Stravinsky and Music Drama Author(s): Arnold Whittall Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 50, No.

1, 50th Anniversary Issue (Jan., 1969), pp. 63-67 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/732900 . Accessed: 06/12/2013 03:49
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STRAVINSKY AND MUSIC DRAMA

BY ARNOLDWHITTALL

1913 to I945. By comparison his four great contemporaries, Bartok, Berg, Sch6nberg and Stravinsky, retained close and obvious links with tradition, as exemplified by the dimensions and structures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Since Weber's originality, and influence, derived from his rejection of these structures and dimensions, and the concept of thematicism on which they were based, it is instructive to study how his contemporaries coped with their seemingly indissoluble involvement in them. Of the four, Stravinsky's involvement was probably the most complex, since in his case there was a clearly expressed hostility to the whole AustroGerman tradition, and, in particular, to the Wagnerian music drama. Stravinsky has described this as an attempt to turn philosophical speculations to musical account, to make music the servant of ideas rather than to cherish its self-sufficiency. He has not been prepared to regard the failure of the attempt as absolving Wagner from the sin of making it. In the 'Poetics of Music' he states that "music drama means that music is arbitrarily paralysed by constraints foreign to its own laws: music is betrayed by being turned into an object of philosophical speculation".1 If we separate, for a moment, the musical issue from the philosophical, it is obvious that Stravinsky has never had any feeling for the Teutonic concept of Durchcomponierung. He cannot accept a 'whole' which is not the sum of separate and self-contained parts. As a work gets longer, so the need for such 'segmentation' grows more acute. In opera, therefore, "arias, ensembles and their reciprocal relationships in the structure ... confer upon the whole work a coherence that is merely the external and visible manifestation of an internal and profound order".2 Wagner, in rejecting the number opera, also rejected coherence and order. His "music is more improvised than constructed, in the specific musical sense".' His work "corresponds to a tendency that is not, properly speaking, a disorder, but one which tries to compensate for a lack of order. The principle of
1 'Poetics of Music', p. 62. Op. cit., p. 64. Loc. cit.

THErelatively recent recognition of Weber as an important modern master gives a new perspective to the music of the inter-war period, and the scope of his influence since I950 is due in large part to the belief that he was the only genuinely radical composer of the period

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endless melody perfectly illustrates this tendency. It is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending".4 Whenever Stravinsky writes about Wagner, argument becomes abuse, anecdote becomes insult. Such writing is merely the residue of the more profound, creative anti-Wagnerianism which is Stravinsky's music. (The last work of his own in which he concedes Wagner's influence is the 'Scherzo fantastique' of I9g8).6 Only the excessive concern with Stravinsky's enthusiasms and the total neglect of his hostilities by recent commentators leads me to open the cupboard doors on these sagging skeletons. For it seems that Stravinsky's apparent blindness to the larger coherence and postponed unities of Wagner's operas is determined primarily not by musical considerations at all, but by philosophical and religious convictions-or prejudices. The master of objectivity has provided for 60 years a complete 'answer' to nineteenth-century German Romanticism which can all too easily be assumed to be universally and permanently valid, particularly by those who refuse to analyse the assumptions, musical and philosophical, on which it is based. As far as the nineteenth-century is concerned, Stravinsky's confessed likes and dislikes are predictable. Admiration for middleperiod Verdi; for the elegance and humour-not the "too frequent Tchaikovsky. Strauss is unable to punctuate; vulgarity" 7-of least in 'Prometheus' and the 'Poeme de l'extase', at Scriabin, suffers from "musical emphysema".8 Incidental swipes at Handel and Vivaldi, among others, create a suitable atmosphere of severity. Hellish length is not the sole qualification for failures. Since it is much more difficult to talk about principles of composition than destructively about composers, however, the following must be considered seriously: R.C. Do you work with a dialectical conception of form? Is the word 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 musical materials. 9 A little later on in the same book Stravinsky refers to his attempt "to build a new music on eighteenth-century classicism using the constructive principles of that classicism".'o Presumably all the talk in the 'Poetics' about the virtues of similarity and the dangers of
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 in Tristan and Isolde is 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. 4

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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 have happened to Wagner. But is there no logical discussion of musical materials in Wagner? And what does Stravinsky mean by improvisation? Apparently the absence of control, of lucid ordering. In Stravinsky's eyes, Weber and Verdi are not just different from Wagner, they succeed where he fails; but only because they provide perceptions which Stravinsky himself can use. Nowhere more than in his thoughts on Wagner are we conscious of reading, not a critic anxious to be fair but a composer who needs all the help he can get from a benign tradition. For Stravinsky, Wagner is the typical revolutionary, in revolt against tradition. In his sermon on tradition Stravinsky is at his wildest. "Far from implying the repetition of what has been", he claims, "tradition presupposes the reality of what endures ... Tradition thus assures the continuity of creation"." What we have then, is not an accusation from Stravinsky that Wagner's works do not assert the continuity of creation, but a confession that Wagner has been of no help to him in his own search for creative identity. This may be self-evident, but the reasons for it are less so. To see Stravinsky struggling to evaluate Schonberg-a composer who learned from Wagner-is to see a man determined to disprove his blindness by walking a tightrope in the dark. He does not mention, as well he might, that Schonberg himself was defeated in his attempt to recreate the continuous, philosophical music-drama. In the end, after all, Schonberg owed more to Brahms than to Wagner-Brahms the progressive assuring Sch6nberg of his function as a traditionalist. Only Webern broke, not like Stravinsky with just Brahms and Wagner, but with the entire nineteenth-century tradition. In doing so he provided Stravinsky with a precedent for the 'total thematicism' of his serial works as well as fulfilling Stravinsky's own unattained ideal of 'similarity'-compression eliminating the need for contrast. ends his Stravinsky 'Autobiography' with a clear statement of his anti-Romantic credo, his disgust with the apparent impostures of those unacknowledged legislators of the world who seek acknowledgement not for the good of the world but to satisfy their own egotism: Art postulates communion and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself. However, perfect communion is rare and the more the personality of the author
is revealed the rarer that communion becomes.12

