ARTS
Stravinsky's potent spirit
Anthony Burgess
Igor Stravinsky The Recorded Legacy (CBS Masterworks GM31)
It is unfair to Stravinsky that one should awaken to his hundredth birthday (17 June) with a hangover engendered by Joyce centennial celebrations on Bloomsday the day before. And Dublin is not one of the Stravinskian cities. And Joyce and Stravin- sky never met. There is not one single line of Joyce's that Stravinsky considered set- ting to music, and not one bar of Stravin- sky's that Joyce would willingly have sung. Yet, sharing a centenary as they do, one has to, at least I have to, look somewhere for a connection. Without doubt, the two over- whelming artistic events of this century were the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 and the publication of Ulysses in 1922. Both artists enormously expanded the vocabularies of their respective arts. Both have sometimes been considered to have shot their bolts with those two works of ear- ly maturity and to have wasted genius on fruitless experiments thereafter. It is still too early to decide how good Stravinsky was as a neo-classicist and, later, as a neo- serialist. The literary world is still divided as to the validity of the oneiric experiment of Finnegan's Wake. But they are both, the Russian and the Irish exiles, a hundred years old this year, and we ought to start
making up our minds. ,
I have been listening with great care, in the intervals of rereading Joyce, to works like Persephone and The Flood and such
'I heard you're a genius — why is it you're not drunk?'
brevities as Elegy for JFK and Aldous Ma- ley In Memoriam. CBS has sent me five albums of the 31-record set (we can ignore the numbers: just knock and ask for the Definitive Stravinsky). With Joyce in mind I have wondered about Stravinsky's handl" ing of words and at last decided that, except when it's Latin, I don't much care for It. My friend Cathy Berberian sings The OW/ and the Pussycat with great fidelity to the composer's wishes. The atonal approach doesn't work with words so simple, and Stravinsky's wilful distortion of speech accent turns a dream into a nursery nightmare. This was not intentional. Nor, think, did he intend to make the comedy °I. the encounter between Noah and his wife (drawn from the York mystery cycle) s° Schoenbergianly grim in The Flood. He either nursed a perverse desire to dominate words by destroying their natural prosodic features or else didn't understand them. This doesn't apply only to English; Gide, who wrote the text for Persephone, was aP- palled at the liberties the composer took with French stress. If, by some rare chance, Stravinsky had set the poems of Chamber Music, Joyce would have been horrified hY the accentuating of synsemantemes like the and in. Stravinsky is, first and last, all instrumental man.
The musicianship is always awe" inspiring, even when the artistic intention I has not been exactly fulfilled (I don't think, it ever was, after, say, the Symphony al Psalms and Oedipus). It is good to hear a whole side of Stravinsky at rehearsal. In his mid-eighties he retains a painful acuity of ' ear apt for the Mozart of four (when he fainted at the sound of a trumpet). He I doesn't like the grace-notes of the clarinets and works on them like a watch repairer.ge doesn't like Cathy Berberian's Russian pro- nunciation and he gives a powerful phonetics lesson. He is expert in the mouth- music which conveys the exact rhythm Ite requires. On the other side he talks in verY imperfect but charming English about conY posing Le Sacre. He tried it out on the piano, and a boy playing outside cried: 'C'est faux, c'est faux!' That, of course, is what everybody said except StravinskY. Diaghilev wanted to know how long a Par- ticular pounding rhythm was to go on for' 'To the end, my dear,' said Igor the incor- rigible. The compositional problems Stravins9 encountered when it came to the writing ° I straight, as opposed to ballet, music find Aa parallel in the multistylism of Ulysses. Gal", I was dead, and with him died the omniscien: fictional narrator. The impressionists ha''' insisted on the limited point of vicgi' Stravinsky deliberately, in the works of the Twenties and Thirties, found his point of view in the long-dead baroque composers. He was not imitating them, nor was he Parodying them (as Joyce parodied dead Styles in Ulysses); he was obscuring his own Personality in their clothes and thus achiev- ing the objectivity he felt the music of the new age required. He was right, one thinks, to be scared of the subjectivity the fashionable virtuoso or conductor brings to an 'interpreted' performance. He preferred the metronome to rubato and the pianola toll to the heirs of Liszt. As late as the bumbarton Oaks' Concerto of 1938 the Clockwork motion of a kind of surrogate Bach opposes the abhorrent notion of
music as 'expression'. , It is both moving and amusing to listen to his version of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. This is the tribute of a new-born American to his country of adoption. Its first perfor- Mance in Boston brought in the police, who Invoked a federal law establishing only one Possible harmonisation, and that was not Stravinsky's. When we hear the chorus Piously worshipping Old Glory, we hear harmonies acceptable enough, but only Stravinsky could have thought of them. It was his gift to be able to orchestrate a C major triad in a way all his own. It is Perhaps finally the Stravinsky sound, not the Stravinsky structure, which holds the ear. There is nothing elsewhere quite like it.
Of Stravinsky's treatment of other com- Posers — Tchaikovsky, Pergolesi, 9esualdo — one can only say that it is a kind of expert refocusing of the lights, a change of stance that turns diverse points of time into a spatial relationship. With Gesualdo, some of whose madrigals he in- terprets orchestrally, he goes terribly wrong. He reads the strange harmonies of the murderous prince (a character straight out of Webster, said Huxley) vertically in- stead of horizontally, obscuring Gesualdo's linear justification of the harmonic heterodoxies. For all that, he never, allYwhere, makes a false instrumental judg- ment.
He was a warm man but a cold com- Poser, paying the price exacted by an aesthetic of objectivity. The romantics onanised on to music paper, but Stravinsky never confounded the toilet or bedroom With the all too public salon. Perhaps it was inevitable that he should end up as a serialist, but one often feels that the serialism is a mode as disjunct from his own Personality as the clockwork or polyphony f the men of the baroque tradition. There Is always, lurking behind the atonalism an nnkillable tonal certitude. A hexachord in °Ile of his later tone-rows is identical with the opening phrase of The Firebird A flat F flat E flat D F natural G — and the memory of The Flood is less of chaos (which atonality all too well expresses) than Of the religious faith which tonality alone can convey. Browning was right when he Wrote of 'the C major of this life' (Ulysses, ending with 'yes', has to end in C major). Stravinsky believed that serialism had to be the music of the future and as his own
serialist convictions come after so long an odyssey of formal searching, we have, though reluctantly, to believe him.
Anyway, here you have, if you can af- ford it, the entire corpus very handsomely packaged by CBS Masterworks. The range is astonishing — Russian dances and folksongs, ragtime, a work for Benny Goodman, austere theology, much ballet, eccentric word-setting, a polka for baby elephants, you name it. Stravinsky created modern music as Joyce created modern literature. One cannot enforce the duty of getting commemoratively drunk in Len- ingrad (all, alas, too easy in that bibulous city), but one can raise a vodka or two over a record or so. The whole collection is a distillery of a potent spirit we still have to learn to define.
© Anthony Burgess 1982
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