Stravinsky and Russian Poetic Folklore
Marina Lupishko
Igor
Stravinsky’s ambivalent attitude towards Russian folklore parallels in some ways
his ambivalent attitude towards his native land: venerated in the early years
of his first emigration, it gradually became an object of his bitter criticism
and negation, as seen in the following passage about Bartok in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky: “I
could never share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was
certainly real and touching, but I couldn’t help regretting it in the great
musician.”[1] The word “never” is an exaggeration, of course, since as
late as 1928 the composer of Apollo was still trying “to discover a melodism
free of folklore.”[2] By 1930, he pledged his non-participation:
Obviously, some composers have found their best inspiration
in folk music. In my opinion, popular music has nothing to gain by being taken
out of its frame. It is not suitable as a pretext for demonstrations of
orchestral effects and complications. It loses its charm by being déracinée.
One risks adulterating it and rendering it monotonous. [3]
Eventually,
the very word “folklore” became associated for Stravinsky with the notion of
narodnost’ (“folkness”), which, together with partiynost’ (“party membership”),
comprised the two pillars of the infamous prescribed artistic method of
Socialist Realism.[4]
As a result, one of the greatest Russian composers of the twentieth century has
been long viewed by the official Soviet musicologists as a
renegade-cosmopolitan[5]
or, at best, a pseudo-nationalist, who, having started his career within the
tenets of Diaghilev’s enterprise, turned off the road of neo-nationalism as
soon as following it was no longer profitable.[6]
But perhaps these critics of the composer, along with those western ones who
like to emphasize the multi-faceted, eclectic nature of his talent, should be
reminded of what the 80-year-old Stravinsky admitted to the interviewer from
Komsomol’skaya Pravda during his reconciliatory trip to the
I have spoken Russian all
of my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself [slog] is Russian.
Perhaps this is not immediately
apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature.[7]
Today
Stravinsky’s significance as one of the true followers of Russian musical
nationalism in the 20th century cannot be disputed. As Taruskin has
shown in his fundamental study (1996), the composer’s adherence to this
tradition was based on several different factors, of which the conscious
devotion to the aesthetic principles of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov is not the
most prominent. According to Taruskin,[8]
what pushed Stravinsky into conscious exploration of Russian folklore was,
first and foremost, the unexpected loss of the possibility of absorbing it in
the subconscious way in his homeland.
At the beginning [of the war] he was a Russian aristocrat
and (in the West at least) the undisputed heir to his country’s magnificent
half-century of achievement as purveyor of exotic orchestral and theatrical
spectacle to the world. At its end he was a stateless person facing uncertain
prospects…[9].
In
July of 1914, when the composer was leaving
Do the songs betray any homesickness for
Leaving behind his childhood, marked
by several personal contacts with peasant culture,[14]
the 32-year old Stravinsky wanted, as it were, to reopen access to the magic
world of Russian folklore to his own offspring. His wife and four children (the
youngest daughter, Milena, was born on January 15, 1914) were by this time his
only inspiration and only audience, since the war made it no longer possible
for Ballets Russes to perform on a regular basis. “The world of folk poetry
also provided a much needed temporary escape from the hothouse sophistication
of the Diaghilev-Paris ambience,”[15] since the
composer no longer had a deadline to work to.
Richard
Taruskin attributes the crystallization of the composer’s style during the
Swiss period to his acquaintance with the historico-political current of
Eurasianism, popular at that time among the Russian intellectual emigration.[16]
Taruskin uses the term “Turanian” (from “Turan’” - the Persian name for the vast territory
extended from the Carpathians to the
More
accurately, the catalyst for Stravinsky’s growing Russophilism was, as Taruskin
also implies, his collaboration under Diaghilev with the painters of the “World
of Art” circle (Golovin, Bakst, Benois, Roerich) and especially with the
founders of Russian Futurism, Mikhail Larionov (1881-1964) and his wife Natalia
Goncharova (1881-1962). These two developed the costume designs and stage
settings for Bayka and Svadebka, respectively (staged in 1922 and 1923), and
were among Stravinsky’s closest friends during his Swiss and Parisian years.[18]
Working in the style of the lubok (a folk kitsch art form), the painters aimed
towards abstraction in their use of bright solid colours, geometric forms and
simplified folk motifs, which often made them equal participants in shaping the
libretto and the choreography of the staged works.
Another
close friendship - that with the French-Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
(1878-1947) - started and grew into collaboration in
[being] a man and a complete man, which is to say, refined
and at the same time primitive; sensitive to every complication, but also to
the elementary; capable of the most complicated combination of the spirit and
also of the most spontaneous and direct reactions. Because one must be both
savage and civilized, it is not necessary to be only a primitive, but it is
necessary to be also a primitive.[20]
Beginning
from 1916 Ramuz became the composer’s principal translator of almost all the
latter’s Russian works of the Swiss period (except PodblyudnVe), although the
former knew no Russian and had to rely on Stravinsky’s word for word
translations. In 1918, Ramuz produced the libretto of Histoire du soldat - their first and only fully collaborative
work.
