Stravinsky’S Creation Myth

“I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise. . . I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite. ” — Stravinsky in Chronicle of My Life, 1936 There is irony in the persisting mythology surrounding Stravinsky’s violent and elemental ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, also known as The Rite of Spring. As a work that is widely acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century, listeners and even historians often refer to it as a seminal piece of ‘Avant-Garde’ writing. But, despite it’s reputation for being fiendishly difficult to perform and famously audience provoking, can we really call The Rite ‘Avant-Garde’?

Throughout the 19th Century, there was a “great thrust” of scientific enlightenment in which the science of anthropology allowed for the de-mystification of myths in popular art and culture, and encouraged the artistic exploration of alternative values like pagan elementalism and primitivism; all in some form a rebellion against the ideals of the Romantic era. Following it’s now infamous 1913 premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, The Rite had it’s share of critics. These included the opinion of Jacques Rivière, editor of Nouvelle revue française, who curiously called the work a “biological ballet”. By this he was referring to it as a variant of the art movement ‘neo-primitivism’ — ‘biologism’ which is, to be brief, a philosophical belief “sceptical of all humane ideals” revealing life to be no greater than it’s most fundamental physical facts and motivations, such as birth and death, procreation and survival.

This is at the heart of what The Rite is. In it’s brutalism and stark depiction of a pagan ritual sacrifice, it aims to tear down the vain façade of civilisation, exposing at it’s core raw subconscious emotion. It returns us to a time when there was no language or culture, and we were at the mercy of nature’s destructiveness. This is no myth, but a musically “architectural” retelling of our history of violence, evoking specifically a prehistoric Russia. The ballet’s narrative and ethnic tradition really only act as a pretext for the music. Or at least this is what Stravinsky would have us believe as he expressed in the years following The Rite’s success, saying to “. . . note well that the idea came from the music and not the music from the idea. ”

The irony is that, despite it’s expressive and elemental subject and Stravinsky’s insistence that the work was not anecdotal, The Rite and it’s premiere riot have become one of the biggest mythologised events of 20th Century classical music. Whether he actually agreed with any of Rivière’s sentiments — this is just the opinion of one in many disgruntled critics who initially rejected the work — one could ask whether Stravinsky or The Rite itself (or any piece of art for that matter) is complicit in the message it conveys. In Richard Taruskin’s extensive work of scholarship The Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Early Twentieth Century, he quotes another critic of The Rite, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, a German social philosopher. Adorno, a trained musician himself, raises some very interesting questions about the social responsibilities of art. In his mind, The Rite’s lack of sympathy for the ‘Chosen One’ (the young girl forced to dance herself to death) reveals a disturbing preference for an “unreflective collective mentality over individual conscience”. For Adorno, this is the unseating of morality and, writing about this in 1948, these thoughts of his had been “vindicated. . . by the rise of fascism” and the events of the two world wars. He seems to even suggest that Stravinsky’s music, in some part, participated in the “prefiguring of fascism”. But can any piece of art (if we assume art is objective even if it’s creators’ are not) really do such a thing?

By the requirement of extreme precision needed to play it’s challenging rhythms, Stravinsky constrains his performers to such an extent as to not allow any room for ‘artistic expression’. Adorno’s argument is that this may well render any performance of The Rite unemotional and dehumanises it’s performers “as surely as the primitive tribe constrains the sacrificial maiden”. Jonathan Cross writes that The Rite’s primitivism lies at the heart of Adorno’s criticism which concludes that it’s “aesthetic nerves tremble with the desire to regress to the Stone Age. ” However, I’m sure that the myriads of instrumentalists (and indeed dancers) that have performed this irrefutable masterpiece over the past century would not all agree.

Taruskin also contemplates on The Rite’s morality, asking whether “the lack of pathos. . . is merely an aspect of the “anecdotal” content of the work. . . ” (he supposes that Stravinsky had reasons in the years after The Rite to distance himself from the subject matter and attempted to reframe his contribution by labelling it “architectural”), “. . . or is that pitilessness already implicit in the music itself. . .?” Perhaps most pertinently, because of his suggestion that Stravinsky was a “fascist sympathiser” in the years between the two world wars, what are the moral implications for any performance of this work? Do we face a “Wagner problem”? Are we as listeners and performers able to participate in and enjoy problematic art without also becoming complicit?

When Adorno was writing The Philosophy of New Music in 1948, The Rite was already being recognised as a classic of 20th Century concert repertoire although not as a staged ballet. The Rite and the ‘riot’ have been entangled in memory to such an extent that we now so strongly associate the piece’s notoriety with the event itself, concluding that of course those at the premiere were shocked at it’s daring nature. And yet, looking at the contemporary criticism of the piece there are many reviews that were instead obsessed with the dancers, hardly mentioning the music “beyond naming Stravinsky as the composer”. That night, the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was largely ‘high society’, members of the Paris elite who ‘Les Apaches’ composer Florent Schmitt described as “immeasurably remote from their feeble understanding, with the stupid hilarity of infants”. One critic described the chaotic scene and only by “straining our ears amid an indescribable racket. . . could we get some rough idea of the new work, prevented from hearing it as much by its defenders as by its attackers”. It is conceivable and even likely that most of the negative attention in the theatre was directed at Vaslav Nijinsky’s “big jumping match”.

