943885

Listening to Stravinsky's Music in the 1920sAuthor(s): Eric Walter WhiteSource: Tempo, New Series, No. 81, Stravinsky's 85th Birthday (Summer, 1967), pp. 32-36Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/943885 .

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LISTENING TO STRAVINSKY'S MUSIC IN THE I920s

by Eric Walter White I first heard some of Stravinsky's music as a schoolboy of eighteen, in the

course of a concert at the old Colston Hall, Bristol on i5th February I924. It was The Firebird suite conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham; and I remember sitting in the gallery, listening entranced, and then to my astonishment finding that part of the audience was upset and scandalised by what they had heard. The impression was so strong that thereafter I began to look out carefully for opportunities of hearing other works by him.

A few months later I was staying in Melun on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. It was May i924; and in addition to exploring the countryside, bicycling in the forest and boating on the Seine, I used occasionally to visit Paris. One day I noticed Stravinsky's name on a poster advertising an orchestral concert to be conducted by Serge Koussevitzky at the Opera House on 22nd May, and I bought a ticket immediately. The programme consisted solely of Stravinsky's works and I found that Petrushka made just as immediate an impact on me as The Firebird had done a few months earlier; but when we came to the piece de resistance, which was the premiere of the new Piano Concerto with the composer himself as soloist, I felt somewhat baffled. I was fascinated by his appearance and performance; I noted the long pause at the end of the first movement, during which he dried his hands with one or more handkerchiefs drawn from a little pile placed at the side of the piano; and I never dreamed (nor, do I think, did the rest of the audience) that this pause was being prolonged owing to a momentary lapse of memory on his part. But after The Firebird and Petrushka I found his neo-classical idiom strange and upsetting, and I was not at all sure how to relate this Concerto to the earlier ballet scores. After the interval there was another surprise in store for me-The Rite of Spring. I was completely unprepared for this extraordinary work, with its extremes of violence allied to occasional moments of sensitivity, and primitive effects obtained by sophisticated means; and when the Sacrificial Dance came to its cataclysmic end, I felt as if I had been knocked out. Not so my neighbour. To my surprise I saw him leap on to his plush-covered fauteuil and jump up and down, waving his programme in the air and shouting 'Bravo'!

Shortly afterwards I left Melun and went to stay in Perigueux with a French family who had a grand piano in their sitting-room. Going to the local music shop ('Neyrat-en face Daumesnil'), I ordered the miniature score of The Rite of Spring and, when it arrived, was so fascinated by its complexity that I began to make my own four-handed piano arrangement. I started with the introduction to Part Two and had made quite satisfactory progress by the time I left P~rigueux later that summer; but I dropped the work as soon as I discovered that Stravinsky had made and published a duet arrangement of his own.

In October 1924 I went up to Oxford, and there the four-handed version of Petrushka, published by Edition Russe de Musique, became my constant com- panion. I taught myself to perform passages of it with two hands; and I remember giving Harold Acton an enthusiastic demonstration of this in my Balliol room in the summer of

I925. It must have been about the same time that Arthur G.

? 1967 by Eric Walter White



LISTENING IN THE 1920S 33

Browne of Christ Church when walking down the Giler, heard the percussive phrases of the Russian Dance emerge from the open window of my attic room and marvelled that anyone in Balliol should share his enthusiasm for modern music.

I doubt whether any professional performances of Stravinsky's music were given in Oxford while I was up-it was true that I tried but failed to persuade Artur Rubinstein to include in one of his recitals the Piano Rag Music which Stravinsky had dedicated to him in 1919. Nevertheless I. made up for that by getting some of my pianist friends to join me in club performances of the duet ver- sions of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Naturally I bought the new Sonata and Serenade for piano as soon as they appeared; and I gave what may have been the first performance of the latter in Great Britain (certainly the first in Oxford) when I played it at the Holywell Music Room in January, I927. The percussive style of Stravinsky's piano pieces influenced some of the compositions of my contemporaries; and the Homage to Beethoven score that Arthur G. Browne wrote in 1927 (with words by Tom Driberg) specially to commemorate the centenary of Beethoven's death was closely related to the idiom of The Wedding.

But during this period how could one hear the orchestral music? The answer was-by attending as many performances of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet as one possibly could. I first saw the Russian Ballet in 1925 when it was contribut- ing a single ballet to each variety programme put on at the Coliseum Theatre, London; but unfortunately no work of Stravinsky's was done that summer. When the company returned to the Coliseum in the autumn, they added Petrushka to their repertory. I went up to London on a date in November and by dint of careful timing and a judicious bit of sprinting from a theatre near the Strand to St. Martin's Lane managed to combine the greater part of one of Balieff's Chauve Souris performances with the full 4. minutes of Petrushka.

