Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume One: A Biography of the Works through Mavra

By Richard Taruskin

This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity—Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"—the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art—and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520342729

Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin is the Class of 1955 Professor of Music emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1987 to 2014, after twenty-six years at Columbia University (man and boy). He is the author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, On Russian Music, Defining Russia Musically, and the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music.

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Founded in 1893

S T RAV INSKY AND

THE RUSSIAN TRADITIONS

VOLUME I

RICHARD TARUSKIN

STRAVINSKY AND THE RUSSIAN

TRADITIONS

A Biography of the Works Through Mavra

VOLUME I

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the contribution provided by the General Endowment Fund of the Associates of the University of California Press. The publisher also acknowledges generous subsidies from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Musicological Society.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

© 1996 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taruskin, Richard.

Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works through Mavra / Richard Taruskin.

p. cm.

A Centennial book—P.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07099-2 (alk. paper)

1. Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971—Sources. 3. Music—Russia—History and criticism. I. Title.

ML410.S932T38 1996

780’.92—dc20 93-28500

CIP MN

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Boobla, Kiwi, and Roo

CONTENTS TO THE VOLUMES

Contents 1

Contents 1

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

A NOTE ON DATES

INTRODUCTION: STRAVINSKY AND THE TRADITIONS

PART I A WALLED-IN ARTIST

I • RUSSIA AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY

2 • BIRTH AND BREEDING

5 • BELLS, BEES, AND ROMAN CANDLES

6 • RIVALRY, RECOGNITION, REALIGNMENT

PART II A PERFECT SYMBIOSIS

7-RIGHTISTS OF THE LEFT

8-TRAJECTORIES

9*MYTHS FOR EXPORT

10 • PUNCH INTO PIERROT

I I • "N E W TIMES, NEW BIRDS; NEW BIRDS, NEW SONGS’

12 • THE GREAT FUSION

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study has been nearly two decades in the making. I date the beginnings of my serious scholarly involvement with Stravinsky to a seminar I announced for the spring term of 1977 at Columbia University, where I had lately begun graduate teaching after earning the doctorate with a dissertation on Russian opera in the 1860S. My earliest graduate offerings were on topics related to the dissertation, beginning with a seminar on Musorgsky. It did not attract a large enrollment, for reasons (I was told, and despite my assurances) having to do with the language barrier. The next time I was invited to give a seminar, I suggested one on Chaikovsky. The topic was broached to the graduate students, and was rejected (as, I hope, it might not be today) for lack of interest. The ever-reliable grapevine carried back a comment from that meeting: Now, if he’d do one on Stravinsky…

Well, why not? And why hadn’t I thought of it? For one bent on nurturing the growth of Russian music studies in what was then the none-too-salubrious atmosphere of the American academy, Stravinsky was the obvious approach, the obvious ploy, the obvious sop. No one could admit a lack of interest in him, and the literature on him in English and the required graduate-school languages was so extensive that no one could cite that barrier as a deterrent. My background in Russian music and its history enabled me to claim a unique perspective on the composer that I did not yet possess. Luckily, no one questioned my credentials. My proposal to substitute Stravinsky for Chaikovsky was accepted, and I had from summer to the new year to master the existing literature and shape a course.

Know then, Ellen Lerner, that it was your passing remark at that long-forgotten meeting that gave me the nudge. I won’t say that without you I would never have found my way to Stravinsky. But you were an effectual if unwitting catalyst, and you have my cordial thanks.

I made one proviso in announcing my seminar: in keeping with my longstanding predilections and my cherished designs, the course would have to focus on the Russian Stravinsky. To judge by the turnout, this was no deterrent (the early Stravinsky is still the one most prefer), even if language problems threatened to rear their heads anew. Fortunately, there were a couple in the class who did read a little Russian (Douglas Stumpf read more than a little, and he is to be thanked here for his yeoman service); I could assign them to report on some exciting recent emanations from the Soviet Union (Smirnov’s little book on Stravinsky’s early development, the sixty letters edited by Igor Blazhkov, etc.). The Boosey & Hawkes facsimile publication of the Rite of Spring sketchbook was splendid grist for a class project. Those with no Russian could get to work, after a little crash course on Russian musical traditions, on the scores themselves (here Paul Schuyler Phillips, who shortly went on to write the best exposition in print of Stravinsky’s serial methods, did especially fine work).

But my motives were mainly ulterior, and the seminar had its desired effect—on me. My experience conducting it paralleled Rimsky-Korsakov’s on being unexpectedly appointed to the faculty of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. I became the eagerest and most committed pupil in the class, and it changed my life irrevocably. Not only did I become hopelessly fascinated with the subject (for—and I should have put this first—Stravinsky had long been the Russian composer I loved best and consequently feared most as a subject of research), but I soon perceived that the state of Stravinsky research, at least from the Russian perspective, resembled that of the Klondike before the arrival of the earliest prospectors. The ground was strewn with scholarly gold, but there was no one to pick it up. The language barrier had indeed prevented most Western scholars from gaining adequate equipment, while Russian scholars had until recently been kept by political and cultural barriers from approaching the subject at all. No one (as of 1977) had investigated the musical milieu out of which Stravinsky had emerged, at least with an eye toward accounting for his emergence. No one had combed the Russian musical press of those days; no one had cast a Stravinsky-educated eye at the music of the other Rimsky-Korsakov pupils (or even at Rimsky’s own); no one had attempted on the basis of primary source material to assess Stravinsky’s use of folklore, his relationship to his immediate musical heritage, or the specific nature of Diaghilev’s impact on his development. No one had ever tried to place his music (or even music as such) within the broader cultural perspective of the Russian Silver Age. No music historian had ever come adequately to grips with the Ballets Russes, and hence with the direct influence of painterly attitudes on musical ones. Perhaps above all, there was little in the way of analytical methodology for Stravinsky’s music, and that little lacked historical and cultural grounding.

My rash but compelling impulse was to try and make good all these lacks at once, and to develop modes of interrelating all the various kinds of research strat egies and methods required by the task, whether historical, theoretical, analytical, or ethnological, by tying everything to the overriding question of Stravinsky’s relationship to Russian traditions—as many Russian traditions as I could think of: intellectual, artistic, cultural, social, linguistic, and of course musical, but the last on several rigorously distinguished levels.