Overall,
the six years of the “Swiss exile”(1914-20) played a very important role in the
coming-to-be of Stravinsky. During this period not only was Svadebka - the “Turanian pinnacle”[21]
- essentially completed but also a “bouquet” of settings of Russian folk texts
including Bayka was produced, and at the same time the basis of the ensuing
neo-classical period was laid (Easy Pieces, Histoire du soldat, Pulcinella). In
his afterword to I. Stravinsky, publitsist i sovesednik, an impressive
collection of interviews and articles by the composer, Varunts points out that
the general direction of Stravinsky’s development during this period was a
search for new forms of expression, on the one hand, and a further liberation
from the grip of the programme music principle, inherited from his teacher
Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other. A new artistic concept - the author calls it
antiprogrammnost’ or antisyuzhetnost’ [22]
- was gradually arising in his mind during this time, paralleling similar
processes in the contemporary music of the second decade of the 20th
century. First stated in 1913 as a rebellious manifesto against the passé aesthetics of the 19th century (the first
quotation below), the concept was made more precise in 1924:
Music can be married to gesture or to words - not to both
without bigamy.[23]
Even if at first glance the music is combined with its
literary or fine art origin, in my artistic concept
it retains all the traits of absolute music. The Firebird,
Petrushka, and some other works of mine
gained recognition as samples of programme music or even
descriptive music… My latest works
do not contain any foreign artistic admixtures. True, some
traces of my former views can still be
found in Histoire du soldat and Pulcinella…[24]
The
vocal works of the Swiss period, although by genre direct heirs of Romanticism,
also testify to the growing awareness of these matters. The turning point, says
Varunts,[25]
came in the summer of 1913 when Stravinsky, having scarcely recovered from a
severe illness after the notorious premiere of Le Sacre, settled in Ustilug and
started Souvenirs de mon enfance. In these three songs completed in October
1913,[26]
we witness a composer amusingly at play with the sonoric and accentual side of
the word material. “It is perfectly clear,” says Varunts, “that from now on the
composer begins to give preference not so much to the semantic side of the
verse, as to its sound.” [27]
Svadebka (Les Noces) is known to have been conceived as early as 1912.[28]
Already by the summer of 1913, Stravinsky was actively looking for a suitable
text material, as appears from his correspondence with Stepan Mitusov.[29]
When the composer finally made his long-awaited trip to Ustilug and
One important characteristic of Russian popular verse is
that the accents of the spoken verse are ignored when the verse is sung. The
recognition of the musical possibilities inherent in this fact was one of the
most rejoicing discoveries of my life....[31]
Here
one is reminded of the quasi-rhetorical question, raised by Mikhail Druskin in
his monograph:
Where and how did Stravinsky encounter this folk-song – as a
child in
Like much else in Stravinsky’s personality, this remains a
puzzle.[32]
But
there is hardly any puzzle here. The answer is simple: from books. The research
of modern scholars (Birkan, Paisov, Vershinina, Taruskin, Varunts, Mazo, etc.)
has shown that Stravinsky mastered the subject of Russian folklore, both sung
and spoken, so well that by the time he composed Bayka and Svadebka it became
his “second nature.”[33]
He obviously studied at the very least a dozen books on Russian folklore,
reading carefully not only the material itself but also the prefaces and
commentaries to it: Kireyevsky’s Songs Collected by P. V. Kireyevsky,
Afanasiev’s three-volume Russian Folk Fairytales, Sakharov’s Legends of the
Russian People, Tereshchenko’s Manners and Customs of the Russian People, Shein’s
Russian Folk Songs and The Great
Russian in His Songs, Rituals, Customs, Beliefs, Fairytales, Legends, etc.,
Rozhdestvensky-Uspensky’s Songs of the Russian Sectarians-Mystics and other
books.[34] Moreover, the composer made notes to himself
to look up every word he was not sure about in Vladimir Dahl’s Explanatory
Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.[35]
All this is not surprising. Both Varunts and Druskin had noticed the
exceptional diversity of interests, continually demonstrated by the composer in
the course of his long life:
It may be said without fear of exaggeration that no
contemporary expatriate composer could compare with Stravinsky in knowledge of
the present-day world, whether it was in philosophy, religion, aesthetics,
psychology, mathematics, or the history of art. Nor was he content to remain
simply well informed, he wished to have a specialist’s understanding of every
subject, his own opinion on every problem and his own attitude to every point
under discussion. Right into extreme old age he was an avid reader and always
had a book in his hands. His library in
[W]e are only approaching the complete assessment of
Stravinsky as one of the greatest persons of encyclopedic knowledge of our
time. The breadth of problems touched upon by the composer with a greater or
lesser degree of insight is astonishing. Indeed, Stravinsky seems to be expert
in virtually all areas. He is interested in literature, philosophy, religion,
biology, mathematics, demography, medicine, geography, linguistics, and - of
course - music.[37]
Out of the last
(incomplete) list of subjects, the one of interest to us at this point is
linguistics. Beginning from the late summer of 1914, after having sketched the
provisional libretto for Svadebka, Stravinsky got temporarily carried away by
something largely unconnected to the peasant wedding ritual based on songs -
the genre of spoken verse (skazovVy stikh) known as pribaoutki. To the texts of
the “Pribaoutki” chapter from the third volume of Afanasiev’s Russian Folk
Fairytales Stravinsky sets the entire Pribaoutki cycle, as well as some numbers
from Trois histoires pour enfants, Berceuses du chat, and Bayka. That is to
say, pribaoutki – miniature folk nonsense poems with their lack of logic,
frequent onomatopoeia, and intricate combinations of images and sounds - rather
than the wedding songs from the Istomin-Dyutsh (1894), Istomin-Lyapunov (1899)
and other folksong collections[38]
- were his main musical inspiration at that time. Druskin quotes Stravinsky’s
