IGOR STRAVINSKY A COMPOSER OF MANY STYLES. 1913 - 1930.

We left Stravinsky having settled in the West and, after the Rite of Spring, crash,
clash cling, clang, bing, bang, bing, the first world war broke out and Stravinsky had
to take another direction, seeking asylum in neutral Switzerland for the duration. It
wasnt actually quite like that and I think that that change of direction was due to
come about anyway. The Stravinskys had been seasonal visitors to France, had
had from 1910 various pied terre in Switzerland as a base but remained firmly
settled back home in Russia where they derived an income from his estate. The
Stravinskys had made it back to Switzerland just before the outbreak of war when
the barriers came down on the frontiers, in the east and the west, and from then
there was no way back.
As to what direction Stravinskys music might take, it is fair to say that there was
nowhere further to go following the Rite of Spring. Diaghilev was never an
impresario to want to repeat himself but would be asking the question Whats New?
There was other talent such as the 22 year old Prokofiev who left his calling card
with Diaghilev in London and was given the commission to write Ala and Lolli, a
ballet about the warlike Scythians. Now you may have heard David Mellors
programme, If you like this, you will like that on Classic FM. Well If you like the
Rite of Spring you will like the Scythian Suite, the name given to Ali and Lolli after
Diaghilev withdrew the commission. Why was that? It seems more than likely that he
did not want a repeat riot of The Rite of Spring. Instead he commissioned Prokofiev
to write a comic ballet, Chout, also known as The Tale of the Buffoon.
As to Stravinsky in 1913, it is unlikely that he would have wanted to get landlocked
into ballet anymore than he was landlocked in Switzerland. World War One was still
a year away after the Rite. Stravinsky had other irons in the fire and now turned his
attention back to Le Rossignol (The Nightingale). This had started out as his first
opera, commissioned by the Moscow Free Theatre back in 2008 and put to one side
at the beginning of his association with the Ballets Rouges. The idea was particularly
attractive to him, the music, yes, but there also being 10,000 roubles in it for him.
The family returned to Switzerland in the autumn of 1913. His fourth child, Marie,
was born in January soon after which his wife, Katya, was confined to a sanatorium
with tuberculosis. It was there, high up in the Alpine air that that he went on to
complete Le Rossignol in March 1914
By April, the family were able to return to Clarens only to discover that the Moscow
Free Theatre had gone bankrupt. How thin is the thread of destiny. If one thinks
about it, had the Theatre not gone bankrupt, Stravinsky would probably have made
his way to Moscow, the performance mounted and then as like as not he might have
found himself holed up in Russia for the duration of the 14/18 war and for the 1917
Lenin revolution. Instead, Le Rossignol was performed under Diaghilev's auspices at
the Paris Opra on 26 May 1914, with sets and costumes designed by Benois. Now
my first thought about that is what a loyal friend Diaghilev was. He must have had his
repertoire for the season lined up and published and not only does he squeeze in a
new opera but gets it produced, rehearsed and mounted all within a month of it being
completed. Wow. Le Rossignol turned out to be a bit of a disappointment with the
public in the wake of The Rite of Spring but there were those who found much to
admire. These included Ravel, Bartok but strangely also Reynaldo Hahn, best known

