in orchestral works, in their symphonic poems Pelleas und Melisande and Die Seejungfrau, both from 1902–3.
In Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra the glissando is an expressionistic moan, a noise from the beyond. Ravel manages to have it both ways; his glissando in the Rapsodie has the exuberance of jazz to come, but it harbors a dangerous, drunken energy, as if the orchestra were about to be invaded by foreign hordes.
Stravinsky and the Rite
In the summer of 1891 French ships sailed into the Russian naval base at Kronstadt, to be greeted not by hostile fire but by ceremonial salutes. Tsar Alexander III, whose great-uncle had withstood the Napoleonic invasion, made a show of toasting the French sailors and listening to “La Marseillaise.” These were the first public signs of the secret military convention between France and Russia, which was ratified the following year. The pact was kept hidden, but the friendliness between the two countries played out in the public eye. When Diaghilev began presenting concerts of Russian music, in 1907, his performances were quasi-official occasions, underwritten by money from the Romanov dynasty. By 1909, Diaghilev’s relationship with the tsar’s circle had deteriorated, but by then his Paris operation—now expanded to include ballet—had won an avid following in France. Nightly attendance at the Ballets Russes replaced pilgrimages to Bayreuth as the obligatory fad among the French aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie.
When the French ships arrived in Kronstadt, one German observer skeptically wrote that the civilized French would find “few points of sympathy with barbaric Russia.” In fact, the sympathy already existed, and composers played a role in developing it. Debussy had visited Russia as early as 1881, in order to teach music to the children of the Russian music patron Nadezhda von Meck. It may have been on that trip that he first encountered the whole-tone scale, by way of the works of Mikhail Glinka. Eight years later, at a concert at the Paris Universal Exposition, Debussy fell under the spell of RimskyKorsakov, who was working with another novel mode, the octatonic scale of alternating semitones and whole tones. The speech-like vocal lines of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov influenced Debussy’s word setting in Pelléas. In the first de cade of the new century, the latest French works began traveling east. Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole, which owed much to Rimsky’s Capriccio espagnol, became a cult object among Rimsky’s students, one of whom was the young Stravinsky. Then Stravinsky came west with his Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite, and the French were bewitched by the Russians once again.
In later years, Stravinsky preferred to describe himself as a deracinated modernist, a dealer in abstraction, and went to some lengths to conceal his early folkish enthusiasms. As Richard Taruskin documents, in his huge and marvelous book Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, the composer actively suppressed information—“lied” is not too strong a word—about the source material of the Rite, claiming that there was only one folk song in the ballet. In the same vein, he derided Bartók’s “gusto for his native folklore.” In fact, the young Stravinsky steeped himself in Russian material, striving to become a vessel of primitive energies. On one occasion he described his homeland as a force of “beautiful, healthy barbarism, big with the seed that will impregnate the thinking of the world.”
With his egg-shaped head, bulging eyes, and luxurious mouth, Stravinsky had a slightly insectoid appearance. His manners were elegant, his clothes impeccable, his jokes lethal. In every way, he personified Rimbaud’s dictum “Il faut être absolument moderne.” If there was something of the dandy or aesthete about Stravinsky, he did not create an artificial impression in person. His mind was in perfect sync with his body, which he kept in trim, gymnastic condition. His friend and fellow composer Nicolas Nabokov once wrote: “His music reflects his peculiarly elastic walk, the syncopated nod of his head and shrug of his shoulders, and those abrupt stops in the middle of a conversation when, like a dancer, he suddenly freezes in a balletlike pose and punctuates his argument with a broad and sarcastic grin.”
Stravinsky was born in 1882. His ancestors were landowning aristocrats, members of the old Polish and Russian ruling classes who controlled much of western Russia. Young Igor spent many summers at his uncle’s spacious country estate in Ustyluh, close to the present Polish-Ukrainian border. There he would have heard folk songs and dances of the region, which resembled to some extent the music that attracted Bartók and Janáček. Ustyluh lies about two hundred miles from Janáček’s birthplace of Hukvaldy, and not too much farther from the Carpathian Mountains, where Bartók had his folk-music epiphany. But Stravinsky’s sensibility was shaped equally by the sophisticated atmosphere of St. Petersburg, which, at the turn of the century, was experiencing a Silver Age, its artistic productions rivaling those of fin-de-siècle Vienna and Paris in luminosity of surface and intensity of feeling.
Stravinsky’s father, Fyodor, was a noted bass-baritone at the imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Their home was comfortable, although Fyodor’s cold, strict personality cast a shadow over it. Igor drew close to his brother Gury, who provided a measure of emotional warmth that was otherwise missing from the house hold. Although Igor read scores and improvised at the piano from an early age, he came late to composition, and began to display real ambition only after his father’s death, in 1902. He took lessons from Rimsky starting that year, his student exercises mostly bland and imitative. The first flashes of genius came as late as 1907 and 1908, in the brief orchestral showpieces Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks, both of which blended French and Russian sounds. The works caught the attention of Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, who was on the lookout for gifted young composers. In the 1910 season, Diaghilev planned to stun his Paris public with a multimedia fantasy on the folk legend of the Firebird, and when several more illustrious names turned him down, he took a chance on the novice.
The Firebird was a magical concoction: Russian musical sorcery, overlaid with French effects, lit up by the X-factor of Stravinsky’s talent. The score is infested with references to Rimsky’s works, and it leans heavily on the master’s tone-semitone scale. But Stravinsky makes his mark in the zone of rhythm. In the climactic “Infernal Dance,” in which the minions of the evil Kashchei are put under the Firebird’s spell, the slashing Stravinsky accents make their first appearance. The timpani lays down a steady ostinato of rapid pulses. The bassoons, horns, and tuba play a jumpy theme whose accents fall between the beats. Then, at the end of the phrase, the accent shifts and now falls on the beat: the ear has been tricked into thinking that the offbeats are main beats and the main beat is a syncopation. The full orchestra sets the record straight with a whiplash triple forte. Such syncopations were not uncommon in nineteenth-century music, and Stravinsky may have heard something like them in rural Russian dances. But they also echo some of Ravel’s favorite devices, and the last few bars of the “Infernal Dance” are basically lifted from the Rapsodie espagnole.
Overnight, under the spotlight of Diaghilev’s patronage, an unknown became a phenomenon. Within days of his arrival for the Firebird premiere, Stravinsky met Proust, Gide, Saint-John Perse, Paul Claudel, Sarah Bernhardt, and all the major composers. “This goes further than Rimsky,” Ravel wrote to a colleague after hearing Firebird. “Come quickly.” Buoyed by the Paris atmosphere and by his impressive new fans, Stravinsky set to work on a second ballet, Petrushka, a tale of an animate puppet who performs at a Russian village fair. Unorthodox ideas emerged from his conversations with the intellectuals of the Ballets Russes. The choreographer Michel Fokine talked of a stage full of natural, flowing movement, the antithesis of academic ballet. Stravinsky responded with a score of exhilarating immediacy: phrases jump in from nowhere, snap in the air, stop on a dime, taper off with a languid shrug. The designer Alexander Benois had asked him to write a “symphony of the street,” a “counterpoint of twenty themes,” replete with carousels, concertinas, sleigh bells, and popular airs. Stravinsky answered with periodic explosions of dissonance and rhythmic complexity, which mimic the energy of the modern urban crowd.
The young sophisticates of Paris, for whom Debussy’s music had always been a little too murkily mystical, rejoiced. It was as if all the lights had been switched on in the Wagnerian room. Jacques Rivière, the influential editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, wrote of Petrushka: “It suppresses,
