Example research essay topic: Rite Of Spring Neo Classicism - 1,951 words

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Stravinsky's relations with his various publishers would make a fitting subject for a long-running TV soap opera, complete with courtroom dramas, emotional farewells, some embarrassing contractual wrangles, and of course background music based on the Ronde des princesses in The Firebird. The association with Chester Music would certainly provide some of the best episodes. Stravinsky landed in Chester's lap after the First World War, a conflict which, among other things, played havoc with international publishing. And he remained with them until he signed an agreement with Editions Russes de Musique (ERM) in September 1923. Before the war he had first been taken up by the Moscow house of Jurgenson, who published The Firebird, and then by Koussevitskys recently founded ERM, who brought out Petrushka and the piano-duet score of The Rite of Spring, and had its full score in proof when war broke out and put paid to their Russian operation for good. After the Revolution in 1917 Jurgesons firm was nationalized.

However, his German office continued to function, and Jurgeson later (apparently without telling the composer) sold the rights in The Firebird to the Leipzig house of Robert Forberg a conjunction which recalls Stravinsky's American train as Mr Firebird). This transaction subsequently gave rise to a lawsuit between Forberg and Chester. Meanwhile Stravinsky had been stranded in Switzerland by the outbreak of hostilities. It seems, he had written to Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov in 1912 whilst working on The Rite of Spring, as if not two but twenty years have passed since The Firebird was composed. What must he have felt in August 1914? A mere five years earlier he had been an all but unknown Russian composer, living and working in his native St.

Petersburg, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, certainly, but with no major successes to his name. Though his music had been played thanks to the good offices of his teacher he had had no independent recognition until Serge Diaghilev heard two of his orchestral works in February 1909 and decided to commission some arrangements from him for the 1909 Paris season of the Ballets Russes. Not until the autumn did the crucial Firebird commission materialise. Stravinsky certainly seems to have felt no qualms or anxieties about this turn in his fortunes. Yet even he must have been surprised by the scale of his success when The Firebird had its first performance in Paris in June 1910. Effectively it distanced him from Russia once and for all.

With his wife, who was expecting their third child, he went first to Brittany for a holiday, and then on to Lausanne, where the baby was born. Here, in the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, he was to live for the next ten years. Much of Petrushka and the whole of The Rite of Spring were composed at Clarens, on the northern shore of Lake Geneva. Ths summers were still spent at the Stravinsky's dacha at Ustilug, near the Polish border of the Ukraine. But even this became inaccessible after 1914.

Suddenly Stravinsky was uprooted from his native soil. He was not to set foot on it for another forty-eight years. In 1920 he would move to France (and would eventually become a French citizen in 1934); and in 1940 he would settle in the USA, becoming a US citizen in 1945. Long before Schnberg or the rest of the great Jewish Diaspora, the gentile Stravinsky was archetype cast as that symbolic twentieth century figure: the exile. The wages of exile are insecurity.

Uncertain of his income and with little confidence in the future of the Russian publishing houses, Stravinsky began in due course to cast around for publishers for the music he had been writing in Switzerland. The first to come to his rescue was a Geneva concert agent, Adolphe Henn, who in 1917 brought out the as yet unperformed Renard (1916) together with a number of shorter works, including the Pribaoutki (1914), the two sets of Easy Pieces for piano duet (1914 - 17), and the Berceuses du Chat (1916). At the very end of the war Blaise Cendrars negotiated the publication of Ragtime (1917 - 18) by the Parisian Editions de la Site. But these were stopgap arrangements, and by 1918 Stravinsky was already seeking a more dependable contract with a major publishing house.

In 1919 Jurgensons London representative J. & W. Chester (in the person of its director Otto Kling) acquired the still incomplete Les Noces, together with rights in the already published wartime scores, and several that had not yet been published, including The Soldiers Tale (1918, but not published until 1924), the Three Tales for Children (1916 - 17), and Four Russian Peasant Songs (1914 - 17). Soon afterwards Chester brought out the vocal score of Pulcinella (1919, but not the full score, which was still in composers hands when he signed his ERM contract in 1923), the Piano Rag Music (1919) and the Three Pieces for Clarinet (1918 - 19). The little piano pieces Les Cinq Doigts (1921) followed in 1922, and the Four Russian Songs (1918 - 19) in 1923, the year in which Les Noces was at last performed and published in full score. On the other hand Kling resisted the two radical works of 1920, the Concertino for string quartet (which went to Edition Wilhelm Hansen in Copenhagen, and so came back to Chester under the agency umbrella), and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments which, with its awkward instrumentation and forbidding yet no longer topical Russianism, remained unloved even by ERM, who spent fifteen years pretending to publish it before war once again put them out of their misery. Chester's were thus Stravinsky's publisher for a mere four years.

