Early Stravinsky

When one examines the earliest works of a great composer, it is almost inevitablywith hindsight that onedoes so.Hearing the earlierworks through the portal that the later, more well-known works supply can be a strange experience, through which hindsight often hardens into selfreassurance. Does one hear a familiar foretaste of this here, a pre-echo of that there? Is there a discernible quality to the early works that is evident to us today, but which contemporary listeners seem to have overlooked? Such questions are easy to ask and carry a hint of smugness, but, conversely, is anything to be gained by turning the presumptions around by dwelling, for example, on the ordinariness that allowed the composers contemporaries to remain unaware of the genius in their midst? Surely not: for such inversion merely preserves the same impoverished agenda in negative. Questions of style impinge on the assessment of early works in ways that demand examination in the present context. Consider the early works of Mozart as an alternative case to those of Stravinsky: as Charles Rosen has famously argued, the received idea of the classical style is defined for us today by the mature works ofHaydn,Mozart and Beethoven, rather than by the music of their many accomplished contemporaries.1 It is not that Mozarts music is recognised as similar to that of, say, J. C. Bach, Kozeluch

and Kraus, and can be measured against it, revealingMozarts superiority. Onthe contrary, in fact: theworks of these other composers, andmanymore, are liable to be heard against the yardstick that our familiarity withMozarts work provides, and so to be regarded as inferior. Listening toMozarts own earliest, childhood works provides much the same experience, for the same reason. One important distinction between Mozarts and Stravinskys eras, however, is the comparative homogeneity of style in the former period, as opposed to the evident diversity of the early twentieth century. The sheer variety of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music mean s that hearing Stravinskys early works in relation to those of his contemporaries and predecessors, and of course in relation to his own later compositions, is a complex business. Add to this the fact that the mature Stravinsky is well known as a magpie consumer and purveyor ofmusical styles, and the plot thickens further. One factor which emerges as much from the study of his earlier works as from the [58] late ones is his persistent use of other music as models: in doing so, he

managed by and large to avoid resorting to self-parody in the way that many less impressive composers of the twentieth century were inclined to do. The seeds of this were certainly sown in his early twenties.

Scherzo fantastique , Op. 3 (19078), Fireworks, Op. 4 (1908)

In the two orchestral works that followed the belated completion of his Symphony, Stravinsky achieved an early plateau of style that points firmly in the direction of The Firebird. Both the Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks are showy, programmatic pieces, with strong rhythmic characterisation and a sense of energetic movement. Unless one imagines that The Firebird came from nowhere, then these two scores, particularly the Scherzo, must be understood as the ballets musico-dramatic point of departure. But it suited Stravinskys purpose to disguise this: he sought to cover up, or at least occlude, the programmatic basis of the Scherzo fantastique inMaeterlincks book La Vie des abeilles (The life of bees) even before the works first performance early in 1909 though the inspiration he took from the play is evident from his letters to Rimsky-Korsakov.35 Whereas critics in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century argued endlessly about the comparative merits of absolute and programmemusic, many composers hedged their bets, as the young Stravinsky did here. Themusic was composedwith a programmatic basis but presented to the public under a classically generic musical title (scherzo), qualified by the suggestion that the work embodies fantasy which was evidently a quality to be admired andwithout divulging the composers reliance on an

existing source. It was a method which also removed the obligation to give credit to the author of his inspiration in this case, Maurice Maeterlinck. None the less, the Scherzo fantastique was firmly associated with bees a few years later when it served as the score for a ballet entitled Les Abeilles that was produced at the Paris Opera in 1917. On this occasion, since neither

Stravinsky nor Maeterlinck had given his permission for the adaptation, both could appear to be outraged. The score was then published with a prefatory note that seems to correspond with the ballets scenario which was derived, as it happens, fromMaeterlincks La Vie des abeilles but again without acknowledging Maeterlinck explicitly. After all this, one can perhaps forgive the older Stravinskys attempts to deny thatMaeterlincks book had ever played a part in the work.36 Taruskin has characteristically sought to restore the original detail to this picture, by outlining correspondences between the book and themusic,37 but so strong is the musical imagery that even the scores prefatory note later disowned by Stravinsky is enough to guide the listener. After a brief introduction, the busy stringmusic that opens the first main section of the work is easy to associate with the buzzing of bees around the hive. As the music develops, Stravinsky unveils many of the characteristic devices that would reappear in The Firebird. Chief amongst these is the artificial scale of alternating whole