I have been working on this project ever since. I will never finish. Some of the results of my research have appeared over the past several years in a series of articles touching on different facets of the larger design. "Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring (Journal of the American Musicological Society [JAMS] 33 [1980]: 5O1- 43), a direct outgrowth of the 1977 seminar, dealt with Stravinsky’s relationship to folklore and his later attempts to minimize it. "The Rite Revisited" (in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang [New York: Norton, 1984], 183—202) explored the relationship of the ballet’s scenario to the contemporary cultural scene in Russia, and to the pagan antiquities the scenario purported to embody. Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s ‘Angle’ (JAMS 38 [1985]: 72-142) sought, through a survey of a certain variety of Russian harmonic practice and its antecedents, to provide a historical justification for an analytical approach to Stravinsky’s Russian-period output. From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters (in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, Modernist [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986], 16-38), originally delivered as an address at the International Stravinsky Symposium held at the University of California, San Diego, in commemoration of the composer’s centenary, attempted a definition of Stravinsky’s creative attitudes toward folklore in light of his Diaghilev associations and in contrast to the attitudes instilled in him by his musical upbringing, along with a preliminary assessment of their effect on his evolving musical style. Stravinsky’s ‘Rejoicing Discovery’ and What It Meant (in Stravinsky Retrospectives [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987], 162—99), originally presented at another centennial exercise at the University of Notre Dame, was a demonstration of Stravinsky’s approach to text setting and an attempt to justify it in terms of his experience with Russian folklore and its linguistic idiosyncrasies. "Chez Petrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky" (19th-Century Music 10, no. 3 [Spring 1987]: 265-86) applied the analytic model developed in Chernomor to Kashchei to a representative Russian-period score. Finally, Stravinsky and the Traditions (Opus 3, no. 4 [June 1987]: 10-17) set forth in outline the theses the present study purports to substantiate, and "The Traditions Revisited: Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles as ‘Russian Music’ " (in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], p. 525-50) suggests their applicability to the composer’s full stylistic range. These essays have all been incorporated in substance into the present work. I am grateful to the original editors— Nicholas Temperley, Christopher Hatch, John W. Hill, Jann Pasler, Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson, Joseph Kerman, James Oestreich, and David Bernstein—for their assistance and suggestions, and for their permission to have the work they published reappear here in more or less radically altered guise. (Thanks, too, to Rey M. Longyear and Stephen Blum for their correspondence pursuant to Chernomor to Kashchei, which has helped me strengthen the argument in Chapter 4.)

I have assembled the mosaic as best I can, and I offer it in the form of a biography of Stravinsky’s works through Mavra. Given the intricacy of the pattern, the rigorousness of the documentation, and the large amounts of background and supporting detail that in some cases (I thought) needed to be supplied in order to justify the essentials of the argument, I hope the sheer bulk of the offering may be forgiven.

My work on Stravinsky has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, thanks to which I was able to embark on systematic research in the fall of 1979, and one from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which enabled me to complete the first draft (on 27 April 1987, a date I am unlikely to forget). In the early phases of writing vital support came to me from two men whose closeness to Stravinsky made their validation of my project indispensable to my self-confidence, and to whom I therefore owe a debt of everlasting gratitude. Having completed the basic research and tentatively formulated a set of unnervingly revisionist theses, I wrote out a chapter outline and a version of the Introduction and sent them off to Robert Craft (mindful that the Introduction contained assertions liable to annoy him) and to the late Lawrence Morton. Both sent helpful, detailed responses; and both were more than generous in allowing that what I had to say was worth saying. Craft’s welcome in particular gave me the courage of my Stravinskian convictions. Though he will doubtless disapprove of some of what follows, his magnanimous encouragement, just when I needed it most, was, more than anything, what carried me through the job of writing. Morton’s wry response to the early chapters—that it was lucky for my project that I had not known Stravinsky—also kept my spirits up during the long months of gestation.

Another whose early support and advice were exceptionally important was William Austin, whose work has always been an inspiration to those of us who see music studies as reaching highest fruition in the soil of context. As one who has had to defend this position repeatedly and publicly and often unpleasantly, I would like to confess my indebtedness to Professor Austin’s cheering example and to pay it tribute.

By all odds the luckiest break I have ever had as a scholar came when the New York Public Library acquired temporary custodianship of the vast Stravinsky Archive during several months in 1983, when I lived a ten-minute subway ride from Lincoln Center and was just beginning a sabbatical from Columbia. I virtually [XIV] PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS lived in the library’s Special Collections room during this blessed period, have been back often since, and came to regard its staff practically as family. Let me thank in the first place Richard Koprowski, who took pains to make sure I knew about the availability of this material. He has since gone to another place, but Susan T. Sommer, Jean Bowen, Frances Barulich, and above all John Shepard, then the archive’s temporary curator, are there still; so it is still a special pleasure for me to visit the library, although I live a bit farther away these days. I have thanked them all thousands of times for thousands of individual favors. Now it is my great happiness to offer a thousand thanks in print for making this book possible.

Primary source research was also carried out at the New York Public Library’s Slavonic Division, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Library of Canada. Thanks are due to the staffs of all six for their courtesy, but especially to Dr. Edward Kasinec of the first-named, Dr. Stephen Willis of the last- named, and Dr. J. Rigbie Turner of the Morgan, who made unusual efforts on my behalf.

Mr. Oliver Neighbour, in the summer of 1985 winding up his stint as superintendent of the Music Room at the British Library, went further yet: he placed at my disposal scores and manuscripts in his own personal collection and even allowed me to copy them—insisted that I do so, in fact. The late Prof. Gerald Abraham, ever my guide and inspiration, not only saw to the copying of a rare score in his possession, but on the occasion of our first meeting insisted that I carry off with me a packet of Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov letters to copy and made me the gift of a Stravinsky autograph (cited in a later chapter). Dr. Peter Hauser of B. Schott’s Söhne in Mainz was very generous with materials in his firm’s possession, as was Elmer Schönberger in Amsterdam with his own collection of rare books and scores.

