indicates the cultivation of pre-Romantic styles, notably the orderly and stylish Baroque. The trend was already well under way in turn-of-the-century Paris, when Debussy extolled Rameau, Satie revived Gregorian chant, and Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s lover, wrote neo-Handelian arias. But the retrospective impulse intensified after the war, perhaps as a way of escaping recent history. Diaghilev, not Cocteau, took the lead in promoting period modernism: he had collected tattered scores by the likes of Cimarosa, Scarlatti, and Pergolesi and began editing them for modern performance, hiring favorite composers to do the orchestration. In 1920, Diaghilev asked Stravinsky to arrange ballet music from a sheaf of scores attributed to Pergolesi. Stravinsky did more than arrange: by elongating and truncating notes here and there, by introducing discontinuities, irregularities, angularities, and anomalies, he emerged with Pulcinella, a new type of ultramodish Stravinsky confection.
A less celebrated guru had already nudged Stravinsky toward the classical past. This was the Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, whose story is chronicled in Sylvia Kahan’s book Music’s Modern Muse.
Singer’s early passion was for Wagner, but she later developed a consuming love of Bach. In a turn of phrase that captures the inborn melancholy of period modernism, she wrote that a Bach chorale “reconstitutes the past, and proves to us that we had a reason for living on this rock: to live in the beautiful kingdom of sounds.” At her salons, new works were often paired with Bach’s, and the former began sounding like the latter. Oddly, the Princesse received inspiration from Richard Strauss, whose use of a thirty-six-instrument orchestra in Ariadne auf Naxos gave her the idea that “the days of big orchestras were over.” She promptly asked Stravinsky for a score requiring thirty to thirty-six instruments, even specifying the instrumentation, though she wisely seems not to have mentioned the Strauss angle. (Decades later, Stravinsky snapped to Robert Craft, “I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality.”) Aloof, intellectual, secretly lesbian, Singer had the personality of an artist herself. She sat in a high-backed chair in front of the rest of the audience so that she would not be distracted. Much displeased her, nothing surprised her. When the instruments for Les Noces were delivered to her house on avenue Henri-Martin, a butler announced, in horrified tones, “Madame la Princesse, four pianos have arrived,” to which she replied, “Let them come in.”
If the Hôtel Singer-Polignac was the clearing house of period modernism, the racier salons—those of Étienne de Beaumont, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, and the outrageous Natalie Barney—catered to lifestyle modernism, the spirit of high fashion, low culture, and sexual play. The rules of the game were laid down by the Ballets Russes, which in 1922 moved its center of operations to the playboy capital of Monte Carlo and began receiving support from the Société des Bains de Mer. The exemplary lifestyle production was Le Train bleu, which took its name from the train that conveyed the beautiful people from Paris to the Riviera. The action involved a gigolo, his flapper girl, a golfer, and a female tennis champion, all attired in sportswear by Coco Chanel. Milhaud, who wrote the music, was asked to tone down his polytonal harmonies so as not to ruffle the high-society audience. “Le Train bleu is more than a frivolous work,” Cocteau said. “It is a monument to frivolity!” It was also a monument to the beauty of a boy, in the form of Anton Dolin. Diaghilev had long catered to a gay subculture, but he now became rather brazen, outfitting his favorite dancers in tight bathing suits or minuscule Grecian shorts.
In this giddy ambience, Poulenc came into his own. “What’s good about Poulenc,” Ravel said, “is that he invents his own folklore.” Poulenc, too, was gay, and held a kind of coming-out party in his own Diaghilev ballet, Les Biches. It is easy enough to read between the lines of his subsequent description of the scenario—a “modern fêtes galantes in a large, all-white country drawing room with a huge sofa in Laurencin blue as the only piece of furniture. Twenty charming and flirtatious women frolicked about there with three handsome, strapping young fellows dressed as oarsmen.” Bronislava Nijinska’s original choreography, as Lynn Garafola describes it, made the innuendo fairly explicit: the strapping young fellows spent more time looking at one another than at the women, and the Hostess tried to revalidate her beauty by posing with the boys.
There must have been a menacing disconnect between Nijinska’s dances of modern narcissism and Poulenc’s aggressively antique genre pieces. Things go musically out of joint right at the start: first come two Stravinskyish signals, with jagged grace notes like catches in the voice; then a clear major third in clarinets and bassoons; and finally the cartwheeling main theme. Poulenc would write more substantial scores—he had the richest, most surprising career of any of Les Six—but Les Biches retains its nasty champagne kick after all these years.
Stravinsky reached the apex of his hipness. He wrote manifestos, gave inflammatory interviews (“Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and who have never understood music”), took homes on the Côte Basque and the Côte d’Azur, conducted, performed on the piano, met famous people, attended parties. There was a fling with Coco Chanel; there was a long affair with the bohemian émigré Vera Sudeykina, who eventually became his second wife. His premieres were A-list events at which luminaries of art and literature congregated. Joyce and Proust had their only meeting at a dinner following the 1922 debut of Renard, although they had trouble finding anything to talk about. Stravinsky’s life took on a name-dropping Andy Warhol quality, as is evident in the questions that Robert Craft asked in the first of his “conversation books” with the composer:
You were a friend of D’Annunzio’s at one time, weren’t you? … You knew Rodin, didn’t you? … Wasn’t there also a question of Modigliani doing a portrait of you? … I once heard you describe your meeting Claude Monet … You were with Mayakovsky very often on his famous Paris trip of 1922? … Would you describe your last meeting with Proust? … I often hear you speak of your admiration for Ortega y Gasset. Did you know him well? … How did Giacometti come to make his drawings of you?
The after-party for Les Noces took place on a barge in the Seine. Stravinsky jumped through a wreath, Picasso created a sculpture out of children’s toys, and Cocteau went around in a captain’s uniform saying, “We’re sinking.”
All the while, Stravinsky was writing rather little music. His output of major works from 1921 to 1925 consisted of the brief opera Mavra, the Octet, the Concerto for Piano and Winds, the Sonata for piano, and the Serenade for piano—less than ninety minutes in total. The composer seemed to spend as much time explaining his music as he did writing it, and amused himself by adopting the flat-toned, in-expressive jargon of a researcher defending his experiments to fellow experts:
My Octuor is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed … My Octuor is not an “emotive” work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves … My Octuor, as I said before, is an object that has its own form. Like all other objects it has weight and occupies a place in space …
Stravinsky further claimed that he had never done anything but create “objects” of this kind. “Even in the early days, in the ‘Fire Bird,’” he told an English interviewer in 1921, “I was concerned with a purely musical construction.” Some years later he declared, “I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state, a natural phenomenon, etc.” This chic formalism echoed Cocteau (“Dance must express nothing”), who probably got it from Oscar Wilde (“Art never expresses anything but itself”). The new objectivity was the old aestheticism.
Stravinsky had cast aside his old Russian self but had not yet hammered out a new identity. On the one hand, much of his writing in the twenties fell under the rubric of “period modernism.” Mavra is a love letter to nineteenth-century Russian imperial style, especially Tchaikovsky. The Octet bustles through the antiquated arts of sonata form, theme and variation, and modulation through the major and minor keys.
