Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
The Rite of Spring
|
“Composing The Rite, I had only my ear to help
me. I heard and I wrote what I heard.”
— Igor Stravinsky
|
Stravinsky was inspired by a vision of The Rite of
Spring while completing The Firebird. His own title for
it was Vesna Svyashchénnaya, Holy Spring, and he was
never happy with Léon Bakst’s more memorable Le
Sacre du printemps, believing that “The Coronation of
Spring” was closer to his original meaning.
Soon after the success of The Firebird, Stravinsky
contacted Nicolas Roerich, artist, archaeologist,
ethnologist, whom he met through his nephew, a fellowpupil
of Rimsky-Korsakov, to share his vision and to
propose collaboration in a “choreodrama. “Who else
could help me,” he wrote to the St Petersburg critic
N. F. Findeyzen, “who else knows the secret of our
ancestors’ close feeling for the earth?” During the
summer of 1910, however, Stravinsky’s imagination
was seized by Petrushka, and when Dyagilev and
Nijinsky visited him in Lausanne to discuss Vesna
Svyashchénnaya, they were astonished to hear sketches
for a puppet drama, which so fascinated Nijinsky that he
persuaded Dyagilev to postpone The Rite. Stravinsky
explained the predicament to Roerich, but urged him to
continue with the scenario, and also to design its
costumes and sets. The following summer, after the
triumph of Petrushka, Stravinsky returned to The Rite.
Wanting him to see the Princess Tenisheva’s collection
of Russian ethnic art, Roerich asked Stravinsky to meet
him at Talashkino, her country estate near Smolensk, to
plan the structure of the ballet. En route to the creation
of this prehistoric work, Stravinsky found himself
sharing the cattle car of a freight train with a glowering,
slavering bull—a tauromachian encounter that surely
must have heightened the young composer’s atavistic
imagination. The work with Roerich, the plan of action
and the titles of the dances, was quickly completed.
The Rite was conceived as two equal and
complementary parts, The Adoration of the Earth,
which takes place in daytime, and The Sacrifice of the
Chosen One, which takes place at night. The
Introduction to Part One represents the reawakening of
Nature. The curtain rises at the end of it for the Augurs
of Spring, in which an old woman soothsayer is
accompanied by a group of young girls. The Ritual of
Abduction follows, then the Round-dances of Spring,
the Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes, the Procession of the
Sage, the Sage’s Kiss of the Earth, and the Dance of the
Earth.
Part Two, “The Sacrifice,” or as the composer
called it, “The Great Offering,” begins after an
Introduction to “the secret night-games of the maidens
on the sacred hill”. The music accompanying these
mysterious rituals is quiet but foreboding. After two
intimations of danger, effectuated first by harsh chords
in muted horns, then by muted horns and trumpets, and
by eleven savage drum beats, a wild dance, the
Glorification of the Chosen One, erupts, leading without
pause to the Evocation of the Ancestors, the Ritual
Dance of the Ancestors, and the Sacrificial Dance.
The Sacrificial Dance began with an unpitched
notation of the rhythmic germ written during a walk
with Ravel in Monte Carlo in the spring of 1912. Pierre
Monteux, who would conduct the riotous première of
The Rite in Paris, 29th May, 1913, was also in Monte
Carlo, and was present when Stravinsky played the notyet-
completed score for Dyagilev on the piano.
Monteux wrote to his wife: “Before Stravinsky got very
far I was convinced he was raving mad.… The walls
trembled as he pounded away, occasionally stamping
his foot and jumping up and down.”
In a state of exaltation, exhaustion, and “with a
terrible toothache”, Stravinsky finished the composition
on 17th November, 1912. Most of the instrumentation
in score form was completed by the end of March 1913.
The vaulting energy of the penmanship close to the end
reflects the force of his drive to complete his work. The
note-stems, flags, and beams of the wind instruments,
followed later by those of the strings, incline steeply
toward the right. The bolder, larger notes were evidently
written at high speed; simply to see them is to be swept
along with the feeling that a powerful creation is
coming to its end. After the last bar, Stravinsky signed
and dated the score 4th April, 1913. His comment in the
upper-right-hand corner of the final page translates as
follows:
|
May whoever listens to this music never
experience the insult to which it was subjected
and of which I was the witness in the Théâtre
des Champs-Elysées, Paris, Spring 1913.
– Igor Stravinsky. Zurich, 11th October, 1968.
|
The Nightingale
Stravinsky had just completed the first scene of The
Nightingale, a one-act opera in three scenes, when
Dyagilev invited him to compose The Firebird. He put
the opera aside for this ballet and its successors,
Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, then returned to the
vocal work between July 1913 and 28th March, 1914.
The première took place in Paris on 26th May, 1914,
conducted by Pierre Monteux.
Stravinsky chose Hans Christian Andersen’s tale
partly because music itself is the story’s underlying
subject, the power of music not only to delight and to
move, but also to conquer death, for The Nightingale is
a version of the Orpheus legend. Stravinsky loved
Andersen’s stories—Le Baiser de la fée is based on
another—and he managed to incorporate some of
Andersen’s fantastic touches into the libretto. He invited
Stepan Stepanovich Mitusov, a friend from the Rimsky-
Korsakov circle, to compose the libretto with him.