Other liberal suppliers to my scholarly needs have been Kenneth Cooper, a dear old friend, who found some valuable Stravinskiana among the literary effects of Sylvia Marlowe, of whose estate he had become the executor; Prof. James Hepo- koski; Prof. Charles Joseph; and Laurel Fay, America’s foremost student of Soviet music and musical life. Ming Tcherepnin was kind enough to send me the original Russian typescript of her father-in-law’s memoirs. Esther Brody supplied me serendipitously with a source for one of Petrushka’s most elusive tunes. Christopher Hatch’s friendly interest in my work sustained him through a reading of the whole manuscript in first draft; I thank him for much welcome advice. Most recently, Prof Yuriy Kholopov of the Moscow Conservatory, an eminent Russian music theorist of the present day, did me the honor of a thorough last-minute critique during a visit to Berkeley in June 1991.

The author of a book that poaches on so many neighboring disciplines is in great need of patient specialists to consult, and here I have been especially fortunate in my friendships. Prof. Simon Karlinsky, of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley, kindly offered to cast his eagle eye over those chapters most relevant to his expertise and saved me from many a gaffe. He also volunteered to translate the all-but-impossible folk texts cited in Chapter 15, for which he has my awed gratitude. Prof. Margarita Mazo, the foremost living expert on the Russian peasant wedding, was equally generous in going over the immense chapter on Svadebka (Les noces), for which Prof. William E. Harkins of Columbia University had previously furnished me with indispensable materials. Specialist assistance of another kind came from Professors Claudio Spies, Milton Babbitt, and George Perle, to whom I sent the concluding part of the epilogue for technical vetting.

My debt to Professor Perle goes much further. My work on Stravinsky having attracted his attention, he has become a steady source of stimulation and support, which I have found especially sustaining over a long haul of seemingly endless public debate concerning theoretical premises and methodology. Our wide-ranging conversations have been much-appreciated tonics; may they long continue.

For last I have saved the nearest. During my first year of full-time Stravinsky research, toward the end of 1979,1 belatedly discovered a long article entitled Some Characteristics of Stravinsky’s Diatonic Music, which had been published in two parts by Perspectives of New Music (14, no. 1 [1975]: 104-38; 15, no. 2 [1977]: 58-95). The author, Pieter C. van den Toom, was then unknown to me. As, with mounting astonishment, I devoured this piece, I experienced a shock of recognition such as must come seldom in any lifetime. The author, pursuing a totally different path from mine, had come to all the same conclusions I was coming to about Stravinsky’s early compositional technique and had made infallibly correct deductions about its sources. It was the kind of mutual confirmation one dreams about, this convergence of historical and inferential methods on a single theoretical viewpoint. I immediately wrote to the author in great excitement, and this led to the most abundant scholarly exchange I have ever been privileged to share in, to say nothing of the warm personal friendship that has ensued. There is virtually nothing in this book that has not been fully discussed and debated with Van den Toom, to its great benefit and improvement. This is not to say that discussion and debate has always ended in agreement, or that my prime interlocutor bears any responsibility for the positions I have taken; but without him the positions would not have been the same, would not have felt so strong, and would not have achieved the precision only an argued and defended case can achieve. My debt to this friend, then, is incalculable.

Yet the greatest debt of all is the one I owe Piero Weiss, now of the Peabody Conservatory. Long after my last diploma was issued I received my real scholarly education from this man when we collaborated on a book of music history source readings. Those few early chapters that I managed to draft during the last year he and I still shared an office at Columbia were the last pieces of mine to enjoy the benefit of his fearsome scrutiny. He was the ideal reader and editor, and remains an ideal friend. I offer him this book with love and dread, my fondest hope being that he will not be able to recall just where his active influence left off.

R.T.

El Cerrito, California

18 June 1994

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [xvil]

ABBREVIATIONS

N.B.: The University of California Press editions of Conv, M&C, and E&D are reprints of the British versions (London: Faber & Faber), which differ somewhat from the original American editions. Citations to these books are always made in double form (e.g. Conv:74/82, M&C: 59—60/61-62), page references before the slash being to the original American edition, after the slash to the reprint. Discrepancies between the two texts are always noted.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

After much thought and experiment, I have adopted, with modifications, the system for transliterating Russian vowels that was worked out by Gerald Abraham for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (for a complete account, see New Grove i:xvi—xvii).

The chief merit of the system is its consistency, allowing adjectival endings to be rendered faithfully. The Russian letter M, pronounced as a thick short i, is represented by the character "ï," while the Russian M, signifying iotation, is represented by y. The palatalizing vowels s and 1 are represented by ya and yu. The Cyrillic e is usually transliterated by its roman cognate, "e," but in initial position and after vowels or hard/soft signs it is rendered as ye. Where an e is found in such positions, it represents the Russian 3.

Modifications are introduced for the sake of clarity, based on the pronunciation habits of English-speaking readers. Thus the diphthong añ (rhymes with high as in Nikolai) is rendered as ai, since ay would suggest to English readers a rhyme with day. When the vowels a and ware conjoined, each receiving its full phonetic value, an accent is used, thus: Mikhail (pronounced Mi-kha-eel). When one in a pair of H’S is stressed, the pair is represented by -iyi-, as in Mariyinsky Theater. When the pair occurs at the end of a plural or a genitive, with neither member stressed, -ii is the form adopted in transliteration. The soft sign is not rendered in names, except in transliterations of titles and extracts: thus Asafyev in the text, Asaf'yev, where appropriate, in footnotes (but even in footnotes, Asafyev where he is merely named as author or editor).

Like the New Grove, this book respects standard renderings where they have become firmly established and where a more faithful transliteration would therefore be distracting. Thus the usual spelling -sky is retained for the suffix -CKWR in names like Rimsky or Stravinsky. Such other customary transliterations as Prokofiev and Koussevitsky are likewise respected. Many familiar spellings not sanctioned by the New Grove have also been kept, such as Balanchine, Diaghilev, Glière, Medtner, and Rachmaninoff. Owing to a confessed quirk on the part of the author, who is possibly oversensitive to reminders of the onetime musical provincialism of the English-speaking peoples, Tchaikovsky is rejected in favor of the more literal Chaikovsky, which is perfectly regular for English, though not for French or German. Words and names that English speakers are likely to stress on the wrong syllable (Músorgsky, Kamärinsknya, dvoryanin) are listed in the Glossary or the Pronunciation Guide with accents to indicate tonic stress. Accents are often given for poetry and titles in the text.

