Igor Stravinsky

“ Stravinsky’s Petroushka; the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor; and Le Coq d’Or, a purely balletic and entertaining spectacle, with the Rimsky-Korsakoff music rearranged for ballet by Tcherepnine. All of the foregoing were by Michel Fokine. Eight other Fokine works were included, all originally produced by him for Diaghileff: three, which might be called exotic works—Cléopâtre, to the music of Arensky and others; Thamar, to the music of Balakireff; and Schéhérazade, to the Rimsky-Korsakoff tone-poem. Five ballets typifying the Romantic Revolution: Stravinsky’s Firebird ”

“ Cripps: advocate extraordinary. © 30Nov42; A169698. Patricia Strauss (A) ; 21May70; R485020.
STRAVINSKY, IGOR. Poetique musicale, sous forme de six lecons, by Igor Strawinsky. (The Charles Eliot Norton lectures for 1939-1940) © 8Sep42; A168094. President & Fellows of Harvard College (PWH) ; 21Jan70; R477903.
STREET & SMITH'S BASEBALL PICTORIAL YEAR BOOK 1943. Charles Moran, editor. © 11May43; AA427869. Conde Nast Publications, Inc. (PWH) ; 3Jun70; R485585.
STREET, CECIL JOHN CHARLES. Dead of the night, by John Rhode,
pseud. © 9Sep42; A167539. ”

“ On music, however, and literature its influence has been great, and here its triumphs are considerable. It is easy to say that the genius of Stravinsky—a musician, unless I mistake, of the first order and in the great line—rises superior to movements. To be sure it does: so does the genius of Molière. But just as the genius of Molière found its appropriate food in one kind of civilization, so does the genius of Stravinsky in another; and with that civilization his art must inevitably be associated. Technically, too, he has been influenced much by nigger rhythms and nigger methods. ”

“ As an influence, he can already be felt. His synchronism of music, light, and perfumes was never realized in his own music, although the Russian Ballet has completely realized it. (How cleverly that organization—or is it a movement?—has seized everybody’s good ideas, from Wagner’s to Adolphe Appia’s!) As for Scriabine’s strange scales and disharmonies, Igor Strawinsky has made the best use of them—Igor Strawinsky, perhaps the greatest of the musicians of the immediate future. I hope Americans may hear his wonderfully beautiful opera, The Nightingale ”

“ In such an extraordinary work as The Nightingale we find him making little or no attempt at representation. The bird does not sing like the little brown warbler; instead Stravinsky has endeavored to write music which would give the feeling of the bird's song and the effect it made on the people in his lyric drama to the auditors in the stalls of the opera house. As for Strauss's use of orchestral color the German is the merest tyro when compared to the Russian. There is some use of the whole-tone scale in The Firebird, and elsewhere in Stravinsky, but it is not a predominant use of it. ”

“ Certainly men like Scriabine and Stravinsky prove that Russian music has not been a mere burst of genius, destined to become embalmed in academicism or wafted on lyrical breezes into the salons. Probably no nation in Europe to-day possesses a greater number of thoroughly able composers than Russia. ”

“ The music is by no means 'radical,' but it shows immense talent in expressive melody, colorful harmony, in precise expression of mood, in the suggestion of pictures, and in a certain elaborate and free polyphony which is one of Stravinsky's chief glories. It is a work irresistible alike to the casual listener and to the technical musician. The next ballet was 'Petrouchka,' produced in 1911. This is a fanciful tale of Petrouchka, the Russian Pierrot, and his unhappy love for another doll. ”

“ Strauss, to be sure, increases the number of instruments, but he still utilizes a vast number of violins and violas massed against the otfcer instruments, diminishing in number according to the volume of sound each makes. He divides his strings constantly, of course; they do not all play alike as the violins, say, in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, but they often all play at once.
Stravinsky experimented at first with the full orchestra and he even utilized it in such late works as Petrouchka and The Nightingale. ”

“ But he is too great an artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating—a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us—as would the Grimms and Aesop. We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part of the artist's business. The effect is a part of his art-effort in its inception. ”

“ As every one knows by this time, M. Nijinsky is the apostle of a sort of ‘post-impressionist’ or ‘Cubist’ revolution of the dance, in which mere gracefulness is ruthlessly sacrificed to significance and force of expression, and everything is stated in terms of symbolism, and in the new ballet he seems to have carried his theories into the most extreme practice.... M. Stravinsky seems as determined to make the hearer sit up as his colleague. ”

“ In the thickness of a red evening, the hall deserted, one heart still beats. Ta-or grieves over her lost love—alone. I have been to Egypt ... learned the ways of women—and the world!
Petrouchka.—Primary things: red, blue, yellow; love, hate, jealousy; people and artists. All told together in a ballet whose dramatic unification finds its remarkable inspiration in the music. No doubt Stravinsky’s most important music for the stage. Pétrouchka, eternal paradox of beauty encased in ugliness. His jealousy of the Moor, who also loves the Ballerine, is the ballet, and the music. Foremost the music! ”

“ This Petrouchka, Stravinsky’s masterpiece, is a Russian burlesque taken from an old fairy-story of Harlequin in love with the Clown’s wife. In this ballet the scenes are splendidly arranged by Fokine and the music is thrilling. The puppet has always exercised a curious fascination upon the human mind. The animated doll is a fantastic and yet pathetic symbol of our230 emotions. Petrouchka is the Russian counterpart of English ‘Punch and Judy,’ though differing in its more sentimental character. Petrouchka represents the character of a real puppet. ”

“ Stravinsky has woven a dramatic plot around the puppet stage. ‘To take us behind the scenes and show the mingled comedy and tragedy of the puppet world, was a true and dramatic inspiration’ of the composer. The scenic effect of Petrouchka is calculated to create a melancholy feeling in the spectator with its bleak gray background and dull frigidity. It gives a striking contrast to the barbaric colors of the crowd on the stage. ”