tones and semitones, known today as the octatonic scale: for exampleCD_ E_EF_ GAB_ (other versions begin on C_ and D, but the next higher example, on E_, turns out to be exactly the same as the version on C, owing to the internal symmetry of the scale itself). The word octatonic could, in principle, be applied to any eight-note collection, but present-day usage signals the fact that in the intervening years this particular scale has come to be so widely shared by musicians that no other eight-note configuration is likely to be confused with it. In the early twentieth century, on the other hand, non-diatonic collectionswith awell-definedmusical character tended to go under various names alluding to their use by certain composers, or their supposed origins in non-Western musical exotica. In Russian musical circles of this time, what we now call the octatonic collection was known as the Rimsky-Korsakov scale; and by this was understood not only the bald eight notes but also a whole repertoire of usages, most if not all of which were imbibed by his pupils through his harmony text. Indeed, other enharmonic devices were included under this rubric, the common feature being the division of the octave into equal intervals: two tritones, three major thirds or four minor thirds.38 The use by Debussy and other French composers of the scale of six equal whole tones was a further step in this direction. It was typical of Rimsky-Korsakov that those passages in his works that

invoked these devices tended to use them relentlessly in sequence, and that they would be set against a generally more conventional background of the kind that was absorbed and developed by Glazunov. Thus, in Rimskys music, they generally remain tricks of the trade: the idea of bringing them into a modernist framework was not what he had in mind. Nor indeed was it yet in Stravinskys, although the ingredients were in place. Keeping contrasted elements separate was something he would famously return to in the block-like architecture of, say, the Symphonies ofWind Instruments,39 but at this stage in his career it served to delay a linguistic synthesis that would become fully evident for the first time in The Rite of Spring. The octatonic scale includes many conventional sonorities four each of major and minor triads, dominant, diminished and half-diminished sevenths and it was common practice to cycle through these in upward or downward sequence.40 Stravinsky had learned the additional effectiveness that was to be gained from combining upward and downward sequences within a complex orchestral texture, as shown in Ex. 4.3: here the horns (later trumpets) move upwards in tritones, whilst the flutes and celesta move downwards in figures that outline successive major triads. Other sources are apparent in the contrasting middle section of the work, particularlyWagner in his Meistersinger vein. The work, then, is something of an odd mixture, but as even the aged

Stravinsky was forced to acknowledge, it is a promising opus three.41 In his dedication of Fireworks to Maximilian and Nadezhda Steinberg, one can see Stravinsky with his Op. 4 still clinging to a place in the Korsakov circle. The work is both shorter, and simpler in structure, than the Scherzo fantastique : its hyperactive outer sections buzz even more than the Scherzos bees, and in much the same style though here perhaps it is the incessant spitting and popping of small incendiary devices that is meant. As in the Scherzo, much of the substance lies in the orchestration: indeed, when Stravinsky illustrates louder explosions, rockets and so forth, the effect is so onomatopoeic as to be almost comical. The central section of the work again moves beyond the Rimskyan orbit, this time looking not towards Germany but to France, and specifically to Paul Dukas, a composer whose influence was far wider among his contemporaries than his present-day profile might lead one to expect. The opening figures of his tone-poem The Sorcerers Apprentice (1897) clearly provided a model for the slower music that interrupts the fireworks (fig. 9 of the score); the scintillating yet still relaxedmusic that follows (Ex. 4.4) is perhaps the most accomplishedmusical passage Stravinsky had composed to date. Stravinsky had earlier interrupted the composition of Fireworks to compose a short orchestral piece in memory of Rimsky-Korsakov. Completed within the space of a few weeks after Rimskys death in the summer of 1908, the Chant fun`ebre, Op. 5, was performed after some delay on 17 January

1909 (O.S.) and reviewed sympathetically in the press.42 Assessing extant accounts of Stravinskys work in the context of other funereal tributes by Glazunov and Steinberg (together with an earlier example by RimskyKorsakov himself), Taruskin has suggested that the Chant fun`ebre is likely to have quoted both from the Orthodox liturgy and from Rimskys own work.