Experiencing Stravinsky by Robin Maconie

Experiencing Stravinsky by Robin Maconie

Author:Robin Maconie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


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Credo for unaccompanied voices SATB (1932; Works 20:9); Persephone, melodrama in three scenes for tenor, narrator, mixed chorus SATB, children’s choir, and orchestra (1933–1934; Works 19:1–3); Ave Maria for unaccompanied voices SATB (1934; Works 20:8); Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (I, 1931; II–IV, 1934–1935; Works 13:10–13).

As with the Pater Noster, composed at the time of embarking on Oedipus Rex, the composition of Credo and the Ave Maria comes across in context as small petitions for divine blessing on larger works of potential significance for the composer’s immediate future. The drama Persephone, a second Ida Rubenstein commission (after The Fairy’s Kiss), brought the composer into collaboration (and conflict) with the writer André Gide. Gide’s verse play belongs to the same prewar French literary culture as d’Annunzio’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, set to music by Debussy, and while Gide may have anticipated a similar musical treatment of an antique myth of comparable doctrinaire formality, for Stravinsky the musical challenge of a young woman abducted from the world of the living, eventually to return voluntarily, as it were on annual loan, to restore the cycle of the seasons to a world in desolation, ran the risk of implying a return to the pagan subject matter of The Rite of Spring and, in some senses, a self-criticism or repudiation of the earlier work.

Persephone would be his way of making yet another political statement, continuing the message of Oedipus Rex and Apollo, a show of defiance toward the Nazi propaganda message of the 1933 “Victory” Nuremberg Rally filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and distributed under the title Der Sieg des Glaubens (“Victory of Faith”), while maintaining a position of political neutrality or separation of art and life (or church and state). He was certainly determined to avoid composing in mock Debussyan style, or pursuing the art deco aesthetic of Oedipus and The Fairy’s Kiss, another tale of abduction by the gods, though of a young man. The new orchestration is larger than life, ranging in style from expressionist abstraction to resplendently colorful. Despite serious aesthetic reservations, he was effectively insulated from press criticism—given the political risk of promoting a message of healing and reconciliation at a time of financial devastation and rising militant socialism—by Gide’s prestige in the world of literature; he also saw attractive expressive opportunities in Gide’s austerely melodious verses and subject matter that he was determined to treat with the luminous clarity and sublime indifference of Erik Satie’s Socrate.

The poet for his part was somewhat taken aback at the composer’s plans for an extreme formality and absence of action and apparent treatment of the lyrics as a kind of news reportage held together by the device of a narrative voiceover. It was all the same a strategy building on the success of Oedipus Rex and allowing the production to succeed in the terms and confinements of a movie production or radio broadcast as effectively as for an audience in the concert hall. Like Momente, Stockhausen’s 1964 choric testament to love,



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