Arnold Whittall - Stravinsky and Music Drama

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Stravinsky and Music DramaAuthor(s): Arnold WhittallSource: Music & Letters, Vol. 50, No. 1, 50th Anniversary Issue (Jan., 1969), pp. 63-67Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/732900.

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STRAVINSKY AND MUSIC DRAMABY ARNOLDWHITTALL

THErelativelyrecentrecognitionof Weber as an importantmodernmastergives a new perspectiveto the music of the inter-warperiod,and the scope of his influence since I950 is due in large part to thebelief that he was the only genuinely radical composerof the period1913 to I945. By comparison his four great contemporaries, Bartok,Berg, Sch6nberg and Stravinsky, retained close and obvious linkswith tradition, as exemplified by the dimensions and structures ofeighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Since Weber's origi-nality, and influence, derived from his rejection of these structuresand dimensions, and the concept of thematicism on which they werebased, it is instructive to study how his contemporaries coped withtheir seemingly indissoluble involvement in them. Of the four,Stravinsky's involvement was probably the most complex, since inhis case there was a clearly expressed hostility to the whole Austro-German tradition, and, in particular, to the Wagnerian musicdrama. Stravinsky has described this as an attempt to turn philo-sophical speculations to musical account, to make music the servantof ideas rather than to cherish its self-sufficiency. He has not beenprepared to regard the failure of the attempt as absolving Wagnerfrom the sin of making it. In the 'Poetics of Music' he states thatmusic drama means that music is arbitrarily paralysed by con-straints foreign to its own laws: music is betrayed by being turnedinto an object of philosophical speculation .1If we separate, for a moment, the musical issue from the philo-sophical, it is obvious that Stravinsky has never had any feeling forthe Teutonic concept of Durchcomponierung.He cannot accept a'whole' which is not the sum of separate and self-contained parts. Asa work gets longer, so the need for such 'segmentation' grows moreacute. In opera, therefore, arias, ensembles and their reciprocal rela-tionships in the structure ... confer upon the whole work a coherencethat is merely the external and visible manifestation of an internaland profound order .2 Wagner, in rejecting the number opera, alsorejected coherence and order. His music is more improvised thanconstructed, in the specific musical sense .' His work correspondsto a tendency that is not, properly speaking, a disorder, but onewhich tries to compensate for a lack of order. The principle of

1 'Poetics of Music', p. 62.Op. cit., p. 64.Loc.cit.

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endless melody perfectly illustrates this tendency. It is the perpetualbecoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, anymore than it has any reason for ending .4Whenever Stravinsky writes about Wagner, argument becomesabuse, anecdote becomes insult. Such writing is merely the residueof the more profound, creative anti-Wagnerianism which is Stravin-sky's music. (The last work of his own in which he concedes Wagner'sinfluence is the 'Scherzo fantastique' of I9g8).6 Only the excessiveconcern with Stravinsky's enthusiasms and the total neglect of hishostilities by recent commentators leads me to open the cupboarddoors on these sagging skeletons. For it seems that Stravinsky'sapparent blindness to the larger coherence and postponed unities ofWagner's operas is determined primarily not by musical consider-ations at all, but by philosophical and religious convictions-orprejudices. The master of objectivity has provided for 60 years acomplete 'answer' to nineteenth-century German Romanticismwhich can all too easily be assumed to be universally and perm-anently valid, particularly by those who refuse to analyse the assump-tions, musical and philosophical, on which it is based.As far as the nineteenth-century is concerned, Stravinsky'sconfessed likes and dislikes are predictable. Admiration for middle-period Verdi; for the elegance and humour-not the too frequentvulgarity 7-of Tchaikovsky. Strauss is unable to punctuate;Scriabin, at least in 'Prometheus' and the 'Poeme de l'extase',suffers from musical emphysema .8 Incidental swipes at Handeland Vivaldi, among others, create a suitable atmosphere of severity.Hellish length is not the sole qualification for failures. Since it ismuch more difficult to talk about principles of composition thandestructively about composers, however, the following must beconsidered seriously:

R.C. Do you work with a dialectical conception of form? Is theword meaningful in musical terms ?I.S. Yes to both questions, in so far as the art of dialectics is,according to the dictionaries, the art of logical discussion.Musical form is the result of the 'logical discussion'of musicalmaterials.9A little later on in the same book Stravinsky refers to his attemptto build a new music on eighteenth-century classicism using theconstructive principles of that classicism .'o Presumably all the talkin the 'Poetics' about the virtues of similarity and the dangers of

