When Chroniques de ma vie was published in 1935, Stravinsky sanctioned what has become his most famous remark: ‘Music is powerless to express anything at all.’ Even if he capitulated to the ventriloquism of his ghost writer Walter Nouvel on that occasion, Stravinsky's faith in the precept of objectivity, ‘perhaps the overriding feature of Stravinsky's modernism’, pervades his aesthetic manifesto, Poetics of Music (1942), to the extent that his ‘explanation of music as I conceive it’ is egoistically declared not to be ‘any the less objective for being the fruit of my own experience and my personal observations’. Objectivity, and its ascendance over what he called ‘the subjective prism’, was, or became, Stravinsky's distinctive habit of mind, an aesthetic and compositional position maintained in relation to any musical material, including his own free inventions. ‘What is important for the lucid ordering of the work – for its crystallisation –’, he wrote in Poetics, ‘is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally submit to the law: Apollo demands it.’ Stravinsky's identification with the Apollonian – order, selection, construction, logic and unity – exemplifies the rationalising tendency within modernism and dominates, but does not expel, the Dionysian – freedom, fantasy, emotion, expressivity and irrationality.

One way of characterising the modernist period might be to say that it was the age of Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce: geniuses who brought about revolutionary changes in the procedures for their arts and publicised them from Paris, so contributing to the myth that it was the avant-garde capital of Europe at that time. Other capitals were home to great geniuses as well – Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Mann – people who, while quite different from Stravinsky, were also very influential modernists and were well out of his cultural range. Indeed, to understand them, we would be moved towards modernist considerations to which Stravinsky was deeply antipathetic. His ‘rivalry’ with Schoenberg (whether it was actual or invented by defenders of the atonal, such as Adorno) is not nearly so important as his intellectual differences from him, including his refusal to write the kind of music that ‘develops’, as it does within the German tradition. But it is the modernist tradition in France – that of Debussy, Proust and Matisse – which influenced at least the early Stravinsky. This was a world that grew out of the Symbolist tendencies so strongly supported by Diaghilev and his circle in Russia and one that produced works such as Fireworks, Zvezdolikiy, The Firebird and, most obviously, The Faun and the Shepherdess, influenced as it was by Debussy, Ravel and Dukas.

When one examines the earliest works of a great composer, it is almost Inevitably with hindsight that one does so. Hearing the earlier works through the portal that the later, more well-known works supply can be a strange experience, through which hindsight often hardens into self-reassurance. Does one hear a familiar foretaste of this here, a pre-echo of that there? Is there a discernible quality to the early works that is evident to us today, but which contemporary listeners seem to have overlooked? Such questions are easy to ask and carry a hint of smugness, but, conversely, is anything to be gained by turning the presumptions around – by dwelling, for example, on the ordinariness that allowed the composer's contemporaries to remain unaware of the genius in their midst? Surely not: for such inversion merely preserves the same impoverished agenda in negative.

Questions of style impinge on the assessment of ‘early’ works in ways that demand examination in the present context. Consider the early works of Mozart as an alternative case to those of Stravinsky: as Charles Rosen has famously argued, the received idea of the ‘classical style’ is defined for us today by the mature works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, rather than by the music of their many accomplished contemporaries. It is not that Mozart's music is recognised as similar to that of, say, J. C. Bach, Kozeluch and Kraus, and can be measured against it, revealing Mozart's ‘superiority’.

Introduction

Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik was published in 1949, at a decisive turning-point for music in the mid-twentieth century. In this highly influential book, Adorno put forward a dialectical reading of the New Music in the form of a critique of its two most extreme representatives, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The effects were dramatic, providing a rallying cry for the generation of new composers emerging in the immediate post-war years, and who were to become associated both with the rejection of neoclassicism and with the espousal of the multiple serialism of the Darmstadt School. The reception of Adorno's critique by the two protagonists themselves was in some respects contrary to expectations. Schoenberg, who disliked Adorno, saw it primarily as an attack on himself, thus going directly against the general view, which regarded Adorno as the great advocate of the Second Viennese School. But at the same time Schoenberg also sprang to Stravinsky's defence, annoyed by Adorno's treatment of his old adversary. Stravinsky, on the other hand, remained silent – in public, at least – thus making it difficult to gauge the extent to which Adorno's critique of his music may have played any determining role in the composer's own spectacular change of direction in the early 1950s, when he himself abandoned neoclassicism and turned to serialism. This has, naturally enough, prompted speculation. Célestin Deliège, for instance, has argued:

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.