Strawinsky: a New Composer
Strawinsky: A New Composer, by Carl Van Vechten, is an essay-length profile of the Russian composer Igor Strawinsky (Stravinsky), written to introduce American readers to his life and work as the Russian Ballet prepared to bring his music to New York. Van Vechten opens by situating Strawinsky within the broader phenomenon of Serge de Diaghilew's Russian Ballet, which had brought Europe's most important new music to Paris and London through productions of works by Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakow, Borodine, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Debussy, and others. Among all these contributors, Van Vechten argues, Strawinsky stands out as the composer who has forged a genuinely new orchestral language while remaining the true heir of the nationalist "Five" (Cui, Borodine, Rimsky-Korsakow, Balakirew, and Moussorgsky), bypassing the more cosmopolitan Tschaikowsky-Rubinstein tradition. The essay is anchored by three vivid personal reminiscences. The first recounts the riotous Paris premiere of The Sacrifice to the Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), where the audience's outrage at the ballet's primitive rhythms and dissonant harmony erupted into open warfare between hissing detractors and defiant supporters, during which a stranger in the next box unconsciously drummed on Van Vechten's head in time with the music. The second describes a calmer evening at Petrouchka, already a popular success, where the shy, near-sighted young composer was dragged onstage by Nijinsky to acknowledge applause. The third relates a conversation with conductor Alfred Hertz in London after a performance of the opera The Nightingale, in which Hertz confesses being overwhelmed by the score and longs to introduce it to New York. Van Vechten then surveys early critical reception, particularly the writings of M. D. Calvocoressi, the first English-language critic to champion Strawinsky. Through Calvocoressi's articles and quoted remarks from the composer himself, Van Vechten explains Strawinsky's central aesthetic principle: rejection of thematic "working-out," development, and repetition in favor of terse, direct expression that mirrors the text rather than elaborating on it. This method, traced back to Moussorgsky's Boris Godunow and its refusal of Wagnerian leitmotiv-based amplification, demands more concentrated listening than audiences accustomed to Wagner's repetitive, intellectually-cued emotional cues are used to giving. A detailed plot summary of The Nightingale follows, based on Hans Andersen's tale: the Emperor of China's court seeks out a real nightingale, is later seduced by a mechanical replacement, banishes the real bird, and, dying, is saved when the true nightingale's song persuades Death to relent. Van Vechten describes the opera's restrained but colorful orchestration and notes Strawinsky's own ambivalence about combining words, music, and stage action, along with his intention never to write another such hybrid work. A biographical sketch traces Strawinsky's life from his birth in 1882 near Petrograd, through his early legal studies, piano training, and pivotal apprenticeship under Rimsky-Korsakow beginning in 1902. It follows his early compositions—including a symphony in E flat, Le Faune et la Bergère, Scherzo Fantastique, Fireworks, and the Chant Funèbre written in tribute to Rimsky-Korsakow's death—up through his discovery by Diaghilew and the composition of his three major ballets: The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911), and The Sacrifice to the Spring (1913). Each of these ballets receives extended discussion. The Firebird is praised for its kaleidoscopic orchestral color illustrating a Russian fairy tale involving Prince Ivan, the sorcerer Kostchei, and the titular magical bird. Petrouchka is described as a realistic, sometimes deliberately vulgar depiction of a Russian carnival populated by folk-tune-derived dances and a tragic puppet love triangle. The Sacrifice to the Spring is treated as Strawinsky's most radical achievement: a nearly plotless ritual drama of pagan sacrifice built on rhythm rather than melody or descriptive narrative, with harmonies and chord formations Van Vechten calls unclassifiable by academic standards, quoting critics Edward Burlingham Hill and M. Montagu-Nathan on its revolutionary character. Van Vechten closes by placing Strawinsky within Russian musical history, contrasting the nationalist "Five" with the more cosmopolitan Rubinstein-Tschaikowsky school, and crediting Strawinsky as heir to Moussorgsky's simplicity and Rimsky-Korsakow's Oriental color sense, while insisting his affinities with French Impressionists like Debussy and Ravel reflect their shared debt to earlier Russian composers rather than direct influence. He characterizes Strawinsky's importance as lying in rhythmic complexity, harmonic invention through original chord formation (as opposed to Richard Strauss's method of dismantling existing chords), and conciseness of expression, calling him "perhaps the most vital of the modern forces in the music world." The essay, dated August 6, 1915, ends with a full bibliography of Strawinsky's works to date and brief mention of later pieces, including three string quartet pieces and a new ballet, Les Noces villageoises, as well as his orchestration work on other composers' pieces and his completion of the final chorus of Moussorgsky's La Khovanchina.
By Carl Van Vechten · First published 1915 · Genre: Music Criticism, Critical Essay, Musicology