Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories, Robert Craft, Naxos Books, £19.99 (hardback), including a CD of The Rite of Spring recorded in 2007 for Naxos by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Robert Craft

A hundred years after the headline-grabbing disturbances that erupted in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913 during the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) it can take a considerable effort of the historical imagination to envisage how a ballet performance could arouse such strong passions. Jean Cocteau described the way the evening degenerated into a ‘free-for-all’; the conductor, Pierre Monteux, recalled boos and catcalls, spectators hitting each other ‘with fists, canes or whatever came to hand’, while the orchestra (who never stopped playing) were bombarded with missiles; forty protestors were ejected from the theatre by defenders of the show; one fashionable lady spat in her neighbour’s face; the following morning, according to Nijinksy, a duel was fought. At the end of the performance the police entered the brand new, state-of-the-art theatre to restore order. ‘Things got as far as fighting’, Stravinsky himself reported, and when it was all finally drawing to a close the composer was spotted by Monteux escaping through a backstage window ‘to wander disconsolately along the streets of Paris.’

‘I think the whole thing has been done by four idiots’, said the ballet master, Enrico Cecchetti: ‘First, M. Stravinsky who wrote the music. Second, M. Roerich who designed the scenery and costumes. Third, M. Nijinksy who composed the dances. Fourth, M. Diaghilev who wasted money on it.’ Idiotic or otherwise, as Thomas Kelly stresses in First Nights (Yale, 2000), The Rite of Spring was a collaborative effort. It was produced by Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), one of history’s greatest impresarios, and was the third full ballet staged by Diaghilev’s renowned company, Les Ballets Russes, for which Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) had written the music.

Virtually unknown before he was recruited by Diaghilev, the huge success of Stravinsky’s previous scores for Les Ballets Russes, The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka (1911), brought the composer immediate acclaim. Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947), the designer of The Rite of Spring, was a painter and student of ancient Slavic architecture, who could claim significant expertise in matters of Slavic folklore, history and anthropology. Writing to Diaghilev, Roerich described his and Stravinsky’s intention of presenting in the Rite ‘a number of pictures of earthly joy and celestial triumph, as understood by the Slavs.’

The choreography for this primitivist scenario was created by the legendary dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky (1890–1950), the star of the Ballets Russes, famed for the effortless power and fluidity of his movements, in particular his gravity-defying leaps. Nijinsky’s experience as an inventor of ballet sequences was limited. He had previously choreographed and created the title role in the Ballets Russes’ adaptation of Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912), which caused a minor scandal on account of its sexually suggestive content. In the period leading up to the first performance of the Rite, Nijinsky and Diaghilev were lovers – one reason, perhaps, why Nijinsky was entrusted with devising the choreography for this important premiere. ‘I liked girls’, Nijinsky later declared, and while on tour in Argentina in September 1913, he impetuously married his Hungarian devotee, Romola de Pulszky. News of the marriage so infuriated Diaghilev that he dismissed Nijinsky from the Ballets Russes, provoking a crisis from which the increasingly unstable Nijinsky never recovered.

The story that underlies the arrival of the Ballets Russes in France is fraught with many ironies. Fundamentally a courtly French creation, and precariously dependent on the vacillating fortunes of the aristocracy, ballet was exported from post-Revolutionary France to tsarist Russia. There it flourished under the aegis of the Russian absolute monarchy, reaching its apogee in the ballets of Tchaikovsky (1840–93): Swan Lake (1877), Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892). By the end of the nineteenth century, ballet in Russia had acquired a prestige that seemed to make it capable of surpassing opera as the most advanced theatrical art form. The position was theorised by another Diaghilev collaborator, Alexandre Benois (1870–1960), who argued that, ridding itself of the workaday constraints of words, ballet can release music and gesture, enabling them together to produce an unadulterated aesthetic pleasure that is unattainable elsewhere. Reinvented as the preeminent arena of high cultural endeavour, ballet was reimported by Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes from Russia into France in 1909, first in the form of repertoire pieces and later through the newly-commissioned works, with music by Stravinsky, notable for their exotic, markedly Russian flavour.
Folkloric Russian exoticism reaches an extreme in The Rite of Spring where the setting is the Slavic Stone Age as imagined by Roerich. In Part One, ‘The Adoration of the Earth’, the action begins with a celebration of spring, followed by a procession of adolescent girls who perform ceremonial dances. Next comes the ritualised representation of rival tribes and a second procession of elders. A wise old man blesses the earth and a wild dance ensues. Part Two, ‘The Sacrifice’, begins with the young girls moving in circles until one of them is fatefully singled out as l’élue, the Chosen One, who is glorified. Tribal ancestors are then commemorated, after which l’élue is commended to the circle of elders. Finally, in the Sacrificial Dance, the Chosen One dances to her death: nature is appeased and the ritual is complete.

