Igor Stravinsky at Paris' Cafe Gaillac in 1923
(Large jpg - 28K)
What single composer wrote musical settings for texts by T S Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, W H Auden and Edward Lear? You're thinking a Briton. Wrong. Add to the list Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide and Paul Verlaine. Now you're racking your brain for a French composer who would voluntarily set English poetry to music. Hopeless. Round the list out with Konstantin Balmont and Pushkin, and the answer is (as it had to be from the first) Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).
Stravinsky's music figures substantially in this year's White Nights Festival, in both concert hall and theater.
The literary variety of Stravinsky's oeuvre reflects his successive migrations, necessitated by two world wars and the advent of communism, to Switzerland, France, and finally to the United States.
His international celebrity began in Paris, where he wrote ballets for Diaghilev's Russian Seasons. It is this period of Stravinsky's career which is most broadly represented in the festival.
The inspiration for "The Rite of Spring" came to Stravinsky in a dream of pre-Christian Russia. In his dream, a young girl was selected by her tribe for the solemn honor of dancing herself to death as a sacrifice to the gods of fertility. Nikolai Roerich, an artist, philosopher and specialist in ancient Rus, helped develop the scenario. The premiere in Paris was the occasion of one of the greatest scandals in the history of ballet. As a precaution, perhaps, the festival presents it in concert form (June 18).
This ballet of barbaric renewal has a more civilized counterpart, in the sung choreographic scenes called "The Wedding" (Les Noces). The composer assembled the libretto from Kireyevsky's collection of folk songs. When he first played sketches of the piece for Diaghilev, the latter was moved to tears. The accompaniment is uniquely and strikingly scored for four pianos plus percussion. The climax of the final scene is the groom's tender love song to his bride after all the guests have gone, in which the accompaniment brilliantly suggests the stately peals of the bright wedding bells. It is one of the most profoundly emotional moments in twentieth-century music. At the festival, you can hear it in the hall (June 24) or see it on the stage (June 29).
Paired with the staged "Wedding" above is an enchanting production of Stravinsky's first full opera, "The Nightingale" (Le Rossignol), based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen. The Emperor of China has a nightingale brought to his court, but prefers the song of a mechanical bird presented by Japanese emissaries. The set is a fairy-land, and the costumes are dazzlingly rich.
It is a musical fable for auditors of all ages. The visual spectacle is captivating, and an especial treat for the young, while the simple tale speaks directly to the most experienced. For despite the Emperor's ill-advised preference for mechanism and artifice over Beauty and Nature, it is the live nightingale's song which gives him strength to rise from his death-bed.
The Great Hall will ring with much more great music by this most celebrated pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, including the alternately steely and lyrical Concerto for Two Pianos (June 24), the Symphonies of Wind Instruments in memory of Claude Debussy (June 28), and the exhilarating score for the ballet "Petrouchka" (June 30). "Petrouchka" is the most Petersburgish of Stravinsky's stage works, about a puppet magically brought to life on Admiralty Square during the Maslenitsa fair, only to find himself on the short side of a love triangle.