The years 1928–9, when Stravinsky first recorded his Russian ballets, have not yet passed beyond living memory. And yet, when it comes to the history of performance (and especially of orchestral performance, since recording so large a group of musicians became possible only with the development of electrical recording around 1925), this is a remote and only just recoverable past. It is true that the pianola versions of The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring push the horizon back to the early 1920s, but the ballets' premieres, from the last years before the First World War, lie altogether within the long, silent, initial phase of music history. Stravinsky recorded each of them on a number of occasions (he recorded The Rite, for instance, in 1929, 1940 and 1960), and in this way the history of these works unfolded, as Peter Hill puts it, ‘exactly in tandem with the emerging record industry’. Successive developments in recording technology represent one of the reasons why Stravinsky recorded many of his works several times: the 78 gave way to the LP in 1948 and to the stereo LP in 1957. (‘Last year's record is as démodé as last year's motor car,’ Stravinsky wryly observed.) But there were further reasons. One was Stravinsky's financial dependence on recording and more generally on conducting, as a result of the drying up of his Russian royalties following the 1917 Revolution; there is a terrible irony in the fact that Stravinsky's career as neoclassical and serial composer was bankrolled by nearly a thousand performances of The Firebird. The other reason takes longer to explain, for it opens up the whole issue of Stravinsky's intentions as a recording artist.

The development of Stravinsky's musical language from Petrushka through The Rite of Spring to Les Noces represents Stravinsky's emergence as a modernist composer. In these three works, definitive Russian subject-matter and content is articulated in an increasingly radical language. The expression of Stravinsky's Russian inheritance within the context of modernism – common ground shared by these three works – is the subject of this chapter.

Petrushka

Petrushka, as is well known, was conceived in the aftermath of the success of The Firebird and repeated the earlier work's collaborative context: it was written for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Following the public success of The Firebird, Petrushka provides what Richard Taruskin describes as ‘Stravinsky's process of self-discovery’. This self-discovery takes the form of a recently acquired technical confidence in conjunction with a new-found modernism. Stephen Walsh has written that ‘the emergence of Stravinsky as a modernist, with an individual manner unlike any other, can be dated with some precision to his early work on Petrushka’. This ‘individual manner’ consists largely in the adaptation of borrowed materials, a process which immediately suggests a relationship between past and present and sets up points of reference.

Stravinsky as context

The eloquent conclusion of Richard Taruskin's monumental study of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions has quickly become the most widely quoted, generally accepted declaration of Stravinsky's significance for twentieth-century compositional practice:

Taruskin's purpose is to assert that once, in Petrushka, ‘Stravinsky at last became Stravinsky’ by transforming his own defining Russian context, he could be seen as ‘one of music's great centripetal forces, the crystallizer and definer of an age’, whose ‘work possessed a strength of style, and his oeuvre a unity, that could accommodate an endless variety of surfaces’. It is a powerful argument, and its appeal might even have been strengthened by Taruskin's subsequent emphasis on the deplorable morality of Stravinsky's sympathy for fascism and anti-semitism – a general lack of democratic fervour that allegedly infiltrates even the exuberant rituals and ultimate sublimity of Les Noces.

In his Bloch Lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley in 1995, the British composer Jonathan Harvey presented his ideas on The Rake's Progress, a work he described as being ‘aware of its own derivativeness’. The Rake, he argued, is ‘the most explicit manifestation of self-effacement’, its meaning deriving ‘not from authorship, but from formal pattern-play and ingenuity’. While such a view determinedly underlines the ‘proto-postmodern’ tendencies in Stravinsky, it is also interesting that it echoes strongly Stravinsky's own aesthetic as articulated in the 1930s (via his various ghostwriters) in such public statements as the Autobiography and the Harvard lectures. In the Poetics of Music, Stravinsky proclaims that ‘It is through the unhampered play of its functions … that a work is revealed and justified.’ With specific regard to The Rake, Stravinsky observed that it is

Introduction

In this exchange with Robert Craft, Stravinsky testified to the generic hostility felt by composers toward critics. As we shall see, however, this attitude on the part of this composer concealed a much more complicated relationship with the supposed enemy.

