Stravinsky
Oedipus Rex and Neoclassicism
Stravinsky Background
Stravinsky began composing Le Rossignol when he was just an ambitious and talented 25 year old. The first act of this touching fairy tale is written in a Russian impressionistic style reminiscent of Stravinsky’s teacher, the great composer Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky might have finished the work in this vein had he not been sidetracked by commissions from impressario Serge Diaghelev, whose Ballet Russes was taking Paris by storm.
Stravinsky’s first ballet for Diaghilev, The Firebird, was an instant success and thrust Stravinsky into the international spotlight. The ballet, a composite of various Russian fairy tales, wowed audiences with its brilliant orchestration and something-for-everyone structure. Stravinsky used traditional harmony for the ballet’s human characters and envelope-pushing chromaticism for the supernatural characters, pleasing traditionalists and the avant-garde alike. His next work to reach the Ballet Russes stage, Petrushka, was also a hit. This burlesque-inspired ballet tells the tale of unruly puppet Petrouchka and his ill-fated love for an inaccessible ballerina. It was both harmonically and rhythmically inventive.
Later in life, Stravinsky claimed that Le Sacre du Printemps was born when he experienced a vision of Russia’s pagan past. He saw a circle of tribal elders watching as a young woman danced herself to death, becoming a human sacrifice to the God of Spring. Perhaps it was But the world was hardly prepared for the bombshell Stravinsky was about to drop next. the strength of Stravinsky’s initial vision that later led him to declare: “Very little tradition lies behind Le Sacre du Printemps…I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.” In actuality, Stravinsky and his collaborator Nicolas Roerich, a painter/archeologist, drew on a number of historical and folk sources to create an artistically interpreted, but fundamentally authentic, portrait of Russia’s pagan past. They researched folk shamans who whirled in a trace-like state, abduction and courtship dances, Herodotus’s descriptions of the augery rites of the ancient Scythians (once inhabitants of Slavic lands), and many other topics. Stravinsky’s sketches for Le Sacre du Printemps reveal that he modeled the work on at least nine identifiable Russian folk tunes. Although Stravinsky altered these tunes beyond recognition in the process of composing the ballet, he absorbed their irregular time signatures and modal melodies, making them his own. The result was a deeply Russian—and profoundly modern—piece of music that evoked primitive man in all his brutality and strength by casting off the traditions of Western classical music. To its first audience, Le Sacre du Printemps was absolutely revolutionary.
The 1913 premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps is still regarded as one of the most infamous events in music history. The ballet’s first moments were greeted with derisive laughter. Many were disgusted and shocked by the violent music, puzzlingly graceless choreography and awkward costumes; insulted, they began shouting out to the stage. Other viewers came to the work’s defense, and soon heated shouting matches had devolved into a general uproar that threatened to break into a riot. The uproar in the auditorium drowned out the sound of the orchestra, still valiantly playing; not even the dancers could hear. The choreographer, Nijinsky, stood in the wings, shouting out the beats to his disoriented dancers. Stravinsky later claimed that he had to physically restrain the choreographer from running onstage andprovoking a scandal. Meanwhile Diaghelev frantically flipped the house lights on and off, hoping to restore some semblance of order to the fray.
Today listeners worldwide have absorbed the style of Le Sacre du Printemps and learned to appreciate it. The ballet has taken its rightful place among the most famous and seminal works of the twentieth century. To those looking at history with 50/50 hindsight, the raw, primitive violence of Le Sacre’s score has even appeared a harbinger of World War I.
During his first years with the Ballet Russes, Stravinsky had made the one completed act of Le Rossignol into a tone poem for orchestral performance, and seemed perfectly content to leave it at that. But shortly after Le Sacre’s premiere Stravinsky was invited by operatic stage director Alexander Sanin to compose a full-length opera for the Moscow Free Theatre. The most obvious choice of subject was Le Rossignol; yet Stravinsky’s style, philosophy and technique had altered almost beyond recognition since his first attempt at opera. There was the matter of the new harmonic and rhythmic worlds he had discovered with Le Sacre du Printemps. Then there was his newly adopted disdain for opera, a fashionable pose among the Ballet Russes circle, which considered opera a dead art enjoyed only by the vulgar bourgeoisie. But Sanin was offering a lot of money, and the young composer was eager to finally hear his music performed in Russia. After some hesitation, Stravinsky agreed to complete the opera.
The second and third acts of Le Rossignol differ wildly from the first. After the fact Stravinsky attempted to excuse the work’s disjointed nature by pointing out that the first act takes place in nature, while the second and third are set in the Emperor’s lavish and artificial court. In accordance with Stravinsky’s new bias against opera, the finished work was short on singing and long on pantomime and pageant. At the premiere (with the Ballet Russes, after the untimely closure of the Moscow Free Theatre) the voices of the Nightingale and the Fisherman were actually sung from the orchestra pit. A later incarnation of the work, the ballet Le Chant du Rossignol, has proved to be very popular as a concert piece.
Oedipus Rex and Neoclassicism
Stravinsky, like Picasso, was one of modernism’s great mercurial artists, switching styles and philosophies as his life changed and the turbulent world around him transformed. The Rite of Spring and Le Rossignol belong to Stravinsky’s earliest period, his “Russian” phase, during which the composer drew inspiration from the traditions and sound of his native country.
Stravinsky wrote Oedipus Rex over a decade later, during his neoclassicist phase. The term neoclassical refers to a new classical sound, the prefix “neo” implying a distortion or caricature of the original classical form rather than a strict return to it. Neoclassicism emulates the simplicity and clarity of the musical forms of the 18th century. The movement’s motto was “back to Bach.” Author T.W. Adorno characterized Neoclassicism as a return to old forms that contemporary society could easily understand and as a criticism of individuality in favor of the collective.
Stravinsky abandoned the Romantic movement’s emphasis on overwhelming emotion and personal expression, which he and many other artists associated with Germany and the devastation of World War I. His previous Russian idiom was distasteful to him, perhaps in part because he was living in exile from Bolshevik Russia and attempting to establish himself at the head of the international avant-garde. Like other neoclassicists, Stravinsky reacted against the nationalistic and Romantic by reasserting the primacy of musical form.
Stravinsky also rejected Schoenberg and his modern twelve-tone school, which he saw as relying on “formulas without ideas.” Believing that the order and restriction of the neoclassical style provided musical freedom, Stravinsky said that “the style, the restraint, contribute to [the music’s] development and only prevent liberty from degeneration into license.”
Although he built his music on Classical forms and ideas, Stravinsky’s music is unmistakably his own, utilizing modern techniques like dissonance and rhythmic variation, and his trademark brilliant orchestration.
Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex was one of his most extreme experiments with neoclassicism. Reigning opera back from the overripe Wagnerian music-drama into a strict “numbers” format (with distinct recitatives, arias, duets, choruses, etc), Stravinsky attempted to create an opera that was as timeless and immobile as a classical monument. He chose as his collaborator Jean Cocteau, whose streamlined adaptation of Antigone the composer much admired.
Stravinsky wanted to avoid anything that smacked of catharsis; he felt that Cocteau’s early drafts were too Wagnerian. The composer made Cocteau revise the text three times before he felt it had achieved the required immobility. To achieve the ceremonial feeling he envisioned, Stravinsky had Cocteau’s French libretto translated into Latin. Stravinsky even thought of the singers as living statues, and recommended a set that looked like an ancient Greek frieze.