for his series of salon songs. One particular reason this opera is said to have failed
to have gained favour is that Stravinsky was picking up in 1914 where he had left off
in 1908. Six years, but during which time he had changed out of recognition and
acquired new compositional techniques which he could not just unlearn and jettison .
The result was a stylistic schism between a before and after. This illustrates that
Stravinsky had to write in his style of the here and now. Contrast that for instance
with Mendelssohn writing his overture to the Midsummer Nights Dream aged 17 in
1826 and the rest of the incidental music 16 years later in 1842, five years before
his death. Yet it sounds as if it had all come out of the same delivery ward without
problems of change of style in the intervening years. Later, Stravinsky would rework
his material into an orchestral piece renamed Le Chant du Rossignol. It is a Hans
Anderson story of the sweet nightingale and the mechanical usurper which replaced
it. Its chinoiserie takes us back to the exotic of the earlier Russian school - Chinamen
in pigtails wearing dressing gowns with dragons and all a world apart from what 1914
was yet to deliver.
His last trip to Russia was as late as July 1914 and he got back to Clarens just
before the end of July. That was the last time he was to see his native land until
1962. He was now Swiss resident, unable to access from Russia, his estate income
or royalties. The privations of the Great War were for him largely economic. War
torn Paris was no longer what it had been and the expatriate Ballets Russes had
found itself further banged up in Portugal. Switzerland did not possess any large
orchestra. Stravinsky was forced to take a new direction, that of the small scale.
Two people who were to have an influence were C F Ramuz, a Swiss poet and the
other was Ernest Ansermet, a professor of mathematics who became a leading
conductor and founder of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. It was Ramuz who
suggested that Stravinsky might write works to be accompanied by a small chamber
ensemble which could be performed in small venues including a converted barn.
(This is somewhat similar to Benjamin Britten and the New Opera Group with the
chamber operas that Britten wrote following Peter Grimes). The first of these,
although it was not the earlier one to be performed, was Renard which was to be
sung and danced. The other was the Soldiers Tale, a morality tale written by Ramuz
to be played by a narrator with two actors, one the soldier returning home on leave
carrying only his kitbag and his violin and the other playing and dancing the part of
the devil. There also was the princess, a dancing role only. The economy of scale
appealed to Stravinsky, not only because it was more likely to obtain a performance,
but also because he realized that there was no further seismic shock he could
deliver beyond Le Sacre. In this work, Stravinsky tinkered with jazz which he had
read in notated score but as yet had not heard any. Stravinsky arranged the work for
a septet including percussion. He even ordered a drum kit to be sent from America
so that he could practise jazz drumming. Apart from the soldier playing his old fiddle
there are three dances for the princess including a tango, a waltz and ragtime.
Shortly before it ends Stravinsky introduces two chorales. Chorales? Thats not jazz
but a hint of Bach. Was this the first signpost of a new direction?
Renard was commissioned in April 1915 by la Princesse de Polignac, with a view to
it being played in her salon. It was completed in 1916 but it was not staged until 1922
in a double bill with his opera, Mavra All sorts of weird and interesting things might
have gone on in the Princesss salon, but a performance of Renard was never to be
one of them. Stravinsky set out to create a new form of theatre in which the dance

and the singing are connected. Renard is a farmyard fairy tale about Reynard the
Fox who deceives the Cock, the Cat and the Ram, but they catch up with him and
punish him at the end. Maybe we could do with them in Blackheath at the moment
with the number of foxes about. The choreography was by Nijinska (who managed
not to get pregnant in rehearsals this time). Ansermet conducted. I have always felt
some kind of likeness between Renard and the subject style of that other Russian
ex-pat, Marc Chagall. Strange to say but in 1929 Diaghilev staged a revival with the
Ballets Russes and sought to commission Chagall to design the sets. Chagall
turned it down much to Stravinskys regret. Renard ought to have been right up the
street of the Orwell of Animal Farm, a satirical Russian work with the animals
saluting very much like the Red Army.
The Stravinskys were settled into Switzerland cut off from back home. With the
collapse of the Tsarist Regime and the October revolution in 1917 there was no way
he would contemplate returning. Stravinsky was not prepared to take on Soviet
citizenship and so they became the Swiss Family Stravinsky. He continued writing
on a small scale due mostly to necessity but also a gradual fining of his style. His
subject matter was still Russian however and his Russian Period would continue
until about 1920. In 1913, as a follow on to the Rite of Spring, he had conceived the
idea of a large scale work, Les Noces (The Wedding), based again on Russian
tradition but from a feminist point of view in the form of protest at the forcible nature
of a womans duty to marry in Russia. He completed it in October 1919 but its
orchestration changed dramatically. Originally the orchestra was similar in size to
that of The Rite with a synchronised pianola roll and two-keyboard cimbaloms, the
Hungarian gypsy instrument used by Kodaly in Hary Janos and also by Debussy in
La plus que lente. In the final version it consisted of four singers, pitched percussion,
including four pianos, as well as standard percussion. This orchestration
demonstrates Stravinsky's increasing proclivity towards stripped down ensembles
with mechanical rhythms in the decade which followed. The story itself starts with the
brides trepidation at getting married, goes on to her mothers advice which seems to
be on the lines of Just keep your eyes shut and think of Russia and finishes with
various saints giving their blessings.
With the end of the first world war, Stravinsky found himself taking another turn of
direction. His music had pared down from the heady days of the pre-war ballets but
he had been sticking firmly to drawing his inspiration from his Russian origins,
probably a mythical Russia he had never known, a Russia beginning to recede. He
needed to move on but where to? The music which shook the world pre-war was no
longer flavour of the month for the emerging post war. Nationalism went out with Big
Bertha; the break with full blooded romanticism had been made by Debussy and the
impressionist school but their aromatic atmospheric imagery was itself out of kilter
with the modernist trends about to follow. Amongst those trends was neoclassicism.
The first neo-classical work of Stravinsky was Pulcinella written in 1920, his last
composition whilst residing still in Swizerland. Now what do we mean by neo
classical and what do we mean by neo classical when we talk about Stravinsky?
The general concept was to seek to revert to some earlier glorious past period of
refinement with musical forms of the classical and baroque periods and to pinch a
good few musical themes of earlier masters in the process. This would bring back

