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Igor Stravinsky - Concerto in E-flat ( Dumbarton Oaks )
Igor Stravinsky Born June 18, 1882, Oranienbaum, Russia. Died April 6, 1971, New York City.
Composition History Stravinsky began the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in the spring of 1937 and finished it on March 29, 1938. The first performance, conducted by Nadia Boulanger, was given on May 8 of that year at Dumbarton Oaks, outside Washington, D.C. The score calls for flute, E-flat clarinet, bassoon, two horns, three violins, three violas, three cellos, and two basses. Performance time is approximately fifteen minutes.
Performance History The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performances of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto were given at Orchestra Hall on December 18, 19, and 20, 1986, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting. Our most recent subscription concert performances were given on February 28, March 1, 2, and 5, 2002, with David Robertson conducting.
Concerto in E-flat (Dumbarton Oaks) A magnificent Federal-style house, Dumbarton Oaks sits on the crest of a wooded valley near Washington, D.C. After Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss bought the estate in 1933, it immediately became the scene of regular musical soirées. At the time, Mr. Bliss, the former ambassador to Argentina, was chairman of the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Music Department, and his wife, Mildred, was an unusually astute music lover, patron of the arts, and cultural maven (Sir Kenneth Clark called her “the Queen of Georgetown”).
The great music room at Dumbarton Oaks, with its tapestries and paintings (including El Greco’s The Visitation ) and its grand piano autographed by Jan Paderewski, a family friend, was the scene of many concerts hosted by the Blisses. It was their idea to commission Stravinsky to write a chamber orchestra work that would be premiered in this room to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Stravinsky visited Dumbarton Oaks in 1937, before he started composing, and he is said to have been influenced in his design of the piece by the perfect layout of the Blisses’ elaborate formal gardens. When his publisher later asked him about the work, Stravinsky called it “a little concerto in the style of the Brandenburg Concertos.” Bach’s scores had already served as a general model for the violin concerto Stravinsky had composed six years earlier. Now they became a more direct source of inspiration. “I played Bach very regularly during the composition of the concerto,” Stravinsky later recalled,
and I was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my first movement is a conscious borrowing from the third of the Brandenburg set, however, I do not know. What I can say is that Bach would most certainly have been delighted to loan it to me; to borrow in this way was exactly the sort of thing he liked to do.
Bach’s spirit does hover over the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, although, despite the efforts of Stravinsky’s detractors at the time, no real case can be made for plagiarism or even affectionate imitation. (René Leibowitz publicly attacked Stravinsky’s “insolent borrowing” from Bach.) The essence of Stravinsky’s style in the 1930s (and the mark of his genius throughout his career) is the way he absorbed the music that influenced him—from circus marches to Beethoven’s symphonies—and made it his own. If the eighteenth century does seem to come alive in the pages of the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, it’s seen from the vantage point of someone who also knew about Amelia Earhart, electric typewriters, color photographs, Pablo Picasso, and the Golden Gate Bridge. And it’s Bach’s vocabulary interpreted by someone who spoke the modern language of Pierrot lunaire , La mer , and, of course, The Rite of Spring.
Like most of Bach’s concertos, Stravinsky’s has three movements, in the inevitable arrangement of two fast movements surrounding a slower one. (The movements follow each other without pause, linked by quiet chordal cadences.) Echoes of the Brandenburg s are everywhere, from the bustling figuration, spare sonorities, and textbook counterpoint to its concerto grosso–like textures, shifting back and forth from one group of musicians to another. But there isn’t a measure of this score that Bach would recognize, and, Stravinsky’s boasting to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the neighborly borrowing that Bach and his contemporaries enjoyed on a regular basis. Stravinsky has reinvented the baroque concerto from the ground up, and the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto is an object lesson in the distinction between superficial resemblance and deeper artistic ties. Throughout his career, Stravinsky was music’s greatest chameleon and a master of disguise. Perhaps that’s why, as the composer Alfredo Casella pointed out, the main theme of this second movement quotes Verdi’s Falstaff, who says that if he were to change his looks he would no longer be himself.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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