CHAPTER 3
Music history of the second decade of the twentieth century tends to focus on two composers and two cities: Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in Paris and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) in Vienna. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when classical music had these two capitals, the world paid attention to what was going on there, especially to what was new and provocative. Perhaps it is no accident that Stravinsky and Schoenberg would emerge as the two most interesting composers of the avant-garde with works that premiered within months of each other (October 16, 1912, and May 29, 1913) and soon split the forward-thinking musical world into two opposing camps.
Although France and Austria would be enemies in the war that broke out in 1914, both countries had enormously cosmopolitan capitals that were international magnets for artists, writers, and money. What happened in those two cities was important and was covered in national and international newspapers. Quite simply, column inches needed to be filled, and there was always something worth reporting and commenting on for readers who were interested in the latest developments in music and the performing arts.
A DANCE TO END ALL DANCES
In 1907, a Russian showman, impresario, and self-described charlatan named Serge Diaghilev presented five concerts in Paris of Russian music that had never before been heard in the French capital. The next year, he went further by bringing a troupe of Russian singers and dancers, plus scenery, costumes, and a symphony orchestra, to give the first performances outside Russia of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov, electrifyingly performed by Feodor Chaliapin in the title role. And then, in 1909, he focused on ballet and changed the world of classical music and theater design forevermore. For Parisians, Russia was a far-off place, an anachronism, a semi-medieval state in the modern world. The passion, the brilliant colors with the super-realism of the graphic art and design, plus a kind of visceral dancing that was unknown to French ballet fans, made the season of the Ballets Russes an essential annual event.
For all the exoticism Russia brought to Paris, France was politically bound to it by secret treaties. The Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 protected the two countries from Germany, which was itself bound to Austria-Hungary. In addition, the 1907 Triple Entente joined the French Republic with the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as a counterweight to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Kingdom of Italy.
Perhaps we shall never know precisely how these political alliances greased the wheels that brought Diaghilev to Paris, but there is no question that a passionate affair between the two countries was cemented in the French capital during that period. The moment when Diaghilev knew he was onto something that touched the very nerves of the Parisians occurred during the 1909 season. The one-act ballet Cléopâtre, an epic tale of a deadly one-night stand with the queen of Egypt, was performed within the fantastically sensuous and opulent designs of Léon Bakst and with the full-body expressivity of semi-nude dancers that thrilled the public. Equally important was the French premiere of Act II of Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. The “Polovtsian Dances” is the centerpiece of this act, and the athleticism of the half-naked men and women, evoking primitive Russia, and its set designed by Nicolas Roerich, caused a sensation, with men from the audience excitedly storming the stage door when it was over.
The commercial value of sex and violence at the ballet was obvious to Diaghilev, and he knew what he had to do to fill his theaters. In the nineteenth century, ballet had been a woman’s world, albeit from the vantage point of men. The magical and precious prima ballerina, who appeared to be lighter than air by having a male partner behind her, controlling her gravity-defying descent from a leap, or managing the appearance of balancing her entire body on one toe, was the graceful fantasy world of classical French-Russian ballet. Now, with the Ballets Russes, women were the sexual predators, with men as their sex slaves.
In 1910, it became a man’s game, both athletic and openly sexual, when Diaghilev let his young superstar lover, Vaslav Nijinsky, choreograph Claude Debussy’s ten-minute symphonic poem Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Nijinsky created a two-dimensional ballet centered around himself as a sexually aroused faun—half man and half animal—with disjointed and ungraceful balletic movements presented in profile, seemingly lifted directly from Greek vases and Egyptian paintings. The extraordinary music from 1894 of the young Debussy—hazy and sensual—and Bakst’s untamed forest setting created multiple scandals. The first concerned the choreography itself, which in no way seemed to represent or respond to the music: it confronted it. And then there were the costumes.
The nymphs appeared in loose-fitting Greek chemises that allowed light to pass through them, giving the audience the impression of seeing naked bodies. Nijinsky wore a specially designed leotard that exposed parts of his torso, a little erect tail at the tip of his spine, horns in his wig, and purple grapes intended to lead one’s eye to his pubic area, where, it is said, he wore no supporting undergarment, exposing what one writer called his “rotundités complètement impudiques”—the shocking outline of his male genitalia just below his tights. Removing the little skirt male dancers traditionally wore had gotten Nijinsky fired the year before by Russia’s dowager empress when he did this very thing while dancing in Giselle in St. Petersburg.
Enshrouded in misty lighting, Nijinsky’s faun was an aroused, naked, alien creature encountering semi-nude nymphs in a glade at sunset. The final moment in his choreography, seen in profile, had the faun lowering his body onto a veil that had been left behind by one of the women, and slowly pressing his groin into it, as the delicate music finished—a tuned finger cymbal and harp harmonics tinkle. The faun arched his back, his mouth open. Curtain.
Riot! Press! Ticket sales! More, please! And not to mention: Sensation. Scandal. Notoriety. What followed was a tour to London and Germany. If the police were called into the hall, Nijinsky made the ending look more like “The Nap of a Faun.”
What was missing from the equation, however, was new music to accompany something really violent and/or really sexual. For sex, Diaghilev had gone to Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1888 score to Scheherazade and produced, in 1910, the most successful ballet in the history of the Ballets Russes. The sensation of this erotically charged version of Scheherazade would endure for decades, even to the point of being parodied in 1936, when George Balanchine created “The Princess Zenobia” ballet for the Broadway musical On Your Toes. For sensuality, Diaghilev turned to Ravel and the Greek myth of Daphnis and Chloe, but the 1912 audience did not care for its middle-of-the-road depiction of love in ancient Greece. If only that final, propulsive music had been choreographed as an orgiastic bacchanal, instead of a merry danse générale.
