Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger’s 1983 book is not just a good book about Stravinsky—of which there are several—it’s a work of art about other works of art. A rarer case. The only example I can think of is Nabokov’s book on Gogol.
Yes, there are classics of criticism, essential texts, but these tend to be about the author more than the subject. The poem/picture/composition functions as a pretext for whatever the author wants to say. But this book never crosses that line: the focus is Stravinsky, not Andriessen or Schönberger.
It takes the form of 45 chapters—some just a few paragraphs long—divided into 4 sections of 11 chapters each, plus an epilogue. Each is a self-contained discussion. The subject matter ranges widely, and there’s no sense of an argument being sustained. It’s aphoristic, not didactic. One passes from dense musical analysis, to discussions of Stravinsky’s life and times, to a journal of a comically futile expedition to visit all of Stravinsky’s residences in Switzerland, to discussions of other people significant in Stravinsky’s life.
Andriessen and Schönberger take up even the most lifeless old Stravinskian issues (neoclassicism, Adorno, emotion) and re-frame them in a way that makes them interesting. Then they proceed to add unexpected comments. At every point their comments are acute, unexpected and provocative. If one of the signs of good criticism is that it makes you eager to revisit the work in question, this book definitely rates very high. By the second paragraph I was searching for “Chanson russe” and “Marva,” and then later for Scriabin …. I have been listening to Stravinsky continuously for 40 years, and yet my taste has been refreshed.
Quotes:
“Stravinsky’s much-praised clarity is an extraordinary form of turbidity.”
“Stravinsky was not the only Stravinsky in history.” (i.e. C.P.E. Bach, Purcell, Pergolesi, Mozart: composers with many stylistic masks rather than a continuous theme, also craftsmanship, impersonality, greed …)
“Stravinsky’s classicism is always slightly irritating, the music is unfinished.”
There is a beautiful chapter devoted to Agon: “The violinist imitates a violinist playing Webern. … The mandolin in the Coda is Tchaikovsky’s harp, just back from the Viennese dry-cleaner. … Agon is a game, with the devil as challenger and the history of ballet as opponent. … The last bars … sound like the end of a Florentine ballet from 1380. Only with the last chord does it become apparent that no candles are being blown out, but that the switch is being turned off. With one flick of the wrist, out go the lights.”
The final chapter is the apex of the author’s art. It is at once another journal of pilgrimage (Stravinskian sites in St. Petersburg). It is also a meditation on bells: the bells of St. Petersburg, the bells of Russia, the bells of St. Paul’s in London, the bells and chimes in Stravinsky’s music from Firebird to Requiem Canticles: “… Bells unsettle the awareness of what they, as clockwork, regulate: time. A bell is also an audible calendar; nowadays merely proclaiming the hour, once also announcing events—birth, marriage, fire, war, peace.”
[Image: Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, 1911]
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