In bibliographical citations, transliteration is strictly according to the rules, letter by letter, not according to customary usage or phonetics. The character r is always g, even in genitive endings (-oro) where Russians now pronounce it v (-ovo). Those for whom the citations are useful are precisely the ones who would find sound-based modifications annoying in this case.

A NOTE ON DATES

The Julian calendar (known as the Old Style, abbreviated o.s.) was used in Russia until ï February 1918, and is still the calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the nineteenth century, therefore, Russian dates were twelve days behind those of the Gregorian calendar (SNew Style, or N.S.), used elsewhere in Europe and in America. Because the year 1900 was a leap year according to the Julian calendar but not the Gregorian, from 29 February 1900 to 1 February 1918 the two styles" were thirteen days apart. Stravinsky was born on 5 June 1882, o.s.—on which day New Style calendars in the West read 17 June. From 1900 on, according to the scheme here detailed, his birthday corresponded to 18 June, N.S., and that was the date on which he celebrated it for the rest of his life. (It is thus the date on which his birth should be commemorated until the year 2100.)

In this book, dates for events taking place in Russia will always be given according to the calendar in use in Russia. Whenever there is a possibility of confusion, or where Russian dates must be synchonized with Western ones, double dating will be employed, unless o.s. or N.S. is specified.

INTRODUCTION:

STRAVINSKY AND THE TRADITIONS

Now that the twentieth century is nearing an end, it is safe to predict that Igor Stravinsky will be remembered as its most famous composer of what, in the twentieth century, has become known as serious music. He was by far the most played, most recorded, most interviewed, most photographed, most talked about. Alone among composers, he led a private life that was consistently a matter of public interest (and the continuing flood of published photograph albums and scrapbooks shows that interest has not flagged since his death). He has been the subject of book-length memoirs by nonmusicians. He commanded a five-figure fee for personal appearances, and his personal archive commanded seven. In short, as his wife once put it, he possessed a lot of numen.1

But if he was the most famous, he is not necessarily the best known or understood. The story of his life—and, even more so, of his musical development— teems with riddles. The biggest of them concern his musical origins and his early (Russian) period, despite the fact that it was the period of his most famous works, and despite the voluminous Stravinsky literature, so much of it contributed by the composer himself. For as his career proceeded along its spectacular course he became increasingly embarrassed by his past and did all he could to force it down an Orwellian memory hole. He did this not only by withholding or suppressing information, but also, more subtly, by supplying it in selective superabundance. His various accounts of his early years, given at various points during his later ones, all contradict one another, and all are in greater or lesser conflict with the ascertainable facts.

Whence this celebrated mendacity? It stemmed, one has to conclude, not just from a faulty memory or from indifference to factual accuracy, but from an astonishing, chronic sense of cultural inferiority that reached a besetting climax near the end of Stravinsky’s career, leaving him doubtful about the validity of his work and fretful about his place in history. Stravinsky’s embarrassment offers an elegant confirmation of Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy’s claim, in his bitter, biting Europe and Humanity, that the enlightened cosmopolitanism of the West was really a form of chauvinism—he called it pangermanoromanic chauvinism—and that Russians infected by it could not help turning hostile toward Russia.2 That Stravinsky was infected with this plague no one needs to prove by now. Its effects on him, however, have yet to be fully gauged.

Robert Craft informs us that all of his life … Stravinsky complained that he had been handicapped in his youth by his isolation from an intellectually stimulating environment.3 Compensation is everywhere apparent in Stravinsky’s writings, with their obsessively recherché vocabulary and self-conscious (and, given the author, notably gratuitous) insistence, particularly with reference to serial pieces like Movements for Piano and Orchestra, on his advanced technique.4 But its most stunning manifestation was something no one could have expected before the period of the serial music and the conversations books: his acknowledgment of the reality and the legitimacy of the Germanic mainstream that he had devoted a career (and for many, very persuasively) to denying. Once Stravinsky had crossed this bridge, his whole past became useless to him.

Earlier he had assumed with special vehemence and authority the archly ironic tone Russian composers had habitually adopted when speaking of German music. (Glinka himself had observed that German counterpoint doesn’t always agree with a lively imagination.)5 In interviews of the twenties, Stravinsky spoke of the nefarious influence in Russia of German music, and claimed that each time that the influence of French and Italian music has been felt in Russia, the result has been an opening up, a flowering.6 In a sketchbook of 1917, Stravinsky jotted a note to himself in which he described Germans as human caricatures.7 His 1915 Souvenir d’une marche boche may have been merely his contribution to wartime propaganda, but at the end of World War I Stravinsky was hardly alone in thinking that the era of boche hegemony in music had ended. By the thirties, newly a citizen of France, he proudly identified himself with French culture, both in word and in musical deed.8 In Perséphone, no less than in Chroniques de mu vie, Stravinsky proclaimed France his second motherland.9 And when he wrote, in feigned commiseration, that even a Tchaikovsky could not escape Germanic influences,10 11 it was with the implication that a Stravinsky could and did.

But sour grapes were ever fermenting behind this façade; for, like all Russian composers, Stravinsky envied the Germans their traditions. The mask fell when it became so terribly important for him to establish belated and retroactive connections with the New Vienna School. Typical of Stravinsky the serialist were selfpitying assertions like this one, from Dialogues und u Diury: "I am a double émigré, born to a minor musical tradition and twice transplanted to other minor ones. What astonishes here is the assessment of French music, which he went on to describe as being, at the time of his removal to it, almost as eclectic as ‘Russian music,’ and even less ‘traditional.’ 1 Stravinsky publicly lamented the fact that he related only from an angle to the German stem," which he conceived as beginning with Bach and ending with Schoenberg.12 One cannot expect frankness about his origins from a man so deeply ashamed of them. All that Stravinsky would allow with respect to his relationship to Russian music, by the time he turned to memoir-dictating on a large scale, was that he had helped to exhaust and scuttle the limited tradition of my birthright.13