4 Op. cit., p. 65.'Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft. Expositions and Developments' (London,1962), p. 62.6 I accept Joseph Kerman's statement that Wagner's mastery of musical shape inTristanand Isoldeis a matter of fact, not opinion ('Opera as Drama', p. 207).7 'Stravinsky and Craft. Conversations' (London, 1959), pp. 42-3.8 'Expositions and Developments', p. 60.9 'Conversations', p. 19.1p Op. cit., p. 21.

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contrast can be related to this impulse. The enemy is always Dionysus.What happened to Oedipus, Stravinsky seems to imply, should havehappened to Wagner. But is there no logical discussion of musicalmaterials in Wagner? And what does Stravinsky mean by impro-visation? Apparently the absence of control, of lucid ordering. InStravinsky's eyes, Weber and Verdi are not just different fromWagner, they succeed where he fails; but only because they provideperceptions which Stravinsky himself can use.Nowhere more than in his thoughts on Wagner are we consciousof reading, not a critic anxious to be fair but a composer whoneeds all the help he can get from a benign tradition. For Stravinsky,Wagner is the typical revolutionary, in revolt against tradition. Inhis sermon on tradition Stravinsky is at his wildest. Far fromimplying the repetition of what has been , he claims, traditionpresupposes the reality of what endures ... Tradition thus assuresthe continuity of creation . What we have then, is not an accu-sation from Stravinsky that Wagner's works do not assert thecontinuity of creation, but a confession that Wagner has been of nohelp to him in his own search for creative identity. This may beself-evident, but the reasons for it are less so. To see Stravinskystruggling to evaluate Schonberg-a composer who learned fromWagner-is to see a man determined to disprove his blindness bywalking a tightrope in the dark. He does not mention, as well hemight, that Schonberg himself was defeated in his attempt torecreate the continuous, philosophical music-drama. In the end,after all, Schonberg owed more to Brahms than to Wagner-Brahmsthe progressive assuring Sch6nberg of his function as a traditionalist.Only Webern broke, not like Stravinsky with just Brahms andWagner, but with the entire nineteenth-century tradition. In doingso he provided Stravinsky with a precedent for the 'total thematicism'of his serial works as well as fulfilling Stravinsky's own unattainedideal of 'similarity'-compression eliminating the need for contrast.Stravinsky ends his 'Autobiography' with a clear statement of hisanti-Romantic credo, his disgust with the apparent impostures ofthose unacknowledged legislators of the world who seek acknowledge-ment not for the good of the world but to satisfy their own egotism:Art postulates communion and the artist has an imperative need tomake others share the joy which he experiences himself. However,perfect communion is rareand the more the personalityof the authoris revealed the rarer that communion becomes.12This final statement shows how completely out of touch Stravinskycan be. He does not say, here, that to reveal one's personality is tomake bad art. This would be even more absurd; for just as acomposer's work reflects his personality (though not necessarily hisfeelings when composing a particular work), so an audience responds11'Poetics', p. 59.12 'Autobiography' (New York, 1958), p. 175.

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to the work, and to the composer within and behind it. Above all,however, it is the word 'communion' which leads to the centralmisunderstanding: to Stravinsky's ideas on the relationship betweenart and religion. Here the Dionysian, formless Wagner becomes, forgood measure, a blasphemer. Stravinsky objects to the principle ofputting a work of art on the same level as the sacred and symbolicritual which constitutes a religious service .l The clear distinctionbetween the two, for him, is that an audience rightly approachesa work of art in a spirit of criticism: they are humans assessinghuman activity. In church such an attitude is blasphemous.It can certainly be claimed that the Bayreuth Wagner cult wasdirected towards the establishment of an uncritical atmosphere.Stravinsky experienced this himself, as he amusingly recounts inhis 'Autobiography'.14 But his refusal to look more deeply into theWagnerian phenomenon was a historical luxury, a piece of self-indulgence as understandable as Wagner's own arrogance in theface of contemporary hostility. The fact remains that one canapproach Wagner in a spirit of criticism even at Bayreuth, and stillenjoy and admire his achievements as an artist. One can appreciatewithout worshipping: and one suspects that it was possible, howeverdifficult, to do this in 912.

