Igor Stravinsky: The One Who Escaped

Igor Stravinsky was born in 1882, and lived until 1971.  Over the time span of his life, Communism was in full swing.  Both the regimes of Lenin and Stalin had run their course well before the composer's death in 1971.  But luckily for Stravinsky, and the music world, he largely escaped the repression of the Soviets.  Of course he was able to do this because he lived in France and America for most of his life, but Igor Stravinsky is still a distinctly Russian composer, and probably the best known too.

The young Igor grew up the son of relatively wealthy parents in St. Petersburg.  His father was a bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre, but like many Russian composers before him, Stravinsky's parents wanted him to become a lawyer.  So Stravinsky entered law school at the St. Petersburg University, but had remarkably poor attendance.  It was obvious the young Stravinsky's heart lay somewhere else.  This somewhere was music.

Stravinsky spent the summers during his time at law school with Rimsky-Korsakov, who was effectively the leading Russian composer at the time.  Rimsky-Korsakov urged Stravinsky to not enter the St. Petersburg Conservatory and instead take private composition lessons.  Stravinsky regarded Rimsky-Korsakov as a second father (his own had died in 1905) and took lessons from him until his death in 1908.

Stravinsky's score to The Rite of Spring

It seems that now Stravinsky was an independent and capable composer.  His two early orchestral works of 1909, Scherzo fantastique, and Fireworks, were sufficiently brilliant enough to attract the attention of Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of The Ballets Russes.

This led to three now famous commissions for Stravinsky, over the next five years.  All three were ballets for Diaghilev, and each one surpassed the last in their impact on the musical world.  These three works make up the core of what is known as Stravinsky's "Russian Period", where his music is influenced heavily by Russian folklore and peasant music.  But this music is nothing like the music of The Five.

The first work to emerge was The Firebird, based on Russian folk legends about a mythical bird of the same name.  This ballet proved that Stravinsky was not only an inventive and original composer, but a brilliant orchestrator as well.

The second was called Petrushka, and tells the story of a Russian puppet who comes to life, complete with emotions, even though he his made of straw.  Petrushka, composed in 1911, pushed the harmonic envelope at the time, enough to have a chord named after it.  The so-called "Petrushka" chord, a C major triad played simultaneously with a F# major triad, is used in the ballet to signal the appearance of the main character.

But Stravinsky's biggest success was yet to come.  The next year, the composer fulfilled his third commission from Diaghilev with The Rite of Spring, a brutal and violent work, depicting the pagan sacrifice of a young girl.  The work is ripe with irregular rhythms and dissonance, enough to cause an infamous scandal at its premiere in Paris.  Had this work been premiered some years later in Russia, Stravinsky would have surely been arrested, or worse.

Here is an excerpt from The Rite of Spring.  Note the sharp rhythms and chords used to convey a sense of savagery and ritual to this scene, "The Sacrificial Dance"

With the "success" of The Rite of Spring and his other ballets, Stravinsky was now a composer of international importance and influence.  And with the independence and clarity of mind that only a true artist can possess, Stravinsky turned away from his earlier style, and adopted an entirely new one, based on the classics of the 18th century.  The first work of this period was the ballet Pulcinella.

This "neo-classical" style of Stravinsky's lasted a long time, and saw some of the composers best work. During this time he wrote many articles about music and his theory of art.

Stravinsky after being arrested in the U.S.
for his arrangement of the national anthem

Here is a selection from the composer's 1936 autobiography:

I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.  Expression has never been an inherent property of music.  That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality.  It is simply an additional attribute which . . . we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention -- in short, an aspect we have come to confuse, unconsciously or by force of habit, with its essential being....


People will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not there.  The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses, and what the author had in mind when he composed it.  They never seem to understand that music has an entity of its own apart from anything that it may suggest to them....

A scene from the ballet Apollon Musagete

Stravinsky in his old age, still lively

Beginning in the 1950s, Stravinsky, who was now in his 70s, did something remarkable.  With all his success from 30 years of the neo-classical style, the composer decided to change styles for the third time.  Strangely, Stravinsky started composing in the style of serialism.

But Stravinsky didn't honor the objectivity that serialism claimed to give to music.  The music produced by Stravinsky in his unique serialist style tends to dwell on religious themes, from the ballad Abraham and Isaac to his Requiem Canticles for chorus and orchestra.  The latter work was even performed at his funeral in 1971.

Dmitri Shostakovich: "Muddle instead of Music"

"Muddle instead of Music" is the headline of this editorial in the Pravda, the official Communist Party Newspaper.  Two days before, Stalin, who had recently taken an interest in Soviet opera, had walked out on a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  The articles author was anonymous, but some speculate that it was Stalin himself lamenting the "deliberately dissonant, muddled stream of sounds" in Lady Macbeth.


