The Many Phases of Igor Stravinsky

The Composer of "Le Sacre du Printemps" and "Petrouchka" Steps Forth as a Classicist

ERNEST NEWMAN

AN eminent English musician with whom I was once discussing Stravinsky summed him up thus: "He began as a mediocrity. In L'Oiseau de Feu he became a talent. In Petrouchka, a genius. In Le Sacre du Printemps and The Nightingale, he became a talent again. Then he sank once more into a mediocrity; and now, apparently, he is an imbecile." But this conversation, I ought to mention, took place three or four years ago, at the time when Stravinsky was disconcerting his admirers and delighting his detractors by bringing out a number of small works,—the Pribaioutka songs, the clarinet pieces, and other things of the kind— that really seemed to be the last poor muddy drops from a shallow and exhausted well. For a phenomenon of this kind had never before been known in the history of music. Musicians of genius have sometimes written below their own best; but none of them have degenerated into sheer foolishness and helplessness just when their genius had fully established itself. (I set aside, of course, pathological cases of dementia like Schumann and Hugo Wolf.) It seemed as if there must be something incurably wrong with a mind that, after producing a Petrouchka and a Sacre du Printemfs, could turn out feeble abortions like some of these minor works of Stravinsky's worst period.

SINCE then he has not only rehabilitated himself with works like Les Noces and Renard but, within the last year or so, has taken, in the piano concerto, a line that no one could ever have anticipated of him. It is evident that a mind of this species confronts criticism with some peculiar and puzzling problems. As yet, indeed, there has been no real criticism of Stravinsky in any country, as far as my own reading goes. He has had many partisan laudators of the parasite type that always fastens upon a new man in art; he has had his enemies, who have been so revolted at certain features of him that they have made no attempt to understand him; but no one has yet studied him critically all round in the only way that makes criticism vital,—as if he were an historical figure and an historical phenomenon. To do this properly is, of course, impossible as yet: it will be the task of the next generation or the one after that, that will have the whole of his work before it and can see it in its true focus. Nevertheless the attempt will have to be made by someone while Stravinsky is alive. Criticism is not an affair of rival camps, with all the right on one side and all the wrong on the other, though that is what our wrangles about living composers tend to become. The business of criticism is to discover just what the artist is, just what it is that makes him what he is, what new contribution he has brought to the common stock of music, and how much of his contribution is likely to be of enduring value.

It will be replied, I have no doubt, that a great artist's contemporaries are incapable of appreciating or understanding him,—that all the innovating geniuses—Monteverdi, Beethoven, Wagner, and so on—have met with little but opposition during their lifetime. But this is a sentimental legend that will not bear a cool scrutiny of the historical facts. No generation, it is true, can see all that the future will see in the work of a great man. But there never has been a generation yet in which the great man was not recognized at once for what he was. I have tried to demonstrate this at length in a book that will be published shortly; meanwhile 1 can only ask the reader not to place too much faith in the pathetic fallacy of the inevitable failure of the musician who is too far above and beyond his contemporaries to carry them with him. We need not turn over to the next generation but one the task of deciding what is good and what is bad in the work of Stravinsky. There has never yet been, since music began, a composer so far in advance of the musical thought of his epoch as to baffle all attempts of the keenest musicians of the day to follow him; and we may be sure that this unique miracle has not happened now in the case of Stravinsky. As a matter of fact there is nothing baffling about Stravinsky's art. It has always been singularly simple and transparent, both at its best and at its worst.

That he has opened new paths really amounts to very little; this will, in fact, prove to be the least important aspect of him. New paths have been opened again and again in music and have automatically closed again. The new paths of a Beethoven or a Wagner remain open; those of a Gesualdo, a Domenico Belli, a Saraceni, are soon deserted and overgrown. In music, as in the animal and vegetable world, Nature often throws out what the biologists call a "sport",—a highly individual organism that cannot perpetuate itself. There is virtually nothing going on in the newer music today that has not gone on, under other forms, in the music of the past. Gesualdo, in the sixteenth century, wrote harmonies that surprise us even today; but he could not fertilise the music of the next century or two with them. In the seventeenth century, the Italian chamber monodists indulged in harmonic eccentricities and audacities that must have astonished the cars of that day as greatly as any harmonies of Schonberg and Stravinsky can astonish ears that have mastered the harmony of Chopin, Wagner and Strauss; but their innovations were "sports" that came to nothing. At the present time, hundreds of eager young composers arc opening up new paths. But history will repeat itself; the spirit of music will have no use for nine out of ten of these new paths, and the remaining one will only be of use if, by some lucky throw of Nature's dice, the right man is born at the right moment to walk along it.

WHILE Stravinsky as a path-breaker, then, is exceedingly interesting to us, there is nothing in the mere fact of his breaking new paths to justify the assumption that he will be a vital figure fifty years hence. A composer survives in virtue not of the direction in which he goes but of what he himself is and what he does. He may not open a single new path, and yet be one of the eternal, unapproachable peaks of the art, as was the case with Bach and Palestrina. He may open new paths and make himself immortal, as was the case with Chopin and Wagner. Or he may open new paths and have, in the end, only an antiquarian rather than an aesthetic interest, as was the case with Monteverdi. His Combat of Tancred and Clorinda was an astoundingly new thing for its day,—newer than, say, Tristan was to the eighteen-sixties; but as a work of art it can scarcely be said to exist now. From being the very newest, "latest" thing it has become the most rudimentary. We may be sure, then, that, merely qua path-breaker, Stravinsky will have little claim on the attention of posterity. He will endure only in virtue of the actual good music he can write.