One who undoubtedly contributed heavily to Stravinsky’s sense of shame was Pierre Souvtchinsky, by the period of the conversations the oldest and most important of Stravinsky’s friends. An éminence grise behind the Poétique musicule, Souvtchinsky exerted a momentous intellectual influence on Stravinsky, the full measure of which has not yet begun to be taken. He, too, had nothing but scorn for the Russia out of which both he and Stravinsky had emerged. Deeply dialectic in his outlook on history, he believed as adamantly as any German in Zeitgeist— what he called the general ideas of the time. The general ideas were Schoenberg’s ideas, he told Craft in 1956. And because it was Stravinsky, whatever he says now, who turned the younger generation against Schoenberg, Souvtchinsky had written him off in the forties; their rift could be healed only after Stravinsky’s serialist conversion.14 By that time, for Souvtchinsky, the mantle of the general ideas had fallen on Pierre Boulez—the rather frightening young Boulez of Schoenberg est mort—for whom, "since the Viennese discovery, every composer outside the serial experiments has been useless." 15 Souvtchinsky did not actually introduce Stravinsky and Boulez (Virgil Thomson did, of all people), but he was chiefly responsible for their brief close friendship (1956-58), a friendship that flowered immediately before Stravinsky began his series of conversation books. The positive reinforcement Stravinsky received from Boulez’s friendship was exceedingly important to him just then, for he had just come through the most serious crisis of his creative career. 16 Souvtchinsky’s motives in engineering the relationship were undoubtedly loving ones: he wanted to see his old friend returned to usefulness and to a creative activity worthy of his genius. (Similar motives must account for the fact that of all Stravinsky’s European friends, only Souvtchinsky welcomed Craft’s participation in Stravinsky’s life without reservations.) As Craft has reported, the Answers to Thirty-six Questions that formed the cornerstone of the ‘conversations’ were in large part written during Boulez’s visit to Los Angeles [in March 1957], and under his influence.17 Thus the voice that speaks to us from the Stravinsky/Craft books—and especially the first of them, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959)—was in an indirect but important sense as much the creation of Pierre Souvtchinsky as the voice that had spoken two decades earlier out of the Poétique musicale.

Comparison of the seven cursory pages allotted to St. Petersburg in Conversations (roughly equal to the space devoted to Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) with the account of his early years in Chroniques de ma vie will suffice to show how squeamish Stravinsky had become about his Russian apprenticeship. In the Chroniques he had been quite candid, if apologetic, about his early acceptance of the academic views of the so-called Belyayev circle, and in particular, about his early admiration for Glazunov.

I was then of an age—the age of early apprenticeship—when the critical faculty is generally lacking, and one blindly accepts truths propounded by those whose prestige is unanimously recognized, especially where this prestige is concerned with the mastery of technique and the art of savoir faire. Thus I accepted their dogmas quite spontaneously, and all the more readily because at the time I was a fervent admirer of Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. I was specially drawn to the former by his melodic and harmonic inspiration, which then seemed to me full of freshness; to the latter by his feeling for symphonic form; and to both by their scholarly workmanship. I need hardly stress how much I longed to attain this ideal of perfection in which I really saw the highest degree of art; and with all the feeble means at my disposal I assiduously strove to imitate them in my attempts at « * IR composition.

Several pages later, with specific reference to his own Symphony in E-flat, Stravinsky even more candidly acknowledged Glazunov’s influence on his early development:

I composed this symphony at a time when Alexander Glazunov reigned supreme in the science of symphony. Each new production of his was received as a musical event of the first order, so greatly were the perfection of his form, the purity of his counterpoint, and the ease and assurance of his writing appreciated. At that time I shared this admiration whole-heartedly, fascinated by the astonishing mastery of this scholar. It was, therefore, quite natural that side by side with other influences (Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakov) his predominated, and that in my symphony I modeled myself particularly on him.18 19

One gets the impression that Stravinsky had bent over backward to praise his older colleague—possibly because Glazunov was still alive and residing, like Stravinsky, in Paris (he died on 21 March 1936, just after the second volume of the Chroniques was issued), but also because the Chroniques were written partly to further Stravinsky’s ill-starred campaign for election to the Institut de France,20 which helps to account for their at times cloyingly diplomatic tone.

In Conversations, Stravinsky bent over just as far in the opposite direction:

The first concert of which I have any recollection was the occasion of a première of a symphony by Glazunov. I was nine or ten years old and at this time Glazunov was the heralded new composer. He was gifted with extraordinary powers of ear and memory, but it was going too far to assume from that that he must be a new Mozart; the sixteen-year-old prodigy was already a cut and dried academician.

I was not inspired by this concert.21

The symphony would have been Glazunov’s Fourth in E-flat, first performed in St. Petersburg in 1893. But Glazunov was twenty-seven at the time, not sixteen. Stravinsky confused this occasion with another, which he did not witness but was undoubtedly often told about: the première of Glazunov’s First Symphony (op. 5) in 1882, the year of Stravinsky’s birth, when the composer was sixteen and was indeed heralded as a new Mozart. But these factual errors are secondary: the chief distortion here is the attribution to the ten-year-old Stravinsky of the emigre Stravinsky’s esthetics and powers of judgment. (How many ten-year-olds know what an academician is?) The whole episode as related in Conversations is an ad hoc fabrication concocted for the purpose of distancing Stravinsky from his surroundings and from the formative influences he had previously acknowledged.22 23

The discussion of Russian music in Conversations touches on a few other matters of tradition, and again it provides a good entrée into the mind of Stravinsky the old émigré and young serialist via a willfully distorted view of the historical situation. He states that when he was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov he already enjoyed the real freshness of Tchaikovsky’s talent (and his instrumental inventiveness), especially when I compared it with the stale naturalism and amateurism of the ‘Five.’ 23 But the radical cleavage between Chaikovsky and the Five no longer existed by the time Stravinsky was Rimsky’s pupil; the dichotomy was a figment of the 1860S (perpetuated, it is true, in the writings of V. V. Stasov and, through his disciples like Rosa Newmarch, familiar in the West), though it was briefly revived by Diaghilev with Stravinsky’s help in the 1920s, as part of the propaganda surrounding the Ballets Russes production oí The Sleeping Beauty. (The matter is also reflected, of course, in Mavra, from the time of which the Chaikovsky/Five split remained a sacred dogma to Stravinsky.) In the 1920s, moreover, the Chaikovsky/ Five split was best viewed in the light not of Russian, but of French musical politics. By the time of Stravinsky’s association with Rimsky there was no longer such a thing as the Five. Rimsky was the titular head of another group altogether— the Belyayev Circle—and his feelings about the old circle under Balakirev were ambivalent at best. (With Balakirev himself he was by then only sporadically on speaking terms.) He looked upon Chaikovsky (dead a decade) as his greatest Russian colleague.24 Naturalism was the deadest horse in the Russian esthetic stable, and had been so (except, once again, in the writings of Stasov) for over thirty years. As for amateurism, it is a strange epithet indeed to apply to Stravinsky’s teacher, who by the 1880s had transformed himself, by dint of a heroic and perhaps unprecedented feat of belated self-education, into a paragon of what Stravinsky himself had called scholarly workmanship.

