to be elected to the Institut français in 1936, and subsequent emigration to the United States, as a significant loss for French music.

Autobiography, An

(Chroniques de ma vie). In March 1935, at the age of 53, Stravinsky published the first volume of his Autobiography with the publisher Denoël et Steele; the second volume appeared later that year, in December. In publishing his recollections, Stravinsky placed himself in a long line of composer-autobiographers, notably following the model of his professor Rimsky-Korsakov whose Chronique de ma vie musicale (1909) bears a similar title. Stravinsky’s book is written in a sober, accessible style. His reasons for writing it are clearly enumerated in the preface: to ‘dissipate the accumulation of misunderstandings’ and present ‘a true picture’ of himself after having given so many interviews in which his words were ‘disfigured’. Of course, Stravinsky had already given many interviews, but he had also published some fifteen articles in the general and specialised press in which his desire to voice his thoughts, often in the form of clarification, was already present.

When writing, Stravinsky often called upon a collaborator to help him formulate his ideas. In the case of Autobiography, it was Walter Nouvel (1871–1949), a friend of Diaghilev whose biography of the latter was published the same year. Nouvel wrote the text for Autobiography, or at least transcribed it from conversations with the composer. A few letters from Nouvel to Stravinsky mention his working stay in Voreppe (France) during the summer of 1934 to write the autobiography. In this sense, Autobiography is a perfect example of a genre described by the literary theorist Philippe Lejeune as ‘the autobiography of those who don’t write’, in the sense that it is an autobiographical account produced by two collaborators (Lejeune 1980, 229). Although the ‘hero’ of the text does not write, the role of the second actor is not to write, but to transcribe. Unlike the numerous drafts of Poetics of Music (1939) that allow for a clear understanding of the roles of each co-author, the surviving archives and preparatory texts for Autobiography are limited and reveal very little of its genesis. The Stravinsky Collection at the Sacher Foundation in Basel only contains a corrected typescript of the first part and the corrected proofs of the second part. Robert Craft has indicated a number of details relative to Walter Nouvel’s role in crafting the text, the book’s origins, transactions with the editors, financial agreements with the co-author and an early review of the volume.

Despite the composer’s supposed exactitude, Autobiography contains many approximations and errors. Moreover, temporal indications are often missing, and sometimes false. In general, the composer never seeks to ground his remarks within a historical framework. The half-century that his account covers saw the Russian Revolution, World War I, the rise of communism – all upheavals of political, intellectual and artistic life – yet Stravinsky never refers to them, preferring to concentrate on his personal trajectory. The first part contains three chapters: ‘First impressions’, ‘Adolescence’ and ‘The period of the Ballets Russes’, which takes the reader to the 1920 première of Pulcinella. The second part is likewise divided in three: ‘The postwar years’, ‘From Oedipus Rex to The Fairy’s Kiss’ and ‘After the death of Diaghilev’.

In terms of content, the aesthetic ideas found in Autobiography were further developed in later publications, notably in Poetics of Music. The portraits Stravinsky draws of his collaborators, particularly those still in activity, are often tenuous but kind. The pages devoted to those who influenced him are marked by entrenched opinions, in terms of both taste and distaste, affection–rejection. Notable subjects include his performers, recordings, Wagnerism, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and musical expression. The composer’s obsession with defining the terms for interpreting his works, be that interpretation critical or musical, is present here as much as his other remarks, but in no sense does the composer set forth any sort of aesthetic doctrine or system. Generally speaking, the text, in both its style and chosen episodes, is the reflection of Stravinsky’s artistic opinions, as opposed to subjective outpourings and glosses on music. For the most severe critics of the book’s early reception, notably Boris de Schloezer and Gabriel Marcel, Autobiography, like Stravinsky’s most recent music, was cold and emotionless.

Among the ideas set forth in Autobiography, that of music’s autonomy and absence of signification caused the greatest critical reaction, to the point that it has been dubbed the ‘postulate of Stravinsky’: ‘For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc … Expression has never been an inherent property of music.’ This idea punctuates Stravinsky’s thought at regular intervals, as early as an interview given in 1916 and much later as well (‘Music expresses itself” – with Craft in Expositions and Developments). It is most often found during the period of the publication of Autobiography, and in many other texts written by Stravinsky, such as ‘My discussion with Cingria’ of March 1935. In passing, it is worth noting that several passages of Autobiography were reused word for word in various articles and interviews of 1935 and 1936 (see Published Writings).

Autobiography quickly circulated in numerous international translations, starting with two English editions in 1936 (An Autobiography published in New York, and Chronicle of my life published in London), as well as a German edition in 1937 (Erinnerungen), partly modified to avoid ruffling Nazi readers and assist in a German rehabilitation of Stravinsky’s music. The first Russian edition appeared in 1963.

Ave Maria (Bogoroditse Devo).

Composed 4 April 1934. First performance, 18 May 1934, Paris. Conductor, Igor Stravinsky. First published 1934, Édition Russe de Musique (Slavonic); 1949, Boosey & Hawkes (Latin). Text, liturgical.

Written, like the Pater noster (Otche nash) for liturgical use, and within the context of Stravinsky’s return to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1926, the first version of this piece is a simple four-part setting of the Slavonic version of the Ave Maria. It is a harmonisation of a four-note melody (varied metrically) in the Phrygian mode on D, with occasional elements of the Aeolian mode. The transparency of the music and its utter lack of any sentimentality run very much counter to the style of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian church music with which the composer would have been familiar. The later Latin adaptation is a tone higher, and has the word ‘Amen’ added at the end.

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Figure 0

Example 1 Abraham and Isaac: Stravinsky’s serial chart (PSS).

Figure 1

Table 1 Agon, Outline

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  • Edited by Edward Campbell, University of Aberdeen, Peter O'Hagan, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia
  • Online publication: 30 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316493205.002
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  • A
  • Edited by Edward Campbell, University of Aberdeen, Peter O'Hagan, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia
  • Online publication: 30 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316493205.002
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  • A
  • Edited by Edward Campbell, University of Aberdeen, Peter O'Hagan, Roehampton University, London
  • Book: The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia
  • Online publication: 30 September 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316493205.002
Available formats
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