Waiting in the wings, however, was the young, smart, and aggressive Stravinsky, who had created two exotic but sexless story ballets for Diaghilev: The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911). “He is the kind of young man who steps on your foot as he kisses your hand,” Debussy said of him. Diaghilev had an instinct about where to go for what would become the apocalyptic work of its time.
Nijinsky would create the perfect response for the Parisian public’s desire for more sex and violence at the ballet, and Stravinsky, who claimed that the initiating situation came from a dream (“I had dreamed a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin dances herself to death”), would compose its score. Together with the painter and archeologist Nicolas Roerich, they would create what came to represent a time and a place: not ancient Russia, but the subconsciously untamed and voyeuristic Paris of 1913—disguised as ancient Russia—during the frenzied months preceding the outbreak of World War I. That work is Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). “The Ritual of Spring” would be a more accurate translation of the French, but “The Coronation of Spring” was the original intent of its title in Russian.
The story of Sacre is actually a series of pictures set to dance and mime, and the work’s subtitle is in fact Scenes from Pagan Russia. It takes us to primitive Russia just as spring is first sensed, arousing feelings of lust and violence among the various tribes. After a twisted and winding introduction for woodwinds and brass, the curtain parts to depict tribal behavior during daylight: an ancient soothsayer, virgins dancing, and a ritual of abduction in which groups of men seize the virgin girls. There is a springtime “round dance,” a competition of rival tribes (an early inspiration for the “Dance at the Gym” in West Side Story), and a dance of the earth. The curtain falls, and when it rises again, it is night—the night of the Great Sacrifice. We see the mystic circles of adolescent girls, an evocation of the ancestors, and finally, the old men choose a teenage virgin who is glorified and, shaking with terror, required to dance herself to death as an offering to spring.
Setting a story in ancient times and in a very foreign land was an effective device in getting past censors in Europe. An opera that took place in Spain, for example, let the composer off the hook since Spain was seen as a lawless outpost of European civilization, one that conveniently had no notable operatic tradition of its own. Thus, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Verdi’s La Forza del destino, and Bizet’s Carmen could be seen without too much official objection. Verdi had to go even farther afield in one opera (Un Ballo in maschera), moving it from Europe (Sweden) to America (Boston) to keep the audience (and the censors) in check from responding to the assassination that takes place in the last act.
Audiences, however, are not stupid, even if censors behave as if they are. The new Diaghilev ballet may have been set in ancient Russia, but it gave a bloodthirsty Europe the excitement and provocation it profoundly wanted. Its so-called scandal was its glorious success.
Describing violence had been rare in Western music, though not in drama. The most violent acts in classical drama, however, took place offstage so that the audience did not witness them. Opera plots included murder and tragedy, but the music itself did not describe them—they happened during a recitative (Handel’s Giulio Cesare) or with a single chord (Mozart’s Don Giovanni). One would not know in Verdi’s Un Ballo in maschera that the king had been stabbed from merely hearing the music—only from the text and the stage action.
All that began to change with Wagner, who was a master in terms of musical metaphor. In Tannhäuser (1845), he composed music to describe spiritual love (using a hymn tune) and invented music to describe sexual love (never before done, until his pulsing, chromatically rising music reaches a climax in the overture, before the curtain rises). Significantly enough, he added an onstage orgy for the Paris premiere on March 13, 1861, which, predictably, caused an uproar and was pulled from the stage after three performances. Historians claim the uproar had to do with Wagner putting his ballet in Act I rather than Act II, as demanded by tradition. While that may be partially true, the descriptive nature of the music, and its visual acting out, was a choice that must also be reckoned with. After all, Wagner could have written a lovely ballet in Act II as a prelude to the song contest. He did not.
Seven years earlier, Wagner had been required by his own libretto to describe an onstage murder when the giant Fafner bludgeons his brother Fasolt to death in the last scene of Das Rheingold. In three measures of unprecedented brutality played by the timpani, with support from the lower strings, Wagner once again made history. (And he never did it again, even though other characters in his Ring—Siegmund, Mime, and Siegfried—would die in full view of the audience. In Wagner’s dramaturgy, those murders are swift and done with a single stroke, and therefore are barely articulated in the orchestra.)
However, in the first decade of the twentieth century, violent actions—and their description in orchestral accompaniment—became more prominent in classical music, especially opera.
The first twentieth-century opera that joined the standard repertory was Puccini’s Tosca, which premiered in Rome on January 14, 1900. Notoriously derided by some critics, it is a masterpiece and, if one had to choose, Puccini’s greatest opera. There are many reasons for saying that, including its perfect balance between action and poetry, the brilliance of its orchestration, its tapping into a primal story of a woman who attempts to seek mercy for her brother/husband/lover from a corrupt public official/person of a higher estate, who demands sexual favors in return (see Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and the screenplay to Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be), and its basis in historical incident. For our purposes, however, it is the musical depiction of violence that marks Tosca as a prescient and particularly twentieth-century view of the folk tale.
Violence is never far from the environment of Tosca, and, unlike Beethoven’s Fidelio—which also takes place during Napoleon’s corrupt empire building—when Tosca is over, it is most definitely over. The three main characters are dead. One is stabbed and dies in paroxysms as he suffocates on his own blood, another is shot by a firing squad, and a third commits suicide by jumping off a parapet—and all of it before our eyes. In Beethoven’s hands, the corrupt official is arrested at the last minute and the husband and wife are saved, as the chorus joins in a final hymn to freedom and God’s mercy. The American musicologist Joseph Kerman famously called Tosca a “shabby little shocker,” but it is neither shabby nor little. Tosca was the first big musical shock to hit the twentieth-century stage, but it would hardly be the last.