opinion from his personal conversation with the composer during the latter’s
trip to
himself in a
letter to his mother, dated 10/23 February, 1916 (the first quotation below),
and by Grigoriy Alexinsky (1879-1967), an exiled politician, in a letter to the
composer, dated 4/17 April, 1916:
Please
send me as soon as possible (you’ll find these at Jurgenson’s [
My acquaintance with you, although of short duration,
gave me much [food for thought] regarding my views of art in general, and
taught me many new things. In particular, it was pleasantly surprising to
discover that you - the person who, let me confess, I had considered before our
first meeting to be a ‘decadent’ and so on
- are turning to the very source of Russian folk poetry and life in
order to find there a stimulus for your fantasy and inspiration.[42]
It
should be re-emphasized that the main impulse for the production of all the
Russian vocal works of the Swiss period (perhaps, with the exception of
Svadebka which was at first conceived as a quasi-operatic embodiment of a
peasant wedding ritual) was a linguistic interest in Russian folk verse (rather
than Russian folk song), frequently asserted by the composer in his writings,
letters, and interviews.[43]
As if commenting on this peculiarity, Varunts observes that Stravinsky showed
interest in the phonic side of poetry in the course of his entire life, and
that this fact alone distinguishes the composer to his advantage from the
contemporary currents and trends in Russian literary verse (Khlebnikov and
other futurists)[44],
and draws him closer to one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th
century, Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941).[45]
There exist a number of confirmations of this interest in Chroniques de ma vie,
Poétique musicale, in the volumes of conversations with Robert Craft, in
Stravinsky’s published letters and interviews, in the memoirs of Ramuz and
others. From these primary sources we gather that not only the phonic side of
poetic folklore occupied the composer’s imagination, but also the language as
such. As a schoolboy, Stravinsky was obliged to study Latin, Ancient Greek,
French, German, Russian, and Old Slavonic. As a “composer-polyglot,” he
produced text-settings of Russian, French, English, Latin, and Hebrew. Here is
his famous response to a Schoenberg aphorism, the response that embodies the
principle of careful preservation of the source language: “What the Chinese
philosopher says cannot be separated from the fact that he says it in Chinese.”[46]
In Expositions and Developments, Stravinsky recalls:
Bible studies in tsarist schools were as much concerned with
language as with religion because our Bible was Slavonic rather than Russian.
The sound and study of Slavonic delighted me and sustained me through these
classes. Now, in retrospect, most of my school time seems to have been consumed
by language studies, Latin and Greek from my eleventh to nineteenth years,
French, German, Russian, and Slavonic – which resembles modern Bulgar – from my
very first days in the Gymnasium. Friends sometimes complain that I sound like
an etymologist, with my habit of comparing languages, but I beg to pardon
myself for reminding them that problems of language have beset me all my life;
after all, I once composed a cantata entitled Babel.[47]
The
following excerpt from an article by Edwin Allen, Stravinsky’s private
librarian in
Stravinsky was a great reader and read as comfortably in
English and German as he did in French and Russian. His lexicological interests
manifested themselves constantly. An expression in English had to be repeated
in French, German, Russian, and sometimes Italian, as a diverting game that
could never be completed until all the languages were represented. Sometimes trips
to the dictionaries had to be made but more often Stravinsky’s phenomenal
memory for language quickly found the right word or phrase. Butter, for
example, could not be passed at table without verbal extension: maslo
(Russian), beurre (French), Butter (German), burro in Italian but definitely
not in Spanish unless one expected to leave the restaurant on an ass.[48]
Having
observed Stravinsky’s interest in linguistics in general and the sonic side of
poetry in particular, Varunts nonetheless let go unnoticed the composer’s
interest in its metric side. The first conscious exploration of the metrics of
poetry came in 1912-13, with the exposure to the metrics of the Japanese
language in Trois lyriques japonaises, a vocal cycle for small mixed orchestra
and soprano (see Example 1). The unusual metric organization of the settings of
Russian translations of these three miniature poems perplexed some musicians,
notably Derzhanovsky and Myaskovsky. The composer’s published response to
Vladimir Derzhanovsky (1881-1942), the
editor of the Moscow MuzVka periodical, merits a lengthy quotation:
Japanese
songs are written to genuine
Japanese poems of the 8th and 9th centuries AD
(naturally,
in translation [into Russian]). The translator
preserved the exact
number of syllables
and the
word order of
the original. Accents
as such do
not exist in the Japanese language or Japanese poetry.[49]
Example 1: Trois lyriques japonaises Opening
Measures
This topic is treated lucidly and in detail in the preface
to the book of Japanese lyrics from which I selected the three poems.[50] I was guided by these
considerations - namely, the absence of accents in Japanese poetry - while composing the
songs. But how could I obtain this effect? The most natural way would be to transfer long
syllables of the poems onto short syllables of the music. In this way, the accents would disappear on
their own, which would fully correspond to the linear perspective of Japanese
declamation…
As regards the queerness of the impression from this
declamation, I am not in the least embarrassed
by it; this
impression belongs to the realm of convention and is simply a matter of habit.[51]
Having acquainted himself with these
“programme notes,” the composer Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881-1950) wrote in a
letter to Derzhanovsky, dated June 20/
The little
Japanese verses are linear, etc.… but
when I was playing and reading these crafty little
tricks, I
always wanted instinctively to rub
my ears
and to shake
my head, in order to get rid of
the
machine-like importunity of this artificial declamation; but
the music is
pleasing to me:
there
is a good
deal of something personal, ‘linearly’ intimate, un-Scriabinesque about it.[52].
