Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Pulcinella • The Fairy’s Kiss
Pulcinella (1920): Ballet in One Act with Song
At the time of the first performance of Pulcinella the
music was attributed to “Igor Strawinsky d’après
Giambattista Pergolesi”. In fact fewer than half of the
pieces that Stravinsky arranged for an orchestra of 33
and three singers were by Pergolesi (1710–1736), whose
entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians lists more “spurious” and “doubtful”
creations than certifiably authentic ones. As much
material comes from the trio sonatas of the Venetian
composer Domenico Gallo (active c. 1730) as from his
Neapolitan contemporary. Further, the score’s most
popular song, “Se tu m’ami,” is by Parisotti, not
Pergolesi. The eighteenth-century copies from which
Stravinsky worked are unsigned. Dyagilev told
Stravinsky that they had come from a conservatory
library in Naples, but in actuality most of them were
transcribed in the British Museum.
The libretto is in the hand of Léonide Massine, who
also choreographed the ballet. The scene is set in Naples
and the characters are taken from the Commedia
dell’Arte. Rosetta and Prudenza respond to the
serenading of Caviello and Florindo by dousing them
with water. A Dottore arrives and chases the musical
pair away. Pulcinella enters, dances, and attracts
Prudenza, who tries to embrace him. He rejects her.
Rosetta appears, chaperoned by her father Tartaglia. She
tells him of her love for Pulcinella, for whom she
dances. He kisses her, but is seen by Pimpinella, his
mistress, who becomes jealous. Caviello and Florindo
re-enter in disguise, and Florindo, jealous of Pulcinella,
stabs him. When the would-be lovers leave, Pulcinella
cautiously gets up. Four little Pulcinellas enter, carrying
the body of Furbo disguised as Pulcinella. They place
the body on the floor. The Doctor and Tartaglia enter
with their daughters, who are horrified. A magician
appears and revives the corpse. When the fathers refuse
to believe the miracle, the magician removes his cloak
and reveals himself as the real Pulcinella. The revived
corpse is his friend Furbo. Pimpinella enters but is
frightened at the sight of two Pulcinellas. Florindo and
Caviello return, disguised as Pulcinellas, hoping for
more satisfaction in their amorous pursuits. The
confusion caused by four Pulcinellas prompts Furbo to
resume his disguise as magician. At the end, the
“Pulcinella” couples, including Pimpinella and the
ballet’s eponymous hero, are reunited and married.
Further to complicate the distinction of identities,
the musical numbers do not correspond to dramatic
situations, and the texts of the vocal pieces—six of the
seven were borrowed from three different operas—are
unrelated to the stage action. Some of them, but not
including Contento forse vivere, from Metastasio’s
Adriano in Siria, are in Neapolitan dialect. Unpromising
as all of this may sound, the vocal pieces, one aria for
the bass, three for the tenor, two for the soprano, one
duet, and two trios, seem to turn the ballet into an opera
with a cohesive dramatic entity.
Stravinsky’s chief means of distancing himself from
the eighteenth century is in the instrumentation, which,
almost alone, transforms the music into a modern work.
The small orchestra, with strings divided into ripieni
and a concertante solo quintet, sounds like, but never
completely like, an eighteenth-century ensemble. One
explanation for this is that the trombone, employed in
the eighteenth century chiefly in sacred or solemn
music, is here the instrument of a 1920s jazz band, as
the glissandos confirm. Other modern instrumental
touches include the use of flute and string harmonics,
and string effects such as flautando, saltando, and the
non-arpeggiated double-stop pizzicato. Still other
twentieth-century orchestral novelties are the alternation
of string and wind ensembles for entire pieces, as in,
respectively, the Gavotta and the Tarantella, the
exploitation of wind-instrument virtuosity—the
whirligig velocity of the flutes in the C minor Allegro—
and the high ranges of the double-reeds (the oboe’s high
A, and a bassoon tessitura fully a fifth higher than would
be expected in eighteenth-century music). The
contrabass, too, in its syncopated, jazz-style solo,
explores a higher altitude than is normal in Old Music,
but this bass riff does not change a note of the original.
Indeed, what is most surprising about the whole of
Pulcinella is how closely Stravinsky follows his
melodic and figured-bass skeletons, and how little he
alters the harmonic and melodic structure. The bass
vocal part also requires an exceptional high-register,
which the vocal score wrongly transposes an octave
lower.
The Fairy’s Kiss
Scene I
The lullaby in the storm:
A mother, lulling her child, struggles through a storm.
The Fairy’s attendant sprites appear and pursue her.
They separate her from the infant and carry him off. The
Fairy herself appears. She approaches the child and
enfolds him with her tenderness. Then she kisses him on
the forehead and goes away. Now he is alone. Country
folk, passing, find him, search in vain for his mother,
and, deeply distressed, take him with them.