The plot of the opera involves a Russian housewife in the 1800s, who falls in love outside of her marriage and is driven to murder.  This story, coupled with the "dissonant" music, inspired Stalin to condemn the opera as amoral and obscene.  This paved the way for more intense Communist censorship of Soviet artists.

That Shostakovich was at the center of these events in 1936 is not unreasonable.  Like Prokofiev, Shostakovich was a child prodigy, and also enrolled in the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 13.  Shostakovich was a little younger than Prokofiev, born in 1906 in St. Petersburg, but he also earned a reputation in the conservatory as an enfant terrible.  But except for Soviet censorship, the similarities stop there.  Shostakovich was a deeply complex man, who could be profoundly emotional, sometimes dry and cold, and especially darkly sardonic.  And after the above article appeared in the Pravda, he was a man continually haunted by a pall of fear.  The fear of political retribution Stalin had cast over the entire nation.

Shostakovich was not politically naive, and his musical career started off with great success, despite the music's radical nature.  The composer was prone to the grotesque and the avant-garde during these years, and beginning in 1929 he formed a relationship with film makers Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg.  In their silent film New Babylon, Shostakovich makes a habit of presenting the viewer with extreme musical juxtapositions to the action on screen.  The video example here shows the French Army shooting the members of the Paris Commune.  The music is a parody of Offenbach's jaunty can-can.  The juxtaposition undoubtedly makes a strong statement.

It was in this fashion that Shostakovich wrote his first opera The Nose.  The opera is, in fact, about a nose, and this nose is one that detaches itself from its owner and lives a life of its own.  An upper class life I might add.  The music is still ironic, and dissonant, in a way that the composer claimed mocked bourgeois values.  But it seems that Shostakovich was fooling himself, for he was soon after accused of "formalism."

A few years later the same thing happened with Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  But this time the scope was greater.  When the Pravda article came out, Shostakovich was working on his Fourth Symphony.  The composer realized this work would too be slapped with the formalist label, and decided to not have it performed.  Instead he continued on to his Fifth Symphony, one in a "democratic" style.  That is, a style well suited to the common man.  The symphony was a success, and earned Shostakovich the good graces of the authorities once again.  The Pravda even publicly praised Shostakovich for "not having given into the seductive temptations of his previous 'erroneous' ways".  After this redemption of sorts, the composer decided to 'lay low' and work mainly on film music, a favorite of Stalin's.

But as the Second World War came around, Soviet artists were given more freedoms, and a more pertinent role in society.  If Russia was winning, Stalin wanted a heroic symphony.  If they were losing, Stalin wanted a tragic one.  Shostakovich however switched this.  In the beginning of the war, when Russia was losing badly to the Germans, the composer presented his Seventh Symphony, a largely optimistic work.  By 1943 when the tide had turned for the Red Army, Shostakovich was expected to deliver another triumphant symphony.  But instead Russia received his Eighth Symphony, which was overwhelmingly somber.  Neither the Eighth nor 1945's Ninth Symphony satisfied Stalin's desires for works celebrating the USSR's glorious victories in the war, and both were unofficially banned.

Now that the war was over, the authorities once again reeled in Soviet artists via censorship.  Shostakovich was quickly denounced as a formalist, and this made him extremely paranoid.  He knew well Stalin's terror tactics, since many of his friends and colleagues had "disappeared" or been exiled to Siberia.  The composer used to wait outside at night for his arrest, so that it would not disturb his family.

But the arrest never came, and Shostakovich spent his time composing film music to keep him afloat financially.  He also now worked on official propaganda music so that he could regain favor with the Communists.  But his most important works from this period are the ones he wrote "for the desk drawer."  These include a Violin Concerto and a song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry.

Stalin sent Shostakovich and other artists to New York City in 1949 as artistic representatives of the Soviet Union to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace.  But the event was a humiliation for Shostakovich.  He had to play the party puppet, and support only the party's official views.  He even had to publicly denounce Stravinsky, a composer whose work he greatly admired.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Shostakovich grew less afraid of political retribution.  But he still joined the Communist party in 1960, so that he could become the General Secretary of the Composer's Union.  Some say that Shostakovich was blackmailed into becoming the secretary, and the holding of this post made him despondent and suicidal.  Also around this time his health began to deteriorate, and for the next 15 years he wrote very personal music, all of which ruminate darkly on themes of death, mortality, and art.

The composer's last string quartet, The 15th String Quartet.  The opening elegy from the selection above demonstrates the composer's preoccupation with morbid, and deeply personal themes.