At its early stage,
Stravinsky’s interest in the metric structure of Russian folk verse is best
reflected in the sketches and drafts of the chansons russes, Bayka, and
Svadebka in the composer’s archive in
Example 2: From
Sketch for Pribaoutki, Natashka, Prosodic Analysis of Text
The
interest in metrics grows steadily during the ensuing neo-classical period when
Stravinsky, while moving farther and farther away from his native language,
starts using designations for Greek poetic feet freely and more professionally.
Here are some quotations concerning Oedipus
Rex (1926-7), Apollo (1928), and Perséphone (1933-34) from Dialogues and a Diary:
When I work with words in music, my musical saliva is set in
motion by the sounds and rhythms of the
syllables, and ‘In the beginning was the word’ is, for me, a literal, localized
truth.[55].
All of my ‘ideas’ for Oedipus Rex were in one sense derived
from what I call the versification… And what do I mean by ‘versification’? I
can answer only by saying that at present I make my ‘versification’ with series
as an artist of another kind may versify with angles or numbers… [Critics] should
also analyze the nature of the music’s rhythmic manners, the hint for which
came from Sophocles himself or, more precisely, from the metres of the chorus
(especially the simple choriabics, the anapaests and dactyls, rather than the
glyconics and dochmii).[56]
The real subject of Apollo, however, is versification, which
implies something arbitrary and artificial to most people, though to me art is
arbitrary and must be artificial. The basic rhythmic patterns are iambic, and
the individual dances may be thought of as variations of the reversible
dotted-rhythm iamb idea. The length of the spondee is a variable, too, and so,
of course, is the actual speed of
the foot… I cannot say whether the idea of
the Alexandrines, that
supremely arbitrary set of prosodic rules, was
pre-compositional or not… but
the rhythm of
the cello solo
(at 41 in the Calliope variation) with the pizzicato
accompaniment is a Russian Alexandrine suggested to me by a couplet from Pushkin,
and it was one of my first musical ideas. The
remainder of the
Calliope variation is a musical
exposition of the Boileau
text that I took as my motto.[57] But
even the violin cadenza is related to
the versification idea. I thought of
it as the
initial solo speech, the first essay in verse of Apollo
the god.[58]
My first
recommendation for a
Perséphone revival would
be to commission Auden to fit the
music with new words, as Werfel did in La Forza del Destino. The rhythms are
leaden-eared: Perséphone confuse/ Se refuse. (I composed the music for this
couplet on a train near Marseilles, whose rhythm was anapaestic.)[59]
By
the year 1934 the word “versification” (“syllabification”) acquires the meaning
of some universal principle of composition:
I was asked
to write about the music of Perséphone, but since I barely have the time to do
it, I would like to draw the audience’s attention to a single concept which
contains the entire programme of the work: syllabe [Fr., syllable] and,
as a consequence,
the verb syllaber
[Fr., to assemble, to put together, to make verses]. My principal task
was a realization of these two concepts.
