| Colossus and chameleon Composer Stravinsky epitomized the restless 20th century 04/08/2001 By Scott Cantrell / The Dallas Morning News Chameleon and cultural pack-rat, priest and prophet, genius and liar: Igor Stravinsky bestrode the turbulent straits of 20th-century music like a big-nosed, bespectacled colossus. Thirty years after his death – the anniversary was Friday – he looks unrivaled in staying power.
"Who else is there?" asks Richard Taruskin, University of California-Berkeley professor and author of a revelatory book and numerous articles on the Russian composer. "He's not by any means universally accepted, although I think many people would say he was the most influential composer of the 20th century."
Bred in the glittery luxury of czarist Russia, Stravinsky became the epitome of the modern cosmopolite, living by turns in Switzerland and France, Los Angeles and New York; he was buried in Italy. He started out composing music that sounded like Rimsky-Korsakov (of Sheherazade fame), then espoused a brisk, internationalist neoclassicism. Finally, after serialism's avatar, Arnold Schoenberg, was safely in the grave, Stravinsky could devote his last years to the 12-tone style.
Early on, he sounded his barbaric yawp in The Rite of Spring, music and dance wedded in a bump-and-grind interpretation of vernal celebration and sacrifice. The ballet's premiere, in Paris in 1913, sparked history's most famous musical riot – and made Stravinsky instantly infamous.
Paris in the teens of the 20th century was a hotbed of artistic isms, and the riot had as much to do with aesthetic rivalries as with the shock value of Rite's pounding rhythms and garish colors. All his life, Stravinsky relished notoriety, but today his cause would probably be helped if program annotators didn't so relish recounting the scandal. Audiences are all but told to strap on their defensive armor.
The sad irony is that so much of Stravinsky's music is so witty, even charming. It's music of tangy harmonies and sonorities, playful interplays and toe-tapping rhythms with clever offbeat punctuations. And, despite Stravinsky's strained claims that music is incapable of expressing emotions, his scores often radiate delight and tenderness.
There's a balletic quality even to music never meant to be danced. Stravinsky made his mark with the three early ballet scores for the impresario Serge Diaghilev – The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring – and it was all but inevitable that he later would collaborate so fruitfully with George Balanchine.
Balanchine was Stravinsky's balletic alter ego, an artist fascinated by abstract geometries, with odd little twists and turns. Was there ever a more exquisite union of artistic minds than the ballet Apollo? Both music and choreography are deft, delicate and unashamedly beautiful.
Agon, a later collaboration, is less conventionally beautiful, but both aurally and visually it's a work to astonish generations yet unborn. Balanchine made balletic magic even of scores like the Symphony in C and Violin Concerto.
Musical nationalism was on the boil during Stravinsky's youth, and Russian folk idioms and Rimsky-Korsakov's brilliant orchestral colors were burned into the young composer's scores. The Firebird and Petrushka were based on Russian folk tales, and The Rite of Spring imagined tribal rites in prehistoric Russia.
But working with Diaghilev in Paris exposed Stravinsky to emphatically non-Russian influences, from jazz to French impressionism to the whole polyglot world of the artistic avant-garde. Then World War I and the Russian Revolution destroyed the world of Stravinsky's youth forever.
The war and subsequent instability were nationalism's tragic legacy. Having reached its apotheosis in Mahler, romanticism now could leave only ironic shudders in the operas of Alban Berg.
The inevitable reaction was both revolutionary and reactionary. Having reached the abstract limits of cubism, Picasso returned to more figurative painting. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, meanwhile, purged architecture of superficial decoration in favor of a crisp Platonic abstraction. Finding new inspiration in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries, Stravinsky became a leading force in the new musical movement of neoclassicism.
"There was this sense that culture had been destroyed," Richard Taruskin, the Berkeley professor, says of the post-World War I period. "People were vicariously trying to reconstitute an aristocracy and culture that had been lost in politics.
So dedicated did Stravinsky become to a new ideal of "pure" music, abstracted from the messy business of emotion, that he increasingly denied the extramusical inspirations of even his early Russian scores. Art was the new monarchy and religion.
"This idea of pure music, not tied to any literary idea, that didn't mean anything beyond structure, is a very aristocratic concept," Dr. Taruskin says. "And it speaks of disillusionment with high rhetoric, eloquence. The whole movement was away from grand rhetoric, toward streamlining, simplicity, transparency.
"Stravinsky also had to sound absolutely non-Russian to achieve his goal, and he had to make his music into a kind of Esperanto."
Neoclassicism was to be the dominant language of Stravinsky's art for 30-plus years in the middle of 51/2 fecund decades. Its artifacts could be prickly (Symphonies of Wind Instruments) or playful (Danses concertantes), gracious (The Fairy's Kiss) or gritty (Symphony in Three Movements). They could summon up associations with composers as different as Mozart – affectionately parodied in the opera The Rake's Progress – and Monteverdi – in the solo elaborations of the Mass, with wind-band accompaniment.
Through it all, though, Stravinsky's own voice was loud and clear and utterly distinctive. Indeed, Dr. Taruskin has traced three characteristics through all his output:
• A preference for abrupt shifts over organic evolutions.
• An "immobility" fostered by repetitive rhythms and harmonies that don't lead anywhere in particular.
• A penchant for simplification.
By the 1920s, Stravinsky was pooh-poohing his Russian roots, but Dr. Taruskin has shown how rooted all three characteristics are in Russian folk music and dance.
Stravinsky's voice was unmistakable, even when, in the 1950s – living in Hollywood, of all places – he finally tried his hand at 12-tone composition. As long as the style's creator, Schoenberg, was still alive, Stravinsky couldn't be seen as imitating his rival for 20th-century musical primacy. But when he traveled to Italy to conduct the 1951 premiere of The Rake's Progress, Stravinsky was appalled to find his music considered passé by the younger European composers. Serialism was all the rage.
Above all, as the English composer Constant Lambert waspishly noted, Stravinsky wanted to stay fashionable and controversial. Egged on by the young American conductor Robert Craft – whom Stravinsky had employed as a combination amanuensis, sounding board, mouthpiece and surrogate son – the 70-year-old composer took the ultimately abstract style by the horns. The lines got freer in these late serial scores, the harmonies even less directional, but the tangy sonorities and itchy rhythms weren't to be silenced.
"Look at the beginning of the Requiem Canticles," Dr. Taruskin says, "and you see the same kind of chordal ostinatos you find in The Rite of Spring. He had certain motor habits, as it were, that persisted throughout his career."
Stravinsky claimed a rootless internationalism for his music, but it never entirely shook off the marl of mother Russia. "Music is far closer to mathematics than to literature," he opined, and yet even his late scores radiate both sublime humanism and a sense of the numinous.
The pity is that we so rarely get to hear anything but The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. The Rake's Progress seems to be establishing a well-deserved place in the regular operatic repertory, but huge sheaves of superb orchestral music get only occasional airings.
"Stravinsky said that music does not 'say' anything," culture chronicler Colin Wilson wrote, "and tried to make his art as impersonal as a block of ice cream." But, as Dr. Taruskin quips, "Stravinsky spent the second half of his life telling lies about the first half." What could be more deeply personal than Petrushka or the Requiem Canticles or even the Violin Concerto?
Forget the pettiness and dissembling. Forget the "difficult" label so automatically attached to 20th-century music. Consider, rather, that ice cream. Thirty years after his death, Stravinsky's music is as tasty an indulgence as a fine Italian gelato. Dig in!
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