Stravinsky’s music for the Rite, characterised (as Stephen Walsh writes) by ‘wilfully discordant harmonies and convulsive metric irregularities’ was ‘genuinely innovatory’. The composer’s brilliance, however, went largely unnoticed by the audience at the premiere, whose whistles and hoots were sufficient to drown out the huge, ninety-nine piece orchestra. Indeed, when it could properly be heard, at a concert performance the following April, again conducted by Monteux, the music was rapturously received, affording Stravinsky what Monteux (and later the composer also) described as ‘a triumph such as composers rarely enjoy.’

The immediate cause of the first-night fracas was Nijinsky’s choreography. In his review in the Echo de Paris the following morning, Adolphe Boschot complained: ‘they stamp, they stamp, they stamp, and they stamp … Suddenly: they break in two and salute. And they stamp, they stamp, they stamp …’ In the second half, Boschot continues, there appears ‘a delicious dancer’ – Marie Piltz, who danced the part of the Chosen One: ‘The choreographer destroys her at will: he deforms her legs by making her stand still with her toes turned in as far as possible. It is hideous.’
The stamping and other unconventional steps and figures created by Nijinsky can be seen in Millicent Hodson’s painstaking 1987 reconstruction of the Rite, performed by The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago (readily viewable online). As Richard Taruskin observes, however, the evanescent note of pathos that creeps into the closing Sacrificial Dance in the Joffrey Ballet’s compelling account, when the Chosen One expresses trepidation at her lot, must have been absent from Nijinsky’s original. In a long essay that appeared in November 1913 in the Nouvelle revue française, Jacques Rivière wrote: ‘At no instant during the dance does the Chosen One betray the personal terror with which her soul must be filled.’

This is the shock of the Rite, immediately apparent in Nijinsky’s choreography, but also characteristic of the music: it is violently impersonal, even inhuman. Rivière perfectly describes what this means: ‘there is in The Rite of Spring something still more serious … more secret, more hideous. This is a biological ballet. Not only the dance of the most primitive man, this is also the dance before man.’ Eschewing the trembling spring of the poets, the Rite displays ‘the bitterness of force, nothing but the panic-stricken terror that accompanies the rising of the sap, only the horrible work of the cells.’ Rivière continues:

There is something profoundly blind in this dance. These beings that move before our eyes carry an enormous question, a question that is not differentiated from them. They carry it with them without understanding it, like an animal that turns in its cage, never tiring of butting its head against the bars. They have no other organ than their entire body, and it is with this that they search. They go here and there and they stop; they throw themselves forward like a package, and wait. Nothing precedes them and there is nothing they might be obliged to rejoin. There is no ideal to regain … Like the blood that knocks against the walls of the skull without any other motive except mere force: that is how they call for a way out, for succession. And little by little, through their patience and the brutish obstinacy of their asking, a sort of solution presents itself, a solution which is not different from them, which also merges with the mass of their bodies, and that is life.

This is human action conceived of as the mere expression of physical forces. Beginning with the outbreak of the First World War, a centenary that will be commemorated next year, the past century has shown over and again the way in which, under the pressure of events, conceptions of what it is to be human become terribly accommodating. Is this mirrored in the capacity of groundbreaking art to stretch the imagination? Prior to its first performance, Monteux’s orchestra were baffled by Stravinsky’s score. Monteux even said he ‘detested’ the piece. By 1940, however, the intuition of brutish inhumanity presented in The Rite of Spring had been tamed to the point where it could be rearranged for inclusion in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (Stravinsky called the performance ‘execrable’). Over the years Stravinsky gradually distanced himself from the Rite’s emotional content. He began by explaining that the work was conceived in 1910, while finishing The Firebird, when he had ‘a fleeting vision’ of ‘a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.’ He also said, however, that it was ‘une oeuvre architectonique et non anecdotique’ (‘architectonic, not anecdotal’) and that he unequivocally preferred it as ‘a concert piece.’

