Every form of art has its starting point in reality and its finishing point in music.
—Andrey Belïy, Symbolism (1910)
. . . For two weeks or so
a woman matchmaker kept visiting
my kinsfolk, and at last
my father blessed me. Bitterly
I cried for fear; and, lamenting, they unbraided
my tress and, chanting, they led me to the church.
And so I entered a strange family.
—Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1833)
Two rivers have flowed together,
Two matchmakers have come together,
They thought a thought about a blonde tress:
“How shall we divide the braid in two?”
—Songs Collected by P. V. Kireyevsky, no. 999
Fair maids, cooking whizzes, pot smashers, proud matrons, thin old grannies, puny brats, zany rogues, and piddling scoundrels: SING YOUR SONGS!
—Songs Collected by P. V. Kireyevsky, no. 806
On the fate of Russia now depend not only the fate of the newly self-conscious cultures of Asia but also European culture’s way out of its current crisis of individualism—its way out or death.
—Lev Platonovich Karsavin, “Fundamentals of Politics” (1927)
THIS portion of chapter 13 is specially dedicated to the memory of Dmitry Pokrovsky, to whose performances of Svadebka tribute is paid within, who died unexpectedly in Moscow on 29 June 1996. Our friendly disagreements about Stravinsky’s relationship to Russian folklore led to many stimulating exchanges, both private and public, from which I profited greatly.
THE PROBLEM
THE FIRST thought of a scenic representation of the svadebniy obryad, the elaborate Russian peasant wedding ritual, came to Igor Stravinsky in 1912, while he was composing the second tableau of The Rite of Spring. The first performance of Svadebka, subtitled “Russian choreographic scenes with singing and [instrumental] music,” took place in Paris (under the title Les Noces villageoises) more than a decade later, on 13 June 1923. No other work would ever occupy Stravinsky even half as long. No other work would ever be as important to him. In Svadebka Stravinsky reinvented in his imagination the Russia that had, over the course of the ballet’s gestation, been lost to him in life.
It was another “icy comedy”—an elegantly detached, non-narrative collage presentation of a ritual action that ends, like its predecessor, in a scene of virgin sacrifice. The difference was that it was drawn from an exceedingly well documented living tradition, or at the very least from customs that survived in living memory, rather than from a quasi-mythical archaic lore. It sought validation in ethnological fact (Belïy’s “starting point in reality”), but, like The Rite, it refused to be bound by any limits such validation might imply. Its reality, like that of The Rite, was ultimately one created, not received. But it was a Rite in black and white—the literal black and white of four keyboards, plus percussion.
Finding this scoring was what took Stravinsky all that time. It superseded many preliminary versions that had tried in one way or another to reproduce the actual sounds of Russian folk instruments—one of them combined a pianola, a harmonium, and two Hungarian cimbaloms—and gave the composer what he called the “perfectly homogeneous, perfectly impersonal, and perfectly mechanical” medium by which he could do justice to the depiction of a sacrament enacted with the “profound gravity and cool inevitable intention” that, in the words of a contemporary folklorist, befit any artifact of “remorseless, inelastic tradition.”1 Despite its considerable clangor, not to mention the rowdy doings in its fourth tableau, Svadebka makes an impression quite unlike the terrifying Rite. Whereas the earlier “pagan” ballet was orgiastic and biological, Svadebka is a work of dignity and reserve, finally of religious exaltation (specifically Orthodox, Stravinsky insisted).2 At a time of upheaval and ruin it offered a restorative view of the only eternity humans can know— the eternity of customs. At a time of existential trauma it offered the solacing prospect of life as liturgy.
What The Rite and Svadebka have fundamentally in common is Stravinsky’s lifelong antihumanism—his rejection of all “psychology.” The sacrificial virgin in The Rite does her fatal dance with animal fearlessness, and the community accepts her ceremonial murder without remorse. In Svadebka, the bride laments at the outset and the groom leers in conclusion (to a variant of the same melody) not because spontaneous feeling so prompts them, but because the immemorial script so decrees.
There was of course a dark side to this celebration of the unquestioned subjection of human personality to an implacably demanding—and, by Enlightened standards, an unjust—social order; and in the awful decades of economic disaster and nationalistic totalitarianism that followed the First World War, the dark side came out into the open (as it seems to be doing again, in the wake of the cold war). Whether it irrevocably taints Stravinsky and his work, as T. W. Adorno insisted, is something we have to decide in keeping with our own liberal traditions. The tension between nostalgia for the security of community and the obligations of enlightened individualism lives not only in Svadebka but in ourselves as, contemplating it, we are emotionally swayed by its potent advocacy of what may appear on rational reflection to be a parlous message. The anxious thrill of moral risk that attends the experience of Svadebka is one of the things that has kept it alive, and one of the marks of its creator’s fearful potency.
That potency arises out of a miraculously successful transcendence of the particular. The musical and textual content of Svadebka underwent a process of streamlining and abstraction as stringent as that to which the scoring was subjected. Originally the composer planned a detailed narrative scenario in three acts, constructed out of the work of the romantic-nationalist “Slavophile” ethnographers of Pushkin’s time—Ivan Sakharov, A. V. Tereshchenko, Pyotr Kireyevsky. Act 1 was to have depicted the Smotreniye, the Bride Show, at which the groom’s matchmaker inspects the prospective bride and strikes a bargain by a literal striking of hands (rukobit’ye) with the bride’s father. The second act was to have had three scenes. The first, in two parts, would have depicted the bride’s lament and the groom’s ritual of exorcism; the second, also in two parts, would have shown the hair-plaiting ceremony at the bridal shower (devichnik) and the preparations for the ritual bath of purification; the third would have taken place at the bride’s house right before the departure for church. Act 3 was to show the wedding feast itself.
In the end, seizing on Kireyevsky’s song no. 999 (one of the epigraphs given at the head of this section), which he adopted for a while as an actual epigraph to head his score, Stravinsky rejected narrative in favor of what the formalist anthropologists of his day called a “morphological” (and what we today, following a related antihumanistic discourse, would call a “structuralist”) reading of the Russian folk tradition. Elements from the peasant rite were freely extracted and juxtaposed to create a vivid artistic shape in two great metaphorical waves. Tableaux 1 and 2, centering metonymically on the bride’s and groom’s coiffures, depict the “rivers”; tableau 3 (the old act 2, scene 3) shows their confluence: that is the first wave. Tableau 4 (the old act 3), as long as all the rest combined, depicts the wedding feast (krasnïy stol, literally “the bonny table”) and aims with mounting excitement at the procreative consummation, for the sake of which the rite exists. The progressive insinuation of the opening melody from the first tableau into the concluding pages of the fourth adds a new metaphorical level, and the imitation of bells proclaiming eternity to the same strains at the very end caps the point.
Stravinsky’s music abstracts three styles of peasant singing. Lament (plach) and chant (peniye), as contrasted by Pushkin in the passage from Eugene Onegin quoted above as an epigraph, provide the material for the first wave. (Stravinsky copied exactly the description of the Russian lamenting style—a three-note formula, sung with wailing timbre and vocalized breathing, and decorated with yodels—that he found in Vladimir Dahl’s dictionary of the “living Great-Russian language,” one of the great monuments of romantic-nationalistic scholarship.)3 Songs (pesni), as in the wedding jester’s exhortation in the penultimate epigraph above, form the substance of the second wave. The unportrayed church ceremony forms the watershed that divides the waves; a suggestion of its music, the product of another tradition entirely, comes in the middle of the second tableau, with a duet for two basses accompanied by the female chorus that is modeled on an authentic church chant, and that was first sketched in 1915 for a projected ballet called Liturgiya.
Otherwise, except for the melody that brings the fourth tableau to its culmination, a lyrical folk song that Stravinsky laboriously took down from the singing of his friend Stepan Mitusov, the tunes in Svadebka, however eth-nographically authentic they may sound, are of Stravinsky’s own invention. By the time he wrote Svadebka the composer, it seemed, could more easily make up a genuine Russian folk tune than look one up.
And there is the paradox of Svadebka. On the surface it seems to represent a pinnacle of Russian nationalism in music, thus confirming and conforming to a familiar prejudice (more a Western prejudice than a Russian one!) as to what Russian music ought to be. On investigation, it turns out that while the texts Stravinsky set were scrupulously drawn from ethnographic sources, the scenario and the music belong to no actual folk tradition but to an imaginary one. They are not Russian in any literal sense but are so intensely imagined that, in their concentration, they emerge as more Russian than the real thing. They fulfill the requirements not of ethnography but of mythography. Beginning with the real, they proceed to something realer than the real, reproducing the trajectory (a realibus ad realiora) to which Vyacheslav Ivanov summoned all the artists of Russia in the turbulent time of aesthetic, political, and (he hoped) spiritual transformation through which they were living.4 As we know, Ivanov saw the epitome of this trajectory in Scriabin. Svadebka is unquestionably another epitome of the same transcendent maximalism. But how did Stravinsky, who had remained aloof from avant-garde literary circles in Russia, arrive at it? How did Stravinsky’s transcendent vision, which retained a much more palpable connection with its “starting point in reality,” compare with Scriabin’s? What were its sources, what were its means of realization, and what were its implications—for him, for his contemporaries, and for us?
EURASIA
Over the long years of Svadebka’s gestation, the whole idea of Russian nationalism, indeed the very notion of the Russian nation, had undergone a profound crisis as the result of the revolution that cut the nation loose from the political autocracy and religious orthodoxy that had formerly defined it, and the postrevolutionary emigration that had cut vast portions of educated Russian society adrift from the land itself. Where the briefly empowered liberals, and then the Bolsheviks, promulgated wholly secularized states on models developed in the enlightened and humanist West, the Bolshevik victory and the consequent uprooting of the intellectual class produced a reactionary ferment that reached its spectacular if politically ineffectual crest not in Russia itself but in the exile communities that careened westward through Sofia, Belgrade, Prague, Berlin, and finally Paris. Though the migration perforce was centrifugally westward, the cultural reaction to the revolution produced the most resolutely, indeed savagely anti-Western moment in all of Russian intellectual history. Svadebka may profitably be viewed as the very crest of that wave.
As the Bolshevik victory represented the ultimate triumph of the progressive, materialist, secularizing, and Westernizing strain in nineteenth-century Russian politics, so the émigré reaction maximalized the romantic-nationalist, antiliberal, theocratic, and autochthonist strain, as transmitted from Gogol (not the story-telling genius of Dead Souls or The Overcoat but the religious reactionary who authored Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends) to the Slavophiles of the 1840s and 1850s (on whom Stravinsky relied for his folk-poetic texts) to Dostoyevsky (of the Writer’s Diary and the “Dream of the Grand Inquisitor”) to the bizarrely neoprimitive Christian writer Konstantin Leont’yev (who wanted to see Russia “frozen” out of time so as to evade the decay that historical evolution inevitably guaranteed). The maximalist phase arrived with the short-lived movement known as Eurasian-ism (Yevraziystvo) that thrived proudly as a widely noticed faction among the intellectual émigrés of the twenties before declining in the thirties into apocalyptic neo-Bolshevist and neofascist splinters. It is with the Eurasianists, many of whom were among his closest friends and associates, that it will be profitable to associate the Stravinsky of the decade, and the self-enclosed (“Swiss”) creative period, that followed The Rite of Spring.
The intellectual genealogy just outlined is the one that the Eurasianist movement explicitly and enthusiastically claimed for itself. “For us Eurasian-ists,” read the unsigned leader in the first volume of their philosophical organ, the Eurasian Record, “it would be gratifying in the highest degree to regard ourselves as located in the same Orthodox and Russian spiritual succession that included the Slavophiles, and Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, and Leont’yev.” Yet “at the very moment when it became time to put our thoughts and words on paper,” the essay continued, “our consciousness was so affected by an immediate sense of ongoing catastrophe that all exoteric spiritual influences were dulled, and our consciousness was remade by our personal experience of what had happened.”5 This was in its way a perfect representation of maxi-malism, conscious at once of a formative heritage and of a transformative burst or rush—what a Scriabinist would call a poriv. It produced in Eurasian-ism the most radically reactionary “ideocracy” (as they called it) in the history of Russian ideas.
This was no “white émigré” philosophy. It preferred almost anything to a Romanov restoration. The Russian monarchy, diluted and compromised by liberal admixtures of constitutionalism, had fallen away, thought the Eurasian-ists, from its Orthodox mission. It had become Europeanized, infected with what one of the founders of Eurasianism called “Romano-Germanic” legalism in place of the primitively organic forms of social organization that sustained the prefeudal, nomadic Slavic tribes, and that still survived among the non-Russian peoples inhabiting the half-European, half-Asian landmass united by the Russian empire. This landmass was Yevraziya, “Eurasia,” and Russia could renew its spirit only by turning away from Romano-Germanic Europe and facing inward, acknowledging the kinship of all the peoples that occupied “Turan,” the great steppe that extended from the Carpathians to the Pacific. Russia was Slavic in language only. Its religion was that of the Byzantine empire, of which it was the only independent Christian survivor, and its cultural heritage (reflected in its customs and, particularly, its music) was therefore “Turanian,” or, in more up-to-date linguists’ terms, Ural-Altaic.6
These theories were the brainchildren of Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Tru-betskoy (1890-1938), a precociously influential and original linguist specializing in phonology (and, possibly not by coincidence, the scion of an ancient boyar clan long distinguished in scholarship), whose ideas about Russian culture, partly inherited from his philosopher father and fully promulgated, in collaboration with the geographer Pyotr Savitsky, by the time he reached his thirtieth year, begat not only the Eurasianist movement but also, through Trubetskoy’s disciple Roman Jakobson, the whole field of structural linguistics. The first specifically Eurasianist publication was a pamphlet by Trubetskoy called “Europe and Humanity” (Yevropa i chelovechestvo), published in Sofia, Bulgaria, the first Russian émigré population center to the west of the motherland, in 1920.
It was in this tract that Trubetskoy radically challenged the claim of enlightened European culture to humanist universality, relativizing it as merely one form of chauvinism (“panromanogermanic”) among others, and issued a call to Russians that they rally, in opposition to the imported liberal culture that had brought disaster to their state, around a new, more authentic and salvific samopoznaniye—that is, a more accurate and authentic self-realization based on their non-European heritage.
The key to the essential Russian character, for Trubetskoy, lay in Russian ethnicity, and the key to Russian ethnicity lay in pre-Slavic prehistory, best reflected in the world of the present by the structure and (Trubetskoy’s specialty) the phonology of the Turkic languages of Central Asia. The manner in which Trubetskoy managed to educe a theory of essential national psychology out of phonological data is breathtakingly virtuosic—or, at any rate, virtu-osically tendentious, reminiscent of the “philological mysticism” that marked a great deal of maximalized nationalist thinking in postwar Europe (particularly Nazism “in its early ‘runic’ stage”).7
“The Turkic languages are very closely related,” the author begins,
especially if one ignores the foreign words (Persian and Arabic) that have penetrated the languages of the Muslim Turks in huge numbers. In comparing the individual Turkic languages to one another, one easily discerns one general linguistic type, which emerges most vividly among the Altais. This type is characterized by an extraordinary harmoniousness [stroynost’]. The phonological content of the words is regulated by a series of laws, which in purely Turkic, nonborrowed words admit of no exceptions. Thus the vowels in every word are subject to laws of “vowel harmony”: if the first syllable of the word contains one of the “back” vowels (a, o, ï, u), then all the other syllables of that word, however many there may be, must contain one of these back vowels; if the first syllable contains one of the “front” vowels (ä, ä, i, ü), then all the other syllables must necessarily contain one of these front vowels. The mixture of back and front vowels among the syllables of a single word is not admitted; each word is either completely “back-voweled” or completely “front-voweled.” Analogous laws regulate the use of “dark” vowels (that is, those formed by bringing the lips forward: o, u, ö, ü) and bright (that is, those not formed by bringing the lips forward: a, ï, ä, i). In the most typical Turkic languages equally strict and inflexible rules also regulate the use of consonants in a word: some consonants (e.g., k, g, l) are allowed only in “back-voweled” words, while their palatalized counterparts are allowed only in “front-voweled” words; some (e.g., d, b, g, j, z, zh) are allowed only between vowels (or between r, l, m, and n and a vowel), while others (e.g., t, p, k, ch, s, sh) are not allowed in precisely these positions and so on.
Thus despite its comparatively rich total inventory of sounds, the language appears to be phonetically monotonous. Owing to the strict subjection of the whole phonological system to the laws outlined above, the number of possible phonological combinations is limited, and in connected speech the same phonological combinations are constantly repeated. Speech acquires a distinctive phonological unity, creating a certain acoustical inertia (something like tonal inertia in a musical composition). The same harmoniousness and pedantic observance of uniform laws is noticeable in the grammar of Turkic languages as well. This grammar, strictly speaking, knows no “exceptions.” All nouns are declined in a single manner: variations come about only according to the laws of phonological harmony already described. All verbs are conjugated similarly. The sober economy of this grammatical inventory is striking; there is no grammatical category without logical or material justification, nor is there any arbitrary division by gender.8
Trubetskoy goes on to describe similar constraints on Turkic syntax, versification, and literary forms, and from these linguistic observations—all converging on an impression of “comparative poverty and rudimentariness in the basic speech material on the one hand, and the subordination of all speech to schematic regularites both in its phonology and its formal aspects,” amounting to “a remarkable consistency and clarity of construction”—he arrives at a description of what he calls the Turkic “psychic profile” (p. 357/38).
We will not be mistaken if we say that all Turkic intellectual activity is ruled by a single basic psychological factor: clear schematization of comparatively restricted and rudimentary material. From this it is admissible to draw conclusions about Turkic psychology itself. The typical Turk does not like to become enmeshed in subtleties or intricate details. He prefers to operate with basic, clearly perceptible forms, and to group these forms in clear and simple patterns. ... It would be a mistake, however, to think the Turkic mind particularly inclined toward schematic abstraction. . . . The patterns on which, as we have seen, Turkic intellectual activity is formed are in no way the product of philosophical abstraction, nor do they even bear any trace of purposeful reflection. On the contrary, they are subconscious and exist in the mind as the unapprehended rationale for that psychic inertia, according to which all the elements that make up the psyche arrange themselves in this, as opposed to that, manner. This is possible thanks to the singular elementalness and simplicity of these patterns. . . .
The psychology, described here, of the typical Turk also defines the lifestyle [zhiznenniy uklad] and worldview of its carriers. The Turk loves symmetry, clarity, and stable equilibrium. But he loves it as a given, not as a requirement. . . . Once having come to believe in a certain worldview, having turned it into a subconscious law defining his behavior, or into a universal system, and having achieved in this way a condition of stable equilibrium on a clear foundation, the Turk rests content and holds fast to his beliefs. Looking upon a worldview precisely as the firm basis of spiritual and moral equilibrium, the Turk in that very worldview manifests lethargy and stubborn conservatism. (Pp. 362-63/41,-43)
And now the sleight of hand. “The psychological profile of the Turkic tribes that we have sketched above,” the author assures the reader, “may be regarded in its general features as a profile of all Turanians’“ (pp. 364/43)— including, of course, the Eurasian-Russians, even if they do not share with their fellow “Turanians” the linguistic base on which Trubetskoy’s whole psychological edifice had been erected. Trubetskoy relies on analogy to cloak a subtle shift of gears from psychological description to social prescription.
As regards the social and cultural values of people belonging to the Turanian psychological type, one can only rate them positively. The Turanian psyche imparts cultural stability and strength to the nation, affirms cultural and historical continuity, and creates conditions that favor the constructive husbanding of the nation’s might. (P. 370/47)
All that is best and most positive in Russian history can be accounted for according to this romanticized psychological model; all that is worst is the fault of Peter the Great, whose attempt to modernize the country through the importation of Western technology brought instead the disastrous infusion of Romano-Germanic toxins. Again there is sleight of hand in Trubetskoy’s linkage of ‘Turanian” sensibility with Orthodox faith.