The most patent fib in Conversations concerns the one early Stravinsky piece that rated an extended discussion in the book. The impression seems thus inescapable that the discussion was included for the sake of the fib. Craft asked whether Stravinsky had had Maeterlinck’s La vie des abeilles in mind as a program for his Scherzo fantastique of 1908. Here is Stravinsky’s reply:

No, I wrote the Scherzo as a piece of pure symphonic music. The bees were a choreographer’s idea. … I have always been fascinated by bees,… but I have never attempted to evoke them in my work (as, indeed, what pupil of the composer of the Flight of the Bumble Bee would?)…

Maeterlinck’s bees nearly gave me serious trouble, however. One morning in Morges I received a startling letter from him accusing me of intent to cheat and fraud. My Scherzo had been entitled Les Abeilles—anyone’s tide, after all—and made the subject of a ballet then performing at the Paris Grand Opera (1917). Les Abeilles was unauthorized by me and, of course, I had not seen it, but Maeterlinck’s name was mentioned in the programme. The affair was settled and, finally, some bad literature about bees was published on the fly-leaf of my score, to satisfy my publisher, who thought a story would help to sell the music.25

And here is an extract from a letter Stravinsky sent Rimsky-Korsakov from Ustilug on 18 June 1907 (o.s.), published in the Soviet Union two years after Stravinsky’s death:

I am working a great deal. This work consists of orchestrating the Symphony and composing a fantastic Scherzo, The Bees, about which I’ll tell you more. … As you know, I already had the idea of writing a scherzo in St. Petersburg, but as yet I had no subject for it. Then all at once here Katya [Stravinsky’s wife] and I were reading The Life of the Bees by M. Maeterlinck, a half-philosophical, half- poetical work that captivated me, as the saying goes, from head to toe. At first I thought, for the sake of the fullness of the program, that I would choose some specific citations from the book, but I see now that that is impossible, since the scientific and literary language is too closely intermixed in it, and therefore I decided that I would simply allow myself to be guided in composing the piece by a definite program, but not use any citation as a heading. Simply The Bees (after Maeterlinck): Fantastic Scherzo. When we see each other I’ll show you the spots I have taken for the program; in a letter I can’t give you a complete idea.26

To be sure, this corrective leaves open the question of who authored the bad literature, which may still be read on the flyleaf of the Schott score, but it certainly fits the course and structure of the music.27 There can hardly be any question of a

lapse of memory in a matter so fundamental, though. Stravinsky intended, quite simply, to deceive. But the deception was anything but cynical. Indeed, it was principled: Stravinsky badly needed to dissociate himself from an artistic milieu that put such stock in program music that one could not so much as begin writing a scherzo without having some definite subject in mind.

Pure music, in any case, was always a sensitive point for the Parisian and American Stravinsky. Folklore was another—the touchiest of all, in fact, for its associations with the Red Russia Stravinsky abhorred, where an art national in form and socialist in content (in Stalin’s words) had become a watchword.28 In Conversations, Stravinsky kept totally silent on the matter of folklore in his own work, even when his Diaghilev scores were touched upon in a section entitled Painters of the Russian Ballet. In this particular section, moreover, the longest discussion was reserved for what was perhaps the least significant of all the Diaghilev Stravinsky productions, Giacomo Balla’s set (as Craft put it) for Fireworks— actually just a backdrop to a light show that accompanied Stravinsky’s four-minute orchestral fantasy as an entr’acte. It gave Stravinsky the opportunity for a three- page excursus on his relations with the Futurists (more than the space allotted to Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring combined). Indeed, the 1917 Fireworks spectacle had been one of the first steps the stranded Ballets Russes would take away from folklore toward the postwar cosmopolitan (read: Parisian) modernism that we now think of as the company’s second period. (Stravinsky was the only first period composer to survive the change.)

The one overt reference to folklore in Conversations came in a startling paragraph on Bartok, where Stravinsky let it be known that I could never share his lifelong gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was certainly real and touching, but I couldn’t help regretting it in the great musician.29 There is no need to offer a refutation at this point; this whole book will be a refutation. Let us only recall that in the period of his first fame, from Firebird to Svadebka (Les noces), Stravinsky was universally cited as the single Russian composer of his generation to carry forward the Russian nationalism of his forebears. However much it may prove necessary to qualify that evaluation when it comes to individual works, the basic truth of it lies too close to the surface to require documentary confirmation as such.

The situation with respect to Stravinsky’s testimony on his Russian past, both as to fact and as to attitude, is hardly different in Memories and Commentaries, Expositions and Developments, or Dialogues and a Diary; 30 if anything, the matter becomes even stickier, for we now encounter gratuitous invention alongside the already-noted distortions and suppressions. One of the best examples of this is Stravinsky’s portrait-mémoire of Anton Arensky, a name that will hardly come up again in this book. Since there will be no chance to offer correctives to this portrait en passant, it merits an omnibus corrective up front to serve as a warning to all who may be tempted to rely for their information on the conversations books, convenient and attractive as they are, without corroboration.

Stravinsky dictated as follows:

Arensky was a composer of the Moscow school—in other words, a follower of Tchaikovsky. I—as a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, and for that very reason—could not know him well. And, in all that concerned Arensky, Rimsky was, I thought, unjustifiably harsh and unkind. He criticized Arensky’s music captiously and unnecessarily, and a comment about it, which he allowed to be printed after Arensky’s death, was cruel: Arensky did very little, and that little will soon be forgotten. I attended a performance of Arensky’s opera Dream on the Volga with Rimsky. The music was dull indeed, and Arensky’s attempt to evoke sinister atmosphere with the bass clarinet was horse-opera farce. But Rimsky’s exclamation to me that the noble bass clarinet should not be put to such ignominious use must have been overheard several rows in front of us, and later, of course, throughout the theater.

