For the explosive energy and power of his music, and its exploring of unheard-of worlds of sound, Igor Stravinsky was the main figure in 20th-century music. Many of us are affected by the ethos of his music whether we are aware of it or not. Its confidence, sharpness, clarity, precision, and lack of sentimentality are distinctly modern and reflect the mood and tempo of the century.
“Since I myself was created, I cannot help having the desire to create.” —Igor Stravinsky
The classical music world seems to value anniversaries as a chance to pause and come to terms with the work of particular composers. Recent years have seen the birth or death anniversaries of some major figures: Claude Debussy, Hector Berlioz, and Ludwig van Beethoven. This year we mark yet another momentous anniversary, one closer to us: fifty years from the death of Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).
Stravinsky was, by any account, one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century; many would consider him the greatest. But placing him and his achievements in context, particularly for readers who are not adepts of music history, is not easy. I find that much writing about 20th-century music is lacking in clarity and order (two qualities Stravinsky prized). One often finds a thicket of information, giving the false impression that music in the modern era was a confusing chaos. Also, while musicologists do a good job of explaining why this composer’s music was novel and different, they don’t always convey the very real pleasure it can give. In addition, superficial clichés about modernism have tended to obscure who Stravinsky was and what he stood for.
Let us try, then, to shed some light on musical history. There are actually several coherent lines of development in 20th-century music, all of which were in place by the advent of World War I and extended themselves thereafter. Debussy might be called the godfather of modern music, with his new conception of harmonies and sounds existing for their own sake, the basic idea behind Impressionism. His experiments in harmony and tone color influenced virtually every composer working around the turn of the century and helped effect the transition from late Romanticism to early modernism in music.
For generations, composers had worked creatively within the system of functional, or common-practice, tonality. In this system, notes of the scale and chords of harmony have a certain hierarchy, and composers developed ways of ordering their music so that each musical “event” leads logically to another. What music historians often call the crisis, or collapse, or dissolution of tonality is a melodramatic way of saying that many composers at the turn of the 20th century felt the system to have run its course; common chord progressions and musical gestures had become banal, predictable; there was no longer anything fresh to say with them. Composers therefore looked in various directions for renewal. They looked both back into Western music’s pre-tonal past—into the old church modes, for instance—and into musical exotica, folk music and non-Western (especially Far Eastern) music. When Stravinsky was born in 1882, musical “nationalism” was an established trend, a sort of parallel to the national independence movements of the 19th century. In the musical realm, many composers were seeking emancipation from the dominance of Austro-German Romanticism, most latterly the giant figure of Richard Wagner.
Wagner had enlarged the orchestra, pushed tonal harmony to extremes of instability, and created more sheer sound than ever before. The question felt by many at the turn of the 20th century was “Where do we go from here?” and different composers had different answers. Many writers on 20th-century music concentrate on the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg’s radical experiments in atonality, which led to his formulation of the 12-tone system of composition, also known as dodecaphony or serialism—a system predicated on “the emancipation of the dissonance” and equalizing all notes of the chromatic scale.
Yet I believe that time has shown Stravinsky, not Schoenberg, to have been the main figure in 20th-century music. This point of view is affirmed by Robert Reilly in an interview with Stravinsky’s friend and associate Robert Craft, published in Reilly’s book Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. While Schoenberg’s ideas about atonality were stimulating to many composers, the Russian composer’s emphasis on rhythm and his own distinctive feel for harmony (which might be called post-tonal rather than atonal) and instrumentation proved an inexhaustible fund for modern composers to work with. In particular, his irregular accenting of the beat, aimed at overcoming the “tyranny of the bar line” that had so often caused music to fall into predictable units and phrases, was something truly new and fresh that excited both composers and listeners.
Stravinsky started out as a late Romantic/Impressionist composer, inheriting the Russian nationalist tradition (as upheld by his teacher Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov) combined with French Impressionist inclinations from Debussy. These were “pictorial” traditions—music that attempted to translate images and sensations into sound. The signal works of Stravinsky’s “Russian period” were the three famous ballets he wrote for Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet in Paris: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The first is quite traditional in style. The latter two, while also based on Russian folklore and melodies, were progressively more novel in their rhythms, harmonies and sound patterns. With The Rite (subtitled “Scenes from Pagan Russia”), Stravinsky created barbaric, convulsive music of an unheard-of violence and intensity. The barbarity was, however, for a purpose. The Rite is by no means a piece of absolute music; it is a stage piece depicting a pagan sacrificial fertility ritual. It is story-and-picture music of the most vivid and hair-raising kind.
Although Rite of Spring was shocking at first, both musically and visually—it is widely reported to have incited a “riot” at its premiere—in the long run it became a popular favorite, even being used as the soundtrack for the dinosaur drama of Disney’s animated film Fantasia. And with hindsight, we could even look upon The Rite as a late example of late-Romantic pictorialism, pushed to a fever pitch. It is a relic of a fin de siècle fascination with the atavistic and primitive.
