Old and New Directions in Stravinsky's Les Noces: Venturing Into

Home , Bronislava Nijinska, Les Noces, Octet (Stravinsky), Robert Craft, Salamuri, Sergei Diaghilev

Old and New Directions in Stravinsky’s Les Noces: Venturing into Neoclassicism through the Avenues of Eurasianism, Exoticism, and Primitivism

A thesis submitted to

The Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF MUSIC

in Music History

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College–Conservatory of Music

March 2020

Maja Brlecic

B.M., Northern Kentucky University, December 2013

Committee Chair: David C. Berry, Ph.D.

Abstract

Igor Stravinsky’s choral ballet Les Noces (1914–23), also referred to as Svádebka in

Russian and The Wedding in English, depicts an arranged Russian peasant wedding in the nineteenth century. The four theatrical tableaux recall Russian folkloric heritage and Christian

Orthodox religious elements that are coupled with exoticism and primitivism—two cultural themes that were key to keeping Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes afloat. I examine three intersecting relationships underlying Les Noces: Stravinsky’s use of the Russian folk and sacred traditions, his blending of Russian and Neoclassical elements, and his socio-political affiliations at the time. Accordingly, I interpret this svadebnaya igra (wedding game) from previously unexplored viewpoints and show how the work presents Stravinsky’s reinventions of formal structures.

I demonstrate how this unusual work responds to what Russian musicologist Victor

Belyayev calls “the call of the blood” in regard to Stravinsky’s departure from his homeland in

1914. In so doing, I argue that Les Noces, although often positioned as a culmination of his

Russian period, also incorporates Neoclassical elements such as balance, simplicity, abstraction, and emotional restraint, all driven by distinct mechanical instrumentation. Additionally, although

Stravinsky based the libretto on an anthology of Russian folklore and rituals, he claimed that the work is a product of the Russian church, and carefully constructed it for the modern French avant–garde culture. Such claims provide an opportunity to evaluate the sacred–secular sonic duality and how Stravinsky mixed them, for both are important driving forces behind the work.

Relying on sources from both music and art history, as well as music theory and the history of Russia, I also examine the work through Stravinsky’s lesser-known involvement with

Eurasianism—an ideology that illuminates the transition to his long and fruitful Neoclassical period. In doing so, I discuss the scope and range of Stravinsky’s experimentation with trends and music methods, and how all those elements were conceived, utilized, and understood.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Les Noces? 1

Background and Methodology 3

Literature Review 6

Summary of Chapters 8

Chapter 1: The Russian Folk and Sacred Traditions Amidst Primitive and Exotic Rituals in

Early 1900s Paris 12

Slavic Folklore, Myths, and Otherness 13

Chant and Modality 18

Primitivism and Exoticism Intertwined 22

Chapter 2: Venturing into Neoclassicism 34

Les Noces and Neoclassicism—The Old World in the New 35

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity 41

Abstract but Real 44

Chapter 3: Eurasian/Turanian Phase 46

Where is Turan, and How Does It Relate to Stravinsky? 47

Turanian Music Idiom 51

Conclusion 56

Bibliography 60

List of Examples

Example 1 16

Examples 2a–b 17

Example 3 20

Example 4 26

Examples 5a–c 52

Introduction: Why Les Noces?

Les Noces (1914–23) is a ballet that Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) wrote for Sergei

Diaghilev’s (1872–1929) Ballet Russes. The work calls for SATB chorus, soloists, four pianos, and percussion ensemble.1 Les Noces occupied Stravinsky for almost a decade while he lived in

Switzerland and subsequently in France. Richard Taruskin claims that “no other work would ever be as important to him,”2 while Robert Craft portrays it as “something entirely new in both music—the heterophonic vocal-instrumental style of the piece—and in theatrical combination and genre, an amalgam of ballet and dramatic cantata that he himself [Stravinsky] was unable to describe.”3 Les Noces was undoubtedly important to the composer, but it has been studied less than his better known ballets such as The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. Issues of style, interpretation, and reception surrounding the work invite closer examination.

Scholars tend to classify Les Noces as a climax of Stravinsky’s Russian period. Given that, in the early 1920s, Stravinsky was already beginning to employ compositional elements that became markers of his Neoclassical works, whether the work belongs exclusively to the former period is debatable.4 As I will show, it contains the seeds of Neoclassical elements in both harmony and counterpoint, and it presents the reinvention of formal structure through a mixture of folkloristic, exotic, primitive, and sacred elements. Stravinsky achieves this by focusing on

1 Les Noces is the original title in French, also referred to as Svádebka in Russian and The Wedding in English. For the sake of consistency, I refer to the French title since it is the one that the composer used himself. However, when I quote other authors, I do not change it to the French title.

2 Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 390.

3 Quoted in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 144.

4 Stravinsky’s oeuvre is roughly classified into three periods: Russian (1908–1923), Neoclassical (1923– 1953), and Serial (1953–1968).

1 three intersecting relationships: the use of Russian folk traditions, the blending of Russian and

Neoclassical melodic elements, and engagement with the era’s political affiliations.5 For example, hidden in the composer’s idiosyncratic musical ideas are certain elements of

Neoclassicism, such as austere instrumentation, endless melodic lines, multiple sudden apotheosis, and asymmetric rhythmic pulses, all of which drives this peasant wedding into a frenzy, with occasional heterophony.6 Because the work is an amalgam of primitive and modern idioms—and thus goes beyond its folkloric sources—this thesis will consider whether it portrays a universal ritual, or a specific wedding ceremony.

This study will also supplement the discourse surrounding Les Noces by examining three things. First, how the work depicts Russian peasant life by turning to the primitive in order to appeal to the emerging modernist aesthetic of the time (i.e., avant-garde). Second, what compositional process and trends Stravinsky relied on. And third, whether the work connects to, or distances itself from, Stravinsky’s past.

Because Stravinsky composed Les Noces during World War I and the 1917 Great

October Socialist Revolution, the Russian folkloric themes in the work also represent what

Victor Belyayev described as “the call of the blood”7—a provocative thought which in the

5 In this context, I use the term “primitivism” to evoke clearer conceptualization of Russian rituals in village weddings, where raw emotion, loud and uncontrolled sobbing, weeping, and even beating oneself (usually, the bride) to the point of bruising, was a common part of the ritual. When applied to the early twentieth century arts, it could be a reaction to the complexities of Romanticism. As Jack Flam has asserted, “When we speak of primitivism, we refer not only to artists’ use of formal ideas from the works of co–called Primitive cultures, but also to a complex network of attitudes about the process, meaning, and functions of art, and about culture itself.” Jack Flam, and Miriam Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth–Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xiii.

6 In his article, Tom Gordon states that “Stravinsky’s idiosyncratic views on language and the appropriate relationship between text and music were beginning to evolve at precisely the time he began his Swiss exile.” Tom Gordon, “Stravinsky and C.F.Ramuz: A Primitive Classicism,” Canadian University Music Review, nr.4, (1983), 228.

7 Belyayev explains further that “Such a response is revealed in Les Noces. . . An answer to the ‘call of the blood,’ this work also shows itself to be an apotheosis of something, which, either by fate or, if you will, by the 2 second chapter I connect to Neoclassicism. To support a contextual reading of the work, I show how Stravinsky’s association with both Diaghilev’s World of Art group (Mir iskusstva) and the political Eurasianist movement (Yevraziystvo) of the day influenced the composer’s venture into exoticism and primitivism, and eventually into Neoclassicism. Finally, I invite the readers to perceive this work as Stravinsky’s own arduous transition from the East to the West.

Background and Methodology

In the 1910s, Stravinsky and Diaghilev transformed Russian Romantic ballet through their collaborations. Both newly arrived in Paris from Russia, the two distant cousins joined forces and began producing folkloristic works to be performed in the West—especially in

France, where Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes was based. The ballet troupe consisted mainly of young first-class dancers brought from Russia, such as Tamara Karsavina, Vaslav Nijinsky, his sister

Bronislava Nijinska, and Ana Pavlova. Stravinsky began composing and largely finished Les

Noces during this decade, but the troupe did not premiere the work until 1923.8 Stravinsky and

Diaghilev’s collaborations fit well into the early-twentieth century Parisian art scene, with its strong appetite for exotic musical varieties, as well as for works that revolutionized European art.

Because I also argue that Les Noces represents Stravinsky’s own journey from East to West, what kind of Russia was he depicting for Parisian audiences? Was it the Russia he knew from his childhood, the real Russia after the 1917 Revolution, or a Russia that existed in his imagination?

force of historical event, is destined to retire into the past and gradually to undergo dissolution, becoming non– existent.” Victor Belyayev, Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, trans. S.W. Pring (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 1.

8 Robert Craft, Stravinsky’s long–term personal and musical assistant has asserted that “Of all of his creations, Les Noces is the one that underwent the most extensive metamorphosis, not only occupying his mind during the longest period, but, in aggregate requiring the most time to compose.” Quoted in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 144.

In addition to these questions about Stravinsky’s interpretation of Russia, the purely sonic world depicted in Les Noces also presents ambiguity surrounding genre. The work features old

Russian Orthodox chants mixed with folk melos, irregular rhythms, and exotic melodic development. In addition, Stravinsky’s choice to hide the chorus and the soloists in the orchestra pit, leaving only the dancers in view of the audience, shows how he chose to approach the production of this innovative work. The work opens with the weeping and lamenting of the peasant bride in a rural Russian village and ends with the chime of church bells that evoke the sacred. In Tony Palmer’s film documentary Once at a Border, Stravinsky states that “Les Noces is a product of the Russian church. . . where invocations to the saints and Virgin can be heard throughout the work.”9 Nevertheless, to Western ears it is challenging to say with certainty whether the work is familiar or alien, sacred or secular, purely Russian or purely something else.

Moreover, Craft writes that the work “presents cultural and linguistic barriers, unless audiences hear it simply as a piece of ‘pure music,’ ignoring the full implications of the work as a dramatic spectacle.”10 I expand on Craft’s argument, and in closing address ways in which the music is autonomous, as well as why it does not easily fit into the standard repertoire today.

Although Stravinsky worked on Les Noces longer than on any other composition, it is only about twenty-three minutes long, consisting of four tableaux. The protagonists, both dancers and singers, are separated: the dancers are on the stage, and the soloists and the chorus are in the pit, accompanying the dancers. The first tableau depicts the father, mother, and their daughter— the bride. The bride weeps (plach). After her parents bless her, the bridesmaids arrive and begin combing her hair, undoing her one braid into two braids, a symbol of a married woman. After the

9 Tony Palmer, Stravinsky: Once, at the Border, 1’28.”

10 Quoted in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 144.

4 plaiting ceremony, she is off to the bath—yet another ritual. The second tableau is placed in the groom’s house, where the groom’s best man announces the departure of the bridal train for the church. Now the mother of the bride performs the weeping (plach) of saying goodbye forever to her daughter. In the third tableau the bride finally departs, and everything is ready for the wedding. In the final tableau the wedding feast begins with the cacophony of a frenzied party of irregular motives, depicted in an almost anarchistic manner with various drums, timpani, cymbals, tambourine, xylophone, pianos, and overpowering crotales. While the feast is still in full swing and more rituals are performed, the newlyweds are off to the cold, unheated bedchamber. The bedroom of the newlyweds has been closed. The bride’s and groom’s parents remain on the stage sitting and expressing sadness, while the imitation of church bells played on the pianos fades away. The groom’s solo voice “resonating from the orchestra pit complements the bride’s solo from the very beginning, and the drama of the main protagonists imposes a sense of unity which pervades the whole work.”11 Although the church-bell theme evokes eternity, I wonder whether it evokes the eternity of life, death, or both. Indirectly, this arranged wedding also points to the social injustice of peasant women, but Stravinsky does not offer any solution to this problem.

As I approach this research through the intersections of cultural, musical, and socio– political aspects, I draw from areas specific to my own interests and objectives such as art history, criticism, ethnomusicology, folklore, and Russian historiography. It is through this multidisciplinary approach that I demonstrate how the crossover of the old and the new materializes. In doing so, I also propose aesthetic interpretations, deriving from the

11 Robert Siohan, Stravinsky, trans. Eric White (London: Calder and Boyars Limited, 1965), 59.

5 juxtapositions and interrelations of folklore and sacred representations, connoted in both musical and extramusical elements.

Literature Review

Unlike Stravinsky’s other staged works such as Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and The

Rake’s Progress, there is no book–length study on Les Noces besides Viktor Belyayev’s short outline from 1928. Instead, accounts about the work are fragmented, either focusing on specific aspects such as music and text analysis, choreography, and ethnography, or presenting only general background information. Stravinsky too addressed the work sparingly; he wrote only a program note about the staging, which was recorded by his musical and personal assistant Craft in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (1978).