Contrary to
the disorganized chaos of sounds in nature, the syllable is always present in
music – an art based of organized
rhythm and fixed
pitch. Between the syllable and
the general sense - that is, the coming-into-being of
the work of art - there is a connecting-link, and this
connecting-link is the word which directs the disoriented motion of a thought
to a logical conclusion..[60]
Stravinsky
says next that the semantic side of a text often hinders the creative thought of
the artist, while the purely sonic side, on the contrary, liberates the
artist’s imagination: “I must say that words, far from helping, constitute for
the musician a burdensome and limiting intermediary.”[61]
As a result, in Perséphone he was more interested in setting “the magnificent
syllabic structure” provided him by André Gide (1869 -1951), than in the drama
per se. At first glance, these statements concern the sonic side of speech in
general, rather than poetry or metrics. However, the following two excerpts are
helpful in understanding that the syllabic structure of the text and, more
broadly, of the music never existed for Stravinsky outside the notions of metre
and rhythm, in so far as metre and rhythm represented for him - respectively -
the result and the process of adding-up of syllables (syllaber in French,
skladyvat’ or slagat’ in Russian). The first excerpt is from a personal
conversation with the violinist Samuel Dushkin in the early 1930s, the second -
from Poétique musicale (1939-40):
In mathematics…
there are numerous ways of obtaining the number seven. The same is true for rhythm. The only difference between them is that the most
crucial for mathematics is the sum total. It is of little importance, whether you add up five and two
or two and five, six and one or one and six, etc. But for rhythm, the sum total – seven – plays a
secondary role. How it is obtained is far more important: five and two or two and five, because five and
two are something absolutely different from two and five.[62]
The laws that regulate the movement of sounds require
the presence of a measurable and constant value: meter, a purely material element
through which rhythm, a purely formal element, is realized. In other words,
meter answers the question of how many equal parts the musical unit which we
call a measure is to be divided into, and rhythm answers the question of how
these equal parts will be grouped within a given measure. A measure in four
beats, for example, may be composed of two groups of two beats, or in three
groups: one beat, two beats, and one beat, and so on…[63]
Beyond
any doubt, Stravinsky’s study of Russian folk songs and poetry had contributed
to the development of this vision of musical rhythm as a combination of equal
and/or unequal metric units.[64]
In his frequent remarks about syllables as something abstract and pure as
opposed to words burdened with meanings and emotions,[65]
the composer rarely reveals to the interviewer the extent to which the syllabic
and poetic-feet structure of Russian folk poetry was the source of his
notorious accent-fluctuating rhythmic thinking. The only notable exception,
perhaps, is an interview given in
Stravinsky tells us that in Oedipus Rex the word is a simple
material which functions musically as a block of marble or a block of stone in
architecture or sculpture. Les Noces, for instance, consists of songs which do
not bear much logical sense, but instead in these poems their sonic and
rhythmic qualities are emphasized. Our language, explains the composer, is
inseparable from emotionality and sensuality, which undermine the musical value
of the word. That is why [in Oedipus Rex] Stravinsky turns his attention to the
dead language of Latin… Stravinsky leaves the Latin text untouched, yet at the
same time he emphasizes syllables, poetic feet, etc.[66]
As
should be expected, rhythm occupies the supreme place in Stravinsky’s hierarchy
of musical means of expression, as seen from an interview given in
Rhythm in my understanding is the music itself. For example,
the works of Bach, which are standards of comparison for us all, consist of
nothing else but rhythm and architecture. Rhythm is an essential and dominating
quality of music. But the Romantic composers have destroyed it with their
infinite vignettes and ornaments of all kinds. I write my music, as they say,
in cold blood.[67]
One is drawn immediately to this
musical-architectural analogy, contained in the last two quotations. As Druskin
shrewdly observes in the corresponding chapter of his 1983 monograph, during
the neo-classical period Stravinsky consciously developed the spatial aspect of
music, possibly inherited from Debussy.[68]
A constant advocate of lucid forms and clear lines, Stravinsky is well-known to
have possessed the eye of an artist - this “supplementary” talent is revealed
not only in his colourful, ornamented and calligraphically immaculate
manuscripts, but also in his numerous observations about the nature of the two
arts, the visual and the temporal. Because this topic is too vast to be treated
in passing, only two pairs of Stravinsky’s statements will be cited here as
examples of his multifaceted nature of musical perception. The first pair is
taken from conversations with Robert Craft (Memories and Commentaries and
Themes and Conclusions, respectively) and is evidence that both visual and
linguistic impressions from real life stimulated to a great extent the
composer’s creativity:
– Has music ever been suggested to you by, or has a musical
idea ever occurred to you from, a purely visual experience of movement, line or
pattern?
– Countless times, I suppose, though I remember only one
instance in which I was aware of such a thing. This was during the composition
of the second of my Three Pieces for string quartet. I had been fascinated by
the movements of Little Tich whom I had seen in
The origins of the ballet [Jeu de cartes]… go back to a
childhood holiday with my parents at a German spa, and my first impressions of
a casino there… In fact, the trombone theme with which each of the ballet’s
three ‘Deals’ begins imitates the voice of the master of ceremonies at that
first casino. ‘Ein neues Spiel, ein neues Glück,’ he would trumpet – or,
rather, trombone – and the timbre, character, and pomposity of the announcement
are echoed, or caricatured, in my music.[70]
The
second pair of comparisons made by the established maTtre Stravinsky is
especially polysemantic for us who study the linguistic aspect of his vocal
works. The first one, borrowed from Goethe, evokes the second, also very
well-known, comparison:
It is impossible to better define the feeling that music
produces on our senses, as to equate it with the impression evoked by
contemplation of architectural forms. Goethe understood this well; he used to
say that architecture is frozen music.[71]
What fascinated me in this verse was not so much the
stories, which were often crude, or the pictures and metaphors, always so
deliciously unexpected, as the sequence of the words and syllables, and the
cadence they create, which produces an effect on one’s sensibilities very
closely akin to that of music.[72]
Of course, it would be too easy to draw
a parallel between a brick in architecture and a syllable (or the smallest
metric unit) in music, all the more that it has already been drawn by the
composer himself in the passage about Svadebka above. Nevertheless, such a
parallel would miss one particular aspect that is absent from the architectural
analogy - namely, semantics and, as a constituent, the correct accentuation and
the rule of prosody.