Richard Strauss also felt the tug to compose two operas in which violence is a main component: Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909). Strauss had honed his abilities to describe objects, characters, and natural occurrences in his tone poems (composed in the previous century) and was universally viewed as Wagner’s heir even before he began to compose operas. Salome reaches its grisly climax with an offstage beheading of John the Baptist in which the orchestra describes the sound of his head falling to the ground, followed by a sex scene with his dismembered head and the crushing to death of the teenage girl under the weight of Roman shields—with clarinets squealing like a slaughtered pig, brass fanfares, and the percussion section taking its cue from the bludgeoning of Fasolt in Wagner’s Das Rheingold. And, as in Tosca, the curtain falls immediately upon her death. There is no epilogue, just a shocking execution performed in full view of the audience.
Elektra is different since it is based on Sophocles’ play in which murder is a purifying act that cleanses the House of Atreus. As in all Greek drama, the murders take place offstage, but the brutality of the twentieth-century orchestral description—and the screams of the victims—were without precedent on the musical stage. And when Elektra dances herself to death before our eyes, her sister Chrysothemis calls out to their brother Orestes while battering the doors of the palace. There is no answer—only a violently triumphant C major, punctuated by a repeated three-note rhythmic figure played with maximum strength by the percussion section. Again, as with Tosca and Salome, there is no comment at the end, only a shocking death.
EDGING CLOSER TO WAR
All of this brings us to Paris in 1913 and the eagerly anticipated return of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. For the new season, the company took up residence in a brand-new theater, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Modern and considered profoundly “un-French” (read “German”), this theater was at the cutting edge of contemporary design. The two world premieres of that season are emblematic of the aesthetic split in Europe of that time. On opening night of the new season, May 15, 1913, Debussy’s Jeux (Games) received its world premiere. Exactly two weeks later, the very same company presented the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps. Each of these premieres was nestled (perhaps “hidden” is a better word) between other works on the program that were already known to Parisian audiences.
Stravinsky admired Debussy and had sought his approval. Debussy was never sure of this young man from Russia. After the premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird in 1910, Debussy, when asked what he thought, said, “One has to start somewhere.” Stravinsky had practically quoted the French master’s description of clouds (Nuages) in the opening bars of his opera The Nightingale (begun in 1908). And when Stravinsky had completed a four-hand piano version of Sacre, he brought it to Debussy and the two sat at the piano and played it, with Debussy sight-reading the lower part.
Jeux and Sacre would be presented by the same company, on the same stage, with the same conductor (Pierre Monteux), and choreographed by the same man—Vaslav Nijinsky. But that is where the similarity ends.
Unlike Sacre, which the program stated takes place in “ancient Russia,” Jeux is set in the future. The diaphanous and mysterious opening chords alternate with a foreign-sounding rhythmic figure that predicts an unusual series of games—“foreign-sounding” because the rhythm is colored by non-Western percussion sounds—xylophone, suspended cymbal, and tambourine—which playfully answer the “normal” and ethereal sounds of Debussy’s trademark orchestral palette. All settles back down again as the curtain rises on a park at sunset—modeled on London’s Bedford Square—and the last “natural” light that we shall see. A startling visual image playfully intrudes on Debussy’s and designer Léon Bakst’s aural and visual environment: a tennis ball arcs through the sky from the right, bounces on the stage, and then disappears to the left. A team of elephants could not be more shocking, and because of the surprise, the audience laughs. The games have begun.
The original scenario for Jeux was a playful erotic encounter of three people (two women and a man) dressed in tennis attire under the unnatural electric lights that had only recently been installed in London’s public parks. If one reads the printed text in the published piano score, the climax of the work was to be a triple kiss, interrupted by a second tennis ball that bounced onstage, causing the three to run away into the night. Debussy composed a score that is atmospheric and sensual, with a quotation of the fundamental love motif used in Wagner’s Ring cycle that is harmonized and distended into something far more sexual and predatory than any version of it in Wagner’s original setting. Debussy hated violence and was horrified that Stravinsky and others of his generation saw the possibility of an impending war as something that might cleanse European civilization. Stravinsky was quoted in a French magazine at the time saying that war would be a good thing since it would purge society of its weaker elements, leaving the world a stronger place. He was not alone in this sentiment. It was, after all, a fundamental part of the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto del futurismo (Futurist Manifesto) of 1909.
In point of fact, Nijinsky, who was simultaneously choreographing both Jeux and Sacre, was equally uncomfortable with violence, and, as he set Debussy’s music with his developing choreography, something in his plan changed dramatically. The climax would no longer be a sexual one. That climactic moment, preserved in the drawings, paintings, photographs, and reviews of the time, is a pristine and symmetrical joining of the man (Nijinsky) with the two women standing on either side of him, their arms entwined like a Greek statue.
What precedes this moment is a series of panic gestures of the two women and the man, who at one point falls to the ground as the three try to dance a waltz together.
The music may have originally been meant to describe the sexual arousal of the three, but in fact the rising emotions in the completed ballet are of foreboding and protection.
The second tennis ball is not the discovery of the three in flagrante delicto, but something more like a shocking attack from above. Originally, Nijinsky had spoken of an airplane crashing upstage, and Diaghilev and others thought it was just some incipient madness on the dancer’s part.
Nijinsky, perhaps because he was also working on Sacre and was a profoundly sensitive man, seemed to have foreseen a war that would leave one man alive for every two women in the belligerent countries when it finally ended in 1918. During the period in which he was creating Jeux, he spent a significant amount of time at the London home of Lady Ottoline Morrell. She, her husband—a distinguished member of Parliament—and her lover, Bertrand Russell, were all pacifists during the run-up to World War I. It is certainly possible that the ballet’s scenario and its visual environment were inspired by Nijinsky’s meeting the painter Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf, and intently watching the ambisexual artist Duncan Grant play tennis in Bedford Square during the Ballets Russes’ 1912 tour to London.