It is interesting to compare Stravinsky with another con-temporary Catholic composer who is much more disposed to acceptWagner-Olivier Messiaen. In outline the contrast is complete.Stravinsky severe, liturgical, primarily penitential; Messiaen notcomposing for the Church-he writes less and less organ music-but using the world of nature as a symbol of perpetual praise.Messiaen is an ecstatic. He has used images of sensuality moredirectly than Wagner-as in 'Cinq Rechants'-but his forms havebecome much more severely controlled. He has never written for thetheatre, but his music is always descriptive. Yet Messiaen is notWagnerian, in that he composes in long, unbroken but progressingspans. Expressionism-in spite of Stravinsky-is still possible:expansionism is a greater problem. Since Wagner the two have beenin conflict and nowhere more nakedly than in the theatre. Operasbecome yearly more old-fashioned, ballets more abbreviated. Ifexperiment is any yardstick, however, activities of the Cunningham-Cage variety have placed ballet in the forefront of the avant-garde,aposition opera is never likely to occupy. At times it seems that theRomantic Messiaen is more objective than the anti-RomanticStravinsky. Messiaen's rituals spring from an acceptance of theworld: he has no need of arrogance. Stravinsky, so much morehieratic and exclusive, cannot avoid expressing a conflict betweenhis own creative ego and his belief in self-effacement as an importantstep along the road to salvation.

13Ibid., p. 39.14 0p. cit., pp. 38-9.66



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It is obvious that Wagner's achievement cannot be measuredsimplyin terms of his influenceor of hostilityto him. But as long as itseemsnecessaryto dance on his grave in the Stravinskianmanner-in the ritual sacrifice Wagner is the ultimate victim-music willremain in a state of reaction againsthim. It may well be that in anycase he has nothing to tell the present about musical form. Onlywhen the period of reaction is over can we be sure of that.Stravinsky'santi-Wagnerianismdid not result in a Brahmsianavoidance of the theatre, but in an effort to provide comprehensiveand pregnant alternatives.This is the paradox of his whole creativelife, for his involvement with traditional forms has been muchgreater than that of Debussy or Webern, and in spite of notableexperiments like 'Les Noces', 'Oedipus Rex' and 'Persephone', hehas been unable to 'rethink' music drama on radical lines. One ofthe reasons for this is an innate preferencefor 'moral tales' of a typewhich have been appropriate to opera throughout its history,whatever the structural principles of composition employed. Since1950 Stravinskyhasnot followed Webernin rejectingthe theatre,buthis most effectively dramatic music is that which extends aWebernian clarity and concentrationinto a Carissimi-likeworld ofreligiousnarrative. The middle section of 'A Sermon, Narrative andPrayer', which recounts the stoning and martyrdomof Stephen, ismuch more thanjust anotherexample of Stravinsky'sobsessionwiththe sacrificial. It is dramatic without being theatrical: it is thepositive fulfilment of a lifetime's anti-Wagnerianism,but it acceptsWebern rather than Verdi or Bach as the true contemporaryalternative to Wagner's methods. Stravinsky'ssubject-matteras amusical dramatisthas never been anti-Wagnerian:it could not be,since the resonancesof Wagner'smythsareso inclusiveand profound.But Webern decisivelybrokethe connection between religiousmusicand music drama, and in his 'Narrative'Stravinskymay have takenthe first step towardsrestoringit. The indications are that dramaticoratoriomay survive, and renew itself, while opera merely reiteratesthe old forms and the old subjects. If this is so, Stravinsky'santi-Romanticism may prove to be a decisive influence on the wholefuture of music. It is as important and inevitable a part of both hisnatureand achievementas its examination and reconsiderationmustbe for all composers today.Webern's rejection of Wagner's dimensions, as well as hissubject matter, has provided Stravinsky with the vital precedentfor his own most extreme and most successful subjugation ofDionysus. At the age of 70 Stravinskyfound a twentieth-centurycomposer who could help him in his life-long assault on GermanRomanticism. At last he could cease to rely on pre-Igoo models-and how different his music, and that of many others, might havebeen if they had accepted and imitated Webern'sradicalismwhen itwas new.

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Arnold Whittall - Stravinsky and Music Drama

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