Trechos de Stravinsky - A Creative Spring: Russia And France, 1882-1934 (2002), de Stephen Walsh.
He [Stravinsky] had planned just such a trip to Kiev in the spring, but had apparently been forced to call it off. This time he must at all costs go, and not just for the books. His finances were becoming precarious. Diaghilev, as usual, was procrastinating over payments for The Nightingale, the lucrative Free Theatre deal had fallen through, and the Mariyinsky, even if they eventually took the opera, would be unlikely to pay an equivalent fee. Now there was talk of an Austrian war with Serbia, which would mean with Russia, and it was already two years since his brother-in-law had warned him that his Ukrainian bank deposits and mortgages were at risk from the political situation. It was high time - it might even be the last chance for some while - to investigate these dangers on the ground.
- - -
[...] about politics. Stravinsky states that Germany is not a barbarous country; but decrepit and degenerate. He claims for Russia the role of beautiful and healthy barbarism, bursting with new seeds that will impregnate the world's thought. He reckons that after the war a revolution, already in preparation, will overturn the dynasty and found a United Slav States. Moreover, he partly attributes the cruelties of tsarism to German elements incorporated into Russia, which have gained control of the main wheels of government or the administration. The attitude of German intellectuals inspires in him a boundless mistrust. Hauptmann and Strauss, he says, have the souls of lackeys. He sings the praises of the old Russian civilization, unknown in the West, the artistic and literary monuments of the cities of the north and east.
- - -
He had attacked the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, so dear to his World of Art collaborators. Music must be sovereign. "Suppress color! Color is too powerful... We should just keep lighting... gestures and rhythms."
- - -
But though Stravinsky might feel distant from his old ballets and former colleagues, the colleagues had by no means abandoned him. Even before he had moved back down to Clarens, Diaghilev had wired from neutral Italy pressing him to come with Katya for a few days to Florence, where he and Massine had rented a villa. Diaghilev wanted, of course, to discuss a project.
- - -
When Casella conducted the Italian premiere of Petrushka at a concert in the Augusteo the following day, mild audience protests were abruptly countered by Marinetti yelling provocatively, "Abasso Wagner! Viva Stravinsky!" [...] All the Italian futurists were present and saluted him noisily. [...] But the only eventual collaboration - to call it that - was in 1917 with the painter Giacomo Balla, from whom Diaghilev commissioned an elaborate, nonchoreographic light show to accompany a performance of Stravinsky's Fireworks.
- - -
By 19 February, Stravinsky was back at Château d'Oex, in a physical and emotional world unbelievably remote from the hubbub of Rome and the intellectual fisticuffs of the futurists, Diaghilev, and the Russian emigration, to say nothing of the daily battles between the pro- and anti-interventionists on the Italian political scene. To some extent this division had been a part of his life since he first came to Paris in 1910. But the outbreak of war, and his own increasing preoccupation with a kind of virtual Russian ethnography, emphasized it to the point almost of caricature.
- - -
It was probably in the late summer of 1915, soon after the move to the Villa Rogivue. Stravinsky had been seeing a good deal of Diaghilev at Ouchy and was well aware of the obstacles in the way of a Paris premiere for La Noces so long as the war continued, even though he told Stanley Wise in mid-August that he was still hopeful of a production the following May.
- - -
You could hardly guess from any of these works that a terrible war was being fought not a hundred miles from the composer closeted in his turret overlooking the untroubled Lake Geneva. They are like messages from inside the whale, in Orwell's memorable phrase.
