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truths in any one place; he heard them equally in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and North Africa. The mark of authenticity
was not racial but economic; he paid heed mainly to the people on the social
margins, those who had lived the toughest lives.
Bartók’s most intense encounter with the Folk took place in 1907, when he went
to the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, in Transylvania, to gather songs from
Hungarian-speaking Székely villagers. Personal upheaval added urgency to the
mission; the composer had fallen in love with a nineteen-year-old violinist
named Stefi Geyer, who received his advances first with bemusement and then
with alarm. Both the letters he wrote to Geyer that summer and his meticulous
notes on Transylvanian songs give the impression that a fenced-off soul is
opening itself to the chaos of the outer world.
Like Grainger in England, Bartók brought with him an Edison cylinder, and he
listened as the machine listened. He observed the flexible tempo of sung
phrases, how they would accelerate in ornamental passages and taper off at
the end. He saw how phrases were seldom symmetrical in shape, how a beat or
two might be added or subtracted. He savored “bent” notes—shadings above or
below the given note—and “wrong” notes that added flavor and bite. He
understood how decorative figures could evolve into fresh themes, how
common rhythms tied disparate themes together, how songs moved in circles
instead of going from point A to point B. Yet he also realized that folk musicians
could play in absolutely strict tempo when the occasion demanded it. He came
to understand rural music as a kind of archaic avant-garde, through which he
could defy all banality and convention.
Emotional rejection can have a radicalizing effect, as Schoenberg’s history in
1907 and 1908 suggests. Bartók, pining for the unavailable Stefi, swung away
from Romantic tonality in those same two years. The Violin Concerto No. 1, his
main work of this period, shows him still in thrall to a Richard Strauss aesthetic,
with a five-note theme representing his beloved at the head of the piece. He
planned but did not compose a third movement, which would have shown the
“hateful” side of the unfortunate girl. Some of that negative energy spills out in
the Fourteen Bagatelles for piano, written in the spring of 1908. A kind of
substitution of love objects occurs: in place of Stefi’s leitmotif there are now
rusty shards of folk melody, showing the impact of the Transylvanian trip and
other research expeditions. The Woman becomes the Folk.
The first Bagatelle begins with a radical harmonic break: the right hand plays
roughly in C-sharp minor while the left plays in something like the key of C (in
the Phrygian mode). This is “polytonality” or “polymodality,” the juxtaposition of
two or more key-areas, and it will play a significant role in early-and mid-
twentieth-century music. Bartók probably derived the practice from Strauss and
Debussy, but he also liked to attribute it to folk players, who periodically
wandered free from their accompanying harmonies.
The Bagatelles, together with subsequent works such as the Two Elegies,
Allegro barbaro, the First String Quartet, and the opera Bluebeard’s Castle, veer
close to atonality. They make frequent use of Schoenberg’s searing motto chord
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of two fourths separated by a tritone. But Bartók’s ardor for folk melodies
prevented him from going over the brink. As the musicologist Judit Frigyesi
observes, Hungarian modernists were not prone to annihilating rage of the
Viennese type; instead, they sought higher unities, transcendent reconciliations.
The philosopher and critic Georg Lukács put it this way: “The essence of art is
form: it is to defeat oppositions, to conquer opposing forces, to create
coherence from every centrifugal force, from all things that have been deeply
and eternally alien to one another before and outside this form. The creation of
form is the last judgment over things, a last judgment that redeems all that could
be redeemed, that enforces salvation on all things with divine force.” Bartók,
likewise, talked about the “highest emotions,” a “great reality.” The artist in his
loneliness need not bring about Vienna-style antagonism and scandal; instead,
Frigyesi writes, he can stand in for all humanity, becoming a “metaphor for
wholeness.”
Bartók’s quest led him both onward and inward. In the first days of June 1913,
he boarded a steamer in Marseille, bound for Algeria. His ultimate destination
was Biskra, on the northern edge of the Sahara, where, seven years before,
Henri Matisse had found the inspiration for his raw, sensual Blue Nude. The trip
lasted only two weeks: the composer fell ill with fever and had to retreat to
Algiers. He hoped to return the following summer, and researched diets that
would have allowed him to stay healthy. But the onset of the First World War
put a stop to his plans. His wax-cylinder recordings of North African music
remained a prize possession and led to a landmark ethnomusicological essay.
