All the symbolism, all the undercurrents of suggestion contained in the text are never explicitly referred to except in the brief utterances of a minor character, the fisherman, who sings a prophecy or an explanation at the beginning and end of each act, foretelling the delight that will be caused by the songs of the bird, the distress that will follow its departure, and its final victory over Death.
The book offers exceptional opportunities for excursions into imitative music such as Richard Strauss, to name one composer, would take delight in expanding into pages of detail, as many of the diverting incidents of Andersen’s tale are carried over into the drama. In the first act, for example, the courtiers mistake the croaking of frogs and the lowing of cattle for the song of the bird; in the second act the ladies of the court fill their mouths with water and gargle in an attempt to imitate the nightingale’s trill. These distractions do not serve to steer Strawinsky from his direct course. He notices them, of course, but in the briefest and most concise manner.
The score of The Nightingale calls for a large orchestra, although for a continent use of it. The list of instruments includes wood-winds by threes, with a piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet, and double-bassoon, three trombones, tuba, and two cornets besides the usual two trumpets; two harps, two glockenspiels, a celesta, a pianoforte (this part is very important), and the whole of the usual percussion, to which are added small antique cymbals. The parts of the nightingale and the fisherman are also sung from the orchestra pit.
The work was begun in 1909 (this date is disputed) and completed in 1914, when it received its first hearing in Paris in May. Strawinsky seems to have found difficulty in composing it. “I can write,” he is reported to have said, “music to words, viz., songs; or music to action, viz., ballets. But the coöperation of music, words, and action is a thing that daily becomes more inadmissible to my mind. And even should I finish The Nightingale, I do not think I shall ever attempt to write another work of that kind.”
Igor Strawinsky was born June 17 (June 5, Russian style), 1882, at Oranienbaum, near Petrograd. This date has been in dispute, and various authors have disagreed about it. My authority is Mr. Strawinsky himself. He was the son of a court-singer and was destined to study law. But, working assiduously with a pupil of Rubinstein, he became a remarkable pianist from the age of nine. He encountered Rimsky-Korsakow at Heidelberg in 1902 (when he was 20), and that Russian composer had a great influence on his career, although very little on his musical style. During this period Strawinsky attended concerts, visited museums, and delved in literature. Everything in the world of art is said to have awakened his curiosity. In 1903 he wrote the allegro of a sonata for the piano, of which the andante, scherzo and finale were completed the following year. Rimsky-Korsakow had accepted him as a pupil, and while the young man alarmed the older composer to some extent, he secretly predicted great success for the only one of his pupils who showed revolutionary tendencies. Strawinsky says that the composer of Sheherazade struggled valiantly with himself at this period in an effort not to restrict what might be beautiful in his pupil’s anarchic methods, at the same time wishing to preserve his own ideals. In 1905-6 Strawinsky worked at orchestration, and during this period, as an exercise, he orchestrated his master’s opera, Pan Voyevode, from the piano score. Subsequently his work was corrected by comparison with Rimsky-Korsakow’s own scoring, recently completed. This might have been a dangerous exercise for a “sedulous ape,” but Strawinsky was not that. He also orchestrated marches of Schubert and sonatas of Beethoven. His friends at this time were the group surrounding Rimsky-Korsakow, Chaliapine, César Cui, Glazunow, and Blumenfeld, the chef d’orchestre. Strawinsky was married January 11, 1906.
Soon after his marriage he terminated his symphony in E flat (1905-7). It was performed in 1907, and was published later by Jurgenson. A song with orchestral accompaniment, Le Faune et la Bergère, dates from this period (1906), and in 1908 he completed his Scherzo Fantastique, which was inspired by a reading of Maeterlinck’s “Life of the Bee.” This has been played in Paris. Edward Burlingham Hill says of it: “In its long passages for staccato strings, divided into melodic phrases for wood-wind instruments and in fanciful figures for wind instruments, celesta, and harps, one can imagine the sinuous and yielding swaying of bees, iridescent with color, and pulsing with life.” I do not think this work has been played in America. New York has not heard it. He set two poems of Gorodetzki to music in 1908. When Rimsky-Korsakow’s daughter married Maximilien Steinberg in 1908, Strawinsky sent Fireworks as a wedding present, but before the post had delivered the gift the older composer was dead. As a tribute to his master’s memory Strawinsky composed the Chant Funèbre, performed at the Belaïeff concerts. Fireworks has been played in New York both by the Russian and the New York Philharmonic Societies. Four piano études, written in the summer of 1908, have stood on my piano for some time. They are interesting. Vuillermoz says that Strawinsky began The Nightingale in this year; Calvocoressi’s date is 1910; the programme at the first performance gave the date as 1909.