One cannot fail to note manifestations of normative Turanian psychology in pre-Petrine Muscovite Russia. The whole way of life in which religion and daily life were one—in which state ideology, material culture, art, and religion were indivisible parts of a single system that was neither expressed theoretically nor formulated consciously, but that nevertheless inhabited everyone’s subconsciousness and defined both the sentient life of each and the transcendent being of the nation as a whole—all this carries the unmistakable impress of the Turanian psychological type. Precisely this it was that held old Rus’ together and gave it stability and strength. . . . Unquestioning submission is the foundation of Turanian statehood, it is consistent, and extends in concept even to the highest ruler, who automatically thinks in terms of unquestioning submission to whatever higher principles may reign in the life of each subject. In ancient Rus’ such a regulating principle was the Orthodox faith, understood as an organic coupling of religious dogma and rites with the particular orthodox culture, the specific manifestation of which is the political system with its hierarchical social structure. And precisely this higher principle, the same for every subject as for the tsar himself, rather than any principle of abject slavery, knit Rus’ into one indivisible and regulated whole. Orthodox faith in the old-Russian understanding of the term was precisely the framework of consciousness that enclosed everything—private life, political system, and universal being. And insofar as that framework of consciousness was not the object of conscious theoretical thought, but the subconscious basis for all spiritual life, it is impossible to ignore the obvious parallel with what was said above about normative Turanian psychology. So what if Russia received Orthodoxy not from Turanians but from Byzantium? So what if Orthodoxy actually countered “Tatarism” in Russian national consciousness? All the same, the relationship of the Russian individual to Orthodox faith, and the actual role that that faith played in his life, were both distinctly founded on Turanian psychology. Precisely by dint of the Turanian makeup of his psyche the ancient Russian was unable to separate his faith from his daily life, or consciously distinguish nonessential elements from religious manifestations, and precisely for this reason he seemed such a weak theologian when he came in contact with the Greeks. That psychological contrast between Russians and Greeks in their approach to faith and ritual arose precisely out of the circumstance that the ancient Russian national character harbored deep-seated Turanian ethnic and psychological elements that were altogether alien to Byzantium. (Pp. 370-72/48-49)
The affirmative value here attached to unthinking submission, and the suggestion that national salvation awaited the revival of the nonreflective, “organic” wholeness of Turanian psychology, or antipsychology, could scarcely resonate more self-evidently with the old kul tural stikhiya debates, or with the sacrificial ethos of The Rite of Spring. Trubetskoy’s special contribution was to give old-fashioned neoprimitivist thinking the appearance of grounding in modern empirical science (here, linguistics). That scientific veneer lent a new luster to the old messianic call: “Consciousness of belonging not only to the Aryan, but to the Turanian psychological type is indispensable for every Russian who aspires to personal and national self-realization” (pp. 375/51).
The kinship between Trubetskoy’s conclusions and the spiritual premises of Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet (composed before there was such a thing as the Eurasianist movement so called) illustrates a striking parallel but does not in itself provide evidence of a direct link. There is more evidence that Eurasians drew inspiration from Stravinsky than vice versa. By the mid-1920s, Stravinsky was a god in their pantheon. The last, and in some ways the most distinguished of the major Eurasianist journals was Vyorstï (Milestones), published in Paris from 1926 to 1928 under the editorship of a millionaire heir to a sugar fortune named Pyotr Petrovich Suvchinsky, known (as “Pierre Souvtchinsky”) to all Stravinskians as one of the composer’s lifelong intimates.9 Suvchinsky had been (with Savitsky and Trubetskoy) one of the co-editors of the Eurasian Record, as well as the journal’s publisher (and, indeed, the bankroller of the entire Eurasianist movement). He and Stravinsky met in Berlin in the fall of 1922, shortly before the Eurasian Record was launched and shortly before Svadebka at last achieved performance. (Stravinsky was stranded for a few weeks in the German capital while awaiting the much-postponed arrival of the Soviet steamer that was carrying his mother out of Petrograd into permanent emigration.) The Eurasianist maecenas sent the composer a note following this first meeting: “The knowledge that you live on this earth helps me to go on.”10
Eurasianist fealty to Stravinsky was confirmed in the very first issue of Vyorstï, which contained a lengthy article, “The Music of Igor Stravinsky,” by the newly emigrated Arthur Lourié (Lur’ye), who would play a role in Stravinsky’s life over the next decade comparable to that played in the 1950s and 1960s by Robert Craft. Lourié’s Vyorstï piece, and a later one more narrowly focused on Mavra and Oedipus Rex, were the only major essays ever published by the Eurasianists on music or a musician. His portrayal of Stravinsky and his cultural significance emphasizes the familiar Eurasianist theme of Russian messianism. According to Lourie, Stravinsky had transformed himself from a “Russian” composer into a “universal” one precisely by virtue of having successfully rid himself of what was covertly European in his ostensibly nationalist style. “In Russia The Nightingale already evoked a howl of despair,” Lourie maintained, “so completely did it withdraw from the Korsakovian pseudonational opera that had risen from a German yeast.” The composers of the mighty kuchka had “poured Russian wine into German bottles,” which made them mere purveyors of exotica. It had remained for Stravinsky to “break the ties that connected Russia with Western Europe,” as a result of which “for the first time Russian music lost its ‘provincial,’ ‘exotic’ quality and ... has become a thing of capital significance, at the very helm of world music.”11
Lourie’s rapturous description of Svadebka as a work that “restores a lost equilibrium” strikingly recalls Trubetskoy’s nostalgic exegesis of the Turanian “spiritual and moral worldview.” Stravinsky’s choral ballet, wrote Lourie, “is a mysterium of Orthodox daily life” (cf. Trubetskoy, “the ancient Russian was unable to separate his faith from his daily life”). It is “dynamic in musical terms, but in the emotional level it is saturated with the tranquility and quietude of an icon” (cf. Trubetskoy’s advocacy of Turanian mental “lethargy”). Was this anything more than enthusiastic appropriation ex post facto? Or was there a deeper link between Stravinsky’s spiritual and moral worldview and that of his new admirers?
SIMFONIYA
Not only did such a link exist, but exploring it will guide us willy-nilly far beyond spiritual and moral parallels, right into the technical heart of Stravinsky’s masterpiece. Svadebka, it may indeed be shown, was a deliberately crafted representation in unmediated musical terms of the Turanian worldview described by Trubetskoy in the more indirect medium of words, embodying the “symmetry, clarity, and stable equilibrium” of “the Turanian psychological [or rather, antipsychological] type” and depicting the “organic coupling of religious dogma and rites with daily life, the specific outcome of which is the [Russian-Eurasian] political system with its hierarchical social structure.” Svadebka is the one musical composition that may be placed alongside the works of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Leont’yev, and the Eurasianists themselves in the annals of Russian “ideocratic” thought.
The missing link was Lev Platonovich Karsavin (1882-1952), a man Stravinsky knew very well in Russia, who in emigration became an elder statesman of the Eurasianist movement and its “principal religious thinker.”12 A historian of religious philosophy by training, Karsavin was a precociously eminent professor at the University of St. Petersburg, appointed to chairs in religion and philosophy before he had reached the age of thirty. As the brother of Tamara Karsavina, Diaghilev’s first prima ballerina, he was acquainted with the whole circle of participants in the great impresario’s theatrical enterprises. Not only that, the Karsavins lived in the apartment directly above that of the Stravinsky family, in an elegant building reserved for artists of the Imperial Theaters, all during the years of the composer’s first (local) fame. In emigration, Karsavin established a family connection with Suvchinsky, who married the philosopher’s middle daughter, Marianna. In the 1930s he was appointed by the neofascist Smetona government of Lithuania to a professorship at the University of Kaunas. He was arrested after the Soviet postwar reannexation of Lithuania and died of tuberculosis in a Stalinist labor camp.
Karsavin’s closest association with Stravinsky came in the spring of 1911, during the merry days immediately preceding the Rome premiere of Petrushka, in which Tamara Karsavina created the role of the Ballerina. The two Karsavins were part of a group that included, besides Stravinsky, the painters Alexander Benois and Valentin Serov, all of whom “lived in the same hotel and almost never parted.”13 Every party to this idyllic interlude left tender memoirs of it, even the normally crusty Stravinsky.14 By 1911, Karsavin’s adaptation of Slavophilistic historical and religious thinking was already reaching its maximalist phase, as was Trubetskoy’s.15 Not only these biographical circumstances but also many detailed and idiosyncratic ideological affinities identify Lev Karsavin as a thinker whose proto-Eurasianist, “ideocratic” impact on Stravinsky came early enough to have affected both the conception and the realization of Svadebka.
In his radical monism, Karsavin was as frankly mystical a thinker as Scriabin. “Amid the multiplicity of things,” as Masaryk put it long ago in The Spirit of Russia, “the mystic endeavors to grasp unity, and more directly, to grasp the one”16 Karsavin indeed saw this endeavor as a manifestation of “the spirit of Russia,” and one of the cardinal differences between the Russian temper and the individualistic, legalistic “Romano-Germanic” spirit of Europe, which, whether in its empirical guise or its rationalistic one, was ever given to making distinctions. In his foundational tract “The East, the West, and the Russian Idea,” written in direct response to the revolutionary events of 1917-18, Karsavin sought to establish “the ideal of all-in-one [vseyedinstvo]” as the essential differentiater of East and West, not only defining Russia as against Europe, but also Orthodoxy as against Catholicism—to say nothing of Protestantism, the rise of which split Western Christendom literally into a dualism. The Catholic Church, Karsavin argued, was a kind of state, replete with a quasi-monarchial social hierarchy and even a territory, set up in opposition, or as a counterpart, to secular authority. But such an antithesis, like every antithesis, is blasphemous:
One cannot acknowledge the categorical supremacy or primacy of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, because the secular is also from God. . . . But neither can one limit the sphere of action of each power or regard them as complementary, for these spheres by the very nature of the church are indivisible, or (which is the same thing) divisible only abstractly, rationalistically. Therefore, . . . Orthodoxy can only aspire to an ideal condition, insisting on the proximity of all its empirical realizations. The ideal consists in the mutual penetration of church and state, their mutual dissolution, as it were, in the true body of Christ, something never achieved as yet on earth.17
Hence the uniquely Byzantine-Russian dogma that church, state, and nation are one—or rather, that state and nation are mystically subsumed and united by church. (Compare Trubetskoy on the principle of submission, and on the Orthodox faith as “the framework of consciousness that enclosed everything—private life, political system and universal being.”)18 Man cannot create unity merely by suppressing diversity. “To achieve the unity of mankind, so that mankind might be like the church, what is necessary is the unbroken interaction of all persons, based on simultaneous self-affirmation and self-surrender,” Karsavin declared, and elaborated as follows on this seemingly paradoxical vision of social utopia à la russe:
All-embracing or ecumenical, pan-ecclesiastical activity is not the same as abstract, uniform, automatic action produced by everyone in unison. It is all-embracing in that it is accomplished through everyone, but in each differently according to the individual. But it is nevertheless an activity undertaken by everyone, which is to say it presupposes the coordination and the agreement of all.19
Such concord can be achieved neither where the church is separated off from the “worldly” nor where the church is actually split. Hence the hopelessness of post-Reformation Europe, and hence the messianic role of Russia—by means of its vision of vseyedinstvo “to reinstitute the unity that Western tendencies have checked.”20
By the time he emigrated and began contributing to the Eurasianist press, Karsavin had come up with a name for his Russian Utopia, and had gone from religious to overtly political theorizing. In an article that appeared in the Eurasian Record under the title “The Foundations of Politics,” Karsavin unveiled the phrase now most firmly attached to his name. There, for the first time, he called the ideal condition to which Russian Orthodoxy aspired a “symphonic society,” incorporating not a polity of individuals in the blasphemous Western sense, but instead a “higher symphonic personality” or “symphonic subject.” The concordance between Karsavin’s symphonic society and Trubetskoy’s Turanian (mental) state is unmistakable, but Karsavin generalizes the notion far beyond the level of ethnicity.
A symphonic subject is not an agglomeration or simply the sum of individual subjects, but rather their concord (symphony), the coordination of the one and many and—in the ideal and at the limit—the all-in-one. Accordingly a nation is not a mere sum of social groups (estates, classes, etc.) but their organized and coordinated hierarchical unity. The culture of a nation is no mere sum but a symphonic unity of more local cultures, and it does not exist otherwise than as a real and concrete unity that is larger than the sum of its parts. Similarly, national cultures can constitute a larger cultural unity (Hellenistic, European, Eurasian), presupposing the existence of a particular communal subject at this level. Insofar as we speak of human culture, we presuppose no mere abstract unity, irrespective of multinational or national cultures, nor do we mean any one of them, but rather the real and concrete unity of all of them, apportioned in time and space.21
Karsavin’s theory of symphonic culture and symphonic society is thus a theory of a pleroma, an all-encompassing unitary hierarchy, mirroring the divine order on the human plane. In its rejection of the autonomous individual it is an explicitly antihumanistic theory. “The individual, as usually imagined”—that is, in “liberal” Romano-Germanic societies—”simply does not exist and is nothing more than a notion or a fiction,” Karsavin asserted, calling for something akin to Vyscheslav Ivanov’s (and Scriabin’s) transcendence of the “petty ‘I.’”
A person is “individual” not at all because he is separate or separable from others or from the whole and is closed off in himself, but only insofar as in himself, particularly and specifically, he expresses and realizes the communal or symphonic subject, which is to say the whole, the higher superindividual consciousness and the higher superindividual will. . . . Therefore the “communal” [sobor-noye] does not negate or constrain the individual the way the individual is negated and constrained by the “collective” [kollektivnoye], which is to say the “massed” [sobrannoye] or the “merged” [sbornoye].22
Thus the higher “symphonic personality” (simfonicheskaya lichnost’) realizes its potential (in words practically borrowed from Ivanov) by “renouncing the T of the lower or smaller sphere for the sake of the higher.” To drive the point home Karsavin invokes a supplementary musical metaphor, comparing the “individuum” to a single voice (“the carrier of a ‘cantus firmus,’“ as Karsavin puts it) within the vast polyphonic texture of the total-unity, the pleroma.23 When successfully harmonized in this way, the individual, being absorbed in an all-embracing “symphonic personality,” achieves true freedom. “In its fullness,” Karsavin declared,
symphonic identity transcends all dichotomies of time and space, freedom and necessity, being and nonbeing. Such fullness can be attained in the church, but not in the domain of the empirical. The empirical is limited. In the empirical world incompleteness is inevitable, identity and freedom are imperfect. In the empirical world some will be passive and oppressed, others resistant and violent; there will be conditions and coercion.24
The “symphonic society” of Karsavin’s utopian vision, then, was a society that existed in a perfect harmony of individuals who were subjectively free but who functioned within it without ever having to make a decision or exercise choice.
It is often assumed that Karsavin derived his symphonic metaphor from the notorious defense of the Russian autocracy in Gogol’s Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, wherein a harmonious society is likened to an orchestra under the baton of a supreme conductor.25 But that is not the case. In an anonymous—which is to say communally authored—”attempt at a systematic outline” of Eurasianism to which Karsavin undoubtedly contributed the passage in question, the actual etymology of the term is revealed in the course of a vehement condemnation of the “enlightened” separation of church and state. It is a passage rife with startling Stravinskian resonance.
We would seek the resolution of this question [of the proper relationship of church and state] in a term used by the hymn-writers [kanonisti] of Byzantium: simfoniya, that is, concinnity [soglasovaniye] and coordinated activity [soglaso-vannaya deyatel’ nost’]. When there is a clear understanding of what the Church is and what the state is, and of their true relationship, the theory of “symphony” should present no problems.26
Nor will Stravinsky’s seemingly recondite appropriation of the word symphony in its esoteric Byzantine-Greek etymology (and in the plural), in his Symphonies of [rather than “for”] Wind Instruments (Symphonies d’instruments d vent), present problems to those who have a clear understanding of the composer’s relationship with the promulgators of proto-Eurasianist thought and his need to take refuge in “Turania,” their ideocratic utopia, during the early years of his deracination. The Symphonies, composed in 1919-20 as a memorial for Claude Debussy, was first published in 1926 (the year both of the Eurasianist manifesto and of Arthur Lourie’s tribute to the composer in Vyorsti) in a piano arrangement by Lourie himself that until 1952 was the only score in print. The idea of soglasovannaya deyatel’nost’ (coordinated activity) is especially relevant to this piece, in which the music constantly shifts among three precisely calibrated proportional tempos. Indeed the form of the work has already been identified, on other evidence, as being modeled on another sort of coordinated activity—the liturgy, replete with interacting celebrants and choir, and with strophes interacting with refrains, of the Russian Orthodox funeral service (panikhida), the longest individual component of which is the long strophic hymn known as the kanon, to which Karsavin made specific reference in the philological fantasy out of which he constructed his mystique of “symphonic” social order.27
TURANIAN ANHEMITONY
In laying out his ideocratic Utopia, Prince Trubetskoy had placed particular emphasis, as we have seen, on what his research in comparative philology had led him to identify as the cardinal trait of Turanian psychology: an inclination to accept restriction gratefully and to make much of little, patterning unquestionable givens with resourcefulness and intensity within inviolable limits. As a sidelight on the restricted phonology of Turanian languages Trubetskoy adduced some observations on Turanian musical idioms, again with an eye toward forging a link with those of Russia, and bolstering the idea of the Russian’s natural predisposition to an organic (or “symphonic”) society at loggerheads with Romano-Germanic legalistic liberalism.
According to Trubetskoy, real Turkic melodies—that is, melodies unsullied by the Arabian or Persian influences that came by way of Islam (and available for collection, for that reason, only in the Ural and Siberian regions of the Russian empire)—are characterized by the use of what he called “the anhemitonic-pentatonic (alias Indo-Chinese) scale.” He further emphasized that such melodies are rhythmically symmetrical and “pair-periodic,” breaking down into “parts with an equal number of measures, that number usually being 2, 4, 8, etc.” All this, plus a highly repetitive manner of elaboration, is aesthetically most salubrious, resulting in
a peculiar clarity and lucidity in harmony and rhythm. Every such melody presents one or two similar and very simple musical phrases, but these phrases may be endlessly repeated, forming a long, monotonous song. In other words, the same basic psychological traits that we have already observed in the structure of Turkic languages are again suggested: relative poverty and plainness of material, and a complete submission to simple and schematic rules, which welds the material into a unified whole and imparts to the whole a certain schematic clarity and lucidity.28
In a study that purported to reveal the dependence of Russian “high” culture on the indigenous “low” culture, Trubetskoy had made explicit what in his later, more general explorations of Turanian lore he would be content merely to imply: that every Turanian stylistic/psychological trait is also a Russian trait, provided that one penetrate to cultural strata beneath those at which borrowings reflective of recent, deplorable, cultural contacts had taken place; and that these shared stylistic/psychological traits, together with their social and political implications, collectively adumbrate Russia’s disengagement from Europe.
A significant portion of Great-Russian folk songs (including the most ancient, that is, the ritual and wedding songs) are composed in the so-called “pentatonic” or “Indo-Chinese” scale, that is, as if in the major mode without the fourth and seventh steps. This scale exists (and is in fact the only one used) among the Turkic tribes in the Volga and the Kama basins, and also among the Bashkirs, the Siberian “Tatars,” the Turks in Russian and Chinese Turkestan, and all the Mongol peoples. Apparently this scale once existed even in China: Chinese music theory, at least, presupposes its existence, and the musical notation used in China is based on it. In Siam, Burma, Cambodia, and Indochina it dominates to this day. Thus we have in this case an unbroken line coming from the East, and ending with the Great-Russian. Among the Little-Russians [i.e., Ukrainians] the pentatonic scale is found only in a few very rare old songs, and one notes only isolated instances of it among the remaining Slavs. Among Romanic and Germanic peoples it is unknown, and only in the extreme northwest corner of Europe is it encountered again among the Brittanic Celts (Scots, Irish, Bretons). In rhythm Russian songs are also fundamentally distinct not only from the Romano-Germanic but also from the Slavic, as is evidenced (to pick just one example) by the complete lack of triple meters (the meter of waltzes and mazurkas).29
Any ethnomusicologist reading these lines would surely point out, between giggles, that they are pure folklore in their own right, the work of an amateur with a pressing agenda. Drollest of all, in its way, is Trubetskoy’s citation, for the benefit of “readers unfamiliar with music theory,” of Rachmaninoff’s recital favorite “Lilacs” (Siren), Op. 21, no. 5 (composed 1902), an item presumably in every literate Russian’s humming repertoire, as an example of pure, anhemitonic “Turanian” style (example 13.1).30 In his collected essays, Trubetskoy appended a page of musical illustrations, reproduced in figure 13.2, that shows, respectively, a wedding song from the Archangel district in northern Russia, cited to illustrate the “Indo-Chinese (pentatonic) scale”; a pair of Turkic songs—Meshcheryak (Ural/Bashkir) and Kazan-Tatar, respectively—that illustrate the same scale, establishing kinship with the Russian; and a pair of Finno-Ugric songs (Ostyak-Siberian and Estonian, respectively) that demonstrate not an anhemitonic intervallic structure but the narrow ambitus (“diapason no wider than a fifth,” as the author puts it) that Trubetskoy had adduced as an additional facet of purebred Turanian style.