But because of the war they harvested the produce of a decade, which happened moreover to be the most fascinating, whether or not the richest, Stravinsky decade of all. Les Noces, Renard and The Soldiers Tale are perhaps the most radical group of masterpieces, both musically and theatrically, by any modern composer, while the Russian songs and choruses of this period have an experimental brilliance and charm unmatched in the music of the time. These pieces were admired not only by modernists on the radical Franco/Russian wing, but also by the Second Viennese School. After a Schnberg Society concert in Vienna in June 1919, Webern wrote to Berg: The Stravinsky was magnificent. These songs are wonderful. This music moves me completely beyond belief.

I love it especially. The cradle songs are something so indescribably touching. How those three clarinets sound! And Pribaoutki! Ah, my dear friend, it is something really glorious.

This realism leads on to the metaphysical On the other hand the Easy Pieces and certain parts of The Soldiers Tale already point towards the synthetic style of neo-classicism, and this line is pursued in the ragtime-based pieces and of course most famously in Pulcinella. The Concertino is something of a fusion of the two tendencies, and thus clinches if the phrase is not a contradiction the transitional character of the period. The Chester period does have, the, an integrity of its own. Before it stands The Rite of Spring, a culminating masterpiece of post-romanticism whose extravagance Stravinsky later to some extent regretted but was unable to moderate; after it came full-blown neo-classicism, Mavra, the Octet, the Piano Concerto works which Stravinsky accompanied with written apologias or manifestos, which aligned him firmly with the Parisian intellectual set. On the left, the Russian Stravinsky, on the right the French Stravinsky, and in between Stravinsky the drain, the exile, searching for ways of transplanting his Russianness into a new and perhaps alien soil. The major work of the period, Les Noces, is symptomatic of this quest.

Originally conceived in 1910 (one of its inspirations, according to the composer, was the bells of St. Pauls Cathedral), it belongs in essence to the ethnic ritual strain of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. But Stravinsky seems to have realized at once that the scale of The Rite was unrepeatable and no longer appropriate. Although, in Expositions and Developments, he mentions an early version of Les Noces using an orchestra as big as that for The Rite, the many sketches which survive all indicate something more in the nature of an outsize chamber orchestra, very much in the spirit of the first fully drafted score, which he completed in 1917 (and which was reconstructed in the early 1970 s by Robert Craft and Ramiro Cortes).

Here the scoring is for a glorified village band of woodwind and brass, mixed percussion including piano and cimbalom, and eight solo strings: an appreciably bigger group than the fifteen-man Renard band, but not dissimilar in character, with the cimbalom mimicking the twang of the Russian gulf. And the same preoccupation is apparent in Pribaoutki, with its squeaky little woodwind and string octet; in Berceuses du Chat, with its burbling clarinet trio; in The Soldiers Tale, whose commando-unit septet was not only devised for reasons of economy; and finally in post-war scores like Ragtime (cimbalom still prominent) and the Four Russian Songs, for which there survives and accompaniment scored for cimbalom and flute an intention perhaps reflected in Stravinsky's arrangement of two of these songs in the 1954 set with flute, harp and guitar. For Les Noces itself, however, Stravinsky was unable to finalise the orchestration quite so readily. Despite the interruption of Renard, written in 1916 to a commission from the Princess de Polignac, the work was finished in substance (though with many differences of barring and accentuation, and shorter coda) by 1917.

But if it took him another six years to find a satisfactory and workable accompaniment to the voices. In 1919 he experimented with a version for harmonium, two cimbalom's, pianola and percussion, but abandoned it after the first two tableaux because, he later (unconvincingly) claimed, it proved impossible to coordinate the mechanical pindola with other instruments (the real reason may have been the difficulty of finding two cimbalom players anywhere outside Hungary). Only in 1921 did he hit on an orchestra of four pianos with percussion, which is the version Chester published in full score in 1923, the year after the vocal score. This remained the definitive version, although the 1917 and 1919 scores are today performable and have been presented in public as well as recorded. Of the four-piano version it can be said that its sound is much closer to the Stravinskian palette of the early twenties than to that of the war years. This is the period not only of the Piano Rag Music and the Three Movements from Petrushka, but also of the Piano Concerto and the solo Sonata and Serenade, where the crisp, percussive piano writing accords with Stravinsky's stated interest in a quasi-mechanical, un-nuanced music (see for instance his article Some Ideas About my Occur, written in 1923).

How far this truly affects the original image of the work we may never know. But Diaghilevs first production, with the four pianos on stage framing the ritual action of the peasant wedding, was certainly in keeping with Stravinsky's long-standing interest in alienation devices, itself probably inspired by the work of the St. Petersburg theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold. This comes out equally in the separation of voices and action both in Les Noces and Renard (where the singers are not identified with particular roles), and in the unpredictable relation between the narrator and the action in The Soldiers Tale, a work that is widely regarded as a prototype of the much later genre of music-theatre and still its great exemplar.

It is a realism which leads on, not (or not only) to the metaphysical, but to the meta-theatrical: to the idea of theatre as subject-matter.

Research essay sample on Rite Of Spring Neo Classicism