Part 5

My second personal impression is a memory of an evening a few nights later, when I attended a performance of Strawinsky’s earlier ballet, _Petrouchka_. _Petrouchka_ is another kind of entertainment. It was a success with the public from the beginning, and is still an important feature in the répertoire of the Russian Ballet. It is by _Petrouchka_, in fact, that Strawinsky will be introduced to New York by the Russians during the current season.... The curtains had closed on these pathetic scenes from the Russian carnival. They were drawn back to disclose Karsavina and Nijinsky. Presently a third figure appeared, very thin and short, with a Jewish profile (I do not know, however, that Strawinsky is a Jew). Dragged on the stage by Nijinsky, pale, awkward, and timid, his near-sighted eyes blinded by the footlights, the composer bowed his acknowledgments to the applause, nervously fingering his eyeglasses. This account would be incomplete without a reference to his dress, as irreproachable in fit and texture as that of Arturo Toscanini.

A London experience is also worth the telling. It happened after the first performance there of _The Nightingale_, a lyric drama to set a pace in the race towards the future. There was a long intermission after this short opera before the continuation of the bill, which included a performance of _The Legend of Joseph_, the composer himself conducting, and Steinberg’s _Midas_. In the foyer I met my friend Alfred Hertz. Those who know this conductor are familiar with his moods. Tired, after a rehearsal of _Parsifal_, or excited before the performance of a work which he is about to conduct for the first time, he becomes _distrait_ and unconversational to a degree which would not seem possible in a man who ordinarily is as fond of anecdote as he is of Viennese pastry. I recognized his mood on this occasion. Mopping his brow (it was June), he was good enough to explain.

“I can’t stay here any longer,” he said. “It’s very embarrassing. Strauss asked me to come. I am here as his guest to hear _The Legend of Joseph_, but I can’t listen to it. I’m too tired--I am exhausted. I have never heard such extraordinary music. I have never been so moved, so excited before at the performance of a new opera.... Oh, if I could have the privilege of introducing that work to New York, then I should be happy!”

I am very glad to quote these words to the lasting honor of one who realized at once the pleasure that Strawinsky’s music, quite in a new mode, would give to the coming generation, and to a few in the present.

M. D. Calvocoressi, I believe, had the honor of signing the first article in English about Strawinsky, shortly after the production of _The Firebird_ in Paris. Mr. Calvocoressi is to musicians what Mr. George Moore, who introduced Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud to English readers, has been to poets--an appreciator of contemporaries. This is a rare trait, one not possessed by John Runciman of the “Saturday Review” or by several other prominent critics, whose names instantly spring to mind. The initial article in English about the young Russian composer appeared in the London “Musical Times” for August 1, 1911. Since then Mr. Calvocoressi has written much on the subject, and a good deal of his information seems to have been gleaned from headquarters, since he quotes Strawinsky freely. (This critic is, of course, particularly interested in Russian music. He translated Balakirew’s songs into French, and wrote a life of Moussorgsky.) With the words of the composer as a guide, Mr. Calvocoressi has made a most interesting discovery, that in the lyric-drama music of this young man “working-out” plays no part. There is no development in the music of _The Nightingale_; the music simply expresses what the text dictates it shall express as it goes along. (In this respect, of course, Strawinsky is but following an ukase of the “Five” to its logical conclusion; they, in their desire to create a national school, chose as the best means of banishing any suggestion of Wagner, whose theories were generally being blindly accepted and adopted by composers of music-dramas at this epoch, the banning of the use of the _leitmotiv_. However, they repeated themes and melodies, and Moussorgsky in _Boris_ brings back the bells that served to ring in Boris’s coronation, in broken rhythm to ring out his life.)

In regard to this matter Strawinsky has put himself on record as saying, “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called ‘impressionist’ methods a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s feelings.”

This, of course, is a more elaborate version of what Moussorgsky said, “Plain truth, however unpalatable, and nothing more. No half measures; ornamentation is superfluity.”

In one of Mr. Calvocoressi’s recent articles about Strawinsky that critic says, in lines which illuminate: “According to the modern conception of the lyric drama, the chief quality of dramatic music is terseness--a quality most uncommon in all kinds of music, and which many will, not altogether wrongly, think almost incompatible with the very essence of musical art. The principle of music as generally understood appears to be amplification, repetition.

“At all events, the art of music has always consisted chiefly in that of ‘working-out.’ And it is but of late that a number of music-makers and music-expounders have raised an outcry against prolixity and redundance in music: an outcry, it must be added, that for the present does not find much echo among the majority of art judges nor of the public.