To understand the concept of primitivism in art (and how it operates in a similar manner to exoticism by constructing an encounter with modernity’s imagined other), I turn to Richard

Taruskin oeuvre, as well as to Nancy Berman, whose dissertation entitled “Primitivism and the

Parisian Avant-Garde, 1910-1925” directly addresses issues with the term. Furthermore, I consider the writings of musicologist Margarita Mazo to help discuss the cultural contexts of the work and approaches to modern primitivism a formalist perspective. Findings about exoticism are primarily based on Ralph Locke’s and Timothy Taylor’s scholarship.12

In addition, I consider older studies such as Boris Asaf’yev’s A Book about Stravinsky, which was first printed in Leningrad in 1929. Although his essays received criticism even from

Stravinsky, Craft noted that Asaf’yev’s collection “is one of the crucial books so far published

12 I consult Locke’s essay “On Exoticism, Western Art Music, and the Words We Use,” (2012), and Taylor’s book Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (2007).

6 about Igor Stravinsky where the essay on Les Noces is important. . . [for] it helps to understand

Russian wedding ritual as both tragic-ironic and grotesque, with threnody and buffoonery as its principal contrasting stylistic elements.”13

In order to discuss Neoclassical elements and the role they play in Les Noces, I turn to

Scott Messing’s Neoclassicism in Music: From the Genesis of the Concept Through the

Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (1988) and Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and

Music, 1914–1935, a catalogue of the Basel Public Art Collection published in 1996. Besides providing a history of the term and its associations with Stravinsky, these resources also discuss how this “new classicism” can be understood as an alternative type of modernism. The latter book explores three issues of relevance here: the pertinent complexities of classicism in modern art and music after World War I; changes of direction undertaken by both Stravinsky and his collaborator Pablo Picasso (1881–1973); and how those changes were not a return to the status quo before Cubism or before the new music, but a continuation of modernism.14 Similarly, in her dissertation on primitivism and the Parisian avant-garde, Nancy Berman dedicates an entire chapter on the changing face of modernity in both The Rite of Spring and Les Noces, which will further support the discussion of the complexities and problems of primitivism. She asserts the following:

Although primitivism has occasionally appeared as a subcategory of modern music in music history textbooks, until recently musicologists have been seemingly unaware of the pervasive trend of modernists not only to evoke the primitive, but also to rely on “primitive” materials as the foundation for the emerging modernist languages of the early twentieth century. Of course, many musicologists have explored and analyzed the use of folk materials by composers such as Stravinsky and Bartók, and the pervasive use of

13 Boris Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, trans. Richard French (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press), 1982, xiv. This book was first published in 1929 in Leningrad, and was eventually republished in Moscow in 1977.

14 Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt, eds., Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–1935 (London: Merrell Holberton Publishers, 1996), 12.

popular music such as jazz by composers such as Krenek, Milhaud, and again Stravinsky. However, with few exceptions, no one has delved into the cultural–historical significance of these trends, especially with regard to that cauldron of cultural activity in the twentieth century, Paris.15

Finally, musicologists Taruskin and Tamara Levitz address the composer’s generally underexplored association with both Eurasianism and the so-called Turanian music idiom by offering insights regarding Stravinsky’s collaboration with Russian–born Eurasianist ideologues such as Pyotr Suvchinsky and Artur Sergeyevich Luriye (a.k.a. Arthur Lourié—Stravinsky’s former musical assistant in France). While in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Defining

Russia Musically, and Russian Music at Home and Abroad Taruskin explores how Stravinsky’s

16 ideas align with Eurasian “ideocracy,” one can also find evidence of the Eurasian connection in the collection of essays presented in the book Stravinsky and His World (2013), which situates the composer in contemporaneous intellectual and musical contexts.

Summary of Chapters

Chapter 1 focuses on key elements of Stravinsky’s Russian period related to Russian folklore and Russian rituals, as well as “how Russian” Stravinsky’s modus operandi was in 1912 when Les Noces was conceived—as compared to its premiere in 1923, when he was already

“labeled” a Neoclassicist. Specifically, I focus on what he retained musically, aesthetically, and sociologically from the old Russia he knew, and what changed in his compositional style over

15 In addition, Berman also points out that “modern composers often found their ‘primitives’ in European popular and folk art and music, in the study of Scythian civilization and peasant design in Russia, and, later, in non– European popular and folk repertoires and African–American jazz.” Nancy Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant–Garde, 1910–1925,” (PhD dissertation, McGill University of Canada, 2001), 39–40, 51.

16 Per Taruskin, antihumanism is a rejection of all interpersonal emotional factors; he calls Stravinsky’s lifelong antihumanism a rejection of all “psychology,” while ideocracy was a “reactionary.” Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically, 391.

8 this decade. I also associate cultural and musical themes related to the composer’s Russian period, such as Russian Christian vs. Pagan practices and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov`s idea of double faith (dvoyeveriye), Slavic rituals, and how all the preceding was considered exotic in the

West. Here I also discuss the use of znamennïy chant, as well as multi-layered textures in

Russian folk songs, coupled with the principal concepts of primitivism and exoticism. As I define the term primitivism and distinguish it from exoticism, I discuss how both characterize the period when Les Noces was in progress, how they reflect Russian “otherness,” and how artists turned to the past in order to express themselves in a world of rapidly increasing industrialization and urbanization. As Berman puts it:

At the beginning of the twentieth–century, artists of all media expressed their discontent with the state of modern civilization, as well as with the academicism of late romantic art. . . . Modern society was perceived to be increasingly and tragically estranged from the earth. . . All of these artists turned at some point in their careers to the primitive, searching for a revitalizing force for art, for psychological and cultural beginnings and origins, for an alternative to what they saw as Western degeneracy; however, like the early anthropologists, what these artists and writers ultimately found was themselves, both as individuals and as members of modern European society.17

Chapter 2 expands on Stravinsky’s exploration of new avenues with form, keys, and the function of tonal areas, and discusses how he developed these elements into a Neoclassical style.

This chapter also provides definitions of the style in response to what Russian musicologist

Mikhail Druskin describes as the “unclear usage of the term Neoclassicism.”18 While

Neoclassicism is often characterized as another protest that encompasses a broad cultural environment, Druskin’s point is more complex. He argues that although there were many contradictions and conflicts in artistic attitudes of the period, Neoclassicism was the most logical

17 Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant–Garde,” 16–18.

18 Mikhail Druskin, Igor Stravinsky: His Life, Works and Views, trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 73 9 form seized upon from those oppositions, and served as a reaction to the horrors of World War

I.19 Since Stravinsky would go back and forth to Les Noces before, during, and after the war, the occasional but meaningful appearance of Neoclassical elements in such a distinct work provides a key to understanding Stravinsky’s stylistic transformation, and illuminates his artistic concepts.

As the focus of this chapter is Neoclassicism, other than the term’s ambiguity, I also examine how it applies to Stravinsky around this timeframe (1914–1923), and what specifically indicates its presence both musically and aesthetically. Furthermore, I look into how Neoclassical elements reflect the folkloric melos through directness, emotional indifference, peculiar instrumental choice, austere timbre, and juxtapositions in melody, harmony, and meter.

Finally, Chapter 3 addresses lesser-known socio-political implications of

Eurasian/Turanian (Yevraziystvo) movement, which also shaped Stravinsky’s expressive means.

While Stravinsky was associated with the World of Art (Mir iskusstva)—an artistic movement that took place during the first decade of the twentieth century inspired by the Russian artists working in the West who helped revolutionize European art20—it was Eurasianism that Les

Noces is directly linked with. This movement condemned both the House of Romanov and

Romano–Germanic Europe; instead, it advocated for “facing inward, acknowledging the kinship of all the peoples that occupied ‘Turan,’ the great steppe that extended from the Carpathians to

19 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 73.

20 According to Stuart Grover, “The Mir iskusstva movement began in the early 1890s in St. Petersburg when the group of artists formulated an esthetic theory contrary to that which was then accepted in Russia, but which would have been familiar to Western European Artists.” They aimed to make Russian art known to the West, mostly for nationalistic reasons. Russian artists who were on the forefront of the movement such as Sergei Diaghilev, Alexander Benois, Léon Bakst, and Natalya Goncharova all worked closely with Stravinsky. Goncharova “portrayed the Russian folk heritage in a series of almost primitive drawings which caught the feeling of the Russian countryside in a way it had never been grasped before,” and thus it is not a surprise that she was both costume and set designer for Les Noces. Stuart Grover, “The World of Art Movement in Russia,” The Russian Review 1 (January 1973), 28, 42.

10 the Pacific.”21 Because both Stravinsky and Diaghilev were émigrés and promoters of Russian art in the West, these socio-political and cultural currents influenced Stravinsky’s musical language, and consequently his dramaturgical approach to Les Noces.22

21 Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 394–95.

22 More to the point, Taruskin notes that “Svádebka synthesized all these trends in Stravinsky’s art, and at the same time took much further the distinctive Miriskusnik impulse toward cool creative abstraction. Thus, Svádebka became at once the pinnacle of the Eurasian/Turanian phase of Stravinsky’s career.” Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1332.

Chapter 1: Russian Folk and Sacred Traditions Amidst

Primitive and Exotic Rituals in Early 1900s Paris

In order to interpret the meaning of Stravinsky’s use of folkloric musical references, one must understand aspects of the Russian compositional tradition that came before him. In the pre-

Soviet Russia that Stravinsky knew, folklore-inspired musical works were part of the everyday art scene. Works by Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), and the

Mighty Five that were based on Slavic23 mythology and folklore were popular and in abundance.

While the eighteenth century “witnessed the Petrine reforms [i.e., those of Peter the Great] and their aftermath. . . where Russian national consciousness was an aspect of Westernization,”24 in the nineteenth century, works by the above-named composers represented an “expression of resistance to repression and longing for emancipation.”25 Whether it was a longing for an emancipation from the Tsarist autocracy, revolt against the idea of a Westernized Russia, or subsequent distancing from the Bolshevik coup d’état, folklore-inspired musical works persevered in Russian culture.26

Besides the revival of folklore references in music, in this chapter I also engage with how

Stravinsky blended these folkloristic elements with the sacred, exotic, and primitive. Since Ballet

Russes—the company that Stravinsky had been associated with since 1909 that always sought new ways to sell tickets and stay in business—often turned to both the primitive and the exotic, I

23 Since there are three distinguished Slavic groups—Eastern, Southern, and Western—hereafter I apply the term Slavic to the Eastern (Russian) group.

24 Richard Taruskin, “N.A. Lvov and the Folk,” in Defining Russia Musically, 3.

25 Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. Arnold and Erica Pomerans (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), xii.

26 Because it is a significant aspect of every culture, many composers, including Stravinsky, quoted folkloric sources in their own works. 12 define those trends, the key ideas, and how the two interconnect in Les Noces. With its unusual instrumentation, and as an amalgam of the above-mentioned concepts, Les Noces created an opportunity for Stravinsky to revive the Russia that Taruskin claims “had been lost to him in life.”27 Around the same time, French composers such as Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis

Poulenc (1899–1963), and Eric Satie (1866–1925) likewise were producing experimental works that became hallmarks of modernism. Caught somewhere in between the old and the new,

Stravinsky set out to produce a work that would still embody all the inevitable Russian characteristics, but be delivered in a new, exotic way—a way that, I argue, led him to

Neoclassicism, a topic addressed in Chapter 2.

Slavic Folklore, Myths, and Otherness

In her detailed handbook on Slavic folklore, Natalie Kononenko writes that “Folklore is artistic expression that is alive and ever changing.”28 It is the traditional art that connects people to the past, it is present in everyday life, and if cherished, it also enriches the future of cultures throughout the world. She also avers that “Through folklore, we can learn about a people—what matters to them, how they see themselves in relationship to other groups and to the world, even how they perceive to be a human. . . .[F]or many Slavic peoples, folklore was a way of defining themselves against other groups, usually the ones who held power over them and sought to suppress indigenous language and culture.”29 In other words, folklore is dynamic, omnipresent, and often provides a strategy of resistance against hegemony.

27 Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 390.

28 Natalie Kononenko, Slavic Folklore: A Handbook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1.

29 Kononenko, Slavic Folklore, 1.

Stravinsky and Diaghilev were well aware that Russian folklore would fascinate Parisian audiences. Busy organizing a new life in Paris, in the aftermath of the (in)famous premiere of The

Rite of Spring (hereafter The Rite) in 1913, the two distant cousins were determined to keep the

Ballet Russes in business. It appears that their motto for producing ballets was “whatever it takes” to assuage the Parisian audience who demanded shows that were new and altogether different from the works they had already seen—an approach that The Rite had justified. Richard Taruskin describes this essential Russianness that became so popular in the West (and made Stravinsky famous) as “a myth of otherness”:

Tardy growth and tardier professionalization, remote provenience, social marginalism, the means of its promotion, even the exotic language and alphabet of its practitioners have always tinged or tainted Russian art music with an air of alterity, sensed, exploited, bemoaned, asserted, abjured, exaggerated, minimized, glorified, denied, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without.30

Although the ideas of exploitation and marginalization will be mentioned later in this chapter, it is important to bring them up now, since they played a crucial role in the cultural shift during the fin de siècle, and the direction that art took afterwards.