Scene II
A village fête:
A peasant dance is in progress, with musicians on the
stage. Among the dancers are a young man and his
fiancée. The musicians and the crowd disperse, and, his
fiancée going away with them, the young man remains
alone. The Fairy approaches him in the guise of a gypsy
woman. She takes his hand and tells his fortune, then
she dances, and, ever increasingly, subjects him to her
will. She talks of his romance and promises him great
happiness. Captivated by her words, he begs her to lead
him to his fiancée.
Scene III
At the mill:
Guided by the Fairy, the young man arrives at the mill,
where he finds his fiancée among her friends playing
games. The Fairy disappears. They all dance; then the
girl goes with her friends to put on her wedding veil.
The young man is left alone.
Scene IV
The Fairy appears, wearing a wedding veil. The young
man takes her for his bride. He goes towards her,
enraptured, and addresses her in the terms of warmest
passion. Suddenly the Fairy throws off her veil.
Dumbfounded, the young man realizes his mistake. He
tries to free himself, but in vain; he is defenseless before
the supernatural power of the Fairy. His resistance
overcome, she holds him in her power. Now she will
bear him away to a land beyond time and place, where
she will again kiss him, this time on the sole of the foot.
The Lullaby of the Eternal Place:
The Fairy’s attendant sprites group themselves in slow
movements of great tranquillity before a wide décor
representing the infinite space of the heavens. The Fairy
and the young man appear on a ridge. She kisses him to
the sound of her lullaby.
The young man, of course, is Tchaikovsky himself, the
Fairy his Mephistophelean muse. The ending of
Stravinsky’s homage to his beloved forbear, one of the
most moving he ever wrote, is rarely heard in ballet
performances at present. George Balanchine’s
abbreviated version of the ballet concludes with the
peasants’ dance, which is in the dominant, not the tonic,
of its key.
Commentaries on The Fairy’s Kiss generally
attempt to establish parallels between Pergolesi–
Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky–Stravinsky, but the only
exact one is that both unwitting collaborators were
composers of the past. The unique entirely original
music in Pulcinella is a short bridge section and the
introduction to the Tarantella. The Fairy’s Kiss, at
another extreme, is largely original composition.
Stravinsky greatly altered, developed, and elaborated
melodies from early piano pieces and songs by
Tchaikovsky, expanding them into sizable ballet
numbers forming a continuous dance symphony. He
was so familiar with Tchaikovsky’s stylistic features,
melodic, harmonic, and instrumental, that he could
compose more Tchaikovsky himself.
The sketches for The Fairy’s Kiss do not contain a
single reference to sources in Tchaikovsky, but perhaps
more than those for any other Stravinsky work they
confirm T. S. Eliot’s dictum that “the mark of the master
is to be able to make small changes that will be highly
significant”. In some instances Stravinsky simply
changes Tchaikovsky’s tempo. Thus the Scherzo
humoresque becomes the slow-tempo song at the
beginning of Scene III of the ballet, and Tchaikovsky’s
Allegretto grazioso is wholly transformed simply by
being played at half tempo: Stravinsky retains the
melody, rhythm, and even the harmony of the original.
Stravinsky had a genius for perceiving the slow-tempo
lyrical piece in the fast-tempo one, the attractive melody
obscured by the dull rhythm. The male dancer’s
Variation in Scene III changes Tchaikovsky’s 3/4
Nocturne to 6/8 and his monotonously repeated eighthnotes
(quavers) to quarters (crotchets) followed by
eighths (quavers). I should add that the ballet also
transposes the piece from A down to G, but that, clearly,
was to accommodate the high notes of the horn.
The most remarkable transformation in The Fairy’s
Kiss is that of the early song “Both Painful and Sweet”
into the Ballad that concludes Scene II. In the first five
notes of the theme, Stravinsky reverses the melodic
sequence E, C sharp, D natural, to E, C natural, D sharp,
thereby changing A major to A minor, while preserving
the ambitus. He also rewrites Tchaikovsky’s rhythmic
pattern of quarter-note (crotchet) beats and eighth-note
(quaver) offbeats to on-the-beat triplets, with a rest
replacing the third note, as in the piano and string
ostinato in the first movement of the 1945 Symphony;
this transforms the mood from resolution to agitation.
What amazes us, however, is the mileage that
Stravinsky gets out of this fragment in its development,
repeating it in different octaves, progressively slower
tempos, and longer note-values, until, at the end of the
scene, the bass clarinet plays it slowly beneath six
ascending octave scales in the flute, the first four notes
of which are in Stravinsky’s A minor, the last four in
Tchaikovsky’s A major, a subtle collaboration indeed.
Robert Craft