Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): L’Histoire du Soldat

Today’s program presents a fascinating juxtaposition of two works which were written within a year of each other. Debussy, already suffering from the cancer which would kill him within a year, composed his Violin Sonata in G minor in Paris, in 1917 as the First World War dragged on exhaustingly a few miles away. Stravinsky, a refugee in Switzerland, composed L’Histoire du Soldat early the next year.

Debussy and Stravinsky were born 20 years apart. Debussy was the most radical of his generation, the fin de siecle composers who were transitional between Romanticism and Modernism. His generational colleagues include Mahler, Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Erik Satie and Richard Strauss. Stravinsky was part of the first modernist generation. Schoenberg and Ives were a few years older; Bartok one year older. Webern and Varese were born the year after Stravinsky and Alban Berg yet two years later. A generation, then, separates the voluptuous languor of Debussy from the rocket propelled, peppery primitivism of Stravinsky-- and yet, in a strange way, their music is closely related. The common ground is wrapped up in that dangerous word “impressionism,” and in these two great composers we see the relationship of master and disciple.

That last sentence may seem doubly dubious. Stravinsky studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov, not Debussy-- and impressionism is one of the few sins he of which he was never accused. And yet, in context of his generation, I consider that Stravinsky was an impressionist, and, as a resident of Paris at the time that Debussy was viewed as the presiding deity of modernism, Stravinsky could not help but be profoundly influenced by his work.

Impressionism

What is impressionism? Typically people tend to focus on the surface charactersitics of the style: pastels, languor, Monet haystacks viewed in different lighting conditions, washy colors, and so on. My definition, admittedly, is broader than most, but I think it is closer to the core of what Debussy’s music was about and explains more clearly the nature of his influence on subsequent composers.

There are three aspects of Debussy’s music that I consider cornerstones of impressionism (at least, of musical impressionism). First, there is a rebellion against the prevailing Romantic aesthetic of emotional expressiveness. In part that is a very French reaction against the Germanic aesthetic of Wagner, but, from his writings, it’s clear that Debussy harbored similar feelings of ambivalence for the music of Verdi and Brahms, for instance. Instead of bombarding you with his feelings, Debussy wanted to show you an object, a scene, an image that evoked feelings from you the listener. Just consider some of his more famous titles: “Footprints in the Snow,” “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” “Clouds,” “Clair de Lune,” and so one. Part of the Romantic aesthetic against which he rebelled was its dynamism-- the sense that it is always moving, that the listener is carried forward with inexorable, irresistible power on an emotional journey. Debussy wanted to stop and smell the roses, as it were, to appreciated sounds for their own beauty. Why should a delicious dissonance have to resolve to a consonance? Why should a phrase or melody end with a cadence? Why does there need to be a formal justification for this beautiful instrumental color? Why does B have to follow logically from A?

These questions point up the other two cornerstones of impressionism: a cultivation of color as a compositional element, and also the use of discontinuity-- the juxtaposing of musical objects that do not flow logically into each other. Debussy favored modes-- diatonic scales that are neither major nor minor-- and other non-diatonic scales, such as the octatonic scale that is heard at the end of the first movement, and the six-note whole-tone scale. This can be heard both as a way of coloring the harmony and of undermining the tonality which provides traditional music with its sense of function.

Stravinsky the Impressionist

Objectivity or anti-expressiveness, discontinuity and color: if you look at impressionism this way, then Stravinsky is an impressionist too. His use of harmony and instrumentation for purely coloristic purposes is well known. Discontinuity is his bread and butter: the rhythmic asymmetry for which he is famous, is just one of the many manifestations thereof. And his music is famously objective. If Wagner had written The Rite of Spring the listener would feel sure that he himself were being danced to death; with Stravinsky you are looking through a telescope, or under a microscope, experiencing the rituals from without. Even his later neo-classical style is impressionist at the core-- it’s an impression of Baroque music, or of Classical opera, an image of its surface filtered through a Twentieth-century lens.

Stravinsky’s impressionism is perhaps best understood when he is compared to his Modernist contemporaries Schoenberg and Berg and Webern, who were all about maximal emotionalism on the one hand and formal logic on the other. One need only compare, say, The Rakes Progress with Wozzeck, or today’s masterpiece with its Schoenbergian counterpart, Pierrot Lunaire to hear Stravinsky the impressionist.

It’s not surprising, really, that Stravinsky should be a disciple of Debussy. When Stravinsky arrived in Paris in 1911, Debussy was so influential that he was lampooned by Erik Satie as “Dieubussy” (‘Dieu’ means God). Satie wrote a humorous set of commandements for young composers that might be considered an impressionist primer. Debussy himself was highly influenced by what he called the “Young Russian” school-- the composers we call “The Five--” and along with the works of Borodin and Mussorgsky he also loved those of Stravinsky’s own teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, particularly Scheherezade and Antar. In some ways, his aesthetic derived from their own-- and theirs, it must be added, were in turn influenced by and earlier French composer, Berlioz, whose music Debussy did not think to highly of, but who nevertheless is an aesthetic antecedent.