Shostakovich died from lung cancer in 1975, as one of the Soviet Union's greatest, and most repressed artists.

Sergei Prokofiev

Prokofiev.  Undoubtedly one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and one of the most unique musical voices to come out of a century preoccupied with conformity to stylistic agendas.  Serialism, the process of creating atonality through the systematic organization of tones, cast a heavy shadow over Europe, with nearly all composers adopting its tenets.  Even though it enjoyed wide popularity in academic circles, Serialism was still considered radical due to its complete abandonment of traditional tonal harmony.  Fortunately, for diversity's sake, the USSR under Stalin and his prescription of "Socialist Realism", was cut off from the avant garde, including Serialism.


This isolation, from the western vantage, is traditionally viewed as negative, and detrimental to the development of Soviet composers.  But the Russian's enjoyed a certain freedom not afforded to the "free" countries of the West.  They didn't have to bear the pressure and influence of the academics and composers of the West.  In a way, this let Russian composers finally develop mature styles unique to themselves.  By being cut off from the West, the Russian composers neither had to prove their influence or absorb Western ideas.


So from this scene, emerges Sergei Prokofiev.  He was born in 1891 in the Donetsk Oblast province of Eastern Ukraine, and showed exceptional interest and ability in music from an early age.  He even began composing at 5 years of age.  His mother supported her son wholly, and arranged summer lessons for the boy with a composer pianist from the Moscow Conservatory.  By 1904 the 13 year old musician met Alexander Glazunov, the composition teacher at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.  Glazunov was very impressed by the young boy, and convinced his mother that Prokofiev should apply, despite his young age.  Prokofiev promptly enrolled at the Conservatory and his family moved to St. Petersburg to support him.


Even though he was quite talented, Prokofiev did not mesh very well with the Conservatory.  He found much of the education boring, and perhaps even below his abilities.  Furthermore the Conservatory was not very fond of his forward-looking and highly original ideas, and thus he gained the reputation of a rebel.  Still, Prokofiev warranted some praise at the school, and finished his career there by winning a prestigious piano competition in 1914.  He performed his own Piano Concerto No. 1.


Here is a clip from that piano concerto, written when Prokofiev was only 20 years old.
The concerto is still widely performed today, along with his other 4 piano concertos.

After winning this competition, Prokofiev decided to travel, and visited Paris and London.  He became interested in ballet, after fellow statesman and founder of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev proposed that Prokofiev should write a ballet for the group.  The composer obliged, and the resulting work, Chout, gained Prokofiev the respect of such cultural luminaries as Ravel, Cocteau, and Stravinsky.


By the time of the October Revolution in 1917, Prokofiev was a well established composer.  He now wished to live abroad in the United States, and the newly empowered Bolsheviks did not prevent him.  Prokofiev was on good terms with the party, and friends with some of its members, who viewed him as a "revolutionary in music" and thus a kindred spirit.


So Prokofiev lived in America for a few years, and garnered some success.  However, the failure of his opera The Love for Three Oranges prompted him to move to Paris in 1920 and reestablish his connections with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, in order not to return to Russia as a failure.


After 15 more years in Europe, the composer finally returned to his homeland.  Prokofiev had quite a large following in Russia, and was commissioned to write the music for some of Eisenstein's films, including Lieutenant Kije, and Alexander Nevsky, both of which received much acclaim from the public and the Soviets.  But soon enough, Prokofiev and his originality came under suspect of the Soviet authorities.  He was branded as a "formalist", that is, a dissenter from the standard "Socialist realism".
Many of his works were banned, or performances postponed on these grounds.  Even his Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution was banned, and was still only allowed a partial performance in 1966. 


Prokofiev grew tired and angry with his repeated censorship, and famously vented his feelings in 3 piano sonatas, generally known as the "War Sonatas".  These were Piano Sonatas 6, 7, and 8.  Most people interpret these sonatas as an expression of Prokofiev's contempt for Stalin, thanks to an allusion in the 7th Sonata to a lied by Schumann.  The words to Schumann's song, in English translation--"I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart." --make clear the plight of the Soviet composer under Stalin's regime.  Ironically, Sonatas 7 and 8 were both awarded the Stalin Prize.


As the USSR, entered the Second World War, the restrictions placed on Prokofiev and other Soviet artists were loosened.  Prokofiev began composing very emotional works, including the opera War and Peace after Tolstoy.  Still, it seems that Prokofiev was not so much inspired by the war, but by his own struggles with his family, and his discontent with Stalin.