“The first of great musicians to abjure the principle of formal, elaborate ‘working-out’ in dramatic and lyric music was Moussorgsky. A striking peculiarity of his best songs and of his masterpiece, _Boris Godunow_, is the absolute lack, not only of anything resembling tautology or amplification, per se, but of all that is not absolutely essential to direct expression (including many devices which no other musician of the time would have dreamt of leaving out), even if the omission be in defiance of tonal construction and balance.

“For instance, the song, _The Orphan_, ends very dramatically on the suspensive harmony of the dominant. _Death’s Lullaby_, which depicts a dialogue between a horror-stricken mother and Death, who comes to take away a child, ends abruptly on the burden of Death’s last utterance, with which the composer’s intention is fulfilled. He never gives a thought to the practice of bringing back the main key which would have led him either to an inappropriate modulation or to a superfluous addition. Similarly, _Boris Godunow_, in the authentic version, ends, without even a cadence, on a chord that hardly leaves the impression of the tonic.”

Mr. Calvocoressi points out the fact that there are few passages for orchestra alone in _Boris_ outside of the _polonaise_ and the very brief preludes to the acts, and he asks us to observe the working of the same principle in _Pelléas et Mélisande_, in which it is evident that Debussy was influenced by Moussorgsky. Schoenberg was the first to apply this principle to orchestral music. However, if an opera-goer finds much to enjoy in the dramas of Moussorgsky and Strawinsky, it does not necessarily follow that all the value of a work like _Die Walküre_ disappears, to his ears. The two principles of art are different; each, perhaps, is equally valid.

“But the fact is that a new factor has appeared in the domain of dramatic music, which is now entering a new path; and consequently a new order of artistic pleasure may be the outcome of this stage of evolution. The first consequence, of course, is a greater differentiation between the style of dramatic music and the style of instrumental music; unquestionably a progress, since it widens the range of methods and gives greater freedom to the composer’s imagination.”

All of this is very stimulating, and very true; still, it cannot be said that audiences as a whole grasp Strawinsky’s intention, as it is exploited in _The Nightingale_, so readily as they do Moussorgsky’s as manifested in _Boris Godunow_. Rimsky-Korsakow’s emendations of the latter work, which one critic has labeled as mutilations, may be responsible for the greater public reaction. But the success of _Boris_ was by no means immediate. Produced in Petrograd in 1874, it was not heard in Paris until nearly thirty years later, nor in New York until 1913. Musicians, in the meantime, had had access to the score, and had adopted some of the Moussorgsky idiom as their own. When _Boris_ was at last produced here it was not, therefore, the utter novelty that _The Nightingale_ now seems. The very principle of the new music demands a greater effort at concentration than can be expected of most audiences when they are listening to music, as many ears catch the meaning of a phrase only after it has been repeated a convenient number of times. This is one of the chief reasons for the popular success of _The Ring_ dramas. It seems incredible, and impertinent, to the average audience that a composer should have had the idea of expressing himself without repeating himself. A catalogue of representative themes would be of no use to a prospective auditor of _The Nightingale_. Now, there are two advantages to this method, aside from the implied advantage of an improvement in effect: First, it makes for a very short opera (_The Nightingale_, in three acts, is so short that at its early performances it was given in a bill with two ballets, one of which, _The Legend of Joseph_, runs for over an hour); second, the audience is not called upon to listen intellectually (nor should it be, at the performance of an opera). The only intention of the composer is to make his listeners _feel_ each situation he illustrates with his music. It may be said that Wagner’s intention was the same, and thereby lies the difficulty in training listeners to understand the new principle. Wagner’s way is easier for them because they can get the emotional feeling _through the intellect_. The repetition of themes would not in itself assure an effect, but the labeling of these themes does just that, so that whenever the Sword _motif_ or the Siegfried _motif_ occurs, the _mind_ of the listener, knowing the name of the theme, is perfectly prepared to create the emotional reaction demanded by the composer. Strawinsky appeals directly to the emotions. On the listener who expects a theme to reappear again and again he makes only the impression of being a noise-maker (in the sense of a worker in dissonance; _The Nightingale_ is most continent in sound). But on the open-minded auditor his effect is usually astounding.

The story of the music-drama closely follows the Hans Andersen tale. In the first act a deputation from the Chinese Emperor’s court, headed by the kitchen-maid, seeks the nightingale in its grove. The Imperial Chancellor, the Bonze, and a number of courtiers are included in this strange procession, which follows the kitchen-maid, as she alone knows the bird’s song, to request the nightingale to come to the court to cheer up the melancholy ruler. Although loath to leave its quiet groves, the bird agrees to go.

In the second act the nightingale’s arrival has stirred the Emperor’s jaded senses. However, the present of a mechanical bird which comes from Japan diverts his attention. In the meantime, the real nightingale has disappeared. The Emperor orders the little brown songster banished from all China, while he places the mechanical toy by his bedside.