Risible all this may be in its musical naivety, especially the conclusive genetic connection Trubetskoy purports to draw between the Russian and the Turkic melodies, so utterly dissimilar in style despite their single, arbitrarily stressed shared characteristic. And yet it is all crucial to any sophisticated understanding of the music of Stravinsky’s so-called Swiss period, both as regards the specific nature of its facture and as regards its cultural meaning. Stravinsky made it all true. Just as he realized in his art the “symphonic” soglasovannaya deyatel’nost’ of which Karsavin could only dream, so, too, in his art he forged the solid Eurasian stylistic bonds about which Prince Trubetskoy could only fantasize. He, and he alone, composed genuine “Turanian” music, for among composers he, and he alone, shared Prince Tru-betskoy’s, and Suvchinsky’s, and Karsavin’s cultural agenda.
EXAMPLE 13.1. Rachmaninoff, Siren’ (Lilacs), Op. 21, no. 5 (pitches not referable to the anhemitonic set are circled
(“At mom, at dawn, over the dewy grass, I’ll go to breathe the fresh morning air; and in the fragrant shade, where the lilacs grow thick, I’ll go seek my bliss . . .”)
“. . . LA BELLE ET SAINE BARBARIE”
The sources of that agenda, where Stravinsky was concerned, were a complex amalgam of the aesthetic, the personal, and the political. Stravinsky’s Swiss period was a time of relative isolation and eventual hardship. At its beginning he was a Russian aristocrat and (in the West, at least) the undisputed heir to his country’s magnificent half-century of achievement as purveyor of exotic orchestral and theatrical spectacle to the world. At its end he was a stateless person facing uncertain prospects, whose dominating position in the world of modern music no longer went unchallenged, and who, as a result of manifold tilts and turns in the surrounding world, found himself in the throes of a stylistic quandary.
The decision to sit out the First World War on neutral territory had been primarily a career move. Stravinsky’s last prewar première was that of The Nightingale, the last and most stunning production of the Diaghilev enterprise’s opulent first phase. The final performance of the Ballets Russes’ 1914 season took place in London on the evening of 25 July. Three days later Austria and Serbia were at war. By the time the company got around to shipping its rented music back to Koussevitzky’s Berlin-based Russische Musikverlag, France, England, and Russia had all joined with Serbia against Germany, Austria’s main ally. The Nightingale nearly became an early casualty of the conflagration. In the theatrical gossip column of the newspaper Golos Moskvi (Voice of Moscow), the following item appeared on 26 August (Old Style):
FIGURE 13.2. Appendix 2 from Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya (Paris: Yevraziyskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927). The examples, in the author’s hand, are headed as follows:
1) Great-Russian folk song in the “Indo-Chinese” (pentatonic) scale: a wedding praise song (Archang[el] district])
2) Turkish songs in the “Indo-Chinese” (pentatonic) scale:
a. Meshcheryak b. Kazan-Tatar
3) Finno-Ugric songs (no more than a fifth in range):
a. Ostyak b. Estonian
Before the war many newspapers carried stories about the impending production in Moscow of Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale, which had gained a noisy celebrity in France and England through Diaghilev’s operatic productions. Now, however, unforeseen circumstances have altered all plans. The Nightingale is lost. The score, the parts, and the piano arrangements of this opera, following its London performances, were sent to Berlin, where the central office of the company that has undertaken to publish Stravinsky’s Nightingale is located. At this very time the war broke out, and our countryman’s opera did not get to Berlin. The composer has kept neither rough drafts nor copies of the opera. He is beside himself with grief. To restore the whole opera from memory will not be possible.31
The embroideries were fanciful. Not only had Stravinsky retained copious sketches and drafts, which may be seen to this day in his archive (Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel), but the vocal score of The Nightingale had been printed at least two months earlier. Indeed, the St. Petersburg musical magazine Russkaya Muzïkal’ naya gazeta thoughtlessly picked up this sensational account from Golos Moskvi and ran it in their issue of 7/14 September, which on another page carried an advertisement for the opera.32 Yet Stravinsky must have suffered a genuine fright, and it must have contributed to his decision to remain in Switzerland as much for the sake of his business affairs as for the sake of his consumptive spouse’s health. The Bolshevik coup thus found him abroad, and Russia lost Stravinsky in fact as well as spirit.
It was Stravinsky who felt the loss more keenly. The early years of his exile, fraught in equal measure with homesickness for his country and disgust at the delinquency of its government, led to an access of sharpened nationalism in the name not of the Russia that was but of an imaginary wr-Russia that he enthusiastically described to Romain Rolland, whom he chanced to meet in Geneva on 26 September 1914, and who recorded their conversation in his diary. Even Rolland’s physical description of his interlocutor bears the impress of Stravinsky’s proto-Eurasianist posture:
A long visit with Igor Stravinsky. We spend three hours chatting in the garden of the Hotel Mooser. Stravinsky is about thirty; he is small, has a puny, ugly appearance, a yellow complexion, a weak, exhausted look, a narrow brow, thin, receding hair, eyes wrinkling behind his glasses, a fleshy nose, thick lips, a disporportionately long face. He is very intelligent and direct; he speaks easily, though he sometimes has to search for his words in French, and everything he says is personal and considered (whether true or false). The first part of our conversation had to do with politics. Stravinsky declares that Germany is not a barbarian state but a decrepit and degenerate one. He claims for Russia the role of a splendid, healthy barbarism, heavy with germs that will inseminate the thinking of the world. He is counting on a revolution to follow the war, which will topple the dynasty and found a Slavic United States. Moreover, he attributes the cruelties of the Tsarist system in part to German elements that have been incorporated into Russia and run the main wheels of the government or the administration. The attitude of German intellectuals inspires him with boundless contempt. Hauptmann and Strauss, he says, have the souls of lackeys. He touts the old Russian civilization, unknown in the West, the artistic and literary monuments of northern and eastern cities. He also defends the Cossacks against their reputation for brutality . . .33
But for the explicitly religious component, which would come soon enough, every one of the tenets in the Eurasian platform is adumbrated, plank by plank: the decadence of the panromanogermanic West, the messianic role of a newly purified Russia of which the communally governed Cossacks were avatars, and all the rest. “Russia must emancipate the world from its slavery to the latest Romano-Germanic fashion,” the Eurasianists declared.34 The form of government they envisioned to replace monarchism as the optimum vehicle for supranational pan-Eurasian self-realization was modeled, just as Stravinsky had foretold to Rolland, on a tortured understanding of the American federal system, implying a “Turanian United States” in which an organic, preternatural unanimity of popular aspiration (soglasiye, simfonichnost’) would replace merely constitutional or legal authority.35
The first Stravinsky composition to be written entirely in Switzerland, and the composer’s first attempt at writing in a purified, explicitly “anti-romanogermanic” style (“heavy with germs that will inseminate the thinking of the world”), was the Three Pieces for String Quartet, completed exactly one month before the colloquy with Rolland. Only the first of them, completed before the war, was “Russian” in any familiar, folkish sense. The Russianness of the other two went deeper, radically intensifying certain tendencies of structure and facture that were already present or implicit in his earlier music, and giving evidence of an attempt deliberately to exclude or excrete all references to general “European” forms, media, or traditions.
Nineteenth-century Russian composers, however “nationalist,” had always implicitly accepted European musical institutions, media, and genres. Once one is writing, say, for the symphony orchestra, one’s basic commitment to the musical Europeanization of Russia—her “Westernization,” to put it in terms of the classic dualism of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history—has been made and shown, regardless of the source of one’s subject matter. Not so the “Swiss” Stravinsky, for all that by 1914 he was known the world over for his mastery of panromanogermanic genres and media. Between The Nightingale and Pulcinella (1919) he would write no new orchestral music at all (excepting only his balletic adaptation of the former as Le Chant du rossignol in 1917); nor, after the Three Pieces, would he write for any standardized “Western” ensemble.36 More characteristic of the period were compositions that used “four musicians, one of whom can only be found in Honolulu, another in Budapest, and the other two God knows where!” as Diaghilev cracked to Ansermet in mock-exasperation one day in 1919.37 He was probably thinking of one of the preliminary versions of Svadebka, made that same year, scored for a truly outlandish ensemble of folkish and mechanical instruments—cimbaloms, harmonium, pianola, percussion—that were expressly chosen and deployed so as to emit specifically Turanian noises.
Even where Stravinsky’s media were traditional in those years, as in the Three Pieces for String Quartet, genre was radically odd. During the Swiss years his works took shapes that baffled even him. In a letter to Nikolai Struve, his editor at Koussevitsky’s publishing house, Stravinsky tried to convey some idea of what Svadebka was like: “a cantata or oratorio, or I do not know what, for four soloists and an instrumental ensemble that I am in too great a hurry to describe.”38 Writing to Ansermet a bit later, he called it “a divertissement (for it is not a ballet).”39 Far easier to say what a thing is not than to say what it is, if your vocabulary is panromanogermanic but the thing you are trying to describe is Turanian.
Turanian, too, were the words Stravinsky set during the period of his Swiss exile. Between 1913 (Souvenirs de mon enfance) and 1919 (Quatre chants russes) he wrote no fewer than eight compositions, two of them large-scale concerted works, on Russian folk texts, many of them in nonstandard, local peasant idioms that would have been hard even for native Russian audiences to understand. There was a great quantity of such material in print by the early twentieth century, collected by the Slavophile philosophers and ethnographers of the mid-nineteenth century, much of it (including most of the Svadehka texts) published posthumously, but very little of it had been set to original music by the Russian “nationalist” composers of the same period, for to do so would have violated their notion of what “art” was.
Even in their visual aspects, Stravinsky’s manuscripts of the Swiss years were “Turanian.” He copied their titles and texts in a pseudoarchaic calligraphy modeled on the pre-Petrine Slavic alphabet—that is, the true Old Bulgarian kirillitsa, the alphabet of SS. Cyril and Methodius that had been introduced to Russia along with Christianity in the tenth century, but was replaced in the eighteenth by a streamlined, deliberately romanized style of writing (the so-called grazhdanskiy shrift, or “civil hand”) that has remained current (see figure 13.3).
As for the quartet pieces, they were so obviously and willfully written against the traditions of their medium as to prompt one British critic to comment (of the last of them) that “if this type of passage has any proper place in the art of the string quartet, then the end is near.”40 More sympathetic and perceptive, yet in no way dissimilar, were the recollections of Otto Luening, the American composer, who at the time was working as a young (indeed, teenaged) flutist in the orchestra of the Zürich Tonhalle. He, too, saw that the Russian composer was reacting to what he perceived as the decrepitude of the West, and trying to supersede it. The wartime compositions, Luening thought, “indicated that Stravinsky was thinning out his style considerably. Rumor had it that this mysterious Russian who lived in Morges had turned his back on all previous music and had . . . reduced his musical statement to an economical, essential style just sufficient to say what he meant.”41
Just as Eurasianism was a radical intensification of earlier movements (Slavophilism, “Scythianism”), brought about by the fact and circumstances of forced emigration, so too the newly intensified Stravinskianisms that marked the period of Swiss exile had their origins in the composer’s prewar “neonationalist” work. This earlier style was an adaptation, the only musical adaptation ever made, of a tendency in the Russian visual arts with which Stravinsky had made contact through the members of the Diaghilev circle. What modern art historians call “neonationalism” consisted in the professional assimilation of style characteristics, not just subject matter, from folk art. “The folk,” the art critic Yakov Tugenhold had written in a review of The Firebird, “formerly the object of the artist’s pity, is becoming more and more the subject of artistic style.”42 Stravinsky’s neonationalist orientation gave rise to the neoprimitivist traits—drobnost’, nepodvizhnost’, uproshcheniye— that were identified and discussed in the earlier part of this chapter. They came to their neo-Turanian peak in the works of the Swiss years.
FIGURE 13.3. The fourth song in Stravinsky’s set of lullabies (published as Berceuses du chat), with a calligraphic dedication in “neo-Cyrillic” style to the neonationalist painter Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov, 2 November 1915 (André Meyer collection)
The second of the Three Pieces for String Quartet, with its radical shifts of tempo, its sectional juxtapositions without transition, and its avoidance of any apparent formal teleology, can serve as a defining epitome of drobnost’. Like the Symphonies d’Instruments à vent (1920), composed at the other end of the Swiss period, it has resisted conventional analytical methods that assume, and seek to confirm, an ideal of routinized formal unity, and has prompted the backward extension of Stockhausen’s concept of “moment form” as an explanatory paradigm.43 Respect for drobnost’ as a positive Russian-Eurasian value can serve to mitigate the anachronistic analytical impulse, just as study of Stravinsky’s sketches for the piece, and some knowledge of its genesis, can reveal just what it is that holds the piece together in spite of everything. It is worth going into in some analytical detail at this point, as it will provide an important clue for uncovering the macrostructure of Svadebka.
Stravinsky was in London in June 1914, to attend the Ballets Russes’ performances of The Nightingale. (The first London performance took place at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, on 18 June, the composer’s thirty-second birthday.) During that stay, he seems to have gone with Benois to the circus, where they saw the famous juggler and clown Little Tich (1868-1928, alias Little Tichborne, ne Harry Relph), who was actually a dwarf, and whose chief prop was a pair of elongated shoes on which, by shifting his weight, he could rise up as if on stilts (figure 13.4). As early as 1919, Stravinsky acknowledged this performance as the source of his inspiration for the second quartet piece, completed on 2 July 1914. At first acknowledgment was indirect, through a program note by Ansermet according to which the second piece “represents an unhappy juggler, who must hide his grief while he performs his feats before the crowd.”44 In Memories and Commentaries, the second book of “conversations” with Robert Craft, Stravinsky gave a more straightforward account of the composition’s wellspring, albeit now tinged with a characteristic squeamishness:
FIGURE 13.4. Little Tich (Harry Relph, 1868-1928) (Mary Tich and Richard Findlater, Little Tich: Giant of the Music Hall [London, 1979])
Q: Has music ever been suggested to you by, or has a musical idea ever occurred to you from, a purely visual experience of movement, line or pattern?
A: Countless times, I suppose, though I remember only one instance in which I was aware of such a thing. This was during the composition of the second of my Three Pieces for string quartet. I had been fascinated by the movements of Little Tich whom I had seen in London in 1914, and the jerky, spastic movement, the ups and downs, the rhythm—even the mood or joke of the music—which I later called Eccentric, was suggested by the art of this great clown (and suggested seems to me the right word, for it does not try to approfondir the relationship, whatever it is).45
What Stravinsky was, as usual, careful to withhold was the concreteness of his musical source. The evidence for this is a loose sheet of paper now tucked into a pocket in the back cover of a sketchbook in the Stravinsky archive at the Sacher Foundation otherwise given over to the Pribaoutki and the Pièces faciles for piano duet, also compositions of 1914 (figure 13.5). The sheet contains three notations of relevance to the quartet piece. The first is headed “Breton song imparted to me by Shura [i.e., Alexandre] Benois” (example 13.2) and followed by a description of the circumstances in which Benois had heard it: “And they danced, while on a rock in the rain a clarinettist] sat and played this song with all his might.” Following this Stravinsky jotted a mo-tivic derivative from the Breton tune (example 13.3). Finally there is a snatch labeled “Dancing Girl: Bareback Rider,” evidently taken down at the circus, possibly at the same performance at which Stravinsky saw Little Tich and received the Breton melody from Benois (example 13.4).
FIGURE 13.5. Two homemade sketch leaves with jottings made by Stravinsky in 1914 (Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel)
First page, recto: under a melody headed “Lullaby” is the “Breton song imparted to me by Shura Benois—and they danced, while a clarinettist sitting on a stone in the rain played this little song with all his might”
First page, verso: the topmost jotting is headed “Dancing girl—horseback rider”
Second page, recto: the single-line jotting across the leaf near the bottom seems equally a derivation from the Breton song or the dancing girl tune, or a conflation of the two
Second page, verso
EXAMPLE 13.2. Stravinsky, “Breton Song,” in sketchbook for Three Pieces for String Quartet
A remarkable cloud of disinformation surrounds this innocent bit of paper in the Stravinsky/Craft literature. Robert Craft, forgetting that Stravinsky and Benois were together in London 1914, and ignoring the bareback rider motif, associates the Breton song with Benois’s visit to the composer in La Baule, Brittany, in August 1910.46 (But why, then, is it found among Stravinsky’s 1914 sketches?) Even more curiously, Stravinsky himself, in a very late program note for the Pribaoutki, cited the plainly labeled Breton tune as an example of an “unused Russian theme” in his sketchbooks.47
But it was neither Russian nor unused. Together with the other jottings on the loose leaf, it furnished the thematic basis for Stravinsky’s portrait of Little Tich. What all three notations have conspicuously in common is the rising-/falling-fourth motive (bracketed in examples 13.2-4), which, in the context of these tonal melodies, represents a progression from the fifth scale degree to the tonic and back. In the bareback rider phrase the progression is extended to reach the tonic through a repetition of the concluding fifth degree (bracketed from beneath in example 13.4), and in this form the motive found a home amid the motley assortment of phrases from which Stravinsky’s famously disjointed composition was assembled.
Its three appearances are at mm. 4-5, 9-10, and 45-46, the last of them especially close to example 13.4. Two pitch levels are employed, as summarized in example 13.5. The four notes thus invoked form a versatile tetrachord that may be embedded in any of three different scale formations that characteristically interacted like chemical agents in Stravinsky’s compositions of the period: the “white key” pentatonic (or, more properly, anhemitonic) scale; various ordinary diatonic scales (including the tonic scales of all the notations on the sketch leaf, plus the scale with one sharp); and the octatonic (or “tone-semitone”) scale, in this case the one called “Collection III” in Pieter van den Toorn’s fundamental study. Add to this complex the ubiquitous use of acciac-caturas, without which no Stravinsky composition of the period is complete, and one arrives at the tonal and thematic recipe, more or less, from which this enigmatic little “grotesque” was concocted.48 It is the anhemitonic component, of course, that attracts notice from a Turanian/Trubetskoyan perspective; it will provide the promised link with Svadebka.
EXAMPLE 13.3. Derivation from the “Breton Song”
EXAMPLE 13.4. Stravinsky, “Bareback Rider,” in sketchbook for Three Pieces for String Quartet
EXAMPLE 13.5. Stravinsky, “Bareback Rider,” derivations and their modal affinities
The quality of nepodvizhnost’, or immobility, is the one associated with the device of ostinato, which reached something of an experimental apex in some of Stravinsky’s short pieces of the “Swiss” decade, notably the little piano duets, the recently recovered “Valse des fleurs” (Tsvetochnïy val’s) for two pianos, the 1917 children’s waltz published in May 1922 as “Une Valse pour les petits lecteurs du ‘Figaro,’“49 and other one- or two-chord “vamping” pieces in which “tonality” seems superficially to have made a comeback in Stravinsky’s music, but in which goal-oriented form and directed voice-leading are manifestly in abeyance. Some of these pieces are virtually reduced to the level of windup toy automata by the maintenance of a single ostinato for the duration. When a more “complex” structure is wanted, it is achieved by juxtaposing a series of unrelated ostinatos, producing the effect designated by the use of the word drobnost’.
But the category of “automata” or “vamping pieces” is not simply coextensive with that of “easy” or “children’s” pieces. The first of the Three Pieces for String Quartet carries the device to an extreme, presenting a multiplicity of hypostatized ostinatos, each having its own pitch collection and registral space, the whole making up as straightforward a bit of imitation folk music as Stravinsky (or anyone) ever composed, as would be perfectly evident even without Ansermet’s program note, according to which the piece “represents a group of peasants singing and dancing against the monotonous setting of the steppes.”50
The sustained D in the viola (paired at the unaccompanied beginning and end with a characteristic acciaccatura C#) is the drone of a volïnka (or duda), the Russian bagpipe Stravinsky must have heard every day at his summer home in Ustilug. The extremely recursive four-note dance tune (naigrish) tootled up above on the chanter (first violin) might well have been a variant of the popular Perepyolushka (“Little Quail”) (example 13.6), or some other actual peasant dance of its ilk. Beneath the folkish surface lies an interesting, and much analyzed, technical study. On the one hand it develops and extends the nepodvizhnost’, the frozen rhythmic immobility, created in Le Sacre du printemps by the use of ostinatos. Here there are two frozen levels: the twenty-three-beat violin tune and the seven-beat percussive pattern in the cello, which determines the barring. Since seven does not go evenly into twenty-three, the violin melody falls behind the cello pattern by the remainder, two beats, on each repetition. And since two does not divide seven evenly, the falling-behind effect crosscuts the cello pattern. Stravinsky lets the music play itself out just long enough for this phenomenon to run its course, then lets the air out of the conceptual bagpipe.