At the end of the ballet, the second tennis ball interrupts the three young people who are lying on the grass. The scenario indicates that they are surprised and frightened, and leap “into the depths of the nocturnal park” (“dans les profondeurs du parc nocturne”). Debussy repeats the mysterious opening harmonies and adds a murmuring figure within its orchestration. For thirty seconds—a very long time in music!—the audience watches an empty park at night, wondering perhaps at the source of this second tennis ball (Another “game”? Another voyeur [besides us]?), and also perhaps imagining what might be going on somewhere in the dark among the two women and the youth, who have discovered something about each other.
Jeux did not cause a scandal, though it surely would have had the gestures of the women (who, as the libretto states, are meeting in the park “to share confidences”) represented a consensual sexual union with the man. Anything like the final masturbatory gesture from Nijinsky’s Faun would have fulfilled and topped that particular expectation. Instead, Nijinsky created movements that were refracted gestures from playing tennis presented in symmetrical patterns. The various pairings were based on popular dance forms—the tango, the waltz, and the two-step—with influences from Cambodian ritual formations and references to classical ballets such as The Sleeping Beauty. The influences from ancient Greek and Egyptian art were intermixed with the procedures of cubism.
The set by Bakst was jungle-like, with the roots of trees exaggerated and twisted upward. In the background, a white residential building, indicating that this jungle was in the middle of a city, looked down at the park, with one open window for the unseen voyeurs—us! The three dancers were dressed in white, and Nijinsky, whose shirt was left open at the neck with sleeves rolled up, sported a bright red tie and a belt on his tennis trousers. Clearly the designs were created for a ballet about gender blending and the open relationships embraced by the Bloomsbury Group.1
The point here is that Jeux was a work that started out as a potential scandal-project enlisting the most sensual designs and music, and instead became a warning against violence. The opening night of the Ballets Russes’ 1913 season had begun with a reprise of the 1910 hit The Firebird. Jeux followed after the first interval, and the evening ended with Scheherazade, Diaghilev’s biggest hit. Surrounded by such overwhelming color and panache, Jeux was dwarfed and its importance all but lost on its glittering audience. As such, it remains relatively unknown, though its score (Debussy’s last completed orchestral score) is a masterpiece.
Two weeks later, a well-documented scandal would come to the Ballets Russes with the premiere of Le Sacre du printemps. Like Jeux, Sacre was presented between other Ballets Russes successes. The historic evening began with Les Sylphides (music by Chopin orchestrated by various composers, including Alexander Glazunov and Stravinsky). An intermission followed and a ninety-nine-piece orchestra crammed into the pit for the tumultuous world premiere of the new ballet. After Sacre, Nijinsky, who had been in the wings for his premiere, went to his dressing room, where he put on his pink leotard, pinned on the roses, and applied makeup and lipstick to appear as the erotic memory of a rose given to a young girl at her first dance.
Le Spectre de la rose (performed to Invitation to the Dance, Carl Maria von Weber’s 1819 piano piece in the 1841 orchestration by Hector Berlioz) was immediately followed by another safe and successful hit, the Polovtsian Dances, the violence of which was somewhat mitigated by its melodious nineteenth-century score by Borodin. Little attention has been given to what was danced that night after the premiere of Sacre, though it must be said that subsequent performances of the program (there were five more in Paris, before going on to London) were not greeted with whistles and the throwing of programs or the occasional fistfight of the opening-night audience. Gertrude Stein, who attended the second performance, reported a bit of noise but nothing like a “riot.” All subsequent performances, judging from the extant reportage of the time, were quiet, and in London Nijinsky thanked the public for not rioting.
A great deal has been written about Sacre, and there is no need to repeat the many stories here. While Jeux took place in the future and Sacre took place in the ancient past, both can be seen as complementary images representing Europe in 1913. Perhaps two other points should be made.
First of all, Sacre’s scandal feels more like the product of a successful public relations campaign than a reflection of its shocking artistic influence. Scandal at a world premiere was not all that unusual. The world premieres of Tosca in Rome (1900) and Madama Butterfly in Milan (1904) were greeted with demonstrations and controversy, as was that of Salome in Dresden (1905). Equally infamous were the world premieres of La Traviata in Venice (1853) and Carmen in Paris (1874). When Victor Hugo’s play Hernani was first produced at the Comédie-Française in 1830, a battle between the conservative classicists and the new iconoclastic Romanticists broke out each night in fistfights and other violent acts.
America, which usually brought the latest important works to its shores from Europe within a year—and sometimes months—took seven years to perform Sacre in concert and another five as a ballet. The so-called opening-night riot in Paris (no one was shot and no one died, but people booed and whistled) seems to have had far more to do with the ballet itself and the ballet audience’s expectations than with its music. The next year, Paris heard Sacre in concert at the Casino de Paris, again conducted by Monteux, and Stravinsky was hailed by the audience and carried through the streets of Paris (much to the annoyance of Diaghilev, who, upon learning about the police presence, said, “Our little Igor now needs a bodyguard, like a boxer”). What makes that story particularly poignant is that many of the young men who carried Stravinsky through the streets would be dead within a year, once the violence espoused by its score became a reality.
Second, and separate from the “riot,” Sacre remains a singular masterpiece. Like Tosca, Salome, and Elektra, Sacre presents violence unapologetically. At the conclusion of the ballet, the teenage girl, encircled by the old men who have chosen her, dances until her heart stops beating and drops dead. They then lift her body to the sky and there is a blackout. Under any other circumstance in Western ballet, there would have been an epilogue to justify the action. A final tableau—something like the ending of Swan Lake or the more recent Firebird—would have shown us the blessings of the sacrifice: the earth would come to life, flowers would bloom, and there would be another fruitful year, justifying this annual ritual. Mother Earth would show her pleasure and there would be a general dance. Curtain. Applause.