They also furnished new compositional ideas, particularly in the area of rhythm.
Bartók wrote from Algeria: “The Arabs accompany almost all their songs with
percussion instruments; sometimes in a very complicated rhythm (it is chiefly
varying accentuations of equal bar lengths that produce the different rhythmic
patterns).” This could serve as a description of “The Augurs of Spring” in
Stravinsky’s Rite, whose first production was still playing to giddy Paris crowds
as Bartók set out for Africa.
Maurice Ravel is a special case among turn-of-the-century “realists.” He was a
man both urban and urbane, disinclined to go wandering up a mountainside
with an Edison cylinder on his back. Yet, during his brief and brilliant career, he
drew on a sizable library of folk material—variously, Spanish, Basque, Corsican,
Greek, Hebrew, Javanese, and Japanese. He, too, was a phonographic
listener, sensitive to microscopic details of phrasing, texture, and pulse. A
gentleman flaneur with unusual powers of empathy, Ravel could spend his day
as a man of the crowd, then reconstruct the experience in the privacy of his
garret.
Commonly considered the most purely French of composers, Ravel was in fact
something of a cultural mutt, part Basque and part Swiss. Although he was
taken to Paris when he was four months old, his Basque origins held sway over
his imagination, the connection maintained in the songs his mother sang for
him. Manuel de Falla judged Ravel’s Spanish-themed works “subtly authentic,”
which is a good general description of the composer’s music as a whole.
Ravel’s father was a Swiss engineer who helped to pioneer, in unsung ways,
the automobile; the Ravel prototype of a gas-powered car perished during the
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German bombardment of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. In a sense, Ravel’s
music split the difference between his parents’ worlds—his mother’s memories
of a folkish past, his father’s dreams of a mechanized future.
In a series of piano works in the first decade of the new century, Ravel carried
out a kind of velvet revolution, renewing the language of music without
disturbing the peace. In Jeux d’eau, melody and accompaniment dematerialize
into splashing, skittering lines, imitating the movement of water in a fountain. In
“Valley of the Bells,” from the cycle Miroirs, novel notation is used to enhance
the impression of bell tones resonating in space: the music is spread over three
rather than two staves, each line moving at an independent tempo. In “Le
Gibet,” from Gaspard de la nuit, ghostly figures rise and fall around a
continuously tolling B-flat—a structure that was in itself a new kind of musical
narrative, one of proto-minimalist repetition. Falla, in his writings on flamenco,
points out that melodies of the “deep song” type often rotate around an
obsessively repeated note, and pieces such as “Le Gibet” may allude to the
great Andalusian dance, although the one-note pattern could just as well have
come from Gregorian chant. Some years later, in the 1928 showpiece Bolero,
Ravel would take the aesthetic of repetition to the extreme: for fifteen minutes
the orchestra hammers away at a theme in the key of C.
Ravel put his Spanish-Basque heritage proudly on display in the orchestral suite
Rapsodie espagnole, first heard in 1908. The Rapsodie calls to mind the
explosive colors of Fauvist painting, especially the early work of Matisse. Again,
harmonic movement freezes on static sonorities; the narrative is driven by
transformations of texture and rhythm. At the climax of “Feria,” the festival finale
of the Rapsodie, Ravel creates a dynamic effect of rhythmic layering,
superimposing five separate pulses: two against three against four against six
against twelve.
In the penultimate bar, in the midst of a quick rush of sound across the entire
orchestra, the trombones make a gloriously rude noise—a glissando, a slide
from one note to another. This effect was first popularized by Arthur Pryor, the
virtuoso slide trombonist in John Philip Sousa’s band, who featured it in such
numbers as “Coon Band Contest” (1900) and “Trombone Sneeze” (1902). As it
happens, the Sousa band toured all over Europe in 1900 and 1901, just before
glissando effects spread through classical composition. Schoenberg and his
brother-in-law Zemlinsky were the first to notate true trombone glissandos 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.
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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 Rimsky-Korsakov, 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 decade 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
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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 household.
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
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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, it clarifies, it hits only the
telling and succinct notes.” The composer had succeeded in carrying out
Wagner’s “synthesis of the arts” without resorting to Wagnerian grandiloquence.