Taruskin does not mince his words when describing what he sees as Stravinsky’s calculated backtracking, calling him ‘a man who spent the second half of his life telling lies about the first half’ (New York Times, 14 September 2012). Underlying this trenchant judgment is the endless series of nagging questions that the historian (like Nijinsky’s dancers) carries everywhere, questions posed in order to transform statements such as those made by Stravinsky about the Rite from declared facts into historical evidence. The composer’s preference for hearing the Rite in concert is expressed in a conversation with Robert Craft found in Expositions and Developments (1962), a beautiful little book in which the questions are cues, provided for Stravinsky by Craft, that occasion fascinating monologues on many subjects: reminiscences, including memories of Stravinsky’s early life in Russia, opinions about music and musicians, delivered ex cathedra, as it were. By comparison with the Stravinsky one hears in video clips (speaking with Nicolas Nabokov in 1965, for example) the composer’s language is fantastically polished. Elsewhere, in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (1994), Craft provides an eloquent elucidation of Stravinsky’s manner: ‘What he offers are judgments without trials in a no-man’s-land of likes and dislikes.’ That sums it up exactly. Stravinsky’s conversational pronouncements comprise a pot-pourri of prehistory, testimony to be put on the rack by students of the composer and appreciated by the non-specialist as a kind of costume drama.

Published by Naxos to mark the centenary of the premiere of The Rite of Spring, Robert Craft’s latest book, Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories, includes a recording of the Rite made by Craft for Naxos in 2007. In addition to his extensive discography, Craft, now eighty-nine, is also a prolific author, having written some two dozen books – about half of which relate to Stravinsky, including the series of ‘conversation’ books, co-authored with the composer. Craft’s life-defining fascination with Stravinsky began in 1937, when, at the age of fourteen, he heard the Firebird Suite. Ten years later, while studying music at The Juilliard School in New York, Craft wrote to Stravinsky to ask for his help in obtaining the score of Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920). The composer received Craft’s letter just as he was beginning to revise the piece; taking the coincidence as an omen, Stravinsky decided he would conduct Symphonies of Wind Instruments in a concert organised by Craft in New York, which took place on 11 April 1948, even offering to waive his fee. As a young student, conducting in only his second concert, Craft recounts, he found himself ‘sharing the podium with the world’s most eminent composer-conductor.’ From there the relationship blossomed, with Craft becoming Stravinsky’s ‘factotum’, archivist, ‘co-concert and rehearsal conductor’, confidant and close friend.

Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories is divided into three parts, dealing with ‘The Music’, ‘The Man’ and ‘Friends and Acquaintances’. In his Acknowledgements Craft thanks the poet, Craig Raine, for triggering the book in four lengthy, ‘maieutic’ transatlantic telephone calls. This helps to explain much of the book’s format. It is chatty and conversational, with many short chapters whose headings one can easily imagine being replaced by prompts and leading questions: Would you discuss Stravinsky and Webern? What do you recall of your meetings with Stravinsky and Salvador Dalí in New York in the 1950s and 60s? Eclectic and anecdotal, the book abstains from developing topics systematically, but that is perhaps its principal purpose, namely to ensure that no scrap of testimony connecting Craft with the magical, glamorous world of soaring twentieth-century modernism is left unrecorded.

Chapter Twelve, titled ‘Amorous Augmentations’, is loosely devoted to The Rite of Spring. Its chief contention is the ‘bombshell’ (p.171) that ‘in the early Diaghilev period’, around 1910–13, the period of the three masterpieces produced for the Ballets Russes, ‘Stravinsky was exclusively in an ambisexual phase’. Among the many assertions made in this chapter, Craft states that Stravinsky had an ongoing affair with the composer, Maurice Delage (1879–1961), that he was an occasional lover of Maurice Ravel, and that in the spring of 1911 he spent ‘a three-week vacation’ near Paris at Delage’s ‘gay agapemone’ (Craft is a master of such recondite vocabulary) in the company of ‘the notoriously homosexual’ Prince Vladimir Argutinsky-Dolgorukov (1872–1941), an erstwhile lover of Tchaikovsky. It will be for the Stravinsky professionals to interrogate these surprising revelations, to assess their merits, and to decide whether they should affect perceptions of works by Stravinsky, including The Rite of Spring, which Craft describes as ‘the epitome of masculinity in music’. Sensationalism aside, however, there is a strong sense in this book that the author is tying up loose ends. For thoroughly compulsive reading, one would far rather go back to Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, where Craft is at his sparkling best.