- - -
Stravinsky was kept intermittently in touch with events in America by [Ernest] Ansermet. After a muted opening in New York, Firebird and Petrushka had enjoyed such a "colossal success" in Boston that Ansermet had the idea of approaching American publishers on the subject of the "easy" piano pieces, little guessing that Stravinsky's gratitude for this intervention would come in the form of a demand for twenty-five thousand Swiss francs as a fee for a package deal including an arrangement for instrumental ensemble as well as the four-hand and two-hand keyboard versions. Later, Ansermet explained that it had been essentially a succès d'estime. Americans were curious about this new Russian composer, particularly since the Flonzaley performances of the quartet pieces during the autumn and the publication of Carl Van Vechten's prophetically titled book Music After the Great War, with its graphic firsthand account of the Rite of Spring premiere. But he doubted that the ballets had been properly understood as music, despite (in New York) an orchestra that was "frankly worth any number of Lamoureux or Colonnes," with "the best tuba player in the world. If you heard him in Petrushka, you would weep for joy." America, he told the composer,
is a lout heap (more or less boche or Jewish in character). All dominated by German or Italian taste (in music!). Yet there is at the bottom of this immense country a forgotten or lost soul which has found its way into the incredible music you hear in cafes! And the absence of traditions has forced this people - in their towns, their bridges, their machines - to improvise splendidly and with genius. These two elements are very close to us; they are precisely what we like, and what your work has revealed in Europe. To free this country from the boche imprint, reveal it to itself, and teach it that it belongs with us - and at the same time to take on this wonderful field of activity - would be a fine dream.
- - -
[Gerald] Tyrwhitt had to send on a packet of letters that the composer had left behind; and then, in May, a large box of cigarettes mysteriously turned up on his Rome doorstep with no addressee, but obviously, in Tyrwhitt's view, meant for Stravinsky, who had set up a private international grid for the supply of tobacco during the war years. Stravinsky had already had to employ Tyrwhitt's good offices to get the Picasso portrait sent to him in Switzerland in the diplomatic bag, after the Italian border police had insisted on regarding it as some kind of military plan when the composer tried to export it in person.
- - -
Values and certainties were rapidly disintegrating in the face of war, exile, and heartless materialism.
- - -
Neither [Charles-Ferdinand] Ramuz nor Stravinsky seems to have foreseen the administrative complications of putting on their own show: the problems of casting and coaching, of locating musicians good enough to play difficult modern music in wartime Switzerland, and of getting them all often enough into one place for adequate rehearsal.
- - -
His own mother was still trapped in Petrograd; his brother Yury and his wife and daughters were heaven knew where; the other Nosenkos and Yelachiches might be scattered or scattering to the four corners of the globe. But here at least, in this little Vaudois town, they could re-create a distillation of the old Russia, an island of family warmth and solidarity in the ocean of war and revolution and social disintegration. It was something which Igor had always craved, something he needed for his work.
- - -
The Soldier's Tale was a particularly sore point. He and Ramuz had worked hard on it for months only to see the performance run destroyed by [influenza] epidemic.
- - -
What infuriated Stravinsky was that thanks to Diaghilev's (unpaid-for) exclusivity, the political situation, and the punitive copyright laws, he could earn nothing from what was by far his most popular work.
- - -
Before the war Empress Eugenie's favorite resort had also attracted Russian visitors in substantial numbers; a large Orthodox church had been built there, and there was a sense of Russian community which intensified with the final exodus of Whites after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the civil war late in 1920.
- - -
The philosopher Nicolas Berdyayev, exiled for his opposition to the Soviet policy of atheism, arrived in Berlin by the same route only a month or so before her [Anna Stravinsky]:
There were twenty-five of us [exiles], and, together with our families, about seventy-five. The boat (Oberbuergermeister Haken) for the voyage from Petersburg to Stettin was entirely occupied by our party. When we left Soviet waters behind us many had a feeling of being out of danger: until then no one was certain that we would not be sent back at the last minute. A new life was opening before us. We felt free; yet in me the sense of freedom was transfused by a sense of intense pain at parting, perhaps irrevocably, with my native land. The voyage across the Baltic was wonderful; the sea was calm and smooth; the sun beat down from an unclouded sky, and the nights were mild and starry. On arrival in Berlin we were met with courtesy and kindness by representatives of various German organisations... No Russian émigrés came to meet us.
Stravinsky may or may not have met Berdyayev in Berlin. But he did certainly meet another, younger Russian thinker of not wholly dissimilar views, who had recently arrived in Berlin via Turkey and Bulgaria: Pierre Souvtchinsky (Pyotr Suvchinsky). [...] After leaving Russia in 1920, Souvtchinsky had become involved with the nascent Eurasian movement in Sofia, and had co-published two books that effectively set out its agenda, Prince Trubetskoy's Yevropa i Chelovechestvo (Europe and Humanity) and a set of essays called Iskhod k Vostoku (Exodus to the East), two of which Souvtchinsky himself had written.