“ A fitting parallel to Stravinsky’s efforts is provided by those of Nijinsky, laboriously instructing a highly-accomplished corps de ballet in mimicry of the awkward poses exhibited in sculpture of pre-classical days, when the sculptor was not so much expressive as struggling for expression. It may be true that under modern accepted conventions in art, expression has been stifled by undue attention to form, but this is hardly the way to demonstrate it. ”

“ So Olga became regent of the kingdom, and Sveneld was made leader of the army.
How deeply Olga loved Igor we are not prepared to say, but we are told some strange tales of what she did to avenge him. These tales we may believe or not, as we please. They are legends only, like those of early Rome, but they are all the history we have, and so we repeat the story much as old Nestor has told it.
The death of Igor filled the hearts of the Drevlians with hope. Their great enemy was gone; the new prince was a child: might they not gain power as well as liberty? ”

“ As in all the other Stravinsky ballet compositions, the orchestration of Petrouchka is realistically true to the action and the characters of the play. It is full-blooded and modern. It breathes an air of the unsophisticated joy of a simple people who attend to their231 affairs regardless of conventional restrictions. Nijinsky, with his dramatic flexibility and vigor, makes the play a vivid fairy tale in actuality, or rather gives life to a dream of a fairy tale. ”

“ Three years afterward he again led an army in boats against Constantinople, but this time he was bought off by a tribute of gold, silver, and precious stuffs, as Oleg had been before him.
Igor was now more than seventy years old, and naturally desired to spend the remainder of his days in peace, but his followers would not let him rest. The spoils and tribute of the Greeks had quickly disappeared from their open hands, and the warlike profligates demanded new plunder.
"We are naked," they bitterly complained, "while the companions of Sveneld have beautiful arms and fine clothing. ”

“ Strawinsky [115] is the new giant upon whom has fallen the mantle of Russian nationalism. His work is based, primarily, on the work of the “Five,” all of whom are dead. That he reminds one occasionally of the modern Frenchmen only means that they, too, have learned their lessons from Borodine and Moussorgsky; Debussy’s debt to Moussorgsky has frequently been acknowledged; it is obvious if one compares Pelléas et Mélisande with Boris Godunow. Strawinsky’s love of Oriental color is possibly an inheritance from his master, Rimsky-Korsakow. ”

“ The music of Strawinsky is the expression of an innocence comparable indeed to that of his great predecessor. "Le Sacre du printemps" is what its composer termed it. It is "an act of faith."
And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able to let nature move him to imitation. Just as Picasso brings twentieth-century nature into his still lives, so the young composer brings it into his music. It is the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All his life he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things have influenced his art from the beginning. ”

“ He was too vital and sane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in the first years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius. If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general way, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being. It is this great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other. ”

“ Petrouchka is, in fact, the musical presentment of Russian fantastic humor in the second generation. There is none of the heavy scoring once thought necessary to reveal the humorous possibilities of some particular situation; Strawinsky lives in a [110] world which has learned to take things for granted, and his method is elliptical. This perception of proportion in humor is one of the surest indications of refinement, and Petrouchka not only testifies to the composer’s possession of this quality, but provides an assurance that he has a technical equipment which can hardly betray him. ”

“ The raising of taxes was always very arbitrary. Nestor's account of the death of Igor is a lively picture of the political customs of the time; we might imagine ourselves reading a page of Gregory of Tours about the sons of Clovis, for example the expedition of Thierry in Arvernia. “In the year 945 the droujina of Igor said to him, ‘The men of Sveneld are richly provided with weapons and garments, while we go naked; lead us, prince, to collect the tribute, so that thou and we may become rich.’ Igor consented, and conducted them to the Drevlians to raise the tribute. ”

“ A composer who sets ‘The Creation’ to living music is just as progressive as another who takes ‘The Last Judgment’ as his theme.”
Strawinsky seems to meet his problems according to their nature with an inevitable sense of the fitness of things. He has set, in Petrouchka, a story of the Russian fair; the leading characters are puppets; the period, 1830. The music is realistic in tone, in some instances intentionally vulgar. [109] It has been pointed out that the themes of the nurses’ dance, the dance of the cochers, and the Russian dance in the first scene, are founded on Russian folk-tunes. ”

“ The Drevlians, when they learnt that Igor was returning, held council with Mal their prince. ‘When the wolf enters the sheepfold he slays the whole flock, if the shepherd does not slay him. Thus it is with us and Igor; if we do not destroy him, we are lost.’ Then they sent deputies and said to him, ‘Why dost thou come anew unto us? Hast thou not collected all the tribute?’ But Igor would not hear them, so the Drevlians came out of the town of Korosthenes, and slew Igor and his men, for they were but a few. ”

“ For such, the world is a far distant thing, lying out on the rims of consciousness, delicate and impermanent as sunset hues or the lights and gestures of the dream. The music of Debussy is the magistral and classic picture of this distant and glamorous procession, this illusory and fantastical and transparent show, this thing that changes from moment to moment and is never twice the same, and flows away from us so quickly. But Strawinsky, on the other hand, is in the very midst of the thing so distant from the other man. For him, the material world is very real, sharp, immediate. ”

“ He was a graceful, sunburned fellow, and as he bent his head over the guitar, during his intermittent strumming, Strawbridge was surprised to see that his hair was done up like a woman's, in a knot at the back of his head.
Just why the American should have decided to ask this particular man for delicate information, it is impossible to say. It may have been because he was leaning against a shrine, or because he showed splendid white teeth as he smiled at the varying fortunes of the players. There is a North American superstition that a man with good teeth also possesses good morals. ”