Let
us recall the “linear perspective of Japanese declamation.” The reflections of
Druskin, who treated the topic in detail,[73]
suggest that the young composer probably intended to compare the absence of
tonic accents in Japanese to the flat two-dimensional perspective,
characteristic of Medieval paintings up until the middle of the 15th
century and resurrected in the 20th century under the influence of
non-European art by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse (rather than to the normal
three-dimensional perspective of the Renaissance, commonly called “linear”).[74]
However, unlike the contemporary cubist painters, the composer of Trois lyriques japonaises did not yet
intend to overthrow the existing canon, but to reproduce the natural similarity
of the first impression from these poems to the impression of two-dimensional
Japanese graphic art:
In the summer I had read a little anthology of Japanese
lyrics - short poems of a few lines each, selected from the old poets. The
impression which they made on me was exactly like that made by Japanese
painting and engravings. The graphic solution of problems of perspective and
space shown by their art incited me to find something analogous in music.
Nothing could have lent itself better to this than the Russian version of the
Japanese poems, owing to the well-known fact that Russian verse allows the tonic
accent only. I gave myself up to the task, and succeeded by a metrical and
rhythmic process too complex to be explained here.[75]
The composer was able to reflect
symbolically the absence of tonic accents in the Japanese language by
re-accentuating the vocal part. In order to align accented syllables of the
text with metric upbeats of the music, the vocal part was displaced
approximately one crotchet ahead of the accompaniment, and so an ambiguity of
not only “linear perspective” but also of the meaning of the words was created.
Later
in his life, when the interplay of musical and textual accents would become, so
to say, a “visiting card” of the composer’s mature style, there were frequent
incidents of misunderstanding, complaint, and frustration - either from critics
and colleagues (such as Myaskovsky) or directly from the librettists. André
Gide, for instance, explained his absence from the premiere of Perséphone as
follows:
The very night [of the premiere], throwing the whole
thing up in disgust, I left for
Says Craft
regarding Perséphone’s reception and Stravinsky’s attitude to text-setting in
general:
Of all composers, Stravinsky - the supreme inventor of
rhythmic structures, of changing meters, of asymmetrical phrase lengths, and,
at another extreme, of rhythmic repetition (the ostinato) - was the one most
fascinated by the exploitation of verse rhythms in music. What puzzles the
listener in Perséphone is, on the one hand, the composer’s acceptance of a text
written in rigidly fixed quantities, which he frequently follows, and, on the
other, his no less frequent disregard of the spoken verbal requirements of
accentuation and stress. Stravinsky’s argument was that to duplicate verbal
rhythms in music would be dull; but the conflict that sometimes arises in his
treatment of syllables as independent sounds, rather than as components of
words, continues to disconcert part of his audience. Prose might have suited him better,
except that ‘En vérité, il n’y a pas de prose… Toutes les fois qu’il y a effort
au style, il y a versification’ (Mallarmé).[77]
Perséphone was the first full-scale
experience of French text-setting (notwithstanding the two Verlaine songs
written in 1910). Being attracted to the Alexandrines in the first place -
sometimes he sketched directly on the poetic text, as he also did for his Russian
vocal works[78]
- Stravinsky became increasingly annoyed with Gide’s directives that concerned
not only the French prosody but also the desired musical setting (“outburst of
laughter in the orchestra” and so on). In his turn, the composer disregarded Gide’s
warning that, above all, the words should be comprehensible to the audience:
There are at least two explanations of Gide’s dislike of my
Perséphone music. One is that the musical accentuation of the text surprised
and displeased him, though he had been warned in advance that I would stretch
and stress and otherwise ‘treat’[79]
French as I had Russian, and though he understood my ideal text to be syllable
poems, the haiku of Basho and Buson, for example, in which the words do not
impose strong tonic accentuation of their own.[80]
Another
explanation is that Gide had little interest in vocal music and text-setting in
general, thinking rather naively that his text would have already provided the
composer with a close approximation of the musical rhythm.[81]
The very fact of collaboration with Gide on the libretto of Perséphone was
rejected by the late Stravinsky,[82]
whereas the cooperation with W. H. Auden (1909-1973) on the libretto of The
Rake’s Progress (1947) was remembered as one of the most intellectually
enriching experiences of his life:
Auden fascinated and delighted me more every day. When we
were not working he would explain verse forms to me, and almost as quickly as
he could write, compose examples; I still have a specimen sestina and some
light verse that he scribbled off for my wife; and any technical question, of
versification, for example, put him in a passion; he was even eloquent on such
matters.[83]
Wystan had a genius in operatic wording. His lines were
always the right length for singing and his words the right ones to sustain
musical emphasis. A musical speed was generally suggested by the character and
succession of the words, but it was only a useful indication, never a
limitation. Best of all for a composer, the rhythmic values of the verse could
be altered in singing without destroying the verse. At least, Wystan has never
complained. At a different level, as soon as we began to work together I