About this time an incident occurred which considerably changed the young composer’s outlook, and which brought him to the attention of a larger world. He was “discovered” by the director of the Russian Ballet, Serge de Diaghilew, and commissioned to write a ballet on a Russian folk-story scenario fashioned by Michel Fokine. Leon Bakst and Golovine, the painters, completed the collaboration. The work, The Firebird, was terminated May 18, 1910, and produced three weeks later. The first sketches for this ballet must have been written before the death of Rimsky-Korsakow, if we are to believe a very delightful story told somewhere by Calvocoressi. On hearing Strawinsky play some bars of The Firebird, the older composer is quoted as saying: “Look here, stop playing that horrid thing; otherwise I might begin to enjoy it!” The production of The Firebird established the composer’s reputation in Paris, and the very impressionists whose methods he has dubbed “hypocritical” were among the first to sign themselves his admirers. Of these Maurice Ravel was the leader. Petrouchka was completed just a year later (May 26, 1911), and its production by the Russian Ballet gave his fame a firm hold with the public. His third choreographic drama, The Sacrifice to the Spring, followed in 1913, and his opera, The Nightingale, in 1914. Several songs, including Le petit Myosotis and Le Pigeon, are other products of recent years.[A]
It is astonishing to learn that The Nightingale was begun so early in the composer’s career, but it is still more astonishing to discover that the first sketches of The Sacrifice to the Spring were written before Petrouchka was conceived. That ballet, which achieved the great honor of being hissed in Paris (I have described the incident earlier in this article), is the work on which, with The Nightingale, rests his chief claim to being a composer with something new to say. The work differs from most of the mimed dramas given by the Russians in that it is practically without a fable. The scenes take place in barbaric Russia, long before the Christian era, and we are introduced to rites connected with the worship of the soil and the springtide; after a series of ritual dances, one of the younger maidens is chosen as a sacrifice to the spring, whereupon she spares her friends the trouble of killing her by dancing herself to death. This exceedingly angular dance, the expression of religious hysteria, marvelously conceived by Nijinsky and thrice marvelously carried out by Mlle. Piltz, was one of the causes for the outbreaks at the early performances of the ballet.
The lack of a fable, the early and uncertain setting of the action, offered Strawinsky an opportunity which he seized with avidity. The music is not descriptive, it is rhythmical. All rhythms are beaten into the ears, one after another, and sometimes with complexities which seem decidedly unrhythmic on paper, but when carried out in performance assume a regularity of beat which a simple four-four time could not equal. H. E. Krehbiel, in his valuable book, “Afro-American Folksongs,” describes the tremendous effect made on him by the intricate rhythms (which he tried in vain to note down) of the musicians of African tribes at the World’s Fair in Chicago. The rhythmic effect of The Sacrifice to the Spring is as powerful and complex. It is interesting to remember, in this connection, that the ancient Greeks accorded rhythm a higher place than either melody or harmony. Strawinsky describes the dawn of a spring morning in a few measures at the beginning of the prelude (here, it must be admitted, there is a startling reminder of l’Après-midi d’un Faune), and then he settles down to the business, and art, of providing material for dances. This he has done with consummate effect. In many cases his chord-formations could not be described in academic terms; the instruments employed add to the strangeness of the sounds. I remember one passage in which the entire corps of dancers is engaged in shivering, trembling from head to toe, to music which trembles also. It makes my flesh creep even to think of it again. At the beginning of the ballet the adolescents pound the earth with their feet, while a little old woman runs in and out between their legs, to the reiterated beat of a chord of F flat, A flat, C flat, F flat; G, B flat, D flat, and E flat, all in the bass (begin from below and read in order), while an occasional flute or a piccolo screams its way in high treble. Try this on your piano. “He has had recourse,” writes Edward Burlingham Hill, “to a violently revolutionary style which is difficult to reduce to a systematic analysis. Chords employing minor and major triads simultaneously in different octaves, figures in double thirds, strange aggregations of notes that can hardly be described as chords, even with critical license, are the ingredients of this unusual style.” M. Montagu-Nathan, in his “Short History of Russian Music,” says: “In criticising the work, the mistake was made of suggesting that Strawinsky’s music had gone back to an elemental stage in an endeavor to provide an appropriate setting for the pre-historic. In reality, of course, the movement was forward, in that music was used in a sphere to which it had hitherto been strange. That is progress. A composer who sets ‘The Creation’ to living music is just as progressive as another who takes ‘The Last Judgment’ as his theme.”
Strawinsky seems to meet his problems according to their nature with an inevitable sense of the fitness of things. He has set, in Petrouchka, a story of the Russian fair; the leading characters are puppets; the period, 1830. The music is realistic in tone, in some instances intentionally vulgar. It has been pointed out that the themes of the nurses’ dance, the dance of the cochers, and the Russian dance in the first scene, are founded on Russian folk-tunes. There is all through the piece an implied tone of a village carnival; the accordion and hurdy-gurdy are never very far away, in suggestion at least. The dancer, personified by Mme. Karsavina, trips her lightest measures to the fanfare of a cornet, and Petrouchka sobs out his heart to the empty sky to the screaming of a piccolo. There are tunes, real tunes, the piece abounds in them, and the whole is wrapped in an atmosphere of realism and truth which gives music the tone of originality. Incidentally, there is a triangle solo in the score.