EXAMPLE 13.6. Russian folk song, Perepyolushka (Little Quail)
The result may be compared with a mobile, a sculpture with moving parts, anticipating the genre pioneered two decades later by Alexander Calder. Two fixed elements here course through time (= space) within independent orbits, passing in and out of phase with one another. The second violin punctuates the texture with an element all its own, just as fixed as the others, but with its recurrences unevenly distributed so as to inject a modicum of (human?) caprice to offset the counterpoint of impersonal automata running above and below.
The pitch material is as strictly hypostatized in this piece as the rhythmic. It is partitioned into two tetrachords separated by the octave-bisecting interval of a tritone, the one (G-A-B-C) assigned to the first violin, the other (C#-D#-E-F#) to the second.51 Partitions of this kind, originating in the “tone-semitone” practice of the St. Petersburg school under Rimsky-Korsakov, could be applied either to harmonic triads or to melodic tetrachords. The triadic partitioning had reached an early Stravinskian peak in the second tableau of Petrushka (composed three years prior to the quartet pieces), with its famous “bitonal” chord associated with the title character. The tetrachordal partition would achieve its Stravinskian zenith in Svadebka, complete but for scoring by the middle of 1917, three years later.52
As discussed in the first part of this chapter, both the drobnost’ of the second piece and the nepodvizhnost’ of the first were aspects of the general stripdown, the radical simplification of means, that was part and parcel of the neoprimitivist ideal, the basic cultural crux that had been so passionately debated in Stravinsky’s Russia between those who regarded the shedding of the conventional complexities of linear thinking to vouchsafe a higher unity of thought and feeling (uproshcheniye) and those who regarded it as mere dehumanization (oproshcheniye). The absolutely homorhythmic, formally strophic, and harmonically static third Piece for String Quartet is a programmatic exemplification of uproshcheniye (or oproshcheniye). Its plainly cultic or ritualistic disposition offers scant comfort to defenders of humanistic values, for Stravinsky seemed to be putting into musical practice that notorious call of Pascal’s for a dogmatic discipline that should, by lulling, quell the voice of reason.53
Adorno’s strictures about the “permanent regression” embodied in Stravinskian musical form again come forcibly to mind; and while Adorno did not comment on the Three Pieces, the closely related Concertino (1920), written at the other end of Stravinsky’s maximally Turanian phase, enraged him: “The composer insisted that the Concertino for String Quartet should hum along like a sewing machine,” Adorno protested. “This he demanded of that combination of instruments once more purely suited than any other to musical humanism, to the absolute enspiritualization of the instrumental medium.”54 Thus spake the voice of Romano-Germany—a highly offended Romano-Germany—assuming, as it will, the voice of (outraged) humanity. It was no universal or “absolute” property of music to represent individualistic subjectivity, but it was a musical potential that Romano-Germany had developed to its pinnacle, for which accomplishment it took an intense and justifiable pride. Romano-Germany had invested heavily in the autonomy of “das Individuum,” the individual sentient agent. That autonomy was both (flatteringly) mirrored and protected in panromanogermanic music by structural complexity and profusion of highly differentiated detail. The acutely sentient, autonomous, reflective self represented Romano-Germany’s ideal of humanity—a human identity that had reached a peak representation in the Beethoven of the late quartets, with their special quality, as Kerman has so eloquently described it, of “voice.”55 Stravinskian uproshcheniye reflected and protected something else—a “symphonic,” unreflective identity that Romano-Germany could only regard as subhuman.56
STRAVINSKIAN ANHEMITONY
That subhuman something, of course, was what Prince Trubetskoy lauded as the Turanian psychological type; and Stravinsky embodied it musically in a work that brought the Turanian type and the symphonic personality to a peak of emblematic artistic representation, altogether comparable to the way in which Beethoven’s quartets had emblematized the humanistic values Eurasianists now sought to discredit, and did it in a manner uncannily faithful to Prince Trubetskoy’s prescription. The most striking feature of Svadebka as a musical composition is its unprecedented reliance on anhemitony, the musical idiom that, according to Trubetskoy, ideally reflected Turanian mentality in its “relative poverty and plainness,” its “complete submission to simple schematic rules,” and its “schematic clarity and lucidity,” all amounting, in the modern context, to a cleansing spiritual uproshcheniye.
A thematic survey reveals a far higher proportion of anhemitonic melodies in Svadebka than is statistically representative of Russian folk melodies, and far higher, too, than the accustomed level of anhemitony in Stravinsky’s neonationalist scores. Out of twenty “themes” (a theme being identified, for the purposes of this survey, as a melody or motif that recurs), a total of six, which is to say more than one-quarter, are anhemitonic. Another six (for a cumulative total of twelve, or 60 percent) belong to a class that may be designated “embellished anhemitonic”: when represented as scales, the pitch inventories of such melodies contain one semitone, but the pitch that creates it operates under restrictions that subordinate it structurally (or, which amounts to the same thing, perceptually) to one of its neighbors.57 Thus the two melodies given in example 13.7 (counted as two versions of one theme in the foregoing summary) may be regarded as representing a single anhemitonic scale—/0 3 5 8/ if the lowest pitch of the narrowest possible scalar arrangement of the collection is arbitrarily labeled zero and the remaining pitches counted thence by semitones—with a semitonal adjacency between 5 and 8 that functions either as an upper neighbor to 5 or as a descending (never ascending!) passing tone. In no case is the note in question ever approached by skip. Whether this embellishing note is semitonally adjacent to 5 or to 8 (that is, whether at the given pitch level it is represented by F or Ftt) is immaterial to the mode’s identity. That this was Stravinsky’s own criterion is shown by the fact that he used the two melodies in example 13.7 to carry two variants (one from Kireyevsky, the other from Tereshchenko) of a single song text. Thus he regarded the two tunes, despite the superficial discrepancy in their scales, as variants of a single tune, representing a single anhemitonic pitch field, variously embellished.
EXAMPLE 13.7. “Embellished anhemitony” in Stravinsky’s Svadebka
It should be emphasized once more that all the anhemitonic themes and motifs (popevki) in Svadebka, however authentic they may sound, were invented by Stravinsky. None was a found object. In The Rite of Spring, by contrast, there is only a tiny number of anhemitonic motifs—seven by the most generous count58—of which only a single one, the “Incantation” at the beginning of the “Rondes printanières” (rehearsal figure 48) is drawn from a known folk source, and even there the “embellished anhemitony” is the result of an alteration to the original tune.59
Thus it transpires that Stravinsky’s anhemitony is not so much a “Russian” as an invented Eurasian/Turanian trait; and so it is no longer quite correct to speak of “nationalism” here, or even “neonationalism.” Those who have noted the prevalence of anhemitony in Svadebka have attributed it to what they have assumed to be an archaistic tendency. Victor Belaiev, the author of the earliest published analysis of the score, who perhaps hyperbolically considered the /0 3 5/ configuration at the outset “the fundamental motif from which the whole of its melos is developed,” identified that melos explicitly with “the old way of Russian life.”60 Boris Asafyev emphasized the “union of archaic musical elements with formal principles derived . . . from the Renaissance.”61 But it is evident (and demonstrable) that the whole category of “embellished anhemitony” was something Stravinsky had never observed but contrived.
It is also demonstrable that Stravinsky’s range of ethnographic awareness and even observation extended beyond the frontiers of Russia, into other parts of the “Turanian” domain. As early as March 1914, before a note of Svadebka had been committed to paper, Stravinsky clipped from the pages of the newspaper Rech’ a lengthy article by the famous linguist and academician Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (1864-1934, the very one over whose theories of Marxian linguistics Stalin would become so comically exercised near the end of his life), entitled “Thoughts on the Religious Singing of the Ancient East: On the Occasion of a Concert of Georgian Sacred Music at the Hall of Nobles on the Sixteenth of March.”62 Marr’s thesis, related to his linguistic theories, which traced the origins of human speech to the languages of the Caucasus, was that “the religious singing of the Georgians and related tribes represents a vestige of the religion of the Ancient Orient [i.e., the Near East], neither Semitic nor Aryan, but of the Japhetic tribes that have newly emerged as a focus of scientific research”—that is, what more recent scholars would call the hypothetical primeval “Indo-European” culture. Marr chides the scholars of the humanistic disciplines for failing to recognize this heritage as philologists and archeolo-gists had done, and calls upon artists to “develop these precious artifacts before they perish in obscurity.”
It was a typical neonationalist plea on behalf of a cultural heritage that would hold a special appeal for an artist with proto-Eurasianist leanings; in fact it was a point of special emphasis for the Trubetskoys and Karsavins to insist on the community of Eurasian cultures. Hence it is not surprising to find that Stravinsky showed an interest in Georgian folk and religious music, or that this interest should have left its mark on Svadebka.
“Scientific” folklore anthologies that we know Stravinsky to have consulted contained studies of Georgian and other Caucasian musics, the work mainly of Dmitriy Ignat’yevich Arakchiyev (Arakishvili, 1873-1953), a Georgian composer and folklorist who was the first to investigate the local ethnic music with the aid of the phonograph.63 It was because he knew these publications by Arakchiyev that Stravinsky made a point, in a letter to his mother of 10/23 February 1916, to request “folk songs of the Caucasian peoples that have been phonographically recorded.”64 His mother must have sent him the collection “Georgian Folk Songs and Verses” (Kartuli khalkuri khimgebi [Tiflis, 1909]), by Iya (Ilya) Kargareteli (1867-1939), because the entire contents of this volume, consisting of sixteen polyphonic songs calligraphically transcribed by the composer on high-quality card stock, survives today in the Stravinsky archive, the composer having become fascinated, it seems, not just with the music but with the Georgian alphabet.65 These songs evidently came into Stravinsky’s possession too late to have had any direct influence on the composition of most of Svadebka; but comparison with Arakchiyev’s publications, particularly the group of religious songs published under the title “Georgian Canticles for the Liturgy of St. John of Damascus in Folk Harmonization,” will show the source of certain devices of harmony and voice leading—parallel triads, upward-resolving sevenths—that crop up now and again in Stravinsky’s score, and will also provide an ethnographic validation for some of his “anhemitonic consonances” (chords in which seconds and fourths are treated as stable) (example 13.8). The passage in Svadebka closest to this “Japhetic” style is the one at figures 12-14 in the first tableau, where the women’s voices sing an extended diatonic melody in parallel major and minor triads, the pianists’ left hands meanwhile thumping out acciaccaturas with a special insistence (example 13.9).
EXAMPLE 13.8. Selected passages from D. I. Arakchiyev, Gruzinskiye pesnopeniya na liturgiyu sv. loanna Zlatoustogo narodnoy garmonizatsii (Papers of the Musico-Ethnographic Commission of Moscow University), vol. 1, pp. 337-60
EXAMPLE 13.9. Stravinsky, Svadebka, first tableau, figure 12
THE PLEROMA
The extraordinary preference for anhemitony in Svadebka had a technical motivation as well as an ethnographic or metaphorical one. Again, it was a motivation that arose out of no mere archaistic vision but an urgent contemporary one. Actual Russian “calendar” or ritual tunes—a category that includes wedding songs, and the one to which Stravinsky was most attracted when it came to actually mining ethnographic anthologies for neonationalist appropriation—are generally constructed on diatonic segments of small ambitus rather than on the kind of gapped scale tendentiously adduced by Prince Trubetskoy. Though possibly prompted in the first instance by the lexicographer Dahl’s description of an unspecified three-tone lament formula (which Stravinsky inevitably fashioned for himself by “gapping” the /0 2 3 5/ minor tetrachord he had exploited so extensively in The Rite to produce the /0 3 5/ trichord that dominates the first tableau of Svadebka), what accounted for the prevalence of anhemitonic motifs in the later score was their suitability to the all-embracing tonal system Stravinsky devised for it, one of his greatest, if hidden, achievements. Through it, Stravinsky solved once and for all the central problem of his “Swiss” period, namely, that of creating the authentic folklore of an imaginary wr-Russia, not the real Russia but one “realer than the real.”
What made anhemitonic constructs indispensable to this scheme was precisely their tonally suspensive character. The absence of semitones bars implicit cadential functions (at least in the ordinary “Western,” Romano-Germanic sense), thus rendering the melodic surface of the score “non-progressive” and “non-implicative,” as one perceptive writer has termed it.66 Tonal “implication” in Svadebka comes about, on those rare occasions where Stravinsky resorts to it, by specific gesture. The most traditional cadence—the only really traditional cadence in the score, it seems—comes early on, where the bridesmaids finish their combing song in the first tableau with a clear-cut cadential flourish that identifies the pitch E as a soon-to-be-superseded tonic (example 13.10). This gesture seems a vestige of the kind of quasi-tonal or conventionally “modal” thinking Stravinsky would abandon as he worked further into the score, and as he evolved the unique ground plan we are to trace, which would obviate the necessity for such explicit cadential gestures.
The quality of “acentricity,” the tonal ambiguity inherent in anhemitonic melodies, was the key to fashioning a convincingly antiromanogermanic idiom, and Stravinsky reinforced it in every way he could. Thus for example the semitonal adjacencies in his “embellished anhemitonic” tunes are never applied to their neighboring pitches by direct upward step progression, which might lend them the character of leading tones. And so they never compromise the tonally “non-implicative” status of the tunes in which they occur. Stravinsky was interested in another kind of implication, the kind he had developed in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, which Pieter van den Toorn has christened “octatonic/diatonic interaction.” In Svadebka, this interaction acquired an unprecedented scope and integrity, maximalized and systematized far beyond anything Stravinsky had previously essayed, utterly replacing traditional tonal functions and governing every aspect of tonal organization in this greatest of all neoprimitivist scores. By using diatonic or anhemitonic melodies devoid of conventional tonal orientation at the surface of that score, Stravinsky avoided any contradiction with the symmetrically conceived and balanced Turanian ground plan it will now be our business to uncover and describe.
EXAMPLE 13.10. Stravinsky, Svadebka, first tableau, figure 8, voices only
The themes presented and analyzed for their /0 3 5 8/ modal background structure in example 13.7 share that structural configuration with the pitch matrix of the second Piece for String Quartet as given above in example 13.5. Other themes from Svadebka built on that anhemitonic tetrachord or on one of its subsets are given in example 13.11. They include some of the ballet’s most prominent tunes, including the opening bridal lament (on the trichord /0 3 5/); the song of consolation from the first tableau, on the same trichord; the invocation of the Virgin Mary at the beginning of the second tableau (on the full /0 3 5 8/ tetrachord, embellished); and the lyuli-lyuli refrain at the beginning of the fourth tableau (its /0 2 51 structure corresponding to the /3 5 8/ members of the original tetrachord, minus the “zero” pitch).
What was said of the tonal matrix in the second quartet piece is true of these invented folk melodies as well: their /0 3 5 8/ pitch/intervallic content is equally a subset of the pentatonic (10 3 5 8 10/), diatonic (1023 5 1 8 10/) and octatonic (10 2 3 5 6 8 9 11/) collections. Another way of saying this is that their pitch content can be variously supplemented to produce pentatonic, diatonic, or octatonic collections; or that such melodies can be inserted ad libitum into pentatonic, diatonic, or octatonic contexts and can therefore bridge them. With these observations we have taken the first step toward understanding the globally worked-out tonal organization of Stravinsky’s Turanian masterpiece, as well as the representational or metaphorical purpose that global organization served.67
EXAMPLE 13.11. The [0, 3, 5, 8] tetrachord in Stravinsky’s Svadebka
If nothing else, the experience of composing The Rite of Spring taught Stravinsky to regard the /0 2 3 5/ T-S-T (tone-semitone-tone) or “minor” tetrachord, of which the Svadebka lament (/0 3 5/) was an anhemitonic subset, as the most potent agent of linearly conceived diatonic/octatonic interpenetration. Replicated disjunctly at the major second it produces what Mily Balakirev had called the “Russian minor” (more generally, if loosely, known as the “Dorian” scale). At the minor second it generates the octatonic scale. The T-S-T tetrachord itself being palindromic, the octave species it generates are likewise self-inverting. The modal properties discussed thus far hold true whether one “reads up” or “reads down.” Here we already have the conceptual nub of the matrix that generated the melodic/harmonic texture of Svadebka (example 13.12).
EXAMPLE 13.12. Interaction of diatonic and octatonic scales around T-S-T tetrachordal pivots
Example 13.12 is notated at the pitch of the opening melody in Svadebka, the bride’s plach (lament), so as to facilitate a number of preliminary observations, including the derivation of the first harmony in the score (if, as seems reasonable, we disregard as harmony the percussive acciaccaturas at the very beginning). At figure 1, the entering pianos harmonize the melody of the plach, the tones of which are found within the upper tetrachord of the diatonic scales in example 13.12, with the pitches that enclose its octatonic complement, as shown there in scale 4. The nature of the spacing, with the fourth inverted to a fifth, suggests another sort of enclosure, or infixing: the symmetrical bounding of the plach melody by the defining pitches of the complementary tetrachord, both of which are semitonally adjacent to an outer pitch of the plach (example 13.13).
EXAMPLE 13.13. First harmony in Stravinsky’s Svadebka, figure 1
Thus the plach tetrachord is harmonically embellished by its octatonic complement at the same time that its melodic embellishment (the grace note F#) is drawn from its diatonic complement. In a small way this “polytonal” example already illustrates a basic principle of harmonic/contrapuntal construction in Svadebka: the superimposition of two pitch fields that intersect around the notes of the plach.
As for scale 2 in example 13.12, the “ascending” octatonic extension of the focal tetrachord, it coincides with the pitch content of the most important octatonic theme in Svadebka, the parental lament from the second tableau that returns so poignantly to conclude the third (example 13.14). This theme (plus the piano accompaniment, which supplies in the form of an ostinato the two pitches required to exhaust the scale of reference) was the very passage from which Arthur Berger inferred the octatonic scale as a referential collection for Stravinsky’s music in his seminal article of 1963.68 Having observed the octatonic source of this melody, and its relationship to the complex of scales given in example 13.12, and recalling the way the diatonic grace notes had peacefully coexisted with the octatonic harmony at figure 1 on the basis of the shared upper tetrachord of scale 3 in the example, we may go on to note a similar interaction that takes place between figures 35 and 39 in the second tableau. As shown in example 13.15, a few tones foreign to the octatonic scale of the parental lament occur in the lines set in counterpoint against it. These are the ones, as noted in passing in the previous section of this chapter, that Berger had ignored as “ornamental”; and yet example 13.12 furnishes a means of accounting for them. In example 13.15a, the extraneous pitch (B) is part of a diatonic motif referable to scale 1 and hence related to the octatonic main theme (derived from scale 2) by virtue of their common possession of the all-important T-S-T tetrachord on E. Stravinsky’s contrapuntal usage here points up the kinship between the octatonic and diatonic sets as extensions of the same tonality-defining basic tetrachordal cell, precisely as illustrated in example 13.12. In example 13.15b, both elements, octatonic as well as diatonic, have been transposed by minor thirds, albeit in opposite directions. Under such a transposition the pitch content of the octatonic component is invariant. The diatonic counterpoint, while no longer referable to any single scale in example 13.12, remains referable to scale 2 except for the newly introduced “foreign” pitch, D, which is referable to scale 1.
EXAMPLE 13.14. Stravinsky, Svadebka, second tableau, figure 35
EXAMPLE 13.15. Stravinsky, Svadebka, second tableau (notes foreign to scale 2 circled)
A similar octatonic/diatonic interaction, involving one of Svadebka’s most prominent anhemitonic tunes, may be observed beginning at figure 68, near the beginning of the third tableau. The melody in question (originally sung as a “consolation song” to the bride at figure 9 in the first tableau) is initiated by the bass soloist at the pitch level originally associated with the bridal plach: that is, on an /0 3 51 configuration referable to the generating tetrachord of scale 3 in example 13.12. The motif is immediately taken through a complete rotation by minor thirds that implicates and exhausts scale 4, the “descending” octatonic collection cognate to scale 3 (see example 13.16a). Meanwhile, the pianos noodle an ostinato, the bass of which sums up the same rotation by minor thirds (reading from the bottom up in scale 4), coinciding with the starting pitches of each transposition of the anhemitonic motif. The newsworthy event is what happens at figure 69: the mezzo-soprano soloist chimes in with a transposition of the motif beginning on F#, the constituent notes of which—D#, F#, G#—are not to be found in any one scale in example 13.12. They do, however, link up with the concurrent transposition of the same motif in the soprano and tenor parts to form an anhemitonic subset of scale 1 at a transposition precisely analogous to that of the soprano at figure 69 + 2 with respect to the initiating pitch level in the bass (see example 13.16b).