the spirit of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Neo-classicism could mean writing an
original work in classical forms such as the concerti grossi of Martinu; it could mean
evoking the spirit of the former age as in Prokofievs classical symphony which is
Haydnesque in dimension rather than its form. There were some composers with a
mission to excavate the music of the old masters. Left in their original forms this
music was not playable and unless re-arranged it would be lost to modern
audiences. Hence there came about arrangements of their works such as
Respighis Ancient Airs and Dances or Peter Warlocks Capriol Suite. A concert hall
favourite till the 1960s was the Water Music by Handel arranged by Hamilton Harty.
It made Handel accessible for the audience of the day. The undoubted reason for
this was that the manufacture and playing of period instruments was a lost craft until
the emergence of the Dolmetsch family in manufacturing old instruments and
creating a festival for their music as far back as 1925. Ultimately we saw the growth
of period instrument orchestras from about 1980. Before then, old masters were
saved by re-orchestration on modern instruments on the Henry Wood principle that
that was how the composer would have wanted it if he could have heard it so
played!. It was not neo-classicism actually but bringing the past back to life. There
was also pastiche as with Tchaikovskys Rococo Variations but it was the world of
ballet to begin with which brought a new form. The emerging world of ballet could not
produce new works quickly enough. So, drum up some old composers, take their
themes, add a touch of lipstick and musical maquillage and you had La Boutique
Fantasque, Rossini arr. Respighi; The Good Humoured Ladies, Scarlatti arr.
Tomassini and the Wise Virgins, Bach arr. Walton but to name a few. From the
ballets emerged the suites for the concert hall adding a spirit of the old world with
colourful orchestral arrangements. The man to whom this appealed most for the
revived postwar Ballets Russes was Diaghilev. It was he who in museums in Naples
and London came across some manuscripts of works by the Italian composer,
Pergolesi (1710-1736) except that they turned out to be spurious and were by
various other composers and handed them to his No 1 composer. Stravinsky, to
fashion them for a ballet to be based on an 18th century play from the Commedia
dellarte
It is an opera ballet and, like Le Rossignol and Renard, the singers are placed in the
orchestra pit giving the stage to the dancers. It is not often that we hear the full work
with its singing which is particularly felicitous. It is the suite drawn from it which is
best known and once the we get past the good behaviour with which the work gets
going the fun really begins, that is if you like a clown trombone playing a trio with two
double basses. Pulcinella is the old Italian version of Punch. The story is a
complicated comedy with two couples and with various serenading and wooing, the
sort of thing not seen much within our group...but who knows! Stravinsky did not like
the idea of music by Pergolesi but once he had seen the music the penny dropped,
as Matthew might say. Now he could just have been another composer who
tastefully re-arranged Pergolesi and the ballet would have been attributed as
Pergolesi-Stravinsky, but Stravinsky went further. In this and in other works to follow
his neo-classicism set out to make the music his own with his mark. He kept to the
spirit of the original; he shocked by making it sound as a pastiche but he didnt just
arrange it but rewrote it as his own with his own rhythms and more importantly his
own undeniable bitter sweet sound world. You dont go to hear Pulcinella to hear
Pergolesi but to hear Stravinsky. Likewise with The Fairys Kiss. It is Stravinsky, not
Tchaikovsky. That is the essential difference between Stravinsky and the others.