Stravinsky could never be described as a humble man, yet there was something
selfless in the way he made himself a collaborator among collaborators,
exchanging ideas with Fokine, Benois, and Diaghilev, adapting his music to
their needs. No prophet descending from the mountaintop, he was a man of the
world to whom writers, dancers, and painters could relate. Ezra Pound once
said, “Stravinsky is the only living musician from whom I can learn my own job.”
One night in 1910, Stravinsky dreamed of a young girl dancing herself to death,
and soon after he began to plan Vesna svyashchennaya, or Holy Spring. (The
ballet’s standard Western titles, Le Sacre du printemps and The Rite of Spring,
miss the “holy” element, the pagan devotion.) Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the
Russian Traditions contains the definitive account of the ballet’s gestation. For
help in fleshing out the scenario, Stravinsky turned to Roerich, the painter and
Slavic guru, who plotted out a sequence of historically accurate springtime
rituals. Stravinsky delved into folkloric sources, drawing variously on a book of
Lithuanian wedding songs, Rimsky’s folk-song arrangements, and his own
memories of peasant singers and professional balladeers at Ustyluh, where he
had built his own summer house in 1908. He may also have seen the
impeccably prepared folk collections of Yevgeniya Linyova, notated with the
help of recording cylinders. Stravinsky hardly matched Bartók in the
thoroughness of his research, but he thought carefully about which songs would
be most appropriate, favoring geographical areas where paganism had
persisted longest and emphasizing songs on the theme of spring.
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Having assembled his folk melodies, Stravinsky proceeded to pulverize them
into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic
collages and montages. As in Bartók’s Bagatelles, the folk material enters the
genetic code of the music, governing all aspects of the organism. Bartók was
one listener who had no trouble figuring out what Stravinsky was up to. In a
1943 lecture at Harvard, he called the Rite “a kind of apotheosis of the Russian
rural music” and explained how its revolutionary construction was related to the
source material: “Even the origin of the rough-grained, brittle, and jerky musical
structure, backed by ostinatos, which is so completely different from any
structural proceeding of the past, may be sought in short-breathed Russian
peasant motives.”
In a resonant phrase, Taruskin calls the Rite a “great fusion” of national and
modern sounds. Its folkish and avant-garde traits reinforce each other. Consider
that percussive, pungent chord in “The Augurs of Spring,” the one that fuses a
major triad with an adjacent dominant seventh. It is not unprecedented:
something like it appears in Salome, at the line “You are truly your mother’s
child.” But the aim of the gesture is not to outdo the Germans in the race toward
total dissonance. Instead, it points up relationships among the simple folkish
patterns that surround it. Immediately before the chords begin their stomp, the
violins play a little figure that spells out the E-flat portion of the harmony. The
winds resume that figure a little later. After several such back-and-forths, the
ear can easily pick out the tonal components within any dissonance.
If other composers went further in revolutionizing harmony, none rivaled
Stravinsky in the realm of rhythm. Off-the-beat accents had welled up in Firebird
and Petrushka, although there the syncopations usually followed a set pattern.
In “The Augurs of Spring,” there is no way to predict where the accents will land
next. As the composer-critic Virgil Thomson once explained, the body tends to
move up and down in syncopated or polyrhythmic music because it wants to
emphasize the main beat that the stray accents threaten to wipe out. “A silent
accent is the strongest of all accents,” he wrote. “It forces the body to replace it
with a motion.” (Think of Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley,” with its “bomp ba-bomp
bomp [oomph!] bomp bomp.”) In “Augurs” the positioning of the “bomps” and
the “oomphs” changes almost from bar to bar, so that the main beat nearly
disappears and the syncopations have the field to themselves.
In “Procession of the Sage,” Stravinsky takes a different tack: in the climactic
eight-bar section, each instrument plays a regular pattern, but almost every
pattern is distinct. Tubas play a sixteen-beat figure three times; horns play an
eight-beat phrase six times; a guiro plays eight pulses to the bar; the timpani
play twelve pulses to the bar; and so on. This is Rapsodie espagnole raised to
the nth degree, and it rivals the most intricate structures of West African
drumming. As in much African music, asymmetrical “time-line” patterns jostle
against a hidden master pulse.