It is impossible in such a short article to consider all the fascinating problems that he raises for the critic, and the purely technical ones are specially unfit for consideration here. We can consider him only in his most general aspects. He began, as my friend said, more or less as a mediocrity: in Firezcorks we see him as a clever young manipulator of the orchestra, but without any particular distinction of idea. For a time it looked as if he would carry on that Russian tradition that, till then, had reached its highest point in Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov; this phase of him gave us one or two tender, wistful songs such as The Novice, and the enchanting Oiseau de Feu,—a little masterpiece of expressiveness and of style. But it soon became evident that though Stravinsky could write only Russian music, he was going to be Russian in a way entirely his own. Both his imagination and his technique took a new line in Petrouchka. Here there was at the same time a narrowing and an intensification of his peculiar genius. The primitive element in him was beginning to assert itself as it had done nowhere in VOiseau de Feu. In that work there is a good deal of humanism, notably in the lovely movement entitled Supplications de VOiseau de Feu. But, except for a few pages in The Nightingale, specifically human emotion hardly reappears in his later work. His sympathies are now with sub-human things and with the unconscious life of the Russian soil. One of the most astounding features of Petrouchka is the way in which the puppets express themselves; if things of wood could feel, we say to ourselves, this is just how they would voice their feelings. It is this that makes Petrouchka himself above all pathetic: in his rage, his mortification, his self-pity, he is barely articulate, but his very inarticulateness makes him infinitely pitiful.

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Then, in Le Sacre du Printemps, Stravinsky loses all touch even with the sub-human. He translates into sound,—often it is hardly music—the unconscious forces of nature. He brings into music a psychology it had never known before. This is not. civilised man-making music, talking about the things that civilisation has come to regard as vital: it is the savage mind using, with infinite skill, the resources of the modern orchestra to express a world that is still elemental; there are things in the Sacre that are like the primitive forces of the universe trying to find a voice.

The question then was, could Stravinsky develop far along these lines? Already his limitations were becoming rather painfully apparent. He could invent comparatively little in the way of expressive thematic material: even in Petrouchka most of the tunes are popular Russian melodies. In Le Sacre he almost invariably becomes commonplace when he has to write thematically; and the work remains a singular mixture of banality and power. The more Russian he became, the more thickly strewn his music was with the characteristic weaknesses of the Russian national style. His melodies were short-breathed, repetitive, limited in scope and resource. For years he wandered about uncertainly. It had apparently become a cardinal principle with him that each new work must be different in form, in idiom, in technique, in texture, from all its predecessors. The greatest of musicians would have found this impossible; Stravinsky necessarily failed in it. He produced a number of small works that are interesting as evidences of the somewhat agonised unrest of his mind, but that have little artistic value.

His style hardened into a mass of mannerisms, especially rhythmic. A vast amount of nonsense has been written about his unique rhythmic sense. He has undoubtedly added to the resources of rhythm; but a good deal of what passes for rhythmic variety in his music is merely variety of notation: it exists for the eye rather than the ear. The page looks fearsome with no two successive bars bearing the same time-signature; but how little necessary all this really is to the music is shown by the fact that one eminent conductor has abolished a great many of these changes of signature in the finale of Le'Sacre, and finds that the conducting of it is thereby simplified without the effect on the ears of the audience being in any way altered. Moreover, these frequent changes of metre are made possible only by a certain harmonic restriction. If we care to do what Stravinsky does —make a new bar-division for each accent,—we can write out the melody of any piece of music whatever with Stravinskyan changes of time-signature; the opening phrase of the Meistersinger overture, for example, would on this method be marked, instead of a plain, continuous four in a bar, "2/4 + 2/4 + 5/8 + 3/8 + 5/4 + 2/4 + 3/4 + 4½/4 + 7/8," and so on. But in practice this would be impossible, because the harmony is fluid and has a life of its own; whereas in the Stravinskyan passages we are considering, the harmony is rigid, moving in solid chunks with the melody.

In his best works of the last few years, such as Les Noces and Renard, he is such a slave to one kind of texture and technique, and his psychological range is so limited, that he becomes the musical equivalent of the dialect poet or novelist. Many of us have wondered for some time what he would do next: he was obviously not growing, and the day would be bound to come when he had said all it was possible for him so say in so narrow a medium as Russian dialect music. His outlook upon music as a whole has always been a limited one; apparently he finds it difficult to assimilate as other composers do.

All through his career he has been liable to rather sudden and drastic changes of direction. And now comes the most astounding change of all.

The new piano concerto that he is coming to America to play shows him throwing over his Russianism and almost everything else that was characteristic of him. He has here tried to write in the spirit of Bach and Handel. He necessarily does it with a good deal of awkwardness; sometimes he is like a student repeating a lesson not fully learned; sometimes, as in the slow movement, the music is like a standardised eighteenth - century theme harmonized by a beginner. But it is always interesting in one way or another; and the most interesting thing of all is the way he has turned his back on the principles that his more indiscreet incense-burners have so loudly enunciated in his name. They have made war in his name on "expression"; and here is Stravinsky writing, as well as he can, expressive music. In his name they have derided the "mechanism" of classical instrumental form; and here he is going back to that form as the binding principle of his concerto. What will be the next avatar of this strange mind? Will he find himself ill-built for music of the western type—for which, perhaps, he lacks the right psychology—and go back to Russian dialect-music, or will he be able to graft upon his unchangeable Russian nature enough of western culture to bring about, in time, a new and vital synthesis of the two?