Arensky had been friendly, interested, and helpful to me, however, and in spite of Rimsky I always liked him and at least one of his works—the famous piano trio. He meant something to me also by the mere fact of his being a direct personal link with Tchaikovsky.31

Here are the facts: Arensky (b. 1861) was, like Stravinsky, a Rimsky-Korsakov pupil. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1882 with a gold medal in composition authorized by his teacher. What made him a Muscovite was the fact that upon graduation he was immediately employed by the Moscow Conservatory as a professor of harmony and counterpoint; there he taught alongside Taneyev. Chaikovsky had resigned from the Conservatory staff in 1878 and owing to his difficult personal life had pretty much withdrawn from the society of Moscow musicians. Arensky knew him, of course, but was never close to him. By 1895 Arensky was back in St. Petersburg, where he lived until his death in 1906. He was residing in the capital all during the period of Stravinsky’s tutelage.

Arensky’s reputation as a Chaikovskian rests on the fact that his best- remembered composition is a set of variations on a Chaikovsky song. This work originally formed the slow movement of his second string quartet (1894) but is a repertory item in an arrangement for string orchestra. Its political significance should not be exaggerated. As its date suggests, it was a memorial tribute such as

was paid Chaikovsky by many colleagues, including such other reliable Korsa- kovians as Glazunov. In any case, as we have already noted, Rimsky’s reputed hostility toward the deceased Chaikovsky was a fiction Stravinsky had been circulating since the 1920s.

Though a notorious loner, Arensky was for a time closer to Rimsky-Korsakov than he ever was to Chaikovsky. A letter from Chaikovsky, in fact, informed Rimsky-Korsakov that Arensky has infinite affection and respect for you.32 Arensky dedicated his First Symphony to his former teacher and quoted The Snow Maiden in his Violin Concerto. On the occasion of the concert organized to commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of Rimsky-Korsakov’s debut as a composer (17 December 1900), Arensky was among the speechmakers. In 1904 his Trio was awarded a Glinka Prize by the Executive Committee of the Belyayev firm (headed by Rimsky-Korsakov), even though Arensky never gave his music to be published by Belyayev but remained loyal to the Moscow house of Jurgenson, with whom he had concluded an agreement during his years of residence in that city. Typical of Rimsky-Korsakov’s attitude toward Arensky in the period of their closest acquaintance was the remark recorded by Vasiliy Yastrebtsev, Rimsky’s Boswell, on 28 February 1895« "You know, I may be wrong, but in my opinion Scriabin may be the more talented, but Arensky’s music is nicer [simpatichneye] and more varied."33

The harsh remark attributed to Rimsky was made, far more in sorrow than in anger or scorn, as a response to Arensky’s dissipated life-style (he was a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic) and his early death. It was the drinking that came between Arensky and the punctilious Rimsky-Korsakov, who stopped inviting Arensky to his home (Yastrebtsev notes no visit after 1895)- But whatever the circumstances of the remark, which Stravinsky misquoted out of context, Rimsky never had it printed. It first appears in his Chronicle of My Musical Life, the manuscript of which was discovered among his posthumous papers and published only in 1909.34 His spontaneous reaction to Arensky’s death, as recorded by Yastrebtsev, was kinder: The man burned himself out—but he did not lack talent.35 Part of the irritation with Arensky in My Musical Life may also stem from the fact that just as Rimsky was finishing his book the St. Petersburg opera house—the so-called Mariyinsky Theater—canceled its production of his Tsar Saltan in favor of Arensky’s Nai and Damayanti.

It was this latter opera (produced 15 January 1908), in which the bass clarinet was indeed conspicuous as leit-timbre for the demonic realm of the goddess Kali, that Rimsky and Stravinsky may have heard together. Given his disappointment, one can understand Rimsky’s malicious stage-whisper. (To Yastrebtsev he complained that Arensky’s work was put together out of commonplaces from Chaikovsky, Cui, Verdi, and the rest.)36 Dream on the Volga (Son na Volge, 1888) was Arensky’s first opera. He began it in his Conservatory years—in Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition class, in fact. Its one St. Petersburg production was an amateur staging in 1903, before Rimsky and Stravinsky were close enough to be going to performances together, let alone exchanging confidences.37 It was Arensky’s most obviously kuchkist opera in style and facture, and would never have elicited Rimsky’s condemnation. Quite the contrary. Yastrebtsev found Rimsky one day (in July 1903) "leafing through Dream on the Volga and sincerely admiring many pages. … ‘Nowadays,’ he said, ‘no one writes like this any more; it smacks of something irretrievable.’ "38

Quite the hardest part of Stravinsky’s account to credit is the claim that Arensky had shown him friendly interest and assistance. As intimated above, Arensky was not a habitué of the Wednesday evening jours fixes at Rimsky-Korsakov’s home, at which Stravinsky made all his early musical contacts.39 Arensky died before a single work of Stravinsky’s was performed in public. It is hard to know what kind of help he might have offered the younger composer, who was within Arensky’s lifetime hardly a composer at all. Indeed, Stravinsky’s recollection of Arensky as a Moscow composer strongly suggests that they never met. The pseudomemoir was probably thrown into Memories and Commentaries simply for the sake of another factitious link with Chaikovsky and with the tradition of Westernized pure music that the latter supposedly represented. In any case, when next we encounter Arensky’s name (not until Chapter 13) it will be in the context of a reference by the composer of Petrushka to the older man’s worthless and stupid music.