To this observation we may add the striking fact that the groom’s concluding address to the bride, which is based on a cyclic (and embellished) reprise of the opening plach, is pitched at the level of the first transposition shown in example 13.16a, and the tintinnabulating instrumental coda that derives from it is harmonized exclusively with pitches referable to an anhemitonic subset of the scale given in example 13.16b. The two “ornamental” tones in the voice part (E and D, regularly applied as anacrusis to C#) derive from scale 4 (see example 13.17). The whole ending tonality of the score, then, is adumbrated by the mezzo’s seemingly anomalous entrance at figure 69.
All these wide-ranging if somewhat desultory observations, drawn from all four tableaux, are in fact converging on a single very significant point. They identify the array presented in example 13.12 as something more than a heuristic tool. We seem to be dealing, as forecast, with a global complexe sonore (to borrow a term from Stravinsky’s Poétique musicale) that governs, at both short range and long, the pitch relations of the entire work. The habits of transposition we have been observing suggest that Stravinsky viewed his anhemitonic and diatonic motifs (and their implied scales) against an octatonic background. That is, he considered them to be in a perpetual state of potential symmetrical rotation by minor thirds (hereafter represented by the figures /0 3 6 91) under which the octatonic background scale is invariant. Thus in order fully to represent the complexe sonore governing Svadebka, the “Dorian” scales in example 13.12 have to be conceived in terms of a fourfold /0 3 6 9/ multiplication. They are in effect mapped as diatonic projections onto an octatonic background scale, represented by scales 2 and 4 in example 13.12, at each node of invariance-producing transposition. Since scales 2 and 4 differ only in their “filler” pitches, not their nodes, either an ascending or a descending representation of this mapping process will have an identical pitch content so far as the diatonic projections are concerned (see example 13.18).
EXAMPLE 13.16. Linkage of plach motif transpositions in third tableau (figure 68 onward)
EXAMPLE 13.17. Groom’s recapitulation of plach motif at end, scalar/harmonic abstract
As newly represented in example 13.18, scale A seems to be identical to what has up to now been designated scale 1. Scale 1, however, was an ascending sequence only, whereas scale A is more properly (and neutrally) a collection, encompassing both scale 1 and its descending counterpart, scale 3, from which an identical array might have been generated. One need only imagine, then, an array of descending diatonic scales (replications of scale 3 at each of the /0 3 6 9/ nodes) mapped onto scale 4 in order to have a technically complete, though in practice redundant, representation of the complexe sonore that governs the score. The fourfold diatonic array (scales A through D in example 13.18) represents not four different keys (for the melodies fashioned for them, we may recall, are all tonally “non-implicative”) but four functionally equivalent diatonic projections of a single /0 3 6 9/ matrix representing the invariance nodes of the octatonic background collection. And so their starting and finishing notes (that is, the nodal points) are not to be regarded as tonics, because the intervallic structure of the various, predominantly anhemitonic, motifs derived from these scales is designed, as we have seen, precisely to preclude such identification. By the same token, the two octatonic scales are best regarded not as representing—in Van den Toorn’s nomenclature—”Collection I” (descending) and “Collection III” (ascending), but simply as alternative ways of filling out the same /0 3 6 9/ cycle of nodes. Thus despite the differing local pitch collections, it can be said that Svadebka begins and ends in the same tonality, here defined as an octatonic pitch field with multiple local diatonic projections, which comprises and controls a unified tonal system by means of strategic, controlled departures and returns.
EXAMPLE 13.18. Diatonic projections of octatonic background
A sense of tonal motion can be achieved by means of transitions (“modulations”) among the diatonic nodal projections (scales A through D in example 13.18). Indeed, this was Stravinsky’s primary means of tonally articulating and differentiating the four tableaux. The main themes of the first (bride’s) tableau are all referable to scale A. Those in the first part of the second (groom’s) tableau all refer to scale B, representing the next “higher” notch along the ¡0 3 6 9/ circle. (The second part of the second tableau contains the chant material originally intended for the Liturgiya ballet; it constitutes the one extended apparent departure from the governing complexe sonore, and we shall pass over it here.)69
The third tableau is dominated, like the first, by scale A (we are back at the bride’s), except for the mothers’ lament at the end, one of the few spots in the score where the octatonic background scale breaks the surface. The fourth tableau places the greatest emphasis on scale D, which occupies a position as far “down” the /0 3 6 9/ circle from A as B is “up.” It may be regarded, then, as scale B’s reciprocal. Scale C comes briefly into its own at figure 110, where it is entrusted with the first statement of the quoted folk song that will eventually bring the ballet to its climax (example 13.19). The theme never comes back in this scale, though, and except for a single brief passage after figure 128, scale C is not heard again. The short shrift given this scale in Stravinsky’s deployment of this complexe sonore enhances the status of scale A, its tritone antipode, as first among equals, shadowed on either side by scales B and D, and, by providing a point of equilibrium between them, signifying harmonic repose.
Its primacy is asserted in another way as well, one that will entail a further refinement in the representation of the complexe sonore. Besides the diatonic scales in their normal forms as represented in example 13.18, which we may term “authentic,” Stravinsky makes occasional telling use of modal extensions, whereby an extra T-S-T tetrachord is attached at the lower or upper end to form a new scale (example 13.20). On a loose analogy with medieval mode theory, we may christen these extensions “plagal” and “pluperfect,” respectively. (On an even looser analogy with the theory of Russian church chant, they could be called “dark” and “thrice bright.”) In principle these extensions could be applied to any of the four diatonic scales in the complexe sonore, and instances involving each of them do occur. (The bass solo at figure 53, for one example, is built on the plagal extension of scale B—see example 13.21.) Such events are sporadic, however, and of only transient significance. They do not seem to possess any long-range implication for the tonal structure of the ballet. It is another matter with the basic scale, A. Its modal extensions are numerous, recurrent, and thematically crucial. Moreover, they provide Stravinsky with the means to achieve a genuine tonal climax at the conclusion of the fourth tableau.
EXAMPLE 13.19. Stravinsky, Svadebka, fourth tableau, two bars after figure 110 (The Bride)
EXAMPLE 13.20. Diatonic projections extended
The plagal extension is heard frequently throughout the “First Part” of the score, comprising the first three tableaux. Its first appearance is the tenor solo (the bride’s mother) at figure 21. The fact that Stravinsky doubles the tune at the lower fourth at figure 23 proves its “plagal” status: the bass’s part is in A-authentic, and the doubling underscores the modal affinity (example 13.22). The climax of the third tableau (figure 78ff.), which is to say the culmination of the whole “First Part” (where the metaphorical “rivers” come together and where a motif derived from the quoted “Mitusov” folk song is heard for the first time), is also cast strategically in A-plagal.
EXAMPLE 13.21. Stravinsky, Svadebka, second tableau, figure 53 (bass solo)
EXAMPLE 13.22. Stravinsky, Svadebka, first tableau
“Strategically,” because of what happens at the corresponding climax of the “Second Part” (fourth tableau). This climax is very elaborately prepared. Scale D having been established as the undisputed local governor at the outset of the tableau (figure 87ff.), its hegemony is challenged in a contrapuntal tour de force at figure 97, where choral parts based on scale A are accompanied by a bass line drawn from scale C, its tritone antipode. Scale D, in other words, has been encircled (example 13.23). By the time the embellished reprise of the bridal plach has made it into the choral parts (figure 114), scale A has reasserted its primacy. At figure 119 scale D attempts a comeback via a reprise of the opening theme of the fourth tableau, only to be rebuffed once again by the plach in its home scale (figure 121). Unexpectedly, at figure 122, the plach theme is taken over by scale C, the tritone antipode. It will never sound again in its home scale. As a matter of fact, at figure 126 (piano parts) it is acquired by scale D, with which it had formerly contended, and in that scale it will remain (though not on the same pitches) for the groom’s grand peroration (figure 133).
Why the sudden switch? Because of a third element, one that since figure 110 had been vying for thematic dominance with the others—namely, the quoted (“Mitusov”) folk song.70 Its first, tactically inconspicuous statement is made in the tonally peripheral orbit of scale C. Thereafter, it is quickly brought into more central tonal ground. All future statements of the theme (beginning with the bass solo six measures after 111) will be pitched on scales B or A. The first statement on A comes at 120, right before the plach melody leaves that scale. In effect, the position of the opening lament as representative of scale A has been preempted by the Mitusov tune. From this point on the place of the quoted folk song—and with it, of scale A—at center stage is vigorously upheld and reinforced. The reinforcement consists in the elaborate mirroring of scale A with its plagal and, for once, pluperfect extensions. The use of the latter, being the unique occurrence of a “thrice bright” region in the entire score, lends the ultimate in exaltation to the climax of the “Second Part” of the ballet, especially by comparison with the climax of the “First Part” at the end of the third tableau, which had adumbrated the same melody in a plagal region.
EXAMPLE 13.23. “Encircling” of scale D at figure 97
The mirroring process works as follows. At figure 120, the bass soloist enters with the folk tune in the plagal extension of scale A. After two measures, half of the choral basses intrude with a continuation of the theme in the authentic scale, which runs briefly in canon with the plagal form before the two join at the end in parallel motion (example 13.24a). At figure 124 the tenor sounds the theme for the last time on scale B before it is remanded once and for all to scale A. One measure before figure 125, the instruments, in their one-and-only explosive solo measure, strike up the tune in the plagal before shifting abruptly into the pluperfect (example 13.24b); the focal note E furnishes the pivot. The whole climactic passage, from 130 to 133, is devoted to multiple statements of the folk tune, it being buffeted like a soccer ball from one form of the mode to another, sometimes with the help of pivots like the one introduced at figure 125 (example 13.24c). The reiterated use of the note B as cadential pitch implies the ascendency of the pluperfect mode, as befits the score’s crowning moment.
EXAMPLE 13.24. Interaction of plagal and pluperfect with authentic scales as climax of fourth tableau approaches
Example 13.24c is an especially good illustration of the way Stravinsky exploits contrasting modal scales as dramatic foils. Between 131 and 132 he dips unexpectedly into the plagal region, and even beyond it to scale B, meanwhile bringing in the plach motif in an extremely remote pitch area (underscoring in yet another way the dramatic situation: the words here hint at the bride’s precoital distress). The harmonic region—C-plagal—could not have been made any more remote: the pitches to which the plach motif is sung here are not present in the authentic or pluperfect forms of scale A, from which the passage from 130 to 133 is otherwise exclusively constructed. Thus the reassertion of A-pluperfect at figure 132 comes as a fresh jolt that enhances the sense of its brightness beyond anything that had gone before. Scale A, the scale that had started Svadebka on its way, returns in glory at the end, rounding off what is tonally one of the most originally and compellingly integrated scores Stravinsky ever composed.
At the broadest level, the tonal flow of Svadebka may be compared with the movement of a pendulum. Beginning stably within scale A (first tableau), the tonal pendulum swings out to a position of greater tension or potential energy along the /0 3 6 9/ circle to scale B (first half of the second tableau); regains equilibrium by returning to scale A (end of the second tableau and into the third), its “downward” motion emphasized by the plagal region; swings out again in the opposite direction to scale D (first part of the fourth tableau); finally regains equilibrium triumphantly at the climax of the fourth tableau, its “upward” kinetic energy dramatized by the breakthrough to the pluperfect form of the concluding tonal region.
The tones of the groom’s final address to the bride, though related earlier to scale D, can also be referred to the tonally neutral descending octatonic scale (scale 4 in example 13.12), out of which the opening bridal plach had been constructed, thus bringing things emphatically full circle. The ambiguity created by the harmonization, which refers exclusively to scale D, can be construed as a reinforcement of cyclicity through the explicit denial of tonal closure, that is, the sense of an ending—a reading amply supported by the bell sonorities, which, as so often pointed out, symbolize the cycle of church sacraments of which marriage (and its procreative consummation) is but one, thus bracketing the ballet’s action within the perpetual round of birth and death that comes from God. The scenario with its collage of abstracted ritual actions, the libretto with its collage of abstracted popular texts, and the music with its collage of abstracted “folk” motifs and tunelets (popevki, to use the Russian mot juste), together metonymically represent not the mere folk-specific but the human universal.
The tonal plan uncovered and described here must be radically distinguished from the usual concept of a functional harmonic plan or a system of key relationships. It is worth reiterating one last time that the four scales on which Svadebka is built have little in common with what is usually meant by a key, for there is no basis for assigning pitch priority either within the scales themselves or, in most cases, within the individual popevki that are extracted from them. In most cases, as we have seen, the intervallic structure of Stravinsky’s popevki inherently precludes the establishment of priority by any but factitious means; in different environments, one and the same popevka can support a variety of centric tendencies. Individual popevki, moreover, can appear at various pitch levels within a given scale, sometimes with altered intervallic content, sometimes without, but in all cases without any appreciable difference in their tonal implication or lack of it. (Compare, for example, the various pitch levels at which “authentic” tune fragments appear before and after figure 131 in example 13.24c.) Thus the degrees of the four basic diatonic scales in Svadebka, unlike the degrees in any tonal, key-defining scale, are not functionally differentiated a priori. Rather than keys, then, the four Svadebka scales represent four diatonic projections from a single—that is, universal—octatonic background matrix. They are the four quadrants, so to speak, of a cyclic, periodic, symmetrically apportioned musical space, as depicted in fully elaborated form in example 13.25.
Thus although Svadebka contains relatively little in the way of surface octatonics—far less than The Rite of Spring or even Petrushka—the deeper structure that rules the variegated diatonic surface is more thoroughly and systematically derived from a single /0 3 6 9/ octatonic matrix than that of any other Stravinsky composition of comparable size and scope. Background matrix and diatonic surface are linked through the ubiquitous T-S-T tetrachords. The lower tetrachord in each “authentic” diatonic scale (corresponding to the upper tetrachord in the “plagal” extensions) is referable to the “ascending” octatonic background scale; the upper authentic tetrachords (= lower “pluperfect” tetrachords) refer to the “descending” background scale. Octatonic melodic and harmonic patterns that had played gaudily on the surface of earlier neonationalist scores were submerged to work their influence at the deepest strata of structure and style. The deeper they went—the more they thus, as it were, receded from view—the more pervasive and determinant their influence became.
In fine, example 13.25 is the map of a musical pleroma, a closed-off, strictly delimited yet all-encompassing hierarchically structured musical universe. All Russian (or Turanian) folk songs have a potential place on its diatonic surface, as all Russians have a potential place in Eurasian symphonic society. That surface, in turn, encompasses all possible diatonic scales, hence not just Russian, but all oral musical cultures, and gives them all an ideal potential ordering that, in its symmetrical apportionment of an octatonic background, is fundamentally opposed to the asymmetrical, fifth-related panromanogermanic norm. Never before had a musical Utopia been so expressly modeled on a social Utopia. The harmonic space encompassed by example 13.25 analogizes the harmonious concinnity (soglasovannost’) of human actions and purposes comprehended by the Eurasianists’ symphonically harmonized society. The hidden octatonic background that harmonizes and controls the audible diatonic surface is a perfect metaphor for the constraints of immemorial custom that invisibly rule the day-to-day subjectively free-flowing currents of life in Stravinsky’s imagined folk world, harmonizing the thoughts and actions of individuals with the transcendent organic community of the composer’s dreams, just as the long-sought and triumphantly successful final scoring for four keyboards and punctuating percussion captures to perfection the nature of symphonic society, as something “perfectly impersonal, perfectly homogeneous, and perfectly mechanical.”71 Together, these symbols of ideally harmonized existence lend Svadebka both its incomparably compelling aesthetic integrity and its ominously compelling political allure.
EXAMPLE 13.25. The organization of musical space in Stravinsky’s Svadebka
UTOPIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Why ominously? Because “perfectly homogeneous” societies exist only in the imaginations of artists and political aesthetes. Conditions in the world fall short of such perfection, and so Utopians must either adapt to the world (that is, give up Utopia) or correct the shortfall. Utopia cannot tolerate difference or nonconformity, and any nostalgic utopianism must necessarily entail bigotry. The history of the twentieth century has provided sufficient examples of the kind of corrective measures futuristic Utopians (e.g., in Russia) and nostalgic Utopians (e.g., in Germany) have been prepared to take in order to adapt the world to their aesthetic vision—sufficient, one would think, to make us wary of visions like the one so stunningly represented in Svadebka.
Leaving Germany to one side, one can locate the difference between futuristic and nostalgic Utopia within Russian thought as that between (pre-Stalinist) Bolsheviks and Eurasianists. And yet Germany still forces its way back into the picture, because the principal scapegoat of nostalgic Utopians, at least in Europe, has rarely varied. A polemical essay in the Eurasian Record, published in the year of Svadebka’s first performances, purported to meet head-on, but only met aslant, the accusation that Eurasianists were anti-Semites.
“We are nationalists,” declared the author, a young economist named Yakov Dmitriyevich Sadovsky, “the most outspoken of Russian nationalists.” As such, he announced, Eurasianists were bound to hold in contempt the tepid policies of the liberal provisional government that had held the reins of the Russian state between the Tsar’s abdication and the Bolshevik coup—policies associated with Pavel Milyukov, the liberal foreign minister, who encouraged the protection of minority rights (“defending every national movement against Russian nationalism”). Still less could Eurasianists support the Bolshevik “nationalities” policy, which would establish “dozens of republics, right down to a Jewish one,” Sadovsky sneered, “with Minsk as its capital.” Nor was nationalism Eurasian-style a grassroots movement: the people needed to be guided toward national self-realization by an intellectual avant-garde, a “nationalist intelligentsia” (a rank oxymoron for Russia, but invoked here without apparent irony). And so the first task was to cleanse the Russian intelligentsia of its long-standing “internationalist” (read: Jewish) infestation. Like the Stalinists of the late 1940s, the Eurasianists cast their anti-Semitism as anti-cosmopolitanism, further masked (and with an irony that later events made bitter) as anticommunism. Although no anti-Semites, Sadovsky declared,
we do part company with the majority of the Jewish community on one question. We part company with them in their evaluation of our political disturbances. For the majority of the Jewish people and for Jewish youth without exception, the Russian revolution is “The Great Russian Revolution,” which has given them everything, even the dominant position within the existing Russian revolutionary power, something of which not a single Jew in the world could possibly have dreamed before the revolution. The Jews have greeted the “Great Revolution” and all it stands for and have become its very cement. . . . For us, though, the revolution is above all a Black Death, a plague combined with all the most horrible miseries of nature.72
There was no place for such a dissonance in any properly symphonic society. The mask worn by Sadovsky’s anti-Semitism, moreover, was only one of many such masks (antimercantilism in the nineteenth century, anti-Zionism in the mid-twentieth) that have given cover to traditional Slavic racial hostility toward Jews.
Given their maximalized, top-down (and therefore topsy-turvy) revival of the Slavophile ideal of sobornost’, the organic, pre-cognitive experience of total-unity (manifested socially in what Prince Sergey Trubetskoy, the father of the Eurasianist leader, actually called “corporate consciousness”), their contempt for democracy, their insistence on audacious leadership as instrument of national self-realization,73 and their horror of Bolshevism as a godless Western positivism run rampant in their midst, Eurasianists would seem potentially susceptible, when the time came, to the blandishments of fascism. And when the time came, the Eurasianist press amply bore out that grim surmise. Books expounding and explicating fascism were regularly and sympathetically reviewed, especially by Karsavin, whose only reservation was the fact that Italian fascism was a wholly secular movement operating within a Catholic country and therefore could not promote symphonic society in all its fullness.74 The tragic flaw in fascism, for Eurasianists, was the fact that it had taken shape in a country where religious authority was vested in another, competing, hierarchical institution.
Nevertheless, the only contemporary political figure whom these Russian exiles dependably praised was Mussolini, “who has given Italy much and who may give yet more,” in the words of Sadovsky, who went on to declare that “many countries might well envy Italy.” The unsubtle hint about Russia is confirmed and extended when Sadovsky upholds Italian fascism as an example of “healthy reaction” and an explicit model for (violent) political action in his own country.