Slavic folklore encompasses a myriad of genres, and Stravinsky chose to quote the one that has rituals connected to family life: the wedding.31 However, this wedding differs from conventional weddings in the West where the bride walks down the aisle in a snow-white wedding dress, and where everyone is merry. On the contrary, this one is a peasant, arranged wedding, where the bride and her mother weep, the men excessively drink, and the matchmakers

30 Richard Taruskin, “Others: A Mythology and a Demurrer (By Way of Preface),” xiv.

31 To be more specific, it is a peasant wedding in the rural provinces of Kaluga, Kostroma, Oryol, Psovk, Ryazan, Simbirsk, Tambov, Tula, Tver, and Voronezh. However, the work is about more than a wedding. Taruskin asserts how “The tension between nostalgia for the security of community and the obligations of enlightened individualism lives not only in Svádebka but in ourselves as, contemplating it, we are emotionally swayed by its potent advocacy of what may appear on rational reflection to be a parous message.” Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 391.

14 make deals that will be profitable to them instead of the young, often helpless couple. In conversations with Craft, Stravinsky reported that the text for Les Noces was adapted from a

Russian anthology of popular songs (1868–74) by a Slavophile ethnographer, Pyotr Kireyevsky.32

Kireyevsky’s collection contains both the text of folk songs and information about the musical events in villages. Although the first collections of Russian folk songs appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, Slavic folklore was collected and preserved for centuries, starting before the

Christian era that began in 988.33 By drawing on cultural and ethnographic factors of the Russian village wedding ritual, Margarita Mazo observes a symbiosis of the pagan and the sacred in Les

Noces by asserting the following:

One of the composer’s concerns here focused on ritualistic aspects reflecting the typical mentality of Russian peasants, a conglomeration of religious concepts and beliefs, which, for the lack of a better term, I shall call peasant faith. Customs, notions, and verbal images derived from both pre-Christian and Christian concepts are tightly intertwined into a syncretic whole and coexist peacefully as indispensable parts of everyday life, festivities, and rituals. The Christian saints often participate in peasant rituals and are treated there as though they were a part of the habitual pre-Christian pantheon. Villagers address Christian saints not only with religious prayers but also with traditional spells and incantations: in folk practice a prayer often differs from a spell only in its mode of expression.34

In other words, the Christian saints are an important element of peasant rituals, and the peculiar interaction between peasants and saints can be seen throughout. For example, “Rather than asking a saint for help as in a Christian prayer, traditional incantations are characterized by verbal expressions of direct instructions and giving orders for actions (‘go here and there,’ ‘do this and

32 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 118.

33 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 5.

34 Margarita Mazo, “Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’ and Russian Village Wedding Ritual,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, nr.1 (Spring 1990), 114. Additionally, in her handbook, Kononenko notes that “The pre-Christian pantheon is important because it continues to be reflected in various folk beliefs, rituals, songs, stories, incantations, and material objects up to the present day.” Kononenko, Slavic Folklore, 5.

15 that’).”35 An illustration can be found in the second scene, where basses exclaim “Go to the wedding!”, which in reality address the Bogoroditsa (Mother of God); see Example 1.

Example 1: Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces, rehearsals 45–50.36

This unusual symbiosis presents not only an important key to understanding Les Noces, but also the idea of dvoeverie,37 which means that although they are Orthodox Christians by tradition, the lives of ordinary people still gravitate around less conservative pagan beliefs and rituals.

Stravinsky’s first composition mentor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), widely used this concept in his two operas, Christmas Eve and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.

According to Francis Maes, “What most fascinated Rimsky-Korsakov in folk music was the pantheist world of folk rites. For him, folklore was less closely bound up with nationalism and ideology; even in his kuchka [Mighty Five] period, his view of the subject had differed from

Balakirev’s.”38 Interestingly, Rimsky-Korsakov’s interest in pantheism was kindled by the same folklorist Alexander Afanasyev from whom Stravinsky adapted the text for The Soldier’s Tale,

35 Mazo, “Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’ and Russian Village Wedding Ritual,” 114.

36 Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces, produced by Sony Classical, 2016, MusicAeterna, 7:38-8:02, YouTube video, 23:23, posted by Muzikay, May 21, 2018, accessed March 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbp3Axl78Hg&feature=youtu.be. All audio files require Adobe Reader 9 or later.

37 “The term dvoeverie (two faiths, or dual belief) is widely used in the Slavic world as a label for the coexistence of organized, canonical religion and beliefs that have a pre-Christian, pagan character.” Kononenko, Slavic Folklore, 6.

38 Maes, A History of Russian Music, 187.

16 another work that had been composed in 1918 when he was wrapping up Les Noces. Moreover, these expressions of paganism coupled with dramatized wedding customs (which started with The

Rite and ended with Les Noces) effectively satisfied the Parisian audience’s desire for the primitive and the exotic spectacles. It appears that Stravinsky did not easily abandon the use of pagan references, for it is through the paganism of his ancestors that he chose to venture into new expressive sounds.

Taruskin’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s use of paganism, however, brings forth social issues that underlie both works:

What The Rite and Svádebka have fundamentally in common is Stravinsky’s lifelong antihumanism—his rejection of all “psychology.” The sacrificial virgin in The Rite does her fatal dance with animal fearlessness, and the community accepts her ceremonial murder without remorse. In Svádebka, the bride laments at the outset and the groom leers in conclusion (to a variant of the same melody) not because spontaneous feeling so prompts them, but because the immemorial script so decrees.39

The following two audio examples demonstrate this “scripted” response, and how instead of presenting a regular Christian prayer, the bride weeps (plach) right before the plaiting ceremony

(Example 2a), and the groom responses in closing by echoing the plach from the opening, promising her a good life (Example 2b):

Example 2: Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces: a) Rehearsals 1-2:40

39 Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 391.

40 Stravinsky, Les Noces, 0:00-0:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbp3Axl78Hg&feature=youtu.be. All audio files require Adobe Reader 9 version or later.

b) Rehearsals 133-135.41

These examples demonstrate that Stravinsky drew upon text, music, and rituals from both

Christian and Pagan traditions perhaps not only to express his longing for his homeland, but also to create an exotic spectacle for Parisian audiences. As we shall see, the stripping-down of instrumentation and melodic idioms, mixing of ensembles, and relying on vertical juxtapositions rather than traditional counterpoint has just begun.

Chant and Modality

According to Pieter van den Toorn and John McGinness, “Despite the pagan roots of the svadebnaya igra [wedding game], Les Noces is a product of the Russian Church,”42 which confirms yet another element that Stravinsky incorporated from his Russian Orthodox roots: chant. Or, to be more specific, znamennïy raspev43—which he also used later in his Neoclassical works such as Symphony of Psalms, Mass, and elsewhere in his choral compositions. Znamennïy chant has a long history. In one of his numerous articles on Russian liturgical music, Alfred Swan

41 Stravinsky, Les Noces, 21:24-22:14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbp3Axl78Hg&feature=youtu.be. All audio files require Adobe Reader 9 version or later.

42 Quoted in Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 71.

43 Chanting by signs.

18 notes that znamennïy was the principal chant of the Russian church that stems from Byzantium at the time of the Christianization of Russian in 988 A.D.; it is contained in over one thousand extant manuscripts ranging from the eleventh to the late seventeenth century, in a notation also called the znamennïy.44

Although pinpointing the origins and development of early Russian polyphonic chants is a challenge, the focus here is on Stravinsky’s usage and how he fused those chants into a mechanical-sounding modern work that he constructed primarily on blocked and layered structures (Mazo calls it “poly-layered texture”), often interrupted with sudden paroxysms, idiolectic text, ululating, and hiccup-like melodies. Furthermore, Joan Roccasalvo states that “folk singing and church singing were intimately related, and the type of harmony used in folk and church singing was one and the same.”45 The fact that Stravinsky turned to this style while he was in exile is significant. To place it in context, after the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution, in

Soviet Russia numerous churches and monasteries were closed by the government. As a result, the chant tradition was abolished. In addition, during his lifetime Stravinsky would repeatedly return to Christian Orthodox religion in which he was raised. Accordingly, referencing the old chant in Les Noces shows its “culturally embedded religious significance.”46

For example, “the music at [rehearsals] 50–53 is derived entirely (and the music after 53 partly) from the Fifth Tone [glas] of the Znamennyi Chant. . .which is sung at the beginning of the

Sunday Dogmatik;”47 see Example 3.

44 Alfred Swan, “The Znamenny Chant of the Russian Church—Part I,” The Musical Quarterly 26/2 (April 1940), 232.

45 Joan Roccasalvo, “The Znamenny Chant,” in The Musical Quarterly, 74/2 (1990), 225.

46 Van den Toorn and McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period, 72.

47 Mazo, “Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’ and Russian Village Wedding Ritual,” 115.

Example 3: Znamennïy chant used in rehearsals 50-53.48

As a result, Stravinsky expressed “the underlying sanctity of the proceedings” 49 and by doing so brought the two (sacred and secular) into conjunction. Moreover, throughout the work, all the motives in the score repeat and thus carry the idea of ritual from the beginning to the end of the work, with no breaks in between the tableaux. Moreover, Taruskin’s description of this fusion of sacred and secular is especially insightful. In one of his most comprehensive studies on

Stravinsky, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, he writes that

A dogmatik, or bogorodichen (from Bogoroditsa, Mother of God) is an invocation to the Virgin Mary (cf. the Greek Orthodox Theotokion) sung following the Doxology at the end of Gospodi vozzvakh (Ps. 140 “Lord, I cry unto Thee”), the opening psalm of the Slavonic great Vespers. The particular one copied out comes from the Saturday evening service that inaugurates the fifth week of the Oktoïkh cycle, during which, as in every week of the cycle, all the proper chants share a particular fund of popevki. It is these, rather than a shared scale or final, that define a glas or mode within the musical system of the Orthodox church (cf. the Byzantine system of echoi).50

By describing the idea of fusing the old Russian chants with folk melos through “‘centonizing’ the old znamennïy chant, and reshuffling its constituent popevki into a new configuration,”

48 Van den Toorn and McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period, example 3.6.a, 72.

49 Van den Toorn and McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period, 72.

50 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra, vol. 2 (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 1378.

Taruskin also points out how Svádebka “presents Stravinsky’s extraordinary powers of abstraction.”51

Besides referring to the folklore and old chants, the harmonic and melodic structure of

Les Noces equally depends on the use of fragments and motives. That is, repetition depicts the ritualistic acts, while metrical displacements and other disruptive effects such as weeping and shouting create expressive nuances. In their analysis on the work’s melody and harmony, Van den

Toorn and McGinness assert that Stravinsky’s diatonic melodic fragments add to work’s folkloric sensibility:

Generally of limited range, the fragments and motives of Les Noces number from two to five pitches. As a rule, they are open-ended and without cadential expression, inviting the immediate and often continuous repetition. . . open-endedness is tied to a diatonicism that is distinctly modal and often Dorian, with many of the fragments outlining Dorian tetrachords. . . The principal fragment of the opening blocks of Les Noces, (E D B), lacks a C#, and the incompleteness of this outline persists in many subsequent articulations. . . While the reduction of interval-class content would have made for a somehow static framework in any case, the particular gaps in question intensify the archaic or “primitive” character of the folk element.52

While back home in those pre-Revolution times the old Russian polyphony was slowly falling out of practice, in the West Stravinsky began a new phase where interest for exoticism and primitivism was on the rise. According to Nancy Berman, “While French critics of Le Sacre viewed the work as a portrayal of Russian ‘Otherness’ against which they could assert—or question—their own identity, many critics of Les Noces more readily identified with the scene on stage, seeing in the Russian peasant wedding ritual a symbolic depiction of the brutal social and religious machinery with which civilization makes its members into obedient marionettes.”53 In

51 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1378.

52 Van den Toorn and McGinness, Stravinsky and the Russian Period, 114–15. “Incompleteness” of C# refers to the Dorian tetrachord.

53 Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 118. Note: “Les Sacre” translates as The Rite.

Les Noces, the repetition of the action serves as a central ritual element (an element that was a hallmark of Ballet Russes and their “otherness”), while in Russia the “obedient marionettes” entered into another dark phase of the country’s history.