For the purposes of this chapter, ‘critic’ is broadly defined. The tasks of the critic include discriminating between good and bad – with all the intermediate gradations – in composition and performance; discerning continuities and discontinuities between new and older work (again, in both composition and performance), whether of the recent or the more remote past; informing the readership about current issues in the world of the arts. A critic in practice serves as an intermediary between consumer and creator (that is, between listener and composer, or listener and performer), helping both sides by creating an intellectual environment where the former understands better the work of the latter. Critics' activities are informed by the work of historians and analysts, though the character of their output is different. Criticism may take any form from brief newspaper reviews to book-length studies; in some cases humble journalistic endeavour facilitates the development of ideas that later find full expression in amonograph. But both are species of criticism.

Introduction

By the spring of 1952, Stravinsky had reached the end of a compositional road he had travelled since Pulcinella in 1920. His brilliant Mozartian opera The Rake's Progress had been premiered the previous year to general acclaim. But, for Stravinsky, it marked not only a culmination of his musical neoclassicism, but a decisive turning-point as well. He had become aware of the low value placed on his music by outspoken members of the younger generation of avant-garde composers and had begun, for the first time, to acquaint himself with the music of Schoenberg and Webern, to whom younger composers were unfavourably comparing him. In the aftermath of those twin shocks, he turned in a new compositional direction.

Robert Craft, Stravinsky's amanuensis throughout his later years, describes the growing sense of strain, the crisis and its immediate consequences:

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’).

When, at the dawn of the third millennium, we use the word ‘Stravinsky’, we no longer merely name a person. We mean a collection of ideas – ideas embodied in, or rather construed out of, a certain body of highly valued musical and literary texts that acquired enormous authority in twentieth-century musical culture. That authority and its consequences are what have been preoccupying my thoughts about Stravinsky since completing Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, which, though published in 1996, was not as recent a study as it seemed. It had spent almost seven years in press, during which time my thinking about the bundle of notions called ‘Stravinsky’ underwent considerable change.

In keeping with the scholarly tradition in which I was trained, my book was almost wholly concerned with the production of those texts, and with determining their place within the historical context contemporaneous with them. My thinking since has been more concerned with the relationship between those texts, and the ideas construed from them, and the contexts in which they have existed since the time of their production, up to their present contexts, including this book. Just as in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions I considered the reciprocal manner in which Stravinsky received influences from his surroundings and influenced those surroundings in turn, so I continue to be interested in that reciprocity of influence in the period since his death.

Antonio Stradivari (b. 1644; d. Cremona, 1737) is the most celebrated violin maker in history, yet it is not generally known that he also made a variety of lutes, mandolas, mandolins, guitars, and harps. Compared to the approximately 600 of Stradivari's violins, violas, and cellos that have survived, only a few mandolins and guitars and one harp are extant. Of the guitars, probably the best-known example, dated 1688, is in the Hill collection at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (see Plates 21 a–d). Other examples include the “Sabionari” (1679), in a private collection in Italy; the “Giustiniani” (1681), also in a private collection in Italy; and the “Rawlins” (1700), in the Shrine to Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. Doubts have been cast on two others: the “Canobio-Pagliari,” apparently by another maker though bearing a label “Revisto e coretto da me Antonio Stradivari in Cremona l'anno 1681” (“Revised and corrected by me, Antonio Stradivari in Cremona in the year 1681”), whereabouts unknown; and the “Vuillaume” (1711), in the Musée de la Musique in Paris. A guitar neck inscribed “ant:sstradivarivs/cremonen:sf.1675” is privately owned in the United Kingdom.

To better understand Stradivari's contribution to the craft of guitar making, it is helpful to trace the development of the baroque guitar and to examine early writings that describe the guitar's design from a theoretical standpoint. Only two pre-baroque guitars and three early vihuelas are extant. One guitar, in the Royal College of Music (London), is labeled in Portuguese “Belchior Dias made (by) me / Lisbon month of December 1581” and also inscribed “bchior dias lxa [Belchior Dias Lisbon]”; a similar, though slightly larger and unsigned instrument (formerly in the Robert Spencer collection) is now in a private collection in the United States.

