PERSONAL COLUMN
The battle of Igor Stravinsky
CHARLES REID
Overtaken by the sort of euphoria we naturally feel on shaking hands with a gen- ius who happens also to be History Ancient and Modern, I told Igor Stravinsky three or four years ago that he was one of the few who had made the first half-and-a-bit of this 'so-called twentieth century' endurable, almost excusable.
There may have been some within earshot to whom Stravinsky's music wasn't quite the marvel that it had been for me. To such people I may have sounded gushing. The old man wasn't displeased, however. He shoved the long-focus glasses up on to his forehead for a closer look at me. Diagnosing sincerity in my regard, he gave me that shining, scirni- tar-shaped smile of his.
It is only some ten years since Stravinsky's smile became famous through stills and television documentaries the world over. Until then he had remained one of the world's marginal images. There has been no more erratic opinion-graph than his in the history of music or, perhaps, of any art.
Firebird (1910) was the starter's mark. His send-off vogue, in some ways a superficial though resounding one (he was to look back on it sardonically), took in as well as Fire- bird two other ballets, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. The vogue lasted four years. The first world war not only put an abrupt stop to it. It also left a generation that yearned for music with more dreams, per- fumes and levities per page than anything Stravinsky was prepared to purvey. The market was with Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and, later, Delius. What the box-office wanted from Stravinsky was successive re:- writes of Firebird, salted here and there in the Petrushka manner, the whole touched up with Slavic folk tunes in deference to the newly entrenched nationaliStic ideolo- gies of the day.
What Stravinsky gave them was music of rigorous discipline and sobriety. In much of it he adverted to eighteenth-century forms and styles which, well enough in their original contexts, became, to many influen- tial ears, an exasperating perversion when harnessed, as Stravinsky harnessed them, to his personal idiom, a disturbing one to say the least, of tonality-conflict, ostinato pat- terns, shifting barlines and 'freakish' instru- mentation.
No single incident more sharply illustrates
Stravinsky's self-destructive breakaway (it seemed no less to Firebird fans) than the first performance (Queen's Hall,. London, 1921) of his Symphonies for Wind Instru- ments in memory of Debussy. Coming straight after the racy, sumptuous March from Rimsky's Golden Cockerel, the Sym- phonies had a peevish, drab sound to un- emancipated ears and were dismissed with a shrug. Time is a great unplugger of ears and understandings. Stravinskians today of most ages, but more particularly the young avant- gardist crop of the late 1950s, place this score high in the canon. Not that the sym- phonies, and more than that other key-work of the 1920s, Les Noces, typify Stravinsky's so-called neo-classical phase. Scores that earned this label by burrowing stylistically backwards (sometimes Bachwards) range from the Piano Sonata and the Piano Con- certo to Pulcinella (after Pergolesi) and the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. All these (like the later Symphony of Psalms, the Violin Concerto, the Capriccio for Piano and Orch- estra and the Persephone 'melodrama') were tepidly or caustically received at first. Of the eight scores named, the four purely instru- mental ones, while enjoying latter-day defer- ence, have never really 'made' the repertory. The remaining four (three of them theatre pieces) are a different matter. Even Perse- phone, for all its pastel shades and spoken narration, is beginning to take on patina and 'mystique.' The pedants stopped gnashing their teeth ages ago over the internal restyl- ings f Pulcinella, which is now an accepted joy in the concert hall. The final Laudate of the Symphony of Psalms brings a lump to thousands of throats. Who today cherishes Constant Lambert's. gibe at it? Who, for that matter, dreams of citing those pundits of the 1930s who failed to 'get' Oedipus's towering size (as well as conciseness) and embroidered beauty?
The battle is long over. But it was a' battle that went on for all of thirty years. During that time people flocked to see Stravinsky play the piano or take the rostrum, not as a composer of their time but as the 'Firebird man.' The music had long made him impatient. He laughed openly at much of it. Yet in fifty years he conducted Firebird over a thousand times with love and precision. Without self-contradiction of this sort 'creative' life would wilt.
Of the critical and top-lc■el knockings he consistently suffered during his Thirty Years War, no better sample or keynote could be found than the principal piece about him and the essay on Musical Form in Grove in, which reigned from the late 1920s until well after the second world war. The first change of wind, the first cautious revalua- tion, set in soon after his opera The Rake's Plogress (1951) but cannot be said to have been determined by that piece. The Rake has never excited first-phase Stravinskians as did The Rite, Les Noces or the Sym- phonies for Wind Instruments. Nor does it arouse later-phase or latter-day Stravin- skians as do, say, the Symphonies of 1940 and 1945, the Latin Mass, the Canticum Sacrum, Agon, Threni, the Movements for Piano and Orchestra and the 'Aldous Huxley' Variations (1965).
The five last-mentioned pieces belong to the closing chapter, the serial (or dodeca- phonic) one. Arnold Schoenberg had once teased Stravinsky in a rhymed satire as `der kleine Modernsky' and had set his barbs for mixed choir. But no sooner was Schoenberg dead (1951) than Stravinsky began to construct his music more or less according to the method invented by his old critic and rival.
For the first time in an aggressively inde- pendent career Stravinsky went conformist. A tide was beginning to run with the Viennese school, or trio: Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. And Stravinsky chose to swim with it. Neo-classicism was a current that couldn't carry him any further. I do not say this in any twitting way. In his day he had done many brave things. The ditching of his Firebird-to-Les Noces public for the sake of what is now seen to have been a salutary aesthetic evolution must have entailed or risked material sacrifice. Equally bold and, in its way, equally risky, was his doctrine— asserted in the teeth of cherished fallacies to the contrary—that music is of its nature incapable of expressing or depicting events, scenes, states of mind or day-to-day emotions. Proved in a hundred choices and conflicts, the man's integrity saw him through ten or fifteen years of `serialisin' and came out unflawed. If doesn't follow from this that the twelve-tone scores have meant or will ever mean as much to as many people as the music of the early ballets or even such middle-period ones as A potion Musagete and The Fairy's Kiss.
The emotional pull, the heart-probe that recurs in Stravinsky are evident now to everyone. It wasn't always so. One trouble during the Thirty Years War was that many musicians of other schools went to Stravinsky premieres with heads so full of his doctrinal writings that they couldn't hear what was behind the notes. It was the case of Wagner all over again. Because they jibed at his theorisings in Oper und Drama, the pundits of an earlier age found the Tannhauser Overture tuneless. Time and time again, from the betrothal music at the end of Firebird to the madhouse lullaby in The Rake, Stravinsky tapped a tenderness and an innocence which, although the note was his own, affined him with Mozart, Schubert and Weber. Yet the purblind went on writing about brittleness, dryness, broken glass. There are others who saw the point in good time. The French chorusmen who sang Persephone first found some of the music so moving that their tone became goo. You can't sweeten sugar, complained Stravinsky. But the sugar was there. A good thing. Music will never get on without it.
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