Stravinsky relied on Russian polyphony, as well as primitive and exotic ideas, which also reflected both antebellum and postbellum modern art. As a reminder from my introduction,

Taruskin states with great confidence that “No other work would ever be as important to him”54— a statement that is telling for it does justice to this lesser-known work. Or, as Victor Belyayev asserted, Les Noces is “the nearest approach which Russian music has ever made to Russian peasant life.”55 With text based on rustic folk songs and special liturgical traditions, the work brings together and unites musical sources of such wide-ranging diversity that affected both

Stravinsky’s aesthetic outlook, and his creative process. What follows is how this approach fits into the early twentieth-century Paris, and what methods he used in order to bridge the old and the new.56

Primitivism and Exoticism Intertwined

While Les Noces has links to old Russian polyphony, Boris Asaf’yev, a musicologist and music critic, viewed it through Soviet atheist eyes. As someone who lived in the same time and grew up in the same culture as Stravinsky, Asaf’yev is important to this discussion. However, for

54 Richard Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” 390.

55 Belyayev, Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, 3.

56 Belyayev assertions are noteworthy: “The composers belonging to the ‘New Russian School,’ in developing to its logical conclusion the tendency to elaborate the Russian folk-melos, brought about a crisis in the Russian national school; and for this a solution was found in a return to the primitive, i.e. to the genuine folk-melos. Stravinsky’s Les Noces is the most striking example of the movement in this direction. In this respect it marks the close of one period in the development of the Russian national school, but on the other hand it inaugurates a new era in its history.” Belyayev, Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, 2.

Stravinsky, Asaf’yev’s assertions about his choral ballet were upsetting, and he objected to his interpretation. What especially upset him was Asaf’yev’s “orgiastic” analogy:

The texture and action of Noces are therefore composed of three stylistic elements. First, the threnodial element—the grief and lamentation that are associated with the obsequies of maidenhood, for the Russian wedding rite is virtually a funeral rite. Second, the element that celebrates the invocation and excitation of the male procreative force—its whole performance, its whole energy. Finally, the humorous and buffoon element—now ironical, now undissembling. It is the laughter of buffoonery that serves to assuage the bitterness of female grief and blunt the wild impulsiveness of the male procreative energy. And it is by the same laughter—sly, inquisitive, not free of lust—that passions are aroused and orgiastic tendencies itself.57

Nonetheless, Asaf’yev admired Stravinsky. Although his review can be interpreted as subjective and provocative, it shed light on Stravinsky’s referencing of sacred components and placing them under a primitivistic veneer. Furthermore, in the foreword of the same book that Stravinsky distanced himself from, Craft describes Asaf’yev as

a dialectical materialist who sought to explain artistic phenomena in terms of a constructivist social theory. . . [and how] Surely Stravinsky was annoyed that an infidel Marxist, living so far from the center and with only the rarest opportunities to hear the music, had penetrated it so profoundly—and it is inconceivable that Stravinsky did not realize that Asaf’yev understood him as no one else did, least of all the authors of the French and Italian monographs published at about the same time and written quite literally under the subject’s nose.58

Asaf’yev also claims that Les Noces was one of Stravinsky’s “greatest achievements,” and viewed the work as primitivistic:

[It] is the embodiment of the ancient cult of the family and of reproduction. Only among peasants can one have a real idea of what this cult means, for the lewd elegance of bourgeois urban wedding affairs has nothing in common with the mighty and terrible manifestations of the sexual instinct under conditions of primitive cultures and heathen environments, where the central moment of the wedding rite is not the betrothal but the first union of the newlyweds, toward which the whole rite—all its orgiastic excitation and

57 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, 130. The reference to Stravinsky’s displeasure comes from Robert Craft’s foreword in Asaf’yev’s book, entitled Foreword: Asaf’yev and Stravinsky. Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, vii-xvi.

58 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, vii-viii.

its dance-like rhythms—has been directed.59

Although Stravinsky disagreed with the critic’s description of the work, one can find many examples of bawdy jokes sprinkled throughout the score, such as “Shake her like a plum tree,” or

“The sheets are cold. . . We’ll warm them up.”60

Primitivism. While nationalism marked the late nineteenth century, at the beginning of the twentieth century artists had their own wave of new ideas and reactions. One of these was primitivism, which developed from impressionism and had an impact on both visual art and music.61 In order to define this complex and problematic term and its relationship to Les Noces, it is important to understand that primitivism was not necessarily an artistic movement. Instead, it was a creative outlet for those artists who sought to prevent the modernization of Western society.

In doing so they would turn to the past of often distant cultures and create artistic works through the use of simpler shapes and abstract forms. Artists such as Paul Gaugin (1848–1903), Pablo

Picasso (1881–1973), and Henri Matisse (1869–1954) were among the visual artists who embraced these new aesthetic forms that revolutionized both painting and sculpture. For example, both Picasso and Matisse had an interest in African sculpture.62 As a cosmopolitan, European artist, Stravinsky constructed musical elements as primitive for a specific cultural reason: to appeal to the Parisian audience. Although underexplored in music (as Berman has already pointed

59 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, 152.

60 Igor Stravinsky, Les Noces (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998), xxi.

61 Although racism and colonialism are the two important issues of primitivism and its origins, I do not engage with those issues. Instead, I focus on how primitivism influenced Stravinsky in a purely artistic way before, during, and after World War I.

62 While for some Picasso’s seeking of primitivism in African culture might be offensive, his views about the African sculptures were as follows: “The masks weren’t like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things. . .The Negroes’ sculptures were intercessors. . .Against everything; against unknown, threatening spirits.” Quoted in The Art History, “Primitivism,” accessed March 8, 2020, https://www.theartstory.org/amp/movement/primitivism/.

24 out), primitivism was omnipresent, especially in works of the so-called Slavic “Total Art Work”

(Gesamtkunstwerk).63 Nonetheless, while primitivism means uncivilized, uncultivated, preposterous, or even wrong, in the post-war period it was crucial to the emergence of modern art.

Although both terms primitive and exotic carry negative connotations, their meanings do not always present threats. On the contrary, contextualizing primitivism and exoticism can be interpreted as turning to the old in opposition to modernization, as well as the artist’s longing for something that scholars can only speculate about. For example, Picasso’s exploration of the primitive led him to develop his analytical Cubist style in which form and space were integrated, and spatial concepts substituted with a new synthesis that would keep resonating throughout the twentieth century. Similarly, Stravinsky adopted his new sonic-spatial conceptions from Debussy, in which the techniques and melodic models he relied on were not only innovative, but groundbreaking. Picasso and Stravinsky were close, and this exploration brought them fame.

The main primitive elements in Les Noes are depicted in lamenting and rhythm. Unlike the melody, the rhythm is the basis and driving force of the work. In his outline on Les Noces,

Belyayev asserts that

Stravinsky lays his axe at the roots of the conception of rhythm as the periodical repetition of equi-metrical structures, a conception which has dominated European music to the present day. For him rhythm is a sort of beating of the musical pulse in a composition, and of a living pulse, i.e. not mechanically accurate, but working with the retardations, accelerations and unevennesses natural to every living creature. . . .The rhythmical beats of the music in Les Noces are the opposite of the mechanical marking of time by clock-work; in this respect they carry us back, on the one hand, to the era of the primitive reckoning of time, and on the other they represent the rhythm of the present- day method of reckoning time, as accepted by the moderns. The latter conception of the rhythms of Les Noces is corroborated by the liberal employment of syncopation,

63 Maes points out that “The first great project of the Ballets Russes had to be a Slavic Gesamtkunstwerk.” Here Maes refers to The Firebird. Maes, A History of Russian Music, 218.

which is the antithesis of the fluidity of the primitive idea of rhythm and harmonizes with the contemporary nervous, ‘uneven’ acceptation of the rhythm of time.64

It appears that Belyayev imagined a universal, uncivilized, primitive Other who experiences time and rhythm differently from “civilized” peoples. Perhaps Stravinsky adopted a similar approach.

Regardless, it is important to understand how primitivism operates in a similar manner to exoticism (discussed below) by constructing an encounter with modernity’s imagined Other.

Although in Les Noces Stravinsky does not settle on any particular ictus, the score is full of repetitive patterns, endless ostinatos, while the melody is subordinate to the rhythmic structure and is minimalistic:

Example 4: Main rhythmical models in Les Noces.65

64 Belyayev, Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces, 22.

65 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” examples 17.4, 17.5a-b, 1359, 1361. 26

Further, Taruskin explores primitivism in Stravinsky’s works by linking the composer’s primitivism with the painter, archeologist, philosopher, and an expert on old Slavic myths,

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947). Roerich was another important Russian figure associated with both Ballet Russes and the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) movement of the Russian diaspora in

Paris. The Roerich-Ballet Russes collaboration started when Stravinsky was still working on The

Firebird. Taruskin discusses this connection as follows:

The urgent task of art was to renounce kul’tura [intelligentsia] and embrace stikhiya [elemental spontaneity] and thus transform itself into an amulet for restoring wholeness to the battered soul of contemporary man. Artists must renounce culture and become “elemental people” (stikhiynïye lyudi), who “see dreams and create legends, indivisible from the earth”. . . How was this elemental oneness to be recaptured? By contemplating and emulating the life of the contemporary peasant, who all unawares still practiced the ancient religion of the earth. “In our villages the maidens perform their khorovods, amuse themselves with games, sing their songs; they pose dark riddles, interpret dreams, weep over the deceased. . . Rituals, songs, khorovods, charms bring people close to the nature make them understand its nocturnal language, imitate its movements.” The poet [Alexander Blok] might already have been describing a spectacle that would be unveiled to the world five years later—only not in Russia, but at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées in Paris.66

Although in this passage Taruskin is discussing The Rite, Stravinsky used this same stikhiya, along with the stikhiynïye lyudi, in Les Noces. His asymmetrical and disproportionate phrases reflect spontaneity, and because nature is often asymmetric, the rhythm is not symmetric either.

In addition, stikhiya stories rarely have a happy ending, perhaps reflecting tragic events in Slavic history, as well as social injustice; in this case both bride and the groom must accept the wedding

66 Taruskin, “The Great Fusion,” 850-851.

27 even if they oppose it. In addition to noting how Roerich’s writings were of great importance,

Taruskin points out that “what Roerich is celebrating is the stikhiya, the primitive immediacy— as opposed to the kul’tura, the rationalized ‘content’—of art. . . . In a positive, welcoming spirit,

Roerich surveys all truly decorative, ‘elemental’ art with joy, pressing ever backward, waving with delight at all the ‘historical stations,’ until he comes up against the threshold of prehistory.”67

Given that Les Noces stems from the famous Rite, it conveys myriad links to Stravinsky’s homeland (the “old”), and at the same time contains an appeal to those who craved for that

Otherness and exotic (the “new”). Taruskin describes this duality by asserting that “Svádebka, too, would be. . . ‘an icy comedy’—an elegantly detached, nonnarrative presentation of a ritual action. . . it would be a Rite in black [and] white: the literal black and white of four keyboards.

And despite its considerable clangor, not to mention the rowdy doings in its fourth tableau, it would not be a thing of primitive abandon, but more nearly the opposite.”68

Moreover, throughout history, living in Russia was difficult, troubled, and even undesirable.69 Considering that many Russians (including Stravinsky) fled the country and never returned to live due to the horrors of both World War I and the 1917 Great October Socialist

Revolution, it comes as no surprise Maes’s asserts that “Les Noces marked the climax of

Stravinsky’s antihumanism . . . .[it] was the ultimate artistic expression of the totalitarian

67 Taruskin, “The Great Fusion,” 852-854.

68 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1322-1323.

69 “In Russia, regardless of appearances, beneath everything lies violence and arbitrariness. . . I don’t believe I am exaggerating when I assure you that in the Russian empire live the unhappiest man on Earth, unhappy because they suffer simultaneously the inconveniences of both barbarity and civilization.” Quoted in Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 66-67.

28 nostalgia of uprooted Russians.”70 Furthermore, for Eastern Europeans, Western Europe was both tempting and horrifying. Tempting because of the exciting prospect of experiencing the bourgeois lifestyle and Western freedom that was so different from “freedom” at home.

Horrifying because, how does one integrate and thrive without knowing the language or the customs of the West, and when coming from a much different Christian tradition? Thus, the spontaneity and tragedy expressed in stikhiya, which sits juxtaposed to “rationalized” kul’tura, effectively expresses this Russian experience.

Exoticism. As I have already said, in order to sell tickets and appeal to the demanding

Parisian audience, the Diaghilev-Stravinsky team had to offer something that would be groundbreaking. Therefore, besides incorporating Russian folklore and primitivism, they also turned to exoticism. Because it encompasses the ideologies of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, and thus raises questions about racial identity, nations, classes, cross-cultural issues, religion, etc., it is yet another problematic term with a complicated history. Although

“critics have tended not to include representations of the ‘folk’ inspired by nationalist sentiments in their discussion of operatic exoticism, despite the frequently clear overlap in representational techniques,”71 it is nearly impossible that in the heart of Paris, the Russian peasant wedding accompanied with the Russian folk melos (and its rituals) would not have appeared exotic.

To broaden the context, French ballet started thriving during the time of Louis XV

(1638–1715), and by the twentieth century Paris was one of the main hotspots in Europe for both ballet and opera. Although in the nineteenth century the Franco-Russian relationship did not look

70 Maes, A History of Russian Music, 285.

71 Anthony Shepperd, “Exoticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen Greenwald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 796.