The crucial point to remember in discussing Luther's struggle with socialethical issues is that he understood himself to be a theologian and pastor not a sociologist or economist or politician. Indeed, Luther's ethics may be understood as pastoral care. For Luther, therefore, theology and ethics served the proclamation of the good news that salvation is received not achieved. Our justification before God “must be believed and cannot be obtained by any work, law, or merit.” In contrast to all pieties of achievement, then and now, Luther affirmed God's descent in Jesus to us rather than our striving to ascend to God. In opposition to the medieval renunciation of the world, epitomized by the image and metaphor of the ladder to heaven, Luther proclaimed that Christ could not be dragged too deeply into the flesh. Hence Luther criticized the religion of the Turks, Jews, and papists for prescribing “heavenward journeys on which the travelers will break their necks.”

The subject of theology and ethics is not God in heaven, in his absolutemajesty, the “naked God,” but rather God “clothed in HisWord and promises”for us.

Martin Luther had a fairly low opinion of himself, though one must leave open the question if this was because he was profoundly convinced that such was the case, or because he thought it to be good politics to say so, or because he saw himself as analogous to the Old Testament prophets who similarly had a way of denouncing their own importance. “I am but a stinking bag of worms,” he observed on one occasion. And even though he had also insisted that at his death all his books and writings should be burned and “the children of God not be called by my name,” neither, in fact, proved to be the case. Luther's long shadow fell over the subsequent centuries. With the passing of time, posterity chose not to take Luther at his word, and the importance he had attained during his own lifetime was dwarfed by an ever increasing importance afterwards. Arguably, Luther's legacy has been one of the most striking phenomena in Western intellectual history. The fundamental observation, all the same, is that such dramatic eminence notwithstanding, Martin Luther has also been one of the most controversial figures in Western life and thought. Indeed, there has been controversy not only about his theology, but also about his impact on German history. For a long time, mentioning the name of Luther meant to step on to the barricades.

This chapter cannot be written from a strictly analytical or historical point of view. An earlier theologian's contemporary theological importance can only be assessed from within the church's present theological enterprise, that is, from within her continuing reflection on her mission. Since the church's mission is to make and be faithful to the claim that the God of Israel has raised his servant Jesus from the dead, we may also think of theology as the intellectual labor internal to speaking this “gospel” intelligibly in the always new times and places which the mission reaches. Theology is thus a temporally extended debate - sometimes a calm discussion, sometimes a shouting match - about Christ and the church, which has now continued for nearly two millennia. As such a protracted conversation goes on, participants drop out, leaving their influence and writings behind them, and new ones enter, from new historical contexts.

Such considerations must give this chapter its method. Active participantsin the continuing theological argument are inevitably and properlycannibals of their predecessors. They dismember predecessors’ systems orstructures of intuition, and use bits and pieces for their own purposes. Toask about Luther’s contemporary theological significance is, therefore, toask for suggestions that such and such aspects or parts of Luther’s theologyare likely to further the present enterprise.

FACING INTIMIDATION

The great pleasure of reading Luther is complicated by several problems. The greatest of these is the sheer mass of material. The critical edition in German and Latin, the Weimar Ausgabe, includes sixty-eight volumes of his published writings, seventeen of his letters, twelve of documents relating to the translation of the Bible, and six volumes of Table Talk. The American Edition of Luther's Works in English contains fifty-five volumes. Even this fraction of the whole can overwhelm the strongest student.

The mention of German and Latin reminds English-speaking readers of the difficulty of reading Luther in his original languages. Any knowledge of these languages will help, but Luther's German is difficult (think of English a century before Shakespeare!) and his Latin also is quite complex. While the most important documents are available in translation, a few significant ones are not. Some translations are not especially accurate, or not based on more recent critical texts.

Some Luther writings are hard to read. One current anthology beginswith Luther’s 1517 theses: Disputation Against Scholastic Theology. Theargumentation in a later and very central work, The Bondage of the Will,is quite complex and difficult to follow. Many other writings are muchclearer, and some are simple and delightful. Luther had a great capacity tocommunicate with ordinary readers.