Death stands in the Emperor’s bedchamber in the third act. Torn by his aching conscience, the dying ruler calls in vain for his musicians to make him forget. But the nightingale returns and so charms Death with its songs that he agrees to allow the Emperor his life. The Emperor revives and offers his saviour a place at court, but the bird refuses and returns to its woodland haunts with the promise that it will sing each evening. Now the courtiers enter, prepared to find the Emperor dead. They are astounded when he sits up in bed and bids them “Good-morning!”

All the symbolism, all the undercurrents of suggestion contained in the text are never explicitly referred to except in the brief utterances of a minor character, the fisherman, who sings a prophecy or an explanation at the beginning and end of each act, foretelling the delight that will be caused by the songs of the bird, the distress that will follow its departure, and its final victory over Death.

The book offers exceptional opportunities for excursions into imitative music such as Richard Strauss, to name one composer, would take delight in expanding into pages of detail, as many of the diverting incidents of Andersen’s tale are carried over into the drama. In the first act, for example, the courtiers mistake the croaking of frogs and the lowing of cattle for the song of the bird; in the second act the ladies of the court fill their mouths with water and gargle in an attempt to imitate the nightingale’s trill. These distractions do not serve to steer Strawinsky from his direct course. He notices them, of course, but in the briefest and most concise manner.

The score of _The Nightingale_ calls for a large orchestra, although for a continent use of it. The list of instruments includes wood-winds by threes, with a piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet, and double-bassoon, three trombones, tuba, and two cornets besides the usual two trumpets; two harps, two glockenspiels, a celesta, a pianoforte (this part is very important), and the whole of the usual percussion, to which are added small antique cymbals. The parts of the nightingale and the fisherman are also sung from the orchestra pit.

The work was begun in 1909 (this date is disputed) and completed in 1914, when it received its first hearing in Paris in May. Strawinsky seems to have found difficulty in composing it. “I can write,” he is reported to have said, “music to words, viz., songs; or music to action, viz., ballets. But the coöperation of music, words, and action is a thing that daily becomes more inadmissible to my mind. And even should I finish _The Nightingale_, I do not think I shall ever attempt to write another work of that kind.”

Igor Strawinsky was born June 17 (June 5, Russian style), 1882, at Oranienbaum, near Petrograd. This date has been in dispute, and various authors have disagreed about it. My authority is Mr. Strawinsky himself. He was the son of a court-singer and was destined to study law. But, working assiduously with a pupil of Rubinstein, he became a remarkable pianist from the age of nine. He encountered Rimsky-Korsakow at Heidelberg in 1902 (when he was 20), and that Russian composer had a great influence on his career, although very little on his musical style. During this period Strawinsky attended concerts, visited museums, and delved in literature. Everything in the world of art is said to have awakened his curiosity. In 1903 he wrote the _allegro_ of a sonata for the piano, of which the _andante_, _scherzo_ and _finale_ were completed the following year. Rimsky-Korsakow had accepted him as a pupil, and while the young man alarmed the older composer to some extent, he secretly predicted great success for the only one of his pupils who showed revolutionary tendencies. Strawinsky says that the composer of _Sheherazade_ struggled valiantly with himself at this period in an effort not to restrict what might be beautiful in his pupil’s anarchic methods, at the same time wishing to preserve his own ideals. In 1905-6 Strawinsky worked at orchestration, and during this period, as an exercise, he orchestrated his master’s opera, _Pan Voyevode_, from the piano score. Subsequently his work was corrected by comparison with Rimsky-Korsakow’s own scoring, recently completed. This might have been a dangerous exercise for a “sedulous ape,” but Strawinsky was not that. He also orchestrated marches of Schubert and sonatas of Beethoven. His friends at this time were the group surrounding Rimsky-Korsakow, Chaliapine, César Cui, Glazunow, and Blumenfeld, the _chef d’orchestre_. Strawinsky was married January 11, 1906.

Soon after his marriage he terminated his symphony in E flat (1905-7). It was performed in 1907, and was published later by Jurgenson. A song with orchestral accompaniment, _Le Faune et la Bergère_, dates from this period (1906), and in 1908 he completed his _Scherzo Fantastique_, which was inspired by a reading of Maeterlinck’s “Life of the Bee.” This has been played in Paris. Edward Burlingham Hill says of it: “In its long passages for staccato strings, divided into melodic phrases for wood-wind instruments and in fanciful figures for wind instruments, celesta, and harps, one can imagine the sinuous and yielding swaying of bees, iridescent with color, and pulsing with life.” I do not think this work has been played in America. New York has not heard it. He set two poems of Gorodetzki to music in 1908. When Rimsky-Korsakow’s daughter married Maximilien Steinberg in 1908, Strawinsky sent _Fireworks_ as a wedding present, but before the post had delivered the gift the older composer was dead. As a tribute to his master’s memory Strawinsky composed the _Chant Funèbre_, performed at the Belaïeff concerts. _Fireworks_ has been played in New York both by the Russian and the New York Philharmonic Societies. Four piano études, written in the summer of 1908, have stood on my piano for some time. They are interesting. Vuillermoz says that Strawinsky began _The Nightingale_ in this year; Calvocoressi’s date is 1910; the programme at the first performance gave the date as 1909.