So we have works written then by the impressionist master and his greatest disciple. And the fact that they were both written during World War One is significant, even though neither work makes direct reference to that conflict. The two works show their respective generationally separated composers reacting in similar ways to that horrible conflagration.

One of the surface effects of the war was to focus artists on economic issues they had never faced before. Before the war orchestras tend to be of gargantuan size-- consider Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. Even the arch minimalist Anton Webern could write a piece that requires 6 trombones...and is only four minutes long. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring requires 8 horns, 5 trumpets, 2 tubas, five or six of each woodwind instrument (including alto flute, piccolo clarinet and 2 each of bass clarinets and contrabassoons) and a full corps de ballet, with soloists. His next theater work, L’Histoire du Soldat, requires an orchestra of just 7 players (fewer, in other words, than the number of horns in the Rite of Spring orchestra). It is a perfect mini-ensemble, with one very busy percussionist and tiny string, woodwind and brass sections, each represented by one high and one low instrument: violin and bass, clarinet and bassoon, trumpet and trombone. Only a handful of actor-dancers are required. He envisioned that the whole company could be transported from venue to venue in a truck.

Similarly Debussy, in his last years, turned his attention to chamber music. Prior to the war he had written one work of chamber music, his youthful string quartet. Now he planned a series of seven sonatas, of which he completed three before his death: one for cello, one for flute, viola and harp and tonight’s example. The devastation of war made everyone economical.

This economy seemed to extend beyond its practical aspect into the realm of emotion as well. The war, for Stravinsky and Debussy, seemed to push them yet further from the emotionalism of the Romantic style and towards the idea of neoclassicism. Debussy’s final sonatas were not only the first chamber music he had written since his 1893 quartet; they were also the first pieces to be given a generic, formal title, such as sonata. There is some evidence that Debussy was alarmed by what the younger generation of composers were doing in his name, particularly the French group called Les Six, who cultivated a deliberate triviality and rebelled against even the notion of art music, and that he wanted to write a classical ‘rebuttal.’

As for Stravinsky, the Romantic imagery of his youthful period disappeared after the war, and he went on to deny the importance, and even the moral validity of the Rimsky-style nationalism of works such as the early ballets. If you know your Stravinsky you can spread the scores in front of you in chronological order and they make a compelling document of encroaching classicism: from Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Song of the Nightingale through L’Histoire, Les Noces and Symphonies of Wind Instruments to Pulcinella, the Octet and so on.

The Debussy Sonata is a short work. The first movement, which bows to classical form by presenting two contrasting themes, is nevertheless rhapsodic in quality. This rhapsodic quality is amplified, no doubt, by the extensive use of modality and non-standard scales. Two different modes (one in the piano, one in the violin) are combined most tellingly in the final measures where a cadence is created, a kind of modal amen, that is anything but final sounding. The second movement is a kind of Harlequinade, similar in character to his piano prelude Puck, and punctuated by episodes of mock sentimentality. The finale begins rather drivingly and introduces elements from the first movement .

Apropos of Harlequinades: Stravinsky’s L’Histoire-- that mini theater piece designed to be performed off the back of a truck-- is a manifestation of another thread that ties him to Debussy and to contemporaneous French culture: an interest, anathema to serious Germans, in popular culture in general and, in particular, to street theater and circuses. Many of the numbers in L’Histoire are “Stravinskyized” evocations of popular music of the day: a waltz, several marches, a tango (tellingly scored only for violin and drums) and a rag. (American pop culture was another newfound delight that swept French culture first before spreading to the rest of the continent). Stravinsky, stuck in Geneva during the war, wrote this ragtime number without having ever heard the real thing (he had some sheet music) and came wonderfully close. The story of the ballet is an age-old one, involving a soldier selling his soul to the devil to win the heart of a haughty princess. As with all old-fashioned tales of deviltry, a fiddle is prominently featured, and Stravinsky’s evocations of folk fiddling are not only delicious in and of themselves, but were also highly significant-- Stravinsky and his contempary Bela Bartok, neither of whom were string players, probably had more influence on string instrument writing than any musician since Paganini. The moral of the tale, by the way, is essentially ‘don’t dance with the Devil.’

L’Histoire du Soldat is one of the first pieces of modern music this composer/program annotator came to know and love. With it’s succession of “Stravinskyized” pop numbers, and its unfailing charm and humor and its brilliantly inventive-- and economic scoring, it has always been one of its composer’s most popular works, a goodwill ambassador of modernism, if you will.