Nothing of the kind! The violence of Sacre is simply what it is, no further comment provided. It is an artifact of a time when many thought violence was “in the air,” and not only does it express Stravinsky’s naïve philosophy—supporting a cleansing war—it can also be seen as both accepting and encouraging what many consider the very worst in human tribal and sexist behavior.
More than 100 years after its premiere, Sacre remains the work on which Stravinsky’s fame rests (even though his sensuous and colorful Firebird is his most popular and performed work). From a personal point of view, if I may, I clearly remember how I felt while conducting it and after having conducted it. What a conductor must become in order to perform Sacre makes us find that thing in our nature we work so hard to reject as civilized human beings. After a performance in London, I decided that the work was just too terrible and that I never wished to go there or be that person again—and, it should be said, neither did the composer.
It would be hard to find an example of any other composer who, having found his or her “voice” and concomitant worldwide fame, stepped away from that voice while attempting to maintain that fame. And, in spite of all that has been written about Sacre’s influence, there are only a few works that sound anything like it—until much later, as we shall see.
Any conductor, however, who completes a performance of Sacre and smiles has no idea what this work is about. We would never accept a singer’s smile after completing Schubert’s tragic song cycle Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey), and yet Sacre has become more of a technical proving ground—the faster the better—rather than what it actually is: a terrible journey into the depths of primitive behavior.
It is true that, with Sacre, Stravinsky invented a unique and fascinating way of composing that indeed influenced other classical composers. It would be hard for a non-musician to actually hear that method without carefully being tutored in listening for it. For one thing, Sacre belies its composition at the piano. Composers who write at the piano make use of how their fingers and hands fall on the keys, which allows them to hear the music in the air rather than in their heads.
The history of how a composer gets his/her ideas and then develops them is varied and fascinating. Prokofiev, for example, was proud of the fact that his “Classical” Symphony was composed away from the keyboard. Puccini, Debussy, and Handel composed at the keyboard. Berlioz allegedly composed on the guitar.
What is clear from Sacre is that Stravinsky experimented on the piano, simultaneously playing “normal” chords with each hand but with the chords belonging to different keys. This was something like a chemistry experiment. Magnesium powder is very stable, and so is water. Put them together and you get an explosion. That’s what happens in much of Sacre, and the technical word for this kind of harmony is polytonality. In general, however, polytonal works after Sacre were comic, since the melody and the accompaniment were playing in different keys. This “wrong-note” setting is funny because it sounds like a series of mistakes made by beginning students who don’t read the key signatures or the clef in the musical notation.
Equally interesting, Stravinsky created long sections of music in the new ballet by compiling various extremely short musical motifs, or “cells,” in unpredictable, repeated patterns. This, I believe, was his way of imagining ancient music and perhaps even the way birds create patterns in their calls to each other. The music of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček is constructed this way, as is the motoric music of Bernard Herrmann’s score to the movie Psycho.
In general, however, the public awareness of Sacre had to wait until Walt Disney’s artists stripped away its original story and replaced it with nothing short of the creation of the universe and the violence of the earth’s first 300 million years (and all in less than a half-hour). After the music’s appearance in the 1940 animated feature film Fantasia, all kinds of Sacre-sounding works emerged, not necessarily in concert halls but rather in movie theaters in scores by Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams, and on Broadway, with Leonard Bernstein’s score to West Side Story—whose harmonies and orchestration on the word “somewhere” in the Act II nightmare ballet are another clear reference to Stravinsky’s tale of macho violence.
But for Stravinsky, Sacre was a self-created dead end. The reason for this, I believe, was an awareness of how utterly wrong he was about the war and, in some deep sense, an understanding of his culpability in supporting and encouraging it. As we shall see later in this book, Stravinsky, like many of his contemporaries, ultimately found his own voice—one that was uniquely his, but far less dense (read “noisy” and “brutal”) and more transparent (his chords became simpler, built with larger spaces between the notes).
After Sacre, he settled into various stylistic “periods” that included modern reinterpretations of other people’s music, his “discovery of the past”—Pulcinella (1920), Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss; 1928), Symphony in C (1940), Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960)—drawing inspiration from and featuring references to Baroque, pre-Baroque, Classical, and even Romantic composers, including lesser-known music by Tchaikovsky in which he altered “normal” chords—as if passing them before a fun-house mirror—by adding intrusive notes here and there and distorting traditional Classical rhythms. After 1918, Stravinsky’s music generally became devoid of the excessive passions depicted in his Sacre. This musical language, often referred to as neoclassicism, showed a wry sense of humor, an emotional detachment, and an occasional spirituality. Above all, it was free of overt violence, while nonetheless maintaining a complexity of rhythmic notation that is the true echo of his Sacre—one, it should be said, that is hardly noticeable to the listener but is a well-known gauntlet run by those of us who perform his music.
Stravinsky lived a very long and public life. Early on, he tried his hand at conducting, and his recorded legacy is seen by many as being the definitive interpretation of his music. While this makes a certain logical sense—the composer as interpreter of his creation—many composers are not competent conductors and their views of their own music inevitably plead a case for their works and their relevance.
Stravinsky made a good living as a conductor of his music. His various recordings of Sacre (1928, 1940, 1960) are always worth examining. Stravinsky the conductor became more secure as the years went by and orchestras became more able to play the complicated music. However, with each new recording, Stravinsky also seemed to be reinventing Sacre to fit into a changing world of aesthetics. Each subsequent recording is more and more detached due to his inflexible and unbending tempos, making it less emotionally evocative—less “Romantic,” if you will—and emphasizing its impersonal brutality.
