“Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto Igor Stravinsky Born in Lomonosov

“Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto

Igor Stravinsky Born in Lomonosov, Russia, June 17, 1882 Died in N ew York City, April 6, 1971

It was only natural that Igor Stravinsky, after composing some of the most startlingly revolutionary music of this century, should have looked backward in history for inspiration. A decade after The Rite of Spring and Petrushka he was a celebrity in Paris, exiled from his native Russia, teeming with an enormous creativity—and looking for a new musical direction. What critics later termed his “neo-Classical” period actually began with J.S. Bach (“whose universal and enormous grasp upon musical art has never been transcended,” he wrote in 1925), but it also ultimately embraced the music of the Viennese Classicists and even that of Brahms.

Yet the relationship of Stravinsky’s neo-Classical music to the works of earlier composers is complex and easily misunderstood. The sometimes conventional-sounding harmonies of these works, beginning with the ballet Pulcinella and including such works as the Octet and the Concerto for Piano and Winds, do not function in traditional ways, and often result from the almost coincidental juxtaposition of pitches that arise from contrapuntal lines. In the Concerto, for example, it is the driving rhythms and spun-out melodic lines that recall a Baroque concerto, as much as it is any harmonic elements. Nevertheless the work’s connection to the past is unmistakable.

In any event this process of continued homage to the past continued to the end of Stravinsky’s life, and the music and example of Bach inspired many of the composer’s most celebrated works, including the three orchestral symphonies; Oedipus Rex; the Serenade for piano; ballets such as Apollon musagète, The Fairy’s Kiss, and Jeu de cartes; the opera The Rake’s Progress; the Symphony of Psalms; and several concertos. As late as the 1950s, Stravinsky was still writing homages to Bach, as attested by the Chorale-variations on Bach’s setting of the Christmas song “Vom Himmel hoch.”

Each of these works took an individualistic approach to what Stravinsky himself (writing of Pulcinella) called his “discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible.” Stravinsky had called Pulcinella “a backward look, of course— the first of many love affairs in that direction—but … a look in the mirror, too.”

The Music Among the seven concertos that Stravinsky composed in the neo-Classical vein is an inspired Concerto in E-flat, which has come to be called “Dumbarton Oaks” after the Washington, D.C., estate of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, who commissioned the piece. The Blisses were celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in 1938, and a piece by Stravinsky seemed like just the thing for such an occasion. During the work’s conception the composer visited the estate—a venue known for vital social functions of the city’s cultural life—and was delighted with its lavish gardens. Some critics have speculated that the structure of the gardens might have found reflection in formal aspects of the Concerto.

Composed in Arnemasse, Switzerland, and Paris from the spring of 1937 to March 1938, the “little concerto in the style of the Brandenburg Concertos” (as the composer called it) received its premiere at the Blisses’ estate on May 8, 1938, under the baton of no less a figure than teacher-conductor Nadia Boulanger.

A Closer Look Stravinsky’s statement about Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos is telling, for in fact each of the 15 instruments of “Dumbarton Oaks” is treated as an independent solo voice; the resulting texture of propulsive “busyness” alludes to the distinctively vibrant nature of Bach’s originals. “I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the Concerto,” Stravinksy wrote later, “and was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement [Tempo giusto] is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know.

“What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to have loaned it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do himself.” The clean lines of the second movement (Allegretto) produce a striking sense of clarity and repose—the same sorts of words, in fact, that are often applied to the neo-Classicism of Gluck and his contemporaries in 18th-century France. The finale (Con moto) is an energetic march filled with a lively contrapuntal gaiety, the likes of which old Johann Sebastian Bach would certainly have approved.

—Paul J. Horsley