About this time an incident occurred which considerably changed the young composer’s outlook, and which brought him to the attention of a larger world. He was “discovered” by the director of the Russian Ballet, Serge de Diaghilew, and commissioned to write a ballet on a Russian folk-story scenario fashioned by Michel Fokine. Leon Bakst and Golovine, the painters, completed the collaboration. The work, _The Firebird_, was terminated May 18, 1910, and produced three weeks later. The first sketches for this ballet must have been written before the death of Rimsky-Korsakow, if we are to believe a very delightful story told somewhere by Calvocoressi. On hearing Strawinsky play some bars of _The Firebird_, the older composer is quoted as saying: “Look here, stop playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it!” The production of _The Firebird_ established the composer’s reputation in Paris, and the very impressionists whose methods he has dubbed “hypocritical” were among the first to sign themselves his admirers. Of these Maurice Ravel was the leader. _Petrouchka_ was completed just a year later (May 26, 1911), and its production by the Russian Ballet gave his fame a firm hold with the public. His third choreographic drama, _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, followed in 1913, and his opera, _The Nightingale_, in 1914. Several songs, including _Le petit Myosotis_ and _Le Pigeon_, are other products of recent years.[A]

It is astonishing to learn that _The Nightingale_ was begun so early in the composer’s career, but it is still more astonishing to discover that the first sketches of _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ were written before _Petrouchka_ was conceived. That ballet, which achieved the great honor of being hissed in Paris (I have described the incident earlier in this article), is the work on which, with _The Nightingale_, rests his chief claim to being a composer with something new to say. The work differs from most of the mimed dramas given by the Russians in that it is practically without a fable. The scenes take place in barbaric Russia, long before the Christian era, and we are introduced to rites connected with the worship of the soil and the springtide; after a series of ritual dances, one of the younger maidens is chosen as a sacrifice to the spring, whereupon she spares her friends the trouble of killing her by dancing herself to death. This exceedingly angular dance, the expression of religious hysteria, marvelously conceived by Nijinsky and thrice marvelously carried out by Mlle. Piltz, was one of the causes for the outbreaks at the early performances of the ballet.

The lack of a fable, the early and uncertain setting of the action, offered Strawinsky an opportunity which he seized with avidity. The music is not descriptive, it is rhythmical. All rhythms are beaten into the ears, one after another, and sometimes with complexities which seem decidedly unrhythmic on paper, but when carried out in performance assume a regularity of beat which a simple four-four time could not equal. H. E. Krehbiel, in his valuable book, “Afro-American Folksongs,” describes the tremendous effect made on him by the intricate rhythms (which he tried in vain to note down) of the musicians of African tribes at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The rhythmic effect of _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ is as powerful and complex. It is interesting to remember, in this connection, that the ancient Greeks accorded rhythm a higher place than either melody or harmony. Strawinsky describes the dawn of a spring morning in a few measures at the beginning of the prelude (here, it must be admitted, there is a startling reminder of _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_), and then he settles down to the business, and art, of providing material for dances. This he has done with consummate effect. In many cases his chord-formations could not be described in academic terms; the instruments employed add to the strangeness of the sounds. I remember one passage in which the entire corps of dancers is engaged in shivering, trembling from head to toe, to music which trembles also. It makes my flesh creep even to think of it again. At the beginning of the ballet the adolescents pound the earth with their feet, while a little old woman runs in and out between their legs, to the reiterated beat of a chord of F flat, A flat, C flat, F flat; G, B flat, D flat, and E flat, all in the bass (begin from below and read in order), while an occasional flute or a piccolo screams its way in high treble. Try this on your piano. “He has had recourse,” writes Edward Burlingham Hill, “to a violently revolutionary style which is difficult to reduce to a systematic analysis. Chords employing minor and major triads simultaneously in different octaves, figures in double thirds, strange aggregations of notes that can hardly be described as chords, even with critical license, are the ingredients of this unusual style.” M. Montagu-Nathan, in his “Short History of Russian Music,” says: “In criticising the work, the mistake was made of suggesting that Strawinsky’s music had gone back to an elemental stage in an endeavor to provide an appropriate setting for the pre-historic. In reality, of course, the movement was forward, in that music was used in a sphere to which it had hitherto been strange. That is progress. A composer who sets ‘The Creation’ to living music is just as progressive as another who takes ‘The Last Judgment’ as his theme.”