Stravinsky and Neo-Classicism

Author(s): Donald Mitchell

Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 61/62 (Spring - Summer, 1962), pp. 9-13
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/944077
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 STRAVINSKY AND NEO-CLASSICISM 9

An interesting subsidiary pattern in the grouping of the sections after the

expository first three is the refrain-like recurrence of an identical pattern of
statements of the series-first appearing in the second half of section (c), and
recurring in sections (e), (g), (i) and (k)-in alternation with varying patterns
in sections (d), (f), (h) and (j ), in which the new transpositionsare all
introduced.
The description in words of all these purely musical procedures, and the
attempt to suggest the formal relationships between them, is cumbersome, and
the reader who studies Ex.3 closely will grasp them much more clearly than I
have been able to describe them. Certainly the telling effect and function of
the transpositions as tonal modulations are visually and aurally plain. Possibly
on the serial level my analysis reads subtleties of structure into the piece where
Stravinsky was working by pure instinct and had nothing of the kind consciously in
mind, but the disposition and restricted range of his transpositions does suggest
that the scheme was planned in accordance with the shape and range of the series,
if not with the actual note-order, and that the study of Stravinsky's later and more
strictly serial works, especially the twelve-note ones, from the same point of
view, might prove fruitful.

STRAVINSKY
AND NEO-CLASSICISM
by Donald Mitchell'
Stravinsky himself has argued that neo-classicism embraced not only his
own works but those of his great contemporaries: "Every age," he observes,
"is a historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either/or to its partisan
contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or
come to be components of the same thing. For instance, 'neo-classic' now begins
to apply to all of the between-the-war composers (not that notion of the neo-
classic composer as someone who rifles his predecessors and each other and then
arranges the theft in a new 'style'). The music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern
in the twenties was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but these
composers now appear to have used musical form as I did, 'historically'. My use
of it was overt, however, and theirs elaborately disguised. (Take, for example,
the Rondo of Webern's Trio; the music is wonderfully interesting but no one
hears it as a Rondo.) We all explored and discovered new music in the twenties,
of course, but we attached it to the very tradition we were so busily outgrowing
a decade before."2
There are surely some questionable aspects of this statement? Stravinsky
rightly deprecates the naivity of the popular conception of the neo-classical
composer. But it can hardly be denied that neo-classical procedures, however
subtle, entail a deliberate pre-occupation with the past. Stravinsky himself, in
I This excerpt from Donald Mitchell's forthcoming book, TheLanguageof ModernMusic, appears by permission
of the publishers, Messrs. Faber and Faber Ltd.
2 Conversationswith Igor Stravinsky, London, 1959, p. I26. If the rondo character of Webern's Rondo is, in
fact, inaudible, one wonders if it may be legitimately described as even a disguised example of neo-classicism?
In a later book, Memoriesand Commentaries,London, I960, p. 22, Stravinsky refers to three "neo-classic"
schools, ascendant from 1930 to I945-Schoenberg's, Hindemith's, and his own.
) x9 6 2 by Donald Mitchell
1o TEMPO

words that show a care for the complexities of the issues involved, expresses
the "notion" thus, in Memoriesand Commentaries(p. I Io) :
"My instinct is to recompose, and not only students' works, but old
masters' as well. When composers show me their music for criticism
all I can say is that I would have written it quite differently. Whatever
interests me, whatever I love, I wish to make my own (I am probably
describing a rare form of kleptomania)."
This brilliant flash of self-examination is part of an answer to a question
from Mr. Craft about teaching. The general sense of it, however, informs
Stravinsky's later observations on Le Baiser de la fie and Pulcinella, in Expositions
and Developments(pages Jog, I
i3-14):
"I believe, with Auden, that the only critical exercise of value must
take place in, and by means of, art, i.e., in pastiche or parody: Le
Baiser de la fe and Pulcinella are music criticisms of this sort, though
more than that, too".
"Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which
the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of
course-the first of many love affairsin that direction-but it was a look
in the mirror, too. No critic understood this at the time, and I was there-
fore attacked for being a pasticheur,chided for composing 'simple' music,
blamed for deserting 'modernism', accused of renouncing my 'true
Russian heritage'. People who had never heard of, or cared about,
the originals cried 'sacrilege'; 'The classics are ours. Leave the
classics alone.' To them all, my answer was and is the same: You
respect, but I love."
There could be no clearer statements, one might think, of Stravinsky's
unequivocally positive attitude to the past, which obliges him to compose to
a 'model' or 'personality' as part of his natural composing process. We are, in
truth, continually faced in Stravinsky's neo-classical works by the 'recomposing'
of which he himself has spoken; and his 'love', we may note, need not exclude
an element of objective criticism. Indeed, both affection and aggression are
involved in his "love affairs" 1
Of one thing we may be absolutely certain; that there has not been a case
like Stravinsky's in any previous period of musical history. Up to a point, of
course, the past has always had a role to play in every composer's music. The
emerging master (Beethoven, say) has composed against the background of his
predecessors (Haydn and Mozart in Beethoven's case, the former particularly),
even aggressively so (Beethoven again). One might claim that affection had
rather less to do with the relationship of a classical composer to his "models".
He wished, in a sense, to develop away from them, to triumph over them.
Even the passive Mozart: are we to imagine that he did not enjoy writing all
those indifferent i8th century composers out of existence, whose cliches appear,
immeasurably transformed, in his own music? That Bach, for that matter, did
not savour his "recompositions" of Vivaldi?
It is plain, indeed, that Stravinsky felt something of this kind of pleasure
himself when writing Pulcinella and Le Baiser ("music criticisms . . . though
more than that, too"). But what radically divorces Stravinsky from any classical
precedents one may have in mind is the immense distance in time that separates
I A point made in Hans Keller's "Towards the Psychology of Stravinsky's Genius", TheListener,29 November,
I956.
 STRAVINSKY AND NEO-CLASSICISM 1i