Maybe this is pressing the matter of Stravinsky’s inaccuracies harder than necessary to our immediate purpose (the matter being difficult neither to establish nor to understand). But the conversation books continue to be cited, even by serious scholars, as authoritative secondary sources.40 Their attractions, to be sure, are considerable and undeniable: their language is colorful and memorable, their content provocative, their authority patent—but only as primary source material on the mind of the Stravinsky who co-authored them (that is, the Stravinsky of the serial period) and his views on many subjects, his own past among them. That Stravinsky was altogether remote from the music and the esthetic concerns of his youth. My attitude toward my first period has changed radically, he wrote Souv- tchinsky, and it is as though someone else had composed [the early music].41 This declaration should be taken as warning, as a disavowal of any special authority with respect to the Russian works. If we are to understand them we shall have to come, by dint of determined scholarly effort, much closer to them than the composer was or wished to be at the time he gave his celebrated testimony.42 So let it go henceforth without saying that Stravinsky’s vast autobiographical and memoir- istic legacy will be considered virtually off-limits as documentation for this book, and will be cited only for the sake of correction or amplification.

The other side of Stravinsky’s deep-seated ambivalence about his past came unexpectedly (but in retrospect, of course, inevitably) to the fore during his brief eightieth-birthday-year visit to his native country in the fall of 1962. At the deeply Dostoevskian dinner tendered him at Moscow’s Metropole Hotel by the Soviet Ministry of Culture on the evening of 1 October—an occasion unforgettably described by Robert Craft—Stravinsky blurted out with quasi-involuntary suddenness to the assembled company, including Shostakovich, Khachaturyan, and Khrennikov, that "a man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only one country—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life."43 Four days earlier, in an interview published in Komsomolskaya pravda, he had confided that "I have spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself [slog] is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature."44

Since Stravinsky’s death the uncovering of this immanent Russianness has become a major focus of research. This has been particularly true in the Soviet Union, where a number of valuable studies of Stravinsky’s music, seen as it were from the inside, and some even more valuable documentary publications have appeared in the course of the last couple of decades. But among those who have placed this issue at the head of the agenda has been Craft himself, refreshingly unencumbered by any sense of obligation to his former role as Stravinsky’s interlocutor. In a lecture of 1974 he enumerated, among the perplexing areas in Stravinsky’s life and work, what he called "the gaps in our understanding of Stravinsky’s musical origins, for the leap from academic anonymity into The Firebird is extraordinarily sudden."43 More recently he has noted that "the crucial information about Stravinsky’s formative years through the period of the Firebird is lacking.44 Although the information that Craft seems to regard as most crucial is the untapped family chronicle supposedly locked away in the diary" (that is, the domestic accounts ledger) of the composer’s father—material to which he would like to see psychoanalytical methods applied—and although the prime source of documentation for Stravinsky’s early period is gone forever owing to the military and political vicissitudes of Ustilug, much can still be done to firm up a picture of Stravinsky’s musical development by examining the early works against the background of the music that surrounded them. But to accomplish this it is necessary first to set the historical scene with the aid of a broad range of documentary material relevant to the period of Stravinsky’s development: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals of the period, and particularly the work of art histo-

recol lections, with their exaggerations, distortions, and other nuances of memory, as more important than the encyclopedia facts; junior thought that ‘anyone’ could dig out the dates and places (Stravinsky: Relevance and Problems of Biography," in Prejudices in Disguisey 280). This would have been entirely satisfactory had all the Stravinsky/Craft books been presented, as frankly as the first one was, as portraits of the artist as an old man. But as the pair progressed from book to book, a mode of straight reportage imperceptibly took over from that of recollection, until, in the end, Stravinsky’s memories were being presented in the form of Program Notes, sometimes even with the suggestion of a scholarly apparatus. Nor would it have taken much digging to uncover such manifest discrepancies as the evaluation of Glazunov in the Chroniques and in Conversations (for surely Craft had read and reread the former), or even discrepancies within the Conversations, like the assertion (Conv:44/43) that Rimsky- Korsakov was no Wagnerite followed two pages later by the recollection that Rimsky-Korsakov kept a portrait of Wagner over his desk.

43. D&D:246.

44. Lyubite muzïku! Komsomolskaya pravda, 27 September 1962; quoted in I. Ya. Vershinina, Ran- niye boleti Stravinskogo (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), 8.

rians whose approach to what is often called the Silver Age of Russian culture has never been emulated up to now by historians of music. That is the task essayed in the first part of the present work.

Beginning with Chapter 9, the focus of the book shifts to the masterpieces of Stravinsky’s early maturity and to a question that has especially interested the Soviet Stravinsky scholars who have emerged in the period since his death: that of folklore and modernity, as the composer Sergey Slonimsky has phrased it.45 For what is remarkable about the period that begins with Firebird is the fecundating influence of folklore, approached in a manner unprecedented in the work not just of Stravinsky, but of any previous Russian composer. As Craft has phrased the problem, The major compositions of [the Swiss’ years], Renard and Les Noces, as well as the songs and female choruses, form the summit of Russian music—except that these masterpieces of a supersophisticated primitive are unique, descending from neither the Tchaikovsky nor the Rimsky-Korsakov side of Stravinsky’s heredity.46 Indeed, this assertion could be taken even further. As a young Soviet musicologist has observed, Exceptional mastery allowed Stravinsky to maintain a specifically national quality in practically all the works of the Russian period. … The striving for national character distinguishes Stravinsky from many foreign composers of the same period, and played no small role in his quest for renewed musical resources."47

But not even this formulation goes far enough toward defining Stravinsky’s somewhat paradoxical and ambiguous relationship to the folk traditions of his native land. The Russian word zarubezhnïy, normally translated as foreign (as in the quote above), literally means beyond the frontiers. But that, ironically enough, was where Stravinsky was located at the time of his greatest striving for national character. And while such strivings did indeed set him off from such foreign contemporaries as Strauss, Schoenberg, and (maybe) Debussy (though not, obviously, from Bartok), they set him no less apart from his modernist contemporaries back home. Where is the national character in Scriabin? In Myaskovsky? Even in the young Prokofiev? These ironies need to be addressed and sorted out, along with the irony implicit in the fact that Stravinsky achieved his greatest national character precisely at the point where he passed beyond the time-honored method of securing it—that is, by the actual quotation of folk music.

Most attempts at dealing with these questions have been hampered by some groundless but durable assumptions. The common conception in the West of a Russian composer—and by now, to be sure, in Russia as well—is one of a musician who imbibes folklore with his mother’s milk. And most writers on Stravinsky have risen to the bait their subject scattered tendentiously in the Chroniques and in the conversations (the peasant with the musical armpit; the Yarmolintsi fair; the St. Petersburg