In his memoirs, Stravinsky expresses his admiration for Nijinsky as an artist — at 23 he was considered one of his generations greatest dancers — and yet found “him childlishly spoiled and impulsive”. It was a wonder to him that Diaghilev had thought Nijinsky capable of the task of setting Stravinsky’s challenging music to choreography with only the experience of staging Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune behind him. Stravinsky also expressed his disappointment of working with him saying of Nijinsky, “he did not know the musical alphabet. . . he never understood musical meters and he had no very certain sense of tempo. You may imagine from this the rhythmic chaos that was Le Sacre du Printemps. . . ” It seems that Stravinsky had something completely different in mind when it came to choreographing The Rite than what audiences ultimately saw at it’s premiere. This is important to note when understanding Stravinksy’s desire to later distance himself from the ballet and promote the music’s independence from the choreography.

The Rite as a concert work takes it’s place among Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, and Strauss’s Elektra as a major canonical modernist work from this period. Also standing alongside other art movements like Cubism, these works share similar characteristics defined by symbolism, expressionism and primitivism. Christopher Butler in his book Early Modernism says that all these early modernists had “a general atmosphere of scepticism which prompted a basic examination of the languages of the arts”. Jonathan Cross, author of The Stravinsky Legacy, elaborates on this saying that these composers, prior to the First World War, were fighting against a deep rooted Romantic tradition, weakening tonality, and challenging the “tyranny of the barline”. However, following the war this negativity became more about reconstruction and a “quest for new kinds of order”, out of which emerged neo-classicism and the twelve tone method.

Despite Stravinsky’s “cultivated facade of a sophisticated cosmopolitan” his Russianness and the mark it left on his music at this time is undeniable. Taruskin in his writings on Stravinsky says “he was profoundly un and even anti-western in his musical thinking”. Although Stravinsky claims that the only musical source he borrowed from is set in the eerily-high Bassoon melody that opens The Rite — a simple Lithuanian folk tune, deconstructed in typical Stravinsky style — other authors of analytical studies of the Rite like Stephen Walsh argue that in fact much of the material in the work is lifted from “provincial denationalised Russian art music in which he had been reared” and that this is evident in his early sketches.

This may be the case, or perhaps as Stravinsky said himself “if any of these pieces sound like aboriginal folk music, it may be because my powers of fabrication were able to tap some unconscious ‘folk’ memory”. Although he left his homeland in search of the cultural and political freedom of France, Switzerland, and eventually the U. S. A. , he would, in writing music, return in his mind (although never in person to the place “he once knew”) to his childhood Russia. In conversation with Robert Craft, Stravinsky is asked what he most loved about Russia, and replies “the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking”. Does this not bring to mind the elemental nature of the thrashing dissonances and ostinatos in The Rite?

Forty years before The Rite’s Paris premiere in 1913, a political and cultural upheaval in France, marked by the end of the Franco-Prussian war, gave breath to a myriad of new artists. For many ‘La Belle Époque’ sparked a new way of thinking about art, rejecting the structures and ideals of Romanticism. It being perhaps symbolic of the political and social turmoil that had haunted France for so long. Stravinsky was a late but important figure in this art movement and in Paris, less curious and obscure than composers like Satie who were, for a time, left lingering at the end of this ‘Impressionist’ period. Stravinsky’s music in the early 20th Century, in particular the Ballet Russe commissions — Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring — represented a gear shift in the new century’s burgeoning Avant-Garde movement.

To define Avant-Gardism, we need to subscribe to the idea that the history of music is linear - the idea one composer can achieve the status of being out in front, being the most innovative among their contemporaries — that is until they are overtaken with something else. Avant gardism seems to suggest three things — something strongly about a composer’s intention i. e. the intend to provoke or goad an audience with sounds that can even challenge their understanding of what music can be. . . . second, the characteristics of the music and how much a composer in writing their work succeeds in rejecting traditional structures. . . . and three, how an audience reacts to it.

The Rite wasn’t really a piece of Avant-Garde but because of the shocking nature of the ballet and the choreography and of the audience at the premiere — this culmination of aspects and events that have led it to be mythologised as this great singularly inspired work. However the music, as the works of Walsh and Taruskin have shown us, is really just a great culmination of influences — Russia, Paris, the Viennese school — that came together as this great ‘cubist’ mash up of ideas. And I don’t think Stravinsky shied away from this, or at least not until he later tried to distance himself from the controversy. He wasn’t trying to creative something completely brand new but rather producing grand art and being inspired by what came before and what was around him. This isn’t Avant-Gardism, it’s postmodernism at the cradle of modernism.

Ever since it’s inception, composers throughout the 20th Century have been acknowledging it’s importance and “centralism” to their own works. Boulez who wrote about and extensively studied The Rite, said it “. . . has not ceased to engender, first, polemics, then praise, and finally, the necessary clarifications. In seventy years, its presence has been felt continuously. ” The Rite has persisted among musicians and listeners as something of a singular testament to Stravinsky’s genius, despite writing many other great works and continuing to dramatically develop his style.

Can art exist without critical reception — in a cultural void? It’s only once it’s been accepted (or rejected) by its audience do we then come to understand its importance, sometimes years after its conception and first performance. Like any new work that pushes at the borders of musical convention, its initial reception is sometimes marred by a lack of comprehension from it’s audience, or sometimes a visceral reaction to the unfamiliar territory a composer is treading. A work like The Rite works so hard to be exactly that, visceral, confronting, fresh in some way. And yet, this wasn’t Stravinsky’s intention. There is of course ‘barbarism’ in the music but this was the first time anyone had taken the subject of had originally intended — was he acting as the provocateur, complicit in it’s somewhat “sinister elevation” of a certain morality, or was he rather somewhat indifferent to it’s reception? The audience at The Rite’s premiere probably didn’t quite understand how important this piece would become, and yet ironically perhaps it was their very reaction to the piece and the ‘riot’ that gave it such notoriety and allowed it’s influence to be felt throughout the music of the 20th century.