“Une musique nègre,” Debussy called the Rite. There is no evidence that
Stravinsky knew African music, although a few early ethnographic studies of
that largely unknown realm, such as Henri-Alexandre Junod’s Les Chants et les
contes des Ba-Ronga, had circulated. Taruskin points out that irregular rhythms
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were also a long-standing feature of Russian folk music. But his notion of a
“great fusion” in the Rite might ultimately be widened to mean something more
than a thoroughgoing assimilation of folk motifs into modern music. These
rhythms are global in reach, and at the time they were global in their impact.
Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing: he
was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to
Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the
Rite into his solo on “Salt Peanuts.” Two years later, playing Birdland in New
York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately
incorporated a motif from Firebird into “Koko,” causing the composer to spill his
scotch in ecstasy.
The first part of the Rite, which ends with the sweat-inducing crescendo of
“Dance of the Earth,” is viscerally exciting, even celebratory. Part II is grittier,
swaying between languor and violence. Debussy’s influence is palpable at the
outset: the crawling sextuplet figures in the winds and the ghoulishly bouncing
string figures in the Introduction come from Debussy’s Nocturnes, as does the
snaking flute melody in “Ritual Action of the Ancestors.” But Stravinsky has
hardly run out of original ideas. At the end of the latter section the bass clarinet
plays a soft, quick, spooky solo—the lower winds periodically show up in the
score like black-clad cabaret hosts, ushering the next scandal onstage—and the
final “Danse sacrale” begins. Another means of forward propulsion kicks in: in
place of regular pulses in simultaneous layers there are variable rhythmic “cells”
that expand or contract. As Bartók observed, these features are also
ethnographically precise; severe rhythmic and metric asymmetries are common
in Russian and Eastern European folk music. The cumulative effect is of
exhaustion, not of intensification. The every-which-way pulsation leads to a
feeling of stasis. The earth seems to be tiring itself out, just as the young girl is
dancing herself to death. At the end comes a morbid spasm.
The notion of a female sacrifice was Stravinsky’s special contribution. As Lynn
Garafola points out, no pagan people except for the Aztecs demanded the
sacrifice of young girls. Stravinsky was giving voice not to ancient instincts but
to the bloodthirstiness of the contemporary West. At the turn of the century,
purportedly civilized societies were singling out scapegoats on whom the ills of
modernity could be blamed: Russian townspeople were enacting pogroms of
Jews, white Americans were lynching young black men, and, closer to home,
the denizens of the sixteenth arrondissement had cheered on the anti-Semitic
campaign against the Jewish patriot Alfred Dreyfus. Against that backdrop, the
urban noises in Stravinsky’s score—sounds like pistons pumping, whistles
screeching, crowds stamping—suggest a sophisticated city undergoing an
atavistic regression.
More than a few people left the premiere both thrilled and chilled by the
experience. Jacques Rivière, who took such joy from Petrushka, spoke no less
rapturously of the Rite, but in the end he found himself falling into a despondent
mood. “There are works that overflow with accusations, hopes,
encouragements,” Rivière wrote. “You suffer, regret, take confidence with them;
they contain all the beautiful perturbations of the spirit; you give yourself to them
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as to the counsel of a friend; they have a moral quality and always partake of
pity.” The Rite, he admitted, was not among them.
War
When the guns began firing in August 1914, French, Russian, and English
composers were swept away by the same patriotic fervor that had overcome
their Austro-German counterparts. The long-standing resentment of Teutonic
hegemony in the classical repertory blossomed into hate. In London, Strauss’s
Don Juan was taken off a Proms concert. The League for the Defense of
French Music sought to ban “infiltrations funèstes,” or fatal infiltrations, of
enemy composers. Manuel de Falla urged colleagues to reject any “universal
formula,” by which he presumably meant, as his biographer Carol Hess says,
the “purely musical” ethos of the German canon. After the United States entered
the war in 1917, Wagner disappeared from the Metropolitan Opera stage and
Beethoven symphonies from programs in Pittsburgh. Karl Muck, the German-
born conductor of the Boston Symphony, was thrown in prison on the spurious
grounds that he had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Stories
circulated that Muck had been communicating with U-boats from his cottage in
Seal Harbor, Maine.