As he stepped away from its obvious storytelling (it is, after all, based on a dreamt scene—Stravinsky’s word—and its story was developed with a visual artist, with each section having a title), he finally announced, a half-century after its premiere, that Sacre “is not a picture postcard of ancient Russia.” All of this feels like an attempt to keep the work new and in line with the intellectual assessment that “pure” music is better than programmatic music (Hanslick again, and kept current by the equally influential German, Theodor Adorno), the overwhelmingly accepted dictum during the 1960s. As described in the 2017 online Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The movement of the twentieth century was generally away from the descriptive [in classical music].” We can call it whatever we like and perform it however we want, but Sacre is a great story ballet, and its music is a titanic description of violent human behavior. Period.
Aside from the brutal power of its harmonies and massive orchestration, it is Sacre’s unpredictable rhythms that are unprecedented. When Wagner called Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 “the apotheosis of dance” in his book The Artwork of the Future (1849), he could not have known that a ballet would emerge in the future that was, in fact, the antithesis of dance music. If we describe all music as being fundamentally a song or a dance, then Sacre is the work that ends the development of dance music, because the very essence of dance—its unchanging and dependable tempo and meter—is constantly upset, fooling and challenging us, and making it impossible to predict the next strong beat.
1–2–3, 1–2–3, 1–2–3 is a waltz. It never changes. 1–2, 1–2, 1–2 is a polka or a samba. A tango stays a tango. Dance bands do not need a conductor because the leader of the band can give a short countdown (“uh–1–2–3–4”) to get it started and that’s that. However, in Sacre the pulses are so irregular that Stravinsky could play them on the piano but was unsure how to write them down. In fact, he kept rewriting the music (not how it should sound, but how to indicate that sound on paper) for decades after its 1913 premiere. Many conductors, even today, rewrite its beating patterns to make it easier for all to perform.
Here is an example of beats in the final section of the score: 1& / 1&& / 1&&/ 1&& / 1&& / 1& / 1&—2&& / 1&—2&—3& / 1&—2&—3& / 1. Earlier in the score, just before the section called “The Glorification of the Chosen One,” four timpani, a bass drum, and the entire string section playing with slashing down-bows strike eleven equal hits at maximum loudness. Why eleven, you may ask? Eleven is a prime number that cannot be grouped by the brain into repeated groups of twos, threes, or fours. Stravinsky makes his use of eleven into an ear-splitting repetitive noise that seemingly has no end—and is unprecedented as something one might call “music.” It is followed by a dance pattern (if you can call it that) that goes like this: 1&—2&& / 1&—2&& / 1&&—2&&—3&& / 1&—2&& / 1&—2&—3&&—and so forth. No listener can predict this wild and mad explosion of tribal ecstasy at having found the girl who will die. For me, those eleven hits shake my very soul, because part of me is committing a violent murderous act, while another part of me feels as if I am literally being hit eleven times. A conductor is exactly that: the one who conducts the energy of the score, leading it and being the immediate recipient of it. There is no more terrible moment for a conductor than this bar of music, because you are simultaneously the perpetrator and the victim.
Even if the world did not get a series of Sacres after 1913—the way Beethoven’s Ninth inspired so many dramatic symphonies, or Tristan’s ghost haunted so may operas and symphonic works in the decades after the opera’s premiere in 1865—Sacre can be seen as the apex of complexity in Western dance music. Many great works of dance were composed after it, but one would be hard pressed to find another masterpiece that gets anywhere near its anarchic rhythmic structures.
If Sacre brought Europe to an end point with its violent orchestration and complex dance rhythms, what about Europe’s great song tradition in the pre–World War I experimental musical world? Sacre’s place in avant-garde history has little to do with its melodies, which are made up from snippets of Russian folk tunes and a few new ones by Stravinsky. When it comes to vocal music and melody, one would have to go somewhere other than Paris for the latest experiments in music that confronted the status quo. Something equally apocalyptic was emanating from Vienna and, as one has come to expect, it created the other camp in modern music, one that dismissed Stravinsky as a creator of kitsch.
A SONG NO ONE CAN SING
It is important to remember that Vienna is at the eastern end of western Europe, and in the early twentieth century its population was a heady mix of ethnicities and influences, far more varied and “non-European” than Paris. People spoke French in Paris, which was also the official language of diplomacy. Vienna, which was the primary capital of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, had, by contrast, eleven official languages. The empire’s population included Germans, Czechs, Montenegrins, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Ukrainians, Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, Slovenes, Bosnians, Ruthenians, and Herzegovinians. Music, art, philosophies, myths, and traditions all mixed together in its capital city, which, like Paris, was a magnet for artists and intellectuals.
Following the 1867 constitution and the formation of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy—and the completion of Jewish emancipation—Jews from across the empire flooded into Vienna to take advantage of their new freedoms. As their numbers expanded (to 10 percent of the population by 1880), their success in business and the professions resulted in ever-increasing anti-Semitism, which was finally allowed official expression on March 12, 1938 with the Anschluss to Nazi Germany.
Vienna was also the city of Sigmund Freud and his discoveries of the deep and violent subconscious, the city of the distorted poetic and visual arts movement known as expressionism, and the birth city of composer Arnold Schoenberg.
Schoenberg’s early music, which was highly admired by both Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, carried on the epic sweep of late nineteenth-century Austro-German Romanticism. However, he claimed that “an inner compulsion” drove him to move further away from evolutionary developments in his music and, during 1908–09, he began writing songs that had no reference to a key whatsoever.
Just about every classical work up to that point could be said to be in a “key.” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is published as being “in C minor.” Bach’s great Mass is called “the B-Minor Mass.” Schoenberg took a step into the unknown with the setting of mystical poems by Stefan George that had no home key and could wander in a rootless metaphoric world devoid of one of the fundamental forces of nature—gravity. Soon he began writing large-scale works that continued the implications of those first steps, and ultimately became known as the leader of what is known as “The Second Viennese School”—the first being that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven from a century before.