discovered that we shared the same views not only about opera, but also of the
nature of the Beautiful and the Good. Thus, our opera is indeed, and in the
highest sense, a collaboration.[84]
Apart
from Auden’s receptiveness to re-accentuation and his readiness to make changes
to suit the music,[85]
the English language also gave Stravinsky more flexibility of accent than
French. Nonetheless, after the first performances of the opera in
English-speaking countries, the composer was blamed repeatedly for his insensitivity
to the language.[86]
The fact that he did not speak that language fluently enough cannot be given as
an excuse, for both Auden and Robert Craft were already at his disposal to mark
the accents (which they did). As his sketches for The Rake’s Progress
demonstrate,[87]
at times Stravinsky changed deliberately correct scansion into incorrect,
balancing up rather tactfully the artificial and the natural,[88]
and at other times he simply added a new text to the existing music - the
practice he favoured beginning from Bayka.[89]
In
his late vocal works written in the 1950s and 60s, there is a further move
towards the so-called “reversed” perspective of text-setting, combined with a
more scrupulous approach to dramaturgy.[90]
In these text-settings Stravinsky distanced himself more and more from the
every-day language. In doing this, the composer undoubtedly took into account
the “ignorance” factor, that is, the fact that his (mostly American) audiences
would be unfamiliar with the historical English or Biblical Latin (or Hebrew,
for that matter), which would force them to pay more attention to the music.
His practice of further abstracting syllables from words reached a pinnacle in
the serial work Threni, where capital Hebraic letters (Aleph, Beth, He, Caph,
Res) were set to music.[91]
Still, the accent-fluctuating and word-painting technique B la russe continued
well into the late period.[92]
Zinar brings up a very interesting point, based on her analysis of Stravinsky’s
settings of Latin (Oedipus Rex, Symphony of Psalms, Threni, Canticum Sacrum).
While the composer considered music “by its very nature, essentially powerless
to express anything at all,”[93]
he repeatedly took the opportunity to word-paint with all harmonic, melodic,
dynamic, and rhythmic means available to him, being equally concerned “with the
expression of the thoughts, moods, and words of the text.”[94]
In
the case of Russian-language works of the Swiss years, however, the strict
observance of the rule of prosody co-exists peacefully and alternates with a
few deliberate violations thereof. The balance was found in 1916, in the course
of the composer’s collaboration with C.-F. Ramuz on the translation of Bayka.
It was real fifty-fifty team-work, as seen in the following paragraph from
Ramuz’s Souvenirs sur Igor Stravinsky (1928):
Stravinsky read me the Russian text verse by verse, taking
care each time to count the number of syllables in each verse, which I would
write down in the margins of my paper; then we made the translation, that is,
Stravinsky translated the text for me word for word. It was word-for-word so
literal as to be often quite incomprehensible, but with an inspired (non-logical)
imagery, meetings of sound whose freshness was all the greater for lacking any
(logical) sense… I wrote down my word-for-word; then came the question of
lengths (of longs and shorts), also the question of vowels (this note was
composed to an o, that one to an a, that one to an i); finally, and most
important of all, the famous and insoluble question of tonic accent and its
coincidence or non-coincidence with the musical accent. Continual coincidence
is too boring; it only satisfies our sense of rhythm and measure. But it would
totally contradict the inner essence of the music which was first sung to me,
then played on the piano with an accompaniment of cymbals, then sung and acted
out at the same time – the music that was coming to me alive. To obey the rules
meant to betray the inner essence of this music. To go against the rules at all
costs meant to turn the logic inside out, which would be no less deceitful and
no less tedious.[95]
Later
in life, Stravinsky would return to the same question in his conversation with
Craft about “subtle parallelisms”:
RC – I have often heard you say ‘an artist must avoid
symmetry but he may construct in parallelisms.’ What do you mean?
IS – The mosaics at Torcello of the Last Judgment are a good
example. Their subject is division, division, moreover, into two halves
suggesting equal halves. But, in fact, each is the other’s complement, not its
equal nor its mirror, and the dividing line itself is not a perfect
perpendicular… Mondrian’s Blue FaHade (composition 9, 1914) is a nearer example
of what I mean. It is composed of elements that tend to symmetry in subtle
parallelisms.[96]
Druskin, the editor and commentator of
the Soviet omnibus edition of the dialogues with Craft, draws attention to the similarity
of “subtle parallelisms” to the concept of “dynamic calm” from chapter 2 of
Poétique musicale.[97]
Both ideas should be understood in the context of the division of all music
into chronometric (coinciding with the normal psychological experiencing of
time) and chronoametric (emotionally charged, sharply contrasting, “Dionysian”)
as described in an article by Stravinsky’s close friend Pierre Souvtchinsky.[98]
The “dynamic calm” is what one experiences while listening to the music of the
first, “Apollonian” kind. Although for Stravinsky the composer striving for
unity is fundamentally more important and always precedes plunging into
contrast, “the coexistence of the two is constantly necessary, and all the
problems of art… revolve ineluctably about this question.”[99]
No
doubt, the precursors of these concepts were discussed with Ramuz who should be
credited with half-opening the door to their creative method “in the making.”