Many aspects of Eurasianism must have sounded echoes for Stravinsky of his own wartime attitudes as expounded to Romain Rolland that distant afternoon at Vevey in 1914, attitudes which were presumably common currency among the nervy and unwilling exiles of the first month or two of war.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiH3vA7q0jo
http://www.amazon.com/Rites-Spring-Great-Birth-Modern/dp/0395937582
- - -
[...] about politics. Stravinsky states that Germany is not a barbarous country; but decrepit and degenerate. He claims for Russia the role of beautiful and healthy barbarism, bursting with new seeds that will impregnate the world's thought. He reckons that after the war a revolution, already in preparation, will overturn the dynasty and found a United Slav States. Moreover, he partly attributes the cruelties of tsarism to German elements incorporated into Russia, which have gained control of the main wheels of government or the administration. The attitude of German intellectuals inspires in him a boundless mistrust. Hauptmann and Strauss, he says, have the souls of lackeys. He sings the praises of the old Russian civilization, unknown in the West, the artistic and literary monuments of the cities of the north and east.
- - -
He had attacked the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, so dear to his World of Art collaborators. Music must be sovereign. "Suppress color! Color is too powerful... We should just keep lighting... gestures and rhythms."
- - -
But though Stravinsky might feel distant from his old ballets and former colleagues, the colleagues had by no means abandoned him. Even before he had moved back down to Clarens, Diaghilev had wired from neutral Italy pressing him to come with Katya for a few days to Florence, where he and Massine had rented a villa. Diaghilev wanted, of course, to discuss a project.
- - -
When Casella conducted the Italian premiere of Petrushka at a concert in the Augusteo the following day, mild audience protests were abruptly countered by Marinetti yelling provocatively, "Abasso Wagner! Viva Stravinsky!" [...] All the Italian futurists were present and saluted him noisily. [...] But the only eventual collaboration - to call it that - was in 1917 with the painter Giacomo Balla, from whom Diaghilev commissioned an elaborate, nonchoreographic light show to accompany a performance of Stravinsky's Fireworks.
- - -
By 19 February, Stravinsky was back at Château d'Oex, in a physical and emotional world unbelievably remote from the hubbub of Rome and the intellectual fisticuffs of the futurists, Diaghilev, and the Russian emigration, to say nothing of the daily battles between the pro- and anti-interventionists on the Italian political scene. To some extent this division had been a part of his life since he first came to Paris in 1910. But the outbreak of war, and his own increasing preoccupation with a kind of virtual Russian ethnography, emphasized it to the point almost of caricature.
- - -
It was probably in the late summer of 1915, soon after the move to the Villa Rogivue. Stravinsky had been seeing a good deal of Diaghilev at Ouchy and was well aware of the obstacles in the way of a Paris premiere for La Noces so long as the war continued, even though he told Stanley Wise in mid-August that he was still hopeful of a production the following May.
- - -
You could hardly guess from any of these works that a terrible war was being fought not a hundred miles from the composer closeted in his turret overlooking the untroubled Lake Geneva. They are like messages from inside the whale, in Orwell's memorable phrase.
- - -
Stravinsky was kept intermittently in touch with events in America by [Ernest] Ansermet. After a muted opening in New York, Firebird and Petrushka had enjoyed such a "colossal success" in Boston that Ansermet had the idea of approaching American publishers on the subject of the "easy" piano pieces, little guessing that Stravinsky's gratitude for this intervention would come in the form of a demand for twenty-five thousand Swiss francs as a fee for a package deal including an arrangement for instrumental ensemble as well as the four-hand and two-hand keyboard versions. Later, Ansermet explained that it had been essentially a succès d'estime. Americans were curious about this new Russian composer, particularly since the Flonzaley performances of the quartet pieces during the autumn and the publication of Carl Van Vechten's prophetically titled book Music After the Great War, with its graphic firsthand account of the Rite of Spring premiere. But he doubted that the ballets had been properly understood as music, despite (in New York) an orchestra that was "frankly worth any number of Lamoureux or Colonnes," with "the best tuba player in the world. If you heard him in Petrushka, you would weep for joy." America, he told the composer,
is a lout heap (more or less boche or Jewish in character). All dominated by German or Italian taste (in music!). Yet there is at the bottom of this immense country a forgotten or lost soul which has found its way into the incredible music you hear in cafes! And the absence of traditions has forced this people - in their towns, their bridges, their machines - to improvise splendidly and with genius. These two elements are very close to us; they are precisely what we like, and what your work has revealed in Europe. To free this country from the boche imprint, reveal it to itself, and teach it that it belongs with us - and at the same time to take on this wonderful field of activity - would be a fine dream.