Bolshevism and fascism have shown that revolution is no creative force; it is a disease, but over its grave a nation’s creative power can yet flower. By now it is clear to every right-thinking person that one cannot simply and categorically oppose “revolution” to “counterrevolution” on the prior assumption that the one is a healthy manifestation and the other a morbid one. Nowadays one often hears that revolution means “swimming with the tide,” or “riding the wheels of history,” while counterrevolution is reaction, movement against the tide, “reversing the wheels of history.” How unfounded all this is, and yet how strongly lodged it has become in so many heads! But meanwhile, can one apply this “axiom” to the communist revolution in Russia, or to the fascist counterrevolution in Italy? Obviously not. Fascism is certainly a reaction to Bolshevism, but full of energy. There are reactions and reactions. There are pernicious reactions and creative ones. In a creative reaction life throws off the wrongs and the falsehoods of revolution and shows other ways to well-being and prosperity.
The Russian healthy reaction will shed the whole revolutionary husk that is impeding Russia’s development. But that’s not all. It will have to take over and assimilate the new ruling class and the milieu on which it draws. Of course the purulent communist pustule will have to be lanced: the higher-ups of this internationalist party (alien by blood) will be pruned cleanly away. For this no special laws need be passed; the elimination of this clique will simply happen. But the broad body of the ruling class, the whole executive component, the “actual heros” who find resonance among the people—they will stay.75
This warped and woolly revanchiste fantasy is, sadly, an indispensable document for understanding the composer of Svadebka, for it shows how the nostalgic utopianism of the Russian émigré right modulated into a barbaric futuristic utopianism (still alarmingly tinged with anti-Semitism) that unwittingly aped its adversary (not for nothing did the Eurasianists acquire the sobriquet “national Bolsheviks” in the 1930s), and that, no longer seeking its validation except delusionally in Russian history or pseudohistory, sought it, rather, in the fascist renewal of Italy. The human pleroma, the symphonic society of the Eurasianist dream, would be enforced—no longer pre-cognitively—with big sticks. The vision was no longer of a pristine society but of a cleansed one.
The Eurasianist trajectory described here was Stravinsky’s, too. Enthusiasm for Mussolini peeps indirectly through the lines of Chroniques de ma vie, when, speaking of his “traditional” Russian attachment to Italy, he gives it a contemporary political twist by lauding “the marvelous regenerative effort which has manifested itself there for the last ten years, and is still manifesting itself in every direction.”76 This was the tip of an iceberg. Enthusiasm had already erupted in full cry when the composer told a Rome newspaperman, right before an audience with the Duce in 1930,
I don’t believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I. To me, he is the one man who counts nowadays in the whole world. I have traveled a great deal: I know many exalted personages, and my artist’s mind does not shrink from political and social issues. Well, after having seen so many events and so many more or less representative men, I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the savior of Italy and—let us hope—the world.77
A year later, Stravinsky allowed himself to be described in print by Arthur Lourie, who had previously touted him in the Eurasianist press and who was then serving (much as Robert Craft would later do) as his live-in musical factotum and publicist, as being the “dictator of the reaction against the anarchy into which modernism degenerated.”78 Stravinsky had consciously cast himself as the Mussolini of music, who wanted to do for modern music what the Duce promised to do for modern Europe.79 This was the subtext and the motivation for his “neoclassicism.”80
Of course enthusiasm for Mussolini or a profession of fascist sympathies in the 1920s should not be confused with what a similar enthusiasm for Hitler, or a similar profession, would have implied a decade later, let alone two. In the decade and a half between his accession to power and the establishment of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Mussolini had many enthusiasts, among them Wallace Stevens, Bernard Shaw, even Winston Churchill. Until 1935, the fascist state did not begin to bear out Karsavin’s prognostication that it would turn imperialist. Until 1938, fascism had no necessary racist component, and the institution of racist laws in that year was a concession to the Axis ally, not a matter of fascist doctrine. One still occasionally encounters nostalgia for the “pure” fascism of the 1920s—a “comprehensive rightist doctrine” and an “intellectual reservoir” as yet unpolluted “by World War II, Vichy, Nazism, and the Holocaust”—in the writings of conservative communitarians discouraged at the splintered condition of the contemporary intellectual right.81 This sort of fascism was the “aesthetic” sort—fascism as a fantasy, not a clanking state bureaucracy, and a fascism without consequences. It was the sort of fascism that attracted many modern artists along with intellectuals and dreamy revanchists.82
Nor did the Mussolini regime’s arts policy in any way discourage such an attraction. Unlike the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes, the fascist state did not (at first) exercise totalitarian control over the arts; repressions were few.83 Quite the contrary: cooperative artists enjoyed a bottomless feeding trough, modernists emphatically included. Mussolini was proud to have Italy play host to international festivals of contemporary music such as the one at which Stravinsky performed his Sonate, festivals at which every modern master was persona grata. Fascist cultural bureaucrats were as philistine as their counterparts anywhere, authoring blustery, well-publicized manifestos against “atonal and polytonal honking” and “so-called objective music.”84 And yet Schoenberg, atonal honker par excellence, toured Italy with Pierrot lunaire in 1924, and his music continued to be performed there under prestigious auspices until 1938, five years after the composer had been forced to leave Germany. Alban Berg’s concert aria Der Wein had its Italian première at the Venice Biennale in 1934 (the composer, in attendance, was loudly feted). Wozzeck was given at the Rome Opera as unbelievably late as 1942.85
Also performed during that wartime season was The Miraculous Mandarin, a ballet by Bartók, easily the most outspoken antifascist among modernists, who by then had for two years been a voluntary exile from Europe. These examples of artistic tolerance, moreover, were more than matched by the racial tolerance that the fascist government quite demonstratively exhibited, in distinction to Germany, until 1938. Refugees from Hitler like Bruno Walter or Otto Klemperer regularly performed in Mussolini’s Italy; and Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service, a setting of the Reform Jewish liturgy, had its world première over Radio Turin in 1934.86 The original fascist movement had numerous Jewish adherents, some even occupying positions of leadership, who saw no conflict in their allegiance to Mussolini, and had no premonition of any anti-Semitic policy turn.
But like his Eurasianist counterparts, Stravinsky was well ahead of Italian public policy in this regard. His anti-Semitism was of long standing and went deep. To be sure, it is something he shared with Glinka, Balakirev, Chaikovsky, Musorgsky, and a whole honor roll of musical Russians.87 It has been characterized as no more than what every Russian “imbibed with mother’s milk.”88 And yet, like everything else about Stravinsky, it had its unique characteristics and foundations, and deserves investigation.
The existence of honorable exceptions is enough to justify the conviction that, however widespread among Russians or any other group, anti-Semitism remains an individual choice. As long as one can point to plausible counterparts—Nabokov (like Stravinsky an aristocrat) or Shostakovich, to give two pertinent examples—who did not so opt, one must admit that anti-Semitism is something for which the individual bears responsibility.
In Stravinsky’s case the matter is especially poignant; for the one who did not so opt was little short of a surrogate father to him, and a man who exercised in most other ways the most powerful formative influence on Stravinsky’s early development. Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov happened to come from a purebred Russian line more ancient and distinguished than Stravinsky’s by far.89 And yet despite his arms-cum-gentry background, Stravinsky’s teacher was a lifelong liberal and freethinker, strongly drawn to the Masons. (Compare Stravinsky, in a 1930 letter to his patron, Werner Reinhart: “I had never realized that you were not indifferent to these antichrists, or to the international Jewry to whom the Freemasons are servants.”)90 Rimsky’s liberalism was tested and genuine: for his support of the student strikes of 1905 he was suspended from his post at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and became the focus of a cause célèbre. As for tolerance of Jews, he demonstrated it in a proverbial way: he encouraged, indeed practically forced his daughter Nadezhda to marry one.
The Jew in question, Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946), is a key to understanding Stravinsky’s later enthusiastic anti-Semitism. He hailed from Vilna (now Vilnius, the capital of the independent state of Lithuania), then one of the larger Polish cities in the Jewish pale of settlement, and its main educational center. His father, Osey (Hosea) Steinberg, was a leading Hebraist, the head of the Jewish Teachers’ College in Vilna, and the compiler of a biblical dictionary that went through many editions. (His annotated Hebrew/Russian Pentateuch was the last Jewish Bible to be published in Russia until the end of Soviet power.)91
Maximilian Steinberg was sent to St. Petersburg University in 1901 to pursue what we would now call a premed course. (He graduated in 1906 with a gold medal in biology.) At the same time he entered the conservatory, where he was put in Lyadov’s elementary harmony class. (All his hometown training, typically, had been in playing the violin.) By the fall of 1903 he was ready for Rimsky-Korsakov’s counterpoint class, and continued with Rimsky into fugue and practical composition. He quickly became the teacher’s pet. Moving on to Glazunov’s orchestration class, Steinberg made another conquest (which earns Glazunov, too, high marks for tolerance). By 1906 he had become one of the select few who were privileged to associate with their conservatory professors outside of the classroom. In this way Steinberg became acquainted with Igor Stravinsky, the Rimsky-Korsakov family mascot, then undergoing his course of pampered private instruction.
Together with Mikhail Gnesin, another Jewish boy from the pale (Stravinsky’s preposterous late recollection of Gnesin—very much an “enlightened” and assimilated Jew—as one who dressed in Hasidic garb will bring a choice scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall to mind),92 Steinberg and Stravinsky formed a recognized troika of late Rimsky-Korsakov protégés. But Steinberg very quickly became first among equals. Marks of special favor were plentiful, and, to Stravinsky, humiliating. Steinberg heard the kind of unqualified praise from Rimsky that Stravinsky never got to hear; he broke into print earlier; his early works were performed under more prestigious auspices.93 On top of everything, he married Nadezhda Nikolayevna (Robert Craft has speculated with good reason about a possible earlier romantic link between her and Stravinsky),94 and inherited Rimsky’s conservatory position. (He would hold it until his death in Stalin’s Leningrad, thirty-eight years later.)
After Rimsky’s death, Steinberg’s favored status continued with Glazunov, who held Stravinsky in outright (and later, of course, amply reciprocated) contempt. In the eight months between the loss of his teacher and his discovery by Diaghilev, Stravinsky found himself frozen out of the inner circles of the latter-day “New Russian school” while Steinberg continued to prosper. It was a time of major psychological stress, a crisis he never forgot, or forgave.95
On the surface, relations between Steinberg and Stravinsky were cordial, even fraternal at this time, and would continue to be so in tutoyer correspondence throughout the years of Stravinsky’s early successes in Paris.96 But no amount of success could ever assuage the envy a musical scion of the Polish nobility felt toward this upstart Vilna Jew who had displaced him in Rimsky’s esteem and in his ménage. More than half a century after Rimsky’s death—and sixteen years after Steinberg’s own—that envy was still consuming him when Stravinsky wrote of his old rival as “one of these ephemeral, prize-winning, front-page types, in whose eyes conceit for ever burns, like an electric light in daytime.”97 These feelings lay behind Stravinsky’s modernist revolt and his anti-Semitism alike, fanned them both, and linked them.
Derision of Jews—silently expunged (both by Robert Craft and by Soviet editors) for public consumption—was a lifelong feature of Stravinsky’s private correspondence, especially with other Russians.98 A 1919 letter quoted in an auction catalog complains about a New York production of Petrushka by a trio of unauthorized “Israelites” (one of them Pierre Monteux, to whose efforts Stravinsky owed a large part of his early fame), heaping special scorn on the “horrible Jew-kraut sets” (des horribles décors judéo-boches).99 Like the Eurasianists, Stravinsky tended to lump his antipathies. He resented the Bolshevik revolution as a Jewish plague, the work of “Braunstein” (Trotsky); to an American correspondent he vented his indignation that such Jew-revolutionists are taken for “authentic” Russians.100
Even in America, after the Second World War, by which time his political attitudes had mellowed in the California sun (“As far as I am concerned, they can have their Marshals and Fuehrers,” he remarked to Nicolas Nabokov in 1947; “Leave me Mr. Truman and I’m quite satisfied”),101 and despite his benevolent relations with individual Jews (notably a whole “Boston school” of young composers—Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Lukas Foss—who idolized him), Stravinsky retained his accustomed contempt for Jews as a group. When Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s last premier danseur, was picketed in New York for his collaborationist activities in wartime Paris, Stravinsky wrote disdainfully to Craft that “if there were some intelligent Jews picketing before Lifar not for his ‘fascism’ (or, later on, ‘communism,’ about which they are silent of course), but for his quite obvious want of talent, I would gladly change my mind about Jews.”102
Stravinsky’s initial reaction to the advent of Nazism was to write to his Russian publisher, Serge Koussevitzky’s Russischer Musikverlag, with offices in Berlin, that he was “surprised to have received no proposals from Germany for next season, since my negative attitude toward communism and Judaism—not to put it in stronger terms—is a matter of common knowledge.”103 When active persecutions began, Stravinsky’s attitude continued to combine opportunism with disdain for the victims. He wrote again to his Russian publisher for advice: “Is it politically wise vis-à-vis Germany to identify myself with Jews like Klemperer and Walter, who are being exiled? ... I do not want to risk seeing my name beside such trash as Milhaud.”104 Immediately on completing his Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, which he wrote as a performance vehicle for himself and his son Sviatoslav (Soulima), Stravinsky tried to arrange a German tour for the work, assuring his German publisher, B. Schotts Söhne, that “I would be so happy to resume my musical relations with Germany.”105
When the Nazi authorities, acting on a reasonable assumption with regard to a Slav-blooded naturalized Parisian, made Stravinsky and his work an exhibit in the notorious “Entartete Musik” (Degenerate Music) display at Düsseldorf in May 1938, the mortified composer, through Schott, protested his inclusion to the German Bureau of Foreign Affairs, explicitly disavowing “Jewish cultural Bolshevism” and objecting in particular to the caption that had been placed under his well-known portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche: “Whoever invented the story that Stravinsky is descended from Russian noble stock?” As he had previously taken the precaution (as early as the spring of 1933) of submitting an affidavit to his publisher in lieu of the Reichsmusik-kammer’s official questionnaire establishing Aryan heredity (and as the publisher had placed an item in the papers quoting Richard Strauss on Stravinsky’s enthusiasm for Hitler’s ideas), he was able to receive the satisfaction of a declaration from the German government affirming its “benevolent neutrality” toward him, and his career suffered no further setbacks in the Third Reich until the war.106
Stravinsky came to the German capital the same year and recorded his ballet Jeu de cartes with the ganz judenrein Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Shortly afterward, he refused to lend his name to a committee that had been set up in Paris to help Bruno Walter, who had emigrated to France and, like Stravinsky, had received French citizenship, to form an orchestra in the French capital.107 Keeping himself persona grata in “Germany, this Germany that was always so attentive to my music” was to him a matter of paramount personal and professional concern.108
Finally, there is sad irony in the fact that the only works by Stravinsky to incorporate overtly anti-Semitic content were written in America, after the war. The texts of two late vocal works embody slurs of a familiar kind. The centerpiece of the 1952 Cantata, all the texts for which were chosen (at the compiler’s recommendation) from a little group of “Anonymous Lyrics and Songs” in W. H. Auden’s anthology Poets of the English Language (New York: Viking Portable Library, 1950, with Norman Holmes Pearson), is a ricercar to a fifteenth-century “sacred history” (as adapted by a nineteenth-century editor), entitled “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.” A song of Christ’s crucifixion, it rehearses the old guilt libel, after Hitler more intolerable than ever: “The Jews on me they made great suit, / And with me made great variance, / Because they lov’d the darkness rather than light.” The “Narrative” in A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer (1961), for which Robert Craft selected the texts, is an excerpt from the Book of Acts that relates the stoning of St. Stephen, including Stephen’s address to the High Priest of the Temple (chapter 6, verses 51-52): “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One.”
It is not that Stravinsky chose these texts for the sake of the anti-Semitic slurs; it is, rather, that for him, after a lifetime of contemning the Jews, the anti-Semitic content was no object. Indeed, it must have been scarcely noticeable to him, for he inscribed a score of the Jew-libeling Cantata in August 1953 to Otto Klemperer, his Los Angeles neighbor in the 1940s, a Hitler refugee with whom Stravinsky had made scant common cause in the thirties. 109 By 1953, the moral implications of setting of such a text, and presenting it to a Jew, had doubtless been occluded by the burgeoning discourse of “music itself.” Stravinsky by then was only one of many who placed beauty beyond good and evil; only one of many to endorse the implicit claim—still fashionable, alas—that artists are entitled to moral indifference, and that the greater the artist the greater the entitlement. It is a view that has greatly diminished the art of the twentieth century—not in “quality” (however that may be measured) but in value; and it has diminished the humanity of artists and art lovers. The prestige of high art has accordingly, and justifiably, declined in our time.
UNIVERSALIZING THE RUSSIAN
It would be anachronistic, as well as arbitrarily invidious, to claim that the subject matter of the foregoing cheerless discussion were all part of the immediate subtext to Svadebka. It is, rather, the long-lingering echo of that subtext. The critical problem, for those troubled by the subtext and its implications, is the way in which what troubles us (if we allow ourselves, or force ourselves, to pay it heed) has contributed to the artistic achievement we treasure. Without the Utopian social vision in all its reactionary severity, and the urge to give it the kind of vicarious fulfillment that art can supply, it is unlikely that Stravinsky would have found it necessary to devise the all-encompassing, all-uniting scheme of Russo-Eurasian tonal relations that so distinguishes Svadebka not only from the surfacey work of its many imitators but also from Stravinsky’s own earlier neonationalist ventures. Without that scheme, there would not be that quality of rigorous construction that so attracts the sophisticated ear and tantalizes the analytical intelligence. And that quality, despite all their ostensible differences of style, aesthetic, and motivation, is what Stravinsky’s pleromic art so notably shares with Scriabin’s. It begins to suggest the special blind and blinding Russian predilections—for the maximal, the single, the supernal—that ally them beneath or behind their openly declared antagonisms, and that give them their enduring, unsettling power over our imaginations, resist it as we may.
What makes Svadebka not merely the culmination but the crisis of Stravinsky’s “Russian” period, and arguably his creative acme, is the fact that, even before the means of its explication were recovered (a process of that for all practical purposes began only with Berger’s potent inferences in the 1960s), it so clearly possessed a “background,” hence a syntax, a language, a structure. The relationship between background and surface in Stravinsky is far more diverse and dialectical (hence, for some, more interesting) than the one governing Scriabin’s more singleminded and limited (hence, for some, more adequate) syntax. In both cases, however, the artistic qualities of the music, however narrowly they may be defined or evaluated, are decisively—indeed, internally—connected with its conceptual metaphors. In Scriabin’s case these metaphors were overtly and transcendently spiritual; in Stravinsky’s, they were tacitly sociopolitical, but with a no less transcendent spiritual component, albeit a more orthodox one. More palpable than in any other Stravinsky composition, perhaps, is the absence in Svadebka of any line dividing “the music itself” from “the extramusical.”
Unless, of course, we insist upon drawing one. Svadebka supremely crystallizes in music what has emerged as a dire crux in twentieth-century aesthetics: the symbiosis of beautiful art and ugly politics. Any easy assumption that we can vote for the art while rejecting (or ignoring) the politics is heedless of the price that the sanitizing process exacts: the art is drastically reduced as the other is syphoned off. Leonard Bernstein, with the best of anticensorial intentions, pled for the reduction: “The ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ may have been a Nazi hymn,” he argued, “but divorced from its words it’s just a pretty song.”110 Exactly so. But is that the level to which we would like to see works of art like Svadebka reduced?
I would argue, on the contrary, that those of us (those non-Eurasianists, that is) who place Svadebka above the level of just a pretty song, who react to it with gooseflesh and to an exceptional performance with tears, are responding to more than a potent aural stimulus or a novel, ingenious patterning of sound. It is precisely the recognition of the danger in the work’s allure, the heart of darkness that lurks behind and conditions its gravely joyous affirmations, that so intensifies reaction. The ballet, especially as originally staged, speaks to the Utopian that lives within each of us, nostalgic for a past that never was, desirous of a future harmony that can never be achieved within the parameters of what we recognize as human justice. The wrenching conflict between Svadebka’s enrapturing, consummately realized aesthetics and our unsexy, unmagical, and often unsatisfying ethical allegiances is what renders us, precisely because of its alienness to the values we have learned to cherish as our heritage, so piercingly alive to the work. And it is what has kept the work so powerfully alive in repertoire despite its cumbersome, nonstandard performance medium and its enormous textual difficulties.
