Ivan HEWETT
Fifty years on from Stravinsky’s death, his odd, angular work sounds as bold and brilliant as ever, writes Ivan Hewett
Ablazing radical who became a classic, immortalised in music’s pantheon: this is something very few composers have achieved. In the 17th century there was Monteverdi, then Gluck in the 18th, then in the 19th Beethoven and Wagner, then after that possibly Arnold Schoenberg.
The last in that glorious line was Igor Stravinsky. The status of radical is assured by The Rite of Spring, which was and surely always will be the greatest scandal in music. The status of classic is assured by the very same piece, plus everything else he ever wrote. Stravinsky is a true canonical master, a touchstone of excellence and the embodiment of the values of the Western tradition. He is one for the ages.
Or is he? The uncomfortable truth is that, apart from the three great ballets, The Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, all composed by Stravinsky for the Ballets Russes by the time he was 30, not many of his works are actually well-known. Very few of the so-called “neo-classical” works he composed between 1918 and the early 1950s have become popular; the bracing recomposition of Italian Baroque music in Pulcinella, the grand and moving Symphony of Psalms. But how often does one hear the radiant Serenade for piano, or the mellifluous oratorio Perséphone, created with André Gide, or the pert and witty Capriccio for piano and orchestra? As for the works of his old age, written in Schoenberg’s severely systematic “12-note” style, they are more or less a lost cause. One occasionally hears his very last work, the exiguous and ritualistic Requiem Canticles, but pieces such as the gnomic Movements for Piano and Orchestra, or the cantata Abraham and Isaac, hardly come round once in a decade.
But if many of Stravinsky’s works are rarities in the concert hall, the totality of the oeuvre is aweinspiring. This composer who was born and died in the spring lived his life in a perpetual one. It’s hard to think of a peer of his who renovated their style so thoroughly and so often, and each time with total conviction and authority. And that list is only the beginning. There’s also the Verdi-isms of his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, the dancing counterpoint of his “back-to-Bach” Concerto in E flat ( Dumbarton Oaks), the overt homage to Beethoven in his Symphony in C, the neo-medievalism of his Mass, and the cubist reinvention of Mozart in The Rake’s Progress. Not to mention the big-band jazz of his Ebony Concerto, and the Tango in his music-theatre masterpiece The Soldier’s Tale.
But this protean quality, which is paralleled only by Picasso’s amazing powers of self-renewal, isn’t universally admired. Some say it shows that Stravinsky was basically hollow, and that underneath the parade of different styles, there was no “essential” Stravinsky at all. They point to his obsession with being fashionable, even to the point of having an affair with the creator of modern fashion, Coco Chanel. Not only did this drive him to change his style as often as his suits, but he constantly sought out opportunities to explain himself in the media. (One notable Stravinsky scholar described him as being in “a permanent state of interview”.) For many, this makes Stravinsky guilty of insincerity, which these days is the cardinal sin in the arts. We want artists to give us their “truth”, we want them to show their wounds. The line between the concert hall or the stage and the confessional is becoming increasingly blurred.
Stravinsky would have found this obsession with self distasteful. “Confessional” composers such as Mahler drew his scorn, and he always took care to keep himself out of his art. “Most art is sincere, and most art is bad,” he once remarked, “but some insincere art – sincerely insincere – is quite good.” On another occasion he said, “For me, interest always passes from the maker to the thing made.” It’s not that he avoided deep feeling; on the contrary, the emotional restraint of his music is one of the things that makes it so moving. It’s more that the feelings arise from a stimulus outside himself: a ballet scenario, a religious text, a tricky technical problem such as conjuring a piece out of a preset “row” of only five notes – as he did in the memorial piece he composed for the poet Dylan Thomas.
“Restraint” might seem an odd word to use of the composer of The Rite of Spring, which is often described as orgiastic in its violence. But one of the most striking aspects of that piece is its economy and precision. All his music gives that same sense of filling the minimum time with the maximum of significance. This is why it feels so extraordinarily alert and alive: there’s no fat, no “marking time”.
That’s one source of the fascination of his music. Another is the way violence and the most sophisticated artifice are found side-by-side. This is a reflection of the man himself, who was astonishingly earthy – his appetite for Scotch and food and women were legendary – but also vastly cultured, and widely read in several languages. The Rite of Spring shows the violent primitivist side of him at its apogee, the luminous ballet Apollon Musagètes shows his ordered, Apollonian side. More characteristic are those works where the two coexist, such as the ballet Orpheus, where at the end lyrical restraint is torn aside by the Furies’ violence.
Those looking for a more stable core to Igor Stravinsky than an unstable yoking together of opposites might point to his religious instinct, which after a period of suppression in his youth became ever stronger from the 1920s onwards. His corpus of religious works is the most impressive of any of the great 20th-century composers. In the closing bars of the Symphony of Psalms, Stravinsky found a way to express a calm ecstatic exaltation that is a world away from the stormy subjective torments of Verdi’s Requiem, and all the more moving because of it. But as his amanuensis Robert Craft once said, “Stravinsky’s profoundest moods are not the same as his profoundest music.”
I know what he means; it’s the tender third movement of his Violin Concerto, or the lullaby from Perséphone, which are my Desert Island Stravinsky pieces. In their poised lyricism and their power to move while holding sentimentality ruthlessly at bay, I feel a spiritual quality, even more than in his religious music. Stravinsky once said of the great modernist composer Webern that he was a “perpetual Pentecost for all who believe in music”. The same could be said of Igor Stravinsky himself.
The modern obsession with ‘self’ in art would have drawn his scorn