After World War I and transitional works like The Soldier’s Tale and Mavra, Stravinsky changed his style quite drastically. He became a neoclassicist, following the trend of stripping down the excesses of Romanticism and replacing them with (in the words of critic Steven Kruger) “sparkling wine, dry wit, and crisp rational templates.”
The stylistic change reflected the feelings of many in the Western world after the devastation of the Great War. In hindsight, one could imagine The Rite as somehow predictive of that brutality. After the smoke cleared, there was a need for new aesthetic priorities—shoring or building up instead of tearing down in a spirit of shock. Rejecting musical nationalism made sense, since excessive nationalism had been one of the causes of the war. Stravinsky instead turned his attentions to renewing—sometimes commenting playfully on—the universal traditions of Western culture. Seemingly overnight, Stravinsky went from a wild primitivism to a civilized urbanity and restraint. He went to work translating 18th-century form and elegance into 20th-century terms, often with a touch of wit and irony.
Although it’s rarely noticed, Stravinsky’s turn to neoclassicism was, in a sense, prefigured in his native St. Petersburg, a city largely built by French and Italian Baroque and neoclassical craftsmen. Anyone growing up in that city would have been surrounded by architecture that combined Russian and classical Western influence—just as Stravinsky’s music does.
Musicologist Donald J. Grout calls one of the products of this period, the Symphony of Psalms (1930), “one of the great works of the twentieth century, a masterpiece of invention, musical architecture, and religious devotion.” Stravinsky wrote several compositions called “symphony,” but not all are symphonies in the conventional sense. This one might be described as a “choral symphony” to liturgical texts. Stravinsky set psalm texts from the Latin Vulgate, again showing the universality that was among the aims of neoclassicism. It is a plausible candidate for Stravinsky’s greatest piece.
Stravinsky’s neoclassicism continued through a long string of masterpieces, from Pulcinella to his wonderful moralistic opera The Rake’s Progress. These works were not a step back as their detractors claimed but, on the contrary, were remarkably innovative in their updating of the language of tonality.
Neoclassic music was “music for its own sake”—setting itself apart from the pictorial, the expressionistic, and the hyperemotional. Stravinsky’s earlier music often had a pronounced expressionist quality. A piece like Ragtime (1918) is a funny, slightly nightmarish deconstruction of the popular genre of the “rag.” This was a composer with a genius for absorbing and transfiguring many influences—from folklore, from the classical tradition, from popular culture (in addition to the ragtime piece, he later wrote the Ebony Concerto for jazz band)—and putting his personal stamp on all of them.
In a sense it was also Stravinsky, more than Schoenberg, who took the truly decisive step out of Romanticism. Schoenberg’s entire work was predicated on taking the traditions of German late Romantic chromaticism to their breaking point. Stravinsky, while he could use chromatic dissonance to piercing effect, also showed what freshness could still be drawn from the C-major scale. Much of his music is predicated on juxtaposing familiar materials in novel ways; sounding two ordinary chords simultaneously, for instance, or layering different rhythmic patterns on top of one another. Many listeners have wondered, understandably I think, whether atonal music is capable of expressing any emotions besides angst and vehemence. Because Stravinsky had access to both worlds, the diatonic and the chromatic, dissonance and consonance—in contrast to Schoenberg’s fixation on chromaticism—he has a wider range of expression and color, a greater richness of musical reference.
Regarding music and expression, there is a remark of Stravinsky’s that has become rather notorious: “I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all…expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.” These comments, however, should be seen in context: the composer was battling a post-Romantic aesthetic that applied a sticky, self-indulgent emotionalism to all music. The point he was making is actually very simple and basic: Music, in its pure essence, is simply music. It is not description, ideology, analysis, philosophy, or anything besides music. Stravinsky became one of the main upholders of the idea of music as a “pure” art, and of the need for boundaries and limits in artistic creation. A later statement of his perhaps shows his intentions best: “My artistic goal is to make an object, clearly and with a natural apportioning in it of my own self. I create the object because God makes me create it, just as he has created me.”
A work that puts the lie to the notion that Stravinsky’s own music is inexpressive is the Symphony in Three Movements, written in 1945 and inspired, on his own account, by wartime newsreels of the defeat of the Nazis and the Allied victory. The piece certainly conjures images, feelings, and physical gestures, and contains as convincing an expressive arc as any symphony of Beethoven.
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Late in his career, having settled permanently in the United States, Stravinsky once again surprised the music world: He had reached an impasse in his creative life and needed a change; he adopted Schoenberg’s serial technique, which he had previously disdained. We have thus the three style periods of Stravinsky: the Russian/primitivist, the neoclassical, and the serial. The composer’s “conversion” was welcomed by the avant-garde and seen by others as something akin to a defection to the enemy.
Although he did so out of a feeling of artistic necessity, Stravinsky’s embrace of serialism produced results that were, to my taste, very mixed. While more humane than much serialism, these works still come close at times to dry technical exercises; the composer seems to be giving us musical snippets instead of a nourishing meal. The bitty nature of serial construction—based as it is on the composer’s manipulation of the “tone row”—seems to destroy the arc that made Stravinsky’s earlier music so compelling.
