Stravinsky ‘The Serialist’ Against Music Criticism
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«Brother Criticus»: Stravinsky ‘the Serialist’ against Music Criticism Massimiliano Locanto (Università degli Studi di Salerno) [email protected] DAVID OPPENHEIM: Have you read the reviews? IGOR STRAVINSKY: No! D.O.: The critics…? I.S.: No! D.O.: They were very good. That must make you very happy. I.S.: I’m not happy by good critics! D.O.: And bad critics? I.S.: Just not very unhappy by bad critics! These words are drawn from a short excerpt included in documentary film produced in 1965, when Stravinsky, who had long since moved to California, had definitively became a serial composer1. If we were looking for something that best summarizes in very few words the old composer’s attitude toward music critics and music criticism, this short dialogue would probably be one of the best choices. It perfectly reflects his typical ostentation of indifference and contempt but behind which a real apprehension and sensitivity to criticism were, in fact, concealed. A lot has been written and said about Stravinsky and his critics2. However, this relationship has been usually considered from the point of view of the reception processes3. In this paper, on the contrary, I will address the issue 1. CBS News Special: Igor Stravinsky, by David Oppenheim, CBS News, broadcast 3 May 1966. The program was narrated by Charles Kuralt, with David Oppenheim as producer, writer and interviewer. The excerpt quoted here is also contained in Igor Stravinsky: Kompositör [Igor Stravinsky: Composer], a film by János Darvas, Munich, Metropolitan, 2001. I would like to thank János Darvas for the precious information he gave me about this and other excerpts. 2. See in particular WALSH 1998 and CAMPBELL 2003. 3. Also CAMPBELL 2003, which, to some extent, deals with Stravinsky attitude toward criticism, is largely devoted to «[…] the reception that Stravinsky’s music has met at Journal of Music Criticism, Volume 1 (2017), pp. 113-139 © Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini. All rights reserved. Massimiliano Locanto the other way round. My question will be about how Stravinsky reacted to the criticism of his works. Or, rather, why Stravinsky usually reacted so negatively to such criticism. I will focus on a particular period of Stravinsky’s life, when his clash with his critics took on a particularly virulent tone, which is to say the years following his ‘serial turn’. Apparently, Stravinsky’s great hostility toward his critics remained unchanged from the very beginning of his career to his final years. Scholars have hardly recognized any significant difference in this regard between Stravinsky’s writings published before World War II — Chronicle of my Life, Poetics of Music, and the many shorter writings and interviews released in the period between the wars — and the ‘conversation books’ edited with Robert Craft from 19594. Stuart Campbell, for example, noticed that albeit in these latter writings «[t]he virtuosity in using the English language suggests Robert Craft’s hand […] the zest — flowing presumably form the composer himself — was equal to that evident when squibs where launched earlier in Stravinsky’s career»5. However, what did change from time to time was the motivation for Stravinsky’s hostility toward his critics, which reflects on each occasion the composer’s concerns about the reception of his music within a different cultural context. During the Californian years, it reflects the composer’s preoccupation about how his serial compositions would be perceived in a cultural context that was divided between a growing mass culture and an increasingly influential and intellectually prestigious elite of composer- theorists. My aim in this essay will be to prove this assertion. However, since it is evident enough that if we want to understand the changes we must know the premises, before focusing my attention on the American years I will briefly recall the origins and motivations of Stravinsky’s troubles with music criticism in the early years of his career. In this first part I will largely rely on previous studies6. different times» (p. 230). WALSH 1998, on the contrary, is entirely dedicated to the historical, biographical, cultural and psychological motivations behind the composer’s fight against critics. However, Walsh study is largely focused on the reception of the early scores for the Ballet Russes and of some works of the French period. My focus, on the contrary, will be on the late Stravinsky. 4. STRAVINSKY 1935-1936; STRAVINSKY 1942; STRAVINSKY 2013. 5. CAMPBELL 2003, p. 246. 6. In particular WALSH 1998 and CAMPBELL 2003. 