The Fairys Kiss gets coupled with Pulcinella, as Matthew will do. It was written in
1927/8 and I will do a Dr Who here and jump forward in time. This ballet score was
commissioned by Ida Rubinstein, a Russian dance-actress who had come to Paris
with Diaghilev's company in 1909, but soon left to go it alone. In 1911 she put on Le
Martyre de Saint Sbastien, a lavish spectacle with music by Debussy. She also
commissioned Ravel's La Valse (1920) and Bolro (1928). The Fairy's Kiss came
about as a result of her invitation to Stravinsky to write a ballet for her based on
music by Tchaikovsky. She knew her man. Stravinsky claimed to venerate
Tchaikovsky. He drew his material from songs and piano pieces by his great
predecessor. He was able to reproduce a Tchaikovsky's sound transmuted into out
and out Stravinsky. He worked on the full score between July and October 1928. The
names of Nijinska and Benois are still there whilst Ida Rubinstein danced the role of
the Fairy. The story is based on Hans Andersons The Ice Maiden. The second
movement of the suite is set in Switzerland with a yodelling French horn and
demonstrates Stravinskys aptitude in changing the rhythms of the original music.
Returning to where we were, the Swiss Family Stravinsky moved back to France in
May 1920, first holidaying in Brittany whilst house hunting in Paris. In September
Coco Chanel came to the rescue by offering the whole family her Paris suburban
house, Bel Respiro. In December, Diaghilev produced a revival of the Rite of Spring
underwritten by Coco who put up 300,000 francs. Whatever happened between
Coco and Stravinsky is a matter of conjecture but I have mentioned earlier that there
is plenty of more than conjecture in the film Coco and Igor where one gains the
impression that his number came after that of Chanel No 5.
Stravinsky also found work by forging a musical relationship with Pleyel, the French
piano company. This secured for him a monthly income and space at the Pleyel
studio in which he could work and entertain. Pleyel had invented the Pleyela, its own
version of the pianola with piano rolls, and Stravinsky began to arrange many of his
early works for it. Included in the Pleyela piano rolls are The Rite of Spring,
Petrushka, The Firebird and Le Chant du Rossignol. Just think of having your very
own pianola at home with the Rite of Spring being played by an unseen Stravinsky.
With Paris came first performances of works written in Switzerland and held back
including Renard, Les Noces, the Symphonies for Winds (nine minutes) and his
Russian opera Mavra (25 minutes).
Stravinsky could now shed the constraints of Switzerland and the war years. In
February 1921 Stravinsky met Vera de Bosset, a dancer born in St Petersburg of a
Baltic German aristocratic family. She had had a multifaceted education including
the piano, anatomy, philosophy and art. She finished with acting and dancing,
inspired by Sarah Berhart and Isadora Duncan, and eloped to Paris with Serge
Sudekin, a painter and designer who had worked on the Rite of Spring. He became
her third husband but it was not to last. The call of Stravinsky was too powerful and
she left. Three months later Stravinsky and his family moved to Anglet, near Biarritz.
From then until his wife's death in 1939, Stravinsky openly led a double life, dividing
his time, mainly between his family in the south of France, but also with Vera in Paris
and whilst on tour. Katya, his wife, accepted the situation "with a mixture of
magnanimity, bitterness, and compassion".

Neo-classicism went further than tarting up old composers to make ballets.

Stravinskys music tended to lack formal structure as it was written to underscore a
stage work. Without a story line his music needed something more formalistic and
this becomes more apparent in the works of the 1930s. The 1920s produced three
important works and a new tendency for Stravinsky to draw his inspiration from the
ancient world.
Oedipus Rex is an opera-oratorio after Sophocles for orchestra, speaker, soloists,
and male chorus. The libretto was written in French by Jean Cocteau and then
translated into Latin. Stravinsky had thought of setting the work in ancient Greek,
but decided ultimately on Latin which he expressed as not dead but turned to stone.
The narration, however, is given in the language of the audience. The work is
sometimes performed in the concert hall as an oratorio. As an opera it is static with
the main characters wearing masks and motionless. It was first performed at the
Vienna State Opera in 1928.
Apollo or Apollon Musagette is a ballet in two tableaux, commissioned by the
American patron, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and composed in 1928, the same year
as The Fairys Kiss. The choreographer was Georges Balanchine, his first great
success. The original costumes were replaced in 1929 with new designs by Coco
Chanel. Apollo was first performed by the Ballets Russes in Paris although its first
outing had been intended for Washington. The story centres around Apollo, the
Greek god of music, who is visited by three muses: Terpischore, muse of dance and
song; Polyhymnia, muse of mime; and Calliope, muse of poetry. The ballet plainly
takes ancient Greece as its setting. It uses a string chamber orchestra, the first time
that Stravinsky seems to have written for strings. His inspiration for this work derived
from 17th- and 18th-century French music, in particular that of Lully.
The 1920s had produced a completely different Stravinsky but the same Stravinsky
nevertheless. His neo-classical period would continue with Symphony of Psalms in
1930 but 1929 would be the end of an era. Stravinsky remained rooted for now in
France but the commissions were coming from America. So did the Wall Street
Crash and what changed things for ever for Stravinsky was the death in Italy that
same year of Sergei Diaghilev. The two had been in partnership through thick and
thin. Diaghilev had made Stravinsky as surely as Stravinsky had made Diaghilev.
From then on Stravinsky was on his own.