This final statement shows how completely out of touch Stravinsky can be. He does not say, here, that to reveal one's personality is to make bad art. This would be even more absurd; for just as a composer's work reflects his personality (though not necessarily his feelings when composing a particular work), so an audience responds
12

11'Poetics',

p. 59. '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 central misunderstanding: to Stravinsky's ideas on the relationship between art and religion. Here the Dionysian, formless Wagner becomes, for good measure, a blasphemer. Stravinsky objects to "the principle of putting a work of art on the same level as the sacred and symbolic ritual which constitutes a religious service".l The clear distinction between the two, for him, is that an audience rightly approaches a work of art in a spirit of criticism: they are humans assessing human activity. In church such an attitude is blasphemous. It can certainly be claimed that the Bayreuth Wagner cult was directed towards the establishment of an uncritical atmosphere. Stravinsky experienced this himself, as he amusingly recounts in his 'Autobiography'.14 But his refusal to look more deeply into the Wagnerian phenomenon was a historical luxury, a piece of selfindulgence as understandable as Wagner's own arrogance in the face of contemporary hostility. The fact remains that one can approach Wagner in a spirit of criticism even at Bayreuth, and still enjoy and admire his achievements as an artist. One can appreciate without worshipping: and one suspects that it was possible, however difficult, to do this in 912. It is interesting to compare Stravinsky with another contemporary Catholic composer who is much more disposed to accept Messiaen. In outline the contrast is complete. Wagner-Olivier Stravinsky severe, liturgical, primarily penitential; Messiaen not composing for the Church-he writes less and less organ musicbut using the world of nature as a symbol of perpetual praise. Messiaen is an ecstatic. He has used images of sensuality more his forms have directly than Wagner-as in 'Cinq Rechants'-but become much more severely controlled. He has never written for the theatre, but his music is always descriptive. Yet Messiaen is not Wagnerian, in that he composes in long, unbroken but progressing still possible: spite of Stravinsky-is spans. Expressionism-in have been two Since the a is Wagner greater problem. expansionism in conflict and nowhere more nakedly than in the theatre. Operas become yearly more old-fashioned, ballets more abbreviated. If experiment is any yardstick, however, activities of the CunninghamCage variety have placed ballet in the forefront of the avant-garde,a position opera is never likely to occupy. At times it seems that the Romantic Messiaen is more objective than the anti-Romantic Stravinsky. Messiaen's rituals spring from an acceptance of the world: he has no need of arrogance. Stravinsky, so much more hieratic and exclusive, cannot avoid expressing a conflict between his own creative ego and his belief in self-effacement as an important step along the road to salvation.
13 Ibid., p. 39. 14 0p. cit., pp. 38-9.

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was new.

It is obvious that Wagner's achievement cannot be measured simply in terms of his influence or of hostility to him. But as long as it seems necessary to dance on his grave in the Stravinskianmannerin the ritual sacrifice Wagner is the ultimate victim-music will remain in a state of reaction against him. It may well be that in any case he has nothing to tell the present about musical form. Only when the period of reaction is over can we be sure of that. Stravinsky's anti-Wagnerianism did not result in a Brahmsian avoidance of the theatre, but in an effort to provide comprehensive and pregnant alternatives. This is the paradox of his whole creative life, for his involvement with traditional forms has been much greater than that of Debussy or Webern, and in spite of notable experiments like 'Les Noces', 'Oedipus Rex' and 'Persephone', he has been unable to 'rethink' music drama on radical lines. One of the reasons for this is an innate preferencefor 'moral tales' of a type which have been appropriate to opera throughout its history, whatever the structural principles of composition employed. Since 1950 Stravinskyhas not followed Webern in rejecting the theatre, but his most effectively dramatic music is that which extends a Webernian clarity and concentration into a Carissimi-likeworld of religious narrative. The middle section of 'A Sermon, Narrative and Prayer', which recounts the stoning and martyrdom of Stephen, is much more than just another example of Stravinsky'sobsessionwith the sacrificial. It is dramatic without being theatrical: it is the positive fulfilment of a lifetime's anti-Wagnerianism, but it accepts Webern rather than Verdi or Bach as the true contemporary alternative to Wagner's methods. Stravinsky's subject-matter as a musical dramatist has never been anti-Wagnerian: it could not be, since the resonancesof Wagner'smyths are so inclusive and profound. But Webern decisively broke the connection between religious music and music drama, and in his 'Narrative' Stravinskymay have taken the first step towards restoring it. The indications are that dramatic oratorio may survive, and renew itself, while opera merely reiterates the old forms and the old subjects. If this is so, Stravinsky's antiRomanticism may prove to be a decisive influence on the whole future of music. It is as important and inevitable a part of both his nature and achievement as its examination and reconsiderationmust be for all composers today. Webern's rejection of Wagner's dimensions, as well as his subject matter, has provided Stravinsky with the vital precedent for his own most extreme and most successful subjugation of Dionysus. At the age of 70 Stravinsky found a twentieth-century composer who could help him in his life-long assault on German Romanticism. At last he could cease to rely on pre-Igoo modelsand how different his music, and that of many others, might have been if they had accepted and imitated Webern's radicalism when it
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