But this is only another way of delineating Svadebka’s (and Stravinsky’s) alienness to the panromanogermanic world—our world, for better or worse—that they so decisively, if vicariously, conquered and transformed. No one ever came closer to realizing the goals of Eurasianism than did Stravinsky, and nowhere did he ever come closer to the core tenets of the movement than in this ballet, this implied call to Russianize and orthodoxly Christianize the world in response to Russia’s capitulation to the modern, atheistic, positivistic, “European” (yes, Jewish) heresy of Marxism.
As Prince Trubetskoy had put it in “Us and Them,” the most bilious and provocative of all his essays, Bolshevik “construction” meant “the transfer to Russian soil of yet even more and newer elements of Romano-Germanic civilization, and for Eurasians the least palatable ones of all, since they carry with them the manifest symptoms of Romano-Germanic civilization’s decline and fall.”111 “The communist Bacchanalia,” wrote Pyotr Savitsky, grimly italicizing every word, “has arrived in Russia as the culmination of more than two centuries of ‘Europeanization. ‘ “112 Defeating communism meant defeating “Europe,” and defeating Europe would save not only Russia, and not only Europe, but the world.
This—”to emancipate the world from its slavery to the latest Romano-Germanic fashion”113—was Russia’s true historical mission. Eurasianism was its vanguard. It fell to Stravinsky, with Svadebka, hugely influential as it as been on Romano-Germanic musicians, actually to accomplish within the world of art what Eurasianists whose activities were confined to the world at large could only dream about. For the critic Emile Vuillermoz, on the romance side, Stravinsky’s Turanian marvel was “that dazzling meteor that crosses our Western sky,” spreading a fecundating “dynamic influence.”114 “I love and admire Stravinsky,” chimed Satie, in the year of the Svadebka première, and in terms virtually borrowed from the Eurasianist vocabulary, “because I perceive also that he is a liberator.”115 For Carl Orff, on the Germanic side, Svadebka was nothing less than the wellspring of a lifelong career as bard of Aryan neoprimitivism. It was Stravinsky, of all Russians, who did the most to turn the tables on Romano-Germanic hegemony, to stem the tide of what he would later call “defilement of the true foundations of culture.”116
But these are ends that cannot be met unless Svadebka’s own dialectical nature—that is to say, the presence within it of its own Romano-Germanic component—is recognized and respected. That component is the performing medium. Stravinsky’s invented peasant lore was meant to be filtered through the familiar, unmarked timbres of “normal,” cultivated Western voices, voices with which normal, cultivated Western listeners can identify without any special reflection. The familiarly human vocal presence effectively channels the subversive antihumanistic message of the music. The recent tendency to perform the work with “authentically” ethnic (read: exotic) voices works against the threatened universalization of the Russian. Far from enhancing communication, it mutes or at least moderates the vital, disquieting subtext. What is enhanced, ironically, is “the music itself.”
And that seems, after all, to be the intention. Dmitry Pokrovsky, the expert Russian folklorist and performer whose ensemble has recorded a dazzlingly proficient exotic reading of this type,117 rejects the notion that Svadebka embodies a social or political agenda with a plea that has an oddly familiar ring: “After so many years of Soviet rule, I’m uncomfortable with this kind of interpretation,” he has told an interviewer. Instead, he has suggested, Stravinsky’s neonationalism and neoprimitivism exemplify “a desire to present an unbiased view” of “the customs of societies based on mythological consciousness.”118 It is hard to square this view either with the composer’s intentions or with his achievement, given what we know of the boldly tendentious creative hand that shaped Svadebka, and the extent of his knowing divergence from his folk sources. Pokrovsky’s conception of the work testifies, rather, to the aesthetics and the politics of a later age, described in the earlier part of this chapter—aesthetics and politics that an older Stravinsky, no longer the one who composed Svadebka, was happy to endorse.
One of the very last writings to be published over Stravinsky’s byline was an account, written for the program book of its “première” performance under Craft, of the most folklike preliminary scoring of Svadebka, the one with cimbaloms, pianola, harmonium, and percussion, that is complete through the end of the second tableau.119 This version, “the most extensive of the abandoned ones” as the author of the late writeup termed it, was also, in his opinion, “the most authentic, more so in some ways than the final score which, though streamlined, stronger in volume, and instrumentally more homogeneous, is also, partly for the same reasons, something of a simplification.”120 These pronouncements make especially vivid the aesthetic gulf that separated the Stravinsky who wrote them—an Americanized serial composer who fetishized reconditeness and complexity after the academic fashion of those days121—from the Stravinsky who wrote Svadebka, who understood, better than any other composer then or since, the terrible power of simplification (uproshcheniye). What the Stravinsky who wrote in 1968 had forgotten was that in 1923 the simplification was the end, the rest the means.
What the Stravinsky who wrote Svadebka actually desired is accurately measured by the work’s creative history, a history of progressive abstraction in which the folk specifics were further attenuated at every stage. Bronislava Nijinska, who choreographed Svadebka for Diaghilev, understood how this attenuation magnified the work’s communicative power, and did everything she could to abet it, astonishing even Diaghilev in the process, as she recalled in a memoir of their first consultation:
“Bronia, are you ready to begin rehearsing this ballet? How do you see it? You remember the first scene. We are in the house of the bride. She sits in a big Russian armchair to one side of the stage, while her friends comb and plait her hair.” “No, Sergei Pavlovich,” I interrupted, “there must be no armchair, no comb and no hair!” I took a sheet of paper and sketched the bride with plaits three meters long. Her friends holding the tresses formed a group around her. Diaghilev burst out laughing—which with him was often a sign of pleasure. “What happens next? How can the girls comb such long plaits of hair” he asked. “They won’t comb them,” I said. “Their dance on point and hers will express the rhythm of plaiting.” I went on drawing and explaining my idea of the choreography and staging. Sergei Pavlovich got more and more amused. “A Russian ballet on point!” he exclaimed.122
A Russian ballet on point implied exactly the same thing as peasant melodies from the mouths of all-purpose oratorio singers, accompanied by the most all-purpose and generalized of “Western” instrumental timbres. Nijinska had divined exactly what Stravinsky was after with his streamlined scoring, which replaced the ethnic with the “universal.” Like her, Stravinsky was now saying, Away with gusli, away with rozhki (horn bands); the timbres of my four grands will abstract and distill their essences. At this point he was after more—or rather, less—than timbres. Whereas the earlier scorings had emphasized a variegated interplay of colors and a consequently antic texture (misunderstood by the serialist Stravinsky as “elaborate figuration” and “contrapuntal tendency”), the four pianos are hitched together, like the members of a Turanian polity, in lockstep. Their deployment emphasizes doublings, and in this sense the last scoring of Svadebka was paradoxically the most “orchestral” (not to say “symphonic”!) of all. The doublings demand precision of execution, and precision demands rigidity—or, in a (Russian) word, nepodvizhnost’.
Here, too, Nijinska was clairvoyantly attuned to Stravinsky’s designs. The most uncannily moving aspect of her choreography is its parsimony of movement, which reaches an unforgettable peak in the fourth tableau, where mounting boisterousness in the pit accompanies a scene of staidly ceremonious near-immobility on stage. The stately, unsmiling final lockstep of bride and groom to the marriage bed makes supremely palpable the “profound gravity and cool inevitable intention” of characters “in the grip of remorseless, inelastic tradition.” Jeffrey Mark, in the inspired essay quoted earlier (an essay nearly coetaneous with Svadebka), had identified these as “the fundamental qualities of folk music.” In a folk singer—that is, in one through whom not a personality but a culture speaks—there is “not the faintest suggestion of the flushed cheek and the sparkling eye,” and the performance thus conveyed “is ten times the more impressive because of it.”123 That is the secret of Svadebka, the secret of nepodvizhnost’, uproshcheniye, and all the rest. In Stravinsky’s postwar masterpiece all the solid Turanian virtues reached their final conjoint apotheosis under the “universalizing” aegis of abstraction, streamlining, and simplicity.
QU’EST-CE QUE LE (NEO)CLASSICISME?
That is what “neoclassicism,” at least at first, was all about. It had nothing to do, at first, with stylistic retrospectivism or revivalism, with “returning to Bach,” or with vicarious imperial restoration. It had everything to do with a style dépouillé, a stripped-down, denuded style, and with the same antihuman-ism that had already motivated Stravinsky’s Eurasianist phase.
So we may read in the very first journalistic essay to attach the n-word to Stravinsky—the very first essay, in fact, to apply the word without irony to modern music. It was written in 1923, the year in which Svadebka was first performed, and the man who wrote it was the same Boris de Schloezer whose writings on the art of his brother-in-law, Scriabin, have been so crucial to our interpretation of its transcendence—altogether comparable, it turns out, to Stravinsky’s—of the “petty I.” Schloezer can serve us again as a uniquely qualified observer on the scene.
The most revealing aspect of Schloezer’s early exposition of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism is the work that inspired it: not Pulcinella, not the Octet, but the Symphonies d” instruments à vent, a work we now tend to look upon (and Stravinsky then surely looked upon) as the composer’s valedictory to his “Russian period,” and one we have already had cause to associate, through Karsavin’s “symphonic” metaphors, with Eurasianist ideology. Nothing could be more critical than this unexpected circumstance to our understanding of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism.
What made the Symphonies d’instruments a vent “neoclassical” for Schloezer, thence for many others, was the assumption that it was “only a system of sounds, which follow one another and group themselves according to purely musical affinities; the thought of the artist places itself only in the musical plan without ever setting foot in the domain of psychology. Emotions, feelings, desires, aspirations—this is the terrain from which he has pushed his work.”124
For all that these words might seem irrelevant to the poetic conception underlying the Symphonies d’instruments a vent (a tombeau for Debussy that, as mentioned earlier, mimics an Orthodox funeral service),125 Stravinsky lost no time in appropriating Schloezer’s view. As early as the next year he was looking back on the Symphonies as the first of his “so-called classical works.”126 Schloezer had, as it were, revealed to Stravinsky the underlying, indeed profound relationship between the Eurasianist rejection of personal “emotions, feelings, desires, and aspirations” in the name of a higher symphonic identity that had found expression in Svadebka, and the new aesthetic of abstraction that attracted not only Stravinsky but any number of rightward-leaning modernist artists to the postwar “call to order”127—a call they heeded in the name of a resurgent, reformulated “classicism.”
From this perspective the Symphonies d’instruments à vent, in which Eurasianist metaphors found a purely instrumental expression, was indeed a turning point—or could be one if its “extramusical” content were suppressed. And so, in a program note that accompanied performances of the Symphonies in the late 1920s and 1930s, Stravinsky went Schloezer one better, describing the work as entirely formalist and transcendent: no more and no less than an arrangement of “tonal masses . . . sculptured in marble ... to be regarded objectively by the ear.”128 We have witnessed the birth of “the music itself” out of the spirit of reaction.
1 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. 118; Jeffrey Mark, “The Fundamental Qualities of Folk Music,” Music and Letters 10 (1929): 287-88.
2 See his cranky remarks in the margins of Asafyev’s discussion of Svadebka (as “the embodiment of the ancient cult of fertility and reproduction”) in Kniga o Stravinskom (Leningrad: Triton, 1929), described in Robert Craft’s foreword to the English translation: Boris Asaf’yev, A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard F. French (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. xiii-xv.
3 Dahl’s description: “The bride does not sing, but wails [nepoyot, aplachot], lamenting her maiden beauty, her raven tresses, her freedom, pleading for her mother’s intercession, and so on. . . . Practically throughout Russia there is a single monotonous motive [napev], the repetition of three tones, the last being stretched out.” Vladimir Dahl, Tolkoviy slovaf zhivogo velikorusskogo yazïka (St. Petersburg, 1863-66), s.v. “plakat”‘ (to cry).
4 See Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905,” Slavic Review 36 (1977): 610-26; an exhaustive gloss on Ivanov’s phrase is given by Andrey Belïy in “Realiora” (“Na perevale, XII,” Vesé 5, no. 5 [May 1908]: 59-62).
5 Yevraziyskiy vremennik, vol. 3 (Berlin: Yevraziyskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1923), p. 5. The volume is designated “third” because it followed two other collections of Eurasianist writings— Iskhod k vostoku: Utverzhdeniya yevraziytsev (Sofia: Rossiysko-bolgarskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921) and Na putyakh (Berlin: Helicon, 1922)—but it was the first to be issued under the name (Eurasian Record) by which it would be known as a periodical journal until the end of the decade.
6 Ironically enough, the old name of the Turan steppe has been revived by the post-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, precisely so as to distance itself from the Russian-dominated Soviet Union. See, for example, “Turanbank: Integrating into the World’s Banking Community,” an advertisement in the New York Times, 2 May 1994, p. A7. (“The historic name, Turan,” it is there revealed, “is the name of the lands stretching from the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains,” which limits the term’s application to present-day Kazakh territory. “It is also the name of one of the oldest civilizations in the region.”)
7 Further on this comparison see James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 760.
8 Prince N. S. Trubetskoy, “O turanskom elemente v russkoy kul’ture,” Yevraziyskiy vremen-nik 4 (1925): 354-55; reprinted in N. S. Trubetskoy, K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya: Sbornik statei (Paris: Yevraziyskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1927), pp. 36-37. Henceforth citations to both editions will be made in the text, with dual page references.
9 The co-editors of Vyorstï were Prince Dmitriy Svyatopolk-Mirsky (who as “D. S. Mirsky” wrote the standard English-language history of Russian literature) and Sergey Efron (an unusual Eurasianist sympathizer because he was a Jew). The masthead proclaimed “the close collaboration” of such prominent émigré littérateurs as Alexey Remizov, Marina Tsvetayeva (then Efron’s wife), and the existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov.
10 Suvchinsky to Stravinsky, 21 November 1922; Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, eds., Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 658.
11 “Muzïka Stravinskogo,” Vyorsti, no. 1 (1926): 124, 126, 134.
12 Nicholas Riasanovsky, “The Emergence of Eurasianism,” California Slavic Studies 4 (1967): 47.
13 Benois to Ilya Zilbershteyn, 9 March 1959; in I. Zilbershteyn and G. Samkov, Valentin Serov v vospominaniyakh, dnevnikakh i perepiske sovremennikov, vol. 1 (Leningrad: Khudozh-nik RSFSR, 1960), p. 431.
14 There are in fact two such memoirs by him: Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), pp. 51-52; and Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 27.
15 See the introduction to Yevropa i chelovechestvo, where this foundational Eurasianist text, published in 1920, is characterized by the author as containing thoughts “that had taken shape in my consciousness ten years ago” (p. iii).
16 Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia: Studies in History, Literature and Philosophy, trans. E. and C. Paul (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1919), vol. 2, p. 259. Masaryk continues, in an explicitly gnostic (and Scriabinesque) formulation: “Even the dualism of the ego and the non-ego is to be transcended.”
17 L. P. Karsavin, Vostok, zapad i russkaya ideya (Petrograd: Academia, 1922), pp. 67-68.
18 And hence the incompatibility of Eurasianist thinking with the old Romanov dynastic slogan, enunciated under Nikolai I, of “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality,” which it superficially resembles. As the Eurasianists repeatedly pointed out, this was actually a statist doctrine that virtually turned the church into a government agency. As the living body of Christ, “the church is really everything—state and culture, religion and church, all in one” (Vostok, zapad i russkaya ideya, p. 70).
19 Ibid., pp. 70-71.
20 Ibid., p. 74.
21 L. P. Karsavin, “Osnovi politiki,” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 5 (1927): 188.
22 Ibid., p. 189.
23 Ibid., p. 191.
24 L. P. Karsavin, “Fenomenologiya revolyutsii,” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 5 (1927): 34.
25 See N. V. Gogol, Vïbranniye mesta iz perepiski s druzyami, in Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, vol. 8 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952), p. 253.
26 Yevraziystvo: Opït sistematicheskogo izlozhenii (Paris: Yevraziyskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1926), p. 43.
27 See R. Taruskin, review of Igor Stravinsky, Symphonies d’instruments à vent: Faksimileausgabe des Particells und der Partitur der Erstfassung (1920), ed. André Baltensperger and Felix Meyer, Music Library Association Notes 49 (1992-93): 1617-21; full details in R. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 1486-93.
28 “O turanskom elemente v russkoy kul’ture,” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 4 (1925): 358-59; K probleme russkogo samopoznaniya, p. 39.
29 “Verkhi i nizï, russkoy kul’turï,” Iskhod k vostoku [— Yevraziyskiy vremmenik, vol. 1] (Sofia: Rossiysko-bolgarskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1921), pp. 97-98; Kprobleme russkogo samo-poznaniya, p. 29.
30 Ibid., p. 97/29.
31 “Brut” (pseud.), “Okolo teatra,” Golos Moskvi, no. 195 (26 August/8 September 1914): 6.
32 “Raznïye izvestiya,” Russkaya muzïka,l’naya gazeta 21, no. 36-37 (7-14 September 1914), col. 714.
33 Romain Rolland, Journal des années de guerre 1914-1919 (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1952), p. 59.
34 Pyotr Savitsky, “Poddanstvo idei,” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 3 (1923): 15.
35 Yevrasiystvo: opït sistematicheskogo izlozheniya, p. 53: “After all, not only does the federal model take formal or external note of the manifold nature of Eurasian culture, it also vouchsafes its unity. It facilitates the development and flowering of individual national-cultural regions, decisively and conclusively preventing mindless Russification. This in fact advances cultural self-realization.”
36 Stravinsky’s eschewal of the standard orchestra during the Swiss years has often been viewed as an accommodation of wartime conditions, when the large orchestras of the European capitals had been decimated by conscription. Yet Stravinsky did not lack for orchestral outlets during the war. His friendship with Ernest Ansermet, who was exceedingly active all through this period—with the Kursaal orchestra at Montreux (1911-15), the Geneva Symphony Orchestra (1915-18), and finally his own Orchestre de la Suisse Romande—vouchsafed Stravinsky many orchestral performances, and even opportunities to conduct (for the first time) himself. (He led the Kursaal orchestra through a rehearsal of his early Symphony in E
in April 1914; his public podium debut was with the Geneva orchestra at a charity matinée for the Red Cross on 20 December 1915; Stravinsky conducted the 1910 Firebird Suite, plus Berceuse and Finale [see White, Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, pp. 31, 37].) Nor did the Ballets Russes cease their operations during the war. Diaghilev commissioned the Chant du rossignol while the war was raging, and Stravinsky wrote the piece in the early months of 1917, fully expecting a speedy première.
37 Ernest Ansermet to Stravinsky, 18 July 1919; quoted in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 155.
38 Letter of 6 April 1919; ibid., p. 154.
39 Letter of 23 July 1919; ibid., p. 154.
40 George Dyson, The New Music (1924), quoted in White, Stravinsky, p. 195.
41 Untitled memoir in Perspectives of New Music 9, no. 2-10, no. 1 (1971): 131 (italics added).
42 “Russkiy sezon v Parizhe,” Apollon, no. 10 (1910): 21; for a detailed discussion of neonationalism and its early impact on Stravinsky, see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, chapters 8 and 10.
43 For the concept, see “Momentform” (1960), in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentale Musik, vol. 1 (Cologne, 1963), pp. 189-210; on behalf of back-extension of the concept, see Jonathan D. Kramer, “Moment Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” Musical Quarterly 64 (1978): 177-94; on the second Piece for String Quartet, see Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, “Relationships of Symmetrical Pitch-Class Sets and Stravinsky’s Metaphor of Polarity,” Perspectives of New Music 21 (1982-83): 210-221.
44 It is reprinted in Igor Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, vol. 1, ed. Robert Craft (New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 407n.
45 Memories and Commentaries (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), p. 89. On Little Tich see Tristan Rémy, Les Clowns (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1945), pp. 376-80.
46 Selected Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 408.
47 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Themes and Episodes (New York: Knopf, 1966) p. 27.
48 For details see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 1467-73. Van den Toorn’s seminal discussion of the octatonic collections is in Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 31-60.
49 Reprinted from the Paris newspaper in White, Stravinsky, p. 210.
50 Selected Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 407n.
51 The cello’s drum pattern partakes of both tetrachords and could be said to bridge them; the viola’s drone D supports the scale segment in the first-violin tune, vouchsafing it an unmistakable tonal priority over the punctuating motif in the second.
52 When tetrachords rather than triads were the partitioning agents, Stravinsky normally preferred to use “minor” tetrachords, with the intervallic structure tone-semitone-tone (T-S-T). Two such tetrachords placed a tritone apart would together form a complete octatonic scale. Here, however, the first-violin music has been modified, perhaps in keeping with its folk source, to the configuration T-T-S, coinciding with the defining tetrachord of the major scale. Substitutions of this kind were not unprecedented even in the work of Rimsky-Korsakov.
