25

I can only attribute the musical style of the later acts-the

augmented seconds, parallel intervals, pentatonic tunes,
orchestral devices (tremolos, muted brass, cadenzas, etc.) to the
great difficulty I experienced in returning to the opera at all after
five years, and especially after Le Sacre du Printemps.^^
In 1917, he recast the music of Acts 2 and 3 as a symphonic poem and
later a ballet, entitled Le Chant du Rossignol. Always experimenting and
searching, Stravinsky began at this time to decrease the size of his orchestra
and to treat it in fimdamentally new and different ways. As he would later
state in his autobiography:
I ought to mention here a concert which had a certain
importance for me in view of my new orchestral experiments. On
December 6 a first performance of Le Chant du Rossignol was
given at Geneva at one of the subscription concerts of the
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under the direction of Ernest
Ansermet. I say new experiment because, in this symphonic
poem, written for an orchestra of ordinary size, I treated the
latter more as a chamber orchestra, and laid stress on the
concertante side, not only of the various solo instruments, but also
gave this role to whole groups of instruments. This orchestral
treatment was well adapted to music full of cadenzas, vocalises,
and melismata of all kinds, and in which tutti were the exception.
I enjoyed the performance greatly, for the rendering was careful
and highly finished.^^
The piano is quite prominent in Le Chant du Rossignol, appearing in
more than one-third of the work, although it is not used soloistically as often
as in Petrouchka. It is generally doubled by one or more other instruments in
a variety of different combinations, as is shown in Table 6 in the Appendix.
The most common instruments doubled with piano are the harp, the flute and
the piccolo; less frequently, the piano is doubled with brass or string
instruments. Glissandi are frequent, as are tremolos played with alternating
hands, both on single notes and on chords. Although there are some

^^Stravinsky, Memories and Commentaries, p. 131.

^^Stravinsky, An Autobiography, p. 84.