The following year the company was back in London for a full season on its own at His Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket. This time there were three Stravinsky ballets in the repertory-Petrushka, Pulcinella and The Wedding-and I managed to see performances of each of these. I was particularly thrilled by The Wedding, although I had to admit that the effect of the two Pleyel double-pianos on the stage with their shabby cases like coffins, was not altogether satisfactory from the point of view of the stage spectacle. But the Nijinska choreography seemed to me apt and moving, the performance of the four pianists (Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Vittorio Rieti, and Vladimir Dukelsky) with Eugene Goossens as conductor was exciting, and the musical score breathtakingly original. But some of the public and many of the critics were outraged. I agreed warmly with H. G. Wells when he wrote, "It was an amazing experience to come out from this delightful display with the warp and woof of music and vision still running and interweaving in one's mind, and find a little group of critics flushed with resentment and ransacking the stores of their minds for cheap trite depreciation of thefreshestand strongest thingthat theyhad had a chance to praise for a long time'"'. His letter of protest, which was written immediately after the London premibre, was reprinted as a throwaway and handed out with the programmes at subsequent performances at the theatre. I kept my copy of it.

In November i926

the Russian Ballet returned to London for an autumn season at the Lyceum Theatre. This gave them an opportunity to revive The Firebird which had been out of the repertory for about five years owing to the accidental destruction of the sets. For this revival Goncharova was invited to



34 TEMPO

design new decor and costumes, and the first performance took place on 2 th November. Lydia Lopokova, as full of bounce as a new tennis ball, danced the title role, while Lifar was a slightly cautious Tsarevich, because a few days pre- viously he had slightly concussed his head and was wearing a skull-cap on the stage. The corps de ballet was clearly unaccustomed to all the exertions Fokine required of Kashchei's retinue, and by the end of the Infernal Dance many of their costumes had become unfastened. I admired the way in which during the following Berce- use the sleeping partners surreptitiously did each other up. Returning to Oxford from Paddington at midnight, I found that a seasonal fog had disrupted the railway timetable, and when I and a handful of other belated revellers arrived at Didcot where we were due to change, we were told that our connection had gone and there would be nothing else until the milk train. Fortunately the station master allowed himself to be persuaded to put on a 'special', which got us back to Oxford in rollicking style.

The Russian Ballet season at the Princes Theatre in the summer of 1927 was memorable because during it Diaghilev mounted a gala performance in hon- our of the King of Spain at which Stravinsky conducted three of his ballets: The Firebird, Petrushka and Pulcinella. I remember how disconcerted I was by his insistence on rigid metre in The Firebird-not a suspicion of rubato was allowed, and there were times when the dancers seemed to find his beat very unaccom- modating and were clearly inconvenienced by the tempi he adopted. In Petrushka I was entranced to notice in Scene Three that from the seat in the pit where I was sitting the silhouette of his remarkable head as seen against the footlights almost literally coincided with the coconut which the Blackamoor placed in the centre of the stage, worshipped and subsequently beheaded. In Scene Four I watched with admiration the way he refused to concede any ritardando during the bridge passage before the Dance of the Coachmen, but presently I was startled to find that at the climax of this number when the tune returns in canon he laid down his baton, leaving the orchestra to continue on its own until the double bar.

For the greater part of 1928 and 1929 I lived in or near Berlin, and there I had the good luck to see an excellent production of Oedipus Rex at the Krolloper in 1928 and to be present at the Russian Ballet Festspiel in the summer of 1929. Oedipus Rex was a revelation. Described by the composer himself as art opera oratorio, it had first been presented by the Russian Ballet in the summer of 1927 in concert form at the Thbetre Sarah-Bernhardt, Paris, where it had been sand- wiched between two ballets. This proved to be a serious error of judgement, and many people seemed to think the work was a ghastly flop. Shortly after the first stage production at Vienna (on 23rd February 1928) Klemperer mounted it at the Krolloper, Berlin, where it formed part of a Stravinsky bill, the other items being Mavra and The Soldier's Tale. Stravinsky was present at the first performance on February 2Sth-and has said that he winced when he saw the Speaker enter wearing a black Pierrot costume. This error had been corrected by the time I attended the second performance (in May); and I was lucky enough to go to each of the subsequent four performances later the same year. Musically the work had been most carefully prepared, and the effect of the stage performance was staggering. I never had any doubt about its being a masterpiece.

Although at that time the general standard of opera production was high in Berlin-and there were three opera-houses open simultaneously, on the Unter den Linden, at the Kroll, and in Charlottenburg-it was a different matter with ballet. Later in the season, Petrushka was performed at the Krolloper in the same bill as



LISTENING IN THE 1920os 35

Oedipus Rex; but the dancers were not particularly good, and with choreography by Max Terpis instead of Fokine, the ballet seemed to have lost something of its true identity. I was accordingly delighted when I found the Russian Ballet advertised to give a short season in Berlin in June 1929. There were two programmes-one for the Staatsoper and one for the Stdidtische Oper-and each was to be performed twice. The Staatsoper programme included The Song of the Nightin- gale with choreography by Balanchine; and the Stdidtische Oper programme included The Rite of Spring and Apollo Musagetes. When the company arrived, it was refreshing to see the dancers again, and I am particularly glad that I saw Lifar (lance Apollo-but to my dismay much of the orchestral playing was very inferior. This was particularly true of The Rite of Spring, where even the presence of Ernest Ansermet at the conductor's desk could not save the situation. I suppose the reason was that this visit came at the end of the season when the players were tired, and in any case the scores were probably under-rehearsed; but the results were distressing, and this was all the more disappointing since recent concert performances by Klemperer at the Krolloper of some of Stravinsky's ballet scores e.g. Pulcinella, The Wedding and Apollo Musagetes had been particularly good. In any case, Stravinsky who had visited Berlin earlier in June to play his Piano Concerto under Klemperer left before the Russian Ballet arrived and (as he rightly says in his Chronicle): "I expect that my absence saved me from a somewhat painful impression."