114 «Brother Criticus»: Stravinsky ‘the Serialist’ against Music Criticism IN EUROPE To begin, we must consider that a deeply negative attitude toward music criticism was not an exclusive prerogative of Stravinsky, since it was shared by many modernist and avant-garde composers of both the first and the second half the twentieth century. However we can agree with Stephen Walsh that «some composers mind critics more than other», and in this respect Stravinsky was probably one of the most concerned about music criticism7. Secondly, in any one individual case there may be a different reason for this attitude. In the case of Stravinsky, we can agree with Walsh that these reasons are historical, cultural and, above all, psychological. Exile was probably the most important factor. For almost his entire life Stravinsky was in a sort of enforced exile, and he always had to negotiate with alien cultures and foreign societies. He had to find a way not only to promote himself but also to justify both his presence and his outstanding position as a foreign artist within the hosting country. Paradoxically enough, his growing success and fame was due, to a large extent, to the ‘foreign’ element the audience perceived in his music. The favorable reception of his ballet music in Paris was largely due to the exotic-Orientalist elements that the Parisian audience perceived in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. More in general, this benevolence was part of a wider French sympathy toward Russian music which dated back to the late 1870s, when the Parisian audience began to be acquainted with the music of the ‘Mighty handful’. As Stuart Campbell noticed, this sympathy «had political and financial as well as cultural resonances»8. To French ears, Stravinsky’s music sounded like an extension of the Russian tradition they had already welcomed. The French intellectual milieu headed by Jean Cocteau considered Stravinsky’s best quality to be a foreigner and an outsider, free from the bonds of the traditions of late-romantic French music. All this, however, could not roll on without certain incidents and misunderstandings with non-Russian music criticism. The whole reception history of Stravinsky’s early works in Paris is dotted with such misunderstandings. We can conclude with Campbell that «[…] the generality of French opinion lost enthusiasm for Stravinsky once his music had parted company with their ideas of what was ‘Russian’»9. 7. WALSH 1998, p. 132. 8. CAMPBELL 2003, p. 246. Campbell also quotes this illuminating statement by Boris de Schloezer: «What [Westerns] look for first and foremost in Russian Art is precisely that which is different from theirs; it is a certain ‘barbaric’ aspect — rough, untutored and, in a word, Asiatic. This Asiatic face of Russia, they think, is Russia’s true face» (SCHLOEZER 1929, p. 191). 9. CAMPBELL 2003, p. 237. 115 Massimiliano Locanto More importantly, as Walsh argued, not only was Stravinsky considered an outsider in France — and later on in the USA — but also, from the very beginning of his ‘exile’, in his motherland itself. From his first Parisian successes, Stravinsky was perceived and described by Russian musical critics as a composer who was at the same time too much influenced by foreign — French, in particular — elements, and too much rooted in the St. Petersburg musical tradition of the Belyayev circle and in Rimsky-Korsakov’s teaching. Both aspects, they argued, prevented his music from being sufficiently original. The first Russian reception of Stravinsky’s ballet scores was, to put it charitably, ambivalent. Since the premiere of the Scherzo fantastique and Feu d’artifice in 1909, Russian critics had admired Stravinsky’s orchestration and use of brilliant harmonies. However, they considered these qualities to be disproportionate, useless or one-sided. Some examples are worth mentioning. After hearing Siloti’s performance of the Firebird Suite in 1910 the composer and critic Vyacheslav Gavrilovich Karatïgin (1875-1925), who was probably Stravinsky’s most trenchant critic in his homeland, wrote a long and unfavourable review, whose verdict is summed up in the following words: «Even though this music is somewhat superficial in spite of all its brilliance […] would you not put it the other way around […]: that this music is brilliant despite a certain superficiality?»10. A year later the composer and music critic Nikolay Myaskovsky (1881-1942) wrote a review based on a detailed study of the piano reduction of the Firebird full ballet. Albeit stressing the «[…] abundance of invention, intelligence, temperament, talent», Myaskovsky also pointed out that the work «lacks originality. The very essence of its musical material is not yet marked by a vividly expressed individuality»11. And I would be amiss not to mention the critic who, in Taruskin’s words, was for three decades «Stravinsky’s number- one’ Russian detractor»12: Leonid Sabaneyev (1881-1968). This is part of a long review of the Rite of Spring published two weeks after the Paris premiere on 29 May 1913: I have looked through the music of this new work of Stravinsky’s. I will admit that I have never had a particularly high opinion of this writer’s compositional (in the sense of ‘musical’) talent. In his music this young composer is as careful as a banker.