Mitusov in turn consulted Vladimir I. Belsky, the
librettist for three Rimsky-Korsakov operas. On 9th
March, 1908, in Belsky’s St Petersburg apartment, the
threesome fashioned the scenario. The original draft of
scene one survives in Stravinsky’s hand, and is
remarkably close to the final version.
Scene One: The forest at dawn. A fisherman is
mending his net and lamenting his fate, in which his
sole consolation is the singing of the Nightingale. The
Nightingale arrives and comforts the Fisherman with its
song. The bird flies away at the approach of a group of
courtiers that includes the Emperor of China’s chief
retainer (Chamberlain), Bonze (Chaplain), and Cook,
who tells the Chamberlain that the Nightingale sings at
dawn in these very trees, and that they will now hear it.
But just then the Fisherman’s cow begins to moo
(upward glissandos in cellos and basses) and everyone
is transported. The Fisherman respectfully reveals that it
was his cow. The Cook confirms this, but promises that
the Nightingale will start to sing right away. In the
meantime some frogs croak (oboes). The Chamberlain
lets it be known that the Emperor wants to see the
Nightingale at court, hear it sing, and, in the event of
success, reward it with the order of the golden slipper.
The Nightingale agrees and flies down onto the Kitchen
Maid’s arm. —Exeunt omnes.
Scene Two: The porcelain palace of the Chinese
Emperor. The Chamberlain appears and chases
everyone away, for the Emperor is coming with his
entourage. The procession of the Chinese Emperor
(Chinese March). The Nightingale is brought out, the
Emperor commands him to sing, and when he does, the
Emperor’s eyes fill with tears. Suddenly the Japanese
ambassadors arrive bearing a gift from their Emperor,
an artificial nightingale. This is wound up to sing. The
offended real nightingale flies away, and the offended
Emperor angrily denounces it and bestows the title
“Court Singer on the Left-hand Night Table of His
Highness” upon the artificial nightingale. The Emperor
orders the mechanical nightingale to be wound up again.
It starts to sing, but the music stops abruptly, the
cylinders turn, hum, squeak, and the machine falls
silent. After a great commotion, the disappointed
Emperor orders his followers to their bedchambers.
Everyone retires.
Scene Three: The Emperor’s Bedchamber. In the
foreground is an anteroom, from which courtiers appear
to ask the Chamberlain whether the Emperor has died.
He lies on the bed in spiritual torment. Death sits upon
him, watching him, and the evil deeds he has committed
hover around him. He wants to be comforted, calls for
help, and asks his artificial bird to sing for him, although
“there is no winder to wind you up”. Unobserved, the
real nightingale flies in from the garden, perches on a
windowsill, and begins to sing. After one song Death
curls himself into a shroud, moves away and disappears,
flying out the window. As the Nightingale sings on, the
ghosts of the Emperor’s evil deeds also vanish, and he
falls asleep. The Nightingale finishes, and the Emperor
awakes. He sees the little bird in the window and begs it
to stay in the palace forever. The bird cannot accept the
offer but it promises to fly to the Emperor to inform him
of the sufferings of the poor and of all that goes on in his
Great Kingdom. The little bird flies away. The courtiers,
thinking the Emperor already dead, approach on tiptoe;
but the Emperor meets them, dressed in royal robes and
carrying his orb and sceptre, which he clutches to his
heart. In the dawn light, he says “good day” to the
dumbfounded courtiers.
Stravinsky’s orchestral palette, different and distinctive
in every work, is never more exotically colourful than in
The Nightingale, which is a virtual catalogue of avian
imitations: tremolos, trills, appoggiaturas, gruppetti,
string harmonics, pizzicato glissandos, flautando and
ponticello effects, harp and piano arpeggios, harp
harmonics, and the retuning of cello strings to produce
harmonics on unusual pitches. The voice of Death is
introduced by four icy high notes in the celesta, and
Death’s aria is accompanied by the strangulated sound
of a cello playing a double appoggiatura on the bridge of
the instrument in a high register. After vanquishing
Death in their vocal duel for the Emperor’s life, the
Nightingale sweetly sings to him accompanied by
mandolin and guitar. In the “Chinese March,” the
mandolin doubling the soft melody of the trumpet is a
previously unheard instrumental colour, and the
percussion effects explore a greater range than in any
other Stravinsky work except Les Noces. Stravinsky
also increases the range of cymbales antiques of The
Rite of Spring from two to six pitches, five of them
tuned to the “black-key” pentatonic scale. The high
trumpet in D, another hold-over from The Rite,
alternates with a second instrument in E flat. The oboe’s
rapid two-note descending scale figure, representing
the mechanical movement of the Japanese nightingale,
is yet another brilliant instrumental invention; no
wonder Stravinsky wrote next to his sketch for the
passage: “I am very pleased with this”.
Robert Craft