Gordon argues (1983: 218) that the close interaction between the writer and the
composer resulted not only in a list of greater and lesser works, but, much
more importantly, in “a mutually evolving aesthetic.” Ramuz’s receptivity to
Russian folk verse was, in fact, an interest of a professional novelist with a
university degree in literature. In October 1913, following a personal crisis,
Ramuz made a pilgrimage to Aix-de-Provence, Cézanne’s native land, a trip that
made him abandon Paris for his native rural Switzerland in 1914. In the summer
of 1915, he was introduced by Ansermet to Stravinsky who, seeking the links to
his own native soil in folk poetry, “succumbed to the contagion of Ramuz’s
affection and, at least temporarily, adopted the Vaud countryside as his own.”[100]
The writer’s newly-found aspiration to “paint with simple words” so as to free
himself from the shackles of conventionality, abstraction, and discursive logic
was a fertilized soil into which Stravinsky’s seed of the “rejoicing discovery”
was dropped.[101]
One year later (1916) the collaboration began. The writer’s and the composer’s
daily efforts on putting together the French versions of Renard, Les Noces,
Pribaoutki, Berceuses du chat, Souvenirs de mon enfance, Trois histoires pour
enfants, Quatre chants russes, and the libretto of Histoire du soldat led to an
intimate friendship which would long be the object of the most cherished
recollections for both.[102]
Later in his life, Stravinsky would deny the linguistic accuracy and the
artistic quality of these translations, as evidenced by his letter to the Concerts
Catalonia, which had invited him in 1929 to conduct Svadebka:
I do not like to hear Les Noces in French: too different
from the prosody of the original… In my view, the French translation… does not
render the character of the rhythmic accentuation which constitutes the basis
of the Russian chant of this work.[103]
The
translation of Bayka was also attacked impartially in Conversations with Igor
Stravinsky:
However,
back in 1916, the composer was rather pleased with the final product of his
association with Ramuz (see below an excerpt from his letter to the Princess de
Polignac, dated October 5, 1916), and he spoke favourably in Chroniques de ma
vie of the ability of his Vaudois friend to grasp the essence of a language
that was totally unknown to him:
I saw a great deal of Ramuz at this time, as we were
working together at the French translation of the Russian text of my Pribaoutki, Berceuse du chat and Renard.
I initiated him into the peculiarities and subtle shades of the Russian
language, and the difficulties presented by its tonic accent. I was astonished
at his insight, his intuitive ability, and his gift for transferring the spirit
and poesy of the Russian folk-poems to a language so remote and different as
French.[105]
Enclosed is
the finished translation of Renard, which M. C.-F. Ramuz made at my request…
This [translation] was a considerable
task, much more difficult than I had thought it would be; I insisted that the French text preserve the flavor of
the original, without [sounding] translated… I think that we have been successful in this task, which we
did together (of course, I participated only whenmusical questions arose)… Let
me assure you, besides, that Ramuz’s translation is not only the best that I
know but is very close to the original as well.[106]
The
last part of the last sentence should not be taken too literally, as no
translation in general (and of poetry in particular, let alone of poetry
already set to music) can do without divergences from the original. Meylan
points to several specific places in Ramuz’s translation of Les Noces, Renard, and chansons russes,[107]
concluding that lyric passages of the folk sources on the whole turned out
“amazingly well,” whereas certain images of Russian folklore, evocative for a
native speaker (e.g., of a nightingale who sings all night long), were omitted from the French version “for
the sake of rhythm.” It should be remembered, however, that the composer could
be held equally responsible for these imperfections.
Overall,
it is possible to hypothesize that Stravinsky, although not a linguist, grasped
(as did Ramuz in his turn) the intricate structure of Russian folk poetry and
the logic of Russian folk accentuation so
intuitively that he
was able to
reproduce them in his vocal works. It is important to remind ourselves
that in these works the composer is still quite remote from the artificiality
of prosody, typical in his settings of Latin, French, or English. In these
works, “linear” and “reversed” perspectives of Russian declamation (that is,
literary and folk accentuation) are combined practically in the same proportion
that is found in Russian folk verse. His main companion on this journey was
(together with Ramuz, of course) his native language that allowed such
experiments - the language that is both rich and flexible, lexically,
semantically, phonologically, and rhythmically. Lastly, Stravinsky’s admirable
sensibility to his native language at the time he was equally distant both from
Example 3: Renard
Rehearsal Number 87