Tonal music, which is the music we hear every day and which developed over centuries, is quite simply “normal” music—whether it is the language of a simple nursery rhyme tune, your national anthem, a song by the Beatles, a gigantic symphony by Mahler, or the score to a new video game. Throughout the centuries, classical music had stretched the tonal language of Western music to take journeys that wandered farther and farther afield, only (inevitably) to come home at the end. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Schoenberg cut the umbilicus and began writing music in which there was no “home key” to return to. And there were no rules by which to navigate a world of total harmonic freedom—which could also be perceived as harmonic chaos.
There can be no sense of home without memory, and without memory, as we well know from those suffering from dementia, there is no home. The new music was free of all rules, except it could/should NOT sound like tonal music. It was, to most people, also free of audibly perceivable structure. Without structural memory, the listener feels lost, since music is experienced through time and can only be understood if that listener can perceive and remember.
“The intentional fallacy” is a phrase that challenges the idea that an artist’s intent can be understood from a work of art, or, in the case of “the biographical fallacy,” that art is an expression of that artist’s life situation. A musician can be unhappy and yet compose “happy” music. However, Schoenberg’s life story at the time of his brave walk into weightlessness surely influenced his musical output. While it is true that his earlier, highly Romantic music was occasionally injected with surprising dissonances, a crisis in his life seems to have pushed him into a complete psychological unmooring that made his non-tonal music inevitable.
Schoenberg’s wife, Mathilde, whom he had married in 1901 and who was the mother of their two children, abandoned him in 1908 to continue an affair with a young painter named Richard Gerstl. Seen by many as the father of expressionism, Gerstl lived in the same building as the Schoenbergs, painted portraits of the family, showed a deep interest in Schoenberg’s music, and even taught the composer how to paint. Mathilde ultimately returned to her husband, presumably for the sake of their children.
On the night of November 4, 1908, during a concert of music by Schoenberg’s students to which Gerstl was not invited, the rejected twenty-five-year-old painter burned whatever he could find in his studio, stripped himself naked, and hanged and stabbed himself while watching his image reflected in a full-length mirror he had set up to view his final self-portrait.
During this period, Schoenberg, like a man possessed, wrote music. In 1909, he composed an astounding amount of it—a fifteen-part song cycle called Das Buch der hängende Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens), which tells the tale of adolescent love that ends with the departure of the young woman and the destruction of the garden; Orchesterstücke (Five Pieces for Orchestra); a one-act monodrama called Erwartung (Expectation); and a series of piano pieces, Op. 19. When there were texts to his music, the words expressed the devastation that a human being can withstand—and still live—as in his own text to Erwartung:
On the entire long road nothing lives. . . . There is no sound. . . . The wide, pale fields are without breath, as if dead. . . . No straw moves. . . . And yet, always in the city . . . no clouds, not the shadow of a night bird’s wing in the sky . . . this borderless death pallor . . . I can hardly go further.
Publicly, Schoenberg frequently spoke of this new music as “the emancipation of dissonance,” as if it were a technical achievement and not an expression of his emotional state and the total humiliation he felt. There is, to be fair, a certain disagreement about when the composer knew of the affair and kept it a painful secret. From his professorial point of view, the new music created a world in which there was no such thing as dissonance. It would have formerly been called dissonance when placed in the context of consonance or harmonious music. However, just as there is no night without day, no quiet without loud, Schoenberg believed that non-tonal music was its own complete universe of sounds in which the very concept of dissonance was inoperative—except for the fact that complex waveforms stimulate the ear, send information to our brains, and have real consequences as to whether we like them or not.
Schoenberg was already famous for his unique music when he reached a milestone with his 1912 melodrama Pierrot lunaire (Moon-struck Pierrot)—a setting of poems recited and acted out by a woman dressed as Harlequin, accompanied by a chamber orchestra hidden from the audience’s view. The sad, white-faced clown that was a common figure in pantomime and commedia dell’arte appeared in full costume speaking, singing—and sometimes shrieking—a series of poems that expressed the longing of the clown who is both moon-drunk and homesick. He has visions of being a grave robber, a blasphemer, a condemned man about to be decapitated, and a poet, crucified on his words by the public.
The work was not premiered in Vienna, but in the city that would replace Vienna in the post–World War I years as a music center—Berlin. Wherever Schoenberg’s new music was played, there were demonstrations. Six months before the famous “riot” at the 1913 world premiere of Le Sacre du printemps in Paris, Vienna had its own Skandalkonzert, also known as the Watschen-Konzert (slap concert), at the Great Hall of the Musikverein on March 31, 1913. The violent response to hearing new music by Schoenberg (his Chamber Symphony No. 1) and his students, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, led to the concert’s being terminated before its scheduled final work by Mahler, as objects were being hurled and furniture destroyed.
There were also those who passionately supported the new music. What is clear is that, no matter what side of the argument you took, everyone of importance went to experience Pierrot lunaire: Stravinsky traveled to Berlin to hear it while he was composing Sacre.
And if you did not go to Berlin, Pierrot came to you. Immediately after its premiere, the composer, his cabaret-star performer, and the little chamber orchestra traveled to no fewer than eighteen cities, including Vienna, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Hamburg, and Düsseldorf. The work received over 100 reviews, now all dutifully archived at Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center. Within a decade, it traveled throughout Europe to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, Venice, Milan, and Barcelona, and across the Atlantic to New York City. In addition to those by Schoenberg, performances were conducted by Hermann Scherchen, Darius Milhaud, Leopold Stokowski, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Stiedry, and Fritz Reiner. Even Mahler’s widow, Alma, hosted a performance in Vienna in 1923 in her home, conducted by Schoenberg, whom Mahler had seen as his musical son.