Above all, serialism tended to negate what was distinctive about this composer to begin with: his idiosyncrasy and lack of any “system.” It’s true that serial Stravinsky still sounds very much like Stravinsky, not like the Second Viennese composers Schoenberg or Anton Webern. Even so, I can’t help but feel that some of his essence has been erased. The serial works have never caught on and are his least performed. (Oddly enough, Stravinsky concentrated on religious music in his serial period, an unusual marriage of the sacred and the ultramodern: Canticum sacrum, Threni, Abraham and Isaac, The Flood, Requiem Canticles, etc.)
Yet there is still so much more to his output. For all the hubbub that has always surrounded The Rite of Spring, I would argue that when all the serious analysis is done, the earlier Petrushka—the story of a puppet at a St. Petersburg fair who comes to life and is oppressed by very human troubles—will be seen to be just as influential a score, if not more so. Echoes of its exuberant and colorful sound world can be heard in countless places. It is friendlier music than The Rite without a doubt.
Stravinsky and Schoenberg are often viewed as the opposite poles of 20th-century music. Both composers believed that they were carrying on the Western musical tradition; neither saw himself as a destroyer. Both believed in pursuing order and method in musical creation. Yet Stravinsky’s music has survived to a degree that Schoenberg’s, and that of his followers, has not. I would submit that it was as a neoclassicist that he did his most substantive and enduring work—keeping in mind that his Russian soul never left him and is present in all his music.
It is very wrong to imply that Stravinsky’s reputation rests solely on the three famous ballets (and especially The Rite), as if he never wrote anything else. In fact, his oeuvre as a whole—some 127 compositions—is a glorious body of music, one too little known and appreciated. Lip service is paid to Stravinsky as the giant of modern music, but many listeners know little beyond the three early masterworks. Fortunately, Stravinsky’s music is not forbidding and there are many avenues into it. Once one has made an acquaintance with the classics from the Renaissance through Romanticism, one is ready to sample Stravinsky. In that spirit, my top ten:
- The Firebird
- Petrushka
- The Rite of Spring
- The Soldier’s Tale (theater piece “to be read, played, and danced”)
- Apollo (ballet score)
- Symphony of Psalms
- Symphony in C
- Symphony in Three Movements
- The Rake’s Progress (opera)
- Agon (ballet score; combines tonal and serial elements)
Playlist (Spotify subscription required; essay continues below):
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For me, Stravinsky’s death in 1971 is symbolic of the end of the Western classical music composing tradition. By this I don’t mean to suggest that there hasn’t been any good music written since then, but there has been very little in it that was truly new, and that is simply because the tradition had run its course and explored every possibility. The 1970s heralded the arrival of the postmodern sensibility, with its stylistic hodgepodges and self-conscious references. In the absence of a common mainstream musical style—as provided by living exemplars like Stravinsky—repetition, imitation, and decadence took hold.
I like to say that my favorites among the major composers are Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky. I include Stravinsky because in him I find all the previous epochs of musical tradition summed up with wit and gusto. A number of his mature works were either religious—reflecting his re-embrace of the Russian Orthodox faith in midlife—or based on classical myth, as the titles make clear: Apollo, Oedipus Rex, Perséphone, Orpheus, Agon. Far from demolishing everything that came before—as many people feared had happened in The Rite—Stravinsky opened a new path of creativity and renewal, based on continuity with the past. Even The Rite might be seen as having an anthropological basis, a sort of snapshot of primeval man.
For the explosive energy and power of his music, and its exploring of unheard-of worlds of sound, Stravinsky was for the 20th century what Beethoven was for the 19th. I believe many of us are affected by the ethos of Stravinsky’s music whether we are aware of it or not. Its confidence, sharpness, clarity, precision, and lack of sentimentality were distinctly modern and reflected the mood and tempo of the century.
But what I most value in Stravinsky’s work is its human content. Never satisfied with juggling abstract musical patterns, he infused his output with moral and spiritual purpose. From Petrushka’s resurrected puppet to the Faustian bargain in The Soldier’s Tale to the sacrificial love of Perséphone, his music is filled not only with sound-forms sufficient in themselves, but also with characters, ideas, images, themes, and archetypes that connect with the human soul. There is in his work a union of intellect, spirit, emotion, and physicality—his music always dances, even at a slow tempo—that is unique. Stravinsky once said that he wanted to “unite the most characteristically Russian elements with the spiritual riches of the West,” and there is no doubt that he accomplished that during his long life in Russia, France, and America. Whatever your opinion of the swerves he took in his stylistic path, there is no doubt that he remained always himself: one of the indelible personalities of the history of music and an indispensable figure in 20th-century culture. If Igor Stravinsky is Western music’s grand finale, surely no grander finale could be imagined.
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The featured image is a portrait of Igor Stravinsky (1915) by Jacques-Émile Blanche and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I had the pleasure of revisiting Stravinsky when writing a new article contrasting him to Boulez. Of course, Stravinsky wins every time. I recommend viewing The Rite of Spring as a ballet instead of just the orchestra piece. Much more satisfying.
Excellent article!
Excellent!