29 promising, Berman writes that “by the time Diaghilev brought his Ballet Russes to France, the boundaries between east and west had become thoroughly blurred. Not only did le tout-Paris welcome the Russians, it adulated them, modeled its fashions and design on their aesthetic, and even celebrated for bringing French dance home to France.”72

However, musicologist Ralph Locke warns that the word exotic “has magnetic, insidious, and sometimes explosive force,” and that “it should be handled with care.” He also raises some vital questions: “What do we mean by ‘exotic’? What counts as exotic, what does not—and to whom? Or, to put the matter in the context of a history of terminology: what are the boundaries of the term ‘exotic,’ and when and how should one best use it in the future?”73 Though all important points, they perhaps raise even more questions than provide answers. Nonetheless,

Locke’s insights surely point into the right direction:

Whatever the process, the creator of an exotic musical work (or the creative team in, say a stage work) achieves a vision, or a reflection, of a distant and different realm. He or she confides those visions to the page. Skillful, sensitive performers then convey the markings on the page—and the implications behind them—to generations of receptive listeners. These musical reflections of Elsewhere then also elicit a wide range of verbal reflections: from fellow composers, from music critics, and from scholars.74

In other words, the sound is marked as exotic through both representation by the composer and performer, and perception by the listener. While composing his exotic works in which he was presumably revealing his own heritage, Stravinsky reflected on Russia. But could it be possible that at same time (a time of upheaval), he was also separating from Russia?

72 Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 77.

73 Ralph Locke, “On Exoticism, Western Art Music, and the Words We Use,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 69/4 (2012), 323.

74 Locke, “On Exoticism, Western Art Music, and the Words We Use,” 323.

In his book entitled Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Timothy Taylor gives us a general definition of what exoticism presents in music. According to Taylor, exoticism in music is a “manifestation of an awareness of racial, ethnic, and cultural Others captured in sound.”75 Interestingly, as opposed to, for example, Mozart, Verdi, or Puccini, Stravinsky was a part of the culture that he was exoticizing about. While Stravinsky’s representation of the Eastern melos conquered Paris, Western composers of previous centuries were probably less vulnerable to possible misinterpretation when composing exotic music for their audiences. Although not entirely impossible, but how does one “exoticize” his or her own native region? In such case, where is the “otherness” taking place (East or West), and how does one reformulate musical philosophy without compromising artistic standards? While Stravinsky’s “otherness” undoubtedly occurred in Paris, historical evidence suggests that his focus was elsewhere.76

Although Les Noces was conceived while Stravinsky was wrapping up The Rite, the final product differed significantly from the prior ballet. Besides the drastic cultural changes caused by the horrors of the World War I that interrupted Stravinsky’s compositional process, Taylor has observed that some composers (Stravinsky included) “sought to counter the erosion of subjectivity by embracing, or re-embracing, a revitalized nationalism along nineteenth-century lines.”77 While my intent is not to slip from exoticism to nationalism, one can hear Stravinsky’s folkloric references as gesturing towards a celebration of Russianness within this cultural

75 Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

76 Locke and others have written at length about this. For example, see Locke, Musical Exoticism, Chapter 4. 77 Taylor, Beyond Exoticism, 83.

31 change.78 Consequently, Stravinsky moved away from subjectivity towards objectivity, and eventually turned to the abstract, the undefined, and embraced the venture into these unknown spheres of his artistry.79

Given that primitivism and exoticism are closely related, it seems reasonable to conclude that Les Noces, along with other elements foreign to the Western tonic-dominant style of functional harmony, paved the way for the new path. While Stravinsky synthesized these trends by presenting this Russian peasant wedding ritual as a “symbolic depiction of the brutal social and religious machinery,”80 his (slightly older) French colleagues Claude Debussy, Maurice

Ravel, and Paul Abraham Dukas started becoming interested in Russian artists of this time period. This reveals that Stravinsky’s ideas were embraced, and it serves as a landmark in a history of musical-cultural exchange. The Ballet Russes produced works in which peoples, places, and cultural practices greatly differed from its intended (Western) audience, and the company’s music, text, choreography, costume design, and scenography portrayed exotic sonic and visual markers to this audience. In some respects, these exotic sounds and visual portrayals gained such popularity that they helped define the primitivist aesthetics that infused modern visual and performing arts during the decade. By placing the dancers on stage apart from the singers in the orchestra pit, whose parts are not in any correlation, Stravinsky continued to separate the music from the drama (just as he was separating from Russia), to drastically shrink the orchestra, and to make it clear that he aimed for “sound that is homogenous, impersonal, and

78 Although these categories naturally overlap—exoticism is frequently tied up in issues of nationalism, and vice-versa—for more see Jonathan Bellman’s chapter on “Liszt and Hungarian Gypsies” in The Exotic in Western Music. 79 Stravinsky even addresses some of his compositions, like his Octet, as a “musical object.” Quoted in Taylor, Beyond Exoticism, 83.

80 Quoted in Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 118.

32 mechanical.”81 As Bronislava Nijinska, the original choreographer of Les Noces, puts it: it was the path toward “utmost simplicity.”82 In so doing, whether consciously or not, the composer entered the next stylistic phase of his career: Neoclassicism.

81 Quoted in Maes, A History of Russian Music, 285.

82 Quoted in Sally Banes, “Early Modern Ballet: Firebird, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces,” in Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 111. 33

Chapter 2: Venturing into Neoclassicism

Like primitivism and exoticism, Neoclassicism rejected nineteenth-century Romanticism, adopting instead the modernist trend of direct, simple, stripped-down melodies, meshed with unusual instrumental combination. In addition to surveying definitions of Neoclassicism, and literature on Stravinsky contextualizing Les Noces as Neoclassical, I will examine possible connections to the composer’s New Objectivity,83 which, in this case, has grounding in Russian roots. I also suggest how putting date brackets around Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period is problematic because he was composing in smaller Neoclassical forms in the 1910s as part of the experimental culture of the time. However, instead of arguing that Les Noces falls exclusively into Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period, I suggest that it evokes Russian traditions, while ultimately serving as a transitional work that launched him into his longest stylistic period.

The catalogue Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music (1914–1935), which was issued as part of the celebrations commemorating ten years of the Paul Sacher Foundation, states the following:

“Classicism in modern art”—this is a paradox which covers a range of possible meanings. Two spheres are combined which are usually carefully separated and contrasted: an artistic interest in the form and content of classical antiquity, and a modernity which stands in opposition to the past and is dedicated to innovation. Is union between the two at all feasible? Or is the ‘classicism’ of the 1920s a retardataire [outdated] movement at odds with the forward movement of modernity?84

While the union between the old and the new will be discussed throughout this chapter, it must be stated that the artistic classicism of the 1920s was also a reaction to Expressionism, over-

83 In the 1920s, the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), often attributed to Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period, emerged as a counter-style to Expressionism in Germany, where artists not only sought new paths, but also “revised” the previous ones.

84 Boehm, Mosch, and Schmidt, eds., Canto d’Amore, 15.

34 emotionalism, and the like. The trend spread throughout Europe and fed the idea of replacing

“the chaos of modern trends”85 with objectivity, clarity, refinement, and concision. As such, “it became a public attitude, an outlook which both important and less important personalities shared.”86 The trend reached its peak between the two World Wars. Since this simplified interpretation of Neoclassicism is too general, in order to obtain a deeper understanding of those inspirations, I first examine difficulties and contradictions within the term, and then move on to where Les Noces—a work that saw the light of day in the midst of all those turbulent events— stands in relation to Neoclassicism.

Les Noces and Neoclassicism—The Old World in the New

In his extensive research on Neoclassicism, Scott Messing argues that the history of the term is full of ambiguities, and often has been misinterpreted. In his book Neoclassicism in

Music, he brings forth the main issues with the term and how it evolved:

Because we lack any individual document which first introduced the term and could thus isolate and embody the problem, we must patiently and thoroughly furnish the background from which the first appearances of the expression grew. . . The term neoclassicism could not have appeared until there was a commonly understood meaning of classicism. . . As a term that signifies these traits within specific styles or eras—the sense in which it is normally used in the arts—classicism appears to be an invention of the 1800s. . . Scarcely one hundred years ago [late 1800s], classicism in music, while signifying a body of work that was superior and excellent, referred to compositions as early as those of Palestrina and as late as those of Schubert, depending on which country’s classicism was under discussion. . . By the end of the [nineteenth] century, the traits of classicism for each art form had become clearly established cultural norms, and its monuments cast long shadows over contemporary artists. At the same time that this historical past was codified, however, there developed an adversarial view of it as stultifying and inhibitive, encouraging artists to be self-consciously and deliberately unfettered to their heritage. It is precisely this tension between order and freedom,

85 Boehm, Mosch, and Schmidt, eds., Canto d’Amore, 16.

86 Boehm, Mosch, and Schmidt, eds., Canto d’Amore, 16.

continuity and innovation, and tradition and novelty that existed around the turn of the century that incited the first appearance of the term neoclassicism.87

Messing’s view of Neoclassicism furnishes a framework for viewing Les Noces in both styles,

Russian and Neoclassical, and provides a path to interpret it as the union between the old and new written in a time of modern trends. Likewise, Russian musicologist Mikhail Druskin agrees that Neoclassicism is “a word that has been widely used by a large number of people who, however, have only a ‘vague understanding’ of it and attach to it a meaning that is either too wide—in which case almost all Western European music of the twentieth century may be called neoclassical—or too restricted, in which case Stravinsky alone bears the load of guilt for the sins of neoclassicism.”88

None of Stravinsky’s works were traditionally considered Neoclassical until about 1923.

However, Druskin refers to an even earlier work when he observes of Stravinsky’s Polka for

Three Hands (1915), that the composer could “hardly have supposed that it would be—as he later called it—a sort of variety of ‘neoclassicism,’ any more than Picasso’s enthusiasm for a drawing in Ingres’s manner in the same year can have seemed to the painter the possible start of his involvement with the neoclassical movement.”89 This suggests that Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period had started before 1923. Furthermore, in her book After the Rite, scholar Maureen Carr states that “The emergence of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism from 1914–25 is closely tied to the changing aesthetics of the time. The year 1914 was crucial for experiments in literature, art,

87 Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music from the Genesis of the Concept Through the Schoenberg/Stravinsky Polemic (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), xv-xvi.

88 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 76.

89 Quoted in Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 76. The book was originally published in Leningrad in 1974, and there was a second edition published in 1979.

36 music, and dance that were initiated by luminaries who spent their early years in St.

Petersburg.”90 Les Noces was conceived around that time, and between 1913 and 1920

Stravinsky also composed myriad smaller works in different styles that captured this transformation of the aesthetics. Composer and scholar Francis Routh writes, however, that

Stravinsky’s stage works differ, and that each work represents an original solution to the “ever- present problem of relating music within a chosen framework of drama, whether sung, spoken, danced or mimed.”91 This brings to the fore both the similarities and differences between the works from the two periods, and helps define which musical and extramusical elements he retained while venturing into Neoclassicism.

For example, Les Noces is often perceived as The Rite’s first cousin. While there are thematic and harmonic similarities, Berman’s compelling findings suggest the following:

Many of the most qualified critics used the term “classical” to differentiate Les Noces from Le Sacre. . . In his review in L’Éclair, [Alexis] Roland-Manuel compares the romanticism of Le Sacre to the classicism of Les Noces: ‘Neighbours, at a distance, in spirit, Le Sacre and Les Noces differ curiously in terms of structure. . . the peculiar romanticism of Le Sacre gives way to a sort of grand, stripped-down classicism, which clearly emphasizes an orchestral arrangement whose simplicity is extremely bold.”92

The ambiguity and anxiety that lingers in Les Noces contributes to the emerging trend. If one considers Taruskin’s idea of Neoclassical as protean,93 then there is no need to put it under the microscope and search for the forms of eighteen-century music, for the signals lie elsewhere.

Taruskin also asserts that “what seems simple and self-evident in the finished music was, as so

90 Maureen Carr, After the Rite Stravinsky’s Path to Neoclassicism (1914-25) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7. Italics mine.

91 Francis Routh, Stravinsky (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1975), 83.

92 Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 127.

