Well folks, it's almost here.
On May 29 we hit the centenary of the most notorious premiere in the history of music: the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score, The Rite Of Spring, which caused a furore at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Today the Rite is a concert hall commonplace, where it resides supreme as one of the great shockers of the early 20th century; and, in a good performance, it has lost not one judder or decibel of its capacity to shock.
As we approach the great day, the world is awash with new books, new recordings (I have three in front of me as I write), fresh performances (we have one in Glasgow next Thursday from Matthias Pintscher and the BBC SSO) and the publication of myriad essays, documents and related materials. These include a new reproduction of Stravinsky's autograph score of The Rite, illustrating the composer's amazing, pristine calligraphy.
So, as we head through May, let's spend a little time in the company of Igor, his belter of a score and the world it inhabited. But let's not jump in at the deep end. Let's take a broader look. The risk of the deep-end approach is that it can generate a narrow and distorted focus, in which Stravinsky is perceived as the great revolutionary of the early 20th century, the fiery wee Russian who shredded the book, hurling every fundamental principle of music composition out of the window. Melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, counterpoint, phrasing and all elements of articulation and construction – out they all went, along with every principle of symmetry and all factors that lead to pleasant listening. Stravinsky did all these things, of course, and that is why he is the revolutionary that he is. But was he alone?
In fact the great revolution that propelled so-called classical music into the new century has numerous strands and they do not all belong to Igor Stravinsky. Perhaps an early wave of revolution, which occured much more discreetly and rather quietly, should be traced back to 1894 and Claude Debussy's L'Apres-midi D'Un Faune, a 10-minute miracle of composition and one of the most exquisite pieces ever conceived.
But look at its construction. In its melody, rhythm, harmony, structure, sonority and orchestration there is not a trace of tradition. Everything in it is unprecedented; and everything in it belongs to Debussy. It is uniquely his and a completely revolutionary composition, from concept to execution. But he does it all quietly, and wholly from a non-Germanic imagination. Debussy was asked what rules, principles and structures he followed. He always gave the same answer: "Mon plaisir." His freedom of imagination was his revolution.
And any survey of revolutionary trends at this pivotal moment in the history of music must also take into account developments in Germany. By 1913, when The Rite Of Spring was unleashed on an unsuspecting world, Arnold Schoenberg's totally weird expressionist monodrama, Pierrot Lunaire, had been out there for a year, following its Berlin premiere in 1912. What Stravinsky might have thought of Schoenberg's German revolution, which was yet to take its primary leap into total organisation of musical pitches, we might guess. But Stravinsky was certainly aware of the German modernist and of Pierrot Lunaire, which he deemed "the solar plexus of 20th-century music".
Coming back to Stravinsky's Paris, there is one other strand to the revolution that must be acknowledged, at the very least as a catalyst to so much that was going on: Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, where Diaghilev presented not only all three of Stravinsky's big ballets, including The Firebird and Petrushka, but an astonishing list of 20th-century masterpieces, spawned under the Russian impressario's's aegis, including Ravel's Daphnis And Chloe, Debussy's Jeux and a stream of works by Erik Satie, Richard Strauss, Manuel da Falla, Francis Poulenc and others. Stravinsky was a giant, but others were there.
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