By the war's end, the authorities came down on Soviet artists and tightened up restrictions again.  Most of Prokofiev's music written during the war was banned, and he was once again declared a "formalist" and a dangerous one at that.  As a result, many concert halls and theaters were afraid to program his work and Prokofiev fell into financial need the last few years of his life.


He died on March 5, 1953, the same day Stalin's death was publicly announced.  Since Prokofiev lived near Red Square, the crowds of people mourning Stalin prevented the removal of Prokofiev's body for three days.  The composers death received one small section on the last page of the paper.  It seems that even in death Stalin could obstruct Prokofiev.




Here is one of Prokofiev's best known works, Peter and the Wolf.  It was written while under Soviet censorship, but it is still a charming and original piece, aimed at children.  This is the March, and a great example of Prokofiev's unconventional yet memorable melodies.

Authentically Russian: The Five

In the latter half of the 19th century, Russia faced many internal conflicts, chief among them the problem of competing with the Western European powers while retaining a sense of national identity and individuality.  As always in Russian life, the country's problems and the people's problems are one in the same.  So in 1856 a young man, by the name of Mily Balakirev, who happened to be an amateur composer, decided to embrace in his music all things Russian.  From the folk dances to the legends, Balakirev wanted to reveal the value of Russian culture to the world.

Balakirev soon met another like-minded young man, Cesar Cui, and over a few years three more joined the group: Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin.  The men were all young.  By the time all five had been assembled, the oldest was 28 and the youngest 18.

Balakirev was the undisputed leader of the group, but this did not mean he dictated how the other members should compose.  Each composer developed their own highly individual style, though they all agreed on the group's founding tenet--to write music inspired by the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms of Russian folk music.  For some, like Rimsky-Korsakov, this meant incorporating Russian history and folk legends, as demonstrated by his large number of operas, including one based on and named after the folk hero Sadko, and another based on Ivan the Terrible entitled The Maid of Pskov.


                                             
                                             

                                                                                                                                                Mily Balakirev

Rimsky-Korsakov in 1863, shortly after joining The Five






The Five wanted to spread Russian music around the globe, and to a point, they succeeded.  While only a small number of works produced by members of the group have entered the repertory worldwide, most of their works enjoy a permanent place on concert programs in Russia.  Nevertheless, performance is not the only gauge of influence.  Many of the group's successors were heavily influenced by this 'alternative' to traditional classical music, and some of them went on to be the biggest composers of the 20th century.  Among those influenced include Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, who was taught by Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Glazunov, and Dmitri Shostakovich.  And beyond Russian composers, the two best known French composers, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, were inspired by The Five's use of 'exotic' scales and harmonies, and unconventional approach to modulation and form.

Ravel even orchestrated Mussorgsky's now well known piano work Pictures at an Exhibition.  The piece is inspired by the paintings of Viktor Hartmann, who was Mussorgsky's personal friend, and one of the first painters to use Russian motifs in his work.  Mussorgsky's work romanticizes Russian peasant life, among other things, and several of the movements depict Russian themes explicitly, such as the last two movements Baba Yaga's Hut on Fowl's Legs and The Great Gate of Kiev.

Modest Mussorgsky

Due to the low status classical music held in Russia at the time, most members of the The Five were not composers by profession, or took a long time to become financially independent as musicians.  Alexander Borodin was a chemist, and a good enough one to be co-credited with discovering the Aldol Reaction.  Still, his music was of a very high quality, ripe with lush harmonies and lyrical melodies.  Borodin is the only member of The Five who took a serious interest in writing chamber music.  The others looked down upon it, but Borodin's string quartets are some of the best in the genre.

CuiBorodin

Cesar Cui was also an 'amateur' composer, as his full time career was that of an army officer who specialized in, and published books about, 'fortifications'.  Cui also produced huge amounts of musical criticism that helped to define Russian musical values.  In his criticism, Cui was usually very negative towards Russian composers whom he felt conformed to the Western style, especially Tchaikovsky, and even occasionally a member of The Five received a lashing.  Cui is best known for his 15 operas and many art songs, all of which emphasize his literary bent.




It is ironic that The Five arose in the time period that they did.  In this late stage of Imperial Russia, the individual was becoming more prominent, what with Turgenev, Pushkin, and Tolstoy ushering in the Romantic and Nationalist era.  It is strange that a group of men, who in themselves are surely individual, should be so strongly associated with one another in one of the few time periods an individual could exist in Russia.


Here is an excerpt from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.  This is the last scene, known as "The Great Gate of Kiev".  This is the version orchestrated by Ravel.  The music is typical of the Russian-Nationalist style advocated by The Five, and features progressions alien to traditional western music, and other voice leading irregularities, such as parallel fifths.  Notice the lush, dramatic chords.