93 Carolyn Abbate, “Outside the Tomb,” in In Search of Opera (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 193.

37 often the case with Stravinsky, the product of a ruthless process of search and refinement.”94

Unsurprisingly, Stravinsky’s search and refinement culminated during this very period between

The Rite’s and Les Noces’s premieres, when “not only had culture in Russia seemed to change overnight, to its very roots, but the ways in which Russia’s past was being constructed—both at home and abroad—had altered drastically, as well.”95

Nonetheless, one could argue that Les Noces shares less with the The Rite, and more with the Symphony of Psalms (1929), the choral–orchestral work that became a paragon of

Stravinsky’s Neoclassical period. Similar to Symphony of Psalms, Les Noces comprises new sounds and forms as through an ironic and indifferent relationship between the chorus, singers, and the orchestra; sharp directness; lament; the absence of strings; changing meters; references to previous styles; and implications of both Russian and Western modality. In addition, both works are about twenty-three minutes in length. Although this might seem superficial, after World War

I the length of Stravinsky’s works shrunk significantly, and Les Noces undoubtedly falls into this category. Moreover, in the Moscow modern-music magazine Muzïka (1915), Vladimir

Derzhanovsky wrote the following:

Svádebka is not an opera and not a ballet. In its conception and structure it approximates a new and specifically Russian type of spectacle that has been sketched as yet only in the imagination of a few leading musical figures, the type Lyadov had meant to pursue in creating his “rusalia” Leyla and Alaley with A.M. Remizov. . . It has no plot in the crudely utilitarian sense of the word. There is no “action,” but nonetheless it is an act, the contents of which unfold before the hearer and viewer in the plain and shapely form of folk festivities. . . Extraordinarily interesting is the orchestral complement in this composition, the result of the composer’s new–found views on instrumentation, already discernible in embryonic form in Stravinsky’s suite “From Japanese Lyrics.”96

94 Richard Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1367.

95 Banes, “Early Modern Ballet,” 108.

96 Quoted in Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1319.

Anatoly Lyadov was also a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov who worked briefly with Diaghilev and

Ballet Russes, while Aleksey Mikhailovich Remizov was a Russian modernist writer whose works were at the same time fantastic and bizarre, and who also looked for inspiration in the past. Although Leyla and Alaley never came into fruition due to Lyadov’s death, it would have also contained Neoclassical seeds.

Asaf’yev, along with a few other scholars cited in this chapter, seems to have addressed the transition in styles by stating that Stravinsky’s “new style reaches the maturity in Les Noces”:

the accompaniment (four pianos and percussion) clothes the chorus in a robe of instrumental heterophony, but all the instrumental factors—harmony, color, dynamics, percussive qualities—are made subservient to the vocal line: Noces, as I have already said, is first and foremost a cantata. The old madrigal comedies of the seventeenth century (like the Ampfiparnasso of Orazio Vecchi) were cantatas in much the same sense.”97

Although he does not clarify what “new style” he is referring to, given that the work was finished and premiered around the time when other experimental (and supposedly Neoclassical) works had been composed such as The Soldier’s Tale, Mavra, Pulcinella, Octet, and Symphonies of

Wind Instruments (composed in memory of Debussy), one can interpret Asaf’yev’s reference to a

“new style” as gesturing towards the Neoclassical.

Like Asaf’yev, Belyayev too compares Les Noces’s melodic subjects to cantatas, and offers an insightful topical analogy:

The thematism of Les Noces is an interesting phenomenon, both in itself and in the manner in which it is employed. In itself it is extremely interesting because it is manifestly the thematism of a vocal composition which in complexity of adaptation is second to no contemporary symphonic work. Although Stravinsky’s cantata is not constructed on the same principles as Bach’s cantatas, in respect of thematism it is in no way inferior to them, notwithstanding the fact that Stravinsky entirely foreswore the employment of those principles of Bach’s polyphony upon which depends the possibility of a genuine thematic development in a choral work. . . As the majority of themes in Les Noces are derived from one main theme, or rather from one main motif, by the addition

97 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, 133.

of new elements to it, so they are very often introduced by “adding” them contrapuntally to the theme that has already been given out after which they lose their original status of “companions” to the latter and begin to sound quite independently.98

Belyayev was among the first ones who wrote about Les Noces and proposed such claims, thus he invites the listener to consider whether deployment of the main theme in each tableau resembles a cantata, or perhaps even the mechanics of the fugal structure. Conversely, while Belyayev refers to the work as a “cantata,” Robert Siohan argues that there is no foundation for claiming that “The

Wedding is a cantata or an oratorio.”99 However, he does assert that “if, instead of concentrating on the forty themes or more that proliferate in this musical fresco, one turns to examine the rhythm, the presence of Bach is immediately felt—particularly the unflagging energy that motivates the

Brandenburg Concertos. By taking the shortest syllable as his unit, i.e., the quaver, Stravinsky like

Bach succeeds in relating these various melodic themes to a common denominator.”100

While on the surface this traditional Russian peasant wedding appears to fall into

Stravinsky’s Russian period, he clearly explores new territory. Sally Banes argues that such exploration is “powerful, abstract evocation of the weighty social forces that impinge on individuals in a traditional culture, shaping their destinies and thrusting their mates upon them.”101

Although thematically Stravinsky does not turn to the old Greco-Roman mythology, he adopts the elements from the past of his own heritage discussed in the previous chapter, and places them in a modern work. Sonically, Les Noces resembles nothing from Bach, Pergolesi, or Rossini (on the contrary, Asaf’yev describes the music as “severe, astringent, graphic”102). However, the new

98 Belyayev, Stravinsky’s Les Noces, 16.

99 Siohan, Stravinsky, 60.

100 Siohan, Stravinsky, 60.

101 Banes, “Early Modern Ballet,” 108.

102 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, 130. 40 interpretation and nuance behind these mainly monodic, uncanny, archaic folk melos brings

Neoclassical ideas into life. Additionally, although Berman is more concerned with primitivism and its significance in French cultural life, she too adds that “the primitivism of Les Noces was perceived, at least to some extent, as a manifestation of both the classicist ‘call to order’ and the mechanistic aesthetic of the post-war period.”103 The work that dominated Stravinsky’s early years of exile is, without a doubt, abstract; it depicts difficult circumstances, and it is objective rather than subjective—all concepts associated with Neoclassicism.

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity

In the midst of the crisis that overtook Europe, Stravinsky adopted old elements from

Russia and brought these topoi to life. At the same time Les Noces seems to cut the composer’s umbilical cord with Russia. The case in point is Belyayev’s observation of “the call of the blood,” which places Les Noces in context by explaining how the assertion of clarity and the unemotional replaced emotional expressionism in the midst of the horrors of World War I.

Nonetheless, Stravinsky reported the following to Craft about the first staging of Les Noces:

The first staging of Les Noces (at the Théâtre de la Gaîté in June 1923) was generally compatible with my conception of the ritualistic and non-personal. As I have said elsewhere, the choreography was expressed in blocks and masses; individual personalities did not, could not emerge. The curtain was not used and the dancers did not leave the stage even during the lamentation of the two mothers, a wailing ritual which presupposes an empty set; the empty set and all other changes of scene, from the bride’s to the groom’s to the church, are created solely by the music. But though the bride and groom are always present, the guests are able to talk about them as if they were not there— a stylization not unlike Kabuki theatre.104

103 Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 118.

104 Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions and Developments, 117.

Stravinsky points out “the ritualistic and non-personal,” an indicator that he was transitioning towards Neoclassicism and separating from emotional expression, just like Erik Satie and Paul

Hindemith among many others did. While Messing does not classify Les Noces as Neoclassical, he writes:

The metaphors chosen by Stravinsky and his supporters to describe his post-Sacre style— simple, straightforward, objective, pure, and concise—might well have been for them the most understandable language they could offer the public. Whereas this vocabulary was appropriated to the term neoclassicism in the 1920s, that expression was anchored to a distant cultural tradition as well.105

While this analogy could suggest both the composer’s connection to and disconnection from the past, Druskin peels back yet another layer, suggesting that

In the realm of expression there was a repudiation of the subjective and a concern with objective content (sometimes involving an ‘over-cooling of the feelings’), a cultivation of the supra-personal and hence an interest in mythology, ritual, and conventions of ‘play.’ Finally there was a huge expansion of existing ties, a new sense of participating in a world culture, a universal tradition, and hence a plurality of ‘manners’ and a freedom in the choice of artistic models.106

Les Noces has been criticized for its lack of charm, and the work’s drama portrayed the protagonists as victims of society “destined to live out their miserable lives.”107 This invites us to consider: was Stravinsky too trapped in the West, just like the bride and the groom were trapped in their own repressive social customs with no escape? In this matter Belyayev complicates things even further by asserting the following:

We know many instances of Russian writers and composers who, living abroad, have experienced with peculiar keenness the “call of the blood,” the imperious summons of their native land, to which they have responded with all the fibres of their soul. . . An answer to the “call of the blood,” this work [Les Noces] also shows itself to be an apotheosis of something, which, either by fate, or if you will, by the force of historical events, is destined to retire into the past and gradually to undergo dissolution,

105 Messing, Neoclassicism in Music, 108.

106 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 77.

107 Berman, “Primitivism and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” 122.

becoming non-existent. This “something” is the ancient Russian peasant life, to whose beliefs, ceremonies, and “prejudices” the revolution brings death and substitution.108

The nightmares and difficulties of war prompted many to adopt restraint and contribute to a general return to rationality in the arts. However, instead of imitating the previous centuries (as in Pulcinella, which premiered in 1920), in Les Noces Stravinsky turned to objectivity in a brutally honest, idiosyncratic presentation that captured the idea of “dissolution” after the war.

According to Druskin, Neoclassicism encompasses more than a turn towards sources from the distant past. In his argument, he points out some key ideas that are essential in order to draw that fine line between Stravinsky’s two stylistic periods:

The neoclassicism that appeared in many branches of Western European art during the years immediately after the First World War was something quite different in character, a new phenomenon in fact. It is an interesting fact, indeed, that twentieth-century neoclassical musicians reacted negatively to the music of the “classicizing” composers mentioned above, [Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Taneev, Reger] and certainly recognized no connecting link with them. The truth is that these two generations were divided by the catastrophe of the war and the social unrest and disturbances in post-war Europe. There was a deep division among Western artists who had lived through these catastrophic events and wished to understand their real significance for the culture of the future.109

If it is to believe that Neoclassicism was a part of a socio-cultural movement in search of renewing European civilization and New Objectivity, then all the answers lie in the legacy of the future. Or, as Druskin puts it, “how is the question of ‘tradition’ to be decided once the limits of the ‘artistic legacy’ have been made so unimaginably wide? Is it to be regional, that is to say limited by national boundaries, or universal?”110 Taking all these ideas into consideration,

Stravinsky was pushing his musical language into new territory through methods that resemble

108 Belyayev, Stravinsky’s Les Noces, 1.

109 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 73-75.

110 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 76.

43 traditional stylization; “he seems to evoke from the depth of the ages, in the guise of a popular celebration, the eternal sacrifice of humans to the perpetuity of a miserable existence.”111

Abstract but Real

Through elements adopted from both past and present, Stravinsky portrays the marriage union as problematic. While his idea “had been to create . . . an abstract selection and distillation of the rich socio-religious folk material connected to the Russian peasant wedding,”112 and by embracing reality as best he could, his interpretation of the drama presents harsh but clear statements, when at the same time his musical idiom also cries for hope. Although emotionless and “mechanical,” Les Noces does carry such hints. In the final tableaux, in which the chorus cheerfully and wildly celebrates the new life of the newlyweds, Stravinsky opted for juxtaposing various vocal melodies that occasionally evoke optimism. The texture is suddenly more concise and dancelike, with cheering and sudden outbursts of joy intertwined with irony. Although the very end of the tableau shifts back to the lament and sonic expression of the unknown, this short expression of bliss represents the utopia that was disappearing right in front of Stravinsky’s eyes.

Asaf’yev describes this scenario as follows:

The interlude continued with the gay, bazaar-like cries of the tenor-attendant (“Krasnye devitsy”), accompanied by clinking of the tambourine and bright piano figurations. . . from the beginning to the end, each character is “a mask” with its own characteristic intonations and rhythms (that define gesture and movement), the sum of whose individualizing properties affords a better unity than could have been achieved by any logical scheme of leitmotifs with which the texture might have been encumbered. In this respect, Stravinsky follows the traditions of Bach, Mozart, and Glinka.113

111 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 76.

112 Banes, “Early Modern Ballet,” 108.

113 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, 149.

Asaf’yev makes another compelling comment about Stravinsky’s musical idiom of the time which cannot be ignored:

His mentality had changed, and therefore his language changed also. Instead of a typically homophonic music with a texture of four voices and chordal voice-leading controlled by vertical progression, Stravinsky passed on to a polyrhythmic and linear type of composition, to the use of harmonic complexes which are product of lines, and to the unconditional supremacy of principles of formulation derived from the dynamics of the melos (as that is found in folk art) and from constructive norms long ago worked out by the intuitive rhythmic sense of human beings, for rhythm is the biomechanics of music.114

Like his close friend and collaborator Picasso, who worked with Diaghilev and Stravinsky in

1917 and experimented with the combination of figurative painting by fusing the old and the new, Stravinsky was exploring ways to overcome the distance between the two. As stated in

Canto d’Amore, “The past is only interesting if it can be seen to be superior to our own time in the expression of a figure, a visual idea, a motif, a space of form. The distance of time is then easily overcome, and the power and relevance of the element taken from the past become evident in the present.”115 In other words, Picasso’s paintings, or Stravinsky’s compositions do not simply recall the old, but they make the present alive and real. Or, as Carolyn Abbate asserts,

“What does it mean to invoke the past? What past? How?. . . Anxious influence and psychology, or politics and sociology, have become classic grounds for debates about twentieth-century works in which we sense the presence of an old and alien voice.”116 A voice that turns out to be

Turanian.

