Stravinsky into the twenty-first century

jonathan cross

There was a time when the course of twentieth-century music was charted almost exclusively in terms of Austro-German modernism. While certain key non-Teutonic early-modern works were recognised for their revolutionary status – among them, Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Ives's ‘Concord’ Sonata, Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin and, of course, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring – the development of the avant garde was constructed in general in relation to a line starting with Schoenberg and his two most famous pupils, and projecting itself through its Darmstadt manifestations (Boulez, Stockhausen) into the future. And this is precisely how Schoenberg himself imagined history would turn out when, on developing his twelve-note method of composition, he declared: ‘Today I have discovered something that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.’ In 1951, Pierre Boulez attempted to perpetuate Schoenberg's myth by proclaiming that ‘since the discoveries of the Viennese School, all nonserial composers are useless’ (not a view he would necessarily hold today). Led in the 1940s by Theodor Adorno (most notably in Philosophie der neuen Musik) – a highly influential figure at Darmstadt – Schoenberg and Stravinsky were pitted against each other as polar opposites: Schoenberg the Progressive, Stravinsky the Regressive. It became fashionable to dismiss Stravinsky as a mere neoclassicist (as if Schoenberg, too, were not guilty of such a charge). It was only when, following the death of Schoenberg in 1951, Stravinsky himself turned towards serialism, that he was seen to have joined the ‘mainstream’ (Adorno expressed his ‘pleasure’ in ‘Stravinsky's departure from the reactionary camp’).