- - -
[Gerald] Tyrwhitt had to send on a packet of letters that the composer had left behind; and then, in May, a large box of cigarettes mysteriously turned up on his Rome doorstep with no addressee, but obviously, in Tyrwhitt's view, meant for Stravinsky, who had set up a private international grid for the supply of tobacco during the war years. Stravinsky had already had to employ Tyrwhitt's good offices to get the Picasso portrait sent to him in Switzerland in the diplomatic bag, after the Italian border police had insisted on regarding it as some kind of military plan when the composer tried to export it in person.
- - -
Values and certainties were rapidly disintegrating in the face of war, exile, and heartless materialism.
- - -
Neither [Charles-Ferdinand] Ramuz nor Stravinsky seems to have foreseen the administrative complications of putting on their own show: the problems of casting and coaching, of locating musicians good enough to play difficult modern music in wartime Switzerland, and of getting them all often enough into one place for adequate rehearsal.
- - -
His own mother was still trapped in Petrograd; his brother Yury and his wife and daughters were heaven knew where; the other Nosenkos and Yelachiches might be scattered or scattering to the four corners of the globe. But here at least, in this little Vaudois town, they could re-create a distillation of the old Russia, an island of family warmth and solidarity in the ocean of war and revolution and social disintegration. It was something which Igor had always craved, something he needed for his work.
- - -
The Soldier's Tale was a particularly sore point. He and Ramuz had worked hard on it for months only to see the performance run destroyed by [influenza] epidemic.
- - -
What infuriated Stravinsky was that thanks to Diaghilev's (unpaid-for) exclusivity, the political situation, and the punitive copyright laws, he could earn nothing from what was by far his most popular work.
- - -
Before the war Empress Eugenie's favorite resort had also attracted Russian visitors in substantial numbers; a large Orthodox church had been built there, and there was a sense of Russian community which intensified with the final exodus of Whites after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the civil war late in 1920.
- - -
The philosopher Nicolas Berdyayev, exiled for his opposition to the Soviet policy of atheism, arrived in Berlin by the same route only a month or so before her [Anna Stravinsky]:
There were twenty-five of us [exiles], and, together with our families, about seventy-five. The boat (Oberbuergermeister Haken) for the voyage from Petersburg to Stettin was entirely occupied by our party. When we left Soviet waters behind us many had a feeling of being out of danger: until then no one was certain that we would not be sent back at the last minute. A new life was opening before us. We felt free; yet in me the sense of freedom was transfused by a sense of intense pain at parting, perhaps irrevocably, with my native land. The voyage across the Baltic was wonderful; the sea was calm and smooth; the sun beat down from an unclouded sky, and the nights were mild and starry. On arrival in Berlin we were met with courtesy and kindness by representatives of various German organisations... No Russian émigrés came to meet us.
Stravinsky may or may not have met Berdyayev in Berlin. But he did certainly meet another, younger Russian thinker of not wholly dissimilar views, who had recently arrived in Berlin via Turkey and Bulgaria: Pierre Souvtchinsky (Pyotr Suvchinsky). [...] After leaving Russia in 1920, Souvtchinsky had become involved with the nascent Eurasian movement in Sofia, and had co-published two books that effectively set out its agenda, Prince Trubetskoy's Yevropa i Chelovechestvo (Europe and Humanity) and a set of essays called Iskhod k Vostoku (Exodus to the East), two of which Souvtchinsky himself had written.
Many aspects of Eurasianism must have sounded echoes for Stravinsky of his own wartime attitudes as expounded to Romain Rolland that distant afternoon at Vevey in 1914, attitudes which were presumably common currency among the nervy and unwilling exiles of the first month or two of war.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiH3vA7q0jo
http://www.amazon.com/Rites-Spring-Great-Birth-Modern/dp/0395937582