114 Asaf’yev, A Book About Stravinsky, 155.

115 Boehm, Mosch, and Schmidt, eds., Canto d’Amore, 19.

116 Abbate, “Outside the Tomb,” 193. 45

Chapter 3: Eurasian-Turanian Phase

Eurasianism (Yevraziystvo) was a socio-political movement adopted by intellectual

émigrés who moved from Russia to the West during the 1920s. Les Noces especially has been linked to the movement, and its musical style.117 However, the scholarship about Stravinsky’s connection to Eurasianism does not provide enough evidence to correctly place him within this movement. In addition, finding a concrete and concise definition of this style and what it represents in music is challenging, daunting, and at times even illusory. Because Taruskin engages with this topic more than other scholars, I will primarily rely on his findings.

Stravinsky’s countryman and once-close associate Arthur Lourié (1892–1966) also wrote about

Eurasianism (and was the first to officially associate the composer with the movement in his writings); however, Taruskin offers clearer and more substantial information that is easier to interpret and use in this discussion. He even suggests that “Svádebka is without a doubt the most convincing Turanian synthesis Stravinsky ever achieved.”118 Despite scarce and scattered scholarship regarding Stravinsky’s connections to the Eurasian-Turanian movement, in order to fully understand Les Noces and what it represents, discussing this phase is necessary.

117 The term is interchangeably used with Eurasian. According to Taruskin, “The word is a derivative from Turan, the Persian name for the landmass beyond the Oxus River to the north of Iran, a huge territory extending, like the modern Russian state, from the Carpathians to the Pacific. Linguists will recognize the adjective Turanian as an obsolete denomination for what are now called the Ural-Altaic languages.” Taruskin, “The Rejoicing Discovery,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1127.

118 In Taruskin’s Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, the chapter where Les Noces is thoroughly examined is entitled “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1319.

Where is Turan, and How Does It Relate to Stravinsky?

Maes states that Turan is a dated term for the Eurasian steppe.119 Today the Eurasian steppe span from Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, through Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan,

Xinjiang, Mongolia, all the way to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. Eurasia went through multiple geographic and socio-political changes before and during Soviet expansion to Central Asia and the Far East, while “the psychological, social, and artistic characteristics of the Russians can be traced back to the pre-Slavic—that is, Turanian—period.”120 While Maes does not provide any dates on these changes, for the origins one has to look into the historiography of Eurasia. In their examination of Eurasian history, Vladimír Baar and Slavomír Horák write:

During the 16th and 17th centuries Russia annexed vast territories of Siberia, invoking the concept of terra nullius, and finally reached the Pacific coast in 1647. . . .Its further expansion to the south and east had to wait until the beginning of the 19th century, when Russia’s expansion to the west was halted by the European powers. Russia then turned its attention to the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East. Unlike the earlier Eastern Expansion. . . this time Russia faced relatively strong consolidated states. This included the ottoman Empire, Iran, and China as well as other colonial powers—most significantly Britain and Japan.121

Over time, Russia expanded in every direction like no other country, and today’s Turan is considered a historical region. In order to connect Turan and the features of the Turanian idiom with Stravinsky, I will first trace the people who linked the composer to this term.

119 Maes, A History of Russian Music, 284. Maes also notes that “what used to be called the ‘Turanian people,’ we nowadays use the linguistic term ‘Ural-Altaic.’” While my intent is not to link Stravinsky to the Ural- Altaic ethnic and language concepts, it is important to be aware of this “connection.” Although Eurasianists explicitly considered the West as the main enemy of humanity—the subject that is likewise beyond the scope of this research—it is noteworthy to situate the movement’s ideological roots.

120 Maes, A History of Russian Music, 284.

121 Vladimír Baar, and Slavomír Horák, “Introduction to Russian and Soviet Territorial Expansion,” in De Facto States in Eurasia, eds. Tomáš Hoch, and Vincenc Kopeček (New York: Routledge, 2020), 43.

Lev Karsavin (1882–1952)—a prominent Russian philosopher, brother of the Ballet

Russes prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina, and a neighbor of the Stravinsky family in St.

Petersburg—also linked Stravinsky to the Eurasian-Turanian movement and may have influenced the composer’s ideas. In Defining Russia Musically, Taruskin writes:

Karsavin’s closest association with Stravinsky came in the spring of 1911, during the merry days immediately preceding the Rome premiere of Petrushka. . . .By 1911, Karsavin’s adaptation of Slavophilistic historical and religious thinking was already reaching its maximalist phase, as was Trubetskoy’s. Not only these biographical circumstances but also many detailed and idiosyncratic ideological affinities identify Lev Karsavin as a thinker whose proto-Eurasianist, “ideocratic” impact on Stravinsky came early enough to have affected both the conception and realization of Svàdebka.122

Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy (1890–1938), a Russian intellectual who emigrated to Vienna, was another, if not the most important figure of Eurasianism. Trubetskoy was a Russian linguist, historian, and literary critic who conceived the Eurasianist movement—an ideology stemming from the idea that Russia is neither a European nor an Asian country. He viewed Russia as a country for itself, sharing more in common with its Asian neighbors than with Europeans.123

Also, he insisted that Russia is a separate civilization, and that its Turko-Mongol element cannot be ignored. Further, he strongly advocated that Russia cannot be associated solely with Europe either geopolitically or religiously. While it is uncertain whether Stravinsky and Trubetskoy ever crossed paths, Stravinsky may have absorbed these ideas through his lifelong friendship with fellow Russian émigré, musicologist, and music critic Pierre Souvtchinsky (1892–1985).

Souvtchinsky not only published Trubetskoy’s founding document of Eurasianism, Europe and

Humanity (Yevropa I chelovechestvo) in 1920, but he was also one of the founders, and thus an important link between Stravinsky and the movement. In Europe and Humanity, Trubetskoy

122 Taruskin, “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically, 401.

123 This attitude stems from the idea that in Asia, Russians are thought to be “true” Europeans whereas in the West are cannot. In the West, they are viewed as outsiders (from the East) and thus not “true” Europeans. 48 expressed fear for the further geographic shattering of Russia, but also fear of the West which was, in his eyes, Russia’s biggest enemy. Taruskin describes Souvtchinsky’s ideas and connection to Stravinsky as follows:

In 1920, while living in Sofia, Bulgaria, he [Souvtchinsky] founded and bankrolled the Russian-Bulgarian Publishing House (Russko-bolgarskoye knigoizadel’stvo), whose first publication, Yevropa I chelovechestvo (Europe and Humanity) by Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, was one of the founding documents of the movement known as Yevraziystvo or Eurasianism. When, shortly after meeting Stravinsky, Souvtchinsky wrote to him that “knowing you are alive on this earth helps me go on,” it was to his Eurasianist activities that he was referring. Eurasianism was an explosive rejection of Europe on the part of intellectuals forced by the Russian revolution to live there— intellectuals whose outlook was conditioned by intermingling of nineteenth-century Slavophilism and early twentieth-century Scythianism.124

The movement’s ideology was rather ferocious. Taruskin characterizes its rhetorical style as

“irascible. . . their aestheticized attraction to violence, and their nostalgic attraction to the imagined cleansing barbarism of Asia, epitomized in Trubetskoy’s assertion of the ‘Turanian’ affinities of the Russians—that is, their affinity not for their brother Slavs to the west and south, but to their Central Asian neighbors to the east (the Turkic peoples, to the study of whose languages Trubetskoy, a famous linguist, devoted his professional career.)”125

In the 1920s the Eurasianists were mostly based in Paris, where many Russian émigrés, including Stravinsky, found new homes. Being associated with Asia rather than Europe, the movement differed from other Russian movements such as The World of Art (Mir iskusstva), another active artistic movement which strived to present Russian artistic values to the Western

European art scene. In contrast, Eurasianism was a socio-political movement with a strong

124 Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s Poetics and Russian Music,” in Russian Music at Home and Abroad, 443. Moreover, Taruskin calls this first publication “violently anti-Western tract.” Taruskin, “The Rejoicing Discovery,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1126.

125 Taruskin, “Stravinsky’s Poetics and Russian Music,” in Russian Music at Home and Abroad, 444.

49 aversion to the “Romano-Germanic ideology,” as they viewed it. Because it advocated for uniting Russia with Asia (and viewed Western European bourgeoisie as a foe), at one point they even believed that the collapse of tsarist Russia would finally free Russia from everything that threatened Russianness.

While the Russian émigré intelligentsia possessed a strong vision of Eurasian ideology, propagating such ideas was often in conflict with what ideals they would visualize. For example, they emphasized their connections with Asia over Europe, but at the same time they would reject these connections. In his essay entitled “Turania Revisited, With Lourié My Guide,” Taruskin observes this paradox in Eurasian writings by stating:

The fundamental original idea of the movement was not that Russia was a dialectical synthesis of Europe and Asia, but more nearly the opposite: that the Russia lands and their inhabitants were to be drastically distinguished from Europeans and Asians alike. Nevertheless, this separatist and essentialist idea—often reasserted as the “true” Eurasianism against deviations, to little avail—was often confused, both within the movement and without, and from the very beginning, with its synthetic counterpart (in two variants: one that saw Russia as a blend of Europe and Asia, and another that allied Russia with Asia in opposition to Europe).126

In addition, Russia was not always considered to be an Eastern country. At one point in history it was associated geographically with the Balkan lands and Ottoman Europe, while at another point it was considered a northern region along with Poland. This movement advocated closer association with Asia as opposed to Scandinavia or the Balkans. But how does all this connect to

Stravinsky and Les Noces?

If Les Noces was “Inspired by that moment of hope, Stravinsky celebrated no Russia that is or was, and certainly no Russia that ever will be, but a Russia out of time and space. . . a

Russia not of the real but of the realiora [beyond reality],”127 then the work can also be viewed

126 Taruskin, “Turania Revisited, With Lourié My Guide,” in Russian Music at Home and Abroad, 166.

127 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1422. 50 as “a typical neonationalist plea on behalf of a cultural heritage that would hold a special appeal for an artist with Eurasianist leanings, the Caucasus being no less part of ‘Turania’ than

Russia.”128 Given that Eurasianists were mainly Russian Orthodox Christians, cherishing their religious and folkloric heritage was of great importance. Furthermore, it cannot be a coincidence that before Stravinsky committed to write down Les Noces, an article caught his eye by the famous linguist Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934) entitled “Thoughts on the Religious

Singing of the Ancient East: On the Occasion of a Concert of Georgian Sacred Music at the Hall of Nobles on the Sixteenth of March.”129 Georgia is located in the southern Caucasus while

Rech’ was a Russian daily newspaper published in St. Petersburg that shut down with the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution. Besides Marr’s linguistic theories and advocating for recognizing Russian heritage, the article also investigates “the origins of human speech to the language of the Caucasus”130 in which Stravinsky, as a part of that infrastructure, was interested.

This may have inspired “the Trubestkoys and Karsavins to insist on the community of Eurasian cultures. Hence, it is not surprising to find that Stravinsky showed an interest in Georgian folk and religious music, or that this interest should have left its mark on Svádebka.”131 In order to explore this idea further, what follows is a brief investigation of such a music idiom.

128 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1413. The Caucasus is a mountain system at the intersection of Europe and Asia.

129 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1413.

130 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1413.

131 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1413.

Turanian Music Idiom

Like Taruskin, British historian Orlando Figes argues that Les Noces (and The Rite) have

Turanian characteristics.132 In his book entitled Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, he explores the Turanian conceptions further by suggesting that Turanian characteristics lay in

“rhythmic immobility:”

Stravinsky was deeply influenced by the mystical views of the Eurasianists, particularly the notion of a natural Russian (“Turanian”) inclination for collectivity, which the music of such works as The Peasant Wedding, with his absence of individual expression in the singing parts and its striving for a sparse, impersonal sound. . . the rhythmic immobility (nepodvizhnost’) which was the most important feature of Stravinsky’s music in The Peasant Wedding and The Rite of Spring was “Turanian” in character. As in the Eastern musical tradition, Stravinsky’s music developed by the constant repetition of a rhythmic pattern, with variations on the melody, rather than by contrast of musical ideas, as in the Western tradition. It was this rhythmic immobility which created the explosive energy of Stravinsky’s ‘Turanian’ music.133

To demonstrate what Figes means by “Turanian in character,” the following audio examples depict the three different Turanian singing styles; see Example 5.