him from 'his' past. It was their immediate predecessors who were the concern
of composers in earlier times. But not so for Stravinsky, for whom the immediate
past, both in general and in particular (his "true Russian heritage"), was soon
to be abandoned as a major influence in his music. (The Firebird, which the
world will rightly continue to value more highly than its composer, might
be considered, in some respects, as a "criticism" of Rimsky-Korsakov. It is
in this early work, in fact, that one encounters, almost for the last time, that
immediate continuity-expansion-criticism of a tradition that had hitherto been
characteristic of musical history. One does not really meet it again in Stravinsky
until the present day, when his serial works bring him in relation to a "past"
that is closer to him in time than have any of the "backward looks" of his
strictly neo-classical period.)
One may well wonder, on a superficial reading of the facts, how this past-
obsessed period in Stravinsky's long creative life, may be classified as a manifest-
ation of the New. But one can only -and mistakenly-think of Stravinsky as
curator of a private museum if one closes one's ears to the sound of his neo-
classical music, which affirms in every bar his own statement that "a new piece
of music is a new reality". 1 It has now become a cliche to remark upon Stravinsky's
ability to remain himself whatever "model" he cares to adopt, but the cliche
is none the less true because it happens to form part of the vocabulary of almost
every commentator on Stravinsky's music. The validity of the cliche even
survives the difficulty that many commentators find in pinning the right model
to the right work. One encounters a typical confusion in the responses to Strav-
insky's violin concerto (1931), a shamefully neglected work, in the two slow
Arias of which the composer, for me at least, offers some of his deepest and most
finely poised "classical" inspirations; so finely poised, indeed, that no one can
decide which models are involved. ("Tansman and Strobel", writes Roman Vlad,
"have mentioned the name of Bach, Casella that of Weber, while others have
even spoken of Tchaikovsky.'")2 Mr. Vlad does not commit himself to an opinion;
I should plump for Bach. Much the same kind of muddle confronts us if we
seek for a concensus of opinion about the "sources" of The Rake's Progress. It is
not unusual to come across rival claims made on behalf of the model that has
supposedly served Stravinsky as a springboard in a particular aria.
The very problem of precise recognition emphasizes the wealth and scope
of Stravinsky's references and reminds us of the powers of transformation his
wonderful genius enjoys. None the less, the fact (or presence) of the models
remains, whether we recognize them or not, whether they are explicit (as in
Pulcinella or Le Baiser or concealed as in the violin concerto or a dozen other
works); we sense them-feel them-even if we cannot pin them down (we
can't wish them away). We feel them, I suggest, and rightly so, not as quotations
or face-lifts or the donning of masks (all aspects of neo-classical practice very
different from Stravinsky's own, and some of them certainly disreputable), but
as the natural and perfect expression of Stravinsky's feelings about the past;
which brings me to what I take to be the crux of the matter.
For what Stravinsky has achieved in his neo-classical music seems to me to
fall very much into line with what we have already observed as characteristic of
manifestations of the New elsewhere, in both music and the other arts: the
exploration of new worlds of feeling, or, to put it more accurately, and once
i Expositionsand Developments,p.o102.
2 Stravinsky, London, I960, p. i iE. (Translated by Frederick and Ann Fuller.)
12 TEMPO