From the beginning, the new music of Schoenberg was associated with Vienna’s avant-garde, expressionism, and the theories of another Viennese Jew, Sigmund Freud, as can be gleaned from the early reviews of Pierrot. This one of the premiere, from the Berliner kleine Börsenzeitung, is succinct in its assessment. Dated October 12, 1912 and uncredited, it reads:
Songs of Pierrot lunaire. Futurism in music. An equivalent to a Kandinsky exhibition. A sad document of our times, a wish from the newly valued art and a helpless Not-to-be. The music: a chaos of dissonance; the recitation—painterly—an hysterical scream or whisper—an enraged public applauded—A sanatorium for all the futurists and their hangers-on, that’s the only way for this new art.
For all its expressivity, Schoenberg knew this new non-tonal music (and his subsequent twelve-tone music) was severely limited in what it expressed. There are no successful non-tonal comedies. There are no uplifting twelve-tone finales. His student Berg’s two operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, are about torture, murder, mental derangement, sexual obsession, and degradation.
WESTERN MUSIC’S BIG BANG
In the months just prior to the outbreak of World War I, Western classical music reached a crucial juncture: the moment when classical dance became undanceable, classical song was unsingable, and all the rules of harmony developed over 1,000 years of European culture were abandoned in two cutting-edge works that made other composers take note. Puccini, Milhaud, Gershwin, and countless others journeyed to hear Schoenberg’s daring leap into a totally new world of music. Stravinsky rejected Schoenberg and then Schoenberg rejected Stravinsky. For Stravinsky, once Schoenberg had espoused his twelve-tone procedures a decade later, his Austrian rival was more of a chemist than a composer. Schoenberg viewed Stravinsky as being superficially modern and not truly revolutionary.
Both Sacre and Pierrot lunaire, significantly, were in the service of images (visual and verbal) that attempted to recreate the mindless primitive—either through violent stage action or as a poetic journey into the darkest visions embedded in the human psyche. The overt tribal behavior of Sacre was curiously similar to the collective nightmares embedded in our subconscious as expressed in Pierrot. The civilized world was on the brink of finding out just how civilized it was, and for many writers what was new in art and music was profoundly important to our understanding of who we were and where we were going.
Pierrot and Sacre together constituted what was for many the artistic equivalent of the Big Bang, because music history is generally described as a journey toward ever greater density and complexity. Ironically, it was in 1912 that the American astronomer Vesto Slipher first observed the “redshifts” in galaxies that led to what physicists call the Big Bang. Once the musical experiments of 1912–13 reached total density of harmony and complexity of rhythm—or, at least, reached the point at which most music lovers could no longer recognize form or find beauty—classical music had coalesced into a molten pre-echo of an imminent global war that would destroy many of Europe’s long-standing structures. Music would emerge from this more-or-less simultaneous event and expand away from it in new directions throughout the century.
How are we to understand Western music after this point is reached—after two modernist composers achieved total saturation and unpredictability? Do we still adhere to the theory of ever-greater complexity, once the mind and the ear already had experienced an incomprehensible complexity in which all twelve tones of the chromatic scale could be played either simultaneously or sequentially, and dance music was possible without predictability of tempo or beat?
The concatenation that occurred just prior to World War I can still be felt more than a century later and is at the heart of what musical arbiters of taste—the academy, critics, and major institutions—consider worthy music, not only of the last century, but of this newer one. A century after Pierrot lunaire shocked the world in 1912 with its newness, British composer George Benjamin’s Written on Skin premiered, telling an adaptation of the Tristan legend of a cuckolded husband who murders his wife’s young lover and then serves her the young man’s heart for dinner. The opera was hailed as a masterpiece by the international press. Anne Midgette of the Washington Post describing its music as “mercifully free of attempts to seduce listeners with sugary melody but often fall[ing] agreeably on the ear, pulling apart textures to reveal moments of soft gentleness before piling up layers of instrumental sound, as the screws of the plot tighten, until the brassy orchestra screams aloud.”2
In 2016, Thomas Adès’s non-tonal opera The Exterminating Angel adapted the story from Luis Buñuel’s film about a dinner party in which the guests are trapped, incapable of leaving a locked room, by expressing it with ear-splitting dissonances, pounding rhythms, and extended vocal ranges that turn every vowel into “ah” and therefore render the text incomprehensible without reading it. The Los Angeles Times review by its music critic, Mark Swed, reporting from the Salzburg Festival, bore the headline “‘Exterminating Angel’ the Most Important Opera of the Year, Proves It’s Here to Stay.”
If we put aside the unquestioned priority given to the avant-garde, the next wave, and the constant re-experimentation that gets so much intellectual attention, what does the remainder look like? What would it tell us of the century that called itself modern, but may in fact have been the flowering of Romanticism in a new technological age? An equally provocative argument could be made that the great composers who entered the world’s stage as composers of enormously dense music—such as Hindemith, Weill, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Copland, and Shostakovich—moved away from their Big Bang moments to create their own twentieth-century voices that were unique, versatile, effective, successful—and superficially simpler. While it might be easy to confuse early atonal Weill with early atonal Schoenberg, and 1918 Bartók with 1916 Prokofiev—when they were experimenting and flexing their young musical muscles—there would be no confusion once they found their own voices, moving away from “having it all” and discovering that “all” was rather useless for an artist. The avant-garde, however, went on without them.
After the Great War ended in 1918, who could have imagined, among other things, that both Stravinsky and Schoenberg would live much of the rest of their lives in Los Angeles, California, writing music (and not speaking to one another!) and dying as American citizens?
And lest we forget the larger picture, Puccini, Sibelius, Strauss, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and countless others from that time, while curious about what was getting some people so excited, just continued to write their music—the music we continue to play in our concerts, perform in our opera houses, and broadcast on our classical music radio and streaming services. It is the music we all refer to simply as classical.