132 Taruskin likewise suggests that Stravinsky entered his Turanian phase with the onset of the World War I: “no work in any of the ‘large’ forms. . . had ever been set to folk verse in provincial dialects (govorï) until Stravinsky entered his Turanian phase at the outbreak of the First World War.” Taruskin, “The Rejoicing Discovery,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1130. The Rite of Spring premiered on May 29, 1913.

133 Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 198.

Example 5: a) Hungarian-Turanian singing,134 b) Altai-Turkic throat singing,135 c) Georgian folk singing:136

The first example is the Hungarian-Turanian style. Hungarians belong to the Finno-Ugric population, who came from the southwestern part of Ural, and thus have ties to the Ural-Altaic

Turanian roots. Geographically, they are closest to the West. Roman Catholicism prevails even today, and their music idiom also incorporates Gregorian chant. The vocal line is of a limited range, the rhythm is ad libitum, and singing is accompanied by the dombra—a long-necked string instrument from the lute family original to Turkic communities in Central Asia, and still popular in both Hungary and Central Asia.

134 Majda Mária Guessous, Turanian Music–Turkish Hungarian Kinship, 0:50-1:15, YouTube video, 3:30, posted by Uyghur Turuk, February 3, 2014, accessed March 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcCx_haqk-0. All audio files require Adobe Reader 9 version or later.

135 Altai Kai, El-Jonim, licensed by CD Baby, 0:35-0:58, YouTube video, 7:09, posted by Ungern Sternberg, February 11, 2017, accessed March 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYUTPH1Y8Lc. All audio files require Adobe Reader 9 or later.

136 Georgian Folk Music, Amazing Georgian Folk Music, 0:00-0:38, YouTube video, 26:30, posted by Traditional Music Chanel, March 20, 2017, accessed March 9, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNHsbiosAkM&t=53s. All audio files require Adobe Reader 9 version or later.

The second example is Turkic throat singing from the Russian Republic of Altai in southern Siberia. Altai borders Mongolia in the West, and this excerpt is influenced by

Mongolian folk melos. Unlike the previous example, the main distinct feature is throat singing, often featured in Les Noces, especially when performed by authentic Russian ensembles. Drones of a passive, repetitive rhythm drive the song, what Figes calls “rhythmic immobility.”

While the third and final example is not “rhythmically immobile,” it is the one closest to

Taruskin’s claims that Stravinsky might have been influenced in Les Noces by Georgian folk music. Georgia is located on the border of Europe and Asia, and their melos is an amalgam of its own traditional sounds, along with Middle Eastern and Euro-Asian tunes. Unlike the Hungarians, they use the pandori and the choghur—stringed instruments also from the lute family, as well as other instruments of that region such as the larchemi (an ancient Georgian panpipe instrument), the salamuri (an ancient Georgian wind instrument), and a variety of drums. Although one can argue that due to its vibrancy and rich sonority this example it is sonically closest to Les Noces, the influence from other Turanian regions cannot be ignored.

To reiterate, Turania encompasses a large portion of both Europe and Asia, and its music idioms vary. However, when linking these special idioms to Les Noces, the similarities in style are obvious: chant-like figures, throat singing, and shifts in the metrical alignments of repeated motives are a few characteristics that the work shares with the Turanian idiom. Moreover, because Les Noces contains multiple layers of texture and meaning, all these Turanian features mixed with Stravinsky’s own Russian folk and sacred elements contribute to the exoticism for which Western audiences so much craved.

In a similar vein, Maes asserts the following about Les Noces: “a considerable portion is even anhemitonic (without the use of semitones), the share of anhemitony being strikingly

54 greater than in usual Russian folk music. . . .Prince Trubetskoy called the absence of semitones the most important characteristic of Turanian music. . . .Since anhemitony was a feature of

Turanian music, it was an anti-Western characteristic.”137 Stravinsky used anhemitonic melodies in Les Noces, which were also a feature of the music of ancient Turkic tribes—the earliest inhabitants of Turania. Although Maes argues that “this interpretation was admittedly more fantasy than reality,”138 Stravinsky applied it throughout the work.

While Stravinsky closely collaborated with the Russian émigré intelligentsia, it is unclear whether he frequented their gatherings or even cared about the actual ideology. Although

Taruskin argues that Eurasianism “began, in profound and surprising ways, to affect his musical thought and practice, his very way of composing,”139 it is difficult to claim with certainty whether Stravinsky was influenced by Eurasianists, or vice versa. Nonetheless, there is a fine line between being associated with Eurasianism, and the experience of being trapped in the West.

I suggest that this is what happened to Stravinsky—in one way or another, he was trapped:

On my way from Russia [to Switzerland] via Warsaw, Berlin, and Basle, I was very conscious of the tense atmosphere all over central Europe, and I felt certain that we were on the eve of serious events. A fortnight later war was declared. As I had been exempted from military service, there was no need for me to return to Russia, which, though I had no inkling of it, I was never to see again as I had known it.140

Stravinsky, however, never rejected the West. On the contrary, he chose to build his life there after realizing that returning home was no longer an option. Perhaps this could be the

137 Maes, A History of Russian Music, 284.

138 Maes, A History of Russian Music, 284.

139 Taruskin, “The Rejoicing Discovery,” in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1129.

140 Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (London: Calder & Boyars, 1975), 53. After this passage, he continues and confesses that “My profound emotion on reading the news of war, which aroused patriotic feelings and a sense of sadness at being so distant from my country, found some alleviation in the delight with which I steeped myself in Russian folk poems.”

55 reason he turned to the past in his works so often. Moreover, Druskin reminds that “Stravinsky was keenly aware of the continuity between present and past. His enormously wide interests had their origin, and later their support, in his passion to understand and to absorb the spiritual values of Western Europe.”141

From a more philosophical point of view, Tamara Levitz also identifies a connection between Stravinsky and Eurasian-Turanian ideologies. In her book Modernist Mysteries:

Perséphone,142 Levitz addresses Stravinsky’s connection with the Eurasianism by observing that

Lourié, like his friend Souvchinsky, sought to mediate between Russian nationalist and classic or universal interests. He did so by appealing to a Hegelian dialectic. In his article “Muzyka Stravinskogo” (Stravinsky’s music) he created a dialectic between gothic, individualistic, expressive music and what he called—echoing Ansermet and Maritain— “plastic realism.” He associated the latter with Stravinsky’s music because of what he called its stunning “vitality’ and because he said that it was motivated by “classic” or “religious consciousness” and driven by musical rather than “calendar’ time. With this theory Lourié echoed Souvchinsky’s Eurasianist arguments and foreshadowed the theories of time that Souvchinsky would formulate more than a decade later. Lourié felt that Stravinsky’s music was rooted in Russian nationalism but had become “supernational and universal” starting with Les Symphonies d’instruments à vent [Symphonies of Wind Instruments]. . . .Lourié mapped Souvchinsky’s Eurasianist idea of the Russian peoples’ immediate, sensuous relationship to material reality onto Mavra by describing the latter as a “primitive” and “nakedly straightforward” work.143

There is no question that scholars and performers consider Symphony of Wind Instruments and the opera Mavra to be Neoclassical. Interestingly, Stravinsky composed and premiered both works while Les Noces waited to see the light of day. By linking Lourié’s Eurasian views of

Stravinsky’s early Neoclassical works as “supernational and universal,” “primitive” and

141 Druskin, Igor Stravinsky, 81.

142 Perséphone is another Stravinsky’s Neoclassical choral ballet from 1934, similar both in form and sound to Les Noces.

143 Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 318-19.

“nakedly straightforward,” Levitz brings us full circle. Although in the passage there is no mention of Les Noces, the work exists since 1914 and thus cannot be ignored.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Stravinsky, as well as other Russian émigrés of the 1920s were both supportive of and influenced by each other. In her article, Klára Móricz writes that Lourié

“depicted Stravinsky as an artist who ‘turned away from the present with a feeling of nausea’ and returned to the past to retrieve from it what he found ‘resonant not so much with the contemporary canon as with his own personal sensibility.’”144 However, was Stravinsky in conflict with modernity and everything that was happening around him at that time, or did he capitalize on chaos and modern trends through his music are the questions that still remain unanswered. Furthermore, was he a revolutionary, or a music restorer? Were his unusual works a product of a business strategy, nostalgia, or emancipation from the homeland? Once again, the answers to these perpetual questions about Stravinsky remain for readers and listeners to decide.

If one is to believe that Stravinsky was in conflict with modernity and was searching for

“an ideal state of order and durable equilibrium,”145 then Stravinsky perhaps used and blended three elements—the Russian sacred-secular duality, Neoclassicism, and Turanian idiom—as his shield to protect himself from modernity. Although Les Noces is not a mature Neoclassical work, in the midst of horrors, uncertainty, and chaos, it appears that Stravinsky produced a work that

144 Klára Móricz, “Arthur Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art,” in Stravinsky and His World, ed. Tamara Levitz (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2013), 129.

145 Móricz, “Arthur Lourié’s Eurasianist and Neo-Thomist Responses to the Crisis of Art,” 129.

57 could simultaneously connect with new sounds and remind him of the past, but one that ultimately cut him off from Russia and led him into something new and unknown.

As discussed in this study, to Stravinsky, Les Noces was the work that meant more than any other, and it is the work from his oeuvre that underwent the greatest metamorphosis. It is through Les Noces that he exhausted a myriad of experiments and by doing so responded to the chaos of modernity that would “chase” him throughout his career. Moving towards such autonomy provided freedom in his art and resulted in many imposing works, Les Noces included.

Taruskin explains this autonomy more specifically:

The freedom of interplay between text and music that made this eloquent peroration possible is all the more remarkable when one considers how narrowly circumscribed is the role of the instrumental accompaniment, the traditional playing field of leitmotif and reminiscence. Abstractly musical structuring in Svádebka must take place largely within the vocal—that is to say, texted—medium. The extreme flexibility with which Stravinsky was able to deploy that medium was due in part to the specific properties of the melodic material, but in larger measure to the composer’s idiosyncratic habits of prosody.146

Stravinsky’s idiosyncrasy in stylistic choices has been widely discussed since the premiere of

The Rite, and he was consistent with it. As James Marsh explains:

Rather than going all the way into subjectivity as the process of rationalizing music would imply, Stravinsky stops short, loses his nerve, and imports socially approved forms from the past. Rejecting new Viennese music as impotent because of its lack of force and authenticity, Stravinsky remains on the level of appearance rather than essence, the shocking, forceful surface rather than the deep structure of both the musical materials and society.147

Even today, one can posit that some of these “shocking” works remain difficult to perform, for they present technical challenges for ensembles. Thus, it is somewhat understandable why Les

146 Taruskin, “The Turanian Pinnacle,” 1354.

147 Quoted in James Marsh, “Adorno’s Critique of Stravinsky,” New German Critique, 28 (Winter 1983), 153. 58

Noces is not a part of today’s regular repertoire. However, it remains an enigma why it has been ignored and overlooked in some important Stravinsky scholarship.

In closing, I cannot end without mention of the great critic of Stravinsky, Theodore

Adorno (1903–1969). An aspiring musician himself, Adorno critiqued his aesthetics, and lack of compositional sophistication. He especially disliked Stravinsky’s rhythmic practices such as repetition and displacement of accents and viewed them as disruptive. Van den Toorn explored this issue further. He writes that “Central to Adorno’s argument is the idea of a balance in music of the highest quality, a balance between the four musical dimensions of melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. In Stravinsky’s music, this is overturned by an emphasis on rhythm and, more specifically, on displacement and its effect of shock.”148 While Adorno’s broad writings lie beyond the scope of this study, his acerbic insights about Stravinsky are well-known and cannot be ignored. For example, he wrote: “Stravinsky remains a scandal because, as a lifelong conjurer, he made visible the inauthentic aspect of objectivity and gave it shape as a grimace. . . .This removed music so far from the realm of the provincial that he was able to produce his tricks and to explain them at the same time, something that only the most preeminent magicians can allow themselves.”149 While one can argue that such comments are unsystematic and even problematic,

I suggest that they illuminate the uniqueness of Stravinsky’s idiosyncrasy, especially in those challenging, and emotionally difficult days of his life.

In this thesis I argued that this peasant wedding served as composer’s venturing into

Neoclassicism through the regression of musical syntax, and extramusical elements that

148 Pieter van den Toorn, “Stravinsky, Adorno, and the Art of Displacement,” The Musical Quarterly, 87/3 (Autumn, 2004), 472.

149 Theodore Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” in Quasi Una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, New York: Verso, 1992), 146-7.

59 influenced his musical style of the two overlapping periods, Russian and Neoclassical. While there is abundant room for further progress in determining where Les Noces stands, one fact is certain: Les Noces not only created an opportunity for Stravinsky to revive the Russia that had been lost to him in life, but more importantly, it opened a new door where he could experiment with his “new tricks.” Ironically, serious magicians are serious thinkers; their tricks fascinate, push limits, and write history.

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