After one of the performances at the Staatsoper I caught a glimpse of Diagh- ilev and Lifar walking away from the stage door and was horrified to see Diaghilev looking so ill and with such a bad yellowish complexion. Two months later he was dead; and with his death his ballet company was dispersed.

In the autumn of 1929 I was working in the translators' and minute-writers' section of the secretariat of the League of Nations, and my work took me frequently to Geneva. At the end of November I broke the journey in Paris for a concert given by the recently formed Paris Symphony Orchestra under Ansermet at the Salle Pleyel and distinctly remember seeing Stravinsky chatting in the foyer in the interval; but to my disappointment I could not free myself for the concert the following week at which the first performance of the Capriccio was given with the composer as soloist. There were compensations in Switzerland, however. C. F. Ramuz, who was living at La Muette, Pully, had written his fascinating Souvenirs sur Igor Strawinsky, and these had just been published in a limited edition

by Mermod, Lausanne. At the Conservatoire de Musique, Geneva, the manus- script full score of The Firebird was available for consultation. Ansermet was living in Geneva and was in charge of the concerts given by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande whose programmes frequently included works by Stravinsky. In fact, Stravinsky came to Geneva on I8th October, 930 o to play his Capriccio at a concert in the Grand Theatre that included Pulcinella and The Fairy's Kiss; and his Ragtime was featured in the programme of a November concert. It was rumoured at the time that he had completed a new work: so wondering what it was, and where and when it would be performed, I sent Ansermet a postcard. He kindly replied telling me that the work was a choral symphony and would receive its first performance in Brussels on I 3th December. My current contract at the League happened to come to an end just before that date: so I took a train to Brussels, bought a ticket for the concert in the Palais des Beaux Arts and enjoyed a magnificent programme consisting of The Firebird, the Overture to Mavra, the Four Studies for Orchestra, and the Capriccio, as well as the Symphony of Psalms.



36 TEMPO

It is true that on this occasion the Symphony of Psalms did not quite make its full effect, as Stravinsky had not yet discovered that it was essential that the pulsation of the coda, 'Laudate Eum in cymbalis bene sonantibus,' should be extremely slow (with minim nearer 36 MM than 48). But even so it was clear that this was another neo-classical masterpiece.

Within the space of seven years, I had pursued performances of his music from Bristol and Oxford and London, to Paris, Berlin, Geneva and Brussels; and I was lucky to have had the chance to do so. In that period I also heard a few of his works on the radio, including the Piano Concerto, The Soldier's Tale, The Song of the Nightingale and The Wedding. But quite apart from the standards of the actual performances broadcast from 2LO, gGB etc. the technical quality of the receiving sets left much to be desired, and the sounds heard were often so distorted as to give a very misleading idea of the real quality of the music. Nor was the gramo- phone of much help. It was true that Columbia issued recordings of performances of The Firebird suite in I927, and of Petrushka (lacking the coda to the ballet) and The Rite of Spring the following year-all three of them with Stravinsky as conductor; and these records became quite popular. But by i930 the only other works of his to have been recorded complete were the piano version of Ragtime and the Concertino. This total of five works out of the fifty-five he had composed by 1930 was rather inadequate coverage, and for anyone like myself who wanted to become better acquainted with the music, the only solution was to try to attend actual performances wherever they might be held, and to study the music in score.

STRAVINSKY AND THE PIANO

by John Ogdon Not only the piano music, but also the relatively unusual fact that Stravinsky

composes at the piano, should concern us. It is noteworthy too that although Stravinsky's piano output is not very large, many of his orchestral works contain important concertante piano parts. That Petrushka and the Symphony in Three Movements were originally conceived as compositions for piano and orchestra, and then altered to their present form, perhaps represents a realisation on his part, prophetic at the time when Petrushka was composed, that the role of the piano as a solo instrument with orchestra could not remain in the same relation- ship to the orchestra, as protagonist, as had been the case in the nineteenth century.

To encompass the protean Stravinsky, one needs a veritable filament of workpoints. A few follow. First: polarities. John Fowles, in The Aristos, enjoins us to think polarly, and cites Beethoven as the supreme example of a composer doing this. Certain works of Beethoven, especially the 'Hammerklavier' Sonata, seem to express in musical terms the potential congruity of those polarities of feeling which express themselves in creation and destruction. At least one work of Stravinsky's, Le Sacre, does this. As is well known, Stravinsky has as-

? 1967 by John Ogdon



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