53 Blaise Pascal, “Le Pari,” in Pensées et Opuscules (Paris: Larousse, 1934), p. 62 (quoted in the preface to this book, xxviii).
54 Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 165-67, 170; translation modified on comparison with the original (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).
55 See Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (New York: Knopf, 1967; reprint, New York: Norton, 1979), chapter 7.
56 Perhaps the most caustic of (self-)commentaries on Stravinsky’s repudiation of his own past in the wake of his “conversion” to serialism (entailing his conversion to what Prince Trubetskoy would have called “panromanogermanic chauvinism”) was his enthusiastic review, written through Robert Craft, of Kerman’s book, in which discussion is confined entirely to the late quartets, and in which Stravinsky/Craft unwittingly (or could it have even been wittingly?) assumes the very voice of Adorno, Stravinsky’s own chief detractor. (For instance: “The String Quartet was the most lucid conveyor of musical ideas ever fashioned, and the most singing—i.e., human-of instrumental means; or, rather, if it was not that natively and necessarily, Beethoven made it so.”) See “A Realm of Truth,” in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 130-42. (The quoted sentence is on p. 133; the review originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, 26 September 1968.)
57 For the full tabulation on which these figures are based, see table 4, “Svadebka: Ethnographic Sources, Action, and Musical Themes,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 1423-40.
58 Generous because to get this number the criteria of selection have been somewhat eased by comparison with those applied to the Svadebka themes. To the /0 2 5 7/ anhemitonic tetrachord played by the English horn at figure 2 a fifth note is added, turning the mode into the diatonic segment /0 2 3 5 7/ the anhemitonic trichord played by the English horn at figure 6 is compromised by a chromatic continuation after three measures; the famous ostinato figure at 14 (first prefigured fifteen measures earlier) is more often thought of as a vamp or an accompaniment than as a tune; the melody first heard at 27 in the alto flute may be classified as “embellished anhemitonic,” but the embellishing pitch is far more prominent in the melody than such pitches are anywhere in Svadebka, and the semitone is far more conspicuous. The remaining anhemitonic tunes are at figures 48, 83ff., and 121; the last, the main theme of the “Evocation des Ancêtres,” consists of a mere dyad, an oscillation of two tones a whole tone apart.
59 See R. Taruskin, “Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33 (1980): 516 (example 3); the source melody was first identified by Lawrence Morton.
60 Igor Stravinsky’s “Les Noces:” An Outline, trans. S. W. Pring (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), table of contents and p. 2. This analysis was not published in its original language until 1972 (Musorgskiy, Skryabin, Stravinskiy: Sbornik statey [Moscow: Muzïka]).
61 A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard F. French (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 129; Asafyev’s reference to “Renaissance” principles has to do with his strange conviction that Svadebka was modeled on “the old madrigal comedies of the seventeenth [sic] century (like the Amfiparnasso of Orazio Vecchi).” Alfredo Casella, too, had likened Svadebka to L’Amfiparnasso, which caused Robert Craft to wonder whether the “farfetched comparison” might not have been “suggested by Stravinsky himself, who was fond of throwing out false scents of this kind” (Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 619n.236).
62 “M’isli o religioznom penii Drevnego Vostoka: Po povodu gruzinskogo dukhovnogo kon-tserta v zale Dvoryanskogo sobraniya 16-go marta,” Rech’, no. 73 (16/29 March 1914). The clipping is in Stravinsky’s 1912-14 scrapbook, now at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel.
63 These were “Kratkiy ocherk razvitiya gruzinskoy, karatalino-kakhetinskoy, narodnoy pesni,” in Trudï muzïkal no-ètnograficheskoy komissii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Moscow University, 1906), pp. 269-344, and “Sravnitel’nïy obzor narodnoy pesni i muzïkal’nïkh instrumentov zapadnoy Gruzii (Imeretii),” in Trudï muzïkal no-ètnograficheskoy komissii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Moscow University, 1911), pp. 119-203.
64 L. S. D’yachkova and B. M. Yarustovsky, ed., I. F. Stravinskiy: Stat’i i materialï (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1973), p. 488.
65 See Victor Varunts, supplementary note to Stravinsky’s letters to his mother in Muzïkal’naya akademiya, no. 4 (1992): 118. The first page of this manuscript is illustrated in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 44, erroneously dated “c. 1904.” This date is contradicted not only by the date of Kargareteli’s publication but also by the paper Stravinsky used, which bears a Swiss watermark and which was also used for the fair copy of the Peasant Choruses of 1914-17. On the basis of these observations this Georgian transcription would most likely date from late 1916 or early 1917, when Stravinsky was hard at the fourth tableau of Svadebka.
66 David Schulenberg, “Modes, Prolongations, and Analysis,” Journal of Musicology 4 (1985-86): 324.
67 Because the pentatonic collection is a subset of the diatonic collection—that is, because every member of the pentatonic collection as represented above is included in the similar representation of the diatonic (with /2/ and /7/ left over)—it will not be necessary to refer to it separately in the discussion that follows. Anything said in the course of that discussion about the diatonic collection will be true of its subsets as well.
68 For the relevant discussion see Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone, eds., Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 130-31.
69 It is fully described and analyzed in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 1378-81.
70 For some reason Stravinsky (or more likely Craft) referred to this song in a late memoir as “a worker’s melody, a proletarian song” (Memories and Commentaries [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981], p. 97; the phrase is not found in the original edition of the book [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960]), and claimed that it had been so identified by his friend Mitusov, from whose singing he had taken it down. That Mitusov did dictate the song to Stravinsky is confirmed by the existence of a bifolium, still extant in the composer’s Basel archive, containing the transcription. And yet the song is found in an anthology—Pesni russkogo naroda (Songs of the Russian People), texts collected by Fyodor Istomin, tunes collected by Georgiy Ottonovich Dyutsh (St. Petersburg, 1886)—on which Stravinsky had already drawn for a number of earlier works, and where the song is classified as a “love song” (i.e., a wedding song). Stravinsky, who took down its words from Mitusov’s singing along with the tune, must have known that it was that. A love song belongs at the procreational climax of Svadebka. What would a “workers’ melody” have been doing there?
71 Expositions and Developments, p. 134.
72 Yakov Sadovsky, “Opponentam yevraziystva (pis’mo v redaktsiyu),” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 3 (1923): 159, 161-62.
73 Karsavin: “National ideas, ambitions, aspirations . . . gain realization not by crowds, not through mass demonstrations, popular votes, programs and principles, but by guiding spirits. . . . The results of elections to the Constituent Assembly never expressed anything of the national will, but Peter the Great, [the eighteenth-century court poet and scientist Mikhail] Lomonosov, Pushkin were authentic expressers of the national will and the national spirit. Speaking for the nation in the sobbing voice of a provincial tragedian, no Kerensky ever expressed anything national, whereas Lenin, oppressing the Russian people in the name of the International, did manage to express something, as did [the White commander] General Kornilov from the other side” (“Fenomenologiya revolyutsii,” p. 38). In fine, even Bolsheviks were preferable to constitutional liberals.
74 He wrote prophetically, eight years before the invasion of Ethiopia: “The secular cult of the nation leads to imperialism, more dangerous to the nation itself than to its neighbors, and it soon betrays itself as narcissism and worship of relative values” (review of G. Gentile, Che cosa e il fascismo: Discori e polemiche, Yevraziyskaya khronika 8 [1927]: 55). Compare Sadovsky: “Fascism might play a role of world significance if it could realize within itself an organic union of the religious and national principles. The fascist nazia deificata is not enough” (“Iz dnevnika ‘Yevraziysta,’” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 4 (1925): 404).
75 “Iz dnevnika ‘Yevraziysta,’” pp. 400-401.
76 Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), p. 270.
77 Alberto Gasco, Da Cimarosa a Stravinsky (Rome: De Santis, 1939), p. 452, quoted in Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 168. In 1935, after another audience with Mussolini, Stravinsky told reporters that he had gone so far as actually to confess his political loyalty to the Duce in person (quoted from II Piccolo, 27 May 1935, in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 552). Predictably enough, Sachs attempts to excuse Stravinsky’s attraction to Mussolini on the basis of the composer’s having been “bamboozled” by the attention paid him (Music in Fuscist Italv. p. 167). But of course attention was paid him everywhere. The same explanation, political (or “apolitical”) naivete, is dependably adduced to rationalize Prokofiev’s return to Soviet Russia, Furtwangler’s cooperation with the Nazis, and so on. But these are not explanations; they are in every case tautologies. Backing losers, or those held retrospectively in opprobrium, is merely the working definition here of political “naiveté.” If the Axis had won the war, if the world we lived in now looked more like the world Stravinsky dreamed of then. he would look shrewd enough. His biographers would now be praising his political acumen and foresight, just as revisionist biographers of Shostakovich have been doing since the proclamation of “glasnost’” (see the following chapters).
78 Arthur Lourié, Sergei Koussevitzky and His Epoch (New York: Knopf, 1931), p. 196.
79 For additional information and documentation of Stravinsky’s flirtation with fascism, see Robert Craft, “Stravinsky’s Politics: Left, Right, Left,” in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, pp. 547-58.
80 See R. Taruskin, “Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology,” 19th-century Music 15 (1992-93): 286-302, esp. pp. 297-99. The prickly Sonate for piano, the paradigmatic early neoclassic score in which Stravinsky strove more assiduously than ever as if to exemplify T. E. Hulme’s dictum that “they [who] hate the revolution . . . hate romanticism,” and to capture what Hulme called “the dry hardness which you get in the classics,” was first performed by the composer in 1925 in Venice’s Teatro La Fenice at a contemporary music festival organized “sotto il patronato di S. E. Benito Mussolini” (Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, p. 551; for the Hulme quotes see T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read [London: Kegan Paul, 1936], pp. 115, 126-27).
81 Norman F. Cantor, “The Reagan Right: No Bark, No Bite,” New York Times, 22 August 1988 (op-ed page).
82 For general considerations see Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism (New York: Macmillan, 1971), and Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
83 There was only one major repression to report where music was concerned: Gian Francesco Malipiero’s opera La favola del figlio cambiato, to a libretto by Pirandello, banned after its first Italian performance in March 1934. The episode is reminiscent of the way, two years later, Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was persecuted by the Soviets, as will be described in detail in the second major division of chapter 14. There is a circumstantial parallel insofar as prudery, so endemic to authoritarian regimes, figured in both incidents (though in the case of La favola, it was only the libretto that offended, not the music). But Malipiero’s difficulties did not come during a general reign of terror. He was not made out a scapegoat and a general example of degeneracy. The suppression of his work was not a calculated assertion of state control. His other works were not affected. Above all, unlike Shostakovich, Malipiero was not mortally threatened.
84 See Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, p. 24.
85 Ibid., pp. 135, 142, 147, 198.
86 Ibid., pp. 198, 175, 179.
87 For evidence of Glinka’s anti-Semitism and Balakirev’s, see Robert C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), pp. 83-85; for evidence of Chaikovsky’s, see P. I. Chaikovsky, Perepiska s N. F. fon-Mekk, vol. 1 (Moscow: Academia, 1934), p. 297 (letter to Nadezhda von Meek of 12 April 1878 O.S.; given abridged, but not expurgated, in “To My Best Friend”: Correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meek, 1876-1878, trans. Galina von Meek, ed. Edward Garden and Nigel Gotteri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 242; for evidence of Musorgsky’s see R. Taruskin, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University-Press, 1993), pp. 379-83.
88 Robert Craft, “Jews and Geniuses,” New York Review of Books, 16 February 1989, p. 35.
89 Rimsky-Korsakov could trace his lineage back fourteen generations, to boyars of the fourteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the Rimsky-Korsakov clan had risen to the very summit of the Russian social ladder. Yakov Nikitich Rimsky-Korsakov (1679-1734) was named vice-regent of Ingermanland, and became the first governor of St. Petersburg under Peter the Great. His son Voin Yakovlevich (1702-1757; the name Voin means warrior) was the first commander of the Russian fleet to be designated “Marshal.” His son, Pyotr Voinovich (d. 1815), the composer’s grandfather, bore the rank of lieutenant-general in the army of Alexander I, and was rewarded with a large estate in the Tikhvin district, where the composer was born. Nikolai Andreyevich was brought up in privilege; his elder brother Voin Andreyevich was the director of the Imperial Naval Academy where the composer received training for his intended career in the family tradition; and, at the outset of his musical career, he was able to exploit his court connections when it came, for example, to securing dispensations from the censor. See Andrey Nikolayevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimskiy-Korsakov: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, vol. 1 (Moscow: Ogiz/Muzgiz, 1933), pp. 5-7; N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, trans. Judah A. Joffe (London: Eulenburg Books, 1974), pp. 125-27; Tatyana Rimskaya Korsakova, “Rodoslovnaya,” Muzïkal’naya akaemiya, no. 2, special Rimsky-Korsakov issue (1994): 9-23.
90 Letter of 27 March 1930, quoted from a typescript transcription (by Robert Craft?) of translated passages suppressed from the published correspondence, kindly furnished by the late Lawrence Morton; a copy is deposited in Morton’s archive at the University of California, Los Angeles. (The Jewish-Masonic link Stravinsky assumes here follows the traditional Russian line that harks back to the venerable Tsarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and lives on in post-Soviet Russia even today, perpetuated by, among others, the anti-Semitic organization known as P amy at’.) An expurgated translation of the letter to Reinhart is in Selected Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 168.
91 Pyatiknizhiye Moiseyevo, s doslovnim russkim perevodom (Vilna: B. Tsionson, 1914).
92 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. 47.
93 For details of Steinberg’s early career as Rimsky-Korsakov protégé and his relations with Stravinsky, see Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 384-96.
94 Robert Craft, Present Perspectives (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 409.
95 For one indicative example, Steinberg received an official commission through Glazunov for a memorial composition for Rimsky-Korsakov, while Stravinsky had to write a similar piece on his own initiative and (with difficulty) arrange for its performance himself. Steinberg’s memorial, Prélude symphonique, Op. 7, was published by the Belyayev firm, of which Rimsky had been the publications director, while Stravinsky’s (the Pogrehal’naya pesn, Op. 8), remained unpublished, and in indirect consequence of the composer’s emigration, has been lost. Details in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp. 396-408.
96 For examples, see L. D’yachova, ed., I. F. Stravinskiy: Stat’i i materialï, pp. 446-47, 471, 473-74, 478-79.
97 Expositions and Developments, p. 49; the appalling outburst immediately follows the recollection that Steinberg was “the only composer I ever heard [Rimsky] refer to as talented.”
98 Robert Craft, unpublished letter to James J. Higginson of the law firm Appleton, Rice, and Perrin, 10 February 1981 ; photocopy courtesy Lawrence Morton. The letter concludes with a plea that Stravinsky’s epistolary archive be closed, at least until the deaths of his grandchildren.
99 To Misia Sert, 18 April 1919; Sotheby’s catalog “Collection Boris Kochno: Monaco, 11-12 Octobre 1991,” p. 227.
100 1 March 1919; typescript in Lawrence Morton archive, UCLA. Another document from roughly the same time is an apology to the composer from Carl van Vechten, now in the Stravinsky archive (Paul Sacher Stiftung), dated 29 February 1916: “Cher monsieur, I am very sorry that an incorrect impression crept into my book [Music after the Great War (New York: Knopf, 1915)] (I do not, however, say that you are a Jew. The line reads T do not know.’) — you may be sure, especially sorry that it annoyed you. However, as you asked me to do, I have written to the papers about the affair, and I am enclosing one of the letters” (the enclosure is not at present in the archive).
101 Nicolas Nabokov, “Christmas with Stravinsky,” in Stravinsky, ed. Edwin Corle (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1949), p. 143.
102 Letter of 8 October 1948. The letter, with the quoted passage silently deleted, is published in Robert Craft, ed., Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 346. A facsimile of the uncensored letter was displayed, and the quoted passage read, by Charles M. Joseph in “Ellipses, Exclusions, Expurgations: What Do Stravinsky’s Letters Really Say?” a paper presented at the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Pittsburgh, 7 November 1992.
103 To Fyodor Vladimirovich Weber of the Russische Musikverlag in Berlin, June 1933; typescript of suppressed passages from correspondence in the Lawrence Morton archive.
104 To Gavriyil Païchadze, Russische Musikverlag, 7 September 1933; quoted from the typescript in the Lawrence Morton archive.
105 Letter to Willy Strecker, 17 November 1935; the quoted sentence is suppressed in Craft’s edition of the letter (Selected Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 238); it was reported by the Canadian researcher Joan Evans in a paper, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany,” read at the fifty-seventh annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Chicago, 9 November 1991.
106 See Stravinsky’s correspondence with Strecker in Selected Correspondence, vol. 3, pp. 265-70; the affidavit on Aryan (and noble) heredity is included in the letter of 14 April 1933, (dated by Stravinsky “Vendredi saint”), ibid., pp. 235-36.
107 Members included Valéry, Bergson, Gide, and Giradoux. Details in the typescript in the Morton archive.
108 The quoted phrase is from Stravinsky’s letter to Strecker, 27 January 1936; it, too, was suppressed in Craft’s edition. Despite Craft’s assertion that Stravinsky’s single live appearance in Nazi Germany (the 1936 performance with Soulima of the Concerto) was made “against his will and under pressure from his German publisher” (“Jews and Geniuses,” New York Review of Books, 16 February 1989, p. 35), the letters Craft has published, even in their expurgated form, show that Stravinsky was eager to appear there right up to the war, and that his failure to do so was due to impediments not of his making. See, for example, the letter to Strecker of 3 January 1938, regarding an upcoming performance of Perséphone: “I greatly appreciate your having placed this on the program of the music festival in Baden-Baden this spring. I would certainly be even more pleased if I could conduct it myself, but after what you told me, I realize that financial difficulties would surely prevent such a possibility” (Selected Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 256).
109 See the Alain Nicolas auction catalog “Autographes-Livres-Documents” (Paris: Librairie les neuf Muses, 1993), lot no. 196.
110 Leonard Bernstein, “Wagner’s Music Isn’t Racist,” New York Times, 26 December 1991, section A (op-ed), p. 25.
111 Prince N. S. Trubetskoy, “Mï i drugiye,” Yevraziyskiy vremennik 4 (1925): 79.
112 Pyotr Savitsky, “Yevraziystvo,” ibid., p. 16.
113 P. Savitsky, “Poddanstvo ideyi,” ibid., vol. 3 (1923): 15.
114 “Noces.—Igor Strawinsky,” Revue musicale 4, no. 10 (August 1923): 69.
115 Erik Satie, “A Composer’s Conviction” (Vanity Fair, 1923), reprinted in Corle, Stravinsky, p. 31.
116 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music (1939), trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 131.
117 Elektra Nonesuch Explorer Series 9 79335-2 (one CD).
118 Joseph Horowitz, “An Interview with Dmitri Pokrovsky,” in J. Horowitz, ed., The Russian Stravinsky (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, 1994), p. 23.
119 Craft’s performance of this version, with the Gregg Smith singers and members of the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, was issued on a short-lived Columbia LP: M 33201 (1974).
120 “Svadebka (Les Noces): An Instrumentation” (signed “I. S., Zürich, October 22, 1968”), in Stravinsky and Craft, Retrospectives and Conclusions, p. 118.
121 He went on to celebrate the unfinished version’s “generally more elaborate . . . figuration” and its “contrapuntal tendency” (ibid.).
122 “Création des Noces,” in Tatiana Loguine, ed., Gontcharova et Larionov (Paris: Kinck-sieck, 1971), p. 119; quoted in Richard Buckle, Diaghilev (New York: Atheneum, 1979), pp. 410-11.
123 Mark, “The Fundamental Qualities of Folk Music,” pp. 288-90.
124 Boris de Schloezer, “La musique,” La Revue contemporaine, 1 February 1923; quoted in Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), p. 130.
125 See n. 27.
126 Letter to Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, 23 July 1924; Selected Correspondence, vol. 3, p. 83.
127 To call it by the name of Jean Cocteau’s testamentary book of essays written between 1918 and 1926: Le rappel à l’ordre (Paris, 1926), trans. Rollo Myers as A Call to Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926).
128 Quoted in Deems Taylor, “Sound—and a Little Fury” (review of the American première under Leopold Stokowski), reprinted in Of Men and Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), pp. 89-90. Taylor wrote with great percipience that “the Symphonies is, I think, reactionary music,” and that Stravinsky “is now experimenting with simplification” (p. 94).