Absurd as this musical paranoia now seems, it was activated by deep shock at
Germany’s campaign of total war. Several significant composers lost their lives
in ways that underlined the changing definition of combat. Albéric Magnard,
composer of four eloquent Franckish symphonies, was burned alive along with
a number of his works after he fired on marauding German soldiers from a
window of his home. The refined Catalan composer Enrique Granados drowned
in the English Channel after a passenger vessel he was traveling on was
torpedoed by a German submarine. England mourned the loss of George
Butterworth, who worked alongside folkish composers such as Grainger,
Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Butterworth’s specialty was morris
dancing, and on his expeditions into the countryside he made meticulous notes
such as these:
Both hands touch lower chest
“ ” “ upper ”
clap
slap with opposite
Then Hey
He was killed in August 1916, aged thirty-one, during an early-morning assault
on a German trench in the Battle of Pozières Ridge.
Maurice Ravel nearly died at around the same time. The tiny-framed composer
should have been barred from military service, but, enraged by the bombing of
Reims, he enlisted as a truck driver. By the spring of 1916 Ravel was deployed
just behind the front lines, and witnessed the ghastly aftermath of the Battle of
Verdun. He often had to weave back and forth on pockmarked roads as shells
fell all around him. Once he found himself in an abandoned town on a sunny
day, walking through the empty, silent streets. “I don’t believe I will ever
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experience a more profound and stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror,”
he wrote. Another time he entered an abandoned château, found a fine Erard
piano, and sat down to play some Chopin.
Such unreal experiences provide clues to the piano cycle Le Tombeau de
Couperin, Ravel’s principal work of the war years. In the context of its time, Le
Tombeau may seem a little precious, as if it were averting its gaze from the
carnage. Not only the title but also the names of the movements—Prélude,
Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet, and Toccata—look back to the French
Baroque, paying homage to the harpsichord suites of Couperin and Rameau.
But, as ever with Ravel, emotion smolders under the exquisite surface. Each
piece is dedicated to a friend who died in battle; the old styles pass by like a
procession of ghosts. There are also hints of muscle, glints of steel. Glenn
Watkins, in his study of music during the Great War, argues that the metallic
stream of tone in the Toccata is meant to suggest the twisting motion of a
fighter plane. Ravel dreamed of being an aviator, a solitary hero in the sky.
Stravinsky spent the war in neutral Switzerland, urging humanity to resist “the
intolerable spirit of this colossal and obese Germania,” but otherwise immersing
himself in musical business. The creator of the Rite was entering a period of
experimentation, momentarily uncertain about what to do next. Never entirely
secure in his reputation as the leader of the moderns, he glanced around to see
what his rivals were doing. During a 1912 visit to Berlin, he attended one of the
early performances of Pierrot lunaire, and came away impressed by the
economy of Schoenberg’s instrumentation, the use of a pocket orchestra of two
winds, two strings, and piano. Next to the Wagner-sized orchestra of the Rite,
the Pierrot band was like a motorcar speeding alongside a locomotive.
Stravinsky effectively imitated Schoenberg in the second and third of his Three
Japanese Lyrics, written after the Berlin visit.
If Richard Taruskin is right, Stravinsky drew lessons from the reviews of the
Rite, both in Paris and back home in Russia. Parisians appreciated not just the
wildness of the music but also its precision and clarity. Innately sympathetic to
Stravinsky’s anti-Romantic attitude, they applauded his prominent deployment
of winds and brass and his relatively minimal use of strings. Jacques Rivière, in
his review in the Nouvelle Revue Française, emphasized what the Rite was
not—it lacked “sauce” and “atmosphere,” it rejected “Debussysm,” it refused to
behave like a conventional “work of art.” In the small-scale Cubist-Oriental
opera The Nightingale, which Stravinsky began in 1908 and finished in 1914,
Rivière heard the beginnings of a new kind of unsentimental, abstract music in
which “each object will be set out apart from the others and as if surrounded by
white.”
Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russian critics and musicians
dismissed the Rite as so much trendy noise. Taruskin suggests that the
confluence of praise abroad and criticism at home essentially impelled
Stravinsky to cut his ties to home and to become a Western European
composer: “By imperceptible degrees, [he] came to resemble his hosts and
exploiters.”