more to return to Giedion's unique insight, making "new parts of the world ...
accessible to feeling" .' The new part of the (musical) world that Stravinskymade
accessibleto active creative eeling was no less than the past itselfy This extraordinary
act may have had its historical precedents, as I have already suggested, and even
been shared among Stravinsky's great contemporaries to a degree that enables
one to write sensibly of a "movement". But the more deeply one dives into
Stravinsky's neo-classical music, the clearer it becomes that his achievement is
not only greater, more serious and more significant than that of any other com-
poser working in this field, but also wholly distinct in kind. The "movement",
in fact, would seem to belong to its minor practitioners, not to its master,
Stravinsky.
This would seem to contradict what the composer himself has written in
the passage quoted above, where Stravinsky shrewdly-but perhaps a little self-
defensively-points out that the serial composers, too, showed neo-classical
tendencies. One cannot doubt that this is, up to a point, a perfectly just comment;
think, for instance, of Berg's well-nigh manic obsession with traditional formal
procedures in Wozzeck or of Schoenberg's lifelong preoccupation with
classical sonata form. But though one may wish to agree with Stravinsky that
one meets here a hidden but none the less "historical" use of form (much more
so in Berg than in Schoenberg, who, by the way, was not above a mild bout of
archaising now and again in the manner that is most generally associated with
neo-classicism, e.g., in his Serenadeop. 24), it is hard to place the neo-classicism
of Schoenberg and his "school" and the neo-classicism of Stravinsky on an equal
footing.2 That there was a certain "historical unity" none may deny, but it was
surely not more than a semblance? After all, if we play Stravinsky alongside
Schoenberg, or Berg, it is not a common attitude to the past that strikes one as
a unifying principle in their music.
For a start, one finds that it is not "neo-classicism"'' (in the sense of the term
that one applies to Stravinsky's music) that flies to one's lips (or pen) when
describing the senior serial composers. Is it not "tradition" that one falls back
on-that one experiences, indeed, in their music? (I notice that I have used
"traditional" already, when writing about Berg.) A sense of tradition was cert-
ainly strong in these men, particularly in Schoenberg, as we were recently
reminded by Roberto Gerhard:
"Schoenberg's sense of belonging to a tradition and of working in the
main stream of that tradition is alive in every phase of his evolution,
even at his most boldly innovating."3
Despite the radical innovations in language, in fact, the sense of tradition persists
and expresses itself most powerfully in the maintenance of traditional forms,
however much expanded or re-formulated. Tradition, indeed, was a "live"
issue for Schoenberg and his pupils as it never was, never has been, for Stravinsky.
One exaggerates only a little I think if, holding in mind the characteristic forms
of Schoenberg and Berg, one discerns a relation between them and their past
not very different in kind from that which we have noted as a general feature of
I Sigfried Giedion, Space, Timeand Architecture,London, 1956, p.472. We find a perfect example in literature
of what Giedion has in mind; Dickens's incorporation of the Railway Age into his novels, a new world which
he made "accessible to feeling" in, and through, a whole battery of new poetic images. This specific achieve-
ment is fully documented in The Dickens World, Humphry House, 2nd edtn., London, 1942, pp. I37--I45.
2 In some respects the most overtly neo-classical work Schoenberg wrote was his Suite for String Orchestra
in G major (1934), one of his later tonal compositions. It is not without significance, I think, that the return
to tonality posed a problem of style that was solved, in part at least, by the adoption of some characteristic
neo-classical features.
3 Article in The Sundav Telegraph, 3 December, 1961, p.Ii.
 STRAVINSKY AND THE MUSES 13

composers throughout the history of music. They composed, in short, against the
background of the past (the immediate past, even, if we are prepared to accept
that "immediate", for the Viennese composer, means Beethoven and Brahms,
not to speak of Haydn and Mozart), in the tradition of their eminent forbears.
One meets here not so much neo-classicism as a continuation of the classical
heritage.

STRAVINSKYAND
THE MUSES
by Herbert Read
The interrelation of the arts is a fruitful subject for discussion, but leads
only to pedantry if the intention is only to make distinctions. It is more interest-
ing to trace the similarities, perhaps even to find an all-embracing identity, but
that task demands an unusual range of sensibility. The senses are dependent on
separate organs of sensation, so that a sensitive eye is not necessarily housed in
the same body as a sensitive ear. The musician may be colour-blind, the painter
tone-deaf, and there may even exist some law of compensation in the nervous
system, so that the hypertrophy of one sense involves the atrophy of another.
Men of universal sensibility are rare, but they do exist and Stravinsky is one of
them.
Serge Diaghilev, with whom Stravinsky was so closely associated in the
formative stage of his career, was another man of universal sensibility, and since
his genius was for presentation-in itself an art demanding the finest sensibility-
he brought together in a common enterprise musicians and painters, poets and
choreographers. His greatest successes were marriages between true minds,
minds linked by common sympathies and identical ideals. In tracing the origins
and development of the modern movement in art one continually comes across
this prince of impresarios, animated not so much by the vulgar ambitions of a
showman, but rather by a sensitive comprehension of the nature of the revolution
in the arts that was taking place in Europe, and anxious to give direction and
force to its manifestations. Diaghilev realized that revolutions are not made in
studios; the artist must come into the open, join forces with his fellow artists,
and overcome the greatest enemy of the arts-public indifference. Diaghilev's
ballets, from 1909 onwards, were the visible and aggressive embodiment of
the avant-garde: without them, the main body of the modern movement would
have been delayed for decades.
Nevertheless, talent is matured in stillness, almost in secrecy. Very signific-
ant in Stravinsky's life must have been those years of forced seclusion which
he spent in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland-they began with the outbreak of war
in 1914 and were prolonged to 1920. Here a circle of poets, musicians and
painters was formed-it included Stravinsky, Ernest Ansermet, who was so
often to conduct his work, Ramuz, a great poetic writer not sufficiently apprec-
iated in the English-speaking world, who was to provide the texts for L'Histoire
du Soldat and some of the songs, the brothers Alexandre and Charles-Albert
Cingria, and Rene Auberjonois who was to paint the decor for Soldat. It was
a time of joyful collaboration and of the development of mutual understanding
( 1962 by Sir Herbert Read